skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy looks at 4% uptake and says the sky is falling. I look at 4% uptake and say we're in really great shape.

According to this guy's somewhat pessimistic view, we're at least two years from the beginning of IPv4 shortages. We already have 4% uptake when there's very little incentive to do anything about ipv6. When the pressure comes on a little bit, uptake will skyrocket.

The great thing is that there's a network effect here: the more people get on ipv6, the more benefit there is to each additional punter. It's more and more attractive as more people join. I think we'll have no problem rolling this snowball.
New eBay Fraud
This is a good point -- keep aware of trends. But once you are into details of "subdomain vs subdirectory" for your blog, the returns are far below the benefit for the vast majority of sites. Those kinds of differences only help in the case of a photo finish.

If you are really unsure about some minor SEO trick, flip a coin and instead try to shave 100 milliseconds off of your latency.

Google is not run by Dungeon Masters. It's not a trap. A search engine will only pay attention to some feature that distinguishes websites if it helps them improve the quality of results. And its in their interest to communicate the features they pay attention to.
Finding Valuable/ Profitable Keywords
Although this might be OK for devices like Palm Pre with Palm's webOS where you won't have other options for games, at least not in the beginning.
Angel Investing Basics - Insights from Y Combinator's Angel Conf
CFIB study finds the best cities for small business
Yeah, sorry, I did mean PUA for "Pickup Artist".

But since you already corrected it for me, I'll leave it. And give you my upvote, sir.
Robot locomotion in sand
The relevant pages of Authoritas are up (they were never taken down), but I have the right to charge for them, especially given that the book is now published. In the meantime, the documents are all available and more easily accessible than the primary sources of just about any other book there is.

http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/resources.html
Free Logo Generating Tools
Definitely some good tips here, but the real challenge is building an ecommerce site with 6 million backlinks and 1 million pages indexed. Aside from that SEO is easy . . .
Free software is a common bogeyman on the Business of Software forum. It's a handy scapegoat for when your new µISV experiences disappointing sales.

You'll note that the guy who asked the question was trying to find an excuse not to start a business, and how quickly cooler (and more experienced) heads prevail.
> District superintendent Rachel Heath reported that school officials tried to back out of the sale, but due to eBay's legally binding contract rules, could not.

I have trouble believing this. It reminds me of Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc. Pepsi won, partly because "no reasonable person could have believed that the company seriously intended to convey a jet worth roughly $23 million for under a million dollars." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc. ]

I don't know much about contract law, but there must be a way out of this.
Inside the Mac OS X Kernel: Debunking Mac OS Myths
Thanks for the reply. I can see how the definition would increase in clarity it grows and you eat the dog-food. I'd also like to thank you for being frank with your decision to step aside as the maintainer -- far too many projects languish as the developer doesn't make a public declaration like you did.
Highly recommend Naval Ravikant's talk as well. Those two were by far the most informative.
Business plan competiton - prize = meet Mike Moritz + $15K in free services
Pitch 2009: Napkin Startup Competition

Grand Prize: Meeting with Michael Moritz of Sequoia

Deadline: April 10, 2009

Do you have the world's next big idea? Here's your chance to PITCH. Michael Moritz (Sequoia) is listening! Put it on a paper napkin!

Women 2.0's third-annual Startup Competition will provide your alpha, beta, or prototype-stage startup with exposure to early stage investors. Our judging panel includes investors and experienced startup executives who will provide valuable written feedback on your business.

NOTE: *only ONE of the founding members needs to be female to qualify.

HUNDREDS of submissions will receive valuable feedback from the judging panel of investors and experienced startup executives.

FIVE startups will be chosen to pitch live on Pitch Night: May 7th, 2009.

ONE winning startup gets a meeting with legendary investor Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital in addition to $15K of free office space,legal services, marketing support, PR support, and more - everything you need to win with your new idea.

Entering the competition is easy. Just fill out information about your startup online, record a 2-minute video pitch, and snail mail us a cocktail napkin with your business plan scribbled on it. Deadline to submit your startup is April 10th, 2009 (firm deadline) -time to get started!

Are you in? http://pitch.women2.org <http://pitch.women2.org/>
I make hip-hop beats as a hobby. I've had industry people listen to the same track, one with a wide range, and the other "hot" and its always the "hot" track that grabs the attention. Loud is definitely the desired outcome in the music industry. I found the chart on this link very interesting.

Another possibility is that a lot of production and composition has shifted to virtual instruments and computer mixing, often times done by folks who didn't have the engineering training that producers had 10-20 years ago. The computer has allowed a lot more people to create music. Mixing a song with a wide range that sounds professional or even "commercial" takes a lot of time and skill. Making a mix hot takes some level of care but not nearly as much as the other side. If you're trying to make it as a producer, are you going to spend your time mixing amazing tracks or making more tracks?
Digital Music Start-Ups Hit A Low Note
The meaning of text from a book being "up" here, so that other commenters can decide for themselves, obviously does not include it being behind a paywall.
Hard Times by Studs Terkel.

While it covers a lot of ground, it does cover what worked and what didn't during the Great Depression.
Rock Band Throwdown 2009 - Mozy vs. Dropbox
GreatGoodbye.com - 1. sign up 2. die 3. send emails to friends and family
Do you propose something else, some other hosting? It seems Godaddy is in his town...so he can go and grab their nuts if they mess with his site...
It was probably due to a plea bargain. He pled guilty, and one of the conditions was likely that he was allowed to be able to work, using computers, until his sentence begins.

I wouldn't doubt that the conditions minimized or prevented his use of computers outside of work-related purposes.
Anyway, if Godaddy fails I guess he can choose something else...the problem is that there are so many hosting companies and so much info that in the end you might end up choosing whatever...trials and error, I guess.
I don't care who the guy is. A contract termination needs to come with a reason, a termination without reason is bullying.
700$ is enough money to make an effort and go to court to settle the sidpute.

What I find it hard to believe is that Google couldn't come up with a reason, I just can't believe they are so incompetent!! Something just doesn't add up...
I do not believe that any legitimate valuable software product has lost a significant piece of their marketshare to free software.

There is no commercial market for compilers on Unix-based systems. Gcc is just too good.
At a pizza restaurant in my home town in 1974-75, I used to shove my quarters into the Pong machine over and over and over while my little sister shoved her quarters into the jukebox to hear David Essex's "Rock On" over and over and over. Pong and "Rock On" are inextricably paired in my mind.
"do not believe that any legitimate valuable software product has lost a significant piece of their marketshare to free software"

Linux is another exception, especially for servers. And Apache httpd.
Well, I just can't win then, can I.

If I charge a reasonable amount of money for my work that involved risk to produce, I'm not being transparent enough, but I'm clearly an entrepreneur. If I make everything free, I'm in the good graces of the open source movement thanks to my perfect transparency, but then of course I'm not "really" an entrepreneur.

Come on people! You can't have your cake and eat it too.
This made my head hurt.

So by not looking, scientists determined that while they were not looking in some spots there was a negative number of photons. This did not mean there exist anti-photons, just that weird things happen while we're not looking.

(scratches head)

A non-observation found unexpected results, which means that the known laws of physics don't need to change.

I shoulda went into particle physics. It sounds like lots more fun than technology consulting.
> "Doomsayers were worried about something they called the 'greenhouse effect.'"

I picked up a strange anthology from 1971 for classroom use, Science Fiction: The Future [ISBN 0155786504], from a street vendor a couple days ago. Here is an excerpt from "The Human Race Has, Maybe, Thirty-Five Years Left" by David Lyle, originally appearing in 1967 Esquire:

"Dr. Barry Commoner reported recently (in his book, Science and Survival) that the burning of fuels has caused the carbon-dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere to rise fourteen percent in the past century. This has produced a general warming effect on the atmosphere. The President's [Johnson, I suppose] Science Advisory Committee concludes that this warming may begin melting the Antarctic ice cap by the year 2000 (raising sea levels four feet a decade and, of course, finally inundating huge land areas and major cities, like New York)."

I remember thoughts of global warming floating in my head since the 1970s, perhaps, vaguely, having to do with chlorofluorocarbons and holes in the ozone layer. But I don't recollect anything about increased carbon dioxide. Hence, I was a bit amazed and surprised when I read about carbon dioxide in this old Esquire article last night.

> Ice age was the preferred senario of the Doomday crowd back then.

I had not heard of nuclear winter until the 1980s. Wikipedia (definitive source ;-) confirms "nuclear winter" buzz began in the early '80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#History
I don't even have an opinion on AG. I'm just saying that having "the idea of Facebook", and that you were the first to have that, is retarded.

First of all, it's a really really old idea.

Second of all, the idea is irrelevant. What made Facebook succeed was the execution. That goes for most of the other online successes as well. Selling books online, or search, aren't novel ideas. Amazon and Google, too, succeeded because of execution. They all did.
No, (at least in Canada) they do not. Small claims is not judged by a "real" judge and those courts do not have the ability to set precedent. Same with most traffic courts. Of course you can always bring up the judgment in another small claims court, just won't be taken as rule of law.
Scalable vs. Non-Scalable Careers
I didn't see a link to the auction, but unless they specifically stated otherwise, how would a buyer know that a school was even associated with the auction.

Furthermore, as posted in another comment, it's likely that the buyer didn't suspect anything -- similar to how freecycling is huge on Craigslist -- it's worth me giving it to you for basically free if it means you haul it away.

Until I see different, I wouldn't be casting aspersions on the character of the buyer so much as I would on the intelligence of the lister.
One of the symptoms of Reddit's takeover by the same kind of idiots that comment on YouTube was the knee jerk downmod of any non-derisive mention of PHP. I hope the fact the parent comment is downmodded so quickly doesn't mean those people have arrived at HN too, now.

IMHO, attitude towards PHP is a great way to tell if someone really codes or just quotes the current hype. People that actually build stuff appreciate PHP's ease of deployment and scaling, even if its weaknesses make many coders (self included) choose other tools most of the time.
I think the example cheats a lot by assuming the solutions have to be positive integers. Is there a mechanism to tell the system "a and b are integers", and if so, could the system still solve the simultaneous equation?
thats been around for a while another common one:

a) buy item

b) pay with paypal using a linked credit card

c) receive item

d) call credit card and get a charge back
Announcing The True Entrepreneur Corps
If you're going to give someone a code to activate a service to send out an email, why not just leave them the email in the first place‽ Their pricing is ridiculous: the silver plan states $30 per email. For that price, I could outsource the handwriting of my typed letters, send them via mail, and include a DVD with them, shipped overnight (note: this is an estimate). For the reasonable price of $.43 per email you must buy the VIP Platinum service. I suppose that they're counting on the fact that people on their death beds usually aren't too conscientious about how they spend their money.

Not only that, but you would have to be planning on dying pretty soon in order to even consider this service, which would leave you ample time to make arrangements to do all of this stuff. And what if, by some terrible misfortune, the email is caught in your spam folder?

Gosh, there are so many things wrong with this I don't know where to begin. Not to mention that it's a service that you pay for to send emails out after you've died.
Moot point. We can't downvote submissions here.
Design. ($25 of stock icons doubled my sales back
in the day. Most OSS projects do not have anyone
who would care enough to secure the equivalent.)

I'd love to hear more about this (before and after pictures, etc). What are those stock icons? Did you have no icons before?
Backtype continues to focus on core tech and hard problems. They're actually the google of this commenting space -- their founders are hardcore technologists who focus specifically on that which is most useful -- while many of their competitors flounder about with bad design and even worse implementation.
I would like to see that review.
I liked when the lower cap for the score of a comment was a higher negative value. It was nice to see comments like this one at -30 or so...
Yeah, but there's a distinct difference between the way this is handled in HN and the automatic "Beh, PHP!" in Reddit.
The flip side of this is that for business/enterprise
software, there is very little risk in just making
your code open source and then selling a
commercialversion.

What if your competitor takes your open source code, adds a little bit of value, and sells cheaper than your commercial version? Or, if there's some clever (algorithmic) thing you are doing, what if he uses your ideas to better compete with you?
I've long doubted this as a serious problem. With the amount of packet filtering and what not that ISP's can manage on the fly, why can't they simply use a NAT to translate an IPv4 into an IPv6? It would fix the problem with most NAT's as both IPv4 and IPv6 can be tied together allowing a permanent IPv4 address to be a IPv6 on the net.
No, this is not a problem (speaking as a Network Design Engineer) these kind of articles are completely overblown and based on nothing but fantasies and hype. Address exhaustion can be very easily controlled at the ISP-NAT level and we are already building in IPv6 capable devices in our networks...its not a problem.
Plus, I'm guessing if you have to wait until after you die to send these emails out, they contain some juicy information. They make themselves a huge target and I don't know how many people will trust a start-up with that sort of information.
Craigslist Should Keep Erotic Ads
Um, Intel and IBM both have their own proprietary compilers. Both are quite good.
His Catalog, the blog featured on Alltop
Pepsi didn't host an auction, they just had a joke in a commercial. Pepsi could have put whatever they want in the commercial, it's not a contract of any sort.
Visiting the Irish countryside and smaller cities in 1996, I swore I had fallen into a time warp to my small-town American childhood of the 1960s. Spices in grocery shops consisted of salt, pepper, cinnamon, and that's it. Shops closed at 6 pm. (Hence, no aspirins or antacids after 6 pm.) Restaurants served food only at specific mealtime hours. No beverages, snacks, or medicines at gas stations.
Video To Help Excel Users Get Familiar With R
Lets just hope they don't have ridiculous restrictions on embedding.
Google Launches Google Code Labs
Good; then people who need them can just buy them cheap rather than having to beg, borrow, or steal them.
Boxee Routes Around Hulu Ban
IANAL, but I think that there is a bit of an exception in the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel), which says that one cannot withdraw a promise to another party that they have come to rely upon. If that promise is implied by inaction, it is still sometimes seen as a promise.
IPhone Particle Generator
I don't see the urgency being a matter of years, due to the fact that most ISPs are adopting NAT's. I guess my problem is, I don't see why ISPs won't just start deploying NAT's to convert IPv4 to IPv6. I mean with the span of IPv6 addresses, why can't they pin an IPv6 to an IPv4?
He's one of the best narrative non-fiction storytellers out there. Regardless of your thoughts on The Game's subject, the book was well-written. I've read a few of the autobiographies he co-wrote. Most were very well-done.

The only one I didn't care for was the Marilyn Manson one. It may have just been my distaste for the subject, but I felt like the whole thing came off as too whiny (not to mention boring) which is at least partially Neil's fault for not controlling the tone better.
In the places where linux and apache excel, I would argue that the "paid" software options are not "legitimate" or "valuable".
Sweet. Boxee's best feature is back again.
This is not only valuable for board members but for everyone involved in the company.
Somehow, I don't think that most of the consumers of music products are in their early teens. Electric guitars, amps, and guitar pedals are expensive, and I doubt most teens have that kind of disposable income. I went to high school in a pretty affluent suburb, and even kids playing in bands there rarely had anything but entry-level guitars and a couple of cheap $40 pedals.

From my limited experience (working in a record store, giving guitar lessons, touring with a band), the biggest purchasers of these items seem to be men in their 20s and middle-age married men with kids trying to recapture some of their youth or introduce their children to music they love.

That said, I'd like to see where Zed buys his pedals (guitar center?), because most of pedals that I've seen have pretty tame names, like the popular Korg series of effects pedals, or technical names, like Behringer CL9 or Boss AD3. The only one that I use that come close to what he describes have been ones from Death by Audio, and they're so great that I don't mind the funny names.
Of course the buyer and the school communicated after the fact. You don't think this came up?
This attribute isn't quite boolean.

For example, a big rock band may have to show up to do a set, but the dissemination of their music (i.e. advertisement for their live shows) is now highly scalable.

($1000 tickets for upcoming Phish show: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/arts/music/05phish.html?pa...)
Ask HN: Review my First Open Source Project - CommentWidget
I also wrote a short blog about the project at: http://www.trailbehind.com/user/andrewljohnson/blog/

I'm very curious to hear criticism of the code, so let me know if you spot bugs or bad style.
Not free, but still a great tool is MarketSplash. They let you pick between multiple designs, and you customize it. You can check out their demo at http://www.marketsplash.com/res/packageSubmitSelection.html?...

Their prices are competitive, and they generate very nice logos.
yea this paper makes me think that quantum physics is bogus... even I could have made this bogus claim. IF I am not looking, shit happens, so how do I prove that I am not looking, by just peeping into it... what shit... what a scam.. now I feel that neone can be a quantum physicist !!
About solving systems of simultaneous equations, I don't know if this particular solver can do it but many solvers can by using Gaussian Elimination from linear algebra.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_elimination
Hey guys! I wrote the linked post.

Very early on, you are right; it doesn't make sense to pay founders before you pay the bills and invest in your product/marketing. But when you maintain the bootstrap mentality beyond the very early days, and when you add people who aren't programmer types, you need to think about incentives rather than sacrifices. The fuel that keeps people going very early on is thinking about launch/release, but realistically very few things achieve overnight success. Organic growth can take a while, and my point was by giving people a fair, scalable taste of the profits (at a weekly interval, out of real profits) you can keep morale and creativity up.

-Jeff
If a competitor takes your code, modifies it, and resells it as closed source software, you sue and win.

If a competitor takes your code, modifies it, and tries to sell it as a new open source project, nobody cares. It's a fork:

* For better or worse, real customers will stick with the "original brand".

* The fork won't get any of the community support the original did, and will always be out of sync.

* Whatever community forms around the original project will angrily reject the fork.

* Worst of all, any future development your competitor does on the product reverts back to your own code. You have all the structural advantages, as the original project owner. Your competitor is just playing to lose.

It's not like this is a supposition of mine. A great example of a project that executed this business plan: SourceFire/Snort (now a public company). Lots of companies have tried to piggyback on Snort, but for Snort's core customers, nobody has succeeded.

There's no clever algorithmic idea you can "hide" in closed-source code. Copycats are an issue (although far less of one than you think) regardless of your business model. Arbor Networks did all sorts of clever stuff under the hood (we were baselining the Internet backbone, after all), was closed source, and was beseiged by copycats.
too bloated, but nice hack
> Bottom Line: If you swing for the fences, you'll either hit a home run or strike out. If you swing for a single or double, you'll probably get there, but no farther.

What about doing both: swinging for a double for a while, then swinging for the fences (saving up money, then taking up to a year to try a startup)? Or, swinging for a double during the day, then swinging for the fences on the side, until you're successful enough to hit home runs full time (37S model)?
This is so cool...

But did you think of security? To prevent automation for example?