skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't find these evolutionary arguments convincing.
That's true. Edited. Note that I'm really not trying to make a profit on selling kratom to the news.yc community. I have had two sales that I can specifically track here. Most of our business is coming from Europe now, the collapse of the US dollar is really helping us out.
If you were a pharmaceutical company, and you did the appropriate, properly controlled clinical trials to demonstrate that this stuff is both safe and effective, then it would be OK.

Until you do that, you're walking a fine line between being a snake-oil salesman and a drug dealer.
I'd love to do clinical trials, but I don't have tens of millions of dollars. Any suggestions? It seems nearly impossible for an outsider to break into the pharmaceutical industry.
Not just the web design. But the whole attitude of the page is screaming spam. If this is a good book that you think people here will like, then inform your friend to reposition it for this audience.
I'm ambiversive.
"(...) I don't meet many men I'm attracted to who are also on the same level as myself. (...)"

According to this article:

# Rich mens wants: single attractive women.

# Rich women wants: single attractive AND rich men.

No wonder why they have a hard time finding a partner.
There is a difference between a drug pusher and a pharmaceutical company. Both groups reap huge profits at the expense of their customers/victims, but the difference is this:

The pharmaceutical company says "Product A could help you with Symptom B. Why not talk to your doctor about it? Be forewarned, side effects can include fever, paranoia, and death."

The drug pusher says "Product A could help you with Symptom B. It's a great product! Why not buy some from me!"

I've seen you promote kratom on this site several times, and this is the first time I've ever seen you mention side effects and the need to speak to a physician. Recreational drug use should ALWAYS be discussed with a competent physician.

In addition, while kratom is currently legal in the US, it is illegal in the region of the world from which it originates. The US DEA says "there is no legitimate medical use for kratom in the U. S." and has placed it on its list of "drugs and chemicals of concern". You would do well to inform your prospective customers of these facts.

Lastly, I believe you misinterpreted the post to which you replied (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71262). Xichekolas wasn't talking about the benefits of alcohol or caffeine; he was pointing out the downsides to chemically altering your brain function, and then you come along promoting kratom. Take a step back and try to realize how this looks to the rest of us.
I'm extremely introverted and solidly INTP.
From Casinos to Counterterrorism
Most other people aren't advertising things of questionable legality and ethicality.

(Note, I consider ALL recreational drug use where the recreator has not made himself aware of competent medical advice on the substances in question to be of questionable ethicality. But I let it slide a bit if you're only using it yourself, and not promoting it to others or otherwise endangering those around you.)
You title your post with "is it wrong to..." and then you go and ramble for the most part about

"Would kratom be ok if I was a pharmaceutical company and I told you that Kratom could help you lose weight, be happy, and be more productive? It is an incredibly viable alternative to oxycontin for pain management. How about as an alternative to SSRIs/Benzodiazepines as an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication? How about that kratom can seriously enhance productivity, more so than caffeine but less so than amphetamine and with fewer side effects than either?"

That looks like a disguised advertisement to me. If you want to advertise your startup that's fine, but that's different from trying to sell people a specific product on this site. If I created a site to sell cars I can mention it on YC. If however I kept posting about the benefits of this particular car that you should buy from me people would get upset as well. If you want cheap advertising find it somewhere else.
Hand-held supercomputers 'on way'
fyi JIRA runs a couple thousand per server, not per seat.

JIRA covers 1(via configuration), 3, 5, 6, 7. Possibly 2 and 4 via plugins.

No affiliation with Atlassian, just a (mostly) happy customer.
What's Russian for "Hacker"
google "trac hosting".

I use assembla.com.
BYU computer scientist 'spills' handheld screen on table
Research Shows Image-Based Threat on the Rise
Driving with poor vision becomes possible
Interview: BT 'futurologist': AI entity will win Nobel by 2020
RMS, you have a marketing and education problem at hand.

It is not about being wrong about selling what you sell. If it were the case, people wouldn't be buying coffee and tobacco.

The problem is you're selling a drug. Legal or illegal, you are selling it on the basis of "this is a drug, but this is not so bad. This is no way to try to win a customer. People will stop listening before the but, if you keep trying to defend yourself.

The marketing issue: don't push it to people that are not looking for a drug. Go for those that want to listen. Can you provide free samples for students that need to study hard for midterms? Party-goers?

The education issue: find other uses of it. Does it make good tea? Would it work for someone that would want to quit tobacco? Keep a blog, find people that are already interested in what you have and let them do word-of-mouth for you.

But, please, do understand that posting about it here frequently won't help you much. Once, it is ok. More than that, you start to become an annoyance.
Why your alarm clock sucks (this applies to other products too)
Seth Godin talks about how for 20 cents alarm clocks could set themselves but the industry is too busy to even consider things like this. This applies to software too and I'm ashamed to say applies to my industry too.
I think you meant to link to this awesome article: http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/main/archive/2007/10...
Microsoft concedes defeat in EU battle
He is not walking a fine line at all. He is a snake-oil salesman and a drug dealer.

I think drugs should be legal, but I would never be in that business.
Here's a suggestion: stop selling it. Where do you come up with a list of uses if you haven't done these trials? How do you know its safe? It might not be illegal but that doesn't make it ethical.
Here at Xobni, we were first using Retrospectiva: http://retrospectiva.org/. Pretty UI, fast, Rails-based, simple to use and tweak. Free.

We later switched to Jira, which is expensive but powerful and a bit cluttered. Jira actually charges a flat price, not per seat as nostrademons suggests.
You say drug dealer like it is the worst thing in the world. What do you think pharmacists and Chinese herbalists are?

It is definitely not snake oil but unfortunately I have been unable to fund formal clinical trials for kratom derivatives as painkillers and I doubt anything short of that will be enough evidence for you. I am sure though that the effectiveness would be demonstrated, both with kratom by itself and in a formulation with non-narcotic painkillers, similar to the way that oxy and hydrocodone are usually pressed into pills with acetaminophen or ibuprofen.
The REPL is pretty cool indeed. :) My question is, once you have to scale to multiple machines, with a separate Lisp instance on each machine, are there any good ways to call load once and update on all instances.
vim balances braces-try %
Kratom has been used safely by the people of Southeast Asia for hundreds of years. It's banning in Thailand was an authoritarian reaction to Western war-on-drugs hysteria and the prohibition has failed miserably because kratom literally grows on trees in Southeast Asia. It would be like if the maple tree was banned in North America.
Why don't you try getting into a less capital intensive and less regulated business, like, say, a web startup?

As problematic as the pharmaceutical industry is, there are very good reasons that these products are regulated, not least of which is that they can lead to injury and death. Safety and efficacy of the active ingredient aside, how do you know that the product you're selling is even what you think it is?
Hmm, good eye. I wonder if they'll respond to the question you sent them.
>Would kratom be ok if I was a pharmaceutical company and I told you that Kratom could help you lose weight, be happy, and be more productive?

If you were a pharmaceutical company and you were posting about your product on YC News, we would downmod you as a spammer. Eventually, the powers that be would probably ban you.
YC: please, give me some feedback on startup business model
Hi everyone,

I need any feedback for my startup's idea and business model and would very appreciate your help. I don't want to go too deep into details, but one of the major points is that I'm going to ask subscribers to use my own IM client to stay connected (well, it could be some open protocol, like Jabber). I wish I can propose something easier, either SMS, or Email, or other IM (ICQ, AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, ...). Unfortunately, no one allows to perform bulk messaging (or it's very expensive).

From the other side, my subscribers will have motivation to use it, to stay updated and connected. However, I'm not sure if downloading and installing one more client (and keep it running on your computer) becomes a barrier for a typical user and can keep them away of being my subscriber.

What do you think guys?

Oh, the business model is not connected to advertisement (although, it can take place), so it's not pay-per-view model. The reason why I am mentioning this, is that recently I've been told that such requirement can lead you to feeling like being back to late 90's, when the market was full of numerous toolbars, advertisement panels, etc and a lot of people still sick of it.

Thanks.
Well I guess I at least proved (once again) sarcasm is not easily conveyed with text :-)
Apple 4Q Earnings Beat Analyst Views
Another vote for podcasts! I love your articles and I'm confident you could easily create superb podcasts as well!
Opiates are controlled substances in most cases.

You, my friend, are full of shit and have no idea what you are talking about.
Bullshit. Kratom is a plant, not a substance. If you had any clue, you would just shut up and go away, Mr. misunderstood 'outsider'.
Pharmacists are trained and licensed. You are not.

Chinese herbalists are snake-oil salesmen who occasionally get damn lucky. Sure you want to compare yourself to such scammers?
So maybe I'm trolling, in the sense that I knew my post would evoke strong emotional responses from some individuals, but so are you.
When you speak of extreme specialization I can't help but think of The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.
http://www.plexus.org/forster/index.html

Sometimes I worry that there aren't enough inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinkers. Of course, it may just be because I'm around a lot of academics who seem to be highly specialized.
Tabacco had been used for thousands of years before we understand more about its cancer risks. You haven't mentioned how you arrived at the beneficial uses of the drug either. Claiming similar efficacy to mainstream pharmaceuticals without similar proof is unethical.

You don't think people should use kratom without their doctors advice? How many of your customers do you genuinely believe are acting on the advice of their medical professional? I think suggesting that they should get a doctors opinion purely on the basis that it might indemnify you or give your claims legitimacy is pretty unethical.
Awesome. AAPL is now bigger than IBM.
So you are saying kratom is a controlled substance? It is not, except in Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and Australia.

While it is a neurological opiate, it is chemically very different from poppy-derived opiates.
i preferred the old isitfriday.net, but that's gone now
Err. It's highly unlikely that people publishing now will have won a Nobel by 2020. If an AI is built tomorrow, it may take that long for its inventors to get the prize.
Many CAPTCHAs are positively pathetic.

Adding little bits of salt-and-pepper noise, light-colored lines, and other cutesy antics do nothing.

The simple fact is that machines are better at recognizing individual letters and characters than humans are.
I have never modded you down; until today, I'd never run across one of your comments mentioning kratom. However, here's why I think people might be modding you down:

Frankly, and with respect, you sound like a crank and, on this subject, you are a bore. I'm bored of the subject based only on a comment of yours I read today, and the few posts I could stand to read on this thread.

I have no time to evaluate your claims, which are indistinguishable from the claims of 100s of bullshit products. I might be missing out on some wonder-substance, but I know I'll waste my life if I look into every thing that someone promotes as a wonder-substance. So, I'd rather spend my time thinking about things that interest me (code, money, women) and I suspect others, similarly inclined, are responsible for the down-mods.

You seem like a bright guy, but I think this topic is unwelcome, as evidenced by the down-modding. I suggest you drop it.
I always extend greenspuns 10th to cover any language (including common lisp itself).

I commonly claim that my job often ends up being fulfilling greenspuns 10th law.
You wrote:

> Disclaimer: Kratom can cause nausea, itching, and constipation, just like other opiates. Like other opiates, it can seriously potentiate other pharmaceuticals and you should ask your doctor if kratom is right for you.

So you are insinuating, that Kratom is an opiate of some kind. As a matter of fact, it's a plant and contains many known and unknown substances.

And no doctor will have an opinion about Kratom (I certainly don't) and would describe this shit to a patient.

> So you are saying kratom is a controlled substance?

No, please read.

> It is not, except in Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and Australia.

So it is.

If this is a controlled substance in Australia, it certainly will be everywhere else if it catches on.

Someone ban this guy.
I don't think there's anything wrong with selling Kratom, as long as you make it clear that it hasn't gone through clinical trials, has known side effects, etc... And you do seem to be very conscientious about pointing those things out. So if customers aren't being misled, what could the problem possibly be? That other non-customers dislike your product and don't want anyone to have it? Fuck them.

Someone commented saying we have drug trials for good reason, and you may be selling something unsafe. That person should not be in charge of other people's lives. Let your customers decide for themselves. Anyone who wants only officially regulated drugs is free to buy only those, and other people can make up their own mind about what is safe/cheap/tested/etc enough for them. If people prefer to buy your product then you are helping them by their own lights, so be proud.
Bountii Launches, Aims At Better Price Comparison Shopping
At this point isn't it enough to realize that no one wants to hear about it? Why do you insist on analyzing and debating the subject? Take a hint and get over it already. Leave this aspect of your life at the door and enjoy the site in every other way. How hard is that?
Coming soon: isitboringderivativeideatime.com
He _is_ such a scammer.
It's wrong to spam.
There is no science behind Chinese medicine, but it works for treating many symptoms in a way that is a lot cheaper than Western medicine, especially for people in China. Pain, menstrual cramps, that kind of thing. Responsible Chinese herbalists know the limits of what they do and recommend western medicine when appropriate.
Wasn't Apple the one where some third person had 2% in case the two Steves had some conflict? But that third person was just for conflict resolution.

In general I find 3 or 4 is a good number for a start. It's not too many to manage, but not too few. 3 is company.
Help me build a powerful data cruncher for a few thousand dollars.
I am quite the novice when it comes to building computers, and in this case I am not even sure if I need one or can substitute it with a bunch of PS3s.

Here are my two main requirements:

1) Crunch heaps of data. I am talking say a 100 million high-dimensional data points, and I may need quite a large number of those handy (that probably means, in memory) to run some machine learning (ML) algorithms on it.

2) A storage device to store up to a terabyte of data.

And some tertiary requirements:

While I'll probably be running hand-crafted algorithms on my data, it would be great to know of existing database technologies that do data management well and also have bundled ML code.

On the coding side, If you suggest python please also suggest a good resource for python-based ML scripts or package (pyML?)

Thanks for any help, pointers, and/or suggestions!
speaking of toolbar.
(1) Lisp isn't (just) a functional programming language.

(2) Why should lisp advocates care about "functional programming in general"?
Comcast traffic blocking: even more apps, groupware clients affected (including Lotus Notes!)
Another example: http://islostarepeat.com/
INTJ/INTP

I help run summer conferences, where I lead small group discussions and moderate. People that I meet there often are surprised when I tell them afterwards that I'm an introvert.

A lot of being able to moderate discussion and engage people was learned, after some practice, rather than anything particularly innate. So things like selling your idea to people, making presentations, being charming, those are all things that a startup founder needs can be learned with a bit of practice.
that was excellent!
So you admit to trolling? Well, I'm not trolling, I'm just genuinly pissed off at your manipulative and dangerous attempts to sell dubious drugs under the guise of 'running a business'. What does this have to do with Y-Combinator startups? Nothing.
Beanstalk -- Hosted Subversion: Free Account*
There is no science behind using Kratom either. It's a diffuse mix of substances, any of which would be sold on their own if they had any pharmacological value beyond giving you a 'buzz'.
I was actually considering looking for a front desk job in a SF condo. The guy in my building has a desk with a comfy chair and just sits at the front desk every day from 9 to 5 and surfs the net with his laptop, and occasionally accepts packages from time to time. Thats time that I could be hacking! I know from the HOA that I pay that he's paid quite decently. So what more can you ask for? A cushy, decently paying job in SF with a desk, chair, and internet. Perfect for hacking.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=PubMed&Cmd=S...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=PubMed&Cmd=S...

Milligram for milligram, 7-hydroxymitragynine is stronger than morphine. Despite the fact that Kratom has not yet been developed into a pharmaceutical doesn't mean it is worthless, it means the marketplace hasn't quite caught up yet.
Price search is a tough market with a lot of room for improvement out there, so I think this is a great launch. I mean, Google is only so-so when you expect they would rock the party at this.

In fact, if I funded startups, price search is one of those areas with enough opportunity that I would fund one every year in that space until someone gets something good going.

Now, so far I'm not seeing anything too hot from Bountii, but they have launched (congrats) and I do like the results page.

But okay, one thing. This is totally one of those cases where the minimalist front page sucks out loud. Because yes, you do want a simple front page, but you also want to give people what they want from you right up front. Bountii has got great product images and they're not front and center to arouse my inner consumer? That's tragic. It should just have a few top products right under the search box on the front page.

Congrats to the Bountii founders. Go have a Moons Over My Hammy and get ready to really work some magic in the upcoming months.
I would love to use such a simple system, and the system you describe would probably work if I were just working alone and were single.

How many are on your team and how many projects do you typically have in the pipeline?

How do you use rainlender in the context of running a startup?

How do you collaborate and manage?
Dear rms, I'm sure you're read PG's What You Can't Say. This is evidently one of those things (surprising in a place like this--I know). Just look at all the comments that claim that this is spam or that no one wants to read it, despite the fact that it's currently at the top of the front page. Such wild irrationality, in such volume, should be your cue.

Take PG's advice and don't talk about it, except to close friends. And good luck with your business.
hm. I should have known.
Facebook: The Failure of Localization
The first of many posts about Facebook on my new blog. I'd like to hear what you all have to say.

See the first one too: http://www.alexkates.com/2007/10/inevitable-fall-of-facebook...
You might as well argue that there shouldn't be laws against fraud, because the would-be victims can make up their own mind about whether to participate in advance-fee scams (and lose their kids' college savings). For that matter, there shouldn't be laws against muggings! People can make up their own minds about whether to walk down a dark alley at night.

Or maybe we care about other people and want to ensure that when someone claims product A provides desirable outcome X without also providing undesirable outcome Y, it actually does that thing.

We have a right and, moreover, a responsibility to examine claims like the ones rms makes. They should be put to scientific test and if they are not substantiated, rms should be prohibited from making them. It is unconscionable to expect every individual prospective customer to make his own detailed evaluation.

We are not in charge of other people's lives. We are merely looking out for the public welfare. For some of us this is merely a matter of morality, but for others, this is a solemn obligation they took on when they became members of the medical profession. For example, the UK General Medical Council lists the following in their Duties of a Doctor:

- Make the care of your patient your first concern

- Protect and promote the health of patients and the public

- Act without delay if you have good reason to believe that you or a colleague may be putting patients at risk

When a person like rms makes medical claims about a product, and the DEA offers information that suggests his claims are false, we have every right to demand that he either substantiate his claims in the accepted scientific way used in the drug industry (scientific drug trials) or shut up and go home.
Lucky for you, Amazon EC2 announced their "extra large" instances just recently with 1.7TB of storage. EC2 and a TB of data on S3 may be a pain to set up, but it has so many advantages that it's a huge win. I would at least take that as the presumptive choice which other options are weighed against.

I know a lot of people will line up to beat the drum for Amazon Web Services but it really is one of the most fantastic resources for startups since Linux.