skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Money from your users.
Ok, so I know that a lot of you are developing free services, but for those of you that aren't. Let's say that you rent digital tools (we'll call them sprockets) on a per-month basis; different sprockets have different line item costs, and you can buy a machine that has a set number of sprockets x y and z.

This is the pricing structure that I'm planning on (the numbers are pretty arbitrary)

Machine 0 - build your own, at line item value.

Machine 1 (possibly free-to-very low cost) has
2 x sprockets
2 y sprockets and
4 z sprockets

Machine 2 has 2x the number of default sprockets, at 90% of the price of buying them at their line-item value.

with maybe 2 more machines, with different % of the line item value (more value if purchasing more sprockets)

This is my question: should users be able to add sprockets to the machine, and then be billed accordingly, or should users have to purchase a sprocket to be able to use it. Has anybody done research on what users want from this type of scenario?
Startups to watch
Chatting with Adrian Holovaty
The Dumbest Startups of 2007
Public and private spaces, and why Reddit and YouTube comments are so awful
Mac OS X market share sets new record at the end of 2007
A friend recently told me about a guy he knows who sold a web site to Disney for $700M (it was Club Penguin). I was incredulous at first, as that number is staggering. But they have 4 million users paying $5/month. Sony offered them $150M and they turned it down as they were making more than that in a year.

The guy didn't start with empire-building intentions. He just had small children and couldn't find anything for them to do online. It turned out a lot of other people had that problem as well.

There was an interesting benefit of being acquired by Disney. Apparently CP was defending itself against a flood of lawsuits claiming rights to the penguin brand. When Disney bought CP they called everybody up and said, "You don't understand. We're suing you." The lawsuits stopped.
S Novom Rokom! (Ukrainian) and yah, +1 to utf-8 support.
Octopart and Bountii are done really well.
the website he started while "living dangerously" is pretty cool: http://mowser.com
Even if it was over a period of a year that seems like a lot.
Thriving Even When a Market "Vanishes"
Glad you found it useful. :D
Nice one. Is there a way of searching only submissions or only comments?
Fixed--you can turn off JavaScript now, if you want.
You mean, like every intrusion detection system ever built?
I like the idea of Songza, but I expected a much better looking design from Humanized.
No, would you like to? You can search a user's submissions AND comments, though: http://searchyc.com/danw+submissions+or+comments
High Achiever, Gifted Learner, Creative Thinker
More than 100 scientists and thinkers discuss what they've changed their minds about
Does a Facebook-Twitter Deal Make Sense?
Lodwick/Karp's Startup Norbum Goes Live - Photos of Homeless - WTF?
Ask YC: can one of you create a webapp to browse the recent NASA flight data?
People are complaining about the format (hundreds of pages of PDF). Surely one of you talented programmers can create a webapp based on this, and it might even be the genesis of a startup (e.g., traveler's hub for aircraft safety, etc.)

I myself am just interested in reading the damn thing and am too lazy to write scripts to parse it.
lane hartwell playlist
Why specs matter
Good UI: Monolog Boxes and Transparent Messages
Xronia Polla! (Greek)
Is it good or bad for India when brighter people leave to go to the U.S.? I suppose they send money home, as most of their extended family remains in India.
Ten things that will change your future [loopt included]
Statistical Data Mining Tutorials - A goldmine from Andrew Moore of CMU & Google
These games are not about high quality rendering, and really can't be -- the computing environment they ship to is not homogeneous enough. Pirates of The Caribbean looks like Ocarina of Time.

While snazzy rendering won't really go anywhere with these games, server side physics just might -- you can control the platform, and as the games move from "pre-teen" to "young adult" you get into domains where realism (in the sense of convincing motion, compression of rubber objects and the like) can add a lot even without fancy rendering.
How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time
The 5 most annoying programs on your PC (and their alternatives)
Sure did... That piqued my curiosity too...
Just because some aspects of the current internet can be described by control theory doesn't mean a knowledge of control theory is beneficial or even necessary.

I remain skeptical until someone shows me how control theory leads to a better solution to a problem we currently have with the internet.
Now we have AWS DevPay too!

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/01/01/amazon-raises-the...

This looks like it could be exactly what I need. Keep up the good work Amazon.
1980: (Alan Kay) let's help children build and explore things on their own to make them passionate about learning!

2008: (Disney) let's help ourselves buy another yacht by blasting pre-teens with ads!
forgot to mention this - in defense of 37 Signals and their flagship Rails app...
I've been a heavy user of Basecamp/WriteBoard for about 8 months now (we're talkin 6+ hours a day), and I've only experienced an unexpected meltdown once.
Rainbows and Unicorns and the Tech Echo Chamber
Strictly speaking, they are attacking the persons behind justin.tv, and not the startup itself.
I had never heard of Songza. I just tried it out and it's pretty amazing. I agree with the red being a poor choice for a background, but everything else I think is pretty spot on.

Searching while listening to music is great, I like it.
Monday, August 16, 2004 ?
The Enduring Mysteries of the Outer Solar System
23 People I'd Like To Meet in 2008
What's that sound Wile E. Coyote makes as he's plummeting towards the ground?
Don't overestimate the power of versions
what exactly constitutes a meltdown, and are there ever expected ones?
11 Best On Startups Posts For 2007
Ask YC: Setting price for services
I am working on an a app which I plan to sell to other businesses and wanted to know what people thoughts were on setting prices.

I am at a lose because my target market will be selling on my product and thus I need to keep the price at a point where both parties can make a margin.
"what exactly constitutes a meltdown"

when all you get is a 503 page

when nothing responds and it has nothing to do with your connection

"and are there ever expected ones?"

well, not expected meltdowns; more like advanced notice for maintenance - probably a deployment of a newer version of the web app
Inside the UK's fastest machine
Cary Grant: The First Modern Movie Star
interesting its number 17 in the top 500 list. I would wager that the government here in the uk has a couple bigger ones that they can't talk about. I bet the US has a few too.
pmarca made quite a leap here . . . I'm not buying it
The Top500 list refers to performance on the linpack benchmark. While the UK and US government probably have "more powerful" systems than this which are used for classified purposes, those are likely to be special-purpose designs which aren't able to run the linpack benchmark. (For example, the NSA has access to wafer fabrication facilities, and is believed to have several custom silicon designs.)

The linpack benchmark runs on general-purpose supercomputers, and non-classified supercomputers shared between a large number of researchers are inherently general-purpose supercomputers.
If you haven't lived in NYC why is the assumption that only sleazy MBA types work there. I am tired of people bashing the startup culture here in NYC, I believe there is a healthy community of startups in NYC anything from etsy, kaltura, tumblr, buglabs, amiestreet, delicious(started in NYC), hakia, viewdle,teachthepeople,clickable, wixi, commandshift3, and more...The concentration might not be like Boston or SF, but I think people forget there are 10 million people in NYC and 2 major universities ( NYU and Columbia) which make for a large number of developers.
Nice article, but it's not exactly news. Adam Smith discovered spontaneous order. He recognised that it was a counter-intuitive idea - we expect that any order we find has been brought about through 'intelligent design' or in Smith's own words the 'invisible hand'
Charles Darwin openly acknowledged his debt to Adam Smith.
15 Open Source projects to watch
True, but I think Wile E. might be at that stage where he's feeling around underneath him for the ground that used to be there. :)
"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."

Hmm.. I'll bet you cant. /snark

I got this error twice.

entries:
"64055"
"Kansas City"

system:
Firefox 2.0.0.11
Mac OS X 10.4
Are Design Patterns How Languages Evolve?
Saudis Arrest Top Blogger
Google favors new web pages for newly popular searches, gets burned.
What does he mean by Facebook having CIA backing?
Honestly, if we hadn't made that list I would have been a little offended. The original Justin.tv idea (which is what they're reacting to here) was clearly pretty dumb.
Andrew Chen: Are your SEO efforts working? Or failing?
Like today?
The Gears of My Childhood
Hmm, wund and wunderground show different temperature data for my city.

I wonder why that is...
MC Hammer's DanceJam will battle YouTube
This is an off topic question, but what do you think of India's economic competitiveness compared to China's?

According to Fortune, China is supposed to be the big player for this century. If true, this is pretty bad since the Chinese elites view people as a means to the end of Chinese dominance. India, on the other hand, institutionally has a better respect for human dignity. Though the caste system is still alive and kicking, it is a religious institution, and not something the government is pushing on the people.
One day I was in CompUSA looking at (overpriced) USB cables. One from the 'main' area (from Belkin I believe) was $23.99. Another in the Mac area a few yards away, exact same specs and same brand, was $27.99.

I studied the packages for a while to find any other difference -- only a 'made for mac' logo on the packaging. There wasn't even a color difference in the cable (such as Mac/iPod white).

Mac users are freer with their money -- less price-sensitive and probably even richer. Sellers know this, and thus there's a 'Mac tax' in retail prices (and disproportionate effort given to creating high-margin Mac-specific accessories).

In addition to ITunes integration and any arty/cultural factors, this freespending tendency also helps explain the paid music download discrepancy.
You should add current conditions, too.

"Right now, it's 39 degrees and Sunny."
It's a conspiracy theory that made the digg/reddit rounds awhile back. Here's Ars Technica's take on it:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070125-8701.html

The author doesn't find the theory plausible, but does link to a DARPA paper detailing how social networking principles can allow financial transactions to be better tracked.
AJAX wave evades vendors
Technologies on the rise in 2008
Larry Wall on Language Features... and Perl 6
http://socialnet.teenwag.com/profile?user=rosalina
Yeah I know the fault isn't yours. It's always annoying to deal with non-english characters.

I was just being mischievous and pointing out the humor to the non-spanish speakers among us.
RIP Netscape (1994-2008)
So is there hope for the Creative Thinker? Because at least in news.yc circles, he seems to be not very well liked?
Not really. The modifications that people get today, usually of the breasts and face, are intended to enhance the visual indicators of youth and health. I don't think they're meant to signal wealth, especially since the people who get these procedures are often loath to admit it.

But there are exceptions; some people are open about their cosmetic surgeries. Perhaps some of them are (consciously or not) displaying their wealth.

I don't think tattoos and piercings are signals of wealth, usually. Most people in rich countries can afford them. Really elaborate tattoos might be an exception.
Dreams: Night School
Should I give my lawyers equity?
Can you describe the services in more detail?
Anecdotal evidence suggests a high correlation between the number of suckers born every minute and Mac users.

That said; I want a MacBook Pro. ;-)
Ask YC: Javascript, memory usage
Is there a rough rule of thumb for what's a reasonable amount of memory for your Javascript to be using? My worst case scenario is a six year old laptop with running XP / IE6.

On a related note, any recommendations for how to avoid memory leaks in Javascript? I understand how they occur but was wondering if anyone was using any frameworks and had any best practices to keep them from forgetting to unhook event handlers and whatnot.
Disqus on Fake Steve Jobs blog
64 bit support on FreeBSD is pretty good; the only real issue is being able to compile for 32 bit targets on a 64 bit host out of the box. The ULE scheduler improves SMP support considerably.
What is the problem you have with SMP support in FreeBSD?
Census sensitivity: counting people
G'Day, mate! Throw a beaut snag on the barbie this arvo and have yerself a true blue Aussie New Years. Stone the flamin' crows, these blowies are putting a damper on things.

P.S. Bring an esky.

(guess...)
I'd like to see the headline: "Disqus now on News.YC!"
Auguri di buon anno! (it)
Jeff Hawkins, who made a breakthrough in the field and I presume indirectly inspired IBM's Blue Brain experiment, is not in the list. No wonder, though: the official science is too conservative to accept fresh and worthy ideas that fast.

www.onintelligence.org
hey, where's my company?
thanks, great bit of insight
The biggest challenge is when you are from outside of the US, and on top of that, from a developing country that is frowned upon.

My country isn't even supported by PayPal. Now that sucks. Let alone almost every merchant account provider in the US. And we were rejected by an "international merchant account provider" with a "100% acceptance guarantee".

Oh well, all these things will never make sense to someone from the US, where you can actually take things for granted.
sure, basically it others a cms type software to web designers to sell on to their clients. The pricing can be done via pages.
Stastny Novy Rok! (Czech)
Norvig doesn't really update the list any more, so a lot of the more recent stuff/people is missing.

Also in the YouTube age, a ton of very interesting lectures/demos/talks are online in video format and he doesn't catalog any of it.
Windows Vienna / 7 - Microsoft's own response to Vista
While it seems pretty logical that everything in our behavior, including dreams, comes down to evolutionary processes and survival, still positive dreams remain unexplained from this point of view.
The 2008 Venture Capital Outlook
Do you translate part time? (37signals-like approach to translating)
Now You Can Graph Your Twitter Usage
I think early adopters in general tend to be more intelligent, and so leave better comments than late adopters. And with youtube, there isn't much to comment on when it's just a video of a guy falling off his skateboard or whatever.
only works for US-based startups
Actually I finally took more than 30 seconds and read the whole piece and checked around a little. I am not involved in RoR, so I don't know much about his technical claims, but I think his description of the consulting business and the fate of languages is brilliant.

I have seen this type of group think and dumbing down in the research world for many years now. I suppose it has a similar form in consulting as well. The world is not kind to the truth seeking individual, especially when that individual announces their intentions. The best one can do is to be wise about what battles to fight and to accept that there will always be some waste and fraud.
Is Twitter F'ed?
His book On Intelligence was published in 2004.
How to Become a Gmail Jedi Master
Briefly, it's a reference to the fact that Facebook closed a round with Accel Partners, which through its manager, Jim Breyer, et al has pretty close connections to the DoD, DARPA, and the CIA. For example, Breyer was (IIRC) the founding CEO of In-Q-Tel [1], the CIA's venture capital arm founded by Gilman Louie. Indeed, some think that Facebook is also funded by In-Q-Tel. Because In-Q-Tel makes a combination of public and secret investments, it's not the sort of thing that would get covered on TechCrunch.

If one considers the data mining and correlation Facebook obviously has in the works, one might think that the CIA is using the vast amounts of data as a staging ground for techniques being employed in the recently black bagged Total Information Awareness program [2] started by DARPA and initially headed by (I shit you not) John Poindexter [3]. One might even argue that Mark Zuckerberg is so blase about potential acquirers because, indeed, the company will never allow itself to be acquired. One would probably be derided as a conspiracy theorist, however. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter
Is it just me, or did anyone else find the information in this article pretty basic? Even something like using the '+' operator in the email address and filtering based on that, or the fact that if you have a '.' in your gmail address, skipping the dot will still result in you getting the email...

I guess I am saying I was hoping for something more, like this one from Steve [http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/12/become-a-knowle.html]
You don't want to know how this sausage is made.
Zed Shaw, as of yesterday, is no longer the coolest kid in the Rails community.
Nice find, hadn't heard about this.
That is a tough question for me to answer, partly because I don't follow any world news... but my impression so far is that China is leaps and bounds ahead of India in terms of economic competitiveness. China has realized the potential of extremely cheap labor, and is fast becoming a black hole, that sucks in raw materials from around the world, and exchanges them for a lot of foreign currency, especially American dollars. India, on the other hand tends to be skewed towards leveraging its technical prowess, though attempting to do what China does (in terms of manufacturing) would definitely be a step in the right direction.

I think India has the potential to create great products at great prices, that can help both raise the standard of living in the country, and bring in foreign exchange. Looking at what the Reliance (and Ispat) group have done in the last 3 decades is a strong reminder of this fact. Over the last decade, India has done some good things, like open up its economy to international companies, which has had both a good and bad effect for the economy itself. On one side, more jobs are created, and the lowest common denominator becomes even lower, but on the other hand, without strict policies, large multinationals have the ability to kill the mom-and-pop businesses (of which there are lot, including the cottage industry within India).

I dont know if this answered your question... Let me know.
Adrian has the phrase "make something useful" in his DNA. I've met his friend Derek out here in D.C. and everything that I hear about him is a genuinely nice personality focused on making things fast.
Cyclone Aviation to Supply gallon Fuel Tanks to the US Navy's F/A-18's
Elbit Systems Ltd. (NASDAQ: ESLT) announced that its subsidiary, Cyclone Aviation Products Ltd. (Cyclone), was awarded a contract to supply the US Navy 330 gallon Fuel tanks to be installed on its F-18's.
Adrian Holavarty's (creator of Django) startup Everyblock is also on the list. I know millions upon millions of soccermoms who would love to have a website that gives them crime info, local sports activities, and local government information. Those things are barely available anyway.
Followup: That cool ICU checklist cancelled by federal agency
Gott nytt, god fortsattning! (Svenska)
This is following up a story posted recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87167
Check the footnotes: "We are not affiliated to Microsoft Corporation."

That is not M$'s response.
Opportunity '08: Browsers?
I suspect dreaming is just a process that goes on constantly but gets completely stifled by either consciousness or deep sleep. The notion that we rehearse our instincts at night makes me wonder why we don't dream about the full gamut of our instincts more often--things like: 1) Placing food in mouth, 2) Finding a designated area to defecate, 3) Forming social hierarchies, 4) Killing animals, 5) Enforcing mores, etc. I've never dreamed about any of those things.
WebGuild Using Questionable Tactics To Promote Events
Australian Government Equates Freedom Of Speech To Liking Kiddie Porn
I suppose that's about Geekpedia, the team itself is part of MS obviously - or otherwise how could they possibly use Microsoft's trademarks?
I think the default avatar for disqus looks like someone who doesn't know what they are talking about due to the giant question mark in the middle of the face.
On Java, Lisp, Ruby and AI: Language explorations
I suggest a free package with X pages and additional per page pricing bought in multiples of 10. That way, you can pass on volume discounts to the web designers and aggregate their total client's pages (instead of per client pricing).
The mere existence of that website makes me wonder if being part of the Rails community is really something to strive for...
Lessons from T-Mobile's support
This article talks about sharing these categories with children in discussion, so that children can consider where they fit in. However, other work on 'mindsets' [1,2] suggests that labeling a child as 'gifted' or 'creative' in contrast to 'hard working' could negatively impact the child's future learning and achievement.

I wonder if Kingore, the author of this article, has written anything taking into account mindset research like Carol Dweck's.

[1] http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84655
I like the idea of the site. In principle, it should be a useful way to pick a Rails contractor.

Unfortunately, it ends up looking like a popularity contest to a lot of people. I'm not sure how that can be avoided.
The suggestion here is not that dreams are rehearsing instincts, but that they're rehearsing of behaviors which are important for survival, and the selection of which behaviors to rehearse depends mainly on what the waking mind is concerned with, since that's a good indicator of "important survival behavior".

Hence dreaming about code for those that program all day, or having World of Warcraft dreams after playing too much WoW. Er... not that I've ever done that last. Nope. Not me.
Non-Facebook version of my Numbrosia puzzle.  No registration required.  Very addictive.
Wouldn't work for people behind a corporate firewall. My old employer used to route all of its traffic through the head office in the US even though we were in Canada.
BTW, if you play for a while without registration, you can register without losing your progress provided that you still have the cookie that you played under.
Subverting Remote Systems With Ruby ("Sploitin' with Ruby: Point, Click, Root")
Is my code hot or not?

Thats just sad
I think this is mostly bogus. Consider the research presented in recent articles like:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

This division into 3 kinds of kids has an underlying assumption that kids can be classified by some innate characteristics.

Rather than putting effort into "identifying gifted students", maybe we should concentrate on finding more effective ways to teach everybody. Getting rid of grades comes to mind as one way to help convert "high achievers" into "gifted learners".
Trading for their own account: What happens as Google grows
The Google Algorithm Is Changing