skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right; some acquisitions survive as real products and it would be a mistake to call them "failures".

I guess what the OP means is that price alone is not a sufficient criteria to judge whether an acquisition was a success. If you sell your company for a large amount of money, but it gets shut down, that's not "success" (although it's certainly much better for you than closing down without any money).
It doesn't seems like a very good strategy, though. It seems ok to drive visits from the blog to Hacker News, but not really the other way around (which I guess is what people wanted)
Aaron Swartz's Prosecutors Were Threatened and Hacked, DOJ Says
I agree. I have a PhD. While the process wasn't 100% sunshine and rainbows I enjoyed most of it, learned a heck of a lot, and I understand the utility of doing a PhD for most people who are interested in doing further research.
VC funding vs. Crowdfunding - let's get real
But those people are then likely to vote up the post on HN (I vote up most posts I comment on, otherwise there's no point in commenting if the post might die). If you have even just 1000 loyal subscribers to your blog, you could perhaps get a handful of votes early on in your post's life which is enough to get it to front page within the first couple of hours.
I completely agree with you in broader terms, but that wasn't really what my comment was about. The poster I replied to suggested that they'd be outraged if they discovered that their parents had made a concious choice to select a deaf embryo. My point, and the reason that it isn't a black and white debate, was that if the parents hadn't made that choice, the deaf-but-outraged child wouldn't exist.

On a larger, societal level, I think that purposefully selecting deaf children is wrong. On a personal level, if I was that deaf child, I don't know if I could be outraged at my parents choice because if they hadn't made it I simply wouldn't exist. You'd have to be fairly certain in your beliefs to be outraged at acts that resulted in your being.
I dunno, a private delivery contract to the ISS qualifies in my book. Maybe I am setting my sights too low. This is a tough crowd!
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In my opinion, that's because Hacker News --- besides self-inflating egos as noted by @petercooper --- has the right tools and already mature community which are more suited to host civilized and fruitful conversations than on a blog.

My aversion for blog comments stems from how little we can trust content there: can I use "pg" as a username on your blog and impersonate Paul Graham? Where do the avatars come from? etc. Lots of little questions of whether or not I can trust what's being written in the comments.

Other than that, there is also the issue of quality: is there a system (e.g. karma, up/downvotes) that prunes the bad comments? the spam?

What about the ever-so-different way the comments are presented on blogs? Are comments threaded or linear?

To me, HN is the perfect framework for good conversations.
You are right, but it came to UK through US:

From the United States, the Ph.D. degree spread to
Canada in 1900, and then to the United Kingdom in 1917.

(from Wikipedia)
"Bitcoin is good if you want to make a deposit of between $1,000 and $10,000. But the liquidity is just not there in the system for multimillion dollar transactions," Colas points out.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-20/jittery-span...

It's not a bubble if big money decides (or rather realizes) they can and will transfer and settle differences in bitcoin rather than fiat. (to me that's bitcoin's strongest point.. it's too cumbersome for day-to-day instant purchases) It might be a bubble now, but at some point either now or in the future, the (next) bubble won't pop.
I think my point was that almost every phd quantum physicist had actually done that experiment. Extending it to "generate a random number" was obvious. Which probably is a flaw in patent granting process than inherent in patents

I am mostly complaining that IMO a patent should be so narrow as to be hardware design ie copyright and as such it is much much harder to get broad applicability - which instantly reduces the ability to effectively patent principles

Lets take a well known example - the use of a cyclone induced to create a vacuum used to suck up dust (Dyson) - he could not patent that it is too broad so he had to patent exact angles of fan to cylinder and so forth - which were eventually gotten around via different manufacturers - but he held the patents on the well known means of generating cyclones, for vacuums.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
Your first example has nice trickery in it but I prefer the original version. I think it is important to keep it simple.

Compressed code is often not the best way to do it; adding a few lines of verbosity can reduce the time it takes to understand the code to a fraction while sacrificing very little in terms of performance.
This is wider than HN-related only. Some non-tech bloggers do this as well (disallow comments). My understanding is that they try to move discussion from private space - which is their own website - to public space, which are all the social networks you can imagine.

The difference is that only people who already visit your site can see the private discussion, but when it starts on HN, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc, it can catch attention of additional people. These bloggers are willing to trade clarity and ability to enhance their content for chance of additional exposure.

I have no idea how well it works for them and I would really love to see some case studies (especially from non-tech bloggers, who targets wide audience with their lifestyle blogs, etc).

I believe people are much, much less likely to comment if they can't do it on the site, but they need to post it to some social network instead to say what they have to say. Is that additional share on Twitter or Facebook worth all those comments which were not written only because there is no comment form on the website?
Mmmm, good point, I didn't though on that.
Anyway, if you have 1000 subscribers on your blog, it seems there's already an audience... For some "corporate announcement" it makes sense to have as much exposure as possible, but for a personal blog I'm still not sure is a good strategy...
This is one of the best things I have ever seen on HN
Agreed but in this case "mySQL" meant "SQL" (vs. NoSQL).
Sorry – "Visual timers", no apostrophe needed. Otherwise it's "Visual timer is are..." :o)
A more down-to-earth guide, and an absolutely fantastic read at that, is The KLF's "The Manual - How To Have A Number One The Easy Way" by the KLF:

http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/

It's a bit dated, given that they wrote it in the 80s, but it contains some absolute gems:

Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7" single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over - the Number One position was guaranteed:

"I'm never going to give you up"

It says it all. It's what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

"I'm never gonna let you down I'm never going to fool around or upset you"

GENIUS.

As soon as they had those lyrics written they must have known they could have taken out a block booking on the Number One slot. Then within the next twelve months to have written the chorus:

"I should be so lucky Luck, lucky, lucky I should be so lucky in love"
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I think you're underselling the piece. There are a few interesting insights in there (not least of all his 3. Find and Exploit Loopholes piece).

I'm not really sure what you expected though, as if it was that easy to get into the charts as an independent artist then everyone would be doing it.
I guess the main difference is that we know exactly how many bitcoins are left to be mined, while we don't really know how much gold is left in the earth's crust.
Wish I fail every week. I dislike this rant a lot. It doesn't fit any pattern because everyone has different goals in life.
What would make just as much (or more) sense for most of their enterprise deployments would be to let the enterprise's own PKI take over. A lot of businesses would probably want to be able to silently update keys (although I can see the value in pinning/local cache with notification on change). They may do that as part of the "custom LDAP/AD" tier.
Wow - So has those 20 question things that have been in magazines and tabloids for 40 years.....
'that's kind of neat' is exactly the feeling of an inventive step in my view when it is a new way of doing things. I do get some of that feeling when programming but that is usually discovering and picking tools put there by the language designers and I wouldn't expect to patent them.

This patent is inherently limited in the amount a license would be worth as it is possible to work around it by sending the full enhanced stream by the other distribution method. In practice this simple way of doing things has proved practical in most cases as available bandwidths have increased.

I also trust the BBC not to abusively troll small companies and startups. Unlike with trademarks you can ignore widespread infringement without losing your rights. The BBC (at the time, I don't know about now) was mostly interested in having a worthwhile patent portfolio for cross licensing mostly for defensive use.

I am personally curious about where you used this although it is probably wiser not to tell me. It may be that some detail makes it non-infringing. It may also be that the BBC would offer a reasonable license although approaching them may be risky in itself. I don't know if a lawyer or other intermediary could negotiate without revealing who the negotiation is on behalf of until agreement is reached.
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“Saggi”: la presa per culo continua…
I am really looking forward to this IDE.What I am missing is a good profiling tools integration. So hopefully they have this in mind.MacOsX gives them a lot of stuff for free with DTrace and clang, so I am excited how this will work on Linux. (does it have DTrace?) Maybe I will be better off using this new IDE with Solaris or FreeBSD.
if it was that easy to get into the charts as an independent artist then everyone would be doing it.

This is why I like The Manual by the KLF so much (I've mentioned it elsewhere in this thread).

They really spell out the effort involved:

So how do you go about achieving a U.K. Number One? Follow this simple step by step guide:

Firstly, you must be skint [having no money] and on the dole [state benefits]. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through

Having no money sharpens the wits. Forces you never to make the wrong decision. There is no safety net to catch you when you fall.

And a word from one of the authors:

If you wanna have a number one, if that's... it's a pathetic thing to wanna have, but if you want to, you can have it. It won't make you rich, it won't make you happy, but you can have it.

http://www.libraryofmu.org/display-resource.php?id=521
depressing news. People don't have money to waste right now.
So what's the point?

Notoriety and because he can? Same reasons many hackers do what they do.

I'll concede that I wish he was doing it for the love of the music, but I don't think anyone who seriously loves music takes the charts seriously these days anyway (it's largely just recycled, generic and heavily watered down crap).
I've said that before about the NSA taking over 51% of the network.

Unfortunately it seems I was wrong. User mrb gives useful information in this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330343), linking to (http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=14)

Someone somewhere linked to a bitcoin information page showing how much computing power is in the blockchain, and it's an amazing amount. More than all the top500 combined. (But remembering that we're comparing non-similar computing units.)
So strange that what was once a tactic of cynical industry players is now the modus operandi of young artists themselves. Where is there room for compensated self-expression in this brave new world of content creation I wonder?
OMFG YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT.

The op should have just started an insurance industry disrupting medical insurance startup rather than get paid to work at an already established insurance company where he's somewhat guaranteed(by law) to get paid......

I used to work at a telecommunications company. Maybe I should have created my own telco company so consumers could get cheaper mobile phones instead!?!?!?

You sound like a kid.
I hate whoever created this, but ... but ... but ... it's really well done.

I've just called "crap" well done. I think I need painkillers.
Twitter India Partners With IPL 2013. Brings Discover, Magic Mirror And More
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." Nicholas Klein, Proceedings of the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1918), p. 53, (http://books.google.com/books?id=QrcpAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA53...)

This article appears to be somewhere between the "ridicule" and "attack" stages.
Some blogs might be run on static blog engines like Jekyll. The only sane way of adding comments to these static blogs would be to use Disqus or some other 3rd party commenting system.

These 3rd party systems might include ads or be killed off sometime in the future (and then where do I port my comments to?). It does make sense when someone wants to let HN or the public space like Twitter handle the discussion.

I don't have a commenting system on my blog for the same reason.
This is quite a long read so I'm going to bookmark it for now. But as I'm quite a fan of KLF, I'm looking forward to having to time to read :)
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If NSA use custom ASICs to mount a 51% attack they are injecting bad data into the blockchain, which is destroying the value of bitcoin.

But even if they don't do this, and they become part of the economy - it's easy for them to create havoc by flooding the market and devaluing bitcoin, then buying all the cheap bitcoin, then flooding the market again. Do that a few times and they'll have removed anyone but gamblers from the bitcoin economy.
IIRC, you can't open Gmail and many other websites on Chrome without genuine SSL.
Oh, I meant the best hope of financial glory - not the general best hope!
> Notoriety and because he can?

Yeah, I'm not trying to downplay what he did. More effort than he implies but still, mission accomplished.

It's just that he says his aim was:

to be a successful musician in the UK with a Top Five single in the charts

And he's talking like he achieved that, the easy way, with a "hack" no less. And it just doesn't seem to me like he's actually a successful musician yet.
How does this differ to any of the other hundreds of online casinos in the UK?
I've just vim a bit, but I'm no expert.

It seems to me that IDEs such as Eclipse, VS etc. are much better suited to large scale development than vim.

For example, recently I worked on the HotSpot JVM, beginning by analysing the codebase. I started with vim and got cscope and related tools working, but they didn't seem to always work, and were much less useful than those I'd used in IDEs. In the end I switched to Eclipse, and was able to carry out the analysis very easily.

One of the Oracle JVM engineers told a friend - they generally use emacs for development, but when someone is trying to get their head around the code, they use an IDE.

So it seems to me that this guy and others "internalize" the way they codebase works, and then subsequently switch back to editors.

Thing is, this all seems rather baffling to me. Surely IDEs are designed to remove a lot of the burden of memorizing syntax, APIs, and the way the codebase works. Intuitively, this sounds like a step forward.

But - lots of experienced and smart programmers still use vim and emacs rather than VS, Eclipse, Qt creator, IntelliJ. Those people know a lot more than me about coding. So there must be a rationale for sticking to text editors.

Can anyone enlighten me please? Should I invest more time in emacs/vim? If yes, why?
> All credentials including PhDs are designed for getting into a job

I don't think PhDs are designed for getting a job actually. Sure, you can get some jobs easier with them, but the value of the PhD is really about the close apprenticeship you have with your advisers and other professors/grad students in your orbit.

When you actually finish your PhD, its like...what am I supposed to do next? Your circle can advise you, but you've hardly been preparing for this at all during the 4-8 years you've been inside.

You could be in middle school and publish an article. You are even allowed to make up an institution, the PC won't care at all. Heck, many conferences do double-blind reviewing now, and you know its possible to accept a paper from someone in prison (who might get disqualified b/c they can't present it, but still...).
Why? The average person will come out exactly neutral. Use less petrol than the average, and you come out ahead. Use more, and you are a net payer.

Transporting stuff doesn't need to use all that much oil. Neither does growing.
Small correction: The language is called Ruby. "Ruby on Rails" is a framework built on top of it. You can learn (and use) Ruby without Rails.

As for its relevancy, it's simply the best way to get jobs in my region outside of Big Corp (where they want java or SAP).

Plus, it's fun.
agreed =) no musician found in here..
Bath, UK. Higher COL than SF. Slightly lower rent, but much higher gas, food, all the rest.
It's in my bucket-list-o-life: [ ] Make a hit record following "The Manual". I don't want to be famous, I just want the meal with the KLF they promise if you succeed.
Time to buy Zynga stocks?

Who is surprised by this move? Zynga was always an unoriginal and uncreative company. This seems the smartest greedy execution in this context.
People regularly talk about education alone not being a good gauge of a candidate's actual skill and viability. If we accept that degrees aren't everything, then certifications are all but meaningless--the primary thing they reflect is that, most likely, a previous employer paid for it, and thus thought you were worth investing in.
I removed comments from my blog for two reasons:

1. I went static, and didn't like third-party javascript solutions

2. People were using comments to contact me or ask questions that were better suited to email

Maybe those are bad reasons, but I've been happy to have one less communication channel.
yeah actually i've asked my self the same.. what's the point, my main goal is to create some good quality music that would be valueble.. taking about popstars.. i don't give a shit, i will earn more as a senior developer per life, then trying to get popular in minutes or "with quality" per lifetime... but this article is quite nice experiment. actually youtube is more then enough for me, although i don't have too much viewers.. i'm still glad to have some at all :)
Great recommendation. The KLF wrote the book on this.

If you like that, you might want to check out "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis, another entertaining half-howto, half-confession by a british "hungry young hustler on the make".
I'm not familiar with all those tools, but it strikes me that there's a lot of them. It looks like a list of web buzzwords.

If you haven't got experience with any of these things, trying to glue them all together might prove a nightmare. Why not start off simple? Play around with d3.js or some other visualisation tool. Load a CSV file and make some graphs. Write a simple node app to take a bunch of data and serve CSV data over HTTP. Combine the two.
As I tried commenting on the original post (but am waiting in moderation for the comment to appear) -

A few reasons I can think of why people do this.

1) Higher quality – while we complain about comment quality all the time on HN, comments from the average blog visitor tend to be even lower quality than posts here or on Proggit. This is due in part to the fact that stupid comments that don't add anything to the discussion, like “First!”, "Nice!", or “That’s so dumb” get downvoted to oblivion on these sites

2) Builtin Spam filtering – feeds on the point above but HN etc have had to deal with spam for some time where joe blogging solution might not have a great solution in place to deal with it.

3) No Trolls - trolls get downvoted or hellbanned on 3rd party sites, but you have to roll your own solution to deal with them in the comment section of your own website.
I would like to host blog comments, but that involves a whole lot of work to keep them free of spam and civil that I just don't want to expend on something that I do in a few hours/week for fun. This is something that could be solved by a good hosted comments package (though even then, I host mine on github pages so it would need to work with Jekyll)
I think one of the best points here is that you should exploit loopholes for your own advantage. Alex did this by allowing multiple song versions to be purchased so he could compound the sales that meant he didnt need as many people to buy his song. Tim Ferriss did it when he became a kickboxing champion by shoving his opponents outside the ring and essentially winning on a technicality.

Sure, these kind of things may be considered unethical and if a new guy came into my industry and rose to the top very quickly by exploiting a loophole after i've devoted years of my life to do it the right way, i'd be properly pissed off. But this option can act as a springboard into turning your ambition into real success.

I once heard a story, no idea if its true or not, of a guy that bought a chain of retail sports stores. He didnt have any real money, but managed to structure the deal to pay a small deposit and pay the remainder over time. What he did to raise the initial deposit was get a series of personal loans, house, friends and family, etc. He then bought the business by paying the deposit, then immediately sold off all existing stock as quickly as he could in sales and wholesale lots, giving the business a massive cash injection and revenue spike. That allowed him to pay off all his personal loans and pay the remainder of the money to the seller. He then got long term lines of credit from suppliers based on the long term good history the business already had, restocked and resumed normal operation, over time paying down the lines of credit and keeping the business on the good track it was already on.

My point being, is that you should always look for your competitive advantage.
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A brand?
This is quite a long read so I'm going to bookmark it for now. But as I'm quite a fan of KLF, I'm looking forward to having to time to read :)

If you like listening to music, it's well worth the read. You'll start noticing quite how many popular songs stick to the rules they outline in the Manual.

It's also a really interesting historical document of how the industry operated at the time, with a few nice tape-reels-and-fun-old-tech thrown in.
With regards to the 'musician' label, I whole heartedly agree with you. Having both learned to play the guitar and learned to produce digital music, I've found term 'musician' is often over used by producers (not that I'm trying to undermine the skill required to be an adept producer, it's just a different skill).