skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your profile says you're new here.

Without judgment of your claims about WMD and the Iraq War, I'd recommend that you take a look at the HN guidelines on comments and submissions:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's pretty hard to have only a lukewarm opinion on these issues, and there's sufficient diversity of views around here to ensure that arguments on political topics are fractious and unenlightening. So we tend to avoid those.

I highly recommend these articles, which describe a similar thought process:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/02/politics_is_the.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/policy_debates_.html
These are the changes in the new Ubuntu 9.04 release
Canonical's documentation on what's new in 9.04 server edition.
By george, he's reinvented an acoustic modem.
Yes, I was a passive reader for about nine months before creating an account, too. I'm also a Redditor (although my username is different) and one thing I found that works for me: if you're very emotional about the subject it's better to wait till it shows up on Reddit and post your opinion there. Redditors love emotions and controversy - so your post will perfectly add up to a discussion there. Alternatively you can just wait for a while and post your comment later: you wording will get more neutral at that time and you'll be pleasantly surprised with how well-formed your answer is.

But if you know something extra about the subject then it's much better to through that information into discussion earlier to let others see a bigger picture.

And of course - just ignore the karma thing. Personally I have no idea what is rating on either of those websites, I just write when I want to write.

Good luck anyway and very warm welcome to HN!
Nope. I don't think pg cares about generating any kind of financial gain from HN aside from leads to successful YC companies.
For the one that I am most familiar with (Goodbarry), traffic to the site is not an indicator of anything. You might as well measure visits to their office.

It irritates me when I see a list of startups with traffic estimates beside them. (A) Traffic doesn't necessarily indicate anything. (B) Traffic isn't a useful comparison unless they are doing the same thing. IE if you are comparing newspapers to newspapers or online Shops to online shops, fine. But this is comparing one company selling enterprise software at 20k per customer (that may never see the site) to one selling books online to another that writes a blog. It's ridiculous.

Exon Mobil gets fewer pageviews then Google.
Well, but troubles at INDenverTimes do not mean it's impossible... only that some business savvy as well as journalistic savvy is necessary.

For real possibilities see the award-winning San Diego Voice, relying largely on (online) donations: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/ [ though I don't think they expected to have some "50,000" subscribers before a product even appeared online :/ ]
:blush: thank you. Just some ideas that were kicking round while I was failing to do much work today. You've inspired me to develop it further though.
Are you funded? If you are, ask your angel/VC to get some recommendations for top people who can deliver in a startup environment.

What are you paying? Some people will work for options, others won't. Some people will work a 9 to 6 job but will refuse to do the high pressure always on call thing.

How much control do you (or anyone else in your company) wish to have about the technology choices -- what programming language, servers, SCM, etc. Some developers are quite opinionated on this stuff and so you have to be ready to sacrifice some control and to trust the developer's judgement.

I'd be wary of someone who obviously spends a ton of time primping his/her reputation in the community. Such people tend to be huge egos who are more excited about fame than they are about engineering. Better to get someone who truly loves technology. Lots of developers have a side project that they would love to work on full time -- check out github and if you find such a project that looks like your company could leverage it, send a message to the people working on it to discuss the project and your business....
Whatever you do, don't say (or give the impression that) you have an amazing idea and "all" you need is a developer.
> In my Linux days I'd just make a copy of /etc and my home directory and that was always enough to get a new machine, install Debian, run a few aptitude commands, restore /etc and move on.

Even better: go make a VCS-repo for your /etc. It's absolutely great.

I have /etc in a git repo, and an hourly cron job to commit whatever there is to be committed (I should probably use icrod instead of cron, but right now, I'm too lazy.) That way you can fix mistakes that got introduced sometime in the past, and you can see the diffs between different versions of your configuration. Of course, it has the same benefit of being able to just clone the configuration on another machine.
EXCEPT, you also get to set up different branches for different hosts, if you need that, but that might be overdoing it already.

Seriously, try keeping more stuff under VCS. I use it for my ~/, my most important dotfiles, and /etc. Great thing.
He's right. I could see some folks that aren't as good at fundamental problem solving disagreeing. Frameworks are easy for code monkeys but how many people get bored of working with the same thing everyday?
It's not programmers that are at fault for the lack of women in the industry. While there are stereotypes about the geeky programmer, those are rapidly dissipating with most of the populating spending just as much time in front of the computer as a programmer.

From what I've seen and know the programming industry to be like, it's highly competitive and has a "if you can't cook, get out of the kitchen" attitude (which I'm not knocking as a fault). The root of the problem is that society doesn't encourage the competitive side of a woman. Men and women alike see them as being something of a bitch if they are even remotely competitive.

Programmers see everything as a challenge of their mental abilities and women just aren't raised that way. So if you want you want to start seeing more women developers, start encouraging them to be more competitive. That is what the root of the problem is. (Although on that note, don't encourage them to compete with the boys, encourage them to compete with themselves first and foremost. If they compete "against" the boys and lose, it reinforces the idea that boys are better.)
The world certainly needs better data manipulation tools for programmers and non-programmers alike BUT ... neither group feels like strongly enough to make the market for spreadsheets and user-level database tool competative again. It's sad.

It shows that individual users drive markets rather than "the world" driving markets - I don't mean this snidely. There are many things that people would benefit from if they thought from the point of view of "the world" But that thinking is not common.
There have been a number of competing products. Two that come to my mind quickly are Lotus Notes and DabbleDB.
http://synthmaker.co.uk/
http://synthmaker.co.uk/about.html < pictures

This tool is designed for audio DSP, but is not limited to that. If you're interested in this topic, I recommend downloading the trial, putting it in advanced mode, and just futzing about for a few hours.

It's very accessible and fast to work with, and could be adapted to quite a lot of non-DSP tasks. I would love to see it generalized: the modules within are how I feel libraries should present. Draw graphs for data flow or complex functions, open up a code box for tight procedural stuff. Perhaps not what the author had in mind, but audio synthesis of this kind is event-driven, asynchronous and features a high degree of interactivity, so it may be worth further exploration.

Please email if you know about this kind of cool stuff in other contexts.
It seems to me that someone with your resume would know how to proceed better than anyone else I could imagine.

I just realized that being a hacker hasn't necessarily made me an expert on hacker psychology since I haven't had to, uh, hire any.

So ... well there's a point somewhere
You can read Newsweek, Economist, Time, VF and others from the 'Media' top menu of my website: http://twitya.com/ eg: http://twitya.com/#theeconomist http://twitya.com/#Newsweek
and make up your own mind about any. Last time I checked, The Economist tilts to the left.
Here's the photo of the radar:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PAVE_PAWS_Radar_Clear...
The checkout page is amazing. I really enjoy using heroku for some of my projects.

I can deal with the dyno pricing (I estimate its 1.5-3x linode or slicehost), but the db pricing is crazy expensive. Disk is (close to) free, and trying to use it to price discriminate moves me to Linode for a large subset of my projects. I'd greatly prefer something more tied to real costs, like query execution time, compute cycles, etc.
Techmeme. Strange, can't see anyone read it here?
Thanks for your 37-signalite contribution. Here's a fantastic bit of information: people are different, not everyone is like 37-S and their cohorts.
The interesting and depressing thing is that I read another statistic noting that women are actually less common in the programming world than previously and this is different than most other previously male dominated fields.

The reasons I can think of:
1) Programming is becoming more a lifestyle and subculture and less a codified discipline.
2) Being a subculture makes the stereotype of programmers more influential than earlier.
Oh no! I'm not a big fan of internet explorer - but I hope the company does well!
As I previously posted on my blog (http://danieltenner.com/posts/0002-counting-hours-doesnt-mak...), counting hours doesn't mean much in terms of how hard you work. A much better question is how much of your energy you spend on your work vs. other things.

I spend most of my waking energy on my start-up. I used to spend about 20-30% on my relationship, but that's not happening anymore, thus resulting in an increase in available energy. I spend about 10% on my blog. I probably spend about 10% keeping up with tech news via HN and other means. It's a sizeable investment, but worthwhile - it does impact my job to be aware of all this stuff and connected to the community.
Cyberwar and scare-mongering | Battle is joined | The Economist
I think the route in to a market like this might be a killer app of some sort built on top of this platform. Users want their POS box tied in to their accounting program - they may not care about user-level databases directly, but they certainly care about making their businesses run more smoothly and reliably.
start earning their respect, become one of them.
These guys had it all wrong from the beginning. I sound like a broken record, but newspaper organizations that want to reinvent themselves online have to run their businesses like startups: lean, agile, bootstrapped. Trying to guarantee $250,000/month before even starting, or having a team of >30 people before the website is even up is certainly not the way to do it.

I really wished they succeeded, but it was just so wrong on so many levels. I hope they take a step back, refocus, and start rebuilding from the ground up. Take a handful of people, release early and often, and iterate. Build up from there.
As a general indicator of "traction", I don't mind the use of traffic estimates per se.

But for comparing AU sites, these numbers are near enough to useless, because they measure "global" traffic (in practice mainly USA traffic), and make no allowance for AU-specific traffic patterns.

Our site (yet to be properly launched) has an Alexa rank higher than Docoloco and a Compete rank higher than OzBargain. I know for a fact our actual traffic is much lower than these sites, and it's the relatively small volume of USA traffic we've been getting that has skewed the stats.
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I'm wondering if the novel usage of OAuth for single click login to twitter might have played a role in letting the vulnerability emerge, as in that case it seems a lot easier to trick someone to click on an OAuth-related link on some site different from the consumer.

Looking at the protocol while thinking to the basic use case (authorizing API access to some consumer app) one tends to think that tricking a user to start the authorization step from outside the consumer could not be easy. But in this flow: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Sign-in-with-Twitter the case 3 (user logged in to twitter) is really similar to the attack case, except that in attack the request would be to oauth/authorize instead of to oauth/authenticate...
Ask HN: Please trash my business plan (non-tech)
This is a television show I have become involved with. My expertise is on the production & post production side - the logistics of planning, shooting editing and delivering video. Business and raising capital, not so much.

About half of this is mine; the original was much more sale-sy and less business-y. There are two of us, the host/creator has sunk a lot of equity into it, it'sa good product but it needs recapitalizing. I've been working free on this for the last month. I suck at business; I need to be the CTO and manage the manufacture and delivery of the product, which is plenty of work for one person.

For confidentiality reasons, I've left out the financials. In brief, we're looking to raise up to $500k and thinking of a 10-15% risk premium with full recap in 3-5, plus 1-2% of net. I think YC people are honest enough that I feel safe to post it here.

Thank you for your time. Anything from 'tl;dr' to longer critiques would be welcome. If you prefer, email me at eddy@entertainingpeople.com. If this is inappropriate for YC, feel free to say that too.
Your analysis fails to distinguish between programming and other competitive fields, such as law and academic science. But the proportion of women in those fields is increasing, whereas it's decreasing in programming.
You don't, unless it really bothers you for some reason.

Consider it 'real option' that is available with Linux but not with Windows or OSX.
I'm holding off on my Kindle purchase until the Economist is available on it.
MIT's Technology Review is always interesting.

I also like "top-level" academic/professional journals like Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum, Science, and Nature. There are so many sub-specialties in these fields that authors put in a lot of exposition to keep everyone on the same page. The result is usually surprisingly readable, and there are a lot of implicit pointers to more information if something really catches your eye.

They're not cheap, though.
I will try to be for you the boss I never had.

:) :)
Isn't a subscription to The Economist part of the standard kit for people who live "abroad" (for whatever definition of abroad)?:-) My wife is the same way.
I used to chuck Communications of the ACM until last year's total revamp. It's really good now.
Coping with change on Scrum projects (part II)
Or Java.

Applets - they don't suck as badly anymore!
Does my project have any value?
This is a post about a personal project, so if you lose interest halfway, I apologize. This is not a review-my-website post, I'm not looking for usability advice (yet).

Over the past few years I've worked on a browser game project. It's very niche and therefore very small, and thereby not financially interesting (current revenue is about $250 per year). It does however have a loyal following of a couple hundred people who use the game site on a daily basis. I've been wondering whether I should increase my dedication to this project (I've been slacking on it the past half year) or just let it be in its current state. Ideally I'd like to get some decent revenue out of this. It's probably not feasible to get a full-time income out of it, but I'd surely appreciate a nice extra on the side to justify the time I put in it.

The project is a political browser game. It simulates elections in which you control a party, and you vote on bills and such to establish yourself in the political landscape. I have a "Classic" version (up since '05) and an alpha of the new version (up since '08). The code base is huge so it's been a pretty large investment in terms of hours.

So I'll evaluate my project's pros and cons here:

Cons

* The website looks like crap. Even the new version looks unprofessional. I'm not a designer, but I do realize that its looks need a lot of work. I'm not really looking for usability advice here since that would take up a whole thread on itself.

* It's a niche subject, which means it can't scale indefinitely.

* Gameplay for a single game world actually depends on <1000 player population, so it's really not scaling-friendly.

* I could be putting my time into something more dollar-efficient.

* Time-intensive: politics can be controversial and personal, so a lot of effort goes into moderation. This is mostly handled by the community though.

* Aside from google ads, the occasional donation and wacky one-time actions like selling a virtual island, there's no business model.

Pros

* Very dedicated player base (players typically hang out for years).

* One of a kind: it's the only political game that offers this kind of depth. Competing games in the same space are little more than glorified social networks and my players appreciate the difference.

* I get around 10,000 page views and 300 uniques per day. That's peanuts, but it's a lot more than zero.

* I like the project personally, but I often doubt whether the hours I invest are at all justified.

* As stated above, there is some revenue, though neglegible.

The game site is http://www.particracy.net/
Make sure to check out both the Classic and Alpha versions.

Thanks for the feedback.
Are you sure you want us to do this?

We are in the start of the greater depression, the yuppies
you want to sell to no longer have money. Wine, travel, Lifestyle/keeping up with the jones' is now considered tacky.

Business plan trashed. Sorry.
I suspect the kind of person that does porn at 18 is not likely to prudently invest the money they make while young.
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To play devil's advocate, when you invest $20m-$100m in a game you often can't/won't take any risks.
People like Dave McClure and VentureHacks have always said keep your business plan short: 1 page.
Then how do you realize the low rate?

It's so much lower than what even the high volume gateways can afford that you're obviously not working on regular contracts.

Abusing their E-Mail/Web interfaces?

Sorry for coming across negative but I'm very wary about the reliablity here.

SMS sending is most often used for some sort of user-validation and usually during a critical phase of the conversion process (signup, transaction checkout etc.). Reliability is crucial at that point, which is why most SMS gateways offer fairly strict SLAs.

Do you provide any kind of guarantee that my penny transaction will result in an actual delivery? I'm asking because random hit & miss or "sorry, the t-mobile web sender was acting funny the other day" doesn't bring my lost customers back.
Certainly not all companies. But it is rather common in this industry. And so far I haven't worked on a game yet which didn't at least have some weeks crunch-time before release.
That's interesting feedback, thanks. Sounds like two different issues:

1. Database pricing. We aren't trying to sell storage space, that's not the value you're getting with a Heroku db plan. We would argue that the value is the instant, provisionless nature of the platform - radically faster deployment and scaling, and an environment that just works. So if those features of the platform aren't valuable to you (i.e. you want to provision, configure, and maintain the db yourself), and you're just looking for the best cost/MB, we're definitely not the right answer for you.

Let's say you set that comparison aside for a moment, and you took one of your apps that's providing value to you and selected a Heroku pricing configuration that fits the app's needs. Given the value of your app plus the value you get from our platform, is the total price worth it?

2. Pricing on query execution time, compute cycles, etc. Why is this appealing to you? Is it because those numbers make more sense to you, or because you think if we priced on those units it would make the platform less expensive for you?

Thanks again for your feedback - interesting stuff.
Anybody here read Prospect?
I'm curious as to what you have. How should I get a hold of you?
And what about creating a language for left-handed people then ?
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The corruptive power of accusing those with whom you disagree about public policy of being intellectually dishonest should not be underestimated.
Calling any business that caters to a middle or upper middle class lifestyle tacky seems a little short sighted to me. Yes, times are rough and people are currently cutting back on this kind of thing because this sector of the economy is heavily affected by business cycles. The timing might not be the best, but that isn't to say that in the long run this type of business can't succeed, or maybe even succeed to a lesser extent in the short run. I mean, what kind of entrepreneur would you be if you thought that your business was only viable during booms.
I disagree. There will always be yuppies who have money. In times of depression they are the least effected group (relatively).
That's more of a necessity rather than anything else, though.
A 1 page pitch for your StartUp definitely is something worth thinking about and maybe also writing down.

But if you don't have THE idea a longer business plan is necessary from the beginning. And in general, in later stages 1 page probably won't help you to plan your business and therefore more is needed for sales prediction, Strategy, the marketing plan, HR policies etc.
I was just making an observation, from the perspective of someone who has no work-life balance, and is occasionally jealous of the people who put their work away at 5pm and have families, houses, friends, etc.
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Hi Ivan,

They do, we've let them know beforehand.

All the best,

Eiso
Normally I would agree. But the circumstances of the current depression are different. There was such a bubble in the middle classes due to living on credit that the yuppies in particular will be hit very, very, very, very hard. See AMEX's recent earnings conference call for details.

The fact is that for years people were living the life not based on real earnings, but on credit. And those that were living on real earning were often earning money from those who were spending on credit. When credit goes away as it has, both groups become poor. Hence yuppies become poor.

The price deflation of mid/upper range houses, bmw's,
audi's, hotel rooms, travel, wine and jewlery shows this
clearly.

PS: Could you please provide some proof that yuppies fair well in depressions/recessions? My evidence suggest they're usually the ones in the middle of whatever bubble activity.
As is certainly the case currently.

EDIT: Added extra Very's for emphasis.
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