skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it is very difficult. Some retail stores (who deal with this regularly) allow customers within a certain timeline to request the discount. However, I'm not certain how well this works in practice, and I have no idea how well it would work for online stuff. People already feel more entitled when it comes to the offerings between free and premium services, so I think its psychologically more problematic.

For me, I've been a Dropbox Pro user for months now, so I wouldn't really expect to get this kind of discount. But perhaps it would be nice if I could gain more than just space as a benefit for referring all my friends to the service. I don't need the space, but I would like to get an account credit for a small part of their subscription $$. I regularly tell people about dropbox and having an affiliate like service would help expansion, I think.
Good call. I should have included something like this in my post. I'll update it and give you a shout-out. Thanks for commenting!
Jim Collins: How to  thrive in 2009
"the one with the best SEO wins while everyone else goes out of business, directly threatening the AP's bottom line."

Versus what? The AP is somehow going to benevolently distribute all paid links equally amongst all of its various print client to help them all reach each month's traffic goals?
I prefer not to stalk my compadres.
First off, this isn't Digg or Reddit. Snarky, shallow, one-line summaries are generally not welcome here.

Second, your stupid summary is not supported by the text of the article.

people [sic] are irrational and make stupid decisions.

There is some truth to this if we take the best possible reading. Research continually shows that people do make decisions that are not supported by rational thinking. Bubbles arise in very simple trading games, even when there is an objective maximum to the item traded that falls well below the traded value, for example. There are countless other examples and a rich and growing literature on the subject. Thus, your first statement seems actually to be true, even if it was offered with sarcastic disdain.

The government knows better.

Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article. Given that the percentage of people making a given choice can be skewed by how the choice is offered, it seems a reasonable course of action to make the offer in such a way as to achieve the desired result. The decreased withholding example from the article is a brilliant case in point. The government really does know better which way to implement a tax cut in order to increase spending.

Typical Time Magazine.

At some point in your life you're going to have to start addressing the substance of arguments offered rather than considering the source. Maligning Time serves no purpose relevant to the discussion of whether or not the propositions offered in the article correspond to reality. It serves only to rehearse your own biases.

This is a forum for grown-ups. If you can't comport yourself in a manner appropriate to your peers, please remain silent.

Or, to put it in terms more fitting Digg or Reddit: Lurk Moar!
Ok, thanks for the notes. I'll check out that waypoint. To answer your questions and bugs:

1. The login box appears to be broken on Linux only, but I'll try and fix it there too :)

2. You need a GPS device to upload waypoints. We are considering letting you click waypoints onto the map, but we are hesitant to do so. Also, we're coming out with an iPhone app this month, so that will be another way to tag a place.
Adgregate Markets Scores Distribution Deal With Google’s DoubleClick
It's effectively what the AP is asking though, or at least what they're insinuating that they're asking. Either to de-list, or to have Google list and index based on their stated (or paid, or bought) priorities. I wouldn't ever expect/want Google to actually just go for it, but if they did just flip the switch on the first bit, the results would be fairly amazing for that month. Google News would become even shittier than it is for that month, too.
Well, I don't use FriendFeed either, but looking at their reach/growth (http://www.quantcast.com/friendfeed.com for example), it's fair to say that people are increasingly using it.
This is why tiny URLs are a solution to a problem the web doesn't have.

Agreed, it solves little to nothing with the web.

It is, however, helpful to Twitter and the problem/limitation SMS has. To my mention earlier, URL shorteners are growing with Twitter's popularity, which is why all the fuss is here, methinks.
3 out of 30 stories in the front page coming from TC.

That's 10% and I've seen more sometimes.

Are we becoming a proxy for TC?
I feel the same way as you do. I am friends with some of the same people I follow on Twitter, and I follow people on Twitter (and am followed) by people whom I am not friends with on Twitter. I fiddled with FF a little and didn't feel the functionality it offered was that useful to me.

If I was a part of a large number of services and I didn't want to check them all the time, I suppose I might use FF. Facebook and Twitter, though, are too distinct to be paired the way FF offers, however.
Even then it's fairly challenging to modify some crappy script for $100. My experience with elance was that development was just a no-go, but you could make some money with other areas, for me system administration. You could get $100 to modify some script, or the same $100 to _install_ it.
> > push to eliminate US nuclear weapons

> I have seen no evidence of anyone in the administration suggesting any such thing.

Really? What about: "Obama Calls for Nuclear Free World, Says U.S. Will Lead" (http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200904/200904060...)

Search Google news for US nuclear weapons.

> > spending $3.55 trillion for 2010 ($400bn over '09), when we've already committed $12.8 trillion to the recession

> What's the problem with that? Be specific.

Uhm... Spending huge amounts of money that the USA doesn't have isn't such a good idea?

> > increasing the marginal tax rate to the highest levels since Clinton

> 'to the highest levels since Clinton' means 'to a higher level than after Bush's tax cuts.' Was the economy, and the federal treasury, in better shape in 2000 (when Clinton left office) or eight years later?

When Clinton left office there was a recession (in 2000 and 2001). It was called the dot com bubble.

Oh. Also take into account that the Democrats controlled Congress the past few years. So maybe it is the Democrat's fault for the current mess?

> > letting North Korea get away with launching missiles over Japan

> Given that this happened two days ago, it's a little early to assess the administration's response.

Didn't Obama want to cut ballistic missile defence?
I blame Scala! :P
i think ff has a visual problem personally ..it hangs just over the edge of the feeling of 'info overload'. very cool functionality indeed - but i have a feeling it is limiting itself to power-ish users and not the vast everyday masses being pulled in by fb and twitter.
The most important company you never heard of
> and hurt the United States in a lot of ways

During the 8 years that Reagan was president the US economy grew by over 30%. This is an amazing feat.

> while Jimmy Carter went on to do a lot of good

Really? Do you think Carter was a good president?

I wonder who created the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act#Rela...)

which had a pretty big hand in the sub-prime meltdown.
Why don't Friendfeed creates a Twitter-account layer? This way I could tweet from Friendfeed, view the updates of people I follow, reply, dm, etc. with all their other features
Ask HN: I'd like to get a telescope for my kids. What do I need to know?
One of my daughters is developing a keen interest in Astronomy, and I'd like to get her a telescope but I don't know much about them.

What I'm trying to find out is how to tell if I'm buying a toy or something good. There seems to be lots of telescopes in places like Dick Smith (Australian electronics retail chain) that are not much more than toys. What should I look for, and how do I tell if it will be any good?

My budget is about AU$200, but if needed I'll spend a bit more to get something that's actually going to be useful. This is an area I know nothing about, so any advice would be great.
Did you guys do any analysis to get the 6 months number? Just curious -- I really respect the way you do things, so I'm wondering how much statistical thinking you put into your business.
Sorry if there was some misunderstanding - what I meant by a 'core' gamer (and I hate this term) is one who doesn't play hardcore, but someone who is familiar with and plays in the more traditional gaming industry (which is our target market). Whether they be a casual gamer or not, I don't care, but if they can discuss all those things you just did in that huge paragraph and carry a conversation with me about them then that's what I'm looking for.

The problem is, trying to talk to someone who's only knowledge of gaming is Wii and iPhone about traditional gaming tends to go nowhere in my experience, whereas talking to a traditional gamer about the Wii and iPhone still leads to interesting conversation and ideas as those "casual" games are pretty much small extensions of traditional gaming.
Yeah, Reagan did some good things. He also created the atmosphere in which presidents are judged more by clever quips than by experience and plans, he turned the US political scene into a scene of nonstop drama, and there was that Contra thingie that he outright lied about.

Carter wasn't good in office, but after leaving he did incredible things. And he always, always, took what he did seriously.
If no one's using it, how cool can it be?

I signed up for friendfeed when it launched. It solves zero problems in my life.

It can't help me build an audience for my startup like Twitter can.

It can't keep me in touch with my friends like Facebook can.

I think Friendfeed's problem was that it banked on the assumption that people would be using 30 plus services on the web and needed one place to store it all....but really people are just using 2, Facebook and Twitter, making Friendfeed unnecessary.
Poll: Move to SF or Colorado?
Just wondering how many applicants are planning to move to San Francisco or Denver/Colorado to start up your dream regardless getting accepted into YC/TechStars?

We are in the process of selling our house and planning to move out west end of April. We'll be driving cross country from Indiana! Maybe we'll blog along our way using our IPhones!

I heard Colorado has a tech scene brewing, so we're considering that as well.
Denver/Colorado
I've been using the HTC Dream for a couple of weeks now, and it's been pretty good so far. I haven't had to break out any hacker-fu to get anything working. Mostly I just had to download apps to do stuff. The only complaints I have are that battery life is too short, especially when 3G is on, and I can't find an app allowing me to transfer files with bluetooth. If anyone can point me in that direction, I would be much obliged.
Agreed, pretty clever way of getting some serious penetration testing done.

By the way, apparently this snippet does the trick:

@rubx f = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = h[k-1]+h[k-2]};f[0]=1;f[1]=1;f[1000000]

It looks like it calculates the 1,000,000th fibonacci number, with decent runtime complexity (not so much with memory). I don't know Ruby though, is there anything peculiar about the snippet?
Great site Ryan... thanks.
They've mostly been complaining about Google News (as if it were the source of all Google's revenue). They are also disappointed by the fact that Google seems to make money in the process of sending people their way.

The real issue with their cash flow is that printing a paper is not an efficient way to run a website. If you stop printing the papers, the operating costs are much much lower.
Or use crowdSPRING to show off lots of various designs so that you don't get pigeonholed by your designer.
Friendfeed does this already - check out http://twitter.com/paultoo

As an avid Twitter user, the problem with this is that they end up posting a lot of tweets, since all of the Friendfeed comments get posted to Twitter - and they don't make a lot of sense in the context of Twitter.

I tend to unfollow people that start doing this because it shows they don't really get Twitter.
It's quite a shame. There are definitely lots of cool things that can be done in this area, but once a network has a large installed base, the ability to do something in social networking (as an outsider) becomes at the will of those large networks. Am I the only one who laments the winner-take-all nature of the social networking space?
Remember the Skittles.com Experiment? Here are the results.
They can claim national security if they wanted to.

If you really want to work on an awesome government program that was released to the public domain, OpenVISTA could use your help: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista There's not higher calling than helping people live healthier and saving some lives.
Isn't this a bit one sided? People born years from now will come into a world filed with amazing technology.

It's disingenuous to suggest that the next generation should bitch about eco-debt from past generation, yet not themselves be in techno-debt to those same generations for what, as far as they are concerned, are boundless inventions and services that simply exist from day one.
On the other hand for the life science and research library community, friendfeed has become the de facto watercooler, especially for the computationally inclined. Even to the extent of conference reviews being presented in a journal like PLoS Computational Biology

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjou...

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/the-life-scientists

It provides a forum for discussion around things we do on the web and I can't think of another resource where doing it is as easy. Note that these are people who aren't looking to get a startup noticed, nor are they looking for page views, and many are not on Twitter. It's just an ideal medium for them.
At Startup School last year, Paul Buchheit said that Friendfeed was an aggregator of social media traffic in much the same way that an e-mail client was an aggregator of SMTP traffic.

Paul is a really really smart guy. It makes perfect sense.

The problem is that Facebook does a pretty good job of being an aggregator of social media traffic too. You can post articles and status updates, photos, etc. I have my Twitter posted to Facebook as well. And with the addition of threaded comments and "Like", etc., in many ways Facebook has made Friendfeed obsolete.

It's almost like Facebook and Friendfeed both came up with the same idea of sharing information and being an aggregator of social media traffic. Except Friendfeed started with the aggregation features, and Facebook started by building a critical mass of users.

When it comes to sharing information with people you know, the critical mass of users wins.
It's in a book called "The Pixar Touch" by David Price I have on order from amazon, but you can read the anecdote here.

http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David-Price/dp/030...

It says:

John Lasseter has instilled an intense commitment to research in the studio’s creative staff. To prepare for the scene in Finding Nemo in which the fish characters Marlin and Dory become trapped in a whale, two members of the art department climbed inside a dead gray whale that had been stranded north of Marin, California.
yes, you could get it under the Freedom of Information Act, which is how the VistA developers got their code out from under the VA. Think of the GPL as a "dual license" scenario. Technically, "public domain" in this context, I believe, was intended to refer to American citizens. The internet and the modern software licenses obviously impose a broader philosophical outlook.
They do offer extra space for referrals actually (0.5GB/referral up to 6GB free on top of the 2GB free or pro plan). I had already referred a bunch of people so I emailed them and they quickly credited my account! Try sending them a nice message, they seem to be pretty on top of customer service :)
:: Spé. O Spa do Pé ::
http://skittles.com/chatter.htm

Skittles nailed it. They embraced social media and that is going to start a trend from here. I'm glad our startup is going to be venturing into this space.
Haha, I misread your sentence "...more than just space as a benefit of referring..." For sure, credits would be very welcome too, although permanent extra space is decent as well. I'm at 60% of my 50GB, so I'm already getting to be a bit space-conscious.
Gotta recommend the book Masters of Doom here http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...

I love these stories. For some reason they elicit quite an emotional response from me. Don't know what the emotion is though.
The <video> element doesn't feature any codec, which is a lot better than A) specifying the piece-of-shit Theora or B) specifying something worthwhile but 'encumbered'. The point is the DOM api for controlling playback from Javascript, not the codec implementation.

In practice everyone will support h264, because terrific implementations ship with OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu (at least once you check the "I am not gnutarded" box). If the BBC's Dirac project doesn't flame out, that could end up being a specifiable free codec. Theora is not remotely viable.
what? really? It was higher under Reagan, he did the best he could to lower it, but you can only do so much with both houses full of democrats. I'd love to know why you would think Reagan would want higher taxes, everything I've read would say otherwise.
Australia commits $43b to network that will be redundant before it’s finished
Do you mean worry that there may be major bugs that you aren't aware of, or worry over bugs you know about but haven't fixed yet (for whatever reason)?
Are they really that direct competitors?
Well, duh.

Do something weird with your website, especially involving something as viral-able as Twitter, and your page views go way up. But, as far as I know, Skittles does not make its money off of page views.

This isn't even granular enough to show if it's been going up even after the initial web talk about it or if it's on its way back down or even if that's right after they did it.

The true "results" would be sales data.
How they do auto bailouts in Russia
We would have been delighted with a larger sample size as well (although I think we got some great answers out of the number of responses we did receive).
Of course, the most important factor for our implementing this survey was to not annoy or violate the privacy of people who elected not to participate. So that means not automatically collecting any information.
We just got notified :-)

http://watchuwant.tv/

http://watchuwant.wordpress.com/

(me, abossy, dmolnar)

Please help us get better, give us comments, check out the blog.

Good luck, everyone!
http://findascope.com/
If you have enough SAMs, why do you need air to air? Also, if your SAM launchers are stealthed and mobile at high speed, they aren't going to be so easy to take out.
How do you manage your 30" Monitor on a Macintosh
The default behavior on OS X doesn't make effective use of large monitors. New windows tend to Maximize, and those that don't, won't intelligently tile. The default behavior of xterm on a 1998 instance of FVWM makes better use of my monitor than a 2008 instance of the Macintosh OS.

For whatever reason, expose and I just don't seem to get along - I like to have all my windows in front of me at the same time (ergo the 30" Monitor). Another approach, multiple smaller monitors, isn't trivial to do with laptops.

I recently tripped across:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000928.html

Which seems to do a lot of good things on the PC - does anyone have insight into an equivalently excellent tool or procedure for the Mac?
Everything you say is true but you do have to admire the simple brillance of the whole thing.

They basically outsourced 99% of their web page under the guise of "embracing Social Networking" and got all kinds of attention and praise for it.

I don't know how much that little flash overlay cost them to make but I'm betting they got at least 1,000 times the marketing value out of it.
After the last 3 years, the one thing I've come to despise more then the phrase "web 2.0" is "social media consultant".

I'm all for companies adopting new tools and being transparent. But the amount of hyperbole used to communicate technical advancements to mainstream companies bothers me.
Public Policy That Makes Test Subjects of Us All
Really?

I would say one of the most useless mashups I have seen. It is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
A meta service can be very successful, but generally only temporarily until something non-meta eclipses it along some dimension and/or is a superset of all the combined services.
Why play is vital -- no matter your age
Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to the percentage of average daily Firefox usage by country. e.g. 27% of Firefox usage originates in the US, 11% from Germany, etc.

The numbers you are quoting are the percentage of a sampling of all internet users in Germany who use Firefox v.s. IE.
Congrats to your team!
Hell. Madison Avenue has always listened to the scientists. Evidence-based blah blah. It's propaganda. That it's good propaganda doesn't make it good in any other context.
Doubt it. My video experiences with the last Olympics and CBS NCAA coverage were pretty good. If the next Olympics and next year's NCAA drops Silverlight in favor of Flash, then you could say that it probably won't take off.

Flash has 5+ years headstart than Silverlight. Flash has also seen its share of technical issues and limitations.

With regards to penetration rate, most PCs come with Silverlight pre-installed so this won't be much of an issue in the future.
The YC Rejection thread
Just got an email informing me of my rejection to YC this summer. Bummer.

I'm still going to go on and develop my idea. It's just going to take a little longer than I expected without the money.
Is Transparency Always the Best Policy?
No, but acting as though they are makes for a more dramatic (and higher scoring) blog post :)

FriendFeed is about simple sharing and discussions. bbgm gives a great example in another comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550126

During the live show that lead up to this blog post, there was a very active realtime discussion on FriendFeed about the show (and MA's Twitter/FriendFeed claim): http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegillmor/1059c36c/gillmor-gan...

Regardless of what people think of FriendFeed and these spontaneous, lightweight conversations, it's pretty clearly different from Twitter.
Whatever happened to that guy who got rejected over and over and over but never changed anything about his website?
The main developer of BRL-CAD also works on BZFlag, or at least he did back when I was contributing to the project. You can usually find him on Freenode as brlcad.
Woohoo, rejected for the first time, and probably not the last! Cheers to everyone who actually sent in an application!
Ha! I remember having an encrypted copy of this on a CD set I had when I was a teenager. I sent away for the license key to decrypt it. It was free, but they had to check that I was a citizen and not dangerous. Somehow I still remember the key too, if anybody has that old file and a copy of crypt(3).

Of course, I played with it for about 15 minutes before giving up.
I wouldn't worry that much about the money, its not what YC is about. I'd worry more about not getting access to all those YC connections.