skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As you correctly analyzed, snapchats value is majority in user-base. I believe it is specifically the attention of users that gives it value. We measure that with metrics like reach, views, clicks, messages sent etc. The attention comes from the novelty of it, as you adequately put, it has a low barrier to entry due to it's 'low pressure'. It must maintain that attention through low pressure to maintain value.

FB went the ad route a la google and then moved towards analytics. Twitter is doing the same. If snapchat went down that route they would have to analyze the photos taken, pictures drawn etc. to provide data to customers in the same way.

Not to get too meta, but there is always value in self-expression.
> Why would your doctor read the latest research on preventing disease when he can make a tidy profit from treating your disease?

Woah woah woah there. Are you really saying doctors don't read the latest research so that they can make a greater profit? Really?

You could have at least picked a more realistic example of misaligned incentives in medicine... e.g. using a more expensive drill bit during a surgery because you know that the surgical rep will take you out to a nice dinner every time he's in town.

There's a huge population of doctors. Some ethical. Some unethical. But I believe the profession does a pretty admirable job of stamping out immoral behavior when it finds it.
I guess his $1000 is worth the same than everyone else.
Doctors offices already have something similar, at least for interactions.
The one feature I was waiting for:

* support for dynamic JavaScript single-page apps (Backbone.js, Angular.js, etc)

Thanks for fixing it!
Interesting proof of concept although I personally prefer hipchat for a the "chatroom with group file sharing" benefit.

The ephemeral nature of the downloads is really interesting though. I've seen a number of sites starting to target that niche (http://dissipateapp.com/ for file sharing specifically with "self-destructing" files) but mostly aimed at just messaging (like Snapchat or Frankly).

Why risk putting your important documents on a site where it's only a matter of time before it's compromised? Most of the time once your recipient has the file it's safe to remove from the cloud.
"why not make an unconditional donation to Bing and then open up these dinners to teenagers willing to apply/write an essay for them, regardless of ability to pay?"

What was done was easy to do. Simple decision "yes or no" here is the benefit. [1]

What you are asking would require meetings, details and more thought amongst people who don't really have the time for that.

[1] Keep that in mind when you are doing business with people. Make it simple for them to agree and require no effort on their part (or at least as little as possible). If you want to delay decision making do the opposite. If you want to delay it even more give them an assignment to complete (like a 3 page list of questions that they need to answer before you will take their money). Friction kills deals just like time does.
You're not going to get much protein from vegetables without a lot of carbs unless you eat protein powder. The two foods you cite are good examples. Quinoa is 71% carb, 14% fat, and 15% protein by calorie. Chia is 36% carbs, 53% fat and 11% protein. If you eat protein powder than it works out fine. (I'm vegan and weightlift).
He lost 60 pounds by monitoring his carb intake.

The thing about diets is that everybody has got one that worked for them.

It seems to me that the one thing all of these different diets have in common is that they require the person to monitor what they eat. Whatever the specifics of the diet, the dieter ends up paying more attention to their meals in general and that extra digilgence translates into reduced caloric intake.

I'm not making a judgment on the nutritional value of any particular diet, just the underlying mechanism for why different diets all have somebody claiming that they work.

Even the twinkie diet: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/
You probably don't need a dev. Try Zapier.com
Customers often require bleeding edge support, often so they can use features present in the new OS.
I think chances are, the readers of HN already know the difference between a protocol and a service.

And the benefit you listed is already one given to email — the reason that lavabit was shut down was because the guy behind it didn't want to provide a service he knew to be flawed, in that the US government could request details about users.

The question is, how does this protocol have it built into it in such a way that both allows anonymity and so that providers can pop up in their place, as you say?
I wonder if Powerpoint (or Visio, OneNote, VS) will eventually evolve this way. My prediction? We'll see lots of bad examples for 10+ years once software for this takes off, until people actually write up what better ways exist through documenting the good stuff. Oh and geeks will use Latex-style power tools that no one else can figure out :) Perhaps I'm talking about the web once alternative layouts and HTML5 component libraries start taking off... Maybe we'll see the return of Quartz Composer someday. When Apple actually takes non-linear programming seriously.
I would call it RockMail or some other sort of strong or hard name. You don't become the punch line of jokes if your product fails in it's security purpose like you would get wtih SafeMail or SecureMail, but you don't have the nefarious naming that DarkMail gives.

Also RockMail fits with the Lavabit / Magma naming scheme Lavar has for his company and software. Or they can call it WhisperMail, QuietMail, FlutterMail, InvisibleMail or SilentMail to fit with silent circle's naming scheme.
Did you even watch the entire talk? He mentioned the written language very early on ... but then moves forward significantly.
Speaking as an upstart search engine guy (blekko) who also has a bunch of webpages and a huge robots.txt, that's a bad idea. Such a crawler would be knocking down webservers by running expensive scripts and clicking links that do bad things like deleting records from databases or reverting edits in wikis. You don't want to go there.
I see your monster truck madness website, and I raise you the Space Jam website, unchanged since 1996 http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
Bitmessage is not very viable for mobile devices unless you offload hash cash to a server.
Might be desired behavior, but holding CRTL while clicking on a link in Firefox opens the link in a new tab, but it does not keep you on the main page. It's a bit annoying to click on a file and have to switch back to the homepage tab to get something else.
Show HN: Relaunched service to help find cool domain/app names
This metaphor is helpful in terms of thinking about how users interact with the service and how advertisers and vendors might try to get at these users.

The very large problem with this metaphor is that you are not taking into barriers to entry. Beaches are valuable in the real world because it's impossible to change the ocean and extremely costly to remove rocks, import sand, bring in wildlife, build access points and accommodations, etc. to suit the needs of the beachgoers.

The digital beach market has low barriers to entry. If Snapchat ruins its beach with advertisements, pollution, and annoying fruit vendors, then users can very easily and very quickly move to another beach of similar or higher quality that can be built in a matter of days.
Technically, it's inevitable. Information will be more actionable. http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_healthc...

Practically, I think the role of humans will be to create a more human experience and to provide specialized knowledge centers.
To whom it may concern - Openstack a plea
Been hitting refresh on the inbox all day!

Curious about other people and their video views, we got about 7 hits on ours after the deadline from California (Youtube analytics wont go any deeper). I doubt they were all from YC as the link was sent to other alums who reviewed our app and it is possible on of them hit it up after the deadline.

Anyone else look at their stats?
Yes, obviously over-analysis/over-engineering is also bad but I'm not sure why that provides any evidence that doing none is good.

It is definitely not impossible to fail fast and emphasize MVPs and shipping while still being highly organized. People do it all the time, and they produce way more useful features than the GSD'ers because they are organized. And by the time they've been working for a few months they are moving faster than the GSD'ers (in my experience anyway, the actual timespan probably depends on how complex the problem is).

Maybe we aren't agreeing on what exactly GSD is? Because even on tiny projects where you come up with an idea and ship an MVP a week later I've abandoned the GSD style blind flailing. I spend maybe 5% of that week thinking about it and planning a few things out, altering that plan as you build it and another maybe 10% keeping technical debt low. That thinking time saves at least a few dead ends that I would have otherwise gone down. The low tech debt makes debugging easier throughout the entire rest of the 85%.

That 15% investment has never not seemed to pay off. Not so far. And then on week two, when there's feedback and it's time to iterate you are sitting pretty, not starting from scratch and just winging it some more like you would be with the GSD strategy. I've done both, and I really can't emphasize enough how much of a payoff there is to keeping lightweight, flexible but mandatory process in place. Always.

GSD style cowboy development is something I kick myself for wasting so much time with when I was younger, and it is totally natural to fall into that style when you like writing coding and are lazy.

Sorry, that was quite the wall of text, I guess that's my 4c.
The fractal goes even further. Why do you think REPL is so powerful of a feature? It essentially allows you to Observe the code and how the system reacts to running it, Orient that reaction to what you know about the system, and make quick Decisions and Actions to change it, all in a framework that encourages fast turn around time.
Is your auction and seems fairly harmless on the scale of things, but surely this prize is expressly intended to give an advantage to the kids of people rich enough to buy it otherwise you would presumably have chosen to auction off a different prize.
The happiest time of my life
This is quite astute. Truly, I only dream of what the world would be like were we free to pursue our most profound curiosities instead of only our most profitable ones.
Isn't Linear A a little bit of an overkill? I mean, if we at least knew what it meant, maybe then, but now?
Good luck to everyone. Remember regardless of what the response is, YC is only a nitro boost.

Everybody is racing to create the future and don't slow down just because you didn't get into YC.
Network spending patterns unchanged in 3 years
Don't forget simply being new and fresh comes with a lot of benefits. Why do kids make top secret forts, no adults allowed? Why do people go to those little hole in the wall coffee shops and restaurants, where there is only one or two tables, and an old women behind the counter? The food? Sure, but even more so because the atmosphere feels unique and unspoiled by the mainstream. Why do people always search out new bands that no one else has discovered?

People like to be unique. They don't like to be grouped in with the rest of the world. This is especially true with teenagers. You don't have to make a better Facebook, you just have to make a new Facebook. It needs that feeling of being fun and exclusive, which Facebook is quickly lacking and can never gain.

Google+ will never succeed. Yes, they've invested countless dollars and time from some of the brightest minds available, but the name Google is simply too big, and too well known. It's boring from day one, there's nothing cool or hip about signing up on Google+.
The OP phrased it badly, but the point is sound. Suppose a doctor has a choice of two activities:

1. Read research, unpaid
2. Treat patient, paid

The doctor clearly has an incentive to focus on treating disease. They do read research, but they would surely read even more if they were paid directly to do so.

There's nothing nefarious in this, it happens in any industry. We do more of the things we're paid to do, and less of the things we're not.
great post david!
We don't currently use Lob, but we use a service like it and for us it's the printing and mailing functionality that makes it appealing. Giving our customers the ability to send things like invoices directly to their customers from the application is a feature that gets lots of utilization.
Verified Vector Clocks: An Experience Report, Part 1
The Buy link is broken.
Thanks for this, I forgot what the web once was.
I read "come" as "become" and was like...what horrible joke awaits me?! Glad to see you won't be eating any children...
A.) I have a job. $1000 is about 58% of what I pay for a month of rent, and about 1/3rd of my monthly income. B.) Meet people, have fun, absorb information from smart people in a memorable moment. I don't see it as much different from e.g. a WWDC ticket, which would be nearly double the cost.

I will add: I grew up relatively poor in Michigan. My parents income was less than $60k, so I couldn't really afford college. I moved into my own apartment when I was 18, and supported myself except for around $130/mo in cell phone and car insurance bills. The only remaining financial support from my parents is a $19/mo cell phone bill.

This year I moved to Silicon Valley with less than $3000 in pocket, and I now work at a startup.
This make sense.
"Props to the SnapChat guys for cashing out, raising a ton of venture from sheep VCs..."

Is this what our industry has come to? Congratulations for raking gullible investors? Like, that's not only socially acceptable, but a worthy outcome that should be applauded?
http://breakingmuscle.com/nutrition/how-to-build-muscle-mass...

Just as a quick look to see details as to what would be required. Quinoa is hardly the only source of non-meat protein.

Now, yes that does include a lot of protein shake stuff, that's not that unusual for most weightlifting diets. That's also a vegan diet, so you might be able to add eggs, cheese and milk to that diet and cut back on the powder in the meals if you just wanted to be vegetarian.

The powder is of course to solve the issue you pointed out already.
So, use triple-equals when you don't want type coercion?
Yes I have done this. Google make it particularly difficult to get the URL of the spreadsheet. And that od6? Thats if you have multiple tabs, they have random identifiers. Its almost impossible to work out what they will be. Its like they are on the web but not of the web.

But it is an easy interface for unskilled users to add data to say a graph on a website, have done that for clients and they have been very happy.
Did not send the link to anyone else except YC. We got one view from US the next day (after the deadline). Being from India, we believe that should have been the YC team.
You speak of "the law" as if you were discussing laws of nature that government had to "properly staff" to deal with. But these are not objective laws of nature. These laws are demands made by government itself, so "objective statements of fact, such as the government is understaffed relative to the task of enforcing law" is just saying that it's an objective fact that government doesn't have all the staff they need for the task of fully enforcing their growing list of demands. If that's all you meant, I agree with you.

But if your statement that government was "hugely understaffed" meant to imply to any extent that government ought to be expanded, that would be ideology, not fact, and I disagree.

The way you put makes government growth seem like some nebulous cancer.

Putting it some other way doesn't change the facts. They add new laws, regulations, policies, and edicts each year to what you position as some sort of objective "task of enforcing law". That would be fine if they also revoked a similar number of laws, regulations, and demands, letting people go back to managing those affairs for themselves. But that's not their way. They don't give power back. When government decides to give itself more power, the only way the people ever get it back is when government lowers its enforcement priority and shifts staff to exercising other powers.

The government has grown far faster than the economy for over a century. It has grown far faster than the population it governs. Though good government is valuable (I'm no anarchist), bad government is destructive, and you always have some of both. A government that removed defective policies at the rate healthy tissue removes defective cells could evolve into something wonderful. But ours doesn't work that way, and until it does, any implication that the government is hugely understaffed and desperately needs to grow larger is an ideological claim I'll dispute. If you weren't implying a need for more government, I don't dispute your statement.
Can anyone compare a GSD culture to a ROWE culture? I haven't seen 'ROWE' lately.
Sound still works
Huh. I thought that the Spreadsheet API was documented as an XML/JSON API, but it looks like only the XML is directly documented so ... poking around a bit more

The alt=json thing is a documented common feature of Google Data APIs, and the current Google Spreadsheets API is the target of the link in the list of Google Data APIs titled "Google Spreadsheets Data API". OTOH, the current v3 Spreadsheets API no longer has "Data" in the name, and there is a note on the Data APIs documentation that some Google Data APIs have been replaced with newer APIs that aren't Google Data APIs.

So, its at best an ambiguously-documented feature.
I don't think PG's blogs are chronologically organized in any meaningful fashion. I also think that your definition is too broad, as it would include any self-published book series or maybe even the Bible.
I once mentioned that to a family friend who was a doctor. He said that if he wanted to make money off of people's suffering, he'd have become a lawyer. Its way easier.
His doctor is correct. Even the lab work obtained - ApoB and CRP - was just a picture in a moment in time. You are not going to be checking these levels on a daily basis, or monthly, at least not until there's an easier way to measure things without having to get stuck with a needle all the time.
Stress is considered a risk factor, but how do you plan on measuring stress? And maybe not with respect to heart disease specifically, but today a study was released suggesting loneliness was as much a health risk as drinking and smoking 15 cigs a day - but how does one measure the extent of loneliness?

A good diet is important, and there's enough information out there to determine what a good diet is. I believe weighing yourself daily is real helpful. And regular exercise - a combination or aerobic and anaerobic. There's enough data to indicate that these interventions, combined, are effective in reducing risk.

And, on a less preventive note, truth be told, if someone in their mid 50's is complaining of SOB and has a family history heart disease, most doctors, in the US at least, are going to do more extensive testing.
To the best of my knowledge, on iOS, 1 CSS px has been 2 device pixels for a while. Might even be 4 device pixels on Retina devices.
This is clearly the most pressing issue of our era, as it lies behind so many other evils.

To say nothing of the oppressed in 'developing' countries, growth and the state-enforced debt money systems have the majority of the educated world running around in blinkered slavery. Yes, that includes otherwise intelligent young people working fiendishly at startups, trying to get rich quick: from the article, the rich might be rich in monetary terms – but they too are poor in the wider context of what being human means.

How can we chart a solution? People can use non-state currencies which aim toward collective value generation and liquidity at labour rather than systematized usury and incentives for hoarding capital. People can protest, develop alternatives to and utilize settlement systems that sidestep the state sanctioned monopoly of the conventional banking system. People can educate one another and their children to see value in resource preservation and environmental and social concern. States can begin to integrate these values in to governance, for instance using tax reduction as incentives.

Just some ideas to get people thinking.

Must read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_first_5000_Years
Even the front side of your analogy is broken. Mechanics are great sources of information on how to drive so you can maximize the life of your engine. It's like you haven't had a conversation with a mechanic before.

Likewise with doctors. I have had 4 doctors in my family (3 still alive), and I've spent many the family meal talking with them about health, longevity, and the mechanical/biology/chemistry behind how your body works and when it works best.
I think there is literally 0 chance for another Facebook. Google tried with Google+

I disagree and agree. I agree there will not be another Facebook. I disagree, because Facebook is not the end of the line for social networks, just like Altavista and Inktomi were not the end of the line for search engines.

No one in the social network space has yet hit the quality Google hit with search. I fully agree that once that place is hit, it will be very, very difficult to dislodge whoever does it.
In our case, we had 1 view from California, but it lasted 22 seconds (our video was 1:37), so it doesn't look too good...
So I just googled "print photo api", and found a while bunch of similar things, like http://www.pwinty.com/

Is Lob different?
YC watch from a embedded player, so check the traffic source also to know how many from YC.
The ones you see on the demo page is what comes with Backtick out of the box. I'm constantly adding more bookmarklets to the default list, just tweet at me at @JoelBesada if you want to suggest anything to be added.
Only from a literal third party perspective. Someone whose family lives in a poor area and lives on food stamps will place a whole lot more value on $1,000 than a rich kid who gets the latest tech, his private high school tuition, and his car paid for by his parents.

Most aren't this black and white, of course, but the point is that a fixed amount of any asset can mean vastly different things to people in different circumstances.
Yes. Good examples are the Bootstrap and Foundation frameworks that are now very much mobile first.
Many have showed up on eBay for $500-$1500 (just for the invite)
Totally not worth 20k, I'll tell you that! There are better ways to get your foot in between the door, for free (unless you have no social skills what so ever).
Don't try to rely on Chrome's Incognito mode or Firefox's Private mode, either. IIRC, I tested Panopticlick on the former and it was actually more unique on that particular PC than Chrome in "normal" mode.

Panopticlick has been out for a while, so I'm hoping more and more people are going to hear about it and eventually there will be tools developed to combat that sort of device IDing.

I did a quick Google search and I found Secret Agent, a Firefox add-on, that claims to "randomize your Firefox HTTP user agent, to surpress device fingerprinting, and resist web tracking" : https://www.dephormation.org.uk/?page=81
Using GNU Parallel to roll-your-own Map Reduce
"Where the nonsense starts is with our habit of thinking of a large number as closer to infinity than a small one." Wittgenstein
In basketball, a hustling player is the guy who goes the extra distance, works particularly hard and gets by as much on effort as on skill. The guy who throws himself to the ground after the ball if that's what it takes.