skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it could be used to reduce typos--when I mistakenly hit "K" on my way to "P", I bet I do it with less force (at least most of the time).
Because the domain doesn't cost anything to maintain. The service has hosting and bandwidth costs, which must be relatively substantial for a service of their scale.
I was not talking about that we should forget the data generated by these experiments in that era. I am just stating that how bad these experiments were, they did make the lives of later generations better, including the tribes that suffered most from this ordeal. I mean that it would be awful to have to do these experiments again, rather use the current set of data, how bad the methods were.

Good things can come from bad things, just like the other way around, science itself is hardly to describe with morality, the usage of said science is what makes the user either moral or a-moral.
What tools did you use? What compiler/target architecture? Was there much turnover? What kinds of bugs got through? You can't just leave it at that.
When they got into the business, Twitter wasn't such a big deal, though. (Personally I believe Twitter will go back to not being a big deal in a few years, but so would URL shortening in general)
"Users won't pay for web search either, and that has monetized very well."

Tell that to excite, altavista, yahoo, etc...
There are different types of efficiencies.

A small group can accomplish more tasks per person than a large group, as there is less overhead.

However, large groups can benefit from network effects. A larger group may be able to build a reputation, distribute work to a broader audience allow more specialization. So even though each individual worker accomplishes fewer tasks per day, the overall output of the firm may be much higher.

A factory with 90 workers and 5, managers, 4 HR people, and a CEO may be able to produce more chairs than 100 independent workers, all of whom spend every day with a hammer and saw.

Different organization sizes are appropriate for different tasks.
The AEI article is stunningly bad - reminds me of intelligent design arguments. Take this: "To get more economic growth by having more start-ups, new companies would need to be more productive than existing companies." This is like suggesting that people shouldn't have kids because kids aren't as productive as adults. I usually try to not name-call on the internet, but Scott Shane is an idiot. He clearly didn't get to be a professor based on his intelligence.

Unfortunately the linked blog post doesn't quite hit the nail on the head...
DDoS attack tool timeline
What frustrates me most* is hardware. I'd love to be able to work in a context where I can do something about its deficiencies.

* In terms of intensity: not frequency and maybe not averaged. The idea of being able to fix the software I use makes it more bearable, even if I rarely take advantage of that.
I think hourly billing is bad for two reasons, even though I do it all the time:

* It just limits the amount of money you can make. People have a strange psychological approach to hourly figures; once you hit a certain rate that they consider alarmingly "high," which is a metric that varies immensely, their eyes just sort of glaze over and they go, "ooof!" But if you give them a fixed bid that assumes x hours and comes out to an equivalent hourly rate that is ${quite high}, they seem to be just fine with that - in my experience, this is often true even if you itemise it and declare the expected hours. Some sort of fixed bid leaves a lot more room for padding in case things don't go as expected, and, if you're lucky, more profitability.

* Programming workflow just isn't linear like that. We've all read Joel Spolsky's "Human Task Switches Considered Harmful." In addition to that, programming problems are often solved in strangely noncontiguous, out-of-band ways, like coming up with solutions to a vexing encumbrance in the shower.

The point is that billing should attempt to reflect the actual workflow as closely as possible, and the workflow of a programmer just doesn't go like an auto shop's. If you have a 20 hour project, doing 5 hours here, going off to do something else, and coming back to it and doing another 5 hours doesn't mean the project is 50% done - at least, from a practical perspective.

Being a very small business myself with no credit facility and no savings or cash buffer whatsoever coupled with relatively high living expenses inherited from my employed days, I face the additional issue of severe cash flow constraints when I attempt to float long projects that pay hourly. I describe this more extensively in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746517

For me - as for many freelance programmers and contractors - I think the right choice is some sort of flat weekly billing, and splitting up any project of nontrivial size into smaller, manageable and well-defined milestones. If you can get away with it.

I think it's pretty fair to say that you often can't do a linear, 1:1 relationship between time spent toward project and money paid. One caveat is the one I pointed out above. The other, more generally, has to do with the fact that at 100% completion code acquires orders of magnitude more economic utility than when it's 90% complete. At 90%, it's just a useless blob of code as far as most customers are concerned. At 100% it's a finished deliverable that does what they want - or thought they wanted, whatever. So, usually there's a bigger balloon payment at the tail. It's not realistic to expect that when you have 7/8ths of the project done, you'll have 7/8ths of the money in hand. There are other reasons for this as well; see the link to my other comment above. But I think one should strive to get as close to that possible, insofar as it's possible to measure % completion to any degree whatsoever.
Taobao.com Online Market Flourishes in China
is there anything like cafepress or threadless for comic books? could be a really cool way to keep a dying industry going.
Yes. Windows Mobile 6 sucks. iPhone rocks. We get it, move on.
I'm (technically speaking) working as a PHP and Common Lisp developer for my own startup.

I'd love to do more Lisp, or in another universe, I'd love to work on engines and wish that I knew more about their design, power, efficiency...
I take 4000 UI daily in gelcaps (vit d if fat soluble, so dry tablets aren't absorbed as well).
Cute idea, but $9 for a basic A6 notebook? Eesh.
Go to Borders, get the Moleskine knock-offs made by Piccadilly. I found myself migrating to the larger size instead of the roughly 3x5 inch small ones.
No, but it helps.

Spec fiction authors are thinking ahead and pondering how things might be - based on to some extent how things are now. You don't have to be barmy, but as the author suggests, you have to think differently - which of course can be mistaken.
Actually, intense thinking, as I recall, burns a lot of calories.

The trick is diet, as mentioned on here (next to moderate levels of exercise). Eat mostly veggies, rice, pasta, avocados, fruit. Drink water and no pop.

The other thing: look up glycemic index of foods. The easier it is for the body to turn something into sugar (processed foods, e.g. white bread), the more likely the body will create an insulin rush, which wrecks havoc by flipping a switch to make your body store fat. Many people don't know about this fact.
not released to the public, it's an internal always-evolving thing.
Say a person links to a series of articles, and the site which hosted them goes down. Now all the links are invalid, and this is nothing more than what we deal with every day.

The alarmist rants I've seen against URL shorteners are simply making this argument without realizing that there is no "new" problem in need of solving, only an old one that we already handle fairly well. Though given the level of irrational rhetoric I've been seeing in these discussions (example here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998) I'm not sure there's any point trying to argue with it.
So let's promote the URL shorteners that are open and provided as free services, instead of those who try and sell click information.

http://ur1.ca is free software and provides a text format download of all its mappings right on its home page. Not a fan of shorteners, but that's the one I'd use for posting services with char length restrictions.
Planet Calacanis
They're not hard to crawl & save locally, at least:
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=TinyURL
maths

the way it should be!
Yet Another Reason Not to Use GoDaddy
PageStack Android: Push/Pop web pages between your desktop & Android phone.
Looks like TechCrunch switched to reruns. I hope All in the Family comes on next. That Archie Bunker is so fresh.
I developed this with @hedgehog during Google Campout. You can now download this on the Android Market.
To my knowledge, no.

I also perhaps misspoke when I stated that comics are dying. I don't honestly know that they are, or what their current sales numbers are -- I just expect for print-related content in almost all forms to eventually die, or become more niche, which may well be naive of me.
An avg of 240 dbIO/s is entirely different from peak time IO/s. When someone like Jeff Atwood posts a link using their service, they could easily see 10x the volume. Volume might be really stagnant for 45 minutes, then bam, 10 percent of their req's for the hour come in within a 2-3 minute span. Judging by their blog-post, I'm assuming they needed to have the infrastructure to handle that kinda load.

Either way, I modded you up for a pretty thorough analysis (and because I largely agree with you (it basically is a mapped 301 Location: http://newsite/)). From my armchair standpoint(1), a 256 mb slice + Redis + nginx should be able to handle 10x the volume easy.

(1) Well not quite armchair, a good 30 percent of my firm's business is directly related to scaling.
On the other hand, it probably wouldn't take much, especially if you cared to take the time to write a custom-purpose HTTP-redirection server.

You must consider the opportunity cost. How long does it take to code such custom server ? As tr.im is not profitable, its developers' time could be used to produce other product/service that has a better business model and is more profitable.
I don't think your answer relates as lazy at all; I appreciate the follow up. If I should accidentally piss someone off in the future, I'll now be able to see how our assumptions differ and we will be able to avoid talking past each other.

Thanks for expanding my perspective in a useful way.
No, but common sense dictates that it takes more time to make all of the decisions required to run a multibillion company with thousands of employees than a single person has.
I am working on exactly what I want.

I have worked on business systems in many companies (mostly enterprise) and learned quite a bit. But the biggest thing I learned is that companies rarely have the applications software that they really need to compete.

I am building an environment and applications that I wish I would have had all those years. This is a great opportunity to put into software all the things that could have been along with all the things that were.

It's hard not to love working on what you really want.
With apple products, it's more about what you can't do with the products that makes them special.

Not being able to use flash is a feature....somehow.
Can it be used against him? I think it's common knowledge by now that mild OCD is a job requirement.
Thanks for the snco link, that looks exactly like what I was looking for!
recessions force companies to be more efficient even if the business is a nigerian scamming business.
Or how do you think that cross-country runners got so skinny?

My guess is that the causation is reversed. Skinny people find running more enjoyable. I used to enjoy running cross-country when I was younger. As I've gotten older, I've filled out. I'm not fat, but I'm no longer thin and scrawny. As a result, I find running much more straining. I can feel it pound away on my knees, and I tend to get shin splints pretty quickly. So now I no longer run. I enjoy exercise - biking, soccer, etc. - but pounding pavement for 3 miles a day is no longer enjoyable.

Exercise CAN make you thin; thus, the statement that it won't is incorrect.

The article does not claim exercise can't make you thin. It claims it won't make you thin. No matter how many calories you burn, your body will send you overwhelming urges to eat more, to compensate for the lost calories. These urges - known as hunger - are incredibly difficult to resist, and thus you will not get any thinner.
OTOH, they could be used as failsafes. If a normal link dies, tinyurl or whatever could go to a page that says,

"This link seems to be missing. Do you know where it moved to?" The responses could be published as long as the 404 continue. I have to think someone has already thought of this.
Type eek at Gimp.org
If you only want to do redirection, no statistics stuff, then pretty cheap. If they don't want submission of new links, even cheaper, they could even run it on shared hosting.
I thought that was pretty ironic too
Incoming training manager at an expensive brothel chain.

Seriously though, seems like this question gets asked about every two weeks around here.

I love flying airplanes. From the first time I sat in a cockpit I knew that I would rather fly than anything else. But I also knew that making a career out of flying would be the worst thing in the world to do. Why? Because sooner or later it becomes a job, just like all other jobs. And when your passion becomes mundane and tiresome, you lose something. Wouldn't it be better to cultivate more things you love instead of just having one and beating it to death?

I've found that motivation comes after action, not before. That means that loving something in the abstract is usually much more fulfilling than the concrete. I've also found that once you pour yourself into something, the love will naturally come. Lots of folks wait around for some kind of epiphany when what they really need is the gumption to go out and start something.
Interestingly enough, I tried to visit the site and Chrome flagged it as malware.
Or go for a swim. In fact I'd suggest either of those over pounding your feet against the concrete.
Conflating private enterprise with government is as fallacious as it ever was. A retailer does not prohibit publication or distribution and does not enforce it's decisions with the threat of violence or imprisonment. It decides what it is and isn't willing to sell. Why is that wrong? Why should they not have the right to do that? Would your opinion change if it were a locally owned sole proprietorship and not Wal-Mart?
Straw man fallacy. A is like B and B is bad. Try again.

The argument is that it makes things MORE fragile, by interposing another party into the resolution chain. Given that it is both easy to do (thus there will be lots of competitors) and hard to profit at means that this party is more than usually vulnerable.

Anyway if the content dissapears, then it is gone. A url shortner failing means the failure could occur even if the content is still available.

Therefore, by definition, it is worse than the other situation.
Ask HN: How Much Money is Enough... What's your Number?
It would be interesting to hear your specific financial goals, such as: "I would sell my startup if the net proceeds of the sale would exceed n." I'm more interested, however, in knowing what factors you considered to come up with your number.

I am asking because I run a profitable internet business that has doubled each of the last three years; our metrics indicate that we can maintain that growth rate for the foreseeable future. As with any business, there are major risks but the likelihood of them actually threatening us is relatively low; unfortunately, precisely quantifying the risks is impossible.

Since a significant chunk of my net worth is tied up in the business, I worry that a "rogue wave" could endanger our prospects. We have been approached multiple times by serious acquirers offering favorable terms and a 5x revenue multiple; so far, have I rejected their offers. We have no outside investors so the decision to sell would be entirely mine.

Since the M&A market is beginning to show signs of life again, I am considering a sale. The question is, how does one decide when to step off the train, and take a huge amount of risk off of the table? Thanks!
The problem with URL shorteners is that you now have two servers which can go down.
I was going to write exactly the same thing, but you've put it more eloquently than I could. Also, it would seem to me that just "writing more test-cases" wouldn't get one very far as the tests are going to be as sloppy as the original work.
The whole question of alternative web browsers on the iPhone is lacking in reality. FireFox's mobile project is in the alpha/beta stage at best. Google's browser is based on WebKit so not much point there. Microsoft can't even produce a decent version of Mobile IE on their own platform. What does that leave? Opera? When we see real mobile browser competition on open platforms this might be a valid argument but today WebKit is, by far, the best mobile browser out there.
Nobody cares about your website.
You might want to just try a different brand of regular keyboard--different models require different amounts of force to register a keystroke.
I believe they do and it's called bit.ly...
My most beloved hobby is radio controlled helicopters. I would love to do something involving autonomous aircraft. Control systems and navigation. Should have gone to school, I guess.
How much to purchase your service?
The biggest bug is the fact that the program itself didn't look this result over and scream FIX ME!
Enough for a house, a car, and some leftover to take care of my family. Everything after that I think is just greed. With those needs taken care of you have all the time in the world to work on another hit.
Domain name alone is more valuable than whole package with a requirement to keep the service running
Yeah, but how is Permanize any different than a URL shortener itself — what happens when Permanize goes out of business?
Yea - it was posted a while back - I think that's how I initially stumbled upon it.
Except that you have to buy gas, pay property taxes, eat, drink and pay for entertainment. I get your point, for sure, but surely you want something in the bank to either help fund your next gig, or to buy yourself more time in case it takes a few more tries than 1?
ImageCaption - a MooTools Plugin for Auto-Captioning Images
ImageCaption is a MooTools 1.2+ plugin for easily adding figure captions to image elements on a web page. It is very customizable and painless to style.
I actually took a quick glance at the list before I posted but couldn't immediately see any recognizable names.

Thanks for looking into it though!
In addition to the methods suggested here, make sure you're taking care of yourself. Eat well, get enough sleep and exercise, and so on.
I see several subtle uses for this in day-to-day applications. When holding down the arrow keys, it would be nice if my cursor moved faster if I was pressing harder. Same with any key repetition. Right now, repeat speed is time sensitive, so if I'm backspacing to delete an entire paragraph, I need to wait a few seconds for it to speed up. Then I have to time it just right to prevent overshooting and deleting more than my target paragraph.

Another practical use--I wish my Tivo remote had pressure-sensitive keys. I could zip forward then gradually back off as I approach the end of my commercial block. Just like one of those professional video editing systems, where the operator has total control of how slowly/quickly they can zip through the video.

They should get rid of the "typing harder makes your letters bigger" part of the demo. It made me cringe.
Given that they're shutting down, why isn't Tr.im simply releasing a complete copy of their URL mappings?

There's no need for some industry-wide URL shortener consortium to archive links. Just give out your mappings if you happen to go out of business, so someone could decode your URLs manually if they really needed to.
Unshort.me is doing it. Look at the following post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577457
"Different organization sizes are appropriate for different tasks."

Yes, if you are making chairs or cars, it makes sense to have more people (up to a point of inflection where the diminishing returns would make adding new workers grossly inefficient).

HOWEVER, if we are talking about startups -- disruptive, scalable businesses -- they are, by definition, more efficient than big companies. I would make this argument myself, but it has already been made pretty well by PG:

http://paulgraham.com/boss.html
Startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans...each species thrives in groups of a certain size...groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour. You should get another multiple of two, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company. Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be?

http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do [this is why/how startups can beat the average].

It's hard to argue that startups are not more efficient than big businesses.
> I've also found that once you pour yourself into something, the love will naturally come.
Therefore, it's wise to choose something you love and that's going to pay off.
Aha! Trenchant observation, old fizgig!

To be fair, I've read a couple of articles like that and (to me, at least) they've been interesting because they'll sometimes explain the approach they had to take to support state in something as interactive as a game. So I always have a kind of morbid fascination with Haskell articles. It's so foreign; like a silicon-based life form. Still, my morbid fascinations will lead me to find those articles on my own, and do, before I see them linked on HN.

But if our goal is to "smelt an ever-purer" HN, it seems we should only submit a link to 'implementation of Canonical Application X in language L' if it answers one or both of the following:

1) How is the approach (non-trivially) different in L than in most languages? Did the language make something harder or easier? Why?

2) What about the implementer's experience is of value to us? Any gotchas to look out for?
what the article doesn't mention is that eBay tried giving away the farm for free in China, and they still got clobbered
Congratulations, elsewhen. Good luck.
Tr.im Throws In the Towel
Also known as the 'F-U Number'. Ask yourself how much you need to live the rest of your life the way you want.

For me, I don't need much in the way of luxuries, but would want enough money to secure my own interests regardless of whats going on around me (ie a war or something).
I would probably sell under one of the following scenarios:

1. When you are bored of what you are working on and a sale would net you enough money to live for enough time to startup one or more new venture(s) that you are interested in.

2. Not bored of the venture but think that in the immediate future your business might come under attack by an incumbent and you are not agile enough to fend off said attack.

Note: those are just two that I would sell off under. I am sure there are a few more that would be a good time to sell but I am not able to conjure them right now.

I would also wager that you should be able to get a fair sale price given the growth metrics you are using.(As long as they are not too cooked.)
Nytimes is now letting readers upmod good comments (e.g.)