skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One approach I've been long-interested in is cooperative ownership of local infrastructure and private ownership of inter-city infrastructure. This would mean that, rather than infrastructure representing a single-provider monopoly in a given area, and a high barrier to entry, the local community could open its infrastructure as a market to all providers or to those who offer the most appealing services.

Seems this could make the difference between slow, monopolistic progress of the status quo and dynamic competitive progress.
I wonder if these things could be made much larger and almost completely automated? If petroleum prices go through the roof, I could see such craft carrying perishable goods.
I agree with everyone else here - GitX is very nice

The features I'd like to see (in descending order of importance):

- Remote repository interaction - push/pull etc. (this is the only thing stopping me from using GitX full time).

- Merging

- Cherry-picking

- Interactive rebase
Still waiting on the Feedmesh...
I sympathize as it looks like I'm headed down the same road. I look at it this way, you can at least "start all over" again from a relationship point of you.

My clock has been ticking for 3 years and not sure if the hard work will pay off but I won't trade what I do for anything else.

Sometimes finding the right person is just as hard (or harder) than being successful in a startup.
You can find a number of them on the opensolaris forums if you search on terms like 0906 iscsi, comstar 0906, etc... here's an example: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=104593&...

Our experience was that 0906 was utterly unusable if you're using comstar, with performance being mildly degraded for straight zfs usage.
Curiously absent from his list is time spent on social networks (including HN).
If you can't make money doing something, is there any good evidence that it is worth doing at all? Leaving aside goods with "free" competition from the gov't (schools, roads, libraries, etc). EDIT: Also leaving aside things you do for your more direct benefit, like growing your own food or contributing to open source projects you use.
What if you had some kind of nfp evaluating nfp that would help a person who wants to donate decide what is effective?
I notice that iPhone app ratings often look manipulated.

On Amazon, if something is good, its ratings look like:

**********
*****
**
*
*

If something is not so good, then there won't be this curve. Instead you might get something like:

****
*****
**
****
**

But what I see time and again on the iPhone App Store:

**********
*****
**
*
************

How I interpret this: You have a good or decent app, and other developers are gaming the system with bad reviews in an attempt to assassinate their competitor.

In my case, this backfires. I now see this pattern for what it is, and this makes me more anxious to see the app: if the competition is so afraid of it, that they're driven to cheating, there must be something to it!

Another thing I take away from this phenomenon: a disturbingly high percentage of iPhone app developers are scumbags!
can you please post the source to the FLA?
cheers
This has huge potential to annoy the hell out of users. I hope developers use it with prudence. Ask me once after 10 startups or whatever. Fine. Ask me again? Your score is going to be F, 0, horrible, awful, stole all my contacts and sold them to the Russian mafia. Deleted all my music. E-mailed all my private photos to everyone in my address book. Lies? Maybe, maybe so. I don't like being nagged. Once is enough.
If he's using a laptop, he's now burning significantly more power. 4 hours of battery life at idle can easily become 30 minutes at a constant 25% CPU load.
>> Companies go bankrupt because the customer has the power to discontinue their patronage if they deliver a product or service poorly

>This definitely happens to many kinds of non-profit!

Unless I missed the sarcasm, it doesn't happen with charitable non-profits. They die when funding dries up, and since their customers don't provide funding, their customers have little/no effect on their survival.

Yes, a charity can continue to exist long after folks stop showing up to receive services.
Which strongly suggest microloans don't really produce that much actual value.
I don't know what the story is behind this but if Apple is upgrading people I'd say it's a smart move. Call it the "Gmail Rule" which states "You should give people a monstrous amount of storage because it's great PR and 99.9% of people won't come anywhere near using it anyway"

End Result: Happier customers for almost no cost (With storage as cheap as it is the .1% who do use a lot of space will still be relatively cheap to maintain)
How do you measure the "results" of a non-profit, when most of them work in non-quantifiable fields?

If McDonalds can work out how to quantify feeding hungry people then any charity working in Africa should be able to quantify feeding hungry people. If an insurance company can tell me the average lifespan of their clients to six decimal places and what exactly the risk factors are among that pool, then health-focused charities should be able to do it as well. etc, etc

(I have some familiarity with the literature and know the excuses for why charities operating in Africa with mobile phones and computers can't be expected to have as good a handle on their numbers as a British bank circa 1780. Yeah yeah, it must be difficult when you rely on globally distributed workers, many of whom are not literate. Oh wait, so does McDonalds.)
Thanks for sharing the video and the notes. As a coder who is trying to build my own applications for the web, sometimes I take the I-can-do-everything-by-myself approach just to save money. But time is money. I fail to realize and appreciate the cost incurred in trying to learn how to do some things best left delegated due to my current skills set.

So, thanks again for sharing this video.
He also recently used "orthogonal" in an essay when it really wasn't the best word choice. When given the option to maximize eloquence, the author favors impressing the reader with his technical know-how, sacrificing being articulate for upping his nerd cred. Possibly a smart move for communicating with the HN community and securing his status as leader. A political thing. I often find myself talking more nerdy than I need to in #startups, for example.
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I operate basically the same except I sit on an idea for 2 weeks. I cleverly named this rule "The two week rule".
There is a difference between email space and storing files. It is hard work to store lots of emails. Particularly when gmail has a limit on size of attachments. Data storage, easy to abuse.
Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education
I agree with one of the commentators below the article ("B.Karn") that there always seems to be a bit of a "Clever Chinaman" undertone in these US/China articles. The Chinese do not have an enviable position; they're in serious trouble, and quite possibly in deeper trouble than the U.S.

There's some not-well-concealed racism, reminiscent of the old "Crafty Jew" banker stereotypes, in the amount of credit the Chinese get. No matter what happens, it's always part of their master plan or to their advantage, at least as it's reported breathlessly in some quarters.

It looks to me like they're screwed pretty badly, that they bet on the same sort of endless growth that burned everyone else, and their economic advice is the equivalent of the guy in the low-lying end of the boat giving suggestions on how everyone might bail faster.
It's a good example of a different type of offensiveness. There is a definite difference between the offensiveness of a tasteless joke and something that strongly goes against our inbuilt desire to protect children. Also, it hanger ad seems inherently less dumb in that it was designed to generate controversy, because (most) attention is good attention. There is nothing good about the PR generated by the censorship company because there is nothing controversial about it; everyone thinks it is a bad idea.
I really want to sign up for Mobile Me, but there's no SSL support for most of the web apps. I'd rather not have all my data transferred in the clear.
There are many possible explanations for that phenomenon. I wouldn't necessarily assume malice.

Rate-on-delete tends to produce a lot of one star ratings, especially for free apps: if they liked the app, they wouldn't be deleting it.

For paid apps, review copies tend to produce high ratings, since getting a special freebie primes people to like the app. Developers often give copies to friends, too, and they'll be much more likely to rate than the general public.
Another factor is that older founders will have (relatively) less need of YC: they'll have their own funds, experience and contacts. The age-distribution of YC startup applicants affects the age-distribution of those that are funded, and so doesn't necessarily generalize to all startups.

E.g. Adobe was founded by a couple of guys in their 40's.
Do you have bad experiences with MSSQL (or any other popular RDBMS) in an enterprisey environment ?

The only RDBMS I worked with that was too limited for the enterprise ... is MySql. But that's because when you have a "Big Ball of Mud" it is easier to patch many things in the data-store and MySql has bad support for stored procedures / triggers / views and I also wouldn't trust it to store a data warehouse. But Postgresql was more than suitable for such a scenario.

MSSQL is also more than adequate for any task you might have.

I've seen this argument many times before ... that Oracle is more reliable. But with Oracle unless you have a DBA with years of experience to administer it, you're pretty much screwed. And a RDBMS that requires so much tweaking and maintenance just to keep it working doesn't seem so reliable to me.

True story ... while working at Adobe I participated in meetings about the future of Oracle at the company. Long story short: the company holds much of its data on 2 big Oracle servers and the problem with the setup is that it doesn't scale horizontally. And many newer projects are using Mysql, because it has a good-enough replication system and it also has a hidden gem (mysql proxy).

It seems to me (at least as an outside observer ... I'm not a professional DBA) that these are just effects of marketing campaigns.
Brett Slatkin on the difference between PubSubHubBub and rssCloud:

from http://jy.typepad.com/jy/2009/07/pubsubhubbub-rsscloud.html:

In a nut-shell, rssCloud's subscriptions are merely a way of redistributing pings to subscribers. We think this is still on the publishing side of the problem and does not simplify the life of a subscriber. With rssCloud, subscribers must re-fetch the feed to see if it's changed. In contrast, Hubbub delivers the actual changes to the subscriber so they have no more work to do. This makes it much easier to subscribe, and has some nice properties when it comes to scalability.
Not a bug as far as I know.

Sometimes the numbers just works out that way.
Or maybe it's biased by the "prompt user to rate when deleting it", like the article says. If you delete it, you probably don't like it very much - and you select the most extreme "don't like" option presented.

And I say "maybe", because we need more experiments to see what the causes really are.

I think that the "ask to rate after using it for a while" is superior to only asking when deleting, but of course you should have both to get the opinions of both satisfied and dissatisfied users.
Why I Study OOP
Excellent example - thanks. I did mean in the app itself, rather than some kind of plugin.
I bought my car from a local dealer for a price that allowed them some profit not because I care deeply about "free oil changes", etc., but because I care about them staying in business.

If my local dealership goes out of business, the next closest one is approximately 50 miles away. That'd be so incredibly inconvenient that I'd almost assuredly end up selling the car and buying a different marque that was locally serviceable.

Auto dealerships add value for me, and as such I will pay a small premium over the marginal cost to help make sure they're incentivized to still be there in 5 or 10 years.
Yes,

The financial regime that China has been on for the last fifteen years was bound to come to the present bad end. They could have let their currency appreciate more earlier and things wouldn't have been as fragile as they are now. But China felt such a need for industrial growth that they were willing partners in the last fifteen years' increasingly unbalanced growth. China is not necessarily more to blame than the US for this mess but they are one of the entities to blame. They certainly signed up for this program.
augmented reality on contact lenses (or anything as intimate as them) - no more clunky cellphones with screens: everything right there in front of your eyes (and the voices inside your head). Introducing the iYou.

edit: that's my take for something for the NEXT 5-10 years - re-reading the question, it makes me wonder if it was about things that were created on the PAST 5-10 years... doh!
Are they just announcing to a central server and the client only polls the one server for any one of thousands of blogs they could be subscribed to?

That's my impression. With the Wordpress implementation, I believe rsscloud.org is hosting the central server.
This is a bug, you occasionally get this on certain types of attached volumes (some large USB drives) and nfs/smb/webdav mounts. Sorry, buddy.
Stuck at 20gb so far. Would love to have 2TB!
While I wouldn't say they are secure, decentralized or fault-tolerant, according to searchyc
the Tahoe-LAFS announcements themselves certainly do appear to be
spread across multiple HN posts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809038 (17 hours ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737464 (36 days ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250566 (415 days ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149283 (527 days ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148202 (529 days ago)
Funny to notice that the Internet is already "an extremely important business" - but it's still NOT profitable for the vast majority of people (quite the contrary, if you analyze how many businesses/industries are getting dismantled as technology spreads its wings and everything goes digital)...
Agent Builder Insurance Services Launches Twitsurance
Yes, more power to equations.
You're certainly right but I still think the number of power users who would even be able to fill 1TB worth of space is minimal. I mean, your average Mac is only sporting about half that. Plus, since you can't exactly stream your audio/video files of iDisk I'd imagine that would cut down on a lot of abuse (since most people want their media on hand)
There are cases where charity in its more pure forms are important - I do think from time to time that individuals need help as a result of an event that may be no fault of their own. I personally try to be compassionate - but I don't think we should shame/force people to be charitable - and even in implementation, local not-for-profits tend to be far more efficient than government at assessing needs and addressing them.

When it comes to foreign relief/charities, it's a really tough call. On one hand, oppressive governments are incentivized to actively show their people at their worst so that they can get more money and in turn collect graft (e.g. Saddam Hussein and baby incubators), but on the other what are the rest of us supposed to do? Let these people die? We play right into the hands of their governments when we don't. Following natural disasters, war/strife, I also personally feel a strong need to help. In these scenarios, there can be no room for sustainable profit because they tend to be unique/unusual events.
Dunno, but I have found that Americans and non-Americans alike have trouble making connections without the conclusion spelled out for them. Simple programming example; consider:

my %hash = ( foo => 42, bar => 123 ); # create a map
Class->new # instantiate class
Class->new( foo => 42 ) # instantiate class, setting foo = 42
Class->new( bar => 123 ) # instantiate class, setting bar = 123

With this in mind, how would you instantiate Class, setting foo to 42 and bar to 123? Many people are stumped, and wouldn't even think to try:

Class->new( foo => 42, bar => 123 )

This confuses me. So I am now careful to spell out conclusions after showing the reader what facts I used to reach them.
Did you really ask "is there any value in leading a moral life if it doesn't pay off financially?"

Non-profits do not actually aim at financial gain (duh!), so measuring their success in monetary term is an error of categories. Of course it is difficult to assess success of an endeavour like that, and Aaron is right in raising awarness for these difficulties, but forcing an inappropriate kind of measurement (did your non-profit make enough profit?) on them doesn't help solving this problem.

The correct question to ask are "what are our goals?" "How do we go about reaching our goals?" "Did our past activities in fact further our goals?" and so on. "how much more money did we raise and distribute" may factor in the analysis, but on its own it is pretty meaningless.
It only asks once per 30 days, and only IF you used it at least 15 times within those 30 days.
File test comparison table for shell, Perl, Ruby, and Python
Another way to kill a great idea is to fail to implement it.

This post brought to mind an old ze frank video: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html
"But it does mean that if you’re involved in nonprofits (or predictions), you need to be much more careful about making sure you’re doing a good job. Unfortunately, few nonprofits do that."

Oh really? So he can cite research that says, for example, that only x% (where x < 50%) of nonprofits with an annual budget of $500k have ever done any sort of evaluation, either comprehensive or more basic?

His assertion may be true. But just throwing this out there with absolutely nothing to back it up, in a blog post titled "The Trouble With Nonprofits", is frankly insulting to me.

I spent > 4 years working in a technical role for a nonprofit, and I can assure people that measurement and evaluation were very much on the minds of staffers. Everyone (funders, management) was becoming more data-driven, so our organization got a grant to conduct a multi-year evaluation. It was a very positive and necessary process, and the results were very positive. Like Aaron, I definitely recommend some sort of measurable goals for most every nonprofit out there.

I don't take issue with his opinion. What I take issue with is the tone of the article.

For example: "...but an actual attempt to measure how much they’re improving people’s lives. For most nonprofits, I expect these numbers will be depressingly small. "

It can be easy, as young paragons of technology and entrepreneurship, to look over to the nonprofit world and disparage it, to think of it and it's practitioners as "lesser than". I should know; it's the attitude I had before I started working at a nonprofit.

Truth is, running a nonprofit can be a hell of a lot harder than running a for-profit. At any stage, you have all the issues that for-profits have - hiring, firing, managing employees, management issues, getting money in the door, technological problems - PLUS a whole other layer.

A lot of this other layer comes because of the weak link between financial health and results. Am I accomplishing my mission? How do I measure success? How do I maximize success based on dollar spent? How do I judge where to allocate capital or resources - when maximizing revenue isn't a goal?

Why am I wasting my time writing this? Because this article uses a lot of conjecture and one very poor example to make the entire nonprofit sector seem like a bunch of bumbling idiots who don't know how to use spreadsheets. They're not, and it's not fair for this community to see such a distorted view.
I have nothing against helping in emergencies, but Ayn Rand had a good essay on that - emergencies are situations outside of normal operations and the response to an emergency should be working to end the emergency situation.
This is a good idea. Amazon does something similar, after you buy something, it sends you an email a month or so later asking you to rate the buying experience (and sometimes the item itself). When I have a good experience, I often don't think to write a review, but this reminds me, and I usually do it. The result is that there are often a lot of positive reviews for things on Amazon, which makes me more comfortable buying from them.
RSS in the Clouds
For the love of Cthulhu! Repeat after me: Profit is not determined by how much value you create, it is determined by how much of that value you can capture.

Some value isn't easily captured and that's a perfectly legitimate reason for nonprofits to exist.
Is it time for businesses to embrace the cloud?
Very true.

As a message of hope from what I learned, I just wanted to put it out there for any entrepreneurs that went through a divorce or any major unexpected event (bankrupcy or failure). I heard this once: In order to fully appreciate a beautiful morning sunrise you have to go through the cold and the darkness of the night..

To add to your comment, In my situation, I lost the bigger picture. Hard work almost always paid off in a way or in another, whether it's experience gained on field or a better financial situation.

The side I never really considered before is the cost of the lack of balance: my relationship, an (almost) ulcer, etc.

Retrospectively, I should have asked myself before starting: how much and who am I willing to lose in order to gain.
> Their main advantage is the shady deals they have with computer manufacturers that push their software to people who don't know they do have options.

Well, to be fair, Windows is still the best OS choice for consumers.

I don't use it myself, as I've got Debian/Ubuntu on my workstations, and Debian on the servers. I used to have a Mac, which is user-friendly and decent for all kinds of users.

But Windows is friendly to consumers, it has the best application support, and it does install on commodity hardware. I tortured my wife at some point with Ubuntu on her home computer, but it really didn't work out. I mean, even I have a laptop with a dysfunctional wireless, and just yesterday Debian-testing broke my Gnome setup.

If you want to help out Linux/BSD to gain more market-share, it doesn't help pretending it's a good choice and that Windows is used because of "inertia". The way I see it, Linux/BSD missed their opportunity a long time ago.
They close it over Labor Day because it's a traditionally low-traffic time for the bridge. But hey, don't let a lack of information keep you from passing judgment on our intelligence.
Nice one Drew!
I didn't say you should try to make as much profit as you can, but if you are not able to make anything, what evidence is there that you are benefiting anyone or even doing more harm than good? On the other hand, I've been following OB and LW since they started so I can easily see why you want to believe in the goodness of non-profits.
Assumptions should ideally have relevance to conclusions besides "you submitted" is a wrong interpretation of my question. I have specifically used the words "bugs filed against his name"
Not necessarily, but the converse IS true, bad ideas make a bad writer no matter how easy to read or entertaining he may be.