skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a market of at least 1, me, for a graphics editor that a smart (I understand the nature of graphics files), but non-trained (in photoshop) person can use. I've tried pixelmator a few times, but I have absolutely no idea how to use the damned thing. It looks simple enough. Yesterday, I opened an image and simply wanted to double the width, keeping the gradient "in tact". I couldn't even figure out how to select the area I needed (which was the whole of the image on the canvas).

So how about a "photoshop for programmers"?
Exterminate the Parasites: Mark Cuban's radical plan to save old media.
It implies both no effect and no predictive power.
I remember checking out your site when it first launched and thought it was a great idea. Glad to hear you executed it well too!
New Operating System Release: LoseThos V5.13
And they probably paid for those college credits. A typical state school might put that at $900 bucks. Great deal huh?

The unpaid internship thing is often a scam to get people to do just the kind of work you're describing. In companies I've worked for, I've seen it done.

I saw interns manually 'cleaning' data in a way that could be entirely automated. I told my employer at the time that they'd never be able to keep up with new incoming data and it's terrible, pointless work. I also said I could automate it in about 20 hours of work. He said, "we'll put an ad in for more interns."

Young people are naive, it's part of being young. It's unscrupulous to take advantage of that. Cuban could have paid internships paying at minimum wage if he'd like. It would still be far less expensive than getting actual professionals to do that work. His real complaint should be that he can't extract any real value for that work from the marketplace, because that's where his real problem is.
don't taze me bro
When I was around 13 years old I was interested in electronics, reading popular science, and listening to Run DMC and any other hip hop I could get my hands on. I really didn't see that many black inventors or scientist in the news or on TV(except the little black kid that would show up on Mr Wizad every now and then). It wasn't until I was a little bit older that I learned about the rich history of blacks in science. Being 13 years old living on a military base in North Carolina I assumed that the field was something blacks could not get into.

It wasn't until I read an article about the guy who invented the super soaker that I found out that your color doesn't hold you back from getting in any field. I learned that he held many patents and that the super soaker was just the most popular. It changed my whole outlook on things and made me do a lot more research. I knew then I had 2 loves, hip hop and electronics and I could do either one if I wanted.
I've found Venkman quite reasonable: www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman.
The sites you will be competing with (at least the ones cc'ing their user content) would probably say something bombastic like "we're better, so go ahead and try to use our content to beat us"--I can certainly imagine the kids at Stack Overflow saying something macho like this on their radio show.

I say go for it. Us HNers have a major crush on Stack Overflow, and if you can drive us to your site (without spamming the google front page a la Nabble), you win. Bonus points for cc'ing your user content so the next fad can take all of your business.
The mobile industry puts you closest to your customers' wallets, so I think that's the place to be right now if you're in it for the money.
So, it looks like computers have a reproductive system now.
"governments have two ways to promote the development of new drugs and can run both in parallel.

First is by passing patent laws.

The second way is by funding research in national laboratories."

What if the government laboratories did their research under the direction of private business? This would reduce the risk of govt labs wandering into the wilderness, offload some of the risk from business, and could provide society with a stake and return in the outcome, expressed in lower prices or wider manufacturing rights or whatever.
I know. It is called Christmas
Could be worse on windows (even 64bit) it defaults to 1MB and a spacious 4MB on Itanium.
I must have my head screwed on sideways then.

First, in your example, I don't see that "Joe" has a preference for you to die.

You are motivated to live, which boils down to either acquiring medication, or not. Acme pharmaceuticals, however, is not in the business of saving lives -- that's not their motivation. They are in business to make money through pharmaceutical development. They produce a product, and people either choose to use it, or not. All moral judgements aside, they are under absolutely no obligation to provide the drug to anyone.

A report by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in 2003 found that the mean cost of bringing a new pharmaceutical to market was almost $900 million [1]. Let's hedge a little and guess that the cost of developing and releasing a new AIDS treatment comes in at $1 billion -- they're going to need around a million patients at $800/year just to recover their costs and break even in a reasonable period of time, and that's not counting continued costs of manufacturing, shipping, lawsuits, or further research and development. I think it's rather likely that Gilead totaled up their development and recurring costs, factored in a standard profit margin, guessed at their annual sales and did a bit of market analysis, and arrived at a price that kept them in business.

Regardless of whether it's morally right or wrong, producing cheap knockoffs of expensive pharmaceuticals is not a sustainable business practice -- even if those cheap knockoffs are equally effective and have the same quality controls in place.

The situation only becomes a moral issue if we find that a particular company has developed, and patented, an effective treatment or cure for a particularly nasty disease, and then they have opted to artificially inflate their price. If that's the case, then yes, there is moral justification for producing a black-market version.

In all other cases, if you think -- as I do -- that effective treatments and cures for diseases should be available to people regardless of their economic means, then I would suggest that the various countries involved resolve the situation by simply purchasing (or promising to purchase) large quantities of the drug for their citizens. The pharmaceutical company can stay in business and continue its research on the next medication, people get treated, everybody's happy.

A nation like India could afford such a deal.

Poorer nations could have assistance from the U.N. or humanitarian organizations ... if enough people really believed in making treatment available to everyone.

Regardless, I don't think the situation boils down as simply as you make it sound. To paraphrase your last line, it's not your place to decide that nobody ought to suffer at the expense of companies capable of treating them.

[1]: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/38/15/25
Yahoo Pipes is yummy for this sort of the thing--the Willy Wonka GUI will make your day. It's what I use to gather my favorite webcomics into a single massive feed.
Generally not a problem if you don't use much multi-inheritance. Making your objects exception-safe will have lots of benefits -- and it's exceptions that are far more likely to be causing leaks in your code than destructor-order issues. Your mileage may vary.

Then again, I don't mean to trivialize the issue. It can be a real problem. But can you suggest a language that will prevent 100% of subtle memory leaks? I can't think of any. Hell, if you're using Ruby with a pre-1.8 VM, you don't even need to roll your own leaks.
This will be useful...when chatbots are closer to passing the Turing test.
For a more practical application of RepRap, see makerbot at http://makerbot.com.
Last time I checked the two weren't mutually exclusive. Going low sugar is good for you. Eating less is good for you and getting off your rear is good for you. One of them isn't the solution at the expense of the other two.
Seeing how easily the media and the public can get hysterical/manipulated over anything I am frightened as well.

Fairly innocuous example: "Freedom" Fries.
Radical? We've been hearing the AP rail about this stuff for years. Newsweek and Mark Cuban need to read a little news before they claim something is new.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/15a/a_note_on_hypotheticals/
He should publish them as a book.

I loved the last chapter of his start-up guide: "Title: how to hire a CEO for your start-up. Body: Just don't. If there's no one among the founders who can be CEO, leave ASAP."

It would be awesome if he started writing again.
Great Paul Graham Quotes from his FBFund Talk (via Dave Mclure)
With proper overloads you can easily track your memory usage or even which instances are leaked.

So yes, C++ is low-level (it does after all include C), but it has features to abstract away tedious details — this allows higher level programming but being in control of how the abstractions are implemented, as there are many performance trade-offs in choosing (implementation of) abstractions, and that is what makes C++ such nice language for software where performance is important.
The "Right to Life" becomes an increasingly expensive entitlement as medical innovation progresses.

Medicine is the only area that I know of where existence equates to entitlement.
Someone once said that most companies die by commiting sucide, not getting killed by the competition.

Well, Mark Cuban's proposal is a crazy way to commit sucide. Imagine thousand of companies of which employ tons of people in between going under, just like that.
Nope, I mostly "consume" free music nowadays, creative commons and others. If I want the music that plays all day in the radio, I turn on the radio.
It depends what you mean by "science". C.S. generally does not use the scientific method, and so it is not science in the specific sense. However, it fits nicely with broader definitions; see, for example, Wiktionary's current definition #2 of "science":

> A particular discipline or branch of learning, especially one dealing with measurable or systematic principles rather than intuition or natural ability.
You have free time on Christmas? You lucky bastard.

Edit: Just occurred to me that you're probably not MWC...
I personally like 'Little Chubby' (http://www.dongwen.net/info/plan/dw4111088.html) more - there's a cultural signifier in the exploitable/photoshop thing, though I can't ID what it is.

BTW, if you're looking for the next LOLcats, you may enjoy http://memegenerator.net/ which is inexplicably unmonetized.
Nope, I actually try to boycott (it always sounds so silly) the music industry nowadays. I switched to Linux about 2 years ago and also shifted to (mostly) free music. I found that in the genres I am interested in, there is more than enough (actually way too much) genuinely free music available.

Still there are many albums and tracks I would love to financially reward the original creator for (I already contact them or review). Both non-free and free.
> But even though people are using a Browser I think they will still complain that it is reporting something back to a server

Not necessarily. The Office User Experience program has been very successful, and that's exactly what it does. Just open a little windows at the 3rd or 4th startup of the software (not the first) telling the user you'd like to make his experience better blah blah blah and to that end you'd like to collect a bit o' anonymous and non-personally identifying data (you can add a "view more" where you say which bits o' data you collect precisely) and would they be ok with that. And give the user a way to enable/disable it post-facto if they change their mind.
Good for you. Do you support artists who use traditional licensing, but direct-via-the-Internet distribution?
Heh, first to be clear, I agree that very few things are truly permanent. In fact, I said that in my original question. What I said is that I do not think Python will be going away any time soon, and your examples play nicely into that theme.

The Roman Empire lasted for many centuries, Jovial, Forth, and PL/1 all had very long runs. In fact, they are all still used in some limited capacities today.
The best way for me to crack creative blocks or even programming problems is to take a walk (for an hour or more). My mind will start working much differently than if I stared at the screen or even sat at home. Make sure to carry something to take notes though in case you get too wild with thoughts.
I think there should be a disclaimer somewhere in there...

Some problems can't be solved by a web app, or the web app solution will be far worse than the desktop app. There are many such problems, ergo this post applies to a subset of programming problems for which the web is a better model.

Thus, while I enjoyed reading this post, I don't think it says much that we don't already know.
Let's compare his 17 reasons why a consumer wouldn't buy a desktop app to what happens with the iPhone:

X. Start your web session on Google, like everyone does these days.
X. Google your pain point.
X. Click on the search result to the shareware site.
4. Read a little, realize they have software that solves your problem.
X. Mentally evaluate whether the software works on your system.
6. Click on the download button.
7. Wait while it downloads.
X. Close your browser.
X. Try to find the file on your hard disk.
X. Execute the installer.
X. Click through six screens that no one in the history of man has ever read.
X. Execute the program.
X. Get dumped at the main screen.
X. Play around, fall in love.
X. Potentially weeks pass.
X. Find your way back to the shareware site. Check out price.
17. Type in your credit card details. Hit Checkout.

There.

With an iPhone app,

1. Go to iTunes and search the app for that
2. Read a little, discover it's what you want
3. Click purchase
4. Enter AppStore password to confirm

At this point, the app is bought.
Requiring background checks is like requiring any bureaucratic red tape, it annoys the good and does not stop the bad.

But I completely and totally disagree with your implication that more research will only marginal increase life spans, and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.

That's like saying in 1989 that in 2009 all the progress in the computer industry both hardware and software would only give us marginally better VisiCalc.

To me at least it is OBVIOUS more biotech research will radicaly change the world not just slightly improve things.

And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.
Wordpress has definitely hit the complexity ceiling; just look at all the security vulnerabilities and random bugs published for it. ;-)

FaceBook and I think Yahoo both make heavy use of an RPC-based, service-oriented architecture. They use PHP for the frontend but then call out to backends to do any sort of complicated processing. This is basically the only sane way to architect a large system. While I think their choice of PHP to power the front-end is regrettable (it's a major reason why I didn't apply to FaceBook), it's at least defensible.

And I'm also a PHP->Python refugee - I used PHP on a bunch of projects in college, one of which got to the 100k-to-million-user range. I would not take a PHP job unless I was desperate for cash; I hate the language that much.
Is this the kind of application you can only pull off in a phone? Is this a harbinger of a whole new class of social/casual applications, all of which will have tiny price tags ($2? really?) but make metric crap-tons of cash because so many people can run them?

The app is cool. The market dynamics that produced the app are inspiring.
Engineers / hackers wanted for top Bay Area startups
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We seek the following skillsets:
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AS3 / Flash
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These are all full-time, salaried opportunities based in the Bay Area. Please contact us at teknominds@gmail.com for more info about these positions.
Perhaps you may change your mind if you read up on how easily bacteria swap DNA and just how many of them there are and all the places they live and all the things they eat.

Or to put it another way, what happened since bacteria have been around? Humans. Humans started out as single celled creatures like bacteria. And if we can get from that to humans, is it not reasonable to assume that bacteria have had the time to figure out how to multiply as fast as possible?
> Most innovative are the plans to offer unlimited downloads for a flat fee.

RealPlayer has had this for like forever now. And with realplayer you could also load it onto your mp3 device. Not sure if it worked on iPods though, maybe that was why it never took off.
someone should make an iphone app that works/looks like the app store app, but just links to web apps. rank by popularity and have reviews.
You know what, I don't find this superfluous. Maybe a bit early but not by much.
I and two others are working on a third solution to this, one that we think can meet everyone's needs.

News consumers now expect to be able to customize their news. Why sit and read a newspaper, full of items that someone else picked for you, when you can read a news feed that you've tailored specifically to your interests?

News publishers are now looking for ways to get their news directly to the consumer, cutting out the freeloaders along the ways. They're starting to die off and hit serious financial problems, and they're eager for a solution.

News producers are looking for a way to be a well-paid journalist without having to restrict themselves to a single publication. Blogging has become more lucrative for a lot of people than if they had become a columnist, even a syndicated one.

At the same time, news consumers also don't want to be stuck with the stuff that news producers think is important, filtered through the news publishers and their biases.

And finally, advertisers are starting to get uncomfortable. I was among the first to predict the dot-com bust, back when people thought I was crazy; I was among the first to predict the housing bust, back when the realtors I knew all thought I was crazy; I think the advertising market is next. It's already starting to get shaky; I think in the next two years, the bottom is going to fall out of advertising.

The indicators are all there: it's a heavily saturated market, it isn't innovating well, audiences are developing not just software-based filters but mental ones as well. The advantage to running a full-page ad in a magazine was a guaranteed audience, and if you made it compelling enough, and glossy enough, you could get someone to look at it for a moment before they turned to the next page. As print media starts to stumble, if you're an advertiser, now you're looking at having to push smaller ads to lots of different outlets, and none of them can do much to guarantee an audience for you.

And, I think we can assume that subscription models aren't going to scale well. In a way, you can think of the recording industry's model as a subscription-based one -- in that they expect people to pay for access to content on an ongoing basis -- and look at how that's gone for them. The more pressure they put on the consumers, the more clever solutions the consumers come up with to distribute the content for free.

I have an aunt who started a beautiful magazine for the central coast and three different friends who have worked in various parts of the news industry. I'm not just pulling these things out of my ass; I've heard about the industry problems from people who are working in the industry.

But, I think we found the right lever that can balance all of this out again. We've already submitted our app for YCW10, software is currently under heavy development, and we're still polishing some edges on the business model. Can't wait to see what happens.
It has long been the contention of many economists that the incentive structure of the FDA is biased towards killing people through inaction (too strict approval) rather than killing people through too loose of approval standards.

The FDA takes a lot more heat when someone dies from a drug they approve than when 100 people die from not having access to a drug that they drag their feet on.
They're running Wordpress Mu which sometimes "lags" behind the normal Wordpress. For long time after 2.8. came Mu was still 2.7.1, and just recently they have cached up to 2.8.4a.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://blog.pmarca.com
Hacker News and Information Overload
I have been reading HN for almost a year now (always via Google Reader) and lately I'm finding HN increasingly difficult to use because of the high volume of posts. Each day HN has about 100 posts which makes HN quite time consuming to even scan. Actually reading the posts? Forget about it.

Increasingly more often I find myself skipping HN in Google Reader because it has become a time consuming chore to find content I'm interested in. This saddens me because quality wise HN is IMHO the single best aggregator for IT startups.

I'm not sure what to do about this information overload problem but I feel it's time to remove HN from Google Reader because in its current form HN is simply broke.

I'm open to all suggestions about making HN more managable.
Summary: he got the job.
An especially nice bonus is the John Cage quote that closes the post:

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”

I haven't heard it before.
Well, guess I'm screwed out of having a relationship yet again. I flunk those captchas about half the time.
Think modern copyright has problems? Wait till 3d printing becomes widespread...
You've piqued my interest. This field is definitely ripe for some experimentation. Be sure to post when you've got a beta, I'm looking forward to seeing what you've got!
But for the iPhone/iTunes you will have the following downsides, not in any order:

1. Give up control and predictability of your deployment cycles, and hence can't time and plan marketing effort as well.

2. Be in a closed market which does not allow you any alternative to better discovery of (your) apps.

3. Be in a closed market which provides high visibility for top-X apps. i.e. hits-based, and very low visibility for non-hits apps.

4. Due to (2), your pricing strategy is much constrained. And there is downward pressure applied to pricing due to (3).

5. You can't charge for upgrades (vs. desktop apps). You can charge for "content subscriptions", but the audience aren't trained for it and there is also policies on what you can charge for.

6. Because of (5), you have lose a major incentive for doing upgrades, but because of (3), unless you have a very successful initial launch, you may need to proceed with free upgrades anyhow.

7. No way to provide trial software, although many have adopted free software as an alternative.

8. Can't track analytics for iTunes. Of course you can do it for your own website, but after users click your link to open iTunes, you don't know if they convert.
Perpetual loop - two computers remote desktoping to each other
> Also, Linux developers are getting treated better than BSD ones, because Linux has the GPL.

Please prove:

1. that Linux developers "are getting treated better"

2. that it's because of the GPL

I'm afraid I don't believe you.

> This of course is very different than BSD where companies like Microsoft and Apple and Sun routinely take code and use it for their own close sourced projects.

. . . and how Linux developers sometimes do the same thing to BSD code -- except that it's a different kind of "closed", and closed to a different set of people.