skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe Uniloc’s so-called invention is nothing more than a rehash of much older ideas and technologies that already existed.

Firstly, the whole try before you buy idea was popularised by Bob Wallace in 1983 with the release of his shareware software PC-Write, a word processor that you could trial for free and register if you liked it. (see http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v2/2_4_html/...).

This concept was adopted by hundreds of software authors in the 80’s, and quickly evolved to include time limits and activation keys long before Uniloc. Users enjoyed the ability to try a fully functional product before purchase. However, even Wallace acknowledged he got the term shareware, which embodies the whole try before you buy idea, from a computer column that appeared in Infoworld magazine in the 70’s.

Secondly, software protection schemes that relied on hardware to generate security keys were common-place in the mid 80’s. Australian software company Pittwater Distributors developed an application called Cashbook in the early 80’s which used a plug-in hardware dongle (a small hardware key) in order to secure the application. Other companies such as Alpha-Micro and Sun-MicroSystems used serial numbers stored in the physical hardware of the computer.

I personally worked on a software encryption and protection systems in 1984 for game publisher Electronic Arts which relied on keys derived from the physical software media (a tape or disk). This approach was extremely common-place at the time.

In short, software trial mechanisms and protection systems were obvious, common-place technologies and marketing models long before Uniloc.

I agree with the judge.
> a thing that eats resources and poops profits

By that definition large numbers of web 'businesses' are not businesses (yet) because they do not make profits. Their owners might disagree though.

And there are plenty of 'real' businesses out there that make a loss.

It's really not that simple to put out a definition of what really is a business, but I think that something that lives by the grace of an API as a total dependent on some other company does not count as a business in its own right.

Every now and then you come across a rant somewhere from someone that got 'cut off by google' because they depend for 100% of their sales on search engine traffic, and google happened to provide the bigger portion of that.

Suddenly they find out that even though they were profitable last month they did not have an actual business, they forgot to realize they were actually a small extension of the google ecosystem and were only able to make a profit because of that. Anybody that has been in business for a while would realize that is an accident waiting to happen.

Making your company 100% dependent on FB or Twitter is no different.

It's easy money if and when it works, but easy come, easy go.
Ok, that answers my other question. I think the fundamental issue (aside from the amazon issue) is you had bytes living on a single EBS disk that weren't replicated to another disk. For important data, this is probably a bad idea regardless of backup strategy, etc.

Edit: By the way, the point here isn't to say "you guys screwed up" but to underscore that these types of issues aren't 100% Amazon's fault either, both parties had issues and the tone of your post seems to be "EC2 and EBS are not reliable we are switching off of it" when the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
SmartShortcuts: Excel Formula Auditor
(I don't know why I can't reply to the post below, so I'll reply to myself):

Yes, we did try this, and it produced the same problem.
I created this program a few months ago, but never put it up on the net. It's a simple Excel formula auditor. The trick to creating it was figuring out the regex to decipher an Excel formula into individual cell references. Enjoy!
30-Day Jet Set: a second take on the Jet Blue travels
GTD principles and http://lifehacker.com/5321180/turn-gmail-into-your-ultimate-... saved my life.

Plus lots of sensible email filters, of course. (But that's something you gotta figure out for yourself, sadly!)
It's unfortunate to call sites with a preponderance of female users matriarchal.

Majority is not the same as power.
the way I found him

I didn't realize until seeing this that you were the person who found him. Please don't be afraid to seek counselling if you have flashbacks / nightmares / difficulty sleeping / etc -- post-traumatic stress disorder is very commonly experienced by those who find suicide victims.
I just moved the box from Cupertino to Palo Alto. Should be up now.
Hadoop World NYC
Honest question: is "hyperlocal news" such a novel idea that no one tried it in the .com/web 1.0 days? It's not as if local news and an advertising business model are new concepts.

"$100 Billion Potential" ... not sure about that
Identity theft is usually an unsophisticated crime
Scientists discover clues to what makes human muscle age
I wish I could use that line to explain to my company why our business has come to a complete halt.

It's a completely valid and reasonable business decision.

For most companies the risk of amazon downtime is simply not a deciding factor when held against what it would cost to maintain an own datacenter with remotely similar properties.

a high-level tier of storage yet. Why doesn't that make sense?

I guess I didn't get what you mean by "high-level tier storage"? Most companies have at most two tiers: Live and Snapshot-Backup. If you're a bank or fortune XXX with truly multi-tiered storage then yes, your inhouse staff might be able to do it better. But it will probably cost quite a bit more than ec2 and the business case for that is imho rather the exception than the rule.

But we have control over our own hardware, so there's really no comparison.

Well, I think you overestimate your capabilities there (unless you are a fortune 500). Amazon doesn't face downtimes over disk or server failures - and neither would you. The real question is who can debug and resolve complicated failure modes faster (you know, nasty stuff, heisenbugs).

Not meaning to offend you either but my money would be on amazon. That's why I questioned your broad statement of "not a high-level tier storage". How much higher level than backed by a 50.000-servers operation can it get?
I'm not sure it's fair to point to a trend from a sample set of one. The other guy was killed in a car crash; it'd be pretty hard to peg that to being part of a startup.
-2 for stating an insightful technical opinion? Seriously HN?
I, too, had a good friend in Austin back in the 90s who committed suicide unexpectedly. The cause of death was phrased delicately as an "accidental hanging". Let's just say that depression is not the only cause of suicide. Some people are the sort who just have to try everything once.

Not suggesting that's what happened to Dan, but if so it would mean that nobody should feel remorse or guilt about failing to notice he needed help.
I apologize if that's the tone I'm relaying. I guess I'm just frustrated due to the time it's taking to fix it.
Lean Startup Circle - Google Group
Indeed, there are consequences, but the outing isn't binary. You don't have to tell everyone, and the sensitive nature of the whole thing means that if you confide in someone or someones close to you, it's not likely to be the gossip of the town tomorrow.

Depending on the circles and acquaintances you have, often the reaction to it is a lot less... impactful than you'd expect. And, unfortunately, as I've alluded to elsewhere, in some circles it's considered almost cool. (Especially if you have a Livejournal.)
Really? "LOL now its just me pointing out your stupidity LOL"

You can do better than that.
i think the photo should just have dan, or at least point a sign to dan, those people who don't know what he looks like, can get confused
Very sad. I wish the best for his family and friends.
I was in your boat several months ago when I had to learn image processing from scratch to implement a requested feature

"Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB" ended up the most useful, along with some basic Matlab tutorials

here's what I ended up with
http://yaroslavvb.blogspot.com/2009/08/robust-ocr-in-video.h...
"By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself."

Now washed-up pro athletes will never retire
I like your point that it's necessary to figure out the math of replication first and then apply the knowledge in design of alternative computer-based replicators.

In addition to the approaches from top and bottom there is one more (bottom-bottom) approach: turn an existing cellular automation like Conway's Game of Life into an evolving computer-based replicator. As far as I know, all existing examples of cellular automation can only produce replicating systems. They are not evolving because they don't have selection. The moment one of these systems is tweaked so that it would also have a possibility to mutate and endure natural (artificial would be a better word here) selection, there will be evolving life in a computer.
I agree he's not in a good place & I empathise.
But the awkward fact is that his work is lowering in value because of greater transparacy, not because of a decrease in worth.

There are several good UK writers earning decent money via newspaper readers today - for example Alexander McCall Smith serialises fictional accounts of ordinary lives, Robert Fisk explores international injustice, Luke Johnson muses on small businesses and Jeremy Clarkson rails against what annoys him - and many others.

Unfortunately, there are also many people paid to write for newspapers because previously nobody knew which articles customers read - now that's becoming clear, some people will lose out. Sad, but true.
Hacker ships tool to circumvent China's Green Dam filter
What should I do with the 21 USB memory sticks in my desk drawer?
They're giveaways, each different. About 8G total memory. Any ideas?
I'm not much of a GTD person, at least not as far as all the core principles go. I guess I follow them in some way, but I've never read any book or blog post and went and restructured how I'm organized.

What I do:

I personally use Things.app with a dozen or so various "Projects". Each Project in Things is its own areas; a particular class I'm in or something that I'm hacking on.

When something that I need to do for any of these Projects comes up, it goes right into Things. If I'm in class, I'll add it to my iPod and then sync up with my computer later that day. I add an artificial deadline to complete the task, if there isn't a real deadline.

What my roommate does:

My roommmate has another, simpler approach that I like: He just has a giant pad hanging on his door and writes down what he needs to do on there. So he sees it whenever he leaves his room as a reminder.

When he finishes something, it puts a giant X over the item. He doesn't have dates written down, but tries to have everything he has written down finished by the end whatever the time period is when he removed the page.

However, you're not me or my roommate. So, here's some other things to look into: OmniFocus, TheHitList, Anxiety (http://www.anxietyapp.com), TaskPaper (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper) and a bunch of other very nicely done apps whos name escapes me at the moment to look into, if you want a program to help you manage things. And of course, theres always non-electronic things (datebook, moleskine/generic notebook, post-its, etc) that you could use if it helps you work.
Thanks!! Very interesting explanation!

And what is needed for face recognition (face matching, not just detection), in the same terms? Are the same kind of tools enough for this? (from what I read, it seems so, but so far I couldn't completely believe it)
I use a lot of the sites mentioned elsewhere on this page, but other than that, one thing I also do is find pictures with color combinations in them that "jump out" at me and then sample those colors into a palette. This is how to get the most interesting combinations in my experience.
I am sorry. My condolences to his family, his friends, and you. I hope you find strength and solace.
Palm's continued attempts to out-fake Apple are more for publicity then any useful feature for their customers. Never mind a standards organization is not happy with them (They signed a contract to get their USB ID, that they are now violating), but they know that their current solution will continue to break. Also, it seems that each time they change their sync, they break third party solutions.

Write or buy a sync program and give your customers some stability.
Yesterday's news story about Google telling its employee that he cannot be a Microsoft MVP (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/02/google_microsoft_mvp) reminded me of Paul Graham's http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html essay where he talks about "What's so unnatural about working for a big company?"
Choosing what problem to work on is much harder oftentimes than solving it.
The link to your idea graveyard seems broken, but I would be very interested in seeing it.
Yea, it sounds like you guys are pretty much at Amazon's mercy right now, which sucks. I think a better way to look at these types of things is "what could we do to prevent this from happening again" and make a post about EBS gotchas.

Since it sounds like you guys are talking about straight up file storage I'd guess a good option would be to set up an HDFS cluster and be smart about locality/replication to minimize the latency.

Edit: Oh, and one more thing is take a backup that doesn't involve EBS snapshots. Maybe biweekly dump the entire sucker to S3 or something or have it getting pushed there all the time. This is something we've been meaning to do since the snapshotting capabilities of EBS are still a bit too magical for me to sleep well at night. (To be fair though, they've worked great when we've needed them to.)
That's really sad news. If you can, posting any warning signs you can recognize after the fact might help other people identify when one of their co-founders might be at risk.
I second the suggestions for using GTD. It really saved me from dealing with school emails the previous year. Now spam isn't allowed, but before students at my university used the email system for basically everything; like finding rides, announcing club events, and selling things. I have over 4800 emails sitting in my trash can going back from September 2007.

And one-touch handling really helped me deal with the flood of emails. After I started doing it regularly, I was usually able to clear out my inbox whenever I logged in. But it also helped that most of it was junk and I could immediately trash.
What I did (with fewer sticks):

Copied whatever pdf files I found useful as a startup (example incorporation templates, cautionary tales, relevant essays, useful tips etc.) onto them & passed them on to whoever wanted them. Great feedback so far - although that wasn't the goal.
Certainly it's tactical, though I wouldn't say it's all publicity.

I think they're trying to hardball Apple into opening up (or negotiating an agreement for use of) their distribution channel.
Haha, yes, I read this a while back.

People with good intentions have been breaking into Apple's secure buildings in two different millenia now.
What would it take for the people to buy back Congress?
Need adsens bot
Hi guys of the great website I need a software engineer who has experience with c c++ python Perl and auto it auto hot-key java and other programming languages.

I need a FUD fully undetectable adsense click bot software to make 30 impression and 3 clicks for my adsense ads from a victim pc it should not have any virus a tall, no spy ware only a executable small under 250 kb software with front face of a sexy girl so that the victim think it’s a pic and when its open it the sexy girl pic is open and software install and make registry entries also copy itself to hard disk boot sectors and some other arrears, its should be 100% undetectable and does everything in behind using internet explorer to browse the website and search for the string ads by Google and click the ads manually 3 times and make sure that the resultant page will completely open then also click any 2 hyperlink in the advertiser website and wait for the loading when it sure that the 2 pages are loaded it should exit the web site and refresh the page and again repeat the dirty work in the different page of your website because Google accept only 3 ads clicks in one day from one ip it gives you only 3 clicks but the thing is it should completely hide running in background even hide from task manager too and also visit 30 pages from your website so you get 40 impression and 3 clicks that makes your CTR under control....

Some unique features it should have
Can be set up to 10 website
Can be send unlimited victims no spyware code or virus type code in it completely neat and clean
No antivirus catches it
Can be set how many impression you want from one ip or victim pc
Software makes sure that victim is connected to internet by ping predefined 3 sites and testing the opening of 1 page in background then start the main works by opening your website and click on your pages
It should not click instantly rather search via Google by typing your website name or go to any other website and click your link from there so Google cant catch it because it don’t opening straight doing reference work and become more legit.
Also can be set to do Google search function and (It should use the google adsence search bar to search for a predefined list of high paying keyword and then click on a sponsored ads which is included in the 400 high paying keywords that come with it)
Should also have a self destructible mode by self destroy after certain number of days, which can be set by me

if you are at all interested please email me under v o n w e d e c @ g m a i l . c o m (remove the spaces) or through the website
I wish I have had to chance to meet him. I do recognize his username for insightful comments. Tom, I hope to know that people are adding on comments to show that they care. I wanted to add just another one even if it had no quip or insight. My condolences.
Zynga has used several partners for payment processing, but yes, they're not relying on Facebook for this service. Actually, Facebook is making a pile of money off of the Mafia/Farm advertising Zynga does.
It may be true that advertisers believe that, but that statement (advertising to smart people is a waste of time) is not.

Buying based on brand recognition is just one facet of a multitude of ways advertising affects buying habits. There are a lot of advertisers that already have a great product, but just need to get the word out (i.e. many YC startups). From the article, "Laporte said he charges $70 CPMs for ads." Clearly advertising to smart people is in demand.
Science & Technology Policy Fellowship Program
Maybe the author should unfollow some people?
A tragic loss. Dan was smart, dedicated, funny, and always a pleasure to talk to.

Please: If you ever find yourself despairing, reach out to your friends, co-founders, parents, investors, someone. They are much more likely to understand than you may think.
That's an over generalization. And difficult and expensive relative to what? When evaluating the cost of solutions to problems like this, the basic idea is to compare the cost of the solution and the cost of the problem (if realized) with the likelihood of the problem being realized factored in.

It's quite possible Bitbucket will cease to exist if they continue to have problems like this. I'm sure their customers are not happy. It does sound like they have plans to fix this once they get back up and running.
We emailed back and forth so much for awhile last summer on just a variety of things. He was a really bright person with a great perspective on life. This makes me hurt so much.
They get a lot more column space in traditional publications for sure, but they also get a lot of talk from people that the sync keeps not working. Customer satisfaction and stability are better.

Given the current situation, could a person really recommend a Palm pre to a friend who wants and a device with and easy sync to iTunes. You know you will get a call right after Apple updates its software. Plus, if you tell your friend to buy a third party solution (missing sync), the Palm pre version is in danger of breaking because of Palm's current antics.

I think companies need to look at stability in their software / hardware more then ever. This simple, reliably solution is often a better selling point then the massive feature monster that is hard to use or unreliable.
If you have some contact information for me that would be awesome. You can find my contact information on my blog or on HN profile.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting pretending it's a file system - I had been thinking of a place to dump the data for backups, thinking fresh instances + fresh EBS would solve the problem. I think you answered this already in the other post - that you booted a new instance and a new EBS with some backup and the problem remained?? This seems like such a horrendous failure on AWS' part, unless it has something to do with how you are accessing the EBS (too many connections or something). I could understand if a given EBS fails, but if you can restore the data from an independent backup and spin back up with new instances and new EBS this indicates a very concerning systemic problem in EBS!
They do not have to write a whole media software package. They can write a program that does the sync.
I completely agree with your points. Again, I was speaking to people who manage their own SANs, and may be looking to use the Cloud as an additional tier of storage, with the same reliability as a local array. Reliable in the sense that they would never have to worry about Internet latency, network nodes going down, or anything else that they have absolutely no knowledge or control over and could potentially affect the performance/operation of an application, ultimately disabling me from meeting business requirements.

If there are no business requirements to meet, I have no arguments, the Cloud is where I'm at!
Trying this right now. Setting up filters and multiple-inboxes is an interesting exercise in what my email priorities right now. Just watching the number of emails in my inbox go down is worth it!
A noble cause, but the implementation may need more thought.

Outspending the lobbyists is not a sustainable solution.

What would prevent lobbyists from spending more? (requiring an increased "tax", etc...)

How would this "tax" eventually be weaned off?
Three problems leap immediately to mind:

Do you really want to play One Dollar, One Vote?

Can we say "boil the ocean"?

Finally, the other big problem with these approaches is that people tend to think in the back of their head that deep down, everybody agrees with them, and the reason the government doesn't reflect their exact desires is that special interests and other things are getting in the way of how everybody feels. That's wrong. People genuinely want different things. How are you going to prevent this from becoming a more expensive clone of what we've already got? It's all very easy to imagine this great getting together of people that will all pull together, but it's the same people that are in the old system.

You're really better off just getting corruption out of the system. Yes, it's harder than anything else, and may very well prove impossible, but if it is, nothing else is going to work anyhow.
A recovering one.
Why WOTS (Wart-On-The-Side) MapReduce is bad for databases
What impresses me is what is left out of the link title on this and what Leo says in the video.

"We have about $350,000 in expenses and $1.5 in revenue and that's doubling every year. The revenue, not the expenses the costs in this are fairly static." (Emphasis Mine)

That's amazing, when I heard this it made my jaw drop.