skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now you are talking specifics.

-Twitter doesn't have a business model. OK. So twitter has a better chance of going out of business, maybe, then a company with a business model. Are you saying there is no chance twitter will be around in 5 years time? No? then what is the point of that objection. Who care what Twitter's business model is. You only care about it inasmuch as it affects the stability of Twitter as a platform.

-Vidly has free competitors Are you applying this as a general rule? Anyone in a type of business where there are free competitors is disqualified?

Sure there are obstacles. The chances of any little company of getting massive are tiny almost by definition. But you haven't put forward anything disqualifying, which is what you are implying.
HP can now sue practically everybody else in the market sector for infringing on what must be the mother lode of networking patents.
I don't know how accurately their wealth is measured, but hiding a billion is not that easy so I will assume it's reasonably close. Anyway, ((15.7 / 15.3) ^ (1/15)) - 1 = 0.17% per year difference in wealth generation and spending per year for 5 people.

I expect they are all playing around with side investments of one sort or another, but they have had plenty of dividends to work with and little to show for it. It's not that I think the government would do all that much better, rather taxing society more to help maintain such wealth has zero benefit from what I can see.
It's a twist, but if we say that an iPod cannot emphasize text, then we can instruct the system to ignore <em> tags. Because the semantics of <em> are clearly defined, a judgment call is available to us to feel confident that we can ignore the tag completely under the circumstances. So we utilize the tag itself still by instructing the system to swallow it.
Outlook tip: Stop fighting PST fires
Keyboard LG GD900 Crystal made with transparent glass
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Describe a social network with user-friendly privacy controls that doesn't fall under your definition of "walled garden".
"Simple" as a discussion-starter? Great. "Simple" as a universal prescription? Maybe not.

Chipotle thrives on its simple offering; Cheesecake Factory thrives on its deep menu.

Larry Ellison fought against the "best of breed" concept to promote a unified Oracle Applications. A Cheesecake Factory style package.

The argument for "complex" is that once you've earned the trust of a customer, you can provide the spectrum of products/services that customer needs. You can be counted on to pick up all dropped balls.

(But maybe there is a completely pointless complexity - proliferation of marginal features - which we can simply avoid.)

The only reliable guide is complete focus on the customer's needs.
2009 Aston Martin DBS | New Aston Martin Sports Cars - Yahoo Autos
It's not news, or hacking, but something that's as important to the success of a startup - the startup life. It's an acknowledgment, or maybe an admission that doing this is hard, that there are definite commonalities among those who pull it off, that it's easier to go it with a community around you.

Running a startup, creating a startup, living a startup is freakin hard. I've done it multiple times before my trip through TechStars, and man, now that I've experienced (and continue to experience it, as not a day goes by that I don't talk to at least one other founder, a mentor, or an advisor) this way, I'm sold and happy I'll never have to go it alone again.

He sees it too. I hope for your benefit that if you're doing this, if you're trying to really start something (not just read YC) that you seek out others who are doing the same. It could mean the difference between your success or failure.
Yes, I'm starting an internet company called "Yahoo", which shouldn't cause any confusion with that other company, "Yahoo!", widely known as "Yahoo Bang". Right, give me a break. :)
Dopamine Makes Us Addicted To Seeking Information
Am I the only one annoyed by all the "retweets, reposts, reblogs" stuff on the bottom? It's twice the length of the original text!

I'm here to read your content, not marvel at your e-dick-size.
> Who breaks stuff accidentally by misspelling things?

Wasn't there just another thread about '=' vs. '==' last week?
I agree with this; though, I do wonder how my Physics teacher knows the latitudes of various major cities...
Can you suggest any way of gaining a broader perspective? Both companies mentioned in the article are B2C and highly visible. They may have "visual punch" outweighing their "economic punch".

How can we get a broader, more realistic picture of what's really happening in the economy?
They strike me as fairly poor, while not catastrophically so. The fact that such messages are typical doesn't make them not-poor.

They're not, though, something constrained to Rails and I'm not sure a Rails-specific rebuttal would help all that much - the difficulty is fundamental when the language and abstractions of expression are different from and essentially unknown to the system that's actually doing the runtime error checking. Another commenter spoke of the infamous JSP stack traces. Googling 'clojure error messages' brought up a thread on this as an error message:

(ns foo.bar.baz
(use clojure.contrib.core :only seqable?))

#<CompilerException java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Don't know how to create ISeq from: Boolean (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0)>
As far as access rights: as an engineer I don't want hoops to jump through; not because I'm going to steal your tech tomorrow, but because simple terms make debugging easier and keep the lawyers away (frankly).

Ideally, start with an existing license that your client's lawyers have probably seen already, so that there are no delays in approving it. Also, make sure it has the terms you want; making changes is also a pain for engineering, since it could mean waiting weeks or months for legal to approve new license terms. Such delays could break your client and kill your contract.

As for cost; keep in mind I haven't tried to run a software business, but I've worked with lots of tech, so the following is just my gut feeling, what seems reasonable to me:

I would start by calculating the maximum possible setup cost, and the likely ongoing development cost, under the assumption that your business exists to serve one product for one client (even if it doesn't). This tells you your high end; it's what your client would probably pay to develop their own stuff in-house. They are coming to you because they want to pay much less than this amount.

Then, factor in the rest of your business. Think about expansion. Will you always develop one-shot, highly-specific tools for clients, or will there be a few generic things that give you steady income from lots of sources? If other products will share in repeating costs (e.g. air conditioning, salaries, replacement servers), estimate what percentage will fall to this one project. Consider this your absolute minimum cost, because it still assumes reasonable success in products you may not have developed yet.

Given these two extremes, pick a number. :)
By the time AIM is irrelevant, AIM and its AOL subscriber-only predecessor will have been important for at least two decades. That is not a short period of time, and its demise could have easily been avoided with a tiny bit of foresight, not that I would've done any better.

Facebook won't be around forever, but it's hard to see how it would be dethroned within the next decade.
Now if only this type of visualization was used for something _useful_...
Let's not forget that Google owns "G", so I guess Go! will just have to change it's name to O!
That is interesting. Warren has a bet out against someone that a portfolio of hedge funds will not outperform the total market returns after accounting for taxes, management fees, etc.

as diversity approaches 100%, performance approaches market returns.

The question is, how long can extreme wealth remain extreme wealth? Considering the wealth gap is increasing, I would suggest forever unless there is a "market correction" like socialism or something.
Tom Cruise Back As Lestat For Interview With A Vampire Sequel
Scoopler is hiring: Join the real-time revolution (YC S08)
huh!? O_o
As another data point, a few of my coworkers claim Netbeans is a reasonably good Rails IDE.
Rails does this many places already. It seems he probably just stumbled into one of the few cases where the flexibility is needed and therefore the parameters aren't easily checkable.
While I don't agree, I'll admit that you may be right, but this is impossible to know.

But why make all the same mistakes? Why have to figure it all out on your own? Why reinvent every wheel that's already been built and can't get any more round? Why wouldn't you want a group of folks who will always give you the most critical feedback, but who will also sell you to potential customers, investors, and partners like no one else could? Trust me, your friends who haven't done this, can't help you nearly as much as your friends who are doing it right now. Sure, you can still be successful, and many have without organized seed programs around them, but why not take every advantage you can get?
I can't believe that it's been a year and Apple still has the weird ass review process!
Another option would be to have a hidden karma impact on sorting. Keeping a hidden score based on the log(karma) of the up voters might dilute the impact of people until they have been around for a while and help maintain the current culture without ignoring new opinions.
One with a link that says "Click here to download all your data."
well, at least it's not a recursive acronym.
I think it's cool that they have a tutorial for converting BlogEngine.NET over to Mono on Linux. It's a good selling point - I've messed around with BlogEngine.NET code and it it not trivial.
It may be tough to convince programmers interested in Mono (a free and open-source package) to pay a few hundred for the tool, but I hope it is a success.
Why start - or stop - at money?

Not sure what you're getting at, but going all the way back to Plato's Republic, there have been proposals to engineer society with children. More recently,

Children's Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders. In the heyday of Children's Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. In Kibbutz Artzi parents were explicitly forbidden to put their children to bed at night. As children got older, parents could go for days on end without seeing their offspring, other than through chance encounters somewhere in the grounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

It doesn't work, of course. Nature will out.
You assume he works in the office...
I'm not sure this is evolutionarily stable against an invasion of new users multiple times the size of the original population.
While I think you're right in the general case, Twitter has its retardedly strong brand which makes them a very important exception.
If that was the case, you would expect there to be a few hundred-billionaires out there.
He's right, rails doesn't improve speling.
How about not letting accounts newer than, say, six months vote on comments? Perhaps you could also do something to ensure that those accounts are active (e.g. they click on links from time to time). It's a lot less sexy than eigenvector centrality, but I think it would have the intended effect. Most trolls don't have the patience to wait that long.
I don't see independence from SQL as a win. Rather than submitting a query in a declarative language and letting the database run a query planner, you are acting as a human query planner, generating row access strategies, and pasting that generated code directly into your higher-level source.
I think that is the point of the article. The errors are confusing to a newbie - 1 day old
You have reversed the sense of olaf's point.
This is one of the more thoughtful evaluations I've seen. All too often, a language evaluator mistakes their misunderstanding of the design for a design flaw. Evaluating a new language is often the tricky mental task of understanding a different way of thinking. This reviewer gets it!
Give Me A Dollar and I'll Give You 90 Cents Back
Really, you can't tell? To me the difference in quality is really far apart. Just look at the first paragraph - which one makes you want to read more?

"Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.
Guerrero drove in two Angels runners. He went 2-4 at the plate."

versus

"Torii Hunter emerged from the visitors' clubhouse at Fenway Park to spray champagne over the fans and family gathered there. Erick Aybar did him one better, handing over bottles of bubbly to those who came from California to see the Los Angeles Angels go for the sweep. History gave no reason to hope for such a celebration."
Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.

I think you are onto something here.
Facebook status admitted as alibi evidence
I personally dont find the app very well made. Interesting outcome for the developer nonetheless.
Reflections in Adobe Flex
That's dismissive of his very valid points. Buffet is one of the most selfless rich guys of all time. Also one of the most infamously direct and honest. He's not saying that as part of some sort of Orwellian consipiracy to quell the masses. He's saying that because its true.

He points out regularly injustices such as the fact that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, thanks to the ridiculous capital gains laws in this country. He points out regularly that people like him should have to pay higher taxes, including the estate tax. He lives less lavishly than most people who have .1% of his wealth.

He's already given most of his fortune (the largest single donation ever) to charity and will give the rest when he goes. He's a real-life Robinhood.
My question is whether society is better served by

1) the destruction of excess money
2) preservation of meritocracy

and furthermore, whether interests of children of wealthy parents are better served through

1) leaving them oodles money
2) leaving them a society where
a) things are affordable because there's less money chasing goods
b) meritocracy reigns
c) not to peg one's identity to money alone

In the small, accumulation of money is a fine thing. In the large, you have corporations whom - in the name of profit - bribe, cajole governments and government agencies, that result in sending people to war, poisoning your food, and endorsing medicines that do not work. Setting a limit to the accumulation of a mere number means that humans can turn their attention towards other activities that are beneficial to society as a whole.
Every tragedy benefits someone. Right now the makers of Purell and other instant hand sanitizers are having banner years due to swine flu. That isn't an argument in favor of epidemics. Oil companies made a fortune due to increased demand when people started flying less after 9/11. That isn't an argument in favor of terrorism.
Post it again! We need 1,000 posts about this in the next 5 days so post it again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.

This could be gamed, or lead to runaway karma effects within a small, incestuous cabal.

If I were pg, I would handle it similarly to amichail's suggestion, but instead of voting power going to submitters of articles that I like, I would have it go to voters of articles that I like.

In other words, I would restate the problem as, "I can't be awake 24 hours to moderate every single submission, so instead, I'll assign invisible voting power based on how reliably a given voter's running and recent preferences match what I would want to see on the front page."

I would add some random jitter to the algorithm, to mildly penalize people whose votes are too similar to my own.

The bonus to consistently good submitters would not be better voting privileges, but better submitting privileges (better initial placement and/or slower decay).

And I would silently give voters and submitters whose patterns negatively correlated with my preferences corresponding penalties, and use their poor taste as valuable data on what not to put on the front page.
That's Tumblr's equivalent of commenting. I find that it's much more minimal than normal comments, while still letting people respond to the author.

It's not as good, mind you, as showing no response to your work at all and letting it exist in and of itself, but people still use blogs as conversation, and I think reblogging's a much subtler approach to the problem.
There are myriad ways of measuring success, both entrepreneurially and otherwise. Your method is one approach, but there are others. Many of the entrepreneurs of former decades and centuries became successful not by asking their entrepreneur buddies for their opinions over beers, but by being persistent and shrewd.

Where you see comfort in others' advice, I see the dangers of falling into the same patterns as them. This is a widespread problem right now in several fields, not just entrepreneurship: there seems to be a cultural movement towards reading others' opinions and following others' advice in the name of not reinventing the wheel, versus solving the problem on your own.

The trouble with this is that there are lots of problems which can be solved through more than one unique approach, so in doing it the same way as everyone else, you're losing out on the opportunity to differentiate.
:) - a number of people who saw the page didn't take note of it, thinking 'cyoa' was the name of the site, or something.
The basic premise of the article is fairly obvious: to learn something teach it or do it. The best way by far to learn something is to teach it. When you have to explain to an audience the way something works you have a pretty good mental understanding yourself.

Interestingly, according to some studies, people remember 70% of the things that they say in speeches they give (at conferences, classes, conventions, etc.)
I know Facebook API and could make that without too much effort. Do you think the demand is there? What format would users want such data in?
Experiment HN: Idea day
The world is full of problems that need solving. They're all around us. I'd say we run into at least 5 frustrations every day, whether those are frustrations we experience first hand or ones we overhear others complaining about, but we probably don't think much of them. So let's train our eyes/ears to recognize them!

So how about for the next day, November 12th, we try and pick up on 3 potential problems/complaints/frustrations we see ourselves and/or others facing. At 8PM Pacific time, I'll post another thread where we can all share our findings and possible solutions.

I figured it'd be a good way to get into the habit of recognizing problems, because really, no problem is too small.

What do you think?

EDIT: Some are saying that there are problems that just can't be solved ( a terribly attitude! ) like traffic lights, etc. Maybe then keep your problems to ones that can be solved within reason, like with a capable team.
True this. When I joined, I quickly found out that the people on the leaderboard tended to be the people whose names I remembered throughout threads.

I'd also place a bet that not too many people with lots of karma are flippant spammers; even the ones I think can be jerks sometimes (myself totally included) at least are putting in an effort.
The idea is even more interesting if you apply it to areas that professional journalists might not already cover, like little league or even high school games.

In fact, if I ran a fantasy baseball league I'd be beating down their door. Every league would love to have their own private newspaper adding color to each game and extolling the wisdom of the team managers.
If he'd like to work on a much more open app platform (where market update time is less than 24 hours) Facebook's Android app needs some love.
He points out regularly injustices such as the fact that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, thanks to the ridiculous capital gains laws in this country.

Corporate tax rates plus capital gains tax rates exceed normal income tax rates. The only way you can claim that he pays less in taxes on selling stock is if you assume that the company's profits -- the sum of which, discounted to the present, is the value of the stock -- somehow don't affect the value of the stock.

If we cut capital gains taxes to zero and added an equivalent amount to corporate profits (say, a 40% annual tax rate instead of 35%), the government would make an equivalent amount of money from the same economic activity, and Buffett's theoretical tax rate would go down. Similarly, if corporate income taxes were zero and his capital gains were taxed at 40%, he'd pay much more than his secretary, but the government would collect the same amount.

If the strength of his argument is independent of the magnitude of the problem he's arguing against, there is a flaw there.

Buffett is an admirable guy. But the line about his secretary is a rhetorical flourish, nothing more.
Maybe. I found routing errors to be massively useless until I spent way too much time finding out just what was expected to make things work.

Rails seems to favor the approach of first reading many docs and tutorials, then working your way through a series of examples, and always doing things Just So. It's not so friendly if you decide to wing it and try things because your gut says it might just work.

The funny thing is, one of the things I like about Ruby is that it works just the opposite; it's quite easy to jump in and guess at what to before reading much documentation. You'll often be right, or you'll (mostly) figure it out pretty fast.
What matters here isn't "Are Apple and Facebook soulless and oppressive corporations?" (I'd argue no, lots of people would argue yes; either way it's not important.) What matters is how each is treating its developers. Facebook is open to developers and their publications; Apple isn't.
Wow, I can't believe your office is 3 miles from my home, and 1/4 mile from my friend's business that I often visit. Small world.
Indentation is logic. Repeating logic is one of the greatest evils one can commit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself

Re: parsing, read each line, if the indent is greater than the current indentlevel, add line to a new block, else, add line to existing block.

Tabs were considered harmful before Python, they're still considered harmful now.

You could add braces to Python quite easily, I think this has already been done in jest a few times...
Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis
the environmental variables make it convenient to cross compile, or so I've heard
Interestingly enough, many of the folks I met remarked that they had 1. mentors who helped them get their first, second, nth company off the ground deal with problems, and just plain succeed, and 2. had sought out others doing the same thing. Oh, and these are folks who are the entrepreneurs of the last couple of decades. Guess what, they are the investors and mentors of today. Regarding the feedback of other startup folks, this isn't about going it your own way, far from it, it's about the things that are similar that are a waste of your most value resource - time, the contact you don't have and the intros that can be made, the things you haven't seen that can sink you, but aren't what make your business your business. Why waste time on that crap?
Hey babycakes, consider adding "via @venturehacks" when you post our tweets.

I'm assuming you got it from us. Because we linked to it. And no one else on the web links to things.