skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The network externalities are not nil for a bug tracker, but most of the value you get out of it is the value you get out of the product itself. "Externalities" refers to value that's not included in the transaction: buying the software, in other words.

For instance, a cheap land line style phone is basically completely worthless without a phone network to hook it up to - the value is entirely in the network. You'll get some small benefits out of your bug tracker having more users, but they don't seem all that large when compared with more network-centric products like eBay or facebook.
What is wrong with that 404 page?

It's a 404. Form follows function. I prefer it to a prettified version, honestly.
What I've Learned About Cloud Computing
Its automatically ridiculous to juxtapose a 1hp 28mph airpowered vehicle with a 128hp 90mph Camry for instance.
How about an air-bike? An air-jitney?
Its not engineering they need, its marketing sense.
Consumer getting left out; FTC blog disclosure guidelines way too vague
World of Warcraft begins selling digital goods
Raising Money Using Customer Development
Exactly. I won't put words into anyone's mouth, but I believe the value of cofounders is for the investor - given many startups to fund, a good cofounder group will make faster progress, have fewer roadblocks, play cheerleader to one another, reduce the incidence of depression and despair. Its about return on investment. Why fund a unicycle when you can choose from many functional bicycles?
Make sure you get your updates!
The unit has to know where it is because in different locations AT&T has different wireless licenses. For example, in most parts of North and South Carolina, AT&T owns the PCS B license and so the unit knows its location and knows that it can operate on those frequencies without interfering with another company's spectrum. If the unit was using the wireless spectrum of another company, that company could rightfully sue AT&T for causing interference with their equipment.

And wireless spectrum wasn't sold nationally in this country so AT&T (or Verizon or whomever) has different licenses in different locations and the unit needs to know what it can use. Heck, the AT&T device needs to know what spectrum AT&T has offered for 3G usage in an area so as not to interfere with the GSM/EDGE signals.

The reason you can't use it in another country isn't some plot to make it so you can't use domestic minutes overseas. It's because it would be illegal for AT&T to allow you to operate a wireless transmitter on another company's wireless spectrum.

T-Mobile is a different case because they aren't using micro-cells. They're providing handsets that do WiFi and traditional wireless. As such, they can allow you to set up your WiFi device anywhere because WiFi spectrum isn't licensed.

Sprint similarly has a device (the Airave) which is a micro-cell and uses a GPS unit to determine where you are. The trade-off is that you can only install a micro-cell where a company is licensed to operate, but it works with lots of phones -or- you go with WiFi and can put it anywhere, but you need a special WiFi-enabled phone to use it.
Rule 2: never go into business with your spouse!
I am sorry if this is completely obvious and I am missing something. But I just do not understand, not one little bit.

Why did you fly to America to get $5000? It is not a large amount of money. I am surprised it covered your air fares.

So why? I do not feel the need at all. You did. I would like to here why. Did they really say something in the interview that justified all that time and expense?

update: I have no idea whatsoever why this is being downvoted. There is no way I would fly to the US to collect a pathetic $5k. I'd genuinely like to know why people think it is a profitable thing to do so. Thanks.
Ask HN: Should co-founders share equity 50/50?
There is a lot of talk on here about co-founders, but one thing I've been curious about is the best way to share equity and make decisions.

In my experience doing a 50/50 share is a bad idea for the same reason you wouldn't have two generals on the battle field or co-presidents of the U.S.:
1. Every decision has to now go through 2 people so you're slower (instead of replying 'yes' to an email you have to say 'i'll chat with my co-founder and get back to you')
2. If you ever can't agree on something, the company is at a stand still. As General Patton said, "I would rather have a good plan today than a perfect plan two weeks from now."

Is this true in your experience, and if so then how should co-founders share equity and decisions?

Thanks!
I scroll and I scroll and still not at the bottom!

Apparently I use Google a scary amount :D
The actual CPUs are pretty impressive, and operate at 3-4.5GHz range. The system will have up to ~80 of these, so it would effectively blow away a Mac Pro. Let's be honest though, at the prices IBM fetches for these (millions for the top end), you could build a VERY healthy Hadoop cluster.

The reason why these are kept around is that the custom software that runs on them often implements very complex business rules that are otherwise undocumented (the code is the documentation). If you're talking about a financial institution, the mainframe IS the business.

As far as reliability, these things are rock-solid and proven, but mainstream distributed systems design has pretty recently surpassed the mainframe model IMHO. It's relatively simple (compared to just a few years ago) to implement clustered data processing using MapReduce, replicate the data across multiple datacenters, and not care about individual node failure.
From what I know, Ryan (icculus) Gordon is still working on it. But that might be my memory mixing that up with another game that took ages and I was not remotely interested in.
At first I thought this was a bad idea, given that Sourceforge is such a well-established and recognized brand. I see now it's not Sourceforge that is being renamed, but the parent company, Sourceforge, Inc.
This is where I was touched.

"Everyone talks about balance. There is no balance. Balance is perfect. There is nothing perfect in work/life balance. It is about compromise, choices and, often, regret. Here is the irony of ambition: The same ambition that drives people to be successful won’t let them enjoy being successful. They pay a terrible price for their success, as do their families, but they are never successful enough. "
That is new to me, where does it say that?
Agreed. But the amount of value you get out of the product vs network is subjective to the user and to the product. It depends on how independent you are as a product user, and how easy the product itself is to use.

Take Microsoft Windows for example. Regardless of its own intrinsic value, I think that a lot of people would chose it over, say, a Mac (or Linux) purely based on their own social network, due to the ease of which they might be able to get help and share experiences. The opposite is also probably true (if everyone you know uses a Mac, you'd be more inclined to use one yourself).

For those that like what some other OS has to offer, and they aren't afraid of figuring things out for themselves, then they would go with that regardless of any network effect, because they're more interested in the value of the product itself.
Interesting that one of the "non-scam" examples described in this article is Free Credit Reports, a company that has run afoul of the FTC for hitting people with a $14.95 a month charge after their so-called free report. Doesn't sound like a scam at all...
Even with good health insurance they still might have to cover 20%, which I'm sure is still a lot with something like this.
The techcrunch article links to this brief article, that I find both chilling and enraging.

http://code.google.com/p/doctype/wiki/ArticleFlashSecurityPo...

System.security.loadPolicyFile() is an ActionScript function in a Flash application that loads any URL, of any MIME type, and attempts to read the security policy in the HTTP response. If an attacker could upload and store an image, audio, RSS feed, or other file on a server that can later be retrieved, then he or she could place the Flash security policy in that file. For example, the following RSS feed is accepted as an open security policy...

Even worse, the file does not even have to be XML. The GIF image below places the Flash security policy in a GIF comment and is also accepted as an open security policy...

In fact, an attacker can embed the security policy within the data of any valid image, audio or other data file. This is easier to do so with uncompressed file formats, like BMP image files, but is possible in virtually any file format. The only limitations are that each byte before the </cross-domain-policy> tag must:

+ Be non-zero,
+ Have no unclosed XML tags (no stray <, 0x3c), and
+ Be 7-bit ASCII (bytes 0x01 to 0x7F)

[YC admins: My trailing "emphasis" asterisk was remaining visible until I placed (this) further text following it.]
80 processors? Big potential for writing concurrent apps. Do mainframe developers exploit that?
Wow it is really sobering to see how much information one company has. Now imagine this spread across all the businesses you interact with on a daily basis.
Yay for playing The Ball without owning UT3!
Or just be sure to tell me at the end of the interview which number you'd like us to call that night.
Digest: "We sell various sorts of ads, on websites, that people use."
Ask HN: Allow voting for posts as suggested founder reading?
I recently talked to a Web start-up founder who had not heard of HN, PG, YC, MVP, etc. I'm sending him some links to pages I've bookmarked at Del.icio.us over the past few years. I also started to add tags to my bookmarks to indicate which pages I thought would be good for a start-up founder to read (most of my law clients are in that category).

But it seems to me that a community-based suggested-reading page would be better.

[EDITED FROM HERE DOWN TO RESPOND TO A COMMENT:]

HN seems like the logical place to host this kind of thing, because a reasonable selection of useful reading is already posted here.

The basic idea would be to let HN members tag articles as suggested reading in two steps:

1. First, let members do del.icio.us-style tagging of articles with one or more topics, e.g., marketing, sales, Ruby, etc.,;

2. Then, for each topic tag for an article, any registered member can cast an up-vote or down-vote (the way they do now for the article as a whole) to indicate that the article is suggested reading for a start-up founder on that topic.

Thoughts?
All the info is on their Licensing page: http://udk.com/licensing.html

As long as you're not using a UDK app to generate revenue, it's free.

And don't worry about the bit saying "[you'll need to buy a commercial license to] distribute an application you've created using UDK", it was cleared up by Epic shortly after: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=21329409#itemanchor_2132...
They lost me as a customer after 2 consecutive miserable flights. Midwest Express has yet to show me anything less then a fantastic experience. Though I've recently been gaining confidence with Air Tran, its the in flight wifi.
This has been asked and answered frequently on HN.

Some summaries:

1) There is no standard answer. 1% might be perfectly appropriate in this scenario, and 80% might be perfectly appropriate. You should probably be looking more at ratios of His Stock:Your Stock vs. finite percentage numbers (which are basically data in a vacuum).

2) You will generally find that the "approacher" will maintain a higher stock percentage than the "approachee". Not always, but frequently. In this scenario (and the limited information provided) it appears that the "idea" guy has (at least in theory) many "tech guys" to choose from. You, based on the post here, have a single "idea guy" in front of you to partner with. Hopefully the rest of the supply and demand concept is obvious enough here that I don't have to type it all out.

3) These scenarios somewhat follow the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" principle. If you don't know what you're worth, or how to handle this, you are probably relatively inexperienced in this particular realm of business. The experience in this case is most likely worth 10x long-term what any delta in equity between what he offers and what you think you deserve would be equal to. Track-record and experience is a very valuable thing long-term. Opportunities to get involved in a founder-type role are somewhat rare and also valuable. This is also assuming that he has at least some experience or talent pool to draw from that leads you to believe that partnering with him offers you some probably of success above and beyond any random guy with a cocktail napkin.

4) EVERYTHING is ALWAYS renegotiable. Sometimes the best way to get to where you want to be is to get on-board, prove your value, and then renegotiate at the next funding round.
Slovene inventor powers on at age of 90
Yeah no kidding. I believe the UE3 engine costs somewhere around $350k to license. In the past, I don't think you could get non-commercial access to mess around with. That said, this is pretty huge for indie developers.

I grew up playing UT99, UT2k*... UT3 was a tragedy on the PC but nevertheless, Unreal Tournament was the reason I got into my first startup. We licensed our tech to Quake Live but yeah... there's a reason we died, Oracle is too expensive for game developers given all the other costs associated to development.
When I flew from the UK to the US with my cat (in cargo) I think the other passengers got annoyed with the flight attendant coming up frequently to reassure me that my cat was (probably) fine. It was a really bumpy flight - worst i've been on. Full marks to Virgin Atlantic for the pet cargo service. They really go above and beyond for long haul pet travel: http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/passengerinformation/tr...

And when said kitty needed to come from Boston to Toronto, it was in AA in the cabin. They were nice but largely indifferent about it. I'm guess they see plenty of pets every day. The normally surly TSA metal detector guys were really patient with me though.

Yay for globe trotting kitty!
A Miniature Miscellany
I pledged $25. I love these types of things... this reminds me of Corey Haines' "journeyman programmer" donation drive (http://pledgie.com/campaigns/5917), as well as the Ruby Mendicant initiative (http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal). The community has such power!
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it. It frustrates me on a daily basis, especially without having a relational database for some critical information.
This is the reason why Windows PCs are pricier than Macs.

Even if the sentiment of this article has some truth to it; you end up looking silly with typos like that.
Note that those stats are for display ads, not for search ads. Display ads would be the crap you see flashing in your face when you go to a site just to read something. Search ads are a different animal as they're better targeted.
This is probably a good idea. Thinkgeek has been floating the parent company for a very long time now, effectively funding all of the other efforts.
The real story here about Apple is at the end of the article (that is if you noticed to click through to page 2 of it).

"Still, it seems that many people are going to keep loving Apple no matter what, and getting hurt when the company acts to make money rather than loving them back. And, as it turns out, those rumors about 10.6.2 not working on Atom chips might not be true after all! Fall in love all over again."

Apple's marketing trust isn't a bunch of marketers, rather a bunch of psychologists. No one has ventured to write in-depth about this yet, maybe I'll get around to it one day. Apple accomplished two things with this latest action and I'll quickly explain both below.

This is only ONE example of Apple marketing vs. psychology and I will keep it relevant to the article:
- Steve Jobs has said before that Apple doesn't seek to create markets or chase them.
Point and case regarding netbooks: Steve Jobs said on the quarterly earnings call a little over a year ago that "not a lot of them are getting sold" (which is debatable) BUT then admitted that Apple is going to "wait and see" how the category evolves and "we've got some pretty interesting ideas if it does evolve."

So, on that note, the psychology behind the OSX update that could have eliminated the popular atom chip support in netbooks, potentially locking out a bunch of netbook owners from updating the OS or face inoperable computers...

It has been a year and netbooks (which is now just a buzzword since they are really a recycle of selling smaller screen laptops that fell out of favor and are now made more lightweight and with hardware that isn't overkill for the general population) are popping up like crazy appear to be selling like hotcakes.

Apple knows that OSX is being installed on these and I'm sure keep an eye on all the posts about how to do it and watch the comments on those posts and other forums. I'm sure just how Google monitors search term popularity, Apple does the same for things they are watching.

So, one year later, how do you test the temperature of the market for OSX on netbooks? Indirectly threaten the entire market by potentially not supporting the processors that run them and watch the reaction.

The second thing accomplished by this was what Apple seems to do that I have not seen any other company pull off so frequently: create controversy and then have people fall in love with you again. I don't need to list all the examples from just the last two years alone, I know you know them. Not only could they test and measure the reaction of possibly shutting netbook users out, but then come back to be the hero and give back what was almost taken away. Reaction goes from angry (without merit in my opinion) to "oh thank God" "whew" "thank you Apple".

Hopefully I'm making sense up there. Just wanted to bring the topic up and hear your thoughts as well.
"Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." suggests that something is amiss.

I'm not a big fan of overboard, fancy graphics (just look at my sites), but just a little bit of looking nice goes a long way.
New Moblin release for netbooks - Linux Critic
Help Jason Scott (textfiles.com guy) go on sabbatical
Who would've thought that VA Linux Systems would get out of the server business to become an ad company?
Personal peeve:
wherefore != where
definition: http://bit.ly/391yjH
When you consider that not only do these systems run a lot of batch processing daily, they also have user interfaces through things like CICS, which users are allowed to login and initiate jobs. Most of the time it has it's own form of concurrency in which it will lock certain datasets for processing and release them when it's done. Of course, it's still possible to get deadlocks and other issues because of this.
Hardly any software company would be willing to share such stats. I like the marketplace idea tho.
I didn't point it out, but I too was wondering if that line was a typo.

I have always argued that Macs (at least from when I heavily compared them to PCs from '02 to '06) were in fact cheaper or comparable when you did a side-by-side comparison including software. And, yes, it was only cheaper if that software was relevant to the purchaser.

Anyway...
Use data mining techniques to detect fraud
The way I see it, HN doesn't need any sort of canon. I think it would only hurt new ideas.

We shouldn't be shoveling the latest by PG or 37 Signals (not that all their stuff isn't wonderful). We should be looking for the next great topic, business philosophy or piece of advice.
The article isn't confused - he's using the SQL in the same way you are (in your first paragraph, anyway) - he's referring to RDBMS's. His point is that that many of the performance benefits of a KV/documentstore based db can be achieved in an RDBMS without throwing away time-tested ideas like ACID guarantees.

I was confused by your post, however. You initially state that NoSQL is about the system/approach to storing data (and not the query language) but then proceed to contrast querying APIs.
What's DHT?
Wow I just found out my uni friend's dad is on sourceforge's Board of Directors. Would've never known!
9,73,241,561,1081,1849,_?_
I think the author meant "option+clicking", which causes the scrollbar to jump to the precise location of the click (rather than a simple page-up/page-down, which is what it usually does on click).
(admittedly, a silly thing to have as a peeve :)
Upgrade your career
I was shocked by this news and think it is a bold move by Intuit. How often do you see the company purchased become the brand and not just absorbed into the existing brand?

Well played.
I have waffling between waiting for this and getting a run of the mill signal booster/amplifier (which should work in my circumstance). I think I'm going for the latter because it doesn't require phones to be manually added and works regardless of carrier. I want visiting phones to work too without hassle.
While I agree with his overall point, his last statement is confusing:

"It's okay to make an ad that isn't easy to measure. If it works, that's enough."

How do you know it works if it's not easy to measure? This is the thinking that leads to Leo Burnett charging obscene amounts for "3 points of equity".

If you do not demand that your marketing team (or agency) give you metrics and demonstrate success/failure, then you have no way to know if your campaigns are successful. So what kind of metric can you use to measure the success of an ad that isn't primarily for clicking on?
I'm not familiar with his other papers, but is there an assertion in that very long article that you take issue with? I'm no scholar in the field, but my on the ground experience clicks with what he is saying.

The impenetrability of chinese character-based written languages is a huge difficulty even for native speakers. As just one example, Japan supposedly has a 99% literacy rate. This is only possible by redefining literacy to mean "capable of reading at a childish level". A staggering number of the japanese people I encounter readily admit that they cannot read the newspaper, as just one example. For another, I received a notice at work a few weeks ago and asked a co-worker who had received an identical notice what it was about.

He looked at it very intently for about 15 seconds, pronounced it to be about retirement funding or some such, and then the co-worker who actually handed the paper out explained that it was a government notice on some completely unrelated topic. We're talking about a piece of paper containing fewer words than your entire comment, and he completely misread even the topic of it. This is a university-educated Japanese person who is indeed "literate".
I once overslept and missed my NYC -> Australia flight on a dirt cheap lowest-of-the-low economy Qantas ticket. Called them up, fearing the worst, and think I was going to have to pay crazy sums to fly out the next day by buying a last minute ticket.

Because I was calling at a weird hour, my call got routed to Qantas in Australia. Guy answers, I tell him in a panic about my situation and he's like "Yeah, no worries mate. Changed your ticket to tomorrow. How's New York? OMG! Have you seen the Statue of Liberty?!" Ha!
Apologies if I wasn't clear enough - I'm talking about tagging articles that have already been submitted to HN, so that future readers (start-up founders or wannabes) will have an easier time finding the information that HN users have tagged as being helpful. I edited the OP to be more explicit about that.
Our Amazon Advertising Experiment
"Sites that pdf your history"? Can you say more about this, I'm not sure what you mean. Sites that export your browser history to a PDF document?
Microsoft should come out with a similar service. I could use it as my homepage. Then I would have a blank page when I open up my browser.
Friedisms
8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all Ad Clicks
From Rejection to Acquisition in One Year: One Startup's Story