skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand the principle of taking investment to enable growth. It is not just a principle. It has mechanics to it.

one option
A common way this works is putting that money to work acquiring more customers. This can mean sales staff. It might mean advertising. It might mean outlets. etc. It works if you have some way of converting money in to customers in a reliable way. Since dropbox appears to be growing virally through referrals, I don't see how this can be the case here. You cannot easily turn cash in to referrals. If it is a case of putting money to work acquiring customers, there is something I don't understand going one.

The other option I can see is funding the free accounts while you wait for premium accounts to open. If you are in a fast growth period, you might have a higher ratio of free/paid customers then what you expect the long term average to be. If you are growing very fast or your profit margins are relatively narrow, you might need some funding. IE, you might dip under profitable temporarily while you wait for the many new customers to convert. This kind of a need is short term & marginal. $7.25m is not marginal.
Sure. With adwords you can know the COC. But not with referrals.
George literally stole the words out of my mouth. $12 to $15 via AdWords, incidentally.

Unhappily for me, I'm capable of saturating all of Google's advertising inventory conveniently available at $15 per customer. (Its sort of like oil: the more you are willing to spend, the more exists in the world. I guess if I were an environmentalist I would describe my current state of affairs as Peak Bingo, but with some sustained effort into AdWords I could probably locate more sources of customers between $15 and $30, or alternatively in different mini-verticals.)
I'm sorry, but this article can't hide the hard reality that medical ethicists are "moving the goalposts" in order to harvest more organs. This is a deadly game.
and the madhouse always blocks the sidewalk because street performers choose that storefront as a primo spot
Opera 10.10: Web Browser and Web Server In One
With version 10.10, Opera (Opera) has taken its biggest step into the unknown so far, marrying the web browser with the web server. It definitely makes it unique in the world of web browsers...
A big part of it is power supply (a tablet ps is extraordinarily hard to design whereas this can run on a large coin cell or AAA battery), and display (blinking LEDs are easier to get a hold of than nice color LCD with good touchpads).
Perhaps not, but you can calculate the chance that a given customer will refer a friend, and factor that into their lifetime value.

Even more interesting, you can see which actions are predictive of referring friends (e.g., leaving a comment on the suggested features list). You can use the same strategy to predict the conversion rate from free to paid.
[people group with copious social media accounts] [negative emotion] [currently popular technology]
Yeah, pronunciation would suck if the only person who knew how to say it correctly was just fing with you.
They are a registered agent. I've seen other Delaware registered agents perform the same fee for $50/year.
Operations magic cure: nightly server restarts
Thanks for sharing your customer acquisition cost. Do you ever buy traffic from anywhere else or are you happy with the volume from AdWords?

BTW, still chuckling at Peak Bingo. Well put.
The article actually claims completely falsely that BMI measures body fat percentage (a much more accurate metric). I wonder if this is actually poor reporting of the fact that body fat % is taken in to account. If you look over the school's football roster most of the players are actually obese. I can't imagine the school has enough blind faith in BMI to put football players in a class on fitness.

rooster: http://www.lulions.com/roster.aspx?path=football&roster=...;
I'm irritated by your negativity. :-) He's admitting his mistakes and he's making progress. These are good things. If you don't like it, you can just ignore it, like the rest of the vast internet. Why take special care to put down this bit of the internet?

In your longer career, I'm sure you've learnt more profound things from your mistakes. Why don't you share those mistakes and what you learnt (or link to them if you already have)? If you don't, you are not as good as the blogger you are criticizing... If your own standards are so high that you don't think you yourself are yet at a 'I should blog about this' level yet, I'm sure you're wrong. Others could learn from you; and you'd learn from understanding and articulating your mistakes.

About his "Too much documentation" point:
In a simple recursive descent parser, I've javadoc-commented each function with its production. Yet even this minimal documentation gets out of date... I think the right solution here is code that reads the productions directly, so it becomes self-documenting - and it stays in sync automatically. :-) (lex/yacc etc etc etc aren't appropriate for this project). I think this kind of approach is the ultimate solution to the documentation problem, but it's a lot of work to create the right tools.

EDIT One purpose of my project is to do that (i.e. read productions), but I wasted a couple of months trying to make it self-hosting (as Alan Kay suggests, and smalltalk and lisp do) before I'd solved the fundamental problems. Better to address the fundamentals one by one, in isolation, instead of trying to make it do everything at once. That's something I learnt.

BTW: No offence meant, just happily challengingly provocatively yours, in solidarity. :-)
Yeah, I've read that. Also "The Man who Came Early" by Poul Anderson and a lot of similar stories.
Never say "VC"
Sounds awesome, but I don't use a cell phone. =( How hard would it be to get it to work with a laptop?
What is preventing a dramatic speedup in Flash performance?
Have you tried dropping by a coworking space?
Book Your Florida Villas In Advance To Avoid Disappointments
If you are planning a holiday in Florida with your family, you must try to make all the arrangements well in advance so that your family and you can have a wonderful time in Florida. Last minute arrangements will always put you into a number of problems. One of the things you must arrange in advance without fail is your Florida holiday villa. If you are travelling to Florida during peak season (Easter holiday, Christmas and Thanks Giving)
The FC is a different issue to the scan and consciousness. No one has suggested he is conscious because of the FC, the article implies that that came after the scans.

Essentially the FC is evil because its pretending to be communication from a loved one and it isn't. He could have some actual capacity for communication and its being ignored because of the FC.

Imagine if he does have the capacity to understand whats happening? Finally they notice he's conscious and then they proceed to ignore him while some bitch makes up pretty stories to tell his family and then writes a book.
logrotate and "apachectl graceful." at 4am. Don't push code without a restart during the day, then you don't have to have someone awake for the restart in the middle of the night.
The challenge of visible twitter at conferences
One thing I'd like to mention is that math and science profs rarely mind being corrected when they're wrong (assuming it's done respectfully). I've seen profs in other disciplines become positively incensed when a student tried to challenge what the professor was saying, but I've never seen a math or science prof do so. Your mileage may vary (and I admit this is really nothing more than anecdotal evidence of anything), but I think it says something about the culture of science vs other disciplines.
An inspiring thought, but was it Starbucks or the wave that did it? (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956570)

I'm not (just) being provocative. I'm not even sure how you'd go about determining what caused the "Starbucks revolution", or even that it's possible to be certain about historical causation (as some history academics have suggested).
I thought I was accusing him of narcissism. Namely that "influential insiders" is synonymous with his friends, or to reduce it to it's basics, himself.
Couldn't agree more ... that is, once I have a good selection of downloadable fonts, and browsers support most desktop-publishing trix (like fonts set along curves ... good luck, CSS! ... and shapes other than rectangles). Because nothing kills a "poster" faster than having to use the same handful of crappy web-standard fonts everyone's seen 2000 times ... and setting them into box upon box upon box.
Or just put an alarm in the device itself. I can see the appeal of a $50 alarm that attaches to my wrist and wakes me up at the right time, but I definitely don't want something monitoring my sleeping pattern and reporting them to somebody's server.
How is it better that a locked-in person is taken advantage of?
Hey, Tim Berners-Lee's original concept comes to life at last.
Today is November 25th. A click on November 25th turns into a purchase by, on average, November 27th. I have to pay Google on December 20th, with a credit card. My next statement date is January 7th, and my payment is due somewhere around January 20th. So, basically, if I get N clicks today, I get $30 two days from now and have to pay $15 two months from now.

This is a long way of saying that, while I'm happy with my volume, I'd be more happy with, oh, enough volume to hit the limits on my credit cards. In fact, I'd avail myself of pretty much every source of credit less odious than juice loans from yakuza or opening an account with CapitalOne.

I have paid for advertising elsewhere. The main issue is that a) Google has a de-facto monopoly on it in no small part due to the fact that b) their competitors s<%= "u" * (10 10) %>ck. Microsoft, for example, takes every bit as much work to get right as AdWords does, but you have to do it within their application, and they have less than one tenth the inventory Google does. To add insult to injury, it is at higher prices. I got a note in the email from them that my credit card had expired and could not bring myself to logging in to give them the updated credit card number, that is how useless they are to me.
Take it one step farther. After a couple of well-publicized bad situations they are likely to find the most desirable users becoming reluctant to check that checkbox. And then the model breaks down, which is not in anyone's interest.

I hope they figure it out before that situation arises. But until I'm confident that they understand that, I won't be comfortable with that service.
Webinar announcing 2009 startup executive compensation survey results
Agreed...reminds me of the story of Kayak. Apparently, when Kayak launched the airlines had no affiliate plans and did not plan on paying Kayak (which they viewed as a threat). Eventually, Kayak started dumping serious numbers of users at their door and the airlines woke up and realized that they would have to pay Kayak. Milo is in an even better position because its more difficult for a competitor to establish relationships with mom and pops stores AND gain a customer base.
I do find the article interesting.

However I tend to agree with this comment - is this 'Hacker News'worthy?

I especially object to the downvote on this post - I think downvoting shouldnt be used unless the post is clearly offensive.

It think this is legitimate comment - HN needs to preserve Freedom of Speech and not become a self-serving myopic site where people are afraid to speak their mind for fear of losing karma brownie points.
Scalable Scraping in Clojure
The plan is that in phase 2 they will introduce a search interface for the convenience of employers.
Introducing Milo
The defining characteristic of this story is not the lying part, but professors who deviate from strict curriculum and think about how best to make their students think. My particular canonical example - Literature and Criticism Seminar (An English course) - after 14 weeks of reading passages of poetry and prose and discussing them in class, our final exam was a wine-tasting exam. An opportunity to take the skills we had learned and apply them to a different domain, and have some fun.

The class was very small (8 people) so it was easy for the professor to do this and not have to worry about evaluation issues.
Johnny Got His Gun is a good book (/movie) but I don't think it's entirely relevant to this story of the fraud of facilitated communication.
They have a paper about the actigraphy technology they use on their website under the "How It Works" link.
Anyone who hasn't restarted their server has:
o Old versions of Firmware (Hard Disks, Mother Boards, BIOS, SCSI Controllers, etc...)
o Old kernels
o In for a surprise when their data center eventually loses power. :-)
Amidio launches Touch DJ - iPhone app with ‘visual mixing’
Flag it. I did. Past that, if members decide to vote this story up, it is clearly news of interest to them.
Roller Door Security
Looking for Roller Door Security - Costello security is a security company. We sell security roller shutters aimed to secure domestic and commercial properties including garages. Our security products include roller shutters fit doors, security gates, collapsible gates, door grilles, windows grilles, roller shutters & security doors
PBS Frontline episode where "FC" is debunked.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3439467496200920717&...

Example:

"
PLEASE HEED MY NEED

I NEED TO HEED

OTHERS

I THIS REASON THINK

THE WORLD

THEY NEED HEED

LIKE WE HEED

BROTHERS" -- Facilitated Communication "by" a 2nd grader

12:13 in the video
We'd prefer that, too, but LinkedIn hasn't responded to our request to use their API.
"Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry'"

Math education could certainly use more fun, and I think most teachers who love the subject and are skilled (if not talented) mathematicians are capable of making it more fun and relevant. BUT most school districts have neither desire nor interest in looking for that sort of teacher ... and certainly not in paying them more. (So they get what they'll pay for.)

One reason for that situation: the majority of students won't respond to great teaching either... for a long list of reasons, one of which is that it doesn't start early enough (e.g. before sex). Another reason is that in most schools, education is not the first priority.

Who will develop this 'cool' curriculum? Teachers haven't got time. It's up to cool programmers to do that. So far, they haven't shown much interest. So the kids get left-overs.
I would argue you should only start a venture because you think it might succeed, not because you think failing at it will provide you with priceless and invaluable experience.

Well yeah. If you don't think you'll succeed then you're doing it wrong.

With all due respect to the author, I don't think you'll tease anything about the value of different kinds of experience out of a bunch of random stats. You can get great experience at a job, or as a founder, or even not working at all. The value you get is serendipitous—you won't know it until the opportunity strikes, and then you need to seize the opportunity.

Every minute you spend sitting around running numbers to try to maximize the value of your experience is one less minute invested in yourself.
What computer science can teach economics
My understanding is that the flash bytecode interpreter's performance is reasonable. Unfortunately the actionscript compiler does no code optimization. But this quake demo uses alchemy, which is LLVM based and offers significant performance gains.

The biggest bottleneck is rendering. When displaying flash content, your cpu has to render every pixel of every frame. The flash player vector capabilities are pretty extensive. Supporting image rotations, resizes and alpha transparency can require multiple cpu passes.

The obvious answer to this problem is GPU rendering. Adobe has made some efforts in this direction, but it doesn't look like it will happen any time soon. There are many issues that make this transition difficult. Backwards compatibility, cross platform compatibility, and reliability are a few that come to mind.
"They must be something that society will punish you for saying...in any degree from social disapproval..."

Social disapproval? What a ridiculously low bar. We might be better off trying to come up with a short-list of plausible claims that don't cause a significant number of people, somewhere in one's society, to disapprove of anyone making them.
Houben has since proven able to answer yes-or-no questions with slight movements of his foot. It’s a tremendous accomplishment, and raises the chilling possibility that, as estimated by Coma Science Group leader Steven Laureys in a Monday New York Times story, as many as four in 10 people considered utterly comatose may be misdiagnosed. But the legitimacy of interviews given by Houben and his facilitator to Der Spiegel, and shown on video by the BBC, may not be as certain.

He can answer questions independently with his foot. So why don't they ask him if he's answering for himself when he types?

He could also learn Morse code...
I've also observed numerous problems in multiple places I've worked with runtime configuration being different than the actual stored configuration across various systems, and of course when a system goes down and comes back up, it goes with the actual stored configuration. If your infrastructure goes down and comes up all at once (think power outage), you're in for a very bad week.
We already have jobs.stackoverflow.com, joels job board, 37 signals job board.

Can't people come up with new ways to generate revenue instead of mindlessly copying others?
Giftedness Is Statistically Associated with Particular MBTI Results
In Snails and Snakes, Features to Delight Darwin
Yes and no. There are underlying truths to programming that you can and should carry with you from environment to environment. Some are very difficult to put into words, but some are not. One example that is now considered trivial and well-known is "shun global variables"... but then, just today I was fighting with code that's hard to work with because it uses global variables. This stuff is always news to somebody....

Another more recent example that may pass into that peculiar state of "everybody agrees its common sense but by golly I sure see an awful lot of violations of it every week" is being suspicious of mutable state. I'm not quite 100% sold on the "never use mutable state" idea (getting closer every month, though...), but I sure am 100% sold on being suspicious of it. Doesn't matter what your environment is, that carries over. A lot of stuff does.
Win7 x64, whatever version of Flash is the current release.

It might have a lower frame rate due to running in Chrome, I don't know. I leave Flash disabled in other browsers due to frequent crashing.
The authors assertion that 'web APIs' can make desktop apps a replacement for web apps doesn't make any sense. Without the web app their are no APIs, Tweetie may be a great app but it can't function without Twitter.

The power of web apps is in the interoperability and reach. The fact that I can access an app with a desktop interface, or through a browser, or on my phone, or on another browser is what makes web apps 'win'.

A Desktop app using 'web apis' is just an extension of a successful web app, but that's fine, it's all about building the right on-ramp for your users. Whatever gets them using the app is the right answer. But whether you're accessing it through a browser or native interface the web has won, there is no refuting that.
I think the author's conflation of empiricism and science isn't quite right. Instead, I would say that science is the combination of empiricism and reason. While ultimately the process of science needs to agree with (and predict) data, the harder part is usually using reasoning to build a model of what's going on.
42fps on timedemo demo1 in FF 3.5.5 / Win7 Home Premium on a laptop i7 720. Felt perfectly smooth though.
See Table 5. Discussion is interesting too.
Under The Hood: Google News & Ranking Stories
Grats guys! Just out of curiosity, how did you come up with $7,252,763? Everyone knows its good luck to end with a 4. You could be $1 away from an IPO there.
In another 13 years there'll be a version written in Ruby that feels the same too.
Please stop jinxing them.
Good post, Rolf. Keep up the good work.

So, this past year, I've tried 3 different business ideas.
Project 1: This was a 4 Hour Work Week idea. I built a contact database for every hospital in the US, I put up for sale on a yahoo store and I pointed Adsense at it. I had done Adsense testing check for demand. It failed. I thought the from my testing I should have been getting 2 to 3 sales at $150 per sale each month while spending $100 a month on Adsense. I didn't get a single sale in 3 months. So, I lost a grand for the whole project. No big deal. I learned a lot.

Project 2: Social cute site. It was a reddit clone for cute pics (cats, dogs, etc...). I shut it down after 3 months, because I couldn't take looking at cute kittens that much. But, I took that code base and what I learned from it to start http://newsley.com .

What I've learned in each one has been invaluable. The argument of whether or not we should try to build a startup to succeed or fail is rather moot, I think. No one builds a startup to fail. But, after having failed at 2 business ideas, I still think it was very worth while. Ultimately whether my success rate ends up being %25 or %29 or even %5. It doesn't really matter to me, because I'm going to keep working at this until I do succeed, and I'm enjoying the process.
What he's saying is that perhaps Dropbox can buy a user for $1 (via adsense, whatever) and make $2 off them. In that case, it makes sense to take all the money you can and plow it into customer acquisition.

At some point the law of big numbers becomes a limiting factor, but probably not at any point that would make it unwise to take $7m.
I don't see how you can ever get a properly controlled test for this. The power of luck aside, it seems inevitable that the population of people who never get around to a second venture because of the success of a first venture is fundamentally different from the population of second-time founders. I'd bet that all things equal the previous experience does help, but there is just no way of controlling for the differing ability of the two populations.
Multiple ventures does not erase the luck factor. The serial entrepreneur might get better, but luck always plays a role.

I got "lucky" with my first startup and didn't too great with the next two. So, I'm headed the wrong way. On the other hand, it might indicate that once you succeed, you might try to stretch out with a more outlandish idea because you're overconfident, or not quite so desperate as the first time.
Talk about nostalgia. I remember being 10 or 11 and playing Quake. I thought it was just absolutely amazing. I had also just gotten into the internet. The curiosity I had back then still exists, which is a good thing. The same feeling that we're just getting started still exists, even though things are so much more advanced.
Well I can't speak for all domain registrar DNS services, but I've had nothing but great experiences with the free DNS service at Namecheap. It's a nice interface, very configurable, and the updates are fast.
Nightly restarts: Implies a Windows server platform. And/or bad software.
Allowing yourself to sleep wake up naturally is probably the best option, but you could easily oversleep that way. Waking up when you are at one of your arousal periods is going to be the next best thing.
Americans’ View of the World « LewRockwell.com Blog
Any statement that argues that X is stupid and arrogant, where X has a sizable population or market is flamebait, and that applies to PPK as well as "Michael Galpin".
I simply hate people who think reinventing the wheel is bad. If we hadn't reinvented the wheel then the wheel would still be a horse.
jerf: try reading. I was replying to ionfish.