skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is good to start with the truth: currently making money selling desktop software is really hard and, in general, doesn't payoff the amount of work you need to be there. We have a lot of examples of companies doing herculian work beyond Sublime Text and Atom which don't have enough revenue. Part of this is related to the web and mobile trends but also the desktop software maturity. In Microsoft Windows you can find a lot of tools but very few assume that they need to pay for them, they can be very popular (look at the most downloaded desktop software) but the profits/users has a very low ratio. In general, the successful ones rely on a mature sales force or they are unicorns. I think it is a good start studying the current desktop ecosystem to see how hard it is.

Notwithstanding that, I recommend to think about a services/product business model more than in selling "millions of units" only. Although a little old now, I recommend Michael Cusumano's work on this [1]. My small company uses (complex) desktop and server software products as a marketing tool for services and support.

Now the question is what is the minimum profit you will accept to make. Is it $ 100k / year, $ 200k or $ 1mm ? From that picture you can deconstruct how many units of your app/service/support you need to sell to be there. As a thumb rule I will say that selling few units for a higher price will be much easier than selling a lot of units for a few dollars. If you want to try, I would recommend start selling to SMB companies who have a budget for this.

Regarding finding ideas, talk to people who have real software problems in their companies.

[1] http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/197_Cusumano_ProdSr...
It's fine to criticize substantively, but this is the kind of acerbic dismissal we need less of on HN. You've cherry-picked one phrase, interpreted it uncharitably, and acted like it's the whole of the article when it's not. A fair summary might be: it's a huge market, existing solutions suck, and things that this startup is doing differently include gift selection, personalization, and more sophisticated logistics via software.

I found the article interesting because it reminded me of the "good business that no one wants to be in" category that Peter Thiel talks about. I'd never have expected corporate gift packages to be that kind of market... which is kind of the point, these things are not obvious until they are.
> Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls

This would be worse than 4chan, that has moderation as well (although more laxed than reddit or HN), why would anyone go there instead of reddit?
Now imagine this protocol used to command and control a botnet.
Merely including <iostream> results in std::cout/std::cerr/std::cin being constructed on startup even if they're never used (as in this case). This doesn't take very long, but when the actual work being tested takes under a millisecond...
What every founder will tell you - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w [Louis Armstrong - Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen (1962)]

...and it's true.
The water and electric grids in my city have near 100% uptake, especially in the denser parts of the city.

While in most cases I would agree with the uptake analysis (eg, if we were talking about coffee shops), I'm not sure that it applies to the particular case of talking about rolling out a government monopoly in place of a natural monopoly using city bonds to cover the upfront cost (and time to smother people not using the city network).

Further, I was actually just interested in plausibility: I didn't account for growth rates, the attractiveness of a city wide network, competition between ISPs, etc. That the answer was ~100 and not ~10 or ~1,000 is interesting to me, because it means that even if the technology isn't there, that the details work out a lot closer than I was expecting -- expensive, but not impossible.

tl;dr: Deciding if we should roll out government infrastructure isn't quite the same analysis as seeing if a business works, and I only did the latter as a proxy for plausibility.
I’ve heard it explained as a remnant of World War II. During the Nazi German occupation of Denmark, the Danish flag was forbidden. It became a resistance hobby to sneak in the simple red-white-red colors into anything and everything, and of course when the war and occupation ended people could celebrate easily and powerfully simply by having the previously-forbidden Danish flag draped over absolutely everything, and this is the behavior which remains – the Danish flag has, by now, become a simple traditional part of many things, and there no good reason to remove it, so it continues to be present at every conceivable occasion.

Or so I have been told – I am not a Dane.
The most compelling argument I've seen is that you don't explicitly `break` at the final run of a loop, either. An explicit `break` or `return` in the middle of a body can be thought as "abnormal" control flow. Otherwise, normal control flow will take place. As for a function, it would be returning the last expression.
Well, and again, it doesn't implement the entire web platform, but Servo is already showing significant speed gains, even without AIO. It's really more useful for servers than clients.

It's important to remember that IO is truly a library concern in Rust. 1.0 means the language is stable, but there's still tons of libraries to build on top of that language. Holding back the language itself for a library that, while important, is only needed for certain applications wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.
Ah, C layout orthodoxy at its finest: shove as much crap separated only by operators without whitespace on one line as you can. (not exactly what you said, but I'm extrapolating uncharitably)

I guess you could lampoon me as COBOL orthdoxy, liking spaces between symbols, but Lisp was good at using whitespace, rather than commas, between symbols as well.
That is $100k or $25K per year assuming a 4 year vesting schedule. Even assuming that you did not take a pay cut relative to working for a bigger or more established company, it seems a little low reward for the risk involved. Particularly considering that $250M exits have low odds to begin with.
I didn't even know there were "hoisting" rules - I put all my variables on one var line at the top of the file, then assign them later. Well, except for lately, function variables in JSDoc work better when the function-var is immediately assigned :-(
That's true but January 11 is in that weird grey area...
I don't think it's bad. It's just not adapted to the kind of community it is managing.

I think the kind of "open" management recently seen with startups like buffer would really make things better if applied at reddit.
But this runs in direct opposition to the title-matching rejection algorithm that is in place. (If posters preserve an article title properly, their attempts to repost are intercepted and redirected to the predecessor.)

If it is intended that duplicates be allowed, then perhaps the discussion threads for such duplicates should be merged together, rather than getting such posters in the habit of not honoring original titles.
I think the author is saying that there is something beyond the message. The quoted scientist use this analogy too.

> The team used a mutant form of S. epidermidis, in which they deleted the genetic mechanism that encodes its quorum sensing system.

This suggests that there is an message chemical and some other obscuring chemical and that the mosquito sensors can be independently tuned to this obscuring chemical.
No. https://web.archive.org/web/20150423220114/https://bjpelc.wo...
> It's excluding compiler time, and it's only outputting a single number. As such, there's nothing preventing any of the optimizing compilers from optimizing the entire program to essentially print("pi<num> = <num>"). Ditto, time to load interpreters is included, whereas time to load compilers is excluded.

Who cares?

This covers real world cases. If an optimizing compiler could actually figure out to optimize those programs to a printf() call, that would be an impressive level of optimization and I'd want to know about it (note that no optimizing compiler achieved that level of optimization). Likewise, I don't know about you, but when I run interpreted code, I often start by loading an interpreter.

If you want to profile a different use case, do it, but that doesn't mean profiling these cases is "completely and totally meaningless".
Surprisingly, there is a "Hacker News for Hacker News for (x)", because a few people have done just that.

http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com/
Most people do... the average number of apps per user is close to 100
On my Mac it opens directly in preview, after I clicked the link in Safari. I have not done anything for that functionality, so I'm pleased.
It's not at all non-obvious if you learn the language. It's also not non-obvious if you learn any of the myriad other languages with the same semantics (including popular web languages like Ruby and CoffeeScript).
If you look at the backlash of the community on the subreddits coming back online, you can see how it was a mistake to involve the immature community of reddit into that moderator/admin tension.
Yep. It feels like people want to use Erlang's distribution mechanism for communication between machines which have no pre-existing relationship, which is not what it's for. It's what regular sockets are for—and Erlang is great at everything to do with regular sockets.

I do wonder if you could get an interesting boost in fault-tolerance by writing an Erlang application to run distributed between, say, several EC2 instances in the same Placement Group. That gets you the analogous "backplane guarantee" in virtualized network-space, AFAIK.
And if you don't be sure to have at least a good book on discrete mathematics handy.
Not every reader has the flag option available.

Also, there should be a distinction between "I'm flagging because this content does not belong or is spam" versus "I'm flagging because this is the 8th copy of it in the 50 most recent postings."
Objects of consciousness
> 40 year old movie

spanish inquisition was flying circus, not holy grail

but my theory is that the vcr, and now the internet, has a lot to do with it, just like you'd expect references to books to increase with the printing press and general increase of literacy
Because, (unlike what reading HN could lead you to believe), not everyone uses VI or Vim – some, even many, prefer Emacs.
Interesting assertion from the article:

Ohanian, who has tight bond with the community, ...

I haven't paid much attention to Reddit until this fiasco, but from what I read there yesterday and today, "tight bond" must mean "detested" or "reviled". Or maybe that's just from a vocal 1%, the other 99% don't care or don't think that way?
Could you give some examples of the closed-source apps you're looking to compete against? So much work in most businesses is done in Office (incl. Outlook and Access, maybe Project), but obviously decent FOSS alternatives already exist for those apps.
You're saying that when the last drama didn't affect the site at all. Wait for two days and see how nobody will talk about this...
Is it MIT or BSD? Thats what I mean ant by profiteering, it doesn't fit with the model of distributed, p2p, anonymous, decentralized and secure architecture it seems to be speaking about while at the same time promoting so business.

My reason is not that profiteering is bad, but in this particular case, I just don't see how you can compromise anonymity with copyright and a business around it.

For this to be truly anonymous, I just don't see how a business can be attached but cause at the end of the day we are still coupled to the original writers.

What's I'd love to see is something like ethereum but without a business or copyright attached to it.

I hope this makes sense, to truly build a decentralized and anonymous networ, can you try to also build a profitable business on top of it? Maybe I've misunderstood.

I'd love to start working with it, however, I realize how his is still have he early day. The future is a completely decentralized, anonymous p2p network that has no overwhelming force from a single agent to censor or corrupt information.

Imagine if facebook, Google, all of it could run on our phones, tsblets, desktop. You can't shut it down. By the n I assume we will have some sort of mesh networking where we don't even need to go through an isp, just a cluster of trusted and self healing network nodes.
In general: Pick a specific topic or set of related topics. Limit the audience to the literate. No pictures. No video.

I don't think writers will go b-tard on you.
The founder/engineer social class division is one of the reasons why I expect the Silicon Valley ecosystem to implode and will be disappointed if it doesn't.

First, there are two types of founders: Made Founders and Hustling (it's a nicer word than "Marginal") Founders. Made Founders (often called "serial entrepreneurs") already have it worked out that, unless they rip off their VCs, they'll get a soft landing. I won't say that they don't work, but they have enough investor-rank friends that they don't really worry about anything, because if their companies tank, they'll be lined up with VP-level positions where they'll probably make twice the salary that they had as founders (typically, founders don't make more than $175k). They probably put in 30-60 hours per week, but they work on the fun stuff and have double-digit equity so... yeah. They worry more about managing up into the investor ranks than running a company, for obvious reasons. (If you build a successful company but lose control and most of your reward, you lost. If you fail but the investors like you and make you a Partner at their VC firm, you won.) It ain't a bad gig, although it's a bit boring because, well, you're a corporate executive. Being a Made Founder is based on pre-existing social class; either something you're born with, or something you luck into. Merit's not a part of it. Hustling Founders are the ones who don't have investor-level people pulling strings all the time and who really, really, really fucking have to pound the pavement-- and hope that a Made Founder doesn't decide to compete in their space, because then they're up against someone who's going to have 50 times the capital.

In the 1960s, all founders were of the Hustling variety because the pedigreed people were still in banking, during the Bateman days when it wasn't a real job (3-martini lunch), and in a time when the pedigreed asswipes still thought the West Coast unprestigious.

What the OP is describing is a cultural shift as pedigreed people with generational social connections jump into the game as Made Founders. They've never been employees or subordinates of any kind (except to VCs) so they don't have the empathy that it takes to run a company, and they tend to be low on competence spectrum (since the mainstream business elite puts its successes in hedge funds and private equity to manage billion-dollar deals, and throws its failures into VC and VC-funded tech).

What hoodwinks a lot of people is that the Made Founders are great at presenting the appearance of Hustling Founders, and thereby they justify getting 100 times the equity as the employees they manage. In reality, most of the Hustling Founders (a middle-class crew) have been driven out and are unfundable due to a lack of social connections, and also because the amount of stress involved in dealing with VCs and abusive investor-level personalities is such a mental-health crusher that even normal people become paralytically neurotic after about 5 years in that game.
Here's an update that includes Go and Haskell:

https://bjpelc.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/yet-another-language...
God I hate the term "semicolon insertion". It's a line oriented language, like shell or BASIC. You only need semicolons when you put multiple statements on a line (like a minifier does). Alas, like Ruby, JS does not require, or allow, an explicit line continuation, such as a backslash or ampersand.

I hate the asshole at Netscape who decided the browser scripting language had to be modeled after Java (C/C++, in other words), especially when it was clearly meant to be a functional programming language that worked with lists and property lists.

Man, I'm feeling "troll-ish" tonight. Not that I'm lying, just being blunt.
AddressSanitizer is great. It's been around for a long time now though, the only thing that's new is that it now has Xcode integration. (And Apple marketing apparently thought that the name was better with a space in the middle, like they think that "LLVM Compiler" is a better name than clang.)
You never know about private funding rounds. It's certainly possible that Ohanian and other early founders/investors received some "fuck you money" from the latest investors.

It might not be a lifechanging amount. But having an extra $1,000,000 in the bank might be enough to buy some popcorn that tastes good?
Some would disagree:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...

My opinion is that both viewpoints have merit, and it is very dangerous to embrace one and dismiss the other.
Yeah, you should have negotiated for more if you tech lead on the most important product. 4 basis points for that is just wrong. It should have been 40 basis points.
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Why is it to this day, we have Electricity and Water Pipes, as well as telephone line ( Who uses that? ) all built and layout into our new home but no one consider a CAT6/7 cable or even fiber cable? These Cable should all go to the bottom of the building where different ISP can easily be connected and provide Internet connection. Solving the last mile problem as well as bring in more competition driving prices down.
As a Scandinavian that has lived in the UK for a bit more than a year, I think racism might be lower here in exchange for a rampant classism and bad public services when compared to average EU places like France, Belgium or Spain.
Fair enough on the security settings. That's something I have to squint at in many system, as I don't deal with it much, other than to grant full access to an app level account. A cheat sheet on common use cases would help.
This is fascinating, I didn't realize that compilers even could do so much with one simple primitive!
This needed to be said and needs to be heard.
My initial thoughts as well. It's hard to think about going back to manual looping. Seemed like a step backwards even.

This article changed my opinion quite a bit and highlights the power of having a real macro system:
http://julialang.org/blog/2013/09/fast-numeric/

I've begun to leverage the points made in the article quite a bit. Alas, now I get stuck when writing numpy based code because it constrains my ability to express a solution in the best suited idiom.
If insurance is required in any case, there's no choice left for the app user to make, so why should it be left to them? That said, I very much doubt that the required insurance covers comercial transportation of passengers (which uber certainly is), so that explains why they need “additional” insurance covering that.
Arab prince to give away 32B$ to charity
> has now become something akin to Hollywood: a world of stars amid extras and hopefuls.

wow, nailed it.
There's no title-matching algorithm. The duplicate detector only considers URLs.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I get your point. It's definitely intended that reposts be allowed if (and only if) a story hasn't had attention in about a year. You have to change the URL slightly to make the repost work, and that's by design. Merging threads doesn't solve the problem we're talking about here, where the previous post didn't get much attention, since you'd be merging into a dead thread. The problem merging solves is the opposite one, when you have multiple active threads on the same story, and we do merge threads when we see that.

Better dupe detection is on our list to work on, but it's a harder problem than it sounds and I don't know when we'll get to it.
Your comment is very strange to me.

So, in your opinion, a point that would otherwise be valid becomes not valid if the author does not cite the best example for it?
And how does this exactly prevent double spends?
1. I would ignore most of the attacks. Don't "you'll get over it" or don't even try to moderate any of the posts/comments.

2. Most of the mods are realizing their mistakes right now, if you can see the subs who are coming back online they are just getting insulted and downvoted over and over for giving up on the black out

3. Use that + give them better tools to moderate their subs = you have the mods on your side

4. They need a martyr story, Ellen Pao is getting harassed all over the place, people trying to doxx her, people photoshoping her pictures over and over, people making bad jokes about her (racists, sexist, etc...). They need to make it look like this is a bad thing, like she's suffering, like the reaction of these people who are a minority of reddit are causing to the people administrating reddit. I think that would be good if it came from some mods of subreddits or from some rumors in random subreddits.

Seriously, I see Ellen Pao as the new Britney Spears. In a few years people will love her (if she hasn't killed herself from all of this harassment).

5.? They could fire Ellen Pao and hire someone from the community. But I doubt this would change something in the long run.

6.? They could make the whole management process of reddit more "open" like buffer does.

Eventually, things like that are doomed to happen. A company needs to fire people, needs to take decision that their users will not like so they can monetize their website, etc... It's also good to notice that things like that often goes away pretty quickly, the last drama lasted a day, I don't think this one will last more than a day or two either... Most people didn't even realize. This is an interesting topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bz9pm/how_...
Well, I do not presume to know your mind, like you seem to presume to know the mind of the author of the article.

However, your comment does seem to dismiss the the article as a list of personal grievances of the author, rather than illustrations of common cultural issues. To me, the article obviously consisted of considerably more than that.

Unsurprisingly, privilege makes it easy to dismiss concerns of the groups that are "other", that do not reflect our personal day to day experiences.

For me, the value of articles like this is in providing a window into the issues that most of us do not have to deal with normally, and making me review my own preconceptions to see if I have unwittingly treated people differently than I should like.
Why? Ignorance. I'm used to running postmaster from years past (when not starting from an /etc script). Postmaster is now just called postgres, and it works for a disposable test instance setup.

I'll look into that, though, as it sounds like the right thing vs the sleep hack.
It's a good post, but I think the success of ycombinator speaks against your concept of "made founders" as a common thing.

I will agree though, they definitely exist and they definitely suck. (Born into it? No, I think they worked their ass off into ivy league university, but now feel they can coast .. which is understandable, it's hell getting into Ivy league universities. To imagine that you now have to sacrifice the next phase of your life probably too much to bear for most)
If I knew about something that was really a billion-dollar opportunity, you know what I wouldn't do? Write a TechCrunch article about it so everyone could take a piece of my pie. This isn't a billion-dollar opportunity for anyone but suckers.

Can we just downvote this clickbait and move on?
Can you give any examples of experiences that felt strange when you returned? Just curious what types of things you noticed...