bk

It would be cool if people's self-hosted public repos could be crawled and indexed to create a repo search engine.

Here's my thinking:

1. Google knows how to scale computers, and perhaps engineering teams, but not people in general.

2. "You make a hundred times what my bank does off me" - Exactly, and hiring pesky call center employees, who would have to be good on top of it, would ruin Google's profit/stock price.

We're all desperate, depending on practically the only ad game in town, so we bark but have no bite. A higher-end (aka non-cpc|cpm) revenue model is the only way out, I'm afraid.

Just out of curiosity: Are you dissolving the corporation (and YC involvement) or are you continuing with YC involvement for a future venture?

It's sad that YC needs to stay on good terms with TC so that its startups continue to get exposure through TC's channel. Any other submission or comment with a similarly dumb title would be flagged or downvoted.

On the substance: perhaps Scoble's unfollow script is making the rounds. ;)

IM/Skype-like clients with an added status message logger (side note: ideally OSS client and protocol, p2p (with async message buffer), encrypted).

Every time a user changes his status message it gets logged as if it were a tweet. It's more like facebook than twitter, though, in the sense that only mutual "friendships" would be possible (could be made configurable: "allow anyone to see my status updates, but not my online status, and only allow mutual friends to chat/talk to me").

It would be a pretty good signal to noise ratio for most people.

    Lamson Advertising Marketing Email Synergy
    Lamson AMES
    Lamson AMES High Independence Technology
    Lamson AMES HIT
    L AMES HIT
    LAME SHIT

/joke-explainer :)

Back then people didn't take issue with IE shipping with windows, but as Windows. MS tried its typical bullying tactics to squeeze out competitors. IE became so tightly integrated into Windows that it a) couldn't be removed without wrecking the OS, and b) enjoyed low-level (performance enhancing) OS access that was refused to competing browser/app makers.

So it was not silly to "squabble" over it. MS wanted to dominate the web as a proprietary platform and extension of Windows. This was a real threat back then.

You could be using "IE 5.8 service pack 14" right now, writing jscript (not javascript), MSHTML, and active-x plugins, enjoying horrific security issues exacerbated by a browser monoculture, and being treated as a second class citizen if you use any other browser than said IE 5.8, since you'd have to reverse engineer all the interfaces and get sued in the process to make active-x etc. work in competing browsers.

I was just flying by HN on a busy day. Syntax parsing: success. Semantic parsing: error. Looks like I failed the Turing test... I'm a bot. Damn. ;)

Good find, but a man can change his mind. Also, given the existing patent system, you're practically forced to seek patents to avoid getting trolled.

Two thoughts:

1. It shows that tests are only as good as the thinking that goes into them, i.e., it's up the programmer to think through all the use cases, possibility for breakage, and use the appropriate tools to try a wide range of inputs.

2. This lack of responsiveness to the vulnerability reminds me of the complaints Zed (Shaw) made about the Rails Core back when he announced he was leaving the Ruby community.

Preemptive disclaimer: These are not supposed to be snide remarks in any way, they're just two quick associations of a tired brain. So please no flames.

The left sidebar is a classic example of keyword stuffing. If you click on a lot of these tags, you get the same two blog posts for a lot of them.

These guys are at least clueless, probably unprofessional, perhaps even desperate or unethical. No thanks.

Fellow HNers: Don't gobble up cheap marketing (link-)bait. This story has too many upvotes.

I think an "Affero LGPL" would be good to get companies to contribute back library enhancements without "infecting" and thus having to give up their whole IP.

Regarding data portability, I've become a fan of json - it's easy to understand and process, and it forces interfaces to be simple (compared to xml, e.g.).

Thanks for replying.

I realize my initial request was a bit unclear. I'm not so much interested in the specific rules/legislation, but rather in a (canonical) implementation of a rules engine of that type. I get the basic functionality, but how does it come together elegantly?

Does anyone have a link to a similar implementation, library, or paper of the ACL replacement / rules engine Zed talked about?

I'm dying to dive more deeply into this, but have little domain expertise right now. Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Thanks. This can solve data and config mobility pretty nicely. For large amounts of (media) data an external 2.5" hd works pretty nicely.

For applications, it seems to depend a lot on the OS. Is there a good/easy way to track what apps/package have been installed (for Debian/Ubuntu e.g.)? How could I take replicable snapshots/images of my system (without user data)?

Would something like this even be possible on windows (since it doesn't have a package manager and installs stuff all over the place)?

The next level of hardware independence would be having a system on a USB device to be able to boot into it on different machines (e.g. a light notebook and a gaming desktop) using the same system on both.

...gluing together C libraries. Why not? :)

Probably not much better, but here's the slideshare version:

http://www.slideshare.net/igrigorik/building-mini-google-in-...

HN etiquette note:

The parent post is neither a troll, spam, or off-topic, and thus should not be downvoted.

A simple "no upvote" would suffice. If you disagree add a substantive rebuttal to your "no upvote".

The "rationality" that a lot of traditional (micro-)economic arguments are based on is the one defined by rational choice theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory). While economics may be moving on, many journalists, business people, politicians, etc. have not yet gotten the memo, and operate based on very flawed assumptions.

I thus thus didn't use a straw man, but rather the operational definition of rationality traditionally employed by mainstream lines of economics.

You're onto something with your definition in that a lot of friction and inefficiency today originates from people not coping well with an environment that is fast-changing and very different from our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

This is a peeve of mine: It's not "behavioral economics". It's social and organizational psychology. Virtually all the research has been done by psychologists. For example, Daniel Kahneman, Economics Nobel Laureate, is a Psychologist.

"Smart" people and the media have been obsessed with "rationality", (pseudo-)math and quantitative research, until it finally emerged in the economistic world view that people are - surprise, surprise - not that rational; something that psychologists have known for ages.

Right now, economics is sort assimilating a lot of psychological insights, which is good for humanity, but it's not economics, the original creativity stems from psychology.

For me: Ubuntu/Debian VM image = same env for dev and deploy. Fewer moving parts.

Thanks, Amy, for sticking to making your point, and not just going along with the PR game of "Yay, they fixed it, they're great again, group hug!"

Your degree of differentiation (e.g. individuals at Google versus Google, Inc.) does a great service to the community and puts legitimate pressure on Google in a sensible way while avoiding the Internet ad hominem culture.

Thanks for your insightful answer, Peter. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to wear far more hats than what their strengths and/or preferences are. As you've said, I think one luxury of a level of success is to "retire" to one's preferred areas.

Side note: Having to do significant work in one's areas of weakness/aversion is what makes the initial phases of starting up disproportionately challenging.

Don't worry, I had to click on "enlarge" to really see it. ;)

How did you transition? Do you hire programmers now to build stuff, instead of doing it yourself? Or is the nature of your business just much more content/marketing oriented now, so you don't need much (new) technology?

Wikipedia was blocked completely for a long time, later they moved to blocking only certain pages (en.wikipedia.org, I think the Chinese version is still blocked entirely). For flickr only the image hosts (static.flickr.com) were blocked, which led to the strange experience of being able to browse an image sharing site with no images.

Only the news.bbc.co.uk subdomain (which is in English) was blocked, www.bbc.co.uk was fine, except for certain sub-pages.

This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another.

The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why.

Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.

Overall, good idea for a service.

My criticism/questions:

- Price is way off: $10-100 CPM for simple message delivery? Does it come with delivery guarantees/retries? In fairness: What's the use case with which you would justify this pricing?

- (How) Do you ensure that email sent via your service is not marked as spam? Reliable mass email delivery is hard these days.

> I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?

If it leads to more (non-CS) students taking a programming class, I'd call it a big win. Other fields can benefit greatly from programming skills. I'd almost go as far as calling it a new form of literacy.