skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a question of stopping manufacturers, it's a question of distorting the market with a phone that has an insurmountable advantage. Google can no longer be an honest broker. I assure you if HTC and Motorola had known about the Nexus neither one of them would have been so aggressive in developing their own Android phones.

HTC makes the Nexus. You can't even buy an HTC phone from HTC, http://www.htc.com/us/where-to-buy (but this may be a function of the US cell market, maybe you can buy from HTC directly in other countries), you have to buy it from a carrier, or in the case of the Nexus, from Google which ends up being carrier agnostic (once the carrier list is expanded).

If the nexus has an insurmountable advantage, it's HTC that can deliver on it even to other specific carriers. I'm not even so sure what this insurmountable advantage is. If these other manufacturers want to compete, they're going to need to start innovating. And they can put less effort and money into innovation on the software side, because they can license android, and spend all that they would have spent on software on making their hardware better.
Hedge the risk incurred by your "mini-venture app fund" with other peoples money.

Given your track record with app development, there would certainly be demand from third party investors for the expertise you bring to the table. Simply offer investors less preferable terms than those you are able get from the app developers that pitch their ideas to you.

Not the easiest approach, but after addressing any regulatory hurdles, lining up investors and getting a system in place, you can focus on investment opportunities and leverage up the capital you are currently earning.

Your passive investors will be more likely to part with their money if you have some skin in the game yourself. This will have the added benefit of allowing you to diversify into a wider range of apps with higher monetary barriers to entry.
I'm wondering that too. I had an idea, and then I saw that a startup recently sprung up with some pretty big names on board. Not sure if I should go forward with it or discard it.
I don't play a lot of Go either, but I've read some on the topic.

There are a few problems with modeling Go in AI. One of the biggest is that in Chess, you can more easily evaluate intermediary positions by material advantage. Positioning still matters, and there's plenty of times where a sacrifice is worth it, but material advantage is a serviceable enough quantitative measure. Go does not see captures as commonly, and emphasizes positioning more, which makes it harder to quantify.

The other problem is that (if I remember right) Go has more possibilities, so it's harder to look ahead as far. All grid intersections on the board are possible moves, and the board is bigger, while for chess the range of moves is more constrained. But really, this isn't the important part, because the forecast horizon of both games are finite, which means in both games at some point you have to stop looking at possibilities and evaluate board position of leaf nodes. And chess has a less-imperfect method for that.
VCs that use checklists are more effective
A well tended walled garden in the form of an App Store for Apple Tablet computers and newer consumer-oriented computers would provide a lot of value.

To most users, a general purpose computer is a power tool that they'll never make full use of. What most people really want in a personal computer is a backplane for various appliances. They just want to buy those things, install them, and have them just work. If an App Store ecosystem could mean Apple could completely shepherd users and take care of their every need, then this would add value in much the same way. And Apple would be able to figure out how to market this and get paid handsomely. This is the exactly the direction that Apple is going with their retail stores. (Especially with the revamp to increase the social interactivity.)
> It was also pretty fun to create.

I like how you described the rollercoaster of emotions that goes into making an app (from initial excitement to happiness having delivered something you are proud of).
It seems like marketing is king on the app store. I'd love to see some success stories that aren't taptaptap (and the MacHeist juggernaut and their 600,000 person mailing list) just to see how one can bootstrap themselves up some buzz.

Have you taken a stab at marketing? Do you have any insights in that area (either successes or failures)?
Just because you have a cursory knowledge of the sort of traffic that comes out of China doesn't mean it's all bad.
Guess it depends on the time you have on your hands, the work involved and the quality of the competition.

If you have worked on it to some extent already then it seems like a waste to not at least release the code.
Car Insurance quotes-a hassle free proposition
It is always recommended to opt for cheap car insurance quotes from a reliable insurance company specializing in such kind of insurance.
So you chastise other programmers for writing business applications for the dominant operating system, using a framework that allowed OS-level integration that was in no way available at the time (and in many ways still isn't)?

You're right, they should have just looked 10 years into the future and started writing full web apps using open technologies. Except that would have cost orders of magnitude more than everything they've had to pay in IE6 support costs up to now, because they would have had to invent them all.

It's easy to judge the past from the perspective of the present.
"This mode also includes a timer at the top of the screen that helps you keep track of how long you’ve spent on a given topic so that you don’t run over time."

Makes me think of Pardon the Interruption on espn (one of my favorite tv shows). Smart idea.
My guess is probably around $100-150 per unit, and I'd also guess that the main part of the profit is in the laser-cut parts, at $200. Now, they take quite a bit of time to cut, and laser cutters aren't cheap, but look at the numbers. That's a lot of profit.

My hackerspace mix-and-matched a whole bunch of stuff from makerbot industries because one of our members had a laser cutter and could make those in his basement. The MakerBot "Laserless kit" is modeled after the order we put in.

We compared a lot of part prices to those found in catalogs, and the price difference was so negligible that it would have been more of a pain in the butt than anything to buy all those parts (hardware, motors, microcontrollers, pulleys, bearings, belts and the like) from catalogs. Sure, they order in bulk and get a discount. There's profit being made on the small stuff, but I'm still betting the laser cut parts are the cash cow for them.
AS3IsoLib Tutorial Series - Materials
jerf,
Can you explain further how Google is endorsing some kind of iPhone app consultancy? I haven't seen anything to make me think they're pursuing this.
I'm in LA but at $397 a ticket I think I'll sit this one out.
Instead of asking users to abandon XP/IE6 - why not just issue a simple patch for the flaw? Of course that would mean less sales of Win7, etc. which I guess is the real reason they're asking users to abandon it parlaying the security situation into their advantage.
It's extremely difficult to feel sorry for the record labels. They all deserve their fate. They saw everything coming as far back as the mid 90s, but decided they were more powerful than the market. With all their CD boom money, they could have bought Napster and Big Champagne, which tracks P2P file sharing. They could have bought MySpace and Pandora and just about any major music portal that any person of average intelligence would have thought was a good idea.
Depends on the content. If you're dealing with broad timeless subjects dating isn't a big issue. You could read an article 50 years old dealing with male/female relationships and get some value out of it. If you're dealing with technical issues, or any subject that moves fast, it's more than a little irresponsible not to date your work. I've personally hosed multiple Linux systems trying to follow old out of date HOWTOs. I know better now of course but I still have to filter through hundreds of outdated results for almost any technical search I do these days.
Yea, we definitely have. I think we spent between $800-900 (modest budget, I know) on ads in 2009. That includes advertising on various iPhone blogs as well as taking part in reddit's ad program beta. None of it helped. Sales stayed the same or went down.

Review articles on Macworld and TUAW helped boost sales temporarily (2-3 days) but the only sustained sales were a result of having our best seller, BillMinder, featured by Apple in "What's Hot." It was great (and appreciated!) but definitely not on the level as the awesome taptaptap or tapbots. :)
I agree, congrats. Great idea and nice design
>> Why is everyone in such a rush?

Because everybody has different goals. Although many programmers seek to become masters of their craft, I suspect many more look at programming as a tool to be used in furthering some other pursuit. Those who see it as a tool are understandably better-served by "Learn C Before Dinner!" books than they are by a 10-year program.

This reality may be frustrating to experienced coders. It results in legions of sloppy programmers producing piss-poor code. It is, however, reality. And I'm not sure it's such a bad thing. Most of the people I interact with don't know a thing about computers -- I'm pleasantly surprised when I talk to someone who's had a run-in with some programming, no matter how brief.
I would consider adding more sounds on a regular or semi-regular basis and promoting them as appropriate. For example, you could have a $2 Valentine's pack, which is cheaper than ANY Valentine's card option out there and packs some novelty value.

You have some way of reaching current users of the app, right? (It is for messaging, after all.) Spend an hour or two and a small amount of money creating a Valentine Pack (preferably something with "if you receive this, you'll want to show it to your friends" value -- "I love you" not so much, but something quirky/whimsical/hilarious probably), ping all your users with a free sample.

("This is a Welfare Valentine, for people who don't have somebody to give them a real Valentine. Happy Valentine's Day, you love-lorn person, you. Say, know someone who should be getting a REAL Valentine? We'll hook you up for $1.99, or alternately, you can send them a Welfare Valentine for free.")
Then he'd make a tiny fraction of his current income. Isn't that why the NYT wants to go back to charging readers? I'm surprised they don't suggest he'd do the show over Twitter.
1. It's backed by the entire Java library ecosystem.
2. It's syntax is a little bit improved but still maintains the code as data that makes lisp lisp.
3. defprotocol and deftype (they promise to be awesome)
E-Prime and the Retiring of ‘To Be’
I'm interested.

How about setting up a meet-up at meetup.com or something similar? This post might not get voted up to front page, or it might disappear before we gather enough people.
Thanks for the idea. We added a Christmas sound pack. We probably should add one for Valentines day as well. :)
Thank you! :)

But our apps work on other browsers as well...:P
yeah I was half expecting to see it rendered with javascript and canvas or video tags but still cool even with flash video.
So here’s my advice to Mr. O’Brien: After he leaves NBC and spends a few months healing his wounds and pulling the troops back together, he should come back and make the Internet his time slot. He doesn’t need to abandon television — there are still millions of viewers who sit around the living room and tune in at a specific time — but he could take the battle in the direction the audience is clearly migrating: online.

Isn't that exactly what most shows (Tonight Show included) do right now? Broadcast at a specific time to millions of people while offering up clips and other content online (and in many cases, the entire show, the following day)?

For example: Last week, knowing that Conan was going to draw a larger crowd than usual, Letterman uploaded clips of his monologue to their CBS branded YouTube channel before the show aired.
'Don't be evil' isn't the basis for a relationship (Jan 15, 2010)
of course they want people to buy windows 7 or vista, but it's not like this is the ONLY bug. IE6 has been buggy for it's entire life, who's to say this is the very last time it will need patching?
i think this is really the question to ask to them. splitting IP is a means, not an end.
Starting at 8 years old I used to attend classes that starts at 7:15 am and ends at 4:15 pm. Both my parents are working full time.

Maybe in other parts of the world this is something horrible but in some countries this is our way of life. We don't complain instead we are very thankful that we CAN go to school unlike others that cannot.
I focused on algorithms in grad school and I've had some kind of programming job for (fuck) 12 years now, so I guess I'm nearly in programming puberty. I believe algorithms touches on something fundamental and provides a foundation that cannot be avoided. However, a house is more than the foundations. Algorithms does not touch on any engineering issues like software maintenance, productively achieving a goal (you can spend your life on interesting tangents) or (generally) performance of systems as a whole.
Conan != NYT
Farmville Gets a Commercial
This looks neat, really dig the approach. Confused about one thing. It states that it filtered out some relevant tweets for me - where are these displayed? Are they simply the ones that are shown at the top of my timeline?
Non Life Insurance in US
Insurance quotes for these non-life insurance policies are readily available online or with the insurance agencies agents
You don't actually mean to suggest we should feel sorry for Microsoft do you?

It's not like they didn't do this to themselves, and on purpose no less. Stopping development on MSIE stopped the upgrade cycle, and the fact is: It is easier to upgrade when you do it every week than when you wait a few years.
Users don't need to get rid of XP. Microsoft needs to get rid of Ballmer.
Http://wwwbing.com redirects to Google
Unfortunately that's what they've been doing for years and years now.. IE 6 is definitely reaching its end of life and companies that depend on it are unfortunate. Probably at the time, they never thought of designing a system that would be independent of the platform. All new PCs come with IE 7 or 8. Applications that only run on IE 6 would mean they would only run on Win XP - companies would have to upgrade as any new computer that they purchase will most likely be incompatible with their application based on IE 6.
Thanks. Looking at the quality of some "top 10" apps, it really makes one wonder how much of it (if you aren't taptaptap) is just dumb luck. I wish there were some way to quantify that.
Funny, I was just introducing Posterous to a friend the other day. As I was explaining it, I wondered out loud how they make money. The thought hadn't crossed my mind until then.

I'm glad they're viable, they are my favorite blogging site.
Wow,

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/10/not-funny-60-still-using-...
I'd like to point out that this battle with Nintendo was by the Atari Games Corp., not Atari Corp. Atari Games was formed from the coin-op division when the computer and home video game divisions were sold to Jack Tramiel.
On a side note:

Is it "posterous," as in making a post. Or is it "posterous," as in preposterous?

I tend to think the former, but every time I bring it up with someone, they use the latter.
I agree with you. I don't feel sorry for the record labels. I do however feel sorry for the artists. They're the ones getting screwed while the labels hold on to their dying industry for dear life.
No, they should've looked ten years into the past and seen this is what Microsoft does: They get you to write software on their platform and then they fuck you.
Doing things with Django models – aka – Django models tutorial
It's an honor and privilege to be chosen to go to Antarctica. Especially if you can actually participate in your field of study. My guess is whoever gets hired is already coding for a similar astronomy or physics project. I've heard of some IT jobs in the past but this is the first programming job.

I've known a number of people who have worked in Antarctica on and off over the past decade. I knew a post doc in physics who went down there and was taxiing people around during his first season. Whoever ends up with this job doesn't care about the money. They have probably been looking to go to Antarctica for a while. My guess is they already travel extensively and their family and friends are used to it. As for civilization... they are probably looking to get away from it.

But there is still a limited civilization in Antarctica and there are some benefits to being a member of it: a unique/rare experience, a cool culture, interesting people. I can't be the only one that thinks it would be cool to be a programmer in Antarctica hacking on a new $275 million neutrino observatory.
It seems like entrepreneurs should have this kind of process as well. I've been developing what I'm calling "Idea Sieve" to help filter through ideas more methodically. Basically it's a spreadsheet with a bunch of questions & a scoring function to make a sort order. The impetus to this was a review of my projects back to 2008 & a realization that I was seeing some avoidable repeat problems.

Does anyone else do something like this or have some pointers?
Also similar to something Google often does in meetings (according to some article I've read on here). They just project a giant timer on one wall. I can't remember if it's usually timing the meeting as a whole or one section.
"Our big challenge though, and one unique to a company started by two extroverted developers, was the decision as to who should be CEO and CTO. The titles aren't too important at the moment, but they certainly will be as we begin to depend on each other for managing different responsibilities."

Is it just me, or is the idea of a company with two employees, both of whom call themselves "chief ... officers" absurd on its face?

You are allowed to change your job title later on, no? For instance, if there are multiple officers two years from now, you can call some of them "chief".
I've seen some weird hacks that sort of get you embedding of embed-disabled videos, but they're incredibly fragile, and tend to break whenever YouTube makes any change to their layout.
And if that doesn't work, you can always conspire to blackball any journals that publish their articles.
Ask HN: Bad Ads?
Best way to learn is from others mistakes. Please submit the worst ad slogan, billboard pitch, etc.
Tom Green did this after MTV cancelled his show.
This isn't a one size fits all type question, or one that somebody can really give good advice on without knowing the details of the situation. Here's what I would ask myself:
- is your market very diverse (e.g. is it very unlikely the new competitors can capture a dominant share?)
- is your market large?
- do you believe you can supply something more than your competitors?

eventually, those questions should be used as input to the real question: can you still run your business successfully, or does getting beat to market by the competition prevent you from executing?
you should probably seek professional help and I mean that with total sincerity.
I prefer the Meeting Ticker:
http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/
Has anyone had experience to be able to comment on the pros and cons of: Slicehost or Rackspace?
Who says that that piece by Nate Anderson was available online? Very often case law is only accessible by pay-for subscriptions.
They should have made the Nexus One, but as Android's iPod Touch: low markup, no cell modem, faster hardware.

It was pretty moronic of them to pull a Zune, especially when their partners making iPod touch competitors are fucking things up even more than their phone manufacturers.
Agreed. The very fact that Bill Gates and Paul Allen both attended Harvard meant that they got some of the benefit. They certainly weren't complete autodidacts -- they got some of the best secondary education in the country beforehand.
Rome, although, may just end up being a pipe dream. YMMV.
Great app. I like the interface, it seems simple and easy to use, and I dont think it'll be too hard to get everyone in my company to use it.
This is exactly the technique that the more efficient managers I know use: make people commit to exactly what they want to say and discuss at the meeting beforehand.
traffic.com owned by navteq owned by nokia is your friend. The data is not free though.
INRIX may have something but I'm not sure.
Wow, this one looks promising. I'll definitely give it a shot.
Ralph Bakshi: Surviving In Tough Times
Another great recommendation, from what my economist of a dad tells me.
I wonder at what point you can give the police a pass for missing something? What is the threshold of reasonable? Based on this article, I guess we are at a point now where there is no threshld. Everything is a serious security threat. Rather scary.

Edit: This also reminds me of the "You can't say bomb on an airplane." scene in the movie Meet the Parents.
My connection keeps dropping while trying to set up a meetup group.

Email me, hn@ordisante.com, or post your email below; we'll get something going.

For those who may be wondering, I hang out here (http://tokyohackerspace.org/) but there aren't really that many software people sadly.
Why Sass And Languages Like It Will Triumph
I don't think anything so radical is required. Fox will pick up Conan and give him a show. Fox seems to have a talent for monetizing the "small but devoted audience" shows (e.g. Family Guy, Futurama, just about every Joss Whedon show ever...).
This comparison is really broken:

- Airlines and venture backed startups have vastly different goals. Flights are supposed to, above all things, be predictable. Crashing is not acceptable. If startups were predictable, there would be no reason for venture capital to exist.

- This is talking about an average over the whole of an industry, venture capital, in which the average, and indeed most of the above average firms are dysfunctional -- they don't make money. Not just, you know, 51%, like > 90%. So being better than average can still mean that you're completely economically ineffective. So the right question isn't, "What makes you better than average?" but "What makes you one of the few that is even functional?"
Tom Green's show is interesting and innovative, and his celebrity interviews are better than any you'll find on a TV talk show. Largely because the celebrities let their guard down in the low-rent facilities.

Conan has a couple big personal obstacles to going online. First, he'd have to lay off a lot of his staff, because an online talk show doesn't require and can't support nearly as many crew members as The Tonight Show.

Second, he'd be taking a big pay cut. If the show did well he might still have a shot at seven figures, but any TV talk show he does would probably pay him at least $15-20 million.

Third, he'd have fewer viewers, which could be a blow to both his ego and his cultural importance (that's not to suggest that either is currently out of whack).

The upside is that Conan is probably one of the best-positioned people in the world to do something like this, and he has the means and support to try it out as an experiment for a few months. At this point in his career, though, he may not be looking to make such a big change.