skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it is primarily about the touch screen. It's probably a combination of things many of them related to limited capabilities.

For example, the app store. Sure, they could allow some other channel for installing apps that isn't restricted. Some apps would be available only for this alternative channel because it's easier or freeier or better somehow. They give instructions on how to install it. It's complicated. A user might try to get something running on her iphone and fail. She might get her daughter to help. The app has some quirks (that's why it isn't allowed in the app store) When she uses someone else' iphone it's complicated and difficult because it belongs to a"power user".

This adds up to the feeling that the iphone is complicated and hard and breakable and you need to know what you're doing with it.

It's naive to say "don't install unapproved apps" or stay in the non-power user world. If it exists, people will be exposed to it.

Think of the early days of GUI. Lots of non computer people where shown how to do something until it stopped working for whatever reason. At that point they asked for help. The helper immediately opens up the command line and demonstrates how you really need to know a little bit about the command line to get some things done.
It works by making use of Twitter's API methods, and I apply your search to filter the results. That way we can search back to 3,200 tweets rather than the measly 10 day limit. With that I've added support for timelines, favs, DMs and mentions.
That is like saying "Pong set back gaming because it is not as complex or in-depth as D&D".
Um, wrong URL?

http://snapbird.org/
That depends on your definition of 'rationally'.

Sometimes preferred will be fully-participating preferred, and the investors will get their money back and then take a share of what's left equal to their ownership. Sometimes preferred will be non-participating preferred, and the investors can choose between getting their money back or converting their preferred to common and getting a share equal to their ownership. Never ever will a VC do a deal where they don't get at least 100% of their money back before common stock holders (aka you) see a dime.

Complicating this is that 'getting their money back' is actually just a 1x liquidation preference - and while 1x is common (the VCs get 1x their money back before you get anything), it's possible for this preference to be higher. If there's a 2x liquidation preference, the VCs get 2x their money back before the common gets anything. If there's a 2x liquidation preference and the stock is fully-participating preferred, the VC gets 2x their money back and then a share of whatever's left equal to their ownership.

Early-stage rounds are often relatively simple and more 'rational' - it's multiple rounds with many different investors that make things interesting.

Brad Feld's 'Term Sheet Series' is the best resource I know of for basic definitions of all this stuff:
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/term_sheet/
Well, for starters, they could allow developers to either get paid through channels other than Google Checkout or push Google Checkout merchant accounts to more countries. I was pretty enthusiastic about writing apps for Android until I realized that it was impossible for me to get paid for it.
Yeah, it would be nice if unionization weren't necessary. Unfortunately history (or even a cursory examination of the world today) clearly shows that, in the public and private sectors alike, employees are inevitably abused when they do not stand up for themselves.

The real world isn't black and white. Unions can do harm, to be sure, but a balance must be struck between the needs of the employer--public or private--and the needs of the employees, and it's never as simple as saying "we shouldn't have unions".

For instance, in my local school district, the superintendent is being criticized for seeking a raise in the middle of budget cuts. Among his most vocal critics have been the teachers. In response to their criticism, the superintendent proposed new rules that would effectively require teachers to take dozens of hours of useless(1) "technology training" on their own time, without pay; thankfully we have a union capable of protecting teachers against such abuse.

(1) Literally, useless. These courses are part of an ongoing initiative the only point of which, as near as I can tell, is so the superintendent can say X number of teachers have participated in Y number of hours of additional training under his reign. The teachers who already have a clue about computers get nothing from these courses; and unfortunately, the courses are so poorly designed that those who actually do have a thing or two to learn get nothing out of them, either.
The Future Of Newspaper Publishers (Embrace The Working-Time Activity)
You clearly don't know statistics on the average and median time it takes to get a Ph.D. in mathematics in the United States.

I'm aware of the averages. This does not mean that the average/median are reasonable. A large chunk of graduate students are unsuited to research [1] and they drive the average up.

I'm also uncertain why you think it's relevant that 1/3 of education is provided by CC (which I'm well aware of, having attended one), or why you believe I don't understand the economics behind the university system. Could you explain?

[1] Typically they want a teaching job, don't really understand what research entails, and don't treat research as a full time job.
Jeff Bezos is a top angel
Are there good explanations of their process, etc. online somewhere? Your paragraph description is tantalizing but a bit spare.
Isn't one of the advantages of scaling investing the ability to count unhatched chickens?
Ooh, that sounds fun.

In terms of process design, I think you could take a hint or two from the Netflix guys here. Currently you're distributing a single test case. That takes very little work to accomplish: good first step! Consider creating two test cases: one we'll call the probe case, and one we'll call the real case. The real case is kept on your servers and never gets exposed directly to the participants.

Make a really freaking simple way for you to check your work on the probe case automatically, without needing to speak to you guys. For example, you could make a simple REST API or even a web page with an upload/submit button. Then run whatever your evaluation function is against the submitted solution for the probe case, and tell folks how good their submission was. For an extra ten minutes of work you can add a leaderboard. (Add a leaderboard!) You can optionally rate-limit this if you're worried about people overfitting to the probe via taking a lot of measurements.

This has a better user experience and will get you more viral exposure because a) you've now totally decoupled your ability to run code from people's ability to participate in the contest and b) people can now get immediate feedback that their participation is valued and producing results. Including a leaderboard also gives folks an emotional hook both for participating and for spreading word of your contest: "Oh cripes guys, the top submission for this problem was done in Ruby. Let's show them the awesome power of functional programming. For the greater glory of Lisp!"

Of course, you can feel free on putting whatever restrictions you want on code which you individually invite for offline exposure to the real test case.
Extraterrestrial Ethics
Sylar on Entrepreneurship (or Startup “Heroes” 101)
Overly Judgemental IE6 Splash Pages
On the other hand, there's precious little I've missed from the Apple store when installing apps on my Nexus One. The App Store has its own problems - in particular, I never did figure out how to easily rate an app except by deleting it.

The biggest annoyance for me WRT Andorid apps is the complete chaos in the SD card root directory. It's a free for all, with no naming conventions or directory structure whatsoever. I hide most of my files in a couple of folders like _music, _video etc. so they float to the top of the cruft when mounted - otherwise I'd be afraid they'd be clobbered by some app's random directory choice.
Almost everybody is building on a platform they don't really control. Notables include Facebook, iPhone, Windows, OSX, .NET, Wii, XBox, PlayStation ... even open source is only technically under your control since it's out of the question for most people to maintain and continue developing whatever they use in a worst-case scenario.
The arms race will undoubtedly continue.
PyCon 2010:Scaling your Python application on EC2 (Reddit)
This is partly the reason, as well as the fact that people were spamming the app store with 1000s of these dodgy apps, featuring a slide show of 5 images.

Also, If you look at the screenshots on itunes for Playboy, SI, they are very tame. The screenshots for these spam apps were getting worse and worse.

Apple had to do something, it was already pissing off developers, with these spammers moving into ALL categories. Most developers are happy with this decision by apple, check the forums.
97% are "not dead"

I also find this hard to believe.

I've invested in ~ 20 companies over the last four years.

- Two are insanely good, but no liquidity yet
- One appears to be dead
- One has been acquired

The rest are in various stages of growth.
I'm simply pointing out that gchpaco's attempt at reducto ad absurdum is flawed. Dpatru's argument applies only to the government and to monopolies, not to private businesses in competitive markets.
From the info it does seem that for this specific failure mode the Boeing design is better. That may be true for other types of failures too. But from what I've read before the Airbus system of software checks/info on pilot inputs can actually prevent a great deal of failure situations as well. The description of the Hudson landing not long ago included references on how the A320 helped the pilot maintain the optimum glide path and generally fly the plane better even in a much degraded situation. I also remember an article that detailed some accidents or near-misses and the Airbus system got mixed reviews, in that sometimes it was better than a conventional one, sometimes worse.

It's easy to have a gut reaction to these things. It sounds like the story for all kinds of advanced technology. Something solves a bunch of common failure modes while adding risk to extreme cases that are hard to test. On balance it may be a positive change and save lives but we are understandably uncomfortable when we see the freak accidents caused. Would you still prefer the Boeing planes if Airbus had a better safety record? They seem to be doing slightly better according to this:

http://www.boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf

Looking at "Hull Loss Accident Rate per Million Departures" (page 21) for recent planes:

- 737-300/-400/-500: 0.54

- 747-400: 0.53

- A320/321/319/318: 0.36

- A340: 0.5 (this is a single accident)

- A330: 0 (this only goes to 2008, would have to be updated)

I haven't done the math to see if this is statistically significant. The upside to all this is that the graph does seem to show planes are getting safer. All the technology does work after all.
I don't have a good one-stop "Here's everything people outside the company know about Zynga" resource in mind, but my two secrets for keeping a finger on the pulse of social gaming are a) andrewchenblog.com (though he doesn't blog much anymore, which saddens me because it frustrates my hunger for testing/metrics inspiration) and b) Slideshare (It is amazing what goodies people give away at conference presentations and a huge portion of them eventually migrate to Slideshare.)
There are quite a few parents that are upset that 'adult content' exists at all, but I wouldn't say that they have a right to try and impose those views on everyone else.
Memo to self: add "Do not build for platforms which could pull the rug from under you" to list of tips for founders with day jobs. That sort of thing would crunch my business like a tin can if it happened to me in the wrong week. (Actually, I think all weeks are the wrong week for something that big.)
Facebook Fan Page Ideas
Forming a union has the problem that it violates the rights of others (unlike buying insurance).

If person E wants my labor, I have the right to trade it with him for money under any conditions we both find acceptable. If E's other employees band together, E and I both lose our rights - I can no longer freely sell my labor to him.

That's as crazy as if Apple and Microsoft merged, and then got the government to declare Linux illegal.
A similar program is http://clpbar.sourceforge.net/
I swear I used to use a different one a few years back, but can't remember what it's called.
Now you have 2 problems :)
How to make yourself happier in just a few seconds
At The Age Eternity by The Nightmares In The Pretence
This is one Techcrunch article where the comments on Techcrunch itself are intelligent. The best comments are from a guy named Jon who clarifies that fortunately we work in a free market. If enough people vote with their feet like you have, things will change. I personally think market forces have done a good job dictating the current founder and employee payouts.
Being Canadian, I also can't get paid, but I still wrote my app (as a hobby). I've started including Google Adsense in my app (admob is another choice I think), but people hate ads without the ability to buy.
What makes a successful online dating photo?
This is why the game I'm currently working on is built using facebook iframe/connect, and not fbml; the thinking being that this product should be able to stand on it's own merit regardless of which API i mash into it.
Poking into Facebook security
Someone contact the Wikipedia people and tell them to update their reference.
As someone on who has been on the side of social games for a long time, it's absolutely not about getting it right the first time.

It has always been about two things - getting lucky, and moving fast.

Playfish tried to do a lot of games "right the first time" but weren't set up to quickly fix their mistakes and have ended up performing terribly.
Right, as Paul pointed out, the numbers for Conway are way low (maybe these are just the SV Angels numbers?), but over the course of Conway's investments in the last 20 years, it's astronomically unlikely that 97% of them are "not dead".
Ask HN: Web Application Development?
I'd love to make some web applications. I've got tons of ideas, I can program (Ruby, Haskell, Erlang), but I've got almost no experience making web applications.

Are there any guides or starter sets/ideas to get the ball rolling?

For instance, how to handle user accounts? Passwords? Twitter/Facebook logins? etc.
Wise marketing advice: Do something small weekly, something big monthly
I think dasil is making reference to the grocer's apostrophe you inserted into "its".

* its - third person neutral possessive pronoun (see also: my, your, his, her, their)

* it's - contraction of "it is".
A hack for VC's
Draft: The Salmon Protocol
It really is. I'm still stuck on 1.5 so my experience may not be on-par with what the 2.x folks are seeing but about 30% of the apps I download from the Market just crash now. I'm super disappointed the latest update to Subsonic is totally unstable. It puts a little notification item up each time it crashes (please stop doing that, by the way) so I know it crashed 7 times today. I wouldn't have installed the new update if I knew this was going to happen. I don't see anyway of going back to the stable version I was using a few days ago that worked pretty well besides a bit of a clunky UI. That type of stuff frustrates me so much.
Well, if everybody who wants to get rich becomes a founder, there will be no employees or at least there will be no highly-motivated employees.

It takes more than the founders to build a successful company.
Posted previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130389
Facebook apologises for defaced tribute pages
Ask HN: What should I build to support my web app?
One of the major reasons I wanted to apply to YC this spring was because I know that there are many things I haven't thought about - that I need to power my web app, that PG and the crew will be able to guide me along that path.

My wife is 3 months pregnant and I decided that now is not the best time, but I will be building my web app anyway.

So...my question is...for those HNers that have been through the YC process, or anybody that has built a successful web app, what else do we need to build to support the web app?

The ideal post will include off the shelf OSS scripts (assume the app is built in rails) that can be installed on the server to monitor server services and other things. It will also include a description of functionality for metrics that I will want to measure (e.g. conversions from free to paid users, etc.), feedback mechanism (to collect feedback from users).

There are stuff that I know I will need to be able to do (like easily processing refunds for customers). But there are stuff that I don't know that I will have to do, because this is my first web app.

I would like if the community can point me in the right direction...if not comments on this post, but providing links.

Thanks.
Blogspam :/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065087

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths...
How to Convert PDF to PowerPoint 2003
Nowadays, PDF becomes one of the most popular file formats worldwide. Many teacher and professors want to make PowerPoint presentations, they need to quote some charts and statistical information from journals of PDF format. So converting PDF to PowerPoint 2003 is essential for these users. The article shows the steps of how to convert PDF to PowerPoint.
This does sound like a neat problem -- and one which I'll be solving soon in my application.

Don't want to give away too much, but looks like a basic statistics text might be a good place to start....
"... think dasil is making reference to the grocer's apostrophe you inserted into "its". .."

Thanks RyanMcGreal.
If I were looking for work I'd have some fun with this. Machine learning is a fun area.
Would you do it that way?

I'd just brute force it, assuming the entries would support it.

Of course, I always like using a shotgun where a fly-swatter might work :)
Only Nintendo's Wii games are prospering, third parties are having trouble making money on the Wii.
How Baidu was hacked
Lua seemed very 'correctness over convenience' to me, similar to the mzscheme or haskell mindset, and I just can't get enthusiastic about language/communities like that.
Agreed re: #1. Anyone who's taken an intro-level security course or had any experience with webdev can tell you that "unguessable" is beyond being an oxymoron - it's a running joke. There's no such thing as security through obscurity.

Of course, they do offer password protection for Pro users, and if they're using SSL that's great too; I just feel like "unguessable" is not the best word to use when discussing any aspect of an app's security.

As an aside: the <del>mark up</del><ins>review</ins> tagline is fantastic! Really clever.
"Facebook is going to set indie gaming back 5 years, developers must follow the money, and nobody can deny that there is sick cash to be had playing the viral lottery on Facebook"

I can cite many examples of people who have abandoned PC gaming for XBLA, PSN, Wiiware, Flash gaming, Unity web gaming, or the iPhone, I don't know of a single guy who has jumped onto Facebook. So the fundamental thesis of hardcore indie developers being tempted by the lucrative cash piles to be had in Facebook apps seems pretty dubious.

The other contrarian point I'd like to make is that Facebook has actually been really kind to indie developers. Facebook Pages are huge for self promotion: Facebook is consistently a top referrer for our game, even though it is a traditional, PC/Mac/Linux downloadable game (that's not even released yet).
Wouldn't this be a problem that was better solved without software?

I mean if its actual people doing the voting, rather than just bots, shouldn't this be handled in a less software-focused way?

What I'd say is treat it like police detective work, have someone go undercover, act as if it was like any other human 'crime' syndicate...
I think the author is upset because developers are slowly learning there is this giant demographic of people who like playing games, who aren't 16-30 year old males, and these people have no problem paying for games.
I think he's upset because games used to be made with only his demographic in mind, and now his group is being shifted back in how many games are developed for them.
I disagree with the Airbus design philosophy of having the computer override the pilot, so I choose Boeing jets whenever possible, even though overall the safety records are comparable.

This is clearly a UI related incident.
Thanks!

Do you mind sharing how much commission you pay your ad sales person?
So we'd have to set up the null hypothesis that the voting patterns are simply random. What probability distribution are we going to use? Gaussian distribution is probably the wrong one to use, since online voting and online popularity usually conforms better to a power law distribution. So bootstrap a distribution from the data, and then test for correlations? How do we control for the deliberately random behavior of the voting circle sockpuppets?
Facebook has done this at least three times previously. This time was better than previous because they actually laid out a roadmap with specific dates.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Road...

So, anyone who hasn't factored this into the development model yet is, well, dead or going to die the next time it happens. :)
"Where do you have any evidence for this?"

This is a design feature of modern FBW systems. It will not let the plane exit the safety envelope. Simply put, the pilot can put the plane through more acceleration than the frame can handle (the control surfaces are big enough), thus the plane could break apart at high speed without the FBW.

You are right for the rest, the flight computer passed control to the pilots after the loss of the pitot tubes.
Personally, I just go for something containing sugar and caffeine.
Perfect example of real-life hacking
I thought this article would be about hookers and blow... nevermind.

Basically: When imagining about a happy event it is better to imagine what would have been if you didn't have something you have right now (eg. gf/bf, school education, good job, food on the table, nice pad),
rather then thinking about "what if x" happened, where x is something that you wish it happens to you; like winning the lottery, getting a gf., a job, whatever.

So, I guess this study plays on two things:
1. You have to have something nice in your life that you cherish about.
2. The "loss aversion" feelings in humans, makes you think it would really suck if you lost it, and you are happy to have that thing (as it puts a larger value to something you already have).

Works for some people I guess. If your life really sucks, then you could say "well, it could get worse, look at those kids in haiti. I should be happy for what I have, and hey, my life doesn't suck that much in comparison. "
James took the simple way out with this one. He just took down all of the voting and commenting features. This drives away all of his users and now he doesn't have to worry about voting rings.

That's a bingo!
How would you decide which of the hundreds/thousands of "rings" would you pursue?