skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a headline technique. As well as including a solid number (always a good headline "trick"), it has the psychological effect of making people think.. "ooh, I gotta read this, because if he/she can do X in Y hours/days, maybe I could too!"

I'm quite into studying headlines as a hobby (yeah, I know) and http://delicious.com/popular is a great source of headlines that clicked with a large number of people. Today the number of "X ways to do Y" or "Z things about A" headlines is reasonably low, but I've seen it go over 50% of the links there many a time.. (HN's editors seem to have a policy of editing out the numbers at the start of headlines, FWIW.. but they don't tend to do with the headlines you're referring to.)
Good point. Unnecessary is not sufficient -- however that fact that fewer than 10% of US households rely on a broadcast signal indicates this technology is trending toward obsolescence.
Running ldd can also invoke arbitrary code: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/ldd-arbitrary-code-execution/
Carnegie Mellon student shows that 64 pixels is enough for Mario (video)
Sounds like you had a similar experience to mine. The book has powerful concepts but is dangerous for the soul.
There IS difference between Western and Eastern Europe. But Eastern is too complicated to be seen as a single region. Some countries (Slovenia) are quite rich, even more rich than some Western countries. While some other countries are doing quite bad (Latvia) and there're many countries in between.

As of culture, South-Eastern Europe is very different from North-Eastern Europe. And Mid-Eastern Europe is totally different thing as well. Some are slavs, some aren't, some has more relations w/ russia, some w/ italy or germany. It varies from country to country A LOT.
When the directors are good, sequels can be interesting sometimes they top the original concept.

Interruption technology appears, apple gets to it first in a consumer friendly way, with superior design. Apple makes lots of money. Apple attempts to lock the market. Other vendors imitate and innovate, maybe even with inferior design. Rival vendor makes said technology ubiquitous. Apple wails. Apple marginalized back to niche market.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes

its hard to imagine how Steve Jobs can win this without completely stifling innovation, which he does not have the power to do.

If Apple is experiencing a sense of deja vu its because the core mode of operation, that of an isolated by design operator, did not change.

The last fight of this type left apple half dead, and if apple isn't careful it might end up half dead after this one as well. Democratization of platforms has always been in the best interest of developers,and software drives hardware sales, not the other way around. Apple always fought this notion, personally i hope that on this issue it will lose and continue to lose, again and again.

At stake here is everything that made apple triumphant again. smart phones largely negate the need for an isolated mp3 players for instance, and online offerings attack itunes directly as well.

I have two apple servers in my shop largely stylish weights now. Take Apple's entry to the server platform. It betrays a conceptual gap with a huge industry, you cannot virtualize the os platform, nor can you use the hardware as sensible virtual host, it is harder to install a non apple operating system on the server offerings then its is on a desktop. incredible short sighted approach.

Sometimes i feel Apple has a distinct strategic reliance on the idea that the user must remain somewhat scared and in awe of the "magic" that operates the machines, it really aggravates them when other vendors, as well as consumers finally get it.

somewhat similar to a time you figure the priest was actually lying to you.

Not that I am pulling for Google, the are to be judged with suspicion as any business of this scale should be.

But just like Microsoft in many ways created the capability for people to have machines cheap enough and open enough to give birth to moders and Linux development. so Google with their approach allow a whole slew of technology that will mark the ascent of its future rivals
Please get well soon, Paul. Thanks for the hard work.
In 1977 the punk band The Desperate Bicycles released their debut single Smokescreen. The song featured the refrain "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it!". The back cover broke down the costs of recording and manufacture, explaining that it cost them in total £153 to release 500 copies. The medium was the message.

The spirit of the "__ in __ hours" posts is exactly the same. Developing the barebones of a product is infinitely quicker and simpler than most people believe. Many great businesses are trapped in people's daydreams because they just haven't overcome inertia and procrastination.

I would expect that most of us here follow the logic of agile, MVPs, iterative development and so on, so why do so few of us actually make a go of it? Look at Patrick of Bingo Card Creator - he's built a small and simple product in his spare time that has grown into something that he can quit his day job for. Any one of us could have built a working prototype of Bingo Card Creator in a couple of days, but Patrick did and we didn't. Too many of us understand intellectually that we just need to launch a piece of crap and start iterating, but not nearly enough of us have the guts to follow it through. It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it.
Feel better! Very impressed with the short timeframe in which you guys turn around the huge number of applications!
Someone should tell this site to update:
http://omghowmuchtimeleftforycdecision.icodedhere.com/
Bad link, FYI
What you are suggesting is exactly what has happened: It is called the iPad, with books and periodicals in iTunes to boot. By his own admission, it is the first device to satisfy the ultimate vision of Alan Kay, the father of the modern personal computer. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

The interface potential of this device is enormous. Expect to see a whole new generation of must-have applications taking advantage of multitouch on a larger screen.
Apple is really starting to subscribe to the competition is bad for business standpoint.

Competition is bad for any company that seeks to maximize profits. That is just a fact of life. You cannot hope to innovate forever and expect demand to grow or even remain steady for all but a few markets.

A monopoly is bad for the consumer (most of you) but it is definitely good for the company.
Do they have inside information on this plan? My understanding is that it isn't going to be released until April 15. All I have seen about it is sort of ballpark speculation based on prior acts/statements.
California Prius Update: Wear pattern on brakes raises doubt
I wonder if Microsoft is as irrelevant as people claim it to be. Bing is gaining share, windows 7 sales are good and the experience of users is good as well. a new phone system is on the pipeline, and they still completely dominate business.

This fight is a huge importunity for Microsoft, bring something new while the other spend their time in courts and media frenzy pushback
Conversely, everyone knows about Mibbit because axod is consistently annoying. And it's written in Java; somewhat unusual around these parts.

I think the take-away here is that "any publicity is good publicity".
If you throw money at any hard problem you will get technological advances. They are a by-product of doing something hard.

But if you choose the actual task to be one that is useful, you also get the results of the task.

So yes, throwing money at space exploration will get you some advances as by-products. But so would throwing money at, say, fusion research, or extremely high speed ground transport, or nanotech, or, heck, I dunno, synthetic (biological) life... and you'd have the chance of getting something useful as a direct product.

I worked in astronomy, which is also pretty pointless from a practical point of view (and also has close links with space research). A lot of effort is put into making things look pretty and exciting exactly because people believing - for no sound logical reason - that it's a wonderful thing is what keeps the money rolling in.
Releasing something rough and unpolished can be scary, so everyone feels a need to qualify it with a statement like this. I find myself guilty of this as well... check out what I made... and immediately "I haven't had much time to polish it... I'm going to make it better soon!... it was something I hacked together this weekend". As makers, we all want to get out our final finished product which realizes our vision, but we need to learn how to build the minimum viable product that can show off the vision even if the edges are a bit rough. So really everyone should be making ____ in x hours/days.
Thanks for keeping the community apprised of the delay, though I'm sure the anticipation is almost more than some of us can take ;).
The reason certain users or companies 'break through' to me on HN (i.e. achieve a long term identity in my brain) is because they change my model of how the world works.

Two examples -- Posterous and Mixergy. Mixergy has gotten lots of visibility on HN lately, Posterous maybe not quite as much (though maybe I just haven't paid as much attention to Posterous lately). But both changed my model of the world in some way. Posterous, for making me think more about email as the least-common-denominator social network publishing platform, and the value of tapping into that, and the technical issues involved with doing so; Mixergy, for the content of the interviews, but also for the format -- I think a Mixergy-style site on ambitious young neuroscientists could be really interesting, and good for my field as a whole.

Posterous and Mixergy changed how I think about things, and because of that, I'll probably remember both for as long as I live.

This is a different model of brand awareness from the one that is implicit in the poll results linked to here -- that brand awareness is some function of the number of times a brand gets posted per unit time and the popularity of the post. For me, that's just visibility -- but stickyness comes down to, "Did this change my model of the world?"

And that's the value I get from the better posts on HN, the better New Yorker articles, etc.
even so, the ipad technology will become a technology that is common as muck in even shorter time it took the industry to mimic and build on the concept of the iphone. what then?
After some experience outsourcing through RAC, I've concluded that paying more for local developers and designers who buy into and understand your product and business model, speak the same language, and share your culture, is often worth it.

Unless your product is extremely straightforward and doesn't need to be flexible in the future, there is a huge hidden cost when your developers aren't on the same page. In my experience, the result is far from "agile."
Yeah.
Get well soon, Paul.
What's one more day when we have waited all this time (all our adult lives? ).

Appreciate the effort you guys put into making this whole thing work.
I thought having your parent enumerate out your middle name(s) was the classic sign that you're in deep shit…
There's a great book by Joseph O'Connor called "Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People "
Which deals a great bit with "framing", as well as other concepts that really open up the understanding of human communication and perception. It was initially intended for psychologists/psychatrists/etc.. (I believe, based on the numerous references to using this in "sessions"), but it is really appropriate for just about every person who wants to understand human communication a little better.
I can't fully agree. To the extent that they rely on advertising on search, they are selling searchers to advertisers. It's their monopoly on search that they're dependent on, not advertising; people searching with intent is the commodity they trade in.
"must be based on historical data"... what about crowdsourced predictive analysis? Something like stocktwits for real-time investment ideas - analyze what people think about games for Twitter, although that would only work during each successive round and not for filling out a bracket at the very beginning. I could see that working since anyone who takes the time to tweet "team x over team y" is self-filtering for game predictive knowledge. Thoughts?
I love silk icons! Really clean - I think we need to push for better standardization of icons though. There are too many sites where developers put the icons without text labels and I find myself mousing over hoping for a tooltop while trying to stare at a 16x16 icon to figure out what it is...
I don't think there are enough connections among individuals in the community to make that work. HN doesn't place a high priority on identity. No avatars, no karma display, no username differentiation. I'd bet the average HN member can only recall around ten HN usernames they have a good idea of the personality & project of.

http://socialstrategist.com/2008/04/16/your-users-are-boring...

HN did start a cofounder wishlist GoogleDoc a while back.

You can find it in a more searchable format on http://StartupLinkup.com
Sage advice gone wrong
Is there any current commonly circulated advice that you have tried and it was a total disaster and if so what would be your advice now?

I tried quitting my job and it was the worst 18mths in my life. My advice would be it's alright to take the conservative route such as school or job until your business starts to generate some sort of income. Furthermore, it might be better to do b2b first then try b2c.
Luigi de magistris:ddl intercettazioni anticostituzionale « Ifarabutti's Blog
If Apple can continuously innovate to a large degree, it can stay ahead. It seems to be doing just that.

But yeah - the open vs. closed platform does seem exactly like the battle for the PC. Apple seems primed to lose the bulk of the market once again.
I like the generally idea of a positive FML-type site and I love the domain, but really, ads already? Sacrificing user experience for an extra $0.20 this early gives your users serious doubts about your intent in building a great destination site/community site.
Nooooooooooooooooooo!

Oh well, still got the Pacquiao / Clottey fight tonight. Get well soon!
That was quick =) The throbbing of the clock is a little too much for me... oh the anticipation.
"Lie, Cheat, Steal, and listen to heavy metal music."

or was that something else?
now with a domain http://www.OMGHowMuchTimeLeftForYCDecision.com
best domain ever. Can we buy madagascar domains? www.o.mg
your idea sounds interesting, but i think it's getting at a different comparison. as presented, the contest is about who can design an algorithm to get the most out of a set (but large) quantity of data.

what you're suggesting is where to get the best data from. i think it's also an interesting question, but it would need to be in a separate category at the very least. also, wouldn't the best bet (pun intended) just be to go with the bookie odds? people who are putting money on the games presumably have better information than somebody just tweeting their prediction.
Could be resolved, but the steps taken would be difficult to accomplish. Essentially the government would need to claim ownership of the fibre, and all ISPs lease fibre based on usage. Essentially if I switch service, ISP1 stops paying for my usage and ISP2 picks it up.

However, this presents the problem that the government will then control the fibre and maintenance costs will rise like a rocket to the moon. So perhaps the ideal resolution to our problems could become the biggest hindrance to lowering costs.
There's also the drivers who would get paid in cash and "forget" to record the fare. And various other ploys (lot harder to take out of towners around the block six times when they're watching the GPS map).

Also, popular objection doesn't strictly mean a majority. It means the head of the Taxi Worker Alliance objected. And like any union boss, his motivations aren't strictly inline with what's best for the all workers.
Not in Russia, where first/patronymic is a proper formal address. Just good manners. Very good manners under the circumstances.

I think this anecdote was in his short story, 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' if I'm not mistaken? And I think the plate lickers were the first to die.
You're in for a double helping of culture shock as long as you still consider yourself a 'national' of some country.

I try - with partial success - to live as though being born in some place was pure chance and to try to lose the myopic view of life that you get when you keep seeing things through the lens of home. It's a mixed success, and I haven't even lived in places that were very different from the one that I was born in.

For me the 'security blanket' seems to be cheese. As long as I can find a good chunk of cheese somewhere I can deal with the rest. Selling cheese at exorbitant prices to immigrants must be a great way to make money.
yeah i kind of noticed the post in a glance and updated the site, it's not like OMG i have been staring at the counter all day ...
Ah, but you appreciate wget much more, if you wait through the amount of time it takes MacPorts to provide it ;-)
+1 for this thread
I'm always impressed when I hear Danah Boyd speak. Heard her at NetRoots Conference talking about how people isolate themselves in community online (e.g. MySpace = virtual ghetto) and thus our fabled use of the internet to spread information to the poor wasn't working as well as we'd hoped because we kept excluding them from the websites where the opportunity was... etc.

This one sounds about right too, the generational gap in how we think about the privacy/publicity tradeoff, that we as techies think of privacy as an information problem and most people think of it as a public perception problem (e.g. "don't want to get embarrassed").

Good stuff. Hope this article gets upvoted to the top!
Thank you for the constructive criticism :)

#7 - there's a checkbox for that called Show Auctions, maybe I should rename it.
#6 - what do you mean show you the eBay link ?

I'll look into the others.
Homemade flying hovercraft - NZ reporter rides w/o seatbelt (video)
http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/ seems appropriate.
Hat tip: James Fallows of The Atlantic - http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/03/good-news...
If net neutrality fails, companies like Google can easily play hard ball and potentially bring ISP's down. Everyone on the throttling ISP's network asking for money from website owner, instead of getting Youtube or Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and the many other Alexa top 100 sites, they get "This website cannot be reached by your service provider, please consider switching Internet Service Provider".

I'm sorry, if all my favourite websites start telling me I have to change ISP to use them, I'm going to change my ISP. Without google I'm out, it has my Docs and my Emails, plus I wouldn't know how to find something online without it (I could, but Bing is suck ass and beyond Yahoo my suckometer stops registering). Even now, if google suggested I switch ISP for better performance, I'd switch ISP. Heck, I even have my DNS through google! I wouldn't have websites without google right now.
Watch out for these UltraShort ETFs. They are only useful for day trading. Over periods longer than a day, they don't match the returns you'd expect to see for a variety of reasons. More info here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/ultrashort-etfs----ca...
I think you mean this line of 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' ?

http://books.google.com/books?id=AyYUCrb7M1sC&lpg=PP1...

"Paclo raised his head. "Didn't they put you in the cooler, Ivan Denisovich? And are you still alive?" (They simply couldn't teach Western Ukrainians to change their ways. Even in camp they were polite to people and addressed them by their full name.)"

Kinda nice how google books enables a 'Good Will Hunting' moment without the genius, eh? :D
In other news, group of people associated with special interest claim plans to restrict or cancel special interest in the face of reality is catastrophic to said aforementioned special interest, not to mention other connected (no matter how tenously) special interests.

I'm not sure that this is really news in the genuine sense of the word. News is Obama announcing the change.
Nearly 50% of the money NASA sends to contractors goes to three organizations: Lockheed Martin, The JPL at Caltech, and Boeing.

The rest goes to other Military-Industrial "Usual Suspects," like Grumman and Raytheon.[1]

These organizations are principally interested in maintaining their cushy position and soaking up tax money. They are not particularly driven to push the envelope.

Obama's plan is a "shifting" around of the contracts, yes, but it's shifting away from organizations like Lockheed Martin to organizations like Scaled Composites. Away from fat lazy organizations to ones with some hunger and drive.

That's also the reason why it's probably DOA in Congress.

[1] http://www.govexec.com/features/0808-15/0808-15s13s1.htm
"I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence."

What does exploring space or landing on the moon have to do with "moral leadership"?
I know it's peripheral to the article but that punching app sounds creepy as hell.
$50 with no recurring revenue is well covered by lots of cheap, simple, inaccurate meters. See http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-monitorin...

As a price example, here is a direct competitor:
http://www.luciddesigngroup.com/starter.php

$10,000 USD up front, $2,000 per annum recurring.

And here is WattVision, which has the "all the benefits (and weaknesses) of a smart meter, available today" http://www.wattvision.com/

Also, GridSpy is far simpler than many competitors. If you are suggesting that we provide a device so you can create your own site to receive data, the creating a site part is not simple for 99% of the population.

Thanks for highlighting how we need to shift the language on the site so it is obvious it is priced for industrial power monitoring. Also thanks for your input.
Try this for full version: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Interstate+8+near+San+Dieg...
i guess that answers that.
How Fast Can You Build A Server?
Then you will have more energy to adapt to your new country. But if you fail to adapt, the cycle may still apply ;)
Of course, you should never drive holding someone in your lap (like a child). You will not be strong enough to hold on to them should you have an accident.
Isn't putting in ads from the beginning just a honest thing to do? Might work better than putting off users later on by changing the model? (Or might not be better, that's why I am asking).
Does anyone know of RentACoder style sites for signal processing?
Do you have links on this stuff? I get what you're saying, and want a deeper understanding of the types of manufacturing/costs of prototyping in the US/elsewhere?
I think it was pippin with 2 p :)
Ask HN: Best way to Market to Customer Leads
If I have phone, email, fax for customer leads whats the most effective way to pursuade them to sign up to a free trial of a subscription based service.

Also the service provides more value to end users as more people sign up (chicken egg problem similar to social networks)
"During the 911 call, the operator urged Mr. Sikes to shift the car into neutral. He later said he was afraid doing so might cause the car to "flip" or shift into reverse."

Maybe a driving test should be re-instituted every few years, or at the very least make sure that drivers have a basic grasp of physics...
So very appropriate.
I'm surprised that it apparently fits Apple's vision more than women in bikinis do.
I suppose it's still too late to send you new info about the application?