skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tough call, but here's the reality of business: everyone ends up "lying", even the people who do their best to be honest (those tend to fall into the overconfidence camp). Some people are just overconfident or have sunny reflections on the past, but everyone lies, and mostly about things of no consequence-- why they left their last job, who they know, their relative rank and responsibility in previous companies.

I generally assume that it's okay to lie if it doesn't lead the other person into a decision that will bring them harm, so lies to inflate one's social standing are generally okay, but promises to deliver a product that one cannot I'd consider very unethical, because the other person is going to get burned when it doesn't come through.

An obvious example is engaging in "creative career repair" with respect to previous job changes. Anyone who has spent 28 minutes in the professional world knows that most people do this and that it's generally innocuous. Everyone has a certain degree of the right to reinvent his or her own history. General rule: it's unethical to claim skills you don't have-- and it's also terrible for you because it means you're likely to fail at your next job; it's fine to upgrade titles, relative performance, terms of leaving, status within the group, and compensation to a reasonable degree (up to the maximum given to someone of your standing and seniority, e.g. claiming top bonus).

Also, although I think it could be a tactical mistake, I'd have no problem with someone lying about having more VC interest in a venture than there actually is, in order to get better terms. This "lie" makes a good deal more attention-getting, but it's not going to make a bad deal look like a good one, except to a VC who doesn't do his own homework. (The danger is that the VC will scumbag you and, behind your back, call up the VC you said was interested.)
Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

This is by far the best advice Carnegie made. If you want to get people to level with you, first you need to let them know you yourself are vulnerable, make mistakes and are very much like the opposing party.

Once your each that level, the other party is more prone to listen to what you have to say next. Be it a suggestion, criticism or a direct order.
If I were Apple, I'd let users vote ads up or down. Not only would this improve the ads and UX, the data would be a goldmine!
Surely there's also the approval process?

Checking an app isn't doing anything malicious may be easier if it's written with standard tools.
I don't want to invest months of my life, only to be told, "sorry, if you can't prove it's C, your app is rejected. Bye."
I think one of the moderators changed it.
If that's all you can say, you really don't have to post it here. We tend to value more useful comments than that.
I predict the differences will shrink and disappear. The desktops and laptops will get touch input and iPhone apps, and the closed platforms will round out in specs and features.
How Wikileaks shone light on world's darkest secrets
Just ask yourself "Am I really enjoying my time, or am I just procrastinating?"

For the former, go on and read Hacker News or play that flash game. For the latter, quit and do something worthwhile--either real work or at least real fun. (Of course just procrastinating and doing nothing really worthwhile can be fun every once in a while. But then at least admit it.)
The internet is a hate machine.
No, but look at YC's bio page at http://ycombinator.com/people.html

"Robert Morris is an associate professor of computer science at MIT, where he is a member of the PDOS group. He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public. He has an AB and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard."

Emphasize the positive.

But it only works if you have a lot of positive to emphasize, and if whatever you're downplaying really isn't important.
Discussion of the same visualisation from a while back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530062

Choice quote: "Walmart grows like a tumor out of Arkansas. Target grows like an ant colony scavenging for pockets of food."
Business Dashboard Roundup – Plus How You Can Make Your Own (Soon)
Gamer sets new Asteroids high score
What about this scenario? VC wants to know how much interest there is in your company. You claim to have 3 leads from other VCs although you have none.

IMO there is nothing wrong with this lie, because it doesn't lead anyone to make a bad decision. If you're a good investment, you get funding faster and on better terms. If you're a bad investment and the VC is any good, you'll get rejected even if you have 1000 leads.

Or another example... you're 30 and have a successful track record but you failed out of college at age 21. A VC is sizing you up and wants to know why you didn't finish. You're a different person at 30 than you are at 21, so it shouldn't matter, but you fear admitting the truth will kill the deal; VC's a bit of an Ivy snob. You say, "I ran out of money, 6 months later had an opportunity to do <X> and made a lot of money, and haven't had any need to go back". Is anyone hurt by this lie? Absolutely not.
Building fences online. The inevitable rise of the gated community.
It’s getting harder to see the default icon, that’s right. I don’t even know whether there is any sort of default icon for the calendar on the iPhone (I think it’s always just displaying the current date).
> Red Hat, Canonical, and Google are just some of the companies that have found valid business models around "free software".

That's a fallacy.

The majority of open-source sponsors are selling closed systems or services to sponsor their "free software" involvement. Google doesn't have a business model around "free software". Neither does IBM or Sun.

I'm also not Mozilla and my apps would probably never get in front of 40% of all Internet users. Even if I'm that lucky, it's probably not going to be a desktop app that's used to search for stuff.

To get paid for customizations, your software also has to be really popular for businesses (consumers don't pay for that, they either endure it or search for something better).

Did I mentioned that I don't live in Silicon Valley nor in Cambridge, but in an Eastern European country? So training is off.

I already mentioned consulting, but then I would be a hypocrite if I promoted the free software ideology while working on the worst kind of closed software, wouldn't I?

Anything else?
This article started out as a set of notes for myself, but I ended up finding so many resources, I thought other people might find it useful, so I wrote it up. There details and resources on ads, navigation, layout, and user interaction, and testing.
"Mobile" is what will become obsolete. These new devices are handheld computers pretending to be phones. Someday they will embrace this reality, and inherit all of the progress that's already played out on PCs/laptops - browsers, flash, etc.
I think his point about holding startups to the same standards of truth that we do "the most mature public companies" is actually a good one. We expect a lot of lying from the marketing departments of mature public companies.

But we feel worse about it when there are so few people that lying means it's Bob and Frank lying to us, not fifteen faceless people in a large department who we'll never meet, and never assign blame to.
I also stupidly forgot to list YC as an investor. Fixed.
Okay, there is ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp) which has been hacked up to work on the iPhone. It compiles to C.

I can't use it?

I hope there are other companies that will release usable tablet hardware.
Chorded keyboards didn't work because they had keys. Smartphones didn't work because they had not enough board. So, if you come up with something that's larger than a smartphone and can run a chorded keyboard without keys, you use...

...yes, you use qwerty.
It's not just the typography. Typing in iPad is stupid, too.
I'd love to see something like Logo or MIT's Scratch for the iPad. As I think about introducing my kids to computers that totally makes sense. This new language from Apple seems to preclude that.

It is totally off base.
Scientists Embrace Openness
Ask HN: How much does it cost to outsource iPhone app development?
There is an app that I would like to code up, but if the cost is not too prohibitive, I'd like to outsource it.

I searched the web for info on good iPhone dev shops and prices, but couldn't get good answers, so I thought I'd ask HN.

Of course, it all depends on the app. How complex, etc. Assume a moderate app, with, say, up to five different views, storing of some user data, and using the location framework.

Nothing too complicated. I think it might take me a month or more to code, but it should take a more experienced iPhone coder maybe two weeks.

Am I looking at $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, more?

Some info:

1) I don't want bottom-of-the-line developers. I don't mind paying extra for good developers

2) I don't mind paying up to several thousand dollars. My take is that if I can't make that money back from the app, I would prefer to have wasted money than 1 or 2 months of my life.

Besides the price, do you guys know of good iPhone dev shops? I take it that the standard procedure is to look on elance.com, odesk.com, etc, but I've never used them and I'm not sure how to use them to find a good developer.

I'm in the SF Bay Area, so a good local dev shop would be great, even though I wouldn't mind a dev shop from elsewhere.
"You might guess that Target and Walmart expanded similarly (I did, at least), but you'd be wrong. Both started in Central United States, and both were officially founded in 1962 by two men who both owned stores under a different name before the Target and Walmart boom. However, besides more rapid growth, Walmart first expanded outwards from its home state before going country-wide while Target seems to have gone wherever opportunity knocked."

http://projects.flowingdata.com/target/

I used to shop at Target store number 3 from time to time when I was a kid. As late as 1983, when I was working for a manufacturer in Taiwan, I had never heard of Walmart, that manufacturer's customer. K-Mart is the third discount store chain that was founded in the same year, 1962.
Does Canonical make a profit? A business model that loses money isn't really all that valid.

And the software that makes Google their money is proprietary, unless you can show me the link to the AdWords server source.
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but, my thoughts on this are that this is just another (poorly made) attempt by Apple to keep what they perceive to be inadequate applications off of their App Store. Any side effects[1] of their decision are simply added bonuses, not part of the primary reason behind it.

[1] With the most obvious side effects being not allowing a "code once, use anywhere" environment to gain popularity and being a direct shot at Adobe (CS5's release is only a few days away).
"So we know that people are living longer and longer. We also know that yearly health care costs are rising. We also seem to think we can keep the latter in control while continuing with the former."

This is a lie spread by the medical guild to convince you to give them more money. In face, the increase in life expectancy has leveled off during the past thirty years (citation: http://daveeriqat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/us_life_expect...), the time period during which medical costs have risen so much. All of the extra trillions we've spent on medicine have done very little.

"The fact is that older people incur much larger healthcare costs over their lifetimes [1]."

This is, in large part, because older people have less energy, and are therefore easier to bully into handing all their money over to the medical guild.

"We may get to a point where we have to make the hard decision of how long we want to wait until we retire and how long we really want to live after we retire."

This is, again, BS spread by the medical industry to inflate prices. The US spends twice as much on healthcare as any other country, yet ranks 42nd in life expectancy (citation: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293008,00.html, from Fox News, no less). The obscene amounts of money are not working.
Yeah, but if someone writes a compiler that compiles apps natively written for the iphone into android apps, Google will allow that and Apple can do nothing to stop it. So in a way this will mostly hurt Apple.
I find it interesting that Smashing Magazine started publishing stuff that many see as the exact opposite of their current image. Even articles that flat out criticize them. Think what you will of them, but at least they're trying to make some kind of a change.
iWork '09 was released in January 2009. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/06iwork.html

But why does the Keynote icon show Q4 2009?
IIS will convert streams to HTTP streaming for iPhones and iPads
Gleick's bio actually puts it at 125. There are a couple reasons to not care about this factoid:

- Feynman was younger than 15 when he took it, and very near this factoid in Gleick's bio, he recounts Feynman asking about very basic algebra (2^x=4) and wondering why anything found it hard
- the IQ is mentioned immediately before the section on 'grammar school', or middle school, implying that the 'school IQ test' was done well before he entered high school, putting him at much younger than 15. (15 is important because Feynman had mastered calculus by age 15, Gleick says, so he wouldn't be asking his father why algebra is useful at age >15.)
- Given that Feynman was born in 1918, this implies the IQ test was done around 1930 or earlier. Given that it was done by the New York City school district, this implies also that it was one of the 'ratio' based IQ tests - utterly outdated and incorrect by modern standards.
- Finally, it's well known that IQ tests are very unreliable in childhood; kids can easily bounce around compared to their stable adult scores.

So, it was a bad test, which even under ideal circumstances is unreliable & prone to error, and administered in a mass fashion and likely not by a genuine psychometrician.

As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data, and this isn't even a very good anecdote. (I charitably assume that Feynman isn't joking here about the score; Gleick gives no source.)
The sort of company that would restrict the original source language of applications in a developer agreement doesn't strike me as the sort of company that would laugh and applaud the linguistic cleverness necessary to justify adhering to the letter of the agreement and not the spirit.
Actually, you could survive solely on a diet of potatoes and milk, with all the essential nutrients provided - http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2828/could-i-surviv... (This includes more potato famine info as well).

I doubt fries and a shake would work as well. Then again, maybe it's just evolving 'essential nutrients' to 'essential nutrients with optional cholesterol'.
Yes[1]; most of the current population estimates show the world population leveling off in the 9-12 billion range. Percentage growth rate actually peaked in the mid 1960s (about 2.2%), and absolute growth peaked in the late 1980s (about 85 million people per year.) This is completely expected from logistic growth models[2].

Different species reach logistic growth in different ways. As the grandparent post noted, "reduced birth rate" is better than alternatives like "mass starvation". Lower birth rates are not a bad thing from a population growth perspective, though the demographic shift they bring about will require changes to our expectations regarding retirement. It's rather unfortunate that we're still using a retirement model designed when life expectancy was lower and birth rates were higher.

[1]"Who's that insightful person who posted about logistic growth and stole my thunder? Oh, hi, honey!"

[2]The image at http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image... shows actual world population data following a logistic curve, compared to an exponential curve above.
There was a company named GrandCentral with similar idea to be a centralized place for connecting and managing web services. They go bankrupt after spending hundred of mil $'s. Such ideas never work in a free competitive world.
Thank you very much for that!
So business as usual.
There are some interesting concepts in the videos hidden behind the floaty little black rectangles, but this has to be the most unusable video navigation interface I've ever seen.

It looks great, though.

[edit]

I see the "grid" button in the top left switches to a vastly more usable interface.
I'm sure if Adobe's lawyers can find any hook for a lawsuit, they'll be all over it.
No. Dishonesty (not limited simply to lying) is as impractical with your customers and investors as it is with family and friends.

Context: assuming that you are dealing with civilized situations in which neither party has initiated or threatened the use of force against anyone.
I haven't used PhoneGap, but I thought that it was just a UIWebView and Objective C? In which case, it would still be allowed.
I had no internet at home for about 3 months after moving to a new place once. I was a few blocks from my office and coffee shops, so it wasn't too hard to get online, but in my actual home I had none. I'm not sure I'd do it on purpose again, but it definitely had upsides. I went to bed at more normal times, read more books, cooked more, and cleaned more frequently.

I think the main difference is that, with the internet available, there is never really any time when I have nothing to do: there is always something interesting I could read, discuss, or do. But without the internet, there are all these bits of down time, e.g. I've finished breakfast but have 20 minutes before I need to leave to go somewhere.
I'm certainly not going for the "staring at a light bulb" argument... I think in the end it's probably a rather minor difference, akin to bad paragraph typesetting, bad fonts or even ligatures and hyphenation. Certainly not roasted eyeball territory...

In the end, what people like will be more important. I remember reading some studies where font choice on readability was tested, and the font that tested best wasn't the preferred one. Probably the same for reading devices. Let's say you compare the Kindle and the iPad for high school use. And let's say independent tests made clear that reading comprehension for the Kindle is better. Then you still would have to consider whether the kids aren't much more likely to pick up the iPad in the first place. Reading slightly slower is better than not reading at all. (Well, never mind that choosing more interesting books would probably make a bigger impact. Friggin' Lord of the Flies...)
Smart people realize that everyone has issues of one kind or another. Just tell the truth.

Most of your past transgressions will get you a free pass. Lieing about them won't.

IMO there is nothing wrong with this lie

You've just self-identified yourself as a person to avoid doing business with.
Rat Trap or Why Canada's drug policy won't check addiction
VCs can just talk to each other and figure out that you're a fraud, which alone is a great reason to not deal with you.

Don't lie! Morality is not just some arbitrary thing that you can make up as you go along if you want to achieve anything. The proper standard of morality for you and me and everyone else is not what will help or hurt the other party, it's what will help or hurt you and your long-term rational self-interest. Lying will necessarily prevent you from succeeding; see chapter 4 of Tara Smith's book, "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics", which is on honesty.
Ask HN: Why are HN relevant submissions getting killed today?
Medical Animations, iPad and mobile news, Zingchart (which I thought looked really interesting, but wanted to discuss their pricing model), Cyberwar regulations, 4 Square acquisition attempt, etc.?<p>What's going on? These all looked really interesting, at least from the titles. Some of these were killed within a couple of minutes of submission. What gives?
The world can live on hemp seeds, edible mushrooms and giant silkworm moth larvae. You can power a laptop by biking. You can power a bike by biking.

If every person had just one child, the world population would drop by 50% in thirty years, disregarding wars, catastrophes and epidemics.

The world won't end. It'll just change... when you notice it may end.
no it doesn't. it practically is a paraphrasing of qooxdoo's intro text.
Terence Tao on the relationship between classical and Bayesian reasoning
The best, and most dangerous, lesson I took was the value in 'mirroring' the person you are speaking with. Subtly mirroring their body language and speech patterns shows empathy, similarity etc, and since I wasn't naturally great at body language I found it really useful as I entered the business world.

Unfortunately, this habit ended up becoming second nature. While in many situations this was great - I just naturally found commonality in discussions - because I wasn't doing it intentionally it could become inappropriate.

One of my coworkers was flirting with me incessantly, and not only didn't I notice that behaviour I was actually mirroring it back. My girlfriend (now beautiful wife) met me for lunch one day and was ready to kill me (fair enough). Thankfully we worked through to the root cause - this book - and I changed the habit.

That doesn't take away from the book, it just shows that any of the lessons therein and discussed here will be most useful when you have a level of self-awareness that I was lacking, and which will help you apply them appropriately.
It doesn't work in yammer, market, contacts, google voice, or facebook. Google voice at least lets you copy the whole message, but then you have to paste and edit.
Just to avoid giving the link-spammer any more free visitors, I confirm that the link in the parent comment is nothing but a ripped excerpt from the original with no extra content.
Unless they start auditing source code and everyone's entire development process, there are lots of ways in which such a rule could be violated that would be completely undetectable (and some cases that would be easily detectable too).
Here's where this hurts. The Adobe blog stated that you'd be able to build iPhone apps.

It wasn't until recently that some of us stopped and thought, wait.... what if Apple decides to deny all Flash built apps???

A lot of time was probably lost by developers. There's going to be a lot of crushed dreams.

Plus, instead of spending $600 on CS5, I'll probably buy a Mac Mini.
Privacy advocates to FTC: Investigate realtime ad exchanges
My entire business (and livelihood) is centered on configuring and adapting free software to fit the needs of businesses. I contribute along the way because what one person needs, likely many need.

Free software is an infrastructure. I drive on it daily delivering value and getting paid.
What developer would choose to write an iPhone/iPad app with the risk of having to re-write or trash their app if apple drops the hammer.

Your comment is emitting dangerous levels of irony.
"If you're a good investment, you get funding faster and on better terms. If you're a bad investment and the VC is any good, you'll get rejected even if you have 1000 leads."

In other words, the investor should have known better than to listen to you. I agree on that part.
Yeah, there's definitely an uncanny valley where you start thinking it's a "buggy" desktop app vs. being a really slick web app.