skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Groupon is really killing it.

Q: Does anyone know whether similar concepts were attempted in the past by companies that just didn't execute properly or connect with consumers? Or is this something so simple it was just overlooked by over two decades of e-commerce?
hardly any SE sites have a community worth paying for, which is kind of the whole point
> its net effect has been positive for entire classes of software that are as-of-yet implausible via the internet.

I'm curious as to what you're referring to here.
Apple should have forgotten about the iPad and focused on Apple TV. Selling an Internet box with a Boxee like interface and all the content from the studios we seek. Sell various subscriptions. That would be revolutionary and yet will take a years to get there due to the studios getting huge wads of their revenue via cable TV. Who the majority of us hate our cable company and long for substitute like the Apple TV mentioned here.
Scala has pretty nice concurrent programming support with its actors, which can even run distributed across machines: http://akkasource.org/ . Scala actors are modeled after Erlang.
Same here....knew about it and assumed everyone else knows about it too.
I think a lot of good stuff remains hidden because people never really 'reach' them.
And the ones who know about it, don't care to keep reminding people, since repetition sounds weird and is frowned upon amongst us hackers.
(On a sidenote) Interestingly enough, revision/ repitition is how our minds remember things too. So, in some cases, things we know exist, are bound to be forgotten by us, if we don't spread the news, regularly.
I know I have definitely forgotten many of these "interesting, i gotta read it sometime later" websites.

Hey, maybe we should make a Bot that keeps sending others info about these kind of sites that we know, and dont share much, so that once someone else knows about it....slowly it still keeps spreading , instead of just dying and never reaching a lot of audience, until way later....
Sell it on eBay. They seem to be going for around $575+ for the 16GB model. It's not really a bad profit: getting paid $75 to play with a new toy for a week.
This is a very misleading title, the CEO of Unity didn't promise 'Uninterrupted Service'

The only thing he said was:

We have a great relationship with Apple and will do everything we can to comply with Apple’s TOS (also, these are ‘beta TOS’, and these easily get changed) so that we can provide uninterrupted service to our more than 120K users.

Which means he will do everything they can to comply..the final decision is still in Apple's hands.
Ayurveda plants endangered / laetrile kills cancer
Just out of curiosity, is your $150-200/hr expectation based on empirical data, and for what programming languages? I'm certainly not discounting your statement, just looking for more information about from where that expectation arises.
where can I listen?
Sure, they can do as they please.

Very few people assumed that this would apply to everyone but it does make it very risky base your business on breaking the rules and even more so to have you business make tools that does it.
Lens production involves high fixed costs and fairly low marginal costs.

Right now you have to build a lens factory so you can sell lenses to professionals and indie filmmakers.

As soon as everybody and their parents are buying DSLRs instead of video cameras the price on good lenses will surely fall.
In my experience most companies that pay 150-300/hr are big companies who get their people through contracting agencies. Which agencies of course take about half of that for themselves. As a lone programmer, unless you are very good at marketing, you find work with smaller shops, or startups, which can't afford that kind of rate. So you end up with roughly the same range ($90-150/hr) in pocket, whether working alone, or through a contract firm.
For music instruments, multitouch is an amazing revolution. For too long, we've been restricted to either very expensive control surfaces with physical knobs and faders, or software solutions which required a mouse and only let us move one virtual fader or knob at a time.

Now, I can turn a 10" screen into any imaginable control surface, including using all 10 fingers to move multiple objects at the same time. It's heaven. The iPad does what you would have had to spend $thousands for previously in the recording/mixing world.
The side by side issue for windows, especially browsers is intrinsic in the small screen size. For now, the desktop is the place for activity like that.

However ... Remember all those Star Trek episodes with people sitting at a desk with _several_ pad like devices spread out in front of them; like a paper covered desk? Now imagine a similar situation with several tablet devices that have some type of screen bridging/device linking software. I can easily imagine scenarios where this will be useful. Now imagine combining that _with_ a desktop display.

Frankly, I think there is a big future in tablet and multi-screen devices as adjunct input and manipulation platforms. Dig up a copy of a short anime called _Pale Cocoon_ and watch what the people are doing with the computer interfaces in that show. Whether or not the UI concepts would actually work in real life, the ideas presented are _very_ much worth thinking about.
This isn't a bad article, but it's not a very smart article either. The ideas are essentially the same ones people have been repeating for days, it takes a long time to express these ideas we've already heard and it employs even less logic and methodology than many writers (for example, John Gruber) in coming to its conclusions. Not trying to be excessively negative or anything — it just seems very much like a "me too." Does anybody else see an original idea here?
i have one of the bigger stack exchange sites...and I'll be moving to Shapado if Stack Exchange kicks me off. I was already looking into them, since their rates were almost 3 times cheaper $50/1mm page views vs SEs $129/1mm pageviews.

If you don't let the admins make money, there is no reason for them to bother building a community.
might as well axe out the 'www' while you're at it.
It also only can use Bluetooth to connect to devices. That limits one's ability to do things like edit HD video with it. It also limits the possibilities with respect to hooking a lot of things up to it (like musical keyboards, etc). Don't just assume the people are saying it's 'consumption-only' just because you can't program on it.
IBM Word-Cloud generator: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/wordcloud

It works quite well, but you will need to tune parameters to get good output. I am using simple script which generate few variants of settings and than hand pick one image.
The touch screen will not provide an adequate replacement for buttons and knobs - if you emulate buttons and knobs, that is. With capacitive multi-touch, there's a real opportunity to rethink the interface here. Interaction in the past was limited to what hardware can do in real life, so why should we keep those limitations now that they don't exist? The music world, unfortunately, has this "old-school" mentality for the most part. The focus is on previous hits and successes with synths and hardware that worked in the past (in this case the Electribe), not with what could be created with new ones. There's a real opportunity here that will take time to play out.

As for the sound card - I agree, the DAC in the iPad is probably similar to the other iDevices in the past.. Pretty good for consumer standards, but poor by pro standards - not to mention multiple outs, ins, etc. Where the iPad stands to gain the most is as a remote controller for a larger rig running on a laptop - via Bluetooth or Wifi. Heck the audio jack could be used for modulated data and have it interpreted by the host machine as a control input, a la Serato et al. Ever since the $2k Lemur people have been hungering for this - it will happen sooner or later!
Do you guys use Windows 7 yet? (I only ask because I work at a big company, and I estimate we will get something other than XP shortly after hell freezes over.)
I can attest that everything Ben says is 100% consistent with the way he ran his company. Even today, ten years later, _my_ employees know better than to invite me to a meeting that doesn't have the set of Objective/Agenda/Outcomes in the calendar entry.
not while there are still stupid websites that don't work without it.
$250M was the valuation at the last round. $1.2B is the current valuation.

And, to make it more credible, only Arrington is reporting it.
No not a spam engine. A spam engine would have to force itself against people and would fight an uphill battle.

What you have to do is find a way to get people to know what you have in such a way that they don't perceive it as spam (because it is not).

Yes that is much more difficult initially, but it will become easier later on.
I think you are on the right track with the idea - but I see some problems with some of the specifics.

1) A lot of companies are paranoid and will want to run this inside their network/firewall. You should develop that option (look at GitHub firewall for example)

2) What incentive do platform providers have in pooling achievements / users - I don't see that happening. I would focus on a white box rewards platform - think SimpleGeo for rewards.

I wouldn't focus on having Webchiever being the destination for leader-boards ...etc because then you are competing with the people you are allegedly providing a service for. Become the plumbing, and if you do it well people will pay.

Cool idea.
So the problem is not that the market for programmers is too big, it's the other way around: the market of jobs available at a better rate is too small and larger companies have this market cornered.

My hourly rate expectation was based on a few years working at Accenture and seeing rates for Java programmers. I figured it would be adjusted down for individual developers, but I didn't realize it would be that much.
Yep - same guy. I was wondering what he'd got himself up to.
I've been thinking along similar lines, and there are pros and cons.

On the one hand, you get cross-platform portability; once you have an iPhone app written to comply with 3.3.1, there's nothing Apple can do about you porting it elsewhere (or, at least, they haven't tried anything yet).

On the other hand, you have to write in a C derivative. It's pretty clear that tools like Unity and Lua have productivity benefits, and you lose these. I think most programmers are complaining more about the loss of freedom and productivity than the loss of cross-platform benefits, which are more of a happy byproduct of working at a higher level of abstraction.

So it doesn't really get around 3.3.1 completely.
Well, that is a promise.

Edit because of downvoting:

I'm no expert in English but it seems that http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=promise defines promise as a verbal commitment by one person to another agreeing to do (or not to do) something in the future

Which is what Unity developers just did.
Have not read the paper yet, but, ironically, according to some scientists, initially LSD was thought to be psychosis inducing drug, useful for teaching medical students about inner world of mentally ill people.
No way. There's nothing special about www. Subdomains could well resolve to different IP addresses.
it scares me that yet another device encouraging passive consumerism may become immensely popular

You mean like one of these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book

But seriously, think about it. Why would a "media consumption" device become popular? It might be because "passive consumerism" is popular. The iPad does what most people already do with laptops and desktops, which they did before with TVs and VCRs and CD players and game consoles and newspapers and magazines and books.

It's just technology conforming to what people actually do, which historically seems to work out in everybody's favor--moreso than trying to change human nature to fit an ideal, at least--in the form of new capabilities and the cognitive surplus to use them.
Based on rates I saw for Java developers while working at Accenture for a few years. I adjusted down, assuming individual contractors wouldn't be able to bill out at the same rate, I just didn't adjust down enough...
It is unfortunate that you have designed your own query language rather than allowing true SQL.

Maybe get someone else to voice-over the intro video.
Informavore: The Future of Data Privacy
My interview with Joel Spolsky on why Stack Exchange didn't work
Well there's plenty of sites owners (with credit cards) that might assume otherwise. It depends on the target audience, but if it was for say doctors or lawyers 1/10th the traffic or even 1/100th the traffic of a typical programming site would be a success.

Maybe they did a survey among all the sites to come to your conclusion, but it seems odd they never tried go paid.
If someone builds a clone of Cocoa Touch that runs on another platform, Apple will find a way to nuke it from orbit.
I thought it involved Cucumber creator Aslak Hellesøy.
Croatian teenager wakes from coma speaking fluent German
Bit.ly 1.3, Bitly.Pro, and stats
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The opposite is true, too. Success is not necessarily the result of following a pattern.
Portable music players were always easy. Apple always had competition, from big players and from small player, at high price points and low price points, competing on features, competing on design. Portable music players didn't get too easy. Apple ran out of people to sell them to.
Paul Buchheit had a good quote at the 08 startup school.

If someone says:
"That's impossible."

You should understand it as:
"According to my very limited
experience and narrow
understanding of reality, that's
very unlikely."

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E

Slides: http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-buchheit-at-star...
"“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”

-- Oscar Wilde"

(ellyagg, 2010)
Good for you! Go for it!
AdAdmire - Buy twitter followers (ethically)
Social Media Demographics: Who’s Using Which Sites?
It hadn't occurred to me that caring for the quality of what my family and I ingest had anything to do with "authenticity", I thought it was all about trying to take care of ourselves and hopefully minimize the possibility of having to fix things after they are broken.

I for one, love modernity, buy some food from local sources, some others even from the "hippie" stores, other from the local cheapie chain supermarkets. It's always balancing quality, convenience, budget and our health. We all have a different sense for what is a good balance between those criteria.

Surely the author has a different perspective than mine, and may be right for even a majority of cases, there are definitely those that seek validation and some sense of self worth with their behaviour. Others, and this is my perspective, just want to be pragmatic and maybe not too stupid.
I am in no way against IM as a component of customer support: I think it should be used in conjunction with (or even in leiu of depending upon your customer base) a phone call wherever possible. But I don't see how you keep score on your pipeline or your customer base purely from an inbox or buddy list. One thing that CRM and bug tracking systems offer is statistics and an aggregated view so that as you scale you don't have rely purely on your intuition or escalations (e.g. customers angry with your deteriorating service levels). My fear with an ad hoc approach is not that it's not appropriate for the early days but that it won't scale with your success, and may fail unpredictability if you get distracted by other issues.
^^^ Great advice for anything entrepreneurial.
I've actually been building an app for this, though I suck at making CSS word clouds. Worry not, the source is on GitHub.

Here's mine: http://www.cvloud.com/max
And here's the source: http://github.com/maxaf/cvloud
Is Apple's iAd the biggest thing since Google Search?
I've been using Apple gear since '90 or so, and my current (2008) MBP seems to be the lemon of the set. So far: blew a fan, DVD drive and shorted out the battery. Thought the Airport card was toast this morning, but it seems to have come back.

Yeah, it's just a single data point, but when a 12" Powerbook is still going strong (albeit slowly), the series of fails in my latest laptop is depressing. I really, really hope it's a one-off.
I thought the article was mostly useless.

It's summed up by this paragraph, "Today, Apple is more concerned about having to re-live its recent history — getting jerked around by Microsoft or held hostage by Adobe — than what it thinks would be manageable damage by a few developers that may leave its platform. Some may regard that as being arrogant. For Apple it’s the price of being in charge of its own destiny. To capitulate at the height of its newly found vigor would be suicidal."

Which doesn't even attempt to address why requiring all programs be originally developed in objc,c, or c++ is a good way to prevent being held hostage by Adobe, and nor does it address the huge repercussions it could have. It's not a "few" developers that would be effected by this change if its strictly enforced. It's practically every 3d game on the market.

In short, a lot of words, not a lot of content.
I think you're right. Since they don't have a trial, I was hoping someone here used it before and could give a mini-review.
I'd say the iPad makes the next step harder, not impossible. Just because you wouldn't want to program on it doesn't mean someone else wouldn't. And if someone wanted to write a novel, nothing is stopping them from starting to write it on an iPad, one day realizing they want an external keyboard, then making the jump to a netbook or maybe even writing on the desktop that they can (and maybe already do) sync the iPad with.

Personally, I'd be more concerned that this new generation of texters, tweeters, and Facebook wall-posters doesn't have the attention span and grammatical capability to write a novel, regardless of what physical tools are available to do so. I was surprised at how many of my classmates freshman year of college were found lacking in the area of writing skills, and I don't imagine the pervasiveness of terse, abbrievieted, and often shallow communication is improving that.
I have a really hard time believing anyone on HN is pro-Palin :/ That would just be bizarre.
I don't quite get this. I was actually just about to create a SE account for the purpose of building an audience for our niche startup.

So, now my idea has to be vetted? Lame.
Ask HN Spreadsheet Contractors: How do you feel about being undercut?
I've been looking through the contractors spreadsheet and I notice that there are many people with similar skills with large discrepancies in rates. How do those on the West Coast, for example, feel about seeing others from the Midwest, South or another country charging a fraction of what you do?<p>I know it's known that developers from the West Coast are generally more expensive than other places in the country (and, of course, throughout the world) but, it seems more stark when scrolling through the spreadsheet.
> Part of that is simpler usage, but part of it is not having preconceived notions about how to use the device.

I'm thinking that most of it is simpler usage. Unless you're qualifying "I can't access my favorite websites because they use flash" under 'preconceived notions.' At least for me, I would be disappointed where the functionality was lacking (i.e. "it can't be done" vs "it can only be done in a different way"), and that is something that a child wouldn't suffer from as much.
is Apple allowed to pick and choose whom they want to enforce that clause on?

Of course they are. And as long as your interests are aligned with that of Apple (making high quality apps and selling them for lots of $), they'll keep being approved.
So then, do you think that Mahalo has a bum rap? Because the rep they have here is pretty close to "Google spammer".
Let's get rid of tld's, too!
A game site I used to frequent. I always thought that this would scupper new word-of-mouth visitors.

http://ntsc-uk.com/

http://www.ntsc-uk.com/
Pretty well, but too early to tell. Closed-beta w/ 4 clients is very positive. Hoping to open up to public in ~4-6 weeks.

Some issues:
- 40+ employee companies which would really benefit from information retention / formalizing institutional memory require a real sales effort and can be resistent to switch to our SaaS approach for information which may be sensitive/private
- not as useful for companies < 12 employees or for companies where everyone is colocated (obviously)
- search is tough; it's easy to do ok, but we need it to be very very good; definitely stretching brain
- unsurprisingly, for companies that user yammer / 37signals / web services (2 of 4 clients), it's natural for employees to switch general questions from email to our platform, but for other two clients much tougher; unclear whether this is because of something cultural at the businesses or what
- am not good at sales (yet...)
- current implementation alone may not be enough to warrant use (i.e., might do well to be integrated with existing project management or CRM or other web services already in use)

I tried to stay with a MVP approach, but it's tough for a tinkerer like myself. I always want to add this or that and constantly have to force myself to stay simple. Big learning experience w/ that and with integrating user feedback from the get-go (balancing act between what's in my head, what client 1 wants and what client 2 wants -- opening up to larger audience earlier is probably better for MVP).
"She can get to her favorite apps and watch her videos in a flash. "

Pun intended?
gaming? perhaps mobile gaming, but definitely not gaming in general. Touch screens are horrible for a large chunk of games. I can't even imagine how you'd play an FPS, but maybe that's my limited imagination. And television viewing? Why? Who wants to hold a tv while they watch it? And if you're not holding it, why not watch an actual tv? I guess for watching on the go... but who does that? Kids in the backseat I guess
Doesn't sound like you've spent much time with the software keyboard. It's quite good. Also there's a reason why Apple makes a keyboard dock and added bluetooth keyboard support. Not sure if your argument really holds up in the face of these facts.

One of my favorite iPad features is that Pages goes into WriteRoom mode in the landscape orientation.
AOL Keywords FTW!
I was responding to a claim that the iPad is "almost unusable for the overwhelming majority of web users (at least as anything more than a novelty [...])".

If mom's savvy enough to use a computer aside from her iPad then she can use that computer to get to the sites she wants to go to that her iPad doesn't support. If she's only savvy enough for an iPad, then she's still better off being able to get to the non-Flash parts of the web than nothing.
Why not jump ship to Shapado?
any reasonably serious musician

Snobbish bullshit like this is a bigger threat to creativity than anything the iPad does or doesn't do.
Houses are decently cheap, rent is cheap in most places (not Silicon Valley). The US is overall not a terribly expensive place to live, if you don't want to be in Manhattan, Hollywood or Silicon Valley.

Being a decent software engineer, your raises can outpace inflation pretty handily though I'm pretty sure I'm not managing 10% annually over my career. My salary is 2.3 times what it was when I started, about 12 years ago. My calculator widget thinks that's about 7% annual increase and I'm now living much better than I did in 1998, despite living in a more expensive area.