skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love for you to read the rest of the book (several chapters are already online for free). I'd be interested in seeing how you feel about it after doing so.

We've worked with a number of small organizations in helping them find their stories and tell them. Largely, what we've come back to is similar to what you're stating here: there are very few immutable rules. You just have to figure out what you're doing, try things out, and make the best choices you can.

The challenge for the marketer (or writer in this case) is to try to find patterns and distill meaning from them. The truth is, marketing--and business success--is hard to pin down, or repeat. Nevertheless, owners of small companies often seem to think (erroneously) that the big guys have it all worked out, and that it's easy for them.

What I worked to do with this book, was outline a set of good, solid suggestions, peppered with anecdotes relating to those who seem to have been successful, as well as those efforts that haven't. It's imperfect, but I believe there are useful suggestions in there; it's up to the reader to determine what might work for them.

For the record, I like the strategy: "Work hard, even if you don't see any immediate payoff, and get a little lucky." The tough part is that there are a number of other questions that such a suggestion won't help answer. At those times, we have to dig deeper and get into the more gray areas. It's harder to make clear and irrefutable statements about those, but no less important to try to find some plausible arguments.
Posted 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387981
Writing a Research Paper in Mathematics
Something more active-voice like GoingGoogle would work better. But they should consider losing the "going/gone" thing altogether and pick another word. UpgradeToGoogle or something.
They're advertising to a corporate audience who may still be on IE6/IE7, I can imagine that's why.
Web App Marketing Metrics by FreshBooks CEO
Why the author is starting to hate email: problems exist between keyboard and chair.
Zoho Search: Actionable Search Across Apps
That's why it so significant that you can easily change the underlying assumptions (which updates the $$/time calculations).

It was a good counter to the BS meter that initially went off in my head too.
One way is to make it clear that the site is not responsible for the user submitted content, and allow users to request to have a post removed. If posts are removed within 2 business days, that should be fair.

Also, the site does not need to be owned or operated within the USA.
Building a Space Elevator in 7 Years?
I worked for McDonald's for years and went through many of their "experiments". It took us workers about 12 minutes to figure out how well something would work out. We often wondered who thought up this stuff up and why didn't they ask us first.

Some of the losers:

- A hard ice cream cone that was supposed to "soften" while the customer ate their food. But no matter how much we pushed them, no one ordered them with their meal. They came back for them, but they were too hard to bite into, so people just stopped buying them.

- Hamburgers with tomatoes. There just wasn't an easy enough way to handle tomatoes at the volumes McDonald's does.

- Grilled cheese. No one wanted them.

- Plastic trays. They were supposed to reduce paper costs. But people just left them on their tables, so we had to hire an additional dining room cleaner, offsetting any savings. (Once they changed the garbage cans to have tray receptacles on top, people got the hint and started using them again.)

On the other hand, there were some real winners:

- The Egg McMuffin. duh. All that store capacity had been wasted on coffee and donuts.

- The Quarter Pounder. Hard to believe McDonald's was so successful with those tiny burgers for so many years before.

- And of course, the Big Mac, which was invented by my boss's boss in order to compete with Eat N Park's Big Boy:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_383369.html

(The most amazing fact was that he lived to be an old man even though he ate at McDonald's every day.)
Google has been embracing flash like crazy lately, partially to differentiate from Apple. Froyo will support it, as will Chrome OS. Seems natural enough to me. IE6 / IE7 support makes sense too.
I agree with the signature part in emails where people talk about "Please think about the environment before printing this email." And some people have some grand quotes of this and that. My college's admin staff were notorious for doing this.

I find that utterly annoying.
There are different varieties of squatters. Drug addicted transients are not equivalent to small business owners with roots in the local community who happen to have an emotional attachment to that particular house. Given the choice of squatters, I'd prefer to have squatters with a non-zero income.
Top 50 GitHub Projects on Twitter
Yes, probably. PKD wrote paranoid fiction (his own words, I believe)--his stories are not really tied to an particular technology, but more to a state of mind.
The Intelligent Investor: You Should Be Worried
Masten: First Intentional In-Flight Shutdown and Relight of a VTVL Rocket
Cells. A massively multi-agent Python programming game.
It wasn't edited for accuracy or logic or fact-checking or bias

In general, I do not expect main stream publications to be able to edit articles regarding economics. Journalists and editors are astonishingly ignorant of basic economics, to say nothing of statistics or law. There's a reason that economics professor Dean Baker keeps an entire blog devoted to correcting the idiocies and distortions found in traditional reporting (see http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/ ); it is the same reason that economics professor Brad Delong regularly lambastes major newspapers on his blog by chanting "why, oh why can't we have a better press corps?" (see http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/better_press_corps/ ). So the fact that this article didn't appear in the Washington Post (where I've read "fact-checked" articles which presumed that inflation does not exist) doesn't really trouble me. It is written by an attorney and officers of the court are generally subject to sanction if they misrepresent cases.

I like McSweeney's probably almost as much as you do

Um, I don't read McSweeny's; I read this article because it was linked from an economics/policy blog I respect.

Unfortunately: still not OK to defraud them.

I don't believe the behavior in question falls under fraud statutes.

This is surprising: generally we expect corporations to act in their best interest taking full advantage of their rights under the law, even if doing so violates the spirit of the law. How odd that we apply such different standards to individuals.
I think it is just further proof that necessity is the mother of invention.

Flash was invented out of a need for artists to be able to create animations on the web. Now there is a back catalog of Flash content which is losing a home. A swf player of some kind is needed to preserve that content. Someone had to build this.
What I don't understand is all the people praising HTML5 because it uses less CPU than Flash yet Chrome ends up using 15-20% CPU just to render a simple animation unlike Flash.
Ground Video of Masten's VTVL Rocket Shutdown and Relight
OSX/OpinionSpy Spyware Installed by Freely Distributed Mac Applications
And another fun one:

http://www.gonegoogle.com/presentation/cf0b55c655124807a89b9...
I forgot that many people on HN can't distinguish between normative and positive claims, so let me clarify: I don't think this behavior is terribly ethical, but I do think it can produce more efficient economic outcomes. There are many of unethical acts that improve economic efficiency.
You do realize that "no widgets" is just a bullshit distraction?
"Why don't you just work for free..?"

But the contributors like pg are already creating and publishing these articles for free. Most of them benefit only indirectly from their writing, and that benefit is increased, not decreased, when the writing is distributed to more readers.
I'd never heard of them, but it does seem that they're aiming for a niche directly opposite to my usual experience.

Seems like they make some awesome stuff though!
Redirect. Not link.
Each core in Knights Corner runs at 1.2GHz, is supported by
512-bit vector processing units, has 8MB of cache, and four
threads per core.

That's 200 simultaneous threads. Wow. That's almost like a GPU.
Comments on this article from when it was first posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795976
For every unwise borrower there is an unwise lender. My sympathies are more with the borrower, since the lender, as the side that supposedly hired people with financial acumen, bears a majority of the responsibility for assessing risk.
Too bad Going Google (Premier) limits you to that 25 GB/user...

There is no extra storage. None. I will be reaching my 25 GB limit by August 1st. I pay Google my $50 per Google Apps user and I can only get 25 GB. No more space. Period. WTF is up with that? I can't even pay for an extra user and get that space assigned to my user.

Now I have to plan a setup for my own email server and migrate all my friggin data if Google doesn't add this soon.

Thanks, Google, for forcing me to DELETE email or move...

(I'm a paying Google Apps user who only wants to get the feature Gmail accounts get, Extra effing Storage for a price).
Money managers should pay the same tax rates as everyone else
Another thought is to change the website name to MyNeighborMightBeADrugDealerMightNotBeButSometimesIWonder.org
Just Flash support. Didn’t sound to me as though Google actually likes Flash.
I completely agree with you. However, I don't think this is a invention directly out of necessity. Instead, I would say closed systems with a controlled goal might be the fertilizer for a better design.
Yeah, my 1-person company could save $32,000 - how, they don't really say. That would be amazing, since my software licensing costs for the year are nil.
I agree with you, but I'll allow that it may depend on to whom you are marketing yourself. I think it may sell to, and may even be necessary in order to sell to, a slightly-below-average non-discriminating (to you and me) consumer.
“They’re all crooks."

Let me see if I got this right... You borrowed money. Now you choose not to make the monthly payment that you have already agreed to pay. And spend that money on other stuff. And you call them the crooks?
In this case the problem lies with the political pressure applied by both Bush and Clinton on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue giving out more mortgages.
It seems to me that this article intentionally ignores a very central point: These men aren't practicing Stoicism. She seems to demonstrate pretty well that Stoicism might have great benefits for a lot of them, but the actual examples of "Stoicism" she shows are kind of the philosophical equivalent of Greenspunning. It has some features of Stoicism, but doesn't really embrace the whole.
I think #3 needs to be expanded a bit. It seems to be saying less "javascript is good for web applications" as it is saying "the web is good for javascript web applications". There's a very fine distinction between those two statements. :-)

Maybe there's a grain of truth to it, but it doesn't particularly convince me fairly well. First of all, you're presuming that it's a good thing to share code on the client and server side. It turns out that there is such thing as reusing code too much. In particular, I don't like the idea that now not only do I have to worry about browser-specific hacks in my client-side code, but I have to also worry about browser-specific hacks in my server-side code as well.
I don't think so. The advice is, don't try to be everything. Iterating until finding market fit isn't about trying to be everything; it's about finding that one thing.
Hamburgers with tomatoes. There just wasn't an easy enough way to handle tomatoes at the volumes McDonald's does.

Interesting. My primary reason for always eating at Wendy's over McDonalds is the tomatoes (well that, and Wendy's has a much better meat to bun ratio). I wonder why Wendy's can handle the tomatoes, but not McDonald's? Is the volume a problem at the individual store level, or at the corporate, bulk purchasing and distribution level?
They're clearly colluding to change the data and get the report out there.

They're clearly not. If you wish to make a claim I suggest you cite sources. Here are some[1][2][3].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/latest-climate-h...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/no-formal-charge...

[3] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a...
Putting books online increases sales by giving extra exposure to those books which are online, compared to books which are not online. Assuming that it would still boost sales if all books were online is a textbook example of the fallacy of composition.
It would be better if the "assumptions" were clearly displayed. Until I found them (mostly due to a comment here) my bullshit meter was loudly buzzing. That aside, it's a little disingenuous that the page refuses to let me enter certain values for assumptions, or add capabilities we already have.

Google seem to believe, for example, they're the only company that offer offsite/PDA acecess, spam-free email, IM/chat for employees, collaborative document editng, and have non-disruptive downtime.

I think not my friends.
Can a Pig with Bread Wings Make the World Suck Less?
Some people probably just assume that switching to HTML5 content always uses fewer CPU resources. There are plenty of informed reasons to prefer HTML content over Flash though. One is that putting performance into the hands of multiple companies will introduce competition. Just like with Javascript speeds, you can expect browser-makers to start racing in other areas of HTML5 performance.

I wouldn't be surprised to see HTML5 outperform equivalent Flash content in a year or so.
This is incorrect. Vast numbers of books have been on Usenet for at least two decades, and that was hardly the earliest internet book “piracy”. Pick an arbitrary “book people want” and it’s quite likely to be online.
For some reason a number of newsish sites/blogs are running this as new news; it's from at least as far back as 2007:

http://www.switched.com/2007/12/10/boy-saves-sister-from-moo...
I find it interesting that debt is always couched in moral terms for individuals, but business terms for corporations. Somehow it's immoral for individuals to work a system for their advantage, but it's standard operating procedure for a business.
And piano manufacturing was one of the major industries in America.
Can a non-compete force you to 'unfriend' your work contacts when changing jobs?
what they're doing is morally indefensible

I don't generally classify actions as morally indefensible or not; 1 bit of information seems awfully limiting. So while this seems somewhat immoral to me, it doesn't strike me as a major moral fault, which is what I think of when people bandy about the phrase "morally indefensible."

any costs to the bank their behavior incurs is largely going to be borne by good-faith mortgageholders and new prospective good-faith home buyers

I think we have to keep costs in perspective; there is no data to suggest that this is happening in significant numbers. So costs must be small. And since occupied homes retain more value (and vacant homes cause adjancent homes to lost value), economically, this might be better for everyone, including the banks.

Historically, real estate industry figures have often complained about strategic defaults with no real data to back them up. Furthermore, these costs pale in comparison to an industry simply abandoning its underwriting standards wholesale. When all the banks decide that they're not going to bother verifying income before loaning people hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's going to cause massive problems down the line, and those problems dwarf any caused by the defaulters described in this story.

Here's to hoping it catches up with them sooner than later.

Given that there are finite resources devoted to law enforcement, it seems bizarre to sic them on these people. Surely there are better targets for law enforcement attention? Like, maybe, every bank officer who decided to abandon their own underwriting standards?
That's a straw man argument, isn't it? The fact that some pundit somewhere drew a line between Morgan Stanley's contracts and Joe Smith's contracts doesn't mean we have to be held to a different standard on Hacker News.

Or, more directly: it's immmoral for businesses to violate contracts too. What's the rest of your argument?
At the very bottom of the color-coded legend on the right, it says "other (dotted)".
Only if you have a record of the frequency changes.

The article says that in London they have a record going back 5 years.

Is there any such record in the US? I have no idea. I don't think there would be - till this idea came up there was no reason to make such a record.
karjaluoto:

I will happily read the rest of the chapters you've got up there, as I quite like your writing style. Though, as I said above, I do think that some of the overall conclusions you've drawn might end up finding lessons and principles in models that are too complex—if not chaotic—to bear them, I like much of the pragmatic advice you gave. Elements like opportunity cost and brand continuity are always good things to reason from, even if there might not necessarily be a 'And THAT'S why MacDonald's doesn't sell pizza' Just-So bow on the top.

As far as what I might offer as an alternative to the specific Macdonalds pizza lesson we're discussing here, I might say that what it really comes down to is knowing WHAT you're doing, and WHY. I really do think that being prudent and judicious with the directions you take your business is very important, just as I think it's very important to continually innovate and reevaluate the market, its technologies, and its material resources. The key is that if you chase after new opportunities just because they're there, you're just as sunk as if you continually 'double down' (as they odiously say) on the same form you've already built just because it's worked in the past and it's what the subhead on your stationery says.

Both of these tactics will be necessary. And maybe even still when you're young and agile. The most important thing is understanding what factors in your market will encourage one approach, and what factors will encourage the other, and to be able to explain to your team and your customers (and yourself) why a certain course is best. Mindfulness and all that.

I think a lot of the industrial companies of the 19th and 20th centuries are interesting in this regard. You could take someone who made a fortune on rubber boots for 40 years. If you ask his customers what his brand stands for, they'll say it's boots. Thus making a whole new product, like tank treads, looks like trying to install a pizza oven in a burger joint. But if the Great War comes, you're gonna have a very new and very big market in rubber treads. And it turns out that a boot company making tires is more like a burger joint selling coffee: the products use a lot of the same techniques to produce and sell and it turns out that your core competency isn't boots at all, but rubber manufacturing. Of course as noted , the ability to see the commonalities between burgers and coffee or boots and tank treads is maybe irreducible.
Your argument here seems to boil down to, "the Washington Post has inadequate editorial standards for business reporting, so we should be happy to cite outlets that have literally no editorial standards for business reporting." Sorry, I disagree.

But you should read McSweeney's. It often pretty excellent.
I believe this example is a SWF running in Canvas (as opposed to vanilla HTML5).

Regardless, with HTML5 you have all the benefits of an OSS rendering engine where performance can be improved by individual implementors (eg, Apple improving WebKit on A4/ARM) or groups of developers with similar interests (eg, Google/Apple/other contributors to WebKit for x86). Where as with Adobe's Flash plugin, you're pretty much reduced to hoping or praying that Adobe will fix problems relevant to your interests.

In other words, the performance may suck now in some demos, but the situation is better than relying on Adobe... for some companies anyway.
Mr. Ballmer did not underperform - a closer look at Microsoft's "lost decade"
A bigger problem is the homeowners mortgage interest deduction. In terms of its stated policy rational, it is a complete joke, but modification let alone elimination remains political suicide.
I'm sorry I haven't noticed. But I do have noticed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387630 because it points to the page I was posting, the homepage. Too bad it hasn't became very popular
The banks don't want to foreclose, because they do better with "extend and pretend" ... until the day before the foreclosure they can still carry the worthless loan as an asset at 100% of its original value (if I understand this part of the process correctly).

Who is the greater criminal?

Some old lady living in a crappy $125K house in Florida--or bank execs who in concert with corrupt regulators are hiding billions in bad loans and meanwhile paying themselves 100K bonuses or more?
This simplification presumes that there are only two parties with stakes in a residential mortgage. That's not at all true. There are tens of millions of residential mortgages taken out in good faith and held in good standing, and they will absolutely pay in one way or another for the abuse of the system by either lenders or homeowners.
The first 6 months of traffic stats
Which do you think grabs more attention in a resume:

- Graduated from xxx University with Honor in computer science

OR

- My site was so engaging to students that my university had to threaten to retract my degree three months prior to my graduation in order to force me to shutdown my site.

This is the kind of PR Bill Gates get by dropping out of college. If I was him, I'd keep the site running, let the university take my degree, then take them to the court (knowing that I won't win), just to create more media attention.

"A few weeks away from getting his degree" is exactly the kind of thinking that I'm trying to avoid. But of course, who knows what I would actually do when I'm in his shoes.