skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
word of mouth will kill the phone

I'm not so sure. Of all the complaints about AT&T consistently dropping calls, people are still flocking to the iPhone. I realize they don't have a choice, but once again, people are voting with their dollars. They're willing to accept a subpar network for a cool phone.
I really enjoyed the thinking in this article and I think there's a tremendous amount of truth to it. It's surprising how often simple potential changes with disproportionately large positive effects (e.g. loosening structure so that creative people can, ya know, work) get dismissed because of dogma.
This video shows one iPhone calling another when the phones are within a few inches, as close as 1 inch apart. It's frankly amazing that the call completes, and doesn't drop more often. This video isn't particularly reliable evidence of a problem. My own experience indicates that there is a high probability of serious radio frequency interference between two cell phones that are closer than about 10 or 12 inches to each other. Older phone models often had trouble within about 3 feet of another cell phone.
people do have choice http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...

people are voting with their dollars. The design of the product is more important than its functionality (this is to say: the average consumer likes pretty things).
Velocity 2010: Stoyan Stefanov, "Psychology of Performance"
well it's about fraking time
It's a somewhat reasonable account (notably by an iPhone owner), though I remain skeptical (i.e., not trusting either side).

I've had an iPhone 4 for two days now, and I have yet to be able to reproduce the problem; I even tried licking my finger and wrapping it around the bottom left corner, making sure to connect both antennas. I couldn't get it to drop even one bar.

This is not at all to say that it's not a real issue, but the sensationalism belies how little we know about it so far. Of course, people are going to delight in exploiting any chink in Apple's armor, especially today.
By choices, I'm referring to the network. Most consumers (not ones who jailbreak, mind you...) don't have a choice. If they want the iPhone, they're stuck with ATT.
It is a shame that so many employers have it in their heads that they need 100% of their employees lives. Why can't people work less hours for less money? Why must they give all of their will-power? Why can't people have a job with medical benefits, paid vacation but only work 3 days a week, with a salary that takes in to account the trade-off?

I'm sure I could come up with some reasonable answers to those questions, but I want to hear what you guys have to say.
Yes, it's a bad title, I just made a comment down below on the post about that. I'm adding a note at the top.

My real beef is that inexperienced candidates make their decisions based on incomplete understanding of the metrics and not knowing the metrics that really matter.

As to your counter-point, empirical evidence argues against that. $150K/yr today that lasts six months is worse than $100K/yr that lasts a year (and often the delta is much smaller). People also often forget that usually one month of not taking home a paycheck is greater than the delta between offers. But as with everything, ymmv.
You made 30K; good for you and congrats. Why all the snark here?

Simple and mindless(pardon not meant negatively) sells. Make apps for the audience who buys apps; males 18 to 34(though 34 might be a bit high) if you aim is to money. Something that makes people laugh and want to share it with their friends who buy it and share it with their friends and so on. iFart & Fat Booth(though idea is mindless but tech isnt) are further examples.
I feel like you're dismissing an interesting article for the sake of an amusing one liner, and that's pretty much the antithesis of HN.

It is a nicely-written and illustrated article, but it describes a problem that hasn't been considered 'interesting' for decades and can, in any case, be tackled with a caching scheme. Why would they need to run the same intersection logic over and over, when there's only a finite number of glyphs to render in any given document?
that's great when you're a lone wolf, but it generally fails when team work is involved; and therein lies the divide between lifestyle vs. startup.
I've had mine only freeze once... and that's when I was messing with boot scripts.

I do find calling pretty unresponsive.
I usually approve of Jobs's candid replies, but not this time.

I mean, holding it a different way isn't necessarily that tall of an order, but if anything is wrong here it's not the user's hand position- it's the antenna, and the user is being asked to compensate for Apple.
+1. But surely one sample point doesn't generalize to all artists? Surely there's a distribution of artist quality like there is for engineer quality?
Apple acknowledges antenna issue in iPhone 4
Help Depressed |Treatment of Panic Disorder|How to prevent suicide
A higher salary is always better for the employee unless the company is going to have a liquidity event in 18 months. Personal cashflow is a pretty good metric. What other metric matters?
The amount of money held in a payclick account must be between $20 to $1000 and withdrawals to a bank account are not allowed. Payclick also supports recurring transactions

WTFno. That's not a PayPal competitor. That's a way to guarantee that you spend money - a credit card company's wet dream.
By the way, why is the knee-jerk reaction always to talk to a "competent attorney" for stuff like visas?

There are dozens of guest worker visas for the United States.

Just applying for any visa to the USA is sufficient cause for the State Department to deny you future visas for the rest of your life. That includes completely sincere and honest applications. They just consider the application for any visa to be evidence of your suitability for future entrance and they keep track of tiny details forever. It doesn't matter if your life circumstances have changed.

If you've seen Brazil, you've met America's immigration bureaucracy.

A good immigration lawyer can reduce the trouble. You should never even apply for a tourist visa to the USA without asking an immigration lawyer.
So if these candidates are so unsophisticated and misunderstand, do you really want to hire them anyway?

Maybe you should highlight in the interview process (if you do an interview with them) the potential in regards to equity, so on and so forth?
Progress of a MP3 file: 1956 - 2014
If a comment from Jobs about the latest release of Apple's product leads you to hate humanity… well let's just say you're going to have trouble with society in general. There is far worse.

Oh, on a second reading I guess it's the people getting suckered in without learning that makes you feel that way… Like this classic xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/743/

I would say this: Cheer up! The vocal minority of shiny-chasing blogoshpere complainers is not representative of humanity in any way! Most people are quite happy with their iPhones and Steve Jobs knows it.
XKCD nailed this perfectly when the Spirit rover got stuck and NASA had to call it quits.

http://xkcd.com/695/
I suspect this might have been easier to accomplish without taking on the exercises. I'd try going through the texts first, gaining some understanding, and then follow it up with some serious exercise crunching whenever I felt like it.

That way, I at least gain a theoretical understanding of the stuff - enough to understand what some CS papers talk about.
Oxygen: A desktop network connected to the cloud
Panic-Inspired Stats Dashboard powered by Rails (Gameplan's side project)
Thanks. I took the liberty of transcribing the latter part of that section.

"We basically found that their background and references are the best predictor. You can't use them exclusively, but it's true: The best predictor of future performance is past performance. And that's what we really found out through the regression models. We also found that there were a few interviewers in the company who were very, very good. They were several standard deviations off, meaning that they could tell in an interview where or not someone was going to be good or not. In some cases, they would be aberrant and reach a different conclusion from the other interviewers, but they would be correct."
I'm looking... (It isn't the first two places where I thought that I saved it.)
For a lot of bright, ambitious young grads, $150k/year for six months is better than $100k/year for a year. They have opportunity costs too: for that time that they're not collecting a paycheck, they also aren't working. That's time that they could be doing other things, like founding a startup or working at another startup. (Assuming you're actually attracting top grads, they won't have a problem finding another job; someone who's good at programming in the Bay Area is not going to be sitting there sending out resumes for a month, unless they get stuck in the Google interview quagmire).
Good to know, thanks. I will give A+ another look.

Having read more about APL, though, I'm feeling less inclined to write off the extended character setup. Still, it's an issue one needs to sort out upfront. I guess it's the APL equivalent of bitching about parenthesis, when either is a shallow detail compared to what's really novel about the languages.

Many languages seem to have shibboleth complaints, to show when people haven't made it past the surface - Lua indexes from 1, Lisp has the parens, Python has the whitespace, etc. Maybe there's a community value in that, I don't know.
Great article. But I wouldn't come to the conclusion that you should hire artists. I would say that the lesson is that you should hire someone:

(1) smart

(2) motivated

(3) conscientious

and

(4) take very good care of them
I understand that the iPhone is also available at some AT&T stores.

Do they have lines? Or is buying at the Apple store part of the experience?
"There's no right or wrong way of holding it. [Close up] I don't have to change myself to fit the product. It fits me." --Jony Ive, iPad intro video (1:12)

I suppose this is a trivial feature of iPad's design, since it clearly doesn't apply to iPhone 4, which is beginning to epitomize form over function--no design ought to sacrifice usability, no matter how beautiful. It becomes simply bad, sub-optimal design.

I'm not happy at all about how Apple is responding to this.
You were missing the A+ font. You couldn't get it or turn the warning off?

The A+ source looks like Arthur.
If this is what you think, you have not worked long enough to know you are wrong.

Read this: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Lots of people have that environment but then get compensated a lot more to deal with it (unlike EA).

Go ask folks you know who have been in the workforce for a decade, they will most assuredly tell you that the different between $100K and $110K is $0. Even the difference between $100K and like $140K is still fairly marginal when you compare it to the other things you may or may not be giving up. I mention a bunch of those things to consider in my post.
The graphics are either misleading or wrong, the tie-ups for the winners are incorrect... the winner of the USA v Ghana game plays the winner of the South Korea v Uruguay game, but this simulation has Ghana playing Argentina in the next round???
I'd like Scribd a lot more if they'd make downloading the document easy. My general process of opening a scribd link is:

1. Oh, an interesting looking article! Hopefully it will be in HTML or PDF so I can read it!

2. (browser tab freezes) Oh shit, it says "scribd.com" in the URL bar.

3. Interface finally loads; the fonts are broken, scrolling doesn't work, and it's only barely readable.

4. I begin the frantic search for the "download" button. On most sites this is easy to spot and use, but on scribd it seems to move around from day to day. Sometimes it's big and green, others it's small, white, and hidden somewhere on the page.

5. Scribd demands I log in to download; it doesn't support OpenID, and I can never remember which throwaway account/password I used, so I just register again.

6. Finally, it lets me download and read the document.

----

How about this instead? Scribd should offer a "direct link" to the PDF, and then it would be easy for users to submit these links to external websites (HN, Reddit, etc).
A great engineer is not expected to know how their impact on a 25 person company will be different than a 200 person company. Moreover a great engineer may not yet know that not having that impact may be a really important loss to them.

I'd still want to hire than engineer though. But when they decline, I'd rather them not tell me it's because the other offer was $10K higher. I'd rather they tell me they see more room for personal growth, more interesting technology, etc. There are reasons to decline, and that's okay -- but $10K is a really stupid one.
However, a modern game engine does perform a large number of polygon intersections for the purpose of collision detection. Of course, this is generally very rough for the purpose of performance.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. When I was being made an offer at my present company, I very specifically told them not to use a higher salary to incense me: I wanted to make a decision based on factors that compound over time. These factors are quality of peers, challenge of work, autonomy: all of these translating to "will I do work that I find fulfilling, will I learn something at this job that will make me more useful myself to future employers, my profession of Computer Science/Software Engineering and society as a whole". I don't mean "will I learn a shiny new technology X", but rather will I learn new concepts (from work itself, from interacting with people smarter than me and with different skill sets) that change the way I approach existing problems and allow to me approach new ones. Unfortunately, many start-ups are (justifiably) high on the former (no legacy constraints, chances to use better tools) but low on the latter.

Other factors are often also a combination of these: working hours is a function of autonomy and ability to work from home (or come in and leave at times when there's no traffic) can mitigate a bad commute.

Under no circumstances, however, do I say engineers should be underpaid: the salary shouldn't impose a burden, it should allow you to (when living within your means) save towards retirement (without counting on winning the IPO sweepstakes), towards your family, towards (if you're inclined that way) a mortgage (1). However, pretty much every offer I've had matched those criteria very well. Decisions had to be made by other parameters.

Shares are a very complex topic: while it's important that employees be a share holder (tying your own financial success to the company's), the number of options, the strike price and even the stated equity percentage are often meaningless when stated _without a context_. There's different kinds of liquidity, there's reverse splits, follow on funding rounds, different types of stock, different vesting agreements. Just because someone told you "you have 0.25% of the company stock", it doesn't imply that you'll be a millionaire if they sell at a $400 mm valuation.

Work is where you're spending the majority of your waking hours. While an eager recruiter may tell you "what's the worry, just spend two years here and then we'll have an exit and you'll be rich!", it's a tremendous decision (especially if you're enthusiastic and passionate about your field of work, as most on HN are) that can't be boiled down to any single number.

(1) One exception here is for fresh graduates. Public, prestigious technology companies do occasionally [edit: added occasionally, per a comment] underpay them (much more so, in practice, than funded startups: there are established procedures and formulas for determining salaries) and the pay off (in terms of skills learned, confidence gained, exposure to smart and experienced colleagues) is often worth it if you pick the right team and the right project.
Yes, certainly wrong.
I have been in the workforce for a decade. Comparing EA to the typical web startup is not helpful. From an early stage engineering perspective I can tell you that most web startups are all the same. You might as well get paid as much as you can. The difference between 100K and 140K is not marginal. It's a down payment on a house in 3 years instead of 6.
> (based on the current top two teams in each group)

It must be using standings from a day or two ago
Salute.
Next issue of Wired for iPad to cost less
Apple always does exactly what Steve Jobs says at any given moment. Exactly.
I'm replying to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459940

Why do you work at a startup then? You could make so much more money at a bigger and more established company.
Italy is using ancient Roman lead ingots, which have lost most of their natural radioactivity, in their CUORE neutrino experiment.

http://www.physorg.com/news190646406.html
No, that's watered down to the point that you are almost not saying anything.

The takeaway from the article, stated more bluntly, is that if you can be flexible on the hours, then you can have (1)-(3) for cheap by hiring artists or other people who need or want flexible hours.
The quickest way is to buy interested eyeballs (adwords or some other route). You can set you budget for the month and grow the budget as the user base and advertising revenue grows. But if you want to see astronomical growth, you have to have a compelling reason for people to refer you via word of mouth. As well posting to aggregators like this is not a bad way to get people to take a look. Just don't get too spammy with it and by all means don't violate other sites terms of use trying to get your name out there.
Public prestigious companies do not necessarily underpay. The pay at Amazon, Apple and VMWare is much better for fresh grads than almost any startup. There was a time when Google underpaid but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
My bet is once the author actually can get a physical handset in his hands he might change his view somewhat. I don't think the author is aware of the extent of signal loss. While Apple's statement is true that any handset will experience signal loss from being held tightly, the loss with some IPhone 4s is almost total loss. The comment by Jobs "just don't hold it that way" is probably going to tick a bunch of folks off. I still love the phone tho.
Just How Important is the iPhone to Apple's Earnings Anyway?
I've gotta say, this was both informative and amusing to read. I wish I got to read articles like this more often.
I've been in a situation like this before. Sales was driving and couldn't make up their minds. Either take a stand and fight for ONE strong direction (for at least a week!) or leave.

The company won't be successful. "Pivot" means to plant one foot and move the other. Not to hop around like an idiot all day.
Because I get paid almost three times as much as I did at the startup I left.
Why Tabs are on Top in Firefox 4
I had a 3 day a week job with full benefits and paid vacation. My salary was cut by 40% from my 5-days a week compensation, as you suggest in your comment, but I still had enough to live on. I gave it up because I was bored. Can't have everything, I guess.
It's $29 because that's what the market said it's willing to pay for a piece of rubber and plastic. Basic market economics. If the market's not willing to pay, then the market will adjust the price. Apparently the market's willing to pay $29.
Indeed, the company offering 80k per year likely thought it was hitting all of the above points.
From their FAQ's it appears this is available only in Australia:

Is payclick available to use outside of Australia?
No. Australia is the first country to launch this new product.
Juvenolatry in Hollywood - writers washed up at 30
These keyboards, BTW, are Model Ms; I wrote a review of the Customizer here: http://jseliger.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-custom... , which is also sold by Unicomp.
I wonder if increasing the gap between the metal antennae pieces would make any difference (i.e. the distance any signal would have to travel through your hand is increased, hence greater impedance).
I'm replying to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459955

I would always encourage someone being offered 3x their salary to take that. You'd be stupid not to take that, almost everything else being equal.

I'm talking about the people who see a $10K difference and think it's material in the scheme of things. If you're only focus is money, then fine, an extra $833 before taxes per month might move the needle. For the vast majority of people, that's not a sound way to make decisions on where you spend the majority of your time.

ps, no clue why news.yc won't let me reply this deep in the thread, some limit or something. Maybe because I'm OP.
They've also abandoned each generation of Maemo hardware shockingly fast as new models came out. I still have a Nokia 770 running OS 2007. After the N800 was released with OS 2008, the Nokia 770 never received a supported upgrade. (There is "OS 2008 Hacker Edition" for the 770, but its performance and stability was noticeably degraded compared to OS 2007.)

I'm glad to hear they'll be focusing on Meego as their flagship OS, since it's been at best a hobby until now. But somehow the platform has had as much fragmentation as Android even though they are a single company producing all the hardware and software (and only four models ever produced, at that).
Masking tape over the lower left corner has been demonstrated to solve the problem. I'm wondering if clear nail polish might also do the job.

Anyone have any idea as to why the human body might be causing attenuation whereas other materials don't?
Ask HN: How to split traffic in A/B testing?
I've been reading up a lot on A/B testing lately on HN. Since sequential A/B testing is not recommended due to external factors, I'm just curious as to how someone is suppose to split web traffic (say 50/50 without using hardware to balance).
reverse spluts suck.
> A higher salary is always better for the employee unless the company is going to have a liquidity event in 18 months. Personal cashflow is a pretty good metric. What other metric matters?

Did you mean "metric" in the sense of measurable quantities or in the sense of "things that matter"? While they very hard to quantify (and thus aren't "metrics" in the true sense of the word), I am pretty sure I am not alone when I say that peers, autonomy, challenging work and capacity for continued learning and technical growth are more important than monetary benefits.
I wouldn't trust the "bars" to indicate anything.
Whoa, are all these APL-related links springing up because I posted about K today? Huh.

I'm not convinced that a vastly different keyboard layout with the same form factor is a big deal. I've been typing Dvorak for several years now, and have never once touched a non-Qwerty-labeled keyboard. (I like split + ergonomic keyboards, though.)
Thanks. I like your summary better. :)
Your demographic may be off. I sell apps on Android, and I am pleasantly surprised by the number of women who buy my sports related apps.
You have to click on the link to the post to do the reply. There is a ratelimit on deeply nested comments.

$833 * 12 is almost $10K a year, it isn't trivial, especially if you have student loan payments to make. I just think all web startups offer about the same thing these days: free beverages! a web site! work 10 hours a day and LOVE IT! we are cool guys with t-shirts! we all work packed into a rented loft in soma! .25% of the company! you can use emacs or vi, we don't care! pick your tools! experience! foosball! you aren't working at microsoft!

It all sort of merges together. So the only thing you can really compete with is the coolness of your project and the pay. If people are choosing higher pay elsewhere, maybe your project isn't really that cool.
And of course, "manual" means, "by hand". :)
Change how you hold the phone. Not that big of a deal.