skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a) 2

b) 1 paid, 1 free (ad-supported)

c) some adsense, twitter, blog posts, Web site

d) ~3k over 3 months, almost nothing from ads
There are plenty of manufacturers who will sell it for it's true price. :) Dealextreme.com
You think that'd stop them from also having a list? It would just make it easier to get started.
* in the U.S.
That's a bit broad, the scene is still there... the roles have simply changed a bit.
+1 for sarcasm
You're right, it certainly could make debugging harder for large apps, but the point is to stop building large apps. Since every app made using (fab) is itself a (fab) app, debugging/testing should take place at the component levels first.
The human body is conductive, so the masking tape acts as an insulator. I'm wondering at exactly what shape the antenna inside the phone is, if it can be affected that easily.

If you've ever played around with short-wave radio (I suppose people do need to be older than a certain age to have done that :) ) it's possible to improve reception if you touch the antenna.
Product Review: Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard
Worse yet, adding those bumpers, and most cases, makes the whole 'square edge to allow the phone to sit up and act as a camera on a table' feature, er thing, not work.
Maybe they will just start putting some clear finish over iPhones from the factory to fix the issue.
7 Tips for Achieving Worldwide Marketing Domination
Sure, I agree with that.

I am just saying that in 2010, every startup claims to offer those benefits. In fact every startup I've worked at since 1998 has claimed to offer those benefits. And from what I know, you can even get those benefits at huge companies like Google.

So really you still have to compete with compensation, or else have a project that the person REALLY wants to work on.

My problem with the article is that the author is assuming that the engineer is too naive to truly understand tradeoff between salary and the "startup benefits." The founder has a lot of emotional attachment to his startup. The engineering hire does not - perhaps he's the one with the more rational viewpoint.
A comment at techcrunch is priceless

"It's not a design flaw. Steve is just trying to bring gentility and good manners to mobile phone usage. The correct way to hold an iPhone 4 is with the thumb and index finger on either side of the phone, while extending the pinky outward as if holding a fine china cup (the pinky will also act as a supplemental antenna). Once the user is holding the phone like a Regency dandy, he will naturally tend to behave like one, showing the world what a well-mannered chap he is. Pure genius. "
Good on them for coming out and explaining their reasoning.

Personally I use the totally fabulous Tree Style Tab extension and have the tabs on the left. Given the prevalence of widescreen displays, it makes a lot more sense to have them on the side and use up the wider screen real estate, even if you are not using the Tree Style Tab functionality (which is essentially a collapsible hierarchical tab structure).
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.

A great engineer had bloody well know how their impact will be different, and they'd damn well know how that difference will affect them. Whatever kind of engineer you are referring to is most certainly not great and, worse, they are the kind you should strive to weed out of your hiring process before they end up getting hired and creating a lot of grief for both themselves and the company. Among other things, they have a strong tendency to bring to the table solutions that are mismatched in scale, complexity, delivery style, etc. relative to what would serve the company best.

(your 10k point is entirely valid, of course.)
I really would like to know what kind of 'financial software' it was that Lucky Dave excelled in. It could be MS Excel.

Sorry for not adding anything meaningful to the discussion.

PS: This guy hired a user of his product. Nevertheless, this user was already giving superb support to other users, without any external motivation. So he hired a passionate customer, who already did some parts of the job. So if you want to hire somebody, you should look at your customers and community first. I think that is the lesson.
This is one of those articles that makes me love the web. In the midst of a wave of angst about iPhone4 reception, we get a high S/N article, bubbled up from a vast froth of noise on the topic.

It's like HN is my antenna for the internet.
What a great word -- juvenolatry -- hadn't heard it before.
Sustaining a 14-day Release Cycle
a) Two apps in a very niche area (standard and pro versions) at pretty decent price points. The pro version sells for more than $50

b) Both are paid apps, the standard version is in-app upgradable to pro

c) We've put a small amount of effort into marketing them via adwords. Approximately $150/month in ad spend results in more than $600 additional profits. Since it is a very niche market, the ads are highly targeted. We're about to branch into some additional marketing on related sites and should be getting some press soon in a big industry mag. Hopefully they will have good returns on them.

d) Combined income from both apps (including in-app upgrades) has exceeded $1000/month for the last 3 months and is growing at a pretty significant rate. This month has already exceeded last month by almost 20%

The apps did require a pretty significant amount of development (client and server apps as well as the marketing website) and my return thus far comes out to about $15/hour but is rapidly increasing.

We're about to begin development on versions of the app for Windows and Android so that we can extend our potential client base beyond just iDevice owners.
The review is helpful in mentioning that the thumbs have more keys to control with the Kinesis keyboard than with typical keyboards. That raises a question: what's a good input device for someone with basal joint arthritis in both thumbs? Mice are hard on such people, and even using the spacebar with the right thumb is dodgy on a conventional keyboard for such people? What's good for users who don't want sore thumbs?
Reading all volumes of TAoCP from cover to cover is probably unnecessary, it's reference material mostly. Also, the pace of "just over 34 pages a week" for such heavy material is insane.
I agree - the guy isn't valuable just because he's an artist, it's because he's a brand champion first and foremost. If you got a lazy artist, they'd love the idea at first and then they'd prioritise their art stuff even without realising and without giving notice ahead of time. Brand champions won't lose interest like that.

Pick people who have irregular work (part-timers, social workers, freelancers) but who are also brand champions.
Certainly, but it doesn't change the fact that the market recognizes a place for the $29 product. You can walk into the Apple store and see ridiculously priced cases. It's because people are willing to pay. The market sets the price. If someone doesn't like it, they have a choice. It's the beauty of markets.
This still depends on rankings. What we've seen in this tournament (and many before it) is that rankings are a pretty poor estimate of actual performance -- or at the very least, there are some outlier results which have perhaps gained notoriety due to their outlier nature.

One problem I would suggest is that ranking are primarily derived from past performance. I'm not sure about the Elo ranking, but the official FIFA one is based on results from the last four years (eight years before 2006!) -- in highest-level football that is way too long.

Perhaps another problem is that there are simply too few games in the tournament for this to work reliably. Given 50 games, a team's win-draw-lose count might be estimated pretty reliably, because a string of three bad games can be offset by a string of three above-expectations games. With only 3 games in the group round, funny things happen to probability.

See: Paraguay with Elo ranking 22, Slovakia with Elo ranking 48, New Zealand with Elo ranking 60, Italy with Elo ranking 7, France with Elo ranking 12.
Of course. And like I said in another reply, the key to LuckyDave isn't so much that he's an artist, but that he's a brand champion - he has irregular work and he's a major advocate.
I have a 3GS, and every time I pick up call from desk phone (with iPhone at the desk), I will experience interference. Now, I need to put my 3GS around half meter away every time there's call to office line. I wonder if anyone experience this also.
Why would the iPhone be any different to any other phone, in that regards. They all emit radio waves, the iPhone doesn't emit any stronger than any other phone, by much anyway.
Xtext: Language development framework
Why are there so many sales and marketing folk in an early startup? Just 2 sales and 2 marketing guys and you burn half of million a year. Sales come in when there's a product to sell. If the product is still in early development (with the daily changes), the company has ramped up in the wrong order. It will run out of fund soon.
It seems like the main advantage to SV is finding a cofounder. If you already have one then a big part of it is gone.
Star Wars Girl Taps Female Geek Chic Market
The productivity gap in Excel between casual users and power users is such that it could be. 80K in NYC in the financial industry does not suggest a high-end tool to me.
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Coloring a Graphic Novel – Part 2
Which programming language do you use?

Maybe someone has already built a framework for you to use?

I personally used ABingo for Ruby on Rails (http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo), Visual Website Optimizer (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com) and Google Website Optimizer (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) for any technology.

The advantage of running a technology specific tool is mainly because of performance. Most technology-agnostic tools execute a javascript on your page to be able to execute the A/B testing logic where ABingo for example is executed on the server side (no additional http request)

What generic tools give you though is the ability to change your tests without changing your code.
Agreed, as a Canadian, we are usually a few years behind, and as for Visa, almost every time I use my credit card online I have to reset my "verified by visa" password, because I can't remember the password from the last 20 times I had to reset it, but luckily all it takes to reset it is the skill testing question of what is my mothers maiden name.

So I have to go throught this BS reset every time, and whenever someone wants to steal my credit card, all they need is my mothers maiden name.

What irks me though is that visa knows this is a security flaw, I wish I had the paper to link the fully explains what isn't immediately obvious.
I agree with you that declining for $10k is really stupid, but as an engineer, I would want to know what kind of impact I would have. If I'm not working on meaningful work, and having an impact, then I probably wouldn't want the work anyway.
> but it describes a problem that hasn't been considered 'interesting' for decades

Actually, polygon operations on grids is still an active research area, with the latest papers on the topic less than two weeks old: http://www.sci.utah.edu/socg2010agenda.html

> Why would they need to run the same intersection logic over and over [...]?

We usually don't. It basically depends on the context in which the glyphs appear on the page. For a standard, say, LaTeX document consisting of mostly text and without weird graphic operations taking place around or on top of the text, a given glyph is just processed once.
Here's a link discussing the May 1962 equivalent to the flash crash:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395760457527...
Stanford MMDS 2010. Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Sets
We have the same thing in Sri Lanka called a "Web Card". You don't even need to have a bank account to get a Web Card - just pay some amount, and get a card for that value. Then you get a temporary VISA number which can be only used in internet transactions. It's actually quite convenient actually.
The folks over at fivethirtyeight.com (usually a political-statistics blog) have a somewhat more complex simulation model that adds information about teams' average goal-scoring / goal-conceding, an estimate of home-field or home-region advantage, etc. It also uses ESPN's continually updated rankings instead of FIFA's stale ones. Still subject to a lot of the same problems, especially the small-sample-sizes issue, but it's at least an improvement. See the sidebar at: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
Beating Binary Search
This is an amazingly content-free post.

All it says is: "Posterous is releasing 1 conversion tool a day for a week. Gutsy move. Will it work? WE SHALL SEE."
Thanks! I was scratching my head there for a minute.

EDIT: The pypi package is "googlecl"
> In fact every startup I've worked at since 1998 has claimed to offer those benefits. And from what I know, you can even get those benefits at huge companies like Google.

There's a difference between saying you do and actually doing it. No one will say "no, you don't have autonomy -- we don't hire top talent so we have to micromanage; we work very strict fixed hours; you'll be writing CRUD screens for sales people" (I've seen companies claim flexible hours in that "you're have come strictly at 9, but you can leave at 5, you don't have to come in at 8 or stay till 6!").

A start-up can say many things, but e.g., if one place is doing very routine database driven webapps and the other is actually solving far more interesting problems (makes systems software vs. "yet another website", or if they're a web site writing their own search stack and other interesting infrastructure, or does serious machine learning development, leads open source projects, etc...) it's pretty obvious. Plenty start-ups also hire PHP script kiddies (while talking about hiring "rock stars") and other assorted bozos (because they have a project to finish by a specific deadline), while others are more rigorous than Google (from what I heard, Kosmix is one such example).

Google is a large company and obviously there are many boring but business crucial jobs to do there. Nonetheless, at least now, they're fairly explicit what area you'll be working on (e.g., systems programming vs. application programming, sometimes even down to a specific team). Free food and drinks are nice, but that's not why I would still (if I were looking for job) apply there, knowing well others likely give better salaries and fancier titles; the long interview process is a discouragement when other companies are extremely aggressive about getting you to sign an offer, but it has changed now.
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Ask HN: Good T&Cs & Privacy Policies
Twitter's seem decent enough in terms of presentation. Facebook are famous for the changes in theirs. Apple wants you to read 94 pages worth on an iPhone and uses them to mess with the competition.

BUT Does anyone have any good examples of Terms and Conditions written in actual English, or is this a bad idea? Also should we involve a lawyer? Does everyone just steal and amend? Anyone care to share their experiences?
This article by the same fellow is great stuff: http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/5/30/30-db-in... .
Make sure to test in a place where you have lost at least one or two bars before you test. Otherwise the reception is probably saturated and your hand can not make a difference.
Very good article by Alex Miller. I have not had time to play with clj-plaza, but it just went on my short list.
Are you willing to donate money to your favorite open source software so they can afford the bandwidth? If not, don't complain about having to spend a few more seconds decompressing the latest release (which you're getting for free).
How can you burn through $1M in 18 months with 3 F/T and 2P/T? The two non-tech co-founders taking $300K each?
It is the same kind of chatter you might be able to hear in speakers when the phone is nearby? That's a standard GSM thing -- GSM uses specific RF frequencies which induce the noise. ("GSM chatter" is a reasonably common name for this.)
Exactly why I'm skeptical about these reports, including my own!

(And if the old method to access the field test mode hadn't been disabled, I'd be the first to give you dBm measurements.)
JK Rowling Harvard commencement speech: Failure and imagination (2008)
I'm sorry, technology is a little pond? I don't know what economy you are living in.
Australia: Testing ground for new products, sideways move for past-it executives, and loads of pretty beaches. Come use our internet while we still have it.
Wisdom from a former squash champion and partner of George Soros
This. If we are going to have a discussion about this, I really, really hope to at least see some dBm numbers.

From a test right now, picking up my Blackberry 8100 (antenna along the bottom) in roughly the manner I would use to hold it to my ear, I lose about 10 to 15 dBm (from around -66 to -69 to around -79 to -81), which means the received signal power drops by around 10 to 30 times. I don't know if that's particularly good or bad; I've never had problems with dropped calls.
everyone needs to read about voyager 2. among other amazing things, its engineers designed it so that it would stay functional in various ways as its battery depleted over the decades. if it does not receive a transmission from earth after a given time interval it will go into some kind of autopilot, faithfully beaming data back to earth. third thing i recall: the signal from the probe is about as faint as a cell phone on the other side of the world
I Hire Artists? More like, I Hired A Champion. IMO it was pre-mature generalizing.
I couldn't agree more. An embryo can afford to be good at engineering and have no understanding of the context, but anyone who's really excellent must understand how what they do fits into everything else.
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Nexus One, same issue:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=34a...
A decision that inconveniences you isn't necessarily evil. I agree it's unnecessary.
Here is even better advice to give (assuming you're not somewhere really extreme like the North Pole, or a place without Internet access, etc.):

Just Do It: Where You Are

because it's faster, cheaper and more efficient. Because being in Silicon Valley is not the critical ingredient, by a long shot.
Horses and some sailing ships go faster than 20 mph, but yeah.

Also, Voyager wasn’t designed for maximal speed out of the solar system. Even then, if we had wanted to get to Alpha Centauri as fast as possible, we could have done better. Not that the numbers aren’t humbling.
When I lived in LA it seemed to impress girls if you said you "had a job", because most of those aspiring actor types don't.
You probably mean FSF, not EFF. EFF has more important things to do than GPL enforcement.

And shame on you for violating the GPL!
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Try Boulder. Startup scene. Major university. Lots of sun like SV. But... from what I can tell, lots more women.
Apple's design has never been especially humanistic (in the sense that things are shaped to the peculiarities of the human body)--the sharp right angles on the MacBooks that cut into your wrists at certain typing angles, or the old undersized puck mouse, or some of the awkwardness for some people using the Mighty Mouse, for instance--so this isn't a very surprising flaw. Add to that Steve's stubbornness in terms of admitting mistakes, and this happens. It's a pretty awesome idea making the structural part of the phone the antenna, but obviously doesn't work if you hold it the "wrong" way.
I pre-ordered mine for shipment from the local AT&T store (would have done it online, but the web site was unusable on pre-order day). It was waiting for me when I got home last night, all I had to do was charge it, activate it and sync it.

This time, it was just luck that I decided not to ask for an in-store appointment. But, next time I'll be sure to take the free shipping FTW.
Dynamic, 3D display of electronic information using nanotechnology & robotics
If the total cost of having an employee is $100K/yr, it's $600K for the equivalent of 4 employees for 18 months. Add in any server costs, legal fees, various petty expenditures. He says they've got 3-4 months left. Sounds about right.
So having to go through the old "there is no problem", "a little problem that isn't our fault", "ok, maybe our fault but we admit nothing and nothing can be done", "ok here is a fix"... is that your idea of great customer service? Why not just cut to the chase and be responsible about it?

You asked me earlier what I suggested, and though you have consistently miss-characterized it, I answered in a way that I think would be a PR win for them. What would your suggestion be then? The old corporate song and dance?

Also, you can have the last word on this, if you wish. Since, although I'm pretty certain I've listened to you, I'm not at all certain you've listened to me in this exchange and that doesn't incline me to continue this communication. If I just wanted insults pushed at my general direction, I'd go spend some more time on reddit. Later.
I'm not happy at all about how Apple is responding to this.

Admitting that they fucked up will cut into their profits. Convincing people that the phone is fine and that the user is the problem moves more units.

Apple has investors like any other company. This move is good for the investors.
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Sweet. This is one thing I really missed from the Safari betas, and really like about Chrome.

Will watch the video some time, but the two "conceptual model" images hit my reasoning too. It seems to be how non-geeks think about browsing too, as many I've seen have trouble with the address bar + tabs in anything but Chrome.
isn't that due to actual full capacity (restaurants) and fire code (clubs)? i don't think either one has the ability to schedule their customers throughout the day or take another approach to reservations.
Are you aware that you are arguing in a circle?
I have had a small amount of success implementing GPGPU programs using webGL. If you code your solution to webGL you are able to offload OS/driver stack concerns to the web browser implementers.
I have a 3GS and I find that I need to place it about a metre from my computer's speakers to avoid audible interference. All my previous phones have done this as well (last before the 3GS was a Sony Ericsson w800i), but they didn't need to be placed as far away from the speakers before the interference could no longer he heard.
Cases suck. It's not the cost, it's having some cheesy looking piece of rubber on your phone.
Unless every human being can reproduce the issue with precision, it is a non-issue and neonfunk will be skeptical.

Sir, We are not talking about newton's third law here. There could very well defective units or other factors come into play. So don't assume others are just lying liers
I'm not sure I see why so many people are against having a .xxx domain name. If it's opt in (like all other TLDs that aren't restricted are), then only sites that want to identify themselves as explicit pornography will be branded with it. If it's mandatory, then there will likely be both false positives and false negatives in the assessment process, and users will eventually learn that .xxx doesn't necessarily mean that a website is or isn't pornography but that it is evidence (not proof) of it. Either way, the result is more accurate information about a site right there in the site's domain name.