skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New players often spam just to get faster, but then as they get better a larger and larger percentage of those actions are useful.

The spam is only unnecessary at the very early game, when it's more just to warm up.

And of course they aren't doing 300 different tasks per minute. Doing a task takes more than one action. e.g. if you select a unit, then order to it attack a point, that was 3 actions. (click unit, hit a, click point). But they do quite a lot of different tasks per minute. jaedong had a game, with kal i think, in something like a semi finals, not too long ago, where there were 4 fights going on at the same time. and despite the fights, they still have to macro (which involves a variety of tasks: making new buildings, making new units, assigning workers to resources, gathering and hotkeying units).

Edit: Just remembered seeing Flash drinking several times during the first minute of the game in big tournaments. It's not like he cares what his apm is.
There is also the buying mentality that an app store user has when browsing for apps. It's hard to measure this but is probably bigger than anything else you get for your 30%. You sell an app store app and people don't mind droping 99 cents or a couple of dollars for something that preforms a few functions.

In contrast I think web apps are a much harder sell at those price points, so for a similar app your only real choice is advertising supported.
Posted about this months ago: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/392868405/mongodb-durability...

I do agree durability is important, but as long as you are aware of this behavior and you consider it in your design, you may still find scenarios where the gained speed is a good trade off.

Another aspect that tends to be forgot when speaking about MongoDB is its fire-and-forget API. Combined with the behavior of automatic collection creation, innexistent data validation this may lead to "interesting" results.
On the contrary, for me, having the occasional } or ] in there lets me more easily visually match up blocks of code when using a non-smart text editor. They are like little beacons of light in the darkness :-)
Direct Mail (http://directmailapp.com) is a newsletter/mailing-list app for the Mac that lets you set up web-based subscribe and unsubscribe forms.
/ did happen in the past (Apple)
Quit quirks when working with others
Maybe the policemen work on a commission basis...infraction brokers?
Garage games?
Ironically, I am unclear on whether their use of "cannot" and "unable" means that some people could not, even in principle, understand these rules of grammar, or just that there are people who currently do not understand them, but could be taught.

(Meta-ironically I am now wondering if the perceived lack of clarity is really revealing something about myself. :) )
Thanks. Why do you not want to hold projects within your main company? Doesn't that increase your costs?
I wish there was something like StarCraft, but where you can actually focus on command. A real general wouldn't be ordering individual units around, and it's silly that most strategy games implement things at that level.

You should just be able to give high-level commands like "build a base there", "focus on Air-to-Ground development" etc.
This idea is also well explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463751
The facebook one could takeoff, but then I think you will only be able to offer an app for free and sell virtual goods. Still the same kind of profit margin for facebook as apple though.
echo md5('USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.');

results in

9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
Side note: R6RS is not the acme of good scheme specs, you might want to try e.g. R4-5RS sometime, especially as R6RS adaptation has been ... less than universal (heck, it proscribes a REPL (no kidding, and not by accident); it's really a different language than the Scheme before it, designed by different people).
And 500 of those were Microsoft employees.
Just to provide another data point from my own college experience, I actually ended up dropping out from my school because I got fed up with the fact that their program focused too much on application.

This is a school whose computer science curriculum circa 2004 still included COBOL because one of the major employers in my area is the banking industry. (Coincidentally, the CS building carries the name of one of the big names in that field here).

CS is a field where the theory end of things are often the most important thing you could take away long term, so having that kind of focus on tools in general (let alone ones that are hopeless obsolete for most purposes) is just insane.

Like everything else in life, it's all about balance. That said, I can't blame academia too much for erring on the side of theory.
I don't think so... but it's an interesting question. As you can see from the recent experience of SF in the article, it's clear that they city is using fines to fill it's coffers.

Would a progressive tax on speeding fines be a good idea?
That isn’t the source, Credo. Gruber claims a source told him directly, on the HN submission's link.
It is all psychology. If someone believes in an idea enough to invest in it, then others are much more likely to invest in it. So, an idea with resources committed to it is worth more than one without.

The ironic part is that the idea itself is not what is invested in. Often there is an attribution error where we hear that "he's making X, so we should make an X clone." However, the important thing invested in is not the idea X, but instead X+the team+the business plan. Of course, the media often does not mention the latter two.
Sure, and it's arguably happening right now to some of the companies I mentioned (Dell, Yahoo) but if/when they recover it will likely happen again. Apple will likely face bad times at some point in the future.
Let's put it this way: do you know of any successful C++ project of serious size that doesn't specify and stick to a subset of the language?
That was my reaction - admittedly, I'm a Python fan, myself.

The real problem is two-space indents. The example would have been much easier with even four-space indents.
"Stealth Mode" when used properly, is an effective marketing tool that leads to a big launch event. We're building, working with initial customers, and when we launch it'll be huge!

"Stealth Mode" used ignorantly means, "we're unwilling to discuss our idea with anyone for fear they'll steal it."

Big difference.
Upvoted for a double-whammy of awesome: Not only have you given us the gift of github, but you just taught me the word "opprobrium". Domo arigatou!
Power Laces: the Auto lacing shoe (Proof of 'Back to the Future' Concept)
Why does it need to be more than a fun toy?
Important SEO Factors
> Don't conflate access to luxuries with wealth. Very few will pay off their mortgages as quickly as their parents, retire as early, raise a family of their own as easily, or weather more difficult times as smoothly.

They're trading luxuries for wealth. In other words, they're trading luxury consumption now for house payments later.

It's unclear why that choice is somehow unfortunate. More to the point - the ones who don't make it are in the same position as their parents.
Try living in DC and listening to the radio. Its bad enough all of the ad spots are targeted at government employees but the amount of FUD is incredible.

It's leaked in to academic recruitment as well, I believe it's the University of Maryland is advertising enrollment for some cyber security program they run.
Is Climate Change Worth Tackling?
Newly Published Mark Twain Essay, 'Concerning the Interview'
Civilization?
First look: new Ubuntu font boosts Linux typography
What do you mean "a somewhat negative-sounding name"? Products succeed with embarrassing names like "Wii" all the time.
All fair points
Maybe they will become collectors items... but probably not given Microsofts ineptitude.
Ask HN: Want to live with hacker roommates?
Hi, all, a friend and I are looking for a third roommate. We'd love to have a hacker live with us. Please reply via the craigslist annon email if interested.

Thanks!
Wii. iPad.
Waste Management, Inc.
Yes, but most companies can't rely on the revenue from two gigantic monopolies to keep the zombie alive. It will take a lot more than the failure of the Kin (which it appears was set up to fail all along) to change the corporate and engineering culture at MS.
You were doing awesome until "seizing of all gold" -- obviously had a viewpoint but were giving credence to other viewpoints as well.. then that doozy. History forgives him because he ended the depression, won WWII and not everyone agrees with you about abolishing the gold standard being equivalent to quote "seizing of all gold".
You know nothing about the upper class. They don't need to hire PR firms (which is very expensive and unaffordable to a bootstrapped startup). They have their well-connected daddies and uncles make phone calls to get press coverage, etc.
Apparently scientific writing is astoundingly gender-neutral, Gender Genie reports the following for my last paper:

Female Score: 3450
Male Score: 3259
Ideas aren't worthless unless you can't execute, and in this case they are only worthless for you, not for the rest of peoples who can execute.
if the confidence given is 97% for it being the wrong gender for me, I doubt that it's actually an effective tool.

Not necessarily. Of all those it predicts with a 97% confidence interval, you'd expect it to be wrong 3% of the time. Without any information other than that it was wrong about you, there's not much evidence about how accurate it is.

I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their cultural definition of gender roles at play.

Men dress up to attract women in just about every culture. The fact that they also wear makeup shouldn't be surprising.

I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their cultural definition of gender roles at play.

My, what a lot of big words. Of course, what we're looking at is somewhat culturally dependent; it just so happens that in our culture there's a heavily male-biased interest in, frinstance, looking at car websites (these seem to be the most male-dominated sites on the list it gives me). What's really interesting, though, is to what extent these patterns persist across different cultures... are men always more interested in transport than women are?
I have met a couple of QNX-based, also microkernel-based, systems that had uptime measured in years.

Lovely OS. I learned C on it.

MINIX reminds me of GNU/HURD. Since they are all Unix-ish from the application's point-of-view, I have hope they someday can more or less compete on equal footing with more traditional monolithic (it would be fair to call OSX "duolithic") OSs like Linux, BSD, Solaris.

Very usable desktops like the Gnome I am using to write this don't care much about what is under the libraries they link against. They would be fine on top of any OS as long as libraries provided the environment they expect. Oddly enough, the first time I ran Gnome was on top of IRIX.
My bet is that someday we will realize that viri cause cancer.
You'd have to think they would be better off giving up on owning the mobile platform, given that they are up against Android and iOS/iPhone I don't think they could possibly come up with something compelling enough to get mobile companies to pay for a license over the free Android OS which iterate much faster.

Possibly they could form a partnership with the aim of bringing other products to a platform. They could support Android, build it into there development tools and release mobile versions of their software there, integrate with xbox ect. Would probably be a bigger opportunity than the dead end that is windows mobile.

I think there would be a lot of businesses at Microsoft that could be cut in order to regain some focus. Although the same could be said about Google and they seem to be doing pretty well at the moment.
>For the record, spanking is not necessarily abuse.

But giving a 2-year old the "mother of all whoopings" certainly is.
Teambox on Heroku
From the wikipedia entry on Kin:

"The Kin was based on Windows CE"

"Kin only supports email attachments, and does not support attachments to other media (like MMS)"

"The handset does not store photos or videos. Instead, every photo and video taken on the Kin is uploaded to Microsoft's server"

"There is no photo editing software for Kin."

"Kin does not currently support playing video from sites such as YouTube or Hulu"

"Kin has no app store and no 3rd party apps can be installed on Kin."

"the Kin web browser does not support Flash web applications, and there are no games for Kin."

"Kin has no calendar or appointment application, nor any ability to sync with Outlook calendar or Google Calendar"

"Kin is unable to Instant Message (IM), or use any IM client"

"There is no spelling correction or predictive text input on the Kin."

"There are no MicroSD or memory expansion slots."

"Kin will not sync or transfer contact lists from some non-Microsoft services (eg Gmail and Yahoo! Mail)"

Wonder why it failed...
I agree. There was recently a Startup Weekend event in Detroit with all of the displaced and laid off auto workers. It was pretty inspiring to see many of these people only working in the auto industry their whole lives, starting over again and starting startups.
Wii.
Common knowledge here on HN and among many startup folks is that ideas are worthless, and only execution counts.

If that's the case, why are some startups in stealth mode?

Ok, that's asinine, I hope we didn't really say that. Execution is almost always the part where value is created (i.e. where you get paid), that is the hard part. The part where skill is involved. But ideas aren't valueless. In fact the control of information is power. Which is why people keep secrets.
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 100% - Likelihood of you being MALE is 0%

This is news to me.
Quote from Phil Jones: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Maybe "conspired to hide it" is too nuanced.
Which means it will bleed more and longer than any previous tech giant.

I'll grab my popcorn and enjoy it thoroughly.
Yeah, Microsoft was relevant to me when the launched Access in about '96 or so. Then there was a brief spell of relevance with .NET and all the cool stuff attached to that.

Since then, Linux or OS X have become the OS' of choice for many techies, and open software has eaten the lunch of MS when it comes to internet development.

MS are on life support (though in a quite comfortable state!) kept alive by a HUGE installed and locked-in base. There are flickers of life in Office and Windows 7, but they may be fighting a losing battle in future markets, likely to be more cost sensitive than the high productivity and high-priced US.
I'm a ".NET enterprise developer", have two macs and two iPhones in my house, and am working on my first iOS app. Your bitter sweeping generalization is flawed and in my opinion has no place on HN.
It's all a symptom of too much money and too many resources, I think. Focus get's completely lost.

Isn't there a way to run a big company? Is anything known on how Apple does it? How big are their development teams, even?

Would it make sense to manage internal teams a bit like startups, that is they would have to succeed on their own and pitch for investments?
What fascinates me is that it took about a minute to show a very striking resemblance to the surface of school tables.
What really pisses me off in general is adding useless stuff to things that make said things worse. For example coloring agents in food, but the same goes for superfluous features in software.
Of course his employees are not his entire business model. But it sure improves margins, increases volume so economies of scale work better etc.

Note the evangelical nature of his argument - it all works better if everybody else does it too. He understood that perfectly.
> they would be better off giving up on owning the mobile platform

They can't afford that. Their strength comes from the lack of viable options - each of their product lines reinforces the dependency on other product lines. If you use Exchange, you probably won't be able to use anything other than Outlook, which runs on Windows and is part of Office, which makes using Sharepoint more or less painless, which runs only on top of Windows servers and requires Microsoft's database...

Their value proposition is based on dependency loops. Break the loops and the value disappears (or becomes negative).
It doesn't need to be, but it's nice figuring out how you can turn 'fun toy' into 'monetizable product'.
It's complicated.

Apple's products were always highly regarded. Their problem was pricing - they charged too much for boxes Dell sold for much less.
Its market timing. Sure you need SOME idea, its necessary but far from sufficient.
Well, at the very least the new syntax is a tremendous improvement upon the previous proposals. (http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/lambda/straw-man/)

Compare the old

#(int x)(x + x)

To the new

{x -> x + x}

Much more consistent with the syntax of normal Java. Seems to be borrowing from C#.
> It's all a symptom of too much money and too many resources

Not only that. Wrong people in the wrong places.
Spot.Us Founder: Five Lessons to Learn from NewsTilt
The higher-level the commands, the fewer of them you give, and the more the game becomes random and no fun.

The stuff that real generals do is, no doubt, impossible to simulate, because it's all staff management and delegation. You don't pick the location of the base, but you do try to pick the right officer to head up the team that's in charge of surveying possible sites for the base. You pick appropriate subordinates and make sure they have the resources they need, and then get yourself driven around from base to base, meeting with the troops and keeping them motivated. Decisions like "actually I think Colonel Smith would be better than Colonel Jones for this particular task" wouldn't make much of a game.

The amount of time a general spends making specific warfighting decisions like "Let's attack the enemy at point A at time T with forces F" must be pretty damn minimal.
and also reading and then replying to your comment :)
That was the idea behind Supreme Commander.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_(video_game)#...
Back when I was using VC++/VS pre .NET for C/C++ I did all my editing in EMACS. Messy when I changed the line numbering out from under debugger breakpoints but it otherwise worked very well.

How practical would that be nowadays?
15 hours later getting error 500
Faceted Search With Sphinx
It depends on how that history is applied.

If a false understanding of history is applied in foreign relations, then there are situations where unnecessary wars can be created.

If a false understanding of history is applied to military strategy, wars can be needlessly lost.

There was a reason that the government created and spent so much on the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984. If you control people's understanding of history, you can have a big impact on what they do in the future.
I'm impressed by his posts.. they are always so fun to read. And it's interesting to see what a simple light switch can teach you.
In reality it matters little what these self-examinationary enquiries come up with, because the climate scientists have lost the PR war with this one, and that's the crucial court of opinion. A few committed internet posters will point to the results and say 'but they were exonerated' - when in reality the enquiries all endorse the opinion they acted poorly.

We've gone past the high water mark of human-caused climate change now - perhaps in history the runup to Copenhagen will look like the high point for the cause. Governments the world over are turning their back as an issue. There'll always be a committed band of supporters and promoters but once governments see it as a dead issue then everyone else will move on.

The good news in all this is that as the smoke clears from the FUD surrounding climate change, it will allow alternative energy sources to be evaluated on their eficiency merits, rather than how well they link in to some government-invented paper-swapping scheme. Removing the demonisation of C02 will allow people to concentrate on the real environmental costs of any energy source and decide if the cost is worth it or not.
Football As Art: the vital stats as you’ve never seen them before
iOS, and considering Cisco used the name first, it only makes it look more dated.
I disagree.

Search Google for "who will buy my idea". The second result is a short tongue-in-cheek where I offer to buy ideas for $0.02. I get phone calls and emails on a regular basis from people actually wanting to sell ideas. They get to me because no one buys ideas.

The exception? Nuclear secrets maybe. Even then it is not the idea, but rather the schematics, etc.

So, to the original poster's question, why don't stealth mode startups at least put the problem they are solving on their homepage? I think the answer is fear. My take is usually that if it is that easy to replicate then they shouldn't be doing it. If the reason they are doing an easy to replicate product is because they are masters at sales and marketing, then I would think they wouldn't be that afraid of someone out selling them.
clever, but how do you explain the rest of the 3 units!
It's a strategy game, but it's not in the "compete with someone for 20-60 mins" followed by the game being reset category.
Tracking the Product Experience Online
To be fair, iPhone launched with almost all of the same limitations. Not to say that today's Kin should be competing with yesterday's iPhone, but even today, none of those limitations is a dealbreaker for me.
IPhone: The Art of the Launch
“Highly Paying Survey Sites Online” #4
According to Wikipedia, Apple has 34k employees. Microsoft has over 100k. Maybe at that scale, 34k and 100k aren't very different, or maybe that's like night and day.