skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever man. That's an unfair and negative value judgment. Everyone's identity comes from somewhere. For some people it's from being part of the elite Geek crowd. For other people it's their sports team winning. For other people it's their business making millions of dollars.
I think the two versions are both fairly honest, though, and wouldn't be if reversed. Microsoft has had an inferior search project for a long time and is playing catch-up with Google. Apple simply took a long time getting the device to market, but when they did, it was completely game-changing.
What, didn't you know that's how developers are made these days? That's how they come, standard issue: awesome rockstars. With 5 years of experience.

That's the impression I get from most job postings, anyway.
The scary part was that you could watch it unfold: http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/charts/2010/05/06-spread.p...

When you can see the spread like that then something has gone terribly wrong. As I read it, that spread is between NYSE on the bottom and the rest of the market on the top.
Completely with you. LOVE Amazon Prime. I just wish that they would let me make a default option to pay with my Amazon Payments balance. It's stupid and discourages me from spending more money. I've complained to their tech support, to developers on HN, yet nothing has been done about it as far as I know.
In many similar situations people don't have reservations. Guaranteeing they receive a product requires them to be one of the first people through the door when the store opens. Taking reservations may have created the false impression that one could show up later in the day without the need to wait in a long line.

The other difference I can think of is that in similar situations the manufacturer and the retailer are two completely separate entities. It's more difficult for me to imagine getting angry at Nintendo because Best Buy is making me wait in line.

I don't really see the point in taking reservations if people are going to have to stand in line all day anyway.
Apple loves this stuff. I was in an Apple store a few weeks ago to buy a gift. Aside from the "Genius" Bar, there were five employees helping customers and another two employees fiddling with boxes and displays. There were seven or eight customers ahead of me impatiently waiting to be served. There was a lot of ostentatious yawning, foot-tapping, and watch-checking. In the ten minutes I stayed, the employees on the floor managed to serve and check out four customers. Seven employees, ten minutes, four transactions. That isn't incompetence. That's policy. They're inflating perceptions of their popularity and their importance. If someone can see you without waiting, you aren't important. If you hurry for someone, that makes them more important than you, so don't do it.

My question is, is this ever a good idea? People put up with it because they have to, but what happens when they don't? (I walked out of the store, but I bought the damn iPad online anyway, because it's a Father's Day gift, and I can't tell my mom and sister we're not getting it just because Apple ticks me off. They've never heard of Android, plus my dad is a perpetual noob who needs the most mainstream device available.)

Would people buy less if they were well-treated? That seems to be the premise. Or maybe not -- maybe the abuse is not intended to maximize sales, but rather to intensify loyalty among hard-core fans. That might make sense: banking loyalty and prestige to prepare for a contingency when they have to move clearly inferior products.
This reminds me of a scene several years ago during the PS3 release. At the Metreon in San Francisco, outside the PlayStation Store that has since closed, Sony was handing out not only bottled water but hamburger meals, real hamburger meals, not fast food, to people waiting to purchase PS3s. I wasn't in that line, but I happened to be walking by the Metreon on the way to my destination, which I don't quite recollect. Pretty incredible to juxtapose that with an event like this.
Tried to apt-get it (on Ubuntu 9.10) but got scared when I gotta a warning about lzma getting uninstalled and possibly breaking my dpkg.

Looking good on ubuntu 10.4

Same folder compressed in 1/2 the size as with tar cvfz, sick.
Beautiful Statue in The World
Let's see some beautiful pictures statues.
In some cases, reviews are a matter of Internet Forum Argument. This happened a lot before they added actual forums--the reviews for anything by Ayn Rand dissolved into Ayn Rand arguments.
Of course the question is what sites get the definition of 'adult'. There are nude photos on Flickr after all...

And even if in the US porn isn't forced into the .xxx tld by law, for other countries they may jump on it much faster.

Then of course there is the issue of a slippery slope. What other content could be forced onto certain tlds by law?
Folks - waiting in line in front of an apple store is part of the experience (I am standing 3 hours back right now in palo alto.). Half of the fun is launch day socializing, enjoying the spectacle, etc...

Seriously, if I didn't want to wait in line, I would have just had them ship me my iPhone. Zero wait.
That isn't policy. It's in-and-out at any of the NYC stores, and the one in Rosedale, Minnesota.
NASA resets computer,  repairs data corruption on Voyager 2 interstellar probe
I don't understand your reaction. Perhaps someone has a good explanation or comment that could help people who can't cope with glossy...
Travel? New quick travel iPhone application
People tend to use their laptop like a TV these days and watching video looks better on a bright, glossy screen.
Restaurants and clubs do this all the time. It's not so surprising or ingenious. It is kind of a bitch, though.
FrostWire for Android v0.2.0 out
that always works
Simple cost calculator/projector for Subscription payment services (Google Docs)
>But, with the exception of a rare few, it seems that neither male nor female programmers give a rat’s ass about fashion.

Fantastic. My sister got on my case about not dressing up or, as she called it, 'showing off my body'. You're only young once, she said.

Which, I said, is why I don't want to waste my time thinking about clothes when I'd rather program. Sure, I occasionally like dressing up, but I really could care less about whether my outfits are new and original each day.

Also, nothing is more insulting than going to a programming meeting, throwing in my 2 cents, and having a guy come up to me afterwards only to comment on my earrings.
IPhone 4 + Gyroscope + Gaming = All Kinds Of Awesome [video]
What I don't get is why we need another Linux-based mobile OS. Why not just use Android?

People flocked to iOS because it was unique and innovative when it was new, and because it runs on great hardware from Apple. People are flocking to Android because it's an open-source alternative that's in some ways superior to iOS, and because it runs on a skyrocketing number of devices from countless manufacturers and on countless carriers.

For MeeGo to win serious developer-share, it will have to either come on hardware more compelling than Apple's, or outdo Android on technical capability / developer experience or overall market penetration. To my naive eye, neither of these seem likely. So what's the deal here? Am I mistaken about MeeGo's prospects, or is this just a massive case of not-invented-here?

(Lest I be accused of ignoring the overriding issue of user response to the two operating systems, I'm working under the assumption that MeeGo doesn't currently have anything significant to add to the user experience provided by Android on smartphones. Am I wrong about that?)
I may just be in the minority but had a lot of freezing problems, lost data once or twice. I also found it quite unresponsive.
That is exactly my point.

Your unhappiness with my comment shows that you care more about what is good for your application than what is good for the user.

No matter how good your application actually is, with that kind of attitude I just can't trust you.

Your second sentence is a non sequitur btw. I'm not looking for easier ways to sign up, I am looking not to sign up at all. If a mugger provided me with convenient credit card and paypal options for how to give him my money, I wouldn't be happy with that either.
Nice post. I think you nailed it: Fried's advice is for a very specific type of company. Scott's example of a giant SAS company is a bit cherry-picked in this sense, since it's the complete opposite of Fried's "type" of company.

And this may be a bit OT, but... how about an Amazon link to that playbook? ;)
I'd love any feedback possible on this thing!

In trying to figure out which subscription processor to use on our new web app, I wanted some way to see how our credit card/subscription processing costs would scale with more subscriptions.

It's currently setup for 1-500 subscribers, but I'm happy to add more if requested.

Hopefully people find this useful! There are probably mistakes and I'll fix any that are reported in this thread or e-mailed to me at bradley@getmochi.com.

(p.s. right now it only checks Braintree/Paypal as gateways and Spreedly/Chargify as billing services)
Nor does it tell you anything about the quality of the work produced. Sometimes a job half done is worse than a job never started!
In most of my friends who are interested in the iPhone, it's mostly just impatience.
Not necessarily. When I was watching the match, whole parts of the image were hidden by reflection.

If you can control the illumination around you, then maybe you have a point. But I think that the frequently that is not the case.
Their implementation of multitasking, to which that sentence was referring, still seems to be inferior. Or let's say different, for diplomacy - yet they make it sound as if they are ahead.
Ironically, apple is actually one of the few companies out there that has licensed one click purchasing from Amazon. (everyone waiting in line, btw, could have chosen to just have their phone shipped to them)
Back when I was younger, I'd camp out with friends because it was part of the experience. I mean, sure I was excited and eager, but camping out and getting home at 2AM and playing something nobody's played before until noon the next day with your close friends was great fun.

I'd argue the inherently social component available in game consoles makes it (potentially; depends on the person or group of people) a little different from the phones, which are purely personal.
I like certain other things when they're bare, but I'd never want them to go out in public without clothes on.
Clarity Evolves from Contradiction
The State of Social Porn
Just trying to understand. I could understand if the queuing was fun, but as that doesn't seem to be the case?

Yes, for 10 hours queuing, you get to be cooler than everybody else for 10 minutes, until the rest of the world has received their iPhones in the mail?
Except for days like today it's the same at the Apple store in Atlanta, GA. Super fast service.
At least they are only reinventing half the wheel this time
I wrote a tool, pixz, that does xz compression in parallel to take advantage of multiple cores. It also indexes xz-compressed tarballs, so you can extract an individual file very quickly instead of needing to decompress the entire tarball. The parallel-compressed, self-contained tarball+index is fully compatible with regular tar/xz, you don't need any special tools to extract it.

http://github.com/vasi/pixz

The interface is still very rough, but it works. The xz utility comes with a very nice library and API, which made this a lot easier--thanks, Lasse!
3 Things Every Web Page Must Do for Success
Phone Battery Life Sucks? Blame it on Software
Clearly the point is to guarantee you a phone on the first day. :-)
It's likely that the FDA has actually caused more deaths than they have prevented, by delaying and increasing the costs of bringing new drugs to market.

More info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZL25NSLhEA
I could be completely wrong here, but I would guess that the majority of MW's customers purchase or rent suits infrequently; old measurements are likely to be inaccurate by the time a customer returns for a new suit.

More generally, I really don't see the point of paying for custom-fitted clothing without first confirming that the clothes are going to fit.
Benchmarking Lean Startups
I don't think they mean that one exchange was DoSing another.

Quotes within a single exchange are disseminated immediately to all interested parties -- if one party was spamming thousands of quotes at a stock, that stream would be repeated for everyone with a feed from that exchange. There's no way to tell which party is sending it, so the only thing you can measure is the quantity being sent by the exchange. Thus it is technically accurate to say that "one exchange was sending an extremely high number of quotes". It's in the exchange's best interest to disseminate quotes as quickly as possible in order to attract order flow and thus collect fees.

On the other hand, inter-exchange feeds are federally mandated and used primarily to comply with Regulation NMS rules that prevent trades from executing at a price inferior to the NBBO (national best bid/offer). In other words, if I send a buy order to NYSE but NASDAQ has a lower price, NYSE is required to either reject the order or route it to NASDAQ for a fee (it's up to the customer which method is used). It's not necessary to send 5000 quotes per second to another exchange because the primary motivation is compliance. Generally, institutions will send their orders directly to the exchange with the best price in order to avoid the extra fee for having it routed by the exchange.

I may be way off on the inter-exchange feeds as I am not a professional, but there are undoubtedly many here who are so please correct me.
And it's a sad thing when someone's identity hinges upon his being part of the elite, his sports team winning or making lots of money. Those are things to enjoy, surely - but if they get to be cornerstones of your personality, it's time for a reality check.

Sure, that is the way life is for many people, but ... to think that Apple intentionally makes thousands of humans waste hours of their life doing something they hate.
A company that is not inherently evil would strive to make the consumer experience joyful and uplifting. But this ... reducing humans to masochistic consumer zombies with large bladders instead of brains - it's a waste of life.
.xxx will be here soon - but only after we spend several more years speculating about how soon the .xxx tld will be created.
While we're talking about compression algorithms, here is a nice little gem called BMZ:

http://bitbucket.org/mattsta/bmz/src

It's is a fast compression scheme implemented using BMDiff and a Google Zippy clone (based off LZO).
Decompression is more often limited by disk I/O, in my experience, particularly when the source and destination are the same disk. I can often get large improvements in decompression and installation speed by putting the source file and / or temporary installation files on a different disk.
Shafi, is my Dissertation Advisor's Advisor. That makes her my Grand Advisor or something like that in Academic terms.

I like this quote "I can’t even begin to understand what this means in English, but it sounds impressive doesn’t it?", this is pretty much what I get whenever I try to explain to people what my PhD is in... ha.
It's just as sad when your identity hinges upon thinking you're not part of social groups you've imagined. But "masochistic consumer zombies with large bladders instead of brains" is RAD hyperbole. My 12 year old self just wrote that on my trapper keeper with a sharpie next to the A inside of a circle.
There's also something to be said about how the more effort you spend attaining something, the more valuable it becomes (e.g. the psychology behind hazing in fraternities).

So Apple gets free marketing AND increased loyalty. Hurray.
a) 1 (Grafly)
b) 1 paid
c) zilch
d) small ($5k/year), but it's all passive income
Taking reservations may have created the false impression that one could show up later in the day without the need to wait in a long line.

I concur with you in everything you said, but I think it is important to remember that that impression was false only because Apple arranged it that way deliberately.

As others have stated, they knew the maximum number they could serve in a day and could have refused to reserve more than that, or made reservations for specific times of day and then ensured they had enough staff to cover those reservations.

If they truly got overwhelmed by surprise (say some employees got sick), they could have started handing out numbers so people could be free to walk away for a bit and return closer to time based on their number. Etc.
Re. Decentralization, you say: It creates the illusion that power doesn't exist, when it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight.

So, a thought experiment is in order, consider the following scenarios, re. restaurants:

* there only is a single restaurant allowed

* there are multiple restaurants, but they jealously prevent any new entrants

* there is a dynamic market of restaurants, which survive or close based on the patronage of individual diners

In each case, power is more decentralized, from an individual institution, to a cabal of institutions, to a set of institutions selected by individual patrons. Now, you could say that in the last case, there are still elites, there are those who can spend more money, and there are the restaurant owners who exercise power over their own establishments. But is it reasonable to say, re. power that: "it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight"? Is monopoly or oligopoly power indistinguishable from market power?

You give the example with restaurant reviews, saying that individual control of reviews would still leave power to aggregators. But isn't it equally open to all aggregators, just as the latter restaurant market is open to those who can start a restaurant and attract a clientele? In decentralization, are we really not also seeing the diminishing ability to exercise arbitrary power?
It segfaulted at the end, after taking 7m28s. I don't know how big the result was because it got truncated to 35 bytes.
I guess this is part of the reason to really shoot for a top school while you're in high school: many people who don't make it end up with a colossal chip on their shoulder for the rest of their lives. Ok, you weren't good enough to get into Stanford. Isn't it time you got over that?

Google has always made it clear that they intend to hire the best and brightest. Facebook has always said the same. When Zuck arrived in Palo Alto, he prowled Stanford for top engineering talent because, like Google, he knew that that was the key to the company's long-term success. He found the guys who made Photos, their first real killer app. They weren't even programmers. They were just clearly brilliant people.

37 Signals is a company full of hypocrisies. They have clearly won the lottery with the popularity of Ruby on Rails but insist on deriding others who have won similar lotteries and actually managed to turn their luck into something huge. They rail against taking investments but make an exception for taking money from Bezos because that particular money isn't used for operational purposes (cuz they marked the Bezos money with special ink and keep it in a separate safe from their other, properly bootstrapped money, which is ok to use for operations). The only advice they're qualified to give is: "how to successfully bootstrap if you create a piece of open source software that spreads like wildfire and lets you make money selling books and software to legions of fanboys".
Does driving or flying for hours to go on a holiday hint at emptiness? It's basically the same thing — putting up with a mostly unpleasant wait for an enjoyable experience — just the details of the fun time at the end are different.

(Incidentally: I have never waited in line for an iPhone. But I do wait in line for hours every year to see Joss Whedon at Comic-Con, so I understand why somebody would put up with an extended wait for something.)
Kudos for that link! When I was originally implementing it, I couldn't find a good cross-browser hash history implementation, but this one looks really promising -- and jQuery to boot!
How about a "Y is the new X" or "X is dead, long live Y"?
I always saw it as in "pre-posterous".
Well what it may lack in polished, commercial apps, it has huge suite of FOSS software available. It even has Debian as an installable 'app' ffs.
People who reserved this item know from previous experience they were most likely going to wait in line for it.

They knew.

I'm not saying that Apple couldn't have handled this differently, but there is a value that was attached to this item by the people in line. The cost of time lost/waiting in line for hours was something factored in to the value they were expecting for their iphone.

Some of the more pragmatic and practical types scoff and write articles about how much all horrible lines are going to affect Apple's reputation (and bottom line), yet history has and will prove them wrong. Did the horrible lines for the iPhone 2G affect the sales of the 3G? The 3Gs, the iPad? It did, positively.
OK, this discussion is way too big for HN, and I'm writing up a massive blog post explaining it, but you really can't blame Apple because the problem is way bigger than that.
just as a thought experiment: imagine android without fragmentation, over the wire updates for all platforms, on demand by users a-la-iPhone.

different developing environments cause developers to think, and develop, differently for the devices lined within those environments. MeeGo offers something Android does not, and that is not only a "truer" linux stack that is not based on java. But this also gives a flexibility for programmers to use languages that are more within their preferences (read: not java, maybe C, maybe scripting languages, what ever).

I think meego is something more developers are going to feel comfortable with as the gap between developing for traditional desktop/mobile devices and handheld devices will shrink. Can you pack an RPM? cuz that's all you need (as far as i understand) to distribute your app to meego.

just my 2 cents
Ask HN: Does your startup change directions on a daily basis?
Hi, posting anonymously. This is my first time at a startup (I previously worked for one of the big internet companies).

Decision-making control at our startup is firmly in the hands of a few b-school types (sales, marketing). In the last six weeks or so, they've been changing our strategy on a daily basis. It's affecting the way we engineer our site and more importantly, we've lost faith that our product / sales / marketing teams can execute towards a common goal.

My questions for HN:
1) Is this common for non-engineering-focused startups?
2) How do you guys deal?

Thanks. Please share thoughts / stories.
Don't know if Android numbers are helpful to you too (maybe just the contrast will be interesting), but here's my experience in the Android market:
a) 1
b) paid
c) I posted in a dozen message board threads or so where people were looking for such an app, and I've diligently answered every e-mail I get about it.
d) It's been in the Market for about a month and a half, and I've made a little over $2000. Hard to give a per-month answer as I don't know if it will taper off and run out of customers. ;)
Yes, it does. My comment was meant comparing PDF and PS purely as languages. PDF is basically a premature optimization of PS: They replaced the plain text PS commands with binary commands in PDF. That makes PDF on average smaller than PS.

But--similar to WiFi relying on special purpose encryption instead of using standard algorithms--PDF is bigger than compressed PS (e.g. .ps.gz).