skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, it is pretty fascinating to see how Barnes & Noble has fared versus Borders (now only 1/10 of BN's market cap).

Borders made a number of miscalculations that have really cost them dearly. They passed up on running their own online store -- outsourcing it to Amazon, but worse they bet big on selling media merchandise at their stores (DVDs, CDs, Games). I am sure originally the media decision worked, but as CDs died out (and DVD sales are dropping off), they were screwed.

Barnes & Noble on the other hand went with their own online store and bet bigger on having their own publishing arm (plus a college textbooks biz). Obviously in the longer run this has worked out but they are still facing extinction. I imagine that bookstores will still continue to exist going forward, but they will be far fewer in numbers akin to record stores. My guess is that Ron Burkle was going to make a play for the whole company so Riggio had to quickly react with his own potential offer (note the language he used in the press release).

Some people will try to play up the store real estate value aspect of these companies but I think that is not a good angle. Borders / B&N have -huge- stores on a sqft basis. That presents a big problem for potential businesses looking to purchase a location. I think the stores are most appropriate for maybe furniture stores but those are still recovering from tough times during the crisis. I don't expect them to start investing any time soon.
Magic numbers in Excel waste my time
Alexis, this was an incredible post -- tremendously moving. You deserve some big props for sticking it through all that and achieving what you did. My mother had an aneurysm just as I was making a big move at work, and that kind of thing really puts things in perspective -- as your post did. Bravo.
First Computer Programmer was a Countess
> Debating the merits of one idea against another isn't judging anyone

Yes it is. If you say an idea is wrong, you are judging the people who believe it as deluded.
Drag and drop attachments from gmail to save them to your desktop
BusyBox and the GPL Prevail Again
You can actually get started for free if you're a developer and understand how to deploy a Rails app on Heroku...
When I lived in NYC, I built recording studios and did noise abatement in a number of bars in Brooklyn and Manhattan. There are plenty of places to pick up supplies

Also, there are TONS of specialty shops. Canal Rubber is my favorite, as I used a lot of mass-loaded vinyl. In fact, in most places in the US, you would have to order in specialty construction materials.

As for general purpose, I got a good discount at Dyke's Lumber. They have locations all over the city.

Metropolitan Lumber is nice also. They've got lots of cheap "used tools", if you know what I mean. I used them when I was working in Hell's Kitchen.

You can haggle prices down quite a bit at all these places. Normally you just say "well, Dyke's gives me %10 off orders of this size" or whatever.

However, when the Home Depot opened up in Bed-Stuy, their prices were so low that pretty much every handyman in Brooklyn shopped there.

Oh, and all of these places deliver. I rarely went in to the location. You just call them up, say you need 20 2x4x8' studs, 10 1/2" pieces of sheetrock, and they'll roll up with a big truck with your stuff. Don't forget to tip!

For the random little things there are hardware stores all over the city. I can't think of a time I had to walk more than 5 minutes to pick up a box of screws or buy some new work gloves.
Ask HN: Would you attend to an event on SV hosted by Latin America startups?
On 2009, Chris Anderson (from Wired Magazine) and Sarah Lacy (from Techcrunch) came to Chile to an event organized by Wenceslao Casares [1] and Tiburcio de la Carcova [2], called Traweln [3].

Traweln is an informal gathering of entrepreneurs, executives and investors that work with technology, design and entertainment companies in Latin America.

This year, the event is going to be held on Silicon Valley at 455 Old la Honda Rd, Woodside, CA.

The event is by invitation only, but if you're interested I think I can help with that thing.

Official website: http://traweln.org

[1] Founder and co-CEO of Bling Nation http://twitter.com/wences

[2] He founded http://www.atakamalabs.com/ with Esteban Sosnik http://twitter.com/tiburcio

[3] Flickr gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42080094@N03/
(Make sure to put your email in the about box, otherwise it is hidden)
IPhone 4 Jailbroken
And it begins. Let me just say that I am yet to jailbreak any of the various Apple devices that I own, but I will not say that the thought never crossed my mind, it has.
Female. I must have missed the predictions (that more women were expected) and what they were based on. Anyone care to refresh my so-called memory?

FWIW: My experience has been that women are at least as ugly about men as men are about women. While going through my amicable divorce (and occasionally since then), I was badly spammed with really hostile, anti-male "jokes" from women I knew who had some fantasy I wanted to read this bitter crapola. (Can you say "projection"?) I don't think either gender is at fault for the current state of things. I think the struggle over sexual mores and changing gender roles is largely situational and both sides end up victimized by it while they each somehow think the other group is getting over.
Duplicate.

See lively discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570694
The tests are perfectly valid, it's the conclusion that is wrong. Of course there is a trade-off, of course you'll find a cross-over point because there is a trade off. The fact that the crossover point is at roughly 60% for your kernel config and machine setup is essentially meaningless, other than that it it at least falls within the expected range (50 to 80% or so).

Your hypothesis is that web servers have the majority of their fds active most of the time, and that's where the problem lies. I've put up the numbers elsewhere in this thread, feel free to do some measurement on your own high traffic websites to come up with more data points.
Twitpic is dead to me. The fact that they are shutting out developers is quite comical considering the whole reason they exist is because of the Twitter API.
My dad died of a Glioblastoma Multiforme. So thankyou for choosing that field to study. It must be a pretty daunting area of research though. The first thing you do as a loved one is research it like crazy, and then you lose all hope.
Isn't it obvious that being surrounded by people you like will give you a better mental state? And conversely, being with people you hate gives you a bad mental state.

This says nothing about your true qualities.
Heading in the wrong direction: we need fewer laws, not more.
He cited five that he had personal experience with. You can't use that as a metric.
OmniFocus v Things – Mac / iPad / iPhone
I got CS degree from a liberal arts school. I really considered it the best of both worlds. I enjoyed the art, music, and other arts classes I had to take, and I think they kept me from getting burned out on math/science.

I feel that I received a very good education for the money I paid.
Ah, ResEdit, tool of champions!
Not true. You've always been able to use JavaScript, and you can use pretty much any other language provided you get approval from Apple and don't use it to build the bulk of your app.

So I can use any language I want as long as I hardly use it at all and get some vague "approval" for my incredibly limited use. Big whoop. That's pretty much the same as not being allowed to use any other language. Much closer to banned than allowed.
I'm not so sure. I used to think there would be one device to rule them all, but now I think that this just applies to mobile devices. "The pocket exception" I've heard somewhere. When you're not concerned with mobility you want specialized devices. I still whip out the old calculator with huge buttons for some tasks. As for a long-reading device I can definitely see the Kindle work out (esp. with it's month long battery charge). I also pre-ordered a Kindle :)
Because the users go to the marketing page to find the login button. You're still just as vulnerable to MITM.
According to Snopes, the Lincoln quote presented by Lessig is misattributed. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/lincoln.asp
I did. Mainly for facetime over 3G, MyWi and theming options.

Super easy to install and lets you actually patch (well, pseudo patch) this exploit.
Charlie Rose interviews Jeff Bezos
LaTeX will warn you when the references are out of sync, and there is no reason why it can't make a second (or third) pass internally without having to call (pdf)latex manually again and throwing .aux .log .other_random_stuff files everywhere.
Why can't I rent ebooks? All I want is to pay $X to take out Y books at a time like I do with Netflix for movies. Who do I need to talk to get this done?

I'd love to do it myself, but the Kindle is proprietary device.
Not exactly, this is where Zed presumably shows that using pipes is equivalent to real world testing and has nothing to do with using the loopback/localhost device.

Personally I think that's nonsense. I downloaded the code, checked it out, there is nothing in there that changes my mind on the whole thing, the meat is in the C code and it's the same as what was linked from the article. The rest is a wrapper script and some stuff to visualise the results, which are what he showed them to be. The premise that web servers have the majority of their fds active is where the issue lies.

FWIW I did some measuring and the results are pretty much in line with what I expected (though the spread is still puzzling, I really intend to find out the cause of that): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573145
And is there any experimental evidence showing that this method actually works?
One thing Tom had learned at his previous venture, Gravatar, was that offering a resource intensive service for free was a losing proposition.

Is anyone else wary about the continued existence of gravatar? Even though it was bought out by Automattic, I think it might shut down in the future because it is resource intensive and hard to monetize.
Your first claim is false (apps might do that or they might not, and either choice is possible regardless of cross-compilation) and the third is a statement of mere possibility, which is uninteresting (Objective-C apps might be ugly and target the LCD as well — the iPhone has proved this). Only the second is true, and that reason is simply a long-winded way to say "ulterior motive of lock-in."
And this is why I hate software.

It should be why you hate apps that treat a common standard like CSV differently.
like the side notes. they make reading footnotes seem stressful by comparison.
Thanks for the advice. My vision suddenly dropped out about two weeks ago. Hopefully I'll have health insurance in the next month and will be able to go to the doctor.

Definitely need to get this checked out...
Will people pay for your web-service?

Will charging increase the perceived value?

The DropBox article that was posted a couple of weeks back was interesting, since they were able to monetize the service at differing tiers depending on how people entered the site.
Not a dupe -- this is his follow-up post.
Completely off topic:

I know this because my mom is German and my dad American and there is an anecdote from their early years related to this. They used to speak in half-English, half-German when they were first together. My dad came home one day and said to my mother "Ich habe ein gift fur dir" ("I have a gift for you")-- everything in German except the word 'gift'. She wondered what she had done that he would wish to poison her.

On topic: I'm pretty open about my medical situation in online forums but most folks at work don't know about it. I'm getting well, so I can't really relate to the stories that end more tragically. It always leaves me ambivalent about bringing it up at all around people who are battling such situations. On the one hand, I would like to help. On the other hand, I rarely seem to be able to do much good in such situations, which frequently leads to hard feelings.
Most claiming that there is nothing "wrong" with .ly are skewed b/c their demographics and role already in the tech world:read:used to it. The science (if I actually went to the trouble of course of proving this) would show that for purposes of mental recall/processing/action .ly is significantly different from .com. It will take longer to recite and the chance of users making mistakes will be higher (especially if your app's market is >techies only). So why incite the additional burden (and still have to buy the .com now/later)? Go for the path of quickest/least resistance (and drop the $75/year for the .ly solely as brand insurance--along with your big TLD purchase round and 301 all to that fresh new .com).
Make money online now
I have California, not NY: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
Good thing Apple requires C, C++, and Objective-C.

Good thing for crackers, I mean.
Maybe they decided that NeXTSTEP was a bad idea, so they're going to switch back to A/UX.
For source, see http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery
How Yammer Does Real Time Message Delivery
*raises hand for etsy. There's definitely an interesting art scene in and around the dumbo area, and I get the impression that it's on its way to becoming a viable place for tech as well.
Both Bay Area companies I've worked for include California 2870-2872 with their new employment packs, right behind the NDA.
Well, since we know that AT&T are forwarding all calls to the NSA, and Sony already has installed rootkits onto peoples computers, I would say that no, we are not comparing them at all. We already know the levels that those two companies will go, but we might be able to trust the website.
Yeah, thanks for this post and your other case studies you have done Chris. Also thank you for the couple tips you have sent me via email. Very helpful!
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my dad went to harvard, i didn't. so no, i was not smarter than him.
It's too late for me to edit my original post, but I should have written this line:

> The only pragmatic argument against Apple's app store policies

Like this:

> The only pragmatic argument against Apple's app store policies with respect to average app quality

I'm only talking about average app quality here, and whether we can conclude anything about Apple's store policies affecting app quality. I would like to see evidence that a more open policy would yield higher quality apps.

Also: I am not arguing that the web is the same as Apple's app store except insomuch as general users needn't care about the average unit's quality. My appreciation for a single well designed app is not impacted by 100 terrible apps that I will never encounter.

> people rely on their search engine or on their friends recommendations (first by email, now by Facebook/Twitter), not on some central authority.

This applies to the app store as well as to the web. I use email and Facebook and Twitter to get recommendations for apps (whether for Android or the iPhone). I don't rely on Apple to tell me what app to use.
I think you are referring to the newsletter I started up a month ago - Hacker Newsletter, http://www.hackernewsletter.com

(And thanks!)
Ask HN: Should co-founders receive equal pay?
I see a lot of discussion about how one might distribute equity among co-founders, but I'm struggling with the issue of co-founder salaries.

As part of my agreement with my co-founder, I'd like to define salary 'bands' that correspond to the performance of the company: ramen-profitable, sushi for lunch, hiring a chef. (This idea came from a previous HN thread).

My question is, should my co-founder and I plan to take equal pay regardless of share allocation? (I'll hold 60%, my co-founder 40%).

My gut tells me yes (so long as we're both contributing seriously and the funds are available), but I'd appreciate feedback, esp. based on experience.

As a side note, pg mentioned in another thread that "whatever you pay yourself, you're always doing it at the expense of the stock you hold". Does that mean we should, in fact, return equity to the company as we pay ourselves?
Release for Android instead? The iPhone is dying.
Ikea Dave Laptop Table
I think the difference is more along the lines of:

- That person is wrong, they must be stupid.

- That person knows he's wrong and is just trying to further his own agenda.

- I think that person is wrong and they are either misinformed or know something I don't.
When did 'testicles' become 'courageous'?
Do part time programmers who are willing to come into the office exist?
I am looking for a part time programmer to work in our office in Burlingame, CA. It seems that everyone who applies is out of the country or a company in another part of the US. Has anyone had any luck finding programmers to work in their office? Maybe the job posting isn't good enough? http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/web/1870600939.html

Any ideas would be helpful. Thanks!
> HN goes through a phase every now and again where I think it takes itself a little too seriously.

hahaha. yes, every now and then. hahahahahahahaha
What's worse is that their stores are in more well-to-do (i.e., well, or at least better, read) suburbs and exurbs, so you can't do a "package sale" to any company who's doing well in this environment (Dollar Tree or Big Lots, for example) to take up space there, as the property owner and neighboring stores in the strip would balk at the idea of their anchor store going downmarket. So, they'll have to pawn each property off piecemeal, which is much more laborious.
Did Shopkick change the Check-In Game?
One anecdote for another. I'll take it.
I agree with you. I remember getting my first job beyond cutting grass. I had gone out and dropped off resumes at all the grocery stores, etc... I came home and told me Dad I tried and needed to wait. He asked me what I did and told me to get back up and go back to each store, but this time ask politely for the store manager and hand him my application. First place I went back to and handed the manager my resume hired me on the spot starting the next day.

It taught me an important lesson about really looking for the job and putting the proper effort in.

And yea, get a job doing something while you look. I haven't been jobless since before my first job at 15.
I submit that those people just aren't narcissistic enough. I am narcissistic, but I don't often have negative opinions about other people. Mostly I just don't form opinions about other people because I am too involved with myself! (and my computer)

Seriously, though, I call bullshit. If a friend asks for your opinion about, say, a potential hire whom you're acquainted with, and you know he's antisocial and incompetent, do you try to say positive things about him? Also, opinions about other people are a relative to the abilities and attitudes of the parties involved, aren't they? If you're Superman, earthlings are all weaklings. If you're Mr. Glass, then just about everyone is stronger than you. I say you should try to form objective opinions about other people instead of either trying to see only the good or the bad, and only when you find that all your opinions skew in one direction do you potentially have a problem (or you could be Superman).
http://dynadot.com/
There's nothing stopping a developer from hosting a web page for his app, which would be page-ranked. And there's nothing stopping me from making an app choice based on evidence other than the in-store reviews. Apps are linked to and discussed and reviewed in all sorts of places all over the web. It works like a charm.

I would love to see side-loading become available for the iPhone, but, knowing Apple, I don't expect it and I don't think Apple should be obliged to provide it.
Not really. "Deluded" is not a personal characteristic, it's the receiving end of an action — a synonym of "deceived." If you concluded that the person is easily deluded or willfully wrong, that would be a personal judgment, but merely believing their ideas to be incorrect is not judging them.
"still in stealth mode"
>the iPhone has much stricter (DEP-style) page protections than OSX

Not sure relative to OSX (or why that relates to Android), however note that Android makes just as heavy of a use of the ARM's NX bit. Gruber recently subtly implied that Android was more reckless about security -- in a blurb about Android 2.2s V8 JIT engine for JavaScript, Gruber offhandedly mentioned that iOS "couldn't" perform such optimization because it barred executable segements -- implying that it didn't have NX-type uses, and he was simply blindly wrong.

And clearly it isn't quite so universal in iOS. This demonstration makes that amply clear.
I love my Kindle, and I've been trying to get my mom, an avid reader, to get one as well. Her biggest issue with it though, is that you can't share books with friends, and I feel like a lot of people have the same thing holding them back.

This seems like such a no brainer for Amazon to create, but clearly something's holding them back (likely the publishers).
For political reasons, it's usually best to pay yourselves the same amount. Reasons for different amounts: children, loans, trust funds, etc. When you're medium successful, that may change if one of you is still CEO. For now, don't sweat it.

I interpret pg's comment to mean that any dollars that you aren't spending growing your business are doing harm to the value of your equity. Realistically, I think this means that if you achieve some degree of product market fit, it's a bad idea to pay yourselves more than you really 'need' as those dollars could be more valuable to the business.
If most people can't--or won't--purchase the banana without the share, then it doesn't really matter. It would be analogous to the price of food items staying constant, but the price of, e.g., packaging going up.
Wow. I had no idea pays were this low. How do you live? Is the job really that great? Why put up with it? I started making 50K a year when I first graduated from college and I still complained it was too low after a year there. And now I think that making $100K a year is still too low. You need to choose a different career. Else no point in complaining.
Depression? Grow up. It would depress me to sit at my house all day for 2 months while borrowing money from my friends to pay the rent.

How would some side work suck up all your energy? It's not like you have to think to serve fries, stock shelves or wait tables. Working crap jobs is the best motivator I've ever had to do better for myself.