skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have always had this app as a demo/restricted version. It would restrict how long you could record tracks and how many map tiles you could download at a time.

With iAds, we thought maybe we could monetize better than just converting over to our paid app, since Lite users outnumber paid users 10 to 1, even with the restrictions.

It will interesting to see how it goes - we'll be monitoring conversion to the paid app and we'll have to make sure this doesn't muck up the works.
This Google? The one with Jewish co-founders?

"The anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. Google refused."

http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-02/200702-BrinF...
I used to think that too when I was a founder, but currently, at least, most VCs and many angels tend to wait till they see a startup starting to take off, if they can. This works just as well as predicting, so long as they jump in before other investors.
Wave, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Answers, Buzz... there is a common theme here. Google is a company run by engineers and their hiring process is designed to find people who can solve problems. It's been said before, but Google is great at panda tasks and horrible at lobster traps. [1]

The successful Google projects are ones that typically solve a serious technical challenge in an elegant way. Sure there were map sites and email services before Google Maps and Gmail, but Google redesigned them to work elegantly so you could save yourself time and effort compared to the other services. The same goes for web search, scholar search, product search, image search, web-based office apps, and application hosting services. Google didn't create these services, they just did them right.

However, building a site like Twitter or FourSquare, there's no real "problem" per se. It's more about community, and that's something that Google just doesn't do well because it's in direct contradiction to their entire mission statement.

Google is great at enabling people to accomplish things. They fail at allowing people to do nothing.

[1] http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-goog...
The t-mob version works fine on Voda 3G here in the UK
Porn used to drive tech on the web. That's no longer the case but top 1,000 porn sites have some pretty impressive technology, like any other top 1,000 site.

The envelope is now mostly being pushed by developments in search, social media and mining the web. The porn industry has moved on from pushing the tech envelope to being much more focussed on marketing and SEO.
The integration was simple... my co-founder timfbowen did all of it in a couple of days.

However, we did get rejected once because the ads wouldn't disappear when users are offline. In our app, we need to have some sort of restriction or ad offline (because it's mostly used offline), so we now show a house ad after we disappear the iAd when the user is offline.

As for numbers, we'll be excited to see and I will share. We have about 100k people who upgrade the app when we do releases now, and over 1,000 downloads per day, so we are hoping for a decent CPM and more revenue as the userbase grows.
I want to see a study that tracks cancer rates per capita over time. It seems like if there were enough analytics done on cancer you could look for rate jumps and use that as a starting point to an investigation.

There is an issue in Carlsbad right now where a bunch of kids have gotten cancer. It is getting a lot of press and a lot of people are trying to say that it has something to do with the Carlsbad soil. But that just seems like a guess.

If there were a lot of raw data out there a researcher could compare Carlsbad cancer rate with other locations. He could compare soil contamination rates with other areas too, and if there was a correlation that would be a good starting place for an investigation. If there were other types of correlations, maybe there is a better place for an investigation.

The point... I think it would be wise to use some of the Cancer research money in this way to look for patterns that cause cancer. I find it frustrating that will all the money behind cancer research, nobody knows what causes cancer.
Compared to how many people are making millions founding technology companies.
The days of the web being defined by what it is not are numbered. It's still new enough that the culture as a whole hasn't yet internalized and defined it, but certainly young people don't need to make comparisons to any other form of media. The web has a richness and ubiquity that makes it hard to pin down to a single definition.
Cool startup: http://makerbot.com

News source: http://www.nycresistor.com/
I still don't get the iPad.
I wouldn't put that in the product review because it's more a feature of the user than the product.

E.g. it wouldn't be accurate to say in a product review of running shoes "you are going to run slow in these shoes" even if on average that's what people did.
The spider drawing is a nice touch. If you're unaware of the meme it can be found here: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
The bit about American media shilling for the left is quite a funny troll.

Admittedly I might be wrong as I don't live in that country, but American media and politics seems to consist of the right and the further right.
A little discussion, without the politics:

I skimmed it. Such stuff is not my cup of tea, precisely because it is unproductive. It's emotional and it's hyperbole. I don't see you proposing any real solutions or doing anything very analytical or thought provoking. More drama is not likely to be the antidote to existing drama. I believe there are solutions, but they are of the "light one candle rather than curse the darkness" variety. Drama is more immediately emotionally gratifying but doesn't make for an adequate solution. Most folks writing such things want emotional release rather than real solutions and don't seem to know or care that such emotional release typically just adds to the ills of the world rather than making it a better place.

Not intended to upset you further, though I realize the odds are good it will. Sigh.
Business has traditionally not needed outside funding. Funding has mostly come from revenue or from family. This angel/small scale investment is only neccessary because technology is changing so quickly and there are many opportunities at the moment. But this will end soon enough and the market will stabilize.

The few new things that startup then will not be worth having a lot of angels for.
This is why I generally have multiple different browsers open.
Chicago? The antebellum South? And plenty of other elections, at every level, in every country?

Seriously, while it's not part of the democratic ideal, cheating is rampant in practice. You've got to stay vigilant any time you're trying to poll a group of specifically-enfrancised people.

Some amount of intentional coordination is to be expected and even celebrated, if you trust the 'wisdom of crowds', but not to the point of falsifying votes/identities or using falsehoods to deter/negate others' votes.
In my experience, a mix of experts and generalists make for a great team... as long as there's a sense of teamwork and mutual respect.

Experts often make quick work of a solution, or pull answers out of triviata unavailable to others.

Generalists -- particularly those with broad experience and polyglot interests -- can often make great connections from seemingly unrelated details.

Managers, though... now there's a problem that needs solving....
Would you have done this with another ad system if you weren't limited to iAds?
This must be your first time hearing about HTML, welcome!

Just imagine how large "quirks mode" must be.
Scripting the Java Debugger Interface with jdiscript
We have always just advertised the paid version in the Lite version and had restrictions.

We probably would have tried a different ad platform at some point, but iAds are reportedly getting good CPMs, and they provided a good impetus to do it.
Have you tried the functions in the clojure.stacktrace namespace? They are limited, but might get you some of what you want.
yet another patent for a another software application implementing a business process(es)

abstract ideas should not be patentable.
If you take PG's essay one step further, it would seem there might also be a need for micro-investing in the same style that Kiva does micro-loans. Something that lets small fish invest in startups that need less than, say, $250k. Investments could have a lower limit of $5k for example, and most software startups might only need 10 or 20 investors at $5k a piece.

Diaspora received a great deal of funding on Kickstart, but Kickstart specifically says it is not meant for investing. I think there might be a niche between well-connected, wealthy angels and simply asking family and friends for seed money. This would also alleviate the choice between risking your relationships with all your friends and family just to generate seed money. If you have a business idea, there should be an option to raise money in an open market at any scale.
Funny part is that the variety of posts here is what keeps me checking into HN on a daily basis. I started reading HN when we were working on "web startup stuff," but have continued to because it exposes me to novel arguments, thinking, and standpoints that I might not have been exposed to otherwise.

The reason that I link to my posts here (and this is one of the very few places I do) is to bring them to another audience (generally designers frequent ideasonideas more than anyone else), and to try and open up new discussions and access varied opinions.

If I'm out of line in posting this sort of thing here, please do feel free to say so, and vote it down. That being said, I wouldn't have made note of it, if I didn't think the topic was worthy of exploration and discussion.

I will argue your last point, though. The notion that, "people who were sympathetic are going to remain sympathetic, people who were hostile are going to remain hostile." I'm one of those people who would have once taken a completely different standpoint on such an issue. With time, though, as I've been exposed to others thoughts on the topic, it has become harder to hold on to those ideas. It's the fact that people kept "bugging me" with these sorts of discussions that forced me to reconsider my positions.

It seems to me that the HN community is one that needs to talk about these sorts of things, just as much as funding, coding, success, and all the rest. These issues are going to become increasingly important in both our lives and careers.
Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study
This seems to read like http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse... and its source- is there anything new here?

(That is, other than the suggestion that the best way to combat large-scale industrial waste is through personal actions not unlike turning off the lights at home?)
That's false. Medieval trading voyages, which comprised a large part of economic activity at the time, were frequently paid for with investor money. Since the industrial revolution most new industries have been.

More things surely would have before, but there was no way for investors to ensure they weren't cheated by the managers skimming the profits. The reason venture funding worked for trading voyages was that when the ship returned, it was very hard to conceal what was in it.

The way railroads ensured that investors got paid was to fund themselves with bonds that paid a fixed rate. Managers were free to do what they wanted with the cash flow, but if they failed to make their bond payments they'd be in default.
Why do you think that is? Why is it so hard to discuss these things in a meaningful way. We all like to think we are reasonable people, that we are open to having our minds changed, and yet it does seem to be impossible to talk about big ideas in any setting other than a dialogue between friends.
Thanks for mentioning this book: I missed it before this.
There's a good talk by Suarez at:

http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_...
Coming from a family of entrepreneurs (in India), this seems empirically false to me, regardless of whether you count tech startups or regular 'small businesses'. Almost without exception, we've needed significant capital to start a business. Whether this came from a bank, a private investor, or existing family wealth has changed over time, but the need for it has not.

I'd actually argue the opposite. Business has traditionally needed outside funding, but the incredible cheapness of software startups is decreasing that need.

Finally, you say that investment "is only neccessary because technology is changing so quickly...but this will end soon enough." That definitely seems wrong. Technological change is accelerating.
The picture for MS and tablets doesn't look good whatever way they go.

1) The go with touch bolted onto Windows on x86. While it's understandable that they'd like to carry along a base of existing software, what are the chances of the interface working well? The CES demo didn't seem to show any more touch than flipping through pages in an e-reader someone else wrote. The lack of OS features and other apps to show off was very telling. It's doubtful many are surprised that HP hasn't shipped yet.

There's been touch support in Windows since XP, but as an add-on, how can it being anything but an awful kludge?

Even if they succeed with a Windows offering, it is apt to be a failure in the sense that it'd just be cannibalizing their own netbook/laptop sales. Vendors do seem to be waiting for Intel to ship a lower power x86 part, so a Windows kludge seems to be the most likely path.

2) They could go with something new... run on another CPU (different instruction set) porting some frameworks from Windows but using a new U.I. Can they pull off a great touch U.I? Can they write code that'll deliver speedy performance and good battery life with a low-power CPU?
Can they write a few great core apps and make the platform attractive to developers? (They've got no phone to migrate an alternative base from). Can they out-Apple Apple?

I don't think it's the competition that's going to be scared of big old Microsoft... more likely the users and developers, and to a lesser degree the stockholders.

With something new, a so-so offering would fail big time. (Think Zune). It'd really have to offer something Apple doesn't. If lower price is the only draw, it may get sales without making anybody any money. Apple has room to cut prices if they want to.

Having picked up Palm and WebOS and BeOS, I think HP has a better chance of cooking up a viable tablet OS (and hardware bundle) than MS and other partners.
Google Wave and Network Effects
NYT says it stands by its Google-Verizon story
I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week.

I always get a kick out that line when I read it.
There's a good set of articles available at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer on the topic. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers is also often relevant.

edit: I don't know if I was downvoted for seeming spammy, but Eliezer's writings actually cover the topic pretty well.
The same problem applies to error codes; meanwhile, careful and consistent propagation of error codes to each caller in turn is semantically equivalent to a panic or an exception unwind, just more laborious, and a smidgen easier to ignore. Indeed, the ease of ignoring errors seems to be one of the motivations of Go's approach, almost as if they got bit by Java's dumb exception specification approach, but learned the wrong lesson - rather than making exceptions unchecked, instead making it easier to insert the infamous empty catch {} (i.e. assign ignored error to _).

The problem is at its heart the notion of an exceptional situation. Whether a condition met by a library is exceptional usually depends on how it is used by its caller, which may be many stack frames away. The library either needs to ask its caller if it should really ignore this error (which probably came from another library again, maybe file I/O or network, etc.). The usual alternate choices are unilateral abortion (raise an exception, or conscientiously propagate an error code) and unilateral ignoring (which is the alternative Go seems to be trying to offer). If Go really wanted to enable handling problems at this low level rather than propagating to higher levels like exceptions do, it might have implemented a restartable condition system; this would have let the library give the higher level module the choice. But Go didn't do that.
Your opinion doesn't upset me at all. I'm glad you've shared it, and it was just the sort of thing I was hoping for: discussion.

I'm increasingly cynical given the industry I work within. I work with many people in advertising, marketing, and "selling stuff." The curious part about this industry is that we're more than aware of the dodgy nature that often pervades our industry, and many of us are deeply concerned about it.

At our studio (smashLAB), we've taken a few different approaches to addressing such topics. The first was a self-directed project called Design Can Change: www.designcanchange.org. It asked designers to place greater consideration into the creation of new objects so that we could minimize waste before it came into production. Numerous folks have made changes as a result of that project, and we've continued to support it by speaking on the topic and advocating for smarter design and more critical thinking around consumption.

This particular piece was "heated," in part because such things sometimes need to be. That being said, it's the first of many new posts, and largely is intended to set the stage for other perspectives, considerations, and more actionable suggestions, to be addressed in future posts.

I hope that didn't upset you. Sigh. ;-)
What would happen if they closed any of those projects tomorrow? How would one recover the data or justify the time investment? Things like search and maps are awesome, but their strength is that they are passively used. I'd hate to see them disappear, but it wouldn't harm me if they did, and something else would eventually fill the void. Trusting Google with data or relying on their APIs is another thing entirely. Maybe they should focus on the area of passively consumed information, which they've proven they excel at.
Why Your Phone Can’t Replace Your Credit Card
UI Design / Adobe CS guy here. Email is in my profile if you want specific design help. Got a fairly busy weekend but I've got 3-4 hours to contribute.

I'm into using CSS3 (w/ fallback styles) in production so that would be cool.
I was working on a similar idea "Flash Mob: Help a Startup Out", but the specifics were to have a live chat at a given time, and have everyone (available and willing) throw their 2cents in.
As a Canadian living in the US I'm constantly amused at the left/right divide here. Left wing politics in this country would, in any other western nation, be considered centrist (if not a little to the right), and right-wing politics here would be fairly extreme right in most other places.
I’m partial to the theory that Windows Phone 7’s UI is actually part of a larger “touch” strategy that would cleanly apply to tablets/pads/slates: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/why_microsoft_isnt_...
Besides the 3 in this thread, is anyone else paying for Mixergy? I find it hard to believe that he has that big of a Willing audience that he could monetize via membership.
Title needs a "(2000)", this was written ten years ago.
Check out the video! What a dummy!
It does sound funny, but I wouldn't underestimate them.

Depending on how mad they get they have a lot of tools at their disposal to make sure these don't get released.

If I were them I would start by DOSing all wikileaks servers.

Next I would trace where the servers were and pressure local governments into seizing them. (It wouldn't take much pressure, other governments can't be happy about wikileaks either.)

Next I would stage local burglaries and just "happen" to steal the wikileaks servers.

Wikileaks does have some options if this happens, most notably peer-to-peer releasing. Because of that the DOD may decide it's not worth starting up with them.
How would it be a big story? Fox "spikes" stories that aren't even true, and are critical to the right every day. A lot of it ends up as fodder for the Daily Show.
I like a lot of this. The simplicity, multiple profiles etc. I'd switch from Facebook if everyone else I knew would too. I think you need some kind of Facebook interaction built in to get it going quickly. Facebook has so many users that first adopters are giving up a lot to move.

Edit: Signup was easy, the username admin was available. Sweet.
Wikileaks might be heralding a time when state secrets are bandied around like MP3, It is a bottom-up demand, and no matter what you think of its motivations, its impact will be lasting.
That reminded me of "How to win at Roulette": http://i.imgur.com/6euVL.jpg
Proposed StackExchange site for advanced users of Un*x-like OSes
What sort of effect have you been seeing on batteries?
I don't really know. To me, it's always seemed that the best, and most interesting, discussions are the ones with some "meat" to them.

My wife's uncle was a very loud man. He was also well read and intelligent. I didn't agree with him on everything, but greatly enjoyed our discussions (particularly the ones accompanied by good scotch).

His sons later recounted a phrase he had used commonly. I paraphrase, but it was something akin to: "Argue with the person across the table as though you love them." I'm butchering the phrasing here, but I believe the sentiment holds.

To Terry, a heated debate was a positive thing, and never an attack--no matter how fierce the discussion became. I've always liked that thinking, and believe it's the way we actually learn new things and strengthen our resolve on what we believe.
The article is coming true! Look, this comment was telling me new things that I didn't know about google and what's happened? It's been censored from me by people (no doubt some sort of google maffia) "burying" it.
Earliest investors get priority since they took the most risk.
Oops. I was supposed to review this but ended up being too busy fundraising.
If the startup starts making lots of revenue (just for argument's sake, I am not actually implying this happens with any noticeable frequency), wouldn't the investors get part of it, even without an exit?
The integration process was really easy. You just include the iAd framework and then add ADBannerView objects wherever you want them. The ADBannerViews work like pretty much any other view with the exception that they must be a certain size. There are callbacks for when the banner loads to fail and if these are called we display our house ad instead of the iAd.

I found this guide to be helpful:
http://useyourloaf.com/blog/2010/7/13/adding-iads-to-an-appl...
I wonder the likelihood that Wikileaks is a CIA honeypot operation.
It's also fairly hard to find a good "cost-of-living" metric that accurately reflects what a given individual's cost of living would be, because how you'd live isn't identical between regions. For example, I've lived in both Houston and the Bay Area, and in the Bay Area I pay considerably more for housing, but considerably less for entertainment. The latter is due to most of my entertainment in the Bay Area being free outdoorsy stuff (hiking, beaches), whereas most of my entertainment in Houston was for-pay indoor stuff. That, and more of my trips in the Bay Area are nearby driving trips (up/down the coast, etc.), while most of my trips from Houston were by plane--- and I took more of them, because I didn't have as nice local weather, nice nearby hiking, etc. The end result is that I spend almost exactly as much overall, despite the higher COL by most metrics.