skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surprised nobody has mentioned this: Python's generator expressions and list comprehensions are delicious. I'm primarily a Ruby guy, but I think Python could teach us a thing or two. :)
It's ironic that you describe Rich's post as "vapid bullshit" because the problem I see in your comment is that you give such a uselessly facile answer.

Yes, sure, all you have to do to make a successful company is make something people want and charge for it. In the same way that all you have to do to climb Everest is keep walking uphill till you can't anymore.

The real issue here is that doing these things is in practice very hard, at least the way startups have to do them. Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy. Doing them at the sort of scale required in a startup is so much harder that in practice few can bear it.

We have a huge amount of data about this after funding over 200 startups. We think constantly about the problem of how to predict which startups will succeed. And nothing is so clear as that toughness is the deciding factor.
Why would they? There's no money there. Just wait until someone else goes and uses it for something and makes some money. Then sue the people with the money.
Dream with your hands
I didn't notice it until 1:20 or so. Then you see that!
> But it doesn't seem that really stuck as the core value of their brand. If Nike's message is "we hang around great athletes," Apple's message today is "we hang around the young and hip," [1] which is different than "we hang around people who change the world."

Sure, but Apple never hung around people who change the world, that wasn't their marketing message. Their marketing message was that people who change the world don't follow the pack, and at the time of this marketing message, the pack was Windows.

Also, the core value of the Apple brand is not "young and hip".
We shall see how well it works out for them to be the brand for people who aren't fond of rules...computer geeks excepted. Computer geeks who want to change the world seek platforms with fewer rules.
This is the problem with Patent troll "portfolio companies" like his: It doesn't make anything, so there can never be a countersuit with protective patents.

So, even if we had IBM step in with its portfolio of 30,000 patents (and growing by 5000 each year) and snarl up the entire industry to prove a point, Allen would be like "whatever" and soldier on, because he makes nothing.
But are they profitable or are they expecting to make it up some other way?
Isn't appsumo a temporary deal? At least I took it that way, kind of like those cable deals where it is 30 dollars a month for 6 months so long as you sign for 2 years except with this you don't sign a contract you just can't use them for less than full price anymore (unless I missed that).
Selling for less doesn't always work, because the more expensive guy can spend more on marketing.

Also, for consumers, $19.99 is pretty much a fixed limit. Above that, you loose people, but below, you don't necessarily gain more signups.
So would I - but only if it looks as beautiful as the real thing.

Anyway, don't most people buy those as shelf decorations?
Is this your software?
I tried to read your story, but the firewall over here thinks your site has pornography, thus is blocking your site. Anybody else seeing this?
There's a Krugman interview where he advocates higher handouts that he knows the government can't pay for with current revenues, which he believes will force the government to raise taxes in the future.

So there is a left wing version of playing chicken with the budget as well, but it doesn't have a catchy phrase to describe it. Maybe "Binge the Beast"?
Ask HN: How do you keep the state information of the projects you're working on?
Let me clear what is state information of a project:

* Any information that have to remembered or written and then retrieved when one resume its work on a project (for example, on the next morning when arrives at work, or at the evening when start to work on the side project).

* For example, when you open the project/solution how, where and in what form do you keep the information what to do next, the context information of the current task in order to resume the work on it. The project/task management systems are not designed to handle things on this level of detail so I can't use some existing as a base for my projects. I have tried to accommodate a software like FreeMind (mind mapping) or ThinkingRock (Getting Things Done), but it just doesn't work.

* What I need (and I think plenty of conscious developers will be happy about similar system) is something that can be used to hold information in form similar to a logbook. I have read some articles about developer/programmer logbooks and the general idea of the engineer logbook, but since then I'm still failing to implement something that suits my needs.

* The system can be used not only for pure development, but also for more academic projects that involve more R&D although there are commercial projects with even more R&D portion (reading and trying things from multiple books, articles and papers).

* The information about the progress of the project have to recorder somehow in order to look for references, code, reasoning for certain decisions, notes, etc.

Do you know some software that can do the job...or I have to start writing it by myself ;-)

Thanks in advance
"We call it grit: when the going gets tough, a person's tendency to grit their teeth and keep going."

Startups (and other intellectual and business ventures) are not sports though. This is a double-edged sword.

Sometimes "grit" means that you push through the tough parts. This is good, and absolutely necessary for success in anything. But sometimes it means that you fail repeatedly by making the same mistake repeatedly because you mistake self-reflection and course correction for weakness and refuse to learn anything.
It is a valid point. However, having a hardware product might help raise more capital for the same reasons you mentioned above.
Thanks!
I'm disinclined to upvote when I'm forced to watch a video to find out why I should watch the video.

"A picture is worth a thousand videos"
That's what I had in mind, thanks.
Can't get Netflix (streaming) outside of the US.
What he said.

If they're going to try to say to break out of your shell and be different and go crazy and be rebels (look at the people in that video, jeez) it's ironic that Apple now tells people what they can and cannot create.
I just didn't think the examples given were very good.
Not necessarily, if YC benefits from high-valuation liquidity events and no so much from continued, steady operating returns on a standalone business.

I understand that things are blurrier with YC than they are with VC firms in general. I know about and admire Wufoo. I know Graham has repeatedly stated how happy he is with the Wufoo outcome. I can see plain as day the network effect YC has created with the large number of operating businesses it has started and with its (even larger) alumni network. I am not picking on YC with this comment.
Yes, we already have a chrome extension and a firefox extension is in the works. Unfortunately, only opera allows you to place bookmarklets anywhere in the UI. I don't like the toolbar very much either, but you can also add it to your bookmarks menu, it's just a bookmark.
Renowned, not really though Dawn of the dead might qualify.

But there are a couple I would want to see, and I could imagine that the twitter documentary (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW2oy9c5NiM) would find a fan base there as well.
Why must being honest with yourself equate to being brutal with yourself?

We aren't all ridden with mistakes and wrong things we do and falling to temptations. We do a lot of good things which need as much attention as the things that need brutality to keep our healthy balance.

The way to rapid personal growth is to be beyond yourself, sort of hovering over yourself, be detached if you like, and view what is from the perspective of reason and logics.

Don't be brutal to yourself. It does not work. Love is superior :)
E-Ink vs PixelQi vs Mirasol – Which One Is the Best?
E-ink, PixelQi and Mirasol are the most popular e-reading technologies (the last 2 coming soon), but which one is going to be the best?
Thanks for both the support and the feedback! I also think that that price is about fair, we just need to convert more users to subscribers, I guess...
So it turns out there is more, here is a Hitchcock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5VJqr9OgIo) triller.
It's strange that the title is 'Windows Internet Explorer' - isn't that exactly what their antitrust suit was about? I thought IE was supposed to be decoupled from the operating system (not that they ever really did it).
Orwells Animal Farm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZldlyeR8DU
They probably thought they were buying a broad general "What news will look like in the future" website.

In fact they ended up with a liberal pro drug, pro gay, pro adblock, anti capitalism, anti consumerism, anti advertising, athiest website.

As time has gone on Reddits userbase seems to have become narrower and narrower even though it's obviously grown massively. Maybe it's groupthink at work, or maybe it's just come to be known as a hangout for liberals being outraged by stuff.
This relates to an economic principle called Price Elasticity. The Wikipedia article is pretty informative on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

What you've done is some basic "elasticity testing", which, in the "real world" can often be difficult or impractical, but lends itself particularly well to online transactions of relatively small dollar amounts. More people selling small services online should be doing this - traditional businesses would love the luxury of doing it so easily.
I mostly agree, but patents were partly intended to protect small-fry scientists/inventors who came up with good ideas that they couldn't necessarily commercialize themselves, by providing a legal mechanism to keep manufacturers from just ripping off the idea as they shopped it around. It makes more sense when it's not a portfolio company holding hundreds of patents, though, and when the inventions are genuine breakthroughs: e.g. if a biotech researcher comes up with something that really would improve pharmaceutical research greatly, it seems okay to me if there's a legal mechanism to make pharmaceutical firms pay him licensing fees if they want to use the invention, even if he himself never ramps up into pharmaceutical research. This becomes much more of a minefield if the bar to novelty/nonobviousness is low, though, because then you just get people preemptively "inventing" a bunch of things that other people would've found anyway, and then demanding licensing fees.
Maybe he is trying to destroy the patent system.

If you have valid patents that read on various valuable products, and you can bank roll a credible law suit asking for injunctions and not accepting any other kind of relief, that might create enough chaos to get the attention of law makers.
This is really the great insight of science: the irrelevance of social status as a determinant of truth. Science was all about replacing mammalian hierarchy games with observation, experiment, and reason in determining the truth. People don't appreciate it much now, but this was really totally new. It had never been done before.

If someone very "alpha male" thinks the world is flat, it is still round. The universe doesn't give a shit about your status.

Neither does the market, really.

Business... or at least business done well... is a science. It's about minimizing and maximizing and optimizing and iterating. It's about building a good fit to a market, and lots of details.

Machismo can be beneficial in certain contexts, but it's not fundamental. You're spot on about analytics and data-driven rational thought.
I dismissed the chart entirely as overtly biased -- but I wish he had just used these numbers because they make his point much better, and honestly.
Congratulations, Colin. Your pricing model has people thinking about your service in terms of "a markup over Amazon S3". =)
Tried it and I much prefer Visor. But I tend to want to go into Terminal and stay there rather than just running single commands.
Depth.

I have read CLRS (the second book in your list); it's really great as an introductory text as it spans a lot of areas. For example, sorting/searching is a chapter in CLRS, while it's a volume in itself in TAOCP (The Art Of Computer Programming). Also, CLRS is written in the style of a textbook, rather than a reference and a newbie would find it easier to follow. And, TAOCP is more of an in-depth reference to practically everything that has been researched in that field so far.
But you'd probably only get hung up on that being "magic" if your mental model of programming assumed stack-based scope for everything.

Besides, how about this pseudocode?

class Foo {
field x;
constructor(x) { this.x = x; }
fun add(y) { return x + y; }
}

bar = Foo(3);
bar.add(5) // returns 8, wait how did the x in the object remember the 3?
I suppose that's true; below a certain point, the effect of a price is pretty inelastic.
I'd say they make far far better products now. That's not the issue here. It's just that back before Jobs was ousted and when he returned you'd hear about Apple, you'd hear about philosophy behind it etc. Now you hear sales stats and here and there how good the product is or will be. No more philosophy or visions in talks. Maybe it's just my perception of it though.
This looks like a really good way to conceptually grasp how the probability parts of quantum mechanics work!
I think it's mostly subconscious. I doubt anyone consciously thinks "That guy's wearing a suit. Don't hire him." However, people probably tend to take it as a sign that someone is dressing up to compensate for a lack of ability.
Transforming Text Into Knowledge API
I am using hiccup for generating the html, compojure and ring for routing and request/response handling, jetty as the webserver and postgresql as the database
Nope; it confirms that the Reddit guys and their Conde Nast overlords don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and that Reddit is not given the freedom (or resources, apparently) to run itself as it sees fit.
Personally I think of it as a value added markup as a good thing.

Using S3 would cost me more per month unless I implemented a similar system to tarsnap.
I wonder whether it's just that programmers who enjoy functional programming are also the sort of people who enjoy Project Euler problems. Since most of the problems are fairly mathematical, they also tend to have clear and concise expressions in functional languages.
Elaborate about "toughness" then. Maybe it could be a good essay topic. Toughness is such an opaque term... to continue with your analogy, I'm sure "strength" is a deciding factor in successful mountain climbers. But that's so coarse grained and opaque. I don't see much "meat" there.

Do you mean some mixture of perseverance, ability to make decisions, and willingness to take a few lumps? Or do you mean narcissism and alpha male characteristics?
We call 'em roundtangles.
I agree that California and other state and local governments have a problem with pensions. What I'm saying is that the graph severely overstates the magnitude of the change in costs over the past and future decades.
Yes, that happens to be the case. It comes down to data. If you don't have the science to back it up, then you cannot win me over with speculation about issues that require scientific investigation and supporting evidence without bringing some to the conversation. I don't make any excuses for that.
I've read some anecdotal evidence supporting this as well (atleast for goods). A store owner can't sell a line of jewelery, so they write a note to an employee to cut the price in half. The employee misreads the note and doubles the price of the jewelery instead. All of a sudden the line sells out.

Part of the reason is that if people notice something's cheap, they'll think the quality is cheap as well. And vice versa.
The article a few days ago about people not liking overly-enthusiastic, helpful team members comes to mind. It might be that some people just get an impression like "This guy thinks he's better than us", or the fear that the new guy will dress up, making them look bad if they continue to dress more casual.
I use them as references probably more often than any other books I own. That said, I use the internets an order of magnitude more.
Another section of that same page gives a different interpretation: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Java_and_patents#OpenJDK:_the_GPLv2... OpenJDK apparently comes with its own patent grant which should cover any derivatives, compatible or not.
I think you are deliberately misrepresenting his post. Is there a particular sentence he actually wrote that you believe is false?
Nearby Friends: Facebook Places meets Google Maps
No, I meant "Liberal". Read the article at the link.
How many people need this level of depth?
You may want to try http://eclim.org -- http://eclim.org/vim/cheatsheet.html

* Eclipse projects integration
* Ant Integration
* Dozens of language / markup integrations -- validation (at minimum)
* VCS integration
* and more... enhancements of vim built-ins
If they did so with any semblance of professionalism, the stories wouldn't be very interesting.

I once interviewed with a company where it was apparent 10 minutes in that it wasn't work I was interested in (they were a stealth mode startup, so my preparatory research didn't tell me much). I made my interests clear when describing myself, and it was apparent on both sides that there wasn't a good fit. We mutually agreed to cut the interview short. Not a very interesting story, but no bridges were burned and nobody's time was wasted. I'd expect that most such stories are similar.
It certainly helped that they where making a technical play. A non-technical founder would have been a liability really.
Another major factor in motion pictures is that each frame also contains a substancial amount of blur. This allows your mind to compensate for the lack of frames. I'm not sure how projectors work, exactly, but I suspect they also fade into and out of each frame in some way. That is, it probably doesn't operate like this: show frame -> clear screen -> show next frame.

LEDs and the like are usually set up to be either on or off (a square wave) causing the flicker much more apparent. Street lamps are sort of a hybrid, they "flicker" at 60hz, but their flicker is not a square wave, but rather a sine wave.
http://paulgraham.com/relres.html
Fundamentally, both lawsuits appear to be about embrace-and-extend.
Some seem rather obvious:

"The technology behind one patent allows a site to offer suggestions to consumers for items related to what they're currently viewing, or related to online activities of others in the case of social networking sites.

A second, among other things, allow readers of a news story to quickly locate stories related to a particular subject. Two others enable ads, stock quotes, news updates or video images to flash on a computer screen, peripherally to a user's main activity."
You know, I always hear employers talking about how important it is for employees to be passionate and to show they want to work for them. But they forget that it goes both ways too. The end result is an interview where employers expect me to show them how absolutely thrilled I am at the prospect of working for them, but they make little effort to convince me that I'm anything more than an inconvenience to them.

When you have an interview where an employer does want you and shows it, it makes all the difference in the world.
If you want to learn some extremely useful tips for real productivity in Vim, I'd suggest the detailed videos on http://vimcasts.org/ over this frenetic if enthusiastic video.
Actually, OC went bankrupt because they had lousy financial controls, and the treasurer made some insanely large bets on interest rate derivatives, which worked for a while and then went sour.
hmm, :u to undo... who would do that?
Seeing how Amazon's whole business model is basically to commoditize storage (and cycles and database queries) and drive prices as low as possible, their price per gigabyte seems like a very dangerous star for Colin to hitch his wagon to.
Chalk me up for anecdotally noticing a huge improvement when switching to the touchpad.

It's worth noting that the Apple trackpad is not only way bigger than a laptop's touchpad, it's also angled so you're not resting your hand on its edge. Also, if you've never used an Apple touchpad on a recent Macbook/Pro (the ones that are glass instead of plastic), you'll probably be surprised at how good the accuracy/tracking. They're much better quality than the Synaptics touchpads that are common in PCs.
I don't really mind their confusion though. Over the past 7 days, I've made around $200 in adsense revenue. It was quite a shock to log in and see that.
This is not obvious to me, can you elaborate?
Because the buyer could build the technology themselves for $50K in 5 months. (Okay, $100K in 10 months, given the efficiency of large corporations.)
I don't think that exuberant means what you think it means. Perhaps you meant exorbitant?
Disappointing. The downside to liquidity events, I suppose.
I can almost guarantee you wouldn't build an entire product/website/SaaS just because you 'smell an opportunity' in a market 'with more than even a few hundred customers', would you?
MuSL - Interactive Application Protocol Fuzzing Playground
Check out this other story about Jobs: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

I understand you probably did not have this story in mind when you made your comment, but he sounds like a jerk to me.
A great tip: Hit command and then space afterwards. This will drop down the spotlight search box where you can quickly launch applications. For example I will hit command, space and then type Term<enter> which will auto complete to Terminal.
The patents are all VM related rather than related to the library.
Clipboard history is a hidden gem on Quicksilver.

Just enable on Triggers, I set Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-V, and then I can use 1-9 to paste any of the 9 most recent clipboard items. I can use the mouse to select any of the most recent 250 clipboard items.
sux man
While watching the video, it was simple to agree on the analysis of Nike's brand/message. Then Jobs went to give Apple's message, and it struck me like as if he actually didn't know at the time. Compared with "honor great athletes" and "honor great athletics", the "we believe people with great passion can change the world for the better" seemed far too broad and general to be the actual message that people relate to with Apple.

I think Apple has actually made themselves several messages: they compare and contrast between the computer geek w/glasses to the normal person (computers for normal people), they target the "creative" crowd (cause rainbows and dancing is creative, numbers/math/text is not), and the combination of that brings the "popular" thing back to normal people (if you own Apple, you're not a geek, but you're still cool and not stupid).