skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There needs to be a Godwin-esque term for "takes one data point and extrapolates it to the entire world".

So, for his 5-person company the social media role "just isn't" a full-time job. I doubt if marketing or HR are full-time jobs there, either.

But at a 1000-person company, they very much are. Tweeters demand and expect instant responses: look how out of the control the Amazon-hates-gays thing got because they took a day or two (fast by corp standards) to respond. You want an instant response from a big company you need a person or team constantly watching and able to get in touch with the people with the answers very quickly. (This fantasy of "everyone in the company can tweet!" doesn't work any more than "everyone in the company will blog on the world wide web!" did)

Similarly, he begs the question hugely with his shade-of-blue instance on analytics and metrics. Not everything that can't be quantified is valueless. It's hard to put a figure on how well-written an article is, for example, or how interesting a story is.

What you can do is measure them by their effects -- see how many readers a story gets, for instance. But even this is a bad path to take: it leads to celebrity gossip and link whoring.

Social media is similar. You might not provide the analytics Spencer wants, but equally you might not want what analytics you do get.
Ask HN: Should I notify users in advance when changing my company name?
We are changing our name in a few weeks. It is definitely a better name and better domain. Should I start notifying users, or just turn on the switch with a clear explanation of why the name change? I believe most users will really love the new name but I am wondering what the best practice is when it comes to changing a company name where there are about 50,000 active users.
Social Networking Safety
Agreed. (I run a product development shop mostly working on mobile projects these days).

As a former embedded Linux developer, I really really want android to knock the socks off of the world. But its not.

Problems:

Its carrier based OS update model causes hideous OS Version fragmentation.

Eclipse is so painful to use many people just avoid it and use the command line tools.

You have to write Java.

There are a dozen deal breaking quirks between basic control behaviors on the different systems.

--

All this with the fact there are HUGE economic issues with 85% of the world being unable to charge for apps in the Android store, flooding the market with free apps, makes the Android platform a bit of a question mark.

With Windows 7 Phone going with a Centralized OS Version release as Apple is doing, I think we're going to recommend it as a secondary platform over the free Android.
Nice point about bad employees will be the most loyal :-) I had not quite thought of it that way.
The Art Of Turning URLs Into A User Readable Preview - Text Extensions
The day one of these things does Knuth's books perfectly is the day when I think they've well and truly won.
After reading the article... in a scenario where subjects have a single task (push a button) and no time limit, then unconscious trumps conscious thought. I don't see how the unconscious could have much affect over rapid-fire decisions involving extrinsic stimulation that could not have been predetermined. Life is much more the latter of the two experiences so I don't really get this as scientific evidence against free will.
Feedback on our explainer video [video]
I could go for folding comments, like Reddit.
"Interesting, thanks. As far as I can tell, it's possible to convert PDFs to the Kindle's native format, any idea if this improves the situation?"

Yes. I use mobipocket creator [1] to convert pdf files to the mobi format. It's free and works pretty well for documents with one column. For papers with multiple columns (like those from journals) I use papercrop [2] to slice the pdf in smaller parts so I can read in my (non-dx) kindle 2.

[1] http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscrea...

[2] http://code.google.com/p/papercrop/

edit: small fixes
yeah it really does. I call international a lot and the prices are almost half for me compared to skype. So, if the phone service is good, I am definitely off from Skype.
You should read up on trademark law. They aren't going out on a limb. Look up Trademark Dilution.

I'm not saying they're right, though; I'm just saying they're not crazy.
So when will this make it in to Google Apps?
I just finished posting a first draft of bettermeans in 3 minutes.

I would love your feedback

what works? what doesn't?
can you tell what the product does?
are you inspired to use it?

which parts need most attention?
does the script make sense?

pace, tone...etc.

thanks for taking the time
I've catalogued the submissions so far:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633754

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633450

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633439

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633368 <- This one has comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633367

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633357
Hmm,

I didn't know this. But I think most users probably don't know this. If they knew, they probably couldn't be bothered. Figuring what to share with whom manually is a daunting task.

I suspect most folks either:

* Maintain multiple identities.
* Just share everything and hope for the best.
* Limit what they share on facebook to what they
would share in "public

Not necessarily in that order

Edit: If Facebook could automatically suggest who to share what with, then they would an ultimate kller app. But I think this problem is too hard currently, to say the least.
it would be awesome to have an api for this.
I was under the impression that the cell phone shutoff was to prevent the towers from freaking out about dozens of phones coming in & out of range at 650mph+.
>Flickr's probably quite a good example of this.

Flickr had contextual ads since, I believe, day one. Then they added paid accounts and I subscribed and have never regretted it.

I've been a paid "pro" subscriber to Flickr for many years, trusting them with my media (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dforbes/4657268471/ <- one of my sons nibbled by a goat!) because I had faith that they had a coherent, sustainable business strategy.

Similarly I have faith in Gmail because I can see they aren't struggling to find a revenue model.

I don't trust services that are saving a revenue model until "sometime later", especially where the service has any sort of lock-in or inconvenience if they get bored and move on. Such a make-money-later strategy usually arrives with very negative changes when the day of reckoning comes: It is essentially a bait and switch tactic (one that PG is a big advocate of), and really I view as deceptive, even if it gets a big enough user base that you can flip it to some VCs.

"All blogs now served with free pop-under advertisements!"
Very interesting possible uses for legal work.
Ask HN: Where can I find startups for sale?
Serious question, want to find some business oportunities in technology.
Does anyone have a good argument as to why I should take wikileaks any more seriously than, say, the drudge report, or the enquirer? In comparison even BoingBoing seems like a greatly more legitimate unbiased, hard-news organization.
Seeing as Einstein's theories are based on math + the observable universe (and that they explain events as we see them in our universe), how can we say that our universe is governed by a specific part of Einstein's theory, namely the behavior of spacetime inside of black holes?

Seems fairly circular to me.
Paul Graham and "It turns out"
The Oxford English vocabulary lists 500000 words.
The number of companies and of registered trademarks is probably far more than that, but the number industries/markets a company can activate in is pretty low.

Pretty soon you won't be able to use any English word, if as you said ... trademarking a common word such as "book" is reasonable.

Also ... if they would have to go for someone, why not go for ... Fuckbook.
http://flippa.com
Maybe this is implicit in calling something a "startup" rather than a "side project", but on both sides there needs to be a common agreement on how much time you put into the project, what your vision for the growth of the company is, whether you have other sources of income (and work) at the same time, etc.

The nasty variation on this that I ran into was something that started as a side project where two of us had full-time jobs and one guy did contract work. A couple months later the other guy got laid off and started putting most of his time into the side project, which then evolved into a startup in his mind. Much acrimony followed regarding how much time each person was or should be putting into the project, whether things were "fair", etc.
Hell no! As long as it is still cheaper and the service is as good, I am going to use it. I saw the international prices and I am going to end up paying almost half to what Skype charges. So, I am definitely in!
Strong experience in a specific language isn't necessary. I know it's anecdotal, but reddit started out being written in Lisp, then switched to Python pretty early on. Many great tech people I know have no problem moving from language to language, or framework to framework.
I seem to read really mixed reports about the Android fragmentation problem. For every report like Joe's, I see others that say developing for Android is fine. I can't get a good read on where the actual truth is.

I work in a group that does research on mobile healthcare applications. We're not a software company, so we can't afford to have a whole pile of devices here for testing. With the iOS platform, at least I can be confident things work if I can test on my iPhone and our iPod touch test units. That said, Android is going to eventually be too big to ignore sometime soon. I'd be curious what other devs around here have experienced. Maybe we should be using PhoneGap to avoid those sorts of problems?
i wouldn't consider that to be a rule of thumb, but it is definitely something worth mulling over as an employer.

i know a good number of employees who were extremely loyal not because they were bad, but because they had been with a company for so long that their skillset had narrowed from deterioration down to exactly what their job was, and they were very good at it.
Secret Codes You Aren't Meant to Know
Maybe you intended to say 0.19.

0.019 < 0.02
Is there any indication that Google might change the Android release model when faced with competition? Maybe in 3.0 or 4.0? If they maintain their development speed, they may release Android 4.0 in about the same time with competitors' next major release.
I wonder why these standards don't use the <title> element?
FiveThirtyEight relaunches on NYTimes.com
I'm hoping so. There are many times when I have sucky T-Mobile coverage but have access to wifi (like when I'm in the back corner of our building :-O) where this would be perfect.
Building artificial wear into video games makes you scum
Teaching with Infographics
> I don't trust services that are saving a revenue model until "sometime later" ... essentially a bait and switch tactic

Ning! Ning! We have a winner!
0.019 Euro > 0.02 US Dollar

Watch the units :)
On a more positive note, does this mean he is working on Facebook's Android app?

If so, that's great, it's really _really_ terrible.
Of course it's reasonable that prisons are more expensive on a per capita basis. The real question is which of those are most const-effective in making CA a better place to live. Putting all those people in prison was a choice.
I understand that, though I agree that my comment didn't make it clear. But you have to manage the property managers, no?
The Unplugged Challenge
Too bad some of us have a Google account for Google Voice, and a different account for Google Apps for Your Domain (email).

Guess my GV number will always be disjointed, unless they add GV to the Apps and have some way of transferring an old account in...
I don't think they can due to licencing issues, although they could offer an optional service which would GREATLY help.
To get reasonable (any) access to your computer's microphone, speaker, and video.
Android SDK is horrendously overengineered.
The idea is more that you can't really directly control your thoughts and emotions but you can learn to see them as just thoughts and emotions and that gives you some room to move towards what you want instead of struggling with your thoughts and emotions by trying to change them or get rid of them; which just tends to increase the negative thoughts and emotions. I don't know the efficacy for ADD specifically.
No, you don't have to be smart to cook. I don't know if you even have to be smart to cook well. I suspect not, because I learned to cook good food pretty quickly; someone who was even dumber than I am might take a little longer, but it still wouldn't be a substantial fraction of a human lifespan.

It does take work, but not a huge amount of work, especially if the aim is to feed your family, not to cook well. Oranges and bananas, you don't even have to cook. A peanut-butter sandwich is two minutes if you already have bread and peanut butter. Cooking brown rice or lentils involves dumping a measuring cup into a pot three or four times and setting a timer. Same thing's true of eggs, oatmeal, polenta, ramen, and grits. Other beans, you have to dump into a pot of water the night before, and you probably ought to sort them so you don't bite a rock, which might take five or ten minutes for a big pot. A big pot of beans and a big pot of rice can satisfy the caloric and protein needs of a family of four for a few days.

And if you dump garlic, onions, butter, soy sauce, salt, pepper, mayonnaise, and hot sauce on any random barely-edible non-sweet crap, you can get it up to the level of McDonald's or Popeye's pretty quick.

There are some cheap foods that require a lot of work. Collards are a pain. Baking your own bread may be cheaper than buying it in a store‚ but it's a lot of work. And about any vegetable you use in a dish is gonna need some slicing. But it doesn't require you to be "industrious" at the level of digging a ditch for eight hours, or working overtime at the bubblebath factory they can't afford to heat.

Now, it's true you aren't born knowing this stuff. You have to learn it, and even if you know it in theory you may not be in the habit of putting it into practice. The soft-drink aisle and the potato chips are pretty tempting. Stopping in at McDonald's on the way home from school is a lot more immediate than stopping at Jewel Osco for a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, even if you evade the peanut butter. And if you've just gotten off your split shift at the call center and you have a couple of kids to feed before you start in on your homework, it's pretty hard to motivate yourself to cook. I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of being poor in the US.

I'm just saying the problem with food is not that good food is out of reach.
Ask HN: What happens when your startup fails?
I keep hearing that only 10% (if that) of startups succeed, but what happens to the other 90%? What happens to you personally? Do you just start looking for a new job or do you have baggage for the rest of time?
How We Got a Link from CNN and Drove 200K
I love software like this: software that not only models data structures, like a spreadsheet, but attempts to model thought structures and patterns of reasoning, too. It's so much harder than building some dinky wizard that steps you through a series of fixed questions to answer. Instead it attempts to quantify the process of hypothesis and disputation in an open-ended way—yet an intuitive one, which attempts to interface with the ways that a professional will already think about a problem. I'd love to see more examples; I guess certain CRM/Project Management tools try to accomplish the same type of thing.
>I'd actually take a guess that a typical family wouldn't be able to spend $200k in a year if they did not make purchases whose primary purpose was to display status.

Mortgage + 3 cars + 2 kids in college + 1 in a private high school + 1 family vacation = ???

I don't think any of that stuff is a status symbol, or excessive. And it seems like that would easily exceed 200k a year, and that's excluding utilities, food, etc.
I must be the only one who absolutely loves Android, its fragmentation, its stupid little quirks and the fact its written in Java. Then again I am not a traditional software engineer / CS grad.

Edit: and he is such a cry baby! :)
Really? I thought they were only rolling it out in the U.S. at first. I don't see it in my gmail here in Canada. Here's to hoping..
I took some rough notes here:

http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2010/08/paul-graham-on-trends-for-...
Scribble it down, whiteboard it out as a process or set of processes, photographing the whiteboards along the way, save images in a directory dedicated to that idea, add text docs or additional whiteboard photographs as the idea progresses.. Out of 50 feasible startups, this process has helped me discard at least 45 of them
> However, we like to call you every once in a while to tell you how good we're doing. ;)

I guess that's why I haven't got a call recently. Not doing too well, eh? ;)
Sun's problem wasn't OSS. Sun bet the farm on SPARC and it died out in favor of x86 faster than anticipated, basically. The OSS stuff was great -- they needed to build and sell an IDE or some other enterprisey-product that would drive Java's big corporate users to pay out big license money.
Sun was a smouldering wreck before they started giving away everything they owned. Their OSS policy was an act of desperation -- it did not work out, but to say it killed them would be vastly misrepresenting their last decade.
Mechanical turk transcriptions?
I would go so far as to say Sun never did enough open source.

I had the misfortune of doing some work in a mixed shop where most of the Unix servers were running Solaris 8/9 recently. A couple things that led to its downfall:

1. No package manager. And now that there is a package manager, maintainers are few and far between. I don't think I would trust it in a production environment. It's never going to be as robust as dpkg or yum. if they had fully open sourced Solaris, and supported the community as primary, there would be a well-maintained package manager. I doubt Oracle will do anything to fix this.

2. I'm still not entirely clear on where their utilities like grep, awk, sed, etc. come from. All I know is I was terrified to push /opt/bin ahead of /bin in my PATH for fear of breaking something, and meantime I hated the native shell tools. They should have adopted GNU's tools as first-rate. Solaris' tools suck.
Basically, it looks like there's no pleasing this guy.

I think some people are just wired this way. As much as I love most technologies I use, I could rattle off a dozen flaws in any one I use extensively. Of course, it's a waste of time to simply complain, but twitter is a great way to immediately release that tension without wasting too much time.
It'd be nice if access were a little more open a least, on terms similar to the Bing Search API, though I can see why they don't do that.
Having never developed for the mobile phone space, do any of the 3rd party developer tools hold any promise for abstracting out some of these complexities? Has anyone used Rhodes?
http://rhomobile.com/products/rhodes/
You use these words "very clearly" and "frivolous" like they mean something. In fact, no. PerfumeBay, for instance, was smacked down by the Ninth Circuit for diluting eBay. "Victor's Little Secret" was smacked down for tarnishing Victoria's Secret. "Charbucks" is likely to lose to "Starbucks".

In this specific case, it's even less frivolous. The Illinois company set up a social networking site for teachers and called it Teachbook. Even they aren't arguing that there's no overlap; they're simply surprised Facebook would care. But of course they do; they are required to defend their trademark or risk someone else claiming that they've abandoned it.
I agree, but that's more of a general "what to look for in cofounders" thing. Business, technical, design, etc. cofounders should all share that quality.
In other news, other developers have different opinions. He has the problem of coming FROM iPhone. If you come from Web/Windows dev to Android, it's a blast. I have some trouble with the devices, screen sizes, background apps slowing things down, etc, etc. But overall, it's very manageable, and I've been loving developing for Android.

Eclipse however.... not a fan. On my old XP box, I'll be working along and it will just vanish. No error. No crash. No stall. Just vanish. Like it traveled back in time right before my eyes or something. I've never had a dev tool do that to me before :)
That sounds like you're taking a favored conclusion and arguing backwards.

How many people have health insurance in the US?

How many of those are government employees? (Answer: far less than half)

Is the government running health insurance? (Answer: no).

EDIT: Wasn't trying to get too political on this. I just find the argument "the government buys some health insurance, so that's why it's expensive" outrageously unpersuasive.
Hm. I think we are mostly the same. I would say that you have free will if, after you have removed all possible influences, you are still able to choose. Many things in life reduce your choices, but reduced choices are still choices. We often have choices we ignore or neglect, too.

When I mentioned the manipulation, I meant that it was to be complete manipulation, whatever the source(s). My point was to differentiate it from predestiny, where the manipulator is a fundamental force (God or the movement of the structure of the universe).
Well, were talking about somebody with $4m to play with.
Unless they expect to get a better return from investing the money than the rate they are paying for their mortgage it makes sense that they would have bought the house.

You don't think three cars is excessive? We'll have to differ in opinion there.

A lot of your costs depend on location obviously but, yes, I stand by my hunch.
Reading his comments, he sounds like many developers when faced with tools they aren't accustomed to using languages they aren't competent at: Instead of acknowledging confusion and ignorance (in the polite way of saying it), turn it into criticisms of the externals.

Look at virtually everyone new to JavaScript and web development as a great example of this. Even brilliant minds, when first introduced to the surprisingly powerful JavaScript, post diatribes of dislike for it.

For instance consider-

"A bit surprised how many hoops I have to jump through to do asynchronous HTTP on Android. NSURLConnection+delegate was so easy."

So how does one do asynchronous HTTP on Android?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/828280/is-there-an-accept...

Is that hard? What hoops are there? It is extraordinarily straightforward, and is built such that you are essentially the commander and chief of a centralized asynchronous mechanism. But yes, if you look for it to be exactly like you've done it before, it might seem Byzantine.

Android has a tremendous number of quirks and imperfections, but I see no reason why Joe Hewitt's opinion is of any significance.
Its not good. I love my kindle, but for textbooks it kind of sucks. Granted I have the smaller one.

Formulae are ok from what I have seen, but graphs and charts are almost impossible to read.

Also its annoying because often times a paragraph on one page will refer to a graph on the next page and switching back and forth is very tedious.