skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Pros and Cons of B-School
Thanks for all the commitments everybody. I really struggled to pick people here. My original intention was to choose between 1 and 5 people, but I couldn't choose so few. Here's the list. If you're on it, e-mail me at neil.davidson@businessofsoftware.org:

BruteForceIT

adriano

rstaats

joinME

turboNH

tooshel

roning

alzatecarol

svetmiru

gdltec
We are part of a new incubator in Syracuse at the moment (http://www.syracusestudentsandbox.com). The older VC crowds we have pitched to really cant understand what we are doing and why it could be huge. We opted to experiment with crowdsourcing from people who "get it". We will let you know how it goes.
I don't remember my models of computation class so well, but wouldn't ASCII and UTF-8 be alphabets, not languages?
He thinks he is a contrarian with some special insight. He gets called out on almost everything he writes.
This is a serious concern, but if you get something for your money it seems not-unfair.

Occasionally, fanatical TV viewers will try to get together and pledge enough money to produce another season of their favorite cancelled TV show. In return for that money, they get to see another season of their favorite cancelled TV show (well, they would if the networks were smart enough to work that way).

So if I donated $5 to this startup and got a life membership with like 3 fighting dudes, while they charge $1/mo post-launch with the same plan, I'd call that a pretty fair bargain. Of course, I don't quite know the legality of selling a chance to possibly in the future own a product that isn't developed yet and might not ever exist, but at a discounted rate.
Why is that so ridiculous? The idea behind Kickstarter is to have people pay for something they want before its built. Actual customers funding you is much more powerful that some VC's who think people will one someday buy what you build.
Sell the problem
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Hong Kong issued a black signal warning against Philippines travel
China's National Tourism Administration (NTA) issued a statement Tuesday strongly condemning a bus hijacking in the Philippines Monday, which ended in the deaths of eight tourists from Chinese Hong Kong.
Surely you understand the backlash from using internet memes at HN where they are not necessary?
I see that as more of an orthogonal marketing issue of not understanding where the customer growth was coming from. When you have the attitude that you sell to CIOs and your consultants do the dirty work of setting up the systems, you don't care if college sophomores find it to be usable. (Until 10 years later when those former college sophomores are now making purchasing decisions, whoops!)

Open source won in this area because of its "by developers, for developers" approach moreso than the source code ecosystem.
Yes.
A solar storm of a magnitude sufficient to cause data loss on magnetic-based storage mediums would cause data loss on magnetic-based storage mediums.
Did you really make an account just for this comment?

If you don't have to give up equity then why opt-in to do it? If enough people believe in an idea/want it built then it's a fine way to make the money that you need. From the sounds of it they've made it this far in a year with almost no funding so imagine what $20k could do...

Also, I believe Diaspora was asking for $10k and simply had an idea, at least this team has executed.
Perhaps this exact patent of Apple is the reason why Dells are blinking faster. And not because they failed to copy Apple properly as the blogpost implies.
Ask HN: Where do you buy your non-DRM ebooks from?
I'm thinking about buying an ebook reader, but have trouble justifying it with ebook prices sometimes being more than paperback costs, especially since they have DRM and are not lendable.

What are your thoughts on this and where do you get your ebooks from?
The anti-glare film from PowerSupportUSA.com is the best computer accessory I've ever bought.
Perhaps this exact patent of Apple is the reason why Dells are blinking faster.
Emergency money lender
In need of an emergency cash infusion? This sites for you!
> One of the property owners is himself a developer developing property in Westchester.

So? (Even if his projects also involve eminent domain that wouldn't make Columbia's actions acceptable.)

I realize that you'd like an argument, but this really is indefensible.

> Every single one of them were offered a considerable amount of money to relocate.

And yet, they refused. So Columbia is resorting to thuggery.

> Columbia will bring a ton of jobs and money to the neighborhood many, many times more than the current state of affairs.

In other words, Columbia could pay more.

> Oh, the campus will also be focused on science and technology. You know, things that have a better ROI for society than storage bins.

There are lots of places where they could build. And no, Columbia's convenience really doesn't matter.

There's always a good excuse to hose someone.
You make an interesting point about muscle memory. My dock has enough icons that it stretches across the whole screen maybe that's why I've never noticed this as an issue.

Can you imagine a left-aligned dock? Or a dock in two parts - pinned apps and open apps/minimized windows? I think it'd look horrible and the benefits would be minimal. They may have erred on the side of aesthetics and decided the usability tradeoff was minimal.
Yeah, I scanned through this and that line jumped right out at me.
I hate to judge a book by its cover, but I could've told you that just by looking at his haircut.
I agree, and I posted this. They're ok at breaking news but rubbish at facts checking in depth.
Everything you were always afraid to ask about SDRAM
Other companies prioritize features over usability. Apple does not create as feature rich programs, focusing instead on making them simple, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing. Google, Microsoft, Linux devs, etc. build more feature-packed, customizable products. It is difficult to make software both feature rich and yet uncomplicated and easy to approach. I like the Firefox way of doing things: put commonly needed preferences in menubar->preferences and hide everything else away in a strange place like about:config that the user can find if they need.

Personally, I am satisfied with Android 2.2's, Ubuntu's, and even Windows 7's UIs and prefer the richer sets of features (not that I dislike iOS or Apple products; I actually use them at work on a daily basis). I think there are benefits to doing software both ways and I think the range of program complexity and power in the consumer software market reflects that.
Back in the 1990s, Apple's products were junk, but the marketing was still excellent.

I think when engineering types hear the word "marketing", they immediately take it as dismissive. But Apple is an example of a company who owes their skin to phenomenal marketing over the long term.
You know it when you see it
The rumor is that Jonathan Ive is being groomed to take over AAPL when Jobs leaves.
I'm rather confused on why Google Voice isn't tied into Google Apps domains yet. Take Google Voice, add some management tools and say "Hey guys, for the $50/user/year you'd pay for email, docs, etc we can be your PBX too!".
I wish more people had greater respect for Mayan astronomy. It took us decades to realize their estimation of the age of the universe was more accurate than ours.
I don't know much about advertising, but could this be on purpose? That is, an attempt to create the impression in the market that the Droid is the powerful, bold, masculine device, and so by implication (certainly never stated directly) that the iPhone is the rounded, feminine device. I don't have a marketer's sense about why that'd be an agenda item, but I could guess it may be a tried-and-true PR advertising technique -- if you're coming from behind, try to create an identity issue around the decision that will get you the fraction of the market you think you can get.

I think if you try, you can see analogues to this strategy in Apple's marketing, especially when it was famously coming from behind in the "I'm a Mac" ads. By attempting to segment the market -- "If you're a serious older person, PCs are for you, but if you're a young hipster, the Mac is your natural choice." -- they attempted to artificially create this sort of identity-based split in preference.

Again, I'm not a marketer, so I don't know if this is standard playbook or just reading more into what I see. I don't even know if this stuff works, but based on Apple fans' statements, it seems to me the message that they should think of themselves as a young, hip, enlightened minority who "just get it" and have great fashion sense seems to have taken root pretty well.
The sysctl.conf settings are bad.. like never ran a high end server bad. 1. tcp syncookies slows down connections considerably 2. rp_filter takes up a large amount of cpu time. 3. kernel.pid_max net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range is useless. Also this doesn't stop a DDOS attack, it mitigates it by having a bigger pipe than the bad guy. A real way to mitigate attacks is to 1. identify an attack based on history 2. make damn sure it's an attack 3. 'tarpiting' attacks (xtables-addons for linux). Tarpiting keeps connections in an open state on the client side thus eventually crashing the client.
Ask HN: I am a non-technical senior in college interested in startups
HN, this post has 2 parts. Part 1 is a question I have and part 2 is a potential proposition.

1) As the title suggests, I am not a programmer, but I do have pretty solid general business skills (finance, marketing, etc.). Is there a demand for non-technical people such as me in the world of startups? If so, how do I get involved?

2) If anyone here has the need for a non-technical employee/intern I would be glad to help for little or no salary - to get the experience and learn while I am still in college and have the chance. I would be glad to provide credentials and educational info. Short background is I study finance and brain science, interned in investment banking and have a veery basic grasp of programming (python) but do enjoy it.
Recommendations for getting testing for a web application done in India
We are an early stage start up based in San Francisco. Our product is a web based application.

We are close to our Alpha release. Before that, we'd like to get the product tested for important workflows on major combinations of OS and browsers.

Does anyone have any experience with outsourcing companies in India that are of high quality and affordable for this job?
I don't know Matt, but it strikes me that he's very self aware. It appears to me that this is a deliberate strategy.

I'm sure there is a reason for this. I think it's an interesting approach, and it certainly gains attention.
You should read The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Monomyth is the basic pattern found in most narratives regardless of location or culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
Amidst controversy Rahul makes tribal rally tomorrow
Some Coda Notes Magic
Full body teleportation system
what parts of stackoverflow.com are game-mechanics? if it's what shows up in that yellow bar, i wouldn't know because it's too annoying to pay attention to.
Welome to the site of ssbros
Marginize: resource oriented conversations
A long, but interesting read. This line stood out as pretty interesting - I'd never given this sort of thing much thought:

"If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way while using men for risky jobs."

Overall, it's a pretty objective (and in-depth) view of the gender debate.
We'll be applying with a project that uses Google App Engine, built with Java. We had originally started with PHP, and had considered Rails, but we found that we were much more comfortable using Java for our product, which retrieves and works with very large sets of data.
It depends on your motivation.

To society as a whole, if everyone released their software as Free / Open Source software, much less effort would be wasted writing software that has already been written, and this effort could be directed towards developing better software to solve new problems.

However, FLOSS is a reverse tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone benefits from it, but the person who develops it isn't directly rewarded.

If your only motivation is profit (or you have a duty to maximise profit), there are still some good reasons to release FLOSS software: contributing to other infrastructure projects (especially if it is an established project) will be useful to other people who don't directly compete with you, and if there are lots of contributors, you will likely get more back than what you put in, while still getting the feature you want. In addition, if you make it known that your company is involved in FLOSS development, it is likely to generate good PR amongst technical people. It may also help you get good quality employees who are already familiar with some of your code base.

If your aim to make society a better place, without harming profits too much, rather than purely profit, FLOSS development makes even more sense. The risks to watch out for are spending too much time supporting the software, liability issues (nearly all FLOSS licenses include a disclaimer, but it is hard to rule out liability entirely), lowering barriers to entry, and having an unfair disadvantage if competitors use your code or ideas but don't release theirs (the Affero GPL can help with the former - and patenting novel algorithms and licensing them to all services which release their implementations with the latter - but you need to consider whether you have the cashflow to enforce your license / patents anyway).
Nice!

I've been using this one: http://johndyer.name/post/2007/09/PhotoShop-like-JavaScript-... but yours has a few more options.

One thing I did notice though is that it's almost unusably slow in FF3.6 unlike Safari 5 or Chrome 7 where it's fine.
That's not how I remember it at all.

Apple's marketing in the mid-to-late 90's was poor to nonexistent, frankly, while on a technical level Macs weren't any worse than PC's (both crashed a lot and came with fairly comparable hardware, but the Mac OS 7/8/9 UI was very arguably better than the Windows 95/98 UI). Apple's user loyalty was fantastic (and fanatic) in the mid-to-late 90's, but the company itself didn't do anywhere near the kind of promotion they did once Jobs returned.

Yes, Mac OS 9 had technical disadvantages compared to Windows NT and Windows 2000, and Apple had a second-system effect of legendary proportions with Copland. 90's Apple wasn't that great at technology. But they were abysmal at marketing, while Microsoft were fantastic at it.
Yep, that annoys me as well.
I question it's relevance to this site. There are other sites (reddit, for example) for this sort of content.
Dealing with friction
After a few years, my macbook has basically fallen apart, gotten stains that wont come out from book covers, the top case still cracking even after replacing it several times over. The build quality is pretty irritating. My girlfriends netbook of 2 years although works just fine and is of identical thickness. I would like a sony vaio Z series with it's 13" 1080p screen, dual SSDs and 3 pounds of weight vs. a macbook, but have to use it because of iPhone development.
1 complete failure. We lasted a year spending all our savings and had to fold up shop. It sucked quite frankly but turned out to be a great learning experience. It also helped me branch into consulting and the startup that I'm currently at.

The worst part was not pulling the plug soon enough. What kills me is I think the idea is still a good idea (vertical search engine for tv/movie content with alerts for shows you want to watch, close caption searching, recommendations, community site.) I see parts of it being built by others but still not as good as what we had 3 years ago. I would use the app today if it still lived.

The major learning points from the failure are
1) Bootstrap the company. Don't require VC funding to get started. We spent to much time chasing after money and not enough getting users
2) Get customers to pay you money is a lot easier than getting ad revenue. You need a lot of users to make advertising pay off. You only need a few paying customers.
3) Listen to your gut. We followed the bad advice of an adviser that caused us pivot in the wrong direction and kept us working when we should have pulled the plug.
4) Release early, release often. We waited to long to release and start getting users.

So the business itself was a failure but I learned a lot of good things and I'm in a better position 3 years later than I would have been if I didn't do the startup.
From the actual linked NASA source [1]:

An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

So it's not even 2012, it's 2013.

[1] http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/29...
Google Trademarks "Speedbook" for Computer Hardware
Jobs actually does some design for the Apple Store's architectural features.

Here's a design patent for the glass staircase, listing Jobs as lead designer: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

Amusing if true: the glass cube outside the Manhattan Apple Store was designed by Steve Jobs himself, and the lease stipulates that it is his personal property and he has the right to remove it at the end of the lease: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/05/12/05/jobs_wants_32_...

(If I ever had the balls to ask Steve Jobs a completely inane question, I would ask what the hell it was with him and cubes.)
I'm considering it (applying, not using AppEngine. If I apply I'll use AppEngine for some parts of it).

I do Java AppEngine work in my day job, so if you have questions let me know.

(When you say "enterprise focused" do you mean your application is enterprise focused, or do you mean GAE/J is? Because there are some issues with using GAE for enterprise software and it's important you have considered them)
>I realize that you'd like an argument, but this really is indefensible.

Dude, relax. I don't want to argue with anyone. I'm just telling HN the way I see it. Besides, there is very little that is "indefensible" nowadays.
Facebook Pushes U.S. Morals on World
I'm not sure I've ever heard anybody complain about not being able to get their code away. Have there been any studies which show that a majority of developers wish they could give their code away?
They let in a small number of charity cases only because if they didn't, they would have already lost their tax exemption. What are we going to do about it, you ask? Recognize that these institutions primarily exit for their own benefit, for the benefit of a tiny economic elite, and not for the benefit of the greater public good (as they claim), and start taxing them accordingly. If I and everyone else here has to pay capital gains taxes, Columbia should have to "pay its fair share" as well.

As for eminent domain, it should never be used for private gain. If Columbia wants more property in Manhattan (an island with some of the most expensive property on the planet), they should have to pay whatever the market demands, not call upon the government to steal it from tax-paying businesses. And the "jobs and money" argument always gets trotted out to defend eminent domain abuse and is bogus; this expansion will benefit Midwestern children of privilege who want to study in New York far more than it will the people who live in Harlem and have lived in Harlem for generations.
I'd imagine Apple's uses a capacitor, so the intensity of the light is indeed continuous.
Question was meant to be: would this predicted solar storm cause data loss?

If so, that seems like it would be a significant cause for concern.
I'm relatively new here and don't read reddit. What about the article doesn't fit here?
Coming from someone who knows absolutely zero on NOLOH, do yourself a favor and change the name. It's horrible. Unreadable, loud, unprounouncable nerd-cronym that doesn't make me care to know what your product is. Just my two cents.
The article talks a lot about risk-taking, and the cultural/societal reasons that men take more risks than women. That's definitely true of this community - entrepreneurship has more risk-taking than nearly any other field (excepting things like the military).

That, plus it definitely "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Seems relevant to me.
Like a political or religious discussion, it's a bit polarizing - it seems to raise the kind of questions where reasonable people would agree to disagree, and we're afraid of not being so reasonable ;)
Hmm. Doesn't seem to be working with Chrome at the moment. I tried the 'I want' and 'I have' with no luck. Possible user error, but there's not a lot to screw up with the user interface. When searching, I never see a map.
Judging by how much discussion it got the last time it was posted, I think the community has decided on how relevant it is already:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346
Business: 7 Habits, 8th Habit, Getting Things Done, 4 Steps to Epiphany, Straight from the Gut

Spiritual: Book of Mormon, Book of Isaiah, The 4 Gospels in the New Testament

Relationship: The 5 Love Languages, Men are from Mars Women from Venus

Physical: Spark, The Vitamin D Solution
There's no requirement that you curve the scores to any real distribution after the fact--you can design your tests with the intention that the average student gets 70-79% of the questions correct and students in other quintiles get higher or lower scores, or with the intention that the average student gets 80-89% of the questions correct, or with some other mix of intentions and related test scores. With some experience and fiddling I bet you could get a grading system like you describe which fell along a standard distribution.
What gender debate? Are you telling me that you take people seriously who continue the "girls are better than boys/ boys are better than girls" debate after, say, the age of 13?
At my company we have a mentor/mentee system in place, where you can get advice from others in the company that aren't necessarily in your discipline or product group. To be honest, I haven't found a ton of value in it, but I have found that others in my group are more than suitable mentors for me.

You could always try setting up something like that where you work (or informally ask around for a potential mentor). In fact, an external site that paired up mentors/mentees together could be quite valuable.
Atlassian's Big Experiment with Performance Reviews
xmonad is great and I used to miss it on OS X, but I've grown to appreciate SizeUp and Divvy for OS X. You get tiling functionality when you want it, and only when you want it. It's slightly more involved than xmonad but only slightly. And it's unobtrusive. They're certainly limited compared to xmonad but they get the job done for me. I only have a couple of configurations I use very often.