skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my view of the pipeline or the funnel, whichever term you prefer, for a membership / freemium site:

- the world
- visitors
- recurring visitors
- members
- paying members

The transition from being a transient to being a customer to me happens somewhere between the visitors and the recurring visitors stage, the point where people start to invest in the site, maybe store some content there or make some changes to the state.

All the people from 'visitors' (inclusive) down I'd label as users, and the visitors themselves I'd label prospects.

Fuzzy thinking isn't going to bring him closer, but rigidly defining terms in a way that is not suited to the current model (freemium services), but for instance more suited to selling cars or shoes is also not going to help.

The lines are there, but the transition points are not quite as hard as they are in retail.

Especially not in a subscription environment, users will deserve and demand to be treated as customers long before they fork over their cash or it isn't going to happen.
$173 million in 2009, up from $172 in 2008 and $166 in 2007. It seems odd to make an assumption when the real answer is seconds away!
Yeah, no thanks. Programmers already ignore best practices and already have too much fun, look at the lack of good documentation for a lot of projects and look at the crappiness of most apps or the piles of bugs they contain. There are very few programmers who act professionally, I don't know why you would want to celebrate that fact.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447610457543...

Intel's stock only took a small dip, and it looks like some of those who left were shifting it to McAfee to ride the wave as the stock went up.

That's a lot of investors in an otherwise volatile market not jumping ship, so they must see something good in the deal that we're missing.
I agree with reading a lot, however, do not spend too much time on it. At some point "thinking like an entrepreneur" means to act on ideas, not only reading about how to act on them ;)
I know this is off topic, but there's another reason it slows you down - too many keystrokes.

I prefer

$(function(){});

to

$(document).ready(function(){});
They would be ecstatic with that kind of return. Without growth and still making a hefty return. McAfee has ~$2b in revenue but an operating income of "just" $221m.
The Onion had this strangely prophetic article about 10 years ago:

Just Six Corporations Remain

http://www.theonion.com/articles/just-six-corporations-remai...
And it's not like they're motivated to start hiring or anything.
Avoiding the #1 Startup Marketing Mistake
If your startup targets developed markets (US, W.Europe) so reducing development costs by moving to another country can be a good idea. I think you can find decent developers and designers in Eastern European countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Poland or Ukraine, for much less money than in Germany. Cost of living is lower there as well. We're doing startup in one of these countries and expect total cost of beta to be less than 20K.
"Best Practices" are anything but--becoming dogmatic about programming is a Bad Thing(tm).

Otherwise, the projects that WhyDay is encouraging are meant to be creative. Without creativity, we stagnate. No one is suggesting that a 4kb implementation of X become part of standard libraries. However, there could be endlessly useful things learned from such exercises even if its just a creative outlet for many programmers.
You probably haven't been to a tea party protest
Atom/RSS feed for the best http://news.ycombinator.com/best
Google Answers predated Yahoo Answers by quite some time (3 years).
Ask HN: Let's talk about Corporate Blogs and Buzz Creation
Our site is not live yet, but we're an older data processing company that through virtue of clients and contracts has primarily become a software development company.

The question at hand is why do I know about all of your technology startups? What are you doing to ensure your products get covered? Got any guidelines for what should and should not be in a corporate blog?
Doesn't say that anywhere--just says "Places is only available in the United States right now"

EDIT: TC has updates from fb on it: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/18/facebook-places-iphone-2/
grinding RL is such a chore, I think I'll buy an account instead
They forgot:

1. Lively
2. Google Print

Also, Google Answers preceded Yahoo Answers -- they got that wrong.
Advice on using Ruby, RVM, Passenger, Rails, Bundler in development
The place marker icon is from Google Maps. Yeah.
Tell HN: Review my site - Hire a tour guide application
Hi HN,

I've been learning python and django for a few months now and i believe the best way to learn is to get my hands dirty to solve a problem.

This application exist because i was looking for tour guide for my trip to Bali. During the process i went through numerous sites through Google, and that keeps me thinking about a job application site, but for tour guide hiring.

So i put my new knowledge(which is still not mature) to work ;). Feedbacks are appreciated.

url : www.tripanatic.com
I greatly enjoyed his eccentric and opinionated book 'Calculated Bets' on writing an automated system for betting on jai alai (although the story petered out rather lamely when the grad students he relied on to write and maintain the code left and he couldn't run it any more).

Sadly jai alai seems to be dying out - otherwise I would have been tempted to have a go myself.
OT: What ML algorithms have you implemented? How has Scala helped/hindered this? I'm considering doing the same.
I sat throught he pain of configuring\testing boost on a set (non GNU\GCC) dev tools for embedded platform and the build times were painfully slow - around 15 minutes was common even for reasonable sized tests. A fresh build of the boost libraries themselves - hours.
Actually, Heroku supports any rack application - that means most of the ruby web frameworks.
They also seemed to forget the photosharing service hello.com
How Innovations Spread in Deal-Making
While prizes are terrible financially speaking, that signed DVD is about as nice a prize as one of the checks from Knuth.

Unfortunately, it looks like the competition will be ridiculously tough since good old ELO has been pushed down about 30 spots.

Also, it seems the improvements are not going to be overly dramatic after the first rush.

Why? Because chess games between human players have some randomness inherent in them.
I mean, what problem does FarmVille solve?

Boredom. A lot of people are bored and wants to be entertained.
But they would argue that the impact on humanity is greater than sending men in space for science. ;-p
Good lord, please no! We need to make viruses so slow and painful that every OS designer must make their OS resilient to them. This is a stupid problem to have at all, the last thing we want is to bake in into the bloody hardware!
Why aren't you using git-flow?
First Clojure conference
[video] Execs Discuss Intel's Plan to Acquire McAfee for $7.68 Billion in Cash
I'd say they are entertainment startups. So they solve the boredom problem. Take FourSquare. It's a game, in the real-world. You win points for playing and then even prizes for being at the top of the leaderboard (mayor, badges, etc).
Heard via NPR this morning: Intel stocks are down a few %, while McAfee is up over 50%.

Seems investors think this is better for McAfee than Intel, too.
Intel decided to do a public good, and plans to remove all McAfee antivirus software from the planet.
ADDED IN EDIT : I wrote what follows when the parent comment had been down-voted to 0. As I write this it's been re-up-voted to 1. Who knows where it will go next - I watch with curiousity, but little understanding.

================

Bizarre - some people up-vote people who cross-reference items about the same topic, and others down-vote. I guess it's my background in wiki technology, always wanting to cross-reference and make things tidy, as opposed to the forum mind-set that seems happy to tolerate sprawling, ephemeral discussions rather than create something of lasting value.

For one, I hate wasting effort, and wasting other people's efforts. I thought that cross-referencing tuff would help prevent duplication of effort, and generally enrich the information, but clearly there are others who not only disagree, but actively think it's of negative value.

<shrug> I don't understand that, but would be happy to read an explanation.
>Whether we’ll ever type as much on the iPad as on a PC, it seems obvious to me that some refinement is needed in managing how ‘touchable’ the iPad’s screen is while entering text.

Odd. I don't find this at all. I type a great deal in the Notes application and I find I'm nearly as fast on the screen as a real keyboard. Of course this is only possible because the iPad manages to correct most of my "fingers walking all over the screen" mistakes. I really didn't expect it to be as good as it has been and figured the lack of typing feedback would be a huge problem.
Anyone find that RPGs don't seem like a natural/obvious/fundamental game genre -- they are more like an accident of history?

People who have not followed their ancestors in game evolution would probably find RPGs strange and arbitrary.
Adventures in integrating payment services as a Dutch business
Oooh, I'll have to look into that, thanks.

I'm personally planning on developing my own at some point ("learning" programs fascinate me), but that might fit the bill in the meantime (probably a few years...).
I think this is indicative of a real risk we will see with large corporations right now. Many of these large cap companies have huge cash hordes and are being pressured to do something with it. The risk is that the cash will be used stupidly to do poor deals and I think the market is indicating that this McAfee deal is a bad one.

Their shareholders would have probably been better suited with a special $7B dividend instead.
Pretty typical for an acquisition -- the stock price of the company to be acquired will rise quickly to the price per share the buyer offers.
I think that's very true.

Many college-age people I know these days are aware that college is just a marketing ploy for most people, but nobody is going to individually risk calling its bluff.
FarmVille solves the problem of people who want to avoid work by creating a game that allows them to simulate working on a farm instead.
Is McAfee really that bad?
That's value to the businesses, not the users, though?

I don't think businesses are craving for a way to give you stuff cheaper. They just want to tie you to their business. Is that really an advantage for the shopper?
Comparing 2009 and 2010 patent grant numbers
You can live in Mexico for under $500.00, I'm doing it and loving it!!!, nice home, internet, all utilities, food, etc. Incredible!!!
Open-source cuts through intell community's red tape
This book is fantastic. It's a great book for bootstrappers.

I believe I ran across it on Fog Creek's book list which has some other good books as well.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum...
Sure - I think Twitter annotations might see some innovative uses in the future. Just not sure if we need an extra app+hype for every category of likeable things.

In fact, why not give everything a URL and be done with it (then the like button would suffice). Maybe that is what is really happening and 4sq et al are just domain grabbing schemes.
I don't really get how you can write:

"They should move out of Steve Ballmer's basement and make their own OS." and "Why do they want to make software for platforms when their competencies are on hardware?" at the same time.
All the people from 'visitors' (inclusive) down I'd label as users, and the visitors themselves I'd label prospects.

I'd agree. And I'd label the "paying members" as "customers".

users will deserve and demand to be treated as customers long before they fork over their cash or it isn't going to happen

That's a key point. If you have to treat subscribers as if they were customers when they are not paying (i.e., put significant resources into support, etc.), your CAC is going to be high. That's not necessarily a problem in and of itself, but it's worth paying attention to.
I remember reading about this branching model and really liking the idea. The tools might actually motivate me to use it.
My bullet points are just pointing out some icing on the cake that comes with the deal.

"Why do they want to make software for platforms when their competencies are on hardware?"

Vendor lock-in and community are just as helpful for Intel as they are for other businesses. If they can grease the wheels for their primary business (even at a small loss), then it's not necessarily a bad idea.
great graphics on this badboy.
Intel offered 60% more than McAfee was worth yesterday. Basically if you buy MFE now (up 57% as I write), you're essentially just buying a bond with a 3% return between now and when the stock switches to Intel. Of course, there's always a chance the deal isn't completed for whatever reason.

As for Intel going down, I would sell too. I don't really see how this deal makes sense.
I have a problem with his conclusion after looking at the methodology slide:

This study compared 26-Inch MultiSync widescreen (MS LCD2690 at 1920x1200 resolution), 24-inch MultiSync widescreen (MS LCD2470WNX at 1920x1200 resolution)
and 20-inch MultiSync traditional format (MS LCD2070NX at 1600x1200 resolution)
monitors.

There was no 30" monitor involved in either of the studies, nor was there any monitor with a resolution above 1920x1200. The slide with a graph showing a drop-off from 26" to 30" is an estimate based on the 4 configurations they tested (the 3 listed above and dual 20" standard monitors).

As far as I can tell the findings of the study were:

1. The 24" and 26" widescreens outperformed the dual 20" standards on a text editing task.
2. The dual 20" standards outperformed the single widescreens on a spreadsheet task, but by a lesser margin.
3. The 26" widescreen significantly outperformed the 24" widescreen on the text editing task at the same resolution.

How do you conclude from this that 2500x1400 is the optimal resolution for the vast majority of people?
How Bilski is working to help curb abstract-idea patents
Talks about Org-mode, by Carsten Dominik
How about paying dividends?
Very interesting article, especially in contrast with the English claim that the copyright was the key to the industrial revolution:
http://www.economist.com/node/16789318?story_id=16789318

I would be cautious about explaining such complex event by a single reason, as alway there are many factors involved.
It solves the problem of knowing if your target is at home before you go to rob it.

Seriously, I can't ever see myself using this. I don't want people to know where I am because then they know where I'm not.

I'm also appalled by the (luckily few) LinkedIn connections that let tripit tell me when they will be out of town. If I were a bad guy that would start my target list.

...end of rant
So when will Facebook invent something new?
That sounds nice, but on what reasoning do you base it? If I'm missing people, I'd sure like to know.
Didn't they stop that campaign years ago?
Firefox 4 beta 4 adds hardware acceleration
Dont know. It is useful certainly. But is it more accurate than other approaches for this problem?
I hate to just say "me too", but, me too.

I've found I can really crank along on my iPads keyboard (in landscape mode) and can touch-type almost as efficiently as on a real keyboard. Overall I'd probably say I have no realistic complaints or suggestions in regards to the iPad soft keyboard.

The portrait mode is a touch cramped, IMO, but still very usable.
Every user has a certain value to the business regardless what the business model is.

Sure, but in some business models, that value is negative-- take the case of a non-paying user who demands a lot of support resources, for example.

If you have a free ad-based application then maybe this is only some cents per user. In this case it does not hold that the 'first ten customers' is what is important. Maybe the first 10.000. On the other hand if you are selling dirt expensive stuff then the first 10 customers is a big deal.

I disagree. Having ten (paying) customers is a good milestone, regardless of the cost of the product. (Remember that in an ad-based application, ten paying customers would mean ten advertisers, not ten users.)

The point of the original article is that if you haven't reached that ten-customer milestone, you haven't really validated your customer development work. "If you build it, they will come" is a cute phrase, but hope is not a strategy. If you build it, and ten people come and pay, you're on your way.
After buying Secure Computing and then discontinuing the SnapGear I know I'm not terribly happy with them.
Upvoted because (a) I always want to go to Shake Shack and (b) why would anyone downvote this harmless comment?
I'm torn when it comes to that. The readability of $(document).ready() is better. Especially for later devs who may not be familiar with jQuery.
Posterous has a new homepage - with a signup form!
Cancer is responsible. If only Friedrich Wilhelm I would have survived on the throne for more than 100 days, say a few decades.
SQLite is a file and thus uses file-level locking and does not have row-level locking. Data can not be read the same time anything is being written, so it is usually not great for multi-user applications or web applications.

Development, or 1-3 user web app it should perform OK. It doesn't scale and you will get db locks and retries if its under too much load.

To speed this up (if you must use SQLite), use a solid state drive as I/O performance is the biggest bottleneck.
How to Disable Facebook Places
But that how would you refer to it? I'm not being snarky. If we're going to have a day recognizing how great it is that we invented these things that we could sit in, it's going to be hard not to use the word "chair."
The site looks very nice. Clean and well presented.

Search is a must for a site like this. I know you said it is coming soon, which is good. One other issue is that you are using a fixed width layout. For code examples, sometimes you will need a larger area to display the code without wrapping. If you had a fluid layout that let the main portion grow, that would solve the problem.

You may want to add a wish list area where people could request examples they would like to see. I also like Detrus idea of chaining items together to form a larger tutorial.
Reread your comment. What are you again focussing on?
Send me an email via hackernewsers.com . I wrote up an article that I sent to others wu had contacted me and I think it might help you.
China probably wouldn't be growing as quickly today if it strictly respected copyrights.

Copyrights favor established industrial producers because they hold the IP.
I've not read it, but I think you're looking for "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss
If Intel bought this in CASH, that would be silly, most likely they took our a low interest rate loan and used the cash to back it.

The fact that deals like this are happening means that the gloves are off and companies are not bunkering in anymore for a nuclear winter.

Also since this is just into 3rd qtr, this means that the company is not worried about 4qtr reports, this is clearly a sign of getting a head start on growth. I wonder how long the integration will take, 3 months would put in in 4qtr with something for Christmas?

What other software could Intel be looking at?
Not available on B&N and Amazon as eBook. Sigh.
The Magic of Thinking Big (David Schwartz), from the 1960s IIRC, is great.
No More Mouse: MIT Invents Invisible Mouse
Toshiba announces a breakthrough in hard drive capacity - 5x increase
My use-case for Foursquare:

Hmm, which bar in the neighborhood are my friends at tonight? Oh, I'll just check foursquare instead of texting them.
Actually, there are claims that patent monopolies delay the industrial revolution, rather than advance it.

Too bad the book in question isn't free to read, otherwise, I would be able to add more knowledge about the other side.

The abolitionists on the other hand, cheerfully made their work freely available when they can. They also happens to make a few bucks off of it too.
What is the most advanced compiler, across all high-level (not C/C++) languages? The GHC?
Invent something original, just like _why did, then build it up over time.
German original: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,709761,00.html
From what I've heard, probably MLton.
Hands-on: Motorola's Droid 2 sequel is a worthy update
I have said this before. Mobility is such a disruptive shift in computing, I am also surprised that the best that is being offered to consumers are check in games and promos. Looking back at the wired internet I think that its widespread adoption was due mostly to its utility. Sure there are distracting fun and games, but people use it because it is inherently useful.

That is the driving principle behind our startup, Presence. http://www.presence.co

We enable physical locations with virtual services, and make them accessible to both businesses and consumers, in an attempt to make mobile useful. If you have some time please visit our website to see what we are up to. I would sincerely appreciate the perspective of the HN community.
For devs not familiar with jQuery (and on the off-chance that you'll need no-conflicts mode at some point), you might even avoid the dollar sign.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){});
Yes. This study is interesting in that it compares two economies. Of course there were many more differences than copyright laws only. (But I guess the author of the study is clever enough.)
Intro to RailGun: WIN API for Meterpreter
I think it's an interesting idea that could be helpful if it takes off.

Some quick comments though:

1. Don't have the form there (and editable) unless you can actually use it - there's no submit button if you're not logged in.

2. Not sure if it works correctly when logged in, but as soon as the location field gets focus the "enter location here" placeholder text should disappear

3. Add a little information on how the site works. If I'm a tour guide looking for people to show around in my city, what do I do? Just wait for someone to enter that city?

4. Can I see where others are trying to find tour guides? Maybe I would want to join in on another tour.

Basically, there needs to be much more information on the what and the hows.
It seems like German authors did publish lots and lots of things in the 19th century, without copyright. So why bother with a replacement. Just get rid of it.

(The 19th century is considered the classic period of German literature. And arguably of German science, too.)
Swytch.net - diaspora already has a clone
It sounds as though the author uses OSX. Are there any tiling window managers that aren't limited to Linux/X11?
After a re-read, it's clear my transition was ambiguous. My point was: the whole study is pretty bogus. It's an excuse to get you to buy more, more expensive monitors. therefore here's my take: there's some optimal number of pixels you want-- not an optimal number of monitors, but a number of pixels.
I think I've ran into this limitation when using Google Reader on my iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.0.2. Images will eventually stop loading after viewing a series of image-heavy entries, but will load OK after a page refresh. Very annoying when you generally do heavy browsing on WiFi, where ~6.5 MB is no big deal. It's good to see a potential cause/fix that can be brought to their attention.
Covered two weeks ago here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575542

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571941

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570551

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567658 <- This one has the comments
Here I was trying to build excitement for this all morning and BLAMO -- HN steals my thunder. ;-)