skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Forgive me, I feel a barely related rant coming on...)

Quote:

'Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.'

I used to live near Corvallis (a wonderful area, by the way), and was always struck by how economic development discussions were ONLY focused on how to get a large employer to move to town (both high and low tech). NEVER was there a discussion about how to enable and facilitate "unemployed engineers with multiple degrees" to start making their own damn companies and exporting either goods or services.

It seems to me that entrepeneurship is requires no more special magic power than getting a degree in CS, but we never even consider acculturating a bunch of people to engage in it. Why always job training for somebody else's company? Why not a massive effort to teach people how to do the basic bookeeping and salesmanship to run small to medium size businesses? If 15% of the unemployed engineers in Corvallis could start companies that hired 5 full timers, they would (probably) have a booming economy all over again. Shit, maybe we could start exporting to China (I think they value entrepeneurship and industrialization there...).

Isn't this supposed to be a capitalist nation, for chrissakes? Carnegie didn't wait around for someone to move to his town and give him a job because he had the right training!

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that we are all being trained to be docile robots in large institutions that are initiated and controlled by other people who are aware that there is an international class struggle, and they are afraid that we might discover we can do it for ourselves and toss them (and their tax breaks) over.

(Sorry, I just got a little emotional...)
Didn't see this last night. FWIW I agree with you, but that was not my recollection of the lecture as presented.
Thank you. :) It is mostly just a guilty pleasure project for when I don't want to do contract work.

Yes. The install process is horrendous. Starting Chrome with a terminal command gets irritating to say the least. Hopefully Google will roll some of the APIs into beta soon.
And these guys had well-established competitors! But one competitor was a lot less functional, and another had a business model of "provide a free version with incredibly aggravating ads so that users buy a premium version." Instead I immediately moved to RideWithGPS when I heard about it & tell everyone else about it.

But I don't think they're making money off of me. I should probably donate now that I have a real job, since I'm a pretty heavy user. Another cool way they could make money off of me would be selling ads tailored to the kind of riding I do and the kind of bikes I ride, since I've given them that information. That'd actually be pretty cool.
Well, the existing Linux package managers aren't really safer as far as the archive formats go; for example, .debs can run arbitrary shell scripts during installation. The main thing that seems to add to the safety is the social practice of grabbing debs via trusted repositories using apt-get/aptitude/synaptic, rather than manually downloading them from random sites and doing dpkg -i. But if there is malware, it's even worse, because at least these shar installers are usually installed as non-root, while installing a .deb needs root.
Things to consider when migrating from a RDBMS to SimpleDB
I think people are too afraid of competition. There is no product without a lot of competition, and suprising as it seems, second best, 3rd best and so on are still making a hella lot of money.

Take microsoft word - it dominates the word processing market. But there are many people earning a lot of money selling OTHER word processors.

Competition is irrelevant, and in his particular case, he has a huge advantage over Nike. He has one product that he is working on, while Nike has a lot of other things to think about, and this is not important. He can add features immediately with no approval process. He can do anything he wants without paying attention to the damage it may have on other parts of the company.

This dude is at a clear advantage over Nike, so very frankly, I don't really think there is a problem.
"Free" isn't the thing Microsoft should be worried about. If Twitter grows to become 50,000 people in 10 years, they won't select Google Docs because it's free. They'll choose it because it helps them get work done better for an overall lower cost, and that is really what Microsoft should be worried about because their competitive edge in most areas is eroding quickly.

For example, Android isn't going to beat Windows Mobile because it's free. It's going to beat Windows Mobile because it's really a better OS (i.e. it's relatively open, has more apps, improving rapidly, etc.)
All the way back in 2006, Joshua Porter wrote a really good article illustrating this principle using the example of Delicious: http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/

The gist of it:

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.
Nice...I'm actually going to try using /dev/null as a data store. It should net me some significant speed gains!
2010 new style Pretty Blue Juicy Couture
2010 new products ---Juicy couture,you will love their fashion style very much ! unique and compact styles , It is very convenient to carry your laptop . Its apperance is elegant which can be a good hand when you go out.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the system was originally designed to be a mobile platform against Soviet missiles in somewhere like west Berlin. Where they needed something that would be moved around every day or two so that the enemy would not know its location. That meant that the system would be reset whenever it was moved, and therefore using a floating point clock was a reasonable design trade off.
Obligatory link to the absolutely brilliant Neal Stephenson article about a very long fiber optic cable. "Mother Earth Mother Board" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
I am astounded by how much of the art of managing one's self is using your forebrain to feed your hindbrain a carefully crafted set of "exaggerated truths" that will produce the results the forebrain desires.

I say "exaggerated truths" because you can't really de novo lie to your hindbrain; it may "be a picture" or it may not be "important" but it is still a marshmallow. But your forebrain gets a lot of leeway on what aspects get enhanced and what aspects get suppressed.

And of course there isn't really a strict separation between "hindbrain" and "forebrain", but as I am working in English this will have to do.
It is even better than that. Nike's core competence isn't shoes, it is marketing an image of sportsmen as an attractive lifestyle. If you make something for that lifestyle, their core competence is marketing you. That is why sales doubled: "serious sportsmen use software" blasted out of their megaphone makes sports software as a category instantly more valuable.
Ask HN: Is it necessary to be a good consumer before being able to do business?
I've been employed as a software developer at Big Co. for several years and have been contemplating taking the plunge into startup-land for a while. I've basically been saving every penny, so I have a comfortable cushion to fall back on.

The problem is that I think my lifestyle has left me out of touch with reality and I don't have any way of connecting with ordinary people. I hardly ever buy anything aside from the bare necessities. I don't have any interesting hobbies or activities that I engage in passionately.

For most of the products and services I see discussed on this site, I find myself thinking, who would ever pay for that? I can't remember the last time I've felt wow, that's awesome, I have to get that! If the rest of the world behaved like I did, the economy would collapse.

This seems like a pretty bad place to start, but I've lived frugally my entire life and don't really know how to live otherwise. Am I hopeless?
School Budget Cuts
Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty (ACTA): US promoting DRM
Uh,

Hurd left because of unethical behavior which many would interpret as evidence he was having an affair.

HP didn't have overwhelming evidence of an affair (and an act isn't necessarily grounds for termination) but the world already a preponderance of evidence. I don't think Mark Hurd is going to be starting any civil cases on the subject any time soon.
I've often wondered about that too. My hypothesis is that there's still a large contingent of tech-shy readers who are scared of the Internet, but who really want to get their favorite author's latest material, so they're happy to pay whatever price as long as it's similar to what they've paid in the past.
Does anyone have personal experience using Amazon SimpleDB as the sole database for an app/site? I can only see using it in conjunction with a traditional database.
Essay Online – Use A Sample or Buy Essays
An essay online can refer to a sample essay or an essay that is purchased. Whichever method utilized, students should have a good understanding of the authenticity and reputation of the company. If a good company is selected, you will receive a paper that is of high quality.
Couldn't upvote you enough. This also applies to a startup vs. another startup. There have been a number of "Ask HN:" posts recently along the lines of "oh shoot, we just discovered there's another startup working on a similar idea! should we give up?"

If nothing else, seeing that other people are pursuing a similar idea is GREAT -- it's a confirmation that the market probably exists for it.
Personally, I don't think that any OS is even close to being what Windows is. Maybe Macs are the closest and I believe they got a few things down better than Windows, but this alternative isn't free either. As for Linux I have tried different linux OSes and I see only use for them in server environments. None of them have made me want to lose Windows completely because they weren't as plug and play as Windows is.

Another killer point for Microsoft is the whole Visual Studio environment and the .NET language. I haven't found a single IDE that is as powerful as Visual Studio and the language (C# notably, but also any other .net language) is also by far my favorite language. Compared to Java, I know that the language isn't that much different, but because Visual Studio makes it so easy, so plug and play, it gives you the freedom to concentrate only on the code and nothing else. I've had bad experiences where IDEs made from Java for writing Java software are really slow and buggy, and that's not what I've seen so far from software written in .Net either as free or paid softwares.
Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers
Cool, the more you know!

Thanks :)
I think you're missing the point of Cucumber (at least as I see it). While it's great if customers write cucumber scenarios and send them to you (we have one that does), that's not the main reason for it. Cucumber facilitates communication between product design and product development/engineering. Cucumber allows the people with much more domain knowledge than you look at your specs and tell you if something is awry. I think this is the biggest win with Cucumber.

One of our clients was dead set on having "functional specs" for every feature we implemented. With Cucumber, they can read our "functional specs" or write their own and send them to us. Then, we can use those functional specs for actual testing, rather than them just gathering dust somewhere on a wiki.

Finally, I do agree that some people overuse Cucumber. Cucumber should really only be used when adding new features, or when something needs the addition of communication with stakeholders. Otherwise, you should fall back to unit testing, or just normal integration testing with RSpec stories or Steak. For example, I think it's overkill to write a Cucumber test in the case of a bug. At most, you should have a Steak/RSpec story that reproduces the issue.
Mhmm.. well I can tell that at work we like to take a few beers on Friday afternoon and it has become a running gag that Friday afternoon code always has to be double-checked on Monday morning.. For what I can say, we tend to be really less focused when we're having a beer and we get distracted by talking to co-workers. In the end, we're not coding as much as we could have done if we were sober and our code is crappier.
I'd be very unhappy working in an environment like the one you described. I consider myself a developer, but I've worked directly with customers most of my career. If I were cut off from that, and had a BA standing between me and the end user/customer, I'm sure the resulting product would suffer.

It's no surprise that we'd come to such different conclusions. I think that a dev who is capable of working well with customers would be so frustrated with a BA that he'd quit, or (more likely) never take the job in the first place. So it isn't random chance that you never meet these developers - they're probably avoiding the kind of organizations you work for. I'm not saying you don't work with talented programmers, I'm just saying that a BA-heavy workplace that probably filters out the kind of developer who has the patience and tact to work with customers.
Out of curiosity, then, where was it?
Hmm indeed I think that's to be expected in certain environments...but I've also heard about people (heard stories, really, so who knows how valid they are) about people who get drunk and spew out some awesome bit of inspired functionality. Perhaps it's just that -- a story?
Whatever happened to labor?
Why compete via the bestseller list when you can compete with your previous sales records? They doubled sales! Who cares if Nike sold more? McDonalds sold more coffee yesterday than every Startup here put together has paying customers, but that doesn't make anyone less successful.
But they do go to medical school before that. Grandparent said : whose only training.
The samurai principle in coding
Latent Dirichlet Allocation Surprisingly Well Correlated w/ Google Rankings
Reminds me of this chain email I've received many times http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

The most interesting part of reading this article was learning of the gap between established scientific knowledge and standard typographic practice. From the author's conclusion:
"During my first year with the (ClearType) team I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very long history that I was unfamiliar with."
Keyboards. That's about it.
The only advantage I can see to having the probation period unpaid is that the principal can now "try" more applicants at no cost, before settling down on one. Are you aware of other advantages?

This puts a serious constraint on the jobs an applicant can try at - even if one is OK with trying out for a job for 30 days without pay, far fewer people can afford to do a few of these in a row and choose the right job for themselves.

IMHO, it is perfectly reasonable to insist that one gets a "try-before-buy" option. Tacking on the "unpaid" factor, sounds like a "While we are at, let us screw them over too" afterthought.
How Vital Juice Is Making Email Newsletters Into A Hot Business
I'm actually a liberal arts graduate myself(Psychology), and the reason I went the startup route is that it was easier than looking for a job with my degree.

As for the unemployment rate, you come on. Quoting that 4.5% figure is intellectually dishonest when discussing the value of a degree NOW, in the current economy.

People who were lucky to get a job years before the current recession are mostly doing OK and surviving layoffs,etc.

For RECENT college graduates, the employment picture is far bleaker. The truth is, employers are not hiring at nearly the rate they were before. I've seen the unemployment rate for recent college graduates(aged 22-25) cited at anywhere from 10% to 30%. 80% of college graduates finish school without a job offer in hand.

If it's so easy to get a job with a liberal arts degree, I would love to refer you to dozens of my friends who are desperate for any job at this point and can't find ANYTHING. I'm sure you'll be able to help them out.
This post is unintentionally hilarious.
In India. This was an academic research lab in a bona fide university, and I believe the same standards apply all over the world in academia.
A desktop OS my mother can use. Sorry Ubuntu. You've sudo apt-got my-heart but, well, reality isn't coextensive with our aspirations.
The ideal time to launch was yesterday, but that's already over. So the next best option is today, followed by tomorrow. There are very few apps/products where launching early with out a big marketing pitch will hurt. Judging by the fact that you are asking for advice here, I'm guessing you do not have a million dollar marketing budget.

It would be far better to launch now, get some initial users, improve your product based on their feedback and then really turn on the marketing effort. The key thing is to get started now, start getting users. Find out how they use your product, find out what they like or don't like.
I really like this - can see some real troubleshooting benefits for it. Great work!
Now do some A/B testing, and improve it even more.
hahaha, the ones with the fingerprint reader. They always have problems on non-Microsoft OSes or give you trouble getting into the BIOS(at times) because its a usb keyboard.
I do have it on, that's how I found access_denied. Otherwise, I would have never seen him/her.

Once I saw a perfectly reasonable comment dead, I digged into the comments and submissions, to the point where the ban occurred. I saw nothing notable whatsoever, access_denied's comments all seem fine to me. And yet he's been unheard an unreplied to for quite a long time. It's not a crime against humanity, but it isn't quite right.
Supertaskers Can Do Two Things At Once - Really
Did their "sales" double? or their users/downloads? The author likes to conflate downloads of their free app and their paid app. I went back and looked at the previous post - when their "numbers" doubled. Then they moved from 11 to 8 in the store, now they're at 13.

Now that Nike has a directly competing product at 1/3 the price I want to see the follow up post with revenue numbers after Nike's app has been in the store for more then a day.
How do they power the repeaters?
I'm unconvinced. This blog post just seems like a lot of emoting and handwaving and contradiction with a light glazing of feminist theory on top, with no real counterargument or refutation to be found. I'm reminded of two quotes:

"M: An argument isn't just contradiction.

A: It can be.

M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

A: No it isn't.

...

M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.

A: No it isn't" --from Monty Python's argument sketch

"DH3. Contradiction.

In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence.

This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in:

I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory.

Contradiction can sometimes have some weight. Sometimes merely seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to see that it's right. But usually evidence will help." (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html)
Nope, I'm not access_denied. As you can see, access_denied has been making comments even after I had created my account.
Please see my replies in sister threads. This was in academia, not business.

Personally I think most arrangements in academia/higher education are indeed exploitative.
Tech Support for Brother Printer Maintenance
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I don't think I have ever bought B2C software other than games, but that never stopped me from selling it. People are capable of empathizing with people unlike themselves, and probably should do so more In tech. ("Scratch your own itch" contributes to making more startups for poor white and Asian twenty something males who don't pay money for software.)

Of course you can connect to real people. Go talk to them. Connection established.
more readable fonts
Exchange - gmail

I see this comparison so often, but it really is apples and oranges. I love gmail and use it daily, but it isn't a replacement for Exchange. First, gmail is just a client... you have no control over the server aspect with Google. That is fine for a lot of small businesses, but for most mid to large companies that isn't an option.

Does Exchange cost a lot of money? Yes, but with that you get a first class messaging platform that you control.
Nosotek's price list:
http://www.nosotek.com/pricelist.pdf

Obviously someone out there thinks 1600 euros a month is a good deal for two guys who cannot IM you when they run into a mind-numbingly common blocker. Or that the internet connection (and the salary of a third politically-reliable guy to censor the internet traffic of the first two) is worth another 800 euros of productivity to two guys who have never heard of stackoverflow and don't go on Skype to do language exchange to improve their English skills.

But for me, if I want a cheap Korean-speaking programmer, I'd go to Yanbian or Shenyang in Northeast China. And if I wanted to do my part to liberalise North Korea, I'd lend some money to a Chinese cross-border trader so he can buy more South Korean DVDs and cellphones to sell in Sinuiju.
This was what I thought until I installed ubuntu. Maybe it's the honeymoon period, but it just works. I doubt your mum is doing heavy graphics work or playing games and those are the only two things that are keeping me on win 7. The interface ubuntu is nice, it's stable and programs can be installed in one click.

I'm not saying its perfect, just that it's much, much better than I thought.
BankSimple: Banking as a Service, API and All
Woah, great resource. Nice and compact. As I'm fond of trees, I decided not to print the PDF, but to add a Table of Contents with links to subsections on the second page, so it's easier to use as a quick reference.

Should fit for desktop usage: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1508039/DesignIntent-draftoc.pdf
XBox? I would be keen on any free/open source gaming consoles if anyone has any suggestions..