skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That article totally describe me. Really realist and interesting read. However, it's kind of normal to have no content if the goal of the site is to let you share things with your friends.
Ask HN: How to create a database as a service?
What is, in general terms, needed to create a service like Redis to go and mongohq ? What's the architecture?

Thank
I question the sort of person who thinks that signing a 2 year contract is free? I have seen people do this before, as if what only matter is right now, worry about the future payments when they are due.
From Wall St to Cupcakes
this strikes at something i've been thinking about for a long time, a good manager learns to leverage his people to get things done, he/she is paid to drive people to get things done. there's an age old adage that says you should not give people fish, but teach people to fish (i am paraphrasing).

and what i've found in my transition from individual contributor to manager is that what made me good as an individual contributor has not helped for management. now i spend my time doing less and directing more, it's taken significant effort for this transformation because i've always relied on myself. but in a sense, this is still doing because i'm still getting significant things accomplished, but channeling my energy elsewhere.

one other side comment is that it almost seems to me that people that are naturally lazy seem to make good managers, their natural tendency to not want to do stuff drives them to push things on others (not exactly the only management style).

what are your thoughts? i probably should post something else rather than ruin this post.
Differences between an iPhone and iPod that I can think of:

the 3G radio you mention

Compass

GPS

Gyroscope (?)

Camera (iPhone camera is far better)

Larger battery

An Aerial :)

Different manufacturing process (pressed steel back vs the iPhone design)

Then there's the cost of development and certification (worldwide) for the phone side of things which has to be amortised across iPhone sales.

Not saying it amounts to anywhere near $400 (or even a quarter of that), just that it amounts to something. There's probably a decent amount of "because we can" in the pricing too
I agree this guy should be looking for other work, but disagree that working relationships are always inherently manipulative.

The big problem here is the bloated management structure, pre-launch vacations and failures to meet targets, all of which are strong signs the decision makers in the company are bad at their job. This implies that decisions about this person's future compensation and role in the company will be made by a committee that does not understand his value. I think that is the problem more than anything else.
Personal favorite Ikea use
http://lackrack.org/
Things I Learned About NYC
Works in Opera, but the drawing updates when I change the value of the field, so by the time I click draw there's nothing to update - perhaps that's what's confusing you.
Beyond not knowing of Conduit before... who even imagined putting a game in a toolbar? The entire game is contained within the colorful little rectangle here:

http://playtomic.com/Blog/Uploads/killer-game.png

That was at least as surprising as being the last person to discover one of the most popular sites on the internet.
Bunn Coffee Maker
Michael Collins. One of the loneliest humans in history. Apparently some other command module astronaut was a bit farther away from any other human than Collins, but I can't find a good source for that.
I don't think I have ever heard anybody claim that repressing anger is good; just that it is better than expressing it. Letting things go is the best way to handle most strong emotions, even strong positive emotions can cause you difficulties if you act on them. But repressing anger is better than expressing it, because expressing it strengthens and reinforces both the feeling and the behaviors associated with expressing it.
Fantastic in a thousand ways.
I find myself torn around the value of content in web businesses moving forward.

On the one hand, there's the observations put forward (most strongly, in my encounters, by Scott Adams on his dilbert blog) that content is essentially in a race towards free. The value in this situation is those companies that can sort, aggregate, or point you in the right content direction (HN fits this group; so does Google).

But then there's the fact, and this article makes the point, that without content there's no value. Whether user-generated, expert-driven or otherwise, we do need some content, and no doubt some content is far more valuable than others.

My strength is undoubtedly in created meaningful content. Does that make me valuable, with the right connections, or a sucker with skills that are soon to be comparable to blacksmithing in NYC or making cars in Detroit?
Apple already had a toolchain and developers before iPod Touch arrived. It made sense for them.

A newcomer with no audience does not have too many choices. The world simply has more developers who program to JVM or CLR.
Hurd is the guy who managed to single handedly destroy the remains of HP's engineering ability.
I give it about a week before the last Sun guy leaves.

Of course this could be a cunning plan to avoid the costs of redundancy payments - hire Hurd and watch all your best engineers resign for free.
Possible justification for HN being biased:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074079
It is a big problem, there needs to be content created but in the majority of cases this content can't be produced in an economical fashion, so it's down to people that love what they do, those using it to cross promote something else and the second rate cheap content farms.
yeah, but the opportunity cost is pretty high.
Don't disagree with your basic point, but your numbers are a little off I think.

Here in Australia (http://www.icyte.com/saved/store.apple.com/320295) the iPhone is AU$859 - $999 (currently US$785-US$913). I believe in other countries it may be cheaper still...
Readers of this article may also wish to refer to this thread about the identity of it's author, Max Klein: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050
Not sure if this thread is still live, but anyway:

1. Find a technical co-founder whom you can convince to build the prototype. Using vWorker to build the prototype before that is likely to be an exercise in frustration if you can't oversee it technically, and your technical co-founder is likely to want to throw that code away in any case.

2. Your blog uses the words 'me' and 'I', which is OK by me (being a "single founder" myself), but the landing page says 'the vivisystems team is working hard', etc. It's not hard to put 2 and 2 together to figure that this is still vapourware so you should probably change one of those.
For me, the chain bookstores are just a place to get a book when I don't want to wait for shipping. The only other store I visit is a local independent, which only stocks titles that the staff recommends. They're a great place to go if I want to read something recommended by people with taste. I don't go there very often, though. There are so many good books available, what I lack is time to read them all, not good recommendations.

I'm not sure how either gets by if ebooks really take off. The Internet is ultimately a better solution for recommending books and delivering them. They could turn themselves into coffee shops, as the article suggests, but at that point why wouldn't I just go to a good coffee shop?
Gucci sunglasses|womens sunglasses|designer sunglasses|mens sunglasses|
At HP, Hurd was famous for ruthlessly cutting jobs. If I were a former Sun employee, I would be very scared of this guy.
The initial thought is to see if users are more likely to correct profile fields from incorrect values than they are to just leave a field empty.

To avoid incorrect profile data, it might be implemented so that if a field is never given focus, it would be treated as blank.
Good skill to have.
Bookstores don't pay for their books until they're sold, and they return the ones that aren't - so yes, they do have high overhead in terms of square footage / labour, but don't necessarily have the same inventory issue that other retailer operations to.

A more interesting question to ponder would be at what point in time (if ever) will it stop making sense for a publisher to print books and send them to bookstores? My guess is for niche publishers this has already happened, and it will never happen to the mass-books - it's the middle guys who will have to make the call sometime in the coming years...
Once a Dynamo, the Tech Sector Is Slow to Hire
It is a bit funny seeing one Oracle exec who had an affair (Charles E. Phillips Jr) getting replaced by another. Someone could base a movie on them.

It's good to see Mr Hurd back at work so soon. He seems a good match and well qualified. Besides seeing how Oracle does under him, it'll be interesting to see what influence he has on decisions affecting the industry in general.

In particular, some wonder how much Android will be affected by the JAVA case against Google. Others wonder about the future of other open-source projects such as VirtualBox (development appears to be continuing)

If they need another exec with a colorful past, there's always former Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas. He was accused of putting drugs in others' drinks; an airline pilot complained of pot smoke so thick that a gas mask was needed.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/06/he...

Steve Jobs used LSD when he was younger and turned out pretty well. Sun had other that did the same. I heard one former Sun exec in a PBS interview talking about that experimental period, trying to expand the mind. Basically he said drugs failed at that, and the expanding experience came later... the internet

There's a little bit of related history at this link that mentions Suns' fifth employee:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/read-the-never-befor...
Also, it'd be good if I could edit the text of each entry after it's been going. Just in case I dont't like the wording or something.
Hurd's only real achievement at HP was finishing Fiorina's work and applying the coup de grace to the HP Way. HPers loathe him. They'd have been dancing in the street when he left, if they didn't know that the board was so happy with his performance that his successor was guaranteed to carry on in the same style.

Of course, if there are Oracle employees who have a problem working for people with Hurd's attitude, they haven't been paying attention.
Debating the Signaling Model of Education
Ambient Un-Belonging: Women and Tech Startups
Audrey's got a great summary of all the clarification / untangling of Arrington's mess...
Looks like the site is crapping out, anyone have a mirror?
The author concludes, "The experience of Ms. Mann and others like her suggests that the technology industry may not be the savior of the American job market and a magic bullet for a moribund economy — even though the Obama administration has called for a revival of math and science training and emphasized the need for American companies to take the lead in fields like clean energy."

She assumes that insights from a subset of the tech sector (programming) will hold true for the entire sector. However, she has given me no reason to believe this assumption of hers to be true.
Some people like to make an attempt to be in control of their life. If you just run your mouth, you end up revealing information about yourself that you didn't intend. Often people might not be able to tell that what you said was an accident and they could hold you accountable in that relationship for it. I don't really like to cut loose unless I have a point to make.
Oh come on, can't you find something better to complain about in that huge wall of text?
Moto Rallye - Play Moto Rallye online Hot Games
Drive this bike like an authentic professional.
Many will say that!
Is there any reason to believe that the story he tells is true? Storybook retrograde amnesia is actually exceedingly uncommon; more commonly, this is used deceitfully. My first instinct, coming from the hospital setting, would be not to believe his story. I would then perform a battery of tests for retrograde amnesia (tests with which I am not familiar since this is outside of my primary interest).
Not all user generated content need be treated the same. As the article points out, a very small portion of consumers on a particular site turn around and create their own content. But, I think this mostly applies to general interest content sites. What if your site provides content as a result of providing a useful, provocative tool?

We have about 21k users on ridewithgps.com. The focal point of the site is the mapping functionalities for planning and logging bike rides. Users create this content by either drawing a prospective ride on a map, or, by uploading a log file from a trip they took. There are very few accounts that have no routes or recorded activities on them, because the site exists to provide utility to a user. With 134,000 maps, that's 6.4 maps per user. By creating an account, users are compelled to start creating maps because it is directly useful to them to do so! However, users can also add less important content: a mini-profile for their bike, photos, comments etc. The amount of this less utilitarian content that users create is significantly smaller. Photos, for example, are 0.3 per user. Comments are 0.1 per user.

What does this mean? Make sure your site provides a strong utilitarian aspect for your users! Provide them with value, not just another place register and store generic content.
Try turning showdead on.
Don't worry, that is not really true.
I enjoyed the validation that other people have experiences similar to mine, regardless of how they handle them. However, what is with the weird [0] citation etc.
Definitely impressive results, but would have been much more useful with a breakdown of the impact each change had. Without that, it's hard to determine which changes are actually responsible for which improvements (traffic to signup page vs signup conversions). Either way, congrats on the improved success.
Maybe a dumb question, but my brief scan over there didn't see US Dollars or anything in American English. Do they have a US website, location or affiliate?
Hurd is the guy who managed to single handedly destroy the remains of HP's engineering ability

I thought Carly Fiorina was blamed for this? How many people can single-handedly destroy something?

Let's be realistic, CEO's aren't able to get much done without the approval of the board of directors, who are elected by the company's shareholders. There are very few "single-handedly"s in business. You can't blame just the CEO, as there are people above him/her. Blame the board, blame the shareholders who didn't/don't value "HP's engineering ability".
Personally, I think the majority of the issue is that hiring is still considered an open problem in the tech world. We know a lot about who not to hire, but little about who to hire. I don't know what the solution to the problem is either. Tech companies can't just open up the floodgates to every idiot who says they can program.
No "Tron AI" design pattern?

smile
This article doesn't seem to match up with reality. There are so many companies out there looking for talented developers, it's staggering.
It took John Grisham three years (1984-1987) to write "A Time To Kill", and it wasn't published until 1989 because he couldn't find a publisher. Fast forward to 2010 -- in an op-ed to the NY Times, he says that writing is the most difficult and frustrating job he has ever had. Isn't that astonishing? Grisham, arguably one of the most accomplished fiction writers of the past three decades, says writing is hard. Harder than being a lawyer who primarily handles indigent cases, being on an asphalt crew in summer, selling men's underwear, and being a politician, in fact.

Other than that, the key point I noted was that writing was not his childhood dream, a practiced hobby, or even a well-researched attempt at changing careers. It was something he decided to do one day and found to be incredibly difficult, but kept at it.. ultimately becoming a monumental success.
Website for Sale Listing Scams: How to Spot Them? | Buy a website tips
I'm confused; when was this piece originally written?
"When President Eisenhower proposed the Open Skies Policy at the 1995 summit meeting to the Soviet delegation in Geneva, it was an unsuccessful move to legitimate the US' plans to launch the U2 spy plane a month later."

Unless Eisenhower returned in zombie form in the 1990s, in an alternate dimension where the USSR was still around in the middle of that decade, I highly doubt it.
"He has not designed a single project" is a bit of a strawman argument. What Jobs does is focus a team of designers and engineers on creating a product that is really satisfying to use. It doesn't sound like much, but if it's easy, how come no company but Apple seems to be able to do it?

Anyway here is a Mac application that applies some of Jef Raskin's ideas to a finder alternative: http://www.raskinformac.com/
MIT researcher finds that social networks influence health behaviors
Early on, before a leader in the PC market was established, investors had the choice of betting which horse would win--Bill Gates at Microsoft or Steve Jobs at Apple.

Many people did get rich betting on Gates, so indirectly, yes, Bill Gates does show that people have gotten rich betting against Jobs. The hyperbole is nice, but only that--hyperbole.
I don't really agree. Yes in some respects and for some purposes the independent claims are the most important parts of a patent, but reading only the independent claims is very different from reading a patent.

The specification and drawings are important as they, among other things, define the meaning of the claims. Usually, if you just skip ahead to the independent claims you will have no idea what the claims are talking about. This is especially true in the electronics/software/online arts where people tend to make up their terminology as they go along.
I think that's the problem. Everyone wants talented developers.
Many companies can no longer afford to hire less talented developers who many have been able to get a job in a booming economy.

And I'm not mentioning the millions of liberal arts majors who used to be quietly employed but now are finding that many companies simply don't want or need them.

That's why I think the recession and unemployment will persist for a very long time- many of those lost jobs just aren't coming back.
Apple also obscures references by making its products look like nothing else, from the first iPod with a unique scroll wheel to the current iterations wrapped in gleaming aluminum. Apple seems wondrously unique, until you consider aluminum is the same material you wrap leftover fish in and then it hits you: Apple is disguising itself so you can't compare prices. Is the new $99 Apple TV box a good deal? Who knows? It looks like nothing else on the planet.

These points are kind of ridiculous. Aluminum cases aren't a Jobsian conspiracy to make it difficult to evaluate the costs and benefits of Apple products; they're because aluminum allows you to make a nicer-feeling computer case.

And anybody who knows about Rokus, Boxees, and all the other streaming set-top boxes can evaluate the price of the new tv.
You wouldnt happen to be access_denied would you? What with your recently created account and low karma.
Fiorina destroyed HP as a great engineering company turning it into a printer ink marketing scam.

Hurd managed to get almost every remaining engineer to leave - see the stories posted here at the time.
The article actually addresses that:

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.

“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”
Anything to find a kink in Obama's plans.
One thing that left me wondering was the last paragraph:

The total visits to our website rose 48% in a 30 day period. The most visited page (after the front-page) was the Sign Up page, and 2nd was our Features Page. Our sales improved by up to a 45%, and we have had the biggest growth Webbynode has seen in 2 years.

If visits increased 48% and sales increased 45%, it doesn't seem like there was a big jump in conversion rate. Maybe they meant that the sales conversion rate increased 45%, which would be impressive.
How a startup responds when a giant arrives
I've always thought that you should make the plans & pricing page provide more information than simply your plans & pricing. The most obvious one is to clarify or explain features. That way, you can legitimately funnel more people to the plans & pricing page and gently move them one step closer to a conversion.
Easy management of your MS Excel 2007 password
"...fast eye trackers and computers ... perform clever text manipulations while a reader is making a saccade."

What a diabolical way to test the brain's reading patterns: strategically switch around the text when the eyes move! Blew my mind.
Behind the Scenes of a Live World Cup
Busted :) I read the first few paragraphs and made up my mind about the article.
Count me in with the "Are you kidding me?" crowd. The iPhone's $199 price tag can only be compared to another device that also has a two year contract and a data subscription that increases TCO by $720.

My bozo bit for this Ben Kunz is permanently flipped.
Once upon a time, companies trained competent people to do specifically what they needed.
This is so exciting. Redis is an exquisite scalpel of scalability for those of us optimizing legacy apps with hundreds of relational tables.
I am voting for runkeeper.com for the win. I have a Forerunner GPS thingy in a drawer and use Runkeeper exclusively. Why would I buy yet another electronic thingy from Adidas or Nike or anyone else?

And why would I use one of the big guys' apps? They have ulterior motives and designs on my wallet and I can smell it. I'll stay away.

Go Jason.
Why JavaScript is AWESOME
A good chunk of advice for the dirty, messy world that is patents.

Unrelated: its very cool to randomly stumble upon someone using a theme I compiled: http://midmodesign.com/news/general/our-special-wordpress-th... :-)
PR: Is it quantity or Consistency?
In Saudi Arabia the media is cooperative with PR firms more than any time before. Lately the economic growth has been reflected positively on the advertising spending dramatically.
Software Engineering in North Korea
The comparison between the iPod Touch and the iPhone is an apples-and-oranges issue, but there's clearly some psychology involved in the price difference between the $229 8GB and $299 32GB version.

The $229 model seems to serve as an anchor price at the bottom end of the range that makes the $299 or $399 look more attractive. $299 sounds like a great price for a 32GB model, a "way better deal" than the 8GB one, especially because I'm sure most people compare the price of an iPod in terms of dollars-per-gigabyte rather than the incremental cost of more flash.

You also see it with AT&T's smartphone data plans -- you feel you're getting some kind of a deal with a $25/month 2GB plan, because the $15/month 200MB plan is utterly terrible in comparison.