skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Making users happy should be core to any business. Netflix and Zappos rose to incredible success on the strength of giving people more than just features – they gave care. In doing that they crushed other companies who gave the bare minimum. Apple's brand has grown in the same way.

Anywhere you find companies indifferent to the user experience, you'll find a huge pot of opportunity. When you earn love and loyalty through truly virtuous exchanges, people will help you with your cause. It's true with business, it's true with your personal life.

Being good to people, through your features, through your behavior, through your values, has to, has to, has to come first, no matter what you're working on or how big you are.
Software has always been their edge.

I worry more about shaking-to-undo on my iPad and faux leather buttons in my Calendar app than about other companies figuring out there is more than plastic to build with.
These start-up entrepreneurs are learning to profit from their passion
Names are really important. This is a bad name.

Gimp, the image editor, is another victim of OSS naming. I know many serious artists who won't give it a try simply because of the name. They don't take it seriously. The fact that it's free is unimportant to them. With a better name a decade ago, Gimp could be a serious competitor to Photoshop now, instead of a footnote.

In this case, the developers are putting a clumsy emphasis on the price and "freedom", which is unimportant to someone who just wants to write a letter or make a presentation.

Read "LibreOffice" literally .. "A free alternative to MS Office". Which is not untrue but this immediately raises the question "Can you afford the REAL MS Office? And are you worth it?" Most people will answer, "Yes, I can and I am certainly worth it". Starving students may answer "No, but it's less work to pirate it than to install this weird thing."

My belief is that for an OSS office suite to dethrone MS Office, it needs a clear focus, and one other than "free".

Brainstorming some directions they could have taken:

LessOffice - A streamlined office suite, fast and bloat-free, that never crashes. (Of course, OpenOffice is pretty far from this in reality)

CopyDesk - A word processor for writers, not for bureaucrats.

DeFacto - An office suite that interoperates seamlessly with every other system. It never asks what format something is in, it just works.

BloatOffice - Has every feature from every other office suite. Combined. The most complete office suite on the planet. (A bit self-deprecating, but could turn a perceived weakness, bloat, into a feature, completeness).

Folio - An office suite without the learning curve.

In any case, this market is long overdue to be disrupted. Google Docs isn't going to do it. I'm a writer, and I can't even get it to do proper manuscript format. A typewriter can do that.

Developers: If you REALLY want to help the free software movement break MS's stranglehold on Office, don't write another office suite. Write a self-contained, standalone library that reads and writes .doc files, that works perfectly for the features it supports and clearly indicates to the caller when it's going to break and what it's breaking on. Once you can write a 200 line example program that converts most docs to nearly identical .pdfs, you've won. Not that that's easy.
Will they now stop with gossip or do even more?
Adobe managed to get lock-in, nothing more. There's no loyalty there. I loved PS3, I loved PS7. I loathe CS1-5. I'm trapped there, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment.

As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone. An app called Opacity is really close – in many ways it's better than Photoshop, chiefly because they care about how I'll use it. Once they iron out some performance issues with vector objects, I'm there.
Wikileaks has as its mission to release classified information to the public, if you are going to do that then you know for a fact that there will be people that are at risk affected by it, that's the nature of the releasing of information that people want to be kept secret.

If there is going to be a transition at some point from a system of closed governments with secrets to one that is open because secrets can be leaked as fast as they are created then I suspect that there will be a lot more people 'at risk' than just the people named in these documents.

Does that mean that striving to open any and all information that is currently under wraps should be abandoned ? I think it shouldn't be, and just like there is collateral damage in a real war there will be collateral damage in a war that centers around information.

I don't think that such a change could be effected without it.

No matter how much you would redact, you could always argue that someone is at risk because of releasing information on current ops.

Ask Valerie Plame what it feels like when information is leaked to serve opportunistic goals, and that was the government doing the leaking, with the express purpose of harming an individual, not exactly to promote a society without secrets.

Really, if anything, I think wikileaks should not even have attempted to redact anything, just like a common carrier they should have passed it on verbatim, by attempting to redact they assume some responsibility, which they could have avoided by not redacting at all.

I understand that that may offend your sensibilities because 'peoples lives are at risk' but that's just a variation on the 'think of the children' argument.

War is ugly, releasing information about a war that is in progress is going to be ugly too, I can't see how it could even be different if you decided to do that.
I don't care who founded them, they've just announced that they're closing citing a lack of a viable business model.

That would seem to suggest that they might have thought about revenue a little earlier in the process and I have a feeling that with hindsight Mitch Kapor might agree.
You can do optimized mutual-recursion in Clojure as well, using (trampoline). As with the optimized self-recursion using (recur), it's more work and not as nice as built-in TCO, but this is likely as good as it gets for now, given the current limitations of the JVM.
Doesn't this do roughly the same thing as the Debian alternative system?

EDIT: I should have read your link first. It appears that your system allows for greater isolation and the ability to relocate different versions.
This is assuming that once it's all about glass there isn't anywhere to go...

Agreed. Apple has a patent on multi-touch in three dimensions already[1] so maybe the next i-device will move away from the screen and towards a more touchy-feely :-) approach.

[1] - http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=FUOxAAAAEBAJ&dq=m...
Facebook and Google can target users more accurately than a blogging platform.
Boxing and Philosophy
In response to the question of design:

- Use the golden ratio whenever possible/practical.

- Be careful with the rounding of the edges. (Sharp corners aren't good, but rounded with unused potential screen real estate and subsequent violation of golden ratio is bad too.)

- Don't skimp on thickness. At least as thick as a Kindle 3.

- Like the author said, the software UI and UE should be tailored to the screen width and input method.
But remember, with a court order, the FBI is already capable of backdooring your machine with surreptitious keyloggers and all manner of other doohickeys. This rather moots any "P2P encryption" you might be relying on.

Au contraire, they'll never get my encrypted FrogPad that lives in my pocket and sleeps under my pillow!
Indeed, 20 years at one company is a long time, plus his personal financial upside became strictly capped to salary once Sun was assimilated by Oracle. There's all sorts of reasons he might jump at a new opportunity, many of which don't mean the end of ZFS.
What the author thinks about his study:

While those with above-average IQs were three times more likely to have a high income as those with below-average IQs, they were only 1.2 times more likely to have a high net worth. "Simply put, there are few individuals with below-average IQ scores who have high income, but there are relatively large numbers (of those with below-average IQs) who are wealthy," he wrote.

"I was expecting that smarter people would have greater wealth," Zagorsky said. "And you kind of expect people with higher IQ to make fewer mistakes. . . . I thought, 'Wow, I must have made a mistake.' "

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/LearnToBu...
I think you misunderstand the described approach. The server isn't dynamically generating javascript, nor is it dynamically signing it.
I can just about guarantee you that Apple TV does not and will not have Flash.
I don't know. I love Photoshop. My personal opinion here, but I think it is an incredibly well designed piece of software. Maybe not the Mac version, but the PC version is just well thought out. I just don't see anything that could possibly make me want to switch.
Why Do They Hate Us?
This is exactly why I will NEVER work for an hourly wage! Im worth way more than anyone could pay me... I create my own value!
Yes yes yes! finally we are getting somewhere. I LOVE THIS
Even assuming great programmers do look at job boards and go through normal channels, they're more likely to get hired and stay employed, which still makes the numbers game work out like I described.
sorry that was a dumb question, i figured it out now
But.. other things must be taken into account besides just the screen resolution, even when assuming the typical desktop/laptop model of browsing. A lot of not-very-competent users I see have their screens littered with toolbars... Internet Explorer users have a greater propensity to see them, but a lot of installers are giving Firefox toolbars if one is not careful as well. Power users, on the other hand, are a lot more likely to not use the browser window at full resolution. Even when I am casually browsing, I usually keep bookmarks open or Pidgin/Skype conversation to the side of the screen... it's usually not maximized, even on the small screen on my netbook.
> There are legions of people working 80 hours a week to put a bowl of soup on their own table and televisions on the tables of the American poor.

This one is too good. Can I use it?
Can I borrow the private key for the public key that was used to create this message?
Women have a higher average education level, too, though. I wonder what the number is if you normalize for education, say stratify it into male vs female for some college, bachelors, master's, etc. Might be interesting. But probably a way less attractive headline.
I think we are talking about leaks and not 'rights'. Nobody has to grant us any kind of permission. If it is leaked we will know. Such is reality unencumbered by legality.
Except my real metal MBP had a bend (I have no clue how it happened) over my Ethernet jack the week I bough it. Everything has faults. There is equal built quality competitors to every Apple products.

My HTC magic has been dropped about 50 times. I have yet to see a crack anywhere. Same generation iPhone had a massive screen problem.

I like my MBP but it's not for the hardware or built quality that I bought it.
If one of AOL's goals was to announce multiple acquisitions in a single day in order to get exponentially more coverage than if they had announced them all days apart, then I'd say mission accomplished.
Ask HN: First employee hours
Dear HN,

I don't really have a mentor / know anyone to ask advice on this, so hoping to grab some here.

I'm a young co-founder (developer), and we're growing pretty damn fast. It was time to hire a first employee a few months back but its a long process - which I'm sure most of you know.

Its going to be damn awkward managing someone significantly older than myself. I've read up on tons of tips and have a more or less general idea how I'm going to behave (ask for lots of advice, but make clear decisions when they need to be made).

My only remaining concern is working hours. I'm currently working crazy hours (worked nineteen hours today - so far). The new developer should relax the workload but I doubt I'm going to hit eight hour work days any time soon -- but I don't expect him and I'm not paying him to work more than that.

Does anyone have experience with this / how have you dealt with it? I'm going to expect him to come into the "office" daily atleast for the few weeks - so we can sort out the groundwork and maybe do a little pair programming.

Does anyone here use the 'rough' nine->five model? Should I just expect him to come in for around eight hours a day?

I really don't feel comfortable asking or even suggesting he works close to the same hours I do. We're paying him a decent salary - but he's an employee; not a founder.

[we're profitable enough to cover his salary so theres no crazy "if we don't get this done by xxx we'll go bankrupt"]
I'd argue that complexity is what causes loopholes, rather than the other way around.
Things like tax credits aren't 'loopholes' - they're specifically codified in the law for people to utilize, in an attempt to encourage certain behaviors.

It's not gamesmanship, although there is some competitiveness between state tax laws (such as this WA vs CA capital gains thing).

That's WA's incentive to get people with lots of money to come live (and hopefully spend) it in WA. CA has enough people with lots of money that it can afford to take a different stance.
Has anyone used Diigo?
Tools to Take your Business to the Next Level
I have multiple monitors but I really dislike having a web browser at full screen. I always run it windowed.
Arrington: Y Combinator Thinks Small
At TechCrunch disrupt Arrington just said that VCs don't like Y Combinator because it sucks up talented entrepreneurs who then think small and don't go for big growth or a big exit. Do you agree? Any YC alums want to comment?
Graphic Designer
Does anyone know of a good graphic designer in the Bay Area which can help me make paper mock-ups
for a website I'm building?
This is for continuous walk.

As you say, in one dimension you will visit all the points.

In two dimension the random walk is dense, so you pass arbitrarily close to every point in the plane.

As the dimension increases beyond two, it gets less and less likely that you hit the target sphere. In some way, space gets bigger and bigger as the dimension increases.

Suppose the d dimensional "target" sphere is very small and very close to the starting point of the path. Let some time pass, and suppose that the Brownian motion does not hit the sphere and has increased by 1 in every direction. Then the distance to the sphere is sqrt(d), which grows unbounded as d increases: if you don't hit the target immediately, on average you will be further away from it in higher dimension. So the probability of touching the target after that diminishes as the dimension increases.

I don't have an intuitive explanation of why 3 is the critical dimension though.
Most floppy disks only have a life span of 10 years, there are a number of computer games form the 90s for which we only have hacked/pirated versions of because no-one has a 100% working original anymore.
I majored in Computer Science and English at school. I don't tell people about the English part so much. But I would argue that Language and Literature has been every bit as valuable to being a good programmer in a media age as Properties of Algorithms. That's a micro-symptom of the issue that's well expressed in this article.
Point taken; he was quoting an unnamed VC who said that and he believes there's a kernel of truth in it. He's also been characterised as supporting that point of view; on stage yesterday Chris Sacca straight out placed "his" words feet and he didn't take the opportunity to refute it:

MA: No one is talking about the entrepreneurs.

CS: That’s not true. You call some smaller companies “dipshit” companies, but they’re not.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/the-panel-thats-definitely-...

Another quote from VentureBeat:
"TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, who moderated the panel, had previously criticized some angels for funding “dipshit companies” that think too small and aim to be acquired by Google for around $20 million"

http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/27/angel-investors-defend-sma...
How the World's Mathematicians Organize Online
Wow! I was wondering what would happen to Brizzly after Twitter's new web interface. Brizzly has nice interface for in-stream media and so. I thought their key point was user interface. And I was thinking what would a startup (client) do, whose core selling point is better UI, in case when a platform itself comes up with a better UI.

I wonder how these acquisitions happen? Probably Brizzly knew they will die soon? So they wanted to sell it off? And they have some connections with AOL somehow, and get the word out that they are on sale? Any ideas?
> But feminists think the top half is men-only, and they want it to be women-only.

Stating this as if it were fact is disingenuous. The feminists that people think of when they think that -- the ones they label "feminazis" -- exist only in their heads as a stereotype. People actually resembling that stereotype of extremity are few and far between and can be safely ignored.

The vast majority of progressively-minded people, even those who call themselves feminists, lobby only for equality/parity, not supremacy.
Well, I've read that just after things get better in that sort of way revolutions are a not entirely unknown development. I don't remember the arguments for why this might be so, but the more people who have spare time and energy, "the devil finds work for idle hands" and all that.
This significantly increases my respect for Zed Shaw.

Yes, he wrote an offensive post crying for blood, but after he had a chance to cool down, he used his own fame and audience to exhibit a well-reasoned response from someone who disagreed. That's a very adult thing to do. In some ways, it's actually better than an apology.
It's little things.

Workflow: Opacity lets me define factories to quickly generate images as I iterate a design. They're like a combo of slices and save for web in PS. Using factories is infinitely faster than cumbersome layer comps, slice selections and export scripts.

Making things polished: Opacity lets me easily snap to whole pixels, instead of sub-pixel horseshit that makes everything look blurry. Using the pen tool in Opacity gives me smart, dynamic guides to help me align my anchor points.

"Layer styles:" Instead of confining me to one of every kind of layer style and forcing me into a specific compositing order for each, Opacity lets me do whatever I need to, in whatever order, as often as I want. It's liberating and time saving, especially when you're making UI elements.

The fact that it doesn't take a long time to launch is also nice.

Photoshop is bloaty and cluttered. There's no focus there and I'm pretty sure no one at Adobe is really giving any thought to how I will use their software. They're working up feature lists, and not much more than that.

(For those interested, here's Opacity, too: http://likethought.com/opacity/)
It's almost off-topic by now, but I think Yahoo! Messenger (or any other app) would be plenty able to clutter up your contact list if it wanted to. As far as I know, the SDK allows read/write access to the Address Book, without user authorization even.

...which I've always found very surprising from a privacy standpoint. Apps need to ask access to your location but your full address book is fine? Odd.
That plus an apology would have been even better.
Yes, and also everything is contained in a single user directory, a "box". You can have multiple independent boxes.
Even if you don't have a ton of cash, check out the Couchsurfing network and travel. I never regret going new places and meeting new people.
I've read a good 1/4 of Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach, and scanned a handful of pages further on, and thus far it's been excellent.

So far, it looks to be very much rule / first-order logic oriented, but that makes sense, as it's been the most well understood, and much more easily provable / understandable once something is built. There's very little about neural networks, for instance, or genetic algorithms, aside from an explanatory section or so. Though I may have the first edition, and apparently the 3rd came out last year.

So, if anyone is interested in a relatively-introductory, extremely readable book on machine learning, it's the best I've come across so far.
ACS doesn't inherently do that, but it's a consequence of the ACS design that the server will do that.

(Obviously, the server is always generating dynamic-SOMETHING).
> Like, umm, a commercial software company?

Just hire them and demand their work to be licensed to you under a free license.
The pay gap that most people care about is that women earn less than men who do the same job. Because men tend to work different jobs than women, this statistic is not particularly interesting to me.
"Any type of event that has nonzero probability will happen infnitely many times(...). This undermines the basis for probabilistic predictions of local experiments. If infnitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely? To be sure, there are also infnitely many observers who do not win, but in what sense are there more of them?"

The first sentence is wrong, as pointed out by zeteo, but the rest does not make any sense either.

Take continuous random walk starting at zero at t=0. There are an infinite number of paths that reach each value at time t=1. Yet we can say the the probability that the random walk is positive at t=1 is one half. And by "say" I mean give a solid mathematical definition of this fact, not some hand waving argument.
I used to think that. But consider:

A user can manage his/her own stuff in ~/bin and add it to path if he/she wants.

A sysadmin can put things somewhere like /usr/local/experiment33 and make sweeping changes just by changing the default path, which a user could override for customization.
It's a lot harder to get ads for an international media. I'd guess most of the ads on www.techcrunch.com are payed by US marketing budgets. The people who manage those only care about US viewers. So question N:1 is how many US viewers, without ad blockers the site has. N:2 - for how long is it gone keep them.

A regional Finnish newspaper is very likely to keep it's audience in one form or another for a long time. That audience has high purchase power and is less likely to go online and research cheaper alternatives to advertised products/services.
The left side is cut off and the right side overflows if the window isn't large enough to contain the full layout. Reducing the text size has no effect on the layout width, either. Columnized formats are annoying enough when they work but this one alienated me enough that I didn't even bother reading it.
- A small point, but I think the comparison between a MacBook Pro an a Lenovo is a bit odd. ThinkPads are not far off from Apple in terms of build quality and are certainly more durable.

You're going to have to justify that. A case made out of a solid piece of aluminum is about as durable as I can think of in consumer-level products. I beat the crap out of my MBP and it doesn't have so much as a scratch on it.
It's sad, but an aspect of human nature. It's all too easy to avoid responsibility, push it off as someone else's problem, concentrate on more immediate problems, etc. Or to live in denial about the limited lifespan of magnetic tape, for example.
This sort of cultural heritability is the foundation of the thesis of A Farewell to Alms (http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet... ... which I should really get around to reading).
This made me think. Could the pay difference be because men work more hours? There are more woman with children with part time jobs vs men with children. This is just a thought.
With their record of taking cool companies down the drain, I worry about this AOL shopping spree.