skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree a lot with this (and with the summary of his previous post); my opinion is coming both from my own experience as well as from some of Guy Kawasaki's advice.

First, the author trotted out Craigslist and the RIAA as examples of prominent brands without memorable logos, but I think that it's far easier to come up with counter-examples: nearly everyone knows the Ford logo, the Pepsi logo, the Coke "dynamic ribbon device", the Nike "swoosh", and so on. Mega-companies like AT&T don't spend millions re-inventing their logo every once in a while for nothing.

As for my experience: I was just some guy who wanted to bootstrap a technology company by doing local consulting work. How in the hell was I going to stand out? What was going to be my message? My field is crowded, and I couldn't price-compete with the neighbor's kid.

The very first thing I did was come up with a name and a logo, and then I bought a batch of translucent plastic business cards from a company that took my naive logo design and turned it into something really professional.

Those stupid business cards, with their shiny, fancy red logo, are probably 100% responsible for getting my business off the ground. I've handed out hundreds -- almost a thousand now -- cards to people, and I can count on one hand the number of times that someone has put the card in their pocket without stopping to look at it, and when they stop to look at it, I've made an impression. All I have to do is not screw up the next 30 seconds, and I might have a new client.

And that's why your logo is such an important part of your brand: it makes you memorable. People have a lot on their mind now. They're being bombarded by names and products all the time. A great logo is your best bet at getting 30 seconds of their attention.
Because worse is better.
My problem is that exact situation almost never comes up. Usually, I want to use the item in the list directly in an expression, not assign it to another variable first. For example:

if 1==len(lst):
return lst[0]
else:
return reduce(fn, lst)

I don't really want to have to do:

if 1==len(lst):
(single,)=lst
return single
else:
return reduce(fn, lst)
I can't think of anything Microsoft has done recently that would be interesting to mainstream consumers.
How often do people recruit through cold-calls anymore?

I was at one of the companies mentioned, and was contacted by a recruiter from another one of the companies menteioned, but they contacted me through linked-in, not through a cold-call.

Did the agreement really matter anymore with all the alternative ways of communicating?

(I ended up leaving where I was, but didn't go to the place that was recruiting me.)
If a company thinks it's meaningful to measure the number of hours you're awake at your desk, naps won't happen anyway.
The main goal of DRM is to increase revenue, be it invasive DRM or less restrictive DRM. Invasive DRM has irritated customers and caused loss of sales. These guys are trying to create trust and goodwill with customers with a less restrictive DRM. It's more of a marketing tactic.

It's actually a pretty good approach, admittedly lot of work for the developers.
I was raised on essentially this. My (Russian) family and I all (when possible) take ~1 hour nap around afternoon and sleep (all incredibly lightly) for ~3-5 hours at night. If I do not take this nap I feels very tired for the ~2.5 hour window ~5-7 hours after I wake from my ~3-5 hour sleep, and the following night I will require 7-10 hours of "sleep" to feel "fully rested". During these 8-10 hours I will not sleep soundly and spend ~1-3 hours of that time lying in bed unable to sleep but fully weary and exhausted.

Personally I prefer this polyphasic sleep, because I have more functionally active waking hours and I experience very vivid and memorable dreams which, though rarely "pleasant," are always incredibly moving and feel critically important to me

I do not know if this is universal or if it is genetically unique to my lineage, as again, I've noticed many in my family are the same way as me in this regard. I assume others must then be this way as well, though they may not have been raised thinking this behavior is normal or desirable.

The issue comes with scheduling, and this is not always possible. Luckily most of my family is well-off enough to demand whatever they so wish in their vocation. I think most startup founders might be this way also.
There were some folks who owned a lot of slaves back in the day, too. Not a good argument, by itself, sorry.
The biggest problem with a system like this is scale, how do you determine the size of the portion? Consider these two pictures of mash potatoes

http://www.mccormick.com/~/media/Images/Recipes/Recipe%20Det...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6slcYXNa204/SwT183CdpjI/AAAAAAAABN...

We all know from years of experience that the first image is a larger bowl and probably contains 6-8 times the amount as the second picture, but image analysis would not.
I'm fairly sure most phones are GSM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_stan...
There are more than 500 different kinds of phones.

That's the problem.
What would you think of a site that lets you use Facebook to login, or charges a Metafilter-like token $5 fee?
I see it as a matter of accuracy and humility. People who care about precision and accuracy and getting the little details right make good coworkers. People who care about communicating effectively and who can adapt to the prevailing conventions of the rest of the team on matters of opinion also make good coworkers.

You can be right and you can be stubborn, but I respect that when you're stubborn and right and not merely stubborn because you want to be right.
Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever Revisiting the Great Object Debate
By someone who submits articles about Vitamin D supplements? Ok.
I used to agree, but now I actually think there are two webs. There is the original web, the document web, but there is also the application web. Sometimes the two overlap, and almost every site has at least some documents that should be plain ol' HTML.

However in working on the application web for the last 5 years I've come to appreciate the power of new approaches for web-based user applications. It turns out that generating full HTML pages for users can turn into an incredible waste of resources and significantly worse UX, for what amounts to a very tiny accessibility and SEO advantage. Facebook is the canonical example here. The way they load a page is brilliant from a UX and server resource perspective.

But consider apps that are much less dynamic. Say you have a 50k page with 1k of dynamic content per user or some other variable such as country. Page caching is impossible. You can rig up all kinds of complex server side fragment caching mechanisms, and squeeze quite a bit of performance out. However these schemes quickly grow very complex, whereas the client/server architecture lends itself to a solution that is orders of magnitude more elegant, which is simply to load the dynamic bits via AJAX. This A) offloads processing to the client, B) solves all kinds of caching problems, allowing full HTTP caching where it would have been impossible, and bypasses hordes of thorny cache invalidation problems, C) creates some elegant optimizations that would have chicken-or-egg problems if attempted on a server-side MVC architecture alone, D) Improves page responsiveness dramatically as the initial HTML shell and static assets can start loading almost instantaneously, and E) allows a more de-coupled architecture that makes sharding and scaling much easier.

Because of the technical advantages, it's inevitable that web-based app development will continue moving in this direction. Web apps that don't go in this direction will be at a disadvantage from an operating cost and UX perspective.
Single-element tuple unpacking?

I've never found a case where I knew there would only be one element in a list, but I do use tuple unpacking all of the time.

Pretty cool I guess; didn't know it wasn't a common idiom. Good to know. Thanks for sharing. :)
Those are just a few hastily written thoughts.

If there is going to be an effort to improve the actual docs, not just their Google ranking, I would be happy to provide some free consulting on SEO, site structure, usability, promotion, etc. You can find contact information in my profile.
There were the problems with the license for some years.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html

Once it became "free" it had too little functionality.

There's too little of the software and it's not so easy to port the existing Unix/Linux software:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/porting_alien_software...

Moreover, very, very little of the hardware is supported.
FWIW, if you're interested in Plan 9 it's also worth checking out Plan 9 from User Space (http://swtch.com/plan9port/): "Plan 9 from User Space (aka plan9port) is a port of many Plan 9 programs from their native Plan 9 environment to Unix-like operating systems."
Right, my point was that templating was a concern of the UI, yet I wanted to be clear that business logic and data services remain the domain of the application server. Further I try to remove templating from any run-time concern (server or client) by doing all static content templating in a CMS and then publishing it to a web server.
New OAuth support for Google Apps APIs
> Sometimes, yes, but this does not explain many debates about (American) politics - where there's often a lot of heat and very little light, and no real attempt to convince the other side.

Trying to convince the other side is often a dumb idea.

The goal is to get to 50%+1 (or whatever the threshold is). It's easier to get there by adding "the middle"
to your base than it is to add "the other side" to your base.

This is why pols ignore the wishes of reliable supporters or opponents as much as they can.
Most people don't enjoy hearing all of the factors involved in things they don't particularly care about. If they want to buy a computer, they'd much rather hear a recommendation (eg: Apple) or a very simple metric (eg: get >= 4GB of RAM) than how RAM, CPU, etc affect overall performance.

Hence, nowadays I give simple recommendations which work well on average. It's just easier - they don't get frustrated at me for lengthy explanations, and I don't get frustrated at them for not caring. But I'll definitely elaborate if they seem interested.
Why we changed our Free plan
"physics, computer science, and organic chemistry"

Bah... I am an engineer and I had all three in the same semester. I don't have the records at hand, but all three could well be in the first semester alongside calculus. However, it's more likely org-chem was on the second semester.
140 is the limit for tweets so that they can fit your username.
Fair points. Having raised money from angels before, here are some of my thoughts:

1. Advice: This is clearly extremely valuable, even for experienced entrepreneurs. That's probably why a company like Chartbeat (serious revenue, and part of Betaworks) raised a $3 million round from strategic angels, when they probably didn't need the money http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/chartbeat-3-million/ . That said, if you're taking on angels for non-monetary reasons, then you still have to think about their value-add in monetary terms (at least, generally). Is this person's advice worth 10% of my company? Also, you could get their advice by asking them to sit on a board of advisors (or directors) for a token sum of equity (<1%) and still get them involved and incentivized without forking over a large chunk of ownership.

2. Networking: This is certainly a huge contribution of the top angels (and frankly, it's probably, more than any other single factor, what separates the Conways/PG's/Dixons of the world from every one else). Again, though, you can potentially gain access to the same networks through less "expensive" means: i.e. connecting with these people in some other way, whether as a friend, or a mentor, or an advisor, etc., but not necessarily as a full-fledged investor. If their network really IS that valuable, though, surrendering a large chunk of equity might absolutely be worth it, provided that they are excited about your start-up. (EDIT: I'm not recommending you "hack networking" in an unethical way. If somebody is providing you value through their network you should certainly reward them for it. At the same time, you shouldn't just surrender a quarter of your company because some says they have a lot of contacts).

3) Money: Agreed. Money makes the world go round. Most hacker/founders, though, only need to cover their living expenses to get projects off the ground. $70k/year for two boot-strapping founders is very different than a million-dollar angel round. Also, people billed as "top-tier" angels are obviously commanding a premium for their investment (a higher % of the company for less money). Just make sure you're getting your money's worth.

I think in certain cases angels are definitely worth it, but I think it's essential to weigh the costs of equity with what they're actually giving you.
I totally agree with this. I've seen a few things lately that wanted my Facebook login and I just went away instead.

OpenAuth (via Google or plain) or private authentication would have been fine, but those weren't options.
I think this style has one great drawback: it requires deeper knowledge of Python then the 'usual' thing = stuff[0].
PopCap CEO: Great games will beat Zynga's social media muscle
Is the purpose of the fee to filter out spammers and trolls in the same way that attaching your Facebook credentials creates some amount of social accountability for your actions in the service?
If you could find the time to shot me an email (possible with some samples, or some links) of how you did your REST services with Node, I would be forever in your debt. My email is in my profile if you get a chance.
Brilliant idea... wouldn't this have to be implemented inside the login wall though?
I almost never see ads on the net (ABP for the win), so my reply relates to television/billboard/newspaper ads:

Consciously, very often in a negative way: Some ads make me less likely to buy or even consider the advertised brand/product. These include obviously fraudulent e.g. Enzyte (not that I needed, but if I ever did, I would never consider), to the we-assume-you're-an-idiot-and-have-short-term-memory ones like Ditech, and includes the we're-trying-hard-to-exploit-your-thought-processes-but-are-incompetent-at-it ones like Sprint's.

If an ad is smart, I'm more likely to be interested in the product e.g., Sony's '80s Trinitron 5 second genius ad: A man stands by a turned off Trinitron and says "This is the new Sony Black Trinitron. But I can't show you how good it is. Not with this one" (and knocks on the screen of the TV you're watching from the inside)

I think 99.9% of the advertising I see leaves no impression at all, though.

I can't measure my unconscious response (duh), but I suspect it's nearly non existent -- I have so few brand name items that it's unlikely to have had much effect.
I'm deeply curious where Clojure would fall in this comparison. Is Compojure as suave as Hunchentoot? Is string formatting just as flexible? In practice, is it a pain to have to fail over to Java library documentation when Clojure doesn't suffice, versus having plentiful but scattered docs for a single language?
It was the pilot's phone, wasn't it.
I like JS for serving as an assembly language for the web - it's not theoretically ideal, but no assembly language really is.

You have an ever-increasing set of options for compiling non-JS code into JS. Just poke around a little - you could use haXe, CoffeeScript, ParenScript, Objective-J, Pyjamas, GWT, Fantom...

Any platform - browser, server, etc. - that supports JS can reap the benefits of these alternative languages - just get your APIs ported and you're most of the way there.
I may not be Dutch enough, but this certainly isn't the obvious way to do it.
How not to greet a little green man
Interesting idea. A few comments:

- It would be nice to see some more detail on your page. Writing stuff down might help with ideas too.

- The video is too laboured. Too slow. I lasted 9 minutes, and was very interested, but that was as long as I could last. You need to script video fairly tightly to hold folk's attention. You can get away with more space when live, but it doesn't translate to video. There's a reason film makers storyboard.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing about progress. I've just started exploring PhoneGap, so what you are doing is definitely of interest.
That's not even close to true. People take pre-orders on products all the time. Blank even recommends the approach in _Epiphany_.
Duck-typing means you don't assume that the object is from a certain type; Instead you assume that it's got the interfaces you need. (Either `.__iter__()` or `.__getitem__(0)` in this case.)

`.__iter__()` is a more general and common interface than `.__getitem__(0)`, so it's preferable to assume that the object implements the former rather than the latter.

But sometimes you do want to assume stuff about your object. In this case we want to assume that the list has exactly one item, and we want our code to break immediately if it isn't true.
I agree, but I don't have a whole lot going on in my life outside of work at the moment. I wouldn't mind hanging out with them for a while. I'm in my mid-30s and am just worried that it would totally "derail" my career... that if I left my job now I'd never get hired anywhere again.

But you are right, I should talk to them first. I'm kind of a pain in the ass...Maybe they are happier not having me around!
This is exactly why increasingly it's hard to do a startup without teaming up with someone with a reputation.

I'll be looking forward to seeing you mention this on your blog, perhaps even in the comments for the latest post.
VCs Are Starving Early Stage Cleantech Startups, Angels Seize Opportunity
not really a fair comparison. Obviously in the case of slavery most people would believe that matters of economic stability play second fiddle to the overarching concerns of Justice and Morality. However, as evil as you may think software patents are, they are not on the same level.

The USPTO should consider economic ramifications of a decision to stop issuing software patents, or to invalidate patents. I'm not saying they should not go ahead and do it, but it would be irresponsible not to consider any potential negative effects.
"Sites" vs. "apps."
Therefore this post, so people will have this knowledge.
I saw some new Xbox thing at Gamestop this weekend that looked cool: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect -- uses cameras for gameplay in a wii-like way.
Is the perception that we will be nefariously ingesting your private data? Or that FB auth is just a trend? Or just a mistaken assumption that all users actually have a Facebook account?
A lot of Plan 9 innovations have appeared in Linux. One of the outstanding issues are union aka. overlay filesystems, and these are currently being addressed.

That said, Plan 9 seems to see continued use in some niches. For example, Plan 9 has been ported to Blue Gene.

(What's kinda cute is that the Plan 9 kernel (including TCP and such) has fewer lines of code than the Ruby parser, 8000 vs 10000, IIRC.)
Truths About the Media Future - Including the End of Rupert Murdoch?
I'm tired of calorie apps that think I only eat out at Chili's, McDonalds, and other chains or prepackaged foods such as Mac & Cheese, Sara Lee, and Oreos.

The ultimate food calorie app would know the calories in a Mission burrito.
Yeah, I've seen that kind of wiki-like functionality in the Livestrong Nutrition app, and let's face the facts: preparation styles vary wildly among different restaurants. If I type "slice of pizza" into that nutrition app, I get "large slice," "cheese slice," "small slice," and several tens of variations. It's okay, but not ideal. If I go to the local pizza joint, I want to know fairly certainly what I'm getting in terms of calories if I order one of their specialty pizzas. That's where I think a database would be useful.

As for the GPS, that would be very cool.

As has been said before, the biggest obstacle to food apps is mobilizing a sales force to convince all restaurants to embrace a product. And because many restaurants don't really have (or need) IT capabilities, it's actually costly for them to implement computers and train staff to learn the particular system. That's why OpenTable and others are having problems with adoption.
Someone just started working on Gourmet Goggles in their 20 percent time.
Apple granted patent for handheld that recognizes your hands
I see what you mean. In this case it's indeed questionable whether this idiom would improve the code. The only improvement I can offer for this code is to fix the Yoda conditions :)
Gary Wolf: The quantified self
That's a bit of a cop-out.

You did present it as following your own advice and seeing if it works. Seeing if it really works requires you to be in square one.
We've got quite a few clients who are currently not listed on our homepage (which we'll fix!) who are racking up some serious bandwidth and page view numbers (3TB - 5TB per month, 5+ million page views, etc). One of these IS listed on our homepage, NiceKicks.

They may not be "cool" but they are big and need to scale. We're in talks to add a few more "cool" startups soon as well.
Interesting Navigation Elements Next to the Scrollbar on MSN.com
What is the logo for Craigslist? Hell if I know.

The lowercased word 'craigslist' in a serif font, optionally with '.org'.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/epicenter/images/2008/04/3...
http://docs.python.org/library/struct.html#struct.unpack

"""The result is a tuple even if it contains exactly one item."""

I run into this constantly using struct.unpack(), and I find the author's idiom to be ideal way to handle this. I will use this from now on.
This is by far my largest complaint with Quora.
It's still massively inconvenient, in that I have to understand their ridiculously complicated scheme in order to understand what I can do with my game.

Eh, as you mentioned, this post is aimed at people like us - to the normal end user that's not trying to play the full version for free, there's nothing complex at all. You just download the game, and enter your e-mail address. If you've already bought the thing, then you just have to click a link in an e-mail, otherwise you either play the demo or buy the thing, no surprises. Even sharing with friends is easy, you just enter your e-mail address and it works fine after you click the link.

The other details involve edge cases; perhaps Cas will at some point release some stats, and tell us (for instance) how many people actually activate more than 10 copies of the game. I can't imagine it's very many, and for everyone else, the scheme is trivial.

If you're writing good, attractive games but making so little money, you have much bigger priorities than your DRM scheme.

I'd tend to agree with this. The level of polish in their games makes it surprising that they're doing so few sales, so there's probably a lot that could be done marketing-wise to improve things. Of course, I have no idea what these things are, myself. :)

I'm sure Cas would be open to suggestions on this front, I know he's aware of this thread, so by all means, fire away if you've got advice...
For me it's more of a matter of privacy. I do have a facebook account but still refuse to log into any site that wants me to connect with facebook.
Yes -- a speedbump/proof-of-commitment.