skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You do realise that this can only happen if your an employee? Where you work your butt off and you still get paid your regular salary even if your product is a huge success in the market.

And in a corporation this is still a minor cause of pain. The politics, stupid rules and pointy haired bosses are a much bigger cause of "jadedness".

I think anyone who starts their own company doesnt have the time to get jaded.
I'm 45 and I've spent a lot of time persuading folks in their 20s that something is possible - almost always by coming up with a basic implementation of an approach. Honestly, the number of times I've heard "I didn't know you could do that".

Very few things motivate me more than someone asserting "that can't be done".
Suggestion: "Lessons learned from Chargify's recent pricing change"
I love my x301 but I do agree.. it is out of date unfortunately. It was the perfect balance between the 12" and the 14" ThinkPads. My only gripe is that it's limited to 4GB. Anyone know if it's possible to exceed this limit?

A coworker of mine just got the T410s and I've gotta say I'm jealous. If I was buying a new laptop, I would go with the T410.
Having worked at a law firm and in the legal department of a large Wall Street bank, I don't think this is as huge of a freedom issue than you'd think. I don't expect this to get used outside that environment.
Great article:-) I think managing the addition of batteries is definitely tricky for a language like Lua. Some of its users do not want any additional baggage: they want small, fast and easy to embed. Other people may want to use it as a 'scripting language', and thus want to have a bunch of libraries and additional goodies to get stuff done with.
Doubt it. I suspect the super-intelligent transhuman AIs that come after us will still be stuck with IE6 support.
Congratulations You do nothing faster than anyone else
I use an Asus UL-30 and recommend it - great keyboard and touchpad, long battery life, lightweight, good display, no problems with Ubuntu.
"I'm sick of seeing EA outsource"

My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.
The map of the world you are used to?  It's a horrible distortion of reality.
Megan McArdle: Mankiw's Bequest
What makes up a house is generally understood. A application or game is often a custom job with all sorts of different features and functions. Any decent company should be measuring these things as best they can. It appears that is often isn't done. It's remarkable that EA hasn't been able to do this since they have a bevy of projects that they should be able to use as a rough yard stick.
Another example is Skyhook. Google started doing wifi based location while driving street view and then forced them out by threatening to cut people who used them off from the official Google apps. Not only did "Google do it" but they also leveraged their position to destroy an open market for wifi location services.
I've been using Macs as my development machines since before Darwin became OSX and that's the only thing that frustrates me sometimes: decent package/library management like on Linux. I've resorted to isolating these issues in VMs running Linux. Anyone else has a better approach? Do you --PREFIX everything you compile? This can be particularly painful for academic software: this type of soft has the annoying tendency to become abandonware the second the Phd thesis is written or publication has been accepted.
I'd be interested in 100m sprints interspersed with 60sec of chess, to see how much of the difficulty is due to hits to the head.
I put that button on Teambox, and I can say it was not because of A/B testing at all. I just like clicking on big buttons!
When can we stop giving up our rights in exchange for protection from a non-existent boogie man?

Which terrorist cells work this way exactly? Al Quieda? Except that's a made up name for an organization that doesn't exist. So where does your insight about how terrorist "cells" work come from exactly?
What happened to the left guy's head? :(

Comparing vector image to a raster image isn't fair -- difficulty of producing the former is greater.
I find this extremely amusing and sad both at the same time.

How far will they go to 'prevent' terrorism?
Same here. I got mine about two months ago. I also installed 10.04. I love the trackpoint (the red pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard) and the mouse buttons just below the space bar (don't have to leave the keyboard to use the mouse).
The only major issue that I have now is the inability to control the backlight. This seems to be due to a bad driver by nvidia [1]. The backlight controls work if you use non-nvidia drivers. This will shorten your battery charge considerably.
Other than that, everything works out of the box. I use the 64-bit version.

[1] http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=150069
Challenge HN: Your company's purpose in a single declarative sentence
Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital says only 1 in 15 entrepreneurs can declare their company's purpose in a single sentence. He goes farther to say "if you can get past that challenge, we are very interested in your company."

I'll go first:

Stormpulse amplifies nature's signals.
I'm using ubuntu with the fw43-cutter wifi and it's working great. Suspend/resume hasn't been a problem either.
Why does digg need so many servers?
But many organizations won't even let users install something other than IE.
> implementing oauth in an old one-off project that only uses one twitter account to access their api is just a pain in the ass.

There's a way around it. IIRC, you just have to sign up for the developer account using the same credentials as your Twitter account, and it allows you to create a permanent key. It's been months since I did it, but the app I built still works.
I use a MBP at work and I'm not really a huge fan. I find the interface requires that I use the mouse way to often, and I have to know all Apple's special key combinations to get anything done. I spend most of my time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, and I wish I were booting Ubuntu natively, but I just haven't had time get it working correctly. I am also in the market for a new dev machine for personal use, and I'm leaning heavily towards a Thinkpad, just based on what I've heard around the Linux community.
Lenovo SL510 here: picked it up for ~ 400 euros with FreeDOS, installed Ubuntu, everything worked out of the box. I use it for all development.
Correct - the only customers I have had to "sack" have been a couple on a "special low price" deal - they always made greater demands than the regular paying customers and their (non financial) contributions to the process were always inadequate and late.
I think you're really pre-judging your customers in a bad way here.

You don't have pathological customers, what you have is a large number of people who instead of paying hard currency for a service will trade time as their currency.

What this means is that a good number of those who stay on the free side of the freemium model are in fact willing to pay. Just not with cash. What they're willing to do is to spend time to learn your service, to participate in your forums, and in any way that is required to get their free service.

When you only expect, want, and cater for the customers who have hard currency you will of course piss off the time-as-a-currency crowd if you've already grabbed them.

Then it should come as no surprise when those pissed off people use their time against you.

I'm not saying that's a reasonable response. But it's certainly to be expected. The best thing to do is to work out how to use the time-as-a-currency crowd to your advantage. Instead of ditching them in a price-hike, ask them to do something for you. Maybe they have to participate in support forums to help others getting on board in return for the service? Maybe they have to just promote your service on their site?

My point is simply that it's naive to ignore this very large set of customers, and even more naive to act in ways that will piss them off if you've already constructed a freemium model that attracted them.
CAPTCHArt
> I know several people that develop Flash ... I see it as making use of existing assets/skills.

Air's selling point was that it enables the use of web-specific skillsets for making a desktop application. A strong accent has been placed on HTML + Javascript, because it has a lower barrier to entry (lower cost) then Flash / Flex (I know because I worked there).

On a regular desktop this makes lots of sense, since Air also takes care of the distribution / updating of an app (i.e. making it almost as painless as using a web app).

> get an Android app for "free" with Air

You mean they'll get a shitty app for free: even web applications are optimized for mobile phones, even for specific architectures with stuff like: http://jqtouch.com/ (for the iPhone)

Flash devs also know Html+Javascript. On the iPhone it takes a couple of meta-tags to make it behave more like a native app (loading screen / no address bar). Add to that HTML5 capabilities that you can take for granted on Android/iOS (geolocation, local storage).

The app store / os takes care of updating native apps (that in the case of Android at least, can have an UI made with web technologies).

So again, what does AIR offer?

(really, it's not a rhetorical question, I'm curios as they probably worked really hard on it)
Seems to already be filled with spam/entirely non-serious responses.
Is College Worth the Investment? (The answer for many is no)
Actually, it is the power management.
Most likely it can be configured. But that is one of the points (admin time): you have to configure it. On Macs, it works.
I think there's a certain amount of serendipity. However, you'll never find it if you're not searching.
> I find the interface requires that I use the mouse way to often, and I have to know all Apple's special key combinations to get anything done

If you expect to get anything done without using the mouse, knowing all the "special key combinations" is a pre-requisite for any OS. I hate to be the kool-aid drinker that jumps to Apple's defense, but I hear a lot of complaints about OS X keyboard accessibility that simply aren't true. A single checkbox enables access to "all controls" through your keyboard. It's turned of by default because, frankly, most people don't use the keyboard. I do, but my computer is my instrument.
In Italy, the 80% of Angels and VCs say:
"We don't know if your idea is good.
Wait until google does it, and maybe we could speak with you about your idea."
Fortunately there are very good VC and Angel (very few..) that want help the new startups and don't scared about big companies.
On building awesome business applications
On Truth in Security Packaging
Securing your ssh server
I'm going to need an iphone app for this, like right now
A disingenuous comparison; the blurriness on the image on the right isn't from the scaling, it was blurry to start with. Here is the decoded source image: http://imgur.com/2jGWJ
yep, see:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/How+to+make+the+Hacker+News+homep...
Hello

My HP 6510b has run every version of Ubuntu since 8.04. I put a 12 cell travel battery on it when I travel so it is a bit heavy. 4GB RAM. Usually run xfce. I am a sysadmin so often have a handful of xterms open and VirtualBox running XP for vSphere, etc. chrome open with HN in the background. Jabber session or two.

I really cannot say enough about this laptop. Not pretty at all but durable.

Everything works - except the fingerprint reader which I have never cared about to get to work.

It has been great. Currently am on Ubuntu 10.10/ xfce. Have used this laptop since 2007 - initially had Win2k on it.

the current incarnation is the 6550b:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13616_ca/13616...

My lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)

00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)

00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H
(ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)

00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)

02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b6)

02:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 02)

10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)

18:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
Indeed. What a lot of these population-rate-below-replacement analyses are missing is that the dynamics vary significantly among population sub-groups. And one variable that is consistently associated with large families is strength of religiosity - e.g., see

http://www.blume-religionswissenschaft.de/pdf/ReproductiveRe...

(PDF; p. 119, fig. 8.1)

Note that people who attend church/temple every week are well above replacement rate. The evolutionary race is on: those religious groups who manage best to transmit their "grow and multiply" gospel to their children will dominate demographics, and consequently politics, within our lifetimes.
It will be yet another feature that no one uses. As long as there is a big button with the word copy on it the machine will often be unpacked, plugged in and never touched again.
UGG Classic Men : Uggs On sale
An idea is worth nothing. Execution is everything. Either pay someone and bring them on board, or learn it yourself. No one works for free, and that's an important thing to remember. They will either want cash or a percentage -- remember to get that in writing too.
From my observations, it is more common in academia than in business. Most companies try to accurately identify productive people because they are aware of gaming issues, and, when there is an issue of rewards, want to continue benefiting by rewarding the correct person. On the other hand, I have seen several claims that the majority of work "produced" by senior academics was actually done by grad students - though I think their claims of how often it happens are probably exaggerated.
Probably because such apps are dramatically more useful/viable in highly dense cities
The Lies Visualizations Tell
Highcharts has been using Javascript for as long as I remember (definitely more than a few months).

What graphics besides charts are you creating?
Just a heads up, you can feel perfectly confident saying that OS X is Unix. Snow Leopard is UNIX 03 certified.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm
I just switched to Ubuntu again - on a two year old Macbook Pro 4,1 though.

To tell a bit about the software side on a Mac:
As long as you don't mess with the system, it runs nicely. Recently I wanted to have a look at clutter ("software library for creating (...) graphical user interfaces") which depends on newer versions of the libraries that ship with OS X. After fiddling around with building it myself (or building Formulae for Homebrew which is a simple and nice package manager for OS X) I decided to go with Ubuntu and Awesome as my window manager. There was just too many barriers in the way.
For web development, OS X was nice. Unfortunately I'm also toying around with a lot of music software which rarely has an OSS equivalent.

Some points on Apple hardware: The build quality is very nice. It might not have the latest stuff, but all components they ship are well integrated and usually don't get you into hassle (as long as you stick with OS X). I honestly don't want to miss the multitouch trackpad.

Conclusion: If you can live with the system that OS X is, go for it. Perhaps you'll get pissed some day about the missing freedom some day. Don't expect that the hardware in a MacBook will fully supported in a Linux distro
Why just not parse/index all the products from stores websites and verify in-stock real-time when making a search via script or something (given that in-stock availability is indicated). Using this approach you can collect product/location data from more than a million stores I would guess. No?
When you exceed your quota you can still receive, just not send (at least for some period of time).
Am I the only one who felt the whole post has some "free users are jerks" attitude?
This was visible a mile off. Indeed, ZenDesk did the same recently and it caused a huge uproar.

Grandfathering existing customers seems like the only logical path if you really want to hike costs of a subscription.
Mostly duped, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782681
The ability to invent has NOTHING to do with age.

Steve Wozniak was a genius at electronics. He had more "experience" in electronics than anyone else 20 years older than him. He succeeded because he had the motivation to build something and the knowledge to execute it.

The same is true for every example that he cited. The inventors, in each case, had much more "experience", within those fields, than anyone else. They used this to create something new.

The younger you are (ie no family), the more time you have to tinker with things. And I think this plays a big role.

You can rattle of hundreds of counter examples: Oprah, JK Rowling, Mark Pincus ...
I have to agree - the first thing I did on the site was to try to figure out where the data was from. But I can't find it anywhere (or even an "about" button that explains it). I assumed it was foursquare (same principle as wheretheladies.at, right?) but would have liked to see some background.
http://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html
pick "nightlife" instead of the "shops" filter
This is a simple idea, but one which is probably quite hard to execute. Issues that spring to mind: identifying identical products (they may be named slightly differently, or be similar variations on a product - ipod w/ 8GB or 16 GB), web prices may often be different from in-store prices (e.g chains will price goods on a store-by-store basis), plus you got multiple prices for a product (big, small, 500ml, 250ml), old prices, new prices, discounted prices - and what about geographical location? Possibly hard to identify for some sites / merchants.

Interesting, none-the-less.
Voted up. This is even stronger than Pasteur's famous, "Chance favors the prepared mind" - if you are not actually working on a problem, there is no possible way to benefit from serendipity.
3, 6 and 5 are all pretty much the same: lack of self-confidence.

4 is very closely related as well.
You don't have pathological customers, what you have is a large number of people who instead of paying hard currency for a service will trade time as their currency.

Look, I'm sure they're very nice people, but their extra time is not going to pay for your ramen. They cost more money and pay less money so they cost you money. You may decide that you would like to optimize for lower revenue, but most people would probably disagree.
In a way, when you are applying for citizenship or even just permanent residency you pretty much know they are going to look up everything they can about you. The questionnaires are really personal on many things. You should have already suspected that Facebook/twitter was used too.
Talking about being lunchmeat. I did notice that Target lets you put in an item and it will tell you which store in your local area has it in stock. Since than I have made purchases at Target, but not toysrus.
Is using prefix really all that annoying? I run Ubuntu as well as OS X, and I like to keep my compiled software segregated from my package installed software. This means I "prefix everything". I mean really, using --prefix is minor in contrast to some of the other difficulties encountered when compiling software.

Homebrew has advanced the state of package management on OS X significantly. Anyone considering a Mac laptop should look in to it to see if the packages you need are there.

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
Speaking of longevity of the brand, my backup system is an old IBM Thinkpad T42 (circa 2004). It runs Ubunutu 10.04 fine. Sure it's not super fast, but the keyboard is still solid. The screen is a bit dim, but it always was. My next buy will be a thinkpad.
hey this is awesome, if you drop a note to me at danielle@twilio.com I'd love to give you some extra Twilio credit, and if you're cool with it I'd love to feature this on the Twilio blog. Thanks for building cool stuff with our API!
A seven step approach to agile marketing
While I haven't followed this situation intently, what I don't understand is: why do they have to provide so much support for free users?

I always thought it is rather common to have free users limited to FAQs and articles/tutorials rather than access to 24/7 phone (and other) support.

(please excuse my ignorance here, but I haven't seen this mentioned)
"And if they’re really strategic older founders hire engineers in their 20′s and 30′s who don’t know what they’ve been asked to do is impossible (exactly the strategy of my partner Ben at E.piphany.)"

That sounds a lot like age discrimination to me. He should be careful saying things like that, because it's illegal to hire based on age in the US.
Is there a particular wireless chipset I should choose that works better with Ubuntu? Options seem to be: ThinkPad bgn Wireless and then various Intel Centrino variants.
How to turn a photo into a Sketch drawing in Gimp
The software entity is constantly subject to pressures for
change. Of course, so are buildings, cars, computers. But
manufactured things are infrequently changed after
manufacture; they are superseded by later models, or
essential changes are incorporated into
copies of the same basic design. Callbacks
of automobiles are ready quite infrequent; field changes of
computers somewhat less so. Both are much less frequent than
modifications to fielded software.

In part, this is so because the software of a system
embodies its function, and the function is the part that
most feels the pressures of change. In part it is because
software can be changed more easily--it is pure thought-
stuff, infinitely malleable.

- Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet
Unicode 6.0.0
It seems to turn out that a lot of them aren't very nice people.
Arizona: Racketeering Suit Filed Against Speed Cameras