skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The margins are just too low on these, hell a decent copy writer is going to cost you half of that if not more. If it needs to have a polished look add a graphics person to that. And that's just to get all of the creative done. I just don't see how on the thin margin of $200 to $500 it can be done. Even with offshore labor the onshore management would eat it up to the point that it would not have a value proposition worth perusing. With canned text, stock images, and a stock template, sure it could be done. But these people never look for a just add water site. They want the "make it like x" twitter, Facebook whoever they want to knock off that week.

I have a friend who owns a vending operation and I promised to sit down with him and show him how to design his own site with GoDaddy's tools and how to use Ad Words to market his service online. He was actually surprised at how easy it was to do. Now he wont win any design awards but for his market something that disseminates some simple info is all he needs. $200 is really a DIY budget and that is all I could really see that someone could do to service this market. It took me 3hr to teach him how to handle it himself. And if someone where instructing people how to do it themselves with these simple site builders they could make a decent freelancing salary. I just don't see a product here that could do better than the existing watered down site builders. Without professional a copywriter and graphic design you will get the same results, offshoring copywriting seems like a bad idea and offshoring graphics requires some management oversight. Until these can be automated I dont see the margins.

The reality is $200 barely covers 2hrs labor for a good mechanic. Developers require a lot more knowledge and skills than mechanics. For some reason people get the idea that this should not be the case but $200 for professional services set's up unrealistic expectations.
> perfection (or in math terms, infinity)

Seriously?
Stop Speaking in Bullshit
Off the top of my head, I guess I'd just count myself among the ranks of the inventor of Cover Flow, the creators of Konfabulator, and the creators of Quicksilver. It happens, and the best thing to do is just to double down and never stop thinking, exploring, and making. As disappointing as it might be, it would be an enormous validation.

My experience with the Apple recruitment process didn't tell me much about the company's plans for the desktop (I didn't get far enough to sign an NDA), but I did learn something important: Their interaction designers, the concept guys whose explorations eventually filter down into shipping products... are also developers. Apple hires the best of both worlds, idea people who don't even stop to sketch ideas out on paper but head straight to XCode and an NSWindow. That's literally their process.

The best thing that came of it was that it inspired me to set out to learn Objective-C and Cocoa. I'm not as far with it as I'd like to be yet, but it's opened my eyes to the possibilities of becoming a designer/developer. Even if, in the future, I'm still the archetypal designer looking for a technical co-founder, hopefully I'll be good enough that I can at least carry my own weight.
My problem with Microsoft Research is that it seems like you would work in a vacuum. I like making things people can easily decide whether they're good too, not deal with marketing dept. red tape to deliver. When I think Microsoft Research I think amazing things poorly marketed and embraced by microsoft. Example: Making a collage in MS Gallery Live is a "microsoft research" add-on you have to go to a separate website to buy.

There's a video from the former head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group that discusses the problem.
Overcome fear of rejection, and have fun doing it with http://rejectiontherapy.com
Learn to Assess Your Assets: Know How Far Your Asset Goes
Marketing Genius Does it Again? Not to be inflammatory, but that seems a bit over the top.
can you elaborate the 30-40k little bit. From what i know fees including premium processing are less than 3k and if you include 2k for attorney thats 5k.
I find that the best thing to do with a pathological customer is kill them with kindness. They end up being your most ardent fans.

If you can turn a non-paying fan into an advocate, they are much more valuable than a paying customer (well, most customers anyways.)
Good points. But why the quotes around the HN post title?
Ask HN: Thoughts on Ubuntu 10.10?
Out of curiosity, I upgraded both my laptop (which uses the desktop version) and netbook (netbook edition) to Maverick this week.

Desktop: Not much is noticeably different. I do like the new Ubuntu font, though. Pretty nice looking.

Netbook: I absolutely hate the new interface. Unity is slow, buggy, and limits horizontal screen space, which is a deal breaker - I need every one of my 1024 pixels. No auto-hide and no customization either. After trying it out for about an hour I gave up and reinstalled 10.04. I really wanted to like this one, too.

What do you think?
A very interesting development from the guys at Basho, who've been on a tear recently.

It looks to target the crowd who would have gone with MogileFS or something like it.
If you read the source article, they say "From our perspective it's pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations."

Saying Android is fragmented because of many unique OS strings is kind of like saying the web is fragmented because of many unique user-agent strings.

It's apparent that TweetDeck understand this, but it seems Engadget just highlighted the "Fragmentation" aspect to drive page views.
You're right of course, sorry.
Or imaging plotting the different user-agent strings for a website.
Short hairstyle haircuts
We got tons of great hairstyle pictures to help you find the style you're looking for Whether it's short hairstyles, medium hairstyles or long hairstyles
Why would you use JavaScript to request the friends list JSON and then use the DOM to insert a stylesheet? Just CSS would be fine if you're changing the color of friends' usernames and not doing anything that needs JavaScript.
This is recursion
Edited. Sorry. I didn't want to give the impression that I thought I had figured out why good Java developers are so hard to find (I didn't write the post).
Android is costlier because designers don't like Google's widgets, so every Android app (that involves a "designer") makes their own instead.

This results in shitty apps that are costly to develop. Fortunately, most of the apps that people actually use don't do this, so it's not really a big deal for users.
Web 2.0 Acquisitions, the game.
You've left out other examples where diversity hasn't been the shit, like video game consoles, and spinning optical disks for playing back music or video. And your example of java capable phones isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for creating a large market for 3rd party developers, since most java capable phones are running 0 3rd party apps.

Look, fragmentation increaces costs. A well capitalized developer can cover those costs and do the marketing to drive the volumes needed to ensure a good ROI. The economics aren't as attractive to small developers.

Android could end up with a much larger market share than iOS, though they'll be fighting with Microsoft to get it.

Even so, that isn't enough to guarantee a good market for app developers. The Android marketplace hasn't exactly caught on like the App store, not yet.
Another one: I like http://eventlet.net/, which naturally blends into the way one writes python code.
A Preview of the Social Media "Buzz Badge" for Store Fronts
very interesting indeed, but perhaps still not quite ready for production systems:

moving the blur control back and forth in a fast motion creates some interesting effects
Ask HN: How do you make your website mobile friendly?
I am working on the css for my new website, one of my consideration is that it has to be mobile friendly, much like posterous.com and avc.com ... Their website look awesome on my iPhone. Here's something I dun quite get.

At AVC, they include multiple css to make to make it mobile friendly.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/touch.css" type="text/css" media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/touch.css" type="text/css" media="only screen and (min-device-width: 481px) and (max-device-width: 1024px)" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/a_vc/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

Nothing of this sort with posterous.com... I could be wrong here. Not sure if anyone else has got experience making their website mobile friendly, if so, please share.
Yeah, I think top engineers have realized that even if they don't succeed as a business, companies like Facebook will often buy them for their talent with more upside than they would have gotten being hired through the normal means.

But at some point that will stop being true, so now more than ever I think it's important to be trying to build real, sustainable businesses.
We socialize online shopping to drive consumerism.
Personally I never use Dashboard, it was cool to play with for a couple of hours and after that the novelty wore off. It really hasn't seen any innovation at all, and overall feels out of place.

If they put iOS support in Mac OS X that would be awesome, but I hope they do it in a way that they are just like other apps on my desktop that can be put in the dock. That way I am much more likely to use the apps.
I saw Space-X was hiring in the last "Who's Hiring" thread here. Working on fricking spaceships would be cool.
Our biggest challenge in building this tool was compatibility. Every webpage is different and even seemingly innocuous things things like frame busters and javascript redirects presented quite a challenge for us. We were fortunate to have a great set of early beta customers that gave us feedback when things didn't work and we took it one website at a time.

We'd love to share the lessons we learned along the way with the HN community in a blog post. Let me know what you're most interested in and we'll share what we've learned.
I don't know if this is specifically the reason, but PCI compliance requires you to hide the version number of your server software to make it harder to trivially scan your infrastructure. They may have considered this a website saying what framework they use to be a similar risk.

(If you consider that a dubious security measure, well, I'd be the wrong one to take it up with.)
I'm getting a Javascript alert on your webpage (http://symkat.com). Something about being "unable to find a syntax highlighter for brush" (Chrome on Windows)
"I don't think you could do much work on a 13" screen anyways. "

I used a 12" Toshiba portege laptop as my development machine for some time, and the 1920x1200 res rocked. So much so that ever since then I made a point of getting 1920x1200 on each new laptop.

This was one reason I skipped on getting a macbook. Poor rez options, and no trackpoint mouse.
JavaScript Compartments in Firefox
I'm a couple hours away from vancouver. Should that make a big difference?
Ask HN: Why suddenly there are so many Q&A services?
Quora, formspring.me, stackexchange and more. Is this some kind of a trend ?
> With no peer review or replication, you are no longer doing science.

Science can be done in isolation. Robinson Crusoe could do science on his small island in the tropics. Without peer review or replication, you're just not doing the particular kind of science that's most beneficial to society: the kind that can be built upon.
I disagree, because your mental model of a large code base that only has one error is absurd. Scientific code is not magically easier to write than real code. Get two random code hacks to write two significantly-sized codebases, say, about the size of a decent web framework, and you won't get one perfect code base and one with a subtle bug that has ramifications down the line. You'll have two code bases so shot through with bugs that they will never reconcile, ever.

The quality issues aren't all that different than a web framework, either. Release one or a small number of code bases, and have everybody pound on and improve them, and you might get somewhere. Have everybody write their own code bases from scratch every time and you'll get yourself the scientific equivalent of http://osvdb.org/search?search[vuln_title]=php&search[te... .

To be honest at this point when I see a news article that says anything about a "computer model" I almost immediately tune out. The exception is that I read for some sign that the model has been verified against the real world; for instance, protein folding models don't bother me for that reason. But this is the exception, not the rule. When it became acceptable "science" to build immense computer models with no particular need to check them against reality before running off and announcing immense world-shattering results I'm not exactly sure, but it was a great loss to humanity.
Like what? I'm on Chrome 8.0.552.0 dev and can't make it not work perfectly.
There have always been a million clones of Yahoo! Answers. You're just noticing some good ones.
iTunes already has a solution for this: shared libraries. It's much, much easier to configure than NFS, and it's fully supported. Why do you demand the ability to reinvent the wheel?

(Also, iTunes will play ogg files if you install the Xiph codecs for QuickTime. This has been the case since at least 2006, and you've stated that you last used iTunes in 2007, so I suspect you're not even trying to be fair in your criticism of iTunes, which is a shame given that there are plenty of real problems with it.)
Lets see.

1 job I had, the company could not realize that monitors are important for developers.

The next job all managers from every department pointed fingers at other managers until the entire company went bankrupt. They had the best product on the market and the only reason why it would not sell insanely would have to be due to the sales team. They instead did not dogfood and paid a heavy price, when they tried to dogfood they realized too late that everyone is incompetent.

And now I have a very high-up manager shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun.
I'm very interested in this challenge as I come from a publishing background, with a few years doing Newsstand Sales analytics and reporting. Will likely give it a shot!
Thanks for the fantastic startup idea. Working on it now.
Every Apple patent doesn't result in a shipped product or feature.

This is Apple we're talking about; they love secrecy, don't want nobody to know what they're doing.

Some of the patents they've filed are probably just ideas, some of them make it into products or features, and some are probably red herrings, meant just to throw their competition off.
Question and Answer Communities for Everybody
I wish I could, but from what I've been told the company usually pays around that to get an H1B... :/
"Google's Latest Launch: Its Own Trading Floor"

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_23/b41810335...
Good piece.

The second job description is written by a manager-type that only vaguely understands the technology. Actually, a place like that would be okay to work if they gave you high enough levels of authority. If you were to inquire about the position, you could say something like, "Hi, I'm interested in your posting, I fit your desired qualifications and skills quite well, but I was wondering who I'd directly report to and how much experience they have with technology?" Interview them a little. Then if (when) they say not much, you explain you'd be interested in the position so long as you get to do things your way. They give you the broad overview of what they want to achieve, you give them the timetable, resources required, and method you propose to achieve it. Working for a non-technical boss isn't actually always the horror it's made out to be, so long as he respects your talent and stays out of the way.

I've managed people with various skills I don't have, and it's actually not that hard - I explain what the high level objectives we want to achieve are, have those objectives repeated back to me in the person's own words, and then let them build a plan to get there from here and execute it. I'll do enough research into the field that I can ask a smart question or two and generally know what's going on, but then I try to just get good people and stay out of the way. If you can set that sort of thing up, it can be quite satisfying if you like self starting and autonomy.
If I slide it over to the right quickly, sliding back to the left doesn't unblur it all the way.
Micrsoft deepens Facebook search ties
I worked there. It was awesome. Smartest group of people I've ever worked with. The job is more about working on cool things than shipping products.
Minnesota-based central air conditioning repair
From the State Fair, to one of the remaining Twins (or St. Paul Saints) home stands, Minnesotans are busy soaking in the final sultry days and nights of summer.
Sounds like a good question for quora.com
the new official Indian currency symbol: the Indian Rupee Sign

Ah yes.. in Gnome/GTK type "ctrl shift u 20b9"

The latest release of the Unicode Standard also includes support for the ancient Indian Brahmi script that was in use during the reign of Emperor Ashoka.

That's circa 232BC - of course a lot of buddhist (read - Chinese, Japanese, etc.) scripts originate from Brahmi, which was arguably used as a medium of religious evangelization to spread Buddhism from India. But I guess the language is effectively a dead language.
There is no incentive for people to speak clearly[1] when their careers, environment and everyday interactions are highly hierarchical, and they're paid, and indeed retain their positions, by being obscure, in an attempt to sound "big". Sometimes they don't even mean it.

Getting clear answers from the Enterprise types is akin to the Socratic method, if not psycho-analysis. You would have to repeat the same question over and over again, until you can illicit the root answer from layers of vague reasons and non-goals. If you're a contractor, a good way is to not make eye-contact, and "delve" deeper into thinking as you listen to their answers (you're not really thinking, you're just encouraging them to think, by mimicking you.)

Of all the W-questions, "Why" is the most important. Keep asking why, why, why, until you hit a logical tera firma, something closest to reality, further down from their tower of froth, and woolly ideas.

--

[1] I was gonna say "clear spoken", O'oh! Then I remembered my Strunk & White.
This isn't just a characteristic of the tech community, but people in general. People who don't know or understand something, companies who aren't selling life improving substantial products, and those without confidence need to resort to the fine art of bullshit to make them feel more confident in whatever snake oil they're trying to sell. When you don't have the goods, it's much easier and beneficial to you to add the fluff. It sucks, but it isn't going away. :(
Search Engines Protect Privacy with Outbound HTTPS Links
Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls
As someone who reads scores of pitches a week from tech startups, I can't say how much I agree with this.

Most of the pitches I get these days force me to wade through swamps of buzzwords that have become absolutely meaningless. It's enough of a turn-off that I pretty much ignore those pitches -- I figure that if the company had something really exciting to tell me, they'd figure out a way to tell me so within a couple sentences without using endless strings of empty jargon.

In pitching (to journalists, or users, or potential employees), keep in mind the most basic rule of poetry: The fewer the words, the more powerful the statement. I.e., less is more.
Rescued from a Chilean mine - The Big Picture - Boston.com
Reinventing the Wheel: Why no-tech ancient civilizations still can't catch up.
the way kickstarter works: if you meet your goal, you see everything you raised. if you don't meet your goal (i.e. anything under $9,999 in theglif's case), they won't see a penny.

needless to say, those guys will be doing just fine in another 19 days :)
That might be so, but right now there's about three of them and they clog up the search results with essentially the same answer but lower quality for the reasons mentioned above. So far I've not seen any that outrank stackoverflow, but it's only a matter of time before one does some blackhat and jumps for certain questions.

You say that they link back, but in the cases I've seen, they link back with a slightly different Url form to the one you use.

For example : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-tr...
this question appears on scraping sites (not going to name them for fear of feeding them traffic), but they link back with this Url:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925 - which doesn't resolve back to the longer version. I know there's a canonical link on it (for the longer url) but I'm wondering if this strategy is working or not.

Maybe it's time to start rejecting some bots crawling the site, or at least to slow them right down.

It's a problem for Google and for SO, so someone from both places should probably be talking about it. Because in the end, SO starts looking spammy because the others are spammy and scrape the content, which is exactly the opposite case of how things should be. The spam sites are just cloning SO and shoving crappy ads everywhere, it's not high quality content. When you ask a question, you want 5 different answers from 5 different site, not the same answer spammed 5 times back at you.
One of those obvious things that you feel stupid for not realizing. Thanks!
That seems like more of a problem with the slider control.
I agree that there is a difference. On the other hand, once you have the business legally established (the easy part), you can conduct business as that entity. You might piss off the government and the liable for fees/penalties, but you're not going to invalidate the actions of the business by doing that.

Perhaps I'm just being naïve, but I figure if the rules are difficult for me to find it's also fairly unlikely that I'll get caught for not following them. Or, I suppose, I feel like by the time it becomes a serious risk I'll have grown to the point where lawyers become a necessity anyway.
I hate to be so snarky, but if you’re going to use a font for your headings that is so big the apostrophes are 20×20px, you might as well use proper quote marks instead of ASCII primes.
Useless without the paper, imo. Here is the closest thing I could find:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/graphics/blurringwithcuda.aspx

When I was a much bigger idiot, I used to read C sources for open source audio codecs, in order to teach myself fixed-point numeric tricks. Turns out, there are entire handbooks of that stuff, with prose. No need to reverse-engineer precomputed tables with bleary eyes.
Here's another great bullshit speak piece by an entrepreneurship program at ASU called the "Venture Catalyst." Warning, there are more buzzwords here than a new employee handbook.

asuventurecatalyst.org
Interesting coming from a blog titled I love groovy.

I take from that the guy writing it already realises the value of alternative JVM languages and is even a big fan of one, so why hold fast to pure Java? If you want to find good developers on the platform, maybe broaden your scope beyond the aspect of it you're having trouble with. I know plenty of people that use JVM languages and very few of them that wouldn't avoid using pure java if at all possible simultaneously.
Global Downloads Speed Comparison | Tech Know Times
This is a really bad model. I could have launch the same service for just $0.50/download. How are you going to stop cut throat competitors like me?

I hope PG did ask this question during the interview, so it should be easy to answer my inquisition.