skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know. We don't know. That's kind of become the lynchpin of the entire debate.
This is a commodity with a low barrier to entry in a mostly free market. If demand pushes price beyond cost + certain amount of profit, you will see more companies entering the market. Cost falls with moors law (yeah, power costs aren't going down... but I can stuff a whole lot more compute power in the same amount of electricity than I could have two years ago.)

So, assuming the market is free (which is mostly is) and the barriers to entry are low (and they are very low.) assuming there are customers who care about price (and there are) you should see prices falling towards the cost to provide the service.
Keep this in mind: networking opportunities come in many forms. Alumni clubs are just one avenue available to someone who is trying to connect with others.

BTW, Auburn is a very good school. Excellent academics and a good reputation almost everywhere in the world.

Of course, one of the afflictions of state schools is an overemphasis on sports. My feeling is that there is an attraction affect happening with certain schools that depends on their "brand." It may be the case that people who want to enter the corridors of power seek Ivy League degrees while others want to tap into more localized fraternities focused on something other than wealth/power/prestige.
It's time to white-label, or offer referrals my friend. Throw the marketers a bone. Put that fucker on Clickbank and CJ and offer 50% commissions. No one has to know you're white-labeling it; keep the customizable version off of your main brand, but don't write a LINE of code until you have someone willing to pay for a license.
Science and poetry were once closer than they are now
New blogging techniques
<3 PHW
I'm "on" twitter in the technical sense although I don't really use it. I use my blog and email/pm to reach my users.
BitlBee 3.0, more Bitl than ever.
BitlBee 3.0 released.
He has now become the IronRuby lead, although not at Microsoft.
That seems a reasonable guess. Also, java has been showing up with a lot of vulnerabilities, so the beancounters may have wondered about the costs of doing qa on implementing those. We know that it is months before we get major new versions of java or some of the security fixes. Also java 7 is on the horizon and the dance would start over again.

There's an opportunity here that Apple should encourage. I write in-house apps in java on the Mac for deployment for my Windows colleagues. They are not going to stop using Windows. Java has real good libraries for rdbms access.

I guess the options are java develop in a vm hosting Linux or hello -ugh- mono. But I hope someone gives us a good java that runs natively.
That would be nice - its merits aside, Jython is unusably slow at the moment.
I think the big issue is that it isn't that big a market. When you factor in the COGS of label music, the market size relative to available profit is actually fairly small no matter what barriers you build.

To Dalton's point there are other interesting markets with barriers. For instance Scrapbooking is a $3B market, 1/3 the size of the music industry by revenue, with 2 tech players. One tech product in Scrapbooking generates $300MM in revenue and faces almost no competition. Arts & Crafts is a $32B industry. Toys is ~$30B, Jewelry is $60B, the list goes on, but there are SO many big markets that are ready for technical disruption that are ignored because they aren't very sexy.
Except they are actively working to make iOS jailbreaking impossible.
I know this is supposed to seem like a huge outlier and ridiculously far-fetched, but historically, its just not.

Its called:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

Yep. People give money to artists because they like what they're doing and they have a relationship with the artist. Not because some middle-man arbitrates the price of the art of some unreachable "star" or because some lawyer mugged them with paper weapons.

Edit: I know that this probably won't work at "Madonna" scale. The artist can't possibly make a meaningful connection with a fanbase that large. That might be the point.
Great story... inspiring actually. I always thought I was the only one in your shoes.
I can't say anything definitively, but the IE Javascript team is completely separate from the .NET team.
His original Python project was Numeric, then Jython, then IronPython. The guy is a one-man coding army for Python.
Iron effects
Apparently the client is too lazy to remove their names as the creator of the website (which is supposedly crashing often). So their reputation is being irrevocably damaged.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/dui6d/new_minecra...
nothing unprofessional about not implementing a contractors work; he paid them quite promptly and gave them a fair explanation.

sounds like they had their feelings hurt more than anything. which to be fair, is understandable. but i would say given the circumstances notch couldn't have been much more professional.
My (wild-ass) prediction: full computer in an Apple TV form factor.
The speech Optimus Prime should have held in the Transformers movie.
"... Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. ..."

Why did it take 6 years?
It seems like most of the beef that people have with my talk revolves around the semantics of what a "music startup" is. Semantic arguments can end up being fairly tedious...

It is a complex issue because even if you don't deal with label music, there are still copyright issues. I personally would draw the line at "recorded music". If a startup does not deal with recorded music (ie streaming, downloads, mashups) they are mostly OK.

One caveat, there are also publishing rights issues around things like lyrics, tablature, etc.

Songkick does not deal with any of these issues, and I don't get the feeling that thesixtyone does either.

Also, if people get the idea that I don't understand the opportunity for independent musicians etc. please research SNOCAP, a company that I partnered with for years, ended up acquiring, and also ran. That company, despite having the star power of Sean Fanning & Ron Conway, was _VERY_ difficult. SNOCAP was promoted by MySpace, which was the #1 website at the time, as well as the #1 place for indie bands. MySpace promoted SNOCAP heavily etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOCAP
If I was the engineering putting the MBA together, I would think that in the back of my mind as I decided that baked on SSDs were the way to go that this wouldn't catch on with everyone (manufacturers).

I mean, there's no way you deny that incredible space savings you get. But you're also locking in the main storage, something that people have been able to change in their laptops for (seeming) forever, something that I probably just did in my own MBP (cause those base Toshiba units are kinda funky) a few months ago.
The slide-out windows license is a nice touch. (HP Slate 500)
Hot Afghani girls Private Pictures and having fun in hot videos
Ruby Best Practices - The Ruby Mendicant University Core Skills Course
Marathon Math: How Not to Hit the Wall
Is it that we really want to talk about it or that the TC/Valley echo-chamber makes us feel like we want to talk about it?
Anti-geek? What could be more geeky than owning a five-point security torx screwdriver?
That sort of exists in Vancouver.

Recently the Vision Party won a majority of seats in council and their coice for Mayor won in a landslide victory. Vision had some sort of agreement where COPE (Coalition of Progressive Electors) wouldn't run a candidate for Mayor so that the two progressive parties wouldn't split the vote. COPE has two councillors and they often vote with Vision. The other party, NPA (Non-Partisan Association) (yes that's the real name...Wikipedia for more details) has one seat on council.

The end effect of all of this is that Vision has very quickly been able to implement their agenda. Most recently several separated bike lanes and a street food cart program.
This is off-topic, but here is a shout out from one of your customers! PopupChinese is great. I found out about it because AdsoTrans was the most handy pinyin conversion site that I've used for years. And I don't remember how I found about that one.
I thought the "by itself" was kinda implied, but what I meant was "PR is not, by itself, a marketing strategy". I can think of lots of examples of companies with great PR.
I agree with what you are saying about pigeonholing, but please realize that just because something raises money, it does not mean that it will work.

VCs view investments as "bets", not sure things, and the vast majority of those bets fail... that's how the game is played.

(Also, for the record, SoundCloud and Echo Nest are awesome. We did a deal with EchoNest at imeem, and the SoundCloud team is worldclass.)
He changed his mind? How dare he!? /sarcasm

He was above-board the whole time, and never said anything bad about their work. He made it very clear that it was his choice, and not something they did wrong.

What more can you ask for? This is -way- better than the customer that doesn't pay or rejects it 800 times to change little things.
I have found this thread blissfully flamewar free regards business motivations. That said, I think this first mention of business issues is both overdue and needing expansion.

How can one look at the deprecation of a particular runtime in isolation from (a) Apple's simultaneous announcement of increasing commonality of iOS and OSX, and (b) Oracle's aggressive enforcement of comm-related java libraries?

Since Apple sells and approves all app-store products, they bear plausible liability for an iOS app, if Oracle was lawsuit-minded. I would hardly be surprised to learn that Oracle will NOT sue Apple over runtimes that could trip up Google, thanks to Apple's agreement to remove possibly-offending code.

Or, alternatively, if you have an iOS app that wants to do comm in java, how could Apple field an alternative library to one that Oracle claims is theirs?

This makes Apple-supplied java runtimes a dead end. We'll see how interested Oracle is in licensing alternatives.
We've been using it as well. Works great!
I posted a related thesis here a while ago:
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is-doomed...

That the complexity of shared hosting would make it uneconomic vs VPSes in the long run.
Yeah, at first it seems a little disappointing, but he got paid.

I guess he doesn't have a continued job, and he won't get the fame of designing the minecraft site, but he's certainly not a loser.
YES, THANK YOU.

One of my personal goals for doing the talk is to get people thinking that way. I wish someone would had gotten me thinking that way years ago.

I wanted to put a quote from Aaron Patzer in my talk, but didnt have enough time.

Here is the quote:
"For other entrepreneurs aspiring to such an exit Patzer advises solving a real problem. “When I founded Mint there were a ton of startups in the social networking space, and in streaming music,” he says. “I found something that was a real problem for me and I knew for millions of others, and I solved it.”
Venn diagram of non-monogamous sexual relationships [maybe nsfw]
You have received this mandatory email about important changes to Google Groups.
مسلسل سيلا الحلقة 40
I think it's more that now Ellison owns Java/Sun, he wants control. Jobs was happy to hand over the resource-suck since he sees the future as iOS apps and appstore anyway.
So new mac book air yesterday. Today the MS phone launches. And VCs put up 250M for new social start ups and you're wondering why you didn't get any pub? I'd launch again tomorrow. Keep launching it until it catches on.
meh, that's nothing. i can do one better (in the small gap of paid, but also screwed).

had a client pay me for work, be very happy etc, take the project away (after promising continued business), and had the new "developer" take all credit for developing it. trumpeted on the landing page for both the client, and the dev shop.

it's their app after all, so i was pretty cool with it, assuming it was some other basement dwelling schmoe who they found to work for less.

turns out it was a manhattan creative firm with offices consuming the floor of a tower, who no doubt charge double my rate. they can be fucked in the ear.

by the way, i'm not stupid enough to out them, unlike the OP.

p.s. it was an iphone app, so i contacted mobile orchard about the shenanigans. they replied that it was too common to even bother commenting on.
Aw dammit, Turk is great.

I spent $300 in one day on Turk and Amazon gave me a personal account manager... And that's the problem, if you spend $300 on Turk in a day you're a high roller, Turk just isn't that big of a market. I've had days when I've been responsible for 20% of the HITs in the system and I'm just a poor computer programmer who writes code for a penny a line. I just got an email the other day from a Turk who was begging for more HITs.

Personally I've got no problem with the API and for certain kinds of tasks I've got good answers for the quality problems. For other ones, I haven't figured it out yet.

If you think Amazon's offering a service that's too bare bones, you ought to start a start-up that layers services on top of it. It may be a tough row to hoe though... My layer that interfaces to turk is specialized to my purposes and isn't spiffy, commercial and easy to use. It would probably cost you 20-50 times as much to develop something "usable" than it cost me to develop something that fits my workflow. Unless you can amortize this cost over a LARGE number of customers, your spiffy new system is going to cost more than it costs to pay the Turks. And good luck getting Angel or VC money to develop something that might never get all that big... And that will probably get regulated with the government when they find out that you're getting people to work for you for $2.50 an hour!

For now I'm tickled pink because I can get labor cheaper than my competitors can -- I can escape the economic problems that keep silicon valley companies going in circles chasing each other's tails.

What I really wish is that I could pay people Facebook credits to do work for me: my guess is that I could be paying people $1.25 an hour that way... However, Facebook knows the first thing people would do if it was easy to pay credits out to people is create gambling apps, so they don't make it easy.
I don't think the player experience and distribution are mutually exclusive - bad games just don't spread and marketing can't ultimately change that. If a game is popular it's because on some level people are having a net positive experience - I don't see the fun in building a farm, but I bet those people wouldn't see the fun in Transport Tycoon either which I played the crap out of.

I would expect Zynga etc work extensively with optimizing the player's experience since the longer you play my game, the more opportunities I have to x.

I work all day on in-game analytics, coincidentally I've had some success using analytics to improve my games:

http://playtomic.com/blog/post/10-an-update-on-trickochet
The headline is hideous I agree, but the point holds... the floppy was obsolescent for a while but apple gave it the final push, might well be that they do it for the optical disc, too.
The chart itself looks worksafe, but some of the profile images in blog comments are definitely not.
In BC, if you are a hi-tech company, you are eligible to receive SR&ED (given by the government, but you need to fill some paperworks).

In the short-term, it's great because it gives your company some money to survive. In the long-term, when your actual balance sheet is red but because of SR&ED it becomes green, most companies are lying to themselves.

There are many companies in BC that rely on SR&ED and as a result, they're not dead nor living. They can't pay top money for top talent. Their product/software take the hit. There are many CEOs that only want to ship the product ASAP or else they're going down ASAP as well.

In general, it's a vicious cycle.
I'd say the hardest part about attending a lab session would be getting a computer account (assuming the computers are networked). I'm sure I've seen students that don't attend lectures (presumably looking at them at home) but are there in the lab sessions.
How to convert Halloween movies to iPad on Mac
Read the tutorial to learn how to convert the Halloween movies to iPad supported video format. Download DVD to iPad Converter for Mac to convert your Halloween movies for iPad.
Yeah, I go to Twitter to check a few tweets from people like PG from time to time, but it's not really an integral part of my life either. I wonder if it ever will be...
Granted. This is a much more reasonable response to the top of this thread than sanctimonious quoting.

See also scottyallen's comment here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1817378). If Google web search has (or recently had) such a thing as "peak hours," I'll hazard a guess that <your web app> does too.
I am an experienced UI developer and while I agree with the main point of the article I would like to note that not all front-end positions are created equal.

I've worked at amazing shops where there was a clear role definition (made easier by the beauty that is Django) and the expected code quality was really high. There were project based code reviews to ensure this.

I've worked at places where a front-end developer meant you write Java in Eclipse (which took 15 mins to launch) that in turn generated JS that manipulated the DOM to create your markup. This is common practice in more places than we realize.

If you're a UI dev do your homework before accepting any position. The market is really dry for our field and people on the interview will lie to get you to come over. I've been to over a dozen interviews in just the past year (and I am thinking I should write more about this) and the industry expectations are simply rarely properly determined of what the role entails.

Apologies for the rant. Downvote if you sense my frustration :)
...not having to buy them? Being a geek is not about owning toys. It's about being open, curious, and observant.

There are hundreds of these types of screwheads now. The regular Torx used to be a security screwhead. Now that everyone has a Torx they whip out a 5-pointed Torx, call that one the "security" version and start the stupid cycle over again. This excludes people from hacking and learning, eg children.
We integrated PagerDuty with scoutapp.com and pingdom.com. Works great.
Being Steve Jobs's Boss
No, his boss asked him if they -should-. He didn't tell him to use it. He did what a boss should.

Sensationalist (and untrue) headline.
The Mac Mini comes darn close.
These are both important. Sometimes the letter of the law is convenient. Needing to resort to the letter of the law is not "open" -- a 3rd meaning!
I'd be happy to continue on email. I've enjoyed it too. It's always good to have a foil. With out them, we never learn :)
I'm in the same position - and I think most people are - of "can't force my idea onto the market." Completing the entire product cycle seems to rank higher for me than "the idea" or "the execution," as it affords a chance to clear the slate, see the project's history in an honest light and use that to motivate the next strategy decision.

Each time I ship something, I'm discovering that I could have cut things down much further than I did and saved (months/weeks/days) of effort, and just wasn't ready to believe it in the planning stages.

Plus, moving fast gives me more opportunities to work on marketing skills and gain some real experience there. Project artifacts have zero real value until someone is using them, so the marketing effort is a way to mitigate risk, and shouldn't be an "oh my god did we get it right?" shuttle-launching kind of experience. If you feel like it's a shuttle launch, you may have taken on too much risk(for a web app).
It didn't. IronPython is open source and has been since early on.
One step closer to being able to simply put "import soul" at the top of my scripts.
Putting the extra silicon on the chip is effectively free.

If you need that silicon to actually work, then it's not free. Floor-sweeping is necessary because the more stuff you put on a chip, the more likely it is to have defects. That really is an extra cost. I don't think there is any way around that.
Agree with this. I cancelled a review because I simply can't give very good feedback on the type of site I was given. I waited a while, clicked 'Review Next' again and got the same site.

If the creator of FeedbackRoulette is reading, skip button pronto!
As an Android developer using Eclipse on a mac, this news majorly sucks. I hope the offering from Oracle will be better than Apple's JVM though.
How many acquisition channels has he investigated? Adwords is a pretty expensive one that only works for certain types of products. He tried that. What else? Hard to comment on his actual idea. Assuming he has competition, that means someone has figured out how to find customers in a scalable way.

Maybe his idea, with a 10 degree pivot, could be a viral/SEO sensation. I've no idea.

But certainly some ideas lend themselves better to cheap/free customer acquisition.

GREAT snippet from Patio11's blog (paraphrasing Seth Godin):

"Specifically, he says that the software business is undergoing radical changes because technical competence is no longer a scarce commodity: with open source tools, an increasing supply of trained programmers, and the explosion of cost-lowering innovations for creating and marketing software on the Internet, things which were previously the purview of a technical elite are now within what talented teenagers can cook up from their kitchen table."

A good web app is really only the "entrance fee" to the more challenging (and longer term) game of building a business.
why the price of the pdf/epub version is the same as the paperback?
I make electronic music. And I basically stop making a track and render when I literally cannot do anything more to it. I don't like bouncing thing down but by the end of my productions I literally have every single track frozen (so that I can still mess around with the MIDI/automation and such.)

I put a ton of stuff on my aux busses that I can't freeze so that's where the CPU goes but man, I would LOVE LOVE LOVE if I have something faster (4 GB MPB 15" 2.53 GHZ Core 2 Duo.)

And really why settle for what we have anyway -- don't get me wrong I'm very happy with the way things are now and humbly understand what it was like back in the day...but this is how we advance things by questioning and being unsatisfied with what we have now and making the future.

[For those curious: http://soundcloud.com/gau5/spotlight -- to listen and download here, any other music people on here send me some links! :)]
The ;) is a wink - was meant to indicate to take it lightheartedly (aka a joke).
What's next? Will Apple design their own GPUs instead of using third parties to design one for every product in the Apple Store just to control the costumer experience? What kind of business advantage Apple will have compared to NVidia that sells its technology? I think that Steve Jobs understands these questions very well, and that's partly what separate him from the Average Joe Tech-loving guy.