skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Select Q&A:

Q: What do you think about the 7" tablets?

A: one naturally thinks a 7" screen offers 70% of the benefits of a 10" screen, but this is far from the truth a 7% screen is only 45% as large as a 10% screen because the measurements are diagonal. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion. One could increase the resolution to make up for the difference, it's meaningless unless the thing also includes sandpaper so users can sand down their fingers.

Another comment by Steve:

"It's being grabbed out of our hands. I talk to people every day in every kind of business who are using iPads boards of directors, nurses, doctors, etc. The more time that passes, the more i am convinced that we have a tiger by the tail here."

Q: Could this be your second biggest business behind iPhone?

A: I try not to predict, I just report.

Q: Any updates on you stance on Flash?

A: Ah, Flash memory? We love Flash memory! [I wonder if the reporter who asked the question understood the joke. ;)]

Q: So if the market starts to move toward lower-functionality smartphones and dramatically lower price points, and you feel you can't make an appropriate product on those price points, you'll throw in the towel?

A: You're looking at it wrong. you're looking at it as a hardware person who doesn't know much about software. who doesn't think about an integrated product and thinks the software will just take care of itself. You assume the software will just somehow come alive on this product you're dreaming up, but it won't. Because these app developers are taking advantage of products that came before it, with larger screens and more capabilities. it throws you back to the beginning of the chicken and egg problem again most developers won't follow you.

Pure gold from Steve. Competitors better listen to this call and learn from the man himself.

-------------------------------------------------

You really gotta hand it to Steve. Absolute no corporate speak (aka bullshit) when he talks. Compare this with recent email from Steve Ballmer,

"I sent a message to the world that we’re ‘all in’ when it comes to the cloud. In that speech I noted that Ray’s Internet Services Disruption memo nearly five years ago, and his work since, stimulated thinking across the company and helped catalyze our drive to the cloud." (from http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/oct10/10-18ste... )

Cloud? Why do executive use the word 'cloud' when the word 'Internet' is so much better. 'Stimulated thinking'... 'catalyze our drive', looks like someone has been reading too much of Dilbert.

The difference between Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer is staggering.
Buffet describes the 'businesses with franchise value' as a company with a large moat - or brand value. That's why he owns large stakes in companies like Coca-Cola. They're not unique, but consumers are willing to pay a premium even though there are competitors that offer a similar product.
I dont think you need to be young. But I think it helps. I consider Reid Hoffman a visionary who views LinkedIn as his way to make a big impact on the world. He started LinkedIn in his late 30s.

However, in general, true visionaries tend to start companies young (Reid had a startup that did so-so out of school in the 90s)
New release of the Cobra Programming Language
Perhaps I'm just naive/ignorant, but I can't tell if this is a positive progression for Ozzie? Ballmer mentions Ozzie's retirement, is Ozzie just transitioning out of the workforce? Or did MS decide Ozzie's leadership is no longer positive for the company? The article does say "His leadership not particularly well-respected among employees in the trenches"
Had to sign up to say thanks.
Its, comforting, reassuring and inspiring that people believe enough to fight without having to be incentivized first.

The links to POST and the Coastal commissioner were great too.
"CloudFlare review and how I reduced my bounce rate 94%"
(not my site btw)
Apple wasn't always like that. Took a long time for that maturity and took a lot of centralizing power before everything came into being.
Please review my startup PlusRated.com
Things I Don't Have to Think About Today
Aw, cute!

Q: Any updates on you stance on Flash?

A: Ah, Flash memory? We love Flash memory!
Microsoft should just invest 10% of its revenue in a YC-like fund that produces independently operated but partly MS-owned companies that join their ecosystem. The brain drain over there is ridiculous - how are they ever going to produce anything competitive now?
Spread Hate, Not Death
If we are interested in a _sequence_ of pseudorandom numbers, then we should be talking about the _joint_ entropy of the sequence. But information theory is plenty capable of describing "how random" a sequence is.

The generator you are talking about is far from producing a uniform distribution (which would have maximum entropy) jointly over the n-dimensional hypercube that would represent a sequence of n draws from your generator, so it has less entropy and is thus "less random" than the distribution you'd get from n independent draws from a perfect rand().
There is an old Gillmor Gang podcast that has an interesting conversation as to what the panel thinks Ray Ozzie would bring to Microsoft. It looks like it all turned to ashes though.
Oh, good point, I still need to write that. I'll put it on the list!
Well,

Leak or not, what the Journal is complaining about isn't happening within Facebook at all but rather between Facebook applications and online tracking companies. And that thing is that the applications are transmitting data without "anonymizing" it properly. And as I recall, the problem of "really" "anonymizing" data is not easy at all.

Another way to put it is "anonymizing" is a fairy tale, users shouldn't really don't expect it really happen and should instead protect their own privacy - at least to the extent of not revealing personally identifying when it's not necessary (though I guess there is a human urge to publish one's address and when one is away from home).
We (280 North) submitted the app on the last day after deciding to apply a week or two before, I believe. Then we worked on our demo (the first prototype of what became 280 Slides) up to the day of the interview.
Memorizing facts is always a waste of time.

Not true. Knowing the APIs you most commonly use instead of having to keep flicking back to the reference makes you much more efficient.

Your professor DID memorize them, he was just smart about how he did it. Instead of memorizing upfront, he did it in bitesize pieces, and was productive along the way. That's what a good programmer does too.
Why is the time macro brittle?
An informal experiment to determine what Facebook puts in your News Feed
I don't think we'd all fit!
Why put your email address in the .sig for your email? Don't they already have that, given that they got mail from you?

Or is it meant for the case when someone forwards it 8 times and your email is snipped or abbreviated out?

I usually sign with one or two lines, maximum. Sometimes I don't sign it at all. And it's not a .sig, I type it in every time and I snip out all the rubbish from anything I'm replying to or forwarding (which often includes overly long sigs).
> If I'll ever meet Aliens I'm sure lists, sets, hash tables, and trees are in their CS books as well. But I bet their mainstream DB model may really be different than our relational one.

I actually doubt that. The relational database model (relational algebra/calculus, tuples, etc.) is a mathematical model. I would expect aliens to have essentially the same model, actually, just like I'd expect them to have the same set theory we do. They're equally as basic.
Nobody invited me! We're open to sponsorships. Send me details: tom@github.com.
It took Steve Jobs returning and demanding extraordinary focus. It started with Apple's now famous matrix of consumer and pro for mobile and desktop. New products were added only after judicious consideration of both the user experience and business cases. As new parts of the business emerged, they were tightly integrated with existing products (iTunes + iPod, OS X + iPhone, etc)

edit: It's also worth mentioning that he cleared out all the dead wood, in terms of leadership, fired the board and re-organized Apple around people whose talent and passion positioned the company well for the future. Most famously, Jonathan Ive was on his way out. Steve discovered him languishing in Apple's Industrial Design labs, creatively wilting, dying to be set loose on something daring. Jobs let him have his way, he built the first iMac and now he's a VP.

The most interesting thing about Apple, from my perspective and theirs, is how often they say no to new opportunities. Focus is the sword they used to cut through bullshit before the turnaround and the sword they use now to plow through a field of opportunities, executing on only the best of the best.

Apple of the early-to-mid-90's was just like any other company. Management fiefdoms, conflicting product strategies, and a sea of impossible to understand variations on the same products. Nothing got done. It survived on the fumes that came from the power of the original Mac, and the DNA that was baked into the company: computers should be made to empower everyone.
Apple Q4 results -- live
Having a short name for commonly used structures aids readability. e.g.

(ref {})
(atom [])

Instead of:

(software-transactional-memory-reference {})
(atomically-mutable-reference [])
China wants its citizens to apply for lots of patents
Our lead sysadmin is in Australia and we have a support person in Greece. So yes, we're open to it!
Build a strong Twitter following, without “experts”
There are a million articles online that explain how “to do the twitter”, no lack of social media experts and Guru’s who promise to use Twitter to get you a bajillion hits for your .biz. But, what if you are too cash strapped to hire a guru and your core team can’t be as consistent as a solid social media approach requires?
Have you checked the Java?
I remember when I first learned about the central limit theorem, having this sudden realization:

So that's where all those normal distributions come from!

In the statistics classes that most people take, they just dump this weird equation on you, and say that the normal distribution often arises in the real world. But they don't explain why, or in what kinds of situations you're likely to see things being normally distributed. It's like suddenly finding a walrus in your living room: everybody assures you that it's supposed to be there, but where the hell did it come from?

The central limit theorem de-mystifies the normal distribution and makes the world easier to understand.
Yeah, I mean one of the reasons he purchased Coca-Cola was actually because of what Roberto Goizueta did when he came into the company. At the time Coke was #2 in supermarkets behind Pepsi.

Goizueta did a lot of great things. He separated out the bottler business and got them to focus on returns on invested capital with every investment they made. He made a ton of money for shareholders. Buffett has remarked that he held KO stock too long but now I believe he keeps it mainly to collect the dividends, his cost basis is low.
Are you recruiting at the moment? I couldn't see anything on github jobs...
Vyrle.com.

Email me if interested.
Thanks! In the settings you can specify pushing the page down or covering the top 33 pixels.
You recommended six good books on founding companies. Would you recommend any technical books or works of fiction?
I live in Canada and I've ordered from amazon.com for many years, 2001 is the earliest I could find.

Having said that, I only have ordered books from amazon.com, perhaps you are referring to ordering something else beause amazon.com has shipped to Canada for atleast the past 9 years.
I don't agree: the relational model is a pretty specific and ad-hoc idea that can be mathematically modeled using trivial math structures. For sure they could understand it in a second and recognize this as part of their math, but will their mainstream database systems be modeled after the same model? I doubt it.

Instead I would expect to see lists, hashes, trees, and most of our sorting algorithms in their code as well.
you're missing the point. This is not how we start our pitch. The use case here is when it's time to offer your bio in a pitch meeting. People don't have time to tease stuff out of you––it's one shot and that's it.
Your post only focuses on risk of death, and from that standpoint I agree 100% that it is rational to spend money elsewhere.

However, people are fundamentally irrational and emotional. It would be irrational to stop flying due to 9/11. The risk of an attack on your flight is negligible. Yet, airlines lost a lot of passengers due to 9/11! If a second successful attack occurs, many people would lose their confidence not only in airlines, but in their government to protect them.

The government is really in a lose-lose situation here. Do nothing, and they are perceived as weak on terrorism. Do what people say they want the gov't to do - protect the airlines - and suddenly more invasive searches are required. Either way, they will have a very vocal group against them.
100% agreed. Lots of newbies think it's hard, but the best investors usually try to meet as many people as possible.

We haven't raised a series A yet, but the feedback is quite useful. We also get free advice and introductions to people that can help us prove our thesis.
Thanks for your comments. We are in private beta, so we are not trying to elicit too many signups at this point with an engaging homepage. We'll be adding that shortly.
Most interesting of the press release "We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year."
This makes sense, the CSA role was, in theory, a major check on Ballmer's power. Though in practice Ozzie didn't execute in the role very well.
Thanks, we wanted to minimize the sign up fields, but will be adding this once the private beta is over.
Ask HN: Review My Startup (Zazu)
Hey y'all,

The end goal of Zazu is to build Jarvis from Iron Man. We have delusions of grandeur, but we will not rest until it's done. The current iteration of the product is an Android application that replaces the built-in alarm clock with an alarm clock that we believe to be more intelligent: it pulls whatever information you find important -- like your RSS feeds, your calendar, your email, your twitter stream -- and reads that information to you using a Text-To-Speech engine. We're working on a deal with Nuance to get a better sounding TTS engine working, but for now we're relying on the phone's internals.

Within the next week we'll be launching a microstore within the application, so our users will be able to enable certain features (like the calendar integration). We're also working with a few big brands to create a new form of interactive marketing/advertising, but that's not going to be public for a while. We promise that we're only going to be providing relevant information to our users... so y'all won't be blasted with Colon Blow advertisements 1000x a day.

We just launched the first version of the application, and I really appreciate y'all's advice so I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. Please be harsh.

Thanks,
Marc

http://getzazu.com

Edit: We're going to be leaving the morning space fairly soon, meaning we'll integrate with your calendar to let you know what you need to regarding where you are and where you need to be (both physically and metaphorically). We're trying to transform the moment of alert into a moment of informed decision making. We'll be looking at emails and other areas that involve alerting and decision making, too.
Original paper (linked in article): http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v105/i16/e161301
Doesn't an app have keep something to identify it's users if it is going have users on Facebook?
We worship the God of security
Copying is not theft.

I have a rather radical proposal, which might even not be feasible (about as feasible as trying to treat virtual non-scarce things as real and scarce):

Authors should get paid for writing, not for having written something.
You want this:

"Zazu wakes you up verbally to your calendar, weather, and news!"

To be above the fold. Right now it's going under it.
clicky: http://getzazu.com

Sorry, but you will need to get another name.

I liked the implicit pun in this bit "but we will not rest until it's done" for an alarm clock related start-up that's really funny. It basically says you will not be eating your own dogfood :)

Promoting 'zazu' as a brand when you do not have 'zazu.com' is working for someone else without getting paid for it.

You yourself refer to it all over the site as 'zazu', not 'getzazu'.
Android is doing well, but we know that Apple users buy apps, not so much with android users.
I've suggested this to some relevant people inside the company on a few occasions. The likelihood of this is 'a snowball's chance in hell.'
> Peter, you imply that Python is better for, or more like, pseudo-code, but why is it better?

Well from what he writes, he seems to say Python looks much closer to their actual pseudo-code, and it's therefore easier for students to translate pseudocode to Python than to Lisp.

> In my opinion, it is better for most people because they were taught syntaxes

Such as english. One of the original goals of Python (inherited from ABC[0]) was to be a good teaching language. I'd expect that when Peter talks about his students, he's mostly talking about students with low-to-no knowledge in programming. Those who are already knowledgeable probably don't have a hard time adapting.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)
you startuppers drink a lot :-P Joking, wish I was in SF ;-)
Feature request: Ability to browse list of existing tags would be great apart from the auto-complete feature.
I agree, however, we'd have to compromise a bit of security allowing people to submit their u/p on an regular http page. Any suggestions on how to avoid this?
one of the Q&A yielded the AppleTV number at being over a 250,000
Update: finally a good answer. If you want to do the people at stackoverflow a favor, upvote this answer:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3956478/understanding-ran...
It's a bad thing because it requires a business model where bucking the Federal government is a key requirement.
Actually, you already have something better than RAII in unwind-protect. Just create whatever macro you need on top of that (I'm pretty sure with-open-file is just a macro on top of unwind-protect, Siebel seems to agree in his chapter on files) and you're done.
Thanks for the engaging discussion _delirium, its one of the best (well-mannered) I have had on HN in some time.

As far as full reserve banking goes, I think that it is all too easy to forget what bank products were actually intended for and how they are used now. For instance, a bank could in theory offer full-reserve banking without charging a fee to its customers by utilizing age-old banking products: The fixed term Certificate of Deposit (CD) and the Savings account.

If you wanted to invest your savings into something that would draw interest, you would use a CD, and the bank would be able to lend out that money for the designated length of maturity of the CD. Yea, mortgage interest rates wouldn't be 4%, but the proliferation of Buy now, pay later attitudes would decrease also.

If you didn't want to tie up your money for a fixed length of time, you could put it into a savings account. No way, other than by transferring to another account could you get money from this account. The bank could use this for shorter-term liquid investments (treasuries, whatever).

Checking accounts and accounts with access to credit / debit cards would require a fee and the bank could not lend out those funds, as they are held in full-reserve.

Ta-da, full reserve banking (not sure how Rothbard would have felt about the savings account thing). Way off-topic from the OP, but a great debate non-the-less.
Well, there's no reason you can't have the same kind of event in other cities. In fact this model of batching a bunch of startups/projects together would be perfect for areas with a lower density of startups...
Credit cards have stiff fees? Seems to me it's pennies per transaction.

I really don't believe it's a ruse, or even that the fees are that large. They're large for small businesses - and that's far from the only place where small businesses have trouble competing with the economies of scale larger players can use.
Entrepreneurship Quotes
"the CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure."

Seems like a position that would still prove useful in a company with so many interconnected moving parts.
Google's site search got me this, which does contain the whole article, but I'm not sure how much longer the key will be valid: http://chronicle.com/article/Academic-Credit-Colleges/124973...
> I'm pretty sure a macro would go a long way towards implementing RAII in a Lisp.

Well yeah, just build the macro you need on top of unwind-protect, that's pretty standard common lisp fare.
Android was slower to rolling out frictionless payment onto their store, only recently did it roll out in a lot more countries http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-countrie...
So I would not necessarily use the past history of paid apps on Androids market as direct comparison to Apples app store.
However the self selecting fact that more Apple users are likely to have a disposable income is very appealing when choosing to just target an iOS device if you do not need reach, I think for non hit applications, that are more of a business though reach is very important as cracking the top 100 in Apples app store is rather difficult and you have very few other options if you do not succeed in this endeavor
GitHub makes a downloadable tarball of each repository available for download, which is nice for those who don't have (or don't want to install) Git.

I understand that the Postgres team isn't using GitHub, but it makes me think -- could they use an oldschool tarball to update their BuildFarm nodes who cannot run Git? Or better yet, rsync, so only changes are transferred?

Anyway, this is a decent writeup. I've wondered before about large project migration to Git.
Great pains taken to preserve the full commit history... does anyone know how valuable it really is? (Not to imply that it is worthless, but how much effort went into preserving it vs how much effort would be spent if it were not available). More of a general VCS conversion question, I suppose.
Yes, I am sure, or I wouldn't have mentioned it. Not everyone uses Thunderbird. (I use Mail.app for OS X and roundcube webmail. Both display them as attachments.)

tbh, I don't pay attention to priority ever, since the only people who use it when they email me are spammers.

So the moral is: not everyone uses the same client as you, and not everyone uses email the same way as you. To piss off the least number of people, go for a lowest common denominator thing. This is also why I always use plain text email.
In Ben Franklin's autobiography, his remarks on self promotion are (paraphrasing):

If something really matters to you, you should be able to put your ego aside. When good things happen, you should be grateful, humble, and modest. Don't seek out or ask for promotions or raises; just do great stuff and you'll get recognized.

Sound advice.
It would be really, really great -- amazing, even -- if there were support systems for people like Michael.

It is (pardon my language here) hella fucking hard to change the world. Nobody else around you is likely to be interested in what you're doing, unless they can directly benefit somehow without any effort. You can't get assistance with your goal unless you have the money to buy it. How many people start out to improve the world, even in some relatively small way, pour a year, two years, or much more of their life into it, struggling the whole way, and eventually give up?