skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a myth that you need to post all the time to a blog in order for the blog to be useful. I post to mine maybe once a month, maybe twice. I have virtually no subscribers, but I get a lot of visitors, to the site from it.

Small Blogs are about personal brand, long tail keywords and SEO benefits. I sometimes talk about products, sometimes post big ideas, sometimes post about failure.

My guess as to your problems would be lack of customer contact the whole way through. Without knowing the problem domain, if you're concentrating on getting 'industry' PR like TechCrunch, you're probably concentrating on the wrong people. Assuming there is some type of vertical you're targeting (travel, photography, vehicles, whatever) thenyou should be making moves in that part.

My final thoughts on the matter : it would never even occur to me to try and get TechCrunch coverage or anything like that. I would just be trying how to work out how to find customers that pay. If you've spent a fortune on google ads, then you should at least know what works as a click through and what hooks to start working around. It's either bad conversions or a bad product. PR coverage won't fix either of those.
Actually what scares me is that I log in and find out that Pandora apparently has a public profile for me. WTF? I sign up for Pandora and somehow Rapleaf gets my email from them?
Will the Antivirus Industry Survive the Cloud?
Because geniuses tend to be particularly averse to labelling themselves as something that has connotations of extreme superiority.

It's the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect - idiots are less aware of their limitations and thus are more likely to be baselessly confident. Legitimate geniuses are the most aware of their limitations of anyone, and thus are less likely to trumpet the 'genius' title.
I don't think the one supplier thing is the base problem. I think Intel's handling of NVIDIA and Intel's failure to provide a decent replacement with OpenCL compatibility is the major cause of tension. The comments Intel's executives are making about the iPad don't help either.
Similar scenario for me, I'm also surprised.
Netflix Streaming = 20% of peak Internet traffic in the US
Weird but plausible...
Oh, the contradiction:
“politics in full sentences”
a) not a full sentence.
b) _definitely_ a soundbite.

OTOH, that could certainly be the article taking his words out of their (grammatically) proper context.
Anything that earns Adobe money is a good thing for Adobe.
Some of us have been there, and others are still there. Reading your post I imagine your start-ups were missing the key ingredient: Connections. It is likely that the well connected mediocre start-ups got press and funding because they knew people.

While there will always be the silver spoon fed types who really "know" people, you can go a long way networking and being social. Not social networking. Get off your machine and go to events, conferences, where-ever the action is and make friends with people who can help you, and presumably who you can help too.

I know it is really hard to shift focus from the product and socialize, especially as a single founder. You have grown so accustomed to the efficiency of the Internet that any offline PR or networking seems like a grand old waste of time. I am guilty of that too. But I realize that many entrepreneurs have a competitive advantage by virtue of their social connections. Whether it be in the form of an introduction to a venture capitalist at a party or lunch with a tech journalist.

So I suggest you don't throw in the towel just yet. You now have a product. And obviously a supportive wife after four years. Drop the code for awhile. Step back and reassess where you are focusing your energy to steer your company towards a brighter future. It is not an easy or short road to follow. But if you really want it, you will get there.
On the surface, this site doesn't look that much different from other news aggregators out there.

There is also no timestamps, so I don't get the immediacy of the content.

And at least for me, I don't care so much about getting all latest news. I care about interesting content as it happens. That's why I peruse the "new" section on HN than on Reddit.
Ask HN: Is a Doctorate Worth it?
I am a Jr in college at the moment, set up to double up my senior year with the 1st year of my graduate school. If I play my cards right I am looking at a doctorate 5 years from now.

First, why do I want a doctorate? At this point in my life I am nearing the end of My computer science bachelor's and I have learned enough to know I have so much left to learn. I love learning, I feel like I can learn so much in the process of getting this degree.

My goal in life right now is to be as educated as I can and have a stable income large enough to support a family. My worry is that the two might be mutually exclusive.

I see myself teaching while in graduate school, but I do not want to make it my long term profession. I want to work in software engineering and I have a big interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and right now university seems the place to work on such things right now.

This all boils down to, what is the job market for a 25 year old with a PhD in Computer Science and no work experience?
Interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the computer as a bicycle for the mind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

To put it in context, he starts off by talking about the efficiency of animal locomotion. In the animal kingdom, the condor is one of the most efficient. It uses the least amount of energy to travel a kilometer. Human walking is rather inefficient in comparison. However, with a bicycle, a man can blow away a condor.
"WozRocks", your bias is showing.
Can I ask why you prefer this? I think that prefacing the word engineer with the type of engineering is much more preferable than redefining the word to mean something to do with physical engineering.
How is intel in the way of "controlling an integrated experience for their customers"???

and apple never did #5. ever. well, maybe within their product line the new models are killers.

what they do is screw suppliers for price. just that.

They secure a great deal with companies that will go great lengths doing designs for them cheaply, in hopes that apple will be a recurring client. Hell, they even pulled that on IBM! They will probably pull that one on ARM too. Use the new arm design to exhaustion for a couple years, and then move back to whoever is willing to offer them a better price.
Good Lord - I want one of those potato peelers.

That guy's a better salesman dead than most people on Earth.
It sort of scares me because I keep reading their name as "Rape leaf" - but aside from that I'm not on Facebook so I'm not all that worried :)
Depending on your market, the freeium Drumlin Reader may be an option.

http://drumlinsecurity.co.uk/

Sister company:

http://www.pdf-publishing.com/

They have provided great customer service despite my limited use.
I've seen Kickstarter fund much stupider ideas (not saying that your idea is stupid), especially related to sending someone on a faraway trip, so you could always try it. They prefer tangible rewards, so photographs from the future trip would be cool but also think about creative rewards.

Or you could also use causes.com to get the word out.
Off-topic but if you are not living in US get PR in your country ... Is it really that important for 'success' to be living in the US? I don't think so.
Sorry for the delay, I just now saw that somebody had replied. Regarding links to the systems- the only one that was ever publicly accessible was for a Facebook app that I wrote some years back that was let researchers post links to their publications on their profiles, and also featured a recommendation system to find other users of the app that had "similar" publications. It's unfortunately fallen into a pretty sorry state of disrepair, as I haven't had any time to devote to maintenance in more than two years and Facebook's APIs have changed quite a bit since then. I described the underlying system a little bit in a conference paper: http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18999247

The other systems I've used the approach for have all been along either bibliometric/bibliographic lines, or have been relating to content-based image retrieval. It's a pretty robust approach, but can take a little bit of tuning to get just right- coming up with a good evaluation strategy is important to getting the most out of it, I've found.

As far as references that were useful:

Ilya Grigorik has a very accessible getting-your-feet-wet tutorial on his site: http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-i...

It might be a little dated w.r.t. specific libraries or APIs, but the basic technique is there. For a more comprehensive look at the SVD-IR approach, take a look at:

Berry et al. Using Linear Algebra for Intelligent Information Retrieval. SIAM Review (1995) vol. 37 (4) pp. 573-595

The SVD approach falls in the same family as Latent Semantic Analysis, which is a whole black art unto itself- I'd actually suggest going back to the early papers by Landauer, Dumais, etc. if you're really interested- those guys did a great job writing up what was at the time really novel stuff.

My contact info should be in my profile, drop me an email if you have any more questions (or to let me know what you end up doing!).
Are you sure that's not because Pandora is part of Facebook's instant personalization program (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/27/a-look-at-facebooks...)?
This excludes people from hacking and learning, eg children.

That's nostalgia talking, I think. I took apart a lot of things when I was a kid, too, and put most of them back together plus or minus a few screws--but I just learned everything there is to learn from taking apart this particular thing in five minutes over the internet, a thing vastly more hackable with vastly more to learn from that I would have gladly traded in my screwdriver for back then.
And this is better than widely adopted, open source Nagios how?
Up until recently, I lived a few blocks from Union Square (I've since moved to San Francisco). I used to see Joe out there all the time, especially when the farmer's market was there. He was always bright, chipper, theatrical...he had a sales pitch that was half song, half story, and made you want to step up even if you had not the slightest need for a potato peeler. No matter what, he always made you smile. His daughter has taken over the business now that's he's gone.

Thank you so much for reminding me of him.
Yes, I agree to an extent. However if Intel weren't the only viable supplier then the handling of Nvidia and OpenCL compatibility issues wouldn't be as problematic for Apple as they are as they'd have an option to go to another supplier.

They currently don't have that option in the x86 space.
I'm thinking one authoring tool which oututs both swf and/or svg/canvas like in this article which outputs a video tag or swf.

I think they are already doing something similar which converts flash apps to iOS apps.
Anonymouse
I would think that Fox would be quite smart to embrace GTV. Considering how much influence they have over politics in the US, this could give them a serious leg up over their competitors plus access to potentially younger audience.
Independent Games Festival 2011 entrants revealed
This, this, a thousand times this. After launch, Peldi was pounding the pavement talking to itty-bitty software bloggers (like me) and giving away hundreds of licenses (60+ a day early on, I've heard) to get the word out about how much time/effort you'd save doing mockups his way. His talk about it at the Business of Software was extraordinarily inspiring: his meteoric success in the last three years is the culmination of hard charging for the last 22.

FogCreek was a wee little consultancy which got the market shot out from under it which launched a product that nobody cared about which happened to produce an industrial biproduct which, ten years later, employs a few dozen developers in an office next door to the New York Stock Exchange.

My software -- which is not nearly on the scale of either of the above businesses -- launched to all of 116 visitors. Four and a half years of very, very part-time work later, it pays my salary. (It will sell the hundred thousandth dollar worth of software some time before Halloween.) I'm happy as a clam and getting the next adventure ready as we speak.
Hence why they should just make it available for everyone. What's the point of having a ton of new accounts to replace old accounts.
The SSD looks like Asus eee pc 1000's mini PCI-e one.

They're available in 7in (for asus and toshibas) and 5in (for dell mini) and now what? 10in?
Large scale engineering dept guy here, the problem there is that most companies like that won't accept a SaaS solution.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely brilliant. I think it's the first time I've ever given a thumbs up to a third level metasolution to a problem.

Pagerduty needs to push some use cases on their site. It might break the SaaS reluctance to steaks and strippers type corporate managers. "It can eat my rediclously complicated jasper report that I send straight to the trash bin on arrival so I don't have to read it and figure out what buttons on the phone I have to push with all the reluctance of a four year old kid with a plate of brussel sprouts and broccoli in front of them? Sign me up!"
The main value of going to the Moon and Mars is shallower gravity wells. The Earth is the largest terrestrial body in the Solar System - the most expensive place to live in terms of getting somewhere else, except for the gas giants where we can't live anyway.

Of course, in terms of life support it's by far the cheapest place around.
this is awesome. thanks for getting it started
You might be interested in Jeff Lindsay's Public Open Source Services idea :

http://blogrium.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/public-open-source-...

http://poss.gliderlab.com/
Cool, thank you, causes.com looks like it would really useful.
This was a good article, but only covered the more superficial best practices concerning formatting. The more important best practices include things like, you don't need to save an object to test its validity. I see this a lot:

it "returns no errors for a valid object" do
@object.save
@object.errors.size.should == 0
end

This doesn't scale well and will cause your specs to run painfully slow when your project gets bigger, as the spec will hit the database every time it's run. Instead, do this:

it "returns no errors for a valid object" do
@object.valid?
@object.errors.size.should == 0
end

Or even better:

it "returns no errors for a valid object" do
@object.should be_valid
end

Neither of these actually hit the database, so the entire thing is run in-memory. And this is just one example of functional RSpec best practices. Don't get me wrong, the formatting stuff definitely helps readability across the team, but if your specs are testing the wrong thing, or running slowly, the formatting doesn't matter.
By not providing a version of their most recent processor that provides compatibility with OpenCL at a cost, performance and thermal heat envelope that would enable Apple to produce a notebook as thin and small as the Macbook Air.

The new Macbook Air uses older, slower Core 2 Duo processors with Nvidia chipsets and graphics specifically because Intels most recent chips (with integrated graphics) do not meet these requirements.

This has an affect on the customer experiences (and therefore products) Apple would like to be able to provide.
Iridium, if nothing else. We've mined all the terrestrial iridium we can reach (there's all that magma, but it's going to be a helluva lot easier to get an asteroid than to get to the magma).

Oh, also: the disadvantage of mining the Earth's crust is all those people and other things living on it. The environment is not an issue with an asteroid - you'll be using up the whole thing anyway.

Longer-term, of course, you can set up a big mirror and smelt the whole asteroid in situ for much, much lower prices than a terrestrial smelting furnace - with the added advantage that you'll be able to breathe in Gary, Indiana. (If you still think getting your metal out of the crust of the planet you're living on is a good idea, I invite you to visit Gary. It's way better than it used to be, since China and Korea have volunteered to poison themselves in its place, but it's still bad enough.)
I think HCI -- even though it's a relatively new program in most schools -- is a response to a problem a decade late. For reasons good and bad, Academia can't keep up with Moore's Law.

First, you don't want to build a major for every new technology; the half life of most technologies is very short. Second, sifting the cruft from the stuff that will outlive the specific technology (think personal updates vs. friendster -> myspace -> facebook -> twitter) is difficult.

So you end up with a compromise: A school of thought that teaches (or tries to) timeless principles of interaction. This is an incredible advancement in education, but unfortunately means less to someone looking for employment right out of college.

The problem is that UI and UX are a mix of science -- something taught at universities and colleges -- and what is traditionally relegated to vocational schools. It's not an applied science; it's more like being a mechanic or someone who makes those really fancy import cars even fancier.

The solution, I think, is going to be a long way off; universities will have to hire people that teach more about the history of design, what people are accustomed to and expect, what interfaces work and why and how to design for people whose aesthetic changes once every couple years. Art schools will have to hire hardcore CS people to teach rock solid foundations of logic, how languages work, etc etc...
I have a degree in philosophy, so I'll use a story from that field to relate what I'm getting at.

The usual lead contender for the title of "first philosopher in western history" is Thales of Miletus. There are a bunch of probably-apocryphal stories about Thales; for example, it's said that he once was gazing so intently at the stars that he failed to look where he was walking, and fell into a well.

For this and other similar incidents, Thales was ridiculed by some of his fellow Milesians, who felt he never did anything productive. So, using his observations of the weather as a guide, he predicted an unusually good season and bought up all of the island's olive presses, making a fortune when the harvest came. Having proved his point, he went back to the things which actually interested him.
I'm just starting now. I'm glad you posted this. There's much survivor bias in the startup community.

It's not the sound but the silence that bothers me. Constantly wondering whether a lack of responses indicates that something is wrong (requiring a pivot), or that I haven't stayed the course long enough for my current strategy to pay off.
That's why I majored in business, instead of CS/IS/etc :)
Thank you jws for the sanity here. It's not "anti-geek", it's engineering and manufacturing (and, I may add, keeping 5-year old Timmy from opening his dad's new MacBook Air and frying the innards with the screwdriver they keep in the kitchen drawer).

Not to be too negative, but if you can't find a way to quickly get inside, maybe you shouldn't be there in the first place. A real tinkerer/geek knows how to make their own tools in no time.
And driving all your customers in design, media, print, video, music etc into the arms of Microsoft?

Or were they intending to pay to port Photoshop, Word, and a bunch of video and music editing apps to ARM?
That sentence doesn't seem to be supported by the citation as redacted and posted online, or I just can't find the relevant language. It looks to me like the list of sections that survive the termination of the agreement doesn't include section 3, which is the actual cross-licensing section. I'm not a lawyer, though, so please point me to the section that has that effect.

Even if the agreement does stipulate that AMD's patent license to Intel becomes perpetual upon termination due to change of control, I really doubt that it is legal in the US, since it basically means that a third party can't buy their way in to the market unless they bribe both AMD and Intel to weaken the duopoly. That would seem to amount to a cartel.
No, at least not immediately. You can always go back to school, try and take a stab at work experience. My first real job was at a startup between my junior and senior year of high school. I loved it, and now I'm asking myself if my Bachelors is worth it.

Unless your pursuing something that you absolutely need the PhD for, don't worry about it for now. You might enjoy yourself more in industry.
1) Don't be afraid to attach your name to your startup. If you are embarrassed about your startup -- why should other people be interested in it?

2) Do not sacrifice other promotion opportunities for Tech Crunch. It kills startups that keep it in a stealth mode.
Why not:

51 : 24.5 : 24.5

One person in control. Without the design, programming etc. there is no company. Those whose work will benefit the company down the road should be rewarded with equity that can be cashed down the road.
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App stores set to dominate future software sales?
I don't know that they had connections so much as they had a hook. The hook was about a couple of students taking on the massive, evil facebook with open source software.

If you want press, think about your story and make it a good one.
Amazon headcount grows
The Mystery of Economic Growth
col-de-sac should have been cul-de-sac

you see, I just made a HN-style comment. Draw your own conclusions.
Google and others can already target things through private philanthropy and private investment.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
I would say it's the same thing that makes anyone good at anything: The ability to take the body of knowledge associated with the field and not only synthesize it, but to riff on it and make new -- or at least -- compelling things.

That might be too broad. Specific to UX, I would say that many companies only consider what a user experiences and the stories they accumulate when their brand is mature -- usually much too late to pivot.

A good UX designer in an early stage venture is usually also an interface designer, to some degree, and taps into the following:

1) Deep understanding of the market and demographic

2) A solid grasp on what people expect

3) A great appreciation for the things that compel people to action

UX designers and engineers make things that cause people to accomplish goals in a way that is unobtrusive (except when it needs to be) unoffensive (except when it needs to be) and not confusing (ever). That's my take, at least.
Same with me. I spent over 1k with a friend on turk, even reported blatant security issues to one of the PM's yet I was unable to sign up and had to get my American friend to do it.

I see no reason why they can't open it up to Canada. Terribly frustrating. Take my money!