skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to think in terms of what the community's return-on-investment is with respect to my upbringing and support. Society has collectively invested a lot of money in me without demanding a direct return: some very good state scholarships and a fellowship to go to graduate school are only the most obvious and quantifiable contributions. There are many more indirect examples, government services and institutions which have helped me in a more diffuse way. These are shared and less quantifiable, but they still helped in an observable fashion.

I appreciate the help, and I will feel accomplished in some way when I feel that I've contributed an equal or greater amount back to the community. Charitable contributions, volunteer work, growing a company, generating employment and wealth, and paying taxes willingly are all activities which contribute to society. That's not to say I won't help myself along the way--I'm human--but I think there are plenty of ways to simultaneously support yourself and support others, and I think it's worth keeping that aim in mind. "Providing a positive ROI" is obviously a long-term project, but I think it's as good a goal as any.

As for addressing unfairness, it's a hard problem and I don't claim to have good answers. All I can think to do is be compassionate and look for chances to help others. I can't hope to help those starving billions, but I can help the guy down the street who needs someone to watch his kids while he goes to a job interview; there's nothing wrong with helping locally.

TL;DR: Think about how others have helped you, pay it forward and try to leave the world a better place. The rest is details.
CNN Money: Microsoft is a Dying Consumer Brand
In a time when infographics are all the rage, you'd think the information here would be presented in a more absorbable format.
It sounds like you think your users are stupid. They gave you specific feedback and WTF comes across as you being annoyed, instead of glad to get the feedback.

Stackoverflow is targeted at geeks- if you're cloning their design, you need to clone the target audience as well. .net development != women's issues.
This could be very useful for relatively low-cost prosthetics. All you need from the user is an arm to mount it on and the ability to control vacuum on and off.
True. Although, to play devil's advocate, just because you can do projects in other ways doesn't mean that you couldn't do them better in Agile. (Don't get me wrong, I think that Unix projects have a better track record than Agile projects)

Personally I think the biggest benefit of "Agile" is that it's established enough to sell it to customers if you're a consultant. As no two Agile processes/teams look the same (hence the name), you've got a lot of freedom. If you came to a big company without that name brand recognition of "XP", you'd probably be forced to do it with ITIL, the Unified Process or other Godzilla-like monstrosities.

Having been there, I feel their pain.
I get the analogy, but after quite a lot of time making websites, I'm still not sure what I should do besides what is mentioned in this doc to improve organic listings. Perhaps you can take a small area of that ocean and give me an example?
Look at Apple. So many competitors have sprung up based on features that are missing in the existing products. Apple still win the consumers.

It's more than adding features to a product.

I suspect Facebook is easy to use because people can see the benefit in learning how to use it. They can see how tagging an image is a cool thing, so they'll make the effort. If they can't immediately see how upvoting a question is a cool thing, they won't bother to understand how to use it.
The Illusion of Patience
Alternatively, businesses can go the boring route and actually make enough profit to justify a $3 billion price.
Very interesting approach to analog sticks. Looks like two circular touch pads with a button in the middle. One of the problems with touch screens is that you can't feel the center of virtual control sticks.
I'd like to hear from Vanilla Ice.

Stop, collaborate and listen

Collaboration and listening are two of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship.

Ice is back with a brand new invention

Innovation is the key to launching a successful company

Something that's got a hold of me tightly, flails like a harpoon daily and nightly

... on second thoughts, forget Vanilla Ice. Let's hear from Morris Minor & The Majors.
I've tried to use it with http://www.squaremeal.co.uk/restaurants/london/view/80677/Ha..., but it didn't pick up rel=shortlink.

UI is a bit weird — there is no submit button, no progress for the magic ajaxy thing.

Page that explains what it's about starts with mix of obviousness and downsides.
Game Design: Simple Steps on How to Make a  basic Game
When the baby is born someone does an execve on you. You inherit your original PID but everything else is replaced. There is no way back to the original process, but you keep open file descriptors to your close friends. Friends without children were likely marked close on exec.
There was something really similar to this (if not the same thing) that came out of University of Chicago recently.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/10/25/a-robot...

Physicists are calling these materials 'granular media' - and there is a ton of research going into that field right now.
John Wiswell on [Programmer] Burnout
Depends on what the paid option offers, of course. In the case of Lispworks it has (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread) a "tree shaker" that makes building stand alone apps a lot nicer than SBCL. It also has a superior debugger. I'm sure there is more but these are what stood out to me when I evaluated it (I currently use SBCL almost exclusively, but I can see why someone would pay for Lispworks).
Pretty good list so I'll add:

The "sponsored tweets" need a sales team. Someone also needs to run metrics, analyze results, report back to the customers, etc.

When you start taking/spending a lot of money you suddenly need finance folks. Someone has to budgeting, analysis, cash flow projections, payroll, benefits, external reporting, etc. A company their size will need several accounting positions as well as a few tax people.
I had thought of doing this also, and a few people to whom I showed the system to mentioned a Firefox add-on that substitutes art for advertisements.

It bothers me that personal computers replicate the internal chatter of the mind. The web itself seems designed to prey on human weakness, to encourage wilfing through the Internet and short-term gratification, and to discourage learning and the development of self-control.
can you contact me on vlad@videolla.com with details? i might be able to help.
54% of Web Video is now available in HTML5
I was going to ask the same question. Not once have a thought "my daughter is eating too much."

Politics, nutrition and parenting are all conversations I attempt to avoid, and this combines 2 of 3 topics. :/
You'll have a ~0% response rate if you copy & paste the same generic letter to the bloggers.

you have to personalize the note. if i was a blogger, i would stop at "hello" --> you don't even know my name?

also, keep in mind that these are bloggers. they're not your grey-haired journalists. you don't need to sound robotic.

my best advice would be to write a conversational note.
Last time I used Facebook there wasn't a system of badges, karma, minimum karma levels required to access core features, and a community wiki for my wall posts. These are all highly nonobvious.

Embedded assumption #475 in Stack Overflow users: it is obvious that replying to a question is not Answering it.
Plus, you always have some coffee around when you suddenly crave caffeine ;-)
You need to accurately identify a "problem that needs to be solved" in a niche that is not crowded.

Nowadays, things need to look great. Some people partner or pay for programmers, you need to partner with or pay for good design. Don't skimp.

Every single chance you have in your product, convey the problem that you are solving, how you are solving it and importantly who you are solving it for. Look at 37Signals as an example. I think they spend 25% - 50% of their time thinking about the message they are conveying throughout their product - not just through their marketing sites.

Never (never, never, never) expect people to use your product or service. Get the word out fast, hard and often. Unless you get lucky (never count on luck), this will cost you money in one form or another. The amount of money you'll need to spend directly relates to the competition in the niche you are operating in.

Listen and pivot. When your customers / users tell you something, listen to them. Don't assume that you're the smartest guy in the world and "know what they want before they want it". Listen and even if you don't believe in it, try moving in the direction that your customers / users want. If income increases, pivot your business or entire model in that direction.

Never (ever) get married to an idea and remember that business is about making money.

Don't judge yourself against others. Every business, every person, every circumstance is unique. Constantly review your product or service but evaluate it against your own metrics. Don't ignore what others are doing, but if your product is successful earning $25k per year, it is successful.

Keep your chin up and do not give up. It sounds cliche, but the worst mistake someone can make is to give in to the part of themselves that drags them down. If something isn't working, change it and be happy, excited and motivated to make yet another change in a long line of changes.
What does your product actually do? Does it solve a critical problem? Have you done any customer development?
I suspect it's a reference to the structure of the community, reputation system and permissions that result. The way those three interplay is pretty complex - how you incentivise certain behaviour, unintended side effects and so on. Some of the more interesting bits on the SO blog are Jeff's comments on what they've done, where it's gone wrong and how they've tried to correct it.

On that sense Facebook is very simple as what you can do is almost entirely driven by whether you're friends with someone or not, and the mechanism for becoming friends (or stopping being friends) is straight forward.

Obviously that's a somewhat simplistic view though and ignores little factors such as doing even the simple things with 300 million users is massively complex.
That position was in Facebook and not Twitter. Read about it in nytimes i guess.
What does that mean? Deceased employees? Which kind of daily task does this guy have?
http://everything2.com/user/ataraxia/writeups/Professional+m...
• New York, NY: 41% higher
• San Francisco: 35% higher

as skype/telecommuting evolve there's an incredible arbitrage opportunity here without even going offshore.
Yes. AOL did a study, blogged about here:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_cli...

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.
LimeWire Told to Shut
This is our first child and we had it all planned out. Well, either the plan was ill-conceived or just poorly executed because nothing has gone as planned.

Example: We adopted across racial lines. We are now a multi-racial family and I thought, why not have a buddy of mine set up a website where I can document my experiences as a father of a child that does not look like me. Thought it might be useful information for some people as well as a place for the birth mother to look in on from time to time if she chose to. The site is up, but there is nothing posted because I have not had time to learn to use it.

....just one of many.
From a content standpoint, StackOverflow requires the participation of domain experts to be successful. Facebook just requires people to sign up and log in.
Does it raise questions that I left Company 2 after only 3 months, and that I went back to Company 1?

It does and you will be questioned on this.

The fact is, if you have a reasonable, logical, verifiable reason for returning then it won't be an issue.

If the company 2 role was a contract position I would highlight that on the CV.
All that says is that the phone is a prototype. "A large amount of dirt under the screen" and an incomplete UI does not mean they are fake.
Gemalto sues Google,Motorola,HTC and samsung over android
Why are you dismayed? What is it in particular that you see wrong with such condemnation? I share it and in fact thought the response on reddit was relatively tame.

I think it's very reasonable to consider domain squatters to be parasites who add nothing of value, and only hinder entrepreneurs and others who want to buy domain names. They're scum; yes, what they are doing is legal, but so are many other kinds of scummy enterprises. Of many analogies presented in the reddit discussion, I find the one with the ticket scalpers the best. Not the kind who buy unwanted tickets from people who couldn't go at the last minute and resell them - those are creating value, they're helping people find tickets who otherwise wouldn't be able to. But those who pre-buy blocks of tickets from the venue to later resell them - they create nothing of value. If they didn't exist, prospective clients would be able, and in fact would prefer, to buy their tickets directly from the venue. Same thing with domains.

Some ways of making money are despicable, even if legal. Nothing wrong with moral condemnation where it's appropriate.
two thoughts to your wording choice:
"We are currently in Beta and need users to test our system."
need users sounds like you're begging. you should exude confidence.

"Beta users would use the site for free without fees and would get other incentives when we launch."
that's a waste of a sentence. i'd say make the note shorter or talk about what makes you unique.

sorry about being harsh. hope it helps!
s/a few/20/
Sony VGN-FZ62B battery
<h2><a href="http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgn-fz62b-battery.htm">Sony VGN-FZ62B battery</a></h2>
Type: Li-ion

Capacity: 5200 mAh, 8800 mAh, 10400 mAh,

Volt: 11.1 V

Size: 209.90 x 47.50 x 20.40 mm

Color: Silver

$ 90.33

<a href="http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgn-fz62b-battery.htm">http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgn-fz62b-battery.htm</a>
How many Air users are going to want to hook up this monstrosity to the "gorgeous industrial design" that they currently have?
I use StackOverflow. I've posted questions and I've read lots of responses.

I have no idea what the badges, karma, etc. are. For me, it works quite well. In fact, the only mildly confusing thing for me was that I had to use some OpenID thing to login the first time.

Think about that. Their value prop to someone coming in through Google or posting a question is simple and the barrier to entry is very low.
To give you feedback about isshort.com, I took me a long read in the blog to even start to understand what it does.

For what I got, you use the shortener of each website (if available) to generate a short URL. Like use youtu.be for YouTube URLs and default to j.mp otherwise.

You claim on the front page to be a different kind of URL shortener and with my first try it seemed to be just as any other URL shortener. You give a long link, it makes a short link.

You should maybe put a concise text on the homepage about what it does and why it's better. Not in a super long blog post that starts by saying when people use URL shorteners
you can disable CSS too
Similarly, I'm reading 50th Law of Power (http://www.amazon.com/50th-Law-50-Cent/dp/006177460X) How to be fearless, drawing some parallels w/ 50 cent life. Excellent book!
Could someone explain to me why he numbers his list of four points starting from 0?
Do remember that the average age of a gamer is now well into the 30-40 bracket. PSP has sold well to teens, but there's no cut and dried reason why a PSP phone wouldn't sell well to an older demographic.

Targeting someone like Virgin Mobile out the gate would certainly shake things up.

I also can't help but feel that the PSPGo might have been a trial platform for this... if this phone has the guts of a PSPGo and can download PSP games to it, I think it will sell brilliantly. If it has to have new games written for it, it's going to get lost in the 3DS/PSP2 shuffle and just end up with another version of Angry Birds and a couple of iPhone games.
Offer HN: Help with ActionScript 3
Many or most developers I've spoken to have little or no familiarity with ActionScript.

I've spent two years working primarily in ActionScript 3. So if you have any questions about the language, about Flex, about Flash Player/AIR, about best practices, and so forth, I'll try to answer them.
Doubt Arrington is sharing...Hopefully someone from HN got a copy....?
There are some steps slowly being taken to deal with that, in Washington DC, apparently the tax on vacant property is %5 rather than 0.85% [1] (although I expect that's more to keep their revenue the same since vacant lots aren't worth much).

The equivalent first step for domains though is for Google to stop treating made-for-adsense domains as real sites, so the $10/year/domain can't be offset by tricking advertisers and web neophytes.

[1] http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2008/08/more_vacants/
for the time it took them to take out limewire, 100 brand new p2p networks emerged.

can the labels start looking to the future yet?
Fix Your Google Docs Sharing Permissions So You Don’t End Up On TechCrunch
Either the publicity got all the participating angels to back off any deals they made, or it wasn't really a thing in the first place.

Regardless, I don't see what AOL would have to do with it
You seem to have a pretty good idea of your own shortcomings — which is a good sign imo, nobody can or should be good at everything — so why not play to your strengths and partner with someone else for the design work?

I've been doing small self-generated projects with 1-2 partners for years. One of them is gaining traction and about to take off in a big way (I hope). I never would have got to this stage on my own.

Note that having a partner isn't the same as selling out, or developing a project with an overmanaged 12-person team, etc. It's pretty much the same as going it alone but with a friend to bounce shit off of.
I'll try to answer your questions directly and avoid the temptation of giving advice or writing about how awesome fatherhood is. For context, I have a 4 month old baby girl, a full time corporate software job and I just started my "project" two months ago...

>So does having a baby give you inspiration and ability to do more?

More inspiration and more motivation but almost no time to implement. The odd thing is that I'm actually getting more stuff done now than before, but I have to admit the bar wasn't set very high. I always knew I was wasting time before but it felt like I had plenty to waste.

Since her birth, free time is measured in minutes so I have to make them all count. On the other hand I've had opportunities for thinking while my hands have been full, so when even the shortest window opens I know exactly what needs doing first.

I keep taking inspiration from patio11 (see http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin... ). If I get 5 hours done it's been a good week, but it's a lot more productive than I would have thought.

>Or you are so exhausted that everything else seems uninteresting?

Exhausted yes, but in a different way to how I imagined it - it's not totally debilitating. I'm still very interested in too many things (some new).

>How does having a baby change your life?

I realised how important family is and how much they depend on me. I spend less time at work and stress less about it. I now try to be fresh and cheerful when I get home even if I don't feel it.

I care even less what other people think. I spend less time lurking in forums. I've finally got off my arse and made actual progress. I've got lower expectations.

I also have baby spit on all my collars, bags under my eyes and occasional unwarranted grumpy outbursts. But it's all good.
This sounds like a great idea.
Arrington was too busy spending his millions
I guess the parties involved all suddenly had an epiphany. They woke up one morning and realised that by making such a big fuss about nothing, the only thing they were liable to achieve was to fuck themselves over by bringing in federal oversight into their industry.

So they shut up.
Forget infographics, how about a simple table?
Focus on the SMALLEST problem you are solving. People don't join facebook to upload gazillions of photos, or message their friends each second. They join because they need a way to contact people without tracking down email addresses. Then they upload a photo because it's kinda cool, then they get hooked on the ecosystem. But that comes later. DON'T SELL THE ECOSYSTEM TO NEW USERS. Sell a small solution (which doesn't have to be anything too special), then let them scale their behavior up. The ecosystem is what makes you rich, but it's not what get's the first few logins. The whole ecosystem just confuses new users.

Oh, and remember, there are lots of people who don't even know what a URL is. SO worked because lots of JoS / Coding horror readers trusted it enough. They also know what tagging is - most of your readers are more familiar with phpbb style indexes. Nobody looks at the tag cloud unless they have already know what they are looking for.
Nope, that's clever housing for the memory chip you REPLACE. This makes it easier to get your old data onto the new storage drive, then serves as portable storage. This is a huge value add.

Edit: Parent comment was deleted. still, this thing is a very compelling offer.
I think the point is that it's an -internal- upgrade, that ships with a USB adapter for the existing SSD (that you'll remove).
The USB thing?

That's a housing for the old drive. Their product replaces the internal storage. That is a casing so you can turn the internal storage into a USB storage device.

At least I think so. The English in the article is a bit unclear.
That was an entertaining read. Very ballsy.
Jane answered this well on Quora:
http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Twitter-need-300-employees
That's the biggest problem--I can have any setup I like at home, but I have to use the desk that's provided at the office. They're not really into nonconformist workspaces there.