skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eureka! That's exactly what I thought when I heard of the Mac App Store. The App Store seems to me like a move to simplify things for Macbook Air users, which is actually a niche product for regular people. Developers prefer a 13 or 15 inch Macbook Pro because of the computing power and screen real estate they provide. Hell they are called Macbook Pro for a reason. Designers prefer Macbook Pros on the larger side because for the scree real state also. It's off course true that a power user might buy a Air for development, but they are the exception to the rule. The market for the air is businessmen on the run, university students, hipster apple fanboys that don't want to carry a 10 pound machine in their over the shoulder bags. For this people opening a disk image and copying the app to the apps folder might prove too complicated, alas they now have the App Store. This will have absolutely no effect on the ecosystem of users that like OSX because it offers a Unix system with pretty graphics (which Ubuntu even with it's latest updates is lacking) and great usability for the most part. Hell I only use OSX because I do both design and code and I need a machine that can do both and is not Windows. The moment Macbook Pros becomes an oversized Ipad I'm biting the bullet, buying a system 76 laptop, putting Arch linux into it and start contributing code to Gimp.
If a collaborator seems to strongly weight punctuality, especially to the point of making little remarks about stochastically late arrivals, that makes me not inclined to work with them because it signals a lack of perspective about what's really important (like good ideas and good results).
Zynga attempting to patent virtual currency for use in gambling
I'm putting money on UberCab becoming a members-only service/co-op type system where you have to be a member in order to request a car. I'm not intimately familiar with the taxi laws, but I bet they don't specify what private organizations can do.
With all due respect, I don't think it was the right choice at all. As I've studied go, I've learned large "life lessons" in an almost 1-to-1 correspondence. Even now, having hit diminishing returns at 5d, I still find it to be a wonderful exercise in metacognition; I can play a game to quickly see where my head's at.

That's certainly not how everyone looks at the game, but for me, go is easily the most enriching subject of study.

Just my 2c!
I paid per milestone, which were set by the developer according to his own estimation of delivery, with a thousand dollar plus bonus to meeting his own schedule. there was never any dispute, just the occasional 'I'm sorry this has taken so long, something came up' until after getting paid for near completing the first three milestones, he disappeared.

I was in another continent, so after all communication failed, decided not to peruse the matter. However I ran into him at PyCon this year, about 2 years afterwards. I didn't say anything, as to not cause a commotion. I'm over it, and a lot has changed in my life since, including that I can now do all the work I once needed him for.
Well, that same decision from some users in 1995 made Microsoft what it was in the later 90's and early 00's.

EDIT: And still is in the corporate market.
> The same people who cannot accurately predict whether or not it will rain tomorrow know with 100% certainty that the polar ice caps will melt if I don't buy a Prius.

Citation?
Three small stories. All minor, none particularly naughty.

1. In the 80's when I was young, I heard from a friend about a phone hack. By dialing a particular sequence, you could redial your own phone number, turning your phone system into an intercom. I tried this, dialed my home phone number and got my parents, who were very confused to learn that I was in our kitchen, talking to them upstairs, on our phoneline. This had no practical purpose - or impact - other than to surprise them.

2. When traveling with my father at one point, we made a stopover at Minneapolis, I believe it was. They made us deplane, but the pilots and attendants came and went by punching in a door code. I did nothing more than watch them punch it in, then followed them, entered the code and let myself back on board. My Dad was surprised when I could open the door, and the attendants were surprised to discover us back on the plane already.

Obviously, this is not something to try these days.

3. In high school, I got stopped by the police quite a bit. Usually because I was speeding, but also because my car was old and beat up.

One of the things I discovered was that a subset of the police wasn't eager to give you a speeding ticket - and impact your insurance rates - but they felt they had to do something. So I gave them something.

When stopped, I would initially "hunt" for my wallet, which had my license and insurance card in it, only to not turn it up, instead handing them just the registration from the glove compartment. On two occasions, I got tickets for not having these times, which - while as superficially expensive as a speeding ticket - did not apply points to my insurance and thereby increase my rates. If it looked like they were going to give me both, I would "find" my wallet in a crease under the driver's seat.

I'm not sure I'd try this now, and I certainly wouldn't try it every time I was stopped, it may well still work on occasion. Of course you're better off not getting stopped in the first place...
It's not true, I haven't gotten an email yet!
no link handy, but a similar thing was tried with email before. You had to offer points for someone to read your mail, and readers would natutally read the highest-paying emails first. The results sounded cool, similar to what you were predicting-- everyone got more conservative with others' email-redaing time. With the email version, you "traded points" by reading (or replying? I forget) your mail.

I'd love to try your calendar version!
Its great to see others like Qwiki and verbaljuicer getting and or interested in the alarm clock content space. Our alarm service(sleep.fm) speaks weather reports and soon(http://sleep.fm/coming-soon) wakes and tells you if your airline flight is delayed or on-time.

Though we only speak and repeat up to 8 seconds of alarm info. Were interested to see in time how this upcoming industry plays out. Does the general population want to hear just a buzzing noise, 5 to 8 seconds of personalized alarm info or hear an alarm voice reading 10 minutes or more of alarm personalized information? What can people grasp upon waking up?

Myself, I set three alarms and finally by the 2nd or 3rd alarm im able to grasp the weather condition and what the temperature will be around.

Id love to try this when you have a windows version available. Good luck!
Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did.

How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bonuses raining from the sky?

Right time, right place. Right age group. Right skill set. 25% of the above are things you can plan for.
I was thinking about advertising arbitrage at the time. Arbitrage, simplified, works like this:

1) Buy something for a price.

2) Sell for a very tiny bit more.

3) Repeat as much as possible, for as long as the market sustains the price difference.

Early on in AdWords/AdSense, some sites were able to buy traffic from a cheap keyword and put up basically a thesaurus page with the higher value pay-per-click (PPC) ads more than covering expenses (eg. pay $0.05 per visit for a N visitors, then by optimizing conversions encourage click-throughs for > $2.00 each).

Later, before the online ad-market shook out upstarts, it was often possible to buy traffic from one source and sell it on another, most often to or from AdSense. Hence a proliferation of MFA sites (with almost no content but relevant AdSense links).

But not thinking too hard suggests that paying nothing for traffic, not paying less, is even better. So with an entrepreneur's ethics, I figured:

a) Business names and addresses are long tail search terms and not under copyright

b) Dense Pages of Long Tail Search Terms => Targeted, Specifically Motivated Traffic

c) (+ AdSense) => User Gets A Solution (finds a service) + PROFIT

I designed a logo, scraped some yellow pages, and it made some money. Continual earnings trumped the dreams to conquer the internet.

Incidentally, the name is a palindrome, and rotating the logo through 360 degrees both spells out "snapspans" and looks like a yin-yan:

http://www.snapspans.com/

EDIT: Somewhat erratically, as search engine rankings update every so often, it's at ~30K visitors and ~$450/month. It got spidered because of a link exchange with another more established site.

EDIT2: Probably a good opportunity to write a blog post and submit, but only if people care.
My Top Idea Refined: A Greenhouse in a (Half)-Shipping Container
When I started my first software related company at 21 (almost 3 years ago) I had already had some small successes in other businesses, and had a fairly strong customer base to start because of contacts I had made. So I went out hired employees bought copy machines, set up an office etc. But after the 6th pay period (3 months in) I paid all my employees and I had $3.62 left in the company bank account with several unpaid invoices from clients who I did not know very well, since we were working mainly for law firms and they are famous for not paying in a timely manner I did not know what to do.

I went and took an evening job at "geek squad" for $13 hour and started selling cars at a friends car lot on the weekends in a city about 50 miles away so none of my employees would know we were struggling. Often times over those next few months I was paying my employees from money I had earned working those two jobs which none of my employees even knew I had.

I eventually started researching effective ways to collect past due bills and I was harsh and even lost a few customers in my collection tactics, but ultimately learned a great deal about the types of customers I did and did not want which allowed me to realize that having tons of business was not necessarily as good as simply having a smaller, loyal customer base who pays their bills and respects your work.

I can recall one conversation where I was speaking to an attorney's secretary and she told me that after talking to "John" Aka the attorney in question, he simply did not have the money to pay the bill, but he "would get it paid as soon as possible" to which I quickly popped off "Well why don't you tell John that if he doesn't have the money he needs to stop parking his Aston Martin in front of my office."

luckily for me, my young hot headedness paid off and I received a hand delivered check the very next day.

While I struggled for some time to come and eventually spent my entire savings paying my employees salaries the business did eventually succeed and go on to be very sustainable.

When selling the company to a large firm out of Charlotte, NC I was even able to negotiate terms allowing all my employees to keep their same grade of pay for at least 2 years after the sale (they were all on salary and paid above market rate) While I worked harder in those 19 moths than I ever had in my life it was the most fulfilling time that I have ever been through and it shaped the me into the person I am today.
Hey thangalin! I remember seeing you on KGS a few years ago. I'm. About 2-3d on kgs and would be happy for a game.

Also, if any go players in CA are interested, next years US Go Congress will be in Santa Barbara, 1st week in August!
You are correct- it is, generally speaking, the change from what you're used to that makes something remarkable.
Http://www.freehacking.net/
Very good engineering analysis explaining the tradeoffs and that no system is perfect.
Ah, right. I tried apport-bug but it said "You need to specify a PID", and I have no time to research that right now... I'll try later on, thanks!
I must say, the deprecating of Java does concern me. I do agree that Apple has been somewhat slow to update their version of Java. It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6. In principle, having Oracle maintain the JVM sounds ok.

However, I understand that the Apple Java makes use of hidden API's in order to provide the level of integration that it does. That integration always impressed me and was one of the many things that originally sold me on using Macs for development. Will Apple work with Oracle to achieve the same level of integration? Or is this really a sneaky way of trying to kill Java on Mac?

I miss the Apple that loved Next, used Java internally, among other languages, and spent a lot of time trying to make technical users happy with things like X11 support and Apple integrated Java. These things are what brought me to the platform.
I've got a new product, it's had some success, but my copy is an abomination. I'd love some feedback-- the site is earningstrades.com

Thanks!
"You can only connect the dots, looking backwards" - Steve Jobs, at the Stanford commencement address.
Has there been a better example than Digg of how detrimental it is to alienate your users on the social web?

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Reddit, which seems to have been the main reason why Digg's numbers haven't bounced back, despite changing some of the aspects which made users leave.
380 years ago today...
It's an anecdote but I've had 2 PHBs that wouldn't accept C# in a "VB.NET" environment.
> Steve Jobs

If you feel he's a good role model, then what do we make of him being cast out of Eden by his own board, and then having NeXT going basically nowhere until Apple begged him to come back and bought the company for its OS and as a talent acquisition?

I suspect he's been happier in a certain sense when his actions have been validated by the market, but at the same time, I strongly suspect he has certain other motivations that drive him and he's happy when he acts in harmony with those motivations. The marketplace validating his work is probably just icing on the cake.

That's all just speculation I pulled out of my Ass, of course!
How to cure a hangover? Get the broview on this quintessential problem
So what are the implications of this information to the average individual? He is basically saying that the conventional wisdom on medical questions is most often incorrect.
From someone who knows what is going on during the iPhone restore sequence, and from what he said, the iPhone NOT bricked. If it is offering to restore, the bootloaders are running (it's actually impossible to brick an iPhone via software), so he just needs to mess around a little bit and restore to the latest software. I'm sure that with a little Googling of the error message, he could get it working again in an hour or two.

I still don't understand how this has to do with Apple as a whole. Hell, in that case, I'd take it in to the Apple Store, even if it's out of warranty: they'd probably replace it anyway. All I see here is that the author is lazy, and doesn't want to bother doing anything to make their paid-for device work... even if that just involves going to the store and having them fix it.
In contrast don't do this in Panama. It's freaking expensive in comparison. Renting a room in a decent part of town can cost you around 700 dollars. And that's just a smallish room. A decent studio will cost you 1 ~ 1.2k. If you go down with 2 friends you can get a room in not so decent but really not that bad area for 1.2 ~ 2k with 2 or 3 rooms. Gotta pay for your ow internet though.
Yeah, I exaggerated. But out of $20.34 billion in revenue this quarter, that revenue is still a sliver. That sliver isn't going to lit Steve's eyes up and get him to go all crazy. You don't get Apple levels of success by acting shortsighted or stupid.
Thanks, good of you to offer. I'm sticking with box2cash.com for now, at least until I can test the concept.
Focus: free ebook on simplicity in the age of distractions
Hmm, I was content to show agreement simply by up-voting your comment, then I realized that was an anonymous action. So publicly, +1 to your comment, you hit it right on the nail.
Survivor bias is the phrase that comes to mind. The other one is "notoriety bias:" Only the stories with a spectacular ending get made into movies, so you read about the big successes and the big failures, but nothing in between.
Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and supper like a pawn.

Then anytime during the day - I highly recommend fruits (my favs are apples, organges, bannanas, mangos, kiwis).

And for a great snack, raisins are win
Looks cool, but I'm much rather use Erlang because of the whole framework it provides.
For updating code, you use Fabric! Nothing else compares.
Dude, that's when your brain needs food the most. Anybody can eat a fucking banana in the morning, seriously it takes like 40 seconds
Is Cassandra to blame for Digg v4's technical failures
Yahoo Pipes compiled to Python now run on Google App Engine
Well here's the problem.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

The "overblown" ones you're talking about are overblown by the MEDIA.

There are basically no scientists in the relevant fields saying we need to freak out because we might get hit by an asteroid tomorrow.

It's a possibility, and we need to study it and prepare for it...but to say it's overestimated or overblown (by the people who matter) is just not true.

Global Warming on the other hand, has a huge majority of scientists in the field agreeing that we are contributing to it, and if we don't stop there are serious consequences.(note that the consequences are gradual and completely realistic).

Your comparison is flawed: you're comparing something like an asteroid strike which would be devastating and perhaps impossible to stop, but also extremely extremely unlikely, with Global Warming which is gradual and pretty well demonstrated to be occurring....it's also dishonest in claiming that those things were "overblown" (and/or the nature thereof).

Then there's the Maya thing which is just a complete joke, and the Killer Bee thing, which again was something that serious scientists brought up as a (valid) concern, but nobody was ringing huge alarm bells screaming it was the end of the world.
Well, they use a futon (they are different from the Western futon, looks something like this: http://futonmattressinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/futo... ) which I found very comfortable. I don't know all the details, but while they still have a 'comforter' and a 'mattress', they were markedly different. The pillows were made of something similar to buckwheat hulls, and kicked the ass of every fluffy pillow I'd used to date. I have since acquired a buckwheat pillow, although it's not quite as good as whatever mystery filler it was. Not quite as cool and fluid. For breakfast, my favorite was hot rice mixed with small bits of meat and a raw egg cracked over it.

edit: I forgot about onigiri, that stuff was amazing too

Providence is most definitely different from SV. I wasn't disappointed or let down either- I expected pretty much what I got. I guess you could say besides the weather (rain) I felt I could have had pretty much the same experience in any of the US cities I've been to. Japan was different, because I was discovering the place rather than living in it. So, perhaps my lack of fascination with Providence stems from the fact that I am not enamored of m&p shops and old buildings. It was nice, but nothing to write home about.
how about vecroid?
I think you're reading a little too much into it. Steam solved this "problem" long ago.

Optical drives may eventually become less common. I admit mine rarely gets much use, but I still fancy throwing a DVD in there once and a while.

But that does present an interesting problem if you're, say, Microsoft. How do you sell Word to someone who doesn't have an optical drive? Would Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else who sells big-ticket shrink-wrapped software turn to the App Store to solve that problem? Not in a million years.
Satellite services are also feeling the heat:

I was surprised to get a call from Directv a few nights ago offering a slight reduction in cost and 6 months of "everything free." My wife has been digging getting all of the channels but since we are both heavy Netflix streaming customers, we may drop Directv in a few years when all programs are available for a reasonable fee on the Internet but we are in no hurry because Directv does offer a great product.

Off topic but: it is really important that new entertainment business models do not freeze out small content producers. I want more options, not fewer, and I would hope that a pay as you watch (or with commercials) Internet option will help small producers thrive.
Digg will generate about $15 million in revenue this year and still operates at a loss

Maybe my perception of the costs associated with running a high traffic such as this are way off, but doesn't it seem like $15m in revenues should be able to sustain the company... at least to the point where it doesn't operate at a loss?

Anyone that has any experiences running a site on the scale of this might be able to advise, I'm just curious where all of that $15m goes in a year - unless the operating loss accounts for other costs that I'm not considering.
Drupal for Web Designers – Part II
This is the second part of the new Drupal for Web Designers series written by Idan Arbel of Arbel Designs. After covering the intro to design (here’s the link to the Introduction in case you missed it) we’ll now discuss the second aspect Arbel loves about Drupal:
If you are on time you are late.

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Punctual
Great idea! I just sent you an email to review my site at http://www.maziesoftware.com/
Just look 'em right in the eye and say "dot Net". Works every time.
> Has there been a better example than Digg of how detrimental it is to alienate your users on the social web?

Facebook. It changed the day anybody (ie. parents) was allowed on. Now most people I know either refuse to use the service due to employer paranoia or just play Farmville all day, but it's not the same.

At least Facebook rolls with it, I suspect their new features (new Groups, new Photos) seem to cater towards their current audience instead of "getting the old spark back".
The hostels I stayed in gave me a futon with a nice blanket. Most futons in Japan are thin (~4 inches thick), but quite comfortable. Several of the hostels had quite luxurious baths. In a town called Beppu, I stayed in a hostel that had natural hotspring pools available for guests. For $20 a night, that place was luxurious.

I stayed with a family in Japan. The dad was American, the Mom was Japanese, and they ate cereal and toast every morning. The dad said that's pretty much what all the kids eat. Another popular snacky thing is onigiri. It's a rice ball with a mystery filling (usually tasty), wrapped with dried seaweed. I ate them quite often for breakfast when I was on the road.

EDIT: Silverstorm's link is exactly the type of futon I slept on.
Revenue is irrelevant. The question is how much profit iTunes draws in. I don't believe that Apple has ever released exact figures, but I've always heard that iTunes is a fairly low-margin business for them, so it's contributions to Apple's total profits are probably much lower than the contributions from the Mac business. Granted, the App Store may draw in much higher margins, but talking about revenue is still missing the point.
That was around my peak, when I could battle a 4d KGS player with a flame's chance in space of winning (that is to say: slim to none).

I don't have a lot of time for real-time games. (Working, travelling, social activities, writing, saving the world, you know how it goes.) A non-real-time game would be ideal.

http://apps.facebook.com/gothegame/