skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With planning and applying one or more of the techniques discussed in this article, contributors may be able to propel their projects into the realm of profitability.

What techniques? This whole article calls out the OSS community on its funding sources, but doesn't particularly give any advice on how to make OSS profitable. Unless you count the implicit suggestion to involve people with lots of free time at work.
My point is that math professors as a bunch put up with this kind of stuff all the time because more than half of the incoming class is just going to be horribly unprepared for any kind of graduate work. Are the students to blame for being unprepared? Yes, I think so but there is also the fact that universities take on way too many graduate students simply because somebody has to be a TA for all the lower division classes the math department offers. This is just bureaucratic bloat and a byproduct of this bureaucratic bloat is that people who shouldn't get a PhD get pushed through the system because it keeps the attrition rate down, at least on paper. So it's great that this guy is standing up for what he believes in but the problem is more systemic and I doubt his one man stand against one student is going to make much difference to how the universities currently operate.
I am completely against prohibition of any drug, however, I can speak from experience that LSD can genuinely drive you temporarily insane, even at relatively small doses.

More than once I have been convinced (even though I knew I had put a little piece of paper on my tongue) that what was happening to me was outside of the context of 'tripping.'

One time I would have committed suicide had I been convinced that it would have worked. I was completely under the impression that it would only be painful and not really do anything but sort of hit a 'reset' button into what was at the time essentially hell.
Google likes SEO
I wasn't actively involved, but as far as I know, the old Atom wiki was the birthing place of Atom. Sam Ruby hosted it on his site, and got a lot of discussion around the idea of a new syndication format. I believe it was called Echo for a long while.

http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
> You need to log in to read this article
Except that we've all known about the new rules for USA DST changeover since 2005.
I've been looking for something like this all morning. The only thing I found close to making a custom browser UI is Mozilla's Chromeless SDK which is in alpha stages. http://github.com/mozilla/chromeless

Anybody knows anything else other than taking Gecko or webkit and doing it the hard way?
> Companies compete with each other and there are winners and losers.

The unnerving thing about this industry, though, is that sometimes this "winning and losing" is fast and close to total, whereas in other industries, many players can continue to compete in the same field. Think about Microsoft's share of desktop operating systems at their peak vs car companies.
This reminds me (on a smaller scale) of Realtime Worlds spending 5 years developing the APB game and then having a cold shower this year when the game was not so successful as they thought, following a close down. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtime_Worlds)
I would have assumed that headline to be true for the last year or so (well apart from the "october" bit).

From another source, it appears Firefox is about to pass IE in europe (or perhaps more correctly, IE is about to pass Firefox on it's way down):

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200910-201010
The thing I love about Jakob Nielsen, as opposed to Edward Tufte (though I also love Tufte's stuff) is that he never just tells you "this is how to present this information"; he backs it up with real studies with real people that track eye movements and actions and records what people learn and retain. It's more than just truthy; it's science.
I had a similar experience once. I'm a bit of an introvert, but have awesome social skills, and was teaching a friend of mine how anyone can get a hottie if he's confident enough. I got the hottie to go home with him by being confident first to lure her in, and then breaking down and making my friend look alpha in the process. His jaw also dropped when he realized it was that easy. He still sucks at getting women to do what he wants.
Wish this was a poll so I could vote and then see others' voting as well. I use all four of the biggies daily - Firefox on my own computer, IE on my PC for sites that just don't do well in Firefox (there are three that I visit), Chrome on my wife's PC (so I can have my own sessions w/o affecting her Firefox sessions), and Safari on my iOS devices.
its not even just a degree, they're bending the rules for a PhD, the rigor of which is much greater than a BA or a BS
I recently did a survey of those sites, and a large number of those links are links to other similar paid products that have more or less relevance to what they're linking to or are of the '$5/month virus check' variety.
Are you a spammer? You should never use bit.ly unless you are a cowboy
That's true, but if you're evenly matched with your opponent, your initial economic curves will be identical, and then strategy and tactics come into play. Obviously it can be more valuable to strike the opponent's miners and factories than to engage his main army -- but real war is no different.
The best thing about that is they can port the game and charge everyone again. Unlike console games that cost $60 dollars. Phone games are a couple dollars so people will pay that again.

They can even out source the development as there is a perfect spec of what to build (original game)
WW1 and especially 2 were an economic strategy game. The Cold War was an economic strategy game.
Perhaps you should have spent those five seconds reading the grandparent of your comment.
Regardless, I'm sure happy that mistake happened. When the main satellite goes down on the ship I work on, the Iridium phone is the always-working standby you can count on.
> The idea of iteration or pivots was unthinkable. This business plan was a static document. It was great for fundraising, looked great in business schools

He (unintentionally?) implies that business schools are similarly clueless, which is funny since he teaches at Stanford's.
I don't really get this line of thinking on hiring CS grads. Most CS programs don't teach Java, they might use it to teach some computing principle or how to solve problems but I'd imagine you'd be hard pressed to find a grad who is loyal to Java just because of their CS courses.
Can non-technical founders succeed -in hiring good programmers- and overall?
In Lesson 6 of "The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups" (quoted see below) PG gives the impression that non-technical founders will likely fail as they are disabled from hiring good programmers.

I am sure his warning is on the money - but does anyone have any experience / wisdom that has (or would) help mitigate this risk? As a non-tech who is hoping to found soon, I'd appreciate hearing any lessons leaned on this subject - good or ill. Thank you.

Lesson 6 by PG "I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it's not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever's required themselves.

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.

In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't. Then they're mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.

So how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer? I don't think there's an answer. I was about to say you'd have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can't recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?"(http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html#f10n)
Maybe it's different in the UK, but a huge percentage of my graduating classmates couldn't write code to save their life. There are people who are bad at their job in most fields, but maybe CS is just easier to bullshit through.
This is half true. Indeed, currently European/NA players play quite "standard" at tournaments, avoiding rushes and "all-in" strategies. The Koreans, however, at GSL have shown that they're neither afraid nor hesitant to do so.

edit: GSL, not ESL.
Great piece, right to the point. What technology is Apple going to declare illegal next. And what if we depend on it.
A GA sounds like exactly the wrong way to go about this. I think you could do much better with a heuristic algorithm than a GA in this case, and I think GAs (like neural networks) are very much overused just because they correlate well with natural processes.

That said, I haven't played SC2, and I don't know what sort of complexity the building problem has.
To give one example: for compatibility, it would be tremendously useful if they released specifications for AirPlay. Eg. Rogue Amoeba had to reverse engineer it for their AirFoil product.
Counter-anecdote: you don't know how much on the web isn't flash until you pick up an iPad.

We must use very different subsets of the Internet, because the videos I run into (on random, lower profile sites, no less) don't require flash.

Honestly, the thing that drives me from my iPad to pick up a laptop (which doesn't happen very often) is iPad-specific websites that don't let me opt-out and use their normal website. This has (unfortunately) been happening more and more lately.
I think that you are perhaps you and your co-founder are the only ones who can answer this question. I know that sounds trite but that's not what I mean it to sound like. My point is this: no one knows better than you two what your goals are with the company. You said, "We're bootstrappers by nature and would rather have our first business be a strong base hit than aim for the fences." I'll take you at your word that this is true.

So the question that you and your co-founder have to answer is whether or not you want your personal finances to be at $25m, $50m or higher in 10 years? If so, it's less likely that this will happen if you bootstrap rather than raise/sell. And there is no right/correct answer - no one can tell you which you should do, only what they might do in your situation or what they think someone like you might do in that same situation.

There are other aspects to it as well but the key point is, in 5-10 years from now, what will you want? Do you still want to be running the business or will you want to have hit the "reset" button and have moved on to something else? There's no crystal ball so you have to take the risks and rewards all into account.

Good luck and congrats on getting to where you are!
We don't know that they had a choice. If you've signed a contract, with penalties, for 15 launches, you might know you're doomed but have to press on anyway. The Eurofighter is another example of this - when the UK govt tried to cancel its Tranche 3 order, it found the penalties would have been more than the cost of the aircraft...
God, articles like this make me feel so much better. Reading nothing but textbooks, source code, and blog posts by ridiculously talented people makes me wonder why anybody pays me to do anything. This article made me feel like a total stud.
Well, in the past six months, the amount of video available in non-flash, "html5" format on the internet has increased from 25% to 50%, something like that.

In another six months, what do you think that figure is going to be? Flash is headed towards marginalization, that's what my crystal ball says.

Besides, what capable mobile flash runtime were they supposed to put in the iPad anyways? It's not like they had a choice.
"Amateur's discuss strategy, professionals discuss logistics"

And more specifically, it's not about maximizing your rate of production, its about maximizing the difference between youres and your opponents (this is both RTS and real life war).

That's the basis of rush tactics. You actually stunt your own rate of growth in the hopes of stunting your opponents even more.
I believe the broader point Nielsen is making is that "filler" photos provide nothing of value to the user, even if they are supposed to set a tone. However, detailed product shots, photos of actual employees or customers using a product can be valuable and relevant to the user. Stock photos used to "jazz up" websites are the scourge of the internet and the bane of any designers dealing with clients or internal stakeholders.

The next time someone suggests that a stock photo of smiling people huddled around a glowing computer be added to the homepage, send them a link to JN's post and suggest an actual product shot instead.
I have at least one consulting client who has projects that are essentially unlimited billable hours if I wanted them, so an hour saved from doing drudgery could get converted fairly easily into my hourly rate with him. Suffice it to say that that compares quite favorably to what VAs make. (You can get them from single digits in low-wage countries to $20 ~ $40 an hour for higher end stateside VAs.)

I've had huge, huge successes previously with outsourcing content creation and web design, and now that consulting has given me something of a cushion, I anticipate doing more things where I really add value to the business and less grunt work. I think it is highly likely that next year I will hire a front-end developer, which is currently showing up very high on the list of "spending lots of time for less than spectacular results" at the moment. That would be a pretty big step though.
'slash the web' -- i had a similar reaction. not a mainstream future in current incarnation. i went to the site and didn't understand what to do.
Interesting point, but Google has much, much more of my data than Facebook has. FB has a few likes of mine and around 200 friends, with a relatively small number of messages. Google has my multi-year mail history (content plus a pretty big social graph that means far more than a few old school friends), my searches (and therefore interests), what adverts I've clicked on, which pages get the most traffic on my websites. It has documents I've worked on with friends and associates. It has my calendar. I've got a bunch of sites sitting on Google servers. When I use my iPhone, Google provides the maps and knows where I'm going.
Agreed, Dominic is held in high-respect in the city and rightly so, but his core expertise isn't in graduate recruitment and it's shows here.

If you want to hire for low level understanding go to universities like Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Imperial, York. Look at Aero Engineers and Physicists as well as CS students.

Kings College has maybe a third or forth tier CS department, it's not surprising he's not finding great candidates from there. It also seems like he's relying on the mainstream recruitment boards, most talented graduate developers don't even look there. Most are recruited either through university events or dedicated graduate recruitment boards.

Also there's a reason it's hard to find talented graduate developers willing to do VBA, because money isn't everything. Sure you might make an extra thousand pounds a year doing it, but that doesn't make worthwhile to do a job you hate. Most talented developers would rather get a job that pays less and is enjoyable.
Most-shared retweets, links, photos from rally4sanity
It's much the same situation here in Colorado. It seems like the applicant pool is even smaller than it's been. The number of qualified engineers is really mind-boggling, and competition is pretty fierce.
I take the Reworked point of view on the word. I prefer "Starter".

http://37signals.com/rework/
Stealth mobile game company seeking engineer experienced with HTML5/Flash. Competitive pay, equity, and benefits. Remote is fine, bonus points if you're close to NYC or SF.

Email this HN name at gmail with a resume and links to any relevant projects.
How Immigrants Create More Jobs
Nice article. I would argue that JSON is suited for a structured web though. Imagine even something like RSS turned into a JSON structure — if everyone would simply publish open JSON feeds we could have a lot of interesting client-side applications...
The most memorable thing I could do with $8000 is follow Wir Sind Helden on their summer tour through Austria and Germany, but that's something very personal to me. I've always loved the feeling associated with big, open air concerts. Wir Sind Helden is my favorite band. I'm obsessed with learning German. And I've been to Germany, and have wanted to go back ever since returning to the states. None of this, presumably, applies to your friend.

You don't need to know all the possibilities. You just need to know what you love.

I don't mean to be unhelpful but, "What's the most memorable thing you can do with $8000," sounds an awful lot like, "What's the right way to spend $8000," and there is no right way. There is no "most memorable thing." There is no "greatest fulfillment of the will." Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. The best is the enemy of the good. There is no possible way to spend $8000 that someone won't consider awesome and someone else won't consider a complete waste.
This is a commonly cited reason, but in reality, how many employees can be given pre-IPO stock before the company ends up with so many owners that they're forced to file for IPO?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the number of owners that a privately-held company can have before being forced to go public is only 300.
While I don't disagree with the basic idea you're presenting, about people building nice sounding solutions that end up DOA, your Four-Thirds example is a bit distracting, since it isn't true.

Olympus and Panasonic have made a lot of money selling four-thirds format cameras, for advantages quite unrelated to sensor cost. These two companies carved an entirely new market segment (very small high-quality-sensor exchangeable lens cameras). Previously there was no exchangeable lens digital camera that was both small and optically (sensor and lenses) high quality. What's more, in the traditional segments Olympus was a bit player with sales very disapponting compared to the Canon juggernaut. So this story is much more about an old player deciding to play an entirely different game rather than just keep getting the stuffing beat out of them by just going along competing directly.

They've done well enough that other players (Sony, Samsung) are jumping in and trying to pitch their own mirrorless formats to try to win a piece of this new market segment. There is speculation Nikon and Canon will try as well.
So they have now 300,000 customers and what about $$$$?
This is a rather paranoid argument of what Apple may do, instead of what it's actually done. Even David admits that a) he's happy to see Flash go b) we're making a move towards open standards and c) Adobe deserves the walloping that they're getting.

Apple's done things like this before - getting rid of floppy drives, for instance, before anyone else did. (And they're very quick to remind us of this). But whether the move to 'attack' Flash is a bad thing isn't clear.

Apple seems to be more obsessed with delivering the perfect user experience - and they don't give me the impression that they're picking battles for the sake of picking battles. Whether Flash (or any other technology, for that matter) gets excluded is a direct result of this obsession. Which is the right way of going about it, of course.
It's been a long time now, but when I was first looking for jobs in IT after graduating, all of the "entry level" positions required quite a bit of experience. Luckily, I had already been providing IT support for an elementary school when I graduated, but it always struck me as odd that an entry level position would require experience...
I don't think it was at all irresponsible of them for accepting a half hearted port of a 10 year old technology that really isn't intended for a touch screen. HTML 5, CSS3 and other standards saw wider adoption more quickly(thanks also in part to google)

What is happening here is Apple is streamlining its products in what they hope will make for a better user experience. It may or may not work out for them, but there is plenty of choice out there.

Further, this isn't the same situation as the 1990s when Microsoft would gun for other companies by releasing same-ish products for free to squash others out of the market. They are just not supporting them if they dont meet their standards.
I don't like this post for several reasons.

1. The author worries about Apple crowning a successor. What they're advocating is HTML5, which is essentially an open standard, where Flash is of course proprietary.

2. The premise of the article is that Apple has the power to kill anything they set their mind to. It uses the lazy argument of the slippery slope or thin end of the wedge ("What's next?"). It's simply fearmongering;

3. It mistakes cause and effect. A classic example of this was Intel's original Centrino platform, which became the basis of Intel's success (after the Pentium 4 debacle) for years. At the time it launched Intel spent $150m+ on marketing it. Sadly, many observers attributed its success to that marketing campaign when in fact the lesson is:

Good products sell themselves.

Centrino succeeded because it was a good product.

Flash came about at a time to solve a problem of creating "rich" Internet applications ("RIAs") when it wasn't possible any other way. That's no longer the case with a plethroa of Javascript frameworks and browsers with fast Javascript engines in them.

The use case for Flash was going away anyway. Apple just hastened its inevitable demise. They haven't killed it. They just threw some oil on the fire that was already burning down the house.

4. Apple is on the outs with a bunch of other companies? Large companies are complex creatures. You will find them competing savagely on one level while cooperating on another. But the real reason they don't like Apple? Nothing breeds contempt like success.

5. Blu-ray. Optical storage, like Flash, is dying. Apple didn't pick a side in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray "war". Some might call this realpolitik. Personally, I think they took a long term view that the winner was irrelevant. The well is drying up. Who controls it doesn't matter anymore.

6. Apple is by far the company that has demonstrated an utter devotion to the paramount importance of the user experience. Now you can disagree with some of the decisions they've made but, on the whole, no company has engendered quite the same loyalty and fervour that Apple has for good reason.

They're still at the mercy of the market as a whole.
I do agree that the certification process for those important professions plays an important part in ensuring public safety. I offered my comment as a path to feeling a bit better about seeing other people who share one's credentials without, it seems, achieving quite the same standard.

I would also offer however, that even those professions do not completely trust the degree. Each one of those professions has a number of oversight and regulation bodies which are inconstant contact with the the practitioners. Specifically:

- Malpractice insurers who specify covered and non-covered activities

- Professional colleges which review practitioners regularly
- the FAA

And so forth.