skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Put up a page now. Someone actually made a project specifically for collecting emails on a teaser page but i cant remember the name, perhaps someone can help me out.

It also worth exploring a test adwords campaign to see how much interest you can get to validate your idea, it also helps build buzz.
"Since I read papers up and down up and down, and jump between sections, I wish there was a PDF reader that allowed me to split the screen like emacs, so i can scroll each independently."

To do this I simply keep the same document open in multiple PDF readers at once (I use xpdf) and stack the windows either next to or behind each other, using a minimalistic tiling window manager (I use i3).
At least we agreed on one count ^_^

Anyways, on the loyalty issue, I use an iMac and a System76 laptop with Arch Linux, and as such I am loyal to my operating systems, as you probably are too. Now the machines in my college where either Macs for design or Dell's for everything else. The machines in my girlfriend's families' house are all Toshiba. My sister has had 4 HP laptops and wants a new one for christmas. These people (the regular people that are the bulk of computer users everywhere) follow brands more than anything else. I had a company that did integration of computer systems 8 years ago and trust me, most of this people (regular folks) follow brands and products, and seldom care about implementations, operating systems, and the such.

I agree with you completely on the the app lock in, and here come's a thought: The reason most people start buying Android devices, is because of the integration with their Google accounts, though you can use your accounts on an iPhone, it makes more sense to the general consumer to use the "Google phone" right? And of course, the catch with the iPhone couldn't have been far away... there are so many more usable apps, that are linked not only with software, but with webservices on the iPhone that it isn't even funny. I'll give you two examples of lock in (in my case): I will not buy an iPhone or a Nexus, because I need my Blackberry with the Blackberry Messenger service; I will also not buy an Android tablet, because they don't have Things nor Plaintext as the iPad does. iOS already has such penetration with the "cool, new, and awesome" apps that it's hard to compete with them, and in the cases where there's a cool app for Android, there's also an equivalent for the iPhone, though not generally the same case the other way around.

The one thing that drives millions of people to Android devices is not Android itself, it's both the marketing based on integration with Google services AND the AT&T fiasco that Apple for some reason didn't understand was maiming their business.

On the profits topic, I meant profit for app developers not profit on device sales. As long as iPhone developers are making thousands, and in some cases millions of dollars, in comparison to Android developers whom are making much much less on an average, quality developers are going to stick with the iPhone platform, Android being a second class citizen for them. It all comes down to the fact that developers are going to flock to Android only after, and if, it becomes the next goldmine.

To be honest, last time I used an Android phone, I liked it a lot. Until I tried the keyboard. That completely sealed the deal for me. I'm sticking to my Blackberry until I can use BBM on the iPhone (probably never :S)!
Server Security tip : How To Finding PHP shell scripts and PHP exploits
I agree; an independent would probably do well here. It's hard for someone to get through the Republican primary without destroying their chances in the general election.

California likes pro-environment, socially moderate to liberal candidates. Conservative economic and fiscal positions wouldn't be a handicap if you could avoid pandering to oil companies and anti-immigrant and religious zealots.
Number Ten
You can't just cd to /var/www/whatever and run "svn export" or else you'll end up with files deleted from the repository still existing on production.

Why would you do that, either? I thought it was something of a best practice to use symlinks for that sort of thing, so you could export to a new directory then change the symlink to point to the directory you just created.
Agreed, except that what Google isn't sharing is my contact information not theirs and so it should be my decision who I share it with. Until now Google agreed with this position and trumpeted their intention to support data portability.

Now they are only allowing me to export my data to people who play by their rules. That's not really open at all.

Sure I'd like the choice to export my contact information from Facebook, but I'd rather Google compete with Facebook on the merit of their products rather than making things harder for Facebook users.
People value their time, but they don't value it like an economically-scarce commodity. For example, you may consider your significant other to have an "infinite line of credit" on your time, while you may actually spend more time actively avoiding people you don't want to spend time with, than the amount of time you'd end up spending with them (i.e. people can actually have a negative return on time—whereas the worst you can do with N dollars is to turn it into 0 dollars.) People are willing to give others as much of their time as they ask for, if they see some sort of benefit coming from it (e.g. monks living in a monastery their entire lives), while there is only a finite amount of money they'd be willing to spend in the same situation.

This is all because people do not rationally value their time vis. their finite lifespan, but unless you're expecting that to change somehow, you can just take that as a given.

Thus, since time is psychologically considered abundant, then assuming a world that is otherwise abundant, perhaps money would indeed be outmoded by something that captures the psychological value, rather than economic value, of time spent? I think Cory Doctorow's "whuffie" is a good start on that. Rather than whuffie changing as you give or take people's time (i.e. time-debt), it's actually a measure of willingness-to-lend-time, sort of like a credit score. If you borrow someone's bike and win a race with it, and they think that's cool, your time-credit-score goes up; if you wreck it or just disappear, and they don't like that, your time-credit-score goes down. The important bit here is that the credit score isn't actually tracking any sort of real debt, because, for the most part, people don't track time debt; they just write it off and re-evaluate how much time they'll be willing to lend you in the future.
Side question: Any one know the font used in the diapers.com logo?
Someone would ask for a citation if he didn't, just by pure hacker habit.
Web Shames Magazine for Plagiarizing Blogger’s Article
How to control material
The indie games scene is still pretty PC focused because of the long standing domination of the PC over the Mac in the gaming area. It's only now slowly changing.
Along the lines of testing, you can do no better than Performable (http://performable.com) for A/B testing of landing pages. Also, read their blog. It answers OP's question, and so many more.

As for collecting emails on a landing page, MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com) is the best service I can think of for capturing emails in a CAN-SPAM-compliant fashion and look good while doing it. Campaign Monitor (http://campaignmonitor.com) is pretty good, too.
I would recommend Kerala also. Its in the far south
This article probably isn't targeted towards a layperson, but it didn't tell me why he was important to the world, important he may be. Why is literary criticism so important?

My background memory: A while back, didn't someone submit a made-up literary criticism to a journal in the field using false credentials, and have his work lauded?

Edit: The above memory doesn't mean anything regarding this subject, scratch that.
He's a Cook's Illustrated writer? For his scientific approach to cooking I shouldn't be surprised but reaffirmed by my suppressed gut feeling: "Hey his articles are a lot like Cook's."
If you have a countdown page I think you should put a form there that allows people to sign up for the beta and/or newsletter. That way the people who don't get to beta still receive updates.
"So perhaps, it might have been instructive for him to think about why he was being singled out for this excuse."

Why? If he'd done that, he'd probably still be a middle manager of a bank or telco instead of drawing cartoons and writing in the WSJ.
Forget launching. You're just leading yourself up to this amazing day that... may not be so amazing.

Put it up. Then email your subscribers when you have an MVP. Slowly, hopefully, the word will get out.

And by the date you'll have originally launched, you'll already have an active user-base!
Google should just draw a zigzagging line in the middle of the disputed terrain and be done with it.
What you're explaining is pretty normal. It's also a GOOD thing. The worst thing you can do is start on a project the moment you think of it. It's like the honeymoon period of a relationship, everything looks great, then you hit reality.

A really good idea you'll get to those problems and still be passionate enough about the idea to resolve them. If you can get past THAT point, that's when you start working. But you need to put effort into resolving the issues first. If you're giving up before then it's because you're either lazy (sorry!) or not that keen on the idea.

You may also need to reassess your expectation of success. I doubt anybody here has had an idea which they 100% knew was going to allow them to retire at 17. Most of the time you have something you think "could" work, or "might be cool". If you can live of your projects, that's a good place to start.
I'm running a VMWare image of 10.6 (Snow Leopard) right now. I didn't set it up, but it does indeed run. It's not perfect. It had problems running Safari 4, but now runs Safari 5 fine. I use it for browser testing. That being said Flash video crashes it hard, HTML5 video crashes it gently (like caressing a child's face with a butcher knife).

I have a pretty capable machine (Core i7 920, 6GB, GTX260 video card), but speed wise it is quite usable and I run all sorts of osx-only apps on it (like the omni suite) every day.

So.. i guess like 7.5 out of 10? Buggy, but really getting close.
Thanks for the advice. I would love to see that project if anyone can find a link.

As for idea validation, I'm not sure how necessary that is in this case. No new technology or space-age innovation here. My idea is ridiculously simple and has been done a thousand times over, in one way or another. There is a huge market, but I think the big players are doing it all wrong. I'm borrowing a piece of advice from 37signals to "underdo the competition". As a consumer, I absolutely hate all of the current options in this app space (too complicated, too ugly, too many useless features, etc) so I've decided to go about building my own app to meet my own needs. I'm operating under the assumption that there must be at least somebody else out there with needs on par with my own needs. Worst cast scenario is that I end up as the only and a hell of a lot more coding experience than I started with (zero). Which would be totally okay with me.
If I want to upload my contact data to Facebook, but Google is blocking Facebook from accessing their API on my behalf, then Google certainly is preventing me from accessing my data. It is not as open as it's always been.

The point is that Google isn't adhering to their own stated philosophy in this case - they're acting as though it's their data, not their user's data.

Here's a reference to "they'll find a way to get it even if it's not through being granted access by facebook":

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/09/15/schmidt-well-pull-fac...
What's Blackberry messenger? It isn't enabled on my Blackberry. (Nor is the camera, or text messages, or pairing with non-approved Bluetooth headsets, or the "app world", or ...)

The reason Blackberry users don't switch to iOS or Android is that their employer mandates Blackberry. I would much rather use my Android phone for work, but RIM's marketing worked, and I can't. (Think about how insecure our company's intellectual property would become if I could join a conference call with a headset that didn't have 128-bit encryption!)
Facing your first Job Interview?
Um. No pain?

If someone forces their hands into your underwear, it is disgusting. Who knows where that hand has been, and now it's in your private area? This is not about touching an arm. I'll agree with the other commenter that much of your posts does seem troll-like, especially when trying to say that shoving your hand into someone's underwear is no worse than touching someone's arm.

FWIW, however, I'm not sure that this necessarily needs to be a "throw in jail" kind of crime. Public humiliation on the Internet, however, seems like the best way to handle a crime of this nature.

Some men simply do not understand that it is not acceptable to put their hands in strange ladies' underwear. This is not a phenomenon that is limited to tech conferences. http://www.frumforum.com/the-prowl-getting-groped-in-the-dis...

Public awareness of this problem is a far better solution than sweeping it under the rug.

Most men don't do this. It'd be nice if in addition to being the great human beings that they are, if they'd step in when they see a woman being accosted in this way.

It'd be nice if in addition to being the great human beings they are if they wouldn't try to excuse piss poor behavior on other men's parts.
This is Stu, the software inventor. You can use DiscoverText to capture, search, sort and classify text. It might be a huge pile of emails. It might be an atom or RSS feed, a twitter stream, or thousands of comments on YouTube. It might be 33,000 comments on the White House Facebook page. The basic idea is to start with a large pile of text and efficiently work your way to smaller piles of just what you need. The earliest version of this software is free online and open source:

http://cat.ucsur.pitt.edu/

The history of the research behind the tool is online at:

http://people.umass.edu/stu/
Yeah, I think you mentioned that before on TUNES or somewhere else. If ints and bytes is the biggest problem, I don't see how that is a big deal - pull the int out of the array and shift/mask it to get the byte. Or am I missing something here? What I was thinking was going to be hard was structs (although most C code tends not to abuse those too much because padding issues tend to be pretty visible disincentives, but then again there's tons of code that does stupid shit that's unknowingly targeted to GCC exclusively).
Compare that with a PC: find a game online, create an account to download it, spend $20-$50 on it or perhaps just $10-$15 if it's a basic game, wait while it downloads, then step through the installer and if all goes well, you can play your game.

sudo apt-get install tremulous && tremulous
Hmm....I'm not currently validating IPs for clients (only for tutors) because I didn't want to introduce an account creation step.

I could add this - although from what I can tell the emails they are using are real (usually Gmail accounts) since they want to be able to respond back and forth with the tutor to complete the scam, and get them to send stuff, etc.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875718
What the parent post is referring to if anyone missed it.
What sorts of programming problems have you solved with Applicative, Monad, and Zippers so far?
An excellent beginner's guide to health and fitness
Sounds like some pretty cool stuff! I hope you post about it when you do decide to release it. :)
You're ignoring the fact that it's the user's data - not
Google's. At least according to Google's philosophy it is, and it's the users who reap the benefits.

Remember, people actually want to export their contact information from gmail rather than having to find all their friends manually, and now Google is telling them they can't because Google doesn't like Facebook's policies.

If Google believed in openness they wouldn't make that decision for their users, they would let their users decide.

Google is playing hardball by taking away data portability to their users. Hardly a good example to set.
You should attend Startup Saturday in Delhi
http://startupsaturday.headstart.in/
I am indeed talking about the millions of users who have stored contacts with Google.

The hundreds of application developers have absolutely no right to access that contact information.

It is the users who have the freedom to give other applications permission to access their data, and it is that freedom that Google is taking away.

To me this means that Google doesn't respect its users rights to do what they want to do with their data.

What if Microsoft prevented users from their loading word documents into Google Apps because they disliked some of Google's policies?

If Google really believes that the data belongs to their users, then they would let their users decide what to do with it, even if the users want to give it to a company that Google finds threatening.
One thing to add: I learned at Startup School that if you really want to talk to FAMOUS GUY at a conference, do it before he speaks.

Never been to Startup School, but, I've found this to be the case at pretty much every conference I've been to.

I usually just go "Hey, nice presentation," maybe adding something like "I really liked the bit about $foo," and then disappear from the group. There's usually a chance to catch up everyone later on - either after other people have presented and they're not as busy or over drinks later on in the evening.
Totally agree, it's very heartening. Stevin Levit has done some research that shows that political spending doesn't have much effect at all in races that aren't super close. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/mccain-the-...

Bloomberg spent over $100mm just to get re-elected to his third-term as mayor. Most likely he would have won if he had spent $10mm. In the end, having that $100 million wouldn't have effected his lifestyle one bit, so why not?
I presume they would be expected to precognit the future emotional state of their own brain.
I may have explained my goals incorrectly in the original post. The idea is to build a product with a set of core features that I have determined will make up the MVP[1]. When these features are complete, the MVP will uploaded to public space known as the internet. Period. Regardless of the date. The date exists as kind of a personal deadline - a form of self motivation. I'm pretty sure the app will be done and ready before then. I haven't worked it up to be some amazing, victorious day. Not into that kinda thing.

My question is simply - do I put a placeholder page and start taking emails today, or put up nothing at all until the MVP is complete?

[1]There are not a lot of these core features - like 4 or 5. Honestly, a decent programmer could probably build all of the functionality in a week. It's a dead simple app.
Its also a reflection of the specific places in corporate America he was in. Adams worked in banks and telecoms during the seventies and the eighties. Even today, these industries are quite slow moving, and back then, the pace of change was absolutely glacial. Its not hard to imagine that one's experience would be colored by dealing with people who know they have a job for life no matter what they do, simply because their corporation is a monopoly in its field.
The first item in quotation marks is my interpretation of the author's tone, for better or for worse. The second is a slight paraphrase of "Please lets not assassinate".
They know something we don't know.

A 5% increase in capital gains tax in 2011 shouldn't be enough for this movement by these people. They should be planning on holding onto their stock indefinitely, especially at places like Amazon with no ceiling. Why aren't they?
I think the focus of his post, which is that there are very powerful social forces at play that guide human behavior outside of a monetary transaction, is spot-on -- but it always has been like that.

What I greatly disagree w/ though is whether this is anything new at all or that the world is fundamentally heading towards an "age of abundance".

Why StackOverflow is kicking ass is the same reason we love HN. It's the community. That's it. No flimsy game mechanics. No monetary rewards or points involved (though like any large social group, there are demarcations for roles and status, like the HN karma). It's the gravitational pull of a strong community with shared interests. This is all textbook Seth Godin, nothing new here.

Strong communities have been budding since the dawn of civilization... so it's weird to say that the online world is pioneering this in any way for the offline world. What it is doing though is accelerating the community because of the sheer global scale of the web, which is unprecedented.

Money will always be driving the world, but more community-building tipping points to come.
Haven't been in about 10 years but it was an awesome trip. I would love to go back some day after the kids are grown. I spent a month there interviewing H1B candidates.
FWIW the author only tested one of the nine experiments. The replication experiment was also done using volunteers over the Internet, meaning it wasn't a true replication. (Not Ivy league students, further away from the random number generator, etc.) Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if any of them can be replicated in the future.
The design could use some love, I am no designer but I have a few critiques.
-You need some semblance of a grid, right now nothing lines up with anything else.

-You could use some sort of color scheme adjustment, less in your face reds, I feel like if I sign my site up I join "the party"

-The pictures of the phone/ipad etc on the right should have their bottom edge matched up with the bottom of the red bar, not 40px above
it.

-The inputs on the left should not have the click here links, what is the purpose of those?

-The quotes would be better off as 1 per row instead of 2, with a few less.

-You don't need all the white space in between the quotes and the copy on the left

-but the copy could use some more whitespace and line spacing.

-The site should have a favicon,

-and perhaps a better title, "mobile tools to mobilz..." doesnt make the most sense.

-The links in the footer are arranged haphazardly, and thats distracting.

-The copyright text needs some bottom padding, so its nor right up on the bottom of the page.

-I'm not sure how or what this does to my site, and that makes me nervous, what do I get when I hit mobilize?

-The logo should be bigger, and the "we help you create mobile" etc text should be smaller

I am trying out the product right now, so I cannot critique that yet, but I am interested in it, so I will. Hopefully you can get something useful out of the above list, because like say I am not a expert in UX.
I am unfortunately reminded of this every workday. The money spent on licences and inept consultants is obscene. The tools are ancient, the code unreadable, modules grafted on after various other companies were bought. I often get told how much money there is to be made in consulting, and alternatively how one can never learn all of Peoplesoft. As much as the former is comforting, the latter is depressing. I just want to be able to code in emacs for a living...