skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made lots of comments on the draft (up until p. 70) on crocdoc: https://crocodoc.com/g30tgl. They should have been added by "Zach".

My general takeaway: You have something great here. I believe that what you have to say is largely valuable. Even if what you're saying isn't necessarily unique (in that it was derived from previous models), the way in which the book is framed is. The reconciliation of Customer Development and the Business Model Canvas with web-based startups is something that I've been looking for, and trying myself, since I read both books a few months ago. I look forward to Parts 2 and 3 (I believe they were omitted from this draft, yes?).

Two main points of constructive criticism:

- The structure of the book is problematic. Many of the headers and sub-headers are very similar, if not the same, which makes the book difficult to browse for content or to find your place. Furthermore, I believe that the chapters should be numbered. This would obviously conflict with your segmentation of the "Parts" of the book, but that could be rectified by using "Part A, Part B, etc.", and using numbers for chapters.

- There is too much summarization. I feel like there are topics that are first brought up in a list, then 10 pages later summarized in a more specific list, then 10 pages later expanded upon, then 20 pages later discussed upon in their own section (This is obviously hyperbole, but it's the feeling that I get). The introduction, for instance, begins with the section "What is Running Lean?" What immediately follows are a few paragraphs that the reader will naturally take as the answer to the proposed question. Running Lean, then, is "a systematic process for iterating from Plan A to a plan that works." But, near the end of the chapter, we are faced with a sub-section, also entitled "What is Running Lean?" From here we learn that Running Lean is actually the synthesis of "3 core methodologies: Customer Development, Lean Startup, and Bootstrapping". I suggest introducing all of this in the same spot. Reduce redundancy; reduce waste. :-)

I will keep adding comments as I read the book (they are mostly comments about wording/grammar issues), and will post here again if my general feelings towards the book change. For any clarification, my email address is available in my profile.

Best of luck!
Grandalf you are making a "greater good" argument. (and a very good one at that)

I'm simply saying that part of my arrangement with my government is to conduct our business like it always has, with leaks, scandals, and voting. I do not like the way things have been going: we're turning into a secrecy state that actively deceives it's citizens. But I feel that the way we make changes is the most optimum for the people involved at the current time. Perhaps you are unhappy with my arrangement, but it is my arrangement and not yours. I do not come to your country and interfere with your arrangement.

Now feel free to carry on with your outrage about the lying and propaganda and such. Run videos of soldiers killing innocents. Run ads and make leaks to convince me that my relationship with my government is bad. Do all the things in a free society that help us find our mistakes and fix them. I might disagree with you, but I completely support your right (and obligation even) to make a moral case to others that some wrong needs fixing.

But short-circuiting the system does not do that.
From reading the cable itself, it doesn't sound like anyone in the US government thinks it's a serious issue, but that The Guardian thought it made a nice headline. The source-access bit is a single line a 7-paragraph section of a 64-paragraph daily report whose own sectional 'key highlights' don't mention it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...
It's helpful to hear the perspectives of others occasionally, if not often, to help to determine changes to our own work and lives.
Fuduntu receives approval to distribute Adobe Flash and the Fluendo MP3 Codec
Renew Forager Law
Isn't there a better source for this news? I mean, here's some quotes from Kelly Hodgkins' article:

"For those that have been living under a rock, Tumblr went down on Sunday afternoon and hipsters everywhere were bent out of shape."

"Tweets about kittens, moleskins [sic], and Starbucks tripled."

"Now that the service is back online, hipsters can grab a cup of joe and get back to their blogging. Non-hipsters can rest easy as their twitter feed will soon be clear of tweets rife with extreme tumblr withdrawal."

...

I'm looking forward to an in-depth postmortem of the Tumblr outage, though!
coz i actually have a life
People will behave badly if it's not too much work...and if no one is watching
yeah. seems they've basically abandoned uma though. speculation is uma cannabalizes their 3g.

The U.S. arm of the German phone giant is a big supporter of Google’s Android OS, and last week, when I asked a T-Mobile USA representative if there were plans to add UMA to Android phones, he said T-Mobile will continue to support UMA on the current and forthcoming BlackBerry devices and Nokia E73. That’s four models in total. In other words, T-Mobile has no plans on adding UMA to Android phones.

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/13/is-t-mobile-backing-away-from-u...
Academia.edu hires H-1b candidates. We just did two H-1b applications for two of our employees. Whether someone needs a visa for the US doesn't enter into our hiring decision-making process at all. We're exclusively focused on hiring the best software engineers.

Academia.edu's jobs page is here http://academia.edu/hiring, and a description of our engineering culture is here http://academia.edu/hiring/software_engineer. We're a team of 7, are backed by leading VCs and angels, and are based in downtown San Francisco. We're growing fast right now and are looking to hire smart engineers!
Spirit Fingers
this is the doing of 4chan, right?
You know there's a wikileaks mirror here, right? http://6qackjstecukcesy.onion/
I can see reasons why you wouldn't want to share an idea, but I think they are border cases. I've been spending most of my free time for the last couple months building a site specifically for discussing and getting feedback on ideas. I believe there is a lot of value in getting other people's insight. Ideas have a great built in defense- as soon as they leave their owner, they are poisoned by another point of view. No matter if it is repeated, a person's vision for what it could be doesn't transfer, it is intimately personal.
Money.

Or if you want to get precise, imperialist policies (which are about Money in the end).
"Bubbles" are complicated and regularly conflated with other things entirely. What is more certain and established is that the economy has a boom and bust cycle.
My JSON River of News (explained, this time)
When I was about four years old I tried to eat a dirt sandwich.
Apparently one can even live there for years and not know any English at all. "Why would I learn it? I don't go to USA".

Also there's a joke about two Russians in Brooklyn being asked direction to some place by a passer by (an American). They just shugged and the passer by went on. So one Russian tells another: "See, sure he can talk English, but what good did it do for him?".
We're using Redis because it's zero-configuration-required. This makes deploying on end-user networks much much easier.
Judging by the negative/indignant comments, I think the title was unfortunate. Reading the article, though, I don't see the OP advising people to do anything actually degrading or unethical. Perhaps he should have clarified that only the programmer-employee part of you is the product (at least where your employer is concerned).

I have a slightly different perspective, which is that rather than you being the product, your skills and time are the product, for which you are the vendor.
Besides, int main(void) is shorter to type. And, horridly, return isn't necessary in main, so you don't even have to be bothered to type that.

int main(void)--for the lazy AND correct!
As someone who used Wave intensely (all day, nearly every day) from the day I got my invite, until the day they announced it was going to die, I couldn't be happier about this.

Wave was invaluable to my daily business processes, working with people on projects that move way too fast to set up up a more structured/"proper" collaboration environment. It had pretty much completely replaced email for me at one point between me, my associates and my friends.

Can't wait to see it get a second life, and hopefully i'll be using it a lot more in the future now too. I still stand by this having potential to really change how we communicate with people.
>"How could wikileaks have done so much harm to civility?"

I wonder what Mr. Markham considers the proper etiquette for blasting people apart with DU.

I would suggest that when one's 14 year old son would assent to a government butchering and eating babies in the name of National Security, it might be time to reconsider one's career as a moralist.
As a long time Java developer (I downloaded the first beta that was released). I would have to say that this pretty much did it for Java. Sure it was showing it's age but until now the pain of leaving it behind was too great for many. I think now there are a lot of people wondering what the future pains will be brought if one decides to stay in the Java world. Oracle has thrown the gauntlet down and pretty much said, Java is for paying customers. So my question now is who is the likely successor? I have been playing the guessing game for a while now as to who I think the most likely champion is and I keep drawing blanks. I think the JVM languages are too close to Oracles reach for comfort now, so I think Clojure, Scala, JRuby and the rest are out. Python is nice and has a pretty decent eco-system but there is a die hard no interpreted languages camp (I know, I know) but it exists. I don't know enough about Go to form an opinion of it's worthiness. I don't think we are going back to C or C++. Objective-C is perceived to be too Apple, .NET too Microsoft. Perl had it's moment in the sun. Ruby too controlled by a select few. My point is, I would love to know what other people think on the subject. I think the writing is on the wall, I just can't seem to read what name the writing spells.
Which was the defense of those who said "there's no web bubble" in 2000, "no housing bubble" in 2005, "no tulip bubble" in 1636, the East India company would make everyone rich in 1670. A bubble by definition isn't evident until after the fact.

But I'll still advance Bebo as the exemplar of an emerging bubble. Acquired for $850 million, sold 2 years later for < $10 million. And there's other similar cases.
Wasn't an SSL problem but a cookie problem...
Just pushed something more generic to heroku last week..

Http://jsonr.heroku.com

Converts any XML feed to JSON or JSONP. Docs coming very soon.
I take just a slightly different view: real joy in life is how much you help others, how many people you love, etc. (and not the reverse of how much help you get, how many people love you, etc.)

To be fair to Nathan his list of things to do were all about doing things for other people (even if it ultimately benefits you too): blogging, speaking, working on open source projects. He even said: I think the best personal branding activities are rooted in the actual value you can provide to others.
I wanted to thank you for your help. I wrote a script to scrape over 30,000 courses and textbooks from Arizona State University successfully in a couple days.
Steve Jobs - "iPhone 7 is amazing. We've included a revolutionary feature we call 'home row' - it's awesome."
I've seen a 25' Baleen whale dead in a river up in Alaska and I can safety say that a dead whale is about as big of a fail as you will ever see. I might have missed the birds carrying it there, but when I saw it they were snacking on him.
I know you're asking about advertising but I think you might benefit from stepping a little back and thinking about marketing before you think about advertising.

Think about who your target customers are (i.e. the individuals within these firms who will pay for your product), are if they using existing products or are they completely new to the product type. What's your value proposition to these users.

Once you understand that it should be much easier to promote your product to those users. If your target market is HR staff in SMEs then use linkedin to target that group, get featured on HR blogs, magazines, etc. and make sure your value proposition clearly comes across whenever you advertise.
Switch to Microsoft security essentials.

faster. smaller. no spy/spam/ad/junkware

better
He mentioned them in his last income report: http://www.kreci.net/reports/android-developer-income-report...
Judging by the negative/indignant comments, I think the title was unfortunate.

I don't. I think there's a lack of understanding what a metaphor is. The tech scene is not known for its glut of English majors, alas..
Were you like Steve Jobs in your primary school?
>We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone...

How do you create and keep a good culture when you're growing that fast? Anyone have experience with this sort of scenario?
I understand they were busy, but only two or three updates about progress during the entire ordeal (on Twitter) seemed a little low to me. Their "we'll be back shortly" page also didn't link to their Twitter page either, so for many people it was just a black hole for updates about when a surprising large chunk of the web would return.
Replying to the deeper nested comment.

1) I totally concede that you could use Dynamo-style consistency to be the system of record for financial exchanges. I just don't think it's a good idea. I'm not sure anyone building these systems does either.

Though if you're doing e-commerce with a payment processing gateway like PayPal, you might be in a different situation. You're no longer anything like a bank at that point (PayPal is).

2) I don't know what Amazon does now, but last time I talked with them (2009) they were huge users of legacy RDBMSs for actual order processing. I know they're not thrilled with this arrangement, but I doubt they think that they think Dynamo is the answer. Perhaps cores of ACID-ness with Dynamo-esque replication between them...

3) You're right that banks use logs for a tremendous amount of things. And a VISA charge looks nothing like a simple debit and credit transaction. However, if you think that banks don't have debit and credit transactions in their applications, you haven't worked on their applications.
I would never complain about the security of my TV remote, so I still don't see that as an issue.
Adding more people to a software project often has the effect of making it take longer, at least for mid to near term milestones. Quadrupling sounds like the adage of pouring gasoline on a fire.
dropbox not being a single company?
The cost is merely your soul. It's giving up that view of yourself as an autonomous human being with unique hopes and dreams, wants and needs. It's deciding that you value a certain society-accepted sort of "success" more than you value yourself. And if you really don't believe in yourself, then you find that everything is easy. You can get a job if you're a branded huckster. You can get laid if you're a pick-up artist. Maybe it won't mean anything but you can have it anyway.

I think you're presenting a false dichotomy. Self promotion as a directed activity is not always so cynical or an attempt to get more than you deserve. It does not always involve dashing your "unique hopes and dreams." Branding is not any more "bullshit" than, say, economics or art are.

There are people doing good, honest work who've found that by adopting some of the principles of branding and responsible marketing to boost their public perception, they can actually turn their work into a profitable long term enterprise where otherwise they could not. I haven't sold my soul or done things I didn't want to do, yet without self promotion there's no way I'd have 38k feed subscribers and a 6K strong mailing list. These things help me realize my ambitions in an honest way.

There's a school of thought that "if you build it, they will come." Now, more than ever, this is not true. You can toil away and do excellent work but without getting out there, spreading the news, and working on your persona, you'll struggle to get by. This is why, I feel, a lot of people do settle for regular, full-time jobs when they don't want to - rather than go out on a limb and share themselves honestly with the world, they'd rather do it on a case by case basis in their résumé.
Your thought experiment is powerful because it forces the reader to see the situation from a new perspective. But it fails to model the power dynamics, and this is critical.

If you found sensitive documents from Saudia Arabia, your conclusions make sense. Saudi Arabia isn't a global power, so you have good choices. You can give the documents to your government. And if your government isn't responsive, you lobby your government, or you become a citizen of another nation.

But in my speculative version, as in the real-life situation, you don't have good choices. Your adversary isn't just a regional player, it's the primary global power.

If you're a citizen of Kansaslahoma (or Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, the UK, Argentina, etc.), your government will not act against the global hegemon due to the power imbalance.

So you can't just go citizenship shopping. If you believe there's a great injustice that must be resolved, your only real options are to do nothing, or to make a direct appeal to the people.
His point (I think) is that white-hat security experts don't have access to the Windows source.
Buying a shotgun would work better, but I think it has more legal repercussions.
30 Days of the Grateful Dead
New type of nuclear fission discovered
I always assumed Windows binaries are heavily obfuscated, is that not the case?
I like puzzles. I like historical settings. I like the settings Pynchon chooses. I haven't really thought to building a coherent mental model of his prose style (unlike say DFW or Galeano or Eco, for whom I could do that rapidly).

What don't you like about him? I like criticisms of things I like.
I appreciate your perspective. I think you have an assumption that there's something innately "sleazy" about marketing, which is where I disagree. I also want to note that I advocate marketing, which is a different concept than selling. Selling is a transactional concept while marketing is about increasing your value in the mind of others.

There are sleazy ways to market yourself. However, the methods I advocate -- blogging, open source, speaking, etc. -- are about finding ways to provide value to people.
My company makes software for car dealers. Our customers strongly believe that the advice and guidance they provide when someone is buying a car is irreplaceable. They can't envision a future without salespeople.

Priority Inbox is just another example of how machines are getting to understand us better than we understand ourselves. Amazon knows what books I want to read before I've even heard of the author, Google knows that I incorrectly spelled my search query and so returns results for the correct spelling, and Xero figures out how much I've spent on coffee this month without a lot of manual entry. Advice is becoming a commodity.
Bayesian Learning in Social Networks
CompSci 101 - Big-O notation
I find these investment posts interesting, but I do miss pg covering those other topics as well.
Ask HN: Does the redesigned Grooveshark sound better too?
It seems to, and not insignificantly so. Is this just me? Or are other people noticing the same thing?
Storage, plain and simple. The Nexus One has a pitifully small internal application storage and everyone I know with one (who chooses not to root it) battles with space for applications. The 16Gig internal would be a dream. (though the lack of an SD slot really sucks... as does the lack of an LED)
Google eBooks for Android
I'm really quite curious why Google is still investing time into wave. It seems to me that either it is a worthy endeavor (which I think it is), or it isn't (ie, it should be scraped). But I don't understand scraping it and then revitalizing it soon after. Couldn't they have done the work the Apache Foundation will do faster in-house?
Yeah, comparing https://www.greplin.com/ to http://www.evernote.com/ it's pretty obvious.
Pretty much my point.

Everyone who could possibly help has open source access to *nix code.

Not everyone who could possibly help has access to Windows code.
Some are, but outside of DRM stuff, nothing in Windows itself. And even when obfuscation is in play, it's usually trivial.
I'm not sure, but I believe instead of replying to my point, you just tossed it out without consideration.

There's a long history in western civilization of what to do in just the situation you suppose. Where would you like to begin? John Locke? Hobbes? Confucius? Jefferson? MLK? Mandela? No matter where we start this journey we end up with individuals making their own choices and taking responsibility for their own actions. There is a fundamental difference between working to change a system by selectively exposing injustices and attacking the system itself. Now you might effectively come up with some sort of scenario where the only recourse is for the individual to choose war, but all you're doing then is picking option 3 from my list, and we haven't gotten anywhere that we weren't before.
Ask HN: Any tips for selling SaaS to colleges/universities?
I have been working on a product that will help colleges cut down their levels of roommate conflicts and have started sending emails and making calls.

Any tips for how to elicit the most interest from these universities? Dealing with universities is a bit tricky, and I would appreciate any advice or experience you all could offer.
It is a leap, but at least it would be a leap up. Neither the Super Hornets nor the JSFs which will replace them have the range and load that the FB-111 had.

For many mission profiles cruise missiles would do just as well -- better, actually -- but sometimes you don't want precision, you want to bust up a whole bunch of shit at the same time. That's the sweet spot for bombers. During the Timor independence crisis the forward deployment of 6 FB-111s from New South Wales to Darwin caused a buildup of troops and armor on the Indonesian side of the border to disperse and return to base.

FB-111s were originally purchased to fill a strategic role. Australia has a nuclear technology establishment. It's an open secret that we only have it to keep some degree of potential bomb-making knowhow on hand. But we don't have a rocketry organisation, so for that threat to remain credible you'd need a bomber that could carry an unrefined, bulky warhead. That's gone.

It was, in the context of the times, a quite nuanced deterrence which avoided prompting a regional arms race.
You'd think for a Books fail, one might have had the whale be white. Even better if you have Ahab attached to it with a harpoon, but that might be a little grisly for an error page.
I'm glad I was able to influence you in some small, positive way. It's comments like this that give me real satisfaction as a blogger.
Good insight information, thanks !
I can't help but wonder why Google is apparently willing to spend $6B on Groupon, but wasn't willing to spend roughly the same to secure a significant portion of the intellectual property assets that Google is heavily dependent upon.

Is Groupon really as or more valuable than Sun to Google?
Precisely. Like any form of marketing, there are ways to go about it that are sleazy and there are ways to go about it that are honest. The ones that are based on providing value to others benefit everyone the most.
Making data races manifest themselves
"Everyone Poops - Yours Isn't Special"
In fact this essay started out as an email to the ycfounders list. After a couple sentences I realized I should probably tell everyone.