skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have looked into this opportunity two years ago. here are my research:
1) USA carriers like Verizon offers a service charging $5 a month to backup contact
2) Carriers in China offers for free. But you have to input them first. But you can query your contact book using SMS. I assume their online contact book sync with your Outlook
3) In 3G, there is a mobile contact book XML standard, using which you can sync with any online contact book supporting that standard on 3G network. There are plenty of startups doing that already since it's so simple to implement.
Google actually was making a ton pre-IPO (on the order of a billion in revenue). Facebook isn't (yet).
Right, it's just that nobody knew about it. When Google's S-1 came out, everybody was astonished by how much money they were making.
What if you accidentally uninstall my app and lose many hours of work?
The question to ask is not what Facebook claims it's worth, but what Facebook thinks it's worth. As in, what's the internal valuation being used for setting employee option strike prices? Methinks nowhere near $10 billion.
BTW, the app in question is here:

http://apps.facebook.com/studystickies

Any hints on what might be wrong with it?
Why you so dumb, huh?
Project Management is Bollocks!
Someone has gone in and added a "status" column.

Everything in that column should have a date, at least an approximate one. There's too much on Wikipedia that's written in present tense. It should really be called "exit", not "status".
iSync on a mac? Or give zyb a try, it's pretty good.
Please cut out the PQ experiment. Of course pg gets more upvotes because many of us pay more attention to him than to random people. The voting isn't indiscriminate; you'll notice some of his comments and submissions do sit at 1.
Joost: 1 Million Users
Monthly updates of active projects would be reasonable. I'm curious which projects are dead, which wouldn't need to be updated often :-P
IPhone Use Disappoints; Apple Slides
Awesome. I love wikipedia -- almost as much as I love delegating work :D
What is the heysan business model? Get bought? Tiny text ads eventually?
At my current job they have a quite strange philosophy, which I don't share.

One one side the customer is simply a retarded who can't learn to use anything (but the managers have weird concept of usability), but at the same time the customer is always right and can decide exactly how their project should work, and how the screens must look.

So I end having a bunch of screens that must follow all the client requeriments and at same time be uber-easy to use.
Aren't they required by law to set them at the price of the last investment? IIRC, that was how it worked the last time I got ISOs. It sucked when the company got a new round of funding, because it meant all new ISOs needed to have a strike price that was roughly double what the old ones were.

FaceBook's Series-A had a pre-money valuation of like $78M, which is nearly unheard of in VC circles. If they've done further rounds, it'll be even higher.
Yeah, I figured it was un-Wiki-ish of me to complain about wanting one and not actually create one. I filled in what I know, but that still leaves a lot of holes.

And I'd like status to include things like funding rounds, usage milestones, etc, because many companies are still thriving without an exit. But you're right, there should be a date on everything.
Kyte Adds Multimedia Mobile Chat Features & Launches Facebook App
His point was that little costs can add up, and help you make the case that a big cost can actually be a cost savings.

You see this happen a lot, especially with costs that are sunk, like salaries. I don't know how many times I've seen the choice towards increasing workload and staff - even though it costs more than just buying a better piece of software - being made.

I'm not sure of your background, but obviously this post isn't aimed at you. If you've ever had to sit around a table at budget time however, it's pretty much a given that a good deal of people aren't able to do "manager math".
This is a great presentation. Who is else using Django besides me an Pownce? What about web.py?
A Thousand Lines of Code Per Week
How many lines of code do you write in a week? Let's forget for a moment the fact that line counts in different languages can differ in productivity, and that line counts aren't the perfect way to measure program complexity. Let's also say if you write a line of code then delete it, it still counts as a line. Do you write over a thousand lines of code per week in the language of your choice? If so, Bill Gates says you're an excellent programmer. From http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... :

"Well, let's figure it out," he said in a slightly condescending tone. "I don't think it could be more than 10,000 lines of code, and a really good programmer like you should be able to write at least a thousand lines of code per week, so I think it will take you less than 10 weeks to write it, if you're as good as I think you are."

How fast do you write code?
This is by far not the only gotcha in Facebook apping.

The Applications Settings form is a magical mess of spagetti logic. The first thing your learn is your can't even access the most useful applications settings in the form unless you choose "other users can install this application" ... then magically the form explodes with all the options you really need to set ... wtf? ...and then the About text for your app is entered in two different forms. Choosing developed by a company vs. developed by individual causes different kind of linkage on the app About page.... The most drunken delusional designer at Microsoft could not design a worse form than this.

Another thing you learn on your own is Facebook does not tell you the end user's ID unless the user installed your application. Their docs talk about the login process but are silent on explaining the difference between login vs. install which leads to this madness about "infinite sessions". All it means is if the user installs your application == infinite session. If user "logs into" your application == 24 hour session. Needless to say it is easier if user installed your application, again not mentioned in the docs.

Oh and another thing, Facebook does not save application data for you. Saving user settings and data is totally your problem to solve. It'd be nice if Facebook had an API to stash just a little bit of data for each app user but no dice.

...oh and finally try submitting your application to the product directory... SORRY! Your application needs to have at least 5 users before it will be listed!! How does an application that hasn't lanuched yet and isn't even listed get 5 users??? Such are the mysteries of Facebook.
All good answers. The reason I am asking is because we made such a software for java phones ( and we can port it to more phones) and I was wondering if that feature is enough to launch a startup around it.
What do you think
And this headline was suppose to entice us to go to the site....?
If someone sends me relevant info to the email address listed in my profile I will be happy to throw it into wikipedia.
Wild. I was living in Providence for over a year and never heard of this.
Looks good, but you shouldn't put equal weight on all the categories. Profiling something slow (a program, a site) means figuring out what's killing you and fixing that. So don't worry about getting an 'A' grade from this thing for checking all the boxes.
I had no idea what the heck you were talking about, 'til I took a closer look.. Indeed, the submitter of this article is 'pq', not 'pg'.
I forgot to say above that the sequel, The Seasoned Schemer, is really great, too. It's got some challenging parts though.
In that case, it's a question of attitude, not (simple, ridiculously obvious) equations. Why is it called 'math', much less 'manager math', when it's really about being stingy?
I was reminded heavily of 37 signals reading the post. Some of their front-page copy sums it up nicely: "Everything you need, nothing you don't."

Although that's not quite accurate, it's a good generalization. I think the 2 standard deviations rule is a good one: build anything that is useful for about 95% of your users.
New Blog: Get Venture
How exactly do you know that they don't?
Wow, Aeron chairs at a conference table. I usually only see them in posh marketing firms where executives sit in conferences all day.
Apple is up in after hours on 3Q earnings posted this afternoon. Jobs also expects 1 million iPhone sales by end of fiscal 4Q.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/apple-profit-rises-73-...
Karma for PQ=0.
Maybe its time to stop the experiment now.
Earnings call today at 5PM EST.
"Here's what it found: To live up to the expectations embedded in its current share price, Google would have to increase its EVA, which was $2.4 billion for the past four quarters, by $2 billion annually this year, next year, and every year into the future - forever. So Google's EVA next year would have to be $4.4 billion; in five years it would have to be $12.4 billion, and so on."

That's one way to look at it, but that's assuming that it's going to grow earnings linearly, rather than exponentially. Google isn't growing linearly, and they haven't in the past (look at their record from 2002 on: $99,656, $105,648, $399,119, $1,465,397, $3,077,446). Under no circumstances would one thing that the best fit here is linear growth.
Want to make your site look better on the iPhone with one line of HTML?
Er. He may be talking about diseconomies of scale (it's harder to get a high return invest $1 billion than investing $1 million), which would be nothing new. Or he's claiming absolutely lower returns (earning $5 million on a $10 million investment versus earning $2 million on a $20 million investment), in which case he's almost always wrong.

There are a small number of cases where a startup would have lasted longer if they'd raised less -- but there's still a pretty strong correlation between having lots of capital and getting a high absolute return.
How to learn how to program well
I graduated from undergrad with (essentially) a C.S. minor in 2003. Since then I've managed to pick up some practical hacking skills and projects, but I really want to take my programming to a higher level. What's the best way to do that?

FWIW, my language of choice right now is Python, which is what our startup is written in. What little I know and understand about functional programming and recursion, I enjoy, but I feel like I still don't have a very strong grasp on algorithms, performance, and what makes for truly beautiful code.

I own PG's ANSI Common Lisp and have considered studying it as part of the answer to this question.

To complicate this, a little background: I've been offered two jobs: Job A means I can code in any language I want on a really cool skunkworks project--but I would have to be entirely self-taught; Job B means I would have to code in C#.NET, but I would be surrounded by some serious nerds (OS and graphics types) that would in theory be willing to mentor me.

What would you choose, assuming compensation was the same?
so hot right now. total boner;P
No Response Needed
Tired of Pointless email responses?
It's Time to Drop the "www"
A startup provides the best way ever to find your work buddies
The Two Most Powerful Words in Business
A single most powerful line I've been using when communicating to people is: "Thank you."

The author of this article is clueless.

PS: I linked this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36709
Couldn't he get an invitation to a party by Paris Hilton? That would be more interesting...

In fact, shouldn't there be enough "Stars" who might appreciate his company? Maybe they should bank on that.
http is deprecated
I think the iPhone met expectations in real sales (vs activations), earnings report came out today.
I voted down pg on his own site. That was fun!
That's actually 'pq'.. I fell for it too.
how sly!
Many blogs require an email address if you want to comment. I've never understood why. I just enter a bogus address
People use "http://" in web content?
(mt) Media Temple - Introducing AccountCenter for iPhone
Decision to store geocodes
I am working on a website and am planning on implementing a google map on each page and would need to make between 10-50 geocode requests on each page. Is it smart to have a whole new table just for storing these geocode address or is it easier to just hit google every page refresh?

Thanks in advance.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pq
user:	pq
created:	2 hours ago
karma:	-5
about:	Not you-know-who; just want to see how many people confuse him for me, since his stuff seems to get a ton of upvotes, automatically.
what, not voldemort?
We are using this method on our site. Create temporary user on the fly and let the user overwrite it if they select to save their state and it works great for us. I think just by renaming the registration page to save work page gives you an advantage since the users are sick and tired of having to register in order to get any value.
Teenwag.com - A place for teens, friends, funny videos
Definitely store them, or at least cache them.
Top Social Networks: The Summer of Social?
Facebook may be the darling of the web 2.0 press, but it was MySpace that grabbed the most attention from consumers in June.
As an update on this, what you need to do is send a request for elaboration to developers-help@facebook.com. I got detailed feedback by doing so.
For us Linux People - How To Forge
Seems like a useful collection of how tos' for various linux distributions.
D'oh! Fonts...too...tiny...must squint...
Monthly updates by whom? You gonna heard fifty cats (or startup founders) into doing anything that doesn't involve free food? I doubt it.
Zabbix - Remote server monitoring tool
Have you used this? Have you used Nagios? A penny for your thoughts.
TED Talk - Microsoft Virtual Earth - pretty good
A Timeless Success Formula
Napoleon Hill described this formula as "A success formula that always succeeds when applied."
I could have been. But since the process is automated, it is much less hassle than searching through huge yellow page books.
I was thinking more in the Digg sense.
Not just the backup.Maybe you can strech it by allowing a user to upload her address book to the site. Then the site automatically links everyone on your phone book to each others profiles and if anyone changes a phone number it has a cascading effect on everyone who is linked with them - this way phones numbers stay current easily. Also, you could offer functionality to send business cards to each other.And maybe even backup text messages.
A social network for phones.
By fan or the founders. Wikipedia is essentially designed for herding cats. That's just another name for user-generated content.
Job A if your want to improve your creativity.

Job B if you want to encourage your technique.

To improve my programming I generally do things that I can't figure out how to do in my head.
Epi0Bauqu is definitely correct that you do not want to access google 10-50 times with each page refresh, that would be very slow.

However, with the number of pieces of data you are requesting you'll have to be intelligent with your storage and querying mechanism. Example: you will very likely want to fork your queries to google to make the entire batch of requests simultaneously instead of sequentially. When you start implementing a caching/storage mechanism you'll want to keep this in mind too: accessing memcached 50 times sequentially will be slower than querying PostgreSQL once (in general, although if the database is very large and has to be paged in and out of memory, etc, this may not hold). So you'll probably want to figure out a way to store these requests in your database, and have a single query that can recall all the relevant geocodes (I don't know the details of how the geocodes will relate to each other, so I can't really be specific), and then you will want to cache that entire request. This will mean that you will (when dealing with data you have already retrieved from google... and prefetching data that you expect to see wouldn't be a bad idea) have at worst one SQL query, and at best a quick access in memcached.

If you can't think of a way to group requests like this, I strongly suspect you will need to rethink your application. Performing 10-50 external requests per page refresh will put a serious damper on your site's performance, and making 50 database queries per page refresh or even 50 memcached queries per page refresh is probably untenable (although you could start caching the entire created pages, depending on what exactly your application does). To get sufficiently quick speed to do 50 queries, you'd probably have to use local memory (which is significantly quicker than memcached), but using local memory will open the door into a thread safety hell.
sorry let me in explain. i will have a database of locations and it already stores the address. i havent looked to deeply into the google maps api, so i am not sure if I will make just 1 request to google for the entire map or if it requires 50 requests to get every marker on the map.

so, would it make sense to cache the results? anyone have good links for tips on memcache?

thanks already for the great feedback
I would take the first job. Many people without a complete formal education have this fear about the things they should know. They also assume that if they had only completed a CS major they would in fact understand these things. Unfortunately this doesn't play out.

I graduated with a CS major, and many of my classmates who graduated with the same did not have a very strong grasp on "algorithms, performance, or what makes beautiful code". Don't let the lack of a formal CS education distress you. The students who know the most are the ones who are off doing their own projects and working with each other to create things, those who charge through the curriculum learn a lot, but don't internalize the knowledge, and thus retain little of it.
I completely agree, they do need to get that pioneering spirit back into the product line.

Although I think the movie studios are a bigger hurdle to digital delivery then almost any company can overcome. The sheer amount of DRM that they will need to place into any product they create will make it nearly useless and no one will make any money off of it because no one will want to use it.

So here is a good question: How do you solve the DRM vs consumer rights problem while still making money and not getting sued out of existence?

If Netflix answered this one question they would be more then relevant again.
The only thing I can think of is to create a way to try to get the user to the page they were requesting as quickly as possible. Or at least make sure you keep them on your site instead of them wandering off somewhere else.
"Are you sick of emails that say 'thanks' or 'sounds great' and other pointless ones that you really didn't need to read?"

I never want to work with anybody that has that attitude. You don't have to time even READ (let alone politely respond to) a "thank you?" But, I bet you have plenty of time to read and respond to everything on digg, reddit, slashdot, news.yc, and facebook.
Facebook is reminding me more and more of Microsoft, it would be good for them if they remind us of Google or something.
[ microsoft = bad. google = ok.]
I understand what you mean. But, who is going to be entering valuable, unreproducible data into Facebook? If they re-install your app then they will probably be pretty happy to enter everything all over again.
Twitter, month 5
iPhone, month 1
hmmm sounds nice.
Jason Calacanis thinks Mahalo doesn't have any competitors
Really?
100 web apps for everything you will possibly need
hmmm did that & got crucified because it's "so over the top" and "too formal" - I'll stick to what I'm doing ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=sbootload++%22Reference%22+%5...
I would take the first job. It will likely put you in more "if I don't figure this out, nobody else will, and we'll be completely screwed" type situations, and those can be great motivators for doing/learning things you never would have bothered with otherwise.
How do you make "arrogant" blogs acceptable?  Build a service dedicated to them?
By arrogant, I mean something like a blog where you talk about your own ideas. Examples:

http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/

http://ideas.4brad.com/

http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/

IMO, there is nothing inherently wrong with these blogs. The problem is that people have certain expectations of what a blog is and these sorts of blogs do not meet those expectations.
It kinda just takes time.

I think the ideal situation would be having something like Job B for a while until you feel like you're a solidly professional duder, and then move on to something more risky and adventurous. I wasted vast amounts of time trying to teach myself to program as a teenager because I didn't know where to go to. Having some structure and guidance could help you.
I think this is the way to go. I am taking this approach for a multi-player game I'm developing - you can play without registering, but you can register afterwards to save your score.

My primary project, mystorespace.com, takes a similar approach. We have a fully functional demo accessible without an account (you will be automatically logged in as testuser@mystorespace.com). I really don't like having to register in order to try something, so I assume most users feel the same way.
Would Arc benefit from [] replacing ()?
On standard qwerty keyboards, typing [], which can be typed with just your pinkie, seems far easier than typing (), which requires at least two fingers and movement of your right hand. What do you all think?
Startup Hacks: Marketing with no money - RescueTime interview
This is a followup post to "Think you work hard? Think again." It's an audio interview with Tony Wright, the founder and CEO of RescueTime.com.

We chat about how startups on a tight budget can market their product and business for free. Topics include getting covered by TechCrunch, linkbait and getting covered by sites like Digg or Reddit, writing great headlines for articles, getting a product to market with no money raised and ugly vs pretty websites and whether that affects your marketing success.
What about the photo scroller?
Their form also asks for like 7 different URLs (canvas, ToS, unistall, install, etc), while many FB apps don't care about all these URLs. It would be nice if they had an option "use the same URL for everything", or, better yet, made everything but the "canvas" URL optional.
Understanding Why Your VC Is Acting Crazy
Obviously there are benefits to both options.

Personally, I find myself in similar dilemma. I studied CS, and the whole time my goal in life was to be a programmer and work with computers. Then you get into the industry and you realise you have achieved your goal, and find you need new goals. You realise the IT world is so huge and there so much to do out there. There is much more to IT than programming.

Theres probably no right answer. I would reassess my goals. Where do you want to be in 10 years. 15 years? Imagine the path to this goal, and I'm sure the right choice will present itself. It may be neither of those options. In fact, I wouldn't limit myself to only 2.

Do you want to be a programmer all your life? (sounds pretty boring to me). This is an important question to ask yourself. What is going to be the best step to where you want to be later on?
Q&A with Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist
My favorite question:
---
Where do you see Craigslist in five or ten years? --Nishi Viswanathan, Austin

I would expect lots more of the same, plus incremental improvements based on user requests. In ten years we may be approaching the Singularity [a state when machines become smarter than humans], in which case all bets are off.