skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to be one of the most prominent debates between entrepreneurs: ideas vs. execution. I'm sure that a lot of us would agree that the solution isn't black-and-white, but it would still be beneficial to know how much influence ideas and execution each had in the end product and its success.

Unfortunately, the title of this post falsely suggests that it is black-and-white. And the article itself uses the same arguments I've heard everyone else with the same stance use. That seems to be the problem: we keep using the same arguments over and over again. People on either side have failed to make a convincing argument, as their arguments are getting old and repetitive.

What we need is a logical explanation to be written or even an experiment to be done on the subject. Perhaps Paul Graham might consider taking up the issue in his next essay, as I know we all enjoy reading them and I'm sure he could introduce some new arguments in the piece.

My "fresh perspective" on the subject is that ideas and execution don't occur in the ways most people expect they would. It's not as if an entrepreneur spends two weeks coming up with an idea and then six weeks executing. The ideas phase and the execution phases are intertwined, in a way where the entrepreneur will spend a portion of each day coming up with ideas as well as well as another portion executing them. Even if you believe you have the solid idea down, executing it will bring up new questions that need to be answered and thus more ideas have to be made.

However, there are usually a few days in the beginning in which the entrepreneur has to come up with the core idea, the framework for everything to come, or the initial innovation. And while the core idea is important to some extent, I actually believe the ideas that are made closer to the end of development cycle have more importance. This may sound counterintuitive since these ideas often result in small details that the user may hardly notice. But these details are like the details Steve Jobs puts in his products. These are the details that affect the user the most. They can bring the core idea to a whole new level by building on it. But without them, there is essentially nothing special about the product.

Try taking a new perspective on the old debate of ideas vs. execution. Don't forget that ideas are made at the same time as the execution process, and not just at the beginning. The core idea is important and it determines the potential success of the product, but the ideas and execution that follow determine the actual success of the product. Unless the core idea is worthless and has little potential, the ideas and execution are more important in my opinion.
I've never had very good luck using the Ubuntu Ruby packages. The binaries are never linked, and I can't update Rubygems, which means I can't install a lot of gems that I need. Is it tough to use RVM on a production server? Is it easy to get Thin setup and all that?
Then we won't need to remap caps-lock anymore.
I thought they were moving towards basing all units of measure on the speed of light?
What I'm really curious about is the disparity between how they are treated for their respective action

The FTC is a regulatory body - Google is a corporation. There's a difference in motivation.
I've always used the browser RSS button precisely in order to add feeds to Google Reader -- I feel like that's the button's main use case. It's an immediate, standard way to see whether a page offers a feed, and to quickly save the feed in your reader. I've found it incredibly useful.
Why do you think I’m worried?

Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)
There's something a bit strange about the approach of this post that suggests a confusion of concepts (though I'm not saying there's anything factually incorrect about it).

The standard C library and the POSIX API are two quite different things.

The standard C library is a library of functions defined by the various C language standards. These functions should be available on any C language implementation regardless of the platform (Unix/POSIX, Windows, embedded RTOS, micro-controller with no OS, etc.).

The POSIX API is a platform specification for Unix like platforms (though the API is sometimes available non-natively on non-Unix like platforms). It is comparable to the win32 API on windows. It has no particular connection to the C language other than that C is the language in which the API is provided.

Perhaps one reason for this confusion is that today many people are familiar with higher level programming environments like Java or Python which provide much richer standard libraries than do C and C++. They include things like multithreading and network communications. C programmers need to use platform specific API's like POSIX or win32 to access these services. Also note that pretty much any higher level language running on a modern OS is ultimately using the platform system API's to provide such services because the OS kernel doesn't allow user space programs access to them other than through a system call mechanism (which the platform API's typically wrap).

One other possible source of confusion that the post doesn't mention is that on Unix the library one links to for both the C standard library functions and the Unix/POSIX system API's is called libc (it's usually called glibc on Linux). Despite the name this is not the same thing as the C standard library.
I know the rss reader fever (by Shaun Inman) tries to do something like this.
> And even for technical users like me, [RSS] isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content.

I have no expectation for it to solve that. It serves its purpose well. I'm thankful for widespread RSS and love using it.
Another thing that I've been using to punch out mvp type projects fast is this for the UI:

http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/

A grid system is awesome to begin with to help with laying stuff out well. But this also includes some basic css boilerplate for typography, forms, tables, etc.

It's purposefully in black and white (see the grey box method http://v3.jasonsantamaria.com/archive//2004/05/24/grey_box_m...) which doesn't look half bad until you decide the mvp is worthy enough of some better style.
You don't. Many journals' PDF-downloading systems embed metadata as well as visible watermarks containing your institution and often a timestamp and an IP address (of course, if your institution uses EZProxy, the IP address might not be immediately trackable back to you).
It's the one the emacs uses.
As a huge Stephenson fan (specifically Snowcrash here) I often tell people how unlike his world our world turned out to be.

In Snowcrash, the rapid pace of technological change has basically splintered the world and caused the empowerment of men and small organizations and the collapse of central governments. In the real world, governments learned how to effectively use mass media to get their message across. From going to war in Iraq, to going after wikileaks to building Great Walls, governments are doing great, with a great future ahead of them.
The same thing happened to Gentoo. I talked to the people behind Ruby packages in Gentoo and they wanted to manually create packages for each gem. It is one of the main reasons why I gave up on Gentoo and went back to Arch Linux.

I see gems as just snippets of code instead of "real" OS packages. They change a lot, they are application specific, and (most of the time) they are simple.
The Death Spiral (print publishing)
Delays in boarding are slow because of people sitting next to each other who are not traveling together. If you have a minor with a window seat and you are sitting next to them, there's is no reason you can't board at the same time; you're not going to be getting up to let someone in after you've sat down.

One abuse I don't like but see often is the "we are traveling with an extended family of adults and one baby, so everyone gets to board 'early' due to the traveling-with-infant rule".
Repost: Need your thoughts and advice.
This is a repost. I really don't know how many people viewed,as I posted it during night :)

Hi. I am a masters student in computer science. Last semester(fall 2010), I took a semester break and came back to India(my native country) because I was not really interested in continuing my masters degree. I don't really think it fits me and my goal.

I am working on my own website and testing it as of now. I really want to continue doing that. So, I was just thinking if I could work on my own website and do freelancing part-time to support myself. Is it possible to get around $800 - 1000/month doing freelancing.

I really love developing Ruby on Rails applications. I have developed applications using ROR, PrototypeJS, jQuery. This is not an advertisement for my freelancing, just an genuine doubt since I believe, many of you reading this would have gone through something like this and would like to know your thoughts.
I'm one of the Remote Conductor devs, and this is the first product from our bootstrapped two person startup, m3me. If you have any questions, let me know!
I just bought it because I was curious. It works well. I just wish it was possible to keep the application in switcher mode. Once you switch apps it drops back into trackpad mode.

Still, this will be pretty useful with my bluetooth keyboard. I now have a wifi trackpad.
The replacement for RSS isn't Facebook and Twitter...it's email. People don't understand RSS but they understand: "Enter your email address to subscribe to updates." Hence the reason that CPM rates for email are so much higher...
I'm a little slower, 1.4x on VLC.
What's the advantage of this over using Facebook and/or Twitter?
Pointing out differences between national business cultures != nationalism.

Handwaving with WWII outcomes = nationalism.
ok this is what you do:
you go to the library only once, get a membership card and a username/password for electronic use.
and use that username/password to access electronic resources of that library from anywhere.
i hope this helps.
edit:grammar.
> Notice how beside ad hominens you don't provide any arguments in this "reply"?

I provided my arguments in my original reply. You then switched to saying Gruber and Arment are always right. I then asked you the definition of right you and me can accept. You did not give one explicitly but it sounded like your definition of right was "whatever Apple does and whatever I perceive" - just like Gruber and Arment. Which to me isn't objective. So I did the next logical thing - agreed that you agree to your convictions about Apple.

It's hard to argue with people who invariably talk only positively and mostly subjectively (it just 'feels' right) about even somewhat complex subjects which require actually defining things, having a lack of bias and use of analytical skills.

For the Apple camp - the simplistic rule is "What Apple does is right - if what they do changes, so does what is right". So for example when Apple gets market share - market share is the king and when they start losing it, suddenly that is no longer worth discussing - profits are. Shifting goal posts. You don't hear the Apple fans complain about anything Apple - the ridiculous positioning of USB ports on MBP for e.g. - for a company and its fans that pride themselves with superior usability - this apparently is no problem at all. That's biased and you can't really argue with biased people other than to say - ok, to you your own.

That is not to say Apple hasn't done great things - but it is also non-sensical to say everything they have done is right and everything anyone else is doing and will do in future will end up being crap - that's essentially what Arment says in that post. And you will get no further discussion from me if that's what you want to subscribe to.
Andrew Warner's Mixergy (www.mixergy.com) pretty much fills this role for me -- some of the talks are merely good, but many of them are amazingly great. I like TED Talks too (and they have much better production values than Mixergy), but Mixergy is something everyone should listen to as well. (imagine: interviews of interesting people by someone who actually is himself both a subject matter expert AND insightful and probing without being obnoxious...)
Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.

That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.
To be clear I have no expectation for RSS to solve the discoverability problem either, and I think RSS/Atom/PubSubHubbub is very useful. I'm just noting why I believe they aren't heavily used by most people, and in particular, me.
Yeah, using a grid-based css framework is a huge time saver. I find things tend to get a bit less readable when you've got "grid_5 alpha push_2 foo bar" classes everywhere, but hey, it does wonders for getting an MVP done.

Also, that JSM post never gets old.
Mm... I'm not sure about that. Google Scholar is a good resource, that's true. But there are hundreds of papers I've looked for that are simply not accessible without proper access.

That said, I don't support this site.
They might have had list pricing but I never saw that page.

When we wanted a confit from Sun, we called our account manager and they did a config/quote for us. We also never paid list pricing.
People normally do this on facebook using the photos feature It would be a website that is basically for doing that and learning about what your friends just bought and been able to know cool new products or clothing. The ladies always want to know what their friends think of their dresses or makeup while the men love to know what other think of his new perfume, suit or car.
That seems like it's the best option, actually. For power-users, a 3rd-party built extension is more likely to be updated / have the options you want than the button built into every version of the browser.
No, that is the beauty of using system packages, you just apt-get install them (if they are packaged, that is). That is why it is so important for projects to make it easy for distributions to (re)package extensions.
The argument is that more people would use the feature if the UI were better, and that hiding the feature because "nobody uses it (because it sucks)" is not the same statement as "nobody uses it (because nobody wants it)".
Harvard, for one, doesn't let you do that. You can't even get into most of their library buildings without an ID.
>IF RSS DIES, WE LOSE THE ABILITY TO READ IN PRIVATE

Based on what causal chain? At best, it's an incredible stretch of a slippery slope fallacy.
Can't we just use Google reader and be done with it?
As does any device with a large screen, reasonably fast processor, and tiny form factor. There's only so much room available for a battery.
For the most part, scientists publish in the highest prestige journal possible, because that counts the most toward tenure/ pay raises/ grant application chances; the most prestigous journals are -- for historical reasons -- still closed since they are profit centers for big for-profit publishing houses like Wiley.

On the other hand, all the scientists I know wish they could give their papers away for free because it builds their reputation to have people use and cite them, even undergrads at state colleges that can't afford the bigger database subscriptions.

Except for textbooks, scholars almost never make royalties, so the profit incentive isn't what you might think. A scholar makes more money by getting raises from the university, speaking and consulting fees, and publishing undergrad textbooks (sometimes). All of these are increased if their is a wider dissemination of their work.

Finally, .... in the US, almost all research is funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly, it's just NIH funded stuff that must be free.

Finally, finally .... if it weren't for the fact that the prestigious journals are a ticket to tenure and promotion, there would be no reason to publish anywhere except for Arxiv: so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system...
Join the Resistance – A Hacker’s Guide to Health & Fitness
Coming from a Canadian entrepreneur/hacker, I can say despite our best efforts it's still sort of hard to be taken seriously by some investors. Where I live there is still a huge focus on oil and energy, so unless your technology is applicable to that industry you have only a handful of angels who understand tech who haven't already moved on to silicon valley, etc.

The brain drain effect is pretty serious here. Why wouldn't I want to go somewhere where the other smart people are, and where I can pretty much wear shorts 10 months out of the year? Culture/politics aside, the US is still one of the best places to live if you have money.
I wondered about this myself as I wrote, but I wasn't 100% sure that CPAN could self-update. I don't honestly know why they're treated differently. (I also wonder about cabal and pip and luarocks, etc. I just don't know.)

Corrado mentions here that he would like to see Ruby/gems handled more like Perl/CPAN in Debian, but I'm not sure exactly what that means or what it would look like.
I know but understand that I don't want to waste 50+ bucks on that for my desktop when I have the iPhone and with an app I can do the same for 5 $
> My personal view is that the Ruby/GEM packages should be laid out like the Perl/CPAN, which seems to be doing just fine.

Could you say a bit more about what this would look like and how Debian's treatment of Perl differs from how it handles Ruby?
>They are still the world's most popular browser

Because of their history. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is bundled with Windows. And look how quickly they've been falling in use. Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an incredible mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how far they've fallen from such complete domination.
Compass ( http://compass-style.org/ ) lets you use CSS frameworks while bypassing the problem of non-semantic class names by using SASS mixins. It's yet another layer of abstraction to learn, but worth a look if you don't know about it already.
It’s a project I’ve been wanting to build for a while, [...]

I think that makes it more than 24 hrs from concept to launch. I suppose you already designed a good deal of the website in your head, if not layout-wise then certainly functionality- / interaction-wise, right?
And where do the aggregators get the news item they aggregate?

They often get their news from blogs, news websites, word of mouth, and web searches. RSS is very useful for keeping up with some of these sources.

Sometimes aggregators do get their news from other aggregators, but at some point that incestuous chain has to be broken and someone has to read the original news somewhere and pass it on to an aggregator.

Finally, most aggregators themselves (including HN), publish their news via RSS (or Atom). I know that's how I read HN headlines, and virtually every other news source I regularly read.
User Experience as a Lesson in Civics
I knew that I wanted to do some kind of reverse Q&A, but fleshed the entire thing out within the 24hr period.
There is a way to keep it in switcher mode: just tap the little lock icon in the bottom left corner. When the icon is locked, tapping on a window will keep switcher mode active (tapping on the background will bring you back to track mode).
And while we are on the topic :) these are some sweet buttons you can create if you are using compass:

https://github.com/imathis/fancy-buttons
The Telnet Song (1984)
Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit!

Nothing offensive about that, as long as it's expressed in a polite manner. To me it sounds like a constructive proposal from someone who has witnessed the problems first-hand, he's not just "ranting from the sidelines".

This is not about imperialism. It's about improving the communications in a project that has long turned international. English is the lowest common denominator. Refusing to acknowledge that simple fact does not help anything.
Disagree. The author clearly refers to corporations like Facebook and Twitter tracking your reading behavior.
The title is misleading, because diet could very well be tied to the Neanderthal extinction. It is just not as simple as, "The Neanderthals didn't eat grains."

See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-did-neanderthals-di... for my explanation over a year ago of why the Neanderthals may have died out. According to that explanation I would expect that the Neanderthals were willing and able to eat anything that our ancestors were willing to eat. However in the presence of competition from our ancestors, they couldn't.
i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine.

And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS.

What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
Install "Barcode Scanner" (available in the default android market). Open a contact (I am listed in my own contacts list), hit menu, select share, select Barcode Scanner, see a QR code on your screen that someone else can scan.
just did the same on some forum I've been a member of for quite a while. the traffic is definitely very good - and I think in general probably a lot better than what you get from reddit.
Cyber Criminals Target Home Equity Lines of Credit
It is working. Safari changed the way it displays RSS feeds. You have to click and hold on the “Reader” button to display any RSS feeds.
Yes, but too bad Gibson's latest books read as if they're from the past...
What would an RSS reader good enough for Kroc's grandmother and 419,999,999 other Firefox users look like? I would be genuinely interested in his designs for one. Of the many different RSS reader add-ons I've tried for Firefox, for example, there haven't been any that made me say "we've gotta put this in Firefox, let's delay $otherwork instead". If we had an energetic contributor like Kroc, though, it's quite possible that we could end up in a great place. I'm not trying to say "patches talk, chump", though of course they do speak quite compellingly. I'm trying to indicate that via open projects like Mozilla technical people can have agency beyond voting in bugzilla (!) or a letter-writing campaign.

It'll be interesting to test Kroc's thesis, though: if he's right that RSS will be harmed a lot by Firefox removing the RSS icon, then hits to the RSS stream from Firefox UAs should change trend-line between 3.6.x and 4. I look forward to such a follow-up, it would be interesting data!
"(and passes the "clearly understandable", Khan academy style, 10 minute video lecture)"

it definitely doesn't pass the 10 minute video lecture requirement though. Strang talks about SVD for almost 45 minutes.
Bitcoin? Call me when I don't have to forward ports through a firewall to handle currency, and when I don't have to keep a local copy of every transaction ever made by anyone on the whole system.
Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.
The Wilderness Below Your Feet: Urban spelunking
If it can track updates to packages, it'll be great news.
For a great explanation of how integral relates to summing the product of infinitely many terms, see: http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-calculus-analogy-integ...