skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More of a web app than a startup. It's the sort of thing where this app can be part of a business, but doesn't appear to be a complete scalable business by itself.

You need a professional copy-editor and designer. The design is good for a wireframe, but it doesn't look slick enough to make potential users want to associate themselves with your brand. The copy has a lot of strange capitalizations mid-sentence and doesn't flow smoothly.

The site doesn't explain the value proposition very clearly. "Learn how to increase satisfaction 40%" is a much more concrete explanation of the benefits.
Nokia used to be up around 60% of the mobile phone market (in terms of profit). Now they're around ~20%, while Apple is more than 50% (on less than 5% marketshare).

Nokia is still making money, but pretty much all new profit is going to everyone else (especially Apple).

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2666565/posts
It's perfectly reasonable to rag on it for this. What's not reasonable is that the code can be written in a much more compact way by not trying for an "applicative" style.

List even = new ArrayList();
for(int i : new Integer[]{1,2,3,4})
if (i%2==0) even.add(i);

Still larger than necessary, and this doesn't have all the necessary class cruft, but still much smaller.

Stolen shamelessly from https://gist.github.com/817635
Steve Yegge recommends a few key bindings in his awesome post, "Effective Emacs" - http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs
I could not figure out what this article was trying to say. Either I'm tireder than I think I am or it's really badly written.
I didn't hear of CTC until you mentioned it. Got a chance to try the free version so here is my take on it
1) Angry Birds is easier to play than CTC. Start AB and you are ready to go. For CTC, you need to go through several clicks
2) For AB, it was pull back and let go, for CTC, it took a while to get used to launching the balls from the trebuchet.

My 3 year old daughter could easily understand how to start and playAB, but she couldn't even start CTC when I left it to her to play by herself.

She enjoys the cute sound AB makes as compared to the sound effects of CTC.

I guess the simplicity is the key here
Motivational Quote(s) For Entreprenuers
Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage. - Niccolò Machiavelli

One of my personal favorite quotes. I'd be interested in seeing some quotes that resonate with other founders.
umm is that supposed to show off Erlang? Maybe it's just me but for such a simple task that looks bad.
While not a Lisp OS, StumWM http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/index.html is an interesting project. I run it on Debian, and I like to pretend I using a Lisp Machine.
I don't know. I am not hooked on AB, but my 3 year old daughter enjoys it (enjoys, but is not hooked yet).
I got bored with it after a while as well, but it goes to show, what I think doesn't really matter, people are willing to pay for what I find boring
The memo directly addresses how Nokia no longer owns the medium or low-end of the market either.

They're being squeezed by smartphone tech making its way down towards mid-range 'featurephones' (i.e. a cheap Android handset easily beats a mid-range Symbian featurephone), while the low-end stuff is becoming a commodity churned out by Chinese OEMs.
How about: America a friend of the status quo.

'Why is it that the "international community" continues to do business with an Egyptian regime which has killed its citizens, attacked journalists, trampled on practically every single human right; and above all never contested a free election?'

See: Russia, China, etc.

I expect that under Nasser and then under Sadat before he opted for peace with Israel that the policies were generally more popular. But democratic?
The Wealthy Pirate VC
I found my team by hanging around the CS lab at UC Irvine and reaching out to the ACM club pres at CSUF a while back. I am a business major that previously had two non-tech startups and I needed hackers in my corner for a project. Luckily, the help found turned into ongoing collaboration with a small diverse group. It helps that we are all upperclass/grad students that have previous experience. We all offer something different to the team and we tend not to argue so much because of this.

When PG says to try projects before a jumping into a company he’s saying: you should date your girl for a while before moving in together.
Let me be the first to say: FINALLY

Autorun was an annoyance at best and a security hole at worst. I'm glad they've finally decided to do away with it. I do wonder why they didn't decide to do this across all media, though.

FTA: As we've pointed out before, the changes to Autorun still don't go far enough. CDs and DVDs by default still automatically execute code when inserted. Adam Shostack, a program manager for Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, said here that Microsoft has yet to see in-the-wild attacks that exploit Autorun on “shiny media.”
JAVA

for (int i:new int[]{1,2,3,4}) System.out.print(i%2==0?i:"");
I used to work for the internet arm of Condé in NYC in the mid aughts. The cafeteria was amazing; they'd have some big-deal chef in each week to work a lunch shift (though people would usually smoke instead of eating). The women there were also incredibly attractive -- it helped having Vogue in the same building. I have no idea what their San Francisco offices are like, but if they're anything like New York, it makes working there almost worth it. ...

almost...
No, you can represent it with your fingers but not count it. By 'count' I mean an ordinal traversal of the sort you teach kids.
Nokia regularly cripple features, specifically including VoIP, at the demands of carriers. Perhaps not US carriers, but it happened frequently in the UK.

I took the calls of people angry that their 'top end' handset couldn't do VoIP because they bought it from Vodafone.

The carriers were always Nokia's customers, not the consumers, I can't see how that's going to change.
they're not?!
furiously rewrites plans
And also the part of the rumors that makes the least sense. Hack through the middle management and bureaucracy with a chainsaw, cut off all the incredibly inefficient contractors, clean all the dead wood from R&D, kill one or both of the in-house operating systems, give up on building services and just start preloading every phone with Bing services for big money, etc. One might not agree with those actions, but at least one could plausibly argue that they'd be beneficial to the future of the company.

But how exactly is moving the heart of the company into Sunnyvale going to help? Nokia isn't exactly in the position to compete for the best people in those horribly over-fished waters, especially soon after a round of brutal layoffs. Are the dregs of Silicon Valley really going to be that much better than the talent elsewhere? Does the world even need one more company centered around that echo chamber?
> But wouldn't Nokia still be making a lovely profit even if they stuck to the more vanilla phones?

Maybe. Until the smartphone market mostly cannibalizes the dumbphone market.

Then where are they?
Many of the other languages write this in functions that are first class citizens. The functions are ready to be used. In Java you would still need to put this inside another class to make it run and other classes would need to instantiate that class to run it.

That's a big difference.
At first glance this is the exact same thing as KISS Insights. How are you better?
Ugh. Thanks for convincing me not to learn Erlang.
Do you think there is a fixed "profit" out there for the taking?

Apple's profit margin is an extreme aberration, and it isn't sustainable. Any comparison that relies upon profit numbers is...disturbed.
Mineral Oil Cooled PC Case - Part 4
It depends what you're doing. Press releases can be a handy tool if you're actually announcing news, not that some previously unknown startup by a relatively unknown team has come into existence.

You should pursue coverage as soon as your startup is ready for people to start using it and then at regular intervals thereafter as you add compelling features or have otherwise marketable milestones.
I think the challenge here is remembering this when I next want to create a survey, not something I have any immediate need for.
idea for how to create value in your brand when you're "just another android phone".

1. create a really awesome skin like HTC has.

2. create a suite of really awesome apps and release them on the apps market, but give them free to users of your specific phone.
This is exactly where Steve Jobs found himself in 1997. He stood by and did what he wanted to [or may be not yet]. Hope Elop does it as well.
Yeah, but being owned by Ben Huh wouldn't be any better than being owned by Conde Nast. It would probably be far worse.
Agree on copy and design but SurveyMonkey has done ok with this category (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/surveymonkey). Granted they have a 12 year head start.
Expenses are like spending equity
Very well said. It's a great memo, but its main effect is to lay the groundwork for a strategy change.

This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem [...] When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company [...] The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future.

This may be a turning point for Nokia, but in the end it will come down to just what this new strategy is and how effective it proves to be.
>Nokia regularly cripple features, specifically including VoIP, at the demands of carriers. Perhaps not US carriers,

Oh, definitely in the US—look at the difference between the E71 and the E71x, the AT&T version. The GP was talking about unlocked phones. I have an N86 which I bought on Amazon, and it's got SIP and other features which AT&T would hate me to have.

>The carriers were always Nokia's customers, not the consumers

Yeah, but that's the case with every phone manufacturer.
Counterpoint to a lot of folks here: I don't like the idea.

This sort of thing has been around for a very very long time, mainly as a way of harvesting email addresses to spam. I remember receiving an email "crush" that is exactly this as early as 1999.

How is this different at all?
Nokia on WP7 would mean they would have to cannibalize their OS teams, their app.dev stack(QT), existing software etc. gutting a huge part their workforce.

It is far more easier to have Meego adopt an Android personality, since they're the same kernel inside. They could add Nokia flavor on top.

The far more important decision is positioning; they would've to leave the low-end phone market to chinese, and focus on the midrange.
I completely agree, though this is where I take issue with both the Java community and with managers and architects who have pushed for Java to be standard outside of the enterprise realm. I don't hate the language, I dislike the people who try to fit the square plug into the round hole. It's taking a lot of explaining to a lot of people at my workplace/university (a Java school naturally) that when developments teams are segregated into 1/2 person teams, have high turnover, and spread widely across an organization, using Java just doesn't make sense. It makes a lot more sense to use an easily approach scripting language such as Python or PHP in this case. But yet I had several Java evangelists literally screaming at me over our decision to go with PHP. In the end we won out, we built a solution that has run flawlessly (knock on wood) and the Java evangelists were moved to other departments.
WP7 with QT doesn't seem an option. QT is C++ and WP7 is oriented to work with .NET and not native applications. (don't try to port QT to C++.NET...) and it's a bit redundant to have QT together with Silverlight/.NET
This is admittedly better, note, tough, that I was trying to do it in the mindset of the other languages included (just having one explicit list and filtering out instead of in); however, as it was stated before, it's never good to try to write code in the idiomatic style of other languages if the end result is something not idiomatic at all, it's like trying to play the bach chaconne for violin in a tuba or <put better analogy here> : it can be done but it's just forcing it.
What is Doug Cutting is saying these days about Java? He wrote Lucene, Hadoop and other awesome things in Java. I don't like Java much but I'd love to hear his side of the argument.
Moscow time is used in the North-West region, there are 9 time zones in total: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Russia_-_Time_Zones...
> Java isn't a scripting language, and it wasn't ever intended to be one.

First class functions aren't a feature particular to scripting languages. Many compiled languages also have them, such as Haskell, Ocaml, Scala, F#, C#, D, Go, Forth, Common Lisp, and so on.

> It was never designed to solve quick little problems in a few lines

C# wasn't either, but it manages to be pretty expressive for what it is. I don't think you can argue Java's design precludes it from having basic things like first class functions, when (a) C# operates in the same market and already has them, and (b) Java 7 is going to be getting them.
Care to share who is doing this, I wish to suggest this to my workplace/university.
Hopefully they're able to restore competitiveness, but I hope they don't do it by simply adopting WP7 or Android. I'd really like to see them make something like MeeGo viable. IMO, the mobile space could use an open ecosystem without the Google tie-in.
Or apache collections:

CollectionUtils.filter(new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(1, 2, 3, 4)), new Predicate()
{
public boolean evaluate(Object v)
{
return ((Integer) v).intValue() % 2 == 0;
}
});
>My best guess is WP7 with Qt allowing Nokia's services and apps on those phones. This would be additional to Symbian and MeeGo devices.

If they adopt any third-party OS, I can't see them keeping MeeGo. That'd be stupid; it'd leave them having to build a MeeGo ecosystem instead of just taking advantage of the one they join.

And I don't see Microsoft allowing Qt on WP7; it'd undermine their whole .Net-based story.
> Yeah, but that's the case with every phone manufacturer.

That's exactly my point. In this regard Nokia are not in a special position to stand up to the carriers.

Unlocked handsets don't count: almost no one is paying that much for a phone. Even Apple had to accept carrier subsidies for the iPhone to get the end purchase price down.
As a heavy user of Mollom, I can say anecdotally that it performs well, but I don't have stats for you, would be cool if Dries could provide some.
I need to give credit to my co-founder Dan for coming up with this analogy. I think it's especially potent because while entrepreneurs can lose touch with the value of money (eventually, it all just becomes "numbers"), equity always seems to stay near and dear to an entrepreneur's heart.
Do you think there is a fixed "profit" out there for the taking?

Definitely not. But I do think that there's been incredible growth in Nokia's core business, and they haven't seen any of the growth.

Apple has been able to do this in four markets now:

1) iPhone -- a carrier subsisized market.

2) iPad -- see (3)

3) iPod -- Large margins based on industry leading large volume.

4) Computers -- Expensive niche product with huge margins. I believe the are the single most profitable computer company (if you look just at their computer division).

Why is a comparison based on profit disturbed? In business that's pretty much the only thing that matters. Profit yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
I wrote a small wrapper on top of backbone and Backbone.Rails.js [1]. The combo replaced a very bulky internal framework, and I would never go back.

[1] https://gist.github.com/719080
I love the design. It's clean, simple, and NOT all web 2.0 with clouds in the background. It's a bit text-heavy, but honestly I think this is fine. Most of the time when I see a site for a product, I want to read about what it does, not sift through a bunch of pages with huge images at the top.

So good job on the design. I also don't notice any glaring grammatical errors (native English speaker).

One tip I have: the screenshots on the right hand side of "Features" look a bit like they are part of the page, but then they are also cut off so it's a bit visually confusing. I'd either put them all in a row somewhere so it's more obvious they are just images OR fade them out a bit (lower opacity) so it's more obvious they're graphics and not actual page elements.

Overall I love it!
I used this exact example a few months ago to compare Java and Ruby [1]. Funny how it keeps coming up.

(While I was using Java, I never even knew there was a need for higher-order functions.)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947723
I don't think I understand why people would pay for a tool like this:
If I want to collect data from the users of my site, I'm going to write the survey ui myself: matching with the design of my site exactly and feeling seamless is crucial to being able to expect my users to take it.

If I were doing something non-professional, just surveying people I know, or what have you, I'd use a free Google Docs form. It looks far better and is easier to use than survey monkey, automatically is in a place I can deal with the results, and isn't trying to make money from me or my cohorts.
Screw that.

Others have already pointed out the Google Guava library. This version is almost all just standard Java, just using Guava to create the list of numbers.

ArrayList<Integer> list = com.google.common.collect.Lists.newArrayList(1,2,3,4);
for (Iterator<Integer> it = list.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {if (it.next() % 2 == 0) {it.remove();}}
System.out.println(list);

Also, Java does have REPL. It's called the Eclipse scrapbook view. I'm sure Netbeans has something similar (and that is part of one of the standard Java SDK downloads).
I am not observing DST this winter. When living off the grid on solar power, messing with the time the sun is up is annoying. It's been working out well enough for me. Did a custom DST-less EST timezone. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_ti...
That's true, and although I don't hate java or the technologies it has spawned (the JVM is a neat one, just look at it's finest offspring, clojure), trying to teach basic programming with it just seems bad. Maybe for an intermediate course on OOP, it does a good job if one wants to teach C++ or C afterwards; but as a first language, I have against it that it forces to spend too much time in syntax and inexplicable cruft (unless you're willing to explain the concept of class and static method the first day), and magic is never good for teaching if it's never explained. Just look at the classic SICP lectures: the syntax is done with in half an hour, then recursion and then higher order functions, and it doesn't feel like a brainfuck at all!
Yes, very strange. That's way out of character for Tim.
Apple has been making similar margins on all of its products for the past 10 years. How can you say it isn't sustainable?
My laptop died yesterday, recommendations?
My old gen 1 macbook finally reached an unusable state, and I'd like some recommendations on a new machine. I'd also be interested in hearing what the crowd uses for day-to-day hacking.
I think Mahalo has refocused appropriately, and I am pleasantly surprised to see that. But I think this is no longer a sustainable business model.

If you need to spend as much on content generation as I'm seeing cited here, your time to break even is quite a while on a per-article basis.
I have a clock from one of my former employers that's imprinted with "We survived the 2007 DST change!"

The clock is broken.
That's much snarkier than simply saying, "how does Java differ from Roman numerals?"

Your way ends conversation and attempts to belittle, my way makes the point in a way that allows for discussion.
a) not quite the same kernel. You appear to be unaware of what Google has done to the internals of linux

b) having an OS team has turned into a liability for Nokia. CEOs normally don't care about 'gutting' workforces. In fact, I predict that Elop will cut the 'deadwood' of the old company as soon as he announces whatever on Friday.

c) (edit) Elop has to pay attention to Oracle having sued Google over Java in Android.

No, this is Microsoft establishing a brand in the phone space via take-over of Nokia. Watch and see.
Hey there,

A few quick suggestions:

Cut out the text below the green bar. Triple the font size of the 3 steps, and put numbers next to them. Arrange them horizontally, and put screenshots below them. Change the red title to "Poplytics: collect feedback from your users in three steps."

Buy a sexy theme on themeforest. This design just doesn't cut it.

Proofread for capitalization.

Good luck!
Most likely these some 280000 lines represent conditional statements that are drawn out to keep weird edge cases out of sight.

For instance Boeing used Ada [0] because it can quickly assert all of the conditionals at compile time.

[0] http://archive.adaic.com/projects/atwork/boeing.html
"Not only does this new technique perform better, but by using this method to reference images, the OS has the option of purging image data from memory and reconstituting it directly from the file on an as-needed basis."

Luckily, that's an option it never takes.

"(Whether or not a given version of iOS does this is another story, but at least this technique gives the OS that option.)"

Does any version of iOS that has ever shipped do this? It sounds like wishful thinking. You're just hoping Apple will skate iOS to your puck.

It seems like a terrible idea, given how the rest of the memory management works. How does the OS determine that you actually need the image? And what if, at that moment, it can't be reloaded because the app is out of memory, the file was deleted, what if the file was overwritten, etc?

I'd guess that imageWithContentsOfFile: itself calls dataWithContentsOfFile: rather than something secret or magical, so I'm curious about how much of an actual optimization there is.
Splunk (who?) takes on Google, Microsoft and Facebook for talent in Seattle
To be clear I <3 clojure, but I'm taking the bait just for fun:

1) The chunk of Java code shows a complete program - the others show function definitions
2) The Java is written purposely to be as verbose as possible
3) The Java sends it's output to stdout, unlike the others
4) The Java code is needlessly written using generics

Things the comparison ignores:
1) The Java code is more toolable than the others
2) The Java code will outperform most of the other examples once it has been subject to Hotspot

Here's a more fair comparison, at the function level to level the playing field (and only one import needed: java.util.*):

List trollBait() {
return new ArrayList(){{
for (int i : new int[]{1, 2, 3, 4}) {
if (i % 2 == 0) add(i);
}}};
}

Here's why I absolutely do heart Java:

I just ran this 100,000 times in 6 milliseconds on a Core i7 920 (2.67 GHz). And I scanned it with Findbugs, and PMD, and a security vulnerability tool. And I refactored it in my IDE with crazy IntelliJ foo-jitsu. And it's more strongly typed. And it's runtime memory model is safer.
Really expensive timepieces should have gone out with the quartz watches that came in during the 80s. They haven't because some of the rich and powerful use an inferior technology (from a timekeeping perspective) to show how successful they are.

While hackers may just use their phones it is unusual to see a wealthy banker, talent agent or lawyer without a nice watch. I would assume it is more prevalent in jobs that require a lot of signaling for negotiation.
hehe, clever! although we are building a new list in the other languages, we're never using it, so this is just as good in the immediate context.
Java floating point bugfix released