skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've worked a lot with PR, marketing and user acquisition methods for different startups the last couple of years and I can't agree with this article. My experience is the opposite, work with Facebook as much as you can, even if most of the "Likes" comes from friends.

There's two (combined) reasons for that:

1. It's really hard to acquire users. With or without budget, the most important part of a startups success is the ability to find and get onboard new users/customers. Facebook might only be one method of getting people sign up for your service but hey, it's one of the most effective ones. If 200 people click "Like" on the same day, of course it will go viral if it's a cool startup. Friends or not, it 's people and most of them have great networks of other people around them. People with many friends are more likely to succeed not only with your Facebook Page but with the business itself. Guess why? People know people, even if they're not themselves in the right target group. Get many people like you, and they'll like what you're doing (and their friends to, hint).

It's no rocket science, really. Facebook is very effective for marketing. Use it. Tips: start the page as fast as you can. Growing the amount of fans takes time, with many invited friends or not. If you get pre-launch press, use it for something. To have 200 FB fans when you launch for real are very valuable.

2. Retention. Facebook is great as a reminder to people. If you have many FB fans, you have many people to remind about your startups existence. Facebook is useful for getting long-time value of a initial interest/hype/launch. Actually more effective than newsletter subscriptions for some of the projects I'm involved in.
Of course, the impressive thing is that Watson can answer the questions at all.

The point being that at the highest levels of play, all of the contestants know most of the answers. This is a very important thing to remember. It means that even in all-human games, it's not "do you know the answer" but "can you ring in fast enough."

So it still is really quite impressive that reaction time matters at all to Watson, because it implies that it can compete at the highest levels.
One big issue is that engineers haven't seen cost of living increases in the last 10 years nearly on par with lawyer/finance/professional jobs. This was justified by the "tech crash" for many years, but it went on too long (only in the last few years are salaries going up again).

The only way to afford to live well in a California tech center as an engineer has been to have a big startup exit or a very senior job.

I managed a team at Google, and had 4 direct reports ask to work from home 50% of the time, or even to work 100% remotely, mostly so they could live somewhere cheaper.

This comes out in "work/life balance" - when your commute gets too long so you can afford a big enough house in your 30s, spouse gets mad, you get overtaxed, and it's not a good scene.
When I was there the Code of Conduct required that all employees abide by the (US version) of the foreign nations laws which precluded (among other things) advocating for the overthrow of any legitimate government, colluding with government or non-government agencies in the public policy area without registering as a 'lobbyist' (there are different terms in different countries), doing anything that would suggest a conflict of interest between Google and the legitimate government. Responses available to the company when an employee had been found to violate the code included things like prosecuting the individual for damages and of course termination.

It was all pretty standard boilerplate kind of stuff. There were higher standards for managers than rank and file as well. But mostly I think it is in there to try to mitigate retaliation from countries against Google corporate.

But let me re-iterate, I don't claim that they would or should fire Wael, I'm just saying that a strict reading of it would make that their next step.

Imagine what happens if Mubarak sues Google for lost income, personal distress, Etc, because their employee lead the effort to displace him? Never under estimate the gall of a plaintiff lawyer if their target has a huge cash reserve.
the virtual design studio you mention is precisely the system i wish the machine learning community was building.
The C99 standard itself and corresponding Wikipedia pages are quite useful. The gcc manual is also a handy reference for determining whether a particular gcc feature is standard compliant.

http://www.google.com/search?&q=filetype%3Apdf+iso+9899

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99
Someone approached hiwith the idea for that product, it wasn't his.

Besides, this is a perfect example of him contradicting himself about how taking VC is a bad idea.

Besides, do you think they are profitable yet? How do you think they will get there without heading down the Expert's Exchange track? And let's not forget how much chaff is now being added every day to these sites, it now seems to be impossible to ask a difficult question because only relative newbies seem to be the only ones answering questions.
You're saying that your salary has no affect outside of your company. That's it's all internal accounting. I don't agree with that.

Salaries will affect the price of your service. That price is paid by everyone else who doesn't work for your company and passed along. You are taking a bigger share from everyone.
There are very much fewer sub-contractors. Major system components are built in different plants in different countries but all by a handful of airbus subsidiaries or major aerospace corps. So the supply chain is much shorter and shallower

There were still screwups, a different version of the CAD package meant changes didn't propagate and the Airbus 380 wiring looms were all made the wrong length.

There were early warnings of Boeing's problem. The prototype had to be built with non-aerospace rivets which had to all be removed and the plane rebuilt for it's first flight.
Aerospace grade rivets were in short supply and Boeing was just looking for the cheapest supplier who didn't deliver.

Japanese companies taught us about the value of close working relationships with suppliers 20years ago, the car makers have learned it but Boeing didn't - they acted more like a Walmart buyer and it cost them.
Oops? Maybe I am not referring to the same problem - Rather than identifying "content farms" I am hoping to block sites that are returned that do not have the search terms on the page returned, and therefore should not be in the results, in my opinion.

Is this Google's intention for usage?
Right, in theory.

But in reality, in any organization of sufficient size, you have a lot of people who don't actually do anything creative clamoring to capture that excess value generated by the people at the bottom (and at the top!). These are the people you are trying to push out, not the productive, well compensated people.
I'm personally unaware of any book that the US Government has banned, although I'm always willing to be wrong

One of Wilhelm Reich's books was banned by the FDA in 1956. (Man, is that a strange story....)

But in the general case, your point holds.
Your approach is unpractical and I doubt you follow it yourself. Almost nobody that uses opensource libraries reads all of the code. As with journalism, science and many other things in life, you have to trust upon others to deliver work that conforms to certain standards. Even though every newspaper article and scientific paper that you accept is 'your responsibility', you would be pretty miffed if an article in the free local paper was completely false.

If you give away toilets for free, it's your responsibility to make sure they aren't lined with sodium and will blow up after the first flush. If you give away a toilet for free, you are an asshole if you know it has a huge hidden hole and you don't warn takers about it. If you write a piece of software that claims to be doing something, but it actually contains malware, then you are violating the law (as much as when you give me a nice statue that contains a spy camera).

It has never been possible or allowed to give just anything you want away for free, without you being liable in any way. That hasn't changed with software and no license in the world can exempt you from certain basic responsibilities concerning your 'gift'.
I like the customer reviews idea -- Airbnb- or Yelp-style come to mind, though by no means are they the only models which should be considered for influence -- and it's important to keep in mind opening these flood gates should never be taken lightly.
"Our industry is set up to reward risk-takers disproportionately..."

But then we're back to square one: why don't you become a risk-taker yourself? It's easy to paint oneself as an underpaid creator of millions of dollars in value, but for this to be possible someone had first to take a risk and then succeed.

And in case of failure - would you, an employee who gets such a dispropotionately small share of generated value, be so eager to increase your share in the generated loss?

I wouldn't and that's why I don't see much value in the "created value" argument.
Ask HN: What are you building on Google App Engine?
I was wondering what kind of apps/businesses folks were working on that are based on the App Engine. Would be very curious to hear what your experiences are like, especially about the limitations of the platform and how you worked around them.

I built a tile cutter (http://www.piritiles.com) app that'd let you instantly create a Google Map of any image a while ago, and now working on a more comprehensive map/mashup building app that I'll be launching in a couple months.

One of the interesting (and not very clearly documented) issues I've faced was the weird 500 errors the app would generate when you have consistent request response times over a few seconds. Technically all requests need to return in 30 seconds and the occasional ~10s response was okay, but for background processing intensive apps like Piritiles, using TaskQueue API (which was just coming out of beta at the time) was essential.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I try to be one most of the time. It doesn't always work, because I am not a sociopath and I follow the law, but I'm sure there are others out there that don't have these hangups.
Don't judge an iceberg by its tip.
They can keep it up until they are ruled to be a monopoly - I'm not sure that will happen to them but when it does then they can't act the way they do now without consequences.
Very cool - I wish many, MANY websites had this. My eye twitches every time something is spelled incorrectly or misused.

Kudos!
User charliekim asked a really good question [1] in the previous thread: "why is it free?"

Would you care to answer that here? I assume you do have some kind of revenue model in mind, but charliekim and I can't be the only people who think that people would pay to use this app...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227784
I'm not sure that I agree with the tenets of this article. Silicon Valley Engineers don't seem underpaid to me. Sure we could potentially make more in finance, but that doesn't mean we are underpaid. I feel like there are a number of things that I value (in the following order):

1) Exciting work

2) Large potential impact

3) Financial compensation

Notice that money is third, and that isn't an accident. I probably make less than many of my classmates who went into finance (although the difference is likely smaller that one might assume based on comparing "averages"). However, most of them don't really seem to like their jobs all that much. I get to work on interesting things that will hopefully have a large impact, and get paid pretty well for it (I've usually made significantly above the Silicon Valley "average").

In addition, I think that many people in finance are likely overpaid relative to the value they generate, and that there will be a correction at some point in the future.
sorry here is a ref link for that:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-...

and one for the Mayo Clinic (which actually shows that meat isn't as bad for your heart as once thought, only 10-20% increases ur chances of heart disease, and 10-20% increases chances of diabetes) (as compared to vegetable protein which increases neither and prob decreases them):

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/red-meat/MY01329
The Link on Techcrunch appear to be broken, I'm getting a 500 error.
I can envisage a chrome extension that would embed greplin results within your organic google results...

Infact i have already asked for API access, heh.
Forbes Accused Of Link Spam, Plays Dumb, But Forgets To Delete All The Links
Rock The Hits » It’s The Heat
Did you know it took 4 hours to film the episodes because Watson kept crashing? Seriously.

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/02/16/nova_610x363.png
I'd like to second this. Although Twisted's documentation and 5-year-old bugs will have you cursing the libraries name at times it really does perform well once you figure it all out.

We're using Python + Twisted for our XMPP servers at HipChat (http://www.hipchat.com) and neither have let us down. Hopefully we can reach 500k+ connections on such a small number of servers as well.

One specific note about Twisted/Python vs node.js: The combination of Python's yield and Twisted's defer.inlineCallbacks generator makes it really easy to write and maintain nonblocking code. In node I find it far too easy to get lost in a sea of callback functions. Here's what you get to do in Twisted: http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2009/03/python-twisteds-...
I would like just to add that sometimes "premature optimization" is confused with "performance decoration". Performance decoration is process in which you make software to look fast but without any positive impact on actual delivered performance.

Also, there are two ways to make software go faster: do what you’re doing quicker or make it do less stuff. It is nearly always better to go "do less stuff" path.
Note that these are operations that haven't waited for any new bills to pass.

As has been debated here previously, these actions are based on importing the draconian "civil forfeiture" device from the drug war into a "war on counterfeiting" or whatever they would call it.

Some have argued that this wasn't a big expansion of US state power.

Indeed, this is not technically an expansion of legal power. It is certainly a expansion of effective powers. It's so not much that someone just put a knife in US rule of law. It's more someone grabbed the wound already opened by the "war on drugs" and ripped it a fair bit wider. I don't know to what degree civil forfeiture" found been found constitutional by the courts. Regardless, in my opinion, it makes a mockery of basic justice in the US (specifically, innocence until proven guilty and the right to face your accusers).
I bought rap.io
Do you have inside knowledge of their framework? Did you know wasabi has memoization and heap of other things frameworks like .NET don't even have? They spent a lot more than 2 months on Wasabi. I think your information is outdated.
That was probably the first .io domain registered.
The problem here is absolutely the law. (disclaimer: IANAL)

You're viewing it from a sympathetic light from the start. While one might argue that domain names are property, the seizure of an access point to an online service means that the seizure can effectively act as an injunction against a business.

Moreover, this is publicly-visible "property". It's like going to your house and turning it into a strip club and putting up a sign saying "We employ minors" (regardless of whether you are a strip club or employ minors). Sure, your house still exists, but the address that it used to be at now showcases something that can damage your reputation irreparably.

So while you might consider the actions legal using an interpretation favorable to law enforcement, if you view it from a different lens of "A harmless business owner's livelihood was suspended without warning by ICE and his reputation untruthfully damaged by said action", then it's clear that some level of legal protection (whether it already exists as a part of due process or not) is missing and that ICE was criminally negligent in its handling of the situation. Of course, this is a favorable viewpoint on the other end of the spectrum, as not everyone whose domain was seized is necessarily a business owner or a highly-trafficked site. However, it is a viewpoint that assumes innocence, rather than guilt, before proven otherwise.
We're also using Twisted a lot at my company, IQ Engines. It's powerful and has done a pretty good job for us so far. I just wish the documentation, which is crucial for getting new coworkers up to speed, was better. Do you guys continue to build new services at Justin.TV using it or have you migrated to other eventloops ie Tornado, gevent etc?
I agree with your point. I'm a student and can't dream of making that much money right now. However, the "point at which you become an out of touch complainer" is different for everyone. To use a cliche example, starving African children would look at you crazy if you complained about your $7/hr burger flipping job.
Lots of things are successful without MS endorsement. If the integration had been as good as it was when it launched, yes. Only MS was willing to dedicate the resources to make that happen (VS addins, gallery site, etc).
Thanks @ghurlman
> How is it possible that someone could have rooted for any character /other/ than Paul in the original Dune novel?

If I may, that you think that is an example of the problem. When you read _The Iron Dream_ (I realize now I gave the wrong title, but I can't edit my original comment, grr.), how can you not root for Feric Jaggar (Adolf Hitler)?

How can a German not root for Hitler, trying to restore Germany to greatness and hold back the tide of communism? (Let's not forget how the body count of Stalin and Mao run into the dozens of millions, as opposed to 'only' the 6 million or so of the Holocaust. The Nazis were right about one thing - Communism was awfully evil.)

> Or were we "supposed to" wash our hands of the book and leave saying "They were all scum"?

Maybe we should have! Sometimes no one is right. The Atreides are noble and everything, but their nobility consists pretty much of not murderously mistreating their slaves - I mean, serfs.

> Was someone seriously supposed to root for Duncan Idaho or the Mentats?

You could make a good case for Idaho, given how central he is to the later books.

> It's nice that Paul was depicted as being flawed in Dune Messiah, but his being an evil character does not follow from the original Dune, unless you take extreme care to see certain changes in his character (such as the aside about him being worried about spice equipment and ornithopters).

Paul is not cackling evil like the Baron. He is evil, even in _Dune_, like the Nuremberg Trials, an evil that is more passive than active - he knows how hideous the Jihad will be, he has seen all the futures. He knows what he is later told:

> "Very good, Stil." Paul glanced at the reels in Korba's hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he could drop them and flee. "Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since -- "

Paul's evil is one of cowardice and a refusal to do the right thing. He knows all he has to do is die or vanish into the desert, or even just go into exile on Tupile (paying with the family atomics). But he selfishly tries to stay alive and stay with Chani, and the only path prescience reveals that does that is the one that also unleashes the Jihad and makes him Emperor.

(Note how deep his cowardice or selfishness runs; we see it again in _Children of Dune_, where Paul refuses to do the sandworm transformation even to save all humanity because he would lose his own humanity. Some hero!)
We launched Rewordious a few weeks ago, do you think you could add us?

http://www.rewordio.us
Samsung aims for iPod touch with WiFi-only Galaxy S variants
How will this company make money?
Acceptable loss in my opinion.
Contrast the positive adjective "storied," applied to the term "aircraft factory," against the negative adjective "mere," applied to the term "assembly plant." Reading only that sentence, it's quite clear which the author prefers.
Forgot to mention, this is just for the NBA as All-Star weekend is coming up.
I'm not really sure I understand the need for this.

(Maybe this is because I only make "tiny Apache applications" and not Enterprise-grade stuff, as one of my day-job Senior Lead Technical Architects told me today.)

Is it not the case that you can already do all of this by granting appropriate privileges and/or by exposing stored procedures?
How do you plan to monetize ? too early to ask but if you had something in mind since you are going to incur cost per sms.
In the universe where I accidentally transpose words. I meant that using BSD is better for developers than for users, I prefer to release code under licenses more permissive than the GPL.
Minor, but you should rename the big button on your apps homepage from "Submit" to "Search"
>>For Google, developing such a service could be a challenge, in part because it likely wouldn’t get the same access to users’ Facebook accounts that a non-competitor startup has

If Facebook would block Google from this, then they should stop Greplin, unless we are so naive as to think Google won't buy Greplin.

"The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data," Mr. Schmidt said. "Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."
You raised points that had absolutely no bearing on her day-to-day use of the phone. And that's the point. Making something that works extraordinarily well, when no one else can, means never having to say you're sorry.
Google "Bono piracy" and you will find lots of articles about a man making $100 million a year that likes to complain he is not making enough. I suppose he too is not entitled.

The free enterprise system - the American way - is also about bringing down the price of goods. If you work, you just happen to be one of those goods.
TSMC preps solar, LED lines
FORMER BIOWARE LEAD DESIGNER BRENT KNOWLES JOINS EMPIRE AVENUE
Yep it gets more interesting if you flip it around.

Say you pay $10K for the mother kahuna press release you've always wanted. Now you can't pay to send people to go look at your work of art on some other site, simply because they might/could/probably click through?

The assumption here is that the only reason to have a press release is to get people to click on something. Is that assumption always true? Sure if I owned the intermediate site, I could purposely set up various schemes, but these guys just made a PR and bought some ads. The marketwatch site could pull or change the links tomorrow and they can't do much about it. Not a very smart or secure conspiracy.

Perhaps you can't use adwords to send people to sites that host your press releases? Nope, that doesn't sound right either. I dunno.

Just playing devil's advocate. Seems like, as the author indicated, you could tell this story two entirely different ways.