skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They get to expand the reach of their advertising to include mobile devices at the app level. The ubiquity of their advertising ensures that they'll thrive in the new dominant computing market.
Hey, thanks for the comment. Perhaps, I didn't address that issue well...I never said $200k/year or having 3000 followers is wrong. There are VC's that throw 200k at startups each year that have 50 followers - seen it myself haha.

The core problem is really letting that "fame" go to your head.
Vancouver seems like the best to me, it's very much like Seattle and SF, and while very west coast also distantly Canadian.
The Printing Press & City State Change
I am not from Canada but the majority of people I talk to online that are from the entrepreneur community are either from the Toronto area or the Vancouver BC area.
This link just shown me how many misconceptions I have about vacuum exposure. Thank you! I've learned a lot from it.
the iPod didn't become dominant due to device lock-in.
Actually the single quotes are not part of the Awk language. They are used by the posix shell to preservers the literal meaning of the characters, in this case { } and $. they are not needed in self contained Awk scripts.
"active content must meet all Amazon technical requirements, not be a generic reader, and not contain malicious code"

Depends on how they define a "generic reader" doesn't it?
IMVU. http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
This is undecidable.
Sounds interesting. Maybe we can start a group for this with Skype handles instead
Maybe because both look a lot like Ultima 7?

http://rampantgames.com/blog/uploaded_images/U7murder-735125...
Love it. Now just find a way to integrate it with the snarky behind the scenes comments on thefunded and you are gold!
That article and corresponding REE marketing pages do a great job of telling me why I should use REE.

Can anyone tell me why I shouldn't use REE? (Currently using MRI 1.8.7)
Yeah, I hear you. Now in that case, I'd make it extra easy..for instance, when we had a bug and that problem was thrown at us with Chalkboard, we offered another month free(as it's a paid app).

@FollowWithoutContactInfo: CHALKBOARDHQ.com SUCKS, I CANT MAKE A PROJECT

^^ We'd reply: Hey, sorry about that, we had [xyz] happen to us. But can you please shoot me an email at emil@chalkboardhq.com.

Either in that tweet or in the email which we respond, we'd thank them also offering something in return for that. It's not necessary but it definitely provides gorilla value to the customer.
Saw your tweet, thank you! I'm a fan of the Zappos philosophy, and we have a ton of work ahead of us to have customer service that can be mentioned in the same sentence (especially now that we are a small bunch). Our dev guys are being great sports about it.
But, Is this really working for them? Is there anything stopping developers from using other ad-networks? Looks pretty risky to allocate a lot of resources to develop an OS and give it away for free.
I'm in my first startup right now, and we're but a few weeks old. I can say with absolute certainty that I'm constantly engaged in the act of learning. I seized this opportunity exactly to have a career where I must learn constantly about myriad topics in order to prosper.
One of the most interesting aspects of this article (which I didn't pick up on until I read the comments section) is that Fabrice has 43 angel investments in 4 countries, but he dedicates just "2 hours per week to angel investing" because he's a full-time CEO. It's a love it or hate it strategy, but it seems to work well for him and his portfolio companies.
This is true. And Nokia just bought WP7 for 0$. The question that remains is... How are they going to split the revenue from mobile search.
Does your company have the right social media strategy and metrics?
> I disliked the game so much that I've essentially avoided any game with 'Cry' in it since playing Far Cry.

Somewhat irrational, since Crysis plays differently and the sequels to Far Cry were developed by different company.

I guess that's brand power for you.
It's a great article. But it's a bit more philosophical than practical, and I particularly take issue with the author's use of the term "statistical myth".

Near as I can tell, Thompson's model is the following: there are lots of abilities, and any test uses many (232+) of them at random. Individuals have a random selection of abilities.The author then declares that any individual ability is not g, since no specific ability describes performance very well. All very true.

But there is a single, explanatory variable in this model: g = # of abilities an individual has [1]! Moreover, Thompson's model makes a specific prediction about g - it should be normally distributed. So overall, I agree with the author's scientific argument: g is very likely to be decomposable into subfactors.

But I don't agree with his claim that g is a "statistical myth". Let me give an argument illustrating the fallacy he is making. Suppose I want to explain the thermodynamic law PV=nT. I can build a moderately more complicated statistical model [2] involving only 10^23 newtonian particles, with normally distributed velocities, and completely reproduce all the predictions of the thermodynamics. But not a single one of those particle positions explains pressure or temperature! Thus, thermodynamics is just a statistical myth.

Thermodynamics and g are simplified models of the world, based on the fact that the macroscale is dependent primarily on the sum of a large number of microscale variables [1]. They both have decent, though imperfect, predictive power. There is almost certainly a more complicated underlying theory, which will reproduce thermo/g as theorems about statistical aggregates. (For example, g may eventually be explained as the interaction of neurons.) Does this make them "statistical myths"? Of course not. Just macroscale models which have an underlying microscale explanation.

[1] Or perhaps a weighted average based on how frequently abilities are used in tests.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics

[3] For example, pressure is the the average force imparted by particles colliding with the side of a vessel divided by the area on which the collisions occur.
What if we postulate a general factor "b" that correlates with a superior body, is that inheritable? It's not that certain characteristics of the brain aren't inheritable, it's that "intelligence" is very diffuse and hard to define.

It's not even so clear that what many of us would call intelligence is mainly an evolutionary advantage, either.
Nice choice of username, by the way.
I think current IP laws are killing innovation and it has nothing to do with "entertainment content".

It used to be that I could sit down at a computer and innovate-up a useful program and no one could say I couldn't. Maybe even try to make a business out of it. Now it's all-but impossible to do that without incurring this large and unknown risk of litigation from holders of patents of wildly varying degrees of novelty.

The system is broken. It needs to be thrown out.

I doubt Obama is the one to do it, he seems to have his head in the status quo as much as any lawyer.
The author isn't saying that intelligence isn't heritable. He just showed that we can measure heritability in things that don't exist (the sum of a persons weight and height in some units) as well as things that exist like their actual weight and height. Therefore, the fact that g is heritable doesn't mean that its a thing that exists.

Except I think the author would point out that there isn't just _one_ heritability for things like height because height would be much more heritable in environments where everyone has adequate nutrition as opposed to in environments where nutrition was a matter of luck, for instance.

All of this assumes a certain philosophical veiwpoint on what it means to "really exist" which I don't agree with, but which I do recognize as coherent.
The advantages of building up - skyscrapers and the city
I used to code for a website handling about 25,000 logged in users per day, and there was a post-commit hook on SVN which pushed changes live, immediately. Working on that taught me a lot (mostly how not* to do things), one thing I learnt is that I code much, much faster under that kind of pressure.

* Note: I am not endorsing this as a setup, it's crazy. I don't think I've ever seen such high staff turnover.
Not working for me...

> echo '1 2 3 4' | awk '{print $1}'

1

> echo '1 2 3 4' | cut -f1

1 2 3 4
IP is more about entertainment startups. It's a battle over our right to preserve our own culture.

With that said, he'll never go for this and neither would the legislature, so... not getting my hopes up.
That's correct. People could rip their CDs and also use MP3s they already had. The Kindle wouldn't even allow Amazon's own MobiPocket books that had Mobi DRM on them to be read! And, of course, neither the Kindle hardware nor software for platforms can read ePub.
Then Elop was elected CEO of Macromedia. And some months later, the company was sold to Adobe.

This Elop guy has an interesting specialty.
Nokia keeps on changing their strategies.
Who is this Hitler to tell other people how to use Twitter? If you don't like it - don't follow it...YOU are taking the decision to follow what I write....eat it or don't..
Using nature’s genius in architecture
I would suggest that you:

(1) Talk with / survey your customers to find out what's actually going on. Based on your description, it doesn't seem like you've actually talked with them. You should find out why they're not spending the required time on the site, and / or why they're not renewing their subscriptions.

Figure out why they initially used the site, and what value they thought they'd get; and also why they don't feel that they're getting that value any more.

Base your questions on the one found at http://survey.io .

(2) Figure out the root of the problems that are causing these support requests, and fix them. (E.g. could you clarify the wording on some pages? Are people not using the site properly?). This way, you don't have to spend so much time on support.

But I do agree with some of the others, a pivot of some sort sounds like it could help. Otherwise, if _after_ you've talked with your customers, you don't feel that you should keep this going, move onto something else.

Edit: Also, remember that the growth really comes down to the marketing. Have you been in touch with bloggers? How are you advertising it? Doing any SEO? Or is it purely word of mouth? And if it's word of mouth, do you have any viral components in there to help people spread the word?
Mixergy is Looking for 3 Volunteers
In my first startup now. The biggest thing I have learned is the roughness of the emotional rollercoaster. When things are going well, it is an amazing rush. Bur when things are going wrong, the lows can be absolutely brutal. You NEED someone to provide support in these times. The best trait to have in a startup is persistence, because without it, you will want to give up during these times.
I wish he shared 9 business selection criteria ...
If I remember correctly, Amazon also let's you tweak the suggestions, providing a voting mechanism to implement feedback.
congrats, dude.

its turtles all the way down from here.
Will you really be able to pull that off? I imagine certain parts of the code base you could use CI, but Rackspace servers cannot have downtime. If I were a Rackspace customer, I wouldn't want innovation - I'd want my boxes to never go down. And I believe that means a rigorous QA process.
Just because someone has to provide it doesn't mean it has to be provided for free. It could simply mean that it can't be denied.
I agree with zdw in that it's very much like the Netflix Challenge, in the way of focus.

If you don't narrow enough, on specific topics, you let irrelevant data in to the results, if you narrow too much, you cut out posts that were tangential but possibly even more relevant.

Also to compare this type of tracking to either Netflix or Amazon's recommendations, is hard, because they use a fairly static set of items to analyze, and thus don't suffer from long-tail analysis that would need to occur in a constantly updated set of data. For a basic search recommendation tool, this isn't as hard, but trying to pick up and determine someone's interests, without over or undercutting the topics, in a constantly changing set is very hard.

You also have to deal with shifts in user interest, Amazon gets by by only having to recommend for the latest few entries, in most cases. Trying to provide recommendations of new data for a user, you have to be able to be able to refocus to adjustments in the user's interests.

Also, as far as the words being a goldmine, not always, are they a great resource, yes, but only slighly more than the source that the user likes. Sources are great for initial narrowing, words are not.

Two is not really easier, even with prior art, the prior art is great to look at for inspiration and ideas, but when it comes down to it, it's a very different set of requirements.
Ahhh I just did some work this week using the older codebase. Any idea how much changed between these two versions?
I've used Apple's in-app purchase system and it has sone serious limitations. First, it's limited to about 3000 SKUs. Second, there is no way to automatically import (or update) the product information. So, from a technical perspective, Amazon simply cannot use IAP - it's far too limited.
The "personalized news service" idea is my default example for startups that people keep trying and users keep ignoring. Entrepreneurs constantly want to build this thing and it consistently falls on its face like few other ideas.

Maybe it's because they just haven't been good enough, and as soon as someone cracks the code it will be great. However I think a much more likely answer is that only a very, very small number of people have a news discovery problem.
Oh, yes, because of course, cell providers whose phones run Android would never think of charging any kind of data tariff or making money in other ways.
Because that would contradict their political ideology.
"solely for the sake of clearing the way for entertainment content startups."

Do you consider Google Books, JSTOR, Wikipedia, etc. to be entertainment content startups?
Make your Girlfriend Happy Webapp - thoughts for Valentine's
Everytime a landlord raises my rent 10% I ask him, "What do I get for this extra 10%? How much will it cost you if I move out?" Will this 30% give anything to Apple's developers, or is Apple just realizing they now have the clout to bully their ecosystem into submission like Microsoft did?
Without knowing the details of this company, here is my theory:

With established companies, with established revenue and legacy product/process, management thinking is probably something along the lines of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". They don't --pardon my french-- give a shit about morale if the profit is rolling in. If they didn't start with CD, they aren't going to do it now.

So to champion any change, you're going to have to make a case around greater revenue/margins, better (less) customer support, more defensibility in the marketplace, or something else that gets the suits all geeked.

Complementary part of this theory:
Startups need every advantage they can get since they have the weaker market position when they begin. So they're more willing / required to be innovative about every last bit of their process, including deployments.

Other advice -- start slow. Prove the process on a smaller part of the product.
Dumped on by Data: Scientists Say a Deluge is Drowning Research
echo '1 2 3 4' | cut -d' ' -f1

By default cut uses TAB as delimiter
A5/1
Sony is crazy or the application of the "Streisand Effect"
I'm not seeing this in the Kindle app on my iPad. Clicking on "Shop in Kindle Store" kicks you out of the app and into MobileSafari.
Yeah, I was thinking about doing a similar thing here at Cloudkick.

Currently, our test suite is not that large and it takes around 6-8 minutes to complete, but with testing every minute counts (testing is generally not that fun and a slow test suite just makes it more painful).

We have a two types of tests:

- Twisted tests - this tests runs asynchronously and finish pretty fast so they are generally not that problematic
- Django tests - Django tests don't run in parallel so they are pretty slow. Recently, I was playing around with the Django test runner and I have made some modification to it to run the tests in parallel. Now the Django tests finish around 50% faster.

The only problem with this solution is that it is a "hack" and it requires some modifications to the Django core (I guess I should play more with the nose parallel test runner).

We also use some other "tricks" which make tests run faster - for example, MySQL data directory on a test server is stored on a ram disk.
The authors viewpoint seems to be that things that can be directly measured do exist. So I would think that the author would be find with talking about temperature the same way he's ok with talking about IQ ("That thing that IQ tests measure").

I would agree with you personally, and say that really any measurement involves some implicit figuring so there really isn't any difference between IQ and T.
It's crippling innovation before people even begin. I was chatting about encryption with some young chap, and I suggested a good way for him to learn about the practicalities of it would be to just sit down and code. He was astonished; he genuinely thought that the principles behind common encryption tools were in some way exclusive property of various companies and that he was legally forbidden from coding up his own implementation.

This is a true story and it's a belief that is on the streets right now; some people believe even mathematics is legally owned by someone and they can't use it. If people won't experiment, they can't innovate.

Note that the countries that don't give a damn about so-called IP happily copy everything they can get their hands on. It will not take them long to start innovating on top of what already exists.
IMHO - one of the very best HN posts ever. no way for YC to be right about founders every time but the rejection feels devastating (we got interviewed then rejected for Winter 2010). But truth is that the vast majority of startups don't do YC or other incubator programs. Hustle, more than anything stands out as the factor that turned a rough situation into a success. good stuff Jon!
Even though 75% of that 78% shouldn't have been held in english.

I find it admirable that the CCC wants to cater to an international audience but for years the community has been demanding: FOR THE SAKE OF GOD please require that the people holding english talks can actually speak english.

If you want to witness the engrish-apocalypse just watch the talk about INDECT.

ps: <3 constanze
Agree with the argument but the title (on HN) doesn't sound right.

I suggest,
Stop trying to make maths look "fun"
$50/mo shared 5mbps connection, BYOS. No limits.

Other options available depending on what you want.

Class A datacenter, generator backup, secure access, hot hands service included.
E-Mail: zezenia@gmail.com
I agree. I run a service business, but am constantly learning new languages, recently using Python to script access between Endicia (US postage app) and Fishbowl (inventory/ordering app).

And unlike surfing, a crowded field can be useful, so no need for a "coding sucks, don't try it" bumper sticker.
Posts in various forums, links at a couple of MMORPG toplists and stuff like that. We sell "premium cards" which give premium time when used ingame. During this time you have access to exclusive areas and stuff like that.

We have about 1.5k accounts used during the past 7 days.
The answer is not quite correct. Corporate protectionism is what destroys innovation. Abuse of the patent and copyright systems is part of corporate protectionism.

Patent and copyright are great things to protect the little innovator guy that starts a new business from being sodomized by the big corporations that lobby congress for laws that benefit only themselves.

Reform is necessary. Right now, companies are patenting things that were invented by other people. Right now, little people with patents are getting their IP stolen from big corporations with lawyers who file legal action solely for the purpose of bankrupting the little guy and taking his property.

These things are not a problem with the concept of protecting innovations through IP law. They are a problem with corporate abuse of the system and a corrupt government.
Only in general.
One of the foundations of America's success in the earlier years (up to the beginning of the 20th C) was its general disregard for IP laws. British manufactures were constantly complaining about American's using their designs, manuscripts, etc without payment, as well as state to state infringement (Hollywood started in CA to get away for legal oversight).

The article is spot on: legal protection is protection from innovation.
I think since iBoos appeared, and publishers demanded an agency model from Amazon, too, Amazon is only get 30% from that $10 price. This means if Apple takes 30% from it, Amazon will have zero left.

Amazon will either quit the AppStore in protest, and hope consumer protest will make Apple change their minds, or they'll start charging $14-15 for books instead to cover the 30% cut.
The rich old couple and the adopted prodigy (a parable of a tech romance)
The meaning of volatile keyword is not "do not optimize accesses to this variable". Rather, it's "this value may change at any time".

Let's say you have a variable that's used as a flag for communication between two threads. Protecting it with spin_locks inside a thread that checks the flag repeatedly inside a loop is not going to prevent compiler from optimizing that access away -- because as far as the compiler is concerned, value of that flag does not change inside that loop -- period.

It appears that the real recommendation of the article is to process shared data in special functions that access them by dereferencing a pointer. I don't see how that's more efficient/effective for simple cases like described above than declaring a volatile variable.
It used to be that I could sit down at a computer and innovate-up a useful program and no one could say I couldn't. Maybe even try to make a business out of it.

Well hold on now. Don't be too quick to lump things in together. You can still sit down at a computer, innovate a program and make money from it. I do agree that serious help is needed in reforming software patents (as evidenced by Amazon's famous 1-click checkout patent), but IP law is what ensures someone can't hack into your files, steal your proprietary "innovative" programming and re-sell copies of it as their own to the customers you were planning to.

Incidentally, that's why I side with the Sony and the law as referenced in this article. You get to say how your own code is or isn't used. If Sony wants the PS3 opensourced they can go that route, but it's not up to anyone else to take it upon themselves to make that decision for them. If programmers don't like Sony's verdict they can build their own player games. That's how a capitalist free market works.
Content producer makes decent money. Middlemen (aka "Internet companies", HN) freak out. News at 11.
Nokia employee working on MeeGo: "Commited to Linux"
Except that software patents don't even function for the little guy, because even if it was only 'little guys' using software patents, it would cost too much to check your code against every other existing patent
Somebody invented the knife you use to eat, the pants you're wearing, the mattress you sleep on, and you are not paying a dime in royalties. You are standing on the shoulders of giants and you pretend those who come after you to pay you for your invention, even if many unlucky people invented the same thing but were just seconds late to the patent office? I have a word for you, damn parasite, fuck you.