skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> " the car makers have learned it but Boeing didn't"

Worked in automotive before (albeit briefly), I don't think the car makers have learned it at all. While I was there I saw GM, Chrysler, Ford, and a couple foreign (i.e., no US presence) makers shop constantly for the lowest bidder on everything, similar to the Boeing story here.

And like the Boeing story, these projects quickly became clusterfucks. As a supplier ourselves we saw the least of it - I'd hate to be the guy at GM handling projects like this.

My first week there I had to rescue a project from the brink of a multi-million dollar fine. There was a critical injection-molded plastic component in the product, but we were too cheap to pay the local provider (that we'd been with for the last couple decades) to cut the mold, and instead contracted it out to a Chinese shop an ocean away and half the price. Well, said shop was late delivering, and then the mold got held up in customs. Then management tried to squeeze a deal on the plastic provider, who turned out to be late, also.

At the end of the day the company had to airlift a few container-fulls of product from Canada to South Korea. The contractual fine was worse than that cost... and I'm pretty sure we wiped away any savings a few times over with this whole debacle.

Too much outsourcing, too far away from home, with no ability to keep an eye on things.
Hack of the day: Data structure padding
Hands on with Intel's MeeGo tablet UI: good ideas, rough edges
My last epic fail was a hoax too, I promise.
Interesting. Want to see how this goes. TED is awesome, so I have decent hopes for it.
Well, opinions differ then, because Ken Jennings said halfway through an NPR interview yesterday Watson has the "advantage of speed which no human reflexes can match."

Plus, come on, everyone who watched the match so far knows they're just trying to put some spin on this. The reason why humans don't wait for the light is because their nervous systems are too slow!

Watson doesn't have that problem. If timing and rhythm were so important, they would have Watson do that too. But we all know they don't need to.
Ask HN: Seeking answers from successful or failed app makers
I'm researching markets similar to mobile phone app stores (specifically called Two-sided markets or Platform markets). My questions are the following:
* How do you determine who is your competition in a specific platform (Apple, Android, etc.)?
* How do you estimate costs of projects?
* How do you, before you begin, estimate the complexity of the app at hand?
* What, if ever, keeps you from releasing a mostly-developed app?
* What kinds of costs do you face for app maintenance/development (for OS/platform upgrades)?

Thanks so much HN!
Windows Phone 7 Connector released to Mac App Store
Thanks for pointing out that interesting, and relevant, data (upvoted).

The problem with looking at negative median returns since 1999 is that from 1999-2002 this is just picking up the bubble, and as you point out many funds from vintage years 2003-present are very much still in business, so a current negative return for these vintages is not particularly meaningful. Unless the authors have some methodology I'm not aware of to deal with the fact that venture funds often don't carry companies at anywhere close to their current value.

Finally, even if (B) were true, there's a huge difference between "Most venture funds lose money" and "Most venture funds currently open have lost money." While the first would make me worry about the business model, the second wouldn't.
Very novel idea, and it's a good thinking game, but I'm afraid that Maps is just not snappy and responsive enough to make it actually competitive.

I like it though!
So if a person, single handedly, year after year makes a company millions, you're a whiner if you want 150-250k?

Depending on where you are, 100k barely supports paying for a house to raise a family without a 60 minute each way commute. Many of the places that have very high paying programming jobs just so happen to also have astronomical costs of living. SF? Check. NYC? Check. If you know C++ stupidly well, I know a very high paying job in a relatively low cost of living city (Atlanta) working for a bank. Can they find enough people at those astronomical payouts? Nope. They're constantly looking, less than 1/100th of the applicants can even get through the programming test.

People are simply paid what they can get demand given their skills, inclination to negotiate, and a motivated company to hire.

Additionally speaking, many of the people who demand the 150-450k salaries have run their own businesses, have skills other than programming that are very valuable to the employer (I know my fees are justified due to lots more than my not inconsiderable programming ability), and could do considerably better than 100k out running a business.

If a corporation wants to keep them, they should pay them what it takes.

Or are you saying no one should ever make more than 100k, including brain surgeons and law partners? Cause they're whiners?
>there will be someone (or some fraction of someone) for whom the anntena problem will convince them to make a difference decision.

From Apple's last earnings call:

"Tim [Cook]: If you look at iPhone, we had record sales with 16.2 million units sold in quarter. As Peter said, we believe we could sell more if we had more supply"

If what you're saying is true, and perhaps it is for around 200 nerds scattered around the world, it seems to be irrelevant to Apple's bottom line.
Not sure about 'consistently', though trying to predict the light seems a reasonable strategy to attempt.

There's a lock-out that applies if you buzz too early, and the variance of the 'beats' between Trebek's finish and the light, if that's a human-mediated process, may be far larger than Watson's light-fired reaction time.
Yeah, I would agree with the no movement towards the consumer space, if anything they have retreated from it with the sale of the PC division to Lenovo.

As well the time to challenge Google was 5-7 years ago, when they where at their peek of dominance.

The way people consume information on the net is changing and even Google has to figure out where the chips are going to land. I am not saying Google is going to be irrelevant tomorrow or even that they will be relegated to a niche player just that their search crown gleamed a little brighter a few years ago.

If IBM's history is any indicator, they would rather license the technology to Google than to dilute their business model with consumer facing technology.
I would recommend adding the Linux Kernel Coding Style guide to the list of recommended reading for C programmers. You don't have to follow its advice, but seeing some of the reasoning behind the policies therein can improve your appreciation of the language details.

Original version (text): http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle

Formatted version (HTML): http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/alfs/view/hacker/part2/hacke...
"But then we're back to square one: why don't you become a risk-taker yourself?"

Who says I'm not? Most of the time that people take risks, they fail. That's why it's called "risk", and not "guarantee".

" 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?"

That's a straw man. Created value isn't allocated in strict proportion to risk of loss, and you don't have to take more risks to get paid more. If that were true, the people who funded a startup would get 99% of the upside, because they had the most to lose. (Also, doctors and lawyers wouldn't get paid squat. Anybody who knows a doctor or lawyer will tell you that that they're just about the most risk-averse people on earth.)

The real answer is that compensation is about market forces. The people with the money are only willing to pay as much as the people who create value demand to be paid.
I'm saying that tech got ahead of the patent office in the 90's, and that combined with a zeal to 'own the road' as a business model had companies patenting anything and everything. That of course then spawned a huge patent trolling industry which has had a significant chilling effect on companies.

A very real consequence of this was "datasheets." Prior to the great patent rush semiconductor companies published datasheets which described their chips in great detail. This allowed engineers to write software to use the chip and build systems with them. By the late 90's the "datasheet" for the interesting chips in a system (sound chips, video processor, GPU, etc) had devolved into a description of electrical signals, pinouts, thermal data, and just enough information to verify the chip was functioning. Detailed information about programming was only available under NDA and sometimes only with a binding purchase agreement in place.

Being particularly frustrated by this when writing a driver for a video chip, I used every ounce of influence I had to talk to the guy at the company where the chip was made who "owned" that decision (which is to say he could have said, 'let anyone have the data sheet' and it would have happened). His response was that they didn't release the data sheet because while they didn't believe they violated anyone's patent in their designs, it was impossible to prove that they didn't (you can't prove a negative and all that) and so they took the expedient route of restricting the number of people who "knew" how their chip did what it did to reduce the attack surface for patent trolls. This has been, apparently, the standard operating procedure for over a decade now.

The combination of the 20 year window (which means even if someone patented something its expired by now) and an improvement in the ability of patent examiners to deal with "tech" (we've now got examiners who were in high school in 1995 so they understand at a much better level novelty when it comes to tech). Means tech companies can engage with individuals with less risk, and that using techniques "everyone knows" or uses is much less likely to come bite you back.

No idea how big a damper it will turn out to have been, but I'm watching for the signs ...
Thanks for the advice. The main problem is i lose interest when it does not pick up. Usually just move on to the next new business opportunity. My goals for this year was to launch 2 web apps and make sure they are promoted. After trying for a while without any good i decided the best way was to get someone who is excellent at marketing.
Not at all, good q- in first releases we have 'support' bring up email directly, no FAQs first.

We also ask people to review after three sessions- goal is to come out even at 3, followup fast, and get to 4 or 4 1/2 within three releases.
Awesome. I thought about this months ago and really wanted someone to make it.

Now what I want is different backends, so it could integrate with whatever software is managing the site. For example a WordPress plugin so when someone makes a change to your WordPress blog, it knows to edit the post in the database instead of you manually doing it. (After the site owner approves, of course.)

I would also want a Sphinx backend so I could edit the lacking documentation websites of many Python projects...

And also I'd want a way to auto-approve specific editors.

Good luck! I hope you take this project seriously and keep working on it.
Strongly agree.

Back when I was running my own consultancy I had this belief that if I made something "cool" then it would become a hit almost (as I understand now, in retrospect) by magic. And it was easy to just move on to something else when the magic didn't work.

I've spent some time working in a bureaucratic organisation for nearly 3 years now and, despite all the obvious downsides, this has been a positive experience because I now think I have more of a "business head" to think with. (The regular salary helps a lot too!)

Coming up with ideas for web apps is, I think, fairly easy for the the type of person who hangs out here on HN. Not all of those ideas will be good, of course, but one in ten might be. It's probably also very easy for you to make the damn thing.

But the only way to ensure you give an idea its best shot is to really stick at it and spend a lot of time and effort on the things that don't traditionally come easily to us programmer-types: marketing, design, sales, customer support.

Disclaimer: I make hardly a penny from stuff I've made in the past (and I've abandoned more ideas than I care to remember) but I'd like to think that my work experience (and the experiences shared by fellow HN members) will help me ensure my next venture is more successful.
Funny headline given the opening paragraphs point the blame at the bankers. Really it was a small group of bankers, politicians and regulators that crashed the country - backed up by a dis-interested electorate (until it was too late).
Interesting idea, a few thoughts:

- No social integration to sign up?

- No clickable links for things you add to the lists (Like Apps? But Articles seems to have it.)

- Why would people use this over publicly available blog posts that collect all of this information in the first place?

Just some questions I had in my mind as I was looking through this, would love to hear the reasoning.
LEAKED: Twitter's Confidential Pitch To Advertisers
Civil forfeiture in and of itself makes a mockery of due process.

Indeed, once you make once exception to due process, you can argue ten more through.

Whether civil forfeiture is done by a judge or cop, it involves the justice taking stuff from you without a trial. The final result is the "Judge Dred scenario".

Merely a trial called "United States v. $250,000 in cash" should be a rather bald statement that what is going on is a twisting of concepts to suit bureaucracy.

The reason to avoid search-and-seizure without real due process are fairly simple. One is that such huge powers cause cops to become sloppy (as we've seen). Another is that that a person's stuff is taken and their reputation destroyed, their ability to defend a later trial is effectively destroyed and "you can sue to get it back" is a completely empty claim. A third is that this becomes so easy a method for dealing with criminals that it becomes the method of choice for any criminality and soon you wind with no trials as such - just papers presented to judges.
Gorgeous design! If I'm allowed a nitpick, the two buttons on the About page are nearly but not exactly aligned vertically, probably as an oversight.
Every time this phrase comes up, we need the context again, which conveys a different picture from the tiny and not-so-useful piece taken from it (and which the author successfully adhered to -- kudos!):

"There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance a considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3 %. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified." --Knuth, emphasis mine
What is Stack Overflow's business model?
Speaking of reflexes, it reminds me of those games where your supposed to click/hit a button once it says go. I did a quick search and found this pretty simple flash reaction game:
http://www.opendb.net/media/content/426.swf

Best I could do was .26 seconds =/

I bet someone with a Lego Mindstorm set could whip up a robot that would do this much faster.
We use it for new things - I think the last thing I wrote with it was a custom dynamic dns server we needed - that was just a few weeks ago I think.

Yeah, the documentation is awful. Fortunately I've pretty much always just assumed that all documentation is going to be bad, so I pretty much never even bother trying - I just read the source.
Being a shareholder is kind of a weak claim to authority when anybody can be anyway, isn´t it? If he picked up a couple of NOK stock is he able to be taken exponentially more seriously?
"GPL prevents your competitors from outright stealing your work. BSD/MIT doesn't."

"Any particular examples?"

Me. I know I can't be the only one.

Your competitors could just download the source code, figure out what you wrote, and re-work it into their app. As long as it was different enough, there's not much you could do.

I'm not sure how this would really help you.

"he Affero clause prevents your competitors from taking your software and running an SaaS operation."

I thought open source was about freedom. It seems like it's an attempt to prevent people from making a profit and forcing a political movement. Freedom shouldn't have limits. If you are creating your work to force me to adhere to your ideals, it's not really freedom.

"GPL prevents your competitors from outright stealing your work. BSD/MIT doesn't."

Can code or ideas really be stolen? After all, the original is still there.
I appreciate someone in your position posting this comment more than you can imagine. The research project I'm working on is an attempt to confront this problem. As you say in another comment on this thread, GA's are good for small problems, but don't scale well as more people are involved on the problem.

The problem is more about software engineering and project management, in my opinion. What would we replace CAD systems with if we could? What does the IDE look like when everyone is trying to encode their expertise in such a way that the final design is determined by a machine learning algorithm? That is, it's conceptually easy to imagine those final iterations being done by a machine learning algorithm, but how do we do that?
Great concept and execution! I've had the same idea for years but thought Google would launch this sooner or later. Love that it was launched with a business model as well.

Some feedback:

* I would be able to search local files as well. Dropbox is a great start but I want all of it ;)

* The UI have some neat features (love the interactive graphics on the upgrade page!) but overall it has to be improved a lot. Better graphics, better search result page, typography and especially all the buttons.

* Another way of monetizing the idea is to have partnerships with backup services. Affiliate deal or whatever. Since the user want the content searchable, they probably want backup of it as well.
I haven't built anything worth bragging about, just a Zillow app playing with the Google datastore (cool stuff there).

Ran into the same thing with those 500 errors. I recall the error message seeming to me like it was a rare occurrence, not a Fail Whale "don't worry it happens all the time" kind of thing.
Sacy 0.2: Bundle less, sass, css and js on the fly into minimized static files
Definitely allowed to nitpick — in Firefox they were aligned but I can see now that in Chrome they aren't. Thanks for passing along!
The excellent, C: A Reference Manual (5th edition) covers C99.

http://www.careferencemanual.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Manual-Samuel-P-Harbison/dp/...
I'm working on a webhook specifically so you can do what you want when edits change. I probably can't write plugins for most stuff, but I can write a webhook!
More friends equals more stress on Facebook
Constant Contact is going NoSQL after buying Bantam Live
Here's a tip: move to Austin.

1) No state income tax. Read that again.
2) Cost of living is at least HALF of SF/SV/NYC
3) Real estate is actually affordable, even close in.

Now, I know there is the argument for needing to be in SF/SV for startups and tech, but Austin is a hotbed of tech activity and with more and more companies allowing remote work, it's worth a shot.
You're in luck, I plan to make a bookmarklet/browser extension that will let you edit any site.
Only goes to show the state of tech reporting. So superficial and trigger happy.
I had that same idea at a point in time. I decided that i wasn't just going to build but make sure people use it. I have people using my web app which is encouraging but not enough for me to be happy to continue development. It might be too early to determine that. Marketing is easy to say but really hard and frustrating to do.
And no offense taken :) I think it's important to keep in mind that startups grow and mature. Right now we're two people (only one programmer) who've been working for a few months. We've learned a lot and (in)validated more than a few crucial hypotheses, but things are far from over and our aspirations are huge.

As PG once said to us, "Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter for the Altair."
i'm still really keen to try this, but taskforce doesn't yet support mailplane. Looking forward to getting that email when it does! :)
I may not have known what the terms meant, but I took that to mean 10 year returns on funds. So, I thought it was only referring to funds started in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Still definitely not a overwhelming amount of data. I forgot to mention the other years in my comment. However, the general idea of the comment still holds- they took an exact bit of data, like 10 year returns for the worst years of funds to determine that VCs aren't valuable. As has already been commented, if you looked at the 15 or 20 year returns you will be amazed in the other direction.
The ZookShop story. A behind the scenes look at bootstrapping a SaaS web app.
Facebook could block Greplin upon an acquisition by Google.

Allowing Greplin to get Facebook data by using the Facebook API (which it does) is much different than allowing Google to get EVERYONE'S data by spidering. One involves consent by the user, and provides search only for that user. The other involves no consent and provides access to user data over a publicly available interface.
Where does sophistry fit into your model? How about crackpots writing long dissertations about alleged government nanotransponders secretly implanted in dental fillings? I wouldn't call those casual, but the label of "intelligent discussion" doesn't quite seem to apply.
I'm making the same points as others have, in a different way. The relative-wealth considerations you mention may be relevant for achieving a sense of gratitude about one's blessings... but are completely irrelevant in determining what salary someone "should" be paid, or when they should complain-to-employer/demand-more. If developers integrate your thoughts into their salary negotiations, others are enriched – not the developers, not the people scraping by on less, but others arbitraging their low demands and higher productivity.

Raising your threshold a little – to 150K! – doesn't fix the problem. If your work is worth 500K – generating more than that for someone else – and you're paid 150K, you're being cheated. You have the right to be angry, complain, point out the discrepancy to others, and vigorously pursue competitive alternatives.

Yes, this may appear ungrateful to those making do with far less. But their remote estimations aren't relevant to the intimate dyadic relationship between an employer and employed, where both fairness and efficiency require salaries to be set by negotiation over value delivered each direction. Let third-parties express their displeasure through progressive taxation schemes or the construction of alternative economic systems... not by telling developers to be happy with a lower share of their own output.
Agreed. I wish I could up you 100 times.
100k goes considerably further in Vancouver than in many parts of the Bay Area. Real Estate Rents and Sell prices are between 40-100% more expensive in that region than where you are. I'd need to make about 180% of what I do here to get what I have here in Atlanta, GA
Which bit's slow? Most of the static bits should be cached pretty well, at least on your second load. My poor little heroku dyno is struggling on some of the dynamic parts though.