skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On SERPs with blocked results there is a note that some results have been blocked and you can click it to reveal the blocked results. So if you don't see what you're looking for you can turn back on the spam and check.
More correctly, this article is about why most business books suck for entrepreneur's looking for clear, actionable advice.

The post does do a good job of summarizing the different types of business books.
My friend I think you missed a great HN article: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal (http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2201469)
I think if someone really wanted to, they could witness this phenomenon. =)
The name of the company is not a circumstance I find especially relevant to whether I am "ok with it".
Well that's motivational! What kind of area are you in? Is it very urban or a tech hub?
A business to business marketplace/network, exclusively focused on enterprise/opex. If you think about real world opex e.g office supplies, travel, insurance, advertising, online is the future. The largest marketplaces currently focus on B2C and realistically, there's only two (Amazon, eBay), which explains both the opportunity in B2B and the possibility to build a large company that benefits from network effects.

Edit - Technically, eBay is C2C like craigslist, though I'd imagine the majority of their revenues are from B2B, eBay stores. C2C/B2C currently has nearly all the mindshare but as the Internet moves deeper into enterprises this will change. If anything, I'd imagine that the greatest opportunity is B2B, especially when you consider the financial/industrial markets and overall business spend is far larger than consumer goods/services.

The problems with B2B are mainly price (negotiation), but also the actual transaction process i.e most businesses operate credit accounts, with varied terms. Get this right and you will have something people want.
Where is the evidence that piracy cause the paying market to unravel?
Essentially what they're saying, as far as I can tell, is that I can't offer in app-purchases without going through Apple.

So something like Rhapsody, for instance, CAN build an app giving you access to your existing collection. They can NOT, however, provide for the ability to sign-up new customers without giving Apple a cut. My bet is that punting out to Safari from your app won't cut it. It has to be initiated completely from outside your application.
I'm not sure I understand your point. All of the contestants "see" the answer at the same time, and none of them are allowed to buzz in until the magic light goes on.
It's called affiliate marketing and it's one of the best ways for an independent operator to make money in the SEO business. I guess the only question is whether Apple can claim 30% in perpetuity or just for the first X months.
Is this only for media/content subscriptions? If I have an SaaS app that I'd like to make an iPhone front-end to, can this subscription service be used?
I imagine the reason publishers dislike the Apple payment stuff is not the 30% but the fact that Apple owns the customer, not them.
One of the best tech meme's i seen in quite a while. Love this one
Maybe one day you will look back at this and be surprised how you ended up acquiring 37signals to complement your business. :)
I've got a whole notebook of ideas, but in particular, I've been working on some studio management software for my own piano studio. The market wouldn't be very large, but turning it into a web app wouldn't be very difficult.

I'm a competent programmer, it's just the auxiliary skills that are really lacking...
Is it just me, or does Steve always seem to over-complicate things so much?

It's not that I don't agree with his point, but I think the problem here is much simpler: feedback loops.

We can argue what sort of feedback is appropriate -- whether colleges should be judged for the amount of value they bring to life, or whether they should be judged by the job prospects of the graduates, etc. But the sad fact is that in most criteria, many people think that the product is mis-aligned with the needs of the customers. This is because there is no feedback loop for colleges to evaluate when they are doing something wrong and thereby correct it. Without a loop in place, all the theorizing in the world isn't going to make a better college, just a prettier org chart.

I think there's a difference between saying something that's probably true and that we can probably agree with and actually observing the results to changes in an organization. The first thing doesn't have much of a quality criteria except for our concurrence. The second always produces results we don't like and makes us challenge our assumptions. That's why feedback loops always beat theory work.
The modern day phrenologists will have a hard time explaining any further abilities he manages to develop.

This part of the brain is for X, here is the Y-centre, here is where Z is controlled.

Except, wait, XYZ are missing :-o
Ok first question:

Why only one button?

Two would have been really nice for most things (like back and forward in powerpoint/itunes).

Edit: Another one:

Why don't you ship outside the US/Canada? I considered buying one, but I'm in Germany :(
Perfect Match
I was going to quit soon anyways, but now that I've been placed in this situation, I'm just torn between educating myself further or diving into a business.
It's also useful, as is the case with many topics these days, to think of risk. Right now, an increasing burden of risk has been and continues to be pushed down onto the student -- in the U.S., at least.

A similar thing happened with pensions versus self-managed retirement funds (e.g. 401k's) beginning in the 1970's.

Not that stable career paths existed for all time before this, nor managed retirement. But the changes do reflect the current, um, "delta".

Where this leads, I don't know. However, a certain amount of stability seems necessary, to me, for fostering advanced, complicated systems including social, employment, and production systems. If everyone's an "entrepreneur", I don't know how we're going to e.g. build jet engines. (I exaggerate for the sake of my point.)

I've met those "specialists in cross training". They're called management. A few are genuinely good at it; many aren't particularly good at anything.

Addendum: On the other hand, much of Blank's post reads like a variation on the argument for a liberal arts education. He even mentions liberal arts as a component.

However... Those liberal arts people need at least a modicum of post-education investment in order to get up to speed in a particular, current area of focus. (And that's when they're good, and really educated: Something neither all liberal arts degrees nor all liberal arts students produce/become.) We're in a marketplace that won't even go that far. Again, placing the risk on the student venturing to pursue that path.

P.S. I do think that pre-graduation work is a good idea. I also think that people should be paid for it. Unpaid internships introduce all kinds of distortions, including distortion of the work experience for the interns. Level the playing field, and make it real.
wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Views
When proposing shared blacklists some kind of distinction between those that produce original (albeit relatively low quality) content and those that simply duplicate the same content available elsewhere would be helpful so people could choose their level of strictness.
This is great, thanks Matt.

After using this for less that 12 hours and I think it's fantastic. I also think it could be vastly improved upon. What if you added reddit style "up" and "down" votes to my results?

Maybe it sounds silly at first pass, but if all my votes get passed back to Google, your algorithms could learn from an incredible crowd-source treasure trove of knowledge.

A black list wouldn't just help you find the bad ones - but up-boats could help you suss the good ones.

There's the concern of DIGG style voting blocks, but perhaps even that could be detected by sufficiently sophistimatacted algorithms. (detection of pairity in voting that fell outside of statistical norms could be downgraded in quality).

I mean, sure, I'm already gaming the system in my head ... automated creation of accounts, automated up-boating (which I suspect happens on Reddit as well, despite being bad "reddiquette")

OK. Actually, maybe it's a terrible idea. Like DIGG with only down-votes. Seems like a potential treasure trove though.

Right?
Spoiler not appreciated by many, I'm guessing. Next time, please don't do that.
People will say the same things 50 years later!

However, it is a fact that AI are pervasive in our world today. We just don't recognize it as artificial intelligence.
I'm seeing anti-euthanasia in the article for sure, and certainly some anti-abortion arguments spring to my mind when reading, but I don't see the article actually making any of them. It's discussing only post-birth ethics.
By this logic, the customer's ISP also deserves a cut.
Not quite (but almost) as long as Nokia Plan A then.
(Another author here)

The basic issue is that we didn't want to include external libraries, because it's a pain to debug, pain to build on multiple platforms and there are licensing issues.

Also we don't use so many datastructures, so we rolled our own and we are happy with them. For example we have an intrusive treemap, that has a function for returning the middle of a sorted key which is useful when you want to split a keyspace into two. Not sure if any of STL/Boost supports that.

Your solutions looks good, you are hired! ;) Seriously, we know that it is not that hard, but still the applicants have problems with it.
Is IE9 a modern browser?
Ask HN: What is :(){ :|:& };:?
Hi,

I just saw this in a wallpaper saying "beautiful destruction" and got my curiosity.

:(){ :|:& };:

I dont know what it is and search engines tells me nothing about it.

Can anybody enlighten me please?
This is mind blowing. Any plans for iOS support? Jailbreak or otherwise?
A lot of you are focusing on content subscriptions in your comments. I don't think that's the real story.

I'm hugely concerned about all of us who are running SaaS apps that are complemented by an iOS app.

We've worked our assess off to reach profitability and now Apple thinks they can come along an extort 30% of our revenue.

The power of the App Store is in reaching the mass market. That's awesome for people who are building apps/services that service that market. They benefit hugely from this powerful distribution channel. But all of us folks who have built up a following in a niche market (web design and development, for us) don't need this and we're certainly not going to put up with Apple demanding we fork over 30% of our revenue just so our customers can have an iOS experience.

IMHO, this is the push we all need to go HTML5, CSS3, jQuery for our next 'iOS' app (the way 37s recently did with the mobile version of Basecamp).

I'm a huge Apple fan (probably spent $30K+ over the years for our company) but this is bullshit.
The full list of programming related slashtags that are being co-edited is here: http://www.skrenta.com/2011/02/blekko_stackoverflow_better_p...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29#Bindings
I hope your interpretation is the right one, but it's still problematic in that Amazon can't offer their subscriptions in-app without price matching instead of (cost + 30%). I don't know the exact breakdown, but I'm pretty sure the iPad is not the primary Kindle reading device. Adding a useful feature like in-app subscription purchases now has a huge negative incentive for Amazon.
"And why should developer bother to know how to deal with pointers ?"

Because if you don't even know the most basic things like the stack and the heap and memory addressing and the mechanics of calling functions, how can you expect to be a "developer"? Fine, let people start learning with languages that abstract all of that away, but for a well-rounded, complete education as a programmer (I'm not talking school-eduction, I'm talking general education) you need to know about these things.
We choose one button to keep it simple (and quicker to get to market). You can do a lot of things with just one button, just look at the single button on the iPhone! For example, you can do two actions, like click and click-hold.
Benchmark your mobile site
Look at other things like your IP, user agent, etc.

Spammers, things done by scripts... They give themselves away really easily. All I want is an obstacle enough that I know people aren't spamming and that if they troll they understand that it will reflect on their reputation.

Do I need a real id? Nope. And clearly Quora don't either as they don't require over 99% of users verify their real id. It's just a spam prevention policy and helps cut down on trolls as it will (or has risk that it will) reflect on you.

It's really not a good thing to start applying onerous terms and your users.
TL;DR: He used free Mozy backup account. Hard drive failed. Replacement took 2 months. He never tried to recover the file within 2 months. Mozy's policy is to delete data of free accounts if no activity for 30 days. Data deleted. He went mad.

Does this mean “cloud” fails? Hell no……
A bit expensive for a watch, but still very very cool!
That is good to see. But I would argue that the change described here is a rather small change while the 2 missing features I described have a larger effect on how you design your application.
I'm sure Shakespeare could have found a way to write his plays if the source material he used had been unavailable/protected. I think the point is that Shakespeare had an effective pay wall which guaranteed he'd be rewarded for his work (there was still piracy, human recorders in the audience, but it was manageable). Later copyright protected markets created 'virtual paywalls' and much more creativity ensued. The web has greatly reduced the effectiveness of all these paywalls, thus someone like Shakespeare might not even bother to create in the first place.

Also, having exclusive performance rights is very important too. Otherwise the only hope of commission is for the chance to debut/premier a work (after which, it's anyone's game).
The point of the detractors, though, is that if only a subset of the language is good for any particular task, why not skip the subset operation and just choose a language better for the task?

I echo that sentiment. I'm using C++ in my current project (first time in many, many moons), and it dies what we want reasonably well, but it is bigger than any language needs to be.
Jaron Lanier - Why We Should Pay To Search
So Microsoft should be taking a 30% cut of every dime spent on Windows?
Hey, I know this must be there in the sdk docs somewhere, but can the knob on the side of the watch be used as an input device? Also, I wish I had more upvotes to give you.

EDIT: Oh, never mind, just saw that its a button, not a knob.
The true test of a language, IMO, is how it will rot over a decade or so.

I'm maintaining a C++ web application written 12 years ago. It's not pretty. I cannot describe the difficulties even an experience C++ developer would have in trying to understand and maintain it.

Fortunately modern C++ is pretty good. We've managed to tack on a legacy compatibility layer via the Boost libs to give us a Python wrapper. It's still running in production and is still pretty useable.

However, C/C++ still requires a fairly high cognitive load for a diminishing return, IMO. There are other languages that are easier to understand and maintain whose implementations are getting increasingly better at competing in areas where C/C++ used to be the go-to choice. There are simply fewer cases where I will reach for C++ these days where it used to be the only choice.
Nice. Now can someone explain the $11 format in the ID3V2 tag?

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0#head-70a65d30522ef0d37642224c2a...
Full disclosure: I generally like apple products and have used NeXT / apple products for a long time.

I don't see how Apple's stance here is defensible or honest. They using their position as a large platform provider to steal from 3rd party developers.

To me this is akin to me writing a program for OSX that allows users to sign up for a subscription service, and apple taking a 30% cut of my cash flows just because I targeted their platform. They have been paid for their device by the consumer, they don't own all the software running on the device. They provide an OS, 3rd party developers provide the applications.

Most iOS programs receive absolutely no advertising from apple. In these cases how has apple contributed anything - how as Apple brought them customers. What if I run an ad-words campaign and drive my own app sales? If Apple were to make deals with developers for cuts of cash flow in exchange for advertising on the store, that would seem more honest.

To me this seems anti competitive and just plain dishonest. Apple is at risk of becoming the troll under the bridge here.
If you don't allow the extension to work in incognito mode (it's opt-in by default), then you can just open up an incognito / private browsing window instead (which Chrome makes pretty low-cost). This might have the benefit of removing any influence on your search results due to Google cookies that would otherwise be sent.
Hey, we actually do have iOS support, but yeah the device has to be jailbroken. You can read the FAQ here www.getinpulse.com/faq
Take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb#Examples
Lots of books about 'were the ancient swedes aliens' - who came to earth in a flat pack spaceship?
Killed. Don't launch things on too little sleep or YIKES makes its way into the public eye.
Original video: http://bcove.me/z8h3m3e3
Here’s an Amazing Reason to Apply to TechStars
Even at that, just look at all the problems Reddit etc. have had with bury brigades working to game the system. I imagine with the reputation defender styled companies out there right now, this would be a natural service.
That the human spirit does not reside within the cerebellum is predictable, though, since it's one of the more evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain and not at all exclusive to humans.
You don't get "heavy promotion". You have an incredibly small chance of getting any promotion at all.

I think people hoping to hit the app store lotto by getting mentioned by Apple or TechCrunch are the same kinds of people that get duped into doing spec work.

"I'll be a millionaire just as soon as my iFart clone gets listed as one of Apple's Staff Picks."
The sun is located a couple of kilometers from my home. Another planet about 20 meters from my workspace and I've only known about it since a month back when a guy from London told me about it. It's well hidden, right in front of our eyes.
So microsoft would be within their rights to take a 30% cut of all cash flows from subscriptions made using internet explorer?

What about 30% of all sales of Windows Software?

Where does the ownership of the OS author end and the ownership of the 3rd party developer begin?

What if Apple insisted upon 50%?
Actually most of the guide relate to good programming practices, and not just stylistic preferences. Also, I would argue that taking offense at style guidelines (which bring a lot of benefits, especially at a big software company like Google) is unprofessional.
What makes IBM Watson so smart?
I don't think this is fair on the so-called "ragers". F'rinstance here in London we really do get people who will ride the escalator to the bottom, step off and just stop, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there is a conveyor mechanism directly behind them delivering a stream people to just where they're now standing.

Of course they know, they've got all the senses of everyone else. They're just self-absorbed, and don't care that they're being rude by getting in the way. There's no reasoning with such people; a shove is the only language they understand.
Why is ODesk more popular then RentaCoder (now vWorker)?
Java developer here looking for small projects! Located in Belgium.
This is Apple's version of suicide -- attacking the developer's that made the platform popular in the first place.
Testing involves paying a price in example counts in order to buy analytical power at some unknown rate. Insignificant results arise when either (1) people react with a lot of variance and that power/example rate is small or (2) the effect you're trying to analyze is so tiny that you need a great deal of power to see it at all.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to determine the difference between those two cases. If many of your tests are failing to be significant, it could be that you're simply never investing enough to get the power you need: your users are somewhat inflexible to the design changes you're making.

It could also be that many of your changes simply are pretty insignificant and by the time you wait a full year gathering simply infinite numbers of impressions, you'll find it was just a waste of time.

Again, practice statistics with a great deal of self-awareness. They're only meant to inform.
More like it means read your TOS closer, and don't get mad when data from your FREE account is deleted in accordance with their policy.
Michael Greeley: What are You Worth?
This is actually great for consumer SaaS. Getting consumers to subscribe to software is extremely hard, and this adds a low-friction way to get new subscribers.

If they come through App Store one-click, you get additional revenue that is at least 30% more likely to happen than if you stuck up a credit card form. If they come through your website, your revenue is the same.
Obviously, any app store-only app will not care about this other than reduced margins for subscriptions -- they weren't making money any other way. But folks who sell through other channels than ipad will .. just leave. I wonder if that's the goal.

But then again: it's like the ebook purchase thing -- Amazon and BN have been strangely silent -- maybe they decided to relent, maybe they're going to get a special deal, or maybe they'll pull their apps just before the ipad2 launches. :-)
I think that retailers should be able to charge 1-2% more to customers who use Visa and MasterCard than to those who use cash, and a couple percent more for Discover or AmEx.

Retailers are free to do this, they just can't except VISA anymore. I've been in a few stores that accept AMEX,Discover, and Mastercard with a reasonable markup (and some unreasonable markup, like the DMV). VISA shoppers, once they realize the policy, just walk out the store and go to a store that has what they want and does accept Visa. Some even come back cash in hand.

In that regard Apple's policy mirrors visa. You are free to put your subscriptions in marketplace, amazon, etc. But if you want to be in the App Store you have to abide by their agreement.
Once you have purchased a phone from Apple - doesn't it cease to be their device?

Doesn't this all seem a little wrong?
That's really true. It's funny that some of the changes we weren't expecting to make much of an impact have had the biggest results.
Here you can sign up http://www.getinpulse.com/mailinglist/
From the non-delivery of the "forgotten password" emails, I assume that you weren't checking the email you registered with any more (maybe it was an old one you no longer used)? However, I don't see this as Mozy's fault. They provide you with online backup for free and all they ask is that you regularly check in to show that you're still using the service.

Providing services costs money, and it's entirely acceptable for the provider to terminate non-paying users' services at any time. Of course, it's much better if they do it after a while and with a warning (which Mozy apparently did do), but it's unfortunate that the email was lost.

In summary, I don't think people have much right to complain that the service they were getting for free wasn't provided in perpetuity as well. If you wanted reliable service, I think the 5 GBP/mo isn't too much to pay to ensure that your files are safe.