skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it really depends on what you are planning to build.

For my last project (B2B) I spoke with lots of potential customers on a casual basis. Once we determined there was indeed market interest, we did more in depth surveying and evaluations to determine the most important features and what pain points the customers really were looking to solve.

For my current project which is consumer focused, I have had lots of casual conversations and I record the input from them into a quick document I use to track, suggestions, concerns, and both positive and negative feedback. The hard part is that without a live product (we are in development) talking about things like: Would you pay for this? If so how much?, Do you think this would help you?, are just hypothetical and we find it hard to really judge by answers if the idea is truly validated. Hopefully when we rollout the private beta of our MVP we can do more in depth usage analysis and collect more accurate feedback.
That's one possible outcome. Another possible outcome is the one in which iOS, now lacking access to Kindle, Netflix, Evernote, and anything else that made it the least bit useful and interesting, gets kicked to the curb in favor of something that actually supports a lot of consumers' interests.

Frankly, the latter is a hell of a lot more likely looking from where I'm sitting.
Huh, crashes every single time in Chrome (dev)
I think they are correct, Apple could reject their app based on the TOS. Its unclear whether or not they would. I imagine this will be rather murky for a while for all apps of this sort.

What I mean by not the real deal though is that TinyGrab doesn't appear to have much of a presence on iOS devices. Apple could have possibly said, "We need 200 hours of additional programming work from you or we'll reject your app in the future" and they may have bailed. One indicator of this is their complaints of the $99 developer fee. I think most successful companies would welcome a small yearly fee simply because it would reduce the number of low quality competing apps entering their market place. A small yearly fee helps ensure to some degree that the app developer has some serious intentions to create something meaningful.

A lot of the complaining is fully justified. There are other cases like Rhapsody where the company has over 700k subscribers in the US and the CEO has admitted most of these users listen to Rhapsody through an iOS device. That has real implications for them as a subscriber service with small margins. In TinyGrab's case though, they could work around the terms of service and still provide access to their user base. They might have to take a large cut in their subscription fee, or increase their prices, but for a basic screenshot/share service they have options.

The fact they are not pursuing those options, or at least publicly saying they won't be, indicates to me they either have a smart PR team that realized the opportunity here or they just are not successful enough on iOS to justify continuing anyways.
How Online Work Can Save America
Property rights are artificial constructs too.
Microsoft Research post on the matter:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/kinectforw...
The French definitely make fun of Quebecers but will also definitely not speak English instead. If the Quebecer has gone to school (which I believe is the target audience here), the accent will just be a minor nuisance.
On the flip side I do know that I currently use the pre-release version of our product and it has solved the problem we were aiming to solve for myself and our other team members. Hopefully this is an indication we are on the right track (fingers crossed).
HN should increase the downvote-ability threshold as a function of time
The title is fairly self-explanatory but here's my reasoning:

Given the current system (a static threshold of 500), as the community grows and time progresses, an ever-increasing number of users will no doubt be able to downvote. And from my own experience in gaming the HN system, it took me relatively very little time to reach the 500 mark.

Of course I feel like I personally should have the right to downvote (as I don't abuse it and am adamant about only downvoting comments of which provide no substance)... and I'm sure 99.999999% of everyone else does too. But the sad reality of the matter is that no... not everyone should have the ability to downvote because it's clear that a number of those who do so are motivated by differences in opinions rather than lack of intellectual stimulation.

I do realize that the administrators of HN most will likely adjust the threshold over time as they see fit (as they've done previously) but the threshold would be much better suited as a function of time... possibly relative to join date and/or combined with average karma per post (a pretty good indicator of individual worthy contribution)... and maybe even take into (small) account how many upvotes users gives.

To prevent decline of these boards - i.e., a "hivemind" formed by general disagreements regardless of intellectual substance - I think a dynamic function for the downvoting ability should be in place. Each user's karma threshold should vary and should be a semi-logarithmic (not quite as steep - maybe cut it in half) function, roughly based on a combination of the following:

- (45%) those with the most karma

- (20%) those with the highest average

- (10%) time since his/her account creation

- (10%) number of active users

- (5%) upvotes given

- (5%) number of submissions
At age 17 in 1978 our local Tandy (Radio Shack) had a TRS-80. I managed to find out how to list the program that was running, read the (minimal/inadequate) "manual" and started to modify the existing programs.

I purchased a Model I (16KB) and started to run things in BASIC for real, and got seriously fed up with the (lack of) speed. I somehow, somewhere got a Z80 book and started to write code in assembly. That was too slow, so I wrote a compiler.

That way I learned both BASIC and Z80, pretty much entirely self-taught from books that didn't really have much. I might still have them somewhere - I should try to dig them out. I certainly still have the TRS-80, and its schematics. I've been trying to work out if I should replace the dud AND gate that corrupts data when it reads from the screen memory.
Agreed. Montreal developers do have a pretty low salary range and at up to 50%, the tax credit definitely makes a dent.
What constitutes a security incident?
I guess my comment (apart from the French part) applies to most big cities in Canada. Thanks for pointing that out.

"the people are friendlier" is too subjective though, can't really be sure of that.

Getting a position in a startup or open source team here isn't up to spoken language (unless like said early, it's customer facing). I think startups here prefer English. French is just that little extra (sad thing to say, but it's the truth).
I think you're either misunderstanding or reading too much into my point, siglesias. I'm not suggesting that "kill or be killed" is a great basis for society or an ethical system. Just like with many other facts of nature, we can and often do improve on them by creating structures and constraints atop those facts we find unpleasant. However, those structures and constraits are inherently manufactured in the strictest sense of the word. Society is just a thin veneer atop a very ugly picture, and it's almost always in our best interests to keep that veneer in place. But it is, ultimately, just a veneer.

Frankly, this has little to do with the original post - I just made my original comment in response to someone saying "don't kill" is an example of a natural contract.
I find it very hard to look at anything non-trivial and figure out what is slow, about right, and fast. For example, #andand (I keep using this example because many people have heard of it, not because I'm foolish enough to think this is good work on my part).

I guess that after Benjamin Stein and I discussed the problem and one of us (I can't remember whom) said "I wish there was an and-and-dot operator in Ruby," there was a rough implementation written fairly soon after.

But the thing on my Github now probably has a hundred hours of work refactoring, dealing with edge cases, adding new functionality like .andand { |foo| ... } and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if the LOC/hr. has dropped below one at this point. And that's without considering the rewrite_rails version which uses AST rewriting.

So for that purpose, I agree that a fizzbuzz given on the spot is far superior to looking at someone's Github projects. Thanks for the valuable comment.
Tumblr is an amazing story, but there is still a lot of room to grow in this world. You just have to look at pg's "Request for Startups post to see how much opportunity is still available http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

29. Easy site builders for specific markets. Weebly is a good, general-purpose site builder. But there are a lot of markets that could use more specialized tools. What's the best way to make a web site if you're a real estate agent, or a restaurant, or a lawyer? There still don't seem to be canonical answers.

Along these lines I think there is a massive success for whoever comes up with a Tumblr-esqe site optimized for sharing recipes, crafting, and other "homey" activities. A few weeks ago I had 3 separate friends/coworkers coming to me for advice on which blog platform to use for a recipe site. Nothing really works great for this application and there seems to be a real desire for it. I'm sure there are dozens of other "verticals" like this that could grow to significant size. e.g. I could see a similar use case for guys who restore old cars. Go to an amateur car show and every guy will have a scrapbook showing off the restoration process. There is a lot of creativity that Tumblr isn't suited for or targeted at.
I know it's supposed to be purely hypothetical, but I can't help thinking that the bulbs will be more prone to break after being dropped multiple times, and might break before they normally would have under different circumstances.
Test-driven (user) testing
Don't get a mortgage from Wells Fargo. Better yet, tell them that you did not and will not.
So what's the silicon valley equivalent of American Film Market?

AFM is where all the lesser films get sold to distributors around the world, in a process that's very focused on commercial value.

In the boom times, producers could famously sell rights to a film that existed as nothing more than a mocked-up poster.

Wait...maybe y-combinator is afm?
Improving value perception by offering 2 different packages for the same price
I'd amend that to say 'go about your activity without being killed'. For some animals (e.g. carnivores), killing is part of their activity. For humans, it's a choice on where each of us draw the line.
A Crowdsourcing Solution to Subway Tracking
I guess we're thinking about somewhat different things. "I find it very hard to look at anything non-trivial" and in most cases the interviews I've been involved have tended to involved 'trivial' cases, where in some cases the interviewer wasn't sure of the right answer, they just knew some of the common 'wrong' ones to weed people out.
What does "forecloses on [an] office" actually mean? The article didn't explain that to me.

From what I read, it sounds like the guy just won a court claim in local court against WF, and got the Sheriff's office to concur that the company was somehow in the wrong. I thought foreclosure was repossession of a house when the borrower is in default?
Oh, it works both ways.

I have seen more managers not getting hired, because they ex-employees would not recommend them.

Bad managers usually leave a trail of bad rep, and at some points it catches up with them (usually when employers move on and spread out to other companies).
BASIC programming guide that shipped with Vic-20 (I was about 7).

Later on C64 BASIC books and the very cool Usborne Publishing game programming books: http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/manuals/cats/usborne.html

Did computer science at school and then did a 3 year degree in Information Technology.

Been coding for almost 30 years... wow
AFAIK this is already the case.

EDIT: Quoting the unofficial Hacker News FAQ:

"You can only downvote comments once you have sufficient karma. The required level rises over time to account for the karma inflation caused by an increasing userbase.

If you do have enough karma to downvote then the reason might be that you are looking at a response to a comment of your own, or the comment may be older than 24 hours."
I found it rather confusing as well. As I understand it, this is how it went down:

1) He made a "Qualified Written Request" to Wells Fargo (W.F.). I don't know exactly what the request was for though. Presumably an explanation of mysterious charges from W.F.

2) W.F. failed to acknowledge within 20 days and/or act within 60.

3) He filed a suit in small claims court regarding this failure to respond and won by default, since W.F. failed to show up in court.

4) W.F. failed to pay the judgment (?), so he went to the Sheriff to have them place a levy (fine) on Wells Fargo via (presumably) their property.

5) W.F. fails to pay the levy (??), so the property is put up for sale by the Sheriff's department.

(I put question marks in all the areas where the article isn't clear)

Here's the first Google result for Sheriff's sale:
http://www.hudclips.org/articles/what-is-a-sheriff-sale-how-...

It's basically a foreclosure, so the headline is only sort-of misleading.
Don’t Be Saturn: Android May Eat Itself
"HR department exists to protect the company from being sued by current and former employees"

This is, of course, true.

There is a surprising amount of work involved in making sure that the company operates within the bounds of employment law. From basics, such as minimum wage, or correct application of tax credits/benefits to payroll, to ensuring that discrimination does not take place in hiring/promotions, that disciplinary processes are within the letter AND spirit of the law, to banal, such as carrying out exit interviews - ensuring that there are no buried issues about to explode.

Their more useful proceedural functions: training staff to conduct interviews within the law, ensuring performance appraisals are carried out, that staff ratios are in-line with "industry norms", or that salaries are competitive.

And finally, the stuff that most of them would actually prefer to do: ensuring that training happens, that the best staff are retained and have their career appropriately managed, that hiring of new employees is as simple as possible whilst being legal.

Of course, the only way this gets done if HR is not "embedded", is through policy and procedure. and discussion with management (not managers). As HR is a cost centre, and increasingly being outsourced (many of these functions are now seen as requiring only occasional consulting, and not full time attentions), I don't see things improving.

Also, the systems they have are shockingly crap. shudder at Oracle HR support software.
Speaking of named captures.. Something I didn't mention in the blog post, but a rather handy feature:

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :011 > /My name is (?<first>\w+) (?<last>\w+)/ =~ "My name is Ilya Grigorik"

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :012 > first

"Ilya"

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :013 > last

"Grigorik"
Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)
Ask HN: What should I try to negotiate?
I am leaving my job to start a company this summer. I am building a product targeted towards the same industry that I currently work. The board of directors at my current company have found out about my plans and approached me with an offer to consider.

They would like to keep me on retainer as a strategic consultant after I've gone. My role would be focused on continuing to drive the direction of their products and help with closing sales. (This is part of my current responsibilities on top of programming.). I think this will consume between 2 and 5 days a month.

In exchange, they would pay me a monthly retainer as well as provide me with office space / conference room space if I ever need it. I would also be able to cross-sell what I'm working on with any potential sales they've got since I'd be present during that sales process.

I recognize that this is an excellent opportunity and I want to negotiate the best possible position since it will be much easier to do now than to try to revisit later.

Charging hourly for my time seems like the wrong move here. I would love to hear any "outside the box" suggestions for things I should try to negotiate. I would also especially love to hear about times that any of you have successfully pulled this off and possibly any pitfalls I should be aware of.

Thanks!
Agreed. I remember reading about this years and years ago, and I thought Gabe Newell said the resolution was that they flew him to the U.S. and arrested him as he de-boarded his plane.
> in particular what seems to be an attempt to contrast the boy's "passion" with Valves lust for "profits"

Wow, did you read the same sentence I did? They weren't implying Valve had a lust for profits, they were indicating that Gembe wasn't motivated by profit. I think you're reading way too much into that particular sentence.

> I see a lot of comments on this that are sympathetic to the kid, and while I understand that feeling, I think a more sensible look at the situation demands that you feel sorry for him because he brought this upon himself, not because he was any kind of "victim".

I see the comments here differently--I don't think anyone thinks he's strictly innocent, I think people are sympathetic because he was looking down the barrel of the American Corporate Legal System™ and only narrowly escaped.

I understand Valve's anger at having their stuff ripped off and published around the internet and if I were in their position I might have the same outlook. But, having the gift of 20/20 hindsight, we can see that it didn't actually affect them negatively in any tangible way. Half-life 2 was released and overwhelmingly successful and there are no game engines with stolen Valve code stealing licensing profits from them.

So I am sympathetic to the fact that he escaped any jail time because in the end what he did didn't matter. 2 Years of probation seems perfectly appropriate.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't see how your twitter influence is important to any job except for paid endorsements.

If I'm hiring an engineer, a project manager, or a designer, I care about their ability to do the job, not about how much they influence their twitter followers.
Never. Recall how many millions iOS users are there, and how many of them have ability to jailbreak their devices. Then how many would want to.
I do program for iOS and I am not a bit interested in Cydia.
They were treated as seperate instances since the crimes were committed against people in X jurisdiction. That's applicable in this case as well since the Valve folk are in the US jurisdiction.
"If you want a language where there's only one way to do it, I think there's a language with that exact motto."

Be that as it may, in Ruby you should also follow conventions, write readable code, use the most obvious choice when possible and avoid being unnecessarily clever. Most of the core principles that Python promotes should also be heeded when writing Ruby code. Ruby gives you the flexibility to choose different options, but that doesn't mean that the flexibility should be abused.
I originally "learned" when I was a kid by watching my dad do his college homework in his office and asking ?'s. I was homeschooled, so he took this as an opportunity to explain how things work, what a compiler did, etc. I remember telling him that object oriented programming seemed "stupid" because it's redundant if you have to program everything to do the same exact task (e.g. programming each item in your house to pick itself up). I really enjoyed it and I think he did too because he spent most of my life telling me I'd be great if I chose to work with computers.

However, I stopped soon after he graduated college in '89 and moved onto other pursuits because I "knew better". I was about 22 when I started taking CS courses in college, so in a sense that's my "real" learning to program moment, but it's FAR from my first introduction to programming.
Agreed. Thanks for the information. A bunch of those partners have a lot of board seats too.. I wonder how they manage.
Just a slight correction on "friendlier"; people in English Canada are more friendly according to the American norm, where you have one (maybe two) close confidants, and then many shallow cordial relations.

French Canadians do it another way. They have a small circle of friends they would do anything for, but most of the outside world is excluded. If you move to Montreal it will take a few years to break through into a social circle, unless you hang out only with expats.

Also, don't go to Quebec expecting the HI I'LL BE YOUR SLAVE TODAY treatment at a restaurant. Just... don't.
This just resolved my biggest complaint about their nifty little device. Glad to see another useful API out in the field.
Getting Inspiration
The Motorola Milestone advertised it was "Flash ready" on the packaging. That was in mid 2009. I bought the phone and have been waiting on Motorola to deliver the necessary upgrades ever since. Their release date for Android 2.2 Froyo for the Milestone changed, what, ten times - from mid 2010 to June to August to September to Q4 to end of Q4 to early 2011 to sometime 2011… in October a 2.2.1 test ROM from Motorola leaked (the "G.O.T." ROM), and they still haven't managed to put out a release.

I don't trust Motorola on anything anymore. Their hardware was pretty good, but their service and communication with their customers is abysmal.
Chromium bug for "Middle Click with named Target opening in foreground"
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62319
Reasons that PHP is better than Ruby
Video interview with Uber(cab)'s co-founder
The required level is static but increases manually via moderator/administrator intervention. It is currently set at 500. I can downvote pretty much anything.

The quote you've provided is somewhat misleading, as the required level is not truly dynamic/automatic. It may "rise over time" but it is solely dependent on administrators/moderators manually raising the threshold.

As I said in the original post, the threshold should vary from user to user... not be a static, arbitrary number (currently 500) adjusted over time by administrators/moderators. Admins/mods should however tweak the algorithm that determines the threshold. And this threshold should change by the day, maybe even hour... even if only by a fraction of 1 karma point.
To me it sounds like a move to retain your IP under their ownership, I would at least specifically resolve that you own your own IP, and there is no non-compete clauses in anything, but IANAL. Additionally, it seems at the very least they want to be privy to your IP and/or clients, so I would perhaps get them to sign a non-compete with you ... Outside of that, I would say that it sounds more like a partnership or something, so I would think of it like that. Conceptually having your own plans dependent on another sole entity means that you should work against that to get as much outside business, at least, that would be best for your company, especially if it isn't a partnership. Again I am not a lawyer though!
Guillaume Marceau: The speed, size and dependability of programming languages
Edit Chrome input boxes with any editor (Linux)