skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I graduated from grad school about four months ago and started working at home as a data consultant. It's important to find a comfortable space where you can still get work done. Having a nice chair to sit on is also very important.

I've never had a professional full time job, as I started working for myself straight out of grad school. I have had numerous retail jobs that I had as a teen and during college, but that's a different story. So i'm not sure about 'how to begin that arrangement.'
I am a bootstrapped guy. I wish there was a step-by step guide that one can follow before and after launch. Despite the target market,etc. I think the basic things that any new startup needs to follow is pretty much the same. A guide will be tremendously helpful that lists a few things such as:

Pre-Launch:
- Contact blogger/journalist a,b, c and d, to give free beta invites and coverage during launch
- Do ....(twitter, facebook) etc to engage with potential customers and start building a community that will end up becoming your first set of customers.
- ... I am sure there are plenty of things a startup can do (and is applicable to any startup across the board), that will help build anticipation and buzz around the product/launch

Post-Launch:
- Immediate steps that can be taken to get your first set of customers
- Startups desperately need traction and attention now that they have launched. PR is critical. What are some of the strategies that can be applied here? For instance, going after middle level bloggers. You are not ready for TechCrunch yet, or you do not have the right contacts. No-name blogger will not give you any exposure (however, I should say that any mention/link helps) - but you need to find the right balance to get maximum realistic bang for your efforts.
- Some strategies to monetize. If product/service based monetization - what are some of the important things that need to be done? Ditto with advertising based model.
- Despite the amount of time you've put into development, you will need to listen. Do you have proper feedback channels in place? Based on this feedback, you might need to completely change your business model, or at least think about tweaking several things including better user experience / smooth user-flow.

I just wanted to say a few things to get a conversation started. You have started ene of the most critical and much needed conversation topics here. Let's here from others. In today's world with all the tools and more or less the same paths that users take to grow their startup, A "Startup Handbook" would be an asset.
If you ignore the hours of data copying or fresh install.
>I'm not sure what it was about Windows that drove everyone to the full screen way of doing things

For myself, it's because so many applications have massive amounts of chrome and tiny vertical scrolling content areas. Height is necessary. Add to that that you can drag things above / below the borders of your screen, and unnecessary borders on everything, and no shadows to show "height", and your desktop becomes a cluttered, disorganized mess with too much scrolling in almost no time.

7 fixes a lot of that. You can drag things to the top of the screen to maximize, and pull away to un-maximize. Height via transparency and shadows. And a regression to thicker-than-ever borders :\ I guess you can't have it all.
The Hindu : Opinion / Editorial : On real Internet freedom
iOS (and apparently Lion) deemphasize the users' awareness and involvement in the concept of which apps are "open" and which aren't. iOS already has a popup "multitasking bar" that lets you switch right back to the apps you most recently used. When you switch back they either immediately resume running or deserialize their state back from storage - and the user generally can't (and doesn't need to be able to) distinguish between the two.
I've been told by a friend who happens to work for MS that they've had this stuff working for years, but it's just been more lucrative for them to not include it (another clue that they have an entrenched monopoly in Office software).

Just like Google ChromeFrame and IE9, I hope this pushes the Office folks to release something better so the Google "barnacles" don't destroy their platform.
Speaking of which my Palm Pre II came with inductive back by default - just had to get the Touchstone charger and its charging inductively on my desk :)

Once Touchpad is out that will be the second device - strange though that it hasn't become THE way to charge.
Is the conversation view fixed in the final release or do they still have the stupid thread view without my sent messages every other client but Gmail has?
Yeah, what was I thinking. Advice noted and title updated. BTW I'm in the Launch conference and this was the first startup presented and was well liked by everyone.
also interesting is 2010's worst name award:

http://eatmywords.com/blog/announcing-award-worst-brand-2010...
Especially when they are trying to move to full-screen apps, which work a lot better on my laptop than on my 24" monitor.
Given what I see for your add-ons, they are very generic and solve problems that others have solved in other ways. Not trying to sound harsh, but your product probably isn't compelling enough for most folks to pay for because they can get it elsewhere for free, or there are similar things to get (e.g. RSS readers, Twitter posters).

You haven't really cornered your niche, although you probably have some nice functionality for those add-ons. In order to get people to part with their cash you need to:

a) scratch their particular itch and do it well
b) not have anyone else scratching it, or scratching it poorly if they do

You've still got 360K eyeballs, maybe you need to find a different itch.
Thanks. I'll give posting on Quora a try.
I don't know how Microsoft is going to react to Google adding a crucially missing feature in Office and leveraging its software for its own purposes.

If Google isn't using undocumented APIs, then they're doing exactly what Microsoft wants: developing software that "plugs in to" the Microsoft ecosystem.
"The plastic casing is brittle and just breaks off after a certain amount of time"

This is apparently a known issue with certain models of the Macbook. I had mine replaced free of charge as well, even though I'm out of warranty. Apple is aware of the issue and I'm happy that they at least replaced my case without a fuss.
No tru.ly ID's for Ayaan Hirsi Ali or even Salman Rushdie!
FREE TICKET TO SAN JOSE (worldtize.com)
Anyone who is interested in relocating to San Jose to network and join a start-up, please contact me. I have living space available and airline credit to fly you here. Also, if you need part time work, I have jobs serving and bartending for some initial survival income.

gstacks00@aol.com.....email me here
The little asterisk after those features links to: "Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion."
I'd think the penetration of non-cash tipping would be low until some sort of casual payment system got as easy as Bump and cheap enough in requirements (including the phone) that people in those service jobs could use them.

Mind, smart-phone capabilities will trickle down to cheap, no-contract phones eventually. Some smart developers and companies will be ready for that.
Garage sale hardware, from comp to router to cable modem, was likely used, if not what you suggested.
Thanks for this - just watched the first video. Clearly spoken and well explained. Will be going through the rest of the course.
... a little too obvious?

Funny how all those accounts saying nice things about hyperpublic have been created within the last hour.
They took out the AMD Radeon graphic card on the 13" unit?

Make up your mind, Apple.
How large is the timeslice on this? Apple releases the iPhone in the summer like clockwork. Lots of people buy during the initial push and follow-on buyers peter out in the period just before the next release. I think Apple even acknowledged this in their last earnings call, but I could be wrong. Unless you absolutely needed an iPhone right now, you'd want to hold out from February - May.

Apple's annual obsolescence for their consumer products isn't a secret to the mainstream, either. It's almost a running gag.
As br1 pointed out - scaling DPI is what Windows does and OSX doesn't - not resolution as you appear to have tested with. No LCD is going to look good at non-native resolution - what you want to do is use the native res of the display and up the DPI in Windows to 120%. Works unquestionably well for most apps if you use XP Style scaling.
> "I don't argue that multitasking (in OS sense) is bad. I argue that multitasking as a way for human to deal with tasks is actually less productive."

Oh, so you aren't saying much then, just equivocating terms throughout the conversation. Please stop.

> "Your example does not contradict that: checking email is different task from watching youtube."

The way your personal ontology cuts the vast range of human computing endeavors into "task" units does not interest me (nor, I suspect, many people in these threads). What does interest me is my own (and their own to them). As the start of this thread clearly pointed out, the computing field learned many years back the lesson of computer multitasking. It enables a decoupling of the computer's task ontology and the user's task ontology. That is good for users, and they, like me, generally like it (as clearly evidenced by their behavior).

If you haven't been intentionally arguing for the equivalent of "being able to get more than one tool out of the toolbox at once is not helpful", then your equivocation on terms (which implied that as your position) has been noise in the conversation.
The problem with C is that it's not memory safe. Therefore you need hardware hacks (MMU) to separate processes. If you use a memory safe language you lose the ability to do pointer arithmetic (and the speed hacks that come with it), but you don't need to remap the page table every time you switch between processes. This makes threads and processes pretty much the same thing. Code injection is impossible in a memory-safe language, which helps with security (I'm talking about buffer overflows here, not SQL injecion, XSS etc).

Using a higher-level language can also help with many other things, for example integrated garbage collection, built-in serialization and process migration, intelligent message passing (pass objects around rather than bytes), etc.

A good example of an implementation of these ideas is Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/), which is written in a superset of C#.
Notice that the iphone is not linked on the front page of http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/. This would indicate it's not a target market for people using uSwitch.

If you put in any search criteria the iPhone scores lower as it is more expensive (any search for <£30 p/m it doesn't feature, anything for more it is consistently 8th or worse).

This 'survey' is a total farce.

The linked article claims top 5 selling which is totally and utterly wrong. It seems the author can't read. And also doesn't even link to the source article from uswitch.
No.

When you pay, we email our user base which is always eager to participate (as long as there is an incentive involved). We have never had anyone who has paid not receive feedback. You can take a look at the following to see the paid amount and the number of feedback submissions received: http://startuplift.com/category/cash-award/
Same reason why every interface standard that flirts with optical eventually ends up supporting copper: optical components are more expensive, and over short runs you can get acceptable performance with copper.
The question is how to display things like that on a desktop OS that might be used with a mouse. With a touch gesture, you touch and then move vertically as a continous action. On a mouse, you click or turn a wheel, much more discrete actions.

Edit: Aha, they addressed this: "With the new scrollbars, if all of the user’s pointing devices support both horizontal and vertical touch scrolling, the scrollbars are hidden during normal use. They will appear as an overlay on top of the window's content while the user is scrolling, and remain visible briefly to allow scrollbar dragging."
Ask HN: How have you solved other people's problems without writing code?
When I have an idea for a solution to someone's problem--particularly a solution that could generate income--I worry that I jump to "let's start coding" too soon.

I see many posts on Hacker News about successful 24-hour projects that make a few bucks and don't involve the creator writing any code, or very little code, and coughing up pocket change for the resources. These posts often come with a helpful explanation of how the project was put together from disparate pre-existing resources, frameworks, engines & tools.

For example, many of the "pieces-parts" I have read about take the shape of CMSes, website templates & designs with free or cheap licenses, payment processors, shopping carts, scripts & libraries, APIs, phone systems, and so forth.

What are some of the tools you use to create or prototype working solutions without spending a lot of time & money? What are some solutions you have created in this way, and how did they succeed or fail?
San Diego: Join us for Hacker News meetup #14 (Fri 2/25)
"work now and talk later"

this is just dead simple lesson in theory but why it takes time to actually practically feel this?

i think i will read and re-read only this post for few days. no more popurls.
They sure are putting the Twit back in, though.
I signed up because I think this is a good idea that has a place on the Internet. However, in order to link to my facebook and twitter accounts it wants permission to post to my wall and send out tweets. I'm tired of apps requesting more permissions than necessary, so that's where I stopped using it. Also, .ly is a bad idea.
If the app can't even re-launch itself, a core support file is corrupted so resume or no resume is irrelevant.
Force is strong in this one
Magnet Boy - 7 year old Serbian Boy is magnetic. How is this possible?
> The work-around is pretty trivial though: just cheat as usual, then claim you forgot to commit until you were already done.

The Workaround for this is likewise trivial: make "failure to show work" grounds for a failing assignment grade.
I was going to snarkily say that they named their database after PostgreSQL's mascot, but then I remembered that Hadoop also has an elephant logo.
I find the benchmark graphs on http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html frustrating. What is the baseline Apple is comparing to? I have a MacBook Pro with a core 2 duo 2.53GHz processor. I am sure that the 2.2 GHz quad-core processor on the new MBPs is faster, but by how much. How do the processors stack up when running single treaded applications? I suppose I'll need to wait for the third party reviews.
My first website
Hi, nothing really big except that this newbie has created his first website.
Notice a lost pixel? you can hit me up at komuw05@yahoo.com
All OK, but I'm European.

I've worked in USA, so I have social-security, but don't have permanent US address. World is a little bigger than USA afterall.
I think the problem is deeper than just concurrency and preventing GC pauses.

Since a kernel is something that is expected to run forever, it can't afford to leak anything over the long term. For most GCs, collecting that last little bit of garbage (in deterministic time) requires O(committed address space) memory bandwidth. A full-copy style GC may take O(object memory), which could be an improvement.

Now that memory and applications are routinely many gigabytes, this is a big deal.

It's hard enough for an ecommerce web server to maintain responsiveness, I couldn't imagine trying to respond to hardware IO interrupts in real time while running a collector like that.
Whatever designer came up with a site that does this needs to do something else with their life: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/truly%20insane.png

Scroll bar fail.
I think this is optimistic at best. There are certain industries, healthcare for example, where barriers to entry are so high that Innovative approaches are almost always VERY slow to be adopted. Whereas other markets, like consumer electronics change almost constantly. My point is you can't just apply this to all industries equally. Generalizations are at best only speaking to the median.
I booked a room on AirBnB when I visited Los Angleles. I spoke with the owner of the room and he said he made $4000 in 3 months off of his 2 rooms. AirBnB is on to something.
Er? I thought they already did add sync with SkyDrive and co-authoring (at least in Word and Powerpoint) in 2010?
NTT Docomo introduces three smartphone; Medias, Xperia and Optimus Pad
Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church Website During Live Confrontation
This makes sense on one level, but it's confusing on another. As a recent transplant to the bay area and an engineer at a big company, I don't feel like I have many "leads" to offer people. But in order to meet people, I need to network. How does one begin the process?
$0 tip is awesome and new tip to me. Watch the video for demo, but basically it's a reference for selected DOM element. It also appears (not mentioned in the video) that $1, $2, etc references are also created for each DOM element you select in DOM tree view.
Slice and Dice OData with the jQuery DataTables Plug-In
A couple weeks back I tried to buy a single copy of PGP from Symantec's site (as other retail versions no longer exist), and it was an unmitigated disaster (you have to call their sales people, who try to get you to buy a site license).

A bunch of folks on Twitter apparently discovered the same thing this week.

Sounds like full ASLR might be in the cards for Lion as well (which would be nice).
hey...smokestack....I'm in san jose....I'd love to meet up and talk with you about my start up if your looking to jump into something....gstacks00@aol.com...reach me there
This is pretty amazing because just yesterday I was wondering if such a site exists. I am always trying to find more adventures wherever I go.

Too bad that the Android app crashes on my MyTouch 4G when "Loading Challenges". Is there any way I can help in debugging this?
The primary focus here (understandably) is "we make your laptop look / work like your iPad". Versions, AirDrop, etc are tacked on at the end and given much less focus.

The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media anywhere, anytime. It has long battery life, sunlight-visible screen, and does not require mouse or keyboard. It is very good at its purpose -- you can use it as a book reader or movie viewer while riding a bus, sitting in a park, etc -- and it sucks for anything else (e.g. anything that requires typing more than a few characters).

My laptop, on the other hand, was designed to be an all-up computer that could be used anywhere that there was a flat surface, but mostly indoors. I can use it at home, at the coffee shop, etc. It's also fine for consuming media as long as I'm not in direct sunlight or away from power for more than a few hours.

So. What exactly am I gaining by adding these iPad features? Sure, I bet they're handy and I'll probably learn to use them. But I can't help but think that a bunch of guys as talented as Apple could have produced something really impressive in the time they took adding these iPad features.

[1] No pedantry, please.
Should RescueTime Help Get You a Job at your Favorite Company?
Social Fundraising Site Fundly Raises $2 Million of its Own
The process of learning a musical instrument isn't too different from learning how to program. As a long time musician, I heard the quote a long time ago and it comes to mind frequently.

Taking part in a programming community like those surrounding more academic languages such as Scala, Haskell or J is a challenge a lot like playing in a jazz band with music majors and 60 year old musicians with amazing grace. That's the wonderful thing about being online - you can interact with a nearly limitless variety of social circles. There's always someone with inspiring talent, skills, ideas or enthusiasm to inspire you.

That's one of the reasons HN is so good - this community challenges members to make contributions which are intellectually substantive, unlike Reddit, TechCrunch or other superficially similar sites.
Many new additions to NSImage internals and new API calls say otherwise...
> Also, is that right that the developer preview is being distributed via the Mac App Store? How does that work?

You get a "redeem" code from developer.apple.com that you enter into the MAS like you would an iTunes gift card, and Lion starts downloading.
I'm sorry, but Fabricly isn't "radical innovation". Radical innovation in the sense we understand it right now, as espoused by Peter Thiel and company, means taking the focus off of social shopping and the rest of all the crap that doesn't matter and getting excited about things like synthetic biology and going to Mars.

The subtleties of the comparison between Vente-Privee and Fabricly simple don't matter. Casual gaming may print cash, but no matter how rich you become, you still can't buy your way out of cancer. That's what "radical innovation" means.

Radical innovation is not about making things more efficient, or simpler, or easier, in broad terms. It's about investing in transformative technologies.
Rather like the first job for a new funeral home in that way.
I'd think the Erlang VM a bit slow as a systems language, but I dream of Erlang as an apps language (à la Objective-C) with a deep integration of the OS and the language runtime (a Lisp Machine in Erlang, and without hardware support, kinda)
Great goal that I believe is skipped over in a lot of "How to" articles.

Getting as many users as possible as quickly as possible not only outstrips your capital to capture those users, but most of them never stay on for long.

Focus on perfecting features and functions that make and keep 1000 users happy. If at first you don't then iterate. Don't keep trying to capture more users when your first 1k are not even using your product.
Hurd not being ready.
Nearly Half of Americans Use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter [STUDY]
Nine Ways to Innovate (other than Technology)
I wouldn't say the calling to the site is based on monetary gain. By comparison, he'd make that same amount if he rented each of those rooms for $670/month (a pretty cheap price for California) - and it'd require a lot less work. I think the bigger call to it is that you can meet new people in an interesting context. It's a fun thing to do, in my opinion.
Last month we had over 40 people attend. Can we top that this time? Let's find out! (Please RSVP by clicking on the link above so we can tell our friendly coffee shop owner exactly how many people are taking over his space Friday night!)

Want to be notified of future San Diego tech/hacker events? Join our Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/sd-hackernews (low volume; mostly announcements)
> Go might be feasible, but forcing system-wide GC at random times for the entire system? GC is very hard to make concurrent and a single random-alloc GC'd memory space can't possibly scale to thousands of cores.

Erlang (and its way) is a much better fit there, I think it'd be a delightful apps language: the GC runs at the (erlang) process level, each process has its own heap, so even though the GC is a vanilla generational GC by the magic of the Erlang VM it turns into a highly concurrent pauseless GC (only needs to pause a single Erlang process at a time, and you generally have tens of thousands chugging along).
The Radio Non-Experts Experts
my sister recently plugged a usb cable into an ethernet port. don't assume that because something seems like a massive amount of kludgery to you that a user won't do it anyway.