skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disruption has three parts I believe:

1. incumbent, customers, and an offering that is high quality along a dimension valued by the customers. The dimension might be: how entertaining, how educational, how clever, how escapist, etc.

2. entrant, different customers, and an offering that is crap along the above dimension, but better than nothing for their customers. They can't attract the incument's customers, so they instead attract people who currently have nothing (and to whom "crap" is therefore delightful). It serve them, but the incumbent can't, because it is cheaper and/or more convenient/accessible/customizable.

3. over time, the entrant improves. The incumbent's customers don't actually want perfection along that dimension, just good enough (like a small meal, you want it bigger, but eventually it's big enough, you are satiated, and you don't want any more). The entrant doesn't need to beat the incumbent; it only needs to be good enough. But it's also cheaper/more convenient etc, so the incumbent's customers switch: disruption.

notes: Disruption might not happen, e.g. if the customers aren't satiated; if the entrant can't improve enough. In considering the dimension, it's important to consider not just want the company provides, but what the customer is trying to achieve (benefit, not feature).

For indy writer's, the product seems to be clearly inferior. But it's cheaper and more convenient (on a kindle - though many books are too). It seems to have already found an audience who doesn't mind that (who is that audience?). Dedicated, intelligent people get better at whatever they work at; so it's reasonable to assume that these indy writers will improve.

Is there any reason to think they won't improve enough to meet the needs of readers of traditional books? One issue is that they have no editor, and an editor can help tremendously. Not just in proof-reading, but also in direction, even plot ideas, character issues - and marketability. It's hard for the one person to be both creator and objective appraiser. But perhaps there could arise a new "indy editor" position? Or writers can persuade their spouse to be their editor (osc does this). Or (who knows) crowd source it (webpage?)/mechanical turk it.

[EDIT But I cannot edit properly myself. It's just not possible. - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tonya-plank/meet-mega-bestsell...]

But note that it doesn't need to be as good as traditional books - it just needs to be good enough for what the market wants. That's enough to disrupt the incumbent publishers. I will note here that many page-turners that sold very well were decried by critics. It seems almost a truism that popular books are "trash" - til the author's dead, anyway. (Though I note that these sometimes are based on savvy market reading - for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardy_Boys) Therefore, it seems quite plausible that indy writers can eventually become good enough to disrupt traditional publishers.
The Myth of Japan's 'Lost Decades'
"You can argue that the crap tablets MS and its partners put out beat Apple to the punch, but that's missing the entire point."

Actually, that is the entire point. That's exactly what is being discussed. Apple did not invent the tablet, they took an existing idea and improved its implementation dramatically.

"Nothing that was released prior to the iPad was anything like the tablets that people have decided are so exciting now, and to pretend they were is disingenuous at best."

The IPad certainly evolved far beyond its predecessors. That doesn't mean it took nothing from those designs. Clearly there are some similarities if they've all been labeled 'tablets'. To pretend there aren't is disingenuous at best :-/
No, that's the right way to do things. The practice he's talking about is buying someone's old domain in an attempt to use its existing backlinks for SEO.
Sorry to be that guy, but the word is waive, not wave.
She's a best-selling author, not a best-writing author.
What was the online editing service?
BTW, just a reminder not to use shortened urls here - even if they are very long. Those urls are actually:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71322&... http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71323&...

And you if you had wanted them shorter just remove everything after the id field.
I Disagree with Fred; Marketing is for Companies that Have Great Products
>When you are dying, All rationality goes out the window.

This is ALS. A progressive, multiple-year disease. Via Wikipedia[1]: Death usually occurs within two to five years of diagnosis.

I've met plenty of rational dying people. Except when it comes on extremely quickly, most everyone I've encountered or heard about has been more rational than the people around them, not the reverse. People don't suddenly become invalids when they have to face their own mortality.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis#D...
Walk the red carpet in Google Earth
James Golick implemented this idea in Ruby last year: https://github.com/jamesgolick/friendly

We used Friendly at my previous company wego.com and t worked quite well although I don't know shehar they at still using it. (Friendly doesnt look like it's in activ development)
Heh, nintendo certainly does. They are actively reselling these games in the wii / 3DS online stores. Expect a takedown notice soon.
The Pentagon Labyrinth
It's sad how common these feelings are and how nearly all of them trace back to the government's (arguably) well-intentioned insistence on running schools itself.
Yeah, I suppose I deserve the down-vote, too much snark. Apologies! Especially due to this info alok-g linked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display_televisi... Important bit: 3M suggests that, on average, only 8 to 10% of the light being generated at the back of the set reaches the viewer.

I'd always thought they were more transparent than that, given that I've seen LCD screens used as projectors: http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-LCD-PROJECTOR/ in which case (though there's no way to detect how bright the box behind it is) a highly-transparent screen could indeed be a fairly significant breakthrough.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267436
I think in the US, Amazon is in one special state where taxes are low or something. So they have to ship from there, too. Hence, the mean distances Amazon has to ship to in the US is way longer than in smaller countries.

However, USPS is slow even for short distances. I presume it is optimized for mean shipping time of all US destinations instead of minimum shipping time of individual packages. And population density in the US is slightly smaller than in Germany, so shipping is more bound to be slightly less efficient.

I guess Canada has a considerably lower population density, so shipping gets more expensive. Maybe the Canadian postal service does not offer fast shipping at attractive prices?
Essentially I guess the government are trying to remove the downside of bad teachers by destroying the upside of good ones, as well as standardizing the teaching process, making it easier to run on a tight budget.

You have to wonder how much long term impact these cuts have, I'm sure in the short term they can keep parents happy by producing decent test scores as they are only focusing on the tests.

Would love to know how the Australian system compares for teachers currently if anyone is involved there?
The pattern with the government is the same from situation to situation.

1) Government makes something free

2) The market for private delivery of the same thing dries up. Those few that still want to pay must pay much more than they would have before the government started giving it away for free because the market has shrunk so much

3) The same thing happens to alternatives to the thing they made free

4) Decisions are now made by those delivering the process instead of the person choosing between the alternatives. Costs and benefits are no longer weighed together or by the person that cares about the outcome the most. Considerations easily described in resumes and sound bites become uber important

5) The corporations and unions move in and start influencing the decision makers, carving out expensive niches for themselves

6) Things that truly matter but aren't profitable for the politically connected fall by the wayside

7) People getting something free put up with it because ditching the free thing for same thing done right is now a super expensive alternative

8) Delivering the free thing grows more expensive, much faster than the rate of inflation

9) Eventually the tax payers fight back and the costs of delivering the thing are slashed, along with quality. The corporations and unions have to spend and/or threaten more to hang on to their protected positions.

10) Those getting the service for free now have to spend all their time at rallies and fine tuning the stories about how badly they're being treated.
Subtitled: From 10 Pentagon Insiders, Retired Military Officers and Specialists With Over 400 Years of Defense Experience
who is that audience?

Hiya. Plucky Quilt Maker Wooed By Exotic Half-Dragon pretty much has me at "Hello." If it turns out to be terrible, oh well, $4/$7/$10 isn't much money. I watched Green Hornet, too. It was bad, but it is not so bad that it will scare me away from the cinema forever... and it cost three times as much as genre fiction for a fraction of the enjoyment. (Semi-relevant: like many genre fans, my consumption in 2010 was above that of 20 average US households.)
There is a serious moral hazard faced by most administrators of the so called "heroic professions" (doctors, nurses, teachers, fire-fighters etc). The trouble is that their jobs involve taking care of people and a significant portion of their personal identity is wrapped up in this. Doctors will work extra unpaid hours "off the books" so patients won't suffer, teachers will buy classroom materials with their own money, fire-fighters will still respond to fires, even with inadequate safety gear etc.

Bureaucrats are more or less free to make whatever cuts they want in these professions because they know that those on the front lines will quietly mutter "I will work harder" and pick up the slack until the stress finally drives them from the profession entirely.

I've never once seen an employee of the DMV run out to kinkos and spend their own money because the copier was broken.
Canada's 28 times bigger than Germany. I would expect the cost to ship something across Canada is much higher than the cost to ship something across Germany.
Am I the only one that read the first two or three lines of Jason's comment and got a headache? http://bryce.vc/post/3520840379/why-i-deleted-my-angellist-a...

He made a good point, but why does he have to express himself like that ? Srsly!

Oh, and don't tell me it's passion. Gimme a break.

Kthnx :)
Interesting idea... I don't think I've ever heard of something like that concept before.

I see two problems, though there may be ways to mitigate them: you're facing the sun, therefore it's effectively in your eyes, and you'd probably lose all semblance of color balancing in the screen.

Not that the second is all that important to most people. I've even gotten used to applications like Flux[1] which change the screen's color over the day, and I find it's usually easier on my eyes. Just sayin'.

You could probably do away with the mirror, and just have a white piece of plastic. It'd be diffused by the fabric anyway, there's no need to have something mirror-like to reflect it accurately. You could possibly use the entire back panel of a laptop screen, and fold it up when not in use (brain-farts while looking at my wife's white Macbook).

[1]: http://stereopsis.com/flux/
I hate to see this getting so many points. You just arbitrarily indicated that all apps are better on iOS and that people pay for apps on iOS but not Android. Well, people pay for apps on Android devices (see http://eddiekim.posterous.com/an-android-success-story-13000... from almost one year ago; Android has only grown since then) and there are plenty of high-quality apps there too. I've used both the iOS and Android apps and found them roughly equivalent -- I certainly haven't noticed a huge quality decline on the Android side. Do you have any evidence or reason to believe that there is a big problem with crappy Android apps?

How is Apple "helping evolve" (apps? iOS?) in a way that Google and its various partners aren't? The Android Market has features and categories, Android gets lots of new features on each cycle, and it's totally open-source. So what's the problem here? What is the big secret special thing Apple does that makes everything magically better on iOS?
Exactly my point, Amazon makes money on the content.

If it was viable to charge more money for the device, I'm sure they would but they need those (or some other) devices in people's hands. Therefore, they can't charge more for the device. That is my point, they don't know how to make more money with it without totally changing their strategy.
Does anyone think it really was well-intentioned? Did the people who passed No Child Left Behind think that the federal government is capable of doing anything good? Did they think that federal regulations and requirements help things on the local level? Did the people who voted for NCLB value education? Did anyone involved with education think that NCLB could improve education?

I don't think so. I think NCLB was a giant Fuck You to people who don't have the money to pay for private schools, a corollary to Starving the Beast. There's little other rational way to look at it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Nah, I figured it'd be doomed, it's a touchy subject. But I'm not here for the karma anyway, so no loss. That's pretty much exactly my point, though a bit more tactfully made :) Thanks for the input! It's appreciated!
It applies to a lesser extent to what we do also - if I had a dollar for every time coders and designers were shortchanged on time by management, but we pulled extra hours anyways; 'cos goshdurnit, we take pride in doing things right.

It also reminds me of why I left the passion that led me to software - gaming. I did a lot of amateur game dev all through high school, even networked a fair bit with the local game studios and got some valuable mentorships out of the deal. But if there's any part of the engineering profession that screams of management abusing your love for your work, it's game development.
A prime example of work that you can't measure with numbers: the value of teaching isn't a scalar. Pretty much like measuring a programmer's output by lines written.

However, if we think we can't afford to have a decent funding for schools then nobody has apparently been heard speaking up about not affording to not have that funding. If we keep merely chasing test scores for a couple of decades, what kind of an education will we have at that point?
I agree. If it's an option, go to Stanford for a masters.
Quite a few available here - take your pick and all the best. :-)

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/ab-testing
I don't understand. What's the point of it? You need a laser to make it work, so what's the gin got to do with it? Aren't they just making a laser out of another laser, while having a beverage at the side?

Is this article a joke or something, it's not April fools yet?

If it's not a joke, it's one of the most meh articles on something that could potentially be interesting. The title is misleading--it's neither DIY nor a "How to".

If it was really DIY, they would have had a couple of pictures of what the final set-up looks like. My guess is that they did not do it themselves.

So the entire article is bullshit. They have nothing to say about the subject.

Maybe it's possible to build a Gin-n-Tonic laser, I don't know anything about the subject, but this link fails to tell me anything, except how not to write an article about it.
Why is this seemingly not true in other western countries where they have cheaper, better-functioning public institutions? I think there's truth in what you're saying, but the idea that government itself is the sole problem is far too simple an answer
Could you link to those Project Euler problems, where you have been using this code ?
By focusing on the efficiency of scoring well in tests, they can ignore the costs of the work left undone. These social, curricular and work environmental costs don't have numbers now but they will manifest in concrete money years later. So effectively the school is borrowing from the wellbeing of the pupils and teachers at the current cost of zero, and moving it to gains in current productivity meters.
Not any more: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Esoteric_programmi...

Also, yes.
Even as a seasoned developer I think the book has value when trying to make the case to less-seasoned colleagues that they might want to think more critically about how they are structuring their code.
When you make it big, never forget your teachers... a phone call, a text, an email, a visit means a lot
Ask HN: Moving away from GoDaddy - which registrar do you recommend?
GoDaddy is the king of bad usability and tacky marketing, but until now I've been okay with this because they're cheap. But when I heard that their DNS servers are slow I decided I'd be willing to spend a little more to get a good registrar.

What registrar would you recommend? I've heard a lot of good things about Gandi.net, but I can't find any new reviews of them here on HN. Are they still a good registrar, and are there other good alternatives to GoDaddy?
I'm not sure but there is difference between: 1) an application server accepts client request but fails to execute it, so client gets an error via JSON and 2) something on server side (HTTP server or application server or firewall) fails to receiver/accept client's request thus client gets back some HTTP error code.
Maybe people like this way becasue in complex systems there is always difference between failure to deliver and understand the request and error during execution of the request.
How much does a co-founder get when joining later
I have been working alone on this project for a year now. Now I want to make a startup out of it, and found a co-founder. What is a fair deal, how much shares should he get?
To explain it better, most things technologically and conceptually are figured out. Now it's all just straightforward implementation. Given no further information what do you think?
> if people are given too much choice they have a hard time making a decision

Human psychology 1.0 :-)

YMMV, but 'too many choices' can be a strong deterrent to impulse buying which, imho, is your best friend, given the kind of apps you have.

HTH
Canada has demographics comparable to the US's, but pays its teachers much more. The results are evident in OECD's "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/60/46619703.pdf

A rewarding job with decent compensation and time off makes teaching jobs pretty competitive.
MySQL basics and commands Part 1
Warren Buffet: The Responsibility of Running a Business
Qt may use Google's V8 JavaScript engine
Well, there's a trick to it. You have to let them know you are fixing things. It's even better if they know everything that's broken and can prioritize what they want fixed first.

I went through a lot of pain before I realized I needed to toot my own horn more. After that, suddenly they were very grateful that I was fixing bugs in their application. (To be fair, they were very grateful at first, too, when the bugs were really obvious and costing them money daily.)

There's no harm in letting them know exactly how much you've improved their system. They really will appreciate it.
BitMate - BitTorrent For The Less Privileged
I feel that RIM is still missing the big picture. If RIM makes a phone/tablet that is 3x superior to the iPad and half the price, they'll still sell next to nothing.

Why? The answer is quite simple. Their software is shit. Their developer relations is shit. They are competing not vs hardware, but vs hardware + software.

They made great decisions too... lets ship the "Curve" model with such shit hardware and new software it was a downgrade from the previous top BB model (the one with side wheel). Old model = 3 seconds cold boot, new model = 3 minutes. The curve could not run any software that was remotely useful. It turned into a glorified email/phone device. The internet browsing sucked so bad I had no use for it. Not to mention that the hardware could barely handle the rendering.

So with good decisions like that, can you really expect any more out of RIM?
Python, Flask, Javascript (including Node.js)
Linux restart after update... LOL
The United States spends more money on education per student than just about any other country in the world[1], and it has been growing quite rapidly over time[2]. America is not a penny pincher when it comes to education. One graph beats many paragraphs of anecdote by someone with an axe to grind. Anyway, I flagged this article because I'm hoping to see less politics on Hacker News.

[1]http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.h...

[2]http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.h...
I wrote the article linked-to above, and I'd like to add a couple of things to your (great!) comment:

I agree with your analysis of incumbents and entrants. I think it's a clever, really clear way of looking at it.

RE: your 2nd point: Novelr.com is about writers who are posting their fiction online, in a serialized, once/twice-a-week format, and then turning their work to ebooks for sale on the various ebook stores. That's one trend to watch out for, and I can say with confidence that there is a market, however inconsistent the quality may be. There are customers out there for the entrant, and they are biting.

(Plus there's also fanfiction, and sites like Fictionaut, where writers read, comment, and suggest (mostly grammatical & spelling) edits on each others' work. I've been seeing trends like this for about four years now.) It's pretty cool stuff - dynamic, engaging fiction, some good writing (see: http://webfictionguide.com - for the good ones).

RE: Your 3rd point: we're building Pandamian (http://pandamian.com), a tool that attempts to make this write-online/publish-to-ebookstores thing accessible to all writers. It's mostly a response to the community's needs - with the mantra that 'writers should not need to read a single line of code'. Our hope, at least, is that the app would allow all kinds of writers the ability to write a book online, get a community of readers around their books, and then publish to the Kindle/Kobo/Smashwords store.

We launched on Tuesday, and now have a small group of very vocal users.
It seems, from the post, that they only made plans to address the webpage issues (registration, download, ...) but not the real problem: the PITA development process. But to be fair, it is the weekend so I think we can assume they hadn't had much time to go over this.
I've never heard of this practice. Do you have any references for further reading?