skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've used this approach before in meetings where I suspected I was going to meet resistance to the ideas I wanted us all to form a consensus around.

I found that this approach is successful but, as sophacles says in a different thread, it can (in theory) lead to you become somewhat blinkered to better ideas. Since I know I'm right when I go to meetings this prepared it isn't an issue, right? ;-)

However, the main problem I found with this approach is not that it leads to me to reach detailed conclusions without all the input I may need to do so. I'm fortunate that a lot of people I meet with are either smart, experienced, stubborn, or some combination of the three - the information needed to reach a sensible consensus will often emerge.

Instead, what concerns me is the sheer amount of time it takes to do this much preparation and the opportunity cost I have to pay while I'm busy trying to get an "A" on one particular meeting.

There's a lot to be said for "winging it" (or, in the recent history of memes, "doing it live"). If you're confident in your ideas and in your ability to persuade people then over-preparing is a waste of time akin to procrastination.

I can't guarantee that arriving for a meeting without elaborate handouts will always lead to a better result. But in my experience I'd rather get 80% of what I want in 3 meetings than 100% of what I want in only 1 meeting.

Disclaimer: This advice obviously doesn't apply to the once-in-a-blue-moon meeting, e.g. meeting with a potential investor or asking your boss for a raise. My context here is working for a large bureaucratic organisation where meetings are a frequent and necessary evil in order to get things done.
A hard lesson to learn the hard way, but there you are. Everyone should have seen this coming as a likely potential outcome for the site.

Either get an agreement ahead of time, or run your own site.

And this being said, I'll bet most authors' takes would turn out to be surprisingly small.
What you said. :)
That algorithm would find duplicate content, which Google has done a decent job detecting for a while.

The new update was about low-quality content. Thinking of an algorithmic way to detect that isn't easy (obviously!). I guess I'd be looking at adapting things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil... somehow, so it wouldn't penalize either easy-to-read or difficult-to-read but would look at the density of harder-to-read content vs easier-to-read fluff. Or something!
Displaying books on your Kindle has nothing to do with Apple's iOS terms. Apple could disappear entirely and you'd be able to continue buying ebooks and reading them on your Kindle. The discussion is over iOS and under the latest statements from Apple it appears the iPad's Kindle app cannot exist in its current state.
Isn't it a lot harder to tell the difference between a real rep and an inline hold message ... "your call is important to us"|"please have your customer number ready". Or indeed the pre-contact message "this call is being recorded [...]"
Apple won't mess with Netflix. No way. Any phone/tablet without Netflix is a non-starter. Apple knows this. Netflix gets an exemption.

Kindle is a tougher call. I think Apple may try to pull them and see if they can do it or not.
Didn't REALLY think I was going to get much past you folks....

It is Sheen related, at least, but has a better domain name (IMHO) and a different spin.

We'll see, I reckon, we'll see. Thanks!
I find it hard to take a viral app and make any kind of significant revenue in a short time, no example comes to mind. But if this was the case I would suggest, possibly a compliment iphone app that costs like 99 cents to capture paying customers of the apple market. This market seems to pay for things like this , example fart app.
I think part of the reason why there is such a "user revolt" (opposed to a tech or developer only revolt) is the prospect of functionality of current apps such as Amazon Kindle or Netflix or Hulu will go away, and that Apple hasn't provided any assurance that they'll stay.

Right now I'm in "wait and see" mode where I don't want to invest in the iPad 2 unless I know for sure that Hulu will still be able to function.
Show HN: I built a realtime, threaded commenting system
Not really, as the Kindle doesn't support any other vendor's DRM. If you can buy a DRM-free ebook, then sure, though you may have to convert it to a different format.
Nielsen Declares Android Winner in the U.S. Smartphone Wars
http://www.fastcustomer.com
http://itunes.com/app/FastCustomer

http://twilio.com

Sorry if I missed them.
The point is that it is in fact a part of the history.

Perhaps only nominally so originally, but that doesn't mean it can't be used to advantage now.
My hobby is olympic weightlifting. I am 6'3 and weigh approximately 300lbs, in imperial terms (190cm / 137kg), placing me well inside the superheavyweight division.

According to the BMI I am morbidly obese. According to my doctor I am in excellent health.
>"My point isn't that the iPhone is better than the Android, my point is that I don't understand the incentive to create a smartphone that browses better than a standard phone when other companies will do it for you."

Sure, companies have tried to build their own OS. They absolutely sucked. I suspect that Google understood what it took to build a mobile OS that enabled easier search. And they got so fed up by the horrid interfaces of the OEMs (seriously, remember how terrible every single one of them was?) that they jumpstarted the process.

Better mobile OS = better adoption, more searched per handset. More revenue.

You can either try to take a bigger piece of the pie, or make the pie bigger. Google's strategy is to make the pie bigger (and with their top of mind branding, they also get the biggest slice). Combine that with the phone manufacturers' stunning incompetence in building a decent interface, and you have the perfect situation for google to build android.

The less generous side of me also realizes that google understood that the OS developer had great control over the handsets (defaults are a very powerful force). And if a competitor (say, Nokia) were to get huge adoption of a phone OS, they would naturally be drawn to build their own ad system. Just look at how Apple did with the iOS apps.
EDIT

- iPhone 5G will have HDMI out and keyboard in.

It represents the end-game of the smartphone disruption of laptops and PCs, because you will "dock" it at home and work, yet still have all your data with you whereever you go (despite coverage, network outages, webapp provider downtime etc etc etc) like people used to do with their laptops. A bit like the portable diskdrive that the iPod was.

You might think Apple would be hesitant to do this, because it will cannibalize their own laptops and desktops. I think they will do it as soon as they can, because: they have a history of racing down the tech curve as fast as possible; if they don't do it and it's possible to do, someone else will, and the strategic losses from not being first are enormous; it will only start to cannibalize their other products (because a smartphone really isn't as good yet; people are familiar with the old way; power users are a long way off being disrupted).

I've been waiting for this. Ye Mark my Words, the End is Nigh for the PC: July 2011
WikiLeaks: the movie
P.S. I use this every day, so it's likely to stay up to date!
Why Sun Microsystems Failed
Got some suggestions for good subreddits?
The 128 Mac had a very tight memory footprint (and no VM). Add to that that stuff was all being loaded from a floppy. The performance they were able to squeeze out of it was amazing.
The article mentions Kodak in 1927, which is an important year for color in the design of products. 1927 was the year that Catalin plastic was introduced. It was like Bakelite without the sawdust filler, so it could be produced in colors other than black and brown, and could be left translucent or marbled, as well.

This was used to great effect all over the place, but the staggering variety of beautiful radio sets of the 30s to 50s are a particularly good example.
i like the idea...have never used it though....trying it now :D
This should now be fixed on Chrome 9.
The business PC gear has been dull, but some of the consumer gear has had color options.

Dell has had various colors available for their systems for a number of years, and HP was selling designer-labeled minis for a while.

Here's the Dell Color site, for example:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/dell_color

AlienWare (now at Dell) VoodooPC (now at HP) and other high-end vendors have some pretty wild cases and color schemes.
pretty good. You should include railscasts possibly add a section for good rails blogs.
How to delete all wall posts on Facebook
Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere
It's Apple's 'Post-PC' World - We're All Just Living In It
The final step is to get him to both throw and chase the rubber dice by himself, with occasional side-trips to open tins of tuna.
Yeah, but unfortunately if it is time sensitive, the approval process required by the Apple market is a huge hinderance.
Well, you temporarily had my car then. In the case of exclusivity, it's not temporarily with the unauthorized copier.

It is deprivation of exclusivity though, I agree.
"great artists steal"
> So why aren’t those who are criticizing Apple for taking a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue criticizing Amazon? My theory: everyone understands, intuitively, that the Kindle is a closed proprietary platform; but many people view iOS (incorrectly) as a platform like the Mac or Windows, where third parties are free to do what they want.

This seems like laziness or intentional dishonesty on Gruber's part. There are huge differences between the two. The biggest being Amazon doesn't have a Kindle app ecosystem so there isn't the [huge] problem of requiring a subscription option (which is the real issue--charge 90% if you want, it just becomes unfair when you require me to use it). Amazon also funds the delivery of the content to the subscriber, which considering it's often over 3G can be considerable.

In the current state of things if you are a publisher with an iOS app, Apple changed the rules to either require you to cough up 30% of your business or stop being a publisher. Also, you get the joy of delivering all content, that's not included in your 30% vig.
My concern with overlay scrollbars is that they don't seem to offer a clear affordance until the user has already taken steps to interact with them. The nub that fades in has the same feel to it as those flash websites that require you to mouse over all the graphics, just to see which ones will perform an action.

Existing scrollbars look like something in a track that you can move back and forth. Overlay scrollbars, particularly in iOS, aren't used to interact with the content. You move the content itself, the scrollbars are just indicators showing your position. They shouldn't look 'grab-able', because you never grab one.

The implementation shown in this post is grab-able, but doesn't look to be. I think that's a mistake.

(I should note, iOS is the only place I have experience with overlay scrollbars. I'm not qualified to discuss how they're used elsewhere. If other systems use them differently, please chime in.)
Dell has offered a range of colours on their notebooks for at least a few years. It's rare but not unheard of. Also the Panasonic Shockwave walkmans and discmans of the 90s. There are 2 off the top of my head.
You mean aside from bandwidth, a marketplace of literally hundreds of millions of ready buyers for your chosen platform, all with credit cards conveniently stored for ease of purchasing your product?

Sounds like Python's Life of Brian.
You would need an upload speed of around 5Mbit/s to upload HD video (720p). Less for lower quality of course, but then why are you doing HD in the first place? It's doable, but not realistic for most people.

You also need a monster CPU to compress video that much in realtime. With a slower CPU you'd get worse compression and need a faster connection (or lower quality).

Reducing framerate doesn't help as much as reducing resolution because little changes between frames, so there anyway isn't much to upload. (You either upload a lot infrequently, or a little frequently. It doesn't matter a ton. You get some benefit, but not much.)
Do you have an e-mail address? I think we can help you out - I run a managed hosting company and would like to offer you some help as a member of the HN community.
Totally agree. Let's not forget the PC - invented by Apple, now it means non-Apple.

No one caught up with the iPod; Apple rode that wave fully, by mercilessly improving and price-cutting it; then subsuming/cannibalizing it with the iPhone/Touch. They will ruthlessly brutalize their current babies too.

When the iPad was launched, there was no talk of competitors. Today, most of the news is about competitors. It's necessary for Steve to trash them. And to be clear: the iPad 2 specs actually do trash them.

Big question: what's the next wave for Apple? I think it will be smart phones as a desktop/laptop replacement (you dock at home/work). Maybe a nano-sized smartphone replacement (or even smaller), for the next form-factor.

PS: The Kindle will disrupt the iPad: it has a far cheaper yet more profitable business model; when the iPad becomes more powerful than it needs to be, the Kindle will be powerful enough.
Don't forget there's a web-based Kindle reader as well. It's not as great as an app but with some offline storage it's a somewhat viable substitute.
That's a good idea - I'll add a separate section when I get a chance. It'll let me separate links to specific articles vs links to a general purpose resource.

But for now... Gotta keep working on hooking up Facebook OAuth2 to my current project ;)
And if you were a forward thinking megacorp, you could build something like this yourself. "Hiya, this is Paypal. Hit 1 to talk to ... Thanks. Type in your last four digits of your... Thanks Mr. McKenzie. Would you prefer to hold while waiting for a representative, or should we call you back in approximately 15 minutes? Hit 1 to..."

15 minutes later.

"Hello, is this Mr. McKenzie? Hiya, this is Steve at Paypal and I have your account brought up. What can I help you with today?"

I think that's far, far cheaper than $100k in dev costs and, if a 6 week test eliminates 5% of your CS spend while bringing your hold times down by 50%, that's like a career-making win. (Seriously guys: Twilio is the startup to watch. I say this while I'm literally wearing their sweatshirt but trust me, they're going to be massive.)

P.S. After you have it, you can trivially wire it into click-to-call on your webapp. "We can't show you that transaction, due to routine procedures meant to protect your account. Click here and type in your phone number, and we will have our Security Team contact you in the next five minutes. Thanks for using Paypal."
Most of the points in the highest-rated answer are just about basic behavior that cannot only be seen in VC meetings, but really any type of business meeting or relationship. Stalling tactics, false representation, polite blow-offs - it helps to recognize those in order to prevent wasting time, but I wouldn't call them warning signs because they are mainly patterns that occur when dealing with people who have no intention of getting involved with you in the first place. Those are not the most dangerous.

I'd consider true warning signs more crucial when it comes to reading people's intentions if they do want to get into a business relationship that may later turn out to be disadvantageous or otherwise a bad match.

The major warning sign in this context would be obvious personality mismatches. If you sense that your VC (or partner/consultant/angel/customer/whatever) cannot be trusted. People that are quick to spout negative opinions about your colleagues or the guys who sat at their table before you came along, be suspicious. Beware people who tend to exaggerate or have a thing where they tell you outrageous and unverifiable stories. Take into account that a VC doesn't just give you money, they should be valuable resources where important feedback and referral to connections come from. Beware of young MBA-types who don't know anything about your industry. Take into consideration that you have to "live" with these people and that they can ruin you if they turn out to be malicious, incompetent or insane.
Haha as expected - like the joke about politicians lying that goes "when their lips are moving".
You should check out Lightcrest, they provide high-availabilty hosting infrastructure - Amazon EC2 and Rackspace are incredibly expensive when you take into consideration steady-state load.
And I you.
> So why aren’t those who are criticizing Apple for taking a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue criticizing Amazon?

Who says people aren't criticizing Amazon? Their DRM-infested marketplace is very customer-hostile. The difference is that you can use the hardware without using their marketplace.
I like to use anti-framework or un-opinionated framework. I think the key point of contrast is stuff like Sinatra gives you a way to build applications that doesn't really have much to say about how the app is structured once you get past the basic necessities of an HTTP-based app, whereas something like Rails guides your architecture much more rigidly.
Hm, I'm not sure I follow. What money do you mean?
Alternative student loans What are they for?
When the cost of college tuition becomes too high and you are not able to cover it with other financial aid received, you will be able to obtain alternative student loans. These alternative student loans provide you the ability to ensure college tuition.
Indeed, we split test Cognac vs other drinks as an indicator of the psychographic profile of operators at various companies. Groupon is all about the rum and cokes, whatever that means.

Kidding! Yeah we play a message so the operators can hit 1 to get their next call.
"a bigger contributor to the massive improvement in (purely economic) standard-of-living for most Chinese."

Has this game even been played out it? From far away, China does not look like a desirable place to live in. Maybe they are just destroying everything in exchange for a few good years?

I remember having read somewhere that the Russians destroyed the Aral sea by starting excessive wheat farming on it's borders. So they had good wheat yields for a couple of years. But then suddenly the Aral sea was gone completely, and with it the wheat. I wonder if we might not see a lot of such things in China eventually.
There's an other point in this Apple/Amazon comparison that's not being raised: If you own a book, and you don't want to stick with Kindle's format, it's trivial to offer that same core product on other platforms like the Nook or Apple's store.

Whereas if you've developed an iOS app, transitioning that to another platform is often going to be a large amount of work where you're basically starting over from the spec and not bringing over any code.

Which means you're going to generally hear a lot more squawking from iOS software vendors than book vendors, because their migration costs are prohibitive relative to those of book publishers.
This is a nice resource. I actually wanted to do something like this for web design resources way back in the day, but never got around to it. I thought about it a lot, and the secret sauce for me was the ability to tag version applicability of resources, and to deprecate resources in favor of new ones. This is particularly useful in the Rails world where whole swaths of blog articles are obsoleted on a regular basis (think Rails 3 articles from January 2010). Maybe the reason I never got around to it was because I was too ambitious?
> This seems like laziness or intentional dishonesty on Gruber's part.

What do you expect from the freelance Apple PR department?
HTML5 Zelda Oracle of Ages
Easy. Break the jar.
I have experience with this.

When the whole Conan O'Brien cancelation fiasco was going on, I registered teamconan.com and teamleno.com because I saw that phrasing in a TMZ poll and they were still available. My friend and I threw together a Facebook Group and put the domain on a Tumblr account. Within 12 hours we had 10k+ members in the FB group and were getting significant search traffic to the site. We were getting emails from people offering up 50-100 bucks to run a display ad (static image, not adserved) and we didn't even prompt for it. I only ended selling 2 of them and we donated the money to the Haiti Earthquake thing. I definitely could have made a lot more had I been prepared to sell display ads. Simply putting a link on the site with a contact email for advertisers will get you plenty of offers if you really are seeing massive viral traffic. Also, ALWAYS make a facebook page for the site you create. You can really ramp up virality and pages with a lot of fans can earn money with sponsored statuses (which is frowned upon heavily by facebook).

Also, for anyone that is interested: A few months afterwards, Conan's lawyer contacted us and asked to to give them the domain. I had no problem with that and now it currently directs to his official "Team Coco" site. We still have the FB group, it has lost about 200k members since its peak but still has 200k members: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=242166564197
Honestly? Die. Or, more realistically, stop being. Whether that means stop being homeless or stop being alive is entirely irrelivant.

I believe (Because I can't speak for them) that these laws come about because people judge the homeless and/or feel guilty about them. Either you see them and you feel angry that "They're messing up the park by sleeping there! They don't pay taxes!" or you feel guilty/uncomfortable (Because 'that could be me' or 'why doesn't someone help them?')

The only way to 'get rid' of the problem is to make them go away, and since killing them would be unacceptible, the next best thing is just make it illegal for them to be anywhere you have to encounter them being all homeless.
Absolutely. There are a few startups doing this, ranging from hardware that companies install to software to "outside in" solutions like we're working on. As far as I understand this industry, the challenge is that they've all got massively complex dedicated IVR systems, and changing them is hard.

Some solutions will detect when call volumes are high, and allow you to put in your phone number to be called back. That's pretty cool, but you still have to call in, press buttons and wait to see if you get that message.

I agree though, in principle it's an area where companies could innovate. Unfortunately, customer service is typically approached as a cost to be minimized rather than an opportunity to be maximized. Zappos is the exception, etc.
RepRap: High-Impact PLA