skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Make a tablet, the exact shape and size and weight of an iPad, make it $50-100 cheaper all around, toss in a regular 'ol USB slot and an SD card and you'll probably have a hit. none of the present, weirdly shaped and overly priced Android tablets have any appeal to me whatsoever."

If it were that simple, somebody would have already done it.

I think this article is pretty spot on—Apple has made it almost impossible to compete at the prices they've set at the level of quality the iPad represents. Maybe you can get to the iPad pricing, but you'll have to cut corners and it just won't feel like that solid slab of aluminum.
Gel presentations are similar: http://www.gelconference.com/videos/
that's par for the course with SEOBook. Aaron is brilliant, but his commentaries are never direct. For example, read some of the stuff he's written about eHow-- it's hard to tell if he loves them or hates Google, and ultimately where he comes down on the issue.
Plugin/Website suggestion for HN
It would be great that when you hit refresh, you don't see the links already visited. (When a special mode is enabled)

So basically, if you've just visited 3 links of the top 10, you would see the "top 13" without your visited site.
I feel like downvoting this post simply because it's so depressing. I think I just shot the rest of my day.
I'm not sure whether it would work in general, but at a university hackathon, making the event a way to 'prove yourself to recruiters' helped us get a good turn-out.

We didn't collect resumes during the hackathon (and in general, we didn't permit any 'company pitches'), but about a week or two afterwards we sent out an email saying "if you'd be interested in working at any of our sponsors (http://pennapps.com/our-sponsors/), send us your resume and we'll forward it on." This lead to (both times we've done this) about 50% resume turnout.
Five technologies to attract venture capital investment
that's actually a great idea..
It reminds me of the type of text that's produced by a spam-bot. Content for the sake of content .. food for search engines.
Thanks for this - so priority number 1 would be making sure users are agreeing to whatever content policy I adopt. In terms of the options you present - what provides the optimal user experience in your opinion?

Option 1 works well for corporate groups, for photos however I'm thinking option 3. My reasoning is that if an admin rejects a user, for whatever reason, they should by default be rejecting the user's photos. In addition, the user, if expelled from a group, should be able to deny the group access to his/her photos. Does this make sense - you think this is coherent?
That's because you'll lose.

You've made the accusation, now the onus is on you to prove it.
Best way to start is to code and learn. Pick any engine and start coding. Java, C++ and/or Python are OGRE-3D, Panda 3D, Unity.
Germany also has an incredible work ethic. Not only did they bounce back after WWII, they also did after WWI. At the conclusion of WWI, the allies effectively stripped Germany of it's factory infrastructure and imposed crippling repayments. Within 20 years Germany had again massed a military machine that took over Europe - overpowering their former opponents - and came close to taking Russia.

They've always valued quality and hard work, and it pays off for them. Right now they're the ones dragging the EU along by the ear.

Another factor is that much of the UK's economy was based on income from foreign lands, particularly India. Once that was gone (India achieved independence post WWII) a decline was inevitable.

Perhaps the secret sauce is having the guts to admit that significant changes need to be made and then act on them. Since the GFC, all the US administration has done is try to preserve "business as usual". There's been no real "stuff is really harsh, we need to take some serious measures here". I guess that covers that stagnation angle...
> A) How are phone calls "more real" than internet conversations?

Bandwidth. While both are real -- thus making the phrase "more real" a bit awkward -- verbal communications transmit far more information than the words being spoken and I can't imagine the amount of typing it would take to convey the missing data. In that sense, it's "more" real.
Anyone have experience running a niche site in a language they don't know?
I know this sounds a little ridiculous but lets say that you are an expert in something that isn't very niche or difficult to learn about in English but the market is not so saturated in other countries. If I could find someone to reliably translate my information (either outsource or partner with someone) do you think I could effectively sell an ebook? Any tips on how I would research the market of a foreign country?
Alternatively, facebook.com has a "block application" that can disable all of the offensive items on an opponent and you can do the same thing.

Edit: others have noted seeing variations of theis on other favimons (see threads below).
Four Steps to the Epiphany: Sell before delivery
I recently read The Four Steps to the Epiphany and I have summarized my thoughts. Especially with regards to selling a product before it's completed, and I'm curious about your war stories and thoughts related to selling before you deliver.
I know this isn't what the OP was thinking, but this is the first thing I thought after reading his question.

Isn't it illegal to have some implicit or explicit agreement not to hire from each other's firms?
He just created a second thread within the last 10 minutes:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fyqpi/26_hours_left_to...
The entrepreneur visa was the one that I was referring to in the UK, which has similar requirements (actually lower – access to £200k in capital) as the proposed US founder's visa.

The German setup is similar, requiring the creation of at least 5 jobs and €250k in capital (though exceptions can be made, and I know some who have gotten them):

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.gtai.com/...

I personally came over on the equivalent of an H1B, which was, compared to the US, incredibly easy to obtain. Basically I had a job offer, which I'd found while in Germany on a tourist visa in Germany, and took the letter from my employer along with a couple other filled out forms up to the Foreigner's Office (Ausländeramt), and was issued a two-year visa on the spot. I'll just emphasize that again: I was granted an H1B equivalent on the same day that I applied for it. There's a bit of a song and dance of them saying that they couldn't find an EU person for the job, but that's mostly a formality that's just a matter of the person writing the employment letter knowing how to write it. After 5 years I was eligible for permanent residence, and didn't start a company until after that. Though I had two different jobs in that time, which would have reset the counter for me in the US.

This isn't to say that people don't ever get kicked out or fail to get visas – I don't think there's a country in the world where it's a joy to deal with immigration officials, but certainly comparing my own experience to folks that I've known that have done equivalent things in the US makes what I've gone through seem like a walk in the park.
Is NodeJS Wrong?
Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that users hate it.
Has Silicon Valley Lost Its Edge?
I disagree. That question is all but meaningless. I see no evidence that any portion of the international community gives a rat's ass about "acts of war". Many people try to cover this up by pointing fingers at some chosen target and showing about how they flout the old European rules for how countries should relate to each other, but since nobody follows them finding some entity that did would just prove that entity to be a chump. It does make it easy to point fingers and try to distract you with a song and dance about how evil some individual party is, since everyone has a list of violations of the old European laws/concepts a mile long now. Some parts of the international community like to talk about it when it is convenient but disappear instantly when it becomes the slightest bit inconvenient.

("So you're saying the actions of $SOME_DISFAVORED_ENTITY are just OK with you, then?" No, I'm saying the dimensions I measure ethical behavior on have little to do with the phantom international law system. It only works when most or all participants agree to be bound by it, something that has not been true within my lifetime. I have not given you enough info in this post to guess what my judgments are.)
Simple ruby 1.9.2 patch for setting GC parameters
Using language instead of icons is only useful for advanced users. I love gnome-do/launchy/quicksilver but most people don't get them. It would be bad to think of them as "replacement" for icon. Instead I think it's better to think of them as complimentary components.
At this point, I bet even hitting $400 would be great, cheaper than the competition, and could still yield a handsome profit if the parts ran $250-300.

I frankly just don't understand the weird form factor bit (or the right form factor and no marketplace, or some other bizarre combination of factors that are just "not quite right")
It'd be interesting to add an A/B testing twist to this--provide value-add to advertisers and newsletter operators by providing them visibility into click-throughs, and then spiffs to the newsletters for going with the better path. But you'd need volume to do this.
Top Ways to Rock Your Resumé
Tossing on my Bayesian hat for a moment...

The journal that a paper is published in should absolutely affect our assessment of the facts in it - if the journal tends to publish only bullshit, we should mark any article that appears in that journal with a pretty high bullshit factor. That's not to say that it can't be overcome, but it's still a mark against.

I'd personally argue that the a priori likelihood of us finding a rock that fell to earth from outer space that happens to contain bacteria inside it (given that we know life is relatively rare) is so low that, coupled with the shady journal it's published in, the claim is so extraordinary that it would be very difficult to provide certain enough evidence to make me think it's true. As in, I'd probably put the probability that this is a straight up fraudulent hoax higher than the probability that this is actually true evidence of alien life.
Sometimes, instead of searching for the YC thread on an article, I just submit it and trust the URl de-duper.

Clearly, that is a stupid strategy.
Apple has made it almost impossible to compete at the prices they've set at the level of quality the iPad represents.

I totally agree, nobody can lock down all of the supply of a given part in some absolutely necessary, but short supplied, channel better than Apple. It's really one of their most amazing business strategies.
Not for software financing, almost all of the funds I'm applying to are in the valley - and I live in Canada... the place still has pull.
I must admit, I didn't understand the name of the app either.
Debunking the 'who signs up for newsletters':

- woot.com members (I would HATE to miss a Woot Off)

- Groupon.com members

- Calacanis' newsletter subscribers

- Dan Lewis' "Now I Know" newsletter (best ever)

Eh, there are many others, but those were the top 4 in my gmail (minus Woot, which I just thought of first).
I read the paper in it's entirety today.

Hoover is a sharp scientist and he has authored a very compelling piece that on the surface appears to reinforce it's central tenant - that the structures documented are not indigenous to Earth.

If that is in fact validated, the remaining debate is about methods and interpretation of the ESEM, FSEM and EDS results. That portion of the paper appears to be very well thought out and presented.

What's also very good, there is a clear and concise method for reproducing the results and the invitation of so many others to do just that.

This thing has legs.
I'm actually writing a chrome extension right now for hn just for the sake of learning. I do believe there is a plugin that does this already (for chrome - search hacker news in the store) - but I would be happy to add it to mine. Right now, I just added a link to the right of all the user names that says "profile for xxx" and if you click it, it pulls their profile details into the page.

I will add this because I needed an excuse to use the html5 local data store. Also, I'll post the code to github when it's done and announce here.

Anything else anyone wants to see from an extension like this?
I also had awesome results from asking for reviews using appirater. I have mine set for 20 days and 20 uses. (They will not be asked to review until they have been using it for at least 20 days and have used the app at least 20 times)

I now have over 50 reviews for the current version with a 4-5 star average.

http://itunes.apple.com/ee/app/icross-wod-free/id397702723?m...
No. Some people enjoy simply wasting other people's time. I've heard self-confessed trolls brag to me about this.

A number of near-trolls are also sincere contributors, but are just incapable of responding to social cues or accepting group consensus.
From the optimized (?) seobook.com front page: "And now you can hire Aaron as your personal SEO coach for just around $10 per day!"

Oh my.
Facebook Comments Have Silenced The Trolls — But Is It Too Quiet?
Right, I agree with all this.

The unit tests will help you with bugs by ensuring your program is doing what it should be doing.

You shouldn't be worrying about automating your testing before you have even started writing unit tests.

Don't try to automate things you don't yet know how to do. Figure out how to run it manually first.

Staging isn't so important at this point. Staging is generally most useful when you are showing a working version of what you are building to a client (or anyone who might need to see it) while you are still in development. In this case, your code is always changing and you are regularly breaking things. If someone needs to look at what you are doing then you need a stable snapshot setup for them. This is especially important when you have multiple developers because you don't know what the other guy is doing. The end game is that your code has gone live and the "client" is your actual customers. This is where being able to push your code to a staging server is critical. You need to be able to "user test" it before going live.
Who actually wrote the worm? Was it Israelis? Was it Americans? How was it a join operation? It could have been just Israel involved.
Are the United States and Iran already at war? Iran held US displomats hostage.

Are Israel and Iran at war? The president of Iran called for the destruction of Israel. Does the count as a declaration of war?
nice game, no idea what i was doing but played for 30 minutes. good times.
only in death are you truly free.
I doubt we'll see another leap as huge as from CLI to GUI. But as incremental improvements in user interfaces go, I find iOS (and multitouch control in general) pretty significant.
Nope. I'd write it in plain vanilla JS. Frameworks are great, but sometimes I think the world is too dependent on them.
Oh this is awesome. It's the last thing I need to completely eliminate images from my website.

All the rest is cross-browser gradient and rounded corner code from http://css3please.com, and I'm debating whether to vectorize the picture of me via raphael.js or do an inline data-URL image in my CSS (it might be considered cheating).
Sometimes I slack off, but overall it's been a lot better for my back than my habits when sitting.

I find the idea of a treadmill desk very interesting. I bet that would really help lose weight and keep one in shape.
You all should get the updated version. I made a silly mistake in the initial version which I now realize left the over a little too soon. Grab the new one for added awesomesauce.
That seems like a situation that is more directly influenced by the country-specific lending institutions, no? Aren't they the ones setting the interest rates, repayment terms, etc., not Kiva and other ML organisations?
When I read recently that the average pay for Valley developers was around $100k, I balked.

In the DC area, I don't know of many 'good' developers making less than that, and I'd wager to say that most of them don't possess the core competencies required to work somewhere like Google, for less money. The soft cap around here is closer to $160-170k for a good developer, working for a regular job where you can work 8 hours and go home at the end of it.

Hell, if you're clearable, and do work in security, the cap goes way up.
The problem with visualization as the goal is that eventually the visual models become so complex that finding patterns, even by a human, become virtually impossible.

http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/images/lastfm_800_graph_white.p...

You might be able to "see" some large scale constructs, but finding patterns in the details is what this is all about and humans simply can't do that with graphs like the above...and it's amazing how quickly you can arrive at hairballs just like this...

even specialized tools for visualizing large graphs don't help much.

http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/
It also fails to recognize that being an asshole is accepted in many online communities. In part this is because the author treats flaming and trolling as if they were the same thing and implies that they are caused by clinical depression, none of which is the case.
SelectOut: Opt out of being tracked online
The result is Microsoft-Bob-esque.
Opt-Out of being tracked online
Speaking as a professional troll, I have to say that this guide is great, and everyone should follow it.
Pretty much everything about the "arsenic-based life" claim turned out to be examples of poor scientific lab technique and poor thinking. There is NOT acceptance in the scientific community that arsenic-based life has been found.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/its_not_an_arseni...

http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-ba...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/arsenic-life-under...

http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/
Wow. 25,000+ words, and yet he missed what I think would be a much more compelling argument to support his thesis; ie: Apple is the perfect storm of Hacker plus Artistic culture. As a company it operates as a native in both the artistic and technological spheres, and that cross cultural influence gives it great power in both spheres.
My Weekend Project: Moral Support - Your Own Personal Help Hotline
I've implemented something similar on my apps, and I have to say, it works. Most users (including myself) simply won't give a good review unsolicited. If the request pops up and they like the app, it won't be that much of a nuisance (they can make it go away forever).

The trick is getting the timing right. Wait long enough that they've used it a few times and have actually had a chance to form an opinion. Otherwise it's just annoying.
The dangers of big monitors. I made the rocket smaller.
Either that or App-irat(e)or - which is ironic considering the aim to get good rating.
What is the problem here?
Why did Google give up so quickly with Wave? If Wave were an independent company, would they have given up so quickly? How can Google win if they give up so quickly?
In this article they have tried to Think Different for the sake of thinking different. Not bad. But they basically described Linux, Command-Line interfaces, and the Web. Their idea of "language" is basically scripting languages.
I like the company and agree that SEO has value. But do you really think "high initial expense" and "uncertain payoff" are characteristics of good marketing strategies for startups? I'd say it's exactly the opposite, and don't think it's a good idea for startups to be doing PR either.
But unfortunately increasingly less so from the poorer countries.

What is the evidence for this? The United States has had high rates of legally approved immigration since 1964, second only to the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries in rate of immigration as a percentage of already arrived population.
Google kind of, sort of, addresses Android Malware
OwlHuntr, if you're interested in some code that could generate PDF invoices from your .clockwork.log files, let me know. I have some code that I think could be easily adapted to do exactly that.
For CribQ (housing maps from Craigslist) we prompt for ratings. It sucks to bug users but it also sucks to build a great product and not have people find it. To the people complaining about the experience, think of the experience of the developer to balance that feeling out.

We've also had issues with what seem to be targetted 1 star ratings with no reviews. Every new version that comes out we instantly get a bunch of these, and I have suspicions about who they come from. Almost all written reviews are 4 or 5 stars.
Absolutely. The advice given in the article is great for when you genuinely have a disagreement with someone but maybe less so for when someone is deliberately being a dick about it. For example, I wonder how this approach would work with someone who is trying to wind up fans of a rival sports team.
I'm in a startup with a B2B product where we have found a few "visionary customers" and have had them on board for a year or so already. They have been essential in the development of a number of essential features of our product. What we're struggling with now is determining the right moment to hit the mainstream with our product.

In one sense we're still building out some features that may very well be essential for some customers, however we know there are a good amount out there that our current benefit/feature-set would be very beneficial for.

In short -- how do you determine when a product is detrimental to future growth (making a bad name for yourself by selling an incomplete product) and when it is ready?
tl;dr: You will probably act differently when not hidden behind the veil of (optional/partial) anonymity.

> Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.

This should probably refer to your "extended social circle" as you can't actually have 700 friends. See: Dunbar's Number
We saw a huge boost in number of reviews, overall rating, and sales when we started to solicit users in TapTyping (went from 3.5 to 4.5 stars). We made sure to only ask people once they had typed 2300 characters which equates to 3-4 speed tests or 1.5 typing lessons. Obviously the solicitation critera will be different for every app.

Not sure why you need a 3rd party library to do this though, it's pretty straight forward.
> You have Android devices that may or may not get firmware updates

All Android tablets that have been announced (including the Xoom) ship with stock Android. So they'll get their updates on time.
Yep, I saw this interestingly articulated here:
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

In essence, the power of Facebook to connect you with your personal friends also makes you re-make how you present yourself to the outside world.

You create a "purified identity", maybe as you see it a better, less controversial character for fear of offending, or perhaps more likely to please your 'friends'.
powered by twilio!
Now how is this different from pulse.yahoo.com? I believe Google have been great in cloning yahoo products than facebook with enhanced search functionality.
Few example
Mail (yahoo is still kicking google ass with their new beta mail product.Seems promising)
Maps (google's maps kicks every products ass.Awesomely done product but a clone from yahoo maps.)
Finance ( Yahoo way way ahead)
Search - no comments :) Its google all the way
News - (Yahoo all the way)
Messenger

All these products resemble perfect clone of what yahoo has and google has done the same thing and have failed in those products which they have invented themselves(wave- [though I loved it] etc). I am excluding their acquisitions (youtube,android etc).

So finally its safe to say Google clones Yahoo products than facebook.