skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems you're finding out how CSS and top google results impact on one's image. A nice stylesheet can turn an affiliate marketing site white-hat (quantnet.com) and the wrong colours, font or too many twitter links will make your site look black-hat.
Dealing with Complexity in UI Design
Not sure if anyone is following this any more, but good questions here -

> Who was was the greatest strategist of the previous generation?

Of the last, say, 50 years? It's certainly debatable. Depends on what field.

You probably know most of most of the excellent business strategists in finance and technology. For statesmen, probably Deng Xiaoping or maybe Lee Kuan Yew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew

> Who decides?

It's a subjective thing, like "best painting" or "best painter" - you could put metrics to it or rankings or something, but in the end it's all subjective.

> Rommel was a great strategist. Is it better to be Rommel or to hurt fewer people and to be forgotten?

Actually, interesting you chose Rommel. Rommel was executed by the Nazis (forced suicide, technically) for being part of the plot to overthrow Hitler. I think it's fair to say that if that plot had been better executed, then millions of lives would be saved. So that's the flipside - better strategy can save millions of lives as well.

For what it's worth, Rommel is a hell of a comparison -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel#Popular_perception

Super honorable guy. Was opposed to war crimes, opposed to the Holocaust, opposed slave labor, believed Hitler should be arrested and tried for crimes and replaced... he's the only member of the Third Reich leadership with a memorial or museum in Germany (he has both).

But anyways, it's kind of a false dichotomy. The Romans had an expression - "Si vis pacem, para bellum" - "If you want peace, prepare for war" - I do believe in that, and sometimes - like Hitler blitzkreiging Europe or Saddam invading Kuwait - military action is necessary. But it's never desirable if avoidable.
I found that using webkit inspector to set the paragraph style to normal letter-spacing, 1.4em line-height helped the readability immensely. Something to consider, perhaps?
Have you tried HN who's hiring threads?
Features of Common Lisp
Just as another data point, I almost never read "mass media", since most things there don't really interest me. (Excluding Technology-related news, which I get from TechCrunch etc.).

This used to be a huge problem for me, sine I would be constantly out-of-touch. But nowadays, I find that Twitter/Facebook tend to keep me up to date on anything that's really big.
How about the "Terms of Use" that say "Apps and other products and services may not use Instapaper’s name, logos, or other trademarks in their titles or logos, or in any way that implies endorsement, sponsorship, or false association with Instapaper"?

http://www.instapaper.com/api/terms
As an atheist, I don't need a soul anyway.

But I don't plan on going down that route myself.
My office is on the 7th floor of a building in Yoyogi. Monitors are scattered everywhere, and our breakroom is effectively destroyed.

Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but I'm really glad this quake wasn't any stronger... I've been through a lot of quakes here, and this is the first time I thought I might be going home in a black bag.
This is just a bunch of links. Can anyone vouch for the author's credibility?
You don't have to get rid of them, make them participate more actively in the movie and or demo.

Sitting there while you're doing all the talking makes you look like bad because you don't seem to want to do it alone, and makes them look bad, because they don't do any talking.
I'm feeling shakes every 20 minutes or so; one of the earthquake alerts on my phone actually preceded the shaking by about 10 seconds. My body's so used to the shaking that it always thinks it's shaking -- I set up a bottle of water to look at just so I don't go insane.

11:30 pm JST and I'm still feeling quakes.
Very nice. Now if you could email transcriptions of the recordings and use voice recognition to identify the call participants you'd be onto a winner :).
I've had an Instapaper account for some time. Have to admit though that I much prefer Read-It-Later's way of doing things. Less intrusive.
Bravo. They may have saved a life.
(I am not an expert on this, so may be wrong, but...) How does that change anything?

If the client needs to know foo.example.com they ask the nearest server. That will have the wildcard and will return the correct address. The nearest server is not going to be the root server for that domain, but something (typically) at the ISP. So the ISP DNS server will see more load, but not the root. Yet this article show the root as getting a huge number of hits. The only explanation I see is that they are not serving wildcard responses when they should be...
I wrote Building iOS Apps From Scratch (http://designthencode.com/scratch) a 30-page guide for coders just learning Objective-C and Cocoa. Also, for coders looking to get into UI design, I wrote a 70-page guide as well: http://designthencode.com

Hope it helps!
"work for" should really be "work with." Powers that be prefer it to be the former so that they feel they have less work and more freedom from it.
They may be downvoting you because they are emotional. Or they may be downvoting because you are wrong. ;)

This story violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the rule against "video" of a disaster; aka cheap sensationalism. Rather, much of the thread is the opposite of sensationalism: e.g. patio11 on the average state of Japanese disaster preparedness.

This story has all sorts of HN community relevance, ranging from how are community members experiencing this on the ground to how do otherwise abstract geology papers manifest in real life to hey, wait, my startup is sitting in a prime earthquake zone; how should we prepare?

And, you know, this is a magnitude 8.9 earthquake. They don't happen every year. We can afford a handful of threads on each one. It's nice to try to have an interesting news site, but if this isn't news one has to question the entire concept of news. Which is fair: News is not for everyone, and perhaps news is not for you. It's just not to your taste. Have you tried an exclusive diet of decade-old paper books?
Let me start by asking $15k/month in revenue or profit? Do you have capacity to hire?

Courting investors is a full time job, but so is hiring if done right. You probably can't do both with just two of you. If the goal of raising money is to hire more people, and you've already got enough cash to hire even one, do that first.

Just make sure you hire into a position you believe can increase your profit. Spend time thinking about it.

Companies your size grind to a halt while raising capital and it can take months. Once you've expanded a little, multitasking becomes easier. If you're lucky (and this is what you're trying for), you may find that your new hire increases your profit enough while you were looking for investors that you can afford to hire again.

If the new hire doesn't increase profit, you can still take investment (especially if you've been doing the leg work after maxing out your headcount), but you're going to have to figure out how to hire effectively eventually, you'll just have more money in the bank.
I meant just any other stock.
I don't know about novels, but finishing a piece of music is a truly arduous task. I've never found another activity which is so deeply challenging: forcing you to confront your own ideas of what you're trying to produce, how good you expect to make it, your own self-confidence and self-belief, stamina, you name it.

Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison.

I don't doubt that writing novels is similarly tough (possibly tougher)
Here's another one:
http://media.staradvertiser.com/images/20110312_gordonMAP1.g...
Why can't this be handled with DNS wildcards? Surely they would allow caching on the nearest server.
So you think you own your Twitter name?
This is what I like about HN. This isn't a particularly "hacker" story, but the perspective here is unique.

On the main stream media, I'll get a couple of statistics and video, then an empty comment about "loved ones trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy".

On HN, I get the facts, but both broader and deeper, from the geological nature of the quake to the effect on other locales. And I get real, unfiltered perspective from those involved -- without the bogus posturing for the human interest feel.
What happened was that Oracle was to assume continued development of Java on OSX. What was reported was Apple was completely dropping it. In fact, I just received a notification that a new version was ready.

And up to that point Apple was slowly killing Java development on the Mac. Updates were less frequent and ages behind other platforms. And you only had one choice to get the JDK, Apple. At least with Oracle, it's assumed, updates should be arriving regularly and in line with other platforms.

Which is what Apple was saying all along when the controversy started.
Lean Principle #7 - Optimise The Whole
8 Tips to Boost Your Business Website’s Conversion Rate
There’s a phenomenal focus on generating traffic in the online marketing world. Businesses fight for clicks, stage immensely competitive bidding wars and spend thousands of hours pushing their websites to the top of search pages.
Top-ranking websites and prominent ads, often on auto-pilot, generate thousands of dollars a day. But is this the most profitable way to secure clients online? The amount of traffic running through a website isn’t directly tied to the amount of income that the website generates.
I'm guessing the experience is similar to hacking graphing calculators, if you've ever played around with those in school. That's where I got started, on a TI-84+ :)

And no, it hasn't damaged my brain, I think.
Admit it, data hogs: you know you should pay more
Apple way ahead of tablet competition, expected to hold 80% share
> tens of megabytes

Is that supposed to be a lot?
Don’t Miss The Social Media Boat
This is silly -- these are just blind leading the blind questions. I guess I can provide some answers ...

- homebrew should just provide binaries rather than trying to bootstrap a compiler for everyone.

- Barring that, homebrew should wait and see if Xcode4 is free with Lion.

- A compiler isn't enough. You also need an assembler, linker, etc. Those can be found in Apple's cctoolz and ld64 projects.

- Headers are are also required. Those belong to Apple and are not freely redistributable.

- GCC 4.2 is still the default, not clang. Apple still builds the majority of the OS with GCC.

- Apple does modify the compiler. Look at PLBlocks (http://code.google.com/p/plblocks/) for scripts that can drive an Apple compiler build.

- homebrew is learning why "do not dupe" is not viable when dealing with Apple in the longterm, and is going to just wind up being a less mature macports clone after going through a few more release cycles.
Ahh yes, the 16k expansion brick.
If you sneezed too hard or a fly landed on the table it would reset. Didn't it also turn really hot after a few hours?
"The best thing about this project is that we're not trying to retain ownership of it"

What? That's like a tiny little asterisk point down at the bottom of your feature list. The best thing about your project should be that it's useful for doing X.

I never got as far as finding out what X actually was, and why this was going to be better than the existing tools out there.

But I did learn what file format you save projects in. Yikes. Developers, stop talking about development stuff. Nobody cares about the technical details. Nobody cares about Open Source. Talk about your product.
YC is great for the startups that are able to get in.

Otherwise, if you have a technical product, traction, revenue, and a technical founder you're probably ready simply to submit your startup to Angel List. It really helps if you have a couple of angels that are active on angel list to vouch for you, however.

Also, read Pitching Hacks. It's $9 for the PDF. It's an easy read, but it's the friggin Bible when it comes to pitching in Silicon Valley[1].

I'd also suggest getting active in the startup community/scene. Go to meetups like 106 Miles[2] and Hackers & Founders[3]. Get a stack of business cards and start handing them out. Start going out to coffee with people. Get to know a new person every day, be genuine and try to help them out. Hang out at Coupa Cafe, or University Cafe to code.

It shouldn't take too long, doing that in Palo Alto before you can get some introductions to Angels.

Heck, Naval is speaking the next Hackers & Founders on March 17. His presentation is titled, "Hacking your funding process". We still have 60 (free) tickets available[4].

Aside from that, the next open H&F is in Berkeley at the end of March. Stop by and chat. I'd love to hear what you're up to.

ref:

[1] http://venturehacks.com/pitching

[2] http://www.meetup.com/106miles/

[3] http://www.hackersandfounders.com

[4] http://hackfunding.mogotix.com
I am watching live and they just said all cooling hardware and backups for one of their atomic plants has FAILED and they are advising residents to evacuate. Ugh.
Seems like a cool game. I clicked around and found something much more interesting ... the blog post they wrote about making it:

http://nerdplusart.com/creating-an-html5-game?utm_source=fee...
- We are going to provide binaries for the CC toolchain.

- We can't wait for Lion, nor expect everyone to use Lion.

- The wiki page even says we need the whole toolchain

- Headers is a good point

- GCC is not the default /usr/bin/cc for Xcode4

- Yeah, we know that.

- Macports needs Xcode too.
Don't “stay with it” continuously, though, that'll just keep the system overloaded. If you can't get through, wait 20 minutes before trying again.
Subversion is simple enough that while you can find ways to mess up your local working copy, it's much harder to destroy previous work (in your local branch or upstream) or otherwise make a mess. Git is a complex, fragile (in the wrong hands) VCS.
"someone always has it worse"...

That was my previous place of employment: in-house perl scripts wrapped around RCS. Absolute nightmare.
Be a Detective with Blackberry Phone Spy
The day finally came, but not before I got Blackberry Phone spy installed in my handset. Interestingly, this spying device is so awesome that nobody comes to know whether it is there in the phone or not! After the installation, even I who actually knew that the device was installed in it felt that it wasn't there really! And the process of installation too is very easy.
Doesn't work vimperator, the first D deletes the tab ;)
Introduction To Machines And Mechanisms [pdf]
Your money's worth.

Seriously, this guy has implemented so many systems and has written so many lines of code that I've lost count. Plus he has awesome business experience ( http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/content/story-behind-wwcom-ca... ) and is a pretty great guy to work with. Yet again, the thing is that what he brings to the table isn't just pure coding skills, or business skills, but a combination of both and years of experience. So, what you're actually doing by hiring him for a day is hiring an army of programmers for all the human years he has invested.

You know the thing is that when you have been in the market for that long and people are willing to pay you that much for that long. There has to be a lot under the surface.
I have been feeling a bit uneasy about the scope of our idea for some time now. Today I feel much better because we have managed to whittle it down to one core product that is easy to understand and sell. Everything is clearer now. However, now I'm unsure what to do with all the other stuff that we still plan on doing but just further down the road. Do I just leave it all out?

To make my point clearer... Originally we were saying we wanted to do X. To do X you need Y and Z but especially Y. After re-scoping we are now saying we will put all our focus on Y (which is a product in itself), see how things play out, then see about everything else.
If you want to see a visual of where the epicenter was:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
A good analogy to use is c# and VB in .net. I was a VB developer and when C# was born, I didn't want to learn it because I can do everything in VB. It's the same framework so the language didn't matter. Overtime almost 99% of code examples and open source projects were written in C# and I ended up moving to c# and haven't written VB code (and don't want to) in several years.

My point is, you want to blog/collaborate in spanish/frensh or whatever language? Go for it. But you have just considerably shrunk your audience and network and greatly diminished your chances of giving or getting help.

PS: Wikipedia is different than code and is not a good analogy. If I want to learn about Cancer/Golden Retriever/Panama Canal/etc.. then yes, I want to read it in my native language.
> Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison.

Really? I suppose it depends on what you mean. Sometimes "coding" can be akin to writing a single bar in someone else's composition. Other times you're writing a whole opera yourself, from scratch. They're two different ball parks.

I find coding elicits the same things you've mentioned about composing.
Successful companies (um, Microsoft?) have mostly razor-sharp bosses. Floundering companies often have a wider range of abilities (both managers and devs). It's a crap-shot whether your boss is great, or clueless.
Nah, bricks stay put.
Who Will be the Steve Jobs of China?
That's why he used the word, "might." Some people wouldn't feel a moral responsibility to pull a toddler back out of the path of a speeding bus; but many people would--and if flyosity is one of the latter, he might appreciate being made aware of the situation and his personal abilities vis-a-vis the pulling.
Removing the Stigma From 'Writing Software'
Closer to 80 times stronger than a hundred, but yeah definitely deep.
Block Content Farms from Google Results: Tech Media will still complain.
Thoughts?
Picture of the Day: Orbiter Spots Rover Perched on Crater's Edge
Apple releases Xcode 4; free for developers, $4.99 for everyone else
How Japan's Data Centers Manage Earthquakes
Mining Government Data: The Future of the Mobile City
We can't wait for Lion, nor expect everyone to use Lion.

But nothing has changed. The presence of Xcode 4 does not invalidate people's existing copies of Xcode 3 already installed or that exist on their OSX DVD. Further, the version of gcc is the same.

If this whole episode is what finally gives people the motivation to have an easier-to-install binary of gcc, then great. But the actual need is the same today as it was last week.
Should You Buy an iPad 2?
Because "business users" = dumb, lots of $, willing to pay for anything, right?

Sorry to snark, it just bugs me when people assume that because you slap a "for business" or "pro version" onto something, that business users will want to use it. Businesses like saving money just as much or more than people.

If there's not a compelling profit purpose, businesses won't buy it.
Parallel Programming with Dropbox
Speaking as a technical user, I don't think I'd use your product for recording my voice. I can do that trivially with a voice recorder utility on any computer, or even my smartphone, for absolutely free, and probably with higher quality than a typical phone line can give me.

What I would consider using this is for having a voice contact form. If I deal with users who might be more accustomed to phoning someone instead of filling out web forms, I might tell them "you can call this number and give your suggestions, feeback, etc". Having an option of leaving a greeting message (and to inform them they're being recorded) would be nice.

If you're a developer, these are trivial to do with Twilio directly, but if people don't want to waste time reimplementing stuff they can outsource to you, it could be useful. There probably are other services which do exactly this, although I'm not aware of their names at the moment, as I hadn't had the need to use them yet.
Good news! Waves did not cause any damage to persons or property in Philippines.
There are some 'skeleton' frameworks available. These provide only the very essentials, like a database abstraction layer, user classes and some useful function wrappers.

For PHP, Tyler Hall's 'Simple PHP framework' is a good example.
ObjC isn't statically-typed. Static typing informations only allows the compiler to warn the programmer about type mismatch. From the official docs:

"Statically typed objects have the same internal data structures as objects declared to be of type id. The type doesn't affect the object; it affects only the amount of information given to the compiler about the object and the amount of information available to those reading the source code."
Rails 3.1 and The jQuery Effect
I think that there is a genuine difference between refusing to lower standards for a product and refusing to be price sensitive in respond to the market.

What Sebastian is advocating is a bargaining technique so old that my grandfather warns against it.

What he's trying to imply is that there's a thin lying between hard bargaining and being insensitive to the realities of the market. Be careful on which side you fall.
Show HN: RabbitQR, a StartupBus Creation
What Sebastian is advocating is a method of hard bargaining that may or may not lead to brand building. What Jacques is advocating is being careful about not crossing the line between bargaining and delusions about your own market worth. It's a perilous balance to maintain if you're playing this game and falling either way might ruin you.
I don't know if it's of use for anyone here, but Google has set up a Crisis Response page:

http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html
The issue is that Illinois has no right to issue laws governing the actions of people not located in Illinois.

Illinois is free to demand that people who are located in Illinois pay sales taxes on their out of state purchases. If it has probable cause for believing one of it's citizens is evading taxes, it can even file a subpoena with Amazon for sales records.
Workshop on Botnet - Cologne
Worshop on Botnet - Detection, Measurement, Disinfection & Defence: due intensi ed interessantissimi giorni di full-immersion sulle botnet nel convegno organizzato a Colonia da ENISA e da altri partner tedeschi ed europei, a cui ho avuto il piacere di partecipare...
I hope you don't try and hold up book-cases in the future (not sure how large they are). But during an earthquake, they could easily crush you.
Data Privacy: 3 Reasons Why Your Company Should Care
This is a fair point.

It may work that we can support both 3 and 4. But experience suggests that even minor build bumps of Xcode cause issues compiling software.

Ultimately it is a lot easier for us if we can say install this and use that and you will have very few issues using Homebrew.
I don't think that's they point they are missing. They know that an employees who shops is "damaged goods", but they don't know why employers don't give pre-emptive raises to everyone, and avoid the confrontations altogether.

The point they are missing is, that companies know they can skimp on 'retention bonuses', because only a few employees will shop for a better offer.

Would you rather hire a hard-working, but downtrodden slave; or a hired gun who's only staying because you are paying them what you are worth? Exactly.

The only solution is for enough employees to churn their way to decent positions, so companies are forced to assume that an underplayed employee will quit.
They probably will. They already have in other states.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/new-york-court-dismisses-am...

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe they cannot file a lawsuit until they are actually harmed (i.e., after the law takes effect).