skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never understood this. I always thought that you'd rather buy from someone who is likely to go out of their way to serve your needs than to buy from someone who simply doesn't care. I know that all other things being equal (I mean, assuming I think both companies can actually deliver, at a similar price point, and that one company isn't going to vanish while I still need them.) that's certainly how I feel, when I buy expensive things.

But then, I've pretty much miserably failed to sell any product (other than my time) that was worth, you know, real money per-customer, so this is likely one of those areas where I'm just weird, and another reason why using myself as a model for generalizing human behavior is a bad idea.

Personally, I focus on selling a whole lot of little things, mostly because I've utterly failed to sell big things, and I've met some success selling lots of little things. Obviously, $10/month is not going to make or break me... and if I spend a lot of time on any one sale, obviously, I'm not going to end up with an acceptable hourly rate, especially as I have some significant marginal costs that come out of that $10 before it can be spent on my salary. But I think it's important, to some extent, to still treat people like customers; yeah, the accountant won't even notice if that customer quits next month. But if more people quit than sign up? or if that customer quits and then loudly complains in public about my bad service?

The customer isn't always right, but dealing with customers you don't want as customers is a delicate art. I'm certain that if I took an insulting attitude towards the customers I didn't want, it'd end badly for me rather quickly. So it seems to me like this issue is... complex. You want to appear to care, but you don't want to appear desperate, and the line between those two, much like the line between confidence and arrogance, can be pretty blurry (at least to someone as socially unskilled as myself.)
Guide to Apple iOS 4.3
Finished reading it yesterday when I was filling-up the form. It was really helpful. YC's form is worth filling for every start-up even if they are not applying. It brings so much clarity for your own self.
Ah, we pushed the wrong version of the site; this will be fixed shortly!
Just a note, when a site implements nested comments, using @<user> is unnecessary as it's clear who you are responding to.
Sorry to be meta, but the @ is pretty much implied when you're replying to their post. Can we agree not to do it?
Ask HN: looking for hacker-friendly housing in the bay area
I'm looking for a short-term rental in the bay area during the months of april and may. Does anyone know of any hacker houses or other rentals available during this time? Thanks!
>Mobile operating systems (and, in my cases Linux in general) are very bad at solving the hard yet common problems -- like seamlessly printing documents or working with arbitrary hardware and software.

You're out of date. Printing is actually easier on Linux than on Windows.

Part of why you can't take a stock version of android and install it on any phone because the hardware discovery on cell phones is entirely lacking. Think back to the days when you had to select the type of sound card and it's address and all that jazz. Now apply that to every single hardware component.
Nice idea, but trying to look at this from a facility manager's perspective (their primary customer), I'm concerned about product durability. How will such a long lever arm survive in the hostile environment known as a public restroom? "Hey bro, push open the door while I stand on that thing, hehehe."

As it is, their site is primarily focused on the idea of the product, but does not discuss its engineering, durability, installation, etc. What alloy are they using, and is it cast or welded? This type of information is very important to the facility managers and architects who would be specifying this thing. There are also potential benefits they've forgotten to discuss if indeed this product solves the problem of people's reluctance to touch restroom doors: Decrease in restroom floor litter and savings on paper towels and extra trash cans.

From a use point of view, have they tested the product to see what percentage of people will actually use their feet to pull open a door? Some doors are big and heavy, and some people aren't. I doubt anyone in heels is going to want to use the Toepener.

The idea seems like a good possible stopgap for an unfortunate design pattern on many school campuses: Narrow hallways best suited to in-swinging doors (where allowed by code). But a better solution to avoiding the transmission of germs on restroom doors is more fundamental: Design the doorway to swing outwards, with push and kick plates, and use anti-microbial stainless steel on the former.

Regarding the toepener.com visual design, I find the blinking Step-Pull-Walk image animation quite jarring to the eye. Should have a fade or dissolve transition between images; Who of the twelve is in charge of UX? ;)
Additional storage for Google Apps users [Blog post]
+1

If you're going to speak with authority, you want to establish some sort of credibility and the About page here fails to do that. I think the author has a great handle on aspirational "made-for-hackernews" linkbait but I'm not sure I want to read strategy advice from someone who has no obvious history of implementing strategy.
What? Your microcontrollers had bytes?

(I'm just gonna end the joke there. This isn't going anywhere good.)
Yeah the lack of credentials is troubling.
Still, the anecdotes were interesting--the author's change in pay just by asking I found pretty entertaining.
Again though, it would be nice to actually know that the author is "successful". These anecdotes lose some credibility if hes living out of a one-bedroom basement apartment at the time of writing.
If you change "money" to "credit" his point makes more sense. People spending credit they've earned, rather than money, is what causes problems.
Why are there so few "embedded software" and/or hardware startups?
On a related note, it's really interesting to see how people act when they know they can't motivate someone with money.

For example, I used to do client work, but stopped (because I hate it) a few years ago after I sold my design firm. On my blog's contact form I specifically say that I don't do any consulting work, but I still get emails at least once or twice per week from people who want to hire me for iPhone work. I always politely refuse, and thank them for the consideration. Sometimes they'll reply saying "we have a large budget" or something like that, and I'll reply again saying, thanks, but no thanks, it's not about the money. As soon as I say that magical phrase, they just don't know what to say or do because they're used to motivating designers/developers with money. It's actually an interesting sociological situation.
Zeus and SpyEye Botmasters Attack Security Sites
Almost everybody in the entertainment business has an agent or manager that does the negotiation for them and tracks down additional opportunities for personal appearances and endorsements. Even the producer on the local talk radio show has an agent negotiating her pay and looking for additional revenue opportunities.

It probably wouldn't work in other industries without a huge shift in expectations, but it really does work at thousands of employers.
You mean like... a union?
But "controlling for poverty" is the same as saying "if you assume that the US was something else without some of its key flaws then"... Do you see that this line of thought goes nowhere?
I'm under the impression that Google can remote kill any .apk that's been installed, not just those that came from the market. Is that inaccurate? I suppose even if they can't do it directly, they could force push an app that would remove a non-market app similar to how they pushed a cleaner for the market malware.

P.S. - Please let me turn off web market/off device installs. Thanks.
Yes, I've had recruiters who submitted me for jobs based solely on a keyword match on my resume -- for something that was clearly not my main skillset. They would have seen that if they even bothered to look at my resume, at all. Now I use that keyword to see if they really are paying attention.
I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a Linux version of the product tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had acquired Trolltech, the QT company, using... wait for it... GTK.

Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)
CashBlogged - A new Finance, Business and Career Aggregator
The title is misleading for sure. Flash itself is not coming to iOS at all, just Adobes Wallaby conversion tool...

Plus the author of the article needs some perspective. The second paragraph is immature fluff, i mean is " IN YOUR FACE, FLASH HATERS!" just not completely juvenile?
Agreed - every time I get 'distracted' by giving up and getting a full time job, or getting sucked into something I thought I'd like but am not truly 100% passionate about, I end up feeling restless and re-exploring my entrepreneurial roots. If you have the entrepreneurial drive, it will always remain within you. It's just a matter of what you choose to do with it.
Heh-- Related: When a site implements upvote and downvote capability, an "I agree" comment is pollution.
That's to learn what the personalities of the founders are like. Few things are so revealing as what amuses people.
Social Search and Search Engines Have Different User Intent
It's not just that more class time in the summer would--if used appropriately--lead to more learning. It is also that better-off students learn much more over the summer than their poorer counter-parts. Thus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_learning_loss
However in this case the missing free lunch may be for anyone with an expectation of making revenue off ads, rather than the people who won't even notice when site X happens to not update too often anymore due to decline in ad revenue, because sites A, B, and C came along and filled that attention gap nicely thankyouverymuch. (And if people do actually care enough to notice and care if site X stops producing, then X doesn't need ad revenue to make content creation profitable)
Wong in the first paragraph. The Personal Wi-Fi hotspot is an iPhone 4 only dealie.
The Freakonomics result only applies to that sample of real estate agents. Even then, the sample is only taken from a population of real estate agents.

In other words, results don't extrapolate to all agents.
I read it a few times, thinking it must be a joke, but there's nothing else in the article to suggest it is... unless the whole article is a joke. In which case it's not a very good one.
You will need to change the phono.js URL from 1.0 to 2.0 like this:

http://s.phono.com/releases/0.2/jquery.phono.js

That's it!
I'd think they'd begin transitioning to a higher level language now that there are many options available. It's gotta be a burden at this point to be (1) maintaining their own web server and (2) developing new features in C++. I'd way rather use ruby/python (or even .Net) and fall to C++ for the really performance intensive stuff.

(Disclaimer: I interviewed @ OKCupid in 2007)
What happens at McK is far less than what happens when competitors steal employees from each other (which happens all the time), the reason you hire employees from your competitors is not to steal insider information (although this does go on), but to steal someone who's done it before and knows what mistakes to avoid.
You can see this attitude in Apple. They sell their products at relatively high prices. You can always hear it from Steve Jobs: we're not gonna produce crap that sell cheap.

When you think you're desperate for money, you become cheap, and you will produce garbage.

I think it's also why 37signals has this mantra about always saying No to feature requests. They're not desperate for more customers; they'd rather make a top notch product instead.
Sounds like you have never experienced Facebook like I do. I only spend about five minutes on it daily and it is all reloads and multiple clicks.
An Airbnb competitor or similar model
AOL Lays Off 20% Following Huffington Purchase
For me it was the moment where he showed the progress of students and how the (initially) slow learner picked up the concepts faster and faster.
The first half is certainly true, but don't overestimate the importance of HN. If you want to spend time on stuff that will impress us, it's better to spend it building things than commenting on HN.

Also, I'd say "people" rather than "person," because we care not just about the founders but about the strength of their relationship.
I turn ABP off for domains that have made it a point to never have abusive ads (popovers, moving, flashing, expanding, generally being a nuisance). I'd highly recommend this to others. The advertising economy is crucial to maintaining free (as in beer) access to information on the internet, and complete rejection of it is just going to mean more paywalls in the future.

I don't mind banner ads or text ads so long as they are neither deceptive (mixing ad content with real content or masquerading as such) nor abusive (flashing! look at me! you're the 1 millionth visitor! tiny dismiss buttons, or worse, no dismiss buttons!)
Scrumblr: Agile Sprintboard Using Node.js + Websockets
I have t a totally new viral concept like this, will top all others, but need a developer to help. PM me :O)
Quicksilver: It Ain’t Over Yet
> I never understood this. I always thought that you'd rather buy from someone who is likely to go out of their way to serve your needs than to buy from someone who simply doesn't care. I know that all other things being equal (I mean, assuming I think both companies can actually deliver, at a similar price point, and that one company isn't going to vanish while I still need them.) that's certainly how I feel, when I buy expensive things.

The idea is the person who's desperate for money is more likely to provide a cheap service, while the person who's not is more likely to provide a top notch service, because he has more respect for himself and would never want to be caught delivering garbage.
I've already e-mailed Harj who helped clarify my points prior to application, however I have one more if I could trouble you.

I am currently trying to get a first working prototype of my site ready in time for the 20th with the explicit aim of selling my idea via the demo, given that you guys will no doubt be flooded with applications on that date would you advise submitting my information and the concept now anyhow?. Other than a working demo no other factors are likely to change.
The link is all the way at the end of the Register article.

To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.
Thanks for posting this again, it's a good reminder.

I'm not applying, but I'd love any insight into how the process of reviewing applications has changed in the last few cycles.

1)
I know you have Harj on the west-coast, and Alexis on the East coast.. Has that made a difference in the way you review applications?

I know in the past, you've said that Harj was acting more as a back-end catchall, than a front-end filter. Is that still the process?

Are you having more pre-meetings on the east coast, now that Alexis is available to help screen people before their official interview?

2)
Do you expect (or have you seen) any change due to the Yuri Milner announcement?

2a)
Do you suspect this will encourage people to apply who might not have applied otherwise, due to needing more runway?

2b)
I know(suspect?) that a lot of the core assumptions of the YC application process are based around "you have to get things done in 3 months.."
This might lead you to reject projects that would take 6 months of work, even at YC-speed, to complete.

Does the Yuri Milner announcement affect this?

3) There's been a large growth in "YC-like" incubators/foundries/angel firms (TechStars being perhaps the most well known). How (if at all) have your procedures or operating assumptions changed, now that the world of funding is so different than it was in 2007?
Can't you just record a movie of yourself dictating your code line by line to camera and email that to India where it can be transcribed into XCode for you?
I saw Conrad's talk a few months ago and I couldn't agree more. In fact I am attempting to put his theory in general by teaching math through programming at the moment.

I wanted to add a caveat to your confidence point though. We need to engender the right kind of confidence. A lot of kids are already confident, even arrogant. Yet it's completely unfounded since they are not actually acquiring human capital.

We need to promote the kind of confidence that comes from taking a hard problem, banging your head against it for a week, solving it, and repeating. The kind of confidence that comes from previous hard work.
Wave of Big Data could swamp corporate IT
When pitching never say...
Sorry, I cannot view the site right now, because it is blocked. But, I was wondering how you combine several users' lists. For example, say there are action movies labeled A,B, ..., Z. Suppose 3 users have ranked action movies. Their lists are A-B-C-D-E, Z-A-B-C-D, and F-A-B-C-D. How do you combine those 3 lists to form a master list? I've looked into this before and was just curious what method you decided to use and why.
I wouldn't suggest polling Twitter Search every 2 seconds like you do in your documentation; good way to get rate limited.
If you've really got a neurotically complex email address, I don't think I want to email you anyway.
Some thoughts on this.

First, thought certainly not a Billion dollars, I came into a substantial (relative to my normal circumstances) bit of cash soem time ago. His #1 point is dead on, it was a mistake I made and regret a lot (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511200 )

In fact all of the advice looks good.

Except: "The No-Friends Rule"

The premise is sensible, do not donate to your mates, and definitely not to new mates, or old ones you forgot you had. But I don't buy that loaning to friends is a generally bad idea.

I lent a fairly substantial amount to a friend because they had run into financial hardship. We called it a loan because they refused to take it as a gift, but I'm not going to ask for it back.

One of my other mates has a fairly mad idea for a business that he always (for years) wanted to try. I funded that about 18 months ago and it is currently in the balance between outright failure and setting him up with a business for the next 20 years. Again, not expecting the money back.

It is only fucking money. You can enrich other peoples lives with it, so why not. No one needs a Billion dollars, but I know most of my friends could have awesome life changing experiences with a tiny portion of that.

So, yeh, don't become a charity... but always give to your friends.
(anon for this)

What's your view on a founder of startup that's relatively young (6-12 months) but with some traction applying to YC with an idea for a completely different startup?

Would you consider it a negative that they're quitting on their earlier startup?
Its optional support in that the OEM-MOs can not implemented it in their Android OS distribution..
There is no Visual Studio 2000.

The story seems fake to me.
and, mate...

"We have to interview so-and-so. I know him from Hacker News and he's clearly smart."

-- http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
-- http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html?s2011
"Consultants at McK are labeled as 'conflicted' if they have served a competitor of a client in a given industry."
and in couple of years consultant runs out of industries.
Exactly, they could spend next day negotiating on your behalf to get extra 10% for you and 2% for themselves, or placing another candidate, and boosting their revenue by extra 100%.
Read to the end, the Dropbox application was superb.
I don't follow. Isn't needing a meeting to create a branch an organizational problem, not a technical one?

As for working offline, my choice of the submarine example was intentional. 10 years ago I used cvsup (and later, svk) to work on the train and plane while using cvs and svn. That mode of working predates git quite a bit, but it's also much less useful nowadays -- Now I just use phone tethering and inflight wifi. I'd be working less efficiently without Internet resources at hand, so now that wireless technology has caught up, I don't have to.
Be very wary of taking the counteroffer.

They don't have a chip on their shoulder. Necessarily. But they have a very rational concern that you, unlike your peers, are particularly likely to bolt. Many forms of compensation, including bonuses, training, and senior positions on teams, are viewed in terms of investments that pay off or lose depending on whether you're retained.

I wasted a year and a half or so of my career by accepting a counteroffer (I didn't really want to leave that badly) and getting marginalized.

That doesn't mean every counteroffer is bad, but I would be up-front and overt about the concern that the "counteroffer" you've been offered is really more of an "option" on you, so that you'll leave on the company's terms and not your own.
Adobe's Flash-to-HTML5 translator: Smart but not pretty
Do startups from other countries have less advantage over american ones?
I absolutely agree with everything he said. It mirrors my own opinions on money.
I love this idea. I've been watching the KhanA videos for a while now, and learning about the U.S history ;) economy, and what not (I'm from Mexico), I'd love to see these videos in multiple languages.
Thanks for being so open. Like you, I would love to just hack on things that make the world a better place. Unlike you I don't have a protective environment from which to do so. I have to fund myself somehow.

It would be a lot easier to do this if people were generally willing to give a few dollars for things that were arguably far more valuable to them than a cup of coffee, but sadly the 'software should be free' meme undermines that.

I think that a general acceptance that software is worth a little bit rather than free would allow more people to hack for the benefit of the world. I think the free model benefits those who are well funded from other sources, further concentrating power in the hands of the well off.

Obviously I'd like a unicorn as well, but maybe two wishes is too much to ask for.
صفوت الشريف وراء قتل سعاد حسنى
if you travel internationally, always log in to a VPN that makes you appear to come from your home country before logging in to paypal. Preferably a VPN hosted on your own infrastructure that makes you look like you are logging in from the same ISP you always log in from.

The only time my paypal has ever been frozen it was because someone who worked for me logged in from Vietnam. I set them up with a VPN, and never had problems again.
Scvngr launches spinoff LevelUp to compete in daily deals market
Salesforce.com to Build its Own Data Centers
Google juices VP8 open source video codec
Apparently for smaller and independent businesses Square is the way to go
I was in a discussion group onceand the tutor asked us "what would you do if your company was sold and tomorrow you found yourself with a million pounds".

Of course, most of us came up with various philanthropic ideas and ways to save the world/do good etc. Except one mate who said "I'd take it and go make £10 Million, then I'd give you all a £1 Million each. Then I'd do it all over again".