skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the real world (with signal problems, battery problems, and a skyhook database with inevitable errors) GPS is unfortunately not quite that good. I really wish it was though!
Its not the points I care about. Its the fact that it was the top rated item. I would rather have something at the top I can take away from.
Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked, Pick Yourself
Exactly - it's like the movie you play in your mind when you read a good book. No movie you see after that will ever raise to your expectation level.
Webvan, eToys, Pets.com and a gazillion million other sites got funded. But if Groupon is 'worth' $25 Billion
Ask HN: Is Jack Dorsey the next Steve Jobs
Both had early exits from a product they help create.
And both into the creating a product that is aesthetic appealing to users.
He said "risky or harmful to the corporation in the long run" so I don't think he believes there is a causality connection there.

No longer trying to speak for the GP here, but I think that for many of the people that hate 'golden parachutes,' it violates their sense of justice. The entire company faces negative consequences when a high-risk maneuver fails, except for the CEO that decided on the maneuver in the first place. When a startup fails, I imagine it's very hard for anyone involved to avoid consequences, for the same reason it's easy to tell who in a startup is creating what value.

Also, how many millions does a CEO have to make before it qualifies as a 'golden parachute'? The last CEO of Nokia (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo) had a sallary of 4.8 million euros [1] and the current one (Stephen Elop) got a $6 million signing bonus along with his $1.4 million salary [2]. Evidently, this amount of money wasn't enough, although I realize golden parachutes also involve severence packages that may not be disclosed at this point.

The real question on the effectiveness of golden parachutes is this: Are there any examples of large companies with golden parachutes taking high risks that paid off? Apple might count, but I'm not sure if Steve Jobs feared the consequences of failure after he had already been ousted as CEO once.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olli-Pekka_Kallasvuo
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
Color Credulity
The comments here to this overall incredible speech are very surprising. I can't argue that it doesn't have any useful information/ideas, that is a subjective value judgement (as crazy as it seems to me); however, in what way is he trying to change the meaning of the word? One of the examples given in merriam-webster is:

extravagent respect or admiration for or devotion to an object of esteem <worship of the dollar>
Oh, I guess it was Phil Shiller that tweeted: http://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429#
A lot of really negative and unnecessary comments on this blog. did the TechCrunch trolls ousted by their new FB commenting plugin find a new home?
I'll probably open mine in Pleasanton or Dublin, CA. It is 30 miles NW of Silicon Valley, give or take a few miles. Here's why:

- Employees can get to these two cities using BART, 580, 680 or ACE trains. This allows me to make it easy for a diverse mix of employees to come work for me (tech, support, admin, mktng, research)

- Slightly lower COL. I don't know the exact number, but housing is a bit lower here than in San Jose/Santa Clara. It's generally a reverse commute.

- Same weather and cultural benefits that come with working in the Bay Area.

- Very low crime rate.
Great idea and great domain name, but I would suggest that monospaced fonts and #6A6A6A text on white are not exactly the best thing ever for readability.

You can probably leave the colors the same if you just switch to a proportional font, add a smidge more of padding, and bump up the line-height just a bit: http://cl.ly/3x1n103K472Z1J2t3Q3k
FWIW I've seen cooking and gardening articles here. Can't recall seeing things on mental illness but possibly stuff about drug regimens; sleep disorders have been handled several times.
Help How do I increase my Twitter followers?
A few reasons (as far as I'm concerned)

1. Startups could learn a lot about presentation from this guy. I don't know about anyone else but I was struck by the video's simple, matter of fact style. No flash or funny animations. Just a smart guy showing what his company had done (and then thanking me for my time)

2. People deify Apple too much. Apple's great but you can compete with them if you put some effort into it. Sure most people won't want a wooden iPad cover but some will and it very well may be enough to make a profit off of.

3. Some people might want a wooden iPad cover and this lets them know about it (isn't that the same thing all those "Tell HN" threads do)

For a community centered around startups I think those insights are valuable which is why I up-voted it.
First, let me say: founders of Color, if you're on HN right now reading all of this, please ignore all of the haters. Most of us are just jealous. Some of us would be over the moon to get 1/1,000th what you just got in funding.

Good on you guys. Awesome job.

That said, I absolutely cannot figure out what color is supposed to do. I went to lunch with a friend of mine today, downloaded the app while we were in line, took a picture of myself, then took a picture of her...and I can't really figure out what I'm supposed to do next. I'm sure there is a guide or something online somewhere, but I think it would really help you out if there was a walkthrough of how I'm supposed to interact with the app within the app itself.

Again, congrats, but if I'm honest, I will probably never run the color app again.
PoundWire Easter Egg - click on #Bieber to try follow the tag
"Women are interested in much more than fashion and shoes" - source please.
Hmm - why did I not see that. I'm on a different machine now - one that can't run FF4 - so I'll worry about it tomorrow.

Thanks.

You've started me wondering what they'll do about it. They'll probably blame HN.

Anyone else here using FF4 successfully to log in?
The amount of risk isn't as important as the kind.

R&D project: if it fails, you paid people to do something that wasn't commercially viable. You have a lot of talent and knowledge under one roof. If it succeeds, upside potential is tremendous. You can move those smart people to another project that might have better odds of taking off.

Laying people off, not because you need to, but because you don't have the vision to make decisions you didn't study in business school: saves costs and usually pops the stock price for a few months, but causes the best people to leave when they can, trashes the culture, and fills the company with mediocrities and yes-men. Upside is minimal; downside is potential loss of the whole company.
Jarin,

your mock-up looks FANTASTIC! Could you tell me what font that is you used there? I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination and am generally clueless about these sorts of things.
What do I have to learn in order to build a cell phone app?
I'm not a programmer or a hacker, but I'm interested in taking on a business project which involves building a cell phone application. I realize this won't be easy, but I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction to get started?

My idea started like this: I was in Fort Lauderdale over spring break and me and my friends had a difficult time finding bars/clubs after we left the one we were at. When you're not from a specific area it's difficult to "bar hop." I thought how easy it would be if there was an app which outlined where I was and where the bars are located around me.

I'm envisioning a map that dictates where the user is, then pin points the surrounding bars/clubs. If possible, the user could click on a specific point (bar), read their hours, if its 18 or 21 and older, and possibly even what kind of drinks they offer or if there's a special.

I even think pin pointing fastfood/late night diners would be helpful in this app since people who are late night drinking are always hungry. I know my friends and I would spend a few bucks on something like this and I think alot of other people would too.

I hope I don't sound arrogant as a non-hacker and I don't want to come off as naive. I know as a non-programmer this will be difficult and I'll probably have to hire someone eventually. But I'm a very determined business student/entrepreneur. If anyone could point me in the right direction and outline what I have to learn I'd greatly appreciate it. Thank you
The reason I like forrst is because an engineer created a community that brings together people who might have never have ever met. Also, the name rocks.
My one line of text pales next to the off-topic meta rant thread you spawned though, doesn't it. Had you been motivated by the noise and not the points you wouldn't have done that. Or shouldn't have, at least. (+1 from me again)
Voting and tagging are on my roadmap. I'm working on seeding it with more content too (just posted an idea myself!)

As for your comment in the EDIT - does it make you think you're going to end up tweeting your idea without a chance to opt out? Currently it doesn't tweet anything out if you comment or submit an idea, so if that's not clear I'd like to improve it.
A Tale Of Two Financings: What It Took To Raise $1.1 Million For My Startup
Of course, I can't, but I'm not a designer, unlike her.
Disappointed. This actually reads like an eHow article. Almost all points are trivial, and are nothing more than pitching the other side of the coin (of why you should start your company in the Valley):

Indepedence? SV: Connected

Low Cost of Living? SV: Center of the Universe

Lower Wages for Top Talent? SV: Where talents are

Fewer Nearby Competitors? SV: Where the action (people/market) is

Relative Obscurity? SV: World renowned

I think the question is something most entrepreneurs in and out of the valley have thought about a lot, myself included. I personally very much like to see more action in Pittsburgh and Portland (OR). I don't think the author offers a very compelling, deep argument beyond what a content-farm author can put together in an hour or two.
Cool, I just wrote a blog post trying to give Credulity too, but from a different angle. I think the app could be something huge, especially with the people and amazing tech they have, as you say.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366137
Another possible problem with the Visiting Fellows program is that you're selecting for fairly unambitious/non-driven people. See this Less Wrong thread:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4wm/rationality_boot_camp/3qmd

And this Robin Hanson blog post:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/06/lazy-hurt-less-than-st...

(Which suggests that the personality development agenda the Visiting Fellows program is currently pursuing may not succeed in transforming Visiting Fellows in to folks who are more driven and productive.)

I and at least 2 other people who have had a decent amount of direct contact with the Visiting Fellows agree on this.

Of course, another possibility is to make being a Visiting Fellow more like having a job--even relatively non-driven folks seem to be able to frequently get stuff done in job-like contexts. It's just that the portion of the population that's able to succeed in deadline-free not-intrinsically-fun self-directed activity seems to be pretty low. (And FWIW Eliezer, I am pretty sure you are part of this portion of the population--the fact that you're frequently disappointed with the amount you get done is a strong indicator. The real problem is when a person isn't disappointed with the amount they get done because their bar for themselves isn't set very high.)
Unfortunately, I really think this is going to be a bust, just like the first time they tried to introduce Questions, for a few reasons.

First, some people have a very impersonal friend network, meaning that they probably don't care about the "favorite movie" (this was an example in the article, I'll use it here) of a lot of the people on their friends list. For example, people they met once, or people that they went to high school with 5 or 6 years ago, etc.

Secondly, Facebook is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Their entire basis for this new direction is that Quora and others are too impersonal, but then they add that you can query the network of your friends' friends. Friends' friends is a pretty wide net, and the original argument for Facebook Questions becomes invalid if you expand the question to that many people. Yes, I know that it's optional, but to me it shows that Facebook is trying for the shotgun method, trying to cover as much ground as possible instead of focusing on a feature that people actually want.

Finally, if I want to know what my friends' favorite movies are (again, using the cited example), there's already a place on Facebook for that: their info page. I don't know if people still fill that out, but I know they used to before Facebook mandated that everything on the info page be tied to Pages (which was another goof on FB's part, IMO).

They may prove me wrong, but this just seems like something Facebook won't quit pursuing because it's trying to be the Internet. Personally, I'm more interested, and optimistic in seeing how and if Deals is going to dethrone Groupon and its ilk.
The Implicit Social Graph - Whats its value?
> The core problem which Obama failed to understand

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you think that Bush intended the likely outcomes of what he did and that you think that Obama is smarter than Bush. Doesn't it follow that Obama intends the likely outcomes of what he does?

Note that Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a majority in the house. He still has a majority in the Senate.

Given a choice between blaming incompetence and blaming intent, why should I think that Obama is the former?
Simple, Great, presentation
There will always only be one Steve Jobs.

However, there are similarities between Jobs and Dorsey especially after viewing his one speech he gave at TownSquare about design and the golden gate bridge. Similar traits: design driven, self-aware, leader, inspiring speaker

Plus, Steve Jobs wears black turtlenecks and jeans while Dorsey wears high-end suits to work.
Question for you:
According to the article, 10% of users pay 9$/month:

9$/month-user * 12 months/year * 10% * 23000 users = 248400$/year

200k$ seems like a small sum compared to your yearly revenues.

What did you gave up for 200k$ ? Why not just wait for the revenue to come in ?
Well, I should clarify that I think the concept of grouping photos (videos, chats, etc.) by GPS is obvious. It's been done before and so far this is not much more than a logical progression (making it easier and more fun).

I don't even know what "elastic network" is supposed to mean, but yes, they better have a lot of that, for $41M...
Ask HN: How long can I get along using FB auth?
I'm building a project with a friend and we're going FB auth only for the initial closed beta. How long do you think that's a reasonable strategy before we have to build our own login system?
I do believe you misunderstood the point. Let me try to clarify from my own understanding.

There are legal tender laws, but these are not the point. They are largely irrelevant.

The point is that the US government itself accepts dollars as payment for debt. This may not seem like a big deal, until you realize that governments are unique in their power to force a debt onto you via taxation. Just like their monopoly on physical power, they also have a monopoly on economic power - for a number of reasons, which are not really important here, but the concepts are indeed very similar.

So the government forces debt on people, which can only be paid using the dollars that the government issues. This creates demand for dollars and therefore value.

Side note: You can learn an important point lesson from this. In a fiat money system, taxation has nothing to do with financing government spending. Government (by which I mean the union of all governmental institutions, i.e. executive + legislative + Fed etc.) can spend whenever and whatever amount it likes. The point of taxation is to create a demand for currency, which entices the private sector to offer goods and services for sale in exchange for that currency, thus enabling government to execute its mandate.

Returning to Bitcoin, there is no entity that can force Bitcoin-denominated debts onto people, and therefore the only people using it are doing so either out of curiosity or out of ideological dislike of government-run monetary systems - or perhaps out of the desire to make money off people who are simultaneously fools and members of the former two categories.
The web is a customer-service medium
> Suppose I gain access to a Toyota plant and press a few buttons or rearrange a few materials in such a way that a batch of several cars comes out ruined. I haven't done anything beyond simple trespassing, but I am responsible for thousands of dollars of property damage, and I can be made to pay for it, right?

Vandalism? Sabotage? You've done more than just trespass if you've interfered with anything in such a way as to cause damage (deliberately or otherwise).
That doesn't work for me.
git commit -a --amend prompts for commit message in $editor
git commit -a --amend -C complains about lack of input

Maybe this is a git version specific thing.
*big pile of exit money

i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!
Hey no problem, maybe try one of these:

.ideaBody {
font-family: Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;
line-height: 1.6em;
padding: 0.9em 1.2em;
}

Or the one in the screenshot:

.ideaBody {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Tahoma, sans-serif;
line-height: 1.7em;
padding: 0.9em 1.3em;
}
I think that 'ego' and 'awareness' are abstractions we have invented in order to communicate about how we experience our perceptions, memories, and actions subjectively. However all of these perceptions, memories, emotions, and actions are, fundamentally, behaviours implemented by neurons, as is the 'subjective' self-aware experiencing that we do. It is all 'behaviour'.
I posted my app here last week and lots of people liked it: https://zetabee.com/cashflow/ - I use it for my personal expenses but you should be able to use it for a small business.
Google Says It Won’t Pull DUI Checkpoint App
If you can fork it, you can include a patch in your bug report. Sometimes, that's all it takes to make things happen.

The most infuriating situations for me are when I submit a working patch, and it is ignored. This is, thankfully, very rare. In some cases, the patch leads to a better fix being written by the maintainer or someone else (an example of this for me was when I needed yum to support authenticated repositories; it didn't, so I patched it, posted the patch to the mailing list, and soon after one of the members of the team rewrote it to be more robust and have nicer configuration syntax within a week).
Great :)

Nothing about your site indicates you'll spam me, but plenty of sites do. I am, and i think a lot of people are, reluctant to log in with Twitter without some reassurance that they and their followers won't be spammed. Just a quick note can't hurt imo.
A Particle Filter Approach to WiFi Target Localization
It's a very smart move by Rim. This is sort of NT4 supports POSIX scenario, having say that I'm not fooling myself there will be some porting considerations how bad they are only time will tell.
At least in this case, people can upvote his comment rather than posting the same comment themselves. It's a way of contributing, "I feel the same way," without cluttering up the threads with a million "me too" posts.
You should start by learning HTML, CSS, javascript. Although not necessary, learning a server side scripting language like Python or Ruby will help. Good luck!
Google, Others Launch Social Crisis Platform for Missing Persons
> Corporations are notorious for externalizing costs but where they really shine is in the externalization of low-frequency, high-impact risks that most people can't evaluate.

So true. This reminds me Feynman's investigation of the Challenger crush.
I'm planning on doing that eventually, but it will be opt-in with a big TWEET THIS checkbox next to the submit button. Do you think that will be clear enough?
I've been reading every article about Color since this morning (3/24) in office and at the end of the day before shutting down my machine and head home I decided to read this one too from forbes.

A sudden sense of realization hit me real hard just this second (honestly not trying to be dramatic).

Color is emulating the exact thing that was shown in The Dark Knight where all the mobile phones are used for spying, but in a more beautiful and positive way. Color is trying to more than an app. It gives the feel of living in the virtual world yet not loose grip on the reality.

I can now feel (in a small way) what the creators of color are trying to do.
I found scrolling up and down the page to be very laggy--without much investigation, it appears to be caused by the background image.
A Few Android App Developers Rake in Millions
No, they (supposedly) use lighting and sound to see if two phones running Color at the same time in the same approximate location are likely actually in the same place.

For example, we could have the same GPS location while being on different floors of a building.
I also love this - funny cause I think that every creative/idea-generating mind with any regard to the internet has had this idea before, but I'm glad that someone is finally making it happen.

My guess to your idea's success is that you need to wire in with the right people and it'll explode.
What incentive is there to create great Playbook Native apps when you can just make 1 android app that "will work" in a "player" for Playbook?

Count me skeptical.
The 'First Social Media Analyst on Wall Street' Tests His Klout with Facebook
Convenience?

Last night I was reading in bed on my iPad. I got an email saying that our main e-commerce site was down. I switched to iSSH, fixed the database, typed of a reply saying it was fixed, and went back to reading.

Yeah, I could have gotten out of bed, put my shorts on (TMI), gone downstairs, and fired up my laptop. The point is, I was reading (comfortable on a tablet, not so much on a laptop), and I had no need to go grab another device.

Had it been my phone, I wouldn't even have attempted it, but on the tablet, no problem. So, yeah, it definitely scratches an itch.
A Potentially Disastrous Design Error (2006)
But this is a problem.

I don't want ten or twenty choices that define my existence. AND I don't want to keep changing my icons.

I want the most relevant icons to "just appear". Based on where I am and where I've just been. Based on what I'm doing. Based on what I've been doing for the last few days. Based every iota of information a machine can get from my activities. ten or twenty or fifty icons won't give me this.

If every successful app is a brick in the wall, the wall will be a problem not just for developers but for users will feel the poverty of only N-choices.

Google beat every portal because a search is ultimately better than drill through N-categories. Some similar approach needs to happen in the "mobile arena".

Edit: Hey, down votes don't always need a reason. But in this case, a reason seem would seem... reasonable.
I'm not arguing that - Twitter has grown much more than I expected. I was referring to the "I'm sure they know things us mere mortals are not privy to" argument.
"UX is about defining the problem that needs to be solved (the why), defining the types of people who need it to be solved (the who), and defining the way in which it should be solved to be relevant to those people (the how). Yet as a rule, startups are being built on the what."

Or, it could be that the why, who, and how are ALSO being handled by the founders, and not delegated to an expensive employee who can only define the why, who and how, but can't actually build any of the solution (the what).