skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting conversation that could possibly takes hours to get to the bottom of. The MSFT bet was clearly a poor one at best.
It seems Gandhi didn't think so.
Why do people get hung up on wording? It is a shame people are just going to dismiss this because he worded it as "open". In reality, what he is saying is that the iPad is more useful than a regular computer, and usefulness trumps openness.

As someone who is very technical, is a computer (or ipad) more useful to me if I can install whatever I want, and program it however I want? Yes. Are most users very technical? No.

People just want to use their computers to do something, and quickly. Why don't alot of people who aren't comfortable with technology install software? Well, they have experience that they download something and install it, and suddenly their computer runs like crap or they have a virus. They have learned they are better off just to leave it be. That's why so many users just stick with the default. They install something, they get hosed. Again and again. The alternative is to spend a great deal of time determining whether the source is trusted, or official, or whatever.

The app store removes that restriction, making it more useful to the -average- user. Apps don't write all over each other, they don't bog down the ipad, and the source is already trusted. Those things mean that a typical user is able to do more, because those are all barriers to -doing something- that don't exist on the iPad that do on other platforms. That's all he is saying. That's the point, and one that people who are building businesses here should recognize. Don't get hung up on wording.

You can sit around and argue all day that people should be willing to take the time to understand their devices better, and then they would benefit from a more open system, but you are wasting your breath. People aren't interested in that, by and large. They just want to do something else, and do so without opening themselves up to a giant hassle.
I know it's kind of beside the point, but Facebook could have done some amazing stuff with hardware-hackable badges considering their budget. Defcon has multi-purpose modular badges, HOPE has RFID and multi-purpose, and even a party by an elitist hacker group has a badge which does multi-player video games.

Surely a badge with wi-fi or bluetooth combined with a custom Facebook app would allow for all kinds of useful communication and location within a conference. Is this just too complicated? (On the booklet thing, most hacker cons have mobile con guides for browsing and offline mobile apps for use)
Depending on who you believe, patents are either a vital component of keeping companies innovating and profitable (which is good for employees), or they are dragging companies down and making them waste money working around bad patents and dealing with patent troll lawsuits (which is bad for employees).

Either way, they seem within scope for unions interested in protecting employee interests.
The tags wouldn't need to be visible. Tag visibility is just a long-standing trend--they don't really need to be seen. An HN tagging system would probably only reveal itself when you wanted it, either in specific contexts or by enabling the display.
I think a job is great for learning, if you take an active role.

For me, I was working in IT, but I was able to build non-IT systems related marketing, sales, product development, HR, and business.

What I would do is listen for someone to say, "I wish I knew X" or "I wish we could do Y differently" and then I'd either write up a marketing/product report or else redesign their old system and have it to them a couple days later.

I learned a ton this way, but I was very active in achieving it.
was open source.
The Kelly Criterion is for making repeated bets on similar offered odds and probability of winning. Admittedly, it's harder to calculate your probability of winning in a stock market bubble than it is at the roulette wheel; but you can still do your best and use that number.

If the rest wasn't clear, your offered odds are the delta in stock price minus the transaction costs.
Dan, I just read the techcrunch article about the Crush Notifier site. I hope you realize that all of the vitriolic comments were almost certainly the work of the "competitor site" that thought his ideas were ripped off of. He probably either made multiple accounts or enlisted his friends to rip into you. There is literally no other explanation for that kind of crazy response.
This is why I'm terrible at statistics. To me, it looks almost like wave function collapse.

The results are good only if you do a set number of observations (say 500) instead of waiting for a significant result (say it happens at 623). But what if you had decided to run 623 tests at the beginning?
This is a great list if you want to do a deep dive into the area of FP. If you just want to learn some Haskell, and also want to use a book, I recommend a combination of two.

Check out Real World Haskell in print of free on the web. It deals with the practicalities of getting started and has lots of examples to show you how to write idiomatic Haskell and tackles realistic examples.

Hutton's book (recommended by Meijer) is also great. #1 it's thin. #2, it is cleverly organized and teaches you some deep concepts without a big fuss. By the time you hear about monads they will seem like an obvious convenience, nothing scary.

The two books complement each other well.
Facts About Starbucks
Could this be Sales people making delivery claims to the hardware manufacturers, which are not technically possible to meet? So the devs have to cut corners to meet the deadline, and are not releasing the code because they are not happy with the internal marketing situation? Just a guess.
I studied under Mason during her time at JWU (which may not be MIT, but is not a technical college, for the record). If you want to speculate as to why her titles were such, JWU has a high faculty turnover rate. To be considered a professor you have to be there full time for a requisite period of time, and I believe she was pursing a degree while working there.

You can doubt her all you'd like based on your "research", but based off of actual interaction and tutelage, she is one of the brightest minds I have ever known and she has a passion for computer science that would put most HN users to shame. I almost wish she was still teaching, because she is as inspiring as she is intelligent.

She isn't in her current position because she's "pulling an act" or "gamed the system." She is completely genuine in her endeavors, and as down to earth as they come. Its a bit heartbreaking to see all this cynicism. Why is it so unbelievable she's a chief scientist at bit.ly? I sincerely hope its not the "she" part.
I think its beautifully done.
I want the 2 minutes of my life back that was just wasted reading that.
US Nation Debt at $14 Trillion, Corporations Still Don't Pay Taxes
I agree with the MSFT bet (.NET is such a heavy toolset), but I think the Los Angeles argument is also interesting.

Does starting a successful company depend on having a geographical talent base, heavily grouped together?
With the exception of the slides, how might the presentations differ from a one-on-one pitch where you still might only have the same two-three minutes to convey the same basic info? I would image investors are very busy and would often want brevity regardless of the venue.
Javascript is single-threaded. You'll block the UI, and your real users will spend 15 seconds staring at the <insert your OS's wait cursor here>
What Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots
Anyone used node-fibers? What are the gotcha's?
Any thought of adding follow-up longer form presentations on a later day for doing actual demos for interested investors and startups, maybe in groups of five to ten startups at a time?
LaTeX math does not work at all on an iPad.
They come in a ten pack, I believe. So you can work through a variety of workflows without having to erase screens.
What I’ve Learned After 1 Month of Blogging
If Honeycomb doesn't cut it, my bet would be on HPalm.

RIM's decision to jump on the Android train reeks of desperation, they just want to have app count, not quality experience or functionality.
The jerkiness of your friends is transitive in many other contexts as well, so I don't think this is a problem with this technique in particular.
Honeypot fields and their ilk are easy to bypass with a focused attack. For smaller sites, that's fine - who's going to make the effort to target you? Keep out the opportunistic bots rattling your contact form, and life's good.

For juicier targets, something more sophisticated is necessary. Captchas are one answer.
newsworthy and I shall fork it.
That doesn't affect Jabbles's point in any way.

Run enough tests, and you will get statistically significant but bogus results.
I usually like what scoble writes, but this is such nonsense. Myspace would like to believe that they were let down by Microsoft or LA, but the fact remains that they were playing with marbles compared to Zuckerberg's chess.

They could have matched Facebook feature to feature and that too the very next moment. I can guarantee that it would not have changed a thing. Google came out with numerous social plays with better strategy, scale and speed without much success.

Finally if Myspace could not change fast enough it cannot be attributed to the platform. In hindi we have a saying, "naach na jaane aangan tedha"(calling the floor crooked, when you don't know how to dance).

Silicon Valley might be awesome for its talent, but I would bet that there are enough awesome developers in any metropolis to make any web company successful. You need to be a place which needs to be able to attract such people. Being in SV would not have changed a thing, as no good person would have wanted to join Myspace.
Nice, it just helped me find what I was looking for.
Good post. I did my first startup straight out of college, which was great for a couple of reasons.

- I was used to living off very little. I didn't develop expensive tastes fueled by a regular paycheck. It helped that I could live at home while bootstrapping. My opportunity cost was getting an entry level job somewhere for decent pay.

- I was used to managing my own time and being disciplined about work schedules. This was helped by attending university in the UK where we had 6 hours' obligatory classes per week or less. The rest was optional lectures and self study time.
A monopoly and a union have equivalent bargaining power. The union members have only vastly inferior substitutes for employment (e.g. Dairy Queen), and the company has only inferior substitutes for labor (temps). It's in both of their best interests to eventually agree to split the rents.

In a competitive market, there is less rent to split (e.g., 5% profit margin instead of 15%) and there is always a third possibility: the unionized employer goes bankrupt and only non-unionized employers remain. So producers (as a class, not any individual one) get to survive, while the union (as a class) is destroyed.

But don't take my word for it. Go take a look at the world. The primary bastions of unionization seem to be monopolies or oligopolies: the government, Big 3 automakers (in their heyday, at least), cable companies and the like. Unionization also declined (outside the government) as the country became more competitive.

Think about what nearly happened to the auto industry. Consumers suffered with crappy overpriced cars, and the Big 3 + unions enjoyed their rents. Then the market became more competitive, and absent government intervention, the unionized part of the sector would have died. The unions seem desperately afraid of this effect in education which is why they fight tooth and nail against charters/vouchers.
The New York Times Paywall Is Destined for Failure
Ra One
I think the insight here for entrepreneurs is that 'web' is not 'enterprise'. Microsoft has spent billions targeting 'enterprise' (to compete with the big software players like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Etc) which is structured and deployed very differently than 'web' (where big users are Google, Facebook, Etc.)

When I worked at NetApp we had customers in both sides of the world, what we discovered was that the 'enterprise' guys often had a cadence, it went something like grow, identify challenges, coast, upgrade, repeat. That cycle was built around taking the latest release of 'big player' software, qualifying it, then putting it into production, growing a bit, figuring out where the problems were, talking with their vendor, waiting, getting a new release and then repeating the cycle. But the cadence at 'web' players was sporadic at best and often frenetic, feature request, test, iterate, feature, iterate, test, coast, coast, coast, feature, feature, feature, test, coast, Etc. As ideas struck the 'web' infrastructure folks they would would immediately implement some sort of prototype or test case, then rapid fire come up with features the infrastructure needed to support to maximize this feature. But sometimes they would go long periods, months, where nothing would change (in the infrastructure side, web pages, UX, etc sure but same servers and storage assets).

What I learned from that was that while it was great to have some other company own the burden of the 'base infrastructure' in terms of operational expense (hey you don't need Linux hackers if your not changing stuff at that level, so its a savings in staff etc etc) it imposes a hard limit on the change derivative. What happens if you try to change faster than the infrastructure can change, is that you end up hacking around the limits, and that builds up technical scar tissue that over time slows your mobility still further.

So bottom line, you can't continue to pivot faster than your infrastructure, if you're hacking your way around the infrastructure to change, then your ability to change will die by a thousand hacks. If you find your self thinking you need to hack around your infrastructure, listen to that warning and start planning for a more agile base to work from now rather than when we're struggling to keep an old system working while developing a completely new one.
I've tested it on the iPad simulator and real iPad, and it worked (I think the real iPad was iOS 4.2). Does the LaTeX markup just get highlighted grey? If so, is there any error message in the bottom left from MathJax?

EDIT: Ah I found the problem, following internal links is conflicting with jQuery Mobile. Thanks for the report.

This is fixed now.
Domains are worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay, not what people in this thread or automatic tools on the internet believe/suggest.

I've had domains that I hand-registered in the last two years sell for 4-5 figures and other that according to experts/tools are very valuable, but that simply do not attract any buyer.

And I'm not even a regular domain investor (or domain squatter as people on YC seem to believe all domain investors = squatters).

Anyway, I think the blog poster has a pretty good idea of what his domains are worth, but he's just trying to raise attention and possibly start a bidding war on the 2-3 interesting ones. Some choose to do their auctions through auction houses, other uses more creative forms.
Then Google should control the Android trademark. Firefox is open-source, yet the trademark is strictly controlled.
Did anyone else read the headline and get a little confused trying to guess what support Google search can offer the Cherokee web server?
I sometimes worry that as someone who's running an A/B testing startup you show a shocking lack of understanding of statistics.

If you run 100 tests, a small number of them will be FALSE positives, their confidence level will be above 95% even though they are, in fact, just statistical anomalies.

That's why it's 95% confidence and not 100% confidence.

What it means, by hiding all your failed tests, is that you are probably only writing about FALSE positives.

If you can't understand that, how can we trust any of your blog posts?

NB/update: Even though I'm generally pretty good at maths, I've always found statistics extremely hard. I totally understand how hard it is because it can produce such mind-boggling counter-intuitive results. But if you don't understand something that's key to your domain you should learn about it, not gloss over it.

Regardless of the statistics though, I personally think http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com is very good.

However I have seen people here on HN make posts about A/B testing that even with my shallow understanding of statistics makes me raise my eyebrow that they really don't get it.
That doesn't really go hand in hand with my recollection. If i remember correctly Internet Explorer actually was the far better browser then Netscape at least once IE6 got released. But it is possible that Microsoft's refusal of continuing to develop its browser has had the effect you mention and has hindered the web overall from developing into an alternative to desktop apps.
Getting these firsthand stories from YC participants is incredibly helpful to those of us who are trying to help the startup scenes in our respective towns. Even if it seems like common sense at times, it's great to have people capturing and sharing this stuff.
Neither the (future) stock price delta nor the probability of movement is known to you in advance.
MySpace wasn't always .NET. It was ColdFusion before .NET v2 came out. Not that ColdFusion would have made any difference.

That said, I'd argue that no, Microsoft did not kill MySpace. Generalizations like this are wrong. There are many more .NET enterprise developers out there then there are Ruby or Node or Python. With quantity comes a varying degree of ability. MySpace killed themselves by lowering their standards to the easy-to-find .NET developer instead of setting the bar higher. Once you lower the standard by which you hire developers, it's a cycle. The new guys will lower the standard a little more to hire the next set, etc.

The lesson to be learned here is if you can't find a good developer, don't blame the technology stack you've selected, blame your recruiter. Find the person you want, they are out there.
Temporarily de-anonymizing myself because my Android experience is apparently not typical. My main paid app (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dozingcatsoftware....) is getting around 25 purchases per day, with no marketing effort whatsoever. It was featured in a few blogs and podcasts, but they came to me. It's had over 10k downloads in a year, and my original goal was 1000. Reasons I think it's done better than average:

- It's not a game. As patio11 notes the competition in that area is incredibly intense. In the last few days I've picked up Angry Birds Rio for free, Galcon for $1, and AirAttack for $3. If you aren't an experienced game developer, you're not likely to produce something at that level.

- But it is fun. It has unlimited "replay value" and lets users be creative and show off what their phone can do.

- The free version converts really well, paid downloads are around 20% of free downloads. It does everything the full version does except for saving pictures and videos. There are no ads, other than a Market link to the full version.

- I don't have to spend any time or money on custom artwork. Even the buttons in the latest version I took from the camera app in AOSP.

So maybe I'm just lucky, but creating a quality app in a non-saturated field has been enough to produce a decent side income, without having to deal with business or marketing at all.
Nobody is playing semantic games here, nor have the goalposts moved, because faith is the application and confidence in a given belief.

From a Christian perspective, the Bible defines "faith" as confidence in that which we hope for and that which is unseen. (Hebrews 11:1)

That's pretty simple, and secondly, that pretty much lines up with every "dictionary" definition of faith -- i.e. a confidence (or an assured belief) in that which cannot be presently assured. Everything in this world has differing degrees to which we must use faith.

When I drive my car, I don't need much reassurance of faith (i.e. confidence in a belief) that when I turn the wheel left, the car is going to make the turn. (My belief being in the car's ability to make the turn). However, if you were rationally honest, you would agree that just because the car turned left 1000 times prior, that does not truly give you a reason to be 100% rationally confident that it will continue to do so.

Why? Because the environment and every single factor has changed. The road is different, the car is older, the wheel bearings may be a little less greased, the tires have worn, the gravel lays differently, the weather is different, thousands of tiny different universal factors have changed, which really forms an entirely unique model for the 1001st left turn you are about to make. Not to mention, you aren't God, so you have no possible way of knowing all those factors. The perfect mathematical model exists for determining whether that car will make the turn, but you will never know it, so you can only generalize based on prior experience. So you go on, ignoring that tiny little chance (using faith -- a confidence in a given outcome) that the car will not perform as expected.

Faith is the confidence in an expected (hoped for) outcome, don't make it out to be more than it is. Some things in this world require larger doses of faith, like whether or not God exists. Empiricism helps to make faith easier.
Any MySpacers here that got laid off or looking to jump ship?

Well, I'm a developer at Leads360 in El Segundo, CA. And we're hiring developers right now! I've interviewed several MySpacers already and extended offers to a few. We hope to get more :)

Send me your resume, if interested. Good luck.

Bill Paetzke:
bpaetzke@leads360.com
No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business.

Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of sites ever had experienced. There were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level, they all had to learn as they go and what they learned was they picked the wrong language so they created HipHop, a hack to overcome PHP and probably hundreds of others that help them scale better.
It's not a terrible argument. To put it differently, the value to the end user is not a direct function of the degree of openness, but the utility of the degree of openness.

The narrative of Sophie measures this utility.
Thanks for the feedback! It's interesting that #3 seems to running away with it by people who are just providing feedback (none of us who've been working on the site for months would have chosen that one, I think).
I'll add to this a bit:

I worked for a 400 person company. The business side of things was very transparent. Maybe if there were 20,000 employees that'd make it less so. But at 400 employees, I could listen in my office for conversations that I found interesting, join them and then create a solution in a day or two.

It's also easier to justify a fix. If you can save 5 minutes a day for 100 employees that's one man-year of work saved. If you can do that for the most annoying process of the day that's worth at a least $35,000, plus any moral issues.

Keep your eyes and ears open and don't focus just on IT systems to improve, focus also on other systems that you can get in there and improve through your engineering mindset.
Exploiting P2P Applications to Trace and Profile Tor Users
Thank you! Will look into them.