skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always said that something is worth reading if there's one good idea in it. Your comment could easily be the most insightful statement in this entire thread.

"What makes the desert beautiful, is that somewhere, it hides a well."--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
> Chromium 10: loads, fails to play

Make sure to use OGG Vorbis audio in Chromium. I'm guessing you tried to play MP3.
I'm not sure. Sometimes, protocols just simply do not evolve fast enough to support really innovative user behavior. For example, IMAP is a great email protocol, but GMail demonstrated a very long time ago that labels are a lot more powerful than folders (especially when you have a wide array of filters to choose from). An API that relies only on a single party (i.e. a company) makes it easier to evolve and provide better functionality while protocols are much more stagnant. Who knows what we'll expect of "social" protocols in 5-10 years? And a better question to ask may be: what's easier to upgrade to with mass adoption -- a new version of an API, or a new protocol?
IMHO, Google's biggest problem is people who think Google has loads of problems.

For example, when Google releases a product that's certainly not perfect but at least as good as that of its concurrents (Buzz for example), it doesn't take off when people keep bashing it.
I think he addresses that in the second point: Next to your own talent the best thing to own is a business with talent. I mean, if you own Coca Cola, it will always be able to command, whatever the currency, a certain portion of people’s earnings or hourly earnings.
Blogging is good. But blogging to an empty void is a waste.

Mark Suster made a nice post. I'd like to elaborate on his points, "What" and "Where".

The point of a blog (in the context of making money) is to build a following of readers; qualified prospects for your product or service - who may ultimately buy your product or service. Ie- a distribution channel.

Yet there are other ways to build active distribution channels without needing to engage people at yourcompany.com/blog. Particularly if you have a 'company blog' that nobody reads...

Think laterally. You can leverage blogging, social media, and email marketing in other ways. It doesn't have to be your 'company blog'.

I recommend planting your 'media presence' with more strategical precision. If not at yourcompany.com/blog then at somesite.com. Where you can build a brand and market to a niche' that has the maximum potential to reach the highest amount of qualified prospects. And then build relationships with those prospects to connect the bridge to your business.

Don't waste time blogging about your company if nobody is reading. Mark Suster is a VC, he inherits followers by default - you have to try harder, think smarter.
Refresh the page, repeatedly if necessary. ;)
I'm in the North East, near Durham
i think buffets point is to find people within your lifetime to hand the money over to. i think the inheritance taxes he is seeking would limit giving money to people in old age as a lottery.

[quote]

"Well, I tell them a couple things. I tell them that they are better off making their decisions early on than later. Rich people live longer than most people and it’s the last will that counts. And if you are going to be 95 with a young blonde sitting on your lap, it is probably not the best time to be thinking about what you are going to be doing with your money. So think about it earlier on and decide really what your plans are.

"And I say, take care of everything you need yourself. The people I am talking about have a lot left over. Then try and figure out the way to improve the lot of the people in this world.

"If people have been touched by a given illness in their family, they are going to focus on that. If the school they went to made a real difference in their life they are going to want to focus on that.

"Bill and I make no recommendations to people as to what they do even when they do it, although I would be inclined to say there is some advantage in doing it earlier. In my case, by ten years after they settle on my death, all my money will be spent. It can’t go to institutions where they put it in endowments, it has to be spent. I would rather have the people I’ve selected during my lifetime handling it than some unknown person thirty or forty years hence."
By which you mean: this bitcoin thingy is analogous to the gold rush in which the miners make no money. Is this an educated assessment or a quick bit of sarcasm? Happy either way, just trying to understand whether Bitcoins are worth paying attention to...
I think you're wrong here. Different people use Instagram for different reasons. For some people, I'm sure there's the "hipster" aesthetic that you've described. For others, it's about the simplicity involved.

My wife uses Instagram because it's the easiest camera on the iPhone to share with Facebook (tap, tap, describe, done). I could have set her up with Best Camera, Camera+, Camera Genius, or anything like that, but Instagram has the "easy" part down pat in a way that the others don't, even though the others aren't hard.

I will use any of those (but have been using Instagram lately because of the ease), but I also have other choices I can make if I want to use more than the iPhone. I can shoot with my Canon 40D and edit the pictures on my iPad with some of the features that the blog post sneers at (in fact, I did exactly that in Italy last summer: http://aureolastatua.tumblr.com). I can shoot with a Minolta XG9 that my parents gave me (I'm mostly through the two rolls of film that I bought for it), or I can even shoot with my mom's mom's camera: http://home.tiscali.nl/benbojo/kodak%20bullet%20open.jpg

Instagram doesn't force you to put styles on the photos; you can just use it to upload the pictures you take. It gives you those styles because it can bring out the emotion behind the picture you took better.

Fundamentally, I agree with the point of the blog post: there are features that I will never use in Tiffen's Photo fx Ultra, and I suspect that very few people will use them (is there a single photograph that I've taken that would be improved by putting the "Light (foliage)/Jungle Leaf" filter offered? no). I have, however, used a bunch of other filters in that and in Lightroom on the Mac that, yes, sometimes add grain or make the photos sepia. Not because I am aiming for a specific "look", but because I think the photo looks better with those filters applied.

I bought Instagram for the same reason I bought Best Camera: it gave me a quick interface for taking pictures, doing quick edits, and uploading those pictures to where those who I know will be able to see them. That's it.
I completely concur with you. On all the points, including,

so lessons learned are documented.

BUT, blogging should not be misunderstood as documentation.

you do not put all your learnings in the public view.. (well, may be in the social web 2.0 view of business, but not in a traditional business).

You create an internal repository of documents (designs/requirements/deals/legal etc.), and go back to them, when the need arises.
I find that my problem is my perfectionism. I know about the minimum viable product way of thinking, but I start wanting to do the things I do at work, namely spend hours upon hours thinking of requirements and how it will be laid out, etc. I guess I have to retrain myself to think in a more iterative, just-get-something-up-and-running way of thinking.

People have told me that when it comes to webapps, it's all about getting a minimum viable product out there, but when it comes to mobile apps you really need to polish because early bad reviews will haunt your product "forever".
...

Ok, I am hanging here. What's your favorite RPG?
Do you watch "The Apprentice"?
I am curious - do any of you watch this show on NBC? I watched the very first season years ago and it is terrible now. I thought the first season had some good entrepreneurial lessons. Perhaps this is an idea for someone to create a show that has some merit - broadcast competition among startups :)
What's funny is that I just suggested to him that he go and ask at 4chan.
So many good bits in this piece. I liked his summary of how he was able to respond to the financial crisis, even though he admits that the speed and magnitude of the housing collapse caught him by surprise: Never owe any money you can't pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets dictate your actions. Always be in a position to play your own game. Never take on more risks than you can handle. But all of those were old lessons, unfortunately. Even though I didn't see it coming, those lessons which are timeless allowed us to in effect profit from it rather than suffer from it. Good businesses, good management, plenty of liquidity, always having a loaded gun; if you play by those principles you will do fine no matter what happens. And you don't ever know what's going to happen.
Unfortunately the article largely ignores the two elephants in the room, both stated (1) by the same Tim Berners-Lee as quoted in the article:
Facebook and LinkedIn and others, and their aversion to sharing data with anyone else.
Net neutrality issues.

Sure HTML5 might help bringing content and development back to browsers rather than native iPhone and Android apps, but if those phones are being crippled by wireless operators, apps will appear alot smoother and win again.

1. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-t...
Exactly. There's a distinction between information you want public and info that should be kept internal.
In life, you first have the test and then you learn. In many modern institutions we're accustomed to it being vice versa.
The funny thing about SVN is that I used to use it a lot for documents and text rather than code. Since there were no local commits, it also backed up my important documents with every commit, and also allowed me to work on documents everywhere. Since I had no need for branching, it worked fairly well. Now we have Dropbox for that.
There is a finite amount of gold on the planet as well, and in all of human history we've only mined something like $7-8 trillion dollars worth.

That's only half the GDP of the entire U.S. for 2009, and we don't even control most of it (something like 12-15% in various reserves).

Look at the price of gold now, it's over $1,000 an ounce. Either the USD has inflated dramatically since 1970 when an ounce of gold was only worth $40, or gold has skyrocketed because of scarcity (or both).

Point being, bitcoins could very well end up being worth $10 or even $100 each as the years go by, or higher. At a factor of 100 that's $2.1 billion USD worth of bitcoins.

Are they worth that much? Maybe, gold and USD aren't worth anything at all until someone is willing to accept them in trade, and people are definitely accepting bitcoins in trade right now.
Yes... Also this "road" can lead us to US slavery period... Should we prohibit from display all flags, emblems from that era?
I'm not sure, but I've been thinking about quality for a bit and figure I'd share my thoughts.

Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.

This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the barrier is removed for the sake of growth.
i disagree with that. life insurance is not a very liquid asset. it does not fight inflation and you can not leverage it very well. i looked into it quite a bit in my 20's and it just didn't make sense.

i think it creates risk, you have to guarantee for 20-50-80 years that you will be able to make the payments, and if you can not make the payments the policy terminates.

immagine if elon musk had been buying life insurance and then was in the fiscal mess he was in, he probably would have had to ditch the policy. the other risk is that you don't by enough life insurance to make it worth while.

there are plenty of good ways to transfer wealth while you are living. look into trusts. i also have a friend where his parents bought him a house over the course of like 10 or twenty years.

if you need to do any financial planing of this sort, i highly recommend talking to several talented fiscal planners with different risk levels. make them compete for your money, and don't let anyone of them plan all of your assets.
that page needs to offer some clues to what it does.... 'above the fold' does also apply to websites
Oh, I see. Never mind :-)
"That and the fact that we are not making enough money to justify the hours we put in"

raise your rates, you're not charging enough. two simple ways to tell if you are not charging enough:

1. everybody is willing to pay your rates - nobody ever says, "no"

2. you are not making any money
Yes? What do you mean by app? It's an app whose entire purpose is to collect data. I wouldn't think of it as a Trojan horse, since it doesn't pretend to be anything else. I guess it's Trojan in that it was made in Troy, NY.
Excellent presentation. Brilliant. I'm always told that sell process is actually selling one of these four things: fear, greed, vanity, or insecurity.

But that is easier said than done. I have no clue how to achieve that (I'm still in "sell features" mindset). I would like to hear is there are any good examples of software product or server which does that well.
an analogy to the web: Quirks mode is a good thing
Ruby Course Lesson 2: Programming for the Web
What is it with the mattresses? I'm only 33 but I've slept on pretty much any surface that's nominally softer than a floorboard and I've generally slept well. Can the mattress really make the difference if you have sleeping problems?
My experience, too. I feel relieved that even Linus himself thinks it difficult to explain how important the distributed nature of Git is. I wave hands a lot when I'm presenting Git to friends.
Google's Garbage Search Results Are Not Going Away -- Blekko CEO
Ask HN: Does anyone wanna skin Producteev to look like GetFlow
I love the UI for Flow. It's very well thought through and has beautiful animations. Unfortunately it's not good enough for $120/yr per person for me. As a result, I'm sticking with Producteev.

With that said, it wouldn't be too hard to add a bit of Flow's UI to Producteev making it the epic app it deserves to be. Is anyone interested in doing a Chrome extension for Producteev to make it look close to as good as Flow? I'll help out... just don't have too much time.
On Maemo News we handle off-topic submissions via ability to downvote posts. And one downvote is worth 5 upvotes.
Why Yelp is heading towards a big failure
Speaking as a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, get off your high horse, Jesse. It's just a name. "Buddhist" is just an identity, and a core goal of the practice is to bring an end to such things.
Mark Suster has one of the best blogs for entrepreneurs out there and this post is a home run no less!

He gives a nice example about Mint.com - Mint used it so heavily in the beginning of their launch that (I read this somewhere) they made it a point to create a blog post for every important personal finance topic. And they did really well on that front!

One more important thing is to be consistent - I've had my share of blogging and let me tell you consistently blogging has worked better than creating art pieces every once in a while (except if you're pg!)
Sorry, ATI/AMD has that market sewn up.
> and is pretty much universally repudiated.

Just curious, based on what?
Private Equity Strategic Investment
Fair points.

I guess I would be paying 0.001 ounce of gold for a candy bar, so why be concerned about paying 0.001 bitcoin.

w.r.t. worth: gold is backed by being shiny, pretty, desirable; USD is backed by the US Government (cue cries of "fiat money! fiat money!") which provides huge implicit inertia; Bitcoins would be backed only by inertia. I guess the answer to my question is: Bitcoins will be interesting if they get transaction inertia. Of course, as an entrepreneurial minded fellow, the next question would be: would it make sense to help build that inertia?
I'd be interested - could someone provide a justification for this belonging on Hacker News? How is it something that "... gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

OK, it's a fun read, but in what way is it specific to Hackers as opposed to a general, generic audience. This is something I can easily see covered on TV news, and so according to the guidelines, it's probably off-topic.

I haven't flagged it. Sunday is a slow day, so I'm not all that surprised to see it here. But I'm a little disappointed.

What have I missed? Why is it here?

ADDED IN EDIT (when the votes stood at -3):

Oh, c'mon peeps. It's completely your right to downvote, I have no problems with that, but at least give some justification, some rationale. As far as I can see this submission is, according to the guidelines, off-topic. Please, please, help me understand why you think it's on-topic.
Great distinction. I totally agree.

You're right that there are internal documents that the business is required to develop. Or ones that are necessary for the business to function. Those may or may not be proprietary.

I was thinking more along the lines of the ethereal thought process of the entrepreneur or maybe providing context for public decisions.

Thanks for making this distinction.
Ironic, coming from the guy who made out like a bandit from buying in to Goldman Sachs...
Are there sometimes threads you want to return to later?
Amen dude. Thanks for such a candid response...for what it's worth I have no knowledge of Cuil so you're definitely okay in my book. :)
In the lab, designing the ultimate biofuel bug
Ubuntu 11.04 offers install-free "test drive" for applications
Just added this metric. Wish I had included it earlier, but hopefully there will be enough votes to get something interesting out of that.
He's talking his book here. Don't forget his huge purchase of Goldman Sachs around that time. You could just as well rephrase what he said as "I wasn't worried, because I knew the economic and financial policy of the USG is completely controlled by the commercial finance industry."
BOOM Greatest presentation evAR? Domo Presentation
from the creator of Tonchidot... comes domo.
I almost always prefer the GNU utils to the BSD ones. The GNU ones usually allow arguments in nicer orders. GNU `sort -h` can sort the human-sized output of GNU `du -h`. I've noticed tons of niceties from these sorts of tools on Ubuntu are completely missing from BSD based OSX.

One man's bloat is another man's convenience.
"This is an Irish company with little reach beyond Ireland and Great Brittan, so I expected to see reviews from either of the countries they supply. Instead I get American naval-gazers who haven’t ever seen or tried the stuff pontificating on web forums about how they would never touch a thing they don’t understand."

Is this because there were no discussions in Ireland about your search subject; or is it because Google indexed only US discussions?

By the way the first result in Google is from Ireland: http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie...
"You can't criticize a movie until you've directed one and sent it off to Cannes! You can't critique a restaurant until you've been verbally abused by Gordon Ramsay! You can't scold people for bashing Color until you've eviscerated the app yourself!"
Music Synthesized from Conway's Game of Life
Serious reply to a sarcastic comment.
(I'm the author of the post)

I totally get where you are coming from. Of course protocols don't move fast. And sometimes we as implementors have to deal with people whose sole goal in life is upholding the sanctity of a protocol to the detriment of it's users.

The real point that I was trying to get across is that when you build your house on somebody else's API you have no guarantee. With a protocol, that company can go away and others will fill it's place.

In designing an open social network, buddycloud (the company) should be able to go bust, have our servers fail, be raided by the police... whatever. buddycloud (the open social network) and anyone who uses the protocol for their servers or clients can just keep on doing social-network-things.
Self-host.
Golden Labels Free Pack
Golden Labels Free Pack
On the topic of straw men, I don't think you'll find me saying anywhere that the financial industry is "stupid, ignorant, or misguided", nor did I say that "wall street is bad". I'm not painting the people in the industry with any kind of brush at all. You make it sound like I'm kicking a puppy.

I believe that there's a systemic problem with the industry and its role in society and that it is damaging our future prosperity.

Yes, any sufficiently powerful institution could, in principle pose such a problem, but why distract ourselves with imaginary problems when we have a real one sitting in front of us?
> If this were true, we'd have tons of programming IDEs and project management software.

Your assuming programmers' only interests are programming related. I'm currently building a site that sells trail mix and another to organize gear lists for backpacking. This is because I am involved in those spaces and I would like to improve the experience for the people I share it with.

I'm sure there are many programmers who are interested in agriculture, natural resources, transport, finance, and manufacturing.
So...what can I buy with BitCoins?

Also, from the link, "Donations are accepted at 1Nqr3MqVyUp6k3o3QPePAdn4Yg4tzgB9kw." Somehow I think that's going to present an obstacle for most people.

Is this something that is really targeted at the general public, or at programmers who are bored of dollars?
I would imagine you would get a distribution favored to 3 and 7. We did similar research during a Cognitive Science class. We asked a number from 1 to 4, and got over 40% 3's.

We also did research to find favored Mastermind patterns. Bias was a large problem there too. When presented with colors, people would pick a single color more often or place the same colors next to each other. When presented with letters, people would try to spell out words.

Peculiar: In product pricing and conversion testing, prices with 7's and 9's seem to provide more favorable results. I believe this is akin to the favorite-color bias we happened upon (7 is my lucky number!), mixed with the slight confusing nature of calculating/rounding down a price ending in 7 or 9 (hey, it's still $2999, so just 2 grand and then some).
>> The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears.

I've heard a few such stories myself recently. About children in Serbia and west Bulgaria, born around the depleted plutonium bombing.
Reminds me of the first project that was entirely my own idea, at age 14 or so, a system to manage customer accounts for my paper route. Written in TI99 BASIC. Data file saved to a cassette tape. It worked, but I ultimately realized that it was much easier to just use a paper ledger so I didn't really iterate on the solution. I could update the accounts on paper in the time it took the computer to load the program and data from the cassette.
I watch it, I like watching the group dynamics although in terms of business lessons it doesn't have a ton to offer, in the first few seasons were more watchable in that respect. Also I find Trump kinda fascinating to watch, despite all the things that one would normally find detracting (ego etc). I find it interesting how he embodies a role (the big NY billionaire) and plays it unashamedly and boldly, it reminds me of the world view the author of the 48 laws of power (Robert Greene) talks about.

I like watching the 'Dragon's Den'(UK tv show) and seeing how entrepreneurs pitch/fail to pitch and watch how potential investors evaluate deals.

I'd love to see other types of reality shows that follow startups & entrepreneurs.