skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to be one of those people, so it really stings. I remember even back then reading stuff like this and thinking it wasn't talking about me. Self-delusion can be a strange thing.

But then I buckled down, read informative technical books (i.e. NOT Godin, the OP, etc) and started producing instead of consuming. Evidenced by the fact that I read this article and am writing a reply, some days are better than others. :)

I don't think I'm self-deluding myself any longer, but who knows.
There is a huge opportunity for startups that manage to bring small businesses to the web. It's a large, virtually untapped market.
It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful. It has always seemed to me that management is an important but overemphasized skill (as a fundamental trait of the way large organizations work) and it's really refreshing to see this happening.
I guess it would've been better if the title were "Advanced Network Communication Architectures (or Patterns)" with ZeroMQ. Network Architectures sounds more hardware-ish and (at least to me) sounds like it's talking about the actual network topology... :-)
It cites a lot of numbers, but doesn't seem to give reference to actual reports. Nor does the article consider that Cherynobl is still not fully understood. The UN report on the effects of Chernobyl put the total casualties to ~4000. This article claims a New York University study reports almost a million. That's a big gap.

The IAEA report may be giving out false data. Yet it's hard to find any other organization that is publishing their data to corroborate or falsify the IAEA findings.

The mainstream media isn't helping to clear up the issue either. My point is that they're just making it worse. Some are heinously using it to further some political bias or agenda.

All I'm saying is that reporting levels as 7.5 million times some un-stated limit isn't very good journalism.
Mind-blowing.
سبيس تون
سبيس تون| SpaceToon سبيس تون| SpaceToon سبيس تون| SpaceToon سبيس تون| SpaceToon سبيس تون| SpaceToon سبيس تون| SpaceToon
Responsive Design & Fluid Grids
Fair enough, I am not trying to fear monger though, I think multiple reactor meltdowns, lack of clear information and continuous reports of radiation levels XXX times [some factor] are doing a good enough job.

Now, even though my Grandfather was a nuclear engineer for GE for 50 years and worked on Hanford and many other plant designs during his career -- I really am quite naive to the matter.

However, that doesn't preclude me from taking a cautionary stance simply because I don't know the empirical truth of the matter directly.
90 Percent of Data Center Operators will be in The Cloud by 2016
No. Because I like to save money and I doubt you could save me more than $100 a year. (I won't even take my coffeehouse's frequent buyer miles card, though, because I noticed it incentivized me to go there more often to get my "money's worth"; but my money's worth was a mere 10% discount. I'll just make my coffee at home.)
Windows + Strawberry Perl - almost all CPAN modules can be installed without problems.
Cool. Its now almost as cool as an android device :P
How startups can use metrics to drive success
Interesting... Misread your comment then. I'm working in e-Commerce in Europe, and I see opposite results.
If not requiring a lot of sleep has an advantage in our society (which presumably it does) then all else being equal, a non-sleeper will produce more offspring. This is just evolution 101.
منتدى الامتحان التعليمى اقوى موقع تعليمى , تطويرى , ثقافى عربى
Even a small differential in reproductive rates would lead to a rapid increase in the prevalence of the trait. Just look at the example of blue eyes -- 15000 years ago nobody had them and now nearly 7% if the world's population do.
This:

Even if all the world’s fastest supercomputers were put to work, they couldn’t generate a perfect algorithm to solve this classic puzzle, which computer scientists call the traveling-salesman problem.

made me a bit sad; it's overcomplicating the description by introducing the word "algorithm", when just "generate a perfect solution to this classic puzzle" would have been so much simpler, and also actually correct.

I had read more Wired, this is where I would lament over how it used to be better, and chase kids off my lawn, I guess.

Sure it's a "popular" text, but when it's easier to be correct, I think it's a bit saddening. This is a quite central sentence in their description of Uber's algorithms, so I think they should have gotten it right.
Today, we need few million dollars for a Facebook poke game.
This got me thinking about role of managers in a modern org (to simplify things let's say it's a Tech company).

It certainly needs a CEO/Visionary, it most likely needs HR and front/back office folks, it certainly needs PR and marketing people. But in a world where people communicate rarely in person, have their own management and economics 101 abilities, are smart enough to not work against their own interests (and look after the org's interests) - what's the role of the future manager?

It sounds inevitable that senior Engineers will double up as managers for their group as and when required (working with marketing etc.) instead of it being a dedicated managerial position.
I wonder if part of this is the result of growing competition from the engineer-driven Facebook.
Evercookie is the herpes of user tracking. Wear protection (don't run JavaScript from untrusted websites).

Still, there are some interesting ideas for places to hide trackers. I wonder which parts actually survive (as wiki suggests that something does) after doing a full "clear browsing data" on something like Chrome (which comes with a super helpful link to clear Flash cookies).
If the service was able to learn about you, places you shop at, brands you wear/buy, and things you are currently in the market for, then it would provide relevant deals and benefits at merchants which would save you more than the cost of the subscription itself -- that is the goal.
How saturated is this market? Is there room for more?
Are there niches?
What Blekko, DuckDuckGo and WolframAlpha do better than Google
Can someone who works at Google chime in with what the organizational temperature is like at Google? Does this whole 'party time's over for the managers' thing we're hearing about have any real weight to it?
Good idea. Im in the same position. Thanks
No.

First of all, I don't understand what you mean by "personalized shopping service" here. It sounds like you are just offering coupons for sale.

It feels like paying to be advertised to. Offering "exclusive discounts" is something my junk mail does. I try to get rid of junk mail, not increase it's frequency. I certainly don't pay for it.

I don't shop in many places, so I would not feel especially confident that you could get me discounts to the few places I do shop.

I don't buy many brands. There are very few brands that mean anything to me. Levi (jeans) and Fage (yogurt) may be the only two.

I don't spend a lot of money in the first place, and I'm trying to reduce my spending, not increase it (both by buying a service and putting myself under temptation to buy more).

Or in a single sentence: I'm not your target audience, so no.
Er, no.

Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud).

Transhumanism/posthumanism was big in the 1990s -- Vernor Vinge coughed up the hairball that is the singularity in the mid-1980s and Hans Moravec of CMU popularized it and spread the fertile soil for the early 1990s transhumanists, who also hybridized with libertarians and cypherpunks by way of the extropians mailing list circa 1990-95. But again, by the time you get to the late 1990s folks like Ray Kurzweil were bandwagoning on it, and these days that, too, is ancient history.

"Accelerando" was written circa 1998-2003, and "Singularity Sky" -- not its original title, but one dropped on it by the publisher in search of teh sexxy -- in 1996-98. If you're pointing to them as signs of where SF is at, I'll just get my coat -- because SF is dead.
Maybe no downside in these modern times but perhaps back when we still lived in caves and only had fire and a full moon now and then to light our ways I can imagine them short sleepers to be quite bored out of their skulls.
Ever since "management" and the dedicated "manager" were invented, we have been told, increasingly in recent decades, that they, rather than talents in other roles, are the key to business success. With the increasing importance and accelerating pace of innovations in our time, it's time to test if to what degree such doctrine would still hold true. Good job Larry. That's some risk worth taking.
In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). Even at places like IBM and Intel you generally have engineers running the show at every level of the engineering org.

I think what Google will see is that the real problem is the board and shareholder accountability. This creates a special type of short-term malfunction in organizations which often looks like a management problem, but really isn't.
I've tried this but I am unable to fall asleep unless I'm extremely tired (and I do mean very tired, one night without sleep is not enough). How do you fall asleep within half an hour?
Linkedin suffering another outage like this NOW
AT&T iPhone 4 users report over twice as many dropped calls
App gives HTC Thunderbolt an LTE on / off switch
Yes, all platforms that are static and curated in this way are aging every day, and Heroku has some flaws in this area as well. But as I understand it, the base platform of AppCloud is predominately a Gentoo-based custom portage tree that Ezra built years ago, and it has seen very few updates. This causes problems building gems or bugs in gems that are quite rare since most people do not use software/libraries that are so old.

While there may be amazing things in the works, it also seems to take a long time for features to be rolled out, and often these are in betas initially which do not fall under the support contracts. So if we wanted to move to Ruby 1.9, it's at our own risk (or was, last time I looked).

As for the jabs at Heroku, I have seen quite a few, honestly, but I don't have a pile of links for you. Many of them are subtle or implied, and not necessarily untrue. For instance, sure, Heroku was acquired by Salesforce, but I haven't seen any indication as to why that should influence my hosting decision. Companies are bought and sold all the time. The "ey-migrate" tool was also a great time to get a few subtle jabs in.
From the title, I expected the law to be about forbidding companies to keep too much data about their users. (which would explain Google's and Facebook's uproar) Consumer rights, or so I thought, tend to be pretty good in France in that regard.

So, I'm pretty surprised to see the French government calling for more tracking of user data. I'm pretty shocked that this could go through.

Full names, addresses and phone numbers is bad but is somewhat available information. Keeping passwords (and I imagine plain text, otherwise I don't see the point) is pretty indefensible. I imagine that if one were to refuse to give out their password to their computer, the police could just request the passwords from a bunch of sites and try? (good incentive to use unique passwords...)

Fucked up.
Just read some of your previous comments, so let me be more precise. Nothing is fair in the marketplace. It is like animals at the watering hole. Show your teeth, stomp around, and defend your space.

Also important to remember: even if you're only the third largest provider of your service, in most industries that'll still put you in the 95th-99th percentile for wealth and power for the overall population.

Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.
We couldn't agree more.
Personalized shopping service means that we would find merchants and get exclusive deals for our members through them based on the feedback you give us of what you are shopping for. We won't just give you a coupon that is readily available online.

Many of the people at HN may not be our target audience, but it can't hurt to collect a little data and feedback :).
Brian Aker explains Memcached
I'm a nerd's nerd. After the dot-com bust I used to collect SGI, DEC and Sun hardware. I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 and also VAX VMS (in a DECNET cluster). I built my own PCs from 1992 through 2007. I work currently as a data warehousing consultant.

My primary computer at home is now an iPad 2.

Yes, I have a computer with a 27" display and tons of memory and four cores and a GPU suitable for playing new games, but it doesn't matter much because it's been collecting an awful lot of dust. As long as I can get my paws on another one, my parents are getting one as a joint Mother's/Father's day gift, because I doubt they'd touch their iMac much anymore.

"I think we'll need a new input method in the coming proliferation of touch ui based devices." I don't. I type at 80-90% of the speed as a physical keyboard. And the thing that slows me down is having to switch keyboard pages for numbers and symbols -- otherwise I'm probably closer to 95% of my typing sped. I bang out frighteningly long emails on an iPad with no loss of efficiency. If it was bad, I wouldn't hesitate to go to my desk that's less than twenty feet away. The only thing that solves the input problem is a physically larger space for a larger virtual keyboard, and improvements to autocompletion algorithms and dictionaries. And time -- aren't there people who can type at furious rates on a Blackberry? There are, but they weren't that fast on Day 1.

Can I program on an iPad? No. Actually, I can't do a lot of things on the iPad, but all those things are what I consider "work" -- I don't do image retouching to relax, nor do I relax by entering metadata for media, write applications, nor model databases. For everything I do that I consider "play", the iPad does all of it. Brilliantly.

Computers are for work. Tablets are for play. Most people's computing tasks are in the latter category, and for that reason, tablets (or at least the iPad) will succeed.

This isn't coming from a septuagenarian either -- I'm barely in my 30s.
Android Market Developer Outage Continues, Test Apps Showing Up in Wild
JavaScript Passes Java in Popularity in Open Source Knowledge Base
Perhaps I'm spoiled by living in NYC, but I don't see a way that this could actually work here.

San Francisco is a notoriously awful place to catch a cab, but I hardly see how taking advantage of a local policy/market failure represents something that might be disruptive to a whole industry... particularly at a 40% mark-up.
WordPress 3.1.1 released
A Successful Failure
Funny to see that some of the buildings shown as various companies in 1998 are all owned by Google today.
When I stayed in a zen monastery a while back, I averaged 6 hours of sleep a night, and always felt refreshed, but out in the regular world, even with daily meditation, I need about 8 hours of sleep. So I think that the environment and meditation techniques must play a part.
Its hard to determine what one would pay for by just looking at its sales pitch. The best way to motivate people to buy into your service is by having a working website, and then tuning it to a point where people actually want to buy the service.
Spousesourcing:  The not-so-new labor pool
Ideally, but power still seems to be centralized to dealmakers (probably a function of human nature), whether they're specially skilled or not. Managers are essentially low-level dealmakers.
All Operating Systems Suck (1996, classic humor)
Understood. It is a large task to undertake, but we are just trying to get some initial feedback on the idea before diving into it and finding out that it is something that nobody wants.
Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal
Things You Must Do Every Week As Startup CEO
I don't believe anyone is in the market to save me money, so there's a lot of resistance to signing me up. If I trusted you enough to access my c.c. account and by doing nothing you could track what I already purchase and then provide discounts based on that...and I could see that those discounts are greater than the fee to receive them...I might join. But not necessarily. I always assume there is an opt out fee, and I'm pretty good about doing my own comparison shopping.

I am probably not your market, but you asked why not...
>The problem is what to do when you get a negative result.

That's easy; if you don't know who made the image, then chances are you don't have the right to use that image. You find a new image that you do have rights to.

You don't assume that the image has no owner just because you can't find the owner.
Camera+ hits 2 million sales / Revealing details about in-app purchase sales
I had never really thought about having a PR push after you were already up and running but I guess that makes complete sense. Many stores and restaurants open for a week or two and work out the bugs then they have the Grand Opening.

My guess is then that this PR launch that builds anticipation with viral techniques is the Grand Opening of this different sites and apps.

Thank you all for the suggestions and other articles.
Toyota Pulls Out From Cydia – Struck By Apple’s Lightning?
Channel API is just comet.
Tobii releases eye-controlled mouse system
My adwords account suddenly stopped displaying any ads about a year ago.

As I tackled the problem, my understanding grew that the Google's Adwords support staff didn't have any additional information than what was already published online. That kind of support is fine for maybe 50% of your users who don't read the online docs. Probably not of use to HN readers.

I suspect that Google doesn't provide information about recent changes to algorithms to the support staff that would help them understand what's going on. I can understand why they might not want to, but it reduces the quality of support that can be provided.
I would love you know how you automate the creation of Adwords keywords.
I've had trouble with this balance in more traditional mentor/ boss relationships. Getting buy in at various stages of a project is definitely a skill.
Interestingly, this topic comes up fairly frequently on HN. Any time an article mentions local web presence, the conversation shifts to how much local business websites suck. It appears that OwnLocal has set their sights on this market.

> How saturated is this market?

There are plenty of local development shops, but the quality and value varies greatly. On one end, you've got your "brother's, cousin's, best friend" who designs websites on weekends using FrontPage 2003. On the other end, you've got seasoned web developers who would prefer to focus on larger, national clients, because local clients don't have the budget to do a web presence correctly. In order to sell to this market, you need a refined "product", not ad hoc development. So from that perspective, I'd say the market is not terribly saturated. It depends on how broadly you define the market.

> Is there room for more?

In my view, yes, absolutely.

>Are there niches?

Every category of small business has its own set of needs. Professional services (attorneys and accountants), food and dining, healthcare professionals, auto repair... name a service, and you could consider it a niche.
Edit: Whoops, I thought this was an "Ask HN." The below post still stands for anyone who finds it useful.

The U.S. Census has an extremely well-documented large data set:

http://www2.census.gov/census_2000/datasets/

And the documentation is here:

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/doc/sf1.pdf

The software that they provide to go through the data is crappy, however (90's era).

I have an equally crappy but more useful to a computer scientist Common Lisp program that will pull out specific fields from the data set based on a list of field names. If you want that, I can dig it up for you.

Also, before you start parsing this, it's worthwhile to read the documentation to find out how the files are laid out, and what each field really means. These files are not relational databases, so if you're looking at it through those lenses, confusion will result. In particular, some things are already aggregated within the data set.
Just came to post a comment along these lines. I'm going to do this with my daughter tonight.
Finally Free Phone support arrives to AdWords
clickable link
http://tripalertz.com/space
An application process would allow us to know what you have purchased/are looking to purchase and the ability to request certain deals from your account would make it so that it is a non-invasive process. I appreciate your feedback.
One of my ex managers said that his role was to attend the meetings,shield the developers from the politics of getting projects approved and other institutional overhead so that we could focus on delivering product.
I paid a dollar for the first video and didn't even finish it. I own Clean Code and think it's one of the best programming books ever. This video series however (based on the first video) looks like it's been made back in 1994 and the presentation is too jumpy and jarring with a lot of short edits to be taken seriously.
Please correct the title. Tanenbaum is the renowned ast of Minix fame; Tenenbaum is the hapless guy being sued by the RIAA.
I rarely have difficulty finding what I'm shopping for. Using your service, I would also not only have to pay money, but pay time by letting you know in advance what I wanted to buy, instead of going to Amazon, making a decision and buying in less than an hour.

That said, it sounds like exclusivity is your main offer, and for better or worse, "exclusive deals" are something I don't ever see myself removing from my category of things that are too good to be true.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this is already in use by ad networks.
Ppl who can make win/win situations out of lose/lose situations are important. Isolated technical decisions are often the easy ones. The tough ones are getting two people or multiple groups to come to an agreement on technical decisions w/o any feeling like they were just burned or stabbed in the back.

This is basically Steve Jobs. Steve is the consumate manager. Not an extremely nice guy, not a designer, not all that technical. But people value and respect his opinion. And even more importantly people want to deliver what he wants.

You know a great manager/dealmaker because he's the person who when they change groups, you want to go with him because you feel like he'll take care of you and your projects.
Certain craft flying autonomous patrols and are capable of rudimentary target acquisition, although they must ask permission from a human operator before firing. (And yeah, I'm in a position to know).
How "The Fighter" shot 35 days worth of fight scenes in only three days
Can you please respond to my point? Your example is flawed since it will only work on a few specific systems.

most of your commands don't run correctly on my system, I'm running Mac OS 10.6.4. I'm assuming that some of the tools you are referencing have different names or need to be manually installed.
Hell, Exxon is run by an engineer.
The goal of management is essentially the same as the goal for any kind of political structure: remove issues which couldn't have been dealt with in a cheaper way.
Data.gov in crisis: the open data movement is bigger than just one site
I don't see any particular reason why this service would have to remain at a 40% markup in perpetuity. That's just where the sweet spot is right now.
Emotiv Hacker starts Gotham Eyewear – Augmented Reality Glasses