skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what happens if Milk quickly stumbles upon the next Twitter? It sounds like Kevin would expect to still develop new ideas, but wouldn't Twitter have faltered if Ev continued to try new things instead of deciding to focus on his success with Twitter?
It's the never ending battle between ideology vs pragmatism. In a perfect world, I'm sure they'd love to stick to their original creed of "Don't be evil", but pragmatism dictates that occasionally they have to bend their own rules from time to time to make sure food gets on the table for their thousands of employees. I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but I get the sense that most HNers fall into the "pragmatism" camp.

In this particular case, my bat-sensor isn't really detecting anything malevolent afoot. They and their partners have been getting hammered on all sides by patent lawsuits and Google has more than enough cash to come out swinging, and this is a major show of muscle to let people know they're not going to get pushed around like some two bit small company.
And recharge time: I calculated once that refilling your gas car occurs at a rate of approximately 5 Megawatts!

But, for 95% of trips, an overnight charge at 120V is sufficient.s
Yet still it's a positive move. Startups will benefit from it.
Personally, Daniel Tenner's Swombat [1] is already fulfilling that need.

[1] http://swombat.com/
It's neat that he was able to make this effect, and I'm glad we're experimenting with new Javascript+CSS3 effects.

This particular effect, though, reminds me of turbulence in an airplane, or the rumble of a subway. When I see the rumbling elements on the page, it makes me nervous and anxious.
I think #1 is a bit of a red herring. The security problem is not what this is solving. It's the ease of getting paid for some content, with less hassle overall.

Keep in mind that this is digital content so anyone could just rehost/resell/redistribute anything they bought or downloaded. But for something low-payment enough or the average silly download, why would they bother?

It's important to tell sellers that it's insecure so they don't assume it's locked, but please don't complicate this by adding DRM or sharing prevention. The most I'd do here is track downloads and let people kill their link and repost it if they sense abuse.
Right now it looks like LuaJIT is your best option for this type of performance. PyPy might get there eventually though...
To summarize: Kevin doesn't really have an idea yet (or at least doesn't have one that he wants to announce), but he did hire some people and he's not going to stick by any idea that isn't immediately successful.

Oh, and: mobile.

Isn't this a non-story? An announcement of an intent to create something in the future?
Yes, thank you, I know who the Wehrmacht were. I paid attention in history class.

More so I'm just surprised when I run across any veteran of WWII. FYI, no you don't run across WWII vets "all the time." Most of them are in their eighties or nineties at this point, and there aren't too many people of that age, let alone specifically WWII vets.

Mainly I was just surprised by a very random piece of information. You certainly don't hear about the German veterans of WWII in America all that much. I hope you're bright enough to figure out why.
So does the name on the incubator have anything to do with Harvey Milk, or am I reading too much into it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk
What's your hardware setup? OS version?
When is it time for a senior sysadmin?
Hiring editors to read and shorten the articles at first. Once I get a feel for how the summaries should be written, I'll experiment with something like mturk and other ideas so I can scale.
Etsy (http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/02/how-etsy-is-using-n...)

Yammer (http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/15/who-is-using-node-js-an...)

Gilt Groupe (real-time analytics using http://projects.nuttnet.net/hummingbird/)

Lanyrd uses Node.js for Twitter stream, I think?

Yahoo! is experimenting with Node.js as well (see Yammer link)

The list goes on, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head.
Very interesting effect! I can see using this to attract attention to an inbox indicator that got a new email, or something similar.
Fascinating. Sarcasm is inherent in the grammar? Can you give some examples?

update: searched a bit, cannot find any supporting evidence for bioh42_2's statement.
So, solutions in search of problems, then.
But there is no evidence to show any sort of causal cross over between the two. You can wave your hands, and say that "obviously" people didn't understand X until we had Y - but there is no historical reference being made to support this claim. Gleick just throws it out because it "sounds right" to him (and us) given our current historical context.

A popular science writer is not a trained historian or academic; but I do think readers of this genre deserve a level of journalistic integrity and depth that is missing here (note: I've NOT read The Information - and am basing my opinion on Gleick's past work and a recent interview about the book).
They are actively using that patent. They're against 'low quality' patents owned by companies that don't use them to create anything. If they're lobbying for patent reform then isn't that a good indication of where they stand on the issue?
Yes, but Kevin Rose. I hope now you understand.
A small team building multiple different projects to see which one "catches" and THEN focus on successes.

My inner shiny-object entrepreneur says this is awesome.

My inner Confucius says he who chases two rabbits catches neither.

As an entrepreneur that, like most, struggles with FOCUS this seems like letting the inmates run the asylum.

Fun to watch, but not sure a recipe for success.
I take it he's thrilled his daughter is dating an American - son of an Allied veteran, no less?

Sorry if I'm prying, I'm just fascinated by living history.
This is brilliant. 10 people really is the limit of organizational size where everyone can know everybody else and what they are working on. Better to focus on gathering the best group of 10 people and empowering each to do brilliant work.

You weren't meant to have a boss: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
Google bids $900 million for Nortel patent portfolio
Yeah, we have a country built for a liquid fuel economy and electric just doesn't fit. I have some serious fears of technology not as versatile as previous and not as cheap.
Being able to get rid of the notification alerts that hinder any functional progress on whatever it is you were doing before the pop-up came along is pretty nice.

Also, the notifications from the lock screen information view is very nice to have. From a usability standpoint being able to triage a sms or email ping sound with one button rather than:

- button click to end sleep,

- swipe to unlock,

- another button click to enter sms or email,

- (maybe) one last button click to open a message.
I have been filing bugs at that URL since some time but they invariably go nowhere - no updates for years, bugs aren't fixed most times. So kind of kills my incentive. And no, anyone can report bugs using that URL - no need to be a registered developer, at least not yet.
http://daap.uc.edu/academics/design/bs_graphic_communication...
http://www.design.cmu.edu/

Two very good programs. They aren't "web design" programs, but will be a more well-rounded design education.
This job listing maybe isn't the best example, but presume you have some highly sought after skill set.

Why not take temp programming gigs where you can sell that skill for some multiple of the pay you could get as a FTE?
This sounds like the formalization of market forces into one company. I could see real value in fine-tuning the right team.

It's all about the execution, right? :)

I love the idea of this business model and wish them the best.
There's already an app for when it fails: Remember the Milk.
In my experience, Germans are more likely to retain friends from secondary school, more likely to date someone for longer, and more likely to keep a social appointment.

I would describe Germans as "slower to warm" to someone, but they "stay warm" for longer.
Ask HN: How in the world do you pay for college?
I posted a thing yesterday about good design colleges but I realized going to a good design college will cost me at least $100,000. How as a designer or even developer do you pay that back?
US banks forged tens of thousands of mortgage documents
That the solutions shown are filtered through an arbitrary set of hoops.
What's funny is that Ev stumbled on Twitter while working on Odeo . . .
MacBook Pro 17" 2010 model, 8G RAM, 10.6.7 all updates applied. [ Also screensaver is enabled along with asking for password ]
Rather:

response_set_status(200);
response_set_header("Content-Type", "text/html");
response_write(body);
response_end();

The awkwardness of which, to me, demonstrates the superiority of C++ in this regard.
Yes, big audacious ideas that can be implemented and proven successful by a couple of guys in four months.
He should have also had 2 confused looking developers sharing a keyboard with a stack of "those other" agile books. Then, magically, they find this book, and all of a sudden, they're just pair programming away :)
Very cool. I'll definitely use some of these.
> the questions they're designed to answer

You'd think there'd be some kind of statement about that?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#why

> the questions people use them to answer

You'd think there'd be some kind of advice about that?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclusions.p...

> I typically want to know "how much slower would my program be in Python?"

And we should all know the answer - It depends on how you wrote your program in C and it depends on how you write your program in Python.
I don't think it has anything to do with people's feelings about Google. Based on the Android owners I know, people who don't make that association strongly seem to respond the same way. The store itself just feels sketchy. I'm pretty sure it's mainly a design issue, although the fact that the iPhone store started off with high-quality stuff while Android Market was seeded with crapware also hurts the perception.
Why not act as a download middleman so the buyer gets a download now button, and the link to the originator is not shown?
I believe scholarliness is not simple. Examples that muck up a naive attempt at defining "scholarly":

. Econophysics, fuzzy logic, systems theory -- are those really serious fields? Could they become serious? The answers are subjective.

. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning -- too specific? is this just a journal that someone started to enhance her reputation in a self-defined field? how long has it been around and how long will it be around?

. Douglas Hofstadter -- scholar or dilletante?

. the blog of Terence Tao -- it is serious but is not published in a journal

. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Jormakka_J/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who claimed to solve more than one Millennium Problem and is widely considered a crank. Articles were published in journals.

. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Perelman_G/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who did solve a Millennium Problem. Articles were not published in journals.

Listen to Frank Wilczek talk about his feelings about not having his genius recognised: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Science/Physics/The-Univ... (Q&A at the end).

Academics play the karma game with much higher stakes.
The key to pricing: "Know your Market"

The cost of producing the object (Fixed, or marginal) being sold isn't particularly relevant to what you should price it at.

For example, check out this dandy PDF Report: "The Networked EV: The Convergence of Smart Grids and Electric Vehicles" [1]

Single License: $2995

Price to maximize long term profit. In some cases, you may want to build your readership by reducing the profit on the current sale - but, for a solid agile development book, presuming it is solid, $99 is a "friction free" price for most agile managers - they won't hesitate to buy it if it's a best of breed. Those that would hesitate at $99 would probably think twice at $50 as well, so there isn't a heck of a lot of incentive to drop your price down that far. If anything, would have probably suggested something like $129, but $99 probably gets the job done.

Anything below $50 is silly, because at a certain point, your audience starts to think you're offering a lower quality product, and you start to _lose_ readership.

[1] http://www.gtmresearch.com/report/the-networked-ev-smart-gri...
I would like to see more of these types of companies; a dozen of engineers, + 1 business/marketing gal/guy coming together and pushing out 12 products/year.
http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html
I'm mainly looking to get a working formula for now. There will be much more built out once I get that right.
> British just came, looted and left. It would be good if people stopped attributing every god-damned thing about India to the "British Influence".

My bad. I just wondered, considering that British humour is a lot dryer than American humour. I apologize if my comment was misconstrued in anyway.
Not just about business strategies but how to run a company. How the pieces like marketing, finance, sales, operations etc play together. How to create a functioning and lasting business culture. For example, when we started we had turnover of close to 100% because my partner loved to win. He viewed every hiring negotiation as a challenge to win which started the employee relationship off very badly.

Initially maybe you recruit from friends, but how do you create a recruiting process that can feed the engine? How do you price your products so that you have enough gross margin to cover overhead, what is accrual accounting, when do you hire people if you are growing through cashflow etc.
the biggest issue usually between idea and execution is locating and actually reaching the market cost effectively and in a timely manner.

Suppose your product is for x people who like y.

Good. You have an Ideal Customer Profile.

Then you say, they will need my product when they do z. Those are the triggers. Meaning person has problem and knowledges problem and is actively looking for solution and at the set of a trigger they will do this.

So that now moves us into demand harvesting stage caused by a trigger (not demand generation which is missionary convincing a person they have a problem).

All good. Now all that was easy. The real hard part is reach. How will you find these folks?

Google is not enough. How will you access the hubs, the well connected early adopters to try your product/service and do word of marketing/referral for you for free?

I find in most of my sales jobs, reach is always the issue. Marketing is usually clueless. So I need to usually figure out clever ways to identify and reach this market.

Example from a recent consulting job. Mechanic wants to focus on Minivans since they are constantly used and constantly need repairs.
Ok who drives minivans: moms.

Ok which moms will be hubs early adopters? Moms that are on committees that will tell others so that will we will get word of mouth.

How to we do reach these moms - through their hair stylists.
What. Huh.

To go after your hub early adopters you need to find the people they will listen to and trust.

These high influential moms that will tell other moms are usually in charge of groups and constantly need to maintain their appearance. They regularly go to salons. They trust their hair stylist more than they trust their husbands.

Great: We designed a campaign to have hair stylists at select locations to try the mechanic's services at a deep discount. Immediately after trying our services, we gave them discounted coupons to give to 1 or 2 of their clients.

Then the these high connected (more like switches than hubs since they become to a number of groups) early adopter moms a chance to try us and subsequently tell their friends. Essentially the clairol commercial tactic with a twist.

Hope this helps. No time to make it shorter.

tldr: pick the one that easiest to reach the well-defined market that can purchase your product/service. And that has easily identifiable highly connected early adopters. This will make marketing easier and actually doable.
Ask HN: User Help Docs for Clients Only? - Pros & Cons
We're using Zendesk and trying to weigh the pros and cons for making our help documentation/knowledge base public or private. Would love some other thoughts.

CONS

* Competitor Access: We are a small SaaS company in a niche market and would hate to offer up our help documentation for our competition, although they could also pay for an account and get access if they want it bad enough.

* Overwhelming or Confusing for Potential Customers: With any enterprise software, there is the risk of overwhelming new users with all your features and functions as well as not being able to control the flow of information that would be most helpful to their problems.

PROS

* Good SEO: obviously our documentation is keyword rich and could provide lots of good SEO

* Building Community: by having our documentation and knowledge base public, we can invite potential partners and clients to be part of the conversation and this should help keep us on our toes
Is Weight Loss A Myth?
Let's rephrase that: their unevilness will be demonstrated by their licensing of the patents freely to all open source projects.

Or not.
TWiT, This week in iPad, TWiST, Kevin Pollaks chat show, and Kevin Rose's podcast(not Digg Nation, the other one).
New Start-up: Save money on textbooks
Frankly, I am surprised it took him this long to come up with the idea of doing an idea lab. I am also surprised there aren't many more of these in the valley.
incanter is somewhat slow. I still use it prefferably to R since I already know clojure, but don't use R enough to be comfortable with it. I certainly wouldn't use it to do real-time machine vision stuff, which is one of the use-cases for Lush.
Why being an entrepreneur should make your bucket list (or not)
My biggest beefs are: the fact that the build system is a complete black box that fails without a good indicator of what it takes to fix it, and inconsistencies in how events are handled, 'swipe' and 'scroll' being prime examples of events that either don't work as expected, or work in unexpected ways.
Reminds me of the Drudge Report "app" that was simply a mobile version of the site created by Jon Gales, without permission from Jon Gales (or, presumably, Matt Drudge).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329283
"But for some reason, I won't pay for something inside the Android store."

It could be one of several things, which would actually vary from person to person, but all leading to paltry returns for _most_ Android developers vs. iOS.

1) The "perceived value" proposition - To a user, Google is "the search engine" and Android "the mobile OS", but they're both free to use. In a consumer's mind, why wouldn't then _everything_ else, including the Marketplace apps, be free. It doesn't help matters that Rovio's runaway blockbuster cultural gamechanger shared timesink app Angry birds is free on Android (albeit with ads).

2) The blatant, flagrant, rampant, money-maker shaking heaps of copyright theft and IP violations that make it to the top of the Marketplace lists. It makes the whole thing feel like a grey market bazaar in old Morocco or Bangkok - just sketchy as all hell. How could I entrust my credit card with a service that allows GPL violators and copyright flouters to rise to the _very tippy top_ of the charts? I mean, alot of that has changed since Google started putting the screws on very obvious scofflaws like Nintendo emulator game ROM packs, Star Wars weapon simulators, and famous rapper soundboards. But the die may be cast for some of the old-school adopters.

3) The weird availability - Android phone users had to pirate Marketplace apps from day one if they didn't come from the US. Now they're expected to _pay_ for stuff? Sorry, but once you've told them it's free, it's free for a loooong time. Hell, Napster all taught us way back that music "wanted to be free". It's taken over a decade for paid music to come back into some semblance of making any money; coincidentally, it's via Apple's iTunes.
Having driven from Richmond, Virginia, to Anchorage, Alaska, twice, I can first-hand confirm that there is a LOT of empty land in the heart of North America.

It is because of these trips that I no longer worry about global overpopulation and just look at people quizzically when they start talking about the topic.
Maybe I've missed it, but has Amazon actually released any sales numbers from its store? So far, it seems to me like little more than a curiosity. The difficulty of installation alone will rule out most customers.
We have paid for premium support. Still our experience is similar to this guy, there is lots of bugs and undocumented behavior keep you frustrated
That sounds like highway robbery.
To be fair, it's Tony Stark.
Neither Android phones, nor Angry birds are "free". One is subsidized by years long contracts, and the other is ad-supported. If these things are really affecting sales then it's mostly psychological, which is interesting in itself.

Recent surveys in the UK by YouGov suggest iPhone users are poorer and manage money less well than Android or Blackberry users, but also that the people who use their phone 4+ hours a day are more often found on the iOS platform. This is an interesting reversal of the common wisdom that Android is the home of freetards and geeks. But an audience of geeks with poor impulse control over their spending sounds pretty good, even if they're relatively poor.
XMPP over websockets [HTML5]
I completely agree with your last sentence. I don't begrudge them opportunities to monetize their platform, but I can't help but be frustrated at watching new functionality being added on top of piles of bugs.
Here, it is not at all uncommon to hear that somebodies grandfather is or was a vet. There were something like 15 million of them just from the US as I recall. For someone a decade or two older than myself (he says it was her father, not grandfather, so you can get a good guess at their ages...), encountering veterans would be only that much more common.

"You certainly don't hear about the German veterans of WWII in America all that much."

"My girlfriend is German and lives in Berlin."

I am under the strong impression that her father lives in Germany....

EDIT: Furthermore: "The total number of soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during its existence from 1935-1945 is believed to have approached 18.2 million." With numbers like that, this hardly seems like such a particularly odd occurrance.
Daniel includes opinion and editorial. I plan on taking things down with no personal editorial.
Exactly. There becomes a point with pricing where it's just as hard, if not harder to sell a cheaper product that it is a more expensive one.

Plus, a higher value product already has a perception of high end quality just because of the price.
Cool idea! One quick thing: I would change the
"(Minus our cut)"
wording to something a little more friendly. Maybe transaction fee or something along those lines.
The comparison to Windows or blockbuster video games seems bogus to me. Windows sells several million copies. A blockbuster game sells hundreds of thousands to millions of copies. A typical book sells several orders of magnitude less than that.
It would be possible to support other gateway interfaces in raphters. The abstractions already exist.