skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the problem, isn't it. You know lots of people, so you have made the assumption that it's all that way. Well, I know lots of people who are my parents age who not only don't have the internet, but are only peripherally aware that it exists, and really have no interest in going on it.

Just because you know lots of people who are a certain way does not mean it's that way. Remember, you are living in a world that is filtered - to a certain demographic, to a certain income level, to a certain intelligence level, to a certain ambition level and so on. There are huge other demographics that are also filtered in a certain way, and for them, the total opposite is true.

For example, imagine an average high school dropout / labourer. His friends are unlikely to be college professors or other upper class, his friends are unlikely to be rich. His friends are most likely going to be similar to him. And their friends are similar to them. So you have this network of high school dropouts who are all linked to each other in one big demographic pool.

And their parents will also fit in a certain profile, etc. So, no matter what you observe, first of all realise that it's filtered. Very few can say they are intimate with all classes of society. When you are born in a certain class, you may get poor or whatever, but your friends tend to stay from roughly the same class.

It's like an article I read in a german magazine speaking about how universities are functioning as match-making institutions. The article spoke about how the path that leads to a person attending universities tends to bring people who are very similar to each other together - because each step of the way towards the university filters out people. So when they do arrive, you have a group of guys and a group of girls of similar intelligence, similar income level, similar ambition and so on. Perfect fits for each other.

Same with most of us here. We are only on this site because we fullfil some criteria. That I could be here typing this comment on this website means I have matched a set of strict criteria that have filtered out a lot of people.

So, the people you know are also people who would be friends with people who would have children that you would come in contact with. So the same filter mechanism that brought you here also acts on them.

So, your observation can only be through the lens of your class, status, upbringing, intelligence, and education.
Aren't direct notes from a developer who was in the trenches at a startup exactly what you want? (As opposed to say, a Harvard Business Review article trying to give advice on how best to run a Silicon Valley tech-based startup?)
Google Advertisements make you seem very unprofessional at this stage and are a turn-off from a user perspective. I'd suggest dropping them but keeping the advertising space to display self-promotional material.

You can always swap out your own advert and swap in Google's later.
Aren't you doing the exact same thing? How is "Grandmas have wifi? You are out of touch with ordinary people" any more rooted in fact, rather than your small sample, than my original statement?

Also my statement was "grandmas have wifi". I know two who do, which makes that statement provably true. I never said that all of them do.

More importantly, in the context of the original conversation, before we took this "my sample is more representative of the overall population than yours" detour, is that the product isn't aimed at people who don't know what the internet is. It's a digital picture frame. It's aimed at people who have digital cameras (meaning they almost certainly have a computer) and have family that have digital cameras, and want to be able to share. All products are not aimed at all people, and should not be.

While I assume they're aiming for a wider demographic than the average digital picture frame (and, I think, doing it in a good way) the point of my comment was that they shouldn't worry about aiming too wide. Worrying about making your social digital picture frame accessible to people who don't have WiFi is like making an iPod for people who don't have computers. There is no point.
Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will?
The couple who lived in a mall
Small salary-for-everyone profitable - yes. Luckily, Tom and I have other sources of income that can be saved while our "salaries" go towards apartment rental, groceries, utilities, insurance and other living expenses.

We really just need a few months of operations (since we've only been launched ~10 days) and we'll go from there.
So what? Those devices are point-of-sale systems, not phones. Why should we expect the iPhone to have that kind of functionality?
No, some lottery winners will say they spent a lot of time and effort to figure out the hidden pattern among winning numbers in a lottery. So they worked a lot just like all startup founders.
Just another rant. Once i liked rants very much, because they are often funny and somehow cool, but after reading too much of them in blogs i have become a little bit bored and suspicious:

If i read a rant what makes me say "yes!" to the article?: Is it the content? Or is it more the writing style which makes even the most stupid points and argumentations sound logical and cool?

Take this rant as an example: it is somehow succesful on hacker news despite having absolutely no content other than that its author feels fine two days out of three. If he would have written that in a normal style not even his mum would have read his blog entry. But by insulting other people and writing somehow aggressive he creates attention that isnt supported by the content.
Who cares if a user is contributing to the discussion by comments if the articles they submit contribute to the discussion?
Imagine Zed Shaw, only angrier and a less effective writer (I know, it's hard to imagine either...), and you won't have to actually read any Ted Dziuba posts. You can just imagine what he would say based on the title alone.
In regards to the size, it looks to me like it varies according to similarity of neighboring area. This makes much more sense than luminance, since it allows the more complex areas of the images to be represented by more "pixels".
Raising venture capital proves exactly one thing: that you can raise venture capital.

Market validation in terms of paying customers or masses of addicted users is more valuable than the vote of confidence of a limited set of investors (even really smart ones).

Disclaimer: I've done startups both ways, and my most recent venture has raised $17 million in VC.
If a startup returns 2X-3X, the founders won't necessarily make a lot of money.

A lot depends on the liquidation preference in the financing terms. Although not common these days, there was a time when VC deals were structured such that a large percentage of an exit went straight to the investors before the founders saw any money.
Top 5 Reasons Business Execs Fail to Work Effectively with Product and Engineering Execs
Just some custom wrapper for PHP's mail() using QMAIL.

Unfortunately, now we're on EC2 and there's no way to pass reverse DNS lookups on e-mail originating from an instance. That's bad.

Looked through many third-party solutions, but they are expensive and impose artificial limitations, so we're basically going to get another machine outside of EC2 and use that.

Delivering e-mail reliably does have a slight learning curve, but it's really not worth it to go third-party unless you're sending heavy HTML newsletter type e-mails to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Knowledge of e-mail and the issues surrounding its successful delivery is knowledge you can carry from project to project or start-up to start-up, so it's not such a bad idea.
They were first introduced for the Christmas 2005 shopping season to handle large queues. Can we say old news?

Those devices have barcode scanners and credit card readers - features which are a must for a portable POS terminal, but are not in Apple's iPhone roadmap. Can we say irrelevant news?
I like the comparison between Blizzard and Google, because they both have tremendous momentum in their favor.

It would be an incredible feat for a company to make a better game than Blizzard. I've watched some QA sessions with Blizzard project leads, and they rarely seem to make assumptions about what works and what doesn't -- they rely on hard data, and the goal is always to maximize playability.

Same with Google, their search has been incrementally improved over many years. They know what works and what doesn't.

That might be why smaller game companies seem to be succeeding (social gaming, flash games), and domain-specific search engines are also doing well (video search, job search, travel search, etc..)
You can say it's crap all you want, but until you've worked inside a CA and seen what goes on - you know shit. Good luck ordering a cert with your 'shopped docs...
I still think you're wrong. A digital camera is owned by practically everyone now for the simple reason that it's very difficult and expensive to buy a non-digital camera.

But WiFi is really a very optional thing for now.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I strongly believe in focusing a consumer as tightly as possible in the beginning, and since he is dealing with a tech crowd here, he can make wifi a requirement.

But all the same, I don't think WiFi is as spread as you think. Imagine an iPod where one can transfer the music only by WiFi. Or an iPhone. That's a bad idea, is it not?

I'm not saying my sample is more accurate than your, but I am saying I have observed the opposite effect. There is probably some middle ground, the question is where the real statistic lies. And if one is willing to bet a business on that.

I really dislike assumptions. I like to treat facts as assumptions that have not been disproven yet, and that's why I argue this point - don't take it personally!
he's not saying the system is broken for the players, he's saying it's a broken economy, because new games can't enter and compete. very high barriers to entry, and players will only play one game, so it's very hard to enter the market.
That's good, I'm sure you guys will be fine. Just don't let the project be an all or nothing thing - let it grow without putting pressure on you. I predict that you'll soon reach a ceiling. Your income is going to stop growing, and your business will either fail at that point, or you will stick even more effort in and break free to really grow big.
I have nothing whatsoever against Paul Graham, I really don't know too much about him and aren't one of the many on here who paste all of his articles onto the cube walls surrounding their toilet, and have read them dozens of times, etc.... blah blah.

However... I do think that a lot of you are shutting Ted down simply because he said shit about PG.

Ted is funny as hell, and pretty much everything he said in his "rant" is spot on.

Personal note: I submitted this at +152 points here on news.yc, let's see how far it drops! Like Google after their earnings report? We'll see :)
I think you're confusing the high profile exceptions (Jobs, Gates, Dell) with the rule. I think you're generalizing based on your own experiences, which aren't necessarily representative of the whole.
Split the picture into grids of 10x10. Take the color in that grid and find the average color of all the colors in there. Calculate the color distance to the box beside it. Do same for luminance.
My problem with CO2Stats is that they are sort of slyly dancing around the truth. The truth is that they do not buy/acquire carbon offsets. In fact, they buy more energy. They just ensure the additional energy was created cleanly. But what about the devices that that use the clean energy?

This is like saying, "I'll offset your polluting car by building another car using clean materials." That doesn't physically offset my car, it builds another whole car (which in itself is wasteful). Now my footprint is increased, not decreased.

As I understand it, the general theory in the business of conservatism is that you should literally offset the consumption, not cause more of it. If I use X amount of energy, I expect a company like CO2Stats to do something to physically counter the pollution and other environmental impacts that went into creating X amount of electricity. Like planting trees or buying real carbon credits or funding research of cold fusion or something.
I wouldn't expect the iPhone to ever assume a POS type feature set. However, I did find it interesting Apple was using MSFT IP in such an obviously customer facing role.
The title lies.
Yeah they're selling snake oil IMHO, but if retards will buy the pet rock, they'll buy this too (they already have).

Even traditional "offsetting" is silly; the science is shaky at best. WE NEED TO DECREASE CONSUMPTION. I'm clueless as to why no one is admitting this. I blame Al Gore :P.
Even though this article is brimming with hyperbole, it brings up a number of important points that are often glossed over by many readers of HN. These include:

1) For most entrepreneurs, the present value of expected personal profit from a startup is probably less than that from a salary at a big tech company -- or even less so than from on Wall Street.
2) Luck begets success in entrepreneurship. Sure, it requires hard work and some intelligence, but obviously there are far more smart and hard working people than people who started public companies. Perhaps the function should be "(success) = (hard work) * (intelligence) * (luck),” where hard work and intelligence = 0 or 1 and luck is any real number.
3) Many tech bloggers and journalists are writing about things in which they don't have expertise. It's commonly cited among the academics whom I’ve met that expertise requires 10+ years in a field. Many of these people are in their 20s. Something doesn't add up. Moreover, many experienced people extrapolate their previous lessons to situations that are too broad or not directly parallel.
A very simple, yet very effective, method of determining if a pixel is in an area of uniform color is to take a block (perhaps 20x20 pixels) that is centered at the pixel you are testing and see if that pixel is within a certain standard deviation of all the pixels in the block. Adjusting these two "knobs" (size of the sample area, and standard deviation threshold) will let you fine tune to your needs. This should highlight edge regions too.
^^ I don't understand why people say things like this.

Clearly the interfaces that Apple has chosen for its products are succeeding. Succeeding in that they help Apple sell more things, and consequently succeeding because they are usable and people enjoy using them.

Eventually these interfaces will become standard. I also dislike it when people whine about Vista looking like OS X, and all the mac people complain about XYZ looking like OS X. I can tell when someone is an Apple fanboy, and I can also tell (you sir) when someone doesn't like Apple at all and probably develops .NET apps in Visual Studio.

Such radical users! Why can't we come together for the common good. If you don't like the interface, what might you recommend as an alternative? People are dumping Vista left and right for either XP or moving to OS X (as their reports will show, Apple is growing momentum! we all know it!)

If you have an alternative then let's hear it but if all you are going to do is whine about it then it's not helping!

Also, as a final note, Sproutcore isn't about the interface elements. You can change those with the swap of a PNG and a few lines of CSS. It's about the evolution of user interaction on the internet. Bringing the desktop-web void closer together.
Well in that case of using XML as markup (what it was designed for) - it is clearer then the s-exp. the only time I like XML editing is docbook - cause when you end a tag, you never have to bounce back up (which may be more then a screen away) to know what tag you are in.

thats about the only time I like it though.
XML is popular simply because HTML made the web happen. XML looked like HTML so people understood what it was for immediately, and then it got overused.

Thats about all there is to it.
This article strikes me as completely worthless, especially the phrase "learn from your mistakes" as a general category. Let me give two simple examples that parents have almost no influence over that require a child to "learn from mistakes."

Walking: a child has to fall down a lot and understand how to lose balance slightly to be able to walk forward. They may observe others closely but they have to learn walking from their own mistakes.

Speech: many adults around a child may correct speech, but over time children have to auto-correct for the most part.

You would think you would find a correlation between delayed development in walking and speech and fewer dopamine receptors but I am not aware of any studies that would support that correlation and I have had good reason to look into causes for delayed development.

Here is the only link between studies and "learning from mistakes" that the article offers, and it's problematic:

"Numerous other studies have linked this gene variant to addiction, obesity and compulsive gambling, suggesting that the underlying problem is trouble learning the negative consequences of your actions."

Addiction, obesity, and gambling all have the property that they are associated with short term pleasure and long term problems. This is very different from being able to "learn from your mistakes." It's possible, for instance, that all three of these activities boost dopamine levels in the brain (as does smoking, another short term pleasure that's problematic in the long run) and counteract the effect of having fewer receptors. I think the real explanation will prove to be more complex (and will need to be evolutionary stable in the same way that dyslexia confers considerable survival advantages).
Spot on.

Also, all those people who feel that Cloud Computing has "failed" just because of some high-profile failures seem to completely miss the point that the promise of cloud computing isn't 100% uptime (though it gets closer to that than most other hosting providers), but easily scalable, cheap infrastructure.
The second sentence elaborates in a useful way that broadens it beyond funding:

"This validation might take the form of an investor or that first major customer. It could be a serial entrepreneur joining your board, or a highly regarded salesman agreeing to work for you."

A friend of mine has a phrase "it takes a village to raise a start-up" by which he means that you end up asking many many folks for help and advice. That's what this article provides examples of: entrepreneurs that were able to ask for help were better able to succeed.
Yep. That was wrong. I thought Dzubia took the page down. He could have stayed away from naming anyone.
Why Python is more fun that Java
I installed redhat 5.2 enterprise version on my laptop. Looks really good. I have not started any serious work yet. I had lot of issues with sound card drivers and my USB with earlier versions of redhat( rhel 3). This one was piece of cake. It recognized my plantronics and the sound worked without a glitch.
More Mac-vs.-PC Price Comparisons: The Cheapest MacBook vs. Best Buy's Sales
Perhaps it is because I use a pretty, elegant language like Ruby, but this article's point seems incredibly basic.

I spend a large part of my rails coding time figuring out ways to remove code. In fact, I feel best about a coding session when I've significantly reduced the size and complexity of a part of the code.
I wonder if it would be good to just have an interviewee just sit with the team through a couple of debug sessions, or let them have a crack at a nagging problem in the codebase.
Why do digital picture frames always have such broad borders? I'd really like one that is more elegant, that is, with less wasted "screen estate".

But never mind, I won't buy one anyway - I am waiting for digital ink to catch up...
Show me a HN account that earned its karma exclusively from up-moded article posts.
All I had to do was create a blank text file, copy and paste the URLs of any Web sites that I wanted to attack, specify how many times these sites should be pinged, and copy and paste a few lines of code from the original instructions.

...
"I will be the old guy, and point out that folks were making chiptunes in the 80's and early 90's on Amigas and Atari STs and C64s"

Well, back then it wasn't retro.
Doing it yourself seems to be a great idea if you want all of your emails to end up in people's spam folders. Here's a great article explaining all of the reasons why you might end up that way:

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/ensuring-your-ht...

Much easier is to just use something like Constant Contact. Our emails seem to have a very high delivery rate through them. There's definitely some pain in the ass as they don't offer an API for syncing your userbase with their list, but if you're a small company for whom development time is valuable it's hard to beat.
I'd say get started as fast as possible with the fastest way possible to develop. We've gone for nearly 3 years "on the cusp" of adding credit cards. Next week...
If by "funny as hell" you mean "good at making up phrases like 'cocksteaks'", then yes.

People like Ted Dziuba and Zed Shaw seem to have found a winning formula for getting attention on the internet: yell loudly and profanely and don't be afraid to blatantly insult people, even if it's uncalled for.
I'm talking about http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/.

If anyone here wants a copy, email me. I've still got mine lying around.
"Cocksteak" is indeed hilarious and could have only been created by true genius. It starts out with a word that generates guffaws on its own and strengthens it with imagery of slabby meatiness. The composition of the two pierces the rational mind and draws out autonomic "laffs" from deep within the humor cavities of our reptilian brains.

I just hope his startup, a web page that lists links to other web pages, does not get in the way of his truer literary calling.

edit: </sarcasm>
There is no reason for them to use an iPhone, but I'm sure there is a ton of unsold iPod Touch devices they could use.

I assume the functionality shouldn't be too difficult for them to port, as it is likely mostly web based (they aren't storing the store in each device I'm sure), all they would need would be an add-on to scan barcodes and a program to translate them.
I wouldn't recommend doing it on your own, or at least use a well known smtp server for relay (where you have access to).

Especially hotmail can be very tricky. If a few users complain about your mails, they will put you on a ban list and your emails will be routed to /dev/null. Tehy won't even appear in the spam folder of the user.
REST as an engineering discipline
In PHP i've used both SendMail and SwiftMailer. Both seem to do a decent job of getting mail delivered into mail and not marked as spam.
A lot of the evolution of user interaction on the internet is directly related to the interface elements that drive those interactions. The current web UI toolkit consisting of, for example, submit buttons, links with underlines, and navigation designed for page reloads, doesn't exactly complement the new designed-for-instant-interactivity backend in things like SproutCore.
raises hand sheepishly I'll admit, it's where the vast majority of mine come from.

I ask you guys questions all the time :D
Reminds me of Montessori classrooms with mixed age-groups.
Even if they did, I don't think they'd have anything interesting to make decisions about.
That's why I said in general. It definitely depends on your valuation and terms (participating preferred can rape a 2x exit) but if you take a few mil in VC money on a few mil premoney, then sell for 3x, you probably got rich.