skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you read Robert Ciadini's book? You should, it explains all the tricks marketers use to persuade you to buy something or buy into something. Most successful companies use some form of persuasion to get you to do something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini
This is from 2006. Am I missing something?
I think Netflix simply identified a big gap in the movie rental market that this guy is still unable to see, even when it's eating his business alive.
Do something really hard that takes you past your limits. It doesn't have to be a start-up, it could be anything (like running a marathon).
The obvious problem wiht your retort is, of course, you're assuming that every year, the runners in the BM are new to the race. This isn't true.

I'm not saying his reasoning is sound, but your rebuttle isn't either.
From a consumer point of view. I hate going to Blockbuster because it takes me a long time to choose a movie. I would like to have the catalog online. Mark the movies that I have already seen. Mark the movies that I may like to see someday. Being able to make an online reservation, and on my way home pick it up at the counter.
Why would the board of directors just wait around for a clueless leader to drive them into the ground?

Typically, CEO's hire their board and gives them lots of options to essentially align with the CEO.

Once I wrote this, out of curiosity, I checked who's on the board of Blockbuster. Interestingly, a one Carl Icahn is on the board. (http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyOfficers?symbol...)

Also, the CEO made $5 odd million last year(http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/officerProfile?symbol=...).
I thought this was a new web design for Google. Too bad it's not.
You have to be careful with the licensing on that one...but a good idea in concept
Three Mistakes Karl Popper Made
Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won’t
A plugin is a total nonstarter. It'd be easier to tell users to switch to Firefox to use your site than to get them to install a plugin.
False. There's gold in them thar hills!

http://xach.livejournal.com/138588.html

http://xach.livejournal.com/139017.html
NewsCred Goes Public With Credibility-Based News Source
I like your approach. Jordans Furniture uses the "shoppertainment" strategy very effectively--I think this could work for blockbuster, too.
Headlines are the last thing written, typically by someone other than the article author. Headlines are space-constrained and compete for attention by pushing a 'hook', rather than providing a perfect summary of what follows.

So if you feel misled by an attention-stealing headline, blame the headline, not the article.
Regularly place yourself in situations where failure is a distinct possibility.

Start to observe that failure is actually less likely than you thought it was.

Repeat until desired level of toughness is acquired.
Honestly, ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp, especially for people new to functional programming and Lisp. "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" would probably be a better start point for CL, as would those Little Schemer books would be for Scheme.

I disagree. PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides. It takes a long time to not say much.
Except the libraries aren't very Lispy. I don't think you can program Clojure without realizing that you are actually programming Java with realistic syntax. (So basically, you need to be good at Lisp and Java. As a result, I wouldn't recommend it for beginners.)

SBCL + SLIME is a nice development environment. CL is far from a perfect programming language, but you can just ignore the stuff you don't like and it comes pretty close.
head may read an awful lot from /dev/urandom before it exits. ;-) And md5sum would limit my password to 0-9a-f whereas with tr(1) I get to choose the character set.
By advanced IM apps, I meant something that could get connectivity through Wimax or EVDO. As for getting them hooked, if you remember awhile back, kids were heavily into pagers. IM style communication integrated with GPS that they'd get with a music player (which they need anyhow) might create a similar trend with middle school kids.

Android wouldn't be necessary, but that would bring an open App development ecosystem with it, which would be great.
PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides

Well, that's a little unfair. It couldn't be condensed to a few slides for people who don't know Lisp. Which is its target audience, after all.

I do agree that PCL isn't as concise as ACL. But we'd know that from the limit theorem on Paul Graham's writing anyway :)
There is a clone for X-windows called "Wily" (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/). I'm not sure if it is still actively developed -- the website hasn't changed much since the 90's. I used it for a while as my editor in the mid-90's. I liked the tiling window placement and the extensibility model: instead of building new functionality in an extension language (e.g. Emacs Lisp), you build it in external programs which interact via an RPC protocol. The biggest drawback is that you really need a 3-button mouse to effectively use Wily/Acme. Mouse-chords are to Acme/Wily as the control key is to Emacs.
No, it is from 2006. But it seems worth another look given the comments form the Netflix CEO--both CEOs seem oblivious to what their customers want, and instead are bulling ahead with their industry's vision of what they will stuff down the market's throat.
Amen.

Most people forget that uiuc consistently has one of the top 5 engineering programs nationally (an honor it shares with the likes of MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford, and Cal-Tech).

And I'd feel pretty confident claiming it's the best in the midwest, hands down. Yet, I can't count the number of people (in Cambridge) that have no idea what I'm talking about when I mention 'uiuc' or the 'university of illinois.'

I think part of the problem is that besides a handful of great programs (like engineering and accounting), uiuc is rather easy to get into. I suppose this means that the average uiuc alum that you'll meet isn't likely to be as bright as the average stanford alum, even though our engineers stack up quite well.
> consistent coffee/muffin experience

Love it!
Yes -- having a great list, it's hard to find worthy new material.
Teens arrested for motorized office chair
No market. No motivation.
The lesson: if the market confuses you, you are out of touch with it!
I agree with your assessment of their website, but the paper itself looks really interesting. The author also mentions a paper that he liked from the same conference:

"PS: I would also like to mention another deserving paper
from PLDI 1998: 'Optimizing direct-threaded code by
selective inlining,' by Ian Piumarta and Fabio Riccardi.
This paper describes the technology that was later used
in QEMU, and it qualifies in my opinion as one of the
greatest hacks of all time."
ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp

I have to disagree. Those are the two books I learned Lisp from and I didn't find them too brief at all.

I like both books a lot. In some ways they're polar opposites, and I've noticed people tend to prefer the one they're more temperamentally compatible with. ACL has a classical style, precise and formal. PCL is more exploratory and dabbly. If you're the kind of person who wants concepts 1..n to be defined before n+1 is introduced, that's ACL. If you want to see cool examples before grokking all the details, that's PCL. PCL's temperament seems more common than ACL's, as far as I can tell.
I dunno; if their favorite site asks them to install it? If it's bundled with Adobe Flash or Acrobat, or Google Toolbar or Desktop?
What's wrong with Lenovo and Dell? They both make millions of solid machines. I suppose that they're not very sexy... but I tend to pay attention to what's on the screen, not whether or not the case won any design contests.

(And FWIW, the Thinkpad has won a lot of design awards. The matte-black box is beautiful and durable. The Macbook feels like a cheap toy in comparison.)

Finally, Asus' eeepc is also a beautiful computer.
The biggest difference from a value perspective: Late Fees.
Lame, I'm sorry but I don't accept his conclusion at all.
I've been with Netflix since 2004, and tried Blockbuster Online a couple of times but always went with Netflix. The reason? Better selection, better website, better customer service. I thought the in-store renting deal with Blockbuster would be a plus, since there is a store within 5 minutes walk from my home, but while in the store, I asked myself, "what the hell am I doing here??"
Pretty bad site design for a Google project.
That is exactly how disruptive technologies take over big markets. While they are developing a great service, the big company is still completely focused on the ways of their old customers.
Ah, I see. I hadn't read the Blockbuster CEO article yet.
Play a game, plant a tree, help restore the rainforest
'Wine' is ok for testing IE under Linux.
Ask HN: Feedback and CoFounder - privatetransit.org
I'm almost ready to open this site up... http://www.privatetransit.org . It's a site where you can post your commute/route. Then riders can request to ride.. It's like carpooling, but more business-like. Payment is paypal, reports can be printed for employer reimbursement. There is feedback/ratings... email status alerts, account info... etc What do you think - thumbs up or down? (also... btw, the site is not functional... even pre-alpha still)

And I'd like to find a cofounder by rollout time who can market and hopefully has avenues to find funding.
Generation Y the least engaged
6 Tips for Reinvigorating a Boring Job
Then perhaps you'd like the original project page: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/
Sure it does. I prefer the Mac over a PC. Windows generally treat the user like an idiot (you have unused icons on your desktop!!) while the Mac tends to be a little more user friendly. Sure I have a PC as well, I don't know of a good alternative to EAC for ripping a perfect copy of a CD. And playing games on the PC is great too, not to mention the hardware is more often than not a lot cheaper. But I've been a Mac User since 1984 and haven't felt any need to stop using one. I like the Mac philosophy, and Windows generally erks me to no end. My newest Mac (a MacBook) runs Windows XP on a partition, which is pretty nice, so I get both OS's on one machine. No more Dells from Hell for me. Knowing the average reader on this site, this comment will probably get voted down to about a -15, because I don't trumpet the superiority of Linux.
I think the word "Lame" should be reserved for responding to an essay on language, history, human genetics, sports, and culture with a one-word sentence that disagrees without reason or evidence. Lame.
Any startups following the philosophy of the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris? 
Tim Ferris, in this book The 4-Hour Workweek, provides a guide that seems to be the opposite of Paul Graham ideas:

* You don't need to work long hours. The title of the book makes it clear.

* Going solo is fine. You don't need a soulmate for your startup.

* Outsource everything.

I've read the book and it makes a lot of sense, but I'm not aware of any startup that follows this philosophy.

Do you know of any 4-hour workweek startups?
I thought it was somewhat far-fetched, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was lame - it's an interesting idea at least.
It doesn't say tables are the answer, it says table are an answer. It says nothing about a CSS version of the site.
Firefox’s SSL policy is not bad, you idiot
It is going to be tough if he wants to invest in software startups. U of Minnesota's CS department is not very good (I dropped out of the PhD program). The job market for programmers is dismal - everyone good moves to the Bay Area, Seattle or NYC. Culturally the mindset of the area is very scandinavian-socialist, with an odd anti entrepreneurial snobbery. If you have a college degree and start a company you are looked upon with pity: "oh, she wasn't smart enough to get a secure job, now she's stuck fending for herself." If you eventually become successful, everyone will claim they've been supporting you all along. Definitely not the same attitude as the HN.YC crowd.

There's an obvious win if he wants to invest in biomedical startups, the UofM is much stronger in the health sciences, and the Mayo clinic is only an hour out of the metro area.

I hope he's successful. I would have loved to stay closer to my family. I have younger friends with engineering degrees who want to stay in the area, and are pretty much working at Starbucks, playing online poker and scrimping along with their own projects so they can avoid the horrible "enterprise" work that makes up 99.9% of the programming jobs available in the area.

Note: I grew up 4th generation Minnesotan, I think more recent immigrants probably avoid most of the cultural baggage.
The end user doesn't care about openness directly, just as they didn't care about it in the case of Windows vs. Mac or internet vs. AOL. It's the benefits of openness they care about.

In the case of cell phones, the benefits are large and obvious. In the case of mp3 players I can't think of any.
Microsoft Sam text-to-speech. I've never found a more amusing computer voice.
netflix.confuses.me
The reason for this: The best sprinters in the world come from West Africa. Say what you want, this is simply true. I'm going to go through a series of logical steps, and I would like you to see if I can get you to agree with my conclusion

The biggest time survival of the fittest comes into play is during a war. When a war happens, the people unfit to fight in the war get pruned out of the gene pool.

West Africa has a landscape that is different from most of the world - the bush. The bush is what happens when humans live near a jungle - they trim down the trees, and low vegetation tends to grow. In East Africa, you tend to have savannah and grasslands which can be walked through. You cannot walk through a bush.

West African wars have tradditionally been fought with machetes. Not with spears, not with guns, not with swords, but with Machetes. A machete is a proximity instrument, and the best way to defeat someone in a machete fight is to be the one to strike first.

A west African war looks this way - all the men paint themselves in black, and walk at night through the bushes till they are near a village. A village is usually cleared of grass and bush, so there is no cover. When a whistle is sounded, the men burst out of the bush and run at high speed towards the village, winning the war by force.

The men in the village have a few seconds to prepare, and they do so by grabbing their machetes and running as quick as possible away, then circling back.

Traditional west African wars are high speed dashes with heavy instruments, in the night, and with lots of fire. It's the perfect enviroment to have gene pool selection for dashes.

Contrast this with East Africa, where the savannag lead to Bows & Arrows and Spears being used as war weapons.
I have an old personal home page that I haven't updated in a couple of years. Yahoo crawls that page almost daily, while it has weeks since the last visit from Google.
Windows seems to work better as a media center PC. Streaming video to an 360 or a PS3 is really easy to setup with Windows and getting the hardware / codec's to work is simple.

Note: I have heard that Linux is getting better for this stuff but windows is cheep enough that I don't really care.
There are plenty of times when being confused and 'out of touch' is better than pretending to know what's going on when people are being irrational. This is probably not the case with Blockbuster, but they don't have the resources to emulate Netflix. Their best bet is to hold on to a gradually declining customer base, and eventually liquidate.
In interviews he makes it clear that you he doesnt think you should literally work only 4 hours. Especially when u are starting up a business.

Its more about building a business that can be run on autopilot. Its a lot harder to build a business while on autopilot.
Interesting Information Architecture
I skimmed the book and it made no sense. Almost everything I read skipped at least one step in logic. "You can work less and be rich. I worked less and became rich." The "how" seemed to be left out of many of his examples.

Anyways, to provide a real answer and not to just diss the book, I doubt many start-ups work a 4 hour work week. The fact is, there is a lot of work to get done in a start-up. If you only worked 4 hours a week, and you needed 2000 hours to get it done, well, that would take you over 9 years to get done. You can't magically make start-up work go away. Outsourcing only works if you have capital to pay for it. So if you don't have capital, and 9 years is too long, then you might just need to work harder, longer, and with more people to get it done.
So Apple is 'flailing,' eh? (re: TechCrunch story)
Yes, the price on Amazon is just insane. I printed the pdf, which worked quite well.
why is this story listed on hacker news?
The Human Piece Of The Venture Equation
I didn't see any sexism, either, and I'm extremely sensitive to such things.
It's great to read the article and see how spot on it was about the iPhone.

"an Apple cell phone is sure to be greeted by existing quote-unquote “smartphone” aficionados as utterly underwhelming. It’s hardly got any features! It’s just well-designed! [...] Meanwhile, the line at your local Apple store will stretch out the entrance and down to the mall’s food court."
Perceived security? How many hundred thousand new pieces of malware for the mac this year again?
MobileMe Users Get 60 Free Days | TechJaws
IPhone 3G Software Update Fails | TechJaws
How much is Your Web Site Worth? | TechJaws
VML and Canvas provide very different APIs and behave very differently. Explorer Canvas maps the Canvas API onto VML with very poor results. It may be possible to build a library that uses either Canvas or VML but they're so different I almost think it'd be easier to target each separately. Either way, this is a non-trivial pain in the neck.

It's amazing how desperately people want canvas compatibility in IE. It's such a simple API, too. It's hard to imagine that it would take any real resources for Microsoft to create a nice, fast implementation. But, once again they seem to prefer holding the web hostage.

You're right though, it seems unlikely that a plugin will succeed. But, the fact that someone's working on creating one is more proof of how lacking the other workarounds are and how much people want this technology.
Hulu beating CNN, Stalking ESPN, but still a fraction of YouTube
Should IT change its policies on user-downloaded 'rogue apps'?
"Still, if you're accepted into a reputable program, you're guaranteed funding for four or five years."

That's not as true as you think it is.

It's important to know the source of the funding. Most schools (even reputable schools) make a guarantee that's tantamount to "we won't kick you out for lack of funding". Notably, that doesn't mean that you'll be funded to do research (hello, grading!), or even that they'll try to find you funding if you should happen to run out.

There are many ways to go wrong with this. The way that it usually works is that you're "guaranteed" funding for your first 2-3 years, and that money will come from a departmental slush fund for grad student training. After that, you've (hopefully) passed your exams and selected an advisor, and from then on, your funding is coming from his/her budget.

Woe to the fourth-year PhD student whose advisor loses funding! It can happen; I've seen it. Likewise, you're equally screwed if you happen to have a falling-out with your advisor after the departmental funding runs out. If you're viewed as a problem student, they won't necessarily kick you out, but they'll play a game of financial chicken with you, and I can pretty much guarantee that you won't win (I've seen this, too). It can also affect your ability to find a new advisor or collaborations; it's easy to become persona non grata when you're an under-funded grad student.

However, these are worst-case scenarios. Most commonly, you just get screwed by having to teach a lot more than you originally bargained. This is a terrible thing to do to a fifth- or sixth-year PhD student (who is also usually looking for jobs, writing a dissertation, publishing papers, etc.), but c'est la vie. You rarely see the blunt end of the funding stick until it's too late to do anything about it.
Dell May Be Signaling New Type of Innovation With Lattitude-On
It's the usual push and pull throughout history between the minimal and baroque, I think. Simplicity is often hard to get right.
Is Microsoft finally throwing in the towel on Vista?
You also tend to pick topics that people feel very strongly about and are sure to push buttons.
I like the theory except the need to depend on machetes as part of the cause. Machetes are a very recent invention in the timeline of evolution.

Maybe there were faster, scarier predators around in that area.
You don't have to know what's going on when people are being irrational. (And besides, we're being irrational almost all the time.) You only have to know how to charge us for being irrational.
What about a "translation mode" where every time you pointed at a word, there would be a pop-up definition. Probably also enable swipe-highlighting a passage and getting a translation as well.
I picked it for HN because it was out of the ordinary. If it was about Sicko beating Expelled, then I'd agree with you.
Inspiration for a generation of tech leaders
When trying to figure out pricing another thing I have done in the past is preserve your premium pricing. It somewhat adds on to #8 and how "Everyone Loves a Bargain".

You can use this in the beginning phases of selling a product or service. Give an intro price. Make sure you let the customer know that this is a special so you can preserve your premium pricing. Give a "Special" 15% discount for the first purchase... or for the first month. Then as business rolls on, you can go to your premium pricing.

No one likes a price increase, but it's not seen as an increase if you are removing a discount.
Science seems to be showing that your longevity is largely based on your metabolism. It's perhaps less accurate to think of a human's average lifespan in terms of years rather than in terms of calories burned.

Eating and then burning 10k calories a day probably ages you significantly faster than eating and burning 2k calories, possibly even 5x.

Also, most people, including elite athletes, are very poor at listening to their bodies and eating accordingly. There's a lot more to eating than simply being hungry. It's very much a habit. Google around for the psychology of eating, it's actually mind-boggling how complex and deeply rooted in our psyche it is. (Actually, most bodily functions go a lot deeper than we think.)

Ex-athletes are often very overweight specifically for that reason. They stop the exercise but not the eating.
Yeah. Somehow my quest for simplicity has always been bewilderingly complicated.
> I would much rather pay for something advertised as $120 than "4 easy payments of $29.99", because the latter seems like they're trying way to hard to trick me into paying a price I don't want to pay.

Look at all the people that bought an iPhone for a down payment of $299 and 24 easy payments of $70.