skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My immediate question is how much of this is due to the analysis, caching, mysql optimization and how much due to the beefing up of their database servers (50% faster CPUs, 4x RAM).

My impulse would be to think that the hardware is responsible for most of it, which makes the article somewhat less interesting.
Google Tips DoubleClick Integration Plans
with $999.99
If the gatekeepers aren't keeping apps out of the store, then they're not offering a useful service for users or developers. Instead, all they're doing is preventing users from getting at applications they might want and preventing developers from getting their applications (and updates) out.

If they'd have a better approval process, they wouldn't have to yank applications at all. It's one thing to simply not allow an application that nobody has ever seen and it's entirely another to make them just disappear after they've been bought. Which do you think is better for PR?

"can you imagine the firestorm if Apple were to reject apps on the basis of the quality of their ad copy?"

Firestorm? From who? Apple is vetting the applications, so I expect a higher quality experience. The ad copy might be written by the developer but it's part of the store. You don't expect bad ad copy on Amazon or Dell and you shouldn't expect it on Apple's store either. I'm expecting Apple to reject applications based on their quality. If users and developers have to jump through hoops, there should be a real tangible benefit.
The iPhone app store's rogues gallery: The 5 apps that have been 86ed
"If someone is on your left and someone else is on your right, you hear them on your left and on your right. You can't do this with a speakerphone, you can't do it with most videoconferencing systems and you can't do it with Skype."

if this is really useful why shouldn't Skype randomly place participants on 2D map which displays where each participant's voice should be coming from?
A far, far better thing to patent is "One more click buying," -- sell it to Amazon, and they have a monopoly by induction.
I'm surprised no one else has asked what the valuation algorithm is yet.

Anyone ambitious enough to survey a set of Younoodle inputs and outputs so we can estimate the valuation formula?
An official's policy is more important than the way it is presented
This is great advice.

I have a blog post I've been meaning to write called "What do you REALLY want to do for a living, aspiring entrepreneur?" inspired by a comment reply here where someone effectively said, "I'm not really that into growing a company, I just want to do a startup 'cause I love to build things and hate stupid managers". If your startup is successful, you generally grow (at least a bit). Before long, your job is hiring, BEING the stupid manager everyone gripes about, customer service, working with vendors and service providers, and doing sales/bizdev.
If you are looking for the most efficient algorithm, then I can say with good confidence that nobody has it figured out yet. The biggest problem with SM is that it is designed for declarative knowledge. I consider it revolutionary in this area, but nevertheless, focusing entirely on declarative knowledge isn't the best strategy either.

I'm not so sure about plasticity -- what kind of plasticity is this? How would you test it? Synaptogenesis is out of the question (because this is not a cellular-scale operation). Standardized tests? That itself is full of confounds.

I have come across some studies regarding memory decay. Perhaps some algorithm is involved. If you dig around I'm sure you can find something, but conclusive data about the effectiveness of various aglos... you'd think that if it exists, the whole world would know by now.
Perspectivism/Quanta. I know. I'm speaking from an objective perspective as it's how most non-philosphers presume the universe to work.
I believe Apple is a bit more concerned with the "does this app drain the battery" and "is this app secure" kind of 3rd-party app issues.
Suburbs in America are a freaky place. Well off people, with no sidewalks, and nothing to do, not locally I mean. And absolutely nowhere to walk to within 20 minutes walking distance. With nothing to do anywhere withing walking distance, and no sidewalks, people almost never stroll through the neighborhood. The results is, absolutely no community feelings, most people don't know their neighbors. But because everyone is well off, there's no crime. It's like a chicken farm but for kids. Freaky I tell you.
I wish I could remember... I'll let you know if I do.
I'll care more when I can buy a phone. I had so much hope for this platform...
DIY Flamethrower
That's a load of crap. "Terminating the agreement" is worthless if you've already done the work and delivered it.

I think considering how shady they're being, I wouldn't work for these guys unless they agree to a 25% payment upon signing the contract, then 25% upon completing the first milestone, then 50% at the end.
Given its brevity (in terms of length and citations), I suppose this writing is making a personal case for PI, from a mostly theoretical standpoint?

The mention of Skinner threw me off in the beginning, but my feeling is the PI you mention isn't a behaviorist one, but a metaphorical one? If so, I absolutely agree with this idea, and think we have enough technology to make it a reality.
It's been barely more than 6 months since they announced it, you do have an SDK, and it will be open source. I'd say that while there have been some hiccups, generally it's still a pretty good deal, and not that far off track.
Agreed with your first point but couldn't disagree more about your second. I can't see why you would think that talented, driven kids getting to know like-minded people who are passionate about their field would be a bad thing. I'm sure they have experience enough dealing with ordinary people for the other 48 weeks of their year.
I've known some very good consulting & software sales people who make > $250K a year. They started selling copiers in college. One guy raised money for a couple charities, door to door.
We thought quite a bit of this. Finally, we decided that there will be some people who won't trust us, and some who will. That does shrink our market quite a bit.

For those who are not willing to trust us, the hope is that they will at least use the iPhone app in isolation, thus helping to spread the word.

We plan to do couple of things to improve trust - a BBB membership is one and some sort of "hacker proof" seal (e.g.http://www.mcafeesecure.com/us/) is the other. Also we might pay for extended validation certificate, maybe that will work better than our basic certificate to assure people in safety.

The only other thing I can think of is teaming up with some sort of a big, trusted name. I have no idea how to get started with that.

Any other ideas are super welcome!
Terry Tao (Fields medalist) on time management
Schroedinger-like PageRank wave equation could revolutionise web rankings
Almost any device that connect to a network these days is really just something you are renting.
Sony Ericsson W550i Orchid White Unlocked
http://www.unlockcell.com/products/Sony-Ericsson-W550i-Orchid-White-(Unlocked)-8719.aspx
If Mozilla can disable third-party extensions remotely, whose browser is it, anyway?

[Anyone care to explain the difference between FireFox and the iPhone regarding how each product deals with rogue extensions?]
Marketing copy can go a long way towards solving this problem. If you "sell" people on how much you can be trusted, then more people will trust you. I think you need to do it better though.

Now, that sounds bad at first glance, but only if you can't be trusted. If, of course, you can be trusted, then there is nothing wrong with tweaking your copy to be more convincing. Its really the only solution, its not like you can show a customer your server room or explain everything in detail. No matter how much jargon you put in, people still won't be convinced. But switch that jargon into marketing copy and phrase it the right way, and people will buy in that their data is safe. Is that a bad thing? If you are doing everything you can to keep data safe, I'd say no.
hey man, congrats! must feel good after doing it full time :)
Grails: internationalization in the service
Today I spent some time by creation of localized messages in a service. Here is a small tutorial.
Ok, clearly I'm not equipped to do that myself. :-)

Any advice on where to hire a writer for that sort of thing and how expensive is that going to be?
New Relic is pretty sick. Definitely recommended.
Its not very intuitive. Right now the design (especially the font) makes you look shady. Are you shady? You don't tell me you're not. In fact, you don't tell me much at all. Am I even a customer you're looking for? What can your service do for me? I think you need to work on the marketing side a bit.
A Geek's Guide to Great Service
Don't turn on one-click ordering.
does this mean more users?
How to Be Persuasive
Business negotiation nessons from my recent mugging
2 thugs want 75 cents for a swisher sweet but are their negotiation tactics persuasive enough?
Is just loading... on mine as well (and I gave it plenty of time). User agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1 FirePHP/0.1.0.3

I also have Firebug 1.2.0b4 installed.
Interesting advice on the knives.

But perhaps a chef's needs are different from an ordinary person's, in that a chef has a lackey to sharpen his knives every night? For those of us who are too lazy to sharpen our knives regularly, perhaps a $100 knife is worthwhile?
i haven't read such a powerfully disconcerting and interesting article in a long time.
Most of the information it requests is pretty generic. If you've raised a round and haven't announced it yet, then by all means, don't give it out.

However, for many startups, funding details will be public (and available via crunchbase or startupsearch) -- and generic ownership percentages can be pretty easily inferred. Asking whether investors own <10% or 10-40%, etc, isn't really saying much.

As for the rest of the information (mostly how the team relates to each other, their background, and previous work experience), I can't imagine this would be sensitive either, but if it is, by all means, don't give it out.
Let's say your employer lied to you in the interview, then fired you because you stuck to the original agreement. Then they lied about the reason they fired you so that you will have a difficult time getting unemployment benefits and you will have no reference to use for future interviews. What should you do?

A lawyer will be able to give you much better advise than I can. My guess is that your lawyer will help you get a nice little severance package and help ensure that your lying, cheating employer provides you with a solid reference to help you attain future employment.

I am not saying that you should get a lawyer so that you can sue them; I am just saying that a lawyer will be very helpful to understand the situation and for negotiating the terms of your departure. A lawyer's stationary is a very valuable negotiation tool.

Obviously, you should never sign anything or agree to anything, without your lawyer's advice. I think such a sneaky employer might try to trick you into signing away your rights immediately when they fire you. But, if you refuse to sign, what are they going to do? Fire you again?
Inbox Heaven - The Ultimate Email Setup
Some Actually Purchased The $999 App for the iPhone
You don't expect bad ad copy on Amazon or Dell

You've never read bad ad copy on Amazon? You fortunate soul.

It's true, Apple could choose to run their platform more like Dell runs its third-party outlet, or Sony runs Playstation: With a relative handful of very strictly quality-controlled apps. We know they could do that if they wanted to, because they did so all last year... and they were met by an army of jailbreakers and lots of complaints from developers and advanced users. So now Apple is trying something else.

Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's approval policy tightens up in the future. Right now I believe they're still working through an enormous backlog. The easiest way to get through the backlog is to release apps unless there's an obvious reason not to.

In the meantime, why not develop a third-party rating service to pick out quality iPhone apps? If such a service is as valuable as you believe it is, and Apple's leaving that money on the table, why not pick it up?
There's that and the fact that while you do hear this advice a lot, chef's (at least ones that actually cook) and busy line cooks typically walk into work with a knife case. It isn't filled with $20 knives. If you're using a tool for many hours a day, it pays to have a really nice tool. Even if it's only marginally nicer, that margin adds up. (It may never add up for the home cook, but that's another debate.)

But if you're making an order to fill out your kitchen, it's no surprise the cheap but fully functional knives will be ordered. $20 * 10 is a lot easier to justify than $100 * 10.
This is a silly post. As others have said, there's no problem making "most elements of the set P have property Q", even when the set P is very large or infinite. "Most real numbers are not integers. In fact, almost all real numbers are not integers."

The problem with making pronouncements about "most bloggers" or "most youtube videos" is that we just don't know enough about those sets. They're large and new and rapidly-changing, and although many of us have experience with a large number of blogs or youtube videos, our experience is strongly biased towards the ones we find interesting, so we don't know much about the averages.
Calling all COBOLers
Saying that "50% of positive integers (Z+) are divisible 2" is probably true no matter what definition you use. But it's also fair to say that whatever you do mean by that does not generalize in the natural ways you'd expect it to from dealing with finite sets.
To be honest, I thought the story was rather stupid. The lesson about SEO would have been more digestible as a "top ten SEO tricks list", and there really is nothing wrong with continuously trying to improve one's site. It is not an unavoidable consequence of trying to improve one's site to end up using black hat SEO tricks. So the story was plain wrong. Maybe the one moral is to not rely on SEO consultants because they might do stuff to your site that is not really beneficial - OK. But to make that single point, the story was too long.
If used responsibly, I don't understand why this is a big deal. In my opinion it's a pretty smart thing to have in place (Though I would hope they would put some verification into the process in the future as not to be spoofed). Imagine if a malicious app did get out of hand. Every trash blog is drooling to write that very article. Apple's already had a perfect opportunity to use it in the very way we're all worried about (Netshare) and they haven't. If just makes me think that it's only purpose is to block applications that are malicious to the enduser and nothing else. I guess only time will really tell.
This is the common behaviour in most ecommerce sites so is a reasonable assumption. When money is changing hands, verification should be standard practice.
BoxOffice was an awesome App. It aggregated freely available information in a useful way. It was attractive. The description is well written. None of the sites it aggregated information from objected to it. Yet they pulled this one. Something is definitely wrong!
Ahhh, they do deep fry very nicely, being made of primarrrily flour and lard.
I thought that be for pirates. Mayhaps that be the arrPhone?
I've missed the part where they have to upgrade millions of readers. Could you provide a reference?
Terry Tao's blog and wiki also has a lot of useful articles about productivity, professional and personal growth, vocational matters related to maths, etc. Worth visiting it.
IBM exec on industry-specific open source apps: 'I'm tired of waiting'
Yeah there is a lot of stuff in there I wouldn't say today. That's why I linked to it, as an example of my failing to understand intrinsic motivation.
Looks neat, I'll have to try it out. Admittedly for someone like me working with a very small team pencil/paper layouts are fastest (and cheapest).

Previously, if I needed wireframes of the sort that Balsamiq appears to be good for, I'd use Omnigraffle. But I've known others to use everything from Photoshop to Illustrator to Visio to Excel. And, of course, for web apps and wesbsites, html mockups are always in the mix.

At the end of the day, you need to use what works well for you and anyone else you are working with. But a hybrid approach that mixes different tools depending on the task is generally what I'm after.
I have heard that the bicycle couriers often end up with destroyed knees. Makes me avoid the job.
Paragraphs, please!
How Not To Sell Out: Talk by Matt Haughey of MeFi on growing a site into a small business
Trough third-party apps my Windows Mobile phone has automatic number-lookup, gmail, ability to look up my contacts location on google maps and what not. That is all cool. It is all subtle.

I assume it's not what the author meant, but reading that, the way he phrased himself, the only thing I could think of was having reddit invading my phone and all my calls interupted because there was new Obama news.

No I don't want that.

I wan't application that works. If they need network or not is irrelevant. They need to work, and most importantly: I shouldn't have to go to a Apple AppStore to get them.
"We know they could do that if they wanted to, because they did so all last year..."

How is Apple not allowing any 3rd party applications like how Sony runs the Playstation?

"they were met by an army of jailbreakers and lots of complaints from developers and advanced users. So now Apple is trying something else."

...And they're still met with an army of jailbreakers and lots of complaints from developers and advanced users.

What we have now is the worst the both worlds: a closed platform without any closed platform benefits. I'd be just as happy if they opened the whole thing up. Or providing a tighter app store while opening the whole thing up.

And yes, they have enormous backlog but it's never going to go away because every update of every application also needs to go through the process. Every app that has been approved today will have to be approved again and again and again.
You are a graphics developer, you are making an image for a business card. You need to upload it somewhere for the customer to see and make comments on it.

You are uploading documents that might have sales reports, contacts that might buy your products.

You have a calendar of events including a schedule of when to meet clients.
While I get the basic idea of the article, the author obviously has no idea what he is talking about.

(absolute numbers are still meaningful in marketplaces where the number of products grows by orders of magnitude overnight, but percentages are not)

Anyone care to explain to me how this is even mathematically possible?
This is probably good advice.

But if you want to practice your sales skills, instead of getting involved in an existing door-to-door sales and/or multi-level-marketing racket, why not start your own door-to-door sales business? Pick a product, buy a trunkload of it, then try to sell it. You'll not only get the experience in sales, you'll get experience at choosing products that the consumer wants, and you'll get to keep all your profit (err, minus taxes) instead of a measly 10% commission.
I usually go for books first. The library. Check out what other sites are doing is big. Take a look at sites that attract a lot of users that love them. Flickr, some of the newer 2.0 sites especially. They have a way of connecting with their users that is repeated throughout their copy.

I mean, to be successful, your actions have to match your words. But a lot of the phrasing is about assurance, about connecting, about giving them impression that you're there and you got your customer's back.

Don't be too concerned, your competitors don't do it well either.

Try reading through apps at the app store and marking down which ones really make you want to buy them. Then go back and find the similarities of how they present themselves.
"2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS" Holy cow, I didn't realize you could stuff 128GB into a server.
This is fantastic advice.

When I moved to California in the jobless pit of the dot-com bubble burst, my first two jobs involved knocking on doors. The first was soliciting donations for the D.A.R.E. program for a Sydcor company called "Synergistic Marketing Concepts". The second was pushing Electrolux vacuums.

Nothing forces a geek to face their social ineptitude like knocking on a door and trying to convince an annoyed stranger that they should trust you enough to give you money. I was never very good at either job, but I managed to keep from starving. By getting from "terrible" to "barely competent", I learned some essential communication skills that have helped me greatly as a hacker.

Besides direct sales, another good training is to do technical support for a terrible company; the worse the product, the better the experience. If it's related to finances in some way so that your customers don't get paid if it doesn't work, so much the better. When you hear raw unadulterated panic in the voice of a customer, and the rage that this panic creates, and learn to convince them that you're going to make everything alright, it forces you to have a lot of compassion for users.
I guess I would lump that under b).
Do you really need CouchDB in particular for this? Any Berkeley DB-style key-value pair database would excel at this.

Languages like Python have high-level wrappers that let you access such databases like a normal hash:

wordpairs[foo] = wordpairs[foo] + k # reads from disk then writes

In my experience you can get really fast simple persistence with basically no code this way. It's not as fast as can possibly, but then again the overhead of communicating via JSON and HTTP isn't, either.

Maybe I'm missing something.
Y Combinator Challenge #14 - Tools for Measurement
Yeah, you're right. What I was referring to would only occur if he didn't have much interaction with ordinary people the rest of the time.
"Apple bashing" isn't the new anything. Semi-informed yay/boo-{apple,commodore,ibm} thing has been going on since at least the mid '80s when you could buy software on floppy disks at your local Wal-Mart/K-Mart, and probably before that but I wasn't old enough to witness it.

The most notable thing about the article in question is that the author seems surprised and concerned that this functionality is there and that there isn't a huge banner on apple.com about it.

RIM has access to the SSL keys used to encrypt traffic between Blackberry handsets and the BES (I don't recall if they do Handset-RIM and RIM-BES crypto or the keys are just escrowed). There are allegedly Nokia handset firmwares that allow silent keying of the microphone, and OnStar has been used by the US government in the same way allegedly, as well.

For science sake people, know what decade you're living in. Network providers aren't going to sell you a device that they can't remotely manage. Unless you're bringing a device to the network yourself it's definitely "owned" in at least the script kiddie sense by the carriers.
As a whole it is not great advice. It has two parts: the good one is "Thinking About Starting a Business? Try a Sales Job" and the evil one is an advertising of Cutco Cutlery and similar businesses.

"Sales reps may have to buy their own demonstration equipment." It is a signature of a pyramid scheme. Encouraging young adults to participate in such scheme is evil.