skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of books on market research, customer development, and internet marketing (real books and serious ebooks/classes) that go much deeper into the topic. Have you been reading those, or just blog posts?

Blog posts are by nature superficial, and more importantly, if you're reading blog posts by people in the tech world about marketing, you're probably picking the wrong teachers to learn from.

As a biz book nerd, who reads probably 30 biz books a year (for the last 12 years), I've never found one or even two resources that are end-to-end adequate. What I've learned, I've pieced together from hundreds of sources, including some meant for enterprise (and adapted for my needs), like _Pricing with Confidence_, and taking vague hand-wavy inspiration (_Purple Cow_) and looking for specific, real-world actions to make it concrete.

That's why I created my "30x500" course: to be a super-concise, super-specific crash course for nerd types (like me) who want to create their first product and want to do it with as little risk of failure as possible. I teach systems. I'm not gonna really pitch it here, cuz it's neither the time nor the place, but to say that I know what you're talking about -- and the stuff IS out there.

It either takes digging and work to piece it together into a strategy, or a willingness to shell out for something accelerated. My course is not the only one where you can learn how to do market research -- but you're going to be hard pressed to find it in one book, or two books, or 10 books, because the strategies and techniques to reduce risk are very valuable. And they take a LOT of work to create… I've spent hundreds of hours on building my course, doing research, tweaking the teaching methods & order, the metaphors, the workbooks, the homework, the supporting materials.

You'll rarely find that level of energy and diligence put into a business book, unless it's a byproduct of "workshopping" (like the GTD system was a workshop long before it was a book). Teaching workshops is vastly more profitable, and in a lot of ways more emotionally rewarding, than selling a book. So as blog posts are to books, books are to live classes & workshops. There's no equivalent reward for selling a $20 - $30 book with that kind of information in it... unless you can turn around and sell something more expensive, and leverage fame, like David Allen did.

That aside, there are courses & workshops where you can learn a lot more about step #1 -- other than mine! I've found these two to be excellent at the "figuring out what to sell" side of things: Presell Formula by Clay Collins, and Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.

Laugh if you must, yep it's internet marketer slumming, but they're really good at what they do. A person who wants to succeed won't sneer at any source of workable knowledge.
We're all entitled to our political views. Mine are that regulation and deregulation are both potentially dangerous, but that if we all assume the worst--that no regulation can ever be effective, so we shouldn't have any--we'll get nowhere fast. So I advocate for regulations that make sense, despite being aware that politics isn't always so logical or straightforward.
I got an iPad 2. It isn't "buggy as hell," but I think I'd accept 10 other bad bugs instead of the wifi connection bug the iPad has (and has apparently had for a year, reading the forums).
I had a weird experience where I was working night shift two nights a week while going to university. I was also writing for a MUD and my deadline was looming. A two week semester break occurred, and for that two weeks I lived in a strange four-hour sleep/wake cycle, broken only by my work shifts.

It was really strange to spend four hours writing, say from 6am, then sleep 10-2pm, get up for another four hours, sleep 6-10pm etc. Not sustainable, but was an interesting experience to have. Gave me an insight into how screwed up shift workers can get, too.
This. So much this. After I had graduated, I had the chance to read some discussion from people who went to private schools, and ipince is 100% right.
Also, EMC owns a significant majority of the company.
http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/matter/index.html

a choose-your-own-adventure kind of like this, released a week or two ago by Andrew Plotkin.
It's average now, slightly better than a base Comcast connection, but that's about it. (I can compare directly since I lived on campus two years and off the last two). I suppose it would depend on what you were doing that would make it matter whether Google Fiber was important or not, but certainly for running large scale things, especially simulations from cloud based sources, Google Fiber would be massively appealing. I'd argue that the effect of ultra high speed internet on a large population base isn't predictable and could only be a positive for the region in terms of drawing developers et al. Also, thank you for laughing at your pun instead of crassly saying "pun not intended."
That talk knocked my socks off and pretty much drove me to my own bastardized version of "Naked Objects"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_objects

[Edit: upon re-reading it again: in P006 he says blackboxes are hard to reuse because they hide performance characteristics? I can think of a better reason, actually]
I was wondering about this myself. There's a fixed total supply of bitcoins, and a non-zero rate of loss can be expected - this doesn't seem like a good long-term combination.
Ridiculously easy world times and meetings across time zones
Yeah: ingratiating themselves to the people with money, and damn the consequences.

They don't have to understand the consequences - they don't consider themselves to be affected. Only little people serve time, duh!
The technology was specifically meant to look like what could be possible ~50 years from its release.
This is a Washington State plan. It's for an unmarried 32yo male. It's actually $91. Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield, $3500 deductible, $5000 out of pocket maximum.
You can include a transaction bounty (traditionally 0.01 BTC) with your payment which the verifiers receive if they're the first to verify your payment. Effectively, this puts your transaction at the top of the priority queue. When you're connected to a healthy number of peers, this can bring down the verification time down to seconds.

Isn't transaction verification tied to block generation, and isn't block generation limited to about 1 every 10 minutes?
It sounds like you're a remote contractor with precisely one client, where relations are not that great. No problem, us contractors have a really easy solution for that one. It's a seller's market for talent right now.

P.S. Next time, leave the title, take the money.
I'm glad you and others seem to like the article, but I'm perplexed by the weight everyone is giving the title. I have a 2006 letter from the U.S. Attorney's office saying that (as of that time) they are considering opening a criminal investigation into my actions under a statute that requires automatic jail time. The President wants to make this kind of letter more common, or skip the letter step altogether.

Not every piece of literature ever written has a title that perfectly summarizes the contents. I like my title, but regardless, the issues discussed in the piece are what's important.
What about project-wide find and replace? I have been looking to switch to vim, but I do this fairly often and don't see anything that compares to what a good ide can do in vim (without bash command madness).
Not to be shackled to iTunes is more than enough reasons for me to get a Honeycomb tablet.
I am in almost the same exact situation as you. Hopefully my experience can help you a bit.

I am the lead/senior web developer at my company (a very small startup thats been around a couple of years). I am paid ridiculously little for the kind of work I do with NO benefits. I didn't realize this at first because I was so naive fresh out of college, and I didn't know that the normal entry level salary for my position was much higher. I do have a good relationship with my boss, and I've managed to talk him into nudging up my pay a little bit. However its become very clear that it will take forever (and maybe never) to finally get closer to what I deserve, not to mention standard benefits. And check this out, after over a year of working there, I'm still a contractor! (AKA, more taxes for me because he isn't willing to pay his share by putting me on payroll)

Your main question is about loyalty. Well, I feel the same as you. My company is so dependent on me that it really would hurt it badly if I left. And to make matters worse, I actually LOVE the work that I do. One side of me feels awful- like adopting an animal from a shelter and taking it back because I can't afford it. The other side wants proper compensation, gosh darn-it.

I did recently make the decision to leave, however, and it took me months to accept that I needed to. (I am currently having interviews for new jobs right now). I talked to my boss to let him know that I am leaving (and why), and I can tell he is pretty upset because he put all of his eggs in one basket with me and is going to have a really tough time replacing me. However, since we have a good relationship, he will work with me to have a good transition out of the company (and give me good reviews!).

I would suggest, like everyone else here has already, that you send out your resume immediately (after making sure to update it, of course). Because you do have a job and won't have to worry about money, you can really take the time to make yourself look awesome and land a great job. Look at it this way: you may feel bad about leaving because they are so dependent on you, but hopefully this experience will make them realize that they need to value and take care of their employees more.
Wow, the http://www.telescopictext.org/ website is a very slick tool to create your own.

I created an example one here (made a few typos that I couldn't figure out how to fix):

http://www.telescopictext.org/text/AYeELHzYgVV8b
What really chaps my hide in particular is that Google doesn't allow folks to track their rankings in anywhere near the accuracy or detail that they need to effectively manage their business

Try Ginzametrics. They're a YC company and work great! (I don't work for them, just use their product)
Reason 8:
Vim keystrokes can be incorporated into ex scripts, either alone or in "here" scripts. These commands are already useful, they can do stuff like replace strings in lines that are N lines above or below lines holding another string, and they can be leveraged further via scripting.

For example, a search and replace across files under the working directory:

tgt_string=$1

repl_string=$2

for file_name in $(grep -rl "$tgt_str")

do

ex - $file_name << END_HERE_SCRIPT

%s/$tgt_string/$repl_string/g

wq

END_HERE_SCRIPT

done

Yes, the indentation of the "here" script is ugly, white space before line texts can bork execution.

Yes, sed or awk can do very similar things, maybe better. My point is, it's nice to get some of these capabilities just by knowing your editor.

(Ed: Sorry about the formatting, if I don't double-space the script it turns into one large text clump.)
That will be awesome! I'll love to see how far they have gone.

Anyway i can contact you without posting my email add here?
Comparing a town with ~300,000 people to a metropolitan area to a major city like SF/Bay Area isn't exactly a fair fight. Obviously SV is going to be better at almost everything. Compared to almost any city its size, Pittsburgh is awesome as far as cost of living, culture, education, and food go.

And your sentiments about the culture here are a bit off. It's definitely much more blue-collar than SV, which may be why you get that impression. But it's a far cry from being anti-ambitious.
> Why do these guys think that out of the blue, Android tablets are going to just miraculously going to start being great?

Possibly because that's exactly what happened with Android phones? Some of the early Android phones (G1, Hero, etc) were pretty buggy, slow, and kind of wonky. The original Droid was decent, then the N1 came out and was seriously competitive. And there's been basically a string of steadily improving models since then.

It seems reasonable to assume the Android tablet market will proceed similarly.
You're right about that, but Dvorak is much easier on the hands. The average distance travelled by your fingers is greatly reduced. (It looks like Colemak beats both, though: http://colemak.com/Compare.)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think transaction verification is tied to generating new blocks.

From how I understand it, verification involves:

1. Confirming the privately-signed transaction against the public key of the source wallet (transactions not forged).

2. Confirming against the historical transaction chain that the coins actually belong to the source wallet (coins not forged).

3. Passing the verified transaction along to other peers.
yea, i saw the github repository and even though they relatively active there, they have gone unusually quiet so was just wondering how their progress has been so far. 1 year in the tech industry is a fairly long time. :)
> the kind of company that takes advantage of you when you're ignorant isn't the kind of company you want to work for even after you're fully-informed and can renegotiate a better deal.

This is the important bit. Don't waste loyalty on someone who isn't loyal back. There's literally nothing in it for you; it will only bring you pain, frustration and health problems.

Sure, I have no problem working for an illoyal employer, and most of us do. I'll do the most skilled work I can, with a professional attitude, as long as I get my negotiated pay. But, they can not expect any loyalty if things go bad.

If my employer refuses to compensate when people run off from the family dinner to help out during emergencies, that is acceptable. The contract only says they are required to pay for my 8 hours per day. But, then they should not expect me to answer the phone outside working hours; I don't care if there's a crisis at Important Customer's site. The contract only says I have to work for 8 hours per day.

If my employer has a tendency to lay off people to meet arbitrary profit goals, that is also acceptable. It's business - they're here to make money. But, I will also not hesitate to jump ship to take better paid jobs when given the opportunity. I don't care if I'm the only person left who knows Technology Foo. It's business - I have kids to feed and loans to pay.

You should not be spiteful, you should just refuse to be exploited. Life's too short to spend in abusive relationships.
I like logging for this, but the concept is basically the same. Being able to switch on debug logging on a running system has saved the day more than once for me.
Another caveat: it's unsafe to embed arbitrary JSON in an HTML <script> tag, because a string containing "</script>" will get picked up by the parser.

This particular case can be patched by replacing "</" with "<\/".
I wonder if a Political Science forum's discussion on web apps would have the same quality as politics threads on HN.
I don't see how those are related at all. Care to clarify?
It was much more interesting than foldr.com.
Killer read. Reinforces my personal belief that the way out of the dark hole of software complexity are programming languages that:

* Emphasize protocols, de-emphasize hierarchies
* Support compile time meta-programming
* Support flexible verification (optional type checker /
contracts / predicate dispatch)

The talk also covers the crux of why OO inheritance is the pits - you inherit the broken implementation. Working against protocols, which may seem initially inconvenient, actually allow you to avoid a future tarpit.
I'm renting a Ford Edge right now. After a few minutes, the radio will mute itself until you buckle your seatbelt. The car is configured to limit your speed to 80 MPH or under.

Even though I drive with my seatbelt on under 80 MPH anyways, it's really annoying for my car to tell me what to do.
Managing Your Own Psychology - the most difficult CEO skill
The Bitcoin protocol allows for 8 decimals worth of divisibility, meaning that there are actually 2.1E16 or 21 quadrillion
"units" (aka "Satoshi's") available.
I respectfully believe you are grossly misinformed. Do you know any teachers personally? It varies across the country, but local teachers are paid half the salary of managers and software developers after receiving the same amount of education, yet they're expected to spend every waking hour dealing with students. Here are some concrete numbers for a junior high teacher:

7 classes per term, average of 40 students per class = 280 students total. There are 7 classes per day of 45 minutes each, with 5 minutes between classes and a 30 minute lunch. Teachers have to meet with students before and/or after school and monitor students between classes, so they're typically at school and busy for 8 hours or more per day with no breaks except maybe lunch. You try locking yourself in a building with 1000 or more shouting young teenagers for 8 hours straight without so much as a bathroom break.

If a teacher assigns a homework assignment every day and spends three hours per day (at home) grading assignments, then each student gets less than one minute of attention per assignment. Every student has his or her own points of confusion on the subject matter, which cannot be addressed in just one minute per day, and using class time to broadly address the questions of a few students slows down the students who don't have the same questions.

Notice I didn't include any time for designing lesson plans and presentations, writing grant proposals, creating assignments, or meeting with parents, let alone spending time with their families (which often enough just doesn't happen).

Regarding "furniture problems:" desks are a fixed size, they have to be spaced apart enough for students and teachers to reach them without tripping, and the classroom also needs presentation space at the front, a teacher's desk, and storage space. Fire codes specify maximum occupancy limits for rooms. There's only so much room available for desks.

Maybe you have to see the combined exasperation and exhaustion of an overworked and underpaid teacher to appreciate the level of decay present in our public school systems. This is an area where averages and statistics are misleading.
Since presenting a link to such a site is illegal, wouldn't it be difficult for the government agency to communicate the information within it's own agency?

If they decide that certain means of communicating the information do not form a criminal act, then what would prevent the arbitrary individual from forming the same means, and giving a link to that, instead?

Or, are law makers and their proxies inherently immune from their own laws?
Decoding business language 101: Whenever someone uses the the word "honestly" they are lying.
My understanding was that the device did work there was just a human element to the interpretation.
If he is going to have such a tough time replacing you, he should pay you more and/or give you significant equity.

It doesn't make sense that he should take advantage of you for over a year, and then act all upset when you finally get a clue and quit.

I seriously /boggle at employers like this.
Attempted Summary:

Black boxes are hard to reuse because the hidden implementation details impact the client e.g. GUIs don't scale to thousands of windows, LRU caching is sometimes not optimal.

The proposed solution is "meta-interfaces" that let the client control how the interface maps to an implementation. For example, a cache could represent pages with objects that participate in swapping policy. The client could subclass the page class to provide a custom policy. It's important to separate the base/meta interfaces.

Some other more exotic forms of meta-interface are mentioned involving reflection and dynamic code generation, but no real details are given. It's also acknowledged that the OO approach often results in fragmentation i.e. too many objects.

My thoughts:

The meta-interface concept is pervasive today, in the form of composable object models and dependency injection. But these models are still hard to design and suffer from the fragmentation problem.
A benchmark comparison of Node.js, Tornado, and 3 Erlang servers
The end of BlackBerry
Though not professional licensing, we had an example of the unintended consequences of licensing here (Minneapolis) when there was a proposal to license community gardens. Though the licensing would not be particularly expensive it would also mean gardens would require insurance, because the city would have liability if something happened at a licensed location (but as long as the city simply wasn't involved no one could sue the city). The result of course would simply halt these otherwise entirely non-commercial efforts, as much out of bureaucratic overhead as financial.
As another data point, I'm paying ~$140/month for a $2.5k-deductible, HSA-enabled plan at 38, in UT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyKey

It should be configurable, the rental company probably programmed the key they gave you.

When I rented a Penske truck, it was speed limited to 75mph, which I don't object too, 26" diesel truck over 75mph is a scary thing, even when going in a straight line through fields of corn.
Fantastic reportage I wouldn't normally expect from TechCrunch (mainly because I don't read it much... is this standard?)

I love reading about tech scenes in developing and/or impoverished countries.
http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...

This echoes your (and Lukas's) sentiments.
Ask HN: What is Boston hacking on?
Hey all,

My name is Kevin McCarthy and I'm a writer at BostInnovation.com, a Boston-based publication. I focus on tech and web/mobile development (see here: http://bostinnovation.com/tag/programming/).

I'm curious: what is Boston hacking on? If you'd like, post a comment on this to let me know. Hopefully, I'll be constructing a view pieces on the responses.

Thanks everyone!
I think this was written under the assumption that only children are smart enough to use electronic equipment.

This was a common theme in the 80s and early 90s when talking about computers and videogames and setting the clock on your VCR to something other than 12:00.
I strongly feel that just like the iPhone, the iPad will be the gold standard for tablets. And just like the iPhone, it will have competition from an open challenger.

However, in the case of tablet, I strongly feel that the challenger is NOT android. Android works well on a phone, but a tablet is a different experience and it needs certain design elements which, frankly, Google has not proven capable of doing.

I have no doubt the challenger will be linux based, but it seems more likely that the it will be someone with a design and usability bent rather than technical-only acumen.

However, all of the challengers could be undone if they cannot play well with quality apps. Getting developers to your platform is absolutely key.
Kung Fu Tetris
It is. Transaction fees are (theoretically) supposed to provide incentive to be a block solver, and the solver can choose what transactions to include and what to ignore, so it's in their best interest to include ones that have fees. As usage increases, this means more and more work for the solvers, so they're more likely to drop things they can't make money on.
The generating of new blocks is what sets the transaction "in stone". And the more blocks past a transaction's inclusion, the harder it is to reverse that transaction - more blocks = more certain you have actually received the money.

Prior to being included in a block, it's entirely possible for the payer to issue the same money to multiple recipients. Once it's in, it's assured that only one is included, and others are therefore invalid. So it's in recipients' best interests to wait for a few blocks before totally accepting something as "paid".