skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"done what 3dRealms would have done with that 6 million."

What 3D Realms claimed, and would have liked Take-Two to believe, that they would have done. Something they claimed they were on the verge of achieving for a decade, and which never came to fruition. What makes you believe they would have accomplished in that final year what they had failed to accomplish for the past decade? What makes you believe they would not simply have started over again?

I find it questionable that 3D Realms would ever have released DNF on their own. I think they would have burned through that money and still not have had a finalized product to show for it, as they seem to have been doing for quite a while, which is probably why the publisher declined to give them the money.
I think that you're zooming into this too much and missing the point.

Think about the difference between success in the military versus success in a small business. In the Army, a protocol faux pas or a single ill-considered statement can implode your career path. Understanding of and adherence to the rules is job 1.

In a startup mode, you can ignore conventions/rules, because those things are often not relevant to a tiny company. That doesn't mean that you have carte blanche to rob a liquor store -- but it does mean that you don't need approval from a VP to fill out a 4 page expense report to buy a bottle of booze for a client.
I don't disagree with your statements -- their is definitely a spectrum of each type of cofounder.

However, out of the spectrum of idea guys, one signal I look for is their desire to pursue their idea. One great way to do that -- teach themselves to code.

It doesn't mean that their ideas aren't any good. But at a glance, if someone has an idea that they believe in enough to teach themselves basic skils... well, then they become more than just an idea guy.

Someone who is unwilling to teach themselves basic programming has no business in a web startup.
TELL HN: Just re-launched our design portfolio
http://www.Masswerks.com

Recently re-designed our portfolio. We are a small design / dev agency focusing on web apps and UI design. I wanted to get some feedback from you guys on the design(s) and portfolio.

*cool note: spinback in our portfolio was recently acquired by buddymedia :)
Plain text files are a communication protocol.

Files allow you to give code to your friends without extraordinary means, to use generalized programs like git and grep, and to post a copy up on the web.

Files also mean that your IDE doesn't have to try to be an OS. (Still can if it wants to, hello Emacs.)
So, if I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that before Warren Buffet was even born, he was destined to become the successful investor we know? Further, that he shouldn't take any credit for thinking through all his decisions and coming up with the more profitable choice enough to substantially beat out millions of other investors?

To answer your question, no, we don't laud the winner's coin flipping ability, because, in the absence of cheating, the person's actions and decisions don't influence the outcome. All participants have an exactly equal chance at being the end winner, and nothing will change that. However, some savvy investors, like Warren Buffet, are able to ensure they win over others using the stock market; the difference being that their decision making does directly influence whether they "win" or "lose".

It seems to me you're suggesting investors could use coin flipping to make all investment decisions, and that makes as much sense as trying to decide by other means, since they don't know what they are doing anyway. Correct?
Actually he addresses that and proposes syntax to address it.

let fib = fun(N) -> fib(N, 1, 0) end
in
fib(N, A, B) when N < 2 -> A;
fib(N, A, B) -> fib(N-1, A+B, A).
end.

Where everything in the "in" block would be hidden.
I've been using Duostack and love it (aside from the low db quotas). Should I be worried? What will the transition be like?
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not sure about the kitchen jar one since I don't know if I take too many pictures or too few! My keep rate is higher than 1% because family and friends expect to see a few photos of the things I do. On my last trip, I took about four hundred pictures and picked about twenty for a quick slide show for friends. (That's a week's worth of pictures. Even on a trip by myself I take less than a hundred a day.)

Can you suggest a place online for finding a critique group?
Try a convertible debt note. YC has a sample contract for it somewhere (can't find it), it means you decide their equity later when you do a larger raise or other things happen.
+1!

When discussions about interviewing and hiring come up, I always like to remember that these things are strategies, and false negatives are simply a cost of doing business. While I'm sure we can find of some great businesspeople with good ideas who didn't teach themselves some simple programming, a strategy of only working with those who did is probably still an excellent filter that will get rid of far more false positives than trip over false engatives.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiIsNotWikipedia
Dude, I had the idea on the weekend to make slippers with Sigmund Freud's head on them. We'd call them freudian slippers. Now, go make some slippers and pay me for this idea.
I also find it interesting. "Software as social commentary" - this single expression gives me a lot of though-food to think about. I think this topic should be explored further. Thanks :).

I remember one game that did, by mere coincidence, serve as a social commentary - Volcanic Airlines (http://www.miniclip.com/games/volcanic-airways/en/). I believe was released just after April 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. It got an interesting reception here in Poland.

Not long before, the president of Poland along with many other people died in a plane crash. An official funeral was held, and many heads of states from all around the world announced that they will be arriving to Poland. Many of them later canceled their visits because of the ash cloud. However, the president of Georgia, M. Saakaszwili, arrived late, taking the trip through five different countries to get to the funeral. It made a great impression on people in Poland, and one of the effects was that the video game I mentioned before, the "Volcanic Airlines", was circulating around the polish Internet labeled as "Saakaszwili flies to Poland", or something similar.
I was looking at an HP laptop online last night and saw it has a "Brightview" screen. This description of it, apparently from the company that makes the screens, suggests that, while glossy, it is also anti-reflective.

Does anyone know if that means it is more like a matte screen than a regular glossy screen or not really?
http://www.screentekinc.com/hp-compaq-brightview-lcd-screens...
I suspect one of the biggest issues with App Cloud is going to be pricing. Brightcove have never been about being affordable, they've been about premium hosting for customers who can afford to foot their bills.
Hot & Sexy Sameera Reddy Wallpapers, Sameera Reddy Photos, Pictures, Images
I mean, wouldn't it be awesome if he took his money and invested it in a non-profit Foundation for Beautiful Evidence?
Matthew, we'll work our asses off to make the transition as painless as possible. You should receive an email soon with all the details. Don't hesitate to get in touch with us directly.
Awesome! I can't wait to redeem the 50% any plan for LIFE! :)
They can't make country's networks secure by covering them with an `one-size-fits-all' global firewall either.

True, but I don't think that's central to what most governments are seeking to do, if it is as all. Even the US "kill switch bill" was almost entirely about things other than the so-called "kill switch".

Could you explain what does that `anthropomorphic Stuxnet' stand for?

The "anthropomorphic" bit was just me being excessively silly and forgetting that it's not a very common word even among native English speakers. My apologies. Stuxnet does not, in fact, giggle.

As for Stuxnet: As jrockway correctly pointed out you can secure a network against attacks from the Internet by not connecting it to the Internet. But, on the other hand, one of the most notable attacks in recent history, and one that I think that governments have in mind when thinking about cybersecurity, is an attack that targeted (and reached) systems which weren't connected to the Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is a term coined in the mid 1700s to refer to any attribution of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to non-human animals or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts, such as god(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
Stuxnet attacked Windows systems using an unprecedented four zero-day attacks (plus the CPLINK vulnerability and a vulnerability used by the Conficker worm) It is initially spread using infected removable drives such as USB flash drives, and then uses other exploits and techniques such as peer-to-peer RPC to infect and update other computers inside private networks that are not directly connected to the Internet.
Chrome+Google.com gave them a great way to short circuit the chicken and egg problem. For example SDCH, their GZip replacement is supported by 22% of my visitors already: http://euri.ca/2011/05/what-percent-of-web-visitors-support-...
What did you think about it?
More to that point, liberal arts were practiced by the rich in societies with rigid class structures. If you were the scion of a comfortable fortune, you majored in the "classics" or the liberal arts because you wanted, more or less, to have the background to enable you to live an exciting and fulfilling life of leisure. To make great conversation at cocktail parties and charity balls. To provide the intellectual background behind gentleman-scholarship and amateur pursuits. To help you toy around with a novel or two. And so forth.

This isn't the way our society works anymore, and the liberal arts curricula never really adapted with the times. To some extent, liberal arts is still a valuable major for those wanting to pursue Law, and whose colleges do not have a discrete "pre-law" curriculum. Other than that, however, liberal arts is fairly impractical. Still valuable for intellectual development, but intellectual development of a sort that's not prized or valued or applicable to modern working society.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/groupons-real-u-s-revenue-n...
Sweet deal! Looks sooo awesome!
Because people stare out a window going "come on inspiration!" Look for a problem. If you don't know how to look for problems, that's a problem. Solve problems.

Every single last "great idea" has solved a problem.

My trips to france takes too long, lets invent something faster.

My bacon gets all greasy when I microwave it, lets invent a rack to put it on.

My MP3 player is confusing and weird, lets make a simple one. How do we make a simple one? Lets make something based around what people find simple.

Etc.
There seems to be an assumption that idea guy == business guy. Also that idea guy has no knowledge or understanding of anything technical. And that somehow idea guy is always trying to scam you.

I think ideas are a skill just like anything else. Most people can design a web page. Not everyone can design a good web page. Most people can or can learn to program, but that does't mean they can develop a good site (this one is a bit more of a stretch).

As a converse, I know quite a few (very good) developers who have ideas, but those ideas suck. And so do their UIs. And their marketing plan.
The Development History of Duke Nukem Forever
Tell HN: Google's hiring process is broken on purpose. I figured out why.
Google's hiring process is broken on purpose because it's an elaborate brain puzzle. If you want a job at Google, and you can somehow figure out how to get inside the Googleplex and/or work your way through the hiring obstacle course, then by that rationale alone you must obviously be smart enough to work there.
Seems like this is gonna be fun competitive space.

I've seen http://vhx.tv, http://shelby.tv, and now WatchLater.

Am I missing anything?
I'm pretty impressed by the path MS has taken with their mobile platform — rather than simply aping iOS or Android they're trying new ideas and it seems like they've put a lot of legitimate thought into how people interact with their mobile devices.

It may wind up serving a different consumer space than the Android or iPhone app-heavy consumer, and that's why it's interesting.
On a related note: The Bank Of America ATMs are really, really great. Their ATMs and their online bill pay service are some great banking tech. They're the only reason I'm a BoA customer for my checking and cashflow accounts.

With their BillPay service, I can have BoA download e-bills from, say, credit card companies or utilities, and pay the amount of the bill on its due date. I never have to worry about it. I can set rules like "Pay my electric bill its full amount on its due date unless it's over $200" so I'm protected from crazy billing errors draining my account.

This guy was just a dumbass.
It's all built on node.js. We used rails before to handle user accounts and static pages but realized we could make it all with node.js and MongoDB instead with some cool template language. :)
Not sure if it's the current version, but it's from August of last year so it's pretty recent.
It's desirable when you're using a laptop with a 120GB SSD that for some reason fills up all the time :/
Often the jargon is unavoidable because "common sense" definitions are actually subtly incorrect. This does not mean that examples and motivation have no place, but there is definitely a chicken/egg problem and starting by stating definitions is an easy and expedient way to overcome it.

Also, the best examples usually link seemingly disparate fields. If you can't assume the reader has a background in these fields, it can be difficult to even state the link. I sometimes find myself writing "readers unfamiliar with X can think of it as [intuitive but imprecise definition]".
Long term simple counters
You are absolutely right. When I read his post, that's squirreled away in a discussion about syntax and I missed it. I stand corrected.
I believe this is one of the signs of the apocalypse.
Oh, thanks alot! Will check it out.
Awesome app! Waited for it since the iPad launch last year.
Charlie Rose Interviews Paul Graham [video]
Any code that has monetary effects has to go through a series of code reviews

The article reported that he installed malware on select ATMs.

I acknowledge that this leaves a great deal to the imagination, but one suspects a code review would not catch the problem. The code was clean, the implementation on certain machines went awry.
Anecdote: I'm 22, have a successful web application business that earns more than any of those median earnings, and am scaling my involvement (and earnings) down to begin my PhD in cognitive science (under the umbrella of psychology, for most).

Why would I leave the "path to riches" to earn - at best - the same as I've made as a teenager? Meaning. Research and teaching give meaning to an otherwise dull life of emailing people I've never met about issues that no one will remember in a few years time. It's fun to work with people, fun to talk about issues that no one quite understands (language acquisition, in my case), and exhilarating to teach students who will hopefully outperform me in every way.

This community is largely driven by money. People ask "How hard is it to make an app that makes $XXXX in revenue?" at least once per week. But there are other things that provide meaning and drive in people's lives. I've forgotten it on a fair share of occasions, but I hope I never look down on someone who dedicates four years (or more) of their time to studying the arts/humanities as opposed to the "hard" sciences or engineering.
Brand is about perception. Value is about perception.

Look at wine. Studies show that people enjoy the _same_ wine if they pay more for it. Is that deception? Intrinsically, why does one bottle of wine cost more than the other? Because it's _better_? What exactly makes one bottle of wine better than the other? It's very subjective.

When it comes to products/service that are more quantifiable perhaps the better argument can be made. But that's almost never possible. Businesses distinguish their product/service by other factors that are not easily quantifiable (eg. better customer service, better user experience) that add value.

I think deception is the wrong word to use but certainly consumers can save a lot of money by simply being educated about what they're buying (eg. buying the generic version of Claritin/drugs for 60% of the price).
Why Censoring The Internet Won’t Work
I can't even remember the last time my credit card couldn't be swiped. What do you do to them?

True, but still even easier to duplicate a QR code.

Signatures don't help very much since the fraudster can sign his own fake card. That's why more stores are asking to see drivers licenses which is annoying.
I was mostly thinking of /b/ day and the exodus to 7chan.
A brand is not deception, it's having people trust what you say. Anyone can say that their software is easy to use, but most people won't believe you. Apple, Google, 37signals, etc have brands that people trust and people believe that their message will match reality. I trust Dropbox to work, but no other sync product has built a brand strong enough that I would even bother looking at them.

Said another way, brands are an ecosystem of response to a company's product and marketing. Despite kajillions of dollars spent on advertising, a lot of Microsoft's brand is BSOD, Vista, Clippy and constant restarts. Despite objective safety numbers and no evidence of failure, people trusted Toyota less, billions of dollars less, when the brake/accelerator "story" was happening last year.

A brand is what people expect to get. The $2.99 corn flakes, even if they are as good as Kellogg's, are dragged down by every other crappy generic cereal a customer has ever eaten.
I agree with both of you. I shoot in both auto and aperture priority modes. I've lost good shots by monkeying with settings, and I've also lost good shots because auto didn't cut it and I wasn't quick enough at picking the right aperture and exposure compensation. For a beginner who wants to get good but also doesn't want to completely whiff on important moments, they're both essential.
I live in Emacs and play PC games. I didn't know they were mutually exclusive.
I dig it, looks like a no brainer for rapid prototyping and iteration.
You're not looking at the big picture. The PC is dead -- it's a commodity now.

I work in a big enterprise IT shop with tens of thousands of PCs. We have management software that meters application utilization. 85% of application runtime on PCs is devoted to: Microsoft Word, Outlook and IE. Most of the other 15% are in-house apps, with a long tail of various tools that people use.

Yet the per-seat cost of a desktop is over $100/year for basic licensing, $75/year for Office and about $250/year for hardware, assuming a 4-year refresh cycle. For 10,000 people, that's $4.25M of annual cash flow just to provide clients to workers -- no infrastructure costs, no operational staff costs. (Those costs are easily $50-100/seat, depending on the org)

That's a ridiculous amount of money. So there's a huge opportunity to offer a solution that improves productivity by hacking away at that cost. Compare the management features of an iPad/iPhone/BlackBerry to ChromeOS -- they are nearly identical. Lower labor costs plus less licensing means enterprise adoption. Technically, the solution just needs to be "good enough".
> The more I think about it the more I think program development should
viewed as changing the state of a Key-Value database.

This is pretty much how I view my programming in Common Lisp.
Not to imply anything, but are any of the iOS or Android UI / interaction models patented?

If so, that may have forced Microsoft's hand in their completely different UI.
Perhaps you should look to real business rather than comics for examples. It would be more convincing.
Great, then it worked out for you. I'm not saying there are no advantages to owning a house, but it's not a magical investment vehicle. Many people seem to just compare the purchase price to the sale price and think, "Wow, what a gain!" without considering all the other costs, or as what they could have made with another investment over the same period.
The Voices in Linus' Head Say Time for Linux 2.8
A fantastic documentary! Highly recommended.
The main meme I want to spread is that Tufte should invest his money in a non-profit Foundation for Beautiful Evidence.
"If not, that sounds like a dysfunctional market."

No, it is not a dysfunctional market. People are perfectly willing to pay more for the perception of increased quality.

In terms of classification, this means that the firms in the market are in monopolistic competition.

Here is a halfway decent Wikipedia page on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition
Do vicious downward cycles actually happen? I'd expect that as soon as the stock price dipped below the value of the expected discounted dividend stream the smart money would swoop in, and could profit even without having to care about the future stock price.

EDIT: I should point out that this doesn't happen with vicious circles or rising stock prices in any reliable way. Well, people shorting the stock can have sort of the same effect but not as well.

Some companies manage to get by on investor's hope for future huge dividends someday without ever having to issue any right now, like Apple, but I don't think its a loss for society is investors lose their confidence in "someday" and start forming their expectation based on past performance. So I guess I'm saying that to the extent that negative articles can and do drive down a company's stock price those of us who haven't invested in them should be happy.
Birkenstocks are never OK.
I like it. Good MVP. I could see my ecommerce company using it.

What features are you planning on rolling out?
I use flipboard.
I just joined the Ruby and Rails communities and one thing I've really enjoyed is looking around GitHub at all of the various projects. Often times I can find something to fit my needs right off the bat and every one of the projects provides a great resource for learning.

My experience in .NET has been that, while there are communities of developers providing how-tos, tutorials and code samples, the community as a whole is more closed off. I can often find plugin solutions to problems but, in general, it feels like I'd better have my wallet ready.

The major difference, I think, is that with .NET you are buying into an entire ecosystem and a pretty expensive one at that. This reduces the impact of the lone developer who is far more willing to share his code.

I know you can get into .NET for free/cheap but a lot of the allure is the toolset.
Wow. I'd never have discovered that if I hadn't read your comment, so thanks. I'm not sure how useful it would be in general but for an article like this quickly looking up terms seemed pretty neat (e.g fluid intelligence).