skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The number that justifies moving from concept to code is going to be based on your revenue model, not your Conversion Rate. There are two key numbers you want to look at: CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and LTV (Lifetime Value of each customer.)

In other words: what does it cost you to get 100 customers? How much do you earn from 100 customers? Conversion rate is one factor, but not the only one.
http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...
This is very similar to an article that made it to the first page yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573664

Still, the more awareness that this topic gets, the better!
Yes, Ron Conway is raising a new fund — and Arrington is an investor
Glenn Beck's New Company, Markdown, Basically Belongs To John Gruber
It's been a long time for me, but in the US I recall that it covers part of June, July and August — so that has to be at least over 8 weeks. Although maybe the idea that our kids get a longer Summer break is part of the the anti-vacation propaganda?
You could also follow the event on eventrt: http://eventrt.com/sllconf
Very neat to see the thought process that went into creating the new UI. Great blog post. I use Rapportive on a daily basis and this will make it that much better.
I haven't even done any C++ for a while, but reading those other articles on HN about undefined behavior in C made the example bugs in this article really jump out at me.
I agree. Visual programming has always been an interest of mine. I see physical parallels in the maker/electronics world and wonder why it has never seemed to spark in the code domain. Don't know if it will help, but I sent a message offering support/expertise (would offer $ had I any...)
We tend to submit on the clients behalf, but we usually have already handed over the source code and instructions at this point.

Early on in the process we have got the client to sign up for the Apple developer programme, if they haven't or are unwilling to do this and want to self publish alarm bells should be ringing anyway
Actors Make Better Observers
I agree. I'm just wondering if anyone has ever done such tests and, if so, what the results were.
I bought a personal copy and recommended it to my team. We're currently looking into using it to create some generic widget templates that can be used as inputs to a widget-making web application I'm going to put together. (The general plan is to enable our internal customers to create their own quizzes, interactive training, etc. by filling in some HTML forms, while ensuring that branding and so on remains consistent.)

My opinion is that Hype is great at what it does, which is allow you to create simple animations. It doesn't have anywhere near the number of features as Flash, but maybe that's a good thing. If you're comfortable with JavaScript and/or you're happy to take Hype's output and manipulate it further then I think you'll be delighted. And for $30 I really feel like I am stealing from them! (Maybe this public advocacy will go some way to restoring the balance.)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Love and Power
Google has said before they didn't use Clang and LLVM because of performance issues. GCC is far from dead, and probably never will. Clang generated code is still typically 10-20% slower than GCC. Lots of companies work on GCC, including Google, Intel, AMD, IBM, Red Hat and others.
Most importantly, let me know if anything can be improved or explained more clearly.
The actual response further legitimizes a broken system. It presupposes that the patent is valid. Nontechnical people (including lawmakers) reading the news about it will continue to have a mistaken impression in their heads that the patent system is a functioning, productive system that technical people are fully behind.

The proposed response would be a small step towards delegitimizing it in people's minds. People love Apple products; if they heard from Apple that this patent part of a deeply broken system, that would be one step on the way towards actually getting it changed.
I meant only to say that gigantic (untestable) scripts are passé at least for the language in question.
Right. I'm rejecting that claim. Quite often people do things that clearly do not fit rational choice theory.
Glossy vs matte screens: why the PC industry’s out of touch
On the misuse of Occam’s Razor
> but when the voices tell me to do things, I listen.

Either deeply terrifying or words to live by. I can't decide.
The cloud layer on each depiction is distracting - they used the same cloud cover data from a modern year for all 30 samples. This would be much better with either no cloud cover at all or (if our climate models are good enough) realistically-modeled cloud cover for the land masses of the day.
But don’t just take My advice
I worked at Apple. I was the engineering manager for the Mail.app back end (Mac OS X), but also worked on software updates, automation technology, SJ keynote demos, and other engineering projects.

I love how "SJ keynote demos" is something you put in a one sentence description of what he did. And what's even crazier is if I had to describe what this guy did to someone else I'd probably sound more like, "Built some of Steve Job's demos ... and did some other engineering stuff too".

At least this explains why there is no Windows client, although I'd still like to see one.
Deal Drop, http://www.getdealdrop.com, 0 employees, located in El Dorado Hills.

100% of Deal Drop revenue is from affiliate commission so this would kill Deal Drop.
Haskell is temporarily the extreme. There are other languages hovering around this same fringe such as Clean, and others which may well be beyond it like Cayenne.

Instead of Cayenne I think the action in languages with dependent types is greater in Agda and maybe Epigram at the moment. I see much more happening with Haskell than with Clean right now, but maybe I need to get out (or stay in) more.
Websites also offer 'terms' that you might never be forced to read (or actually read), but would still have some presumptive legitimacy in the absence of other customs: giving the site the right to curtail your use, or limiting your claims against the site. A court could reason, "What, did you think the service was free, with terms totally in your favor, in the absence of any other guidance?"

You might be able to argue ignorance/non-assent and then have them cease some objectionable reuse; you probably couldn't ding them for big damages because you thought you retained all rights.
150 million requests per day is just under 2 requests a second... 100k users/shard is also hardly impressive even if you account for 2x or 3x replication.

I hate to sound like a dick, but anyone who has dealt with large scale web apps would consider this a starting point, not worthy of a architecture presentation.

EDIT: Ah ha. Having never used Evernote before, they didn't make it very clear that they are essentially trying to build a SAN. I assumed they were storing plain text notes like stickies.
Sadly, most compilers are not modular so it's generally easier to add a post-compilation step than to add an intermediate compilation step.
Go at Google I/O 2011: videos
Lisp is its own model of evaluation. It had a procedural-abstraction operator, LAMBDA, which was inspired by Church but LAMBDA didn't become a "true" lambda until the seventies with Scheme. (CL always had lexical scoping and a true lambda, because it is younger than Scheme and its designers deliberately adopted these ideas.)
My company, Cashier Live (http://www.cashierlive.com), is in the same space as Erply and some others. We haven't ran into Square competitively at all, as Square is getting their business traction from mobile businesses & small quick serve restaurants/coffee shops/bakeries etc.. Cashier Live (and Erply, from what I can tell) is targeted towards retailers with inventory on the shelves, something Square isn't good for.
Did the same thing, deleted all the images I uploaded to that site. There's dozens of sites out there, no point in using that one.
Most users don't mind paying for services with their time. eg: watching tv programs with ads in them vs HBO subscription.
The cases where you see people paying for services is when the service will provide them with value/convenience/time savings and the users care for the value/convenience and time savings

I could check if my servers are up every hour without subscribing to pingdom. Do I want to do it though? no. It's too painful and time consuming.
For most people, it really doesn't matter if their desktop is up or down, their livelihood doesn't depend on it.
Have you ever heard of Tango? http://www.witango.com/products/studio
Just imagine the abuse Mr. Small had to endure as a kid...

No surprise he became a patent troll...
That is certainly a fair opinion, although sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong :)
Google Buys Seattle’s Sparkbuy to Improve Consumer Electronics Search
I'm an engineer at Square, so I can neither confirm or deny such speculation ...
but in an interview with Wired, CEO Jack said
"People understand credit cards. They know exactly what to expect from them. They’re used everywhere. But Square is payment-device agnostic. It doesn’t matter how you pay. Some of our users accept only cash."
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/mf_qadorsey/all/1
Which maker/electronics projects do you see as similar? Arduino?
> license costs for things like these are a rounding error

Paying a troll is like dumping toxic waste on your water supply. It's, at minimum, inconsiderate. By doing that, they further enabled this troll to go after everybody else.
AARRR is more of a methodology for coming up with these stats. Thanks for posting though, this slide deck is worth a look for anybody that hasn't seen it.
In order to have altruistic behavior in a group you need to spread a gene that promotes such behavior within the group. The simplest way for this to happen is for the gene to appear in one member, and then spread to others by inheritance.

For this to happen across, say, two genetic lines, it seems you need the "cross-altruistic" genes to emerge more or less simultaneously in the two groups so they can cooperate. The probability for this to happen is smaller, so it's not surprising that it happens less often than kin-style altruism. But if this does happen (and apparently it does), then it means kin selection is not enough to explain altruism.

It seems to me that Wilson's theory is an elegant generalization of kin selection. I don't see the contradiction between them, although I'm not a biologist so quite likely I'm misunderstanding something.
Are you a technical person?
Why bring it up then?
> something that Apple has already bought

Implying they support software patents.
It actually charges your credit card right then - the card is kept on file with Square. Just at the moment when the vendor would normally swipe your card, they pick your name and user icon from a list instead.
From the fifth "paragraph":

> It took 6 months to get that deal and we just emailed 70,000 AppSumo.com customers and 6 whole buys two hours after the email went out.

The phrasing there implies that the effort required to arrange the deal wasn't trivial.
It does not work exactly this way.

When you create a file "DSCN0001.JPG", it receive a prefix, even if it's not conflicting, becoming, lets say, "123_DSCN0001.JPG".

But both you and your software (say: a filemanager) are presuming the file is named "DSCN0001.JPG", not "123_DSCN0001.JPG". To solve that, Tagsistant 0.4 provides an aliasing layer that maps the original name to the prefixed one.

It's still something under development, so both the idea and the implementation can change. For example: how long should an alias exists? Just after the first access? Up to an extimated expiration time?

I'm oriented to the latter solution. Being aliases implemented as an SQL table, adding a expiration column and a garbage collecting thread should be all that is needed.

Of course, using expiring aliases is just like postponing the problem. But, in my opinion, Tagsistant is primary a personal tool, nothing that automated procedures or batches are supposed to rely on. I hope that, in this perspective, the alias workaround is an acceptable compromise.
What does it mean to say that natural selection is observed at the level of an organism? I'm not a biologist, but I was under the impression that natural selection on all of the 'levels' of biology all shook out to being natural selection of snippets of DNA.
From my experience, Java applets are slow. The loading time to load the actual JVM is a pain. Because of that I haven't installed Java in many years. If I come to a site that asks me to install Java, I just go to another site. There's your portability problem.
The inappropriate implication of nocturnal habits implies a lack of subsequent dependents. I'll assume a due-every-month mortgage isn't involved either.

Of course you'll assume that. You hate him already, why not assume whatever you feel like to further your agenda?

This guy doesn't know what stress and depression is

Yes, like assuming this too. Do you know that? Have you met him?

Does your comment have a point other than hatred and derision? Other than posturing and oneupmanship about how much harder your life is?
Totally awesome - congrats Sparkbuyers!
Aftermath of a Twister: Tornado damage in Joplin, Missouri
It seems to me that the reason for this shift is the same reason manufacturers ship their TVs set to overblown saturation and brightness: it looks good in the showroom.

As someone who has no office and works every day either from home or from a coffee shop on a laptop, the glossy screen is pretty annoying. It's not impossible to work on it and you do get used to it, but my next MacBook Pro will be the matte finish. It's more annoying that a matte finish costs $50 more.
well..... as long as we are being truthful, after 10 days vacation with a wife and two kids getting back to work is a relief. I'm often more stressed by vacation than work, but one of my children has "special needs" and despite the fact that I love him with all my heart, the constant monitoring what he eats, what he is doing, if he has craped himself, etc. takes a lot out of a vacation. That said, next year in February I'm taking a 2 week trip to South America with just my daughter and meeting up with some cousins and other extended family from both the states and Ecuador and Panama. My south American cousins I haven't seen in thirty years. I'm very much looking forward to it. ( and on that note, I think I'll have to post a "ask HN" on language learning options to brush up on my 25 years forgotten high school Spanish (if one doesn't exist already).
How Square's New Pay-With-Your-Name System Works w/ Pics
The end of the world and a bubble are two entirely different things. I can also argue that your statement didn't add anything either without stating the obvious.
Nah, they put it under the right to sublicense.

I think this is a great move, if it kills TwitPic (which one presumes will be the outcome if WENN puts enough pictures into distribution, and DMCA-bans folks)

That will help clarify what this is "worth" (since WENN will either make money on this or not) and it will help folks figure out what's what with the TOS stuff.
Ballmer: 'next generation of Windows systems' coming next year
I may have missed this, but I didn't see anything indicating Evernote has any off-site redundancy, in case of earthquake disruption. The Evernote "Architectural Digest" blog entry linked in the OP says "All of these servers are racked in a pair of dedicated cages at our data center in Santa Clara, California." (I've been a paid Evernote subscriber for a couple of years or so.)
Unbelievable guys - great work Scott, Dan!
Interesting. Personally I was disappointed there was no snowball earth. Granted, I can imagine what it might look like but it would have been fun to see the contrast.
PlayStation Hack to Cost Sony $171M; Quake Costs Far Higher
No public APIs yet, but we'll get there. (I'm an engineer at Square)
who's behind gcc? Nobody?

I hear there's this kernel called Linux that depends heavily on GCC.
Were any of you users of SparkBuy? I was...it was excellent. I'm really hoping it will be back in action soon, but somehow given how Google treats these things (e.g. Jot, Dodgeball, etc), I'm thinking it will be awhile.
Ummmmm...there are 86400 seconds in a day, so that's just under TWO THOUSAND requests a second...significantly more than what you mentioned.
“[t]he authorized sale of an article that substantially embodies a patent exhausts the patent holder’s rights and prevents the patent holder from invoking patent law to control postsale use of the article.” Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Elecs., Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008).

In plain English: because Apple bought the patent from Lodsys, Lodsys cannot ask for any benefit that might be related to the patent. Period.
I hate glossy finishes :(
Ok, now suppose that you'd like to spend developer resources customizing your video player. If you do this in Flash you support the entire modern PC universe, and can fall back to HTML5 for iPad kind of as an afterthought ("mobile version").

If you spend your resources trying to customize an HTML5 player, you leave a large percentage of PC users out, either those using IE, Safari, and users without cutting edge browser versions (if you want to be a pioneer of WebM), or Chrome and Firefox (if you use H.264).

It's a solved problem only when everyone supports one high quality codec, and with Apple and Google both major players in the browser space this will never happen. So Adobe and Flash occupy a sort of stable island in the middle of a massive tug of war.
Re exclusivity: The article portrayed it as a debate over which one is the cause. Does group altruism exist because we desire to help kin, or does kin altruism exist *because we desire to help the group?

Group selection sounds more reasonable (by being more easily implementable at a sub-conscious level) to me.
Cost of living in Europe is higher than in the US.
Consider cost of gasoline and real estate.

It's just that Europeans have lower income, so they do not buy things that wealthier Americans do.
Europeans on average are driving smaller and older cars, they drive less.
Other things you mentioned - Europeans are buying less gadgets.

Who's making the right choice is hard to say. Does larger house worth more than long vacation? The answer depends on who you ask.
In the subject line, "praise" is misspelled as "blame".

The approximation that 2^10 == 10^3 is incredibly useful in many contexts. The "kilo" prefix just makes it clearer and easier to remember.
Things that suck are always bugs, unless the suck is the feature (e.g. having to walk 20 miles to get water is lame, but being able to hike over a weekend can be fun for some people).

First world problems are still problems. It doesn't trivialize the crap that most of humanity still has to deal with, but it doesn't mean that we can't improve how we do things. And given how many small, annoying little things everyone has to deal with on a daily basis I think that we'll still be improving things for decades to come.
Wouldn't really categorize it as a flash competitor - it's an HTML5 builder (which is very needed, but different).
Right. That suggests that the value of WENN is mainly going to be as a convenience clearinghouse for quick and easy licensing of the images.

Don't post it on TwitPic unless you want it to be used by others. WENN/TwitPic may get paid but, probably no one's going to get much out of any individual image either.
The feeling inside of Square is "What's so great about NFC?"
Ask HN: If any of you have started email newsletters, I'd love your advice
I am starting an email newsletter to target a particular demographic (residents of my city outside the US), I am imagining something like something like thrillist or dailycandy on a scaled downlevel.

I have set up a signup page, with good design that is essentially collecting email addresses. It has around 57 sign ups so far by sending out emails to my friends and family, and asking them to forward it to friends/ some other methods. In the next month I will be advertising on two forums that residents of the city frequent, and I am thinking of actually launching the newsletter in late June or early July. Till then I am collecting emails, and creating content that would give me a buffer of sorts.

I am just wondering whether anyone has done something similar, and if so could you share some anecdotes regarding increasing membership, advertising, and whether how long a runway should I give this to figure out whether this may be sustainable in the longrun? I am planning on emailing content M-F with the weekends off.
In the PLs context, "axiomatic system" has been used for decades, especially in Lispy parts of PLs, in a sort of metaphorical way to refer to languages that start from a small core of primitive built-ins that are taken as givens (the "axioms"), and then build up the rest of the language by composing those "axioms" via "theorems" within the language that define the higher-level functionality. John McCarthy introduced the axiom/theorem terminology in his 1960 Lisp paper. Paul Graham is possibly responsible for re-popularizing it, since he uses that terminology a lot when discussing the design of Arc.
Apple's been pushing developers toward LLVM for several years, and is bound to make it an app store requirement at some point.

I've observed no such 10-20% slowdown on iOS, which is more CPU-constrained than most realms. Typically, LLVM-generated code is equivalent to or faster than gcc. Sometimes it's much faster.
The security consequence discussed in the draft is that since handshakes validate, allowing the protocol to bypass them undermines authentication, giving more opportunity to construct, say, man-in-the-middle attacks.

There is no whitelist of algorithms. The discussion talks generally about how to patch up this authentication problem, but it doesn't go into much detail. Ignorance is really our default state when it comes to security.
It doesn't seem to be a PC problem, it seems to be a laptop problem. My lcds at home (and my TV) are all matte, its only my laptop (mac) that is glossy.
The matte screen also comes with a grey bezel and not the sweet looking black one, FYI. Not a huge deal but it was a shock when I pulled it out of the box.

edit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/3184631310/
My last (windows) laptop purchase, in February 2011, was actually made easier by the fact that only two manufacturers (Dell and Lenovo) offered matte/anti-glare screens on high-end developer laptops. It was actually the default on the Lenovo W701DS I ended up buying.
Apple has a long history of supporting patents. In fact in a keynote that Jobs gave a few years back one of his lines was something like, "And we've patented this up and down" which was followed by loud cheers. Apple is a very strong believer of HW and SW patents.
How To Temporarily Silence Followers in Your Twitter Feed
Cryptocat - web chat app with clientside encryption
Data Structures for Disjoint Sets
~200 points, on the front page for at least a day.
Only non server based thing I pay for for is evernote, currently in second year but have fallen out of love with it slightly so will probably be my last.