skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  Why should I defend a pay site model?
Had lunch with potential business partner today. We outlined out plans to add in a host of premium features over the next 60 days. In August, certain features would be available to only "premium" members, who would pay a monthly fee.

The response: "You guys should really try to build traffic up for the next year - maybe two - and once you have that large audience, then charge for it."

I suppose that is conventional wisdom among many tech companies but the thought occurred to me....if I were starting a restaurant, would I be asked to give away free food for a year until people decided it was good enough to pay for? What if I open a T-shirt store? Give them away until the designs get popular, then charge for them?

The toughest thing about building a business online is dealing with this mentality that everything has to be free. How to get past this? A related question is: how to best present this cost to visitors and customers in a fashion that allows them to fully understand what they're getting? Anyone care to point out great examples out there of other sites that are successfully communicating their value proposition?

Mainly just posting here to avoid finding a therapist - the overall mentality has me pulling my hair out.
#DEDEDE every now and then when a Boeing plane flies over the camera.
DB2 :)
I like Hulu Plus for the newer shows and I can watch it on my TV with a Roku.
Notice how there's some outrageous and short-lived tones during sunrise and sunset -- that's the white balance jumping around (Possibly an automatic saturation gain too?)

The ones at sunrise are weird (blue throws off the white balance) but the sunset ones are actually accurate-- that's the color of a NY sunset in the summer. Surreal, eh?

I miss New York.
The USA has an orderly and, from what I understand from my immigrant friends and coworkers, not too difficult immigration process already. The meritocracy is here already. The article's author decided to cheat the system and be a criminal.
If I learned anything from reading Hacker News, it would be to never underestimate the fanaticism people here have with Gruber, Erlang, Haskell, Node.js, etc..
That because XML does not map well to Simula style OO.

"Iterating" XML in XSLT (a language designed to manipulate XML) is way less of a pain.
Dolphin Browser HD 6.0 Beta released in the Android Market
Dolphin Browser HD 6.0 for Android has added some precisely, the above-mentioned Webzine, which gathers news content from around the web interface"touch-friendly and easy to use".
Sharing frames with 3d glasses: two people viewing different fullscreen images
I'm in my early 40's now, so here's my take: Follow your passion (I quit College to develop software), do the things that interest you without overspecializing (I did low level device drivers, database systems, consulting, games), and don't stay too long at any given job. (Never more than two years)

Do something crazy occasionally. (I emigrated to the US, from Germany - and I spent all my vacation time working on cruise ships)

By your early thirties, you'll have had a lot of fun, and a decent idea what you like. (Although that changes occasionally - did games for 15 years, working on the Internet side of things now. No more games, got over it)

Above all, have fun. If things go wrong in your 20's, a reboot is not a big deal. As you start accumulating the things that go with age (a family, a higher salary, a mortgage, etc.) a restart is more terrifying and probably harder.
IPhone 5 may come with dual LED flash
Like many, I read about the cool kids using CoffeeScript for months before I finally tried it.

(I mostly work with Objective-C native apps and Ruby backends, so I'm not a JavaScript programmer--more like a user. A web view needs to frob the DOM or do some AJAX or something.)

A project came up where I needed to write the skeleton for a simple single-page web app component of a larger system. The window has a few panes which need to do AJAX, swap subviews in and out, and react to various inputs. Simple, but it has a few different view controllers and different kinds of data objects, so I decided to use this project to try CoffeeScript.

Comapared with JS, CS is much more concise and instantly readable. I think basically everybody agrees about that. It makes even Ruby feel a bit clunky with all the extra typing. ;-)

But surprisingly, there are no significant drawbacks. Debugging, the issue I had been wondering about, turned out to not actually be a problem at all. Two lines of CS code might be compiled to a sixteen lines of JS, but it's obvious what is going on, and debugging is effectively just as easy as ever.

So, two weeks in, I am reasonably sure that I will never write in raw JavaScript again. I just can't imagine why I would ever again type "function() {" three times to write one spec, or write my own for loop just to iterate a collection, or spend my time mentally filtering out all those braces and semicolons.

Granted, I am not mainly a JS coder, so my perspective is not the same as, say, a frontend dev to whom JS is second nature and 'the good parts' are deeply ingrained. My hunch is, though, that even if I was I would still switch.

The end result is the same, but the process of reading (and writing) the code is much nicer.
FYI, from the bottom of the page; "I'm CTO and co-founder of SimpleGeo. Before that I was Lead Architect for Digg."
Json2.js does the check. However, it has to be loaded in order to be checked. Not a big issue if you are minifying and bundling all your js files before sending them to the browser client.
>The problem is that those "few apps" that most other people use aren't the same "few apps" that he uses.

are they really? having one or two obscure apps might be nice, but there are very, very few people for whom app availability is actually a necessity.
Amapô Summer 2012, Brazil
I don't think it's necessarily incoherent to keep both around as this might give them a way to more easily try out ideas without whatever overhead of having to fit into the MS platform. In the future there might be some degree of convergence, e.g. Microsoft will probably eventually open up the marketplace to native code (maybe at the same time they move to an NT Windows kernel) and Nokia could port Qt.
The Native Americans lost it fair-and-square through force of arms. Moreover, much of North America was unoccupied, unorganized territory open for colonization by Western Civilization.

Whatever tribes were able to hold out are today richly compensated - see the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service.
Paying Attention To English Coursework
English coursework is a compulsory subject. The coursework accounts for 25% of the final grade of the GCSEs. One of the requirements of the English coursework is to submit a written essay. To receive a good grade, students need to be able to write this essay in the proper manner.
Instead, he wants us to think that it is cool that he has been knowingly stealing opportunities from legit members of the American family, and that gall, that cheating behavior, just doesn't sit right with me.

Sorry, dude, but I just can't have a productive discussion with you. This kind of xenophobic attitude is reprehensible in my opinion, and I just don't see either of us changing each others' minds.

Let's assume for a moment that he "stole" writing jobs from legal American citizens (or legal aliens). Let's also assume for the moment that the hiring processes for those jobs were concerned with finding the best candidate for the position.

I don't want a "real American" to fill that position. I want the best person for the job to fill that position. If a citizen/legal alien is actually the best person for the job, that's great. But if not: I don't care who it is, where he/she comes from, or what his/her immigration status is.

Maybe for a job like a newspaper/magazine writer, it isn't absolutely critical to have the best person possible in that job. But for other jobs it's certainly important, and regardless, I'm not willing to make that value judgement.
yeah, but if you are modifying the schema and are not using south or something like that, you will still want to rm & syncdb again....
Wish I could upvote you more than once. I find the language fetishism - especially for new/"hip"/esoteric languages - in HN and other geek echo chambers kinda annoying and, frankly, silly. There's only so many times one can express the same algorithm using basically different symbols until it gets old. Mastering new problem domains is a better time investment and more satisfactory than learning yet another way to write the Fibonacci function or a String class.
They probably all use macs though, why not develop first for something you understand well and can immediately put to use yourself. It probably started as a fairly experimental product, now that they have a version out and a clearer idea they could more easily tackle a windows version.
I never could understand why people paid for IntelliJ licenses when Eclipse was available for free; and then I finally tried IntelliJ on my last project. Long story short, I'm now an IntelliJ user. The strong Maven support was a strong selling point, but really it's that strong built-in support you get for all of the libraries, frameworks and tools in the Java ecosystem.
Yes, the point of copying yourself is the "not dying". Physical longevity won't do a whole lot against a roadside bomb.
Like I said in my original post - ship him back to the Philippines.
If an unemployed person loses out to an immigrant (legal or illegal), clearly there's a reason. I'd rather have jobs filled with better people than pander to people who are currently more eligible solely because they had the luck to be born in a certain place at a certain time.
And shows like Arrested Development, Firefly, and Jericho. Maybe not those shows in particular given the amount of time that's passed, but, the next time it happens.
Ask HN: How does Facebook acquire new users overseas?
Especially wondering in how they drove up the massive growth in Brazil and India.
It must be hard to sleep at night with all that light.
Yea, I was thinking about considering startup executives in big company executive recruiting for a while new.
Digital warrantless surveillance coming to Canada?
As they transition into their first act as handset hired guns, Nokia produce a sexy piece of industrial design featuring the OS which caused them to finally throw in the towel, in a form so simple they couldn't screw it up.

And they didn't.

And they may have accidentally produced the second most interesting phone of the year? ...which also happens to be a dead end.

The N9 would be underpowered if it were released today; the trick where videos continue playing as they're swiped into the multitasking ether is cute, but time will tell how well it can perform those tricks when it's been piloted for a few days (or months) by a careless human without so much as a reboot, especially as compared to the dual-core, spec'd-out superphones it will have to compete against this Fall/Holiday.

Also, something something apps. Even if you only need 10 of them. I'm in the "you need the ecosystem to draw the developers to make the two or more third-party apps you give a damn about" camp.

All that notwithstanding, aesthetically and (to the extent that I can infer anything of value from the video demos up now) in terms of ui/ux execution, this thing looks really good.

Physically, it somehow looks as just I would expect of an object which, when slid across the surface of another, would cause music (or anything else) to come out of the second object. Even if it's an unexpected hit, in 5 years it'll still probably look like a 3303. But for now I think it looks more like the future than any computer we've carried in our pockets to date.

Regardless of the quality of the software experience, the hardware execution makes me feel like Nokia is positioned well in the role they're assuming. It actually makes me wish they'd compete directly against HTC/Samsung on Android as well, although admittedly I have no idea when, if ever, their agreement with msft would allow them to do such a thing.

If I could ignore the part of me which is fairly confident they'll release a slight variation on this running WP7 within the same general timescale that the N9 is on the market and shift most of their resources/support in that direction, I may actually have considered purchasing a Nokia in 2011 or 2012, something I would not have assumed at any point in the last 3 or 4 years.
1. Realize that wasting time is getting you closer to your deathbed

2. Try to write some short term goals on a piece of paper or notebook

3. Google pomodoro technique

4. appomodoro.appspot.com

5. Start working your @#$ off

...

6. PROFIT!
> if I were starting a restaurant, would I be asked to give away free food for a year until people decided it was good enough to pay for?

Maybe, if you were surrounded by other restaurants that were giving away free food.

I'm not saying he is right. Nor am I saying you are right. I think the bottom line is that you don't want someone as a business partner, if they have fundamental philosophical differences from you, in how the business should be run.

Regardless, I think you'll run into trouble if you provide certain services free, and then begin charging for those same services. It is reasonable to add premium services, which are charged for as soon as they are available, to an existing free service. It is also reasonable to charge for everything, with nothing ever free (or maybe just a brief try-before-you-buy). I wouldn't presume to know which is best for your business.
Interesting, so the _id trick mentioned by FooBarWidget is not the real reason for the speedup?
Unless I can interact with it then there's not much for me to get excited about. Why not keep it stealth until you have a demo that people can use?
Gruber is really smart because he always proves that Apple is the best.
How my twitch and failing to deliver got us a 100 foot Samsung display
http://www.mwkn.net/2011/18/front.html

4000 mostly from meego and symbian. So yes they actually are laying off at least some meego devs.
The problem is "starting a restaurant" is a big job that not everybody can do, especially in your neighborhood. Making something comparable to your startup might not be anywhere near so difficult especially on a global basis.

If there's a lot of competition it would be a nice differentiator, but in hindsight I say screw it charge for premium stuff from the start and if it fails to get traction then "guess what everyone, we love you all so much it's free now!" and you're their hero.
We're well aware that Windows support needs improvement. Rest assured we will be addressing that issue.
The opposite would just blame society for not training girls to be leaders, or something.
Your 'lump of labor' logical fallacy contradicts the principle of 'the bottom line'. As a journalist, he is not creating work, but performing work assigned to him by a superior. His amount of available work to perform is limited.
I’ve recently started going to Python meetups. At the last one I attended, the technical presentation was given by the CTO of a local startup, and he made sure to let all of us know that he was hiring. At the one before that, another startup covered the tab for the post-meeting trip to the pub, and somebody from that startup passed out postcards encouraging people to apply.

I have no idea how effective the technique is, but the principle seems sound: everyone at the meetup can be assumed to have interest/skill in Python, and this way you target them without opening yourself up to being spammed by job-seekers who are desperate but not competent.
Optimizely Open-Sources Guiders.js, a Library to Help You Guide New Users
I always wanted to make a wall-sized version of this with really bright LEDs-- kind of like a light therapy box, but programmed with the full progression of color and brightness of various locations and seasons around the world - summer in NYC, Paris in the springtime, New England in the winter, LA on a non-smoggy day, etc., with options for real-time data feeds, too.

So you could feel like you were in the best location in the world on the best day of the year. Or just synchronize your work/sleep schedule with some other timezone.

Small versions as nice gifts, big custom versions for the luxury/institutional market. Chumby app. Wall mounted LCD/LED and/or LED dome projection.

Any hardware hackers feel like pairing up? I'm a short flight from Shenzhen. ;)
"and Angry Birds"

I bet games is the big exception here. I bet many of the "non-geeks" referenced by you and others in this thread have downloaded a few games to their iPhone, and would be much less likely to switch to a competitor that didn't have the same games or games that were just as good.

One more counter data point: at a party last Saturday in a room with a bunch of non-geek college kids, fiddling with their iPhones, one of them spontaneously asks "Hey, what's that app that can tell you the name of a song if you hold it up to the microphone?" One of the other college kids quickly confirmed that it was called Shazam.
The baby that has been thrown out with the bathwater here is a schema/data description layer.

NOT, I repeat NOT, I repeat NOT for verification but rather for tools, so that people working in strongly typed languages can interact with JSON services in a reasonable manner.

Unfortunately the one option I see, JSON Schema, appears to have caught the XML/Java bug, and has gotten very complicated.
"Not sure what features to build? Add fake buttons to your website to test market demand before you build." <- some shorter form of this needs to be the BIG h1 tag at the top of the page, not "Fake Buttons". It took a second to figure out what it does - at first glance I thought it was an icon site.
I think I have a hack that'll save you commission on refund. Follow/DM me on Twitter and I can share.
One of the cool things about using a functional language for web development is the potential to use continuation-passing style (CPS) to make http look like a stateful protocol, which makes implementing chains of user interactions a lot simpler.

I know Clojure doesn't support first-class continuations, but does anyone know whether is it possible to use Clojure Noir to program in this style?
Door number two is more likely to lead to door number three.
Me too... in Excel 95's VB for applications! fun times.
> But the relational model doesn't align well with object-orientated programming so you have an ORM layer that adds complexity to your code.

The mismatch comes about for a number of reasons:

* OOP has no formal basis so it can't be reliably transformed into relational terms.
* OOP is identity-bound -- each object is essentially
an address in memory, not a relation in a set.
* The biggie: OOP mixes data with behaviour.
Relational does not.

> How would you calculate PageRank using a relational database? As I said, with a graph database and Gremlin, you can do it in 2 lines.

For something on PageRank's scale, a custom datastore based on matrices and their multiplication makes business sense. Or MapReduce over a distributed key-value store (note that these are both OLAP approaches).

Still. SQL's a bit verbose, but these days we have recursive queries. For Oracle users, I'm talking about CONNECT BY. If I find myself running the social graph every minute, I develop an ETL package that periodically moves data from my write-bound system to my read-bound system with a more query-friendly schema. Depending on how you look on it, relational systems invented "eventual consistency".

More to the point, boring old database greybeards have learnt that OLTP and OLAP are very different use cases. The 3/4/5NF of the OLTP database will be very different from the star schema of the OLAP database.

There's really not much about NoSQL that hasn't already been done, under a different name, by the relational crowd.

I still think there is a place for NoSQL. It's just not as universal a replacement for relational systems as many make it out to be, whether we're talking about document stores, distributed key-value stores, graph stores and so on.
Mini Waterproof Outdoor Helmet Sport Camera
we do a lot of ETRM's and sybase plays a big part for us.
My boss makes very heavy use of the Starbucks app. My daughter has a billion apps that she uses daily and they aren't all games.
Streamline your hiring process so it's not so expensive. We talk about agile software and fast iteration all the time, but we don't apply it to employees. It shouldn't be so expensive to decrease the level of filtering on incoming resumes, try more people out, and get rid of the ones that don't work out.

Otherwise, the alternative is to create ridiculous criteria that doesn't even describe a good employee for your situation. Instead of being productive in a company, I'm off developing a me-too open source project just to even get a chance of getting hired to a decent position. This is infuriatingly frustrating from the point of view of someone who is a great developer but enjoys things other than programming.
Reiterating the point the blog post makes, but: It's very very easy to structure the same data in different ways in XML. While JSON has the same issue, it's a lot harder to do and you have less flexibility in making bad storage decisions.

You are absolutely right on walking the structure. JSON just tends to be easier (in my experience), even when working with XML libraries that make it less of a pain.
Despite a desire to use Postgres, we use MySQL in production. MySQL is what I knew and thus still what I know. Given that most future work involves an ORM, probably moving to postgres as soon as I learn more about configuring the server.

Currently using memcached (not memcachedb) for caching, thinking of trying out Redis.
Has Amazon dipped its toes into content production before? Then again, I'm still occasionally surprised by the Kindle.
I'm a USAA customer and unless you have ties to the military, you can't use the iPhone check cashing service. USAA is quite great (debit card points, ATM fee kickbacks, interest on checking balance), but I'm still very much looking forward to BankSimple, mostly for the iPhone check cashing and Mint-style finance tracking.

USAA doesn't let me put in future transactions such as bills, savings for vacations, etc, which puts me back into using some finance app to track that (which sucks).
Except their mobile deposit option requires you to be a member of the military or a qualifying family member, so for the general population, the feature might as well not exist.
The best way I've encountered to construct XML:

<person>
<property>
<name>first-name</name>
<value>John</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>last-name</name>
<value>Smith</value>
</property>
</person>

I kid you not. That's what I'm dealing with at work right now. Thank you, enterprise SOAP solutions.
So is 'American' culture or tribe affiliation? If he/she grew up in America then deporting him/her is like sending them to a foreign country for all intents and purposes. What if he/she doesn't even know her/his native language? It's not such a black and white issue, as much as you might want it to be.
I'm not sure that is true. I agree that talent is made (thanks, K. Anders Ericsson), but I think that anyone running a business has a finite amount of their own resources to spend. Devoting more of those resources to developing employees takes them away from developing the business.

To put it another way: the harder your job is, the less likely you are to succeed. Less skilled employees make your job harder.