skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article makes a false argument. It somehow seems to categorize programming as being different than other disciplines, and argues that programming needs "knowledge how". But this is really the case for virtually everything. What isn't best learned by practice? That's how you best learn math, plumbing, mowing the grass, writing, reading, circuit design, cooking, research, shooting free throws, etc...

In fact, everyone here knows about the popular 10,000 hours of deliberate practice rule. No one achieves competency through Matrix like osmosis -- not even programmers.

And I think what the author is missing when he/she goes to these conferences is that a conference session is a jumping off point. It's a place say, "I didn't realize you could animate that with that technique." And then you go home and try it and practice it. It's not about mastery at the conference, but awareness of something worth pursuing more.
Ron Conway is also an investor in YCombinator. Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
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You're welcome to your opinion but Eric has helped a lot of people like me that he has never even met.

Reading the four steps to the epiphany helped me knit together what I'd learned and helped me understand why my last startup didn't succeed.

But it was the lean startup movement (along with Ash Maurya's book) that gave me a game plan to go forward. As a result of the lean startup movement fewer startups will fail and that's a pretty fine legacy.
Definitely. Obviously the software industry has a lot of know-how that would be invaluable to the science community. The critical point I was trying to make is that scientists need to understand the fundamental difficulty of software correctness before they can be expected to apply best practices effectively.
Whats this FounderCard? Want to leave your referal code?
Not by today's standards; you can buy a PowerEdge R815 with thirty-two 2GHz cores and 128GB of RAM for $8,000.
Depends on your definition of "everywhere". I don't even walk the dog without throwing my phone in my pocket first. Would you always walk your dog with your iPad?
I live in NYC now and have spent enough time in SF, MV, and PA to know what it would be like to live there. It’s certainly expensive in Manhattan, but there are a number of advantages:

* I don’t need a car. This has been as freeing for me as for others.

* I don’t worry at all about logistics, ever. The subways run all night, taxis are ubiquitous, and walking is safe and pleasant.

* Everything is close by, so I don’t need to worry about meetups at the opposite end of the bay.

* I can find good food nearby regardless of the time of day. This city never fully sleeps, which is great because you can set your own schedule.

The city is also distracting, but after a while you get used to it and build up the self-discipline to stay in and work. I’m not convinced this is any harder here than it would be in any other place that I had friends.
The Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Design (IE&D) Dashboard
I don't think we're really arguing here. My comment was meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless most currencies share the property that their value in trade is decoupled from their inherent value. Back to the OP's question, there is no such thing as a real value of a BitCoin, it comes down to how much someone else is willing to exchange (in barter, currency, gold, whatever) at any particular moment.
People did this to share non-mp3 files on the original Napster. I wonder if Wrapster still runs... http://www.team-mp3.com/mp3/wrapster.htm
I've never used GWT but there are three things that I spend a lot of time dealing with in my day job:

1. WebForms controls mess with the markup that is output, this used to be a real nightmare in v1 with tables being inserted everywhere. It's better now but you still don't _know_ what IDs you're going to get and there are still issues like the GridView doesn't output thead rows in the table unless you set certain properties explicitly. All this makes using ASP.NET with third party CSS and JavaScript tools hard because They often rely on markup being defined a particular way

2. ViewState is on by default and posted back to the server every time the page posts back. Most people have slower updoad speeds ti download speeds, so this causes real issues. The whole design of WebForms assumes that every control will be setup once on initial page load and then rebuilt from ViewState each time after that, whereas usually each postback only requires some of the page state to be posted back and a few controls to be rebuilt. Some sort of ViewState group would be useful to tell the page "if the user clicks that button, then these fields are needed at the server end and these other controls will be rebuilt. This would be virtually impossible to retro-fit into WebForms though.

3. UpdatePanels are a performance nightmare and still post back the entire page, usually they are only needed to update 2 or 3 of the controls on the page and a page method would be far more efficient, but UpdatePanels are just so darn convenient (especially given point 1) that they get over used.

Some abstractions are really nice and I totally don't care what happens beneath them, but WebForms is not one of them. Markup matters, IDs matter, upload bandwith matters. WebForms abstracted the stuff I care about and made bad some bad assumptions too.
First, thanks for the historical data. That's nice to see.

But it doesn't seem to me that we'd expect to see an immediate bump in iPhone's numbers from Verizon for at least three reasons unrelated to the platform's (potential) desirability:

1) The iPhone has a lot more competition among Verizon customers. For a while, if you wanted a good smartphone with AT&T, you were getting an iPhone. We wouldn't expect to see "auto-flocking" to the iPhone on Verizon like there was on AT&T for that reason.

2) Contract rollover inhibits fast reaction to new developments. I know a substantial number of people who went Android with the Motorola Droid release in November, 2009. For a 2 year contract, that means November, 2011 is when those customers will be reevaluating their smartphone brand.

3) For some people who wanted an iPhone, they probably bought an iPhone regardless of the network. iPhone on Verizon was (or will be) a chance for some people to change carriers and keep the phone they love.

I think those three factors inhibit a massive switch to iPhone simply because of its availability on a new carrier. Other factors may play a role, too. For instance, AT&T put a lot of their own advertising weight behind the iPhone. Verizon hasn't platformed the iPhone in the same way.
Thanks for the kind words. It takes courage to admit that we don't know everything. (For the record, I certainly don't).

I look forward to learning from you, when you're ready to share your story.
I think you're modifying the argument yourself. I saw, at no point, where the author argued that programming, design, etc. are _different_ from other disciplines. It simply states that the author believes they are better learned by doing than by reading (to over-simplify it). I don't see where the author condemns any other method. I actually don't see any point at which you and the author are in disagreement.
I've also had mine pre-ordered for several months now - looking forward to it! Will there be an epub format to download to my nook?
Will AppSumo customers receive their copy via email, Eric? I pre-ordered via AppSumo back in October (I think).
We have just launched Giveaway portal, feel free to give us some feedback
I am curious about this book, however unfortunately at the moment I'm sick of the marketing efforts. There's been a bit too much book related BUY ME NOW spam on Twitter for months and months on end.
Domain renewal is something like $140 per year !?

I hope you mean web hosting.

//edit: Ah you mean for the .com + .org + .net etc. Still can't see this being 140 but makes more sense
Mark Zuckerberg could easily become likeable within a year. He just has to make it his annual challenge; he must prioritize connecting with people (one aspect of himself) over animals (this year's challenge though another, perhaps less immediately relatable aspect of himself, though perhaps also a smarter long term strategy).

Please take this with a grain of salt because I am still working on liking myself but at this stage in my life I do identify with Mark Zuckerberg very much. I listened to him talking on a YouTube interview at the Palo Alto house in 2005 and noted an intense similarity or parallel I perceived in our body diction - particularly vocal tone.
A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that makes locally optimal choices. The classic example, if you've taken an algorithms course, is the travelling salesman problem with the nearest neighbor heuristic. This starts at an arbitrary node, and will usually generate different solutions based on the node that is chosen to start at.

The very presence of the "internal heuristic" that you mention is usually enough to make the algorithm greedy.

Otherwise, thanks for being nice, and try to take less offense at what people say on the Internet.
Microsoft - the dominant tech behemoth who everyone loves to hate & Facebook - the worlds current social network crack that everyone hates to love.
I think it's safe to say he was being tongue-in-cheek.
Same here - support and group understanding are critical for taking things to the next level. Send me an email if anything takes form.
Yes, the book will launch on Kindle/iBooks at the same as hardcover. You can pre-order the Kindle version at http://bit.ly/LeanStartupBook
Ask HN: How has your profession affected your non-professional thinking?
For example, I'm a software developer. To become good at what I do I've developed a habit of rapidly thinking through possible execution flows whenever I write a routine. I especially tend to imagine what will happen in "bad" situations, and what will cause failure scenarios. What if the array is null? What if it's just empty? Etc.

Developing a habit of thinking like this is crucial for being a good programmer. However, this manner of imagining failure situations is generally bad in the real world. I notice myself doing it from time to time (more often I've been working a lot). Today I caught myself in an empanada shop wondering where I was going to go to get change for my 100 peso note if the empanada man didn't happen to have change (Argentina has a significant change shortage). I was worrying about this before it was even time to pay. It ended up being no problem at all. Had it been a "problem," I could have easily just found a solution after the fact and not wasted time being concerned beforehand. It wouldn't have crashed any servers, exposed private user information, or gotten anybody fired.

So, that example happened to be a negative one (although it's not so bad to train myself against). I can name plenty of positive effects too, but I'm more curious what other people have to say.
We have just launched our new Giveaway portal, would love to get some feedback from fellow startup developers/designers.
I can't think of anyone I respect on entrepreneurship that doesn't practice it themselves.

Me neither, but perhaps you were asleep during the part of the program where Eric Ries:

A) worked at at least one startup that exploded on impact with the market in spectacular fashion,

B) learned some lessons from that,

C) co-founded IMVU and made a bunch of money?

Ries may have faults, but a complete lack of practice does not appear to be among them.

As for your allergy to salesmanship: Reticence sells nothing.

I wish Ries luck in leveraging the awesome psychological powers of branding and the publishing hype cycle to get his ideas in front of more people. I know I've lost years of my time to management who had apparently never heard of these ideas.
Looks like they have standardized on a 475 pixel width headline image for each section. In this case, it has lots of text, but usually it has product photos emphasized with headline text.
The conclusion I drew from this experience was that I should get over my fear of making mistakes. I could have been more clear on that in the post.

There's probably some optimal level of fear-of-mistakes for any given project. Monorail made me realize my brain was tuned too far in the fear direction. I stand by that generalization.
I immediately get redirected to http://chatoften.com/login, then get the following error

ReferenceError: Jade:19
17|	p ChatOften connects you with another random Facebook user to have a one-on-one chat with. You'll both see each other's picture and name so that you can start a great conversation. Click register to start.
18|	fb:registration(fields="[{'name':'name'},{'name':'gender'},{'name':'location'}]"
> 19|	, redirect-uri="#{redirectUrl}"
20|	, fb_only ="true")
21|	- if(clientCount > 0)
22|	#numClients(style="text-align:center;color:#aaa") There are #{clientCount} people online

clientCount is not defined
at Object.anonymous (eval at <anonymous> (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/jade/lib/jade.js:224:10))
at ServerResponse._render (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/view.js:425:21)
at ServerResponse.render (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/view.js:316:17)
at Router.<anonymous> (/home/ubuntu/www/chatServer/server.js:33:9)
at done (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:250:22)
at middleware (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:244:9)
at param (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:227:11)
at pass (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:232:6)
at Router._dispatch (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:255:4)
at Object.handle (/home/ubuntu/src/node/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:45:10)

Hope this "bug report" helps.
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All AppSumo customers who bought the Lean Startup Bundle will get a brand-new hardcover copy shipped to them in the mail.
Check out http://cloudharmony.com/status We've been monitoring Storm for over 18 months and never once experienced an outage. They are one of only a few providers with no downtime (we monitor over 100 different cloud services).
You'll have to order the ebook version separately. You can pre-order it on Kindle right now.
P90X every night before starting to work late again!
What's to stop me from changing all my file names to 'mp3'?
Clearly I didn't mislead all the weak-minded people. Those aren't points, those are questions disguised as points in the absence of data.
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I'm working in biology now, and a good example of researchers who produce quality, documented code that other people find useful is the Knight group at UC Boulder. They write python with good docs and support, publish the algorithms they come up with in bioinformatics journals, and people cite them all the time.

Might be worth thinking about why there are incentives there and not elsewhere.
Personally I've never applied for a job (I'm 32 now) and in our company the very first thing we do is ask around for personal recommendations when hiring new staff. Advertising the job is the last resort and usually gives the worst results.
You've got to have misstated that. That would be a complete and total disaster of enough scale to completely kill Plus.
Sounds like MIT could have taught him a lesson about selecting the correct tool for a job, then -- there's no real sense to use a non-deterministic algorithm to solve this class of problem. Beyond the spirit of just experimenting, of course.
Only when you lower the price and get more profit as you can easily get more customers but actually lose money in process.
Well, in most of the normal goods you listed, someone's free to sell good, cheap furniture or toys. Target's in business, as are smaller businesses. Telecom's a natural monopoly, which is prone to distortions -- in a normal market, you'd think competition would drive the price of texts down to free, right? It's finally happening but it took a long time. Essentially now it's just a hidden cost in the price, add in $15 to what's advertised for the unlimited texts.
Spotify to launch in US
Isn't good entrepreneurship all about profiting from doing good? I don't see anything wrong with that.

Besides Eric and Steve have been expounding on this idea for a while and while it now seems like second-nature, it wasn't obvious back when.

I think that it is remarkable what they have done. Encapsulating that in a book so that people who are not in SV but are instead in Beijing and Bangalore can read and apply can only be a good thing.
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John Anderson, 7%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Anderson#1980_President...

George Wallace, 14% and 46 electoral votes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace_presidential_cam...

Eugene V. Debs, 3% three times and 6% once: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
Thanks tomp, I was deploying a new version and I seemed to have caused an issue. It should now be fixed.
just brilliant!
Nope.

They're uploaded as 'private' by default, and it's a configurable option, so you can turn the auto-upload feature off altogether. Actually, maybe I did, because I think it asked me the first time whether or not I want auto-upload on or off by default; but even with it on, I don't feel even remotely unsafe -- the photos are automatically backed up to 'the cloud' and aren't shared unless I go in and explicitly share them.
This looks fantastic - Downloading now
Can you define "algorithmically simple"? This looks like hamiltonian cycle with an extra constraint that there is one bounded region. I wouldn't be surprised if this problem was NP-hard.
"It turns out to be easier and faster to iterate from an existing but wrong solution, than to deduce a correct solution from scratch. Even if you have to occassionally press the “clear” button to start over."

This is what I was referring to. Yes, if you tackle coding projects that are challenging mostly by size and not by algorithmic difficulty, simply plowing ahead is the right attitude. But sometimes you will encounter real challenges, and for those you will need all the top-down design and logical tricks that you can muster. To the extent that my personal experience is relevant, for my PhD thesis I've designed and implemented a novel algorithm. I went through three non-functional versions before I realized that I actually needed to spell everything out on paper first, before writing a single line of code. After that, I was done in two weeks.
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Using sendfile with node.js
Wow. That's deadly for Google.

No matter what you personally may feel about it, I can guarantee we'll be seeing blog posts and news stories about "Google put my private pictures I took for my boyfriend on the internet."

Guaranteed.
Thanks for the quick hacks. I'm a little confused though - are you advising that you shouldn't display the date in the blog posts?
I agree with this. The key differentiator in my mind is that categorizing my friends in Circles is, Hell, almost fun. I can easily drag someone to multiple circles, or drag multiples of people into a circle, or drag multiples of people into multiple circles.

The user experience on it is just great. Yes, Facebook sort of has this functionality, but it isn't anywhere remotely close to being as usable as Circles is out of the box.
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No, you don't know what you are talking about. I ran the COPPA compliance for a Fortune 100 company when the law was passed. There is no public/private distinction in the law.

"The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and Rule apply to individually identifiable information about a child that is collected online, such as full name, home address, email address, telephone number or any other information that would allow someone to identify or contact the child."

http://www.coppa.org/comply.htm
I don't disagree, necessarily, but it would be a pretty baseless claim made by someone who doesn't understand how the internet (or the app) works.

Admittedly, that's quite probably most people, but, as I said, it does ask you by default, and it does upload those pictures as private until you explicitly go and share them otherwise.
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Any plans on bringing this across the pond to the UK/EU ?
I think its common for people to use a phrase like "lease valuable" incorrectly. What he's really saying is that "these other reasons are important but undervalued so you need to consciously emphasize them."
Perhaps you were thinking of the series of articles on the "Gervais Principle", in particular #2,
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...
Systems verses Intuition and Experience
You're right, there are probably instances of this problem for which greedy algorithms are quite slow.
Are you sure that price is right, Dell is showing that box at quite a bit more on their site right now.
They haven't done a whole lot about MS (which is basically the definition of this behaviour) though, even looking at Europe.
In many installations it was very well possible to take down entire cell by mobile terminated short message traffic, which is fact that is highly inconsistent with this "idle channel theory". The GSM signaling infrastructure is not especially suited to reordering and queuing of signaling frames. The scarce resource here is time on PCH (MT case) or RACH (MO case, which is more significant as contention there can waste resources even more), actual data transfer transaction is relatively expensive (and not-so well designed), but comparable in resource consumption to initial allocation of used SDCCH. By the way, it's interesting to note that source and destination addresses of SMS can be larger than it's payload.
This (with the links to the dissertion) gives a pretty thourough background:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/24/viewing...
IIRC he was at IMVU for only the first few years. Mostly before the company grew. Regardless I don't see how that single historical piece of entrepreneurial experience translates into a three item list.

I don't think it's his relative lack of experience that I have a problem with so much as the conscious effort he's making to become a "guru" that sells picks to the miners.
After a decade as a professional investor, I've learned to think about the world in money terms, especially with regards to people: incentives, greed, fear. I used to be a very optimistic person who assumed people to be good-natured and innocent until proven otherwise. I lament the loss of that.

I've read about and experienced (as an investor) so many instances of other people lying/cheating/stealing in order to make extra money - it's amazing what CEOs get away with in public companies. And it's very sad to me that trustworthy/ethical CEOs are in the minority.

So now I tend to automatically think in terms of incentives and what the other side of a large money transaction will do, whether it involves buying/selling a house, inheritance issues, fund raising for a private school, etc. Sometimes, this thinking is not warranted - but it's automatic now.
I'd love to use it but I don't use Facebook
The only hitch in that is caltrain stops running at midnight. Even if you're not out partying, but just having a later dinner, you always have to keep an eye on the time, and make sure you're in the cab (muni, etc) before 11:30 to get on that last train of the night.