skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I've ever seen a company cut employees en masse like this truly help a company come from behind to regain their former status. It sends so many wrong messages. If those 10% of your company aren't worthwhile, why were they hired and employed in the first place?

If management can afford to cut staff by 10%, the C and VP level management should be fired. Start by cutting at the top, not at the bottom.

Cutting that deep means that management was fine with spending money like drunken sailors. Nothing RIM or Nokia has announced in the last few months in terms of changes has shown that they are going to do anything other than wither and die on the vine.
محمد مهدي الجواهري  
محمد مهدي الجواهري

محمد مهدي الجواهري

محمد مهدي الجواهري
Cloud-based Java app start-up CloudBees scores $10.5 million venture round
Yeah it's like a visual "Yo dawg" joke.

"We heard you liked USPS on your laptop, so we put USPS on a laptop on USPS on your laptop!"
They will probably get shutdown as soon as this story gets enough attention.
'Better', for varying definitions of the term. When identified, people behave as to protect themselves from social criticism. That may involve not post profanities in others' posts, but it may also involve not posting stuff that goes against the status quo.
Comparing the punishment for a first offense DUI in my state (Colorado [1]) to the UK [2]:

Format will be Punishment: CO/UK

License suspended for: 9 months/12-36 months, depending on BAC

Fine: $600-$1000/£0-£5000 (apparently £300-£400 is typical due to how the UK hands out fines with their band system [3])

Jailtime: Minimum 5 days, maximum 1 year/Depends on BAC but none is pretty standard until you get to a .276 and then it's 3 months to 6 months standard

Community service: 48-96 hours/Depends on BAC, but none is standard until you get to a .207 BAC

It looks to me as though my state (which is not indicative of the United States) takes drunk driving much more seriously. This isn't even considering the fact that a DWAI can be given out to a driver that blows a .05 (the UK requires a .08) at the officer's discretion. DWAI penalties are similar to DUI penalties. Note also that it is mandatory for you to disclose any alcohol related driving offenses when you apply for a job in Colorado so it isn't like you can hide behind something being a misdemeanor vs a felony.

[1] http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/olls/PDF/COLORADO%20D...
[2] http://sentencingcouncil.judiciary.gov.uk/docs/Magistrates_G... p.124
[3] http://www.80mg.org.uk/ddlaw.html
Adding another data point: Bought it, reading it, so far very impressed.
Somebody finally figured out how to do marketing on Twitter
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801332
If you check the Update section at the end, I realized after posting that the scrolling was in fact not implemented in Flash.

However, any navigation implemented in Flash is by default at risk of being displaced by fundamental changes in the OS, as we've seen this week with Lion.
We Like FB
Their problem is they make phones and no one wants phones, they want computers.
From #1: "you can never lead your market by following the pack."

You don't have to "lead your market" to be profitable.
Thanks for the link, I did not know of them. Unfortunately, we don't get many tourists around here (not that I'm surprised...heh.)

You are probably right on the cost, though. I didn't want to make my post any longer, but I've also considered having 2 types of tours: a group (up to 10 people) standardized tour with a pre-planned route, for $10 a person, or a private, customized tour for $25-$30 per person.

That would work out to:

$50 for a 5 person public tour

$75-90 for a 3 person private tour

Which is a bit more reasonable.
I am not fully versed in the notion of innovative disruption, but it seems pretty obvious that a Clay Christensen-esque Innovator's Dilemma disruption is what's going on here: somebody had a decent product, is first to market, but doesn't have a clear enough vision to see how to stay on top and stay innovative and gets blindsided by unexpected (read Apple + Android) competitors. I wonder how closely the non-cliff notes version of RIM's fall matches the innovator's dilemma model.
I can't believe no one has suggested this yet: this is the PERFECT argument for two-factor authentication. He's even already sending texts to himself.

For every new connector, send some sort of code to your phone, and require it to be inputted back into the computer before any access is given whatsoever. Summarily disregard every single connection and command given without this code re-input.

You're even most of the way there: if you're sending messages to yourself, you might as well implement this behavior with it.
If you care to read the output, that seems like a good way to find errors in your fitness function.
Well, it just could be another form of duality, like wave-particle duality. You'd think waves and particles are mutually exclusive too, but nature disagrees.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the two characterizations come from two different branches of physics that to date have still not been fully reconciled. (General) relativity is based on a mathematical conception of space-time where gravity can be modeled by mass bending space. Quantum mechanics models all long-distance forces between particles as local interactions with a mediator particle that represents the force. These two theories have trouble getting along together for a number of reasons (look up "quantum foam"), plus we really have no way of telling if these models are a faithful representation of reality, or are just mathematically equivalent to something totally different.
#5 Epiphany Don’t bank on epiphanies. Processes that are repeatable and controllable are the most reliable sources of innovation.

I disagree. Brilliant people make for innovation. Repeatable processes make refinement possible but not true breakthroughs.

Overall I think the statements made work very well for a consultancy selling services to management. I don't see them working so well for a startup.
PopCap teams with 9-year-old to grant wish, create fun game
Free Developer Event  Computer Science Museum...NO WAY
Correct, $30 per tour.

You are right, though. The slight difference would be that we wouldn't lose money on the non-booked time; there's no commute or overhead, other than the website and some printed materials. I, or my tour guides, wouldn't have any significant prep time for each tour.

I mentioned it in another comment, but perhaps a split model would work better: $10/person public generic tour vs. $30/person private customized tour.
Is this a common practice on other +1-like buttons? (say facebook "like"s, twitter's RTs, digg/reddit upvotes, etc)
Kudos to the organizers for being selfless, but I actually think it's okay to recoup some money for the countless hours and unexpected $$ you WILL put into things at the last minute.

In other words, this might be a huge hit for everyone except the burnt out organizers. Good luck!
Ask HN: How many of you/us use Google Reader on a daily basis?
I'm just curious, as it is still my #1 consumption app in spite of FB, Twitter, G+, etc.

I have over 80 publications and read over 800 items a day.

Am I the only one?
Maybe this is an in joke or something, but searching for "seoshop" on google results in a landing page as the first result.
Yup. You can buy pretty much any vote for $0.10-0.50 per account. Including Reddit and Hacker News. (Of course, it's black hat and you shouldn't do it.)
This may actually be detectable. If someone who has never, based on their search history, suddenly +1's something that would normally be outside their interest, you could weight that plus one differently than others.

In fact, I would be very surprised if Google _didn't_ weight +1 data, and simply used the total number as their "+1 Signal".
cool talk
World's most valuable _public_ company, perhaps.

Saudi Aramco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco) has an estimated market value in the trillions.
Google should buy 1000 +1s for some random obscure site and then ban all the IPs that +1'd it.
Ask HN: Why haven't there been more articles about the tragedy in Norway?
I'm just asking this because I'm genuinely curious. I've been checking HN daily now for over a year and generally, when there's a world event of any form, people will submit articles about it and, despite the protestations of some in the respective articles threads - generally about it not being "of interest to hackers" - a robust debate will often ensue. Obviously given the situation in Norway robust debate isn't exactly the order of the day, but I'm still surprised there's not more articles about the situation there ranking highly.

Have I misread the behavioural patterns of the community when it comes to world events and not picked up on some nuanced quality required for an event to become HN-worthy? Or is it just that events like this are of little interest to the HN community-at-large?
Surely Google can detect this for sites that use Google Analytics -- they know where the majority of their traffic comes from (presumably a high-value economy) and they know where their +1s come from. If there isn't a significant geographical overlap, then there's something fishy going on.

EDIT: For tl;dr, The article mentions that +1s are likely coming from developing countries.
Holy crap that's expensive. I'm not sure if it's scalable though. At that price I would be surprised if the botnets used mostly for sending spam doesn't just query google for whatever result and "click" the +1.
Visualizing How A Google Search Can Track Users
The difference is that in the #1 point he was talking about not simply implementing the features of a competitor. If you notice company B has feature X and therefore decide you must have it as well, you may be in trouble if it turns out feature X isn't useful and is hard to implement.

So, it's obvious that while Google wasn't the first search engine, they also weren't simply copying Altavista's feature list.
Twitter's @replies are a good example. Friend requests / follow updates are another.
High Performance Python tutorial v0.2 (from EuroPython 2011)
I could see $200-250. It's basically a big netbook with most of the ports and storage removed.

Better to just buy a largish netbook (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220...) and install Chrome OS on it. (http://moreinews.com/google-chrome-os-review-notebook-tablet...)
I think you just have to be more careful with your rhetoric if you're going to point out something negative that Apple has done. Most of my karma actually comes from comments that could be taken as anti-Apple.

If all karma were so hard-earned, the system would probably function closer to the intentions of those who created it.
Locai Android Beta Sign Up
Shivling : Avoiding boilerplate views in Django
"There were 46 executions in 2010". For some perspective, if you think the death penalty is commonplace, then you must think getting killed by lightning is very commonplace.
OS X Lion - Causing hair loss as you use your Mac. One follicle at a time.
Aspergers and Joel Spolsky's the Joel Test
Easy parallelization with Bash in Linux, part 2
Product Development at Facebook By Mark Zuckerberg
Netflix Is Coming To Facebook Soon -- But Not In The U.S.
Funny how Festo's SmartBird has been posted to HN multiple times over the past few months, but never voted up: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+sma...

Proof that having a good HN headline matters!
New users and non-techies aren’t the only groups negatively affected by Lion’s changes, either. Seasoned Apple users have spent the last two days filling the internet with blog posts and Twitter updates noting their frustrations. Whether it’s the gestures, scrolling, full-screen apps, Mission Control, Versions, or Resume — people are having more than their fair share of trouble adjusting.

Every release of anything is followed by weeks of people complaining about anything that's changed, whether it's changed for better or worse. From my perspective at least, the Lion-likers appear to outnumber the Lion-dislikers by a wide spread.
The sacrifices needed to make it $100-$150 would result in you not buying it. Like crummy screens and slow processors.
Vi is actually quite nethack-like in its interface.
I can't disagree with the first two paragraphs, but for the last, what about shutting down entire divisions? If a company invested in a failed product that requires a number of specialized employees, does it imply they were spending money like drunken sailors when they have to let them go?
Maybe you could change this into a poll?
I use Google Reader and check it often, but I'm very selective of what I subscribe to, so there's not usually a lot of updates to catch up on.
Ask HN: Work on something you love (little $$) or something that has a market?
Hey HN,
I created FilmBet.com (design is horrid) two years back. It's a Box Office Betting app. I love the business side of movies. On sundays I always check how much they have made in the box office etc.
So I figured what the hell, maybe others would be too. So I created it, you log on and bet on the upcoming movies on which would perform better than others.

I had thoughts of issuing monthly prizes to the users with the highest points. I tried to quickly come up with a business model: If you were a pro user (Paying a couple bucks a month) you would get double points.

I didn't research the legality of the betting angle.

I built it, and I guess when I got to the marketing and growing and how it's gonna make part I flaked out. But it's always in the back of the my head.
Considering to rewrite it in Rails and see what could be.

On the other hand, currently working on a Saas application that handle employee vacation tracking.

I guess my question is-
Have you ever been torn between working on a something that genuinely interests you (but the chance of $$ is low) or something than doesn't quite interest you but there is a market for it.

Edit: Formatting
I'm not sure how he came to the conclusion that Lion isn't beginner-friendly anymore. The only reason it took him 20 minutes to get acclimated is because he's most likely been using advanced features of OS X (that were slightly changed in Lion) for years and it took him a little while to rewrite his muscle memory.

I installed Lion on both of my parent's computers a few weeks ago. The only things they noticed that was changed was the vastly improved Mail UI, which they both picked up almost instantly, and the scrolling.

I simply warned them that scrolling had been reversed, they noted that "it finally makes sense because the stuff that's moving goes in the right direction now," and they continued using the computer normally.
I've seen a few articles in the last year pointing out that the diff between the USPS being in the black or the red is the cost of funding health care in its pension system, something Congress mandated a few years back. This past year's funding they had to put aside $5.5 billion, IIRC.
Ask HN: Simple Online Helpdesk Ticketing System?
We recently decided with some of our clients we need to use a ticketing system, as the pure volume of emails they send us with support requests and feature requests, it is is too easy to lose an email.
So we're looking for the most simple system that satisfies the following requirements.

* Can parse emails+attachments and create ticket

* Allow web submitted tickets with different priorities

* Multiple users per ticket(ie two of the clients users can be on the ticket)

* Let user see their own tickets and tickets from their company(based on their email domain).

* Export tickets for a given company by one of their users.

We'd like internal notes on tickets, but that isn't a must. We looked at osTicket which has a lot of these features, but it doesn't have the view all tickets for a given client(as a client user) or export ticket.

Kayako we looked at, but it may be a bit over kill.

Open source is great, free is even better.

Any suggestions?
I don't know if the situation has changed, but every AOL user used to be behind ~20 firewalls. So banning the IP of one AOL firewall would block 5% of AOL users.
I couldn't disagree more. I just gave my father (who has an iPhone) his first Mac and he had no idea where to find applications until I showed him the Launchpad. It's a feature I would never use, but it's accessible with a single button press or click and looks and feels just like the familiar iOS interface.

Apple is doing something smart here. My guess is that more people have iPhones than Macs and they're betting that switchers will understand these new features and turn into across-the-board Apple fans.
http://subvertandprofit.com/
Once you've nailed your customer acquisition strategy & costs, you pour on the gas. $112M is an awful lot of gas.

airbnb is offering $25 for friend referral. Assuming $100 / night @ 3%, and a 50% profit margin -> it takes 16.6 nights to break even. Average time to 16.6 nights? 1 - 2 years?
Facebook for iPad: early unofficial preview (video)
free!!

Mark Zuckerberg, gives an example to demonstrate product development and experience at Facebook and talks about how their product has evolved with the company.
We are doing the same thing for ErlangCamp. We realized we could lower the price point, so we did, as well as retroactively lowered it for those who already had ordered.
I see Google moving to use their 'news algorithm' to fight this kind of thing. When a news site gets linked to a great deal real fast then it shoots up in rankings, but once that super-high load disappears, suddenly as other news articles become more relevant, then Google basically blacklists that previous article despite that it has super-high backlinks.

Could Google just see a site get 1,000 +1's in a week and then never get another for 2 weeks and then blacklist it like the above news algorithm?
This feels a little more akin to a Reddit post, but it is amusing nevertheless.
That'd be a good idea if you are sure all the +1's are coming from illegitimate users but with the existence of botnets/malware/etc, it's very possible that the people +1'ing have no idea they are doing it.
Socrates wouldn't trust the Web.
On the other-hand a sizable percentage of developers already use this technique, informally, for bugfixing. My intuition is that replacing those developers with this algorithm would only improve code quality.
"I don't think I've ever seen a company cut employees en masse like this truly help a company come from behind to regain their former status."

Apple?
I wanted to do a poll. I didn't see how to do that when I posted. Can you give a quick howto? Sorry for being a newb.
Wait a minute....

You cannot take the opinion from regular users of a system and apply it to new users of a system.

New users will simply adjust unless something is completely off.

So nice headline but it has no actual argument to back it up.
It's obvious that writing another good review about Lion wouldn't have generated enough page views.
Surely this is a side effect of Mechanical Turk-type sites and offers; if you offer someone $0.10 for what amounts to a few seconds work, it kinda starts to all look worthwhile.
nothing will help these companies. It is time for them to go.

Look at the bright side though - 2000 of mobile developers is relieved from working on dead-end products and ready to be injected into red-hot mobile hiring market to work on the successful mobile products. Its win-win for everybody - the developers, their new companies, consumers.
How many AOL users are there left in the world? I don't mean to imply that there aren't many, or that they're not important, I'm really curious.
I sort of assumed that part of the point of Google+ was that you could have +1s from your social graph weighed much more heavily. Trust only the recommendations of people you trust, or people they trust, or so on with diminishing weight.
I don't see how that would particularly help. If patents couldn't be sold, they would instead be licensed under highly permissive and exclusive terms. The effect would be the same and it would simply add needless complexity to the system. Complexity is largely the cause of the existing problem.
I've tried, but I just can't get used to Lion's "natural" scrolling. I think a better transition would be to leave mouse scrolling alone, but reverse the scrolling direction for MacBook trackpads and the "Magic Trackpad" device.
If this is possible, you could try working on your Saas application until it becomes profitable enough that you can work on other stuff while still having a steady income from your work. That way, you can use your hard earned income to supply your passion into something that would not make enough money for you to make a living.
Student discounts are always necessary. I will definitely miss being able to ask for this, as even a small amount matters to students just starting to break into tech.
I'm not sure how taking away an inventor's current right to sell his patent counts as "return[ing] the power back to the actual inventor."

Also, under current law, an exclusive licensee can be granted the right to sue on a patent. So you'd have to change that part of the law as well, for your scheme to actually change anything.
Good question. I don't mean the sellers. But rather the accounts that are being sold. Meaning that the buyer of such an account will have wasted 10$. Don't see why would anybody pay for a +1 account though. Especially since they will eventually open the gates to everyone.
Japanese Man Arrested For Storing Malware
WOW! $1/vote for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon etc - the cheaters must have pretty deep pockets if they want to game the system! Or does it only take 10-20 votes to swing things in one's favour?
That's a pretty flippant attitude, considering people are losing access to critical stuff like all their emails for making the mistake of violating some rule buried in a 20 page TOS.
The number of deaths is around 90 a day in the US. (...) I don't think it's as high as some think.

Right, it's almost as low as the worst killing spree in Norway. Move along, nothing to see here.
good point. i'm still not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing.
My personal experience was: i entered google+ with my nick name and switched to my real name on my own, before those deletions took place... don't ask me why, it was just a feeling?

As i especially enjoy the locality based stream, i enjoy not having to read too much crap :P

Also, posting against the status quo is kind of natural in the internet, the difference is HOW and not WHAT is said..

On the other hand:

Around 15-20% of my facebook friends use fake names out of privacy concerns and in general don't post crap. They still have their own, good reasons to not use their real name..
Yes, I agree 100%.

There is a downside however. memcached is very much for hash-structures (point lookups only). InnoDB is a B+tree, so it can do ranged reads as well.
Disclaimer: MS is a big company.

I don't see this attitude in my group at all. Not saying it doesn't exist elsewhere, but people are extremely generous with sharing credit/praise, and people overall are pretty good at standing up and publicly admitting errors.

I'm sorry you worked in a sucky group. Hope it's better where you are now.
The Difference Between 1% and 2%
I almost laughed out loud at the part "Have you ever invented a programming language? :-)"

Off topic:
It annoys me when people go "Oh you don't know this person? But they're so famous!" because not everyone knows all the famous people in every field.
Fuck google. I love there e-mail but hate verything else about them. here me google? FUCK YOU. im sticking with facebook and bing