skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I changed an ex-girlfriends life with Reader -- I swear to god. She's a (semi) extreme couponer and deal hunter. Every day there's dozens of give-away's. Good, expensive stuff. Be the first 100 to click on this link, or the first 25 to take that survey, etc. She followed a dozen+ blogs every day to stay current on these things.

When I set her up in Reader and she discovered the "Next Item" button, it changed her life. It was really pretty great to be able to help her like that and see her eyes light up.
Well, either those are corner cases or the Homebrew guys are doing a great job because I've never had a problem. Not a heavy user though. Before Homebrew I used to build my own packages because I tried and couldn't stand Fink or MacPorts.
Familiarity. "Hmm, I've spent thousands of hours driving carelessly and haven't killed anyone. Why start being careful now? It'll just make me late to my meeting."

(As a cyclist, I think people drive a lot better than they are made out to, however. I can't think of any time anyone's endangered my life.)
I used to check it daily, but now I've stopped because of information overload. The most important news finds its way to me (eg through Facebook or Twitter shares), otherwise, I'm much more productive just getting some work done.
I'm a hacker, what can I say? The design I think makes a lot of intuitive sense. The visual layout leaves a little something to be desired. But then again, that's how you know NewsBlur is legit and not some fly-by-night.
At below 22mph or whatever they said, and at the distances they show in the movie, I'm almost positive that braking is the correct action. In that situation, stop distance is short and it's too late to swerve. (It's true that swerving becomes a progressively better option as speed increases.)
Makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
I think the population of atheists (and near atheists) is at or above 10% in the US. Judging from my perspective in North Carolina, the population of devout Christians is at least 10%.

I wonder what this model would say about ideas that oppose each other.
I switched to http://fastladder.com/ after bloglines became unusable.
It's a perfectly viable strategy. Combine your peanut butter (hardware design, workflow, bb messaging, etc) with proven chocolate (android smartphone technology) and try to make something that preserves the unique qualities your company is known for while keeping pace with the competition on other features (high quality mibile browsers, games, etc.)

I know several people who still use blackberries because they are fundamentally superior for certain business needs. But that's just an extreme corner of the market, ultimately people will make due with other options that are "good enough" in order to take advantage of other benefits.

As far as the lowest common denominator problem, if you think htc, samsung, and motorola are in a race to the bottom then maybe you haven't been paying attention.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/108/1086448p1.html

Their work agreements didn't allow it, but Activision cheated them out of their bonuses anyways.
I find these old computing stories fascinating. All programming luminaries should consider putting their history into books for us normal nerds to read ;)
Cheap Pandora Bracelets
Almost all professional employment in the US is characterized as at-will. How can someone get ensure their work agreement accounts for this prior to starting a job at one of these companies? Ask for a "you will not fire me prior to paying me a bonus" clause?

It seems to me that if a company in this situation wants to screw the employee, they will find a way.
Let me rephrase that: They are supposed to -ignore- an action they are aware of that they believe constitutes criminal conduct? Prosecutors, DoJ don't drop cases they think they can bring to trial when, in their perception, illegal activity is taking place just on a hunch. Right?
Love NewsBlur--moved all my feeds from Google Reader over and am planning to tell all my friends about it :)
What they mean is that organic growth is insufficient. You have to bootstrap the 10% (of your cultural group, population, market...fill in the blank), but once you pass that threshold, statistics is on your side.

So how to do it? that's what marketing is about. You can pay people (sales force), fake people (advertising), trick people (Ponzi scheme 'winners'), convert people (early adopters or force people (lobbying as product launch). Sometimes you can achieve a great deal by plying a lever judiciously in just the right place, but that can, of course, be very expensive. If you have time but not money, you can take a map/reduce approach and build dominant positions in smaller markets - a good example being the various techniques used by local bands to build a following among a particular geographic or demographic group.

This sort of research is at a relatively early stage. It's sort of like epidemiology, but we're feeling our way here to a large extent.
We're building a "Priority Inbox for News" that's the opposite of sort by magic: all the factors that determine priority (you mention some of the key ones) can be exposed and tweaked.

Sign on up! We're close to alpha.

http://signup.linktamer.com/
Makes sense to me, as I'm always in hurry to get back to the comments on HN.
I can't think of anything more ridiculous in the world of professional software development than planned crunch-time for video game development.

The concept is a bit boggling. Planned periods of "oh shit we need to work 14 hours today or we'll miss the deadline!"
I agree with this.

The games industry has conditioned itself to believe it is unique in software development, and that as a special snowflake, it is able to define whatever is reasonable for itself. Whatever is reasonable is what's come before, and what's come before has been a terrible mess. Google can launch products with a much better work/life balance than most games studios, and their engineers make a lot more money for it too.

The only people that stay are the people who can survive it. Those that survive are those that don't know any better (fresh-faced grads), grizzled and bitter vets that perpetuate the cycle of violence, or those people who really can't imagine anything more awesome than making games, personal life be damned.

Pachter is being blunt here, but he's right. The industry won't change, and in my interactions with it, it doesn't seem to want to.
Both sites (http://seoshop.biz/ and http://plussem.com/) use Google Analytics. So Google could feasibly track who makes a purchase. If you make purchase on those sites and you've recently logged into your Google Webmaster tools or something and then get a load of +1's Google could surely fairly easily see that.
I use Google Reader daily, but I probably would not have participated in this poll if I didn't.
Yes, I was talking mostly about visuals.
But again, very good job.
Sushi at 38,000 Feet, Please Why don’t they sell sushi on the airplane?
Here is the essence of what I do
Teena Touch PR. Consistent results, strong media contacts and long history launching startups. http://www.teenatouchpr.com
Crunch is the unavoidable result of poor project management. Project management in software development is notoriously bad, and in game development we're even behind that curve.

Schedules are built on hopes and dreams instead of historical data. Impossible promises are made to publishers in order to secure funding or keep from being cancelled.

Most harmful, is the belief that crunching actually increases productivity. If you look at the research on the subject the most you can hope to gain is about a 2 week boost before you backslide and become less productive.

If you could reliably deliver (fun) games on time and on budget you would have a serious competitive advantage in this field.
You should know how to update your Facebook status like a boss.
Ditto. I used Google Reader until I found Reeder for Mac and iOS. Reeder syncs with Google Reader so technically I do still use it, just not the web interface.
So what happens if there are multiple groups, each larger than 10% and all holding mutually exclusive beliefs? Say for instant, 40% of the population of a country is Catholic and 45% is Protestant? Civil war, I guess?
Click the fork button. People that release free software have no obligation to their users; they wrote some code, made it available, and that is that. That's all free software is about: instead of being at the mercy of some Supreme Entity that makes your software, you have the power to do anything that Supreme Entity does. Fix the bug. Pay someone to fix the bug. Write your own database, and include the parts of MySQL that you like.

People who dedicate their time and money to hosting free software are not the ones to blame for your problems. Yup, they made a fucking dumb coding error that's costing you millions of dollars a second. But that's your problem, not theirs. All they did was share their creative work for your enjoyment; if you don't enjoy it, it's your problem.

As free software becomes more popular, people are forgetting what it means. It means that everyone has the same opportunity as the original author to fix stuff and freely share their fixes. It doesn't mean that the author has to do whatever you tell them to.
I'm in the same boat. I use Google Reader, but pretty much (99%) of the time via iGoogle.
That's true, but earn outs and equity ownership can both vest over time. So if you're 90% of the way through a project, you're locked into 90% of that earn-out regardless of what happens. That would seem especially important in a situation where you have very distinct "ship" dates, as opposed to most other jobs where there would be an inherent cost to dismissing an employee in an ongoing project in terms of replacement costs, time lost, etc.

In a situation where you know your value to the project is going to start to approach zero (and it does as you get close to shipping, since your work is mostly already in the product) you have to protect yourself against the situation where it's cheaper to fire you than pay you.
Having a 'no store link' version ready-to-go isn't calling Apple's bluff. Calling Apple's bluff would have been not submitting a replacement version and directly telling your customers why the app was gone.
That's pretty cool. GReader does leave a lot to be desired... I imported my feeds and here are a few initial thoughts (I realize this is a weekend project but it is a huge want of mine):

+ I prefer to see the RSS text before I see the original site. Easier reading (no nav or ads) and I'll click through if the content catches my interest. So it would be nice if I clicked the feed tab that tab would stay selected as I browsed my other feeds (rather than switching back to the default original tab)

+ I use folders in GReader to group my feeds. I have a ton of feeds and a lot of them are not updated often. One of my favorite features of GReader is the ability to click on a folder and see that folder's feed. Saves a ton of individual feed reading and the folder mark as read is a time saver (I read the headlines and don't want to read the individual topics)

+ I need better marked as read (a button). The context menu is nice but requires two clicks (give me a hot key).

+ The config icons in the bottom sidebar get lost behind chrome's stupid appearing status bar making it frustrating to use these when the feed is loading.

+ Minor - I'd like to see the feed list above the site or rss txt body (more like a email client) Is there a way to configure the layout of the panes?

In all this is pretty exciting!
Warning: this poll is useless due to high selection bias. Why? Most people who don't use Google Reader will not bother to click on the link to the poll. I don't see how to correct for such a huge bias.
This appears to be Yet Another "we threw some code together and published the results without feeling obligated to check our model against the real world" study. At least if they did any sort of real-word verification, the article doesn't mention it.

The assumptions strike me as unreasonable, the results worthless because the details matter a lot. Another prime candidate for "we tuned our unverified model until it did something publishable", too.
The fact that Google owns the most popular flash site on the internet (YouTube), probably helped with their decision to include Flash.
What about Dreamweaver? If you're not a native developer the new Dreamweaver has a pretty nice environment for the JQuery Mobile/Phonegap combo.
No, it isn't a crime. Then again Google and Bing aren't going out of their way to evade web provider's attempts to keep them out of those servers.
Thats how I felt when I discovered Reader. I went from browsing like 8 websites to 80, in the same amount of time.

Reader made me more intelligent.
Ask HN: Did I choose the right NoSQL database? 
I am frustrated and finally ready to hear the truth (as is usually the case after I've exhausted myself trying to answer the question independently.. "Did I make the right choice?"): I built a web analytics application using CouchDB. Should I have used something else?

[more detail]

I've had a great time working with CouchDB, and the guys behind it have been enormously patient helping me along on a case by case basis (I have refused them the right to tell me I should use something else, because I needed to understand why myself. Doubt is a cancer). I have rebuilt the entire back-end several times confidently, and concisely. On top of that, I'm primarily a front-end developer, so to have gotten this far is without a doubt something the CouchDB team can brag about (I can hardly manage the basics of MySQL without a cheat sheet).

But in my "smallest big client" tests, I haven't been impressed with what speeds I've gotten and fear launching in this state would highlight my lack of qualification to enter the market. Still though, I have pressed on. Maintaining the logic that not finishing is not an option (I have other ideas that are simpler to build).

So far, CouchDB has nailed real-time. The _changes makes something that seemed like a Trojan horse of complexity, as simple as a callback (when paired with NodeJS). The learning curve was slow, but ramped up quickly (remember I'm coming from no NoSQL experience). Additionally there was never a database problem I came across that wasn't due to my own error. The problems I'm having are with representing historical data quickly.

I completely accept that I may have botched some small detail, or missed the big picture during my implementation.. But for the number of iterations I have gone through, I feel like I should have nailed it by now. I am at least confident of that.

Knowing what I know now, I'm certain I can make use of some high level insight. What do you think? Was CouchDB a silly choice for my application?
That's what lawsuits are for. Contracts can't always make people do what they should, but a good contract will mean you have grounds for legal action if necessary.
Used IntelliJ on all projects so far, but looking at using emacs + eclim for code and eclipse for some nice GUI building whenever the next project rolls around.
I haven't had an eye exam in over a decade but I think that my vision was around 20/20 and I know that my grandfather had better than 20/20. This is probably about right though. I paced off 15 steps until I was about a yard from my monitor from where the picture was clearly Marilyn.
Enough with whiteboard coding interviews
I see Reader is my main consumption service, and I see G+ as my potential broadcasting service. That being the case I would like to see more integration.

like = +1
Share= Share on G+
Share w/ comment = Share with comment on G+

Are there any other features? related to G+ or otherwise?
“As the tests get more specific, the code gets more generic.”
As someone who is interested in Android, but is currently being scared off by Eclipse, does anyone know any good resources for developing for Android in something that isn't $BLOATED_JAVA_IDE?

I tried vim, but the command-line builds were horribly slow, and almost all documentation and tutorials I found expected me to be using Eclipse.
The Apple Store, so far as I know, has some built in unsustainability because it supports update paths but doesn't have a way to charge for that service. In the long run, it will need either a new revenue source or a "trust" created by initial sales. In-app purchases probably provide this revenue source.

I think the end-game here is for Apple to create an "alternative minimum price" for apps that are free or already sold based on Apple's cost and a margin on the App Store generally. In-app purchase cuts will be charged until the total AMP has been reached.

That's probably a long way off, though. First Apple has to abandon an admittedly intuitive charging system. Second, there will probably need to be a point where the best apps are on Android and the App Store is bringing up the rear.
My comment was meant at least slightly tongue-in-cheek. I've seen some people (usually pretty deep compiler experts) who were able to do a remarkable job of reconstructing original source from object code. There obviously is brilliantly written source code out there that is a downright pleasure to read.

In general we don't enact legislation entirely against the worst cases, for good reason.
I don't like how this article frames MySQL vs. NoSQL as the important battle. There are other SQL databases besides MySQL, and there's lots of variation in the various NoSQL offerings.
Justin.tv is looking for a programmer interested in digital advertising
Yup, everything's already there, just a bit disguised:

* Feed before original site? No problem, set Feed as the default in Preferences. Also, if you like one view or another, it saves per-site.

* To read all stories in a folder, just click the River of News icon next to the folder. It's exactly the same. You can also right-click the folder (or click the little arrow) and mark the folder as read.

* Plenty of Keyboard Shortcuts. Type `?`

* I'm working on more customization of the interface as we speak. You'll be able to move panes around, change sort order, etc.
This seems more interesting than it actually is. In effect, it seems like the authors are saying, "exponential growth is like real fast!"

The model seems very one-sided. I can't access the original paper, but it seems they have 4 states for each node:

1a) Committed to opinion A

1b) Has opinion A

2) Has opinion B

3) Has both opinion A and B

In this model, there is no "committed to opinion B" -- which makes this useless as a model for things like climate change, evolution, or civil rights where both sides have a committed population. Since this is the case, opinion A can only grow, and at some point will hit a threshold that takes over the whole population.

I assume they built the model this way because if it were balanced, you would likely get random outputs, depending on how the graph is arranged. And random outputs don't make good headlines. :)
I do not use Google reader. I just tech news droid app. It is good enough! GR seems an old concept already.
Ask HN: Review My Questionnaire - Is this Good Market Research?
Hey guys, My startup (Rootbuzz) is doing a little market research and I was hoping you could help us out with our questions.

We are focussing on Customer Service, and our product is a Q&A platform similar to Quora or Stack Overflow.

.

ABOUT US

The idea is that the Q&A site will:

- reduce the number of times live support staff have to answer the same questions over and over

- get many questions answered without support staff getting involved at all

- help build/boost community among the company's customers

- boost the page rank (ranking in general, not the page rank number specifically) of the parent domain

.

Who we think our customers are/will be:

- Businesses who sell to a relatively technical audience

- Businesses who make things

- Businesses whose customers think of themselves as "<business_name> users" (e.g., Mac Users)

.

We've spoken with some companies who we think are aligned with those characteristics and some have agreed to answer some more detailed questions to help us out.

Are these the right questions to ask? Are any of them too invasive? Are we going down the wrong path with any of these?

Please, tear them apart :)

.

OUR QUESTIONNAIRE (SO FAR):

1.) Do you have a customer support staff? How many employees is it? Is this a major cost center for your company?

2.) Tell me a little more about your product? What are your customers like? Are they technical users?

3.) How do you communicate with your customers right now? Phone? Email? SMS? Text Chat? Video chat? Contact Form (on your website)? Other?

4.) Is there an active community around your product? Are you trying to build one? Why or why not?

5.) Do your customers try to find information about you on Google? What kind of info? What do they find? Is this something you're trying to improve? What are you doing
right now to take control of what people find about you on google?

6.) Do your customers find information about you or your products on websites other
than yours? What kind of sites? Do you know which sites they are specifically?

7.) Which of the following sounds the most interesting to you?

- Software that helps your customers find answers to their questions online
rather than through your other (more expensive?) support channels?

- Software that's designed to leverage the community you've already built
around your products in order to reduce your support costs?

- Software that helps you take control of what your customers find when they
search for information about your company and it's products.

8.) How much would you expect to pay (monthly or yearly) for the software you chose in the previous question? Would you buy it at that price?
We use NewRelic to see everything from the bottom up:
http://newrelic.com/

It's really easy to use, comprehensive and they have a 14day trial.

I also like yslow:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

It's good for quick checks.
I think they mean Marilyn Monroe.
You may be interested in this article that was on hacker news a while ago: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

And the hacker news discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1523991
For people choosing vi/vim, I'd love to hear about your environment/plugins/build process.
Eclipse 3.7. Big community
WxPython: Windows Styles and Events Hunter
Ah Flask is pretty incredible. You could probably learn it and build a functional MVP by the time we get a decent answer. (And no, I'm not hinting that it'll take a long time for him to answer :)

You can turn off the console debugger though if it's making you uneasy by doing this:

app.run('localhost', debug=True, use_evalex=False)

You'll still get the nice stack trace and code context, but without the ability to run arbitrary code.
I'm using Eclipse 3.5 and vim via eclim.
Eclim should probably be added as an option. Since it isn't quite one or the other.
I've heard of a two-year crunch. Never participated in it, though.
I use it, but get a sense fewer people are using it than a few years ago. Most people I know get their interesting links by connecting and following smart folks on Twitter and feeding their links to PostRank.
I've been using Feedlooks (http://www.feedlooks.com/) which also a Twitter client built in. It also takes care of the "mark as read" problem when subscribed to a large number of feeds.
I believe the 10% are the people who are able to form and hold their own opinions. Rest will then follow.
I use vim with eclim[1]. You have to have Eclipse open, headless if you choose, but you get most of the features of Eclipse right from vim.

http://eclim.org/
I'm not sure, I have not used CouchDB (have played with MongoDB, and know MySQL etc very well).

Your description of the problem is not that clear.
Yes, I've often heard people say this is the way to go, but please blog about your own django server setup process using chef / puppet so we can see the details.
Wow, this is pretty excellent. Is there an easy way to subscribe to things similar to how Reader works?