skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This concept can even be taken further - rather than testing just a name, use AdWords to test your entire product before even building it.

For example, if you are thinking of opening an online business selling widgets, you can build a test website and advertise it using AdWords. Provide a fake checkout process, but rather than processing credit cards, just inform your users that your product is not yet available (at a point in the workflow where it's clear they intend to pay already). Then, with a quick calculation on the data, you have a rough idea of how profitable your business will be upon launch.

Obviously, it's not a perfect model, but still a very nice way to gather market data for cheap before you invest the time and money to build anything.
A mess very definitely is technical debt. True, as opposed to the "clean" debt that Uncle Bob's advocating, it's a bit like getting expensive cash advances on a credit card or going to a loan shark. A mess is likely to be a lot harder to discharge than the technical debt that comes from careful well-crafted decisions; the approaches you need to take may be different; and there's an increased chance that you won't be able to get out from the burden of debt. But it seems to me that all of those points fit in very nicely with the general analogy of debt, and I'm not sure why Uncle Bob thinks otherwise.
No, I didn't say Republicans stand for small government. Some of them do. Not enough.

But certainly people interested in a small, limited government aren't going to vote for redistributive policies.
Yeah, I'd say $19 is really pushing it for this sort of app, which is something that is zero-maintenance, zero-interaction, install and forget kind of thing. The app needs to have some sort of presence (perhaps it does, I would not know, I am on Windows) that would prove that it is alive and doing its job. At the very least I would expect some sort of subtle visual feedback in the event when the blocked app is actually prevented from getting out. Showcase it in action on the landing page too.

The way it stands, it looks like a pretty UI for configuring built-in firewall. And $19 for that is an overkill. Also, keep in mind who your audience is - (paranoid) geeks, so it is important to show that the app has some non-trivial content to it and it's not just an empty shell on top of what's available for free already.

In other words, if you manage to convince me that the app actually has some brains and smarts, that while it is simple, it is not trivial, then $19 is a fair price. If not, then even $10 is an overkill.
Google buys Motorola Mobility, not Motorola. The title should be corrected, as it's overly sensational now.
Principles of Accounting
An Analysis of Google’s Motorola Purchase
Its all about the patents. But not the ones you might think. Google has been accused of being short sighted in its acquisition of Motorola Mobility citing the lack of support Motorola's patents will provide against Oracle and Apple. It is true, Motorola’s patents are not going to change Google lawsuits against Oracle and Apple, but these lawsuits are not a large problem for Google. Oracle just had a key patent ruled invalid and the judge over the case is calling for Oracle to significantly reduce their damages claim against Google. And it will be extremely difficult for Apple to get a significant amount of money from any of its dozens of lawsuits relating to usability and user interface given the broad nature of Apple’s patents and the numerous similar patents issued to other organizations. But Google did not buy Motorola’s patents to defend against the current Oracle or Apple lawsuits.

Google will use Motorola’s patents to defend against the ongoing hushed patent bullying by Microsoft. Microsoft has been coercing Android phone manufactures to paying up to $15 per handset for “licensing fees” and so far hasn’t even taken anyone to court! Even if you assume that each major Android handset manufacturer negotiated Microsoft down to $5 per handset that could be $40 BILLION next year!

Motorola already announced that they want to go after other phone manufactures and that they have the patents to do it. Google’s acquisition also ensures “patent attacks” with Motorola’s patents will be contained to non-Android handset manufacturers. Motorola’s patents can provide a sort of deterrence against Microsoft and others (either in court or behind closed doors) from collecting these “licensing fees” in the future and prevent them from leeching off of Android’s success.
"NASA engineers were counting on it to function for just three months" and it is still functioning 8 years later? What an impressive accomplishment.
Curious if there are any Jersey folks amongst us and whether or not they might eschew potential NYC opportunities in favor of being closer to home if something like this comes to fruition.
On forgetting the remember me checkbox.
Thanks for your input. I'm currently running at $9 for benchmarking.
Actually i've used a few "NoSQL" databases in tons of projects and come to the conclusion that traditional relational database systems are more appropriate for many, many tasks. I really like mongodb and will continue to use it, but not for serious projects as i just don't see the tradeoff being worth it.

Thanks for the ad hominem attack though.
Very good thoughts... I am opening it up to users very soon (invites should start going out by the end of this week).
I was talking about _some_ posts from sites like Asymco, Gruber's and Marco and some HN comments.

I don't know how you construed it as if my comment was against general(if a little overactive) Apple coverage, which is think is well deserved since Apple is doing a lot lately. You were attacking a strawman.
That's true, but age is so strongly correlated with mileage that it's an insignificant factor in sell-price once you control for mileage (Based on my own research using proprietary data).
Pentagon’s Lightning Gun Sold for Scraps on eBay
I fear the essence of this story is true, that Google doesn't have a coherent strategy with regard to this fight, and its certainly out of their comfort zone, so this does feel more like someone flailing.

That being said, Google has a really deep pool of expertise in a lot of areas in house and if they can come up with a reasonable way to surface that expertise I would expect them to come up with a solid response.
Yeah, I have heard and looked into them, but the thing is I would have to get into their incubator which is quite difficult since I am still a full-time highschooler.
Good article, but I'm still going to use two spaces.
New trending tech news site smartly filters headlines
"The old stereotype is largely a relic of the late-90s
Dotcom Bubble"

That is why the "mindless bashing" is so important. It is a defence mechanism. It is vitally important that we remember from our past mistakes and codifying that knowledge into stereotypes is a great way of making sure that knowledge sticks around an is remembered.

Besides, I don't think many MBAs are losing sleep over a few techies on HN thinking that they're full of shit.
The "called-out" comment is the only thing about this link worth reading. The writer has never used Google+ yet complains about the lack of activity within his own news and invite feeds.
Warren Buffett has me Confused
Thanks... very good ideas.
I'm not sure why krakensden is being downvoted for their comment.

Maybe because Google have been pretty emphatic about the fact that the Honeycomb / Ice Cream Sandwich code will be released, and because their delay in releasing this one specific revision is hardly the same thing as "closing Android" or whatever hyperbole is being floated around.

That said, I didn't downvote him. I didn't think the comment added much to the conversation, but it's not worth a downvote in my eyes.
YC NYC, September 26
The problem is, they don't HAVE to A) if they were not forced to prefund. I don't see the problem with B) and C).

Just because you are sore, you don't have to hate on a profitable company.
So go through the process if it's required to use university resources. Is this a case of poor planning on your part constituting an emergency on theirs?
Wow, I had no idea about the near employee revolt at CDBaby. Derek is one of my favorite speakers.
Habit Labs Creates Games to Make You Live Healthier
They keep them till last week.
The last news I read was about 1500 layoffs:

http://www.fiercewireless.com/europe/story/nokia-siemens-cut...
Why not stage breakout by buying the patent part of the business, transferring those to a foundation, and leaving the hardware business to MMI?
Huh what? If they had bought the Novell or Nortel patents, would they have been blocked? In fact they were able to block MS(via the DoJ) from using Novell patents against Android.
Rosetta stone wholesale
Screen shot of Google's Groupon clone
"ZFS makes SANs and other expensive, redundant storage systems obsolete"

Yes, because clearly what enterprise-level storage customers really want is to roll their own storage solutions using open source technology.
I think people take the ignoring customers as an on or off thing, but no company ignores what their customers want (including Apple).

What a good company does is never listen to only a single customer. What a good company does is listen to all customers and take that knowledge and solve the over arcing problem. Each individual customer is likely only seeing part of the problem and thus only asking for partial solutions. The problem is that they simply do not have the visibility to know the entire problem, and that's where a good 3rd party business comes into play.
> Thats fine if your communication is only via your website. Consider if you have to send an email bulletin and explain this. Or write it up in a technical support answer.

The people who visit your page with the problematic version of Firefox will get to see the message. The others don't need to know.

> Sometimes there are problems in the latest version.

as you only have to deal with one version of Firefox, work around the problem in your web app code.
Thank you. Probably my favorite tech demo of all time. It gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. Likely watched it at least 30 times by now.

Everything about it is beautiful, from the art to the music to the sound effects to the incredible feeling of "being drenched". Natalya Tatarchuk is truly a hero.

Watch it all the way through, with headphones, in fullscreen, or don't watch it at all!

The experience was so much more intense back in 2007; it was breathtaking.

(Nooooo I don't wanna get old! Make it stop!)
Parental Tips From Zappo’s Founder Tony Hsieh’s Mom And Dad
I've had a great experience with CouchDB as a NoSQL solution, simply because it is NOT like your traditional MySQL/Postgres. I'm not trying to map my existing knowledge to something that is fundamentally different. I think MongoDB might be a mistake in this regard, because users will attempting to deploy it similarly to a SQL solution.
This appears to be mmap-friendly. Since arrays have length values it's possible to jump around in a large messagepack-serialized structure without having to scan it. In JSON if you want to get to element 2 of an array you have to scan to the end of element 1. If there's a length value at the beginning of element 1 (as it looks like there is with msgpack) then you can seek straight past it.
I don't know about US, but here in India, you can re-incorporate. I don't see how that can be an issue - operate as a LLC(if you have reasons to) - re-incorporate later when you are becoming a potential acquisition target. I don't think whoever is going to acquire you will decide not to just because you are going to re-incorporate.
Adobe doesn't get it
FTC Hits Kids' App Maker With $50K Privacy Fine
I was at DoubleClick when it was bought by Google -- same issue. I left before the deal was completed, but it is my understanding that many people were told "we'll give you a year's salary if you would please just not come to work anymore". In a few months, everyone I knew from that job (minus a select few who were Google material) was working somewhere else.
Surprise Fusion Garage is TabCo, announces Grid 10 tablet, Grid 4 smartphone
No problem.

Here's another nitpick. Upon checkout it detected that I was in Canada and showed the price in CAD. It came to $9.16, and this is very odd since USD has been cheaper than CAD for a while now. It should've been under 9 CAD. I don't know why it worked out to be 9.16 and I don't really care, I just know it's wrong. So, not to confuse people like me just show the price in USD.
Believe it or not, they actually do teach useful skills in B School. And more often than not the grads jump into a career in big business at a significantly higher level than they were at before they got an MBA.

The doors that open up are numerous - like being able to credibly get in front of the right private equity firm interested in doing a wireless roll-up.

There's no magic here. It's just work and education.
My G+ is just as active as my Facebook. But here's the kicker:

G+ almost always has better content.

The only explanations I have for that are that it's mostly techie people on there and the bar for posting something is a little higher than Facebook. I don't see people whining that WoW is down, but instead that they found some new scientific breakthrough in the news.
True, but one month isn't unheard of. During the crash of 2008, bank deals were being made after 72 hours of "due diligence":)

A company like Google is always in talks with other companies, a deal like this can happen very quickly if you've been having informal talks all along.
Yep, that pretty much calls it for Paul Tassi.
Our most effective marketing campaigns where the ones filled with buzzwords and non-specific claims.

s/where/were/
Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies.

http://www.cheatsden.com/google-acquire-motorola-mobility-fo...
I'm not sure I get the problem?

The thing I find odd about Google+ is that only one person has ever asked me to join it, and they no longer use it. Whereas with Facebook I used to get an invitation at least once a week from someone to join. As a Facebook member, I only post pictures, yet my feed is crazy. The first page is full of status notes, yet it only goes back one hour.

People seem to use Facebook like crazy. No one but tech pundits, like Robert Scoble, seem to use Google+. Maybe I'm wrong, but my experience matches those of the Forbes article.
A patent is a finite time period monopoly on the use/practice/sale of an invention. To innovate means to introduce something new. The two concepts aren't the same.
E.g. You can patent something economically useless, you can patent something and not build it. As a practical matter its not clear to me if you can or should require patents to be linked to innovations.
This really resonated with me.

While I do appreciate the sentiments expressed below (that we're doing good by doing our daily work) I do think that we can take an extra effort to make a positive contribution to the world. Yes, doing your daily work and doing good aren't mutually exclusive, but dedicating yourself to doing good explicitly is better than plugging away at something that coincidentally creates social value along with the main goal of corporate benefit. And yes, that does matter.

It's definitely difficult to fix injustices. It's definitely not as easy as creating the next iPhone game or daily deals site. Nevertheless, it needs to get done, by someone, and I think it's wonderful that you want to be that person. Step up to the challenge, you're one of the few.

I can't give that much tangible advice-I'm trying to do the same thing and am fairly clueless. Nevertheless, here's my (up)vote of confidence!
You think that's enough to support the following statement?

>Besides android vendors aren't really profitable by big margins
The writer has never used Google+ yet complains about the lack of activity within his own news and invite feeds.

That seems a strange way to put it. Essentially, the writer makes the rather obvious point that if you run a social network, network effects[1] are everything.

I have the exact same experience: I'm signed up, but why would I visit when I can see updates from the same people and 10x more on Facebook? Likewise, why would I post there when a post would reach the same people and 10x more on Facebook?

Unless Google+ can offer something amazing, new and different -- which best as I can see, they haven't so far -- network effects will surely doom them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Hmmm, I had to CTRL + SHIFT + T that.
I don't think buying Sun would have protected Android from Apple/Microsoft/Nokia/etc., just as buying Motorola won't protect it from Oracle. If anything, buying both may have made sense.
There is a bit of double speak going on here:
1. don't copy my idea.
2. competition is great.

How do you have competition where no one is copying? Also, what constitutes an original idea? I haven't seen an original idea (that isn't derivative) in a REALLY long time.

If you get bested, the other party executed better.
Reading these quotes is like watching a hostage video...

"We are being treated kindly and our captors are attending to our needs."
It's also probably a little early to declare something dead when people anxious to move to Google+ still can't even register. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Do you realize that the "same percentage tax as middle-income earners" would be LOWER than what they currently pay?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States...
'everybody has known that the U.S. is on an unsustainable spending curve due to entitlements'

I wouldn't agree with that. I would say that the problem is fighting two un-funded wars coupled with a decrease in revenues caused by the Bush Tax Cuts. Long term we have issues with popular entitlements such as SS and Medicare. But our immediate problems are generally due to the drop in revenues from the Bush era and an massive increase in military spending.
Firefox isn't going to gain any valuable publicity that they don't already have by announcing "Firefox X is here". Unlike Chrome, they're not in a position to be making rapid gains - a large portion of what's left of the market is companies using older versions of IE for compatibility reasons, which aren't going to switch over on a whim.

Chrome had an advantage - it took a bite out of the large firefox market, which was already prepped for 'trying new browsers'. While the constant 'Chrome Y released!' helped, Chrome would probably have risen nearly as fast without it.
I doubt it - the spreadsheet in Google docs, even at a casual glance look to be missing some key features that are incredibly useful (Trace Precedents/Trace Dependents being one that jumps out at me).

There is also the fact that there are an awful lot of "mission critical" spreadsheets out there with huge amounts of VBA in them - I can't see Google supporting that (and you probably couldn't as a lot of these things call client side objects through COM).

To be honest, I don't think users want an Excel killer. Yes it has weaknesses (why it still can't handle Unicode CSV files properly is still a mystery) - but overall most people just see it as part of the standard corporate computing landscape.

You could perhaps make the whole model more interesting (e.g. by having better support for the hierarchical multi-dimensional data that finance people in particular just love) but then you'd probably lose the wonderful simplicity of the basic 2D sheet.

[NB I've spent a lot of time building finance apps that have Oracle Hyperion as a backend - which is a specialized 12 dimensional hierarchical database that is the market leader in its particular niche].
Im really happy with this! :D
Hackers Could Target Automated Military Systems
Ask HN: how does HN's pagination work?
Pure idle curiosity. Whenever I have to paginate through a list of sorted items, I just use page numbers. The param seems to be a hash of some kind, which might allow for things like persistent snapshots, but if so, why do the links expire?
It won't change - it's not user-visible, it's just for other developers, who do, in fact, have an interest in the version.
Except wireless ISPs don't come close to the offerings of a copper connection, let alone the connectivity provided by a fiber connection.

Harp all you want about how "awesome" wireless is, but until it can push 40ms across the US and back consistently at high bandwidths, you're screwed.
Appealing to the non-existent support for the poor downtrodden "media brand owners" might not be the best way to push your agenda.

Also, domain squatters aren't really happy about this, if multiple TLDs become popular then the already dying business of domain squatting generic terms (squatting trademarked terms is already a dead business thanks to the UDRP process) just becomes even less profitable.

I'm not even sure what "black hat domain traders" refers to, I'm assuming they mean domain squatters and don't know what "black hat" means.
I mostly agree with you.

Perhaps another distinction Uncle Bob could have made is between hidden technical debt (i.e. the mess that PHBs refuse to acknowledge) and acknowledged technical debt. Uncle Bob is talking about the latter, where everyone agrees some trade-offs were made up-front.

The former is much harder to wrangle because, so often, the decision makers are unwilling to accept that it even exists ("well, the system's working fine, isn't it!?")
I own a "first" Droid, so I'm assuming that was sarcasm.
> Google, as a software company, doesn't currently have
> to worry about a lot of the issues that the hardware
> side of Motorola does, like supply chain management

The purchase comes with the employees that are currently running these things. It's not like Google bought the operation sans the talent, and now has to use current Google employees (with no experience in this field) to run Motorola Mobility.

All they have to do is operate it as a separate business that has to follow certain 'edicts' from on high. If they want to further integrate it into the Google fold they can do it gradually over time.
If I see a new feature in Firefox is going to appear in Firefox 8, to me, version numbers are just out of control. In that case, reducing the relevancy of the version number makes sense. But I feel that, and I'm sure many developers feel the same way, if a software is not rewritten from scratch but instead is incrementally updated, that the major version number shouldn't change. I prefer Firefox 4.123 over Firefox 11.
Try to Be a Test User Sometime
> Those patents would have been issued in the 70s and long since expired.

This makes sense if you're talking about individual patents, but often patents are interlinked, and with a "priority date" of a "key patent", subsequent patents can be filed and granted that effectively extend this window... these constitute a specific "patent portfolio".
You think 2.5Mbit is "not bad"?

This is what's wrong with the country.

2.5Mbit is dogshit slow. Your freaking bluetooth wireless mouse is faster than that.

Now think about that for a minute.
Samsung's profit margin is good, and HTC's acceptable (though neither are as high as Apple's), but all other major manufacturers are either loss-making or making a tiny profit margin.
Not at all. The beauty of KVM on SmartOS is that Joyent's customers can run BSD, or Linux, or Windows, or whatever they want without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos. That's why the user base isn't as much an issue. But the underlying foundation is critical. I'm actually really glad BSD is adopting DTrace and I'm sure it will be successful, but the BSD documentation says that it's experimental and not yet production ready (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dt...). Solaris DTrace has been in production since at least 2005.

Disclaimer: I work for Joyent, but I do not speak for them.
PPI: The commoditization of Malware Distribution