skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hah, I love the idea. Seems like a massively popular site using it would be ripe for abuse, but, I think it very clever.
Bloodhound Is On The Scent Of The Perfect Conference App
They got off too easy. It's easily billions they earned through this methods. Facebook is the same story. Many of their ad dollars are from scams, and shady schemes, not legitimate businesses. I mean... spending advertising dollars to advertise something pure on a social network where people go to talk with friends and ignore ads..... did you really think it would have a good ROI? it's rare. People often have to resort to making things as shady as possible to increase the ROI and make their advertising dollars worth it.

I can't put what I want to stay in clear words, but you need to be shady in order to make ludicrous money. Examples: Wall Street, casinos, etc. If you want to pure good, you're gonna have to give up some profit to do so.
I love this comment:

"Demonstrate you’re not a dick. To do this, it helps not to be a dick."
Am I right when I say that this is a pretty huge coincidence? As far as I can see Soyuz rockets almost never fail and Proton rockets only fail from time to time.

Excluding this incident, Soyuz rockets had one partial and one complete failure during the last decade (and more than 115 flights during that time). The variant that is now used exclusively for manned flights had 33 flights and no failures. Soyuz-U – the variant used for this flight – seems to be the real troublemaker. It’s responsible for the only other complete failure during this decade.

Proton had more than ninety launches in that decade and five failures.

Those Russian rockets are very mature and usually don’t fail.
Am I the only one that found that French fries illustration to be terrible? Cheesy picture that purports to be a "chart", that shows 2 values, plus the cryptical legend "French fries do not reflect actual earnings-per-share gains." And I'm not even much of a Tufte fanatic myself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk
We don't have to relocate "literally everyone" in the company. We have myself (one of the co-founders), three engineers, and a project manager here in Portland already. A couple of other people planned on moving for personal reasons in the next few months.

Still, there are a number of people in the company who are uprooting their lives in NYC, SF, and elsewhere, and we really appreciate that they were willing to do so.
Can you explain the process? i.e. What if I have a say ~500 friends and just drive the cost down to 0 (since you're sharing tweets and shares) then wait for the price to update, do I get it for free? How do you handle the case where starting price was too low? I know, lots of question, but that's because the idea seems really cool :)
I recall reading an article here on HN a few weeks ago that said marketing is not selling, it is lead gen. Selling is an entirely different stage in the process. Makes me a bit wary to take tips from this guy if he doesn't actually know the difference.
On the one hand, I haven't used a resume since my college internships (5 years founding startups, then freelancing through the network built up during the startups).

On the other, I still think it's worth the time. Being forced to write big, gnarly programs (like a compiler or collaborative text editor or puzzle AI) will give you experience that you'll never get from tutorials online about dealing with big, scary codebases. Or working in teams. Or whatever else.

If you learn as you go, each of those problems will get you fired when you hit it, because they're not exactly intuitive to deal with and you won't notice it until shit has already hit the fan.

There's not a 1:1 mapping between academic and real world problems, but I guess I'm saying it's still going to help. It also puts some extra items in your toolbox in case you want to do something other than vanilla web dev.

That being said, I have no way of evaluating the financial or chronological opportunity costs, as those are unique to you. It also depends how keen you are to get involved w/ your professors and students.

Plus, universities are where co-founders live!
I find the remark about not funding such elementary research silly. It could be said that not finding the Higgs particle is a bigger discovery than actually finding it. Either way, it's about gaining knowledge.
> "He brought the emotional baggage here so I stepped up to say it's not welcome in clear and unambiguous terms."

Your post suggests that his version of emotional baggage is simple-minded and unwelcome, but your version of emotional baggage is OK.

In reality, neither of your versions of emotional baggage belong on Hacker News.
HP TouchPad Android Port Bounty Now Over $2,000
It’s definitely legitimate arrogance. (Well, I don’t know if arrogance can ever be legitimate but if I concede that it were they are definitely legitimately arrogant.)

When SpaceX can be successful that may change but only slowly.
Can someone explain exactly where this money will go?

Will it go to states, the federal budget, some specific department in the government? Is there a particular person who determines how this $500 million gets spent?

I've seen companies get fined before but its never explained what happens to the money post-fine.
What Is Bitcoin?  NPR's Planet Money
Cute. But, actually, if my co-founders had decided to move the company to another city entirely, I would have happily moved. Portland happens to be a good fit for what we're doing, particular from a customer service hiring perspective.
搅拌车
Who is NPR? The article doesn't say.
Just wondering how you'll handle spam? What if someone goes to fiverr, gets a couple hundred spam tweets, then buys it for a couple bucks?

Really interesting idea though, reminds me of Pay with a tweet.
I think that a serious programmer should know at least 10 different programming languages, including but not limited to (don't learn them in this order):

1) Assembler - preferably more than 1 CPU architecture. You _must_ know assembler in order to be able to reason about performance and computer architectures.

2) C - It's the most used systems programming language and will stay relevant for at least the next 10 years. Knowing what kind of assembler is emitted from C is also useful.

3) Java/C# or another flavor of Blub that works with a virtual machine, garbage collector and so on. Not really a family of languages with the most educational value but widely used

4) Lisp. Any Lisp. And some theory in lambda calculus.

5) Brainfuck. I'm not kidding. Brainfuck is to Turing machines as Lisp is to lambda calculus. Knowing how to program Turing machines with pen and paper is also useful.

6) Prolog or another logic programming language, like the one used in SICP. A whole new and different model of programming. Will blow your mind, guaranteed.

7) Ruby, Python or Javascript. A dynamic interpreted language.

8) Haskell or another functional programming language. ML dialects or Erlang might do, but I recommend Haskell for it's lazy evaluation semantics.

9) (edit) A stack based language like Forth or some of it's descendants.

10) Pick any language that will introduce a previously unfamiliar concept to you

11) Optional: Perl. I don't know anything about Perl but some people swear by it. That's a reason good enough.

Before you ask: yes, I do know every language in this list and many more. No matter what language you use to earn your livelihood, learning a language or two more will make you better at it.
It's a tricky problem, actually.

My game as an example: Almost half of the users are under 18, but most of the other half are in the 18-35 range (according to Flurry metrics, which guesses what the age of a user is based on what OTHER apps on the device are reporting -- I'm not asking them myself).

Unless I ask each user how old they are, I can't know whether or not to serve them ads. And if I DO ask them, then people often feel like I'm prying too much. ESPECIALLY if I'm asking if they are under 15 (and finding out they're under 13 would cause COPPA to kick in [1]).

I already have the "no adult ads" selected in my ad provider, which is supposed to block singles ads, but I've seen them come up anyway. Presumably if I fed them an age that I'd gotten from a user they would be filtering the ads more, if only to target them better.

Don't know.

[1] http://www.coppa.org/
There is also the issue of ethnicity. If you are targetting a global market, what pics do you put? Asian, African? Caucasian? Does that affect your conversion per region? That would be interesting.
One of the things that Groupon has taught me is that there are certain businesses and products that work well with certain types of offers.

I'm hesitant to call this a "reverse auction" because it's more like a discount fueled by sharing.

I think that this type of discount process would work well for those who make more by selling more, even if the price is reduced. Products and services with a "long tail" would benefit particularly well from this system.

As an example, this system would benefit a movie studio. A movie studio could offer discounts on tickets to see a movie, limited release extra content, etc. The biggest advantage of one movie studio over another is the ability for them to push their product as far and as hard as they can. The profit a film sees is a direct result of the number of people who see a movie, not necessarily how many people use a coupon or discount to see that movie.

In contrast to the Groupon model, this type of deal would work best for products that don't have a tangible limit on their production.

Also, it would be important to weigh the quality "sharing". A system like Klout, while certainly not perfect, is an example of an existing product that could use this type of deal to measure and weigh the influence of those who have shared.
Samsung didn't invent any of that.
The Treasury, as if they were tax funds.
Firefighter Training
I'm inclined to agree, but there's maybe more to that: another reason why many technical people struggle with sales/marketing is that they simply assume that sales is all about tricking people into buying stuff they don't need / stuff that doesn't work. So once they find themselves in a salesy situation or role, they might feel like overcorrecting in the negative direction, just to not be salesy.
Caribbean Family Vacations
When DoJ collects fines or asset forfeitures, it remits the proceeds to the Treasury.
I enjoy the option. Part of the reason I deleted Words With Friends (Android) is because I would never remember to take a turn, and it rarely notified me properly.

They don't always have to vibrate/chime, mind you. An icon appearing and the light blinking is, to me, not intrusive at all. I check it, see what the note is, and dismiss it if I need to.

At home I leave my phone connected to wifi and commit the sin of leaving it to charge overnight. Your downsides don't affect me at all.
okay, tell me why. I'm just telling you my experience of seeing this first-hand many many times.
Except Google employees do manually review ads. Ads that might break the guidelines, such as pharmacy ads, are flagged by the system when they are submitted. Flagged ads are then reviewed manually to see if they comply with policy.
http://www.npr.org/
The only thing that I had in my undergrad education that I miss in this list is experience with an assembly language. It probably fits in best in the discussion on Architecture: programming in an assembly language, at the very least, makes programmers appreciate high-level languages and makes them think about the underlying hardware.
Business might be great, but TIL McDonald's borrowed $109M directly from the Fed as part of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility invoked after the Lehman collapse and was in debt to the Fed for 223 days.

http://www.bloomberg.com/data-visualization/federal-reserve-...
Bloodhound helps you sniff out the best stuff at events
Bushido sounds really interesting. I've always liked the Add-Ons for Heroku, and a platform-independent version of that would be a huge help.
The best salespeople I worked with at $LAST_VENDOR_JOB could have given a flying fuck about the product they were selling. None of them understood it. Belief in your product is simply not a requirement for successful sales. It may be for a startup, but not in the general case.

Sales is a skill. I could try to break it down in a neat little bulleted list, but I'm not a good salesperson and so wouldn't be credible.
An ARM board running Linux. Is this really news?
Ask HN: Need advice about my startup
Hi. My name is Ashraful. I am a business student (about to graduate), but I do freelance website design work as well. Portfolio at madebyargon.com for those interested.

I always wanted to launch my own startup and I have managed to save up a few thousand dollars from my freelancing gigs. Nothing significant but enough to get a startup up and running. I planned on building a modern web browser and had convinced a programmer friend of mine (who is very talented) to team up with me. I was very excited about the whole thing, and really thought (and still think) that the idea had a lot of potential if we could execute it properly. I posted the idea for the browser on my blog (http://ashraful.org/introducing-browsr/ and http://ashraful.org/browser-features/), hoping to get some feedback.

While most seemed to be underwhelmed, the idea seemed to have resonated with some big co.s and several lucrative job offers came our way. All of the companies wanted us to join their browser team as programmers, so while my friend is deciding which to join, I am left without a programmer to build the product, and no job offer to mull over.

Being a designer, my coding knowledge is limited to HTML/CSS and some javascript, with zero knowledge of desktop programming. I cannot really move forward on my own and do not know anyone who is capable of building something like this and is interested. Now I am left with two options.

1. I can try to find people interested in building the browser online (if you are interested email me: inlith@gmail.com). The problem is I do not have enough money to pay someone to build this, and I know from experience that its difficult to find good programmers who will work for equity.

2. I can abandon the idea for the browser and move forward with a different kind of startup. Other than the browser I have a few ideas for some cool web apps. I am considering starting a company, similar to Kevin Rose's Milk Inc., that focuses on building a few good products. With my savings I can hire two or three good web developers locally (it costs $500/month to hire decent developers where I live). I can continue freelancing as a designer to make enough money to keep the company afloat (operating costs are low), until we have some profitable apps under our belt.

My third option is to go the traditional way of a business grad in my country and get a job at a bank or some FMCG company. Not something I'm interested in doing.

What do you guys think? I would be grateful for some advice or suggestion.

Thanks for reading.
I'd love to know how they connected Graphite to Geckoboard.
We just got some Lion iMacs and have not been able to keep them connected to the AD. It doesn't work as expect unfortunately.
... Maybe I'm a foul person? But they should really redesign that logo.
It's very relevant, as selective enforcement of laws is the bread-and-butter of corrupt and dictatorial governments everywhere. As the former de facto dictator (known anecdotally as "colonel" even though he was a civillian) of the place where I was born (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil) used to say: "to my friends, everything. To my enemies, the law"
But they're entirely the point! You can not say on one hand that Samsung is incapable of differentiating their product, and then wave away all the ways in which their product is differentiated.

You can unless the difference is attributable to Samsung. The back button was present on Android prototypes in 2007. Samsung didn't hop on the Android bandwagon until 2009.
We have Perl on DotCloud! :-)
On the web, esp. with SaaS and other self service business models, marketing and sales are much more intertwined than they originally used to be. If your price point does not allow for a salesforce, your website essentially becomes your #1 sales rep. And while not 100% comparable, a lot of the best practices of classical selling apply very well on creating a high-converting sales funnel online.
Does that suggest something about the precariousness of MCD's business model or about the severity of the credit crisis?
Very good, informative article.

I do have one issue with it though, this line:

1. Establish warmth – Demonstrate you’re not a dick. To do this, it helps not to be a dick.

If you're a naturally outgoing person with a warm personality, then yes, it's not more complicated than that. But a lot of tech people struggle with this..

How DO I "establish warmth" if I'm naturally inwards-looking person that likes listening more than talking?
Interesting how this post shows a connection between logical paradoxes, the Halting Problem and Quines.

The reasoning that proves you cannot assign a true/false value to the statement "This sentence is false." is used to show that for a computer program "feeding the source code for that program into the program itself (or some slight modification thereof)" will create a logical contradiction.

Cool stuff.
I am not sure what point Bloomberg is trying to convey. Is that all current iPhone developers should be scared, because all the "iPhone development" jobs are going into India.

Hasn't the same argument been used many times before in the past? Their (the outsourcing advocates) crystal ball on outsourcing hasn't exactly been correct. Right now is the best time to be in software in the US, even in a down economy.

It pains me when the "suits" try to dumb down development to something that can be off shored without any issues. There will definitely be a surge of mobile developers in India, like any other country, and some of them might make very good apps, just like here.

But the crux of this story, that some business person will come up with an iPhone idea, and just outsource it to and Indian company and profit, it is just disingenuous.

In the best case, the Indian company gets the ability to create superb , top 50 in app store applications. If they have that ability, why would just accept 20-30 dollars per hour, when they can get 70% of how much their apps makes.

Sorry Bloomberg just fails!
You'd have to dive into their business to figure out if they would have been in deep trouble without public money or if they were literally eating our lunch. Personally, I'm not sure a fast-food chain should be receiving money from the Fed, but hey...
There is an option
"Require password <time period> after sleep or screen saver begins"
in the Security preferences, general tab. I'll bet yours is set to something other than "immediately".
Knock v1.5 - Subdomain Scanner , allows to bypass wildcard
The gov't statement makes it sounds like the "rogue illegal online pharmacies" were mostly just Canadian pharmacies? It's ridiculous how the US gov't treats Canadian-approved pharmaceuticals in general; it's oligopoly protection for US big pharma.
Tells you something about Apple's testing methodology. QA team at Apple must be playing real fast and loose.

Being affected by 3 serious regressions in Lion (all filed as bugs and Apple closed them as duplicates, btw) - I get the feeling that Apple could do better at software engineering. (Alarms on iOS if you are still not convinced :) Just the fact that they release software that allows authentication without correct password means that they lack any kind of automated test case verification even for basic functionality - and this is basic functionality we are talking about, not some obscure thing that happens only when dozen different factors are combined or a thing that only happens once in billion tries.

Say what you will about Microsoft but in my several years of using Windows I rarely had these type of glaring issues even with the awful amount of hardware it supports. It might just be that Microsoft was forced to adopt better Engineering practices due to their situation - lot of complexity, huge impact potential, and lot of money at stake - 50% server market and the Server OS shares a whole lot with consumer version etc.

Not trying to troll - just my thoughts on something that I have always wondered - how Engineering culture varies between different successful software companies and to what effect.
CityPockets acquires instant deal upstart DealBurner
National Public Radio, source of much good reportage and interesting infographics.
[..] that may change but only slowly.

which is still a very optimistic assumption.
You commented before my edit, but everything you've said is still very relevant. Thanks.

The thing about the big, gnarly programs thing is that I don't think that's what happens at our CS department. The older kids in the department always talk about how the teachers can't actually code too far beyond the level required to teach the intro classes because the focus in the higher level classes is not on programming but on abstraction and theory.

I once brought a web app to my CS advisor that I'd spent a great deal of time on, testing over and over again and polishing it so that anyone who saw it would recognize it not as some sketchy work in progress but something that could actually be a finished project. His response? "I don't know anything about this kind of programming." Not "what sorts of challenges did you face?" or "what are your next steps, what are you planning on doing from here?", just that comment, some disinterested staring, and "this looks nice." I was later told by a senior in the program that any other professor would only be less interested.

I want to build things that people actually use, and that really doesn't seem to be the focus of the program. At all.
A grid of icons with text underneath is considered *ripping off*
Apple now? Are you serious?

As I said in another comment here:

It's not just the app icon layout. It should be obvious to any
casual observer just how many things Samsung copied: the
highlighting on the bottom row of icons, the dots that represent
different pages of apps, the overall aesthetics of the handset
itself, etc.

Pointing out one of these things and saying "Should Apple have a
monopoly on X?" is, once again, missing the point. It's the
combination of X, Y, and Z that makes the product look like an
iPhone instead of a differentiated product.

You said:

Have you actually used a Samsung Android phone? The "look and
feel" is nothing like an iPhone. [...] Just because one screen
happens to look similar to an iPhone doesn't mean the entire UI
is copied.

If Samsung's Android phones have differentiated user experiences that aren't evident from the home screen, then I applaud them. That doesn't, in my opinion, negate the fact that their home screen and phone design looks entirely too similar to the iPhone.

You can not say on one hand that Samsung is incapable of
differentiating their product, and then wave away all the ways in
which their product is differentiated.

I never said that. My point is that those minor tweaks are, in my opinion, insignificant in relation to how similar the rest of it looks. To proffer a crude and admittedly horrible analogy, it seems like Samsung is painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and selling it as a separate product.

In any case, I'm guessing we disagree on how much differentiation Samsung has done here, but different opinions are what make the world go 'round. :)

Recall that iOS 5 has been announced with a notification tray
that is a carbon copy of Android's notification tray. Taking good
features from the competition and iterating on them is par for
the course.

I agree completely, which is why I've said all along that this whole patent litigation silliness should go away.