skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fortune 500 advice on advertising has almost nothing to offer you; I'm glad you've been able to find a better way for yourself.

Fortune 500 Marketing 101 breaks your activities out into the AIDA funnel - Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action. [1]

I can't think of any reason a startup would focus on any part of that funnel before "action" unless they needed to achieve some bizarro network effect for their idea to work (in which case they better have a couple million bucks to drop, and will still probably fail).

The sort of advertising before "action" presumes you're talking to someone who doesn't already know they need something like your product, and doesn't already desire something like it. The only reason to communicate to someone like that is if you've already maxed out your market share amongst people who give a hoot.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)
Here's what I'm curious about that is not mentioned at all:

How do they manage deployment to staging? At my company we typically deploy topic branches directly to staging, but we have fewer developers and slower pace. If multiple people need to deploy topic branches we set up an ephemeral staging branch that merges the multiple topic branches together, but I can imagine that getting super hairy on a team the size of GitHub's.

Do they just mostly deploy directly to production, thus severely minimizing staging contention?
yes this is what I meant. Obviously they're not going to make money on this fire sale, just hope to reduce their losses a tad and get some good PR (if they care about consumer PR anymore).
I've been using Mac OS X Lion as my main development machine for the last month or two, and it is absolutely fantastic. I have had none of the issues he mentioned. Mail has been faster than ever, I don't have random windows closing (when in full screen) and when I drag and drop to Safari there is no issue what so ever.

Do I like the new Mission Control UI over Spaces? No. That, and multi-monitor support being particularly broken makes me sad, but I have learned to live with it for now.

I have no idea why this guy is seeing all of the issues he is seeing. I didn't do a clean install either, so far my files have come from:

10.2 -> 10.3 (PPC) -> 10.4 (Intel, used migration tool) -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7.

Without any major issues.
If they made AT&T agree to use sims and antennas compatible with Verizon's LTE network, that seems worthwhile.
Bangladesh became independent in 1971 not 1972. And it was not formerly part of India, but was part of Pakistan. Makes me wonder what else is wrong in that chart.
> Uh, OK. So, you're happy with single-core boxes then, I take it?

Not at all. You use only one core for the core execution of write transactions, but that's a small part of any real system. All cores can read simultaneously. All cores can also do all sorts of other work, including preparing transactions to execute, deserialization of requests, rendering responses, logging, and anything else your app needs to get up to.

The limit is also one core per transactional domain. If you can split your data up into lumps between which you never need transactions, you can happily run one core on each.

> Also, I'd like to point out that just because you aren't explicitly doing I/O doesn't mean that you aren't doing I/O.

Actually, it does explicitly do I/O. You do it just before every command executes.

> The OS might have paged out some stale data.

I guess that's possible, which would indeed cause a momentary pause, but this approach is typically used with dedicated servers and plenty of RAM, so it's never been a problem in practice for me.

> I just want to clarify: so when you encounter a problem, you do some rollback, which automatically moves the state to the last snapshot and rolls forward to the previous transaction, right?

You mean a bug in our code that causes a problem? Depends, on the system, I suppose. Prevayler had an automatic rollback. It just kept two copies of the data model in RAM; if a transaction blew up it would throw out the possibly tainted one. But there are a number of ways to solve this, so I don't advocate anything in particular. Other than heavy unit testing, so that things don't blow up much.
Rapid Blog Cash Bonus
Rapid Blog Cash Bonus
Create VirtualBox VMs for IE7 through IE9 with one script
Headline missed an important point. FTA:

"Nearly 25 years ago, the Social Security Administration changed its system for generating new social security numbers, inadvertently making it easier to predict someone’s number from basic information. Once Carnegie Mellon researchers identified students, they were able to access and match publicly available information. In just four attempts, they successfully predicted the first five digits of students’ social security numbers nearly 30 percent of the time—all from a single photo."

The first step was to map a given photo to the identity of a student. That might be something like name, DOB, and gender (ie, "basic information").

The next step was to guess the SSN first five from the basic information.

The important point that the headline missed is that CMU already had the student's basic information. There is no way you can guess the basic information from a photo.
Robert J. Sawyer: "Robots will play a major role as caregivers for the disabled"
It was disappointing for me because of the broken promises - the PDC 2003 video shows a very impressive GUI with skillful use of animation. WinFS would also offer vastly improved file management. Finally, being heavily based on managed code would make it both more secure and easier to develop for. But I agree most prospective Vista users were not aware of any of this. I, however, was.

FOr most users, the disappointment came from the "Vista Ready" sticker on computers that could run XP very well, but were barely capable of running Vista at acceptable speed and the Aero look.
Is it really done using GWT? Of the web engineer friends I know at Google, most hate GWT and try to avoid using it whenever possible. Most Google products don't use it.
Lion iChat Growl Notifications
(Offline Gmail team member here)

One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection.

This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.
Came across this and thought it'd be useful for HN'ers who have to do IE testing
That quote is basically the entire premise of Fahrenheit 451.
Where did "Tabs" come from? To me it conjures the image of little sheets of paper (acid) and or pills ... when did this start being used to describe tablet devices?
Scrappy App Marketing - In Application Cross Promotion for Higher Conversions
I don't know why they even bother having a blog… Do they think they are going to win people over?
Unless there are burning issues that you need addressed the best thing you can do is just talk to people about their startups: what issues they've had, how they've overcome them and the like. The advice and stories you'll hear from people will turn out to be incredibly useful.
Have you talked to Steve Jobs? Apple's cash flow would seem to fit your requirements perfectly.
On a related note, for a side project that requires a windows download (http://www.getbugcam.com), I've been experimenting with Microsoft's "ClickOnce" installer + autoupdate technology. Obviously (per the name and Microsoft reputation), it's not quite as simple and straightforward as Chrome's autoupdate process, but it is pretty good.

For those interested in some of the available options for Windows apps, see here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37030/how-to-best-impleme...
What's not to like about it?
Oh, ok, so fsc is comparable to just connecting to a nailgun daemon, right?

I don't actually know Scala; is there a tl;dr for that link?
> Employees should work in a company where they believe in the way of working and feel comfortable doing the job. Agreed on that.

That's not what I said, although it's probably a good HR policy.

I didn't say people should do things that they think are good and not evil (at work or otherwise).

I said people should do things that are good and not evil.

If I thought what you think I thought, it would be counterproductive to bring up these issues publicly, because it might make people uncomfortable by making them question their values.

> But I see the problem arising on how to define what's evil and what is not.

Yes, of course it's difficult to know what's good and what's evil (it's not a question of "definition" unless moral relativism is correct), and if past experience is any guide, we probably won't come to any kind of permanent consensus. That doesn't mean that discussing it is pointless. We can probably come to better conclusions about what's good and what's evil with the discussion than without it.

> There are lot of things which can be thought as strengthening existing imbalances of power in the world. Even the Google search could be considered to be such.

Someone might think Google Search strengthens existing imbalances of power, but I don't think so. And of course it does the opposite of harming people.

> I can't figure out why "real names" policy is evil. I don't see it harming people.

I don't really want to get into the whole #nymwars discussion here, but suffice it to say that the broad consensus among Google+ users is that you're wrong about that — which is what I meant by saying that Google's policy was undemocratically chosen.
I agree. Asus and Acer seem to be the only respectable Android tablet manufacturers that get that pricing matters (quite a bit).

Yeah, people are willing to pay for quality, but given the huge ecosystem advantages the iPad has right now, your Android device would have to be many times superior to the iPad at the same price to think of competing. Meanwhile Android tablet makers are producing tablets that are often worse than the iPad 2 in ways that really matter (eg. even many of the high-end ones using crappy TN panels) and cost as much, if not more.

The HTC Jetstream is even worse, as the rumored price for that one is $700 ON CONTRACT (with AT&T), and $850 off contract. I don't even know how a decision to make that device at that pricepoint got made, but it is completely absurd.
Will fix that!

At the moment, there's only one option so we'll probably just switch over to having a button, but I haven't had a chance to convert it yet. (PayPal has a habit of blocking your forms if they detect any mismatches between your encrypted and form data, so I want to be careful about it.)
Advertising does work, but it also has other issues being overlooked. For instance, all Geico commercials featuring the Cave Men have made me hate listening to Royksopp. I don't believe that's an effect Geico or Royksopp could have anticipated. Be ready for the affects good or bad if you're the 3rd party in one of these 'viral' ads.
Such as? (I'm sure you corrected for population density)
While I think the new Metro UI is very pretty, and potentially might turn out to be a good contender in the tablet space, I'm skeptical that their plans for a dual system like this will work.

I'm reminded by the interviews with the original Xbox team at MS, who were apparently shouted at by a red faced Ballmer for weeks after they said that it wouldn't run Windows. Imagine how the Xbox's usability and popularity would have been reduced if they tried to run the Windows desktop on it.

It seems to me that there is a huge push at the upper levels in Microsoft to put Windows on everything.

Meanwhile, Apple realized the sad but true fact that most computer users are completely incapable of understanding concepts like the filesystem. They made a tablet that your granny can use without having to be taught. They made a system as foolproof as possible, while the power users who scream "walled garden" and "i needs my zsh shell on it!" can still use it as a casual device and jailbreak it if they want to get the features they require.

Many in the tech media lambasted the iPad as a useless oversized iPod touch, but look at it today. They shipped a "crippled" device that ended up being more usable to more people than the PC has been. They also successfully convinced users who want to be able to do things like spreadsheets and presentations to try things like Numbers and Keynote, which were completely redesigned for touch and work great on the device.

Microsoft hasn't realized this strategy, and I think many users will be worried by the initial lack of apps for Metro and try to use Word and Excel on a 10 inch touch device, and get angry with it when the UI is just too cumbersome.

I played around with a Windows 7 tablet at PC World recently. An anti-virus warning from McAfee or something like that was popping up and becoming modal every time I tried to open the Start menu, then when I eventually managed to kill it, the items in the Start menu were way too small to accurately touch. Text input worked like crap, and IE was barely usable. Anyone buying that device was doomed to constant frustration. (At the same time, a friend of mine, who is a hardcore Arch Linux user and a sysadmin, went in with the intention of getting an Eee Pad Transformer or other android tablet, and was so disheartened by the user experience of those that he left with an iPad 2).

Really, I don't want Microsoft to fail. Many people have hated them for many years, but these days it seems to be more pity than hate. If they released an excellent update to Windows for the desktop, still focusing on the mouse and keyboard, then pushed for developers to make awesome apps for Metro and had that only on tablets, I think they would be much more likely to gain some marketshare, especially if they pushed some cloud syncing features and integration with other products. Of course Windows 8 will gain marketshare anyway, I think mostly through OEM sales, but I don't think the tablet market will pick it up like it might if they focused on a solid tablet-only OS but played the vertical integration game with services.

Just my opinion.
Meet Mabel the robot that jobs like a human
I understand that, but placing it on a "what OS do you use daily to develop with" while leaving out far more popular OSes gives a distinct "it's a pretty obscure OS; you probably haven't heard of it" hipster vibe.
I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.
Eternity Part 3: DDoS Attack and Hiring
Do you know why they dislike GWT?
Is there any way to have it enter command mode instead of insert mode automatically after opening a file?
Whenever a catchy "indie" tune hits the top of Spotify, I wonder just how long it has before it becomes a VW commercial or the ending credits of The Hills.
When it comes to Google I find myself eating my words from a year ago -- they've really gotten their act together in terms of cleaning up their product line. I only hope they go to the next level and modernize the feature sets Blogger to catch up with the Tumblrs of the world. I'm also encouraged by the fact that they're shutting down side projects -- it's like when Jobs came back to Apple and cleaned up the product line by killing off fanboy favorites like the Newton and HyperCard (two products I loved).
I love Tumblr and get a lot of value from it both personally and professionally. I also regularly recommend it. (I start off with with this endorsement because I'm about to point out some opportunities for improvement that I don't want anybody to interpret as reasons not to use it. No matter what, you should probably be using it like people 2.5 years ago should have been starting to think about how they/if could use Twitter for their projects/socializing.)

On the one hand, Tumblr's lack of internal analytics (as referenced in this article) is a major weakness of almost all social networks. But on the other, users and businesses feel the pain more acutely on Tumblr than on other sites.
It's a bit chicken and egg, but Tumblr is best consumed through its internal Dashboard, and many social interactions on Tumblr are invisible through any other interface.
(When you see a Tumblr out on the web, it looks just like a normal website, but people "inside" the system are having a giant party you don't know about.)

Tumblr's API (very recently updated, I may be slightly behind on everything it supports) does not giving visibility to a lot of this stuff, so there's no rich ecosystem of clients like Twitter has. One can argue how well Twitter handles its developer community, but there's no denying that all the little tools out there, even if they only get "stolen" by Twitter in the end, give Twitter visibility to what users want.

Let's start with search. Twitter's original search was much worse than it is today (bad timing for me to write this, as for about a month now, Twitter search has been slightly broken). They bought Summize, who did search very well. In fact, Summize also did the first iteration of trending topics (which even if they make you worry about America, is a fascinating and incredible thing to have around).

Tumblr's personal search has been broken for about 3 years (longer?). There is pretty much no global search. (And not supported in API.)

The Twitter ecosystem also has a whole bunch of little point tools like "Where are your followers located?" and "What tags do you use the most?"

Tumblr at one point asked you what city you were in during onboarding, yet that data is nowhere to be seen, even by the account owner.

I'll stop with my examples. My point is mostly that sure, Tumblr could make an analytics dashboard. That would be great. OR, it could provide more data through the API, and I'm sure a developer community would spring up to meet many of these needs, and some we haven't even thought of.
Salesforce.com Reborn Social
This is precisely correct.
Feds test data exchange between cars
If Google fails, it is an unsolved problem [1], and therefore requires study and research. A variety of communication mediums (forums, IRC, etc.) exist to communicate with others who are working on solving the same problem.

[1] At least to the extent that the public is concerned. It is possible that some skunkworks operation has solved it in secrecy.
I took that as part of his point -- there isn't a convenient buzzword or easy label to describe what he does, which leads to fear and "people won't understand".
I've worked as a patent lawyer. If this patent worries you, take a look at the claims (Ctrl+F for "claims")

http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...

In order to directly infringe a patent, you have to do everything in a claim. Now look at Claim 1. It is very long, with lots of clauses. That is a sign that the PTO pushed back hard against the lawyer writing the patent, making him add more and more clauses to the claim, until it was so long that no one will ever infringe it by doing all these things.

Why would a company spend $10k+ to get such a patent? Is this what Thomas Jefferson had in mind? Companies get patents like this to add to their "patent portfolio", which is both a club and a shield in patent litigation with other companies. This patent by itself is worthless, but when you sue somebody, you cam dump 500 patents in their (lawyer's) lap, and it will take a few hours for some associate billing $300+/hr. to figure out it's worthless. This drives up their litigation costs and encourages them to settle. It's a terrible system, it hurts innovation, it hurts small companies at the expense of big ones, and society would be better off without it.
> has been gamed and is no longer useful

To be fair, if you can game it, the interviewer's doing it wrong. The idea is to ask a question that the interviewee can complete and then work together with them for ideas on other ways of implementing it, trade-offs, demonstrating that they understand the memory and execution model of the machine, talking about how to measure performance issues or representation choices, etc. You're trying to discover by working with them on a problem in the small how they will react when faced with similar problem on a problem in the large. And while I don't claim that A -> B, I do claim not A -> not B. If they can't even talk about the memory touched during binary search, good luck putting them on partitioning an algorithm to run across multiple processors.

If you're just giving an algorithms quiz, you'd be better off just outbidding IBM on their "we will hire everyone from the top 25 ICPC teams" strategy.
Branding (impressions over time) vs Direct Response (clicks).
I'd bet you that it's coming -- my gut tells me they've focused the big guns on G+ and then will swing back to feature up other products to get a halo effect.
Gnome's (and OSX's) spacial mode was rubbish. The whole philosophy of MacOS's Finder ("spacial mode") is to hide applications from the user, and make the whole user experience document-centric. The user opens documents and manipulates them without having to worry about what program they are using to do it.

Wonderful though Linux is, it's applications are not consistent or mature enough to support a totally document-centric UI. Microsoft could achieve that with Office, but they would probably be accused of over-integration, and hit with the anti-trust stick.
A long time ago, I briefly had a girlfriend who was a geographer, and she impressed the hell out of me by casually looking at a globe in a library we were visiting, and telling me it was from 1923, just by looking at the borders and country names. Totally knocked me out.
Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Unfortunately that little nugget is stuck in my head for life, but I've never bought the product (nor do I know anyone who will admit to having bought it), so in that sense did the ad really "work"?
Actually, it probably scales better, if structured a bit differently.

1) Phone screen (1 hr)
2) Give them a project to work on over a weekend(0 hrs)
3) Have someone go through the code (1 hr)
4) Bring them in for lunch, and then a demo session with Q&A (1 hr for lunch and 1 hr for Demo/Q&A x 2 engineers)

This seems like it would scale much better. The person who reads the code can say yay or nay to the demo session, and then whoever is involved in the demo session (probably 2 engineers) can ask questions throughout the demo. Total time would be 5 hrs and I think you would get a much better feel for the candidate afterwards.
Buy less stuff in general, and watch for falling sales funnels.