skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't assume you're getting downvoted through simple fanboyism.

Your comment is thin and unproductive, and flies in the face of the experiences of many.

We've been using ImageMagick in our product for about 6 years. Across 4 new Mac laptops and 3 versions of OS X, `sudo port install imagemagick` has never worked for me.

I've had similar woes on Ubuntu with `apt-get install imagemagick`.

I don't know if the fault lies with ImageMagick itself, the package managers, or just the simple fact that ImageMagick has an extraordinary number of library and environmental dependencies which are always moving.

Even today, my local development environment loads and runs ImageMagick with no errors or warnings, yet emits only black and white graphics -- no color. At this point, I'm exhausted of trying to fix it, and I've given up.

I've never tried brew, but I'm more than willing to give it a shot.
I don't think he cares about accuracy of the result; all he needs is a binary on off. So you measure the output of the circuit with the TV off, make a note, measure the output of the circuit with the TV on, make a note, and set the threshold (in software), somewhere in between. Then you know if the TV is off or not.

(I would personally have pasted a photocell onto the power LED, if I really needed to know the TV's state, but that's just me. My TV doesn't have a button for "power on", but it responds to a remote code for one.)
Wi-LAN Suing Apple, HP, Alcatel, others over Wifi and LTE
I am now convinced that the standard Ruby syntax is itself a DSL.
A Quick and Easy Way to Create Successful Email Campaigns in SageCRM
I side with Arrington too, AOL didn't stick to their promise and Huff Post is hardly editorial brilliance. They don't pay most of their staff and a lot of their content is just SEO spam. I mean all of these editors of Engadget left, keeping quiet but many hinted about the editorial aspects inside of AOL as one of the reasons they'd resigned.
Dreams of mobile payments lead telco to try banking
A more apt comparison is a GE board member working as a NBC reporter.
Reddit is currently a small team of developers, so there's really no "within" to promote from. I don't know them personally, but I somehow doubt any of the developers wants to be CEO.
Ask HN: Ruby on Rails equivalent for marketing software?
TL;DR: What are the defined processes or methodologies for marketing SaaS, or App Store software? Existing software that no one knows about yet, just ideas for software on proverbial napkins, and everything in between?

I often see posts/articles mentioning how important it is to find customers, to sell before building, etc. I've read the Four Steps to the Epiphany and related lean startup posts. I understand the concepts of marketing as a conversation, building something people want, iterating quickly based on customer feedback, etc. This is all great, but it's either a bit too high level, or it's too focused on the product development aspect of marketing.

Just like Rails has baked-in opinions about how a Ruby web app should work that make using the framework much faster and easier then starting from raw Ruby, what are the opinions about the right way to market a SaaS or App Store product that can be baked into the process (Marketing on Rails) so things are faster, easier, repeatable (and perhaps automatable)? What's the cohesive framework for it all? What are the best practices? Does a book/blog/whatever capture the Ruby on Rails equivalent for business processes or methodologies? I'm looking for the framework of actionable best practice marketing tactics. The same way that Rails provides "your specific code fits here" into this overall web app best practice. What is it?

My situation is this:

* The small company I work for has an existing product that approximately nobody knows about.

* We have two products in development (a web app and a Mac app) that scratch our own itch.

* We have 33 ideas written down for future products; an effortless search would reveal hundreds more.

Note: I am not talking about product/market fit. Our products are very opinionated: they are something we're passionate about. The products fit as much or as little as they are going to fit. This question is about the marketing process to maximize whatever market potential they do have.

How do I become the marketing master for our company so the people that are willing to pay for solutions that we've solved, are solving, or will solve in the future are able to find our products?
Octopress: Create Static Sites with a Full-Featured Framework
Headless Browser Testing on Mac
It's understandable that you'd rather focus on the positive, but you have to respond to the negative.

Text to speech would be a good feature for this service, but it's not at the point where it's easy to compose tweets with license plate numbers and character restrictions yet.

In any case, this service would involve people taking their attention (one or more of mind, eyes, and thumbs) off of driving to send and receive tweets. Any safety features would have to outweigh this detriment.
Why? Om Malik is a partner in a venture firm[1] and still writes for GigaOm.

You don't have to obtain a license or agree to uphold any particular code of conduct to be allowed to write about news for the web. You just write, and if people value what you have to say, they read. Arrington even had signoff from the CEO of AOL saying he could do both.

That's not to say that Arrington is completely in the right in this. Many reasonable people seem to be worried about the conflict of interest, so there's a good chance that it's in AOL's interest to dispose of him to avoid worse PR. But I think he absolutely went into this thinking that he could keep doing TechCrunch.

[1] http://www.trueventures.com/member/om-malik/
You could also use a photodetector placed over the TV's power light, and I bet you could even input that to a PC with very minimal hardware, over a serial port or microphone jack.

Cost would be very low, even if you have to buy USB<->Serial adapters. And you can run many feet of serial over CAT5.

Also, you may want to check xrandr, that strikes me as the correct way to ask the X server what is connected.
> how AOL managed stay alive

selling overpriced dialup to old and ignorant people

(not a joke)
Happy Appiversary, Lanyrd
Torvalds dumps Kernel.org for Github after breach
The form factor (for some applications) is a genuine problem, but it's the only remaining problem in my recent experience. There is a reasonable facsimile of a 60-100W "A" bulb for use with lamp shades that clip onto the bulb, but the base widens too abruptly for some fixtures, and low-wattage bulbs do tend to be longer than their incandescent counterparts.

I'm not using any "name" bulbs (except in photo lighting, which is another kettle of fish entirely) at the moment (they're the cheapies from Canadian Tire) and it has been a long time since I've experienced mechanical noise, flicker or an unacceptable spectrum (there are only a few very small gaps, as revealed by a diffraction spectrometer -- er, a CD held at an angle, which has served me well as a photographer over the years).

And "pinkish" is weird -- it sounds like somebody's tried to use older "conventional" phosphors (which gave a very green-biased spectrum) and tried to overcompensate with the complement (magenta). I've never run into that with any of the brands I've tried (and I'm rather picky).

ADDED: the buzzing shouldn't be a problem with a recent bulb, either. That's an artifact of an older ballast design that I haven't seen used in years. All of the ones I've tried in the last five years or so have had high-frequency ballasts and long-decay phosphors to deal with the flicker issue (it's not an issue anymore), so the 120Hz buzz went away at the same time.
The lenses can be passive and thin, which is all you need to make camera or spectacle lenses.
If the concern is the journalistic integrity of a tech news blog whose founder also funds certain startups likely to wind up in the tech news... one way would be to make those investments subject to an NDA I suppose. None of the blog writers would know which companies were or were not funded by the founder's fund.

Or a news blackout could be imposed on that blog for any companies funded by the founder's VC firm. I suppose the news blackout would be an imperfect solution, since presumably reportage on any competitors to the portfolio companies could be viewed as suspect.

Even if Mr. Siegler insists that the tech blog where he works is a cool place founded by a cool guy, that does not address the perception of the blog from the outside. If there is any perception at all of potential bias, then both the VC fund and the tech blog suffer an erosion of perceived integrity (regardless of whether or not that is actually the case).

Independence is a tricky thing. I think maybe if TechCrunch were not part of AoL, then they could potentially pull off this balancing act. They have enough momentum now that readership won't evaporate overnight, and a few blog posts critical of portfolio companies or complimentary to competitor companies would re-establish their credibility. But a big corporate parent is not going to like that kind of the seat-of-the-pants approach to managing risk. Doubtless somewhere in the bowels of AoL somebody is running the numbers of what would happen if somebody sued along the way, and not liking what they see.

As for Mr. Siegler ranting about his employer on a blog they own, that strikes me as a classic CLM. Big ol' corporations really really tend to hate it when someone down on the front lines starts to think they're irreplaceable and they can do as they please, just because they've taken a lot of bullets and led a few charges over their little piece of the battlefront. A better approach would have been to tactfully address all of the issues he addressed, in the interest of informing the readers, and with the same goal of trying to gin up reader support. But he could have mentioned that he really appreciates the resources at his disposal thanks to the AoL acquisition, and he believes that TechCrunch adds value to the parent firm primarily due to its unique editorial independence policies, etc. As it reads now, he comes off as churlish. Nobody likes to have f-bombs hurled at them, not even dull gray corporate types in upper management. It really burns when those f-bombs are lobbed by someone on the payroll.

IMHO, if Mr. Siegler truly wants to help his boss keep his job, his best move now would be to pull that little rant pronto, and edit it to be a lot more polite and respectful to AoL, throw in some mea culpas about getting wound up too soon, etc. and then re-state his case in terms that corporate can understand and appreciate. AoL might be a bunch of assholes, but they are the assholes that cut his check.
Get stuffed already.
The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.

"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.

Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.

I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.

If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.

Condé Nast isn't built to do this.
I suppose. I frequently congratulate launches, and never gotten downvoted before. Hmm.
I know I will be voted down, but this reminds me of PGs comments on the AirBbB threads.
Moonlight is actually 4100 K, colder than incandescent, but warmer than regular daylight.
TechCrunch's Mascara Tears
There might be a really cool cafe on my block, and I might go in there and have lively discussions with intelligent people, and there might be more and more people in that cafe every day, but if the cafe doesn't sell any coffee it goes out of business.
I bet NBC Nightly News has a fairly rigorous and well-defined code of ethics.
vagrant forces you to run in a virtual machine, bit more inconvenient than running on the local physical host.
Harrisburg PA DJ Service
AOL has been making money hand-over-fist while being the brunt of insults for 10 years now - this wouldn't be the first time.
Groupon Rethinking the Timing Of Its IPO
This applies to guys as well as girls. My parents made sure that I learned that people judge me on how I look, smell, speak, etc.
Groupon IPO on hold
Judge Calls His Own Expert at Oracle/Google Patent Trial
The first page reads so much like an attack on the Mac that I didn't read the rest. I want to attack the Mac too, but if I were writing a comparison article, I would try to be fair(er)? Wouldn't I?
Individual locales can have particular niche demands or simply end up as technical backwaters where employability depends entirely on your familiarity with, say VB 6.

That's mostly, I think, an argument for moving out of technical backwaters if you're in a technical career. If you let yourself be limited to skills that are more valuable in Minneapolis than the major tech hubs, you're eventually going to be stuck with skills that aren't even valuable in Minneapolis, as the "hot" tech hub technologies become mainstream and finally migrate there way out to the backwaters.
How Google makes gmail mobile fast
Atari planning its own iOS controller? (Updated: Yes)
Condé Nast seems to have every intention of 'funding' this new company itself (that is, without raising outside investment), so it's really just removing the "Condé Nast" from the process but maintaining ownership.

Granted, they were rather autonomous (one reason why I know I stayed until the end of my contract) but with money in the bank, the new CEO can simply do things as easily as any of the other startups in the top 50. Before, that money would be going through some other big company approval process -- e.g., if reddit wants to hire away a fabulous programmer, it simply gets done.

If things go well, reddit continues to grow and increase its value, at which point, it could potentially be acquired, IPO [RDIT?], or just become a cash cow for Condé Nast.
The question is, does growing a loss making company make sense? Or should you solve the monetization issue first.

Reddit doesn't need more money, it needs to be brave, slap up some real advertising, and start generating real revenue.

A website that does 100m pageviews, but makes $10m/yr profit is better than one that does 500m pageviews but makes no profit.
There are some security and privacy issues with that extension. It requires permission to run javascript in the context of every page, so the author could auto-update the plugin to inject malicious code in your banking session.

It also sends every url you visit to HNSearch, which a lot of people were unhappy with from a privacy perspective. My extension sends MD5(url), which makes it nearly impossible for me to track someones browsing behavior.
It would seem remiss for a story with such a headline to not have a comment that points out that Apple do a pretty good job of being Apple for the blind...

Here's just one random article in that vein:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/association-for-th...
If it was just a single downvote, it could easily have been due to someone on a touchscreen accidentally pressing a downvote button while trying to scroll the page, press the upvote button, etc.
I think we both lost :P.
Maybe it's just me, but millionaires fighting other millionaires for WordPress admin status makes for little sympathy. I don't work at AOL and don't need to take part in their office politics.
It’s Official: WebOS Is Divorcing From Palm’s Hardware
Reddit's quality has gone down exponentially over the last year in line with the exploding traffic. So the majority crowd is probably not the cynical tech bunch anymore - translates to - it could get a little easier to monetize the traffic.
That nurturing roles vary by income would seem to be a solid argument against biological predestination.
Fee diversion remains sticking point for patent reform
Please review my startup and sign-up for beta!
Groupon Reevaluating IPO Plans Due to Market Volatility
@trafficlight:

How much did Polycase quote for having the enclosures milled and printed? In what quantity?
Malcon 2011 - Call for Papers ~ THN : The Hacker News
Nailed it, joshklein. In fact, publishing xkcd and SMBC (along with the other breadpig products) has taught me a few things about that world. I'm hoping reddit makes good use of them.
is it just me, or does anyone else think that though the design is prettier, it kinda makes other parts of the app look bad - for instance compare the commit style to the tree listings. it's not that one or the other look bad, it's just the dissimilarity is jarring.
Cheezburger Network seems to be scooping up the business model you're mentioning, bringing the 4chan and reddit memes that are likely to have a broad audience into the mainstream and monetizing them.
Sure. But to suggest that the site might be dying at the (so far) height of its popularity seems odd, which is why I was asking for clarification. Would you describe Twitter as dying? Or YouTube? Or any other sites that have been infamously unprofitable for years and years before eventually turning it around?
I once ended up in a ... discusssion ... with the owner of nfs.net about deployment of certain open source projects I'm involved with. It didn't end well, due to a couple of early misunderstandings that we failed to resolve before the conversation went of the rails.

As such, I don't think I'd ever want to be a customer of theirs.

However, I -do- believe that their service is competently delivered and extremely cost effective; every other user I've ever spoken to has been entirely happy, so I've put my own experience down to a combination of personality conflict and bad luck, and am happy to say their service is likely one very much worth considering if you fall into any of the markets they target.
The Simplest WebWorker in CoffeeScript
Is it growing slowly and consistently, or experiencing explosive growth? The link I was replying to shows that while Reddit and Digg started at about the same time, Reddit really only took off when Digg committed suicide.

http://soshable.com/reddit-traffic-has-exploded-in-12-months...
Tons of helpful links here.
Agreed; having something like this tied to your GPS would be a great service. It would also be useful to quickly know the time the spot becomes illegal again.

I can imagine, too, this would be incredibly useful if self-driving cars ever become a reality (or in helping them become a reality). After one drops you off at the show downtown, it could then check for nearby parking. But maybe this is dreaming too far down the road...
WordPress ClickBank Plugin Review
Not only is it proven, it is also tested.

I am not a genius like Knuth, who only needs to prove things.
Just as his website was MIT-driven by encouraging Mr. Wade’s entrepreneurial spirit and putting him in those awkward social situations, it was also MIT-driven by twisting his view of reality into a purely utilitarian model, completely devoid of any morals. As SeekingArrangement.com says, “Who is to say what is right and wrong?” Many would see this as dangerous, but to Mr. Wade, it is purely a case of the output being worth the input.

It really rubs me wrong that the OP believes that MIT is responsible for certain actions that are really up to the individual.

- You are the only one responsible for cultivating a moral compass. A college can require an ethics course, but whether you absorb any of it or not will be entirely on you.

- MIT didn't fail him any more than any other institution. It's not MIT's job to give him or anyone social skills. Again, see point #1, it's on you to do something about it.

I get the point of the article and the general depravity of the site he started, but seriously, is MIT responsible for this or simply collateral damage in this article's bomb crater? What if Ted Bundy, or Osama Bin Laden graduated from MIT? Is it MIT's fault that they are sociopathic too?
People fail stat and pass linear algebra?!
Thankfully the software development game isn't quite as arcane and antiquated as the visual arts. If you pay a coder $250 an hour to write some code for you from scratch, you generally get to use it for more than a year or on more than one specific server without being charged additional "licensing" fees. And that's a good thing.
Maybe the humming I hear is due to old lighting fixtures, but I don't want to replace all of them in my apartment :)

I think it's things like this that make mainstream adoption unlikely. And difficulty of safe disposal (but I'm being optimistic, and we might just get tons of mercury in our landfills if people are fine being negligent).
Gosh, that was judgemental. I suppose it was intended to be an opinion piece, but it took prostitution to be wrong a priori, with no discussion or justification of this premise. Bandying about words like ‘exploitation’ is, frankly, cheap. The phrase “exploiting young women and enticing men to have extramarital affairs” reveals several of the author’s strong inner biases (to wit, that women are weak and men are evil). If anything, I'd say the author himself demonstrates ‘the dark side of an MIT brain’.

On a more general note, where are the articles discussing the long-term effect of prostitution on psychology? For example, do students who sell sex at college go on to be less or more successful than their cohort? Do they form longer-lasting or more volatile relationships later in life? Those are the articles I’d like to read.