skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still have a hard time buying into the lean startup method hook, line, and sinker. I think there is quite a bit of evidence in support of it, but a lot that flies in the face of it as well.

Certain features, for which presentation isn't critical, I would certainly want to deploy early and often. But that also seems to be contradictory to the dictum "execution is everything." Of course building something with excellent execution quickly is ideal, but if you release your product before it is what you believe is your best work, then aren't you kind of hurting what little chance you've got?

To draw an example, Palm had a touch screen phone and apps available for download in 2004. But their execution wasn't very good, and their software provided an awful experience. In 2007 Apple released the exact same idea but with far better execution, and the rest is history.

I'm not saying the lean startup method doesn't work, I just think it is highly dependent upon the product strategy.
Mozilla Corporation. We're global, we're hiring, we offer four weeks PTO plus your birthday.

http://www.mozilla.org/careers
That is a very nice detailed write up. I do think this illustrates the need for offline access though.
Liberating and future-proofing your research data
Should've taken that GOOG offer I guess. But greed, excuse me, "growth" trumps all else.

Now all we need is a sex scandal and let's seal the deal.
It’s Hard to Predict the Future [2006]
Video: Python Fundamentals Training - Defining Functions
What Is The Scientifically Scariest Video Game?
Please be more specific with your question.

I'm apprehensive to reply, given your use of the word "obsession," which sounds like you are biased against Twitter, versus email. If that's the case, please explain your reasons.

Regarding your question, are you suggesting that a system for registering domains by sending an email would be better? If you are, I can think of several reasons why I'd disagree.

For one, email addresses can be easily spoofed. So to confirm that an email was really sent by someone, there might need to be some sort of autoreply with a confirmation link. At that point, you've used your email client, your web browser, and have added several steps to the process.

So I think, in that case, registering oTwitter is more efficient.

I also think that Twitter is more reliable than Email, in several respects. Though neither platform is perfect.
Third parties can now submit prior art to patent applications. This is huge, it means we can help intercept and readjust before patents get granted and people get sued.

What we need now is a website tracking patent applications and assignments by companies (specifically Intellectual Ventures and their cronies) and inform the public to submit prior art for these applications and now help the patent office do a better job than it's been doing, and prevent the courts from even having to be involved.
Adobe Unveils Flash Media Server for Apple iOS
Since I wrote that comment he changed his article to include that (unattributed, of course): https://github.com/yogsototh/Scratch/commit/6555b7d94cee124a...
"TechCrunch used its influence to gain a virtual chokehold on news about new startups from Y Combinator"

Hardly. The reason most of the startups announce on TechCrunch is simply that arranging a launch in multiple publications is a huge time sink. So we advise they pick one and give them an exclusive. Most pick TechCrunch.
This is negative, and I know that it's not the most socially acceptable thing to do, but: this article typifies everything that's wrong with the fluff that hits Hackers News sometimes.

✓ Random quote from historic/epic source
✓ Exhortations to throw caution to the wind and just ship
✓ Gratuitous bash of unit testing
✓ Bragging about a quick, rich, exit to a bigger company
Cash flow is definitely a big part of it. With daily billing, we never see any huge fluctuations in our account. In my opinion, a slow and steady stream of income is much better than big pop once a month.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7500.0
Good analogy. Reminds me of the perennial Steve Jobs quote, "real artists ship." You can think up the greatest masterpiece the world would ever see. However if you never actually paint it and display it, the world will never actually see it.
Commit to being an entrepreneur
صور اليسا
Link to JSTOR's announcement:

http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-j...

These articles are from 1923 and before in the USA and from 1870 and before in other countries, so historic scientific research from the 1930's and later is still behind the paywall.
That is not true. They vastly overstate the decline in wages, due to the rise of more single person households. See: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=a7jenngfc4um7_&#...

Individual wages have risen steadily since 1910, with no gaps. The household income chart is a misleading chart.
I haven't seen it featured in a lot of US news agencies, but the economical situation is Israel might be insightful in comparison with the US.

For the last couple of months Israelis are protesting about the economical situation around the country. The focus of those protests is the neo liberalist and capitalist direction the country took. You can search for #j14 on twitter. The protest demands among other things social justice, free education from the age of 3 months and free housing.

Last week 400,000 protested around the country. That's about 7% of the population.

Oh, and today S&P just upgraded Israel credit status to A+.
The rise of the corporate raider mentality. Instead of making money by making and selling things, American corporations shifted towards financial games instead, seeing a prosperous factory as an unmined resource to be cut up and sold to the highest bidder.

We've been eating our seed corn ever since.
Right, but that's why it makes sense that the top quintile should have runaway gains like those shown. I would expect that.
minus.com? letscrate.com?
Talk about a non-announcement.

"Hey, uh all that content we no longer have any rights to, uh, now you can get it for free can you imagine?"

An announcement would be if they made journal articles before 1960 free.
A Different View on Freelance Economy
Share HN: Bleeoo, a video site to record your impression of a dialup modem
Free SitePoint eBook on Web Design worth $29.95
Flexible vacation sounds a lot like flexible salary, in my opinion.
How do I know how much is reasonable? Also, how do you determine when the job is done, unless you have a very detailed to do list for the year? My job is never done, otherwise I'd be fired.
Also, I hear people mentioning "taking 4 weeks in a row" as something quite rare.
The article gives two ranges: 1947-1979, 1980-Present. Reagan's presidency (1981-1989), and the political changes it brought, coincided with the beginning of the second range.
To be fair, one shouldn't bash Brendan, he had to build the initial JavaScript language in a week[1]. It's not his fault the language became the defacto web-language.

[1]http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...
Mount Sinai Hospital/School of Medicine -- NYC
Forgive my ignorance, but how so? How does the wealth extracted from the transaction play into this (arbitrage extracts value from a transaction, ideally it's made up for through liquidity).
ok, thanks. That makes sense.
I'm not sure this proves Krugman is wrong.

Sell-offs (especially large ones) don't indicate that hoarding hasn't taken place. In fact, if hoarding wasn't taking place I'd expect low variability in trading volume (since the currency would be used by a number of parties for small transactions). A large sell-off implies to me that a large amount of value has just transferred from one set of hoarders (investors?) to another. Either that, or someone just made a huge donation to WikiLeaks...
Ask HN: What is your preferred alternative to GoDaddy?
With the recent news concerning GoDaddy, I plan to move all of my domains to a new registrar.

So I put to you this question: which registrar should that be?
I have a bad feeling that they won't improve with Windows 8. The issue at hand is that Microsoft believes Windows 8 should be everything to everyone all at once, and it simply can't. They need to realise that to "win" in the tablet space they need to leave their love child Windows behind and build something that was designed from the ground up for a small form factor tablet device.
The Model T is not a very good car, even considering the time. It's about as simple transmission as you can get, terrible brakes, a gas tank under the front seat (how convenient), would roll over in heartbeat, you'd get soaked when it rained and freeze in the winter, and only came in black.

It was wildly successful because Henry Ford knew one thing - customers wanted cars but they couldn't afford the current offerings. Everything he did was to make the car affordable to the common man.

I will disagree that timing doesn't matter. Ford was definitely at the right-place at the right-time. 5 or 10 years later and he probably wouldn't have been so successful, someone would've beaten him to the punch. The plain fact is that while timing isn't everything, it can't be considered irrelevant.
The 1 Thing You Have to Understand if You Don't Want Your Business to Tank
Can't find the link for "Organizing Programs Without Classes". The Oracle site says "click here to download", but there is nothing to click?
That’s the most compelling argument I’ve heard for regularly paying down technical debt, and/or for acquiring it with great care. The craftsmanship argument — made by Uncle Bob and others — holds guilty appeal for me as a hacker but strikes me as self-indulgent. What’s compelling about your perspective here is its rational basis in the interest of the product owner. I had not thought of user stories as an abstraction, and therefore a probably leaky abstraction.
Video from the Pitch SF startup event - Shwinkers, Doot, LocalMind & more
Pretty cool, now I can waste even more money when I am drunk. Would be cooler if you could use any registrar, but that's really not feasible so I guess eNom is a good place to hold them until they are eligible for transfer. Would appreciate maybe a confirmation step, so you can check if something's available then reply yes or no if you want to spend the dough.

Overall a nice affiliate front end with a value add.
People making your argument always mention TVs, they never mention rent, land, food, education, childcare, or healthcare.

1. Rent

2. Land

3. Food

4. Education

5. Childcare

6. Healthcare

You know, the stuff that actually matters.

I'll give up my $400 LCD TV to be able to afford having my spouse stay home. No problem.

I'll give up my Hyundai to be able to get a degree on the cheap like they did back in the 60s.

I'll give up 100% of my silicon-based technology if in exchange I can afford to own some land. Easy choice.

If I have to become a silicone-smashing luddite to return to 1960s level wealth, fine. I don't love computers THAT much.
Care to elaborate? Doesn't my phone always have a control channel signal?
Namecheap

I reg'd one with Gandi but to be honest haven't used much of it, so can't say
Well, you'd need 400 Million on profit for a fair $8 Billion valuation (at 20-1 P/E). I don't know what Twitter's current ad revenue is, but I think that having sponsored tweets is a good idea, as long as I don't get emails from Twitter featuring sponsored Tweets (and if sponsored Tweets are something everyone can buy). Having ads mesh in with the main content of your site is, i believe a winning formula (this has been a great is part of Google's success). I think that $8 Billion at this point is more reasonable than lets say $80 Billion at this point for Facebook, but we shall see.
I love the facial hair theory. LOL.
The user-agent is somewhat configurable within the application. You can currently choose between 4 options: Nexus S, iPhone 4, Windows 7 Chrome, or None (no user agent string sent). I didn't want to change the actual strings from what is used on these devices, because I wasn't sure if sites would still recognize the string as corresponding to a mobile device (in the cases of the Nexus S and iPhone 4 options) if I altered it. Maybe this wasn't the best decision but I wasn't intentionally trying to "use my powers for evil". If anyone can think of an alternative let me know.

You are obviously welcome to block my domain/IP (not that I could stop you). I don't currently plan to expand beyond a single host. Even in the midst of all this coverage my single VPS seems to be working fine. Sorry in advance if I cause problems for you or any other admins...
> making notes in a Google Doc.

Care to make that doc public? :)
Has anyone been successful getting into the Kindle developer program? I applied many months ago and got nowhere.
In my experience Godaddy has been fine with just registering domains. I have my domains there but use PHPFog for my hosting.
I would "never" work for a company that only offers 10 days of vacation

That drastically reduces the number of companies you could work for. I have never had a problem with the number of vacation days. If you need more, just take unpaid days. If company A offers 4 weeks of vacation and company B offers 2 weeks, assuming everything else is equal, try to negotiate 4% more in pay to compensate for 1 paycheck's worth of unpaid vacation. I have always been able to negotiate at least 10% more than the initial offer for every job I took. This more than makes up for any lack of vacation days. I vacation a lot (e.g. 1 week Caribbean cruise, 4 days in Cancun, 5 days in Puerto Rico, 1 month in Philippines, 1 week Caribbean cruise again, Vegas for New Years, and a 3rd 1 week Caribbean Cruise within a 365 day period at a company that just offered 2 weeks paid vacation) and I just take unpaid days.
ITunes U: Apple’s Unsung Mobile Learning Platform
9/11 flight 93 crash video
I've been aware of Sifter for a while but it's great to get the inside story.

I particularly liked your point about building features that no-one used - I'm sure it was kinda hard to watch all that hard work go to waste.

You might have covered this in your talk, but which features did you add that you could have omitted? Without having that usage data early on, is there any way you could have done this differently?

Your slides are awesome by the way :)
I've got to imagine that they can parlay their sponsored Tweet concept into a mult-billion dollar a year revenue stream. If not, forget it, but I actually like the concept of sponsored Tweets (from an advertiser's perspective, I like that the content of the ad will look a lot like the main focus of the site -- regular Tweets.)

I don't know what kind of revenue Twitter has right now, but if they can get anywhere near $2 Billion a year (with lets say a 25% margin), then at a 20-1 P/E that would be a $10 Billion valuation. Only time will tell, Twitter may be a fad, but the price seems more reasonable to me than Facebook at $80 Billion.
ResurfaceART Makes Swimgerie Bikini Surfboard | Builds Water Well in Africa
Magic crystal ball: You at age 80
I see a postscript version here: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~urs/oocsb/self/papers/organizing-pro...
We use OpenID and OAuth to authenticate users against Google before granting them access to anything. We encrypt everything and go so far as to use an EV-SSL cert. We use only SAS-70/SSAE-16 certified data centers, wrap our own servers in a VPN, and lock down all incoming connections. But probably most importantly, we assume a security break would be a company-ending event, and implement our controls accordingly.

Please contact me directly (charlie.wood@spanning.com) if you have any questions or run into any problems.

Thanks,
Charlie
Founder, Spanning
A single large spike of stop-loss sales of a commoditiy that happens at the moment the commodity touches its previous three month low during a long downwards trend does not prove anything about the suitability of the commodity as a currency and is irrelevant to Krugman's argument. Without additional evidence that the exchanges are related to larger exchanges of bitcoin for goods and services, large sales on an exchange only show that would-be hoarders may be losing faith.
This is the fundamental problem with macro economics. there is no way to isolate variables. So obviously saying it is 100% attributable to Reagan is probably not true.

but also (to take some of your points) global competition would effect firms profit margin and theoretically depress income growth. but it does not necessarily explain why income growth shifted away from the middle classes. the issue is more about growth distribution than the presence of growth.
Also, don't miss the movie adaptation of Roadside Picnic by Andrei Tarkovsky: "Stalker".
Furthermore, running $1 trillion deficits helps.

$1 trillion / 153 million workforce
= ~$6500 / worker
= $13,000 per household

It's not too hard to imagine that somehow this money tends to flow moreso towards people in the upper quintile (straight wage-earners would miss out, whereas the investing class has many avenues to receive it), so it wouldn't surprise me at all that 1 household could end up with their "share" plus that of 2 others, so:
$13,000 * 3 = $39,000 household income based on govt deficit spending
$112,541 - $39,000 = $73,500 household, /2 = 36,500 per person in "real", non-deficit enhanced earnings required to make the top quintile.

Made up entirely, but I don't think it is an unrealistic scenario at all. The enormous deficits we are now running can go a long way in hiding the truth for a very long time. Meanwhile, the debt grows and grows, and the interest on that debt gets larger every year. I just don't see how debt is inconsequential, but the vast majority of people seem to act as if it is (at least those who are even aware of it).
Every time I see this kind of chart, I always wonder why the aggregate income distribution of a population is a metric that anyone ought to be concerned about.

What does one person's income have to do with anyone else's - why would you aggregate everyone's separate incomes into a single figure in the first place?

And if someone's particular income is insufficient to meet their needs, how do the aggregate population data help rectify that problem?
Whenever you think you're smarter then Krugman on economics take a step back, apply Occam's Razor and realize you're probably suffering from a cognitive bias.

Krugman's simply making a bigger and simpler observation: costs of stuff in bitcoin over time haven't just been slightly deflationary over time, they've been massively deflationary such that there is no incentive to ever use it for actually buying things. This is sufficient to reject it as a currency on the first pass without looking at anything else. Maybe it will stabilize at some point and at that point can be evaluated on other merits.
awesome idea, blast from the past!
You're arguing that an aristocracy is OK as long as they didn't get there through heredity.

First of all, I would disagree that social mobility is increasing. Rich kids are doing better than ever.

Secondly, I believe history indicates that hereditary aristocracies are actually less brutal and dangerous than "merit"-based ones. It is the revolutionary forces that destroy societies and kill tremendous amounts of people. People born into poverty who work their way to the top through a sociopathic drive for power and look down on everyone else with a blame-the-victim mentality.

These people are dangerous. And Hacker News is full of them.
Hmm, the shareware market before the app store was pretty lucrative too.

The app store didn't really change anything for small shops. If you compete against big money on the app store you still have the problem that they have a lot more marketing money to spend. And marketing is still of #1 importance.

The only difference is that the download portal now takes 30% of your money for the privilege of being listed there. You still have to make some buzz so that people learn about your product.

I'm on the app store with my products but I really don't like the concept.
Groupon Employees Sue Over Working Conditions
raganwald, I am waiting for your language that will, across a 10+ year time span with millions of users/contributors, not only serve its legacy but also adapt to/conquer new markets.

Just make sure you don't call it LISP2 or Arc2.
I ROFL torn between hilarity and disgust at the use of that quote. He takes his little metaphor and stretches it until it breaks and then some. It takes some skill to say so little with so many words.

TLDR: Shipping Ships.
What's on David Lieb's home screen?
I'll give up 100% of my silicon-based technology if in exchange I can afford to own some land. Easy choice.

You can't possibly be serious. Why aren't you already in Nebraska, then? There's plenty of land in the United States, most of it dirt cheap (being dirt). If you're not already from the country, you probably don't know why we all left the country. (Myself included.)
New Form Techniques to Save Clients Time and Money
this messed up some stuff for us due to partial reliance on this at www.spottmusic.com. had to work to repair the database this morning. not fun.
In my defense, this is what shows up on my screen:

What you will learn
What you won't learn
Java.

Weird!
We need an app for that!

/Dear god I hope he is not dead.
Echofi - Music suggestions for Spotify based on user's tastes
I upvoted your comment, but I still think you might be wrong.

The journalist may be sensationalizing here, but a high-growth, pre-IPO start-up that is contracting, before it begins to exploit profits, is in trouble.

Whether it's the market or the company that is in trouble, or a mixture of the two, is debatable. But I do think "suddenly unpopular" conveys the gist of the story better than "contracting from its previous peak." The first tells me something is wrong in Groupon world (and there probably is), and the second tries to convince me the whole thing is a non-story.
Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality, because the bottom end of the scale is firmly anchored at zero (someone taking a vacation), while technology gives the top end ever more powerful levers.

So the interesting question is not why economic inequality is increasing, but why for a few decades in the mid twentieth century the trend was reversed.

There are probably several factors at work here, but as someone who was around and paying attention at the end of that period, I think the key to the answer is the large corporation. The period of flattening coincides with the heyday of the large corporation.

Large corporations tend to decrease economic inequality. You can't measure individual productivity well within large organizations, and even if you could, it would strain the fabric of the organization to reward people that way. They also hide a lot of inequality by giving elite employees benefits that don't show up in their salaries (http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html).

What happened at the end of the 1970s was that the most ambitious people started to lose interest in working their way up the corporate ladder. They wanted to get paid upfront. That was why the term "yuppie" was born then. Before 1980 it was rare to find young professionals with lots of money. In the old days, they were all still paying their dues at that age.

I remember the transition quite clearly. When I was a little kid, in the early 70s, the most impressive thing you could do was to work for a large corporation. It was the era of conglomerates in shiny office towers. By 1980 we were starting to see a glimpse of the world we now live in, where the ambitious people are all free agents.
Well, if you did not quit your job to do this project and did not spend all your savings on it - the risk might be worth it. Good luck! :)
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