skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All good points, I especially liked, if you are doing what you love then:

* You do better work
* People notice

Unfortunately, not a lot of people are in a flexible enough position to take the "quit what you are doing today and go figure out what you love" advice.

I think it is truer than most people realize, but for a lot of folks with families, mortgages and car payments the gamble is too big.

In this vein, I took a lot of inspiration from the ABC interview with John McAfee[1] where he went from being worth something like $119 million to $1 million and his response was: "I feel free"

When you learn more about his story and how he had stretched himself so thin over so many assets, it makes sense why being broke would make him feel free.

The paradox of choice[2] for a lot of us, but some people especially, is a crippling reality.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=8462247

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...
bleh, thats even worse.
Ask HN: Has anybody here ever successfully started a videogame company?
I think most of the honest people here 30 or younger will say they got into programming in some part due to videogames. These days, it seems more viable than it used to, with the various routes for self-publishing available through the Xbox Live marketplace and the app markets.

After seven years of doing much less interesting varieties of programming at work while making silly JS games at home - my urge to actually make videogames is stronger now than ever. So, I took action. I downloaded the XNA Toolkit and banged out a basic pong clone in an hour to start off with and moved forward from there. Coincidentally I happen to be friends with an amazing musician who was more than happy to provide me with music and a great artist to provide me with graphics. Fast forward to today and I've got a game that I can feasibly see myself releasing this week.

I want to keep doing this and would love if I could start doing it full time; it's been a blast. I'd like to do this full time but like most people, I'm not independently wealthy quite yet. I still have to feed myself. So, all of that is to say, has anyone here tackled the same endeavor and succeeded? Are there people who fund games other than the big successful videogame companies perpetuating themselves or does everyone find success on the side then keep going? Certain platforms sell better than others (I've heard Steam's much better than the Xbox 360 market)? Any hurdles to watch out for?
GP would just turn all the programmers to digital shepherds :P

It would be a really interesting challenge to get broad enough coverage in the fitness function that things like the previously-mentioned "400 NOPS" don't cause problems.

Besides unit (or otherwise) tests, it should also be possible to use static analysis to measure fitness and/or use a static type system to restrict the possibilities. I'd think this would have some of the same problems, though- anybody know of any work on that?
Ask YC: Why not just redirect to homepage on Unknown or expired link
I really don't get why I should have to do this on my own, and I can't imagine that this should be all that hard to fix.
A great point. Some companies price in their very excellent support (Nordstrom comes to mind). At the other end of the spectrum, I worked with a guy who ran an wifi internet service on the side. His prices were so cheap that he refused to help clients troubleshoot and offered only two support options: cope or get a refund.
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You don’t use the timeframe option? I use that one all the time, it’s invaluable to me.
Achievers (formerly I Love Rewards) raises $24.5 Million led by Sequoia Capital
I bet if you add this new price point to the graph, you can plot a new curve that makes it not go to zero.
To clarify, we price a given address through three carrier APIs: Qwest, XO, and Covad.

We hope to add more (Level 3, Verizon, etc) as we work out the kinks in talking to their APIs.

I'd love to get any feedback on the site: design, functionality, etc.
You could use "interlaced" or progressive images. (I don't mean scanlines like old TV signals.) GIF, PNG, and JPG use the same idea: it sends stores the pixels out of order, and progressively fills in the image all over instead of from the top down.

Interlaced GIFs use a three-pass system. Interlaced PNGs use a 7-pass algorithm. Progressive JPGs actually decompose the frequencies and send the "most important" ones first. http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.d...
Depends on what you are doing. If you are doing sales with brick and mortar establishments then I believe the answer is "yes".

They are pretty cheap. Hell, you can even make your own..
As an extension to this, simply experiencing as many facets of life as you can is an incredibly enriching experience :)
Kindle Touch looks really similar to the Nook Touch, which is a truly excellent product. But Nook Touch still has a killer feature for a ebook nerd like me: it reads epubs. I'm assuming the KT will still be locked in to Amazon's ridiculous .mobi format, so I'm sticking with my NT for now.
But there's also a $99 touchscreen e-ink reader, so there you go. :) http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/28/amazon-touchscreen-kindle...
Life After Google Labs: 5 Cool Google Experimental Apps
I'm sure every operating system has weird quirks like this.

The odd thing about this article is it tries to pretend it's the user's fault. Which is doubly odd as Raymond Chen's stuff is usually pretty good.
Why do I still use newLisp?
I don't think F# is necessarily more compelling. It is subjective to what you weight higher.

If you go to the article at the bottom it lists some limitations. Libraries, tooling and proper parallelism including in GC. Also IMO F# ties OOP with functional better, on par with Scala.

If you weight these against F#'s weaknesses: lack of full modules and functors, tied to .net and mono / non native code generation and they come up being more of an issue then you would prefer F#. Which is the choice I ended up making.
I used to like Marco Arment. But he's one of those people that was better left to keep himself quieter. The more out spoken he's gotten the more obnoxious he's gotten.

Sometimes it's best to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Or something like that anyway. The more Marco opens his mouth the more of a fool I think he is.

I enjoyed Build and Analyze (his podcast at 5by5) in the beginning, but he got to the point where he was just being more and more obnoxious.

He's not Gruber, yet he seems to be trying to be Gruber.

Ah well, this is just another of his predictions that has gone wrong.
Yaron really does know his stuff when it comes to OCaml.

http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61

people interested in some great OCaml libraries should check out what Jane street has released to the public:

http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13
Now you know why they called it Google Plus.

Seriously, though: these are signals that the inmates are running the asylum and it's time to find alternative providers. There are other ways to search.
Hacker News HD has been crashing for me for the past two months. The only way I can get it to work (for a day or so) is by uninstalling and reinstalling the app.
why do people get upset by this? Android is a nice baseline. Think of it as the tide that raises all ships. What's wrong with a manufacturer experimenting?

NB. I don't support lock downs or anything like that, of course. my point is that there's nothing wrong with them customizing and branching it off into something else. isn't that the whole point?
In response to the title I was going to go with ATT. I was not disappointed; they truly have no respect for you as a customer nor your privacy.
(One not inconsequential issue: I spend 20 minutes the other day googling the F# "as" keyword. In the end, all you can do is read the language spec and source)

http://cs.ioc.ee/~keiko/FSharp.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826564

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4507600/extension-techniq...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4239121/code-compatibilit...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6390665/hesitating-betwee...
Bezos, on Amazon's refreshed e-Ink readers:

So meet the family. These are premium products at non-premium prices. People are going to love these products.

This is Amazon's mission statement for product development. They will not compete with Apple's "revolutionary, magical" phones and tablets; instead, they'll sell quality tablets and readers to the average person at great prices. This populist attitude has been missing from the tablet market since the iPad's release.

The Fire will be the first successful Android tablet because the user base already exists. With the last few Kindle generations, Amazon has groomed customers to pay for electronic content. These users will buy Kindle Fires and e-Ink Kindles in droves, buy more books, and tell their friends.

At this price, Amazon won't steal Apple's customers. They will simply introduce a new segment of people to the tablet market. Developers need to think about this as another golden ticket. Here's the iOS gold rush, part deux.

EDIT: changed "luxurious" to "revolutionary" after reading a comment below. I need more coffee.
I used DDG for about a month as my main search engine, I love the bang syntax and lots of other goodies, but for me down in Brazil DDG just responds 10-15x slower than Google -- so my commitment is that I will keep coming back to test for latency improvements until I can switch over completely.
I imagine thats what they said in the boardroom.

But its still a layer ontop of Android.
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You might be interested in a rather spirited debate with the head of the ACM here:

https://plus.google.com/117898054357703859389/posts/b783VnN4...
Audio is the core feature of the original iPod. Reading is the core feature of the Kindle. Reading from an lcd screen is a significantly worse experience than from e-ink. My point is that Amazon releasing the Kindle Fire is akin to if Apple released the iPod Touch (which had new features such as web browsing, youtube etc.) with degraded 8-bit audio.
As snippyhollow pointed out above, the FSF recognizes it as a free license. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL It's even GPL compatible!
Spotify pays more per listen than radio does.

If that's not enough money for an artist, then the problem is really that the artist isn't popular enough when people get to decide for themselves what to listen to.
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Something as simple as travelling to the airport in Gatwick minicabs can make you feel that extra bit special.
The Kindle Touch's killer feature would be better PDF support. The Nook Touch looks totally unusable for PDFs.
See the 'U' combinator link above, but it's a bit of a trick.
I'd be interested to see what % of Kindle users make use of the Keyboard. I'm pretty sure that I've only ever touched it for inputting URIs when web-browsing from abroad.
If we're going to talk loss functions, then 1-0 loss is most appropriate here. As you say, "Hellp" is really no more or less fit than "Helln" whereas even absolute distance wouldn't reflect that.

Squaring admits a function into the class of loss functions which must be strictly non-negative to be meaningful, but really it's just always been done to make derivatives easy. If you don't need derivatives (or expectations), you can probably get away without using squared loss if you don't want it.
These are just resource limitations. I already addressed that. If you start out with something where a resource limitation prevents you from doing X, then any kind of statement about Turing completeness inherently only draws a comparison with a Turing machine that has the same resource limitation keeping it from doing X. It doesn't matter if this is sending RGB data to a monitor (which some languages cannot do unless augmented with certain hardware) or computing Kolmogorov complexity (which no language can do in general). A human plus paper and pencil is a different computation than a human without paper and pencil, just in terms of hardware and memory.

It also seems like some of you are not computationalists. Anything physical is just the result of a computation, whether you are talking about the chemistry of producing colors on a monitor or adding two numbers by sending electrons through circuits of transistors. The ECT thesis says that anything which can be computed in the real world can be computed efficiently by some Turing machine. This includes anything a brain can do (aided by pen and paper or unaided) and certainly includes anything your graphics driver can do. If Java can't do something that Java + Graphics Card + OS can do, then Java has a more serious resource bound, and all claims of Java's Turing completeness inherently include this resource bound. You guys might like some sections of this research paper: (http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf).
I'd rather take a hit to my reputation than a hit in the face with a bullet.
Two words: Don McLean.

All moneys made off of one song. From 1971. Sonnofabitxch.
Moscow is one of the most expensive cities and living there for 6 months will take out a hefty chunk. The mentors don't seem of the highest calibur, but are fine I guess.

I would agree - for Russian based startups, this might be a good option. Otherwise...no
I'm not too hot on the touchscreen. I don't need it. I like the physical page turning buttons on my wife's Kindle 3... they have a satisfying weight to them and they sit nicely where your fingers already are. I don't want to tap tap tap my e-ink screen all day.
The e-ink screen doesn't have fingerprint problems the way tablets/phones do. It's more plastic, no gloss..(of course, I'm assuming the Touch is still like that).
In case anyone cares, music sharing is about to return to 100% at my house due to the shortsighted inabilities of whomever is running Spotify.
I think they are trying throw new names at the wall of hype and see if one sticks.
"Then I opened Windows Task Manager and noted down the Memory consumption of all chrome.exe processes"

This approach won't yield an accurate result because of memory being shared between processes. As an example, 12 chrome processes might appear to be using 50mb each, but if half of that is from shared libraries, then the actual total is 325mb, not 600.
Testing prices sounds great, but how do you test prices for SaaS subscriptions? I can't just lower or raise prices without making at least a moderately big-to-do about it.
My memory of OCaml is faded. Can you explain how Ocaml can be more verbose? Especially since the inference story in F# is not as full due to having to deal with objects with ad-hoc polymorphism. I don't see how Ocaml can be more verbose. The core language of both is virtually identical.

Also F# is not all of Ocaml. To mind, it lacks functors, ocaml strength modules and polymorphic variants. Ocaml also has the potential to be faster. At least in the single core case.
Backtrack Metasploit Megaprimer
How the paradox of choice works as a function of regret
Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling results
Does not compile to native code! (???)
I found your post much more informative than the original article. His work vs cheesecake seems to be an issue of discipline vs temptation, and to be honest, something we all face with various amounts of success (especially considering how popular home-grown projects are in this community)
Unfortunately due to Oracle's behavior, it is completely irrelevant.
"With this price, though, Amazon won't steal Apple's customers.."

I think a lot of people with iPads would have been more than happy to spend half as much to get an easy-to-use tablet.
Chrome 16 dev: degraded font rendering on the Mac
I checked all the links but didn't find any source?

I suspect a lot of slowness is round-trips to mysql. In postgresql you can e.g. do "with recursive" queries to query simple graphs like your example, avoiding the round trips.

Their cypher [1] query language may be a much better selling point.

[1]
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/cypher-query-lang.ht...
SLA-Driven Development
Amazon's Bezos unveils Kindle Touch, $99; Kindle, $79
Anybody know if there are comprehensive specs anywhere? I can't find information about the resolution anywhere. Additionally, it looks like most sites thought it was going to cost $250.
It isn't, really. They've built their Kindle product on the Android codebase, but it isn't Android and they won't be allowed to even call it an Android tablet, because they're not dancing to Google's tune.

The new Kindle tablet may be sort-of compatible with Android today, but this isn't likely to remain the case since there is no feedback loop or collaboration between Google and Amazon in this.
Amazon rolls out world's first cloud-browser: Silk
I agree with you, except that years of painful Windows crapware experience has taught me that manufacturers don't often do a very good job at "value adding", unless you define value as meddling pointlessly with things that work, or lining their own pockets through pre-installed junk software partnerships.

That said, Amazon have a solid reputation so I don't think any of that applies in this particular case.
Finally. It has taken Amazon years to understand that a device used for reading shouldn't have a keyboard; users spend at least 90% of their time reading, yet they saw fit to add a keyboard which took up 25% of the hardware.

I'll happily go buy a Kindle now.
Live at the Amazon Event
Agreed. Value, price, and cost are three independent variables. When they line up advantageously, you have a viable product. But one does not determine the others.
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I hesitate to agree because it seems like the iPad and Fire will provide different experiences.

For what it's worth, I couldn't justify an iPad for $500. I would absolutely consider a Fire for $200 (or a Fire 3G for $250-300).
What is a programming language other than a language for creating instructions for moving pieces of matter around? You could do this with Java if you give it the same physical resources that the current graphics pipelines have. That stuff isn't exposed to Java and would be pretty cumbersome to manipulate with Java, but it can still in principle be done.
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At least in my understanding of Agile/Scrum, there shouldn't be any cards representing code quality. There are only features that make sense to both the customer and the developer. The time to write tests and so on should be built into cost estimation of the feature.

However, as 'api' says, this tends to result in a mucilaginous mess. There really is a certain amount of work that you have to do on a project which is just about the code itself. I haven't seen any Agile method capture that in practice. A manager who listens to the developers will often suspend Agile in order to get refactorings done.
You're making assumptions about usability before using the product.
Agreed, I asked a bunch of people but nobody could tell me. Anyone with a company name was a YC Alum. I wound up just putting my skillset (LAMP +JS + MOBILE DEV) and what I was looking for (DESIGN HELP) on my tag. It helped me to meet a lot of people and for sometimes people would just walk up and intro mid conversation which was cool.
A great question. The only thing I can think of is starting at a high price and then lowering it slowly. You definitely want to do some split testing to see which plan pages get you the highest conversions, too.
You have a point, and experimenting is a good thing.

As I've seen it, the users they aren't afraid of change and are upset by the fact they're experimenting, the objections seem to be centered around not having the option to go back when they don't like it. And that the experimentation is often disliked in the first place because they're not less genuinely UX driven experiments, they're more of an attempt at uniqueness for the sake of branding.
In terms of quality of experience, I think Amazon's product is going to be perceived as runner up to the iPad, while other Android devices will be perceived as the lower end.

Other Android manufacturers are probably going to start competing with Amazon's offer as well, lowering prices and cutting corners in the process.
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Sad that that's a good indicator, still, no?
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The business model to compete with Apple has been known for extremely long: offer lesser products at lesser prices. Everyone else failed at the "lesser price" part.

Amazon can pull it off, because they don't need to make money with the tablet: as long as it sells ebooks and movies, it remains profitable for them. Since there's nobody to challenge them on this market, they will get the volumes to drive the BOM prices down, too.

HP hadn't the option to make money by selling ink cartridges for subsidized tablets, as they used to do with printers...
Tivo or Roku are a layer on top of Linux, but that doesn't mean they are fully capable Linux boxes. The OS is just a tool to build upon.
Start low and raise them gradually. Grandfather existing customers at the price they had when they signed up. If you need to cut prices, cut them for existing customers and new customers. It's really not that big a deal unless you're out of the startup phase.
Startup Quote: Omar Hamoui, Founder, AdMob
It doesn't seem much like the same kind of project. I watched the video from the WATCHME file and it looks like wpshell is a shell to your installation where you have a command prompt to execute wp code.
> think about a real time system that can know when it has spent too much time planning, and needs to use whatever its current best plan is

That's why iteratively deepened depth first search kicks ass in board game AIs (specifically chess).
One point that I rarely see made in this type of valuable articles, is how pricing affects your ability to do paid advertisement.

Let's say that for your particular niche, you pay on average $1 per click. These are the expected conversion rates to break even, depending on the price of your product.

$1 - 100%

$2 - 50%

$4 - 25%

$8 - 12.5%

$16 - 6.25%

$32 - 3.125%

$64 - 1.563%

$128 - 0.781%

In general, it's far easier to convert 1.5% of your visitors, with a product that costs $64 than it is getting 50% of your visitors to pay $2, 25% to pay $4, or even 12.5% to pay $8.

So in my experience, charging a premium has practical implications when advertising, that go beyond pricing as a quality indicator.

The lifetime value of a new customer must justify the cost of paid acquisition channels, and leave room for profit.
I suppose you are right. Kindle brand could be stronger if tight to e-ink eye confort and even black and white, which make the thing austere and monacal, and not toyish like iPad.

I don't know, is touchable e-ink coming in near future? Then they could have waited for that, and improve a lot Kindle OS (allow for plugins, real browsing, epub, viable pdf, email, etc) meanwhile.
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Does the Google Bot index css hidden divs?  yes.
Never, never, never, hire people with an attitude. You will regret it.

- Omar Hamoui (@omarh)

http://startupquote.com/post/10767300677
Maybe not Bada, but LiMo, and presumably now Tizen, is not just GTK. It also includes support for EFL (aka Enlightenment/E17), a project Samsung has been supporting for the past few years.* The EFL Webkit port is also progressing, also with Samsung support.

Hopefully being HTML5 buzzword-compliant doesn't mean they're dropping all support for native apps too.

* As previously discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495826