skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's conflating marketing and advertising when they're actually two different things. Think of marketing as the social component of design.

You wouldn't start coding without at least a rudimentary spec to guide what it is you want to make, right? So why start designing your product without first identifying what and for whom it is you are designing it?

Marketing is the process of identifying the target market for your product. The "what it does" and "who it's for" part that a design needs if you're going to "build something people want".
It's not that people are unwilling to make tradeoffs, they just aren't going to let some guy in a suit with a huge sense of entitlement dictate which tradeoffs they have to make.
Segway Inventor Turns Mind to the Poor
His list of publications is here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guestrin/publications.html
I don't think there was a condescending tone regarding his statement on being blunt, the parent was simply being blunt and apologised in advance to make sure that what was being written wouldn't be misconstrued, a point you have missed.

You don't have to justify yourself as a woman, but as a person. Your comment about a line of trace could've applied to anyone as the context in unclear - I don't get how being asked to justify your code is a bad thing let alone a sex specific thing. A competent programmer would be able to justify it upon request without trouble. Whether or not you can decide for yourself if trace is needed depends on the type of project you're on.

The issue about the toilets I get completely, I had a similar experience with a request for a prayer room on our floor for one muslim employee which was denied. He claimed that we weren't respecting his religious rights and got his prayer room and was the only person to use it. When he left we still couldn't reclaim the space.

I'm sorry to hear you feel so embittered by your relations with fellow colleagues that you feel you must head out on your own but wish you look in your future endeavours - having said that if your actions are as defensive in real life as they are in your previous comment then I suspect you won't do as well as if you let go and focus on getting paid.
What's everyone think of this? At this point they pretty much have to go public right?

A $2 or $3 billion (or more) acquisition isn't very likely and anything less than that would be unacceptable to their investors. I've heard some nasty things about LinkedIN, but it was all from indirect soruces.

Did anyone on HN ever work there or know someone who did?
I’m not sure whether it is image loading or image search that is making the whole pretty slow. It challenges the user’s patience. The relevancy is pretty good, the design great.
You’ve got to cache those images if it is image loading the problem; if it is the search the problem you must go back to your drawing board because image search should not be that heavy.
This is true of many industries. I have a friend who is a wonderful painter. People who see his work tend to think highly of it. Problem is, he only knows people who are "into art." He refuses to market his product. I kind of see a parallel here. Great code is great art. The next step is presenting it to people in a way which shows how it benefits them.
To me money pouring in from customers is much more noteworthy than money pouring in from investors.
The title made me think about what my answer would be. If there's one thing a programmer should know, what is it? What is the most important thing I didn't understand about programming when I started doing it?

My answer would be: that code should be seen not as a static thing, like the answer to a math problem, but as an evolving effort to figure out the right question to be the answer to; and that it should thus be written to be easy to change.
yeah, you're going to want to pitch em to a co-founder or close friend first. or if you want to follow guy kawasaki's method, find a woman. which i'm not saying your co-founder or close friend ISN'T. i'm just sayin...

you know what i mean?
:) thanks for the free "guidance". I agree with you on finding the most viable. I just wish this process was easier. I wish I could take a few months off work to pursue these business ideas that I have.
That's not the full picture, really.

1) Since a large chunk of the money on financial markets flows between funds, and this is pretty much a zero sum game, the average hedge fund performance is bound to be around 0%, other things being equal. It's your fault if you pick the wrong hedge fund, or you don't know the risks.

2) A lot of hedge funds do not target an absolute return, but rather a return on top of the market's return (and they pick an index or several which they consider to be "the market"). So if the market is down 20%, but funds are down 17.6% on average, then they have actually made a 2.4% average return compared to the index they follow. As weird as this may sound, this is actually a success for them. They would usually get a cut of the 2.4% gains as their commission.

One of the main reasons is that absolute return funds are mostly quantitative and/or derivatives-based, and those are much harder to do than buying stocks by your gut feeling (which is what a large number of funds do, really). The other reason is that when a fund is big ($5bn+) it is very hard to move your positions around quickly (as would be required for an absolute return strategy), without shaking the market, and losing money in the process.
Why is it that 90% of the time you need a co-founder?
Here's a quick list off the top of my head:
Quicksilver, TextMate, Coda, Transmit, VisualHub, AppZapper.
Not only are my wife and I planning on getting one but I can name about four others who are also planning on getting one.

For a lot of people price is really an issue. But I still think that Andriod is just a better phone system.
Go through your ideas and pick the one that you yourself need and that you can make at least a version 1 of in a reasonable time. Then do so, preferably with a friend you've known for a while and who you admire for his/her ability.

This was the recipe for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and many other startups.
A better headline would be "Linked in: the equity keeps trickling out".
365 * (0.05%) = 0.1825

... days. Or about 4 hours.
Thanks for posting as one page. The source is truly awful.
My favorite quote:

> With leadership guided by a vision of IT as a value- enhancer, the
potential for next-generation enterprise applications to shift IT's
focus away from automating static departmental func- tions to creating
value by supporting end-to-end busi- ness processes and innova- tion
is undeniable. The rec- ognition and realisation of this opportunity
is already driving the next cycle of IT value creation.

BINGO! It's only missing something about synergies.

Joking aside though, there are some good articles there.
The Receptionist Test (The Interview before the Interview)
Seems like that's still a pretty good investment if the market as a whole is down 40%.
LaunchBar,Adium, CoverSutra, Linkinius, NetNewsWire, Things, Versions, Yojimbo
It's 4 hrs, 22 min. 0.05% = 0.0005

.0005 * 365 days = .1825 days
Stocks are down. Gold is up.

Hedge funds don't just invest in stocks. They can bet on anything, including stocks going down. This is supposed to allow them to make money in down markets as well.
Omnigraffle!
Coming up with "The" one thing a programmer should know seems too narrow a question. Kind of like "What is your favorite song?" instead of "What are some of your favorite songs?" A more interesting question might be "What things would you emphasize to someone learning to program?" Flexibility? Precision? My answer:

Every programmer should

1. Learn C / Assembly - Understand how code interacts with hardware.

2. Learn Lisp - Understand how ideas interact with code (and vice versa).

3. Learn "O" notation - Understand algorithm complexity.

4. Be clean and flexible.
Keep in mind that unless when personal computers came out Apple was not the first one to release a smartphone. There are already hundreds of devices from Windows Mobile to RIM. I have to admit I haven't been too much attention to Android since I'm perfectly happy at the moment with my iPhone. How does the added competition from Android change anything for Apple?
Well, yeah, I guess posting to as many places as possible is one way to go, but apart from HN, do you suggest any other extremely cool, heavily hyped, news sites, mailing lists, and the such? :)
code should be [...] an evolving effort to figure out the right question to be the answer to

Interesting change of perspective. Could you expound - do you mean this in terms of product design?
Socialcast: Gritty Yammer Alternative
The Dashboard, Dashcode. I think it's a pretty awesome environment.

Also Versions (the best SVN client ever), Transmit (the best FTP client ever) and Coda (a pretty awesome website editor).
If the process were easier, everyone would be doing it.

Hang in and keep at it. Perseverance is rewarded.
Hedge funds are really specialized. Usually, different people trade different things - one team on stocks (or even a narrow subset of stocks), another team on commodities, etc. It takes a lot of experience to get good at an instrument. And if your fund just doesn't have good commodity traders, you are not into gold or any other commodity.

Hedge funds are like startups, really. All of them do the same thing on paper, but some do it better, so it's your responsibility (and a bit of luck, of course) to pick the good ones.
It helps to prove you're not insane. If you can convince another reasonably smart and rational person to go along for the ride, it shows that at least you're not the ONLY person in the world to see merit in the idea. Keep in mind this means your co-founder should also have a decent pedigree. It's not very hard to convince your mom that you're smart...
HN review will give you a good sense of how useful your “fancy” application is, this is paramount to whatever promotion you may want to take your product into. Good review on HN gives you a strong launch pad, I speak from experience. You may get meaningful coverage over the internet, better than what mass mailing, spam posting and any other free platform will do.

Other alternatives are places like techcrunch ; there you must be one in the circle or getting a funding scoop. Or at best they will write in an effort to bury you instead. :-)
I don't see anything suggesting that...
Target target target. Before you build your app, you should identify a dozen or so forums, mailing lists, or blogs where people talk about products like yours and would like to hear about your new website. Pretend you're your customer and Google for the problem your product solves.

Then when you release, you're just letting people know that there's a better way to do things.
This does not prove hedge funds do not work. It only proves what we already knew: active investing is a zero sum game.

This is tantamount to claiming that poker doesn't "work" because the "average" player breaks even.
Marketing vs. engineering is a common issue within a company and coming out of a failed startup - NOT marketing enough was part of the problem. The product did not sell itself, and many engineers mistakenly believe their product is simply that GREAT. It's often not (and I don't mean this negatively because engineering a GOOD product is very challenging to say the least), so be careful not to drink too much of your own kool-aid.

Historically, consumption has been driven by brand appeal which is defined by form (brand), function (product), and message (definition)... you'd be surprised how many great products have bad brands and lost in translation.
The recent financial reporting has been pretty atrocious.

"This unregulated, at times volatile corner of finance which is supposed to make money in bull and bear markets lost $180 billion during the last three months."

Our financial systems are heavily regulated. The specific regulations that the author would like to see may not exist, but this does not justify claiming that hedge funds are unregulated. Many people seem to believe that all risk should be regulated away and actually believe that this is possible. More information on current regulations that hedge funds are subject to:

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2007/04/13/hedge-fund-regulat...

"Many hedge fund investors, particularly the wealthy individuals, are flabbergasted by their losses this year. The average fund was down 17.6 percent through Tuesday, according to Hedge Fund Research."

The S&P 500 is down 40% for the year.
FIFO (First In, First Out) is an abstraction in ways of organizing of data relative to time.
Queues are usually despised, being considered a waste of time, either when waiting in front of a cinema for a movie show, or when in a bank to withdraw a check.
Haha, I love your optimism ;)
NEWSFLASH: Chemist does stuff with chemicals.
Ah, thanks for all the great suggestions. I'm quite excited about omnigraffle :)
You're clearly hanging out with the wrong CIA agents:)
In principle, you're right.

However, hedge funds typically use a lot of leverage to make their returns, even as high as 20x. Given the credit contraction, I can see how this can kill their returns. I don't understand why someone would lend a hedge fund this money.

On a related note, I saw that K-mart advertised their "layaway" program for xmas. I hadn't heard that since I was a kid.
That sounds like a rephrasing of his #2 and #3
Kind of sounds like a religious discussion at that point.
I assume what was meant was that they failed in their job of hedging. Hedging is supposed to involve taking a very conservative position to protect against losses.

This, I assume, is a bit of a joke since hedge funds have largely turned into speculation funds which take risky positions in the hopes of large returns.
I am in the process of writing a program to sort one million 32bit integers in 2MB in RAM.

The trick is to notice that sorting the numbers loses information. One million sorted numbers take (in theory) log_2 (1000000!) less bits to store than the same numbers shuffled randomly. That's around 18488884.82 bits.

So you get an ideal storage requirement of +32000000-18488884=13511116 bits. That's about 1.6MB (thus less than 2MB). If you're clever you'll stay close enough to the theoretical limit in your implementation.

Strangely bz2 seems to be able to compress my list of random numbers (in a binary file) to 164KB. That's even less than what my theory says.

At first I suspected my pseudo-random number generator (/dev/urandom on a recent Ubuntu) my produce hidden patterns. But I since tested it on true random numbers from random.org. Same result.

I'll investigate.
And now for the enterprise ...
That's some pretty funny accounting.

By your first point, hedge funds are the market, and so between all of them, ought to average exactly the market returns. By your second point, they measure their returns against the market, and so on average should return 0%.

Why should anyone ever invest in hedge funds, under these premises?

A much simpler (and probably truer) explanation is "What goes up, must come down." Hedge funds booked large paper profits during the boom; now it's time for them to book large paper losses in the bust. Except that if their customers get scared, those large paper losses turn into large actual losses.
Skitch is a small simple and free desktop/web application that makes it easy to capture screenshots, mark up mock ups, and share them via the web.

It's brilliant. If you haven't already, check it out now: http://www.skitch.com
I was in the same position as you: I wanted to try mturk myself. That way I noticed that you have to be in the US. I did not investigate the matter further. Thanks for finding hit-builder!
Agile: Managing your Backlog Size
Ah, but you missed the "other things being equal" part. ;) If the markets move as a whole and hedge funds are heavily long on the market, but others are market-neutral, or even short, things are not equal.
The author says there was no one waiting in line at the store for the G1.

This just pisses me off - it encourages companies like Apple to hype up a product and then slowly sell it in three locations in all of NYC. The news isn't that people want an iPhone, the news is that Apple can be a dick to their customers for publicity and they put up with it.
Right, but on the whole, you'd expect those all to average out. If the markets move up and hedge funds are long, they're as likely to move down while hedge funds are long, or move up while hedge funds are short.
BTW Paul, why did you post this? Do you believe this drivel or were you trying to incite discussion?
That is why better hedge funds know when to be long and when to be short. My explanation makes a lot of assumptions for simplification, because it is impossible to know what every hedge fund is doing at every point in time.
Gold is actually down, trading near its 52 week low

http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/gc08z?sid=1633395

I agree that hedge funds can invest in anything (unlike MFs, which are regulated) but if you look at the short term (4-week) T-bills their interest rates are down by as much as 62% since 2002, so the general consensus is that, that is where most money is getting drained.

Why? They are the most conservative, safe investment choices available. If I may digress, this is not a good thing for the economy as we are not using that money to produce anything.

Considering the Dow is down over 30% and counting for the year, 17.6% down seems impressive to me :-)
To make themselves feel better I think they call it a "balanced round".

They say they've been profitable since 2006, but why are they still taking money?
does anyone use floppies anymore?
"The key to Dr. Guestrin's algorithm ... is that it can assemble the maximum amount of information for the least effort."

So it's efficient then? As opposed to every other inefficient algorithm?

I bet this is what medical researchers feel like every time they open a newspaper.
Receptionists do. ;)
>Gold is up

[Citation needed].

Everything I can find indicates that the price of gold is about the same as a year ago, while platinum has severely dropped due to lower demand from the car industry.
Gold is actually down, trading near its 52 week low

Oops, sorry, was relying on a news story I saw a couple weeks ago. It was doing better than the stock market a couple weeks ago, though, which was what I was getting at.
They actually succeeded in hedging, because they halved their losses compared to the market.

Hedging doesn't mean you always make money. It means that if your main instrument falls, instrument B is going to go up and cover some of the losses, but not all of them.
Good point. This has been going on a very long time too. It's not reserved just for Apple products. Video games are a prime example. I remember this stuff going on back when I was playing NES. It really pissed me off when they created artificial shortages when the original Zelda and Double Dragon were released. And don't forget about the GMail launch when it was invitation only. This kind of thing is just another tool in the standard marketing toolbox.
Self-driven edification is a religious experience for me, yeah.

Read up on game theory, network econ, information econ, financial analysis, and modern art criticism...it's totally spiritual!
Yeah, at first glance I thought they were going to teach me how to do this in my basement. I'm disappointed. ;)
Whoops, sorry. Driver's Education - it teaches you how to drive at speed on a race track.
No, not just product design. Practically all programs are best seen as explorations.
Mistaken with percents, I'm sorry.
That's an excellent way of phrasing this situation, actually. Android isn't the only competitor Apple's got. It's not iPhone versus Android. It's that versus Windows Mobile versus Blackberry versus...

I also don't see what open source would have to do with improving sales of the device. If Android succeeds, it'll have to be because it does something very special that RIM and Microsoft - and especially Apple - haven't done yet.

Considering the reports say that within another quarter Apple might have more iPhones out than there are versions of Windows Mobile everywhere, I'd want something a lot bigger than "This is a good product" to suggest Google has a chance of toppling Apple.
Out of curiosity, are you speaking as somebody who's used Android? I'd like to know how similar the two interfaces are.
Agreed, I would have like to be down 17.6% this year instead of whatever I am actually down. Luckily, I pulled most money out last spring to travel and start a company - best investment I have ever made!
What makes you think it's a better system? And what sort of people are those others who want to get the Android? Are they tech-focused? Because it seems to me that Android has the advantage there, but that it's got nothing that appeals to consumers. Not like the iPhone has.
It seems awfully redundant to do it any other way

So you're against rss feeds? You think it would be a more elegant solution if instead of having an rss feed for a site like hacker news, other apps scraped the front page?
Move to Austin.
I don't think so.

I don't think it is up to the ultimate consumer to become interested in what we (as developers) are doing. I think it is up to us to explain to them just what problem we are going to solve or just how we are going to save them time or money.

Thats marketing - identify the target market. Convince that market segment that they need your product and then make sure that you don't put obstacles in their way while they are trying to buy it.
nice article, though i'm not sure that's the One Thing. my one thing would be 'know your audience'. that's part message and part usability. if you're designing an app for engineers you design the ui very different than if you're designing it to allow residents of the local retirement community to self-schedule dinner deliveries.

that said:

if you're a resident in a company with a separate marketing team, it's key to speak their language -- after all, the people you're going to be marketing -to- is the marketing team. it's their job to get the message out, it's your job to be sure they know what the message is, and what it isn't. make sure you don't oversell, and let them know what would be overselling, and promote key features internally; they'll get external through the firm's marketing wing.

if you're a startup, marketing is doubly important. if you can't sell a friend on the idea of a product, you won't be able to sell the public. if your startup idea is complex, you're going to have to find a way to make it intelligible in ten seconds by picking the key features you want understood. and everyone in a startup is on the marketing team, whether they like it or not.

it's really worth it to read a book or two on marketing, if for no other reason than to get the lingo down. i've found my suggestions much better received when i could speak market-speak to the marketing team and sales team, and promote effectively to civilians. i recommend 'the culting of brands' by doug atkin as a good start.
ThinkPad W700 - The first 17-inch ThinkPad reviewed
Startuplet financial model, users
Great idea. I read about this one firm that would occasionally spill drinks on candidates to gage their character.

Also, I'm glad they didn't call this the "administrative assistant test".
LinkedIn Reels in Another $22.7M in Funding
Computer scientist solves all problems with an algorithm! Alan Turing spinning in his grave! News at 11!
OK, Microsoft clearly foreshadowed this: http://i36.tinypic.com/2llnhxk.jpg
"High tech" version of Henry Ford's old test. He wouldn't hire anyone who put salt on his food before tasting it.
How Bars Can Use Microsoft Surface Tables to Get You Drunk Faster Than Ever
Got a G1? Feeling Lonely?
What allowed Apple to compete pretty successfully with zillions of mp3 players?
App Stores galore - now Rim’s and Android Market
You can be profitable and still need to raise money to expand more rapidly.
The Age of Big War Has Passed