skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Moore (Chasm guy) says that "visionary" customers actually do like to be first: they want to leap-frog their competitors, and to do that, they need something that their competitors don't yet have; which is necessarily not known or trusted. They therefore expect (very) rough edges etc (of course, they also need some amazing order-of-magnitude breakthrough benefit).

BTW: the 3-year rule-of-thumb rings true for me too: a year to get the first customer (putting it out there and improving it for a year); a year to refine it/build the customer list; a year to make money hand-over-fist. (Unfortunately, by then I also got competitors, and worse, I also got bored.)
>This is starting to look like another case of super-smart over-specialized eggheads making assumptions and not seeing the big picture

What a fucked way to spin this -- the group asked for outside help in explaining their results and finding any mistakes.
>committed customer service employee will perform at least the minimum self-maintenance to make them selves not unattractive.

I absolutely agree.

But the article bemoans the lack of "hotness", which I feel is incredibly sexist, no matter what sex the flight attendant is.
I've been teaching people to code for 20 years. In virtually every course I've ever taught, at least one person comes up with a question that I've never heard before. If that person were limited to learning from a web site or a video, that's the point at which that person would get stuck. But because I can answer their question, they can continue quickly.
Yes; especially given this comment on the article (by Bo Higgs):

This article gives too much coverage to the 'Politically Correct' piece of crap by this clown, Richard Nevle.

The "Little Ice Age" began long BEFORE 1492. The Pope in Rome sent Columbus a letter (after 1492) asking for Columbus to investigate, "what had happened to the Bishop of Greenland," because Rome had not had any letters from Greenland for many years. N.B. -- There were so many Catholics living in Greenland, that the Pope appointed a Bishop to live there.

The Middle Ages Warm Period had ended decades before, and could no longer sustain the European-style agrarian life-style.

Also, bear in mind that post-1500, World exploration meant required an exponential increase in wooden ships, both in number and in size. As a result, not only did population increase, but so did de-forestation. Indeed, perhaps the main export of the American Colonies was LUMBER. Even the export of tobacco,and then cotton required de-forestation.
By 1608, the well-known, but un-mapped 'Northwest Passage'
had frozen over to such an extent that Henry Hudson was un-able to complete his mapping. Re-forestation must have been exceedingly rapid to effect the entire Earth in such a short time.

Richard Nevle is proof of the adage that, "If the only tool you have is a Grant to prove A.G.W.(tm), then everything in the result of A.G.W.(tm)"
It’s A Great Time To Be A Designer
Loveless: Failure
I'm not saying I care about my code. I'm just saying that one can write bug-free code if one takes the time to do it.
Quickly, on OpenSuSE 11.4 (x86_64) running Chrome 14, the game interface doesn't hide my system's mouse pointer, but also displays its own. Slightly visually distracting.

While playing, I would move the spell bar to the left, as that seems to be both more natural and more common. For whatever reason, having it on the right distracted me a lot more from the gameplay, I felt as though I always had to keep looking over at it and back (seeing as I hadn't memorized the hotkeys). The info about my current health (which is currently in the top left corner) is displayed under my avatar, which makes it non-essential info, so it can be moved to the right.

Take all of this feedback with a grain of salt, I'm not a UI person :)
I think you forgot to include the link. By Googling "jpallen online latex editor", I found jpallen.net and ScribTex.

To make our volunteer's efforts more expedient, I'll note that the url is at -> http://www.scribtex.com/ <- Click that.
You didn't have to write blit functions yourself on the NES either, it had hardware (PPU) that would handle blitting of sprites for you. There were a lot of restrictions that you'd have to work around, but actually displaying something on screen didn't take that much code.

This also indulges the fallacy that the hard part of game development is writing low level graphics routines. That can be difficult to learn but once you know it its relatively straight forward. People don't judge your game on the quality of your sprite drawing functions (unless they're extremely buggy :)).
Down but not out: Flash in an HTML5 world
Depending on how much time it needs ( you mention "a little bit of actionscript" ) something which I have used in the past to speed up this kind of small task is to look at oDesk and search for developers who know the technology in question and who like to pair program. You get to learn something along the way, and can keep the project focused and completed quickly.
This list sucks.

On the other hand, I've been running Ubuntu 11.10 on my notebook for almost 24 hours now and it is pretty nice. I think the biggest improvement is Unity. Unity sucked in 11.04. But now it feels right. It's got the smart ideas from Gnome3 while leaving behind the holier-than-thou stuff (i.e. the removal of the minimize button). I will say that Unity in 11.10 has a number of bugs. None of them show-stoppers but it's crashed on me a few times -- but it automatically restarts so it's not a big problem.

A few minor hardware issues specific to my Lenovo notebook also seem to have been resolved by default.

I agree with a couple posters that Ubuntu seems to be trying to copy a lot of OS X and bring it to the PC. They are at least doing a half decent job.
Dennis Had A Bigger Effect Than Jobs: Pike
FWIW, http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/help/currency_disclaimer.htm... must be assumed to cover access through the API as well.

> Foreign currency rates provided by Citibank N.A. are displayed under licence.
Book Review: The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg
Good point. My intention is not to solicit their contacts but to have a dialogue about the best way to secure a developer. I'll take your feedback and that of other HN'ers and rethink how I am approaching people with my inquiry.
Thanks everyone.
Hi Mike! Thanks for displaying such unselfishness and support. It's really people like you who begin making a difference.

If you don't mind, I'd like to get some feedback for the landing page http://grooovy.me . If this is something that you might be interested in, signups would be appreciated. It would also help immensely if you can spread the word about us in any way you can!

Again, thank you for taking the time out to do this. You're amazing.
"Almost trivial"? You're vastly exaggerating. I'm pretty sure most physics graduates would get problems of special relativity as applied to rotating (i.e. accelerating) systems completely wrong, as it's usually just not taught. Yep, someone doing the experiment should have ideally spotted it, but it's already an extremely complex system, so I'm not surprised they didn't.
Thanks, I didn't think the actual site was too important and didn't want to appear spammy. But you're right, actually what ScribTeX is can only help matters!
Review: For Ubuntu, The Road To 200 Million Desktops Starts With 11.10
Good for you! I haven't decided yet if I want to do that one. It seemed tangential to me too.
If you made it smaller (size of tennis ball?), you could give them to soldiers and instantly have a great intel gathering tool.
It's because it's integrated with more things in a more useful and immediate way, taking it over the threshold of (just) being a geektoy and into being something useful. In standalone app form it wasn't considerably faster/easier/"lighter"/more useful to use for much of anything. Now, some of the most tedious tasks one uses (or would consider using, if the tasks were less tedious) a phone for aren't tedious anymore.
Ubuntu Font Family released.
Mind is racing with possibilities of what this could do when combined with a water balloon slingshot. Wonder how waterproof and shockproof they have made it.
Get 50GB of free storage for life
Ubuntu 11.10 screenshots
That's fair. I pointed out somewhere in the docs that I'm open to people contributing improvements to the legals, including the license and disclaimer. For me, the important thing is that the data is available, for free and on-demand. I don't much care what license it's under, but I know that many people do.
Thoughts as I go through:

- Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.)

- I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page are used for navigation. Placing numbers to the left and bring more attention to the current step to clarify that there is a flow here.

- I really appreciate the supporting material. (Video, articles...) The video would probably be very beneficial to introduce the step to the user and what they will do. Find a way to shorten the video to a 30 second overview and then offer a longer 3 minute version if the user is interested in hearing more. The 30 second clip might start when the screen first loads. (The auto load should probably be limited to new users only... saved users will have already seen this and will annoy them after some repetition.)

- Find a lecture hall with carpeted walls and re-record those videos (or invest in a clip mic). The echo is horrible in the video.... (still, major points for having the video in the first place).

- When you're segmenting customers, make the left area your "workspace" and the right area your committed data. Allow the suggested segments to be expanded. The first time the user does this in each step, give them tooltip explanations of each field and what it means in the big picture. Just a few lines are sufficient.

- A progress bar would probably help for long processes like this. I'm now noticing that the left side expands as additional steps are covered. So maybe the numbering scheme above might not work. But some combination between numbers actions and a progress bar should indicate to the user how far along the process they are. I currently feel like I'm falling down a rabbit hole so far...

- I should be able to reorder each (Customer Acquisition) Stage ever after they're added. Having to remove them after realizing it needs to be entered in order is forcing the user to do work twice.

This process is drawing out. Had you not specifically asked me to look through it, I probably would've given up a step or so back. I'm not sure what your on-boarding process is like, but the user should be prepared to invest 30-60 minutes if that's what it will take. (And PLEASE make sure you justify why it takes so long! Let the user decide if they want to make that investment with full knowledge of benefits and value they'll get.) I'm going to stop for now but I can continue on it later if you'd like. Hope these initial thoughts help a bit for now.
Dell prepares to walk the tightrope
Dell aims to be like IBM but with consumer hardware as well. No other recent company has succeeded in this strategy.
In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory
That's good advice for solo cofounders. The running is key for me. I'm not a morning person - at all - so I roll out of bed around 6 am, go to work for 8 hours, come home to run around 3pm (I enjoy the nicer weather in the afternoon and I get all my frustration out from my day job), and then I have a clear mind and lots of energy to get a few solid hours of coding done in the evening.

I do usually have to set aside a couple hours for family time. I used to bring my laptop and try to get something done, but it wasn't enough benefit to deal with the added stress while trying to enjoy family time.

So that's my advice:

* Do something to clear your mind and give you energy before you work on a side project/job

* Be realistic about when you can get things done - "you don't need more hours, you need smarter hours" ~ Rework
If we created an AI that was actually intelligent enough to understand all of our queries and sort through our junk to find the answers we need, it probably wouldn't want to do it.
What Will Google Do With $42.6 Billion War Chest?
Mike, I'd appreciate some feedback on my sales page for Status2K http://status2k.com.

Does it look professional ? Would you change anything about it ?

Thanks.
Australian Shopping Malls to Track Consumers by Mobile Phone
> Circles are invisible. When we say we want to draw a circle on the screen, we want to set pixels (light up equally sized rectangular bits of the screen) at integer coordinates to represent an approximation of the circle.

Priceless.
Looks like this would be awesome but I can't seem to get it to work (ITEM 149)...I tried for lots of different values of epsilon. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what a point-plotting display is?

http://jsbin.com/umurar/edit#source

EDIT: err - nevermind, I had a silly bug that didnt update the old values. Kinda working now!

http://jsbin.com/umurar/6/edit#source
Redis 2.4.0 final was just released
>>> a natural language query and have an AI agent fetch relevant data, sort it, and present it contextually.

What about IBM's watson : you asks it a question: am i sick? it gathers symptoms from you , looks in the medical literature and concludes your possible illnesses and in what likelihood.

I think it can also refer you to the relevant literature.

>>> Or sketch an idea for a building and have an AI do all the hard work of creating the blueprints.

bluethink house designer[1] does that.You enter a very high level drawing , and it fills in all the details according to regulations, cost efficency and best practices.

[1]http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2009/BluethinkHous...
Seeing a variable shadow something in an outer scope makes me cringe, simply because the decrease in readability far outweighs any benefit it could give. You might remember how things are, but the poor sap who has to keep extra scoping depths in his mind just to maintain your code will curse your name every day.
There are features of Mission Control that are impressive (full screening certain applications creates a new Desktop, for example) but I'd consider integrating Dashboard into the mix to be something one might consider the "dumbing down" of Spaces.
That's all very well, except that it's wrong. The last line needs to do "(buffer + mask) & ~mask" or you'll end up pointing outside the array.

You also violated the C standard in a less severe way. According to the standard, any identifier name starting with a double underscore (or underscore followed by upper-case letter) is reserved by the implementation for any use. These reserved names are frequently used in system header files, and encroaching on that namespace can easily lead to weird errors if the code is ever compiled on some other system.
MeeGo&SUSE: What's Up With That?
I'd be happy to play around with it a little bit over the weekend. I know a few people in academia and will ask their opinion as well. Maybe that will provide some help...
Thanks! The mouse cursor is definitely a bug (doesn't happen on windows, mac os x or ubuntu).

About the left vs. right - I didn't think of that. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that my mother tongue is Hebrew (written from right to left)?

It sounds far fetched but I've noticed other such "directional" issues since moving to Europe a few years ago.
FOSS Patents: Samsung loses Dutch case against Apple
The picture thing got me thinking. Perhaps PANDARUS had an eidetic memory. He had studied a picture that MANELAUS had access to. MANELAUS could simply ask a question about some minor detail in the picture. The picture would be selected such that there are too many such details to communicate a substantial fraction of them.
Hey thanks! Would love your feedback on http://www.workforpie.com/. It's a resume of sorts, built specifically for software developers, and based primarily on open source contributions to Github and Bitbucket.

I'll leave it wide open, but would especially like to know what feature/features you think might make it useful to you. (survey completed, btw :) )
It certainly doesn't make you a bad person. If lexical scoping wasn't the intent of the language authors, it wouldn't exist. I tend to agree that the warning is more of a hassle than it's worth. Though I guess it can be argued that if your scoping is so deep that you actually need to reuse names, that perhaps some refactoring should be in order.
Tips&Tricks for indie Android (mobile) developers to guarantee non-failure
There also seems to be an over-corrective quality. As I am now on 20 points, but people can't see that (until this comment) and therefore I think some people presume I am only just back from negative and give me an upvote to pad the figures against the humourless. Strange indeed. But you are right regarding what usually happens: a complaint can often lead from burnt whiskers to a smoking crater.
Robert's article: http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/why-if-you-miss-siri-youll-...

I guess most of us here in hacker news would have known Siri (from Sri) from its first public release. Many of us here also would have watched that Youtube video describing this amazing combination of technology. I guess I didn't feel any magic comes from the fact that I am not living in the US (so the app means nothing to me)
what is the stack/web technologies you have used?
There's a cultural difference in the orientation of eating pie/cake? Is it the same for pizza?
No, don't do this. It works on x86, but on architectures with load alignment restrictions it can crash on valid data.
Samsung Lawyers Struggle to Tell iPad and Galaxy Tab Apart
> they're completely opaque black boxes with structure that only plausibly mimics the absolute simplest of biological neural networks

I guess this depends on how advanced your toolkit is. If you're simply using feedforward nets with fixed weights, fixed topology, and sigmoid activation, then yes that's probably right.

However, there are a lot of advanced techniques in ANNs that most people never use. Lots of more biologically-inspired approaches have been explored, such as leaky integrator neurons, Hebbian learning, and indirect encodings.

> I want a "brain" which was built from principles

See, but the problem is that we don't even have the knowledge of how real brains work to start forming such principals. In fact, we're starting to see computational models used to form principals of biological brains (for example, [1]).

> that allow its workings to be intelligible

And what does that mean? You want to be able to discern some rule base from the system that you can understand? Even biological brains do not have that property.

> based on a technique which reflects the structure of the problem of learning, generalization, and hypothesis search and illuminates it.

This is very vague. Happy to dive into it if you are willing to expound a bit.

> It's probably a whole lot like that automatically enumerated proof of the 4-color theorem. It's definitely important, but there is something unsatisfying about it. We aren't learning as much as we felt entitled to because the destination was only a small part of the journey.

Again, very vague. Do you think having children is unsatisfying because you can't understand their actions most of the time? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue here.

Seriously though, I want to know what will impress people here. It's not going to be a fully general, "human-level" AI, obviously, as that requires huge amounts of semantic knowledge about the world that was encoded through billions of years of evolution, but that to me is not really a necessary condition for AI.

[1] http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?hoffman:biopsych11
Google was the Apple II of AI.
PS: And you should consider accepting "+" characters in the email address. It's valid. (i.e.: user+name@domain.com)
Since some people are posting macros (including some intentionally malicious ones), it is handy to know the -E compiler flag for debugging purposes. This will run only the preprocessor on the given files and print the result to stdout. (N.b. -E works at least on gcc and clang; the flag may be different elsewhere.)

Not really a C language trick, but useful nonetheless.
Bypassing the Uncannny Valley: Siri's Robotic Voice
Maybe you could help me with an iOS API build question?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3110572
It's a very useful gcc extension. Use if if you're building with gcc. Standards adherence is all well and good, but there are many problem areas where you can rely on a single compiler (surely others support it too: intel and clang seem like likely suspects).
I've seen good alternatives here like rsync.net but I wonder if a simple Linode wouldn't be a better option if you already need one for other purposes, because with the basic Linode you already got 20Gb, and it's only 10 cents/GB afterwards...
WebGL Dungeon
Whoops, that's what I get for prettying things up after copy and pasting. Thanks for pointing that out.

As for the double underscore being reserved for implementation use, this was in fact part of the compiler (well, runtime in this case) implementation, again a side-effect of copy and paste.
I worked at SRI on the CALO project, and built prototypes of the system that was spun off into SIRI. The system uses a simple semantic task model to map language to actions. There is no deep parsing - the model does simple keyword matching and slot filling, and it turns out that with some clever engineering, this is enough to make a very compelling system. It is great to see it launch as a built-in feature on the iPhone.

The NLP approach is based on work at Dejima, an NLP startup:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.70.5...

A lot of the work is grounded in Adam Cheyer's (CTO of SIRI) work on the Open Agent Architecture:
http://www.ai.sri.com/~oaa/

A more recent publication from Adam and Didier Guzzoni on the Active architecture, which is probably the closest you'll come to a public explanation of how SIRI works:
https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2007/SS-07-04/SS...
If you find this interesting, I'd highly recommend "Racing the Beam" by Montfort and Bogost, which talks about Atari development from both a technical and a cultural perspective. It really goes into detail about some of the landmark games that introduced new techniques to push the platform to the edges of its capabilities (e.g. the scrolling and color-shifting "neutral zone" in Yar's Revenge was actually created by repurposing the game's machine code as opposed to being algorithmically generated)
MG Siegler: Just Win, Baby
Another data point : Amy Hoy mentions that her first webapp and those of two other people running SAAS businesses all took 2 years to hit 200k after launch - add on some dev time and it approaches 3 years.

http://unicornfree.com/2011/drawing-back-the-curtain/
Hmm -- I thought we did (our CTO is a huge fan of that)
Yes, because they're like so successful.