skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every time I tell an engineer that I worked on the wave team, I'm greeted with the same response: "Oh, Wave! You know, the real problem with wave was X". And then I stop listening, and tell them this:

I have heard that for all the values of X. Here are the most common:

- It was too hard to use / I didn't know what to do with it

- It didn't integrate with email / didn't have email notifications

- It didn't support IE

- I started using it, but none of my friends were using it, so I stopped

- It was too slow

Too late, the team spent a bunch of time talking to actual users and finding out how they were using the product and what their real pain points were. People use wave to communicate in small teams. IIRC the biggest pain point our users cited was that wave didn't support printing. The people who did get over the adoption hurdle ended up using wave a lot. (I still wonder if maybe wave might have survived if we had charged for it.)

Wave died because we were too slow to make it good. The code base consists of around 1M lines of java. With 1M lines of code, you need a giant team to get anything done, and a giant team working hard on features tends to add even more code. The wave team burned too much money too fast. And we were still working too slowly to get explosive user growth. It made lots of people sad, but Google was right to kill wave.

If I could go back in time and give advice to the team, I would say:

- Don't use Java

- Don't scale past a few engineers. You will have a much longer runway that way, and you'll need it if you want to replace email.

- The network effect will kill you unless you integrate with email from day 1.

- You don't know what you're building, so talk to users early. Like, today.

- Don't optimise for scalability until you know what the product is supposed to be

- Don't try and reinvent the scrollbar, you idiots. (So much stabbing.)
Think Differently, Live Fully
I don't see what would make "Smalltalk" a good description of Dart. It doesn't appear to be message-based, isn't built with images and doesn't appear to be pervasively object-oriented (e.g. it has a syntactic `if` rather than using messages to booleans).

I can see some Smalltalk influence in Dart, but only as much as I see in Java.
>> That said, the rest of the management system was in shambles

I think that's the issue. I think status reports work great in companies where the management is really good and competent. Ironically, it doesn't feel like status reports in that environment though, just day-to-day flow.
The thing I'd really like to see in the book (but don't expect to) is why Jobs said no to the Amiga team back in 1983-84 when they were desperately looking for investors. This was prior to the Mac being launched and Commodore eventually buying Amiga.

Apparently Jobs said the Amiga had "too much hardware" which confused chief engineer Jay Miner because all the Amiga's wizardry was handled by 3 custom chips. Wikipedia alleges that Jobs was just nervous about the Amiga upstaging the Mac, but it'd be great to know what his thoughts actually were. I suspect we'll never know...
Tangle: JS library for reactive documents
Tangle is just a stepping stone as far as I can see: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

Right now he's simply playing around with some basic ideas.
I don't think you have any idea how insurance works.

>If we charge them by their expected cost, it's insurance.

Um, no. Insurance premiums are determined by total cost of claims plus expected inflation plus administration costs. There is no "expected cost". You are making this term up. There is only risk and the premium mathematically calculated to cover said risk. Making these calculations is the entire purpose of a whole profession: http://www.soa.org/about/about-what-is-an-actuary.aspx

>I referred to the fact that maintaining a pool has costs which the payments must cover in addition to the losses.

...which is always significantly less than the losses, since administration fees are usually a percentage of claims.

> My risk of having a car accident does not depend on how many people are in "the pool".

You're failing again to understand the math. The risk of you having a car accident is only part of the equation, the other part is the number of people that are able to absorb said costs. Any artificial group will vary from the mean overall risk, either being better or worse. The larger the pool, the less this variance. This is why you can't get insurance if you get sick: The pool's overall risk is artificially lowered to maintain competitive premiums.

>However, subsidies have issues and it is dishonest to claim otherwise and confuse the two.

There is no real distinction here except for the doublespeak you're introducing in an attempt to somehow differentiate health insurance from any number of insurance services. Actuaries do not define the term subsidy. It's a political creation to confuse and obscure.
Promote nearly anything among millions of Twitter users free of cost
The VirtualBox Kernel Driver Is Tainted Crap
Trip to the land of the automatic extraction of data from documents
Please stop trying to reinvent the browser scrollbar on your blog. Can't page down with this junk.
My friends in college swear by Chegg. You've done a tremendous job building loyal customers. Looking forward to hearing the rest of this story. Could you drop me an email (I didn't see any contact info in your profile) paul@thestartupfoundry.com? I'd love to bounce something off of you.
Well, Sorry at some places. Making it rain won't change anything. Heck, you may make it storm, or cause a earth quake to to happen or even a make Volcano to explode.

Some workplaces are so strict about dress codes, they just won't change for any reason. Especially large corporate bureaucracies. They have a crazy like beliefs that dressing in some way will help their business more than actual work will.

And going against those norms actually will work against you.
Chanos Sees 'Deterioration' in Chinese Banks
I guess his essays must be rubbing off on me lol.
Amazon's Cloud Business Is On An Absolute Tear
Alas they have more resources than myself, so will most likely end up with a better experience than me. But you are right.
About The Secret to a Better You - Why Bother?
Fascinating stuff --- thanks for digging that up. The main question in methods like this is how to constrain the blur kernel and the original image. I've only skimmed the first one, but the key idea used there seems to be to constrain things by looking at the edges in the image. The image has its own, natural distribution of edges, but there are also artificial edges created by the blurring that can serve as a clues for the motion of the camera (imagine if everything is blurred diagonally --- there will probably be a lot of artificial diagonal edges)
Weird. ソニー 三宅一生 制服, ソニー 三宅一生 作業服,
both miss that site.. Needed ユニフォーム instead, or not at all!
Very nice, I'm learning Vim right now and appreciate this.

However, I also find it useful to set my MacVim window to be slightly transparent so that I can see the shortcuts through the window if I need to.

When trying to remember/memorize anything, it's mentally helpful to not have it anywhere in sight when reciting it. I was taught this forever by a drawing class I once took where we were instructed to do draw a nude model with our back to him/her, only turning around once every minute or two. Same idea I think :) For this reason I'll keep this bookmarked but I don't think it would be good as a wallpaper.
You are right. The bitterness must be left behind, focus on moving forward.
Verizon and Sprint unlock the iPhone 4S SIM card slot for international roaming
-Don't use Java

Could you recommend a good alternative?

Also, could you elaborate a bit as to why not?
Dear Google,

There must be ways to protect user privacy that are better than collecting everything in a form that can just be handed over. Example: encrypt on the client side, with user-supplied, large, non-compromised keys, and don't ever inspect the data on the server. If you need to inspect data in order to serve relevant ads, do it on the client, and only send back enough information to tailor whatever ads are currently available. Maybe do the ad selection on the client too. If this doesn't work for one of your services, consider it for other services where it would work. Laws prevent you from providing service X without providing such-and-such a hook? Then don't provide service X. Provide a plugin framework instead, and let users bring their own service. Use your heads. Maybe use a bit of the compute power the client has available. You spun down a lot of your China presence because of stuff like this, supposedly. You should be able to take big steps anywhere, not just in China. You are smart. Figure. It. Out.
Something to remember when ever I start thinking about him.. Thanks for your comments
You could route URLs for this site with a moderately sized switch statement. The code to route everything would be smaller than the code needed to just route closures before you've setup a single one.

Obviously replacing closures with directly linking is more difficult than just using direct linking in the first place.
I agree. And I think you can see both this essay and Tangle as further work in the direction he identified in Magic Ink.
Air Force Network Admins Found Out About Drone Virus Through News Story
I recently discovered two neat papers on deconvolution from a Bayesian perspective, written by Kevin Knuth.

http://knuthlab.rit.albany.edu/papers/knuth-ica99.pdf

Abstract: The problem of source separation is by its very nature an inductive inference problem. There is not enough information to deduce the solution, so one must use any available information to infer the most probable solution. We demonstrate that source separation problems are well-suited for the Bayesian approach which provides a natural and logically consistent method by which one can incorporate prior knowledge to estimate the most probable solution given that knowledge.
We derive the Bell-Sejnowski ICA algorithm from first principles, i.e. Bayes' Theorem and demonstrate how the Bayesian methodology makes explicit the underlying assumptions. We then further demonstrate the power of the Bayesian approach by deriving two separation algorithms that incorporate additional prior information. One algorithm separates signals that are known a priori to be decorrelated and the other utilizes information about the signal propagation through the medium from the sources to the detectors.

http://knuthlab.rit.albany.edu/papers/knuth-eusipco05-final....

Abstract: Source separation problems are ubiquitous in the physical
sciences; any situation where signals are superimposed calls
for source separation to estimate the original signals. In this
tutorial I will discuss the Bayesian approach to the source
separation problem. This approach has a specific advantage
in that it requires the designer to explicitly describe the signal
model in addition to any other information or assumptions
that go into the problem description. This leads naturally to
the idea of informed source separation, where the algorithm
design incorporates relevant information about the specific
problem. This approach promises to enable researchers to
design their own high-quality algorithms that are specifically
tailored to the problem at hand.
IPOTT is a flywheel company..
I feel exactly the opposite way. I find this essay and his site in general really inspiring, and I always get lots and lots of ideas for things to do when I read them! I'm also really glad he's implemented Tangle, because it means I don't have to; I can just use it. Although I haven't yet.
This is why (in my case):

You asked for permissions to
* See who you follow, and follow new people.
* Update your profile.
* Post Tweets for you.

This is a no-no for me. I believe you can specify that you want read-only access, which would solve my problem.
If they have faith in the system, then surely this should cost them next to nothing as everything should be repaid? (Although I'm naive on the accounting of things like this.)

Great idea though, never lost a $1 through kiva lending.
That was a great move when Siri was a stand-alone app and it is an even better move now. A bag full of easter eggs that people will talk about not just on Hacker News. I think it will become (English-speaking) mainstream culture really fast.
He tries to avoid naming his companies. He worked at Apple from ~2002 to 2010, and was simply banned from giving any details, or even mentioning that he did work for Apple (though it's on Wikipedia). I guess the habit stuck.
Why indoor navigation is so hard
If you happen to use CyanogenMod, you can go to Settings->CyanogenMod Settings->Input and set it so a long press to either the home or menu buttons launches the soft keyboard.
Basil Tea/ Tulsi Tea
Worse than that, there's no content if you have Javascript off. Talk about tedious!
Dolls House Wallpaper
Car Accessories Mumbai
Car Accessories. Discount Quality car accessories delivered across India. Access cheap car accessories to add style and value to your automobile.
CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...
Some feedback

1. Talking a bit too fast.

2. Covering too many things in one shot - perhaps if you just focused on one or two benefits and show how a user achieves those benefits

3. You do somethings before you talk about them fully

4. There should be a clear break between different things you do

Hope that helps...
This is especially true in healthcare(IT).

So what if management(middle, and upper) are one of those critics and all they add to the equation is the constant back and forth on UI iterations as if coding UI interfaces is free or easy?
Ask HN: What to do with several unused domains?
I have collected a number of potentially useful but currently useless (PUCU) domain names over the years, and while a couple seem obvious, I'm interested in opinions from others on what might be done with them.

Should I sell them, setup forums and wikis and hope the community self-polices (or forms in the first place), start blogging on specific topics, etc.

Thanks in advance :)

actropolis.com
arsauralis.com
digitalrights.ca
elite720.com
fashiontouches.me
firestrum.com
innereyes.com
iwriters.net
kincms.com
slashbracket.com
spankk.me
withanks.com
His doing a startup doesn't prevent you from doing it.
An idea is just an idea - it's not a real product and it's not even a patent. There's a lot more to a startup than just an idea, and takes a lot of work.

If you're passionate enough about your idea, you'll find ways to win. Besides, no startup can succeed without competition, so in some ways, he's actually helping you to create or grow this market. Also, he cannot support all of his customers by himself so there will be other customers out there where you could serve.
Those things would be a no-brainer for me if I was a billionaire.
The US Citizenship Test
There are many requirements one has to fulfill to qualify for US citizenship. One such requirement is taking the citizenship test.
UGG Bailey Button, Ugg Boots Bailey, UGG Bailey Button Boots
I am truly boggled that Wave contained 1M lines of code given the functionality.. No wonder it was hard to make it good..

Feels like two high-end devs could implement the 80% of it that people actually used in a couple weeks and 10-50k LOC.

Maybe I am missing something, but it sounds like Large Company culture doomed it.
I don't see how. Updating a view count or putting a pin on a "countries that have visited this page" map is fairly benign. Trying to randomly scribble on somebody else's data is not.
Like most supermicro chassis, it comes with the drive caddies, backplane, and power supplies. All you need is the motherboard, cpu, ram, and a SAS card, well, and the drives. It's even got an expander built into the backplane. If you want h/w raid, you need to bring that as well. (I plan on using zraid2, most of the raid cards that cost less per port than the drives are not better than software raid.)

I buy most of my supermicro stuff through kingstarusa.com - I know the site looks a little shady, and you have to email for quotes for almost everything, but they are good people. My office is actually above their warehouse; I'm unit C. Their price is usually a few dollars less than provantage, which is usually the next best retailer for supermicro chassis, and they don't do shady tax dodge bullshit, and I don't have to pay shipping. I could be misremembering on the exact price on the 45 bay.

Most of the 'mapping out' done with the backblaze version is already done and tested on the supermicro.
Methods to Install Installous on iPad 2
Git mirror of the tz Time Zone Database FTP Server contents
sweet. what'd you use for your sas card?
博狗亚洲
Exactly - the takeaway is that Bret can create amazing things as a result of building off of his own creations. He's not running, he's building reusable components for a rocket ship.
Thanks for the feedback. Very actionable. We will incorporate it in our next iteration.

Do you have any feedback on the product/product philosophy? Would love to hear that too.
Great article, covers the basics in detail.

Though I have to admit that I wonder how come most Linux / open source software websites are so average-looking in terms of colors, font and general styling.

There seems to be a policy of content over presentation when it should be possible and even easy to have both in 2011 without much effort.
Two simpler use cases:

* Using a big repository for a bunch of related projects. Settings up a new project (not a new repository, but who can tell the difference?) is as simple as creating a new folder, then commiting it. Then you can directly checkout that folder if you need the single project. This beats SSH one-liners to set up new repositories.

* I usually have something like a "httpdocs"/"website" subfolder in my bigger projects. With svn, I just check out that folder on my web server. With git, I'd have to check out the whole project, which feels more like a kludge.
I was there when "Walkabout" started being bandied about. It irked me to no end that I could jump through all of the hoops and finally get behind the NDA curtain by being hired and then be told "nope, you can't hear about that". That was a severe jolt to the internal culture of the whole company.

There had been other projects which had been kept under wraps successfully. Chrome and V8 were demoed in Seville long before anyone on the outside heard about it. They said keep it quiet, and we did. Google TV had been knowable for ages before it went anywhere externally. There was no reason to think someone would leak Wave.

Instead, they started playing the "we're special and you are not" card, and that started a sense of resentment growing. Not even the infrastructure teams which were going to provide services to them were let in on what was really going to happen in there.

Then after far too long, demo day of Wave arrived. I only stayed long enough to see them hit backspace and have it echo out to everyone else who was connected. I remember my exact comment at the time: "packets". As in, lots and lots and lots of packets flying around to generate RPCs for all of those deltas. Then those turn into XML or whatever going out to web browser clients, and ... yeah. SO many packets. That right there worried me greatly.

So then I see this thing about it not scaling properly and choking JVMs and suddenly it all makes sense.

Oh well. All of the secret code depots and restricted access areas must have been practice for what is now happening with Plus. Entire floors of buildings you can't open as a full-time employee? Yep. More code depots being locked down? Yep.
You're implying that Wave engineers don't know how to use Java. But Wave engineers are Google engineers. Google engineers are hired somewhere in a high 90th percentile of programming ability and experience.

You've proven the GP's point -- don't use Java because the only people who know how to "use it" are 1% of programming experts that you probably don't have working for you.
You mean you've used Tangle for that, and it worked? Are your explanations public?
because nineteen grand a month buys you a boatload of hardware /and/ a really smart person. A really smart person that can also be used on other things.

S3, economically speaking, is an incredible deal if you are only using a little. But if you are using a lot? it makes NetApp or EMC start to look good, which is to say, only a good deal if money doesn't matter.

I mean, yeah, if you are in a situation where money doesn't matter, or rather a situation where the amount of money you are spending on the storage is trivial compared to what you are doing with the storage, sure, NetApp or EMC will deliver a far superior product. S3 may have it's uses too. But if you are doing something where the storage needs to be cheap? yeah, neither one of those players, nor S3 will get you where you want to go.
Besides Meridian (the app mentioned in the article), the guys at Building Layer (http://buildinglayer.com/) are also doing some pretty interesting stuff. They totally nailed the pitch at Vator Splash and already custom-made Microsoft Surface solutions for some hospitals and other places. It's a very interesting space!
Anything that makes me money, saves me money, or saves me time.
This is a good example of how to make a high-confidence prediction about the future: look for something that's already happened, and predict that it will have happened soon.

In other words: he's already published paradigm-shifting things!
Am I missing a zero? that's about $0.10 per gigabyte, no? which is dang close to what amazon charges. Unless you mean one hundred grand up front rather than one hundred grand a month.
Brilliant idea. (i just did my first loan with the matching loan.)
B2B Marketplace - A communication Medium
What is Business to Business Marketplace? B2B Marketplace is a communication media for suppliers, distributors, manufactures, exporters communicate through different search engines such as Yahoo, Google, ask.com, MSN, etc.
Looks like kiva has 98.87% repayment rate, so a small price to pay to attract new users.

http://www.kiva.org/about/risk/overview
Here is my critique of your reasons. It is just that.

Reason #1 you say: You don't need the money.
Reason #2: You will waste time relocating.
Reason #3: You think you are onto something decent.

I am posting this becuse I fail to see how does any of these three reasons negate the YC value prop. There are good reasons to not do YC, but I do not see how these three are it.

Also, even if you do, you won't regret it terribly because you can always apply for the next batch.
I think knowing when to quit is like predicting the stock market. Many extremely successful companies were in positions where they should've quit but didn't, and then ended up successful because they managed to pivot correctly (either by pure luck or good observations).

Means you shouldn't worry if you messed up if you didn't 'quit at the right time', but you should be more concerned if you acted rationally and took an objective view on everything, and most importantly took the time to judge how your company/startup is doing and how you can improve it.
Alappuzha backwaters
Yes, that's the mistake most people make: back-end is engineering, front-end is art. No wonder we have such shitty front-ends.

Sure, there are a whole slew of "applications" that will suffice with a basic form-driven UI accessing a rails or servlet back-end. And indeed there are applications like twitter where the entire complexity is in the complexity of the back-end. But then there are all the apps that simply aren't web-apps yet, because nobody has figured out how to do complex, rich, and above all Interactive, applications using fucking javascript. We're getting there, but people are writing the code to do it as I type (jquery, backbone, etc).

So this is why UI is hard: its art and its engineering. And nobody thinks about the engineering part. And when they do, they have to find an engineer who can talk to the designer without scaring him/her (very often "her").
Magneto Development Easy to Manage