skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was looking around your site trying to find your products:

http://whitetailcensus.com/

http://www.mywhitetailscout.com/

One of them doesn't even seem to have a stylesheet or a single picture or video of your product. Sounds a cool product but I have no idea how hard it is to use. Is it like facial recog software?

The other, the scout product, the 'reasons to buy' are the worst I've ever seen. And I still don't know what you're selling! But it has rapid record retrieval. Wow. Marketing 101 man, that's not a reason to buy, customers don't care about that.

I didn't want to be negative but on the other hand I honestly think you could do more harm than good with this article.

Firstly it seems that online selling is not at all your forte. Let me be frank, you cannot write marketing copy. Worse you've presented yourself disingenously, as if you had some skill with adwords, I thought I understood AdWords pretty well. I even worked on the AdWords API team as an intern at Google.

What has working on a technical product at Google got to do with writing marketing copy? Quite obviously nothing.

Secondly, cold calling can be a very expensive way to acquire customers. And you've hand waved your way through it. You converted them because you drove out there and sold.

At $29.95 a year, the price you're listing one of your products, you cannot buy a list of phone numbers, call the customer and then drive out and visit them and still make money.

The premise behind the article seems a great way to validate your ideas, but that's not what adwords is for. Adwords is for selling. And you haven't mentioned any sales costs associated with the phone process in the article. The fuel? The time?

Having worked in industries where we did buy leads, the mortgage industry, it was £75 a number. They weren't even cold and we still had a conversion ratio of 1 in 10. Could you make money paying £750 per customer? Our product sold for £2500 so it was worth it.

And say you go b2b instead, companies give away their numbers on websites all the time. Can you get to the decision maker in a couple of minutes? Or are there barriers?

Overall I just think this article is badly titled and you shouldn't have mentioned adwords at all. This is a great idea for getting to know your customers. For selling, I doubt its benefits.

I want others to think, is cold calling really worth spending your time on? Can you actually afford to?
You have to build this sort of think into the infrastructure.

For example, TCP and Ethernet retransmission strategies and HTTP servers should have reasonable timeouts that result in error responses rather than just letting incomplete HTTP sessions pile up.

The same principles can and should be applied to any communication protocol.
Welcome to the Ruby and open source community. Don't look back. I did the same thing a few years ago. I left Java for Ruby.
BBX-powered BlackBerry London phone purportedly pictured
Someone should make a short list of "best practices" for contacting your representatives. For instance, is there an easy way to set up a second google voice number so you don't end up getting called a million times during election season? And does anyone have apps to recommend for finding your representatives phone numbers, such as songrabbit's below?
No, it's not jailbroken (there's no jailbreak for the iPhone 4S). This is just a feature of the iPhone: if you embed a SSL certificate in a mobile provisioning profile, it will add it to the system list. This is mostly intended for enterprises who might have a special SSL cert for their intranet, but it also works for this purpose as well.
I like the "visible from space" superlative. In this day and age when you can see a guy on a bike from space.
This reminds me of that joke in which jokes have been reduced to numbers. It's nearly as obscure, too.
Slicehost's extensive collection of server side tutorials
I'm available to help you snap necks and cash checks immediately.
There is no jailbreak for the iPhone 4S (at least not publicly available), so any hacks like this must be done from outside the device.
I've worked closely with Dave @ Client Acquisition Partners ( http://teleleadsonline.com/ ) - I know he's worked with some tech companies, so it might be worth a shot.

FWIW, they are redesigning their website!
I won 1st place at a big hackathon. Here's exactly how I did it.
This is the script I'm using for calling and emailing my Senators and Congressman. Feel free to adapt it.

"I'm a voter in Congressman Rush's district, and I'm calling to ask the Congressman to vote against SOPA, HR. 3261. As the owner of an internet business in Chicago, I fear that I'll be forced to close shop if SOPA passes. SOPA would make it easy for anyone to have my websites shut down, without having to prove that we've violated any law. Our only recourse would be an expensive legal process that we simply can't afford. Thus, if SOPA passes, my company and others like it will be out of business, and many people will be out of work."

Also, EFF makes it dead-simple to email the right politicians based on your address. They even have a template email for you. You can be done in under a minute:

https://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?...

BTW, if you're afraid to call in because you think you'll sound silly/scripted/unimportant, don't be! The people who answer phones at political offices get lots of calls, and they're used to hearing all kinds of weird stuff. Believe me, even if you read your script in a Ben Stein monotone, you'll still sound twice as smart and engaging as a lot of what they hear. So don't be afraid to call your politicians.
>"Using Android means no license fees, no restrictions on how you implement it (apart from those you impose on yourself and / or technical limitations)."

[IANAL]

If Microsoft's patents are not infringed or they are invalid, that is correct.

However, the former does not appear to be part of B&N's argument, while the latter is obviously subject to debate at this time.

Therefore, it appears to be premature to assume that this premise of your argument is well supported from a legal standpoint.
Using an almost amazingly simple procedure a few weeks ago, I worked a bit with @tmm1 on figuring most of this out. We actually got custom commands working via both proxy and on-device interposing based methods: http://mobile.twitter.com/tmm1/status/131520489049960449
Did you read the article?

When the proxy failed, they "ressorted (sic) to using tcpdump on a network gateway". They eventually had to "setup a custom SSL certification authority, add it to our iPhone 4S, and use it to sign our very own certificate"
doh! The real link http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.ht...
Ask HN: Best paid iOS dev tutorials?
Hi guys,

I'm currently learning a bit of iOS development and I'm enjoying following video tutorials wherever I can find them.

I think its best if I follow some course or arrangement rather than freestyle on my own, as I find myself wondering what to do next after each session.

Does anyone know of any awesome sites or have reviews? I'm a noob programmer, but I've caught up with enough C/Objective-C reading to be comfortable. So far I've been using tutsplus.com (awesome, free) to learn about Xcode & IB.

I've also heard of:
- DiveIntoiOS.com - $199, a bit pricey for me
- Lynda.com - $25/month
- Various courses on udemy.com ranging from $25 to $250

Any recommendations appreciated. Thanks
One Millionth Tower - HTML5 Documentary
I wonder how Apple is taking all of this? Is Applidium risking their developer license?
One of the comments suggest it was the result of lithium mining..."These sites clearly represent the process of lithium mining and extraction. Sedimentation trenches are dug to extract lithium iron phosphate to create batteries." Sounds reasonable.

The other ones looks like bombing sites.
Using the map scale, it looks like it was a triangular shaped lake measuring 70 miles by 60 miles by 60 miles.
Ah. So the point is that the state of execution of parse_log_entry and everything up the stack from it is frozen, and then an out-of-band exception handler figures out what to do, fixes the condition that caused the error, and resumes from the exact spot where the error was first detected, restarting just the most low-level code block? Man, CL is pretty sweet.

This, by no coincidence I'm sure, reminds me a lot of how signals are handled in UNIX/POSIX. I guess you could simulate this very crudely with those by sending yourself a SIGUSR[1|2] :).
I'd say things are looking positive. While I haven't yet had a paying customer (didn't start pushing it until this fall, so my first paying customers will start this winter), the response from the folks who own and/or run the leagues has been overwhelmingly positive.

One thing is for sure, I wouldn't see Adwords working terribly well for this market segment: most of these folks don't really know what exactly they're looking for, and since they just get things done with spreadsheets, they're not looking for (ie, not searching google) for solutions.
if you're using python, lxml has a cssselect module that makes this a breeze.
So I just feel terrible frankly that I mistakenly turned down interacting with him. Would have we had some conversation that would have changed his opinion on things? Given him some new hope?

This is a very human reaction, but please don't let yourself get hung up on this line of thinking. Heroic intervention is something we tend to overestimate. What you can do is to be there for the people you know well. When someone's hurting, be generous with your time; be someone they can turn to. If you ever think someone's at risk, know what to look for and know where to turn.
This is a great concept, especially when you're trying to set yourself apart from the pack. I'm curious to see what kind of results you get.
"A year and a half after Steve Jobs endorsed it in an unusual essay"...Must everything be explained in the context of Steve Jobs now?
This is a good article, but the spec has been dead since the release of the first iPhone. (Maybe earlier, but that was when everyone talked about it.) Apple showed that users don't really care about spec unless everything else looks the same. When all consumers have are rows and rows of identical-looking computers, they pick the one with the highest numbers. When they have a single piece of hardware, with no specs at all, but which behaves intuitively and does what they need, the spec doesn't matter.

Everything the article says follows from that.
The one in China is 10X bigger.
IBM and Oracle are the champions of the world when it comes to selling ultra customized supply chain and communication systems to Top-500 companies.
It bothers me when people apply a new buzzword to an old concept. Calling things like HN and forums "Social Media" is no more descriptive than calling a garbage truck driver a "sanitation engineer."

I can just imagine less scrupulous investors saying, "Hey, look! That thing you're doing? It fits in my overly-broad buzzword category! Give me money for my Social Media fund!"
Good lord. This is why I universally recommend journalists writing on technology take at least 6 months of programming instruction.
When implementing submenus please let me move my cursor somewhat down before moving right. With this implementation you must move your cursor almost perfectly to the right into the submenu.

Mac OS notably lets you move diagonally as long as you are moving more right than down I think. There may be a delay involved too.

I couldn't find an exact reference for this, but this is on the topic:
http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/2000-07ReaderMail.html#Anch...
The article says: "In the Justice Department’s view, the CFAA criminalizes conduct as innocuous as using a fake name on Facebook..."

Facebook's Terms say: "You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook..."

But Facebook's registration is VERY unclear. They ask for an entry for "First Name" (not specifying whose), an entry for "Last Name" (again, not specifying whose), an entry for "Your Email" (specifying an article "Your", so presumably if they wanted my first name or last name, they would have specified "YOUR name") and an entry for "I am [Select Sex:]" (presumably asking me to predict the web developer's gender (?). If they wanted the registrant's gender, they should have said "YOU ARE [Select Sex:]", or at least make sure that the email question and the gender question were consistent. The Terms refer to the user as "You" and not "I".

Given that they have first person, second person, and no person specified on their registration page, any lawyer worth his $250/hour should be able to argue your way out of criminal charges (or even breach of contract) in using a fake name on Facebook.

A reasonable argument would be that the first time I went to Facebook, I wanted to search for a friend, so I put in HIS first name and last name, created an account, and now I am stuck with it.

Unfortunately, Facebook's very own terms restrict me from correcting this error (due to their lack of clarity and inconsistencies on the home page), as the terms say "You will not create more than one personal profile."
> I have to regard Buffett's frienship with Gates as a pretty strong endorsement of him as a businessman.

I would have assumed it had more to do with endorsing him as a philanthropist...
It is necessary — some places have custom non-public CA's, for things like S/MIME and internal servers.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Siri doesn't have to communicate with your company's internal servers (and my paranoia already suggests a malicious IT department, reckless — and probably illegal — as that would be), so the code should, in my opinion, accept only specific CAs.
Maybe, but what's the point? If you try to run a service on top of this, you'll have to make so many requests that you'll either have your ID banned or you'll need to buy so many iPhones that you might as well contract a speech-to-text service to some company.

If you're just using it for personal reasons, why should Apple care?
The opinion of openness of an Apple product has nothing to do with whether Steve Jobs' biographer lied intentionally.
Based on the headline, I thought this would be about how software engineering is now most often done in a scattershot--sorry, agile--manner, without documents that first detail customer requirements, then product specifications, and so on.*

By the way, my somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious rule of thumb is to avoid specs when doing software in-house that I direct and to insist on specs when contracting out work.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model
Good question, my company released a pretty specific app into the big 3 earlier this year, and have seen a whopping 10 installs. Granted, it's a pretty niche app (leadership development for corporate ethics), but I have been wondering the best way to really market this to the casual market-goer who might also fit this niche.
i couldn't agree less. I think the thing looks exactly like what it is. A hurried, "let's ship something before my reputation is entirely ruined" product from someone who sold a vision without so much as the scaffolding in place. The original product was a mess and facebook could easily eat the lunch of "color" as it stands now. Hoping for better for whatever is next from this team.
Cannot upvote this enough. Stuff like this is the reason I read HN.
ITunes Match Released
You're right. It's called hagiography -- a term HNers would do well to learn.
All these major sites should shut down for a day...or even a few hours. The loss of production from a site like Google being down would be outrageous. Why should corporations (which are people?) have the right to censor other people? It's like our bill of rights expired...

I for one welcome our new MPAA/RIAA overlords. All hail the great firewall of america. This wasn't the change I voted for... /sarcasm
Why meat from a petri dish is still a long way from the supermarket
Google BigQuery Service: Big data analytics at Google speed
A little googling shows some interesting info about the ACE request/header. From skimming, it looks like a header compression method for VOIP on cell/lossy connections.

Slide deck: http://www-rn.informatik.uni-bremen.de/ietf/rohc/ace-033100-...

Whitepaper: http://w3.ualg.pt/~bamine/B3.pdf
Considering we just celebrated Veterans' Day, and the fact that I happen to be a Veteran, I thought I would post a plug for the benefits of hiring Vets.

Thank you to all who do!
1. Can Google pay $1mn to each senator and buy them out?
2. Can/will Obama veto this?
I think the comment relates to the caution one might wish to use when evaluating the selection of information for presentation given that there is some evidence of an editorial bias on the part of Groklaw, e.g.:

"incredibly insignificant patents Microsoft has the nerve to use against Android"
Can Technology Be Society's Economic Engine?
David Yates To Direct Bigscreen "Doctor Who" film
Github's founder Tom Preston Werner had a similar article]1]: Blogging Like a Hacker

[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hac...
Emphatically

not empathy.
Submitting this because I think it's a really great discussion. My own question in response to this chat: Are there declining marginal values to innovation? Cowen says we aren't making the progress we made during his grandma's lifetime. Is that because we're moving down the curve toward more incremental innovation gains?
NYU replaces Blackboard w/ Sakai
Among the most important decisions we make as an institution is the selection of the technologies we use to improve the educational experience for students.

As NYU approached a juncture where our course management system -- Blackboard -- would require a substantial upgrade, I asked the Teaching Technology Committee, chaired by Senior Vice Provost Matthew Santirocco, to take the opportunity to review NYU’s needs and determine what product best suits the University. After considerable review, the Committee has recommended that we replace Blackboard with Sakai. The transition will take place over the next two years, with a targeted completion date of September 2013.

Peer institutions – including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan; and Stanford – have had successful and positive experiences with Sakai, as has our own School of Medicine. And by moving from Blackboard to Sakai, the University moves from a sole-sourced commercial product to an open-source learning management environment that allows us significant say in the software’s development. It also provides an open framework to integrate the other important tools to support teaching, learning, and scholarship, such as Google Apps. Finally, the University is piloting additional Sakai functionalities, and what we learn from this will inform our next steps.

Detailed planning for the transition to Sakai is now underway. The planning process will include broad consultation with the University community by the Teaching Technology Committee, including development of a plan for a smooth and well-supported transition.

The University will communicate about additional developments as our efforts progress. I hope you share our sense of excitement at moving to a new platform that will better serve the teaching and learning process at NYU.
A lack of evidence does not equal evidence of the negative. In other words, just because you can't see Google working to defend Android, doesn't mean they aren't orchestrating a defense behind the scenes.

Plus they did just give some patents to HTC.
Reminds me of "the right to read" by Richard Stallman, it is a preview of a world where the right to read is regulated, throttled and taxed.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"Lifestyle business" is a strawman argument.

The fact is, all -- ALL -- the research on work effectiveness & work-related health shows that this kind of work schedule is terrible. Not only do you stop working effectively after a few hours (you only get the illusion of still being sharp), it's terrible for your body.
Yeah, this is an itch I've had for a few years and last year's summer leagues was the straw that slayed the dragon (is that how that phrase goes?). The youth market is definitely something on my radar as well. I've met with a few folks who've provided some invaluable information for tailoring to youth sports leagues and activities, and I have a few more meetings/conversations to have to hopefully score my first school contract.

As for Erlang, all my new projects are written with the Nitrogen Web Framework (http://www.nitrogenproject.com), and will be using bits and pieces of my little blogging engine/CMS, Yabbie, which will soon be an open source and hosted project of mine.

That said, the BracketPal software is not currently planned to be open source, at least not at this time. I do want to find a way to tailor the service to smaller ad-hoc-type leagues (like a group of friends who regularly play volleyball together, do a fantasy league together, or who want to run like a weekly gaming league amongst themselves).

So there's that :)
I'm a coder at a big media company.

I would die to find a gaggle of people who want to work with me on a simple CMS on top of Git.
A rule generally accepted in the startup land is that you don't work on multiple ideas

Interesting. I have not heard this before. As it stands, I have always worked on multiple projects for as long as I can remember. My current main company started out as a side project, for example.

Is there a canonical reference or blog post that the startup community refers to, to elucidate the reasons for one-project focus?
How to Avoid Demo Fail
Purdue builds nation's fastest campus supercomputer
money problems would definitely fall under work life for startups.

Girl/health problems might fall as well, since the work/life balance is so crappy
Thanks! I've found the Ruby community to be very open and welcoming. It took some ego busting to pull the trigger and make the switch, but I'm very glad I did it.
SIEMquisitions
I commented above that low cholesterol is a risk for suicide as well. [1] A diet of Red Bull and Doritos contains very little of the healthy fats that your body needs.

[1]http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/...
Now that's how you handle a pricing change
My Blog Needs a Strategic Plan...?
This not Apple. This is every company that deals with both the Internet and the laws of the United States under which minors are legally toxic (because they/we cannot sign a binding contract and therefore cannot agree to terms/conditions, indemnity, release of copyright, etc).
Actually, I'm doing this for my SUPER SECRET startup at the moment. Originally the front-end would just send the back-end the whole HTML of a user's page when they executed the browser plugin, and the back-end would intercept it and knock it up in Perl.

Wasn't sure how well that was going to scale, and was worried people would get weird about sending the entire contents of the page they're on - I have a 90% working solution now where it's all done in-browser, with a bunch of classes I've been working on with a node.js set of testing tools
A major feature that Jekyll is missing is commenting. Relying on Disqus, a closed source platform, is not ideal because it slows down page load times, does not contribute to SEO, and it does not let you host and search for comments in your git repo.

Some people argue that adding a dynamic commenting system contradicts the static html goal of Jekyll. Going along those lines, critics say that a conversation is best carried out on 3rd party sites like HN. However, for technical blog posts specifically, a two-way conversation helps illuminate finer points in the original blog post.

Googling around for 'jekyll comments' or 'disqus open source alternative' reveals many people who would use such an idea. However, aside from some quick-and-dirty projects, I see no compelling open source alternative to disqus that will include features such as OpenId, spam prevention, comment threads, etc. Does anyone know of such a project?