skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of these points strike me as contrary to traditional lean startup advice--e.g. it's ok to expend a huge amount of resources without seeing results for 5-7 years, and it's important to be first in a big market.

Obviously, this worked for Amazon, and there are some opportunities you won't be able to take advantage of in any other way, but it's certainly high risk. I mean, Pets.com arguably followed much of this advice.

I suspect what really separates Amazon from the pack is their actual customer experience--but that's only 1 of 6 points here.
How to View Private Facebook Pictures and Profiles
I would love to wear a dosimeter under my shirt while going through a scanner. Though, I always opt for the pat down.
Agreed. To fix, open up the JavaScript console: $("p").css("color", "white").
clickable: http://www.strongtrends.com/
You don’t buy a laptop from Apple to save money. That’s a lame talking point.

Sometimes people are willing to pay more for reasons that have not much to do with durability or specs.
If your main use is to root the device, the Nook is definitely worth the $50 upgrade... even if you're not sure, the Nook with it's SD slot allows you to "test drive" a root...

B&N hardware has always been more hacker friendly than Amazon's.
A time lapse study of the sky for a year
That's not an issue with the UI.

It goes without saying that mechanisms in the back-end need to be implemented in order for AUI to provide a great user experience.

For instance:
- On error, an action should be retried.
- Long-lived processes should be queued and upon failure, requeued.

Hopefully, the user won't reload the whole javascript app before this action is successfully completed and should never notice it failed in the first place.

It's not perfect, but I find that it is better. There's definitely work to be done on the error handling front. The UI should be able to clearly notify the user when something he previously did, didn't work.
How much harm do the scanners do to TSA employees who are around it for hours each day? If it's shown to severely affect them, or if they can be 'scared' into believing it does, it might solve this problem once and for all.
The idea that they're not seriously pushing for this is flawed. Yes, they've hired expensive lobbyists, but that's not all they're doing. They've put up their own campaigns ("Makers vs. Takers" I believe they called it) and are pushing their own employees into supporting it.

Moreover, they have quite a bit of political support in this administration. They've got everyone from the RIAA lawyers now in top Justice Department spots, the new Copyright Czar, the US Trade Representative (who negotiated ACTA), several members of the House Judiciary Committee (who are sponsors of this bill), and Vice President Biden.

Don't underestimate their ability or willingness to pass crazy laws.
With a Mac version of this in the Mac app store, you can seriously compete with iTunes and iCloud as the music solution for many people.

Kick ass.
We do the same thing. Our CMS delivers views based on the type of agent and whether JS is enabled or not. It allows our users who aren't able to handle all the fancy UI stuff (we have some blind users) to use the site without losing any functionality, much like Gmail static. With the proper design it's really simple to extend and add content this way.
Fall Clean Up: DampRid Can Help
Yeah, it's insane. This law isn't that extreme yet but it's a push over the ledge towards censorship (it seems...)
I am afraid that would create a mess in a db(its just my guess). Though your idea sounds nice to my ears. The hardest part would be if session runs out of id-s I guess. One can never allocate optimal pool of IDs for every user, there are always going to be "bad cases".
Obfuscated code contest returns
I observed these traits from a unique vantage point.

Worked with the "world's biggest auction site" for 8 years since 2002. I remembered the pride the company had about it being profitable from Day 1 and the dismissal of Amazon for not turning any profit for so many years. The company had strict quarterly goals and any decision, no matter how appropriate, if it hurts the quarterly goals was discarded.

Comparing this myopic view with Amazon's patience, stubbornness and customer focus; it's no wonder that Amazon went from half to more than double the market cap of my previous company.
Benihana, Indian Food, And Discovering Your Life Purpose
So far, the only VC that saw the video is Ron Conway.
Which, put that way, is not unlike the Innovator's Dilemma.
maroons happen everywhere.

But I guarantee you only the most amazing and celebrated of individuals have self-taught themselves advanced mathematics and performed at the highest level of the art. The only one I can think of the modern era is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan, who is essentially legendary for what he did.

The core issue is climbing the tower of knowledge of what has gone before requires deep investment and usually a guide until you attain a deep and broad knowledge. There is so much knowledge, we must leech off of the knowledge of those who have also done the studying and have more experience. It's a pain.
Audiogalaxy is a great service. Works well on desktop and iOS. Highly recommended.
Lawsuit Claims Death is a Result of Poor Road
How To Brine A Turkey | Savory Spice Shop
Viacom v. YouTube. The one who complains is listed first.

But yes, it does mean wasting a lot of money on lawyers to fight a very bad law which Google could instead be using to build computer-driven cars, improve machine translation, and to create more high-paying jobs.

Instead, we're getting the broken window version where they're forced to create more highly-paid lawyers, instead.
CrashPlan looks awesome, and they support linux. Thanks for the pointer.
Generating realistic-looking stories in Pivotal Tracker 
A Ruby script to fill a Pivotal Tracker project with some reasonable looking stories.

This is useful for:

- Experimenting with workflows on a tracker other than your production one
- Teaching clients how to use tracker without exposing another clients' stories
- Learning to use Justin Smestad's pivotal-tracker gem

Cheers,
Jon
This is really awesome very excited to start using.
I've also been working with the Dropbox API on a file-sharing-platform.

http://uberzet.com
As I said, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Verfassungsbeschwerde von E.on in Karlsruhe eingegangen
Previous submission, quite active:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242371
No they don't. Degradation of lithium-ion batteries is a function of temperature, time since manufacture and charge level rather than charge/discharge cycles. If you keep the battery cool and don't discharge it below 20% or so, it will last a very long time. If you keep it hot and constantly do full discharges, it will be dead very quickly.
Exactly. There are ~50,000 applications on kongregate alone that wouldn't have existed without flash. The hatred is puzzlingly ill-placed.
Wait, which phone doesn't have a proprietary OS?
Ancient Gambling Sites
IANAL, but I would think that if downtime that is not covered by an SLA occurs (and you can prove monetary loss because of it) you should be able to sue. Maybe a lawyer can pitch in...
I often wish there was some way to inject some order back into the real world systems. So many of the techniques and processes that developers take for granted seem entirely absent from our regulatory and administrative law systems:

refactoring

version control

DRY applied to laws and contracts

diff tools for laws and contracts

standard interfaces
Hear hear!

I long for the days when I can awaken my laptop from it's peaceful sleep not to have it crash the moment I hit a youtube page in a browser tab I left paused.
Here's the Makers vs Takers video. Replete with scary music and "The Daily Show has been watched x million times.. illegally" (because Comedy Central doesn't let the whole world watch it on their website? I watch it there and sit through their ads. What's not working about that? Oh, I know. Sometimes my net connection might suck. If I hypothetically can't watch it streaming in RT I might look for other options.)

http://www.viacom.com/news/Pages/anti-piracy.html
Thought experiment: Imagine the same product, determining the location of a mobile device, through a different mechanism. How about we replace SSID with paint color of a building, and the mobile device's wifi antenna with the same device's camera. From there, the service works more or less the same. The sensor (camera) sends google a snapshot of its current surroundings. Google compares this pattern of colors to a map it has created by cataloging building colors around the world and makes a best effort to find a match and provide a location based on that.

Assuming you are ok with google street view (if you're not, I assume they same reasons would apply to SSID mapping), what then is the difference between the color of your house and your SSID?

And to head off one possible reply, the data collection issue is orthogonal to the mapping of SSIDs. I don't think anyone is saying that it was ok to capture data packets, but for the purpose of this thought experiment, let's pretend that google had properly performed the SSID mapping and stored only SSID and location of their collection vehicle.
La Identificaci�n Y Los Sistemas Biometricos
I don't get the impression that they're allowed to talk about their jobs.
If your job is to shepherd, say, Proctor and Gamble forward, then the upside of boldness is radically less than if you're Amazon. And the downside of boldness, profligate spending, is likely to come out of your margins without ever being made up in the long term.

In a relatively mature segment, operational discipline is more important than big ideas and plans. Since the reward system is different, it attracts different people, and a more suitable mentality.

This is heavily related to why it's so often that the best people from a growth company leave as the business matures -- the skills that make you great at growing a company will not make you equally successful at managing an existing business, even aside from the fact that growth-company people usually don't like doing the more mundane tasks of a later-stage business.
Yup, that is why I bought Amazon stock in 2005 (really, from an interview that was very similar to this one). Jeff Bezos talks about long term thinking and also executes on it.

I think it also relates to the point made a few weeks ago about Silicon Valley being ADD in some respects -- chasing the hottest new thing, rather than conscientiously building value over years. I think someone said something about Bezos choosing Seattle for that reason. He wasn't from that area like Bill Gates -- he was in NYC I believe and moved out to Seattle to start the company.
You need to discharge them really slowly to if you want to keep them cool. So, there is a link between discharging and temperature assuming a high power device.
I just responded too, just in case, awesome of you to offer to do this for the community! Good designers are hard to find your stuff looks excellent!
I really want priority inbox and bulk actions.
It seems to me that deleting the original file is hardly good enough.

I think that a secondary market for digital works is something that will just never work like it does for physical media, and that's something we just have to accept and move on with.

My biggest worry is that ReDigi is going to end up losing a lawsuit that sets a bad precedent and makes future better technologies impossible.

That said, the RIAA's ownership vs licence vs access debate is BS, and they never even stick to it.

The RIAA needs to change course soon, because unlike the book and movie industries, I can easily imagine a future without a music industry at all.

As for Amazon vs. the authors? I think they are pretty much both wrong, and I'm staying out of it.
Love Every Second of What You Do
Cardinal Sins of Landing Pages and A/B Testing
Several factors are important here:

Degeneration of K-12 education. College freshmen have to spend significant effort (up to 1-2 years on average I'd guess) just getting caught up to levels of basic mastery of reading, writing, logic, and mathematics that they should have had as a HS graduate.

Increasing concentration on volume of "material" rather than on level of mastery.

As the college loan bubble and the increasing reliance on a college degree as a necessary credential for most white collar work colleges have shifted towards becoming degree mills. More and more students are valuing the credential more than the knowledge, and they are pumping huge amounts of money into the system sustaining those values. This necessarily warps the institutions of higher education. And as they struggle with ways to soak up massive influxes of tuition without throwing their integrity out the window (or losing their accreditation) they've increasingly fallen back on volume and intensity of course work in lieu of demonstration of mastery of knowledge.
"If ReDigi’s service can accurately prevent users from accessing songs they’ve sold to the service, then the RIAA’s rights have been legally preserved."

Big if. How is ReDigi going to prevent users from downloading song backups from dropbox?
Actually, if the goal is to gauge students' progress and make grading easy, you can get that same effect with periodic short quizzes and occasional exams. There are loads of college classes that do this, and make homework assignments optional. Loading students down with vast busywork isn't necessary for tracking and easy grading.

I think the main reason why students get lots of busywork is because it feels like diligent teaching, and it's relatively easy. Cynical of me, I suppose.
What Hiking Can Teach Us About Launching a Startup
I liked this article a lot, so please don't think I'm being negative. The only thing that I sort of disagreed with was "we should optimize for the most likely scenario"

I disagree.
1) optimization is fragility
2) the extremes will inform the average

The "most likely scenario" is a visitor with a fast-enough Internet connection that a few hundred ms more won't matter.

So we should build for the extremes? Well, that's a little extreme (see what I did there?). But if you point to stats like "5-9% hit the back button...", that is not the most likely scenario...it's, well, 5% to 9% of the scenarios...

There's a documentary called Objectified that examined this with physical products, check it out. I think when developing and/or designing for speed, the "most likely" person is the least of your worries. The people still rocking slow dial-up connections are the ones who will be impacted...design and develop with them in mind.

One example from Objectified was a toothbrush. When they targeted extremes and made a handle that musclebound roidheads, people with MS, and old people could easily use (i.e. the extremes of human mobility), the "average" consumer was more than taken aware of and the extremes were satisfied.

If you develop and design for the slow browsers and the wonky old Internet connections, or at least keep them in mind, the normal folks will be more than satisfied (ideally).

Sorry to be so picky it just caught my eye and I felt compelled to chime in whilst waiting for school to end...
I agree, though, zero sales tax certainly plaid a role, too.
Any political action that can restrict the behavior of business is crippled in advance.
What evidence is there that iPhones have Carrier IQ? The articles out there seem to be about Android.

I would at least like to hold out hope that Apple's approach of not letting carriers screw up the iPhone with a bunch of third-party crap would extend to this.
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Or even just using ReDigi on a machine that isn't their main iTunes machine? It's easy enough to copy your library over and just never sync to it.
The post is pretty scrambled and confused, I didn't get anything out of it.

For an independent assessment of what proficiency means:

Being proficient means that you are good enough at what you are doing.

There are four ways you can go from there:

1) You can vegetate, rest on your laurels, and keep doing the same-old. This will sort of work for a while, but you will likely get into trouble down the road.

2) You can continue learning about the technology or application, developing focused expertise. You become the expert at some narrow field.

3) You can start learning about the context within which you and your software works. This can lead either to a management position or to a technical integrator-type position depending on what parts of the context you focus on.

4) You can branch out, once you are comfortable with what you know in one area, start learning in a different one. Applying your language to a different application, learning a different language, or almost anything. The big benefit here is flexibility.
Great post however many things don't fit the pattern. For example, lacking precognition, your search app can't know what people will search for. There are many similar UI examples, where you can't do stuff until you get input from the user, leading to a fundamentally synchronous (from a user's perspective) transaction.
I like the basic concept, but I am not going to give you access to my entire Dropbox; why not a subfolder therein?
So much awesome. I know alot of HNers may view this as another sign that we are "in a bubble" but I think this is just good old fashioned creativity. Im rooting for you undrip.
Lithium is worth a lot more than lead so unless there is significant reason to think otherwise they are probably worth recycling.
Capture and Style Web Content Your Way
here's my take, for the tasks I've done with turks. Maybe I'm no expert, but I've run enough HITs to get an account rep.

A certain group of turks are just criminals who do totally bogus work. Maybe they use automation or maybe they just click as fast they can by hand, but their work is worse than an optimal model that does work by chance. They're easy to catch, both technically and emotionally.

The people I have a hard time with are the "superturks" who do a lot of work and manage to do it just barely well enough that it's hard to kick them out. Technically it's easy to catch them because they are the N people who did the most work. Maybe I could just be tough and kick them out, but I'd get the work done more slowly without them.

My guess is that a turk who's good at task A might not be good as task B and vice versa. I know that turks like my tasks enough that I get regular emails begging me for more HITs...

... but then, I hate to break the news that I built an A.I. that's more accurate than the average Turk and 1000 times cheaper.
My shameless plug: http://safebox.fabulasolutions.com/ released few days ago to take care of end-to-end encryption.
Georgia Tech Invokes Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, Cripples Wikis
Ballmer: We Will ALWAYS Be In The Windows Era
IPhone 4s Siri
Mining Twitter Data for Winning Political Candidates
Only if they are also the authors of filtering software. However their bets are hedged on DNSSEC and other lucrative snake oil projects.
because he bought a tesla with that money... :) LoL
Introducing Evernote Clearly: One Click for Distraction-Free Online Reading
Ah, and just as I read this, I find that cyanogenmod for the galaxy s has recently become stable. I now have a hot date with an exploitable bootloader.

I've been running some sort of dodgy leaked nightly build from samsung that doesn't have any carrier shite on it since I got the thing, so maybe it hasn't been there all along. Either way it's high time for some new firmware.

As others have said here, you can remove this stuff all you want, all you're doing is shutting off the simplistic application layer backdoors. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the backdoors built into the baseband firmware itself, which is what law enforcement agencies use.

Well, absolutely nothing except flashing your own open source baseband firmware from the fine folks at the OsmocomBB project. Unfortunately that project only targets a very small set of simple featurephones, which won't do much to excite HN types. What may whet your appetite however, is the possibility to inject arbitrary packets straight into the GSM network! The possibilites for fun, learning, and prison time are endless.

http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0LCgxe24Po [27C3: Running your own GSM stack on a phone]
Liquid cooling for batteries wouldn't be worth it in earbuds, but it probably would in an electric car.
Gmail optimistically updates the UI in many cases, for example when starring a message or marking read/unread. Not doing so for send was a very conscious decision due to the severity of the failure cases.

That said, work has been done to ameliorate the problems and reduce the chance of data loss. Check out the "background send" lab released earlier this year : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-in-labs-background...
I was under the impression that discharge rate scaled fairly reliably with recharge rate. Is that not the case?
Very well done. I like the second rapper. I would have liked to see more computers in the video. And maybe even some matrix code effects...
Greplin (YC W10) Opensources Zookeeper Utilities
Skimming the site, it looks to me like DNSCurve is more of a transport protocol for DNS records, almost like running DNS over DTLS. This would certainly be a useful improvement, but I don't see where it talks about how the records are authenticated.

It is pushing off the "do you trust (Versign+USDoJ | greatfirewall.cn) to give you the legitimate answer to your .com query" problem. Which is the kind of problem that the Internet is good at routing around but would be bad for it to do so.

E.g., users will (at best) change to alternative DNS systems or (at worst) toss out this hierarchical authority naming concept entirely. Consider how many users simply wouldn't notice if Google started returning IP addresses or proxy names for search results. Or maybe they set up an alternate with their own naming scheme for Chrome, Android, ChromeOS, and everyone with their search bar. (Oh wait, I just Googled it and they already did that and I didn't notice http://www.infoworld.com/t/dns/google-launches-alternative-d... )

If Google does it, then Microsoft must too. And Amazon, and The Pirate Bay and so then we need a protocol for deciding which DNS system the client will use on a per-request basis, and civil-rights-disrespecting governments try to sabotage that too and round-we-go the Internet we know and love is circling the drain.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one that can't stand Pivotal Tracker and agile project management "stories".

Pivotal Tracker de-emphasizes the things I think are most important:

* A clear, long-form description of the problem or requirements

* A long-form description of the likely solution or potential issues around the idea.

* A simple one-at-a-time view of a specific issue. If I'm working on a specific feature or bug, I don't want to see every other feature or bug sitting around.

Pivotal Tracker seems to push these things to the edges, and instead focus your attentoin on extremely small/quick/poorly-considered "story" entries, in a huge list of entries.

In contrast, I'm a huge fan of JIRA and Apple's (internal) Radar. Do I just not understand something critical about the agile project management approach?