skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This actually doesn't solve the problem it think it does. If this is an 'incubator' like YC (i.e. only lasts 3 months) this doesn't make any sense, because I can get a visitor's visa (B-2 I believe) to go and participate in YC.

If this is a more long-term solution, and given that they are renting office space for $1300 - $3000/mo, you can actually get an E-2 Treaty Visa assuming that you can prove that your company will employ 10 people over 2 years and be setting up office locally, and investing a minimum of at least $200K I believe. This was even before relaxation of H1-B rules that allowed foreign workers to start their own companies.

So I am not sure how far this will go...they should re-examine what they are trying to do. It sounds like they are just trying to experiment with a Seasteading exercise and have it subsidized by funded tech startups.

If the real aim is to solve the immigration problem for startups, this particular solution might not be the best.
It just seems to me like the author of this article isn't technologically inclined and owns an iPhone and/or iPad. Really none of the "advantages" (other than a larger music store) of iTunes Match aren't advantages when using an Android device with Google Music. And the "workaround" he posts (downloading music from the Android Store and importing it into iTunes) works the other way around for all the WMG music: buy music from iTunes, upload it to Google Music with the Music Manager.

I'd expect this from a general news publication, but it doesn't really seem like HN material...
I think the idea would to be ask once when you the app tries to do something that requires a permission, and from then on the app would be granted that permission (unless you revoke it). In practice, this doesn't seem to be a nuisance on iOS.
I think you are willfully misrepresenting my arguments. First, my initial post had two points: one, his argument is entirely fallacious and two, free software can and does work. I never claimed anything about all software having to be free or even that "he's stuck in old ways of thinking..." (which really sounds like a personal attack more than anything).

Secondly, my point about money was based on the fact that, in the same article, he admitted to being in the red. If he is losing money on this model, the assumption that any reasonable model will lead to his making money is unwarranted.

Finally, I don't see why nobody would pay to have a weather app. Plenty of companies give such things away for free right now; I see no reason it would not be carried over to Android. For an example, just search for "weather" on Google. While this is not open source, it is free so from an economic stand-point it is almost equivalent. Additionally, I could definitely see somebody like Samsung funding this in order to add a "feature" to their phone. Besides, there are actually several free and open source weather widgets for KDE, so it's clearly practical to have them.

On a completely unrelated note, there really seems to be something about the free software movement that engenders straw man arguments. Perhaps some of its supporters are too zealous, or maybe the arguments behind it are insufficiently clear. Or maybe it's just that most people don't really understand what it's all about.
Hi!

It sounds like you have a well established network of advertising that is working well for you currently!

Instead of looking to increase traffic, why not look to reduce traffic (i.e adwords cost) and A/B test actual conversion on your pages. Try to get more sales from fewer visitors.

Perhaps your Adwords are too broad, meaning that you get less qualified visitors. What can you do, to convince the customer to make a buying decision, today?

For new advertising methods, you could always focus on advertising on sites that pre-qualify the need to purchase jewelry. e.g popular wedding sites, people searching for expensive holidays (honeymoons), gift guides.

Analyse your online customer base. Are they all individuals, some businesses? Make a point of speaking to them, how they found you (who your referrals are coming from) what they liked about you, what occasion are they buying for. Go the extra mile for them.

If you notice patterns in your sales cycle how can you use this information (i.e more sales at the beginning of the month after pay-day) Find new ways to make your previous customers become repeat customers.

It sounds like you are already reaching far and wide with your Amazon business and that it's paying off.

I think if you use the information and data that you have at your fingertips you can ensure that you are making the most of the traffic sources you already have.
With how much Facebook are doing behind the scenes with the user tracking, it's hard to blame the EU officials trying to stop them. Facebook tried to bite more than they can chew, and they've been warned about going too far with all the privacy invasion for 2 years now, and they still didn't care, and went ahead anyway.
Autism Articles: Some Ideas For Teaching Autistic Children
Here's what I hate about Java: No unsigned types. Why do you love this?
As the article points out, the credit check is supposed to be one metric among many, and not taken as some overpowering data point. But for anyone to say that one's credit score does not proxy dependability is, I think, naive.

I think the notion that credit score is something invasive while work history, criminal record, GPA, determining how one got along with previous bosses, etc. is commonplace and goes unnoticed is somewhat odd. It should be obvious that employers have no interest in one's actual affairs, and instead are attempting to gauge dependability through proxies. GPA, how many times you've left jobs recently, insane rants on the internet -- these are all fair play and raise no eyebrows whatsoever, so why is a credit score any different?

This is a simple matter of being averse to things you're not used to and comfortable with those you are. Credit score bad! But pulling and evaluating your GPA, stalking your online footprint, looking into your criminal record, talking to your old bosses -- that's all fine. Sure, that will remain true until it becomes commonplace. At that point, just as with all these other things that most find completely unobjectionable, this won't bother anyone either. This is especially true when it's not even being considered as any sort of overriding decision point. Great candidates can have poor credit scores. Poor candidates can have high ones. Everyone knows this. But that can be said for all the other metrics gathered in an interview process as well.

And then there's the argument that credit score clearly can be asked for in certain jobs, e.g. financial services, but not others. This is highly curious. Why is it that one asks for credit scores when a position involves working with money? It's not a work competence question, to be sure -- it's a dependability metric: plain and simple. So I ask you: what is the difference between counting money somewhere and handling vulnerability data for the internal networks of Fortune 50 companies? Very little.

If the objection is that you don't like someone getting your credit score, then sure: I don't either. But I don't like the 10 other invasive activities that happen during any modern interview. It's all somewhat uncomfortable, which should be expected since the entire process reduces to evaluating your past and present to predict worthiness and fit for a given position. Complain about that if you wish, i.e. make the argument that interviews are too invasive to begin with, and perhaps I'll agree with you. That's a much better premise than taking one metric among others and claiming it alone is a problem.
The specs of the Nexus S don't differ significantly from the Galaxy S, which came out half a year earlier.
And at the end, it should be "omission" not "ommision". Thanks a lot, wish I had this years ago.
I don't think you looked very hard. This is quite plainly stated in the developers policy. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand this:

From https://developers.facebook.com/policy/

6. You will not directly or indirectly transfer any data you receive from us, including user data or Facebook User IDs, to (or use such data in connection with) any ad network, ad exchange, data broker, or other advertising or monetization related toolset, even if a user consents to such transfer or use. By indirectly we mean you cannot, for example, transfer data to a third party who then transfers the data to an ad network. By any data we mean all data obtained through use of the Facebook Platform (API, Social Plugins, etc.), including aggregate, anonymous or derivative data.
Living in SF and paying the super high rent, I think it would make sense. If there was a nice bus with Wifi that allows for a good commute, that might be a good option. I would miss the SF lifestyle however, esp. in Modesto. A lot of the advantage of being here is that you meet a lot of people. However, you might meet a lot of people on the bus...
I personally would want the incubator not to be located in Modesto however. Maybe there is some nice little town north along the 101?
It's different levels. I care about marketing in a check-the-rss-feed-once-a-month way, but not in a omg-what-is-pg-having-for-breakfast way.
You're basically making an economic argument, where you assume the risks for cheating outweigh the consequences of being caught. But your support for that argument is the claim that the risk of being caught forging data is less than the risk of not having a career, but that is a false dichotomy. There is a middle ground, which is publishing valid but less sensational results.

In other words, the choice is never "Forge these results, or have no career."
This article seems ahistorical. It suffers from a lack of awareness regarding how far back some of these trends go. The inaccurate emphasis here is on something unheard of and new:

"Technical founders have already become prerequisites in the world of tech startups. Now get ready for the designer founder. The combination of this new duo is going to change the world of tech forever."

But this trend is not new for startups. 37 Signals has been preaching this for a long time now. I can not easily find the original blog post that I'm thinking of, but there is this:

"At 37signals, designers lead the teams. Each development team is made of up three people – two programmers and one designer. The designer also manages the project. In addition to designing the screens/elements, you’ll keep the team focused and make calls about what’s important."

http://37signals.com/svn/design?n=25

But I recall quotes on the 37 Signals blog from as early as 2004 where they were essentially saying the same thing. Since they first began talking about Basecamp, they have talked about this style of development. This is not new.
In your opinion, do you think they should proceed with an IPO even if they have yet to "figure out a better way to monetise their audience"?

Perhaps the key word is "better".
Then what does justify behaviour?

Ethics is grounded in physical reality, that is sort-of where the buck stops -- at least it seems a better place than anywhere else. Surely an ethical evalution of an act depends on what the act is.

What makes an act bad? If, for example, you say stealing is bad, and are asked why, you can reply that someone loses something -- they could do things with it before, but no longer can. There is a sense of harm, in basic physical terms that we can all pretty much agree upon, simply because we all share the same basic physical condition.

But what if it were possible to steal something without taking anything away from someone -- i.e. the basic physical effect is different. Is that still bad? In what way could it be? You could just institute a rule proscribing such an act anyway, and so breaking the rule might seem bad superficially. But that would be like ruling that no-one can go out in the sun on wednesdays -- surely at some point someone will ask why. And there would not seem to be a good answer.

That is the way copying is different from taking. Because, at bottom, it does not do anything harmful, and is in fact positive. And that is why people are probably likely to have some underlying sense that copying is morally OK.
The Best Product I Never Knew About
Relationship Graph
ipython has known issues running certain code. It is not guaranteed to function like a normal interpreter. If you insist on a fancy interpreter, use bpython.
Google+ has exactly what you are describing. You can view those you follow separately by placing those followed into circles defined by yourself. Place all "person with independent beliefs" in an "Independent Believers" circle, and you can view only updates from your "persons with independent beliefs." The same applies to segregating "manipulators" into their own circle, defined by you and "tagged" by you. Note: you can place those you follow in more than one circle, in the event you have an independent believer that also seeks to manipulate you.
Aircraft engines occasionally catch fire, too, but no one suggests turning them off during takeoff and landing...
Exactly. Let's keep HN purely filled with startup advice, middle age crisis geek questions, functional programming trivialities and Mongo.
Eigenvector isn't that bad, it's just not english:

"The prefix eigen- is adopted from the German word "eigen" for "own"[1] in the sense of a characteristic description" (from wikipedia)

I think Shannon's Information Theory is pretty fair too. It's about how much information is in a message.

Plus, Computer Science has it's own grievous names: A* search, B* search, B tree, B+ tree, B* tree. That always drove me nuts.
It is also worth noting that, at least for me, seeing a tiny jpg of a Pollock can in no way compare to actually seeing the real thing. I was totally indifferent to his work right up until the point I stood face to face with an actual painting. The size and 3-dimensional textures and all the other little details that, to me, really make the works great, cannot be translated via an image.
Avdi Grimm responded [0] to this (relatively old) article with what I think is a salient point: traditional design patterns are good, but Java makes expressing these design patterns very obtuse and heavy-handed. Nick Kallen conflates using intelligent design patterns with calling out every use of said design patterns in bold-face.

Writing Java feels like "now I'm going to make a Factory Factory! See, it says FactoryFactory right there in the class name!"

It's entirely natural to use intelligent design patterns in other languages than Java - so natural, in fact, that you don't have to invoke said patterns by name to use them!

[0] : http://avdi.org/devblog/2010/02/09/everything-you-love-about...
You're absolutely right - the point is to break the app. This is great if the user breaks the apps in exactly the ways they want, but my point is that users rarely understand the scope of the app, and may (and likely will) end up revoking permissions that break functionality they want.

For example. I sign up with Foobar's Widgets with my Facebook account, and manually deny the "publish_stream" permission, because I just want to browse Foobar's widgets, and I don't want Foobar posting mean things about my mom on my stream behind my back.

Three weeks later, I come across a really boss widget, and see the "Share this widget with your friends on Facebook!" button. "Neat!", I think, and click the button. That fires off a job that gets stuck into a background queue (because doing external applications work in your web app directly is a recipe for self-DDOSing), and the worker pops the job, tries to run it, fails because the publish_stream permission is missing, logs the error, and closes the job.

I, the user, go to Facebook, expecting to see the widget there, but it's not there. I'll just assume it's lag. Things are slow sometimes. But it never shows up. I'm left with the assumption that it's Foobar's fault, for having a buggy "Share to Facebook" button.

The problem is that by putting permission revocation in the hands of the users without any documentation on what those permissions are used for, you leave it open to each user to assume what those permissions are used for. Imagination runs wild, the user freaks out and revokes the permission, things break, and people go home unhappy.

The case where this is absolutely needed is where an application is known to engage in some behavior that is undesirable, and you want to be able to prevent it from doing so. However, that's doable via the Facebook application permissions panel already, so I'm not sure that this is a big win. By placing it up front as a part of the authorization process, you're inviting people to break things in ways that they can't really see at the time of authorization.

I don't think the solution is "always trust the developer". There are bad developers out there writing abusive apps, and we need the tools to deal with them. The solution is also not "fully rely on the user to evaluate and grant/revoke permissions", because most users can't be bothered to read anything longer than your average tweet. Developers need better ways to tell people why they need permissions, and users need more powerful tools to cut out permissions that they know are resulting in abusive behaviors.
The definition of churn rate was the subject of a shareholders' lawsuit against Netflix in 2004. The shareholders accused Netflix of reporting an artificially low churn rate using:

Number of Customers churn / (Number of customers at beginning + number of customers gained).

Where the plaintiffs preferred:

Number of Customers churn / (Number of customers at beginning + number of customers at end of period)/2.

Netflix succeeded in having the suit dismissed, since there is no official way to calculate churn.

http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=62086

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/33875708/In-Re-Netflix-Inc-Secur...
On the other hand, I've had a few projects where I spent a lot of time building up documentation and marketing presentations and by the time I got around to writing the code I realized that the project really had no legs. It's very easy to hype yourself up to create a project and convince yourself of everything it's going to do, but before you do you need to understand if the project will work out.

I've had a lot of "wow, I don't know how to implement this" or "this isn't nearly as interesting as I thought" moments. Marketing tends to focus on the best aspects of the project, getting down to coding it makes you understand the challenge you're actually facing.
Cyanogen Mod, however, allows you to revoke permissions afterwards.
There are cheap pockets in Bay Area, like Oakland for example. There is a reason why nobody who can afford to not live there doesn't live there. Such pockets would definitely benefit from influx of educated enterpreneurial people.
Chrome should integrate this into the Browser. That way, Google could "protect" you against "privacy violations" by Facebook. It could show a little warning at the top of the screen, and allow you to edit the permissions (kind of like what the app does now, but as an official-looking browser message).

Oh, and Google should also do this with the Android App Store...
How I'd Stop SOPA
The top line in the article is "( This short story is from the October 2007 issue of Radar magazine. )".

1997 would make Cory Doctorow amazingly prescient, as Google was only a research project and not officially a company at that time.
I assume you overlooked O(n). You've probably used Bayes' theorem and the binomial coefficient, if only indirectly.

But I tend to agree with you: many of these are skewed by the author's perspective on what should be considered foundational. Someone doing webdev will not ever calculate eigenvectors. Someone doing machine learning will not be able to avoid them.
How to find great engineers outside of Silicon Valley
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I would imagine Adrian's list of priorities represents just that -- the things he wants to work on.
I broke my Nexus S 4G a few weeks ago (or, rather, it broke itself, and in the fixing I repaired the power problem and destroyed the speaker). I'm not sure if it's just the phone, or if Cyanogen contributed (I installed it almost immediately upon getting the phone), but that thing had awful reception on pretty much every kind of network, and the battery lasted less than half the day. Kind of a let-down for a flagship Android phone. Now I just wish that half the stuff you can do with a Nexus was available for something like the Photon, which has fantastic reception and battery life, but no CM.
I think you should change the default template to libnotify, so much nicer.

Also, the notifications behave strange when hovering over them with the mouse... they shrink onhover, then on the next hover they dismiss.

This is on Chromium 15.
(By 'value' you mean 'price' -- copies certainly have value, but they just have a near zero market price, ideally.)
I see it as being very similar to something like noflash - if I choose to install and run noflash it "breaks" some websites. Sometimes that's exactly what I wanted it to do - sometimes it's collateral damage, and when/if I notice it I can go in and whitelist something I broke to make it work again.

Unless you're worried that somehow this extension will get sneaky-loaded without the user understanding what it does, I find it hard to see your argument as anything but alarmism...

(Having said that, I've never written a Facebook app, and have no personal experience with that demographic - I could be easily convinced that popular Facebook app developers do get the sort of customers who complain that their critical "RanchVille" app - which they got for free - is broken with a blank screen and needs fixing _immediately_, oh and BTW hurry up, it's getting cold in this blackout!)
>The straightway is not self-policing because the dangers are not as obvious. Maybe there are animals crossing, or some other thing that is not immediately obvious to a driver.

I assure you that while I understand your point, people do go 80km/h in that area even though it is heavily ticketed and even though they do, there have not been any such accidents.

I'm not directing this at you but I have to say I'm getting irritated by the 'stop questioning, you wouldn't understand' argumentation. The reasons decisions are made and the way conclusions are reached continue to be a non-transparent process when there is no reason this should be. In the past, you could bring about an argument about communicating this information but with the possibility to post information on the website, there is no excuse.

I already highly question the competence and honesty of my municipality's decision-makers, this kind of shit is not helping.
Yeah I'm glad I didn't have to go through all that to realize that happiness and satisfaction has to start NOW. Don't push it off to some rose-tinted future of the ROI of investing heavily in a startup. Startups should be built with sustainable happiness in mind.

Disclaimer: I did my own startup in 2009 via debt financing, only to wake up daily with a sad, solemn face because I did it at the expense of my family, friends and my life purpose.
software startups on land: piracy is annoying or irrelevent

software startups at sea: piracy is deadly or worse
Minimum Awesome Product
i'm with you.

i'm rooting after the warranty expires
I think you're missing luigi's point. He's simply remarking that the OP didn't have to advocate a change in use pattern in order to lend his expertise to his friend's father. Instead, the OP made the choice not to use his time assisting someone who doesn't want to "go all Apple". Of course, the OP isn't obligated to offer free tech support, but he certainly could have helped.
Yes, that, plus the things that I think would be good for the framework and the community.
Are you talking about this review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R31YJRU8MO6FD4 ?

I was hoping for something longer...