skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thats like asking if what if DSL is slow compared to FIOS or something when everyone else is on dial up.

Sure, I guess you can always find someone smarter. But really, Einstein had a particular "smartness" and existed at a certain point in time that made him notable. To say that someone sometime could come along and be better is pretty meaningless.

Just because the local maximum is not the global maximum does not imply the local maxima are meaningless.
In a SaaS company the cost of sales is recognized immediately, but revenue is only recognized one month at a time. The company might spend $3K on marketing and sales to make $15K over the life time of the customer. The cost of sales up front, while the revenue won't be recognized for months or years. Thus when the company is in rapid growth phrase, earnings will be practically nothing,. All cash is reinvested in sales & marketing, and the profits won't arrive until growth starts to plateau.

Of course, sometimes it turns out that the sales and marketing expense is actually more than the life time value of the customer. The company never gets to profitability, and the share price tanks. This happened to Vonage.
Don't they use affiliate links for when you purchase the song from the (iTunes?) music store.
The FreeBSD Forums (Just Launched)
He didn't say that he has a right to make $50,000 year no matter what. He said that if you are not going to make $50,000 a year then your company is not going to survive, so you need to find a way to make at least that much money.

How much money the top 10 developers make is inconsequential to all the other developers that aren't in the top 10. The top 10 will always be filled mass-market applications. Most developers aren't developing applications with mass-market appeal.
Does Design Matter in Comparison to Content?
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365384
In either case, the numbers still don't reconcile.

Is the 5.7 Million hours of video/day number right, or is the 2000 Years of video/month right?

2000 Years of video/month only works out to half a million hours per day ... not 5 million. They still differ by an order of magnitude.
Taken at face value business majors are surprisingly conservative. They're there because mom and dad told them it would be safe/smart, and in other cases because they couldn't think of anything else to study.

So it's in those impractical majors (e.g. philosophy) that you're more likely to find free-thinkers, idealists. And as it were, that's exactly the type of attitude you need to reject offers for safety, security, and fortune in the name of your own romantic idea about making a difference (but probably just losing your shirt).

Least that was my experience, and I'm a startup founder + recovering business grad.
Popularity is what you need in high school. Yahoo needs some money.
You ask seriously?

Then you should stop programming and start hacking (in the spare time of your day job).

Seriously: what exactly do you expect from the only 2 languages left with exactly no fun?!
Hi, Ben from microPledge here. Hmmm ... it's not that PayPal is an "unreliable" payment provider. We found them to be pretty reliable. It's that we (and you, by the looks) are contradicting their ToS in quite an up-front way. We didn't know this at first (i.e., we didn't read the fine print carefully enough.) It's partly holding money in escrow, and partly collecting money on behalf of other "traders" (the developers).

As soon as they catch a whiff of that, they'll shut your account down, and lock your money in for 6 months.

It's not very pleasant, to put it mildly, and if I were you I'd switch to AlertPay or some other provider ASAP. Sorry to be negative about this ... but I'm commenting so you hopefully don't have to go through what we at microPledge did. :-)

(Edit: Oh, just curious, how much did you know about microPledge before you launched? I wouldn't be surprised either way, and certainly good on you for trying ... but your descriptions of the site on Bitloot sound awfully familiar. :-)
If you build a good app for $20.00 then somebody might clone it for $2.00. But, will they survive on their clone? Probably not, if they are living in a rich country. You just need to outlast these cheap knock-offs until their developers get bored and move onto something else. It might be a constant stream of knock-offs, but the longer you last, the better the reputation you build. Reputation is worth a lot, especially with people whose lives don't revolve around software development.

A good developer in SW Asia, SE Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe will always have an advantage over you regarding price. $10,000 or $20,000 a year goes a long way in those places (I lived in Thailand for $1K a month without even trying to be cheap). But, that is the case with other parts of the software market and somehow Asian, African, and Eastern European companies haven't taken over the while software development market yet. Probably in the long term they will, but that is years off.
Yes they do. I would, and so would you probably.

There's a huge difference between reading about this on the web and actualy being in an emotional situation where you want to help someone and don't diligently think all the consequences through befor you act. A situation also known as everyday life.
Quantum cloaking makes molecules invisible
It seems to me that if the local maximum in 1940 was lower than the global minimum in 2140, interesting things would happen, and that's worth wondering about.

How to best give people nutrition, love, security and education and everything they need to develop to their full potential are all tractable problems. How to manipulate human brains to enhance performance is something we learn more about every day. A guy in australia is unlocking savant abilities is some people with TMS. It's quite possible as these ideas blend with each other, a revolution in living could happen where the average person was functioning at a higher cognitive level then einstein. It may in fact be the only way we don't all kill ourselves by blowing up the planet.
More people losing their jobs means more people with free time to build an iPhone app while they look for a new new job. Plus, a poor economy lowers the market for these unnecessary goods. So it is likely the result of a serious recession is more competition for fewer customers.

Apple could reduce the number of iPhone developers by charging more for the SDK, or by charging a larger transaction fee. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did increase the costs substantially sometime soon. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see the standard transaction fee increase substantially, with tiered percentages based on price and/or volume (e.g. start $1 flat transaction fee + 30% of the price for the first 1,000 copies, then reduce the percentage gradually for each 10^nth copy).
You're right, excellent point. Totally overlooked that.

All a matter if Salesforce's software is satisfying enough for their customers to break even and to make profit.
smart ones do.
Top 10 Greatest Game Consoles
Right, but the same could be said about the USA. My monthly burn is much higher than $1000 :-(
BUT, living in rural Minnesota as I do, it really isn't hard to lower your living cost below $1000 if you want to and are single (When I lived in the city of Minneapolis, my monthly bills including mortgage totalled probably around $1,500). Being American and living here in the US gives me a huge advantage on understanding our culture and being able to design a UI that appeals to Americans and to be able to support them that a smart Thai doesn't have.

I am seriously thinking of getting into iPhone development even though I've only seen one once :-) Why? Because I already design & build mobile Bluetooth hardware and I can see many apps where the mobility of an iPhone would result in a great product. I don't care about consumer apps, but there are tons of small business applications that have been waiting for this kind of connectivity in your pocket!
Joe The Plumber's Landing Page
This is certainly true, especially when you're only trying to create a feature of an existing product. There are however, recent examples of features from other products turned into successful services on their own (FriendFeed is one example that comes to mind).

The flip side is that there is very little new under the sun, even in technology, so successful products are more often than not the result of innovation as opposed to invention. I know Paul Graham has written about this, and it has certainly worked for companies like Google.

One important feature of new tech products is the whole product concept from Crossing the Chasm. In our field, where things are changing on almost a daily basis, it's hard to determine what the whole product may be but companies with this mindset and approach are much more likely to succeed than others.
Do you have examples of MS running over companies that got in the way? What should I avoid to prevent that?

I am thinking of selling a somewhat unconventional and new (for the mainstream, like Lisp) programming tool. I thought that the .NET community will be less reluctant to try such a thing because MS is pushing new things like F# too. What do you think?
i'd be interested in how much money justin.tv makes as compared to various countries' GDPs
Smanek - your right - I misplaced a decimal point - corrected above.

Thanks :)
I just had the best laugh of the day - thanks!
He's still assuming that maintaining one app will consume a person's entire capacity for the lifetime of the app.

One app does not have to be your sole source of income.
Unused Frequent-Flier Seats in a Flash
Jesus Christ, I need to drop out of hs. Tech is just passing me by.
The economics of restaurant reservations
What is it with online dating sites?
Did you mean: "expense is actually more" in the last paragraph?
While you could get by making $1000 a month in Minnesota, that isn't sustainable for the long term since you could just go get a programming job where you earn over $1000 a week. If you aren't making $100,000 a year developing your application then you are losing a lot of money once you factor in opportunity cost.

Regarding competition from our foreign friends: I think we are both thinking the same way here. Right now, we don't really have to worry about ultra-cheap competition too much. Eventually, I think we will--the cultural advantages you speak of are a short-term advantage, not a long-term one. My Thai friends already know a lot about Western culture because they deal with us all day long in Thailand. Whatever they don't know, they can learn. But, almost none of my Thai friends could afford to buy an iPhone right now; even if they could, they work 80 hours a week at their job so they wouldn't have time to develop anything for it. But, slowly, all of that is changing.
Does computer science need to be saved?

I agree that chatbots have tremendous pedagogical potential, especially if they could be programmed directly on the Web, rather than requiring complicated setup of a development environment.

Are you working on something?
What is needed to get started with Bluetooth hardware development? Do you have any suggestions for finding more info about it? Thanks!
Feynman, Rothbard, and the Science of Economics
Right, fixed now.
Hulu forecast to catch YouTube
why was my page was deleted
why was my crushspot page was deleted
Ask HN: Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC?
I'd like to start writing an iPhone app with a few friends while I'm a college student, I've always been a PC though. I don't really switch to something because it's more trendy, although I am a fan of Steve Jobs and have an iPhone. Can I develop iPhone apps on my PC, or do I need a Macbook?
Just like Google didn't win in search by being better than Altavista.
Which do you use more and find more convenient, a phone or the internet?
I agree with both you and kwamenum86.

Nobody would want to be mocked at when their startup fails. But the Cuil guys should have launched it without commenting anything about their search engine's performance against google. It this wasn't done, the feedback would have been a lot more nicer. (like "you've got to improve" instead of a quick BOSS mashup like Yuil)
I know yahoo works with it, and apples own me.com thing, but gmail doesn't which sucks, I think you can setup other email servers to do it.

Apple do still have a way to go though... especially with the battery usage which does suck if you actually use push/3g/gps.
Major science award goes to British woman 'role model'
This is interesting. However, from my perspective, I dont see this as a lack of 'provided solution by google', but rather a lack of plumbers even caring.

In the article:
"But if you are going to buy cpc advertising, then you'll need a place for the clicks to go. The local ad agencies and local oriented web services are happy to create a web presence for local merchants, but they are often poorly designed and there's no standardization of them."

The real key here, then, is not having this service available, but making it easier/better/more cost effective for the local ad agencies and ad resellers to use this instead of their own (and inferior) existing pages.

Most of those places (ad agencies, local web services) charge a nice upfront premium for this -- a handy new cashcow. Good luck getting them to drop it in favor of a free google solution.
Fascinating. I wonder if some sort of math model could help them squeeze out extra 5% or so?
It seems, we are pretty close to epoch where C programmer to be treated as assembly guru nowadays who can read machine codes right out of hex dump.

Man, learn C/C++ first, I beg you!
Hardest job in the world just keeps sounding worse and worse =)
SiPort Shooting: No Layoffs, Killer Was Fired
Isn't Omnisio a feature of Youtube? To me it is. And I use it way more than Youtube itself.
More people losing their jobs means more people with free
time to build an iPhone app while they look for a new new job

It could swing either way, I agree.
Well that changes the context quite a bit then.
Nice idea. (Aside: I'm running some experiments on similar themes, the first one is at: http://inimino.org/pffs/experiment )

As others have said, the site would benefit greatly from proper use of Web standards and accessibility. Perhaps these problems are due to GWT. What you have is probably good enough to test the idea, so I won't beat this into the ground.

As for the model, I think users are much more likely to fund software that they already know and use. Once software is actually released, it develops a community of users, some of whom may be willing to support it. Asking the small fraction of users with the foresight to anticipate using a program to bear the entire cost of developing it may work for a few cases (e.g. device drivers, or cloning existing software) but there are many other software projects that would have more success if they can rely on donations after they have been written and released.

A model that finds a way for developers to work on credit against donations from future users would be interesting.
MIT OpenCourseWare + VideoLectures.net
Snowball Effect: It’s Not That Bad
Good idea ... so far, 1 new customer from 110 clicks. Not terrible I suppose.
In some ways, yes. Although it's less of a math model, and more of a server (as in waitstaff) model. A good server will make suggestions and upsell you on things like premium side-dishes or other add-ons, without making it seem like they are doing so.

A well mannered and sales-oriented waitperson can easily bump up the average per-seat revenue by 10-15%, without making the diners feel rushed.
I was thinking more around scheduling the tables.

A model could take into account who is coming (given caler ID), today's events, weather, traffic accidents, etc. and see if there is effect on how late people come and how long they stay.

Now of course a good waiter would be very helpful in that customers will not have to wait to order deserts and so they can leave earlier. Good waitiers however are very rare and once found can not be easily scaled like a good model can.
As far as I know, the SDK will only work on an Intel Mac running OSX. (10.5?) Cheapest option is to go for a Mac Mini, or ask to be allowed to use someone's mac remotely to use the SDK. As there are a few of you, you could share the cost. (although you should probably work out who keeps it when you're done/in case you give up)
Alright, let me rephrase that:

"Don't trust unusually nice strangers who trust you too eagerly."

It helps with many different breeds of manipulators.
For what it's worth, while the SDK claims to be Intel only, I managed to get it mostly working on an old PPC powerbook.

The only piece that did not work was code signing.

In any case, just splurge for a Mac Mini if you're not ready to make a bigger financial commitment.
Fair enough, you got me there.....I was so excited about the post I forgot to question why there might not be any comments.

Sometimes that's what happens when you are doing design/biz dev/recruiting/hiring/marketing/testing/metrics/admin/coordinating freelancers/articulating the vision/project management/etc/etc.....7 days/week, 12 hours/day. Execution is a lot of hard work, and there are lots of painful lessons learned through trial and error that look obvious in hindsight. Onward!
The point of Gladwell's book totally whooshed over the writer's head.

We know the robber-baron industrialists were born in a particular decade, but is that the cause of their success? Obviously not. Gladwell isn't making an argument about the particular reasons that they were lucky -- just observing that they were. They had good timing, and that translated into economic success in their time. Everything else is speculation.

Nobody knows what's going to be "lucky" tomorrow. Maybe this time around, nobody will get rich. Maybe this time, we're creating a new economic paradigm where wealth will be more equitably distributed. Maybe this time, 30-somethings will get rich, because they've had a decade head-start on the 20-somethings to save cash. Maybe this time, everyone will go bust. Maybe this time, risk-takers will get squashed by the market, and savers will be rewarded for their conservative moves. We don't know, and we can't know.

Trying to extrapolate useful information from Gladwell's observation is antithetical to his thesis -- once you've controlled for practice and skill, a lot of the "secret" of success boils down to dumb luck. You can't reproduce luck. The best you can do is work hard, practice a lot, and hope that someday, lightning will strike you too.
Does this work for anyone using Safari or Firefox? I can't type in the box.
I understand where he's coming from as an investor, but it's kind of a shame that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism by which these sorts of features can be turned into reality.

Companies can't really accept unsolicited ideas from the general public due to the IP can-of-worms that that opens, and it's a huge amount of mostly wasted effort to build a company that's essentially a clone of another firm but with this one extra feature.

Unfortunately you can't un-know an idea once someone tells you it and you decide it's not worth what they wanted for it. And nine times out of ten it's probably not worth what they wanted for it in the first place. So maybe the problem is inherent.

One probably-unworkable solution would be a sort of IP escrow company, where, say, Facebook tells them every idea they've ever had, and when an unsolicited idea comes in, they compare it against the list and advise Facebook whether it's worth paying for. But conflicts of interest in that sort of setup are probably unavoidable.
I think the "have a plan B,C,D" point is important.

However, I think it's also important to have the right Plan A. Plan A needs to build something and get it out there - it needs to be the plan where you work hard and deliver.

If Plan A involves others coming to the party (e.g. a sudden investment) you're tying yourself to too many intangibles. Plan B should be "what if some investment comes along"?.. Your plan A needs to be flexible enough to accommodate these things when they come along - they can't be built-ins.

In my view - Plan A needs to be the most likely, if slightly pessimistic scenario.
Mayson, I don't understand tweetsville at all. Please help.
It's a lot like how one-off pieces of art always seem really expensive, but the fact of the matter is that to make that art someone has to be able to support themselves doing something that typically doesn't really scale.
These photos are great! I'm impressed with this stuff. Which one did you like best?
I doubt the global minimum is going to change too much in the short term. There are people with philosophical objections against say genetic treatment for diseases, and I think certain developmental disabilities will remain with us for a long time.

(Plus, oftentimes people who are immensely smart in one respect are lacking in others, so perhaps there will always be room for, say, math savants who can do little else.)
* OCW is not an MIT education.
* OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
* OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
* Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

I wonder if removing the nots will ever be considered a goal.
"Let’s face it. Life would be pretty boring without the Darwinian struggle for survival. Without external forces pushing organisms to adapt in order to ensure their continued survival, you would be swimming in a primordial goop, along with the other single-cell creatures, rather than reading this enlightening article."

Ironic. Value systems evolved because they conferred an advantage and were passed on. He's quite literally programmed to think competition is good & promordial goops are boring.
Here is a question that's been beating at my brain lately and this post help catalyze my thoughts into text: how do we know what we're working on is worth it? In other words, how do we measure what we're doing? This question begs another set of questions, which is: What do you value? Do you value what you do? More often than not, I find money as a poor system indicator for determining the value of what people are doing.
Why would that be scary? Most people still don't attend college; attendance certainly has no bearing on innate intelligence.
What do you all think of our graphing calculator app, Grafly (http://grafly.com)? Is it worth $9.99? We think it is, in that there's nothing like it on any other platform at any price.

Like all the "please rate my web site" posts, I'm interested in what HN denizens think.

Thanks.
If you're interested in working on the Microsoft stack, they actually make it very easy for startups and ISV's. You can get a full Action Pack subscription of licenses for $300: https://partner.microsoft.com/US/program/managemembership/ac...

Or, if you can find a Network Partner, join the BizSpark program and use their stack for free for $100 after 3 years: http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/

The argument of Java is better because it's cheaper tends to fall apart when you look at that.
Google didn't win by having a better particular feature, it won by being better at the core competency of its competitors: delivering relevant search results with a minimum of spam.
Blender Game Engine Competition
Lambda Calculus and Lambda Calculators
I think you'll find an equal portion of developers on any platform are eager to try new things.
His comments on undercutting Sega are exactly incorrect. You, a random developer, have little expenses and can stand to make $50k off of an app. Sega, on the other hand, has a ton of expenses, spends probably millions just to make a Super Monkey Ball, and can't afford that.