skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your FTC link is really handy. You should read it more carefully. On that page is a paragraph which directly addresses this situation:

Q: Is it okay for a company to "dry test" a product?

A:"Dry testing" describes the practice of placing an ad for a product to see if there is sufficient consumer interest before actually going to the expense of manufacturing the item. Although the Mail Order Rule doesn't specifically deal with this situation, the FTC has issued an advisory opinion that such ads must clearly disclose to consumers the fact that the merchandise is only planned and may not ever be shipped.

Then it references another FTC publication about the "Mail or Telephone Order Rule" (also known as the "30-day Rule"), available here:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/adv/bus02.shtm

The page summarizes the Rule as follows:

The Rule requires that when you advertise merchandise, you must have a reasonable basis for stating or implying that you can ship within a certain time. If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days. That is why direct marketers sometimes call this the "30-day Rule."

And it provides this relevant paragraph:

Dry-testing

Q: We want to sell by mail or telephone a product that is not yet available. Does the Rule apply?

A: It depends. In an advisory opinion, the FTC told a publishing company that it could "dry-test" its merchandise as long as the following conditions were met:

> In promoting the merchandise, the merchant can make no suggestion that the merchandise will be shipped or that customers expressing an interest in it will receive it.

> In all promotional materials, the merchant must disclose all material aspects of the promotion, including the fact that the merchandise is only planned and may not be shipped.

> If any part of the promotion is later dropped, the merchant must notify subscribers of the fact within a reasonable time after soliciting their subscriptions.

> If, within a reasonable time after soliciting their subscriptions, the merchant has made no decision to ship the merchandise, it must notify subscribers of this fact and give them the opportunity to cancel and, where payment has been made, make a prompt refund.

> The merchant can make no substitutions of any merchandise for that ordered.

If these conditions are not met, the Rule applies.

So the answer is: This is not against the FTC's rules, so long as you are reasonably up-front about what's going on. It's particularly easy to comply with these rules if you avoid taking orders or money, but it seems as if you could even work around that, assuming that you're honest and timely and issue refunds to everyone on demand.

[NOTICE: mechanical_fish is not a lawyer and this is not sound legal advice.]
You bought AAPL puts near the current price? Given their growth in the mobile market, the presence of Steve Jobs, and cash on hand, that would be more of a bet than I'm willing to take. But hey, the thesis that consumers are going to stay away from Apple Stores this Christmas is reasonable - just not certain enough for me to bet on, especially given Apple's extra-low guidance which would seem take this into consideration.

I made a bit on AAPL calls buying the day before their earnings, and selling the day after (Dec calls, sold immediately after the pop in this market).
If it's a company that would be almost certainly successful and profitable but is caught in a bind because of the freeze in capital...

Then Warren Buffett will buy it out. If it's a company that is a bad, high-risk investment, its managers will skip asking big outside investors (there are plenty of hedge funds and private equity shops with spare cash on hand) and go straight to the government.
EventBox - All your social services in one app. (Mac OS X App)
Good idea.

GM should accept the fallout resultant from their poor production choices.

American auto manufacturers, GM especially, kept rolling out massive gas-guzzling SUVs, trucks, etc when the rest of the conscientious world was switching to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM's production decisions, coupled with their obliviousness to market economics and the shift of tastes in the _world_ economy is what hurt them. A governmental bail-out of GM would be devastating, really. Let the old, tired monolith die so that baby innovations can bloom.
Your title was very misleading. But the information that you wrote about was mildly informative and entertaining. Try to write about something really interesting and intelligent.
There was also an interview with him on Mad Money:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27599591
I'm in two minds about this kind of thing. On the upside, some of these ideas really do seem like they could help programmers to do things quickly and with fewer bugs. On the downside, the combination of bright colours, constant supervision, hand-holding, over-planning and idiot-proofing would make me feel like some kind of cross between a kindergartener and a galley slave.
Jealous of what? No profits, no business plan, fumbling with the developer platform and with Beacon (or whatever their ad platform was called)
What makes that a lower-class job?

If you can only get a high salary by joining a cartel, you are in a low-class job. If you join the cartel instead of earning what you're worth or finding a different line of work, you are a low-class person.
Do you have a link to the talk he gave?
Your confusing the engineers with grunts.
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2008/10/13/wsj/index....
Have you ever heard of XSS? I didn't fcked it up though.
Matt's point is that it will run well even without Steve. But, at least according to Good to Great, such ego companies fail pretty hard once their leader leaves.
The world is not all gaussian, though I do agree with your point.
Density (of population) is destiny.
Because the ads are paid-for, there is natural limit to amount of this sort of "recon" ads. If it's one out of 20 that I click on, I wouldn't be to upset and I don't see recon ads havng more than 5% of overall advertising budget in the world economy.
Clarium doesn't usually do that, though. They usually look for ideas so big they don't need to hedge to offset them (e.g. with oil prices, they found a discrepancy between the prices of various heating oil contracts, which could have been a nice arbitrage. But they just bought the cheaper contract, because they saw it as a cheaper way to get exposure to the price moves).
I had no idea that anyone still made whole sites in flash. Horriffic !
I'm assuming the goal is to see how many people would click on a "Register" or "Buy Now" link, rather than to see how many people would fill in their full credit card and shipping information? The former seems like it would still give some valuable information without being too bad, while the latter does seem questionable.
"Why" is rarely the right question for fashions. "How" works better: the party was a little cool, so cool people were more likely to associate with it, so it became cooler, so cool people were even more likely to associate with it.

Now, it's just visceral. A rally against the double-taxation of capital gains and dividends just doesn't have the cachet of a rally against hunger. This despite the fact that economic growth (the kind you get when taxes aren't excessive) has done a lot more to stop hunger than any rally or government program ever did.
I am 23
yeah, neat technology, but the site is terrible. You can make realistic looking teeth out of copy paper and you bury the image in a crappy flash gallery 10 pics in? Hopefully the technology is better than the marketing.
The economy of scale is a good point. I'm not sure there is necessarily a linear relationship between cost and energy use. It is more likely super linear.

In my mind, the costs passed onto the consumer in terms of pollution seem to be a big hole in the theory, though I do like it. Is there some way to theoretically cap it? Otherwise, it isn't possible to even hypothetically say how much price correlates with environmental impact.
Ah yes, but localization has moved up a level.
Awesome idea
it's pretty rare in our society, but believe it or not some people do appreciate what they have even when it is given to them.
This is interesting stuff (especially Cassandra), but I have to confess I've had nothing but troublesome and negative experiences with Thrift in my experiences with it, and right now I'd say that's the weakest link in this structure.

Thrift is fantastic when you're working in a C++-ish mode where CORBA-style IDL was as good as it got. But when it comes time to try and build something more flexible in terms of the protocol, or interface with scripting languages like Python which depends on a less typed kind of architecture, you're going to hit a lot of growing pains.

For example, I work on a project (which you can see public code for, check my github for Fuzed) that we'd like to look into providing a generic thrift interface for. But so far the Thrift infrastructure, despite being entirely capable of it, doesn't seem to show much interest in embracing flexible or generic protocols. Everything needs to be big-banged out up front, and this just doesn't jive with larger meta-projects building out fault-tolerant and flexible infrastructure that Hadoop doesn't meet the needs of.

This post's intent is not to say, "Thrift is terrible." Indeed, it is awesome at what it currently does. But if you want to go beyond that you're going to have to invest significant time and resources to get the protocol that binds all these amazing services up to snuff.
I'm generally way dissappointed with these lists from big name thinkers.
And isn't that precisely the scenario outlined in Tipping point? That's pretty cool - a book that proves its own point. It also reminds me of people who get rich selling self help books.
Right, b/c to become a star you need recognition from the masses. Thus, you must conform to the criteria the masses have for success in your field. Who's most likely to have the worst idea of what entails success in your field? The masses.
Maybe you could call it postpinkslip.com It's a bit shorter and (IMO) sounds better. It's also available.
Amazing stuff.

I am particularly interested in Scribe:

A Thrift service for distributed logfile collection. Scribe was designed to run as a daemon process on every node in your data center and to forward log files from any process running on that machine back to a central pool of aggregators. Because of its ubiquity, a major design point was to make Scribe consume as little CPU as possible.
If you build it on rails this wouldn't.... err, wait a second. Nevermind.
A union is a cartel now? Are you shitting me? It's amazing how anti-labor people are nowadays.
Though I must admit I HAVE NOT being inside zuckerburgs anus day in and day out so I can't judge the guy; I must say that from outside looking in, we have to respect what he's done.

Sure its easy to criticize but its a very simple fact that he had the vision/balls to make pretty bold moves and have them pay off.

How many of you guys can honestly say you could run that big of a company as CEO mind you. Not just some tech guy, some programmer but as C.E.O. AND programmer I have to respect him for that. He has made pretty swift and successful business moves which can't be said for a lot of startups.

Who would turn down 1 billion dollars, only to be valued at 10 times that later? Did we all forget about the success of the facebook api?

It is ironic that I am defending the guy, because I never went to college, so when fb was happening and all my peers were using it - I couldn't .And I do remember the douch-ness of his "a mark zuckerburg production" copyright details coupled with a logo that had HIM IN IT - but that is besides the point.
In a way, I named "Detroit" as a symbol of other rust-belt American cities, and more generally, industrial labor in America. US Steel cut pensions, GM cut all salaries by 10% and stopped matching retirement, and this is just the very beginning of a series of moves that corporations will take to protect themselves. I won't comment on the ethics at play here, but I will say that if handled improperly, you will have many angry workers with a lot of time on their hands and little to lose.
Why's it so important to not get demoted? Why not start out as high as you can, and then get demoted to peonage - getting the best of both?

On the other hand, peonage is enticing to me b/c then you don't have to care so much about red tape. If you are an awesome peon, then you pretty much have free range, though not a lot of money. But, if you're warm, fed, and have an internet connection, who cares about money?
Was that just bought at extremely-early-stage by HP or (why) would HP come up with something like that on their own?...
Mark's Facebook didn't succeed just because it started at Harvard. It succeeded, so far as I can tell, because he and his roommates lived across the sidewalk from the president of the Harvard Crimson in Kirkland House. I was also at Harvard in 2003-2004 with a cool product for students, but unfortunately I didn't have the press on my side.

http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/housesystem/trailer.htm...
Being an autoworker is not a skilled job anymore. Anyone can learn to do this.
Ask YC: Help with how to save data from crawler
Hi all!

We are creating a web spider/crawler for experimenting with classification of sites. We are at a point where we can't make a decision and I was hoping someone out there who has done this kind of thing before might help us make a decision.

Here's what we are doing as an experiment

1. Taking 1-2 million domain names and crawling index page plus approx 10 internal pages based on whatever links we get

2. The above will be done in a polite way so not to overload the resulting server and the spider will have a link back to us.

3. We want to run 3-4 downloaders on individual machines and we are using either Twisted or Pyro to do this

The above bit we're OK with and its done. We have two options we think for the next stage. Either:

- Push all downloaded data into mysql to process and for our parser machine to access and parse/classify

or

- each downloader saves the data as a file to its HD and then our parsing machine takes this information across the network

I can't find easy information about how search engines save their data (into a database or just locally to the filesystem) and we kind of feel at this end that it is fundamental at this point to decide on the correct path.

Any help or advice appreciated. Even criticism :)

John
Of course, but I never said that. One thing I don't like about all of this is the treatment of college students as anything but grown men and women trying to get an education. There is a strong contingent, if not a majority, that wants to treat college-aged adults as if they're still children (note alcohol and gun laws). This and its consequences are the main reasons that I left college.

Immediately following high school, I began work as a web designer/front-end developer. After over a year of that and taking night classes, I transferred to a good university in my state. I'd had enough after a semester, and more than enough after two, so I went back to front-end development.
HP purchased Tabblo (http://tabblo.com/studio) a while back, and I'm sure that team did this (they already deal with layout / printing / etc).
I wonder how many of the problems that plague the standardization of software engineering reduce to some form of Godel's incompleteness theorem?

My thinking is this: unlike the artifacts of other engineering disciplines, programs can be self referential. Thus, they can meet the basic criteria for Godel's theorem to hold. Godel's theorem states that for a formal system meeting these criteria, not all true statements can be generated from its rule base.

So, if we can say true statements are equivalent to use cases, and design patterns are equivalent to rule bases, then it may be demonstrable that software engineering is actually an unsolvable problem, at least in the large. Thus, there is then a rigorous argument that programming should also (but not only, since there are good software engineering insights) be considered an art in order to be accomplished effectively.
I pretty much gave up facebook and linkedin, never had a profile on twitter, friendfeed, and whatever else is the rage right now. And I don't find that I miss anything, on the contrary I actually have much more time to pursue the business and interests I like.
Isn't this anti-37 signals?

Ok ok , before the downmods come, I'm just saying!!!
This seems to be everything that 37 signals DOES NOT stand for, so the point is ...to each his own!
Why don't they just use solidified wood pulp, and remove the paper gluing step? Seems inefficient to me.
Not the way it was told to me. Though, to be fair, this was a non-union workplace (and actually they made buses, not cars). The grunts could be all gone.
It is ugly, though, to see the pigs begging for a place at the trough. What was sold as a bailout to sore up systemic instability in the financial sector has become an everybody-invited tax money giveaway free-for-all for the favored donors and supporters of Congressional election campaigns.

The next time I complain about high taxes and someone says "STFU the government does so much for you like libraries and fire stations", I am going to throw this trillion dollar pile of shit in their face.
Nice anecdotes, but they also have rooms where workers they don't need and can't fire come in and sit for 8 hours everyday. The unions are a millstone around their neck.

Airlines, car makers, government, schools. Four sectors that are unionized, four sectors that are grossly inefficient, four sectors that are kept alive by taxpayer money.
It's Caches All the Way Down
I don't think they're too big to fail. They are too big to fail without causing a political issue that challengers can use against incumbents. That is not equivalent.
When you are working on big problems, it's sometimes easy to let yourself get stuck on some unimportant decision. Usually it's a sign that you are unsure of something more important but you don't want to think about it.

If you just want to run an experiment on 10M pages, then use whatever you feel comfortable with. The important thing is NOT files vs sql but whether your classification idea is worth spending time on. Who cares if it's inefficient? That's not what your experiment is about.
yters, is there a technology like that used in industry now? If so do you have a link?
The G1 does have a headphone jack - it just isn't the normal shape. You plug your headphones into the mini usb. It comes with some headphones that fit in there, so the headphone thing isn't really an issue unless you want to use your own special headphones.
Smells like 500GB of data. I'd save keep the crawled data in filesystems on the crawling boxes. Then you can load your mysql database and when it fails because <<insert-unforeseeable-circumstance>> you can take another shot at loading it from your data.

After you resign yourself to working with a subset of the data in mysql you will learn how to compute what you really want to know and write a fast processor to just scan the spooled data you have on your search machines and put that into the database instead of the raw data.

[[edit: maybe 500GB instead of 5TB, got a little crazy on my zero key in bc]]
Right, but you can't pop down to the local store and buy wood pulp (can you?). This does have the advantage of using something you can buy practically anywhere.
I think the HP team is more focused on marketing, manufacturing, and chemistry. The Tabblo product builds design intelligence into the software. It is a "soft" innovation, but certainly something that makes it more likely for a non-technical person to jump in.
10 hours isn't a long time, relative to the amount of effort it would take to produce something similar with other materials or older processes.
You are right, I'm just thinking about it in terms of production rather than prototyping. 10 hours is nothing in an engineering office, but if you are trying to produce low price point consumer products, or custom packaging, or something along those lines it becomes cost prohibitive.
I agree with you on 1) which is why I think 2) will be the more common route.
Zuckerberg may be less capable than his success indicates, but I am sure we are all capable of better things than sitting behind a screen and hurling mud at the successful. Envy is an ugly thing.

By the way, did you hear Steve Jobs is arrogant? The nerve of the guy, after building the second most successful consumer computer company of all time.
Like I said, the puts were based solely on the nosedive the stock will take if he retires or falls ill. Seriously, every time a blog posts a rumor that he's sick it dips 10% with no signs of stopping before they suspend trading. That's happened twice in the past year.

I agree with most of what you said, which is why I'll reverse positions immediately after it happens. If it does.
I haven't read that but perhaps I should. Either way I think selling the puts is good. But if I'm wrong that Apple can't function nearly as well without him, I shouldn't reverse positions after.
The tactic described in the article has limitations, but the underlying purpose of properly assessing the market before building the product is exceptionally important.
Why do we think about graphs and numbers differently?
This couldn't possibly be considered a complete or authoritative resource, just a spruced up email response, but I thought some folks might find it interesting.
I thought I was reading Hacker News?
Ask HN: What are the great ideas in computing?
Alan Kay has said that "the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past...it's very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past."

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Alan-Kay-The-PC-Must-Be-Revamped151Now/

So what are some of the great ideas of computing?

Where/how does one go about finding them? There is so much trash and "pop culture" in the majority of what's been written in our field (both popular and research works), that I don't know how to find the important ideas.
Tim Ferris also uses these techiques to test his ideas in his book, The 4 Hour Work Week
Same prompt on a desktop computer running Firefox with Flash intentionally de-installed.

I de-install Flash because it tempts me to waste time, and even when I do not give in to a temptation, resisting the temptation expends mental resources (namely, executive function) I could have put to a better use.
Anyone who's ever spent hours going down a rabbit hole that in retrospect was an obvious mistake may have a conception of why it's not necessarily a waste of resources. That, and anyone who realizes that programming isn't straightforward and he may not have all the best ideas about how to do something.

Sure, but many people know when they are about to go down a rabbit hole, and can just ask a colleague for some advice.

Also, experience is the best teacher. If you rely on the person sitting next to you to prevent you from making mistakes, you don't learn anything.
Still files.
I'll start with one way I've been trying to find some of these ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

Yes, awards always have a component of politics in them, but it's useful to look at these for a zero'th order approximation of at least some of the important ideas in our field. I've been working through each laureate's important works to try to find the key ideas. It's slow going, but yielding some good results so far...