skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a bit "pushing it" by saying the iPhone was a "big" technological revolution for having synthesized a few technologies together. Deep down, every invention is to some level, an evolution over existing inventions. As many great inventors said throughout history "I can only see this far because I'm standing in the shoulder of giants".

But sometimes, to better see the whole picture, we need to take a step back from the drawing board. We, as engineers, like to think that every great revolution in consumer behavior is due to a technological invention fundamental to the shift. But if you pay attention you'll notice that Apple's biggest innovation wasn't technological. The area they excel the most is marketing. They built a coherent experience from the device interface design, to the propaganda on TV ads that was powerful enough to convince consumers to buy their products.

Steve Jobs was a genius. But if you believe he was a genius engineer who you should try to mimic, then you'll end up making poor technical decisions. He was a genius marketer who excelled at convincing consumers his products are worth it. That's what we should take from all this. That's we should learn from Apple's growth. Marketing matters.
Of course you can. You only need it for the initial login.
I didn't mean to provide an exhaustive list successful characteristics.

Also it is a bit of a logical fallacy to say just because luck is not the main factor in success that being unsuccessful means you are lazy or dumb rather than unlucky.

You can take the luck argument too far though. You were lucky to be born as the you that you know because there were millions of other sperm competing to fertilize your mother's egg.
And in the same way: measure how long it takes to get an answer from your DB before you start worrying about these number.
I agree. Comparing those devices to the iPhone is just laughable. The iPhone took everything Palm could do and made it much more elegant and intuitive to use. It did it in such a way that made the older palm devices look so incredibly archaic.
Dodo?
I worked at a development shop where we hired a programmer who couldn't get a standard browser toolbar implemented.

Therefore, coders are useless. See how fun anecdotes are?

>"I left because I did not have faith in his management"

Weird, because all we had to do was replace the guy with someone more capable, and off we went.

Sounds like your technical founder didn't know how to manage human resources. And if he did, you wouldn't have left, and the business would have been better off, right? That's why knowing the intricacies of running a business is important.
Google? My management chain is engineers all the way up to Larry.
I'm very interested in the point made regarding interactive children's education. High schools across the country seem to think that giving students iPads to use as text books is a good idea. I think that if I was in high school and I had an iPad, I'd be surfing the web the entire time I was in class. I'm certain that's what the next generation will be doing if high schools do indeed end up going that route.
Nothing new here. Hence the term non-tech "cofounder", you're only half the equation.
Depending on the business, it can be an important half. Jobs, by his biography, wasn't technical. Gates was quasi technical, he ultimately purchased their initial OS. Larry Ellison wasn't really technical either. They all built some of the biggest companies in the world. And by technical I mean a coder, not someone who sort of understands technology.
In some industries, being technical isn't going to be enough. If the business is the technology itself, it may be, but a lot of times it is not. Take healthcare for example. It's a complicated arena, and unless you have some background about how the system works - the relationships providers have with each other, with their patients and with insurers, it's hard to gain footing, which is one reason why there have been only a few success stories so far. Or in media, with a company like Hulu, which hasn't been successful because of it's technology - but rather because of it's partnerships.
There are many ways to build a business, but what has changed is that there are many more instances in the past 15 years where the tech person/team can go it alone and build the business before other players come in. And I think that's a good thing.
I have a list in GV for people who frequently dial the wrong number. It plays a special VM telling them that they often dial the wrong number but to leave a message if this is correct and I will get back to them, eventually. I would probably use this for a similar setup.
Nope. It's called an "authorized generic. It's marketed by Barr, but it's still made by Shire.

From Wikipedia on Adderall: "Authorized generics are exactly the same as the brand name product both in active and inactive ingredients—they go through exactly the same brand manufacturing line, yet different labels are put on at the end of the manufacturing process."

There is only the illusion of competition. I'm honestly not sure how they get away with it.
Bullshit. http://i.imgur.com/Nw5gv.png

That’s how much detail OS X icons are supposed to have. (Have you looked at the apps that come with the OS?!) Smaller versions with less detail are used for smaller sizes.

I wish more app developers would actually have such awesome icons. But HN has to complain. Of course.
Well, many formats of telephone book are copyrightable, particularly the "yellow pages" portions, where selection and arrangement into categories are applied, meeting the "de minimis thought needed to withstand the originality requirement".

http://www.copyright.gov/reports/dbase.html

Many other collections of pure fact will meet those criteria as well.
I visited Prague and it blew me away. I kept going back; eventually met a Czech girl. In other words: for the best reasons.
So that's what a page looks like without Adblock. Interesting.
Microsoft Takes on iPhone, Android with ‘Windows Phone Challenge’ [video]
FREE feedback for your startups website
but I'm wondering if anyone has any words of advice for a techie (i.e., me) who has little business experience.

Just flip the equation around... if we're always telling "business people" to "learn to code" then, as a coder, maybe you should make a conscious effort to learn more about the business side of things. Is that really any less reasonable than asking a marketing guy to sit down and learn to code from scratch?

For an entrepreneur, I'd suggest reading Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany (at least until his new book comes out) since that's about as close to a "paint by the numbers" guide as I've ever seen, for founding a startup and dealing with the customer/market side of things.

Beyond that... read all the Jack Trout and Al Ries books on positioning, marketing and branding. Read Crossing the Chasm and The Art of the Start. Find out what textbook the nearest college/university uses for their "Business 101" class and "Marketing 101" class and "Business Law 101" class, and buy and read them. Even better, go to the nearest community college and take those 3 classes. That trio makes a pretty good foundation on some of the most basic stuff one needs to know about running a business.

And (talking out of my ass here, since I haven't done this part yet myself) read some of the top books on selling and negotiation. SPIN Selling always seems to be high recommended, so that's queued up on my personal reading list for this very reason (technologist with no business background, acting a founder).
I'm not an expert here, but my opinion is that there is no limit on the megatons, or if there is, it's substantially higher than 50. The reason I believe this comes partly from one sentence in the Wikipedia article: "Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland." That focusing reminds me of the practice of shaping conventional explosives. The focusing from the Tsar Bomba test was accidental, meaning that they did not design it into the bomb, but if you were to, for example, design a nuclear explosion to work in conjunction with techniques which allow for precise, large-scale control of weather, you could effectively create a nuclear shaped charge which would focus the explosion downwards or outwards, thereby allowing you to increase the expected yield, as delivered to the target, whereby dissipation into space would not be a real concern. This is just off the top of my head, and I'm guessing that no one's tried it, mostly either due to lack of need, or lack of ability to do grand nuclear experiments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_focusing
Visual Studio '11' Announced
> Scanning down underneath the diagram, I saw “Play Games on Google+” along with a lot of small text. I kept scanning, thinking that the column of text had something to do with playing games.

Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction. I am so used to skipping over ads with my eyes that I literally didn't even notice there was an ad there; I read the article about dinosaurs, and when I read the above sentence, I had to go back up to the screenshot and verify that there was indeed a Google+ ad there, that I'd totally failed to see.
But why can't tech people be the top management? Google has never had a suit as CEO. Don't think their VPs are suits either. But it's true for most of the business world.

Let me put this another way: are hackers inherently not suitable for top-management jobs, and there will always be suits managing them?
I/O and what nonprofits could learn from Angry Birds
Just flip the equation around... if we're always telling "business people" to "learn to code" then, as a coder, maybe you should make a conscious effort to learn more about the business side of things.

Oh, absolutely. And I have been. But I know it's more work than one person can handle, so it simply seems like it ought to make sense to bring a business head on board. But a cofounder is no small deal, so I'm concerned about doing it right.
Install AdBlock Plus. Solved. Not that big of a deal, huh?
The book 'Thinking: Fast & Slow' has a section on 'ego depletion' that may have some insight into your question. Basically when you think hard on a problem, make difficult choices, or work hard physically, you suffer from 'ego depletion' that makes further work even harder. This has a measurable impact on brain glucose levels. People given a glucose supplement don't suffer from the same drop-off in performance as those given a fake-sugar drink.

I hadn't thought about it in terms of Dweck's work on open-mindedness but it seems like accepting failures and persisting probably fall into the category of tasks that cause ego depletion. Very interesting.
LOL, I just gave Google as an example and I don't even work for Google ;-)
One thing that I don't understand about their interface is that if you click on a listing and then "back to search results", it doesn't return you to your search query but rather does a search for everything.

Also, it would be really nice if they would allow saving a search query for a trip being planned (I'm assuming they don't allow this now); it can be annoying to have to find and copy/paste some long address and fill out other parameters every time you want to resume your search.
"Backwards Compatibility

The maintainer (and original author) of Mercurial, Matt Mackall, is a strong proponent of backwards compatibility, which is important when you’re choosing a version control system that you plan to rely on for a long time."

Well, that's air-tight. You sold me.
> Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone

Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.
Venture Capital (VC) Blog Directory - Paul Graham's Essays #1
Tesla will have you sign a waiver: "We have the right to track your vehicle location in the event you're about to kill your $40K battery."

I don't know anybody in their right mind who would say no to that.
I'm curious as to the pricing structure in less corporatist countries, especially in places with public health care where (unlike the US), the government has the legal right to bargain prices and doesn't just satisfy any arbitrary price set by a manufacturer.
> Wrong and poor advice to subvert browser functionality. Alert the user to which input they are currently working with. Eliminates [tiresome] user guesswork and is conventional. Also helps the visually challenged.

If look at Google.com, the outline is a single pixel color stroke that replaces the gray stroke that currently exists when it's not in use.

When you look at Facebook.com, they don't have a highlight either.
So who is the author blaming? He's not blaming the end user (the one that makes those ads worth the most to both google and content sites).
- Is he blaming Google for maximizing ad revenue for the content site?
- Is he blaming the content sites for wanting to maximize their own revenue on page views? (or, perhaps, for being too lazy to sell ads themselves?)
- Is he blaming the people who spend the money to get their scammy ads to show up on these sites?
I find it seriously hard to believe that there's not a manual drivetrain disconnect. I do find it easy to believe that a tow-truck driver didn't know it had one, as I've seen them drag automatic vehicles rather than pull the transmission disconnect. I also don't find it hard to believe that most people don't know that these things exist.
I see that I somehow have made the entirely wrong point. I didn’t say that it’s sad that I have to wade through ads. As it happens, I have this “reader” thingie in Safari, which solves the ad problem and the readability problem in one click or keypress.

The thing I was trying to say that makes me sad is that there is a generation of smart people toiling away with the power of what may be the world’s biggest computing infrastructure, all to put those ads on the page.

I am lamenting the waste of people and resources, not the waste of my time.
Communicating with your Angel Investors
Never mind the polls—we’re convinced our candidate is going to win
100% certainty is always nice, but I thought everyone was already pretty well convinced that it was designed to specifically attack that lab. At least, that was my impression from that big long article about it that was going around a while ago.
Yes. you go to a psychiatrist who is familiar with the condition and are evaluated via a checklist, essentially - there is no blood test or technical diagnostic. Of course, it's not as simple as saying 'yes I am easily distracted, no I cannot concentrate, now gimme a prescription/disability parking sticker/get out of jail free card.' A good psychiatrist will look at the whole person's medical history and ask a lot of questions to check the consistency of the diagnosis, and may be slow to give a diagnosis immediately.Given our limited understanding of how the brain works, it's an inherently tricky process.

Regarding the claims of the article, I would like to see a lot more supporting evidence. I take generic Adderall (instant release) and have noticed no systematic supply interruptions. Nor have my pharmacist or psychiatrist mentioned any difficulties with availability, although I am used to reviewing the branded vs. generic options and pricing. Mine is manufactured by a firm called Corepharma, which isn't even mentioned in the article. Apparently some people find this version of drug inferior due to side effects or inadequacy of primary effect and prefer not to use it. For me the side effects have been very marginal so I have not bothered to seek out competing products. I presume that for people who are sensitive to a particular ingredient or characteristic the version of the medication they take matters a good deal, but in my own experience it's like preferring a specific flavor of coffee - others don't taste as great as my favorite, but they're hardly undrinkable.

The fact that other brands of the same generic drug go entirely unmentioned in the article makes me question the whole premise. If medication were simply unavailable as a result of manufacturing quotas that would certainly be a bad thing, but from here it sounds like 'it ain't coffee unless it tastes like Starbucks.'
Yeah, except that I'm fairly sure that a large percentage of web users don't even know their browser might support plugins, let alone that AdBlock exists.
What's the alternative ?

Having content locked behind a pay-wall so even less people can access it ?

Running ads which are more relevant but don't generate enough revenue to make the site viable in the long term ?

Not having the content at all ?
Don't move something I want to click
From my own experience, it seems that Google tests different contextual content from time to time. They have an algorithm that is supposed to automatically adjust and optimize the ads that get the most click throughs. Perhaps gaming related content works well on that site for some weird reason.

The "sad" part, if anything, is that the publisher decided to place the ad there. In my opinion, that is too misleading.
Cubes Python Framework is now MIT license (with SaaS notice addition)
http://www.djangobook.com/ is really good.
Hating on Apple is Stupid, Unless You’re Gonna Hate on Everyone.
We've Done Some A/B Testing and Came Up With This, are We Doing It Right?
Heh, it predicts Up Up Up!
You're telling me there's not one person in Google who's not an engineer/geek? Advertising people? Accountants? The CFO, Patrick Pichette, includes time at a management consulting firm and has an MA in "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics". I'm sure there's some geeks out there that do work for the financial people there.

Sounds like a suit to me. Don't get me wrong, there's lots of great suits out there, but that's my point, there's nothing wrong with working for competent suits.
When I see misplaced advertising like this, I just remember that it's not Google's fault; they didn't consciously make the decision that dinosaurs are childish/recreational fantasies that should be associated with gaming. It's the fault of dinosaur's representation today across the entire internet. Google's bots picked up that correlation mechanically, so while it's unfortunate that they propagate stereotypes like this further, it's not the root cause.
Tz Database lawsuit dismissed, no copyright for the rising Sun yet
Great post. Janice Fraser's LUXr classes (and slides) are worth a look. What I particularly like is for the first step, you describe setting a clear user goal, and they expnad on that:

We believe that people like [customer type] have a need for, or problems doing [need/action/behaviour]. We will know when we've succeeded when [quantative/measurable outcome], or [qualititative/observable outcome], which will contribute to [KPI].

See http://www.slideshare.net/clevergirl/luxr-oneday-workshop
How do you feel about the fact that certain farmers will starve if they can’t grow coca or poppies as a cash crop?
The Prada phone is as similar to the iPhone as the android phones people claim are rip offs of the iPhone. Given the short difference in time between their announcements, it is. Lear they were developed concurrently. Therefore, the android devices are derivAtive more of the Prada phone than the iPhone or the design decisions in common to the iPhone and Prada phone are "obvious"
The text ad is the only one served on that page by Google, if you go and look at the actual page the rest are served by AdBlade or Tribal Fusion. I feel like it's pretty misleading to complain about those ads as if they all came from the same company.
Devs and admins have different mindsets and attitudes, and that's a good thing.

Devs are more aggressive and forward-looking. Admins are more conservative and status-quo-oriented. You don't want folks with an aggressive mindset to admin your stuff. You don't want folks who worship the status quo to do development.
In a recent talk, Bret Victor gave a demo of an animation program where you could just click on an object (a leaf in his demo) and drag it around, and the software would record the object's position as a function of time. (His demo actually had the software on an iPad.) It was beautiful, direct, intuitive, and now I want it in all animation software!

Video of his talk: http://vimeo.com/36579366
This is stellar! Will definitely help create-out-of-this-world connections!
The difference is, hackers aren't inherently not suitable, but they're not inherently suitable either.

A good CEO can be a good CEO everywhere, but a good hacker isn't necessarily a good CEO anywhere.
I'm all for that mechanism that would distribute a fixed amound say 5 USD amongst the websites I browsed in that month so they could run without ads.
A fun read. I used to do my own lucid dream experiments, but it was very psychologically stressful, so I had to quit. Been thinking about taking it up again, though. I think it’d be neat to hold onto a mobile while you fall asleep so you can phone someone from within your dream.

It’d be nice to think you’re “hacking the universe”, but that’s dangerous thinking—if you’re wrong, you’re dead wrong. Besides, so what if you can’t predict the future? Your brain can make some decent conjectures based on patterns you’ve picked up without really noticing. That and keeping your mind open to opportunity makes you a very “lucky” person. That’s all you really need.
That is the Fundamental Attribution Error, that success derives from the person more than it does from circumstances.
Lightboxes are a dishonest metaphor for popups.

There's usually no indication within the content that what you're clicking on, usually a link, is in fact not going to take you to a separate URL where you can complete your business, which is conventional, but it in fact going to change your visual experience by [poorly] applying an opaque [non-universal] overlay to your content and present you with a form, content, media in a format that is completely unnecessary to the experience. In the case of the author's preferred third-party plugin, it adds an additional four steps to your experience:
1) activate overlay, 2) resize viewport to content, 3) present content, 4) user-activate close button.

All for content that is preloaded with the page. The author seriously thinks that inconveniencing the user with added steps and amateurish functionality at the moment of conversion is a good idea, but you can browse the code over at their webpage to get a feel for what they think is acceptable advice.

The author-suggested solution takes four to five times longer without even making a server call. If that isn't ignorant, I don't know what is.
Oh, absolutely. And I have been. But I know it's more work than one person can handle, so it simply seems like it ought to make sense to bring a business head on board.

Yeah, that's similar to the boat we're in. Three technology people (2 hardcore server-side coders, and one front-end coder/designer), and we're still looking for the right "business head" to bring in. The good thing is, we (well, me anyway) are arrogant enough to think we can go ahead and get started, and add the dedicated "business head" a little later on. But I've also been working hard to remake myself into a little bit of a "business head" myself (including taking some business classes at the community college and that whole bit).

Keep slugging away, the right combination is bound to come together eventually. Like pg says "just don't die." :-)
Human Investment - what it takes to build a good founding team
The article is quite clear on the fact that the other ads need not be coming from Google.
Is it lacking any major features? I've been using it happily since the GrandCentral days and don't feel like I'm missing much of anything.