skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AOL out the funds they spent on his theft of service and resources, and they're out the time they spent having security figure out why someone was sleeping there. They've been embarrassed in the press, and they're that much less likely to trust people that are part of their entrepreneur programs in the future.

The security staff in question was probably reprimanded for their failure to detect the interloper -- he abused the trust he had gained by previously becoming a "known" face.

You do what you have to do, ethically, to succeed.
Six-Figure Businesses Built for Less Than $100: 17 Lessons Learned
I applaud him (a former employee did this at one of the incubators in the valley and I always thought: mad respect), but want to to comment on the "no worse" statement. This is a typical tragedy of the commons mentality:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Sure, if one person does this, AOL is no worse off, but if everyone adopts this attitude, it will have an adverse effect.
> but as far as the long tail goes, the kids are much less resistant to new ideas

I think that the "old farts" resist "new ideas" mostly because they aren't really new, and they know where those ideas went the last time around. You know, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...";

An example: Object Oriented Databases; when they were popular (early nineties), all the "cool kids" thought the "old farts" were just resisting the "new idea", when in fact the "old farts" had experience with earlier network/entity databases (some of which weren't far from the object databases of the day), and knew why they preferred the relational databases to everything else.

For a modern example: I don't know anyone experienced with HPC who like hadoop. You pay about 10 times (CPU, management costs) for using hadoop compared to actually solving the problem at hand - in return for getting the code to a working state twice as fast (e.g. 6 months without hadoop == 3 months with hadoop). If your problem scale is small, it might seem like a win, but it isn't; If you need 10 servers instead of one, you paid ~$10000 and another month in system administration without noticing. You might still come out ahead, depending on your constraints, but it isn't clear cut.

When you're running 1000 servers instead of the 100 you could have, that's easily a couple of million dollars, which is disastrous for many projects -- and yet, I get labeled "old fart" for not embracing hadoop.

edit: minor edits
Airfoil Speakers Touch App Yanked Because It Duplicates Functionality In iOS 6
Great story and lucky for Eric he wasn't locked up in prison. Worth noting he was involved in an earlier project at AOL and they hadn't deactivated his pass. A without this things may have gone the other way.

I think Gates and Jobs spent nights at places they were working at, leveraging off free to use, latest technology.

His startup idea is great. There are variations out there already but maybe this story and network will turn this into something successful.
Sorta... It's still stealing gym time, electricity, showers, laundry, and work space. The ends don't justify the means.

Though, companies like AOL or Google could totally make this a legit practice by asking for 2% or something of any startup that comes out of it.
What do you think? Is TechCrunch dead?
Their founder has left, their best writers have left, and their traffic is down. In addition, startups have recently reported that they get little to no boost after being featured in a TechCrunch writeup. So wdyt? Is TechCrunch dead?
It's weird because their other apps open a URL to authenticate within the main Facebook app. This is a bit cleaner.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/DOCUMENTATION/ToolsLa...
Never said it was illegal, just unethical.
The Android shortcut was really confusing - a guy at our local watering hole last week was showing me his favorite Android apps, then pointed out an app he installed because his camera app broke. "It just stopped working last week, but I installed this app and use it instead, it works. Don't know what happened to my camera."

Turns out that the Facebook Camera shortcut just said "Camera" - and of course it didn't open up the stock camera app (I think it showed up on the main screen and first in the apps list, too). Once he updated Facebook and the shortcut disappeared, the stock camera app was more obvious.

The shortcut itself was really confusing - it said Camera on it and it wasn't immediately obvious that it was Facebook-specific. You want to take a picture, you look down & see "Camera," and you click on it. Combine that with the fact that icons change underneath you a lot anyway (see also "Android Market becomes Google Play Store"), and you just default to reading the app name anyway; so you tap to open the first app whose caption matches what you're looking for.

I mean, why would anything but your stock camera app be named "Camera," anyway?
I don't understand the problem slide. what do the size of the bubbles reflect? it isn't consumer spend or market size.
G+ is a failure, but here's how Google beats Facebook on social anyway.
I don't think the topic is new per se, as really a lot of software engineering history has been about dealing with the human aspects of development. Even fundamental concepts like object-orientation are grounded in psychology and even before software, there were precursors for this kind of thinking in the way machines and working environments were designed. Josh Bloch's Effective Java is a more recent example.

The difference now is that UX has become a popular, well-understood, discipline. So we have a lot more concepts to take back into API design.

Some of us have been capturing relevant links on the topic on a Developer Experience page (https://plus.google.com/116834904360889286443/posts) and under the #devexp hashtag. We don't have t-shirts, but we do have a logo in need of much love! I'll go add a link to that presentation too.
How To Focus On Doing Startup [infographics]
You may want to take a look at tboot: http://tboot.sourceforge.net/

tboot is a version of grub modified to perform a TPM-measured launch of the OS. It's not sufficient by itself to do what you want, but you could build on that by, say, sealing a volume encryption key under that measurement, such that if the boot loader is modified, virtualized, etc., it won't be able to decrypt the volume. (Or less aggressively, sealing a user-secret that is displayed at the grub-menu, allowing you to verify the above, but not completely hosing you if the measurement changes unexpectedly due to a software upgrade etc.)
A Water Landing for Facebook's IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?
I'm not sure about the logo. It's a set of tipped scales. On one hand I suppose you're showing how you'll weigh it up and measure the cases, but it can also imply your unbalanced and unfair from the start.
What I find _most_ effective is, finding hacking buddies. Having someone else around that is in focus mode is like pure energy. I try to find hack spots that have other people working (but not too many people so as to be distracting.)

Other tricks that keep me going as a solo freelancer:

* 100 Pushups Plan

* Paleo/Slow Carb Diet

* Clear Wireless Hub + an arsenal of coffee shops and all nite diners

* Podcasts (they help the solo programming time go by)

* High Quality Cannabis

* Adderall, but not too often. Once a week helps me out

* Getting the hell out of town when I get burnt out
The startup culture is similar to professional sports in that it requires a fleet of fresh-out-of-college kids to trade their lives and their health for the potential of short-term glory.

This seems to be true in these "social media" VC-istan bubble startups, but is it true in Real Technology? (This assumes VCs are still funding Real Technology.)

I know some people in their 40s who started a biotech firm and seem to have balanced lives, but this was also in another country.
I had a friend that claimed he was squatting at Virginia Tech's Math Emporium. At the time I assumed he was joking (they didn't have showers) but now I'm not so sure anymore. And it's not like college students are renowned for their personal hygiene.
AppFog Goes Public Beta
Now that you say it, and I think about it more, I guess you're right. It does add features like list comprehension and pattern matching, and the compilation really is ambiguous.
> Team has no apparent prior company operations experience, let alone M&A success.

The advisors do have M&A experience, and that may well be why they have them. Two of the team founded a company called Moxy, so they'll have some operations experience. Not everyone needs it to start up and an investor should look at the details, not the flashy site.

> "Technical" team member isn't a "founder".

I'm not aware that this is a requirement for a successful business. Indeed, there are plenty of businesses where the technical people aren't founders that do just fine.

I'd worry less about the design than the numbers. For me, I wouldn't say it was well designed because of it's intricacy. It's not intuitive, things were inconsistent (do I scroll or click, or both?) and some areas just seemed to be blank (at least for me).
AOL is a public company that has a responsibility for ensuring the safety and security of its employees and IP. That includes logging in or badging visitors, requiring contracts like NDAs, and requiring background checks. This entrepreneur skirted all those requirements.

So while AOL may not be worse off for having someone sleeping on their couch IN THIS CASE, you can bet that the hammer will come down on the rest of us in the building. From AOL's perspective, it could just as easily have been a homeless person with psychological issues. Honest entrepreneurs will suffer because of this.
There seems to be an assumption that you can either be: 1) spending money; or 2) doing nothing but sitting around. Surely that choice, if it was ever true, is no longer true. If my living expenses are covered, it costs me $0 in additional spending to do a lot of the kind of productive stuff I would like to work on if I had more spare time.

For example, I have 4-5 open-source projects that I would love to contribute to, and several ideas for projects I'd like to start/maintain. That doesn't cost much. There's even quite a bit of research you can do without much money. Obviously some takes money (e.g. maintaining a chemistry lab or HPC cluster), but lots of math, CS, and humanities research takes little budget; just time, energy, and access to a university library.

If anything, I find it a lot easier to think of ways to spend money on leisure than on work. It might be cool to travel to a lot of places, stay at nice hotels, etc. But that isn't advancing the productive part of my life goals; that'd just be a nice-to-do vacation break. The productive parts for me aren't capital-constrained.
> I made a mobile web app

You missed my point, ironically by perpetuating the obsession around mobile.

I meant why can't it just be a regular desktop webapp. E.g. not require a phone to access.

I don't really see myself sitting in a coffee shop thinking "I want to chat with a business guy right now", and pulling out my phone to see if any are sitting within 10 feet of me.

Granted, the app being mobile (and geo!) is probably 10x more likely to get VC investment right now; I'm just saying that, personally, I would be planning stuff like this more deliberately while sitting at my desktop/laptop than while killing time on the subway.
Good point. I guess the difference is those are apps they couldn't recreate themselves for cheaper than the purchase cost, whereas they used to buy trivial apps (MenuClock being a good example of that).
I suspect that this app uses Apples's leaked key for airplay encryption. In that case I would understand the rejection. I can't wait for the official explanation.
Is there a well-known framework or JS library that most of these "scroll to animate" pitch decks are using?

It seems like a lot of work to roll your own, and I imagine the designers have better things to do. They all seem to work roughly the same way.
I wish I did but it's from a bunch of different posts. I wish it was easier to A / B test in the store but the daily traffic is so unpredictable and unmeasurable. I guess it could be tested on a landing page before hitting the iTunes store, even if you have to lie about the price.
It's totally possible, even likely, that my fast read of their investor presentation missed facts. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to point a couple of them out?
You mean the CEO that had nearly nothing to do with turning it into an innovative company?
Stanford's Long Delayed Online HCI Class is Finally Starting on May 28
I used to naively hope that situations like this would force the government to sit up and take notice at how badly the patent system is broken and how it hurts most industries more than it helps them, especially hurting the "little guys" (who are often invoked in defense of the system) disproportionately since the system is set up to cost so much to "play the game".

But now I know that in the end each will pay the other their necessary "protection money", the lawyers will skim a huge amount off the top and big corporate business will go on as usual.
A guess: Facebook phone with separate facebook apps all built on android.
PBX cracking alive and well in the UK
Show HN: BoxenBase - Facebook for neckbeards.  Battlestations, rigs, etc.
Plus it's pretty seamless replacement. Same label "Camera". Same icon, just with a blue background instead of grey.
Every language is derivative. C++ looks like C. C# looks like Java. Scheme looks like Lisp. It's OK to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Awesome explanation, Public Key Cryptography: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
We had a homeless guy living in our dorm lounge for almost a week before someone realized he wasn't a student.
In that case, perhaps there is an intelligence bias that he is not acknowledging. Seems to me that if someone is naturally intelligent (re: genetics), they would be much more successful with this strategy than someone who isn't.
What does the geography of incarceration in the United States look like?
This is the weirdest, least substantial criticism I've ever seen of CoffeeScript. Do you hate C for looking like B? Python for looking like a cross between C and ABC? Haskell for looking like ML? Objective-C for looking like both C and Smalltalk? Almost every mainstream language for pretty strongly resembling ALGOL-68? Heck, Ruby itself was intentionally made to look like Perl. Criticizing a language's syntax is often just an expression of personal preference — but criticizing a language for using syntactic conventions that are familiar and generally well-liked? That just makes no sense.
I'm the author of the article. The laptop in question is a Thinkpad. The good thing about Thinkpads is they all look the same, and they don't look valuable. Well, not like a Macbook or a Sony Vaio. I don't think they look like particularly valuable targets even when they're brand new.
does anyone not know the deal with Apple

Hopefully very few. I wrote that at the end of 2004, and it seems simpler to link to it than to repeat the same old, same old arguments all over again.
"Disgustingly unethical" is a little much.

AOL is going to get press out of this that am sure they will find worth the few months of squatting.

Also, entrepreneurs break rules in order to get stuff done. I applaud Eric and look forward to seeing him do well in the future.
Forums are still a great asset for companies. They introduce additional free, and generally high-quality content to a site -- providing an SEO boost, outlet to address customer concerns / questions you might not want to address on your main site, and lots of additional monetization opportunities if that is something you are aiming for w/ your content.

An interesting resource on an adjacent topic is Google's white paper from last summer Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. It provides an interesting perspective on how the ways consumers are making decisions are evolving, and how companies can better become a part of the NEW decision making process. I would argue that forums fit nicely into this new paradigm.
Google: Transparency for copyright removals in search
Is the HN traffic enough to crush their servers? Something is deeply broken as I post this.
I'm curious whether GitHub includes private repos in these statistics. If not, then I'd be curious how it would change things if they did (not saying they should, just curious to contemplate the difference).
I think the difference between syntax and semantics can be quite blurred sometimes. For example, CoffeeScript embraces the "everything is an expression" philosophy and that's a pretty big difference for me compared to plain JS; it affects the way i write -and think about- code in a much deeper way than using indentation instead of braces. So, is the difference between having statements and expressions as different constructs and having only expressions just a syntactic difference?

Another aspect in which CS differs from JS is that it provides built-in classes; which i think can make code written in CS much more consistent compared to JS, where everyone seems to like inventing their own way of writing classes.

And i'm sure i'm forgetting other aspects in which CS differs from JS that i wouldn't consider "just syntactic".
I'm reminded of Rodney Rothman's My Fake Job (New Yorker, November 2000), a "personal history about the writer's tenure at an unnamed downtown Internet company where he did not actually have a job":

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/11/27/2000_11_27_120_T...

* Reporter's fake job irks real dot-com:
http://articles.cnn.com/2000-12-05/tech/reporter.irks.dot.co...
This is what's so screwed up with our employer based insurance model, you would never purchase insurance from a company that engaged in tactics like that.
Always when I see such exceptional HTML based pitch decks (the last one was from a wedding thing, don't know the name anymore) I am on the fence: They look so damn good and for sure you get attention en masse (today you should get 20K from HN and many VC related people).

BUT:

- Isn't this a hell of work? A good JS/frontend guy should need at least one or rather two weeks? Please tell us how many people did this gem of a presentation in how many days .

- The pitch deck is basically an evolution—everytime you meet a VC, an angel or whoever the deck gets better due to their feedback—after 2-3 months it's perfect. This means that you need some good presentation software where you can quickly add and change content all the time (nowadays it's Keynote which is both fast and makes stylish presentation with ease).

- And my last point (which is a matter of taste): if you go public with your pitch deck, you are public and the surprise effect if you approach VCs after you went stealth for months is gone. I think latter is pretty important, when something is public, everybody knows it, incentives are smaller to make intros and get angel/advisory shares and finally you have also the risk that you don't get funded and the pitch quickly wears off (in your case with your stats I wouldn't worry but still for startups in earlier stages this may be not the right path; anyway I am wondering that you did this presentation because your stats are so incredibly good and skyrocketing that you'd need only this one stats chart attached to your an email).

So, isn't it better to spend time and effort instead for a great parallax HTML JS page landing page for the actual users of your site??

Or you just want to put a VC who you currently talk to under pressure to get a better valuation (by getting more leads and offers).
Agree with this statement. To compete with Microsoft, Apple, Google you need a platform (OS and phone). While Facebook messenger didn't really off, photos may be more of a popular transition as many send photos to Facebook anyway.
Funny that you have to create a throw away account just to say that :P
aka "I'm not dead yet"
And out of those things the last thing I remember using was probably reading an article from huffpo or techcrunch.
I promise: no snark intended with this question, but I don't know a better way to ask it: does starting a design shop count as company operations experience in startupland?

Totally prepared for the answer to be "yes". And clearly there are design shops that have become serious companies, with growth trajectories, quarterly and yearly revenue forecasts, employee turnover, the whole nine yards. Is Moxy one?
nifty!

thanks :)
Sure.

The founder (Daniel) has been involved in a number of businesses. If you had read his description, even just glanced it at for more than a second, you would have seen a fairly long list of businesses with which he has been involved. He is the co-founder of visualize.me, the founder of Everyguyed (a men's publishing network), and the co-founder of a design agency, amongst other things. I can't speak to his experience with M&A, but it would seem unlikely that he would have a hand in running so many separate businesses without at least being exposed to some M&A experience.

As someone else pointed out, the advisors of the company also have M&A experience.

Also, Piccsy was founded at around the same time Pinterest was, so it's untrue to say that they are simply following in their footsteps.
Off-topic, but you've been awfully critical and quick to judge as of late, Thomas. You've already shot this company down without seeing the product.
That could also say something about the languages and the platforms rather than the number of people using them, especially since all of Apple's libraries fall under the category of Obj-C. You're probably right, just wanted to point that's not necessarily a good measure either.
This is an exceptionally long rationalization for unethical behavior that well demonstrates why I am so opposed to the focus on "hustle" (or as you put it, "moxie") in some segments of the business world.

If someone leveraged this kind of "moxie" in interpreting a gray area of a contract with our corporation, I'd hesitate to do business with them again -- they couldn't be trusted to ethically consider both sides of a moral/ethical/legal quandary and resolve those gray areas to our mutual benefit.
The U.S. Housing Crisis: Where are home loans underwater?
I think this sort of approach depends heavily on how good your attention span is -- that is, can you focus deeply at will for a certain period of time, even if it's only ten minutes -- and how good your memory is.

I've spent two hours getting twenty minutes of work done because my mind wouldn't stop wandering, and my memory isn't so hot so I often need to review things. If I could focus like a laser and I had near-photographic memory, my life would be very different and this would sound possible to me. As it is, it doesn't.
I like how one of his justifications is that upholding copyrights is more in public interest than our entertainment.
Break the rules when it fits your own interests. This kid should leave the valley and move to Wall St.
Excuse the shameless plug, but pages like these ensure me that launching musicrage.org was a good idea.
I was enjoying the slideshow until I got completely distracted by the pool table shot. The arrangement of the pool cues made me irrationally angry.
The traction graph has a terrible y-axis. Equally spaced ticks measure 500, 1.5M - 500, 500k, 1M, and 600k. Many people who notice that will think it is meant to deceive, regardless of whether that was the intention.
Why are email scams written in broken English?