skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I make a regular habit of clicking through a large number of Kickstarter projects and back a fair number and that number doesn't surprise me at all. I suggest you also look through a few sometime. A lot of projects on Kickstarter are, quite frankly bad. They are trying to build something nobody wants or their projections or idea are unrealistic. They provide little to no information about the project. Their reward tiers are unattractive or poorly built. Their creators lack credibility and have nothing to back them up. They are obvious scams. They have ridiculously short or ridiculously long funding periods. They do no promotion outside of Kickstarter. The creators provide no updates and don't communicate with backers.

The projects you see are the ones that overcome all or most of these potential issues and I'd suspect that the numbers for those are much, much better. But I'm honestly surprised that only 56% fail given what I've seen.
Realtime Video Aggregation
You can work with it or route around it when it doesn't make sense for you or the particular context i.e. it gives you choice.
Additionally, I regard checked exceptions as automatic documentation.
I think there is SSL but you have to manually change http to https in the login URL.
Homeless entrepreneurs: The new cool thing.

Now I just need $50k or so.
I'm not willing to predict that Pebble walks away with their $10M...

but I can tell you that it's nearly certain that Pebble is going to slip the schedule by months.

and what happens then is anyone's guess.

Rumors are in the air that Kickstarter is now refusing to host any more 'hardware' plays, due to the huge overhang on Pebble. I have no idea how to find out if those are true or not.
For those like me who hadn't heard of warrants before and thought they sounded a lot like options, the key difference seems to be the source of the warrant is different than an option, and a warrant lasts longer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_(finance)#Comparison_wi...
It was / is scary! Luckily, I had a wife familiar with the court system. Plus, she's a rock star to boot. ;-)

Were the two lawsuits you faced patent related? Or something else?
when you read stuff like this one [1], you may think that working on 2 photo apps at the same time make sense, until dust settle.

[1] http://www.donnaklinenow.com/investigation/instagram-scam
They fall over time. The algorithm simply needs the date the item was created at and the amount of points.

The difference is that instead of doing the calculation from the "time since submission" (which changes over time and, as you say, won't work with Couch's views which can't emit values as time goes on) it does the calculation using the "created_at" property. In essence the outcome is the same.

Here's the algorithm I use which needs some better documentation :) https://github.com/lmatteis/hckr.it/blob/master/common/util....
These laws make me doubt the future of the industry in Europe. I respect users' privacy and all - but this is atrocious for user experience.
Made this as a joke for a hackathon and won, NFC gaming app
[Free] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapthat

Yes it's silly, it's a proof of concept, thought HN would have a laugh and also own NFC Android Phones compared to other forums.

Know issue: FC first time it loads, should load after that.
Visions from the API Economy
When you browse all Kickstarter projects rather than simply checking the most popular presentations from each category, it quickly becomes apparent that a lot of the projects have very little effort invested in them and lack the backing of any sort of serious talent. This is especially apparent in the game's category. "Here's some concept art for a game I want to make. I want to make it mechanically similar to games X, Y, and Z. Please give me $80,000" is pretty common, and it's equally common to see projects that don't even make 10% of their fundraising goal. Understandably, Kickstarter doesn't display these projects prominently on the front page; you need to dig several layers deep to find them.

If you've never browsed Kickstarter, your perception of Kickstarter success rates is probably colored even further by the fact that hearing about a Kickstarter outside of Kickstarter (on an aggregate such as reddit, HN, etc) is social proof and that itself is a symptom of success.

For a similar exercise, try checking the HN new queue. Lots of submissions fail to get even a single upvote; you just never see them.

If anything, I'd say that 44% successfully funded seems amazingly high. Much fewer than 44% of Kickstarter projects I've viewed actually deserved to be funded, in my opinion. Then again, this perception is likely skewed by the fact that I've spent a disproportionate amount of time in the games category, which seems to be plagued by "everyone wants to be a game dev without knowing how to code" syndrome.
No one is talking about entitlement. Read what I said. If the above argument is presented as reasoning against, then the counterargument is valid.
Well it doesn't have to be a symbol, just something that would not be likely to start a real tweet.

Just as an example let's say "q", followed by a space, followed by the command with the appropriate number of parameters, e.g., "q get username". That would allow otherwise-reasonable tweets that are currently being mis-interpreted ("get better" vs. "q get better").

That's just an example. There are other ways around the problem too without making things too inconvenient on a smartphone user. And sure it's possible someone somewhere will want to write a real tweet that says "q get better", but that's far far less likely than someone somewhere wanting to tweet "get better". And the point is that allowing a non-trivial portion of the tweet-space overlap with the command-space is a bad decision. A trivial overlap (like "q get better") would have been a much better decision.
"but we're still attempting to find product/market fit"

Then find the product/market fit first. If the code works, you can clean it later.
I'd be much more likely to donate money for a track/album if I had some automatic way of tracking which I had donated to. One way to do this would be a website that let you donate a suggested amount for a song or album. For each song/album you donate towards, you get some signed key that says you supported that song.

There's some interesting things that you could build off of this:

- Media players could show a little badge whenever you're playing a song you've donated to. They could also remind you (if you wanted) when you listen to a song frequently but haven't supported it.

- Hook into Facebook - when someone downloads a song, they can see which of their friends have donated to it.

- An additional metric for music suggestion services. What better way to show you like a song than by putting your money where your mouth is?
Stocks pay tax and commission.

This is never shown in these fancy charts, but any investor will see his bottom line affected by these costs.

Also, companies can be ejected out of S&P and replaced by more successful companies. These events are also routinely hidden from graphs.
seems like he's done ok grade wise in life, whether he could or couldn't get an A in some supertough class at CMU,

don't like his methods, don't use them

give him a little credit for accumlating and sharing alot of different strategies to do well in some pretty tough academic settings
I have an S-Corp, and the typical upfront cost with my lawyer is $500, that includes one hour consultation and all setup fees. Legal paperwork is under $100 and one hour per year. Accounting comes out to $900/year, but that usually pays for itself in all the deductions that my accountant can find.
Standards are a necessary tax, just like process. If everyone could just get in a room and do the right thing, we wouldn't have any issues. Any time you throw a governing body at anything, you are going to have a certain amount of inefficiency.
I like the idea of Flattr, but I think it lacked the ability to donate a specific amount to a specific person/thing. So it seems to be more of a cash-backed "Like" button, which is nice too, but different from "I feel this Software is worth £40".
There's one thing you can say about AOL: they have a sense of humor.
The kickstarters you're likely to pay attention to are the popular ones, which have a much higher chance of getting funded.
> Spending $20,000/year seems impossible in the US.

It's not impossible at all. Get rid of all your high reoccurring monthly expenses. Cell phone. Cable. Gym. etc. You absolutely don't need any of that junk. It's just keeping you at work. It can be inconvenient not to have a cell phone, but a lot less inconvenient than spending 38/hrs a week at work.

Also, it's important to keep reminding yourself you live in the consumption capital of the world. The entire US is geared towards spending money, and you will be encouraged to do so many times per day. Your friends, family, colleagues, dentist and the guy at the gym are all going to encourage you to spend money - it's just how the society works. You will have to develop a think skin, and remind yourself to resist spending money at every opportunity.

I'm in Canada, and I feel the pull to spend money here daily. ("Come grab a coffee with us". "checkout this new canoe you should buy". "I found a good deal on...". ""pfft. I get unlimited free texts for only $50/mo." ... etc. etc. etc.

At the end of the day, it's your choice if you want to keep spending money and going to work, or cut out the spending to limit the amount of time you need to go to work.

NOTE: I'm from Australia, lived and worked in the US for a year, now have lived and worked in Canada for 6 years and my family live and work in NYC, so I have some perspective on "consumerism"
You won't believe how much tech is crammed into your iphone's accelerometer
Anybody know his Twitter username? The one linked to from the "About Us" page doesn't work.
I feel a lot more energetic after I get off from work. But, you're nuts, cooking for yourself and working out is great.
68.6 million Americans live in households with incomes under 20k.
I see this as an inflection point for them. Pivot or die. Hopefully they'll do the former, and reach new heights.
This is a 6502 emulator written in Java and embedded in Minecraft. It's neat, but not as impressive as a 6502 built using the in-game logic gates, which is what the title implies.
Tip when SMS users need to text a code - use numbers not letters
Too bad his incubator wasn't at Google. He probably could have lived a little better down in Mountain View.
Right, but it's about the psychological state. Jimmy Wales made his money outside of Wikipedia. Linus wasn't doing Linux to get rich. If you read their bios, the Google guys weren't thinking about getting rich. Of all the recent crop of successful startups, maybe only Mark Pyncus was really focused on getting rich.

It's a bit zen but there is a good way to tell the difference. A successful startup founder, when presented with the choice between more money and more power, will take power every time.
Cookoo - the watch for the connected generation
On learning to code (and Hackstar Academy)
The problem is that twitter keeps refusing to implement anti spam measures.
There're pros and cons.

Breaking apps up feels smart—it's like Unix. But otherwise you have more overhead, more apps and more updates. But I guess the app quality would heavily benefit because then the devs have to fulfill just one use case and by focussing on one thing the overall app quality might be better.

They could also introduce a system similar to web bookmarks: one app and many entry points—or like a command line app which does different things by adding options. Android widget often fill this gap offering different entry points into one app.
This assumes that the "That is an idiotic thing to say;" is unimportant. On the contrary.

1) It gives a lot of pleasure to respond with it to idiotic ideas.

2) It adds emphasis and a sense of proportions to the error, ie. it's not just a simple mistake, it is an idiotic mistake.

3) It (hopefully) shames the perpetrator of the idiotic idea into thinking twice before speaking.

It's not always appropriate, but a lot of times it is just the thing.
I went through a similar phase where I couldn't focus or do anything productive. So I took a break from everything, did some lawn work, re-did my home theater, got a new puppy :)
After few weeks of break my partner and I got back together to start things about ideas to work on and within a week we have a list that we can pick from.

Before that I remember we spent weeks without one decent idea.

On a side note, puppy is a lot of fun but she will poop and pee all over the house until housebroken :)

Good Luck
The just pivoted less than a year ago from DailyBooth to Batch.

(The team is awesome, though, so I'm not worried about them.)
Are Tech Conferences Worth It? What say you?
He was here 10 years ago, he was the king then, he's still around in 2012 and he still rocks. Whichever way you want to look at it, 99% of the people dissing the quality of his work and noting how he's lost the magic don't have the talent to judge him anyway.
While I don't disagree that Apple's technical skill isn't best of breed, where Apple has shined - both now and in the past - is their ruthless determination and focus on UX and HCI. Apple goes further than any company on the planet to make technology devices (computers, laptops, music players, tablets, etc) that delight their users and just work and make them happier and more productive.

Apple doesn't have "cheesy blah inside" stickers because that doesn't delight users and make the product better to use. They're stupid. Apple also doesn't chase fads because fads are just that, "a fad" and rarely do fads have long lasting staying power like a good product should.
I agree with a lot of what you've said. People make apps in their spare time because it's fun, and maybe also a little because they have the dream of making it big time. They're not in it just for the money, but it's nice to think about. I bet lots of musicians play small gigs because it's fun too, but I'd hate for their only chance at "winning the lottery" to be "Congrats, we booked some big shows for you. From now on, you live in a tour bus 300 days a year."
If you take the existence of papers as a measure about what is relevant for an industry programmer, then I hope you are familiar with things like writing formal proofs using Coq and Isabelle (Coq started in the eighties), or generating programs directly from a specification.
This is cool. What are some plausible attacks via reading memory over firewire or chilling the memory to preserve its state at shutdown?

Also, does anyone know what he does that the security of his laptop merits this level of care?
Is SF Still The “Big Idea” Genre?
On the one hand, I see what you mean and have some empathy for this position. On the other hand, it's very telling that you used a Herculean feat in your analogy: it suggests to me that you perceive the act of adopting some new habits as also being a Herculean feat.

I don't see it this way. Of course, I spent over a decade in my youth studying a musical instrument, and I think that experience taught me how easy it is to program new habits into the human mind. It all boils down to a little repetition, but also entails making sure that you're not repeating bad habits. ("Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.")

Sometimes it takes a little faith, but things do become automatic if you repeat them for surprisingly little amount of time, and this ends up reducing your cognitive load so that you can move on to focusing on new aspects.
Automation is not always Scalable
Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering

Small nit: manufacturing is engineering. Integrating manufacturing into the electrical/mechanical/software engineering process makes good sense.
It was on the Featured page on the App Store for me.
I feel like I'm missing something. Why couldn't you work on the stuff you love instead of sitting on the beach?
World Of Goo makers launch 'Because We May' game sale
And, importantly, it is because of Tim Cook that they have such a great supply chain.
The Perfected Self
Not always. Regarding core Unix commands yes (like 'ls', 'cat') but look for example at 'git' which is a real beast.
There's trouble with three major Linux desktop application developers
You are wrong. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Corporations-Pri...

If you don't want to read the book, talk to a lawyer. Expensive lawyers have the first hour often (usually) free. My less expensive lawyer offered "one-hour consultation plus all filing fees" for $500 deal. That would be money well spent.
What is this "after work" you speak of?
CPrompt - an unobtrusive way to abide by the EU cookie law
Its a neat story. When I read the headline I thought it was a Mike Arrington story :-)

We joked at Google that they really did want you to live there but their secops team would not let a non-employee do this.

However for a potential investor this is a great demonstration of how committed someone is to their idea, and their passion. I don't doubt for a moment that Eric will be successful at what ever he sets out to do, you can't buy that kind of focus.
At that point is there any difference from just pirating it? You're going to be in violation of the license anyway - I'm just they have a no-transfer clause.
GREAT summary of what makes SpaceX so exciting. Personally, I knew all of this (I've been following the alt.spacers since way before they were cool), but clearly you know what you're talking about, and I hope that others see this post!
Don't worry -- we're not going anywhere. We hang out in the chatroom every day, and that's going to continue.

Stripe is growing extremely quickly, and we're trying to craft the Support Engineer role for exactly this reason: we want to keep the same support experience as we add more users.

Please ping us if you ever notice stuff that we should be doing better. (And thanks very much for the kind words.)
It's also worth noting he's not actually retired, he's actually a self-employed handyman and also says in the article his wife works too and plans on working more when their boy is older.
Hi! My twitter is http://twitter.com/#!/ericsimons40 - not sure why it didn't work from the about page :O
Using Memcached As A Distributed Lock From Within Django
If Apple likes your product, and they steal your features for their OS or apps, they kick you out so they don't have any competition.

Yes! Sharecropping in the Orchard:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...
Wow that is neat.

I saw you use couchapp, installed with npm. Have you tried kanso http://kan.so ?

There is also erica, a similar couchapp deploying script written in Erlang. That one comes with an ACE on-line code editor (so you can edit your couchapp as it runs).
I read the kickstarter. They're just polyester pants - that's what polyester pants do.

They're also really itchy if you have hairy legs.
Could you link to a fuller gist? Is self referring to an ActionDispatch::Response object? I plan on improving rails integration with rack-stream so that you can call `#chunk` from controllers and that will defer sending a chunk of content.
I can't edit any more, but I've looked around, and this clearly isn't true. For some good details on the size of the Linux project, check out the beginning of this talk by Greg Kroah-Hartmann, one of the chief kernel devs; it's from 2008, but things have only moved faster on the kernel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw
"Some people are so poor, all they have is money."
This.

Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat.

Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook.

If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB.

If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device and OS agnostic, it works even better than what Apple is trying to do with iMessage.

So why separate apps? Because people today already do these things as separate apps. You take a photo with your camera and then upload to FB. Now you just take a photo. This is actually what Google does with G+ and its automatic photo uploads. But FB can't do that, because they don't own the device ecosystem so this is their technique...for now.
Is this the one in Stamford? I've been there! In one corner there used to be a group of traders who had at least 8 monitors (often more!). The second interesting thing about them was that they were what remained of Enron, after that company blew up.

By the way, these people are traders. Developers generally don't work on that floor.
So which is it, software patents are good and this is "stealing", or software patents are bad and this is inevitable?
On iPhone you can share secrets between apps by the same developer if there are signed in the same way, there is no easy way to do it across apps.
The cause informs what you can do, though.

If warming is caused entirely by increasing CO2 concentration (and I know it's more complex than that, this is a hypothetical), then reducing or stopping it is comparatively easy: reduce CO2 emissions.

If warming is caused by some natural process like volcanoes or ecological feedback loops or whatever, well, how do you stop that?
What’s Wrong with Behavior-Based Personalization?
Was afraid this was going to be one of those "damn it why doesn't everyone just use webkit already?!??!" posts, and was happily surprised. The points are good and well-reasoned.

There are problems with the web standards process, to be sure. But in my mind, the most interesting part of the whole affair is that developers get any input whatsoever. I don't recall MS ever asking for input on the Windows API, nor Apple on Cocoa (if I'm wrong, links are appreciated). We're helping to build a major platform here, in real time. That's really neat!
Because it ropes in people like me who don't want the native Facebook app on their phone, but want to keep in touch with friends who use Facebook messages.
Agreed, and while I would love to reliably get a 5% return above the inflation rate, its not always so straight forward.
faye-websocket-ruby's a great project. rack-stream actually uses it to detect websocket and eventsource requests, and stream back on those protocols.
It's more than conceptual lineage - geometrically, the Mac Pro was a 1st gen. mini flipped on its side then amended with handles and vents. And the precise curve of the corresponding corners is repeated on the MacBook Pros. And the iPhone. And the iPad.

Now, identify one - just one - computer that shared those trademark corners when the Cube came out. Nothing else looked even remotely like it, including Apple's earlier products. Now, there's little - if anything - done by Apple that doesn't mesh with the Cube beautifully. Even the individual keys on the current wireless keyboard (which I'm using to type this) and the trackpad off to the side are clearly post-Cube, and entierly consistant with the direction it set...a decade ago.

In terms of towering achievements in industrial design, the Cube is to computing what the 1927 Yankees are to baseball.
Ironically, they use a cookie to store your preference regarding cookies.
And I've been around twice as long as you! I also understand the reasons for the humor taboo.

But there's a sadness about the Yahoo situation that invites joking as a coping mechanism. If we don't laugh, we'll have to cry. Or rant.

And speaking of rants: plenty of upvoted, 'serious' comments about this incident are just variants of "HUH-hah, look at Yahoo's latest screwup!" Those can be even worse for reasoned discourse than a few silly quips in one tangent. But HN smiles upon the hyper-critical and mock-aghast sort of rhetorical competition.