skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point, you will need to hand over the customer service job to someone else, but when you do, it should be someone amazing. In her case, probably a very caring mother. Someone who can fully relate to her customers, because they would be (or are) a BabyList customer themselves.

When I stopped doing all my own customer service at CD Baby, I found someone even more patient, playful, and charming than me. It sets a high bar, so that if you grow to needing an entire team of customer service people - (I had 28 full-time customer service people in the end) - then you and your first one or two really set the expectations for how caring, helpful, and charming they should be.

Definitely don't just outsource to a cheap provider or cheap person. Whoever is actively communicating with your customers should be the best of the best.
5by5 sponsorship costs can be seen on this page: http://5by5.tv/advertise

There doesn't seem to be a pricelist for a particular show's sponsorship though.
Deserving freedom and deserving free aren't really the same thing though. The FSF is not about entitlement to something, but rather about human rights, or applying the basic principles of trade to software too.

If you buy a house, it's your property, and you can modify it how you want. Similarly, if you buy a car, you can resell it when you want a new one.

Imagine if these purchases came with the same shrinkwraps as proprietary software - that you weren't allowed to sell your home, your car, perhaps not even modify it. Some estate agents might go as far as telling you who can enter your property, and what times you can use the bathroom.

The "free" entitlement that GPL complainers want, is the ability to get a house (or part of) for free, modify and sell it (or put it for rent), and then force the buyer/tennant to sign a contract stating that he may not modify, resell or lease it out.

I wouldn't be too pleased if all construction companies only rented out homes, and it was impossible to buy my own property. The GPL applies that same economic freedom to software - when you buy or otherwise obtain GPL code, you own it - where you only ever "rent" proprietary code.
I don't think the target market is existing bikers. The idea isn't that you "split lanes" trying to get places faster in a car-dominated environment, it's that you have a reasonable commute vehicle to use as a car replacement. Note that it was designed to have a windshield and roof (although this one doesn't seem to have the windows installed).
Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide
X-rays and iPads: The network healthcare evolution
Some lessons in software engineering take a long, long time to sink in. (For me, at least):

- Don't generalize too early, which seems to address the original question pretty directly.

- Don't optimize too early.

- Maintainable > Correct > Fast. Maintainable = comprehensible. If it isn't maintainable, you won't know if it's correct. If it isn't correct, there's no point in making it fast.

- Minimize state. Deriving something from scratch every time it's needed leads to far fewer bugs, and the bugs there are probably far more obvious. Cache only when you need to for performance.

- Simplify as much as you can. This is the hardest one, because it can take a very long time to figure out all the ways in which a design that you thought was simple, turns out not to be.

- Simplify some more: The usual statement of the "simplify" rule is "as simple as possible, but no simpler". I don't think that's right. If you see a nice simplification at odds with requirements, push back on requirements.
Stories like this or the debate over social security suggest to me that the basic idea behind defined-benefit pension plans is fundamentally brittle. All of the variables feeding into a pension fund's balance sheet - market fluctuations, new contributions, the duration over which an individual will ultimately receive payments, etc - are fundamentally unpredictable. I'm not sure what kind of machine it would take to take all those inputs and output a reliable stream of fixed-size payments, but I suspect that magic would be a key component.

Maybe it was easier during the period where pensions became so popular in the US. Fluctuations presumably aren't so problematic when the upticks greatly outweigh the downticks, the 5-10 year trend always has a positive slope, and you aren't getting ready to have 1/5 of your workforce hit retirement age all at the same time.
I don't think that paragraph has anything to do with libertarianism. It's about whether you should wear your seat belt or not. On one side are the safety improvements, on the other is the Peltzman effect (that safety improvements cause us to act more dangerously). Thiel is debating with himself because the most rational option (seat belt+careful) may not be the most pragmatic (because in practice he will still be less careful).

In general I think arguments about the Peltzman effect in transportation are not that convincing.

If they were discussing the requirement to wear seat belts by the government/the requirement to add them to cars, Thiel would have responded quite differently.

edit, grammar mistake.
So far we are getting very promising numbers. The main difference betwen us and all of the annotation services which have come before us (around 50 on last count, thanks to Hypothes.is), is that we are page level. We connect one URL to another. It is so simple your grandmother could probably do it. The previous versions were all line-level, meaning that you had to highlight text and then write your comment, or connect to another page etc. It was overwhelming and confusing. rbutr requires you to press two button, small descriptive comment and tag. You don't need to be an expert on the subject matter or anything. You just connect the two authors who claim to know about it to one another...
At least for the first day, this was documented (and expected) from the underwriters.
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-banker-morgan-stanle...

Underwriters start out with a net short position on an IPO so that they can step in to support if necessary.
Not the ones I'm talking about. I see many more bike lanes that have no road side hazards and bikers still ride on the white line.
I've got a question about Noir. Is it necessary for me to write HTML with Clojure, or can I separate it and write plain HTML somehow? Writing HTML in the middle of my Clojure code doesn't appeal to me coming from a MVC background...
No one knows that business more than Nick but this part struck me as possibly faulty logic:

"So with each new version I tried to simplify the user interface, and dropped features & options that complicated the product. FeedDemon became more popular as a result, but you’d never know it if you visited my online support forums."

I'm wondering if this is correlation problem - in other words, Nick perceives that the popularity of FeedDemon is due to his simplifying the design, however it is also possible that a rise in both the awareness of what RSS is/does and a corresponding search for tools led to the popularity. It could also be the additional press/marketing received from the Newsgator acquisition helped. It could be that Google Reader's concept was great but people decided it was too simple/not good enough and they wanted a power tool for RSS (thus Google found/educated people for Nick).

I'm just wondering if the foundation of Nick's particular business was built with the power users and it was the power users who got the word out about FeedDemon. If that's the case, then he's drawing the wrong conclusion and thus the future of FeedDemon is in danger.

I've been a FD user for 5+ years, I guess, and I certainly was one of those bloggers talking about it back in 2006 or 2007. I'm certainly in the power users category so I don't really know that I can be objective here.
I have heard the term "false friend" suggested as an alternative for "false cognate" but I've never seen it used except when someone is trying to talk about both.
I imagine many of them hedged with options on the open market.

[edit] I just learned below that that market just opened, so that strategy must not have been available to them.
Clippy was crippled by MS when they implemented the working research project into the broken version used in Office.

(http://robotzeitgeist.com/2009/08)

The original implementation was deemed "too cautious" by PHBs, and thus a stupid kludge was added to make clippy appear more often.

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/7wt/funny_even_clippy_can_be_blamed_...)

(Interestingly that URL mentions siri before it was released).
In the end, I don't think the "business reasons" really matter. Gruber was well within his rights to end the podcasting relationship if he was unhappy. It just would have been polite to the audience to give them a head's up.
Or Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car? It suffered a similar tragedy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car#World.27s_Fair_acc...

The first picture in the Wired article shows the driver's unhelmeted head poking out of the roof above the rollbar. Prototype or not, how could the CEO even let a photo be taken of such an obvious safety flaw, let alone allow a journalist to take it for a test drive? Demonstrating a lax attitude towards safety is enough to scare off investors.
Wow your kids must suck.
Facebook's Promoted Posts Rolling Out, Here's What It Looks Like
7.5k views _today_. But they know what we want so why bother?
Billionaire Zuckerberg left no tip after Rome lunch
Project Management for Startps: Thoughts and Musings
"Dell" tells me nothing. You can install Lion on a PC that meets the system requirements on Lion, which are as follows:

x86-64 CPU

At least 2GB of RAM

Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later (Mac OS X 10.6.8 is recommended)

At least 7 GB of free hard drive space

It may be possible to install it without first installing Leopard or Snow Leopard. I'm not sure. You will probably have to install Unix as well, I'm also not sure about that. In any case, it will be a massive pain in the ass and more trouble than it's worth, but if you really want to, go for it. Education is good for you.
> You'll find that adding a long salt, unique to each password, is a far more effective protector against brute force than "hash speed".

No, I'll find that you've apparently stopped your education at hashing 101 and hashing speed is covered in hashing 102.

1. It's not an either-or situation, all three hashes I mentioned not only specifically include salts in their hashing interface but go as far as mandating a salt for brypt and scrypt (I don't believe PBKDF2 mandates one though it surely is recommended)

2. Salts don't protect much against brute-force attacks, their primary role is to protect against rainbow tables (dictionary attacks) in case the hashed data is leaked. They do add cost to brute-forcing a series of passwords (if salts are unique), but that cost is low compared to

3. Hash speed mitigates brute-forcing from both inside (leaked data) and outside (provide built-in rate-limiting, of course additional rate-limiting is still a good idea). Increasing the raw cost of computing the hash by multiple orders of magnitude and adding data dependencies within the hash (to prevent trivial parallelization) are very much vital against brute-force attacks.

4. You might have wanted to read your own bloody links, the first one specifically mentions hash speed to mitigate brute force attacks, and mentions salts only against rainbow tables; responses to the second one specifically note that salt mitigate rainbow table attacks but do not significantly mitigate brute force attacks especially on weak passwords.
> Anyway, I'm glad about this drop. Not out of any kind of schadenfreude but because the market is acting... rationally. These P/Es were never justified and instead of not mattering and the stock skyrocketing anyway (which would happen were we in a bubble, which we are not), the stock is seeking a more appropriate level.

Agreed entirely. Everyone's been acting disappointed by the lack of an IPO extravaganza, but that would have been horrifying-- this drop should be heartening to anyone in tech.
"The Computer Language Benchmarks Game" has never been a valid benchmark for any language or implementation.
50% of which are daily active users.
Grooveshark launches Beluga, a free music insights tool
i want jount to groop
That article read like The Great Gatsby, I gave up after a few paragraphs. I don't think I'm into idolizing rich people anymore, I probably would have devoured this in high school, though.
Rampant speculation: there could also be disagreement over how revenue from “run of network” sponsorships, where 5by5 charges a fixed price for sponsorship of their most popular shows, is divided between the shows.

I could imagine not being satisfied with whatever method 5by5 used to do measure and allocate this revenue share. For example, one show might have x% of listeners, and everyone might even agree on how to measure that (feed subscribers, downloads, live listeners, whatever), but the host of one show might feel those listeners are worth more to sponsors than other shows.
Liquid Tension Experiment is Dream Theater (John Petrucci, Jordan Rudess, Mike Portnoy) with a different bass player (Tony Levin)
A musical masterpiece
I'm confused over the significance of the P/E ratio. It seemed like a big deal when I was reading these stories about the FB IPO, but then I got to look at other ratios in tech. Amazon's is much higher than FB's 93.72 at 175.23 [0]

[0]: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AMZN&authuser=0
If everyone were valued by how much money they could be making, we'd all be billionaires.
Dates for the first space tourist flights
Ulead video studio puls 10
Is that what your parents told you ? :)
In 1 month the price will be back to, or above, the original IPO.
Ooh, Microsoft Agent support in JavaScript!

I had a lot of fun playing with the MSAgent API as a kid.

Microsoft Agent was pretty cool. Not terribly useful, but there's a huge variety of available agents. It had text-to-speech as well as voice recognition. You could completely programatically control it.

Internet Explorer even supported MSAgent in the browser. There were a few sites that used it for various fun animations or greetings cards. Perhaps this could make them usable again.

In fact, you could also use it in PowerPoint to add an agent to your presentations. That was fun.
I would argue that the drop isn't from the market acting rationally at all, but in response to yet more hype supplied by the press, specifically the "how low will it go?" narrative you mention.
Out-of-the-box thinking on out-of-the-box thinking
Thanks for the words of advice, Kellros. And I totally agree, you can't always blame technology.
> Marriage is about compromise.

...

> Children, however, afford no such privilege.

Well, at least you're 50% there. Don't compromise with your wife, either.

Lead your wife and children to a better place. Lead them to a place where all of you are happy and yes, it is possible. It's very easy to "compromise" ... just divide by two, right? Much harder to use your noggin and figure out a position where everybody is genuinely happy. You can compromise with your business partners or whoever else is largely irrelevant. With your family, spend the few extra calories, burn the oil, and figure out a path toward making everyone optimally happy.

Lead them there.
Hah, I know what you mean about it being a mystery. Honestly, whenever I accidentally open vim I end up closing the terminal window to get out of it. I suppose that means I should at least learn how to exit it and such.
Intro to Node.js : CodeSchool
Modern Business is a Video Game
Productive? Certainly not, but that's not the fault or the point of the equipment.

I'm just surprised.. I spend a lot on tech because I love it, and I expect others who are so immersed in tech to do the same. My computer is almost 2 years old now, but it's a quad-core with 12GB ram and 2TB storage (including an SSD boot drive)... I have 4 computers in my house (2 PC Desktops, 1 Mac Mini, and a laptop) along with an iPad3. I love this stuff.
What is it about a person being rich that bothers you?
Photostrap - A safe place for your photos to hide
I do see a difference between the portrait monitor and the others (it seats between two TN 24' Samsungs) but it is perfectably acceptable for writing code.
Thanks for sharing!

Becoming a parent is an awesome experience--one I wouldn't trade for anything.

I can still remember time freezing the moment each of my kids was born.

I wish you, your wife and your little one the best.
Gem Creation with Bundler
The problem is that mobile is just one of their problems. They need to increase their monetization by an order of magnitude per user. This will require them going from a niche advertiser to taking over a significant fraction of all worldwide ad revenue, this is no small feat. They also need to tackle mobile better and respond to all the other competitive threats that will come their way in the next decade.

They have several thousand employees and a few billion in cash now. They need to pivot and scramble like crazy. If they don't they will end up on the wrong side of the inflection point and on a glide slope to obsolescence. I don't get the sense that people inside facebook see things the same way, I think they see themselves as the crowned king of social, and with the IPO they are transitioning to being a value company, which could not be more wrong.
Thanks for the tips, Mappum! I've definitely been on the hunt for some good JavaScript material, so if you know of any please shoot it my way. I'm not familiar at all with Node.js, but I'm going to take some time to look into it now that you've mentioned it.

Respect,
Alex
Whole Exome Sequencing for $999
Well said... I miss my old 21" CRT that had higher resolution than my current LCDs. (1920x1200 vs 1920x1080). Damn HD TV's for ruining the resolution craze.
Why on Earth would you conceive another child with the risks involved here?

There are thousands of unwanted children that would benefit from having such a thoughtful and dedicated set of parents.

Is it pure egocentrism that keeps high-risk parents from adopting?
If you wanted to value it at $25-$50B, the share price would accordingly be $12-$24.

Remember market cap = total shares * price. :)
I'm failing to see why Clojure is a bad choice for this problem. It's a general-purpose programming language, just like others that you mentioned. And beyond those, it happens to have the benefits of being more expressive, testable, concise, etc.

Can you elaborate on why you think it's a bad choice?
> Your advice leans toward the "fungible cogs" school, where the capital crime is to expect others to learn something they don't already know.

Not following what you mean. Do you mean that I do expect people to learn stuff, or that I don't expect them to learn stuff in order to do their job?
Alternate title: FB down 20%+ since IPO

You'd be gambling enough already if you bought FB stock at 20x earnings (the tech norm for well-established companies), let alone at 100x.

At 20x, you'd be speculating on FB's ability to sustain its current earnings power in an increasingly competitive and verticalized space. That's a tough proposition, particularly since social graphs are not as much of a competitive moat as people thought (Orkut for example had at some point virtually the entire online population of Brazil engaged with it, virtually none now), and everybody and their mother is investing in a new social network for a different vertical.

Of course, it is entirely possible that FB will not only maintain its market position, but also increase its earnings power five-fold or whatever. In that scenario, they would have squashed most other vertical social networks and found a sustainable business model (they haven't really yet, see [1]).

Again, not impossible, but bear in mind what assumptions the current valuation implies. It's not surprising to see the market re-adjust its valuation after the IPO craze.

[1] http://cdixon.org/2012/05/15/facebooks-business-model/
RIM now has $1 Billion in Unsold Inventory
Ask HN: Crowdfunded change to a non-viral license for the next software release
Disclaimer: not a software developer.

Crowdfunded projects are getting more and more popular [1]: it is easy, fun, and profitable (hopefully, anyway). On the other hand, there is a license-dependence success rate of the "open"-source projects (e.g. [2]).
Thus, my questions is:

Is it possible for software vendors to release a particular release version of their product under certain license, if crowdfunded capital goal is achieved?

As an example let’s take a well-documented case of bash* [3]. Following my question, could bash dev-team release their next version (let’s say bash-4.3) under not viral open source license (e.g. (Simplified) BSD [4]), so that bash could be incorporated in the commercial products.
Both parts would benefit in this case: business will get (newer) version of the product under convenient license, dev-team will get funding for continuous developing of the product.

Thanks for you time.

* I understand that because of the affiliation of bash to FSF this will never happen.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/08/crowdfunding-state-of-the-union/

[2] http://blog.opalang.org/2012/05/opa-license-change-not-just-agpl.html

[3] http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990

[4] http://stackoverflow.com/a/1205283/1054068
> If it continues to languish, people are going to be much more skeptical in making investments and even starting web based businesses.

Is the latter part of that really true? Starting a web based business is worlds easier/cheaper than just about any other kind. I see this more as injecting a dose of reality and doing away with the give-things-away-to-get-big-then-monetize-somehow "business plan".
As if competition from Apple and Google wasn’t enough, they “Osbourned” themselves by talking up BB10 and then failing to ship on time. Now they’re in Limbo, with their most loyal customers holding off purchases until the new OS ships.
That's the source of the mentioned complains in the support forum. They're complaining because something they used to have isn't available anymore.

It's only natural that they feel angry and betrayed. If the direction of the product's evolution really is removing those features, it should at least be done more gracefully. For instance, first disabling them for new users but maintaining them for current customers. Or releasing a new "light" version and giving the customers the option to stick with the old one.
I know everyone keeps pointing to the 100:1 P/E but with 900 million active users that is more than 100 bucks per user. Is the average FB user worth 100 dollars to FB?
Love it. This is the less pretty version of OATV's awesome investment thesis pages.

http://oatv.com/are.html

http://oatv.com/not.html

(Which are hosted on Github.)

It makes it easier as an entrepreneur to see where you align with an investment firm, and also shows you who's getting it and who isn't.
This was a fascinating and inspiring read. It's astounding to consider the granularity with which we can debug the software of human biology, even if it requires incredible resources. That protein visualization is dumbfounding, but it feels comforting to know that human source code isn't completely intractable.
I would also think that it's easier to build a mobile app/social network that competes with Facebook than it is to build a mobile OS/device that competes with Android/iOS.
>>out of date as far as Clojure is concerned<< What a pity that Clojure programs, written months ago to do benchmarks game tasks, have not been contributed to the benchmarks game for all to see!