skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was recently playing around with modelling business growth using logistic equations, and I came upon a possible reason why large companies are unable to be nimble and dynamic in the way small companies are.

Note: The basic logistic equation is 1/(1 + e^-t) which one can extend to be S = M / (1 + e ^ (-rt-y)) where M is the maximum growth capacity, r is growth rate, y is number of years to the 50% mark. Anyway, it produces nice S-shaped growth curves that generally approximate growth in a limited environment.

Anyway working with these a few things occurred to me. Near the bottom of the growth curve, growth is very slow. It then picks up suddenly, grows to a certain point, then growth rate declines and the market size tapers off. Lack of immediate success along these curves may be due to a growth rate that is too low or a market size that is too small (duh) but when we vary both maximum size (M) and growth rate (r) something really interesting happens.

If we have a curve that successfully predicts two or three years of growth but then overperforms what we observe, this has exactly two causes: Either M is much bigger than expected and r is much smaller (meaning smaller growth now but much more growth later), or M is much smaller and y is much bigger (meaning the market is already saturated). You can't differentiate these just looking at how a project is performing.

A small business can bet against the short term and for the future. A larger, publicly held business is often less able to do so, so getting over the slow growth in the lead-in of the logistic sigmoid is really tough in a larger corporate environment. This is probably a good part of the reason why big companies have a much harder time innovating.
Yeah, date. Old news :-X
As an app developer myself, I never said that it was good review :-)
Following your link, I see that Apple contracts with "Sims Recycling Solutions" to recycle their computers.

Here's what Sims has to say about the new Apple Systems:

""Sealed units [like the iPad] make it difficult to remove the batteries," Steve Skurnac, president of SIMS Recycling Solutions, said in a statement. "From a recycler's point of view, the hazardous components [like batteries] need to be easily separated or removed.""

If Apple is contracting with third parties to recycle systems, and those third parties don't know how to recycle the glass with an adhesive on it - then there is an issue. [Edit - In their interview, iFixit called out in particular the difficulty separating the battery from the Retina MacBook Pro case - the same concern of the President of Apple's recycling company. http://ifixit.org/2884/apple-ditches-green-standard-cuts-off...]

I just think Gruber (a podcast that I listen to, so it's clear where my biases lay) should have given a bit more credibility to Kyle Wiens. The iFixit guys know a lot about the material elements of hardware, and he did take the time to contact people in the recycling industry before making his comments.
Ask HN: Startup funding from Dubai?
I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with startup funding - especially early stage - from Dubai?
The certification is about easy recyclability not about recyclability in general. While it could be taken that they are saying their products are not recyclable anymore one could also say that they are just accepting that they aren't recyclable with standard tools anymore. Given the new retina laptops this definitely makes sense and its nice to see them volunteering to remove themselves before being removed by the organisation.
The "barriers" you describe amount to nearly nothing. The salary a lawyer commands fresh after passing the Bar is not significant enough to be relevant to this conversation.

Just like most other industries, it's experience, deep knowledge of their field and skill that commands the high prices.

It's market driven because, despite $500/hour rates, you can still find a lawyer for $50. Both of whom passed the Bar but they're massively different in terms of their knowledge and experience.

Edit: one more thing, if you're looking for professional legal help from someone who couldn't pass the "barrier" of the Bar exam, you're probably going to get poor legal advice.
I've messed around in there, and I have a friend who built a rather elaborate Tron thing in there.
One down side of those door desks, sometimes they leak sap on you because the legs are made of just plain old unfinished lumber.
Seems like this is only for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) users, unavailable for us who uses EC2 on public cloud.
I worked there for about 3 years in the mid 00's. Everyone still had door desks, and all-hands frequently mentioned the fact that they were less cost-effective than actual desks, but they still used them as a reminder of frugality.
Because Science, man.

You don't do things in science because they are practical (you just write that on the grant applications), in fact you do many things largely because they are impractical.

It's about wonder and lust for knowledge and all that. It just so happens that the theoretical ground work for all technology piggy backed on this motivation.
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Thank you for saying "High DPI", I'm sick of that Retina quasi branding BS.
If you had an advanced civilization living there for thousands of years, without continuing the labors of terraforming, doing absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening (even when they know what will happen, while measuring the atmospheric levels slowly dropping)... maybe they'd deserve to die. I mean, that could only mean that they actually wanted to die!
Chosing a random year for his example story gave you the impression that it was "bashing 1890"?

Or that it had anything to do with the wounded knee massacre?

Talk about non sequitur...
sigh. I had just ported over one of my sites to their API and was superhappy to have it back online (it was offline before when I relied on opencv but then the only host supporting that shut down).

And only a 30 day notice? For shame. Are there any worthy alternatives? Maybe even some I can pay so maybe they stick around longer?
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How are we defining a success and a failure here? Second Life is still around. They're not raking in millions, but AFAIK they're profitable, provide value to their customers in return, and occupy a dominant position in their market. In what way have they failed?
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1) Connections in the domain the startup is working in

2) Marketing experience in that same domain

3) Someone who is honest and genuine
Yes, but the GP doesn't it that way because humans tend to under-evaluate low probability events. Forgot the name of the theory. Basically, low (so until 10% probability) are taken by most humans as "0%". I agree with your statement fully, to make that clear.
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We requested it for public instances years ago.
VPC doesn't help.
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Thanks a lot for the link.
As an french guy, I didn't know about him before I read this article. This was actually one of the best I've read since a long.
I'll definitively look at this series, I have to see more of his work.
Thunderbird is stuck to one device (desktop). Technically you can have Thunderbird across a lot of computers by using IMAP instead of POP3 but that slows down and cancels out a lot of your speed benefits.

You're still using POP3? You're about the second person that I know does that.

Your complaints about Lightning are misplaced. It's an extension, not part of Thunderbird itself.
Look up e-waste in general and you'll find more than enough to read..

The difficulty is always in chasing these companies around following every step and verifying they actually do as they claim. Typically, unfortunately, and especially where expenses without profits are concerned, they don't.

The other problem is now they've made the product this much more difficult to recycle and far more toxic. Somehow, however it happens, huge volumes of Apple's incredibly popular products continue to end up discarded in places where they should not be, and when the "recyclers" get them, the glue, especially the glued batteries and glass, will be a big nasty problem.

NatGeo has done a few programs, and this larger feature discusses the big picture:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/high-tech-trash/ca...

This photo gets a lot of circulation when the topic of e-waste comes up, largely because of the recognizable brand.
http://marketingheart.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/waste-chin...
To be fair nobody knows how the keyboard got there. But it makes a point, it's there, what happens next..?
If you're based in Dubai (or any where else in the Middle East) there's a couple of investment companies that focus on early stage investment, namely N2V (N2V Labs: http://n2vlabs.com/ - StartAppz: http://www.startappz.com/) and Wamda (http://wamda.com) of Abraaj Capital (http://is.gd/C7O4QR).

There's a couple of Startup accelerators as well that focus on helping early stage startups get started like Seeqnce (Lebanon), Flat6Labs (Egypt) and Oasis500 (Jordan).

I'm not sure if any of those can help if you're based somewhere else.
It's their API, and they can do what they want with it - but I'm not entirely sure shutting it down is entirely in line with "we love you guys [API users], and the plan is to continue to support our developer community", which is what they posted on their blog when the acquisition was announced.

A lot of people took this to mean the API was going to keep running.
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The author mentions this himself:

"[...] Now, all of these statistics are flawed in a variety of ways, PHP's included, and the bigger a community is, the more they will be flawed — for example, PyPI download stats will often be way out because people are using mirrors etc — but this doesn't affect the point I'm making.

The point is that all the communities are large, and these figures are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much is going on in each and every community. And from within a community, you can see some big figures and think “well I doubt anyone could seriously be competing with that!”. This is true no matter what community you belong to. And it makes it difficult to communicate in a meaningful way. Very few can honestly say that they've evaluated the alternatives in a fair way, because the alternatives are so huge. [...]"

This really contrasts with statements in Fabien Potencier's article like "Yes, PHP has a better dependency manager than any other languages." or "PHP is the best web platform... ever".
My startup just got unsolicited offer from Dubai. Seemed suspect.
it was only a matter of time they would do. If a company is sold off, they would no longer support their existing API users
> The depressing but true fact is that the U.S. wields more military power than the rest of the world combined.

Um. This isn't true according to an Economist article I'm having trouble finding. Switching over to Wikipedia, China has the largest active military by a good 8.3 million troops; you'd have to find some explanation that can convincingly say that America has more power by another measure.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
As someone who got a year out of those Tellme desks before we moved, thanks for building them. Goddamn they were sturdy.
I disagree, and I think you're set on the auto-update in Chrome and Firefox on being equal – they're not. Average Joe doesn't care about a update that brings support for a new css selector – but he cares if that update smacks him in the face. Firefox smacks him in the face, Chrome doesn't.
Ah, Chavista propaganda, how delightful. Is that why Chavez is trying to strong-arm the so-called banana republics in the region into an economic "alliance" akin to the Euro, but where Chavez retains control over the currency? You can't trust those silly banana republics to be responsible over their own economies, you have to uplift them with the SUCRE, isn't that right? Gotta issue the currency in Caracas because you can't trust the banana republics to mint it, isn't that right?

Interesting how you (and many foreigners) call us neo-liberals, but liberals here insist it's neo-cons ruining the world.
I have 9 tabs now and 700mo taken, on Win7.

After restarting it (and loading all the tabs): 250mo.

It may well be problem with some extensions but I only use 9.

edit: if someone is lloking for the restart extension : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restartless-r...
> it has no tray icon, it starts up maximized and I have to close it every time, it has no decent "send later" functionality

All of this can be solved by installing addons.
The Mail.app searching now is so fast, it's bordering the incredible. It's made me rethink the way I archive e-mail. I really no longer need to sort everything into monthly folders in order to find things.

The 9000 ways of searching things in Thunderbird are not always an advantage, I found it makes it really hard for me to find things, because I have to select so many things. The searching of Mail.app makes me get what I want within 2 seconds for 95% of the cases.
If it doesn't there's usually a sensible drop-down suggestion of where to search (body, subject, recipient, sender). And if that does not help you, you can always use the system-wide Spotlight to drill down even further.

I've moved from Thunderbird to Mail.app about a year ago, and have been pleasantly surprised. I'm a pretty heavy mailer, receiving hundreds of mails a day and sending out 30-50. I also search my archives regularly and that has not been a problem.

I've not tried filtering into folders, but your mailserver should do that for you anyway.
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* CampaignMonitor[1] reports just 1.21% usage

* litmus[2] reports 2.4%

Not the huge market share that you'd expect.

[1] http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/email-...

[2]http://litmus.com/resources/email-client-stats
Funny, because two codebases exactly what Firefox is doing with FF 10 ESR, but without the renaming. So I don't find his proposition stupid, at the opposite.
And come on, working on different codebases is a usual dev task, and every developer outside Facebook should know how to do that properly. Usually you have your shipped code and your development code, and you want to be at least able to ship a security fix without disclosing your new functionality.
Concerning your last point, if you don't like that you are probably at the wrong place for web developments, where you should at least support a dozen different browsers. For enterprise software, that means one can just support 10 ESR instead of 1x and everything new that comes at each release, possibly breaking the application.
Show HN: Prototype demo of my indie iOS/OSX game [Save the Pixels]
Rapid updates doesn't need to be disruptive, look at Chrome. I don't think Firefox users will miss the Update Dialogue if they removed it, and did silent updates as Chrome. Fragmenting into two apps, and keeping an app with slower update cycle and a crappy update experience, seems bizarre.
I am not one, but I know someone that was attached to a rather large group of players that even had parties happening in SL an the real life, connected via webcam. They definitely used it to the max.

EDIT: Just normal parties with people sitting around and chatting :).
It's time to make an alternative face.com
Hopefully this will open up some breathing space for serious open-source mail client alternatives.
I'm hoping for a revival of Letters.app (https://github.com/ccgus/letters)
Playable demo: https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9780 (Download love engine from http://love2d.org)
That's probably one percent of the total lawyering costs. Maybe get into that :P
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We use it at work.

For sure, there are bugs never fixed and some features that would need polish. I hope support will continue for some time.
Totally OT, but I must say that I've seen the best startup ideas in HN comments like this one. It would need a lot of polishing, of course, but it's a decent start for a creative mind. :-)
Unfortunately I don't have much to add to the OP, but I wanted to comment on this. Everyone I know that hates Perl had some sort of experience where they inherited some legacy Perl script that broke all the time and yet performed business critical functions. I started my first full-time job in 2004, and whenever I get together with my old co-workers we'll STILL talk about the battle scars we had trying to bubble gum and tape together a particular script called cc_processing.pl (yep, just as critical as the name implies), that seemingly broke every other day and went so far down the rabbit hole you had no idea how it ever ran successfully. $a{$a} = $a->{$a}? Sure, why not.

I wonder how much of Perl's reputation is based on these kinds of formative experiences. I love Perl, but I'm realizing that everyone had their nemesis in sitecounts.pl, or traffic_reports.pl, or partnerpayments.pl, or wtf-how-did-this-ever-work.pl, and unfortunately didn't draw the same conclusions about Perl that I did.
> But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome).

Hi Azakai,

Paradoxical it may be, but this is exactly what I have observed: people leaving Firefox for Chrome and citing dislike of rapid updates as the main reason. Not just the intrusiveness of the update mechanism, but the breakage of compatibility and UI habituation are also cited as reasons.

Yes, these problems exist in Chrome as well as Firefox. It's just that users aren't noticing them as much in Chrome. Probably because, as new Chrome users, they don't yet have UI habituation and they don't yet have a workflow that depends on specific add-ons or other fragile compatibility issues.

Maybe if they stay on Chrome for long enough they will realize that the same problems exist there. But they're the sort of problems you don't encounter right away as a new user of a browser.

So yes, fixing the experience of the update itself is the highest priority since that's the number one thing that was driving people away. I know the Firefox team has been working hard on fixing this and the updates are much smoother now (especially since Firefox 12 got rid of the Windows UAC warnings.) That's great!

However, I predict that in the long term there will continue to be problems in both Firefox and Chrome caused by automatic updates breaking UI habituation, compatibility, or low-frequency use cases that particular users depended on.

Software that's as important as a web browser really ought to offer users an option to get just security/performance updates without any other changes. (Mozilla does offer Firefox ESR, but they don't publicize it and they discourage non-enterprise users from downloading it.)
At the moment SecondLife is miles of empty houses, casinos, and furries, it's pretty sad, but salvageable. First there needs to be zones with something like property taxes based on foot traffic over an area. This would incentivize change, and renovation of an area instead of static dead content that persists forever. Next the viewer client needs to be scaled down a bit. SecondLife is very much ahead of its time (advanced 3d modeling, advanced scripting of objects) the result is a lagged experience. Wonder why Minecraft took off? It's because building in Minecraft is simple, in SecondLife building is a pain in the ass. Again - way too advanced, no simple options for people. Anyways I hope someone eventually gets it right because SecondLife made the same mistakes AlphaWorld did and is meeting a similar fate. Im holding out on Carmack's 3d goggles to re-enter the metaverse and sword fight you guys.
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A Clojure Tutorial worth your Time.
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I've been a Second Life player for about six years now, and there isn't a lot of crossover between the audiences of SL and here, so I thought I'd weigh in on the 'success' of the game.

Originally there was a a huge amount of hype about the idea of real world businesses opening up an SL presence as something of a "new frontier", as well as vistualised museums, art exhibits, music shows and so on, but these for the most part never got off the ground.

Second Life generally has two sides; the first is an incredibly commercialist (to the point of being fetishistic) sector, where the players that prefer to treat SL as a kind of gigantic virtual dollset can buy clothing, hair, skins etc for their avatars, and has the same kind of draw as The Sims games, except this is real money we're talking about. This in itself gives one type of businesses at least a good way to generate income; 3D content creators.

The other side of SL are the very large groups of people that play the game to indulge in some sort of alternative fantasy. There are massive populations of furries, Goreans, BDSM practitioners and so on, who again are usually quite willing to pay for content for use in role playing in the virtual world.

I originally joined because I was interested in the technology side of things (I read an article somewhere about players using the in-game scripting systems to create 'virus objects' which spread across the world, which I thought was interesting enough to merit checking out) but I stayed because I found I had inadvertently formed a group of friends, and I even ended up getting engaged (in reality) to somebody I met there.

In a sense, Second Life has thrived, but not as a clean, bright new frontier as originally intended, but instead as a kind of collaborative roleplaying framework for people whose tastes are not really catered for anywhere else.
that's so bad. I know many products empower their products with face API. Now they are shutting down their core feature. It made me understand that we shouldn't rely on commercial stuff and build technologies upon open source software once again. At least this way, things keep running instead shutting down because of business choices.
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>That's probably one percent of the total lawyering costs. Maybe get into that :P

I don't think you know how much expert witnesses charge and what they do.