skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen a lot of startups come and go and there is a huge difference between 'coming up with a problem to solve' and 'finding a problem to solve.'

They sound the same but they aren't. In the first case you look around and you say "What problems are people having?" and you see one and you thing "Oh, I could solve that, let's go!"

The challenge is that if you asked them they might agree its a problem but might not think it is worth solving. If instead you talked to a bunch of people and said, "I'm here to solve your biggest problem, tell me about it so that I can get started." you get from your future users what they think is the biggest problem that needs solving.

Now if you talk to a lot of people you will get a set of problems. If you make sure you talk to people of different ages then you'll populate your set with problems from different age groups (and different life stages), if you talk to people in different industries you will populate your set of problems with with different skill sets, and if you talk to people at different sized companies you will populate your problem set with people with varying levels of time/money to invest or spend.

Now if you take those problems, and try to tease out what the underlying structural issue is that makes it a problem you will get a list of structural issues.

Finally, after all this talk talk talk, you find the structural issues which are at root of many problems, and then design a product around that.

Your will have a huge advantage. You'll know why you built your product, you will know the kinds of problems it can make go away and how much of the problem it will mitigate. You can quantify the impact on your customer's quality of life, and you can target people who you can reasonably expect are having the problem you can solve.

In many ways understanding how your vision fits in to the rest of the world will be the 'secret sauce' that makes you successful.
I don't know. But unless you have a strategy, don't start a company. Without a strategy you're just picking up nickles in front of a steamroller.

I'm sure that strategies exist on any platform. Zynga doesn't seem worried that Facebook will copy its games (even if they do hate paying the platform tax). Many products are pretty safe from Facebook. For example, build an app for dentists, or personal trainers, or pregnant women.
> they are willing to pay extra for things they think they can track.
> This means that if I'm right (and who knows) then the brand-building advertising,
> that most people consider largely untrackable, is underpriced.

I disagree. Online display advertising, which can be tracked effectively has had incredible downward pressure on prices as tracking has gotten better.

I think most advertising is highly overpriced (brand advertising especially) and as tracking gets better prices will drop.

Ad supported business models get harder and harder in that world.
I think that came with the switch to unibody, so for some Macs in 2008.
I think Microsoft understands this and that is probably the motivation behind the keyboard cover.
Watch for recommender systems to disrupt and replace many of these rating systems.

As Gladwell pointed out in the Car & Driver example, the "scores" assigned in these rating systems are arbitrary linear combinations of factors chosen by "experts." You the car buyer will personally care more or less about certain factors than they do, but they've already chosen the coefficients for you, so too bad. Same for the college ratings assigned by the USNWR.

I think we're asking the wrong questions with college rankings. Prospective students should be asking, what education will maximize the expected value to me personally in the future? It's not a heterogenous and inexplicable "score" they're looking for, it's the probability that the match between student and college will be a productive one. Given data about individual students, colleges, and historical outcomes, surely a better predictive model is possible.
I'm sarcastic in general, and when receiving accusations respond. Of course we could always improve our writing in general. If you don't like your argument critiqued, perhaps you shouldn't do it either?
> It’s the worst Apple design blunder since the hockey-puck mouse.

Looking back at Apple mice and their acceleration controls, I think Steve Jobs had a blind side here. Perhaps he was more coordinated than most people, so could compensate and was unaware of the various shortcomings of Apple mice.
Just bought a MBA yesterday, and my relatively unbiased impression (from a non Apple product user) is that the power adaptor is awesome. In fact, I would worry if it were more securely fastened in there - I don't mind if it falls out, if it means that there will be less damage over time. I've had one too many chargers ruined on my PCs... I remember buying 5 or 6 for an old Dell I had.

"The beauty of the MagSafe connector was that Apple had found precisely the right balance between attachment and detachment. Strong enough to hold the connector in place, weak enough to detach if it gets yanked."

Pretty subjective I think.
I wouldn't ever consider building a product for consumers.

Why?

* Businesses are used to paying for services.

* Businesses can typically make judgements about the ROI of software (X saves Maggie 5 hours a week. That translates to $200 in pay. Sure, $100/mo is worth it.) Consumers can't.

* Businesses pay thousands of dollars a month for each person on staff. If you can eliminate the need for a position, a business will probably willingly pay 3 to 4 figures for your software.
Well, I agree with your parents in that you need to get a degree. But for most jobs a degree from pretty much anywhere is fine. For technical jobs there are tons of good programs at state schools. That's just too much money.
Myth, or unrealistic expectations? Aside from the point that one should make sure a significant number of their website visitors are from tablet / mobile (which based on broad trends, would be surprising to find wasn't the case) before diving into targeting different than desktop screen resolutions, I would have liked to see more detailed analysis on the alternatives and whether they were any better. My sense is that responsive design is a technique that can make managing desktop / tablet/ mobile experiences easier than maintaining completely separate websites. Another point of doing responsive design is that a few tweaks can make one experience (say tablet landscape -> HD) work much better for a range of resolution sizes than doing a fixed pixel design.
The video shows an example of how Pixate will enable you to style your entire mobile app using CSS. The dynamic nature of Pixate will mean you'll be able to A/B test different looks for your app in real-time, even in the users' hands (i.e. server-side push), allowing you to determine the most effective design for your customers.
I absolutely love Workflowy. It has replaced every piece of software I have used in the past for todos.

I actively recommend it to my coworkers. Is just fantastic.

Thank you. Really, thank you.
A competition isn't necessarily the best metric b/c the competitors are going to be a biased subset of the overall student body, and may not actually represent the quality of the education. I didn't go to a great school but there were still some very brilliant people there.
Most of what is kinetic energy? Its job?

A rocket that reaches escape velocity from Earth can have zero kinetic energy.
Total jibberish. There is no need for any more social any things let alone a "social web OS", whatever that means. I'm sure the average Internet reader thought this sounded smart with all the fluffy language and big words but in the end it was a lot of words with little substance. The web already is social. So what now? We rebuild the Internet pretty much like it is now but we change the names of the protocols, languages, and frameworks? I have a hard time understanding if this is a call for an open source Facebook created by Tim Berners Lee or if someone's been reading about App.net and wants to get in on some of that action. This kind of came off like someone rehashing Dalton Caldwell's idea except in a really convoluted way.

What's going on with what get on the front page lately?
The actual term they are looking for is social web protocol.

As others have pointed out, though, an open social protocol would quickly degenerate into a wretched hive of ads and spam. The underlying problem to solve is identity, which the existing social networks attempt to solve through real-name policies, social conventions, and pro-active policing, to various degrees of success.

This is going to be unpopular to say on HN, but there would be upsides to a government-issued internet ID card, that allowed to someone to declare unambiguously which actual human they are (ideally on an opt-in basis).

Would the inevitable abuses of this power be worth the benefits? Probably not. But authenticated identity is the core problem that needs to be solved for an open social protocol to really work; without it, you're trying to craft TCP/IP without IP addresses.
I taught the physics core curriculum at Caltech for five years, so I'll do what I can to help. For many of the classes at Caltech, we never found a truly satisfying textbook, but when you're learning on your own that's still the route I recommend. This means putting textbooks back on your list for consideration. Buying a textbook for a full 1-2 year college-level physics sequence costs less than $200, much less if you buy used. You have parents, right? Now they know what to get you for your birthday.

Your immediate goal should be to get a firm grounding in classical physics, which will be important for everything else you do. When choosing a textbook, the most important thing is to pick one that's aimed at scientists and engineers. That means it should be calculus-based, "algebra-based physics" being a contradiction in terms. If you don't know calculus, you should start there. (This will set you back some more money. Sounds like a plan for Christmas, Hanukkah, etc.)

To my knowledge, none of the introductory texts are truly great, but I did some poking around and University Physics by Young, Freedman, and Ford looks like a good bet. If you need to learn calculus, Calculus by Larson and Edwards looks decent. Get the most recent editions if you can afford them, but I'm sure older editions are fine. Those two books alone should take you a year or two to consume, and they are likely to be very challenging unless you have an exceptional preparation in mathematics. But even if you get stuck occasionally, you'll still be way ahead of the curve. (I wish someone had put a calculus-based physics textbook in my hands when I was in high school. I would have been unstoppable. Unfortunately, though it now seems impossible, I went to high school before Amazon or even the Web, so it simply never occurred to anyone.)

I recommend supplementing the textbooks with liberal use of Khan Academy videos and Wikipedia articles. More than anything, it is essential to solve a large number of exercises. Developing a good physical intuition is important, but physics is a quantitative discipline, which means being able to do calculations.

One more thing: if you want to demonstrate your competence to the world (and to college admissions committees), it's a good idea to take the AP Physics exam (B or C) at some point. The AP Physics C exam is the best one to target if you only have enough time to take one, as it will let you test out of introductory courses at many schools. (Not at Caltech though—we have a separate system of placement exams.) Take a look at the AP Physics C website to see the syllabus. If you decide to take the exam, buying a test-prep book such as 5 Steps to a 5 AP Physics B&C is probably a good idea. If you go this route, try to negotiate with your school to get course credit for your independent study.

P.S. At some point, read The Feynman Lectures on Physics. FLP doesn't make for a good introduction, but after you have a foundation it's gold.
At first (and second) glance it's not obvious to me whether this is a desktop app, a mobile app or a web app / service. Does it send emails for me or does it just make HTML? Does it mail-merge from a CSV? Can I bring in my own templates?
Oh, totally. If you're playing Microsoft Simulator, you really want to start at right about the year 2000 or so — gives you a great starting position but also tons of opportunities to improve on previous players' high scores.

(Somebody please make Microsoft Simulator!)
"We should all focus on being as effective as possible in the shortest amount of time."

Obviously, flogging a dead horse there. The point is that when everybody does that already, the next differentiating factor becomes the amount of hours put in. Which brings us to the current situation; which is, I might add, the natural order of things, and I'm continuously flummoxed by the total lack of, or even the slightest insight into human nature, emerging behavior or the ability to take fundamental processes or drivers and lead them to their conclusions, by the authors of pieces and posts like the GP and the article under consideration. Much like, let's say, socialism, I suppose, but I digress.

Also, an anecdote does not data make. The article covers that, too, by the way - some people are just almost 'super-human' (comes naturally with normal distributions), so measuring everybody against them just sets those others up for failure. You're basically saying 'yeah if you'd just all be as good as this Gilette guy here, you wouldn't have a problem! Can't combine parenthood and a top career? It's just because you're not good enough!'.
I commend SpaceX for the work they've done to reduce the costs, but it's not particularly fair to compare to the Shuttle program for several reasons:

1) SpaceX employs engineers who worked on the Shuttle, thus getting all of their lessons learned for free.

2) SpaceX gets to use facilities NASA built, like launchpads and testing facilities much more cheaply than if they had to build their own facilities. They tested their heat shields at NASA Ames, for example.

3) Everything is cheaper now. Not just raw materials, but imagine the cost savings when every engineer has a (Shuttle Era) supercomputer on their desk. Testing is dramatically less expensive.

4) Everything is better now. The (NASA developed) heat shields are much higher performance than those available in the Shuttle era. The level of computer control is much more sophisticated. Better technology means you can do more with less.

In short, SpaceX has massive, massive advantages over the original Shuttle team. I would hope that they could do more, more safely, at less cost.
In "The making of Warcraft part 1", one of Warcraft's developers says they used Dune 2's art assets as "programmer art" during Warcraft 1's development:

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-...
This font: TiemposHeadlineLight - was VERY difficult to read and made me want to run for the high hills.
Since Facebook launched the "seen" feature, my friends have used Facebook messages significantly more often. Today's communication landscape is filled with tools that leave you uncertain if the recipients have seen or will ever see your message. Facebook messages will see more adoption because they remove that uncertainty.
Change Wordpress Upload Mime Types
I don't know how to run a shell alias using a git alias, so I ended up creating a file ~/bin/fact, and defining the git alias as:

[alias]
ff = "!fact && git fetch"
Oh hell no. There is, as is noted, a big difference between Internet communications and actually being there. But auto-answering calls doesn't help that; instead, it removes the advantages of these kinds of communications without really introducing any of the advantages of face to face.

Face to face works so well because there are so many unconscious cues we can pick up on. There's a whole other channel of nonverbal, subconscious communication. That isn't really picked up over videoconferencing, so all you'll get are unwanted work interruptions at best, and some really embarrassing situations at worst.

It's polite to knock on a colleague's office door; I don't see ringing before a call as being different. If you need to work face to face, work face to face.
The people who believe their religion is he one true path to salvation _do_ tend to proselytize.

Thing is, many religions don't think they're the one true path to salvation (and in fact many don't even have a "salvation" going on). And people who hold to those rightfully get annoyed when they can't have lunch in peace because someone shows up on their doorstep trying to convince them that this someone's religion _is_ such a one true path.

The key problem with proselytizing isn't that it happens, it's _how_ it happens.
5 Lessons Learned as SWTOR Surrenders
The Classic Buffer Overflow Attack
So much for coding in the shower.
So maybe google is being a little obtuse here, but I think their point is a good one: android developers, please stop updating your apps once a week. It is annoying to open up my app list and have 25 of the 30 apps I've got installed needing to be updated. Roll all your little bug fixes into larger updates and push those out infrequently. Unless you have a real show-stopping security or functionality bug, I don't need the update immediately.
Inkflow for iPad. Then if I like something I shoot it over to Inkpad, slap a new layer on top of the doodle and convert it to nice vector graphics.

Edit: Changed second 'Inkflow' to 'Inkpad' as it should have been initially.
It is a web app. It handles subscriber management, templates, compose workflows, and of course sending emails. Sendicate is a full ESP.

Templates are very welcome. Have a look at the template docs https://github.com/Sendicate/sendicate-theme-docs
I'm going to give EA the benefit of the doubt here, and suggest that there is almost certainly additional compression on the images from when it was converted to PDF / uploaded to Scribd.

Or, to put it another way, I'm pretty sure EA has a fairly competent legal team, and you don't make such a specific claim in a filing unless you're prepared to back it up.
Hey, maybe we have Pincus all wrong; when he strongarmed his early employees into giving up stock options for late joiners, he may have been doing them a favor.
but hey, you had a start-up in the valley. congrats on learning from your mistakes and committing to making it better, next time. Good luck finding your path!
London 22:53h took 50s to respond with an error page:

This website is offline

No cached version is available
Ask HN: Do startups hire soon-to-be graduates?
More specifically, do they hire them in the fall for work after they graduate? I'm asking because I will have an offer from a large company that I need to respond to quickly, but I don't want to just blindly take an offer without seeing how I would fair on the open market. My concern is that all the kinds of companies I would be applying to don't have the financial ability/risk tolerance to assure me a job starting next summer. What would you do in my position?
Interesting. I've never had this problem with several types of Macbook and Magsafe, and I've never heard of anyone having that problem.

As I'm typing this, I'm trying to dislodge the L-shaped plug from my 13" Macbook, and it's truly impossible to do that by accident.

On the other side of the equation, I'm far from unfamiliar with tripping on the cord, but maybe that's just my clumsiness.
What would be the upsides of the government issued internet ID in your opinion please? Compare such an ID with the stuff everybody already has in his wallet.
Express.js debuts brand new home page
Hi, I'm on the CloudFlare support team. Which domain was this in regards to? I'd like to look into this further. By "false errors" do you by chance mean SSL mismatch warnings?
I wonder if their internal emails can be subpoenaed.
"Use Websitename"
>I disagree. Online display advertising, which can be tracked effectively has had incredible downward pressure on prices as tracking has gotten better

that's essentially what I was trying to say. The part where we disagree is that I think tracking is not as good as you (and most people) think it is.
It looks very choppy to me in Chrome. I've noticed this with some of the more recent nicely designer blogs. Is there a special Safari font or something that is becoming common, that looks terrible in other browsers?
I wonder if this is EA's (aggressive) opening to a Zynga acquisition.
About the product itself[1], I don't think I would be comfortable with coworkers being able to glean if I'm on an IDE or Hacker News.

[1] http://www.quicklychat.com/
> Employees often lack empathy for their managers

You're very right. I've only had one boss I disliked/didn't respect, but I've always worked at small companies.

At larger companies, managers are more beholden to their bosses than you. At my current company, my manager knows that I provide value to the company, so if his boss told him to fire me, he'd fight for me. Empathy: granted.

If I were working at say, IBM, seventeen levels down from the CEO, the manager would be more worried about being fired by his boss than he would be about my loss of productivity. So if his boss told him to fire me, I'd be out looking for a new job. Empathy: lost.
Yeah, this is the problem with any big movement without a figurehead, like the 99% movement.
I had hoped that Apple had finally got it's power cable plug shit together with the L-shaped Magsafe. Before that, my wife and I have managed to kill every type Apple has produced over the past decade, but the L-shaped Magsafe has survived.

Why on earth did they have to mess with that?
It is already happening, though very slowly. Part of the city's budget here is decided online and via presential polls [1] since 1989, and the model has since spread to cities like Brussels and Barcelona.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting
The image is a jpg, which does not always retain true colors (it's a "lossy" format.) Click the same color block in 3 or 4 different places and you'll get different results.

In order to do a true comparison, you'd have to use a color tool directly on the game or on screenshots taken in a lossless format.
Ha, thanks (I work on it). Both for the comment and for upgrading to pro. There's still like a bajillion things we can do to improve it. A few big features, but a bajillion smaller usability improvements that add up to a really big deal.
Just a query: How similar is this to the 9 lines of code in the Oracle vs Google situation?
A bit OT, but I don't really get the need for a tablet specific design apart from the desktop site in general (I'd see why gestures for e.g. would be tablet specific, but almost no site with iPad specific versions use them). What would be the hurdles to have the same version for tablets and desktops, and a more reduced version for mobiles? It would force a very discoverable page design, no plugins required, and a lot of side benefits from the design POV in my opinion.
Different types of Google Spiders and how they work
We do want to make an API, but we think it would be irresponsible based on our current organizational status. We're still in scrappy-two-person-startup mode, and we don't want to do the poorly supported, unstable API thing.

But yeah, it's clearly important.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple even issues certs to malware authors — and then uses the resulting signatures to more reliably target their blacklist (which is now updated every day).
>Company #1 starts selling black glass slabs and company #2 clones themm in almost every respect.

Except this is totally false since Samsung had black slab designs since 2006.

http://i.imgur.com/KPGYL.jpg
When I was about six, I had a powerful alnico magnet to play with, and I remember being quite intrigued that dirt would stick to it. Not all dirt, but some dirt. At one point I had a small jar full of magnetic dirt, collected by sweeping the magnet thru dirt and scraping off whatever sticked. As I recall, the magnetic dirt was darker in hue than the grayish non-magnetic dirt.