skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Arch is less annoying than Gentoo when it comes to package management. I don't say that lightly. I think that the power of emerge is quite respectable. I like that Gentoo gives me a lot of control over package builds and whatnot. I also like the endless tweaking abilities of Gentoo. However, the Gentoo repos are marred by package masking that gets ingratiatingly annoying. I think that Arch has a great balance between power and ease of use... especially in comparison to Gentoo.

Honestly though, I prefer Slackware.
It's a great new innovation from Silicon Valley.. "frictionless stalking"
Exactly. What we don't know is how many organizations came across this tip and decided not to run a story on it, since they didn't have any such contacts. We do know that some decided to write a story anyways, even though they had zero corroborating evidence, in case...?
Where Arduinos are Born: Touring a PCB Factory « bunnie's blog
Android developer? Work on one of the fastest growing Apps at Heyzap (YC09)
1. He's working for the VCs (that's what he calls them I think it's rather a beginning startup accelerator) because they promised to invest in us if he helps them.
2. Well, he's sincerely convinced of his skills. That's part of the problem.
First, there should have been a discussion about who makes the ultimate decisions - him or you.

Has your code formally been added as an asset that the company owns? If not, you may still technically own all the rights to the code, and be able to do what you want.

Second, what is the potential of the product, and what is your passion like? Do you want to take this company over and make it a success, or would you rather just move on? Certainly easier to just move on, but finding another business cofounder is not a super difficult task (there are hundreds of people who would love to do it). Or since you are out of money, are you considering getting a part time job instead?

It seems odd that your cofounder 'got hired' while he was supposedly working as a 'cofounder' - at this point it should have been a flag that hes not committed and you should have cut him loose. Next time you are sacrificing a lot of time and money, make sure you have the control to fire someone if they aren't working out.
Here's what I find really surprising: Making the word "Free" in the call-to-action much less prominent did not reduce conversion by very much.

The original page prominently says: "Sign up for a free trial" and gets a 6.9% conversion from visitor to trial user.

The new page unprominently says: "Money back guarantee" and "Free Sign Up" in the top right corner. Conversion is 5.2%, which is almost the same considering the scope of the change, even though there was much less use of the word "Free".

This is surprising in itself.

I'm also curious about how the next stage of the funnel is converting users from the trial to entering their credit cards.

Also you say that credit card signup is not mandatory. When does the CC enter the picture? Does the service wait a while (e.g. one month ) and ask you to enter you credit card? How does this compare to taking a credit-card upfront and offering a one-month money-back guarantee?
Awesome - two of my favourite recent startups.
Which of these are you most interested in learning more about?
Geary - A lightweight email program designed around conversations
Yeah, so many of the Mac designers / evangelists who screamed the loudest about "Designed for IE" and other web evils have come full circle, and adopted a mantra of "Looks good on my MacBook with Safari, ship it!"
If I may rewrite your comment a bit:

"I wouldn't say the entire internet is useless, but the good websites are few and far between due to the internet's culture abhorring any sort of regulation.

"Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to [Facebook, YouTube, pick a popular site]? Certainly if you have a scientific question, [insert science website] is great, and [other website you like] tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on the internet, especially in the popular websites, is uncommon."

While you seem to acknowledge that Reddit is several communities, not one, many of the things you say still make it seem like you're lumping Reddit into one community and one culture.
Does anyone on HN use IE6/7/8? I’d guess that this is a more web savvy place than that.
Hate to be a downer but there are a lot of products in this exact same space (several of which started 3/4 years ago and have since died.)

Alertme is probably one of the slickest (https://www.alertme.com/try_the_demo) and there are many others that just provide a nerd-happy line graph like this and even more with just the price/day calculation, but the problem they've all found is that after at most a month, people become disinterested.

I'd like to see some innovation in how you can keep this relevant and interesting to the continual user.
> App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue

Many of whom were backers who were sufficiently curious to pay to get access to / see the product. The real kicker will come at renewal time, and how many of those customers remain.
T.js - A tiny templating framework in ~400 bytes
I know well of the niche communities in reddit. I frequent most of them to hide myself from the default subs. However, the same problems still exist.

For instance, I enjoy the show Adventure Time, so I subscribed to the /r/adventuretime subreddit. It was fine for a while, but then a submission popped up on my front page. It was a photograph of a group of kids cosplaying as Adventure Time characters at a local convention, and a few of the kids either had a "poorly done" costume or were heavier than the characters they were cosplaying. The top comments in this thread were saying hurtful things about their weight and attractiveness. Not fluffed up "jokes"; these were crude and would warrant a punch in the face in any real life situation. When I made a comment about how it was rude for them to say such things, and that cosplaying is about the person cosplaying, not the people viewing, I was met with hostility and downvotes. I even messaged the moderators asking them to remove the comments since they offered nothing but vitriol, but the only moderator to respond said, "I'm not their mother. This is the internet."

You can try to escape it by going into smaller and smaller subreddits, but you'll never outrun it. This is what I mean by it being pervasive.* It's in everything on the site. You can argue "reddit isn't a single community" and all, but there are some characteristics that permeate through almost all sections (or maybe eventually show up due to how the site is designed.)

* edit: I realize after I posted that this was a different comment chain. The comment to which I'm referring is this one, last paragraph: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378485
It looks like the $30,000 funding goal has been reached, although I'm sure they'd appreciate more donations/backers.
No offence but I don't think the government could possibly care less about you or the conversation with your mother. There is a long list of far more important and interesting people for them to worry about.

How about using whatever is the easiest, most enjoyable and trouble free setup for her to use.
I hate to be that guy. (And really, I almost never say this). But, coming from the guys who made Twitter, can we talk about how and why this could possibly be monetized?

Neat idea. Gorgeous design. But how is Branch Inc sustainable?
Interview with Canonical Kernel Manager Leann Ogasawara
"folders reflect reality" +1
But one produces engineers, the other produces shop assistants.
> Please explain how I can have a secure online conversation with my mother easily. (Easy for me, easy for her).

Pidgin with OTR -- configure and verify keys once, use whatever protocol you want. It is doable and not very difficult right now, the problem really is that no one cares.
We'd love to get contributions so feel free to open pull requests for any extensions you would like to see.
You definitely did drink the Kool-Aid:

"I paid for a product, I can't login, and I can't fix things so I can login. But I'll meekly 'reserve judgment' rather than lambasting what should be a fairly important issue."
I think it comes down to what you're trying to achieve with your app.

If your goal (and your software) is based around lots of users, then clearly free is optimal. There are lots of studies which show the power of free, and how free is much more appealing than something costing as little as 1c. It makes sense that FB is free (or at least has a free tier). FB is useless without other people.

If you're writing an app that is entirely / mostly non-social, and your worth is not measured in the number of users you have, then paid makes sense.
Meta: This is a really awful linkbait title. Microsoft "[didn't] want you to see it" because they thought there was a vulnerability in it.
cOOL :)
Quora was founded by facebookers. People who actually have the worst fucking view online about what should be private and what should be public.

People who have no digital-cultural compass because the only reference point they have is from working at Facebook, thus they think that "this is how it was thought of and done at Facebook - and Facebook is the most overly hyped company in history, so I must be a fucking genius!"

No thanks.

Done with quora forever.
There's functionality available on a tablet that's not there in a book. Much more timely updates to local events, for one thing. Google Maps for transit information, possibly dispatch of taxis in parts of the world that haven't thought of regulating that yet.

Considering the number of people who bought netbooks for the purpose of having a "disposable" computing device for travel, there may be a rental market for a travel tablet.
I've done a bit of this and I suspect a few others have considered something similar, if not doing it themselves. I'm concerned about leaking a couple of these types of passwords, enough for someone to notice the pattern and apply it to the rest of your online presence. I'm sure there are black hats building personal databases of every password leak that goes by and it wouldn't be hard to do some sub-string matching to identify people making simple patterns like this.

I'm also concerned about a targeted attack against my online identity. I've had a couple of online acquaintances be the victim of targeted attacks, one holding accounts hostage as a sort of online blackmail. Someone who compromises a couple of random forums and picks up on the pattern now has the key to your online identity. I'd mitigate it somewhat by using multiple prefixes and suffixes, one set for 'throwaway' accounts and others for more important stuff. Even that tactic has issues, do you remember to change your password for that throwaway site that blew up with success and now your account is part of your online identity?

The alternatives aren't too reassuring though, I balance these risks against the possibility of my KeePass, LastPass or browser password list getting compromised.
I just started using Backbone.js, it's a great library I must say! :)
"issues"

That is being far too polite for what in all likelihood is the most insecure piece of software in history. Not joking. The frequency of security updates over the last decade is a disgrace. And that is without even talking about the appalling state of affairs on the Mac platform where it is still ridiculously buggy. I mean why has it taken this long to be self-updating ?
Which is which? A person who works in either role will do so more quickly by virtue of not needing to constantly consult a machine over trivial problems.
The agreement on equity is 50/50. It's originally my idea and the stuff that's technically interesting in it is mostly my work. I very much doubt he could pull it off just by himself (technically). I'd have more technical chances of success but less business (which is why I chose to work with him).

I made the mistake to work solely on this project and to rely on my savings. Only lately I've started to look around for project to pay the bills and I see fulltime employment as probably the only currently viable way to go (I finished my CS PhD (SemanticWeb) about a year ago and although I do have coding skills and industry experience, it's not enough, I feel I need more experience to do consulting and more networking, etc. to do freelancing).
The post is definitely correct, but I think the App.net scenario is a startup unicorn from which valuable conclusions are difficult to draw. There's very little that they did that others could repeat.
What’s Still Holding Back a Small Business Software Revolution
If you want to MAKE people use secure passwords you assign them a random password and don't allow them to choose their own. They'll write it down on a piece of paper making them pretty damn secure against almost anything except a physical break-in.
On the topic of dimensions of programmers.

We can further subdivide the Artists into those who enjoy getting their revenge by being more than properly miserable, and those who prefer to get their revenge by being less than properly miserable. Artists of the first sort will prefer to work in a more formal medium, one that inflicts extra pain on the Artist, such as composing sonnets, dancing ballet, or programming C++. Artists of the second sort tend to be much more fun-loving, free-wheeling and undisciplined, whether the verb in question is composing, dancing, programming, or slinging. (Especially slinging. There's nobody quite so joyful as a B.S. artist. I should know...)

There is, of course, a third category of Artist, the one who oscillates between the two extremes.
Branch seems to want write access to my Twitter account, even just to "request an invite." Does anyone know why? It looks intriguing, but I'm not ready to trust it to that degree.
Thanks Jon. Happy to have you :)
Another day, another blog with low-contrast text.
Memorable Moments From Black Hat 2012
Of course it was silly. Conservation of energy... There is no net gain, they would put energy (food) in to their 'human batteries' but it is impossible to get back any more than they put in. Complete nonsense.
They do encrypt passwords but that doesn't matter. You can still log in to their accounts and do anything you want. And if for some reason you really do want the actual passwords you can obtain those too, obviously they get decrypted to send to the website you're logging in to so just capture it at that point. Normal people don't configure master passwords.
Sorry for the confusion! We should be more clear about our intentions. We need write access so when you do get an invite, you can invite your friends to branches (via DM or @mention). But we'll never send anything without your explicit permission.
> "The minimum buy-in for the service is now $99 a month, which will segment away customers who are less serious about their server uptime."

I use Server Density (and even blogged about it, http://cherrypopapp.com/blog#Server_Provisioning) and would not pay $99/month to monitor 1-2 servers.

I don't see how paying more or less reflects a level of seriousness.
Coworker With Two Computer Screens Not Fucking Around
You haven't said anything that has attacked my point.
Thanks. People don't like to be reminded of the bad news.
Man, if it's your idea and if you've done most of the work, get some balls and fight for your project !
Slavery seems more defined by the master-slave relationship, the turning of a person into property. The point isn't what the master is specifically forcing the slave to do, but that the master literally owns the slave. So from this, I can't call forced conscription slavery. Everyone is forced to do things; the morality of being forced into very limited military service is a much more individual one.
ok guys, got it

First of all we need to improve the website and corporate image, cause that's what we sell.
It has nothing to do with size of the jump and everything to do with continuity along the path. A "quantum leap" from A to B implies that the path from A to B was discontinuous and therefore completely unpredictable given the knowledge you had at point A.

In other words, You went from A to B without going through any intermediate steps.

Said yet another way: B is a post singularity relative to A.
Game of Thrones - Season 2 CGI
I don't see why it's better to create a general portfolio app. Then what's the strategy to get new clients? I mean, the purpose of the categories is to have landing pages that rank on google and have good score for adwords
Better just to do a smaller editor like Vim.
probably without optmd.com popunder ads, too.
According to the article, they want to do it "the lean startup way".

So... why does it have to be self-balancing? Just add a third wheel and it's always stable - no need for gyros and complicated electronics. And as a by-product, you have immediately lowered the price massively: it's just a few motors then instead of that balancing magic. My price lowering guess would be between 50% and 80% lower. That would be really "the lean startup way" in my book.

(Idea courtesy of http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=segway_more_complicated_t...)
Why Google Bought Frommer’s (For Nothing)
Startups and Ramen Noodles
I think this looks interesting, as long as you don't apply the same "X of Y" comparisons.

Someone likened it to a forum, and I think it's a nice take on it. Not necessarily something with SOCIAL all over it.

The promo video was pretty horrible, though. I'm also getting a little tired of Valley videos that make it sound like we're curing cancer or something.
Cool! You should feature these on your front page!
You presume that it has to be sustainable to generate a profit.
From personal experience, all I can say is absolute trust and strong communication from your cofounder is absolute. You guys lack that and having to address it at all is already a red flag in my book. Given that you brought it up and things still haven't improved, its time to shut down or talk to an attorney to sign him off. Clearly this will not go well in the long run if things don't change.
Victim-blaming is not a necessary reaction to anything.
Sounds like you got a bad cofounder. I was listening to a VentureHacks talk about finding a cofounder, and they had two main points:

1. Is your team making progress? Because startups have fewer people and resources, your founding team needs to be effective producers.

2. Do you guys trust each other to have your back? An example they gave was how two cofounders were arguing over equity. Instead of arguing that the other guy should get less equity, they were doing the opposite and insisting that the other guy should be getting more. And from that, they knew there was some underlying trust that drove their decisions.

Seems like this guy is breaking that trust repeatedly by doing weird stuff. And continues to do it after your confrontation. This sounds like a situation that will only get worse.
We have no monthly fees for typical home use and anyone buying through the kickstarter. And you can download everything in 15-second intervals to CSV or via our real-time API at any time.

You're welcome to try that other device. You'll find, among other things, that:

1) the +/-100 watts of resolution, updated every 30 seconds, at best, will yield a cumbersome user experience. Turn on five 20 watt bulbs and then the data will jump 30 seconds after you turn on the fifth bulb. Wattvision: +/- 2 watts, and 3x faster updates.

2) You need to buy another piece of hardware, and figure out what software you want to use, and then tie this all together, if you want to look at the data online or your computer. It's a cumbersome user experience, not counting the need to change batteries rather often on the sensor (Wattvision is a set-and-forget system).

We're building the best user experience for this scenario. Thanks for your feedback, perspectives, and kind words.
Don't forget papyrus!
Victim-blaming, like all blaming, is a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth in who's to blame -- not because the facts can't be established, but because blame is by its nature about meaning, not about whether events happened.

You're saying it's a necessary reaction to the telling of truth. He's saying it's not about truth, it's about opinion.

So yes, he is responding to your point.
From the post body: "...Microsoft named no vulnerabilities and were primarily concerned that our motivation for replacing ASP.NET forms authentication..."
Just went all the previous QT Designer screenshots in Google Images. And not a single one looks similar to either Xcode or the Samsung IDE.

And the court nonsense is still news because the case isn't over yet and this is demonstrating a pattern of copying by Samsung.
That's actually a pretty big problem with the whole "browser app" thing, isn't it... there are certain key bindings that you just can't have. I wonder if there'll ever be a solution for that. Anything I can think of sounds like it would be a security issue, or annoying. (Having to answer pages asking for permission for certain keybindings... ugh.)
“Losing Yourself” In A Fictional Character Can Affect Your Real Life
In defense of skeuomorphic design in iOS
I'm pretty sure that the trick to tackling most problems in practice is to see the basic problems to solve, and find existing tools to apply. Solve 80% of the problem in 20% of the time, and move on to something else you need to get done.

If the problem warrants it, you can revisit it later to do something more ornate. In the meantime, you've got what you need to move on.
There are cockroaches in Ukraine.
The beer commercials are actually quite a bad example in this case: Coca Cola certainly don't spend billions a year to reach people unfamiliar with their beverages. Beer companies do.

A major target market for alcohol is those either underage or just starting drinking. Habits and personally preferences are frequently set very early on - Superbowl beer commercials may be designed for press, but a significant bulk of advertising money is spent by beer companies to convince people who have just started drinking that their brand is the right brand.
We've actually been charging money the day our Beta went live. Our users have been happy to pay, happy to have the product, and are amazing people. Patient, happy to help, thoughtful people.

This probably isn't the norm - and the people choosing to not pay for our product (at least those that communicate with us) are rude, unwilling to think of things differently, and mad we're trying to make money.

We couldn't be happier with how it's going.
Tim owes you what?
SqWebMail - Copyright 1999-2007 Double Precision, Inc.
Thanks for the feedback, and yes, we're working on keeping users engaged. Most of the competitors you reference require you to go inside of your breaker box (require an electrician) to set up in the United States, among other shortcomings.
And it's ineffective. If you have to say it's about opinion, you've already lost. I know that there are opinions that state that victim-blaming is a terrible thing.

I even believe it.

But we couldn't have this conversation unless this, _this itself_ was a reaction to the telling of truth.
To my reading, OP didn't intend to convey "unpredictable" so much as "large," and if he did, then I'm not sure what he was thinking; "quantum leap" isn't even colloquially understood to mean "unpredictable change".
I called this in the first comment, it then reached -4. Oh well.
"We pulled the post on Friday because we got a note from people at Microsoft that they were worried the solution we had published was unsafe."
I understand the global implications of energy usage. But being from an old factory town I wonder if on a local scale now that the factories are all gone there is less energy consumption. I see the energy companies changing to all of the smart grid tech and I wonder if there would ever be a need to change the grid to support more power. Seems like everyone is into less power consumption, but if you do weld or have a garden its tough to keep power bills low. thats my two cents.