skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It makes sense for an obese person to stop stocking the pantry and refrigerator with ice cream, cookies, chips, and soda. Binge eating and sugar addiction are serious problems, and just blaming people and telling them they have “bad self control” doesn’t really solve anything. Putting dangerous temptation out of reach, however, can have real benefits. (Although usually overeating is also linked to other unrelated stress, so this may mainly be treating a symptom rather than the root cause.)

For the science, some of it quite shocking, check out this great lecture series http://www.youtube.com/course?list=PL4FD135EA45DEEBB6&fe...

This lecture in particular, about rat studies, is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cli0RJQiPc
Second that! Love the Packstations in Germany, can't wait to have Bufferbox in SF!
Maybe Fidelity? PIMCO? Humble Warren B. of Omaha. Lots of other examples. Money is universal...like love. Kind of.
"it allows us to get really comfortable wasting a lot of time."

And then the article fell completely to pieces. If you view your time searching for new information as a "waste", then you're going to end up in a world of self inflicted ignorance.

We have the capabilities of sifting through bleeding edge information that shapes our lives on a daily basis with the internet. The act of ignoring this blatant fact is to effectively censor your own education. Why not just try to stay away from all of the meme loaded bullshit that the internet has to offer instead?
@akeefer nailed it. This is an essay about why project management is bad, written by someone who it seems like has never actually studied project management.

Good planning and estimation is the tool of the worker, not of management. It keeps pointy-haired bosses from coming in and asking "is it done yet?" When done properly, it help justify the number of resources that will be needed to deliver the project on time, and the amount of cash/resources that it will take to complete the project. Good project management results in a not-to-exceed date that is 90% confident (only 10% of projects will exceed this date), so the team has time to tackle unknowns that pop up along the way.

And, yes, at the end of the day, project management is a tool for accountability. Like it or not, everyone has to be accountable for their performance at the end of the day, whether as parents, life partners, or employees. Saying that you don't want to be held accountable by some stupid boss is naive and unrealistic.
Wow. The negativity of the comments here to this post is astounding.

I personally find this post very insightful. Just yesterday, I bought the EA Tetris app for $0.99. I played it for three minutes, and decided I hated the "touch" interface for Tetris. It isn't Tetris at all. And it pissed me off that I paid money for something useless. It doesn't matter if I paid $20 for it or $0.99. It just makes me feel like a fool, like I got taken in.

When the author says "Your $1 App is a Total Gamble", that's exactly the point. And it has nothing to do with it being an app or an online purchase. It's the same way I feel about buying a new snack for $0.99 and discovering it tastes like cardboard, or a shirt from a new store that turns out to shrink unexpectedly in the wash.

People hate buying things they'll regret, particularly when they're buying blind, or have no idea of the risks. It's psychological, not necessarily economic, but it's true. And in app stores, there's rarely a trusted brand to rely on, or anything at all, to tell you you're not being taken for a fool. Customer reviews tend to be worthless, and you're not going to spend 20 minutes researching a $0.99 purchase. So you just won't buy it period, because you hate feeling like a fool. Psychologically, it makes perfect sense.

But what if the app stores switched to a subscription model? Pay $10/mo for unlimited apps. Suddenly, no regret. Pay developers based on their proportion of hourly usage across all phones. All of a sudden, no regret, and developers are paid based on people finding their apps useful, instead of their ability to convince people to buy them...
> I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better product.

Which is inevitable. Their clients are crappy, otherwise there wouldn't be a third-party ecosystem to piss off in the first place.

Which means their only defense is network effects.

Which means it's probably a bad idea to motivate all your early adopters to find and grow the network that unseats you.
That's just the point, neither imperfection nor simplicity leads to viability, but taking less time and delivering something more appropriate does. You can make something simpler by stopping too soon or thinking too long; make something imperfect by not testing enough or sitting around adding bugs. ;)
Yes, the point here: the actual non-monetary "cost" of a purchase to many end users is much higher than 99c. I would say personally that the cost of any app I have to purchase is $2-3 at least. Therefore all that pricing the app at 99c has done is brought the cost down to the floor imposed by other factors.

So app developers need to judge and price their apps comensurate with the real "effective" cost the user is going to pay anyway to install their app. Pricing less than that, or at least deluding yourself that pricing less than that gives you a competitive advantage, is pointless and sometimes counterproductive (in the absence of other information I will judge the quality of your app partly by how it is priced).
There's something to be said about forcing yourself to develop new habits. Take away the distractions for a while, and you'll find that when you add them back, it's harder to break these new habits.

Just focusing on self-control is very hard. Take smoking, for instance -- it's hard to just "cut down" when that temptation is always there.
Congratulations Dalton Caldwell!

Who could have known that Twitter would just hand you the entire game with one stupid maneuver.
That Wikipedia link doesn't lead to a valid page -- perhaps you meant this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand%27s_nuclear-free_zo...
"Thanks for your patience about all the" is quite an unorthodox name for a company.
App.net got over $800k in funding and still has a large amount left from picplz. As Dalton put it at last nights AirBnB tech talk, they have an "infinite amount of time" for a startup. As in several years at their current burn rate.
It's rather frightening that the only example that they give of a user facing service in the appropriate 'quadrant' is Klout.
Estimating may be a way to figure out what is plausible to do by Christmas. Which may help you scale your desires up or down to have the best deliverable product that you can.

Also in any contract negotiations, someone has to take the risk. The more risk you take, usually the higher margins you can get. (I am currently working on a contract where my willingness to take on all of the risk of not delivering value has improved my likely profit margins 10-fold.) Thus if you're willing to do fixed schedule and/or fixed price contracts, on average you can charge more. But it would be insane to attempt that without being able to estimate your likely costs and schedules.

Sure, that estimation is an intrinsically hard problem. That is why you get to charge extra for having done it. But it is not trivially the wrong business decision to make.

As an extreme example, I offer you SpaceX. Which signs lots of fixed price bids on development tasks that make the average software project look like a cakewalk.
As soon as everyone learns to write there will be no need for writers.
Square Offers Businesses a Flat $275 Monthly Usage Fee
The operative difference between buying cups of coffee and paid apps is actually this:

If you try to spend $50 on cups of coffee you'll quickly become twitchy and have to stop, but if you keep pressing the Buy button in the app store you can easily get the thing done.
That is the most obnoxious site I have ever been to. I closed the window after having to close two Popups to continue reading.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
You might already know this, and it's not as automated as just dropping in a file, but one option for extracting tables from PDFs (other than retyping them) is the pro version of Adobe Acrobat. If you drag-select around a table, you can right-click to export it as Excel or CSV, which works most of the time.
Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.'
They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit
at most 200,000 users.

Nitpick - it's 200% of what they're at now, so if they currently have a million users they're good for up to 2 million.
This is something that a favorite instructor of mine has stressed to me—the most difficult part of data analysis (and the part in which mistakes are most often made) is not choosing the correct analysis to do, nor actually performing it, but rather manipulating the data into the necessary shape/format. My favorite utilities for this are Hadley Wickham's plyr and reshape (http://had.co.nz/) (not sure if you already use these, figured I'd drop you a hint if not)
> It makes sense for an obese person to stop stocking the pantry and refrigerator with ice cream, cookies, chips, and soda.

I would call this "self control", which is exactly what the GP was advocating.
Or, if you have a Mac, you can just order your prints from within iPhoto.

It’s at least as convenient and 2 to 4 times cheaper.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/print-products.html#prints
Is this not what git does?
Your first point is relatively correct. Prices in Australia are hugely more expensive because of a combination of high wages and sheer distance from everything else.

The second point however is a stereotypical blanket statement. It's important to note that Anchor as a company designed and maintained the infrastructure of Github.com and now does the same thing for testflightapp.com; Both of which are high profile startups each of whom have traffic numbers orders of magnitude higher than most Australian hosting providers see across their entire network.

In the end, quality hosting isn't just about the hardware (linode, rackspace), but highly skilled engineers who can architect and provide solutions that don't 'just work' now, but scale into the future.
Something like BufferBox was attempted 12 years ago and failed
I guess coming from the web world I would call those Game Frameworks, not necessarily engines. Just because he hasnt laid out a proper API doesnt make his game "run" (as in engine) any less... its still a working game. And it could be used as the engine to power similar type games, even though time and forethought hasn't been put into making that easy (like in the case of a Framework API). So in my mind its still a game "engine". But I see your point, definitely.

I never really knew "engines" implied API's and abstraction, but I guess that does make sense.

Just the fact that its running in a browser on Webkit kind of implies its an engine of sorts in my mind.

Thats just how my train of thought works when thinking about things in the context of javascript/the web world.
I totally would.

I purchased Dark Sky a couple weeks ago on the recommendation of a friend. I thought the $3.99 price tag was way too steep for what is mostly likely another crappy app, and I would never have bought it if my friend hadn't sung its praises.

And it's now one of the most useful apps on my phone, and if it had been a 14-day free trial, I'd happily pay $20 for it.

If free trials were available, like are common in the desktop software world, I think app prices could go waaay up.
Dave is spot on. Nothing is more frustrating than a mediocre meeting with no feedback, or polite feedback. When you're funding you need to learn quickly about what's resonating, and where your falling flat.

Tis far kinder to be cruel at this point.

Obviously it was an asshat thing to say, but I've heard lots of stories of VC's pushing sensitive buttons to see how founders will react.
Not 200k users. 200% of their current user count. If Product A has 150k user tokens then their limit is now 300k. If Product B has 5 billion user tokens then their limit is now 10 billion.

Although this distinction doesn't really change anything.
Yup, OpenJsCad has the ability to do live editing, but it tends to render a bit slow when the models are somewhat more complex. It sends work back and forth to a background worker to generate the polygons, but it still has to send it all back to the main thread.

Unfortunately, OpenJsCad doesn't seem to have a high rate of adoption among 3D printing modelers...at least not yet.
Features, budget, schedule. The development team has to have control of one of those three.

Generally schedule is fixed by external factors. Budget is fixed by the existing team size times the schedule. Therefore the corner that makes the most sense for the development team to control is features.
You mean like http://filepicker.io? :)
I don't go on road trips without a significant supply of my concentrated aqueous solution of caffeine and theanine, and my handy concentrated flavoring so that I can make energy drinks on the go. So no, I wouldn't surrender to Starbucks in that scenario.

But I realize that my habits are not exactly typical.
Yes, I agree. I'll have to find space to fit it, but it makes sense to do so.
Free Beer: The truth about dishonesty
It was 8 years ago when I started using Debian after trying out numerous distributions and it was the first one that just "worked" for me. I have been using it on all my servers, and my desktop (During the Vista years) ever since.

Here's to another 19 years!
It's actually exciting to see all of these companies coming to fruition. If anything, it'd be nice to see an official "who's launched" list so we can check everything out.
Okay. Then by the same token, getting rid of the home internet connection is “self control”. So then what is he complaining about?
You, like a staggering number of men on the Internet, have developed some notion that women go around randomly accusing people of rape all the time— like it's such a common occurrence that we need to devote time and laws to prevent it. The exact opposite is true: Women are most often times afraid to come forward about a rape due to fear of being ostracized. In fact, even when reporting a rape accusation, officers will often times mark an accusation as "unfounded" just because the victim didn't fight off the suspect![0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#FBI_st...

Women aren't going around changing their mind post coitus about whether they wanted to have sex with you just like you aren't about them. It's incredibly rare and a notion perpetuated by people who really don't want to face the fact that rape and sexual assault are problems in our society.
The issue is counterparty risk, generally.

Don't buy something, especially something with an ongoing or operations component, from someone you don't trust. I think J.P. Morgan's famous quote is instructive.

There's nothing wrong with using long-term (perpetual is very long term) liability to finance growth. That's what happens when you sell equity in a start-up -- it's dead anyway if you can't launch, so that you'll eventually be paying dividends to shareholders (or otherwise returning capital to them) is often a reasonable trade. Financing early customers the same way makes sense; if you have to sell a unit of product now at a perpetual loss, you can compute the lifetime cost of that; for instance, giving pg a free lifetime email account ($500/yr) if that brings you 10k customers at $500/yr is probably a worthwhile strategy for a new high-end email hosting service.
General Motors Is Headed For Bankruptcy - Again
I find all of the job posts from YC companies that launched years ago most distracting.

Launches are interesting to a general audience.

Jobs only to a small niche.
Show HN: JavaScript Blocker Safari extension
The vast majority of Twitter users don't use Twitter because they like the 3rd party apps.

They use Twitter because they could get constant updates from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.

3rd party apps means nothing to them as long as Bieber and Gaga are still on Twitter.
"INTERPOL cannot compel any of its 190 member countries to arrest the subject of a Red Notice. Any individual wanted for arrest should be considered innocent until proven guilty. "

http://www.interpol.int/
It's very similar to Code Complete, but much, much shorter. Also, Code Complete has a fair bit of dumb stuff mixed in with the gems of wisdom that comprise most of it; TPOP doesn't.
Mathematical Reading List for Cambridge U. Students (.PDF)
I program every day. I live on the internet. I blog (privately), plan projects, work on said projects, and inhale information probably 15 hours per day- sometimes more (I don't sleep much).

A week ago, a lightning strike took out my internet. I didn't react this way at all.

I don't remember being bored except for the last day, when I was waiting for the Ethernet to USB adapter to get here (My Ethernet port was damaged, along with my modem and router).

I read a book. I watched the history channel. I drank some coffee and spent some time with my family. I read another book. I got a hair cut.

This isn't a problem with what the internet allows you to do. It's a problem with what you do with your time.

Edit: My boredom on the last day can probably be attributed to the maker habit of not getting into something when interruption is imminent.
Darpa enlists makers of “BigDog” to construct machines that think for themselves
I'm an Aussie coffee afficionado, and the best coffee I ever had in London was at Monmouth. No idea of the address, but it was about 5mins walk from the modern art museum, on that side of the Thames, near a food market. As if that'll help... :-)
Auction: financial modeling for your startup, proceeds to save Hacker Dojo.
Apple's TV Vision: Icons, Sharing, Full On-Demand
I find that I'm much more productive working in languages designed by other people, because they have much larger standard libraries. :)
Entirely so – they died from a stagnant product and a hideous experience.

But whether MySpace died from Twitter's flavor of incompetence or not is irrelevant to the point that the end result is going to look comically similar.
My understanding of his question was how I rendered the diff of the models.

While git does calculate textual diffs, it does not calculate visual diffs of 3D models, which is what I've managed to do here.
I have a genius idea how to make a p2p pseudo-twitter which I have shared with only one person yet, but why not share it now on HN (maybe someone can build it instead of me, since I don't have the time at the moment because of school stuff).

Basically, what you need to solve in something like p2p twitter is: how to authentificate the user, how to send the message around, how to archive the message that it is not lost.

Now the genius idea:
all of this is exactly what bitcoin solves.

Bitcoin already has mechanisms for authenticating. Bitcoin already has mechanisms for sharing messages (altough it is called "transactions"). Bitcoin has a mechanism for archiving those messages (it's called "blockchain").

And the kicker - bitcoin already has an ability to enter arbitrary data into the transaction. (sure, not much, but about the 160 letters tweets have.) You just add it into the script and add OP_DROP; since the transaction including script is signed, noone can just remove it.

My idea was to hijack the already existing bitcoin infrastructure and hack Twitter-like P2P messaging thing on top of it; let's call it "bitmessage".

How would sending a "bitmessage" look like? Well, you can, for example, send money from your address to the same address (send money to yourself) and add the wanted string into the script.

You can then look for a message of a given user (if you take bitcoin address as an ID of the user).

Now of course, this wouldn't be free for long (if it catched up). Right now, bitcoin miners take just anything the P2P network throws at them, but if the network was flooded with people sending money to themselves with a message in script, they would just throw these away so it doesn't enlarge the already giant blockchain. However, you can add fees to any transaction. If you add fees high enough, some block miner will eventually take your "bitmessage" and add it to the blockchain.

Would the resulting thing be equivalent of twitter? No, it would be slow (it takes about 10 minutes to get transaction to blockchain) and it would most likely not be for free (if it catches on, miners will throw away the messages with low fees). On the other hand, every message would be recorded forever, without any chance of anyone deleting it, censoring it or getting your IP address. Also, the Bitcoin seems to be going strong and doesn't seem like it will go away any time soon, and the infrastructure is super-strong.

I want to hack a prototype... maybe... one day.
> 3rd party clients that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.

Not clients that cater to anything other than the basic user. Managing multiple accounts already seems to deviate from that qualifier.
The people who would be interested in buying FB shares.
Cool. I did happen upon you solution a couple months ago when I was researching the topic. :)

I checked out your snow globe and the augmented reality stuff you're doing in open hardware. Pretty neat!
Big data and data science blogs ordered by Google PageRank
Anecdote (I assume I'll get down-voted since it's HN but I don't give a fuck, please yourself):

In my city, in Montreal, people love to honk all over the place when their favourite sport team wins. It's freakin annoying.. I'm not a hockey fan and I couldn't care less that a team just won a tournament or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see people happy about it.. but it's not an excuse to go honk in the streets at 10 PM and yelling non-stop.

Anyway, 2 years ago, a Linux kernel was just released and I decided to have some fun driving the street and honk-ing at 10PM. I did that for a good 15-20 minutes before being arrested by the police. I then explained why I was honking and that since hockey fans could go in the street, I could do it.

Believe it or not, I had no tickets and they told me they understood and would make sure nobody would honk in my neighbour.. and even now, after 2 years, I see police cars in front of my house arresting people who honk when hockey or football/soccer teams win.

Meh.. so when I see these "Happy birthday Debian", I like to think that, maybe somewhere, a little nerd like me is happy and go out honking in their neighbour.
This is one of the thinner pieces I've come across on the HN front page (as was the linked article). I'm not usually one to over-emphasize qualifications, but the author is making fairly bold assertions about an industry he is at best tangentially involved with.

"Professional Interest

Nick analyzes portfolio companies and their target markets to help them focus on opportunities for profitable growth.

Experience

Prior to joining OpenView in 2011, Nick worked at Echo Bridge Capital, a startup hedge fund in Boston. In his two years there, he analyzed prospective and current investment opportunities in the Consumer Discretionary sector, and helped write the quarterly investment letter."
You tell them to define a minimal feature set, and impose that it is actually minimal. This feature set you estimate and give a hard deadline on. Then you tell them that you will iterate based on feedback and add features as directed until such a time as they choose to stop paying you. There is no such thing as "done" in software development.
very cool. being monolingual definitely has its advantages. can't wait to try ratchet.io out
Which winter are you talking about? Twitter has been tightening the strings for a while now.