skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really interesting that the test subjects said they preferred the guy with the most achievement, yet actually picked the one with the most potential. It makes you wonder how many of those "how to get a job" articles are written with the achievement mindset even though it's not what employers are really looking for.
Just picking up where the past organizers left off.

See you at the meetup!
It's a beautiful site. I'm thinking someone is in the process of buying it.
I think it's useful to think of ideas you could pursue in kind of a 2x2 matrix. You have revolutionary ideas and evolutionary ideas. You have high-capital ideas and low-capital ideas.

If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing revolutionary, high-capital ideas.

That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market, or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of potential acquirers in the existing market participants.
solve hard problems. Things have become easy now a days so it should be more affordable and doable to really solve hard problems.
Thanks for organizing so much in the past.
GC doesn't have to be global or blocking. If you look at the GC in CLR/.Net 4+ then it can run GC on low priority background threads.

I know Go's GC isn't there yet, but it's easier to centralize a performance improvement under this model i.e. GC improvements will lead to global improvements rather than case by case.

There's more than one way to skin a cat on this one.
I love to rip on 'social startups' as much as any good hacker, and I basically start my day with a cup of coffee and the 'startup guys' video.

reading this article, though, something clicked for me. why does it matter that there are startups out there that are constantly pivoting or not producing real products? what is the loss?

one statement I've seen put forward is that the startup energy would capture smart people who could be our next Feynman or Shannon and instead of having them do real science, we figure out how to get them to click on ads. I can appreciate this fear, however, I've spent a lot of time on university campuses lately and I've met a very large number of very smart and very motivated young people who are getting educated in real science and have a passion to go into the world and change it. They won't go figure out how to get people to click ads.

is the fear that these little pivoting media startups will seriously suck all of the spare cash out of the economy and we will wind up doing nothing but producing Twitter clones? if you produce this analysis, in my opinion, you should step back and consider that maybe you're too close to the bubble.

so what's the harm with having the brogrammers produce products that no one wants to use? do you have a backlog of awesome work that you wish was being done, could be done by these constantly pivoting wunderkinds, but isn't? maybe you should start a company!
Not shocking, the most misunderstood part of Apple is that people think they are just a company who makes shiny products with great marketing, which they do.

What most don't consider is that they have among the best supply chain management in the world. Their inventory turnover is basically once every five days. That is completely absurd, beyond the likes of Dell, who was always the best in the industry at those metrics.

The thing about Apple is they are executing well in almost every area of their business. They just don't make a lot of mistakes.

It is insanely difficult to beat a company that does it all and is pretty strong in every area. Apple is very profitable, well managed, well marketed, and produces great products.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/221442/rest-clients-for-j...
thank you, thank you, I've been wanting to write something similar for a while now, but have been advised not to, because of my tone.

I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not.

There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie, i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three simple questions they all fail to answer:

1. where is the value?
2. what's your competitive advantage?
3. who's your target and how are you planning to make money.

just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really care, as i just need to build up some funds."

let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential to make a shitload of money.

But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones.

But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.
"The article fails to mention that HP and Dell haven't exactly been setting the world on fire with sales of Android tablets"

HP has never released a single Android tablet and Dell's Streak efforts have been half-hearted at best so your entire comment is extremely specious.
It says on the Anyvite invitation that is linked. Part 1 is at Pangea Bakery (Kerny Mesa) at 7:30pm and Part 2 is at O'Brien's bar across the street at 9:30pm. See you at the meetup.
So you want to hack on IMAP…
Show HN: We made a .gif website for science ...and a few laughs
My brother and I made a ".gif" website as a summer side project. Before you quip "thanks, the internet needed another one of those", let me explain.

We love gifs. The file-type has been around forever and the funny ones guarantee a chuckle or two. We often email or text each other gifs that convey the perfect emotion in a conversation. Our gif folders were becoming huge and it was becoming difficult to find the ones we were looking for.

There is nothing ground-breaking or seriously innovative about the project, however it did help us learn a whole lot. We found a problem we know pretty well and we set out to solve it while learning as much as possible.

My brother is in a computer-related undergraduate program but his exposure to web programming is limited (non-existent). He had his own set of goals. I wanted to try Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the first time and tinker with multiple APIs, so I had my own set own of goals. Both of us have jobs unrelated to web-development.

Just thought I'd share the site with you fine folks. Feel free to provide feedback (although we don't plan on working on it too much in the future) and share your side-projects where you solved a small problem for yourself.

Fun fact: "GIF" is supposedly pronounced as "JIF" ...like the peanut butter brand.

Link: http://gifpost.me
This is highly unlikely and probably flat out wrong. Placing any app in the app store will result in a few immediate downloads just from being listed.
A few months after IBM's Watson won Jeopardy, the IBM Research team came to the Texas Medical Center in Houston for a dog and pony show about its possibilities for health care. They presented for two hours to an auditorium of a hundred doctors and administrators from TMC, one of the premiere medical communities in the world. From a technical point of view, it was pretty impressive what Watson can do, reading everything, never forgetting, assigning weights to knowledge over time, able to explain where it got an answer. But when the time came for the doctors to respond ... ouch! One male doctor said "I already have access to a $500,000 decision support system and I don't use that. Why would I start using your stuff?" Another woman cardiologist said she could see using Watson on about ten percent of her office appointments, but she had a hard time seeing how to integrate it and not be slowed down for the other 90% where it was unnecessary. Doctors are a tough crowd.

The Ruby Rogues podcast had Conrad Barski, author of Land of Lisp, a while ago:

http://rubyrogues.com/043-rr-book-club-land-of-list-with-con...

Barski is a medical doctor who gave up medicine to code. He explained how it just didn't fit the medical culture to be interested in thinking deeply about an interesting problem, House MD not withstanding. Medical training is designed to give real time answers to presented problems, and it is, er..., 'highly discouraged' to tell a patient "That's an interesting case you have there. I'm going to go google that tonight and I'll have more information in the morning."
You're right, I'm really on the fence with this, it's a hard one. I'm going to look into getting a light-weight HTML email for the system notifications. If the right balance can be struck I'll go for HTML.

Edit: When I say HTML I mean well designed (boxes, colors and logos). At the moment, like tomwalsham said, its just some <p> tags.
FB new low (18.23), down 52% from 38 IPO price
Anatomy of an Interactive: A Look at The Guardian's Second Screen
But nobody was discussing the Irish economy, hence why it isn't really relevant.
To keep the detector saturated for any period of time you would need to have aim that's a little too perfect. Besides, my central point was that there are lots of vulnerabilities in existing cars and they're still driven.

In case you decide to test your theory about lasers and human eyes, please don't use someone else as a test subject.
Unrelated to the content of the article, but the light grey text is almost entirely illegible. The figure captions are particularly bad, and I am surprised Bret Victor chose such an awful color scheme. This page is basically a perfect case for http://contrastrebellion.com/
I think he's forgetting how Elon Musk got started.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zip2
Face-off: acceptance testing with rspec versus cucumber
I think a lot of people here are missing the point of 'sl', 'gti' et al. They're practical jokes, not training aids. Of course you can alias 'sl' to 'ls'! Of course some shells are smart enough to DWIM! 'sl' is there so we can watch the expression on the clewless n00b's face when he inevitably mistypes 'ls'-- probably in a moment of stress.
However, what you are capable of is mostly derived from what you have done in the past.
Zynga Hires a New Executive to Lead Online Gambling Ambitions
Headline is wrong. Squatting is already illegal in Scotland.
> The right way to avoid GC pauses in a GC'd language is to avoid generating garbage; e.g. with free lists.

And Go makes it much easier to avoid generating garbage than pretty much every other GC language around, already "by default" Go code tends to generate dramatically less garbage than for example Java, and when you care, you can further fine tune it to produce even less garbage.
Understanding Algebra: Why do we factor equations?
This was actually the first thing I noticed too.
"...we concluded that an average zombie is getting zero to ten downloads a day, depending on the country."

This is not even remotely the same thing as "never been downloaded". I've flagged the article for blatant stupidity. Do people not think before they click the up arrow?
Pure speculation: maybe these apps are actually ebooks or some other kind of static content just packaged as an app and they are generated by an automatic or a semi-automatic process. Assuming that the article is correct, of course.
You can sideload an .apk without rooting the device, yes.
I have doubts about the offered explanation.

From the abstract of the study behind the article [1]:

When people seek to impress others, they often do so by
highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive
appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often
prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating
others. Indeed, compared with references to achievement
(e.g., “this person has won an award for his work”),
references to potential (e.g., “this person could win an
award for his work”) appear to stimulate greater interest
and processing, which can translate into more favorable
reactions. This tendency creates a phenomenon whereby the
potential to be good at something can be preferred over
actually being good at that very same thing. We document
this preference for potential in laboratory and field
experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to
comedians to graduate school applicants and measures
ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to
admission decisions.

What causes this apparent preference for potential achievement over actual achievement? According to the study's abstract (the study itself is behind a pay wall), it's a mind trick: uncertainty "stimulates greater interest and processing, which can translate into more favorable reactions." More of the same from the HBR piece:

When human brains come across uncertainty, they tend to pay
attention to information more because they want to figure
it out, which leads to longer and more in-depth
processing. High-potential candidates make us think harder
than proven ones do. So long as the information available
about the high-potential candidate is favorable, all this
extra processing can lead (unconsciously) to an overall
more positive view of the candidate (or company). (That
part about the information available being favorable is
important. In another study, when the candidate was
described as having great potential, but there was little
evidence to back that up, people liked him far less than
the proven achiever.)

That's a nice theory, but another explanation, which doesn't seem to have been considered, is that in many cases something that has the potential to reach a value of X is actually more valuable than something that we know, with certainty, has a value of X. That's because a thing that has the potential to reach X also has the potential to reach beyond X, but a thing that has already been measured to be X does not.

In other words, you are given two probability distributions: one wide, one tight. The wide one, you are told, has the potential to contain X. But the tight one, for certain, is centered on X. Now, which do you pick?

If you're in a situation were values of X are nice but values beyond X are gold, then you pick the wide distribution. That's because the tight distribution is centered on "nice" and, being tight, offers almost no hope of straying into "gold" territory.

So maybe it's not a mind trick, after all.

[1] http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2012-18069-001/

EDIT: fix typos.
Close, but no cigar

Take home pay should be competitive with other companies and guarantee a certain standard of living

So salaries are higher for a competitive take home pay. But the lower corporate tax ends up making things even.

I was only saying the value mentioned by the parent was off, that's all.
Count Form Fields, Get Form Fields Values of a PDF Document in Cloud
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That's a pretty nice way to think about these things, Kudos!

A visualization of the concept, would make a great blog post.
Walks And Walking - Mud Huggers Exclusive Reader Offer
Do Ghosts Exist?
This stuff is really useful even if you don't want to move off Heroku. Just knowing that you can is really reassuring in case they stop offering what you need. Simple how to guides are even better.

It was the fact that Heroku offer an environment to run fairly standard Rails + Postgres that made me pick them over the more unique and harder to move from Google platform. Even though I was starting from scratch.

It's always good to have an exit route.
Pro tips: 20 steps to the perfect website layout
Like nearly everything in education, this is woo. We have almost no evidence for any intervention, even in mainstream approaches to schooling. We still largely hold to the absurd idea that if a school environment is intuitively appealing, it will be effective in providing a lasting benefit to the pupil. This is of course a baseless irrational belief.

Education does not need more opinionated "humanitarians". It needs randomised controlled trials, and lots of them.
Cyborg tissue is half living cells, half electronics
Actually the world probably does need "another way to connect with merchants." The way you can convince yourself of that is to ask: have all the ways of connecting with merchants been invented? "Connecting with merchants" is such a large category that the answer is surely no. In fact it takes some effort to find sentences of the form "All the ways of doing x have been invented" that one can feel certain are true.

It's certainly not true for photo-sharing applications, because that's not even a real category. Images are a fundamental medium, like text. We don't lump Twitter, email, and blogging together as "text-sharing applications." The only reason we do with photos is that it's only recently that smartphones have brought a lot of photos online. But a huge number of what we would now call "photo-sharing applications" remain to be invented. Ditto for text-sharing applications incidentally.
I think I'm going to write a counter-opinion post sometime called "Everyone poops" about how the advice given here scores an 11/10 on my trite-meter.

Readers have by now heard their start-up isn't solving an important problem by now - that doesn't help them start something that does. "Advice" of this nature is just the author procrastinating from solving the same ambitious problems he seems so enthusiastic about. If your going to change the world, you need to stop giving a shit about the inevitable dogdating sites of others and just do it yourself.
Does anyone have any pointers to or comments on the implications for the hiring/manager side based on this research? Namely, when hiring, should one consciously avoid the bias toward high-potential candidates versus experienced candidates? The article doesn't comment on this aspect, and I couldn't get a sense of whether the players/candidates went on to perform equally well. Unfortunately the full text of the actual research paper referenced in the article is behind a paywall.
When I was young enough to be in pediatrics, my doctor once pulled out a pocket-sized electronic device and keyed in my symptoms. The result it suggested matched his guess, but it was unusual enough he was reassured to have a second opinion :)
Well it depends a bit when you pivot. I'm guessing most people pivot before actually coming out with their product, simply because they don't know what they really want and they have no idea how to do it either.

Pivoting is good when you're already out there with your idea and then understand that you need to adjust to your customers needs. It is not when you don't really know what to do and just experiment with other peoples money to find out what YOU want.
Interesting research, but I'm not a big fan of the 'blog article that draws on the abstract of the research' type of article.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a sharable, non-paywalled draft of the article anywhere.
This is terrible advice. When you decide to create something, the first thing....it's probably going to be crap. It's only by creating, and shipping, over and over again that you begin to learn how to create products. Often times, in fact most of the time, people are going to create a bunch of crap before they finally make the gem that's going to be awesome.
I'm somewhat in the same space with Folyo (http://folyo.me), and I know it's not an easy market.

But Workfu was one of the competitors I was most impressed with. They had a great team and great execution, so I hope they find a way to pull through somehow.

I guess this is the only time being a single founder is actually an advantage. Since I run Folyo by myself I have very few expenses, and can always feed myself by taking on client work if need be.
Is nine months really enough time to make a determination whether a company is viable? It seems a little on the short side, and I recall reading in a number of places that you can only truly know how it's going a couple of years in. Is the issue here that resources/finances weren't adequately planned for?
Of course the goal of this website is to sell cars to Indians out of Japan, so really fail on Nissan's part
Open source the software if it's really going to just die perhaps?
I read a quote recently that "most startups get interesting around 18 months". I think you guys are giving up too soon. Workfu has enormous potential. Either way, kudos for making it as far as you have.
Have you tried asking your users? Because they'll probably be only too happy to tell you.
The OEMs are lazy and risk adverse. They just want to sell their hardware. I don't understand why the OEMs don't see the long term picture. Would they rather have a totally dominant Apple where they have no chance of selling their product? They should take the opportunity to learn from Microsoft's example and help push the platform forward with great hardware devices - by taking risks. The more they give way to Microsoft, the more more they will cripple their own business. The same can be said about Google-Motorola situation.

OEMs should focus on what they are good at. Making hardware.
It was not Twitter that was supposed to kill the blogs? | Orderly Chaos
How To Build A Satellite
+1 on this feature request! It would be even more valuable to me than the image swap/image hosting features I mentioned. I obviously can't speak for other users, but my ideal use case would be setting this up for a client and then letting them fill in the blanks themselves for each new e-mail, so fancy formatting could be set up ahead of time--the clients just want to edit text and have the paragraphs inserted automatically "without all that HTML stuff" :)