skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've only just skimmed this -- won't have time to fully read & listen to it until much later today. But I wanted to bring up something that I didn't see mentioned anywhere in there.

You have to charge more. Aside from all of the arguments in terms of value and avoiding pathological customers and so on, there's one more really good reason to charge more: you need the money if you want to be awesome.

I've been running a small business for a while now that helps a lot of people that need help but can't afford it. That's all fulfilling, heart-warming work, but it's also put me into a very difficult position. Right now, I need to hire more people, but I can't afford anyone that's good. That's directly hurting my customers. Our turnaround times are really hurting as a result. I've got an opportunity to hire on a brilliant old friend of mine, but I'm not sure yet if I can swing it, because the bank account really doesn't have enough in it to afford him, and I don't know if I can work long enough hours to get that kind of money in there.

I've resisted every other justification for charging more. Vacations? I don't need more than just a few days off once in a while. Toys? Don't need those either. Avoiding pathological customers? But those people need help too, and I want to help them.

But not being able to build a strong business with lots of talent under my current model? That's pretty hard to ignore.
Just Another Static Blog Generator (tutorial)
I think the problem is that you're looking at yourself as an expense. What if you marketed yourself as a money multiplier? Someone who can take the money clients invest in you and create a positive ROI?

A huge amount of people who want what you have to offer aren't actively looking for "X Developers". I'm working on a $200/hr, 6 month contract now for a client that wasn't even looking for custom software.

I'm really against the marketplace / elance / odesk model. Go into the world, talk to business owners, discover their problems, and then see if there's any overlap between your abilities to solve their problems and their pains.

Check out the bottom of this post (http://planscope.io/blog/my-most-effective-newsletter-to-dat...) for a real life conversation I had at a networking mixer that landed me the contract I described above.
Cheating's understandable, especially on HN. You only need to get a couple of votes early on to edge onto the bottom of the frontpage. And once you're on the frontpage you get seen by a lot more people, so you tend to get upvoted and stick around for a while.

I'd even say that it's not that sleazy, since anything which sticks around on the frontpage is, at least, obviously of interest to enough people to keep it there. Unless you've organized a huge fake-voting ring, I suppose.

EDIT: I am slightly surprised at the downvotes. :P
Edited! Thanks for the feedback.

I'd love your input on another thing. We're passionate about making the hiring process awesome for both employers and jobseekers.

I've spoken to a few designers who really dislike things like 99designs, or to a certain extent, what this article advocates because it seems to commoditize designers. On the other hand, the vast majority of designers we've worked with are really happy with the way we met and started working, because it ensures a good fit and doesn't waste anyone's time.

As a designer, how do you find work (either full-time or freelance)? And in the ideal world, what would that process look like for you?
There was an amazing blog post (http://41latitude.com/post/2072504768/google-maps-label-read...) on 41Latitude when it still around about the absolute thing of beauty and art that is the labeling and visual design of Google Maps that enable it to have extremely high data density, while maintaining perhaps the best readability of any of the interactive maps out there. Correctness is the most glaring issue, but it's far, far more that sets Google apart from what Apple launched in their maps application.

EDIT: Here is an archived version found elsewhere: http://www.allhatter.com/showthread.php/13017-Google-Maps-am...
Some excellent points here, but his conclusions seem to be severely limited by self-interest and/or nostalgia.

"Individual investors and the funds that just invest in stocks and bonds are not going to crash the market."

So what happened in 1929 then?
One Bad Apple Spoils the Ride
Ask HN: Is the Accounting Space Crowded at the Moment?
Would doing an accounting product at the MVP level be a bad idea currently with free products out there like Wave?
Do you mean 10.7? Because 10.6 was everything 10.5 was, except better on pretty much every front.
I read it. The whole article. And all I can think after digesting what I read is, "U mad?" I think this journalist is just irritated that someone scolded them for "working the news cycle."

And it's not clear why saying, "Well Apple's events are also over covered!" is somehow a dodge for "The RNC is being massively overcovered."

P.S., If anything CES is undercovered. In the 10 years I've been following it I've never once felt like I have any clue what is going on there.
From the docs: "Tent is a protocol for decentralized social networking." I'm not sure why this is interesting? It's neither the first nor the last such protocol, can someone enlighten me?
And 10 years ago the opposite was true. Apple was on the verge of collapse and MS ruled the world. Fortunes change.
Security issues, most likely.

Plus new HTML features, but they are secondary.
And do you call San Francisco, "Frisco"?
BBC call on Newry community for emigration documentary
> Edison’s Conquest of Mars

I read that a few months ago. What a hoot! It wasn't meant to be funny, but it's so distant from us that it is funny anyway.
> Eventually I was not able to run safari

Of course you were, you were not able to update Safari anymore. And why would you be?

> In my view Apple is charging users for service packs.

Right, 10.0 to 10.8 is exactly the same OS, just 8 service packs, exactly... (you're joking right?)
Thanks!!

>> then you have to talk about determinants instead of angles

I certainly never heard this before. (I know how to calculate determinants, but never quite developed intuition around them.) Can you please say some more on this? :-)
No, I'm saying that the value of Twitter isn't the product itself, it's the people using it. I don't get on Twitter because of the allure of a 140-character-limited textbox. I get on Twitter because it's the only place I can receive regular personal updates from my idols, role-models, and colleagues, and even engage them in conversation. The more people on Twitter, the more valuable it becomes to me.

You can build a rival service if you want, but nobody will use it until it provides value, it won't provide value until people use it.
Why Google Acquired VirusTotal
Sounds like someone is trying to reinvent the unhosted[1] protocols. Unhosted is used in relatively popular apps like owncloud[2].

[1] http://www.unhosted.org
[2] http://www.owncloud.org
If the real motive is to prevent scams/failures-to-deliver, that's OK. But that's almost the opposite concern from the headline -- "not a store" -- about just using Kickstarter as a channel for moving already-developed, riskless product inventory.
HN does have a voting ring detection algorithm. It's not at all clear that this attempt at cheating will actually work.

(Of course, an unsuccessful cheater is no more moral than a successful one - but considerably less damaging.)
Nokia Maps Drives Circles Around Apple and Google
I think being 'easier' in a Rails app is debatable. Facebook authentication certainly isn't 'hard'.

IMO OpenID is an awful user experience, I much prefer using Facebook. But that point is certainly debatable as well.
He's probably irritated cause he wasn't invited to the launch event.

I find most,"tech journalist" want their feathers stroked. Throw a couple of lunches; make them feel important and they'll write a bible about you.
I think we're just going to see a rise in more "architectural" styled development renderings, over fully polished marketing-style imagery. I welcome that.
Agree, name and shame. If people believe there is a significant risk to their reputation in the community, that alone can function as a deterrent.
You're right and I apologize, I was sloppy in wording and left much of my usual argument out. Please read my response to jd if you're interested in clarification.
seeking alpha is a sucker's bet.

Surely this can't be right. If for the only reason that, if it were a sucker's bet, then most people wouldn't take it. Especially most 'informed/rational' actors. The vast majority of the players on Wall Street, we can assume, are informed and relatively rational. Yes, they may follow the herd - but that too is a rational exercise. If you are in a building and everybody is running for the exits, it is irrational to stand still and risk being trampled.

So, the mere fact that there are countless informed/rational actors seeking alpha and - quite frankly, many do capture it - would seem to me that statement is inaccurate.

If your argument is that the odds are long, well that is more nuanced view.

There are many traders that seek a small amount of alpha, with no leverage, and make a reasonable return annually - enough to support say 1 - 2 employees. But, there are many others that do the same with a larger capital base and capture enough to support larger organizations.

Seeking bets with long odds is, quite frequently, not a sucker's bet - because the mainstream view of that bet is that it is a sucker's bet. Mainstream adoption of that view, actually - non-intuitively - turns the bet into a prudent bet. The whole be greedy when everybody is fearful bit.

The same can be said of founders wanting to build the next Facebook - you might argue it is a sucker's bet, but the outcomes aren't as rare as it may seem.
But isn't Safari 4.1 still supported by Apple? The issue isn't the age of the codebase -- it's whether anyone is still bothering to patch known security issues!
I am not sure there is anything suspicious but I often see stories from the same sites making the front page of HN News. I am guessing that most of these stories are there because they are of interest but sometimes I wonder...

The Atlantic, NY Times, Techcrunch, Extreme Tech, TheNextWeb, Github, bbc are the main ones off the top of my head.

Unless someone has already done it it, it would be very interesting to see the break down of front page stories by source and by poster.
Yes, the :as option is the same whether you use it with require or use.
Mac Chrome users as a percentage of total users or as a percentage of Mac users? My traffic breaks down as Macs making up 7.46% total visits and Chrome is used by 7.91% of those Mac users (the percentages are oddly close, but unrelated). Safari makes up the vast majority of Mac browser share, 76.30% for me.

But it's an even smaller slice when looking at who's using 10.5. Fraction of a fraction of a fraction of users (Mac > Chrome > 10.5).
> This can all be proven by something called the efficient market hypothesis.

Of course, the efficient market hypothesis is basically an unproven assumption.

The general gist of it is obviously somewhat reasonable, but you have to be extremely careful what kind of statements you really believe.

Just to make two obvious examples: the strongest form of EMH claims that asset prices reflect even hidden information. That cannot possibly be true, because the circle of people with access to that hidden information most likely does not have enough money / market power to affect a shift of sufficient size.

The other example: slightly weaker forms of EMH still claim that prices adjust immediately to new information. That cannot possibly be true either, because traders simply aren't that fast. HFTs typically cannot afford to put so much money into affecting big price shifts, and other traders are slower. Besides, it's clearly falsified empirically: if this form of the EMH were true, stock prices would look like step functions, and they don't.

Another argument against EMH is complexity theoretic: one can most likely show that if EMH were true, the market would solve NP-hard problems efficiently (I remember seeing a line of work that attempted to show such a thing, though obviously the modeling is very messy).

Now you might argue that EMH still somehow approximates the real world. Maybe. But small errors can add up, so you have to be really careful in your thinking.
There are! http://geekfeminism.org/tag/wear-and-share-star-wars-day/

The problem appears to be the social backlash little girls face if they like those things.
the new "accepted answer" by jeff is a very very poor statement and makes me to never touch Titanium ever. the statement didn't answer any part of the question at all, and does nothing to clarify the situation. marketing speach par exellence.

if they debug their code the same way they debug their business processes than titanium would be the windows vista of mobile development frameworks.
Perhaps the past discussions on this will help. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904
I would be very curious as to exactly what OS features are really required to display a web page, that are apparently missing in 10.5 which is a perfectly modern operating system. And if there is such a thing, why the browser doesn't degrade gracefully (i.e. if it's some hardware acceleration API, doing the same thing in software slowly, a la OpenGL). It smells a lot like "encouraging" upgrades for the sake of it, which really means, to sell new hardware while the old hardware is still perfectly fine for 99.999% of what even power users do.
Right, Snow Leopard was a great upgrade[1]. Lion was a major downgrade.

[1] Except for the abysmal changes to Exposé. Luckily there was a hack to get the Leopard version back: http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-...
1) Don't use the freelancer sites. They're markets for lemons.

2) There are a variety of networking mechanisms besides networking events. Anything pitched as a "networking event", explicitly, is going to self-select for people who have nothing better to do than go to networking events. Successful businessmen largely don't go to that sort of place because they have networks. They go to places which promise value to them.

One specific example is e.g. focused presentations or conferences on a topic of immediate need to their business. For example, the Business of Software conference charges something like $2k a ticket, and is pretty much totally attended by people who own or work at software companies that can justify $2k a ticket and a half-week at a luxury hotel if it sells more software. That might be a good place to meet well-heeled software companies if you're in a mind to do that. (How to avoid paying an arm and a leg for conference tickets? One way is to get invited as a speaker. How to do that? a) Get really good at something. b) Reach out to conference organizers. c) Tell them that if you speak about your thing at their event it will receive high ratings and people will talk about it after the conference.)

Another hack: can't get invited to a party? Throw a party. Invite yourself. You must be a desirable person to meet at the party, after all, you're throwing it. Ryan Carson talks about this all the time. It takes absolutely nobody's permission and a budget in like the two to three figure range to say "October 22nd: SEO For Law Firms seminar, Community Center Conference Room A, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM with reception to follow. Register now to reserve your ticket."

3) they are probably hiding behind an army of secretaries

Is this an obstacle that the world is presenting to jiggy2011 or an obstacle that jiggy2011 is presenting to jiggy2011?

I know at least 30 people who can greenlight 5 to 6 figure engagements. 25 of them have publicly routable telephone numbers... I assume, anyhow, because calling people scares the heck out of me. Every last one reads their own email. None has a bodyguard separating them from the hoi polloi at e.g. industry events.

You don't need to get the CEO of Bank of America on the phone to charge $1X0 an hour. A company the size of a BoA bank branch can be a great, great client to have -- one or two people in the decisionmaking loop, monthly payroll of $X00,000 to $Y million so your invoices won't threaten the ability of anyone to make their mortgages.
I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

Apple's willingness to obsolete their old tech has been the plan for a long time, and works fine for them and the higher-spending niche they're targeting. Basically the pitch (to oversimplify) is: we will make technical decisions based only on supporting the last two or three years of customers. If you keep up with us, things will work great for you, because we won't be slowing things down to maintain compatibility. If you have hardware or software older than that, good luck, but it's not our problem if our new stuff doesn't work for you. The only promise is that we won't compromise the product in order to save you money.[1]

This works for Apple (and the customers who keep upgrading) because it's nice to live in an ecosystem where you can assume modern hardware and software -- for example, where developers can reasonably target multitouch trackpads or webcams or motion-graphic APIs or whatever within a year or two after they're released, and cruft can be thrown out of the OS when it's no longer needed.

As it happens, I'm one of those customers -- I spend more than half my waking life on computers, and I don't mind spending a little more to work with modern hardware, and to have an OS that assumes I have modern hardware. I'm not trying to glorify or demonize that -- it's just a business model targeted at a certain part of the market that likes it that way, or at least accepts the downsides in exchange for the upsides.

[1] Please don't feel compelled on my account to recite all the ways Apple doesn't live up to this pitch. Believe me, I know. (Quicktime 7?) I still think it's a decent approximation.
I'm not aware of any other such protocols, can you name a few?
This buzzed right around the time app.net was funded one month ago, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904
It seems like an increasing number of people are mentioning Geometric Algebra and everyone that likes it seems to _really_ like it.

It is getting to the point where I am going to have to learn it just to see what the hype is about. (I love being able to say that there is "hype" around a field of mathematics)
Actually, it turns out it's already implemented: https://github.com/santoshrajan/lispyscript/blob/da6602126eb...

So any script with type "application/lispyscript" will automatically be parsed and run. The only requirements appear to be RequireJS and underscore.
In-flight meal・NRT-FRA, Cclass (JL),July 2012
I think that it's healthy to be surprised by an email like that. I would rather do business with someone who is outraged by cheating, than someone who excuses it.
I see algorithmic trading as not a symptom of, but one of the solutions to the problems in investment banking This is incredibly naive. Amazingly so.

"This can all be proven by something called the efficient market hypothesis" really? This is even worse.

Front running is a betrayal of the fundamental behavioural "assumptions" underpinning economic theory. By definition, without these assumptions, there is no EMH. So this whole thing falls apart.

That's why this is such a problem. If you really believe in markets, the first thing you do is make sure their underpinnings are not corrupted.

Its not clear that OWS believes in markets. The critique I'm outlining above is a seperate position alltogether.
The proposed "solution" would only exacerbate the problem. The author basically proposed that the cheaters can not only put articles on the front page, but they're rewarded by also increasing each others' trust scores. Why is that good?

There are tons of solutions to this, largely in the domain of statistics and machine learning. They're flawed, but communication is not a precise beast.
Companies like MapBox, Stamen, MapQuest, and Bing, who have OSM layers, have an incentive to improve OSM data because it makes them competitive with Google; it eliminates the massive fixed/sunk cost of creating proprietary data and redirects the game into how you can use/distribute/mainstream that data. The business models for that are fairly clear; charging for services based on the data.
Here's a fantastic article explaining scalars, matrices and tensors: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/Numbers/Math/documents/Tens...

Explanation of why dot and cross products are defined that way: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14082/what-is-the...
Not off the top of my head, but give me time - I have only recently started working under a non-technical PM! The synopsis ('code monkeys') nails it from my experience (ad agency).
This reminds me with my trying to catch-up on philosophy and its writers.

I began wit Aristotle (because you know, he was the first). I never finished his Organon since it was terribly, terribly boring. I never read anything else, so I ended with Aristotle.
I'm not sure if that's darwin terminology, but calling a process that's blocking on io or in a tight loop "frozen" certainly isn't tradition in UNIX - you're much more likely to use hung or stuck. In linux specifically the term has a completely different meaning - "freezing" a process is intentional and involves putting the process into a cgroup and then removing all cpu shares to prevent it from executing - suspending the process and allowing for sleep/hibernation/etc.
> That cannot possibly be true either, because traders simply aren't that fast.

Forget traders...our universe has a speed limit.
When is gaming actually cheating? Some people analyze when to submit posts for maximum likelihood of making the front page. Is that a bad thing if it pushes another worthy post out of contention for eyeballs?

I sometimes write a blog post, but instead of submitting it myself, I check the new queue waiting for someone else to submit it, then I pounce with an upvote, giving it a second vote in a short period of time. Is that gaming the system? Is that pushing another worthy submission down that really deserved a better chance?
"A complex "number" (don't think of it as of a number! ..."

Excellent point! Another example of misleading mathematical terminology is "random variable", which are not random or variable but instead are well-defined mappings.
Polls say 1 in 5 in the US plan to get the new iPhone.

Its release certainly is news if that is the case.
It's heartening to see that the HN responses echo my sentiment. Also..

"Democrats or Republicans look too rehearsed on stage? Let’s pounce. Apple? Let’s sweep it under the rug."

Look too rehearsed? When presenting a demo to a client, managing an "Apple like" demo is the holy grail. Although, you could expect a political candidate to partly be "too rehearsed" and still be his real self (or his other pretend self) on stage.
PC Ads of the past
Look at what happened with the iPhone 4 antenna issue. He just went on stage and said, "This isn't that big of a problem, and if it really bothers you, put it in a case." That is clearly not an option for Steve Ballmer or Larry Page in the same situation.
You dont by chance have that special event to where I could get it do you? I have wanted to re-watch it again for some time.
You may find SimBase interesting. Don't know if it was ever open sourced, though.
ITC: How an obscure bureaucracy makes the world safe for patent trolls
Yea, and that is almost what I am thinking. I am going to need to network and find a contact that has done sales within the space. This way they have more of those personal contacts. Seems like persistence will be key here.
This isn't some point-and-laugh thing. It's informative and interesting. If this is "long and formal" to you, I don't know what to say. It's like 500 words, and a bunch of it is bulleted points.