skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see an opportunity here. Is there already a recommendation service around that takes your rating profile into account? Apple has their 'Genius' system, however with respect to movies rentals I think this is lacking a bit: Movies I want to rent are usually movies I only want to see once, not gems like Godfather or Constant Gardener. A personal rating service would have to pose you targeted questions about your movie preferences and drill down into your personal taste.
I'm aware of the point he is making. Maps is an app distributed through the Play Store. It is not distributed by installing a specific version of the OS.

At least understand the platform you are criticising before assuming it operates in the same restrictive way as others.
>""what kind of bubble are we in" - good question, and that was the key point. Tech recruiting is a big business, but recruiting in lots of other industries is not nearly as big. Why is that?"

What you say is reasonable.

I'm not sure how I'd answer that question, however, which I guess brings us full circle to why it seems frothy to me. I'm not arguing that there is no business to be had in the space; apparently, it's happening.

But the fact that there is actually demand for such an occupation to require or request agency representation is so far from the norm, it seems like an anomaly, destined to be corrected. Of course, I'm using hindsight, not foresight.
But doesn't that picture track the current essay rather well? Apart from a false start that turns out to be noise, it shows a series of experiments that don't go anywhere for a while but eventually produce a repeatable growth rate.

If the diagram were data, the essay would explain it.
You're assuming the government initiates regulation. In reality, merchants and artisans tend to form into guilds and then demand new entrants to that market be licensed. Adam Smith noted this phenomenon in The Wealth of Nations in the famous passage: 'People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.'

A more recent treatment of the subject appears in nplusone magazine, but the site is down just at the moment: http://nplusonemag.com/death-by-degrees Another recent example from NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/154826233/why-its-... (you'll be happy to know that Clayton recently won her court case, and plans to reopen her business).
Feedback welcome.
Show HN: Real world growth rate
> But the two connections are distinct and in principle one could start a startup that was neither driven by technological change, nor whose product consisted of technology except in the broader sense.

Arguably Netflix was one of these. DVD's may have been the "technological change" driving the company, but in principle you possibly could have done the same thing with VHS.

Most logistics-based big companies, like Fedex, Walmart, or even Costco, could be cited as examples. Jetliners predated Fedex by decades, for instance. Aside from the novelty of selling PC's, Dell was a similar instance.

This indicates that, just as in war, solving logistical problems often provides the biggest wins in business as well.

Combining innovation and logistics was powerful enough to make humble Apple erupt into the world's most valuable business. In fact, Apple's growth rate during Jobs' tenure as CEO was ultimately exponential despite the company's age--does Jobs-era Apple somehow qualify as a startup due to this?

> I once explained this to some founders who had recently arrived from Russia. They found it novel that if you threatened a company they'd pay a premium for you. "In Russia they just kill you," they said, and they were only partly joking.

I remember that in the 90's, many of Microsoft's acquisitions had this same sinister undertone to it. I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode where Microsoft "buys out" Homer's startup, but all that happens is a bunch of goons smash up the house while Bill Gates quips, "I don't get rich by writing a lot of checks."
Does app.net have any significant traction?

Or are you saying they are trying to grow organically (other than their Kickstarter fundraising)?
I showed my dad the Replicator 2 yesterday, and he's really close to ordering one.

I also showed him the RepRap, and he was immediately turned off of the idea... he just wants something easy, polished, and more consumer grade, not "hacker" grade.

I am a huge fan of Open Source, and have no problems with using Open Source in a commercial manner (I actually have a commercial software product that uses some Open Source components), as long as the licenses are being adhered to.

Bri Pettis strikes me as being a solid guy, and I believe his intentions are honorable, and he will do as he says, and ensure that everything will follow all the license requirements.

It's understandable that he has to be a bit protective of some aspects of his products, as I think the big players (Epson, HP, etc) could become a real threat as soon as they twig to the fact that there's a reasonable market there.

I can't blame him for trying not give the proprietary aspects of what he's doing to his competitors, especially when they're 800 lbs gorillas.

I think that balancing the need for protecting your investment and meeting the requirements of various Open Source licenses is a bit tougher than some realize. It's not just a case of "release everything to the masses", it can be quite complicated.

For now, I'm willing to give him (and MakerBot) the benefit of the doubt, and trust that they'll Do No Evil.
Most people are ignorant and believe propaganda, and that makes them easier to control, which is what politicians like to do.

But not you, you jedi you!
Obviously I meant investment in the traditional sense, the deployment of capital with the expectation of yield and preservation of principal. Working for a startup is an "investment" in the figurative sense, since you are trading your time for equity instead of cash, but what I meant here was literally putting money into some asset or security to increase your wealth or income.
Wow. I completely agree with this.

I went to a private high school that prided itself in its English (writing) classes[1]. I didn't know it then, and I wish I had found out sooner, but I loved writing.

I started to realize this in college. I went into university as CS and picked up a Philosophy dual major after one semester so I could write more.

During my final year, in every single interview I had I made the argument that mere communication is massively underrated in engineering fields and that my Philosophy degree (or rather my writing skills) made me a better communicator than most other software engineers. I think I can safely attribute this to at least a few job offers, as the argument seemed to take a lot of interviewers by surprise.

After my college experience I certainly think the two majors (or any STEM major plus a writing-heavy major) compliment each other. CS and PHIL as a combination seems only natural from the get-go, especially with the intersection of Logic. But I especially think PHIL compliments CS because in my opinion the largest deficiency in every other CS and engineering grad I've met is that they have a hard time communicating their ideas and debating others effectively. Philosophy (all writing really) helps with that. A lot.

I think writing out anything, even just your own thoughts on a subject, makes you a vastly more empathetic person, something most engineers I've met seem to desperately need. It's mind-boggling the amount of extremely smart people I've come across that nonetheless seemed to simply lack the concept of not-them.

-----------

[1] The article says "The program would not be unfamiliar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950." I had 12 years of Catholic school, though not in the 1950's, I graduated HS in 2006, so I imagine some of the curriculum theory stayed put.

[2] I've found myself considering the humanities majors I've met far, far more socially capable than the engineer majors, almost to an embarrassing degree. I've always been quite the introvert, supremely shy as a child, but was totally unprepared for just how shy I would find others. My college (RPI) was known for being an introverted place and I met so many great people who almost literally never left their rooms. Great minds and personalities who were self-sequestered from the world.

It felt tragic sometimes. I met and found a lot of people that wanted to meet others but had a great fear of simply being in public spaces more and exchanging pleasantries. Others still, and this was not an uncommon opinion, would disparage the idea of small talk as useless. It's funny but, of all places, once I came to college and met enough varied and amazing people I became vastly, vastly less shy. It just wasn't worth it to be shy when there were so many great people to meet and listen to.
Social Media Tips For Programmers
PG's essay makes it perfectly clear: it's not about creating technology, it's about user acquisition.

Read my original reply again.

The startup's goal is to acquire users fast. Why? To lure VCs.

I don't want to be a part of that.

I want to create a business, not a startup (in the sense defined by PG's essay).
Read the book, "Value-Based Fees" by Alan Weiss to get some ideas.
Right, I specified that when I said they were already likely wealthy. The point being however that even once you have had a liquidity event, it might not make sense to invest in startups, it might make sense to build wealth via another startup, but reserve your capital for less risky investments. I think there's a tendency for founders who have had an exit to immediately transform into angel investors. But, this only makes sense if you have a knack for picking winning ideas and identifying founder talent, which is probably only somewhat correlated with, if at all, with what is necessary to be successful at building a startup yourself.
> Amazon is a decent example. Bezos chose books because it was (a) accessible (catalogs existed), and (b) he got 6 months to pay back booksellers, which meant he could afford to grow the more he sold, by using the money owed to the booksellers as float.

Books are fantastic for other reasons: easy to ship, relatively non-perishable, mass-produced, and even affordable. Webvan, for instance, would always have a harder time because groceries fail at least three out of these four criteria (as well as the two you cited).

Amazon is trying its hand at groceries now, of course, but even they're having a hard time at it.
As someone who learned iOS development by myself in high school, I wish I had something like makegameswithus to help me along the way. There were plenty of resources available to learn Objective-C, but I found that one of the major pain-points was getting through the stuff that's not related to code (managing certificates, publishing, managing artwork/copy). Those are still valuable skills to have, but something mgwu seems like it would help a lot for someone who is starting out. Games are a powerful tool to inspire students to create something really cool. Good job!
I love this essay... but I'm concerned that the emphasis on growth so early on will cause some new startup founders to put their focus on vanity metrics, as opposed to spending time to talk with users and build a product that has true product-market fit and organic growth.
The problem is there is no other company that does maps and so Apple cannot even buy some one to fill the gap. They are now forced to grow/improve the maps organically, which will take some time. But this is Apple they will get there.
That is a page, not a timeline :)
They also reinvested their revenues very aggressively. It was years after IPO before they became profitable, and even now they're remarkably low-margin.
From the three engines of growth[1]:

- virality index

- retention rate

- customer lifetime value / customer aquisition cost

Having more than one is hard, so optmizing for one is much simpler (don't kid yourself, it is hard on any of them, and not all business can pick all of them).

[1] http://www.deviantbits.com/blog/engines-of-growth.html
> If your growth rate is already 7% with the pay-up-front model, that's better IMO than getting, say, an 8% growth rate with the pay-after model.

That 1% difference per week makes a huge difference in a year. A startup growing at 7% a week it is 34x bigger at the end of the year, but at 8% it is 55x - or 62% bigger. And at 10% it is 142x - or over 4 times larger than the 7% growth rate.

>> no company can catches up to 7% growth, so wasting your equity on 8% growth just makes you poorer, and the VCs richer.

Not true, since a company takes the VC money to achieve the higher growth rate, will catch up precisely because of the exponential impact of that 1%. With a 10% growth rate they will be far ahead of you, and capture a bigger slice of the market, even after starting later than you.
How Apple Maps can help solve China-Japan islands row
I should upvote you more than once! This is exactly one of the items nobody has on the radar right now.
I do find it a little amusing that he thinks that the engineers had any real say in the working of a system like this.
The context makes it entirely appropriate. A FactoryBean allows you to construct complex objects, or construct objects Spring can't easily create itself (e.g. JndiFactoryBean). A ProxyFactoryBean builds Spring AOP proxy beans.

As it turns out, there was no need for the class as it has been deprecated. However, providing an abstract singleton scoped proxy factory bean is indeed convenient. If there was a need for a factory that creates AOP proxies then it would be very useful to have an abstract class that implements most of the methods for you, and create them with singleton scope. In that case, AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean is sensible.

It's a corner case. It was used by one class, but that was deprecated later, so this was deprecated as there wasn't really a need for the convenience class.

I take this lot of stuff seriously because I see a lot of ignorant pattern bashing by those who haven't taken the time to understand why patterns are very useful and potentially can make OOP code cleaner and easier to maintain.
The "proprietary aspects" of a tiny stepper driven extruder are less than trivial to the company that created the first mass market laser printer. You can't fight gorillas with gorilla-ness when you're lemur sized.

The primary asset Makerbot has is the community. Its fine to polish the product to make it more useful to those less skilled, but lock the community out of the product by closing up the software and its over. That is exactly the advantage someone like HP needs. Theirs is going to be just as good or better eventually with or without Makerbot's suuuper secrets. In the end, the only differentiator will be community.
What if people call me "T-Bone"?

The divide between "real name" and "pseudonym" is very fuzzy as soon as you step outside the "engineer box" and look at real world data. Many people in this world go by names that you would never expect to see on their driver license or passport, both of which seem to be things Facebook asks users provide to "prove" their "real names".

And lets not even get started on the fact that facebook is in fact part of real life. If people call you a certain name on facebook, they are calling you that in real life. Different names for different social situation is far from unheard of. Which is "real"?
i like the site design and the javascript scroller is pretty neat.. i think your images load a bit slowly however, which i think means you could probably benefit from serving your assets, i.e. images and such, via a cdn (like cloudfront). all in all, good work, it looks like something to be proud of, which is always great!
It's funny, Makerbot actually took the MK7 extruder design from a Chinese 3D printer (UP!). I'm not saying that what the guy did with the kickstarter campaign was right, just don't be fooled into thinking Makerbot invented everything.
True, but I tend to believe that the makeup of the community is a dynamic thing; it's going to change over time.

To start with, it might be a few of the hard-core early adopter, hacker types that will help develop the product, but it will eventually move away from that and become more a straight consumer community. (That's my guess, any way).

For instance, my dad will probably buy one and use it a fair bit for various projects, but he's not at all someone who'd give anything back to the "community", other than his cash.

And while it is the initial "hacker" community that will give it some momentum and critical mass, it's the "cash paying user" community that will really drive development forward.

$0.02
Funny - it says they won't take any action over it. Do I trust that?
That's a rather silly notion -- and kudos to his parents for investing in the company when given the opportunity along with that massive list of other entities who ventured onboard.
What I meant is that there is no 2x2 matrix like this. You can: work for/be a founder. And you can invest.

There are no 'figurative sense investments'. You can't 'invest time'. Nobody cares about your time. You can only invest money [or hours * your market rate, which is money].
Contract law is perfectly adequate in that situation - Samsung signs a contract with ARM which specifies the exact terms under which they can use ARM's designs.
You'd make a great persecutor in a totally liberal regime.

Honestly, I don't think that. But could you try to focus on the argument and not the person? Your ad hominem attack has contributed nothing - just like my first sentence contributed nothing either!
Good to know! I got my beta invite recently and I'm excited to play around with it. Out of curiosity, what's the lifespan of the cert?
It's a little Pop Science, but as Geoffrey West notes, other things that follow an S-curve growth are people. We start small and weak, at some point start rapidly growing, and as we reach a certain age we level off. West then extends this to the inevitable deaths of corporations:

http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_o...
Do you know which side sshfs falls on? I'm guessing slow?
I do commend you on the amount of research that you engaged in for this comment. However, my CV is a little misleading; I work for deviantART, which is based in Loa Angeles, but I do so from Missouri. :)
To me, the cautionary warning (echoing Andrew Chen's[1]) for consumer startups was key:

Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the churn is high too, so that you have good net growth till you run through all the potential users, at which point it suddenly stops

Sean Ellis[2] has a similar test for product market fit (the 40% rule):

I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product.

[1] http://andrewchen.co/2012/06/20/quora-when-does-high-growth-...

[2] http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/
Statement regarding Phil Galfond and Bluefire Poker
No, PG states a preference for revenue growth... with user growth being an acceptable stand-in, contingent on the usual assumption that users will convert to revenues.

And the VCs in his model are not the end goal, but only a middle stage, to accelerate growth and thus dominate a market, creating an enterprise that will be valuable to others on some combination of traditional factors (such as discounted expected profits or synergistic/strategic value when combined with an existing business).

I think you're trying so hard to see what you already believe you're missing parts of the PG argument.
There is a Flattr button on the annex front page.
Subscribed for a year...
This is the only viable model for free. The balance depends on the cost of free and the benefit of not free. The cost of free (or cheap) should include the cost of support of bad clients.
Presumably you are storing the individual submissions, even if the reports generated are aggregate.

What safeguards are in place to make sure that the information is not used in the future to target accounts for suspension?
Duck duck go is doing just fine.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why does actively restricting features that people clearly want enhance user experience, and exemplify good taste? Where's the bad taste in NFC?
2 year activation required with initial purchase.
iOS's lead over Android in app monetization in shrinking
Some community-oriented/UGC startups nowadays seem to prefer modest growth, at least for a while, to make sure the right standards/user-expectations can be maintained. (Hypergrowth can mean a change in community makeup faster than desireable norms can be maintained, which can spoil the dynamics in a way that's hard to un-spoil.)

Compare HN's own revealed preference for limiting certain surges of new users. (Corollary: HN is not a 'startup'.) In a way, even Facebook's initial campus limitations served this purpose, getting certain mechanics (and corporate practices right) before facing the challenges of a larger userbase.

I wonder: have YC companies had to face an explicit decision: grow faster or defend/consolidate the culture of the existing userbase, and if so what advice would PG and the other partners be likely to give?
I find that even in heavily populated areas in the US, OSM tends to best Google in the case of trails and paths in parks, and biking routes.

I suspect this is a case that is particularly well suited for crowd-sourcing though, since these are the sort of places people who enjoy mapping are likely to enjoy exploring the most.
For that matter, they have people working on natural language processing, though my phone's too old for me to know how that's working out for them.
If you are able to afford to buy and hold, then it does not matter how long the markets stay irrational - you've bought it and it should work out.

Where Keynes' rule applies in spades is when you are doing things like shorting an overpriced stock. Now as the price goes up you keep on having to put more money in, and should you run out of money you lose your shirt.

And about poker, there are a lot of variants of poker out there. Texas Hold 'em is what everyone is playing because it has the combination of more strategy and thinner edges. So good players have a real challenge figuring it out, and weaker players have a better chance of walking away lucky on any given night.
Twitter API terms shouldn't detract Twitter/Facebook syndication services
Thanks for your explanation! Yes I see your point. No need to delete your original comment...
The game looks fantastic, and I'd just like to say: I love the idea of MGWU. Coming out of an iOS game development course (aware that you don't offer traditional "courses", but still) with a polished iOS app seems like a great deal - even better when your profit is tied to the success of the apps themselves. Love it.
Comparing Micro USB vs Lightning and why Apple chose Lightning
Every time fb does something scummy, and people act surprised, I am surprised. They've proven themselves to have the morals of a used car dealer. Why would you trust them, or be surprised when they act untrustworthy?

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." No?