skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once attended a university lecture on entrepreneurship. In it, the lecturer moaned that the pace of technological change has slowed and big things weren't happening anymore. It turned out he was an aeronautics person, and there was no concorde replacement, the 747 was 30 years old, no more moon rockets, etc.

I didn't interject but I thought - how can you live in a world upended by the internet and say no big changes are going on? The answer is that it all depends on your focus.
This article puts a whole new spin on 'anti-virus'. It posits that open sourcing 'important' genomes, those of presidents and others, would be the best defense against any sort of synthetic biological attack, targeted specifically at the individual, because the group is smarter than the individual. And certainly a whole industry is better than just the secret service in the case of the US President.

It seems inevitable to me that each of us will have organisms, bacteria, that exist on our skin and in our bloodstream that make up a sort of personalized and general 'anti-virus'. Coming most likely from the Cancer research of today. The question for me becomes how quickly will we get to this point, and how many will die before we reach it. If it's true that by 2020, you will be able to replicate the Polio Virus for $3, I can only imagine what fringe crazies will be able to do with better engineered viruses.

exponential growth as applied to industries adjacent to the tech industry is really hard to grasp. I have a very difficult time seeing what the future will be like 2-5 years from now, contrasted with 1999 when it was easier to see what the world would be like by 2010. 100m iPads in 2.5 years is a perfect example of this. The idea of not a tablet is now absurd in so many instances ( airline pilots, doctors, etc. )
I think that the "incorporation" requirement is a bit unclear - technically, an LLC is not a corporation even though most small businesses that would qualify are LLCs.
Placing Distractions Before Scheduled Stuff
Our Debt to Stalingrad
I could see Mindstorms working out really great :) Or just any sort of "simple" 3D game engine. I think it's important that he sees immediate results, he can learn the gritty details over time, having the actual feeling of creating something is a big motivator. At least it was for me, back when I was like 12 and started out on my own, surprisingly I remember being way more productive back then I think I once wrote a really decent cannon hill clone in a week or so, but today I can hardly get any project started at all, meh.
There Are 84 Million Stars in This Nine Gigapixel Picture
So are you saying despite that, Apple doesn't care about its competition?
Thanks - ordered.
A buddy of mine suggested I post to HN, so here goes. I'd love to hear your thoughts -- or other examples of new products that had/have a UX optimized for the first-timer...
I like your 6 steps...As an experienced designer, would it not take you less time to get that done than most other people?
Would it then not be worth your while to charge for say 2 hours of your time to provide , say 2 revisions to anyone who pays for your "hungry startup" package?
> Do foreign merchants feel they can make deals as equals with the native American merchants? Can foreigners trust that the American courts are fair and neutral and unbiased?

As a foreigner, I feel somewhat qualified to answer that question.

No. Categorically, no.
Productivity is Prosperity (Economics for Hackers #2(b))
Will this thing behave nicely when I put it on a machine which already has grub and several linux partitions? Or will it insist on killing grub or even do worse stuff to my machine?
The Minimalist's Guide to Career Happiness
These types of moves have been standard operating procedures for all the great nations since the dawn of time.

The health of the US depends on the trade of oil for dollars, just like the turn of the world depends on energy...

This petro-dollar system helps establish the dollar as the world's default currency, and regulates it dominance.

If you don't think we are going to eliminate anyone that tries to inject a non-dollar currency as a trade for oil, especially in the middle east, then you live in a fantasy world.

That entire region has been destabilized for the benefit of the US for the last 50 years.

It's much easier to come in and take (buy, transfer, etc) the oil when those nations are in ruin, then it is when a strong leadership is present.

The moment that leadership decides to trade oil for non-dollars, or even worse, under a gold-standard (non-fiat, non-debt system), then you start seeing on CNN and Fox News stories of all the innocent people being killed by "despot" monsters, and all our useful-idiots begin their war chants.
This is good advice for unsticking, but remember even the folks we consider great artists today often worked for 'cheap' when they were starting out. There is nothing compelling someone to participate on Fiverr, and there is nothing compelling someone from using their services and then not using the logos. Sometimes design challenged people (like me) like to have some ideas tossed at them so that I can begin to understand what I do and don't think would be useful in a logo.
A charming person, and a lovely, theatrical, speech.

If she had rehearsed it a couple more times, she could have achieved a perfect rhythm.

I was turned off a bit when she started using historical present to describe the incident at the Catholic school. She used it again in a couple more cases, but thankfully not for long. Most of the times I find historical present awkward. It is difficult to do well, and, to my eyes, it seldom succeeds in its purpose.
Real World Comparison, GC vs. Manual Memory Management in D
I felt like this for a long while. The last few projects I've built have been kind of a turning point, in either popularity or revenue. I focused on keeping it small and sharing it with people.

No matter how much work you put in on a big project you never feel 'done' and that leads to feeling demoralized. Also small ideas need less maintaining.

This is coming from someone with very limited development skills!
Go for hit. eLance, ODesk, Freelancer, the list goes on and on.

I want to read your story of how you hired a programmer for $5 and got something done. I will even try it myself if I see a way for me to use the same strategy. You would be saving me a huge amount of money.

Everything matters. Saying logos matter is matters is somewhat meaningless. The question is how much do they matter? How much do they matter at one specific moment in time? How much time can you afford to spend on the logo problem at a moment in time?

I shared this story because I suspect there are a lot of people who would be willing to spend $30 to try getting a cheap logo for their startup/side project/whatever.

I really don't think you should feel threatened by it if you're able to communicate what value you're adding to a company by applying your unique design skills.
Don't forget that Nike's original logo was accepted due to time constraints. The swoosh was combined with an incredibly badly aligned logotype that was altered later before finally arriving at "swoosh only." http://www.logoblog.org/nike_logo.php

Nike has since paid huge amounts of cash to refine and iterate their logo.
Apple Reports Quarterly Results: $36.0 Billion In Revenue
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No Ipad mini? Those prizes are so last week.
>> "Short version - outside of Metro it's basically Win7SP3 and it works great. Metro is every bit the usability disaster that people have claimed when not running on a touch screen."

I've been using it on a MacBook Pro and with the multi-touch trackpad metro actually works reasonably well. Obviously it would be better with a touchscreen but I am able to tap to click, use two fingers to scroll left/right/up/down and moving the mouse the the screen corners activates charms/open apps/last opened app. Maybe PC mouse makers (including MS) will come up with similar mice to make the experience better for non-touchscreen devices.
Of course, who it really punishes is the user.
Not much of a choice
On first read I thought this implied it would add Obamads to my browsing experience, but looking more deeply, it just replaces other ads with Obama. Neat idea.
I see Vista characterized as a failure over and over again, and Win 7 as a success. Win 7 is somewhat better than Vista, but the distance between them isn't that great. Besides the fact that UAC prompts were more frequent in Vista, was there some particular problem with Vista?

For a year or two there I was running workstations with both, and didn't see much difference.

I think Vista took the heat for imposing security where none existed.
The Company sold 26.9 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 58 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 14.0 million iPads during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.9 million Macs during the quarter, a 1 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 5.3 million iPods, a 19 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.
Going back means using the restore disks or partitions that came with your computer, or installing fresh from a retail DVD of a previous OS. There's no "downgrade" process.
Well, how much did the last phone app you bought cost?
How To Temporarily Pause You Terminal Output So You Can Actually Read It
they use echo string >> script.txt , they are the real deal !
I don't design enterprise software often, but when I do, I prefer loose neoplastic principles. Stay curious, my friends.
Yuck, that is clearly a $30 logo. You got what you paid for. I find it hard to think that you're going to be happy with it in the long run.

Here's the approach that I took. As a startup, you don't have a huge budget or a lot of time. Design firms cost more than freelance people, so you probably want a freelancer.

I hired a freelance graphic designer (It was Ty Wilkins if you're curious, www.tywilkins.com). You should have a budget of $750-2000 or so. Fundamentally, you're hiring their time, so the less you pay, the less time they can put into it. I tried hard to give him efficient feedback, and we came to a final logo fairly quickly. I probably spend three phone calls with him, and some time reviewing his ideas. It was a good process, maybe a week in elapsed time, and a got a great outcome (see www.predictobot.com).

Where do you find a freelance logo designer? I found Ty by looking on dribbble.com (note that has 3 b's in it). That's a designer hangout where they post recent work. Find a few you like, check out their websites, and then email one. See if they're available in the short term, and are interested in jobs with your budget.

If you have no budget, then I agree with JoelMarsh's comment. Set your name in a nice font, pick a color, and you're done.
If you actually care about the photos that your friend is sharing on Google+, what's actually preventing you from seeing them? You don't even have to visit the G+ site, just set up email notifications if he/she shares anything with you.

Let's look at an alternative scenario: What if your friend posted the photos online to Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa etc. and sent you a link via email? Would you still complain?

My point is not to evangelize Google+ here, I am using it only because you referred to it. My point is that the power that FB has over your online social life is entirely up to you, and you can choose to increase/decrease it at will.
The most obvious "useful" ability of Piet comes in calculating Pi: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

Of note from the sample program, emphasis mine: "... this amazing program which calculates an approximation of pi literally by dividing a circular area by the radius twice. ... Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program."
With regards to business, not national security. This is the kind of thing he's talking about:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/dec...

However, even in terms of human and civil rights, I'd place the US far, far, FAR above China...
Using a SAT solver to solve a reversing challenge (hack.lu CTF)
Apple’s Fiscal Q4 2012 Results: $36 Billion In Revenue
raising funds != success

What was that comparison? No one says, "congratulations on that huge loan you just took out!".

I'm sure the team was great, but I'm confused as to why we should be lauding this state of affairs. If they were making money, then why should they all have up and left to go work at Yahoo!?

From the, admittedly poor on information and high on snark, position I'm comfortably seated on it seems like you had a great team that was wonderfully subsidized by VC that managed to save face with an 'exit'.

I'm sure it's really fun to go through the motions, but I don't really see the part where they added value; I only see an elaborate social signaling event (again, obviously the team is competent, filled with A players) fully subsidized by Yahoo! shareholders.

If I'm missing out on something I'd love to know about it.
So is the Win 8 system builder a single license that needs to be transferred between machines...

...or can I use the license to run Win 8 on my PC, laptop, and HTPC all at once?
The forward-thinking architect will, naturally, consider the judicious use of open source software such as https://github.com/sl236/Piet to streamline enterprise development.
Tell Us the One About the Robots, Mr. President
Sadly this is more common than you might think and also well known
The corruption perceptions and international ease of doing business surveys and rankings would provide more statistically significant evidence to counter your anecdote. Note that competition is relative - we may find the U.S. courts deplorable on specific issues but they do turn out a measure better than most other economic powers' courts, e.g. China, Russia, or Brazil.
Isn't shareware where you only get a portion of the software and you are required to pay to get the rest?

If so, I'm not sure how DF fits that description.
Ad providers already silently notice context and provide relevant ads (manipulating the eventual result of your page load). Isn't that just as creepy? (especially when it happens inside e.g. Gmail)
I've gotten to look Metro more than I did at first. I still don't stay in it; I mostly just head to the desktop and use the newer, flatter Windows 7 I find there.

The elephant in the room for me is the horizontal scrolling. I'm sitting there spinning the mouse wheel vertically, and what's on the screen is moving horizontally. That's a total disconnect.

Why this emphasis on horizontal scrolling? I don't see how the horizontally scrolling items are in any way easier to use than a vertically scrolling set of items. Seems like different, for difference's sake.
No, money normally moves into countries with higher interest rates (ie their currency is purchased), all things being equal. But of course all things are not equal.
I definitely looked into Scratch and it seems perfect since the visual aspect would help him out a lot. But I never looked into Lego Mindstorms! This looks awesome (and even I got a little excited as well). I'm pretty sure this is what I'll be going with since he loves Legos already. Thanks for the response!
If you browse through the models, there's actually nothing like a Purchase model. Devs using this library will still have to integrate Stripe
Facebook got greedy and it’s not stopping
Exactly. That's what makes this article DOA and not worth a read. Of course Apple cares about their competition.
No one that works on a logo for $5 is a designer, they're someone that is trying to make a quick few bucks off of preset shapes and OS-shipped typefaces.
I think they ask this for the "Show the love" tweet. But I agree that if I opt out of it they shouldn't ask for this permission.
No Retail copies?
So to get a copy you have to buy a new PC or have an existing Windows OS?
We're talking about Microsoft here! What about DOS?
I think the equalizer-like option that wasn't chosen had the best concept. Problem is, it would actually require more refining that anyone should/would be willing to do for $30.

Also, the mixing of fonts / styles on the actual ReviewSignal site is pretty nasty and the chosen logo feels quite out of place.

This possibly goes to a show a real designer is actually worth something.
Pictures of people using NFC on their smartphones
Glad i could help

Happy hacking :)
I can't wait to give them my bucks, once they become Safe Harbor compliant!
...and this thread will never be much more than butt hurt designers.

Happens every time someone suggests that perhaps monstrous 'identity' projects aren't a good value to a lot of businesses.
"You did not meet the criteria for this discount"
Know what the reason could be?
Amazon Posts 3rd quarter loss
Maybe you were thinking of the Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
NASA Astronaut.
Show HN: I created a free Highrise (37signals) plugin for my birthday
Will there be any exceptions for companies that are not (yet) incorporated? E.g. a company that has many big name clients/users, great product, solid community and following, etc.?
A very nice complement to my ruby fronts hosted at DotCloud.

I really can't wait to use this!
A Close Look at Backbone.js Collections
I think of buying a videogame as most comparable to buying a season of a TV show in a DVD box set: both are ~10-20 hour experiences to have on your TV set at home. The price of a videogame is basically on par in that comparison:

Video game = $50 / 20 hours = $2.50/hour

A season of The Wire = $30 / 13 hours = $2.25/hour
Dude, you are missing completely the point. There's a vast difference between automatically dealing with spam in Twitter and shutting down a paying customer with legitimate (non-drone account) followers.

And this is not about spam, it's about TOS violation, itself much more subjective than just spam.

I suspect you've never been on the other side of this equation.

Anyway, you are comparing apples to oranges.
I think we believe the same things here, and are talking around each other.

Spending time thinking about our business for us included talking to customers and asking hard questions. Only after understanding our customers could we build anything at all--for an enterprise product like ours, it's impossible to iterate in a vacuum.

Working on your company should always be the answer, but before we could ship code, we needed to know where we were going.

As PG points out, "The biggest mistake founders make when applying is to confuse us. Half the time when I'm reading an application I'm thinking 'I have no idea what this person is even talking about.' I suspect this often the writer's own confusion showing through."¹

Trying to explain our very-difficult model helped us to both understand it and define for ourselves.

Admittedly, it was a bit weird to just start making money without knowing where the future of the company was going. The YC app itself forced us to talk through these things; but maybe this problem is unique to our company.

¹ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694322
Quite easily; you look at them. If there were a way to programmatically define a good logo, there wouldn't be so many bad logos. I don't mean for this to sound facile, but it is like looking at art, or writing: it is very difficult to create a meaningful definition of what good is, but it is often very easy to classify things as bad and not-bad (if not good and not-good).

It probably isn't worth spending $$$$ on logos. But you should care about design as an extension of caring about UX. If your design taste is sufficient that you can produce a simple, acceptable logo - great! If it isn't, it is possibly a warning sign that you need to involve someone who does have that design taste - and not just on your logo.

To head it off at the pass - yes, some start-ups have succeeded with weak design (although far fewer than you think - simple is not necessarily weak), but start-ups have succeeded under all sorts of circumstances. It doesn't invalidate the principle that a good user experience is very valuable to any product.
Care to share some of the stuff you've built?
I'm saying you don't talk to your kids the way you talk to your friends. Context matters. In a context where Apple must talk about the competitors, they do. In contexts where they don't, they don't bring it up. In presenting their lineup to consumers, they will absolutely never say "this is our answer to the Google X" when they could instead say "this is a bigger/smaller/'magical new' Apple Y."
yes, it's like BizSpark and Startup America. Regardless good for early stage startups
But it didn't stop them or kill their brand. No reason you can't launch with a $30 logo and iterate later if/when the need arises.
Pi Crust makes it easy to get peripherals on Raspberry Pi
That actually made some sense. Get out of here!
Why Companies Will Ignore Windows 8
Hey napierzaza, you've been hell banned.
If you switch that metric from good/bad instead of success/failure, it makes more sense. Something doesn't have to have been objectively good to be sucessful.

Here's how I remember it:

3.1 was the first windows GUI for mass consumption, and was successful, and pretty decent for it's time.

95 was also succesful, but I remember it being very, terribly unstable. Moreso than 3.1.. i put it in the bad column based on that.

98 improved on this and added a lot. Good.

ME was utter dogshit.

Kernels changed from ME to XP, so I make the link there. Microsoft did provide a direct upgrade path from ME to XP.

XP was awesome

Vista was horrid.

7 was awesome

Now 8. If they continue the pattern, 8 will suck.

It seems like there's a micro pattern like "new UI paradigm" >> "polish and improve new UI". 98 improved on 95, 7 improved on vista, XP improved on 2K.
And what does that prove? Are public profiles banned from piratebay?
You realize the high costs on the list aren't really for the logo. They're for the whole rebranding exercise. For Accenture, that includes advertising to introduce the new name and logo. For BP that includes new signs at thousands of gas stations, repainted trucks, and advertising, etc.
> No developer will work for $5 in the first place

www.elance.com , www.odesk.com
A coin has 51% chance of falling on the side it started on
Dwarf Fortress is donationware. You are not obligated to pay anything to play the game. But don't take my word for it:

http://www.bay12games.com/support.html

Bay 12 is dedicated to providing original games free of charge, but that doesn't mean it is free for us to make them. We've been online since December 2000, and you can help Bay 12 Games continue to thrive. If you've enjoyed any of our games, and you are able to give, we accept financial support. If you contribute electronically, you'll have the option to receive a story reward. If you contribute by mail and provide your return address somewhere on the envelope or check, you may receive a unique drawing, most likely in crayon. This option is available to electronic supporters as well. Upon receipt, you'll also have the option to be listed as a Bay 12 Champion.

Toady has been averaging $3-$4k/month lately:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=117156