skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it seems like the main argument here is this: perfectionism in product development is a good thing because (in the author's experience) products succeed if and only if the team is perfectionist. This requires obsession and investing yourself personally into what you are creating, as if the products you produce are a performance of your soul.

First of all, I think this ignores various different effects that also influence success, such as mainstream tastes, the first mover advantage, PR/marketing/sales/branding/whatever, monopolies/antitrust, being an established player, and the overall utility of an idea independent of its execution. If you have enough of these things, perfectionism doesn't matter, as long as you're defining success in capitalist terms.

But let's say perfectionism IS required to succeed; in that case I'm still not sure it's helpful in the long run. Growing up as a superachiever, I used to embrace perfectionism more than anyone else I knew personally. (Then I met someone who was more obsessive than I am and he got cancer and I slowed down a bit.) It does work if you want to make a certain kind of beautiful thing - a transcript, a CV, a piece of software, a meal - but it's psychologically hard on the perfectionist and by extension the people the perfectionist works with. It's not a sustainable model. It is notoriously ungood for healthy relationships; God help you if you try to perfect your relationship partner.

In the end, our work and personal lives are complex, and you simply cannot optimize all the variables. Enjoy things for what they are, rather than what they should be. In my personal experience, perfectionism is a defense mechanism that seeks to fill up a desperate emptiness inside.
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If your identity isn't attached... it isn't your history. It's just 'a' history.
Same. It is clear now that I am a beautiful snowflake.
By that logic, nuclear energy was not paradigm changing. Essentially we're still just heating water and using it to move a generator - just like coal or oil power.
Right back at you
Perhaps that common feature set will be rebranded and sold as a new MS-Works?
Given the history of people being identified from "anonymous" records (thanks a lot, information theory) ... well, I'm glad I'm not banking with the NAB.
Tweaky is for small business owners and non-technical people.
Final Fantasy X arguably. X 2 for sure. XII and XIII as well.

Ironically, the first games I thought of, Fallout and Elder Scrolls, are probably not the best choice for a girl who can't read yet.
Not at all, in fact we've had a couple of applications for physical products - definitely something we're interested in.
Plan 9 mounts and dependency injection
Reddit is a fantastic product— and its huge, growing popularity is a sure sign of that. But it never was built with a clear business model in mind. Their two sources of revenues are (i) ads and (ii) reddit gold.

I don't think anyone ever expected (i) to be more than just a little extra cash; and (ii), as they say, was never heavily promoted at all. So it seems like (part of) their solution today is to try to push (ii) as far as it will go. I don't believe it's going to get them very far in its current state, but it's a valid first step.

I think this highlights, once again, the need to actually build a viable business in addition to a quality product- one does not make the other, and it's hard to retrofit a business model 5 years later.
Sadly, everyone expects everything digital to be free (software, social networks, services, magazines, games, etc.), so it's an uphill battle. I think Reddit has some interesting cards in its hand though: AMAs are a growing trend, so that's something I'd try to monetize if I were them.

Regardless, I'm curious to see where Reddit will go.
> Now we have a new entry in the saga of "Why the hell does this thing need to connect to the Internet?"

We live in this age for some time now already, but 'till recently it was only "why the hell does this software need to connect to the Internet". On-line document editing, on-line spreadsheets, on-line 3D modelling, on-line recipes, on-line weight tracking, on-line todo lists... Store everything in the cloud, use everything through the browser. So now I don't own any data nor can I easily export it, can't integrate tools with each other and have to choose my tools out of sea of unfinished, half-assed apps (also known as MVPs) that stop being supported or just disappear when developers get acquihired or just move to another project out of boredom.

Leave my files to me, give me off-line tools and a working sync. I just want Emacs to work on my tablet, and some sane way to seamlessly sync data between it and my desktop. Or personal cloud. Or whatever. And then I won't need all those fancy todo, note-taking and calendaring apps that all together can hardly beat org-mode.

Internet is not electricity, it's not always on and not always free. Until someone figures out how to put Internet into a bucket to use as a battery, please let me work off-line when I want.
http://edweissman.com/53640595 -- or check his profile.
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Also interesting to their their margin of error is significantly lower than any of the other polling organizations. From what I gather on Wikipedia, they are internet-centric although I'm not sure if that includes XBox.
I think the assumption is that white people are the default kind of Irish people. White people playing some manner of traditional African music get asked the same questions, and it's not because black people are the default, normal human beings.
And where does ITA get it's data. I assume there must be a few competing standards, and the airlines use one of them to give their data to ITA. Why can't other companies get the data directly from the airlines?
Who isn't familiar with 4Chan Gold? ;)

(http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gold-membership-trolling)
Does anyone know what Reddit's AWS monthly bill is these days? I suspect they would be closer to profitability if they ran their own hardware, but I haven't seen any numbers recently.
Maybe there's a third way.

On one end is their free and ad-supported access. The few ads that I see are very easy on the eyes, easy to ignore, and I don't feel compelled by the ads to buy a gold account. In return you get user generated content.

On the other end is the gold account, where you don't see ads, and you get the same user generated content.

In addition to any of that, they might decide to generate content themselves. Be the paid New York Times of the Internet (whatever that means, to them); the Site of Record. They've almost got the credibility, and certainly have the name recognition; their drama gets covered by the mainstream media.

Of course they'd have to hire another body or two.
Such a great use of SMS. Brilliant article too. Really enjoyed reading through your thought process.
They have the "4chan pass", the premise is pretty much the same as reddit gold, pay $ to support the site and get benefits: https://www.4chan.org/pass
> During the third quarter of 2012, Apple shipped 14 million and Samsung shipped 5.1 million of the 27.8 tablets shipped during that period. Trailing behind them were Amazon, shipping 2.5 million, and Asus, who shipped 2.4 million of their tablets.

Has Amazon started releasing their tablet sales numbers, or is this a guess? It seems rather low, considering Amazon sold >1MM (confirmed by Amazon) last December.
That's great stuff, it's a bit like a bottom up R&D process!
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As good as this is, it doesn't seem too much of a quantam leap from where Google Translate is, with conversation mode, installable in every Android phone.

I didn't hear the inflections in his voice superimposed on the Chinese voice, so it is just modeling his voice characteristics and reflecting that into output voice. From what I understand the voice modeling happened off line, not in real time, so it is not nearly as sexy as if it was happening as he spoke. In other words, a nice touch, but I don't see it as revolutionary (unless I'm missing something).
I'm old school - when improvising on the guitar I like to be able to read the drum/guitar/bass player etc based on looks, nods and general "intuition" (being person to person that is). Don't think an internet connection is going to be able to do that quite as well!

But, perhaps I'm being nostalgic :)
Also worth reading Bruce Tognazzini on Magic and Software Design:

http://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html
Even though it is a technical interview, confidence is always key. Visualize yourself succeeding and believe in yourself. I would stick to your guns and just do what you know best.

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined."
― Henry David Thoreau
Once I was happy that someone had the technical knowledge I'd say I'd go with someone who is a good communicator - someone I click with. Perhaps I'd ask them to explain a concept to me.
what if there are only 5 'people like me'. Or even 1 or 2.
It might be helpful for them to put a link in the blog post to buy reddit gold.
Throughout all the criticism from pundits of Nate Silver et al. as a liberal/commie/whatever for predicting that Obama would win, I couldn't help but wonder if there was even any merit to the idea that an Obama supporter would want to say that Obama is going to win the election. I would think predicting that Romney has a 10% chance of winning (making it tough but a distinct possibility he would win) as Nate Silver did would lead to some of the BEST possible voter turnout for Romney (making it the worst possible prediction strategically, if you want Obama elected). On the other hand, a prediction that Romney will win in a landslide would make many Romney supporters stay home.

Is there actually evidence that higher poll numbers in favor of X lead to higher voter turnout from supporters of X? It seems like everyone takes that for granted but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.
Learn exploring connections and mapping relations between concepts
Was the united states really spending more on defense during the 50's and 60's than it is now?

I think we spent over a trillion dollars this year.
> It may be a good feature for internet cafes.

Do those still exist? I remember playing StarCraft a lot with friends in such a place, but this was like... 8 years ago?
Uh, they did it with video games.
I bet the audio directly from his mic would be enormously better quality than whatever YouTube has recorded. Plus Google can hardly afford to dedicate gigantic amounts of CPU to the transcription - they'll be going for a crude but useful job where for this demo he probably has a whole lot of CPU grunt just dedicated to it.
To clarify further for those unfamiliar with the language,a super literal translation of "watashi wa hanbaga desu" is something like:

(concerning/as for) myself, (it's) hamburger.

On it's own if Bob says this, basically it comes out as "I (am) (a) hamburger".

However, if Sally has just said something like "I'll have a salad...what about you Bob?" then it makes sense as Bob's order is the implied subject and it becomes "My order is hamburger." or "I'll have hamburger."

I know very little about linguistics but I think there are a bunch of other things that make Japanese-English difficult to translate via software as well.

There is the whole aspect of culture embedded in it. あなた could mean "you" or something like "dear/sweetie" depending on the context. There also the question of how to translate "you" (etc) in English text to Japanese as you have to consider politeness etc. If you are just translating a business web page it's probably safe to stick with polite forms, but if you are translating say the dialogue in a TV show you want to preserve the tone of the characters.

In terms of voice recognition, Japanese seems to have a lot of homophones to me when compared to English. It may just be my imagination, but here are some I ran into recently:

舶,錘, 頭, 摘む, 積む, 詰む, and 紡錘 are all pronounced つむ and mean completely different things. Or 六, 碌, and 録 are pronounced ろく. 上, 神, 紙, 髪, and 加味 are all pronounced かみ.

I seem to run into things like that regularly; when just hearing it spoken you need the context to figure out what they mean.
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@hluska

Have had a similar experience like you. I had to change my life. First i started to walk, that was very easy for me. Immediately i felt better, which gave me a big motiviational push. Now i go either swim or to gym every second day. I eat a full breakfast in the morning, a normal meal in the noon and a fancy salad in the evening. No coffein. I also learned simple relaxation techniques. Gymnastics and stretching before going to bed. I do not feel much pressure, actually my body is pretty determined in what it needs now. I just have to follow. So it seems to work for me.

I can sleep again. Back, neck and head pains have vanished, unless i sit longer.

And intellectually, well, yeah, i actually re-think a lot. The past 10 years i have worked at a startup, umm, that is not really a startup anymore, but still feels that stressful and immature. Like i do feel about myself. I did not feel being in control. Anyhow my life was/still is pretty dull. Thats what i try to achieve now, to bring color, beauty and warmth back to my life again. Tough.

Trying to establish more options to chose from. If one thing doesnt work anymore, i can change to something else. I am not getting younger. And who knows, maybe this little attack, that i have experienced, maybe the blood pressure was just one of the symptoms. I could still be dead tomorrow.

Also a way to grow up, folx. Privileges of the youth disappear one day.
Australia comes to its senses, abandons Internet filtering regime
>The refrain "where's my flying car" or "where's my jetpack" is just misguided.

I'll take autonomous private jets, drriverless cars, high-speed trains, and electrics scooters over these archaic ideas any day of the week!
It is exactly like affirmative action:

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04...

"Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans."

In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.
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That's not quite right. A choice quote from the kick-off call today helps explain more about what's going on here: "Some customers require Microsoft support in order to adopt a technology; some customers require community (non-Microsoft) support in order to adopt a technology."

You can think of the F# Software Foundation as the community side of that equation and, well, Microsoft as the Microsoft side of that equation.
I don't know that I'd connect to any website in a cafe, and when I did go to LAN parties, they were riddled with people scanning the network, and so forth. I'd be much more comfortable paying more for more storage in the device.
The premise that "information gathering" is a manager's most important task is a pretty interesting assumption underlying this post.

I recommend reading Andy's book "High Output Management" for more insight into this assumption.
I don't quite understand why a site like reddit would have "editorial pressure" from advertisers. If anything it should be the other way around.
The fundamental point around "incrementalism" makes a lot of sense.

Even government is largely incremental these days... the margin of winning the presidency seemed so small that it probably boiled downed to a series of micro-optimizations. If you buy that... why would a great micro-optimizer run the country any differently?

And even with technological progress poster-child Apple... the big outstanding question is whether Tim Cook will end up turning the company in to a micro-optimization that converges toward it's current local maxima?

But maybe it's all just cyclical... once all the low hanging fruit is picked over 1000 of times, the world at large will naturally be forced to be less incremental.
Hmmm ... you could do the same thing with any device. Phones, tablets, computers. Make them dependent on the cloud for daily operation, then drop support later and force new sales.
Sure!

ps. I'm not an SF native. Just a visitor too.

email: giannnichan[at]gmail.com
IE8 doesn't work - obviously;

IE9 has some odd layering issues - depending on the zoom level some elements from the UI don't show up - zooming back in or out restores them. Other than that it seems to work well from quick testing.

Don't have IE10 so can't test that for you.

* Looks awesome btw!
Well Romney supporters were certainly predicting a Romney landslide, so it's certainly plausible that Obama supporters would predict an Obama landslide. That's independent of whether or not that's a good idea in the game theory sense, of course.
I would gladly have an hour long conversation with my computer once to be able to speak in another language.
I think the biggest improvements to our quality of life will come from 1) energy advancements, 2) transportation (high-speed rail, self-driving cars, electric bikes/skateboards), 3) home advancements (automation, health, adaptive lighting)
>Digg didn't fail because of advertising

I agree with your point and I agree with this. But something interesting I remember from when Yishan was hired is this comment by kn0thing (cofounder Alexis Ohanian)
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/qnyy7/new_reddit_ceo_r...

>I asked all of the candidates I interviewed the question: "Why did digg fail?" Yishan knows. And I'll do everything in my capacity as a board member of reddit, inc. to make sure he doesn't fuck it up.
If this service were used to obtain a postcard print of someone's artwork, would that be a breach of copyright?
Posting from http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=379...

>> The extent to which Razer collects information is not much different than your average terms of service for most software you use. Like teamliquid, they collect anonymous aggregate and individual data. Unlike teamliquid, they reserve the right to collect personally identifiable information. This personally identifiable information must be volunteered by the user. This includes, your name, email address etc. This information is not shared with any third parties except in a few instances where it is necessary to provide a service or comply with the law. In all circumstances, the user voluntarily provides this information.

===

And you are silly to think otherwise. My first impression upon hearing this was immediately positive, even without hearing this. All my settings anywhere I go with my laptop, without having to retweak it on a new computer.

Do you have multiple profiles? Do you have multiple profiles with a lot of different settings? If you want to store it all offline, then you'll need more expensive memory, and have to pay more for your mouse. Use the new cloud based Synapse and you don't have to store all your profiles on the mouse. Store it on the cloud, then sync it to your mouse when you want to use that profile.

I don't see why everyone is making a big fuss about this. I don't need the features, so I just don't download Synapse.

From http://www.razerzone.com/synapse2/faq

>> All Razer products function as plug and play devices. Razer Synapse 2.0 offers a service above and beyond basic functionality to enhance your Razer product's capabilities. This includes features like configuring and saving macros, key binds, and preference settings. Razer Synapse 2.0 also maintains your devices in optimal condition by automatically updating and downloading driver and firmware updates, in addition to its cloud-syncing ability.

Razer Synapse 2.0 is not compulsory software to get your Razer peripherals working - but it is advisable if you want to get the best out of them.

===
Hofstadter also wrote this: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html regarding gendered language.
We're too busy debating the merits of the new iDevice, or bashing people who debate the merits of the new iDevice, or wasting our upvotes on personality cults, upvoting every little thing said personality has written about.

Did I about cover all the problems with groupthink and hivemind?

It's a shame though, but I hang out in new a lot, and I urge other HN'ers to hang out there too.
This is spot on.

And to go further, where the OP argued that product quality and development time are mutually exclusive; I submit that they are not.

In the right hands, good code can be written quickly and efficiently, just as good novels can be written as quickly as bad ones are, or good music can be written as quickly as bad music is.
What to do?

IMHO you have to kill all the regulation and the government mafia (yeah, that's what it is) preventing new businesses.

I know of many people that have not started companies in the US because of the limitations for immigration (these people were computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, some undergrad, some with PhDs).

Examples abound. Beer is one that I like since I tried to start a brewery with a few chemical engineering friends a while back in Georgia. There is a regulation that breweries can only sell to distributors, and distributors can only sell to retail stores, and retail stores, pubs, and restaurants are the only entities allowed to sell alcohol. Heck, if you brew your own beer and it's more than 50 gallons a year (that's 9 batches) you can go to jail for up to 20 years. We stopped our project because of the ridiculous regulations. We had an idea of how bad it was going in, but it was beyond our expectations. I met more than 200 people that brewed on a consistent basis much superior beers than 90% of what you can get in the market (the 10% were imports), who would love to start a brewery but couldn't. They worked in the different layers of the distributors and restaurants, with their ideas crushed.

This was just an example, in nearly every industry, including agriculture and manufacturing, this is the case.

You want innovation, you have to fight against the ever growing crony government you have that plays special favors to each industry in countless ways to go towards a free market and allow competition. There are no incentives to innovate. You may say my beer example is outdated, well look at Dodd Frank with the banking industry, look at the federal reserve system which is destroying the money markets and causing the financial bubbles. Peter Thiel mentions that technological innovation is a way to leave recessions faster. He knows how to avoid them altogether, but suggesting ending the federal reserve is so politically incorrect (ever heard a democrat or republican even talk about this who is not alienated by his own party) that it has become a waste of time.

The free market is the answer. There is more regulation in the US than in Sweden by the way, which is usually quoted as a Socialist state. The US is far more regulated than Sweden, even in healthcare and education!