skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dear Google,

You really need to fix your shit when it comes to selling hardware.

Despite being a huge Android/ChromeOS/etc fan, every interaction I've ever had that involved buying hardware (or in some cases, trying to buy hardware and failing) from the Play store was some level of painful ranging from minor annoyance to full-blown disaster.

I get that the Nexus 4 is supply constrained, I really do. In no way do I feel entitled to purchase one at any specific time. Being out of stock is no big deal and I'm normally a very patient person, but your inability to address the issue with any sort of useful public information and your lack of useful human customer support is inexcusable. Apple, Amazon... hell, even Microsoft... all make you look like a bunch of bumbling idiots when it comes to this stuff.

I'm basically done trying until you address the huge problems you have in this area.
I'm trying that now, but I think that would only have worked if it came back in stock. I think I had the bad luck to learn of this trick right as it sold out this time. I would be very mildly surprised if they stocked just as poorly this time around.
Shameless plug time! My own company, Uptano, is doing something kind of neat with dedicated servers. We're letting you rent dedicated hardware and then launch multiple virtual servers on them.

https://uptano.com

We're not trying to be the absolute cheapest, just trying to be the company we wished to exist.
Perhaps one ought to compromise on a "minimum viable fork."
Dustin's "best" philosophy:
* depends upon a search for an expert designer
* follows a "waterfall" process (large up front costs, infexible result)
* trusts that the expert has made good decisions for you

Moxie's is a hackers approach:
* A/B testing
* learn what matters as you go
* customise
* exploration and innovation

Both strategies have different costs and benefits.
Read your entire article. If you weren't so parsimonious with words, I suspect I would be reading well into the night. :-)

More seriously: It is a given that app stores primarily generate free content for the platform-owner and enhances the value of supported platforms. (Additional outlays for dev+test hardware+licensing+developer-hours add insult to injury) Surprisingly not many developers seem to care or account for. With the amount of free noise in there, it is not surprising that you guys experienced what you did. Thanks for confirming what we had deduced indirectly.

Our startup launched deliberately as a web-app even though it would've been easier to get more (initial) eyeballs with a mobile-first strategy. For reasons you develop (and more), mobile apps aren't part of our current road-map (although we do address form-factor related nuances). We did consider expending resources to go mobile a few weeks ago but it made more sense to focus on creating new "content".

Last, the level of control gained (as you allude to) by owning A-Z of the product+distribution is truly empowering. That said, there is an undeniable development and eyeball cost associated with it. We should acknowledge this.
So I think it'd be fair to say that Linux does ok in the robustness / lines of code or robustness / devices and real world interfaces, however, in terms of absolute numbers, a smaller system is almost always going to do better.
I can't scroll down with the space bar. This makes me unreasonably angry.
This is an automated way to do what was previously "copy and paste a Google Docs link into an e-mail".

Yes, you can change the file. If it's in native Google format (e.g. a Google Doc, not an uploaded/stored Word .doc file) you have a revision history. You can see when people join/leave the document while it's open (without timestamps), but you can't bring that up later.
Although I've never tried them, there's http://www.server4you.com/root-server/ that is relatively good value for money, but still a little more expensive. I don't know how their support/reliability is.

I actually use OVH on some older Kimsufi plans. I'm kinda disappointed actually with these new plans as they got rid of the Core i5/i7 processors which were a bargain for the amount of CPU power you got for the money.
Everyone should realize this by now, but if you must use Wordpress (or, host your own blog) please physically & logically separate it from critical files and infrastructure.
I secondly hate on social media "gurus" as well as SEOers who can't code (or at least read html).

IMHO: Growth Hacking is just Inbound Marketing for startups. Going from 0 users to 1MM+. You leverage all the online marketing skills: seo, ppc, email, display (retargeting), ux, social, cro, etc.

BTW, nice post John - glad to see it on here as well as inbound.
Bringing the Startup to the Enterprise
I'm 37 and have not been concerned. If I compare my current work to that I did a decade ago, it's obvious to me how much better I am -- faster, better at design, fewer bugs, etc. AFAIK, no one has turned me down for work because I'm too old. Perhaps they've chosen someone younger and less expensive, but that's fine by me -- maybe not a rational choice, but not one based on discrimination.

Other than code quality, how was I different as a 25 year-old? Much more likely to adopt new technologies, libraries, etc. because they were shiny and hyped. Did this serve me well? Sometimes I got lucky, but I also wasted a lot of time figuring out the hard way that Technology X was way too bleeding edge for production. I was way too willing to go along with (or even suggest!), massive, all-things-to-all-people architectures which looked great as block diagrams but didn't match up with timelines, project risk, etc. Now, I push for incremental change over big bang projects.

One way I've regressed in the eyes of an employer: I'm no longer willing to put in long hours in exchange for vague promises of future pay-outs (bonus, promotion, whatever).
Not disagreeing, but I'm curious. What you described sounds, to me, like "good marketing." What makes SEO a distinction from that?
Indeed. I don't intentionally damage new things, but people are often surprised that I don't agonize over keeping my phone, car, or laptop looking brand new. The idea of a scratched Honda sort bothers people, but idea of a scratched Audi makes people crazy. Why waste your energy worrying about this?

A Audi with some scratches is a very nice car, and an iPhone with some scratches is a very nice phone.
I'm in the same category. I don't enjoy drinking and I hate most video games, especially console ones and especially FPSes. The SV frat culture is such a turnoff.
While the prose is a bit breathless and sensational, the reality is that drone proliferation is a challenge. We haven't yet seen the improvised drone assassination but I expect we will within the next 18 to 24 months. Basically some lone wolf flying a quad-copter with a hand grenade attached or something similarly basic. The challenge is that it takes a lot of training and practice for a sniper to kill from 1000 yards out, but not so with a remote control drone.

Not a "good" development in robotics for sure.
That's interesting. Thunderbird has been doing this for a while, and I love it.
The narcissism theory sounds like an arbitrary rationalization. The following would sound just as plausible, if not more:

"Narcissists hate being around young people because it reminds them that, once upon a time, they used to be young and able to do the sorts of things that narcissists cannot do on the weekend anymore."
> Just think of the number of people on HN who have posted about how they don't understand Facebook, Twitter, or shoot down some whiz bang new technology. I've done it sometimes myself. Engineers are naturally skeptical, but this skepticism can grow out of control. It's fine in moderation but there's a tendency for this type of perspective to grow with age naturally, and that can ultimately undermine your ability to recognize and execute on genuinely novel, good ideas.

This is so very true. I was pretty young when twitter first came but remember being incredibly skeptical about the idea. Although to be frank, the way twitter is being used to consume information (as a news feed) was not how it was being thought of then. However, the greater point still remains: If you are skeptical of nascent ideas, you will never let them grow or become mature.
Buying Tips for Ultrabooks
The screen shots seem to show iOS apps on both sides. If the Android apps don't look like Android apps then it isn't a tool I want to use.
The vast majority of Pinterest users are over 35 and the average age is 40. Roughly 80% of the users are also female. Given that, I would be surprised if the early adopter of Pinterest was your stereotypical 25 year old male developer that these companies look for.
You would make an amazing political speech writer.

I think this debate boils down to "acknowledging certain market realities" versus "creating market realities." If you advocate youth based startups, you have to define youth, which is entire subjective. "Youth" in this context probably just means "hasn't reached full creative potential."

Of course, people won't think that much. They'll see youth, think 25, then start evaluating the world from that viewpoint.
A single machine is never going to be completely reliable. At any time it can halt for a variety of reasons: power loss, hardware failure, disaster in the data center like flooding, etc.

Thus, a configuration that relies on the availability of a single machine is already risking serious outage or data loss by not being machine-redundant. Reliable systems require the coordination of many machines (at least two), and the replication of data across them if data's involved.

It is useful to have component-level redundancy (e.g., RAID or ECC memory), but in some environments it may be cheaper overall to have machine-level redundancy using inexpensive machines. It also only takes the failure of a single critical subsystem for a machine to suffer an outage. You might have ECC memory and RAID, but do you have only a single Ethernet card and power supply? Single machine availability is a "weakest link" phenomenon from its components.

I acknowledge that building software to run across a fleet of machines is more difficult than software that runs on only a single machine, but (1) the software development cost is largely a fixed cost, not a variable cost in the number of machines (2) building a distributed system is sometimes needed for scaling reasons anyway.

If you scale a single machine vertically (i.e., get a bigger box), its cost rises faster than its capabilities; so an efficient high-scale system typically also means running a fleet of cheap machines (scale horizontally). I think these effects contribute to the rise of commodity-server computing, and cost is a reason not to consider it disturbing.

In other words, crunch the numbers and see when it makes sense :-)
I think that, over time, people would drift towards using only 0 and 10 and none of the middle scores, similar to how, over time a plurality voting system drifts towards only having two political parties (Duverger's Law). 0 And 10 are the "strategic votes" of score voting as 2-major-parties are the "strategic votes" of plurality voting.

A possible counter-argument to this is that score voting doesn't have a reinforcing feedback loop (each election, the minor parties get weaker until they remain at around 1%)
I thought most of the email clients did that already and I just checked a few which in fact don't! I'm pretty sure thunderbird does this if you want the same feature on an external application.
Apple outsells Android in the US, for what could be the last time ever
I am equating SEO with 'tricking search engines into preferring your content'. The whole premise of the open web is that natural selection would allow rich information to be filtered through because it is good. Producing garbage and tricking the tools which filter information are both counterproductive pursuits.
I think this article can be a little misleading. Sure, with cloud tech you can easily spool up more instances. And yes, it is great to not have to worry about configuring a load balancer (I guess). But just because adding more instances sort of fixes a problem doesn't mean it is a good thing to do. Not "having to do calculations" is a very bad attitude. You should know where the bottle necks are, and if adding instances is actually necessary or just some scotch tape. Bad architecture and coding can bite you in ways that adding hardware cannot fix.
Google’s Nexus 4 Sold Out In Less Than Half An Hour
One of my favorite song lyrics of all times:

"I've been losing lots of keys lately,
I don't know what that means
But maybe I've been better off with things that can't be locked at all"

I'm a happier person when I am using things that I don't worry about breaking or being stolen than I am taking care of nice things.
Y'know. In a perverted sort of way the bogus assumptions about age the OP talks about, further demonstrated in some of the comments here, actually cheer me up.

More than occasionally I've found an advantage in being underestimated and then over delivering ;-)
Proud OVH customer both in Europe and Canada. Very happy with their hard service and amazed with their tools. With their control panel you can deploy a new dedicate server in under an hour with a custom setup preloaded with your SSH keys. Provided they have stock of the server.

They suck in the support/soft service department, but frankly if you know what you are doing, you don't need it with OVH. They have pretty much automated everything. If there is a hardware fault they are on it before you even know.

Just a few days ago 24 servers failed due to cooling issues. They sent an army of 8 nerds to handle the issue: http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=3736 Resolved in 40 minutes.
Time to order that LG Optimus G :)
Is this minuscule feature worth the front page?
Perhaps. Every startup, mobile or web, start with a non-existent customer base, so I don't think one way or the other spells "more successful" necessarily.

That said, mobile-first companies are certainly unchartered waters compared to their traditional web brethren. I think they're a bit ahead of their time.

One distressing thing I can see happening: traditional web going the way of the newspaper industry. We're already seeing it with Google. They took a hit in this past quarter's earning's report because their traffic skyrocketed via mobile, but advertisers wouldn't pay the same CPM they were paying on the traditional web.

Sound familiar? Newspapers hit the same dilemma. They went from getting easy $30k tickets for single-run full-page ads to $3k/month online ads (to $300/month mobile-only ads).

Of course, this is a pure advertising model, which is separate from the OP. So... I'll stop here :)
http://www.hetzner.de/ are pretty good price/performance wise .
And I was about to say "Of course I'm not using this since I don't use gmail" but I use claws, which does this. Personally I would chuck any mouse-using client that doesn't do this.
er, ignoring the narcissism thing, which is bizarre (you want to hire narcissists, so better not hire old|ugly|disabled people!) your post seems to be arguing for the assumptions that the article is about: we can assume old people had to take shitty work in the past, therefore they are probably going to appear to be a poor candidate.

This completely ignores the evidence directly in front of us that all good engineers will one day start looking older and start having a lot more trouble finding job offers.

I don't really understand how you go directly from saying that it's unintentional and is "unreasonably harsh age-grading, coming from an inexperienced and privileged set of people who've never had to do grunt work" but then proceed to (try to) explain how it's perfectly logical that you can have a positive outlook of the future of your career, but actually you're going to have to take what you can get, which is the reason why "premature decline is far more common than it should be".

Maybe I'm missing the gist of your argument here? Are you suggesting we should be doing job interviews on a curve, excusing 20 years as a code monkey at some place you've never heard of because they probably had a mortgage? I don't know if that's your point, but it is definitely off base here: those 20 years might have created a middle-manager toady or they might have honed razor-sharp gut instincts and experience with relevant languages and tools. Either way, walking in with the assumption that "premature decline is far more common than it should be" means you're probably going to miss the truth of the matter, which is the whole point. No one is suggesting affirmative action for greybeards, they're saying that the kinds of things many in tech assume because a person has grey in their hair means that they don't get a fair shot, even when their experience is extensive and applicable.
Its frustrating because the old Maps did in fact let you click on the individual direction instructions to zoom into them.
"... by dumb happy newbies with no private life."

Interesting choice of words to attack ageism :)
I think there's a fundamental divide between people who became adults before the internet existed in the modern form (circa 1995 or so), and after.

I also think that there is effectively another break point at the advent of the smart phone (circa 2007) - people who become adults after smart phones were commonplace have an entirely different worldview.

I think that if your focus is narrowly on facility with technology at hand, ageism is a natural consequence.

I also happen to think that's a bad idea - a diversity of viewpoints is a goal to be pursued in and of itself.
I do use this feature -- I often select random blocks of text while reading. This feature means I often (5-10% of the time) have to click discard and then reply again to get my desired behavior.

In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused me to stop reading their site.
That's the one feature I hate.

I usually read through emails highlighting (selecting) the important parts with the mouse. So when I hit "R", Gmail quotes only my last selection. Discard, unselect, hit R again.
This post seems to conflate two issues:

* Churn is high, optimising user flow is mediocre at best, and iteration speed is slow, on mobile.

and

* Free is bad because of privacy blah blah blah.

I personally view the first issue as kind of un-solveable. Life is hard, etc. What are you going to do, make a HTML5 mobile application? good one.

The second, ehhhhh. Users don't give a shit about privacy. Really. Really. Like, really. Hell: I'd rather use Facebook for free and let them "sell my data" versus pay $50 a year.

Anyway, I'll reiterate my #1 learning of how startups grow into businesses. There are two ways to build a $100M company:

#1 Your users have a high LTV (=$5k+) and you can afford to spend significant (=$100+) capital on acquiring the user.

#2 Your business is massively (=10) viral, allowing you to acquire users insanely cheaply.

The reason why it is – always – very questionable to charge for a B2C user is that it's generally rather difficult to have a story that makes individual people = high LTV, ironically, without having millions of them.

You need to wrap your legs around one of these two approaches and never ever stray from it.
This seems like a very sane way of handling this particular issue. I know it's cool to hate on MongoDB these days, but I've always liked the way they built their product. Maybe at ridiculous scale it's not as awesome, but it's been pretty decent for me on the small projects I used it on.
any mail client does that imo.. Mail.app too
This blog lists the latest cheap options available: http://www.lowendbox.com/
I am using Oracle's Outside In PDF export library, for which I have written a Node.js module for. My module is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/ryancole/topdf
As some one who's only "best purchases" have included portable items like a good chef knife, MacBook Airs, iPhones etc over the last 10 years I agree with this whole heartedly. I've been able to live and work in 8 different countries. Experience amazing things and work with fantastic people. It frees you from all kinds of things to not have that $5000 TV, $1000 monitor and $5000 sofa.

It was big step (with a lot of fear) for me recently to buy a $180 24" monitor and a $800 Aeron chair as it implicitly makes my life less portable. I have noticed how these purchases have changed my thought patterns. Now before thinking about the future I'm actually thinking what to do with the Aeron. The funny think is that I'll hardly think twice about spending $800 on a flight.
Ask me, I am risking my job for this phone...
Can we anchor this comment to the top of the discussion? You've eloquently characterized the entire problem and a potential solution.

So many current work environments have self defeating dynamics. You're not allowed to be better than your boss. When that gets thrown away (e.g. startups -- you have no boss) everybody can thrive. Well, they can thrive if they haven't been trained over a lifetime to be risk averse due to shitty management.
I disagree. As I get older and see my friends who are programmers, I see a key issue: Becoming set in your ways for better or worse, which leads to... not as willing to change or learn new stuff.

To be fair there are exceptions. There are people who just enjoy programming for the sake of programming and building stuff. These programmers will most likely never be out of date. If you're not one of those people, then you need to force yourself to step out of your comfort zone and try to use something new at least every year if not more often.
Moviegoers are biased, and Hollywood wants to create products which sell. The people behind the cameras often are old even if the female stars on screen are barely out of high school. If I see ugly shirts in a store year after year, I don't blame the fashion house behind them, I blame the people who keep buying them.
Most mail clients seem to do this (maybe not so many web-based ones). Gmail has the problem of creating Tofu:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Top-posting
If you look at Brazil, which has multiple parties and plurality voting, the problems are pretty clear.

In this year's elections, the candidate with 28% of the votes was elected mayor in my city.
I am interesting in 1) a provider with comparable features in Asia and 2) another with comparable price on the west coast of the United States. That is until OVH roll out their west coast data centre in the coming years.

BTW, I'm thinking of webnx's special deals as the best on the west coast. Competitive on the high end. No where near as cheap on the low end.
I've had bad luck in Seattle and Oahu HI.

I now start with Google maps via Safari and only resort to using the Maps app if I need my location to show up as fast as possible.
How could it? Well, it could be biological, for example. An awful lot of personality traits are affected by our biology.

I'm not saying it necessarily is, but just that it's one theoretical way in which they might "not be due to inherent gender discrimination" or "strict gender roles".

Suppose testosterone makes men more aggressive (and thus more likely to negotiate), and women have less of it -- then that's purely biological right there, no gender discrimination required.
That would be teaching the students a tool, not a workflow.
Well, using an IDE also has a workflow... whatever.