skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had this same crisis in 2006 after realizing that I've never created a business that generates any significant cash. I figured out I have no right to mentor, do talks, etc of which I was doing plenty. So I completely withdrew and have spent the last 6 years trying to earn the right to mentor again. I'm about there, so will be reengaging starting next year.

Avoid mentors who fall into the following list: Made money off stock options in a non exec role. Made money through talent acquisition exit. VC/Investor experience only. Old money.

First prize is that you get an angel investor who has built profitable businesses. There is no better mentor than someone like this with a vested interest in your success. They are very, very rare and don't like to talk much.
the amount of good news coming out of newspapers is pretty minimal.

This sort of snobbery towards blogs one of the big reasons that newspapers are failing so badly these days. The medium is unimportant, the content is what matters. Just because it's printed on newsprint, doesn't make your content good. Just because it's on a blog, doesn't mean the content is bad.
Has anyone read this book? I can't find any reviews anywhere.
Behavioral Design and The Fogg Behavior Model
I don't agree.
The cloud provider is a company only existing for the sake of generating revenue for the share-holders of this company.
The government is a (usually) democratically elected institution.
That is why I prefer to trust governments.
We built a click 2 call app for a client using Twilio and now realized that they needed to have Caller ID to be passed to the call center.

This morning, we were looking into Tropo. Glad to see Plivo also supports setting arbitrary caller ID.
Miniclip: a handy tool for Web developers.
I've just made Miniclip, a Linux tray app that quickly converts HTML to Jade, CSS to Stylus and JS to Coffee from clipboard.
It uses html2jade, stylus and js2coffee as backend.
Have you thought about finding an intern who hustles and just put them to work reading growth hacking blogs and implementing/testing ideas.

Search for:
Dan Martell
Patrick Vlaskovits
Sean Ellis
Noah Kagan
Hiten Shah
Dannielle Morrill

etc.
The definition of a state as a "geographic monopoly on the legitimate use of violence" is not particularly controversial.

It is the definition of a state as started by Max Weber and sociologists in the tradition of political realism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

Max Weber's definition is used by wide variety of political factions, and is not a construct of anarchists\libertarians. During the Iraq War when discussing the use of mercenaries, the current President Barack Obama was quoted as stating:

"the core of our military relations to our nation, and how accountability is structured, you are privatizing something which sets a nation state apart, which is a monopoly on violence." [1]

Any action that is legitimate for the state institution to enforce, but would not be legitimate or legal for a non-state institution to enforce, derives its legitimacy from this monopoly on violence. This definition is simply stating that unlike other social insitutions, the state is the only institution which has the power to commit legal incarceration, execution, and confiscation.

The fact that non-state organization cannot impose taxes upon individuals and threaten fines and incarceration for non-payment indicates that taxation is a forcible (violent) means of appropriating revenue. If it were not, the revenue would be referred to as a donation, purchase, charity, or trade.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQl-qAtNwQ
I recently removed my iPhone 4 cover because I was sick of it and suddenly it was dropping calls and losing signal when I was holding it in my hand. I never had any of these issues back in Holland either (better signal perhaps?) but here in SF the problem is very real.
Wow!! I don't have access to the live stream. Can you post any important updates here? Thanks.
Ask HN: Need advice on a great phone system 
I've tried Google Voice, cell phones, Grasshopper, Avaya, RingCentral and several others. I have yet to find a system that I love. Each one solves some of the problems but the rest feels like a kludge.

Key for me are:
- Simplicity to transfer calls
- Compatible with physical (conf rooms and desks) and mobile phones
- Simple to administer
- Scales well for an office of 20+

Any advice?
I thought the sidebar was clever:

> If you enjoyed a pirated copy of Hacking Happy, compliment the author by: GitTip, Flattr, e-mail, Review
Oh, I absolutely agree. What my friends did was wrong, and I fully respect why Google did what they did, I would not have done anything different if I was them.

My point is more that it's interesting how easy it is to use this as a DDOS type tactic and it's a shame they don't have better appeal system in place. These days I am sure I could contribute to the AdSense ecosystem in a substantially more positive way.
Better to make money you don't think you deserve than to stay poor because deep-down you don't feel worthy.

Chances are, if you're fresh out of college, you know more about current demand and technologies than the seasoned executives out there.
I'm not sure you actually understand my phrase 'quantifying their happiness'. It uses tests derived from The Feeling Good Handbook, Dr. David Burns and Beck Anxiety Inventory, Dr. Aaron Beck to track emotional well being over time.

It makes it possible to compare how you feel with various points in the past to track an overall improvement or regression.
Temper tantrums only feel good if people are watching you.
IRC compatibility at the last is fantastic, and it's a simple protocol. Flowdock offers this (and is a similar service).
Agreed.

However, I look at TC as more of a gossip rag than a real tech news blog. When I want some dirt on some startup, I'll read it. When I want something with more substance, I'll read Wired or Ars Technica.
The problem is the wrong person is punished, and the content creator has no recourse, and it nets out worse for everyone. Somebody who used to be rewarded for producing good content no longer is so they stop. Google's content gets worse, advertisers venue for selling their ads gets worse, consumers have less good content to watch. Nobody wins.

Would you want me to be able to shut down your business with a relatively simple action for me to take, without you being able to take any recourse, without you even having any relationship with me? It has terrible externalities with seemingly innocent actors, imagine what could be achieved with a bit of malice, as you will find among competitors.
Suits are one of the many well-known ways to get (certain) people to like you and respect you. If you've ever failed to reach your goals due to other people's suboptimal reception of your presentation, consider this:

"Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad that you have it. Take my word for it, if I wear everyday casual when I visit e.g. City Hall I get treated like a hapless awkward twenty-something, if I wear the suit I get treated like the CEO of a multinational company. I’m actually the awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company, but I get to pick which side to emphasize when I want favorable treatment from a bureaucrat." [1]

Now, obligatory suit-and-tie-wearing can certainly be seen as a form of workplace oppression, but the motivation to positively impress business associates is perfectly valid. On the flip side, dressing down and cursing like a sailor can also be a form of calculated personal branding that conveys the desired impression (confident, powerful outsider) to certain prospective clients in certain situations. [2]

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/

[2] http://500hats.com
He's not dismissing Bitcoin, but the idea that through Bitcoin you can "remain a pair of anonymous public/private keys". This is explained here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity (and yes, I know that the technology can theoretically support this, it just doesn't in its current incarnation).
Google channels are specifically designed never to bother humans

This is not really true; Google does answer customer support queries for products that have customer support. Google Wallet and Google Apps are two products with dedicated 24/7 phone support.
OT: Does this title remind anyone of the "happy hackers handbook" or whatever it was called that was widely circulated online in the late 90s?

It taught the basics of stuff like telnet , traceroute and how you should choose an ISP that provided you with a "shell account".
To pretend that your experience is anything other than an outlier, given aggregated data to the contrary, is also illogical.
We're talking technical here and you're throwing in a legal argument?!? What does this have to do with the implementation of the JVM?

"Be different enough to not get sued" is a technical requirement as well as a legal one because it informs the design of your product. For example: the use of a different bytecode format in Dalvik pretty obviously had much more to do with "we can't make it look like a real JVM because we'll get sued" than efficiency; it's not a significantly better format than the standard Java bytecode system and using it trashes your compatibility with common Java libraries and tools.

Obviously, you are an expert on virtual machines and the Android team should listen to your wisdom.

Good ad hominem, bro. How's that working out for you?

I am not an expert, no, but I do know a few things about them and I know a few more about application development, on Android and off. Dalvik is not a good citizen of the Java ecosystem (as evidenced by its inability to do things that are considered very normal, i.e. Groovy or Rhino for scripting). You can't do really basic stuff like LiveConnect because of the twin fails of no bytecode generation (there's no dexer on-device) and, as mentioned, the class limit does a number on Scala and will hose Java 8. These are technical problems that stem from decisions made during the design process, and they're not edge case problems--well, the Scala bit is, but you can surface the same problem by just having a lot of dependencies that pull in a lot of class files.

When you're talking JVMs, you must compare to HotSpot because that's the main game in town. Dalvik doesn't compare well the design decisions inside of Dalvik serve to hobble developers who are not looking to write very simple, Android-idiomatic (which is not Java-idiomatic) CRUD apps. And that sucks. I would like it to be better. It isn't at present. I don't hold out a lot of hopes for improvement, though I would like to be wrong.
It's not unheard of. I've had Dell service people out to my office on the same day. I don't think Apple even offers on-site service.
It's hard for me to believe that they don't know the test is insufficient when the protocol involves waiting 1 minute for the problem to go away.
Why is Google's UX design so inconsistent?
Dropbox Encryption with Vivvo
I think years and years of people focusing on the tiny percentage of people who are wrongly accused by the googleplex is what set me off.

Everyone knows. It's boring. Get over it. It's exactly the way it is supposed to be and there is no better way. All the proposals to get a human involved slow everything down and Google would never have gotten to where they are if they had people wasting their time on every case that cried about being an exception to the rule -- especially since even those who cry about being the exception really aren't the exception.

It's a waste of time and these blog posts are a waste of time and here I am wasting more time.
+1 on the self-hosted. A wishlist in silk accompanied by a 2-ton brick of a deal-breaker. You'd think the most solution-starved demographic for chat would be those behind a corporate firewall...
Right, dozens out of dozens of millions.

It's totally irrational, sensationalist, click bait.
I'd be "unsatisfied" because a slow processor, a 4GB RAM maximum, and a shitty GPU would suck, sure. I upgrade and sell my old machines on a yearly basis or so because paying a $300-$400 delta (sell the old one, buy the new one) is worth it to have something in the target area for Apple and for developers. There's no point for me in keeping older devices long-term because nobody really targets the trailing edge. I spend more on car repairs in any given year than I do on my laptop upgrades; it is just not a significant amount of money.

If "people who keep old stuff" was what he was really going for, he's doing poorly at describing it, because I don't think that "long term customer" doesn't mean "customer who refuses to upgrade for geologic eras" among reasonable folks. And I certainly don't think an ecosystem where newer devices are generally preferred is a symptom of "bad engineering"--more "engineering decisions he doesn't like." Every MBP iteration has made me much more pleased to actually use the machine, and that's the core of what matters.
Is the government offering to provide Internet services to you? You're comparing apples and oranges.

A government still can, and will, seize domains, block sites, and issue takedowns and warrants on content to Google. Suppose I own xyzzy.com, set up to use Google Apps to handle mail and serve some web pages. Just like if I was hosting at home or in a colo somewhere, the government can still come in and demand the data. In fact, the biggest difference is that companies like Google are more likely to just roll over--see the stories about cell carriers just handing over tons of information just because law enforcement said please.
agreed, and i should have been more clear. the author's blog post states that one of the reasons he explored Go was that his initial sketch of a solution in his language of choice (ruby) was sequential. my point was that you can get performance in ruby with asynchronous operations, and that you don't need to go parallel for something like this.

then again if it was a matter of "well, i had a problem to solve and i had a desire to explore another language, so solving it in that new language was a way to explore" then the point is moot.

however agreed 100% or more on the "code smell" of doing an event loop in Go.
History will repeat itself. The story of these publishers trying to claim some significant web space reminds me of the internet gold rush of the 90s.

We had all these flashy sites springing up trying to leverage this new web technology in wrong way, by adding all sorts of whiz-bang most was unnecessary. We had an incorrect (immature?) view as to what this new technology should be used for.

Just because we have iPads and other tablets with the potential to pump out lots of flash-bang, does not mean we need to build our apps submerged with these features. iPads (and the net in general) give us many great advantages over print media not related to putting extra pixels on screen, many of which are beginning to be taken advantage of.

Marco Arment recently launched his iOS magazine (http://www.marco.org/2012/10/11/the-magazine) which strips bare many of the hassles involved with paper based publishing and delivers an excellent reader experience while cutting out all the crap which publishers seem to believe they need to inject into their online models.

I could be wrong, but if The Daily had concentrated on putting out excellent content, quickly, with a minimal interface with excellent sharing options, maybe things would have been different? Surely they could have avoided spending much of the $30 million on start-up costs.

Rather than listening to the siren singing us to shipwreck upon the glittery rocks of "Web 2.0", we should be using this new technology to help get better content to readers more often. Fuck the rest.
I don't believe that's necessarily true. This is more passive than active, and piggybacking off an universally recognized brand can be quite beneficial.

Apple has spent billions of dollars crafting a brand that inspires trust, quality, and modernness - and regardless of how an individual feels about Apple on a conscious level, the strong majority probably associate those three things with Apple products.

Slapping a Macbook Air in their design passively speaks to viewers by saying "we're a quality brand, you can trust us, and we're the future in this outdated industry." If you look around, you'll actually see that a lot of successful startups (usually post-first generation) piggyback off one aspect or another of established brands.
Oh, so it's like wearing an ironic t-shirt?
I'm not saying punishment doesn't happen. But the relevant questions are:

How could your posts have been better written?

Was their content thoughtful enough to be worth
submitting in the first place (or not deleting
after having been posted)?

As I said, take the votes as editorial feedback, and karma as a reflection of the quality of the writing not the author.

Before posting the grandparent, I gave the links a cursory review. It was pretty clear that there was nothing outstandingly insightful about the comments. There was a bit of meanness, however. Their tone was a bit argumentative without being informative, as well.

All one can do is support their writing with effort and bounce back from mistakes and rejection as an author.

[Edit] I will add that comments do get systematically downvoted in a thread when someone disagrees. This morning, all my comments in this thread were downvoted by one, in a very short period of time. It is not unsurprising given what I compared and the entity I criticized. If I was certain I had never done the same thing, I might complain about it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864977 But I think I might have had a bad day, myself.
"Would you like a demo?"
Looks interesting, but does it support existing chat protocols like XMPP or IRC?

This is one of the main reasons I stick with Grove ( http://grove.io ) for team chat needs.
Is USPS not a sane service? Sorry to hear.
How the Tumblr worm spread so quickly
In the case of media companies vs Google, and Amazon vs everybody else, I think they deserve for not innovating their businesses, and leaving customers in the cold.

Now for Starbucks vs traditional cafés, just make better coffee. I doubt Starbucks would thrive in Italy for that reason.
I use Plivo for my telecom service. You should be able to put a custom script together. @UnFundedHype if you would prefer I put it together for you.
Overlayer: Add custom images to webcam streams
I'm guessing that Pakistan's influence once others have left is a bit of a concern. Were you in Afghanistan?
Because they never want to have to deal with the potential problem ever again. They want to move forward and creating a machine moving forward with all the ducks in a row is better than constantly re-evaluating the potential fraudsters -- however small that potential may be.

Remember, in this case, Google is the customer and the content provider is the vendor. Google has decided not to be those vendor's customer anymore.
What unity desperately needs is better NLP.
If I type something and it can infer that it's probably a book title then show me books, probably a film title then bring up IMDB but if I'm typing "xterm" I really only want xterm.
" How do you think Samsung feels?"

Samsung feels fine. They're making billions.

Oh by the way, Samsung deserves everything they get from Apple. Since Samsung has been down this road before; TV, business phones - it's a long list of products Samsung copied, dumps onto the market and then hides behinds it's "culture". Meanwhile Samsung now has carved a foot hold in your market. Effective strategy. And it's worked for them for years.

What I find funny is that it all goes around. Cause now Samsung is being copied by cheap Chinese knock-offs. Who are flooding the Chinese market.
Instagram uses POST method do actually issue a "delete" photo request on their API. Just wanted to say this is a bad REST API practice.

http://reventlov.com/advisories/instagram-plaintext-media-di...
The Internet Isn't Broken; So Why Is The ITU Trying To 'Fix' It?
I really don't understand the hate with which Dan Lyons is speaking.

Startups are crazy, sometimes hugely profitable companies that sometimes start up with the same money it takes to start a restaurant or less. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, sometimes they are a complete joke. It's intense and awesome and that's why we are all drawn to it: huge potential. VCs are a part of it and without them this market wouldn't exist.

Not every startup needs VC money but some do and all the investment they have poured into the economy has had a positive impact. Again, I don't get the hate.

Dan Lyons's article is completely absurd (maybe that was the point) but I see no reason to help him or anyone else by posting this ridiculous ant-startup link bait. They all the say the same thing in different ways and they all have this weird, bitter, almost-jealous resentment to them.

I don't know if journalists are mad because they don't get into startups themselves, only cover them. Or because journalism has been fairly marginalized (sad but true) and is undergoing some major transitions... I don't know.
I'm wondering if maybe by getting these kinds of instant motivation bursts you're attacking a symptom instead of the problem.
Building in a weekend
Why Rep. Darrell Issa's New Internet Bill Is A Non-Starter
I find it to be a good riposte to this fluffy NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/saying-no-to-colle...; "Saying No to College"
Zenbar: The Fastest Smartphone App Switcher Concept on the Planet.
I'm not going to enter into a discussion that belongs on those other threads, I'm trying, as a relative long-timer to explain how I read your posts. Of course you think your posts are value adding, otherwise you wouldn't write them. I'm trying to explain why they might not be understood as such.

The fact that you write "I agree with the broad points" doesn't change the fact that your comment disagrees with the broad point (that FizzBuzz is a good and useful test). Also, the bit you quote seems unrelated to your concerns. How do you disagree with the interpretation that 40% passed the test? Any interview situation is "for an audience" and stressful. Not testing actual coding (rather that talky-talky skill) is deeply unfair to those many talented coders who are not great sales people.

For two and three, the comments are still not good ones, they're just further being ill-considered because of the bias. There are plenty of good comments that go against the bias of this site, but still get upvotes, because they're good.
> rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.

I do not own a rMBP, but laptops in general are not as fragile as we sometimes imagine. Most of the failures I've experienced over the years have been for things unrelated to drops. I've had a dead screen backlight, a dead trackpad (water spill), and similar one-off failures. I've also seen overheating, failed logic boards, and of course dead batteries. I've never seen a laptop that died because someone dropped it (though obviously that can happen).

However, if you drop a metal laptop, you're likely to get scratches and dents. You won't see that as much on a Thinkpad because the plastic will shrug this off better. With cheaper plastic laptops, you might see cracked plastic.

If you drop your laptop a lot, you might want something like a ThinkPad just so it won't get dinged up. But then you might want to just stop dropping your laptop so much.
Of course. But by constructing a straw man by taking revenue as the figure to compare to tax paid they devalue their argument.

[edit: not that you were doing that, I'm referring to the "politically motivated" publications I mentioned.]