skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Personally, I don't care about an ecosystem because I don't use third party apps at all.

Then you are a feature phone customer, not a smartphone customer, for the most part. Nothing wrong with that at all, but if they want to survive, they need to meet the full expectations of smartphone customers that want to utilize their devices to the hilt. As far as paying for the top 50 apps...it isn't feasible. The top 50 apps include many apps that are actually platforms in and of themselves. Coding for an entirely new OS induces obscene costs up front, and for ongoing support, and in order to justify those, there needs to be a substantial customer base, -not a hope for one and a substitute of cash in its place. RIM doesn't have enough money to bribe devs into bad business decisions on that scale. Unfortunately for RIM, apps are made by developers not on their payroll, and developers are independent business with bills to pay. They aren't going to waste their precious resources like money, time, infrastructure, marketing, and opportunity cost to build for an OS that has no customers at the moment. Classic chicken and egg scenario, and yes, a perfect OS on perfect hardware in no way implies a solid position from which to regain a decent stable market anymore. The market has matured.
Paul Graham goes a step further in his Startup=Growth essay, focus the entire company on a single goal: growth rate. I didn't realize the analogy till now. Thanks for bringing this up.
It is only natural that lego would have a "for girls" page that emphasizes product lines that they think girls may like. A lot of criticism has been leveled at Lego for being for boys only recently; I don't think an attempt to refute those allegations can fairly be said to mean that those product lines are therefore only for girls.

If I google "McDonalds communities" I get a corporate site that highlights to good McDonalds does for communities. Should I then conclude the chain is a community outreach program?
...when there are an insane number of VC's & angel investors in the UK.

The constant gripe of U.K. based talent is that nothing ever gets funded there.
At least not at the rate or the fluidity with which it does in the valley.
Besides this maverick ex-con of an angel, Xavier Niel, who claims to have invested in some 700 startups to the tune of almost $150,000 a pop, who are these angels and VCs you talk about?
What's Eating Android? The answer to browser usage and poor app revenue
More specifically — assuming the rules were the same as for the first such workshop, linked in the article — "women were automatically allowed to apply for a spot, while men were allowed to apply if they knew a woman who was going to attend."
How did you actually get that plan with your Nexus 4? I've been a T-mobile customer for several years, always owning my phone outright (now a Nexus 4), but they gave me a serious run-around, telling me that particular plan was a promotional thing that could only be used with a Walmart handset.
note that this is clearwire wimax only - a network that is actively shrinking as they transition to lte and their partner (sprint) decommissions iDen cells.

You can get a similar price item with better connectivity but without the gimmicks from sprint's budget brand: $79 for a wimax+3g hotspot, $35/mo for 2 gigs of 3g data on sprint (evdo rev a) and "unlimited" wimax. or $5/day for 200mb/"unlimited"(activated for just the days you use it)

sprint's evdo rev a network performs pretty poorly, but it is way better than not having a signal, something that will be true more often than not with wimax only service.
I'm not sure I agree with this. If I'm looking at the implementation of a function, it's because it's done something wrong. For this function, I would fire up the debugger and say:

"Does isTestPage() return what I expect? Yup, so the problem is going to be in surroundPageWithSetupsAndTeardowns()."

A well named function becomes a black-box; you can tell if it's working just based on its inputs and outputs. Why open black boxes that are working?
I would not. Not all failure is created equal. Failing is fine. Even failing big is fine. But the risk has to be worth the reward. His reward was a name. That's it - not the success or failure of the project he wanted to start, but just the name. Sure, names are important, but spending this much effort on the name and not the project itself does not, to me, indicate good judgement on where one's efforts are best spent.

"Learning to embrace failure" is not an excuse to avoid basic cost analysis.
It sounds like you have a lot of experience in this area. I admit I've only really touched on it before on projects I've worked on. Do you know if there's any good books or online guides on this subject, as I find it quite hard to devise these systems myself?
I used to follow Lifehacker on post by post basis. But then I realized blogs don't help much. So, I closed my Google Reader and stopped reading all blogs. I subscribed most blogs on G+ and receive a handful of posts everyday. Some of their stuff is good and most of it is so simple that it shouldn't have been mentioned. Currently, I have subscribed to Lifehacker's VIP feed which brings whole article to my Google Reader. They have been bringing interesting people through series' like How-I-work and Ask-an-Expert that I feel like missing. I just skip any article that I find to be overkill.
I don't know about AT&T and T-Mobile, but Verizon and Sprint (CDMA) phones have the IMEI/MEID tied to the phone since there's no SIM. It works a bit like a VIN on a car I think. This means they know what phone you're activating during activation.
I have often wondered why...
Both of your examples are fine, as it is pretty clear what each method does.

In such cases, the golden rule is "if you do it more than once, create a new function". I don't know what kind of things you program if you have 100-line functions with no code sharing.
I am in favor of this line of thinking, there's a lesson to take out of this about finding a way to make sure you get paid.
I sent him a tweet (the only contact info I could find) yesterday. He responded later last night. He's looking into it.

https://twitter.com/davidmarcus/status/275853590080417794
Oh yes, you do. You do indeed :)

http://vimeo.com/22439234

What were we talking about again? Oh, LEGO. Bleh.
Bought a micro-SIM card on the website (Wal-Mart sells them too), popped it in the phone, chose the plan from the list when activating the SIM card on the website. You got a run-around because you talked to a real person when that's a web-only (t-mobile.com or walmart.com) plan for new customers.
Reading code without a purpose can cause your brain to tune out. You think you're learning but you aren't. I would rather suggest you find an open-source project and fix a bug in it. You will have to read lots of code in order to do so, and, so long as there is a repeatable test-case, fixing the bug shouldn't be too hard.
Is anybody seeing irony in the fact that McAfee has become an entity whose suspicious signature (Behavior) has made him a suspect in an event detrimental to his host system (murder) & he's now trying to elude the dragnet laid to catch him ?

You'd think he'd find sthg better than changing directories, I mean countries.

Maybe false positive Karma is a thing after all.
As a reseller, their coverage is completely based on CLEAR's coverage, like how Virgin Mobile is entirely based on Sprint's coverage. It's as though Karma is a MIVO - Mobile Internet Virtual Operator.

Why CLEAR has no coverage in Santa Monica is a very good question.
The problem with

if (page.hasAttribute(“Test”)) {…

is when you then decide to change boolean attribute Test to an enum attribute Environment with values Development, Test and Production.

Because now you have to hunt down all the page.hasAttribute(“Test”) in your code and replace them with something different. And if your code is creepy enough you will miss one or two and something will break.

So you have to look very carefully whether you repeat the same checks. If you repeat a check in different places and it has some meaning, you should abstract it away.
Then, they could release it as free and then charge in-app as soon as they launch?
42% more than they received.
I stopped reading at "develop their own sources of ... water"
Well, the solar wind is really a stream of electrons and positive ions. Charges of opposite sign moving in relation to each other are more commonly known as an electric current. Electric current generates heat and a magnetic field.

It seems to me that the "portals" as they call them are just places where the insulation of the earth's upper atmosphere breaks down and begins to conduct a current. It becomes ionized, a plasma. The fact that these "portals" would then sometimes appear and disappear should then be obvious and predictable to anyone who has ever watched one of those novelty plasma globes.

They would also know that it's pretty much impossible to predict, though.
Had this exact same experience, and you are the first person I know of that saw it as well. I distinctly remember (SPOILER) when they were on the roof, about to disable the device, going "I can't believe that Marvel allowed Lego to do this before their big movie blockbuster". For that matter, who was the marketing genius who thought that surmising the entire story arc would make for a good commercial at any time?
Half the fun I had playing with Lego when I was young was unfolding plots between the minifigs - you'd build something, then have your minifigs interact with it. I'm not really familiar with Meccano, but as I understand it there's no 'human' in it with which you can project yourself. Meccano can let you build cool items, but Lego can let you build cool items, an environment to put them in, and people to interact with both of those things. Lego seems more versatile in satisfying a flexible imagination.

Also, suggesting that the decline in quality of modern engineers is Lego's fault is an interesting variant on the usual 'kids these days' crotchety-old-man talk.
Has HTML5 made us more secure?
Analogizing jQuery & Dojo
My bad, it's pretty much the same. I didn't know about their "money making WiFi" feature. Pretty sure they didn't have it when they launched.
It's nothing new for the CCC.

Germany already has the Bundestrojaner ("Federal Trojan")
But the more valuable it is the more unlikely it is that it will be given away. Is spending time and money on the extremely small chance of getting hold of zap.com smarter than using those efforts to get hold of zap.co or zap.me? How much more is zap.com worth to your business over other alternatives?

If a few days and a few thousand pounds isn't worth much to him then I understand but if resources are scarce, using them on long shots that might not even pay that much over the alternatives is not good business.

edit: punctuation, grammar
Complete Review of Daylite 4 - Curtis McHale
When the cops want your username
From what I can see ZPCM isn't a public company it trades on what is referred to as the pink sheets.

It has no revenue or business activity meaning it was probably once a public company or had the intention of becoming one.
I agree with this but also found that there can be a significant difference depending on your subject matter. It's typically easier for people in CS to publish because there are fewer barriers to developing and testing your work. Compare this to something like biology where a PhD student may have to cultivate an experiment involving animal tissues that may or may not become compromised somehow (for example), or some other delay that's much less likely to happen when working with computers, and you can see why they might take longer to develop something publishable.

Consequently there is an expectation that CS PhD students should publish more.
> The alternative to patents ("open [letters]") is industrial secrets. If you can show me how making all current patent disclosures in to industrial secrets promotes the propagation of technological ideas I'd be much obliged.

I think most programmers will take industrial secrets over patents in the blink of an eye. Patents here are things that any programmer can come up with if they spend a few weeks working on.
I would recommend South.

I have found it has very nice/shallow "curve". In that if you are doing simple stuff, South is simple. Don't even have to look at generated migrations, just use management commends. As you need more complex things, you can learn more details about South.
The little research I've seen has not backed up that opinion. While that view is shared by many - especially those who come from a Smalltalk heritage - the studies I've read about do not show a clear association between small pieces and more readable/maintainable code, at least not for code blocks under 100 lines or so.

I dislike reading Smalltalk influenced code with many small pieces. They tend to use instance state as a way to pass parameters, and that makes me uncomfortable - I have a leaning towards functional programming.

I also distrust function names. A function like "noMoreElves" might actually be "no more elves!" and implemented as "elfCount = 100". I exaggerate a little, but an inline "elfCount == 0" is much easier to verify than having to jump elsewhere to see the code.
to me the point of HN is to read the articles and comment on their content

Hear. Hear. I think of Hacker News as a community of people who know how to read, and who appreciate good writing. Submissions to Hacker News should be from reliable sources and submitted with the original article titles in the first place,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933

so the reader should already receive a signal from the submission and its title that it is worth a read to the end, and a signal of what the article is about.

And often the point of stories on HN is not some tiny summary or moral, but a long article with many different points and data that are hard to summarize.

Yes. The best submissions to HN have some consideration of more points of view than just the author's point of view, and will be harder to condense to a one-line summary than the articles that need not even be submitted here.

Also, I'd argue that reading a long piece (especially if it contains an illustrative story) is much more memorable than a summary like this.

Agreed with this too. A pithy point embedded in a carefully reasoned article with pertinent examples and discussions of alternative points of view is actually better understood, and better remembered, than the same pithy point written in isolation.

Here's to the readers who still read writing longer than one sentence. Be bold in submitting articles that are more than five paragraphs long. Invite your fellow participants on HN to be absorbed for a few minutes in THINKING about a detailed, nuanced argument. Encourage the submission of articles with analysis and factual detail by upvoting those articles. Reward your fellow readers by submitting and upvoting articles worth reading in full.

P.S. My user profile here on HN begins with a one-liner tl;dr summary. Yes, that is a joke, although the summary is accurate.
Couldn't this be seen as a "benefit" - not having to rewrite code after every major release?
I would think a more impressive effort at hustling would be to find a (more readily) available domain name, then focus on building such a great product that it works anyway.

IMO the story shows great hustle but poor prioritization. Domains don't matter that much. One of YC's most successful graduates is airbnb after all. That domain is basically nonsense, but the product is so good, now it's their own special nonsense.
Sure. If you plant an acorn in crappy soil and fail to fertilize and nurture it, does it still turn into an oak tree (if it turns into anything at all)? Of course.

But does it turn out as well as it would have if it got off to the right start and/or was cared for appropriately? Probably not.

How the oak tree turned out is largely dependent on the environment it was raised in, the care and attention given to it, no?

Humans have more ability to control or change their conditions than oak trees but the principle still applies reasonably well. At the very least, taking on this responsibility as a parent minimizes the chances that one will be absent or non-attentive.
A classic sociopathic anti-reality extremist viewpoint. I've seen this type of thinking run companies into the ground. It is myopic and will be detrimental to any real-world situation in the long run.

Thiel is chock full of this BS, and his success should be disregarded as anything other than the statistical anomaly that it was.
> I'm starting to think that for anyone to call themselves an industrial designer, they should be required to get an ME degree, and actually see how products work and are manufactured. Your design school degree means nothing to me.

There is a semi-controversial architect named Peter Eisenman who made a similar claim. His thought was that architecture should only be studied at the graduate level, leaving your undergraduate education for something more practical.

After getting a taste of undergraduate design education, I'm inclined to agree.
Ah yes, and this is the part where common sense runs head first into Apple's walled garden.

This is how almost every multiplayer game does it to great success - tie your copy of the game into an account that the game developer can verify (possibly via a third party, like Steam). This makes it such that it's pretty much impossible for a pirated copy to hit your server.

Except, Apple does not allow you to take payments outside their channels for services provided in an App Store app. You don't have any personally identifiable information as the developer - nothing that can indicate if the user is a legitimate, paying user.

Administering IAPs and subscriptions is a huge pain due to the opaqueness of Apple's APIs. When customer service gets a complaint, like, say "I subscribed to your shit but I don't have premium access!" you cannot do any verification whatsoever, since you don't know their Apple ID, and their Apple ID was never visible during the transaction, so there's no way for you as the third party to back-trace anything.
> Why open black boxes that are working?

Maybe to modify them ?
The Secret Weapon Of The Little Company Google Can't Beat
With downgraded credit, Nokia sells and leases back HQ to raise cash
Andreessen's counter-argument to lean really needs to be put out there. As in all trends, people take a popular concept like lean too far and adopt it by default (instead of by its fundamental merits).

Of course lean has worked well. Especially when it was the hungry rat or roach to the 90s dinosaur. But people are getting complacent in this success, and increasingly chicken-shit to do something really difficult and time-consuming.

And there are a lot of skittish roaches and rats running around the tech scene now. The startups types just out of college saw Social Network and they think its easy, ha ha. Time for a new kind of beast to rise, a bigger one that does not suffer from startup-ADD and requires a lot more intellectual and financial resources to grow.

I've been working on some hellish shit, pushing myself to the very limit of what I can do after 15 years of programming. A lot of people won't touch difficult now. But difficult or not-on-trend or unseen advantage is what good investing is all about.

It seemed risky to people with self-programmed assumptions to do lean in the early-to-mid-naughts. It seems risky to do a big beast now. But investing is finding some edge, that is one great way to increase your chances to win.
That is pretty cool. What did you do about face cards though?
Rack::PushNotification: Run your own push notification service on Heroku
I switched majors after a week in architecture school for much the same reasons. It really felt like a strange, cult-like realm: architects feel superior to both engineers and artists, though they do a little bit of both and neither as well as the other.
This sounds like something you only see in movies: Billionaire hedge fund manager signs over really valuable asset to persistent little whipper-snapper then utters some cliché phrase like "You've got spunk, kid!". Hedge fund managers didn't get rich by giving things away to the first person who asked nicely, and they still have business partners to answer to.

I'm surprised that calculating risk before investing large amounts of time and money now qualifies as 'conservative'. If that's a common attitude in SV these days, the bubble may be worse than I thought...
Is it possible that inflation[1] has outpaced your childhood memories? Assuming 1990 is a mid-point for peak LEGO buying among HN readers, here's a couple of basic 'space' sets with comparitive prices:

6923 "Particle Ionizer", a small space ship: $24 in 1990 would be $42.48 in 2012

1616 "Space Combo", couple of minifigs and mini vehicles: $10 in 1990 would be $17.70 in 2012

[1] http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[2] http://guide.lugnet.com/set/6923

[3] http://guide.lugnet.com/set/1616
Evernote Expands Its Premium Offerings
I think this is the only way to go if you have significant server expenses necessary to support the game. Still it sounds like Apple doesn't let you know who legitimately bought the app, and they also prohibit in-app purchases that don't go through their system. So I'm wondering how people actually deal with this?
This just borked Chrome in Ubuntu 12.04 on a desktop. I could see the memory increasing by 20MB a second in the mem util and the Chrome tab locked completely. This is with 8GB of ram...
So these "portals" are the connections being made between the two fields when the magnetic differential between them is great enough? Like lightning strikes? So very cool!
This actually isn't extremist or crazy, it's common sense. Multitasking is a myth and you really can only focus on one thing at a time. By adopting this philosophy, you'll probably get a lot more done, quickly. Once your one task or goal is accomplished with that hyper focus, you move onto the next one. It's really the best, and arguably the only way, to work. Again, our brains don't do more than one task at once with any efficiency.
Ruby's image to the programming public is inextricably linked to Rails, and so to web development, and making fun of web developers is a time-honored tradition among people who fancy themselves "Real Programmers."

Outside of this (friendly?) rivarly, I think even the most obstinate Pythonista has to recognize that Ruby is a perfectly capable language for non-web development.
>"I start to wonder if the person may be bipolar and experiencing a manic episode."

...I would think that depends on how many thousands of dollars you have in the bank. It would be nuts to do this if you had no money to your name and were struggling to make ends meet, sure. But if you're got a high disposable income, or you know you can make it up with work, why not?

I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Stevie, and I know nothing about his financial situation. I suspect neither do you. Regardless, you could easily cover the cost of a last-minute LHR-NYC flight with three, four days of contracting (I should know, I used to freelance iOS in London). Doesn't seem quite so crazy when you frame it like that.

What I probably wouldn't do is throw around the idea that simply because somebody buys a ticket on a whim that makes them a manic depressive.
University of Waterloo Students Win Facebook's Hackathon
Wear wooden shoes around the house? :) A Dutch woman told me that after you wear them for a year they start to get wear in and get comfortable.
I would recommend the above, along with chapters from http://www.aosabook.org/en/pypy.html as a guide
I was bored and I made this presentation