skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Talking to people who just bought or just quit is great, but if that's all you do, a lot of key insights will be missed:

- Talking to people who didn't buy, but instead bought a competitor.

- Talking to expert users who've been with your product for a while to learn what they're doing with it you never even considered a possibility. Or to learn what they thought they'd be able to do, but could never quite make work well.

- Talking with all sorts of people to refine your elevator pitch and figure out how to secure the earlier parts of the funnel. Just because someone bought doesn't mean they're the only oracle of why people might buy. They could simply be early adopters after the latest shiny thing.

These are all things I've done with success.

#1, talking to competitor's customers, is what led me to invent spreadsheet notebook tabs on Quattro Pro at a point when most everyone thought the world wanted 3D spreadsheets instead of formula linking across sheets. By talking to folks who had bought Lotus 123 and asking why they wanted a 3D spreadsheet, I quickly discovered it had nothing to do with summing along a z-axis and everything to do with grouping multiple spreadsheets together as a single file.

I've gained all sorts of insights from #2 by talking to power users. This is particularly true of products that have programmability through scripting and API's. But it's also true when you hear about someone doing something amazing you'd never dreamed the product could do, and then you hear about how many flaming hoops they have to jump through to get it done. Yet, solving the problem is so valuable that even making it a little easier makes them thank you. Suddenly, you see how to make it a lot easier and a lot more accessible to a broader audience. Depending on what you've discovered, you might even open a whole new sub-market this way.

#3 just comes from the realization that the more you pitch an idea, the more you learn about how to present it. It is extremely helpful for the people calling the design shots to get to go through the full two way interaction of trying to sell the design. Engineers, especially, quickly learn that prospects aren't going to give them a blackboard and 2 hours to prove that the laws of physics insist they must buy.
Glad you like the site!

Queueing the next video is an interesting idea. I know there is a way using the YouTube player API to queue a video but I know that it doesn't actually start loading the flv until playVideo is called, so I'm unsure if that would speed up the process. Another idea would be to have multiple youtube players that can load videos separately and then switch between them as necessary. This might add unnecessary bulk and slow down the page, but I'm not sure if it would be considerable. I'll look into this.

Right now there shouldn't be much delay between videos, has it been enough to be annoying for you? There might be other ways this transition can be smoothed as well.

Better support for playlist creation and sharing is something I agree is crucial and we should get to that soon. Improving recommendations to make music exploring and discovery is something we're constantly working to improve.
He's in Slovakia, man.

Just think about that for a few minutes. You're complaining about the hosting quality of a page that is being HN'd from a _kid in Slovakia who put up the page to try and appeal to Americans to host him as he studies in their country._

Can't the novelty of this new era persist for even a few years?
I've tried to warn OUYA countless times that if they're going to launch in 2013, they're going to need a 2013 chip, not a 2011 one (Tegra 3 was initially launched in 2011, and was also delayed a bit). They're probably going to lose points in reviews because of it, and everyone will be overall less excited about it having significantly less graphics quality and performance than the latest high-end (granted, more expensive) smartphones.

I thought Tegra 4 or something in that rage, was a MUST for OUYA. But they didn't listen, either because it was impossible to make the switch at that point, or they couldn't get a good Tegra 4 deal, or they just didn't think it was that important. But I hope they at least expected that this is going to hurt them at least a bit, and they might need a change of strategy.

I think OUYA could still succeed if instead of targeting it against Nvidia's Shield, and towards more "hardcore" gamers, they target it more as sort of a "toy", like something they could sell at Toy R Us on the cheap, and for sub 12-14 year old kids. Another strategy is of course promoting it heavily as a cheap media device, kind of like an Apple TV or Roku alternative.

There's still a way for them out of this, if they do it right, but personally I'm still disappointed it's not coming out with a Tegra 4 chip or something cutting edge like that. Hopefully OUYA 2.0, if launched in 2014, will have Tegra 5 or some other cutting edge 64 bit SoC with support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL. This is the sort of stuff that gets "gamers" excited, and they've kind of ignored that. But again, it might not be a huge problem for them, if they refocus on a slightly different market.

And I agree that OUYA, Shield and other such devices will basically help each other, and Android gaming in general.
Any website "could be generated with jekyll" but you're totally ignoring the benefits of maintaining content with a dynamic site.
Thanks! I didn't know that. I have his book on my shelf - Lisp In Small Pieces.
Make Money on Kindle: $345,000 in 5 Months?
Working fine here and I'm in the UK on Three mobile broadband, tapped refresh a few times all good, though waited few minutes and on the 5th refresh load check I got the sorry try later page.

Reminds me of my old telco day as between 3-5pm (GMT) USA lines were at there busiest as that is when they wake up and with that I suspect the same is true today in many ways still.

But is certainly not a case of any region limitations from what I can see and is just a busy site waking up to the morning local rush of freeness. The old /. effect.
> Welsh hydro-electric dam

Dinorwig. A perennial favourite of GCSE geography teachers (with good reason.)
Even the dispute footnotes would be disputed, and where would those go?
Another site that blindly blocks a browser based on user agent. Is checking for capabilities that hard?
For a Glimpse Of The Future, Try Reading A 3.5-Inch Floppy Disk
It does work like that http://api.jquery.com/addClass. Wrong URLs could use some work though.
ISP of the Future
Nvidia Project Shield Console, Tegra 4, and Onlive Style Cloud Gaming
Anyone with a computer can switch to no computer at all. But yes, anyone who can't live without their computer is not free. I guess you could say we've sacrifice some freedom for power.
I believe the main developer of Bigloo has always been Manuel Serrano [1]. I'm not 100% sure, but I think so. I think he is more focused on Hop [2] than Bigloo nowadays.

[1] http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Manuel.Serrano/

[2] http://hop.inria.fr/
Busting the 'XML is bloated' myth
These tests were developed several years ago to demonstrate how slow XML was ... today the difference is very small. True in some circumstances json is more applicable, but it looks like advances in browser tech helps XML as well.
I had this same problem once upon a time, so I created a WPF clone of the standard Windows/.NET MessageBox which allows for custom strings for button text (OK, OK/Cancel, Yes/No, YesNoCancel).

It's on Github: https://github.com/evanwon/WPFCustomMessageBox

There's more to be done, but it's been handy for me so far!
We seem intent on enabling an old-style media format that is dying in the background, rightly so. I don't read content online because I don't like flipping pages, I read it online because I don't like sorting through crap. Flipboard is pretty and quiet elegant, so I don't really relish the idea of criticizing it...but the fact of the matter is – it's not a better way to read.
He's using the jQuery Waypoints plugin to fire events when a visitor scrolls to specified points on the page. Probably that.
Solids of constant width (video)
I'm quite happy for you to say 'this person is acting like _why' :)
“I’ve been seeing spots in front of my eyes.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No, just spots.”
Simply going by the "Top X apps" thing, the bulk of downloads seem to be of new apps (though there are a few old ones, like Facebook and Angry Birds, perennially up the list).
First off, great cause. However, these kinds if guys give pigs (the animal) a bad name.

Personally, I like pigs (the animal). I don't eat them because of that. Maybe try a different name.
Logging in Clojure / JVM – Part 3
Not good advice. This violates the strict aliasing rules, and is not guaranteed to give the results you might expect.

Strict aliasing is off by default in MSVC, which is why he might get the results he expected here, but bear in mind that it's on by default when optimizations are enabled in GCC.

As a general rule when blogging about some programming language features - follow the language specification and not some implementation specific behavior.
Leaked Oscar Screeners are BitTorrent Smash Hits
Good article overall. However, I must object to this bit:

"C represents nothing as 0 for primitive value"

That's not true. There is no "nothing" for integer types, and floats either also lack "nothing", or have NaN as their "nothing", depending on your perspective.

One of the (many) annoying features of C-style NULL is that it means that some types are effectively option types while other types aren't, and there's no decent way to make them so. An NSString* is inherently "pointer to NSString or nothing", but an int is always an int, and I have to either carve out a special value to mean "nothing" (e.g. -1 used as the error return from a lot of UNIX syscalls) or use a separate flag.
Quitting LinkedIn
Perhaps something changed since you posted this, but when I view the documentation, the URLs do appear as you would have liked. Just substitute "$" with "jQuery"

Some examples:
http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.post/
http://api.jquery.com/remove/
http://api.jquery.com/last/
Why the Future needs a Brandname.
The Invasion of the Lightweights
Something I have noticed on HN lately is our (and I do me our) tendency to search for purely technological solutions and completely ignore the possibility of manual labor.

Wikipedia would not be possible without manual labor, as an example. We should not discount manual labor and the fact that humans are so versatile at dealing with ill-defined input.

Surely a "service" does not need to be a purely technological and automatic service.

I can imagine a portal, like google, that instead of storing vanilla cached pages, stores "vision impaired friendly" pages for viewing. I can further imagine that with the right tools developed, crowd sourcing could make this successful.

If one were to develop tools for slicing and cleansing or dynamically transforming pages such that these tools were friendly to blind and otherwise vision impaired users, you would have built in motivation among the crowd to participate.
How many were repeats (deleted from device, then re-downloaded later)? How many were updates to existing apps (or did they count those)?

These numbers are meant to impress people who know nothing about numbers, in my opinion.
He was indeed closing. I count 6 different places where he did. They are not direct closes, but nudges towards getting you to contact him. Can't really do a big close on such type of situation, because nobody (well, Brad Pitt might) will bring a kid from miles away without knowing him a little first.

By the way, he is using the compassion close.

Don’t decide now. Please write me
and we'll see how we get
on with each other...

He is aiming right to your heart and hitting.

Much better copy than most startups out there. I agree. Which brings out an important point. If you want to sell something, you better be convinced and believe 100% in it. Otherwise, your copy is going to be bad.
Chrome 23 + Win7 here, page was fine and had no scroll lag whatsoever.
This was so needed, don't know why people are hating, it's much easier to read and browse through. Thanks for the update.
He's done a great job and presented his information quite well. As an adult and a father I'd say that I represent his target market perfectly and he succeeded in: a) impressing me with his ability and determination, b) delivering to me the kind of information I need to know and c) delivering to me a sense of his maturity.

Not only do I think he would be a great guest but I can see him being very successful with whatever career path he chooses.

So is it a better sales page than you? Yes indeed, information delivered.
This 16yo boy from eastern europe has a better sales page than you (hostmeinca.com)

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

It looks like a cruel joke.
The main idea here is that it is a platform for modifying websites...
I found this article online which gives more details on this offering : http://www.ghacks.net/2013/01/07/grab-adobe-creative-suite-2...
For me personally, I am friendly. Ask how their day is, ask how busy it has been, depending on the time of year happy new year ... and small talk about the area.

Last guy I had when coming into the US used to be a software developer as well (Fortran, Cobol, and Pascal) and was interested in what kind of work I was doing.

Haven't had an issue yet. I am on a green card, and even-though all my paperwork is in order I still find myself nervous while waiting to enter the US. Also, the whole fingerprinting/picture taking makes me angry and I feel like I am being treated like a prisoner rather than a tax paying citizen.
You can experiment with Polyphasic sleep. The extreme one will let you get away with 2hr sleep per day. But you need extreme discipline.
Startup Depression
with its restrictions and censorship

So the students can't post an email or blog expressing their open thoughts because it's an iPad? Is so, I'd agree with you.

You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship.

Exactly how are regular text books open for modification in schools? Writing in my textbooks was strictly forbidden. Apple's restriction on their app store has nothing meaningful to do with students expressing themselves.

There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source.

The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the iPad. Go back before the iPad was introduced and find the market estimates for tablets. The fact that you could even imagine replacing this school's hardware with something like it that's open source is thanks to the iPad. The iPad VALIDATED the market and many of the concepts built on top of it. Without it, open source or even Android alternatives would still not be here.

On top of all of this, who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway? That tablet is for distributing information and coordinating with the teacher. The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem. You also don't want a system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store items riddled with trojans that keeps the students from opening their legitimate apps and learning.
Dan didn't go into detail about this, but the reason to talk to people who just bought or just left is because they are very close to that specific moment. Decisions are still fresh in their mind. The information is cleaner, less embellished (people tend to embellish when recalling something a long time ago because they can't remember actual specifics).

Someone who's been using your product for years can't tell you why they bought. It's been too long. They may think they remember, but the reasons are often so tied to a specific event - often emotional - that it's too far in the past to remember the specific timeline that lead up to the purchase.

Yes, talking to power users can be helpful for other reasons, but it's not helpful if you're trying to find out why people buy or quit.

It all depends on what kind of information you're looking for. You have to know who to talk to and when to talk to them.
Lego Mindstorms EV3: The Better, Faster, Stronger Generation Of Robotics
I actually had not seen EyeOS. Thanks, looks interesting.
While I am skeptical about a continuous release cycle, Agile methodologies work well for Enterprise software. I've used them at all of my Enterprise gigs, including selling multi-million dollar license mission critical sales compensation software.

There are two things that should not be conflated with Agile: Software Quality and Willingness to Accept Change

In many ways, Agile can make life better for both if you have a SaaS rather than On-prem business. For example, when building the business plan for Callidus Software's foray into SaaS, I surveyed Customer Service departments at a number of Enterprise companies and asked 1 simple question:

How many of your open tickets are fixed in the most current release?

The answer was staggering: 40-70%

So, ensuring customers are always on the latest release can eliminate 40-70% of trouble tickets with commensurate increase in customer sat. Sounds like Agile can help.

The need for SaaS comes about because Enterprise software has the nasty reputation of needing an expensive re-implementation with each new release, at least for On-Prem. With SaaS, you can do more frequent and less traumatic releases.

Agile works extremely well for Enterprise if you do it right.
Mh, i just tested on my phone ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.darkbloodst... ) and i don't see/hear a latency, certainly nothing above 100ms, so i don't think your remake "NONE of the devices currently on the market.." is true. My Galaxy Nexus is over a year old and works fine. Atleast i suppose that this app would show what you think is not working.
Oh crap. And I wanted to get work done today :P
Charity Asked to Pay for Linking to Newspaper Website
No. This lifestyle is basically a scheme to trick yourself into believing that you're still living the youthful college dream.

Do you want your kids to grow up in hotels and short-term rentals, never having been in one place for too long? If the answer is "sure", talk to people who grew up in military families who were shipped all over the world -- it's not fun.

If the idea is that you're going to travel, and the family stays put, understand that the cost is that you won't have a family at some point. Road-warrior consultants generally aren't the happiest people.
If you don't return the loaf, I think you're being unethical.
Just shows how big demand for such stuff there is, similar to "making money from writing about making money from writing" ;)
Libel tourism only matters if you can be affected by UK judgements. I think the US no longer honors them, but I guess if you are in the EU, it is a problem.
No, Dependency Injection is a language specific pattern. A pattern useful in Java, but not in Ruby.
Unfortunately, the solution can only be offered by Apple and Google, since they are the only ones with the data. This is one of the big problems with a walled garden approach - neither you nor your users really control your software. Another big problem is discoverability - Apple and Google basically control who is and is not discoverable on their platforms. There is no doubt that apps/developers in their favor (genuinely or otherwise...) have a far higher chance to be featured than others, creating an unfortunate effect.

For example, if Microsoft released an Android app, there is no way Google would ever place it in their featured apps list.
Plenty of people live aboard and travel via the ocean. Not sure how many are in the tech field (one comes to mind: the MicroStrategy CEO - Michael Saylor.. from what I understand, the guy lives aboard some massive ship and travels the globe that way). No idea on family lifestyle, but I suspect having kids would be much more difficult with that setup.
"*40 billion unique downloads excluding re-downloads and updates."
Yes, exactly. But you could go even further: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021748
I've pointed out in a couple places, I don't buy the "instant feedback" solution. If I write some maths on paper, my teacher can see where I went wrong. If I check a box on a tablet, it's a boolean. Was I right, or wrong? The teacher saves some time in marking, but now I'll have to go and show them my work (on the forbidden paper!) to see where I went wrong.

As far as searching, the index at the back of a book is likely more useful than full-text search. Usually I'm not interested in a particular term, but 'that thing that we covered last week, with the Fourier Transform', or something like that. There aren't any keywords, regexes won't help - you need a well-organized textbook where the headings and sub-headings facilitate this kind of searching.

Curriculum changes seem like the wrong way to go as well - if a tablet isn't good for teaching a subject, don't jam the subject into a format the tablet can understand. This is clearest in the testing case, but it's generally applicable: the tablet, as a device, exposes an interface. Paper exposes the ultimate interface: it accepts any free-form input. At best tablets can work in a similar way, but we have a hard time doing anything useful with this input. As we normalize the input to make it easier to process, we move away from a general purpose input device, and we force students to think and express themselves in the specific way we designed the interface to work.
> In other languages, like C++, this would crash your program, but in Objective-C, invoking a method on nil returns a zero value. This greatly simplifies expressions, as it obviates the need to check for nil before doing anything:

// For example, this expression...
if (name != nil && [name isEqualToString:@"Steve"]) { ... }

// ...can be simplified to:
if ([name isEqualToString:@"steve"]) { ... }

Wow, that is some bad, bad code. Consider this snippet instead:

if ([name isDifferentFromString:@"bob"]) { ... }
I'm on my phone so all I can see is a jquery mobile-based site but, given some of the comments, I assume he's probably overloaded the scroll event. That event fires _a lot_ so if you load it up with too much logic or attach too many listeners, you get some nasty lag (think "New Twitter"). You're better off attaching a single listener that does some light action like setting a variable (`didScroll = true`) and an interval timer (every 50ms is fine) that checks that variable and performs some logic as a result.

John Resig wrote up an article about this very probably several years back. If curious, I can dig it up.
Unfortunately that article doesn't have any more or less information than we ourselves have. It is just an "article" written about the page the OP linked to.
I could access this on my mobile about an hour ago, but now it's just showing this error:

-----

Site Area Temporarily Unavailable

We're sorry, the site area you've requested is unavailable. Please try again later.

-----

It's so frustrating to miss out on stuff like this.
The issue is with them using Direct3D, which will be slower on wine, as well as platform differences that wine can't abstract well. Past that, wine isn't that bad of a target. Limbo's linux port for instance is simply a bundled CrossOver installation.
2012 Personal Annual Report
This is common with many types of drugs, especially stimulants. Your body's systems are homeostatic, they have a self regulating balance. When you introduce a drug that disrupts this your body attempts to compensate.

This is why users of stimulants, like caffeine, have to increase dosages over time to maintain the same effects. It's also part of why you have withdrawal.
There are still significant Economic and Cultural differences, though.

(no, I'm not generalising, talk to a Czech citizen about their Soviet-era banking sector...I imagine the Slovak system is in a similar shape.)