skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since you where collecting sign-ups, it would be really interesting to see registrations by marketing channel and calculate a CPA for each. In terms of building the "seller" or in this case, the "lens renter" side of the market, I'd probably do targeted facebook ads to photographers with messaging around "Make Money Renting Your Gear" or even more specific messaging "Make up to $20/day/lens renting your unused gear".

You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0% commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.

You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher capital costs, where you own the inventory.

PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as "camera lens rental + city name" has decent volume, as does "lens name + rental" and "lens name + rental + city", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.

All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it will be difficult to differentiate:

http://www.borrowlenses.com/

http://www.cameralensrentals.com/

http://www.lensrentals.com/

http://lensrentalscanada.com/

http://www.lenslenders.ca/

P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach internet marketers/affiliates, though we strongly discourage it.
Hamile Korsesi 7202 | Medikal Ürünler | Biyomedikal | Varis Çorapları
The problem on "future-seeing" entrepreneurs
This is one of the strongest arguments I've seen for simply starting with the "default" stack. Move to other stuff when you feel the pain. If you're teaching or just starting off with Rails, don't use the "Prime" stack stuff until you really need it.
The wiki page about lunch discussions, etc. was brilliant. That is the kind of cool, outside-of-the-box thinking that gets your noticed in a large group of people. That people wanted to be 'featured' validates the idea nicely, too.

Can we ditch the 'hustle', though? Some things, like asking the CEO to lunch, seem like 'hustle' because they're obvious but 'hard'. This wiki page was a very clever idea more than it was hard work, I think it kind of demonstrates how the term has grown out of control.

As for the 'large' company, I think his definition is valid. Where I am now we're approaching 200 employees, and it's well beyond the point where everyone knows each other (there is a term for this limit). Even for 400 people, the traditional 'meet at the watercooler' methods break down, and you need to inject some innovation to meet everyone.
There's no clear evidence that AA works:

http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005032/alcoholics-anonymous-....
Facebook UK loses 600,000 users (1.86%) in December
> How many parts of Rails can you swap out before it stops being Rails?

Rails is meant to be modular, it just doesn't stop being Rails.
"Hacking Politics" from Aaron Swartz and Demand Progress is pay-what-you-will
The Case Against Aaron Swartz Was Complete Garbage
http://plugins.jquery.com/
Something like this takes a long time to develop - you may find that development started well before Apple announced the new port style
One message I'd like people to understand when they're starting out with Rails is that it really is confusing, and that being confused and maybe even feeling stupid is normal!

But if you care about Rails uptake, aren't those bad things?

People don't like being confused. People don't like feeling stupid. If their initial impression of a system is "this is confusing" or "this makes me feel stupid," many if not most will simply go look for an alternative that isn't confusing and doesn't make them feel stupid, even if that alternative is inferior in other ways that aren't immediately apparent to the newbie.
I do that too, round to the nearest multiple of 5 or 10 and fix it at the end :D
Very nice. That would solve the basic inefficiency.
thanks for the kind words man :)
http://plugins.jquery.com/

They wiped out all the plugins (with no recent backups) in the process of removing spam.
I know absolutely why I feel so upset. He was part of my tribe. Though I never met him, or even directly engaged with him, I was very aware of him and took direct inspiration from his actions. I have dealt with the death of close peers in the past who were part of my tribe. I was younger and more prone to succumbing to anger and spite - now I know the best thing I can do is to honor their memory by maintaining the impetus we once shared.
Graphic: Operation ‘Red October’: Victims of advanced cyber-espionage network.
Video games don't create violence in society, they reflect it
Actually, at least to read comments here - many are saying or implying that. Over the last few days, I've read many comments that ignore and/or gloss over any underlying depression and state, almost as unequivocal fact, that the actions of the US Attorney and her Assistant Attorney are precisely and solely to blame for driving him to suicide. I've seen calls to sue them personally, consider what it would get to have them charged with manslaughter, calls to remove them, to sue MIT, to sue JSTOR, to sue law enforcement officials for following valid warrants, etc, issued by the court and US Attorneys.
Of course the downside of that kind of power is that it makes it very hard to reason about what code will do sometimes. As I once heard about continuations, it is a like a goroutine, only worse.
TIL. I was under the impression that they all ran (more or less) in parellel.
Nginx Load Balancing Basics
That's the first time I'm hearing anyone complain about wifi issues. Everyone I know that have an iPhone5 have had no such complaints.
One of the things that got me thinking about this was the recent security issues. I was helping people on Skype upgrade their apps, because they were new, and they got into Gem Version Hell. Only pulling in fancy gems when you need it helps when you _really_ need to upgrade, and you're not stuck figuring out why twitter-bootstrap-rails, therubyracer, and libv8 (in this example, obviously, it could be any combination of gems) all refuse to get on board.

If you're using the default stack, the number of dependencies you have drops quite a bit.
I wouldn't learn how to multiply from the Japanese. They are clearly pretty bad at it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bdrates_of_Japan_since_195...
Hear, hear. That's exactly the nature of my intended comment. There's a disadvantage to being an old Web veteran, in that you tend toward the grooves you have created over the years.
A look at Ruby 2.0
>Or perhaps (I know many don't like this, especially the government) a separate trial for each charge.

This is a very bad idea. If the prosecutor can charge 13 crimes that are all substantially the same thing, they get 13 bites at the apple to try to convict you. I imagine it may also violate double jeopardy when the underlying actions for the crimes charged overlap, but I am not a lawyer.
Any particular lessons learned rewriting from node to Go?

I've got a small but growing node/socket.io app I figured I'd have to one day rewrite in go if I really wanted it to scale.
interesting. I guess we can't really exclude the possibility, that this fossilized diatom cam from earth, traveled through space and came back to earth?
There are only a limited number of Ivy League slots available, though. And they aren't really making any more, so it's only going to get harder and harder to get in.

The Ivy League works pretty well but it doesn't scale.

EDIT: "needs-blind admission" doesn't mean that it's cheap. It just means they'll admit you without regards to your ability to pay. They might still require you to take a boatload of student debt in order to get through.
Cybersleuths Uncover 5-Year Spy Operation Targeting Governments, Others
TaskRabbit Nabs Ex-Googler Stacy Brown-Philpot For COO Spot
I agree with you, which is the reason why I think PHP is still way more popular than Rails. Cut-and-pasting scripts from Google searches is a terrible way to make code, but it works and it's a lot easier.

I agree with DHH that Rails shouldn't be dumbed down (see his Railsconf 2012 talk https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3171-keynote-by-david-from-r...). Cooking with Rails is like cooking with a real oven, not an easy bake where the end product tastes terrible. Somehow new people need to know that Rails is a real framework that can burn you if you're not careful.
> There are multiple successful businesses already in the area of product validation.

Any chance you could point me in the direction of some of those? I've got some ideas that I would like to validate and I've been unsure of how best to go about it.
Very cool. Like 99designs but a step further with the domain. The inventory isn't the most amazing, but I could still see hacking out a MVP on a couple over a weekend. Thanks for the link.
Shutting down a product
Prime example of how not to behave in public.
That was my first thought, so I checked, and yes, it does. You just change the carrying rules. But by the time you've accounted for the number of digits you'd need to do anything useful, it's fairly useless except from a theoretical computational perspective - even when converted to logic circuits, I'm guessing it's not the most efficient solution out there.
How widespread are abacuses (Soraban)? I saw the below article [1] (and listened to the corresponding podcast) and the speed mental abacus calculations seem incredible.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/alexs-adventures-in-number...
You should see what kind of shit disturbing Robert T Morris (the Y Combinator partner) was up to back in the day. If Aaron Swartz was facing 30 years for his curl script in a closet, rtm's hacking would have him on death row today by comparison. His worm was pretty bad ass - way ahead of its time.

Taking down a large part of the internet was not a good thing, but obviously the guy had/has a lot to offer society, and not ruining his life with prison was the right call.

A lot of us are not that different, either in terms of what we came from, or where we are now.
I'm atheist, and I find a godless universe stretched across the vastness of space and time exhilarating. I can do anything I want.

Anything.
Android NDK: How to Reduce Binaries Size
> As for the 'large' company, I think his definition is valid. Where I am now we're approaching 200 employees, and it's well beyond the point where everyone knows each other (there is a term for this limit). Even for 400 people, the traditional 'meet at the watercooler' methods break down, and you need to inject some innovation to meet everyone.

Personally, I like to use Dunbar's number as a the divide between small and large companies.
ThoughtWorks Mourns Colleague Aaron Swartz, Responds to MIT’s Statement
Not very thrilled: "Currently your data can only be viewed on your smartphone. Future capabilities for PC compatibility will be announced when available."
I was going to write this on the parent, but I didn't because I thought it was tangential. You have to realize this is my personal experience, but it speaks volumes.

The scariest, closest to suicide moment I ever experienced was when I was shopping at a mall. It wasn't very busy, and I was feeling very... manic might be the word. Head down, headphones in, speed walking between errands. I had to keep moving, no matter what. I noticed the sort-of cut-away in the floor, so you could see from the top floor down to the ground. It was only 3 stories, but I had a really strong, sudden impulse to vault over the railing and see what it would do to me. Maybe I could land on my head, that might work. It was something I had never really considered before, it wasn't a very efficient way to do things, but it just gripped me very suddenly and all of a sudden it was a huge crisis.

Being suicidal, generally, is death by a thousand cuts. You have a predisposition, and all the stresses in life push you in that direction (as you've said). But the jumping off the ledge moment is crucial; personally, I have strategies for daily temptations like putting away knives in the kitchen. It's the spur of something unexpected, the sudden, strong, irrational impulse that really scares me.
If we look at one of the authors, Chandra Wickramasinghe, it's clear he has an obvious bias towards this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe
Just wanted to say thank you for the hacker newsletter! It's a huge time saver by being able to visit HN less often while shaking that feeling of missing out.

That said, I still have this compulsion of clicking open more links than I have time for. Any thoughts on a Hacker Newsletter Lite?
Lexis-Nexis pays bulk rates to Pacer via contract. Attorneys pay to file documents. Those are set by the U.S. court system, not Congress.

He's making the same argument the U.S. court system has made, sub-rosa, for years, as it's raised fees for accessing court documents. It used to be 8 cents a page. Jumped to 10 cents earlier this year.
> We report the discovery for the first time of diatom frustules in a carbonaceous meteorite thatfell in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012
Really great article...an instant classic.

Shameless plug It's validating that we mentioned over half of these points in an interview with startup founder Eric Lindvall on his Papertrailapp.com log management app: https://peepcode.com/products/up-lindvall
I would love to get some input on the design of the website. It went through many iterations and as a non-designer (read technical guy), I'm always looking for criticisms on my design.
Why is it that every time Kaspersky does anything at all, the article says "Russian researchers", or "Russian security analysts"? When Twitter does something, the news article doesn't read: "California based social media experts released ..."
Which also means he most likely never saw it. In any case I've been involved with, it typically takes at least a couple of days after the court filing for a document to filter through the other attorney to the party.
Why Autocomplete in Twitter Mobile App Sucks
I upvoted you because I agree with the majority of your comment, but, to be satisfied, I have to say the following:

Make sure that any company you damage is one of those institutions with no respect for privacy.
My revelation came while taking Linear Algebra and Discrete Math in college as an Engineer/CS student. It really abstractly told me why these things were happening and how to deal with them plus giving me a real survey to mathematic techniques. The technique is a bit gimmick, but works for that part of world vs. what we do - which is also gimmick on adds/subtracts on multiple numbers. Its less about what we are teaching our kids, and how to handle it efficiently. Anyway, drawing lines is nothing more than adding numbers like what we do. I see nothing special about this.
Loving this series, but it feels like waiting for v1 to be minted would have been a good call. Hopefully we can keep these up to date well into the future.

Thanks!
At some value of company largeness, your group/org is the 300-person-or-less size, and you could use the OP's tips to meet people in your own group.
This is one of the richer accelerators and located in the SouthEast where there isn't as many choices. Plus Durham is a great location. Worth checking out. Only downside is how new it is so there is a huge Alumni organization to tap into yet but only time solves that problem.
Very interesting to read! I guess I'll have to try my hand at multiplayer HTML5 game as well some time, because even reading you, I believe you, but at the same time it's hard to believe that it's hard like that :)

Care to elaborate a bit on the part where you say communicating the entire board state was too much data? Looking at your game, I don't see how the board state could be much more than 100 bytes or so? Was it the JSON that bloated it up?

If I were you, I'd do it like this: split the state into a static and dynamic part. Player's names won't change during the game. Or if they might, maybe even better to split the state into a high and low latency part. If you see a Player's name update a second too late, it's no big deal, so communicate that via a different, slower, channel. All the other data, the board state, player positions, scores, you don't need JSON if you're transmitting the same fields every time. So make sure everything's a ranged integer and squeeze them together either using a base64 library, or maybe just simply Number.toString and ParseInt with radix 36 (max natively supported radix encoding in JS, and still 5.17 bits/byte), or maybe you hack Unicode/UTF8 to translate integer code-points into bytes and vice versa (you should probably go for the latter, because it'll be awesome).

Oh and then, a tip, when you wrote:

> I added some rules and gameplay elements to make it feel more like something one would like to play, including:
Feedbacks when you get hit

I was reminded of this really cool presentation about game-design and "juice": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

As you can see, all those tricks are "merely cosmetic", but they truly do make the game a lot more fun to play. The second most important thing, almost all of them are simply transformations to the "view" of the game, so they can all be done client-side, cost nothing extra network-wise (apart from loading initial extra gfx). But the first most important thing is that all these extra tweening functions and particle animations help cover up any accidental lag or latency! If you got a bare bones squares-on-a-grid game, any lag and stutter will be super obvious, because that's the only thing to see. But if everything is bouncy and wobbly, and there's explosions and smoke flying all over the screen, those things can keep moving and animating because they don't depend on server information, while the game engine waits for the next data packet, and the player won't suspect a thing. It similar to "suspension of disbelief", in a way.

Please do post follow-ups if you continue developing this game!
My great fear is our brains (both individually and collectively) are simply unable to comprehend the universe in its true fashion....just like my cat cannot comprehend how a door opens by pushing on it.
The podcast I tangentially mentioned above talks about Soraban, and Japanese people learning Kuku:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nkxkv
am i the only one who thinks this is not at all like stealing... if some one stole your car you'll not have it any more... you will be devoid of it... not the same in this case
I agree, I just don't think gmail is a good example of the "really advanced HTML/CSS" the parent is looking for.
If it weren't bound to iOS, I would have bought one on the spot.
I know that there was a previous link on HN about the math education approach and materials used by Phillips Exeter which very much followed this approach. Where the students are allowed to discover the relevant mathematics in a structured way so that by the time they learn the "standard" way of expressing a line they understand intuitively why it must be so.

It was very interesting, and actually quite similar to the way I was taught physics in university tutorials - I think I've commented on HN before about the way we "discovered" an approximation similar to Born-Oppenheimer as part of a cleverly designed series of small group tutorials.

edit: I just noticed that the previous link was in fact posted by you.
I read through this and got the opposite impression from most people who are responding here.

This is explicitly not an analysis of right versus wrong. This is an analysis of the cudgel that the prosecutors were about to use on Aaron. This is about whether the charges were likely to stick in court.

The analysis says that the cudgel was very strong. Aaron had real cause to fear. And his defense was going to face an uphill battle.

I look forward to part 2, which is explicitly supposed to be an analysis of whether or not the cudgel should have been swung in the first place.
I understand why they'd drop IE8 support in 2.0 but it's still a bitter pill to swallow.
A good way to introduce this starter is to put up a map of the world and get learners to point out Japan. As a teacher you can then move into how Japanese Pupils learn to multiply.

Shouldn't the focus be on teaching kids to multiply, rather than teaching them that "all Japanese people do it this way, look how strange"? How do the Germans do math? What about Indians?

It really frustrated me that the author chose to illustrate a potentially very helpful teaching aide by focusing so much of the apparent strangeness of Japanese culture. Not exactly setting a very good example.
I think the best way to describe the difference between a 'regular' website and the advanced layouts I talk about is that an 'advanced layout' often looks similar to a desktop application.

Remember the first BaseCamp? Given designs, I reckon I could build the front-end for that. However given designs for GrooveShark, icloud.com or the new spotify web-app - I wouldn't know where to begin.

I've tinkered with responsive designs, Backbone, LESS, grid layouts and such (by the way, I will check out Compass, it looks interesting) - yet still I feel like I lack the knowledge to build more advanced apps.
Yeah, my bad, I was looking at the url.
"jQuery 2.0 now has more patches and shims for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox than for Internet Explorer!"

Interesting.
I think the fact that the starting point for php is an html page is a big deal. Whether or not its a good thing to replicate that (and things like that) is debatable but its not just about cutting and pasting from Google.
I agree. But one man's "freedom fighter" is another man's "terrorist". It just depends what side you're on.
Upvoted because this is an important skill in a company of any substantial size-- even at 25 people. You should always have a sense of what kinds of projects and work are done within the company, because most of the people getting the best projects are there because they're the first ones to find them.

We quip a lot about the disadvantages of large companies. There is, however, one major advantage: transfer opportunity (even though the formal transfer system of most companies should be a last resort; you're better off being requested) and the chance to make contacts. However, to actually get at that, you need to be a bit more "entrepreneurial" and self-motivated (to meet people and ask them about what they're doing) than the typical big-company employee.

Another upshot of this is that if you do it right, people won't fuck with you and you're very well insured against being personally fired or PIP'd. You might be laid off if there's a huge cut, and your boss might tell you that it's time to transfer, but personally firing someone who is well networked within the company is so politically dangerous that most people won't fuck with you.
Thanks Pete, I agree it has been a moving target. This has been mostly an exercise in teaching myself Ember and sharing that knowledge. I hope to update the posts for any changes that happen leading up to 1.0
I don't if this is known by everyone, but the anonymous author G.F. is Glenn Fleishman.
Lessig Remembers Aaron Swartz
> Using an ethernet cable to get internet to download wifi drivers

Lucky him -- I was installing some new PCs just yesterday, and windows didn't even have ethernet drivers for them; digging around for the driver CD is a pain :-/ Then when I eventually did get online, I found that the company that made my scanner don't support 64-bit versions of windows at all :-|

(All works fine out of the box with latest ubuntu)

Also, what's the windows equivalent of "tar czvf /media/usb/home.tgz ~/" transport USB stick "tar xzvf /media/usb/home.tgz"? Setting up custom profiles for several users on several PCs was hours of pain, and they somehow came out differently each time x_x (As you can tell, I'm not a windows sysadmin, and don't have access to a copy of Windows Server...)