skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although what you write is not false, it is little more than a distraction from the much more important fact that the $45.2m figure comes from Wikipedia, which in turn got it from a NYT article written in February of 2006.

(I am not saying or implying that the distraction was intentional on your part.)
Don't waste your twenty minutes reading this article. Go play with your spouse/children/cat/dog/friends for twenty minutes instead and then read the desiderata (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata) for instructions on how to live life at any age.
Willix, I haven't downvoted you and I don't know why people have downvoted you either (though I disagree with you).

I know Freelancer.com and the rate at which it has scaled. I know the tremendous growth rate you guys have achieved (kudos!). By no means am I questioning your ability nor your skills. I am just genuinely curious as to why people are so interested in using the term 'Growth Hacker' so much.

And I disagree that, even being data-driven alone is not the apt definition of a real hacker.
On SSL
That's the point, he is actively making it difficult for you to understand him. By dropping in words with complex backgrounds, he hopes you (you generally, not you in particular) do not have enough knowledge in those domains to understand how those terms do/do not fit together. This leaves you in a position of having to accept his point as there might be truth in what he is saying - you aren't knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between the correct and incorrect usage of the terms.

Generally, someone who understands the concepts will not use terms strung together like that unless forced. "machine-learning based classifier" with "company funnels" seems a bit suspect in this case, and probably needs a blog post to explain fully, not a simple one line rebuttal as above.

So yeah, it's not just you.
Question for willix: How is growth hacking for freelancer.com different to good marketing for freelancer.com?
I would say it is way more healthier if the community progresses and moves on to something else rather than HN changing.

Successful platforms desperately trying to expand their usefulness or audience has rarely been a good thing.

Which is what I like about HN. It's not the 800 pound gorilla in the hacker-community space, it's not desperately trying to find commercial success and it's not locking us in with value we cannot easily leave behind.

There is room for someone else to come up with something better, and if we all move there I'm sure nobody at YC is going to lose any sleep over it.
Is it easy to do non-blocking code in Grails? I have played with Groovy lately and it is definitely a productive language.
You can however disable pre-installed apps on newer Android (4+?) phones.
Hello people, it's Chrome opening up your camera for "good"... or bad
Chrome Developers (@ChromiumDev) tweeted at 10:44 PM on Tue, Feb 05, 2013:

Chrome's permission bar will not re-prompt, once accepted, for Camera & Mic (getUserMedia, Web Speech API) if page is served on HTTPS

(https://twitter.com/ChromiumDev/status/298925039519166465)
Awesome. It sounds like you had a great decade!

Do you have any pointers for us early-twentysomethings? I've just turned 23 and while I'm having fun in the city, enjoying the world of work, it doesn't sound quite as interesting as the same part of your life. How did you meet new friends, expand your social network, sleep with new people, and enjoy the metropolis? I've found the transition from university to work has made all of the above more difficult.
Apple Is About To Lose The iPhone Trademark In Brazil
Hey, thanks for responding!
Programmers Should Not Test Their Own Code
Cool idea
btw "love", "coffee" example doesn't work
Very well explained, Ryan. Agreed!
Kickstarter Open Source Death Star
Dude. You should try your hand in writing. The second paragraph would've made an excellent opening to a SnowCrash-like book.
Not buying the article.

I agree that no one should waste 10 years of his life-- that seems obvious-- but the article itself is a mix of pseudoscience and anecdote.

In fact, the people who seem least to be "wasting" their 20s-- the ones in IBD analyst programs and MBA programs-- are the ones losing their creativity the fastest. If you play the corporate game, creative atrophy sets in, and it's a rapid process.
I agree that employees might leave managers.

But I disagree that people don't leave companies.

First, there are some companies that kinda act on their own, they are very old, and people just obey tradition and old rules and policies. This sometimes the managers can fight hard against, and several will fail anyway.

Sometimes, the company is in a field that make the employee leave, I know for example many IT people that after they realised how banks operate, they felt bad about it and quit.

Sometimes the company itself is having problems, like being sued, or going bankrupt...

So no, sometimes the fault is of the company.

But sometimes.

Asshat managers can make people go away too.
I actually know people that prefer the taste of instant. I think it's one of those things where if you're raised on garbage, you'll like the taste. I know for a long time I though Tim Hortons coffee was the tits.
Your point being? The title says "Kinda", after all. It's a good analogy.
Hacker News Meetup - Boston - Tonight - Feb 6th, 2013 - 6:00
Date: Tonight, Wed. Feb 6th, 2013

Time: 6:00 PM

Location: Meadhall in Cambridge Center

In case you need to get a hold of anyone,
http://www.meetup.com/hn-boston/

We should be upstairs, but ask the hostess where we will be.
Relevant read:
http://www.your-brain-at-work.com/

"Your Brain At Work" points out, among other things, that the brain is capable of doing much less intensive work (as in, concentration) than most people believe it is.
What language is that?

I usually fail at glass doors when PUSH and PULL labels are transparent so that I read "PUSH" and (reverse) "PULL" simultaneously.
the config has arrays, it is a json superset. foo.bar = [1, 1]
Same for me, once my wife and kid are asleep
Show HN: Find parkings easily
Math Puzzle: Number Games
Why did they decide to use static methods for the controllers?
Fantastic! I originally thought you meant visual art but was pleased to see a surprisingly fluid poem (though it didnt make much sense).

I experimented with twitter as a random art generator a while ago, but its been down since they changed their API requirements and I haven't had the motivation to fix it yet. An old snapshot can be seen here: http://binarymax.com/brownian_2.gif

There really is a lot of great stuff you can do with the entropy that comes from twitter.
Keen learner
Keen learner
All quite true but I'll drop in here that the Fields medal is only available up to age 40.
Mathematician models the spread—and prevention—of crime as a wave
I usually don't reply, but your comment seems heartfelt.

1. If you want to be offended, be offended. Can't help that. My statement was full of qualitative generalizations. Nobody meant you in particular, but you're welcome to feel that way if you like.

2. I never said HN was useless or should be avoided. In fact, I feel just the opposite: I like coming here and posting and commenting. Too much, in fact.

3. Things have good qualities and they have bad qualities. Simply because I like coming here doesn't make HN good, and simply because it has bad qualities doesn't make it not worth visiting.

Look, I'm just calling it as I see it. I've spent a lot of time here - some useful and some wasted. I've thought long and hard about the role of technology and online communities in my life. These are the conclusions I've reached.

As I said, this entire question is a value judgment about personal opinion. I like ice cream but parts of this ice cream suck. You love ice cream and love everything about this ice cream. It's silly to get emotional about discussions like this -- they are simply opinion questions.

Thanks for your comment. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way. I should have been more diplomatic, but it's how I feel.

ADD: "nearly meaningless and diluted forum where inane wannabes try to sell stuff to each other" -- I did not say this, and this is not how I feel. I simply said that participating in the community, where people find things of interest and share them can become something you do all of the time instead of doing something useful with your life. HN is not meaningless and does not exist to sell things to people, although it does look a bit like a platform for YC PR, which is fine with me.

If you're interested in more of my premise, here you go: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...
No need to be pedantic. The OP used apt-get as a good enough analogy and got the point across quite clearly. It let's you install things quickly, just like apt-get.

"But with apt-get you can perform searches not just exact name ma-"

Nope. Don't be pedantic. You got the point, that was the intention.
Not only locking in your users but abstracting cost away. Consumers are very sensitive to price changes to a product, e.g., Games are $0.99 now but $1.05 a week later and $1.07 a month later, they will notice and possibly stop buying or at least make less purchases. But if 100 amazon coins is $1 then $1.05 the $1.07 but Angry Birds is being advertised as 99 amazon coins the entire time then people are less likely to be put off from the sale.
IMO Play framework is the most important thing happening to Java right now.

I hope this brings Java back to everyday web development :)
Virgin Media bought for £15bn by Liberty Global
Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter is rediculous.
"Do you think that raising your prices by 50% will hurt your sales by 50% or more?"

For an article claiming to treat pricing like a science, this sentence stood out. If you raise your prices by 50% (to 1.50 of original) and hurt your sales by 50% (to 0.50 of original), you'll only have 0.75 of your original income.
This is pretty informal, just a get togher to meet some new people. Come on out for a few drinks.
I currently work in an environment with about 40 people -- managers, developers, "operations" people -- all in an "open plan" office with half-height partitions. The distractions are constant; my field of view is always busy, someone is always talking, I can hear every phone conversation in the area, and even the coffee machine is loud. The printer is in the middle of the area, so whenever someone prints, it becomes a squeaking, beeping distraction. If I check my bank account balance before going to lunch, everyone can see; even if I have head phones on over earplugs, people still interrupt me!

My productivity has fallen by at least half, probably more.
Egypt-chile-live
You had me at Big Mac. Maybe.

It seems like such arbitrary conditions you set in order ...wait a minute, I just noticed the website is "growthsensei.com", that's like Guru level 88?

Aaand that's all my time for the day.
There's no such thing as a "schemaless" database. There are, however, different ways of handling the storage and management of the schema.

In the situations you describe, and when using most NoSQL databases, there's still a schema. It's just stored in the minds of developers, in documentation that's correct and up-to-date, in documentation that is incorrect and outdated, throughout application code, and numerous other places.

Then there's the sensible approach taken by most relational database systems, where the schema is centralized, it is described with some degree of rigor, and it can be more safely modified and managed.
Sometimes companies are inflicted with some extreme bad luck related to names, marks and so on.

This is a case that is not really trademark trolling, and more of a company that did planned for a product, registered it, and another years later ended with a name conflict.

I hope they can solve this in a amicable way, because the brazillian justice system is very crazy, and if they go for for lawsuit, it will drag, and drag, and drag... and might end killing Gradiente (that is a important company somewhat in Brazil)
How To Create a Blog On Blogger In Just 5 Steps?
Fair point. Chasing happiness (esp. short term pleasure) as an end in itself, rather than as a side effect of doing valuable things, is unlikely to result in happiness.

But I think a strategic view of "what big choices in life will contribute to long term happiness?" is a still good thing to consider.
I have a hunch if Apple were doing this you'd be all about it.
Dreamers vs doers
The point was to hire the very best you can, which I think is something everyone can agree with.
I don't like seeing issues like this placed at google's feet. The real problem here is verizon. Why would they want to give up prompt updates that make the phone you already purchased just as good as the newer better phone they want you to pay for?
I went though this with the thunderbolt and turning s-off and unlocking my bootloader. I was able to load up anything I wanted but this isn't something that others with the phone were really able to do.
So yea, they got $700 more of my bucks because I purchased the gs3 outright and promptly unlocked that too but I will tell you this, I'm about done with verizon. They're probably the most greedy company I've dealt with since I actually used to have a phone line (thanks Ooma).
The younger you are, the more biased towards long-term returns you should be, largely because you have a longer long-term to enjoy them in.

... and the more biased toward short-term returns you are, because you're young.

Life's a bitch that way :)
I spent 5 years as a full time consultant building 'Human Capital Management' software for enterprise companies. I learned many things about enterprise dynamics in those 5 years, but my biggest takeaway analytically is that performance management is backwards. The people actually doing the work are graded by their managers, and in very few cases are managers formally reviewed by their employees. I can't speak for small companies, but enterprises would do much better if the employees had a formal process to get a manager on some sort of performance track - without the fear of going above their head in an informal process.
I think if you called the team marketing you would struggle to hire people with the right skill sets into it.
Obligitory Disclaimer: Test and verify.

I actually have a datapoint from one of my SaaS products showing the exact opposite conclusions from this article: Doubled prices, sales dropped to ~25% of their previous levels. Dropped prices back, sales came back.

But don't make any decisions based on that either. A few years earlier, I doubled prices for that same product and didn't see any sales change at all.

So go ahead and experiment with different pricing, but be sure to wrap it in an A/B test. Look at the actual numbers and let that make the final decision for you.
Stated by Guillaume Bort here[1]

Play uses static methods only when it makes sense:
- in the controller layer, because controllers are not object oriented. Controllers act as mapper between the HTTP world (that is stateless, and request/response based) and the Model layer that is fully object oriented.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5192904/play-framework-us...
That one data point doesn't mean it's a mistake to compare it with the MBA. It's "complete" functionality and more importantly, price after keyboard means the MBA comparison should be made. Comparisons to tablets and other hybrids should also be made.

What I find interesting is the confusion about the product's positioning in the market. I am also confused and don't think it bodes well for the customer. At the base, it's most commonly known as a tablet, but the keyboard begins to confuse things. The moment you get into the Pro territory, the price confuses things even more. Even outside of the "RT/Pro" discussion, I'm not sure if it's lack of clear (existing) product category is beneficial for MS
I stopped reading at "hypergrowth"
USPS to Cut Saturday Mail
This is a secure problem, have your camera open just because once you enter a website is absurd, jut because you open your house's door when is necessary doesn't mean you should leave it open. This idea that SSL is all what it takes for a server to be reliable is nonsense.
Worked for me, though I had to actually enter those words in the boxes...
I like the concept of putting managers on some sort of performance track. That is an interesting idea. I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen.
Growth is marketing- it's just done with a different set of people than you would do a decade or more ago. Instead of people with MBAs or marketing backgrounds you do it with computer scientists and statisticians, and you base your actions on science; lots of testing and data.
QA Analyst (NYC office) – SmartAsset
SmartAsset is looking for a QA Analyst to join our Product & Tech Team, on a full-time basis. We build technology that algorithmically answers personal finance questions, given the importance of our advice, we can’t be wrong… ever. You will be responsible for drawing up test plans, tracking bugs and issues, testing our product and ensuring our advice is working as intended.

Responsibilities:

* Working with the Product and Tech teams to construct test plans

* Working with the Product and Tech teams to test and verify intended operation of product features and bug fixes

* Build automated test systems

Requirements:

* Strong communication, problem solving and analytical skills

* Working knowledge of software development, particularly with Java, Perl, PHP

* Working knowledge of unix shells (bash, sh), databases (MySQL)

* Working knowledge of some Web-based automated testing tools

* Some experience with web development (HTML, Javascript, CSS)

* Self motivated with an entrepreneurial approach to tackling problems

Other:

* This is a full-time paid position, based in our offices in New York City

* Full medical and dental benefits provided

About SmartAsset:

SmartAsset is a venture backed, Y Combinator Company. We use our financial modeling technology to provide accurate, interactive answers to important personal finance questions. We are a consumer advocate, recommending specific strategies so people can make smarter decisions and save money. Our launch in July attracted attention from over 40 publications, including the New York Times, Techcrunch, Fast Company and the US News and World Report.

More details at https://smartasset.com/page/jobs
You're not far off. One of my customer, a startup, pays me a flat $400/m to take care of one Debian server (PostgreSQL+ Play + Lighttpd)
Similar trajectory here. Probably a number of HN'ers in the same boat?

Phase I, 18-29. "Work, train (athletics), travel, and save money." Started working at 18. Never settled down anywhere, after 21 I started saving money. Also building contacts that will carry me into phase II.

Phase II, 29-34 (now). "Husband/father/freelancer/student/athlete/coach". Pursuing studies in Math (my passion) getting ready for Grad school (2014). Funding it with Phase I and working part-time from home. Lots of family time and staying in good shape. Keeping a consistent routine (something I never did in Phase I).

Phase III. Probably starts around 35 next year: Math PhD? Post-doc, etc. Nothing set in stone. But without Phase I in my 20s the way it was I wouldn't be in the position to do this now.

I think I was supposed to be a student first, then start a career. Not the other way around.
I didn't read the article other than the comparison with all those great minds. I don't feel that concerned when it comes to comparing myself to such persons. I mean, should I have been the next Einstein, I would have know before reaching my 20s. Nevertheless, I'm a very curious person, thanks to my dad. I want to understand and know many many things (not everything), and for the last year I've spent most of my time learning, reading interesting articles here and there, following classes, reading the f*g manual. Eight months ago, I never had touched Linux. Last week, I installed Arch Linux. I didn't know how to program a year ago. Now I touched SQL, VBA, C/C++, Python, Haskell. I'm no expert in any of these language, but I do my best to learn a handful of languages before sticking to one/a few. I try to learn something new every day, and I don't even feel like I'm trying. All the information just flows at me. For each new thing I understand, there are 1000s more questions that appear. I don't feel like I'm wasting my 20s even though I'm not building the next Microsoft. I'm constantly learning and I couldn't be happier about it. I feel like I'm doing a ton of investment for my future, and I'll never stop learning.
Minimal yet relevant
a question (not about the framework, but about the linked webpage) - this awesome effect where i scroll down and the pictures (next to the "Developer friendly" headline) "fold up", is there an animation-lib that does this? how is it called? it's awesome, i want it.
3,000 sign petition to remove Ask Toolbar from Java
The brave new world where there are no jobs for PhDs so they have to work for the marketing spam department.
Speaking strictly about the website redesign, I think that (although nice) it fails to communicate the framework biggest selling points. Some comments on that:

* The code-save-refresh workflow: this is mentioned briefly as "hit refresh workflow" which is confusing to say the least.

* Some other weird or 'meh' bullet points like type-safety (you're using either scala or java so you take that for granted) or stateless-web-tier.

* The introduction video is long. It's fine as a tutorial, but being the first thing you can click on I expect you to sell me the framework in 2-3 minutes or so (it can be done, play is fantastic).

Disclaimer: I love play and used it a lot last year. In fact I was part of the team that put the first play application into production on LinkedIn (featured in the bottom of the play site).
Soo... you are definitely not wasting your 20s. :-)
I wrote a compiler. Linus is not fit to undo my sandle strap, 'sept I'm not a granola hippy.

The new nigger word is "compiler" as in a "shader compiler".

The CIA is busy clusterfucking the other side of the river styx, until it is completely absolutely clusterfucked beyond hell.

They watch me for 5 minutes then run over there and clusterfuck shit.

It's nothing new. Train engineers. Assembly language.

DoS Stack IDE CLI ISA

They just clusterfuck everything. I can smell that shit clear over on this side of the Styx.
There is nothing wrong with selling fairly priced products to people who will get incredible value out of them. Something tells me the people buying these phones won't share your elitist view of phone ownership. These 'undignified' phones are much more powerful than top of the line phones were five years ago.
BLOKK is a font-based alternative to lorem ipsum
Even though a lot of smart people agree that we can only get a few hours of real concentration a day, not many of them link to scientific papers that support this claim. I would agree that the claim "feels right". But in absence of a real experiment, how valuable is this insight really? Maybe useful to keep the idea in the back of one's head, but seems far from a definitive answer.
I love iOS but wouldn't Android be a better choice in merging markets? A lot more variety and cheaper. I'm not sure why Google hasn't brought Android to the desktop. It could be a real third desktop choice.
Simple elegant and effective. If it takes one second to transfer water from sink to machine, you only get one second to process the data and possibly get the wrong conclusion. If it takes 60 seconds to walk across the room, that provides time to think ... why did they make it so hard to add water to this thing? Plenty of time for data processing to kick in and notice ur doin it wrong
Hover Over the Cup - The Craziest Product Tour You'll See
Very good managers might shine in a bad environment and very bad ones disrupt a good environment. Most though just reflect the organisational culture.