skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also Xerox, a classic example of this. Alan Kay tells the story of how the inventor of xerography tried to sell it to IBM, who commissioned consultants to assess its viability. They found that it was much more expensive than conventional copying, and there just wasn't that much demand for it.

This was all true, yet Xerox become a multi-billion dollar enterprise from the technology.

http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm
(he's quoting from John Dessauer's "My Years at Xerox, the Billions Nobody Wanted", but he also worked at Xerox PARC himself.)

MVP: I like the Minimal Viable Product idea, but mainly in terms of building the product. It's a great discipline to work out what's important and what is not as important ("core" vs. "non-core"), and also to get feedback from the market. I like esr's formulation of it: (1) something that runs (2) has the promise to become something really cool. Of course, the MVP depends on the target audience (his target is open source developers).

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-baz...
(paragraph 3 )

PFA: But I don't like PFA. It sounds very sensible, but I'd rather be focussed on why something might succeed, rather than why it might not. My experience is that insurmountable problems often turn out to be surmountable, once you understand them, and had some time for your unconscious to work on them. It might require a very different perspective, or stepping back to look at the bigger picture to understand the situation you're in, what's important and what's not and so on. As a coder, I'm easily trapped in the details, and not actually be able to see what's important in the bigger picture.

However, I totally agree with your conclusion about shipping sooner, iterating faster ("release early, release often", esr again), and also the perfectionistic wish to not release til it's "perfect".

I deliberately fought against perfection for my first product. It was driven utterly pragmatically, and I didn't care whether it was pretty or not. I made enough money to live on the interest (barely live on it: ramen independently wealthy), and today, 9 years later, it's still useful to people, and still making money.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Build 10A432 Designated 'Golden Master'?
It'd be great if you can share it.
Interesting post - I found this quote pretty telling: "After six months the project has been found to significantly reduce child malnutrition and increase school attendance. It was also found to increase the community's income significantly above the actual amount from the grants as it allowed citizens to partake in more productive economic activities"
You can reduce the number of tests necessary by designing APIs that simply can not be used incorrectly; it is not necessary to write them to provide type checking "for free".

But it is necessary to write them to test functionality and if the functionality is correct, surely the types are correct as well (and if they aren't, who cares? It works.)

Static typing makes it marginally safer to not have tests at all, or to have incomplete tests. If you have complete tests, type checking is redundant.

I see what you did there. I consider hubris a sign of a very unskilled programmer ;)

For what it's worth, Larry Wall disagrees with you :)
Turn on the Activity Viewer: Window->Activity Viewer or ⌘-0. Shows each account being accessed and all related activity. Also allows actions to be cancelled.
This would have lots of un-intended consequences, especially when you think about how much money can be saved with group living (10 to 100 people per house, economy of scale with respect to room and board).

Separatist cults would now be profitable instead of being money sinks. Debtor's prison is now a possibility again (you can house the person more cheaply than their annual stipend).

If the government gets to confiscate the stipend of incarcerated felons to offset prison expenses, there's now economic incentive to increase prison population.
Was it this guy: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~loui/ ?
It wasn't really overly special - but I built and debugged a full web app from the ground up including MySQL backend, (simple) scripting language, and design/logic in about a month on deadline earlier this summer.
High schools are so unreliable here that we need an AA degree to compensate for it.
Because the basic income money isn't given to purchase any particular good. People can spend it on what they like. If the person gets to choose between spending their $5000 on a laptop or plane tickets, supply-and-demand says laptops will stay at their marginal cost.
Quite likely, though not for the exact reasons the author thinks. I have this theory that while some sites trade on content (this one for example), those that trade on specific functionality tend to be just incubators for technology that becomes widespread if its any good.

People inside the full-service site enjoy a more structured net experience that would be difficult to create otherwise, as well as a multiplicity of special features that are unique. But eventually, the overhead of maintaining existing features means change takes place slowly within the site compared to what's taking place outside, and those who relied heavily on it as a portal eventually discover that the benefits offered by the site are no longer unique and disperse.

Remember when CompuServe and AOL towered above all other virtual communities?
Unless you love copy protection, root for RealDVD in its court battle.
Is there a way you can incorporate the A/B testing into an actual product?

You can release two pieces that are functionally equivalent but have a slightly different UI on it. If you send stats back to the server you can probably get a good amount of data.
/* ================ */
/* = The 1Kb Grid = */ /* 12 columns, 60 pixels each, with 20 pixel gutter */
/* ================ */ /* Enjoy your tableless layout that acts like a table! */

.grid_1 { width:60px; }
.grid_2 { width:140px; }
.grid_3 { width:220px; }
.grid_4 { width:300px; }
.grid_5 { width:380px; }
.grid_6 { width:460px; }
.grid_7 { width:540px; }
.grid_8 { width:620px; }
.grid_9 { width:700px; }
.grid_10 { width:780px; }
.grid_11 { width:860px; }
.grid_12 { width:940px; }

.column {
margin: 0 10px;
overflow: hidden; /* Bad call */
float: left;
display: inline; /* float: left implies display: block */
}
.row {
width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto;
overflow: hidden; /* Bad call */
}
.row .row {
margin: 0 -10px;
width: auto;
display: inline-block; /* Not well-supported */
}
In the future, I plan to put up the deck we took to the VCs when we went seeking the Series A round. We received two term sheets from what anyone would call Tier 1 firms.

That would be awesome. Thanks Brandon.
Upvoted for interesting implications.

I'm not sure if the study design or sample size

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

reported here inspires confidence in the conclusion, but this would definitely be an issue worth investigating some more. I'm not sure how many men would guess this, or for that matter how many women would guess what this article says about men. I can think of one example of a woman I knew (back when I was single) who seemed to be signalling to me that she wanted me to "poach" her by telling me she had a boyfriend. But to me that was just off-putting. (I was already put off from a romantic relationship with her--I knew her strictly through studies we were both pursuing at the time.)
Thanks, I'll have to check problem is that I bought it in Hong Kong and I'm in China right now....
I've thought this should be done, approximately as follows:

Basic income starts at $0. Each year that the economy grows, one-half of the amount of growth (in dollar terms) is redistributed evenly as basic income. This seems fair, because the fruits of economic growth are distributed extremely unevenly, and about 50% of what determines who are the winners vs. losers is luck (e.g. Facebook vs. competitors who, in 2004, had superior products). It also means that this proposal never lowers the standard of living of any social class; the basic income increases slower than economic growth.

During recessions, the basic income stays flat.

Over time, we can get rid of other redistrubitive programs that will become unnecessary. Asymptotically, the minimum income will grow to 1/2N of GDP, where N is the number of people in the country. In other words, no individual will have less than 1/2N share in the total pie.

With basic income in place, we can also get rid of the minimum wage. We'll have essentially the same labor market, except for that we've eliminated the need to work. People still will, for economic reasons, but this means that the inexorable downward trend of wages that occurs in the absence of a minimum wage (because of peoples' desperation to work) will no longer necessarily exist.
Kurzweil has some theories about this...
I converted a Porsche 914 to electric power. http://www.evalbum.com/573.html
I was parts manager at a six-bay auto shop for over a year and our parts markup was 30%. (Springfield, Missouri.)

The first and third paragraphs are right on, btw.

Internet research is grand and all, but if you don't want to get ripped by your mechanic try going to the same one for a few years and getting to know the guy. Go to a local shop and chat the guy up, do not go to a Jiffy Lube where s stoner fills out a questionnaire on a computer and reads back to what it says.
Diigo have a group bookmark feature which may fit your needs.
Reminds me of the Lone Wolf series. In case anyone is interested, most of the series is available to download/read (play?) in browser:
http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books
I think to encourage young people to drop out and take up a trade as soon as they think they know what they want to do with their life would be incredibly harmful. Many people think they have an idea of what they want to do at 14, but end up discovering an entirely new field in their course of learning. It would be hard to happen upon a career in physics if you were never introduced to it in high school, and weren't in an environment where you could learn easily at a high level about it.
Andrew Warner, the interviewer, built his online greeting card company to $30+ Million in annual sales while still in his 20's. Partly by using his "used car salesguy" skills. Maybe you could learn something from him...he responded to you here on HN without being defensive (or overly dismissive.)
And of course inflation.
Jon Johansen subpoenaed in Apple lawsuit
They're IOUs because the average person reading the stories about them won't understand what it means if they said they were bonds (they'd think commercial paper, if anything).

If you read hardcore financial papers, they're effectively bonds backed by the State of California.
I hate this about human nature: the fact that resources are available to those who don't need them and denied to those who do. It seems that most people have a tendency to kick others when they're down. This is why bullying works, and it's why above-average but "beta" men go down the Sodini route.

This tendency would be a prime candidate for a trait to weed out of the human species if eugenics ever gets underway.
Third-Party Twitter Developer Sued By Twitter
I can think of one example of a woman I knew (back when I was single) who seemed to be signalling to me that she wanted me to "poach" her by telling me she had a boyfriend.

I think you can generally assume the opposite. If a girl mentions a boyfriend, she's not romantically interested. They know that men have a visceral dislike for hearing the words "my boyfriend" from an attractive woman's mouth.

It's either that or she wants you to inquire about her sister, which is a fully justified response to the mention of a boyfriend.
I would have thought that there are already books that cover the same ground as this one does. Could anyone link me to some examples, or perhaps tell me why this new book is necessary?
exactly... people like to make Friedman into some sort of ideologue, but he was quite reasonable and most importantly highly creative in his insights about economic policy.

I recommend reading Capitalism and Freedom for a taste of his creativity.
Hiring is not necessarily worse. In many countries (e.g. China), good engineers have a much lower market rate.
Yelping for Dollars (2006)
great job!
and please tell us it doesn't run Windows
Startups, or the companies that they would later turn into would have a substantial tax burden keeping them down. (You can't hide an economic inefficiency - the effect of taxing to pay for it would have a negative impact.)

There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Looks like VC's and women have something in common.
Google Voice and you: what it is and how you can use it
"threads" on the top bar shows you all your comments, with replies. This is all you need.
It does seem to be a spamming tool, and they are right about the trademark. You can't just go and use another company's name as part of your product's name or domain. You need to create and build up your own brand.
I'm with evidence. The glossy screen on my new MBP is definitely not as usable as my old matte screen.
Ask HN: Do AJAX enabled User Registration pages increase conversions?
I am in the middle of creating a new site/business which will ask all users to register an account as well as submit their credit card for payment of the service.

Right now I am working on my user registration page. For me this is the most overwhelming part because there are so many things you have to validate as well as getting the credit card info processed correctly.

Currently all the validation/processing is done on the back-end once the user clicks "Submit". If there is a validation or processing error, the registration form is displayed again. After polling a few friends on the matter, I was told that I should not repopulate the password or credit card info (number, cvv, billing zip) on the page because this would probably breach a lot of security stuff and possible PCI regulations. I agree they shouldn't be repopulated.

But, this presents a rough user experience, because if they goof one thing (email confirmation, for example) they end up having to fill in a lot of the form over again.

I also heard suggestions to use AJAX to do some validation work on the front-end before really sending the info to the back-end for final processing. To me, this adds another level of complexity and another point of failure to the system; however this seems to be a much nicer user experience because validation errors are found quicker/easier and they can be corrected before final submission.

So, my question is (finally): For those that have gone through this process, what is your recommendation? Does adding AJAX validation substantially raise registration/conversion rates?
I think kids should be encouraged do productive things they enjoy. That might mean school, that might mean work.

Nor would getting a job at 14 preclude a career in physics.

Most people who discover an interest do so in their own free time. I know very few creative works (programmers, architects, scientists) who picked up their careers because of a high school class. Do you?

Perhaps a kid might work at carpentry from 14 to 16. Then get interested in physics books he read in the library, and apply for university. Who knows. The real harm is that society has cut off a productive path (work) and forced students into a path that is neither productive nor enjoyable for 99% of the kids (school).
See also Grace Llewellyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook:

http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...
Income Loss Persists Long After Layoffs
It's pretty obvious one would have thought. Success is a better confirmation than alleged ability.
China's Fractured Web
Prostate Cancer Treatment Fatigue Eased by Exercise
Or as Guile http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html suggests, if you're going to add a scripting/extension language to a program, they have a way of growing in size and complexity; just use guile.
You mean like downloadable software? I did it once.

There are many ways to distribute Java applications to customers. That probably bores you. To make a long story short, the tradeoff is usability versus download size.

I made two functionally identical (or so I thought -- long story) versions of BCC, and randomly redirected half of the people downloading from my site to one (1 MB, required JRE) and half to the other (10 MB, did not).

I was able to check which versions were causing sales by incorporating a URL parameter naming the version of the executable when people clicked from the nag prompts to the website. Set the version they're using in a cookie, associate it with a later purchase, blah blah bob's your uncle.

Early testing suggested that the larger one was statistically significantly more effective at producing sales, but this trend did not continue.

There are numerous downsides with this. It took a LOT of work to set up. I got to maintain two versions of the same executable, which introduced bugs (I'll spare you the details, aside from one: Vista). It cost me in support requests. I will be supporting those executables for years to come (trust me -- I still get people buying from software not on my website in 2+ years). Changing the A/B tests used takes a full release cycle.

On the web, these are all so easily surmountable it isn't even funny.
> I'm not sure how many men would guess this, or for that matter how many women would guess what this article says about men

Really? I've always believed it to be common wisdom that some women strongly prefer men in relationships.
Back Up and Disaster Recovery Services 
Global Storage delivers cost effective back up and disaster recovery services including data protection to fulfill the business requirements for business continuity.
That's an awesome idea. I don't agree with it, but that doesn't change anything. The world needs more interesting ideas, and you have one. Kudos.
Caffeine is twice as slow...
The rant is sort of on, but not really. MPG is a bad name, but it is based on the EPA's draft standard for plugin hybrids. What it is telling you is that for a typical city driver who charges up each night, by the time the odometer reads 230 miles they will have used one gallon of gas. They also are kind enough to report that the car gets 50 mpg when running the engine, so other than the headline they aren't being too deceitful.

I'm not sure what the EPA stickers will look like, but I hope they have "kwhr per mile (electric)" and "gallons per mile (gas)" as well as the standard numbers. It is time to fix our silly reciprocal measurement (mpg is silly. No one says "I'm gonna burn me a gallon of gas and see how far I can go!")
Gmail on my desktop with the gears extension. Sometimes I use my blackberry message client to read emails.
Great insights, observations and wisdom - thanks Jed. Look forward to more of your Blog Posts! This had some super useful ideas and tips and written well with thought and humor
Pricing is mostly a dark art / finger in the air analysis, here's what I think you should do:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677396
I don't understand how this can be true given Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. The theorem shows that not all true statements in the second order Peano axiomatic system for the integers can be formally proven by a computer. That is, no first order axiomatic system for the integers is rich enough to capture all true statements in the second order system.

The statement, '...allowing a computer to find a formal proof of any theorem which has a proof of reasonable length...' is where the problem lies. How does one determine which statements have proofs of reasonable length? I believe this is tied in with the Halting Problem. You just can't tell when something will be provable formally and when it can't. A proof of P=NP is not going to destroy mathematics.
Until I heard about this (previously), I had no idea that the rabies survival rate was 0. That's seriously insane.
Bullshit. If providing information incriminates yourself you do not have to provide it. If those account numbers are on a piece of paper, sure he has to produce the paper. But not if it's in his brain only.
$3,290 a year, which is the Alaska permanent fund dividend, will not take any startup to ramen profitability.

https://www.pfd.state.ak.us/
"Could anyone link me to some examples" answers "tell me why this new book is necessary?"
From reading it, I lose sympathy rather quickly.

His app auto-follows people based on keyword mentions, which is an annoying marketing tactic. And seems to be what twitter considers spam.

Using 'twitter' in your app name or domain name is a trademark issue; they have to defend their trademark rights.
Mormon settlers practiced a basic wealth version of this briefly during several periods during the 19th century.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Order

"Members who voluntarily chose to enter the United Order community would deed (consecrate) all their property to the United Order, which would in turn deed back an "inheritance" (or "stewardship") which allowed members to control the property; private property was not eradicated but was rather a fundamental principle of this system. At the end of each year, any excess that the family produced from their stewardship was voluntarily given back to the Order."
Re: GPA, take As when you can get them. Doesn't matter if the course is bullshit - an A is an A, and your GPA is cumulative. This is especially important in first-year, as your performance therein haunts you for the rest of your time at school.

If you went to a moderately good high school, most of first year should be review for you. Learn the new parts, ace the old parts, and finish first year with a 3.7+ GPA and you're set for the rest of your time there.
Cool. I'll throw mine up and see how it goes.
Nokia:We are still commited to Symbian
I could write this thing in a weekend.

(Forgive me, could no longer resist.)
Thank you guys, got your point
"invented" something small but useful in CS. Won some reserach competition, got invited to the Turing Award ceremoney, got an award on the same stage right after Vincent Cerf and Rob Khan got thier Turing Award. Goose bumps :-)
Design and project execution should be about taking on the key risks in your project.

If you're a startup, the biggest risk might be 'is there a market for this?'. In this case, yeah, maybe skip a lot of the design, get something rough-and-ready to the market.

If you're a bank, your biggest risks are probably around reputation, security, compliance, etc. In this case, you might do a lot of design around scalability and reliability.

So I'm an advocate of always doing design - just make sure you focus on the parts that count.
He shows some ways to poke memory managed by the iphone driver and saturate the gpu using only ~20% of cpu instead of the 64% that you use with the conventional OpenGLES path.

This necessarily introduces some fragility since you're essentially poking at magic locations in memory in a totally non-safe manner, but he seems to think the driver's internal structures are stable enough that this isn't a problem.

In fact, if enough top quality games do this, then the stability might be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since messing with the driver internal structures' layout would break all the really nice looking games.
got ie6 and ie7 running on the same windows install.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756761
I think the appropriate way to deal with this would have been for twitter to have something in their T.O.S that states it does not allow this.
Where? I only see the footer link
In metric countries (i.e. most of the rest of the world) we use litres per 100km, which is the "right" way around. :)
The question should not be "How do I increase conversions". The question should be "How do I provide the best user experience possible".

Keeping that it mind I find its best to not make a user submit a form to determine that there are errors.

http://www.position-absolute.com/articles/jquery-form-valida...

The link above is an awesome JQuery Inline Validation Script.