skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It completely depends on what's happening at the time! And even worse, you can only know in retrospect. Some of my time in this life has been priceless and I wouldn't give it up for anything. Much of it turns out to be near useless, on the other hand.

I make ~$12/hr right now, but I'm into what I'm doing (that is, I think it'll generate some of those priceless moments eventually). But given that I'd like to have more money (it may even end up saving me some time!) if you have $30/hr for me you can have a bunch of my time.

That's probably a more philosophical answer than you were hoping for. But given that I have no money, I'm probably not within your target market anyways, so consider me to have spared you an outlier.

edit: grammar
Finally, a failure. I'm tired with all the success stories.
Why Aircraft Carriers are not Agile
Not really the same thing. iPhone vs. Android is more like comparing business class on BA vs. business class on AA. Both are nice, but neither are first class. (And just like with the phones, it's a trade-off. BA has pretty awful food, and AA's seat does not lay 180 degrees flat.)
The numbers indicate that it's a small shift at best. People switch carriers every 3-4 years on average (usually citing employer discounts, pricing plans, family networks, etc,) meaning that for any given phone, you'd expect 25-33% of purchasers to be new customers. The iPhone is somewhere between 30-40%, meaning that it's probably outperforming the average by 5-10%, which is great but not indicative of a sea change in consumer habits.

It's probably more effective at keeping people on AT&T who would otherwise have left than in bringing new people on.
It's a good way to convince stores to invest in a long-term relationship with Lego. If I'd had to guess, I would think they were marginally profitable, or even losing money. And if I sold toys, that would factor into the decision to order Legos.
I can do the "death by a thousand cuts" thing to the iPhone just as easily as you can do it to Android. Every user has different priorities.

(You also mentioned Xorg.conf. I have not had one of those for years.)
If so, it's an unfortunate one, because it looks identical to a common bait-and-switch. The pre-signup copy reads "Get 500 free credits \n
Earn more by referring friends, listing
auctions, or buying them ($0.10 each)" After signup, you have 100 credits, and the site copy reads something like "list something to get the rest of your 500 credits". Get on this, guys.
>Give us a decent real time high resolution scanner, and your "private" experience is just another data set on a big computer somewhere.

That huge dataset still won't tell you what it's like to see red, though. It will just tell you what happens in the brain when someone sees red.

>It really doesn't, though, unless you already ascribe something mystical and aphysical to this "subjective experience," begging the question.

You don't have to do anything of the sort. You just note that there's nothing in the physical description which corresponds to the subjective quality of your experience. To make it more concrete, there's nothing that explains why seeing red isn't like seeing blue and vice versa.
Is [it serving as both the Dialer and the Contacts app all rolled into one] a good idea? When I'm in my Dialer, presumably I only want to call people. Surely the system should sense context (likewise, if I'm in the email app, it should show contacts for whom I have no email!).

There is a "dialer" app that shows the phone pad. There is a contacts app tha shows all your contacts. While the device has phone functionality, it actually does a lot more, and showing all your contacts, and all the methods to contact them, actually makes sense when you have multiple methods (voice, SMS, IM, email) available. The contacts list even shows you if someone is currently on IM.

[Open the contact, long-press on the desired number, and select Make Default Number is] Invisible and undiscoverable except by accident - this is a UI failure. The fact that this is not displayed implies to the user that it cannot be changed.

Just like the long hold on the icons on the iphone so you can move them around and rearrange them (and then they shake?) is invisible and undiscoverable except by accident. It took me forever to find out how to do this on my iPod touch.
Sure, it's easier and nicer and whatnot, but the way I look at it is that git is a nice patch management system, but you still have to do the 'community stuff'. You still have to decide whether you actually want to fork the project, or not. Forking a project is different from simply creating a version control 'fork' - it means you're actively taking the project in a new and different direction than the current maintainers.
I've been really enjoying learning Haskell. I believe I'm still in a honeymoon phase though, and it too will pass, though it has lasted longer than for any other language.
It just depends on your definition of "taking it seriously". For example in that article Gruber says

Most people can thumb-type just as well, if not better, on an iPhone as they could on a BlackBerry.

I prefer the iPhone to a Blackberry overall, but the argument that there is no advantage to typing on a Blackberry is just not true. Here's a better analysis:

http://msgnet.org/2008/08/blackberry-vs-iphone-simplified/
Quality advice is important, but it’s not the key to success
Visual basic CAN look nice. Its just the vast quantity of it doesn't.

You are picking the people you're programming with when you pick a language. Lots of people do very dirty dirty things in perl, and while those exist in Ruby and Python as well, proportionately they are much fewer in number there.
Here at FairSoftware, we are watching closely which platform developers are most interested in, and iPhone is almost 10X ahead of Android.

I have been thinking for a year that Android would catch up, but I still don't see real signs.
This article is garbage. Delicious is not Digg and it's not Reddit and if you're only using it to boost traffic to your site - you have no fucking clue what this service is actually about.
I second jquery in action
Considering the levels of investment, it does not seem like an unqualified success. Apparently ticket master already sunk about 13 mil in there.
Could you do this for the ipod nano, 2nd generation? I've been wanting to get RockBox on it for years, but the firmware is encrypted!
Customize Your Content For Different Cultures
"Normal people", by which I mean myself, want to plug in their iPhone and have all of their stuff synced without ever clicking any button. Drag-n-drop is nice, but even that's more of a hassle than I care to bother with.
It's an interesting idea, but this seems more like something that could be a neat tech demonstration rather than a product that people would want to use.

First, speech recognition is very difficult. Fortunately you have a limited number of key words you have to support. Unfortunately, there's an almost infinite number of symbol names available, many of which can't be pronounced in a definite way. Variables created through speech recognition are going to be pronounceable, but what if you're working on a project with someone else who's not using speech recognition? What if you're working on existing code and don't want to refactor all the variable names? It seems to me that this could be even more difficult than natural language speech recognition.

Second, what problem does this solve? You mentioned RSI sufferers, which is certainly a problem, but how large is the market of Python programmers suffering from RSI? I'm guessing not that large. The software would have to be extremely accurate in order for me to not get quickly frustrated. On top of that, it would have to offer some benefit over typing, and that's not something I see in your pitch.

Third, I'm not so sure about your business model. I think in order for people to want to pay to download their personal acoustic model, the default model would already have to work really well. If it didn't, programmers would probably find themselves thinking "If the default model works so poorly, will the custom model really be that much better?" However, if it's too good, then there's no incentive to get the custom model. You're creating a balancing act that you'll have to perform in order for anyone to want to give you money.

A more interesting goal would be to supplement the keyboard and mouse setup rather than replace it. Think of ways that any programmer might become more productive through using voice in addition to hands. This would probably be much simpler, which allows you to release more quickly. I think it would also increase your potential user base, and eventually you could expand it to do everything if need be.
It feels to me that most* programming languages were created to solve a particular problem and use a particular style. If you are working in that problem domain then often that language will be best. If you are looking for a language to be your go-to for everything you're only going to end up hating them all.

Each programming language makes trade-offs. Ease of low-level control vs. ease of high-level constructs. Quick write-execute turn around vs. code optimization. Strong type guarantees vs. ease-of-use duck typing. There are hundreds of these tradeoffs and you just have to figure out where you want to be for your particular problem.

* I say most, because there are some really terrible languages out there that were largely created out of ignorance. Usually they're just scripting languages created for a specific application. Instead of using a tested solution, like extending Ruby, Perl, or Lua, they write their own which has most of the same features half-implemented.
Yes and no, it looks like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito#History

Looking at that picture made me suffer though... I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd probably be happy just to get some Taco Bell. Things are that bad here in Padova.
sorry about the wording. It's clear in all the FAQ and about pages, but I guess we ran out of real estate where some of the text is shorter. Will get right on this.
Da Vinci's Mechanical Lion Brought To Life After 500 Years
Recruiters and HR are the worst people to deal with in the entire technology industry.
Teleology is funny.
Nobody thinks Apple is perfect. The people John Gruber named are all people who are huge in the Apple world but quit the iPhone in protest. John Gruber himself blasts Apple harder and more accurately than most Apple critics.

This whole "Apple is perfect" thing is a straw man that I've seen many times before. The argument isn't that Apple's perfect. The argument's that Apple is really, really, really good, and that its competitors' products aren't as polished as its own products. Android's advantages, as you highlight here, are certainly appealing to some people, but not to mass consumers, who care more about smooth than they do about extensible.
hah, what makes you think this guarantees anything?

a noble ambition but one with no vision.
How to debug your mind
Every verb in what you just wrote is in the present simple, with the single exception of "your mileage may vary". It's probably the commonest of all tenses both in everyday conversation and in complex sentences. I see no reason to think that people in general (or programmers in particular) lack experience of expressing things in the present tense. It's also far from clear to me that there's any real correspondence between the present simple and functional programming.

Apart from that, though, I liked your last paragraph just fine.
> Sumon and crew will be successful at whatever they do next, there's no doubt about that.

I don't know how you can make that statement unless you know something that is not public knowledge.

To repay your investors if it doesn't work out is class (though they say it was from 'money in the bank', it is very well possible that this was simply the easiest way of liquidating the business and that the founders let their share of the payment due to them go), there is no doubt about that.

But the fact is that this didn't work out, how the next project fares remains to be seen.

Past failures are not a guarantee for future success or something to that effect.

What impresses me most about this farewell note is that they decided not to go for mediocrity but instead decided to pull the plug.

That takes guts, and is on par with the repaying of the investors (which is relatively easy if you have the $, otherwise it is much harder and even more classy).
...the companies that were best at mundane things like answering questions, taking orders, packing and shipping them, and taking returns...

The companies that are best at these things are best precisely because they don't consider them to be "mundane".

In customer service and fulfillment, it's a fine line between being excellent and being out of business. These can be very difficult things to do, and the thinner your margins, the better you have to be.

And very few companies handle customer returns well. They keep getting better and better until they realize the best way to handle customer returns is to avoid them in the first place.
He's right, though, +34 was way too high ... must've struck a nerve.
Using Applied Focus Sessions to Boost Productivity
I agree. Besides, a better comparison to email campaigns, instead of phone calls, is mass mailings via snail mail. I don't think people expect that the return address on the envelope is the same address to which all customer service related letters should be sent.
That's not an "analysis". That's an opinion just like Gruber's - who, incidentally, has much more in-depth articles regarding thumb-typing than this one, which treats it as an incidental issue.
The rebooting wasn't really the issue. The attempt to steal $1.3 million from his insurance company was. Although, I will grant that in light of current events, 10 years for attempting to steal (and failing) such a minuscule amount seems a bit perverse.
This sounds interesting. On a very high level, a good solution to this would feel like window-shopping in a huge mall. Amazon.com is great if you know what you're looking for, (as GavinB said), but it's doesn't work for discovery. I can't meander through Amazon.com to check out products and I wouldn't go there for fun. Compare that to your local mall, where people go to just hang out.

Shopping is often a pass time and a social experience, not a mission, yet most sites are optimized for the last "stage" of shopping--the stage where you actually make a purchase, or the penultimate stage--the one where you compare a few specific products. The last stages are the most profitable and easiest to implement, so that's why they came about first. But if you can grab a consumer at an earlier stage, when they're brainstorming bridal shower ideas, or when they're bored at work and checking out new cell phones, and if you optimize for discovery as well as sales, they'll come back and buy from you.

The challenges/pitfalls/competitors are numerous, obvious, and non-obvious. Good luck to the team that attempts this!
don't know about your other issues, but I love DoggCatcher (see Android Market) for podcasts. I'm in no way affiliated with the developer. Downloads programs in the background ... when I want news/interviews/talk-show I have plenty.

I used the phone for talk, lots of web browsing, podcasts, and music, mostly. The music transfer is lacking ... I just do file copies. YouTube works fine, haven' tried transferring videos.
Does this article really need to be over 6 different pages?
They partnered with AT&T because they needed a company that would let it add things like visual voicemail to its existing system, and rolling that out with a single company would be easier. The argument against Verizon is that Verizon insists on adding branding to every Verizon phone, which Apple is against.

Neither Verizon nor Apple is stupid. If network choice really starts hurting the iPhone, which it isn't because iPhone sales are insane, then Apple will bend slightly to accommodate Verizon. If AT&T continues gaining Verizon users on virtue of the iPhone itself, then Verizon will look for a deal with Apple. The point of the ancestor post is that if your strategy to compete is "we're shittier but use a different network", then you aren't focused on the product, you're focused on making money. John Gruber is writing about product, not about market competition.
Yeah, but the W3 site is so ugly...
>>- Why do all eleventy-billion of my contacts show up in the dialer instead of the relatively small handful who've got phone numbers?

Contacts -> Menu -> Display Group -> Contacts with phone numbers
I'd be interested in seeing your proof for this claim. My experience has been the opposite: a stateless individual must entirely vanish from the map.
how about a cashmere sweater ?

http://www.listia.com/auction/208
I don't think the author appreciates how difficult this is.

I think it's trivially easy. Hire some temp workers to do it.

Heck, you could put a note "We send these emails to a lot of people and many are returned to sender unopened. If you reply to this, please type the word 'reply' in the following space to make it stand out from the returned emails and grab our attention : [ ] "

Then filter those out as a priority. That could solve a lot of the problem even without a good mail filter.
I've never owned an Apple product before last year, so I'm not making any comment about their durability, one way or another.

My point is this: go and survey today's Apple users, and ask them what they like about the products, or why they decided to buy. I'm willing to bet that "durability" will not be in the top three reasons.

Apple is one of the very few tech companies who has managed to meld its products into a fashion item, and over the last few years (since the first iPod, really), that is what made them as successful as they are today, NOT durability.

This also means that people want to replace their Apple products with shinier, newer models, long before they actually stop working.

I can't comment on BMW bikes, but I think the same is true of BMW cars - how many people buy a brand new BMW with the intention of driving it for 20 years?
I guess the only reason why ppl think "iPhone is cool" is just because of slick multi-touch GUI, there's nothing else superior in iPhone per se.

Slick is superior. Having a phone that looks snappy and feels responsive is superior. It's not superior in a benchmark sense, perhaps, but nobody gives a fuck about benchmarks.
Mine's a humorous topic :)

"The Ballmer Peak: How Alcohol Intake Affects Coding"

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3115
I used to build these ridiculous 10-storey buildings from Lego when I was younger, and we had a huge box of all kinds of Lego bits from proper sets. I think Lego leads to making people programmers.
Yeah, morons, they should just do rsync or something right?
"* Both are premium products at premium prices, designed against disposability. A BMW motorcycle and an Apple computer will typically outlast 2-3 of the average competitor's products, while costing about 1.5x as much."

I disagree with this. While the design of the a macbook is nicer than any other laptop I can think of, I had to replace the motherboard, optical drive, wrist rest, LCD panel, trackpad, and webcam before it was three years old. Granted I did use it extensively, but I don't think that my usage would have destroyed a Dell latitude or Lenovo Thinkpad any quicker. In fact, I am expecting my current Dell E6500 to last longer than may macbook did.
I wonder why Google isn't doing an App Store?
Their goal is profit via market share, not innovation for the sake of innovation.

Apple's goal is making good products. If they wanted shitloads of cash, they could have sold out at any time in the last decade. Instead, they try to make things that people will love.

If Apple has no competitor, they'll continue to innovate, have no doubts. However, they might not innovate in all ways at once, meaning they might not focus on annihilating all their weaknesses. If they've got a competitor, suddenly there's incentive to beat their rivals in every way possible, and the resulting products are even better.
i believe their point is that twitter has an open API and encourages app development on top of its platform everywhere it can, but it simultaneously will pick a golden app that creates a huge barrier of entry to the next "good idea" in that area.

kind of a silly thing to do, and something i'd complain about a bit if it caused a company of mine to go under.
Is that necessarily a good thing? Surely then it's harder to decide who is a good programmer and who is not.
Dear modsearch, you guys have the right idea but the wrong way of implementing it.

My advice would be really short and simple:

stop.

You can launch exactly once. It doesn't matter if you are feature complete. But it does matter if you're consistent.

You are building an e-commerce site of sorts, so reputation is really your only real currency. The site right now is confusing.

Fix it! Now. Don't promote it any further than it has gone already, repair those things, make it clear and consistent and then make your push.

Also, you should probably yank all the dummy auctions (or at least the stuff that looks like a dummy auction) (a poorly drawn giraffe ? a floppy disk ?) because they degrade the profile of your site.

I realize you guys are of good intentions but you are making a poor first impression. You only get one chance at a first impression.
Have you ever dealt with over 1000 bounce-back messages? It's as if every email server on the planet uses a different bounce-back method and message. It's terribly unpredictable.

Lots of people have done mailshots before. Is there no open-source email-bounce-rejection corpus yet?
Did I cause you to say that? :-P
Is no one trying to get Android working on an iPhone? Surprised I haven't heard anything about that yet.
Gradually!
Some classic Jaguars had the pedals switched - including the famous one in the Inspector Morse TV series which led to a few accidents on set.

Porsche also made some race cars with the accelerator on the left to make it quicker to do 'Le Mans starts' - where the driver must run to the car and start it.
Most failures just wither away and die. They rarely announce it.
I think I did wear it when we were visiting galleries for Artix, the horrible startup we tried before Viaweb, because I found a couple Artix business cards in the pocket.
Ask HN: A startup for the "Coming soon" startup pages?
I came across the idea that a lot startups put out the COMING SOON page, with a email address to stay up-to-date with all the news, etc.

I'm wondering, has anyone taken the chance and turned this into a business? I think it's a brilliant idea.
Hornet for Blackberry, real-time address book (Will .tel kill the phone number?)
So long as people discount "user experience" as the most valuable "substance," they will continue to lose contests against Apple.
Who cares who's a good programmer and who's not? What matters is what gets made, and if people are making cool stuff then I don't care if they're completely inept. Hell, I'm completely inept and I've found it doesn't matter as long as I end up with a product people want to use.
Ah, so if the iPhone is flawed that makes all of Android's flaws go away. Finally, I understand! Thanks!
In addition to the other text I quoted, you should probably change this: "1. Sign up and get 500 free credits"
No, we've just decided that Zed Is Predictable.
Nokia is committed to Maemo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo_(operating_system)

Here's the announcement:
http://www.ftd.de/technik/it_telekommunikation/:Strategiewen...
DEFECT12655: Blog poster stretches metaphor beyond the breaking point. Runtime exception.
Temp workers are more expensive than CPU time. Bayesian filtering would go a long way in cutting out the auto responders, but I agree, the problem doesn't seem too difficult.