skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, aren't you forgetting the mathematics of compound interest? A 5 to 10% conversion advantage over your competitors, combined with a higher retention rate -- this is going to really hurt competitors after several years. After 10 years? Ouch!

It's a good thing that AT&T sucks so much. Otherwise, the iPhone would be unstoppable.
Mahalo Guides cashing out for over $1,000 a month
A Mathematical Model for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Uh, you post supports my original point. Plausibly vanishing with no leads whatsoever is best...
iLike is in many ways the poor man's Last.fm. I don't see how it's worth Myspace's money, unless they're buying it for the infrastructure.
Engadget is reporting the G1, due to internal flash limitations, may be stuck at version 1.5 forever. Really horrible situation for such a young platform to already be having these issues.
Motorola Moto ROKR E8 Black Unlocked
Motorola MotoRokr E8 reacts to the slightest touch and the slim design won't be obtrusive when you carry it around. The touch-sensitive keypad, built-in memory of 2 Gigabytes is truly the most beneficial feature here and the addition of a MicroSD slot.
Jeff Jarvis Tries To Save Local News (With Spreadsheets)
Commuting is the subject which make me think most about time and the value of time. Unless you are lucky enough to be able to telecommute, you have a choice to make with respect to time and the value you place on it. I have always held that one should live close to where they work, or work close to where they live - something that I was fortunate enough to be able to do until last year. Since then, and for the first time in my life, I have become a commuter and I miss the 1.5 hours per day that I lose because of it. Even if I could bill for that loss, it would not be worth it because even with the pay I am still robbed of some of my time. The only way to recover that time is to get up earlier in the morning and/or stay up later at night in order to accomplish what I cannot with that missing 1.5 hours.
Jason, this was a great piece and more should do themselves a service by reading it.

It's one reason to pursue 'smaller' opportunities with lower variance of return expectations but higher median returns -- for example many niche businesses -- than industries with gigantic return expectations. The latter attracts far more entrants, and while somebody gets rich, the median player does not. But this isn't clear to new entrants because of survivorship bias.

Somewhat related to this is the data availability bias. Big opportunities tend to have much better data sets, and so are easier to study and receive more attention. Many niche industries are closely private and are smaller, so do not have much publicly available data, making study difficult and attracting less attention. Therefore like moths to light bigger industries receive more study and more entrants even though their median expected economics are worse.
It's been in development far too long at this point for that.
We will implement consistency fixes asap. However, I don't think there are any more giraffes on there :) all the auctions on there are from real users and we try our best to moderate the fake or silly ones :)
Google Code now supports multiple hg repositories per project
It would be nice if they switched course without announcing they're going out of business. Reminds me of this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

AppJet did a good job following that advice IMO, but Heroku takes the cake. They didn't just change direction. They kept the old product alive, too.

Edit: I was wrong. AppJet kept some of their old stuff around, too! I can't wait to check it out. http://appjet.com/dev-archive.html
I have exactly the same experience, I have worked with some amazing HR people (as clients) at my previous job and we really made a good product that would have been impossible without their fantastic input. They are humans like everone else, and it's a job like any other.
Thanks for that comment. It's always important to compare our metrics with reality. So if we are selecting in a way that punishes the right way to do things, complaining about it is an appropriate first step.
Good one.

Let me know when you're done I'll give you a boost, email is in the 'about' bit.

I've been hard enough on you ;)
lol. Did you read the article? It's from a publisher's perspective, not a bookmarker's.

Just FYI: Neither Digg nor Reddit are only used to boost traffic either. Apparently social media marketing is off your radar.
Only true if, by harder, you mean relative to the good practise that it makes easy.
Ustream Sued By Boxing Promoter Over Pirated Broadcast
Infosys among world's 100 fastest growing cos
Something negative and irrelevant that doesn't add to conversation about this link and somehow says I hate Zed Shaw so I sound like I'm a cool rebel too

Joking. Was a good read. Also, some of you need to read to the bottom to the 'Clue mean in' part.
The comments Schneier's blog generates are sometimes worth a read also
Who cares who's a good programmer and who's not?

The poor soul who has to maintain your crap.

it doesn't matter as long as I end up with a product people want to use

It does matter when it comes to maintaining that code base. When maintaining crappy code, only bad things can happen:

1. It takes too long.
2. It costs too much.
3. It doesn't get done at all.

"cool stuff" and "completely inept" are contradictory terms.

You may not care, but enough of us do that you should get better at your craft and spare the rest of us.
Talk about wasting money.
LaunchSet.com sounds like what you're talking about.
You should include those Business cards with the coat :-)
Why is it classy to throw in the towel? The letter doesn't suggest that investors asked for their money back. This is the worst case scenario given my understanding of the VC market. It sounds like the team has lost their momentum, but certainly they have learned something in the process. If they dissolve the company and start something new which becomes successful, the original investors get nothing. There's nothing wrong with that from a morality perspective, but don't assume that investors want their money back - their reasons for investing might be complex.
Everyblock : every things
"Normal people", by which I mean myself, want to plug their iPhone in and NOT have it sync, because I have more music than can fit on it, so auto-sync for a subset of my playlist is nice, but even that's more of a hassle than I care to bother with.
World Record for Highest Score in ODI
Charles Coventry from Zimbabwe, maybe his name you are hearing it for the first time but he not only brought up his hundred but he went past the highest ODI Score by any batsman 194* World Record Highest ODI Score
Did you mean to say "Palm" instead of "Google"? Android has the Android Market, which is like the App Store.
You're making the assumption that I code things that require maintenance from other people, and that I code for a living. I code for fun, and I make small things that other people happen to enjoy, things simple enough that once I get them working the first time, they don't break. When I work on major projects, my partner's the programmer, not me.
Don't Always Do Your Best
...which is why iTunes also supports drag-n-drop, and subset syncing. Are you trying to make a point?
Yes, ease of programmer ability ascertainment should not be a concern of a PL but I don't support your "as long as I end up with a product people want to use" philosophy that belittles the importance of the means used to reach an end. When discussing PLs you are discussing means. If you don't care then I don't understand your interest in this post.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

Compared to what myspace already has it would be a drop in the bucket though.

I think myspace just needs to be seen as doing something (anything) and they need to prop up their rapidly failing numbers. Since mid 2008 they've halved in traffic, a trend that they'll have to stop somehow.

At least this gives them a way to get the myspace.com domain in the press in a positive way.
Preview of Jolicloud: The social Netbook OS
It just seems biased towards an OOP mentality.

If I were to conceive of the universe as a program, I would think of it as one giant state with a few fundamental particles and a simple functional program that resolves the state over time based on the previous state.

Passing messages to me implies a finite set of messages and pre-conceived interaction, whereas in reality there is no such thing as discrete objects or interactions, everything interacts with everything, and the world we know is emergent from the low level physical properties.

I suppose there could be an infinitely polymorphous OO program behind the universe, but that just doesn't strike me as a good fit with what we know about physics.
"More importantly, the general feel of the technology scene in SF has almost zero douchebag in it."

Good to hear that someone's trying to change that.
Well, Myspace has its own set of artists with a loose structure. iLike, on the other hand, has a comprehensive list of musicians that it builds (rather than having individual musicians add themselves), and it has a slew of information including track listings for albums, videos, and tour dates.
Feature tour here: http://www.jolicloud.com/tour

You can request an alpha invite here: http://my.jolicloud.com/account/invitation?next=%2Fregister
nice one! Here is a video of his wind-up car:

http://green.autoblog.com/2008/01/08/cool-video-leonardo-da-...
Language designers want to create languages that professionals will use. Maintenance is a problem for any professional. You're lucky not to have to deal with that problem but that doesn't mean language designers are mistaken for engaging in attempting to find a solution to that problem just because it doesn't affect you.
Very Nassim Taleb. These are great books NT's written that discuss our susceptibility to survivorship bias and other rational failings we have: Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.
Not necessarily. The article makes no mention of assumptions about zombie behavior, so any disease fitting the virility assumed by the researchers is susceptible to the same model. Somehow I doubt any government will go for 'eradication' as an epidemic solution, though.
Ask HN: Please Review my app - TwitterBatcher.com
Dear HN community, I made an app to satisfy a personal need concerning Twitter. I found it was convenient to upload a bunch of text containing twitter IDs (@accounts) rather than add them manually.

It's pretty handy on Follow Friday to follow recommended friends of friends.

So, to solve this simple problem I made a simple app.

I don't know if many of you have a Twitter account but, I would definitly love to have your feedback about this project HN community.

ps. It uses OpenAuth for authentication, no worries for your data.

Edit: You may encounter failwhales... Keep retrying.
I wasn't saying that programming language doesn't matter. I was saying, in regards to axod's specific point that "great languages make it harder to write crappy code" might make it harder to decide who's good and who's not, that the goal of a programming language isn't to let people judge other programmers. It's to let them write code.
As if that weren't enough, he actually mixed two metaphors: debugging the code and using a computer.
He's right about the Mexican food in NYC, just horrible. But then all the Mexican stands are run by Chinese because the Latinos run the pizza parlors.
The Alan M. Turing Endowment
Please let me answer you in one thread before you repeat your counterargument. I've answered this as you posted this second one.
This is a good article describing Microsoft's Datacenter design effort. http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our-vision-for-ge...
HiddenNetwork (http://www.hiddennetwork.com/) which had a very similar business to SnapTalents first service also recently shut down. I think both of these affirm that advertising jobs to people who aren't looking for jobs isn't the best business model. (Job boards frequented by good people can be a lucrative business though, see 37signals, etc)
Wrong and wronger. You can't say that because the iPhone sells very well, network choice isn't hurting it. There might be 2x as many iPhones in consumers hands in the U.S. if they were on Verizon too, and 3x if it were on the other majors on top. I'm clearly just making those numbers up, but they seem reasonable.

The exclusivity was about a lot more than visual voice mail. It had to do with sales channel and profits from ongoing contracts as well, which were probably far larger issues and ones Verizon has absolutely no reason to cave on.
And my point was that it might be in both Verizon and Apple's best interest to not work together.

The network is a huge part of the product when it comes to phones. A phone that is constantly dropping calls, one of the iPhone's biggest complaints, or out of fast data range is an inferior product through no fault of its own. In the mobile industry by being on a better network you have a better product.

Nonetheless, the best and worst thing about capitalism is that inferior products win all the time when the salient point of competition isn't product "quality" as you're meaning it here. We in the tech industry love the idea of a Google or an Apple making a better mousetrap and slaying the entrenched competition, but the reality is that for every one story like that, there are 20 of a better product that died due to vendor lock-in, marketing, or some other form of differentiation. Apple's been on both sides of that equation.
Reader's Digest plans to file for bankruptcy
Why does it have to be a storefront? I think it would be better if it were an advertising solution.
This is a good point. At the same time, I believe there are actual differences between businesses that affect their chance of success.

So the trick is to separate the 'accidental' features of successful businesses that don't increase their chances of success from the 'essential' features that do.

I wish the article went into how one might do this...
No, not really. I love what Danny did with LaunchSet, it's just not really what I'm pointing at. I mean imagine the software that is a combination of a Email newsletter along with some Comming soon page manager.
I dont think there will be a big market for speaking out Python code, but I can think of a few other uses for specialized voice recognition. (In fact I'm working on something vaguely similar, but in way different direction)
Do you have an email address, maybe we can get in contact?
Classic shows the home page as it would appear without votes from people with accounts less than a year old. pg added it about 3 months ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
That was the point.

If you research solutions for an epidemic you have to come with realistic solutions that can be implemented, not pretend the whole thing is some kind of computer game.

Even if 'eradication' would be the only viable solution I still doubt that it would be implemented.
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.

But if Twitter decided to implement their own redirection service, there would be no problem, right ? As in, would you still consider that as an innovation barrier ?

I know a lot of the innovation for url redirection services should be looked for in the data mining area, and you need lots of data for data mining. But these tr.im posts all give me the impression they feel like they're entitled to a share of the traffic Twitter generates. They're not, and never will be. Twitter is entitled to decide what they do with their traffic. They could've implemented their own redirection service, they didn't, and decided to go for a single url redirection service. Perhaps precisely to keep the innovation going in that area (url redirection is Bitly's core business, thus they will take the data more seriously), while on the other hand keep the service reliable and predictable.

If your entire business depends upon the grace of a single company, and you don't do anything to break your business out of that, you've just got a bad business model which is destined to give you a lot of headaches, and even will make you fail. And yes, I'm looking at you too, AppStore developers. Quit whining already!
To an extent I agree.

The general purpose language has been very successful because there's sufficient commonality between the operations that a lot of programs enact (what is good for one is good for the other) but the DSL has been also, perhaps a lesser extent, because of the benefits of specific optimisations you mention.

That's my balanced observation.
Do you really need all that processing power or do you merely think you do?

I do just fine with a 2GHZ Core 2 Duo (1MB L2) desktop PC with 1GB RAM (I've even used it to run Windows Vista in VMWare on Ubuntu). Heck, you wouldn't notice the difference between my PC and my 1 year old MacBook with 2GB RAM and a 2.4GHZ Core 2 Duo (2MB L2), mostly because I keep my Ubuntu install in very good shape. If I was using Debian, Arch or Slackware, I could get even more performance out of this baby.

It's likely that I will not be upgrading this PC for a few more years. Thanks to cheap, low-end netbooks, operating systems are getting lighter. I expect this trend will continue for some time, and I intend to take full advantage of it, partly because I don't want to waste perfectly good electronics, but mostly because I want to see how long I can keep them running :p

Computers never get old. They just become incompatible with the state-of-the-art.
I don't use iTunes, how do I copy music to my iphone? btw, I use Ubuntu...

On the Android part I sync my music with Banshee ;)
Is it just a weakness? They presumably get a lot from the AT&T deal. The right to exclusive Apple branding on the phone. Visual voicemail, some untold but presumably high % of monthly contract fees (allowing them to plow tens of millions into ads, creating the virtuous cycle of users and app developer growth), an unprecedented degree of freedom over app distribution, commitments to building out the cell network, etc. Building the hardware and software themselves gives them better quality control over the end product, having tremendous upper hand in an exclusive deal with a national carrier performs a similar function.

I'm guessing that had they given in to whatever the hell Verizon requested, and has no reason to discontinue requesting, you'd be looking at a much different phone. That's why I still don't believe we'll ever see a CDMA iPhone.
Money Making Ideas & Tips
Disclosure: I built, own and operate Cligs, one of the URL shorteners that was part of the 301works founding announcement last Friday.

First off, I don't know what happened between bit.ly/Betworks and tri.m. But I do take offence that 301works is a bit.ly publicity stunt.

See, I care most about the Cligs users. To me, 301works is a backup in case something bad happens to Cligs. The backup is operated by an independent (read not bit.ly) service, namely Gnip. I and others insisted on having an independent entity run it for obvious reasons.

Each URL shortener specifies the terms of transfering the data to Gnip. It can be anything from what I call "the dead man's will" option of simply locking away the data to be released on the termination of service, all the way to having a completely open data policy that the URL shortener basically says to the world "do as you please".

So, at the absolute worst, it's an offsite backup service. In reality, it's much more useful than a mere backup service. For example, if we get the details right, the Gnip API could power a URL-expanding service that takes some load off the URL shorteners' servers; this is just a basic example.

I've been talking about such a service with other owners of URL shorteners for a few months, and so there is nothing new about it. We just worked hard now given the anxiety we were seeing from our users. A lot of people worked hard to make it work in a good way, sometimes working at odd hours, to make sure that no one gets the short end of the stick.

So please, don't call 301works a bit.ly publicity stunt. It's not.

If anyone wants to talk about this more, email me: my first name (first 6 letters of my HN username) at cli.gs.
According to the letter they already switched course and it didn't work out.
Real Estate is close.
Childish is almost insulting to children. They're still insisting that twitter somehow deprived them of a business. Oh and that bit.ly's offer of actual cash is a 'publicity stunt'.
Clickable link: http://twitterbatcher.com/

I love that despite it being a simple app for a simple problem, you’ve really thought about the UI and design. It does what it says on the tin, and does it well.

I would have liked an extra step after submitting my @users—a list of the users with their full name, their twitter icon, and whether or not they were already following me. This would give me a chance to confirm my choices and correct any mistakes.

Also when I submit a garbage ID like @cyvubinjsoidjajwld I am told “You are already following these Tweeps.” rather than that they don’t exist.

Good job :)
http://www.marksguide.com is a great resource. Also:

http://dorkbotboston.com/upcoming-events/

http://bostontweetup.com/calendar/

http://microsoftcambridge.com/Events/tabid/57/Default.aspx

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/search/?type=events&rt=1&r...
As far as I know, Clojure is a scripted multithreaded langauge that targets JVM. it is not a concurrent language. almost all current programming languages are like that. The upcoming C# 4.0 will be concurrent C#. which is yet to come.
Why it is tough to compete against the iPhone: Example - Tiger Woods game
AFAIK, nobody messes with pedal positions. In India, all cars are right hand drives with signals on the right, but pedal positions are still: CLUTCH BRAKE GAS

BTW, you can still find some old cars on the roads here which have the gears on the left hand side of the steering wheel :O
Actually, yes. There's a limit to what a $200 phone can do. If nobody has The Ideal Device, you will have to choose an approximation. How those approximations are flawed vary between devices.
$10k for the tr.im domain alone is an offer that would be obviously turned down. Total publicity stunt by bit.ly.
Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned
One of the authors also whiles away his hours making infection models for HIV, malaria, and West Nile virus. http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/

Modeling a zombie outbreak is not a bad way to keep work fun, and it's a good way to introduce undergrad/grad collaborators to the field.
Not sure why people are saying the whole business was based on tr.im. Was pretty clear in the articles I read that tr.im was a side project for Nambu.

Seems that Nambu acknowledged pretty clearly that URL shortening isn't a business.
Not much different from our last LaunchBox Digital -funded venture Razume.com. We had nice "review layers" as our unique feature. In effect, community reviewed resumes.

This space is really hard. Revenue model certainly does not write itself, when there's dozens of similar free services around. We tried by pushing to SaaS to B2B (Career Centers), but ultimately didn't get the funding which we would've needed to bring support & sales to acceptable level for big players such as universities.

If you're interested in our venture's post mortem, watch this interview:
http://www.junloayza.com/interviews/how-to-transition-form-t...
.tel is about using existing infrastructure (the DNS) to resolve contact information. Will it make phone numbers as inconsequential to the experience of communication as IP address are to browsing the web? Discuss.
How to Make Electric Cars Cheaper? Use the Same Batteries
Being part of three successful startups must have taught you a ton, though. Certainly more than being a drone.
Makes me proud to be a Pittsburgher. Any others here at hn?