skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gets my vote simply because I won't be forced to use an otherwise unmarketable language like Objective C. Not that I hate the syntax...it's not that bad really...but I hate that I'm forced to learn it just for iPhone or OS X development. I can't really use it elsewhere. With Mono/C# that's not the case, and it's immediately worth it. I hope they'll target other phones and make it at least possible to migrate your app from one to the other, but a quick glance at the tutorials makes me suspect this is very bound to the iPhone.

I'm also more than a little concerned that you have to pay for the dev environment itself (with an evaluation version on the way). I really hate this model. They should've gone the route of giving away to tools themselves for free, but charging upon the need to deploy. This allows developers like me to vet the platform before spending hard-earned dollars.
It drives me nuts that I have to download Eclipse to write Python code (instead of using Visual Studio). I am on a mission, and my execs have made it clear to me that they are willing to invest in what I am doing, which is awesome. Phase one, start building some trust with the community, and that starts with listening to them. Since I am in the product group (and not our evangelism group), I have direct product and strategy responsibilty. It's a cool role, and I am looking forward to spending more time doing what I love, which is working with devs and hopefully finding ways to make them more productive.
Additionally, Cloudfront is cheaper than S3!
My son is in a district-run preschool. When he's picked up by car my wife puts a card in the window that matches the ID number on his backpack. A teacher or aide walks him to the car and even loads him in so that my wife doesn't need to exit the car.

The reason for this system? He's four years old. It's easier to keep the kids inside the building and seated quietly on benches until the car drives up and is ready to receive the child. No responsible school would turn 200 kids that can barely speak into a parking lot and let them sort it out. It's also more efficient, with 50 cars lined up in a queue they can move kids in and out of these without a traffic jam.

I think it's misleading to put the idea of children being escorted into cars into an article without giving a little more context.
Official press release from Intuit: http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_releas...
Downvote me if it makes you feel better, but it still doesn't work.
It looks fine. You're just skeptical because you can't imagine it being real.
Linus's general attitude "developer time does not matter" is appropriate only when you have free slave labor that you can afford to waste.
Why newspapers should grade their readers.
Consider what would happen if the New York Times say started grading its readers. Readers could use their scores as a way to promote themselves when applying for a job, going on a date, etc.

I would suspect that this idea would reduce ignorance by encouraging people to read more and to do so from more reputable sources.
There is on the page, click the Chat tab. It defaults to the Social Stream, which is a twitter powered chat.
Nanosolar Increases Solar Cell Efficiency to 16.4% and Starts Mass Production
The links that bind the leaders of industry
The device used on the rats seems similar to the weaponized air tank in the horror/drama film "No Country For Old Men".
That might not work out for the universty trustees. Once the median qualification is a B.A., many academic professions will no longer command a significantly above-average wage level, and an expensive college degree will be a bad investment. Countries with a mostly public funded university system might be at an advantage here if they invest theit tax money wisely.
Whether there's an underlying fault or not, it's an interesting datum that it ran 5 to 10 times faster under Linux. If nothing else, compiling and running under both platforms gives clues to places problems are happening. We target three different platforms and seeing the performance change from one to the other is really useful.
I find it useful to find out who wrote articles that are in areas as contentious as this:

W. Bradford Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for American Values.
Lobby your government to allow more and earlier research on human volunteers. Not only will this spare animals, it will also tremendously speed up research.
"With great power comes great responsibility." Without a good set of C++ best practices, the average C++ programmer probably writes crappier code, than, say, the median Python programmer. So it's not a stretch to wonder if the majority of the C++ code that exists might not have been better off in a different language.

As for a serious industry where C++ is not going away soon, virtually all major game titles, even on consoles with restrictive memory limitations, are written in C++ for performance reasons.

What language drives the inner loops at Google? C++. Google is famous for being driven by best practices, so if you're doing a lot of C++ coding, you might want to take a look at the Google C++ style guide.

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
Developers are responsible for debugging their platform then? He states that he had a significant speedup in Vista too, which is pretty good evidence that he'd isolated the problem to something in XP. So he needs to decide on what to do, and fixing XP retroactively doesn't seem to be an option.

And in any case, the thread scalability of the allocator some of MS's older C runtimes is a known performance issue. I'm not surprised by this at all.
what's UX mean?
It is time for Startup School to take to the ocean.

I think we should charter one of these vessels and sale around the South Pacific while building our companies.

We could fit 100 companies on board, charge each $100/day and turn a profit:

"You may wish to know this because, if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500)."

Anyone want on board?
On universities, material isn't important, social interaction is.
it sounds like they they raised a little over $30M, and the last $14M of that was @ a $140M valuation.
IPhone to stay on AT&T, practically forever
Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?
Building the initial team for seed stage startups
Understanding what you read on the news, being able to communicate clearly and effectively, and being able to spot bullshit and faulty arguments when you see it - great reasons to go to college.

But 90% of people won't be using what they learn to "improve their community" and whatnot, not unless they're specifically going to school to learn that.
REST-* - middleware patterns in a REST world
The Libertarian Case against the Google Book Search Deal
Looks like a local version of RescueTime.
Right on. Looks like we have more in common than I first guessed.

Once you are "ready" you've got to spend your time and effort (over sometimes very long periods) into transferring abstract concepts into concrete/shareable products.

Bookmarked your post for later reading: http://quandyfactory.com/blog/1/productivity_and_procrastina...

Glad I read your post, now I found a couple of others to read. (you Pointed to Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html & John Perry: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ )

Looks like procrastination is a hot topic for many of us.
I'm ignorant on how the TechCrunch50 conference works. Does TC have any ownership stake in mint?
I think this is the first time I've understood some of the path to profitability for the iPhone App Store. It's not about making a great app and keeping it up forever. It's about having a hit, milking it for all it's got, then moving on to another app. Even if your app barely took off at all.

For another example, look at Tapulous. They started off with a bunch of small apps, and one of them, Tap Tap Revolution, took off. They've turned that into quite an app with numerous versions. Note that it's not just updates to the app but a bunch of more limited, artist/genre-focused apps. This kind of stuff is the key.
You can take a look at my master thesis (Charack: Pseudo-infinite 3D virtual world generation). It's in a pre-alpha stage, but I think you can find something useful (besides the wide range of similar tools and works I found during my research).

Project link: http://code.google.com/p/charack/
It's fun to see the good names it comes up with--except almost none of them are dot com names. I wonder whether a dot com name is really so essential anymore. Unless your marketing relies on print or word of mouth, your traffic will come from links, where the text of the domain name doesn't matter. Hmmm, I can't quite bring myself to believe it...

If you do register a name from this site, be sure to click the Learn More link on the Google domain registration page. It will give you the option of choosing the registrar.
Haiku OS Alpha 1 released today (VMdisk available)
Firefoxin lisäosat
That video of "automatic mario" is absolutely amazing. It boggles my mind just thinking about how much time that must have taken.

And to anyone who didn't check out that link, it's definitely worth watching. If you're not interested in the whole thing (eleven minutes) I recommend starting right at 8:00.
Five rounds of funding totaling $31.8M: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mint.
"the HSPA standard used by AT&T is more widely used than the EVDO standard used by Verizon"

The new HTC Touch Pro 2 from Sprint gives you the best of both worlds. It has EVDO/CDMA for use in North America and the Caribbean and HSPA/GSM for worldwide use. I wonder if this is a sign of an eventual shift toward GSM for Sprint?
Tackle Business Projects: The Smallest Thing That Could Work
Don't forget that the engines in these things burn something on the order of 1 liter of fuel oil/second.
I'm with you Ryan, it is a success story for Techcrunch. I'm not a TC fan, but still not gonna let emotions get in the way of the facts.
Same case here. My first job was at MegaCorp but the pay was good and the hours were great. I would be home by 4:30 with lots of energy and time in the day left. I left because of the slow work pace and bureaucracy.

Then went to MediumCorp where the pay was less because I thought I would be happier with the work and would have more opportunity to contribute. I didn't really find much difference and ended up being unhappy that I was making less.

Now I'm at a new company. I have more influence over my work and no bureaucracy but I'm still trading time for money. One good thing I've learned is how fast they get products out there which has been a good lesson for me.

I've also done freelancing full-time which is better in that I get to set my own hours and work with multiple projects but it is not ideal for me.

After a few years in the workforce, I now think the smart thing to do is to find a job that pays the most amount of money for the least amount of work so that I have lots of time and energy left over for working on my own thing.
Here’s to the Mint team, from New Zealand, from France, Tunisia, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Canada, Greece, and all over the U.S.

Hm. So, they got their start in the valley and then hired people all over the world? It reads like an ode to the valley absolutely till the last paragraph...
All facts indicate the problem _was_ the platform. The program ran much faster on Vista, even with the original manual threading. When ported to Linux with OpenMP the problem went away, suggesting it never really existed inside the program.
Some of the greatest works of art have been created in essentially that situation. The subtly subversive works of artists toiling under the employ oppressive, totalitarian governments, people like Hans Fischerkoesen.
There is no big secret about it, which is the sort of reason the Daily Mail is Fail. It's just not talked about much outside of the business pages - there's no conspiracy to kept the fact of the anchored fleet covered up.

There are two reasons for it to be there: one is that a glut in cargo ship availability (due to the long order cycle) has coincided with the recession, so that the expected growth in shipping has stalled. Hence the large number. As for the location outside Singapore, it's handily just north of the equator and so not subject to tropical storms and weather patterns, meaning it's the handiest place is Asia to park a ship without paying port fees.

Sure, it's interesting that there's so much unused capacity gathered in one place, but 'secret'? I think not.
Would you be willing to spend $100k in 4 years to be "part of the group dynamics" ? Perhaps so.

The university is a networking place, a place to meet future business partners. There is some value in that. Or perhaps,going to a particular university has become a singaling mechanism to communicate "my family is rich and can afford to send me here", or "I am so smart I was picked from 10,000 candidates to attend this prestigious college. That makes me special." and so on ...

I am just not sure that a $100k worth of student loans is a good price for that. Someone can already be a part of community life, participate in open source projects, go to conferences , sprints, etc. It might be exactly the same but for someone not having that $100k is certinaly a good enough option.
Part of the problem was that until recent years, you couldn't get free dev tools for the MS platform, pretty much stifling the hobbyist developer from using .NET. Those are the people that tend to start and contribute to open source projects like the Facebook library. Now that there are free tools there's been an up swell in open source activity on projects like those and I think it will continue to get better.
I found a second example on youtube last night. http://offgridissues.com/site/off-grid-energy/31-off-grid-en...

I am going to test this soon, see for myself , would love it to be true.
Yeah I got the same weird feeling when I read that headline, but honestly, getting that type of coverage probably helped them considerably. It seems like most successful companies have the right proportion of hard work and luck.
Wow, $5500 a night is probably cheaper than a top stateroom on the Queen Mary 2, and a helluva lot bigger. On the downside, it probably doesn't include fuel or docking fees.

It would make an excellent lair for a supervillain, though.
Uh,

When you start to hit issues that you have good reason to believe have nothing to do with you, finding the root cause of the issues is not always the best choice.
> This gets my vote simply because I won't be forced to use an otherwise unmarketable language like Objective C

I don't understand this argument. If you're already familiar with object oriented programming, it should only take you a day or two to learn Objective-C. This won't save you from having to learn Cocoa Touch, which is where the real time investment is.
Beyond A/B testing: hypothesis testing for startups
The Ho-Hum Sound of Google Voice
In Germany it seems common to mail lists of transaction authentication numbers to customers, and in the Netherlands smart card readers that read your card and generate a TAN seem standard. There are companies built around circumventing this and allowing third parties access to your account (sofortueberweisung.de, for example), but it usually is against the bank EULA.
> Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.

Wow - if Mint's growth doesn't impress you, then what has?

I felt their timing couldn't have been better. Their product matured as a recession hit and demand for money-saving financial services skyrocketed.
The "year of the Linux desktop" is no longer relevant.

It works for me. It works for a lot of other people. That's all it needs to do.

The "year of the Linux desktop" being a viable choice was about 2006. Today people look forward to the "year of the Linux desktop" in the sense of it gaining massive popularity. But that day will not come without lots of marketing or the price difference actually being meaningful. Windows will never have solid DRM because the day the price conscious are ever forced to choose between free Linux and $200 Windows is the day Microsoft loses a massive chunk of market share. So masses of users comes down solely to marketing, and who would get into an advertising buying war with Apple and Microsoft trying to push something free?

Linux has a critical mass of developers, testers, and users willing to help others. As long as it fulfills their needs, it will continue to improve.

It is not a business where market share matters. It is not a business selling licenses on seats. It is a project that scratches some people's itch, and thats all it is. People derive great value from it, and that drives its growth.

I've used it at home for 4 years, and my company (30 people) has used it for 2.5 years. It does everything I need and my company needs, and costs a lot less in licensing and IT support. It might be different for other companies who came from Windows and have to deal with legacy systems/documents, but starting from scratch it is great. I'm happy to give back some bug fixes and support in exchange for what I perceive to be a better experience. That experience is derived solely from the number of developers and dedicated users, it has nothing to do with how many total users there are. A billion more users that do nothing to help Linux progress wouldn't do a damn thing for me.

So I believe that the "year of the Linux desktop" has long since past, and anyone still writing about it just doesn't get it.
I'd be happy if python just had a package manager.
Yes, really. You're responding to something that wasn't said.
No, they just won the $50k prize... but it seems like Arrington got some (advisor?) stock if you see the exchange between him, Calacanis and Aaron.
I think QT is real gem as far as application frameworks go. It's the easiest C++ framework I've ever worked with.
You're giving me reasons why they could be profitable, not proof that they are. Having a good story for future revenue is not the same thing as having revenue.
The Data Liberation Front - Getting Your data from google services
This seems like a good place to get some inspiration from. Even if you don't use the name it could be a fun way to brainstorm some biz ideas.
> When I first arrived I read and signed a piece of paper.

You should have made the university sign a paper saying it wasn't going to cheat you out good learning environment. A university where it is possible to cheat and it is part of the culture is also cheating you out of your money and learning.

I think telling what you just told here to an employee should make them not look at your GPA as much, and you probably don't really want to work for a company that looks at GPA only.
I think having the right PR chops is a huge benefit - visibility is so difficult. Building product anticipation is the key there I think. It is really hard to time things right with the app store approval process so I'm curious if they got their apps approved first and delayed the release date until building enough interest.

Regarding the milking/moving on - one of the most frustrating parts of iphone app dev is the incredibly long feedback loop. The app store means you aren't agile and can't respond to customer feedback as fast as you'd like. I think you're dead on with the model Tapulous used - cast a wide net, nurture what works, and milk the living hell out of it until it dies.
>What are you trying to do on a windows install that requires customization?

Slipstreaming XP SP3 into a pre-SP1 ISO image, installing useful software (esp. Firefox), setting themes and desktop backgrounds, etc. I've done the first without too much pain, the second with some fiddling and mediocre results, and I don't even know if you can do the last.
While I can see where he is coming from(and have myself grown tired of the social media stuff), his tone is kind of condescending.

Cool he sold his "real problem" startup; but to suggest YouTube, facebook aren't solving "real problems" is interesting in the least.
I sincerely hope anyone willing to date or hire me would be a better judge of character than to rely on a newspaper comprehension test
Come on...one of these is from 06, and it looks like it was totally dealt w/ by Amazon customer service, and the other one was from 07 and is a complaint about EC2 when it was still in beta.

Would love to see REAL documented cases of data loss on Amazon, and anything in the last year would be great too.

Not saying it's infallible, and you should always back up your data (Amazon can't prevent things like natural disasters - this is the point of backing up in general - you can't predict), but if you're going to act like you gave good examples, at least give good examples.
Statements like yours sound nice but you didn't really provide any reason what so ever to back it up.

What proof would you use to make your statement stand up?
Sure, developer time matters. But you've got to be able to recognise sunk cost, the product of 100 hours work should only ship if it is better than what came before. The end result matters more than the developers time - if it fails, there won't be any money to pay the developer, no matter how long he has been working.
If I woke up tomorrow and one of those sites was down for good, Mint is the one I'd miss the most.
"Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream"

People keep saying this as if it were fact, but never provide evidence. From what I've seen, Mint has a great potential for revenue. I've not seen any public statements about their financials.
Alright, then paying $100k in student loans for social interaction is a little screwed up. I am not saying it doesn't work, just that it is a little crazy.

I think universities are the next bubble to burst, they have inflated their grades and their tuition so much, it is ridiculous.

In the meantime, they are full of professors who have tenure and sit on their behinds all day not doing anything, or being too absorbed into their research and not giving a damn about undergraduate students who pay thousands of dollars per credit hour to be there.
This was interesting inside view. One thing that I did notice is the statement that the level of changes on the MSFT side was causing him grief. I'd be curious, as a follow-up, to see if he continues to develop on Linux. It seems like he has generalized the ease of the port into other perceived benefits on Linux (e.g. rate of change, lower need to adapt code) that might not be true in practice, or at least as true as he feels they will be based on the porting experience.

Sounded a little bit like some kind of initial success euphoria bias. Yes, I just made that up. I remember it with Rails too. This isn't a knock on Rails--just using it as an example--but a lot of people had such a blast porting code (me included) that they assumed everything was peaches and cream until they realized that the big, dirty things in web apps like scaling, localization and the impact of poor planning didn't magically disappear.
Null Is Benign
VCL first. But more generally any application. I think that a MVC approach will be the best one. Just that we need tooling to help us to do this.
Your comment isn't really useful :/ you're obviously an outlier. Most people would go insane if they couldn't access youtube or facebook.

Social media, music, video are real problems that people have, and need solutions to. The problem comes when a startup doesn't really solve anything new and just copies existing stuff.