skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It takes a lot to make me dumb-founded. This is one of those times. Microsoft isn't small, which means multiple people all agreed and signed off on this being a good idea? I feel like a small group of the same people decided that this, the 64 cell upgrade matrix for Windows 7, and windows 7 starter edition were good decisions. Please keep them away from the XBox, which is still one of my favorite consumer devices of all time. Actually a close second behind the iPhone.
I usually really like the New York Times, but this is just raw data. There's no exposition.
Response to Open Letter, You're Killing Me Zappos
Eh, calling BS on this. The sheer attention TC gets from TC50 is going to prove too much of a temptation for either party to stay away for long. Neither Arrington's temper nor Calcanis's smarm will be sufficient barriers to another conference some time down the road.
But really, Andrew's redesign isn't the point.

He wasn't saying his design was definitely the way to go, he simply took a stab at it as an example.

The points he made in the text of his letter aren't invalidated by any arguable shortcomings of his design.

Also, while you're right that he removed certain front page elements, he specifically said in the text that his design "doesn’t reflect all of the functionality and content currently in the Zeta". The point was to make a general design for the sake of his argument, not to meticulously integrate every single piece of functionality into his design.
Well, maybe like how people switched from ICQ to MSN to gTalk to Skype, or from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit to HN. Opening a user account on a competing website is much easier than changing OS or car engine.
How long was the Apple keynote session? :D
To find reliable programmers, start by being a reliable recruiter...

DO:

1. Check with your inner circle first. You know their interests, skills, and reliability. If they're not available, ask if they would vouch for anyone they know that might be interested and available.

2. Broaden your search to past associates who you have reason to believe would appreciate hearing about the opportunity.

3. Check the list you've been maintaining (!) of programmers whose public work you admire and who have indicated availability for consulting work.

4. Present the opportunity to relevant user groups or communities. Be sure their policy welcomes such queries, especially if you're not a regularly contributing member.

5. Be upfront and explicit about available compensation. It wastes both party's time trying to get a max $25/hr opportunity together with a min $125/hr consultant.

6. Consider permitting remote work. Some of the most effective teams I've worked with have been distributed geographically. If you can make this work, you've increased your pool of possible matches tremendously.

DON'T:

Assume that your need to find someone gives you license to be pest. The one person who ends up in the position will appreciate that you found him/her. A small group will appreciate the consideration. A somewhat larger group will tolerate the intrusion. Most of the rest of the world won't want to be interrupted. Try not to bother them.
Tactile keyboard for iPhone
The reason Steve's product launches are the best in the world isn't because he's more dynamic than Tony Robbins, more charismatic that pg, or more quicker on his feet than Boris Johnson. Nor is it because he's using NLP. It's because he's used his background as an entheogen enthusiast, an experience junky, and an appreciator of world cultures to create his own private set of rituals. This works basically the same way that organized religion works, but instead of "community magic" it's Steve's "reality distortion field." (Because no one has access to the power these rituals confer.)

The number one thing we're missing in the startup field right now is a good set of rituals that dictate how new businesses are launched. We never evolved this in the West because 250 years ago everyone lived in the same town their entire life, so all their potential customers already knew them. And 100 years ago everyone went to work for these enormous companies.

But today launching your first business, or any new business, is a major part of a person's life, just as big as a wedding or a bar mitzvah. But as a society we haven't yet caught up.

If you look at all the big companies, like Facebook or whatever, a huge number have gotten their start by spamming people, or astroturfing, or doing some other really unethical stuff.

What we need is an open source set of rituals that govern how new entrepreneurs introduce their products and services to the world, and also govern what is an appropriate response from the people being pitched to. The point of the rituals wouldn't be to say what people can and can't do per se, but rather to induce people into a state of mind conducive to acting ethically and transparently.

Anyway that is my take at least.
A full economy, with people on normal sleep / commute / eat / work schedules. Each person is a free agent. You'd model different relationships and the likelihood of in person interaction.

A REALISTIC simulation like this on a global scale would be ridiculously useful in multiple fields. And while several groups have been trying to do something similar, there just isn't enough data for it to work properly at the individual agent level.

(At higher levels you have for example http://www.gleamviz.org/2009/09/us-winter-projections-mitiga... )
Hat trick for Singapore startup scene
Funny how this is happening the same week we discover Google now supports (or works on) real time search: http://blog.omgili.com/?p=108
I would like to see a similar video based on a Microsoft marketing event. I'd be willing to bet that the word 'feature' is featured.
It's hard to think of many things less resonant with the HN crowd than Jung. But this is a good article about a pivotal event for anyone who is interested in him.
I think they tried that when the T1's first came out.
Yeah, I took a lot of interest in that.

Step 3 in the simulation is to make it a game.
The prices of the Stradivarius violins are as reasonable as the price of Van Goghs and vintage wines. The truth is, Joshua Bell playing a swinette would sound better than me on a Stradivarius.
Answer 2: It's always easier to raise money while you still can.
So... it turns an iphone into a blackberry? I'm terribly amused.
But you can get global stats to find interesting things. It's similar to traffic simulation. It is often hard to decipher the cause of patterns, but you can show that a sequence of lights will reduce congestion.
I'm confused. How is that a problem? A student who is having trouble with a problem, rather than being told "Huh. You must be some special kind of stupid, everyone else got it" is instead told "Huh, you must be a real kinesthetic learner."

That does not seem like a problem in the slightest. Yes, it does assign part of that as an identity to a student, but an identity as "Visual Learner" is a lot better, and significantly more useful that "Bad at math." I can't tell you the number of people who have said they were "Bad at math" when their only problem was that they had only ever been exposed to visual math lessons.

I still don't understand what is exactly the problem with having children identify with a learning style. Yes, "their" learning style is more based off of preferences than anything, but being able to acknowledge that you prefer to learn a certain way seems be a step up, not a step down as the article seems to be arguing.
Not true. The code was changed. There is no "University of Maryland System" anymore - only a "University System of MD" (www.usmd.edu)

UMUC and UMD are two different schools and the degrees says so.
well, You seem to be taking this 'all value is relative' (which is true, and the reason why capitalism works.) thing to mean that changing the branding of your product is no different from making your product better in a measurable way.

I disagree. Sending the consumer false signals is a very different thing from actually producing a better or cheaper product.
For link-bait titles, I look at the comments first to see if other people considered the article worth reading. This information could be exposed by displaying the ratio of clicks on the link vs clicks on the discuss link.
Heh interesting argument for color blindness as an optimisation rather than a disability.

Does anyone know if short-sightedness/long-sightedness results in a corresponding benefit to the opposite-sightedness?
The latency in the network has more to do with the networking equipment than the transmission speed. Also routing can often cause longer return times and dropped packets.

Paying the high price ensures that their transactions don't leave the building and all of the equipment in the middle is optimised for that type of operation.

The only other solution would be 10 miles of dedicated fibre through a metropolitan area. Not a cheap solution.
You're not seriously comparing twitter to these things, are you?

What will they do when a competitor offers to "keep your account in sync with twitter" (tweets and followers)? Forbid it in their TOS ofcourse - and that's the beginning of the end.

Also get over the "everyone is using" myth. Last time I checked the number of twitter accounts was in the ballpark of 0,1% of the internet population. Based on their publicized, inflated figures mind you - likely including all dead and double accounts.
>meanwhile, you can survive with LVM and md RAID

Why would I want to barely survive on beans and rice when caviar is available at the same price?
Not true. And not sure why you think you can get something for nothing. First, the code was changed. There is no "University of Maryland System" anymore - only a "University System of MD" (www.usmd.edu) UMUC degrees say "UMUC". UMCP degrees say, simply: "University of Maryland", and UMCP is the only school in the USMD authorized to do so as the flagship university.

UMUC is a separate university within the USMD. Why you would attempt to argue otherwise is beyond me. It is a fine school for its mission -- but is not U-Md.

UMUC and UMD are two different schools and the degrees says so. for example, an MBA from the top 25 UMD can be found here:

www.rhsmith.umd.edu

The UMUC MBA (open admissions, different school) is different and can be found here.

www.umuc.edu/mba
It's not just birth control: Even more important is education of girls, which is the number one factor reducing natality. Educated urban women (and educated urban families) just don't have the 8-15 children that rural peasant families do (before industrialization anywhere in the world, for thousands of years). Part of it is also that previously >50% of children died before age 5. Now infant mortality is extremely low in most industrialized countries.
Checked exceptions are probably are of my biggest pet-peeves about Java (erasure and lack of closures/first order functions are the other ones). They create excess verbosity, but what good are they if most code I've seen does this:

try {
foo.bar();
} catch (FooException fe) {
logger.error(fe);
}

A descriptive crash would be more useful, especially if the exception is thrown as a result of an invariant being violated. Scala is a step forwards in this manner, but now there's the issue of remembering which Java methods (foreign to Scala) rely on exceptions to convey important information (e.g. anything which throws InterruptedException).
Apple mail actually works really well with exchange 07 now since it uses exchange web services that replaced the WebDAV stuff in 03. I am sure you have all read about this or maybe even used it but I have to say it's very easy to set up on the client side and much more stable than the nightmare that is outlook 2003 or 2007. I also like iCal as a separate app...

Getting exchange 07 configured correctly is another story altogether, but after a bunch of deployments I am beginning to to like it a lot more than exch 2003 since you can do so much with PowerShell for administration and to manage large numbers of mailboxes and users.
Outlook was always too busy for me. It was almost designed for people who want to spend their day "living" inside of email and calendar appointments. Ever click on the Journal by accident and get a wizard to set it up? New emails greet you with a "click me" pop-up notification including preview text, a sound, and a little "new mail" icon by your clock. It's like the most important thing you should do right now is stop whatever you're working on and read the new message; mental death for anyone attempting to concentrate on something.

I know you can shut this all off and make Outlook quieter, but sometimes coworkers and bosses don't like this. "Did you get the email I just sent you 30 seconds ago?" The thing that bugs me about Outlook more than anything is that its incessant ADD can affect an entire organization and trickle into its blood. It takes a group of rebels to fight against it.

This isn't really an issue if you're job is reactive. Customer support, IT getting an email alert that a server just went down, etc... Then Outlook can be really helpful so long as you know how to "tame the beast" with email rules.

Exchange is a nice piece of tech (albeit a bit of a pain to setup and configure from an IT's perspective - I've done several builds myself). It "tightly" integrates with Outlook in a properly-configured Active Directory environment. For corporate-hosted email, the Outlook/Exchange combo is pretty tough to beat if you have the cash for it.*

In non-corporate land, however, I'm in love with Mail.app. It's so simple and basic. Far less annoying than Outlook. There still are new-mail notifications (easily turned off), though they're less tempting to click on as you don't get a mini-message preview as with Outlook. Search is MILLIONS of times better than Outlook.

I think it comes down to a matter of taste and work habits. Some people live and die by Outlook. Others like myself are just plain sick of it for a list of reasons and like something else. It's like OS-wars. Just pick whatever makes you happiest and stick to it. Don't tell others what they should be using or how they should be using it, etc... :)

*If anyone has any experience using Mac OS X Server's mail server and Mail.app, compared to Exchange/Outlook, please share!
I don't see how a $25 burger on the menu signifies that $25 burgers are selling. Especially in the IT industry. It's normal for vendors to have 'list prices' that are 50%-70% higher than what you can negotiate them down to. (seriously. talk to a small business who has bought a new NetAPP or EMC storage device.)

Also, yeah, we are all biased, even nerds. I'm sure you could, for a short while, trick nerds into paying more because of those biases. But I'd bet money that they'd figure it out, probably sooner rather than later, and they'd be mad at you.

If you are selling to the middle managers who tell nerds what to do, it's different. But I'm a long ways from being able to hire someone who can pull off that sort of thing.
> Actually on a long enough scale population growth is exponential

This doesn't really make sense. Human population growth could potentially be modeled as a logistic curve, but I doubt that even really explains or will explain things adequately. More realistically, human population growth without new technology or social structures showing up is exponential, but those dramatically change its shape, to the point I'm not sure we can predict population more than 2-3 decades out.
Isn't it at the end there where you're supposed to name-drop your startup, http://www.swagapalooza.com ? ;)
Exactly, that's what I did, but my action was not recorded in survey results which became more biased because of lack of options. It's like asking what my favorite color is and only offering 3 options without the option "other".
Prior art as a design method
It depends on your definition of better. I can't comment on Apple's offering but I suspect your definition of better is feature based.

Exchange has a lot of promise (easy server and user integration, if you use small business server it's an easy setup, if you use a standard win server god help you) but it's features are incredibly poorly limited, the performance is horrendous and it's missing lots of basics. I truly have no idea how the money and brains that must be behing Exchange could have so poorly tested the system for usability and real-world use.

Outlook again is better than any other email interface I've used. Customisation and filtering and stuff can be a pain and have their limits, and there are some general problem but overall it's not that bad. But one thing that is bad again is its performance - it's terrible! With Xobni, search isn't such a problem (even instant outlook search can be slow) but just opening an email, and eventually the interface is an experience in frustration unparalled for the average user.
Ooh, new word: entheogen - noun (plural entheogens)

1. A psychoactive substance used for the purpose of inducing a mystical or spiritual experience.
Ask HN: If 37signals apps were free...
Ok so in the next few months I'll be releasing a web app similar in functionality to several of the 37signals apps and I've had quite a hard time deciding on the exact revenue model/pricing structure to aim for.

Lately I've seen quite a lot of discussion on HN and even from 37signals themselves about whether or not you should aim to get mega-eyeballs, aka Facebook, or whether you should grow more organically by signing up paying customers - building a smaller but more immediate cash flow over time, aka 37signals.

I'd like to imagine a scenario in which Basecamp and several of the other 37signals apps were free. In this hypothetical they might also have a freemium deal where they have a ridiculously cheap pro version like Google Apps for business - $50/user/year.

Currently, it's safe to assume with their current model they are steadily growing market share and are making several $million in annual revenue. I wonder, however, where they'd be today if they had a purely free, ad supported system in place of their current monthly fee plans. This also assumes they had other means of funding themselves whether raising more money through angels/VCs or they depended more heavily on their consulting business.

Anyway, I pose this question to HN. I'm not really sure how to answer it. My only doubts about a free model for them would be that possibly businesses expect to pay for services much more than individuals do so perhaps they wouldn't be perceived as high quality as they are now.. but then again if they had millions more users than they do now with a targeted ad system in place perhaps they'd be that much better off.

?
"... The number one thing we're missing in the startup field right now is a good set of rituals that dictate how new businesses are launched. ..."

I thought there already is a way, release quietly and informally, then listen to the feedback.
Maybe I've been spoiled by all the good blog posts I'm exposed to here, but the writing style of this article is atrocious.

Some parts are broken up into single paragraph sections (which are frequently much too long), the headings add no value at all, and the content itself is a rambling drunkards walk through only loosely related ideas.

If there was ever a case for "reprocessing" someone else's work as a value add - this is it.
First rocky planet found outside solar system
Needs code examples.
U.S. government sets up online 'app store'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc spot on!
The enlightenment's operating system
Usability evaluation: Empathy and Pidgin
Most try-catches are considered boiler plate and are often generated. For example of the default options in NetBeans generates the following:

try {
foo.bar();
} catch (Exception ex) { Logger.getLogger(InvalidConversionException.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
}
It sounds like a minor thing, but I hate when I highlight text in chrome, right click and select to search, it opens the new tab in the forefront. I want it in the background like Firefox does.
Agreed, though that's only for certain browsers. Hopefully either those browsers fix it or some hack around it is established. What browser are you using?

Until getting any push/real-time features is going to come with that.
FileNotFoundException is not really a corner case, it's all but unavoidable race. No matter how soon you open the file after verifying its existence, it could have gone away. And the only reasonable thing you can do in the face of it is route the message that the file is missing to the user one way or another, and possibly exit.

In that way, it makes sense for a top-level handler, such as at the main() routine or in the event loop in a GUI app, to be the one to handle it, and for all intermediates to pass it up. The fact that most meaningful applications do I/O at some level, means that almost the only routines that can be indicated not to throw this exception or a similar I/O exception, are functionally pure ones, or the ones that implement the aforementioned user notification.
another difference is that the $25 burger is signaling "this is not like other burgers. this can not be thought of as a commodity; this burger is /special/"

First, like I said, smart business owners base their businesses on commodities they can get from multiple vendors.

Second, All of my marketing is focused on saying 'Hey, you can treat what I'm selling like a commodity.' - the thing is, I am selling something that is fairly similar to what my competitors are selling. But my competitors are good at marketing, and they charge quite a bit more than I need to. It's in my best interest to not differentiate, to instead say 'Hey, I'm kind of like those guys over there' - I want to turn the market for what I'm selling into a commodity market. Sure, a commodity market is best for consumers, but in my case, it's also better for me, because it slashes my marketing costs. I mean, it's not entirely fair to my competition, I am benefiting from the work they have done to introduce people to this class of products, but I think it's not unethical. This is just what happens as a market for a particular good or service matures.

From what I understand, marketing costs (or referral fees) have traditionally been a huge portion of the cost of providing shared hosting, and the barrier to entry into this market is only slightly higher.
It's nice that they are releasing this, but it's boilerplate that most shops are going to have in one form or another, whether by open source or something they brewed in-house long before an alternative surfaced.
How Mike Arrington wrote a post about us (without breaking into his house)
From Nicolás Boullosa, ceo-founder of faircompanies, an independent site on sustainability: "So Michael Arrington himself posted an article on faircompanies in TechCrunch. We just covered the making of of the note we personally left at the TechCrunch offices in Palo Alto. All that said, we don't want to encourage unpolite proceedings with anybody, and TechCrunch is not an exception."