skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all: Despite not being in your target audience, I really like your landing page. It looks fresh and professional to me. Maybe a nice key visual (e.g. a screenshot of an actual survey) in the hero section would make it even more compelling and help understanding what polljoy does in the very first moment.

Regarding marketing the app, here are a few (unsorted) ideas off the top of my head:

* You said that you developed the app in order to scratch your own itch. So basically, you need to find more people like you (or rather your co-founding developers) that are in need for such a solution. Where do these people "hang around"? Where are they looking for help with their work, where would they look for such a tool? How can you get in touch with them?

* Contacting developers directly would be one of my first ideas, too. How many developers did you contact? Did you get any feedback at all? Did you add tracking to your mails so that you can estimate open/click rates? Maybe you need to improve your cold pitch mail...

* Are there any conferences or game development meetups in your area where you could spread the word about your service?

* Did you think about performance marketing, e.g. AdWords?
An important criterion is missing: the quality of human interaction.

How nice and attentive your average vendors, service providers, random strangers you ask for directions are do affect your experience in myriad ways.

In fact, it may inversely correlate with spatial density. The optimal density is likely not the highest possible, as the report implies. Hong Kong is notorious for its stratospheric real estate prices. This likely contributes to the rush way average citizens, esp. lower-income service personnel, e.g. 7-11 employees, spend their time--they need to make ends meet or to fulfill strict quota set by business owners who need to pay those high rents.
After 5 years of getting my degree in psychology the dirty little secret I have found is this: all of the persuasion studies are incredibly appealing to marketers and the general pop and also the researchers who are incentivized by money and reputation. Making deep insights is akin to crack for a scientist.

But the truth is most effects and mechanisms are overemphasized and exaggerated, because it makes a more compelling story. That is not to say that many of the mechanisms and factors that are reported aren't real or influential, it's just that they are over-hyped, over-appreciated or less understood than the academics reporting these studies back to the public care to admit.

You are putting far too much weight on the power of association in advertising. Much of the benefits of branding can be explained in a much more parsimonious manner. If given the choice between a and b, you will probably pick the one that is more familiar to you. Advertising works best if it gets people's attention. If you think people drink Dos Equis because people subconsciously think it will make them as cool as the Dos Equis man, you've been drinking the Koolaid. No, it works because it's funny, memorable and it gets a lot of exposure.
As someone who lived in cities with pretty big variations of sprawl (ranging from Dallas to downtown Tokyo), I feel like density is positively correlated with ease of living.

This obviously depends on your priorities, but being able to walk to the grocery store is a nice experience. I don't have a garden right now, but the public greenery I have access to are usually nicer-kept and I can do 80% of the things I would do in my yard anyways (picnics and the like).

The utility of density is very dependent on lifestyle, obviously, but if you haven't tried spending some time in a really dense area, I'd recommend it. You might find that you won't miss the things you thought you would.
Sadly not. It's just another way of obtaining a Tier 2 (General) visa, which comes with all the restrictions I have described. Telling somebody they can stick around for 5/6 years, contributing taxes and economic growth, starting a family, etc. but that they can't start their own business, and they may be told to leave in the end through no fault of their own, is a very lopsided proposal.

EDIT: prior to 2010, there was a highly skilled migrant programme. You would be allowed to perform any kind of work in the UK, provided you met certain requirements. So you could arrive, work a highly skilled position and build a side business. Sure, it could fail, but at least that's through your own fault and you'd be working on it from day 1 so you'd find out sooner or later if you should remain or not.

Today, you cannot do this. You have to hang around for 5/6 years, hope you get indefinite leave to remain (ILR), and only then are you allowed to start a business. But you might be refused ILR, and then you have to leave. It's a nonsensical policy when you consider people's private lives are involved.
They rated Boston a 5 (worst). Boston is a pretty compact city, and you definitely don't need a car.
OpenGL has support for: image/shader/texture/. The standard is quite clear about how these are handled. Anyway the trend (and demand from games programmers) is away from more features and towards a simplified and lower level API.
I understood nothing.
The Tokenisation FAQ by EMVCo suggests that the BINs could be selected from the card network's existing ranges, which would allow merchants and acquirers to simply pass them through to the network (where the de-tokenisation is performed):
http://www.emvco.com/faq.aspx?id=264#13
Interview with Peter Thiel
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11098971/Peter-Thiel-the-billionaire-tech-entrepreneur-on-a-mission-to-cheat-death.html
Hong Kong does indeed have a surprising amount of accessible green space. However, you can only call it the world's best city in terms of "Spatial Adjusted Liveability" if you entirely ignore the stratospheric rentals that lead to a whole lot of people living like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertypicturegalleries...
Apple explicitly states that the iPhones 5, 5s and 5c are supported when using the watch:
https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/

The 5 and 5c don't even support Tough ID, so they have to use some other form of identification, either on the watch itself or on the paired phone.
I almost did this to my friend group (who use iMessage and WhattsApp exclusively)

Maybe I'm making perfect the enemy of good, but I won't be 'pushing' my friends to move to anything other than textsecure. Unfortunately the iPhone version is a long time coming (and necessary for a switch in my friend group), and I'm becoming doubtful that it will ever arrive.

I don't want to force my friend group to switch only to have to learn the lesson all over again. I prefer an open-source, end-to-end solution with a lot of eyes on it.
No matter what, FB will *never* delete your activity
Interesting to see this on HN as we dug out an entrance to a WW2 German bunker yesterday afternoon here in Jersey (the British island). Like urbex and WW2? Photos here: https://plus.google.com/photos/105983129534664287827/albums/...

Some videos also on our group's YouTube page, with a quick walk-through. We already have one of these restored and open to the public, and we were after parts and a bit of exploration.

As for the accuracy, WW2 guns were good enough. This Youtube video on mechanical fire-control computers is very interesting and I've seen it come up on HN before several times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

Lots of this equipment survives today. It was built to last and many people still collect it. We've also got about a dozen French and German cannon dumped from cliffs that we'll recover some day.
Original text at
https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info
National Instruments' Labview environment also fits in this category. To me it feels like an analog of an electronic schematic diagram editor. I find that it turns into a visual mess as the system becomes complex. To counteract this, one has to spend a lot of time and effort revising the visual elements, and this is not time spent solving the problem better. Of course, many of us spend a lot of time revising our text-form code for clarity and ease of maintenance.
It's easy to forget how small the UK is, which leads to London centric commentary when people talk about the UK tech scene. In reality, a startup could be based comfortably outside of London where the cost of living and the cost of operating are a lot cheaper, creating not only a better deal for founders and employees, but investors money would be going where it's needed and not on rent or rates. I've recently had the opportunity to see what rents people are charging for office space at the moment and it's obscene.

The London investors will still be there. The talent in London is usually from somewhere else in the UK or Europe anyway. It's a cool city, but it's not as cool as having a successful startup of your very own.
Having fairly recently been to Hong Kong (#1) and Phnom Penh (bottom 10) I wouldn't say HK was that much more liveable. Indeed the air made my eyes sting. The wages would be far higher in HK though.
I have a 14 year old and their habits are interesting. They don't use FB. They hate how FB messes with a timeline. They were big Instagram users but dumped it pretty hard and are all in on SnapChat. Instagram is only for very deliberate "statement" photos (dressed up for school dance etc) They don't need multitask SN's like FB. They use single task apps and switch all the time between them without blinking. And they have no loyalty. They'd drop SnapChat in a second I suspect if the 3 coolest kids started using something else.
> That sounds like if I was bombarded of pictures of people smiling drinking coke I might forget that it tastes like crap and want to drink it.

It certainly seems that you have made your opinion on coke, and that it's a strong one. Pictures of smiling people won't obviously overturn that, they don't have that large power, but in this case, you are not a target group.

However, imo majority of people don't have that strong opinon, and the less of that they have, the proportionally larger the weak influence of advertising will become.
If you read the article you will discover that the very next paragraph is called "Perl/Python/Ruby are also evil".
Maybe, I dunno. But I'd sooner conflate, say, C and Java (something that would never happen, but anyway) than willingly conflate command-line and screen-oriented - the former are different in degree, but the latter are different in kind, you know what I mean?
Right, just a 200k investment :) This belies a very specific view of how enterpreneurship works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple... none of these companies would have met a similar requirement in their times. Furthermore, by the time most people have 200k to investment a business they're likely to have settled in a geographically locked private life.
Munich Data: Good and Bad Years at Oktoberfest
i'm work only on freebsd - so zfs was already there.
why snapshots every 5 minutes? it's cheap and i lost at most 5 minutes of my work if something bad happens.
I'm not sure there's a point in ranking cities. I've lived in a handful of the cities listed, and their ranking has very little to do with my own perception of them. Cities are a bit like people in the sense that they have a character, you can fall in love with a quirky city and be bored out of your mind with one that looks great on paper (I'm looking at you Toronto).

I guess that highly ranked cities are more likely to be a pleasant place to live to the average person. As for myself, I've noticed climate and warmth of people are my own best indicators.
I'm in South Africa. I work for a global company with offices in London. I have very specific knowledge that makes me a natural candidate for employment by the London office that nobody in the EU would have. But I have private life and certain freedoms here in South Africa, which I have to give up to work in the UK under the current visa scheme. I would have to terminate all my side projects that earn revenue, and only work on non-income generating projects - or perhaps become a couch potato.

How does that benefit the UK, bearing in mind I can easily get the visa with these restrictions? All the UK is going to end up with, under this policy, is a majority of migrants with no dreams to do anything bigger than what their boss tells them to do.
Probably A Discipline of Programming

http://www.alibris.com/A-Discipline-of-Programming-Edward-W-...
So Ello is basically a Facebook + AdBlock Plus. Those who care about ads block them already. I completely agree with this comment.
Thiel's opinion of the NSA really runs against the grain:

The debate about security and civil liberties, he says, is often framed as involving a trade-off between the two things. ‘My view is that it’s quite the opposite. As a libertarian, I believe that it’s critical to develop technology like this, because the alternative is that you will get very low-tech solutions that are enormously intrusive but have very little value, which is basically what happened after 9/11 in the United States. For example, if you have no way of potentially identifying likely terrorists you may require every single person to take their shoes off every time they get on an airplane. And I think this is the way one needs to think of the entire, somewhat dysfunctional, National Security Agency/industrial complex. It’s more the Keystone Cops than Big Brother.
Toronto made it? Hard to believe. No way I'd live here if it weren't for the job. Way too expensive.
Maybe when companies are successful they hire employees till the money's mostly gone. So it'd kinda work for profitable companies but not most startups.
Total UK population is nearly double California's population so it isn't that small. the problem is that London has a prestige to it, so business in London is seen as more serious than business elsewhere (and salaries higher) so it draws the talent.
Top 5 money problems Americans face
> E.g. modern C code tends to use "int" or "long" all over the place without considering if "short" or "char" is likely to be sufficient

"Sufficient" is bit odd choice of word here. Word-sized types should be used unless there is a good reason not to. See nkurzs comment for a great example for this:

> The first 'movl' wipes out any bits greater than 32 if they are there. This is because x was defined as an int, and not a long.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8346336
What am I looking at? What does this chart present?
Also London is one of the cities in the EU zone with the highest cost of life (maybe it is really the highest of the entire EU). If you work there as a junior and you must live inside the city it is very problematic to find a even just decent flat and have still enough money to survive decently in the short term.
> I know what you're building and totally rooting for you!

Any hints? I'm extremely curious!
Thanks!

Do you think we should write content on our blog, or write it on other places? eg- other sites for guest posting, or linkedin etc

Should we be worrying about SEO for the articles and keywords etc?
This sounds incredible! could you detail the process?? I would love to set up a similar system. @raamvi
Conclusion on the page:

> Q: Is Homoiconic much ado about nothing ? A: Yes, after much wasted bandwidth on c2 this seems to be the only logical conclusion.

I would add my $.02 to the discussion. Homoiconicity is the "same" representation of program and data, and they give Lisp and Tcl as examples. I want add the following to the philosophical discussion.

Q: Are program & data representations really the "same" if data can represent invalid programs? E.g. the form (nil 3 4) is valid data, but invalid program in Lisp.

I would answer "no" to this question.
> At first glance, the increase in speed from seed to Series A in Europe from 424 to 205 days appears to be a good sign. However, remember that the average seed investment in Europe in 2013 was $150,000 compared with $500,000 in the U.S.

>

> We suspect that the reduced time between rounds in Europe unfortunately signals that entrepreneurs are being forced to refocus on fundraising more quickly at the expense of building and scaling a product and the business.

I believe this is true, my own anecdotal experience backs it up. We're a London based startup ( https://microco.sm/ ) and we raised our initial £150k for our friends and family round which enabled us to build the platform and get to 43,500 users.

But... we're now in a tough spot with the runway end looming, and have to return to fundraising. I'd much rather carry on focusing on the product development and improving awareness of our offering. But instead it's a drop-everything and go focus on raising money... which in-turn kills a little of our momentum.

It feels like the European adversity to risk manifests as smaller investments that result in the startups not having as much time to mature their offering and build that momentum before constantly going back for more investment.
FWIW: I have tried to contact ohlife to ask about keeping the service up (on new servers / new domain etc. is all fine). I believe I have the time and wherewithall to do that before Oct 4th, especially if the costs can be shared.

(also: none of us - I assume - knows the back-story. I wouldn't judge before you do and have time to digest it)
Scientists reveal ‘fair system’ for countries to tackle climate change
Tabs: Designing Firefox 3.2 (2009)
That does not work with companies dealing in physical Goods ... At all
Thanks frobfoo for the feedback.

"You said that you developed the app in order to scratch your own itch. So basically, you need to find more people like you (or rather your co-founding developers) that are in need for such a solution. Where do these people "hang around"? Where are they looking for help with their work, where would they look for such a tool? How can you get in touch with them?"

We're thinking to start in stackoverflow and unity forums, and try to figure out other sites and forums. Challenge is that we don't really post or have accounts there so we're starting from scratch and concern about being spammy?

"Contacting developers directly would be one of my first ideas, too. How many developers did you contact? Did you get any feedback at all? Did you add tracking to your mails so that you can estimate open/click rates? Maybe you need to improve your cold pitch mail..."

We got pretty low click rates, about 5% and then low conversion on the homepage. We guess that they just get bombarded with so many messages from ad networks etc the tendency is to delete everything?

"Are there any conferences or game development meetups in your area where you could spread the word about your service?"

We're in Hong Kong and no travel budget, so not really :(

"Did you think about performance marketing, e.g. AdWords?"

I checked out the rates, seems really too expensive for adwords, maybe the VC backed ad and analytic companies are pushing up the keywords for everyone. Not really an option, have to figure out how to grow with no/minimal marketing spend..

Appreciate the help
We all got messed up with the transition to OpenGL 4 and now we are gonna have another OpenGL? I don't see OpenGL getting out of this funk until the language you learn today will be useful tommrow. Perhaps, a new API is a step in the right direction but things are gonna hurt bad bad for years to come, especially when OEMs don't support the API.
The Emergence of Life on Earth by Robert Hazen
Update - switched the headlines (we're a/b testing a few) over from "poll" to "survey"
Designing the Browser of the Future (2009)
Cockroaches: The insect we're programmed to fear
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-pursuit-o...
Larry Ellison Retires as Oracle’s Chief
tl:dr - balance your mind and body.
Thanks. Like I said in the original comment I'm for opening up immigration. I just wonder how many people there are like you. Are there enough to convince government the spend the time and money to change the immigration laws.
All the whining and complaining makes me wondering how anyone was able to write something with OpenGL at all. This is fascinating because a great amount of people were actually able to write awesome Games and Applications with this API.

Look at the whole lot of mobile devices. I have no numbers to base this statement on but I would be bold enough to claim that OpenGL is thanks to the multiplatform ability by far the most successful graphics API out there. The set of devices that brings some or another form of OpenGL support outnumbers other graphics platforms. This alone is a huge accomplishment. Heck, even Minecraft was able to run on PowerPC systems until they pushed the java version supported[1].

But now I need to look at the link and have to admit that the criticism is still correct. The API is still pretty rough and could see some improvements. I know this myself, I also played around with OpenGL at some point. There is a lot of boilerplate code that needs to be written before you can start yourself with the real game. This was always the case. This is why we always had an engine, a framework to built on.

But to say that it all is a huge pile of shit is a little bit harsh …

[1] https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/884921-mine...
> I would answer "no" to this question.

You're declaring a conclusion that goes against the outcomes of several pages of heavy argument. When you do this, it's customary to attempt to support your position with arguments. :)

An only-somewhat-related anecdot. I remember sitting in the car with my sister and mother when I was young. My sister was learning to write. On this day, she asked what a fictitious word meant. She showed us a word she had written down, and then said it out loud. We didn't know what she meant. But we worked out that was playing with an idea: does the fact that we can use the tools to represent an idea (in this case, that you can form apparently words from letters) mean that it maps to an idea. As it happens, no.
Or maybe it can't be monetized due to development costs?
As long as there are multiple different GPUs around, there will always be a need for multiple code paths if you want to get good use of those GPUs, whether you use the same API or not.
Yeah, what is that? "The great thing about living in Atlanta is that it's so easy to leave!"
Our Aussie mobile payments startup
Wouldn’t it be harder to recruit developers in other UK cities?
>“The notion is you can make end runs around price controls by increasing the number of things you do and bill for,” said Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, a health policy expert at the Brookings Institution until recently.

.. like promoting and charging for unnecessary and damaging surgery on baby boys, robbing them of bodily integrity and killing ~200 infants a year from complications.
This is for SaaS companies as described in the article, title maybe needs this detail
As for some kind of material test, I propose that a language which can be expressed in itself in a page, has the desired properties behind what people mean by homoiconic.

The fact that the small set of primitive abstraction LISPs (even though cons, read aren't necessarily trivial) use are enough to express/manipulate LISP. Doesn't have to be a data-structure thing.
Came here for this. (Not saying Ng is wrong though.)
Lucid Synchrone: an experimental language for reactive systems implementation
Small as in physical size. Even with a sparsely populated Scotland, the UK has around half the landmass of California so its possible to commute to/from London from a great number of locations.

You can't commute from Harvard to Mountain View everyday but you can commute to London from Oxford, Cambridge or Bristol. For occasional meetings, travelling to/from Glasgow/Edinburgh is doable.

We should take advantage of this and support and encourage startups to bootstrap in less expensive post-codes rather than competing for office space with investment banks.
Even in their specific ratings Toronto does poorly (although better than it should), and yet somehow bad scores almost across the board adds up to good?