skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is difficult to determine just what, exactly is so revolutionary about this device. Is it that it is small and easy enough for an untrained operator to run? Is it affordable enough for a bookstore to install?

I ask, because on-demand book printing is nothing new, and $8 a book has been achievable for a long time. Lulu.com does it with Xerox iGen3's and 4's, attached to perfect-binding equipment, with a really snazzy workflow that automates everything from order to shipping. Of course, a single-machine setup requires a trained operator and about $1 million. (I'm a certified iGen4 operator, but not affiliated with Lulu).
The "quality factor" of elite degrees has little to do with the education and a lot to do with who you can network with. Consequently, people think Harvard is the place to go not because they think Harvard grads have the prestige of being particularly smart (like say MIT grads have for CS or Julliard for music) but for being particularly well connected - something that everyone else has to bust their hump to build up happens by default at a place like this.

If the startup community (and well established, famous former startups like Google) only recruited from state polytech schools, those would be the hot schools to attend. Consequently, no-name schools like New Jersey Inst. of Tech would suddenly be full of startup minded people.

If those schools suddenly started charging $50k/yr for tuition and boarding (instead of the in-state tuition), that would select for people with money or access to money.

Make the admission process highly competitive and selective (GPA >3.8, SAT >1400 or parents donate a library wing).

Now NJIT is full of startup minded tech people with money. Add that up and you achieve the same thing that Harvard does for MBAs and Lawyers. Well connectedness with people who have the means to approach and achieve what they want.

There is no doubt that the education one receives at these places is also adequate to the task. Otherwise money, connections and no brains results in dumb ideas like Internet connected toasters and Flooz.com
Interesting, but not really surprising. Artists & musicians aren't "getting rich" either.. Is there some reason a normal(ish) distribution wouldn't apply to iPhone earnings?
Hiring an employee costs the business a lot more than what they the salary (think benefits, insurance, office space etc....). Where I work, the cost per day of a 'resource' is at least 4x their salary. Plus, if they're full-time you can't just use them when you need to, when you have cash etc - you're committing to paying them for a long time.
This code is not endian-dependent. You can only observe endianness when you address the same memory as two different types:

int x = 5;
char *chp = (char*)&x;
printf("This value is endian-dependent: %hhd\n", *chp);
I think the intent of the post was to have people review the post at an idea level, not to collaboratively write something.
> One VC, after investing in a company I was at, deliberately fed us the pitches of competing companies that were pitching them. Thanks, VC!

Well, but would you ever want to deal with that VC again ?

Thanks but no thanks, VC. We already know you can't be trusted. I'm actually surprised that you would accept such information, I find it highly unethical.
This squares with my experiences.

As for the design argument, I think that the thing that TDD actually encourages in terms of design is testability (something that I do think is desirable, in general). If you have high test coverage without using TDD, you've probably either taken testability into consideration before you wrote your code or you made some changes after the fact to accommodate your tests.
Yeah, you're right. I think the quotes page on IMDB has the names backwards, or I'm really in need of re-watching that film.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009
They extended apple's dev environment and then built an online iWork suite. They are likely going the 37 signals route until Apple offers them a check they can not refuse.
I'm curious: Did anyone else read "to do NOW" in the title as "to do Network Of Workstations"?

I think I might have too much clustering on my brain...
> Early stage folks tend to be more lightweight than the processes you mentioned.

It depends on how far you got under your own power and how big the deal is. Anything that comes from a fund will have the whole show regardless, they have to because otherwise if a company imploded after the deal was done they could be held liable.

And some small time investors are quite savvy, and have their own small army of people to call on. "Angel" deals are different, there it is all much more personal.

But even an Angel deal > 250K will have quite a bit of dd, unless there is a longstanding relationship between all parties.
If I remember right from my summer in Cambridge, it's basically a rebranded Barnes and Noble, yes?
Chemistry Nobel goes to ribosomes, the protein manufacturer
I misread "beaten" as "eaten" the first time, and was shocked at the "different attitude about corporal punishment", then even further shocked when I read that he was happy to go home, until I got to the final word...
I am a freelance web developer, so maybe I can show the other side of the coin to you.

For $15k from me, you would receive: 1) a complete website built to your specs (including advice on how to best design your site if desired) 2) a period of support and bug fixes after the site is finished and 3) a site built using readable, commented code with actual error handling. I charge by the hour, so you can keep me around as long as needed and make as many changes as you like.

It's lower risk to bring in a contractor than to hire a full-time employee. I don't require an office, a computer, health insurance, or a period of time to learn your company and its politics. If you don't like me or my work, you can generally terminate the contract without any legal problems as long as you pay your outstanding bill. I don't have to play office politics so I can do the things that an in-house developer wouldn't be allowed to do.

I come to the table with several sites under my belt and a library of code that I can draw from. Once you have a website built by a skilled contractor (note, there are lots of unskilled ones out there), you can bring in a less-skilled developer to maintain the site or enter into a reduced-fee maintenance contract.

Really, it comes down to what you plan on doing with the site. If your business is a website, you're probably better off developing it in-house.

If your business involves a website/web app but it isn't core to your business (or if you don't plan on continued maintenance), it makes sense to hire it out and use the money saved on other business expenses. eCommerce and CMS sites are a perfect example.

If you want a website to announce you exist, hire it out to the cheapest contractor or flat rate developer you can find. Just don't expect to be able to easily maintain it.

You tend to get what you pay for. I've worked on several sites where they hired out cheaper developers only to bring me in to clean up the mess and make the site work.
Here's a nickel kid, go try out your ridiculous proposition. I'll wait while you pull the power plug and restart...
Thanks - Mint is discussed in The Web Startup Success Guide [http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219858] but I actually found this more useful.

Update: the parent link disappeared? Did you delete it?
These links speak for themselves:
MS Ad: http://tipotheday.com/2008/09/08/microsofts-foot-in-mouth-lo...
MS Case Study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?...
There's a sample image below which it says "First results, 83 lines of code." Is that the total number of source lines in that version of the raytracer? Wow! I mean, the sample doesn't look especially beautiful, but 83!! WOW!!
Astronomers find a much larger ring around Saturn
What's the Secret Success of Mint.com? The Real Numbers...
Those are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from center to center, but Harvard (including Radcliffe) is already 2 miles from end to end. (I know, because I used to have to race from one to the other between classes at times.))

The real scandal with the Allston campus is that Harvard was buying it up piece by piece (most of it was admittedly pretty useless--train yards and trucking distribution points) using front corporations for the past 2-3 decades. Only recently did they come out and admit what they'd been doing.

I suppose there's some argument that they had to keep things quiet while buying, in order to discourage speculators from competing with them.

Now Allston is faced with a huge tax loss, though Harvard does voluntarily pay a property tax fee of $80M a year to Cambridge (or used to). That's probably a lot less than the commercial value of that land, but the non-commercial value of Harvard's central presence in Cambridge is hard to calculate.
Concurrency Can Be Deterministic (But The Type System Doesn’t Know It)
This isn't surprising, the simplicity of the problem does not exceed the overhead of parallelism. A task like that is actually quite rare in practice, but easy to stumble upon when doing demo or example code.

Even with Erlang I don't expect much improvement, when what you're solving is trivial for a single core, adding more cores and processes does not help.
what is really amazing is what amount of traffic goes directly to Wikipedia (just deducting from the spills that we are getting today).
Astonishingly Candid Conversations Break Out At The Lobby Conference
The value of connections is definitely real.

My class ('76) was one year ahead of Gates ('77), and included Scott McNealy (Sun founder), Trip Hawkins (EA founder), Tim O'Reilly, John Quartermann (sp?), and others.

(Not that I knew any of them well. Gates I knew casually from chatting before/after class, and Trip was the roommate of a friend from San Diego.)
Or having to have x% Canadian authors of which y% has to be in French ?
You may want to also check out kuro5hin.org. They've been doing a form of what you are talking about via the "edit queue" for quite some time, where members can comment and suggest changes using a different class of comments that reset prior to the article being published.

It's a shadow of what the community was at it's peak, but it still may offer some insight.
I'd definitely agree that TDD leads to testable code, which is usually a good thing. If you know how to write testable code, it's not as much of a win (in my opinion), since you tend to write with testing in mind. If you don't have experience with unit testing, though, doing strict TDD for a while can really help you learn what sort of constructs make for testable code.

The places I've seen TDD lead to less-than-desirable design is when some larger problem is broken into such tiny pieces with so many interfaces that it becomes hard to read through the code and follow the flow of control. That's certainly testable, but often times I personally get as much mileage out of writing tests one level up, against some higher-level abstraction or API that those other things are all components of, and not being so religious about breaking up all the little parts. In my experience those slightly-higher-level tests (they're not even "integration" tests, since they're still strictly against one logical component) tend to provide the same amount of value in terms of preventing regressions while requiring fewer compromises to make the little parts testable and giving more flexibility as to future refactoring. Essentially, you're treating a whole bunch of classes/parts as internal implementation details.
It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.
Jodi.org (art collective)
Why Facebook Should Acquire Foursquare - Caleb Elston
This is _hacker_ news. It doesn't need to be good for something as long as it's cool.
Good article until the last paragraph where he gave in to the temptation to make a sensationalistic statement. If Windows does indeed offer this functionality I've never seen it. Not in Windows 3.0, not in 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, or 7. You get a default application per file type and can choose to open any filetype with any other application on a per access basis. To the best of my knowledge you cannot even statically assign a specific filename.type to open with a different application. Everything goes by the filetype extension in Windows. If I'm wrong I apologize to the author in advance.
To paraphrase Alcuin, "those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of Google, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness."
Content is free. Formats are not
The longer the iFart apps remain the top selling apps and hard-working apps get rejected the less interested I am in developing for iPhone.
You'd think they'd act like grown-ups before the press, given media's tendency to blow things out of proportion. But nope, not Schmidt.
Man threatens to shoot Iphone; escorted to Genius Bar
Is it just me or does the entire interview seem very strained and uncomfortable? Schmidt seems to violently differ from Sergey and they both go compeltely mum when asked about their competitors.
I don't understand where the "free" comes in. I get that format (?) is important, but none of the things mentioned are free. They're all things you pay for being marketed in ways that you pay for. What does this have to do with free content with non-free formats?
Yep, I wasn't imagining this as some kind of lets all get together and write a blog post kind of thing. Really just to get some comments on "does this make sense", "am i dangerously offending anyone here", etc.

Just like Paul Graham's essays. Those are still very much his voice, even if his friends and colleagues submit their opinions to him on earlier drafts of it.
What you meant is Pareto Distribution, not Gaussian distribution. They are completely different.
In Nomine Patris et Felis
There are so many of these 'iPhone development doesn't automatically make you rich' articles that make it to the top of HN. I tend not to look at the comments for those articles, so forgive me if this is a common question, but can anyone tell me why there are so many? You'd think this is something we'd all know by now.
The fact they didn't remove it this time has no relationship whatsoever with their ability or willingness to do so in the future. You may call it yours, but, in the end, they control every aspect of it.
Systems can get large enough that it would take a few seconds for GC to complete thereby causing unacceptable latency (especially if you need to meet strict SLAs). Consider a caching datastructure that needs to be constantly updated with fresh data. Objects in the cache remain there long enough to get into the final generation only to be pulled off some time later. Without memory management (e.g. object pooling for one), you'd quickly fill up your long lived generation causing the system to repeatedly want to reclaim.
75k apps and billions of downloads suggest we dont know anything.

The only real winners in this whole game have been Apple and iphone dev consultants.
Macros are a power tool. Heck, pointers are a power tool! You can do fantastic stuff with them. You can also create a big mess, fast! Doesn't mean we should live without electric drills, just use them intelligently.
Putting your life on the line for a 50% chance to fail
I wonder if they use mint.com to track their startup expenses :o
World's Fastest Cars: Top Fastest Cars of the World
I am just surprised by the number of articles written with the exact same tone. Its like saying, I opened the first coffee shop in XYZ place and made a heck of money than 10 more coffee shops opened and most of us are barely making enough money to sustain ourselves. Yes, if you come up with an insanely good idea which is new and cannot be replicated easily for example: what smule is doing, no matter what, you will do extremely good. The probability of being a lucky 1 hit wonder is diminishing because of big brands now in the foray with a total of 85k+ apps on appstore. Now only the best of the best will survive who are in it for the long haul and have the patience, persistence and vision to stay there and develop a business and not looking to hit a jackpot kind of a mindset.
Stop Distracting Me, I’m Trying to Procrastinate
Thanks! Rago is the copy I actually have on my bookshelf, didn't notice the site I linked was only the first edition. Guess with Steven's unfortunate passing they made a new site.
We have not released a price tag or date for Atlas 1.0. We have announced a developer beta program, which will give interested parties early access, for a nominal fee of $20.
They'll be posted here as they come online: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/content
It seems the same as with any "hit" driven environment. Getting a top-40 song, a top blog, the next NYT bestseller, or top iPhone app takes a lot of work and a little luck. There are those who are suited to it, persevere and get that big break. Then there are a few who just don't get lucky and thousands of wannabes who fail to execute, be it on minor flaws or epic levels.

I think the best description of the process comes from an editor explaining why so many manuscripts fail:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#00...

It's harsh, but has given me insight into how the startup world, including iPhone app startups, works.
EVs and Electric Vehicle Infrastructure rollout in 11 major U.S. cities
Certainly the idea is not new. But we do believe this specific implementation (which has a lot to do with the design of the underlying framework) is miles ahead of other offerings.
No; you're thinking of the actual HU bookstore, the Coop.
"Amazon has no control over content you add on to it yourself; they never know about your own PDFs"

I see no reason to believe they have no way to examine the contents of your device.
"No" probably does mean "no", but you're lucky if you hear "no", because VCs have so many ways to avoid using the word "no".

"Maybe" is so much more expensive than "no".

I'm pretty sure Paul Graham wrote about this in "How To Fund A Startup", but I don't have time to read and he doesn't like being misquoted.
Allston is a neighborhood of the City of Boston.
No it isn't - at least, not by your arguments here. Harvard could theoretically scale its operation to select more people of the same quality - or indeed to create more people of the same quality. No one thinks there are only 1600 people of a given age and a given quality in the world; Harvard could potentially put their imprimatur on more of them, in such a way that didn't damage the value of the imprimatur in people's minds. The author of this piece is asking, why don't they want to use their incredible resources to try?
The beta program is partly about getting early feedback, it's partly about keeping our future customers happy while we finish the product, and it's partly an experiment in how open we can be and how much people will want to be part of the process.
Apparently, even being a drug dealer works the same way.

http://www.freakonomicsbook.com/thebook/ch3.html
It's a gold rush. The first prospectors do pretty well. The later ones starve. It's the people selling auxilliary stuff to the prospectors that make a killing.
Why I think Google is and will remain strong and innovative:

"One day Larry and Sergey bought what became Android, and I didn't even know about this. They said this is really interesting. I didn’t think about that, but now think about the strategic opportunities that created"

The fact that Larry and Sergey can still pursue what they consider 'interesting' with their resources WITHOUT giant bureaucracy getting in the way speaks volumes about the health of the company IMO.
Phonegap Apps Officially OK with Apple
Full book (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010) at

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/
The idea is that you'll be able to target the browser, and native desktop platforms. It will all be javascript based.
You've made another mistake: I wasn't the one who made the comment you responded to.
If you don't think it belongs, flag it, move on
I really wonder how game-changing this will be. Of course most sites on the web aren't meant to be application but rather information presentation.

But it does seem like a huge step toward liberating developers from writing front-end code. The biggest possible downside I see to it that it could also liberate us from writing truly beautiful apps and we'll have a million apps that look like the standard interface.

It would be awesome to see some demos of apps not looking like 280 Slides.
Yeah, what you describe sounds more like The Story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Which, though terrifying, could also be pretty funny in the right hands. (Terry Gilliam)
"So why not cut out the middle-men and make a sort of “in-app PR” – i.e. new features in exchange for tweets from within the app?"

I could have sworn that was against app store terms. If not, it still feels kinda slimy.
Precisely. I think cost matters to students more than convenience in most cases.
"That's right: The biggest and most notoriously closed wireless carrier on Earth is partnering with the biggest and most open Internet company ever, to bring Google's new Android phone platform to users who want a truly expandable smart phone, yet still require a robust and dependable carrier."

Anyone who thinks that Verizon's Android phones will be 'open' has never written mobile software that'll run on their network. I'm really hoping to be wrong about this, but historically Verizon's track-record is to lock down any platform on their network.
Amazon cuts Kindle price tag
You should consider a Dutch auction for a fixed number of slots. That may be interesting enough to attract more media attention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction
It depends though... If you're a brand name like say, Jason Santa Maria (http://jasonsantamaria.com/) you can sure charge the premium. His experience alone warrants the extra charge.
Finding common ground in a tiny barbershop
Ruby For Pentesters - WIN32OLE
Newsweek picked two really bad examples for this article. One is flat out profitable and the other is making ~$100k. From my perspective that's rich in this economy where many talented and qualified people can't even find a job. I'm sure there are lots of real examples of people losing money on the App Store but Newsweek couldn't be bothered to find any.
I'm not going to get any more specific about the circumstances, but my conscience is clear and I agree about the ethics.

As for "that VC" --- if these ones were so sketchy, why would I assume the lesser-known ones were better? Maybe they are. I've met some VC's I really liked personally. David Aronoff at Flybridge was fun to talk to, for instance.

I'm sorry for tarring everyone with such a broad brush, but I'll note that Graham made the exact same point in "A Unified Theory of VC Suckage".
its simple...argentina was victimized by economists from the university of chicago and later the IMF (essentially a US policy proxy) whose misguided policies utterly destroyed the nation

see:

http://www.amazon.com/Money-Rolling-Street-Bankrupting-Argen...
My GMail password scares me with its power
I agree that most web sites are not applications, and this tool is not for them.

Atlas is going to make it pretty easy to customize the standard controls, so I wouldn't be all that concerned about cookie cutter interfaces.

It's also worth pointing out that most people don't have the ability or resources to create beautiful interfaces. Those people will get something that looks good by default.
I don't have statistics to back me up, but I'm fairly certain the odds of survival are considerably higher for iPhone developers.
Abruptly Forgotten: Working Memory Disappears in a Blink