skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Customers are very busy people too, and they are not on your payroll.

Sometimes I wish they were on payroll, especially customers who left.

One frustrating thing I've learned is that people hardly ever tell you why they stopped using your product or lost interest in it.
Do you have a daughter? Since this article is still on the front page I would like to ask HN how does one deal with the similar issue of letting a young girl know she's pretty without suggesting it's of central importance? The problem is physical attractiveness is more inate than intelligence. I think the best course is to suggest innate attractivness is happy chance to be taken advantage of, generally it should be treated with indifference. I don't want my little sister to be swept off her feet by the first boy who gives her flowers, but you don't want her to ignore any advantages she may have. It may also be useful to point out how much attractivness depends on cultural assumptions of beauty.
Jason's referring to the web software.

Pie is referring to the digital boards on walls.

I think "he" may have been referring to two different people
I would assume Apple has some patents in its portfolio too.

So, what happens when one company sues other over patents, and the other has interesting patent portfolio? They settle it and each gets to use some new tech (without fear of similar lawsuit in the future).

> "[...] those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for," said Ilkka Rahnasto, vice president of Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia. "Apple is also expected to follow this principle."

So, I think it's not Nokia being evil and suing the disruptive underdog to keep its profits. It's just a (start of) business exchange.

(Disclaimer: IANAL and I own a Nokia phone, so :)
See also: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870422400457448...

Referenced from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897380
Why TV, not Facebook or Twitter, is still revolutionizing the world
Rounded corners are the single biggest headache in HTML+CSS. There is nothing else that's commonly designed and as big a headache.

Rounded corners are a bit cheesy anyway. Look at Hacker news, see any rounded corners?

Eventually, the standard will go to arbitrary inline vector graphics and everyone will be happy and the most horribly designed pages imaginable will be inflicted on us.
Building a brain inside a supercomputer
Company Value vs. Story Frequency on TechCrunch
I agree, just that darn character limit. You got a way to combine the two thoughts into 80 characters or less?

The difference between a lede (from a quote) and a shortened tweet, I guess.
If I unfocus my eyes and stare at her long enough I can see a horse.
I really like Mark Solon's post on being motivated by that sort of drive, "Don't let the bastards grind you down":
http://www.highway12ventures.com/2009/10/15/dont-let-the-bas...
Robert Allen: Why the Industrial Revolution Was in Britain
It is interesting that you mention review. I have written a book and I write a blog. I think the blog is much higher-quality than the book, because I don't have to concede to the reviewers, and I don't have my work "edited" by non-native speakers of English.

Also, writing a lot at once makes the stuff you wrote first go out of date. Then you fix that, and the stuff at the end goes out of date.

I am going to stick to blogging.
Winner doesn't take all: How to compete with dominant market player
"Apple Inc. v. Atico International USA Inc. et al" looks like it would fit the bill (see http://news.justia.com/cases/featured/delaware/dedce/1:2008c... )
Bollocks to your bollocks. You're reading comprehension must be very low.

"HTML is a mark-up language for documents. Its simplicity has enabled the spread of the web. In addition it provided a means for some semantic marking BLAH BLAH BLAH."

You are repeating what he says in his blog. Maybe you read the wrong blog?

"CSS was the answer to presentational issues."

Yes, but it's not a good answer. It is possible to criticize something not as reflection of a person's own deficiencies, but because it is works poorly.

"Most important this separation enables easier indexing of web pages which is next to impossible to index with graphical based systems."

He never said the separation of content and layout is bad. He said they way that it is implemented is "POOP" Any sane person is for the seperation of content and layout.
You need to make an honest assessment of what value prop you each bring to the equation.

He has an idea. You can implement it. How many other people in his reasonable circle of contacts (meaning that he might actually have to go and look for someone) could implement his idea on-par with you?

It does not matter that you are "the technical guy". If (for example) his idea is to create a forum targeted towards people who have imported right-hand drive cars to the US, well, that's little more than installing a few basic packages and there are 8 million people who could do that, which makes your unique contribution very marginalized.

If his idea encompasses things that you have more specific domain knowledge of, and more value-add, then your unique value goes up significantly, as does your appropriate % of the equity.

Most likely, it's somewhere in the middle. He has an idea that to implement might be 80% "work" and 20% "invention". You're probably the best guy he knows for the job. I stress knows, because there are probably 10,000 other people that could do equally good work, but they are an unknown to him. This gives you an edge, but it's on the order of a few %, not a few dozen %. At some point it would be more valuable to him to find 1 of these other 10,000 people and take the risk instead of doubling your stake (again, generalizing somewhat, but you get the idea).

Conversely, how easily can you find another "idea guy" who would also make you a good deal? If you have many "idea guys" to choose from, then his unique value to you is diminished and he would have to lure you to his project.

If you are just loping along in life and have no better options, you're probably looking at something in the neighborhood of the 1:9 he proposed. If you have better/more valuable/more lucrative options in front of you, you're probably more like 1:5. If you have a solid track record and have been-there-done-that (which I don't suspect, else you wouldn't be asking this question...) then you might be 1:1.
what a content-less article. they just reposted screenshots from bgr and didn't even do any of their own testing.
I'm one. I have read it for a long time, although I never joined until this thread.
Don't beat yourself too much about that. I had the exact same problem. Took me a few days to realize that zooming was even possible.
I don't see the direct harm to YC here. If Sequoia and other YC insiders are cherry-picking the best YC investments before they hit the mass market, incoming entrepreneurs will correctly see YC as an awesome automatic networking opportunity. Sure, the opportunity doesn't always work. But the chance is valuable.

If there is any possibility of damage it would be because YC could come under pressure to recommend companies to go the VC route when that is not in the company's best interest. Why would that not be advisable? Well VCs interests are not always your own (see http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html) and particularly not if there is an opportunity for a direct acquisition (see http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html).
Save the planet by eating a dog? The eco-paw prints of dogs
I see no video on the link, but I was intrigued and found this post by Robert Allen on the same subject:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570
It will not solve your problems.

It will give you experience with the act itself but not with the process of "getting there" since the deal is already set and the outcome already known. What you would learn from the experience will be just about the act itself (which is really no big deal) but nothing about the part where you have a problem which is the social interaction that comes first. And once more, the social interaction that comes first is not really all that geared toward sex, so this experience could harm your capabilities by reinforcing this wrong perception that you seem to have.

You just need to understand treat this as something you need to learn. You need to learn social interactions, some people have it naturally, some people not so much. Your goal should be to learn by observing, trying to understand the situations, trying to understand the point of view and perception of people without asking direct questions.
> There are people who tell startups that they should hire the most senior people that they can find.

When I was involved in a management buyout we went to loads of people to get advice, funding, resources, etc. Without exception the funding people - government sponsored in some cases, independent VCs in others - said that we were light on management skills (which we were) and we needed to find someone to fill the gap.

They then went on to suggest people who were demanding ukp30k for one day a week, plus equity. Here we were putting everything we had into this, and these people were insisting on a full living wage for 1 day a week, plus a piece of the profits pie.

OK, we weren't exactly a startup, but this "advice" really is given.
Let 5 = 6
It's not about lying in your praise, it's about setting the expectation that smart people don't have to work hard at things.

This is actually a serious problem among gifted children. They are told they are smart for most of their lives while the work is very easy. Once work gets difficult for them, they start to think "this is different, it's HARD. Crap, maybe I'm not smart after all".

The linked NY Magazine article covers this concept nicely.
In this case, I think it changed the tenor the the statement completely. How about:

Gladwell to aspiring journalists: Become an expert first, then write
Tell HN: Make #Snowleopard a trending topic today on Twitter
Let's make #snowleopard the top trending topic today to alert everyone to the great alternatives out there with Windows 7 launching today. I'm also open to #ubuntu etc. Just leave the RT link in the comments.

Link to tweet it:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Check out the alternatives and get a Mac with%20%23snowleopard%20http://bit.ly/3veLAf
It's not like Sequoia is capital restricted and has to choose between multiple good investments. They have way more money than good opportunities. If they see two companies that are equal they are probably investing in both or neither.
I've been out of the econ phd world for a little while now (see blog post here: http://hellosorld.com/personal/2009/07/16/why-i-quit-my-phd-...) so it's hard to remember what all the resources were, but i'll ask around for some good material and post it here. Natural random experiments are another good source of identification (i.e. elimination of unobserved variable bias).

For the elite vs state university question, choosing to attend isn't an instrument since it's still an observed decision. If there was some source of randomness that was uncorrelated with all your other variables besides attending vs not, then that would be an instrumental variable. Say the government decided to take a pool of 10,000 elite college acceptees, gave them each a number from one to 10,000 and then said only the even numbers could actually attend. That would be your instrument. Trouble is that those kinds of natural random experiments don't occur often. That's why economists can get tenure simply by finding a good instrument for some study.
150 Million new users expected by 2013. Not bad for something invented in the 20's.
One upside of spending millions of dollars on cryptography research is that this is unlikely to help even the most able of your adversaries.

Also, the NSA does not really want to see your porn stash. They captured it as it was being downloaded.
How to Tap the Ripe Mobile Enterprise Segment
I'm pretty sure several of those patents covering "GSM, UMTS (3G WCDMA) and wireless LAN standards" refer to actual hardware.
He probably doesn't have enough karma for that.

From the FAQ,

How do I submit a poll?

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

This is an experimental feature so there is currently a fairly high karma threshold for submitting new polls.
The real problem here is PHP/MySQL, not the dynamicism per se.

A blogging platform based on Rhino (EcmaScript) on JVM hosted on virtualized server (or in cloud) would easily resist slashdot effect.

And using file-based storage it would be storage-friendly, too.

And nobody prevents you from using external editor for WordPress, even.
I've spent a lot of time studying this question. The high bit is that it would have been surprising if it hadn't been. Britain was already the most advanced country in the world by all the usual measures, like literacy, per capita income, etc.

The question of why it didn't happen in the Netherlands is interesting. At one point I thought it was because the Netherlands lacked natural resources like coal and rivers. But it turns out they were already out of contention by the time the Industrial Revolution started. The Netherlands were prosperous in 1650 but a wreck by 1750. The main reason seems to have been high taxes, driven by the (ultimately impossible) goal of maintaining military parity with England and France, which had much larger populations.
Standards exist to ensure interoperability. In software you can't even copyright an interface, let alone that you should be able to get a patent on an element that is a standard of communications.

It is, pardon the pun, patent nonsense.
You can joke about that, but it happens. I've had a particularly good few months, and as a result I find myself getting less done than last year, when I was frequently miserable. In that last two months, I've done maybe one really neat piece of work, and that was immediately after a bad weekend.

I'm not exactly complaining about it, but a part of me wants to throw myself into an upsetting situation just so I'll get back to obsessing over my work.
blah blah blah... yes I know he's done a cool blog for a long time, but he's got MASSIVE entrepreneur/big win envy.

Everyone wants to hit a home run, and it has nothing to do with being a craftsman or a suit... he's hating on people who have won big because he hasn't.

I have the inside line on this, trust me.
I second the notion of a front-end like CFront. It's a fun exercise. It took me about a week to do a Pascal to C translator a couple of decades ago. One problem is that the grammar for C is not context free. If you are using a top down parser, it's probably manageable, If you are using yacc, bison or the like, you will probably need some kind of parser or lexer hack. Unfortunately, I cant remember where the problem lies.

Ordinarily I would recommend getting a ready-made parser, but they usually generate an abstract syntax tree and often throw away things like formatting and comments that you want in your generated code. I also recommend using Python or your favorite scripting language. Doing it in C hurts the flexibility that you want in your experimentation.
It looks like an interesting book, but it's not available on Amazon, even for pre-order. Interestingly, Amazon seems to recognize the title, as it auto-corrects searches, but it doesn't list it.
Why would anyone downvote this entry? Not that I care, just curious...
That I didn't know... and for which I'm very sorry for him. That has to be crushing.

Please forget my previous comment.... don't want to kick a guy when he's down.
Transactional memory constructs in C++
That works unless you really want to be a journalist.
'overloading' the standard library is simply a matter of some #defines that make funcx call my_funcx, that's easy.

If you want to mess around with language features such as control structures and such then you probably will have to write a pre-processor of your own that parses your language accurately and outputs the corresponding 'C' code.

The macro system will quickly run out of steam when you start doing things like that.
After reading this article, I have no idea what the heck Direct Ajax is supposed to be and how it's any different from regular AJAX.

The product that the article advertises seems to be one of those huge, frameworks that abstracts everything you could ever want to do away into single function calls. (And even though the article talks lovingly about "No more XMLHttpRequest", the demo apps make 'em pretty much every time you click.)

I hate frameworks like this because when someone asks, "hey, why isn't x working," you look at the page and realize that the only code you can touch is a call to GenerateNewProprietaryWidgetWithLotsOfGoodies(). Your only option is to rewrite the darn page the way it should have been in the first place.
You kind of contradict yourself. I'm sensing that you feel college education is purely a signaling mechanism, and I don't disagree completely. You correctly acknowledge that the behavior of both the signal's sender and receiver (student and employer respectively) is rational, but then lament that we are throwing money into a fire-pit as though we could all agree to just stop using this signal and save money. The reason we have the signal in the first place is because high-quality individuals want a way to differentiate themselves, and they have rationally decided that such differentiation is worth the cost.
Because if the startup wasn't one they'd have funded otherwise, it would be the world's most extreme case of throwing good money after bad. They'd be investing millions to improve their return on an investment of tens of thousands.
Right I realize doing it voluntarily for an hour is a lot different than being left in there for six days against your will after being beaten and injected with god knows what.

Then again, the guy who invented these tanks thought that dolphins were talking to him.
pyblosxom can run dynamically or be used as a static renderer. The same input files are used for both so you can start with static rendered content uploaded to your web server, and then easily migrate to running dynamically. I use it both ways, works good.
Why can't they all be revolutionizing the world? This meme where only one thing can be revolutionary at a time really bugs me. Revolutions happen all the time and they are all awesome.

I also dislike that an article like this needs to open with the typical anti-TV comments. Ray Bradbury always struck me as a whiny brat of an old man who refused to embrace technology as being really neat. Whenever somebody quotes him just because he's Ray Bradbury I sigh a little.
Solar Power Cost Decline Steeper
And my Mac exists for the sole purpose of syncing my iPod.

Mind you, it's a G3 iMac.
Agreed. No new information. Same screenshots I've seen on 5 or 6 other mobile blogs. Useless 'me too' article
Jonah Lehrer: The Personality Paradox
Photos, video from Microsoft Store grand opening
It's higher than mine.
Arbitrage in Baseball: Did Moneyball Not Work, or Work Too Well?
I think you may misunderstand what I meant. I was trying to say two different things.

First, I am new to blogging, so even if you are writing a comment saying you hate my guts, I appreciate that you took time out of your busy schedule to comment about something that I wrote.

Second, there are many things that are problems now with CSS that the original authors couldn't possibly have known about. However, I strongly disagree with the sentiment that css was good for its time. There are many things that are terrible regardless of what was or wasn't known at the time.

As to what I would change...I didn't actually bother to check any facts when I wrote this. I had some idea in my head of what the facts were but I never bothered to get them right.

Of course, sometimes lying can be a good thing. Imagine if every time I said that something like X doesn't work, I followed up with a long 2 page article about how you might be able to accomplish it in some browser on some operating system running some plugin.
If they are beta testers, why do they need a code?
Android lets you "return" a full app within 24 hours for a full refund. You don't have to guess if it will do what you need, you can try it and see. I guess you are out 99 cents on your credit card for a day, though, which will probably annoy someone here.
And do you really think that 40 BILLION (not million) is required to implement GSM, UMTS and wireless lan ?

Did some Standard-Bearing Moses come down from the mountain carrying three stone tablets on which the fully-formed GSM, UMTS and WLAN specifications were inscribed?

Of course not. These standards were derived from inventions by Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm and many others; inventions that indeed did cost billions to develop.
Ah, cool. I had thought about going to it before, but didn't know if it was still happening every week. Maybe I'll go this Friday.
When it comes to rounded corners, I think the CSS3 solution of both "border-radius" for simple cases and multiple backgrounds per element will solve a fair few problems.

Some of my particular problems with CSS would be that it's insufficient for styling a document, the idea is fine, but to be able to do any advanced css you'll need to muddy up your markup with additional elements to hold styles.

If that were fixed, then it would at least be reasonable, and sure it's slowly moving closer to it. Aside from that I personally dislike the oversimplicity of the style of CSS that leads to difficulties in creating stylesheets that are easy to navigate what with the lack of structure (over a couple of years of fixing up a design stylesheet are rarely that pleasant to look at), having some basic support for variables and calculations to more easily create complementary colors to your document styles also be nice, but eh.

See if I get killed for those opinions.
Near as I can tell, the study suggests simply that 2000 calories (18% fat) will give you the same long term bodyweight as 2000 calories (40% fat). However, drinking 3.5% fat organic milk will give you more calories (and make you slightly fatter) than 3% fat regular milk.
Nice observation. I published a novel, released it for free and on Amazon, and while I made some money and got some publicity, I find that blogging makes it easier to edit yourself and attract attention, and I got a few perks from blogging that I never saw from writing the book. I had a reader mail me a novel I mentioned regretting not reading, which was pretty incredible, and I met a handful of really neat people I met because they were following my blog posts.
It's not true we have to spread ourselves thinnner when it comes to advice. The startups we fund book office hours with me online. I can tell when demand is satisfied, because there are slots still open.

And we couldn't spread ourselves too thin with introductions, because the supply of those is not even limited. Later stage investors are delighted to hear about any good startup we can send them. If we send an investor twice as many good deals, they're twice as happy.
What's to stop me from doing this right now? "Here's a free app for you, click here, this link is only for you." It's not only for you, of course, but who checks to see if the URL has a real unique ID in it? (You could always add a "?gift-code=293874" at the end of the URL anyway, the server will probably just ignore it.)