skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you, thismat.

You really should start a blog

Thanks for reminding me, I forgot...

7. Don't blog.

Blogging is one of those things I'd love to do (along with bridge, piano, & foosball), but I don't because I don't want to do it "half way". I'd be afraid of having 3 posts one week, then none for the next month. And I don't want any of these things to interfere with the time I dedicate to my projects. I know that by the third Wednesday night, I'd have to choose between coding and blogging, and I don't want to be in that position (at least at this point in my life).

So instead I come here. hn is perfect for someone like me; I come when I can and don't come when I'm really busy coding. I suppose my posts here comprise my "pseudo-blog".

Getting work done really isn't all that complicated, and I'm glad to share what works for me. Most importantly, work on something you're passionate about and find those habits that work best for you. All the rest is details.
You can't compare taxes to services, Tobacco tax gets NOWHERE near covering the medical costs that the system has to bear for example.

NI is pretty cheap and the only kinds of treatments that are going to be prevented are those that are incredibly expensive, experimental or incredibly rare. You can still go private though.

Same sort of scenario for pensions, if you don't save for yourself you will still get a state pension. You will have to live on Tesco value bread even though you "paid taxes your entire life".

The defining line is: If you're a UK resident and you're not wealthy and you don't save any money you WILL be catered for: TO A DEGREE.
Sure its not always fair but it has to be pragmatic at the edge cases to work at all.
Nobel Prizes are not a metric for achievement. That's insane. It's the most selective and irritatingly limited metric you could come up with.

What I'm trying to get you to understand, xiaoma, is that if ranking anything is stupid, then it doesn't make sense to point to a certain ranking system and say "Gee, that's stupid." Of course it's stupid. It's ranking.
Because for the theatre chains, the costs are fixed? Doesn't sound to unusual to me. It costs me as a theatre owner the same amount to show Gigli as it does to show Titanic.

One could argue the length of the movie is a factor, but most people see movies at set times, and at two showings a night it doesn't really matter how long the movie is.
Yes. I also pointed out above that ranking U.C.L.A. above U.C. Berkeley, the flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system is nuts.
Same thing. One is on a W2, the other is on a 1099.
Other people will respond if they have something to say. Isn't that how it always works?

Your current comment is the exact same as your other comment. You edited that one, then deleted it as it got voted down. I believe that you didn't do it for karma, but still it was silly.
That's horrible. Why is everyone so desperate to make everything depend on JavaScript? Especially Google, with GWT and Google Moderator (a great example of a site that could work just fine without any JavaScript at all). I'm all for progressive enhancement and making the user's experience better if they have JavaScript enabled, but hiding everything behind a single GWT script tag and then using grotesque hacks to make the content crawlable is just crazy.
To boil it down more, it's customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime value of the customer (LVC). Great products help drive down the CAC and increase the lifetime value of the customer. Sales are great and an often overlooked aspect, but just one piece of the puzzle. You can have an awesome close rate, but if the product sucks and they leave, the LVC goes to shit. You can do a ton of sales as well, but if the cost to close those sales and acquire the customer is too large, you become unprofitable.
Exactly - it costs the same amount whether the theater is full or there is one person in it. Therefore if the theater is empty, they should be charging LESS to get more people inside it, since the marginal cost of each additional viewer is very near zero.
He doesn't need to be Internet-savvy. He just needs to know his limitations and be able to defer to more knowledgeable people (whom he trusts) in situations where he is out of his element.

The real problem is that nowadays most people that get into a CEO/Director position have highly inflated egos, and deferring to anyone on anything is out of the question.
Online H1N1 Flu Response Center (joint venture between Emory U and Microsoft)
I had similar thoughts about movie ticket pricing but focused on charging different prices for the different seats in the movie.

I came to the conclusion that this hurts business for movie theaters since some people may see that the theater being pretty filled up and not bother going until a future time. On the other hand other people may be willing to pay a lower price for the crappier seats.
Seems like a new development coming from the ushare side, will be keeping an eye out.

I still prefer http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver for transcoding and the plethora of other options.
All Hail Linux Package Management - as though FreeBSD /usr/ports was never invented
I agree with your points and would like to add this:

> "No, no, no, that's not the way you do ... in this industry. You do it this way."

This would be great especially when the next sentence is "And here is why: ..."
"I have touched on functional programming with the grace and emotion of a lover."

I feel dirty.

BTW - I just "got" the name of your project you clever project namer.
<sarcasm>Man I am glad I have this app now! HackerNews is a website with MB's of flash and images that make browsing it _really_ slow. I mean it doesn't even have rss!</sarcasm>
My Economics Professor at Emory writes:

One might argue that authors have fewer incentives
to write good textbooks if the expectation is that
they should be made available for free.

One way around this is advertizement financing;
and if you download [our] micro textbook, you'll
see that its full of ads targeted at students!
This a small price to pay for the zero sale price,
but the book itself is not the highest quality.
Nonetheless, it is a useful reference.
He wants to put $xxK of his money into his developers in [third world country]...

That is equal parts terrifying and awe-inspiring for its sheer brazenness.
I'm not seeing how getting bitten by a supertick is chronic. I was responding to the meta-problem (insurance not paying for chronic conditions), not the OP's specific problem.
The right kind of background music really helps me concentrate on a task. It has to be something with enough energy to get my pulse up, but brainless enough not to distract me.

I've been listening to http://www.philosomatika.com/ a lot lately. 24/7 streaming psychadelic trance.
What kind off pricing model would HN readers accept from AT&T (since its obvious they want to charge for it)? Would you prefer a flat rate or a usage charge?

I feel the data plan is already expensive, but I would be willing to fork over another $2/month for this service.

Similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869156
Times Higher Education 2009: Top 200 World Universities
If you read the site basically the Co2stats thing is a subscription service that buys carbon certificates using a portion of your subscription.

So I guess there is the green aspect :)

Whether that makes HN (or any other site using) it "green" is another matter. I suppose it is having some form of effect.... just not in any readily visible way.

If a million sites did it then there might be an appreciable affect.
Check out iamusic.com.
Somehow, "considering giving up equity in exchange for services that add only dubious value" equates to "being eating alive."

Then again, I suppose fewer people would read a post titled "Entrepeneur considers letting shark bite"...
Really nice app.. Anybody know what tech this was implemented in..?
Having spent time on both sides, I'll offer one pro-tip:

Never comment on how difficult something should be. Just don't do it. Physically restrain yourself if necessary from saying, "but it's only doing X, it shouldn't be that difficult." [1]

If a smart technical person says that it's going to be hard, then it is going to be hard. If it really is a blocking issue for you, you instead need to bring your team into the bigger picture and ask, "At the end of the day, we're trying to solve a problem like X. How can we permute X into something we can solve more easily?"

[1] Only if you are technical can you get away with this. You'll still be wrong if the other person has thought about it quite a bit more than you have, but at least you'll be able to understand and appreciate the explanation they'll throw back at you about what deep complication makes the problem hard.
Indian Institute of Technology is not listed? That's a shame. There are 7 institutes and atleast one of them should easily be in top 10. But again that's just my opinion.
The simple fact that the entrepreneur knew to ask the question shows that he already knew the answer. He wants to go with his gut and reject this; he's just looking for a little vote of confidence.
Can I suggest that you remove or change the blowjob analogy? It's needlessly sexual, somewhat jarringly out of place in the rest of the article, and also carries an implication that all of the readers of your book are male. We've seen far worse recently, and I don't think there's anything demeaning in what you said, but still I wonder: why go there?
The naivety of some people is just scary.

If you are being approached always be on your guard.

An 'investor' (I use the word lightly here ;) ) that wants to pressure you to do a deal is afraid you'll wise up, find something or that you'll back out. So, help them a bit and back out. On the spot.

A good relationship can be built slowly if there appears to be time pressure you will likely make a decision that's not to your advantage. Good decisions are made from a position of strength. Time pressure erodes that strength.
aah the baby rocker one lined

while true; do eject -T; done;
Empty theatres are desired, because you always need somewhere for the people who can't get into the box office smash hit to go.

Let's say you go to see Titanic. You get to the theatre and surprise, sold out. What do you do? Go home? Nope. You go see Gigli, even though that movie would never have brought you to the theatre in the first place. And, you pay the same price as you would have paid to go see the movie you did want to see.

You're suggesting that these people pay less. You're also suggesting that if Gigli was $3 instead of $12, you would actually get off your butt and come to the theatre to see that steaming pile of excrement - knowing full well that everyone reviewing it is telling you it's crap. I think not.

Why do you think the studios position the movies that they know will be very good/in high demand to come out at staggered times? Yup, to ensure that there is always overflow.
The illusion here is that simple/less complex apps are better. But the reality is that more simple apps with fewer features means the end user needs more apps to manage their business or their lives.

Your invoicing app may be simple and let you send an invoice, but does it integrate with your time entry system? Wouldn't a time entry system that does invoicing or an invoicing system that also does time entry be better than two disparate apps that do one or the other? Who wants to waste time entering the same information twice? Making data entry mistakes? Flipping between different apps, usernames, passwords...

The problem with the simple is better line of thinking is that it actually complicates the business life. Multiple accounts at multiple sites. Multiple payments to multiple vendors. Different user interfaces to learn at each site. Different ways of doing things. Maybe the enter key over there submits the form, but it goes to another field somewhere else.

All these separate systems are really just features of a business management suite and I'd rather keep all my stuff in one place than have 15 accounts at different locations to do one thing. If I can pay $50 a month for a system I can customize to do what all these 15 sites do for $10-99/mo I'd be a much happier customer.
Thanks for some interesting insights!

If it is money, then I would suggest they perhaps follow your advice and go with whoever gives them the biggest advance (and just forget about negotiating royalties since they are 'unlikely to earn back' in your words). However money is often not the major motivator as you mentioned.

I might have explained myself poorly, but I disagree here. I'm saying that if money (long term) is the motivator they should go for whoever offers the biggest royalty rate. As I showed, if PragProg published my book, I'd have earned the same with 2000 copies as I did at Apress with 8500 copies (or thereabouts) :)

Sure they'll give up royalties but they will receive what they want. Small and medium-sized publishers will generally not have the resources and expertise to perform those same functions at the scale a big publishing house can do them.

Not always. I think the Pragmatic Programmers do an incredible PR job - especially as they have a PR umbilical cord with O'Reilly. Apress, on the other hand, shut down their entire Berkeley marketing department recently (and lost some great people).

Your case of selling 8500 copies through Apress vs. 2000 through Pragmatic Programmer is important since some might perceive that the book was a failure because it "only" sold 2,000 copies. And those "some people" might include potential employers, industry colleagues or the author.

But.. most authors don't publicly disclose their sales. There are quite a few other Ruby books published at Apress and I'd be interested to know how they've sold.. ;-) There are ways to get rough figures but they're as accurate as using Compete for Web stats (IME).

It also does not take into account the perceived prestige someone might feel with being accepted to be an Apress author vs. a PP author (again "some people" might have never heard of PP books and so it might not have the same weight).

In my limited experience, and especially amongst the Ruby world, I'd argue being a PP author has more prestige than being an Apress author - perhaps only trumped by being an O'Reilly author.. I know this isn't your point though ;-)

Apress starts to take notice and they hire someone to write the Beginning Ruby book for them and they market the shit out of it. What do you do now? You l-o-s-e, that's what. PP can't afford to market your book - they don't have any budget left after your 50% royalty and paying their staff - so you are SOL.

You make some good points in this paragraph but I don't think they apply for me or my market - though they might in other situations. There are other introductory Ruby books from more popular publishers out there but mine still outsells them - and this isn't because Apress is doing a great marketing job.
Just to be clear: $170k is what Apress made off of him. He himself made $19,000. His book was an unusually strong seller (it outsold Resig's book). For most books, the advance is calibrated to cover all the expected royalties.

Authorship contracts are a ripoff.
Do you not agree that if the entrepreneur took the deal, it would kill his company? If so, a kill, in shark language, is appropriately described by eaten alive.
I know what you mean. I spent like four paragraphs on the first version of this post I did for Mashable in '08. Left it out this time for the sake of brevity, and because it really doesn't seem like it took (since people still don't remember).
Well, the lower bound is actually zero, if you know where to go (and some art houses do charge).

Also, the price depends on the theater+day+time, not on which specific movie it is showing, so, while price certainly correlates with movie budget, it doesn't capture most variation.
Tobacco tax gets NOWHERE near covering the medical costs that the system has to bear for example.

The UK govt. makes approx GBP 10Bn a year from tobacco, and spends approx. GBP 2Bn on medical costs associated with it.

if you don't save for yourself you will still get a state pension. You will have to live on Tesco value bread even though you "paid taxes your entire life"

The problem I and others have with this is that the person who contributes nothing, by their own free choice, will receive far more than those who have contributed, and saved, and now get nothing due to means testing.
There are a lot of musicians who advertise themselves on iDevGames in the Classifieds section of the forum (http://idevgames.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=4). A lot of them will work for free, or under very reasonable terms, because they want to experiment with games or they're just feeling generous. And they really are responsive. I've worked with a couple.
Are these copyright free textbooks? I am curious to how this free textbook thing works. There are so many free textbook projects going around the world. Can anyone use the content, reference the content and use it for commercial purpose?
I find the thing that most kills my concentration is lag. For example, right now I'm at work and we're facing a crucial deadline, but I'm not working. Why? Because I just made a change that requires re-running an integration test, which takes several minutes to run. I'm not about to sit there staring at the test, so I switch over to my feed reader and catch up on news.

Logically, I know this is devastating for my productivity, but so is staring at a progress bar for 10 minutes after every change. After the iteration, I focus on fixing the one or two serious lags that hurt productivity. It's not always possible (I've no idea how I'll speed up this integration test), but it's a worthwhile effort.

It is for this same reason that my company spares no expense on dev workstations. When a build takes 10 minutes, the productivity hit is at least twice that, and it's a recurring penalty.
I used it last night :)
Record your every thought and idea, and reference it later at your own leisure
Thanks - I've made it more gender neutral. I think a sexual reference makes the point stronger though, because I wouldn't find getting 10% of anything else at a time to be so frustrating (though ideas are welcomed!). Even 10% of a Big Mac wouldn't be that bad ;-)
I wrote a HN clone for .NET developers: http://www.managedassembly.com
I agree the article title is misleading.

My 2 cents on outsourcing:

I have been working for 2 years now on 2 projects that were brought back from outsourcing. I must say what a disaster. It has taken us almost the entire 2 years to get the project code maintainable. From what I have seen from outsourced code is a fundamental lack of understanding of programming the languages (one project C++, the other Java).

I fail to understand the reasons that most companies choose to outsource. The company I work for was paying $3.7million per year to outsource these projects. After bringing the projects back in they are spending less than $800k per year to maintain 6 developers. Since insourcing the product has become more stable and feature rich. In my opinion outsourcing is the kiss of death for a software project.
You need to develop the ability sell, advertise, publicize, make deals, etc. In short, all the things a programmer may wish to not do.

I'm the very deepest of technical kinds of guy, but on many co-working projects, I'm still the business guy, as I'm very comfortable with talking to customers, selling and negotiating work.
Run like hell, Say no firmly and forever.
Debugger and live conferences still important in cyber-2009
I don't think your method though is the normal behaviour. Most people "go to see a movie". They may have one in mind, but once they get to the theatre they end up seeing something regardless.

If this is the normal behaviour, why would you encourage this customer to spend less?
Just yesterday my insurance company decided that a routine physical and cholesterol blood test was not covered. After calling them up, they assure me that they will cover preventative care but somehow this physical exam is not preventative. Their definition of preventative clearly is not the normal definition and is meant to screw with people. Most likely it is a billing error or some such. So I'll spend the next few weeks calling various people and harassing them.

It wouldn't be so bad if this wasn't the norm. Every time I visit the dentist or doctor, something comes up from insurance. Then I waste a week or a month fighting the insurance company for the most inane things.

Now imagine if you couldn't speak English or didn't have the time to make these calls.
I think you're on the right path... Getting a technical background is important to get a feel of the problems that your engineers face and as long as you know that they know better than you and let them decide the technical choices, it's going to work well...
And, learning how to code is a great way to learn that things are sometimes much more complicated than they seem :-)

On the other side, I believe that when you look for a programmer you should look for someone who has a little interest in business and tries to learn... Having both founders trying to understand what the other does goes a long way to having good communication.
"With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a..."
Building Your Career in Open Source
If you find a track licensed under Creative Commons, be sure that it's not licensed Non-commercial. It's bar far the most common CC provision.

Also try Rumblefish's music licensing store:
http://musiclicensingstore.com/
Ask HN: have you built an electromagnetic levitator?
Theoretically, what's the biggest gap you could create between the levitator and the object? Why is it that all examples of levitation I've seen on youtube lift an object just an inch or two?

The specific challenge is to suspend a Canadian penny from the ceiling; it's primarily steel, and strongly influenced by magnets. My current strategy is to:

- use an arduino for the controller

- drive an electromagnet with a sinusoidally modulated voltage

- use a hall effect sensor to detect the distance of the penny

- in the arduino, change the maximum voltage of the electromagnet, based on the voltage coming from the hall effect sensor

I don't know how the penny will behave when it's in the field, so I don't know if the hall effect sensor will be able to detect the penny's distance. Obviously, when the penny isn't magnetized, it will be invisible to the sensor, but I hope it will behave differently when it's actively being levitated.

I am not sure why this system will become less stable as the distance from the electromagnet increases, but it seems like it must. It also seems like the amplitude of the sine wave is going to need to increase, based on the distance from the penny, to cause grosser adjustments to the penny. I'm assuming that because in the opposite case, when the penny is close to the electromagnet, it seems like you will only need to make small adjustments to keep the penny a specific distance. I assume the relationship between distance and the amplitude of the sine wave will be non-linear, which will determine the maximum distance the penny could ever be.

Here is a specific question: how do I determine the force of attraction between the penny and the electromagnet given the distance and the voltage of the magnet?

This is still in the earliest stages, so any advice at all will be appreciated!