skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It very much depends on the market. If people buy an 'object' then sure, they'll compare lists and figure out 'value for money'. Cars are a good example where that goes.

If they buy in to a service it changes. For instance, when shopping for web hosting you take for granted that the 'basics' are all there (bandwidth, power, AC, a working server with X ram, HD and CPU) the differentiation then sits in things like support quality and other intangibles.

The 'feature' list is exactly the same, but the quality of some of the features will be what will swing a customer one way or the other.

For instance, I pay a significant premium on some of my hosting simply to get peace of mind, 24x7 instant help.

And other parts are not that critical so those go to cheaper providers. On paper the 'features' are exactly the same, but in practice you find out that 24x7 support can be two very different things.

And if it is a web service that is essentially free the whole thing changes once again. You are no longer 'selling' anything, you can't compete on price (unless you start giving money for signups ? (it's been done)), so you have to compete in a different arena, such as ease of use.

It's hard to make sweeping statements like that and not have a whole pile of exceptions, it probably would have been better to say these things with some context.

But the essence is valid for the target audience, which I interpret to be for-pay services either b2b or b2c.
I think the time is ripe for some creative destruction.
The article doesn't go into any details and that site is pretty well known for its negative coverage of GS but the wide connections of GS to the Financial Authorities and with other large companies is quite well known.

Anyone who thinks that there is nothing at least slightly illegal in the way GS does prop trading is naive at best.
I'm so sick of this crap. This must be what it was like for Microsoft when everyone hated them just because they were on top.

The iPhone has already won, give up the 'iPhone sucks' posts already. Or try to use it outside of NY and SF and realize that the call quality actually isn't bad, the reception doesn't suck, and you can make a call whenever you want.
Wow, talk about link fodder.
I recall having a conversation about this with an investor in the early 90s or so. He told me that a five-year projection was horse-apples, but he also insisted we do one because the exercise of guessing is valuable in and of itself, and he wanted to see evidence that you tried to think things through.

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." –General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Happy Birthday Trevor!
Having tried to raise money years back with a previous venture this advice really rings true to me. It's rare that an angel levels with everybody, this is an important article.
Did he watch the market over the past 3 months? It's been doing a pretty steady incline. If you got in low, it's been really hard to not make money.

Goldman is getting vilified in the press these days, and I frankly think it's unwarranted. People who have little understanding of how they make their money quickly cry foul.

Hanlon's razor applies here: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
One of his many innovations, the fresnel workout:

http://ycombinator.com/images/fresnelworkout.jpg

Instant results. Makes your head big though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob
I have a 2G iPhone with OSes 1, 2 and 3 and yes, call quality is pretty bad - on par with a mediocre featurephone and certainly far worse than top-notch phones like the BlackBerry.

One thing iPhone fanboys can't understand is that the iPhone isn't the best at everything. It's got great internet, multimedia and games (and apps, if you use those), but if you're looking for a phone or messaging devices, other phones will serve you better.
I was kind of surprised that he was still alive. I don't think his stuffs are completed threw out. Even when you are working on post modernism, post structuralism, his stuffs still are classics to be read as reference frame.

I remember 20 years ago when I read "The Raw and the Cooked". It was still a pretty decent work to be read.

Sarkozy's visit to Lévi-Strauss is similar to Wen Jiabao's visit to Qian Xuesen. But you see, French is more philosophy oriented and Chinese is engineering oriented....
The problem here is that when you're pre-launch or just launched you do not know your product life-cycle yet, so it is absolutely impossible to get this right.

You can make a stab at it but until the first year is out there is going to be so much change to that projection that even if your input data was valid at the time you made the projection it will look like advanced science fiction by the time those 12 months roll by.
Interest rate adjusted?
Tarsnap is the one service which I log on to once in several weeks and go..Wha! How the hell did I spend so little money in all this time?

ps. Note to cperciva - Speaking as a customer, please don't take this as a sign that you should raise your prices.

pps.: Note 2 to cperciva: Speaking as a fellow entrepreneur, how can you not raise your prices? ;)
Internalize that your route to getting customers is critical to your success. Admit that to me and yourself - this is one of those things that makes or breaks the entire venture! Spend real time in your pitch on this subject.

This sounds eerily similar to Mark Andreessen's biggest concern at TC50: distribution. He said "how to get customers" is usually the most glaring missing piece in so many pitches he hears.

Listen to these guys.
How You Learn More from Success Than Failure
As someone who has actually built binaries to run across multiple distros, this doesn't address even half the issues. Very few people are concerned about binaries that run on more than one architecture when distributing binaries that run on more than one distro is a harder problem.

This solution doesn't solve the hard problems, but solves an easy one in an uninspired fashion. Rejecting these patches wasn't a case of holding back innovation, but merely holding back solutions that more experienced developers felt were not appropriate for the platform.

There was a good reason for that and playing armchair critic after reading a sympathetic story from a developer who is understandably hurt after getting his feature rejected just doesn't help anyone.

The kernel is more well managed than most people give it credit for, and it's exactly because of this that hacky incremental solutions get rejected, even when they might legitimately produce a small benefit. Eventually the overall solution to the problem FatElf is trying to solve is going to have to be something different.

I feel sorry for the developer, no one likes getting a feature rejected. But it was the wrong solution and the technical merits must trump other concerns.
"“The parties were unanimous in their wish that more of the experience be away from the computer,” Mr. Gould said. “People are expecting and really preferring a simpler, more straightforward experience that doesn’t involve the PC,” he said."

This is great news for my next project ;)
I think he influenced this community through his essays, and without them this place wouldn't exist.
The IMF had slated the sell off of some gold for about a year now, although I can't remember the reason. Gold is getting a bunch of attention right now because it's a commodity, a hedge against inflation, and these are historic economic times. However, there is a problem with gold. It's heavy. People don't want to carry or trade it. It can go out of fashion just as rapidly as it's rising. Next year the Fed will begin raising rates and the dollar will regain strength, taking some momentum off gold. Betting against the dollar is betting against the future of the U.S. economy, and Warren Buffet made his stand clear on that yesterday. I expect gold to continue to be up though, as the dollar and economy are in for less-than-stellar performance for several years in my estimation.
He's not dead. Or someone's got his account. Hard to tell really.
I don't think it's a matter of comspiracy, but rather of control. It's seen in their app store approval process and it's key to their product's success. Why leave important aspects of a product's perception (3rd Party Software), up to chance and also make money through that control? Sounds like a good way to make a profit.
Simple reason - dilute/diversify your USD holdings.

Its pretty well known that the Chinese and Indian Banks hold one of the largest USD reserves in the world and have been responsible for artificially inflating the price of the USD , this has been going on for years.

China last year or probably earlier this year said "We would like another currency other than the USD to be the World's Reserve Currency".
If nobody knows what this guy is rumbling about, why is this article so high on HN? There is something wrong here.
I've heard of Y Combinator and Hacker News not because I'm seeking funding but because I've been reading Graham's essays ever since "A Plan for Spam" made the rounds in 2002. I actually am working at a startup now, but I wasn't when I started reading. In my case at least the cause and effect were just the opposite - pg and HN were part of what convinced me to seek out and join startups.
any recommendations to learn Fractal geometry, from the ground up?
For future... host the prototypes on your site, making them instantly accessible to others... maybe also some sort of prototype exchange/marketplace... ideas for expansion are endless, however, first you have to concentrate on the ability to create clean, tight HTML/CSS prototypes
I'm not dead yet, just being trolled.

http://twitter.com/str0ke/status/5422531377
> have you seen modern riot control technology?

Yes I have. That's why I didn't mention riots. I also didn't mention massed assaults on govt installations.

There are ways to lose against a modern military. Don't use them. (BTW - If you think that tanks are decisive, you need to spend some time with Marines.)
This is not a very good analogy.

* You are one individual that averages 6 trades in month . GS has hundreds of traders, many of which do average that amount in a week (if not a day). The law of averages applies to GS, while your experience is anecdotal evidence.

In fact, if after 3 years with an average of 6 monthly trades you haven't liquidated a single negative position I'd say that most probably are making a classic investment mistake - holding onto your losses too long.

* GS trades much more volatile investments than you - futures, derivatives, etc. Traders have a much shorter time-horizon than you as well. You sell when you need the money while they're trying to meet their quarterly numbers.
And I'd like to add, with the influx of so many good and kind people who are not really doing anything but dreaming about startups (or not even that), the signal-to-noise ratio has understandably decreased dramatically.

I hope I put that diplomatically enough.
Micro-documentary on "A cool tiny home tour: living in 96 square feet"
Homes are shrinking in America. After doubling in size since 1960, the national average dropped for the first time in nearly 15 years (by 9%, the size of an average room). But far from this new average of 2,000 plus square feet are the so-called tiny houses. Also called wee homes, mini dwellings, or microhomes, their definition is not exact, but they run as small as 65 square feet.

The video is worth watching.
The architectural location that I was alluding to is some fat binary format itself, because this has the greatest impact on customer and user experience. How you parcel out the supporting code between kernel and userland would flow from that invariant...if I were Linus for a day.

Or, perhaps even better, adopt a small, architecture-neutral IR like LLVM-BC and a workstation of any architecture could choose to compile it just-in-time at launch, or at install time.

Either way, the greatest tragedy here is small thinking. I would love to see Linux rise to the level where users don't need to know what an instruction-set architecture is.
That would be a fun idea. I'd probably buy it right away and start using it more then Tweetie (leave it open in the background while doing other work and just passively hear tweets).

Incase anyone does want to do this, Apple doesn't directly tell you when a song is starting/stopping, but they do tell you how long the song is (with MPMediaItem and the key MPMediaItemPropertyPlaybackDuration) and how far into the song you are (with MPMusicPlayerController).
Though it's worth noting that Daniel has definitely contributed a whole lot more signal than noise :)
I love this comment, "Farmers to stay in close touch with the land, the source of their sustenance, and not to relegate all the manual work to hired laborers."

Every great company had been started from several small innovations. I knew youtube or any site that was playing video with flash was going to be big. Its because we had just developed the flash player to do it.

I learned then that playing with any new idea/software gave me much more than some curiosity.
Fair. But you don't need to be accurate, just within reason.

Explaining your inputs logically is important for other people to see at your level. Plus as another posted mentioned, going through these motions helps you better understand your product and target audience.
Agreed!

If it was 1997 I'd actually might read an article published on a CNET website, but it's not so I made this superfluous comment instead.
Er, that's not the same thing at all.

They're talking about daily P/L. They realize profit and loss every day. You can't simply ignore all the days when you had (unrealized) losses and still compare with situation described in the article.
Ask HN: Support ticketing system
Hello HN'ers,

I'm in the market for a new support ticketing system.

So far we've been using a todo list on steroids, and it has served us well, but we need more features that this one does not contain, so the time has come to upgrade.

The biggest missing feature is good email integration, so whatever will replace this should at least do that well, furthermore we have a ton of stuff on the go, development in several branches with a beta environment for each of them.

What kind of ticketing system would you recommend ?

Which ones would you definitely stay away from ?
> Goldman is getting vilified in the press these days, and I frankly think it's unwarranted.

Oh really? Goldman made a lot of deals with AIG and bought "insurance" from folks who didn't have the ability to pay off. When things went south, Goldman went to the US govt and said "pay off AIG's debts", saving Goldman the trouble and risk of going after the folks it bought insurance from.

What part of that do you disagree with? Do you really think that pointing it out is unwarranted? Or are you going with "it was good"?

> People who have little understanding of how they make their money quickly cry foul.

I have no objection to them making money by being smarter or creating markets. I do think that they should take their losses like everyone else. If they buy "insurance" and it can't pay off, that's their problem.

People who have little understanding of how they make their money quickly cry foul.
My nearest IKEA has a number of "tiny houses" all set up that you can walk through. (I'm in Australia)
Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early

My expirience is the opposite. All customers I have dealt with were very happy to receive an acknowledgement early and a post-mortem analysis later.

Most customers don't care one bit about what is wrong, they care about when their service will be restored. Knowing "they are working on it" is already one step up from "Does this affect only me? Have they even noticed, yet?".
The beef that people have isn't that they're making money, but that they're doing so unfairly and at the expense of taxpayers and individual mom-pop investors.

I'm not taking a stance here. Just clarifying.
I flagged it for that reason. Without any background, it's nothing more than nerdrage about supposed unjust business by...someone. Not the blogger's fault to not fill random people in, perhaps, but people who post blog-drama need to remember that we're not all following their favorite blogs.
This is misleading, you essentially you learn from positive experience not necessarily success. You learned from the teachers who encouraged than those that didn't.
Along the same lines, if you build a twitter app that uses Oauth and change the access from read to read/write the oauth tokens never change and won't work if you try to do a write operation. Even if you log out and log back in manually. More problematic the error is '401 - Unauthorized', blah.

The work around recommended by Twitter? Register a new twitter app that is read/write from the get go. :(
You can really say the same for most of the big dealers...

In fact there are a few who actually are BIGGER brokers who serve more institutional clients than GS...
One thing that I found particularly interesting is the way that it partitions groups of processors per application. It reminds me of the way that IBM's Scalable Power 2 system worked.

This Tilera chip looks remarkably similar, just a LOT smaller, and less FP oriented; although I suspect that in computational applications, the contemporary GPU solutions, including Larrabee, will probably blow it away, it looks like something that has a lot of potential in I/O bound applications like web servers and DBMS's, as others have pointed out.

If they can get enough developer interest, they could have a winner on their hands. I could see this sort of thing being very popular in web server farms, as well as in data centers.
Dave Winer has now literally become the grumpy old guy who mumbles angrily about stuff nobody understands while everybody ignores him.
>Makes your head big though.

It's a workout, not a yoga session. It's supposed to make you proud.
We've been using PagerDuty since they launched beta on HN a month or two ago and overall we like it although we think the pricing seems a bit high.
I think a lot of people are missing the future. Most people aren't going to have what we think of as a computer today. They will use their phone or some form of consumer electronic device that has a browser and an app store.

Linux needs to get a foothold in this market in an open way.
Gates' Memo about why the Office format should be a proprietary format (1998)
ARGHHHH I finally decided to use Tarsnap and it happens that it's not available in Canada :/
Newspaper publishers are running out of costs to cut
If you got in low, it's been really hard to not make money.

Absolutely true.

But there have been plenty of down days, and what's suspicious is that Goldman made money on all of these except one (though see my final statement in this post - I don't fully believe that the numbers that are posted mean what they are supposed to mean).

Since July 3 (random date a few months ago), if you look at S&P 500 returns, there have been 50 up days and 36 down ones. To make money on each and every one of those movements screams "exploited loophole", if that's actually what happened. I'll leave it to other interested parties to calculate the probability of that happening by chance; it depends on your assumptions, but there's no way that it's significant enough to consider.

Or maybe they've fully solved the problem of market timing. But they're really just not that smart (there's not an analyst alive that believes you can nail day to day movements at 99% accuracy).

In this field, another maxim applies: never attribute to genius that which can be adequately explained by malice. Here, we've got motive and opportunity for malice, so I'm very hesitant to believe that they're playing fair...

However, I also don't necessarily believe that these numbers mean what we think they mean, since I don't know how they were generated, or what sorts of accounting or trading tricks may have been played to "smooth out" the risk profile and ensure very few losing days, as long as the long term average was positive. The appearance of zero-risk trading has some very tangible benefits, and there's a lot of stuff you can do to shift a distribution of returns so that it looks a lot less volatile than it really is...that whole CDS bonanza had a lot to do with shifting risk to the tails to snatch at predictable returns the rest of the time, so who am I to say there's not something similar going on here?
And, indeed, he might!

http://twitter.com/str0ke/status/5422531377
The call quality on the iPhone seems much better than on previous smartphones I've used (almost exclusively Treos), and callers complain about my voice quality far less then they used to. I can't compare to Blackberries since I haven't owned any. I'm willing to believe that Palm's handset design was poor, although I did own every Sprint model that came out for several years (300, 600, 650, 700) and you'd think they'd have fixed it if call quality was that bad.

My understanding is that 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) and EDGE/GSM are two different networks running in parallel. If the 3G network is overloaded with iPhones, then older/cheaper phones that only use 2.5G should (in my understanding) work better. This theory could be tested if iPhone owners tried disabling 3G, but I don't know if that's a widely-tested theory.

I don't know if the overloaded 3G network is the entire problem with the iPhone - maybe it's combined with a poor ability to handle an overcrowded network. I can say that I live in Western NY (Rochester) and do not see any of the problems people/articles report. I drop calls maybe once every two weeks, I've only missed calls due to reception problems and have never had problems with missing/failed text messages. (I have had some occasional Visual Voicemail issues, however.)

I have, however, had all those problems when going to conferences in much larger cities, and those conferences have had very high proportions of iPhone users.

It's a tricky problem, because Apple chooses their partner carriers and their reputation is coupled to the carrier's experience. Apple wants to sell as many phones as possible, but that seems to quickly overload the carrier network in many areas and leaves an impression of the device not working well. I wonder if this would be less of a problem if Apple chose to only sell unlocked phones and not partner with carriers, but then the iPhone wouldn't be the success it is today.
The only major one that I've had passing experience with is Kayako SupportSuite (http://www.kayako.com/solutions/supportsuite/). I don't know how it stacks up against competitive products.

I believe it is PHP-based as well, if that matters.

The price is pretty good though - ~$500 for an 'owned' license (http://www.kayako.com/purchasing/pricing.php).

All that said, I'm interested to see what other options people suggest.
Yes, universal binaries do not help when it comes to supporting multiple distributions. However I have a problem with the fact that Linux people downright reject the entire idea as being "useless". This same attitude is the reason why inter-distro binary compatibility issues still aren't solved. Whenever someone comes up with a solution for making inter-distro compatible packages or binaries, the same knee-jerk reaction happens.

And yes, the developer must take care of packaging anyway. But that doesn't mean packaging can't be made easier. If I can skip the step "setup a cross compiler for x86_64" then all the better.