skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it.

Okay. I respect this tremendously, but...

> When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid.

...then you've got to be ready for this. You're going to get it your whole life if you keep acting the way you're acting. It upsets people. They think you're acting out of your place, and you haven't put in your hours and earned your stripes and who the hell does this kid think he is? I went through a similar thing when I was younger and went into business.

Here's one of my favorite quotes, it's by Bertrand Russel:

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves."

Okay, so step 1 - you've got to be willing to accept that you're going to provoke reactions like this if you keep acting as you've been acting, questioning authority and the way things are in a very confrontational way. And when people confront you, they won't fight fair and fight your arguments, they'll pull anything out of the hat they can to discredit you or get under your skin. It's going to happen more often rather than less as you go forwards.

So if you can accept it, and keep on going, you can do some things. So I support you as someone who dropped out of high school and went into business quite young, and got called all sorts of nasty things too, and I admire you character. With that said:

> Fixing AA.com would be ridiculously cheap and simple...

This is where you go wrong. No, it probably wouldn't. You can get all the mileage you're currently getting, and a lot more credibility by changing that statement to, "Hell, maybe there'd be a lot of bureaucracy to cut through to fix AA.com and it'd cost some coin, but it's possible and it needs to be done." --> Lots more credibility. Doesn't lose much bite.

When in doubt, fake the modesty. You'll get much more mileage out of life. Later you might learn that some things are more complicated than they initially appear, but you're going to get better mileage anyway if you sympathize with the difficulties people are likely to face trying to make change. And if you're a little extra nice and sympathetic, and it really would be cheap and easy, then your suggestions sound even more palatable.

So - I'm with you, and keep on trucking man. Maybe add a touch of sympathizing with difficulties people face (guess/fake it if you can't see any potential difficulties) and your critique is much more likely to be received well.
Sure, that requires Jobs. However, Apple has a pretty clear direction that Jobs established and If all that Apple does from now on is to keep the direction calibrated and keep the pace that he set then Apple will do very very well in the long run.
jmtame's email is in his profile.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmtame

(no need to keep making public statements...)
I'm not saying you don't have a reason to be angry at the guy, I'm just saying that an opaque comment questioning somebody's character in a public forum is not appropriate.
That's what used to be great about Dell, you could price every option you wanted on the website. Then if you had missed a deal or wanted a discount on shipping there was a very nice business customer team in Dublin you could call.

Then Dell gave us a sales manager and all sales had to go through him - to be fair he would often return our calls within a week or t least send an email saying he would call. And quotes through him were generally only 10-20% more than the website price once you had removed all the Server CALS and Office licenses that got added to every machine you asked for.

But of course he wouldn't sell you Latitude or whatever they were calling their low end machines because you were now a medium size customer. In the end we resorted to buying anything for the dev team from the outlet on credit card.
May I ask how this qualifies as news? Or how it even affects anyone other than the original poster?

I mean, the dude's marketing agent was laid off and the new guy didn't do as good of a job (or the emails didn't reach). And?
> It is always easy to say that things are easy to fix on an outsider's perspective. In reality, it isn't. I have worked for a big company before and changing things, even the obvious ones, are often difficult.

Let's call a spade a spade here though. In a lot of these large companies the barriers are artificial. Especially when your redesign will 'encroach' on someone's little fiefdom that they've cultivated over the years. I've heard stories of people that were left to their own devices (even in a small company) and when it became a dictate that he/she had to open up to others in the company they quit rather than give up their little 'kingdom.'

These barriers are not there to protect the company in any way, shape, or form. They are there due to petty politicking and stuff that should best be left on the 3rd grade schoolyard. Sure we have to deal with them if we are going to exist in 'corporate culture' but they don't need to be there. This happens in large companies because at some point it becomes harder to control/eliminate, not because it's a necessary part of being a large company.
They’d just say it’s harder and more expensive than doing it with Open Source

Well hopefully this program will highlight some usages of .net where open source (or proprietary non-MS) has traditionally dominated like scientific computing, core infrastructure or rich web applications.

I've only ever seen .net in enterprise situations so here's hoping some novel things come out of this.
Are We Friends?
Great post. In particular, I liked the part about the "Hierarchy of Proof" in pitches:

On the bottom, and least convincing are statements about your “idea.”

Next are hypotheses – “I think customers will care about x or y “

Better are facts from customers – “We interviewed 30 customers with 20 questions”

Even better is “Customer Validation”– “We just got $50K from a customer” or “we got 100,000 users spending x minutes on our site”

Finally if you’re ever so lucky – “Everyone’s buying in droves and we’re here because we need money to scale and execute”

If you’ve actually been doing Customer Development at a minimum you’re at step 3 or 4. If not, you don’t have enough data for a VC presentation. Get out of the building, get some more customer feedback, spin your product and go back and read the book.
that's the thing, though, I want less complexity in pricing, not more. Buying parts, unfortunately, even though it means I buy and price compare many more things than buying servers, actually makes the price of my next server a lot more predictable. This is what I'm saying is messed up.
The naming came from Mandrake's purchase of Connectiva which happened a number of years ago, I agree. Bad name choice. this is a great distro though.
That's a lot like saying if I purposefully drive off a cliff in my Ford Mustang that Ford gave me a poor user experience because I ended up dead.
Video games move online
I don't think anyone would disagree with you that AA has an awful site, but they seem to be reacting to how you phrased your criticism. If criticism is phrased in the wrong way, people will instinctively go into face-saving mode, and ignore the actual feedback ("Can you believe how arrogant this 21 year old is!"). I know this because I've had self-righteous outbursts due to my passion, but I've learned the hard way that it can sometimes rub people the wrong way and actually hurt your cause.

(PS. I think 37signals did this sort of thing brilliantly: http://37signals.com/better. Reading the copy just makes me feel warm inside and shows good emotional intelligence.)
"'social' games... have become all the rage on social networks such as Facebook. These are more about interaction than action: players either join their friends for an online game of poker or Scrabble, or to create and show off virtual pets, farms and mob families. Zynga, the market leader, which had 22m users in January, now has more than 170m..."
Ask YC: Publish the bubble list?
I was hoping YC might be interested in an experiment. The idea being to publish a list of runner-ups to YC, and have them be adopted by HN. A primary goal being to increase the number companies which have some form of “YC approval”. Since picking winners out of a stack of excellent applications is such an imperfect process, these companies that just miss the final cut are probably just as good as the ones who make the final cut. By publishing a bubble list (the top 10 or 20 companies that just missed the cut), these companies gain the YC seal-of-approval, and a level of recognition. I’d like to propose that they then become adopted by HN, where they can lean on the HN community for strategic advice, constructive feedback, and networking---many of the things YC provides. This could foster some friendly competition with YC, where the HN crowd supported companies and the YC supported companies race to the finish.

Obviously, there would need to be some form of permission granting process so that the bubble list companies agree to take part.

Some of the benefits I see:
1. Good will towards entrepreneurs; you double the number of “winners“. Less rejection letters.
2., Winnowing that last pile of 40 applications to 20 becomes easier, perhaps enjoyable. Its not “which great team do we have to reject” but “which great team will go to the bubble list”.
3. Friendly competition. HN vs. YC.
4. Fun (At least for me :), hopefully for others)
5. Learn about “crowd wisdom” as applied to biz-dev. (Nothing like a good experiment)
6. Motivation and support for the entrepreneurs involved means more completed companies.
Precisely. I remember a psychology professor who did some consulting for marketing firms telling us:

"No matter how sophisticated your tastes or your decision buying process are, there's a marketing profile targeting you".

Don't ever under-estimate the marketing people just because you see them trying to sell beer with girls in bikinis (or server hardware with smiling guys in suits). When it's working best, you don't realize anything is going on at all.
Criticizing Dustin for an incident regarding which you have not sought his side is very poor form. Similarly, criticizing his argument ad hominem highlights only your own bias without refuting or examining any of his points.

To quote John Stewart Mill here, "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."
I can't tell if those are diagrams of what the circuit should look like, or actual in-game implementations.
I agree with lionhearted about earning your stripes. What have you done in the past that should make AA.com take your redesign seriously?

There are a number of web entrepreneurs/hackers that I pay attention to. Some are young, some are old but I know they have paid their dues and earned their stripes.
Android is a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination.
You can also jump to the last buffer in Vim with the command :b# To view all open buffers: :ls
Maybe this story is riding the coat-tails of the AA story about how "big companies just don't get it". Who knows.
OK, I get the point about being nice, but the AA.com design is ugly. I'm sure as a giant company AA is used to criticism.

There are many big companies with sites not only ugly, but unusable. For example, Rogers.com (Canada's cell phone almost-monopoly). Half the site (the account management interface) seems not to work with anything except IE6. Are the people responsible for that abomination incompetent? I'd say so. But we are all supposed to be nice to the slow big companies and not talk about it on the Internet :)
History of Apple, EA and Sequoia
Picking a name for a software project is one of the few areas where a developer gets to kick loose and be completely creative, and even fanciful.

Personally, I love picking names that recast old words in a new way, and think Closure is a great name for this project.
You can simply modify your definition of "simplest" to be "shortest that completes in a million steps" or some such. A program that takes so long to finish that you're not sure it will return your desired value is probably not the simplest.
Ford likely doesn't have the option of removing you from the driver's seat before you go over the cliff. Webmaster's do have the power to remove content that could do harm to the user's actual life. Most of them don't give a flip and wouldn't waste any of their effort to protect someone who posted something they might regret 10 minutes later but be unable to remove once it's posted. Most of them seem to agree with you: It's your problem, bozo.

I have personally left sites where the owner has such an attitude. One of them is now upping the efforts to strong-arm users into joining and participating. They seem to still not get the concept that honey is better than vinegar.
Doesn't seem like a big deal to me, but then I'm not a Linux guy.

And J2ME is portable and that's truly an abomination.
Mr. X is going to have a much better job very soon. Don't you worry. This may have ended up being the best decision he ever made.
Exclusive Oracle Interview; How Does an 80,000 Person Organization Use iPhones?
Ask HN: Billing?
I'm looking for low or no cost billing software for my web site. I have a Want Ads section with ads that run for 1-2 or 3 month intervals. I'd like something with a report feature that will print a renewal bill/invoice about 2 week before an ad is due to expire. Any suggestions.
Controversy? I'd call it holding people accountable for their actions. AA has a terrible website and their employees know it. Mr. X shared "corporate secrets" and got fired for it. AA fired an (seemingly excellent) employee for no substantial reason. Dustin got called out for shoving a design in a companies's face.

Holding people accountable is respectable. And for that, I respect. I respect you and Dustin. Accountability is a rare bird these days indeed.
This is ingenious. Imagine if you combined their sales technique with a solid technology!
Something that burned a friend of mine is that college math is nothing like high school math even conceptually. She liked calculus and algebra and became a math major to discover that the math classes she was taking contained very little algebra and no calculus but required really abstract thinking that she had trouble with.

I came at this from the other side, where I dislike mathematics and calculus but love abstract thinking.
IPhoneCTO's Top 5 iPhone OS 3.0 Enterprise Features
No offense, but dcurtis (at least claims) to have asked Mr X if it was ok to publish the email. Mr X agreed to allow it as long as his name was removed. How is this now dcurtis's fault when Mr X consciously chose to allow the email to be published?

This is something that seems (at least on face value) to be perfectly reasonable. He published something from an 'anonymous source.' When was the last time you heard of a company searching the text of an email through their email system to find the culprit?

I could see this being a boneheaded way to protect an 'anonymous source' for an Apple rumor (seeing how cut-throat Apple is with plugging leaks), but when it comes to some random large corporation... probably not. It's not even like any of the information that he provided could be construed by an outside person as a 'trade secret' either. On top of that, it's impossible for dcurtis to know what type of contracts Mr X has signed with AA or what their wording is (or even what the current enforcement policies are).
Really? How is Joshua's position arrogant and discourteous?

He never attacks Dustin as a person. He calls Dustin's methods and actions into question. I fail to see the irony in this...
Agreed, I was hoping to read something of substance but what I ended up reading was very hyperbolic.
Anyone who has a cool or novel use of .NET can feel free to @reply me on Twitter or email me. I would love to blog about it.

@BrandonWatson or brwatson [at] microsoft
Coyotes, A Pulitzer, And DHH's Lamborghini
I said the exact same thing to someone, and couldn't remember the name of the company either. It's killing me. Who knows the name of the late 90s company selling keywords, like "pizza", for millions.

Update: Goto.com is what I was thinking of, I think.
I don't mean this exact approach, but something like Kickstarter where people could prepay a few bucks for something. Imagine if Blizzard offered people who paid $15 some special weapon or tool in their upcoming MMO. They have a massive fan base, but is their a way to "presell" with a startup?
Or Ctrl-^
I would be incredibly happy if we were taught in Python or anything other than the hideous monster that is Matlab on my MSc course. After using Ruby and Python it's rather painful to use such a clunky environment.
The overlap of people interested in Clojure and people interested in Closure is rather small.

This entire thread is evidence against that point.
How To Handle Twitter SPAM On Your Twitter
So, you’ve made the decision to join Twitter. You’ve taken advantage of the various tools available to help you figure out who to follow - such as Twitter’s search engine and Twitter Snipe - and you’ve started to build a following of your own. As this process unfolds however, you may find yourself having to deal with that internet bane of long standing - SPAM.
Why is it called Closure? Does it close stuff? Does it pass functions and bindings? What could possibly have inspired them to use this particular name?
> No offense, but dcurtis (at least claims) to have asked Mr X if it was ok to publish the email. Mr X agreed to allow it as long as his name was removed. How is this now dcurtis's fault when Mr X consciously chose to allow the email to be published?

And at that, how is it dcurtis' fault that Mr. X (stupidly) used his company email address? That said, is it possible that dcurtis would have believe Mr. X if it wasn't from an aa.com address? I don't know the answer to that.
Fighting for great user experiences is one thing - what you did was not that. You called out the entirety of AA's online design department, called them names, and then proceeded to be smug and use the opportunity to be self-aggrandizing.

If you really just wanted to fight what you thought was a terrible user experience, you would've brought up a list of usability concerns and optionally some remedies. You would not have called them names, you would not have called for mass firings, nor would you have gone into insane hyperbole.

In this new age of online communication we as a society really need to find ways of remaining civil without seeing each others' faces.

Working for one of the largest sites on the internet, I know first hand how difficult to get even a single usability feature pushed through - for good reason. A wholesale redesign would take a supreme amount of coordination, dedication, and effort, from multiple teams of people. It is anything but "cheap and simple", and your continuous insistence of this falsehood shows how little real experience you have in large-scale web dev.

Failing to appreciate the complexities of an enterprise-scale website makes you inexperienced and perhaps ignorant.

Failing to admit that there are complexities to an enterprise-scale website that you aren't aware of is being smug and arrogant.
Yes, spreading rate is really the thing to measure. The reason being, is that this region is faulted and rifted throughout. This particular rift is one of many. Rather than elongating; the rifts will join and will connect northward to the Red Sea. It seems that rifts are nearly connecting now. Though, it will take millions of years to finish this connection and create this sea.

I found some information on the spreading rates. Seems the plates are spreading at rates of 15 mm/yr in the north and 6 mm/yr in the south.

Here are some other references:
http://www.ees.rochester.edu/ebinger/Site/Publications_files...
http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/afar/index.htm
for (char *p = strchr(tmpfn, ' '); p && *p; p = strchr(tmpfn, ' '))
*p = '_';

OW MY BRAIN.
How many lint-like tools use a full AST? pylint yes, but I doubt the original did.
I work for a very large company. I am very careful about what I say online that might in some way be about my job or the company I work for. Maybe lots of people routinely get away with talking trash about the place where they work and it never comes back to them. But if the risk is potentially getting fired (and that seems obvious without having any idea what contracts the guy did or didn't sign), then posting it online seems like an act of callous disregard for someone's welfare. If you are the one that gets fired, it doesn't matter if the statistical odds are very small. The consequence was 100% for you, regardless of how many countless others got away with it. It was a plum for the site to have "insider information". That mattered more to the webmaster than the possibility it would harm Mr. X. So he erred on the side of "good site content" and it's justified because Mr. X. said "sure, post it". I wouldn't be comfortable with that.
The Real Time Infrastructure Ultimatum
In my humble opinion, the biggest advantage of .net, is visual studio.

For the on boarding experience, i think it's really worth putting emphasis on the fact that the free Express versions are really fully functional products for daily use.
A mobile phone OS that expects to be running on a mobile phone. Those bastards.
Note that the word closure has meaning in set theory and other areas of mathematics relevant to computer science. SICP explicitly avoids using what wikipedia calls a 'computer science closure' for this reason.
You're replacing all spaces in a string with underscores, until you reach the end of a string or there are no spaces left...

Cool. But what does this have to do with the article? (I apologize if I'm missing something, it is 3am afterall)
Mint Founder Aaron Patzer: How Gen Yers Can Sell Big Ideas
Scientific content:
http://www.ees.rochester.edu/ebinger/Site/Publications_files...

More photos:
http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/afar/websitepages/photogallery1.h...
Wade,

After reading this original blog post you wrote, I think it's a bit of a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The only difference is Ford intervened to stop a PR disaster and AA fanned the flames. I know you're well intentioned, but there's no need to resort to name calling.

http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/12/pr-disaster-ford-sui...
I would agree with that statement. I love Visual studio, its a great tool set. I use eclipse quite a lot, and on occasion I've been known to fire up netbeans.. but none of them seem as solid as visual studio does. Add in resharper and its an even more incredible platform.
It was in the presentation.
In that case, I don't understand why we are celebrating the soul-crushing mediocrity of these Fortune 500 companies. If anything Mr. X's letter made AA look pretty good, and I fail to see what super-secret strategic plans he was airing either. Companies are run by people, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to make rational decisions that treat their employees with dignity.

Dustin might be brash, but he is pointing out obvious problems. It makes no sense to bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer.
I am holding a vigil around my computer...
That's fairly redundant.

char *p;
while (p = strchr(tmpfn, ' '))
*p = '_';
What's the purpose of the "&& *p"? Would strchr ever return a pointer to a null terminator?
Ask HN: Resources for CPC/ conversion rate statistics?
Hello,

I'm running some advertising tests, and I'm not sure how many clicks I need to have a significant sample. Are there any resources for this?