skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if your conversion rate is 1%, losing a single customer is like 100 people never coming to your website. Strike that traffic from your logs.

I'm not sure how well this actually holds up logically. (There are other parameters to take into account.) But it's a reasonable motivator to analyze retention in your specific case.
There's nothing wrong with making money in that case, just avoid these kinds of statements:

> earning money was never the point of charging job seekers
First: in case you're wondering, this is not a complete or even representative history of the early days of ISS. I like Chris fine, but there was a long time ISS ran as a 2-3 person company and those people are the ones HN folks probably want to know about.

Second, while I admire the analytic approach, the raw data here isn't very interesting:

* Most of these companies went nowhere.

* Many of them were never funded.

* Some of them aren't really security companies (for instance, Sonicity, which I cofounded, and Zoompf, Billy Hoffman's web performance startup, which has existed for I think a couple of weeks now).

* Most of them have nothing to do with ISS, and everything to do with GATech, which has been excellent on information security for a long time.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that every other tech hub is also a security hub; you can draw similar graphs for Austin, Boston, and of course the Valley. Similarly, lots of other tech companies were funded in Atlanta. WheelGroup/Cisco, TippingPoint, RSA, and @Stake/Symantec also shed lots of little spinoff companies.

At the end of the day, security products are just a uniquely easy way to suck large amounts of money out of large corporations using small dev teams and small direct sales teams.

Some quick notes:

* Zoompf isn't a security company.
* WebTone isn't a securty company
* VistaScape is physical/plant security, not IT
* Starpound isn't a security company
* Sonicity isn't a security company
* Kaneva is Chris Klaus' video game company
* Steelbox isn't a security company
* Omnilink is a physical/plant security company, not IT
* Virima isn't a security company

And then:

* ScannerX was a services company
* RBTI was a VAR
* Errata is a services company
* Vigilar is a services company
* Infoweapons is a VAR

Finally:

* NMotion never appears to have launched or gotten funded
* I can't find Key Connections
* Pramana doesn't appear to have gotten funding

Some genuine Atlanta security startups w/ traction (he's not making up the fact that there is a security scene in Atlanta):

* ISS (IBM)
* SPI Dynamics (IBM)
* CipherTrust (McAfee)
* Damballa (still a going concern with serious funding)
* Reflex (still a going concern [limping] with serious funding)
* Oversight (and, actually an ISS relationship)

I think he's got a point about Atlanta but a little bit less of a point about ISSX.
If smtp could be linked to an iTunes style payment processing system, those billion spam messages would result in $10 million (assuming a penny per email) and quite possibly reduction in spam.
It's not that the news is more official, it's that the original link was speculating about a $99 unsubsidized price, which is pretty exceptional for a smartphone. That's not in the article at all.
It seems to me that a couple of different issues are being conflated here.

FIRST ISSUE: What syntax is available.

Memorization is the way to go here.

For example, write this in C, and you look like a moron:

foo();
while (bar()) {
foo();
}

... as well as violating DRY and thus producing less maintainable code, etc., etc., because you can do it this way:

do {
foo();
} while (bar());

But if you don't already know that C has a loop construct with the test at the end, then you'll never write the second version.

SECOND ISSUE: Exactly how the syntax is put together.

Maybe this needs to be memorized, and maybe not.

Consider the above example. I write a "do-while" loop maybe a couple of times a year (?). If I forget exactly how to type it in (semicolor at the end, or not?), then I can look it up. So I figure, as long as I know that "do-while" exists, I can look up the details when I need them.

On the other hand, I write a "for" loop once a week, at least. If I hadn't memorized the pattern

for (INIT; COND; INCR) { ... }

then I would waste huge amounts of time looking it up every time I needed it.

However, I don't really need to predict in advance exactly what syntax I need to memorize the details of. If I find myself looking something up more than once in a week/month/whatever, then it's probably time to memorize that.

Disclaimer: If you're taking a college class, and the instructor says to memorize something, then you'd better know it, at least until the final exam is over.
Not to dig up the dark past, but could you share more. I'm interested.
In the short run, yeah. But if everyone is flinging money at junk mail, eventually the ones who are doing it wrong will be broke.
Nexus overload. I thought its the new mobile platform. and now its the new OS.

I thought chrome was just a browser and then now chrome is also a OS.

d'oh.
not really a paradox. learn to play poker.
Apache Directory Project
On the positive side, this has led to some improvements, at least in the motherboard market. I've seen both Asus and Gigabyte market motherboards with "High Quality" "100% Japanese" capacitors.
That is some impressive variable-width ASCII art, I must say.
I prefer Richard Stallman's term: Treacherous Computing.

These academics, like many others, have sold their souls. Books on "trusted computing", "remote attestation", and similar freedom-destroying garbage have become disconcertingly plentiful at my university library.

We must fight it to the last bullet. Because once we lose the general-purpose computer, we aren't ever getting it back:

"The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently, disastrously wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it."

Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere
(http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html)

"Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call “trusted computing”, large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you."

Can You Trust Your Computer?
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html)

Buy, maintain, and cherish true general-purpose computers, my friends, for I fear that within a decade, they will be contraband items.
His "Don't Make Me Think" is still the best UX book I've ever read. Focused, clear and sensible.
Generally a business goes through three stages: innovation (create and fine tune the product), growth (increase market share through marketing), and harvest (maintain large customer base). We experienced all three stages with our first company. Each stage is unique. Each requires a different mode of operation. They require different talents, different ways of thinking, and different filters for making decisions. Conventional wisdom says this is the desired course of a business. You start out small, innovate, grow a customer base into a huge corp and then harvest the rewards.

After reading Paul Graham's "How to Make Wealth" essay, we had an 'aha moment'. It's not necessary for a business to do all three stages. In fact it's not efficient and usually not desirable. Some people/companies are good at innovation, some are good at growth, and some are good are harvest. Each should focus on their strengths.

The model of creating startups and then exiting is about focusing on the innovation stage.
I've just tried this out and it is indeed deeply cool, although the scrolling even on my 3GS is not quite native-like. I would love to know how they're managing fixed-position toolbars; has anyone reverse-engineered that bit yet?
If smtp could be replaced ...
I had the great pleasure of visiting the Walker library last year. Not only is the library packed inch to inch with incredible artifacts as Wired describes, but it is truly his own as well, with items that have been great personal inspirations to him as well.

What surprised me the most, however, is how down to earth the entire family is. They are all energetic yet realistic, and some of the friendliest people I have ever met.
OK, their next cheapest thing is called the 'Bing' (LOL trademark infringement...), costs $389, and runs an atom with 1GHz and a ~10" screen.

Is this closer to what you think is a good base spec? I presume the point you're trying to make is that a computer aimed at the developing world should be x86 compatible so that users will have a realistic choice of software an budding engineers and programmers will have access to a platform that will give them transferable skills rather than a possible technological dead end (don't know what's in this $99 device, perhaps an ARM?).

So if we take $100 as a desirable price target that manufacturers could hope to break even on, and assume some aid for development help and technological fairy dust to help us along, what would be your 'sensible minimum' spec?
I assume Google makes a cut from those too. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that those who consume many apps over a period of time might also contribute towards covering for the subsidy.
And if Ballmer murdered someone, that would have been harder to apologize for as well.
They say Linux too, though not which flavor. Might be a charity writeoff for MS, I doubt the volume license for CE is more than $5 or $10 per seat anyway.
I appreciate your response and your concerns, and it's also worth noting that I'm not an iPhone developer so my view may not be representative of the group you're trying to target.

My observation, from having been involved in and observed class action cases in the past, is that the named individuals who represent the class need to be prepared to fight on behalf of everyone. They are taking greater risks by standing up the front, and the joining, support, and enthusiasm of the rest of the class is dependent on the class being able to trust them to do that leading.

If you're concerned at this early stage about shielding your identity, then could I (hypothetically) trust you to fight the good fight on my behalf?

I guess the danger / problem is that by posting anonymously you will get fewer, and less-genuine responses from those you seek to help. If your gmail account runneth over, you can consider me wrong.
Sorry for being a fundraiser email--couldn't easily find a simple blog or other web source.

But I think Barr is making some good points here even if it's a very short overview of the problems of privacy & Google.

Disclaimer: I don't support Barr politically, but I have a lot of sympathy for his position.
Great - you have a preference and gave some principles that define your aesthetic. I find your alternative to fmt.printf to be horrifying, but then, I hate Objective C and plenty of people love it.

Fortunately, you can have it your way by using gofmt to show you format.PrintFormattedString() when you edit, but give fmt.printf to the compiler.

As for the command name, there's always "ln -s ~/bin/gofmt ~/bin/goformat" or "alias goformat gofmt".
This is the second recent problem MS had with a contractor stealing source code (the other was the Windows 7 image tool violating the GPL).

I'm sure Microsoft handles lots of outsourced projects, and they can't review every last bit of code. Why not put in a system where violations like these can be reported to someone at MS?
What a fantastic bikeshed* we have here.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality
Shitty computers for the third world is better than no computers.

In the same way, we don't stop digging wells for tiny villages just because we can't supply them with hot and cold running water in every house.
How to be a Great Lecturer (and Professor)
Good milestone for Android. I wonder what the growth rates for the App Store and Android Market are.
Regarding the actual legality of such a suit, doesn't some ind of statute of limitations apply here? This has been a blatantly obvious part of of a very public industry for a long time. And NOW, in 2009, they choose to sue all of the internet giants for their idea? There's no way they can claim this isn't just about wanting more money.
Being a patent troll and all, I'm sure Jay Walker could care less about sharing anything with the public.
I blame Flash
This is too radical a correlation. The issue is the protocol - it was designed to let colleague in academia and military to exchange messages (with all the weight of their collective social contracts bearing on their use of the system). It wasn't designed to allow sleazy characters across the globe to engage in harassment through messaging.

Maintaing 'net neutrality' in conjunction with committing to the necessity of evolving net protocols to address end user responsibility is a viable path forward. If the choice comes to rewriting software stacks or giving up certain rights, then I'm 100% on the side of the rewrite. (Its just code, after all.)
Funny,

The system is down for maintenance as of 14:26 PST.

It'll be back shortly.
Fascinating--it looks like they've implemented a micro-Objective-J-like language and then, based on that, implemented a whole micro UIKit in that language.
This begs for a mashup with the sex-offender locator.
I suppose an ISP's customer could opt-in to receive spam. I'm sure there will be many takers :)
Are you using a 3GS? I find the writing on my 3G to be too laggy for a normal writing speed, so I end up writing at about the same speed as I type in the 'regular' Notes app. I love the attention to detail and thought that has gone into it though.
Plurk is banned by domain, however if it came under the Microsoft domain it may be a different story. Has anyone heard of any Microsoft products through Microsoft China being banned?
I thought he was going to say he was turning the junk mail into paper logs to burn - free fuel.
When CS5 comes out everyone will be able to make flash apps directly for the iPhone right? It seems a pretty hefty cost to hand over half your revenue just for a slightly early release and "shepherding" through the app store approval process.
Word got out on MathJax a little early, as things tend to do on the web. We barely got a sample page up. Although it probably won't matter, our hope is you don't hammer MathJax too hard until we get things going and officially announce. Very soon now!

Paul Topping
Design Science, Inc. (one of the MathJax founders)
How did Morgan Stanley fare in their previous predictions?
3d TV fail in Dallas Stadium
thx for the link appearing last in the article about parallel computing patterns, quite a good wiki.
Anyone running Django on top of Iron Python? I'd be interested in hearing about it.
The page itself isn't actually scrolling. There are Javascript event handlers that are capturing the swipe events and adjusting the positioning of the main content block via WebKit CSS transformations and/or standard CSS positioning. Since it's never actually scrolling the page, the toolbars don't change position.

There are a few JS demos that show this off floating around for iPhone, though they tend to have a variety of potential problems. (Intercepting every touch event via Javascript and handling it yourself results in a lot of edge cases you need to handle; see what happens in the User Guide if you drag your finger off the edge of the screen...)
A friend has an Apple iMac G4 that they paid a shed-load of cash for and expected to last well - it nearly made 3 years. The point of failure? Electrolytic caps in the [overheating] graphics card. The card is soldered in on the screen side of the mobo.
It looks like lifetime is specified in hours of life at a high temperature - e.g.:

http://www.rubycon.co.jp/en/catalog/e_pdfs/aluminum/e_BXF.pd...

Lifetime is specified at 10000hrs at 105deg C.

As temperature decreases, lifetime appx doubles per 10deg C:

http://www.low-esr.com/endurance.asp

It looks like a cap rated at 4000h @ 105deg C should last around 60 years at 100deg F or so. Anecdotally I have a guitar amp made in the 60s with the original electrolytics still working. Sounds great.
No, to the extent where the first step in booting up your Android phone for the first time is filling in your Google account information (at least on the HTC Dream I tried). It's closer to Windows asking you for your MSN or Live or whatever login the first time you boot it up.
It's cases like this that make it so easy to be skeptical about global warming. There is a fair amount of real, verifiable evidence that global warming is real, human-caused, and problematic, but none of it is dramatic enough to make a good story. Endangered polar bears, Hurricane Katrina, and out-of-control Malaria epidemics are a much easier way to get people's attention.

Unfortunately, in the quest for a good story, the activists may give their critics so much scientific firepower as to eventually lose the political battle. It's happened with other environmental problems, and it looks poised to happen again.
Related note: Has anyone tried using this: http://code.google.com/p/iui/
Right, but of my monthly TWC bill, $45 is for internet and $90 is for cable. If I cancel the cable because I can watch everything online, they'll have a very difficult time recouping that $1080/year another way.

That's bad for the content producers as well (NFL, MLB, etc). They don't want their best customers going out of business. Nothing online can offer them anywhere close to the money they get from cable and DirectTV contracts (yet).

So although there may be some additional revenue opportunities through online viewing, neither the NFL or the cable company will risk cannibalizing their main source of income.
Apparently, the cool thing to do is now to defend Microsoft, actually, even in the face of ridiculous transgressions and clear unlawful and unethical behavior. I can't believe that people are giving them a pass on this 'oh, a 3rd party developer did everything and it was all their fault!' excuse. Somehow I doubt that Plurk was elated to find that a giant corporation had thoroughly imitated their site. Probably, once they saw that the exact code had been lifted,it was a relief, though, as they knew that couldn't stand.
I assumed that they were carefully designed so that the electrolyte would go off just out of warranty (no I'm not kidding) and force a resale.

Perhaps electronic manufacturers that are big enough could have a state mandated "cost of parts and actual labour costs" repair service.
This apology is not some amazing achievement; this is simply what they were supposed to do.

I'm not ready to heap a ton of praise on a major company just for following basic ethics and PR in the wake of a scandal they caused. Just how low of a bar are we trying to set here?
You got a lot of downvotes, but I actually upvoted you since I think that fits within HN's guidelines of a comment that creates a lot of discussion.

I think something you are overlooking is that this is like hardware we used to use 10 years ago. And we (the 1st world) were pretty darn productive with that kind of hardware and the software that could run on it.

There's no reason in the world why something equivalent wouldn't be just as beneficial for the developing world.

>I ask though why do they have to get crap?
Because they are poor. Cheap stuff is usually crappy stuff. If your price-point is $99, in an industry where the average is ~$1000, and you want to fit into that low price-point, you end up with low-end stuff - period.

Put another way, a $3000 laptop still costs $3000 (maybe more) in the developing world. There's no "3rd world discount" just because they live in the 3rd world. AND we've already tried subsidizing decent hardware/software through the OLPC program and that hasn't exactly turned out like anybody hoped.

To a rural farmer in Africa who wants to keep track of his harvest schedule, balance the books and gaining access to the Internet so he can comparison shop from seed suppliers, $3000 may as well be $infinity and he'll just continue to muddle along -- heck, $500 may as well be $infinity depending on the case. But $99 is something you can squeeze out of being a bit more frugal on the petrol usage in the tiller for a few months.
Is that a hash tag? This is not twitter.
In that case, can I suggest making that clear in the initial section of the document? For example, changing the sentence "As a solution to this problem, I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented" to something that makes it more clear that you're codifying and naming something which was already a widely recognized scheme.

(I'm also having a hard time believing that we don't already have a name for this system, although I have to admit that a short amount of searching did not come up with one.)
I’m sorry but we blew up your laptop
Aww I wanted to see results at the end :(
I think the practical reason is that it's a drag having to keep them on the books/in the loop/contact for years.

As for the contribution, is it only 1/26th as difficult to run one mile compared with 26 miles?
MathML was supposed to be the answer, and we all know how that went. Just goes to show how over the top people were going with XML in the late 1990s. I mean,

<math mode="display" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
<mrow>
<mi>x</mi>
<mo>=</mo>
<mfrac>
<mrow>
<mo form="prefix">&#x2212;<!-- &minus; --></mo>
<mi>b</mi>
<mo>&#x00B1;<!-- &PlusMinus; --></mo>
<msqrt>
<msup>
<mi>b</mi>
<mn>2</mn>
</msup>
<mo>&#x2212;<!-- &minus; --></mo>
<mn>4</mn>
<mo>&#x2062;<!-- &InvisibleTimes; --></mo>
<mi>a</mi>
<mo>&#x2062;<!-- &InvisibleTimes; --></mo>
<mi>c</mi>
</msqrt>
</mrow>
<mrow>
<mn>2</mn>
<mo>&#x2062;<!-- &InvisibleTimes; --></mo>
<mi>a</mi>
</mrow>
</mfrac>
</mrow>
</math>

to typeset the fucking quadratic formula?
what's wrong with dividing by 6 equally?

any sort of unequal distribution will mess with moral and effort
Very exciting. This project looks impressive and I really hope it succeeds.

Also, what would be really orgasmic is if it would be possible to type math in Latex inside the browser and see it displayed nicely like that. But this is probably asking for too much.
Yes, that's been around for quite a while.

We used it for the built-in help files in our iPhone app (Grafly, a graphing calculator).
Our analogue signal was switched off and despite having a digital ready TV we've not watched telly since. Spending license money on DVD rentals from the library instead.
Hyper-V Technical Information and Resources
actual labor costs quickly make repair more expensive than replacement.
Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks
With Google Chrome OS Your Web Applications Will Be The New Desktop Applications
IPhone + children's book = new interactive medium from Japan
It solves a significant problem that I've encountered several times in real world packaging setups. The problem it solves is outlined on the linked website.

Semantic Versioning is also about more than just dependencies. It's about transparently and accurately communicating the impact that a new version will have on your existing code. As a user of a large number of libraries, a more rigorous approach to versioning would make my life immensely simpler.
> But on the whole this User Guide app and the PastryKit framework are rather amazing. The $64,000 question, though, is whether PastryKit is something Apple intends (or that a team within Apple hopes) to ship publicly. It seems like a lot of effort to build a framework this rich just for this iPhone User Guide, so I’m hopeful the answer is yes.

Is he talking about a different Apple than the one that I know of?