skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think post author missed the point of "lean". The point is to iterate through a few adjacent market positions with the lowest cost possible until you find one which resonates with users the most. Once you found one, by all means get out of lean and start building out like mad.

This is an alternative to building out like mad something that you have no idea if anyone wants to pay money for, and then doing it again and again at great expense of time, money and morale. Think ".com" mania.

I agree that Steve Blank needs to talk more about lean success/failure criteria and an exit strategy. If you've used lean to build a smallish business you need to leave it behind and go look for something else. This is challenging logically (how do you know if it's too small?), psychologically (given the sweat put into it) and financially (revenue is revenue after all and you get attached to it especially if you don't have other revenue to fall back on).
revisionists trying to discredit scientists instead of providing data

OK, but kinda the point of this is that these scientists themselves attempted to discredit other scientists who disagreed with them, rather than refuting them through data. That lays them open to ad hominem attack.
It's just a hypothesis. The burden of proof rests on gathering evidence. So far, I don't think there is any.
"Parentheses sometimes create first-class lists in Python"

No, they never do. (don't know about ruby) Square brackets are for that. No problems with syntax this way.

"They also sometimes group expressions and disambiguate precedence"

But it's obvious: "expr ( [expr ,]* expr)" is a call - always. "(expr)" is for precedence. "([expr,]+)" is a tuple. Same as in 99% (made up number) of languages you encounter.

OTOH, in Perl, you've got the same expression that creates a list in one case, but not in the other, which is simply confusing. To be honest, I don't know of any other language that does it. You can call my expectations to be appropriate for a pastiche of whatever other language - yes - all the other languages I know / heard of, work the way I expected... and don't force me to learn rules that work based on context. Similarity between languages is a "good thing".

If you like that syntax, good for you. But I fully understand people who'd rather not be surprised this way. To me it doesn't make sense to be that different. I think Steve Yegge knew exactly what () do when he was writing his blog - he was simply complaining about that unexpected behaviour.
Docking them on the ISS uses the dock. Launching the shuttles for a goodbye costs millions of dollars for sentimental purposes.

Most important: Retiring them on earth lets us put them in museums for people to see.
How to Gift an App using iTunes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMwKYl2ed3E
As the interview was closing, Mr. Brahmachari questioned why anyone would be interested in the situation, and then said he would complain to a reporter’s bosses in New York if she continued to pursue the story.
I think it's just that voting does an asynchronous request to the server, and a lot of requests to HN have been timing out lately. I usually open comments that I want to vote on in another tab, vote, and then refresh the tab later on to see if it took.
Current system actually doesn't allow reposting right? So yea that would be a good idea, along with a minimum time limit for reposting.
Science isn't math.
Even if that is a bad example, it's not unbelievable there is the "price" effect.
I was not aware that one could only upvote a position one agrees with. I upvoted because it is an interesting argument cogently made, not because I agree with the premises or conclusion.
It's true of Arabic, though; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Primary_letters.
That is true. I think the core benefit of the lean startup thing is that you'll be debugging something that people actually want and are paying for rather than debugging something which may be released to an uncaring world 18 months from now, if it gets released at all.

With regards to his point about building a hotel whose core infrastructure doesn't support 100 rooms: I think, based on the dissatisfaction with having to support customers and the price point, that he is probably talking more about scaling per-customer interaction rather than scaling in a technical sense. Scaling in a technical sense is a) a nice problem to have, kind of like having to hold your pants up because the number of Benjamins in your pockets keeps threatening to tear them off of you (hint: buy a belt) and b) is largely a solved problem for sites with less users than most nation states.

So can the lean startup help you scale out of that CS issue? I think so. First, if you treat CS incidents/bugs/etc as things to be optimized away, constant small improvements will mean you get less and less CS incidents per customer as time goes on. (Find what gives people trouble. Fix it. Repeat. I get less than 1/6th as many tech support requests per sale now as I did when I started out.)

Second, if you find your current pricing isn't attracting quite the sort of customers you want, you can always change pricing for new customers. Grandfather in the existing folks at $4 a month, and then carefully consider whether you want to be serving the market that values their data less than they do a frothy Starbucks drink. "Charge more" fixes more CS issues than any other single solution. It also has some nice side effects, such as getting you more money.
On Being an Internet Entrepreneur
Companies are not charities. Giving out benefits to people not producing value is very bad for them.

These are people that have already produced significant value for a company, so the notion that this is "charity" is really pushing it.

Given that many countries are having serious economic problems because of low birth rates, there is a strong need to encourage people to have children; ensuring that they don't go broke and lose their jobs as a result of having kids and properly taking care of them is not a knee jerk reaction, it has a very important economic function.

Extending a lot of benefits to men will just "equalize" the reluctance to hire.

...and the market should correct for this by reducing wages by exactly the amount necessary to cover the lost productivity.

While we're on the topic of higher order effects: removing these benefits from women would cause an increase in wages, as well as a disincentive to have children. That disincentive to have children has a real economic cost, and I'm not seeing any effects that would tend to offset that.

I would question whether this is really a knee-jerk reaction - to me, it seems to have many of the qualities of useful government intervention, in that nobody would be likely to offer it on their own, but it has positive value to the overall economy if everyone does it (in other words, the second order population growth benefits are spread throughout the country, so there's no direct incentive for an individual company to do their part to spend money to cause them, a typical prisoner's dilemma situation).
I felt compelled to tune into thesixtyone
> What is the best way to deal with skeptics of generally accepted ideas?

As a creator of a "NoSQL" database (CouchDB), I think I understand the skeptics that climate researchers must deal with, and how it's difficult. In our case, there are a great deal of skeptics who deny there are any advantages to something that isn't SQL. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise.

So I don't argue with them, it' a waste of my time. That's not to say it's a waste of time, but it's a waste of my time. I continue to work on the project, make it better, grow the user base, etc. But I don't engage the skeptics, I let the code and real successes stand on it's own, and others can argue in it's defense if they are so inclined (and many are).

Anyway, for climatologists, the easiest way to deal with the skeptics is make as much data and methodology as possible public and easily accessible. Skeptics will still argue against it, but others will take up the fight of arguing for it. If it's possible that people will argue passionately about a new style of database, it stands to reason there's a whole army of people ready to take up the fight of supporting your data, methodologies and conclusions when it involves the entire Earth's climate.

And if the skeptics finds something in your research people can't defend, maybe your data or methods are flawed and need improvement. That's a good thing regardless if it came from skeptics or supporters.
The guardian link seems very weak in content - trying to get a paper published is not fraud. Sorry, but all I see is the news trying to make a story.

The whattsupwiththat thing was discusses in another thread, again I don't think it is all it is cracked up to be. It is just anti-warming people jumping at a chance, addressing the dumb public who doesn't understand scientific jargon or processes.

If this leads to a better grasp of the public about this, it might at least be some benefit. I am not claiming that academia is perfect these days.
When did that happen? I did not read that in the emails that were floating around here.
It seems I am missing the "trying to discredit" part, where is that from?

So far I also haven't seen any "flaws in proofs". I have only seen words like "trick, milk data" that can or can not mean bad things - take your pick depending on what you want to believe.
I yawned at least 6 times
The biz plan competition at our school is very clear on this: it is just about the business plan. They do not care about execution. In fact, they recommend that the prize money be distributed equally between the team members as opposed to being used for the company. I am having a hard time digesting this, nonetheless I appreciate their clarity.
Yes, but as someone points out in the comments there's another file where it is used: http://di2.nu/foia/harris-tree/briffa_sep98_e.pro
"The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million - a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water."

And what of those bacteria/viruses that do survive. Don't we run the risk of creating "super bugs on steroids" - letting only the really fittest survive?
"Brain drain" is often cited as the problem. I doubt it has as big an impact as people claim it to have.

Even though a fraction of the top talent leaves, there are a lot of very intelligent and talented people in India who don't leave the country.

The biggest thing that's holding back development in India is the one thing which Indians are very proud of: culture. In a country where you have to respect people purely based on age and status, bad ideas will continue to win.
Top Government Sites Powered By WordPress
All these sites are powered by WordPress and doing a great job out there. Do share other wordpress based websites (only .gov) if you come across.
I just temporarily gave up on something I was trying to program. That's why I'm on Hacker News. Thanks for backing me up, random Internet blogger!
This problem exists even if we ignore unicode. What is the reverse of the following string?

foo\r\n\bar

I imagine the most useful answer if you are writing a notepad-level application would be:

rab\r\n\oof
Ditto for me, especially on squats. About 8 seconds after my first lift in a set, the lack of oxygen hits me hard: I first yawn and then begin breathing faster. This is when going straight into the squats with no warmup whatsoever.
I think this is a good point:

Imagine you have an idea for a new type of hotel. Would you build just two rooms and see if people liked the general idea then, if they did build 15 rooms and if those sold build 40 rooms and then eventually 100? If so, you would end up with a building whose core infrastructure was not designed to make it efficient to service and run a 100 room hotel. That is what can happen with a lean startup. You could argue that once you prove a market then you can always go back and rebuild the thing from scratch when you have more resources, but that too isn’t really true.

It seems to me he is, in part, talking about the idea of "right sizing". But it also seems to me that part of the point of starting lean and using customer development is to develop the founders -- their skills in dealing with the customer, their understanding of the product and market, etc. This piece talks like it is about "the product" but towards the end makes this comment:

Lean startups can be attractive because they minimize your chances of failure. They allow you to string along a mediocre business for years while keeping your day job and justifying the whole thing by saying you are lean.

The above comment brings it back to development of the founder as an entrepreneur. Perhaps the author is struggling to understand what went wrong and doesn't quite know how to frame it -- which would make perfect sense because if he already understood it well enough to frame it well, the odds are good he wouldn't have made the mistakes he is frustrated by. He would have done something else (and made some other set of mistakes/discovered some other set of pitfalls).
So maybe we haven't found a smoking gun yet, but the general gist of the documents and emails in that package is not very encouraging.

You can find reviews of IPCC's book that are full of very strident critiques. You can find emails discussing the inherent inaccuracy of their work. You can find internal dismissal of the tree ring data, stating how useless it is. You can find a scientist openly glad that he's not being held accountable so he can push his climate interests.

After spending a couple hours pouring through the repository, I haven't found much that makes this work seem stable enough to base global lifechanging legislation on.
OK, I have looked at the ESR link again. it says in the code

"; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!"

Folks, please!!! So it is known (from the other emails about tree-ring data not corresponding with thermometer readings after the 1960s or something) that some correction is needed. So it seems plausible that a researcher starts with some crude correction to test things out, before they take the time to find the proper adjustments. This is probably just some throwaway code (like approximating pi = 3,14 before you take the time to make an algorithm for calculating Pi to higher precision). I don't think it ended up in a chart that was presented to Obama in person.

The whole case looks very, very weak, and to be honest, I just lost a whole lot of respect for ESR. Climate change be true or not, I don't like brainless mob behavior.

I think the problem again is with the wording, "artificial" can mean different things - again take your pick depending on what you want to believe.

In the end, I don't see how "artifical charts" like that could end up in scientific papers. Surely if you present a chart, you also have to present the way you derived it, at which point any fakery should become evident. If no such process is included, it simply is a weak paper.
I think the parent post was saying that the "revisionists" like to pick out weak points in one particular small result, and try to unfairly imply that all of the larger results in the field must be wrong, as well, without touching on any of the data or arguments in support of those results.

This is what happens in the evolution debate on a regular basis: someone comes up with some minor technical complaint about peppered moth observation, spends a long time debating it, and then declares that evolution is "in controversy" despite the fact that even if their complaints were valid, there are thousands of other pieces of evidence in favor of the larger theory.

I don't know enough about global warming to know if its critics are merely hacking away at a weak sapling to draw our attention away from the dense forest that they can't cut their way through. But I know that tactic has been applied in the past, so I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder.

Scientists tend to get caught up arguing over whatever particular claim is being criticized, but I think in this situation, it would serve the climate scientists well to point the public eye towards less vulnerable data and claims, if they're out there...
I've heard it phrased as "We overestimate change in the short run, and underestimate it in the long run"

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/03/roy-amara-forecaster.ht...

E.g. it doesn't take long to go from "OMG online Social networking"? this will change everything! To "eh, my life is still the same". Then year later, you notice how much your social life has been slowly but totally extended and rearranged.
They read stuff written by people who've been working on the story for 6 months, or 30 years building their list of contacts and their knowledge of a field.

I read a lot and 99% is not what you describe.

Also, the difference between drugs and well-researched news stories is their perceived value. People perceive drugs to be of a high price and don't mind paying that price--especially when the drug has a patent. The same is not true for well-researched news stories: while there may be a niche customer segment that will pay for it, most folks that read news do not perceive the well-researched news stories to be of significant monetary value. The choice for newspapers then is to keep sinking money on expensive researched studies or adjust to a model which better addresses the needs of their customers, even if it means letting go folks.
Good points.
People care too much about pointless things.
People, too often, live in the short-term while ignoring the long-term. Instant gratification doesn't lead toward long-term satisfaction
Cadillac tried to compete with Lexus and Infiniti by lowering prices. Sales nosedived as the price reduction was seen as confirmation that Lexus and Infiniti made better cars.

Again, I've heard the story a number of times, but I can't prove it. Also, the 1980s were the height of Cadillac's atrocious badge engineering, where they's just throw different grilles on the same car across all the different makes.

I have a better pricing story that I'll be using on my new blog soon.
Well, auto-generating cross-language bindings so that you can make function calls between code written in arbitrary languages would be a good start. Limited subsets of this exist, usually variations on "how to call C libraries from other languages" since that's the most common scenario.

For example, there's SWIG: http://www.swig.org/

Unfortunately, there tend to be subtle issues of impedance mismatch that make cross-languages bindings never feel quite right.
Adium also has a pretty insane way of matching URLs, that's been in use (and growing all the while) since 2004.

http://hg.adium.im/adium-1.4/file/542aa252713b/Frameworks/Au...

is the lexing part, and then there are other files in the same directory that do other little bits. The whole hyperlinks framework is under a BSD license.
Exactly! Most people forgets that india has more population than USA and Europe combined!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+population+%2B+europ...

They don't lack people who can make a difference, they lack the proper environment to make a difference. You can take all the best and the brightest of the world to india and it would not make _much_ difference unless the government initiates the right environment for change.
Mothers should be programmers
A calculated gamble on the new language becoming popular in the next several years?

It's like investing in a company; the smaller it is when you throw in your lot, the better placed you'll be when it grows big. Imagine that Go becomes the Next Big Thing five years from now, displacing large amounts of C/C++ code--this guy would then have five years of experience under his belt in the hot new language right as its popularity spikes.

The potential downside is that the language never takes off and you end up an expert in something that no one wants (see also: Lisp.).
I'm happy with Dreamhost. It's a great value.
The challenges facing toy startups: distribution, marketing, design.
"Computer science" is, unfortunately, often used as a catchall term for "everything related to software and programming".

Not to mention that computer science, in the narrow sense, isn't about computers and isn't a science. Three cheers for unclear terminology!
A touch on the fluffy side, but interesting to see how different the world of hardware entrepreneurship is . You need to worry about shipping products, physically. You can't iterate. You need to have massive marketing budgets, and you need to nail the product out of the door. Interesting to see if the YC model can work its way into software.
Customer Development's unspoken premise is that web startups are in a world where market risk, not technology risk, dominates. Its usefulness is that it focuses techies like me on mitigating those market risks.

The question on my mind is whether it's too much of a greedy algorithm that moves you towards a local maximum but discourages real audacity?
The author is completely missing the point of lean and minimal viable product. His assertion that Google would only be a "small search player" if they'd gone the lean startup route is way off, because Google already had their MVP built by the time they took their VC money. There's nothing wrong with taking money to accelerate business growth; it's just dangerous to have unlimited resources up front when you're still trying to figure out what the market wants.
Getting it wrong over coffee
Look at all the compliants:

117	regarding Advertising Issues
178	regarding Billing or Collection Issues
4	regarding Contract Issues
14	regarding Customer Service Issues
35	regarding Delivery Issues
3	regarding Guarantee or Warranty Issues
5	regarding Product Issues
556	regarding Refund or Exchange Issues
220	regarding Sales Practice Issues
2	regarding Service Issues

They probably just refund the money or something, but if this many people complain, how many don't?
Actually, Armstrong was talking about text handling, which is not the same thing - certainly not in the context of a thread about writing an editor (in Erlang).

I'm by no means an Erlang expert, nor have I ever written an editor; but I don't think it self-evident that, say, language support for regular expressions is a significant aid. (Automatic memory management may be helpful, but Erlang has that and it's not what we're talking about anyway.)