skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

Set in "an ancient China that never was", Bridge of Birds is a humorous, epic tale of adventure as Master Li and Number Ten Ox attempt to cure the children of Ku-fu, and uncover a vile crime perpetrated against Heaven itself.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345321383/

Amazon's review:
Bridge of Birds is a lyrical fantasy novel. Set in "an Ancient China that never was", it stands with The Princess Bride and The Last Unicorn as a fairy tale for all ages, by turns incredibly funny and deeply touching. It won the World Fantasy Award in 1985, and Hughart produced two sequels: The Story of the Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen. All present the adventures of Master Kao Li, a scholar with "a slight flaw in [his] character", and Lu Yu, usually called Number Ten Ox, his sidekick and the story's narrator. Number Ten Ox is strong, trusting, and pure of heart; Master Li once sold an emperor shares in a mustard mine, because "I was trying to win a bet concerning the intelligence of emperors."

Number Ten Ox comes from a village in which the children have been struck by a mysterious illness. He recruits Master Li to find the cure and comes along to provide muscle. They seek a mysterious Great Root of Power, which may be a form of ginseng. Of course, nothing turns out to be as simple as it seems; great wrongs must be avenged and lovers separated must be reunited, from the most humble to the highest. And even in the midst of cosmic glory, Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub are picking the pockets of their own lynch mob, who are frozen in awe and wonder.
ozzie, ozzie, ozzie, oi, oi oi! in of course firefox.
Anything by E.E Doc Smith.
Finance is tough job market. You don't have much job security and the risks go up as your position does. Most financial officers are one major fuckup away from a ruined career.
All types of engineers are in the best position right now because everyone is desperate for more good engineers. Not just from the explosion of software engineering but also from all the baby boomer mechanical, chemical, and civil engineers on the verge of retirement.
Adobe Bringing Flash to the iPhone
this is a more articulate version of what i've been saying.
do a startup if it will make you happy. Some people are only truly happy when they're challenged as thoroughly as only running your own business can be. But don't just assume it's for you based on how cool it seems.
The results are that every single startup has a pile of business cards from people who are interested (to a wildly varying degree).

Now we have dozens of additional demo days, pitching in front of the many people who gave us the aforementioned business cards. After that, haggling over term sheets. After that, lawyers. After that, money. After that, we actually have to build and grow a business (the hard part-- most of the funded companies will likely fail).

In short, the jury is still out-- and will be for years. ;-)
Creators of stu.dicio.us launch New Web App for Budgeting
I don't know how many of you were around for stu.dicio.us during the summer of 2006, but it closely rivaled MyNoteIt with it's incredible simplicity, and was one of the early startups to partner with FaceBook and allow you to add friends from the social network.

Either way, I just received an email from the creators about their new web application, SumApp. The idea is for simple budgeting and money tracking. It's a great application so far, makes use of shortcut keys to track expenses. You can also (if you so choose) tie your credit card to the account and manage money from there as well.
I don't know how many of you were around for stu.dicio.us during the summer of 2006, but it closely rivaled MyNoteIt with it's incredible simplicity, and was one of the early startups to partner with FaceBook and allow you to add friends from the social network. I made extensive use of it during college, and got about 12 friends to use it, it became quite a resource and before you knew it there were flyers all over the school recruiting kids to use it.

Either way, I just received an email from the creators about their new web application, SumApp. The idea is for simple budgeting and money tracking. It's a great application so far, makes use of shortcut keys to track expenses. You can also (if you so choose) tie your credit card to the account and manage money from there as well.

Accounts are usually $5/mo, but because I was one of the stu.dicio.us beta testers, mine was free. If you used stu.dicio.us, check out your inbox you may be entitled to a free account as well.
Ah! I thought they changed their minds about allowing downmodding. Heh.
Not really that important to note. Basically all of the scheme instruction (short of two classes taught by Sussman) has been removed from the curriculum.
In our experience, we've rarely run into scenarios where users forget their passwords and have mistyped their email/faked an email after having spent time on their account. If they haven't spent time on an account -- create a new one!

Otherwise, how does someone who fakes their email expect to recover a password anyway? It's kind of an assumed risk that if you fake your email, you won't be able to recover your password. And requiring a confirmation won't help anything -- they'll be forced to re-create another account with a valid email... that is if they even want to use your service anymore. This user apparently hated giving out their email so badly that they put in a fake one... What makes you think they aren't just going to turn around and not use your service when you require a valid email?
The immediate result is that all the YC folks went out and got a few drinks. The rest will take a bit of time to settle.
I'm about to use it for serious development. We're planning on using it exclusively so I haven't paid much attention to how well it will integrate with Java. My feeling is that we'll be able to develop a much richer front-end in Silverlight in less than half the time it would take in Java/Ajax. Plus we won't get weird lags and delays, and we can do more extensive multi-threading type stuff.
I'm curious as to what other people think of long valuation waves?
http://www.zealllc.com/c2005/Zeal080505B.gif
No Adjectives please! (How to pitch your company)
This is interesting. I plan to move out to San Jose in mid-July to do FT at IBM. Would you mind sending me more info., namely where in San Jose you're located and what your project is all about?

adambossy [at] gmail [dot] com
It’s not them, it’s you: Why new hires are so hard.
is sci-fi allowed as well? In that case "rainbows end" by Vernor Vinge (can be downloaded for free from his website)
If just fantasy: "Monstrous regiment" by Terry Pratchett
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson.
All this technique proves is that I'm extremely unlucky.
So commenters could tip the blog poster for useful content, and likewise the poster could tip commenters to reward intriguing comments. Commenters could tip fellow commenters. Lurker nonmembers could tip everbody.
It isn't at all obvious what, if any, advantage paying with your cellphone would provide.
Safari 3.1 Develop Menu
i'm still waiting to hear why macs are better than PC's. I've asked many mac fans and never received a good answer.
Could you add iTunes links? I've got music in iTunes, but not on Amazon. (CDBaby only does the former.)
You could mod up 10 of my other comments, but Paul Graham would have to remove your voting rights for abusing the system.

I think allowing arbitrary karma transfer on here would be an interesting experiment in reputational economies.
That's awesome. I might just have to take you up on your offer for a couple of weeks between semesters if the offer is still open before or after summer.
Oh I see what you mean, electric sheep is in iTunes. (i really like it)
We'll try to do that soon.
Nice article.

If you can answer the question "What you would like to do with your life?", the macro decisions, then decisions such as doing a startup or not, where to buy a house, etc. seem pale in comparison.
While I was reading this, I kept making a mental translation of the word "startup" into "grad school" (especially the bit about being 30 and single, due to the seven previous years of 80-hour weeks). It held together just as well.

I'm no defender of the blind optimism that goes along with the startup universe, but there are certainly less lucrative ways to waste the best years of your life.
Great Idea, Hope Something good results so that more people emulate your example!
Definitely a lot of truth in this article, but Matt barely acknowledges the advantages to doing startups. I also think that he's way too pessimistic about things like maintaining friendships and finding things to do after cashing out -- both of those are probably a lot easier than he describes.
I enjoyed the article.

I have to say, though, and this is totally unrelated to the article itself, that this is one of those pieces where I've thought--hey, I'd like to get in touch with this guy--and yet there's no way to do it directly. I may be the only one who still prefers to communicate specifically with one person directly from time to time, rather than via public comments, blog posts, walls, and the like, but I do. And there's no e-mail address or general contact information I could find on the site, no WHOIS information, no information in the Y Combinator profile on this board, etc. There's probably information somewhere on Facebook, but I can't access Facebook, and even if I could, I'm probably not in the right network to see it.

Oh, well! Still a good article.
Ask YC: Internet Startup or Big Powerhouse for a summer internship?
Hello YC! I'm a current UC Berkeley computer science student in my junior year (and loving it), and I've been mulling around this question in my mind for the last couple of weeks: Should I spend my summer at a small (30 people) startup or at a reasonably big (1000 people) CS/Art company? I have an offer from each of these categories, the pay is the same, and i'm pretty sure both would be a great working environment. What I'm left to decide is which one to take, especially considering the experience and education I would get in each sphere.

I really can't decide, so I'm hoping for some opinions from the hackers here at YC news. Which would you choose?
Fear and loathing at the Customs desk
Tales from the White Hart (Clarke, RIP) kicked off my interest in science and thus in IT. So that inspired me most.

Still, I think the best SF I've read was Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks.
Odeo Acquires BlogDigger
Adobe Forging Ahead with Flash for the iPhone Despite Jobs’ Remarks
StudentBusinesses: A Network for Student Entrepreneurs
Visa IPO Sets Record $17.9B
My perception was that it's much harder to fail at grad school.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin made me aware that the way society is organised is not permanent and can be changed
Just to be a bit contrarian, while it sounds like a good idea, the dynamic of having "some people more equal" than others might be tricky. Having people pay their part, or at least a part, might actually make sense from that point of view.
Good one. Being the pessimist I am, I enjoy thinking about the flip side of things.

Really good programmers also need to consider other opportunity costs. Linus and the world are better off because he has pretty much stuck with Linux through thick and thin, and never got heavily involved in running a startup. Tcl started going downhill when Ousterhout did Scriptics (although he did make lots of money). Some people are better off focusing 100% on tech, in other words.
oh sorry. just send it to matt@.
That was the point of my article. The advantages are well-covered. The disadvantages aren't.
Wiki Time Travel Humor
Firestar by Michael Flynn. It's a little-know book by a little-known author, but it's the best near-term space sci fi I've ever read.
I came directly by searching Egan in the comment tree :)

Permutation city (or any of the Egan's short stories such as 'Closer') is probably the one of the most intense mind blowing experiences I ever had (at least regarding books), it shouldn't even be called "SciFi" it is... something else

BTW: Diaspora is the next book in my list.... I hope not to be dissapointed.
Flatland.
What a downer of an article.
Now I'm just imagining what is essentially a hacker frat house. That would be sweet for some sort of incubator or whatnot to set up a 10-20 bedroom house in SJ or SV or somewhere and get like 5-7 startups to all work out of there. You could pay their living expenses +stipend and such in exchange for equity and they could get the benefit of living with a bunch of hackers. Eta Alpha Kappa!! 
If you go with a Big Powerhouse in a vertical silo, you may learn enough about the business to create a startup. My first startup was based on my 12-month experience at an established software company, where I learned the market and built a better mousetrap that competed with their software.
David Brin's Uplift novels
Personally, I would go with the startup. If I can, I never want to work at a stereotypical, large corporation. On the other hand, if I did go to the large company in your situation, it might give me that much more drive to getting my first product launched as I would have experienced cubicle-land, office politics, and all of the other things that people complain so much about.
Startups tend to be fairly binary, with you making either a very large amount off of them or nothing at all.

Recently re-reading pg's How To Make Wealth [1] made me wonder if this will soon become an outdated view of startups. The factors leading to the current and predicted rise in the number of startups (free software, cheap hardware, less personnel) should also lead to a large broading of the spectrum of failure <-> success.

The startup world has until recently been determined by its capital-intensive, high-risk nature - big money chasing big rewards. But the new dynamics may leave room for a lot of diversity in between, and consequently a lot more working on some kind of startup. 37 signals can be seen as exemplary of the other extreme to a go-big-or-die startup: founders and employees accept less risk, less pressure and more life for a higher chance of reward, though a lower expected reward. I think there will be a lot of middle ground: a lot of investors willing to accept less risk for lower return, and a whole lot more people will choose lower rewards for a more comfortable life, and better chance of success.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html] "The all-or-nothing aspect of startups was not something we wanted. Viaweb's hackers were all extremely risk-averse. If there had been some way just to work super hard and get paid for it, without having a lottery mixed in, we would have been delighted. We would have much preferred a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, even though theoretically the second is worth twice as much. Unfortunately, there is not currently any space in the business world where you can get the first deal."
two responses, two opinions - probably very much in the gist of my question! good point on both of those though!

A little bit of background - I've already worked at Yahoo! for a year, so I have an idea of cubicle-land as kingnothing puts it. I do want to point out that the big company in question is not at all the typical big company. Without making it _too_ obvious, its one of Steve Jobs' previous ventures...
I'm probably the odd man out on this one, but I've honestly not read many, if any, sci-fi books. I've always been more interested in non fiction and realistic fiction, although I do get in to a bit of fantasy as well.

I thought I'd give it a go, though, and the copy of Crypotnomicon I ordered last week should be here soon.
I think this is already happening somewhat thanks to Google's penchant for making a lot of small acquisitions, and other companies following their lead.

The problem still largely remains though. A venture backed company still has a lot more money than a bootstrapped one, and that still translates into a big advantage, even though database software is now free rather than $100k.
It would surely depend on what your longer term goals are. Do you want to set up your own start up? if so, go for the start up option. Being in a smaller company also exposes you to a wider area of activities, which can also be a great advantage, especially if you hope to one day start up your own thing.
It depends on your major... it's really tough to make it as a Biology PhD. There are just so many of them.
I suspect there is a massive, unexploited gap in the current venture model (with YC and Google leading the way in exploiting it), which will soon start to rapidly close as the opportunities become clear, and a new set of investment skills is developed.

The current economic turmoil may even help speed the process up somewhat, as investors seek to minimize risk.
I'm a junior at the University of Washington, and I was faced with similar decisions last summer and this summer. Last summer, I went with the Big Powerhouse, and I was pretty disappointed. It wasn't challenging, I wasn't working on interesting stuff, and I wasn't really learning anything. This summer, I'm going with the Internet Startup, and all indications seem to be that it will be a much better time.

Then again, my Big Powerhouse was Microsoft, so that may have had something to do with it. Even so, you can look at it in terms of the affect you'll have on the company as a whole. If you're in the Big Powerhouse, you're doing 1/1000th of the work. If you're in the Internet Startup, you're doing 1/30th. This means you'll be working on more important (and thus probably more interesting) stuff.
I think the tipping point has already been reached. My partner has a MacBook, so when I bought her a Garmin nuvi GPS for Christmas, I was expecting to have to fire up Fusion on my own MacBook fairly often to update it, load maps etc. Imagine my surprise when Garmin released Mac support for their products just before Christmas.

If you go to the peripherals section of any electronics store these days, it is rare to find a device that doesn't support Mac. We're also starting to see an improved support for Mac by games software producers...
Last summer I did an internship at, ummm, Steve Jobs's current venture. It wasn't a good fit for me, but that had nothing to do with the size of the company. The position simply wasn't a good match for my skills and experience. I was offered a full-time job as a result of the internship, but since it wasn't a good match, I turned it down.

That said, my feelings about the internship had little to do with the size of the company. The perks of a big-company internship were great, and you can meet a lot of other interesting hackers through a larger internship program. Also, all my previous jobs were at much smaller companies, so it was great to experience life at a large tech company first-hand. Life at the large company wasn't really any different than life at smaller companies.

I would suggest picking the job that interests you the most, based on the team or the project you'd be working on, and the quality of the individuals you'd be working with. The most important aspect of an internship should be the work you do. That will be the most important factor in how much you like it, and that's what you can show off in future job interviews. Plus, internships often lead to full-time jobs, and you won't want to make that decision solely based on the reputation or size of the company.
Yes, i was reading this book while commuting and thought that the mantra's those people said while swallowing anti-depressives was a bit over the top. Then the guy in the opposite seat swallowed a peppermint and said 'no smint no kiss' to the guy next to him...
I have never interned in a startup environment, but I can provide some insight into what it's like to work for a corporation. I participated in my school's coop program, which allow me to work at IBM for ~9 months in programming/design. Working in a corporation is everything you expect: very slow, process-oriented, very little responsibility. Doesn't matter how hard you drive your manager for work, it's unlikely you will get anything substantial unless you take the initiative yourself. I can't say I learned a lot in terms of hard technical skills (you will learn much more in school), but I have learned some very valuable soft skills -- how to coordinate work with others (it's surprisingly difficult when you are only coding a small piece of work that belongs to something much larger), how to present in front of senior managers, etc. One of the most valuable lesson I learned is to comment your code, I remember back in school, my professors tried to drive that concept into our heads, but I always thought, why do I need to comment when I know the code by heart? Nothing makes you realize the importance of comment until when you try to debug someone else's code, and the genius name variables after his children (serious, no joke).

There are valuable lessons to be learned in a huge corporation. They are procedures, how to coordinate work, how bureaucracy works, and the most important lesson I learned is -- I dislike it and I will never want to program in a big corporation environment.

From what I have heard and read, you will learn much more in a start up environment. You may not just do programming or design, but you have the opportunity to get involved with marketing, advertising, etc. But at the same time, you won't see the picture of what makes corporations successful at what they do. If I have to do it all over again, I would probably intern at a start up because there are more learning opportunities. Corporations are very silo-ed, every department operates on its own and it's very hard for interns to touch any other pieces of work. (e.g. if you are a programming intern, chances are you won't have a chance to do marketing as well).

Hope that helps.
Vista SP1 officially released
This is a mistake.

Firstly, if Flash on the iPhone is buggy, because Apple withheld its help, users will blame Flash and word will go around to keep it off of your iPhone. Secondly, if Flash on the iPhone is less capable than the desktop version, and more capable than Flash Lite, developers will become irritated. Finally, if people are making full 3D shooters and racers with the regular iPhone SDK, AND making money off of it through the iPhone store, Flash developers will be in a position of staggering disadvantage. This is because even if Jobs lets Adobe make and distribute a Flash runtime, which is far from certain, he will certainly not let Flash developers put their apps on the app store. Even if he did, who would by a Flash app? In user's minds, Flash apps should be free, remember. And once users make up their minds . . . well . . . talk to the record industry.

If you think advertising will underpin it all, you should be paying closer attention.

Flash has very little to gain, and a great deal to lose in user perception, as well as developer perception. If Adobe chooses to go down this road, they MUST execute flawlessly.
Apple evaluating "all you can eat" iTunes option?
700MHz auction comes to a $19.6B finish, winners still not revealed