skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a certain 4 trillion dollar financial services firm I know. They operate like this at a country level: each country is graded against the others on an elaborate score card. The idea is that when a country finds an innovative way to "win" one year, althe others can use the idea the next year.

Only, the winning countries try (nicely) to sabotage the sharing process. For example, Country "U" outsourced part of their self-service web applications to a nice fellow I know living in Country "C." Although it is not in writing, the understanding is that if he so much as has a coffee with anyone from that company in Country "C," his home town, he is out of work.

Furthermore, the Country "C" guys don't really want to hire him, they're afraid he'll report what they're doing back to Country "U," so when they ask him out for coffee, all they really want to do is dangle contracts in front of him while pumping him for information under the guise of establishing his experience.

It sounds like a cheap spy novel, but it's business as usual when some bright person at the top decides that a little competition is healthy :-)
Ok, I see your reasoning, but I think it would be better to word it like this: "You are (statistically) twice as likely to be a millionaire if you are an entrepreneur than if you are not an entrepreneur (assuming that less than two thirds of the total population are entrepreneurs)."

But this still leaves a correlation/causation problem if you want to use it to imply that choosing the entrepreneurial path makes one twice as likely to become rich.
Wow. There's a whole generation with a new explanation.

Casual dress.
No one alive will ever see Easter on March 23 again - Here's the math to show why
The Semantic Web 1-2-3
Nice essay, as usual. I've always found these to be a source of hope and inspiration. At the end of the month, when I close the books on my company, I like to sift through these writings for inspiration. Because he's right: there is no guarantee you will be successful.
I'm the partner in a struggling chemical company. We actually make physical items, which makes us a rarity as far as start-ups go.
"Xerox gave us the mouse,"

No, Doug Engelbart gave us the mouse. You may wish to go through the rest of your list and fact-check it. There's a nice on-line encyclopedia you can use at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ ; I forget what large corporation invented wikis and later funded the application of them to encyclopedias.
I really like the size decrease as the conversation goes deeper. Great UI touch.

Is there no way to index old content?
:%s/find/replace/g
./setup.py test

I've also got a find/sed script for doing find/replace across a whole directory tree.

I really do miss having the semantic refactoring tools that are available in Java IDEs, though. That's one area where I think Java (and Smalltalk) really leads the pack, and the rest of us are blubbed into accepting half-assed solutions. Sometime I should check out BicycleRepairMan, but as I understand it, it's still not as robust as a provably-correct refactoring in a typed language.
I've found that I rarely know the right name for a variable until I've written a significant amount of code that depends on that variable. Refactoring's a must for me, because otherwise what the code says would have little relationship to what it does. I don't think this is due to a lack of foresight or planning (I do pencil & paper design notes before I start coding); it's more that in the process of coding, I discover abstractions and common code that that aren't apparent until the code's actually written.
The best (yet flawed) analogy I ever heard for a large company. People in a company are like gears in a complex gearworking. Some gears have more influence/leverage such that if a big gear (GM) moves a little a lot of smaller gears may start moving faster. And to cap off the analogy, sometimes a movement causes some other gears to go backwards. It was from a VP too.
I like Dailymotion because I can still view copyright protected mixed martial arts videos. They are using a similar strategy as youtube, using copyrighted material to gain popularity and then dumping the copyrighted material when they get big enough to draw notice from content companies.
Whoever wrote that article could do with some lessons in tact.

"The vaunted Latino family is coming to resemble the black family" and "The Latino family is not in such a dire state as the black family."

Further on they qualify this with "poor black family" but in the more general quotes above, which "black family" are we talking about? The average one? Is the average "black family" really in a dire state?
What's really fun is that you can do this with anything, e.g. lawnmowers. I might own one, I lend it to Bob. Now how many lawnmowers are in circulation? Certainly I own one, I have an IOU for one lawnmower. And of course Bob owns one, he's mowing his lawn. If I swap out my lawnmower IOU for some cheesecake and a Tijuana Brass LP, now I'm creating currency and inflating the money supply, since really anything can be currency, ask all those people swapping around cell phone minutes.

I think this is confusing for currency because the IOUs look so much like the real thing.
Unless Ray Kurzweil is right

;-)
Set the global/outtermost background color. I've got F6F6EF only in the innermost content area; it's all framed by my default bg color.
Stress is really a function of whether you care about the outcome, not how much work it is. In my first full-time job, I didn't give a damn about whether the company failed or succeeded since I was gone in a year anyway, and it was one of the least stressful periods of my life. When I first went to college, I figured I'd coast and forget about grades, and had a blast. When I started flunking out and I realized I didn't want to throw away 4 years without a degree, it got stressful. When it became virtually certain that I'd flunk out, my stress level just evaporated, despite the fact that I was working harder than ever (I ended up getting that degree after all). Then my second full-time job was very stressful because I actually cared how the company did and yet big factors in the outcome were outside of my control.
http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/11/6/ubuntu-gutsy-setup-p...

I like the Slicehost guides to getting a server up and running relatively safely. The link has some good basic server hardening tips to start you off.
Reddit believes that it is impossible to be happy or succeed in America because we do not have Universal Health Insurance paid for by taxing rich people. All in all, they have a very pessimistic view of the world in general and the free market in particular. The startup crowd is long-gone from reddit.

My hypothesis is that this effect comes from the international nature of reddit's audience. I hope this hasn't become the normal thinking of people in the US.
UI Simplicity
I have found Solaris, being "weird" and different from Linux, results in less attacks from bots. You can run "netservices limited" and it will turn off almost everything except ssh.
Ouch. Nearly all of those things you listed happened before I was born.

No wonder the baby-boomers think our society is perfect and if you complain there must be something wrong with you.
I think it ranks up there with 'Ideas are worthless'. You could just as well say the 'Air is worthless' or 'Air is nothing more than medium that can be used for commercial flight'.

The ability to monetize something is not the only measure of its value - the benefit that it causes the world is another important measure if value (this could be measured economically or otherwise). In an ideal economy, total 'value' would be maximized when the 'benefit' and 'monetization' metrics of value were closely aligned as it would lead to the best allocation of resources. Or to put it another way - things would be best if people were rewarded for doing good, useful things.

Of course the practicalities of the world don't always make this possible. But to try to cut someone down like Arrington did for suggesting that it would be better if musicians could received compensation for the enjoyment their recordings provide is in my view incorrect and immoral.
It actually is possible to index old content, so I may do that. Thanks!
Finding your Niche
example feeds:

http://quotably.com/TechCrunch
http://quotably.com/davewiner
http://quotably.com/Ross

note, there are also RSS feeds for anyone's conversations, just add a .rss to the end of the URL. ie: http://quotably.com/Ross.rss
That last quote reminded me of something I just read on gigaom:

"Seesmic is a video startup I’ve shied away from writing about too often, because I’m not sure I really get it. But I figure if so many smart people think there’s something good going on here, I should keep an eye on what the company is doing."

That's everything I disliked about silicon valley right there.
Yellow Drummer Robot
US economy not so bad compared to others
A New Tool from Google Alarms Sites
The number of recording artists/groups making money--that is, a profit--on tour is dwarfed by the ones trying to scrape by any other way they can ('real' jobs, selling cd's and other merch at shows, bar mitzvahs, etc.). Even a lot of the top-of-the-charts artists don't draw a big enough crowd to make their tour their livelihood.
Impressive Services for Photographers
Wow. It started out quite well reasoned and then, making larger and larger leaps of logic, ended in "stock up on gold and ammunition". I found myself adjusting my tin-foil hat on a regular basis.

I think I liked them more when it was "Music was meant to be free".
You might also want to use:

AllowUsers user1 user2...

And it's probably best to disable password logins and use keys instead (http://www.google.com./search?hl=en&q=ssh+authorized_key...).
If we had a good way to send and receive money through the Internet then it might make sense to charge a fee to accept an incoming email. One would have a whitelist of senders who get automatic refunds. Everyone else will be spending real money to send you email.

A tiny "postage" fee might also solve spam.
Whoever wrote that article could do with some lessons in tact.

The Economist doesn't have to be PC because they're not an American magazine. In principle they don't have to worry about offending local sensibilities any more than an American magazine writing about China. At least that's the official story....
>I find that I tend to want to write things that cannot be disputed, but to do so I usually have to include all the phatic cruft that you take out. I'll have to work on that.

Keep in mind that different situations demand different writing styles. For instance, if you are trying to resolve a bitter conflict, "writing things that cannot be disputed" is just the way to go. In that situation, your #1 objective would be to find things that both parties agree on, and build up from that. (This also might be a good way to win an argument.)
The Zoo vs. the Savannah
Want Some Jelly?
Interview: Socialthing! Founder Matt Galligan
Really cool site!
I lurk and once in 6 months I may make a comment. without clickpass, i wouldn't have made this post today
He's right. Anyone who's been a true musician or a true artist eventually realizes that the "products" are just messages. They are not exclusively an end in themselves. They are messages about awareness. They are communications from one life to another. Really, the important thing is the life lived, and the inner life shared.

This is why museums are nothing but directories or a table of contents. This is why "intellectual property" is so absurd.

A musician's "product" is as much a message as someone's blog post. One hopes that the message is understood and absorbed and possibly re-transmitted with elaborations and new insights.
that's not going to give you a very good representation of language use in the wild. the HN crowd that responds is probably pretty skewed one way or another. good luck
>People are very sensitive about their own choices (stubborn), especially ones that are hard to defend rationally (religion, major, job, etc).

I agree, but I don't think it's because they're hard to defend rationally. Instead, I think it's because they're an essential part of their identity. If I criticize you're choice of colors, that's not something that you can defend rationally, but you won't be too concerned if you're not much of a design person. On the other hand, if you're an academic who built a career on some theory, criticism to your theory will be very personal. The issue here is one of cognitive dissonance. It's very difficult to differentiate between critcism for someone's choice and general mean-spirited feeling for that person.
I just threw it up on twitter... it got a big thumbs up and shoutout from Scoble.

edit: and Leo Laporte, and Cali Lewis... I hope you can handle the coming traffic.
It's embarrassing to see this story at the top of News.YC. Think of all the sentences in history (in recent history) that have sent streams of people to their deaths, and this is the saddest and stupidest he's ever read? Honestly, this is at worst a bike shed painted slightly the wrong shade of green.
I've tried all three. #2 is a good way of becoming unpopular very quickly. #3 is a lot of effort. You need to be very committed to the mission to make it work.
XKCD: Important Life Lesson
I think it is a good idea. Contact http://twitter.com/help/contact and let them know. They usually post twitter tools on their blog, they might post your tool.
The funny thing is that if you collect all of these people that show up to complain and have a look at them, you'll very often find that they are decorated with magnets and crystals and all kinds of other "healing devices", many of which produce considerable emf.

Superstition is ugly and difficult to deal with and sadly it seems will not be cured anywhere in the foreseeable future.
IBM Poopheads: "LAMP Users Need to Grow Up"
I agree that it is like a prisoner's dilemma. Perhaps more like the iterated version which does actually allow for cooperation to be the optimal solution.

I think countries holding large amounts of US dollars have a large incentive to talk up its value while quietly selling it off.

However those countries can probably use their influence over the US dollar to influence US policy and perhaps that is a benefit they have factored into to their currency holdings.

I'd say the chances of a collapse are unlikely unless the US decides to play 'chicken' with its creditors and is unwilling to align its spending and earnings.
"There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."
> The Erlang VM is written in C:

It has been written _once_ in C. That does not mean that re-implementing it in C again would be a good idea or would get you the same set of benefits as the existing Erlang VM and its associated libraries. Just because one particular team has accomplished a task in C does not mean that any random collection of C coders have the skill or experience to do the same.

(A pedantic point perhaps, but the quote you reference said _reproduce_..._
"With that you get a very different corporate culture and overall "climate" if you will. This makes it a lot easier for an engineer to start a company and not being pushed to the background 1 year later by his investor's buddies."

Hmm.... have you read ojbyrne's post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143269

?
Cool. Simple. Clean. Thumbs up.
It's not BS? Really? Did you happen to notice any of his citations? You know, videos on YouTube, counterpunch articles, other reliable sources like that.

You're also probably not including the part in the comments where he says Federal spending has to be cut 134% to "balance the economy," citing an article he read somewhere but can't seem to track down right now. And then the part where he repeats the unsourced, unexplained claim.

C'mon. The guy's a crank, and not even a Jude Wanniski-caliber crank. Just because he hates WIPO doesn't mean he's right about anything else.
Very well done!

It seems a little iffy on associations of tweets as replies... but I guess that's the nature of twitter.
I'm several months away from launching (SaaS product), but since our service is targeted towards paid clients, we figure the growth will be much smaller. We'll probably use S3 for daily backups when we go live, growth after that will be determined based on sales volume, etc.
AMD cuts 5% of its workforce
Not the first to market?  Competitor has traction?  You're screwed.
This is hands down the best rebuttal to pg's arguments for young men to start a SV startup that I've read.

(Actually, for young women, too, but for the opposite reason.)
In-browser command line interface
Provides a nice contrarian perspective. Though I personally don't function like that, I can understand workers who work to enable other more important things (family, hobbies, etc). In essence, they trade being caged for stability, safety, personal time, etc. To some, that can be happiness too.

I don't think it takes anything away from PG's original point that for a lot of younger, more ambitious folks, being caged is not the best way to live or work.
That would require you to sort each email based on urgency, and the only way to do that (effectively) is to open and read the email. That's the problem.
Neat features in Eclipse editor (that Richard Stallman wants for Emacs)
Exposing a Database as a Web Service
What the author doesn't mention is that this "tool" has been around for a while and is available for every site in google's index.
This thing is pretty sick. Not sure if it has any real world applications though. Maybe training?
Well in some sense perhaps .. you can also say working your ass off is like becoming "caged in work". The question really is what is more important to YOU. If doing excellent technical work or making money is your first priority, then if you are working in a megacorp, then one can say you are caged. On the other hand, spending time with your family or watching movies or travelling are important to you, startup life is a cage for you and you will feel "trapped" by work.

The definition of caged seems relative.
They moved on to bigger ideas.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

Not only true for products. I use this rough estimate in developing ideas and prototyping. It works for me.
yeah, unfortunately it is. At present it uses the same threading algorithm as twitter does, namely: if there's an @username in a tweet, assume it's responding to the last tweet of that user. I may look to do something smarter down the road.. we'll see.
you just added another 200 applications to the next funding cycle. Hope your inbox can handle it.
That sounds really shitty. Work 1 out of 4 weeks (roughly) at night. Talk about a rough week. I feel like i'd be continually out of sync. Just when I was back to normal I'd have to work all night again..man. Or all day.
I hate when artists try to sell me on some philosophical message. I could care less what some guy high on coke who has never demonstrated his analytical ability has to say.

Yeah I'm one of those guys who listens because he appreciates music and its fascinating properties in and of itself, not for sung poetry or any other nonsense.
good point. it's very weird to not trust your own judgment about whether a startup is interesting, but to trust your own judgment of whether others see something in it. understanding what others see is actually harder than just looking at it yourself.
You made techcrunch, congrats!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/quotably-the-perfect-tw...
For Bloggers, Legit News Photos For Free
This reminds me of the way white boards were covered at a software company I used to work at.
"If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come."

I know lots of people - the working poor - who are doing a hell of a lot more than nothing, and poverty still comes.
this isn't an app realted but equally important...i think. i put everything behind a deployed firewall and layer3 manged switch. cisco plus 'ios' is good hardware solutions. run nagios for upkeep etc...
"The black family" refers to the typical black family. Given the number of kids born out of wedlock quoted in the article (71% of all black kids) this is a sound characterization. "The black family" does not mean "all black families" but only the average or median one.

Sort of like the statement "the American middle-class family does not save enough for retirement" - again likely true in the average or median case.
you just made it on techcrunch. good job.
Quotably Goes From News.YC to TechCrunch In Under 3 Hours
Nod. If I start life tied to a load of bricks, and you start in a Ferrari, I can do a helluva lot more than you and still get nowhere. The history of slavery should be ample proof of that.

It's one thing to say that "We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them." It's another thing entirely to deny that there are no structural, sociological barriers to escaping poverty.
Short Is In
I see pixies (and the future of social networks)
Ralph Johnson on design patterns
My research advisor was a star professor in a big name school. Also very arrogant. He considered me one of his best students (so no personal axe to grind), but I was turned off by his arrogance. Moral of the story: you can't generalize!
vim's capabilities for search and replace on regular expressions make it awesome for refactoring. trying to lay your code out as regularly as possible makes regex refactoring easier, and gives you a nice, consistent codebase as a bonus.
I know lots of people

Just wondering--do you really know "lots of people" who are among the "working poor"?

I come from Appalachia and have known--genuinely, no bullshit here--lots of "working poor" and can't honestly say that there was some systematic conspiracy to hold them down, rough them up, prevent them from rising, etc.

Fact is: There are a lot of people living in the lap of luxury--luxury measured by creature comforts--who in any other age would be lucky, yes lucky, to spend 12 hours a day behind a horse's ass.

The real reason for people staying in the lower ranks is exactly what we already know: They have some dysfunction. Perhaps a lack of intelligence, or an excess of impulse, or simply a chronic inability to show up to work on time. The latter might suprise you, as it hardly matters if programmers get up at 8 or 9 or 10, but in low-end jobs, one of the big problems among "trouble employees" is simply their unwillingness to follow a schedule. Who's to blame?
here's an idea. Make a message to @B from A be a reply to the last message from B to @A if any.
This is a great post. A much more balanced perspective. I worked at a large well-known company, and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit there and learned a lot of engineering. My leaving had almost nothing to do with them - I had to relocate for personal/family reasons, and I combined it with starting up. I have been reasonably successful, though I started for the "wrong reasons". I actually was sad to leave that bigCo.

I still have gifted friends "over there" and they are quite happy, seem to enjoy what they do, and have no intention of leaving. From a purely technical perspective, I have to say they have done some really interesting work - more than I can say about my own technical work. I have learned other things like product management, sales & marketing.

Keep in mind what kinds of innovations that Bell Labs & IBM Research & Xerox Parc (my bigCo was like them in a way) produced during the few decades of their high point. The foundations of this industry were laid in those places, and they were all huge companies.
"Does it strike you as odd that the startup founders at YCombinator apparently get told when they can take a day off? Me too."

That is pure and utter crap... There isn't a single mandatory day at YC (though you'd have to be a little daft to miss Demo Day). Paul (and the other folks at YC) haven't the slightest clue what hours (or days) the founders keep.