skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps I am "just" an introvert, and not a loner -- the author does say they aren't the same thing -- but I didn't so much care for the tone of this article and thus will probably not read the book. I much prefer Jonathan Raunch's article, "Caring For Your Introvert": http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch
3 of those say basically the same thing, "a similarity of structure or form"...
Very good point. It can't be open to everyone if demand is great and we're going to keep it to 50-100 people. Also, there is a focus issue.... good points
Better to ask, "when are we going to start making hardware optimized for smarter programming languages than C?"
I have lots of 25-year-old friends who would like to start a startup but decided against it. I'm trying to convince at least one of them to reconsider, since my cofounder quit yesterday and that leaves me a single founder. Their reasons are pretty varied, but include:

1.) One has Marfan's syndrome and needs to work at a place with guaranteed health insurance to cover his medical bills.

2.) Two would like to start a startup in the future, but feel that they don't currently have enough experience. This was also my reason for not founding a startup straight out of college.

3.) One was always interested in startups, but his family background has steered him towards law school, and so he doesn't have the technical skills to start a tech startup.

4.) One has a wife and two stepkids to support.

5.) One (my former cofounder) wants to start a startup, but got into Harvard Business School and figures a bird in the hand is worth 10 in the bush.

6.) One likes working for small companies, but enjoys his work-life balance too much to take the plunge and actually start one himself. He also doesn't desire the financial rewards that come from a successful startup all that much.

7.) One couldn't do it because he's on a student visa and it was doubtful that the visa would let him co-found a company.

They're all good reasons, and you can see that they're a lot more varied than them all being caged animals.
Great read. I will be adding this blog to my Reader, for sure.

I would say that although most companies wait until their logo is "burned" into the memory of customers, changing up the logo is a definitely a practice that is done. Just think about when you watch a commercial on television, and you know it's Coca-Cola long before they tell you. Is it the music? Is it the certain shade of red? It's branding. The Economist is also known for its creative use of brand power; their advertisements often feature a very small version of their logo, if it's featured at all. But the same dry, sharp wit for which the magazine is revered, leaves no doubt that the ad belongs to The Economist.

By the way, there is more information on the Dilbert-Google fiasco these two posts on the same blog:
http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2006/05/theres-no-story-yet-plo...
http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2006/06/brilliant-love-it-now-c...
it wouldnt be theflip if it got more features
Count the number of people who attempt to start a (tech) startup and compare with the number of people who go to grad school. You've gotta apply Bayes's rule: P(success) = P(good outcome) / P(trying), not just P(good outcome).

Unfortunately, I can't use my personal experience as a reliable count, since I went to college and live in the educational capital of the world (Massachusetts). It also happens to be a startup hub, and I hang around with lots of startup founders. So both my count of tenured professors and my count of successful entrepreneurs are likely to be distorted.

Anyone have actual numbers we could use to perform the computation? We need the number of students entering grad school, the number of new technology firms started, the number of tenured professors in the U.S, and the number of multi-million-$ acquisitions and IPOs.
As long as it's not #1...
"But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn't just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong.

I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees."

I guess this is what has put off a lot of people, along with the reference to the caged lions, right at the start of the essay.

The key message (as i got it) from the essay was:

"one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live."

It is spot on, and i completely agree with it.

In the 'Cliff Notes', Paul summarizes it well, when he writes people are reacting to what they imagine he would be saying in the essay, but yes, i guess the essay intro could have been worded a bit better.

Little what i have read of Paul's essays, it doesn't look like he would be intentionally putting down "any" smart programmer, just based on where (s)he is working, and i would still stick to that opinion about him.
Tales from the WTF company, part I
Tales from the WTF company, part II
I agree, and I think I was unnecessary harsh on "wasting your life". I guess I was just trying to say that in SV most success stories were driven by engineers: google, yahoo, facebook the list is long. Moreover, there is a history of it, look at Apple or even HP.

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. And living there, I suspect, makes it easier to understand and appreciate PG's views.
I work in the area. The weirdest thing is that the original Stacey's is in downtown Pleasanton, which is an older and quaint area with other locally owned restaurants.

But Stacey's at Waterford is in, as the article says, an unremarkable strip mall. Why? It looks like just another strip mall fake plastic PF Chang Chili's Flingers suburban food dispensery. I never understood why Scott would put a bunch of money into building an original restaurant next to PJ O'Pootertoots.
fake threads are not threads

unless they work on multiple cores (transparently, including all kernel syscalls)
I do the opposite: I often purposely include phatic cruft because I've found I can't convince people of anything without it. If you look at my comment threads, there're whole paragraphs with no purpose other than to equivocate or make my argument more palatable to those who would otherwise discount it. It's good for karma, but on a strictly technical level, the writing is weaker than PG's style.

I picked up this habit in the Harry Potter fandom, which aside from being a community of writers also happens to be 99% female. Women's writing tends to include many more phatic expressions, because (particularly in something as socially-constructed as fandom) its purpose is often relationship-building. I adapted to fit in; before then, my writing style often tended to be brusque, mechanical, and to-the-point.

I still use my old style in technical posts, where I figure the reader can deal with any unintentional rudeness. For example, compare the last paragraph of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144001 to this comment: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3103
The thesis is throughout the essay. Didn't you read it? I just quoted the last paragraph because it is a direct contradition of what they claim I said.

I imagine that new-hires at 37signals, or Fog Creek, would not feel they are missing out because they are not currently heading a start-up.

Now I'm convinced you didn't read it. There is a paragraph explicitly about this:

You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling
the size of company you work for. If you start the
company, you'll have the most freedom. If you become
one of the first 10 employees you'll have almost as much
freedom as the founders. Even a company with 100 people
will feel different from one with 1000.
Find and follow the RFCs related to email.
Ahhh, that makes sense. But I took the whole thing to translate as "Startups are liberating!" ... not "People not doing startups are stupid!"

But you have a point... startups probably aren't for everyone, or even most people, but PG has to keep inspiring people to try for YC's sake.

(As an aside, sorry for the snarkiness of my last comment. I was at my Ballmer Peak right then, and reading it now makes me wish I still had the edit link O_o)
These terms come from Roman Jakobson's model of the functions of language. (Jakobson is the legendary structuralist linguist of whom it was said that he spoke 36 languages, each with a foreign accent.) The model had six functions; the others were emotive, conative (issuing a command), metalingual, and poetic.

The bit about using phatic language mostly with people one doesn't know well is not from Jakobson. I made it up, and it's probably wrong. I didn't go over that sentence 20-50 times :).
It is not considered unreasonable to expect readers to be able to understand where a metaphor ends. Metaphors wouldn't work otherwise.

Imagine if I'd written something about tides, and begun with a metaphor about swinging a condom full of liquid on the end of a string. No doubt some Christian fundamentalists would be so offended at that point that they'd stop reading and write angry blog posts about how "distasteful" it was to compare God's Earth to a condom. Would that be my fault?

You have to draw the line somewhere. If you write about things that are difficult and/or controversial, some people will misunderstand you. I try hard to write as clearly as I can, but the things you'd have to do to make an essay proof against readers who were really stupid or personally oversensitive about some topic would ruin it for the other readers.
Ask YC: Have you ever used an embedded web server C library?
I'm planning to write a small, light daemon. It'll essentially maintain an event queue for my app. It must be (1) very fast, (2) capable of dealing with a few TB of data, and (3) gracefully recover from total machine failure. I've been thinking about using Berkeley DB as the data store for its replication features. That way, I could bring up a few of instances of this daemon, and use one active master with the rest available as hot replicas and read-only copies of the queue.

The Berkeley DB APIs for, e.g., Python, lag behind the C, C++, and Java versions because Oracle doesn't officially support them. I thoroughly dislike both C++ and Java, and I'm actually quite comfortable with C, so I figured I'd just write all the storage code in C.

Clients for this queue should communicate to it over some cross-platform messaging system. I expect Python and Java code to want to talk to it, for example. HTTP seems to be a convenient way for the queue to accept requests. (Any other cross-platform messaging mechanism out there? I've heard of spread, but it seems a little heavy for what I need, and I don't know how cross-platform it is.)

I found two reasonable-seeming libraries which implement embedded HTTP servers in C: libmicrohttpd (http://gnunet.org/libmicrohttpd/, available in the Debian distribution), and shttpd (http://shttpd.sourceforge.net/, available in MacPorts). I also found something called LibHTTPD (http://www.hughes.com.au/products/libhttpd/), but it looks like a semi-abandoned commercial project and doesn't seem to support multithreaded listening anyway.

Question: has anyone here used these libraries? Any war stories? Any other packages I should look into?
New Google Mobile feature lets you search without typing
Hard-wired for the ups and downs?
Remove "academia", which is a feeder for both startups and industry --- disproportionately favoring industry, of course.

Now, defend your argument. Maybe we should start with processor cores? I hear there's some open source HDL you can download for that. Or how about routing algorithms?
ReProduct: Greeting Card Demo [Flash]
Sounds like a business opportunity to develop what was Meraki's original vision, with improved hardware and a software-defined radio.
Well the title is rather misleading; I don't think even they think they will produce any AI out of this.

I think the reasoning goes more like:
1. Intelligence is good at representing information succinctly.
2. This is similar to what a data compression algorithm does.
3. Maybe if we come up with some uber-powerful compression algorithms, it will teach us something about intelligence too.

There's actually been a lot of papers about the parallels between data compression and AI. Look up the program "MegaHal" and papers on it by Jason Hutchens. He shows how a Markov model can be thought of as a kind of data compression.

That being said, there are theoretical limits on data compression efficiency, as shown by work by Shannon and Huffman. These apply to lossless compression, so at best I think all they would be doing is experimentally verifying the theoretical limits. If they want to find a data compression algorithm that tells them something about intelligence, it's going to have to be a lossy compression algorithm, not lossless.
PG: I read your essay and most of the comments/remarks across the Internet. In my experience starting at a company, junior hackers learn from senior hackers, most of the problem solving skills I have learned was from other hackers (often more senior than myself). Even learning what not too do.

If young hackers starts companies, who do they learn from? Do they just learn these problem solving skills and people skills by themselves? I am sure YCombinator has something to do with this process...
Reading the Lines, Not Between Them (PG & Coding Horror)
It did come across as a casual observation, though. The essay is structured as if the entire thing flowed from a single observation of a few people at Starbucks. And the observation is subjective and vague; you just say their demeanor seems different.

I believed you because I know what you're talking about. However, for a skeptic, it leaves the door wide open for them to say that you're just seeing what you want to see. Also, you come across as someone who thinks his five-minute subjective impression gives him the right to dismiss other people's life choices. They feel justified in writing you off as arrogant.

So, a couple of suggestions:

1) If you're going to present an argument from subjective observation, the example has to be very vivid, almost like a novel. The reader has to be compelled to your conclusion by feeling like they are observing things right along with you. Specific details are important. These corporate programmers -- did they wait glumly and patiently in line, or were they eager with anticipation to get back to what they were doing? Did they mumble to the barista while looking away, or speak forthrightly, making eye contact?

2) Rhetoric becomes great when you point out the invisible monsters in the room, and tame them. When you talk about startups to people who are not in startups but could be, these monsters are envy and self-doubt. You have to deal with the fact that your audience sees other people growing rich or at least having fun, and is plagued with self-doubt about whether they are chickenshits. Given a chance they'll project their self-doubt onto you, the person who raises the question. There are various strategies to prevent this from happening, but i-could-be-wrong is not one of them. The main one is to get people to identify with you before you move into more challenging territory. It does require more space to accomplish this, but it's far from filler, it's essential.
Why was he fired? Because he didn't stay overnight?
Why is this a trade off?

OK, if you have to choose then for me it's a foreign language over a programming language. One of the most satisfying things I've done is to learn French to the point where I'm fluent. Being able to communicate with other human beings is very satisfying... and although I think RoR rules it's just not as satisfying communicating with an API.
A large cruise ship (2600 passengers) costs about twice as much:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Princess
Not to be a douche, but how often does a person find themselves out of range of an open access point? In my neighborhood alone there are 10. I had to start using WPA just to keep myself from stumbling onto other, lower signal power SSIDs when I'd fire up my laptop's wireless at home.

With Starbucks and other chain operators apparently going over to an unlimited access plan, and typical coffeehouses, etc. offering free wireless, and cellular services (RIM, iPhone, etc.) that allow a perfectly reasonable simulacrum of wireless connectivity -- I guess my question is, why go to this much trouble?
I always use Thunderbird, but I think where Thunderbird really sucks is the address book and mailing lists management. I am not really a power user for that, but when I tried to use it for mailing list, it was horrible. So there is definitely room for improvement.
Of course they also use UPS to ship (I assume), so UPS gets a piece of theirs.
Never attribute to logic that which can be adequately explained by entropy.
Yes, but you try canceling a purchase on a debit card. Plus, I get points for free flights on my cc.
An entirely free of charge University with top notch research facilities and professors.
More likely: He questioned everybody's practices within a few hours of starting. Right or wrong, it's bad politics.
I don't think Apple went far enough. I wish they'd offer the ultimate bug fix: A pre-checked box marked "Mac OS X".

If the user absolutely insists on having a choice, throw in an "Ubuntu" setting. ;)
I thought married men are always preferred, less likely to just quit their job, if the wife is pushing at home.
I feel kind of sorry for the person who will buy such a ship. There are so many more interesting things in the world, yet for all that persons money, those things seem to be out of reach.
The rules of engagement
Somebody accidentally turned the compression setting up to eleven. It's like two completely different grant proposals had a traffic accident.
regardless of the ethics of for-pay wifi and what have you, I love the tutorial.
Heh, I take it you don't live in a small town in the Midwest. ;)
What such optimizations are possible? One that comes to mind is transactional memory which is being implemented by Azul and Sun, but I don't know of any others.
Its a geometric series. In math: Let r=(1-reserve requirement) and Total = 1000 * sum(1-r^n,n=0,infinity) = 1000 * 1/(1-r)

Now I'm probably wrong with my indices because I'm a little confused about connecting my infinite sum to people running around at the bank. If I plut in .8 for r (the same as the comment above used, I get 1/(1-.8)=5, or $5,000 so I'm right that far. For 10% its: 1/(1-.9) = 10 or $10,000. So the author is right in numbers, but arguing against this would be ridiculous. How could any bank guard against this? Why would they want to?
The $50 price was obviously unsustainable; consider that a high-volume, non-mesh WRT54G sells for ~$45. The other parts of the story are certainly worrying, though. I wonder if this was driven by a change in management or if Meraki just said to themselves, "time to stop fooling around with open source and make some money".
I don't feel like the fed is bailing out Bear so that I can continue, its just giving hope to all the stuff it owns and more importantly, to those it owes. If bear gets bought by JPMorgan, Bear is still screwed. They are gone for all intents and purposes, just their investments and debts live on, which IMHO, is a good thing. I feel that the i-bankers already feel like idiots and will have learned their lesson just in this whole mess, whether or not their company tanks.
Free Streams of NCAA Games
Seaside Tutorial (continuation-based programming)
Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as "miserable failure"
Quantum Computing Not an Imminent Threat To Public Key Encryption
I'm an European and the US economy is holding some of my money hostage :-)

I have $8000 that I got from selling some stock options of mine. I let it remain in the US for a couple of months because I needed to get some information from my bank and never had the time to call them...

When the dollar started sinking, I decided to wait because the dollar has its ups and downs. BAD DECISION! Now I will lose 1/6 of the money when I transfer it to my local currency.
Custom Recordings: The Future of Getting Paid as a Musician?
The author has since added an italicized paragraph explaining that this is what he meant to write, but I think the original wording crosses the line from shortcut into misleading, because by the time it will have "the right to lend $9,000 to other people", the bank will have had $10,000 in deposits, not $1000.
she did you the biggest favor.
Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL (video)
Those are great examples. I think the beginning of PG's essay has two issues that provoked most of the negative comments. He was playing around a metaphor instead of a clear situational simile, and then he left out the details of how these programmers looked like caged animals to him. The latter prompted follow-ups like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142050

So instead of readers seeing this:

"MegaCorp programmers looked purposeless and embarrassed,
like caged lions, while they were doing the scavenger hunt"

they saw this:

"MegaCorp programmers who I saw at a scavenger hunt are
caged lions with something missing in their lives."

The first sentence wouldn't draw much outrage. The second implies those programmers act liked whipped puppies around their girlfriends, look confused at the gym (if they even go to the gym), etc. [The negatives will vary depending on how you view caged vs free lions.] The programmers don't just act like caged lions in a situation, those programmers ARE caged animals.

To be fair, the actual line in the essay is this:
"And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild."
It's just preceded by lots of prose that reinforce the IS relationship.
It was just that I recently had this thought that language could be divided into a "smalltalk" component, where the content is replaceable but not the conversation partner, and an "info" component, where the partner is replaceable but not the content. I have no clue about linguistics but I vaguely remember that this may correspond to competing theories how language evolved. "Phatic language is about maintaing the connection" seemed to fit perfectly.

But as there are four other components according to Jakobson, I should be careful. Added Jakobson to my reading list.
No, it's an excellent way of filtering out bad companies early.
Deep Zoom Composer
Carriage before horse. It's not that hardware is optimized for C, it's C that's optimized for hardware. Think of C as a portable assembly language.
How to evaluate an internet property part 1: payroll
I wouldn't want to work there either.
Hmm there is a Sony camcorder called Network Sharing Cam which is also a basic, really lightweight and cheap camcorder. Pretty similar to the Flip and priced at around $200. Video is at 640x480. I have one of these Sony cams.
The Sony model predictably runs on a memory stick and can also shoot stills at 5 MP. There are 2 buttons : one for taking photo, press the another to take video. Its a nice pocketable design and now I keep it with me at all times. I was not too enthusiastic about videos b4 i used this easy to use cam.
The Flip looks an even simpler design.

edit : The sony model has some additional controls like (digital) zoom etc. So slightly more features than the Flip which can either be a "feature" or a "put-off" depending on your perspective.