skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...why I keep running into the same brilliant, wise, full-of perpsective programmers at the same parties/meetups... because I know that all programmers everywhere know a lot more about businesses... than anybody anywhere."

I could be wrong but have you ever thought that maybe since you had trouble convincing/selling your idea to the programmers themselves that they logically concluded that you'd probably have a hard time convincing/selling to other people too? or that since you have no track record, that its hard to prove your busines acumen... Knowing about textbook business is different from being able to execute it in real life...
Ubuntu Mobile
CouchDB on its Way to Becoming an Apache Project
I actually agree. I have been programming for the web for about 8 years now and looking back, I wish that the web server had not been such a mystery - it would have been helpful.
Um ... I think they covered that already in "Mad Max" ... didn't work out too well if I recall the movie correctly.
Energy isn't that scarce, actually. If we eliminated our military, for example, there would instantly be a 100% surplus as the military accounts for about 50% of the fuel this country uses. As for why we abstract energy with bills, it's because people are easier to control that way. Plus you need to account for the not to easy to calculate idea of "human energy" represented by money. If China's population doubles, bankers can increase the money supply to account for their economic activity - to a point. But how can we increase the energy "things" to do that? A bit harder.
Apple iPhone SDK Event Planned for March 6
Regardless if you're bootstrapping, or get outside funding, an early startup should always bootstrap. Bootstrap to me is to spend every dollar bill like it was your last. Now, when you start a startup, you won't have time to cook (good way to save money, but not good way to save time), instead you can spend that time coding. Going to a restaurant is out of the window (way too expensive). The best way to save money, and save time is to buy pre-cooked food. I think noodle is the best in that case. I love noodles; just throw it in the microwave for 2 minutes, and it's ready. You can even eat it while you're coding. Trust me I've experienced it before. Noddle will save you time and money.

good luck!
Apple set to release iPhone dev kit
Flex 1.x was a joke, but Flex Builder 2.0 was only $500. Making the Flex SDK (but not the IDE) open appears to be a case of openwashing, since most Flex developers are probably still buying the IDE.
Ask YC:  Why not have adsense placement with "visitor quality" feedback from your service? 
Currently, you need to figure out the sorts of places where you would like to advertise. Why not provide an objective measure of visitor quality and have Google figure out which places are best to place your ad?

For example, for a social news site, visitor quality could simply be the karma of the user after a week or month.

Another measure of visitor quality would be the number of ads that the user clicks on your site. This measure could be determined solely by Google if we restrict ourselves to the Google ad system.
Physics is like it's own religion with it's own priests, and a social caste. Ideas matter only depending who they come from. This guy, is basically nobody, hence he will face a lot of this backlash from the estabilishment.

There are so many theories out there, that are just madeup mathematic formulas with lot's of wholes, and new concepts being invented just to fill those gapping wholes, from which those theories wouldn't make sense.

Gravitron, dark mass, dark energy, gravitational waves, all made up. They may or may not exist. Until there if concrete proof, they just exist just as god exist for religious people. You can't prove they exist, but you can't really prove they don't exist.

I am still counting the number of "dimensions" comming out from the string theorists, from 9 to 10, to 11, and now the brane theory...things that just we cannot test with our current technology.

This guy's theory, should be partially testable, especially with the new particle accelerator comming out of Cern. But the problem, he is not in the establishment. He is not an insider of the religion.
I read the second article. It didn't help my understanding of Doctorow's position all that much.

The problem, as always, is in the details. I want to understand what Doctorow thinks are the essentials of this putative "age-old normative consensus" which he finds so compelling.

Just stating that such a thing exists doesn't get me any farther along to understanding the intellectual framework which he wants to use in order to make the trade off between the creator's interests and those of society at large.
Printer friendly version: http://www.sanfranmag.com/print/node/6516

article runs 13 friggin pages...
Free will has always been a very disputed notion since the Greeks, but the debate took another dimension with Freud's discover of subcounscious. As I said in my conclusion, I did not intend to open such a vaste debate here, I just noticed the paradox of Mr Buffet stance on this matter considering the core values of the society in wich he lives (and what he represents).
I'm not saying that engineers don't need business people at all, but they do need competent business people. Either the business person in question is charismatic enough to convince or he has a proven track record or he already has money (from convincing investors). from your perspective would you partner/hire an engineer who can't build something. you can guage who's a solid engineer by what they've built, as oppose to just what they claim...

on another point, when u don't have a product yet does it always make sense to get someone to start selling it before it's there in every situation (as opposed to getting someone to help you build it)?

"imagine going to a doctor or surgeon only to have them tell you, "Well, tell you what - if you're willing to go to med school, I might operate on you. Otherwise, you're not worthy of my effort.""

that's a bad analogy, considering patients are doctors' customers
A Hierarchy of Needs for Code
socialthing! social aggregator coming in march
TechCrunch: Google Swooping In to Save (Or Confuse) Yahoo?
check's in the mail... cheers!
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's wrong with ActionScript? I've never used it, so I don't have much to go on besides the fact that it's based on ECMAScript/JavaScript. Being a superset of JS can hardly be considered a bad thing.

You still get the prototypes, dynamism, and functional programming of JS with AS, right?
Robot as good as real dog at easing lonely hours
I didn't think you offended me at all. I take critics very well. I learn from them, and adjust if it's necessary.

Thanks for all your comments.
Right. Downgrade my post. I made a perfectly valid, succint point, insulted nobody, pointed to a flaw in the logic, supported the original logic, and just because you disagree and can't defend your own logic you click off a point. Feel powerful, do you? You showed me!
Whatever you do, don't call it micropayments.

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht...
Wide Gap Between Security Skills Wanted and What IT Workers Have
Yeah, I'm sure they named him Paul.
> but they do need competent business people

But most business competence is recognized in retrospect. How many Harvard MBAs with awesome corporate track records do you see starting awesome companys which make products you love? Like, almost none?

> to convince or he has a proven track record or he already has money

"proven track records" are what jealous people who inherit money to start investment funds look for to make business starters feel small. Tell me, based on the "track record" of Steve Jobs/Woz, Howard Shultz (door-to-door expresso machine salesperson), Richard Branson, and God knows who else, would you invest a penny in their "I dropped out of college/never went to chase my dream of beating huge, well-financed, well established companies on their own turf by doing something unproven" ideas? I bet not. But you'd be very rich if you did.

> from your perspective would you partner/hire an engineer who can't build something. you can guage who's a solid engineer by what they've built, as oppose to just what they claim...

But most people just showcase what they CAN build, which, in my experience, rarely translates into the ability to build what they've never built before.

>on another point, when u don't have a product yet does it always make sense to get someone to start selling it before it's there in every situation (as opposed to getting someone to help you build it)?

Sure. I'd gladly pick an awesome salesperson who can pre-sell it to 100,000 paying customers over 10 of the best programmers working away day and night all the time. That salesperson's ability will get me the money to tell VCs to go to hell and then have plenty left to hire the best programmers I can find. The programmers, meanwhile, don't guarantee anybody will buy it once its done.

>that's a bad analogy, considering patients are doctors' customers

Not really. Most surgeons make enough money to not have to work for the money and do it for the challenge/love. Imagine they got offended at everyone's lack of medical knowledge.
I guess I wrote this to counter Silicon Valley's “social media” culture, that requires success to be financial and buzzworthy.

"The work of an unknown good man is like a vein of water flowing hidden in the underground, secretly making the ground greener.” Thomas Carlyle

“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, assumes personal responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and keeps out of it. Without this hidden conspiracy of good will, society would not endure an hour.” Kenneth Rexroth
iPhone will hit milestone this year.
Salesforce.com at the moment. It is pretty awful and kind of expensive, so we're developing our own.
Coding Horror: Douchebaggery
"Um, actually they were the first and I don't see any others so I assume they're the last."

I'm speaking of successful entrepreneurs in general and not just of successful internet ones (even then there were a lot of successful internet entrepreneurs that came after them)

"if you studied the history of currency management"

that's currency, I'm speaking of the world and trends at large including technology

"Yes. But here it's worse. In 3rd world countries, poor people have to endure a few well educated rich snobs... many poor people have to endure watching disproportionately rich 18 year old ditzes driving by in the new Mercedes convertible"

doesn't sound like you have been to the 3rd world. over there people care about more important stuff like food and water and maybe even basic education; you call suffering watching some guy drive a car you can't afford? we live like kings over here

"Just because I wish I could duplicate some of the better aspects of S.V..."

so you really do believe in what you wrote? I thought you were just messing with me. ironic
Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost
http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html
It would be better if all of the categories/sections weren't stuffed down in the footer.
Wall of text.
Of course energy is scarce! We can't afford to send very heavy things into space. We can't send a radio signal into space that is so loud that you can be sure as hell everything within 100 light years is going to know we are here. We can't build superstructures, even if we got rid of the military. We could probably build a huge particle accelerator if we got rid of the military though...
how is that insightful? do what you love? everyone says that. it's well known and lacking detail. good advice is different from insightful advice.
I saw it. I liked There Will Be Blood a whole lot more.
The problem with this theory is that it's factually false. Physicists simply do not behave that way. A handful do, but physicists in general are much more principled than most other specialists in other fields, which is why physics has been so successful.

PS you don't have to attack science to defend religion
"David (heinemeier Hansson) gets off on putting other people down."

And there's a pretty serious backlash appearing on the horizon because of it. If Jeff Atwood, who is normally a really nice and straight guy, starts writing personal attacks then I think that DHH has a potential problem.

Note: I don't personally have anything against DHH, I've met him once and hes one of the smartest guys I've talked to. He even bought the beer...
The insightful part is doing it. Everybody is talking about it and agreeing that it is a great idea. This guy puts his surfboard and his brains where his mouth is.
Can someone give an example of a practical application of the semantic web?
German court limits cyber spying
Here's my algorithm:

1. Parse the program input with a lexical analyzer that:

i. Loops through each character.

ii. Appends it to a buffer.

2. Submit the lexed program to eLance with a 7-week bid.

i. If someone with at least one project completed bids on it, continue.

ii. If no one responds by the 7th day, return an error: "Syntax error in program. Please recode."

3. Accept the bid.

4. while(!checkIfIndianSentCompletedProjectFiles() && isTakingLessThanTwoMonths()) Sleep(1);

5. if (!isTakingLessThanTwoMonths()) return a run-time error: "Temporal stack overflow."

6. else print resultant code.

It takes a long time to compile some projects, but it's reasonable, since it is after all a very, very high level programming language.
Sure, maybe a bit of momentum halted, but when they open for public interest will definitely still be there. Seeing the large influx of new git users lately, and GitHub being one of the two main repository hosting facilities and the large number of people craving for an invite. They will manage just alright.
"How many Harvard MBAs with awesome corporate track records do you see starting awesome companys which make products you love?"

well a lot of them tend to join big established corporations... not to mention many successful entreprenuers don't have MBAs let alone degrees

"tell me, based on the "track record" of Steve Jobs/Woz, Howard Shultz (door-to-door expresso machine salesperson), Richard Branson,"

well I mentioned charisma right? Jobs and Branson are bad examples for your argument, since they are extremely charismatic - hell they're legendary for it

" most people just showcase what they CAN build"

better than empty words...

"Sure. I'd gladly pick an awesome salesperson who can pre-sell it to 100,000 paying customers "

what if it doesn't get built after you presold?

"Most surgeons make enough money to not have to work for the money and do it for the challenge/love"

well all the doctors I know from college have a lot of bills to pay, which don't include the extremely high cost of malpractice insurance.... =)
YC: 7 Weeks In
Third Parties Controlling Information
http://zunger.livejournal.com/160426.html

"The non-technical version is that it makes for a great news story and all, but this is the sort of idea that most high-energy physicists come up with sometime during grad school, think about for a few minutes, and then realize why it doesn't work."
Is string theory also 'factually false' according your definition?
No, he doesn't, it's just media hype. He claims that the E8 is probably significant to the fundamental forces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_polytope
How Do You Find Programming Superstars?
Here is the same sort of advice I'd give a web startup:

make it really clear what the point is, on the front page.

You have a pretty, color picture. Good start. It has a legend which pairs colors to numbers.

But what do the numbers mean, in useful terms? I looked a bit and did not find out. Does 20 mean we're all going to die, or the price of pet fish will go up 20%, or what?
OK, she's cute, on several levels. I don't know what was more surprising, that she is a geek with style or an American with same.

But the talking so fast that it's dazzling? Phleaaaaaaase. Since Xerox Parc, the trick is public domain: use twice as many words to say the same thing. Easy with practice. And a tad boring.

Still, a cool motivating story. Back to hacking!
I would love to solve one of Google's problems, particularly if they would pay me to do it. Your point seems to be more about understanding the problem.
Huh? He indeed does claim that his model unifies all the forces. The title of his paper was: "An exceptionally simple theory of everything".

From: http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection.
i wouldn't call string theory factually false yet -- that's too controversial, and one shouldn't use the word 'fact' except when it's quite clear. the data about whether physicists act like priests is not controversial so using 'fact' is ok there. further, i was emphasizing the problem with the 'physicists are like priests' theory is not the explanation -- it's plausible in the abstract and has a certain kind of appeal -- the only problem is that the factual data doesn't support it.

FYI my best theory is that string theory is false.
God, that article has the worst pagination ever.
It's more inspiring than insightful, probably.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Blogger and Blogspot are down
Was any advance notice given? Any ideas as to what's going on?
"I could be wrong but have you ever thought that maybe since you had trouble convincing/selling your idea to the programmers themselves that they logically concluded that you'd probably have a hard time convincing/selling to other people too?

Well, since it usually never even GETS to my idea because they're busy showing me their brilliant technical features that few people would use and even fewer would pay money for ...

Plus, I don't trust the business acumen of most programmers. In 1999 I got turned down by Phil Greenspun because he was 100% convinced he could build a successful company building $1-5 million a pop corporate websites forever based on (1) Oracle costing a million per licence then (2) no other technologies existing to compete with Oracle (3) complete obvliviousness to offshore development trends (4) never-ending bubble enabling people to pay that much for a website forever and ever.

Guess he really showed me his business acumen when a year and a half later the VCs outmaneuvered him out of his startup.

So, since most programmers admire his business acumen, by transition most programmers in my mind have ... um ... not too much business acumen.

"or that since you have no track record, that its hard to prove your busines acumen...

See above.

Or my current experience this summer with a programmer who left my profitable business model and private equity relationships to work on his awesome idea which currently has a blog with ... um .. 3 subscribers (myself being one) and a never ending stream of posts with "o" comments.

" Knowing about textbook business is different from being able to execute it in real life...

I know nothing about textbooks. Just a market with a need and willingness to pay and a relationship to a CEO at a Dubai based equity firm willing to invest if I can build a "showable" example.

I would have thought in today's environment a profitable business model and people willing to invest would be of some value ...

But I could be wrong. Maybe bush is right and we're not coming into a recession/depression, but are merely in a "slowing down business time" as he put it that's due to reverse any second now, which will mean come this summer Ruby/Ajax based sites with no paying customers and no business model in the foreseeable future will be all the rage again.
Sorry, English is my second language. Feel free to correct me.
> well a lot of them tend to join big established corporations... not to mention many successful entreprenuers don't have MBAs let alone degrees

Exactly. Hence, track records are useless. Unless you have a track record of starting big successful companies. Nobody who has that would bother talking to programmers. They'd hire them to wash their ferraris for the entertainment value.

>well I mentioned charisma right? Jobs and Branson are bad examples for your argument, since they are extremely charismatic - hell they're legendary for it

Psst! AFTER they get rich it's called "charisma" .. until then, it's called being a loon. Take away fame and money and "charisma" suddenly = annoying personality.

> better than empty words...

Not really. I can build the biggest house of cards you ever saw. Not sure how that makes me money. Same thing with most applications I've seen programmers show me when they told me they're too busy to build my thing. Awesome. Profound. They even convinced me their solutions were technically superior to everyting. I can't figure out who'd give them any money for it, so in the end they amount to the same thing as my house of cards or "empty words" , ie, nothing anybody would actually buy.

> what if it doesn't get built after you presold?

Um, well, if programmers are still too snobby here after I got 100,000 people to pay me for it up front, (a) they're too stupid to hire because they don't realize the value of 100,000 people willing to pay you before it's even built and (b) I'd use the money to fly to Russia and spend 3 months finding programmers there.

> well all the doctors I know from college have a lot of bills to pay, which don't include the extremely high cost of malpractice insurance.... =)

Doctors, maybe. Surgeons, I doubt. Most surgeons can pay off med school with 1-few proceedures, depending on the nature.

> extremely high cost of malpractice insurance.... =)

I don't think the doctors themselves pay that - the hospitals / private companies which own/manage them these days do that.
Yeah, that might be the word I was looking for.

See the above comment :-)
Superfish: DropDown menus by jQuery's
My co founder read the book, so I haven't picked it up. I understand that keeping things simple and easy can be really important. We have been focusing on simplifying and usability for the past couple weeks, because we saw how many users were having a hard time using the site. Our usability tests have been paying off really well.
Oh, then you probably don't know that was a Princess Bride quote. Don't worry about it, nothing too important.
SugarCRM is cheap, but I am not too fond of it...
We use Salesforce.com at my startup HubSpot.
Is it really worth it to develop your own CRM (no matter how awful Salesforce.com might be)?
Cool. This has come at a good time for me. I've been working on a problem where I've been going down quite a few dead ends. Conceptually the problem shouldn't be that hard to solve, so I've been berating my self a bit about failing to hit on the solution correctly the first time.

So where the article mentions:
"To arrive at that goal, the craftsman at work has instead to dwell in waste, following up dead ends".
That perfectly describes how it feels to struggle through this problem, with code strewn around and thrown away in different approaches.
Jaanix a new social bookmarking tool