skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is I'm not sure the 2 requirements can be mixed, are we sure the government wants a fair and secure election? They are certainly working very hard to hack the system from within (redistricting for example), that we can't really casually ignore gaming outside the rules.
I can't find the link, but I think Joel (or Eric Sink?) said there are 3 acceptable pricing levels for software:

1) $5-$99 - this is for consumers/regular expenses
2) $100-300 - this can bought within a normal company budget with a purchase order
3) $10,000+ - this is for organizations that require a huge sales effort to reach.

The price here was totally unrelated to product quality. It's just that a $250 piece of software, even if it's better, is too cheap for a huge enterprise to consider buying. Hence Oracle, Blackboard, etc
No.

As per Google's IPO filings (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125041...), there are two classes of Google Common Stock, Class A and Class B.

Only Class A stock can be publicly traded. It's listed as GOOG on Nasdaq.

Class B stock is "insider" stock. It's the stuff that Larry, Sergey, Sequioa, and Google's employees got. It can't be publicly traded.

If you want to sell Class B ("insider") stock, you can convert 1 share of Class B stock into 1 share of Class A stock. Class A stock can then be sold on the public market.

The catch? Class B stock gets 10 votes per share, while Class A stock only gets 1 vote per share.

If someone decided to launch a hostile takeover of Google, they'd have to convince Larry, Sergey, and Google's VCs and employees that Google should get acquired. Most other stockholders (those holding Class A stock that is publicly traded) don't really matter, because their stock gets far, far fewer votes. Even if you bought all the oustanding Class A stock there is, you'd still have a rather tiny share of voting power.
Thanks for the references. I read parts of Lawrence Lessig's books in the past. Very clever stuff indeed. And from now on, I'll definitely keep up with Chris Anderson's blog. Those are stimulating readings.

Thanks again!
Microsoft declares its modeling love with a new language, 'D'
16GB iPhone now available ... oh, and a 32GB iPod touch
Textonyms give cell phone addicts a new language
Is mobile spam OK if the sender pays?
QuickBase, your enterprise database in the cloud
Here's the quote:

http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2

"Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."
They did that to grab attention ("Wow, a Sun for $900?"), but additional memory is not outrageously expensive, as it is for, say, Macs.
Silent start-up readies to take on Intel in notebooks
Read arstechnica's review, they didn't get even get 3 hours, much less 5. They got worse battery life than from a regular Macbook and noted that it takes twice as long for the battery to charge than to discharge. In fact, an entire section of their review is titled "Battery Life, I Miss You". Does that sound appealing?

When I say accessory, I mean that some people don't NEED to be able to pull out their notebook at any given time to do something important. Not everybody does, but those would be the people that view it as an "accessory". It's cool that they have it, but I hope their ability to get work done is not solely dependent on it.

Like I said, I like the Air, but it seems to only be perfect for people who don't actually NEED it.
Very interesting. Is that common practice to have this kind of differentiation between a company's stocks?

Second (newbie) question: say you have a public company with only one type of stock: 1 share 1 vote. You have 10 shares. I have none, but I plan to buy 11 (so that I end up with more than 50% of the total). What kind of restrictions there exists in order to prevent me from taking over your company?
I have a reasonable understanding of Brownian motion. Your comment indicates that you don't really understand markets. In an efficient market system (one which is perfectly predictive of chance of an event occurring based on observable information) it should not be possible to know if the price is going to go up or down. If could know for certain then obviously the price is wrong (and you could make a risk-free profit). So yes this would obviously look a lot like a random walk. However if you look at the graph of the odds through time (say for Obama winning the democratic nomination) you'll see it is responding to new information (such as poll results etc). It represents the aggregate opinion of the participants. If you were confident that your opinion is more accurate than this group then you could profit by betting.

Oh crap I just wasted more time on this.
not a whole lot, but on the hip-hop side of things, I have some album advances with tracks that didn't make the final release, and a couple of albums that got shelved and never actually came out. Others would just be specific mashups / blends that DJ's might just do live on air; a lot of them record their sessions and trade tracks with each other, but they're not going to put it up on p2p.
I just upgraded the memory in my macbook pro and I bought the exact same kind I would've bought for a non-Mac laptop. Its my first mac, so I'm no expert on whether it was more expensive before, but its definitely not the case now.
ICANN flips switch on IPv6 DNS root servers
Rails Plugin: Throttler
The Typography of Code
Google's model was inspired by Berkshire Hathaway. I'm not entirely certain, but I don't think it's very common to have such a two-tiered insider/outsider voting system. It really dilutes the value of the "outsider" shares. (Especially if, as in Google's case, you promise to never, ever pay dividends. If you never get dividends, and you don't get to vote, then what are you paying for when you buy a share? A pyramid scheme? You hold some claim to Google's assets, but it's essentially unenforceable unless Google decides to buy back its shares or dissolve the company. Both are decisions that are taken based on voting power that you don't have.)

As for buying a company's stock: Who are you going to buy your 11 shares from? If I don't want to sell them, and no one else owns any, then where do they come from? The Company could issue more shares for you to buy, but it doesn't have to. And if I control the Company, I can tell it whether or not to issue more shares. When you buy shares on the stock market, you aren't buying them from the Company itself. You're buying them from someone else who owns shares and wants to sell them. If no one wants to sell, there are no shares to buy.
No one, really. But, the ad got me to look around on their web site, so I suppose that it worked.

Frankly, I'd rather roll my own dev box, thank you very much.
We've been through one significant idea change so far. By 'significant,' I mean that we're still pursuing the same core business concept, but we've made big changes to how the concept is executed (and how our customers interact with it).

The original idea was too derivative and didn't have significant uniqueness. The updated idea is new to the market (based on our research).
At the risk of sounding like an Apple fan boy:

"Apple has already taken us quite far down this road"

is really a nasty bit of bait.

Yes, iTunes music is DRM'd. I get it.

But Apple's been really good about dealing with EXACTLY the sort of issue that Atwood is running into. I've transfered songs between many, many computers without any trouble at all.

And I didn't have to pay.
I admit the volume isn't huge. Maybe 10K per day on the presidential nominations. So you might be able to average placing 1K on per day without destroying your odds. If you had even a 10% edge then that's $100 gain which most people wouldn't be giving up their day job for. There are other markets though. Betfair had turned over $3 million on the Dem Nom.

The funny thing is the more accurate the market is the less 'smart money' would be attracted to profits and vice versa.

Good luck with your trading. By participating you will presumably increase the accuracy of the market. But I think the average trader might be more knowledgeable than you give them credit for (even ones from those non-US places). And you never know... there might actually be something in this 'Wisdom of the Crowds' thing.
Hal Varian - The economics of innovation
My experience has been that learning new programming languages from the manual is not very effective. I like to read the overview (theory, executive summary, what's different), but after that I just want to code something.

Whenever I have trouble figuring out how to do something, THEN I refer to the documentation.

Maybe I do it this way because I have never met a language that didn't have 10 times as much stuff as I needed.
But it's the Solaris kernel that remains competitive. Solaris' userland is crap^Wunimpressive compared to what you get on a Linux distro.
UK Domain Record Shattered as GBP560,000 is spent on a single letter
No, because it wastes my time and flattens my battery.
I see. Let's pretend you control the Company and you convince the Company's board to issue 11 more shares, which I will subsequently buy. I'd have 11 shares; you'd have 10.

Is that enough for me to take over the Company? Once the stock exchange transaction is done, I can just dissolve the board in place and do as I want to?
Then again, it takes some people 10 years: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Many of the offices I've worked in have named meeting rooms after cities. But there was never any confusion -- I guess when you say "the meeting's in Milan in 5 minutes" there isn't any ambiguity.

(I did try to get out of a few meetings in that room by claiming I was too sexy for it. Never worked.)
Do you live in the Valley, or would you be moving here for the summer to do your internship?

Can you afford to not work and not take the internship this summer? If you can, why not pursue the idea anyway. If you get in to YC, great. If not, keep working on the startup and see where it takes you.

Why are you taking an internship? One of the main reasons to take an internship is to get job experience, and I'd say that starting your own business is pretty good resume-able experience. The vibe that I'm getting in the Valley right now, is that if you want a job, and you have decent skills, you shouldn't have too hard a problem getting it. It's an employee's job market right now. So, I wouldn't worry about screwing over your long term job prospects too much.

Another reason to take the internship is to get contacts. But, the kind of contacts that you'd make as an intern probably aren't going to be all that great. You're better off moving to Silicon Valley, starting your own business and doing the Meetup/conference things. Networking in Silicon Valley is pretty easy to do, and contacts come pretty easy. It's really a small town.

Another reason to take the internship is the pay. Which, is usually pretty low. If you're hard up for cash, I'd say that you're better off taking a coding job for the summer. From what you've said, though it doesn't sound like that's a big issue for you right now.

And, if you're worried about stepping on the companies toes--don't. Sending them a polite, professional letter explaining that you've decided to pursue other opportunities, should suffice. If they throw a fit or hold a grudge, you really didn't want to work for them anyway.
The nerdiest scheme I encountered was naming machines after elements, and matching the last part their IPs with the atomic number of the element in question.
Berkshire Hathaway has two classes of stock, but for a different reason. BRK.A trades for 137000.00 and BRK.B trades for 4562.00. The smaller one was issued to make ownership accessible to individual invstors, so that an outside company would not provide that service.

The GOOG model is much closer to the NYT model, where the purpose of having two classes of stock is exclusively control. I'm glad that, for now, the New York Times and Google are in a position to not be evil.
Theoretically, you would only make money in an efficient market by taking a position on something people didn't already expect, and being right about it. I think volatility as election results come in is about as expected as sunrise in the morning. In fact, I'd say volatility has been less than I expected, because I thought by now either Clinton or Obama would be above 80%, and instead it's still a coin flip.

But if you did want to bet on vol, you would need options, and I haven't seen any derivatives on the election futures markets. Some cursory Googling turns up nothing.
Possibly, but it depends. Some companies have special restrictions or internal regulations regarding shares and control. For instance, some smaller companies (with only 21 shares issued) may have a policy that each shareholder gets only 1 vote, regardless of the number of shares owned. Others may have a system in place where those serving at the company have more voting power. If I set it up, I could issue you 20 of the 21 total available shares, but because I'm the CEO and chairman of the board, and because the articles of incorporation state that internal shares receive extra voting power, my shares provide me with 90% control of the company. Other companies might have internal controls to prevent a radical dissolving of the board or other establishments in the company. It all depends on the articles of incorporation.

As far as external regulations such as the SEC, I don't think there is too much in the way of what you can and can't do with purchasing stock. There is of course the concern for monopoly-like control of an industry, and then someone may step in, but I don't know enough about that to let you know exactly how that will work. In fact, I don't think anyone knows for sure, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about their Yahoo! acquisition being shot down.
I found this line interesting:

"were tiny enough that Yahoo didn't even have to disclose the purchase prices"

What's that amount? Does anyone have a sense of how high an acquisition price can be before it MUST be disclosed?
Where's House when you need him? :)
As far as I'm aware the board of any company is legally obliged to act in the interests of all shareholders. If an offer was big enough then each board member would probably have to defend their decision in court from angry shareholders if they refused, possibly against criminal as well as civil charges.

So in the event of say a $500 Billion offer, the whole board would have to resign if they didn't want to sell. Where it goes from there I don't know? Of course I don't see anyone offering that much in a hurry.
Richard Stallman Likes the OLPC Laptop
umm... doesn't D already exist?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_programming_language
I've been using some of the proggy fonts[1] for some time now. Nowadays I use the Proggy Square font with bold punctuation, which looks great.

[1] http://www.proggyfonts.com/
Using a dual currency system is the best way to sell virtual goods
VC Fundraising Manual: Ask The VC About Follow-On Investing
Typically at the end of the meeting the VC will ask if you have another other questions that they can answer. While you can ask questions throughout the entire meeting, this structured window usually comes right after the end of meeting VC pitch.

One question that you should always try to ask is whether or not the VC typically makes follow-on investments in subsequent rounds. There are a couple reasons why this is important to do:

see more at markpeterdavis.com
braaaains!
Google expands business options thanks to Postini acquisition
I wonder how Digital Mars feels about this...
Excellent article, it was invaluable to me a couple of years ago when I was trying to find a memory leak that was placing a very large project in jeopardy.
A compsci student at the University of Alberta wrote a web app https://bearscat.su.ualberta.ca/ that scrapes the U of A's WebCT install and can drive WebCT's UI in the background to do basic registration stuff. It's infinitely more usable.

For some reason the university administration seems to resent the fact that it exists.
Firebug 1.1 Supports Firefox 3 Beta
Lemonodor: Pan/Tilt camera with Apple's SMS Sensor
Hackers can Turn Your Home Computer into a Bomb
This also reminds me of the latest installation of the Die hard movie, Live Free or Die Hard (2007). Where bad guys used computer hackers to blow up other hacker with the press of a certain key, when a program is activated remotely, and the program itself activates a bomb attached to the computer.
How about a work safe edit on the title?
World of Warcraft Is Worth More Than Facebook
I'm going to assume that because this is on theregister.co.uk, it's likely about as accurate and meaningful as a randomly-chosen comment on slashdot.
Wolfram offered prize money just recently to somebody to prove that some small automata he found was turing complete.
Atwood is generally straightforward and doesn't bait. I think he means exactly what he says - Apple has taken us down this road, and other companies will follow. But just like other companies haven't been able to make products as nice as Apple's, they probably won't make a DRM system as nice either (case in point, XBox Live).

Do you really think that Motorola, Sony, the movies studios, or heaven help us, the RIAA, will pull off a system as nice as the iTunes DRM?
The code samples identify themselves as PHP, but they appear to be Python.
It's the same as all enterprise software - it sucks because the people who buy aren't the people who use, and the people who buy make decisions based on criteria that have exactly nothing to do with usability. And so the problem is that you can't compete with the vendors on usability; you have to compete on seemingly meaningless features, and you have to compete with very large and well-connected sales organizations.
That book is mistaken (it goes so far as to deny the possibility of scientific progress), see instead The Fabric of Reality which comments on Kuhn and provides a better theory.

http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl...

Edit: btw you got the title wrong.
There are plenty of Americans who want something for nothing, and people like to root for the underdog. It's the feel-good sensation that's sweeping America!
If you REALLY think your idea/product has huge potential why are you worried about your "career"? Your startup IT IS your career!
Hackers & Bakers
Writing Multithreaded Code Is Like Juggling Chainsaws
10 Reasons to Learn and Use Regular Expressions
Online Course on Parsing and Languages
Async I/O
Department of split-second golden ages, Henry Kravis edition
Ruby: 15-second Profanity Filter
Buttonwood on trouble potential and unfairness of current bank regulation
The 5 Worst Web Designers in the World
Web 3.0: Basic Concepts
Despite it being a MSFT product, my favorite fixed-width type is Consolas when coding on a PC.
11 Ways To Expand Your Mind And Recover From Brain Rot
I wonder how creationists score on this thing?
Google Introduces Physical World Hyperlinks to the U.S.
And the language for DTrace scripts is also called D.
YC sounds like a fantastic opportunity. I would pour-your-heart into the application and if you do get the offer - write a hand-written letter (no email) and FedEx it to your internship contact. In the letter, tell your internship liason exactly what you told us - explain your feelings for why you regret turning them down (tell them how you feel, don't use logic). people buy on emotion and rationalize with logic (even the most logical people). Carpe diem!...
I'm sorry, who thinks Marc Andreessen is a dumbass?
Security Cloak : How to fool Passive OS Scanner
Security Cloak is designed to protect against TCP/IP stack fingerprinting and computer identification/information leakage via timestamp and window options by modifying relevant registry keys. The settings used are based on the results of SYN packet analysis by p0f. While the OS reported by other OS detection scanners were not identical to those of p0f, testing against Nmap, xprobe2, queso and cheops showed that they were unable to identify the correct operating system/version after Security Cloak settings had been applied.
Did anyone else parse that as "Open Cialis API"?

I get too much spam.
Everything you ever wanted to know about video codecs.
We had to read portions of Kuhn's book in college. Dense reading.

Ever hear the phrase "paradigm shift"? He's responsible for launching that into our mindspheres.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvZJ9xGutI

Brighter version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9UKcGTcfwo&watch_respons...
Mozilla's ex-CEO on "Innovating Differently"
Don't think of it as an infinite gas tank, but rather a gas tank that's roughly the size of the universe. Theoretically you'll empty the tank eventually, but it'll take a good while.
TrueCrypt 5.0 Released, Now Encrypts Entire Drive
How To Read C Declarations - from Terence Parr
Guy Kawasaki interviewed about Truemors
Okay, but if you price out a system on store.apple.com, memory upgrades are roughly twice as much as on Sun's online store.
nope, www.diveintopython.org
Ask YC: "Why would I want to do that?"
I'm working with a friend on a chat application that we think is a unique approach to an idea that's been around for a few years but has never been implemented in a sensible way. When I tell people at work or at school about it, most of them get pretty excited, but I've noticed that I get quite a different reaction when I explain it to non-"tech-savvy" people. Their response is either, "I don't get it," or more frequently, "Why would I want to do that?"

At first, I found this response rather disheartening, since as an entrepreneur, my top priority is to make something that people are going to want. After some reflection, though, I think that this response is OK . . . at this early stage at least. I think about applications like Facebook and Twitter, both of which are hugely popular presently, but would have sounded tedious and pointless to Joe Sixpack a year or two before they were launched.

I'm crossing my fingers, and hoping that when I have a workable demo to show non-tech people, they will "get it" and be as excited as my technologically inclined peers. Is this leap of faith necessary, or am I being foolish in trying to sell people something that they may not readily understand?

Either way, I think my elevator pitch needs some work.
Redeye VC: Microsoft/Yahoo - let the exodus begin
Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent
Dreaming in Code - Andy Hertzfeld Quotes
In reality, the first is true, even for Planck. He'd be a fool not to realize it too. I didn't mean to say Planck's right forever.

Phrased another way, I don't think his point in saying how science progresses by funerals is to point to his own death. It was to highlight the misconception that most people have that current science theories come to prominence in science because the revolutionaries changed the minds of the old guard through proofs and experimentation. Rather, proof and experimentation changed the minds of young revolutionaries, and only when old guards die off, the revolutionaries rise to take their place and make prominent the new theory.