skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly, the attitude evident in the last two paragraphs of your comment runs deep in young people. Zuckerberg at YC Startup last year, age discrimination suit at Google, etc. Logan's Run in Silicon Valley.

It's also upside down compared to other fields like medicine and writing. In medicine, you make your "mark on the world" after you go through significant training, which ends around 30 or later.

As far as making it entrepreneurially:

1) If it depends purely on intelligence or hacking ability, PlentyOfFish.com and other success stories wouldn't have made it. Even if it's somewhat true, consider that the decrease of your ability with age should be less than the interpersonal variability of ability. (50 yo Einstein > 20 yo Homer Simpson)

2) If it depends on luck, don't worry about age.

3) If it depends on connections, you get more with age.

4) If it depends on others' perception of your youth.... you may be in trouble.
The Arc Debate
I thought the same thing about browser based email a while ago, but now I use gmail exclusively.

Not saying it will work, just.... sometimes these things take off in places you wouldn't expect.
>Of course, you'd have to know how to produce horoscopes

It's easy. Pull a bunch of random, vague shit out of your ass. I bet someone could write a wicked horoscope generator, kinda like the postmodern essay generators: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Apples and oranges are not the same, but they have things in common. That's why we have a concept of a fruit. You and I have never thought twiddling a knob and words have things in common, and yet another human being finds them almost identical. This is when I realized that it is really human to think about interacting with environment in the same way we interact with other people. I wouldn't have thought of this by myself.

Yes, she doesn't use the word "language" in the meaning we "normal" people have agreed to. But this is not the point.
Umm...the author is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, and he's a published author (in fiction).

Jordan Ellenberg (ellenbergwired@gmail.com) is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of the novel The Grasshopper King.
The net effect is to make businesses, small businesses in particular, more leery of doing business with startups. These guys succeeded and abandoned the promises they had made to their customers. Google did support it as is, but most early buyers don't want "as is" for the next 18 months.
Hal Varian Answers Your Questions
Adobe to port AIR for Linux
Excellent piece. He could not be more right.

I think there is more in that story than was argued. The equity structure in startups, in my opinion, could see a change similar to what is happening to venture financing.

Here is the current problem: if you hire an employee, and give him .1% of the company, what happens if that employee's actions significantly increase the value of the company? Maybe this person makes a key innovation that pushes the product over the chasm. That .1% looks like an unfair reward. In general, the greater the contribution, the worse the equity allocation becomes.

My guess is that market forces will find a way to solve this problem. Companies that can give employees variable equity based on contribution will find it easier to attract top talent. Legally, I have no idea how this would work, but the market forces are there nonetheless.
I work with a bunch of rxvt terminals, a browser, and a few gvim windows. It's the same damn setup on either Windows or Linux once I have Cygwin and Virtual Dimension (virtual desktops for Windows) installed.

If you're deploying to a Unix server, i.e. not writing desktop apps or systems code, I fail to see how it matters what OS you're using. The dev tools are all ported.
Agreed. They definitely should have had some visual cue in the bottom nav showing where you were. The page num in the article tools didn't cut it.
How will this be different from expert exchange?
...yes...that's what I was pointing out...
Here's the actual changelog, btw: http://changelog.friendfeed.com/
What is the legal status of serving in a foreign army?

At any rate, if you read accounts of the various wars Israel has been in, one of the deciding factors has always been the sloppy preparation on the Arabs' side.
I'm guessing lots of people access HN from work, skewing results towards Windows?... (I don't doubt Windows would still be quite dominant though).
Ask YC: Gmail Speed Problems?
I usually run two Gmail app tabs in Firefox constantly. In the last month and especially the last weeks, Firefox is grinding to a halt using a great deal of cpu power and memory. I tried other browsers, same thing. Finally, we tried running Gmail with basic html - problem solved. It seems like there is a big problem with the current gmail javascript running. Anyone else having problems?
I think even this stat is misleading as many of the readers probably still work for an organization that determines their workstation environment. I think what David is talking about is what do you use your hard earned money to buy and work on when it's completely your choice.

I believe that this is relevant as well: http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html. Even though we are talking about tools and not art there is clearly a better one. If you think it's just a matter of opinion, spend several months developing on Windows then Linux then OS X and get back to me.

When I worked as a sysadmin in a company using Windows NT 4 then Windows 2000 I must admit that I didn't understand why people used mac's either. I thought is was just style or monopolizing education and the creative market. It wasn't the intel processors that changed my mind. It was --

"The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?" -- Paul Graham

I was already using FreeBSD on all my servers and it dawned on me that a great UI on top of BSD was the way for me to stop messing with linux and focus on writing code.

After reading what I've just written it dawns on me that I really don't care what others use. I guess I just don't like reading what I feel are incorrect statements by people that have obviously not worked extensively on all 3 environments.
Also see:

http://tserve01.aid.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~fujiki/ole_coordi...
Very cool!

PS: paul, what do you guys use on the backend? I see you guys use nginx (great choice). What else?
Yeah, it does seem interesting. Also check out RRDTool (if you haven't already) if you're doing roll-your-own stuffs.

I'm also currently setting up/trying out Zenoss. http://www.zenoss.com so far I like it, just need to get used to its way of doing things...
Make them sub-contractors? (And if they do not like the risk you can offer to cap the down-side (as well as the up-side).)
Interesting article.

Roger Zelazy wrote a short story "Dayblood" in the "Frost and Fire" collection that addressed the vampire population explosion problem. He gives us a creature that feeds on vampires keeping them in check.
Yet another psychological problem mathematicians too eagerly claimed as their own. Why not try to find patterns about the movies which appeal to a certain individual? Is it against the rules to use outside data (actors, directors, etc)?
I have been having problems with CPU usage and memory in firefox beta 3 on Windows. This isn't confined to Gmail though.

Since you have the same problem in other browsers that doesn't seem to be it.
<head exploding> Avoid Procrastination at All Costs </head exploding>
"as long as you have money for rent, ramen and bandwidth"

Can you reformulate that to use three 'R's?
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
--Geoffrey Chaucer
Regression analysis of test scores reveals: Massachusetts is smartest
While I was struggling making my first (and so far, last) piece of furniture, I got some sage advice. The woodworker said, “Woodworking is about problem solving. There is no right or wrong. Only smarter, faster, and safer. It doesn't matter how you do it, as long as it looks nice.”

He added, "Do you think the true masters of furniture making don't make mistakes? They do. They shim stuff up. You think everything's perfect, but it's not. You can't even tell." It's ok and part of the process to make mistakes.
Whoops! OK, so just to clarify, I didn't mean for my off-hand generalization about "science journalists not knowing anything about science" to extend to the author of this article in particular, who as several people have now pointed out, turns out to actually be a professor of mathematics at Madison.
That is a brilliant game.

But it is a hazard for politicians--it teaches people that hiding dangers makes them go away :)
The school of hard knocks? Dropping out seems to be a common path for successful entrepreneurs. Witness Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, to name a few in the technology space. Follow subjects that energize you; they are the ones that you will continue to get better at after you graduate. Entrepreneurship has very little to do with programming or college, and a lot to do with a relentless focus on value creation.
I'd love to set an ethographer loose on this, and see what insights they have about how programmers and programming works. Might make a nice PhD thesis for someone :-)
From the Netflix prize FAQ:

Why not provide other data about the movies, like genres, directors, or actors?

We know others do. Again, Cinematch doesn’t currently use any of this data. Use it if you want.

That seems like an easy target - if I've 5-starred every movie with Kevin Spacey, I probably will like anything with Kevin Spacey. Why not mine blogs and reviews, trying to find themes which are appealing to individuals?
or possibly even higher than 3-5x by starting a startup.
Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body
Ok, it's about time people on HN read/re-read this.

Money quote: "I don’t believe people should do things for reasons they don’t understand—things like looking healthy, eating spinach, or avoiding GO TO statements."
Markus Frind is quite a bit more intelligent than many people give him credit for, eg. he discovered the then-longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers in 2004. Same goes for many other entrepreneurs that people assume were just lucky - James Hong, Marc Andreesen, Brad Fitzpatrick, etc. And the variation due to age may be much less than the variation due to person, but remember that there are many more smart people than there are millionaires. Empirically, it seems like you need to be smart, young, and lucky.

Also - I doubt few people would dispute that succeeding with a tech business requires the ability to concentrate intensely for long periods of time. (Something I'm obviously failing at, having been back to news.YC 3 times so far today.) Certainly many young people lack that, but for a given person, it seems likely that they're better able to do that at 20 or 25 before things like family, business connections, or reputation intercedes.

It definitely is upside down compared to medicine or writing, but that's because computer programming is nearly in unique among human fields in being subject to lots of chaotic effects. Almost every other body of knowledge is additive, but in software, small changes to requirements at the base layer can have ripple effects that invalid your whole system's design. That's why the software industry seems to undergo major tectonic shifts every 10 years or so, each of which creates lots of opportunities for young entrepreneurs who haven't learned the now-obsolete ways of "how things are done".

When I was a kid, the hot new field was microcomputers, the programming language was assembly (no wait...Pascal. no wait...C), and the largest platform was Windows. When I was a teenager, the hot new field was the web, the hot programming languages were Perl and PHP and Java, and the largest platform was Netscape. Now that I'm in my twenties, the hot new field is rich Internet applications, the hot programming languages are Flash, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby, and the largest market is Internet Explorer. I can almost guarantee that the hot field, language, and platform will be different in 10 years, and all the technical skills I've learned so far will be obsolete.

Edit: On reflection, it's not really software as a whole that's chaotic so much as the leading edge of software, i.e. the edge where you can still have a viable startup. If you're making a desktop app, the tools and skillsets are only slightly different from making a desktop app in 1995. If you're making a webapp that's just a sequence of forms, the tools from 1998 will work fine. But those are mostly solved problems: either there's an off-the-shelf solution that's already been built, or you can hire one of an army of consultants that knows how to build one. The leading edge, by definition, involves tackling problems that haven't been solved before, and so there's no advantage to experience in solving them.
Google's Andy Rubin demos Android
What are the key things you've learned, if you don't mind me asking?
The craftsman style in archtitecture has seen a tremendous resurgance in popularity since the late 90s. People seem to more and more value the attention to detail and appreciation for natural materials.

Small home arts & crafts are increasingly more popular (did you know scrapbooking is a >$3 billion industry in the US?). Look at the popularity of Etsy.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124684

I feel like society is going in 2 directions. One the hand, people are willing to accept low/lower quality in items/services, in particular if they're being made free. But also the availablity of information in the form of online instruction and tutorials is reducing the barriers of entry for many individuals, sparking their interest in hand-made high-quality items.

Other than saying I agree with this article, I don't really have a point here, just voicing some thoughts I've been pondering quite a bit in the last couple months.
I think the important lesson here is the sense of ownership, whether emotional (passionate) and/or financial (founder), that someone who works at a (usually startup) company feels. If you're not invested in something, what do you care about making things better or the symbolic act of saving some of the startup funds by traveling on the cheap?
Who's at FOWA?
Anyone want to meet up? on twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/bunsen
I think the limiting factor is the amount of computation required. When you take the number of variables (actors, directors, themes, box office gross, etc) x the number of values each of them have (dozens to thousands) x the number of users, that's a lot of crunching to do. Perhaps do some pre-crunching to find actors that have a correlation like that and then just check those. Apply the "Kevin Spacey index", if you will.
Lode Runner trapped in Escher's universe. Could be good!
Yes. I tried to tread the fine line between making my point and being subtle, but I failed.

The article's countering exactly the issue I say it missed.
"rent, ramen, Rackspace"?

"food, a flat, fiber"?

"home, hamburgers, hosting"?
Guidelines for competing with Twitter
How old are you? (If you don't mind)

(I was somehow under the impression that most of the people were very young so your "10 years" remark stuck out for me.)
I could do this, being a native German. Price depends on how interesting your site is ;) Drop me a line.
file.io ?
Zuckerberg "punishes" naughty developers, rewards users
Ubuntu Brainstorm Launched
I would like to point out that if your aim is purely financial freedom, there are much easier ways to accomplish this.
Cool. But do the bands pay dividends?
But how long have these desktop-like websites been around for now? I remember Hotmail catching on like mad in their first months of being available. Not so much with the WebOS sites as far as I know.

Mind you, I'm not saying that web-based take-your-info-anywhere web apps will never succeed (heck, people are using Hotmail and Gmail as storage, so the need is certainly there). It's just that I don't think that mimicking a WIMP desktop is the way to go.
Hmmm... it's an "iPhony" for the most part. I wonder what else they have in store. Is the openness of this the entirety of the radical innovation in this? Or am I expecting too much?
I always thought that vampires just killed you by default, or could choose to turn you into a vampire. That would solve the numerical problem with vampires too. Also, people kill them and sometimes they kill each other.
Ubuntu Brainstorm Site Takes the Community Pulse
Feeling the heat at Microsoft
Open source gains business credibility
Split the difference and make it your 5th rule. We need to restate this rule at least 10 different ways to make it stick in people's minds.
How to Get Ahead on LinkedIn
As an independently wealthy individual, due to family inheritance and MS stock options, even before starting Fog Creek, I don't think Joel is in much of a position of authority to discuss the average corporate employee's economic perspective.

This article would be far more credible were he not posting on his $10k Sonus home audio system and written by someone who had overcome real economic hardships in life. Fog Creek's first offices were in his grandmother's New York brownstone. Most start-ups in New York can barely afford a closet-sized office.
The naval gunfire story is recounted in more detail in "Gunfire at Sea" and is available here
http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/TT/Sims/Sims.pdf it makes for fascinating reading. It's a chapter from "Men, Machines, and Modern Times" by Elting Morrison http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Modern-Times-Elting-Morison/d... which also makes great reading.

Elting Morrison makes the point that the modern naval gunnery was enabled by the intersection of metallurgy advances that could build longer strong gun barrels giving improved range, improved optics so that you could see and range find what you were aiming at since it was a mile or more away, an elevating gear to compensate for the rolling motion of the deck.

Together these three inventions enabled a continuous aim firing method that saw 175x increase in the rate of effective fire in 6 years: "After twenty-five minutes of banging away, two hits had been made on the sails of the elderly vessel. Six years later one naval gunner made fifteen hits in one minute at a target 75 by 25 feet at the same range–1600 yards; half of them hit in a bull’s eye 50 inches square."

I had included it in a longer blog entry about Paul Saffo speaking on forecasting technology
http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/08/28/paul-saffo-on-foreca...
One, they draft in Israel and many, with dual American-Israeli citizenship, go back to serve.

And considering America sends them 2 billion each year, plus all the tax revenues they have, they have more than enough to invest in advanced military tech.
Yeah... Israel has it worked out such that they draft in such a way as to not violate US citizenship.
I can't believe I'm becoming an Apple Fanboy
Real World Architectures: Scaling Audiogalaxy.com to 80 million daily page views
What Is Plant Liberation?
Unless, as we do, hackers build things for parts of their lives other than hacking.
Congress tried to make serving in a foreign military cause you to loose your citizenship, but that was struck down by the supreme court. The actual case where it was struck down involved a guy with dual US/Israeli citizenship voting in Israel, but the law that was struck down was the same one that tried to punish serving in a foreign military.

Now, keep in mind that it might still be illegal (with most likely an exception written in for Israel), but at least you won't loose your citizenship for it.
a bit out of date. links arc0, and didn't someone already write a unicode support patch?

and pg is busy spending his millions? lol maybe that's part of it, but there's also his essays and ycombinator.

and arc doesn't exactly force you to use table based layouts, it just comes with some libraries to support them. soon enough someone will write a css-layout oriented library for arc. it's not very hard.
10 Free Links that Will Make Your Site #1 on Google
In general, I couldn't give a rat's ass about any of this. But I must say that 3 months ago I switched back to a Mac after 10 years away, and while I like it much, much better than Windows, it's absolute bullshit to talk about Apple or Mac OS X like the quality is infinitely better. On that front, I find both my hardware and software to be just as flaky and crappy as the Dell/Windows hell to which I had become accustomed. Laptop wakes from sleep? Usually. Machine locks up? Rarely, but sometimes. Crummy wireless mouse works? Usually. <sigh>...
I've considered doing this for a while, too. I went to far as to make a post-commit hook script for subversion to post to twitter, but it was friends-only so only my collaborator and I could see it.

Even better would be to post the diffs :-P

Would people be interested in seeing the svn changelog on my current project?
Does YC only fund web startups...
or any startup involving technology? I have an idea for a educational program for elementary and middle school aged students to get involved in technology on a more interactively level than what's being used in formal schools. The idea is to have more innovative interaction exercises, group dynamics and personal development that uses technology instead of the up front "This is how you type", "this is what Microsoft Word looks like" type of education.
Python, mostly. There's a little bit of c++ to make some things fast, but we're trying to minimize that.
It's not that you failed exactly -- I thought I got the point. It's just that it's pretty hard to be sure on online forums. Plus I didn't read the article :)

What I noticed was you said we should define intelligence in terms of being normal instead of thinking quickly and precisely. So I guessed you were making fun of the parent post by agreeing in a silly way.
They do tax out-of-state corporations, but it's a franchise tax not an income tax.
4 Reasons On Why Google Buys Companies
I disagree. Every startup, except a few, can only hope to target maybe 5% of anyone who ever stumbles on the site. So, the only opinions that matter are those of the 5% who sign up and use the service. Everybody else is just thinking up reasons that this is either not needed, takes too much trouble, already has a better alternative, too busy to look into the site further and then forgets about it, doesn't feel the site is safe or secure, doesn't feel they know the author, think it costs too much money, thinks it costs too little money, or thinks the idea is too simple and therefore must be put down because, who do these people think they are, writing free web apps for the public--Mother Teresa? They can do the same in three seconds!
I turned 30 last year, and I'm the youngest of our 3 founders, so I'm feeling my age a bit. The RescueTimers skew the average age higher a bit, but not by that much, There are people ten years older than me here, too, for sure.
If you live in Illinois, it is a great idea. Otherwise, you will pay dearly for the degree.
Well, I'm not fully agree on the examples with Sergey and Max. Sergey's father is a very qualified ex-soviet mathematician, he gave very good basics to Sergey. Max moved to US when he was 16. He's got grounds from the soviet education system, which was very different comparing to US. So, their college choice (theoretically) could not change their fate. ;)

But in overall you're right. Don't treat college as your pass to success, however it could be your backup, just in case if you're not that smart as you think. ;)
choice exerpts:

changeset: 50bb94a18270
user: bret
date: 2008-02-26 13:23:50
description: Undo shitty code.

---

Sat, Feb 23: Let's redo our entire UI two days before launch

:)