skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i doubt we would have seen 7-8% unemployment. the US wines when unemployment reaches 4%. Typically in recessions large companies lay people off to protect share price and free up cash. It's just an excuse to shareholders to let go some of the spending. If companies were to cut spending in a boom time shareholders would speculate that something bad was going to happen.

in recessions labor prices return to market value, and entrepreneurs like us can afford to hire talent.

the best indicator of an economic down turn is a cut in R&D, and from what I can tell engineering salaries are still increasing right now.

I think the thing to do, instead of bailing out homeowners with low interest rates is to provide a free education. we are in a full blown knowledge economy and EVERYONE will have to make the transition sooner or later.
It is interesting to say whether it would hurt or help vc and seed funding. My theory is that it will help. Seasoned investors have seen recessions before, and just switch to investments that provide the best reward. I think as a credit crunch exists, I think competition for those funds will become slimmer because less people can afford to take the risk of a startup which means it will be easier to get those funds.

You may actually see more funds available than normal. Could be great for our startup, (www.propertystampede.com).
But a lot of mac users ARE buying computers with the same criteria that a clotheshorse uses when buying a pair of jeans.

I think that there are two groups of mac users, the above mentioned and the crowd that use it because it is a nice gui on top of a unix based opereating system, allowing for a lot of control.

The latter, of which you are probably a member, is a minority though. This is why you have to read about it time and again. For the larger part of the mac base it is true.
Well I only bought one to be in the "in" crowd. It's actually the worst computer I've ever used and takes me hours to get anything done. But I suffer just so that I can be trendy :/
Throw it up and wait for the email complaints from customers :)
Link triggers my corporate content filter - bad bad bad
my grandma can, but she does not have an account on hacker news. actually my great great grandfather made a fortune in the depression, well, immediately after it.
Yea, right. Until the next time you're given a choice between doing it wrong or not doing it at all. The blanket of incompetence spreads faster than we can measure it.
extremely impressive, not from a technical point of view or anything, but this kind of profitability with a bare bones design and low overhead is quite impressive.
The only feature that would get me using this is if there was some way to synchronise between different machines. It's perfect if you use only one laptop, but I use three different machines and I would find it irritating to have a snippet I needed on a different computer.

Kudos to the developers though, it's definitely a great start!
In the middle of an adoption curve it is hard to tell "trendy" from "gaining in popularity", but for the reasons that others have already mentioned: unix roots, stability, ease of use, there are ample "non trendy" reasons for buying a Mac.

But the MacBook Air is f'ing trendy.
FriendFeed and SocialThing are totally different
well apple products are most of the time trendy .. for example ipods are just trendy - there are mp3 players out there in the market which has lot more features (such as radio, voice recording etc.) than ipod does... so there are users who look for value (by getting maximum features) and there are others who just go with the trend (i would call marketing trap). This is the reason why apple is having hard time in increasing ipod business in value driven markets like India.
Yes. Being virus and spyware free is de rigeur.
The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907, because J.P. Morgan (ironic, isn't it) single handedly stopped the panic by buying out the second-most-bankrupt bank (he let the worst one fail). He was the only one in the U.S. who could do so; the Federal Government had no mandate to intervene in economic matters. After the crash, a bunch of congressmen decided it probably wasn't a good idea to have the nation's fiscal health in the hands of one man who was looking out for his own interests above those of the nation, and so they created the Fed to serve as the lender of last resort.

A similar situation existed in Europe, where the Rothschilds functioned as the lenders of last resort to the kings and queens of Europe. Because of their special relationship with the rulers, they made obscene profits through superior access to information and special interest rates. European central banking is largely a reaction against the concentration of so much power in private hands.

A connected elite will always rip off the population at large. There seems to be no way around it; if you cut off one government organization, some robber baron will just grow into the role. Nature abhors a vacuum. It's better to know who the demons are and have some semblance of nominal regulation to keep them honest.

BTW, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Paine were demagogues, much like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are today. Their goal is to form a new connected elite by preying off the passions and fears of the population. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups, and all that.
The front page is better, but the insightful and intelligent comments are lost forever.
You're being downvoted, but it's true. Going to the Apple Store here in Columbia MD makes me kind of ashamed to be a Mac user right now. There are literally crowds of teenage girls flocking in to dote over how "cute" the hardware is... and not a whole lot else; both in terms of clients or the merits they see in Apple products.

It seems like 90% of the Mac user base right now is as clueless as trolls say they are. This was not the case 5 years ago.
you have to ask what is riskier a bunch of guys and gals fighting for their first chance, or a bank full of big wigs that have f'd up and are trying to refinance? Most recessions are caused by over production or over speculation of some sort, this is different, this is about the banks (low interest) money screwing up big. we may find that right now startups and companies are less risking than banks and loans.
Same thing that happened in 2000-2002 when there was almost no financing available. Folks grow businesses by being cheap, doing the work themselves, and having a revenue model.
I've seen other players that do more, but nothing I really need and they lack the iPod's killer feature: ubiquity. Seriously, it's great that any time I want to use my iPod with any high end electronic I can plug it in and the device's manufacturer has already provided an interface. My Xbox360, TV, stereo and car all came ready to work with the iPod - how many other players can say that?
The Censors Take Down YouTube and Google News in China. How Will Google Respond?
New Video of BigDog Quadruped Robot Is So Stunning It's Spooky
There's also plenty of real estate for banner ads on the main page! That will make it easier to monetize the service.
I can't decide if the bit where he tries to kick it over or the bit on the ice is best.
That'd actually be pretty cool. Might have some privacy issues with it though?
I agree that most non-tech people are much more concerned about form factor. I recently tried to explain to a colleague why a MacBook Pro is faster than a MacBook with the same topline specs - his eyes glazed over after about four seconds, and he said he just 'liked the look' of the black MacBook better. You have to hand it to their marketing guys - the greatest illustration of their success is that they've persuaded teenage girls to care at all.
Don't rush the big day
It's 2% per year of typically hundreds of millions of dollars: it pays for VC salaries and maintains office and staff. Their upside comes from investment profits. They take 2% of the fund per year, whether or not the fund makes money. If it doesn't they may have trouble raising an additional fund but that's a different question. Angel groups have a much different structure (e.g. Band of Angels, Angels Forum) where each individual investor contributes a set amount to a particular investment.
The author is insane. Why on earth would you want to settle on a old and rusty Windows-based tool? Just because you're an "average" user you should not be settling on junk, otherwise an argument can be made for buying a 5 year old used PCs for $100 on ebay.

For starters, Windows is barely usable on high-DPI screens. Their UIs don't scale, the graphics does not scale, the font rendering is still tuned for 72dpi.

Second, Windows users automatically get sacks of junkware pre-installed from "friends from Dell". My Lenovo T60p came with a crippled wireless because of trial versions of some "protective" software that I had to remove (online forums were full of cries).

My friend has cut a finger once by touching an edge of a Dell laptop. It happened 3 years ago and new Inspirons are better. Now he is getting "A Message from Logitech!" bubble in the corner of his screen every couple of weeks.

And finally, Windows with is antiquated window management is simply no match for Mac as far as productivity is concerned.
Mostly item 2 caused by 6. When 6 is demonstrated, 2 might become less ominous.
"The problem is that a generation of Rubyists has grown up being used to getting everything pre written for them. "

A generation?

Hyperbole much?
Patent challenges have proven effective, which is why they're endangered
This article is just more "My myopic Rails-constrained view of the coding universe forces me to conclude ..."
I think its great, but they don't have a "moat" around their castle...
this is another oft-repeated misguided statement. yes, you can buy a music player with more features than an ipod for less money. that's irrelevant. the reason ipods are popular is because they're fun and easy to use. they give their owners a warm fuzzy feeling you don't get from the junky pieces of plastic sold by creative, et al.

the same is true for apple's computers. it's not nearly as easy to switch computing platforms as it is to switch music players, or else macs would be even more popular than they are.
Very accurate comment - and for Apple this is not a bad thing. They have managed to create brilliant products, and even more brilliant marketing. Their greatest insight is that for a lot of users a computer is just another gadget, and they realise that consmuer electronics are sold on looks and lifestyle - not on technical spec. The real genius, of course, is to tie everything together so that the teenage girls will have to own both the iphone, the ipod, the macbook, and whatever else they come up with.

The market is huge - there are a lot more teenage girls out there than there are hackers...
Maybe. Thanks to subscribing (only) to economics, programming, ruby, science, and a handful of other subreddits, I'm seeing an awful lot more of the people I thought had departed. I've started 'adding them as friends' so that I can visually track the density of good commenters at a glance. It appears that modifying your subscriptions to avoid 'politics' and 'pics' increases that density substantially.

And, really, Metafilter isn't that great afterall. So I'm very happy that reddit did this. I was wondering whether normalization wasn't a good answer. Looks like it was. If I weren't working on my thesis I would apply to reddit. Hell, once I'm done with the revisions, I might just apply to telecommute as an 'intern' just to play with the data, if they'll let me. This sort of thing is always fun.
Someone can make a website called Compiled<x>.com and charge $25 (undercutting company) per download of the compiled product legally.
This actually works in many cases.
Maybe a repost, but it's a great article.

Consider: what incremental value is really provided by a 4-bedroom McMansion in some shithole out in San Berdoo?

Answer: about as much as the assets of Bear Sterns (and this is intentionally metacircular, btw)
hey ideas101, so:

a) 20% goes to the partners aka founders of the fund in most cases.
b) The other 80% goes back to the LPs
c) Salary is taken from the 2% management fee. It also covers the very nice expenses, dinners, travel,etc.
Glad to see the grammar police have arrived. I feel safer already.

Maybe you oughta check spelling, too. That'll give you something to do.
The better the mantra, the harder to implement.
I think the only one i have heard of was a playboy social network that got like 30 users in 6 months and was featured on TechCrunch - (and still only had 30 users)
sort:
I want to be able to sort by date, by mod points, by poster
and of course if search is added, sort on my search result:

Views:
count the number of time an news item was viewed and also allow me to to sort on this number

views can complement mod points, if an item is viewed like 1000 times and got 55 mod points and another was viewed 55 times and got 55 mod points, well, this is a nice indicator
Seems to be the opposite of Startup School, which is not only free but so content rich.
Interesting. What issues with HTTP do you think need to be addressed?
It's kind of silly to try and lump Python in with Ruby. Ruby's sold itself on how easy it makes web development and how you don't have to learn very much to be productive with the language. To use Python you need to know a fair bit about what's going on with the language. I'm not sure the same thing could be said for Ruby on Rails.
Lowering barriers is good. However, if you didn't actually understand how Rails was making life easier for you, wouldn't that be a problem?
Yahoo adds Buzz! - (the possibility to get on Y!'s homepage)

- Digg.com's value plunges 30-40%

- The idea wins when backed with a great re-ward, I look to MSN and CNN etc to do similar things.
Protosafe makes Prototype third party library friendly
The Sony Mp3 players are superior--and I wouldn't have any other--for one little feature: Built-in, active noise cancelling.
Martian Headsets
"igon value"? Surprised the editors didn't catch that..
Honestly, Black Swan is not Taleb's best book. I would recommend you read Fooled By Randomness first if you have the chance...

http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Market...
Completely agree. I've been saying to anyone who will listen that Rails is not for people who are new to web development, nor for people who were never willing to learn how certain things in web development work.

However, marketing of Rails was such as to invite the newbies in. These newbies will also complain the loudest when a certain plugin doesn't play well with their code or with other plugins. However, we cannot expect them to contribute, since they are not fully aware how Rails works anyway.
All developers should start from scratch, create their own languages, compilers, operating systems and framework.

If they don't they don't deserve to get their right of passage and will never be mensa, spartan or ninjas

I havent used RoR, but what I always thought, was that even RoR is too hard, you still code from scratch, a better approach for RAD should make you start from a GUI/IDE and let you add code when needed something like VB6 only better!
This person hasn't been working long. Epiphanies like this are like rings in the tree trunk.
> they give their owners a warm fuzzy feeling you don't get from the junky pieces of plastic sold by creative, et al.

Warm fuzzy feelings turn into rage and hatred relatively quickly.

My girlfriend: "OMG, a cute engraved ipod! It's so pretty!"

Later: "I can't copy music from your macbook onto my ipod without nuking my music? But they are both apple! How come your cheap chinese knockoff ipod works better than the real thing?"
well, offtopic here, but in short: we initially funded two projects, one of them died before the launch (product almost ready but delayed multiple times), and the other one is doing well but needs to grow a lot faster (with the founders having very different views about marketing and growth strategies than us, tho).

Another startup that i'm a founder/coder of is about to launch in our first city in April. But yeah, Europe is tough - you can basically ignore public funding (just like everywhere else, but here people don't know that it would be better if they burned that money), nor expect to find competent angels. What we're doing is still the same: create space where hackers can meet and projects start, and then provide advice and possibly initial funding, so that promising projects don't die for the wrong reasons.
Stay in the U.S., market to (and develop for) Europe. There's much more unfulfilled demand in Europe than in the U.S.

Just browse TechCrunch and realize that almost none of these website are available in French or German.
Firefox 3 Goes on a Diet. Eats Less Memory than IE and Opera.
Microsoft Surrenders to the Cloud.
I grabbed this book to read on the flight to Dublin (from Seattle). It's a good read; humorous, but informative.
I'm in the final round of alpha testing of an application that will do just that. Stay tuned...
Your first sentence was gold.
It also happens to be a pretty stable, fast and usable OS for people who don't care or even know about the underlying BSD OS.
It sure is! There are not more than 8-10 partners in a large fund, smaller ones ($200-400m) have no more than 3-4 partners. The most typical structure is 20/2.5 which means that 20 % of the exit pay off from a company and 2.5 % of the fund size are pocketed by the VCs. I learnt this from a talk with an Indian VC who had a prior experience of running funds in US as well. Hope it answers your query!
I saw that and thought, " . . . I better not mention it or everyone will think you are a mathematician . . ."

Thank you, sir, for being willing to take that virtual wedgie for all of the math geeks out there!
The other piece is that it takes a bit less time to learn a fair bit about Python.

Regardless of the merits of each language, Python has a lower barrier to entry. With Python, it only takes a half day to get used to the language. While I picked up enough to be comfortable in a subset of Ruby in a day, reading code isn't always as obvious to a newbie because of the numerous rubyisms that one encounters, especially with metaprogramming.

As such, it is going to take Rails developers longer to be able to meaningfully code plugins. The impedance mismatch leads to the Duplo syndrome here.
The jump is the best are you kidding me?! It's like Jordan haha
may be few friends should just come together and start small (may be $100K) - a clone of YC is possible to start small - it requires 2 things though - a vision of founders to pick right startups and few VCs to come on a demo day !!! what do u say??
You know, I knew there was something weirdly familiar about watching that video.

Then someone remarked that it reminded them of a Hunter from Half-Life 2. Now I'm scared.
<3 Taleb. What's surprising is that people are surprised by this latest crash. Banks, throughout history, have never made money.

I worked in credit structuring for Deutsche Bank and saw first hand the manipulation of credit ratings to engineer 'profit'.

http://www.kulveer.co.uk/2007/09/credit-crunch/
The biggest issue I have with this article - which does an excellent job of explaining the issue - is that Joel seems to ignore the elephant in the room: EVERY OTHER BROWSER MAKER HAS SOLVED THIS PROBLEM!

Seriously: Opera, Firefox, Safari. All of these manufacturers have no issue rendering both pages designed to standard and table designed mishmashes. They're getting so good at their implementations of standards support that for 90% of the time, a design will look exactly the same in one browser to the next.

The exception to the rule is IE. The EXCEPTION.

Why? Because Microsoft, or forces within it, as far as this outsider can tell, continually wishes to revert the many-to-many market back to the one-to-many market. They use their size and position to force their way on everyone. Their way isn't necessarily bad, but it's different for the sake of being different to achieve the goal.

From my POV, Microsoft is an increasingly irrelevant player in the web browser world. The imminent failure of Vista will make this more evident. Customers are getting sick and tired of having things break when they upgrade their software.
Eigen value is probably not in their spellcheck dictionary.
I think people simply have a habit of categorizing things to make them easier to understand and easier to remember. We associate many things with eras, generations, periods, dynasties, etc.

The web is always evolving; it's just easier to consider a particular time frame 'Web 1.0' and the next 'Web 2.0'. From my viewpoint, it seems as if each 'Web x.0' will/would occur after each recessionary cycle.

Then again, why try to make sense of something like this that is still so new?
There are quite a few Web based ones already. One example: http://snippets.dzone.com/

Of course, a combo between a Web based one AND a desktop app.. that would be reasonably original.
Hah, it slipping on that ice is hilarious.
I think the ice part is better--I doubt any animal would have recovered from that without falling on its side. What I really want to see is a bloopers reel from early in the project.
For some reason I thought it said "Beer sale". Now I'm disappointed.
I was actually thinking of starting a company who's sole purpose would be to repackage existing US based tools and apps for other countries. (The easiest being Canada, but of course Europe is a huge market)
Hey mwerty,

I know what the issue is, sorry about that I am going to put in a fix. Thanks for the feedback!

update: fixed
Microsoft Adopts Flash Lite For Windows Mobile As a Stopgap Measure
I wouldn't call a company with a marketshare of 81% in the browser market irrelevant - I'd call them marketleaders.

Yes they are the exception, but like it or not you just have to deal with it.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
I believe the majority of OS X hackers fall into the latter category. I know I sure like my nice GUI ontop of this unix 3.0 OS... not to mention quality hardware build, nice screen resolution, ports galore, decent battery life, web cam, and nice keyboard buttons...
yet it's apple that owns something like 80 percent of the portable music player market, rather than chinese knock-offs. go figure!
I was watching thinking, "Yawn". Then it got hit -hard- in the side and use its 'elbows' to stabilize itself. I'm just glad it doesn't hit back (yet).
This is actually a future component of my project http://www.propertystampede.com. We are initially focusing on property managers, but then later to parking lot managers. Our goal is to create a site where someone is relocating for work to a new city, can login, pick an apartment, apply online, then find parking near their new place of employment and purchase a monthly parking pass...

What do you guys think?
Are they trendy? Yes.

Are they just trendy? No.

Next question please :)
Agreed, absolutely. You have to motivate rigor. I actually think the show does a fine job of that.

Sometimes they'll do a half-assed experiment, bust some myth, and then get viewer mail criticizing their technique. Then they'll revisit the myth, with better controls! This is pretty much exactly how real science works. Nobody does rigorous science because they want to spend enormous amounts of time and money doing the same boring experiment over and over, gradually imposing tighter and tighter controls on everything. They do it because otherwise their half-assed papers will get rejected by their extremely critical peers.
The Boston Dynamics site is here:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

It seems to me that there is a lot of promising work that will be done in this area of robotics. There is a recently published book on this...

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...

...which suggests we should evolve brains and bodies together in order to get the most natural/most efficient gaits from them.
Steve Jobs Was Only Half-Right: People Do Read - Even Kids - They Just Do It Online