skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that farmers of commodities like corn and wheat have the government wrapped around their fingers. But the reason they're big enough to do that is that their market scales. No one has invented a fresh carrot that can sit on a shelf for six months the way a candy bar can.
Ray Kurzweil on "I've Got a Secret" in 1965 [Video]
GE has a jet engine plant in Durham, North Carolina that has 170 employees and one boss. It seems to work well. Although I have not heard that the concept has propagated to other parts of the company

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html
this is quite old, YV was started almost a year ago, if not more, i think.
170 Employees, 1 boss
What an AWESOME idea. I wish I had some sort of widget to sell.
Powered by the People
You know, till now I had believed the story that Clarke invented the geosynchronous orbit.

Shows you how much things have changed. Ten years ago that reporter would have gotten away with this. Now he looks like a fool.
What if the Singularity does not happen?
I've got a friend that works for Bridgewater, and it's amazing the extent they go to foster this independent culture. My friend can be kinda abrasive at times - not really arrogant, but more an "I'm right, damnit, and I'm going to be pedantic about it" personality. His first assignment was copy-editing some client reports. He came back with a long list of grammatical mistakes in the report, along with a lesson on proper grammar, for the fund manager. The fund manager said, "This is excellent - keep up the good work," and made sure my friend got his hands on all the reports going out...
I am the very model of a Singularitarian [Video]
MacBook Pro with SSD: Benchmarks
The "monkeysphere" is more commonly known as Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)...though Wong's essay is much funnier than the Wikipedia article.
One way to think about CC debt: if you fund your startup with credit cards, you need to guarantee that you'll grow earnings by at least 20%/year, just to keep up with interest charges. If you can't do that, you're personally on the hook for any shortfall, and have to make it up yourself out of future job income (after compounding, no less).

There're very few startups where revenues are certain enough to take this risk. Most likely, your startup will never make anything, and then credit card debt for a startup is no different than credit card debt for a spending spree. That's why startup founders are wary of debt financing. If you can guarantee that level of earnings growth (perhaps you have customers already lined up, and just need to deliver on a well-understood technical problem), then it can make sense.
Idealab rediscovers the physical world after a decade of launching dotcoms
Practice your best, and you won't be bested by your practices. - The Sphinx
"... How is Kapor a non-coder? ..."

I'm not trying to say he has no technical ability. I'm saying that in this case an Entrepreneur succeeded in spite of what is considered by many to be the prime requirement of Entrepreneurship. The current mantra is, "if you are non-technical, give up". If anything, Kapors success came more from his insight into human psychology than the his technical ability to code ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2348902846/
The subsidies follow the disproportionate voting power and political influence of the relevant mid-west states, not the inherent marketability of corn.

Veggies and nuts are mostly grown at massive industrial operations in California with desert sunshine and irrigation systems. It's definitely a scalable operation not much different from corn and soy.

Not to nit-pick, but carrots keep really well even at room temperature. That was the whole point of root cellars. Veggies store fine. Lots of "fresh" stuff at the store routinely comes out of 9 months in cold storage, and that's without the complex chemical processing and packaging applied to the junk food. Then there's freezing and pickling.

The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan to pump out more cheap calories. It might have made some sense in a Marshall plan world, but we're still stuck with it. That's the story as I understand it.
Where does a 17-year-old get the bankroll to build a computer in 1965?
Great article. a) I liked the HFC / food comparisons. b) I've been thinking a ton about the relationship between maslow's hierarchy of needs and the needs of groups (and, potentially, their parallelism and that parallelism's relationship to maturity and intelligence / technological singularity). anyway... i dug (one g, not two) it.
(Job + Freelance)/2 = "Coworking"
Dunbar's number is a limit on the size of a society, not on the size of a group that can work together to complete a task.
Like a lot of things, somebody else thought of it, but Clarke put popularized it. I'd argue Clarke's job was more important.

Same goes for a lot of songs. Great song writers write a lot of stuff, but until some half-rate performer popularizes it, it's just notes on a page.

For that matter, same goes for good ideas. Lots of folks have them. Takes something special to take an idea and put it into millions of minds.

Clarke was the man. He didn't do everything, but eulogies are made to evoke fond memories, not get translated verbatim into a history book.
It was mainly their body language and facial expressions.
Unfortunately, student loans constrain the freedom of action of many recent graduates. They have to have that income to make the payments, which can be quite high.

This of course favors upper middle class people as young company founders.
Has anyone checked out the reddit comments for this same article? It's like night and day.

http://reddit.com/info/6cu0t/comments/
Yes, that is a real problem. I thought of mentioning this in the essay. The problem is the same as with visas: the government's definition of work is a job working for someone else.

I hope eventually they'll wise up and change the rules about student loans, because the intent of the rules about repayment is not simply to get the money back as soon as possible, but to discourage people from merely slacking after college. And on that scale founders are actually doing better than regular employees.
I'm just skimming the article right now, but I hit a couple tiny errors that stopped my reading flow. For example:

"The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are [a?] few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley."
There are small companies like one of the startups our host sponsors, or like those Joel Spolsky runs, and then there are those which languish under the them of a boss who is living a good life while 1 to 5 or so programmers slave over ancient technology and insane customers.

So qualify your employer carefully before you go to a small company. In particular, if they are using old technology, run away, nothing they do or say can be trusted.
Paul Graham posts essay pointing out that -- gasp! -- large companies suppress creativity. And the blogosphere goes wild!
Some interesting problems require more than 8-10 people, no matter how insanely great they are. I work at a highly interdisciplinary biotech startup. My instrument SW team is eight guys, the tools-for-scientists team four, mathematicians are about five, etc.; then you have a bunch of physicists, chemists, biochemists, etc. etc. I'd rather suffer the problems of a large company than work on a more pure software problem.
Nonsense. The Singularity will happen, it's only a question of when. 20 years at the earliest, 50 at the latest.
Search engine query length is doubling every 7 years
How To Use Perks and Rewards in Startups to Get The Best Talent
I have been on African Safari as well and that point instantly resonated with me. The 100s of 1000s of miles were theirs to freely roam around and do what they wanted - and the humans who came to see them are the ones in the cages (except that the cages moved around - in the form of a jeep with a guide).

I also used to wonder what is going on in the Lion's mind - some 10 jeeps surrounding it while it is resting in the shade and some oohs-and-aahs (and even though it is 1 pm, some idiot always has the flash-on by mistake).
This is really a brilliant and appealing idea!
This is astounding and will really shake up the fulfillment business.
I'm not sure if you have to go back as far as the savanna for a comparison. I'd regard the lowest level in corporates as servants of the boss, the bosses job is to fight off the other bosses and acquire resources for his people, so that he can acquire more stuff and convince his bosses that he can use the resources more efficiently.

Corporates are more a feudal hierarchy, whereas startups I liken to the old guilds of Europe that evolved out of the feudal system, it has been said that programming is one of the few crafts left, and so the comparison may be appropriate. The guilds occurred because the craftsmen had skills that weren't available to all, and so could demand a premium for there services, much like programming (and writing, and graphic design - witness the recent writers strike)

Maybe there is a new republic on the way all we need is to lop off the heads of a few managers :-). Let them eat cake!
Yeah, it was about a year ago. I met with them last April about a now-defunct project, and they had been operating for a few weeks.
god this site needs more articles on ai. I know I shouldnt be complaining since I could be submitting articles myself, but I am pretty lazy.

I guess what I am saying is that reading this is a nice change of pace from the boring articles about over-valued web 2.0 startups.
Venture Capital Confidence Plunges
Best reason: Because if you start in a recession, you have better odds of being acquired with a rediculous valuation during a boom cycle.
If the Singularity doesn't happen, then humans will probably live for another few millenia.

If (and when) the Singularity /does/ happen, humans will be wiped off the planet within a few centuries.
I've been in your position with a team that's quadrupled (including international staff). In the team's I've worked in it tends to work on trust, committed alot of code and senior then it's probably not going to be reviewed. Still earning your stripes then a more detailed design and an over the shoulder before commit and/or a formal review post module completion.

I tend to think you have to trust your team so I've tended even for junior guys to operate in permissive mode (I've yet to revoke someone's commit privileges). Small teams have a great advantage in that they can communicate more efficiently and often deliver quicker. If your team is growing and you can't trust (or grow to trust) what devs are committing then you're going to have longer term problems. Code reviews to me are more about mentoring and growing new staff, not enforcing 'good' code. The first question is always how could you have done this better. Why did you do it this way? Smart teams self correct so getting people to think about these things themselves tend to mean they don't repeat mistakes.

What really works is automating your success conditions, especially dumb stuff like formatting and dumb bug checking. Use continuous integration, in our dev team check in will get it running through all the tests including a full ui regression every night so if it makes it through that then it's already reasonably good. Cruise control integrated with .net and java checkstyle findbugs etc, turning warnings on as errors in the build means simple dumb stuff just doesn't happen. If someone consistently breaks the build or is checking in broken stuff then a switch to review first works. Breaking a build in our teams sends an email to the 'list of shame' (all the devs on the team) so people tend to avoid breaking it. We also don't allow any build to be broken for more than 24 hours (usually < 1 during business hours). It's all about tradeoffs and if it's a good tightly knitted team then code reviews tend to become less important.

In a distributed dev team, working remotely or getting close to release then I've found review board really good. http://www.review-board.org/ I found people commit to the continuous integration system, if it breaks they fix it and upload a diff or patch to review board. People get emailed and can mange their time more effectively, they pick the best time for reviews themselves. A 'ship it' from any of our senior team means it's done and hosed.
Reminds me of a song the Flying Burrito Brothers wrote, that the Rolling Stones made famous: "Wild Horses." I'm not sure the Rolling Stones changed that much, either.
>The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan to pump out more cheap calories.

It was deliberately done by the government? I probably shouldn't be surprised... I always assumed it was the corn farmers pushing for subsidies that did it. Do you have any more information on this?
What they didn't tell you is that Tupac is there, too.
Interesting the comment about 'living a human-scale life' was worth the read.
How to Write a Company Blog
Start your own hedge fund
You also just described the major problem with the government artificially allowing such a thing as a limited liability (I'm talking about legal, not debt) corporation.
Idaho Turns to Chess as Education Strategy
Well, what the heck.

I just ordered my mom and girlfriend flowers, something I've only done for birthdays and Valentine's day come to think of it. It was $50, but the article is definitely right.

Hackers, take a hint. :-)
I guess it is too late now :), but what do you guys think? Am I stupid or brave?
Nothing I've read in the past 5 years has been this scary.
Permalink: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art...
Congratulations... I don't think anyone here will call you stupid for quitting. Funding yourself with credit cards though, maybe. I think it's a really bad decision to go with credit cards over much more risk free money.
Clear! After CS.EE Eng school I completed comissioning as an officer in the British Army. The hieracy, groups, rules, and orders were perfect to fight other Armys. "Peace keeping" in Ireland was not nearly as well suited. I left and joined a US start with 10 poeple (long story). The 10 person start became 3000, (10-60-120-240-480,900 now 3000 people). Relecting I feel like I'm back in the Army. Small groups 10-100 people can run rings around 3000.
What do you think will kill us, in both scenarios?
Braveness takes a certain amount of stupidity :-) Tried to leave a comment on your blog but looks like they are disabled. Anyway, best of luck to you I really admire what you are doing and succeed or fail I think you stepped out and did something, and that's really really awesome.
Well, i have my tax refund check which would last me about 4 months... after that it will be credit cards or investment funding... but i agree credit cards is not the best way to do it..
The end of traditional venture capital
I agree 100%. I'm hoping the reason they aren't up here isn't because we haven't made anything but incremental progress on AI in a long while.
I remain skeptical: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_singulari...

Applying Moore's law to every form of technological progress just doesn't work. Look at the internal combustion engine, space travel, or energy technology and try to fit an exponential curve to their datapoints since their introduction.
What about energy consumption? I think that's the most important measure of technological progress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Career

> Butz revolutionized federal agricultural policy and reengineered many New Deal era farm support programs. His mantra to farmers was "get big or get out," and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow to fencerow."
I'm surprised by how incoherent this page is; it almost seems cultish. Perhaps this sort of thing would have found a more overtly religious expression in the past.
Some will advise that you should secure funding if you see a downturn coming so that you can weather the storm. I agree though that getting investments at early stages can often be far more trouble than it's worth.

As far as quitting, well of course we think it was a good idea.
awesome. luckily i live in boston--not much direct sunlight and high proximity to cambridge.
Ask YC: What happened to Teledesic?
I just recently found out about the Teledesic initiative of the 1990's to provide high-speed wireless internet acces to every location in the world. It apparently only cost $9 billion, and I was wondering if anyone has more knowledge or comments about why an effort like this never materialized?

It seems the economic and intellectual implications of such a network are enormous. For less than 1% of the price of the Iraq war, everyone in the world could have free access to global communication and information? That sound utopian, yet apparently it's completely in reach logistically. What has caused this effort to fail?
Xkcd: Travelling Salesman Problem
Hands up, how many Global Warming alarmists have read one well-researched anti-alarmist view on Global Warming (such as Bjorn Lomborg's)? Noone? Didn't think so.

It's sad to see that rich people are just as foolish as your average man.
MacBook Air Blues - 3 Airs in 32 days
Looks like a conference set up to extract fees from eager fools without providing anything significant in return.
It is nice you were able to find 100k seed money. Most people don't have that opportunity. I am not sure if it is a good idea using credit cards, but it is not a secured loan.

Someone posted a quote by Shakespeare "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt."
With enough memory to write a composition, no less?
I love my city, and so should you
I'm sure megacorp lobbyists in DC will get right on that, Paul.
Unsurprisingly and understandably so. PG's essays resonate most strongly with a particular type of person. There are enough assertions that do not generalize across diverse populations and nobody who reads his essays should actually expect them to. The population in this site are not are self selected to the extreme. I for one am happy to see multiple opinions.
If we move into space, I think we'll be ok. We need an offsite backup.
Sure is. But look at how long it has taken us to reach a Type I class with fusion. Another technology that is eternally just 20 years away.

My main points of contention with Kurzweil are in his summary dismissal of fundamental problems in science, acting as if because Moore's law exists, nanobots running in our bloodstream are just a process node or two away.

He is also dismisses biological complexity as not being that inscrutable because our genome is only as long as microsoft word in bit length. This is just silly; the power in the code is it's expressiveness that explodes combinatorially in a given environment. You know probably far better than I do
that his statements about the ease with which we'll understand DNA, etc. to reverse engineer the brain is nowhere near as simple and linear a process as he makes it out to be.
Because they smell like them.
Thanks for the comments.

PS: I also fixed the commenting on my blog... it only took an hour or so :(
I also remember running across them a while back. Does anybody know if they've actually funded anybody yet?
Well most of it was just talk... I am not sure how much of it would have materialized and if it was worth the effort to do so now... maybe later when my money dries up.

I love the quote.
There's something about anonymous commenters bashing PG and YC on reddit, of all forums, that makes me smile.
That's how my current microwave is, and it's great. Not only that, but the numbers on the knob no longer have any bearing on actual time increments, so I don't have to think at all. Just turn the knob an arbitrary amount, and hopefully I'll take it out on time.

Brilliant.
This guy helps illustrate my theory of why hackers and mathematicians have a reputation for being young.

First: Because both math and software don't require expensive equipment, credentials, or direct access to one's mentors (like Ramanujan, you can learn from books!) you can start your training as a mathematician at a very early age and be doing professional-grade work before you graduate high school. As I said the last time this came up, "software is one of the few fields where a seventeen-year-old can have ten years of pro-level experience".

Second: Mathematicians who want to get jobs in academia have large incentives to do good work when they're young: Until they make a splash, they're poorly paid grad students and postdocs. This is also true for other scientists, but in physics or biology you have to be in grad school before you can even get a long-term job in the lab where you can start learning to do great experimental work -- and then you still have to take reams of data, do multiple postdocs, etc.

By the time they hit age fifty, most talented mathematicians have already accomplished some math. They have jobs, and possibly tenure. They have children, they have committee meetings, they have books to write. They have already proven themselves. Even if they do accomplish some great math papers, you won't see headlines about "astoundingly old mathematicians". They'll be billed as "veteran math professors", whom everyone expects to do great work, since they've been doing great work ever since they were twenty!

But then there's this poor guy, who somehow arrived in his forties and fifties without tenure or even a job. That was unpleasant for him, of course, but it gave him a lot of incentive to do some great mathematics in order to get and keep a new academic job. And, what do you know, he rose to the occasion. Perhaps if more sixty-year-olds had good reason to do great math, we would see more of them doing so.
You, sir, have clearly never dealt with web-based course management software :).
Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics
Interesting stuff about the nature of truth starts at 10:35.
Ask: Where to get good feedback /prior/ to launch? Friends not competent enough to use mouse.
Need some validation that my, most awesome, project is headed in the right direction, or else guidance on what should be done differently. In return, I can provide the same.

Where can I find this? Or is there no value in an unfinished project?
Linux sysadmin tip: How To Extract Values From top And Plot Them
Interesting stuff about the nature of truth starts at 10:35.
iFund: just Kleiner Perkins' Java Fund all over again?
Shadow.sh: A simple directory shadowing script for Linux
"If (and when) the Singularity /does/ happen, humans will be wiped off the planet within a few centuries."

a. I disagree.

b. Even if I assume that you're right, why do you assume that all possible outcomes in which there are no humans on the planet are negative outcomes? e.g. What if all humans decided to "upload" themselves into computers? (Assuming that such a thing is coherent and feasible and becomes commonplace.)
Will singles be priced out of dating?
When it costs $4 a gallon to fire up the SUV to meet someone you may not even like, cocktails start at $8.50, and movies pass $10 for tickets, what will happen to dating? With the economy down, can people living on a single income afford dating?
Ubuntu Linux Disk Encryption Benchmarks
I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells": it's understood (and encouraged) that 3 different teams are all trying to implement the same thing, in completely different languages and with completely different interfaces. They might not even know the others exist, until they ship. Hopefully at least one will survive.

In some cases, more than one does. Amazon has at least 3 different data stores you can use, last I saw.
Introduction to iptables
The best motivation is making the worker feel that what he's doing is very important and expressing a sincere interest by letting him discuss with you the details of the project that interest him.