skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't really speak for the rest of the world (any one know any studies?) but the quality of online is the Australian market is absolutely appalling.

The Sydney Morning Herald is probably the best broad sheet in the country, but online smh.com.au is absolute link baiting trash. Personally i could not fathom forking out for celebrity trash nor for the un fact checked gibberish that is posted throughout the day. Lately i would be lucky to check it once a day for 30sec.

And i'm really skeptical if they could ever find scale to charge for online access in an any Australian city market.
Downvotes...nice.
Nothing at all. Attempting to understand what our politicians and courts are doing at the moment is difficult indeed. I expect people like that to be intelligent and informed. They seem to be lacking in both with re. to the internet.
I really would like to see some studies on this topic. Its certainly my firm belief but i don't have the facts to back it up.

edit:

OK is not a study... but its pretty funny

+ http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/15/when-the-big-medi...
*SPOILER

I really like this.
I was hoping that it is true.
Acknowledgments shattered that :)
I did not see it that time? May also be the title given to the post. Humans are fickle. ( will up vote you now ;)
Based on your project spec, the logos from snipp seem to be the most successful. I like how they use a similar set of colors to your screenshot. They are simple, elegant and compliment your app's UI.

If I had to choose, I would probably pick logo number 120. It's playful and modern. And I like the typeface!

But don't listen too much to other people. Part of the fun of running a startup is getting to choose your own logo! ;)
think about how much more successful you could have been as a creator of Twitter or Nexus One
Mr Hodder-Watt then undertook legal action, that resulted in Google acknowledging its legal responsibility to remove the offensive site.

How does Google have a legal responsibility to remove a site from search results?
But Detroit was much more than that in its heyday: it was a symbol of American industrial might. The birthplace of the assembly line. The place where other industries looked for process innovations. The biggest growth industry in America. (If you look at which professions did well during the Depression, "gas station attendant" and "automobile mechanic" were at the top of the list.)

Much like how Silicon Valley is currently the symbol of American innovation. The birthplace of the microprocessor. The place where other industries looked for process innovations. The biggest growth industry in America. (If you look at which professions did well during this recession, "Web Developer" and "Software Engineer" are near the top of the list.)

Detroit didn't start out as 3 gigantic car companies with bad management. Before WW2, there were literally hundreds of automobile startups. Everybody had an idea for how to build a better car. There's a nice long list of them on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_United_States_a...

But eventually, most of them went bankrupt or were absorbed by the Big-3. And that let the Big-3 get complacent, which let foreign competition kill them (undoubtedly helped along by government). The same thing could easily happen to SV's tech industry, given a period of consolidation.

A lot can happen in 50 years.
It's a start, but there needs to be 1000x better organization and curation.
I think people might have been a little upset to find that they needed to pay a further $949.01 to access all the parts of the course :)
Or they're just doing the same thing they've always done in all non-China countries: removing search results when the country's legal process tells them to (they remove results in the US over DMCA requests, for example) and linking to Chilling Effects to show a copy of the complaint.
Article about Aboriginals that Google censored; warning, disgusting
Sure, but 30 seconds before you pitch that startup is it more beneficial to hear "Pingswept you look great!" or "Pingswept that zit on your nose really detracts from your presentation."

White lies have a certain social utility.
I have used Schumacher Clean for ages, and find it awesome. Not sure it's available on Mac/Win, but it's very readable and clean (...). I mostly write LaTeX and C/C++ in Emacs on dark grey background.
This piece gives very helpful advice about the right questions to ask concerning equity when you are about to sign up with a startup as an employee. It also gives credible explanations of most of the equity-related issues at that stage.

In my experience, very few employees who get option grants will ask the right questions to understand what their equity piece really means. That is, they won't even ask about something as basic as how many shares a company has outstanding (much less about size of equity pool, liquidation preference held by the preferred classes, etc.). When they fail to get this information, they really are going into the employment with poor knowledge about what likely will wind up being the most piece of their overall compensation.

Why don't they ask? Sometimes they just don't know how it all works and proceed out of ignorance. More often, however, I think they feel intimidated about pushing a company to disclose what they think is company confidential information, especially when the company is a big-name company that is already VC-funded and the offer otherwise seems tempting.

Because of this, startups will sometimes play games in this area, arbitrarily inflating the size of the company's capitalization structure (e.g., splitting a 10M capitalization structure 3 or 4 for 1 to turn it into a 30M or 40M-share structure). This splitting lets the company make a 100K share offer to a key employee sound like a 200K share offer and hence make it appear better than competing offers from companies working from smaller capitalization structures.

It amazes me how many times employees will simply accept such offers thinking they got better deals than they would have from other companies, when in fact they may have passed up equal or better alternative offers. This is truly a case of flying blind but it happens a lot.
I was trying to figure out what I didn't like about a lot of them, and then I realized it's really the name I don't like.

I'm a fan of stylized text as a logo, which most of those aren't, so I wouldn't be happy with any of them for myself.

(Sorry if this isn't very helpful)
89 for me, definitely. Echoes the look of your app (assuming that is actually what it looks like in 91) and isn't too busy.

I find the most of the others a little distracting, random colours swirling all over the place.
Consider Chile.
This is a good article, but a lot can happen between your option grant and an exit. I'd keep in mind that startups are generally for making founders rich, not employees, and that no matter how hard you push on equity, the chances of you getting meaningful money from your options is pretty minute. You may want to optimize your base salary instead.

That said, the most important concept in the entire article is "[i]f they won't tell you, go work somewhere else." Founders who are open with their employees up front are less likely to take advantage of them later.
link to offensive article:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Aboriginal

Warning: extremely racist.
Yeah, and most projects do -- it's called a style guide.
Thanks -- I'll hold off on saying which one I like for now.

As far as the layout, I haven't spent much time on it yet (intentionally) and it'll likely look a lot different when it launches. The timeline, however, will mostly be the same.
What 85 years worth of research says about who to hire:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...
Sergey Brin Profile (Independent)
Making a Space Invaders clone with PushButton - Killing the Player
Goodspeed is not just an awesome hardware hacker, he and I are the world's finest belt buckle engineers. We created a printed circuit board in the shape of our home state Tennessee , unquestionably the best shaped state for a belt buckle. The perimeter of the PCB is encrusted with LEDs, and when a button labeled "PARTY MODE" is pressed a MSP430 will blink the lights. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/travisgoodspeed/3471776770/in/p...)

It turns out that chicks also dig it, see http://tnbelt.com for more.
or the mythological figure: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/morph225/images/sphinx-front-wa...
Latest Developments in Ruby 1.9.2
The Art of Building and Maintaining an Unpopular MMO
The same applies to non-management founders as well. There's just too many ways that board members can cash out without you.
Not a terrible article, although I was a little put off by the "K&R Style is obsolete" remark, considering that a lot of the projects I work on use a slight variant of K&R, the Linux kernel included.
111 suggests time while most of the others dont. 36 is interesting, but probably doesnt work.
As someone has has in the past worked in biotechnology software and is currently working on biothech instrumentation software - you are EXACTLY correct.

The problem with #2 is that we could get a lot of things cheaper and faster to market with only slightly more risk for the consumer. But the regulators have no incentive to take on that extra bit of risk. Sick people on the other hand...
Has anyone else tried Crowdspring or similar distributed freelance sites for designing entire website templates? (xhtml, css, images) If so, was your experience positive? What have you found leads to the best submissions? How did you decide on an offering price?
you probably had the bad luck to take over a block that had previously been blacklisted.

That's exactly what happened. It was apparently dial-up space many years ago.

I say many, because the space in question has been under my control since 2005, and it's STILL on the dynamic ip list, despite a roughly annual attempt to get de-listed.
Completely concur on #120. Definitely my favorite.
Google: warlord in a world of bandits?
I think Erlang and MS Singularity use this technique to some extent.

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1029873.1029875
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1146809.1146813
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6748...
Can you make a note to yourself to do it after tarsnap makes you filthy rich?

And btw, tarnsap is awesome!
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&...

As the CNet article noted, Justice Blackmun and the 3 judges that agreed with him thought that there was a distinction between the phone numbers the petitioner dialed (obviously recorded by the phone company, still they would later appear on his bill) and the contents of his conversation (not obviously recorded, and already protected by Katz v United States).

The three dissenting judges agreed with you, but there were less of them, so their views did not become law.
Yes, you can delete and move/rename pages, but you need to create an account for that. This is supposed to prevent vandalism. Not sure why would you need a spreadsheet view. You can always use plain search. And than there is semantic search, which I plan to add soon. Having all that data in a structured database (every field/property in a page is query-able in a semantic mediawiki app).

About people vs. startups, you are right, they are no the same. I'm not sure what to call that entity that is something between an idea and a startup. If you create an account you can list your skills in the "Person form". There will be a search for that.
Metatrace, a C++ compile time ray tracer
Interesting list.

But, if you summed the market caps of all these companies, what would you get?

My guess is $2-5 billion.

Now Google alone is worth ~$200B.

I agree that you can start a really successful Internet company in NYC. I'd say any city in the U.S. would do. However, if you have some pathological urge to build a gigantic Internet company, you absolutely need to be in Silicon Valley.
What is the customer's industry sector and what kind of data do they store there? Is SenSage have much success pushing their solution to other similar companies?

And also how is SenSage doing overall? I don't hear much in the press these days and assume either (a) not going so well; or more hopefully (b) they and their customers find each other in more private circles and there's no need to grab all the headlines.

I care because I worked on the product for almost 4 years starting from when we were in a living room/den/kitchen in Berkeley. Good times.
You have to look at the market. People that buy this app are going to be "in the know" and be serious about the bar exam and thus willing to spend some serious time AND money preparing for it. For the target audience this is not random purchase.
"Americans complain just too much about their mobile carriers."

So the best way to improve things is to be quiet and accept it? What are you saying?
I have lots of notes of things to do after tarsnap makes me filthy rich. :-)

And btw, tarnsap is awesome!

Thanks! Good to see I'm not the only person who makes that typo...
I am a fan of Terminus. Very readable, crisp and works on both Linux and Win32 machines.

http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/
thanks :-)

I told you I spend too much time here :-P
I finally got around to spending a couple of hours configuring emacs 23 for the Mac. If I had fully realized that it supported native fonts now, and that Inconsolata would make me this happy, I'd have upgraded months ago.
Three words: "Barriers to entry."

Competitively manufacturing a car became a more and more expensive thing as volume sales allowed steadily more serious tools and tooling to be applied to the problem. Per unit design also became cheaper as volume rose.

As far as I can tell the barriers to entry in much/most/all but x86 processors??? of what Silicon Valley does are steadily dropping and look to continue. The process of design also looks like it's getting better/faster/cheaper for a whole bunch of reasons, and I doubt that happened in a big way in the auto industry until CAD was adopted, by which point Chrysler had probably bought AMC, finishing US car industry consolidation.

Consolidation is fine for an industry as long as it doesn't stop new companies from forming and becoming successful.

And, hmmm, a note on the Big-3: how many of their competitors failed to exit the singularity of WWII? All got converted to wartime production, did some not bother to go back to cars and/or civilian trucks?
My dream of creating a GSM network called "Free Public Wi-Fi" is one step closer to fruition...
I think another important thing to note is that $300 of it goes to apple. Time to buy apple stock!
Like Amazon, Microsoft and Activision Blizard?

Being in the valley is definitely a boon, but calling it a must is silly. Those guys combined have a market cap of $343 billion. The other end of the bullshit-spectrum is people pretending that it doesn't make a difference because they don't want to move.
What I use is here: http://philh.net/smart-tab.el

Which is a (very slightly) modified version of what I foud here: http://bytes.inso.cc/wp/2009/01/07/dot-emacs-smarter-indenta...

This seems to be a more language-agnostic approach: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs
If you only had 1 minute, what would you want to do?
I tend to prefer Consolas to Inconsolata. Consolas' glyphs feel like they have more uniform thickness throughout.
It's basically a chronicle of everything that has ever happened on 4chan.

I too disagree with this censorship, but man, subjecting yourself to torture is not the answer!
I used to switch fonts between different ones all the time. About a year ago, I found Envy Code R. I haven't switched since. Easy to read, easy to tell the difference between zero and O, paren and curly brace, etc...

http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...
Quite interesting: I don't think I have seen (serious) software for handsets that's more expensive than the hardware (for PC's this isn't uncommon). If you want to run this, the costs of an iPod Touch to run it on are almost negligible (well, about 20%).
Quick HD video walkthrough of how the Square iPhone payment system works
Hmm, instead of posting on Crowdspring for creating my app's logo, I might just contact snipp to do it instead. Most of the good ones on that page are by him.
In re Bilski
So because, in your opinion, there are other results that have "good stuff", that means that government censorship is ok?
Evaluating Django Caching Options
I think that http://academicearth.org/ does a good job, although they only aggregate courses from universities.
People write (http://www.julmar.com/blog/mark/PermaLink,guid,3670d081-0276...) that even .NET itself has a similar kind of GC (partially concurrent, only address fixup stops the world). Unfortunately I can't check how it compares to Singularity.
Try http://nalandau.com/
Domino's Pizza is pulling down some major good press by basically trashing their own product and then engineering their own comeback. As an indication of how much traction they've gotten, I was reading a political article the other day -- some rant about something-or-another -- and the author's thesis was how the subject compared to the Domino's Pizza ads.

Kudos to Domino's for such a unintuitive yet highly effective campaign.
Ask HN: How to hold an online fundraiser?
I'd like to hold an online fundraiser in which I provide gift incentives of no cash value (virtual goods, extra features, etc) on my site in exchange for a user's donation to a non-profit organization.

I initially planned to just accept payments/subscriptions directly on my site through my existing PayPal infrastructure, and donate all of it to the organization at the end of the fundraising period. But I learned that attempting to do so would immediately cause PayPal to freeze the account and demand paperwork that we are authorized to accept payments on behalf of a 501C (which we aren't).

Instead, I'm thinking that it would be nice if there were certain non-profit organizations (or an authorized third-party site that collects money on their behalf) in which I redirect a user to the donation URL, and the site sends me a notification when the user has successfully donated (via a POST to a URL of my choice), allowing me to confirm and process the reward. (Similar to how PayPal works, but with the non-profit directly handling the processing).

So my question is: Does anything like this exist? If not, any ideas for getting something like this started?
It depends a lot on what the dominant technologies are in 50 years.

It's non-trivial to become a big search engine like Google. It's non-trivial to develop an image-editing program like PhotoShop. It's non-trivial to build a language runtime and ecosystem like Java, or to set up a content network like Yahoo, or to make scalable databases that run on all sorts of platforms like Oracle.

Right now, there're lots of new markets being formed, which opens up room for lots of new startups. But will those markets get consolidated into features of big tech companies? Or will they continue to nurture small independent players?
"Would you always answer these questions completely and honestly"

Pretty much. If they ask something that's none of their business, I tell them that, too, as tactfully as possible.

Answer completely? No, not always; people are not entitled to information just because they ask.

What I try not to do is get people to make decisions based on me willfully and deliberately making shit up.

When I read stories such as the "custom porn" tale, and people's reactions to it, I get the sense that the bravado and cleverness of it absolves (or at least obscures) any issues with deceit.

There are times when lying is not only needed, but the absolute right thing to do, but that's not decided by what a good story it makes to tell your friends later.
> except it's open to everyone

...with a US passport.
From the article:

"It portrays indigenous Australians in the most unsavoury light possible, and you wouldn't want a child stumbling across it," he told ABC Radio.

I'm getting really sick of people playing the "won't somebody think of the children" card.
Introducing The Alexandria Project
Isn't it time there was a suspense novel for, and about, hackers?
> The people of the Maldives want the temperature rise regulated below 1.5 C.

Do they? Or, do they want a given sea level?

Note that sea level may well be independent of CO2. (That's part of why I mentioned artic ice, which has been increasing.)

> There are certain acceptable limits.

And you're assuming quite a bit about a lot of things, such as the relationship between CO2 and temperature and sea level.

> Surely we can't risk a global temperature rise of 10 C?

I don't know and that may not be the question. I've posted links showing CO2 levels several times what it is now. What was the temperature then? (Since those times were in the past, it's absurd to argue that whatever happens at those concentrations is irreversible.)
You ask a fair question. In general, I don't support government censorship, and especially not prior restraint of mass media (such as exists in China today). But I also have trouble characterizing what happened in the case discussed in this thread as "government censorship," inasmuch as the site is still posted for all the world to view (and for much of the world to become more interested in, as a result of this controversy). As another reply in this thread points out, Google's response seems to be standard operating procedure for Google much like what Google does in many other countries around the world. I am not an Australian resident, much less an Australian citizen, so I will defer to the constituents of the constitutional commonwealth that is Australia to decide whether the current policy in Australia is a good idea or not. But I don't think Google is deserving of particular criticism here, and I think the blog that publicized this story might have devoted more time to how Google is spammed up by quacks on medical issues or constrained by dictatorial governments like the government of China.
Babylonian Twins: game built in Iraq 16 years ago finally about to be released
I don't see grandma putting on the shutter glasses to watch Leno in 3D. Even with the ideal target market - kids watching 3D animated movies - do you really want your kids tethered with expensive glasses to an even more expensive television?

I could see 3D TV appealing to console gamers, but the hardware cycle isn't at a point right now where any of the console manufacturers is likely to add 3D support. Particularly since 3D glasses have been available on PCs for years with little apparent demand.
120 for me. It incorporates the multiple lines, and conveys a lot of action with those lines just bursting out. Only thing I'd try to do is emphasize the whole line theme throughout your app so the logo makes a bit more sense. But it's definitely the most polished, professional, and exciting one for me.

On a side note, it's interesting to see some of the logos so blatantly rip off Plaxo's.
But the real cost was never the production of the physical newspaper - it was always centered on content. Content really hasn't gotten any cheaper to produce, though... the fact that they're saving a few pennies a copy (that they used to sell for money) by distributing their content for free online is really little comfort to them I'm sure.
I can't tell if the pictures of Steve Ballmer next to a caption of "Proof that getting rich is mostly luck." is funny or a low-blow.
To me the bulk of them come across as way too generic; you could just replace preceden with any company name. There's very few that have any character.

I like the ideas in 15 and 87, but not so much the rest of the logo.

I notice a lot of variance in how the name is written. Do you prefer "Preceden", "preceden" or "PRECEDEN"?
Which is why there's little value to the 483rd blog post touting the absolute advantage of SV.