skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well this just goes to explain why Adobe is failing and why apple is boxing plugins in separate processes and everyone is pushing for HTML 5's <video> and <audio> tags. The fact is, nobody wants adobe's crap, because everyone seems to be able to fix these stupid bugs except for adobe.
It's not a 4:3 screen, it's a 3:4 screen.
these are not very good questions, are they.

the interviewer starts with the obvious bias that he thinks it's bad that calvin and hobbes is not around anymore. watterson says "yeah i'm pretty much over that" and the interviewer just won't take no for an answer: why not do some other strip, give the fans something they want, they all feel a connection to you, etc.

it would have been a lot better if the interviewer was willing to accept what the guy was saying and go forward from there. "okay, so you're not doing the strip anymore ... so what's in your life these days?"
Open Luna Foundation
This jumped out at me: "Unless MSFT develops Xbox into a widespread payment system..."

After a couple years of being down on MSFT, I've gotta say that xbox360 is a pretty brilliant product. Xbox live Gold can be purchased as a 5.99/month subscription, or 45/year one time payment. (like itunes cards, you'll find these in places like target and walmart).
What about 'pay for what you use' model?

Isn't this somewhere in between of subscription and one-time payment? Users still get the sense of 'ownership' and based on a product, businesses can get payments almost as if it was a subscription service.

Though I absolutely understand that this model can't fit all, but I find it to be a good option to consider.
So much humility. Our industry needs more.
This is an issue I'm dealing with in relation to a possible YC application.

My assumption has been that the best co-founder is one you have some history with so you know that you're compatible for the long term.

Is it realistic to expect that you can find a person and accurately make that assessment in six months? Particularly if it's from a different mindset (e.g. sales/bizdev cf. tech) and/or location. Are there any successful examples from YC?

FWIW my concept is embedded hardware-based, in a toy/education market, I have technical experience and am looking for someone with financial, business development, marketing and sales experience & knowledge.
In effect looks at the issue raised in the Microsoft is a mature tech company/Why tech companies never pay out their earnings as dividends http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090632 and another earlier. Many Microsoft units improved their bottom line by reducing headcounts ... and this is not a sign of an "immature" (growing, hopeful, etc.) company.
we're definitely hiring experienced programmers who enjoy python. drop me an email at paul@dropbox.com. (san francisco)
I think that you can. To date, Google really only has one successful product (success meaning "makes money for Google") and that's Ad-sense.

Sure it's wildly successful. But if that stopped making money for Google tomorrow (for example, I automatically mentally filter out all advertisements in my search results, how long before everybody does that), what would their revenue and profitability picture look like? In almost every other product area outside of web search and perhaps email, where Google competes against another company, they haven't done well at all -- both in terms of users and in terms of dollars.

In other words, Google's first product, designed by a couple of grad students, is the loss leader that drives people to their one and only money making product that supplies 99% (not 30%, or 60% or even 80%, 99%!) of their operating capital.
Official tours are only for 'official' visitors (and big parties). There's a program to get students visiting if you're in that boat, otherwise, I'm sure a HN Googler would be happy to host you if you're local. What sort of work would you be interested in - engineering? product management?* anything specific within that you'd want to see?

Of course, you do get a nice tour and lunch if you get interviewed :)

Edit: Ha. Somewhat appropriately, were you to have a campus tour of Mountain View around about today, and should you visit a bathroom in that time, you'd see a quote from pg's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" on the back of the stall door...
Depends where you are.

Here in the Bay Area, demand for Python programmers is pretty high.

.Net is almost dead here.
Talking sex robot? Thats the deal breaker right there.
Sadly, no info on what he's doing now.
This is just bad jurisprudence. It's the reason why legal language is supposed to be intentionally vague; so that there aren't potential legal issues with doing something that a completely rational person might do. Obviously there is no intention for the law to be interfering with any super bowl parties you might want to have at home and no prosecutor would relish pursuing someone who did. This whole thing is pretty much a moot point unless you own a sports bar. That's what happens when lobbyists get to the lawmakers though...
"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded about 55,000 runners to study."

People are taking this garbage seriously? Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks. Ya don't say. Where are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation?

The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled intervention. You can't simply survey runners. You have to pick people and make them run. I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of this.

Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold. Pro athletes are not long lived.
JQuery Plugin: CuteTime, C'est Magnifique (v 1.1) [UPDATE]
Institutional failure
Corporations are simply a group of individuals, so yes, a corporation has rights.
If you think about it he is responsible for the first gen modern PC interface and it looks like he's going to be responsible for the second gen with the iPad on the horizon.

HyperCard is also considered by some to have been a precursor to the web..

I can't think of one other figure in the last 25 years that has shaped the industry this much in terms of innovation.
In the case of corporate speech, employees of the corporation are speaking as directed (ultimately) by the board of directors. The BOD is elected by the shareholders.

The majority of shareholders selected the BOD, while the minority agreed to use their property (their share of the corporation) in furtherance of the goals of the majority as per the corporate charter.
Named tuple
And the even BIGGER question then that is who will rehash this age-old topic around this time next year?
Thanks!
What about for updates?
How do you regularly update your data?

LOL. It downloaded in about a minute. Nice server!

Again, thank you so much!
Thanks a ton, jacquesm.

This would've been very useful for a past project, and while I don't necessarily need it at the moment, I suspect it'll come in handy sometime in the future.
It breaks with the norm, but I think it may be preferable for interviews. All we want from the host is for them to be a question-enhancing proxy for ourselves. Seeing your own face in a mirror wouldn't improve the experience of interviewing someone yourself, so seeing the host's shouldn't either.
SyncPlaces lets you do this to a file or FTP server.

http://www.andyhalford.com/syncplaces
I think you are misreading profound shyness and discomfort at being in the public eye for something else.

I may be wrong, but I don't see pity or lack of respect for his fans in his (few) interviews, but rather fear at the intensity of the fans. This isn't so unusual. Some (many?) creative people love and desire the attention that fame brings, but others simply freak out (Salinger, Pynchon, Glenn Gould, Watterson - if I'm right).

Quick follow-up: it's linked on this thread, but a different interview (Watterson responding to fan questions) gives a much more laid-back vibe: http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/calvinandhobbes/interview.html So maybe part of the problem is how poor the new interview's questions are.
It is legal to use money/speech to talk yourself out of future speeding tickets. You can spend money on posters entitled, "Vote Smith, No More Speeding Tickets!" in the hopes that it will persuade people to vote for Smith (who presumably promised to end laws against speeding).
Maybe the interviewer was just so amazed to be interviewing him at all that he just fell apart.
The Secrets To A Killer Elevator Pitch
The one we used for our analytics product came from here:

http://www.geonames.org/export/
Almost every interesting and serious study regarding lifestyles is ethically and practically unable to be instantiated as a controlled experiment over the long term. Like many things, from studies of the economy, to social structures, to the climate. You can try to do a multivariate analysis, but ultimately you're not going to have much to go on. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, but it doesn't mean there isn't some valuable data in there. In addition, long term results are probably more interesting and important than short-term results; so much so that I would argue longitudinal studies are probably more useful than controlled studies, so long as one is careful and rigorous and vigorous with multivariate analysis after the fact.
Marathon running appears to cause heart damage. 12% of asymptomatic marathon runners had evidence of myocardial damage. Only 4% of the sedentary controls had damage.

This Breuckmann study repeatedly found about a 2.5 to 1 increased incidence of heart attack from marathon running over sedentarism. The number of marathons run was an independent and significant predictor of the likelihood of myocardial damage.

http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/2009/11/1/cardio-causes-h...
screw "minimize" - any law that would be selectively enforced should (in a perfect, unattainable world) be eliminated
Why does everyone assume that NASA will turn to the small startup companies?

History indicates it's the Lockheeds of the country that NASA will turning to.
Thanks again! I will compare this with jacquesm's file.
This is a hybrid of a public dataset and a lot of manual polishing to get rid of duplicates (no doubt there are a still quite a few of those, especially in Asia).

I don't actively maintain the dataset, but if you want I can create a small website around it so people can update it.

The reason I built this was a project called 'autotagger', the idea behind it is to identify people, places and subjects in texts automatically.

It's one of my pet projects but I don't have enough funds to continue to work on it full time without a way to monetize it, so it's been sitting there rusting for the last year or so.

I think I have most of the datastructures and algorithms worked out, it needs a massive rewrite to get it production ready and fast enough.

The fields most subject to change are the population and the names, cities/towns don't get created too often but merging smaller towns does happen.

They rarely move around, so I figure the longitude/latitude should be good for a while ;)
"I think some of the reason 'Calvin and Hobbes' still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it."

A good, good lesson.
As "hga" mentioned penny is made with zinc with a copper. 97.5% zinc core, 2.5% copper plating

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_%28United_States_coin%29#...
I love the solution Austan Goolsbee semi-seriously proposed a few years ago: "re-base" the penny. That is, declare that all Lincoln pennies currently in circulation are now worth 5¢ alongside the nickels (and then remove the nickels from circulation as a natural phaseout). Subsequent mintings of the penny would actually say "FIVE CENTS" but the old pennies would also be worth 5¢.

Advantages: The five cent penny would cost less than five cents to mint. The expensive nickel would no longer be minted. Immediate but relatively contained inflation that puts the "printed" money in the hands of the poorest people (who would have more pennies as a percentage of their cash on hand than richer folks)---a lightweight form of stimulus. Brings pennies back into circulation because they're not worthless anymore.

Disadvantage: vending machines wouldn't accept pennies for the new amount, but most don't accept them at all so that's less of a problem than it might be.
I meant an actual release, not a beta. I'm using Chrome on a Mac as well, but the bookmark manager doesn't work, and there's no syncing. Interesting how I get voted down because people on Hacker News don't know what it means for software to be a "release". It means, a release, as in, not beta, or alpha, or a release "candidate".
Here is the transcript of his Kenyon College Commencement speech.

http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
Having read this article, numerous other articles, heard from Google Employees in large and small settings, and knowing a few Google Interns, I can say one thing with absolute confidence.

Google Engineers know that they're the best engineers, ever.

I've always found it offputting, but maybe I'm just jealous or something.

edit: Worth adding that this is a common thing among many engineers. Also, I know and like a number of Google interns (and engineers). All that said though, the one expression I've heard more than anything else is "Google hires smart people".
Tell HN: Paul Graham will be live on Mixergy w/ Andrew Warner, 2/9 @11AM PST
Tuesday 2/9 Andrew will be interviewing Paul Graham live on Mixergy.com at 11:00AM PST. Please post any questions you have for PG here in the comments. Hopefully Andrew can work in a few of the questions that receive the most upvotes.

Upcoming Mixergy guests along with handy calendar subscription links can be found here: http://mixergy.com/coming-soon/
"Disclaimer: This post is not about defending Flash."

No, it really is. This is just as annoying as anyone claiming that HTML5+extras means the immediate (or even near-term) death of Flash.
I think this is a challenge that a lot of startups encounter. I've certainly encountered it so far. I think the breakthrough for me was when my dad (good 'ol parents) asked me to describe what I wanted to do in one sentence. Once I did, it became clear how to best focus on what I was trying to accomplish, who I wanted to reach, and how I wanted them to benefit. Sometimes giving yourself some solid guidelines will free you more than anything else. Above all I find that you have to maintain focus. As an entrepreneur I find that you will pick up on many problems that can be solved, and many ways to do so. You have to pick the most important problem to solve, and the way that will solve it the greatest amount is the first one to pursue. My thoughts, from someone that is still learning a lot...
A flash platformer made in 48 hours by myself and 4 other people
Seven "Corporations of Interest" in Selling Surveillance Tools to China
Well, the history thinks differently, the penny has been "changed" 5 times in the last centure that's 20 years on average. And the last change happened in 1982 (28 years from now) well above the average time period and is the third longest survival period for a penny ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_%28United_States_coin%29#...
"Just" silicon dioxide? Ever heard of the irreversible lung disease, silicosis? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis
Robots are not better at exploration, they are just cheaper. Those are different things.
I have found the link in HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530086
"You are expected to. . . solve problems . . . Usually by email. The result is an organization which is in a constant state of flux . . . With . . . very large volumes of email."

So now we understand Google Wave - they built it for themselves!
I think this is covered by the "we don't want to discuss this issue, don't want to revamp a bad system, don't want to make a decision that will piss anyone off" law .... also known as "Don't ask, don't tell"
We're hiring - http://jobs.hiidef.com/ - full time, distributed team. We're a consumer web incubator. Feel free to contact me directly at johnwehr@hiidef.com.
I wish there was a video of this somewhere. I would need to hear his voice inflection to really get his true... attitude on life and relationships.

"When it seemed I would be writing about 'Midnite Madness Sale-abrations' for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea."
Nope. Sorry. Don't buy it. This is not Amazon playing some deep game to drive the ebook market in directions that it wants. This was very plainly a screwup of epic proportions. I don't know enough about Amazon's internal structure or politics to finger a name but this does have the earmarks of an overreaching junior executive who was high on the idea that "hey we're Amazon, the 800lb gorilla, and we can call the shots and make publishers dance like monkeys." It may have been a group rather than an individual, but if this was an agreed upon action at the highest levels of Amazon... I'd say sell AMZN. Because that sort of hubris in management leads to bad decisions.

And think about what message this sends to other Amazon customers and suppliers. Would Amazon boot your startup off AWS if they decided you were serious competition? Would you want to bet your company on that?
Awesome, I wish I would anticipate such a move and start hoarding pennies!
Colbert loves attention. He may or may not be genuinely excited for the iPad, but I bet he's more excited for the press it generates.
McClure gets close to a good point but fails to convert.

Here's his solution to password friction: "Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product. If users login a lot, then they don't forget their password." He then lists the following examples that solve this better than PayPal: Social Networks, Email, IM, Games, Music, Entertainment.

I can't recall the last time I needed to use my password to login to Facebook, Skype, gmail, etc. The cookies are set to let me in. If I were a low-tech user, the password friction problem still exists as it always has. Amazon has me logged in; I can add books to my wish list without retyping my password. But to make a purchase, I have to type my password. The password friction problem does not go away.
I guess Microsoft exceeds in all aspects, even layoffs!
Clickable link: http://mixergy.com/coming-soon/
http://www.geonames.org/ (download area at http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/)

Used as the placename source for http://www.dopplr.com among others.

HTH,

Brendan.
There are many controlled intervention studies into diet and exercise. It is done. They provide the only results worth any consideration. More often than not regression analyses and "risk-adjustment" models are invalidated.
Easy = True
He's had to fight the syndicate for a long time during C&H not to merchandise his comic strips. In an industry where it's ok, if not normal to merchandise your comic strip, he's one of the few the railed against it, even when his comic strip peers made of of him for it. He's had lots of practice not defining himself by others' values.

"It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would
be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.

To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works."
http://psychologynews.posterous.com/speech-by-bill-watterson

If he was a HN user, he'd probably get downvoted a lot for his anti-money-as-the-bottom-line view. And oddly enough, I argue that part of that attitude and values contributed to the long lasting value of his comic strips, as we're still talking about him and reading C&H today.
Indeed. However when you get past the overused rhetoric of the first paragraph the author makes some good points and it is quite a balanced viewpoint.

Imo it is a lot better than the Gruber and Brimelow led style of drivel that is doing the rounds at the moment.
A penny in 2008 is worth 44% of what it was worth in 1982, when the last change was made.

I wasn't able to find a 25 year chart, here's the oldest I could find, going back 15 year: http://www.infomine.com/investment/charts.aspx?c=zinc&r=...

From 1995 to 2004 it was basically flat, it took a huge jump during the recent bubble and is now again going up beyond that historical range. The previous recent bump wasn't due to a decline in the dollar's value, but this one just might be related to it.
A human controlled robot on the moon is much better at exploration than a human. Humans have to do things like eat and shit.
People reflexively downvote DeVany's observations to their own peril.

While some of that list is anecdotal, most is based on relevant studies, and on DeVany's long interest and observation of patterns of health (as an athlete and economist). His perspective is a necessary antidote to the popular conception that ever-longer distance-running delivers a monotonically-increasing level of healthiness.

DeVany suggests -- with evidence -- that instead, the optimal activity involves bursty, varied, intense exertion more than marathon-like exertion. The stresses and rhythmic pace of marathoning damage some systems more than they help.
Microsoft Bing masterclass: Use Bing search and maps more efficiently
Remember back in the days of VHS when recording one TV program while watching another required one to pour over a users manual while haphazardly pressing an assortment of buttons in the hopes that you’d figure it out? Nowadays, DVR systems are so simple that the average 10-year old can watch a Baseball game while simultaneously setting up a series recording of 30 Rock. The technology is not only easier to use, but a helluva lot more powerful, and it’s that balance that drives Apple’s products. The iPad embodies that balance for the large group of consumers who get their tech news from CNN’s cable channel instead of from Engadget.

The closing paragraph says it all very well.