skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Corporations are not Immortal. They are not living beings. They do not have free will. By calling a company immortal one further pollutes the dialog.

They are a logical / legal construction, and it makes no sense to call them mortal or immortal. By calling them immortal you are implicitly inferring that they actually make decisions and have actions; they don't. Agents of the company work within the constructs of the law on behalf of the company's directors. The company's directorship management makes the decisions.
If I could emphasize one thing I said in this interview, it would be the importance of cofounders. More of the interview dealt with that topic than it seems from these notes. That's what someone thinking of starting a startup should be thinking most about, not the idea.

I talked afterward to a guy who wanted to apply to YC, but didn't have a cofounder. I suggested he just apply 6 months later, and spend the intervening time finding a good cofounder. He didn't want to hear it. For some reason founders seem to think that the set of potential cofounders is a given they can't change. But surely if you made finding a cofounder your main priority and worked at it like a job for 6 months, you could find people.
To be honest, most of that stuff works just fine in BASH too.

http://gist.github.com/277975

That's my bash prompt, doing the same. Except, it doesn't factor in mercurial repositories, but that'll be a breeze to add.

Displaying:
(<virtual_env>) user@host [ <folder> ~<branch> <* available changes>]$
This just posted on nytimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/technology/personaltech/28...
Responding to "It could probably improve, but I haven't looked closely" with "Why isn't it better?" is nonsensical to me. He just said he hadn't analyzed it - and that he didn't feel the need to.
Thx--I'll definitely take you up on that. My setup is certainly sub-optimal, but me not being on camera is deliberate. On my second interview, I lost my feed and so went without it. After it was done, I thought it worked better than the first (with me in it). Since the interviewee does the vast majority of the talking, it seemed I was just sitting there being distracting from the main content. But maybe I'm wrong?
Humans should not be going to the moon at this point in time for exploration. We should focus on robots going to the moon - spending that money on developing robots will have a much larger benefit than spending the money trying to keep a human safe. We'll develop advanced controlling and communication systems for this.

You can send a robot to the moon and leave him there - a human has to come back. That's an uneccessary expense.

When we have enough robots on the moon they can build the structures neccessary to support human life there.
Wrapping up our Free Holiday WiFi program
Well, what I meant specifically is that corporations can influence elections indirectly via PACs and 527s, and that corporations can attempt to influence elected candidates via lobbying (and by actually getting their representatives into positions of power) so they already have some reasonably effective mechanisms for converting their money to votes.

I don't think that the Supreme Court decision to enable them to spend directly on candidates really took into account very much these existing abilities one way or the other, although I'm not a lawyer and I probably haven't studied it much more than you, so maybe I'm missing some chain of reasoning.
You have a cite for that decade number? Seems silly to me, given that we've already been to the moon, and over 40 years ago at that. Surely we should be at Neptune at least by now, no? :)

More seriously: what is the value of a Mars mission that we should be paying for it? There's no meaningful science to be done there (vs. what can be done via much cheaper means, anyway), just lots of eye candy and fantasy material for wannabe astronauts.
I'm not arguing for chasing new things all the time, in fact I'm arguing for the opposite. I think its important to be decisive about a path and not chase new things all the time.

I agree that understanding your market properly is extremely important (see the first post in this series), however its also possible to market research yourself to death. At some point you just need to launch and see what happens.

I would argue that 'concept' was not our problem. Certainly the concept behind the Snaptalent blog network was flawed in its economics, we figured that out and tried to shift focus. Recruitment branding (large campaigns not focused on a single rec) is actually a fairly large market where spend is moving online rapidly. I don't think the analysis that this was an opportunity we were well positioned for was wrong, we just never really pursued it hard enough.
I wish people would stop bringing up file-sharing in the privacy debate. It's a terrible example, for the simple reason that a lot of people are breaking the law and hiding behind legal technicalities to get away with it, and the law itself is not self-evidently unreasonable in providing the concept of copyright.

Yes, there have been miscarriages of justice, and there have been abuses of the legal system (particularly in the US, which in my studious and considered opinion has a dumb legal system that encourages such actions by the big boys with vast legal warchests). Of course these things are bad and legal systems that allow them would be better if they had stronger safeguards to protect the innocent.

But if you look at the big picture, there are a lot of people (mostly young ones) growing up with this unhealthy attitude that anything you can physically do is OK and you can take what you want for free because you'll get away with it. Shielding those people from being held accountable, on a pretense of defending privacy, is not going to make society any more enlightened, it's just going to raise a generation of people who don't think about anyone but themselves.
That's probably not what he meant by "paradigm": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
Contrary to popular opinion in the U.S., America is not a Space leader. Japan landed a probe on an asteroid. Russia beat the U.S. to space, to manned space flight, and to venus.

Most of the U.S.'s belief in its universal superiority is fluff. I don't doubt at all that china and india will overtake the U.S. in space exploration in the coming decades. If commercial endeavors are going to go to space, why would they waste their money over paying washed up NASA scientists to do it when they could go to china or india just like they do for Nikes and cars and everything else pretty much.

The entire supply chain is in asia, what does the U.S. have left? Guns. That's about it. Guns. No room for butter -- move aside.
The iPhone is 320 × 480. The iPad is 1024x768. It's not 2x the size of an iPhone. The AR (aspect ratio) is the same as two iPhones sitting with their long edges touching. The resolutions do not make for easy scaling.
Just to be clear: This announcement kills the entire Constellation program including Orion, the spacecraft meant to replace the Space Shuttle.

In other words, after the last few shuttle missions this year, the United States will no longer have a manned space program.

Right or wrong, this is devastating news to me.
> For example, the Emacs repository (the git clone at least. I haven't checked bzr) has commits dated before my birth.

Given that both the Bazaar and Git repositories are imported from the same source, they should contain the same commits. The earliest commit in Bazaar is:

------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 1
committer: Jim Blandy <jimb@redhat.com>
timestamp: Thu 1985-04-18 00:48:29 +0000
message:
entered into RCS
------------------------------------------------------------

> However, any conversion from git is going to have to retain full history.

Full, except for the bits of it that Git discarded.
The moon has never made any sense as a stepping stone to Mars. Why truck fuel and materiel down a gravity well, only to bring it right back out again? Nor would the Apollo-redux spacecraft suitable to a moon mission be useful for a trip to Mars.

A realistic Mars mission would consist of a spacecraft assembled in earth orbit, then flown directly to Mars. However, the technology required to get a human crew to Mars and bring them back alive is so far beyond what we have now that the moon-as-a-stepping-stone plan is more of a way to avoid confronting the problems than a way to solve them.
Ditto. When we needed to do a little admin, we just modified the database. (A little risky, I suppose, but we were doing regular backups.) We only wrote administrative tools when things got too complicated for the least-technically-sophisticated member of the team - me - to easily tweak things.

As it turned out, some of the most common customer support issues we had weren't anticipated by us in advance, so building out an admin panel would've still only met part of our needs.
Oh no, certain metals are becoming valuable...what will we do....

That's right. Use other metals.
The continued existence of the penny is a great mystery to me and has been for some time. One cent is not a meaningful unit of currency anymore. Eliminating the penny seems like an obvious way to save on costs. I'm not saying it could happen overnight, but it seems high time to put a phase out plan in effect.
Business Lessons from Avatar's James Cameron
Microsoft exceeds goal of 5,000 layoffs
The original space program paid for itself many times over with multiple technological and engineering advances which benefited the larger economy. One study I saw estimated the dividend as seven-fold, but that seems very low to me.

Money spent in technological and engineering development is rarely wasted. And frankly I reckon $8b is worth it in PR benefit alone.

Robots don't cut it. There's an irreplaceable excitement in seeing actual living breathing humans doing something incredible. At a time where inspiration and hope is sorely needed - and especially in the fields of science, technology and engineering - cutting the space program seems extraordinarily short-sighted.

You could make a valid point that NASA is not the agency for the job, but since the USG seems intent on pissing away every borrowed yuan it can find as fast as possible, I guess I just wish they'd piss it into something I can believe in once in a while.
Obviously, his attitude/philosophy towards C&H hasn't changed much in the past 15 years. It's almost like he pities his legions of fans for digging the strip so much. When ever I read the interviews from years ago or even some of the strip commentary, I feel like Watterson's just got a giant chip on his shoulder and I kinda want to hate the guy.

I started reading C&H when I was 11-12 and my son has been interested since before he could even read on his own. This strip touches on something that I haven't found with _any_ other strip. Peanuts was great in it's time (I guess, I never really liked it.) But I can read C&H a zillion times and never get bored.

I just wish Mr. Watterson wasn't so off-putting, it would be nice to get more insight into his creativity as opposed to the shoulder-shrug and giant "meh" that's he's provided so far.
as though they are purposefully deceiving us to some end

That end being "getting funded". Which, given the revelations coming out of the CRU, is a valid concern regardless of the science.
Brocade BCNE most valuable certification on earth
Because they're cutting something dumb in favor of funding good science?

FWIW, from numbers (the stuff you skipped, I suspect) in the article: a $6B increase over a $19B budget over 5 years comes to about a 5.6% increase per year. That's just barely above the overall (typical) yearly change in federal revenue.

All budgets increase over time, because federal revenue increases due to inflation and GDP growth (itself due to fundamental population increase). So increasing funding by itself is never news; the news is about changes in what kinds of things are funded. Thus the headline.
Corporations, by definition, cannot have natural rights, and since they don’t exist outside of government, cannot have surrendered any autonomy to the government. Therefore, the Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment, cannot apply to them. QED.

My comment was primarily directed to the concluding statements (quoted above) that posit a deductive argument in absolute terms and that conclude that the Bill of Rights "cannot apply" to corporations. This absolute position simply cannot be defended based on the law. I agree with you that the issue can get more complicated if the point is limited to the question of free speech. That doesn't mean, though, that the argument is not overstated, which I think it is.

By the way, the distinction you make between rights accorded to entities versus rights accorded to individuals through entities is an important one and a thoughtful discussion on this distinction may be found here: http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/20....
I was never terribly good at arithmetic. :-(
Do you think entrepreneurs would be happy there? After all, many compelling ideas would not fair well with Google's data-driven evaluation (at least in the short term).
Erlang-like Hot Code Loading in Node.js
Will your big-screen Super Bowl party violate copyright law?
I love NYC. My life is there. If I could move my startup to NYC, I would do it in a heartbeat. But every venture requires capital, some more than others. Pretty much all "early stage" funds make one or two early stage investments a year, most likely into someone they already know. That means most first-time entrepreneurs have to pitch to dozens of funds before they get funding. Most first-time startup founders I know scheduled three meetings with VCs per day, five days a week, for at least two-three weeks before they got anywhere. That's at least thirty meetings with all kinds of VCs of all shapes and sizes! If you were to do this in NYC, you'd exhaust your opportunities within two days. Six funds cannot possibly support a healthy startup ecosystem. The Valley has thousands, and I've still seen some good early stage teams that didn't get adequate funding. All arguments end here - no capital, no startup scene.

If you've already started a successful company before and you already have a good relationship with one of the funds in NYC (i.e. they invested in you before and you didn't screw it up), you can start thinking about starting up in NYC. If your company is taking off like a rocket, you can start thinking about moving to NYC (in this case you'll get funded pretty much anywhere). If you can bootstrap, you can start thinking about starting up in NYC. Otherwise, moving your startup to NYC is suicide.
"The point that I feel like those who are against it completely miss (and that anti-business people generally miss) is that corporations are just groups of people. It's people/turtles all the way down."

Many of these people see exactly that point, and use it to assert that since corporations are just groups of people, and people have the right of free speech, no additional laws or protections are needed for corporations.
Preach it, brother!
He was really put off by the publicity and loss of privacy when the strip got really popular. Rumor has it he paints landscapes and then burns them. http://quazen.com/arts/animation/bill-watterson-and-calvin-a...
For the record the article isn't his first interview since 1989, this was: http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/calvinandhobbes/interview.html

It's still neat to have another though...
Framework emulation will allow FuseJS to use the plugins and extensions of the emulated framework as well as allow devs to use the framework syntax they are more familiar with.
I haven't read his prior interviews, but I must say, I took away none of that from this one. He seems to display an appropriate humility about his art:

"Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to...I'm proud of the strip, enormously grateful for its success, and truly flattered that people still read it."

Although we all hope for some kind of tremendous story of revelation and inspiration and toil behind meaningful art, I don't think you can really fault him just because he doesn't have one ready to offer.
If a nickel lasts 30 years and is taxed multiple times during that period, the government should get back the cost of producing the nickel during that time period quite easily.
Mars has a compellingly high potential for colonization. It's the only place in the solar System one can cheaply grow food, other than Earth. Its lower gravity well gives it an insurmountable advantage in access to off-planet resources, and it has water-driven geologic processes that have probably created exploitable ore deposits.

Mars will be to the 21st and 22nd centuries what N. America was to the last four. The short-sighted will ask why we'd ever want to go there. It will take some form of "irrationality" to overcome the short-tern economic myopia. If it's Chinese national pride that opens the door, so be it. They're no worse than the Pilgrims.
I agree that everything is leaky abstractions. The lesson I get from the idea is to assess the probability of leaks occurring and the risks they present when they do. Some of the ORM ones that the author mentions are pretty onerous.
"One study I saw estimated the dividend as seven-fold, but that seems very low to me."

What is the dividend of leaving billions of dollars in American's pockets?
The Property Review
Edit: After a little more reading, everything he's posting about seems to be Java specific. It would have been nice for him to point that out somewhere.

After reading the ORM article, I've come to realize this guy is using ORMs to completely ignore the SQL Layer. Also, I don't see any references to any ORM except Hibernate. A single datapoint isn't enough information to draw these conclusions about all orms, just Hibernate.

Coming from Ruby on Rails (and having used NHibernate for a project), I see this guy as an idiot. I use ActiveRecord to skip writing full sql for every statement, not to ignore sql completely. I check the generated queries, I only load the fields I need on high traffic pages, and I dip into raw SQL when I need it. I'll admit to being lazy with my edit screens but they aren't loaded nearly as much as other pages. And when I hit a bottle neck, I will do whatever incantation (SQL) to the database is required to fix the problem.
Anyone know of any Python shops in Salt Lake City area? I'm about to start looking for a new gig myself...
Which common mistakes do less experienced programmers make time after time?
We have just released this site. It allows you to review your UK rental property or holiday let. What do you think? Any suggestions on how to improve it?
Ah, I didn't know that.
How to Find Awesome Angels for your Web Startup
Saw this discussion over at reddit, and wanted to know thoughts of readers here.
"The World is Moving to HTML 5" and Other Flights of Fancy
I normally don't do that. However for perspective I really wanted to give an idea of how intelligent I consider myself to be, and giving that relatively objective number sounded like the least assholish way I had to convey that to people who don't know me.

You'll note that immediately upon giving the number I pointed out that there are issues with that method of measurement and gave an honest self-assessment whose upper range was well below what the number said.
The first one is git status: Magenta means there are unstaged changes, cyan means there aren't. Star is master, I have different symbols for a few different branches I use on some projects. Otherwise, that symbol just shows as the branch name.

The second symbol is my currently-active ruby interpreter.

EDIT: see http://github.com/burke/dotfiles/tree/master/.config.d/zsh
quite frankly a cynical bread-and-circus idea

That may well be the truth. But at least it's a circus founded on science and engineering.

The Chinese will be on the moon in a decade minimum, two maximum. When you're sitting at home with the rest of the world watching a large chinese flag being placed on the moon in hi-def colour, what thoughts do you think will be going through your head? I bet it's not "boy, I'm glad we didn't waste that $8 billion back in the day!".
How Apple kills hardware innovation
So to summarize:

- Make a lot of fake accounts to submit content, so it looks like there are many more users than there actually are

- Get mentioned in a very popular essay by Paul Graham

- Eventually stop submitting content from fake accounts once you have grown enough

- Once you are so big that your referral starts showing up in the New York Times, etc. log, people will naturally start putting your buttons on your site.

- There will be some other huge sites that haven't organically put your button on their site yet. Cold email them.

- Post in the comments of any site that mentions you, regardless of the size to make yourself available to them.
yes.... http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/orion_announcement.html

The orion crew capsule was part of the Constellation program. Same technology and innovations to bring the astronauts to the moon.
Thanks, Paul. This was helpful in my thinking on this.
Sounds like a fairy tale? Any experts here want to chime in on whether airborne silicone dioxide is really as harmless and versatile as they claim?
Direct links to github projects really shouldn't be HN topics. An article, explanation, etc would make more sense -- maybe the github wiki link for a project, if it actually explains something. Even that doesn't work for this project, though.

Something distilled is more appropriate.
Agreed. I don't doubt that it's an amazing place to work, but every job has its honeymoon phase and the author is definitely in that.

I'd be eager to hear an honest assessment from him after a year though. There has to be a reason why brilliant and motivated people leave Google, after all.
The New York Times didn't exercise free speech rights in publishing the Pentagon Papers. The First Amendment protects five specific rights (speech, press, religion, assembly, petition), along with protecting against an establishment of religion. The Times was using its press rights under the First Amendment.

There are different lines of jurisprudence in First Amendment law depending upon the right implicated. A press case is going to be decided upon a different line of cases than a free speech case.

The corporate or non-corporate form is irrelevant. It's looking to the substance. There's a difference between freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Freedom of the press protects the ability to report the news. It's rooted in the the British government prosecuting those publishing stories critical of the government as seditious libel, giving rise to the maxim, "the greater the truth, the greater the libel."

Speech, in contrast, is the speaking of opinion. The Times did not do this in publishing the Pentagon Papers. There is a difference between a newspaper with corporate form publishing the news and a corporation such as ExxonMobil or Google effectively advocating for a specific candidate.
We're just as well without it. Absent accountability via serious attention from higher-ups or the constituents themselves, bureaucracies tend to devolve into inefficient, unproductive jobs programs, and NASA is no exception: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770268

The future of space travel will come from organizations with the accountability to properly motivate them to succeed. I, for one, welcome a future of private space flight.
Versus a seven-fold dividend from the space program, you mean?

The answer is: minus six times the program cost.
There's a great C&H collection with tons of commentary [1]. He does talk about the creative process a bit and how he loathes certain aspects of the newspaper industry. I find it all very fascinating and could probably watch an entire documentary series on this guy and what he went through during his career.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=xtiMQXCLdJEC&lpg=PP1...