skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use Google to start the process of finding answers (often with results pointing to SO). But when it comes time to ask a question, I go to SO immediately and almost always get a reasonable answer within a few hours. The more this keeps happening, the more the Googling step will become irrelevant.
Chris Wanstrath - "Rippin' Off Python" (video from RubyConf 2009)
I chose Tallinn because of two primary reasons, firstly Rob lives there, and although I'm kind of an isolated person myself, I didn't feel comfortable living in a city where I didn't have at least one person extremely close to me, and two I went with the assumption that there'd be better quality of life in the larger city. I have since arriving however heard a few times that Tartu is quite a bit more peaceful and still has all the important stuff that Tallinn does so YMMV.
Make them make quizzes one question at a time instead of multiple ? (lower barrier to entry)

Give them an incentive ?

Make it seem like the ability to make a quizz is a privilege awarded only to special users ?

Attach their username to quiz questions that they've added ?

Offer to send them results on how well people scored in their quizzes.

Hope there is anything useful for you in there!

greetings,

Jacques
I read the book "New Ideas from Dead Economists" when I was in college. It's a great read. One of the recurring themes is how economists seem to always predict gloom and doom.
It's Scala code.
If they allowed me to embed their system into my site to provide "smarter" message boards, I would gladly pay them a set-fee/month.

They don't need to care how I monetize my sites.

[Sadly now they do not allow this in any way]
I'm not sure which arguments are worse: Calacanis's cheerleading of Buzz, or this guy's inability to make a point without resorting to calling someone an idiot multiple times.
Are the Wolfenstein graphics and sound files freely available too?
Jeff has to go in the new company. He is a liability for the VC.
I could imagine you could create a book focused around start ups just by extracting the wisdom of the best responses on HN. So much collective knowledge here from smart and accomplished people.
More support for incorporating early is that the date of incorporation is important to some organizations and if you aren't incorporated, they'll simply pass on you.

Having been incorporated for the 5 years prior has value. Of course it depends on what you are selling.

additionally, it protects your personal assets, like your home, if you get sued.
I thought this response was brilliant
The IRS does not set tax policy. Congress does, via legislation. [..] My apologies if you already knew this and were just being imprecise in language.

It's roughly the same here in the UK (though the tax man can choose to "interpret" the laws in his own special way) but I was being more pragmatic than accurate - the tax authorities are the "face" behind these sorts of policies, even if the law makers came up with them :-)
Manage Your Time - Forget Rules, Invent Your Own
Note: parent edited while i was replying. This is in response to the first 2 lines. (who will maintain the robots)

Well, first it can probably be assumed that there will be a few standard robot types. These will be cheaper to replace than to repair. One of the standard robots will be a replacer robot which can swap out all the standard robot types (including other replacer robots).

I presume that the few standard type robots can themselves be assembled by robots. Then it is simply a matter of having two (or more) robotic factories with the necessary stuff to create a robotic factory. Should one factory fail, a robotic robot will become the number 1 manufacturing priority.

Now since the robotic robot factories would become ideal targets for sabatuers and terrorists and the like, a better step would be for each robot to know how to create a robotic robot facotory built in. Then even if both robotic robot factories fail, they can team up with the nearest robots to create a new robotic robot factory.
I've got mixed opinions of StackOverflow.

On the one hand, it's definitely better than ExpertsExchange, and does an adequate job of providing answers to many developer questions.

On the other hand, it's far (far!) from living up to it's potential. The basic premise of the site is that the wisdom of the crowd will separate the gold from the dross; however, the incentives lead to a plethora of mediocre answers which do not converge (Wikipedia-style) towards some platonic ideal, despite Joel's stated wishes to that effect. What's more, there's a well-documented problem ("the fastest gun in the West") whereby the first semi-correct answer will quickly rise to the top, drowning out later (but more correct, more thorough) answers.

In short: they haven't (yet) solved the basic problem of "changing the way people get answers".

What's more, gaining the critical mass of early users was leveraged largely through Joel and Jeff's celebrity. Which is not transferrable to other domains. Which means that the site can't easily scale out.

Based on the preceding, I'd say that VC money is a good way to go-- it should give them the resources to a) solve the basic problem, and b) build subscriber bases in other domains.
Care to explain this a little more?
Well, I suppose your first step is to market to people who need to make quizzes. Who are you marketing to?
French philosopher laid low by "Botulism"
There is one more danger of groupthink and that is, it inevitably leads to an 'us' vs 'them' situation.

Irving Janis (who coined the term) proposed groupthink as a small group dynamic. Yet the collective shifts in perceptions towards target groups and group goals that occurred in Germany, Rwanda or Cambodia are clear examples of groupthink at a national level. The groupthink spreads, becoming a national dogma with an unchallenged world view or view that defines reality.

Human brains have a lot of bugs!
I'm not sure how the rest of it will pan out, but we are right on the cusp of a pretty significant job takeover by robots. Truck drivers.

Consider that we already have vehicles (in prototype) that can outperform a human behind the wheel. Hell, Stanford is sending an Audi TT up Pike's Peak at 100+ mph (http://bit.ly/9akGU1).

And consider that truck drivers are basically meat-based robots anyway inasmuch as they are all practically interchangeable.

Once the first trucking company gets the idea to start replacing drivers, that's going to put them at such an insane competitive advantage that the rest of the industry will have no choice but to follow suit. No downtime, no accidents, far cheaper, no irresponsible behavior.

Once the process is started, the entire delivery driver industry is going to be obsoleted within 12 years.

That will be the first time a massive number of people perk up their eyebrows and start wondering if their job is far behind...
I second this, everyone should be contractors and you should structure it so that they are all, including yourself, are paid on 1099. This requires some special configuration. They should only be in an office a certain percentage of the week and they have to be competent enough to be their own boss, you can't tell them what to do and when, only what you want them to deliver and by when. It's up to them to figure out how to complete all the steps in between.

There are other issues as well, consult an accountant or tax attorney if you want to go this path, because the IRS wants everyone who works with you to be an employee and they could fight you so make sure you have all your ducks in a row.
Compounding Interest
I'm not saying they overthrow statistics, just that real things happen and suddenly statistics don't matter. One crime that hits close to home is more important to you than thousands that don't. And I'm not just talking about murders, I'm talking about simple burglary as well.
Does that mean it happens often enough for us to worry about it?
Someone has been envious on the Vark acquisition :-)

Of course VC makes sense in their case. There is no barrier to entry in this field, the model is clear:

* users tend to type questions in search engines

* search engines tend to rank up exact matches (especially with some trivial SEO like put the question in the title and url)

* given the proper environment, users will help each other answering those questions for free, generating lots of content - exposing ever bigger surface to the search engines
I guess my first question is, how will the site make money? It's only useful to give away gift certificates as an incentive to create quizzes if quiz creation leads to making money.

I'm guessing you plan to make money from ads, which is why you're trying to get more quizzes (so that it will attract more users to take the quizzes). If that's the case, then you also need to account for advertising to actually inform users of newly created quizzes, etc., before figuring out how much to give away for creating quizzes.

As for other ideas to get users to create quizzes, maybe more prominently asking quiz-takers to create quizzes. Adding in more of a narcissism factor for people who create quizzes (I notice you don't even put the creator's name for popular quizzes on the front page).

Another possiblity: get a hold of Ben Huh at Pet Holdings, Inc (of lolcatz, loldogs, and failblog fame), as they seem to be interested in this sort of thing, as shown by their most recent site, http://graphjam.com.
wow. i am so glad I haven't logged into any google products since they launched this. I may create brand new accounts. I don't use gmail, thank goodness!

I knew my reluctance to use Google products would pay dividends.
Regional self sufficiency is exactly what I was writing about; did you miss the part about disconnection from place?

And no, it doesn't contradict notions of comparative advantage. It puts a value on connection to place that the current system has valued at zero. By valuing connection to place you neutralize notions of competitive advantage achieved by absolute mobility.

This doesn't mean physical mobility is a bad thing, it just means that long term connection to a place should be valued. As such it acts as a tempering force against mobility. There's a reasonable middle ground and our system denies that.
The $1K iPhone App Took Just 3 Weeks To Scare The Crap Out Of BarBri
someone needs to do this for shopping.
FWIW, here's a 1983 National Academy of Engineering report on the topic: http://books.google.com/books?id=hS0rAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR1
I suggest that you tune in for the next post, which will discuss the downsides of excess mobility in society, in very specific ways.
Yes, there is plenty of room for improvement. At least make it possible to browse the site by more than one tag and fix the search engine.
I think your analysis is correct, but all of of your criticisms are most likely fixable. They may need lots of tweaking, but overall the concept is solid!
Google wave is a godsend for teams of people who work together. We no longer have to exchange a million emails about a project topic. We all keep it into the wave.

Its not an email alternative. Its and adjunct.
Facebook Data Team: Relationships and Happiness
I paid for TwonkyVision. It was faster and easier to set up than the free alternative (MediaTomb). Saved me time so it was worth the money.
I do agree with your arguments, but regarding robotic scientists:
automation is pretty strong also in science.
combinatorial chemistry is used a lot in chemistry and chip fabrication r&d.
And there's even a robot called ADAM that does biology research: he raises hypotheses , plans and executes experiments , analyzes results , and decides how to continue. the whole research loop.
HCL CEO on alternative management styles
I fear that this argument is too sci-fi to be taken seriously by the overly literal personalities that tend to dominate HN, so let's make it clear: he's not actually saying that "robot scientists" are going to take over. Brain is performing a reductio ad absurdum -- he's taking the other side's argument to the extreme to demonstrate the
fundamental logical fallacies involved.

We don't need to wait for robot scientists to see the consequences of automation -- it's happening right now. Smaller numbers of skilled laborers are replacing larger numbers of unskilled laborers. To make the argumentative leap that this is a sustainable process, you have to prove that somehow, we will dramatically reduce the number of people who depend on unskilled labor to to make a living. I have yet to see a convincing proof that this is occurring. At best, we seem to keep shifting the kind of unskilled labor that we need, and paying less for it.
It is far from perfect, yes, but it's also much better than anything that's come along before.

More and more when I search for solutions to problems I'm having I've been coming up with SO links. And when I do and the SO question is related to my issue I usually get the solution, too.
Worth a read in conjunction with this Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Botul
Scaling at MySpace
No, the data files are copyright by Id. The game is still for sale, e.g. on the 3D Realms website.
It seems to me that we have the resources and technology to solve a lot of problems for good, but a permanent (or even just "better") solution would get in the way of profit. (I saw the documentary "who killed the electric car" recently, which describes one instance of this.)

There was a discussion here on HN a few weeks back about automating and simplifying taxes
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072955

Automating and simplifying certainly seems like the right thing to do - but lots of people would lose jobs. On the other hand, they would be free to do something more productive (in the larger sense, producing value instead of papering over the cracks) and certainly more interesting!

Why can't we just automate away the boring stuff, and just work less? I'd be interested to see if it were possible to open source more than software. (Open source organic farming, anyone?) I know, I know, this is utopian and unrealistic and probably plain silly.

I'm not trying to suggest that we should all go create a hippie commune and get rid of money, but not solving a problem right because of some legalese or pure profit just seems wrong to me!

Another thing that I find perplexing is that the depression doesn't only put people with automatable jobs out of work. My father is an extremely talented craftsman. He builds traditional log cabins, wooden boats, furniture, beautiful houses... Right now he is living in a van, and not-quite eeking out a living picking fruit. He sells a couple hundred lbs of fruit a few days a week. He also shoots deer every once in a while which provides protein.

He's this great resource, but hasn't had a job for well over 2 years. If he didn't have to worry about food, he'd work for the sheer pleasure of creating something useful and beautiful. The thing that confuses and frustrates me is that my father would be delighted to work for free provided that his needs were met (seriously! Food, a beautiful view, a sauna, and some poetry. Seems simple enough, right?)

He loves to build beautiful things, and certainly there are people who need houses (even small log cabins would be an upgrade for many). I don't know what the solution is (obviously). It just seems strange that legal tender or lack thereof could get in the way of creating real value.
Microsoft got the memo.
Google Buzz, Sharks and the jumping thereof
Jeff talks publicly all the time about how much of a fuckup he is, how proud he is that he sort-of figured out something you thought was obvious, how he just can't do anything right. It's his public persona, and the subject matter for his formulaic blog, where posts usually end with an explicit confirmation that it was a waste of your time: http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/nothing-to-say/

He doesn't talk so much about what a successful badass he is (see Joel), despite obviously having accomplished some pretty major shit.
A couple of things I noticed that haven't been mentioned here: Wi-Fi syncing will be great, the animated XBox Live icon is a little annoying.
The glass is half empty? I think you're completely missing the point. It's really up to each community (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Clojure, etc.) to develop their appropriate sections of StackOverFlow. I've been on an Lisp bent lately, mainly Emacs Lisp. Think of a good question and ask it. You'll be throwing down breadcrumbs for the next guy who wants to learn an esoteric language. I've got 86 questions, and the last dozen have been mainly about Lisp, of some flavor.

http://stackoverflow.com/users/5020/melling

I'm going to turn Emacs Lisp into a mainstream developer tool. :-)
I agree the problems are fixable.

The more germane question is, are the problems best fixed via an infusion of VC cash?

In this case, I think the answer is "yes".
"Geeks are good at the things they try." Therefore if geeks try sex they will become good at it ?

I wish they were no flaw in that argument :)

And, oh btw, agreed 100%!
"their inability to make serious revenue"

To somebody like me who doesn't really understand advertising, it seems like the value of an impression ought to be really high for StackOverflow. Based on the tags associated with my userId and the questions I've read, they pretty much know which technologies I use everyday. How much would it be worth for EnterpriseDB (the PostgreSQL folks)to advertise to someone who is wondering how to covert his Oracle database to MySQL? Perhaps, even with 6M users, there are so few people in any coveted niche that the friction overshadows the value?
how could over-production possibly be bad?

Over-production results in a general glut. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_glut

Real demand is still present, but the lack of liquidity in a general glut artificially depresses demand. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke explains:

but the story that captivated Bernanke involved a town full of shoe factories that closed during the Depression, leaving the community so poor that its children went barefoot. "I kept asking, Why didn't they just open the factories and make the kids shoes?

The reason is because the community didn't have anything to offer the factory owners. The factory owners know that the community doesn't have money to pay for shoes, but on the other hand the community would have money if these factories paid them instead of closing the factories.

These problems would go away if anyone could own a factory and have access to the materials, which many people above have said. However, this goes against the tenets of a capitalist free market: where someone is free to own much of the resources/land/factories/IP, which sets the barrier to entry beyond what most people can pay.
There's another good reason to incorporate early: It permits you to set up your financial infrastructure. In order to set up corporate bank accounts and merchant accounts, you'll need to be incorporated. This is critical if you're planning on charging from day one.

If you're not incorporated, you can hack together something using your personal accounts, but this is usually a Very Bad Idea. It's far better to keep things clean by separating out your business and personal finances.

The piece seems to be targeted at startups that are both venture-backed and deferring revenue. Delaying incorporation is probably good advice for those folks. For those of us that are bootstrapping and charging money from the outset, it's far easier to incorporate as soon as is practical.
I've been watching that over time, as a potential data source for http://LangPop.com , and StackOverflow has definitely "improved", but it has historically had a .net/c# bias compared to what turns up elsewhere, just like github has had a Ruby bias, which is slowly fading as github gains in popularity with the developer population at large.
MBA Monday: Compounding Interest
That was perhaps a bit inflammatory... I probably shouldn't have posted it, at least not in that tone and manner.

Certainly college doesn't provide "nothing but networking", nor does going to TED. You learn a lot in the process, sure.

The reason American tuition is so high, however, especially at elite schools, is because a lot of Americans believe that attending the right college is a golden ticket of sorts.

I guess my point is that there's no sense in being indignant about $6000 to attend TED when Americans are willing to spend an additional $250k over the cost of attending a first-rate state university (including the prep high schools required for most people to have a decent chance at the most prestigious college) for the supposed networking advantages.
The Economist had a similar story on the perception that crime is up even though it's considerably down in the UK: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor...

Their two main explanations are:

1. Increasingly nationalized "local" news means that when rare but gruesome crimes happen, instead of just the city or county where they happen being outraged, now the whole country is outraged.

2. A lot of the decrease in violent crime, for the UK at least, is a decrease in violent crime by people known to the attacker, like domestic violence. Crime by strangers is not down nearly as much, and is the kind people mostly mean when they're worried about crime--- they're worried about some guy on the street mugging them, or a robber breaking into their house.
What resources are you implying will help solve the basic problem?
Food, Shelter, Education, and Medicine all fall under the heading of welfare. A well funded library system is often the first piece of a welfare state. Like health care education can be a great boon to society in moderation or a great drag in excess, but just because it can be useful does not mean it's not welfare.
It's not a hard-hitting exposé -- it's just supposed to be a little bit funny.

Sometimes the flaws aren't about details. It's the aura of holiness. Americans seem to think it's good that children have a sort of secular faith in their head of state. I'm not sure why.

I saw this book "Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope" in my local bookstore once, which takes it way over the top. Unintentionally hilarious, or perhaps disturbing. Judge for yourself:

http://www.nikkigrimes.com/books/bkbarack.html
Tax is not forced. The government doesn't force you to pay taxes. They punish you if you don't pay taxes and you earn more money than you spend keeping your business running.

However, there are myriad ways to legally pay zero tax and many people do it every year.
I love the names of the fountains.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/76143995/
I think that's changing in the iPad SDK
Err... apologies. I thought you were unaware of the UnboundMethod class.
How many programmers don't have some form of adblock in their browsers?
You can't embed, that's true. You can pay a set fee and run your own however: http://stackexchange.com/
It gets more exciting when you have companies creating robotic forklifts (http://www.inro.co.nz/automated-forklift/), so the end-to-end manufacturing, loading, shipping and unloading could potentially all be automated.

I wonder if a robo-shipping vessel would be next? With radar, anti-pirating water cannons and no accessible decks, galley, etc it would be a huge boon for shipping. Then again, I don't know how uneventful those journeys are.

Hopefully the govt can step up with some way of re-educating employees obsoleted industries into something that interests those citizens.
I call it "intellectual masturbation." Mutual intellectual masturbation in the case of TED and I participate remotely over the internet in a voyeuristic manner stroking my curiosity as I watch the people on stage.