skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You just said a lot of what I was thinking.

Metronomes of course, have been around forever. As early as the 70's a lot of bands started syncing to an electronic source. Especially the prog bands, with excellent drummers, who were versatile enough to sync at will to the arpeggiators on analog synths. And even those arpeggiators often had tempo drift due to the analog electronics.

I looked in the archive for this article -- an amazing collection of data by the way -- and found U2 tracks with tempo variations all over the map:

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRKYQTC123E85932E2&#...

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRZFYJM123E85816BE&#...

And then others, just a year or two earlier in their career, more "machine"-like:

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRYMXDV123E8593F96&#...

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRJTTTN123E8593796&#...

This project has created some amazing data, but I don't agree with all the conclusions at face value. Some of the stuff that is labeled as too machine-like, is well within the discipline of a lot of drummers. Meanwhile modern click tracks can be easily programmed to speed up and slow down throughout a track. In fact, it's done all the time.

EDIT: One other thing, some of the most interesting intentional tempo variations occur in the cycle of measures, phrases, and sections. The data presented here, only measured in seconds, doesn't track that relationship which would be the most musically interesting thing. It would be a good experiment to listen to some of these tracks with a prompt following the timeline in real time.
37signals has taken an investment from Bezos Expeditions. As Jason Fried explains in the blog post, it was certainly not the standard VC deal though - http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
I got a robot-related ad also. It's not a coincidence, Google must know that 320 Pioneer way is the HQ of Anybots and show related ads.
If in this theory though one person was able to make all the worlds food, they would would in turn employ the people so they would have something to give back for the food, it would be in the single food producers interest to put as many people to work as possible.
The "fastest gun in the west" problem is really only an issue if you want an answer within one day of asking the question. Long term I haven't noticed it being a big deal. Over time, if a question is relevant, good lower ranked answers will rise to the top even if faster, lower quality answers were voted up initially.

The worst case scenario is a question which is perfectly written such that it garners attention from experienced folks who know what they're talking about for only a tiny amount of time, and ever after only garners attention (via google searches, for example) from clueless noobs who can't judge the quality of the answers (and don't have the rep. on the site to vote answers up or down anyway). However, this is a pretty contrived scenario which doesn't play out often in real life. Important questions will garner attention by people with a range of experience and qualifications, which will have the side effect of improving the quality of answers over time through future voting etc.
Brain drain problem? What, all the entrepreneurs are moving to India and I didn't hear about it? ;-)

The US may be "hostile" to newcomers -- you're right, we do have stupid patent laws and some of the business taxes can seem ridiculous -- but then again, most countries have stupid patent laws (see the WIPO) and many many countries tax business at much more aggressive rates.

Even more importantly, if we're talking about technology: Silicon Valley has never been replicated full-scale. Yes, there are pockets. But what draws people to Northern California -- aside from the unique culture, natural beauty, and the weather -- is that there has been an innovation pow-wow going on since Hewlett and Packard took to the garage. People want in on that, especially if they're into innovation themselves.

There are more startups starting up right now, especially here in CA, than I've seen in years. Not all will innovate, but many will, and at least some of that innovation will stick and maybe even change the world.

No innovation? Really? Has this guy seen the frickin' iPod? Oh, and heard of Twitter? (Just to name some easy examples.)
Another option is to collect a group of your friends, family, and various non-technical users and just give them a few tasks to do on your website. If the site is usable then most people in the group will be able to complete the tasks.

As a technical user, I'm finding that some users struggle with the most basic things on the web so you should always base your usability tests on your target market. (seems obvious but frequently forgotten)
Could be... grumble grumble nda grumble can't say for sure..... :P
So then, given the current state of software patents (seems like they're difficult to attain and even more difficult to defend) how are you supposed to put up barriers to entry as a consumer web company? Are there examples of web/internet companies in the last 5-10 years that have succeeded by following #1?
That's pretty much how I think of it, but I've also gotten a 39% gain with it over the past year or so.
Why do they feel the need to publicize their desire to raise money? Surely they can get their foot in the door of potential VC's based on Joel's reputation with Fog Creek alone, so what do they gain by announcing that they are looking for investment and giving a bunch of reasons why it's the right thing for StackOverflow? Why not just quietly raise the money and then, if/when they get funded, announce it along with the reasons?
My comment was referring to NSTextView which is present in OSX/Cocoa. NSTextView is extremely powerful and feature-rich. UITextView is.... not so much, of course. :)
endtwist- Adding some chat bots to the demo instead of linking anonymous users could solve this problem. http://www.alicebot.org/downloads/programs.html
What exactly is it about Stack Overflow that Joel can't pay for himself with his own funds? What kind of hiring does he want to do to make it any bigger?

These are the precise questions that we can't presume to know the answers to. Joel probably has very good answers to these and more questions, and is using them during VC pitches right now. Just because his ideas are not obvious to us doesn't mean he doesn't have something good in mind.
If I may permit myself a pun, DHH is right on the money.

VC funding makes no sense for Stack Overflow.
Maybe there's a business opportunity here in vanity StreetView shots?
2010 Social Media Marketing Report
Customer Buying Hierarchy
Free creates its own problems that stand in the way of innovation.
Usually the app just gets rejected if someone uses an undocumented feature. Jailbreakers or people developing just for fun or using the adhoc or (I think) corporate deployment method don't go through the approval process and therefore can't get banned/rejected. So for people in those situations, it's fun to know how to do it.
whereas most people experienced catastrophe over the last year or so. commodities move inversely to cash investments.
Well, here's an example of a search that can be done with regexes, but not with a simple boolean word/phrase search:

Find a word/phrase (not)followed closely but not immediately by another word/phrase, with arbitrary characters in between (regexes would allow you to specify exactly how many arbitrary characters between these words/phrases there were).

For each of the constituent words/phrases, regexes also allow alternatives to be specified. I suppose the same could be done with multiple ordinary searches, but regexes make doing this much easier and more convenient.

With regexes you can search for fragments of a word. I've seen some ordinary search engines sometimes automatically search for a root word with various endings, but that's not quite the same.

Something else that regexes allow that no ordinary search engine does (as far as I know) is searching for non-alphanumeric characters. This can be a lifesaver, to disambiguate some words, or to make sure you're only searching for something at the beginning or end of a sentence (or in a heading, maybe delimited by a dash or a colon).

Those are just a few things off the top of my head. I'm sure lots of other use-cases would present themselves, once you started using such search engines regularly (pardon the pun).
Higher average productivity is great, but the problem America has at the moment is an ever-widening gap in income, and very little political will to do anything about it. An important passage in the article:

William Felkin, in his History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures (1867), tells us (though the statement seems implausible) that the larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years.

If this is true it is a big deal. Suppose you invent a device that will double economic output while putting half the population out of work. There's no question the device needs to be put to use, but something needs to be done about all these displaced people as well. Much of the surplus in productivity borne of your invention will need to be used to help those people switch to other work, allow them to retire early, etc. In other words you will be taxed heavily, something which is very hard to do these days in the States. So the American worker seems especially vulnerable to displacement by automation, and you get this scapegoating of machinery. If you don't like it, next time you hear some jerk on the radio bleating about high taxes and socialism, think about where that money might be going, and vote accordingly.
This is like when someone calls in to call in radio show about how the new way of qualifying for the rugby world cup asking "should we really be encouraging our kids to play such a violent game?" OK. Good Question. We can talk about that next week. Today we're talking about qualifying matches. Most people who listen to this show like rugby, so we probably will keep relying on the assumption that rugby is fun and we should keep doing it.

Yes. There is an assumption that employment is better then unemployment, indirectly. The point being challenged (automation causes unemployment) assumes that unemployment is bad and the counterargument goes on assuming that. It doesn't (as you suggest) assume that employment is the only possibly important thing in the world.

If you would like to make the case that employment is not good or that automation is bad for some reason not related to employment, go ahead. It is perfectly reasonable to write that article with the assumptions that it made.
I think it is more of a point of the success of the platform. Plays-for-Sure was a failure, so it is being fazed out.

You have the same issue with any DRM'd media. I can only put my iTunes music to x number of mac devices. You bought a license, not the media. This is the whole reason why DRM sucks.
In fact, it's recent enough that my great grandfather (who was born in 1908) never went to high school. His formal education ended in the 8th grade, and that was plenty good enough for him.
That document was written for Norwegian resistance fighters during the occupation by Nazi Germany.[1]

You can tell from its reference to "Quislings", which were the collaboration government (like Vichy France) of Norway at the time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Norway_by_Nazi_Ge...
The startups recently are probably partly due to the decline, and the projected improvement. People with money can capitalize on cheap locations to do what they want, because the people who don't have money are gone.

And they're not all moving to one place, and of course there's evidence both ways, but smart people typically want to educate their kids well. Our schools have been slipping a lot for quite a while. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is catching up rapidly for the first time in who knows how long. How much you equate to coincidence and how much to causes A-ZZ varies by person, of course, but I really do think this is part of it.
I don't know why Joel used Starbucks as his example of why land grab makes sense for StackOverflow. Starbucks, like McDonalds, is all about location/location/location. So it is literally needing capital for a land grab.

Websites are never about a land grab. Especially when talking about creating just a network of sites for individual niches.
No, people in open relationships post fewer status updates with "happy" words. They also post fewer status updates with "unhappy" words. So, we might be lead to conclude that people in open relationships choose, for whatever reason, to expose their emotions in status updates less often than others. That doesn't particularly mean they have fewer emotions, positive or negative than anyone else.

You also see this strongly in the "widowed" category, who have dramatically less happy or unhappy postings.
"Welcome! To the World of Tomorroooww!"
I've just recently gotten into using usertesting.com to get quick feedback on the usability of my product. It's extremely valuable to get an idea of how other users are interacting with software, and helps guide where we need to make improvements.

As the article mentions, it also helps our team to get on the same page. If left to ourselves we'd debate for a long time on how certain things should work. Once we see the user testing videos it's painfully obvious what needs to be done, and then we all get to work making it better. Down at the bottom there's some good tips for usertesting I'm looking forward to giving a try
They've created a great platform and established no way to make money off it. It is like Twitter in the early days, but like DHH said, it has the disadvantage of being on a thousand different niche websites instead of one aggregate.

One possible way to still make a good return off it is take the Twitter path of getting VC money with the hopes of finding some revenue stream down the road. Maybe they can come up with a similar search deal?
It's worth pointing out that the 4 graphs on the page have different normalizations, which makes naive comparisons between them misleading.
Probably more like "I have have HD reception" - opting out of ads improves your experience a great deal.
Buzz: Control-Release
Starbucks wasn't about a literal grab for land. it's not that hard to find locations for coffee shops. It was a grab for a piece of culture.

The US didn't have enough coffee houses with good coffee and that kind of an atmosphere. If Starbucks had taken 10 years to get to LA, there would have been Starbucks-like coffee houses there by that time.
Simply put, I counted 6 people reporting this here (I am one). My attempt to estimate how many people read this: X HN daily actives, each looks at Y threads a day (random out of 30 they see), one in Z posts to the thread.

Quick check with Alexa gave me something on the order of 2 million for X, that seems really high to me, let's say X=100k (even this seems very generous). Y and Z are pretty tricky, using a gut guess of Y = 5 and Z = 10:

6 * Z / ((Y * X) / 30 ) = (6 * Z * 30) / (X * Y) =
6 * 10 * 30 / (100000 * 5) = 0.0036 = 0.36%

0.36% of the HN audience. Very back-of-the-envelope.
I don't get why they don't raise a small amount (750-1mil) from some insanely smart angels.
Zebra Imaging has developed a holographic display that is capable of interactively generating natural true-3D images

So... no tech demos in existence? You'd think they'd be proud to show it off, especially as a video would reveal extremely little-to-nothing that competitors could steal.

Shenanigans?
If I were told "Here's several million dollars, an Answers platform, and a mandate to make a super-scalar return", I would immediately start trying to pull off Demand Media, starting each property with a core of content produced by cheap freelancers and then thickening them out with real UGC as they gained traction in the search engines. The million get spent on the freelancers and on having my crack team of engineers build a search prediction algorithm so that I know, e.g., what the top three questions about birdfeeders and the highest payout topics are.

The resulting company looks very, very different than what StackOverflow looks like... but it would make sense, I guess. (Major risk of getting annihilated by Google in the next 12 months but, hey, not my money.)

I generally yield to no one in my agreement against "land grab" economics. However, this space actually is a land grab. Maybe it isn't obvious to DHH because DHH doesn't really need to worry about the nuts and bolts of SEO all that much, but Demand Media can create a page for $15 and sell $40 of ads on it this year (it will still be there next year). That model scales to the effing moon, at least until Google gives them the smackdown.
For those that read the article and not the comments, the following link was provided to rebut the idea that reporting from Der Spiegel and the Times was uncovering something previously secret:

http://www.risk.net/risk-magazine/feature/1498135/revealed-g...

The question here is not what Goldman did wrong but why the ECB didn't take any action when this really was news.
Quoting from the article:

"There are a few indicators for the type of company that I believe can benefit from, and should take, VC."

Which means, the list in his article of companies that can benefit is more academical, and each of these may not apply to StackOverflow.

The response from 37signals is a bit presumptuous in the sense that it assumes Joel means //all// of these apply to StackOverflow.
So you probably didn't look at all.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-ha...
20 ad agencies in Belgium go on strike,  produce artful protest
The problem certainly isn't that "education" is ruining peoples' lives. It's that the way our schools are structured (with the exception of some private schools), they're almost certain to squeeze anything resembling creativity and free thought out of a child before he learns his multiplication tables. One of the fundamental functions of schools seems to be to keep kids occupied, lined up in rows of desks, while their parents are at work.

I think the reason we could get away with this type of educational system in the industrial era is that factory work doesn't require a whole lot of knowledge or critical thinking skills. For that matter, neither does low-level management at most companies (I'm thinking of the "shop foreman" or "team leader" type positions here).

Educating people for a knowledge economy is likely to be more labor-intensive than the 30+ student per teacher classrooms we see sometimes in public schools today. So far, the best model I've seen that even comes close to educating children to be creative, critical thinkers without fundamentally denying what it means to be a child is the Montessori model. Unfortunately, the Montessori model isn't a practical one upon which to base the entire country's education system right now, in no small part because there just aren't enough teachers to make it work.

I really wish I had the answer, but I don't.
Ask HN: How to manage costs for Twilio apps?
So, I'm running into a dilemma. I just wrote a Twilio App that I think is kinda cool.

The problem is that Twilio can be expensive, and I can't immediately think of any plug-and-play advertising solutions for use with audio / phone applications (such as Adsense for the web). I really want to show my friends this thing, but I'm afraid the costs will spiral out of control.

What are your suggestions on how to make money to offset the costs for web applications that are built on services such as Twilio?
data mining seems like one of the least offensive things they could do with my data. as is clear in the report, since it's all aggregated information, there's no information tied to any person. i might be concerned that someone at facebook could read my status updates, but lets be honest, many employees at facebook probably have the ability to read my status updates anyways.
Welcome to Hacker News, where the conspiracy theories roam wild and free.

There's something funny about GW deniers. They call themselves "skeptics". But, by definition, "skeptic" is someone that doesn't believe in something, not someone that strongly believes in its opposite. They're not "skeptics" in the sense of "not-yet-convinced" but rather deniers as in true-believer on the opposite.
Question: Why does the iPhone still have the best touchscreen in the industry?
It's hard not to be condescending about this but this is super basic: Video is hard if it is not hardware accelerated.

Apple refuses to provide a public api for this, so flash video needs a lot of CPU time on OSX.

All cell phones that allow flash video will have hardware acceleration and will not have a problem with it.
That's a fair point in general, but you didn't make clear in your example that you were choosing one of the worst times someone could have invested in Gold. I don't think this takes away from your argument -- it's just that I would suggest specifying whether your data point was arbitrary or carefully chosen to make your point. I think this would make your general argument stronger.

I think the most interesting, non-arbitrary comparison would be an investment starting in 1971, because this whole discussion is really about a fiat currency system versus gold, and how people value gold relative to such a system. 1971 is when the U.S. went completely off of Gold to a fiat system.

At the end of 1971, a few years after Gold started trading on open markets, the price was $41.25 an ounce [1]. Today, it is $1,100 an ounce [2]. That is a 26 fold increase.

At the end of 1971, the DJIA was $900 a share [3]. Today, it is $10,000 a share [3]. That is an 11 fold increase.

Gold outperformed our current dollar system, since its inception, by more than two fold.

That's not to mention the fact that you didn't have to do anything with Gold -- you just held it. With our dollar system, you'd be a fool to just hold the dollars themselves (because of inflation), so you are forced to speculate in the stock market or other risky vehicles.

[1]: http://www.measuringworth.org/datasets/gold/
[2]: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/gold.html
[3]: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=INDEXDJX:DJI
The startups recently are probably partly due to the decline, and the projected improvement. People with money can capitalize on cheap locations to do what they want

Spot on. Also, they want to take advantage of the downturn -- history has shown that if you make a successful startup in a downturn, when the economy comes back, it brings the company with it. Google's an example.
X-Men Universe Relationship Map
Wondering how it effects the SmartPhone industry...

RIM/Nokia: Should be worried. They're jockeying over last place in the SmartPhone modernity contest these days. Hasn't hurt them much yet but it's hard to see how that lasts forever. Nokia is probably in better shape than RIM here.

Palm: Good try. Consider Open Source and/or licensing before it's too late.

Apple: Probably not much to worry about for now but they shouldn't get complacent with the iPhone platform. My biggest question here is how big of a distraction the iPad was for Apple internally. Do we have a major iPhone revision and a strong software update in the works or another minor hardware bump with a merely evolutionary OS update? If they stay off Verizon for another year (at least) it could really start to hurt iPhone sales. The iPhone is no longer so far ahead of the pack that you'd suffer with bad coverage to use it.

Android: Not much for Google to worry about but I think a lot of third party handset makers will put some resources back into Windows Mobile devices. Even more so with the existence of the N1.
They don't have to ask you since you already gave them permission.
But that doesn't really get to the point of the article- why were there fewer real things happening when more people were getting victimized?