skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The laws obviously cannot prevent all fraud. But the least they can do is make fraud relatively difficult. Some of the examples you provided were fraud, but they were relatively difficult to pull off, as opposed to what would happen if there were no securities laws. (Some of your examples, were not fraud but just stupid decisions.)

For example Enron had to work hard to fool all those accountants, and as a result one of the largest accounting companies in the world went under and many of its partners are still mired in lawsuits. The banks created a very convoluted system to mislead investors as to the value of their securities, which involved a lot of new legislation, somehow tricking or corrupting the ratings agencies, controlling markets, etc.

So scams happen, but they are not as easy. Of course I think securities laws could stand improvement.

But we do not have the case where there are so many scams on the stock market that everybody assumes that everything is a scam and nobody invests, so the stock market is essentially useless. This is the case for many (actually most) countries.
doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits

Similarly, just because they are "me too" product doesn't mean they won't succeed. It seems that "me too" product is too often played as a trump card to discard new startups.
Ah, so we simply need to match people with work "suitable" for them?

Socrates also wondered about how best divide labor. He couldn't come up with a good argument, so he proposed to invent a lie:

Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are our brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. . . . But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. . . . if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the state, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it?

From: The Republic, Book III.
SpaceShipTwo WhiteKnightTwo fly... (on Earth Day?)
For anyone curious about the quality assurance effort that goes into jQuery UI, take a look at the history of the new autocomplete widget.

I have been following since it was an standalone plugin, and the author cleaned up the design and code so much just to qualify for inclusion into UI. Perfect.

Another high-quality piece of code is jQuery Cycle: http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/
I tried Sinatra after I read RailsSpace and thought, man, I will probably never need most of this, though I'm glad it's around in case I do. I think of Sinatra as a layer on Rack that can do views and things, and that plus plain ruby gets me far enough on the server side. I usually like to use files for storage when I can get away with it anyway (yeah warning not scaleable warning). The online Sinatra book is great too, it had answers to all of my early questions.
Why do you think that the article's popularity reflects badly on HN or HN's current users?

Sure it's provocative (maybe deliberately so, maybe not), but it's also well-written and engaging. I won't argue about the writing, but engaging should be pretty obvious: almost everyone involved in this thread disagrees with the author, but they're all clearly involved in the debate, right?
The dos xcopy command. Command line globbing seems like a great idea until you find out the hard way that command lines have a maximum length.
Dick Costolo (Twitter COO) on Stock Options Acceleration
I'm really not a fan of the webapp framework. Like you said, it's quite verbose - but more importantly, it runs out of steam very quickly - the moment you need to do anything useful with cookies, for example.
Well, it's free to read the website and they haven't quite figured out how to make much on the ads. It's extremely difficult to make enough money off ads to support a world-class team of reporters (or even just a world-class web team!)

People have written many books on this stuff, but I personally don't think it's even possible to make as much off ads online as they used to make off print a few decades. On top of that, the NYTimes biggest advertisers used to be national retailers, auto retailers, real estate, and finance companies. Those also happen to be the sectors hardest hit by the current recession.
Very true. I became a math major in college because it was the only technical discipline where I didn't have to deal with numbers. I calculate the standard deviation the same way everyone else does, I plug the numbers into Excel, but I know what's going on under the hood and I have a better understanding of what the result means. For example, the standard deviation of the sample versus the standard deviation of the mean came up the other day.
I've been doing crossfit for six months on my own. I got good results, but lately I am feeling it is getting harder to do it and i feel I am not improving as much. Today, I am planning to start with MMA training. It just feels like more fun, now that I've got a good general fitness base.
What is the purpose of college? If the aim of attending college is to have a credential which will lead to a job post-graduation, then we ought to axe about 2/3rds of humanities majors. If the aim is to pursue knowledge for knowledge sake and "learning how to think," WHILE simultaneously building a resume and connections, the case can be made more easily for things like journalism school. It sounds to me like the author focused too heavily on a belief in the intrinsic value of the journalism degree... why not launch your journalism career while in school?
I really like the new development of goinstall - a package manager for Go. I especially like the choice of native support for GitHub, BitBucket and Google Code.
The article is about what happened to the core developers of MySQL, not its users.
wow, this is awesome.

but please track Spoon :) - or is this algorithmically choosing bands?

i find the roll over for last.fm / spotify exceptionally jarring - how about icons to the right of the spark lines or something?
Daily Telegraph not tabloid enough for you? ;)
hmm, like what? I've used cookies extensively with it.
In praise of the OMB's prizes for technological innovation
I'm hoping that Crocodoc does well because I have a need for their product in a few projects I'm working on. I think there's a need for an alternative to Print2Flash which is pretty much abandoned as near as I can tell. They seem to just collect payments and not respond to emails. They don't really compete with them exactly now but if they did that could be good for them.
In C# query syntax, you write in this order:

from where select

I like it that way; it happens to already match the way my mind plans a relational query.
He did not criticize. He just said he was not impressed. Frankly how often are you impressed with a product other than yours? Not so many times.

As for Zenedy. I think they are following the Demand Media model, and that has proven to be a business that generates a lot of money.

Do not discount affiliate marketers. If you look at startups that operate affiliate businesses they tend to become quickly profitable (frugalmechanic, ticketstumbler etc..)
Sean Grove (sgrove) also works there
What the Mafia can teach us about Corporate Fraud
His site has a console mode...and its pretty awesome. I've never really heard great things about "The Joy of X" books but if the books are as excellent as his blog posts I may have to chip in.
I think that the long-term benefits of elevated consciousness are worth $40.
I did. The sounds were relaxing but the talking was disruptive. Even with my sound settings maxed out, I couldn't hear what he was saying, so the voice was doubly distracting. That said, the software might be worth it if there is no mellow, therapy-guy yakking in the background.
Startup CEO's message at DEMO: 'The Internet is dying'
> for an educated liberal young person to write about accepting a working-class Spanish-speaking working mother as her peer is not really any different from writing about how pretty, thin, or well-educated she is. That is to say, whether it's true or not, it's in bad taste.

Isn't the whole point, "I used to think there was a distinction before and I used it to discriminate, but now I realize that I was wrong?" How is that message in bad taste?

{edit} For example, if someone in the 1860s (or even 1960s) said something like : "Black people are just the same as I am. I used to think different and think that they were below me, but now I realize that skin color isn't everything." Your response would be something like: "That comment is in bad taste. You're just trying to emphasize the fact that you're white and not black!" In other words, that 'whoosh' sound you hear is the point of the whole thing going over your head.
Prior to getting the Mindfold, how long did it typically take for you to fall asleep at night?
Heh heh heh... first thing that ran through my mind as I started reading the article and looked at the banner above it :)
I am deeply sorry.
It's tempting to play armchair investor and criticize YC's choices, but they've been doing this for a few years now and if at first you don't understand the choices, dig deeper.

For me, it seems at first glance to be a good mix. A few pretty obvious starting business models for some, really good synergy between the groups with their ideas, and in general it seems to reflect the scope intended for seed stage start ups.

Sure not all of them are at first glance overly ambitious in trying to change the world, but I'm also not convinced that a good majority of them can't end up doing just that.

Many of them fit perfectly with YC's philosophy of "intuitive hacks" that a group could bang out and try to build traction for in a three/four month incubator time frame.
A neo expert is a "new expert". It could be thought of as describing the type of people he is talking about as a "new breed of expert", unless I am sorely mistaken.

However, I agree that the word "expert" itself is rather disingenuous. Just like the term "hacker", it (as stated in other comments) is not generally considered a description one could apply to oneself, and (still just like "hacker") it means many different things based on context and user.

A good decision, in my opinion, would be to phase out use of "expert" except in instances where you want to imply that a person has a lot of experience in a particular area (so "he is an expert computer scientist" == "he has a lot of experience with computer science"). The term "professional" could be only used to label people who are what we currently call a "consummate professional": someone who is skilled in many areas relating to their field of expertise and to business and people skills in general.
I did 36-miler as I recall four times, found it to be essentially an extended marathon. I did a 50-miler once and did not feel the urge to go back for more--just too long. I did meet a friend in the last hundred or so yards, a woman for whom I later served as handler at the Old Dominion 100; however, she was an unusual type, one who came into her own out past about 40 miles.

I will say that one would be reckless to do a road race out beyond 40 miles with a support crew of at least one person to bring dry clothing & fluids, perhaps snacks. At the Old Dominion 100, the runner could have a companion starting at mile 75 one year and 66 another--people were crossing Massanutten Mountain in the dark and exhausted, and the organizers were aware of the hazards that presented.
He may have been hoping to see a demo, like some fancy dummy javascript or (gasp) flash. I mean, whatever your real report is, but in a popup or a cool DOM inlay or whatever.
Jonah Lehrer: Why We Dream
Why China Is An Incubator For Female Billionaires
Yup! Actually quit a few hn users working here, it's been a great experience, and I'm looking forward to working with Adam now that he's come onobard with us as well. He demoed Windmill to us, and we were all blown away - the guy knows what he's doing.
The clouds of unknowing
If COCA is less than first months earnings you have nigh infinite cash until you run out of channel. If Google found me ten million dollars worth of ads I'd have a stressful month doing daily credit card payments and calls to bank, but it would end with fifteen million in pocket and more miles than I want to think about.
yeah...i totally agree with you...rather i say, we should pass a law and punish those f'kin genius bastards for being smart. Lets just force them to innovate and sell it to the society for free...after all they owe us...
hmm .. hmm .. ohh wait but what if they go on strike..
shrugs .. who cares?
You've missed the point of my post entirely. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

The point is that all of the skills you just listed will be obsolete eventually. To say they will not be obsolete is to bury one's head in the sand.

The question is, if all skills will be obsolete then what are people to do except be flexible?
Too many start-ups! 26 really? Hard for many to stand out and get good coverage/press.

Pardon if that's a downer of a comment I do wish all best of luck!
I think you should just ignore his 'IQ' comments and treat it as people having skills. She has skills/training/knowledge that she gained in university and on the job before being forced to work other jobs that exercise none of her skills. We don't necessarily need to 'match people with their skills' in Futurama-esque "job-chip" type way, but isn't it a waste of resources to have her spend time and money gaining skills/knowledge that will never be put to use?
Brainwave entrainment java app:

http://pantheon.yale.edu/~bbl2/GnauralJavaApplet_signed.html
Digg: 40x Performance Increase by Sorting in PHP Rather than MySQL
Unsophisticated users "fucking themselves" was a huge problem in OS X's early years (and only petered out with the horde of switchers 3-4 years ago), mostly thanks to the aggressive efforts of these folks: http://unsanity.com/

It was an extraordinarily similar situation: tons of expected features were left out of the new OS, and large parts of the UI changed substantially from what old users were habituated to. The most popular 'Haxie' by far was Windowshade, which restored the old window minimization metaphor of collapsing into the titlebar, and was installed by millions of mostly elderly people. Unfortunately, that whole class of extensions worked by means of a kernel extension that diddled with the address spaces of every binary and interposed itself in core GUI library code. They fucked over not just the users, but anyone who had to support any application on their systems.

If they allowed you to easily install apps from other sources, they'd be right back in that boat immediately and they know it.

A fringe group of users (and handset manufacturers) have been fucking themselves for years on Windows Mobile: http://www.xda-developers.com/ -- and they've had an exodus to Android, where they have access to a lot more consumer users that would think of installing their stuff.
http://www.pzizz.com/wp-content/uploads/audio/Default%20Slee...
I guess, I just hear some version of the startups not being impressive, interesting or whatever else enough each time. I don't think his point was, I'm not impressed because its not mine, I think his point was he was disappointed.

There's nothing wrong with affiliate marketing, I'm just a little surprised to see the YC funding the old "pick area, get low quality freelance content, build search rank, sell affiliates" model.
Whoops. Here, have a widget

javascript:location='http://translate.google.com/translate?u='+encodeURIComponent(location);

Paste that as the location for a new bookmark, and save it to your toolbar for a handy bookmarklet. I'm enthused.
the story is actually pretty recent, he was awarded the Millennium prize last Thur, the previous one he declined was back in 2006. but figuratively speaking this story goes back to Diogenes, so yes, it is old
PHP Address Parser Class
It still (like most of the widgets) only goes 90% of the way and lacks things like gmail/facebook-style multiple items by comma separation. The worst thing is that the properties exist (multiple: true) but are not utilised as yet. Instead when an item is selected you have to dump it in a recipient field.
No idea why you got downmodded --- perhaps for the crack about OS kernels, though. Every mainstream OS kernel is C.
Innovation and govt.: your say?
Just wanted to stimulate discussion on this topic
Hilarious. Doesn't seem that useful as evidenced by him not being able to not smile. He should make an LOL version of this though!
Very very nicely done :)

Please don't get offended, but the color scheme seems rather jarring. Any chance you can change that? Or give an option to?

Great job!
I disagree with that view. That is not what America set out to be nor will any American settle for that. Mobility of all sorts has been inculcated into us for decades (one could argue since the foundation of the nation itself). This is different than many countries, where "duty" is upheld over personal fulfillment and improvement. It's our belief in possibilities that drives America and makes it unique among nations. And I don't say this in a cheerleading manner. This is why people come here. It's not just the money. It's the freedom to do things.
I disagree. You need to know how food behaves, not why. You need to know how an onion will taste after different processes, not what molecular changes it's gone through. Equally being able to explain the maillard reaction or knowing what Myoglobin is won't help you cook a decent meal.
Art of Problem Solving Publishes Calculus Textbook
Hey, pretty cool. I had no idea about the (-> ... ... ) macro. I loved how F# (and Haskell) made that same thing really easy, but it turns out Clojure did too. Heh.

Now if only I could get it working on Windows.
nope, I'm only that rambly when exhausted but not able to fall asleep.
Answered in reverse order: I'd have done market research first. They all failed because the intended market didn't exist and I couldn't afford to retarget.

The ideas:

1) Unrealty, a 3D real estate startup. This was tech-driven: Quake 2 and Unreal had recently been released, and I was doing consulting for a real estate developer. Unreal Engine 1 had compelling outdoor scene capabilities, the ability to link areas in a map to and from the web via URLs, and other things. Why not build 3D models of commercial real estate, and have real 3D virtual tours with text and voice chat, AI NPCs who could give "tours" of properties, and link things in the level to web-based stuff like web admin consoles for HVAC systems (or whatever)?

So I built all of this. We had some success, mostly due to the novelty. NASA used it for a commercialization demo around the ISS. There was another startup that had us develop even more interesting tech like an in-game web browser and player view tracking for in-game, clickable, ad-served billboards (in 1999!). But, ultimately, it failed because I was not a salesperson, and we didn't hire any salespeople, and architects are generally only interested in doing the amount of work the client needs, and the client (real estate developers) are used to seeing drawings, and the client's clients (tenants) are always going to visit the site in person anyway, so there wasn't really a market.

2) Infrastructure for supporting "developer networks," like an MSDN, an API platform community, etc. The problem here is that the infrastructure is the easy part. The hard part is either convincing yourself that you're not a product company any more, you're a middleware company and you have to support your developers really well; or to pay a lot of money to hire dedicated support people (who pretty much have to be really good developers) and then pay them even more money to not go work for your clients once they've learned all there is to know about your middleware or API. If you can do one or the other, you don't need the infrastructure because you'll sort that yourself pretty quick; and if you can't, you don't need the infrastructure, because you don't believe in it.

3) Dorm Duffle. Ever go to a Target or a Wal-mart during the weeks leading up to a new semester? The shelves are bare from all the parents and kids buying shampoo and conditioner and soap and notebooks and backpacks and towels and on and on and on. Wouldn't it be nice if all the essentials were waiting for you at your dorm? A big, military-style duffle bag. All you need is your personal effects, books and clothes. Mom and Dad breathe a sigh of relief, and Junior has a sweet college-branded duffle bag to hide the bodies in.

Coming from the northeast, that sounds like a pretty good deal, of course I'll pay to have someone else do some boring work for me.

But we actually tried it out in the southwest, and got only 1 response. Not 1% from our mailing to the parents of over 15,000 incoming freshmen. 1 single order. Our theory was that in the southwest, culturally, going shopping for kids is something you do, it's important. But I was too broke to follow up.

C'est la vie.
no. I really have better things to do with my time, like building real products and make $$.

I did these stuff of things back in college, ACM contests and all. Time to grow up and build real things.
The energizer one was the one I used for napping, rather than the sleep one, fyi.
Perhaps the old distinction between the wise man and the pedant is what you are after.
Tumblr's business model...
I don't think that has the impact that you think it does. I'm not saying I believe this now but the one of the first things I learned in life is that rich people will lie to you. They feel guilty about being where they are so they'll tell you that you can be like them when in fact they'll never really accept you.

You're probably right. There are some poor people who work to send their kids to college thinking that it will solve all their kid's problems. But I think most know better and so I think a lot of that outreach falls on deaf ears.

(Which incidentally isn't to say my parents didn't encourage me to go to college. Because much of society has set "having a degree" up as a litmus test for "is smart enough to have a career". But they made sure I knew enough to learn from my professors expertise while not adopting their flawed valued system)
500 error :(
Are these countries trying to kill the Internet?
While I understand why they have to do this, I hate those types of names.
Sinatra has had etag support for years; longer than Rails (http://bit.ly/9rBLut now http://bit.ly/d3ir1T). Sinatra is well suited for large apps. I suggest using it for them. :)
:) just tried it, its pretty cool, but has a lot of false negatives. Opening my mouth was enough to trigger a smile and I can't even make a real smile. It was cool that it have a false trigger when I frowned.
How Common is Co-Founder Salary Inequality?
Ah, yes. In 1943 my father was in basic training at Camp Lee. His sergeant described it as "Camp Cupcake, the country club of the U.S. Army."
As a math guy I know I'm guilty of looking at a problem and trying to map it to a general math problem, solving that problem, and then trying to map that solution back into code, when really I just should have gone for the brute force three line for loop. When you know enough math you tend to see everything as a potential math problem, and sometimes that can get you into trouble.