skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mind the higher prices, but they do need to add features to compensate.

$10 was a hard-sell because it was only available on platforms Amazon feels like supporting, only has the features Amazon feels like supporting (no search? no annotation?) can't be lent, can't be resold/gifted/donated, etc.

FairPlay is (slightly) more consumer-friendly as a DRM package, but I'm still bound to the 'blessed' apps of the service, the features and platforms they feel like supporting, still can't resell/gift/donate, etc.

Again, it's not price that keeps me away from most ebooks. It's price/performance. I still buy a few. Here and there. But I'm not building a library of the things the way I have with mp3 and h264.
Why exactly wouldn't you touch iPhone development with a ten-foot pole? Do you dislike Apple Inc., or don't trust your ability to design mobile apps that are worth paying for, or what?
For those you can't make it, I'll try to have a copy of the interview up on YC's blog by the end of the day!
Lets compare this to the profitability of the countries (dollars mean billion dollars). I'm not an economist so I don't know whether this makes sense at all.

Country selfemployed export import net
========================================
Greece 35.9% $27 $82 $-55 (ouch)
Italy 26.4% $369 $358 $+11
Portugal 24.2% $58 $88 $-30
Spain 17.7% $216 $293 $-77
Germany 12.0% $1,187 $1,022 $+65
Netherlands 12.4% $398 $359 $+39

EU ~13%* $1,952 $1,690 $+262
US 7.2% $995 $1,445 $-450

* I eyeballed this from the data in the PDF posted above

So within the EU there doesn't seem to be a positive correlation between net income of a country and self employment (or if there is one it's negative), except maybe that self employment is higher in the EU than in the US and net income of the EU is positive whereas net income of the US is negative (Anyone want to make a table of the full data set? Export and import can be found on wikipedia and self employment in the PDF posted above).

Offtopic: While browsing wikipedia I found this: External debt of Luxembourg is 4,973.68% of GDP (not kidding). Is this something to be very scared about if you live in Luxembourg, or is it not a big problem? Can somebody with a understanding of the matter explain this? :) Edit: Oh I think I get it: it's the amount they borrow, not the net amount of lending/borrowing.
The app looks amazing. However, I think this will be the Google Voice of the iPad. Under review ad infinitum, always possible never approved :-)
The universe is a quantum computer
"The Windows installer currently provides the 2009.2.0.2 Haskell Platform"

Problem with the website or is Windows release lagging behind?
A new kind of visa is just insane. An overhaul on how immigration is done in the US needs to be done. Since that won't happen, the next best thing is another band-aid. A Startup Visa.
The amount of time you spend considering the data shouldn't depend primarily on the magnitude of the decision. It should depend on your beliefs about how much another marginal unit of delay will cost you, vs. how much another marginal unit of considering data will benefit you.

For instance, if you're wondering which new ballpoint pen to buy, that's trivial next to strategic decisions in war. But it still might be worth comparing reviews on Amazon.com to increase your chances of getting something ergonomic which won't annoy you in some way.

Likewise, if you're Stanislav Petrov, you may have to make the most important decision in the history of mankind based on incredibly limited information, but with a large delay-dependent penalty if you just go with the flow until you can evaluate a sufficient amount of information.

Contrariwise, if you slip while climbing a tree, you don't stop to work on a coherent theory of quantum gravity even if you're only a few feet off the ground, however more accurate that might make your actions; you just grab in the general direction of a branch.
Experts Exchange is actually a decent resource once you realize you can scroll to the bottom of the page to get the answer.

Yes, I realize their tactics are nasty, but for all those answers to simply disappear from the web would be a shame.

Ideal would be for Stack Overflow to buy them out and import all their existing content.
Call me REALLY cynical if you like, but just noticed this as well: http://ycombinator.posterous.com/yc-founders-at-work-series-...

Coincidence? We shall see...
The problem IMO is that affiliate links in the hands of entrepreneurial types will get ugly pretty fast. There's simply more money to be made when you're not being objective about what you're recommending: just pitch the highest paying affiliate link as the best option available.

And contrary to what you are proposing (mention it's a 'sponsored link') you'll often see that people who place these affiliate links in their articles/overview-sites are explicitly stating to be objective (or having the compiled the best overview possible, etc). This of course because it increases their conversions.
Thanks! These are amazing. How will they tie into Founders at Work v2, the book?
Site currently overloaded. Google cache:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.antipop...

Here's part of the central point, which Charlie partially bolded in the essay:

...labour wants to migrate where working conditions and pay are best. Capital wants to invest for growth where working conditions and pay are worst.

By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit...

I have a similar reaction whenever someone raises praise of "the free market" particularly on a global scale. It doesn't exist.
Nityananda Yuvarani Video: Next Tsunami or Just Rumor
If you are using Firefox, the CustomizeGoogle add-on will allow you to block listings from search results:

http://www.customizegoogle.com/
Please ask if they're profitable and what % of users pay for their service.
http://userstyles.org/styles/17132

You ever happened to urgently need a fast solution to a problem, search on Google, click a link - and again you were on a page of ExpertsExchange, exactly describing your problem - but not giving an answer? Instead they tell you, you would have found it here if you paid? Never again. Ads gone, solution shown :-)
>Yes, we do not yet have the understanding. Yes, we do not yet have the necessary tools. But we will have them one day.

We'll only have them one day if they're not beyond the limits of our understanding. Given that our understanding has limits, this is far from certain.
one of the early stated goals of Stack Overflow was to be a better version of Experts Exchange. It looks like they are accomplishing that goal, in terms of users switching (which of course, the graph does not prove but does seem to suggest).
I think it will be competitive with the iPhone once someone contributes a patch for MobileMe sync. At least it bypasses AT&T.
Tell that to Soichiro Honda or Akio Morita & Masaru Ibuka
Why? I have to get a new phone soon and really don't know which one to get.
Too cool–love seeing examples like this after I begin to learn a language: everything in here is mostly understandable after reading about half of "Programming Clojure" (which I heartily recommend). Not only that, but it's something interesting (who didn't act like a spy when they were a kid?) that I've never really been exposed to (stenography–who's had more than a fleeting introduction?)

Where can I find more articles like this?
The Future of Venture Capital is Hanging-Out Downtown: The Not So Big Secret 
Despite the hyped meme people are putting out there about the “venture model being broken”, I’m definitely of the school that believes Venture Capital is merely going back to its roots. Smaller, smarter, more agile, leaner, that’s all. Just look at the charts Kopelman’s been sharing of late. If you ask me, this is all a very good thing.
I've wondered but haven't investigated in detail (no need, yet). If it would lift/increase "bandwidth" caps and incent higher reliability, I'd find that a worthwhile option. I wonder how widely available such plans are and why they don't receive more attention.
I prefer affiliate links to ads if they are done right. If it is just a shill for the product i'm leery, but if there is some value add or a quality review, they're ok.

My question is, why do these people with so much money already waste their time on a a 40 cent commission for a book?

It'd be better for them to avoid the suspicion. Take the ulterior motive out of the equation. Trust is worth a lot.
Most people complaining about formal interview 'tests' are really complaining about the ones loaded with trivia and minutia; classic 'gotcha' testing.

And most people defending them pretend like the trivia and minutia never happen.

As with anything else, I think a formal development test or question is something that can be done well or done poorly.

You just can't generalize the applicability or usefulness of something practiced by a million different people in a million different ways.
To say most bubbles are good is incorrect. Bubbles depend on whether they are equity or credit-based.

Typically, credit bubbles are terrible for economies because they usually start in one area and spread, infecting the entire economy.

Equity bubbles on the other hand are usually well contained. When the dot com bubble popped, we didnt have banks collapsing and affecting other businesses.
Yep, 3 KB/sec for a 50 megabyte file is unacceptable. Honestly, have they heard of mirrors or torrents?
What do you consider 'basic data structure questions'? That always seems the rub, and it always seems to vary with the relative age of the person asking the questions.

I haven't interviewed in quite awhile. The last time I did, every time I saw a relatively young group in the conference room my heart just sank. I knew that I was going to be spending the next hour talking about red-black trees and low level language trivia.

There has been a point in my life where I knew the implementation details for various sorting algorithms and exotic data structures. That was called 'college'. More than a decade into my career, I simply don't remember most of it. I've been coding at a senior-level (meaning, primary designer and implementation) for about 8 years. In that time I've only had to build a data-structure of any complexity once. It was the internal structure for a word processor (Quickword). Everything else has been deferred to standard libraries of the various languages I've worked in.

It seems to me that we should be trying to identify engineers who can think at the abstract level great software requires. Identifying that is fantastically difficult, however. To the point that I'm not sure if I know how to do it even today. I do tend to ask more design related questions (not logic puzzles). I've found that 10-15 minutes of talking about a specific problem tell me everything I need to know about a candidate.
> Given that our understanding has limits, this is far from certain.

That is a pretty big assumption to make. If you are saying that our understanding is limited at this point in time, then I'd agree. Barring loss of data/memory, our understanding will always be limited now compared to our understanding in the future.

But if you are claiming there is some fundamental upper bound to our understanding, and that a complete functional understanding of the human body is beyond that upper bound, then I have to ask what motivates that claim.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that kind of thinking is what supports flawed pseudoscience like "intelligent design" (not claiming you support that, and really not trying to open that can of worms; just drawing a parallel). Sure, if you assume that our understanding is already at some kind of limit, and then show something we can't explain, it follows naturally that it must have supernatural origins. If, on the other hand, you realize that our inability to explain something is most likely just a function of time (eventually we'll learn enough that we will be able to explain it), then the argument seems absurd.
If someone finds out about a book through your site, then continues on to buy that book, you should be rewarded for generating that traffic - that's why the affiliate program exists in the first place.

I think you can get around any moral qualms by clearly pointing out any affiliate links. If you're turning readers on to a good book, they'll be happy to intentionally click your affiliate link.
A butterfly flaps its wings and you make a sale
EE and Nabble...
What do you do if you get a serious condition in your 20s? Not particularly common, but I certainly wouldn't feel good if I wasn't covered for it.

Also, most people literally cannot afford to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. Nonetheless, this is what they might end up having to pay in medical expenses.

I can't see any hint of a practical or sensible option in what you're saying.
The key is that there are some individuals that can be masters at their craft and still doubt themselves, and some that know nothing and are able to create new realities.

Subject matter knowledge is only a part of the equation. The ability to "think on you feet" - and to do so correctly for often than not - is one of the most undervalued yet important skills of modern life. It affects everyone from Generals to Data Entry clerks, and will probably mean the difference between a meteoric rise up the success ladder and questioning why that other guy got promoted over you.
Dell stock from 1990 to now had an average return of ~30% per year. You could have lost money if you bought at the peak but it would have still been an awesome return over 20 years. So yes it's only worth ~200x you initial investment now vs. ~800x I don't think anyone who bought in 1990 really cares all that much. And it’s not just Dell Microsoft did the same thing as did several others.

PS: From 1990 to now the Nasdaq beat the Dow.
Hmm...I got kicked off my parent's health insurance after graduation, but I'm still under 26. Would this bill allow me to get back on my parent's insurance or is strictly for children still on their parent's insurance?
Yep, that's a great question I kind of wanted to bring up in the post as well, but it was getting long.

Because it calls into question things about how much money Tim makes, which is sort of none of my business, but since he writes a book and blog about how you can be basically make more money more efficiently, it sort of becomes interesting to me.

Does he need the supplementary income from Amazon because he doesn't make enough from his books + lecturing + investing?

How much money is he making with this kind of thing?

And maybe it was sort of unintentional to post an affiliate link and his Wordpress installation just auto links those somehow?
we can't tell you that! :-)
One of the references in the Wikipedia article is this long interview covering the major points of his life and work:

http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/mfb21/interviews/m...
What's the upside of paying money to a shaky company to license a struggling webOS, as compared to paying nothing to a huge stable company for healthy Android or paying money to a huge stable company for interesting-if-unproven Phone7?

As the article states: the market has largely spoken on webOS. Customers aren't choosing it based on its strengths. And when they choose its competitors, they do so for reasons that correlate strongly with webOS's weaknesses.
I'm sure it's possible that there is one in the works but it is lower in priority than an iPad app. iPhone users spend more money on apps, and ebooks, than Android users. You've got to go where the money is.
Do people really not give themselves any credit for having some kind of morality? This author seems to be questioning whether the author himself would be doing something wrong by including affiliate links. If you can't include affiliate links and still write a fair review, then don't. I know myself well enough to say that I would be happy to give a fair representation and still allow myself the chance to receive some payment for the work I've done.

It's not impossible to write a neutral or negative review for an item and still include an affiliate link -- the only slant I could see happening is trying to include something positive, but I would argue that we should be doing that anyways when we are criticizing something. If you are an honest reviewer, you may be concerned about people not clicking affiliate links for badly-rated items. The solution is to try to find something similar that you can honestly give a positive review for, then link to that positive review from the negative review. Your readers will appreciate you for your honesty and will be more likely to trust your positive reviews if you follow a policy like this.

The problem becomes a bit harder as a person reading someone's reviews. You can usually identify affiliate links pretty easily just by scanning the URL. If the author is using an affiliate link, it is up to the reader to determine how much faith they have in that author. If they do not believe in the author's integrity, then why are they reading that author's reviews in the first place? After all, affiliate links aren't the only way to skew a dishonest author's integrity (think: free goodies, free trips to "review" expensive items, etc.).
for people (like me) who do not know what TL;DR means, it is according to Urban Dictionary[1]

Literally, "Too long; didn't read"

Said whenever a nerd makes a post that is too long to bother reading.
"Cultural fit" is probably more important in other industries - ones that require softer skills. They are in NYC, so - advertising, publishing, PR, fashion, etc
The value of free coding
Worth a shot :)
Congratulations. Very impressive work keeping in mind it was developed over just one weekend. How did you populate the site in such a short time?

How are you planning on getting business owners or managers to use your site? I am a business owner myself, and I don't see why I would like to go to your site other than to read reviews of the applications.
And that means this stat likely does not reflect the usage habits of technically proficient users, because they are the least likely to have allowed those grayware installs.
DigitalScirocco Launches Marketplace for Web Content and Services at DEMO
If I recall Jeff and Joel, in one of their podcasts, said their ideal situation was that people would visit the site via Google. They acknowledged that they didn't think they could improve search beyond what Google offered and expected / intended for the overwhelming (I think they said it was something like 95%) number of vistors to be from Google.
I think the startup visa is an excellent piece of legislation.
I know of several startups now based here, and lots of budding entrepreneurs moving to town - just because of the Visa requirements.
And with this city's links to China and India I'm confident this will be the home of the next big thing.

Of course I'm in Vancouver (BC) and these are guys being frustrated by the US process. Some of them hope to eventually open branch offices in Silicon valley so you will pick up some of the outsourced work.
Doesn't this "duplicate functionality of one of Apple's apps"?

I smell a storm coming.
Let's see... I'm willing to bet that Apple will not approve the app for the iPad. After all, they now provide their own ebook reader and we all know their stance about third-party apps duplicating functionality that's already available on the device.

Maybe they'll even remove the existing iPhone app because that would run on the iPad too.
> Duplicating 2 or 3 lines may seem like a minor problem, but having to change those 2 or 3 lines every time you make a change quickly becomes a maintainence burden, especially when they're littered throughout your CSS. The extra burden such prefixes brings is greater than the amount of extra characters they add.

http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/tree/master/framewor...
Ask HN: Anyone in Boston for PAX this weekend?
I was just wondering if there was enough people from out of town attending PAX to consider a possible meetup.
I agree. While I take a very dim view of the H1B visa, I don't think it's helpful to liken it to slavery.

In fact, in some ways, it's not even entirely appropriate to compare it to indentured servitude, since these folks were essentially "owned" - the main difference being that they were released at the end of their term of service (the reality was pretty brutal, from what I've heard).

On the other hand, the H1B is particularly offensive in that the quid pro quo is purely visa and green card "sponsorship". The employer is allowed to bestow a government status - legal residency - that the worker could not otherwise obtain.

I'm actually kind of amazed that people put up with this in 2010, that a corporation would have that kind of power over an individual. I think a lot of it comes from a lack of understanding of what's really going on.
More ACTA Leaks: Would Create Special Org To Manage Worldwide Copyright Laws
Viviti launches three new partner programs, and built in domain support.
To read the full press release please go here: http://viviti.com/assets/releases/03-22-2010-NewRelease.pdf
Memorial for Robin Milner, feel free to express your feelings

http://lifestrand.net/robin_milner
very excited for this
My best guess is that Tim makes 35,000 dollars per speech, and a few hundred bucks per year from referral fees. The reason Tim blogs is to build his permission asset and then monetize it speaking, it's not like he's writing the posts because he wants an extra couple bucks on Amazon.
The stance about third-party apps duplicating functionality has always referred to functionality of the device's built-in software. iBooks is a (free) App Store app and does not come preloaded on the iPad.
Not a built-in app: iBooks is an App Store app.
Untangling Evented Code with Ruby Fibers
It is good to know that you experienced this effect as well. I also have not seen it documented anywhere.
The stuff is simply great. I am in a third world country (Colombia) and in a backwater town to boot, and Piracetam is both readily available and inexpensive. What's more, it's a local generic brand, and the quality is very decent.
>But if you are claiming there is some fundamental upper bound to our understanding, and that a complete functional understanding of the human body is beyond that upper bound

I'm claiming the first conjunct. I don't know whether or not a complete functional understanding of the human body is beyond our understanding.

I don't see why a claim that our understanding has certain fundamental limits should need to be justified. Rather, the opposite claim seems to require justification. If you look at any other animal on earth, this is obvious. Why should we be the only animal without limits?

This is not to suggest that what we happen to know right now is the upper limit, just that there is an upper limit.

>not claiming you support [intelligent design], and really not trying to open that can of worms

Oh please, this issue has nothing at all to do with ID.

> it follows naturally that it must have supernatural origins.

Or, more plausibly, that it has natural origins which are too complex for us to understand.
This brings up an interesting point though from another book I read "Sway" from Ori Brafman. There's a chapter called Compensation and Cocaine, and they talk about some research done on the brain when money is involved. And basically, a part of your brain turns on when money is involved. So even if you are trying to do something altruistic, as soon as money was involved people immediately started acting differently and part of their brain took over the process. It was like you have "two different engines" and they can't work at the same time, even if you as above think you can. I'm not exactly arguing against any of your points, just that this 2 brain thing when money is involved is super interesting, and maybe adds bias even for the most awesome of people that just shouldn't be there.