skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are there certain intangibles that every entrepreneur simply cannot be successful without? PG has cited determination and toughness as two essential traits that YC looks for in entrepreneurs. Vivek seems to argue that there aren't any traits to you HAVE to have, but that most people, given the right opportunity, can learn and grow into the right person to create a successful company. I don't agree with this, but I do think it has some merit in that you can't really tell how well someone will stand and deliver until you push them into a wall, which you can't really do in any kind of formal interview process or pitch. So how can you tell how determined or tough someone is?
Unless it's the same employee at Goldman doing both within a short timeframe, I'm not sure what the problem is. Goldman is a big place; of course they'd have divisions dedicated to shilling instruments and divisions dedicated to exploiting market opportunities.

A lot of the blame should be laid at the investors feet; why did they buy something they so manifestly failed to understand?
It's my primary editor on all 3 platforms, I'd definitely recommend it for beginners.
> telling clients to continue to invest while GS was internally hedging for a fall.

I think it's slightly more subtle than that. They didn't actively tell clients to invest - rather, they had clients who wanted to go long housing, and facilitated the trade without telling the buyers that GS thought it was a bad idea. At least, that's my understanding, based on talking to some people who spent decades at GS and left between six months and three years ago.
Slides, Video, & Notes for most of Startup Lessons Learned Conference
Personally I cheered the housing market's decline as well. It's interesting how we're always told it's a disaster when there's a market correction but never when an asset class is getting overvalued.
I really like this idea of learning things the "hard" way, of doing something and then figuring out why without a lot of handholding. I think it works for beginners, but it also works equally well for experts -- for instance if I'm learning a new language I'd rather just do something and figure out why it's acting in the way it is, rather than read through a chapter explaining it.
My understanding is that kids were told that this was a common malfunction and not to worry about it.

This whole thing has struck me as beyond creepy. I'm embarrassed both as a technologist and as a former educator. That this was allowed to happen is just horrifying.
It is of course always the marks fault. If they line up to be fleeced, they should not be surprised when they are sheared.
>interesting features that I’m sure Android users will find interesting.

Really, copy-editor?
Why is nobody in prison yet?
What if you had bought Apple stock instead of that iPod?
>I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.

We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
I remember an article from when this story broke about how the administrators bragged about a script they wrote that would turn the camera on, but block it's output so if a user saw it was on and then loaded a program to see what was display they would see nothing.

Apparently the also ran this randomly so it would flicker every now and then...

purely despicable.
Launch of secret US space ship masks even more secret launch of new weapon
Considering the only example of life we've seen is all of these species that co-evolved on earth, I think it's a little too early to understand what "life" even means, no?

After all, it might be that there are many more variations of evolutionary paths than the inverse of the probability of one getting this far... and who knows what a different evolutionary path for an ecosystem looks like? There is no reason our imaginations could be even remotely suited for such a task.
Help like this entrepreneurs don't need!

The facts are BootOut FU'd up big time and anyone who recommends them is either a buddy, a rookie, a groupie or a government wanker wannabe.

Stay clear of these #Fail douches!
All name changes have to be approved before they go into effect, at least from what I remember.

They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.

I read an article once about people with fake-sounding but real last names like Batman, etc. having their name change requests denied, and needing to convince Facebook employees of their own identity. They have gone to great lengths to ensure their data on you is tied to a real name.
Awesome stuff, but I wish Clojure (and other languages) would stop using foo/bar/baz in examples.
If he doesn't like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google he sure isn't going to like News Corp. That and Photobucket is a bucket of crap.
Tripit.com - Continuously improving to provide a better experience
Tripit has done a great job of being the only option for online itineraries, it has done this by continuously adding new features, to the point where there is no reason to start a competing site.
If you invest in something you don't understand I'm not sure you're entitled to complain when it doesn't do what you wanted.

(If you don't want to have to spend all your time managing your investments then you're best off sticking to simple things like index funds or cash. That's not a bad choice at all)
Apple IIe Twitter machine
I'm cheering for its decline too: I don't own a house, so lower prices are good for me.
Money quote from the study being ridiculed here:

Students "could live without their TVs and the newspaper, but they can’t survive without their iPods." (from http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/)

Are students wiring up their iPods to interface with pacemakers? Have their survival skills atrophied so much that the only thing reminding them to eat is the "it is time to eat" track that plays every 8 hours on their iPod? Or could it be that the people who wrote the study carelessly or intentionally exaggerated in their quest for headline-grabbing material?
>3. IBM Selectrics were ubiquitous - every office had them in abundance, and they were the standard tool for secretaries of the day.

I took my Grade 10 typing class on a Selectric. :)
Marriage-minded do better online than at bars, survey claims
Because the trial hasn't taken place yet.
Someone watched "Avatar" or "V," I see...

In all seriousness, the possibility of harmful alien contact is quite real and should be taken into consideration by the scientific community. That said, I think it's much more important (and hopefully covered in the new documentary series) to concern ourselves with our behavior as we venture out into the Universe and seek new territory and resources. I mean knowledge.
If they've been living on a spaceship for many generations, the thought of living on a planet may be quite repugnant to them.

The original mission may have been to find a hospitable planet, but generations later the travelers just prefer their spaceship. Maybe that's their "home" now.
Very true, except that it's called Dalvik.
Yes, and then the government 'has' to do something to 'correct' the market's own correction.
Beating Diabetes Naturally
Doubtful -- those who don't know the underlying reasons will still look at one thing: their stock price / market cap. Adobe has an unstable stock price over 2yrs with a 20bn market cap and Apple has a hockey stick stock price over 2yrs with a 250bn market cap.
Still, I would have been more impressed if he actually had written a TCP/IP stack and Twitter client, instead of just displaying tweets received on a PC...
I think he's thinking along the lines of Charles Pellegrino in _The Killing Star_. When we can command the technology and the vast energies it would take to travel to other stars, wiping out planetary or solar-system wide civilizations in a single bombardment becomes relatively easy.

Other starfaring intlligences may well decide to do unto us before we do unto them.
When mine started doing this, it was because the drive was developing bad sectors and mapping them out. The drive becomes unresponsive for some time while doing that, so as each application would need a disc io it would beachball.

Sadly the Apple supplied interface to S.M.A.R.T. data only gives the rosiest outer level summary so it showed "verified". Third party tools that show all the data confirmed the failing sectors, including another half dozen as I refreshed my backup.
But what did they lose in sales to people who are now holding out for a 4G? Thats the primary reason Apple is so secrative. I also very much doubt this story eclipsed a normal Apple media buy in terms of exposure.
Which would suggest that when it comes to reasoning about the true mysteries of the universe, being Stephen Hawking doesn't give you much advantage over being Roland Emmerich.
This is a valid point, and I'd take it a step further. Not only are we not well suited to speculate on the nature of life "at large", we're even less suited to speculate about the nature of intelligent life (whatever that even means).

On the other hand, should we encounter sentient life, it certainly is not difficult to imagine hostility or callous indifference -- from either party. Particularly if said encounter is not on our terms.

And as profoundly exciting as the prospect of meeting alien life would be, I'd much rather it occur sometime after we've grown up a bit, ourselves.
Very good point... maybe we should focus on developing photon torpedoes and phase cannons before we go advertising our fragile existence.
Jordan Rudess, the keyboardist for Dream Theater, uses a number of synthesizer apps on the iPhone, and has played the iPhone live

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFG7-Q0WI7Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONGpprZBkrs

EDIT: Heh, Monday he'll even be in SF "hosting a discussion" about the iPad, among other things: http://rudess-pyramind.eventbrite.com/
is he regurgitating crap or is he trying to make the most simplistic negative scenario possible so as to draw the attention of people who might not otherwise follow? mitigating existential risk requires quite a bit of talking down to policy makers and purse-string holders who do not understand statistics, game theory, etc.
This point of view makes much more sense than the one of skeptics. However I believe that there is a huge technological barrier to interstellar and interplanetary travels which provides a natural protection. Overcomming this barrier implies mastering energy source and many other aspects to the point, I expect, that colonizing a planet like Christophe Columbus discovery initiated would not make any sense. A civilization would most probably build a huge vessel providing it the optimal conditions for its long term subsistance with the required mobility to avoid whatever obstacle it could meet. We, on earth, can't do that and are exposed to a collision that will be very difficult to avoid. Another reason, I beleive, is that the most important value is scientific and technologic knowledge which yields the ability to develop the capacity to defend one self and to control its own destiny. There is no need to colonize a planet or kill everybody to get this. Though I agree that there is a risk and the longer we can stay away from it, the better. The repression/inhibition (refoulement) agressively and arrogantly promoted by skeptics is the worst strategy to adopt. We should try to face it, understand it, and learn whatever we can from it. I also beleive that there is a good chance that UFOs are manifestations of ET visits.
Strangers exist, but talking to them is too dangerous. Any person you talk to is likely to be self-centered and care nothing about your welfare; they'd love to just take your house, your car, whatever cash you've got on you. And you know, a lot of them can kill you outright. You wouldn't believe how easy it is.

So the best policy is to not talk to strangers. Ever. Don't look at them. Don't let them see you. Don't let them know your name. And for God's sake don't let them know where you live.

In fact, you know what the very safest thing to do is, when you meet a stranger? Kill them first.

-------------

There's no reason to expect any given alien race to be murderous. Quote the opposite, there's every reason to expect them to be rare. Like murderous humans or murderous rogue states, they tend to die quickly because everyone finds the behavior so intolerable.
> Are investors supposed to be cheer leaders?

No, and neither are they supposed to not be assholes.

But imagine a situation in which someone elects to profit from a crowd of people getting run over by a freight train. Why is this bad?
Exactly, someone who gets it. Apple may have lost millions of dollars because of this release. It is so hard tell the loss due to this. It certainly makes Apple security methods seem inept. Leaks are something Apple control very precisely, this is a huge slap in the face to they way they normally do things.

I could not believe it if this guy was not fired. It would appear to be a huge slackening of Apples usual style.
True. But considering that Erlang was designed especially for high-availability systems and concurrent systems, I would favor a database written in it than in C++.

Of course, it has very little to do with the language and a lot to do with how the code is written, but some things are easier to write in one platform over the other.
Hmm, roughly half of those concern either DNSSEC or DDNS... which, in fact, no one uses.
> He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on

Umm, if they can travel to earth and gather resources (at a cost less than the fuel, time, etc), why wouldn't they just raid an uninhabited planet? there are plenty, and they have resources too. this makes no sense.
This is almost depressing. As a freshman in college, I bought a PowerBook. If only I had bought the equivalent value of Apple stock, I could have afforded my entire college education.
This only looks bad in hindsight... I cannot speak for GS et al., but it seems like most of the commentary attributes the banks with prescience (and therefore malice).
On the other hand, should we encounter sentient life, it certainly is not difficult to imagine hostility or callous indifference

Just because we can imagine something doesn't make it at all possible. We're speculating the probability of something having seen it occur once...
Thanks. I'm glad you like it. I am thinking about possibly updating the code base so that the prices are generated in real-time, based off Apple's current stock price.
You already think like a programmer, probably you were either born or raised that way. For example, you already have an attention to detail which is why you demand solid details about every possible thing before you feel as if you understand it.

I actually learn some things like you, but I had to learn to not learn this way when I started studying music. There's actually a lot of things you just cannot learn by first having all the details. Insisting that everything be presented this way will prevent you from learning a vast array of topics that require an intuitive artistic sense or require non-verbal expression.

I would say that if you read this book as a beginner and found it boring then you should move on to the books I'll mention as the next books to read. I would also say that you should try a few other ways to learn something. It'd do you some good to learn something without having to completely explain it first.
His MB is limited to 2GB. I was in this situation and was able to put off an upgrade for a while with an SSD. I also moved the SSD to the new machine, so it was/is a good investment. Swapping wasn't even too painful with the SSD. Highly recommended (SSD, that is)
I have one friend (male) that plays these games, but he uses specially created accounts, and is motivated only by being able to mess with other players.
Google
I want to delete search contents or at least place them further behind at google search results? How can I do it?
Agreed. This was outrageous behavior on the part of the school district, but we must remember that we have due process.
Why would you go through the effort and uncertainty of hunting wildlife when you can just saunter down to the local grocery store and pick up prepared meat?

Why go to the store to buy bottled water when you can get clean fresh water from your tap at home?

We have enough of a challenge explaining human motivations, we can't know any potential alien motives. We don't have any context. So far science has taught us that reality consistently overturns our preconceive notions and it indeed far stranger than what we've anticipated. Just one example: We knew that light was propagated by the luminiferous aether until the Michelson Morley experiment blew that assumption out of the water.
relatively easy

You could do it with 1960s computers and whatever Sci-fi Magic propulsion system your probe needs to get from system to system. Find a big asteroid. Accelerate it into the orbit of the planet at, oh, .01c should be plenty. What is the planet going to do, roll a natural twenty to dodge?
And yet if you get struck by lightning, you'll probably start being afraid of storms, despite the vanishingly small chance of being struck twice.
Tech 4000 - News with attitude - NetworkedBlogs.com
You might give PeepOpen a try: http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen
Ask HN: SEC Regs on Solicitation & Raising Seed Funding
I am raising seed funding for my next venture and want to reach out to people to try to find an investor but am concerned about doing the right thing regarding SEC Regulation D, which requires you to be careful not to cross the line from "private" to "public solicitation". This article from the American Bar Association makes it sound like it's a very easy line to cross. Does anyone have any advice -- is it wrong, say, to email a number of your contacts and ask for help finding an investor? (If it is, how in the world can you raise money?)

http://www.abanet.org/genpractice/newsletter/lawtrends/0807/business_batman.html
Here's clickable link: http://www.abanet.org/genpractice/newsletter/lawtrends/0807/...
Ah the age-old corporate cop-out: commission vs omission.
Won't Idle work for that?
Would be really neat if there were a few of the earlier models too, for comparison
Funny, you read that as saying, "Zed's wrong." I read it as, I may be right. For example:

> no one challenges KSC on the basic premise, that putting introductory students in the position of discovering information for themselves is a bad idea!

The article doesn't say, "Don't get programmers studying code right away." It also doesn't say they shouldn't work on problems.

It says that the constructivist approach to teaching by giving students very little direction on complex problems right way isn't effective. Instead the direct instruction method of having them work on directed problems to build initial capabilities is more effective.

This has been the position of the direct instruction school of education for a while now. In fact, if you actually RTFA they mention that the constructivist model of is the failing. If you then read the linked articles you'll find the same thing.

Not a single thing in that linked article supports what you've stated.
I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the outcry against weaponizing Space.

Space is going to get weaponized. That’s going to happen. Because our power needs are going to start skyrocketing once robotics and other automations become more and more viable. When that happens we’re going to need a way to generate much more power and there’s really only one viable option: Space based solar power (a technology we’re almost capable of now if we can just figure out how to effectively transfer the power to earth wirelessly).

When that happens we’ll have most of our power grid in space and it will need to be defended. Which brings us to weapons in space.

Beyond the inevitability factor I’m not sure the danger posed by space based weapons (such as laser systems) is any more significant than future earth bound weapons. Weapons like unmanned hypersonic aircraft will be able to circle the globe in a little over 2 hours (and hence could hit any target worldwide within minutes from the closest U.S. airbase). So if we have jets on Earth that can travel too fast to be intercepted and hit any target within minutes how much worse is a space based laser?
> "Like murderous humans or murderous rogue states, they tend to die quickly because everyone finds the behavior so intolerable."

I'm not sure this makes any sense at all.
What if they view us as we view chickens?
They could come to our planet and see an exotic and splendid buffet on display for their enjoyment.

Om nom nom.

You could make the case that a lot of other species here on earth are very smart. But they're more delicious than smart for us.

I think us humans are neat, I may be biased :)

Maybe aliens would be terribly unimpressed.
I like "The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites"

You mean: he turned off the safe search option. Given the rest of the content it seems odd to spin it so that changing an easy to alter option is made to sound like "hacking" but perhaps that is all being spun too!
I'll spell it out:

Apple controls what can run on the iPhone. Apple doesn't control content that comes in over the internet. Apple makes iPhone a closed proprietary system. Apple advocates for open standards for internet content.

Adobe 'controls' a sizable portion of content over the internet, by virtue of their Flash format being proprietary. Adobe doesn't control what software can run on end-user machines (specifically iPhone). Adobe advocates for openness in regard to what can run on iPhone (by enabling Flash apps to compile to native iPhone code). Adobe still keeps Flash a proprietary format.

If that doesn't make things crystal clear I don't know what will. Each controls X, which they keep closed and proprietary, yet doesn't control Y, which they push for Y be 'open' in some form or another.

The hypocrisy is here: Apple preferred to support more open standards which replicate everything Flash can do, added the statement.

Which we can translate as: Apple preferred to support more open standards, because they don't control Flash and don't want Adobe to gain control of what runs on iPhone (because that they do control and therefore want to keep closed).
Closed ecosystems seem to reach a stable equilibrium of peace and natural harmony, eg Mauritius's dodo, so we don't need to fear aliens (er, unless they come here.)

But earth itself is a closed ecosystem and it's not in harmony - for peace, it must also be open within.

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it. - sadly, past tense

BTW: I didn't fully get the cute headline at first: a literal meaning of alien is stranger http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alien
Actually, after you've been struck by lightning once, your chance of getting struck by lightning again is the same as getting struck by lightning in the first place.
Can you also include transaction costs to give a truer picture. This will be more relevant for the smaller gains. Also remember these are pre tax.
Depends on how you got struck :).
This ABA article would seem to suggest that most angel groups, and popular sites like VentureHacks' AngelList, are a bit questionable! Or am I missing something?