skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite honestly YC is the only one of these kinds of ventures that I trust. And even in the case of YC, if I were to advise a budding pair of young entrepreneurs, I'd tell them to move back in with their parents for a year, get a low skill but high paying job to give them sustenance money (e.g., bartend or barista), and focus on implementing their idea. There are nice YC value adds like being introduced to influential folks. But part of being a business person is finding a way to get to these folks anyway. Why pay for this service when you can get them for free?

So many startup folks are attracted to these kinds of programs because I think they mimic the illusion of safety that school offered. You have to be "accepted" and it's not a venture but a "program". Everything is geared towards creating this sense of safety without pointing out you are giving up a lot for it. Know why these programs want to save you the hassle of doing your own incorporation paperwork that took me a day to figure out when I was a teenager? Because they have to put clauses in that will help them, not you.

Again, I'm not saying these ventures are sinister. But you can get by without them and in fact may become a better business person for it.
I was going to grab eurocentrist.com, but all the cool ones on the top 500 list are actually taken. Even buckminsterfullerene.net. Yeesh.
What I really enjoy about these is that they are written from the point of view of his "sociopath" rather then the more conventional "loser" observer.

You get a sense of being disgust at all these "transactions" leading nowhere.
I totally hadn't thought about that, but I will. :)
That was just brilliant. I hadn't read the previous installations before, but I finally did. I bought him a coffee.
Mirror's Edge is extremely linear - there's usually exactly one right way to do things, and if you don't do it that way, you die, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum, ad tedium. I couldn't play it for more than a couple of hours.

Two games I relate to on the theme of navigation of space are the Thief series, and Far Cry 2.

With Thief, you have a rough map, and your task is to navigate the territory to get to your goals, avoiding hazards such as loud tile and metal, bright lights, guards, traps etc. With a selection of arrows for making the ground silent, extinguishing torches, and rope arrows for climbing, it can be a lot of fun. Constantine's Mansion (Constantine's Sword mission) is a particularly architectural delight, with optical illusions and a network of grassy tunnels joining different floors.

Actually, a defining metaphor of the first two Thief games is architecture as sexuality; in the first, your enemy is the earthy Pagan Trickster and his co-conspirator, wood nymph Viktoria, and you pursue him into the bowels of the earth. In the second, your enemy is a technocratic religious self-described prophet, and you pursue him in a monstrous skyscraper of metal, working your way up and up.

Similarly, a substantial and (for me at least) entertaining part of Far Cry 2 relates to the navigation between mission objectives. The roads are patrolled, and intersections are heavily enough guarded that clearing them risks depleting ammo, so the best policy is generally to navigate in the gaps between the roads, choosing crossing points, swimming in rivers, selecting the right angle of entry approach for mission destinations, etc. Given that every main mission involves at least three different destinations (one to your buddy in a safehouse, one to the buddy's preferred mission target, and a third as the original mission), you need to enjoy this navigation to get the most out of the game. (Most people didn't; it seems they stuck to the roads and found the guard checkpoints tedious.)

As to games like Half-Life and its successors in particular, they seem to me to inhibit exploration and be very linear. Any time there's an interesting passage hidden away in a corner, I make a note of it and scout out ahead to see what the mainstream alternative is; but in HL2 and episodes, it usually turns out that the main branch is a dead end, and you must go back and investigate that hidden passage. So it kills any chance of you feeling clever, and makes the unorthodox mundane.
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I read it back in 2003 I believe, just after I got into Macs and got really interested in studying about Steve Jobs. It was an entertaining read for sure. Nothing spectacular but this particular chapter is the one that stands out to me after all these years.
You can add them to the master list at http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=TinyURL . If you know it, include the charset and algorithm that the short URLs are generated from.

If you don't mind putting a CSV copy of your database up for public download, that'd be even more awesome! (http://ur1.ca/ does this, for example.) Plus then I don't load up your database server with my multithreaded, rather antisocial scraper of doom.
Do you think Zynga is working on a clone that works inside Facebook, yet?
Yeah. I have a multithreaded perl script that can basically peg the database on the far end. This usually happens at about 20-30 threads. It sort of leaks memory, to the point that restarting it every day or so is advisable.

http://github.com/chronomex/urlteam if you're interested in my code.
The blog post strikes me as a pragmatic observation rather than an ethical justification. It makes a very good point too.

If you use an in-house tool that compiles lisp/ruby/whatever to Objective C, I seriously doubt Apple is going to go through the trouble of detecting this. Even if they did, I don't see them giving two shits as long as you follow the HIG, stick to public APIs and keep the tools to yourself.

Since the do-gooders can't release the tools publicly, the only people who have them are the people who can make them. If you are one of those people, you can probably come out ahead from this whole debacle, even if it doesn't give you a warm freedom fuzzy inside.
How to Burn Bridges with Bootup Labs and Other Investors

They're only investors if they actually invest money.
Watch Real Madrid VS Almeria Live Free Broadcasting
From Passion to Business
The piracy comparison is bogus. I don't think anyone is worried about Apple suing them for using Flash/MonoTouch/whatever. The problem is investing a month or three into writing an app only for Apple to say "Nope, sorry."

Or even worse, getting your 1.0 in the App Store, only to have your 1.1 rejected as their "defenses" against translation layers grow stronger with time. It's a peculiar case of FUD against your own partners.
The problem with these kinds of organic ideas: startup geeks and developers are all similar. There are so many developer tools, social tools, project management systems, freelance and small business accounting systems, and all the other things that geeks need.

The really great business opportunities are in the areas the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid drinkers don't even look twice. Many of them are not even fundable by VCs because they aren't sexy. YC funds some cool ideas, but most of them are immediately useful to the 20 year olds who come up with them, which means they are immediately taking on markets being built out by the rest of the startup community.

Ask a 60 year old manager of a sales force in a backward industry how his business works and you'll find real "organic" startup ideas. You might even find an idea that adds value to the universe, and might therefor yield revenue and profit.
Hello from Cebu, Philippines!
Hoping you'll pick me!

(This is my first post btw if that will matter)
Ular Purba Hidup di Madagaskar
Probably not very useful if you haven’t read GEB.
Yeah, I think there's this odd view that creativity is ex nihilo, an unexplainable intercession from the cosmos that disrupts the usual ways of thinking. Since an area I care about is creativity in AI systems, we very much hope that isn't true, because simulating intercessions from the cosmos on computers is hard. ;-)

Although it's got all sorts of things I disagree with, a decent overview of, "can we nail down creativity more specifically than just 'flash of inspiration'?", and in particular how it ties in with "normal" problem solving, is Margaret Boden's book: http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Mind-Myths-Mechanisms/dp/0415...
well this is most likely because they have no experience in how to finance or run a venture fund of any size.
Yesterday or the day before, he put the whole album up on his site in a Flash player, perhaps in response: http://lcdsoundsystem.com/thisishappening/
I don't think so

http://www.squidoo.com/womensera
That's great news. For teaching programming classes a good code editor (with git functionality included!) and a (ssh) terminal - both with VGA/DVI output (for projection) would be great - currently I still have to use my MacBook Pro for everything, but when I can only use the iPad for presentations and code demos, that would be very nice.
There are no lPs. Bootup is/was a VCC.
Every women should read this amazing stuff

http://www.squidoo.com/womensera
Interesting. I haven't played yet, but I saw a video of a talk where he was talking about how this is his response to interactive drama. Essentially, instead of aiming at deep, believable AI characters with coherent yet non-linear plotlines, he just has one of the players be that "deep AI", sort of like D&D on a computer.

(He doesn't like the D&D comparison, though.)
why are you apologizing? Seems like it should be the other way around...

Soory you guys have had ahard time, Hope this experience doesn't scare too many other people off doing startups in vancouver or coming here to start a business
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Great catch. It would be very impressive if this is the case. Looking forward to see what others think.

http://www.squidoo.com/womensera
Not a bug; you mis-parsed it. "There are ideas as-obvious-as-that lying around now".
"closing a round" could be code for didn't have the money when the intake offer was made and couldn't raise the money for all the startups... so picked and kicked to stay afloat.
I'll still view it as a rumor until Google confirms, personally.
Thanks! I should look into this!

http://www.squidoo.com/womensera
Combine/Compress/Minify JS and CSS files in ASP.NET MVC
I thought it smelled off. Not a big surprise from The Register, I guess :-)

I found the 100mW EU limit but curiously the "wifi" page on Wikipedia fails to list the US limit and I believe it claims it varies by jurisdiction.. (state?)
Ease to build is important. Linkedin founder once said: software startup is about building the simplest thing which has a market. The power of organic ideas is that it is just less mental energy to start building it and ship it! Simplicity is beautiful and realistic. It takes several years to grow an idea to a real success. So the idea has to be simple, interesting and beautiful.
I don't think "deserve" is the word to use here. They get the epidemics that their cultures perpetuate, sure, but that happens everywhere.

I hear Mormonism is rampant in Salt Lake City..
You are looking for what Steve Blank calls "Customer development" (http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/)

He suggests that you schedule 15 minute interviews (no sales pressure) with a range of people in your target marketplace. Ask them about their pain points and try to come up with a solution with them.

There is a lot more detail in the essays I linked to about what to do next.
The itouch had some undisclosed bluetooth in it that was enabled by subsequent software. Could the A4 chip be housing more than one core? ARM, and something else as well, to be activated by software later? They're already taking a bath on the unit as a long-term investment, so anything's possible.
I'm a low level minion ( :-) ) and I have exactly the same number of layers between me and SteveB right now that Joel had between him and Bill back then.
Partnership site, not a dating site. ;)
That, uh, reads a lot like Dana saying: "haha nub, you won't ever get investors now will you!"

Not exactly solid reporting :(
ditto that. gong show. The main skilz were self promotion and beer drinkin'.
British Chiropractic Association v Singh - BCA admits defeat.
I understand it's simpler to store everything, and simplicity _is_ a virtue; but one could store the current revision plus deltas (and perhaps a few intermediate revisions for oft-edited articles), and obtain performance at least as good as in the current case. It would also save lots of space.
Reminds me a lot of Steve Yegge's "Business Requirements are bullshit" blog post: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/08/business-requirement...
True VC firms would never invest in this structure for many reasons. Naive angels or silver-spooners, maybe.
I figured out a way to do it once, but this text box is too narrow to contain it.
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the ____ giveth and the ____ taketh away!
Yup, that is why I don't hang out with geeks (at least computer ones). Most startup geeks and developers as you refer to them should step away from the keyboard and join a house league sports team; one with people they can talk to that won't whine that the iPad sucks because it only has 256 MB RAM. Most of these geeks should aspire to be as sociable as Richard Feynman was. Not only will it help them achieve their goals, but it will make reaching them all the more fun.
It sounds like not being very good at this was their problem, which they realised.
Spirit like this just shows how special hacker news is when compared to other forums. (Don't need the drives just wanted to say what you are doing is nice.)
Bureaucracy.

Israel, like my own country, has laws in place which forbid the sale of any RF-capable devices until they have been expensively and painstakingly approved by some central regulatory authority. This sort of thing is common in state-heavy countries. The Israelis are just more competent about enforcing their laws and regulations.
Could definitely use one. We'd finally have onsite backups!
This guy is remarkable at both analysis (which is pretty common in our line of work) and rhetoric (which isn't so much). I'm not sure why but my mind keeps returning to the thought of him having the makings of a ridiculously effective attorney. Anyways, this was very well written. Definitely worth a read.
The current consensus seems to be that asking people what they want doesn't really work. Summarized in this quote from Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Boris Mann's response to BootupLabs portfolio reduction outcry
R&D? at the pub?
Perhaps the parent quote refers to people not being allowed to shirk overtime which they have already agreed to be there for. In other words, signing up to work four hours overtime, leaving after two and getting your friend to clock you out two hours later.
Creating three related Spark DropDownList controls in Flex 4
I guess mid-thirties should probably look at the other type of startups: those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you
How I Came to Write iGesture
Loading US firmware has issues - you are going to lose channels 12 and 13 (I found out the hard way - I bought an Airport card for Powerbook in US and had missing channels ever since).
tl:dr – general usability improvements, HTML editing for the DOM, timeline (a lá the beginnings of Speed Tracer), audit (a lá YSlow). Wiki here: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebInspector
Google docs link to slides: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.scottaaronson.c...
So does the US - the agency responsible is the FCC.

In general regulating broadcast RF is a good thing, because it only takes one badly behaving device to spoil the air space for everyone.

You might think that it would be possible to rely on foreign certifications but standards are not totally harmonized between regions and governments worry that local inspection and certification is required to avoid having B-grade out of spec product sold in their market.
That's beautiful.

For anyone who's wondering: why a 17-gon? the answer is an astonishing theorem: with the traditional Euclidean tools of ruler and compass, you can construct an n-sided polygon if and only if n is the product of a power of 2 (1,2,4,8,...) and some set of "Fermat primes": prime numbers of the form 2^2^n+1 (2,3,5,17,65537, and no one knows whether there are any more but there probably aren't). You aren't allowed to use any of the Fermat primes more than once.

So you can construct a regular heptadecagon but not a regular nonagon or a regular heptagon.

Why? Here's a super-handwavy sketch of the ideas involved. Points in the plane are complex numbers. Constructing a regular n-gon is like constructing z = exp(2 pi i / n). That satisfies the equation z^n=1. We only need to consider prime-power values of n, because if m,n have no common factor then you can do mn if and only if you can do m and n. (Proof left as an exercise for the reader.) For such n, it's not hard to figure out the minimal polynomial in z whose value is 0; when n is prime, e.g., it's z^(n-1) + z^(n-2) + ... + z + 1.

Now, imagine doing any ruler-and-compass construction you like. Start with two points, which we'll call 0 and 1. Then every individual construction you can do involves solving either a linear or a quadratic equation. Conversely, you can solve any quadratic equation by doing ruler-and-compass constructions. (Details again left as an exercise; or look it up.)

Now think about those "minimal polynomials" for all the numbers you construct along the way. The degree of such a polynomial (i.e., the highest exponent it contains) is an important quantity. It turns out (super-handwavy, again) that when you solve a quadratic equation with coefficients whose minimal polynomials have degree d, you get something whose minimal polynomial has degree d or 2d. So at any stage in your ruler-and-compass construction, all the degrees are powers of 2. In particular, you can never construct anything whose minimal polynomial has degree that isn't a power of 2. And that is enough to tell you that when n is a power of a prime number, you can't construct a regular n-gon unless n is a power of 2 or a Fermat prime.

The other direction is conceptually easier but fiddlier, and I shan't try to explain it here.
OK, but I still want to hear what their strategy was. If I can't think of obvious ways to improve it then maybe organic really is the way to go.
In practice nearly all WiFi in London is on channels 1-11 because there are enough tourists who would otherwise complain.

Some personal WiFi is on 13 because it buys you two-channel separation for free. (13 and 11 still conflict, but not as badly as 11/12 or 11/11.)

I feel your pain though. Apple are horrific about regional settings. Mine Macbook is a US model so it's missing 12/13 and there is no region crack for the DVD drive so it's permanently stuck on region 1. Next time I'm going to buy a Thinkpad.
Quoth Boris Mann in the linked blog post: "I read a number of comments / response to me directly that suggested that we should have been more apologetic. We leaned towards the factual. I can say that I know I broke a personal commitment and that I feel like shit about it and have already said my 'sorrys' in person."

Quoth Danny Robinson, in a comment on Jamie Martin's blog: "After everything that we did for you and Steven, I'm shocked at how you have twisted the truth for PR reasons. [...] in the end, I made sure that you got the better end (sic) the deal."

I can't think of two more opposite approaches to communicating about this matter... and I definitely know which one I prefer.
Case dropped against Simon Singh
He is exceptionally well read
The article should be titled How to Burn Bridges with Blog Readers and Other Audience Members
Rohrer is looking for up to 5 of the best stories in a contest: http://sleepisdeath.net/amazingStories.php

200 bucks via paypal for anyone who managed to get selected.
This author sounds boring.
Out of about 10 of these I checked, 9 were already taken.
"The current consensus seems to be that asking people what they want doesn't really work."

Who besides you and Henry Ford is participating in this consensus? I'm not trying to be mean or confrontational. The fact that you're speaking of a consensus while sharing the opinions of only two people suggests that you have a lot of additional information you're not telling me about :o)

"Summarized in this quote from Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.""

I'm not suggesting that you exclusively pursue the strategy of asking people what they want for the development of your idea. More like guess what they want, then ask them if your guess sounds good. Or listen to a description of what they do now, suggest a change or improvement, and see how they react.

There are two stages to the development of a startup's product description. The first is (or should be) before any code is written. The second is after the initial product is launched. I think you can do both stages effectively without actually being much of a user of the product yourself.
Thanks very much. I stopped downloading the 7 MB PPT file. Google Docs surely is the better option.
It is only two players as far as I know.

However, since the source code is public domain and come with the game, you probably can hack it to support multiple players and controllers as well.
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Note that this is _not_ necessarily true on a personal level (the adulterous-partner argument).
Did Microsoft patent automated XSD inference?
I think you have a bad setup. I've been using p9p for years as my main desktop and I know 10s of others that do the same.

try setting your font= variable in $home/lib/profile

You can also mail the dev mailing list and see if anyone can help you.

http://groups.google.com/group/plan9port-dev

Do you not get output like the screenshots ?

http://swtch.com/plan9port/screenshots/
I'd appreciate being added to the list. Thanks for the real life illustration of the pay it forward concept.
Let's hope.
Is anyone else troubled by the fact that these psychological studies, once you've been exposed to them, seem indispensable to everyday life, but you just can't get used to the idea of actually studying them much?

Maybe it's just the clinical or analytical nature of formal psychology that makes it hard to swallow. Perhaps reading the Proverbs or other sage literature dispenses the same helpful advice, but without the clinical self-awareness.

And, aren't psychologists the ultimate sociopaths, distorting the metaphysics or their surroundings?
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Intel’s compiler is best for AMD too says software director
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Last updated: 16-04-2010 from 14:50 until 16:50
14-04-2010 on 09:42
Cool I asked for -Wlogical-op 9 years ago :)
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4412