skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It could be argued that the browser itself is ripe to undergo a rather radical change over the next few years. Google's strategy here is to fatten the browser so that it becomes the Operating System, and then offer web-aware apps through that environment. Another strategy would be to thin the browser down and integrate it more strongly into the OS.

Browsers should be managing this kind of continuous (or as I like to say, persistent) state for us. They should also be capable of a lot of the social interaction some companies have chased after - sharing certain information with friends, syncing things up (simple app idea: sync up youtube across multiple browsers so you can fill your house with music simply by having a net connection), and likely other things as well.

I would suggest that people work toward building these browsers of the future, but such an undertaking would be monumental, and as you noted, Google has a pretty strong lock on this corner of the tech world.
I'm at La Jolla shores, so I have to agree ;)
No, to reduce energy use you'd need for people to take conservation seriously and to dramatically improve efficiency. Plenty of energy is wasted on inefficient cars, poor insulation, wasteful industrial processes, and so on.
I'm genuinely curious who you're referring to. Making fun a haughty 22 year old CEO makes sense, expecting that one of the founders will likely not be the CEO doesn't.

"If you don't have anyone on your founding team who is capable of being CEO, then sell your company -- now." -- Marc Andreessen
> "ome home, realize that they have nothing to spend their days on and their life has no purpose any more, and promptly die."

I honestly wouldn't mind that. In my ideal world I'd work till I drop - such would be how much I enjoy what I do. As I get older I imagine I would want to scale back how much of work I'd do as other things take over (children, grandchildren, etc), but I doubt I'd ever give this up altogether.
That will depend on the language. I think I pretty much covered that point.
I encourage my clients (mostly small businesses) to embrace the CEO tag, but to view it as a function or role, not a title.

In other words, you might be CEO 20% of your time / one day a week. Another 20% of your time might be Sales Manager or Code Monkey. All are necessary roles, none is more essential than the rest.

FWIW, we then define the CEO role as having three tasks: Managing the company's vision, Managing the company's energy, and Coaching the team to up their capability. This encourages small business owners to think and act strategically, even if only with part of their time.
I think he's funny. And his point is less about the need for sacrifice (in general) and more about the need for future time orientation.
I once wanted a business card that read:

<my name>

CEO, Janitor, Marketing Director, Coffee Maker, Architect, Tech Support, HR, Snack Purchasing Agent

But to your point: If a company is a corporation, than someone is CEO; it doesn't matter if the corporation is 1 person or 100. But I agree -- the main thing is that titles don't get in the way of the work to be done.
To be clear, is this because green energy is (yet) incapable of satisfying our current needs, or purely because our ability to generate green energy is as finite as from oil?
Android is growing much faster than the iPhone. The rest of the world (where I come from) is a lot more varied. RIM doesn't do so well and Nokia dominates heavily in a lot of markets. The iPhone doesn't do so well outside of the US either.
How much equity should I be getting
So, I've been working in a really small company (6 people) making an app. I wasn't one of the founders, but I've been working at half my rate for the last 8 months. I figure at this point I've "invested" $48,000 in opportunity cost. Though the app is making about $1000/day, the company has run out of cash and I've been asked to stay on for a few months while they look for investment. So, they're offering some equity. (I would have received some anyway for working at half my rate for 8 months.) I really have no idea how should start to valuate how much I should be looking for. It seems to me at this point I'm more a partner in this thing if I'm actually working for free and have already invested $48k as opposed to an employee you'd throw a few shares at for incentive. Any thoughts?
The video also makes the point that people are ignorant of the exponential function's effect, believing that constant growth is possible, when it clearly is not.

The Dr. also mentions that 0% growth is inevitable, so that is covered - but I had no idea it was called the logistic function, thanks.
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I know Art of the Start from Guy Kawasaki mentions it -- I thought it was in his blog too, but I can't find it at the moment. Here are a couple more:

http://venturehacks.com/articles/top-heavy

http://www.beyondvc.com/2006/06/topheavy_teams.html

I've also heard this in private conversation (specifically, the first time we met with a VC before promptly ditching the titles) and a couple of the speakers at YC in our batch mentioned it.
I have a "smart phone" with Internet connection, but I've used it about 5 times in the last year.
Its useful for checking emails but horrible to try and respond. If you actually need to do something on the net, you need a netbook or laptop..which needs Windows or Linux.
Why not just slap in the google code highlighter javascript, if the page contains code. http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/

Simpler and cleaner that way.
did he use the method of loci? it's very popular in memory competitions but doesn't seem popular for language acquisition
Anyone with vision, courage and the ability to inspire.

Balmer could always execute, but that's not what Microsoft needs right now. It doesn't know where it's going, so it's meaningless how well it gets there.

Microsoft, for better or worse, is still in the driver seat. In terms of market share, Apple is a rounding error. But they inspire. They are exciting people about the future. When was the last time Microsoft did that? This isn't just about share price; it's about perceptions by investors, customers, employees -- everyone. They need to inspire again.
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A tad slow! I think I requested this a couple of years ago :-P Garry added some preliminary support back then, but it never worked properly. Good to see it works better now.
That makes good sense.

Do you view the role of CEO as tied to a specific individual?
Windows is going to have to play nice with other technologies.

To an extent, this is already in place, with technologies such as WCF that support web standards.

I'm currently talking with a potential client about splitting out part of a Silverlight thick app to a platform-agnostic RESTful api to allow mobile and webapps.

It's to Microsofts credit that this sort of thing is getting easier, though it's an uphill battle to sell such techniques to Microsoft development shops that still regard running a Citrix viewer to a Terminal Services farm, as a web-app.
Actually, what I meant to say is that fossil fuel consumption has to stop growing and preferably decline. But there are limits to green energy too. For a British take on this: http://www.withouthotair.com/
The Xmarks plugin has the option to sync tabs, although I haven't used it myself.
This is because they are replacing your interest with a linked page. The offer to link is the prompt.
John Gage: "The network is the computer", 1984

There's not really much more to be said than that. Most people here are aware of the competing visions of that time, and Microsoft never quite got it as their business model depended on (depends on) a computer on every desk. Apple never quite got it either (though, a little more now). Sun got it (obviously). Google got it even more.
> come for free with static typed compilation + JIT

NO. Static typing doesn't help when speaking about inline caches for virtual calls (most method calls in a typical Java app) ... it only helps on the initial method lookup because you're dealing with a vtable instead of a hash (that's because at least you know the interface at compile-time).

But to do code-inlining and other such optimizations, the Hotspot JVM only compiles bytecode that has been profiled. That's because jitting itself is an expensive operation and you can't just redo it after you've inferred the conditions of a potential call-site cache, being more efficient to just first interpret that code until you have enough data.

Thus the long warmup time. But what works in a desktop/server environment doesn't necessarily work on a mobile phone with much less constrained resources ... and unfortunately Moore's law in the mobile world goes to increased battery life instead of increased processing power / bigger or faster RAM.

I still think Java was a poor language choice for Dalvik precisely because methods in Java are implicitly virtual and because you can't have custom stack-allocated values. A language like C# would've been more suitable ... but since its their VM, maybe they'll provide an efficient alternative.
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Live soccer world cup provides access to all of the latest live football streaming and soccer feeds for football fans so one can easily catch the action online. ...
Thanks, I'd forgotten to escape the search string in the title element.
Possibly the author (who I haven't researched and didn't recognize) failed to realize the connotations of the "A modest proposal" meme.

The easiest way to implement this "vision" would be to host your session on a cloud-based server, and then use VNC from whatever machine you're at to connect to it.

It would require some tweaking of typical accessing machine's operating systems and so on, to drop you straight into a login dialog for a VNC client, and would of course assume that bandwidth isn't expensive, but it would be very simple.

Since your (default, at least) VNC server address would be constant for you, it could of course be trivially remembered by the various client machines, so all you do is log in and there you are.
While that is true, this is not the most efficient way to solve the problem if you have a lot of RAM. My point is merely that your laptop can compute PageRank for, roughly, any link graph that will fit on its hard disk, or that it can access at a reasonable speed over the network.

(At 30 links per web page and 5 bytes per link, you need about 160 bytes per web page to represent this link graph. That would allow you to store a 6-billion-page graph on a 1TB notebook hard disk. Unfortunately, making 8 passes over that terabyte will probably take more than a day.)
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Huh. This guy is simply making the very basic point that politicians, economists and bankers selling us "growth" as a solution to unemployment, debt, etc are plainly lying. Growth (population, GDP, energy availability, etc) will stop at some point. An economy that relies entirely on growth to merely function is doomed to fail spectacularly at some point in time.
Completely agree. You're not worth the prespex if you allow the title to reduce your mental flexibility. However if you let the prespex sink in and take responsibility of the company, of doing what it takes to make sales, getting satisfied customers, building a product, dealing with challenges and making money, you've got that 90% inspiration thing going. Now you need that 1% perspiration.
Well, he had just prior spent some time explaining how to convert any growth rate to 100% just by scaling the time axis. So when he says it's 11:59, he means it's 10 years (or whatever) to the end, if one were to assume constant growth.
I'd much rather just not be monolingual. When I think and write (notes, plans etc.) I use norwegian and english together. Both languages have useful features that makes thinking well easier; english has an enormous amount of words norwegian has those beautiful compound words like skadefryd (schadenfreude in german). There is no need for europeans to give up on their languages because learning english for professional and educational is easy.
These "high runtime cost" operations are done by V8, Chrome's JavaScript engine. I don't think they're as high cost as you think.
Sorry, what was my analogy? I'm saying distributed social networking should work like email and you just described it. However what I don't think it should be is decentrAlizing down to the user level. Another problem with standardizing the system is that new or special features will not be cross compatible, however that's another issue for another thread.
In the short term, sudden changes in energy consumption are very disruptive. (For example, see gas prices and the auto industry last year.) But a longer-term, gradual shift towards less energy usage need not be.
Interesting ideas. But would be a lot better with some evidence. Take some examples of massively scaled start ups and explain how they conform to the theory.
I use ReadItLater in my browser and on my iPhone to keep track of stories I'm interested in.
Well, I connect to my workstation on my laptop with remote desktop.

This way I can use my netbook on the road and still have the quadcore gpu, multiple vm's and the open tabs in firefox.
If this happens it'll be a massive shift for Apple. It ultimately means less Macs will be purchased for development purposes, whereas right now, that HAS to happen.

It does make sense though... more developers = more apps = more revenue.

Who knows.. maybe they'll also have OS X app development in there too :-P
What I'm objecting to is this concept which seems to exist in this thread that work is a drudge, and being relieved from it is a net positive.

I think it's simply not true. Quite apart from enjoying your work, there's the social aspect, it gets you out of the house, gives you a reason to get up in the morning, you incrementally work towards longer-term goals, etc. Retirement in leisure has none of these things, and I strongly believe you'll find the bloom wears off the rose quite quickly if you don't find some other form of work to do, even if you don't choose to call it work, or aren't paid for it.

I believe a man who retires at 70 will be happier than one who retires at 50, and he'll live longer too (leaving aside those who die between 50 and 70).
It all depends on the stage you're in. When you are just out of the gate, building a product and getting your first customers having titles is silly.

At a later stage it makes good sense. Whether or not 'investors want a CEO' depends on a lot of factors, the most important one being what stage the company is in, as soon as you incorporate you'll need a 'signing officer' (or two, or three, depending on the law), and maybe one of the people in the company is preferred for that role and so a natural transition from co-founder status to a CEO role is established. Don't be surprised if the guy that ends up in that chair is not the guy you originally envisioned.

There are lots of situations in which investors don't want a CEO. Two co-founders looking for seed capital are going to have a problem getting themselves taken serious if one of them labels himself CEO and one of them labels himself CTO. Too many chiefs, no Indians.

Agreed that having 'two captains' is not ideal, but should there be so much conflict that this is a problem the titles don't matter much. When your 'other half' walks out you have a problem regardless, and a title used to force an issue is not going to help in this respect.

Finally, the title of CEO of a successful company is useful when starting a new company, it becomes part of your track record, and a successful company will have a CEO, but you first have to get to that stage. And a good CTO is just as valuable as a good CEO, to weigh the role of CEO as fully 20 times as important as that of the other co-founders is not at all in line with my experience.
I remember we had a slightly painful meeting when there was 4 of us and it was clear who the best candidate for CEO was - and it wasn't one of the founders. I even said the "you aren't going to be CEO he is" to my co-founder, which I don't think he ever forgave me for (although we went on for another 6 years after that).

That was probably the single best decision I made at that company. Once we got that out of the way we kind of all knew what our areas of responsibility were, before that it was "everyone does everything".
Or German at 16. I teach high school German in Norway, and the kids don't hear/read enough German for immersion to work. We have 4 hours per week of classes, so memorization of vocabulary and grammar is fundamental. (but some combination with immersion is obviously very preferable)

But: There is no silver bullet. Take The Korean too with a grain of salt (but there is a lot of truth there)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72
I am about to start a "Sole Proprietorship" to do some VoIP consulting and system integration. I have had 2 clients before this, but I was just getting my foot in, so I didn't have a "Company Name". I am glad this came up on HN. Would 'Founder' be the most appropriate title on my biz card?
But things are improving.

http://www.gapminder.org

The GNP and life expectancy of Africa is about as good as it was in the western world around 1930, that's not exactly stone-age, and the situation is steadily improving. They'll get there.
In a not so distant future I can see viruses infecting pace makers and numerous other RFID human aids.

Of couse, by this point governments will be pushing for mandatory chipping of all new born babies and children.
> Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition

How's that unfair?

I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low and I only stay with them as long as their products kick ass. Not only that, but they do make it easy to import and export your data using standards on all their products that I use ... GMail has POP3 out of the box, Gdocs can export your docs in whatever format (HTML/OO/PDF/Word/Excel), GReader can export your feeds in OPML.

As far as search engines go, replacing them is ~5 clicks away in both Chrome and Firefox. And from a dev POV, I only care about white-hat seo stuff, like having good articles with semantically correct tagging that all other search engines care about.

I care more about the availability of my data and about my privacy. There's no point in fear mongering about what might be as long as they are playing nice ... trust and reputation have been the foundation of any society for thousands of years, I can't see why that wouldn't continue to work.

E.g. both Apple and Microsoft have betrayed my trust, and now I don't use their products or recommend them anymore. And I don't really miss them that much ;)
That Venture Hacks article says "One of the founders should be the CEO so you can make decisions quickly."

Anyway, I'm sure it varies. I really am curious what top investors think though. Does Ron Conway think less of you for telling him "I'll be the CEO and he'll be the CTO" assuming you're not arrogant/lame about it?
And the people who don't speak it well are those you don't have to speak to anyway (professionally). In europe english is becoming the language of higher education, academia, all kinds of "niche" writing/communities (hackers, libertarians etc.) and business. The common language of high IQ, high openness to experience and ambitious people.
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I doubt I can make it...but I would love it if we could have a los angeles HN meetup. Any happen yet, or any plans/groups for it?
How about an open nonstandard? To me, there seems to be a lot of open-source innovation these days. To take one example out of dozens, where's the proprietary site that has a more useful proprietary programming language than Python or Perl? I agree with what I imagine your point to be: that standardizing Python up front would have made it very slow to innovate. But being decentralized hasn't made it innovate more slowly.

The issue with email is that innovations have to be adopted independently everywhere for them to be widely useful. But that doesn't have to be the case. You can structure a decentralized system so that any user of the system can deploy innovations on it, that the other users can immediately benefit from, without requiring them to be standardized.
humourless dolts
Why morality doesn't need God
I agree that population growth cannot go on forever (although I consider doubling the current number quite likely). However I see no reason why energy availability can't keep growing for many many centuries to come. We aren't tapping the full potential of nuclear fission, to say nothing about fusion. Things like solar energy in all its variations is also a source we basically aren't using at all. Give us 50-100 years an we'll no doubt come up with some new source of energy we haven't even considered yet.
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I have a list of some powerful resources that recently launched and very beneficial to web designers and developers. This list includes some of my favorite resources like Video JS, Google Font API, & Nivo Slide (jQuery Plugin) etc.
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That happens far more frequently than you may think. Kudos to you and your team for recognizing this (ok, reluctantly in one case) and acting on it.
Re: Wie

For Norwegians learning German we have a similar problem.

The Norwegian "som" can be translated into "wie", "als", "der", "die", "das", welcher", "welches" or "welche".
Will Steve Ballmer show up at the WWDC keynote?
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Most of my weekend is spent playing, usually evenings too. But only part of that is playing for playing's sake. The major part is actually playtesting of my hobby project - patching new functionality into a certain game with asm/c++ (some more details in my profile). Wonder if that skillset is employable?

Productivity, yes, GTA VC/Urban Chaos/UT2k3 helps me unwind after work and in turn makes me more productive the next day. A few times I even solved some work problem that was bothering me, while ingame.

Oddly, I noticed that I fare better in GTA VC racing courses when I'm paying absolutely minimal attention to the actual game and focus on the music or some thinking problem instead.
Anyone in the HN community working on PGP encryption for the iPhone/Android? Not in the hushmail vein, but using the Thunderbird/Enigmail implementation of GnuPG as the model instead? Thoughts?
"there is nothing inherently special in "culture" which is distinct from it's component elements"

I disagree, there are expressions that correspond to modes of thought that get legitimacy/relevance from their connection to the history and identity of your people. The expressions "blood, sweat and tears" or "keep calm and carry on" does not and can not mean the same thing in mandarin, if you never use them in english anymore you will have lost a connection to that particular historic/cultural experience.

http://karolbednarczyk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/keep_c...
From another comment:

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...

You can play with the data here: http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly...