skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've thought EXTREMELY long and hard about this - also because I run a review driven site. I wrote up a blog post talking about some of the more abstract/theoretical concepts revolving around motivation:
http://mysimplemindedworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/a-framew...

So under my framework I'd say the major motivation is that the people contributing reviews are those that are passionate about the Content/Topic. And the simple reason why they get so many is because 1) ridiculous Amazon volume that somebody already mentioned, and 2) Amazon is the place where you voice CAN have the most impact (if you're one of the top).
They are not taller and stronger than adult men, and the rapists are generally adult men, aren't they?
It's actually very easy to make a web service that makes a couple thousand dollars a month, if you stay away from 2 startup pitfalls:

1) Don't rely on advertising to monetize
2) Don't target it to consumers/end-users (if you're selling a web service, obviously this does not apply if you are selling an actual product)

There are many B2B niches right now that have terrible software solutions people are willing to pay for improvements to.

For example: About a year ago, I created a very niche web service for Internet marketers. It was basically a PayPal subscription tacked on to a few custom scripts I wrote to automate certain marketing tasks for myself. I didn't advertise it at all except for posting on a couple of Internet marketing forums I frequented. The site only had a few hundred visitors a month, however about 10% of those converted and became subscribers. Within a couple months, I had about 30 subscribers paying $50 a month to use the service.After I wrote the code for myself, the site required no work to maintain, the subscriptions were coming in on autopilot, it was an easy $1500 a month with no effort.

I was surprised at how easy it was to make a little extra money this way- the key was focusing on a very specific, small B2B niche, and creating a paid subscription service that was far superior to anything else that was available.
That's what I was thinking too, so I don't think the "start-up will die" rule applies to him if he had joined Google. I personally would love to be recruited by Google when the time comes because even though I'll be Employee number 300,001 - I'll learn a LOT and be able to help the next startup/company I am with.
What a terrible test..

When the browsers tried to get to 1000 you could see them fluctuating as the os gave and took their resources (even slightly noticeable at 100 (mainly in opera)). They needed to be done one at a time at that point.
That's perfectly fine. It happened to me before of someone offering a job that wasn't for me but for a more Jr. developer and I ended-up passing it on to someone I knew and trusted.
I'm from Argentina, and down here you have the leverage of currency being 1 to 4. Is not that you'll be paying cents an hour, but you'll be paying less and will pay someone above his/her local rate. Win-win.
You're at a serious disadvantage if your server is not across the street, it's true.

That actually wouldn't change with a 50ms rule. You still want your order in the queue before the other guy, even if he can't pull his order for 50ms.
A (fab) Approach To Web Apps
The only reason I stick with gzip over bz2 or 7z (lzma) is that gzip is everywhere. In reality, nobody has a file compression utility that can handle LZMA (even though I do, I never use it).
The article makes the point that being in the valley improves your odds, not that it's impossible to start a successful company outside the valley.
Here's what a law professor considers to be the key finding in the decision (http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/06/gulf-oil-spill...):

"Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness, the Summary also states that “the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” As the plaintiffs, and the experts themselves, pointedly observe, this statement was misleading. The experts charge it was a “misrepresentation.” It was factually incorrect. Although the experts agreed with the safety recommendations contained in the body of the main Report, five of the National Academy experts and three of the other experts have publicly stated that they “do not agree with the six month blanket moratorium” on floating drilling. They envisioned a more limited kind of moratorium, but a blanket moratorium was added after their final review, they complain, and was never agreed to by them."

Judges don't tend to view blatant lies with favor.
There is a sideshow of nightly drunken mixers and panels and meetups and conferences and such. If you attend these you will meet hundreds of loser "CEOs" with idiotic derivative ideas. Most engineers and founders avoid this, but Digg was one of main promoters of this nonsense, which probably colored ojbyrne's experience.
Given the increasing CPU/network gap, it's only a matter of time before the bandwidth (and thus time) saved by XZ more than compensates for the slower compression.
Are there no eligible females in SV? Being a person more interested in finding a mate than the "predominantly male engineers 24/7 who are only talking about tech" wouldn't that put you at a comparative advantage to them with the females who do exist in SV?

I would think it might even be better than LA where being a developer or startup founder is not a asset in a movie fame and fortune mindset.

An idea: stay in LA and do a startup that manages/matches talent to managers. No business plan needed and doesn't need to even work past the "I can get you a deal/make you famous" intro.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/derekflanzraich
The latter wouldn't happen if you read the reviews ;).
"X reasons for Z": there, I fixed it for you.
Congratulations, you've just discovered the purpose for consumer reviews!
Accidental downvote, sorry. It may be more SF-centric than valley-centric. My experience at digg did prompt me to network somewhat, so indirectly, you're probably correct.
SF is better than Mountain View, but is not "loaded with single women" if you compare it to somewhere like NYC. It's still pretty bad.
Blogs get attention by being on one side of the fence instead of straddling the fence.

Obviously Jason Fried doesn't want to write "Resume's work sometimes, other times pay attention to the cover letter," That's just boring.
It's my understanding that Apple is supporting a _subset_ of the ePub standard, as are most of the readers. I don't know of _any_ reader that supports the whole standard. If you do, please point it out as I would love to play with it.

To my knowledge Apple isn't extending the standard at all. Is Apple _adding_ anything to the standard? Isn't the DRM (grrrrrrrrrr) that Apple's adding covered under the standard?
9 Reasons Why You Should Hate "X Reasons for Y" posts:

1. They're overdone

2. They're uncreative

3. They're unoriginal

4. They're a crutch

5. They're assembly-line writing

6. They're used by tabloids to appeal to supermarket zombies

7. They've helped turn respectable mags into tabloids (or are a symptom of it, not sure which came first)

8. They're psychologically manipulative (I don't know how, I just know it)

9. They work

:)
How did you evaluate it was a small niche? Are you getting any growth in terms of customer signups per month?
They lost me at Stanford vs State school, I had to stop there.

Cover letters are an excellent way to judge the intent and character of an applicant. Sounds like Scott is the one with a chip on his shoulder there...
Video: Crazy Three Hour iPhone 4 Wait at Apple Store
Government mandated net neutrality is basically what most of the debate is about. I don't see much of the net neutrality debate framed outside of whether or not the government should enact regulation.
Do you have a technical background in trading/exchanges? (FYI, I have a background in trading, but not HFT or connecting to exchanges) I think we should defer somewhat to the people who provide exchange data professionally.

Don't you think the people who work with this data (and its consumers) professionally know what's fast enough to run and what's not?

Don't you think they know what behavior gets you shut down, how quickly you get shut down (and therefore how long you can game the system), and what doesn't?

I'm not saying you're explanation isn't possible/plausible, or that you're skepticism is unfounded, but I've seen you post several times about Finance/HFT and I haven't usually found your commments/assertions were very substantive.
The negation of "you can do a startup from anywhere" is not "you can only do a startup in Silicon Valley".
8. E-Myth Revisited by Gerber.
Also see http://www.quora.com/What-books-should-entrepreneurs-read
You're absolutely right, being in silicon valley does not, by itself, equal success. There are other factors that are far more important and there is no silver bullet. That's why there are tons of examples of great startups all over the world, including ones based right in my hometown.

So, if you personally have no desire to move here and are happy with your startup right where it is, then you should stay where you are.

All that being said, if deep down you've got the feeling that the valley might be the place for you, you see that you're not moving forward on your startup as fast as you'd like, or you haven't yet found the right people to work with, then it's a move I highly recommend.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/651759/c-grab-frame-from-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44161/real-time-wmv-video...
What about labour costs? I am currently working for a startup that has its development office in eastern germany, with a management office near Frankfurt. Although nobody explicitly said that, but the reason is simply that wages are much lower over here.

On the other hand, afaik in Sillicon Valley salaries are very high. I'm just wondering why nobody has brought that up so far.
Ditto in Chrome.
Use KISSmetrics for funnels, Mixpanel for cohorts, and Clicky for visitor-level details.

Sadly, there's no good "one true alternative" for metrics yet.
I'm not sure an internet TV Guide qualifies as "awesome shit that matters", but hey congrats on the new gig. At least you'll have responsibilities a lot faster than at Google.
And facebook integration? Seriously I think it is quickly becoming the obvious sign of a douchey website.

What? I completely disagree. I'd much rather have other options for sign-in, especially to get around the issue you're complaining about of having to sign up to check it out.
Majored in Government/Poli Sci. It was a flexible major, by which I mean I ignored it entirely.
It doesn't help that the rampant secondhand info we have about Google's hiring practices (for generalist devs out of school) suggests that they preference top schools; I wouldn't be surprised if that's where this guy drew that comparison from.

Not sure why I'm meant to be influenced by how an MBA stumbles through hiring tech people, though.
Great point, really.

With Harvard, the honest answer is that I didn't truly consider many other options-- I think I'm not the only person who'd say I attended Harvard because it accepted me.

That being said, I did learn a ton (more so from my friends and extracurriculars than academics). Harvard is obviously an academic institution, so technically I paid them for the opportunity to do whatever I wanted & use their own resources. If I didn't want to do something, I didn't. If I wanted to spend all my time building sweet shit, I pretty much did.

Google, in a large way, is built on this model-- but it's still a job, it's still got serious responsibilities, and, most importantly, I wasn't sure I'd learn as much there in four years as I would somewhere else.

But I guess we'll see, right?
If Cantor Were A Programmer...
Interestingly, file(1) can't identify lzma(1)-compressed files (they show up as data), but unlzma(1) reassuringly knows the difference between LZMA and random data. This came up once or twice in DEFCON CTF quals (http://www.vnsecurity.net/2010/05/defcon-18-quals-writeups-c...).
> Graduating Harvard Senior. Digital Media Entrepreneur. Builder. Disrupter.

That helps.
Meh. There are several of these for the iPad. Not sure it's super uncommon to have a different browsing interface anymore...
7-Zip utility (for compressing and decompressing different file types) doesn't?
LZMA is much, much slower. It is simply a matter of the rate at which you generate data and the compression ratio and the rate at which you add more storage/move the files off to tape. Can you "keep up" essentially.

Right now, CPUs are fast enough that LZMA is a realistic prospect. It boils down to what the extra CPUs will cost vs the cost of the storage saved (incl. the "cost" of space in the datacentre, the administrative overhead of more hardware, etc).
The Giant Sucking Sound (Why the “Fattened Middle” Deserves No Quarter)
I certainly see myself in this description. I started working on http://votereports.org/ because I wanted to perform the basic civic duty of voting, which is expected of every adult in the country, without the superhuman requirement of scrutinizing all the bills and tabulating the votes individually, which I wouldn't wish on anyone.

And by creating the tool for others as well there's a real chance it can make a structural change in the popular literacy of legislative/political accountability - reducing the role of yard signs, hypocrisy and party politics, and increasing the role of issues and legislation.

Incidentally, please do message me if you're interested in the project. We've got a lot to do between now and November.
Hint: don't stray too far from larger universities. Santa Cruz is a nice gender balance. San Francisco isn't bad. Berkeley can be alright, if a bit ghetto.
I'm sure that their chances of making it big are better here than they are in Kansas, but not by much if all you have going for you is the fact that you live in LA.

Adding to that: if the only difference between your success and failure is your location - your probability of success to begin with is probably slim. Success is a mindset, not a zip code.
"It's smash and grab, no different than a guy walking down Fifth Avenue and smashing the window at Tiffany's and reaching in and grabbing what's in the window."

Except that it's not...stealing jewels from a store deprives the original owner of physical property. Downloading torrent of the latest Jay-Z album (that I would never have bought anyway) doesn't take any "ice" off of Jay-Z's wrists. The former is theft, the latter is copyright infringement.

As the article mentions, piracy may actually help the economy. If I download that Jay-Z album and tell 3 friends how great it is, they may actually buy it, or even better, buy some concert tickets to see Jay-Z in concert (where he makes more money from merchandise sales).
mileage may vary; If the time it takes to compress is costs much less than the time it takes to transfer over the network, you might want not want to use gzip. For example, you're transferring a large file (1GB? 1TB?) to a remote person to deal with, is it cheaper to gzip (lower compression rate), take longer for the network transfer (most likely slowest step), and have the other person unzip, or to use a better compressor, and have the file transferred over quicker?
If you're in the jam where you have very little time to make a decision between two people based on their school and their job application, you may have screwed the whole process up several steps earlier.

Try to avoid getting in this jam; make that an explicit goal of your recruiting (and, more importantly, business planning) process. You may find that Fried's "chuck the resumes" advice starts making a whole hell of a lot more sense.
SvN, Getting Real, and Rework are an indirect marketing campaign for Basecamp. Sensationalized, aggressive, and confrontational articles attract more readers and more Basecamp signups. I love 37signals, but sometimes I wonder if they are providing me with good radical business advice or if they are raising controversy to attract attention.
From a user's point of view, PDF is a good experience, at least for highly formatted documents. By this I mean documents for which the specific layout, placement, and aspect ratio is an integral part of the authorship. A comic book/comic strip or a diagram meant to be viewed a certain way are examples of this. Lots of the technical books I have are designed such that to change their visual presentation would require changing the actual content. Like it or not, there's tons of pre-existing content designed for a specific presentation, and PDF (or postscript) are a good choice for that.

The biggest problem with PDF is that it usually requires a specific page orientation and aspect ratio, if not a specific page size. This is okay if you have a large enough display and can resize your viewer window to suit, but it's a bit more of a problem on smaller displays, or irregular shaped or resolved displays. For those, a liquid layout and typographic styling, something like HTML or ePub makes much more sense.
That's why you should use xz instead of lzma (they're not the same thing) — the XZ format has a magic number.
I tried it on a 943M tarball that contains miscellaneous Git
repositories and their checked out trees that I had lying around:

Compressor Size Ratio Compression Decompression
gzip -9 555M 59% 2m39.840s 0m16.495s
bzip2 -9 531M 56% 4m10.541s 1m27.720s
xz -9 457M 48% 13m55.730s 0m53.290s
I'm not as up-to-date as I need to be, but isn't the idea of truly semantic markup and RDF and microformats that Instapaper (and many, many other sites) won't have to have site-specific parsers? Now, I recognize that a) Instapaper can't do anything about that, and b) the vast, vast majority of sites are unlikely to change. So I guess the main question is: if you have really good semantic markup, do you need this, or will Instapaper already handle your stuff correctly?
For anything related to computer vision, OpenCV: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki

It also includes a bunch of useful generic image processing routines like scaling, convolutions, etc.
Cleardot?
Pretty near every function shares the same
first two parameters

Better then to make those two params passed by default so you don't have to type them every time.
IPhone 4 iMovie Video Review
Lefties: beware iPhone 4 reception problem
So the FTC reads about horses escaping, tells the farmer to close the barn door, and reports that as a successful enforcement action. Woohoo, your tax dollars at work!

Twitter didn't need any federal regulator to tall them to improve their practices; the embarrassment of the well-publicized incident -- and their continuing growth as a prominent target -- gives them all the motivation they need.
Well that was at least my experience living there between 98 and 2002.

You don't need to have the VC right next to you. If your product/service is good you will get access to them.
Thank you. That sums it up pretty concisely, though not very precisely.

I wonder if Goodhart's law is more apt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law
I disagree. A recruiter that uses resumes effectively frees up time that lets him carefully inspect only those candidates that made it through this coarse filtering process.

I've helped my friend do recruiting at his startup (albeit, not in the US). There are hundreds and hundreds of applications, and the constraint I pointed out becomes evident. Is it really cost-effective to personally interview and understand the context of every single resume-submitter, including those with absolutely no experience? How about someone without even a compsci degree and no experience to make up for it?
Did Twitter Cost McChrystal His Command?
This guy reminds me of Stephen Fowler: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzIDaRY82fU
How long will it be before we all need to add Go to our resumes in order to look legitimate?
Technically speaking, it may not be a trivial matter to ignore your own quotes, but it's not very difficult, either - if it takes M operations to handle your typical fully processed quote, and N operations to hash the quote and compare it to a table of quotes that you've delivered, then as long as M > N you've got some room for manipulation as long as you're able to pump enough bullshit into the system that everyone else has to deal with; I assume that in these situations M is usually substantially greater than N, probably on the order of at least 10:1 unless the quote is discarded as obviously irrelevant. It's just awful hard to imagine that the amount of processing done per quote in a HFT system can be less than a few hash table lookups...

I'd imagine the real difficulty would be making sure that the quotes you're putting in are a) relevant enough not to be immediately and trivially screened out by your competitors, b) not in danger of actually getting acted upon, and c) seemingly legitimate even in the face of after-the-fact scrutiny so that you avoid getting butt raped by the SEC for manipulation. a) and b) would likely be pretty easy to satisfy if you didn't have to worry about c), so...I don't know, this doesn't seem terribly implausible to me.

Then again, I don't know much about HFT, there may be factors in play that would make it a lot trickier to manipulate things in this way. And I'm certainly not convinced that this is what was behind the crash - "stupidity, not malice" is a good rule of thumb, and I'd have to see more evidence to assume that someone deliberately manipulated the markets here.
So bzip2 and 7-zip are way, way slower than gzip, then?

Bandwidth is cheap. Stick to gzip.

It's not as simple as that. Which one is better depends on the use case. If you're sending a one-off file to somebody, sure, gzip is better. But if you want to distribute a file to a large number of people (like Linux distributions do with their packages), the extra CPU time is insignificant compared to the bandwidth saved over the course of thousands of downloads.
Probably a Windows issue with font-face.
Right, sorry for not making that distinction. That is what I meant, but the latency between brain and fingers is under some delay :)
Raganwald does a nice job explaining the pitfalls (and to the OP's credit this was also linked from the original post.)

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-0...
Of course. But there's no reason not to make security easier and more natural (pit of success vs. struggling uphill).
The problem is that we currently have blackberry devices which have distinct data plans associated to our account. Perhaps this isn't a real issue...
More importantly, xz decompresses quickly. Essentially, you get the compression ratio of bzip2 at the decompression speed of gzip (and, unfortunately, the compression speed of bzip2).

EDIT: also, like gzip but unlike bzip2, you can stream data through xz (at an insignificant penalty in compression ratio).
Explaining/justifying the reasoning may be hard, but it's not abstract minimalist, is it? More like idealistic about open standards?
Something akin to productivity measurement isn't completely useless, but it should only ever be used: a) to identify and address systematic problems, as opposed to scrutinizing individual performance; and b) in rare cases to identify extreme outliers - but managers should be aware enough of what their employees are doing to know who those people are already.

Unfortunately, that kind of approach doesn't lend itself to a productivity measurement team seeking a high profile for its activities. Nor does ostensibly objective, non-punitive measurement stay that way - it's just too tempting for managers to use it as a stick.

I've been working on different projects for the past couple of years, and frankly I'm glad to be out of the productivity game.
Thanks. These types of things always hit that "this is awesome" spot due to both the engineering and community aspects.
3 years into a C.S. and Engineering major and I still feel like I know nothing