skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook came after MySpace and Friendster, Google had entrenched competition. If investors don't get that, I wouldn't want them on my board.

Before starting I made a list of all my potential competitors. Then I spent some money getting industry data, and found out none of them actually had traction with bigger companies.

And then I changed products, twice, each time redefining who the competition was. BI? Recommendation engine? Advertising optimization platform? Recoset could end up as any of these, depending on customer validation.

Finally, every week there's a new potential competitor announced. I don't care: my focus isn't on winning against anyone else, it's making sure I have a viable business model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
This is interesting enough data, but it doesn't really prove anything. As you can see, the turn "django" was at the 1.0 mark before it even really started, so you have to take that into account when looking at the numbers.

Even with that correction, it does seem to put Django in a slight lead, but it also shows that it has had a much steadier growth (assuming jazz references would have stayed steady and all new growth is related to the framework).
It shows attention to detail, the kind of mind that you'd want tending to the software running your backend. Not by any means a bad thing.
They seem to take pride in U.S. provenance:

"Designed by Apple in California

Assembled in China"
I suppose that if they are working hard at arranging it, that's better than avoiding taxes and then blaming things on TurboTax.
Indeed,

But calling WikiLeaks a whistleblower site does not accurately reflect the character of the project. It also does not explain why others who are engaged in open government, anti-corruption and whistleblower protection activities are wary of WikiLeaks or disdainful of it. And it does not provide any clue why the Knight Foundation, the preeminent foundation funder of innovative First Amendment and free press initiatives, might have rejected WikiLeaks’ request for financial support, as it recently did.

Which of the fallacies from a few days ago are included here? Should "describing wikiLeaks as a whistle blower site" explain why the Knight foundation didn't give them funding?? Labels aren't intended to explain most of the time...
Sure, but whenever anyone proposes that, 40% of the country, suckers that actually pay their taxes, stand up and beat their chests and wail about the inequities of making a corporation pay taxes.

Last I heard, Exxon-Mobil, the most profitable corporation in the entire world, doesn't pay a dime in US taxes. Meanwhile, I pay every other week. This is BS.
You might start with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacircular_interpreter#Exampl...

Maxine is also interesting, it's aimed at being a production JVM (someday), is under heavy development even after Oracle acquired Sun and is exclusively 64-bit CPU targeted, X86-64 and SPARC.

Jikes RVM has and continues to be heavily used for research of all sorts (as a random example, for GC research). x86-32 and PPC 32 or 64 bits. It's the basis of Jnode, a x86-32 OS that's 99.9% Java and the rest assembler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jnode.
Article title is misleading, they only minimize some capital gains tax on their cash and investments with the nevada entity. And they certainly have a duty to shareholders to do so.

They pay hundreds of millions in income tax on their profit in California, plus everything else - property tax, payroll tax, sales tax on purchases in CA...
Supreme Court calls for tighter oversight of Sarbanes-Oxley
I think they were wackier. When I got into Web (95/96, though did some new media stuff a couple years earlier) almost anyone already in the field had moved across from another career path because there simply weren't established training pathways for young students. If you were a strong graphic designer, you stayed in graphic design. Whereas, if you were a desktop publishing hack who was a mediocre designer but didn't make a concise type-setter, then learning PageMill and so on was for you.
I'll admit, I hadn't put much thought into exactly lucrative it could be to work for Facebook pre-IPO. You make an excellent point and I've changed my mind: I COULD fathom walking away from something like Chrome OS if it meant that kind of financial security in my future.
congrats guys! good to finally see a public launch!
That's why it would need to be something new. Right now we have the "big pool" where you can have as much fun as you want, but you can also drown and there aren't lifeguards to help you out. What we also need is a "kiddie pool" where the water is shallow and safe. I don't think he's advocating for replacing the big pool with the kiddie pool. He just wants this AppStore that would allow regular folks to install / uninstall apps without the fear of messing up their system. A rewrite of the OS to prevent apps from doing what they want would break a ton of existing app -- that just won't fly. But, a "new type" of app, something that's safe and you install from the AppStore...
Can I run my business with a 4-day work week?
Sounds like you could use some good ole defragging. Just get out to the nearest nature something place or a quiet spot and just sit there and watch your thoughts race by. Just do it. Don't think about anything in particular but just watch yourself think. This can do wonders if you keep at it for a while.
Apple’s Third Co-Founder Sold 10% Of Apple For $800
Yes, but in practice, this means that the middle classes pay most of the tax, since the poor don't earn enough, while the rich are able to afford different wealth structures that e.g. fall under capital appreciation, or are structured around shares of ownership and operated in a different state or country for tax reasons, etc.

In other words, the burden of funding of the state - the security, infrastructure and social consensus which is the foundation of all citizens' wealth - proportionately falls least on those that benefit from it most.
That is certainly one problem Windows has. It's also not really orthogonal (I'm looking at you, registry) and doesn't strive for simplicity or elegance like Unix/Linux tend to do. (Why the user folder is so ambiguous and mysterious before Windows 7 is beyond me.)

If Eric Raymond is to be believed, another problem is that it has no unifying concept, a la Unix's "everything is a file" or Apple's "make the GUI simple and focused".
<50 downloads as of now
Why I Don't Believe In Personal Branding
Nitpick: "Assembled in China"

I guess nobody "makes" Apple products...
Are you a DBA? You didn't include much info on what it is that you do.
> I wonder if the researcher's brain scan is a product of his environment or an inevitable genetic conclusion

I also often wonder if small governments are better for society than larger governments.

While its common for people to take sides on those matters, it's likely the answer is somewhere in between the two.
The system he describes sounds a lot like what I think web apps are going to look like in a few years. Why reinvent all this machinery for "native" apps that aren't any better for most tasks than a web app that also automatically solves the problems of backups, sharing, security, collaboration etc at the same time?

Sun was absolutely right then they said the network is the computer. They just jumped the gun by about 20 years.
Agreed. If it's truly a startup, something's very wrong.

If you can't quickly figure out what game is going on, seriously consider bailing. If they truly don't have work for you, they may figure that out in due course. Something political above you is very possibly going on, and those sorts of things can get ugly without notice (well, way down where you are).

How big is the startup, i.e. rough number of employees, 10s, 100s, 1,000s?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469466
What if science gets very good at predicting who will commit crimes?

Would you still value civil liberties then?
Back Office Exposed: ReTargeter
For some reason it didn't occur to me to look at some of the resources avail. through Universities. I will be sure to check out your suggestions.

For those interested in Ruby I did find a free book on Ruby and after glancing through a few pages it seems to be written in an interesting way with funny references.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_%28poignant%29_Guide_to...
Not true, the top 5% of earners in the US pay more than 50% of the taxes, and the top 10% pay almost 3/4ths of the taxes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States#T...
That's a good point. Here is the California only version, which is a bit cleaner:

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails,+django&...
Absolutely. I value living with relative freedom in a surprising world more than I value safety or justice.

I feel compelled to point out that few humans would consider it ethical to punish someone for something they haven't done. I'm sure you don't consider it ethical, either, so I don't see what the point of this line of reasoning is.

In addition, this has nothing to do with the article, which makes no claim to prophecies or predictions.
It is interesting that the author describes three ingredients for psychopathic behavior, and that he was missing the third: abuse during childhood. In rats, the quality of maternal care was shown to cause long-lasting effects in the brains of the offspring, particularly in areas that respond to a neurotransmitter called oxytocin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin

Rats that receive high levels of maternal care when pups have higher sensitivity to oxytocin in certain brain areas. This is significant because oxytocin is implicated in prosocial behaviors, such as pair bonding and maternal behavior.

Recent experiments with humans showed that the inhalation of oxytocin increases people's ability to trust and empathize with others. So, my guess is that a 'normal' oxytocin system might be able to counter the negative antisocial effects of the first two ingredients described in the article. The author might want to take a look into his own oxytocin system next.
The difference being the tax situation is created by laws, and engineering is governed by reality.

The laws shouldn't create a situation where big, slow-moving corporations get huge built-in advantages over smaller, more innovative companies (I know apple is more innovative than many big companies but stay with me here). Particularly, they shouldn't be getting those advantages by paying a bunch of blood-sucking lawyers and accountants to move money around and create nothing. The law should, if anything, be providing support for smaller businesses.
This is all 100% false.

We did change our model from revenue sharing to paying writers, but we did not steal any money or not pay anyone.
Also, we publish under Creative Commons, so folks are welcome to do whatever they like with the content provide they shoot us a link back.

This is just false, and in fact probably libelous, stuff.
On the other hand a lot of very small business can often operate by 'cash in hand' which bypasses most taxation.
Anyone else notice that all the news links which appeared on that page were for Django terms which had nothing to do with the framework. Ruby on Rails is a solid search term, Django is a bit vague it seems.
Yeah, but they make more than 50% and more than 3/4 of the income, respectively.

Richer people pay lower taxes as a percentage of their income than the middle class. Much lower. It'd be lower even if they did it all by the book and didn't hire expensive accountants and use offshore accounts, tax havens and all of that. Once you add that stuff in it's significantly lower.

It's a bug, not a feature. Meanwhile, presumably you're not a multi-millionaire, and you're actually cheering for them to pay less off their income in taxes than you do. Pretty funny stuff.
We did not promise revenue sharing forever. We said we were going to try revenue sharing and we, of course, reserve the right to change our model.

We tried hard to make revenue sharing work, and it only worked for 5% of the audience. So, instead of pretending that freelance writers wanted something they told us they didn't, we pivoted and we're moving to a more About.com-like flatrate with a bonus system.

Now we have a line of folks out the door who want to work for us.
Can People with Autism Learn Implicitly?
It would be nice if California became the most business friendly state in the nation. One of the reasons we chose Austin over California for our startup is the high California taxes and loads of red tape to operate.

Texas seemed a lot more business friendly to us, the only downside we can see is the humid climate.
Android market must be updated nightly or something with download count as there are over 380 ratings.
My startup - machine generated digital camera reviews
Why didn't facebook IPO?
Mobile DTV moves forward as D.C. test proves successful
About United States Trademark Registration
I have been in a similar situation and unfortunately did not leave as soon as I realized it could never possibly work. Instead I wasted about six months working half-heartedly on a garbage product that was eventually thrown away (literally) the day after I quit.

This sounds like a leadership problem. You need to have a hard, honest conversation with the founder(s). Your time is your most precious commodity and they're wasting it.

You need to get simple, direct answers, too, not vague promises.

We don't have the whole story, but from your side it sounds like they're either clueless or are not communicating clearly, e.g., maybe they expect you to figure out what to do yourself.

They need to either give you concrete tasks or communicate the vision so clearly and concisely that you know the next 10 things that need to get done. If they can't do either then that's poor management and you need leave.
Anyone happen to know of similarly priced options for SATA drives? Have a few extra laying around I'd like to put to use as cheaply as I can, currently don't have any desktop PCs to plug them into.
Interested to hear people's opinions...
It's pretty normal for there to be some rough edges at the beginning of a program. I think tweaking the formats is a natural thing to do for any program in its first few weeks of release. It will improve.

What should be TechCrunch's main concern now is how to monetize this. Online and broadcast tech video has been tried by many sites in the past, and I can't think of a single program/channel/site that has been a commercial success. Video is expensive to produce (especially using a staff-generated content model) and most shows do not generate huge audiences. Advertisers have too many options to choose from, which keeps prices down.
seems overly complicated. why not just have mutt connect directly to google's imap servers over ssl? with header and message caching enabled, switching between mailboxes is plenty fast against most imap servers.
Yeah, taxes come out of worker paychecks, so it doesn't matter that the big corporate entity with billions in the bank doesn't have to pay any. We can just hit up the workers with their mortgages and families.

Personally, I'd prefer a little more honest accounting, and maybe some more money going the workers' way, a little less going investors' way.
How was that ever even vaguely under threat?
Quote from the article you link to: "Asked if his son was on board with the tax initiative, Gates Sr. said, improbably, they hadn't discussed it".

Why does Doctorow think its improbable that Gates Sr hasn't discussed this with his son?
Because 62% [1] of Windows users are still on Windows XP. And these people bought computers; they didn't rent them. It at least feels like Microsoft's duty to herd as many of these people to the modern web stack as possible.

OS X, on the other hand -- virtually everyone is on Snow Leopard or Leopard by now, with a few stragglers on 10.4 Tiger. No one is on 10.1, or even 10.3, anymore. [1]

Part of the difference in the upgrade curves can be attributed to the legendary way Windows bloats and requires beefier hardware with each release (possibly excepting Vista → 7), the fact that Apple only needs to release OSes for its own hardware, the much cheaper and simpler (one version) OS upgrades on the Mac side of the fence, and frankly the anti-consumer DRM/validation tactics of Microsoft that make people fear updates. Apple makes no attempt to stop end users "sharing" or outright pirating OS updates — in part because everyone already bought hardware, but mostly, I suspect, because it's extremely beneficial to the (developer) ecosystem.

[1]: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-shar...
Why we don’t remember how science works
Don't liberals hold...

I really hope you learn that saying things like this points out to people that you are willing to stereotype a huge number of people of whom you are completely ignorant. Also, there wasn't really an issue here. It was a human interest/science story about a scientist learning he is similar to the people that he has studied. Interesting story without an issue being focused on.
Thus, they assign a low value to events which might happen in the future - that is, a high paying job in 5 years is less valuable than using meth now.

That's two different classes of events and you are misrepresenting what was claimed by attempting to further devalue poor peoples choices by saying they would rather use meth than work. It's also insulting towards poor people to imply they are all meth users. A proper analogy would be that they disproportionaly value a job they can have right now over a higher paying job they can have in 5 years.
may the voip be with you
Visiting The United States of America
Windows 8 Plans Leaked: Numerous Details Revealed
because it's a choice

Edit: I misread "is" as "could be". It's a good thing to have because it could be a good thing to use. It may be a bad thing to have enabled by default, but it's a bad thing to omit outright.
Either they don't need money, or the bankers told them they'd get a crap valuation (or both). Why go public in a recession when you can wait 'til the boom times to cash in?
There is no reason to down vote this comment. I know the HN collective dislikes Jason, but there is nothing wrong with it.
I'm a web developer. I just have a pretty extensive background in database query optimizing. I enjoy it but there is only so much work you can do there without understanding the whole system.
There are maybe 30 people there now and they're hiring a lot.
I would guess they need it to call TelephonyManager.getDeviceId as part of their DRM device authorization scheme: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Tel...

Or maybe they change their sync settings (for "Whispersync") based on your network status.
Would most windows users be better served if the system was more like the iPad? IT support seems to think so, and except for developers, this maybe true.
For a second there, that seemed like the real Tom Cruise.
I'm interested in this, since my phone is my favorite book reader. The best app I've found so far for reading on Android is Aldiko ... and it's quite good: I'd be interested to see a comparison. The linked article is not particularly enthusiastic.

(Min version is 1.6 -- I'm going to have to upgrade my phone somehow before trying it out.)
Not a good sign. But don't sit there if everyone else's busy.

Check this out.

http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-mac...

Also, you can sort out source control, servers, build machines. Ask questions, lots of them, and offer any sort of help. There are no real job titles in startups.
Yeah I'm not sure how to approach the subject given that they think everyone is working hard. That's odd from my point of view since no one seems to be working very hard (in comparison to the crazy stories you sometimes hear about startups).

The tasks they end up giving me take me hours when I think they hope the tasks take me weeks (mostly so I don't come back asking for more work).
While I'm not arguing the system is perfectly fair - those large corporations also create jobs, and pay a huge amount of tax in raw numbers. People look at the percentages and say "Ohh look how they cheat...." - but look at the raw figures, and see where the tax dollars are really coming from.

Joe average 9-5 worker doesn't create jobs, or employ hundreds or thousands of people, and he does get tax breaks for certain things in his everyday life (dependants, mortgage payments, whatever) - a large corporation occupies a completely different place in the economy, and can indeed take advantage of different things.

(joe average 9-5 worker, even if a staff of 10 tax wizards helpded him out, wouldn't be able to save much on his income tax legally - because his financial situation is simple)
Software engineering may be (currently) part of CS, but theoretical CS is more than just applied statistics. The halting problem, one of the most famous undecidable problems, is pure math and is CS. Lambda calculus is CS and is pure math.
Yikes! Reddit style submission title editorializing, through convenient quoting.

"tl;dr;hca: Too long, don't read, here is the conclusion I want you to arrive at"
I've offered my help in any number of areas. It just typically is ignored. Very confusing situation for me.
ha! I think the parenthetical part of your statement is actually the most interesting.

After all, not many people are left on 10.4, and 10.5 runs on all the hardware that 10.4 does (not so with 7 and XP).
I knew there would be something to worry about, but reading the linked article, I think it's more likely they want to be assured that they can maintain a viable food supply. For example, once they have good wheat genomes, they may be able to engineer varieties of wheat that will be resistant to new strains of rust.

Also, they will be in a great position to reverse engineer everything coming out of Monsanto and other big-time GM food producers. Don't underestimate the benefits of being able to stick closely on the coat-tails of some of the World's smartest genetic engineers.

Do you have a source at all for the intelligence vs genetics study?
If you're at a software startup, and they can't find anything for a programmer to do, that's a very bad sign.

Just find yourself another job with your idle time and move on with your life.
I don't think one month is such a long time. Assuming they're planning to start a new project soon, it makes sense to keep hiring. The strange thing is that you're kept in the dark. You really should ask what are their plans for the new hires.

Also, if you have "no real knowledge of the system" you should work on changing that, even if they don't expect you to.
Taking a wealthy friend as an example, and watching how many jobs he's created, how many charities he's created, and how many lives he's changed - plus the sheer raw numbers of dollars he paid in taxes on top of all that - I don't really care if the percentage is less than mine. I didn't create 500 jobs or donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to real-life charities every year.

EDIT: That doesn't mean I think the system is perfect or that people don't cheat, or that the wealthy are somehow innocent - money is power, and those with more money will exert more influence on how to keep more of it - that's natural.
Fun error message - "This update failed to install successfully. Please try again after reboot"
In some cases (e.g. elements that trigger JS events but aren't real links or buttons) an I-beam may appear. In these cases cursor: pointer; is quite beneficial, though cursor: default; (not the same as "auto") may be appropriate.

But the web != your OS. Many things that work and are expected on the desktop, such as double-clicking, right-clicking, and dragging, are considerably more rare online, where there are a different set of expectations and, as you mention, affordances.
Facebook: The Reverse Paypal Mafia