skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The stakes are already as low as they can get. There is no shortage of postdocs who will work for peanuts.

In relation to tenure, what you are proposing is already in place. When a tenured prof dies, they don't replace him, they just hire 2-3 adjunct faculty.

With this in mind, the article is somewhat pointless; most universities have been in the process of effectively eliminating tenure for at least a decade. The ones that don't have billions of dollars worth of endowment money, so who really cares what they do?
Great essay, and great writing.

This is why I shower twice a day. The morning shower is to boot the brain and for all the other things that showering is done for.

The second shower is simply to think, before the night's coding binge. Refreshed and with clear thoughts, I find that it provides a fresh start for the evening's challenges.
Good essay, but paragraph six is redundant.
I would have called it bottom heavy :) In python+C, every time something is too slow, all you have to do is push more stuff down into the C layer. You have control of the continuum between 100% optimized (100% C) and 100% clean and readable (100% python).

I don't know any other programming environment that can claim that without adding tons of complication (the C/python interface layer is the simplest I've ever seen, except maybe for c/tcl).
If you've got one-time declaration/definition of functions, that's just one less thing you need the CPP preprocessor for. There would be no conflict, it would just end up being used for macros only.

I think you might be right though, I'd loose the cpp preprocessor but add built-in hygienic macros and constants to make up for the loss.
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If your language isn't completely terrible, then you can choose to use a named function anywhere an anonymous function will do. The libraries can never force you to not give your functions a name or not put them in a global context. That's why it's a harmless feature.

Templates might have been harmless if there was a way to do basic obvious stuff (callback functions, strings) without using them.
You're a what? - The job of a Flavorist
$720M of yearly revenue is nothing to sneeze at. Just because we don't stand for this by American standards hardly makes it a "mafia". Many Europeans would never stand for how we handle our energy or health sectors, that hardly makes them akin to a mafiosi.
I don't think he'd threaten it, but rather would just immediately liquidate his share, and move on his merry way.
Day 3. Listen to advice & Google App Engine
Question: You are the largest software maker in the world. How do you get a good developer base for your new phone OS coming out?

Answer: Give every employee said phone.
I would bring in a application sales and marketing guy and let him run with it, someone with SEO experience and web marketing that can generate some interest outside of the app store. 10% is paltry for turning the who operation over to him. I would say starting at 30% you are starting to get in the range of a guy that can make them take off.

Out of curiosity and to give you an entry for a shameless plug, what are the apps?

As for the value for an outright sale it is 8-12K.
A Brief History of JavaScript, by its creator
I'd just use placeholder, and screw anyone using an old browser. If people can upgrade their cell phones every year, they can install a modern browser. ;)
I just wanted to say congrats, good luck and one of you should be a 51% partner. Trust me, it's painful if a 50% partner takes off.

Give this a read, paying specific attention to founder share vesting: http://startuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-star...
$1000 of weed/beer in exchange for 50% of a worthless venture probably sounded ok at the time.
Three reasons I can think of, in order of time to get things done:

1. Availability, ease of use of Java based hosting provider

2. Time from writing code to live deployments

3. Lack of agile frameworks like rails, django or any other php framework (hot code reload etc.).
You shouldn't write software to use .NET
The best way to introduce programming (2007)
If an ISP wants to offer differentiated services X, Y, and Z, because it thinks that will maximize its revenues, and then the FCC says that service mix is illegal due to the costs it imposes on others, then yes, that 'neutrality' enforcement is about curtailing the ISP's revenues, preventing them from capturing the value others create, boosting other businesses.

The FTC's trial balloons around taxing aggregators, enforcing new 'hot news' rights, or subsidizing news producers are also motivated by the desire to provide a 'level playing field' for newsgatherers and story-originators, where a near-monopoly like Google, or thinly-staffed all-cut-and-paste-no-research aggregators, can't capture all the value news media create.

Once you invite committees and congresspeople to set rules to reallocate the revenues from an activity, where do you stop? (Even if economist/philosopher-kings can tell the difference between the right places to intervene, and the wrong ones, can our political system?)

If the FCC can ban certain service packages in the public interest, why can't the FTC force republishers to buy distribution rights from traditional media in the public interest?

Google wants its pot-of-gold to be protected from meddling network operators by new rulemaking. Why can't the newspapers ask for their pot-of-gold to be protected from Google by new rulemaking?
That is why they say, ask for something (your good idea for instance) then let it go. It happens when you least think about it.
>What about the groups that kill people for money, or extort 'protection money', or groups that rob banks? Unless you want to make murder, arson and theft legal, you need to go undercover in these groups.

You watch too many movies. Such groups are extraordinarily rare, and it's even rarer that they'd be around long enough to actually infiltrate. The only real examples are organized crime, and almost universally a "man inside" is not an undercover cop, but a former member who's changed sides.
The $20-30k is likely an average, spread over many years, and also skewed towards particularly expensive patents. As others note, provisionals and the early costs of filing can be relatively inexpensive.

Clearly, in the software space patents are nice but not needed. However, they are the coin of the realm for biotech, clean tech, materials, and many other fields. There's some other papers by faculty at Berkeley (Ted Sichelman) showing that, in many fields, patents are one of the more prominent drivers of series A valuations.
I have always envisioned Hamming's third question as less of a leading question and more of an honest one. Having read that lecture, I think if I said "well, because they don't pay and I have a mortgage" Hamming would have just as easily agreed and moved on. The interesting part to me about this series of questions is more that it requires being honest with yourself. That, and the fact that most of the people he asked were apparently insulted, took it negatively, and hated him for it. Not only could they not be honest with themselves, they metaphorically shot the messenger.

Still, a great series of questions to make you re-evaluate your course in life.
Good point. Kinda like what Google does...with everything.

But what's next on their agenda? Other photo hosting sites? Youtube/Vimeo/etc for video hosting?
I don't think so. Flickr is great for a lot of people, but is great for everyone that currently uses it? No. It doesn't have the personal touch that a tumblr type site has nor the flexibility. Plus you are locked in (I haven't used Flickr in a long time, but maybe it is more open now?) with it.

Posterous and Tumblr (my favorite of the two) have made blogs about as easy as using Twitter (or Facebook) and there is a lot of market for them to go after.
"(Talking about C++ macro) [...] Well fuck you. If you take it out, I can't #include stdio.h, and I can't implement awesome assert-like macros. End of discussion."

This statement is simply wrong, and saying "End of discussion" is useless, if not plain stupid.

It's like saying: 1+1 = 3, End of discussion.
Contrary to popular belief software process and design is the antitheses to minimum viable product. In a start-up proper, cash is constrained and getting to market should be the goal primo. Getting senior level technical people up front allows you to short cut software process and go straight to building that persons vision of the minimum viable product.

This is the essence of a software start-up, the freewheeling idea factory, that does not have layers of bureaucracy and work that does not readily translate directly into a product.

You have less people with their hands in the produce so the layers of documentation, design and communication do not have to be as stringent as it does in the enterprise. Even in the enterprise it is overdone due to the pushing of best practices by enterprise vendors with some snake oil to sell.
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No more failed whale? At least less of them anyhow. That seems like a big move and a good one doing that earlier than later.
I do a lot of non-work-related coding in addition to my work-related coding.

I do it because I enjoy it.

Nobody's going to pay me to (edit: because I'm not a tenured professor) make finite state machines, toy languages in LLVM, and roguelikes.
You sound like you work for Braintree, especially due to the fact they harp on not being able to export data from other merchant accounts/gateways.

Just saying.
Like how angel investors prefer referrals; they may also prefer referring folks they know in their network.
Despite being "thin" that phone is too large.
The Game Theory of Frenemies
So it's a crappy keychain digital camera, except bigger, and far more expensive, thanks to the big sensor, small production run? Sign me up!
It delivers revenge. Whether it delivers justice or not depends on the specific situation, but if you have to resort to vigilantism, probably not.
Here is one chart that supports that computer programmers are above average.

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/08/19/iq-distribution-of-vario...
Sorry guys for the weird format..had to post this one through my phone
I take running out of hot water as a sign it's time to wrap things up.
When Fred Wilson speaks, you have to pay attention. He's nearly always got something interesting to say and agree or disagree, his opinion carries a lot of weight.

That being said, you also have to remember that Fred isn't just speaking as an insightful guy with a lot of experience, he's also speaking as a managing partner of USV. As an angel investor or VC it seems you most often are an advocate or evangelist for your portfolio companies.

He also disses Gowalla but Foursquare is USV-backed and Gowalla isn't. The counterargument is that Foursquare is a portfolio company and Gowalla isn't precisely for the reasons he cites but you have to consider the evangelism POV too.

As for Facebook, saying every Website (and indeed the Web as a whole) is a social graph sounds a little like equivocation to me. It is clearly the juggernaut in the room. Think of Facebook as the country in which you live and all these other Websites are local clubhouses. That's the kind of disparity we're talking about.

For many people FB is a photo-sharing site. For others it's a chat site and a site to pick up people. For yet others it's a casual gaming site. Often it's many of these things for people. FB is many things to many people.

Fred has also said that FB has basically won and it's here for a generation, which doesn't seem to gel has likening it to Flickr. Take that how you will.
How To Build A Startup Ecosystem: Vivek Wadhwa Video Interview, Part II
You're kidding, right?

I think every apple employee including store employees were given the first iphone.
DropZap 2.4 released + promo codes.
I honestly can't begin to contemplate how you expect stdio.h to work (without writing extra wrappers) if you don't support macros and a preprocessor.

Some of the "functions" in there are macros.
If this guy's claims are legitimate, does he own 85% of all of Facebook, or 85% of Zuckerberg's share of Facebook? Presumably he would have been diluted in subsequent funding rounds, etc?

What portion of Facebook does Zuckerberg still own?
Also, why didn't he resolve the situation by either starting a new company or buying back his shares as soon as it was apparent Facebook could become something big?
Isn't the pay of sports coaches largely related to the fact that sports is a big earner for the university? So basically you're paying someone a lot of money to put on a popular show that brings in a lot of money.
What are the indicators you have identified that you think are responsible for giving you the ability to avoid trouble? In other words, what do you recognize as being the cause of your lack of trouble?
Optimizing For Your Best Work
Why not? I think Posterous is right to go for everyone (just about) and as a user I appreciate that.

I wish TweetDeck had posterous support :( and I wish there was better integration into my Android world.
I don't consider that massively extended -- that's a optimization but it's not really a fundamental change in the way the linker works.
As many here have answered, you don't need a graduate degree to get into this field and make money. Both myself and my partner at Repustate (http://www.repustate.com) have undergrads in CS, but other than that, we just read a lot of published papers from well known experts in the field, like Bo Pang @ Yahoo. She's a great source of information if you're interested in SVMs (support vector machines) and contextual polarity, that kind of stuff. Generally speaking, Cornell University has a really strong library of research in this area.
I saw the interview, Fred was having fun on stage being witty when the snark started to creep in. Perfect recipe for a soundbyte unfortunately. This is what happens when conversation stales around the usual suspects (apple, google, twitter, etc.) Too bad too, I could tell Sam from Loopt was unimpressed with the event as he wanted to talk about users but after the one-liners things stayed very superficial. Don't think less of Fred though, VC's don't become celebs for their one-liners.
I have been getting messages that say "Reddit is currently under heavy load. Please try again later." or something to that effect.

I'm pretty sure they are just having trouble dealing with the level of traffic they're getting.
I've read this complaint many times on HN, but my real world experience just doesn't match. All the employees from startups in our YC round, that I've met at parties, meetups and other events seem to be pretty amped about what they're working on.

Our engineers are free to work however many hours they choose; all I care about is that we get stuff done. My co-founder and I certainly put in long weeks, but I would be deeply concerned in any of our engineers put in as many hours as we do. In fact, I am constantly reminding our engineers that they need to maintain work/life balance because I don't want them to burn out. To put in another way, they volunteer to work long hours and I tell them to work less.

It doesn't makes sense to overwork engineers. Talent is hard to acquire in Silicon Valley, so I (and most other startup founders I've met) put effort into retaining it.

(By the way, we're hiring Ruby hackers, learn more at http://seeinginteractive.com/company/jobs/software-engineers...)
I don't know if Posterous wants to get into the business of becoming a mass video repository just yet... but they have quick-embed support for YouTube links, and I could see it as a natural extension if they tried to supplant the YouTube channel functionality in some ways.
Facebook may be close to becoming a Harvard Business School case on how to create a startup with dangerously murky ownership of IP and equity.
Sometimes video tutorials are good but my personal preference is to have a book. The best way would be to have a lecture and a book. Something like the SICP lectures and book.
"Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish."

This is brilliant, ethically (and practically - the two are never at odds in my view).
A Great Progress By Morgan Stanley
I don't think "better" is really a consideration at the Holga or LOMO factories. :-)

A guy that knew who was very serious about doing sharpness testing on lenses pointed out that lens resolution doesn't really matter that much. He claimed that most lenses had resolution far beyond the capacity of any media that we could record images to... and things like flare and aberrations were far more important. I have no idea how true this is, but it certainly sounds plausible.
Looks neat, made something for Android and I will happily indulge :)
I wish I could subscribe to your HN comments as a RSS feed.
Unless the fiction is a Cohen Brothers movie. In that I could see Facebook being killed off by a wood fuel salesman from New York.
Their methodology is a great mystery, but I think they poll people who hit the websites in question. In which case Fox News' score is no surprise. It's the most polarizing news source out there, and the other pole isn't part of the poll.
I actually found the last line:

Facebook paid [ConnectU] $65m to go away.

to be the most interesting. I don't follow the Facebook story very closely, but I had no idea that much money changed hands over the ConnectU thing.
While I think you're probably absolutely correct from a legal perspective, I also think that you're missing the point. This is interesting precisely because
the contract is so amateurish, yet it appears that Zuckerberg actually signed the damned thing! As bizarre and weak as the claims may be to a lawyer, to a layman, this is the clearest evidence yet that Zuckerberg was involved in some shady dealings early in Facebook history. And this time, unlike the rich kids involved in the previous dispute, we've got an amateur investor, who can't afford competent legal counsel.

You're thinking like a lawyer, and focusing on the technicalities of the case. Everyone else is taking the contract at face value. If Zuckerberg gets out of this on a legal technicality, it's because he's damned lucky that the contract he signed wasn't written by a better attorney. Frankly, I doubt that most laypeople like the precedent of that outcome.
Jacques Hadamard gives an account of a similar phenomenon (a sudden flash of an idea) in Mathematics in his Psychology of invention in the Mathematical field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Hadamard#On_creativity).

Also, very coincidentally, I have been reading up classical works on "proper conduct" in an attempt to do a spring cleaning of personal attitudes for pretty much the same reason as PG's - it just frees up a lot of mental energy. I'm currently doing a parallel reading of The Dhammapada and the Analects of Confucius. Earlier I read the Thirukkural (English translation, alas! - http://www.scribd.com/doc/20912297/Tirukkural-of-Tiruvalluva...).

If you or I rationally considered affairs and made up quotes ("'Tis easy to achieve an aim, if it be firmly kept in mind"), they wouldn't have the moral authority and rhetorical power they do coming from the world's classics. It just feels nice to work from ready-made axioms of conduct.
Right, but the problem is that the root node is always going to be Python, and any code that uses Python is going to have to go through the root node (hence all Python code is really part of the root subtree). This becomes problematic if you have more than one queue that you're watching (e.g., input, network, graphics output, etc.).

Were it possible to have Python code be in some non-root node, it'd be great (e.g., for parsing text, or doing something algorithmic). As it is, when everything has to be fed through the interpreter, the design becomes top-heavy from a performance standpoint because the slow stuff is on top. And any time you want to optimize something but then use some Python, you're stuck (it becomes part of the root subtree again).

At least that was my experience. But Python does encourage interesting alternatives for performance (with generators, etc.). And if you're already mostly doing Python anyway (I'd say the threshold has to be 70%), then it seems to make sense (v. the opportunity cost of switching contexts between languages -- if you are spending more than 30% in C, I find it difficult).

But it's a really interesting issue. C, C++, and Obj-C all take a much longer time to develop up front. But if you refactor into libraries, maybe not in the long-run...
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Yet, in spite of all this, the reporting on it is building continual momentum such that it is perceived as a serious problem for the company.

Despite the shoddiness of Mr. Ceglia's case against FB, at what point does the price of negative publicity outweigh the price of a cheap settlement for FB?
possibly because he is/was young and naive
That a loose analogy can be drawn between network neutrality and newspapers does not mean both cases have equal merits.

One of the merits of each case must be their practicality, and at least to me, net neutrality seems relatively straightforward compared to newspaper regulation. It is more-or-less the default state of the internet today, I believe, while newspaper regs appear harder to craft.

Regulators could fail to discern the right vs. wrong places to intervene, as you say, but that's all the more reason we ought to point them out.
About Gowalla he said 'it's tough playing second fiddle.' They are, and it is. I just want to point out he was factually correct despite being hyperbolic. He also said every (major) website has a social graph, not is a social graph. His point was more that he didn't think yahoo et al would be interested in linking with fb for that reason.
No, that's still a stupid proposition. Most Harvard students are presumbly pretty damned well off in the first place. Also, now that we've seen Zuck after the fact, you can't deny he is reasonably intelligent. Seems like a completely non-standard move imo.

Even though I surely could use the money I'm way too arrogant to give up 50% of something I'm working on. I think the entire planet knows how arrogant Zuck is (not necessarily a bad thing).
47 Seagulls: Why Documentation Sucks (Parody)
C++0x managed to add closures without adding GC. The only issue is that if you want to the closure to outlive the current stack frame you have to capture by value ([=] rather than [&]) or use a shared_ptr (which is then copied by value).
I remember, many years back, when Microsoft gave some nice gadget to their employees. I was green with envy, for I was not a Microsoftie.

I remember again, some time back, when Google gave free phones to their employees. I was green with envy, for I was not a Googler.

Now, Microsoft is giving free Windows 7 phones to Microsofties. I couldn't care less.
Jacob, stick in the peninsula or south bay, San Francisco is frustratingly expensive with a really broken housing market. The last 2 months of my life have been devoted to finding the right apartment, and I think I'm leaving San Francisco because of it (and I've been in SF for 10 years). Your life will be easier if you don't try to do anything cool but accept that the only reason you're in the bay area it to succeed in business and leave.
Is it just me, or does Ars need a table of contents for longer articles?