skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't matter. If the institutional investors were so brilliantly prescient as to anticipate the failed negotiations, they could have easily profited from the knowledge. They didn't need to liquidate. Hell...simply making a public statement on the deal would have put immense pressure on Yahoo's board to sell. Where were they last week?

Point is, this stuff is largely crocodile tears. These guys weren't long because they thought Yahoo would be bought out, they were long because they saw value in the investment. Complaining now that Yahoo's negotiation strategy was somehow "irresponsible", is either massive hindsight bias, or part of some more complicated scheme....
I think the graph shows the geographic extent of the languages not which language is primarily spoken in which region.
Assistive Technology Research Institute Partners with Microsoft to Develop SeniorPC Program
District Of Columbia Tests Google Apps
"Google charges a flat, monthly fee of $50 per user, per year,"

huh?
This is really interesting - I never though about this before.

A quick quote that gets to the meat for those too lazy to read:

Look at the example of a typical large bank, he illustrated. Such an institution deals with “100 million events a month.” Yet, few of these events are actually captured and linked to the accumulated intelligence on the back end. Ranadivé pointed out that when he goes to an ATM, the first question he is asked is whether he wants to conduct the transaction in English or Spanish. “All this infrastructure, and the bank doesn’t know that I use English, even though I’ve gone to their ATMs zillions of times,” he said.
Constitutional challenge "casts a cloud over many thousands of patent decisions"
That part of the article is wrong or at least extraneous: the music industry doesn't care what you play music on.

The actual issue is that the music industry realizes how powerful the iTunes Store has become and they feel threatened, so they'll give anyone a deal who says they'll compete with Apple.
I dunno.

Real time or event driven, it still sounds like poor design.
I've wondered about it often. I have no idea what to do. None.

I sympathize. It seems to me that part of the block comes from defining the problem monolithically: how can we take the standard system we have and make a better standard system out of it? Nobody seems to have a good answer to that. Maybe we should stop asking it and instead go through a period of decentralization and even destandardization. Let all sorts of experiments be tried. There's a study I read about that showed that when great schools or great teachers achieve amazing things, attempts to reproduce what they do almost always fail. The problem seems to be in the systematizing impulse itself. Can there even be a bureaucracy that sustains life, joy, creativity?

Here's an example of what I mean (I may have even got this from Gatto). In the traditional one-room farm schoolhouse, there weren't enough children to segregate by age, so by necessity they would work side by side on different things. This has interesting effects. You no longer have the problem that not all kids are at the same level; each is working at his/her level anyway. So, no reason why a bright 9-year-old can't study math with the 15-year-olds (but play with kids their own age at recess). Another example is that because one teacher simply can't address all the different subjects at once, older kids end up teaching and mentoring younger ones. Think of the organizational contortions required to set up things like this in most schools. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone should go to a one-room farm school. My point is that we need a great deal more diversity and that maybe policy should support this instead of trying to fix everything the same way (or even at all).

People will cry out about the risks of destandardization but really, if you stop to think about it, kids want to learn. Passionately. They're hard-wired to do it. What we should be asking is not how we can get them to learn but how we ever manage to program the desire out of them. Personal anecdote: when my daughter was in the third grade (and had a teacher she loved), she would get up in the morning and literally jump for joy that she was going to school. I don't mean little bunny hops... I mean she would jump up and down bigtime and sing "I'm going to schooooool!" Just a short time later (after the teacher she loved was fired and not even allowed to say goodbye to the class... different story) a pallor that I can only call depression came over her about everything associated with school. It took years for signs of intellectual excitement to return.
i share your distaste for social networking. i hardly check my facebook, just once every couple of weeks. there are just too many people blasting you some game or stuff like that. boring.

but w/twitter... it was different. after you get past certain barriers, it becomes a conversation.

some people use the sms function to blast all their friends "wanna meet for lunch". hey, if you only need to send once, right and pay once?

there are business leaders on twitter and some really smart people. think of twitter as a party that goes on 24/7. you get interesting conversation.

sometimes, some people come in and shouts out that they're on ustream, and hey a couple of people slip out to go to that room. while everyone else keeps the conversation going.

sometimes, you get the really breaking news. other times, you get good links to interesting stuff.

there are times, you just listen in on a conversation between two twitters and you learn stuff.

how do you keep up? you don't. you don't need to keep up. you can miss stuff and that's ok. i use growl on the mac to give me a heads up when someone twitters. that way, i don't have to actually be directly engaged. just think of it as background conversation in the office. And of course you can really turn it off.

just my two cents.
Am I missing something, because this doesn't seem to say much about architecture. It just seems like some guy got his marketeer on, and is using strange words to say, "You aren't storing enough data".
visual perception with deep learning, google movies
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416
I am using it along side my gmail account. I like the way the way they have improved traditional email. I like their tabbed interface and the calendar tool is fairly useful as well.

The best feature is the attachment tab. Having a list of all the attachments you are currently storing is a very nice feature.

I haven't had any problems with having other accounts forwarding to my Zenbe address, I am having a good beta experience!
Twitter is micro-LiveJournal.
Not sure about that specific quote, but I know that one of Durkheim's main interests was how organizations, institutions, and culture reproduce themselves, so it would make sense.

I haven't read Dumbing Us Down yet, although I think Underground History was meant to supersede it. I'm sure I'll check it out eventually though.

There is a cool video series with him here too:

http://www.edflix.org/gatto.htm

It starts off with a rather poor summary of the book, but then he eventually makes a few important novel points. He comes up with a list of patterns that separate the nation's elite boarding schools from our public schools. Pretty important stuff, albeit you need to sit through the rest of the video to get at it.
Thanks for your opinion, Person Who Coincidentally Happens To Have Exactly The Same Name As One Of the Conference Organizers.

(Update: Incidentally, it took me a while to find out the names of the organizers from the website. Which is odd -- most conference organizers love to let you know exactly who they are.)
"I can buy DRM-free music from Amazon and play it on my iPod, so what's the problem?"

Amazon can't sell DRM'ed mp3s with any degree of success because they won't play on ipods. Apparently they figure if they can break the ITMS stranglehold they'll be able to offer music only in their DRM & hopefully further restrict or shut out the ipod. Classic content owner's mistake of overvaluing the content, and undervaluing the platform.
That's all well and good if you have a single layer of business logic operating on a particular database. But in the real world you may have multiple completely separate pieces of business logic, often written in different languages. It that situation, the database itself becomes the only place to put shared code to ensure that rules are followed.
Just popped into my mind: do you know the book "Systemantics" (also known as "The Systems Bible") by John Gall? It's not on education but is very much in the space we're discussing. It's a brilliant (and hilarious) underground classic. I think you would like it. A lot of people here would. It's irreverent and subversive and incredibly smart and not rigid.

One of its more famous aphorisms (relevant to the software startup crowd) is "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked".

http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/dp...
Twitter reflects the overrall california lifestyle and the shallowness of conections made in here.
Comming from the east coast, I can tell there is a huge difference on friends I have in SF, and friends I have in Boston.
I know more people, and have more "friends" in california, but for some reason they tend to be more of the "good times" types,
while in Boston I had less friends, but more people I could rely on and stronger connections.

So, with twitter, you just broadcast something to a bunch of your "friends", while in the east coast you would just normally text few of your friends directly.

And, there is a good reason they call it "California RSVP". Some people call it shallow, some call it "laid-back", it depends on your point of view, but I have gotten used to it.
facebook is the new facebook:)
it's an algol language with array manipulation. APL languages start with array manipulation as a primitive in the design of the language, so they are much better at these sorts of things

Matlab is for engineers, Mathematica is for scientists. Matlab is designed for speedy matrixy stuff. Mathematica uses a lisp-like structure 'replacement' pattern matching evaluation scheme, and intrinsically supports symbolic mathematics and is the the only language i would really call multiparadigmatic
Feds Tackle Mobile Spam
give J (an APL descendant) a try, it has some good tutorial thingies that appear right in the console thingie:

http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm

and here's a post about it:

http://www.squidoo.com/jprogramming
The share button is so trivial to click and the sharing is forceful (i.e. it appears in my feed without me ever adding the friends or letting them share stuff with me implicitly) that I think it will actually be used a lot.
No, I did the exact same thing.
Or yahoo? Or any internet-related company, for that matter.

It uses the old-style rainbow Apple logo, which dates it at 1998 or earlier.
I never thought i'd find myself appreciating Apple’s dominance of the music player business.
So how does he know? Did he sign off both deals?
Thanks for the tip, I added it to my Amazon cart. (Although I already have far too much reading I need to do for my startup at the moment.)
It didn't seem to do anything useful when it tried to add additional email addresses from outside sources. Nothing ever imported and for some it didn't ask passwords or anything. Just didn't immediately understand what would happen next, so I left and didn't come back (yet?).swor
I've run into this situation as well. A few apps sharing data. The extra constraints help ensure data integrity.
How to Write a Social Media Press Release
Not really when you realize that we are a small group of hackers trying to put on an event. I personally try to let my work speak for itself.

The goal of this conference isn't for us to become rich and famous, its to get us the answers we need for bring our startups on line.

This is going to be a small event less of hopefully a 100 people. We are trying our best to put it on for as close to cost, without have a huge bankroll of money to do it with.
Most of the 'startup' events in Seattle and Silicon Valley assume that you have many thousands of dollars to spend on their event we don't. This is a total bootstrap by people eating the dog food.

Any questions, complaints, whatever about this feel free to send them to me.
Rob Eickmann
roberte3@gmail.com
Apples and oranges.

They don't have SUS speakers (who does?) and they charge a small fee. So what?

Sounds like a good thing to me.
it sucks. coz i still don't have an invite. anyone with a kind heart email me an email from zenbe's inviting me to their new email service. boy. im really an email addict.
How to Get 6,312 Subscribers to Your Business Blog in One Day
Madonna or some other popstar wrote about this in an essay about how much the record labels suck.

Variable pricing also sends signals to consumers. A $1.99 single can be positioned to be better than a $1.50 single which can be better than a $0.99 single.
Heh. This is light reading, the sort of thing you can have fun with for a few pages before falling asleep.
About my "Ask YC" posts:  Follow me on twitter (@amichail) for more questions like that.
I'll reduce my "Ask YC" posts here -- at least for a while. You can follow me on twitter (@amichail) if you want to see more of those sorts of questions.

P.S. I don't have much patience for writing blog posts and I suspect most people don't either. That's why I see quite a lot of potential in twitter's microblogging although its focus on what people are doing now is a bit strange.
hmm... NYTimes' data is distressingly behind some of the other media org's
Alex3917 - Thank you sir. I really don't have any words to describe what I felt after I read this article. And thank you for the book references. I will be sure to follow up on those.

Mr. Gatto - I certainly hope we can see some of the ideas you suggested in our lifetimes. I am sure it will make for a much better world.
I think "could care less" is the british version of "couldn't care less".

The british are more inherently sarcastic or something.
There is more tech specific info at this post ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182885
Plan B time for Microsoft web strategy
Wish I could... You did not post your email, and there does not seem to be a way to invite your from my account (either that, or it's well hidden in some sort of IQ test way)
http://www.intrade.com
Arrington and Ross Sorkin Talk About Yahoo On Charlie Rose
Some of these games (gravity head with friend's heads) could be adapted into social network widgets and may stand out because throwing sheep at the end of the day can get trite
Good post, and great writing. I owned a few Plays For Sure players (great ones too, actually) but never bought any DRMed tracks. I did use the time-based DRM (Rhapsody To Go), with which at least it was understood from the get go that you were renting the music.

Unfortunately even that didn't work very well, so I gave up on it rapidly. At least in my experience most of the other people who had those players didn't bother purchasing DRMed tracks.

I wonder why MSFT doesn't just give customers the same track for free with no DRM. It wouldn't be that expensive for them, and would foster some serious good will, whereas their current position will do the opposite.
The introduction to J that peaked my interest: http://prog21.dadgum.com/14.html

Haven't done anything with it yet, but it's on my radar.
Thanks. My project is calculation-intensive and performance is important. I would love to use kdb. Arthur Whitney's work is stunning. Unfortunately, their licenses are draconian. Can you offer any insight about these various options from the standpoint of building a commercial product on top of them?
WSJ: The War for the Web
4 Principles of Not Wasting Time
Beta testers wanted -- tarsnap encrypted backup service
>Was it Durkheim who said that the first purpose of any large organization is to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to accomplish whatever mandate it may have?

I'm not sure about Durkheim, but I am a big fan of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."

(http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view40...)
Ask YC: What is the best solution for managing user email lists?
Ok so I have a list of 10k email addresses from users signing up to our site. What is the best way to manage sending them all an email newsletter - any good list managers out there people recommend?
What a coincidence - I was planning on building one myself, and happened across this guy's site about a week back.

http://www.multitouch.nl/ is another cool site.
Whoa. Your story is pretty... well, unpleasant, I suppose. Especially at such a young age. It's all too often that people give up on education just because the school system sucks.

At my school, I'm branded as a "nerd", often because I don't think I've joined that group of people who have given up on intellectual curiosity just because the school system is inadequate. What bothers me, though, is that such an attitude is pervasive through a very large portion of my school, even though it is an advanced program school.

Ah well. I hope it will become better. Maybe I'll be able to do something about it someday. I'd certainly love to.
Ask YC: Been going to BarCamps? (BarCampBoston3 is May 17th & 18th!)
Is the Hacker News community aware of the free unconference phenomena, like BarCamp/PodCamp/MacCamp, etc.? They're community-organized conferences for hackers, geeks, techies, webheads, and entrepreneurs.

There's a huge list of BarCamps at: http://barcamp.org/

For those of you in the Boston area, I hope you'll come to BarCampBoston3 May 17th & 18th, and give a talk or otherwise participate: http://www.barcampboston.org/

Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software,
startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking,
robotics,mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software,
programming languages, and the future of technology.
That's the Microsoft strategy, and it works quite well in many markets. But it's not the only winning strategy. for example, GM profited handsomely from the Interstate Highway System, even though the roads worked for Ford as well. Levi Strauss profited handsomely from blue jeans becoming a fashion statement, even though they did not have a monopoly on wearing denim.

When you are the market leader, when you have the biggest piece of the pie, you have the most to gain from the entire pie growing exponentially. Right now, Apple has the most to gain from music players growing as a market. I suggest that DRM-free music makes the market for music players grow exponentially, and locked-in music holds the market back.

Remember, the vast majority of the music on iPods today is DRM-free MP3s. Apple profits from consumers ripping their CDs to MP3s. The more DRM-free music is out there, the more iPods people will buy, even though they also play on other machines.
it's better to fully comprehend the problem before you start coding

Often the best way to understand a problem is to try to implement a solution.
I mean that the original essay provides an interesting exercise that, IMO, would be helpful to try as an exercise.

However, I do not suggest that the resulting software--as a whole--will necessarily be better after the exercise than before. I picked method length as one example, but I think it applies to all of the suggestions.

Just because we observe some property of good software, it doe snot follow that software deliberately written to exhibit this property will be good. That's what I was suggesting.
It's not really stated anywhere that the email address in your profile is not public. Easy mistake to make.
IPhone SDK Beta 5 Now Available
iPhone SDK (build 9M2173a, beta 5)
Hm, not exactly sure how a question about Twitter became an indictment against California / Californians. Lets stay on topic.
Yes, they do, but the subtle thing is that they should not.
SS wasn't really free for the most of us. In my case - Air Travel: $180, Hotel: $140, Car: $30 etc ... (I'm not going to make a lame "priceless" joke here)

Think of the expenses of the dudes from UK!
Be cool if they intentionally left the tracking in it. Good way to vet for a VC with a sense of humour and fun.
truthfully, i have no idea. it's certainly unfortunate that these languages/environments are not widely usable. i don't know of a more powerful scratchpad than Mathematica

have you looked at R? it's an open source matlab. though i don't know what kind of database options it might have
It was trollish and I was trying to bait the OP, in the sense that it was completely off-topic and that I was suggesting the OP was an hypocrite. Which I still believe to be true. Duh. Christianity and usury? I thought it was obvious for everyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#New_Testament

I would have liked to know how the OP solves the cognitive dissonance between his beliefs and the accepted practices of today's world. I hoped to get an intelligent answer other than the usual 'everybody does it' or 'I could not get by otherwise' fallacies.

Unfortunately, the only thing I learned is that HN threads are not to be taken off-topic. Curiosity is for the weak.
When did Techcrunch become a gossip rag? I understand that reporters need to follow leads but their posts on Yahoo are starting to sound more and more like Valleywag.
Yeah, don't mind my snark -- you guys are doing good work, keep it up!
volume! economies of scale!
It's been hard. We have some solid .com alternatives for our service, but we did decide to go with the less traditional style with http://bug.gd as our service. So far it doesn't seem to hurt our traffic too much and helps us stand out a bit among tech geeks, but it's hard to say for sure.

But one anecdote (and I'm sure del.icio.us has a dozen), I know PC World magazine wouldn't have misspelled our site as "bug.BD" if we had been a dotcom. (They did get the url right later as bug.gd, even if they got our "product name" wrong.)

I guess the upside is we get a free mention in the next magazine when they correct that.

Fun!
Great article. Learn the hard way and it'll stick. Plus it's fun.
I'm a bit surprised that neither this article nor the two currently on News.YC which reference it mention these reasons:

- revenue from in-app advertising has been steadily falling

- users have lost interest in apps and app invites, partly because the novelty has worn off, partly because they're sick of the spam.

Neither reason is surprising. Most Facebook ad networks run ads for other apps... it was an obvious mini-bubble. I believe CPMs were around $1 in November, and are now closer to $0.10.

As for invites, the effect of spammy apps on Facebook users is also not surprising. Combine desensitized users with belated and arbitrary measures to combat app spam (which the article did mention), and the end result is that the first big apps are left with their millions of users and the ability to promote new apps to their existing users, while developers new to the game have a much smaller chance to get explosive growth.
Interestingly, the issue was resolved in the 1490s for the Catholic Church with the discovery of the New World. The expeditions required financing and the financing entailed interest. The explorers were painting pictures of golden cities, boundless riches and fountains of youth, somehow the church managed to magically resolve the interest issue.
Company sponsoring university level Ayn Rand courses