skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tony Fadell started out as a contractor here at Apple. He brought him his designs for a media player and a team merged that with the small hard drives that Hitachi was peddling and from there on it grew into the original iPod prototype. Tony is now a VP.

iTunes was bought, sure the codebase (rebooted from 4.0 and onward) is different but it was bought in. Just like almost all the pro tools and that has now since been revamped.

My point still stands: after Steve Jobs came back what Apple has really done well is taking parts/ideas off the shelves and developing them into wonderful consumer products.
Didn't Sturgeon confess? Not sure how much (if any) corroborating evidence there is, but a confession is something.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser
http://techshop.ws/

it's a great place.
Via Reddit:

"Never mind the fact that her ex-lover states that he's killed multiple
people in the past, her family has ties to russian organised crime, and the
kids have gone to St Petersburg, most likely with their mother."
Yes that is what is troubling. It seems he is convicted on his own character/personality.

It would be pretty rough in 10 years if some other evidence turns up and his life is wasted.

There is also the children who are obviously victims in some sense as well, this must be horrible for them.

I thought for a conviction there had to be no shadow of doubt? There are shadows here.
It is damning circumstantial evidence, for sure. But only circumstantial, that is troubling (but there is precedence for convictions on circumstantial evidence of course).
If there is no body, how does one know it isn't an elaborate framing?

You don't, if you're a philosopher. But the rule is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all conceivable doubt.

The reason to disbelieve the "elaborate framing" hypothesis is straightforward: It's really easy to prove, and yet it has not been proved. All you have to do to prove it is find Nina. And yet she has not been found.

In fiction you can make a character disappear by saying "they moved to Russia/Argentina/Outer Mongolia and disappeared". In the real world it really is harder than that. Russia is not on the moon. You can phone up some Russians right now if you want and have a chat. Even if the Russian government won't cooperate with an investigation, there must be private investigators in Russia. All Hans and his legal team have to do is hire a P.I. to stake out the kids and produce some evidence that they're being visited by a mystery woman who might be Nina and suddenly his case becomes a lot stronger. He could still do this now, from prison, if he wanted. Might really shorten that 25 year sentence.

I suppose you could argue that Nina is so sneaky and so well connected that she and her kids have truly vanished from mortal ken, like Osama bin Laden. I haven't followed the case, so I don't know if Reiser tried to argue that. If he did, it obviously didn't work.

And I suppose you could argue that the woman hates Hans so much that she's willing to be separated from her kids for 30 years (or forever, via suicide -- there's a Sherlock Holmes plot for you) just to maximize his suffering. Good luck selling that "reasonable" theory.

The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted...

Um, no. That jury system would be called "never sentence anyone". This system aspires to spare the innocent, but there is never a guarantee. And I have to say that, in the annals of potential injustice, this is a pretty weak example. Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore.
Experience of criminals being dumb? I'm not sure I understand why that would make me seem threatening. (I don't particularly mind seeming threatening, I just don't understand how saying criminals are dumb would make it so.)
Whilst not racially charged, as SwellJoe points out, Hans (and others) have personalities (aspergers??) so different from any member of the jury he may as well be totally foreign to them.
ok, but still his analogy is not bad. Ivan's arguments against web2py so far are unconvincing. It reminds myself, right out of college, when I thought "I knew" things, and I was fully opinionated for everything, as long as I had heard something about it.
The Dunnin-Kruger effect in action. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
the problem with using this site is that, your competition can only last 7 days.
I went from Perl to Python and back again over the span of about ten years (with lots of other languages before and in between). I like them both, but Perl is also more comfortable for me. Ruby maybe even moreso, but I've never done any large projects in Ruby, so I can't say for sure. But I do know that when I write a few lines of Perl, even after ten years, I tend to include a few syntax errors...when I was learning Ruby I was often stunned by how many lines of code I could write between syntax errors. It's probably an order of magnitude higher, and something I've never experienced before. Python, I found to have roughly parity with Perl, which many Pythonistas find shocking. But I agree that there are different types of folks, though I don't know that one can do the comparison with C and C++...maybe C and Java.
Only most of those who get caught.
I would be interested to know what precisely the word "tellingly" means in this context ;)

This actually has to do with access to capital markets.

It is a common pattern for these companies to decide to list on LSE or NYSE, since it allows them broader access to more capital. (Consider for example that Telkom, SA's goverment telco, is itself listed on the NYSE for this same reason).

To some companies, LSE is attractive because London is the "closest stop" from Johannesburg, travel-wise (and an easy timezone diff). In SABMiller's case, they are cross-listed in London and Johannesburg.

This makes sense when you talk to stockbrokers in the USA (or Canada) that tell you they will execute a trade on the JSE @ $250 minimum commission -- but that they must advise against it because the markets are so volatile (which to me seems an exageration).
Mostly interesting, though some of his assertions are somewhat questionable. Like saying that Perl5 takes its OO style from Python. I'd like to see some citations on that, as I don't find them at all similar (beyond both being object systems in a dynamic language). The JavaScript module pattern (which obviously came later) feels more like Perl 5 objects to me. Likewise for some Lisp and Scheme object systems that make use of innate closure support to build the object system from primitives rather than building it in--Perl objects are effectively hashes with almost no new core language features (bless, and the new special variable @ISA, primarily).
I think he meant you personally knew a bunch of dumb criminals.
Yahoo rewiring itself from the inside out
Where by precedence, you mean to say "multiple centuries of jurisprudence built around it". There is nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence.
well, you have to ask why some of them took it up. but once that initial tribe did, they could've spread their way of life by conquest, since agriculture generally supports bigger populations than hunting. that newfound power might answer the why-keep-it-going question. as to why they'd even start (assuming they didn't decide to switch based on theories about population growth), i recall hearing a plausible-sounding hypothesis that hunter-gatherers experimented with agriculture to keep rare drug-producing plants in supply.
Not only did Sturgeon not confess to the the murder Reiser was convicted of, but after claiming to have killed 7 other people, he was not arrested or charged of any crime. To believe in some kind of coverup, conspiracy, or massive miscarriage of justice here, you have to believe that the State of California was willing to ignore seven other murders in order to screw over Reiser.

The reasonable explanation here is that the evidence available to both the prosecution and the defense suggests that Sturgeon is simply a nutcase telling stories.
Venture capital firms produce positive returns, but they are weakening
Indeed. And to think that Guy Kawasaki is involved it's more odd.
Twing offers deep search for forums
Except that "big success" is a lot rarer than it seems. Mundane success (and a few millions) is actually a lot easier to achieve - practically any very hard working, reasonably intelligent person can get there within 10-15 years, and that assumes 1-2 false starts/failures along the way.
Good article. Atrocious formatting.
FoundRead Thanks YC News
But it is pretty horrible that Hans was convicted of murder with only circumstantial evidence. For petty crimes, or even for more intense crimes like battery, it might be worth it to make decisions based entirely on risky (though possibly accurate) circumstantial evidence. But when the most valuable portion of a person's life is on the line, the legal system's stance has to be that this person can only be convicted if there is hard evidence he committed the horrible crime, no matter how much we may want to believe that circumstantial evidence.

Imagine what the result is if we're wrong about Hans. He is an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, and could have made significant accomplishments in the next 25 years with his intelligence and experience. If we're wrong then we're throwing away his future contributions to society, depriving people that he would have helped of his assistance, stealing him from his friends, and in general not allowing him to have a positive effect on anyone's life for the next 25 years. Admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, that isn't too horrible, but it would certainly be horrible for the people that he would have had a good effect on. Perhaps he would have inspired some child to go on and do great things. We can't know.

Based on that, if a person is to be imprisoned for a huge portion of his life then there should be no doubt about his guilt.

It's true that it's impossibly unlikely that Nina made herself vanish, but consider that someone else could have used her to frame him.
A lot of people on Wall Street seem to be fans of that book, but I found it a rather dull history of probability theory. There wasn't much focus at all on the development of the truly remarkable system of risk transfer and management via derivatives that underlies much of modern finance.
Ask YC:  Instead of online ads, wouldn't seamless website embedding work better?
For example, instead of an online ad for amazon.com, why not allow people to use amazon to buy books from other sites such as acm.org. It would look like it was designed for acm.org all along with no obvious indication that this is coming from another site.

Taking it further, one might even restrict the selection of books to those that would interest acm.org visitors.

One problem though is that of handling accounts. Requiring people to register on acm.org to buy a book when they already have an amazon.com account is questionable -- though doing so would preserve the illusion that this is all acm.org.

Another problem is that seamless embedding requires an amazon.com UI that fits in with the rest of acm.org. Trying to automate this would present some interesting research problems.
If Sturgeon was lying, was he charged with falsely reporting a crime and was the jury warned that his testimony might be suspect? If not, it seems reasonable to believe that the State of California was trying to screw Reiser over.
I think it was written in Europe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_%28music_service%29
You have essentially stated the facts I could use to support my somewhat cynical "tellingly." Africa is not going to be an economic world power until it has the ability to trade within itself to the extent that, say, Europe was 50 years ago. That a successful South African country has chosen to base itself (not just list) in Europe seems like a statement on Africa's commercial climate to me.

In any case, I am willing to defer to those more knowledgeable about African economics in this thread :)
the american people are a fearful people. they don't want lifestyle jobs, they want jobs that they will be able to get rich at so they'll have financial security.

Is this attitude because they know that if you get old and have no money in america there will be no one to look after you? I don't know.
"Um, no. That jury system would be called "never sentence anyone". This system aspires to spare the innocent, but there is never a guarantee."

I didn't say there is such a guarantee...just that our system is supposed to protect the innocent from conviction even if it means the guilty occasionally go free (at least many of our founding fathers felt that this was the purpose of our jury system). If you don't believe that is the correct way for our legal system to operate, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think it is more important for the courts to first do no evil than to always get vengeance for crimes committed (even if it's sometimes taken against an innocent party).

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe Hans is innocent, and I've also stated above that the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming. But, I am saying that one should be cautious with purely circumstantial evidence, and that I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.

"Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore."

That's a completely different discussion, and I agree with your statement entirely, though I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
this already exists. its called an affiliate program
Peekay ran a network? :p
I've worked with a number of people on the heavy end of the asperger's spectrum and one thing that I've found disturbing about their personalities is that when they make a mistake, they have an extremely hard time admitting that they are wrong. In fact, they don't admit they are wrong, they do everything they can to explain why they are actually right. From what I've read of his testimony, this seems like what Hans was doing.

An elaborate framing story is hard to believe as it is easy for a woman in California to get a divorce and custody of her children.

On the other hand, OJ got off his criminal charges scott free, and later went on to write a book about his murder technique. The jury system isn't infallible.
it's not obvious that it's significant. we shouldn't waste our time worrying about tiny things. for example there is uranium in the ocean. it's a lot as an absolute figure. but it's very dilute, nothing to worry about.
How is that seamless embedding? Do you have examples?

I think only casual games sites have seamless embedding.
Advanced Polymorphism in Perl 6 (PDF)
Charles Stross explores a very similar thesis in Accelerando (http://www.accelerando.org): the civilization needs such intensive bandwidth to continue functioning "normally" that the distance between galaxies is too large to support both the bandwidth required and intergalaxical expansion (it's been awhile since I read it, so correct me if the details are fuzzy).
Here's a note about using Hadoop in Python: http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Writing_An_Hadoop_MapReduce...
I think there's another possibility: advanced civilizations exist, but since they're not malevolent (if they were, we wouldn't exist by now), their ethics prohibit "disturbing" us in the slightest bit, including via the knowledge that there are others out there. So they take care to camouflage themselves when they visit.
Well, we still have quite a few wise folks who witnessed the Great Depression. Nevertheless, we didn't listen to them or consult with them or else we wouldn't be facing the current economic crisis. Life extension is good, but it will just mean that more people will witness history repeating itself.
HotOrNot.com or PlentyOfFish.com have done pretty well for their owners...even if they stopped producing income now (which PlentyOfFish may do, given competition from FaceBook), their founders have banked enough off them to live well for the rest of their lives.

I'd imagine 37signals is in that category too...it sounds like they're making a few million in profit each year.
There's specific stuff in the article about this. Emacs is much more discoverable than your average IDE. It is much easier to write plugins. You don't have to bow to the gods to get a working, documented interface (see the Stevey post just before when he tries to implement focus-follows-mouse in an OS X accessibility API which is basically undocumented and, fatally, doesn't work as advertised in its comments).

Here's another way to think about it: cobbling together myriad programs at the terminal and getting them to talk is an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of GNU Emacs. Like it or not, you're going to work in some kind of environment, so it might as well give you awesoma powah in every window you open.
Hurrah for Home Chemistry
I'd do the same thing I'm doing now whether I have 10 million or not. The difference is that with 10 million, I'd be sure that I could keep doing the same thing, forever. (Or at least until I got bored with it. ;-))
Why is it "horrible" that he was convicted with indirect evidence? People are convicted without eyewitnesses all the time. That's why we have juries.
If we are the only ones, I find that incredibly scary. We are incredibly more precious than we thought. The fate of all intelligent life rests on this one tiny speck.

I, for one, hope that we aren't the only ones, because if we fail, then its all over. If there are more, intelligence will be able to carry on.
No matter what other story you want to tell based on California's actions, the last sentence of your comment is predicated on the idea that the state betrayed seven other murder cases simply to get at Hans Reiser.
Why? What possible reason could a benevolent race have for not helping us?
Dear Yahoo and Microsoft Management - please do something soon!
success = log(quality). To build a business that has 2,000 paying customers is probably 85% as hard as building the next Google.

Not to say that you are wrong, but what data do you have to justify that statement?
Yes. You weren't meant to have a boss, but get the feeling you think founders are somehow better than the run of the mill coders, but that is just not the case. We are all part of a system and need to work with each other. Hell, if I had a 9 to 5, I'm sure I could be a better husband and father and golfer, but I have worked an average of 12 hours a day for the last 10 years trying to be an innovator and I'm probably not going to stop anytime soon.

Founders may have freedom of thought, but they don't have freedom of time because they devote 90% of their time to their craft. It would seem that founders are the ones missing out, unless you are talking about the MIT and Stanford geniuses who's brilliance attracts funding.

I like what I do, but I don't think it is for everyone. If given a choice, I'd be the VC who gets to pick which young guns have the best ideas and make them share the wealth. The founders, who actually have to come up with the great ideas and actually execute...they have the hard job.
I judge software still in development by the people developing it, especially if it's something that'll be part of my project for a long time. It tells me about the direction it's going, and it's a fast and incredibly accurate method. If you heard that Linus Torvalds designed a DVCS, and Microsoft designed a DVCS, which do you think would actually work? Hopefully, that decision wouldn't take more than 10 seconds. There are exceptions; you might have subtly different (but important) requirements than what the library/tool author was designing for.

When you see this amount of unjustified duplication and defensive rationalization (including off-site remarks from the developer that building an ORM is easy), warning sirens should go off in your head.

I did go through some of the source code, but it's not my job to provide detailed code review. I can say that the packaging is strange, it doesn't resemble Python, and I've seen better versions of everything bundled in web2py. I'm not sure the integration and "ease" of install is worth being stuck to this framework.
People are routinely convicted of murder (or other substantial crimes) without hard evidence? Because I was referring to high crimes, not petty thefts or speeding tickets.

It's 25 years of a smart man's life. Let's at least be 100% positive about his guilt.
SICP in Texinfo Format - Read It In Emacs
They are so far above us that they don't notice our existence.
Is no one else going to comment on how ridiculously long his tie is?
They've observed how we treat each other, and don't want to give us enough power to somehow destroy or harm them?
What is "hard" evidence? This is a term you've invented. "100% positive"? When are we ever 100% positive? "Smart man's life"? You really think we should have different standards for programmers?

People are routinely convicted of murder on indirect evidence. Evidence is evidence. It's up to the jury to decide how compelling the evidence is. I'm surprised they came back with murder 1, but would have been shocked if they had acquitted: there was a lot of circumstancial evidence.
It's made even worse by the fucked up state of the US prison system -- his contribution really doesn't need to wasted. Would it be so horrible to give him a laptop and some internet access and let him hack?
What is "hard" evidence?

Evidence is hard if we are 100% positive about its accuracy.

When are we ever 100% positive?

When our decision is based on current technology that we've used to rigorously prove something.

"Smart man's life"? You really think we should have different standards for programmers?

Those are your words, not mine. It would be silly to have different standards based on an artificial rating of a person.

But we should have different standards that reflect the possibility that we're wrong. For example, by limiting prison terms to an absolute maximum of ten years unless we are 100% positive (as defined above) that the person is guilty.
I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.

And so would I. But neither you nor I are on the jury, and so we don't know the full extent of the evidence.

I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.

Well, that impression is probably mistaken, unless what you're saying is that there's no amount of circumstantial evidence that should send a guy to prison. If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.

I will say that my opinion would be closer to yours if Reiser were in danger of being sentenced to death. I disbelieve in the death penalty for precisely the reasons you describe. As it is, if Reiser isn't a murderer, there's a very good chance that he won't spend 25 years in prison -- Nina could turn up alive, or turn up dead in circumstances that exonerate Reiser. This isn't his last chance. Unless he's guilty.
But, the Wall Street Journal uses Frontpage.
I think the difference is that it costs less to start tech company, at least in terms of physical goods. Little to no distribution cost, no need for physical space to store the goods, etc.
We actually know several things the jury does not know. For instance, the DA sought to have admitted emails from Nina to Hans that referred directly to overt threats Hans had made. They weren't allowed due to hearsay rules.
So, in the palish system of justice, if you can conceal a body, you face an absolute maximum of ten years in prison.