skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> redress the imbalances these shifts point to.

To me that sounds like politics, unless you're going to be more specific, or at best economics (distribution of scarce resources). I think many of us are concerned about that kind of thing (and active), but given our own comparative advantages, may feel that it's best to concentrate on what we do best.

> level of cleantech investment is tiny

There are a few guys here with money to invest, but not that many. That's a fair comment, though.

> i appreciate that it's a lot to handle. but aren't you guys supposed to be revolutionaries?

I'm not sure I'd define myself that way - I'm a hacker with a predilection for open source software, and I like to "build stuff". I can't speak for other people. Right now I'm simply hoping to be able to find a niche where I can make a good living for myself making something cool, and my guess is that that probably doesn't include big, world changing ideas. Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd probably look askance at anyone who describes themselves to others as a "revolutionary". Guess I'm at an age where I'm content to leave the world a better place than I found it by doing my part.
seen http://infochimps.org/datasets ?
Newspaper Online vs. Print Ad Revenue
I know that you could make a decent argument that some of these companies make no revenues, but he's way off base on some of them. Betfair, for instance, had 2007 revenue of ~$300 Million. And Kayak has a great revenue stream.

I'm an admitted skeptic sometimes, but seriously, do some research before spouting hyperbole.
Can Web Apps Get Too Drunk on Aggregation?
Eh. You're overreacting to the title. Internet ads do work. Just not very well. There's obviously opportunity there, I suppose.

I finally found the link I keep quoting. Here's the submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176934

What you find, with some modest rounding, is that print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue — the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be.
I could see you not caring for the "hand wavy" or "rant" comments, but my open source line is simply saying it like it is - there's nothing cynical about it. I've spent tons of my own time working on open source software, and while I've gotten a lot out of it and enjoyed it immensely, I don't think that in monetary terms, it adds up to a great deal.

Like many people here, I don't have "big $$$", so that cuts me out of the investing part of the equation.

Let's put it this way: maybe your article makes more sense if specifically directed at people with money to invest. As a hacker, either I have a big green/anti-poverty/etc... idea for people to invest in, or I don't, and as one without such an idea, your article comes across as a bit of a harangue about something I have little control over, having neither the '$$$', nor that kind of idea.

And one final note: there are plenty of practical and noble ideas that could help millions of people that aren't, however, money making ideas. Once again, your article isn't clear (to me at least) on whether that's what people ought to be spending their money on, or if you think that investors can make a buck by investing in this stuff.
a "kneeling chair" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneeling_chair) is a similar solution that keeps your spine straight but doesnt put stress on your legs. i have a friend who has one and he loves it
Ruby in Ruby...Seriously
I never mentioned any prizes. In fact, only one sentence of the above was a positive comment about Hans, and most of the the rest pointing out his flaws as a project leader.

But, prisoners generally are encouraged to work as part of their rehabilitation, and it seems to me that if his skills are most useful to the public in the development of software.

Nobody said he's Albert Einstein or Jimmy Carter. Just that he's done useful work for society--millions of people use ReiserFS, and he's worked for the US government for many years doing cryptographic and plugin-capable filesystem work--and that he could continue to do useful work for society with a few minor modifications to the terms of his imprisonment.

If you think Open Source software on the scale that Hans was involved in it has no value to society, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
Doug McCune » Blog Archive » Why I don’t read books
That seems useful, but it's more aggregated data (by state & region, not zip).
Marketing your startup: dorks vs everyone else
So here is the question: when you are marketing your start-up do you go after the online tech community (dorks) or go after normal people (people whose lives do not revolve around the internet.) Maybe its both, maybe not. Suggestions, insight, comments...
Try some of each and see who gets more excited about it.
Reveal more.  Learn from twhirl's recent user experience improvement.
MythTV also runs well on OSX FYI.
The company holds copyright to all the code you write on company time.

In theory, abstract ideas in the code are not patentable. Patents are supposed to be specific embodiments of ideas. In practice, you totally need a lawyer if you or the employer are considering patents.
>rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy

This is self-righteous 'leftist' moralizing of the worst kind.

The global economy is not flawed. It is the way it is. Human interests, interaction, history and habits are stronger than any amateur Marxist can imagine.

You think world is unfair? Probably. However, the pathetic attempts to seek high moral ground are futile. You have seen how One Laptop Per Child faired in real life. You should also remember that there are tons and tons of used computer equipment and especially mobile phones imported into Africa and other poor countries every day. This used equipment is imported for money and put to use immediately. Some of this technology is affecting how farmers in distant African villages are managing their harvest sales, for example.

This is globalisation. It may sound humiliating (used clothes, used phones etc) but it is wonderful, vibrant, living global economic organism which will show some interesting emergent qualities in our lifetime. Who would imagine South East Asia growing the way it does today?

You may see some surprises from Africa too. And no, it would be not because some guilt-ridden guy has shown us, the masses, what to do. Some of the worst damage to third world economies are done by Western donors.

So, basically, my advice to the author: stop preaching the need to change this cruel world and go make something that people want to buy.
Sample Comet application in Pylons with cogen (an async network programming Python library)
pssh... emerge -uND world
Google Maps Driving Directions Add Street View Option
No, using a package manager where you select the app you want is NOT like dragging and dropping executables into some magic location on the filesystem.
BBC Micro Advanced Users Guide

Programming the Z80, Rodnay Zacks
> don't spread it around
Why not? Is it not public domain, or are you worried about the load on your server, or what?
i click through ads in Gmail and I also click through some of the products Amazon recommends. why?

because they're actually relevant to me.
Seems it would depend on the product/service you are offering.
I think it really depends on what you do. If you offer the type of product/service that geeks are likely to recommend to their non-geek friends and will still excite geeks target them. I fully believe a great deal of Googles success came from exciting the geek market and using them to spread the word to non-geeks who could tell people to Google it instead of spending time answering a question.

Other companies either don't appeal to geeks or just aren't something a geek is likely to recommend in which case just targeting the general population is probably better.
I think evaluating the economic potential of an idea against the effort it requires is a better plan.

I have a text file with a long list of business ideas/plans. I have ordered them pragmatically.

But, the good business ideas aren't quite as cool or interesting as the strange things I think up and hack together. So, I often do myself a great disservice by I getting excited about a new idea and start building it instead of picking one from the top of the list.
Twitter Usage Numbers Finally Emerge
Startup People are just people like everybody else, though, somehow trying to get by. It is not like most of them are swimming in money, trying to be successful just for fun. So why should they have a special responsibility?

I am not against solving the worlds problems, but I suspect it makes more sense to focus on the problems you also have a chance of solving.

And I buy into the "to create wealth, create value" mantra (or what is it exactly). Anyway, I think if somebody is successful with their startup, they probably have build something that people want, and hence made the world a better place. Even if it is just a game or some stupid network, I think it is still valid and valuable. If the starving people get their first computer, they'll want to have something to play, too.

If the only goal would be survival for everyone (without any prospects of fun), I would probably look into deep freezing technologies.

Finally, I would like the challenging blogger what he himself is doing about those problems?
"Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley.
I think the point is that thanks to deceptive marketing, most people don't properly evaluate whether it is worthwhile to go.

As for a "generic career readiness test", that's probably pointless. On the other hand, some sort of standardized testing would be useful.

Take a student who got a B in calculus at Rutgers, and a similar student who got a B in calculus at NYU. Are they equally skilled at calculus (Hint: definitely not)? Given a standardized calculus test we could tell the difference.
no, but you definitely see ads that don't smell right. the ones written in rigid language that require 5+ years in several mediocre technologies.
Disagree. SearchMonkey suggests the future of search. It's how something like Mahalo can scale to the size of the internet. Because, as the author says, we use frameworks that can generate semantic info for us.
go out and build your product and let the users prove whether or not your startup is valuable.
When I was buying them in Austin a couple years back, I found they were about $600-$700 from used office furniture stores, though occasionally they'd show up on Craigslist for less. I bought the one I still have from the Arthur Andersen auction after the Enron scandal shut them down...got it for $385. I also got a truly awesome Keilhauer chair for $35 (list price ~$950, but everybody was after the Aerons, so the other chairs went for nothing, even though most were really nice chairs), which I also kept. Maybe Aerons come down in price in the past two years, or are cheaper here in the valley, I dunno.

But I agree, spending a few grand on every new employee for a nice working environment, the keyboard they like, a great chair, a good desk, a nice top of the line computer with dual monitors, is just sound business sense. The money spent will disappear into noise by the time you add their annual salary to their line on your expense report. And the work environment will last for years, just upgrade the computer every 18-24 months, and the monitors every 3 years, and you've got a fat and sassy employee that feels like you appreciate them (assuming you actually do appreciate them and treat them with respect in addition to giving them great tools with which to work). And the chair is the single most important part of that equation. I'd never ask anyone to sit 8 hours in a crappy chair.
I think what drinko is asking is what sort of web app you're working up. The type/function/target market will help people gauge what's appropriate. It's probably worth the risk to your confidentiality...
The article is addressed to the wrong people. Food and water imbalances are political problems. Energy is a big problem and the fix will be technical but the skillsets of the "Web 2.0" crowd and the petrochemical engineering crowd do not really overlap. Nobody would suggest that NBA players stop doing what they are doing to solve more more important issues.
They are not random fluctuations. Federal Reserve policy had a lot to do with both food prices & the financial system.

Read libertarian economic literature to understand how the US and world economy have been fundamentally warped by the credit bubble unleashed by the Fed - LTCM debacle led to Nasdaq bubble, fighting the Nasdaq bust led to the housing bubble and so on.

Even the start-up flip-it mindset in the valley has roots similar to the housing flip-it mindset everywhere.
> C++ is universally regarded as a language for large system development.

Actually, C++ is a terrible language for large system development. Far worse than Ruby. Then again, I'm not entirely convinced that Ruby is a great language for large system development, either: monkeypatching in a 50-developer project = teh evil. Of course, you can at least solve the worst problems with Ruby with coding standards. C++ problems are more fundamental.

> My heresy is that static type checking is white elephant. I've been doing this kind of work for going on 15 years now, and I can count on 1 hand the number of head-scratching bugs I've had due to type safety, and that includes 100kloc+ components built entirely around void* closures. The things that really fuck you in large systems are object lifecycle and concurrency.

If you use a powerful static type system (i.e. neither Java's nor C#'s) intelligently, you can sidestep whole categories of problems simply with proper type declarations -- for example, by using different types for escaped and unescaped string data from users.

In any case, the real reason that enterprises are more comfortable with Java and .Net than dynamic languages for major projects isn't speed, it's that the deployment and monitoring infrastructure is mature and well-understood. Obviously, many enormous websites have been deployed on dynamic languages, but enterprises have a much higher comfort level with the tools available for Java and .Net than the tools for doing this with Ruby, et alia. That's why you see a lot more enterprise traction for solutions like JRuby -- problem solved, as far as they're concerned.
Bad Stereotyping
Up For Grabs: $42 Billion of Newspaper Ad Revenue
Great article. I work for a startup company and these are exactly the issues that we go through. We're in the second phase of funding and it's always a tough time. Will we have enough money? Is there money? How will be get it? Where will we get it? How much do we need? All these question about money. What I got from the post is that we are here for a purpose. I totally agree with nostrademons post. Provide a great service and product, let the people be the judge. Let's get to work. We're not going down quietly.
I've answered far less intriguing ads in my 'desperate for a job phase'. The fact is that I'm simply not looking at job ads most of the time, and I'll probably only work on something if I already know the person, or I really, really like the idea.

So it really depends on whether or not I see it.
Why Steve Ballmer Will Keep Chasing Yahoo
The Perfect and the Good
Understand Google's Guidelines
Kenyan Runners
Perhaps there are similar reasons behind US dominance in the tech sector.
This might be a necessary piece of framing behind marketing for YouNoodle.com, for example.
C from Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets as a first book for C? Okay....
On the other hand, the high street price of these drugs has subsidized a lot of research that could have neat private-sector applications. Perhaps diverse legal regimes are the best way to go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRE_Mathematics_Test

Although I don't know what we would gain by making every graduate taking the exam, even if they didn't want to continue on to graduate school.
Great quote, but it was misquoted. It's actually:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
The Mac as a gaming platform should have most of the advantages of PC's and consoles: The advantage of consoles are standardized hardware, and the advantages of a PC are the openness and not having to pay royalties or operate at the whim of the console manufacturer. (Sony, MS, and Nintendo exert even more control over console game developers than Apple does with the iPhone)

Of course, the high cost of Macs and the lack of intersection between the gamer and Mac demographics has kept all of the medium-sized game developers away; only the very smallest developers (eg shareware writers) and the very largest developers (EA, Blizzard) bother to pay attention to the platform.
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy.

It's not technical, but it is very much about computers.
The Risk Pool - What's behind Ireland's economic miracle—and G.M.'s financial crisis?
Google-Hacking Goes To China
> You never see an ad saying "Startup looking for mediocre developers." Nothing about this one really resonates.

Not true. Auctomatic had a job ad for a long time looking for a so-so developer. I answered it right away but was distracted from learning smalltalk at the time.

Here it is:
http://blog.auctomatic.com/?p=4 . It's hilarious.
Inc’s Great Idea Contest
There is no clear consensus. The few studies done suggest the opposite of what you are saying - that the glycogen depleted state your body is in when you wake up leads to burning fat before muscle. That said, most physiologists suggest you should eat something before working out. THAT said, most bodybuilders suggest doing "fasted AM cardio." I tend to go with the bodybuilders' advice as they are the ones actually putting their ideas into practice and figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Yeah, it is hilarious. I'm also pretty sure it's not serious.
There already are exams if you want to go on (e.g. that GRE link). But having all graduates take it regardless is quite useless, especially as a method to determine how "good" one program/class/graduate is to another.

We've already had to deal with standardized testing BS thanks to NCLB before college, and look at the mess now. Teachers only teach to the exam and that is really not a good thing.
Ask YC:  Do you plan on becoming a space tourist if you make it big?
To me, this would be the greatest reward of having lots of money.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QPbdfUpGjyI

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WBo8t0B5NhM
he failed to mention, that unfortunately, in our profession you have to quit and get another job in order to get a good pay raise.

A lot of employers, once they hire somobedy, raise the salaries just enough, and a bit, but they fail to recognize that the employee is much better developer and valuable than he was a couple of years ago. This is especially true to people in their 20s.

One way to retain employees:
Give them really good raises and money to stay.
Let them switch projects, or groups, when they are bored with what they are doing.
Linux funny and otherwise edifying factoids
No, I like the mac. You misunderstood the point. I just don't think it's a good choice for the average person.

And yeah, the keychain is more secure. It's just harder to understand at first.
I had a kneeling chair once. They are great if you have a regular chair to alternate with every few hours, but kneeling for an entire day gets hard on the knees. The main benefit for me was to switch between my kneeling chair and my regular one every 3-4 hours.
Your idea of the greatest reward is much different from mine.

I'd probably head a couple humanitarian aid projects and fund several medical research projects, depending on how 'big' I made it.

Space would be awesome, but I think there are more rewarding things you can do with that much money.
The latter. You're free to upload it elsewhere and spread it, however.
Kernighan Ritchie: The C Programming Language.

I had a copy lying near my unix lab computer. It must have been around 85 and I hated it back then (it was a very bad german translation).

4 weeks ago I grabbed an old copy from our library (this time the american 2nd edition) and now I appreciate how well this book is written.

If you have some time, read it. Its a real pleasure!
Yep, but I'm going straight for the moon:

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/136063main_bm4_high.jpg
Leo Brodie's 'Starting Forth'. Just a great book on how to think about factoring a program.
For some reason I doubt either the DEA or the drug lords are going to publish their findings in an academic journal.
Two years after that posting, comes this: http://groups.google.com/group/seattle.general/browse_thread...
Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?
Standing is great, but walking is even better. I've been using a treadmill desk for the past 7 months and have seen the same benefits Jamis noted - less fatigue, better concentration, improved posture. Walking at a slow pace (.7 to 1.2 mph) is less stressful to your joints than standing still, but you don't break a sweat and can type, use a trackball, and talk on the phone comfortably.
Stolen Mangos - Facebook for India
I read this on progit once and it has stuck with me: "If you can go across the street and get a 25% raise, then you're worth a 25% raise to your current employer."

Of course, this is not always true. The other company might have a use for one of your skills that your current position doesn't make use of.
Goowy - The History and The Acquisition
I would recommend going for the non-geek community ("normal people") 99 times out of 100. Basically, go for real people as customers unless you're selling a bug-tracking app or tech news app or something else that is only pertinent to geeks.

Geeks are less willing to pay for a product or service, because their interest in new startups is largely a technical curiosity and/or a competitive curiosity. The people that are on the cutting-edge of technology are also constantly looking for the next thing, so they lose interest quickly. Non-geeks are much more likely to pay you and to continue paying you if your service actually helps them. An app is likely to be remarkable (in the literal sense) for geeks if it has a unique architecture or was written in an unusual language, etc., whereas an app can be very remarkable/viral among non-geeks as long as it is useful.

In sum: If you want a business, go after non-geeks. If you want 15 minutes of geek-fame, go after geeks.
I truly miss those times. Well... my computer is much more powerful now, but, still, those heroic days when I could fully understand the Apple II ROM will not be forgotten.

At least, not by me ;-)
bzip2 it. It will slash the size to a fraction of its current size.
"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder.
Grab lunch with Jeff Barr of AWS
you should always eat protein after workout.if you need to eat before as well depends on the amount of training.if you just do a couple of 30 sec series of pushups eating after should be sufficient.if you fail to eat after you will fail to gain strength
This has been my secret motivation for the last few years.
Implementing Type Inference: Not So Hard!
Christopher Diggins used a Hindley-Milner type-inference algorithm when designing the Cat language. Clear explanations of the technique seemed hard to come by, however, until Christopher uncovered a good book and a couple of papers that filled in the gaps.
No, I plan on becoming Dash Rendar. I'm not coming back.