skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could have a prediction market based on the startups then.
Build Your Own Multi-touch pad
Define "succeed".
Not sure if you'd all be interested in things like this but I thought that this was pretty unique and a nice alternative way of thinking about things.

The software is also open source so if you are interested in some type of video recognition/tracking, try taking a look.
Does that violate some kind of SEC regulation? It seems perilously close to an actual open market for startups. Though obviously no won would care if the max buy-in was $20.

Actually, cash prediction markets are probably against US Law anyways, I think Intrade operates from Ireland.
People buying your stock on this prediction market.
I figure about as far off as Bermuda shorts are from Speedos.

And dang it, where's my flying car?
Milton Friedman is an excellent writer. Try "Capitalism and Freedom" or "Free To Choose". Not so much academic discussions about partial derivatives applied to indifference curves, but very informative.
There would be no money involved although YC might use it as another factor (both in terms of predicting success and being predicted to succeed) in its selection process.
How can you have a prediction market without money or at least prizes? People won't take it seriously. It's not a market then.
I think it's far more likely they'll invest that money into product development rather than spending it on acquiring someone.
You're right. The home robots side that makes the roomba's uses a version of lisp. The PackBot side uses C++, tcl, and python.
Awesome :) Reminds me of Bobby Tables: http://xkcd.com/327/
The cost of infrastructure.
Anyone here have feeds to share?
Cofounder Jerry Yang is back as CEO.
Cubans line up to buy their first legal PCs
"Economics and Making Decisions", by Kourilsky, Dickneider, Kaplan, and Tabbush. It was the first of many economics books that I have read, and I still haven't come across a better primer.
This would be interesting in that the leaders may have an easier time getting venture funding. It's another piece of social proof that would help VC's with their groupthink.
I'm genuinely interested in what pg's commentary on this might be so I'll bump.
I'm tired of people complainig on behalf of the Yahoo shareholders, especially since I haven't seen anyone that actually owns Yahoo shares complain.
I highly recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. The title is not very imaginative but I found it a great place to start before looking at more complicated concepts.

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-2nd-Ed-Citizens/dp/046...
Public transport is, however, very expensive, even in Europe.

I can drive the 300 round trip to London and back from my house in England FAR cheaper than the train (£40 of gas versus £50 train ticket - if two of us go, that's £40 of gas versus £100 in tickets - not even counting the cost of getting to a train station). Sure, I could take the coach which would be marginally cheaper than driving (not by much), but it takes 7 hours to get there rather than the 3.5 in the car.
Innovation in any niche could, ultimately, propel forward an entire branch of science. Few people used or heard of scientists or innovators who went on to break significant barriers. Let's hope Why is the same :)
I'd say that if he's very talented and you really want to keep him, you should give him the 25% equity. Chances are, you can't do it on your own, and you're not going to get founder-level effort without a founder-level stake.

There was a story in Founders at Work about the Hotmail founders. The way they worked it was that the guy with the family quit his job, and the other guy gave him half his salary.

In particular, give up the illusion that startups are fair. You're going to get screwed over in your startup, and someone will inevitably end up doing more work or putting up more of the cash. The trick is to get screwed over by the right people, so that it all works out in the end. If he really is good enough that he'll make the difference between success and failure, give him the 25%. If not, why are you working with him?

This all assumes that you trust him, i.e. have a good working relationship with a decently long history. But if you don't trust him, why are you starting a company with him?
This is the best thing that could have happened for everyone (MS, Yahoo, Yahoo's stakeholders, Google, Apple and all new startups) ... there are 3 major stakeholders (shareholders, employees and end users) and two out of 3 stakeholders weren't happy with the deal - it would have been irreversible disaster if MS bought yahoo by borrowing money from outside...i think MS knew that Yahoo won't come below $37 and walking away is the best face saving tactic - it was like heads i win, tale you loose... it seemed that MS was having cold feet after realizing that yahoo brains and end users may leave the company after acquisition. Also it was uphill battle to integrate 2 businesses with totally different culture and technology. MS can do much better with $45Billion.
not having any experience to say. I would say no. If you make him a partner he doesn't require a wage like an employee would, since his potential benefit would be higher, as would his risk. When the cash flows then everyone gets it.

However, you must handle that tactfully, giving him the chance to remain employee if he wants. Of course you may have to explain the reason why an employee would get payed where a partner making the risks wouldn't.
Interactive Python shell with Flex Using Google App Engine
Bah, Microsoft can just get some interns to replicate Yahoo now.

At any rate, a google+yahoo merger would be a nasty monopoly--something you can only really understand if you've dealt with their respective ad systems, which can be (sort of) played off one another.
I strongly recommend:

The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures
By Richard Duncan
Who's to say someone at Yahoo doesn't have the capability of coming up with the "next big thing?" Maybe the junior developer they hired last week will have a great idea tomorrow - you never know.

Steve Jobs came back in 1996 - it took 5 years for them to launch the iPod. It's anyone's guess where Yahoo will be in 5 years - maybe Jerry Yang will be looked at as a hero, maybe not. Predicting Yahoo's position five years from now is impossible.
In my experience a lot of drinking and a few weeks of "dark time."

Sometimes it is issues between the founders that tears the company apart. Think "bad breakup" or "nasty divorce" and let your imagination run with it.
It mentions the mailslot displaying things on a "screen."
If this blog entry is just a restatement of "there is no silver bullet," then I agree. However, you can't blame the tools or their authors for what some people in the user community claim. The root of the problem is clearly a combination of lack of understanding and laziness.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street. http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039331...

Required reading for one of my economics classes in college. This is an excellent book covering the efficiency of markets. Extensively backed by real world data, this book boils down to some of the best and most prudent investment advice you can get. I re-read it after graduating just because it's a great book.
Interesting but irrelevant: "good buy" and "goodbye" are homophones and close to antonyms. I said goodbye to Java a while ago.
Yahoo still in talks with other partners
I can say right now that it would be difficult for him to accept 25% equity while giving up his salary.

The guy wants it both...
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=550&...

It is an audio course (also avail) on DVD from the Teaching Company now in its third addition. Taught by Timothy Taylor. I've read a lot of economic books and taken a lot of courses, and I believe this is the best introduction.
And that is a lesson to us all that we should have private companies.
Is it common for the NYT not to link to sites they talk about? Neither FriendFeed nor Flickr nor Twitter is linked to. The smaller sites could certainly use the link juice.

However, they have linked to sites that everyone knows about: Yahoo and Google.
Microsoft is not going to do anything innovative in search or any of the things Balmer mentions. One fine day, like IBM did with their PC business, MSFT will sell their MSN division for cents on the $.
Hey, no prob -- I dislike me-too posts as much as the next guy :)
Really? How does that follow?
Perhaps he means "connected component"?
I can't think of a better textbook than Samuelson.
Yes, but Blu-Ray sales are actually down, even since they won. They're getting beaten by upscaling DVD players and conventional DVDs.

The high player prices, high disc prices, and player incompatibilities have created a situation where most people simply don't see the value in Blu-Ray.
I know hardly anything about this world.
Here is my take:

First, I observe two broad primary meanings of "hacker" in computer culture today. One is an individual whose interest is in computer security. The other is an individual whose interest is in creative programming. The person has a drive to create, invent, to make computers do things that they have not done before.

The former is what the article is about. The latter is what I understand PG means when he says "hacker".

Second, I don't buy in the least the phrack author's take on the future demise of the security industry do to drying up at the well of capability. This is bollocks. I read a lot of sour grapes coming from the author that the old style hacker as cracker culture may be dying or dead. That I don't know, I'm not nor have been part of that community. But if one looks at Common Criteria (http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org ), or DoD Instruction 8500.2 (http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/html/850002.htm) one will see that security quality is far from dead. One doesn't have to be part of an underground culture to "get security." Instead it has become very formalized and institutionalized, emerging from an "Art form" into an engineering discipline.

And for kicks check out the US Air Force Cyber Command ( http://www.afcyber.af.mil )

EDIT: I have to add: Yes I have experience working with DoD software security contractors. Some of whom are very capable even though they did not come from the underground.
You should check whether the people from VC firms who've contacted you are associates or partners. If they're associates, you're no closer to a deal than if they hadn't contacted you.
Cuba allows sale of computers to public for the first time
Fair enough. I can certainly sympathize. :-)

I've always approached those stressed out midnight feedings and diaper changes with enthusiasm though. Every time I take a look at my crying son I think: these are the times I'm going to remember when he graduates, gets married and has a family of his own.

Makes things much more bearable, I think.
If you are asking for introductory economics +1 for "Basic Economics" by Sowell and "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman (Sowell is one of Friedman's proteges).

PBS made "Free to Choose" into a series back in the 1980s. You can find all the episodes on YouTube.
These two are my favorite (that are reasonably priced!). Samuelson is definitely a formidable thinker and lays the groundwork for much later economic thinking.

http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Th...
http://www.amazon.com/Price-Theory-Milton-Friedman/dp/020206...

However if you go with the Samuelson, Fridman, and Heilbroner you'll be missing out on some key concepts relating to information and games, which are essential for understanding modern developments in economics.

So, I would also look at Myerson's Game Theory
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Analysis-Roger-Myerson/dp/...

Finally, the empirical side of economics is quite important, and it is essential for investigating whether the theoretical conceptions (say in Samuelson) actually hold up. There are many bad texts, and the seminal ones (Greene) are quite difficult in the beginning. So, I recommend a pedagogical text that uses the likelihood approach. Although, this is, by no means, a comprehensive text, you can certainly gain an understanding of a basic econometric study
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Econometric-Modeling-David-Hendry-Ni...

That should give you a broad introduction. Also, checkout http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayJournalBrowse.cfm, which is an excellent resource with many free papers.

Good Luck!
Good Experience: The flip side of customer experience
Gel 2008 - Recap
http://www.friendfeed.com/kfischer

it's mostly just the posts from my biology press release blog
The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing
It depends if you're looking for a textbook or more entertaining general-audience book. If the former, check out Principles of Economics, as mathoda suggested. If the latter, here are Mankiw's recommendations:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/05/summer-reading-list.h...
Thats a lot of bad Karma. I apologize, i was posting from my phone and it posted multiple times. It was non-intentional.
I wonder if this is the first impact of a new CEO. There were a number of complaints about the loss of the "stay in touch" functionality. Their focus "Lightning fast search and a view on email that works the way your brain does – by people" would seem to include "stay in touch."

Deleting functionality is a tricky decision, this is one area where SaaS gives a startup an advantage since it's much easier to measure real usage patterns.
If you really get stressed out with the crying and sleeplessness, just take some video or pictures being "cranky". That's what I did. It became a significant stress reliever.
Accept no substitutes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital
Purely functional (retro) game programming.
This series reminded me of Palish's interest (one year-ish ago) in how to apply functional programming principles to making games. Hopefully, this will be of interest to others here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172345
I second this recommendation. I learned a lot about economics from this book...and felt my liberal latte-drinking hippy self shifting a good deal towards the right :).
Thirded. I would also recommend Economics for Dummies. Sure, it's a "For Dummies" book but it actually goes into quite a bit of detail and gives good visual / graph based explanations for things that Sowell covers more verbally.
Summary of the MS/Yahoo Hullabaloo
Microdobe?
Urgent Changes Are Needed To Facebook Messaging
With the title of this I assumed Randy had died. In case anyone else jumps to that conclusion before reading the piece, he hasn't (as of yet). It's a sad story, but ultimately an inspiring one.
Once. Fleaflicker is the only startup idea I've ever pursued.
An interview with Russell Keith-Magee - Django core contributor
If Microsoft issues more stock it would dilute it's shares which causes some people to pull out of the stock further sending it's price down. I really don't believe they would wipe out hundreds of millions / billions of shareholders value for Yahoo.

You just can't take billions of dollars in investments out without proper planning. Just because they can cash out doesn't mean that is a great idea. They would have nothing in reserves. One of the founders of Microsoft, Paul Allen was really big on having reserves that they would not spend and I would be suprised if that attitude didn't still prevail today.

Yahoo doesn't throw of enough cash either. Microsoft would have to fire half of Yahoo's employees (think Compaq computers), which would cause customers to run for the hills expecting the worst to happen to customer service and other functions.

Yahoo right now is just too expensive for MS.
The Principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS reports):

(1) highly specify activities,
(2) clearly define the transfer of material and information,
(3) keep the pathway for every product and service simple and direct
(4) detect and solve problems where and when they happen, using the scientific method.

There was significant time spent on systems like this in my Industrial Engineering manufacturing classes. These systems like Six Sigma sound kind of hokey, but if you rigidly and ruthlessly adhere to good principles, it really makes manufacturing function better. It's much better than running without a rigid system.
I find the timing of the article pretty ironic. Its interesting that you bring that up. I think you could be right that Adobe would be a good acquisition for Microsoft although merely talking about search Adobe doesn't fit will into that strategy. Microsoft is struggling to capitalize in search space and they obviously find it an important piece of the puzzle. At this moment Yahoo was their best fit in order to increase their market share. I am not quite so sure if they can do that with adobe.

Although i think a mash-up of Microsoft and Adobe technologies would be cool to see.
We use hardware load balancers, Cisco CSS 11501's.
Microblogging should be decentralized
I remember Yegge calling Java's "smart" for-loop the "stupid" for-loop, and for good reasons.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/next-big-thing
Maybe the junior developer does have a great idea tomorrow - the question is, will anyone listen to him? Or will his small voice not be heard in a big company? It's not that they lack people who have the potential to do great things, it's the size/culture, the organization itself, which in (most) large corporations stifles new ideas and creativity.
There's a Diane Sawyer ABC Special from April here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=265263428002185148
I don't follow your logic: if Microsoft has an NIH culture why would the combined Microsoft+Yahoo do more acquistions than Yahoo did independently? Remember who would be consuming who here. Isn't it more likely that the larger Microsoft would replace Yahoo's culture than it would be that Yahoo's culture would mollify Microsoft's?
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Ask YC: Identifying a troll
I recently made one of my few contributions to HN, and it turned out it was a response to a troll.

I didn't realize it then, and I'm embarrassed about having condoned this behavior by feeding the fire.

Are there any hard and fast heuristics that you use to identify trolls? I can diagnose the patently obviously cases, but apparently I can't see the items that are subtly trollish.

(As a side note, I've found I have the same deficiency across all the sites I frequent).

edit: My motivation for asking is this: I like and respect the people here. I do not want to make the same mistake as last time. As far as I can tell, the definition of a troll is heavily dependent on the community that defines it.
Adobe is clearly not going to help Microsoft with search. I'm just not sure that search isn't a bit of a lost cause for them anyway.
I think he means you can't (AFAIK - please correct me) do a hostile takeover of a private company, at least not in the same manner. because in a privately owned company there are no public stockholders to appeal to; the owner and the manager of the business are one and the same.

Really though, what this really is is an example of why you should have a dual-class share system where there are "investment shares" and "voting shares", and investing doesn't give you automatic voting rights. Yahoo for some reason didn't have that, and it put the board especially at risk to hostile takeover.
Everything is a tradeoff. How much free time, over how much money?

The general statement that Americans value free time over money is both useless and meaningless.
Reading stuff like this makes me never ever want to run a publicly traded company.
>And it uses no proprietary or "non-standard" plugins

It does. http://ostatic.com/158658-blog/is-lovd-by-less-really-open-s...:

"Lovd by Less touts itself as an open-source platform for social networking. And indeed, the software itself is released under an open-source license, and provides some useful functionality. However, restrictions on some of its essential plug-ins raise questions about its actual licensing status."
This article doesn't really seem to say anything or come to any conclusions. Am I missing something?
Translated version: http://tinyurl.com/63vunj
Curious. What do you think - has Microsoft been so successful in business at least in part because of its insistence per Paul Allen of keeping large cash reserves, larger than most companies keep on hand? (MiniMSFT blogger said something like, "Why? We're not a bank!")

Or is it simply that Microsoft has held a very lucrative monopoly position for many years and just makes more money than it knows what to do with? I.e., perhaps its habit of keeping large cash reserves are just an effect of its success and not any kind of cause of it?

The reason I pose the question is that I have been forming a layman's theory that in fact it is all about the cash, even as much for a huge company as it is for a small mom and pop store; that as long as a company has cash on hand it can go on, and when it runs out of cash the end is coming even if it takes years in a downhill slide. If you take corruption as a given, I suspect that all the accoutrements of big-company strategies like pursuing growth over profitability, borrowing money to run at a loss, etc., are nothing more than smokescreen thrown up by upper management to make it look like they're doing a good job when they're really bleeding the company. Rather than being a waste of resources, I rather wonder if keeping a large cash reserve is like a protective armor to keep a company from having to borrow at interest during rough periods. Is this completely off the mark?
The Entrepreneur's Checklist
This one's free on line:

http://www.introecon.com/
i was trying to get votes on a youtube video for a contest so i offered it up to mechanical turk
Economics is a pseudo-science.

It does not follow the basic principle that knowledge is proved and disproved by experiments. You can find all the sophisticated mathematical methods you want in economics, and none of them would stand a test of reality. Most of so called 'models' come with disclaimers against 'exogenous' shocks, and pretty soon you discover that our whole life is one big exogenous phenomenon.

No wonder economists today are desperately in search of identity. You can see them dabbing in psychology, history, social behaviour studies, business organisation etc. It's all call 'economics', but plucking concepts from assorted fields does not compensate for a general lack of substance.

'Economics' can include hard factual stuff like how international trade or balance sheet of a central bank work. Those are hard to argue with because that is mostly accounting. Like the fact that bloated 'left side' of the balance sheet should be covered by issued money on the 'right side'.

Mainstream economic concepts such as 'equilibrium' or the horribly misnamed 'Modern Portfolio Theory' are as far from latest scientific understanding of the world as mediaeval barbers are from the modern medicine.

So instead of polluting the brain with what they call 'economic science' go and study complex systems theory (or related theory of computations, chaos theory etc) and you will be a) on the forefront of modern understanding of economic reality b) will be actually studying Science, not quackery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics#History_and_schools_o...

Most books can be very dry, i would recommend looking for something more edgy and opinionated

This is why i recommend googling and reading online articles such as the link above

Economics is a very debated field, i would recommend that would follow the debates and the debaters

classic school vs neo classical ... this is where the most fun is