skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good business mentor/advisor can be extremely helpful at the start, although finding one can be difficult if you don't know what you're looking for, which was my experience. My first business mentor, while excellent at running his business, didn't know anything about running a startup or web business. While much of his advice on running the business on a day to day basis was invaluable, he was pointing my business partner and I off in the wrong direction long term. We ended up wasting a lot of time focusing on the wrong areas. We had similar problems with other advisors. We even had one attempt to defraud us into giving him control of the business. Basically, our advisors were no wiser than us on how to do a startup (rather than a lifestyle business) but we were too naive to see this and far too often blindly followed their advice.

Over time we became quite jaded about having advisors due to repeated bad experiences. We decided to implement the policy 'never take advice from someone who's not a millionaire'. We also learned to trust our own judgement and gut instinct a lot more and it often proved correct (not always though :-). Eventually we found a successful entrepreneur in a comparable field who was able to give us excellent advice. Because of that advice our startup is now growing in leaps and bounds.

I know I probably sound quite negative about advisors but I believe the right advisor at the right time to can mean the difference between success and failure. I experienced what happens when it goes wrong and the business was lucky to survive it. If you can't get the right advisor (someone who's both successful and in a similar field) you're probably better off with none at all. I don't want to sound like I'm blaming them though, most were well intentioned, excellent at their chosen professions, and I'm still grateful to the time they gave to me. However, I was 19 years old when I began my startup and still very naive and in a catch 22 situation. I knew I needed advice but didn't have the experience or someone to advise me as to who to get advice from. In hindsight, had Paul Grahams essays been available back then it would have saved me a lot of pain as that's exactly what I needed to know. I expect that since everyone here has access to them they'll be better equipped to avoid making my early advisor mistakes.

Oh, and just a small observation I've noticed with advisors. The better suited they are for your business the less they need to say. They can just cut through the crap and tell you what you need to know. The more they talk the more it's likely that they're well meaning but don't really know what to tell you so they tell you everything.
The New York Times covers blogging
Hey PG, You talk about Isaac Newton, here's something that might interest you:

Newton was a “glandeur”; In Dijksterhuis 2004:

George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”

Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity."

More on Glander by Taleb:
"It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called “Glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part –so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."

[Taken from http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm]
Ants and the nature of their intelligence
I suspect the problem is that most people want to keep the option open of implementing their idea at some point in the future, even if they probably realize they never will. Giving ideas away, knowing that others will come along, seems to be in line with believing the pie isn't finite, and I think most people are convinced the pie is finite.
Anonymous Code Blocks in Python
I don't see how this is on topic. Could someone please explain?
Tell that to the families of the people here:
http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/unabomber/victims...

Kaczynski was just a dedicated psycho whose only hack was to show how hard it can be for society to deal with people like him. He may have dicked around with math a little but to call him "brilliant" is a mistake along the lines of Clarke's third law.
Personally, I think Zimbra's an awfully small fish to be a major concern in a $45 billion deal.
that example with the audio generation could be done by keeping track of the random seed
He probably means ascii file.
Yes! I remember learning infinite series in college and thinking about Calder. His work is similar to measuring the area under an infinite curve that approaches zero. Infinite line, finite area area. Calder has the recursive mobile(s) and a counter weight. Literally Counter Weight == recursive mobile(s). Something seemingly infinite equated with something finite.

His big one in the East Wing of the National Gallery is outstanding. They blow the HVAC on it to make it move. IM Pei requested that it be the centerpiece of his great building. IM Pei, another possible hero. Fun essay.
I'm sure it has more to do with competing with Google, but now that you mentioned it, I'd be really disappointed if Zimbra fell in the hands of Microsoft.
Consumer (Dis)Comfort With Online Tracking
Euler's Constancy
As the comments on the site point out, Leonardo is just the kind of person who would make use of mirrors to draw his own profile, so ruling them out is inaccurate; and the arithmetic for his age in the years of those portraits is off.
Should you bound your actions by what is acceptable, or should you bound your actions by what is practical and moral? The question I would ask, to phrase your worries more explicitly, is to ask whether that behavior will make things better or worse for you (because if you ask me, there's nothing morally wrong about telling people about your site). If the blogger were to say negative things about your site on his/her blog, in reaction to a politely worded message, people would react as if the blogger were whining, and your site would get free publicity. If the blogger were to say positive things about your site, well that's certainly good. If the blogger were to inform the cabal that you messaged them then they might organize an ignorance campaign. So, do you believe in the blogger cabal? :-)
Bloggers need things to write about, you need people to write about you - if your offering is compelling it can be a great match. I recommend you read this article: http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/08/22/how-to-pitch-bloggers
Asterisk is in many ways a fairly standard "disruptive technology":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
Notes from Valentine’s Day - Knuth Lecture Notes
I don't know that saying negative things is whining. depending on what they are. I did just such a thing the other day, because the site truly sucked. It wasn't whining because I had no real interest in the site, it was just my opinion based on web design, security, and anti-competetiveness. Honestly, the only thing I was whining was that an old friend had forced me to use it.

But if you ask a blogger to blog about you, you can't coerce them, just say, 'thought you might be interested in url' and then hope they say good things. If they don't learn from the bad things they detail and fix them. Then make a comment about how you made the site better.
It's not particularly easy to find for people of any age. But all the more important for you to seek out those with similar minds.
Creeping Up on Riemann
Sure. Just make sure to make relevant pitches, and truly personalize each one. Bloggers can tell when they are being PR-spammed.
Certainly, but nobody really uses the term for such services. Salesforce.com likes to call itself SaaS because it distinguishes itself from Siebel, Oracle, and other big enterprise software co's that sell similar services using the old product model.

But it doesn't really mean much outside of the enterprise space. The whole web is SaaS. =)
Yes, parentheses are beautiful. I don't actually like to look at code without them anymore.
This is the kind of idea that will lead to revolutionary thinking across multiple domains at some point. People in all sorts of fields should follow this kind of work very closely. Excellent, exciting stuff.

This also offers a very fertile, multidisciplinary endeavor for developers, designers, and science folks. A good designer should build an ant environment such that the environment is strictly controlled, and precise alterations to the environment can be made, and either video + software or tagging to track the ants movements, environment, and functionality. A good computer scientist, with a physics, mathematical, or cryptographic bent, could work with this designer and ant researcher to use the ant environment video to generate algorithms to model and predict ant behavior, which could be evolved as the system generates more information about the ants. They could create several of these identical boxes to run at once. Eventually, the system will be quite good at predicting the behavior of ants. At this point, they could bring aboard a person with an interest in ant brains, to link the models evolved from the boxes with ant neurology. Then, they will have an answer to how intelligent behavior can arise from stupid ants, which will offer revolutionary insight into fields from AI to economics to psychology to neurology to education.
You know John Carmack? I wrote him.
Skype Plans for PostgreSQL to Scale to 1 Billion Users
Beats my plan of using this month's rent money that's due today to buy a plane ticket and then riding my luck from there. Doesn't carry the same sense of adventure. Pro: Does reduce probability of having to resort to cage fighting for food.
pg's criteria: Everyone on the list had two qualities: they cared almost excessively about their work, and they were absolutely honest.

Thomas Clarkson.

Ben Franklin.

Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Alexander Hamilton.

Alan Turing.
He forgot to mention coffee and a computer. FAIL.
Yeah, I think my wife would kill me if I used some of the the mortgage to buy a plane ticket....

Actually, I was hesitant to even post this, as I really don't like the idea of panhandling my way around the internet. But I haven't done this sort of thing, and don't see any reason I'll have to do so again... so I figured it's worth a shot to see if I can still make the event. Here's hoping. Wish me luck.
if only they actually did all that stuff. they've been promising a new war3 patch for years. if they'd just have one guy making a few small balance changes per month it'd be much better than it is. it's not rocket science to watch pro games and slightly nerf everything you see a lot of, and slightly buff everything you never see, until there is more variety used.
Knuth just said something about this at his last "Musings" lecture....
http://thermalnoise.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/notes-from-vale...
25 Must Buy, Borrow, or Steal Books for Web Designers
I'm really getting tired of all these pundits who have a magic crystal ball.

Services can stay irrationally bad for a very long time. He's making ridiculous speculations about the spread of broadband over the entirety of the United States without even considering why the USA doesn't already have the kind of bandwidth Europe and Japan have.

Just because there's a potential for something to occur doesn't mean it will happen. Do you remember microformats? People like Jakob Nielsen had chubbies for that crap for years. It never materialized even though it kind of seems like a good idea.

Just because you throw money at people for a living doesn't mean you know what the fuck you're doing.
You could offer some service, like promise to provide the best video coverage of startup school ever, or really good transcripts, or something like that.
Just curious, what version of APL and what does your answer to the Arc challenge look like?

A web-style APL should let you do something like that as tersely as APL lets you compose operations like +.×/ for the inner product.
Picasso’s Top 7 Tips for Creating an Exciting Life
Is Giles saying that with the help of Rubinius you can do Lisp-style code generation in Ruby? I don't know much about Rubinius but this doesn't sound right. Lisp macros let you manipulate the program's AST in compile time very easily because the AST is made of sexp's, just like the program code itself. This is due to the peculiar Lisp syntax. Lisp code generation seems quite different from the monkey patching techniques demonstrated in the presentation. Am I missing something?
Did he write back? ;)
I think the answer is different depending on who really stands to gain from being part of it. Does it help a community to the point where they will want to lend a hand to keep it going (e.g. Wikipedia) or will only founders and investors benefit from it?
1. No.

2. Yes.

3. When you find you are out of your element, for example when raising financing or negotiating an acquisition.
> Richard Stallman ...

and for never selling out.
I've been using RT for a while now. If you have to click that much it's because of the way you've set things up. You can even do most all the single-ticket operations (opening, updating, resolving) through email. I know a few admins that regularly manage dozens of tickets at a time without ever using the web interface.
Bah, it's all a matter of habit. Firefox's "/"+term for find, as well as C-k and C-l to select search and URL fields respectively will always be second nature to me.
"... What are these people commenting on? ..."

In short, people as individuals do not scale as well as software. Read this piece scoble wrote about the effect of techmeme - an automated blog link gathering tool & ranking tool - has on individual people who grab themes from the Internet and add value to these themes through writing & money through advertising ~ http://scobleizer.com/2007/10/21/reverse-engineering-techmem...

The sting for companies is trying to keep up with a software system is that the systems keep improving. No matter how many people they throw at gathering content & commenting, they cannot compete. To me it's a statement of how tech-savy the parent companies really are.
The decision to open up BigTable would seem to mark Google’s challenge to Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite, which also includes the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for cloud processing power and Simple Storage Service (S3) for cloud storage.

About time. I'm really surprised how long AWS has been around without a sign of competition from Google. Cloud computing was supposed to be their big thing...
Cram 20s clarinet solo into sub-kilobyte File
Sex and Financial Risk Linked in Brain
Number 8: Stop spending the few fleeting moments you have before you depart your increasingly pathetic and desperate life looking for tips about motivation on the internet and dedicate that time to either reading about the things that make your heart beat faster when you talk about them or self teaching something boring you need to get through to learn the fun stuff.
He left this one out: plain paper and pencil. lets you do plain text and it out saves your file!
http://wifind.in/
Stanford Launches On-Campus Venture Fund, SSE Ventures
Hash collisions. Two different docs and same MD5 hash value
Watch the attack at 3:53. It is pretty easy being a martial legend if your students attack like that.
Windows 7 in 2009?
Concentrated Solar Thermal is more than 90% efficient. Ausra has a 175Mw base-load plant in construction. A number of Gigawatt plants will be made within a few years.

In China, there are 30 million solar hot water systems capturing the energy of 40 large nuclear plants and is growing at 20% per year. South Africa has mandated all buildings have to have solar hot water by 2010.

My company will install thousands of solar hot water systems without change and we will get the carbon credit and charge for the 'free' energy captured from the sun.
Aztec Math Used Hearts and Arrows
"Shut up and hack", as the motto says.
Browser based easy font creation tool from Fontshop
Setting up Subversion on Windows
Does anyone here use JRuby? I'd like to hear people's experiences with it
I'm waiting for a 9" ASUS Eee instead. Dirt cheap so it won't matter when the TSA drops it (my PowerBook got a nice dent the corner), small enough to unfold in economy seats, and all the hardware works with Linux out of the box :)
Making sure you tell them why your site is relevant to their audience would be a good start. For example mention the occasions in the past when they have covered similar products or services.

That will also help them be certain that they aren't being hit by a cut/paste job.
Tin Whiskers: Within a whisker of failure
Behind the Alter-G (anti-gravity) Treadmill (text + video)
Nasty Bug:  Safari doesn’t cache stuff.
Non-Advertising Business Models for Your Startup
For a minute there, I was thinking I was 1/500th of the internet. :(
Ask HN: when does your bullshit filter turn on?
After working in an enterprise software development house for a while, I found that I have developed a so called "bullshit filter". Once somebody mentions "enterprise", "workflow", "service oriented architecture", or similar phrases, my brain switches to the mode where I ignore rest of what's said. Any similar experiences? What words turn you into that mode?
I couldn't wait for a 9" Asus EEE, so I ebay'd the 8" 8g one. I love it. It's the size and heft of a hardback book - you can literally run out the door and grab it. Not having to worry that much about shock damage and defragmentation makes the limited SD-only storage worth it. Girls think it's cute too (sometimes it's good to be different - MacBooks are as vanilla as some guy's default personalities)
And they threaten to lower their offer, which probably didn't go unnoticed by Yahoo! shareholders:

"If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal."
The Fakest Apple iPhone
Nasty? It just reloads it? I fail to see failure to cache as a nasty bug.
the study was conducted on 15 people only.. i think that is grossly inadequate to come to such a conclusion
fizzbuzz, oh my!
I'm also unconvinced. The only time I hear about it is on here. Is it that much better than sending an SMS email or calling? Enough better to pay for??

Seems like a kind of useful feature you'd expect to be free with your phone.
It's just a little further east in Tel-Aviv.
It’s an Aggregation Festival
Maybe it's a feature? Because we all love waiting for large SWF files to load. It's probably not noticeable if you're just looking at plain HTML like HN, but if you're viewing large photo galleries or downloading many large embedded flash files, it probably becomes a problem. So yes, I think this qualifies as a 'nasty bug'.
"endless sea of lists of names"

"something useless"

Honestly, do you guys really believe that these phrases describe this thread?

I really enjoyed reading about people's choices, no matter how much they had to say, didn't you?
Interview With Steve Wozniak at Boston Robotics Competition (video)
Managing The GRUB Bootloader With QGRUBEditor On Ubuntu 7.10
Microsoft: Yahoo has three weeks or else
The Top 9½ Books In a Hacker's Bookshelf
I think it was E.O. Wilson who once said, "If you're not interested in ants then you're probably not a very interesting person."
3 Reasons to Welcome a Recession
Women are more successful stock investors than men
No standards and don't take it personally. I was simply asking if your opinion was based on recent use of Asterisk or your experience from a few years ago. Software evolves, sometimes in a good way.
Translation Game - Hacking Users into Workers
Network Algorithmics is an awesome book; it's been recommended here before.

But I don't think most of the DPI products use advanced packet classification algorithms. No product I've worked on has; it's pretty much, "that's port 80, so use the HTTP decode". There's classification done for binning and accounting, but it's pretty brute force.

Narus is a DPI vendor, but not of the type WaPo is talking about. They provide "lawful" (read, "unlawful") intercept for traffic that has already been classified and diverted.
That's what his example was. Instead of saving 12 hours of generated music, he's logging the data that generated it as instructions on how to generate it.
Was this a class presentation written for a CS 101 undergraduate audience at a community college?
Summary: sell something ---or if that doesn't work, try an advertising business model.
And how exactly is the fear of parenthesis 'pretty awesome'?
I have also found God. God said, "Let us make Men in our image, in our likeness.".

And that is what he did: http://www.aikenslaughs.com/adult/1484.jpg
Random guy who heads US research institute and is not Craig Venter believes in mystical sky daddy. Film at 11.

How is this hacker news, or even interesting?
I would be interested to know how one would derive a belief in the Christian god from reproducible natural observations alone.
Einstein's Top 3 Tips for Digg Bait

1) Write something with which everyone agrees and attribute to some famous figure.

2) Condense writing into a numbered list.

3) http /submit => printf("%s's Top %d Tips for %s", celebrity, num, Something_Everyone_Wants)
Nothing new under the sun..
Top 3 on news.yc:

1) Non-Advertising Business Models for Your Startup

2) Picasso’s Top 7 Tips for Creating an Exciting Life

3) I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome

This sucks.
Slow news week. ;-)
Big whiteboard also does wonders for holding mental state.

In the office we've got some great big windows running down one wall that we use as scratchspace with special markers. Works a treat.
Guilt Culture vs Shame Culture and free markets
101 Resources For Learning, Developing And Experiencing Silverlight
web 2.0, web 3.0
"apologies to nickb"

You mean PG, of course. NickB's just his sock puppet.

;-)
Ie, give people what they want in an easily digested form.
Custom written essays
Isn't that a misquote of Einstein? I think Einstein was just using figurative speak, not expressing a faith in god, when he said stuff like that ("god doesn't roll dice")?
The fact that I like those people and think they shouldn't be written off doesn't mean I think they're right about protecting dying sectors of the economy at the expense of strangling growth. And yes, I believe strongly in free trade and love to see the growth in standard of living in (parts of) India and China.

I do, however, support free-market-compatible ways of softening the blow such as job retraining programs and enterprise zones for the hardest-hit areas. We can't stop the clock for people, but we can try and help those people get back on their feet when they get knocked over.
That's a great idea! I could do that -- extensive notes & summaries for sure, and it's possible I could beg or borrow a camera. Not sure if they allow filming or how the sound would be, but it's worth a try. Good call.