skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They've been paid obscenely well in stock options. Even if the Google stock price falls to its initial US$85 per share, at least 2200 Googlers are going to get US$10 million or more in vested stock options this summer ( http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-... ).
Aspect Oriented Programming With JavaScript
I kinda want to move to iceland after reading that. I've always seen pictures and wanted to visit, but It'd be fun to go and do research there or something.
This criticism -- that genius is being wasted on "soul numbing" ad work -- strikes me as an inaccurate cheap shot.

First, because most of the brain power at Google isn't devoted to the ad systems, but to the services that attract an audience. Don't you think their most "hyper-intelligent people" are engaged in the constant and noble battle to continue improving search, for an ever-changing internet and against the efforts of many unscrupulous manipulators?

Second, because even creating better ad systems is a valuable and intellectually challenging activity. Directly, because matching people to info about things they may want is crucial to our economy, and online systems can do it better than ever before. Indirectly, because ad revenues make so much of the rest of the internet possible. Ad work is no more "soul numbing" than any other commercial work to "make something people want".
Microsoft is acting like a desperate & spurned lover, Yahoo like the 30+ year old former HS cheerleader who thinks she still has what the boys want.
No. Islandic is closest to old norse, proto-north-germanic. Anyone from Scandinavia can pick it up relatively easily. Other Germanic languages such as English are not so far removed either.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't know if I could get serious work done at that Zurich office. I think it would feel more like working at FAO Schwartz.
Watch out boys, that article can make your genitalia shrivel up and fall off! Wham!

(Seriously, what the hell?)
Outside the bubble of SV/Google, some of us accept free coffee (that we have to make ourselves) in the morning as a perk
Diggin' this project so far.. makes it convenient to catch up on what's happening 'now' on the web..
I stopped hitting slashrot and digg simply because the noise level was unsquelchable. SO off I have been in the land of Greader, my own little feeds set up with some slight input from googles friends linkages...but this...this is cool

Being able to add your own feeds, thats great. I am so sick to death of reading echos of echos of the same hand full of places digg,redit,slash,etc etc pick from. Its threadbare folks. Now i can agg in places like Greylodge and Ovo..whoot.

When I do want to see what the masses are trending for the tools that I see here look to be right on the mark to get the gist and gestalt. Simple and useful.

I look forward to seeing this site build up some more tools and flexibility to bring more diversity , controllable by the user, into the feed agging. One of the problems with how other feed agg sites work is they become so damn insular and inbreed over time. My hope is this one will allow that not to happen.
based on continuing research..

i think i'm looking towards research in the area of web data mining/xgmml applications... some of the articles i've looked at today, appear to have application to what i'm considering.

if anyone has additional thoughts regarding this area, let me know!!

thanks

-bruce
caliventures@yahoo.com
Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16419
For a critical look at the OLPC security model as an avenue for surveillance, this paper is interesting:

"Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model"

by Meredith L. Patterson, Len Sassaman, David Chaum

http://www.usenix.org/event/upsec08/tech/full_papers/patters...
I don't know about you, but I strongly suspect Iceland needs a good stiff dose of diversity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland#Demographics

It's all just a bunch of what Barack Obama would call "typical white people". There are 743 Filipinos! Can you imagine that being the largest "diverse" subset of a population in any other country? I sure can't. Perhaps the United Nations should send a commission on human rights to see what kind of discriminatory migration policies Iceland has enacted.
The article says nothing of the sort. It says that TV is a waste of time since you're not making anything new or different. The same would go for watching baseball games, going to concerts, sitting in traffic, eating at a sit-down restaurant, etc.
There are 2 comments praising the site you link to, both from user names created at the exact same time as your own.

Coincidence?
Aren't you, then, the Poster Child for this article?
The Impossible Dream: Asimo robot conducts Detroit Symphony Orchestra [Video]
Look at the presentation from SS08. There was some good advice n legal issues.
1.

Yes, I was at Startup School. More enthusiastic than is "typical" of whom? Startup people in general, or of the whole population?

Events for people starting startups are full of optimistic and enthusiastic people. I try to go to about one per month. Last month it was Startup Camp, this month it was Stirr Deal Hacks, and I pretty much always attend YC events because they're among the best of the lot--though I got overwhelmed and exhausted this year with the StartupSchool events (I'm an introvert and crowds make me tired) and ended up skipping the after-party.

Anyway, I go just to keep perspective: we're not alone, we're not astonishingly brilliant and unique, and we're not crazy. By this, I mean it keeps things in perspective from both sides of the coin, by being both a reminder that we aren't the only people who could do what we are doing so we have to move fast and effectively, and also being a generally fun and validating atmosphere.

2.

Of course. You asked about startups, so I told you about startups. Rejection happens in every aspect of life. From cliques in school, to college applications, to getting your first job, to raising money for a startup, to getting a date with the pretty girl that works at the book store, etc. The difference might be that when you're the messiah and you're going to change the world, and someone tells you you're not and you can't, it's harder to take. I'm not sure why some people take rejection by investors so hard (maybe harder than other forms of rejection), but they do. As I mentioned I'm a "robot/cold fish", and so I don't take it personally, but many startup founders do.

And, of course, some of the best businesses have been rejected dozens of times by investors. One rejection per idea is bad enough...dozens probably starts to wear you down. I imagine authors have the same problem before they reach a certain level of success, since one story may be rejected by dozens of people. At least in the rest of life, each rejection is independent: The girl at the book store says "no", but that's the only "no" you'll ever hear for that one idea (the idea being "get a date with the cute girl at the book store", and honestly, it's not a very big idea, anyway...she's cute, so many others have probably had the same idea). Likewise for a job. You want to work at Google, they say "no", OK, you move on. With a startup, you have a lot more invested in the idea--often months or years of your life. Again, like a writer with a story that she can't get published.
This is cool, though I worry that people will conclude (as the Icelandic president has) that Iceland has "blended the best of Europe and the United States here, the Nordic welfare system with the American entrepreneurial spirit".

There are a lot of policies that work well with an ethnically homogeneous society of 313,000 people but completely fail on a larger scale. This scaling problem is the perennial defect of socialism. (Well, one of them, anyway.) In contrast, free markets appear to scale indefinitely, naturally finding the right business unit sizes along the way. (For example, for gourmet restaurants, it's ~1 restaurant; for fast food restaurants, it's a national or global branded chain.)

I suspect that the natural business unit size for much of Iceland's 'Nordic welfare system' is approximately 313,000 ethnically homogeneous people.
Are you kidding? How many buffets have you been to with real, decently awesome sushi? Filet Mignon? It's a several leaps above Hometown Buffet in so many ways...
If any book results in me becoming a multi-millionaire, I'm thinking it'll be Ready, Fire Aim by Michael Masterson. Written by someone with waist-deep experience in multi million dollar revenue businesses and full of crazy amounts of advice. The focus of the book is marketing, although it most certainly crosses over into entrepreneurship a long way.

http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Fire-Aim-Million-Agora/dp/047018...

The reviews on that Amazon page should show how well it's regarded.

The thing about many "clever" marketing books, such as Seth Godin's (which ARE good), is that they don't help you clarify if what you're building is actually WORTH marketing. Ready, Fire, Aim looks at that side a lot more. You need to work out WHAT your product quite is before marketing it.
Nathan, I agreed with you. This is another reason why I go to aggregated sites, instead of individual. Otherwise, I would mind as well go directly to the company's website instead.
Good point. Socialism doesn't scale. This is more of an issue about the size and homogenity of the population than any ingenious public policy. Unfortunately, living in a homogenous country isn't terribly exciting or stimulating.
thanks for the kind words..

that's what it's all about.. and everyones definition of content differs, so we're taking a stab at solving that algorithmically.
I agree it's a bit of a cheap shot. I don't think it's inaccurate.

There is no doubt the ad system is valuable. There is no doubt that creating the advertising systems google uses would be an intellectual challenge. But people don't want to see ads. This work is mostly the work of deciding how to best trick people into being distracted by text they don't want to see in the first place.

The better the ad people do their jobs, the worse off most people are for it. This is the basis for the work being soul numbing.

Conversely, on what basis would working on google's ads be the kind of soul affirming work you look back happily on as you cough up blood while you're dying 50 years from now?

Then the googlers can look at all the stuff someone like Ludwig Mies or Steve Reich or Jonathan Ive comes out with. I am sure that google has a huge amount of talent that would be capable of creating at this level (the peak of human potential), and they don't produce much at this level.
I thought about the same thing. The University of Iceland apparently teaches its classes in Icelandic, but (from the website) the textbooks are mostly in English. Perhaps learning Icelandic and then doing a PhD might be a way to achieve that.
Of all the sites listed above, I think http://www.hotstartupjobs.com is probably the best in term of page layout - I see everything on one page.
How many links do you need to get PR 6 or higher?
I am looking to get my site higher PR. In 2 months, I was able to get YouYap.com PR 3 now I want to get PR 6 or higher. I need new strategy. Anyone have advice?
One-fifth of Americans have never used e-mail
Web Site Design: Paths Instead of Hierarchies
wow, excellent discussion on jobs at startups. I'm a reader of popurl.com for a while. HotStartupJobs.com is exactly that, which I find it to be very simple, yet super useful
"JSON stacks not only do that, but they do it better because the set of available data structures in JSON is constrained to a sensible subset"

To my knowledge, there is no "built-in" way to specify if a number should be parsed as an int or a float in JSON. The idea that one of JSON's strengths is it "is constrained to a sensible subset" is a naive view. Yes it is a strength if you are only using dynamic languages, which is valid given the nature of most of the projects talked about on YC. However, enterprise projects are usually loaded with formal specifications, UML diagrams, and usually use languages with static typing. A mixture perfect for SOAP.

"you don't end up having to replicate complex classes in multiple different languages"

SOAP and almost every SOAP stack have been designed to prevent this. Almost every SOAP stack has a tool with naming similar to wsdl2java, wsdl2perl, etc.,. Again, narrowly looking at SOAP without understanding the associated technologies, mostly WSDL and XSD, the technology as a whole cannot be effectively evaluated. I don't expect any of the Web 2.0 AJAX guys to understand the benefits of an implementation with such a formalized specification or broad scope. However, SOAP was created to fit the needs of large enterprises trying to interop with other large enterprises. It covers a huge scope and various edge cases. JSON covers a very narrow scope. The original post talked of SOAP as a dead technology. It isn't. Is it the best for AJAX style web services? Maybe not. Don't simply disregard it as a viable solution in all cases though.

Yes, people use the transport layer agnostic aspect of SOAP. The first SOAP service I implemented used SMTP. It worked very well for sending messages to offline clients. SMTP provided queuing and storage of messages until a client came online and requested it.
Ivan Krstić's point isn't that Windows is bad at all, in fact, he is in favor of it. His point is that the original educational mission of the project has already mostly failed. Those people saying "why not build $100 of water infrastructure per child?" were right.
Lucky for you, the developer of Clicky actually reads this web site. (Yeah, that'd be me).

#1 and #2 (API and real time) we have been doing at Clicky for a LOOOOOOOONG time. I still am in awe that Google hasn't released an API - that's just insane.
Clicky has an API and real time + historical data - http://getclicky.com
"It's a fact" makes it sound like some actual facts supporting the title would be in the article. Alas, no.

Noticing this was from sfgate.com, I suspected this was a Mark Morford piece even before clicking through. Morford is such a perfect exemplar of bien-pensant San Francisco thought, and of what passes for wit among the orthodox politically correct, that I sometimes wonder if he's real. He's like a character from 'Stuff White People Like' brought to life.

It's a fact: The number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.[1]

[1] http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/28-not-...
> Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine, classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing

The above suggests that schools were ruined by the shift to "let's see if we're getting what we're paying for". While there may have been a time when schools were considerably better than they are today, they weren't significantly better right before the recent testing push. The testing push was a reaction to crappy schools, not the cause.

Note that the charter school movement makes it possible for folks to have "old style" schools for many definitions of "old" Feel free to demonstrate the superiority of your approach.
That's EXACTLY what we do at Clicky - http://getclicky.com

We support the option to host the javascript yourself, but before you can do that, you must check a box that says "I am hosting it myself". This flags that user/site in our database, so whenever we release updates to the javascript, we can automatically notify all of the users that there is a new version available.

We make a lot of minor modifications to the code but usually only announce updates when there are new features in it, or if certain features of the old tracking code may no longer work for some reason (this has never happened so far but I can't guarantee it will always be that way)

PS: I'm the Clicky developer, so that's why I know all this.
PR is meaningless except as a personal game or if you want to sell PR passing links back to other people in violation of Google recommendations. What really matters is a secret number that Google never discusses and that is where the art of SEO comes into play.

Anyways, you need PR6 or higher links to get to PR6. And it's a logarithmic scale so each step is much harder than the ones before.

This also is not really a forum to discuss SEO beyond basic SEO best practices, use http://forums.digitalpoint.com.
Terrorism as a Tax
Malthus is coming back after his 250 year vacation.

http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=...
I think what you want is an SEO forum.
I recently joined "Of The Now" and so far I like it. I like that I can sort through all of the titles in one spot rather than having to go to several different sites. I also like that I am basically building my own feed of news that I am interested in rather than what other people think I might be interested in. I look forward to seeing how this site developes.
"Paternity leave is the thing that made the difference for women's equality in this country."

That's surprising, and intriguing. I've never thought of that, but it's quite plausible. I wonder if it's right...
We're not talking about survival food, we're talking about your demand for subsidized tomato orgasms.

> Add to that the fact that the food produced by free market forces is often of dubious quality and nutritional value and it becomes clear, to me, that maybe farm subsidies are the lesser of two evils.

Wrong. Your complaint is that you can't get tomatos that you like for the price that you'd like to pay. That's not a free market problem, that's you being cheap.

BTW - What is it with folks and tomatos anyway? The ones from my garden reduced some folks to gibbering puddles, but I quit growing them because I didn't see the point.

However, if someone wanted to pay me enough, that would be different. Here's your chance to prove that you're willing to pay what it costs to get what you want.

BTW - Subsidies don't make anything cheaper. They merely change who is paying for it. They move the cost from the consumer to some poor sap who didn't have the political pull to avoid having his pocket picked. Remind me how demanding subsidies for your tomato orgasms makes you a friend of the oppressed.
For a contrarian -- but reasoned -- argument, see Steven Johnson's suggestion that TV, especially in its growing complexity compared to past decades, is a brain-booster:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html?pagewan...

As much as we may suspect TV erodes patience, initiative, focus, and a deep understanding of things, there's still the 'Flynn effect', the not-completely-understood rise in normalized IQs for as long as there's been regular testing. The ever-growing variety and complexity of 'pop' entertainment, from early radio and movies through to TV and the internet, might be a factor.
I visited Iceland last month on business for about a week.

Iceland seems great statistically because there is no national underclass. Most Icelanders would be considered "middle class" today in the United States: some college, literate, aspiring to home ownership, and employed in services.

In every other country, the national statistics are skewed by some underemployed, undereducated, and often foreign "labor class" (or worse, welfare class). There is no "ghetto" in Iceland (though strangely, graffiti is everywhere). Why?

Because every modern nation was at one time "industrial," and industrial countries must import/create/preserve a labor class to work factories and plantations. But Iceland went from "frozen rock" to "modern service economy" in about 70 years.

I assure you that it's not a magical fairyland where everyone is happy. It's more like an American suburb of 250,000 (maybe in WA) where everyone is white and employed in an office... and a glacier/volcano/wind storm has trimmed away the unpleasant urban and rural elements and plunged them into the Arctic ocean.

Icelanders have the same hopes and strifes one would expect in such a suburb.
Like the simple design. The healthcare link isn't too solid at the mo.

http://news.80concepts.com/public/category/science/healthcar...

Why is it that I can't read comments without logging in?
This is why we need Search.YC. So much good, old information on the site falls into oblivion after two or three days.

[searchyc.com by chengmi and alaskamiller is a great tool]
"The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy"

I've always thought most unhappy people live in China, India, Pakistan and such...

The statement above shows that happiness is mostly depending on culture. I personally found Russian culture and way of perceiving the world too depressive.

You wont be happy if you just move to Iceland. Learning Icelander's style of world perceiving is necessary. Could you?
Shameless self-plug: www.viddyou.com - We have a lot of features like the best consumer HD (1080p and 720p), fast uploads + transcodes, you can view all your videos on your mobile device, a special interface just for the iphone, you can take your videos into Facebook, upload your videos or record directly with a webcam. If you have any questions, please drop me an email: aaronw@viddyou.com :]
Ries and Trout are excellent. I've read several of their books, and they all basically amount to the same ideas presented in Positioning, but they include a lot of great anecdotes that make things concrete--sometimes it's hard to see the right positioning for your products, so it can help to hear stories of how they found the right positioning for various products.
Peter Molyneux: My Next Game a 'Significant Scientific Achievement'
It must just be me, but if I had a job at Google I wouldn't leave it to go work at a place like Facebook. All they have going for them is mass adoption which doesn't mean much without a worthwhile monetization strategy which they've yet to find.

Work for a high-flying tech company with more perks than anybody, 20% of my time to work on whatever I want and a proven method for generating massive income or jump ship to work at the "hottest thing" of the moment where they need to take millions of funding each year just to keep the lights on and expansion moving along... seems a pretty easy decision to me.

Have we really gotten to the point where working at Google is considered "soul numbing work?" Some people would be wise to gain some perspective.
Also, Google's engineering and hiring and payment policies are frustratingly biased towards C++ developers. I know several top-notch web developers who have turned down google offers because they'd be making less than other companies would pay them, and many of those startups offer options as well.

When you find a top-notch web developer, telling them they're not worth as much as a C++ developer (of any ability) is just crazy. They're a rare and hotly contested breed in the valley.
It's like a race where one guy is ahead and the number two and three stop and have a fistfight, each thinking they'll win the race if they knock out the other.

Interesting analogy. Are there any cases of #2 and #3 in an industry merging and taking over from the #1?

I can't think of any offhand.
Sounds a lot like Seattle or Portland.