skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to look at the special interest groups as the problem of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. In the case of the off-shore drilling, the minority has much more to gain individually than the majority has to lose individually, so it's worth the minority's time, money and effort to advocate fiercely, while resisting would expend more effort than the result justifies.

So, if we want to dis-empower special interests, we need to empower the general people, specifically by affecting this equation: by decreasing the cost of advocacy, and/or increasing the expected benefit of advocacy.

You seem to be attempting to increase the benefits by tying nations to group benefits, and decreasing the cost by redefining advocacy as joining a 'nation.' The challenge here is that for the advocacy to influence the existing system, it needs to result in election results as well, and I don't see that connection quite so clearly. Could you elaborate?

I do think there's something here - with a little help on the advocacy cost/benefit side, voter power could definitely put a damper on special interests in general. That's the thrust of my own effort in this area, focused on the voter side: http://votereports.org/

P.S. Great to see Duverger's law mentioned
Shouldn't that read "Intuit has no idea how to compete without crying to the government."
Product changes more frequently than the team or culture.
This looks like it will be a very fascinating series. So far only the processor and memory have been emulated. I look forward to seeing the rest of the pieces come together.
What Amanda Sudimack Learned In First 8 Weeks Of Starting Wedobo
downvoters: Sorry if this question was offensive; I'm asking about if the "apple is like a startup" trend continues into developers being able to choose what kind of tools they want to work with. My complaining about my MBP isn't meant as a critique of apple, I'm just saying that if it was me I would probably choose a linux machine, not a mac.

I apologize for the off-topic question, but is anybody here a coder for apple (or has been in the past?)?

Are you allowed to use a non-apple computer if you work at apple?

I just got a macbook pro over the weekend (my first mac) and it seems like they've really gone out of their way to make this as difficult as possible to write code on. No page up/down keys...no dedicated delete key, no home/end keys...it seems like the UI is designed around the mouse. Alt-Tabbing seems really neutered in comparison to the gnome/kde/windows equivalents...and the solution that is offered is the expose' key (which works, but involves using the mouse).

Is there just a steep learning curve? Don't get me wrong, the machine is very pretty, but it seems like the type of work that geeks do was ignored when they designed this laptop (like having no dedicated right click key?)

Obviously they were talking about apple being run like a startup in that the teams are small...one of the things that I see advertised on some job postings for coding jobs is that there is a LOT of flexibility on what your workstation is...is it like this at apple?
How Children (and my dog) see the world
That reminds me of an old story about the Texas Rangers. In 1896, Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald was sent to prevent an illegal prizefight in Dallas. Upon his arrival, the mayor of Dallas was confused why they only sent one Ranger, to which McDonald responded, "Ain't I enough? There's only one prize-fight!"

The story isn't true (there were several Texas Rangers on hand to prevent the prizefight) but I'm not surprised there's one, really talented guy working part time on the Remote app, as "there's only one app!".
Bean machine - the first generator of normal random variables
Coma, by Alex Garland. Choose a day when you can read it in one sitting.
Seems like lock in here, in that you can't take your video elsewhere or send it to non-YC companies.

If you've spent the time perfecting an intro video, why wouldn't you want to use that for other (non-YC) companies.
The Five W's of UX - 52 Weeks of UX
Tracing Oil Reserves to Their Tiny Origins
However, if they successfully commercialize sans patents - it'll be a good case against patents being needed to monetize. Finding markets, production advantages and expertise is still a bigger part of the equation than King George fencing off your market.
Photos are probably frowned on to discourage racism, ageism and the good old fashioned "we'll only invite the pretty ones in for interview". It's also common practice to remove date of birth from CVs.

It's more a case of being considered inappropriate than legal barriers...a friend of mine recruiting abroad found the idea of attached photos nearly as amusing as the adjacent salary demands.

I think that the video thing will suffer more from being considered a bit odd or time consuming compared with skimming through text, especially for large non-creative employers looking to fill a quota. On the other hand, webcam interviews could start to replace the first-stage phone interview.
I would agree with the general point, but if we're talking about end-user features, even Apple admits 10.6 was under-the-hood, so we haven't seen any UI enhancements since 2007 (10.5's release).
A System for Connecting Brains to the Outside World
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

Also, in Exposé it's possible to tab between applications and use the arrow keys to select windows.

As for right click: on an Apple trackpad, two finger click works much better for me than right click (either tap with two fingers or click with the thumb while two other fingers are on the trackpad) ever did on a windows laptop. YMMV.

FWIW, I also prefer the Mac ⌘⇥ (command-tab) behavior. You can drag stuff in and out of command-tab, you can hide or quit applications from it (Q and H keys), you can use either keyboard or mouse (or scroll wheel) to select apps, etc.

I think you’re mostly just unfamiliar with it... which is perfectly natural, but you might try phrasing your question in a less aggressive manner.
This is somewhat of a silly move for Intuit - the free programs that California aren't something that I, as a California resident, am going to trust, namely because I don't feel that I can get support for it like how I can from Intuit and that I don't think I can hold the state accountable like how I can Intuit in case of a screw-up.

I suspect that there are going to be a lot of long-time TurboTax users like me who feel the same way.
There are chords you can use to replicate some of those functions in any Mac OS X text input field--command-up or command-down is top or bottom of block, command-left or command-right is left or right of line.

Personally I just use vim--using the normal letter keys for navigation and jumping to insert mode is easier to me than chording or reaching over to the far reaches of the keyboard. If you're not vim-inclined, I'd use the Mac OS X chords.
I love the look of the site! And kudos for using Haskell + Raphaeljs.
It's a great example use-case for data mining Twitter. There are so many interesting data-mining mashup possibilities on Twitter that I've been disappointed by the lack of creative imagination shown in the various Twitter-based web apps aggregating and interpreting trends via Twitter.

However, I do wonder if it would be easy to spam Twitter and thereby ruin its usefulness for real-time data mining. If Twitter can be used to accurately track trends, as soon as everyone knows trends are being created based on Twitter, then they can manipulate it, similar to pump-and-dump spam schemes we've seen on various financial news boards, like Yahoo, Motley Fool etc.
There are two versions of the YCommonApp: one with video, and one without. You can apply using whichever you choose.

That said, we think the one with video is much more powerful. None of the YC companies are looking for slick presentations, just good hackers, so the videos should be pretty informal and conversational.
ah, thanks.
1. The Black Swan

2. Fooled by Randomness

3. The unbearable lighness of being

4. Ahead of the Curve (Its about a student's experience at HBS)
Apparently mileages vary, my signup took only a week to get approved. I think it depends on the idea you submit.
Spend some time learning what you got there.
Hmm... Thank you. Honestly though, I was just generally curious about if apple devs are allowed to use non-apple computers.
LSE went down last year if that helps for (2):

http://blogs.computerworld.com/14876/london_stock_exchange_d...
The New Games People Play: How Game Mechanics Have Changed In The Age Of Social
If you haven't, read Ender's Game. It's phenomenally well written science fiction.

If you have read it a long time ago, re-read it!
Oddly, Debian has about the same release cycle (once per 12-18 months), and ends up being the butt of lots of jokes about how they rarely ever release anything.
The sad thing about task killers is how many "normal" people will end up using them because some salesperson for carrier X has told them to do so.

Go to a Verizon store and look at their Android phones, I bet most of them have a task killer running.
I recently bought, read, and took detailed notes on what, on Amazon at least, appears to be the most respected book about getting a PhD and the reality of how hard it is: http://peterc.org/pedia/getting-what-you-came-for/ .. My notes will only inspire, it's a book well worth buying.
I have to admit, TheKnot has an enormous amount of resources, tips, and articles. They are probably the biggest name in the industry, while Marrily is a one-man product. Marrily probably won't have that much wedding resources as TheKnot does, but I'll add more and more resources to the site until it truly become a good stop for people to plan their weddings.

During the development process, I got an advice from Roy Rodenstein (one of the guys from AngelHackers) to do further market researchs. This advice was probably one of the best ones that I've got. I put up a survey (http://marrily.com/survey) and ran a couple campaigns on Facebook (total cost: $200). I got about 20+ responses, and most of them either used or heard of TheKnot.com. The responses were about 50% hated it, 30% said "it was decent", and 20% said "Loved it". I probably need to come back to the survey for more accurate numbers, but basically the survey confirmed my thought that TheKnot is a bit over-crowded, and sold-out. Marrily is built to be user-centric and keep things as simple as possible.

In terms of features, the biggest difference between Marrily and TheKnot is probably the contact/guests management, and the seating arrangement (the rest is probably pretty standard which you can find similar features at a lot of other productivity applications). Personally I'm truly proud of the Seating Arrangement feature that I built for Marrily.

Basically I will respect my users, and I'll do what's best for them, instead of selling out and bombarding them with ads and resources that users won't need. Users will probably use Marrily as their main planning tool, and TheKnots and other sites to be other sources of inspirations. Wedding industry is a big pie, and I think Marrily will co-exist nicely with other sites out there.
Justin.tv was also subpoenaed, but hadn't gotten a comment back to NewTeeVee when that post was published. I'm curious as well.
To be honest, I thought the remote app was great for about 5 minutes. Then it suddenly couldn't connect to my library until I went back and re set the code. It functions exactly as if one guy wrote it and never updated it.
I've read through this list a couple of times. Always great stuff.

In case anyone wants all of these links in one pdf: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5081628/Y%20Combinator_%20Startup%20...
Jacob Appelbaum, Wikileaks Volunteer, Detained At U.S. Border For Three Hours
This example REALLY illustrates the differences. Very nice.
This post has to be taken in context of everything else that Piaw has been saying for a while: Google is an excellent place to work. It may not be as nimble as it used to be, but it is still better than most other big companies and most other startups as well. Sure, it is not _the_ best place, but it is right there at the top.

Once you keep that as the background for the article, then you realize that the article is meant for Nooglers interested in a certain career path. It is not for everyone, but it is certainly the most common expected path for the majority of their engineers.

It is odd to see HN jumping to conclusion reading one article without any background. I think thats part of the reason why bloggers stop blogging because whatever they say is taken to mean something else.
True, the BarCamps tend to be more technical where the StartupCamps are more business-oriented. Attendance varies but I've noticed that the turnout is much better lately than it was when I started attending them in 2007.
Chromium Blog: Google Chrome in a Coal Mine
But you don't find the concept of interviews disgusting, presumably because it is already a familiar one. Which suggests that your real problem with this technology is its novelty.

No, I'm not one of "those people" :-) My initial reaction was negative because filming yourself a hundred times is a torture. I failed to see what's in it for folks who are looking for jobs and are pretty miserable already.

Your argument is also flawed because you are comparing video clips to interviews like they're going to replace them which they won't.

One can make an argument that this approach will eliminate the need to apply to hundreds of jobs. That would be great, but how? The ratio of resumes/replies is determined not by technology but by applicants/position ratio.

I've exchanged a few emails with Nicolas and he feels confident that the product will make life easier for candidates as well, I really want him to be right/succeed. At least YC companies are using it right: they actually save time for an applicant.
A paragraph very similar to this one occurs in the article.
Good call! I just bought it at https://libyanspider.com for $75/year.
you don't need to be introverted to find the idea of trying to convey your personality to an unknown, unseen interviewer a little awkward.
As a user I'll tell you what:

The knot is more like a bride magazine, like a catalog, I get lost in too much advertisement.

Marrily is about getting things done, everything I need to do (information related) in one place. I hope he keeps it that way.

In short, to get things done I'll use Marrily, to shop I'll use the knot.
Lots of failures, a few epic.

No regrets.
See also this: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3211
You can configure some area on trackpad, clicking ther will register as right click (bottom right corner, for example).
The first 3/4 of this article is fucking terrifying.
Check out US patent 3,223,785. It's a patent on a phone switch from 1960, including both circuit diagrams and program listing.
Maybe I'm not good at the context-switching between parsing things as operators versus as English, but I find them confusing in Perl except in some very simple idiomatic cases, where they're fine because I read them as boilerplate. The common do_thing or die "error" idiom is perfectly readable, but anything more complex and I start explicitly reasoning about short-circuit semantics.

It's possible I have that reaction due to the strong negative consensus about using short-circuiting as control flow in C being hammered into my head at an early age, though.
For a training set of 3000?
Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them. They put together large teams to build products. And large teams require managers.

I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. They have some good products. Apple being successful doesn't necessarily translate to Microsoft sucking. They are both damn good companies.
Here's a video of the ball drop test mentioned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTX79QU-1-U

Compared to regular glass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=forSXEJIM3E
I think after you get fuck you money, your goal should be to create a lifestyle business. Something that can more or less run on autopilot and generate money for you to live on.

If you are a web guy, you can create some software product(or pay someone to build one for you). Then charge $50 a month...and you only need to make 6 sales a day(via adwords) to make $100K/yr.

If you are not...you can buy a franchise...i.e. McDonalds franchises make something like 1-2 million a year. And you as an owner don't need to do anything...just hire a good manager...and it'll more or less run on autopilot(from your perspective)
Data Mining is a new weapon in the fight against Medicaid fraud
Out of curiosity as much as anything else since you've quite possibly done the research, how much of that 90% of communication is reciprocal (body language towards interviewer, instinctive reaction to questions)?
Verbed
From the bit of Bioinformatics work I did in college, that actually seemed a problem rather than a boon. Genes are not ascii sequences, and Perl is not really made to manipulate them.

Perl is however an excellent scripting language, and though it's ugly, it's just as easy as Python to pick up and use. Thus its danger.
Haskell's motto is "Avoid success at all costs!"

It succeeded.

I appreciate the fact that Haskell's designers don't look down on "average" programmers like the Java designers did but I think it's sad that they don't look at all.
What do you think about "lignito"?

Yeah, lignito.com is mine. We are very "discrete", nobody knows we exists.
If you can make something that makes you $100k/yr why wait until you have already made your fuck you money?
Rest assured, lots of non-Apple users have plenty to say about Apple products & services. You learn to smirk and click on.
Am I the only person who hates that animation? This is about the only reason why I use Stanza, no animation to waste my time with.
Watching UFC over streaming sucks big time, but I've done it as paying ~$50 when its just me watching is just too much.

I wonder what kinda revenues they'd make if they did their own low quality streaming for say $10 - this way, if you have friends over, you'll opt for the $50 HD version, but for a single person, $10 is reasonable.

I'd bet there's a huge segment of the market they are missing out on.
Just added Disqus and Opzi to the list.
This is actually a terrific idea... for applicants who are good on camera.

I instantly get deer-in-headlightsy and stiff when the camera starts rolling, so a potential employer wouldn't get an accurate read on me.
This article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and mgmt and their associated marketing, sales, etc. organizations.

The .NET GC was roughly 1 person (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more). Most of the base class libraries were one person. Even larger things, like the text editor, were usually a senior person and one or two very junior ones. And this is software that has to run on a not-at-all-fixed set of hardware platforms :-)

In my time there, I never saw or heard anyone "think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them." Uniformly, the decisions made to get things shipped were to either cut the features that were the combination of the furthest behind and least value to the market or to pull over extremely senior talent that had already gotten their parts shipped.

Of course, it was a big company, so YMMV. Can't speak for much more than dev tools, office, and windows.
His premise seems flawed to me. He says people should forget about F@#$ You Money because you can't depend on it to grow in this bad economy. That's reasonable.

But then he suggests you aim for “f@#$ you influence and credibility” because it "allows you to charge $30k+ for a 1 hour speaking engagement". But I know people who used to make $10k per speaking engagement and they aren't getting much work lately. In my experience the first thing people cut in a bad economy are the expensive speakers and while influence can probably get you a magazine column I wouldn't expect that to pay much at all.

So if the problem was finding a stable income in a bad economy his solution really didn't solve it.
Not devs but it is rumored that deep in the inner sanctums of the product engineering/design labs there are PC workstations running 3D/CAD/CAM/CAE software.
Here are some nonfiction books that I've enjoyed.

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life - Gilovich - a good book on the inability of the human mind to accept things as random.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High - Patterson, et all - fluffy but nice short and solid book for better skills at listening and responding in conversation

Full Throttle: The Life & Fast Times of Racing Legend Curtis Turner - Edlestein - Curtis Turner was an influential figure in the development of what became NASCAR. I enjoyed the book for his character and as insight into a pass time that I had not really understood.

Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day - Reinhart - His latest book on quality home baking. This is definitely a do along with the book kind of read, but I found it to be easy to follow, appealing to detail, and satisfying in producing delicious bread.

Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them - Haigh - If you're of age, this is an interesting background in cocktails and their evolution in America.

I forget whether it was on HN or not, but I've been enjoying this list of great magazine articles http://www.kk.org/cooltools/the-best-magazi.php .
If you are not fucking terrified at the moment you're not paying attention.
what's the moral of this story? you most likely, even if you make a good amount of money, will not escape the anxiety associated with money. or, escaping the anxiety associated with money is not accomplished by making money. the idea of fuck you money is for kids. being able to say fuck you to anyone is more about what you've got on the inside than what you've got on the outside.
Ok so now we're being nostalgic about fucking apartheid?

Gimme a break. I'm sooo sorry you had to start treating black people like human beings. I know it's such a drag.

At least we know what's really bugging you.
10.6 was the setup that is needed for the future. All the under-the-hood stuff is going to make a huge difference once developers focus on it and start ignoring <= 10.5.
Australian Patent Office Refines Test for Patentability of Business Methods
I think the Feynman book is great! He is a great storyteller and humble to boot.
A very easy solution to this: Go live in a cheaper country. Go now, before the heavily debted countries lock down money transfers (In which case, buy gold/silver)
He's saying you should forgt about a few million and go for a few billion.
No, I'm talking about a clear-cut fact.

All the standard-issue corruption aside, the current Republican party has made it their official policy to gum up congress completely, hoping that come election-time, they can point to a lack of progress and regain control of the House. It's clear as day. It might even be a good move, from a game theory perspective. Not so much from a "honor the oath you swore when you took office" perspective.
$5M is definitely not retirement money if you're only 30 years old. I figured at that age you'd need about $15M, and even at that you'd need to make sure you invest it properly to at least keep up with inflation.

I've always thought that FYM and retirement money are two different concepts. If I had FYM, I can quit my job. I would still be looking for what's next, but I can take my time. (Usual disclaimers apply re: deadlines)
The idea is scary at first. But really makes sense once you think about it. I agree, it makes the screening process more human.

I know the job market is not good right now for job seekers to be chosers, but if I have to apply with a video, I would feel more up to it if I see the hiring team's or manager's video too.