skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His numbers are pretty specific, making me think he is drawing on specific studies which naturally he doesn't cite in a short interview. (Likely the citations are in the book... which doesn't help us.)

But I'm not very satisfied by those statistics. I looked up one school, Stony Brook University (in NCAA Division I-AA, whatever that is), and looked at its expenses: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e6974696...

I see listed salaries, recruiting costs, financial aid costs, and operating costs, which yields a net profit of ~$700,000.

I don't see any entries for the $22,000,000 stadium the football team uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium), nor operating costs for the stadium. 22m wipes out an awful lot of 700k years.

And that's the first off-the-books cost that occurs to me, a college sports ignoramus, to look for. So now I know that those statistics are at least incomplete for the purposes of examining the overall picture; but can I even trust the statistics provided? I suspect that further investigation would reveal many more expenses and costs, and few revenues.
Cool, hopefully will make it.

(btw, did anyone else from San Diego attend the YC 'Work at a Startup'? I went: http://clemesha.org/blog/2010/jun/22/my-experience-at-ycombi... and would love to talk more about experiences, etc. It was a very cool event.)
And that's why the GPL (and its derivatives/workalikes) is important - because it prevents any company or individual from taking away the freedoms of the users downstream.
I thought his comment was utterly stupid. I thought twice or more wethere he was joking or being for real. No one else has agreed with him. He hardly has offered any good follow up arguments and in the end he even seems to soften down his approach.

None of that was achieved by calling him a racist or anything else. He has a belief in some idea, that "dictatorships" are bad and we should do all we can to "liberate" the people of such dictatorships. That is his right.

Ideals are only half the story though. Pragmatism trumps most often. But there is no reason to insult the man rather than his thinking.

This comment I replied to has a fair point though. Shame it was tainted by the previous ones.
Most of what is sublime about San Francisco can't move.

But you're right. People in San Francisco don't seem to value public order enough to take the actions required to establish it.
it's a joke because it's almost true.
From the article:

He found a partner, and together they began trading on their own. The programmer now pockets more than half of any profits his software generates. The programmer says he's making about the same money he did at the job he left. But at his old job he'd topped out in pay while now he says the sky's the limit
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It's one of the more successful ones but for all the hype I haven't signed up and neither has anybody that I know outside of HN. Now I'm probably not the target audience anyway so that's no surprise, but I really can't see something like dropbox being the next google.

They have a business model that requires payment for anything but the most trivial uses (which is great, they'll be profitable, but it is a definite brake on growth). Hard to do that soft of thing without charging for it, and as soon as the price goes over $0 the market is much smaller.

It's a much bigger decision to pay at all than it is to pay $10 or $20.
New Scalien offices and ScalienDB announcement
The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to take away the freedoms of your downstream users.

Once GPL'ed, any derivative must also preserve the freedoms of its users. This doesn't happen with MIT/BSD and that's one of the reasons there is a vibrant ecosystem around the Linux kernel and the GNU userland and nothing comparable around *BSDs.
Um, citations? I don't think Bing Maps were built on Multimap in any way, and I don't remember Multimap having aerial images before Google. I could be wrong, though. AFAIK, the only map that had aerial data before Google maps (and the only draggable tiled map before Google maps) was map.search.ch, built by Endoxon which was later bought by Google.
These discussions are really tiring. First it was "Canonical is not contributing to the kernel", now it's "Canonical is not contributing to GNOME", ... Isn't the point of free software that people can take the code and build whatever they want to build on top of it? The consequence: people can use the code it without owing you anything. Apart from the strictly legal side, there is of course the question of moral behaviour, but even there I don't see the point of the complainers, since

* AFAIK, canonical never claimed to be the driving force behind GNOME development.

* Even if they could be doing more for the upstream development, what is the net harm that canonical is doing to linux? What is keeping people who don't like ubuntu from ignoring it, and going on with their business the way they did back when ubuntu didn't exist?

Constructive criticism is ok, but the belligerent tone of the accusations gives the impression that this is ultimately about hurt egos.
Right, but so is any community change "for the better". The job is to convince people it's in their self-interest.

Meanwhile, only the tiny population of people who are programmers really even have a basic understanding of what Stallman's freedom is all about, and even they do not value it very high.

On a micro level I don't care about software freedom that much, because mostly I just want to get something done, and if 0.5% of my yearly income is going to commercial software that I find useful and have no desire to modify, then the freedom issues just don't even enter my conscience.

However on a macro level Stallman's slippery slope argument is correct. If the balance of software shifts to proprietary, then I feel the goodness of software in general is greatly reduced. If GNU/Linux didn't exist for instance, the technological landscape would be a shadow of what it is today.

But I digress... for free software to ever gain any mindshare in the non-developer community would require a stroke of marketing genius the likes of which I've never seen. It's just not reasonable to rank freedom with such a high priority for the average person who has no ability or desire to modify any software. There might be a redistribution angle, but again, it would have to be sheer marketing brilliance to convince anyone of that.
>but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch
your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we
have developed.

This is a terrible way to sell. You're going to have a hard time convincing people that the only way to be "morally acceptable" (in the eyes of someone they don't even know, no less) is to take a step back in most of your computing experience. He would have had an easier time getting fat kids to eat their spinach.
Interests - Natz' Blog (:
Apple Fanboy Turned Armchair Videogame Analyst Predicts Doom for 3DS
The InfoQ panel gives a great overview. Thanks.
I've never had any issue using my iPhone in sunlight. Granted, I live in London, where bright sunlight is like a rare delicacy, even in the summer (glances out the window... yeah..), but still, the point remains - I have never had any trouble reading my iPhone even with direct sunlight on it.
There is a fine line between building a maintainable architecture and over-engineering. I think experience of being at both ends of the spectrum can help you "feel" the right level of generalization.

At first your code is an unmaintainable cesspool of special cases, then you educate yourself "proper" design and compulsively try to make your code as uniform as possible and you end up with a cesspool of design patterns. After being on both sides a few times, you should have a better idea of what's worth generalizing in a specific domain.
The banjo: A hacker's instrument
I did some consulting over the summer, and will do some in the future. Speaking generally, clients pay me quite well but customers pay me quite well while I sleep. I'm probably not going to talk consulting on HN too often -- it might sound like advertising.
Different kinds of photographers, analogous to different types of hackers
There will be a concerted effort to discredit wikileaks.

You can expect a lot more of these articles, where every Afghan civilian that gets murdered by the Taliban will be listed as possibly being killed because of ties with the US.

Informants that sell information to the army of an occupying country know the risks they're taking.

Scapegoating Assange (and I'm no friend of his) is just a cheap attempt at diverting attention from the fact that the main failure here is one of US army security.

The whistleblower could have uploaded these documents to the nearest torrent site with much the same effect. Don't blame the messenger.
When I hire, I want to see the hacker's github account =) Projects they work on, the community of hackers they're connected to, their insight to technology, that's all extremely important.

I'm less about the "code challenges" that some companies do, because that's usually just a lame useless task. I'm more about giving potential hires a real feature we want to make, or bug we want to fix, and see if they can do a quick rev 1 of it.
What a load of horse pucky. The only notable thing is the decline of sales of DS software, which could be attributed to the DS nearing it's end of life. In a market where physically distributed games continue to make money hand over fist, this kind of article is pure hyperbole. That digital distribution is the future seems self evident, but that doesn't mean that the current market is under immediate threat.

The article also fails to mention that Nintendo already have their own digital distribution. Admittedly under developed, but they obviously aware of the shift in the market.
There is a program called Stylizer (visual CSS editing, highly recommended) which inspired this. Their implementation required you to copy to the clipboard (via a Javascript onclick event on the last page of the purchase flow), but the software sniffed the key right out of the clipboard and upgraded itself automatically. This avoids pasting problems. (Useful factoid: many computer users cannot copy/paste, and many who can can only do it with the MS Word copy/paste buttons onscreen.)

I thought "Dang, that is great", implemented it, and then started looking for a way to extend it without requiring people to read the instructions for copying.
The iPhone is pretty much marketed and sold as a multi-purpose computing device. There is a huge market for installing software on it, there is a development environment etc. People know this when they buy it. It is very obviously a computer-phone.

When you buy a microwave, you are buying it to heat food. You are not expecting to be able to browse the web on it or play games. If you are, then you need your head examined or to invent this new product (if you are right that it's a reasonable/desirable expectation, there should be a market for it). I think the distinction is actually very very clear, continuum or not.

Once the microwave starts allowing for remote control and twittering its status, the line does become more blurred ;)
I think that we do overpay for this liquidity. Both in terms of economic rents extracted, and the wasted resources poured into the competition. I wonder if there might be a way to keep most of the liquidity but at a fraction of the cost
Awesome, I've yet to meet any of the Justin.tv guys in person.
Only if you use them as servers.
I think this says a lot about Google, from the intro:

"The first time I heard about Node.js I thought, What a crazy guy he's trying to put JavaScript on the server when everybody is trying to put Java on the client"

Personally, I stopped trying to put Java on client in the mid-90s.
It’s Hard To Tell If Voyurl Or Their Ads Are Creepier
Someone put together a pretty good google spreadsheet of YCombinator (and other early stage investment groups) startups at least:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1...

As you can see, this list gets ridiculously large. It's probably not that useful to see every single startup.
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Not all projects I mentioned are under GPL and some chose non-GPL license specifically to give more freedom than GPL and likes allow.
Becoming a billionaire almost assuredly requires some luck. However becoming rich not necessarily (depending on what you define as rich, of course). Managing to create one business that you sell for $20 million is much saner in theory and still can set you up for life.
But Open Source!=Free Software, as I'm sure RMS would point out if he was reading this.

Apple do contribute to open source software, but you certainly don't have freedom when using their products, which is what RMS is all about.
they don't relate the the core technologies (kernal & GNOME) being discussed.
Wait, so people who do A/B tests didn’t already do that? It drives me absolutely crazy when I don‘t have any measure to assess how likely or unlikely it is for some difference to be random.
There is a big problem with eye-controlled interfaces called "Midas touch".. It gets extremely tiring to force yourself to look/not look in one point.
grep, n.
Computing.
A Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified sequence or pattern, and to output all the lines matching this. Also grep command.

grep, v.
Computing.
1. intr. To search for a string of characters using the grep command. Also trans.: to search (a file) in this way.
2. trans. slang (usu. humorous). Of a person: to search; to scan visually.

Both marked: DRAFT ENTRY June 2010
How do you bridge the divide between change managers and project managers?
Does anybody recommend McAfee Security these days? Apparently not.
Good answer. Arguably, in a simplistic sense more liquidity is always better for the functioning of the market. But if we have a lot of "false" liquidity that perhaps encourages people to make optimistic assumptions, and that liquidity can go away... like it did a few weeks ago (or during a crisis...). Maybe some people can profit from this, especially if they have the ability to front-run?
Ask HN: Does Hacker News really understand Fred Wilson?
Despite 33.8% of HN following @fredwilson http://searchyc.com/fred+wilson shows up only 302 results, in contrast with searching for "invest" - 24919 and "venture capital" - 1164, "angel" - 3856 or "37 Signals" - 2763.

Does hackers really get their most followed VC? If not, why?

Links
http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by-readers-of-hacker-news/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1555866
That was my reaction too, apparently the author thinks that iPhone games == DS games.

It's also like saying that since DSi can play music stored in SD cards, Nintendo is a threat to iTunes.
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Ask HN: How do you fall asleep?
I've always had trouble falling asleep. But not having a 9 to 5 has made it even worse. Left to my own devices I fall asleep when I'm mentally exhausted and wake up, without an alarm, when I'm rested.

I just can't seem to shut my mind off at will, and further I can't decide if the effort to go to bed at a reasonable hour is even necessary, aside from fitting in with social norms.

What do y'all do? Do you try to go to bed at a reasonable hour? Why? How do you shut your brain off and sleep?
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He's talking about GWT (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/), not applets.
Reminds me of the Pirahã 'One-Two-Many' language.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6303-language-may-shap...
And as an alternative to the double-knot for a tighter shoelace knot than the normal one, http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm from that site is also handy.
I find really interesting that patrick build a pagerank on a totally different population than his customer base. He target hackers for pagerank building (and invest a lot of time writing articles who are probably not his first customers), but his customers lands on content created by freelancers (cheap, lesser quality content probably ).
I suppose doing both is ideal; I just wonder if it's possible you'd end up with the consulting being so much more valuable than bingo cards that the logical thing would be to do more of the former. Something that makes $1 when you sleep is not competitive with something that makes you $1000 when you're awake, even if, ultimately, the former is a superior model.

Also, I don't think anyone minds if you mention that you do consulting; your feedback here is very valuable. One of the things I appreciate about this community is that self promotion is ok as long as it's not completely out of context or otherwise annoying.
Truth be told, badly. I can lay awake all night thinking about stuff and then when I get up in the morning I can be more tired than I was when I got in.

Very frustrating, and I wished there was a reliable, non pharmaceutical way to get a good nights sleep. I've tried a lot of different things over the years, the only thing that seems to help me is to stop 'work' around 4 pm and to only work on physical stuff after that. (not that anything I do could legally be called work, but it keeps me busy nonetheless).
FWIW, RMS would definitely not say "Open Source", he'd say "Free Software".
I don't see how 'followers' on twitter translate in to any level of understanding. It's more like a fanclub than a measure of insight.

Also, that's the 33% or so of HN that uses twitter, and/or was put on this list, not of HN as a whole.
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Anyone know any helpful sites for scale practice (on piano)?
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It appears that the Gates Foundation works under certain contstraints, dictated of course by the elite family which runs it. For example, they appear to strongly respect intellectual property and corporate profits, as you might expect from a Microsoft founder. (This may take the form of ensuring that companies like Monsanto benefit from aid.)

There was an informed article in The Nation which touched upon the undemocratic vision the Gates Foundation allegedly has; people affected by poverty do struggle to fix their own problems in a self-governing way. Elite benefactors like Gates or Soros may conceivably help to strengthen the systems which make it hard to self-govern, along with whatever benefits they accomplish.

http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africa...

(Incidentally, I don't see why Gates is considered a particularly predatory businessman. He just happened to be the one who succeeded, as usually happens; and other businesspeople don't like an entity with the resulting market power. He might be a much nicer guy than many of his competitors, for all I know.)
Another very good posting from coderoom.wordpress.com. I like it especially because this way of thinking is uncommon in the industry but very important.
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I think most people do not do this because they do not know it is important, or like me, they do not understand the theory behind it. Neither did I know how to do it in practice.
No, people who do A/B tests have known this for years. It is the wannabes who haven't sat down and figured out the statistics who run into trouble. See http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ for an OSCON tutorial that I did on the topic a couple of years ago, which includes all the gory statistical detail you could want.

Furthermore I note with interest that 2 of the 3 statistical techniques he named (Student's t test and ANOVA) only apply to cases where the observed variables are themselves normally distributed. Which is not a good description of binary yes/no outcomes. As for the remaining test, it is appropriate to use a chi-square, but statisticians tell us that the g-test is preferable.
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It's a positive observation in the sense that one's actual market value is equal to the cost of replacement. The price discovery method (negotiation) is imperfect, causing the discrepancy between the market value and the actual paid price, but the point of the grandparent would still hold.
While the move to git is great, it's not going so well if you're on the Rawhide ("bleeding edge") like me. The new tool uses Python, which is broken in Rawhide right now because of the transition from Python 2.6 to 2.7.
Data syncing is a huge problem and its need will only expand. Dropbox is at the forefront of this (i.e. when I think of search -> google, shopping -> amazon, online storage -> dropbox).

The consumer space is growing (more devices and users) and the enterprise space is wide open. I can see Dropbox going after Sharepoint et al.

You're right, it might not be enough to be the next google but they might come close.
It sounds like Google might like to have you on board. Have you considered applying with them?
I'm working on a Rails based CMSaaS called Hibreed. It is mostly finished and should be available soon.
I do seek links from outside my customers and recommend it as a tactic, although it is not the only reason that I blog or participate with folks. You can compare it to other companies trying to get written about in the New York Times despite not selling to newspaper reporters. Programmers and Internet businessmen control a metric tonne of links, schoolmarms and the Jane Austin webring not nearly so many.

I do take minor exception to the comment about content quality. With the proviso that I'm making bingo cards to teach lessons to school kids, I'm usually making pretty darn good bingo cards. Search for [biology bingo] some time and compare my site to the other options.
> Surely you're joking? Outlook is a crappy email client.

Surely you're joking. First, Outlook isn't for anyone who'd be comfortable operating mutt. Period. Second, sure, Outlook has stupid design-decisions. But nobody claimed that Outlook is perfect, it was argued that Outlook was better than Lotus Notes which is was competing against when it was launched. And it was (and is), leaps and bounds. Third, Outlook isn't just a mail client, it's an integrated communications suite. It has taken OSS years and years to catch up with this. You may not agree that it's a critical feature, but for millions of business users, it's a deal-breaker.

There's good innovation in the kernel-space, too, but user-facing apps are playing catch-up.
I don't think there a many people able to shut down their brain by pure willpower. When I notice that I can't go to sleep I get up again. Why?

Because when the body is not ready for rest, it's, atleast for me, impossible to force him. So I just start doing things like go for a walk in the dark, read a book or clean up. Once I get tired I hop back in bed and surprise, I'm able to fall asleep.