skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend that is an Oracle DB Architect. One day he tells me he's left the bank and is working for some Swedish multinational. Tells me the name and I go "hmm, never heard of them". Website is a simple one page affair with contact information (in 50 countries) and nothing else.

I tell another friend about this company, he's a family investment planner (the guy that rich people give money to when they are too rich to work). He tells me in the hierarchy of multinationals, this one is at or near the top. You never hear about them because 99% of everything you buy is financed through them.

And that is Oracle's main clients. Really large companies with incredibly deep pockets and, most likely, a simple webpage that doesn't describe what they really do.

Think of it, most people never heard of AIG, until the government had to loan them $182 billion.
Looks like he was wrong about Android not being a serious competitor and Google wave being important.
Encrypted and obfuscated? Your P2P protocol can still be IDed
It's usually rather obvious just by chatting with someone for more than 5 minutes. It's also more obvious to those who aren't themselves assholes... YMMV
It's more on personal (Jobs-Ellison) than company level.
Ask HN:  How can you be rational and still believe in free will?
There is no scientific evidence for free will. It may just be an illusion.

Moreover, there's scientific evidence against it: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=unconscious-decisions

How do you reconcile your rationality and a belief in free will?
I did actually look at the population numbers but, inexplicably, just did a mental guesstimate rather than getting out my calculator or trusty paper. I apologize: it seems my mental guesstimate was on the wrong side of 2.
That ignores unfunded liabilities. A state can easily under fund a pension system.
Why I can't afford it : I'm a grad student from Costa Rica researching in South Korea. I'm about to launch my thesis project as a product here in Korea (http://www.discovr.net) and I'm very much deep in blogs, videos and books learning about bootstrapping and launching a startup while I code and manage 2 under-grad students from Costa Rica who are helping me bring the project to life (iOS, Android and Server)... everything under the budget and time of a grad student... u guys do the math :) - hint: I only get to sleep 4h a day and I'm exited!

My commitment: For more than a year now I've been running a twitter account (innovacr) where I curate articles, books and talks about innovation and entrepreneurship with the mission to foster innovation in Costa Rica (my home country) and this week I've put the final touches to a posterous site that will be used to accommodate similar findings but in a more search and read-friendly approach along with adding comments of my own and guest leaders not only in innovation but also in how we can make a better job at changing the mindset of fellow costarricans towards bootstrapping and startup founding. You can take a look at the new website at http://www.innovatiquicia.com . Whether I get selected or not my commitment is already on the run but I assure you that if I do get selected I will do my best to bring the goddies of the conference not only in practice in my project but into the innovator community of costa rica, which btw is one of the most technology advanced in latin america.

cheers!
Does Y Combinator list its launched startups exclusively on TechCrunch?
Jeff Bridges.com - Latest Update (his site has a really bizarre design)
Have fun trying to read long non-wrapping lines of code scrolling horizontally.

I mean, come ON! A plugin for freakin' word-wrap?!
Software Predicts Criminal Behavior
Both "rationality" and "free will" are vague terms. Your line of questioning won't get you anywhere beyond linguistic/logic side-effects.
Now why would that get modded down, it is a well known joke that school is 'cheap daycare' amongst people that have both parents working full time. Once the children hit school age they are in school for the same amount of time that they would have been in daycare otherwise, and schooling costs much less than daycare. Which is weird, because daycare effectively is a school (one adult supervising a bunch of youngsters) without any obligation or license to teach.
The original claim seemed to be that women were hypocritically wanting equality only for the good CEO-type jobs.

How the original poster missed the many women who have chosen to be (and often fought hard against the same prejudice they meet in "prestigious" careers to be accepted as) police officers, firefighters, soldiers, nightclub bouncers, oil rig workers and do various other dangerous, dirty or under appreciated jobs I have no idea.

But I thought the example presented summed up the issue quite well given the obvious enthusiasm the worker had for her job.
I was exposed to these before the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (which uses number station samples). It was fun to have my mind blown by the album and then explain to my friend (who introduced me to the album) about number stations.
too much work to read... if everything was scaled smaller I might bother to actually try
Bad Parenting
A BIG no-no for future parents! Being a parent is not an easy job.
Orkut's last bastion falls
You'll have to because affordable housing is so rare that you end up buying a house because the mortgage roughly equals the rent elsewhere. Of course then you do have to pay for the maintenance.

> but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.

That's from direct experience and believe me I don't throw money around if I don't have to. A very basic bit of shopping for 3 or 4 days costs you 50 bucks easily, if you're careful you can whittle that down a bit but not by much. And then of course I still have to get to the cheap supermarket and back, which is 20 km by car, if I bought it in the one around the corner I'd pay quite a bit more. No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.

Please note that I left things like cell phones, internet connection and TV subscription, newspapers etc out because they're not strictly speaking 'needs'.
predictability doesn't necessarily preclude free will. free will doesn't imply randomness.
Does Thinking Positive Really Help?
THe key point in there is "long term" .... as in youth to retirement... .and that fit the lifestyle of people who are old retired bankers now.

It's still true - real-estate, by it's nature, is probably a good long-term investment when compared to anything else.
Possibly lowering that number all the way down to 0.
> A corporation is a technology

Yes and a very useful one since it adds +1 trade routes per city.
Accept of course those standardized tests are the gatekeepers to the best schools, best programs, best networks, and likely even confidence and motivation.

A better way to show that standardized tests mean nothing is to have every student take them, but then store them away for the next 40 years. No one knows the results. And then in 40 years correlate the results of these tests with "life success". We've already seen with one similar measure "IQ test", which has little bearing on academic placement, that it turns out to have very little utility in predicting "life success".
UPDATE: Link on IQ -- http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html
Free Janmashtami 2010 Wallpapers, Sri Krishna Janmashtami Photos, Pictures
Janmashtami, one of the most popular festival in Hindu religion is celebrated with lot of enthusiasm. Janmashtami is famous festival celebrated with great devotion in the honor of Lord Shri Krishna. On this day lord shri Krishna was born and people worship lord krishna with great zeal. Janmashtami falls every year in the Hindu month of Sravana (August-September). Lord Krishna was born in the second fortnight of Krishna Paksh (lunar Fortnight) in Rohini Nakshatram. Lord Krishna was born at midnight. Sri Krishna Janmashtami or Krishnashtami, also known as Gokulashtami.
I've no idea how the govt would be able to do this in a workable way though - how to you value the appreciation in somebody's house when the only meaningful way to value a property is to sell it?

A bureaucrat called a 'tax assessor' makes an assessment - which may or may not be fair - of your property's current value. You're then charged a percentage of this assessed value in taxes. That's how property tax works across America today.
Great candor, great article. Displays some very critical perspectives that people often miss, they want safety, they want good roads, they want good education for their kids, etc, and still not pay the taxes that enable these things. One has to invest now, for a better future.

But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer.

The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues.

Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level.

The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization.

How does one break this paradox?
Ask HN: Is there success for back-end developers? 
I consider myself a back-end developer. I work on server apps mostly in c++, parsers, etc... systems that usually run on cron jobs, and not generally consumer facing. I don't do front end-design well, or even at all. Most of my ideas are very technical, and would not apply to anyone but a small subset of developers.

I believe that developers with ideas such as mine, are usually doing work for someone else, full time.

I've written several systems, that are pretty cool, but usually are the type to be open-sourced. A recent example is a memcache like server I created, that stores the expiring data in the background on cloud storage, and can later be retrieved and reloaded into the memcache like server. Stuff like this is really great, but a lot of sites don't get to be the size where they'd need to use it, and when coming up to needing something like this, its usually created by some big company out of need (like memcache) and then open sourced. This is not something I'd go with for a start-up, and merely an example. But this is mostly the kind of programs I write.

Are there any back-end developers here that have done a start-up, and become reasonably satisfied with their success (with a back-end idea?) or should I be looking into Objective-C for a Mobile game? Creating the next remote-control my MacBookPro app, or even looking at some SAAS? In the end, my web design skills are poor, I don't want to be forced into a web niche, I want to do back-end development, but for myself, or in a start-up.
Entri - Free collaborative article writing tool, any use to any of you?
On an entirely unrelated note, a suspected british spy was killed this week.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/08/20108258200...
Time: 50 Best Websites of 2010
Digital Signage Software - MySignTV
how to you value the appreciation in somebody's house when the only meaningful way to value a property is to sell it?

I think property taxes are fairly widespread in the US, actually. Your county has a group of assessors, who pick a SWAG based on comparable recent sales and -- ahem -- their desire to have the county generate tax revenue this year, and then you get to pay .8% or whatever of the assessed value in property taxes.

My father has drolly noted more than a few times that he wishes this assessment came with a shotgun clause (i.e. if the assessors tell you your house is worth $X, you could say "Sweet! I'll have the lawyer draw up the sale documents. You can have the keys tomorrow.")
Full List: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29...
Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after
Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002,
saying that he did not have the time to attend necessary formal
board meetings.
Competition "View to be Thin"
Very nice looking, potentially useful.

I take it 'lock' is to avoid conflicts? Good idea, but do I have to activate it manually every time I think someone else might open the doc at the same time as me? Perhaps it should lock automatically if I am editing it.

Otherwise, very nice.

edit: I just noticed on your haloweb site that you made invoice bubble as well - I bookmarked that a while back when I was collecting good-looking sites. You do good design!

edit 2: Invoice bubble appears to have been redesigned since I last checked. Still looks pretty good though (I preferred the minimalism of the old one, but I expect this one is more functional)
Larry Ellison is friends with Steve Jobs and even threatened to buy Apple for Steve Jobs. Check news from the 1996-1997 era about Apple's buying of NeXT. I really don't think that is in play here.

Although, I really believe Adobe can shut it until they point to an open source Flash client that can be used with Hulu.
I hear running a startup and raising kids both tend to involve rather significant amounts of drive, talent, and time investment to be successful.
This is assuming stable economic and population growth. There are lots of rural and inner-city property owners who could provide a cautionary tale to this theory.
There is no scientific evidence for free will. So why believe in it?
But that's just like buying a woman dinner. It's arguably about sharing a gift and having an experience. Money is a (perhaps small) step further.
Ask HN: Why so much Apple patent news popping up?
Has Apple increased the number of patents they're filing recently, or is everyone trying to jump on "guess what Apple will do next" hype. Or are they just trying to put up some preemptive defense against patent trolls? Your thoughts.
Jobs was the "official photographer" at Ellison's wedding.
buying for appreciation is much more speculative, in my opinion

We need to say this louder and stronger.

Examine the chart at the bottom of this article:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/08/chart-day-housing-...

Then try, as hard as you can, to realize that if you've been paying attention to house prices over the last decade you've been training yourself to think that this epic once-in-a-lifetime bubble is "normal" behavior for real estate prices. It isn't.
This reminds me of Shepard Tones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
First Ruboto Release
They are indexes (REIT) and funds (ETF) so you get diversification at the loss of control. Kind of like buying an S&P Index or investing in a mutual fund as opposed to investing in specific company stocks.
I think a good read of "Rich dad, poor dad" would do many good on the philosophy end of things.

His point is to define "rich" as having your assets (which he defines as investments that produce income) produce enough income to cover your expenses.
As soon as you reach that point, you can quit your day job and focus on managing your assets.

The point about redefining the meaning of asset is a good one - real-estate is his thing too - but he points out that the cycle joe average has been playing (at least, pre-crash) where he gets a mortgage, waits for the market to go up, then sells, then just goes out and mortgages a bigger/better place and keeps doing that...... he chooses not to define this as an Asset in this context because it's not generating income for you - it's a constant liability and bill you have to pay.
Could you be a little more specific? What's your area of expertise?
Someone at my office had a kid not long ago, and after he and his wife weighed daycare options versus her returning from maternity leave, they realized it was pretty much a wash.
Looks really cool - but it needs real-time collaboration. If you could pull in something like Etherpad/AppJet to it and make it editable in real-time by multiple people, then I think you might be onto something.
This only scales if the value of the property appreciates and allows you to refi and purchase another property with the equity. If the value goes down, the cash flow will as well.
Here's a good list of REITs I was looking at recently:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/056_reit_stuff.html

They've unsurprisingly been hammered over the last year or so. In the long run investing in focused REITs (like apartment rental, etc.) will give you similar exposure to investing in their target market yourself.

Of course, you pay the standard laziness premium. The REIT takes a fee, and sometimes their incentives are not aligned with yours. Perhaps they have $x they are incentivized to invest, forcing them to buy and run properties without top-tier ROIs and you, with a tiny fraction of $x, could do better. Perhaps you could just flat out do better than them by knowing your market and running your properties better.

But REITs are probably not a great way to go as a solo investment. Most that I've found have underperformed the S&P 500 over the last decade. I'd use them more to hedge though as we've seen recently, it's entirely possible for both the stock market and the real estate one to nosedive together.
Would you consider expanding on some of the nuts and bolts of hiring and managing those professional managers? I can't name anyone who's had a good experience with a management company on either side of the transaction but of course that's likely confirmation bias.

A 'day in the life' of what kind of issues you run into with those properties would be fascinating (to me anyway).
Andreessen Horowitz Seeks $650 Million for New Fund
what defines free will, and what scientific evidence would sufficiently prove your definition of free will?
Although the private by default thing is a nice idea, here's the problem with the fridge's model:

What about the situation where someone in a group goes 'rogue' and invites people who other group members don't want to see their stuff? These new members will see everything already posted... I think it's an important principle that anything you post to a group should only be visible to members of the groups _at that time_... otherwise you have no real control over the info you share.
The spreadsheet links to http://bit.ly/93pK2v (pdf) as a source of further information. Seems to be a discussion of SaaS in general.
There are a number of (large, quiet) sites with ginormous Oracle databases.

Sites which often fill large rooms with multiple and well-populated versions of storage controllers similar to the HP XP2400 series to house all those Oracle databases:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12711_div/1271...

Acceptance of (most) other database vendors and of other data access models tends to trail in the enterprise market; it's a very large and cautious and conservative market, and poles apart from a startup.
PostfixAdmin and Fetchmail
Erm... Well AIG did do ads on TV and whatnot.
If you are in the right place at the right time, and willing to live there, that can work.....

Not everyone can handle that, though - people are unlikely in general to be able to treat their home impassionately as an investment.

The key is knowing that you've already won before you sign the papers.... as you said, doing the research, etc. Good investors always make their money on the "buy" - you buy something you KNOW is already undervalued - you never buy and then just hope.
One can ask something similar about proving the existence of God.

Why should you not believe in God on faith but believe in free will on faith?
Grats guys!

Perhaps the founders will be so kind as to tell us if they manage to retire on $4.3m each :)
Huh? I'm not even joking. I don't look at school as day care, but whether you think that or you don't, you're not paying for someone to watch the kids while they're there.

This isn't politics. It's a simple fact. You stick out 5 years or so with very expensive child care (maybe 4, for many families, where someone stays at home for the first year), and then two-income families make sense again.
>I can't find a reasonable human being that can agree with the pension system for state employees (I am actually unsure if it applies to teachers), which has to be the biggest money whole I could ever conceive.

The issue with pensions is that everyone used to do it. Private and public sector both. It's just easier for the private sector to declare bankruptcy and throw away their obligations. Pensions themselves are a giant scam to steal money from future generations. It isn't a failure of government or the public sector. It's a failure of one generation to consider their children or grand children.

The only people who ever thought pensions are a good idea are old or already retired. You're unlikely to meet a person like that.

>It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation.

The Leave It to Beaver household never existed. What makes you think home life has degenerated in the last 50 years?
This is a really old video. It's been a few months now, so Adobe already has Photoshop CS6 out. $200 please.
Apparently, Florida Senate candidate Jeff Greene made a billion dollars doing just this, over and over again.
IBM X-Force Report: Global Security Threats Reach Record Levels
for me, it was impressive that he was modest - in noting (a couple of times) that there are exceptions.
A month is quite the honeymoon :)

Cinque Terre in Italy isn't crazy but would be relaxing and offers some awesome hiking, but it can be pretty much done in a day.

One of the trails between the towns has the lovers lock, http://www.travelsignposts.com/Italy/wp-content/uploads/2010... which could be a special place to go.
What Happens When Animals Behave Like People?
Amazing and very interesting photographs of animals caught at the right moment when they behave like people.
On copyright: I would not bet on copyright. With copyright holders, its going to be an unbelievable fight that they will ultimately lose but it will be so bloody -- it will be like the civil war. So i have advice for you: Dont start a music startup unless one of your cofounders is Johnnie Cochran.

Because seriously, those guys are just unbelievable
It's certainly not a wash once you factor in the opportunity cost of sitting at home and letting your skills and contact network fall to the wayside. It's a lot easier to find a job (or get your old job back) if you start working as soon as your child is old enough for daycare than if you wait 6 years for your child to start school. In addition your salary after having worked those years will probably be quite a bit higher than your starting salary after having stayed at home for those years.
Facebook overtakes Google's Orkut in India
The right way to think about S.E.O. and social media operations is that it's all about chance -- first you do what you can to get the odds in your favor, then you buy as many tickets as you can.

Search engine designers think about it statistically too; Google doesn't understand a damn thing, but the algorithms "bet" that a certain choice will be useful for end users. I was at a machine learning talk lately where they described it as a "multi-armed bandit".
Good to have some positive examples where academic research helps rather than hampers the startup... It strikes me that the profile of a person who does research doesn't seem to fit too well with the image of a young entrepreneur who wants to translate ideas to the market as quickly as possible. Albeit both require a hell lot of perseverance ;)