skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'm not an angel, but i would think that at least some would be. depends on the idea, just like software.

the problem of software vs hardware, though, is simply the fact that software will scale easier than an item that you must manufacture/produce/distribute. give someone $5k (for example) and a software company will probably be able to run further with it than a hardware company.
For those who have no idea what Prop 19 is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_19

Basically, a marijuana legalisation proposal.
Wouldn't that only work until a competitor with a sufficient product crops up with a cost+ price?
I like Defcon a lot. Sure it can't be 'won' but that's not really the point. The point is you kill millions more humans than you're enemies. I find it a tough game to play well because there's so much going on. The wrong tactical decision can have serious repercussions.

From reading the Dev blog the other developer has been doing it actually sounds like their new ambitious game is something they'll release within their 1 year of life that's left.

I certainly hope they do because from what I can gather it's like uplink but more focused on breaking into buildings and social engineering people, which sounds awesome.
This is pretty effective, ctrl-] takes me to the definition of any symbol. And with the appropriate plugin I get the same quality tab-complete I'd get with an IDE. If you need even deeper exploration, cscope will allow you to find files which include this one, all calls to a given function, etc. But never underestimate a simple `find | xargs grep`. I'm currently learning a ~4m line code base using these methods and haven't had real problems yet.

I will agree that out of the box vim/emacs aren't set up as an IDE replacement. But since you're investing so much time in learning vim modal concept or emacs bindings, the added effort to customize your editor for what you do is a drop in the bucket.
GPS tracking is the tip of the iceberg. I bet we're not 10 years away from the cops being able to put an all in one video-audio-gps-wifi snooper the size of an ipod-nano on you, your car, house, boat, whatever. And given how fast hardware commoditizes, the device will probably cost under $500. If these hypothetical devices become equipped to tweet, then everybody is fucked. It sure gives me confidence that our law enforcement worker-bees are amongst the most trustworthy, noble and incorruptible Americans out there! In many countries, everybody implicitly understands the police are corrupt, and basically operate like the biggest, legal gang themselves.
/sarcasm

Thanks a lot technologically myopic courts for setting such a dangerous legal precedent!

On the bright side, isn't it trivial and relatively cheap to make a radio detector of GPS and other such radio transmissions? Or even a signal jammer? Like what the spies use to sweep a room for listening devices?
Let's just assume you're cool with temporarily violating FCC broadcast regulations within a small personal vicinity. ;)

Unintended consequences are my favorite however. Perhaps, if we're lucky, this situation might just invert, and if total surveillance becomes dirt cheap, then it also means we can watch the watchers. Imagine a Facebook for watching every LE agent in real time across the entire country. Sounds laughable, but technology changes fast! (I bet certain global crime cartels already have something like this, in crude beta—all it takes is one mole and you've got the right data to connect the dots.)
Yet surely the virus authors themselves aren't experiencing "millions of crashes" during the early development stages that Heckman is describing. So how does he find their code, given what you've said?

Clearly, there must be some red flags which cause even small numbers -- perhaps single -- crash reports to get human attention at MSFT.
Maybe it's because I'm in a cynical mood right now, but Steve Jobs looks like he's performing for an audience. I'd have loved to hear what people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates really think, but whenever these guys speak, I suspect that they compensate for the fact the people will be listening to them, and that what they say will influence their lives' work.

You're left with no other choice but to reverse-engineer their real philosophies from how the respective companies behave in the market.
Why is Oracle suing Google not ok but Sun suing Microsoft for essentially the same reason ok?
for those who haven't seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULUGHJCCj4 . As you said, a brilliant and motivational ad.
"We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are the way to protect that."

Innovation has no value to the public if you don't produce and ship a good product. In my opinion the company that actually ships something should always have the upper hand because it's good for consumers. Patent reform should follow a use-it-or-lose-it model. If a company comes up with an innovative idea, ships a product, and that product stays on the market (in one form or another) for many years they probably deserve to own the patent. If people are buying it then it must be halfway decent. If they never produce a shipping product they shouldn't be able to hold the patent hostage. If they decide to stop selling a product that uses the patent someone else should have the opportunity to dust it off.
I can have a bazillion files open in emacs and still switch between them easily with ido-switch-buffer (C-x b), which does fuzzy matching on the buffer name.
This is not something I'm going to be able to even begin to answer in a comment on a website, that's a couple of hours just to document the whole process and make it understandable if you have no experience.

First step: get a corporate legal eagle on your side, one that has done this multiple times and has a good track record. Find someone near you that has sold a business and ask for a referral, that should help you.

You will be doing technical, legal and financial due diligence (financial only if they buy your company, not if they only buy the product).

You will need to investigate the difference between an asset sale and selling your equity, in a deal like this that can make a huge difference tax wise!

You need to find an entrepreneur close to you that has gone through this to be your 'second opinion' on anything you do.

Try to move from 'telephone conferences' to more email based communications and keep the emails. Do not negotiate for yourself, place another party in between during the negotiations (for instance your lawyer).

Set yourself a target price and be prepared to walk away if it looks like you're not going to make your target.

Set that price now, not when you're negotiating.
1. Estimates of units sold for both the iPad and the Kindle range from 3-5 million.

2. Even with competition from Apple, Barnes and Noble, and others Amazon still holds 90% of the ebook market share.

3. Publisher Author J. A. Konrath reported that on the iBookstore he sales 100 books per month. On the Kindle store he sales 200 books per day.

4. Kindle is not just the physical device. You can read Kindle books on the iPad through the Kindle App. Kindle is also on Android and Windows and everything else that you could possible want to read an ebook on. This means that even if the iPad or an Android

5. The production of the Kindle and price Amazon must purchase the ebooks from their publishers must be taken into account. Let’s assume the Kindle Reader only costs Amazon $150 to produce and that for each $10 book sold they have to give the publishers $7.

19 x $7 = $133 in ebook costs + $150 for the Kindle = $283 in total that Amazon would spend on giving away the Kindle. $283 – $189 the customer pays = $94.

Amazon would go from making $39 on each Kindle Unit to losing $94. If you factor in the lose sales of 19 books x $3 Amazon gets for selling the book then Amazon is losing out on another $57 in revenue for a total of $96 in lost revenue by your brilliant idea. $96 in lost revenue + $94 from the unit sold = Amazon would be making $190 less by giving it away for free than they would by still selling it.

6. Oh yeah, Amazon already gives away over 1.8 million out of print books for free.
"Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source"

The lawsuit is against Google, not the OpenJDK. It seems disingenuous to keep linking Google's situation with Open Source in general. Google isn't using the OpenJDK. Google didn't want to spend the money and now has to deal with that decision. A simple "We are not going to a conference sponsored by someone suing us" would be good enough. Adobe and Google must have sent their people to the same blog training program.
I have to admit, watching this video kind of killed the magic of the Think Different ad video.

From now on I will see it as a Nike ad rip-off. A good one, but still.
How to build out an entrepreneurial & customer focused culture
Sadly a virtual machine by itself just isn't good enough anymore. The maturity and performance of the JVM shows. That kind of infrastructures takes oh ... about 20 years to build.

Until the current crop of JVM based languages showed up my interest in the Java the language waned. But now that you can use your language of choice and still tap into JVM libraries, perf and the high quality profiling tools, the JVM is compelling again.

Also experience stories like this, http://blog.urbanairship.com/blog/tag/java/, show that as great as Python and Ruby are for building websites, surprise, surprise, they don't have the performance for the real-time web.
Accolades about one's toughness and perseverance are also more credible when they're not self-gratifying.

If this article was written by PG about WePay, that would be one thing. Even if its 100% true, it sounds less impressive when the author is telling others how great someone else thinks he (or his company) is. It just came off a bit too self-congratulatory to me. And that's saying a lot in the already narcissistic world of startups.
Google Bails Out on JavaOne
You didn't really ask this, but here goes... Do you really want to sell your company before it's out of private beta? If your product (and yourself as an employee) are worth six figures now, what is the likelihood that will decrease after general availability? That is an actual question though, not rhetorical.

If you're not confident in continuing to increase the value, you may want to cash out now... But you're only alive and productive for so many years, and developing a product people are interested in isn't something you can just turn around and do again automatically. I think if it were me, I'd probably hold out and keep rolling the dice if I felt they were loaded in my favor :)
What's the barrier? Oracle has business relationships with most companies using Java and this does not affect OpenJDK, IBM, or any other licensee.
The state of Virginia has actually used money from its tobacco settlement to fund the development of a broadband network in the southern part of the state. That was a key piece of the deal, as there's lots of power and water infrastructure in that area from old factories. Here's more details:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/08/27/micro...
> that's why 401ks are great the total cost of an employee is understood completely

This isn't true. There is no definitive way to determine the total amount of the future burden of a matching 401(k) plan because:

1) You don't know how long the employee will continue working there.
2) You don't know the interest rate at which to discount this future liability.
3) You don't know what future voters are going to change in the current matching system.

In fairness, determining the funded status of the future liability of a retirement pension is a lot more difficult than determining the expected cash flows for 401(k) plans.
You'd be surprised how big the world really is. Plenty of people will have never even heard of you or your competitor. Good luck marketing your product to the point where you've gotten 100% saturation in terms of reaching your target audience. Even coca cola and google can't claim that.
Quick Prototype: Realtime slides using Twitter
Inspiration: http://lessigerator.com/

The basic concept is that a presenter could create short text slides with just their phone, while they are giving a presentation.

Three hours later:The code is strictly proof of concept, essentially my first use of Jquery, and mostly stolen from online tutorials.

Currently it polls the twitter API every 10 seconds. It will go through the allocated 150 queries/hr for anonymous in about 25 minutes. If it were able to authenticate with the API, that could be stretched to continuous use.

I don't know if it's possible to text while giving a dynamic presentation without looking like a douche.

It could also be useful for a 'notetaker' putting up a general topic as a group discussion moves from point to point.
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2010/06/01/the-milliona...
How hard would it be for Google to fork OpenJDK and release Guava 7 instead (with all the niceties we're waiting for). If they made it open they probably could get a lot of people to switch over.
It's simple. Give developers access to production servers but not root privilege. Deployment and configuration change should go through change request ticket, whose main purpose is communication to the group and maintaining a history of changes to the production site. Change tickets can be as simple as sending an email to a group list or an elaborate system of reviews and approvals using ticket tracking app.

Implementation of the change ticket can be done by developer, qa, sysadmins, DBA, or ops, depending on the needs and required privileges. Routine stuffs should be automated.

It usually takes a few times of site down and screwup before some form of process to be put in place.
I see where you're coming from, but I think we're talking about 2 different things. The trail of the conversation was this:

sumeetjain quoted: "We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th."

Then "what" said they didn't have it working yet according to a video posted a little while ago.

I said that it might be working now because it's been over a week, assuming they're pulling long hours to make it work.

So, I guess the definition of "working" really depends on what the Diaspora team meant when they said it was working and they liked it (in this context).
I'm pretty sure Coca Cola can actually claim 100% saturation.
Think Different was to keep their current users and the iPod campaign was meant to get the mass market. Both needed to be done to survive.
When they do their sums they are gambling that the average amount of space per user will leave them profitable. They advertise unlimited storage rather than capped storage so they have to hedge their bets somehow.

I like their model. Your milage may vary.
Maybe it's performance art?
Sun/Microsoft was a breach of contract lawsuit.

Oracle/Google is a patent lawsuit.
About how much does this actually end up costing/employee? And how many actually take advantage?
create something. start a club/group/organization and host something like a startup weekend.
it's funny, in French engineering schools we have the opposite reaction; in "prep" schools students are taught OCaml which is their first programming language if they're not geeks.

Functions returning functions seem a natural thing as they are used to the exact same kind of abstraction in math (and even sometimes order 3+ functions when you study duality!). Conversely, they are initially puzzled when they are taught Java in their engineering school because of the difference between static variables and attributes, constructors and other unnatural concepts.
Some of the patents that Oracle is suing Google over are pretty general and would apply to either Mono or Microsoft's own .NET runtime as well as many other similar pieces of code in the wild. As long as software patents are taken seriously, any large blob of code is facing similar "issues".
Is that bad ?
What, you don't thing that a State (especially California, the startup capital of the world) in a serious budget crisis has anything to do with entrepreneurs that may be attempting to start their own businesses in such a climate?
The Founder-Model Misfit
It's an SEO trick. By linking to your home page from your home page, the googlebot falls into infinite recursion and your pagerank exceeds google. Soon, all search queries will lead to AdGrok.

</dry-nerd-humor>
Yes, although it gets trickier with mutation. For example:

x = 0
foo = function(){ x += 1 }
bar = function(){ x -= 1 }

Somehow you need to update bar's x too when you call foo and foo's x when you call bar. One way to do this by wrapping x in an object of its own, for example in a single element array that just contains x. I think the implementation of closures in Mono got this wrong, calling foo would have no effect on bar and vice versa (perhaps it's fixed now).
Not to mention that most startup founders in the western world come from affluent families, so quitting a great job to do a startup isn't particularly risky for them since they normally won't end up on the street if they fail. Bouncers and fighters on the other hand risk their lives.

This talk about startup founders having to be "tough" just seems like an ego boost to make the whole startup experience feel heroic and epic, which I think is OK because a little self-aggrandizing is probably good for motivation.
How to Create A Custom ‘Tweet This’ Button For Your Facebook Fan Page
Scratched discs which hang right at the most exciting part of the movie.
This probably becomes off-topic to this OP, but the whole point of YC is the resources and network you get accepted into. And you need to be here for that.

Also, if the idea is to obtain funding during/after the YC program you will find that VCs will rarely invest in distant companies.

If you don't want to be here for that, even for the duration of the program, (and really, with the aim of moving here) then YC is probably not for you - but perhaps there is a similar program locally to you?

(NB: I'm not connected with, nor work for, YC)
Could this be the commencement of the long feared software patent Mutually Assured Destruction?
I didn't care for this video. I thought it was light on content and the narrator had some pretty annoying mannerisms.

"...cuz you know, like back in the day we didn't have fancy X-windows where we could you-know move around and play on the web and look at porn and shit... so it was uh...you know, I mean... screen... but screen is still definitely, you know.. something that is really good to use."

I do however agree with him that screen and vim are both pretty kickass, I just think he could have done a better job showing why.
I would love to read stories of interviewees who've decided to call it quits on the interviewers. It must happen right?
A company like apple does not have 5 seconds. People know about apple and their products much that they need to.

You give an elevator pitch if you are unknown to an investor. Perhaps a company which is unknown might have 30 seconds to tell the world - if they can afford it - who they are, so that they can get others to remember their brand.

Once their brand is remembered however, you have 30 seconds to maintain your statues quo. Like some Cadbury ads. If you remember the one with the gorilla drumming, it hardly tells us anything about Cadbury, let alone the most important thing. It just makes us feel well good and like Cadbury because unlike other adverts this one was quite cool and so Cadbury keeps being cool.
> Sad to see him become a Patent troll.

Yes, quite. Paul Allen had an excellent reputation up to this point. He always struck me as the one with the interesting projects, such as backing Burt Rutan.

> Some of them will surely fight back.

all of them will fight back.
yep. and i suppose you won't be surprised to learn its called the pipeline operator.
The only one missing from that list is Microsoft, wonder why... and youtube == google.
Great article (I suspect people that don't think it's great haven't had to wake up every morning, day after day, for years, and tear themselves apart for that extra inch).

One thing I find interesting is that people often call me very tough and direct, while most of the time that's not how it feels. I always hesitate on whether I'm being too wimpy, and I still get amazed that it doesn't come through in conversations. I don't know if it's because I got lucky and have a good pokerface where my emotions don't easily come through, or whether I am actually not wimpy and the state of hesitation goes hand in hand with toughness.
I can fully agree about the quietness of developers working on large ruby app considering I work on such an app but were not big on advertising it yet.
As one anecdote, I wouldn't have paid for historious at more than the $20 a year I paid (I hesitated, and decided it was worth it due to the usefulness and the fact you seemed like a cool bunch). It's a cool service, but not THAT cool. I could always go back to forgetting URLs, or using Google Reader to remember them.
or reverse psychology? I find it hard to imagine that someone who agreed to donate his billions to charity suddenly becoming a patent troll. Maybe he is trying provoke a repeal of business method patents the most direct (and expensive) way possible.
Hm. For truly niche software, I suppose I can see that, but for anything with more than even a few hundred customers, I don't think it'd last. Someone (like me, for example) would smell an opportunity and sell for less.

I suppose it's not a bad thing for you in the short term, but I'd caution against getting comfortable on the profit cushion, and reinvest in revenue sources that can't be taken away by the same opportunistic competitor.
Probably more of a status symbol for most people.

How many of you actually read these books carefully?
Random thoughts on Clojure Protocols
I don't understand your position at all. The company puts money into a 401k, either as a grant or via some sort of matching scheme. The employee sets up their deductions, normally happens once a year. From that point you know exactly how much that employee will be paid in all compensation that year.

There is no future liability. The money has been paid to the employee in it is in their hands now, and their retirement becomes their responsibility.

I think you might be thinking of some other type of retirement plan.
From a Tasteful Experience at Joe’s to a Simperium of Modular Innovation
I could see some definite pros to that. I'm trying to think of problematic things that might also get banned as a result, and not thinking of a lot. One thing that'd get banned along with large pension promises, if that rule were applied consistently, would be golden parachutes.
At least it is less likely to led to black lungs.

I don't dispute that you did would take more grit than most people would be willing to put up with, but for heavens sake man a mask is what $0.5? If your phlegm changed color, what do you think happened to your lungs?
I have a feeling those graphs are more than a little fishy - the bottom one especially. Retirement costs went up ~5X from 2000 to 2010? And they'll go up by the same from 2010 to 2020? I call BS.
That would not really solve the problem. The Sun/Oracle patent grant only extends to JDKs that conform to the specification, and pass all tests in the test suite. That is, if you can license the test suite (see Apache Harmony).

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Java_and_patents#The_Java_Language_...
The optimistic side of me hopes that people are seeing the writing on the wall for software patents, and are hoping to extract value before the landscape changes.
How the engineer driven culture at Google damaged Wave
I thought it was people saying they're doing a lousy job of explaining the rules of approval?
> "The only one missing from that list is Microsoft"

FTA: "Notably missing from the defendants' list are Microsoft, in which Mr. Allen remains a major investor"