skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd agree with you on most of this except the oil part; the reason the government doesn't invest in alternative energy is because reliance on oil is necessary to make the petro-dollar framework work - if alternative energy existed, nobody would buy dollar-based oil units from the middle east, and therefore nobody would need to negotiate from a position of weakness with the U.S. in business transactions because their nations needed dollars to buy oil. No need for oil = no need for dollars = dollars backed by nada = America's primary industry (dollar production) = instantly useless = we're suddenly very, very poor and weak. In other words, your frustrations are valid but it's done on purpose until the people who tell the government what to do and how to do it can figure out "the next big thing" in keeping the world under control via financial frameworks. Right now it's still the petro-dollar, so alternative energy will at best be unsupported, if not suppressed via regulation, buyouts, patent-blocks, etc.

As for the magazine bit, have you tried the economist? It really is a misnomer ... it has more to do with the issues you want to focus on.
Just a heads up, I'm not anything to do with this project but its from an event in the UK called Launch48, this idea was started on friday night and the idea is that over the weekend you build a MVP then work on it after the event.
well, I'm a nerd pretending to be a business guy, not the other way around, but I think some of the same lessons apply.

First nobody will take you seriously (as a business guy or a nerd) without some experience. so we need to get you some experience.

Do you have cash? if not, go get a regular job. get it the way regular business grads do it (what I mean, is you need cash for the first step. not a lot of cash, but some. a job, in my experience, is the easiest way to get cash. If the job sounds impressive, it can also count some towards experience. But, if you have enough cash already, you can move on to step two.)

Now, find someone to hire. You can hire inexperienced nerds for very little. depending on where you are, anywhere from min. wage to $15/hr will get you started. Note, you won't get anyone with experience for this rate... but sometimes you get really promising people without that attribute (and you can't afford experience right now, unless you have more money than I think.)

the thing to remember here is that you will probably end up firing the guy. I mean, I know nerds fairly well, and I end up making a lot of mistakes, so you will too. The trick here (and if you can learn this, you will have vastly improved your value as a business person) is to learn how to fire well.

By firing well, I mean you need to learn how to get rid of your mistake without making an enemy or making him or her feel to bad. It's a small community and if you have a rep. as an asshole, you are going to have a hard time picking up your second guy. (and when you find someone you don't need to fire? be /extra careful/ - that guy's friends will be the people you want to hire when he moves on to a higher paying job... or he might be the co-founder you want.)

I think the key is to start people off as contractors without the expectation of continued work. If they don't work out, you pay them for what they did, and the job is over. Nobody's expectations have been violated; nobody feels ripped off, etc... Only move someone into an expectation of longer term employment once they've proven themselves. As you get better you can move on to figuring out how to fire people who have been working for you for a while... but that's pretty rare if you work everyone as contractors first. People will leave, but usually they leave on their own for more money before needing to be pushed.

next, if you do manage to do something cool, always give the nerd who helped a bunch of the technical credit when you are talking to other people. It'll make the guy feel good, and if anything, it makes you look better. Nobody likes (or believes) a business guy who tries to takes all the credit, and really, as a business guy, if you pick the right nerd co-founder, that makes you look really good. by pointing out how good your nerd is, you are pointing out how good you are to have found and kept that nerd.
The ultimate reporter tech toolkit?
I read his biography, in fact he collaborated with a friend based in the States to start the first version of that yellow pagesish site (it was during a time when nobody knew what internet was), which was later either acquired or started a new joint venture with the government.
What? How did America and its "shortcomings" enter into the conversation? Neither the parent nor the article made any such allusion.
I was up in Churchill, Manitoba this past summer, home to many polar bears. Some locals told me stories about film makers who come to the North with their "the bears are all dying" narrative already set, and being very distraught when they couldn't be taken to a skinny polar bear, because they were, indeed, all fat at that time of year.
"So you get a number of good startups, a bigger number of lame startups, and a lot of capital tied up with the fates of these little companies."

Is there really that much capital tied up into the small, low investment required firms? (I mean, by definition they don't need a lot up front and current VCs aren't even structured to make such small investments.)

I don't know, but I have to wonder, because the elephant in the room, the single thing that makes it difficult to get enough money to solve "hard problems", is the brutal fact that SarBox was the last straw that closed the IPO window for all but the most exceptional firms.

Investing a lot of money in any single venture simply doesn't make sense any more, unless the firm is one of those exceptional ones (think Facebook) or you can see a way to get it bought by an existing big firm (MySpace is an appropriate mirror example).

I'm not too worried about failures to "invest" in "clean-tech, alternative fuel, renewable energy", for these government inspired and subsidized boondoggles have a long and unsuccessful history going back to the '70s (if you don't remember or know of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation) and this geneal long lamentable history you should probably read up on it before being unhappy that the sector is none too healthy right now; for that matter, factor in NIMBY->BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)).

(Which is not to say that some if this is both hard and high payoff: if we could just figure out how to grow oil rich algae in mass quantities that would be a game changer, but it's obviously very hard and unfortunately has yet to be cracked in 3 plus decades of effort.)

What I'm worried about is that we're unlikely to see the next FPGA type disruptive innovation, simply because so much investment is needed that getting it back in a reasonable way/time frame is unlikely at best. Yes, we'll see sustaining innovations, and there's a set of these low capital up front web sites that count as disruptive (Facebook is a great example here), but in general I fear we just aren't going to invent the future any more.
Thanks for you advice, especially about the reduced learning curve. Really appreciated!
a literate haskell program by Phil Wadler
Ask HN: Yet another Facebook chat privacy hole?
From http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=84283397130

"Going Offline
Alongside each list, you'll notice a green switch; when you turn off the switch, you'll be logging off of Chat for that list. Friends in lists that are switched off will not be able to see that you are online or chat with you, nor will you be able to see whether they are online."

However, if I open the Facebook iPhone app, and go to the chat view, I can see everyone who is online, regardless of whether or not they have placed me in a group that is set to offline. Note that this only occurs in the iPhone app - the website chat view is fine.

Can anyone else replicate this?
I registered last week to see if there's any value in such a service, but after doing a search I cannot find myself in their database. What's up with that?
Methane.
Regardless of whether its wise to bet on where technology is heading, the point I got from this was that more thought should be going in to what technologies should be focused on as a matter of principle, regardless of "what sells to the masses at the moment."

We've seen where demand (Wall Street) driven acute focus on the short term has brought many companies today, ie, over-reliance on what was once popular but quickly hit the dust the second something slightly more trendy came along.

Of course, making so many rapid platform adjustments drives people into borrowing ... from Wall Street. But companies were told over and over by a barage of management consulting gurus that things were so fast and blurry, they couldn't afford to not keep borrowing more and more money to pump out more and more crap to keep up with the almost instantly changing trends.

On the other hand, look at apple - just over a decade ago they were considering bankruptcy, and instead of giving in to the urge to "do what would sell at the moment" they decided to ignore "expert advice" and instead invest in a simple but well-thought out development plan (iPad seems new but is really just a long-held fantasy of Newton II) and chart their own long-term course of doing what they wanted at a time when it wasn't certain there was going to be a long term for them.

Now of course everybody praises them for their determination to do what they wanted rather than catering to the fickle whims of the market.

Now look where they are. They define the market. They don't make what you want - they tell you what you want and make sure you get the hint that they know what you want even better than you do. And more and more people seem to agree.

I think that's what this article highlights - what will the world be like 5 years from now (more of the same) if facebook keeps getting more and more money to hire more talented people so they can figure out clever new ways to help people keep each other up to date on useless banalities that do nothing to advance anything other than their intimate familiarity with useless and ephemeral trivia about their sometimes friends but mostly loose associates.

The world is facing more and more problems ... exponential inter-relationships between these problems will at some point overwhelm us ... and smart people are figuring out how to steal money from grandparents on wall street or how to better allow you to tell everyone you ever bumped into in life that you got a new refridgerator.

Path dependency is very real and we may come to a point where we can't solve the important problems anymore even if we want to or need to.
Http://www.expomail.es/boletines/ehv/octubre/ehv_octubre_eng.html
I was replying to this remark:

Wind towers are part of Middle East heritage and I always wonder why they've gone into building all those a/c energy wasting offices, malls and homes, instead of simply adopting this technology from the start.

I didn't say anything about "shortcomings". When I used the word "short-sighted", I meant that Americans tend to have a short-term time frame in mind. For example, American companies tend to focus on the next quarter. In contrast, Japanese companies tend to have a 10 year plan. I've had foreign friends or American friends who lived for some years in an older country/culture. They think different than the typical American. They have a longer view than is the norm here.

Also, I don't see how remarking that there are good things and bad things about a particular approach is some kind of attack..or some such.
A) It's not "something they don't need"; they can easily write it off as a business expense doing PR for their country and attracting more outside investors keen to discover this 'green' oasis in Arabia (please ignore the Dubai behind the curtain, move along, nothing to see here ..)

B) The money belongs to them. They don't even advertise their crack; people go out of their way to seek it, pay for it dearly, and sometimes even mount belligerent invasions to get it :-) Only thing worse than a dealer is an armed crackhead.
are you sure it was this service? the domain name was only registered yesterday and its being built as part of a hack challenge
Your users are not the product you're selling
The article is not exactly about advice to patio11, it's more about advice to many other Hacker News readers.
Besides, by giving advise the author is getting feedback on his own advise, which is important too.
I don't agree with several statements in the article, but I like the article overall.
The Geek's Guide to Love
look how facebook or youtube are doing it... like or dislike. should be that easy. also I don't recall a situation where I thought: "well, maybe I like this beer"
Right, just imagine how much blood loss the patient would have experienced if we hadn't used the leeches! His is the kind of nonsense you guys trot out to defend every program... No matter how much damage to the economy, you just claim that things would have been worse otherwise. You never support these claims, of course, but you then go on to claim that those who point out the damage are not supporting their claims, even when they do, and you just, out of the blue make nonsese assertions like "have no basis in economic theory".... Without, of course, defending that asertion. I find this mode of argument particularly anti-intellectual.
Clearly that article polarizes Hacker News readers.
Which is a good sign.
PEP 444 (web3) is being worked on, but will be a fairly significant protocol change/upgrade. In the interest if getting something quickly, the original WSGI PEP 333 author decided to just make the minor updates required to make it python 3 compliant. But Guido along with some other python developers have objected that it isn't appropriate to try and change PEP 333 so substantially at this point and a new PEP should be developed, although hopefully it could still be done quicker than PEP 444 will take.

The ongoing conversation can be found at http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/117249
They are just doing exactly this in Beijing, rebuilding those square houses around courtyards called siheyuan, in alleys called hutong. They progressively renew blocks one after another, imposing strict architectural rules. I live in one of them, I get traditional Chinese village life, but with Internet connection, cars and toilets inside the houses (for some of them).
I tried to look around, but... I can't find any general information what is this all about? Nodes? SmartMachines? There's loads of installation instructions, API docs, etc. but where is the "what is it and why should I care" page?
Currencies are a really interesting thing. After I started to get into commodities and read up on the history of central banks-- the creature from jekyll island is a good book on the subject-- I found I started tobsee money fundamentally differently..... I see the paper in my wallet like i see the huge bundles of worthless notes from Zimbabwe.... Worthless. I know intellectually that I can exchange it, but knowing it's eventual and intrinsicev value changed my relationship with it.

And in doing so, I realized just how strongly I'd been conditioned, emotionally, and thru rationalizations, to see this paper as money.

Not sure if that resonates. One thing I'd like to also put yor ear is the idea of moral hazard. Even when everyone was in denial about the bubble, and trying to not be the greater fool, they had in the back of their heads the moral hazard.... Knwoing if it was really bad, they'd get bailed out by the government. Im not talking about banks, but about real estate agents and home buyers, etc...and they were right!
Eight Tips To Successfully Bootstrap Your Business
Ask HN: Is real time the future and what fields still missing this feature?
Real time search, charts, products updates etc. Every field seems to have real time updates now. Although, it seems useful, do you think it has a future or what could there be something beyond real time?<p>The reason we put the question is because our idea of a startup is related to updates of transactions in real time. And since this was the area we could think of, we also would like to know if there is any field lacking real time feature.<p>We'll really appreciate your response to our queries.<p>Thank you.
Thanks, what I see is that the users invented what twitter is, and in my perspective they are filling the gap the web left: having a distributed social graph (e.g.: FOAF, etc).

Now, about revenue? it seems more related to social analytics, since using the API (with its limitations) it's difficult to do big scale analysis.
We are not Waiting for Superman, We are Empowering Superheroes | Startl
Anyone want to play a high stakes match?

(Why, no, that isn't a directed graph of wikipedia articles and a BFS implementation behind my back.)
Hey lsc, thank you so much for your advice about hiring techs on a contracter basis, it's such an eye-opener and I think this might be something I can pursue! (Only if I could upvote multiple times, I'd upvote you multiple times!)

Out of curiosity, does it work the same way for you as a hacker hiring a biz type? For example, if you hire a sales and later fires him, there's the chance that he/she will take your clients away. Thoughts?
Summary: Alcohol can be a bad thing (excess), or a good thing (moderation), depending on how you look at it.
Your better-than-expected is interesting. At the point BigCo Coder, your probably get above-average income already. Maybe we should learn a little modesty?
I'm really wondering whether this controversy was manufactured to bring attention to the book. The situation is a perfect storm of Streisand-effect-inducing terms: Army, Pentagon, DoD, Afghanistan, 9/11 Commission, redacted, book-burning, censorship, DIA, CIA, NSA, SOC, bronze-star medal recipient, black-ops team, Bush administration.
No, punting out that the author is not someone trying to spread secret info, but someone who wrote things that are embarrassing. If he'd had really classified Info in the book, he'd be facing charges.

This is all about embarrassment.
I think it is all about resources you can bring on the table. Bigger resources means bigger leverage. I think you need to bring business skills AND some money, the more money you have, the better.

I heard that the historical CEO of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, didn't know how to use Nintendo gaming machines. He almost never played any of his games. But he has the money and business acumen to hire guys like Gunpei Yokoi (engineer) and Shigeru Miyamoto(game designer).

I also heard that Intuit was started by Scott Cook, a marketing geek, who brought business skills and enough money to lure Tom Proulx. Scott Cook met Tom Proulx when he came to the Stanford campus, looking for a programmer.

So, if you have vision, business skills and are able to raise some money, it is possible.
Welcome Nike: Thanks for Coming (Part Two)
This piece is quite charming: "If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence." (Item 154)
Ask HN: What makes a thread go on the HN front page
Is it based on algorithm or manned by an editor?

I want to know because I use HN as my daily tech news feed, so I'm curious about the principles of what gets recommended.
No, no, and no.

There's a lot of problems with jQuery, the least of which is developer ignorance to the actual language.
The way to slap him is to beat him.
Oh, I see your point. However, "technology fetishism" is not a U.S. specific phenomenon, so making the conversation about American comes off as parochial, and is off putting.

FWIW, foresight is not a Japanese only quality, and to be frank, Japanese culture has its own technology obsessions that would seem weird to anyone who chooses to see Japan strictly through the "robot wife" lens ;-)
Vision, business skills & Money - Points taken! :)
Rate my WebApp: FAQoverflow (www.faqoverflow.com)
FAQoverflow is the coffee table book version of the Stack Overflow family of Q&A websites.

I wrote a Ruby Script that spiders the API to find the top 1000 questions on each of the 25+ sites, and which selects the best questions according to a quality heuristic before bucketing them into sections. The whole thing is published as a static site to S3/CloudFront and updated a couple of times a week. More technical details regarding implementation on the site itself.

The idea is to provide a nice, clean interface for browsing great answers to questions about everything.

http://www.faqoverflow.com/
Good point. It gives a common language, common metrics, etc.

I suppose my argument is, then, that good design shouldn't be collaborated on, but should instead originate in the mind of a single auteur, without the constraint of having to convince or even explain anything to others. As soon as you necessitate UX decisions be communicable and convincing, you begin suffer the weaknesses of design-by-committee.
What's to stop people from editing Wikipedia articles to shorten their click paths?
Parents: This is What Your Founder of A Son Does
clickable: http://www.faqoverflow.com
It's certainly an algorithm. If enough people vote for an article, it will go to the front page. It helps if those people have a lot of karma points.
Ask HN: Scrybe invite?
Sorry to ask such a trivial thing, but I'm researching online calendaring today, and Scrybe looks really good. Anybody here using the beta and could hook me up with an invite?
This site crashes safari on iPad.
“Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends; for this profound service to mankind it will generate about $1.5 billion in revenue this year by bombarding its 500 million members with ads.“

This statement seems very indicative of the author’s cluelessness or hypocrisy. $1.5 billion from 500 million members means that they bombard each member on average with $3 worth of ads every year. I’m bombarded with more ads when buying three issues of Newsweek.

Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends for $3 a year. That sounds like quite an impressive feat to me. There is much that is wrong with Facebook but I don’t think that they are making their money with ads is one of those things.
I don't disagree with your point in general, but I would point out that humidity can put a serious hurt on passive cooling options like that.
What I learned from the article: Keeping the trapped miners mentally inspired is at least as important as providing food and health care
> "Easy fortune" huh?

It's easy money if you're a patent troll, he may be thinking that everybody has it that easy.
No, it already has security functions in place. If you don't want an app to use the internet, and it has stated it will do so, DO NOT INSTALL IT.

If you really want to play a game that requires that access, and you think it shouldn't, contact the developer and tell them so.

The firewall would only be used by a few people who both pretend to be security-conscious and also install any app that suits their fancy. Yes, it's work to install the firewall that requires root access. Suck it up and just do it, if you want that feature. Don't saddle the rest of us with it.
Patrick IS a public figure.
That article discusses only things that Patrick chose to share about himself.
If you feel creepy about that article -- that means there is something wrong with your perception of sharp ideas, not with the article.
That read like two negatives to me.