skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To have new founding fathers, you need to found a new country. Although I admire the Free State Project (http://freestateproject.org/), and I find the concept of charter cities fascinating (see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-poli... or Scott Adam's previous post http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/startup_country/) I think it will be extremely difficult to do any serious experimentation with new forms of government on any land already claimed by an existing government. I do not think that existing governments will permit any truly radical experiments on their territory, they would be too afraid of spawning something that would change the status quo and push them out of power.

I think that our best hope for innovation in government is to open a new frontier, perhaps in the ocean with projects like seasteading (http://seasteading.org/) or in outer space. We need people to found new nations in places that are free from any existing form of government (and don't have existing residents).

I think it is much more likely that we will be able to enact real change in America when there is a better example that is actually functioning in the real world. If we didn't have the example of the United States, would democracy (or democratic republics) be nearly as widespread in the world today? I suspect most of us would still be living under monarchies.
Here is their most popular graphene paper (open access in Nature Materials)

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v6/n3/full/nmat1849.html
I don't think the article is actually saying that. It's saying we need to be cognizant of why we make decisions and avoid situations.

We are controlled by fear a lot more than we realise (or at least, that's what i got out of the article).
Cubase64 - 11 real-time audio effects with a computer from 1982
Cubase64 White Paper [PDF] http://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Cubase64_White_Paper_by_Pex_Mahoney_Tufvesson.pdf
really, it puts you off that people who exchange time for money would like to get the most money possible for their time?
Good point, I didn't think of that. Obviously I'm not a master criminal.
Android most popular OS amongst recent purchases
Many commercial databases are good and work very well. The difference is when you are stuck with a small ridiculous problem and are cash-strapped and in a hurry.

Google searches turn up far many more results for solutions to OS software problems than for commercial products. Also forums, knowledge bases and communities are not that convenient to access for many of the "enterprise" vendors. Finally there is the issue of the eventual price being "call-us" for many commercial solutions (although it seems like it is not the case here with DB2).

Open source products often just better fit the dynamics I'm in when starting something.
Would it be possible to have one password for accessing the system, and a separate password for permanently wiping sensitive parts (in the background, even)? What would be the legal implications (other than the obvious obstruction of justice charges if the authorities catch on)?
The basic issue here is that in the US, iphone is only available with 1 carrier - AT&T -- which has only 30% or less of the wireless customers in the country. Since the reach is so low, iphone has to have a low market share. Once it is available with all carriers in the US, then it will be an even playing field. Even then ofcourse, it will have to compete against 20+ android phones, atleast it will have the opportunity to.
In Europe, where iphone is generally available with more than 1 carrier, it's rate of getting new subscribers is still 3 times android! See:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/stats/1733041/apple-google-cont...
So you'd be okay with a moldy green look?

Hmm. Women who want to stay slim + algae. Maybe we can finally get real live Orion slave girls… (Not actual slaves. Not actually from Orion. No refund possible. Ask your dermatologist, divorce lawyer and Michael Okuda for side effects)
This is the kind of post that has been being skeptical. The post is heavily slanted toward Swish with little details on the actual case. After reading the post you are suppose to feel sorry for Jason and small business (which is exactly why it is on the domain prosmallbusiness.org).

As tptacek spelled out...there is a whole different side Jason didn't even bother going into. Be careful when reading articles this one sided.
Type Rendering on the Web
"Swish Marketing Inc., headquartered in Palo Alto, California, is a leading and fast growing marketer of prime and sub-prime financial services. Swish Marketing serves more than 1.5 million customers monthly, introducing a wide array of consumer financial products."

How do they serve those customers? On a platter?

Here are their top advertisers:

http://www.cashnetusa.com/

http://www.acecashexpress.com/
Sun Co-Founder Uses Capitalism to Help Poor
iTunes is a great personal media database, and a terrible everything else. The former is enough to make me willing to put up with the latter.
London and Wales? Was this some Ken Livingstone law? :P
> disposing of evidence

Authorities are very aware of this. One reason for "raids", no knock warrants, arresting you on the road, at work, away from home, etc.
Pointing to China for excellent government is highly questionable. Singapore, however, is probably the best run country on the planet.
It might be because the example is somewhat contrived, but am I the only one who sometimes finds refactored code harder to understand or change? The final version is "cleaner", but it also is twice as long, which means you have more code you need to understand, and more text to sift through to find what you need.

I often find the "many little functions" working against me. An abstraction is beneficial if your task doesn't require seeing through that abstraction - but otherwise it can be harmful. If I need to change something core to movement, flap() and drop() aren't doing me any favors.

Unless theres other glaring issues, if a function is already less than 30 lines of code, I usually find a comment nicer than refactoring to yet another method.
Sounds like Gentoo's system to me. (And, of course, my BSD-loving friends hold Gentoo to be the most bearable Linux.)
It depends, apparently mysql for example poses real problems under FreeBSD under heavy load.

edit : to make it clear, Perlmonks.org for instance have performance problems because their host (which is also mine, BTW), pair.com, hosts the (heavy) mysql database backing the site under FreeBSD.
...or maybe the kid thinks that "mama" means "phone?"

Seems like the most obvious answer.
More people should learn from this attitude. This is what I say every time I have an idea, and I later found out someone already built a startup around it (happens quite a lot, since I spend half my waking time thinking of startups).
As for support, BSD has over 30 years of community expertise built up, Linux about half that.
I also would not pay anybody to store the music. It's just cheaper to buy two external hard drives and keep them in sync.

As time goes by I have noticed that most of what I have downloaded is becoming extra baggage to log a round. I keep going back to the same set of things to listen as nothing really good seems to coming out in the genre I like (ambient, electronica).

In short, I perceive digital music as the money pit not that's not worth it.
There may be some truth to the "preventing the next google argument," but I have two opinions:

1) From an entrepreneurship standpoint, who cares. $50 million is a lot of cash. When Mint was sold, the VC's were critical about selling too quickly, but that $170 MM was a lot of money. Also, some of these successful small sells will definitely lead to more super angel activity, which is alright by me.

2) The next Google will appear. To assume that powerful, rapidly growing companies will be less likely to emerge is silly. Ego, or boldness, or vision, or some other human emotion will continue to instill a drive and eagerness within founders to grow and expand. They may have 2-3 or more small company sales before they do it, but that intrinsic drive to build will still remain. If anything, the 2-3 or more small sales may result in the "new google" being built better than a first time startup, as the first small companies were where the painful learning occurred.
Having studied economics and programming, I think that programming is advantaged. Econ taught me some principles that serve me well in understanding incentives and behaviors, but programming teaches a way of organizing thought which is more broadly useful.

Thinking about what I'd studied in public school, I wish I could trade hours spent learning rules of grammar for hours spent learning how to create and organize symbolic logic.
Stooping to Conquer
I would tend to agree with you about China, but Singapore? Citation needed.
A friend of mine (who used to work for the SEC) said that the government was like a mountain. It rarely moved, but when it did, there was no stopping it.
The data schematics will be implemented via the OStatus protocols. CouchDB's role is to comply with OStatus and push and pull data when necessary.

As Dale stated, this is a good fit for Couch's replication mechanisms. Protocols like PubSubHubbub are ripe for porting over to Couch.
The Article said $25 a year
Or vice versa: It's plant DNA that has infected an animal and uses it for reproduction. The algae's chloroplasts haven't figured out how to survive the step into the next generation, yet, though.
The hp garage is behind a gate at a private house. You can't get close to it.

The Shockley building is near my house. It is now a fiesta market, which makes me sad. I hope someday to buy it and turn it into anything other than a fruit stand.
In light of what tptacek posted, "unbelievable" is an excellent description.
Ask HN: Is Instapaper's 'send to kindle' broken for everyone?
It's not working for me, but I wonder if it is something on my end.

I sent an email to Marco a few days ago, but haven't heard back from him - so maybe there is something broken and he just hasn't gotten a chance to fix it?
Stop thinking of RAM/disk/etc as storage systems and start thinking of them as retrieval systems. Then stop thinking of your data costs as $/GB (storage systems) and start thinking of your data costs as $/(IO/sec/GB) (retrieval systems).

I know everyone these days seems to think that removing a structured query language parser from a database makes every other problem go away, but realistically RDBMS vendors spend millions of dollars trying to fix this exact problem. It's called cache invalidation and it's a hard problem to solve in a general way.

SSDs are just a midpoint in the performance trade-off game.

The OS is the worst at this, DBs are somewhat better, but realistically if you want serious performance out of your application you need to make those choices for yourself, and use all strategies where appropriate RAM for records you need instantly (memcache,redis,mongodb) SSDs for the stuff you can't afford to keep on an SSD And hard drives for stuff you can't afford to keep on an SSD.

What you need to think about is the value of your data in dollars per IO/sec per DB ($/(IO/sec/GB), if the amortized value of that data exceeds the amortized cost of the retrieval system then buy it. Focus on increasing the value of your data, not reducing the costs of it's retrieval as that will drop by 1/2 every 18 months anyway. Alternatively, change your business model so you are going short on IO/sec/GB, (eg. pre-sell storage so that when you need to buy it you can do so cheaply)

What I'm trying to say is that the value of a picture is worth more to Flickr than it is to Facebook, thus Flickr will have an easier time building it's retrieval systems than Facebook because of the costs involved. That's why Facebook had to write their own filesystem for retrieving pictures.

I'd bet that any commercial DB will blow rings around redis/mongo/etc if you had your persistent store as a RAM disk and used hard drives for the transaction log. The cost of a SQL Server license is negligible if you're going to buy a server with $200,000 worth of RAM in it. If your data is valuable enough you could just keep everything in SRAM (L1/L2 cache) and buy processors just for the cache.
> Pointing to China for excellent government is highly questionable.

Looking only at their pragmatic decision-making and not at their moral stances, can you substantially back this up?
I don't know the details of Pandora's finances, but present profits tend not to be the whole story here. Many if not most of the startups that have deals with labels also have large debts to them. Plus the labels can change their terms. So you pretty much live on sufferance, for as long as you're useful to them.
Thanks! I expanded on that in an article:

http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do
Not wanting to sound too negative, but sometimes it's better not to have a job at a kcik-ass startup.

The author also commented/wrote in the past that he endured burn out multiple times and is constantly working >10 hours a day.
From Sketch to Website (Hint: Skip Photoshop)
The fact of the matter is that OS caches are shitty for anything other than what the OS does.

This is why databases have bufferpools. The database knows best what information stored in memory is useful. Look at the cache hit from a database bufferpool vs. an OS cache. It's abysmal. The OS makes the assumption that, if I got this page then I'll probably want the next 5 pages and pulls em in. That's great for sequential access because it's likely that you WILL need those pages but for random access it's horrid.

And that's just disk. In the case of redis, the last thing you want is the OS determining what data is needed but isn't. At worse case, the data you need is spread across multiple pages and you can't really swap anything out. Systems that implement thier own memory management on top of the OS are typically ones that know the hot spots in the data in the first place.
Don't think the field is altogether random. They do know orbital mechanics and math.

But, I came here to say that landing looked pretty dang hard.
From my personal experience:

The "business" person should learn a little about computability and feasibility. You don't necessarily have to understand the theory and mathematics of it all but should have a sense of when a problem is intractable. I had one startup try to recruit me as an intern to build an AI that would pass the Turing test and generate their marketing content for them. I had another "business guy" push strongly for an idea based on AI that could predict the future, then quit when it finally got through to him that I was not going to spend my life researching an intractable problem. I've had marketing people try to explain that solving the traveling salesman problem is an easy opportunity.

I'd like to see a business person who really understands market research, especially pricing. Make sure you're finding stuff that the programmer wouldn't have found himself. Avoid making premature statements of strategy - many quantitative people will (rightly) see this as a weak attempt to appear decisive.

Legal and accounting are great things to take off the programmers' shoulders.

Let the engineers handle at least half of the "idea" phase. Let them take some support as well, since they'll be able to answer technical support queries best. Don't jump to grab "all the networking" unless you've been asked to - programmers who found companies often rebel against being shoved into the backroom.
The problem there is that any evidence should have been copied and should be accessed from a read-only media at that point.
The story of penicillin is similar, e.g. it required finding a mold strain that would grow throughout a culture, not just on the surface. That came from a rotten melon a scientist noticed on a street grocer's cart, and it took some convincing by the former for the latter to sell him the "bad" fruit.
Ah, cryptome. The Wikileaks long before wikileaks existed.
Court Refuses Preliminary Injunction In Edge Trademark Case
Technical recruiters may be clueless, but this is hardly evidence. This is spam. I got a similar e-mail today saying they had viewed my "portfolio." Well I'm not sure how they did that since I don't have any work under the e-mail address they sent it to.
Isn't this the wrong way to go about securing a system? It's better than nothing I suppose, but black hats aren't going to tell you when they've found a vulnerability. On the flip side, there's no guarantee that the right set of folks are looking at the system (thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case here).
Which building would they elect as the target. It's not like the enemy is walking around in broad daylight under view of the eye n the sky.

And it's not just an expression it's how every successful campaign has been one. If it was possible to wage an air only war. Don't you think the US, with he largest airforce in the world would be fully invested?
Clarification: it's impossible to determine if a hidden volume exists in a TrueCrypt volume. It is trivial to determine whether a given password unlocks the main, hidden, or neither volume.
My little project maybe useful for other Freelancers
Interesting. I have 2 questions:

1. What does the business person do in the weeks/months before there is anything to sell?

2. How do you teach people to sell? Judging by the stories coming out of the major incubators pitching to investors is just a matter of iterating on your elevator speech and answering questions until you have sharpened your vision to a sentence or two. How do you formalize that process in a classroom setting?
> Of course, long term Excel is a toy [...]

I too, would like this to be true. However, the unfortunate truth is that the main market for windows-based HPC is... monstrous, clusterized excel computations.
One simple way to be able to throw more CPU at image compression/decompression, and thus save space, could be to use bigger blocks than 8x8.
Ha, only because that's what he could pay.

The order imposes a $5.5 million judgment against the settling defendants, which is suspended upon payment of $52,000 by the debit card company’s owner. The full judgment will become due immediately if the settling defendants are found to have misrepresented their financial condition. The order also contains record-keeping and reporting provisions to monitor compliance.
Infographic of who's suing who in mobile
It wouldn't be the first time I was a legitimate anomaly.

The tests seemed solid (as part of leadership courses), but I didn't investigate beyond that. I also took potentially less solid online ones that came out with similar results.

We're talking about a period of 10 years btw, from when I was 16 to 26 (now 31). As I said in a comment response on the blog, in retrospect I can see the changes over time and see seeds of them at the original time.
That's exactly how those customers are served. There haven't been that many the FTC has actually gone after though.

Another example: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2007/08/edebit.shtm

Then you've got CPA Empire which is run by Scott Richter a notorious spammer. Their offers are extremely spammy/scammy. There are a lot of people making millions of dollars (well, not as much now) by feeding on the sub prime market. This was especially prevalent during the housing bubble as you could sell mortgage leads for $40-100 each. Auto loan and payday loan leads are/were also extremely profitable for affiliate marketing companies.

As those sources of revenue dried up the companies that were still around switched to recurring revenue models where they'd sell crappy products on free-trials and then bill the consumer the full price for a couple of months worth of the product before they had a reasonable time to cancel the subscription.

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/08/acaicolon.shtm

Facebook and a few other places stopped allowing advertising for those products and the merchant account providers stopped handing out "high risk" accounts like candy so much of that revenue has dried up as well. Not sure what the latest scam is. If you dig into it though you'll find that a lot of these offers are run by the same people. One company goes under and they just come back out with a new name and scam six months later.
I work a lot by choice. And getting burnt out was a problem of learning to use my time effectively. Now that I have more self-discipline and force myself to take breaks on a regular schedule (and not work when I'm not feeling it), I don't burn out anymore.
Sarah specifically notes "This is not a zero-sum game. Both waves will find funding," so she agrees with you (despite the headline).

I think this is worth talking about though, since Thiel has signaled that Founder's Fund is transitioning to "hard tech" like space/robotics/ai/biotech. I agree with Thiel's assertion that the internet is no longer a contrarian investment.
I remember watching a video of a talk you gave at startup school 08 and near the end during the Q&A, you said something to the effect of "we fund what people apply with, which usually ends up being some form of facebook or something to do with independent music".

It seems that if the labels have positioned themselves as unfavorable toward startups to the point of making an anti-platform, that there would be demand for an independent, label-free music buying/selling experience for startups to work with. Yet the only thing I think of that comes close was the old version of thesixtyone's marketplace.

Are the startups that apply to ycombinator in this area trying to build something outside of the current music ecosystem and failing (and why)? Or is everyone just trying to work with the current system and finding that it isn't feasible/profitable?

The talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc
play eveonline in home? ;)
I never know how to get any of my ideas out there. So I thought this time I'd just put a link out there, maybe some of you here are Freelancers on freelancer.com or scriptlance.com, or any of the other communities I might add or joi in the future.

Any feedback, if even to say your site sucks would be greatly appreciated.
There is an paypal library for donations (the link is hidden in the linked version) which uses this permission. More info here: https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-2532

Other than that we don't use it in any way but I understand it might rise concern.
What insight would a person with such experience have brought to this case, in your view?
TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2010
Not just kick-ass programmers. I have consulted with a lady who ran a small, posh web-shop; she met me at the door and hushed me to tip-toe past a bunch of interns fiddling with photoshop and drupal. Those kids got more respect working for school credit, doing nothing but theming, than most of us get in higher positions with other companies. She also made it a point to "take them to the ATM" on Fridays as well.

OTOH, if you have never seen competent interns with a modicum of responsibility, well, they're a sight to behold. They subcontract for bigger shops and get no credit for their work, but their stuff looks like shrink-wrapped orgasms dipped in pixel-perfect honey. Really awesome crew.
It highlights the dangers of the cloud as people move more and more "mission-critical" applications to the Web.
Time lost by driving fast