skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only way out of this that I can see is for artists to sign onto digital-friendly (ie, small-time, currently) distributors. Which loses anything you'd get from signing with a big label. It's a nasty situation; with luck, the music labels will kill themselves off entirely, and something new can rise from the ashes. I doubt they'll actually embrace digital distribution for a minimum of several more years, which is murder to artists.
Thanks for looking that up. Looks like it's not terribly difficult to qualify.
Oh please.... we're going great work with millions invested in content and amazing results due to it.

type "how to play guitar" into google or youtube, and watch our videos.

... or check out our halo reach walkthrough
http://www.mahalo.com/halo-reach-walkthrough

we're making a lot of good content that is helping our 17m unique users (11m on mahalo.com and 6m on YouTube!) every month. The massive traffic to these pages is creating nice revenue that we are reinvesting 100% of into great content.

So, give it a look.... i think you'll find it solid.
So in your opinion, the idea of working is sort of like Pascal's Wager where you should only work hard, and build the best relationships you can just in case you get top dollar, and even then you didn't really deserve it-it was arbitarily given to you.

Otherwise, just be mediocre and be happy to be getting what you're getting?

That makes absolutely zero sense.
Cool, thanks. Best of luck to you on that valuation!
But why can't this change over a period of time as physcab has indicated (who by the way, works/worked for one startup leading the charge)? I believe it impossible for the industry to fail--there will always be people making music. So the big four are either going to have to get with the program (and probably significantly reduce their market cap), or get the hell out the way.

This is in someways analogous to what YC, super angels, et al. have done with venture capital. Just like ~$20,000 is about all you need to get a talented founding team started, musicians today can do things on the cheap just as well. The entire system no longer hinges on the $100M home-run in either case.

Everyones been focused on investing in the killer app that will bring the music industry back to equilibrium. The Spotify's and last.fm's will certainly play their part, but its a fundamental shift in capital structure that the industry needs. Making it as a musician is, never has been, nor ever will be easy. There's extremely talented people out there though that, given a little cash and a little support, have the drive and persistence to make a career for themselves. Sans record label.
Thanks, I'll definitely checkout that book :)
Telstra’s biggest rivals: Google, Apple, Facebook?
Having to manually shard your data seems like so much work when offerings like App Engine will take care of that for you. It seems like exactly the kind of thing that you shouldn't have to think about when you're trying to get a business off the ground.

I can see the lock-in concerns with AppEngine, but an AppEngine level of abstraction seems so much more appropriate than manually deploying/configuring an entire infrastructure of proxies, load balancers, web servers, etc. Especially when an error can take down your whole site, like in this example.
Small steps is exactly what I'm after but I guess in my mind, to keep going I need to convince myself I'm making progress
So this kind of annoys me. The idea that being able to write a compiler is sort of frivolous but what's really important is that someone can "light up a CMS instance." Really? There are far more jobs for those people? I suspect most compiler writers can probably figure out Sharepoint. I mean, come on.
Heh...that's one hell of a commercial support contract then. Should be interesting to read 10gen's own detailed post-mortem.
Why did we sell Dapper to Yahoo?
>We're seeing the very beginning of what it means to be able to go to war for free (both in terms of cost in lives, and, in practical terms, in literal price), and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

you're right about very beginning. The "to go to war for free" is available and applicable to both sides, and thus, after a couple of iterations would lead to cost escalation.
Remember the Stinger effect on the Soviet forces 20+ years ago in Afghanistan? The same way the next couple of steps are clearly visible:
1. Pakistanis buy Stingers(or likes)
2. USA start using stealth drones (google for SkunkWorks' one already being tested in Afghanistan)
3. Pakistanis buy small [mull cart/pickup truck mountable] radar/missile automated system like Phalanx or Kashtan CIWS
4. USA improve speed/stealth of the drones, increase the range and intelligence of Hellfire
...

As a result it is going to be more expensive and technologically intensive.
"but... MongoDB is web scale."

--- commenter
A resume is good but a portfolio of cool projects is way better. We are trying to hire here at Anybots (jobs@anybots.com, fyi) and all of our want adds say to include a portfolio of cool things you have build and we receive very few.

Make it easy on the employer to see how talented you are. Since cover letters are now always cover emails there is no excuse for not linking to a site that explains your previous projects with pictures and links.
I'm not sure how realistic your counter-example is. If I have two workers, one passionate about her job, the other disinterested and bored by it, is it really realistic to expect that the latter's output will never suffer because of their attitude compared to the former?

That would seem to fly in the face of our basic understanding of human psychology and intrinsic motivational factors. It's like the old canard about the "goodness" of a man who spends his life doing only good deeds while thinking only evil thoughts. Humans don't work like that.
I know this is a popular opinion here, but I couldn't disagree more. You're saying that it's good for everyone to try to learn to code. Far from it. Some people are just not cut out to be coders, they suck at it, they hate doing it, and they don't WANT to do it. More than half of my intro CS class was just like that, and they dropped out.

If you're a non-technical founder, and have money, it's perfectly ok for you to hire a developer or a team to implement your idea (full disclosure - I run a company that does that, link in profile) instead of learning how to program yourself. Here's a very good article by Derek Sivers on steps you could take to make that happen: http://sivers.org/how2hire
1. Well, Mike kicked me out of the TechCrunch50 conference. He nuked it--not me.

2. Sequoia is not peeved, they are more excited then ever with Mahalo and the amazing performance right now. We're really crushing it on all fronts including revenue, hiring, content creation and, yes, a really killer version 4.0 that will be out next year. It's not easy to build a top 200 site in under three years... in another three years we will be in the top 50!

3. I spend an hour or two a week on ThisWeekIN.com hosting my show, This Week in Startups. That show has resulted in about five of the last seven developers we hired. It is the ULTIMATE recruiting machine for Mahalo.

4. You might notice I wear a Mahalo logo playing poker on TV along with Full Tilt (which I need to wear since I'm a Full Tilt Red Pro... I'm sponsored, yes). I play maybe five hours a week.

5. 90% of my 100 "work" week is Mahalo. Literally.... I love what I do and I'm 1,000% dedicated to Mahalo.

I'm not distracted... far from it. I'm super focused.
you may find Lev Gumilev's book "Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere" interesting, in particular the fifth chapter, Drive in Ethnogenesis - http://bit.ly/cSnuEN
He's not being tried for refusing to hand over the password - he's being held for contempt of court or similar, which can (and does) go on indefinitely. He's free to leave any time as soon as he hands over his password.
>The kinetic energy of a non-rotating object of mass m traveling at a speed v is mv^2/2, provided v is much less than the speed of light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy
Yes, I got a bunch of people who send me invoices to do it through Freshbooks. But AFAIK, we're all using the free account ...
I strongly disagree. Learn code if you are interested, but what ill advice is that you have to learn code?! Consider your advice from a designer perspective, should founders/coders learn design because "worst case scenario, your future designer partner will respect you for trying, ...". The same goes for scaling, you should stop and learn how to scale if you're a front-end developer because the reasons you gave?
As would I, but doesn't that eliminate a lot of the convenience of leaving it up to Google, the cloud, etc? At that point, why not just set your music up on a RAID, and stream it from home?
I can tell you plenty of things I would do differently. But I probably couldn't think of them right off the bat.

For example in python I'd change how function references are passed around. Especially in regards to passing them around to children processes.
I've actually been thinking about this a lot (recently started commuting from the East Bay to San Mateo). So it's awesome that others are too. Personally, I did a back of the envelope calculation for speeds. Was trying to estimate the time improvements of 65mph over 55mph v. the likelihood of accident. Suffice it to say, you all can do the math.

But that's not why I comment. I was actually thinking of a startup idea re: driving and accidents. Specifically, a site attached to Google Maps, etc., where people can register comments about where and how they got involved in an accident. If there were a way to feed in police report data, that would be awesome too.

But like the San Mateo bridge. I can see it from my desk. And I can see when it gets slow, and sometimes I'll check sigalert and note that there's been an accident (it seems to me usually at the top of the bridge where it's kind of windy and the furthest left lane has like no shoulder). Or otherwise I've gotten to know where accidents occur on my commute.

So my point is that all the information should be readily available so that people can figure out what are the high risk locations of their commute or trip. I think if you had a simple enough interface that integrated with Google Maps, people would voluntarily start using it. To my knowledge, there doesn't exist such a service. Perhaps I'm overly cautious, but I'd use it.
I think this is a very common problem in any business. If I want to start a restaurant, and I'm a "business guy" I could maybe try to find a "chef" co-founder, which many people obviously do when they start restaurants, however if I know little to nothing about the culinary arts, food preparation, and what kind of cuisines matter to people in a specific area, my "skills" as a business person are of limited utility and give me no competitive advantage over the dozens of other restaurants in the area I'm trying to start one in.

This very same pattern is the same in many other industries, not just software. But I couldn't agree more. Know your domain knowledge.
Wow, people are kinda douche-bag-y. They're like, haha, you're really poor right now, that's hilarious and ALL YOUR FAULT. Funny, how people think they know everything about you after reading a single short post...
Refactoring is merely changing code without changing what it does. If you took a bunch of methods and combined them into one, that would also be refactoring.

Now, you may disagree with people on what constitutes "better code", but that's not a knock against the practice of refactoring.
"Your honour, seeing how important this password is, I stored it in the encrypted drive."
For another point of view:

http://head-nurse.blogspot.com/2009/05/fuck-passion.html
I have to wonder if email is almost faster these days than conventional websites. Of course I am going to TechCrunch once I hear on Twitter that something tech-related happened... But couldn't I have already gotten an email on my smartphone instantly?

Email is old and antiquated, but it is the closest thing bloggers have to push access to all their readers. I know my droid buzzes every time I get an email; it might be time for bloggers to take advantage of this.
You are on the money, Ryan. Email is extremely powerful and often overlooked by our community. I'm growing what it is essentially a list with http://anynewbooks.com, and loving every minute of it.

This was my epiphany: there are blogs I visited in the past that I really loved, but for some reason I haven't visited anymore (out of sight, out of mind). On the other hand, I still occasionally receive newsletters I signed up with 10 years ago, from sites I barely visited once.
I think Fried is sharp enough to identify talent and bullshit anyway, so he overcame the necessity of this advice through that and the fact that the above advice isn't entirely applicable to his case.
Moonlight isn't useless.

There was a goal (a while back) of getting Moonlight embedded in Firefox (on all platforms). The goal hasn't come true but think about that. A general purpose VM embedded right in the browser!

I have no doubt that Moonlight would be used if it was embedded within the browser. CIL is an open-specification, we already have many compilers that target it. We could run C#, Scala, Java, Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc on the client side.

But all we're stuck with is a JavaScript VM to use.
> "it's completely clean, completely safe, with friendly, helpful and quick civil servants, perfect order"

Shivers of "Brave New World" ran down my spine as I read this sentence. It's safe, clean, and orderly because it's incredibly conservative and repressive - culturally and politically. I mean come on, can you seriously buy that only a single person stepped forth to run for the highest office of the land? Or that a single party has 97.6% representation in parliament?

IMHO this is too high of a price to pay. This is a fine example of a place that has thrown away the heterogeneity of life, the celebration of differences and quirks, in exchange for strictly enforced harmony. No thanks - some things are worth the dirt and grime, the chaos of disagreement and protest.

You mentioned Hong Kong in another post - I'd much rather explore Hong Kong's system than Singapore's. It's dirtier, grimier, but much more human and IMHO real. It's free market almost to a fault, and is IMHO a pretty damn good example of libertarianism as a success rather than Singapore's story of centralized one-party rule.

Your idea of "well governed" seems to have an awful lot to do with lacking in things that ruffle feathers and make people uncomfortable. IMHO the mark of an enlightened society and people is its ability to integrate individualism and inevitable disagreements into the core of how its society functions - rather than seek to squash all semblance of it in exchange for artificial harmony.

[edit] I also find it somewhat distasteful that we harp on China for its human rights abuses, its repressive single-party rule, and its incredibly socially conservative policies... yet we give Singapore a free pass. I suppose all of the above is okay as long as quality of life is high, economy is good, and everything gleaming and spotlessly clean.
Strange but True: Helmets Attract Cars to Cyclists
VCs Offer Terms Most Angels Can't Match In Pulse Funding
I have a similar feeling toward my car's problems. I think it's the general issue of reproducibility that can cause such a feeling. You know the problem is there, but you're not sure of the cause, nor can you reproduce it reliably. Immediately, the issue becomes top priority because you don't know what to expect.
> there is this American guy who's helping people teach their kids and this American guy is a hero

And this is a far better way to wage war - to understand the enemy is not Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The enemy is ignorance, fear, superstition and religion. A dozen schools costs less to build than a drone. A hospital costs much less to operate than a military base. The friendship and understanding you earn by doing these things is much more valuable to finding terrorists than the best airborne imaging sensor. When nobody listens to them, you can also save a Hellfire or two.
I have the book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code"[0], and it's pretty much just "Put things under test, then change them.". Still a useful read, though, if you find yourself working in that sort of thing often (I do).

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea...
Personally, I recommend http://railstutorial.org/

That moved me further along the path to understanding Rails than any of the other books or tutorials I tried. Still not there yet, but closer.
cluttered designs == longer time on site, more clicks, more page views.
Actually, I think that it wasn't even all that technical. They took their time to explain what shards are, etc, so their intended audience was still power users, at best. Not saying it's good or bad, just saying how I felt when I read the post.
From my perspective, when I go on Yelp I'd like to see latest/relevant reviews, and search. The other stuff isn't really that important to me.
I worked for this large company, who had just bought another smaller company. Wisely, the smaller companies IT department had moved everyone onto Firefox, but since they had to have access to our new system, which was IE, we had to tell them to move back to painsville.

It broke our hearts, the IT people, and the users. The new system will work on all browsers (except IE6), whenever that will be out.
wait. what!?!?
Thanks for group-thinking the downvoting... So I guess I need to explain why I said it's bad advice.

First of all, credentials: I have been covered on many of the sites listed including techcrunch, venturebeat, killerstartups, etc... I know first-hand the kind of response each site generates.

Second: I forced journalists from VentureBeat, the San Jose Mercury News and Wired to spend 30 minutes discussing the best approach to get coverage, in public. I linked to that video. If you don't have time to listen to how the press wants you to pitch to them, don't be surprised that nothing is working out for you :-)

Third. The answer is relationship. Build relationships with the various media & influencers. Not by buying them drinks, but by understanding who they are, what they write about, and why. You surely hate spam. They do to. And using such a list of 100 sites to send the same announcement is spam in their book. I thought you should know.
The farthest spot from a McDonald's in the U.S.
And it's a response to this full document:

http://regmedia.co.uk/2010/08/13/oracle_complaint_against_go...
Do you have a specific part of that, that you take exception with?

Replies like "wait. what?!" don't actually contribute to the conversation on YC.News and are functionally, pollution.

Also don't use downvotes as an "I disagree" weapon, but rather a way to cull commentary that isn't contributing to the exchange.

Much like your own, actually.

Confer with http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the "In Comments" section for more info if you haven't reviewed it already.

Thank you.
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute —  Technology Start-Up Boot Camp
I'm unable to come up with any reference to a 3 day outage regarding Oracle and Ebay in 1999. Can you provide more info on this - I'm very interested to see what happened.

Edit: I found this reference to the 22hr outage that occurred, and I remember this outage, but I don't ever remember it being a 3 days outage.

http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/137251/Cost-...
It's wrong.

And it's not a paywall, it's a registration wall, and is easily bypassed using google.
Hmm my relevant theory is a little sketchy, but there are FSMs that aren't modellable by regex right? (e.g. Nested tags).
ummm, you can't use observational data to draw conclusions like these. period. you can use them to hint at causations and effects of changes, but you absolutely cannot make conclusive statements like those made in this paper. REALLY bad science.
NY Times seems to hit you with a pay wall after you have read a few articals. Delete your nytimes cookies and hit the link again.
I'd never seen that before... will put it on the of things to checkout, thanks
So the reason is to
1. Create a prototype, and
2. Get respect from developers.

Re: #2—Let's reverse this, specifically for marketing.

Developers (and pretty much anyone) who know a little marketing can be harder to work with than those that believe they don't understand it. They over-rely on cliches and stereotypes without realizing it.

And what about the scenario where you end up with a person with limited technical knowledge micro-managing a tech worker? Not a good thing.

Re: #1—I find creating mock-ups shows functionality more accurately and in much, much less time than creating working prototypes.

I'm a business/marketing guy who loves coding. I usually avoid it because it's incredibly time-consuming to do even half-assed well, and you can re-use little of what you learn when it's just a one-off experience to creating something to show. (I realize that if you are always learning and creating things, your experience builds in more reusable ways.)
By the same logic, if the authorities had asked him one hundred times in the first interview for his password, and he'd refused one hundred times, then he could be charged with one hundred counts of the offence and put away for 30 years.

The courts aren't run by robots. If it's substantially the same instance of the offence, he couldn't be tried again.
It's not manual sharding. You specify a key a MongoDB is supposed to handle everything for you. There are manual operations you can perform if you want (like moving data or splitting) but normally you'd let Mongo handle it all.
"What if a shard is down or slow and I do a query? If a shard is down, the query will return an error. If a shard is responding slowly, mongos will wait for it. You won't get partial results."

an approach to CAP that chooses consistency over availability. I wonder why as it isn't a bank and they could have chosen the availability instead.
It seems like the pervailing thought is that developers are not the same as the idea guys, but I can't for the life of me understand why not.

marknutter is 100% correct. I can't imagine founding a startup that had a non-developer "idea guy."
Ask the nice lady who posted it on her blog?
It's about time this happened. In the UK we have a law called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which allows access to certain data held by ISPs or can compel people in certain cases to not only hand over encryption material but prohibits them from acknowledging that they had been charged under such a law.

As you can imagine, that last bit results in some very complicated situations. The laws governing paedophilia are quite different, with paedophiles having to sign a sex offenders register.

In the case of a sex offender being caught, it's easier to just take the RIPA sentence instead. This is what appears to have happened. I hope the guy's password is long enough otherwise regardless of his crime he's in for a world of pain.
What you can get with 120 million US Dollars.
> linear

I don't think that word means what you think it means
The 32% that said they didn’t make a profit from the program reported that customers rarely bought more than the coupon deal and few returned to the business at a later date.

----------------------------------------------------

Does that remind anyone else of digg traffic?
It's not analogous to testifying against yourself (Fifth Amendment). It's analogous to forcing you to give them a key to a door so they can search your basement.
Data visualization: the bird-worm matrix
Your comment is 10 times more intelligent and thought provoking than the article. Thank you.

It really would be interesting to see a more legitimate study on this topic.