skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, exactly right, except with two caveats.

Doubling the valuations means you get to make half the number of bets--thereby halving your expected returns--except...

(1) ...if the price of finding a given start-up to invest in is significant. You've already paid the search cost before you decide on the valuation.

Extreme example: It costs $100 to find each start-up, and you are arguing over a valuation of $1 or $2. Paying $1 instead of $2 won't let save you enough cash to find another start-up.

(2)...if the market cannot be approximated as infinite because there are only a couple of Googles. In other words, when valuations drop to half, you can only double the number of bets if there are other similar bets to be made.

So when Paul Graham says

>Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big successes, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked than how much you paid for them?

He's either mistaken or (more likely) he's implicitly suggesting that one or both of the above factors are very strong. But if so, why not be explicit about it in his original piece?
PL/SQL is an awful language to work with. What's up with having to declare variables before using them? Does it not even have multi-pass compilation?! And it works only with Oracle, which causes lock-in I'd rather avoid.

I'd rather create a service layer on top of my DB and access it through that. Then I have more control over logging, managing access, pubsub, etc.
Their brand new phone is of course using the most stable browser they have, and their brand new browser supporting HTML5 is of course not the most stable browser they have.

In a perfect world they would have shipped the phone with WebKit, but we all know that Microsoft is not going to do that (I'd love to be proven wrong).
Silverlight + "Intranet" is always a good combo. I'd say a better replacement for smart-client apps.
English is currently hot, just as e.g. French was before it, but I'd expect that to start changing within the next, say 20 years. I'd expect the US to lose more and more relevance while China is gaining. Something could screw that up, you can never predict the future with any accuracy but I would give these events a higher probability than English becoming the global language.
They also bring in results from codeproject.com. This definitely makes MSDN search a first stop for tech-related info. No more weeding out experts-exchange or software.informer results from my Google search.

I'm curious about the weighting they give for different sites. Some search terms don't bring in results from StackOverflow like I thought they would.
ok i'll bite ... the y axis starts at 2.6, not 0, which visually exaggerates the differences. regardless of the merits of this analysis, this graph is disingenuous
We use it as well. No problems to date. Its pretty great.
Cool post and great that he backed up his argument with data.

My only beef with this article is that it does not follow logically that "bimodal" returns means that you want to get in every deal. That's the "throwing good money after bad" flaw that leads to addictions to video poker and the lottery.
I won't argue with you there. I've blown my $$ on mobile ads already and don't intend to do it again.

Ads need captchas. If an ad is clicked, it should popup a message that says, what's 2+2 or something. If I answer that, then I'm through, and THEN the advertiser pays.

..... pipe. dream.

Hey, anyone interested in creating a mobile ad network startup that caters to advertisers so when their ads are clicked, a captcha pops up, and if the captcha is answered, only then the advertiser pays?

As an advertiser, this would be interesting to me.
This is smart competitive positioning by Microsoft. Microsoft has been burned in the past for not embracing standards early and clearly wants to be on the right path from the outset. The difference this time around is that HTML5 also presents itself as a competitive option to the proprietary iOS and Flash platforms, to which Microsoft offers no significant or competitive alternative.
I don't get why you were downvoted, as this is so true. I'd rather throw hardware at a problem, than having to get developers to work on a rewrite on the database level. It's cheaper, easier, and totally not risky in comparison.

I've always seen databases as an index storage layer and thought that "outsourcing" the apps job to the database while convenient in a lot of cases, are hell to maintain at scale.
Hmm, I didn't know that the comps worked out that way; I always assumed that the value of the comp wound up less than your expected losses even with optimal strategy. Nice to know.

Still, it's a lot easier to remember to pay a bill on time every month than it is to play optimal-strategy blackjack for hours with no mistakes.

The analogy holds, but it's not all that good an analogy since there's a severe difference in the difficulty and the risk/reward ratio. Some things are better explained in their own terms than via an analogy.
Pivoting the Microsoft ecosystem is like trying to shove the Indian subcontinent a foot to the left.

On the plus side, continents may not move very quickly or in the precise direction that one might desire, but they do move.
Weekend Project: Analyze Your Network with Wireshark
As a rationalist might point out, you can not go into a problem unbiased. You must make some hypotheses before you can test them; your initial hypothesis space can not be the space of all possible hypotheses or you can not get anywhere. "Shut up and calculate" works for the final part of the problem, but you need your "intuition" to get to the part where you know what to shut up and calculate about.
Google TV Review
Go (via the online system at http://golang.org/)

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println(.1+.2)
}

0.3
If you claim to be an expert, it's reasonable for the interviewer to pass on you if he doesn't think you are an expert. This is a great way of saying you have some familiarity without the interviewer ever interpreting it as you think you're an expert. It could provide a lot of value in that way -- if someone only claims to have a '4' for Python, I probably won't expect them to know that you shouldn't put [] as a default value for a kwarg.
I agree without reservation that Apple is accountable for this. They choose their employees, they establish policies, they train them, they supervise them. I was only quibbling about the word "endorse."

More importantly, Apple extracts 30% of the sales of this garbage. It appears somewhere on an Apple web site. Even if Apple had a policy of allowing any app to appear on their store I would still hold them accountable for reselling this kind of thing and having it appear under their name on the App Store.

Their guidelines are not on a public server, however Gruber quoted the guidelines last month:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/app_store_guidelines

We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

And:

Any app that is defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited, or likely to place the targeted individual or group in harms way will be rejected.

And if neither of those apply:

This is a living document, and new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your app will trigger this.

I think we're in violent agreement that this app has to go, and go swiftly.
What do you mean by "Chinese"? There are thousands of what are called "dialects" but in reality they are totally different languages with different grammars and so on. They do share a common script but that doesn't tell much about the spoken language (since it applies to all of them afaik).
Yes, I have never seen anyone ignore someone else.
Again: What do you expect people to do about this? Stop using Facebook while sipping on a latte?
I went to Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. It's a liberal arts college with about 2,000 students. They explain to all the incoming freshmen (and their parents!) that they don't do grade inflation. An average student is a "C" student. The bookstore sells t-shirts with "C+ Better than Average!"
Or he is her husband.
Powershell:

PS C:\> 0.1 + 0.2
0.3
No. The event being bimodal only implies that the probability is centered around two values, not that p =1 or p = 0 for those values. For example, take a biased coin that turns up head once in a million. This is bimodal with p(head) = 10^-6.

PG's argument appears to be that the error in your estimate of p is almost always larger than the value of p and one should invest as long as 2*p is also within the estimation error.
We're hiring a business analyst
Writing cross-browser "desktop" html/javascript is very painful right now. The mobile world is a beautiful playground because IE isn't a serious player. Now if Microsoft would adopt WebKit for its mobile browsing, then I'd eat my hat.
As long as your users don't want to use most mobile devices. I'd much rather put out HTML5 apps where possible... intranet apps in particular seem to tend to live for longer than you ever thought possible. But, yeah, it's definitely nice for certain scenarios.
Look at the answers people give in the search. It doesn't help that every time someone asks this they get a link to something like this: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html

I'm surprised someone hasn't translated it into Klingon or Sanskrit yet.

It's pure snobbery that makes people leave responses like this. This document falls into the further reading for enthusiasts category. Nobody should be linking to it as an introductory answer to the question. At least not if they want people to learn and stop asking the question eventually.
A Cloud of My Own -- save your music online
My friend wrote this site to store your mp3 files in the cloud and access them from anywhere. He built the site and Air App to upload your music. Membership is free for now while he goes through beta.
> One group is in charge, they do a pretty good job, and everyone likes them.

That doesn't sound like any government I've ever heard of. I guess my concern is, what if they don't keep doing a good job? Like let's say they get corrupt and slovenly like every other long-running institution. It doesn't seem like there's any way to remove them.

It reminds me of a line from an old Dave Foley sketch. "In Canada we are ruled by a small boy with supernatural powers. (menacingly) Of whom we are all very fond."
Mount Everest now have Internet | Speechyourm1nd
I am currently bootstrapping a startup (http://www.wellhubstudios.com) while working at another startup and have a 1 year old with another child on the way.
Couple tips that I picked up along the way:

1. Patience. Building a company is a time-intensive process that can be frustrating when family is demanding a lot of your time. Just focus on the goal and slowly pick away at your giant todo list for launch.

2. Its Good enough. Sometimes it seems like things are not moving forward or moving forward at a glacial pace. At these times I try to switch gears and say to myself "whats here is good enough for V1".

3. Time Management. I work 8-5 at my job. Come home and hang out with the family from 5-10. Then work on my startup from 10-1 pretty much every night. This takes both discipline and the ability to handle being a bit sleepy.
>There is no one language. There cannot be one.

Especially when you consider that language isn't just spoken words. It's a whole way of thinking. A big part of the culture itself. That's not going to just die off because English speakers are too lazy to learn any other languages.
In contrast to the typical "outrage" story, it appears that the people complaining here are actually in the affected community. Good on 'em for making a noise.
thanks, added
Sparkup: Write HTML in a CSS-like syntax
The app that Democrats are using to get out the vote
That's why Windows Phone 7 doesn't support HTML5?

Seriously, Ballmer is never clear in interviews.
If you double the valuations, the # of bets halve. This affects your likelyhood of getting ANY wins.

I would expect this is only true if one "must" have a certain percentage of a startup. It makes some amount of sense for traditional VCs who insist on taking a board seat, but I though this was a differentiating characteristic of angels.
Extra syntactic sugar for Objective C
sosuke used cocos2d game engine which has native mac support. Apps would be way more work to port it seems.
One more reason to climb Mount Everest: 3G service
While Apple hasn't announced anything yet, I have to think that a lot of iOS APIs are going to show up in Lion to make it easier because, you're right, it's very non-trivial now. I mean, I'd rather port a UIKit app to AppKit than a Windows Forms app. But there are a lot more differences than there have to be.
Upvote. This is precisely analogous to the following "brick-and-mortar" situation:

You notice that some folks in your town aren't locking the doors of their houses when they leave. So you go to each of those houses (when they're not there), walk in the front door, and tack a note to the first wall you encounter, telling them that they really ought to lock their doors.

The next day you go back and check their locks. For those that are still unlock, you go into their bedroom and mess up their sheets (being careful not to look around too much lest you notice some "marital aids", since you're not that kind of guy), so they can see that someone's really coming into their house.

It's pretty clear that you've violated any number of laws, morals, and societal values in the physical world. Why, in the virtual world, do you think that in doing so you're a white knight?
Why don't you get rid of the fault-tolerance part in a filesystem system (remove recovery, remove concurrency control). You are not too far away from interacting directly with harddrives' firmwares.

SQL (and RDBMS) is good for three things:

- The relational model can model the nature of our data well.

- Transaction control, recovery, etc are notoriously hard to implement. Most people (I bet 99.99% of the programmers) would fail to design these systems. RDBMS takes care of these for you.

- Physical data independence: The declarative nature of SQL enables you to specify what data you want, rather than how you want them. The optimizer picks a logical and physical execution plan (that doesn't suck) for you. The same query from the 70s running on IBM mainframes can still be running today on say 1000 Amazon EC2 nodes, although the underlying computer and storage architecture is poles apart. (There are political reasons why this is not as true as it should be, but that's another story.)

Now of course, the features are double-edged swords. Some engineers dislike RDBMSes because they don't understand what is going on in the system. If you are Google, you have the engineering power and the business needs to design systems that precisely tailor to the nature of your data.
not all graph should start at 0. In this case that might be a good idea but if your data is all above 5000 and moves a couple points, you probably don't want to show 0 because it will be hard to see what is happening. A one point change might be very significant.
I got a little bit annoyed with the wordiness of some standard Objective C operations, so I put together this preprocessor and library to make things a little bit easier.
The article isn't clear, but it sounds like the author used firesheep the second time to see if the users changed their habits.

Most people already know that if someone gets a hold of their account, and they already have access to it, to change the password. For this particular situation, they don't know about the whole SSL thing. It took me nearly 20 minutes to explain what a session was to my very non-technical girlfriend 2 days ago. Most people are very unsure of following directions from an untrusted source on the internet, even if they are very trusting of strangers on the internet. Most users are aware of Phishing scams as a general strategy. There is a good possibility they changed their passwords, since that is what they already know, but that particular solution doesn't work all that well for this scenario.
It doesn't matter if you're being sarcastic or not. It's a content-free expression of your opinion, without actually giving us any information.

HN rewards information, not "Me Too!" type comments.
Paparazzi Costume 2
If you're not saving money you're still living above your means, because statistically, cars break down, fridges quit, houses need new roofs, and people get hurt in car wrecks. If you're buying flatscreen TV's instead of saving money for a rainy day and then using your credit card to buy a new fridge when your fridge dies, that's equivalent to buying flatscreen TV's on a credit card when you can't afford it with your salary.

Having a momentary catastrophic expense like that might require putting money on a credit card and not paying it off immediately. In the long run, though, that shouldn't cause systemic credit card debt because, just as you should have money to save at the end of the month, you should have money to pay down your emergency debts at the end of the month.
I'm very sorry you took my comment as sniping; that wasn't my intention at all.

I was pointing out the mistake because I found it to be a very interesting mistake — as I hope is conveyed in the link I gave — nestling in your otherwise exemplary written English. In fact, it caused me to momentarily question whether it was I who had got that idiom wrong for all these years.
Again? XP is old. Seriously. Just get over it.
Great points. It's impressive how elegantly SSL with a CA solves all these problems. :)
This idea has been around in science fiction for a while. Note especially Charlie Stross' "Accelerando" and its worldwide reputation markets. You're talking about a reputation server of sorts.

It's an excellent idea and actually marketable I think. But reputation servers would need to be highly interconnectable and data needs to be easy to migrate. I wonder if diaspora + openid would get us more than halfway there...
Some say NoSQL = "Not Only SQL", implying that there are alternatives to purely relational DB's. I think this definition fits better than the implied purely unrelational DB.
We wrote the apps below which is an all JS front end, and skinnable product for event media, It was written with Dojo which in my opinion is the toolkit that is geared towards large JS web apps, we have built large web apps, in virtually ever toolkit and Dojo is pretty unanimous among the development team as the one that makes building large apps maintainable and rapid to develop, We opt for jQuery for small widget stuff that will just get added to pages and to spruce up web pages. We used to use Ext but, their licensing switcharoo really soured us on that toolkit. As well Dojo and jQuery do not conflict so if absolutely necessary one can leverage existing jQuery code in a Dojo app. You can email me or post to the thread if you want to know any specifics about how we built it. We have larger corp apps that we have done but the following are some public facing apps that we built, there is also the back end admin systems for these apps but that is not publicly avalible:

http://www.ibm.com/social/northstar/

http://www.ibm.com/social/informationondemand/
> Just because XP is their most popular OS doesn't mean that they need to keep supporting it.

Ballmer said "we're embracing HTML5". If they want to embrace this technology then yes, they do need to bring it to their older, more popular OSs. Otherwise, they're just putting in a halfassed, minimal effort to it.

All other HTML5 browsers run on Windows XP. Microsoft is the only company to produce an HTML5 browser that doesn't run on the world's most widely used OS, which happens to be made by them.

That's absurd. Definitely not "embracing".
My friend wrote this site to store your mp3 files in the cloud and access them from anywhere. He built the site and Air App to upload your music. Membership is free for now while he goes through beta.
I guess, the main issue is that if half the colleges increase grades, the other half looks bad. Maybe a new measure should exist, like your GPA relative to the school average.
This is the way it should be everywhere. Grade inflation is nothing more than a way to beef up a resume. GPA is a number like a credit score which I feel has quite a bit of bias behind it and does not tell one much about a person's character or student abilities.
Indeed it has, integers and longs have been unified as a single `int` type, so the external marker is gone as well.
They say quad-band, but which 4 bands? You need to know that in the US, depending on if you want to go with AT&T or T-Mobile.
Have people classify their relative skill distribution using a pie chart. Test them on a slice or two to calibrate. Dumb idea?
Thanks Kenton :)
So Microsoft is still a gargantuan hydra with different heads fighting each other?

It's fairly fascinating. On the one hand, you get this sensible, open Microsoft - the company that still delivers reasonably good Desktop products, has a great development platform, wonderful developer resources/support, now supports HTML5. On the other hand, you keep encountering its evil twin: the institution that made the Kin, that scrapped Courier, that can't decide which horse to back in the internet race, that made IE7, and so on and so forth; the company that will end up losing most of its mind and market share to the new (and old, actually) kids on the block.

Wish there was only the former.
Wow.

I would be happy if I could do even half the things simultaneously, that you have listed out in your post. (Quality time with wife + 3 Kids, Bootstrapped Startup, 3-4 Consulting Projects, Being to the gym 5-6 times a week, 2 podcasts per week, ...)

If we rewind a bit to when you were just starting out after college, were you pretty efficient and disciplined then as well? I am just curious whether self-discipline and efficiency can also be cultivated and improved upon drastically, later in life as well.

Thanks for writing this post. It inspired me to utilize my time more efficiently.
Will there be any good ways to “crossgrade” buyers from the retail edition of an app to the App Store edition without making them pay again in full? (My guess: No.)

You can gift someone an album on the iTunes Store. When you buy a DVD the DVD can "gift" you the iTunes version of the movie (The Dark Knight did this, though it just copied over from the disk). Why can't a software company gift someone an app on the Mac App Store when they buy the app elsewhere?
From the article. The flip side of the fact that the interviewer has had time to carefully prepare while the interviewee has not is that what you get from that inherently contrived, lopsided discussion, kind of a long, drawn-out game of "gotcha." Fun for the <strike>interrogator</strike> interviewer, but tedious and buzz-killing for the interviewee.

It provides insight, yes, but a certain cost: many candidates fine this approach simply alienating, and more to the point, it upsets their thought processes (such that they don't really get a chance to shine).

As a candidate you can train for this kind of confrontational approach, of course, but I think lrm242 nailed what's most alienating about this interviewing style -- that ultimately the candidate is put into a position that's basically uncomfortable to be in, where they have to _placate_ their interlocuter according to some hidden criteria set -- and mostly they just want that particular thread to be overwith as soon as possible.

I just think we can get the same insight into candidates from different ways, where things are more on an even keel, and there's more "flow."[1] It takes more tact and creativity (and perhaps a bit more time), but it's not that hard, is more mutually enjoyable and (I think) ultimately provides a lot more insight.

[1] "flow" being of course a very important concept; e.g. in the sense of Murakami.
Are there other affiliate programs you can use?