skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He that writes the code has an extreme amount of influence, and can effect design decisions.

Linus is the benevolent dictator, but if the code is clean and doesn't stomp on other stuff, it goes in. It's always been that way...and is as it should be in most large-scale Open Source projects. If you want to see examples of conflicts and how they were resolved, or not resolved, look at the ZFS in Linux discussion or the history of ReiserFS (somehow filesystems bring out the fight in people), though there have been other points of contention where developers wanted to push a little too far into the core design in ways that Linus didn't like.

With companies and individuals that do it well, like Red Hat and IBM (individuals end up becoming Linus' "lieutinents", like Alan Cox for a famous example), it is almost invisible...they produce code that Linus likes, they take his advice on changes without making it a fight, and so he trusts them more and more over time, to the point that now it's pretty rare to see a Red Hat sponsored contribution lead to significant conflict.

Do you have concerns about someone like Red Hat or IBM having influence over the kernel? I'd be curious what those concerns are based on.
The Rise of the Homepreneurs
Julian Assange's Swiss bank account closed
Hey Google --- why is Kindle not supported while Nook and IPAD are supported ?
In a dozen companies we've funded, the founders still had a majority of the board seats after the series A round.

Out of how many series As total?
I'm not talking about quantity. I'm talking about quality. Utility and polish. Diversity is the cherry on top.
Can anyone provide us with a step by step instructions on how to get this phone?

I'm really confused about buying a phone plan after I buy the phone.
Or Google could release the books in DRM free format. Then it'll work on Kindle.
16Gig, no expansion slot? Awwww... +1 for the large internal memory but -1 for no expansion slot. I run a 32Gig SD in my Nexus One and load it up with video when I travel. I also load it via a card reader and not USB. That is the ONE thing I find highly disappointing about this new model. Rest looks good.
Now, if only it could do HSPA on band 1900 so I could get 3G with it in Buenos Aires. :(
A few observations:

1. I would say that, even as of 5 years ago, it was rare for a startup to go through a Series A VC round without the VCs taking at least shared control.

2. Founders of reasonably strong startups can usually do angel rounds, also denominated Series A, without giving up board control and have been able to do so for some years now. These rounds used to be for smaller dollar amounts, often capped at $500K or so, but this has changed today in an era where founders can often turn to angels and superangels for larger fundings. VCs want to stay competitive with the angels at this early stage because, if they lose out at that level, they find themselves sitting on the sidelines as their deal-flow shrinks and they lose out on potentially strong investments made at an optimum stage in promising ventures. To stay competitive, therefore, the VCs must perforce bend a little on their traditional terms, including their former obsession with gaining board control right out the gate.

3. Founders themselves are far more savvy today, on average, than was the case a decade ago. In the bygone days, only a relatively few serial entrepreneurs had the sophistication to sit on a reputable board and still add value to it as founders. Today, the average founder is far better versed on what it takes to drive a company than was the case before. Thus, it is easier for VCs (and other investors) to accept the idea of a "founder-driven company" than it used to be. (Over the years, I have seen all too many "control-freak" founders and other variations that could only be labeled an embarrassment to sound management; based on this, I can understand the historic VC attitude, though of course this all must be counter-balanced by the many ills that the VCs themselves brought to the process when they would sometimes abuse the founders in whose startups they invested.)

4. Founders today have far more control over timing on when to do their Series A rounds. The cost of launching is far reduced today and the options for deferring larger rounds are greater, as for example by taking bridge funding from angels or F&F to allow the company to build value and minimize dilution before it goes for larger forms of funding.

When all these factors are combined, it seems clear from the trenches that a profound change is occurring by which founders have more control than ever before over their ventures. Of course, having this validated by someone such as PG, who is at the heart of this activity in Silicon Valley, goes a long way to letting the VCs themselves see it as respectable to accept as a fait accompli as they move forward.
Let Us Confirm - Automated Appointment Verification Service
I'm using a pay-as-you-go plan with my Nexus One and couldn't be happier. I just called them up and they had a sim in the mail for me that day.
> The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper

This is the bit that has me the most mystified...none of the released cables reveals anything particularly surprising (or at least not surprising to anybody who pays even minimal attention to world news)...yet the media is acting like these are huge revelations and it leaves me confused -- is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?
6 years ago called. He said that John Edwards hasn't been on a general election ballot since 2004, and there's no organization called the Trial Lawyers Lobby.. he suggests demonizing community organizers and voter registration groups instead.
We have, but they are under the Limited Production page: http://www.invincibilitee.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=101

The link you posted is for legacy shirts, that have proven to sell well and will be available permanently.

I know the 3-tier system might be a little confusing, and we are trying to make it as intuitive as possible. That's why I posted this, so thank you for the suggestions!
If we were, in fact, in a bubble of sufficient size, wouldn't these predictions be at least somewhat correct? That is to ask, when do you actually know if these statements are true or false? Couldn't you conceivably be in a bubble that develops over a decade which suddenly comes crashing down to pre-bubble-assessment levels in the early half of that growth?
Back-to-Zero: Give your Brain a Creativity Break
Sterling & Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_ is fantastic, if _Learn Prolog Now_ piques your interest. Clocksin's _Clause and Effect_ is sort of like "The Little Schemer" for Prolog (though not cutesy).

Also, if you learn Prolog, don't forget to learn the constraint programming extensions! SWI and GNU Prolog are free Prologs with constraint programming included. It makes Prolog much more practical.
Interesting/cool product.

One thing that threw me off - the term 'Aero' (for me) implied Windows only... No real easy solution there as I don't expect (or even think you need) to change the name, but maybe adding something like 'cross-platforming file sync without servers'.

Awesome none-the-less though!
There's only so many initials people can remember for peoples' names.
But still no JIT and no threads that don't take 20 seconds to spawn on a moderately sized app. :(
It's probably worth noting that because he's in Poland, he doesn't have a choice.
Looks like they definitely just scanned some books. I downloaded a sample of "Information Theory and Statistical Learning" and the font was too pixelated and thus unreadable on my android device unless I zoomed in. Zooming in only evidences the pixelation even more.

An O'Reilly book seemed fine, so I want to imagine that technical/math-notation intensive books are hard to optimize for e-reading. Anyone have some knowledge about this? How hard is it to make a technical book's digital font easier to read if you don't already have the LaTeX/pdf?
This is an idea that Reid Hoffman has advocated for a while now and that I fully support. It is also the reason why I think sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can never meet - your professional brand is something you want to control completely.

I think that you should do product development on yourself and constantly reevaluate if you're headed in the right direction as a product that people want.

It sounds odd to objectify yourself, but a lot of the same techniques related to iterative development can be readily applied to personal development.
Android 2.3 release video
Wait until the 16th. Walk into Best Buy.
Subsidies can and should be independent from carrier exclusivity. It was in germany since the late nineties. Until the iPhone I could get any GSM-phone on any carrier with a subsidy (for extending my contract).
Now that is one area the academic literature on venture capital and entrepreneurship hasn't studied: the social networks of entrepreneurs and bargaining power. Putting that on my list.
Fair enough. I thought it was an interface bug, but that is a solid reason. I'll keep that in mind for my next app.
Yes, it's possible - a serial entrepreneur with a good track record can often raise money on an idea.

For us mere mortals, it can be done if you're raising a small amount of money and you're in an exciting space.
Study shows my "mind's eye" may be 3x larger than yours
A lot of VCs are good guys. The difference between us is largely that we're in different situations. VCs invest 100x as much as us. Larger amounts of money will inevitably have more constraints attached.
unison is quite nice, but it does require being both sides, which can be problematic sometimes.
Built by a friend of mine on Asterisk.
True - important since there are other ingredients in Red Bull that could have factored into the result.
If you'd like someone to do the voice over with a studio quality setup, drop me a line. I have all the equipment, have done a few voice overs in my time and above all, I'd love to help. I can probably knock it out in a short amount of time.
Is there a offline mode only? If I have a laptop and a desktop and I want them to be in sync but only when I'm at home so I don't 3G or my friend's bandwidth.
you shouldn't put fingers in your ear so much ;)

That's on par with "I'm rubber and you're glue . . . ", it's not a logically grounded argument, so there's really no counter argument.

"institutional investors, namely pension funds,
university endowments, etc"....I am betting at least one
invested in Facebook.

Again, you're missing the scale required for a market-wide bubble. We're not going to see federal bailouts just because one or two pension funds lost money on facebook.
To the media, each Wikileaks dump is just another lump of fuel for the attention-gathering machine. Everyone knows this, including Assange, who acknowledges it openly.

One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be disadvantaged in this climate; it might, perish the thought!, be boring. Where would we find the persecuted elfin protoganist? What about the sex? The gossip? To whom would we sell the movie rights about a policy process story?
Of course, they're very unlike each other. I'm just not convinced by the idea that a city needs poor (both in income and in quality) people in order to function.

The low-paid jobs which do need to be done in Manhattan can easily be done by people commuting in from New Jersey.

I'm actually not sure about the outer boroughs, I've never actually been there (that sounds snobbier than it is, I've only been to NYC twice). It seems to me that gentrifying the outer boroughs should be one of the great challenges facing New York City.
does one opt out of long-term cookie tracking by having a long-term cookie stored that says "do not track me"?
DST Out and Kleiner Perkins In in Twitter Mega-Funding
Agreed -- back in the day Prolog and Forth both exposed me to very different ways about thinking.

I actually wrote my Masters' project on transistor sizing in Prolog. A fascinating experience, although at the time it was horrible for numeric work. I wound up hacking the interpreter to include a couple of optimizations otherwise I'd probably still be waiting for it to finish :-)
Hi estacado. Sorry to hear that :-(
Normally You need to be logged in before you can save your image. Once you are and click the save button and choose a path it is saved instantly to your computer. There is no download as everything is client side! Let me know if you have further issues! Thanks
Side-by-side feature comparison with the Nexus One: http://www.google.com/phone/compare/?phone=nexus-s&phone...
Here's a great reddit post from the author of StrictMode: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/eh2jf/gingerbread_a...
Skepticism is only healthy when it is borne out in truth. Pointless skepticism is not healthy. So if you constantly believe there is going to be a bubble, and there isn't one, that is an example of unhealthy skepticism.
Surely the solution to nonsense is not more nonsense with the sign bit flipped?
To me that is part of marketing.
It's worth noting that with the exception of the National University of Singapore, there's virtually no worthwhile research done in the whole of the tropics. Cold climates seem to be far more conducive to scientific productivity.
It's actually part of the cycle. The boy-cries-wolf effect is part of what helps the bubble grow bigger by making it easier to ignore those who continuously breathlessly pronounce that the wolf is here. Even otherwise-rational people start wondering if maybe this time really is different.

Then it isn't.

That said, I don't think we're anywhere near "bubble" territory. If it looks like a bubble it's only because it's a less sick sector of the economy against a backdrop of a dreadfully sick economy; in the land of the insolvent the $1 profit is king.
Interesting, it hints at some "machine learning"/"behavioural targeting" on Google's end then.
that's rather odd. Which version of safari are you using? And flash player 10.1 or 10.2 ?
But It could also be because you have javascript disabled. one of those. Please let me know. So it can be fixed!
I use twm. It's pretty lightweight, it doesn't conflate "being on top of everything else" with "focus", and it's highly customizable. Oh, you can also handle ongoing-process-icons in a sensible manner that doesn't eat up screen space.
I think one of the main factors pushing the trend in the direction of more founders retaining control is the increased availability of angel money.

If it came down to my cofounders and I having to give up control to raise a Series A (or any series for that matter) I'm sure we'd turn to Angel List to raise a similar amount from well connected and useful investors, without having to give up control - if that were a viable option.

Increasingly it seems like raising a large angel round is an option, which is great for entrepreneurs.
Has anyone created a probabilistic language akin to Prolog? I feel like confidence interval propagation, with appropriate notions of covariance and error distributions, could be really useful for hypothesis testing.
I think the key is to allow many HN users to mark dupes and have a few trusted moderators use their discretion to fix them.

(Of course, nobody will see this thread because /newest is clogged with dupes.)
Shouldn't that fall under the responsibility of the browser author then? It seems like this policy just makes it easier for individuals to file lawsuits.
I wish tmo wasn't the only major carrier without a 3g femtocell option. I can't even get tmobile 2g at my house.
The big one was my SMS plan.

With contract, I had (iirc) 200 SMSes a month; going no-contract I have to pay $10/mo. for the smallest text plan they offer. I don't get a lot of texts, the few freebies were plenty for the little bit I used.

Looking back at my data plan, I now realize they've grandfathered in my data plan on my line at the previous rate ($25/mo) rather than the new rate ($30/mo) which they told me that they would not be able to do-- still a screwup, but one in my favor this time. :) I just hadn't looked at that part of the bill, so that's one that I thought had gone up, but hadn't

Additionally, there's the phone insurance I'm still being billed for-- it's $4 a month now, but I'm so sick of fighting with them that I'll try one more time, but I'll probably just keep paying it until I go with someone else.
Can you elaborate? Do you mean something like the probability monad?
interesting. Can you let me know which version of flash and safari are you using so i can have a look?
For some odd reason only safari makes problems. It was such an headache to already get the facebook integration because of their weird javascript handling policies... ;-)
amazon sells books, and let's you read them on any device, their own Kindle included. They would see that opening their device up to Google or others will reduce the amount of books that they can sell. It would be similar to Apple opening up iPods to Windows encrypted/DRMed music files.
As an undecided/prospective iPhone/Android customer, would you mind elaborating on which apps in specific (for which platform) you are thinking of when you make this statement?
Although it also doesn't cover the entire system. The commuter rail trains go out where they can't rely on wireless coverage (in fact, there's at least one stretch on my line where we can rely on not getting coverage), so they can't install the card readers. As a result, the monthly passes for zones beyond Boston are still in ticket form.
The Pills Have Eyes: Microchipped Medicine Is Coming
I love his definition of a startup: "startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.". Solid, concrete advice in this book - advice you can disagree with, not just apple pie advice.

Compare "Four Steps" to "do more faster", another highly recommended startup book.

First, both books have off-putting titles. I'm much more likely to buy a book called "The Customer Development Model" than anything that sounds like it's marketed to the naive or flaky: "epiphany?", "do more faster?". Can we please stay pragmatic and grounded?

Apart from that, the books are worlds apart. "Four Steps" is pragmatic and grounded. The "do more faster" book starts with an essay by Tim Ferriss, the author of "The 4-hour workweek."

As long as we're talking about Steve Blank, here's a couple of other books that I've read and liked because of things I've read on his blog/book:

* Business Model Generation, by Osterwalder & Pigneur

* Crystal Fire, by Riordan & Hoddeson

* A Radar History of World War II, by Brown

The last two book because of his "secret history of silicon valley" posts.
WP7 Cut & Paste Update Rollout Begins
I taught myself to do that when I was about 13, and playing second flute. Lots of really long rests, and I kept getting distracted and losing count.

One hand wasn't enough, though (some of these rests were over 100 measures), so I practiced counting on both hands, though. I didn't have any rests over 1023 measures.
I'll also emphasize his "Read it out loud to yourself" bullet. If you're not that great of a writer, simply reading it aloud to yourself (or getting someone to read it to you) will immediately bring any problems to the surface. Most people have more experience listening to the spoken word than reading text - use this experience to your advantage.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Clipper card can be used on Caltrain, BART, and Muni.
apparently they mean 'open' in the sense of 'restricting users via DRM' and 'locks out most of the world'
Is this post part of your SEO strategy? :)
I believe there are backup tools for the Kindle that strip out the DRM and save the books to your PC.

But essentially this is the same risk as your house burning down and taking your books with it. I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
Listening Room - online group music listening
The switch to the new norm may be surprisingly fast, because the startups that can retain control tend to be the best ones. They're the ones that set the trends, both for other startups and for VCs.

Are they the best ones because they can retain control or can they retain control because they are the best ones?
Has anyone here cancelled their att iPhone service? i.e. gotten out of the 2 year contract early? I know this sounds ridiculous but I'd like to make the switch to T-Mobile and Android.
Saw some tweets about this and thought it was interesting. Example room where some others are posting tracks: http://listeningroom.fettig.net/room/therad/
I want it just for the sexy improved keyboard. Geesh!
So...any word on when Android 2.3 will be available over the wire for Nexus 1? Surprised this wasn't mentioned.
> "but please let's not turn it into a marketing buzz-word when it's not really necessary."

I think it's about a year late for that.
We do support LAN-only sync (i.e. on an isolated ad-hoc network), which is what I think you're asking for :)
No doubt The social network (Movie of entrepreneur for entrepreneurs )
Only iPad for now. Maybe I'll make it universal by the end of December, not sure yet...
It sounds like since the Nexus S runs stock Android it may not include the Swype text input system common on other Android phones -- practically a killer app for touchscreen text entry. Does anyone know if it will be available on the Nexus S (either preinstalled or as an add-on)?
Complementary Protein Myth Won't Go Away
There's PRISM, which is used for analyzing probabilistic systems: http://www.prismmodelchecker.org/
A few weeks according to a "Developer Advocate" at Google: http://twitter.com/retomeier/status/11830023140937728# . Probably shortly after the Nexus S hits stores.
Oh wow. I wish I could've done my projects in Prolog. I failed a unit at college on sorting algorithms because I submitted my work in Prolog instead of Qbasic. My lecturer didn't know Prolog and I was too young and stupid not to get into an argument over it. Just as well as I was used to 8-bit Micro-Prolog (this in fact: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008429 - you can use it in a browser if you're feeling masochistic!) and had no idea about the differences between LPA and other implementations!
Seems really similar to the Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant) and I am disappointed to see it doesn’t have the
1. roller ball
2. physical buttons (that you can feel) for home/back/menu/search
3. LED (for notifications)

Now, if only Samsung would upgrade the GalaxyS owners to 2.2 (as promised) or 2.3 (wishful thinking).
I think Eliezer says it best: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelli...

What counts is calibrated predictive power.
Really looking forward to future discussion. Congrats!
Store and query numeric intervals in Lucene (Greplin open source)
Doesn't the same apply to going green, though? At least on a consumer level.
I doubt it, given that you can get FM radios under $10.
Same with my last few Nokia phones.
Why do you put up with this?

Essentially because we're really bad at math. $500 for a phone is completely unacceptable, but hiding the cost in inflated monthly rates is just peachy.

Vote with your wallets.

I ordered the Nexus One the day after it was announced; unfortunately I was heavily outvoted.
No.

Joking aside, this is pretty cool.
Chrome's Progress on HTML5 and open web features
Prosper: A Prolog Web Framework
Reminded me of pg's article about the PR industry. From the article:

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It's not a list of "people who, if killed".
Reading A Google eBook On My iPad
AT&T 3G is on 850 and 1900. So the GP would be able to use EDGE, but not 3G.

It's a little odd that a phone which clearly has the antennas to run on 850 and 1900 can't use them for 3G. (Yes, I know it's common. It's still odd.)
Why Your Income Is So Important