skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the part about the iPhone is a bit convoluted. The author wraps up the phone and the service, which are not the same thing.

A more accurate comparison would be the difference in the price of the iPhone service vs. previous service. This all assumes that you already have a cell phone, which I believe is a fair assumption.
Brand Authority and the Milgram Experiment
...The experiment found that few people have the resources needed to resist authority, even when the authority figure is telling them to do something in violent opposition to their moral judgment. Brands carry a level of authority. Take a startup for example...
I'm tempted to make a similar graphic with some junit/jmock code in java.
Yeah, it was just a guess. But I figure that after someone has had enough time to get complacent, he/she's probably at a pretty senior level and is making more dough.
I never saw the rationale for the government making risky investments, just because purportedly because nobody else does.

Risk is important because it offers incentives to the marketplace, and prevents economic systems falling into stagnation (local optima), as Aaron Brown describes in this interview: http://marketplacemoney.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/05/...

But I agree with you that it is not the government which should be taking those risks, since (as others have pointed out in this thread), governments really don't know what they're doing in that regard.
In Search of the Silver Bullet
Three things every entrepreneur must know...
1) Lists like these are just link bait.

2) Working won't get you girls.

3) It's hard.
The unemployment rate in Germany currently is 8.8%. Bad enough, but far from 10-20%. In the East there are some regions with more than 20% unemployment, but on the other hand in the prosperous southern states (Baden-Wurttemberg, Bavaria) it is about 5-6%.
What do we think of Tandem Entrepreneurs...
An incubator that invests more money than ycombinator but takes much more equity. They are supposed to follow you through to a liquidity event and put sweat and knowledge into your app. Good deal?
Facebook's Secret Plan: Help people be lazy
A 12" laptop? I'm guessing the "business" guy had that one.
Sure, if you accept that there are engineers that are 5, 10, 20 times as valuable as their salary requirements, then that makes sense. You might as well scoop up those under-priced assets, even knowing that you can't necessarily measure them perfectly.

Since engineers love the product more than the marketplace, you keep them happy by paying them well and letting products flourish on their own technical merits. You do that and you don't have to worry too much about driven engineers leaving for startups.

And you have to provide them with a stimulating and rewarding environment, like, some kind of... super-college.

That's all pretty much conventional wisdom, but they're executing well on it. It worked for Bell Labs and Xerox in a simpler time. Of course, their underlying companies had too limited a mandate to take the technologies their "radical researchers"[1] created and bring them into the marketplace. But as we know, Google's mission statement is a less succinct but more exacting restatement of "do computer science," so they're good there.

I don't know, it still seems fundamentally sound to me. Maybe Google is bound for the "eternal September" effect, or maybe they're getting better at teasing out the engineers out there who are a better fit for the company. Mere hiring numbers don't really tell the whole story, I think.

[1] - http://equityprivate.typepad.com/ep/2006/04/what_spaceward_....
Does anyone know how Ron got his start?
I have a FOAF profile and it's not at all useful.

I've had my GPG key on my website for the last four years and I've yet to receive an encrypted email. But at least I've been able to test it by sending encrypted emails to myself, which makes my GPG key about an order of magnitude more useful than FOAF.
Google wants to do for TV what it did for the Web
Qualitative Before Quantitative Research
Email is dead? (kids use Facebook, MySpace)
Collaborative writing, collaborative production
The Birth of myYearbook (youth up-front, suits behind, outsourced tech)
I think it would be very interesting to see Pg address some of the criticisms of Arc.

I did notice the comments on the original reddit posting, of which several seemed well considered. CL seems to generate so many branches that it does not seem worthwhile to study the specifics of each one. Can anything really be that new?

What I would be really interested in is hearing who the next McCarthy might be. CL is interesting, but wordiness does not seem to be its primary problem. If Pg disagrees I'd be quite interested to hear his opinion.

Perhaps people have other thoughts about the primary shortcomings of Lisp?
[SF] Justin.tv hiring jack-of-all-trades hackers
Justin.tv is a funded video startup bringing live Flash video to the Internet by storm. We've been covered on national press (MTV News, The Today Show, Nightline), and we're in the process of building the destination site for live video online. To do this, Justin.tv is looking to hire the smartest, most motivated programmers who enjoy working on interesting problems. We are currently a small five person team who work together closely in a startup environment.

Here are the traits/abilities we're looking for:

- Comfortable doing everything, and working on many different projects. Some of the various things we do at Justin.tv include working with Asterisk, Rails, IRC, and our own custom Flash Live Video server.

- Likes learning new languages (we've used Ruby, Python, C).

- Willingness to work very hard for a huge upside. Would prefer this to a stable job.

- Smart.

- Has a desire to work on a revolutionary project backed by some really smart and successful people (who we will have interview you).

- Wants to implement features quickly without bureaucratic overhead.

- Will contribute to a fun working environment.

- Experience in scaling websites, page optimization, video encoding, and mobile application development not required but a plus.

Here's what we can offer you:

- Ownership of large projects.

- Ability to play a critical role in a young, funded startup.

- Management role in the company in the future (if you want it).

- Fun work environment (check out our officecam! http://www.justin.tv/officecam).

- Competitive salary and equity stake.

To apply please email info@justin.tv a plaintext resume or just a list of programs built or websites worked on and your academic credentials. Things we can see and play around with online are a plus. For extra credit, include answers to one or more of the problems at
http://jtvproblems.weebly.com/

Justin.TV Press Highlights:

- Nightline - April 5th 2007 -
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1987583148000297546&...

- The Today Show April 2nd 2007 - http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/17909799/

- MTV News April 9th 2007 - http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1550530&vid=142338

- Financial Times Tuesday June 26th 2007 -
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.as...

- Wired - http://audio.cbsnews.com/2007/05/28/audio2859018.mp3

- San Francisco Chronicle -
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/08/BUGK...
"... Email interviews are boring, and worthless ..."

... but more accurate. It's hard to mis-quote someone in writing (a good reason to use email). Maybe the boring bit your talking about is the lack of physical contact between the interviewer & interviewee giving the writer less chance to interpret and make insights that can lead to writing a more entertaining piece.

From the interviewee standpoint, fact is far more important than spin or fiction. From a reader point of view, facts mixed with entertainment (& possible spin) maybe what they expect. But I ask myself, "what do I want to get when I read about something, I really want to know "hard information" about?" - the facts? impressions or entertainment?

I'll settle for the dry facts & any entertainment in the way of humour or language is nice, but secondary.
See also: "Google wants to do for radio what it did for the web" and "Google wants to do for newspapers what it did for the web."
I'm curious: why was I modded down? I'd love to hear what is wrong with this idea.
There's an interesting observation in "On Lisp" regarding the shape of programs written in different styles, along those lines. Imperative programs tend to have a fairly straight and vertical left margin, programs in a functional style usually slope in (for lack of a better description; that's not the actual quote which from memory says "blocky" and "fluid" instead).
Krasdale seasoned bread crumbs have 96 calories for $1.69 pretax (in the C-Town grocery store in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn). I couldn't find a cheaper source. You?
Startup Epicenter -- rumbles with the latest start-ups
Eighty entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists gathered yesterday at Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West's headquarters for Startup Epicenter to hear funding pitches from ten early stage startups.
Why don't most web 2.0 startups use sophisticated algorithms?
Lack of knowledge/ability? To avoid infringing patents (even accidentally)? Most users won't care? Not important in the problem domain?
Because the vast majority of users won't appreciate them. Also users like predictability, particularly in social sites. Clever heuristics are not predictable.
In terms of cleverness for dealing with spam, perhaps most founders are playing a game whereby they are hoping to be acquired before spam becomes unmanageable using simple techniques.
Parans are in the wrong place.
Should be:

($60 required cellular plan + $5 taxes & fees) x 24 months = $1560
If the problem with Arc is that it's not different enough from existing Lisp dialects like CL or Scheme, all I can say is that being different is not my goal. I'm trying to make it good, not original. So it will only be as original as it has to be to be the best language for writing programs (as opposed to pleasing managers, or writing papers about, or seeming comfortingly familiar).
Huh, that depends on what you're looking for, I guess. In a live interview, you can be asked a question you weren't prepared for, and if you lose composure even a little it doesn't matter what the truth is nor what your answer is, what people will remember is that you got flustered. With email, you can relax and take your time.

I'm not saying email is superior, but one should recognize the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Live interviews (and to a lesser extent, IM) are a place where the glib win. http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...
Actually, I think pg was asking "on what do you base the theory that they don't use sophisticated algorithms?" rather than "why do YOU think that startups aren't using sophisticated algorithms?", but depending on the emphasis, it could go either way.
If they are using sophisticated algorithms, then they are using them behind the scenes. For example, such a startup might use sophisticated spam detection or a clever algorithm to get a performance boost.

This is different from a startup such as Google where PageRank is major breakthrough that is made obvious to everyone. We don't see many startups like Google in web 2.0. It seems that web 2.0 is more about harvesting people power and less about sophisticated algorithms.
Google To Launch AdSense for Games
I bet most people aren't thinking about eigenvectors when they are looking at Google's search results. The user does not (and should not be made to) care about sophisticated algorithms; only utility counts (in business, of course, not in research.)
PG, hats off to you. This is exactly the attitude I wish I had while I was doing research, even though the "must-produce-papers" part of academia teaches you otherwise. That's how you can produce useful stuff, anyway.
One can still ask the question though: of the startups acquired by major companies, how many of them use sophisticated algorithms?
Depends on what you mean by a major company. Does a startup acquired by Cisco qualify? Or Intel? Or Yahoo, even, in some cases? I know of a few small acquisitions Google has made where they purchased the research technology and not the founders!
I don't get the question? I know a lot of startups using all kinds of algorithms. Xobni(email analysis algorithms/bayesian analysis, statistical analysis), Topix (classification algorithm), Reddit (recommendation algorithm), automattic (spam detection/classification algorithm), krugle(ranking algorithm),joost(distributed system alogrithms) and the list goes on.
Seems perfectly sound to me. redditers will have to find something new (possibly - or even probably - artificial) thing to rag on, I guess. Again, I'm not sure why, but it seems to be a favorite activity of online communities to try to criticize anything they can. It feels like there should be an official term for this phenomenon (that is, other than "trolling"; more like WHY it happens), but alas my research fails me. Help, anyone?

As an aside about Arc, but not to harass you:

If you don't mind my asking of silly questions, I have noticed that in provided snippets the syntax you seem to make use of the most is the [_] notation even though you had some additional ideas kicking around originally (e.g., x:y for (x 'y), allowing infix math, letting users define syntax). Are you still planning to include / already have these (and possibly more) syntactical forms? What of parentheses inference (not as a matter of hating parens, but just as something included in your initial writings that hasn't seemed to surface in code snippets)? Any new thoughts about such things?
Here's a rather funny take on it... http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...

What amazes me is that nobody's pointed out the obvious counter-observation: Lisp is not an acceptable LISP. Not for any value of Lisp. There's nothing magical about this, nothing partisan. If Lisp were acceptable, then we'd all be using it.

You've all read about the Road to Lisp. I was on it for a little over a year. It's a great road, very enlightening, blah blah blah, but what they fail to mention is that Lisp isn't the at the end of it.

He points out a few things:

1. Too many different implementations

2. No decent, updated spec

3. CLOS (he gets pretty detailed here, and there are some counter-arguments and clarifications in the comments)

4. Macros, and how they don't quite deliver on the promise because most modern tools aren't equipped to handle them.

5. Type system (He doesn't really get into this one)

I'm a Lisp newb, so while I understand most of the arguments conceptually I'm in no position to really evaluate their validity. But it's an interesting discussion.
How about something that would be publishable in a 1st tier conference?
I 100% agree. If there is any way to get rid of the parens, Arc should do it. My guess is that smart people have thought of this a lot, and they can't be removed, even with whitespace restrictions like python.
Google open to wireless spectrum bid to become fully fledged wireless operator
But the results of that hard work can get you girls!
I've been looking at honeypots and I'm learning how to implement them on my app. Basically I'm building (well for the mean time until a better idea comes up.) is a "classified ad" site that doesn't suck and is a beauty to look at. And the problem I see with apps like these(or rather a subset of the main problem) is the amount of spam that gets fed into them everyday. Alot of interesting ideas flowing from this discussion.
Dunno either so I upmodded you :-)
We use some pretty sophisticated algorithms in our startup.
One of the weird things about doing something mostly benevolent is that you end up breaking the standard journalism algorithm. We've hit this on several occasions. They feel like they have to find something at least slightly bad to say about us, and they end up choosing something random. It seems like the same thing happens to Google.

I'm not sure if this happens because it's an axiom of journalism that every story has two sides, or because conflict makes stories interesting. Maybe both. But one sees it often on TV news. A city bans people from setting one another on fire, and the reporter diligently tracks down the president of the local chapter of Pyromaniacs of America to offer the other side of the story.
Agreed. One follow-up question might be:

Do you believe that the best language for writing programs would be universal, or might there be one best for you (syntax you like and find convenient) and a different best for me (syntax I like and find convenient)?

My uneducated guess is that much of Lisp dialect proliferation amounts to a confusion between syntax and logic. I would distinguish as follows, 'syntax' is arbitrary elements which are used to describe program logic. Logic is the underlying computational processes which drive the language.

As a consequence, I would suggest that some language designers may be confusing syntactical and logical elements when they claim their language is 'better' than other variants. Where the syntax varies according to preference and not because of an improvement in logic, I would say that this is a contextual 'better' and not a mathematical (and hence, universal) 'better.'

Anyways, I wouldn't pay the reddit critique much heed, as much of it mirrors the endless debates over vim vs. emacs. Which is to say, I don't find it very helpful and don't know why Pg would either.

Thx for the response.
I'd like to highlight number 3, it's harder than you initially thought. But you'll go with it anyway cuz you don't know any better :-)
I made a comment on the (Facebook) -> (Social Networking Microsoft) possiblity a few days ago on a similar thread that was up here. I believe at this point only pmarca and Ning have a decent shot at saving us from this nightmare. On the other hand if someone could throw together an open-platform API for social info sharing, this could prevent Facebook from locking up the market.

If no one is able to do this in the next six months, it is going to be a long hard messy few years for social networking, esp. since Facebook places your data behind lock and key. That will be a lot of unrecoverable data after three or four more years.

Any one want to form a startup to challenge Facebook? I'd love to take on Zuckerburgler.
Just because under-18s don't use email doesn't mean it's dead. It's not going away for anyone that uses the internet professionally.
A better software development process
I recently joined a growing company that, among other things, builds web applications.

The development process boils down to:

1) Determining Requirements

2)Building exact specifications complete with descriptions of functionality and mockups

3) Developing the software to match the specifications

4) Creating a QA test plan to break the SW and ensure that it matches the specification exactly

5)making necessary changes to both the specification and software

6)Rolling out the product to users

Being a loather of redundancy and having a personal project/startup background, this process strikes me as antiquated and arcane. Surely there must be a better way to develop software. What are some of the workflows that work for you to create great features when you've got more than just a couple people hacking? What can startups teach scaling companies in this light?
I agree that seems kind of stiff, especially for a smaller company that is developing for the web. Getting Real is a quick (and free to read online) book by 37signals that helps focus on a very light development process http://getreal.37signals.com/ . Reading it might give you some material for suggesting ways to improve your company's workflow (and coming from a fairly credible source).

Many web startups have come to resemble the open source development pattern: release early, release often, don't plan too far into the future (your assumptions will probably change by then). I think these are all good ideas: you get feedback sooner from real users, which allows you to focus on providing functionality that your users actually want (or at least think they want).

In general I think the extreme programming propaganda has a lot of good advice, but I don't know if any large companies have successfully applied them to teams of more than 10-20 people.
I first learned lisp in college, and learned prefix notation and about the REPL before seeing any lisp programs. I never had the opportunity to be scared by all the parens. Honestly as a non-lisper the things that were most intimidating to me when looking at a chunk of lisp?

1. Nonstandard ways of doing things that are common in other languages, "setq" sticks out in particular.

2. Functions with lots of cars and cdrs but not much else.

3. Control structures. I didn't see conds and ifs very well because of the way they blended in with other functions around them.

4. Anything with lots of macro definitions.

Most of those are still pretty easy to overcome, but in terms of seeing lisp code and thinking "oh god," those were the biggest culprits.
Post-Mortem of a Tokyo-based Web Start-up
Pull quote:

"The reason we built these apps was, in retrospect, incredibly shallow, and I thank my ex-boss for helping me realise this. We built them because we thought they were going to be popular, following the typical web 2.0 path to riches:

1. Make popular app.
2. ???
3. Profit!!1

"Looking back, I think to myself, is trying to make a popular app enough anymore? If you just attempt to make a popular app, how are you any different from the next web startup. The only thing that separates you is ability, and ability can be hired or learned - so the question becomes who has deeper pockets or more free time. Thusly any idiot with time or money can build a web app these days and these were crowded markets we were attempting to break into - productivity and mobile blogging. What then, separates the wheat from the chaff in this case? For me, I think the big one is emotional investment."
Facebook in legal trouble: A brief history of Mark Zuckerberg's legal woes
There are degrees of socialism. What if the United States government took 1% of all new companies?
Short operators, explicitly local variables, more operators are favored rather than overloading, and a built-in hashtable type? This sounds alarmingly like Perl. ;)
But if you know how to get girls then you probably have what it takes to get VC
No.

Next question?...
I think there might be several optimal languages for different domains. Not 100% sure yet whether that's also true for different users. I know I'm not planning to protect users from themselves. If there is a genuine need for that, then different languages might be better for different users even in the same problem domain.
I'm still considering other syntax, but I want to take my time deciding. Adding syntax is like a constitutional amendment.

I spent a couple days working on getting rid of parentheses, and it got really ugly.
Does Arc support i18n?
I've notice that news.ycombinator doesn't have an encoding declared in its HTML head information, and it made me wonder, does Arc use Unicode internally? (If so, true Unicode or just 16-bits worth of UTF-16 like early Java?) Or does it only allow ASCII? Are there any facilities in Arc to make internationalization easier? Looking at the example of previous web frameworks, it seems like leaving out true Unicode support early ends up biting you later when you have to rewrite stuff to support Unicode after all.
In effect it takes about a third of all companies, because corporate tax rates are about a third of earnings.
Internally strings are represented as 32 bit unicode. That seemed like the right plan, and conveniently it's what Mzscheme does.

In news.yc, however, I currently (out of laziness) aggressively convert all input to ascii. Life is too short.
Why would that be relevant to running a business?
50 reasons why people aren't using your website by Scott Heifermann, founder of Meetup.com
That seems like a good compromise between YAGNI and future proofing.