skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My advice to you is to either market it to kids and their parents, or go 3D. If you market to kids, throw in some ridiculous security, the parents are going to want to see that. If you go 3D, try to get it done in JUST Java or Flash, because that is the only advantage you will have over Google at the moment.

By the way, despite the existence of these other worlds, only Google's Lively matters. None of the others have any ACTIONABLE advantage over Google's, so Google will win. Consider Google Video vs. YouTube. YouTube had several actionable advantages, the biggest of which was the ability to capitalize on copyright infringement. So YouTube won the 'eyeballs' war, and Google had to buy them. I know, it also doesn't hurt when dad-in-law is a big shot in the Valley, but give credit where it is due. The decision to ignore IP law was decisive in YouTube's case. VWs don't have the ability to take advantage of copyright infringement in a similarly simple fashion, so in this case Google wins. If you can think of an actionable advantage then use it. That said, many have thought long on the subject and come up with very little.

The other VWs are, at this point, deciding whether to try to find a niche, or whether they want to enter the pool of VWs that will try to get bought by Yahoo. If you want to enter the 'get bought buy Yahoo or Microsoft' sweepstakes, then write your 3D engine using DirectX. Bonus points for utilizing DirectX 10 ONLY features. Of course, this means you won't be able to compete against Google. It's get bought . . . or bust. If you want to find a niche, then you had better become a game designer, and quickly. What Google's entry does is ensure that, in the future, consumers will be paying only for the gaming components. The 'stand around and talk to people' part they will offer for free. Also, I am 99% certain, that the typical microtransactions will be free as well. You know, the dress your avatar in snazzy clothes, get that cool car, and get that outdoor pool for your penthouse apartment stuff. They can do this because they have advertisers to pay for it. So your niche will need to be a game that people are willing to pay for. Think teenage boys, currently under-served on the web. Look at Jagex and RuneScape.

'To be certain you take what you attack . . . Attack only that which is undefended.'

-Sun Tzu (Military Adviser to the Emperor of Wu)
> the same behaviors that men can use to achieve high status, if women use they're frowned upon

To achieve high status, males have to endure much more than being frowned upon; the price of failure, historically, has often been death. You bring up Hillary, but compare the total weight of attacks on her with the total weight of attacks on McCain or Obama. Even if we take just the ad hominem ones.
Hmm, I'm not on Facebook, nor do I have an iPhone... How is this relevant?
Obviously this sentence is... flawed. But the most important lesson here is: Every sentence of the form "X invented Y" suffers from the same flaw.

Consider "X invented the television": One canonical value of X is "Vladimir Zworykin", but maverick outsiders have a hero in Philo Farnsworth, and every Scot knows that the correct answer is "John Logie Baird". And all of them are right, in one way or another.

Or the sentence "X invented the first antibiotic": is the correct value of X "Sir Alexander Fleming", "John Tyndall", or "molds in the Penicillium family"? (And why didn't the Penicillium get knighted as well? It did all the grunt work!)

For the really strong form of this argument, google "James Burke connections".
My friend, I think you're more than set to get into CS grad school. Though please understand, the PhD enterpreneurs are few and far between. Most PhD students in CS and engineering don't understand how to develop their own great ideas, and they don't want to. PhD's are mostly for academics. Exceptions include places, like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

The upside is that you'll have lots of free time during a PhD curriculum to chase down your own ideas, and find the handful of like-minded people around campus. A PhD is a free time to pursue your own intellectual pursuit, and if you're already so energized, you'll do well.
Killer feature for Facebook chat is chat history? Really? My (free with contract) Verizon phone does just this with AIM. No need for a data plan.

And the iPhone does this with SMS. I'm sure the iPhone AIM apps do this, too.

So yeah: "Woo! Facebook chat!"
I would say both both yes and no.

No! if you are going to have the same features as in 3D VWs. Because features borrowed from 3D VWs don't look the same everytime.

Yes! if you are developing something very nice and that its going to be uber-cooler than a 3D world that already exists. The first thing is the creativity of the features in the VW. So it all depends upon your creativity.

And for the audience to cater to... It's all upto you. But since kids nowadays seem to have the statement "3D is cool" engraved in their minds, you need to develop something too coooool for them to forget the fact that they are paying something 2D. If you feel tough to do this, then I suggest you first develop a prototype with the coolest feature you think your VW is going to have and open it up to your close friends and colleagues. Ask them to play with you when they return from office or college. They might be tired and might be interested to play/hang on the VW for some fun. There starts your road to fame/shutter. It all depends how you carry it. Surely go niche first to an audience you think you can get easily(people you know) then open up.
It's great to see some attention getting paid to the documentation; the old wiki was woefully inadequate and out of date.
Ah, geographical market timing. It's like trying to time the stock market, only with less liquidity!

You know, sometimes Tim Ferriss gets things right. For example, he once wrote:

What if you need to learn to do something your friends haven't done? ... If the task is how-to in nature, I only read accounts that are "how I did it" and autobiographical. No speculators or wannabes are worth the time.

Has Paul Kedrosky, resident of La Jolla, CA, ever even been in Brazil for more than a week, much less tried to get a job or start a company there? He conspicuously fails to say so.

I remember the last news.yc item like this: It was about Dubai. And, wonder of wonders, Kedrosky's sly commenters have already posted the link that threw cold water on that idea: "The Top 20 Reasons Not To Move To Dubai":

http://www.escapeartist.com/efam/94/art_20_Reasons_Not_Move_...

A good principle: Before moving anywhere, find a "Top 20 Reasons Not To Move To X" article and make sure you're okay with it. (The first item on Boston's list is probably "snow"... unless you're a news.yc reader, in which case it's probably "Boston is not near Palo Alto". )
New Otto malloc helps spot ancient bug (33 years old) in yacc
The best explanation I've come up with is people have been playing Russian roulette with mortgages. It's mostly a zero-sum game.* During the boom, a lot of people made money by firing empty rounds at their temples, and got out of the game. But some people fired when there was a bullet in the barrel, losing an amount similar to that gained by the luckier players. The problems come when the gamblers weren't even using their own money to begin with. The winning gamblers got their commissions, management fees, and incentive fees, while the losers don't lose much that is their own.

Then, the costs get socialized. The Fed guarantees Bear Stearns for some fucked-up reason, making all taxpayers liable for the gambler's losses. With the Fannie Mae, this happened in reverse; first the gambler was isolated from getting a bullet in her brain, then the gambler proceeded to play Russian roulette.

*However, this game is not zero sum when it comes to markets. First, houses are rather illiquid, and second, meltdowns create unemployment and other inefficiencies. There's a reason nobody really plays Russian roulette in real life.
You'd be best off in Santiago, IMO. Lower taxes, little/no corruption, lower crime, etc. Not a bad place from which to serve the Spanish-speaking market. Keep in mind, though, that SV is still a better place to be.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#whyslash

We're talking about a version of GNU, the operating system, distinguished by having Linux as the kernel. A slash fits the situation because it means “combination.” (Think of “Input/Output”.) This system is the combination of GNU and Linux; hence, “GNU/Linux”.

There are other ways to express “combination”. If you think that a plus-sign is clearer, please use that. In French, a hyphen is clear: “GNU-Linux”. In Spanish, we sometimes say “GNU con Linux”.
Here is a better video with the same subject:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5_eEKEC28

Amazing to see how small the team was before Google acquisition:

2 sysadmin

2 scalability software architects

2 feature developers

2 network engineers

1 DBA
It's precisely because everyone else has thought of it that it's essential if you want to have even a fighting chance.
Kids take a lot of time, granted. But grad school? It takes 4-5 years (1), and during that time, you can work on your startup part time. You also develop technical skills, which you can later use to work outside the (somewhat crowded) webapp space.

(1) The average is 6 years, but that includes lots of lazy people, future college teachers, people who enjoy grad school, etc. Potential startup founders would almost certainly be faster.
The problem is these companies, with the implicit backing of the federal government take unnecessary and huge risks knowing they will be bailed out if they fail.

It's not "risk" if they only profit from the upside and don't take their medicine on the downside. Heads they win, tails you lose. :)
> .. there may be another Linux also that's not GNU

Technically there may be one. While the history of Hurd shows that the opposite is not quite true. So all things considered it should really be Linux/GNU :-)
This article is idiotic, but the higher-level point is that people should kill SMS with applications that send messages as Internet data. This is more likely to be AIM or Yahoo messenger than Facebook chat, but with so many devices out there supporting 3rd party applications it won't be long before a large number of heavy SMS users switch to these alternatives.
If you're willing to forego working with your brain in favor of physical labor, western Canada is probably one of the few places in the world that you can make a 6 digit income right out of high school.
Studies do show uneducated and people in 3rd world countries are more likely to be religeous in general.
dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240803
In many cases, the problem is that if it did fail, lots of other institutions would almost certainly be wiped out.

Imagine that you open a flood insurance office right next to a levee in New Orleans. You could price things rationally, but if there's a flood you're dead anyway, so why not price your insurance low and live it up in the meantime?
The us is roughly twice as religeous as the uk. Is it twice as moral? I'd say crime is quite a bit higher in the us.

In my experience growing up in the uk (majority of people are not religeous), the majority DO have a good sense of what is right and wrong.
Well, I guess that's a sustainable strategy as long as only one person pursues it, and everyone else is cool with it.

I don't know what to think of a moral system that dissolves all rights when one practitioner really, really wants something. Seems like nihilism with a smiley face.
What is interesting about the iPhone is, that you normally get it with an unlimited data plan. As soon as 3g is included in every plan, sms will loose it's importance. but I doubt that it will be replaced.

The keyboard issue kept me from buying one. Though at my school in Switzerland about 1% of the students already have one, even though until yesterday you couldn't get them.
Oh no, someone's written something on the Internet that's not relevant to wmeredith!
You can't really expect to see a page with 28 links that are 100% relevant to you. Just ignore the stuff you're not interested in and don't waste your time on completely useless comments such as the above.
Yes, and the Chinese invented the printing press. But what did they do with it - nothing.
> It makes it harder to buy a house, but deliquinces are low, and prices are not heated up.

Prices rose quote a bit in Italy and especially Spain, despite having similar conditions to those you describe.
So what? Few heroin addicts would reject a dose of heroin, but that doesn't prevent them from rationally knowing that it's not doing them any good. Arguably, our attitude toward life is like that of an addict.

I also think it's BS, FWIW, but not for the reason you mentioned.
Is anyone else using BackgroundRb? (http://backgroundrb.rubyforge.org/).
Wow. I've heard that people are a bit more despondent at FB. This could certainly explain why. Their high valuation has attracted politicians. I'm not sure if Schrage did anything special at Google -- he landed into a PR job for one the most beloved brands on the planet -- and then he jumped ship for FB.

They say this was part of what killed Netscape.
Shit, someone beat me to the flash light web app:

http://www.vflashlight.com/iphone/

It's not a subscriber site, but he asks for $5 donations (http://www.vflashlight.com/). What the hell is wrong with people?
A History of Hooch
Hey Kyro,

I can empathize with your experience trying to network in SoCal. Hopefully, your post encourages more local entrepreneurs to join the effort.

Peace.
+1.

See this line from your autobiography?

Entered pure-math grad program in fall 2005. Passed quals but did poorly in courses. Left after 1 year (no degree) to work on Wall Street...

You're right to think that grad schools might look at this and say "hmmm". Sometimes past behavior does predict future results: You will have one eye on the door throughout your graduate career.

(Although some grad school, somewhere, will admit you anyway -- there's not a lot to lose; they get a very smart and cheap TA for 1 to N years. So you should be as sure as you can before you start school that you have found an adviser worth having who will take you on, so that you don't end up wandering around campus post-quals with a "will write thesis for food" sign.)

Whatever you do, don't tell them up-front that you're uninterested in academia. To an academic, that's like saying "I have no self-confidence and I'm going to quit under pressure" -- because precious few of them accept, deep in their hearts, that quitting academia is a meaningful career choice. You don't need to go into detail about your imaginary academic plans, but do make some vague noises about the possibility. Talk about how your brief excursion into the working world served to remind you of how much you prefer really meaningful, advanced research problems that could change the whole game. They'll eat that up.

But to heck with what other people think about your resume. Let's consider what you should be thinking: You've been to grad school, you obviously didn't like it much the first time, but now it looks really good compared to life on Wall Street. My take on this is that perhaps you need to try door number three: You ought to get out of Wall Street, a land of credentialists in suits, and try another job or two before you try grad school. Because

I'm interested in AI/machine learning research, which practically require a PhD, even in industry.

sounds frighteningly like the kind of thing I would have said before I started grad school. You know, back when I was really used to jumping through hoops. I had a really awesome track record at hoop-jumping -- big GPA, big GREs, NSF Fellowship, etc, etc. -- and, whenever I got confused about my future, I would just look around the arena until I found another hoop!

Try something else for a while. At this point, the Ph.D. program will wait for you. Take your future out for some casual dates before you marry it. If nothing else, why not start with an M.S. degree? Two years will give you plenty of time to network with folks in your new field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

"Also, the life expectancy for women was lower throughout history than it was for men; because, until the advent of modern medicine, one in four women died in childbirth."

I had heard this statistic originally in some atheist propaganda video, hilariously enough.
I don't think anyone would claim that we know or understand all of those differences yet. I don't even really have an opinion on the math one, it's just the most commonly cited so I used it as example.

But we need to be open to the fact that they are there. It hinders scientific and social progress to scream sexism any time someone suggests the sexes might be different in some way.
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Irrelevant in that sharing "mostly the same genes" still leaves the door open to vastly different physical and psychological makeups. It's a given to say that men and women are very different physically (hell, our brains even have noticeably different shapes) yet it's taboo to say we might be different psychologically.
The freemasons.
But don't jog there, because you'll be less likely to pass a Starbucks with a bathroom.
I saw a finger get cut off.
You got me excited that Kathy was posting again!
IPhone Users Plagued by Software Problems
And Western Australia is another.
I wonder if this will make parking better or worse. If everyone knows about open parking spaces, then everyone will rush to the nearest space causing more congestion around it. Once they get to the space and realize someone else got lucky, they will all go to the next nearest open space. So are you really solving the parking congestion problem?
I do not work for the company that the link points to, if that is what you mean. Just saying you can jailbreak your phone and run anything you want.
BBC Have Your Say: What has been your costliest mistake?
Knuth Musings Video Lecture Series
Me too - I miss that blog so much!
Signs Point to Facebook Payment Platform Launch
It hinders progress in the same way to scream anti-sexism when what is really being suggested is a reasoned discussion.

It might be absurd to assert equality, but it's a decent postulate to take while we don't know for sure. And I think asserting the certainty of particular innate differences, without sufficient evidence, is more dubious than the corresponding assertion of equality.
Well, at least now you get something in return for the parking fee. I wish we had something lke this in Seattle as well.
why doesn't he call it "ginix"?
iBroken - Is the iPhone 3G on its way to a recall? (Pictures)
I think that this is a fantastic idea. I wonder what kind of variable and fixed costs come along with employing the parking sensors. A service like this will certainly justify a raise in meter fees.
Guess that means I'll have to wait a week or so to pick one up. Which doesn't bother me one bit. :)
Hrm. This seems like it CAN work (clearly) but is really sub-optimal... Like hunting for a wife on dating sites or hunting for an employee in a resume database. A lot (but not all) of the best options aren't going to put themselves out there as targets because the signal-to-noise ratio is so bad.

I'd second the "find the watering hole where your prey is" comment.
or ginix"?
Well, the one thing we know for sure is that we're different. We just don't know all of the why's and how's. So overall equality (in the sense of similarity) is the only thing we know to be incorrect.
The 9 Signs of a One-hit Wonder
If Fannie and Freddie fail and shut down, you will not be able to get a mortgage for the next several years. This is not an exaggeration. Mortgage lenders depend on the ability to sell their mortgages to Fannie Mae; your average lender doesn't have enough resources to keep all of them on its balance sheet. A huge number of investors buy the mortgage backed securities Fannie Mae issues because it's one of the biggest, most liquid, most transparent, and safest markets in the world. (And traders like me depend on it for their livelihood...) If that market disappeared, mortgage lending in the US would freeze.
If the OS is powering something like a nuclear reactor, it better not crash or do something unexpected.
Facebook haunted by mild-mannered specter
As the "Road to Reality" explains, if you study Quantum mechanics, complex numbers become every bit as "real" as the integers or real numbers. You just can't explain some of the quantum mechanical phenomena or concepts without using complex numbers at all.
Interviewing and being interviewed
Agreed. I think that's the key point to this whole article. Too bad the discussion focused on the Christianity part.

If you found a lot of value in this article, check out their website (http://www.horizonsoftware.com/). Although it's not interesting, unless you are interested in successful, multi million dollar software startups.
Oh certainly, I agree. However, the lack of (non-awful) explicit, atheistic writing on morality is still an important problem, and helps religious people get away with denying atheists can be moral. If you are moral, but can't explain why, it's easier for people to doubt.
> This was predicted by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in the Black Swan.

I got the impression that he firmly asserted that he was not in the predictions business.
I saw a finger get eaten.
Play this game for 20 minutes - learn about concurrency
You're HURD's biggest proponent, aren't you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7aShDkLWKs

Oh I'm sorry, did I break your concentration? --Julisu, Pulp Fiction
Culture, law and basic infrastructure matter more than some of us realize. If you are waiting in line for half a day to pay your utility bills or if things, a lot of us take for granted, such as sewers and potable water are not available then its not worth it.

Sure, entrepreneurs succeed in any environment but fighting against the environment is not the only problem that should be taking up an entrepreneurs resources.
well,for a heart failure patient,he could have a new cloned heart!
You have to play through level seven to appreciate my point -- fork-and-exec is basic Level One stuff but you need to play for a bit to appreciate the full horror of shared-resource contention.
eww, a bunch of youtube commenters are taunting the victim. they care more about alligators than people.
It could be that banks are unique in that a failure at one could cause consumers throughout the economy to irrationally panic, which could cause lead to a feedback cycle where a drop in confidence leads to a drop in economic activity leads to a drop in confidence etc.. In this case then due purely to chance(because even if a bank took adequate risk measures, they could still fail due to a freak event) the economy could spin into a recession without this "government insurance policy".

It could be that all the top dogs on Wall Street and at the Fed are buddy-buddy, and don't want anything terrible to happen to each other, so they watch each other's backs. (Similar to how foreign rulers sometimes allow their deposed enemies to go into "exile", to hopefully win some good karma should they themselves ever become deposed).

It's probably not either of these. I don't know. I don't think anybody does.
The point that I found interesting and hopefully other budding entrepreneurs would too, is how he created a niche...

"We had written all this software. The best was our warehouse and distribution package. I had been using it for years in my own stuff. We decided to try selling it. I thought it would be like the paint: I'd just go out there and introduce myself, distributors would pick it up, and I'd be home free. Well, I had a rude awakening. When those big boys are in there, they just stomp you. I realized I had to have a niche."
A Disquisition on Acquisition and Relinquishment