skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every time I see WePay claiming to be an anti-paypal I let out such a sigh. Instead of building a business (well, the marketing side) on what they offer, they're building it on how shitty a competitor is, except they're not a competitor.

WePay is to paypal what... Myspace is to Facebook? I have no idea what to compare them to, but WePay offer 1/3rd the functionality of what Paypal offer and are building their business on everyone "hating" Paypal except they don't face the same challenges Paypal do.

Even this comment is ridiculous, everyone is praising them for their "honesty" when this is exactly what companies like Mastercard did, so because they're big businesses they're not allowed to make sensible decisions, but because they're a startup they are? http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/f5vh1/i_founded_the_an...

It's stupid. They mentioned Paypal 17 times in their post, more than they mentioned their own business.
"Convert your contractors"

Ha. Unfortunately he doesn't explain how, which of course is the difficult part.

I'm currently contracting myself and I love it. I get paid high daily rates, have no commitment other than the project I'm working on and I can move on with only a weeks notice. Please explain me how you are going to convert me. How is it going to be worth taking a pay cut and not be the final technical decision maker within your business?
In a country with rule of law and transferable property rights (most of the western world), one would expect market forces to prevent this. Underutilized land (such as a slum) would be purchased from it's owners by investors hoping to make more efficient use of it. Both parties would wind up richer because of the transaction.

The phenomena of nontransferable property rights exists only in a few parts of the US, so most Americans are unfamiliar with it. NY is one such place - claims on public housing or occupancy in a rent control apartment are a form of property rights (it's very difficult to deprive you of them) which is not transferable. NY is also one of the rare places where we have land used by very rich people directly adjacent to land hugely underused by it's occupants [1].

Most of the US is better run than NY, so phenomena like this are absent from most people's experience.

[1] Most of the value of the land is caused by it's proximity to institutions like GS or Bloomberg, but the lower middle class occupants of public housing and retirees living in rent controlled apartments do not make use of this proximity. Thus, the land is underused.
That is effectively the same (but not quite as nice) as the solution I linked to.

The problem is that I can't ask Joe Client to create placeholder divs. I want to handle it magically for him.
Agile in a Flash -- is chock-full of a bunch of great insights by some real practice-based folks.

Caveat Emptor: you will not become an agile master in a flash by memorizing the cards in two days.
To be honest, after failing the first time I knew I had to pass, so I CTR + Tab'd to this backup HN tab and wrote this comment as the soothing ocean noises on the other tab calmed me.
This would be perfect, but if you read the notice on the top of the page, it no longer works with current browsers.
Yeah, because if the judge could do that, they'd just set up shell companies that only own one patent, but which funnel the rewards of litigation back to their masters.
Sigh, my laid Bangalore is no more :|
You can just install a web based ssh solution on your EC2 ubuntu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_SSH
Start-up Stories: Mike Malone
Overmind: the Starcraft analog to DeepBlue?
See: Halliburton's Patent Trolling Patent

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...
"The irony is that most startup blogs are written and maintained by failed entrepreneurs."

In the last six months or so, I've felt the same way about a lot of the users here on HN. It's a joke amongst my friends who also read this site that we wish there was a "PROVE IT" button next to each comment... just as a way to tweak all of the people who like to talk like they've come down the mountain with stone tablets to tell us how to do things.

That's not to say that everyone here who has taken the time to offer advice and suggestions to others is full of it, of course. Yet I still think you should hesitate to take a lot of what people say with any degree of importance until you know that their background justifies it.
I think this means you have a business case for a faster computer with an SSD...
That is far easier said than done. If the streaming is point to multi-point then the crypto can get tricky, if you allow people to join and leave the group at random it gets tricky, and keeping it all working without providing a list of the participants to each peer is tricky. With BitTorrent Bram started out with a system that had strong crypto and privacy (Mojo Nation) and stripped most of it out because it increased the complexity for little benefit.

Strong crypto and privacy have costs, both in end-user resources and bandwidth implications. Getting it all correct is hard and if you screw up a little it is usually worse than starting from the position that privacy and a secure channel is something that the user has to bring to the table if they really want it.
That's kind of a personal question.

Oh wait, MEDITATE? No, not that one. Takes too long.
Why didn't they use the Space Shuttle to rescue the Apollo 13 astronauts?
We just finished the incubator program with i/o ventures (http://ventures.io) I think it's certainly a different experience that you would get from YC.

The biggest reason why I wanted to join the i/o class was because of how small it is. i/o only brings on 5-6 start-ups per class which really helps let them focus on making sure you succeed. At any time, we can get a sit down with the partners to bounce ideas off of or just chat and hear about their experiences.

And they're completely honest about their opinions. I remember when we first joined with our original idea (we pivoted twice), Jim flat out said I'm not a big fan of your idea, but I know you guys will succeed somewhere down the line, and that's why I wanted you guys here. And 4 months + 2 pivots later, he's excited about what we're working on now and the potential it has.

One of the best parts was if we ever needed advice around a particular topic: SEO, scaling, customer acquisition, sales, PR - one of the partners would introduce us to a founder who knows everything about it. The best way to leverage advisors and learn from them.

The i/o space is also amazing. I love the fact that it's like a second home. Whenever we're in the city we drop by to catch up with everyone there. And even after the program, everyone still hangs out there.

I think all of the incubators bring a lot of value to a start-up. It really just depends on what you're looking to get out of it ...
I have no beef particular with Apple (or Ford).
£10 Raspberry Pi computer could teach kids programming
The Social network locks many award at Golden Globe 2011
Web 2.0 for Noobs (An Intro)
Let's give this guy credit where due. It's probably the most awesomest transistorized 4-bit adder handmade in the US since 1973.
Thank you. I think it's funny how the same idea spawns several places at once. And great to hear that you guys think there is a demand for it.
JsFiddle: a REPL for web development
Group buying has been around for eons starting in China known as tuangou. Although there are lots of new competitors in the space, there is clearly a great deal of pent up demand from local businesses in the marketplace. I doubt that this form of consumer purchasing will die anytime soon.

One should ask themselves why there is so much pent up demand for group buying in the marketplace?

Some critics focus on poor efficacy rates for repeat business from Groupon customers. Others will claim that it is a fad. Still others will argue that the business running a Groupon campaign will not make money from the deal.

But what is the alternative?

The alternative for most businesses is to purchase ads in local print newspapers, create print flyers, and other more traditional means of marketing, which all require upfront costs from the local business. Most small businesses do not use online SEM.

The great advantage with Groupon is there are no upfront costs. (1) Businesses get thousands of impressions from the email marketing campaigns showcasing their deal. (2) If a deal gets executed the business gets guaranteed foot traffic and revenue from customers, which is trackable. (3) There is the potential to acquire a percentage of new customers as repeat customers. All of this with no upfront costs.

The reason I am very optimistic on the continued growth of this model of purchasing is that the market is validating it. You can see this from the explosive revenue growth numbers of group buying companies. And businesses recognize that it is much more cost effective and measurable to launch a Groupon than invest in the alternative.

So the analysis should not be what is the best or perfect solution for local businesses to acquire customers, but what is a marginally better alternative for customer acquisition. Group buying is.

For large businesses, I see a similar value. I would make an educated guess that Gap and Amazon spend a great deal of money on customer acquisition. Thus the group buying economics probably work in their favor. I would have a hard time believing that they lost money on their Groupon campaigns. Even if they broke even, it is a campaign that successfully drove millions of paying customers to their site, broke major headlines, and was great PR for both companies. Just because you are a big company doesn't mean that you do not appreciate this kind of attention.

We are witnessing the nascent stages in the evolution of group buying. Larger companies like Groupon and LivingSocial will build an incredible amount of data to mine for new initiatives like determining their customers' preferences and targeting them for secondary purchases. This is just the beginning.
After 6 seconds I couldn't help but check the source to see if it was playing sound using <video> or Flash.....
JavaScript Computer Algebra System
Totally agree. The best people care more about working with, begin challenged by and learning from other great people, and pay is far down the list
Samsung Vibrant Froyo Upgrade Coming Jan. 21
Well, at some point you become so enthralled with the project and the company that you want to be a part of it vs. thining of yourself as a paid agent doing a job. And if not, you probably aren't a fit and wouldn't get the offer in the first place (at least not in my experiences)
This is why I hate long bike trips: you spend 90% of your time pedaling uphill.
you seem to be implicitly perpetuating the 'fast, good or cheap; pick any two' myth.

Please allow me to reiterate my belief that software is one of the few things in life where raising the quality reduces costs and speeds delivery.
Programmers must learn licensing or I will kill them all
If your intention was not to answer the question you quoted, it would have been best not to quote it, because it looks like you are trying to answer it.
Phoronix recently tried to benchmark a micro instance. It didn't do very well:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amazo...

Turns out that on average a micro's performance is somewhere between a netbook and an ARM tablet for most tasks, but the performance varies wildly.
But it still can be made with image objects.
Eric Schmidt Out as Google CEO
All lists for browser share that I have seen show FF as having either plateaued or started to drop by small percentages. If you add mobile browsers into the mix then even the plateau becomes a small drop.
Google Announces 2010 Results and Management Changes
Humans have evolved to pay close attention to, and be keenly aware of, their environment. Of course you can't just sit still for two minutes: there may be a snake crawling by. Pay attention or suffer the consequences.

As the Zen enthusiasts already implicitly acknowledged, the ability to concentrate on a single thing may well be valuable, but concentrating on a single thing, especially on a single thing of your own choosing at the time of your choosing, is vastly different from doing nothing, on a moment chosen by someone else, while actually concentrating on something you don't consider interesting.
Reports say that Larry Page will take over the role of chief executive
When was the last time Apple had a bad quarter? :-)
I'm sorry, my wording was pretty poor there. What I was really attempting to ask was whether most people consider MBA grads to be "rich", not accuse _you_ of conflating the two terms.
Learning from Twitter
Eric Schmidt: On April 4th I Will Step Down, Larry Page to be CEO
Agreed. It sounds like a very useful feature.
I don't have much patience for the claims that not thinking can yield profound insights; but I have found mediation techniques useful for simple relaxation.

I got the techniques from an ebook called "Mindfulness In Plain English":

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html
I didn't mean for this to be a personal question - I don't think it is. To me, meditation is scientific (although to some, and in some religions, it is a spiritual thing). I could just as well have asked about whether you sleep or do sports, or code using vim vs textmate. It's as personal as you want it to be - but I respect your opinion, and your reluctance to reply.
This must be an amazingly fun AI competition :)

Would be great if Blizzard officially opened up a bot api for SC2 and made a special league for people to compete with them.

I expect blizzard have a lot of data mined from ladder games that they use for balance tweaking; shame they don't (afaik) also use it to make a kick-ass AI that learns from real battle.net games vs human players.
Larry Page To Replace Eric Schmidt As CEO
Generally sleep and relaxing with friends is the best meditation for me.
Odd; keeps failing despite no input.
A Quick Overview of the U.S. Economy, NAICS-style
maybe because you have owned 4 laptops over the last 9 years.
Well, 30 years ago was 1981 and the IBM PC was kicking off that part of history. 40 years ago was 1971. There were still many commercial transistorized systems but most new designs were going to integrated circuits quickly.

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401 is probably a representative example of the transitorized computer, produced from 1959 to 1971. It's a good bet that the people who designed it knew how to solder but were different from those who assembled it. They knew the transistors, but probably designed it in terms of higher-level blocks of logic (adders, memory, etc).

Not many people have designed and built full computers from scratch at the transistor level. Enthusiasts didn't really get into it until microprocessors were available. Even then, they required hundreds of solder connections to be able to even use lights and switches for IO.

Fun times.
It's accessible from more places than your laptop is, unless you take your laptop with you everywhere. You could demo something to a friend for instance.
I meditate to awaken (in the deeper sense), to bring calm to a wild mind (as I think Robert Pirsig said, peace of mind is not the most important thing, it's the only thing), and to try to become a better, more compassionate person.

You don't have to meditate in a convoluted sitting position if you choose not to (although there are good reasons for sitting in lotus).

I would start by just regularly sitting or walking quietly, being aware of your breathing, and watching thoughts and emotions flowing into and right back out of your mind's I.
My favorite line of questioning was the Breyer/Scalia comment:

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, one reason might be
that this has really never been a problem because all
the legitimate -- or most of them, anyway -- that these
organizations that have interests in privacy are
actually taken care of by the other 17 exemptions here.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Another reason might be
that personal -- nobody ever thought that
personal privacy would cover this.

I think that combined with the burdens analysis from Scalia is much more damning:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Is it the burden of the
government to show that they intended to exclude
corporations, or is it your burden to show that this
exception was meant to include corporations? I would
think the latter is where the burden lies in this case.
MR. KLINEBERG: Well, Justice Scalia, our -­
our burden is to -- is to defend our view of the
statute.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, but if you're asking
the government to show that the -- there was an intent
to exclude corporations, I don't think that's their
burden. I think it's your burden to show that this
exemption was intended to include corporations.
MR. KLINEBERG: I agree, Your Honor, that we
are -- our burden is to demonstrate to you why the words
"personal privacy" in the statute apply to corporations.

If the Government had to demonstrate that Congress intended to exempt corporations, none of Robert's questions matter. It might weaken AT&T's case, but it wouldn't destroy it. That the Court & AT&T agree that AT&T needs to demonstrate that Congress intended to exempt the privacy of corporations and that 35 years of FOIA requests don't have a single example of such a decision is what really damages AT&T's position.

And Mr. Yang closed well:

Now, AT&T has given up on the grammatical
imperative that guided exclusively the court of appeals
decision in this case, there's nothing left. AT&T can
provide no example where the term personal privacy has
ever been used to refer to a corporation, much less a
foreign government or state or local government in any
context, whether it be FOIA, the law generally, or even
in common usage.

Also, for what it's worth, one other 'fun line' came at the expense of Mr. Yang. Justice Scalia:

Well, I'm not going to help
the government's position if the government doesn't want
to be helped. I'm happy to leave you where you put
yourself.
Congrats on having one.
He was joking that he read another, more personal activity that begins with m, rather than what you actually wrote - meditate.
I wonder how much of this is due to some of the bad decisions Eric Schmidt has made with google.
I plan to, in the future. Both of those features are essentially layers on top of my current set of features. I've only got a small number of additional things to add to what you see before I begin to go back and polish everything. I'm still focusing on making the back end into something that can grow.
Wow wouldn't have seen this coming. Any ideas on what caused this change? Seems like they are trying to move Schmidt to more of an operational role.
Cool idea. I'll see if I can work it in! Thanks.
I was making a joke because at first I misread the word 'meditate' as something else.

I'm beginning to realize that there's a humor tax on your karma if you're prone to make sarcastic jokes in well meant questions. Seems only fair.

But to answer your question in ernest, I've been thinking about it after hearing folks like Dan Benjamin and Leo Babauta talk about it, but currently don't. I'm sure it can benefit a lot of people (even me), but somehow there's a motivational hump I haven't gotten over yet and there always seems like there's something else to do.

...which basically means I'm the perfect candidate for someone who ought to do it.
The similarities between religions may relate to the forces that shape them aka people/society/war/physics/or even god(s). However, many of the world’s religions are fairly closely related. If you ignore those that were influenced by Mesopotamia or India you find there is a lot more variety out there than you much suspect.
Learning about the hukou system disturbed me at first, but the longer I live in Beijing, the more I approve of the system in some form. There are too many people here. Live with Beijing's traffic for a couple of years, or push more people than you can imagine can fit into a crowded subway train. There are not enough resources to go around. How would you deal with it?
If you are interested in learning CS stuff you should find an interesting domain outside the web. Traditional web development is too simple (all based around CRUD operations) until you run into problems of scale.

My favorite CS courses and the ones I learned the most in were:

* graphics (algorithms, data structures, and OpenGL)

* compilers (wrote a parser and compiler for a subset of
Java)

* lisp (blazed through the SICP)

* operating systems (wrote a tiny linux-esque kernel)

I would suggest scratching a few itches and see where it leads. Pick up an introductory book on the topic and your choice programming language. Read through these cover to cover to get your fundamentals, but simultaneously start a project incorporating new skills as you learn them.
He wasn't fired, his role is just changing
You can if it's absolutely fixed. But what about when it's only "more-or-less-fixed"? :-)
Leaders of the two major players, Apple and Google, are taking a back seat now at the same time. It'll be an interesting watch from here
If meditation were suddenly discovered now, it would probably come with a bunch of baggage about how the mind is a computer.

But, IS the mind a computer?
I have been meditating for a while, always sitting in a chair. What are the advantages of the Lotus?
Most forms of meditation originated from religious practices, which is why many people still see them as connected.

Of course yoga also originated out of religious practices, but very few people have trouble seeing yoga as an activity that can be done completely separate from any kind of religious or spiritual practice. I would assume that over time, as meditation practice becomes more common that people will have an easier time accepting that it can be practiced in a completely as a completely secular activity.
I just can't picture Larry as CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world, I'm frankly surprised he'd want this!
Your essay is a tautology disguised as a morality tale.

You define a bad technology as one that can't be automated.

And then, those things which can be automated, will be.

Automation speeds things up, hence the majority of things left to do are the things that can't be automated.

Which you already defined as bad.

Hence the majority of things for a programmer to do are 'bad'.

====

Anyway, the thing that leaps out at me as laughably bad is your editor where you have to type in a particular line number.

Dude, it's 2011. Even Eclipse (which I despise since it has a truly shitty UI which keeps trying to reduce my coding area to the size of a postage stamp) has a feature where you click on the bug and it takes you to the line that the compiler reported. And it has a nifty feature where it shows which lines are broken.... which has only been in Visual Basic SINCE THE FRIGGIN' EARLY 90s

I'm gonna have to assume that you're using Emacs or Vi or some piss-ant command line equivalent. Let me tell you guys, the holy war is over... YOU BOTH LOST!

Emacs vs Vi reminds me of the Iran-Iraq war. A war that went on for ages, in a place that nobody cared about, between two groups that nobody cared about, that stagnated and stunted their development, while the rest of the world left them behind.
Seems like Larry is done with CEO school, and ready to lead his company. It would have been hard to get this far without Eric Schmidt
I read about this on the SCOTUS blog and it really stood out for the reasons you mention. But there was also the part where one of the justices mentioned that they'd always construed the parts of this statute narrowly and the FCC counsel actually said that they're prefer not to interpret personal privacy too narrowly due to their broader interests (i.e. not wanting to gut it for everyone), only to find out later that the justice was essentially trying to help him argue against AT&T's arguments.

Like you said, highly unusual.
You may be getting your Larrys mixed up (Page vs Ellison).
What decisions made by Eric Schmidt would you consider "bad"?