skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For most undergrads, you're right (and note, I'm not saying that this is how undergrad should or shouldn't be). But the ones that are typically celebrated are those that are doing graduate/professor level research (or public service) as undergrads, and exceling. It's the Barton Reids and Wendy Kopps of the world. Those are the people that college professors heap praise on and recommend for prestigious fellowships.

Someone who is all-around good, but doesn't go deep, is likely to go unrecognized at the Rhodes-level. You must excel at something for your department or professor to take notice.

There's an old saying about Harvard... Harvard doesn't want well-rounded students. It wants a well-rounded student body. That is it doesn't want a bunch of good students. It wants the best math student, the best physics student, the best chess player, the best violinist, the programming prodigy, etc...

My point is that we've created a system where this is the metric. And when this is, you can't be surprised that when you try to take the cream of the crop, using this metric you may not get the results you expect.

Like I said, if she picked members of the top debate teams I think she'd be very impressed that they have answers for all those questions.
How Google can beat Groupon: take 4 of the best developers, rent an apartment in Palo Alto, wait 3 months, take the Groupon clone they create and give everyone in the US $10 to signup: http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/bring-me-the-head-of-eric-sc...
Eh, people have been attributing a lot of Twitter's success to the same phenomenon for a few years now.
Interesting. The name isn't the best to google for, though...
Netscape was Clark's brainchild. He had left SGI (his previous startup) and recruited Andreesen, who wrote Mosaic at NCSA / Illinois. Clark brought so much to the table with his experience, connections, vision, etc.
The author should probably provide links to zipped versions of the file. Would definitely save his and other's bandwidth.
Eh? Not only are houses and furniture still made of wood, but a large portion of the wood houses from 1911 are still being lived in.
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Right, that's why I said he's mostly a CEO in title. Inventing new technology isn't typically part of the job description of a CEO at a major corporation.
I quit the best job I ever had. Honestly, I regret it still.
And now this new account claim, that if you can misuse a tool, it is bad (please hand over all your kitchen knives).

>>Lisp isn't very useful for these obfuscated code contests

I quite like Lisp. I still am quite certain that nice macro system can be used in many very interesting ways...

I have no problem with language war trolls either, as long as they stay at 4chan, or where ever they come from...
It's a poor one. And I'd rather not have it made at the expense of someone I do know even if I'm sure that it's not going to bother him in the slightest.
Thanks for being helpful. Here's where I run into a problem: http://www.google.com/cse/manage/create

What do I put in the "Sites to search" box?
If people don't meet their goals, the thread will full of crickets or excuses.
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Much better. Let's review the accuracy of his predictions:

1. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels.

Accuracy: Pretty good (please let's not take this as a cue for another thread about the lack of a high-speed rail network in country-of-your-choice though). I'm not sure what "hydraulic wheels" means here.

2. He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside

Accuracy: Very good, though too slow by a factor of three (yes yes, airport security sucks, blah blah blah, I love pre-empting threads).

3. The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost -- of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradlehis father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother's boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies.

Accuracy: Yes and no. We could have steel furniture, but we generally don't, because it tends to be ugly. I could build a lightweight sideboard out of sheet metal if I wanted to, but I'm not sure why I'd bother. In any case, chipboard turns out to have been the best option for low-cost furniture (hello Ikea).

4. Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound

I have no idea where this comes from. Maybe we could make a book with ultra-thin metal pages, but wouldn't they be so insanely delicate that you'd rip the pages when you tried to turn them? Of course we have better ways to carry around an encyclopaedia in a tiny volume.

5. "Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel. We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions."

This falls into the category "lolwut"? Was this really widely believed in 1911?

6. In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern

Except that gold is really heavy and extremely soft and as a result one of the worst possible materials for shipbuilding?
Your third paragraph is correct and I'm confused why you thought it was contrary to my point.

I'm not saying that no one has any trace of stupidity. I'm saying that the concept of stupidity-intelligence is not a binary, it is a gradient.

What I'm arguing is that the question reveals its flaws, and the flaws of the lesswrong community. A member who self-identifies as part of that community is either being redundant by saying something about themselves that applies to every human being, or they are being elitist by implying that they have (or seek, and therefore have) some special understanding of the universe.

This is illustrated because Kenneth is dividing the world into people who are right and wrong and wondering if being wrong can sometimes be right. It's nonsense, a question brought about by too much caring how right you can be.
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Ahh.. As to redundancy, is there a case to be made that all or most self-identification reduces to self-identifying as a human? (After all, we're the only species (we know of) that self-identify with some word...) If not all self-identification is redundant, then surely many forms of self-identification could be made to be elevating your personal self above others? (Never mind whether it's your personal rationality or your personal programming language preference.)

I guess I'm not seeing your point on this. Why pick on rationalists? Because they think they're smarter and not supposed to fall into the traps of lazy/empty-labeling and social signaling? I'm reminded of http://xkcd.com/774/
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An achievement system for Pivotal Tracker jumps immediately into my mind. I want achievements for consistent velocity, low number of bugs, PM's who regularly go in and accept stories, etc...
It's also a reinforcing spiral. Getting into a Model UN conference at high school, improves your chances of joining the state debate team, which improves your chances of getting into an honours society, which improves your chances of going to that Future Leaders seminar, which ...

I called it "The CV circuit". The only way to win was to get onto it first. I think Americans have worked this out more completely than we have (in New York they send toddlers to prep school to get them into the best kindergartens).
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Are we ready to apply for YC S11?
We are a team of 2 working full time on an app. We have a prototype ready, but still few weeks away from when we can have some early adopters test our app - and we can get feedback / validation. Although, we have been talking to people and they seem to like the idea of our app.

We are debating if we should apply for the YC next batch - the quality of YC finalists has gone up in a big way in the past one year, where the finalist startups are much beyond customer validation stage, they now have real users using and loving their product, and most of them seem very close to their beta.. some have even reached a stage where they can charge their users. We still have some time to reach that stage.

There are 2 point of views floating in our minds -
1.) We are not there yet, where we can compete head on with the current set of finalists.
2.) We should just apply and let the judges judge. Many times we ourselves are not the best judge of our work - as Sivers points out.
We know we should apply when we feel ready. However, at times it's just good to discuss it out with few others - the debate helps clear out our own thoughts.
What do you think?
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I actually found it significantly easier to meet women outside of college. I was a Computer Science major and all I did was go to my classroom with all males and work on my hw/projects with all males. Further, as you get older, you have more and more women you can date.
Lest we forget, the main purpose of shows like CES is for buyers and to let manufacturers gauge demand. Apple is in a much different situation than most OEMs who need to secure partners and shelf space.

If companies like acer, asus, etc. tried to go around to their large stable of retail buyers in secret all that'd happen is the details would leak out well before their "available now" announcement.
True, Oppenheimer became CFO of Apple in 2004, replacing Fred Anderson. But he's been with Apple since 1996, when he came on as controller for the Americas. In 1997 he was promoted to vice president and Worldwide Sales controller and then to corporate controller.
Why do people still insist on using DTD?
You left out $4M of his own money as the initial investment.
While I agree with you, it's not entirely true that you have one form that you post in once a year. While your 'group certificate' is postcard size, I think it's somewhat like a W2 (been a while since I received either), you still have to submit a personal tax return. For most people, it's just a case of reporting the information on the Group Certificate(s) (depending on how many jobs you had) and perhaps claiming on some deductions like uniforms or (new) secondary school expenses for dependent children.

That said, the government is talking about moving to a model whereby you don't have to submit a return unless you specifically want to claim some deductions. This is more like the UK model.

As for the US being the laughing stock - I don't know if I would choose those words, but I do think the IRS needs its wings clipped by foreign governments. The whole W8BEN form thing is ridiculous (so tempted to put F.YOU IRS as my contact details) as is the mind-boggling fact that the only way to not file a return in the USA is to renounce your citizenship (and good luck visiting your relatives after that!).

The myriad of local, state and federal taxes, forms, rulings and corporate structures - well, I do wonder how much GDP is lost in paper shuffling. It can't be insignificant.

Personally, I would have the tax laws in most countries scrapped and replaced with flat-banded taxes with zero exemptions. The tax rates would be lower to make up for the lost deductions, but in general, if you earnt X, you'd be up for taxes of Y. Corporations would be kept for their original purpose of limited liability rather than taxation structures. As noted above, it's all the special interests that get in, and, well, anyone who was tried to selectively reward children will know the impossobility of 'fair' once selective rewards and exemptions are introduced.
As a point of curiosity, what's the usual rate of stock vesting for early employees at most small tech startups?
Enables you to easily borrow someone else's layout as 'inspiration' that you can then tweak. Don't discount the number of designers/developers that use another layout (or elements of it) as a base to work from - I've seen many do it.

Before there's a "Plagiarising!" response, also keep in mind that the final product in this case usually looks nothing like the original but that an original often serves as a more effective starting point than a blank canvas.
Thanks for your reply. Just to be sure I understand you correctly, which one (if any) is true:

If an S-Corp makes money, it is assumed that the earnings are distributed and thus both personal income tax (on the entire earnings amount) as well as payroll taxes (on the reasonable wage) have to be paid.

Or:

If an S-Corp makes money, it is assumed that the earnings are distributed and the personal income tax has to be paid (on the entire earnings amount), but payroll taxes don't need to be paid.
>"However, I'd like to try to convert them into a paying client for a product that we'd discussed nearly 2 years ago but haven't implemented (it's been effectively killed)."

Cross that bridge when you have a working version 1.0. A heads up might just cause the project to revive. And if you pivot after telling them your plans, you may leave them hanging.

Most importantly, don't make your business model dependent on having your former company as a customer. The most sincere intentions to funnel business towards you may go unfulfilled, even when the benefits of working with you appear obvious. Don't kid yourself, you are a potential competitor.

My advice is to leave on the best terms possible and consider your former employers as part of your business network. Call and go to lunch once a month or so. It's the social relationship that will have the largest payoff in the long haul.

Good luck.
Apparently they do emulate podcasts.

Here's an example of one of their feeds.

http://www.ezrss.it/search/index.php?simple&show_name=pb...

Note that each item has an enclosure.

They have other data that doesn't fit into the existing elements of item, so creating a namespace is exactly the right thing to do.
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There's that too. Clark recounted years later that he felt short-changed by the VCs over SGI and he wasn't going to let that happen again.
"At 158, it’s a small sample size, and it’s still early days for the Windows Phone 7 platform..."

It's still a bit too early to tell considering how long iPhone and Android have been out.
An alternative approach previously posted on HN:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...
"After thinking about it for a moment, I guess I'm totally wrong."

And yet, your totally wrong and snarky comments above get up-voted. Go figure.

"The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina."

And you said you were here for 10 years? Based on the amount of real-estate you devoted to talking about getting girls, I'm guessing you're not too good at it. Yes, it's harder to get girls in SF than in NYC, but the people droning on about it are as hopeless in SF as they are anywhere else.
The western media are notoriously NON neutral on the Palestinian issue. I'm on the periphery of the West and can get a quite good impartial access to both sides, but for an American it's almost impossible if he does not venture outside of mainstream media outlets.
> The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost

He seemed to way over-emphasize the use of metal but way under-estimated the use of plastic!
I disagree. My undergraduate degree was in biology, but I earned it from a liberal arts college. What did that mean? It meant that I took an awful lot of biology classes, but I was also forced[1] to take a lot of classes outside of the science building. The college's degree requirements specified that you had to take a certain number of credits from such-and-such department, a certain number from so-and-so, and so on, no matter what your major happened to be. As a science major, it was sometimes very challenging to fit all the requirements in, but I'm really glad I did. Having a broad base of knowledge outside one's speciality is extremely liberating personally, and it can be professionally empowering, as well.

It's easy, as a scientist, to lose perspective about what we do- both in terms of "why are we doing this at all" to "why do we do this in this specific way." A good liberal arts education helps you a) recognize situations in which those sorts of questions are relevant, and b) can help you develop a useful set intellectual tools for answering those questions. Also, a lot of the biology I learned is already obsolete, ten years later; while learning it was certainly worthwhile, it is of relatively little practical value to me today (and not just because I didn't end up going into biology).

Also, having to take some humanities classes helped me become a better writer, and also helped me learn how to effectively discuss my work and why it is important. Those have proved to be extremely useful skills in life, both in academia as well as in the "real world".

Now, I would also argue that, had I been a humanities major of some sort, taking some hard-core science classes would have been quite beneficial- it would have taught me about a different way to engage with and think about reality, which can only be beneficial to one's ability to think about literature, or music, or whatever.

Oh, BTW- in addition to biology classes, I took a fair number of CS classes (almost enough for a minor), and I feel like my programming abilities over the years have definitely benefited from a liberal arts background. Furthermore, when I was doing hiring at my pre-grad-school job, I found that the best candidates weren't necessarily the ones with impeccable CS credentials. Often, the ones that worked out best in the end were often the ones that had broader academic horizons. They tended to have an easier time dealing with ambiguous situations and instructions, and were better able to "dive in" and "JFDI" when confronted with new and unfamiliar codebases, technologies, or projects. That's not to say that CS classes weren't important, or anything like that- just that there's a synergistic effect between good CS and the humanities.

[1]: "Forced" isn't quite the right word, here, since getting a broad education was the whole reason I chose a liberal arts school. "Required," maybe?
Funny, but how do you get four developers to find the deals for the 100,000,000 americans and talk to the local businesses and administrate everything and and and..!
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If you replace "steel" with "plastic" it would be pretty accurate.

But I'm really surprised at the suggestion to use gold structurally - even then he had to have known it's too soft for that. Plus anything common is no longer luxurious, so if we did have cheap gold no one would want it.
HN: Who are your favorite Tech World bloggers?
Recently I've realized that I've learned so much from blogs, especially from some of the top ones, such as Paul Graham's Essays, Fred Wilson's AVC, and Guy Kawasaki always makes legendary entries.

I was wondering who are some of your top
insightful bloggers that you follow? I was hoping that HN can recommend some best kept secret on the web =)
It seems really encumbered, lots of logging, restrictive license...
I mean it seems nice but theres no guarantee its going to be around.
I reject your case. Self-identification isn't even necessarily something that's public. It's as much a question of who you are to yourself.

Self-identification is a broad topic. Sports fans create opposition with other self-identified fans for the sheer hell of it. Crack addicts self-identify. Being married is a joint self-identification.

In any case, the redundancy is meant to force the argument to the other definition. My prime point is not that they think they're smart, it's that they're trying to sort people into valid/invalid thinking bins.

And as a side note, there's something very wrong with thinking that social signaling or labeling is a trap.
Last I checked Catholic dogma, which has been a couple decades now, I think Steve has to actually pass away before he can become a saint.
Well, bloat is somewhat subjective, so "evidence" is hard to come by. I don't know about the other poster's reasons, but I agree, so here are mine. That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree is the first indicator. Then there are the multitude of build options, a few pages' worth. The output of these two commands is somewhat telling:

~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \.c -o -name \.cpp -o -name \.h -o -name \.idl -o -name \.js -o -name \.xml | grep -v /tests/ | wc -l
11740
~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \.c -o -name \.cpp -o -name \.h -o -name \.idl -o -name \.js -o -name \.xml | grep -v /tests/ | xargs cat | wc -l
4386362

(Painful to construct command lines like that on a phone, and that is a somewhat old version of the tree, but unless FF4 is significantly smaller than 4m lines and doesn't require building xulrunner and FF, the point stands.) The large number of dependencies is another indicator.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that FF is still my "workhorse" browser, and I like it a lot, despite the flaws and the bloat. (I've been using Arora for a long time, but it has some stability issues still. I like Luakit, which is small and hackable, but it's kind of a niche browser. I'm not at all a fan of Chrome.)