skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Xen is a classic example of a technology and company that never reached its full market potential due to nerd pride.

In this particular case, Redhat/Linus/kernel hacker's obstinate refusal to add it to the stock kernel. They exhibited NIH and did KVM (which surprise surprise was owned by Redhat). I'm no virtualization expert, but KVM is doing things totally different than everybody else (no hypervisor), and I'm not 100% sure that KVM's way is better.

Xen should be a cautionary tale for startups that opening source is not a silver bullet. The capricious behavior of a coterie can kill you even if that coterie is ostensiby not controlled by any company.
Daily Kos: Astounding True DK4 Bug Story
SproutCore 1.5 Gives Your App Handlebars
How to Use a Smartphone to Process Credit Cards
At my university, all classes weighted equally on a four point scale. My GPAs in my majors, CS and Linguistics, were slightly higher, but the heavy systems component of my department's curriculum kept it low.
Hoaxing the Press with PR
Toshiba and Lenova, yes. Dell has no channel expertise except through their site. The problem with tablets is they are not a cookie cutter device. Dell could sell PCs off the web because one PC was like every other PC with a different logo on it. Dell will struggle with tablets because it isn't a box with a logo on it and customers will want to hold it and play with it before buying.
Show HN: Yak, my weekends project - invite code "hackernews"
New paid RSS based startup - Greatiful
Point being, that should be your call, and his, and not Apple's.
My concern would be, what do you do if you've built on top of these guys and then they get bought by a company like Salesforce that will shut down the service? What are Heroku customers doing post-acquisition, for instance?
But if you were to receive a personalized, sixteen page sales letter signed by Paul Graham, you'd probably read it multiple times.

"The astonishing startup secrets of Ycombinator's founder

Ryan,

below I'll reveal an amazing startup plan specifically designed for sole founders.

It has a proven 73% success rate.

If you're interested in running a SaaS company and you're willing to relocate to the Bay Area, then this letter might be the most important you'll ever read.

WARNING: You are not allowed to share the information contained in this letter with anyone else. It's for your eyes only.

What you'll read below will at first seem contradictory. It'll fly in the face of everything you currently know about starting and running a business. It'll blow away your current beliefs about product development and customer acquisition. So make sure you sit down, because what I'm about to tell you will possibly change your life forever..."
Because there are some people who care about the social and philosophical implications of their work or hobby. If you don't need that, that's fine. Go with "Open Source", or "Copyleft" or whatever suits you.

The only reason why we insist that it is important is because there are others who continue to push that it is not. I never really understood that particular color of "activism", but to each his own, I guess.
But it's more than that. There are lots of boys out there that never interact with men. There are lots of boys who become convinced that school is for girls and who tune out and subsequently become shut out of the entire modern economy, not just segments of it.
One place where Koppelman (and presumably Frakt) is mistaken:

"...any slippery slope argument depends on a prediction that doing the right thing in the instant case will in fact increase the likelihood of doing the wrong thing..."

For the person arguing against doing A by invoking the slippery slope, A is NOT the "right thing" to do. The point of a slippery slope argument is to warn against making a concession. The person who is opposed to an income tax in principle would likely use the slippery slope to sway those who tend to agree with them, but are willing abandon the principle for the sake of compromise. If A was simply the "right thing" from the start, it would not likely face argument, slippery slope or otherwise.
It's just unnecessary.

for example:

Subject: Sparrow already does virtually all of this

Body: The only real differences are the Subject thing (not sure how this saves you time, other than pressing TAB once), and displaying images from the address book.
Get Used to $.99 iPhone Applications
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Isn't is useful to have all prior discussions linked? Ideally, it wouldn't be a post, but a separate part of the message, shown on the side.
I'd appreciate any and all feedback, particular wrt market positioning and differentiation.

Yak will have the classic chicken-and-egg problem of being kinda lame prior to having a critical mass of users. Any ideas of how to jump-start growth are welcomed.

As a way of saying thanks, I'll give the top-rated commenter here (after 24 hours) 1,000 Yak Credits, and every other commenter with positive points 100 credits.
If it were that easy, we would.

The problem is that in a lot of "slippery slope" type activities doing A will make it much more likely that you won't be able to avoid B, or that someone else will use the fact that you did A to do B.

Purely anecdotally, I have a very hard time limiting portions for foods I like, especially cookies. If there are cookies available, I find it very hard not to take 3 or even more if I take the first one. it is easier to never take the first one.
Have you tried asking him? A hand-written letter might just work.
Just because the journal Nature is run as a business does not mean that charging for access to published material promotes scientific progress. If the growth of scientific knowledge is of primary importance and depends upon the wide dissemination of knowledge, charging for access is socially irresponsible.

It could be that the conflict here is with our rather strange notion of intellectual property and a free market economy. Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind makes the case that the two are antithetical. A free market requires that something be secret and not generally available to create an artificial shortage and pump the price.

Perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes intellectual property. What sort of an intellectual property policy would you propose to your university? Who should own ideas? Or should they be held in common? Will Mickey Mouse ever slip into the public domain?
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out another "scientist" (minor) actor not mentioned in this article:

- speaks Swedish, English, Spanish, some German, some French, some Japanese, and some Italian

- awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

- has a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney (1982)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_lundgren
"For instance, the federal taxing power theoretically empowers the government to tax incomes at 100%, thereby wrecking the economy. But there’s no slippery slope, because there is no incentive to do this, so it won’t happen."

Through the history of the income tax, top rates reached 94% in 1944, exceeded 90% for 16 years, and exceeded 50% for 54 years. It's still over 30%, and you'll notice our economy isn't doing too well.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

Just because the bottom of the slope wasn't hit doesn't mean it wasn't slippery.
Although you can use drugs to enable an all-nighter to learn a certain technology just before you need it, you can also use drugs during the daytime hours to enable you to concentrate on learning material far before you need it.

The former solution is what I've seen preferred by students who don't prioritize school, and the latter is what the so-called "nerds" use.
[report spam] click

This does remind me of the story about a week ago where a "females only" founders Q&A conference run my Ycombinator which turned out to have no female founders at it at all. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229494

Usually when something makes broad claims, for me, it needs to back it up ASAP. Most long form letters over exaggerate, repeat a lot of vague information & then throw in a bunch of unverifiable testimonials(e.g "Bob in Austin, TX writes"). A large portion of copywriters are people who don't use the product, never plan to use the product and are essentially lying about the product. Blah.
Keyboard shortcuts would be an absolutely essential feature of the application. You could be in a browser, Photoshop, full screen app, and just press control + n and the interface pops up. All you have to do is type. After the first email, you'll have the workflow memorized. Shortcut > Type email > message > enter.
I've had my one game app in the Android Market free and full for about 9 months now. Its making $400 a month now. $150 from actual sales $250 from ads. Only recently ad revenue makes more than sales and increasing. At the point when 50,000 users keep it on their devices is when ad revenue started making real money at around 20,000 impressions a day.
I'm more impressed by Dolph Lundgren - an action movie actor - who has a MS in Chemistry and who was studying for a PhD when he decided to become an actor.
"Hedy Lamarr complained bitterly that people would look at her face and assume there was nothing behind it. Perhaps it was a case of projection. “When you see a very beautiful face, it’s stunning, and you yourself become stupefied,” said Lisa Heiserman Perkins, who has completed a documentary about Lamarr. “So you project your own stupidity onto the person you’re looking at.” "

Now, maybe I'm projecting my own stupidity to this remark but it just seems hare-brained. This effect is very easy to understand: many beautiful people you've met before have little/no interest in science, i.e. appear to be stupid, so your subconscious Bayesian learner assigns a low probability to the gorgeous woman you see having invented a new spread spectrum technique.
She has published peer reviewed research: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (her actual name is Natalie Hershlag). One of the co-authors is Jerome Kagan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Kagan. Seems good enough to me. Certainly not a career scientist; very few would be with another venture making millions. But she has walked the walk. There's no hype here.
Minus the random firings and black mock turtlenecks. Not so much minus the tantrums.
I'll offer this. At what time was any recorded account of history not skewed by some prevailing perspective?
How do you secure the ring? Should you use iptables so that only the other 3 hosts are allowed on the cassandra port? That seems like a bit much.
all i care about (in chicago) is whether it's going to rain or snow. the temperature or cloud cover don't really matter to me as much. http://goingtorain.com/
BankSimple Wants to Shake Up Banking, With Cutting Edge UI Design
A wonderful collection of dead links, sadly enough.
I yet may do just that. I have, at various times, had speculative versions running around in my head.

Recently a good colleague of mine died very suddenly. I realised that there was so much I had wanted to ask him about, and never got the chance. Last year I got to spend an afternoon with one of my childhood - and adulthood - heroes. That was just 2 months before he died.

If you put up a piece of A0 paper marked off in centimeter squares, and I marked them off one per day, there's a very good chance I wouldn't cross them all off before I die. I'm starting to think of some of the things I want to do for me, as well as the things I want to leave for others.

Maybe I should write to Kevin Bacon.
Very Interesting Twitter Statistics
The interface suggests the user has used the application more than once and is familiar with the workflow.

After the first email, it will be quite apparent to the user that the first line would become to subject, which will become an action without the user thinking too much about it.

Also, lets just assume that John knows about the Baseball Game tomorrow, but has no idea about the dinner plans.

Hope that clears it up!
Random House caves, will hike ebook prices
The title implies that we have functioning market today. Let's say a functioning market is something that provides real time price discovery and efficient transaction execution.

I think it's fair to say that a clever person would not have to steal a bank's quant code to take down the market. I'm sure some element of the infrastructure could be targeted.

Maybe a better question to ask is, Do we currently have a fair market and if Hackers steal a bank's quant code would we have less of a fair market?

I suggest this question based on the following quote:

"The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti [in regards to the code taken by Sergey Aleynikov]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=...

Here we have the bank admitting that the software can be used to "manipulate markets." With these banks having quarters with no losing trading days, are we to believe that they are not using this software to manipulate markets?
Tool of the Day: WakeMate: Become a Morning Person
"University of Redwood" - Reed College has its identity stolen
The Puzzle TOAD
I don't think you are saying that makes it justified, are you?
Natural language is ambiguous, sorry for being misleading; I meant "novel" in the sense of "fresh, not seen before", referring to the more pragmatic paradigm described in the paper.
In Jan 2010, 10% of web video was HTML5 compatible. By Feb 2011, 63%.
Ask HN: Re-review the redesigned eBookCake
I just redesigned my eBook design service's website ( http://ebookcake.com ) and hopefully made the purpose/ focus of the service clearer.

Let me know what you think of the site designwise but also if the purpose of the service is clearly conveyed. When I initially launched the service all I designed was PDF format ebooks and the input I got was that PDFs are low man on the ebook totem poll.

With the addition of the two main ebook formats (.epub and .mobi) would you use this design service?
Leaving the Silicon Valley as a web entrepreneur
But I'm already invested in my Disqus account and I prefer their pseudo-anonymity approach, also I don't have yahoo nor facebook accounts.
This is a very good explanation but, its probably worth mentioning that this is neither a new concept nor is it unique to node.js.
I think your quibble here is with lying to the insurance company about your condition to get them to pay for the performance enhancing drug.

The lie to the doctor is necessary in many instances (not many will just prescribe you Adderal for the sake of performance), but the lie to the company can be seen as abusive since it is someone's undeserved loss (the companies) for your gain.

Buying the medicine full priced would be morally clearer, correct?
I disagree with a lot of the points in the article, but I think its well-written, thought out, and worth reading.
مدونه مصر اليوم: مشاهدة مباراة برشلونه وفالنسيا بث مباشر
arguably, we actually have a more efficient market if the code is in the open or if M&A deals are revealed..
Facebook competes with Disqus on user comments
WebINK: a font-service for delivering quality live type on the Web
Marie Curie in "Bride of the Toxic Avenger"?
America's Coolest College Startups
Exactly.

Also, please realize this is just a concept and further research will be put into the it if it goes into development. A swift workflow is the biggest goal.
The best thing you can do right now is taking a good 3-6 months to figure out what you want to do with this money, framed in terms of what you want to do in your life. Just park the money in a safe place (eg money market fund, treasury bills) and work things out. There's no need to rush into things, the money will still be there when you know what you want to accomplish with it.

After you've done that, you should have some idea of when/whether you plan to use the money, and how comfortable you are with losing some of it. To be honest, you're probably best off just choosing a reasonable mix of stocks/bonds/cash which reflects your goals/needs, then going on with your life. 5mil sounds like a lot, but in investment-land it's not an unusual amount for a family to have saved for retirement. You would be well off to check out the Bogleheads wiki and forum at http://bogleheads.org. The forum would be an excellent place to post any questions you may have.

With regard to specific allocations, here are some example mixes between stocks and bonds, and how those behaved over 40 years. It's not the best chart, but it should give you some idea. Note that the author is subtracting out an annual 1% management fee from those returns, which is completely bogus. Go with good index funds and you'll be paying 1/15th of that.
http://www.fundadvice.com/images/stories/fundadvice_images/f...

Also, if you ultimately decide that you really want to get into real estate, you might want to consider REIT mutual funds/ETFs, rather than buying individual real estate properties and the risk/maintenance that comes with them.
Apple granted patent for scratch-proof nitride metal device coating
I feel really bad about this. I'll explain.

Every person has different "social roles" in real life (for friends, business associates, hobby, etc.). But I have only one FB account. With single avatar pic. Imagine leaving a comment on some business related website using this system while I have FB avatar of me on some crazy college drunk party. When I'm socializing on FB website only that's OK, but when you try to go out, that's a big problem. We need a better way to manage our social roles.
Hi is this social bookmarking site? anyway I like the concept, where users can post anythink.
I'm sure he's fundamentally wrong. His logic depends in part on the idea that the "Action B" shares common motivations with Action A. But there's no reason that this should be so.

For example, thus far the federal government has been unable to pass legislation mandating a federal law for seatbelt usage. We know they're interested because they do try to cause the same end effect, by tying it to State highway funding.

Their interest isn't motivated by insurance costs (we know this because thus far the federal government has no direct interest in health insurance costs), but (presumably) by a direct interest in avoiding injuries in accidents.

However, if the slipper slope is opened up by allowing the Interstate Commerce Clause to refer to mandating an activity (wearing seatbelts), then it's a fair bet that the federal government will abandon their arm-twisting (viz conditioning based on highway funding) and legislate seatbelt usage nationally.

This might be a good thing; that's not the question. The real question is whether taking this first step is likely to precipitate further steps that, today, are understood to be forbidden.
Hipmunk (YC S10) Brings a Little Ecstasy to Hotel Search and Booking
Interesting. Since it comes from 37s, there's the expected spin that selling is bad because you lose control, but Mohit says that it would have imploded from internal struggles if they hadn't sold. So it's not pro-sell, but it's also not pro-go-big.

So what is the implicit message here? Taking on the big boys is a sucker's bet. This seems sobering in light of the pushback they gave on Aaron Patzer for selling Mint instead of taking on Intuit.
For a weekend project, I have to say it looks nicely executed. I like the Yak - I think.

The location-based touch could be pretty neat if people adopted it. I think your challenge is going to be convincing people to share content on your site, as well as reddit. We all know nobody is going to "leave" reddit for another site, so I think your mission is to figure out how to make people want to also check your site.

The channels are cool, but you need a more intuitive interface for them. It's kind of difficult to browse them, I feel like. Maybe even some type of full-text search for locating new channels.
Foundation Interview With Philip Rosedale, Founder Of Second Life
I think it is a good conclusion. I certainly will be pushing all friends, family, and otherwise towards Chrome. There's no sign their model will go awry -- they are already ahead, in my eyes.

There are just too many great features, for grandma AND developers, that I can't pass up the simplicity of a single platform. There's absolutely no reason my non-technical consults should have to bother with upgrading their browser, hacking their extensions, and dealing with performance issues.

Chrome's ecosystem is headed in the right direction, and it is owning up to a lot of its faults and addressing said faults in droves. There's a lot to be said for Chrome's _rate_ of success, when predicting the future.

Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, both fairly significant releases, barely touch the charts, with respect to Chrome. FF 4.0 is going to be great, so I don't expect many to leave the platform, and I think it's fair to expect Chrome to be its equal.

IE9 is also shaping up to be a good platform -- better than 7 or 8 hoped to be. It too will probably capture a lion's share of its zealots and the Windows platform, but there is no reasonable justification for the tech savvy to continue pushing others onto more stable and paced browsers. IE team still need a bigger fire under their seats, and we'll hopefully see a worthy opponent for a three-pronged, browser shootout.
another question to ask: do I own the IP rights to the freelancers creation, and if so, can I enforce that contract?

IP doesn't automatically confer..
What's the point of having a Constitution that sets limits on the powers of government?
Ireland has a huge cost-of-living, awful healthcare, and is terribly run.

It's a good place to house a corporation(the tax is very low) but for living in... You'd want to be very secure, financially.
These guys are moving at mach 5 for such a small team.
Wouldn't the median be a bit more useful? The highest selling apps will tend to skew the average upwards. The median would be more useful to determine what the average app creator might make.
Defining Internet 'Freedom': Senator Al Franken Interview
I've never seen a US-based system that weights classes later in the curriculum higher than the beginning ones (which is too bad, since like many, mine rose towards the end).
I think the type of market before IP protection when authors published serially and collected advances (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Dickens) was closer to a functioning market than the current system where authors, programmers, and pharmaceutical companies shoot their whole wads into the market and hope for a return on their sunk costs rather than attempting to actually sell their labor.
Don't Let Sweat Equity Create 'Phantom Income'
Just none of them spend all their time with solitary, sedentary activities on a computer or in a lab

That's just it - the folks that do spend there time on a computer or in a lab (off the top of my head: the goth girl from NCIS, the Law & Order lab techs, Chloe on 24) all have some sort of anti-social nerd personality type.

Why can't there be a computer tech who works hard at his/her job, has a beer after work, watches sports, etc like everyone else?