skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't walk away from investments either by that definition.

There's an old Romanian saying:

The cow grows fat under the eye of the farmer.

Investments are just another business model with recurring revenues. It begins to die the moment you stop managing it. You can get a professional manager for that too - but they too require attention.
His examples don't support his conclusion. They are all easy to describe with an elevator pitch.

Facebook - It is a social network for college students

iPhone - it is an ipod with a web browser and telephone built in

FriendFeed - we extended the Facebook news feed concept to all the places where people host content

wii - it is a nintendo with a cool new controller

data visualization apps - we made an app for visualizing data

His story about Facebook is also bad, because Zuckerburg did say "we made a social network for college students" and Peter Thiel did give him money.
Two better candidates for an early terminator:

iRobot's Warrior + Metal Storm:
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=150
http://www.metalstorm.com/component/option,com_sm2modulewind...

Or, Foster Miller's Talon Swords projects http://youtube.com/watch?v=EhR8PMllkjY
How can it be pillaging when the whole point of Wikipedia is that the information in it is free for everyone else to use?
If you are reading this while at the office, you will probably feel as if he was whispering the words to your ears. One of the Greatest post.
The market value of combat experience per se is basically zero (or else veterans would make more than non-veterans at other jobs, which they don't)

Does this not adjust for the kinds of jobs they get? I would expect that to be true of many variables, e.g. people without a degree may perform just as well as people with a degree in the same job, because without a degree you have to impress employers in other ways.
I work with wedding photographers (providing web solutions). They are not overpaid because they are self-employed and paid directly by their customers. If brides are willing to pay their going rate, how is that being "overpaid"?

I think the point was that a saner price would be lower. He's not saying that they should be regulated, just that you'd be stupid to buy from them.
This is an old article (2003) and the wedding photographer claim has already been rebutted many times over. Most wedding photographers are BROKE.

http://photo.net/columns/mjohnston/column32/index.html

note the link probably doesn't work as the reliability of photo.net has taken a nosedive over the past year.
Judging by the number of zombie/pirate/vampire/werewolf invites I get, I think the majority of people don't give a shit about the usefulness of the apps. Even if 95% install FacebookCthulu, I still don't care.

In fact, as was mentioned before, I don't think I care about Facebook apps at all. The only one I installed was iLike, back when it was pretty much the only app available. I installed it solely because I liked the aesthetic of having all the images of all the bands I like tiled in a square. Facebook apps are a dead platform now, if they were ever even alive to begin with.
Do you like use warnings and strict?

I do not like use warnings and strict.

Do you like them here or there?

I do not like them here or there?

I do not like them anywhere.

I do not like use warnings and strict.

I will not obey your good coding practice edict.

Could you, would you in your code?

Would you, could you in your PerlMonks node?

I could not, would not in my code.

I would not, could not in my node.

Not in my program.

Not in my script.

Not a one-liner.

Not with shebang.

Say! At night?

Would you, could you at night?

Not at night.

Not in the mornings.

I do not use strict and warnings!

If you do not use warnings and strict.

Then upon your code bugs you'll inflict.

I will not use warnings and strict.

My freedom of coding style they will restrict.

I am too Lazy to declare with my.

I do not need it; I'll get by.

You do not like them.

So you say.

Try them! Try them!

And you may.

Try them and you may, I say.

If you will let me be,

I will try them.

You will see.

The stubborn hacker finally relents to trying them.

Say, I like warnings and strict!

I do! I like them a little bit.

I will use them in my code.

And I will use them in my node.

And in my programs.

And in my scripts.

warnings and strict are right for me.

They are so good, so good, you see.

(not my writing, just something that fits your request)
I could definitely see some new rules being put in place sometime in the near future. Steve Jobs is absolutely critical to Apple and a serious disease should be an obvious material disclosure. Not all CEOs are so vital, but Steve Jobs has tens of billions of dollars invested in his well being, it would be borderline fraud to be hiding a career threatening disease. Not to mention an insider trading nightmare.
"Every great idea doesn't" != "Not every great idea does"

And now that that's out of the way: so what? Is this a serious problem? If your idea is too great to encapsulate in an elevator pitch, why not wait a few months and turn the pitch into "I'm going to completely fix the X industry. Visit URL dot TLD to look at my prototype."?
...and the pitch is not the product or the feature, the pitch is the company. I don't know why I read the 'whydoeseverythingsuck.com' entries. You don't sell an investor on the iPhone, you sell them on what makes Apple, Apple. The iPhone follows the overall Apple mission and strategy. You don't sell Facebook.com as it looks, you sell it conceptually. Concept is not distinguishing enough, then you sell on the traction, traffic trends and demographics. You seek funding from _within_ a company like Apple, or Nintendo, to make the products that have to be experienced to understand; you seek external funding to empower the company to be able to fund them.

As the oft repeated question (is your idea a business or just a feature for another company) implies... your pitch should follow.
I'm sorry, but I'm not getting your argument. What does investing have to do with whether or not 37Signals' founders can walk away from their business?
You can probably remember yesterday, 2 days ago and last weekend. I suspect those dates encompass 80% of the use cases for such a tool.
What about promoting Jonathan Ive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive)? He definitely has good design sense. I don't know about the maniacal sociopath perfectionist bit, though.
It's interesting to try to tease out what factors might contribute to these jobs being overpaid:

1. Fear: Wedding photographers, pilots, longshoremen & orthodontists

2. Creaming a little from a lot: Skycaps, real estate agents, mutual-fund managers

3. Scarcity: lecture circuit

4. Legacy: longshoremen, old CEOs & athletes
Nice quote but... I can't understand why you call "blog" what is a plain old website?
Don't know about Squidoo, but based on my brief look at Knol it seems very distinct from Wikipedia for a single reason: individual authors credited along with name, photo and profile link.

I think this flies in the face of many things that made Wikipedia a success.

Not to mention my first instinct was to visit knol.com, the website of a Dutch company who manufactures something resembling a crippled R2D2 using a walker.

I vote against this project as a serious rival for Wikipedia but only time will tell.
Also of note is that on (some?) Debian-based systems, particularly Ubuntu, single user mode will still require you to enter the root user's password before you gain console access... In this case, your only hope is a LiveCD and chroot...
Yes! This was the major mistake that doomed Lifestreams: the whole notion that UI and finding your stuff is an either-or proposition. Let's give people MORE ways to find their stuff, not (just) a different one. (And, naturally, provide a more sensible default than the desktop metaphor we provide by default now.)
This action item is particularly interesting:

"Server: we need to write an App Engine server for testing, local development, and potentially production deployment. (Replace Bigtable with MySQL, Hypertable, Hbase, Couch DB, etc.)"

An open-source production-capable alternative to AppEngine (that uses its APIs) would help defuse the lock-in issues.
HN Talks, Startuply Listens (or at least tries to)
In a free market, the idea of a particular profession being "overpaid" is just silly. People are paid exactly as much as they are worth to their employer... If there was someone better who would do the job for less, they would be replaced.
I've often thought that subsidizing higher education would lubricate the U.S. economy.
This is an amazing community. I am 100% certain that companies will pay for the type of fast, accurate and NHB feedback that HN can offer. Cheers to you, and thanks for helping Startuply grow.
http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt
This is for swombat too - if revenue has grown 15-30 times since '04 as DHH said at Startup School, and headcount went up by 30%, then that's still 10-20x the revenue per employee.

Costs: Can't be too much more, certainly not nearly matching the revenue growth. They do their own advertising and marketing so that's free. Infrastructure costs are higher because of more accounts, so let's count that as the cost of 7 employees, giving them double the costs. And with extra benefits for employees, put it up to 2.5x of 2004 expenses. total.

The profit picture gets even more ridiculous. If they had 5% margins in 2004, their costs go up by 2.5 and revenues go up by 15, then their profit is over 250x over 2004. Divide that by 3(?) founders/principals and you get a lot per year. Heck, it's still a lot if you divide it by all 12 employees.

37s is probably making more profit annually than most startup founders will ever sell a company for. If they pocket a part of that a year, then they have the equivalent cash to a liquidity event plus they still have the company. Granted, they're exceptionally successful, but hopefully these numbers will open some eyes for people that look down on lifestyle businesses.
They've made so much money that they could walk away, let it die, and still be richer than most successful startup founders. Just think of the HotOrNot guys - who cares if it dies if you've already pulled $5 million apiece out of it?
I'm pretty sure this is fixed/mitigated in Darcs 2.
One of the reasons I love wikipedia is that its neutral and no ads.
Google Im sure will have plans to stick in some adsense and share revenue with the author. Why should I contribute to an article bcos of which the original author might get paid.

Even if there willbe no ads , with the author's profile there, any contribution I may make doesnt feel like, Im part of it. I love all contibutors being annonymous in wikipedia

I vote this me-too project down.
The assumption the writers of the Django docs might be making is that you're coming from a web dev background already (e.g. recovering PHP4 or ASP user), and you're ready to dive into what makes Django different.
Trouble in Online Travel: American Airlines Ditches Kayak (Maybe Orbitz Too)
As a photographer who's done a couple of weddings, you have no freaking idea how much time goes into it. The sales cycle takes time. Dealing with Bride-zilla and Mom-zilla is always lots of fun. Then usually you do engagement photos, often outdoors somewhere. Figure an hour of driving, a couple hours of shooting. Maybe 8 hours of post-processing the 500 pictures:) Maybe less if you're conservative.

Then the wedding itself. Wake up before dawn, pack up your gear. Drive to wherever the event is happening. Get a lay of the land, figure out where people will standing, how the light will be at X o'clock, etc... Then you run around all day with a heavy pack and a heavy camera shooting the bride and her bridesmaids hanging out in her big hotel room. The makeup artist working on each of the girls. The hair stylist doing each girl. Mom lacing up the corset. Etc... This is 3-4 hours, maybe more. Then over to the grooms room, repeat, only much quicker. Then slam in new batteries, new CF cards, and jog a mile to the church. Shoot people walking in, sitting down, etc.. The whole ceremony, which can take hours and hours. Then take the bride and groom off for their own photos. Then reception photos. Then dinner photos. Then dancing photos. Wrap up around 2 AM after a 20 hour day on your feet with a 20 lb bag on your back and a 8 lb lump that you're holding up to your eye all day. Drive home.

Spend 2-3 days post-processing. Spend another day laying out books. Realize the check they gave you isn't signed, and they're on honeymoon for three more weeks.

Etc...

It's physically taxing, and at the end of the day your hourly rate is hilariously low. And you only work a few weekends in the summer. It's a very hard way to make a buck.
Map: Mentions per capita in the NYT
What is to stop people from ripping articles from wikipedia and posting them en masse to earn adsense revenue?
Aristotle, by Billy Collins
http://members.cox.net/mppowers1/aristotle.html
Occasionally someone posts to HN stating they want want to drop out of high school or go straight from high school to working full time. Maybe they should read this first.
I agree to an extent, but what Shawn might have meant is that the trade-off between cluttering the design and making a few cents/day right now isn't worth it.

It might be a better strategy to keep the most clean, minimalistic approach during the infant stages then introduce adwords once there's a steady stream of traffic.
I evaluate being able to "walk away" as having the kind of FU money pg says founders get from an acquisition.

By my math, pg made between $10-$30 million. I don't know what his cut of the $50 million was, but Stan Reiss (?) from Startup School 2005 said the Yahoo stock value went up from $50mil to $750 mil, so whatever pg kept in Yahoo stock went up by 15x. We don't know how much Yahoo he kept post-crash, but I'd peg him still over $5mil, maybe up to $30mil if he's Mark Cuban savvy. I don't think the 37s guys have accumulated that much, but I'd bet they have more than any YC alum (so far - we'll look again when YC is 5 years old).
If it doesn't fit in an elevator pitch, you're probably trying to do to much.
Knol doesn't distinctly look like a google page. It seems like they are trying a new layout and design.
PR Newswire fights small Internet upstart with praise, accusations of theft
That just underscores how outdated this article is. The industry has gone through a lot of changes in just a couple years.

You can get a wedding photographer on Craigslist for $400. I also have friends/customers who get $15K to shoot a wedding (yes, $15K).

You can get a haircut for $15 at Supercuts, but you can also go to a luxury spa and get your hair done for $250. Does that mean hair stylists are overpaid? No.

There's no such thing as overpaid in a self-employed, service industry–especially those that cater to upper-class individuals. If people are paying your rates, then your prices are spot on (or too low).
Scaling in the Cloud with Joyent's Jason Hoffman
alternatively: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/apple-universe
Clearly the title should be Hacktris...
Google offers helping hand for toilet clogs, erectile dysfunction, tooth pain
Science bloggers split over 'Sizzle'
loving the electronic music in the background
Problem is that Google will rank their articles higher than Wikipedia's and will suck the traffic out of Wikipedia and then who will edit Wikipedia?!
Well that screen tip is going to be really useful - I can feel my explaining things to remote colleagues getting easier already ...
Why would anyone visit such pages? Much will depend on how Google Search treats Knol pages.
I find the very idea of forced disclosure of medical information downright scary, regardless of who the person is or how vital they are.
The referenced lecture:

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-...
Ha, can you tell its a web start-up?
Wikipedia already makes the information free to use, and other sites freely republish this information (notably answers.com); this doesn't hurt Wikipedia.

However, if you set up a Wikipedia clone -- allowing both reading and editing -- it hurts Wikipedia because it "splits the hive mind". If both sites become equally popular, we can expect the number of edits to be divided between them. Since Wikipedia succeeds because of network effects, a Wikipedia with half as many edits becomes less than half as useful.

That said, Knol does not appear to be a direct clone of Wikipedia; it emphasizes authorship, it allows multiple people to write on the same topic, and it allows opinion, trivia, irrelevant topics, and all the other things that are against Wikipedia guidelines. It will be interesting to see what role it assumes relative to Wikipedia. I wonder, for instance, how they plan to prevent Knol from turning into the next Geocities?
Obviously Knol is structured to reward/encourage authors, not contributors. Hopefully the result will be not a Wikipedia-killer but something with a different flavor.
lol I wasn't sure if you would pick up on that, I tried to keep it subtle hehe.

Anyway I think if you really wona keep everything before the fold, I'd suggest giving the bands-box more weight than the map. If you swapped it round that would work quite well. So the map would be 30% of space and bands get 70% rest. But if you're thinking of adding lots of markers to the map, I'd suggest 50/50 split.

Check out http://kuler.adobe.com/ for color scheming.

Good luck.
Live: Mark Zuckerberg at F8
So do I :-).

Like I said in the essay, the bloat objection to emacs is irrational. Nonetheless, though, it's a natural reaction that most people have to get over.

The key to appreciating emacs is to realize that it's only incidentally a text editor. It's really a not-quite-general-purpose application platform for tasks that fall under the broad heading of "text processing". Similarly, Mozilla has evolved into a not-quite-general-purpose platform for interacting with internet services. With the advent of Web 2.0 the world seems to have suddenly embraced that interpretation of Mozilla. Before that, people used to gripe about Mozilla bloat in the same way that they still gripe about emacs bloat. (Think Zawinski's Law.)
This is a great read along the lines of the GTD philosophy. Very simple to handle and very focused on continuing to complete tasks on your To-Do list. I've got to try this out now to slim down my To-Do list. It's getting a bit crufty.
Nintendo can't fight off patent metroids, faces injunction
Oh yeah, I totally agree. It doesn't have to be a government sponsored union like the AMA or ABA to count as market manipulation.

My point was that software is among the most free labor markets in the US. This was in response to the point that engineers are hypocritical for not applying their libertarian leanings to foreign engineers who would like to move here without restrictions. My point was that 1) I plead guilty to this charge - I do not support unlimited immigration, though that would be the purest form of free markets, and 2) relative to other fields, software engineering is more open to foreign nationals than almost any other field in the US (rivaled only by crop picking - the other great employer-sponsered work visa program - and maybe that tells you something about software...)
Banks Sites Remain Woefully Vulnerable
Pixily: Put Your Paper Docs Online in 3 to 5 Days Max
I meant well-represented in the same way that creationism is today. Not as in believed to be true by most scientists.
If this is the case, then it would compromise the credibility of Google search results. I think it's too early to say for certain if Google views Wikipedia as such a huge threat that it would go out of its way to create a new project for the sole purpose of intentionally ranking them higher than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is as much of an icon of the internet as Google. I'm predicting that Knol will go the way of Google Answers for the same reason why Digg remains a stalwart of user generated news - it's the community.
I disagree with all the people that criticized the colors and layout (unless you've made a lot of changes in the last 14 hours). I like the way it looks, I found it easy to use, loved the big map, etc. Not everything has to have the spare white rounded corner Web 2.0 look, and if you're pulling events from MySpace, you're better off not looking like FaceBook.
E.g. Lisp, Darpa.
Live:  F8 Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg
I agree, but no one is requiring him to be the CEO of a public company. He shouldn't have to post his blood tests on the web, but something like an annual checkup would be reasonable. Athletes do it before they get signed. Politicians do it before running. Pilots have to do it every year. Etc etc. Right now he could be dying (I don't think he is) and the board/investors are just counting on Steve to let them know. That's not cool especially after he showed them he wasn't willing to do that the first time (going on for months with natural treatments and waiting to the last possible time to disclose that he was very seriously ill).
New big corps coalition forms to support plug-in vehicles (hybrids, electric cars)
Make an Animated Short Film Online
lolcats are the UI of the future
So, you can't be friends with religious people? Do you and your friends sit around and talk about epistemology all day?
i stand corrected. two and a half days a week for six figures. hell, i'd be happy with two and a half days a week for a mid to high five figures. leaves me plenty of spare days a week to work on my bootstrapped projects
Similarly, if it can't be distilled into an elevator pitch, you're going to have a really tough time convincing users.
The issue is more along the lines of other startups attacking the same problem with more funding, particularly those still in stealth mode.
He's a damn good designer, but he's not a social designer. I figure Apple wants another performer to step up to the lead when Jobs is gone.

Besides, Ive is good exactly where he is. He's doing what he does best. A promotion would make no sense.
I saw that as a typical example of Google humor. But from the way the site's laid out it also looks like they're trying to make Knol a standalone thing. They don't want people looking at this page and thinking Google.
does the government get credit for Walmart, for laying down highways? Same concept...the internet is more than just "a series of tubes".
Actually, the article actively refutes the idea that computers explain the wage gap. The thesis is that it's all due to supply and demand in the labor force, and that it has been going on since electrification in the early 1900s.
The NAO humanoid: a combination of performance and affordability [pdf]
> I decided to actually read about this "Austrian economics" nonsense.

The Austrians are too doctrinaire for my taste. They do have some good insights that have been ignored by the mainstream. For example, the idea that cheep Central Bank credit leads to boom/bust economic cycles has gained a lot of mindshare in the wake of the mortgage mess. However, they tend to close their minds to cool ideas from other schools of thought.
Squidoo and Knol seems to have the same idea behind it. Knol has the advantage of looking very nice in the process, and - of course - being sponsored by Google. Seth Godin is bright, but Squidoo is not fun to use and not fun to look at. Knol has an edge there.

The fact that Google didn't buy Knol.com is sort of odd, agreed.

I don't think this can compete against Wikipedia. It can, however, serve as a supplement - it doesn't have the disadvantage of tyrannical, half-crazed admins. That makes it much freer than Wikipedia, in a sense, and that'll give it an advantage in quantity, if not quality.
The Advertising-Based Web 2.0 World is Losing Its Anti-Gravity Ray Too
As a die-hard radical anarchist-on-wednesdays libertarian, I am hesitant to read these comments. I have a feeling that I'm about to wander into a flamewar.