skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about Gmail? I haven't had a single problem with gmail spam filters, which used to surprise me.
Banana?? I admit, I was curious...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbOajWDg_Ts
There are a lot of side effects of the burgeoning middle class, and I'm not sure it can continue at this rate unchecked. However, it's true that more and more Chinese will be able to buy nicer things.
Historical bias? When China creates a new industry rather than improving and reducing the cost structure of existing industries, then I'll be a believer.

BTW, Are we talking about two different things? The article was talking about venture investment in general (which you seem to be talking about) but the title (and your original comment) was about "Who will fund the next Steve Jobs?". While I think China's rise in wealth, middle class, political influence, etc are nearly unstoppable, I doubt that the next Steve Jobs will come from there (or if he is Chinese, he will work in the US).

My interpretation of "the next Steve Jobs" is:

1) starts a many billion dollar company

2) that company creates (ie Apple and the PC) or matures (Google and search) a big, new industry

3) retains control of that company and is the global face of that company (ie Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Phil Knight, Oprah, Larry + Sergei, Buffet, Bezos, heck even Astor, Carnegie, JP Morgan, Hughes, etc)

I can't make any useful predictions about where someone like that would come from because I can't predict the new industry, but the safe bet for those criteria would still be the US.

4) success of personality and company make them widely known and recognized outside of their industry and their country
Not really news, is it? Brendan Eich himself has said that he wanted to use Scheme as the embedded language in the browser, but the higher ups thought people would be frightened off by all the parentheses. So, he sneakily implemented Scheme with C-style syntax and nobody seemed to notice for a few years.
I'll second PyDev Eclipse. I just started a Python project after not using Python for several years, and have been fairly impressed thus far with PyDev.
Technically we e-mailed our heads off. Still, to this day we're out of the yahoo spam filter (for now).
That's a valid point. Then again, the 3G iphone has push email and exchange support, which looks to be an improvement that came directly from user feedback.

There's got to be some sort of quality of user/user feedback/time launched algorithm in there someplace. :-)
have you tried Eric? http://www.die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html
Anyone who relies on restricting information to stay in business is in trouble these days.

I'm pretty sure (and there's a quote in the article about this) that thieves pretty much ignore locks and just smash and grab. Locks keep honest people honest.
From the man too modest to directly name his own name... :)

I guess that changes the question - will the next Steve Jobs need a traditional VC?
thieves pretty much ignore locks and just smash and grab.

Thieves, but not spies.
One huge impediment of starting up in China is the legal hurdle. YC tries to help young hackers navigate the relatively easy legal formalities in the States, but China is ten times worse. Not only does it require much more money, but it also often requires political connections. Young hackers cannot even think about doing a startup without first considering funding and finding connections.

Also, working for Microsoft or Google, you can make very very good salary (perhaps multitude more than your folks), so if you're a capable young hacker, the typical path is going corporate or study abroad for grad school.

Before we can get a Chinese Jobs, we need a Chinese PG to insulate the potential Jobses from the legal mess, provide key connections and offer validation to family and friends.
Komodo is the best that I've found. I like vim for editing individual files, but I prefer the mouse for jumping around a project. Komodo has decent vim key bindings and so I get the best of both worlds.
I didn't know you could emancipate yourself post-age-of-18.

I already found a solution via community college.
Rogers has reached a new low
I use emacs for all my coding work (multiple languages) and am very satisfied with it. I have tried Komodo and a couple of my colleagues at work swear by it--it's a bit bloated for my taste, but probably I am kind of old fashioned...
(btw: same holds true for Eclipse--imho at least). It would probably be nice to know what experience you've had with emacs and why you are looking for an ide, then people might be able to point you towards comparable/corresponding emacs features...

(e.g. my problem is the completion feature with both python modes--i just can't get it to work, which is definitely a pitty, but probably i am just too incompetent :)
I'm thinking spies already know how to pick a lock. Unless it's Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, but even they seem to get the job done in the end.
Why, when I click that link, do I have to click "back" 4 times in order to get back to HN? (Firefox 2, winxp)

Are they being rude by doing a bunch of redirects (and making it harder for me to leave) or is there something else going on?
Ah yes, the good old fashioned sneakernet.
Court rules smartcard hackers can publish exploit data
I moved from city (Chicago) to suburbs 2 years ago, here was the breakdown:

1) safe - there's plenty of safety in the city if you can afford it. It's usually the tradeoff with space.

2) good schools - ditto

3) this was a downside of the suburbs - I'd much prefer a nearby park that I don't have to own, mow, etc. I ended up buying a new house with a very small (2800sf) lot, most of which is covered by our house

4) My kids are still small, but we've got the same variety of people here as in the city (basically traded white & black for white & hispanic)

The biggest issue that forced us to move was $/sqft. We could afford a one bedroom in a city neighborhood we were comfortable with but not a 2br. We moved and although my salary is much higher, we have another kid and we'd need a 3br soon.

Space, Commute, Safety, Schools. Pick 2 (or 3 if you're lucky). We traded Commute+Safe for Space+Safe (schools aren't spectacular where we moved but our kids aren't school age yet).
Who is we? Link?

I'll try to make it...
Are these any good? I'd go if they are.
Paul, Friendfeed is blocked in the UAE, can you please provide an alternative link or post this on your blog? Thanks.
he said that they were a "bunch of non-IT people"
Microsoft Searches Jump 15% After Live Cashback Launch
I'd love to have help with our copy. More generally, our team lacks Marketing/BizDev expertise; perhaps you'd be interested in more than just editing our copy. Contact me at zhyder AT dabbleboard DOT com.

The startup is at http://www.dabbleboard.com . We launched on HN 1.5 months ago.
>>so if the calculus class is looking like you'll get a C or maybe a B, drop it and take it again. Don't screw up your grades, they are your ticket to the future. When I found out 4-year universities did not care about dropped courses, I started keeping my "A" classes, and dropping everything else.

Not good advice, Most 4 year universities wont let you do this but only two times. Even then, your main focus is getting the degree. 3.5 and 3.0 gpa is no different in interviewing for jobs. Most of the jobs(4) I interviewed with right out of school never asked, Only retake classes you have to or classes that are in your major and you enjoy. Don't waste more years and MONEY. Get the degree then job. THAT IS YOUR MAIN FOCUS.
I think only western culture can produce someone with that kind of boldness and lack of humility.
Imagine how different the programming landscape would look if he had stuck to his guns. We can but dream ...
Anyone with an access to this book and some practice can crack even the most secure locks and safes: http://security.org/dial-0/lss.htm
http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/
True - I did not realize that the flip icon was a kill. Plus there's no easy way to undo the flip.
"Anyone who relies on restricting information to stay in business is in trouble these days."

That would be the "SEO" industry (not the entire industry.. just 90%).
Here's what I've observed. It doesn't directly apply to your problem, but may shed a little light:

My company sends out a lot of emails to our users. Yahoo will occasionally, for no known reason, put our first email into spam. From then on, unless the user explicitly marks that email as not spam, yahoo bounces all future emails sent to that user with a "mailbox doesn't exist" message.

I've repeatedly had to do phone support where I directed the user to their spam folder to find our very first email. Once that gets ok'd we no longer have any trouble with that specific user.

On the topic of hotmail, this article is interesting:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Hotmail_Fails_To_Deliver_Up_To_81_Of...
Us too! (and I'm sure many others on here as well)

On a side note, a business idea could be simply to offer a "we review x for $y in 1 week" set price system. Marketing Express, like 37signals used to offer an express design service of 1 feature in 1 week for a set price. This would produce a tangible benefit/result for the startup or small business, while limiting their risk and investment, and likely it would cause them to bring in many more individual items over time.
Microsoft's Real Problem: The Second Coming of Apple
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=241126

In case you missed the discussion last week...
And our startup (that would be interested) is http://www.dojolearning.com/ :)
thinking and typing too much. Take the two months and prove your worth by building something GREAT that has a great growth rate and happy users. If you manage that, you remove a LOT of the risk that YC takes on by funding stuff this early.
BARCamp Chicago is great, probably the best BARCamp! Lots of interesting talks on a wide set of topics. Plus, there's music, great beer and lots of people to talk to.
I've found it very hard to find an IDE that works properly with Django.

In particular, there seems to be no way debug code while using the Django dev server with its autoreload feature. This means that either you don't debug code, or you have to restart the Django dev server every time you make a change. Very annoying.

Also, I haven't been able to find any Eclipse/IDEA level features in a Python IDE... things like being able to ctrl+click on an object to see where it was defined, or a "Find Usages" feature.

All in all, I think there is a huge opportunity to innovate in the web IDE department. Python, RoR, and even PHP all still need a killer IDE.
More like SyntaxOf(C) + subset(Lisp)
I was a little curious too - I was expecting something more like macguyver where he used only a banana.... a little disappointing, but does have merit I guess.
Your service would be really cool if you structured it around the research that has gone into best practices for decision making. For example, James Surowiecki's book the wisdom of crowds is all about improving the decision making process.
The question is wrong. They should have asked "Who wants to be next Steve Jobs?" I suspect not too many: most technical entrepreneurs are more interested in quickly making a "widget" of some sort and sell out to the first real business that comes along.

Some may argue that personal computers in the 70s can be compared to web-widgets of today: the public at large didn't look at them as at "real computers" and few believed in truly global adoption. In that regard early PC pioneers were swimming against the flow.

While today, the entrepreneurial mantra is to "figure out where everybody is going and be there first", being "part of the flow" is crucial (any VC will tell you that). And nobody bothers with re-thinking anything: hey, ideas are nothing, execution is the king. Build something fast. Be in a browser. Get on TechCrunch.

Next Steve won't grow out of making half-assed JavaScript reimplementations of existing desktop software. And I honestly have no idea what the Next Steve will do. I know for sure, that what we're doing today is sorta "configuration files" for software built in the 50s. Perhaps this is what they call a "matured industry" and perhaps looking for a next Steve Jobs is as practical as looking for a next Henry Ford.
It would be interesting if responses to these kinds of questions became "required disclosures" when startups hired new employees that involve stock options.

Would help protect the naive/inexperienced.
Mao Zedong? Stalin? The Japanese circa 1943?
Sounds interesting. I'll see if I can drive up from St. Louis for the weekend.
Apple didn't have any for the Apple I. Jobs secured orders from a computer store who paid up-front. This money was then used to produce the machines.

Funding did, of course, follow quite quickly from this for the Apple II.
What Mainstream Publishers Don't Want You to Know About Door-to-Door Magazine Sales
I'm thinking of using zipcar -http://www.zipcar.com to get around. Has anyone here used it? What do you think?
Well... It does exactly what you've described in your question.
It seems like many of the strengths of Lisp/Scheme are an emergent property of the S-expression syntax, though. Expressions like ((if test func-one func-two) arg1 arg2 etc) are certainly more awkward with infix notation, for example. Using OO/polymorphism is one way around this, but that's a bit heavy-handed in situations where it's just a workaround for infix syntax. (Duplicated code with a switch or if block is even worse.) Also, macros / code generation are vastly easier with a consistently prefix notation.

Similarly, many of the advantages of stack-based languages like Forth and Factor emerge from postfix notation. Very interesting to compare the two.

It's really too bad that non-C-style syntax freaks people out so much, from a technical standpoint it's almost certainly the worst of the three. </fighting words>
"is a PhD from Stanford" vs. "has a PhD from Stanford"

connotations...
If anything, this is more evidence that search is now commoditized, and the difference maker is basically marketing. Your standard consumer probably cares a lot more about saving money than getting whatever incrementally better results Google might give them.
A monad is a means by which people who are pedantically attached to the notion of pure functional programming can write programs that /actually do something/ while still claiming that they're functional.
Suppose climate change is real.

What do we do about it?

Massive centralization and government control?

Or free-market based solutions, based on: 1. restoring individual property rights, 2. re-classifying pollution as trespass rather than nuisance, 3. providing legal remedy?
Add (management, strategy) consultants to that.
Yeah, clearly they can record it-- it just wouldn't be nearly as convenient to capture it.
Right. So, like I said, you need to control the old servers for at least a few days after the cutoff date.
The American Exception: Should Suspects Go Free When Police Blunder?
Surely locksmiths should be happy if ordinary key locks become insecure -- they're the ones who are going to be called out to replace them with higher-tech locks.

It's the rest of us who should be pissed off, we're the ones who'll have to pay them money to replace our locks.
In both art and code, there are objective differences between high-quality and poor-quality products.

The hard part isn't finding the differences between good and bad code. The hard part is finding differences between good code and average code.

There is also a big difference between pointing out examples of quality code and being able to establish guidelines that lead to quality code.

In other words, I do think that much of what determines "quality" code comes down to what aspects the person viewing the code believes are the most important.
looks very promising! I look forward to checking this out.
Should hacker news be linking to it?
XHTML and CSS Tutorials
Logic, Programming and Prolog [free book]
While somewhat interesting and revealing, this is hardly new information and certainly not HN.
OK. I checked the gasoline numbers and they are right. That said,I think China will pass California soon. Of course, that still means that fuel usage in California is profligate in a 'world class' sense.

I also checked CAISO 2006 energy usage statistics for California against CIA world fact book numbers for China. California uses more energy in general than the entire nation of China. I am ashamed to say that I have to confess to being surprised by this. What exactly is it that causes that level of usage? Does anyone have any ideas? I don't know enough about what the energy is being used for to know if usage can be safely reduced in California. Can someone more learned in this area help me out?
Get a virtual secretary - you can ask them to do much more than just spam filtering.

A bit on the expensive side, though. :)

http://www.b2kcorp.com/basic_services.html
http://www.taskseveryday.com/Pricing.html

Other ideas, if you're willing to allow other people to see your emails, why not just mechanical turk it?
A monad is a kind of control structure between functions. Kind of like if you could overload add extra hook functionality to the Unix shell pipe, besides just piping stuff along. For instance, seed it with a countdown, and every time stuff is piped to another process, see how much time has elapsed; if at any point it's been more than, say, 30 seconds, just stop the whole series and return an error. Or find a path through a maze by backtracking every time it hits a dead end, returning to the most recent unexplored path.

They're a necessary workaround to do some stuff in pure functional languages (which is why Haskell users make such a big deal out of them), but you can do some really cool tricks with them.

(NB: This is a really vague summary. I found this OCaml-based monad intro helpful, because it mostly avoids entangling the monad concepts with unrelated issues in Haskell.
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2007/08/06/a-monad-tutorial...
There's a good Monads-in-Scheme intro, too, I forget where.)
Assembly listing of the Sinclair Spectrum ROM
AS3 is a mess in that it tries to be everything to everyone. I would prefer plain old fashioned javascript, like that in my browser right now to the AS3 mess. It's bolted-on Java-esq OO features are clearly just that. Hopefully AS3 dies along with Adobe's inevitably doomed RIA effort.
Not really. They complement each other. The one you showed claims (rightly so) that openness is a fundamental requisite for the progress of science. This one, shows how that openness results in more hits on the best papers on a given subject.

Think of it this way... even if you have easy access to 100x more papers than before, the number of citations that you put in your paper is still the same. This means that the you will try to pick the best references from the set you have available, which, in turn, will result in some particularly good papers being cited more often than they would otherwise.
Leading to more herding and informational cascades (http://www.info-cascades.info/) wherein individuals cease to follow their own thoughts and instead rush to verify what they have heard through (in this case) the academic grapevine.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb also addresses this topic in some depth in his book "The black Swan" (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...).
Why podcasting is failing, part II: Lessons from PodTech
I wish there were more details on the engineering team in the article. All they say is "25 engineers working remotely".

Would be interesting to know what the growth in the engineering team has been from the early days, and how they are distributed geographically.
(My speculations:)

I doubt it's really any one thing, unless you count California being really wealthy as the one thing.

I think air conditioning is fairly normal in California? It isn't in most of the world.

High motor vehicle usage.

Lots of energy-using technology used in agriculture.

Manufacturing: stuff is actually still made in California.
You reckon he didn't stick to his guns?

I think he did alright for a relatively junior level developer, a lone developer to boot, given the task of "add scripting to the browser". I can imagine far worse fates, particularly given how enamored of Java the entire industry was at the time. I have nothing but respect for Eich and JavaScript. It's held up strikingly well for what could have been, and odds were in favor of it being, a band aid solution. Given the circumstances, I think we're just lucky that Netscape had some of the best developers in the world working on it at that time...because the one who got stuck adding "scripting" happened to be quite gifted and ambitious, and took the task very seriously and came up with something quite clever.

It was a very different time, and dynamic languages were a bit downtrodden. Tcl was the closest to a "standard embedded scripting language" and I think I'm comfortable calling JavaScript a more powerful language than Tcl (at least at the time, though I think the two have stayed the same related to one another over that time, despite advances in both). And, of course, Tcl was only popular among UNIX nerds. Getting Windows developers on board might have been a problem...a whole new "simple" language like JavaScript may have been exactly what the industry needed. I dunno. It's certainly apparent that JavaScript has revealed itself to be a very powerful language in the past few years.
How to monetize this AIM robot idea ? 
I have a full time job as a systems administrator. During my free time I work developing AIM chatbots. I did this as a hobby because I wanted to create my own bots on AOL, I have created many bots. RSS AIM bots, Stock Quote and weather bots, Bots that will give you a quote or joke, and other Chatbots including a chatbot that gives you tips on how to save the environment.

I notice that my server is always busy answering to real human requests, I would say my bots get a lot of daily traffic from mostly teenagers and other people who are bored at their offices or home. I don't even advertise them that much they get around through word of mouth.

I am wondering how can I turn this into something that can help me make some cash.

I though about making bots for companies, I think there is a market for something like this. Any ideas on how I can take my side project to the next level ?

Thanks everyone
Steve Jobs probably should not be compared to Henry Ford. Apple, if anything, is a great fast-follower with an incredible sense of design and marketing. Henry Ford, on the other hand, was mainly responsible for the initial commercialization of something that's pretty much reshaped culture. If anyone's had a similar impact in the computer industry, it's Microsoft, not Apple.
Just a side note:

acceptOnlyIf name doesn't tell what the function does. acceptEach or acceptAll could be a clearer alternatives (at least for a python programmer (there are any() and all() general functions in Python)).
I tried Komodo and PyDev, now I'm back to my favorite editor SciTe. Sufficient for me as I don't work on large Python projects.
"It's also probably safe to say that most won't be running Excel, Word, or Outlook, either."

Umm, no. The fact that Office programs are written for Mac is one of the prime reasons Apple is able to make inroads into corporate.
Appssavvy makes it easier for advertisers to navigate the demographics of social networks
I guess it is - though the amplifying aspect of said blog and consulting contacts have kind of been undersold. The term 'special case' is fitting - I think that 37signals is in many respects a special case, though they offer advice as if they are not. One of their amplifiers I forgot to mention is 'Step 2 - build the hottest open source web framework on the planet earth.'
Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China
Thanks! I changed it to "has a PhD from Stanford".
These 10 companies will demo on MobileBeat stage
No, you're right, I just submitted the above before I finished reading this thread's article - I thought it was going in the opposite direction.