skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently encountered the "no spec" campaign, which argues against doing preliminary design as a proposal before getting paid. More here:

http://www.no-spec.com/

Your example illustrates why I find their position unreasonable. Designers can get away with refusing to do spec work when their portfolio speaks for itself and they want to keep doing the same kind of things they've done before. But encouraging less experienced designers to refuse spec work is holding them back.
Ugh, how can he miss Quicktime? VideoLAN is all anyone I know uses on OS X (and often on Linux, for that matter).

And as for Pidgin, I actually appreciate its economy of interface and simple notification methods.

The trackpad bit is spot-on, though. I did miss that whenver I ran Linux on my old PowerBook instead of OS X.
Announcing Our Offer For The New York Times Company
I would think 10 extra IQ points would benefit a receiver

Well, these two wide outs are certainly using the old noodle: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3166/2691471704_abbceab973_b....
he says it's smart to build for profit and take the safer money, rather than go all or nothing.

the point is that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. they may well be if you're building a consumer web app without any monetization strategy but not for e.g. an ad network - something that needs to make money from the start and can also be bought out eventually.
Your math is wrong as you assume the person who keeps the company uses all of his income and the person who sells uses none of his. Your also assuming really odd rates of return and a stupid high valuation but:

Let's say he is living off of 150k/year after the first year:
Y1: Keep = 100k savings, Sold = 10.85M savings.
Y2: Keep = (2501.15 + 100 1.1 - 150)k = 235k, Sold = 10.85m * 1.1 - .15m = 11.785m
Y10: Keep = 4.8m savings and the company, Sold = 23.5m
Y20: Keep = 39.6m savings and the company, Sold = 58.6m
Y30: Keep = 219m savings and the company, Sold = 149m.

Note: If someone offers you 40x earnings it's probably a good time to sell.
It's unfortunate that he died but to be honest, I don't quite understand the appeal of Dr. Pausch.

All of the quotes attributed to him seem specious reasoning at best. "Beat the Reaper by living well?" I think "death" wins, always. "Brick walls" are just there. They don't have a purpose. Pontifications about the meaning of life? It looks like it doesn't really have one. Sort of like 'god', you can just make up what ever you want. What's his proof for any of what he's telling me?

Do we listen to this man because we feel sorry for him? because we're afraid of dying as well? The whole concept just seems like so much saccherine from a dying man. In 20 years no one will remember this book or him.

I remember seeing him on the Oprah show and starts spouting about how he's in oh-so-great shape. Then he starts doing push-ups to demonstrate. The whole display was pathetic and delusional. I'm thinking, "Dude, your dying! You're not in good health!"

The whole lecture just seems like a bunch of jibbersh from, unfortunately, a walking-dead man.
ShoesFest is today: Hack on _why's Ruby GUI toolkit
So it's like turning your whole web site into a giant Facebook App, which as we have learned, has no business model.
Well, the problem they're addressing is going to be solved somehow by someone, it will probably be either this or openid and xfn. I think FB has head start so far.

Passport btw, offered no benefits really for app developers, not the same case here.
3 Reasons Why Wikipedia Will Beat Knol
"[My father's] most adamant instruction was that I should never under any circumstances go into debt."

Now that's a dangerous heuristic. Never purchase a house, car, education, or medical treatment, except with cash?
this is potentially very useful info. In what ways is the benchmark wrong?
I have no problem with facts. If there is currently an IQ gap between races, then that's a fact. We can study the reasons, that's fine too.

But it's the potential for assigning social roles to certain groups because of some "natural" disposition that I find troubling.
Microsoft is Now a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Foundation
This seems like the sort of thing that botnets would excel at. Instead of just a link farm, unscrupulous companies could have a whole bunch of machines "clicking" away within their link farms to make it look like there is actually user traffic.
Agreed, I've lost count of the number of apps that have tried this over the years, probably all let down by not getting the social aspect right: lack of community/friending/critical mass.

The idea always seemed to make sense, just waiting for the right time and the right implementation. The friending/link sharing angle could be the twist that makes it work.
Mike Maples: The Party is Over
An amazing guy by anyone's measure, but a "hero"? Does that word mean anything anymore?
I agree. In current American society, it's impossible to make claims on the race variable in a vacuum without referring to other social factors.
Randy Pausch Graduation Speech at CMU
But they don't really have any reason to care what position Google shows up for "search" for someone already using Google to search.
No, had to get the specs as close as possible. If you look on the Ubuntu notebook page, you'll find something with a name like "Dell 1800n". Then if you look at the normal page, you'll find a "Dell 1800". You can get the specs close, but not exactly alike. It was clear that they were offering more bang for the buck on the Windows side.
Many of the modern web successes have shadows in the 90s, I don't think that should hold anyone back. The changes in internet culture and technology, as well better understanding what people want means a lot of old, failed ideas could work someday.
Boy, reading this, I don't feel so bad about the things trolls say about my essays.

That was very harsh. Which is not in itself bad. If someone were going to call an emperor on his new clothes, I'd hope this would be a safe place to do it. The problem is, this is both harsh and vague. It's ok to be vague if you're saying something nice (harmless pleasantries are a useful social lubricant) but the harsher you are, the more precise you ought to be.
Has anyone tried to create an actual 'Knol' yet? I did, and the experience was less than smooth... in fact I gave up. Editing a big article is not only slow, but will cause stack overflows in JavaScript, making it impossible to save your work. Then the thing froze again for a few minutes, after which it informed me that 512k is the maximum size for an article. Of course, in typical Google style, there's no real feedback form, just some 'help' page [1] where you can react, but which seems to be completely ignored by the Google staff.

Oh, and the 'confirm name' feature works only for US citizens. Which is probably no big loss, since it mostly looks like a lame excuse to gather even more data about us. But (though I can't confirm this first hand) someone blogged that your Knols only show up on the actual site if you confirm your name.

I'm appalled.

[1] https://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help -- Take a look at the enraged comments, it's amusing.
And being dependent on one thing just generally isn't a good idea. Also there is a huge number of users out there who don't want or need flashy apps. They just want to quickly get stuff done from their phones, and would be just fine with simple text apps.
"Tom held some shares in Disney, and while he liked the company, he thought its stock price was a bit rich at the time, so he sold the Disney stock to fund the purchase of the piano. Tom never got back into Disney and instead watched it rise and rise. Years later Tom would walk through his living room, see the piano and mutter to himself, "That's the most expensive damn piano on the face of the planet!""

I have heard this story about Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, kitchen floors, new cars, and masters degrees. I bet at least 50% of the US GDP has been attributed to selling great growth stocks too soon -- or rather, to a friend of a friend doing so.

Sadly, we don't have any great stories about people cashing out of leveraged positions in Enron ("Have I ever told you about my negative four hundred thousand dollar house?").
It is even worse, imagine if everyone were to follow it: there would be no money today.
Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video?
I'd suggest reading this article: http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/

"white kids from households with annual incomes of $20,000 to $30,000 easily outscore black kids from households with annual incomes of $80,000 to $100,000."

In an adoption study where black and white babies were both adopted by high IQ white parents, there was a one standard deviation difference ( 15 IQ points) between the black and white children.
That argument would hold more water if the U.S. budget wasn't so padded with fat and wars.
I don't like that argument. By that logic, we shouldn't import microprocessors, steel, oil, or a hundred other things, either. However, that makes little economic sense. In addition, the United States is an ally of most of the rest of the world, so the chances that we will ever be cut off from all food sources is negligible, unless higher-ups in the government were planning to start a war with the entire planet (which seems possible lately).

Also, the government isn't subsidizing farms to bring up our agricultural production to national self-sufficiency levels, but it is massively subsidizing them to make the US a huge food exporting country. Our farm policy doesn't fit the pattern of a program that has been logically designed for a purpose. Rather, it fits the pattern of entrenched producers influencing legislation for their own gain.
Microsoft to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation (Really)
I kinda cringe when mobile reimplementations of desktop ideas, such as AdMob, are compared to Tesla.
The problem with Grand Unified Login Theory is that it often goes against the primary goal of having your own web service which is to build your own user base. In the long run your user base is worth more if it is uniquely yours as opposed to just being a subset of someone else's user base. In this case if Facebook caught a cold then any web service heavily relying on Facebook logins would get a flu. No thanks.
The way modern farming works is that huge corporate farms open up lobbying offices on K street, which they use to get politicians to increase their subsidies year after year until the payments are larger than any logical purpose could justify. When the production subsidies get too large and environmentalists start to complain about all the marginal land that is being converted to farm land, the farming industry gets the government to pay them to leave acres alone as well.

Fly over a desert state and you will see occasional large patches of green. Those patches of green are farms that are phenomenally expensive and resource intensive to produce, but the subsidies make it worthwhile. Some of the fallow land you see is also owned by the farms and they are being paid by the government to leave it alone.

Whether agricultural giants are being paid to farm or not farm, taxpayers foot the bill, of course. To keep them from getting upset, politicians from farm states blow patriotic smoke about how important farms are for a nation.

>Also, all it can take is one bad year (without subsidies) for an independent farmer to go under.

In the old days, this is what crop insurance and futures contracts were for. Crop markets were the original source of many financial innovations that were meant to lessen the risk of participating in a volatile industry. Now I suppose that it is the government's job to guarantee people's livelihoods.

Software startups are a very volatile industry as well. Should the government start subsidizing them to keep them from going under? Perhaps it could start with 10 cents per year per line of code written. The first bill will cost $50 billion/year and most of the subsidy will go to Microsoft. After all, we can't allow our software industry to go overseas in case war breaks out. We need American programmers available to write guidance programs for our satellites, unmanned drones, and missiles.

Now I just need to switch my startup from Ruby to something more verbose to rake in those LOC subsidies.
I switched to "Internet Video" in 2001.
Lisp for the win
Search engines were pretty crappy before Google (and there were plenty of 'em-- it was a crowded market).

There were lots of crappy mp3 players before the iPod.

Cell phones were pretty universally crappy/boring before the iPhone.

A guy I know who was a VC in the first bubble laments that he funded a startup that did the EXACT same thing as YouTube and failed horribly.

Timing and execution can turn an existing market on its ear or develop previously small/uninteresting market. And by looking at the previous failures in a market, you can actually learn a little bit about what people really want or don't want (on someone else's nickel).

In short, don't dismiss a market because someone else failed trying to serve it.
I went TV-free about 10 years ago. The initial reason was because paying for cable or satellite was beyond my budget. But after about 2 weeks I realized that I didn't miss it.

Netflix and video games are far better alternatives for me.
if you purchase nonperishables when they are on sale, the return on investment is enormous

Only if you have space to store them. If you could buy nonperishable consumer staple futures at similar discounts, it would absolutely be worthwhile; but if you make a practice of saving $10 by buying a dozen boxes of cereal when they're on sale and then having them sit on your shelves for the next six months... well, you're probably paying far more than $10 for the larger apartment/house which gives you the space to store said cereal boxes.
Nice to have, but how many of you actually using Common Lisp?
Judging a really early stage startup
Except for a house, there are many, many people who do that. Especially in countries where education & medical treatment is not heavily inflated like the USA. And even in the USA you can go to berea and get a 2003 Civic without much hardship at all. Some people can take the subway for a while until they save the money for a car.
The difference between Facebook Connect and Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID) is reputation. With Facebook Connect you may be able to see that Bob friends with Jane, and since Jane is a good person to deal with then Bob is probably not too bad either. Social Networking + Payments is a killer combination if you can get people to participate.
A better rule might be:

"Never go into debt unless your benefit from whatever you buy using the debt exceeds the cost of the debt."

Examples:

A house generally appreciates in value. Usually worth going into debt.

A new car. Unless you gain somehow from having a brand new car (e.g. you're a movie star), you can get most of the value from a used car and avoid the massive value decrease.

A computer. As a hacker, you need your computer to create. Having a computer lets you make wealth that wouldn't be possible without one.

An education. Hopefully improves your ability to create value by teaching you new and interesting things :)
I just took another look. The purpose is pretty clear, and like you say, that's really important. But I think it is also important for your site to show (not just describe) a prospective user how they can benefit.
fbFund and Y Combinator
Impressions of fbFund and the f8 show
Interesting Outlier: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/the_bonus/07/1...
LuckyCal Awarded fbFund Grant
Philosophy is good as an exercise in approaching questions systematically, learning to make arguments, and examining foundational assumptions of a discipline or theory. It's also useful to learn about the philosophical background of ideologies, especially political beliefs, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Philosophy as an end in itself, detached from knowledge or consideration of specific empirical facts, is mostly a dead end.
This seems reminscent of Blodget's offer for CNET at the end of 2007 (http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing-our-friendly-...) and CNET ended up being bought by CBS so maybe he is on to something.
Actually, halfway through SICP sounds like a great place to start projects that are interesting. For example, my first real exposure to Lisp was through Arc. The tutorial was enough for me to write a basic ray tracer (I submitted it to the unofficial arc repository a few months back).

I've never looked for open source lisp projects myself, but I'd give a site like github a try (just search for Lisp).
OK, I see. Yeah, we have similar tax breaks for capital gains (when they are realized, via a sale). I think it's half the normal rate if you wait a year (your tax rate depends on your income here - highest is about 50%); and half again (ie. 1/4 the rate), if it's the sale of a business you created.

But note that you only get taxed on capital gains if you realize them (ie. if you sell the stock). If you just sit on it, and take the dividends, you don't get taxed on the capital appreciation. Over time, the dividends (usually!) increase reflecting the capital appreciation (so you are getting something out of that capital appreciation), but you're not taxed on the capital appreciation itself.

The distinction between this and starting a business yielding the same dividends is that you don't pay tax on sweat equity; whereas you were taxed on the $ equity (that you bought the stocks with) when you earnt it.

hmmmmm, they are both instances of capital appreciation which you don't get taxed on - until you sell the stocks/business. It's just that the business starts closer to $0, though there is always some $ investment in starting a business - even if only in the form of your living expenses).

Yes, it's deliberate encouragement of investment (which creates new employment, new wealth... new taxable income), but which flows naturally from the nature of capital appreciation. And it's easier to police the event of a sale. But truly, if they really wanted to tax capital appreciation (without a sale), they could. It's a decision to not tax it, to encourage investment.

PS: you mean 0.1 capital gains don't you? (ie. not 0.1%, but 10%)
This is interesting. I work on a large medicine software, and after 10 years of development in C++, we switched to C# about two years ago. Overall, my feeling is that the development process is quicker and the libraries support (.NET) was also improvement, along with the IDE (Visual Studion 8). To sum it up, the whole experience have been positive.

Of course, our product is tied to Windows platform. But living with this restriction, I'd say C# is a good choice.
Mistakes are not eliminated by constant practice unless you practice not making mistakes. If you just keep repeating yourself, you'll just learn to optimize around your mistakes and never reach peak performance.

This happens to musicians a lot.
In the long term, we are all walking dead men and women, at least in this life.

What makes us live is whether we get down to the business of living or not.

Professor Pausch embraced life and lived it to its fullest.

The proof is in the pudding. Look at the life he lived.

He will be missed.
AT&T already does the most important parts of that. In my complex every network is named and secured uniformly because AT&T sells cable models with built-in wireless routers. They have an installation process that is totally automated and automatically configures them for WPA or WEP. The users don't even (get to) choose the network name. As a result, I couldn't leech off another network even if I wanted to.

Secure networks make perfect business sense for internet providers; otherwise, they'd end up with customers with wide-open networks that neighbors could share together (unwittingly or otherwise).

As for port forwarding, typical users never need to configure that, and when they do, UPNP usually can do it for them.
I just wanted to point out there is a difference between being brave and being fearless. While one has no fear, the other faces it and does not succumb. For all I read from and about him and his struggle against cancer, he was a very brave man.

When my time comes, I hope I die with at least a fraction of his dignity.
Hiya!

I've been reading HN for a long time. I'm happy to answer questions about the f8 conference and the fbFund process.

I'll be on and off today, but will keep up with the conversation as best I can.
> It is plausible that this correlation represents bias in the decisions of the coaches, not real ability.

Gladwell's point is that there is a matching problem, i.e., that quarterbacks with high Wonderlic scores are drafted ahead of those with low Wonderlic scores. In fact, one of the players on his high scores list (Tony Romo) went undrafted, while some of those on his low scores listed (McNabb, Vince Young, and Marino) were drafted in the first round.

His examples don't support his matching problem thesis. Further, people that follow the NFL know that Wonderlics aren't a huge factor in selecting players.
AOL Closing the Door on Xdrive | TechJaws
This is a dupe, and a link to a secondary source. Here's the story linking to the actual googleblog entry:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256896
not surprising. Do traffic is primarily autos, homes / apts and sex / dating
Err, I mean: Instead of comparing linebackers and centers, compare different types of staff on the teams, viz, coaches and water boys, etc.
Python(x,y) has five main features:

* collecting scientific-oriented Python libraries and development environment tools (e.g. Eclipse plugins) ;

* collecting almost all free related documentation ;

* providing a quick guide to get started in Python / Qt / Eclipse ;

* configuring Eclipse to be ready to develop in Python, and adjusting some Windows parameters (file type association, windows explorer integration, ...) ;

* providing an all-in-one setup program, so the user can install or uninstall all these packages and features by clicking on one button only.

</quote> http://www.pythonxy.com/features.php
I think this was more a demonstration of mental illness than cowardice...
ITunes DRM Playback on Linux
There could be money; there was before fractional reserve banking was invented. It's just that the economy would work significantly less efficiently, we'd get widescale deflation every time people wanted to save, and we likely wouldn't see the large investment projects that have resulted in our 21st century lifestyle.
Glassfish V3 Lite Express (Prelude Release)
I don't think "normal people" are as anti-Apple as this post makes them to be. Also, "normal people" are certainly much less tech-phobic than they were, say, 15 years ago.
I don't know what else to say. I have no reason to listen to what this guy is saying or give it more value than any of the other feel-good books from terminals. ie, "Tuesdays with Morrie". Remember that? Yeah, me neither. The value of these books seems specious, too. Probably because all humans are afraid of dying unless they can delude themselves to go to church.

He gives off this whole vibe of some crazy new-agey street preacher. THe way people lap it up and buy his books is disturbing.
I never understood the concept of financing or leasing a car. I was taught that you save for a car, and then when you buy one, you start saving up for the next one.
Busby seo challenge
Busby seo challenge : website malagasy in busby seo challenge. Tongasoa eto amin'ny takila busby seo challenge ianao. Page malgache qui participe au busby seo challenge
well allow me to modify my robots.txt so you can be at infinity-1. since you pricks decided to hijack your role as impartial algorithmic search to walled-garden with knol, i want nothing to do with you.

every major website that handles referrals seems to bite the poison fruit of capturing traffic...now google has to. oh well, maybe clusty search will have to do