skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't understand why someone would start a company if they didn't think they'd enjoy running it.

I'm not proposing that. As I said in the essay, running Viaweb was the most interesting job I'd had. It just wasn't the most interesting thing I could imagine doing.

That's the question you have to answer, if you're ambitious: not just "do I like what I'm doing?" but "do I like what I'm doing more than anything else I could be doing?"
Just asked somebody at Facebook who works on this stuff - apparently they do care and it is a balance between a giant freaking download or increasing HTTP requests. There is also the issue of redownloading a giant file whenever a small piece of JS changes on the site, which can happen quite happen.

They've also profiled the browser performance itself and found that loading all their JS in-memory is actually a performance issue.

So I guess the answer is that they've really thought this through and came up with the best solution that works for them.
They'll manage the co as they please.

Sure, but they guarantee your returns in advance.
Stumpedia Offers A True Human-Powered Search Experience
Building Tiny, Ultra Low Power PCs
Kontagent Offers Deep Analytics For Facebook Applications
Andrew Chen: Recency Frequency and Monetization
It sounds like you're disagreeing with something you think I said, but I can't figure out what. Can you give me an example of a specific sentence or paragraph I wrote that you disagree with?
What the U.S. Can Learn from Indian R&D
The Joe Kraus Q&A : Put your business model in Beta along with your product
Um, this article is from 2003. WTH?

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"?

This article is either baloney or outdated. Or both.
Google App Engine Perl Project Started
Direct link: http://knol.google.com/

It'll be interesting to see how this competes with Mahalo, eHow/wikiHow, and other sites like this.
This is very cool and I may investigate adding these to one of my projects.

My biggest question is: do they print? Charts are for reporting and a lot of people still like to print reports.
I didn't say it was impossible that one's interests would coincide exactly with customers' demands, just unlikely. Of course it will happen occasionally, and those founders are obviously going to do particularly well.

Incidentally, though, Gates did just find that there was something more interesting to do.
The regulation here in question and our policies are a cause and effect. That's why it's painful. We'll solve this soon though. It's a top priority.
Facebook f8 Keynote Live Stream
people who are not can watch the stream here http://www.visualwebcaster.com/Facebook/50038/reg.html
The only way Apple can succeed without Jobs, is if they find another super productive sociopath perfectionist with a 1 in a million sense of design. A sugar water executive won't do.
1. Combat experience is zero for pretty much anyone, with the exception of a pilot. Because pilots are evaluated by their performance in super stressful situations that require quick thinking, combat is valued. Same goes for hours in cockpit. Greater the number of hours, the more likely you've run into "situations", the more accurate the pilot can be evaluated. Good ones rise to the top.

2. Being able to fly multiple aircraft is highly relevant because it makes you more valuable to the company, and to other companies. If Airline x flies A330s, 767s and a bunch of Embreaers, and you already know how to handle all three, you are in an exceptional position.

3. Emergency management going hand in hand with experience is commonplace in the industry, factual or not. Given car insurance premiums, (new drivers pay more for a reason) and the increased complexity of piloting an aircraft, I'd certainly accept the common knowledge.

I'll give you the union deal. That certainly will always have the effect of inflating salaries. I'm not sure I can take that to mean that senior pilots are all a bunch of overpaid bums, as that FA was suggesting.
I absolutely meant the score as a tongue-in-cheek thing, which is why I tried to keep my response to you in the same spirit. I had no intention to offend!

Outside of having a laugh--supposedly at Steve's expense--I wouldn't try to compare the two men in any serious way.
Looks like they've disabled the "print preview" version of the page. I had no problem getting to the original article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making
I understand the point that PG is making here. But I think DHH might argue that it's possible to create a business that doesn't require an unreasonable amount of work and attention. The work could even be enjoyable and interesting long term and business could still manage to be a success.

Edit: I guess 37 signals is a good case study of this. They work 4 days a week and have had tremendous success. I have 0 experience running a real "business", but I have a hunch that you could build a successful one that doesn't require the amount of attention and work that PG is talking about.
Google Invests in Aptera Motors and Lithium-Ion Battery Maker AtaCell
What about two things being equal. Neither is better than the other or "best".
Simplicity = Innovation
I evaluate being able to "walk away" as being able to maintain the status quo indefinitely. The slow revenue reduction that you are describing is applicable to any business model with a recurring revenue set up. Sure it's not bad, but the company begins to die the moment they leave.
For cash, or if the company's stock seemed a very good bet, and you were young (or rich) enough that you were willing to risk having no diversification.
The quote was great...

The string of arguments that followed between "flowery evangelist" and "cynical asshole" just as good.
You mention an "underclass" as a talking point for your "progression" from the libertarian. You subsequently argue that hackers wrongly disrespect the underclass. Wrongly, because the underclass is [unknowingly] stupid.

Being an uninformed idiot is not always a choice, but often times it is. I argue that some of them earn their lack of respect because they are selfish and ignorant. They earn selfish because an uninformed person is a cost to society, through pollution, welfare, medical, insurance, etc...

When you have a population of intentionally ignorant people, you need to lie to them to prevent them from doing dangerous things. For example, abstinence instead of protection. This is a problem because it is a bad way to solve problems, and an ugly trend.
Liveblogging Eric Schmidt Interview at Brainstorm
Or about a lightsabre building. It would be the most dangerous building on the planet.
I find the "Steve’s health is a private matter" line a bit odd. According to the SEC it's not a private matter. His health directly impacts $150B in AAPL shares. My health is private because I don't have billions of dollars in other people's money counting on it.
Hey people. Number 22, "a web-based Excel/db hybrid", was my previous pet project before openphotovr.org. I built a couple versions, showed them to some people, got some good responses, didn't put it online because of laziness and overwork. I'm willing to give free advice to anybody willing to tackle this problem. Also Kragen Sitaker used to work on this, you could try to contact him.
"I don't think Mark Zuckerberg could have sat a VC down and said, this is my idea, (or this is the idea I stole from the Winkelvoss brothers or whatever) please invest in me."

Well, this is exactly what he did when he got money off Peter Thiel, isn't it?

If someone can't either explain your vision or at least mock up a tangible version of it that shows what they are trying to do, then how can they expect to create the product in reality. Sure, Facebook may not have made sense until it existed in some form, nor friendfeed, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have a good elevator pitch, the pitch is often showing off part of the product, not just an idea, which by itself is largely worthless. Most VCs don't fund just ideas, there has to be at least some basic implementation already.
Twhirl makes me Dizzy
This looks like something really great. I think that a "google wikipedia clone" can only benefit the web, by offering innovative features to the "web encyclopedia" space. This is something distinctly different and I like it. From the short time i've spent on the site it looks like this could be pretty big.
if you reverse that math, you're looking at a job that, if you worked the normal 9-5, you'd be making in the neighborhood of $250k/yr.

i'd love to work 2 days a week and still make six figures.
The reason airline pilots aren't overpaid is that the feeders to them are underpaid. An airline pilot has to spend at least 20 years before he gets to the 200k+ salary. A pilot usually has to pay for his own training up to Commercial Instrument/Flight Instructor, which costs about 70k.

Then he has to instruct for several years to build up flight time. Flight instructing usually pays about $15k a year. From there, he has to somehow get multiengine or turbine time, maybe flying small freight, probably at night, laying over in nowheresville, for virtually no money, maybe 15-20k. These jobs are also very hard to get.

From there, he might be able to get a job at a marginal regional airline, paying $20-30k as he moves up as a first officer. Hopefully after several years at the regional, he can move up to captain on the regional, now earning about 50k.

If the majors are hiring at that point in the economic cycle, he can now be a FO at a major airline, making 40-60k for the first few years. After maybe 8 years of that, he may make captain, and perhaps earn 100k a year, increasing as his seniority increases. Getting from 0 to captain at a major takes about 25-30 years.

On top of all of this, if at any time he his not able to meet the FAA's very stringent medical requirements, basically if he has to take almost any medication, or has any illness, he loses his medical and his career is over. Furthermore, if he makes any significant mistake in all of those late nights in bad weather, his career may be over or he will be unable to advance to the next rung. Furthermore, he's moving around every time he moves up a rung, and he can't have a normal family life when he's in some strange city half the time.

Anyone who decides to take this path does it because they love to fly, not because it is an easy buck. What's worse is that now the brass ring at the end is being eroded, and so after all of that hard work to get there, he might only end up making $100-150k at the end.
Probably because society has different expectations when it comes to men and women which in turn can cause different behaviors. For example I had a teacher that would only read "gender neutral" stories to her daughter since she didn't like the message sent by the typical "princess waiting to be saved by the prince on a white horse" story.
dup of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=254569
Creating Passionate Users: My Favorite Graphs... and the future
From what I've seen on the list, Catalyst seems to be running a little ahead at the moment.
Darcs is pretty cool and innovated out a number of the DVCS features, but it's kind of dead in the water until they figure out the stalling problem where, from time to time, merges take essentially infinite time.
Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha)
Interesting comment. I agree with you somewhat in the absolute, but completely disagree with you when you consider the degree of protection relative to other fields.

Consider the difference between an American consumer who wants to 1) have a simple spreadsheet extension written, or 2) have a simple legal will drafted.

In case 1, the consumer can 1) hire someone with a PhD, MS, BS, or no degree at all in any field, 2) send the work overseas with minimal oversight and regulation, 3) bring a foreign worker into the US on an H1B or L1 visa (to a limited extent).

In case 2, the consumer can 1) hire a member of the state bar who attended an ABA accredited school. That's it. No other options.

Law is an extreme example, and lawyers are, as members of the judiciary, quasi-government officials themselves, so maybe this isn't representative. But even in relatively unregulated labor markets here in the US, there's still no specific visa program to bring people on. In fact, the late nobel prize winner in economics Milton Friedman, champion of free markets, actually called the H1B program a subsidy for the tech industry!

Milton Friedman scoffs at the idea of the government stocking a farm system for the likes of Microsoft and Intel. "There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy."

link:
http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/labor/stor...

So while US immigration policy, by not allowing everyone and anyone in, does indeed mess with free global labor markets, if anything it skews immigration in favor of foreign engineers who would like to come here, and against US Citizens in these fields. But I don't know anyone other than extremists who think that the US can have a truly open door immigration policy. The numbers would simply be too great. Instead, the US "only" accepts well over a million legal immigrants a year, not counting hundreds of thousands of work-related visas.

Keep in mind, in a true free labor market, I, as a programmer would face more competition, but I'd also benefit as a consumer from an increase in competition in the services I consume. By targeting high tech specifically with work visas, but leaving the other fields untouched, the market is probably more skewed than it would have been enforcing a skills-blind approach.

Lastly, plenty of high tech workers most definitely do complain about the unfairness of the policy. Most of the programmers I know are much angrier about the corporate control over the H1B's life than the presence of foreign workers. I know that the economic world is a positive-sum game, especially in wealth creating industries like high tech.

But the current approach of skewing immigration toward high tech workers while allowing employers to control the residency rights and green card application? I'm looking for the free market with a microscope dude, and I ain't seeing it.
Curious the front page has "Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F" on the right hand side above the listing of Knols...
Great quote...but now HN is pointing to a blog that is pointing to a HN quote.

I really hope he doesn't blog about this thread.
What explains the growing gap in wages? Computers.
I think where this argument breaks down is that VC's don't invest in elevator pitches. Elevator pitches give you a foot in the door. At some point you're going to have to have something more substantial.

I think where the elevator pitch is most useful an exercise in distilling the "one thing" your company doesn - and in the beginning it should be as much as possible a single thing. For Facebook it could have been "We make it easier for people to connect over the web". You take that and then move into more details. Use the Pitch to start a conversation at a networking event and then go from there.
Call me crazy... is there any relevance to the sex of the author?
Orange County: Best Vegan or Vegetarian Friendly Restaurants - Associated Content
The thing is, you don't just work two days a week as a wedding photographer. As the article mentions, there's almost 20 hours of work for a single client, given the initial consultation and any other legwork you have to do. If I remember correctly, my wedding photographer, who we paid $2K, also included engagement photos in the package, which were taken on a different weekend.

Anyway, not trying to make this into a photography thread, but just pointing out that the original article is a bit strange.
As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual
If they sell it to the public, they should provide a PC based API where one can customize it with one's own commands via an application running on one's PC connected to the robot via USB or the like. I love robots, but would not want to spend 4K euros on something I could not customize.
Where can I find article subject ideas?
That was genuinely inspiring and great timing for me personally. I talked my fiancee into quitting her job this week and she's turning in her notice today, for pretty much the same reasons: life's too short for her to drain her soul away at some place just because it looks good on the resume (intensive care unit at a good hospital here in SF). She's got a few other opportunities lined up already closer to her interests (reproductive health) and the pep is back in her step again. But first, we're going to concentrate on thoroughly enjoying our 3 week honeymoon!

I'm living vicariously through her - I've never quit a gig without having another one lined up, which also explains why our wedding in Aug is my first vacation in about 5 years.
Hey Louisloius,
Apprently your comment points to our opposing attitudes, as I commented on mixturtle that you had too much below the fold. ;)

I don't think users should have to scroll to see content, particularly when there is a sub-scroll and a map. I think it would suck if you scolled down, selected an address, had to scroll back up to get to see the location, or the player(I originally had my player inline like you have on mixturtle, but wasn't a huge fan of it that way, preferring the consistent location for the control).

Having said all that, your site looks way better than mine, so I definately take your critique seriously. I've already started piecing together a new layout, but with the additional features I have coming, it is only getting heavier. :(

My original had the map seperate form the controls, and I may return to that.
Thanks - hope all is going well with mixturtle.
God, someone needs a better UI metaphor than those hideous slides!
Interesting, what did you google? Your HN id?
Yes. When I found this, I forgot why I was googling in the first place.
Just because the government initially funded one piece of what eventually became the internet, doesn't mean that government sponsorship was necessary. Many other parts of the internet ( telnet, SMTP) were originally developed outside of the government, as were technologies before the age of the mega-state ( such as the telegraph).
I suspect 2.5 hours is far less time and energy than most startup founders put into allocating shares. It's not something that we spent weeks or months on. We actually spent more time blogging about it than doing the actual allocation, and I think the increase in productivity associated with happy hackers was a net win.
Ugh. Feels like a fluff piece. Most Indian companies (including HCL Tech) still run like sweat shops, I think.
Yes, doctors and lawyers are protected by non-immigration-related government policies that geeks don't benefit from. But most of the money you spend every day doesn't go to doctors and lawyers.

Consider your laptop. What proportion of the cost of a laptop can be attributed to the cost of wages for workers in the US? (Remember what Adam Smith said: the cost of everything in a free-market economy can be divided among "rent of land", "wages of labor", and "profit of stock".)

There's the cost of the longshoremen who unloaded it from the docks, the cost of the truck drivers who drove it across the country, the cost of the warehouse workers who put it on the shelf and then took it off again when you ordered it...on a per-laptop basis, I don't think those costs add very much to the price. So if the US opens its borders and people all over the world compete for truck-driving jobs, I don't think the cost of laptops is going to go down very much.
Not exactly.

He already had lots of traction. I think the author's supposing that Zuck went to a VC before FB took off like crazy.

Sure, Facebook may not have made sense until it existed in some form, nor friendfeed, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have a good elevator pitch, the pitch is often showing off part of the product, not just an idea, which by itself is largely worthless. Most VCs don't fund just ideas, there has to be at least some basic implementation already.

What is this point talking to? I don't think it addresses anything in the post, and I think you might have read it incorrectly.

The author's arguing that elevator pitches don't do justice for some products; that a VC essentially won't be able to understand/grasp the power of a product until s/he sits down and uses it, a la the Nintendo Wii or the iPhone.
What, you think the SEC is going to compell him to publicize his health? It doesn't matter how much stock you own, your health is always a private matter unless you want it to be otherwise.
I have to agree. My father worked in the airline industry for thirty years and we had a number of pilots who were friends of the family.

They have to bust their ass to even get a commercial flight licence, it's harder than going to medical school. They end up heavily underpaid for most of their working life, for what they do.

All to chase that big final reward. Which few end up getting.
Typical UNIX user. A girl writes a bit of sed and they're in love. Disgusting...now a girl that writes Emacs-Lisp? That's a different story...
So this is what they mean by "echo chamber."
The dailyWTF stories without code samples always seem phony.
Could not agree more. I know it first hand that wedding photographers are probably the most underpaid kind: even though I love photography, but sitting in a quiet cubicle writing 5 lines of Java a day and hacking on your own stuff for fun at average "corporate IT Job" is by FAR easier money.

Even if you charge $3K per wedding, you still (most probably) won't be able to book every single weekend, pay shitload to private medical insurance (like $1.5K/mo), work your ass off post-processing 2-3 thousand photos you take per wedding, and yes - deal with hysterical bitchez who had absolutely no life for a whole year planning this "day of their life".

Wedding photographers are either: bored housewifes making little money on a side, producing mediocre results, or talented people who are unable to find any other way to make money on photography: they work really hard and get paid well, but that money is hard earned.

And this is how you do it: http://juliabailey.com/
Ask HN: Hackers on Poetry
I've been toying with the idea of memorizing some poetry. You guys have any favorites? Bonus points for material with a techno-tinge.
A bank without $20k
Still, what I'd like most from an open encyclopedia project is a simple, stable API. There are external projects bringing this to Wikipedia, but Google (API frontrunners that they sometimes are) don't have this at all. Hope they add it soon.
You're joking right? Basically, they're going to populate their encyclopedia by pillaging the information out of wikipedia. Search engines should not be competing with content providers.
Not really sure why people keep calling this a Wikipedia clone - seems much closer to Squidoo than to Wikipedia, to me. Granted, that's a debate that's already been had and done (back in December, if I recall correctly).

* disclaimer: I have worked with Squidoo in the past, and still have a couple of lenses there. I'm not taking a position on which is better - just pointing out a better comparison.
http://sachachua.com/ ...swoon
The case for a Facebook app store based on the iPhone analogy is severely flawed. Nobody would pay for a Facebook application.

1) iPhone users pay a small fortune to buy and use their devices. This selects for people with relatively high disposable income. Facebook profiles are free.

2) The iPhone is a platform in a way that is analogous with a computer. Facebook isn't. (e.g. there is a Facebook application for the iPhone. There is no iPhone application for Facebook).