skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was going to say this as well. You need soil and water to plant crops but in the desert water is more valuable than the soil because its the harder commodity to obtain.

In business solid execution is harder to get than new ideas, so it's true that having a good idea is important making it work is more so.

The article says:

"For Google, it was the idea of PageRank. Did search engines exist before? Sure they did. But it was that little spark of innovation, coupled with years of execution that got Google going. In fact even Google “borrowed” it’s idea of search advertising from what used to be called Goto.com and then became Overture.com. (Kudos to Bill Gross here for his role in Goto.com). That is a perfect example of how the idea mattered, but it also needed the execution to make it flourish."

Which I think undermines the who 'ideas are important' theme. What was important about PageRank was the insight that it was an analog for social intent, and that social intent provided a useful ordering out of an otherwise random set of documents. Using that insight to design as document retrieval system which scaled and could operated cheaply enough made the insight useful.

Its all mental gymnastics however until you put your money down. Then it becomes real. And its really hard to hand a check to someone you don't think can actually produce the thing they are talking about.
I get about 1% CTR with $1.50 CPC. Not unreachable in the financial space, if you have a site with relevant information. I make about the same as you do, on many fewer pageviews a month.
If you aren't putting in the requisite time to make a quality content-based website, you can probably generate many more websites of lower quality. Perhaps the profits from having more websites (albeit of lower quality) exceed that of fewer (higher quality) websites.
How to push adoption of web standards to browser vendors
As in the case of HTML5 web workers, some browser vendors will not implement HTML5 standards, hence slowing technology adoption for all of us. Let them know that we will do it, with or without them.

Spec:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/workers/

Microsoft has no plans to support:
http://www.jeffdepascale.com/index.php/general/internet-explorer-10-preview-no-sign-of-web-workers-among-others/

How to do it in IE (and other browsers) anyway:
http://bit.ly/irM6XV

Thank you.
I just read a book about astrophysics where he was lamenting just that.

They've been stuck by not being able to combine general relativity and quantum physics for decades now, entire careers. Pretty frustrating if you're in that field.
ideas are worthless as long as there is no feasible concept behind it. there are so many ideas out there that nobody execute, so they are worth nothing. the team behind a great idea is many times more important than the idea itself. it's about people, people, people and then the idea.
In an act of self-fulfilling prophecy, I'm sure this will be shut down for "lack of use" (since Google APIs are now all radioactive)
Those example are all technology. Astounding technology, sure, but still technology. They're not great theories or discoveries. (And by "discovery" I mean a discovery of something that exists in nature -- like plate tectonics -- not discovering a way to make something.)
Neuroscience is a biggie. Finally getting much closer to really understanding consciousness.
I've seen 2-4% CTR across my sites. Positioning of your ads matters a LOT.

If you use Wordpress, consider using something like http://www.ctrtheme.com or ProSense.
Half (or more) of the problem with ideas is the vetting process. You need to vet your ideas. Very frequently, as stated in the article, some ideas are "dead on arrival". This is because founders don't have the proper frame of reference, they're expertise is lacking, or they've made some concept framed early on their baby - that is, unable to let go. Ideas need to be vetted. Like getting your first customers, in whatever you do, you need approval from something or someone to know that something is there, and you need it fast.

You can't be in your basement grinding with one other person for four months just to find out you misappropriated your customer base, or the problem your software solves, only to find out there's nobody has that problem, nobody cares, or some amalgamation of that and many other factors.

I see this elsewhere as well. People want to be a model their whole life but never had a hope from the getgo. They want to be an architect but their frame of reference is so off they'll never have a chance. Not saying that work can't make up for a lot of it, but I'll never in the NBA. Talent dictated that. There are several other dictators that create the same boundaries as well.
I typically agree with 99% of Manu's words of wisdom, but for this post in particular I have concerns that it could be misleading for some entrepreneurs.

It is understandable from Manu's or other experienced entrepreneur's perspective, ideas are important. I don't deny that. That is because they have been through startups over and over again, these people understand the work that goes into the company months/years post-idea-conception.

I would say a good portion of the people who are reading this site won't fall into that category. As a matter of fact, very few people do. Most of us are just budding entrepreneurs trying to our feet wet and trying to find our way to "make it".

If you feel you fall into the latter category more than the former, read Manu's post with a grain of salt, it's _not_ really meant for you.

I'd argue (with my limited knowledge) that it's more important for young entrepreneurs to know that ideas are a dime a dozen. By the time you come up with it, 10 other people have thought of it as well. What separates great ideas from good ideas is that you have a clear competitive advantage that can allow you to out-execute those other 10 people. This competitive advantage can be your passion, skill set, domain knowledge, connections, etc.

So if I have to sum it up, and to modify Manu's post to fit the eyes of the budding entrepreneurs:

It's not the idea that matters, it's the people + the idea that matters.

- my 2c
Writing an interpreter can be a lot simpler than coding an equivalent compiler. Suppose you have an old game you want to play that was written in hand crafted 8080 ASM. You can emulate an old CPU at reasonable speeds and get a complete working solution. But, if uses say self modifying code there really is no way to directly map 8080 to x86(64) instructions.

But, a more common case is it let's you debug systems. Even if you can't run an iPhone app in full speed on your desktop you can inspect what's going on in detain with an emulator in a way you can't really do with compiled code.
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
I'll repeat myself: "How to detect a #bubble? There's more Hubs than spokes" http://twitter.com/#!/FrancescoRizzi/status/7129779448014848...
Greplin's Lightning Talk at Lucene Revolution 2011
It is much more straightforward to take on a little side work. Set your rate to $100/hr and work an extra 20 hours a month. In today's market this isn't terribly difficult to do.
An Open Letter To Texas Instruments
> I've done no link building

You have 1,211 backlinks.

You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools?

Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible.

Set up a RSS feed and add OpenSearch.

You have a lot of on-site SEO work to do. :)
At least part of the problem is in communicating great discoveries to the general public. Let me give an example. In the last few decades, Cosmology transformed from being a speculative, mostly theoretical field to a precise, quantitative science. Experiments that measured the Cosmic Microwave Background (WMAP in 2001 and others) enabled us to form a history of the universe that is backed by evidence. Measurements of supernovae (1998) showed the universe is accelerating (an amazing fact by itself) and from this we understand its future behavior.

Within Cosmology, I think the theory of inflation (Guth, 1980) deserves special mention. Its purpose is to explain what happened before what most people think of as The Big Bang, and it does so successfully, agreeing with highly nontrivial experimental tests (with data collected by WMAP and others). The fact that we can say something meaningful about what happened before the big bang, and then check it experimentally -- isn't it just mind blowing? What's fascinating is that inflation requires quantum mechanics and general relativity to work together to produce the effects we measure in the microwave background -- the very effects that are later crucial for the formation of galaxies. [1]

And yet, no one I talked to outside the physics community is even remotely aware of any of this. We are making great strides toward understanding where we came from -- the very origins of the universe -- and yet almost no one seems to notice. Wouldn't surprise me if there are similar examples in other fields.

[1] The basic picture is that the microscopic uncertainties of QM are amplified by GR to become cosmic-scale perturbations, which later collapse (due to gravity) to form galaxies.
Hmmm, day 3 and I'm at 58 downloads.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facemouth/id428103766?mt=8
Home - All about good services
Actually, Larry Birnbaum over at Northwestern is doing exactly that: http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/

They take the coded sports results, and automatically generate narratives using statistical speech models. They have a startup that is doing it too, don't recall the name of it....

EDIT: I believe this is it: http://narrativescience.com/
The poverty rates for metro and nonmetro areas are not dramatically different (12.5% vs 15.4%).

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB59/EIB59.pdf

Some quick math suggests about 30% of poor people live in nonmetro areas.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/

Since you seem unwilling to browse any sources I cite, I'm not going to bother looking up suburban poverty.

If you are interested in understanding poverty in the US, you should skim that 642 page report. It's a fantastic report and it answers many questions one might have about the material conditions of the poor (and many other categories of people).
Eh, a computer is a computer.
I've worked with him. He's a smart guy. :-)
Ask: HN Best book on programming for non technical founder?
Best singular book for intro to programming and web applications. I know one book will never 'cover it all'. Yet best all round start to this.
Can be hard with the IP restrictions that go with most employers. The nice thing about something that's pure marketing & writing is that for software developers, it probably does not fall under your employer's umbrella.
Just because there are a lot of ideas doesn't mean that they are all on the same level. There is such a thing as a good idea.
It must be your browser or some of the extensions. The WP theme works good in any browser since I'm the developer/designer that made it.
No one will do this because their sites will be mirrored verbatim within 24 hours. It takes a couple minutes to write a scraper using Nokogiri. :P
Is it just me, or are Google's APIs becoming more farcical with every revision? I see these words before "API" that you just wouldn't think belong in that context. Now "Prediction API". It makes me really excited for the next batch.

Bacon API?

HFT API?

Physics API?

API API?
Here's the question... would you pay for better information? Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with depth.
It's not using "OK" as a measure of difficulty. It's saying "don't feel like you're wasting your time on a project just because it isn't going to make you Ferrari money". I guess it's a restatement of the programmer's adage "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.".
I would suggest you read "Joel on Software". It can teach you how to better communicate with your technical founder and programmers and to understand the general technical challenges in undertaking a project.
One good reason to seek out employers that dont' have all encompassing NDA/IP restrictions as part of their hiring contracts. They're hard to find but they do exist, and they're worth their weight in gold.
To me it evoked lesbianism..
HTML5 Moved Into Review Phase
But I think food is definitely something that can be siphoned off of Groupon.
an idea is just an hypothesis, you need to prove it, if it doesn't work you need to be able to change it and tweak it until it works.
Give the same idea to 50 people, only one will execute it well.
wasn't D-wave a scam company?
What resources do you recommend for learning more about SEO?
I disagree, completely.

1) The iPad is not a no-brainer. Far from it. Apple is a public company, with billions of dollars of revenue and many short-term focused investors it needs to satisfy. The same pressures of "profit maximizing resource allocation" apply to Apple that apply to Microsoft. If apple sells iPads entirely at the expense of Macs, it could go out of business. Someone very well could have made the argument that it would destroy the company.

2) Disruption is about building "more convenient" but "not as good" innovations that target low margin segments of the market. It's not about the % of the market that the largest incumbent holds. You can disrupt an industry with 9 players with 10% of the market just as easily as you can disrupt an industry with 1 player with 90% of the market. For Google to sell netbooks is a no-brainer (they don't disrupt any of Google's existing businesses). For Apple to sell iPads is gutsy.
People are too quick to create a dichotomy between Idea and Execution. A good idea isn't static; it unfolds and evolves over time. A powerful idea, well executed, leads to more powerful ideas and, in turn, better execution.

When we stop thinking of ideas solely as the germinal stage of startups, and we expand our conception of them into something resembling a wave of constant, innovative inspiration, then we get to the heart of what a good idea really is.
It's much easier to get the negotiating leverage to strike out IP restrictions on your contract if you've previously worked at a name-brand company, and name-brand companies are the ones that tend to have the most all-encompassing IP restrictions.
Functional languages will rule (but not this year)
If you have no programming experience whatsoever and you're looking to do web development, I recommend starting with HTML. A good book is the Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. HTML isn't a programming language on its own but it is used in conjunction with pretty much everything else and is pretty much the starting point. That book does a really good job explaining the very basics and why you'd do something a certain way. From there, you can expand into actual programming languages afterwards.
They're trying to avoid getting screwed like Linkedin.
booo! where's api replacement ?
I'd love to know how many people in the world actually understand quantum computing with reasonable depth. My bet is less than 500. I will be the first to confess that I have no idea what they are talking about most of the time.
There's another work-around I've been using for 6+ months now. A cronjob which resolves the CNAME target (i.e., the ELB hostname) to an IP, then dynamically updates the A record(s) for the zone. It's a hack, but it does the job.
Not just any defense contractor, Lockheed Martin. They're practically another branch of the government and wouldn't exist without tax payers. So technically US tax payers just bought a 10 million dollar toy.
There's often more money and less stress to be found doing something else. You figure this out as you get older. You wise up and start wanting to have a life and not spend every waking hour typing code. Thus you move up the management chain and find a new crop of the young and stupid to accept the wages and working conditions. Just wait, it'll dawn on you eventually...
Paypal's whole anti-fraud system is trade secret. Also, their mobile payment system hasn't even launched yet, so there's no way for us to know what's in there.
True, but codesearch only searches codebases. But suppose I want to search for mixed content and code. A lot of my programming related searches lead me to StackOverflow, a mailing list entry, or a blog post.
Your point (1) is wrong. From 2010, before the iPad:

"A report in the Wall Street Journal notes that in the 2010 Apple fiscal first quarter, which ended Dec. 26, iPhone and related product revenues came to $5.6 billion, 36 percent of Apple’s revenue total. That compares with $4.45 billion for total computers and $3.39 billion for iPods. The iPhone, clearly, is largely responsible for doubling Apple’s sales over the past three years. Even though computer sales are up sharply at Apple, iPod sales have been roughly flat over the same period.

The associated increase in gross profit margin is even more impressive. The iPhone carries higher margins than do other Apple products, so the gross revenue of the company has increased from 31 percent to 48 percent over that same three-year period. "

http://iphonetouch.blorge.com/2010/01/27/apple-gets-more-rev...

Apple only made 33% of their revenue from their computers. And even moreso, as noted in that article, the iPhone carried much higher margins than their other products. I don't think its any stretch to believe that margins on the iPad are similarly large.

IOW, even if the iPad cannibalized all of their Mac sales, they were on solid ground, because its clear their revenue and margin growth was not the Mac, but the iPhone and eventually the iPad. It was obvious that iOS was their key platform, not OSX. Nothing is a sure shot in business, but this was about as easy a call as it gets.

On (2) we were explicitly not talking about disrupting an industry. We were talking about Apple disrupting itself.

I don't think it was at all gutsy for Apple to sell iPads. The market math just made too much sense. WebApps are gutsy for Apple now, since it undermines their huge app ecosystem. New devices that build on their iOS platform are not gutsy nor disruptive (unless they do something like give iOS away for free and make money just from the appstore).
While I think it's a clever spin. I don't see why Groupon can't do the same in an instant if it proves to be effective. If that happens these guys just become another Groupon clone competing on lower rates for merchants.
Here are a couple of articles on the announcement by Scott Aaronson and Dave Bacon (professors at MIT and U Washington).

http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-pr...

http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-comput...
> Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with depth.

We already have one of those: it's called the World Wide Web.

If only bottom-feeders could stop getting in the way of navigating it, we could get back to answering useful questions with a quick Web search the way we used to.
I did an informal survey, and it seems like the same is true for Conservapedia and "nation" -- which might be the most common non-stop word spoken on "The Colbert Report."

http://www.conservapedia.com/Nation
Google admits it doesn't know sh!t about running a stable business.

Thanks Google! Ya dumb fvcks.
That's not a PHP issue. It's a programmer issue. Validate the bloody input properly! e.g if someone types in a phone number with hyphens or a credit card number which may contain spaces, don't blindly check it for a number...
The only reason it 'doesnt' work is that you then have to handle mail on the same hosts as web and https; Many consider that to be bad practice.

I can put all many gigs of email in a flat file called 'mbox' -- that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

The 'traditional' way to handle this without doing all kinds of nasty, is to simply use the standard A/MX combo and either proxy/redirect back to the 'www' version.

slashdot.org has been doing it for years as 'proof' though, so, congrats?
Hope it has nothing to do with the plaintext password storage revelation , which came last week
People used to buy books and magazines or go to the library.

The great thing about the internet was that it replaced the hassle and expense of doing that. It works pretty well even with the nearly-content-free sites clogging up the system.

Incidentally, for Q&A, IBM might have something that will beat google search:

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html
Find Foursquare specials near your place
On the other hand, I had a roommate who spent his time criticizing "government handouts" while at the same time using food stamps himself.
I have signed confidentiality agreements going back so far that I can't even remember. The list of industries that I can't work in would be moderately long, were it not for some companies simply going out of business. Now if you are not in a business that doesn't have something interesting going on, then you won't be baffled.

Otherwise, expect to deal with this.
I'm by no means an expert, though I've worked with experts and picked up some stuff from them. The rest I learned from Google and various forums:

http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo

http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3...

Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it.

What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
Class decorators might also be super
Computing power, sure, but who's running it?
> the fact that five years /have/ passed and Python 3 is still a silly pipe dream for almost all users of Python should tell you something about how poorly this was done.

So far, it has been just how it was meant to be. It was never the goal for Python 3 to be the default Python version by year 2011.
I agree. And the article just writes so much marketing gospel you have to wonder if they even understand what they're writing.
I agree, it sounds as though they are "reeducating" him into a white hat and not necessarily hiring him on as a employee. It would surprise me if they actually hired him right now because he had set up a phishing scam. It is good though that they are working with him vs throwing the book at him especially for one so young.
"People Have The Right To Seek Better Jobs"

Seeking to hire a bank employee...as long as he/she empties a few bank safe boxes and brings them to me. Pay depends on the loot...
Writing a JIT is often very difficult, and requires making many assumptions (particularly regarding self-modifying code, in the case of emulators). Some languages and architectures are inherently difficult or inefficient to JIT.
Synchronous Node.JS
My conclusion is that 100% of these articles are more about "accurately modeling the world" then they are about "providing insight," although they all have some theoretical insight component as well.

Before you can figure out why, you have to make sure you can accurately characterize the what. So there's a lot of science that is focused on coming up with a descriptive tool like an adhoc curve, before the underlying principles are discovered.

I think Chomsky is afraid that statistical models will cause people to stop looking for the underlying principles.
Live by sword, die by the sword.
I like your attitude towards the industry and hope you are right about the availability of good music. I am working on something myself in this space and I wonder if I would truly be able to evangelize good indie music to people. It is not a simple answer.