skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, but four hackers around a kitchen table can start a wireless company.

Do people actually come straight out of an MBA program and start a company that requires hundreds of millions of dollars in funding?

I feel I would be skeptical of anyone who wasn't already sitting around a kitchen table with hackers at some point in their life and, more importantly, have shown they have some ability to run a successful business that didn't require the massive funding.
A smile can double your revenue.
Surely that's happening too.
I never readback the textures. The water surface is entirely generated and simulated on the GPU, and its heightfield is converted into a normal map and fed into the renderer every frame. There was literally zero performance overhead (we were CPU limited, not GPU limited).

The lake surface looked utterly convincing; it was as if you were watching a rainstorm pour down on it. I wish I had a video.

The bottleneck you ran into was readback. Transferring data from GPU->CPU was, is, and always will be, "expensive".

GPGPU is completely unrelated to this; it merely enables you to perform computations on the GPU faster, nothing more and nothing less.
The title (of the blog post, and the submission mirrors that) is misleading.

There's a bug report (OK, so the report was submitted by Asa Dotzler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Dotzler)) but that doesn't make it a planned feature quite yet - does it? It appears that it's still under discussion.
Ask HN: What are you most excited/worried about Google buying Motorola?
Apple manipulated Galaxy Tab image to get European injunction?
Show HN: Sublime Text 2 Package Manager
> That so many sites aren't up front with what's allowed in their passwords.

This makes complete sense... they feel that obscurity will aid in defending attacks (esp. if they have some ridiculously small password-space like 6 digits).

Considering it's a small inconvenience when you first create your user password, then from a cost/ben point of view, I can see why they wouldn't advertise this info.
Strange. I think FastSpring controls all the currency logic with an iron fist, but I'll see whether I can force a "show everything in USD" option.
Want an invite? KMon@sogetthis.com

But yeah, this service is brand spanking new. Facebook didn't have a ton of activity two months into its launch either.

The rumours of G+'s death are greatly exaggerated.
The problem with a large up front capital type of company like wireless is that you have to convince someone to give you that capital. If you're begging people for money and reputation is your only collateral, then an MBA from a big school helps (plus the likely connections you formed while attending said school). It certainly doesn't help as much as say already having been a CxO at a wireless company, but it is just one more checkbox to help convince people to give you money.
You seem to have a very low bar for "evil". I don't see how most of those things (e.g. naming policies, shutting down or charging for free services that turn out to be too much of a burden, being popular enough that their algorithm is important to many business models) are even moral concerns. They might be stupid acts on Google's part, or very inconvenient for some people, but evil is a different kind of thing. You can't just expect others to live up to your own idiosyncratic idea of evil.
I think you actually agree with him. Perhaps an analogy will help. "Technical debt" is like when you go to the bank and get a loan. There are terms for paying it off, and while it is debt that you should probably avoid, you have a plan for paying it back. "A mess" is like when you just stop paying your bills. You're getting yourself into debt, but you made no arrangement to get yourself out.
It's a defense mechanism for sure - but not for that reason. The real reason, in my view, is that techies are terrible at recognizing intelligence/skill if it does not somehow relate to math, logic, or, more concretely, code. I have no idea why, but the shoe fits.

When presented with the numerous and obvious counter-examples to "MBA's are full of shit", they clam up and resort to "yeah, but they're assholes, immoral, and basically stole their way to the top".

If you can't code, you're not smart. And if you're not smart, how are you more successful than me? (Success is derived from smarts, right? Dammit, I'm SMART.) Therefore you must be a cheating douche bag. And man, there are a lot of you cheating douche bags.

No, the problem is not the MBA. It is the refusal of some to accept a broader world view in which different people can do great things despite vastly varying approaches and skills.
Techie people post tech news on a site used by early tech adopters. Not sure how you build that out to the general public.
If there is more demand for government bonds (due to higher capital gains taxes, for example), I imagine the yields on government bonds will decrease. That would probably help the economy more than hurt it.

Taxes (in general) apply to _gains_, inflation applies to _principal_. If 30-year Treasuries start paying 2%, capital gains could be taxed at 50% and people would still invest in equities just to have a shot of not having the real value of their wealth cut in half over the next 20 years.

The apocalyptic vision expressed in the article (nobody will invest in bonds! and nobody will invest in stocks!) is overblown. The market will adjust to demand, and the fear of inflation will grow as bond interest rates decrease.
Wow,

I think my group should pay its fair share (paraphrasing)

OK, lets do little example.

Suppose a large group of your friends a pizza and half the people just hadn't paid. Would you say "hey, I'll pay for all these people" or "hey, we all need to pay our fair share".

How hard is that to understand?
Which doesn't have to mean anything. If I don't post on Facebook, my feed is still full, the same can't be told for Google Plus, at least from the author's perspective.
The primary point of Buffett's article isn't even addressed here: most people pay a much higher percent of their income to the federal government than do the "mega-rich" (I do have to say that don't really like Buffett's term there) and, furthermore, that the economy didn't suffer one drop when the rates were more reasonable (and in fact, did much better than under the historically low capital gains rates of the last decade).

In fact, if you read this article closely, it really doesn't present an argument, it just says "I don't wanna."
I agree the foundation is critical. So would you say that the extensive community use of KVM on SmartOS has decided it is production quality compared to use on Linux?
I'm a big fan of Weebly. It's by far the easiest tool to recommend to a new web client. I can build a simple template and then hand over the reins.
I like this distinction. I think a lot of people hear about technical debt and then feel OK about writing shitty code. But in reality, taking on technical debt is a calculated engineering risk, not sloppy work that "a mess" is.

With that in mind, I've never seen a codebase with any technical debt.
Many, many companies do want this, yes. Back in 2005-2006, I worked at MP3tunes and among other things I helped design the storage system. After testing a bunch of storage solutions (many of them high-end systems), we ended up rolling our own using Linux + MogileFS. This was scaled up to a couple hundred terabytes before I left, and even higher afterwards. Sometimes the off-the-shelf solutions simply don't work, especially at scale.
I find it very odd that Steve would cooperate with a project like this without so much as the right to read it before it's released. Honestly I wonder why Steve would agree to that. Any theories?
I hope this is available as an ebook straight out of the gate. It would be ironic in some ways if this was only available as a paper book and the ebook was delayed.
Aren't kexts the main reason for upgrade issues between OSX versions?
In the US, you can form a corporation and then merge your LLC into it, thus tranforming your LLC into a corp. So yeah, it may lead to extra work down the road, but it's not a life-or-death decision at the beginning.
That wasn't a Eulogy.
I love that they are profitable and have been for a long time. I've recommended their product to small business novices and they have been impressed with how easy it is to use.

I'd love to see more articles about companies that are profitable and how long/what it took to get there. We are seeing a lot of hype in the consumer/social media space, but it seems to me that it is much harder to be profitable in that space (but also more likely to have a massive exit). It seems that the B2B space offers less risk and reward.

Way to go, Weebly!
(disclosure: they are a customer of ours)
Why Minorities Reach for Bottled Water Over Tap & How Marketers Persuade Them
I'm not sure I see the point of opening an Android release after it's developed. It defeats a primary benefit of open source software. And even then, on most models (HTC, Motorola), unless I'm willing to violate my warranty and root it or unlock the bootloader, I'm not able to actually use the source.

This whole "Android is open!" thing seems largely for marketing, not to actually promote any openness (unless you buy a Nexus phone, which is what I own, FWIW)
1) the rich (top 10%) pay almost 70% of taxes. I wouldn't call that "so little"

2) you can't just take property from people based on a such wildly misused and subjective term as "fairness". Running a government is necessary for society to function. Everybody benefits, especially free-riders, crony corporations, politicians, and bureaucrats. The rich have the resources to fund a big chunk of the government, and they get a lot out of it too, sometimes to our detriment.

3) what does our deficit have to do with protest and riots in other countries?
I was guessing that's what pstephens was referring to, but he hasn't elaborated.
In my experience, an MBA or equivalent (meaning someone with experience building/running a business) adds value mostly through pattern recognition. In a startup, it is easy to get lost in the noise and go down many wrong paths. An MBA should be able to use their experience and knowledge to guide the company to better paths more cheaply, quickly, and efficiently. And of course, later on, grow the fledging organization (e.g. hiring, scaling the organization, etc.).

I meet and advise many entrepreneurs and most of the time they fall into common traps stemming from lack of understanding of market dynamics, how companies make decisions, what companies worry about, what matters, etc. A common example: thinking about cost and not value when it comes to selling a(n enterprise) product. Or forgetting about risk management for their new cloud-based solution.

For tech startups, there is no question that everyone on the early team needs to understand, live, and breathe technology. A lot of folks are attracted to the Facebook-size wealth generation (including MBAs) and end up destroying value because they don't understand technology.

Full disclosure: I have an MBA. I also have been programming since I was 9 and have built and sold two companies. I fully believe that a lot of MBAs don't add value when it comes to startups in particular (see Steve Blank's recent posts explaining why) and many times in mature companies as well. Of course, that is true for people in general - i.e. there are many engineers, designers, marketing folks, etc. who are just not very good at their jobs. It all comes down to looking for the exceptional gems!
It’ll cost $499 for the Wi-Fi only version, and $599 for built-in 3G.

Even if they hadn't completely ruined their credibility with the crunchpad fiasco, I'm still amazed by the meetoo's that end up costing as much as an iPad.

To have a tablet that competes with iPad it has to either be very much better or very much cheaper. If you do neither, you're screwed even if you're not “Chandra” Rathakrishnan. Double so if you are.
Google+Moto:  Change the World Using the Chromebook Model, Not the Apple Model.
Curious on how many spots are going to be available and are any spots reserved for students?
Teen Wolf Season 1 Episode 12
Teen Wolf Season 1 Episode 12 Time of the Wolf child a particular incident Twelve crusher use of web value to be transmitted when this summer within the fifteen year coming from the shredder company indicators,
International Cloud Computing Trend: Indonesia
Great post.

Relevant tactical point:

Replace "I have to" with "I choose to" and "I should" with "Would I like to?"

It really, really, really works.

Instead of, "I have to take out the garbage" - "I choose to take out the garbage." (Or alternatively, "I choose not to" - that's okay too, if you choose to do it that way.)
“Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said. “It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,” the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion. “Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.”

Google thought they were playing a game, lost, and has been crying about it ever since.
One thing I find interesting is that nowhere in the post itself does Larry Page (or whatever flack wrote this for him) say "Motorola Mobility". The only place that construction appears is in the title of the blog post.
Google launches a tool for Internet consumer behavior data in key Arab markets
The interface is a bit confusing. You probably should prevent people from typing in the url and short url field. In fact, they should probably be hidden until the QR Code is created. It's not obvious what they do until a QR Code is generated.
I'm not a big Google+ fanboy like many, but damn, this is a bit premature no? Furthermore, the quality of the editorial is suspect, mostly because the author is using personal anecdotes to reach broad perspectives. I can't believe this is on Forbes.com
Very cool!

There seems to be at least one big missing piece: D. E. Shaw & Co. That would have spun off Juno via Charles Ardai (bought by NetZero?), Amazon via Jeff Bezos, Fog Creek for Joel Spolsky, Farsight Financial Services, and probably a few more that I can't remember just now.

(Art of Problem Solving and Two Sigma are significant but aren't in tech).
Are you considering going back to the 2 city model where you have a YC batch on both coasts? It would seem to make sense in NYC, as the city has made great strides as an internet startup hub and probably significantly ahead of where Boston was when YC moved entirely to California.

edit: PG's reasons for moving to California permanently (2.5 years ago) are described here: http://ycombinator.com/ycca.html - but as YC has grown, I'd imagine things are a bit different as there are many more people involved now.
when I was in the military service (not US)

So, how did you make it into the military service without learning to do unpleasant things?
I would argue that a portion of that is simply the way you view things. I would also argue that you could eek out control like the method by which you choose to meet your deadlines.

Still... I have this work I should be doing...
Interesting method but the author seems a little surprised that doing market research actually works. His sample size compared to the population seems just a liiiiittle bit too small to yield meaningful results from though and there's no real indicator of its reliability.

What would really be interesting is a long running series of these with larger sample sizes. Might cost a bit but you could probably come up with a reasonable hypothesis test and some solid results.

Fair play to him if it's not just a fluke.
That is simply because large organisations have decided that's the way up.

It speaks nothing of whether one become better at doing business what so ever.

I have worked with my share of MBAs they are as diverse as any other group but none of them owe it to their MBA.
Perhaps, but I'd say that it varies a lot. The kext here is more compatible with old versions than the UI.
Thank you. I guess I just have to go dig through the Illumos/OpenIndiana documents.
Majority of the comments seem to be discussing the merits / morality of taxation, rather than Buffet's central points.

Entertaining the discussion on the merits of taxation, I've found John Rawls' Justice as Fairness to be especially enlightening. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness) Essentially, a just society is one in which decisions are made to benefit the worst-off in society. Given a majority of the factors that contribute to individual success are outside our control (what family you were born into, what neighborhood you lived in, what school you went to, etc), a just society would in turn be one which compensates for such naturally-occurring inequalities. He provides a well-thought out argument for how progressive taxation is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) lever to do so.

Now in practice, it is true that our government has been terribly inefficient in managing tax revenue and creating public goods. But that shouldn't discount the role government can play. Realizing the potential reach and role of government, the goal shouldn't be to neuter it, but to make it more efficient.

On Buffet's central points, I find them hard to argue with. 1) Lower taxes on the rich in the last 10 years have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic growth or job creation, especially in light of the 20 years before that. 2) The front-end drivers for entrepreneurs, VCs, and angels have more to do with product creation, addressing a market need, and simply playing the game. Money is of course a big part in too, but tax cuts only play a back-end behavioral incentive- they affect the NPV of behavior that was already in play.
3) Just because the actual tax revenue on the rich may not put a huge dent on the deficit (as some comments seem to imply), the point is that the billions in tax revenue it would raise could still stave of cuts to programs that the poor and middle class depend on.

(And larger food for thought on the role of tax cuts, and how they've contributed to the deficit http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/the-char...)
Ok, I get your distinction, but (and I'm a complete neophyte non-professional here, so bear with me), the layman's explanation for dark matter has been, "We don't know what's causing it, but it acts like gravity, and the only thing we know of now that has gravity is matter, and it appears (hah) to be invisible to all of our known electro-magnetic radiation, so we call it "dark"".

So I apologize if I've misunderstood, but based on that I don't think hypothosizing this unknown phenomenon as some sort of "dark matter" is entirely out of line.

Thanks for your explanation.
I think the author is making a small fallacy regarding investments. He assumes that as the capital gains tax rises, investment will fall because the investor will make less money. This seems true for small investors, who might decide to "not invest" their money, and instead find starting their own business will have a higher return than buying GOOG stock.

But if I have $1 billion to invest, then I don't have the option of "not investing" that money. It has to sit in stocks, bonds, or some other financial instrument. A higher capital gains tax may change which instruments I choose to invest in, but that money will all still be invested.

A legitimate argument against higher capital gains taxes is that really great investors (i.e. the kind you want selecting investments, such as Buffet) will have less money to invest. This would hurt the economy, unless the corresponding good caused by government spending is greater.

I think everyone would agree there is a happy equilibrium somewhere. Most rich people think it lies on the side of less taxation. Buffet, in contrast, seems to think that quality investors don't add as much value as they want to believe.
First: the service is invite only for the time being.

Second: the network effect can be a curse as well. Linkedin has succeeded because its network is limited to work contacts. There are costs to having a complete public network.

Third: Google+ does offer an amazing, new and different service. It's not Facebook. Facebook is built on its social network, which is the product most users want, not the features (which a lot of users seem to hate). But Facebook expanded initially by being a high prestige social network; that's changed and, given Google's invite strategy, it's reasonable to believe that G+ is now higher prestige.
With $20 budget and 4 versions this seems like a random spike in data. If you are going to use this method I suggest to use Google AdWords Campaign Experiments (built-in tool). It will tell you if your results are statistically significant. There is also Excel spreadsheet to download and play with numbers to see if results are significant.

Second caution. This approach only tests what's the best name for your ad. It doesn't tell you what is the best name for your product.
Let's start with the first argument:
"His message seems to be 'I'm rich, and I want the super-rich like me to pay more in taxes.'

That's great. Write a check."

But him writing a check isn't the point. If Warren writes a check, we get that check's worth of new government income. If taxes are raised, for Warren's contribution of the same check, we get much larger pool of spending. Put more simply: plan (a) warren donates $10 and we get $10 of government income; plan (b) warren is taxed +$10 and we get $10K of new government income.

The rest of the blog is well characterized as Dunning Kruger in action.
Asa is the product manager of that feature, so I think it's not a "bug report" so much as a "assign this to a developer" request. Sounded like she just wanted to make sure the translation team didn't have a problem with it.
So do I. It's VERY old now and I'm very excited about the Droid bionic, but when it came out, it was a very nice piece of equipment, probably the best droid with a keyboard for its time, notwithstanding the buttons-falling-off-from-too-much-texting issue.
No need for apologizing, it's just a civil discussion :)

Have a nice day! (and good coffee as well!)
It seems to me like you want to suggest, that Google is copying Apple here. (If not, ignore this post.)

I remember using a Nokia smartphone back in 2004. It already had the application icon grid, colored icons, it had maps, it had navigation, a web browser, email and an mp3 player. The quality of the software was poor, the hardware was cheap and underpowered, there was no multi-touch and, of course, the network was slow and too expensive to actually use.

Sure, Apple took the smartphone and actually turned it into a mobile computer that was a pleasure to use. Also the timing was right.

Google did not add as much value as Apple to the state of the art. But Apple certainly copied older smartphones feature-for-feature as well, then they made this into a great experience.

But to suggest that now Apple has somehow the exclusive right to produce phones that are not on the level of smartphone from 2006 and older is just wrong.
How do you use date-based version numbers for planning purposes? Do you have another versioning system just to list what will be included in each release?