skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Undermining presence: lack of IPOs or desire to hold one, increasing prominence of partnerships, prominence of smaller businesses (technology seems to lead here), private equity shops, the almost complete elimination of vertical integration (great project of 19th/20th centuries), what looks (to me) like increasing transience of corporations.

Undermining norms: flattening of formal hierarchies, reduction of corporate-cum-personal identity in workers, reduction of same in founders (more businesses operated as "projects" rather than presumed perpetual institutions), slow abandonment of generic "managers".

A lot of this seems more prevalent in technology, but tech is also where we're creating lots of genuinely new companies and so the most likely place for shifting practices.

The "end of the corporation" idea has come up a lot since the 1990s but it may just be availability bias.
I just moved from a 17" MBP to a fully loaded 13" Air and I love it ... no regrets at all. Generally more than enough horsepower and screen real estate for both Rails coding (in TextMate) and iOS programming (in XCode).

The only annoyance I've dealt with is that the Storyboard feature in XCode is practically made for a large screen device.
I agree, Ikea is popular because of the price.

Build-it-yourself and low price for Ikea furniture are related through these aspects:
* It turns out assembly does not create nearly as much value as the other steps in the manufacturing process in furniture. I couldn't sell you the chips of wood that went into the MDF of your Ikea dresser for anything near the price of the dresser, though it's a major component.
* The cost of assembling furniture on a large scale is greater than the cost of manufacturing the components. Putting pegs into holes using a machine is a hard enough engineering problem (that's one reason behind surface mount electronics), let alone the rest of the assembly. Of course, the way a piece of furniture comes together is different with machine assembly, but there is still cost here.
* The volume of flat-packed furniture waiting to be assembled is a small fraction of the assembled volume. This impacts shipping as well as warehousing costs.

Both 'build-it-yourself' and 'low price' are true for Ikea furniture, and due to their correlation, it's easy to pick the wrong one as the cause of success.
(Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but as I said at the start of this comment, I think price is causing popularity)
Half of FB software issues are managed by automation
Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You Cope
See, I never got to test it. I think this is differently sad now.
User tracking by Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Xing
Ask HN: Startup/Product Eminem looking for a veteran Dr. Dre?
I'm Ameen. 22yrs old. Not quite Eminem, but I'm crazy about my ideas, not quite a hacker, but I wake up at 2 am, and add a potential feature to my project. I have no experience in Software Development, but I did my undergrad in C.Sc.

I want to develop consumer software. Software that makes sense in the 21st century, and not yet another social network. Software that helps improve the quality of life of millions of people if they ever get to use it. I'm mad about Design & UX, and have done some UX/IX for a project. I want work to be a part of my life, I want to influence what I'm working on as much as it would to me. I'm not in this for money, as Money can be made from multiple sources, I might as well die poor with an awesome product(s) to my name rather than die rich with nothing to show for it. Please help/guide me be what I aim to become. (or if you don't, I will get there eventually, thanks for reading though!)

@amxn
Why change machines when at your desk versus elsewhere? That sounds like an 'rsync' accident waiting to happen.

I've been using the first generation 11.6" Air which replaced a unibody 15". Other than FreeBSD and Linux servers racked elsewhere, this Air is my "everything" machine.

My tricks for the smaller screen:

Keep windows overlapping with just enough visible underneath to indicate status, and of course set the Dock to auto-hide. e.g., Mail window is on far right with little more than the scroll bar showing, so I can still see whether the horizontal cursor/bar is at bottom of that window or not, which indicates new mail. Of course, when I'm deep into code-mode, I don't want the distraction of email anyway until I come up to breathe, so it's one less distraction.

Likewise for Terminal. I have less than one row of text visible underneath Emacs, VMware and browsers. This is just enough to see if a background compilation or other task is still running. Again, like email-- one less distraction unless and until I want to be aware of it.

In Emacs, I'm using my own build of 24.0.50 with 185x46 character resolution and make heavy use of 'split-window-horizontally instead of 'split-window-vertically which I used predominantly on earlier machines since 1989.
Would you mind posting some links to your marketing and product companies?
Review my new project, feeditnow.com
Im looking for some feedback on my new project Feedit Now. You can manage up to ten of your favorite websites using this.
I believe the bit JGC quotes comes from Ada Lovelace's translation of Federico Luigi's memoir on the Analytical Engine (which, as the story goes, she supplemented with her own notes at the suggestion of Babbage). Am I mistaken here?

Is it clear from primary sources whether this should be called Lovelace's Leap, Luigi's Leap, or even Babbage's Bound?
~/.ssh/trusted_yubikeys ?

It's the I'd of your specific Yubikey - I'm on my phone on a train right now, but off the top of my head it is the first 12 characters that get printed when you use your Yubikey. Pretty sure it's 12, anyway.
Steve Blank feels otherwise: http://steveblank.com/2011/09/15/the-pay-it-forward-culture/

You don't have to be Machiavellian to succeed.
Agreed. And as a San Francisco startup guy for a dozen years, that balance between honesty and self-interest is generally what I have seen here. There are assholes wherever you go, but I've benefited a lot from the relatively collaborative environment here, and try to give back in turn.
Glad you're having a good time with it. I mostly do LAMP-style development as well. It looks like the majority of people who posted in this thread love the 13" MBA for development.
Dear Tumblr And Instapaper Genius Marco Arment: We're Sorry You're Not A Fan
�No Pierdas el Enfoque, Un paso a la Vez en Los Negocios por Internet
Any heat or battery problems with the i7?
This statement is false. TARP cost $19 billion compared to NASA at $18.5 billion per year.

http://www.housingwire.com/2011/03/30/cbo-drops-estimate-of-...
It's not just you. I still believe they are mostly "responsible" for inflating Facebook's valuation from $20 billion to $80 in a matter of months, with all their posts about Facebook's valuation increasing, therefore creating a feedback loop, where one more post raised their value higher, and so on.

They are the only site around that uses Facebook comments from what I've noticed, and many people stopped going there because of that. And their stories lately on Facebook do seem extra sensational.

I don't think Techcrunch has any credibility left. They're clearly picking winners and taking sides with certain startups on their site.
One Beer With... - programmers' other passions
To Prevent Theft of Content, Adapt
My wife recently opened my eyes to the idea that the low rate of female to male programmers is far more cultural than genetic. I found a link, in fact, that speaks more to this:

http://www.themarysue.com/women-programming-over-the-years/
Auto-sharing[0] [1] just seems like an obviously terrible idea. For both the privacy implications and the signal-to-noise ratio. Separating the streams into high-signal deliberate sharing and low-signal 'ambient' sharing is interesting, but seems kind of fiddly/inelegant.

An obviously better way to do it is to auto-share into a private queue that you can then go through and approve for sharing into specific lists/circles. Maybe that's a bit too fiddly, though, and probably too cognitively expensive. I suppose it also creates an update bunching effect, where your updates come in bursts instead of a steady stream.

Either way, passive auto-sharing just seems like it makes embarassing situations too easy.

It also sometimes seems to me like Facebook is actively and deliberately trying to make human communication/interaction as reductive as possible.

[Edit: I think there's another angle to this that's kind of quietly subversive in a pervasive way: If auto-sharing of your various web activity is on by default, then you might have some low-level filter on your actions, because you're always a little bit afraid that everyone can see what you're doing. We all start to behave as if we're living in a pan-panopticon (everyone is watching everyone else).]

[0]: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read_in_facebook_social...

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3028328
Exactly - I think they're a bit confused in their language. When HMA say:

"our VPN service and VPN services in general are not designed to be used to commit illegal activity"

...what they actually mean is:

"...not designed to be used to commit illegal activity in the USA"

Clearly one of their main selling points is the ability to circumvent censorship in countries where that's a problem. For better or for worse, trying to get around such restrictions can very well be illegal.

Of course, I'm not saying trying to get round oppressive censorship is a bad thing. Of course it's not - but HMA don't seem to acknowledge the hypocrisy of on the one hand saying "use our service to get around your government's laws" whilst on the other saying "but don't do any illegal activity!".

The real reason HMA have that attitude is that being based in the US they have everything to fear from US government action. This is the same reason online poker sites actively and aggressively block US players - because chances are at some point in the future you're going to do business in the US, and you don't want it coming back to bite you in the ass.

Similarly, why should HMA care about China or Iran getting upset at their service? But it's much more inconvenient if the FBI starts poking around, because they're based in the USA (I think).
If you knowingly purchase stolen goods, you are guilty of a crime. If the seller swears the goods aren't stolen and even signs a contract to that effect, you aren't guilty of a crime unless you know that the goods actually are stolen. They key element is the intent to buy goods that have been stolen; merely intending to buy goods is not enough.

More appropriate examples would be Napster or Limewire. Their TOS's barred using their programs for illegal ends, but both companies actively promoted illegal downloading. In the end, liability issues brought down both companies.

IAAL. Please don't armchair lawyer, or you'll end up like the guy who runs TechDirt.
This is true.Being originally from the Bronx NY i have been in connection with a few people who know how FAT JOE does business.

Allegedly Puerto Rican and African American rappers from the Bronx were getting signed to FAT JOES label and then being kept on the back burner for publication.

Turns out the plan was to make sure to not have any new rap icons come from the Bronx so that he can get all the notoriety of being the Bronx icon. The music business is no joke. This is a true story.
There is a 100% chance that you are wrong. Do you honestly believe that they wouldn't think of taking that into account, if it could be relevant? That you can immediately think of it, but not an entire group of physicists; let alone a group trained and experienced in performing time-critical experiments? How far removed from reality do you believe physicists to be?

Anyway, relativity cannot possibly be relevant in explaining the time difference. I will not explain why: please actually read what they published. It will be crystal clear why it isn't relevant.
Not at all. Sharecroppers are typically protected by contract law; landlords can't just arbitrarily evict them in the middle of the growing season. By contrast Facebook can change their API or terms of service at any time. Facebook developers have no way to seek redress (except the court of public opinion).
Seconded. Once the Air can run two external monitors over Thunderbolt I can ditch my desktop.
Apparently "request beta invite" means "grant every possible Facebook access to a non-functional application".
Finding the Best Pizzerias Near You w/Founders of Pizzerias.com
Well, there's that and there's using a USA-based VPN service.

They could have picked any other totalitarian police state in the world, Russian, Chinese proxies, they all accept creditcard, and the FBI could have done fuck all to get the logs.

Instead you know USA based companies are required to barf up the logs at the drop of a hat.

It's not just lazy, it's really really dumb.
It's not especially interesting that Facebook made a deal for a music app (and subsequently supported that deal over a competitor). This is business, not charity.

What's interesting to me is that iLike -- the success story of early platform days -- was being promoted heavily from within Facebook itself. If you read the press at that time, you'd have been excused for thinking that the Partovi brothers were the victims of a random lightning strike -- just two guys who got lucky with a tiny little app. I know that in Seattle, everyone was buzzing about how iLike was caught so "unaware" by their traction that they were borrowing servers from local companies just to keep up. Now it turns out that the "overnight success" was at least somewhat pre-ordained.

It's just another bit of practical evidence about the origins of business success in the Valley. Your rolodex matters a lot.
half the price of SpeakerText and 3 times the speed? sounds awesome, I'll definitely be keeping this one in mind :)
I should qualify: I do iOS, Android, backend Django/Postgres, and Clojure dev.

I'm sure I could run Postgres locally on the Air and the SSD would keep up without breaking a sweat but I like to share dev databases between my machines by running them on Dotcloud.
Business portraits
There are a few projects in the works to improve the experience for doing aggregation and analysis with data stored in MongoDB:

- Using V8 instead of spidermonkey [Will probably lead to better performance for MongoDB's map reduce]
https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2407

- New aggregation framework [Will make it easy and fast to do simple aggregations]
https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-447

There is also Hadoop adapter that read and write directly from/to MongoDB that is in an early stage
https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-hadoop
I'm sure Google has been considering it as a possibility since before Android launched.
It's not looking good:

http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed...
The author could have done a better job of explaining this, if he would have said "Einsteinian Space" rather than "space" in that section. That's fairly easy to infer from the context, but it could have been explained better. Einstein viewed "space" as a vacuum. Tesla argues that view is flawed, that nothingness by definition can't have any properties, and as a result can't bend, because there's nothing to bend. He proposes aether/ether as an alternative explanation of "space".
This terms of service page is hard to find. Earlier this day I could not find it, but it was quoted in some article.

Now I have been successful: I have found a link to a terms of service page from the HTML sitemap page, it is here:

hidemyass.com/proxy/tos/

There is this statement:

"We reserve the right to cooperate with law enforcement agencies who are investigating criminal activities from abusive web proxy users."
Would love to know as well! Was looking for this exact information a few days ago.
More information in the original article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/15/scitech/main201066...
There is python merchant (http://code.google.com/p/python-merchant/) and the implementations are similar, but provider support is nowhere near as complete.
Want more femgineers?
> Has anyone spent a decent amount of time in both areas that could give an opinion on whether it's worth doing?

Might be worth a separate "Ask HN" post.
The P vs NP problem and all the implications it will have if proved or disproved
I have interacted with both Scott and Brandon a bit in my time at MSFT.

I found the bit on Brandon particularly jarring - Brandon runs developer marketing and is doing a really good job of getting developers onto a phone that people aren't buying much. Just look at his activity here on HN or him getting Scott Adams to try out WP or how responsive he is on Twitter/email to any developer out there.

I empathize with a lot of what Scott said (though I'm not sure terrible marketing sites were the core problem Silverlight had) but he's off the mark with this one.
You say:

> I learned a lot in that, and one thing that actually surprised me is that in many cases, I was able to make a good argument that Einstein was wrong, and there was no empirical evidence to support his view on the particular point we were discussing.

Then:

> I'm not interested in getting into a physics debate. Its been too many years, and I've spoken vaguely because the specifics are not what I'm addressing.

You can't go making a claim like "there was no empirical evidence to support his view" about nearly any of Einstein's physics papers and then not want to debate it.

That's like saying "I have proof that bigfoot exists, but it's been too many years and I don't want to actually present that proof, so just believe me because my background is in being a bigfoot expert".

In any case, your assertion is false - there is a great deal of empirical evidence for all of Einstein's important theories.

Sure none of this evidence is proof, but it is good evidence. We know that if Einstein's theories of relativity are not true they are at least very good approximations over a very wide range of scales. It would take truly extraordinary evidence to justify a conclusion about the falsehood of relativistic theories at large scales. Some of this has been done (physics, like all science, is an ongoing debate), but many of those original theories are still believed to hold.

> So, I'm not declaring victory. I think this is good news, though, because it might be the beginning of the revelation of an error in understanding that, when resolved, results in a big jump forward in physics.

Taking the position that a piece of science will be eventually proven wrong and gloating when it is proven wrong isn't big or clever. Every theory of the past has gone the way of Phlogiston, and we can reasonably expect every theory of today to go the same way. However, saying "I think this is wrong" isn't contributing until you say "and here is my evidence".

By the way, "I'm not declaring victory, but" is the same as "I'm not a racist, but".
That's an awful name for an otherwise important cause.
We sort of already know that "Einstein is wrong" in this strong sense, since GR is incompatible with quantum field theory. It still works just as well within its realm of applicability, though.
No matter what they discovered: Einstein's theories of relativity will hold. They will hold forever, just like Newtons theory of gravity will hold forever. It's just that its range of applicability may become smaller and smaller.

There have been numerous experiments that perfectly validate both the special and general theory of relativity. The outcomes of the same experiments will not suddenly change. The theories predict the outcomes of these experiments to within experimental accuracy. GPS wouldn't work if special relativity wasn't a sufficiently accurate description of reality.

However, it may turn out that there are also experiments that are not sufficiently described by the theories of relativity, even thought that was previously expected.
If You Love to Complain About Facebook Changes, This Is For You
More information: http://www.lambdassociates.org/doc.htm
I have the 13" i7, and for me it's great for web development (I do rails). The three-finger swipe to switch full screens introduced with Lion is actually really awesome for doing terminal stuff.

The screen size only becomes a problem if you're doing stuff like Xcode development with the iPhone simulator open, because there just isn't a lot of space. In that case I much prefer to have a big monitor, like 27".
Grats on the sale - always good to see a great app developer have a good exit :)
every line of code written brings with it a ~potential~ violation of someone else's intellectual property

It's astonishingly bad, but not quite that bad yet.

direct the Patent office to cease issuing ~software~ patents.

I'd prefer they eliminate all patents, but let's stick to one goal here.

We, also, ask the

Are those commas necessary?

request that Congress pursue legislation to void all previously issued software patents

Congress, at best, is only going to let lobbyists tweak the rules some more to favor the big guys. Do you really want that?

How about asking USPTO to apply this standard when reviewing previously issued patents as well?

We these two steps,

typo?

those of us in the software industry can stop worrying about mutually assured patent destruction and get back to doing what we do best.

what we do best.: creating and keeping high-tech jobs!

Hmm, too panderous perhaps?
I didn't have enough time to cover everything, so I would be happy to answer questions or expand on anything in the comments here.

The main theme is that buying display ads isn't just for brands any more- any small startup can do it profitably and get massive ROI from a budget of just a few hundred dollars.
Microsoft patents modular smartphone
You can choose what is shown or hidden. There are initial recommendations, but you have 100% control over what is shown, highlighted or hidden.
I'm totally going to advertise on your site :D
Walk the Talk, Julius
I wonder if this approach could be used for more "static" sites as well? This sounds great for JavaScript-heavy web apps, but what if there's server-side HTML generation involved?
Facebook's Timeline to Allow You to Write Your Own Pre-Facebook History
For those looking for more information, check out the specification page which has a nice introduction and more in depth documentation:

http://www.lambdassociates.org/specification/shen_1.7.htm
Funny. Just yesterday I had to use my girlfriend's laptop and (not being a mac user) I didn't know that Skype on Mac OS X has a "start video call" by default.

I had a skype call with a business associate, and it was quite bad when I realized that I was talking to him without wearing a shirt, and that the camera started by itself. Now I can only hope that I was fast enough to cancel the video before it actually started streaming.

Perhaps you are right in the sense that people will get used to the idea that "always-on" video is normal. However, I will not. I am as far as possible from being technophobic, it's just that I like the barrier of not being on display.
You didn't look at the webcast, did you? Someone asked this question and they said "no we took it into account in the sense that the clocks at CERN and Gran Sasso run at different speeds because they are at different elevations. However, that's only a 1e-18 effect and the signal is 1e-5.
Sorry about that, it was intended to be an introduction to a series of articles comparing the two. You can e-mail me if you want more details.
The whole point of this thread is to share the details. Coming in and saying "oh yeah, I also make a ton of money, but I can't tell you how" doesn't really do anything for the conversation. Even if it's minor details like the fantasy sports guy that uses the Yahoo API, that's contributing to the conversation.
Perhaps mobile apps will fulfil that role?
Financial Trading At The Speed Of Light
why don't you send a pull request then?