skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, I'm as anarcho-syndicalist as the next hipster, but I read your original comment as saying schools need to focus on the lowest common denominator. I'm still kinda getting that vibe from this comment.

Grades are different from money. Yes, society needs to provide a basic standard of living for everyone--but we need to do that in the way that allows the median standard of living to rise as best as it's sustainably able to. Advances in everyone's standard of living don't come from those of us in the bottom 95%, they come from the very best and brightest when their environment challenges them and allows them maximum room for growth.

The incentive structure for many of the most influential people in today's society--lobbied legislators, option-cashing CEOs, income-cutoff-avoiding welfare recipients--is completely screwed. But you don't buy food and housing with grades, and inflating those by pulling down the smartest does nobody much good.
Why'd you change the title?

The title (and content) on the actual story is quite different from what you wrote, and making it a question doesn't excuse you. So no upvote on this story from me.

Absolutely nowhere in the story does it even imply that this is _the_ gene. It just says that that protein plays a role.

If this was _the_ gene, then a little genetic engineering and we'd have a sentient monkey.
Thank you very much! I'm glad to know this now.
Barduino - A drink dispensing robot built with Ruby and an Arduino
Read again. He is only doing that with his personal investments. It is not "billions".
Little Big Planet for the PS3 will be delayed after Qu'ran verses found in music
Probably the same way that their reacted when they told them that mellowing out was groovy. Or the way _their_ parents reacted when they told them that the hep cats were jumpin'. Or the way _their_ parents reacted when told that some bird was the bee's knees.

Shrugging and invisibly rolling one's eyes seems like appropriate.
More Layoffs: Pandora Cuts 14 Percent of Its Staff
In July a WW1 mortar shell was found and detonated in the Presidio of San Francisco...

http://www.ktvu.com/news/16764203/detail.html?psp=news&r...
Are you a troll?

Your posting history is suspect.
(Arguello gate into the Presidio was blocked on my way into work, and we heard the boom later that afternoon.)
Alexis Ohanian at Business of Software 2008 [video]
Is this cheating?

http://www.google.com/search?q=00000000000000000000000000000...
"Taffy DB does not have indexes." Indexes are a key component of a DB system. Until they add indexes and are able to support large amounts of data they should not call themselves DB system.

In the mean time Taffy DB can be viewed as a library that can process a list of maps. Nevertheless, it might be useful.
Buffet owns about 27% of Bershire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is $196 billion. 27% of $196 billion is $53 billion. Warren Buffet's estimated net worth is $62.3 billion - that means he has a little less than $10 billion for personal investments.
Introducing “M” The New Programming Language from Microsoft.
Wow, a lot of common sense and then BAM - Linux & Hemp, I wasn't expecting that.

Not that I don't agree with it, but weird seeing that, I guess that guy is a hippie finance nerd. (I mean that in the best way possible).
Nokia 3600 Slide Unlocked
This lightest presentation of Nokia 3600 of 97.3 g will be launched with a TFT display of 16M colors along with a unique feature of a five-way navigation key.
This is very good advice, but mainly for people who are already in shape.

However, this set of articles seems targeted at couch potatoes. You can't get started doing much of anything until you can do the basics: a 4 mile run, 20 pushups, 60 situps, 5 pullups and 50% bodyweight squats (less upper body for girls, I guess). Once you get to that point, optimize for bodybuilding, powerlifting, etc. But reaching that basic level of fitness will be the same for any sport.

By the way, here is a very good document on reaching that basic level of fitness:

http://sill-www.army.mil/bolc2/FM%2021-20%20(PT).pdf
Because everyone loves Schadenfreude.
The Market Was 2.0 Long Before the Web
please email me when you do - aaron.blohowiak at google's popular free email host.
You have to give these guys credit for AIR. I'm very impressed by the applications I have seen built on it-- especially balsamiq.

I'm definitely looking forward to building on it.
Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire
Ew, HTML5. What we really need is for IE to support SVG. Instead, they made silverlight.
I agree that BitTorrent didn't just pop out of the ether, but how does Bram's work at MojoNation fit into this?
Powerlifters do 'whatever works'...

huh?

In order to do olympic lifts, makes sense to go to a powerlifter -- who do have good form.
Good question. I've used everything from expensive mail house software to hacked scripts, I still haven't found anything very versatile... maybe hire some Indians (or mturk?).
Because you can't pack enough different institutions within a sufficiently small radius.

Parents want 5 year olds to live at home. They're ok with 18 year olds not.
Why so much resentment for those with rich parents?. A genetic endowment of intelligence and conscientiousness is also a stroke of luck,
There's a good chance that his regressed-to-the-mean progeny will avail some of that financial fortune and social capital in getting ahead.
Goldman Sachs has negative Operating Cash Flow (-$14.57 billion)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GS

And Buffett brought $5 billion worth preferred stock of GS.

Is this a rational investment?
it's great to see people who can be so irrationally ambitious at first but become rational AFTER they've achieved significant success
Atwood can treat markdown as critical to his business, he can roll his own, and learn to create a parser and he should STILL start with something like Beautiful Soup.

Then he can modify it, extend it, refactor it, what ever.

But starting from scratch all that will happen is that he will, after a LOOONG time, end up with something almost as good Beautiful Soup, but with a much uglier code base.

And he will not learn more doing it that way. He will perhaps learn just as much, but not more.

Reinventing the wheel is stupid.
If X is critical to your business get a wheel for X then own the damn wheel and X.

Joel himself started with an open source VPN project for Copilot.

And I'm guessing that's a pretty critical part of Joel's business.
Update on my search: I'm currently looking at something called NetAddress. It seems to work well but costs $500. Probably better than writing it myself but I'm not eager to cough up that much cash.

http://www.softwarecompany.com/dotnet/netaddress.htm

Plus, it's made by a company called "Software Company". That can't be good.
"reigned in?" He asserts that the top-tier schools have been producing straw men -- suckers for the other sides of his trades. I think he's right. The level of education in this country has fallen across the board.
I'm shocked it takes 140 (now, 120) people to run Pandora.

Does anybody know how they are grouped (Engineering, Marketing, Biz Dev, etc)?
In my experience, freemium can be a really tough sell, and it depends on who you're after as a customer. Consumers (man I hate that word) will pay extra in small amounts as evidenced by the iPhone app store, online games, etc. but I've found it can be tougher to get them to pay for something less fun-oriented. They aren't businesses, after all.

My first business distributes an open source app and sells a paid version of it. We've been in business for 7 1/2 years now and it's been my sole source of income for 7 of those (subsequent business attempts aside :). But that's targeting businesses, and not necessarily small ones either. The freemium side of open source works to a certain size in the corporate world, because of things like the perception of support. But in this case it's software as an install not a service, and so there are problems with scale.

My next business tried to sell something to individuals (ah, much better than consumers :), and that was really tough. I discovered that about 99% of our revenue was going to come from advertising, which hit a plateau and couldn't continue to grow like we needed. C'est la vie.

My newest business is again targeting business users, again with a kind of freemium model (we offer a basic free account), and I really think we might be onto something big with it this time. So it can definitely work, but it does have its own set of challenges, and sometimes they can be killer ones.
How bad is it when we're seeing coverage of mainstream media's coverage of internet memes, on the internet.
He's not saying buy stocks after any crash, just after this one. The Japanese crash was a unique one because a corrupt old boy network of companies holding one another's stock and banks refusing to write off bad debt caused the fall to be artificially prolonged.
B-Hive, F5, And Bluelock Make Cloud Computing A Reality
I hope you're kidding! Keeping a bunch of pissed off soon-to-be-ex-employees around the workplace isn't good for anyone. The best you can do is to lay people off on Friday morning so at least they can be with your friends and family over the weekend for support.
a couple of questions:

target market: do you want university students' friends as your earliest members?

incentives: do you want to pay for referrals or active users (e.g., the friend uploads a pictures, posts a review, etc.)?
"If a child is so clever, he can read books himself and he can skip grades. But if a child is lagging behind, he requires help from others."

Part of the problem is that clever children are not allowed to skip grades at most schools. Reading extra material takes time that is often prioritized for homework(often dull for a bright student). Also how is the student supposed to know what books to read on a subject. It is here that a mentor would be very helpful.

I wasn't allowed to skip grades, so I read in other books in high school classes. Most of what I read was undirected and I studied without any conviction, because I was just passing the time. I developed a terrible work ethic that hinders me to this day because I was never challenged at a young age. Not that I would have become some mathematical prodigy but I'm certain I could have accomplished more by now if I had more encouragement early on.

Here's an illuminating anecdote about the attitude most teachers have towards students: One day I finished my reading assignment early in freshman physical science class. I put away the textbook(most high school science texts are terrible and this was no exception) and started to read something of my own, Einstein's book on Relativity for layperson. The teacher called me out for not doing my assignment. She didn't believe that I had finished, because no one could have read that fast. I don't actually read unusually fast, but I did finish the assignment. She demanded to know what I was reading and after I answered sent me to the principals office for, "reading a book unrelated to physics". The principal wasn't in his office but his secretary thought that the incident was hilarious.
99Designs charged a fee in teh neighborhood of $35 and we paid $200 to the winning designer.
Always good to see someone get out while the getting is good ...
Found it. It's from "How to be Rich" which I finished last week (after getting a recommendation from another HN'er -- good book!)

(Regarding the May, 1962 Crash)

"I told them quite frankly that, while I sympathized wholeheartedly with anyone who had lost money because of market developments, I saw little if any reason for alarm and absoutely none for panic....I said I felt that the stock market was in a much healthier and certainly in a much more realistic position because of the long-needed adjustment in prices. As for what I was doing, the answer was simple. I was buying stocks...Most seasoned investors are doubtless doing much the same thing. They're snapping up the fine stock bargains available as a result of the emotionally inspired selling wave." [page 152]

Perhaps there's some difference this time around, but I doubt it. I imagine old J.P. would be saying the same thing today if he were alive.
Stop taking a salary? In this economy? Are you crazy?

I totally agree you shouldn't be a jerk and blog about it like, oh it was so tough for me, I had to fire so many people, the emotional agony it will inflict on me for the next couple weeks will be so hard. You have to recognize that no matter how hard it is for you, it's worse for them, something this blogger didn't seem to want to take on.
From Designing Alltop to Modular Innovation Micro-trends
I'm not sure how "lose" got replaced with "fail", but hackers have been using "win" in the same sense since long before 4chan came along. Also, using a designated but unusual superlative -- "epic fail" -- is a common hacker speech pattern, as with "die horribly" or "grok in fullness".
YouTube down, grrr
> more notably the idea was the foundation for Digital Fountain

IIRC Luby came up with a rateless encoding algorithms while working on overcoming content delivery issues in lossy networks. It had less to do with a group delivery per se, and more with the lossy transmission medium. They did initially focus on a single-sender setup, and in that they were quite a bit different from BT. Only after DF was founded they started looking at alternative applications of their (patented) ideas and resurrected the swarm-casting stuff.

In other words I wouldn't mix DF and BT together. They are certainly related, but they are more different than they are similar.
Firing an entry-level developer? In this economy? Are you crazy?

Startup founders seem to love calling themselves "CEOs". Working for a one-dollar salary during rough times is something that real CEOs actually sometimes do.
Watch for levels full of Qu'ranic verses and a Prophet Muhammad Sackboy put out by angry fanboys.

Seriously though, do musical renditions of Qu'ranic verses go against Islam in the same way as images of Muhammad?
Marijuana was not made illegal promptly after WW2. It was illegalized during Nixon's presidency in 1970.
Don't know, but OpenCola and SwarmCast predate MojoNation, which in turn predates BitTorrent.

Again: not saying XDCC is as big a deal as Napster.
You'll probably win an argument about Luby's CV, but I'm just going to point out that the signature technical detail of BitTorrent is FEC, and Luby is an FEC, coding-theory, and crypto luminary from way before the first bubble.

I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01 that was directly in this space; we implemented basically the same system as BitTorrent for group file transfer. We definitely felt like there was significant overlap with Digital Fountain (though we were using off-the-shelf PD coding schemes, like BitTorrent did).

"Lossy transmission medium" is another way to think about multicast congestion, and multicast congestion is another way to think about "how to get content to a large, diverse audience of people", which I think sums up BitTorrent.

The big difference between BitTorrent and DF is that BitTorrent is P2P, and DF isn't. That sounds huge, but realize that "P2P vs. Planned" is an informal way to describe the major approaches to multicast reliability protocols.
What does

"Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals"

mean?
Nah. It's pretty awesome: we're seeing, day by day, the birth of the new media.
This is just a small-scale repetition of the utter freakout that happened when they went with Intel CPUs. It's the flipside of the religious mania that Apple produces in its customers. A distinguishing technical feature (PowerPC, FireWire) is taken in by the acolyte and interpreted not simply as a difference, but as a fundamental difference between the wonderful Apple stuff and the junk in the rest of the world. The fact that CPUs and high speed peripheral interconnect standards are more or less interchangeable in the modern world gets lost in the mix.
Recession Proof Your Startup
Google Apps portal pages wreaking havoc
This is exactly why I would wait. Words from Buffet will reduce fear in the market. I'd rather invest when fear is at a maximum (eg, next bad quarterly report, or bad economic numbers).
Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with James Elwood
Why start a startup now? Because that's how it works
Yeah. I'd say it's one of the downsides to the hardcore relation Apple has with its users.
Please Don't Stop Innovating
Facebook's #2 and #3 Leave to Start Own Company
Sequoia Capital's Advice on Avoiding the Death Spiral
> I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01

Feel like sharing a name of the startup ? :)
As someone who's watched this happen a couple times I definitely agree. Furthermore, the earlier the cycle you're in the better your packages tend to be. The first round got great severance. The second round got a small package IIRC, and they missed payroll on round three, which is like getting -2 weeks of salary, pretty sleazy, IMO.
"They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten."

The only thing that motivates me in my professional life more than money is history. I would like to be remembered. I would like a student of history to read about me in 100 years and think that I left this place better than I found it.

Alas, this motivation doesn't stick well in my head, and the money is always there for the taking.

I like his point that people simply earning money will not be remembered. He's made his money, and he's OK without being remembered. He can now relax (Which by the way, is why money is such a high motivating factor for me, personally. I don't particularly love the sight of money, but I believe it can buy peace of mind.)
It's not too hard to track down, but, no. We weren't particularly successful. I've got a blog post or 50 to write about that whole experience, when it's less raw.
Yeah, I prefer "make something people want".
Here is a man who understands how to live.
Target market: university students, young professional

In order to create an account one needs to upload a photo at least. I would also probably only pay for accounts that are still active after a 30 days period...
I am being lazy. It is trivial to track it down.
I just realized that I was stuck in that traffic jam in picture 5 of the photo gallery.
Its really amazing how seemingly small things can take over 20 years to perfect; and they still say they haven't perfected it!
I guess this is a perfect example of "fuck you money."
WYSIWYG is a Lie
There are no "decision making rights" in a 3 person startup. Anybody can disagree strongly enough to leave and kill the team. Leaders lead. They don't dictate.
No, he understands that a lot of the things holding us back are rooted in greed and politics. Resistance to hemp would be one of those.
Make something that makes other people money (like adwords). Ha!
Buffett's "buy now" call gets lukewarm reception
You're right. My numbers are off by an order of magnitude. I guess we'll see where we stand in late November then.
Notes on Introduction To Algorithms
Given the essentially contrarian investment philosophy that Buffett laid out, is it any surprise that his advice falls on 'lukewarm' ears? Isn't that the point?!
Powerlifting and Olympic lifting are different sports.
I don't use FireWire for anything, but it is a superior technology to USB. While USB 2.0 is rated for theoretical speeds higher than FireWire, in reality FireWire performs much better. It's like ATA vs. SCSI. With USB, the CPU of the host machine must manage the connection while FireWire has dedicated hardware for that. FireWire also allows for memory mapped devices which means that the CPU doesn't need to be bothered for copies.

I don't care that FireWire isn't in the new MacBooks, but it is a much better interface than USB. I don't have FireWire devices and don't do anything that would benefit that greatly from FireWire (like video devices or external hard drives). However, I can understand why people who had invested in FireWire devices or people who would benefit from the better interface would be annoyed. The problem for those people is that, just like SCSI, very few people need the advantages of FireWire.
"so long and thanks for all the fish"
Both times for me were when the company decided to stop doing what I did. The first time, the company got out of technology altogether to concentrate on its strategy consulting business, all the engineers except a skeleton crew for maintenance were laid off in one go. Sucked to be one of the engineers they kept!

The second time was the company shifting from products to services. They said you can have X months money and leave now, or X/2 months paid to find a job somewhere else in the company (and then nothing). I didn't look back. In both cases, senior managers know they're in trouble but think they can get themselves out, there's still plenty of cash in the kitty and they need to preserve the appearance of confidence, so they'll pay fair severances. When it gets desperate - then it's everyone for themselves.
The overall point-of-view here is much better than the original "freemium is not a business model" article. Our company views free accounts as a marketing tool and lead generator; It is a great way to generate some trust and excitement into potential customers that may convert into paying customers at some point down the road.

I would say most companies fail with freemium because its an afterthought. I've seen a few start-ups build out an entire featureset, get a ton of people to use it, and then think, "Well gee whiz, how are we going to make money off of this?". Then they will attempt to monetize their product off of some non-core features. This just won't work.
Both Imvu and Gaia Online are U.S. companies supported by selling virtual items for the user's avatar to wear. The core functionality (chat/forums) is free. Second Life and Habbo Hotel are similar, charging for various kinds of virtual ownership.
It's hard to get everything right.

Apple has messed up a few times (firewire and the mini slot on the macbook pros that were never used). But overall, they make great machines.
I don't think it was rationality or a lack of it. It sounded like he couldn't stomach the business anymore.

Or, he didn't feel like exposing his wealth to the markets for a while. Let's see if he ever comes back.
I once submitted (to NTK) this hilarious search-and-replace-typo where someone replaced Bill in Billionare with Gates to make Gatesionare.

Sinisterly, I can't find it on Google anymore. Odd.
I'm not sure I'd characterize the switch to Intel as an "utter freakout" -- my impression is that the doubters quieted down fairly fast once they got a look at the demos of the compatibility layer and the relative ease of cross-compiling. And while the switch to Intel now looks like a no-brainer, hindsight is always 20-20. That said, I'll agree -- to the extent that people freaked out about the Intel transition, it might be fair to call it an example of "religious mania".

But complaints about Firewire aren't about religion. Firewire and USB 2.0 are only "interchangeable" if you don't already own thousands of dollars' worth of Firewire-only peripherals. Which quite a few people do.

Yes, there are probably converters out there somewhere, or there will be. But will they affect latency? Will they affect driver stability? The owners of $1200 audio interfaces worry about such things. A lot.

Of course, this is not yet the end of the world. As the article points out, Apple still offers Firewire on the MacBook Pro. Moreover, they are still selling machines like my white Macbook, with Firewire, for less money than the new Macbooks. So it's not as if Firewire is being phased out tomorrow. But I don't blame customers for pushing back. If people can convince Apple to keep Firewire around for an additional year, that's one more year that I don't have to spend several hundred bucks to replace my Firewire-based audio interface and hard drive enclosures.
Wow that's an intense article.

Lesson learned: Zoho FTW!