skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A business -- or a charity, military platoon, gang, masonic lodge, baseball team, or any other name we have for a group of people -- is not a robot. It is still a group of people.

Take some activity we might consider disgusting -- like chopping down a productive fruit tree, or shooting a milk-producing cow, shitting all over the people who give you 30 percent of their sales and help make an economic engine that feeds you, etc -- it is not disgusting if a robot does it.

If a tree-harvesting robot cut down productive fruit trees instead of the pine lumber, we'd say, "Hey, broken robot there -- fix it." But if a group of PEOPLE did that, we'd call them stupid and disgusting, and be fearful of what they were doing to the economy. If they formed an LLC and did it, they would be stupid and disgusting. If they formed a cult and selected a guru and did it, they would be stupid and disgusting.

"Apple" is just a name for a bunch of stupid and disgusting people. They could dissolve the corporation, and they would still be a few tens of thousands weirdos, with a creepy turtle neck wearing "design guru", and probably be trying to sell you overpriced crap that you could not modify, based on a subtle implication of elitism if you joined by buying.

I think the only reasonable phone to consider at this point is the OpenMoko. Unlike Android, it's here now. People are doing stuff like http://www.neopwn.com/ with it.

Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, there are simply no cellular providers that meet basic standards of reasonable behaviour, such that I would sign up with them. They all seem to be run by people like axod, and probably think it's OK to have sex with children as long you form an S corp hire yourself to rape them, to insulate your soul from it like a kind of ethical condom.
This is a great post because it helps evaluate the very different goals of various organizations. That is, it shows that the "products" of large institutions (government, higher-ed, corporate firms) are not necessarily those of smaller businesses (start-ups, boutiques, small non-profits). It also helps us consider what exactly "failing" is (it has very different meanings if you're a hacking in your free time or applying for a CS PhD, even if the output is very similar).

So, in short, one man's "useless paper," may be another's inspiration. I'm not saying all products are the same, but it's important to evaluate context and think carefully about the complexity of a product's "worth." I mean, finding value (or being able to extract value) from "junk" is a goal for most entrepreneurs.
friendfeed does so many things right and i'm taking notes... constantly.
It's probably not the stack I would pick and my initial reaction is always to gasp when I see startups built on Microsoft, but...

- ASP.NET can scale, if you do it right. Aside from Microsoft.com/MSN, which don't really count, MySpace uses it (though they upgraded from ColdFusion, which wasn't much better) and Plenty of Fish, the web's largest dating site, uses it too:
http://www.plentyoffish.com/about_team.aspx
These are probably all larger than the most successful Rails sites.

- ASP.NET MVC isn't a horrible programming model. Forget the abomination that's normal ASP.NET with its funky events. If you've used another MVC framework like Rails or Cake, you'll feel right at home.

- Microsoft's startup program gives startups the early software for super cheap: http://microsoftstartupzone.com/

- It's all about getting v1 out and releasing early and often. If your team grew up on Microsoft, are you really going to make them all learn a new framework? If you do it right and prove out your idea, you can always rewrite later.
"A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms"
Globalisation today: Emerging-market companies competing furiously vs. rich-country ones.
During one of the podcasts I believe Jeff stated that he was able to get free copies of the most expensive version of Visual Studio from a friend at MS.
How much would SQL Server licenses cost?
Cryptonomicon. People will read it to understand the 1940's and the 1990's.
these will continue while we let unassailable yet unsupported statements be passed

this is too big to fail

the alternative would be worse

markets will never recover unless we act

now that we've handed over a blank check once in response to these issues, we'll be doing it again and again and again

fuck that, i'm liquid. put some of this shit on the auction block and i'll bid on it, yeah, the seller will take it up the shorts. but it will sell. will i buy ten bankrupt houses for $5k each without knowing if they are on a landfill? sure. so would others.
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keep going as long as possible as you can without VC -- in fact, you need to plan to do this and not bank on getting funding.

out of curiosity, with $500k how will you "expand your coverage and services" in a way that won't currently happen? Is there really a burning need for this money, or will most just be salary for you to go full-time?

with the little info I know (and my few life experiences) why not built out the viable revenue model while still in bootstrapping phase.
I believe Mahalo uses HBase/Hadoop.
Yahoo's Poor Ad Targeting & Thoughts On Google-Yahoo
yeah not only are the banks licking their chops knowing they have a guaranteed buyer, they will likely go through other non-toxic stuff in their portfolio that has simply become inconvenient and pawn that off too

this is the wall st scam of our lifetimes. its just starting
Graph Theory: Part III (Facebook) | 20bits
Greek: Pledges Allegiance
Tired of the poor treatment they ve recieved the pleges at Kappa Tau fight back. Elsewhere, Evan conspires to use Calvin and Michaels relationship to help a brother whos failing.
My Role in the Collapse of Lehman Brothers:

I wasn't a very good programmer when I was an intern there, and they had me working on various internal financial calculators. :-(
this highlights a key component of the housing bubble not talked about much. the "official" home valuations quoted by assayers hired by either the homeowners or the banks. the banks, homeowners, and assayers all had incentives for inflating these quotes.
Barnum has always been my hero. His autobiography is a great read too:

http://www.amazon.com/Life-P-Barnum-Written-Himself/dp/02520...
Drop it. He could be legitimately prosecuted for everything from identity theft to electoral fraud.
"months to years -- and in the meantime my line management still had to keep me employed somehow. On a number of occasions I had proposals rejected on the grounds that what I was proposing was impossible, when in fact I had already done the work in the intervening time."

That bit made me chuckle...
How is this different from Hypertable, other than being written in java rather than c++?

http://www.hypertable.org
Richard Dawkins' jaw-dropping talk on our bizarre universe
Thanks for explaining: your ridicule of newcomers was parody; not your opinion.

I disagree with you about the article - I think comparisons and metaphors can shed light and reveal common principles of tools/tasks (without defining them). I thought your comparison of sh vs. lisp was insightful.

I take back what I implied about some lisp-users. It's just that I wish it were easier for me to learn about lisp (which I wish about many things).
If you read Barnum's works, he has a much less condescending view of his customers than that quote would suggest, which is probably why those who knew him said it was out of character.
It's not impossible to put together an angel round that's $500k or more with angels, assuming a) there's enough interest, and b) early on, you get angels who are connected / influential and you get a pile-on effect. (That being said, it is very hard to do.)

Some have been able to pull together up to $1M or more in $50 to $100k chunks.

As Ivan mentions, VCs like USV, Charles River Ventures and Bay Partners also come to mind -- they can do $200-$500k seed deals in one shot, or syndicate with angels.

There does seem to be a step function in valuation though when you get to Series A -- but that's moreso because of the economics of the VC game. They want to put $x million in a Series A, and they want to leave enough on the table for the founders to keep working, so they work backwards from that to set a premoney valuation.
I completely agree. Also, the best work comes from word of mouth most of the times.
Tell that to the people whose money markets just returned a loss :)
JamLegend is SUPER fun. Wow, these guys are in for a great launch when they go public beta.
.. At least they didn't use Visual SourceSafe.
I know that legally, some crimes are more severe when perpetrated against a government employee. You'll get a much steeper penalty for punching an employee at City Hall than you would for doing the same at Burger King.

No idea about hacking into personal emails.
This is a really great link, it should make directly into the front page.
Just don't go inside the coffee shop. Do it from a car or the restaurant next door, just to be safe.

Or better yet, drive down the road looking for a resident with an unprotected WiFi connection.
While I believe this article is a fascinating look at the bureaucracy at JPL, it is analogous to the mortgage crisis only in that it is an example of perverse incentives. Perverse incentives exist all around us, so I don't find this example particularly enlightening.

Some other examples of perverse incentives in systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
I think there is a distinction between disgusting & amoral. One is an aesthetic judgement, the other is ethical.
Yeah, but using Hadoop doesn't necessarily imply using HBase - HBase is built using Hadoop core.

Btw, the HBase Wiki is here:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase
Yet more advice given from the narrow scope of one person's experience. The problem is, some of it is just wrong. Some people have succeeded despite (or perhaps because of) just being in it for the money.
I think comparisons and metaphors can shed light and reveal common principles of tools/tasks (without defining them)

Oh absolutely. We are pattern-matching machines. If we had to reason about every new thing from first principles because of the exceptions and corner cases that mean no two things are exactly alike...

Well let's just say we would need a whole brain architecture. The one we have--highly parallel with relatively slow procesors and six layers of neocortex--wouldn't cut it.
There are always absolutes.

For me, good entertainment is that which does something new. Something stimulating.
How web savvy are New Zealand’s political parties?
Try not to use threads - (Not sure I agree)
Also, lot easier to find programmers if you're in .net or java. One might argue about the quality, but certainly the supply is much larger.
Factor now available on x86-64 platforms
Google Miscalculator: Revealing Errors
a = ["red", "green", "blue", "black", "white", "yellow"]; "I have %s and %s" % (", ".join(a[:-1]), a[-1])

Well almost...
Goldman, Morgan to Become Full-Fledged Banks
I hardly think it's fair to take someone's religious beliefs and infer their intellect. Someone's beliefs about the unknowable (or lack thereof) doesn't have a causative effect on their intellect in any way I can determine.

Imagine the power a person would have as president: being able to call up the SEC chairman or the Fed chairman for an hour gives him more power than any entepreneur I know. If Bush is a complete bumbling idiot, surely some enterprising entepreneur would have been able to outsmart him in an election. Seeing as how that didn't happen, I'm forced to conclude he's at least slightly more intelligent than he appears.

Have you ever heard Tony Blair speak for any length of time? Blair appears to share many of the same views as Bush, but tends to express them much more clearly. I don't agree with Blair on many points, but the reason I disagree is not because Blair is an idiot; it's because he is working from a worldview / set of assumptions that I don't share.
I'm on the RDF mailing list. I think they sent me a notice of this. As a guerrilla tactic, it seems like this is almost to Richard Dawkins' advantage.
Depends if it's monday.
Default by the US government is no longer unthinkable
That suggests that the difference between management teams at this stage is worth $1m - $14m. Incentive for dummy managers?
Post-scarcity Software
On Starting Up: Introduction
College Panel Calls for Less Focus on SATs
"At the peak of my JPL career I attained the rank of Principal, which is the highest rung on the technical career ladder whose existence is publicly known. (It turns out there are "secret" promotions you can get after that.)"

So, that's when you get to work on all the X-Files stuff?
Cliff Asness Is Mad as Hell
How to Stage a Revolution
In other words, we agree that there is a growing anti-American sentiment outside the US.

I'm pointing out that a lot of the US doesn't care and explaining some of why they don't. I'm also asking you to explain why they should.

Let's take Australia's contribution in Afghanistan. Australia's military, man for man, is amazing. However, it isn't that big. It's a smaller contribution than Texas.

If anti-American sentiment kept Australia from joining in some of the US' foreign activities, one of two things would happen - we'd go it alone with roughly the same outcome or we wouldn't go it at all.

As to the behavior of US media outlets wrt allies, you're seriously confused if you think that they give US interests any weight. The canonical example is a discussion of media ethics during the Vietnam war. A US reporter was asked if he'd tip off some US troops walking into an ambush. He agonized for a while and then said that he would, but would feel bad about it. His fellow media types jumped down his throat and he retracted.

Or, we can take a more recent example. AP is quite critical of surveillance of suspected terrorists and insisted that there's a public right to know of the methods. Fair enough. However, when the govt asked for information about the break-in to Palin's e-mail, AP declined.

Of course, if it had been Biden's e-mail, the reaction would have been very different.

However, your observation that they left out Australia because it interfered with their shot is probably correct. It wasn't a planned snub - they didn't give it that much thought.
1. Please don't use 'Breaking' in the headline.

2. This, from what I know, seems like a terrible move.
Why is this a terrible move?
Actually I think, that's when they let you in on the real secret, there is no "X-Files stuff" and leave you to wonder what the heck you just wasted the last 20 years of your life doing.
Learning about startups from a Packers Loss
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/express/default.mspx
> Realistically, for a country who holds some core ideologies such as the freedom of speech

Which doesn't apply here, because there's no right to govt sponsored speech.

> and the seperation of church and state, having a politician want to ban books because of religious views supports neither of these ideologies.

Palin didn't try to get books taken out of the library, let alone ban them.

There's no "right" to the govt buying certain books. Libraries refuse to buy books every day. They refuse to accept book donations every day. They take books off the shelves every day.

Do you really think that a community can be forced to pay for a library that doesn't do as the community wants?

> The point isn't that she fired the librarian for supporting a political rival, the point is that this woman has views that could be considered

How about arguing against those views honestly instead of making up bogus charges?
Pitch Camp Dallas is Coming : Fort Worth Startup Blog
The name "coffin nails" is so old that it's gone out of style.
Fun talk
Disclaimer: not an economist.

My understanding is that the Glass Steagall act in the 1930s was passed to separate holding banks (like WaMu etc) and investment banks (GS) because when they were combined certain risks popped up.

One of the first that immediately comes to mind is that now investment banks will be in charge of deposits. Securities trading is pretty risky (especially when you're leveraged) and if something should happen (tech bubble or the current mess) then the deposits are threatened. Since deposits are also insured by the government (FDIC), the government then is automatically on the hook for the money.

This means that there is a need for new restrictions placed on the hybrid banks. If the regulation is too low, then we run the risk of putting deposits in danger. If the regulation is too much, we run the risk of crippling the investment banking industry.

Then again other countries seem to work fine without such separation, so hopefully this will work out. From the article it seems new regulations will be imposed on the banks.

If anyone else has additional insight, feel free to correct me :)
My friend tell me to go to tzones for me too look for fun talk I can find it that like a chat room
Previous and Next Actions in Web Forms
I did that is notthing that I can find I one the t-mobile can go at boost hookt chat room
Sorry. Guess I got a bit excited. This is pretty important news. The wall street we knew yesterday may never be the same.
I'm not an expert on the mortgage crisis. I've had a lot of experience over the years "fudging the numbers" in the real estate sector but that was before I became a web developer and, thereby, an upstanding example of responsible personal economic behavior.

I am an expert on Matrix Management though. Unfortunately, I have lots, and lots, and lots of experience there.

My recommendation..... If any of the big shots at your company say that they are switching to "Matrix Management" just polish up the old resume and start looking for a job elsewhere.
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David S. Johnson: http://www.research.att.com/~dsj/

Co-author, with Michael R. Garey (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/former/mrg/), of "Computers and Intractability". (See http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/articles.html .)
Daily Deals - Off The Back
Event Calendar Script 
AJ Square Inc is a free and simple online event calendar written in PHP and MySQL. Our Event Calendar script allows you to easily add a calendar of events to your website.
Tilera launches new generation of multicore embedded chips for communications
Right, nothing is impossible. It's just harder. You're limiting yourself to the 2 or 3 VC firms who are ever willing to do this, or large angel groups. Or, you have to get 10 or so people interested. That's probably even a little harder right now than it was when I was going through the process, as the money angels use to invest is often paid for by selling shares of something.

Or you can convince one VC firm out of pretty much the entire set to give you $3 million. Raising investing is a lot like dating. You try to get set up with (or find yourself) as many people as possible until you find yourself in a situation where you like them and they like you. And if your total dating pool consists of 3 VCs and 2 large angel groups, your chances aren't 0, but they're a lot less than they would be if the pool was everyone with an office on Sand Hill road.

There are, of course, strong arguments for not taking that much, I'm just pointing out that it's easier.
Powerset (a search engine aquired by MS) is behind hbase development.

I have been using hbase in my project -- an interesting experience.
If you are a startup you can probably get Microsoft's software for free.

Talk to one of their technology evangelists, they love seeing cutting edge companies building their business on MS.

Anand Iyer, http://blogs.msdn.com/aniyer/, can point you in the right direction.
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I agree with Hamilton - and I hope that becoming older and having more experience and exposure doesn't take that mindset away from me. Doesn't look like it has for him.
I admire your practicality about taking action. But...

Haven't we seen enough of this style of decision-making and 'action' from this administration? Take a look at the record, at all the high-pressure-sales-to-the-citizens executive actions they've taken. It's a lot like Iraq. Pump up the fear in Congress and among the populace that 'something terrible' will happen if we don't immediately cede rights and budget to the exec to do 'whatever trick is up our sleeve, don't worry we'll tell you all about it later.' We've seen enough erosion of rights and we've seen enough power grabbing. It's time to say no, take our medicine, and clean up the mess we've all caused.

'No Mas.'
Scientific product development.
"And in both cases, if push came to shove, the government with its deep pockets was there to foot the bill."

Americans foot the bill. Government is just a group of people acting on behalf of Americans.

It's easy enough to get upset at the bailout, but the fact is that we Americans are going to pay the price one way or another, and this way is (or so the theory goes) significantly cheaper and less painful than a full-on depression.

The perverse incentives that caused our current economic crisis were almost entirely the fault of private industry left unregulated. So the same people who are angry about the bailout now would have been angry then had the government started intervening in the private markets by regulating private enterprise more tightly than appeared necessary.

The most important thing about the bailouts is that failure was not removed. Shareholders in many bailed-out corporations are losing tremendous amounts of money. It is sad to see the executives who ran these corporations fall gently due to their golden parachutes, but those were not the making of our government.
Right, in the economic case, the perverse incentives were created by the market. The bailouts are only meant to stop the failure of our economy as a whole. That sort of failure must never be an option.
We have been extensively looking into hbase on hadoop, its a fascinating technology.

I would love to know how it runs as a basic DB for simple queries.

From what we have seen hbase and hadoop are about 10x slower than their google counterparts. Other tests seem to indicated the request time seems to hover between 50 and 250ms. I am in SF and I would like to hack on hadoop and hbase with anyone in the area to run some tests.
Why not do convertible debt and not worry about your valuation?

http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/financing/startupfinancing...