skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true, incorrect choice of phrasing on my part. Although saying 'yes' to an 'or' is a valid response, it's not very insightful.
Be proud all you want. Just be able to explain your idea clearly. Taleb intersperses self-promotion in his explanations, which muddies them.

His writing style in general is meandering and lacks focus. The book I read had a handful of insights amid pointless narration. I read books like The Black Swan to learn new ideas, not to learn how great the author is.
Bullish for America, Get a Real Job
just wrote you
So the advantage to WYSIWYG is instant gratification and automated coding. It's great for amateurs and if you're just posting to a form but it complicates site building because now you have crap in your files that you don't understand. To the extent you want to build something original and editable, you should avoid dynamic template editors -- they inevitably change three things whenever you change one thing. Most of what I've seen them produce is irrelevant or incidental to what I'm trying to accomplish. But if your boss only wants you to build something static with a few minor changes to a template, maybe he's right. Not all projects call for elegance, creativity and adaptability.
Curious to hear about it - email in profile. Cheers
Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line
Windows without Win32
In our days where the most important application is the web browser, and the OS is losing its importance, A User Mode Virtual Machine OS is the way of the future.
That was one of the worst, most ill informed articles I've read this month (hey, I read a lot). And the only reason I read it at all was because it was on HN, which was unfortunately due to linkbait trickery.

Edit: I just realized it was written by Seth Godin. Now it all makes sense.
I am interested as well. My email is haidut (-at-) gmail DOT com

thx
Done. Cheers.
Travel industry and Deep Web: exclusive interview with Marcus P. Zillman
I'd certainly like to hear more about it - can you contact me? Email address is in my profile.
Yeah. That's what I kept thinking the entire time I was reading this. Overloading competent with this extra meaning was mildly uncomfortable. Rigid, process oriented, (and only sometimes reliable because of those things) would have been better. Blindly trusting process is like fake competence, a plastic, cartoon version of the real thing.

Real competence is the ability to deal gracefully with exactly the kind of change the article talks about.
Yeah, just don't tell any Persians that they're similar to Arabs; unless you wan them to feel insulted that is. Suppose you're from the USA, how would you feel if someone says you're similar to Mexicans?
Democracy is not designed to be efficient, in fact, it is designed to be the opposite. Why? Because with efficiency comes power to the top, and with power to the top comes dictatorship - which is the whole thing that democracy is trying to avoid!

Don't compare government to business. It's apples to oranges. Government is designed with checks and balances - which are by definition inefficient - because bickering about the same thing for six years is better than making the wrong decision - we've all ceded the control of our lives to this thing, I want them to take all the time they need.

Be careful not use the current American experience with government as an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
just wrote you. Thanks.
I'm with you on this one. This must be a very hard hurdle for hosting based startups.

Perhaps on of the github guys could comment?
At one point in history Persia was ruled by the Samanids who practiced Islam. If you said Islam in those days, you said Arab.

Although he may be Persian, you can most definitely be sure that he was deeply influenced by the Arabic tradition and culture.
I don't see it in there.
The worst part is: the entire article is such an abortion you could do this with what feels like every other line. It's filled with marketing non sense, truisms, conventional "wisdom", wrong definitions and outright lies. It's almost impressive, really.
Sorry, I must have removed it - it's there now.
I think that's what this guy is doing. He's young, he's confident (to a point), but he lacks the wisdom and ability to reflect that comes with age.

All of the things you mention occurred to me by the time I was 19. There's a difference between young people who are sprinkling their brains with alkaloids[2] at raves and the young people that are sprinkling their brains with DHA, creatine, and glutamine.

I also realize that there's a delicate balance I have to reach with regard to confidence. It's not easy to reach this balance, because on the one hand, young people are treated like second-class citizens (in some circumstances), but on the other, you need to have a lot of balls to do a startup, to charge what you sholud be charging, and claim the work you do is as good as that of an older adult's. This is especially true because claiming you are equal is taken to mean arrogance, even though the evidence for the alleged inferiority of the young is lacking. In objective contests like chess, war, athletics, hacking, and mathematics, there are many very proficient people who are very young.[1] This is not the case in established corporations, politics, or the job market. Finally, people always want to feel superior to others, and while they can't express this desire for superiority by being racist or sexist, they can do so by discriminating based on age.

Sometimes behavior that is acceptable in a male 50-year-old CEO is considered unacceptable in a female of the same age or a young guy (there was a Harvard Business School study that showed something to this effect; it was a case study of a CEO that has to make certain decisions. The male was considered to be "tough but fair" or something, while the woman was considered a bitch. The case studies were identical but for the gender of the protagonist). So, would you say he's being arrogant if he were 50?

Now, is Sam being a douche? I don't know, but I do know not all young people are the same.

[1] Fidel Castro, Alexander the Great, Octavian, Bobby Fischer, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Woz, most athletes (for many reasons), Reimann, etc.

[2] NB: I'm not talking about caffeine or ritalin.

Edit: I didn't mean to get on your case, petercooper; you seemed to have said things in good faith. I guess you touched a nerve...
My sense is that most of the traffic on github is open source, which isn't scary; also, my product source code is less scary than my financials.
Don't see an e-mail there or on your blog. Feedvolley looks interesting!
7 Tips for New Businesses
Listen. I do not have the time to write out, what could be a, three page argument on this topic and then send that to my boss. Instead I wanted to get an array of opinions from different users here to make my argument that much stronger.

I have already mentioned that it give you more control over the code, hand coding will make the website load faster, it will make it easier to validate, and it will make it easier for a group of people to work on.

An explaination or links from respected CSS/HTML gurus would be greatly appreciated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
I am personally in the process of raising capital and have already felt the effects of this. I talked to a possible investor, a financial adviser, yesterday and his response was "I'm sitting tight with my money right now". Of course, he was in the middle of receiving phone calls from many panicked investors, so it probably wasn't the best time for my dumb ass to touch base. I also heard from another party that is still interested and said "I am still interested, but all of my other contacts are sitting on their cash right now, as they are panicked about the economy."

It's always possible, or likely, that these are polite "No's", but I have had polite no's before and I get the feeling that this market is going to affect all of us raising capital.

I agree with the author when he says that angels invest when they are "feeling wealthy". Most angel types I know invest in internet/tech deals because it's just something different and want to be in on the action. I can't imagine this turmoil being a positive thing.
e-mail = sent!
How is this sentence wrong? Speed and velocity are two different concepts, and Seth's usage is perfectly cromulent.
To summarize:

Shit happens.
Actually, since the depression one could argue that they've may each bust since infinitely more bearable for a whole host of people.
It's not an exaggeration at all. I didn't say Portal, Psychonauts, Killer 7 (which I'm ashamed to say I haven't played), or Shadow of the Colossus aren't interesting or innovative, although your inclusion of Zelda, Final Fantasies, and Half-Life 2 makes me think that you're confusing "entertaining" and "artistically interesting." And I'm not looking down on games that are "just" entertaining.

Portal was an extremely fun and funny game. What does Portal say about the human condition and how does it use the mechanics of videogames to convey that meaning? In what way is this use of the mechanics new and exciting?

I'm not going to get into a full discussion of the ramifications of Bioshock here, but they're not hard to come by. The game is far from flawless, but that's not the point. The point is that it uses the medium in a way that is fundamentally more purposeful than most games that people consider to be "great."

* Herein, a reference is made to a MASSIVE Bioshock SPOILER *

When Ryan reveals that the protagonist has been under Fontaine's control the entire time, and you look back at all the instances where your conditioning forced you to do something, it calls into question the very idea of freedom and choice in games. Because, while the game didn't compel you to perform those actions, the system (of the game rules and genre conventions) was set up so that you had to (unless you wanted to stop playing there, the meaning of which is the subject for another discussion). This forcing of your hand is itself a commentary on Objectivism and capitalist societies which put freedom first and foremost, but systematically pushes everyone to fill the economically "best" niche, a concept Ryan refers to as "the great chain." To reinforce this connection, you'll notice that the protagonist has a tattoo of the chain on his wrist. His wrists are literally chained by "the great chain" which in this case is a metaphor for the game's rules.

* SPOILERS over *

Now, before anyone tells me to get a life: I have a life. I make videogames.

Before you tell me that the game designers didn't intend this and I'm reading too much into it: I don't care about authorial intention. Lots of people have made art that they themselves didn't understand. If you doubt that, look for homosexual undertones in Victorian literature.

Aside from that, I welcome responses.
NASA patents to be auctioned
merryl = substr('merrill', 0, 4) . strrev(substr('lynch', 0, 2))
My experience from a decade in manufacturing is that people and copmanies can also be "competent" (using it in the sense of this article) at the process of improvement. That is to say not only do they have reliable, repeatable processes for the tasks they do every day, they also have reliable repeatable processes for improving those things.
Using the example from the article, if the contractor was also competent at the improvement process, they would have the ability to experiment in a controlled way with new ways of doing things, and a repeatable process to apply lessons learned from those experiments to ensure that the next time they attempt something they improve on it.

Being competent DOES NOT mean you have to be hidebound.
Can't believe this wasn't posted here. It's been over a day since it was posted on slashdot. Anyways, this a very good opportunity for _real_ startups to get their hands on some advanced technology. It's very cool that NASA is doing something like this. If i had some funding, I'd for sure be at that auction.

Any startups plan on being there?
The biggest problem with this field is that most undergraduate-level teachers really don't have the passion required to research free replacements for the textbooks recommended to them by the publishers associated with the university.

I think students in each faculty should rally together and really push this point and work with the professors to find alternatives to 200$ textbooks..

The financial strain that textbook publishers place on students for profit inhibits the learning that their textbooks are supposed to stimulate... That's the big irony.
Top 25 (Non-Obvious) Ways RSS Can Make Your Life Easier
Here are 25 applications, sites and ideas that can help you make the most of RSS. There are tons of little ways you can use RSS feeds to help you make your daily tasks, errands and life in general a little easier.
I just hope a bunch of trolls don't show up and then use what they get to keep people from building anything for the next 14 years.
Panda: Open Source Video Platform For Websites
60+ Open Courseware Collections to Help You Be a Better Teacher
With open courseware, however, you can learn about a wide range of topics, from classroom behavior to using the latest technologies at your own pace. Check out these 60 places.
Interesting classification. But I wouldn't put the answer/view count in crap. Otherwise there is no way of judging/weighing the answers and its usefulness.
So, as someone who has been a Mac user since before it was fashionable, I greet this kind of stuff with skepticism. I lived through the OS X transition - yeah 10.0. People are all talking about how certain things look off in Vista and how it can be a resource hog, but 10.0 was worse.

10.0 took forever to load on brand new hardware. Want to launch a web browser? Got a minute? Want to minimize that window, please hang on. Everyone on Mac message boards was complaining and many hoped Apple would just go back to the OS 9 codebase. Plus, since Aqua (the OS X interface) had such different dimensions from Platinum (the OS 9 interface), nothing lined up right even if they were native OS X apps. 10.1 helped a bit with the speed issue, but things still didn't look right and Windows XP ran circles around it in most cases.

It was painful. I mean, I have been using Macs since the LC & Quadra days and 10.0 just sucked. But it turns out they were just growing pains. Today, OS X is awesome. I'm amazingly happy with it and its future, but it wasn't so bright a year or two in. 10.3 was really the breakout release IMO and it was 10.4 that started attracting the hackers in droves.

I've used Apple eMates more than I've used Vista so I might just be full of crap, but while most current Mac users were on the sidelines for the OS X 10.0 growing pains, I was in the thick of it and I can say that Vista is a ton better than 10.0 was. Of course, we are nearing the two-year anniversary for Vista and that's about when 10.3 came out. . . Maybe Microsoft isn't able to smooth out the rough edges quickly enough.
Adobe AIR launches on Linux
We Need Platform Plays That Don’t Wobble
"The flip side of this is for application developers to realize that unless a platform has set rules in place, then they’re building their products not on firm ground, but on quicksand."

+1 Open Web
So is google worthless?

Let's see here. Google pays no dividends, is probably to large to be bought, won't be allowed to merge for antitrust reasons, and if it behaves like other Silicon Valley companies that came and went, will spend every last penny before acknowledging defeat (which granted, is a long way off).

Unless Google pays dividends at some point (which Silicon Valley companies usually do not do), then yes, it's stock is worthless. That's exactly what I'm saying. Its stock buys and sells at $441.41 as of my writing this, but is intrinsically worthless.
after hearing feedback from everyone on hacker news and other places, i’ve decided to pull this post as it was misinformed and inflammatory. sorry if i made you mad!
Very interesting, thanks for posting this.
To summarize:

Shit.
-1 points by ideamonk for freedom of imaginitive speech.
Talking a lot has nothing to do with being a good communicator.
Mr. Graham-Cummings,

Amen. Kindly forward a similar letter to the IEEE and ACM.

Regards,

aswanson
Control is one thing. As far as I can tell, although files are encrypted, DropBox have the encryption keys, which means the encryption isn't particularly effective for protecting my files. I realise that this is necessary for the web frontend to work.

I'd consider using a DropBox-like service with solid encryption all the way through and no (or only a partial) web frontend, but in its current form, I'm not touching it.
Video about GM Volt battery system
As a customer, I will not use a system with "growing pains", unless it gave me some huge benefit. If they are unable to make it stable, at least make it great while it runs.
Not to be too negative, but I think it might be a bit ambitious to get someone with no technical background up to speed on the entire web development lifecycle quickly. Being an effective web project manager is software project management; it just happens to be client/server software with a very, very large installed base of clients.

I would focus less on specifics of servers and implementation languages, and more on numbers 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9. If he can focus on the information architecture, usability, and overall project workflow, a decent design and engineering team can support him in the rest.
Generating Analog Voltage with Digital Circuit
This method requires having a number of microcontroller pins available to be used for this specific task only. It is a very cheap method, as it only requires a few resistors of two different values only. The circuit shown in Figure 1 depicts an 8-bit DAC built around the available pins of the microcontroller using 2kOhm and 1kOhm resistors. To simplify the Bill of Materials, you could also use only 1kOhm resistors, by using two of them in series instead of each 2kOhm resistor.
This just in: auto industry claims that manufacturing is at the heart of US industry. Chemical industry claims that materials science is at the heart of US industry. And so on. This is a lobbying group we're talking about; remember that.
You have to take into consideration the author is a sales guy and not an operations guy. The problem for a sales guy is, "how do I get my prospective customer to take a risk and shake things up by buying my product?"

An operations guy would read it a lot differently, because it seems to be implying that you have to choose between predictability and innovation.

As any operations guy knows, the reason Toyota etc. are consistent and innovative is because they have gradual continuous improvement throughout the company, led from the bottom-up by the employees themselves.

As you can see, Seth has heard of the term "Six Sigma", but I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means. Not his fault, I wouldn't ask Deming for sales advice either.

At the end of the day what I took from it is the old message: "what made you successful in the past is not guaranteed to make you successful in the future", and a lot of people and companies have trouble letting go and trying something new.
All DjangoCon 2008 videos:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=djangocon+2008
Unfortunately, organizations have a much higher Young's modulus than languages.
bloated

4 gigs of DRAM costs less than $100, today. Who cares if software is bloated?
Except for people with PowerPC OSX systems.
I agree, and I should have mentioned that easy credit is an even bigger problem than government bailouts.
In the middle of All Marketers are Liars, Seth plays a little trick on his readers (paraphrased):

"I'll let you in on a little secret. I didn't really write this book. I paid a ghostwriter to do it while I took a vacation to Tahiti. Then my publisher slapped my name on the front so it would sell more copies.

"...Just kidding. But you reacted differently to this book, didn't you, knowing that I didn't write it. You thought you were getting one of Seth Godin's books, but instead, you got one by an anonymous ghostwriter. It changes the story you tell yourself about why you bought the book, and that changes how you think about your purchase.

"That's the power of marketing."

Anyone remember Alanis Morrisette's song Ironic? It wasn't ironic at all - everything she sang about was just bad luck. But that was the meta-irony: she'd written a song called Ironic that wasn't irony at all.

I think a lot of Seth Godin's writing is the same way. The "product" is crap. But it's exceptionally well-marketed crap, so people spread it around anyway. The message is in the medium, not the message itself. Look at it as meta-writing.

I see that in a lot of his writing. This article was a barely coherent stream-of-consciousness. And yet here it is on the front page of Hacker News. You commented on it. I commented on it. I may've ascribed meaning to it that wasn't even there in the first place. But that's the point. He got people talking.

Same goes for his FastCompany article that's currently #1 on Hacker News. He took a risk, just as he advised people to do. He spoke on topics that he's not competent in, with a perspective that's just different enough from mainstream views to get people talking. And it worked - his article is #1 here. People talk about it. It got published in a major magazine.

Look at what Seth does, not what he says. What he says is almost always pure drivel. But it's pure drivel that works.
Ask HN: Entering a saturated market full of low quality competition?
I'm involved with a new startup company (http://anticlothes.com) and one of the main goals of the company is to take on the huge leaders in the field already, who the founder feels deliver almost insultingly low-quality products: Snorg Tees and BustedTees.

Our products are already receiving favorable reviews and compliments, most notably on the style and feel the brand has, and we only print our shirts on American Apparel shirts (regarded as the most comfortable tees you'll ever get your hands on).

My question is: What do you think about joining a particular industry where the competition is HUGE, but you feel it is sloppy and poorly run? Is there a chance, or is it a sort of situation where the odds are just too unfavorable?
I can see why this is a huge disappointment to the HN community since NASA isn't releasing it's new "social aggregation" technology.

-yawn- wake me up when Web 2.0 is over and people are ready to build _real_ software.
Totally agree. It is, in fact, the opposite. Over half of being a good communicator is being a good listener and that's often missed.

Yes, you have to be technically competent. Communicating clearly is a technical skill and if you fail it, it is like saying you're competent, except you know, with pointers.
"Good communication skills" go hand in hand with "easy to manage."
Don't conflate the business cycle with boom-bust. Business cycle downturns are inevitable, as misallocated resources are redirected. Big busts require government. There really aren't any examples of major boom-busts happening without the hand of government.
McCain helped create BlackBerry To Surf Al Gore's Internet
I'm in the same situation but only until Friday!

I gave my 2-week notice last week.

My morale went down while working for the company. I have always been told no on pretty much everything.

I'm unhappy. I told them about my situation but they never did anything.

For the past year, I hoped for things to change. But sometimes you have to be realistic. Developers can do a lot of good things but fixing the management is beyond what we can do.

All I can say is that you should leave too. Your morale or spirit is down right now. Leave before you have none left.
Consumer engagement that matters
welcome back! So pretty interesting and novel idea. Do you think the amount of reps could really scale up over time? Oh, how much easier it might be to have someone bitch to fedex when my package is lost.
I've always used the word "professional." I think it captures it better.