skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm perfectly fine with hearing about the one or two things a year that Valleywag does right from other sources than having to put up with the constant crap from them.
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Here's a rundown of the groups that switched:

http://reason.com/blog/show/129262.html
"[...] and compare her to Hugo Chavez. Guess what? The imbecile wasn't that far off..."

To me that line makes him own the journalists's remarks about Chavez.
The main difference is the four days in between that has allowed insiders to buy up quality stock that was free-falling and that will presumably recover now.
I'm familiar with some of the strengths of Erlang, but the slides look like they're written from the point of view of someone that likes Erlang and was looking for a way to justify rewriting Delicious in it, rather than explaining what about Delicious made Erlang a wise choice for the task.
Ahem. No, it's not. The new system is MySQL for the datastore, a huge piece of C++ for the "backend" and PHP for the front end.

The script that copies the data from the old system to the new one is what they wrote in Erlang.
Yeah... Until people more to Oracle shared nothing RAC and then... problem solved.

Databases can scale. Just that the ones which do currently cost on the order of several million USD/yr. When that changes, the stigma associated with them will go.

PS. Well designed concurrency (ie. PostgreSQL MVCC and not MySQL MyISAM) does not create false data dependencies unless those are in the table constraints.
I'm not sure I'd say "New Delicious was rewritten in Erlang" is an accurate title here. More like "certain subsystems of Delicious were rewritten in Erlang." As far as I know no one (or at least hardly anyone) is actually writing web-applications themselves in Erlang, they're picking off the subsystems that fit the language's sweet spot.
Branching is pretty easy in Subversion as long as you're using 1.5.x.
Heh... I wasn't expecting a keyboard layout complaint as much as a left-handedness complaint, since the latter is bigger problem for more of today's users.

But as I presume you are someone arguing for a more ergonomic layout, I assume you can appreciate Photoshop's ergonomically fortuitous default choices. And as you are someone who likely knows how to remap a keyboard, I assume you are already capable of relocating a shortcut key to an appropriate location and making up an alternate mnemonic to match whatever letter is already there.
If anything ought to be written about the D2 project, it would an illustrated guide to dysfunctional engineering processes.
I don't know anything inside or specific but I have read some books on buffet. He invests in good companies that are below market rates. His generally buys companies that have sound financials and will continue to make money. He also likes companies that make simple products (razor blades, furniture, not technology : ).

Buffet has gone on record multiple times (cnn, print interviews) saying he would be the person who buys the mortgages from the banks and resales them later if he could get a 700 billion dollar or comparable loan.

The mortgages are current artificially low because everyone is scared. If you can buy them low and sell them once the fear is gone, you could make a ton of money.

People will make money on this situation, the government will completely mess up some aspects of this, articles will be written 'exposing' all the problems.
The nation's control over its form of government goes beyond voting. All people have the government they deserve.
or misrepresent us?
"This includes files. So you can't host that 1.2MB PDF you want to offer for download as part of your site."

This is what the static directory is for.

But in spirit I agree that the 1MB limit is troublesome...let's just make sure we get the facts straight.
Any patent that has a little squiggly blob labeled "internet" in the picture should be automatically denied.
openid support would be nice, but I love the idea.
Good link, but the commentary there is just as bad as on this site.
"Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere."

This statement raises a few questions about the Oracle sales process.
someone that likes Erlang ... what made Erlang a wise choice for the task

You've just answered your own question. You can solve every problem in every programming language -- as long as you like what you're doing. If you pick a langauge you like and a project you like, it will probably get done.
Well, like you wouldn't want to read Paul Krugman's or Tyler Cowen's opinions on programming languages, most people here don't have much that's truly insightful to say about economics and finance, with the exception, perhaps, of economics as related to software. I guess there are a few people who work or have worked as quants and know more than a thing or two about finance, but how much insight does that give you into the system as a whole, which is what broke?

This remains the best thing I've ready so far, in terms of something brief and at the same time thoughtful:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...
Concurrency is one of BDB's strongest points. (As for networking connectivity, BDB has an RPC server which works pretty well, although I'd personally probably roll something higher-level and stick that in front of the actual database.)
I'm not in a (physical) position to quote the numbers used, but I was one of the first people to buy the app and have a low serial number. I then got serial numbers and purchase dates from others to work out the intervals vs serial number increases (which we are assuming are sequential, as that seems to fit the pattern). Take numbers and multiply by usual license fee (not always applicable, but not a bad average).
So far as I know, no part of the operational system itself is in Erlang.
Thanks for comment the typo.
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Twitter / gopherteam
The TC article has much more substance than the ValleyWag one.
Cool, thanks for sharing:)
Thanks for pointing this out. Both TIFF and BMP should work just fine now.

Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Thanks. It's very informative to have the other side, as well.

Tragedy, all around, it seems.
Run Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) on a Dell Mini 9 - Howto
"as soon as something turns into a PR war, nobody is ever going to see the facts anyway" (at about 13:30)

I had this start to happen to me once with software. It was really, really horrible.

The video gets really sad towards the end. The Arc developer says "shareware wasn't really about the money, it was about the mail", meaning fan-mail - that turned to hate-mail.

It seems like this guy had the same attitude to software as Phil Katz - that it was emotionally very important to him, as a way of being appreciated.
What a tremendous crapfest this promises to be. I'm praying they have a live comment stream updated via SMS.
I was wondering about that...I remember shortly after your acquisition there were a number of job postings for C++ programmers on your blog.
Anyone who has ever tried to debug a random piece of software, and guessed wrong about the cause has imagined a pattern that wasn't really there. Especially when you are looking at sporadic concurrency bugs and other psuedo unpredictable issues.
Do founders actually do this? I'd never even heard of such a thing.

I imagine the investor is getting extra equity to make up for this (since the investment is less desirable due to it) so the deferred salary probably be less than the founder would get in a liquidity event if he had just hung on to the extra equity. And it there's no liquidity event, he's not getting it anyway.
Well... static files aren't writeable, and there is also a limit on their size as well.
SGN’s Wii-like Golf And Bowling Games Both Top Ten iPhone Apps
(1) Really? I'd never heard of this.
(2) No startup CEOs I know get that.
(4) True, but what he says is mainly just common sense.

Maybe it's because I went through the good end of Silicon Valley that I didn't know these sorts of things happen.
Accounting fraud is exactly what will make this whole thing degenerate into a transfer of wealth. Think about it, they can cook the capital ratios so that not only the bonds, but now even those CDS's that they have are worth X, when they would fetch Y at market. This gives them more liquidity, yes. But it is an illusion. Those CDS's are still as precarious as they were before, so are the now revalued bonds that they carry. Nothing changes, except the balance book. Add to this a guaranteed market for these assets, the taxpayer and surely you must see the potential for fraudulent profit taking in this scenario.

Early indications that a bank needs to be looked at comes to the FDIC because people with more than $100000 start moving excess money to different banks. FDIC starts to look at them, and that is where the lowest form of all quants comes in. The "shorter". They get wind. I don't know how, but you and I both know it always happens, and the bank's stock starts a death spiral. Putting more pressure on their capital ratios, which have to factor in cheap stock now. Also, in fractional reserve banking, the fees charged by the FDIC to the banks SHOULD depend on the amount that the FDIC is insuring accounts for. There is NOTHING in the bill about raising fees. I'm sure we can all imagine that fees will probably not be raised, as the idea is to help with liquidity, not hinder it. So right there the banks just got something for nothing in terms of insurance. Helping their financial position appear safer.

Maybe we are talking about two different things. Could you please explain why you believe this does not help the banks to appear financially healthy longer?

If you consider $150 billion a 'drop in the bucket' then salud! I think $150 billion here, $150 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money. Consider the possibility that you believe it to be a small amount because you agree with this bill. What if we gave $150 billion to fund welfare? How about we give $150 billion to fund the salaries of H1B workers? Or we blow $150 billion on 2 toilets for stealth bombers? Is it still a drop in the bucket?
I've always thought that deferred comp was a long shot at amounting to anything. It rarely pans out.

I've gone for the "founders never earn more than anyone else" approach through several startups and I've found that it works well. Sometimes, at the start, it means the founders earn $0 or need to infuse cash to pay others. But the benefits for the team are great. Of course, this assumes the founders can afford to do it.
I reckon Facebook is pretty well established now. I don't think one resignation is going to hurt it too much.
For those that don't see what I mean Jon Stewart explains it best himself.

From his appearance on CNN's crossfire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmj6JADOZ-8
SSL support is deal breaker for me.
“a system and method for locating and notifying a user of a person, place or thing having attributes matching the user’s stated preferences.”

This is an inevitability, not an innovation. They probably have a patent on holographic GPS, or HDTV-smartphone applications too...they just can't get them to work.
100,000 processors is a big-sounding number, but it might be less interesting than the glue holding them together in this case. The dedicated 10Gbps pipe allows much more interesting problems to be solved than a traditional grid computer (unless the grid computer uses P2P).

One of the biggest problems that we always face with big grid computers is that we either need computations that can be broken up into very small parts and have very high compute/io ratios - or else we send bigger chunks of data with VERY long computations to the grid nodes.
Do you know if the prizes were claimed?
Sticky Note Experiment by EepyBird
Verisign Acquires .Name Guys
Ask Hackers/Entrepreneurs: How are/will you change(ing) the world?
Most entrepreneurs will tell you that they want to "improve the design". Changing the world. Such a noble cause. So if you do not mind (and do not be humble and/or shy) can you please tell how you are or will change the world (or part of it)?
That same sentence stuck a chord with me too. We all know it's true: perception trumps reality. In this case the guy had to chose between fighting a PR war (which he didn't want to do - he wanted to win on merit) or losing everything he worked so hard for. Harsh.

Don't get me started on hate-mail. People see it as a joke, as a bit of harmless fun. But vicious letters can do very real damage. Look at what happened to Kathy Sierra and so many others...
Interesting note - I don't know if it's a typo in the article or not, but 15PB/year is less than one CD per second, not the 6 CDs per second the article states.

If the numbers in the article are correct, they might be combining or selecting parts of the data on the fly meaning there might be more relevance later on when the data distribution technology catches up with the data the LHC is producing.

The dedicated 10Gbps pipe mentioned elsewhere can handle the 15PB/year, but not the full 6CDs/second mentioned here.

Very impressive regardless. :)
"We can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie."

What a terrible thing to say about someone who is dead, regardless of whether they stole anything.
Only if you don't know the book. Even then, I explained it in the next line (single point of vulnerability).

But I can see that if you read the first sentence in isolation, and didn't know about the book, it could be interpreted as rude. It wasn't meant as rude. I'm sorry that it came across as offensive to you, and so I clarified in my follow up.

BTW: They're excellent books (the second in the series is best IMO).
How well does MySQL Cluster work; anyone have experience? Are there any other free (as in beer as well as freedom) in-memory databases?
I was intrigued by that, too.

However, iPhone share is growing quicker and it's going to be slightly embarrassing when the iPhone passes Linux in market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Allegations_of_har...
Not much to do with entrepreneurship, but I have been part of a group for the past 5 years that teaches at-risk youth about college and general success/happiness in life. We volunteer directly with about 500 kids a year and regularly hear success stories about them pursuing their dreams.
if you can't beat them in the market... ligitate and extort
I read once a quote, I think by some senator in the 1800's, who responded to someone's attack on a man who had just died by saying : "Sir, when God puts his hands on another man, I take mine off."

That's a bad paraphrase, but the original quote was pretty good.
That's her.

What happened? She got death threats because she said something about bloggers having the right to moderate/delete comments. From what I gather, somebody posted an anti-Sierra message and then a bunch of people (who didn't even know her) started harassing her. It makes no sense.

Quote:

It's not clear what provoked such a vitriolic response to Sierra. She attributes it to comments she made a year ago in support of bloggers' rights to delete comments on their own blogs.

Reaction to Sierra's announcement was swift and polarizing, with many people remarking on the viciousness of the commentary, and others defending the original posts on meankids.org as non-threatening satire.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/kathysierra
I've always wanted to do more to "change the world", but I've found that I am ineffective/unmotivated to do so through direct actions via volunteering. I've tried and I'm not good at it. My wife and I used to have many discussions about this (she's much better at the direct help actions than me).

After I had a nice startup exit in 2001, I found that I could try to change the world (or at least things I can see around me) much better through directed donations and angel investing. That lets me broaden my effect without doing the parts that I am not good at doing. I still like the startup game too. :)
Have any of you guys installed some decent pdf reader on an OLPC? Any suggestions?
Maybe we're talking about startups at different stages. I'm sure an angel-funded startup doesn't pay anyone 175k. But post- major-label A round? Yeah, I'm going to stand by my assertion. The VP/Sales may get that too, pre- varcomp.

I wish I could give you specific examples of founders I know got deferred comp; I can't, because it's none of my business to name names. The legend of deferred comp was not just pulled out of someone's ass. It's being blogged about because people ask for it, and people ask for it because some people have gotten it.

Again: don't take VC at all. Then this stuff doesn't matter.
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It's amazingly difficult to make a game that gets traction these days because of all of the competition, but it is definitely getting easier to make money without license fees and subscriptions if you manage to hit paydirt. There is a gold rush going on to start new game companies and make new games to run from the browser (java or flash mostly - maybe Silverlight too in the future). The newer games are getting more and more sophisticated and free to play.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think there is a window right now where indies can get pretty far with a low-budget game before this new space is completely swamped.
"... I was hoping for an insight into some cool algorithm they use, instead I get a piece of puffery ..."

If you want to read about the precise, analytical technology that by and large has been solved - yesterdays news then try Cal Hendersons blog ~ http://iamcal.com/talks Hendo has some excellent talks on massive scaling, unicode filtering, how to build cheap & fast, etc. If you want to read about the messy, yet to be solved problems that could really use a technological hand this is the type of article you should be reading.

Once the most of the easier technical problems are solved you are left with the hard ones to solve ones. Well written stories like this one about those "messy, hard to predict humans" and their complex interactions in Web Apps as big as Flickr are unexplored territory. Read here for more on this thread:

- http://thomashawk.com/2008/10/use-swear-word-in-private-emai...

- http://digg.com/arts_culture/Potty_mouthery_deletion_at_Flic...

- http://yaniv.golan.name/blog/2008/09/22/you-may-or-may-not-b...
"if history is any indication, corporations can always cook their book if they really want to"

Right. So why bother with accounting standards at all? They're just going to break the rules anyway....
It is par for the course for "seasoned" startup executives to get paid $175K+.

When you see a random website with $20M in funding, and you think "what do they do with $20M?" What they do with the $20M is overpay a bunch of serial startup execs.
This beta state is taking too long. And there isn't much communication. I dropped out a month ago and consider all those working hours as time wasted.

Don't get me wrong, they are giving a fantastic opportunity to long tail sites with a free service. It's just not for what I need. My under $10 a month web hosting gives me 400GB/1TB and python as cgi for low volumes, clustered and with 99.8% uptime.

Amazon might have downtime but they have been up and running for a while. And have a pricing system. Google needs to catch up fast.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/03/31/sierra/index...

It's a kind of trolling. I can see that violent sexual threats could really get to you - I've never experienced that. But I want to share something I found about trolls:

Trolls used to be able to get to me, by combining factual argument with their vitriolic, because I found it hard to separate the two. But I discovered that by ignoring the factual part, and just reading the vitriolic, it just sounded so ridiculously childish and nutty that it didn't affect me. It exposed where they were coming from - and then I could assess the factual part separately. However, I choose to not have anything to do with such people, since they're not actually that interested in the factual argument anyway, even if it's true. Life is too short.
I don't know of strong evidence either way. The fact that I think the article has no bearing on reality doesn't mean that I know what the reality actually is. I'm not sure what the best estimator of intelligence is -- perhaps the amount of time taken to pick up a completely alien concept -- but I've never seen an article thats convinced me of the changeability of intelligence in one way or another.
Kiva.org to start. Need to think about the "will" part.
Do believe that mental exercise has no effect whatsoever on mental ability?

You can definitely increase your ability. I don't think that's necessarily the same as changing your intelligence. I think the derivative of ability may be intelligence though -- ie, the rate at which you can increase your mental ability, as opposed to the level of ability. I also think that the increase in ability is probably asymptotic, and intelligence could affect the point at which it becomes extremely difficult to increase your ability.
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"Brides are always beautiful, babies are always cute, and the dead were always kind."
Was the Yahoo/Google deal a ploy to weaken Yahoo?
At TimeSvr, we want to take advantage of the quality/price arbitrage between developed and developing countries to help busy people save time and get things done everyday. Noble? If we can get people to free up 15 - 30 minutes a day, that's almost between 2 and 4 hours per week they can spend doing something/with someone they love.
Fring brings Skype and other VoIP services to iPhone
"Everything that can be invented, has been invented"? ;-)

I agree with your point about SaaS, that people are tied to you. It stops piracy; and repeat sales are the norm. Theoretically, you could achieve the same by renting software - but it doesn't seem to work in practice (and doesn't stop piracy).

But one solution is to make a product into SaaS in an odd sense: that you keep releasing new versions - so the "service" you are selling is your on-going development. The ideal need for your software to meet therefore becomes one that can never be fully met, so that each improvement you make is needed. This differs from my perfectionistic urge to pick a problem that I can solve perfectly, and instead pick one that can't be solved.

In my software business, I experience the odd effect that when a new problem needs to be solved, people come out of the woodwork to buy it - as if they'd been using it without buying it. Before that they didn't have any problem, and so hadn't needed to contact me. Or is there a more probable and less cynical explanation?

This solution is not as good as SaaS, because you have to keep working. :-( But in SaaS, you also have to keep working, or the competition catches up. And that's a much more serious problem if the competition is free...
As far as I know, this is the only counterexample that has come up in the months since the ban. I think that not being able to submit this one Valleywag story is a small price to pay to have kept dozens of crappy stories off the front page.
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As of today, I have it on good authority the live-streaming is not through YouTube technologies.