skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can someone explain to me how Sun even makes any money at all?
So wear a coat (and a scarf and gloves). If you're on a bike, your blood is pumping, and you're probably generating far more heat than the people sitting in cars waiting for the windshield to defrost.

I've biked through four or five Michigan winters so far. It's really not a big deal if you dress sensibly.
Yes, it is generally true. There is not a big dependence on flight speed because the inlet on jet engines slows down the flow before it enters the engine. So even though an airliner might be flying at Mach 0.85, the face of the engine only sees about Mach 0.3. The reason the duct improves the thrust of the engine is because it reduces the pressure losses (improves efficiency). A fan (or any stage in the engine compressor) increases the pressure of the air. Since air moves from high pressure to lower pressure, the air that you just pressurized wants to sneak back around to the front of the fan around the tips. By putting a duct around the fan, you help keep air from sneaking back and robbing you of the work that you just did on it. In fact, the efficiency that you gain is highly dependent on the clearances between the duct and the tip of the fan. A lot of work goes into reducing these clearances as much as possible. You can imagine that that is a non-trivial task since the parts of the engine expand and contract based on temperature, and also vibrate and have dynamic structural behavior.
Paul, I think you are wrong with that one.
Who would lend NOW a bunch of (IT) guys money for a startup. A bank ?!?! No! Rather the mob.
The reason why Viaweb/MS/Apple were succesfull is that they invented / did stuff that didn't existed at that point. You /They created a market where there was none. Back in these days there was a small amount of technology and a small group of people who understood it. Nowadays it's much tougher with competition from anywhere and anyone has access to loads of information and technology.
Regards, Anes
I have been very tempted to buy one of these..If you're interested in the Arduino project, you have to check out
http://www.freeduino.org/ .Contains a host of info on the Arduino board.
Ironscheme 1.0 beta. Scheme on the .NET Framework
Who would buy software from these guys?
That's a lot of horsepower.
Ars reviews the 2008 MacBook Pro
Part II is here:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/2008-macbookpro-revi...
Summary of the article:

Premise - The media created a near universally-held belief that people went crazy over "The War of the Worlds". Conclusion - The media don't really affect us that much.

Here's another entertaining look at three different radio broadcasts of "The War of the Worlds" and its influence on "The Blair Witch Project":

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/07
Why should django deal with subdomains. Just use mod_rewrite or whatever your server offers to map your internal urls. myname.mydomain.com -> mydomain.com/myname/
Our company almost exclusively buys Sun hardware to run our services...and we pay them an absolute fortune for it as well.
One more http://web.archive.org/web/20041012081327/http://www.bagley....
I'm not particularly convinced of Apple's good will.

Speaking of the 80ies, Apple is the one that wanted to control both the OS and the hardware (still true today, from phones to computers), and Apple is the one that sued MS over 'look & feel' issues.
They keep buying companies and hoping for "synergy". StorageTek you can excuse, since the real purchase was the patent protection it got them from NetApp and others. MySQL makes little to no sense from my perspective.

Sun, my advice is to put all your "wood" behind three arrows: Solaris OS, Java programming language and tools, Sun hardware (SPARC and x64). Forget everything else no matter how tempting.
Are You a Hustler?
I would assume you would set up a subscription based service where the first month is free and every month after that is a certain fee. This would all be setup with the payment gateway of choice, such as Authorize.net. You would set it up in a manner that would allow the customer to have the first month free, and then Authorize.net would charge their credit card every month for whatever fee you set up. Authorize.net would be responsible for making sure the credit card is valid and processing the payment.
McCain and Obama Unite on H1B Issue
Nice. Saw those the other day, including one DIY version, and it looks like a good idea.
What's also interesting is how it will affect what airliners look like. These engines pose a very significant problem for integration onto an aircraft. Projected diameters for an engine of this type range from 12-17 feet. Compare this with a diameter of about 56-60 inches on a current high bypass engine as found on a 737.

Picture: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2006/05/09/2002983476...

Article: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/200...
Capital Perspective: East Cost VC Discusses the Opportunities of the Financial Crisis
People who have been living under a stone for the last ten years.

That press release sure is buzzword compliant. It even mentions Web 3.0!
where's the companion graph of how much money each of those people bring in to the university?
I can read passwords over someone's shoulder while they're being typed in. However, I usually look away to avoid temptation (University lecturer's root, etc).
If the main link isn't working try this one:

http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2008/10/21/sun-to-change-ticker...
5 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people
Ouch, aren't they dead yet?
Whenever I hear arguments like these one side always sounds like this:
"Oh yesyesyes everything is fine! No need to question anything! Oh no! You're questioning things! THAT'S CREATED A HUGE PROBLEM! Everything was perfect before you revealed... erhm... created, yes you created our problem!"

Despite the delayed expression, those tense situations ALREADY EXISTED! If you're not treating your people fairly , or if your people can't handle knowing someone else is valued more than them... guess what? You already have problems! Sure you can hide from the problems, but when they come to light, don't blame it on the truth. The truth could have helped you avoid these problems, if you made sure everyone was honest and understood things (and could handle the truth!) to begin with. That's how "The truth will set you free."
3 oil countries face a reckoning
Picasso would say that I'm not counting the decades Jerry spent building himself up to the point where he could earn this payday, nor am I counting the years Tom spent doing the same.
It's much cleaner to have it taken care of in Django than through mod_rewrite. For one all of your URL routing will still work. In your setup using {% url %} or reverse() wouldn't work.
This known vector has been around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST
He certainly won't be less in three years.
Americans Shouldn’t Worry About the Bailout…
Success depends on a strong mind vs a strong body. A combination of the two would also work, as long as the emphasis is still on the mind.
> What is the advantage of not facing this question? I would rather know (and learn from it) than not know at all.

So we know the disadvantages: social strife, perhaps feelings of personal inadequacy, friction with your supervisors.

So why then, do I also have to justify the opposing side? Things are difficult enough right now with the integration pains of moving into Microsoft. Let me be the first to tell you it is not easy to go from the frenetic and dedicated full, sustained sprint of a startup like Powerset to the slower, bureaucratic pace of Microsoft.

We all know some people were more valuable than others. But to get the full and absolute dollar-amount measure of it hurts some people's feelings. You can say you'd rather know, but that's you making a decision for yourself. The unfortunate part of Tom's story is that he decided for everyone at the company, and that has some people miffed. You can say it's emotional and irrational, and that's probably true. That doesn't make it less real.

> I think this is a very interesting take away point - always have something to walk away to.

This is absolutely true, and I also drove up my retention price by making it clear I had opportunities to walk away to. The instant I heard about the MS offer process I immediately applied for several jobs. When it came time to listen to Microsoft's offer, I already had two other offers on the table (one from a stealth startup and one from EngineYard), and I made sure my supervisors knew (in general terms) what I was looking at.
Today is Global Anti-Piracy Day | TechJaws
Look, no one can dispute that some people are more valuable than others. I'm sure you can name someone you know who should be paid more than you for your line of work.

The point is, this can be tough to deal with when nerves are already a little ragged from the non-trivial process of decelerating your life from startup speed to Microsoft speed, and fitting into a new company where your role and plans are far less certain.
How universal do you find these salaries are? I imagine they would vary a great deal by the size of the startup. Is that the case or not?
If this leads to being able to have a "Streamable" song at a real rate of .10 - and is the new barrier for buying for other services (apple, yahoo music, napster) etc. then yes revolutionary -
Tech workers: Ready to be a free agent?
Also, am I the only one worried about the whole "Gives you a web copy of music on your hard drive" deal?

This seems like a great way to get data on possible infringers. "Well, this user has a 50gb library of mp3s. No way that's legal. Lets fire off an infringement notice to this IP."

And don't pretend this couldn't ever happen.
The combination of open source hardware and software is very exciting. Especially if someone can create viable home fab.
Android code now available
How much flexibility do funders have to renegotiate terms on the fly? In general, I think we should remember that startups should be as interested in the profitability of VC funds as much as anyone, but some of this seems a little extreme. Very thorough article, though.
Android Code Is Finally Released Into The Open-Source Wild
Considering researchers have been able to read CRTs without looking at them by Van Eck phreaking, and more recently even get LCDs (http://www.omninerd.com/news/TEMPEST_Attack_on_LCD) it's not really even game changing for a realistically secured facility. http://www.tscm.com/TSCM101tempest.html is a primer, and http://cryptome.org/nsa-tempest.htm is an in-depth guide, if you think it's worth your time and money to mitigate this kind of vulnerability.
I have been drinking his kool-aid since I read bootstrappers bible

http://www.changethis.com/8.BootstrappersBible
100+ Free Open Courseware Links for Web Designers
If you are a web designer and looking for some cool links on the web, your search ends here. Check out these useful free open courseware links for web designers.
Generating call graphs for Python code
There probably is a better solution - likely one involving some minimal human moderation paired with machine flagging, but the technical challenges don't make obscenity filters a bad idea. A young startup could face a make or break moment when its site starts attracting obscenity and thus repelling all its early users. This is clearly worse than having some odd misspellings. Consider the worst case scenario of implementing an obscenity filter and not doing so - the decision becomes quite clear, it would seem.
Nah, he's saying that trips are usually made in the company of one or more persons, and that those persons are on foot. Thus the total trip time is composed of unlocking, travelling at a walking pace, then re-locking. This is true, in my experience, but isn't a very good argument against making bicycles available to everyone for free.
(alternatively, if you're rolling in dough, try something like the Xtracycle which can carry passengers and cargo)
New Bailout Plan - $700B to go to Startups.  YC on steroids.
Of course, for months and months after 9/11 you really heard about little else on the news, and it was understood that everyone was in a dizzy panic over terrorism. In fact, I've never met anybody worried about terrorism, and even directly after 9/11, almost no one had much to say about it.
game on! i've played with the iphone sdk and just the process to get started with android is simpler than apples offering. i just dont see how apple can be so closed in their sdk when they have this massive competition staring them in the face. dont get me wrong, i have an iphone and am even called, dare i say, an apple fanboy. but please apple, open up more! or else all your potential devs will bring the cool toys out for android and screw you again like you were screwed when all the apps came out for windows first.

i mean, does anyone really remember why windows beat mac 10-20 years ago? i really think it was because at that time, windows was a better development platform. they had more killer apps. it wasnt the hardware. apple - dont make the same mistake twice!
Excellent - now all I need is something to run it on. It would be good to see it ported as an alternate OS for a couple of existing smart phones.
Sobering news dept: The Hobbesian world of startups
Good article with quite a list of 'free things'. Surprised it missed putting Skype on your mobile (cell phone) - especially useful for international collaborations.
Capitalism will succeed only when race to the bottom is prevented in rest of the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
I'm under the impression open sourcing android isnt meant for the development masses. The code has some elements that I'm sure will be picked out to make development easy. But I dont think your average application developer is going to be diving into kernal code.
Make Your Own iPhone/Android Apps With New App Generator
How Much Do You Pay for Web Apps?
ASUS CEO Reveals Eee PC Sales Numbers, Plans for Touch Eee PCs
I still manage to get spam from China on a site with subdomains. It would actually be a feature if I could easily block all of China.
It would be even better to see it ported for the older ARM CPU in the Openmoko Neo's. Then you'd have truly-free hardware for your free/open-source Google Android. Win-win!
I like the idea that the internet of things will be built with a diversity of agendas.
Wow! That article was fantastic! My best bud worked for Asterisk for a while, so I knew how to get cheap VoIP. Just order that switching line from the telco.

I didn't even know there was an OSS alternative to VMware/MS Server! Again, great stuff!

I bookmarked this page and I'm forwarding it to my partners as I write this.
They did include google apps. Look at "He’s no longer the Richest Man in the World" again.

Some businesses like keeping their data internal. There's nothing wrong with running your own SMTP server. Personally, I'm not exactly thrilled with Google's choice to make email into "conversations." Plus, how much control do you have over your data if it's in Google's hands?

Ever heard of Hula?
Augmented Sales « Augmented Reality Blog
Agreed. A single look at a performance chart for MySQL under simultaneous transaction load shows it crumbling under. Furthermore, it has had substandard ACID support and substandard ANSI SQL support for generations and these problems are just starting to get fixed. Using MySQL as an indicator for the rest of the industry is deeply misguided.
Do startups normally have bonuses?
Seven Archetypal Software Projects
"I hear the sound of a thousand business models crumbling."
Deaths per passenger mile is the stat that air travel happens to achieve spectacular figures for, so of course it's the stat that the airlines have always touted as evidence for the safety of flying.

In some ways, though, it's a silly measurement. In many (most?) cases, flying and driving are not equivalent alternatives. You can't drive to Hawaii and you can't buy a ticket on Northwest to the grocery store. A comparison of the deaths-per-passenger-mile stats for those two trips only sounds meaningful.
Apple’s next act: Changing PC buying habits
Finally, some fucking compromising/agreeing.

If only they could "unite" to cut waste, reduce spending, protect privacy and lower taxes. Baby steps I suppose.
This wouldn't work, for the same reason that the subprime derivatives bubble collapsed. If you increase the amount of funding available to people, then more marginal teams/ideas/homeowners get funded. The actual success rate will be far lower than the historical 1 in 10, because the driving factors of success (having a market and sufficient technical ability to go after that market) remain constant, yet the pool of people going after success increases.

Same effect as the dot-com boom, or the Web2.0 boomlet.

If I were to craft a bailout plan with those $700B, I'd do it like this: $400B to go towards undergrad scholarships and graduate research fellowships for science & engineering fields; $200B to be spent directly on basic research; and $100B as a venture fund for entrepreneurs pursuing wildly ambitious ideas based on emerging technologies.

Currently, there's a glut of Ph.Ds and inadequate research funding, so many physics & math Ph.Ds end up working on Wall Street. This is a huge waste of talent; instead of performing basic research that could expand the capabilities of the human race, they waste their time shuffling money around. $200B could fund between 500k-1M new professors. Imagine the potential breakthroughs they could discover.

1M professors is definitely more than the pool of qualified Ph.Ds, so $400B goes toward increasing that pool. This could fund 2.5M college educations, or 5M man-years of graduate school stipends. Combined with increased research funding for after they finish their Ph.D, this would make grad school more attractive relative to law or business school - the old "default options" for bright young individuals who don't know what they want to do with their lives. Imagine if everyone said "I want to be a physicist" instead of "I want to be a lawyer".
I like the don't be a douche clause. If only more laws were that clear-cut.
I have to disagree with some of the thinking here. In my view, TIME is your most valuable resource, and anything that isn't a core competency you want to get out with as little investment of time as possible.

TWO DAYS of hacking spent (squandered?) building your own phone system? Really? Unless you have significant staff, how can that be remotely a reasonable return vs just using cell phones?

Many of the other suggestions are good ones, but don't get caught in the trap of "Just because I can do XXX which will save $Y, that I obviously should." If your core competency has something to do with phones, by all means hack away on your phone system.
I don't think anyone said that. But for something to be truly an adventure, safety or a sense of safety, will be compromised at certain points along the way.
Time is more valuable than anything.

Google Apps = better than any other email solution and free.

Also, please, if your smallbiz cannot aford a Campfire account, come one, what kind of business are you doing? IRC is not for everybody.
Is anyone else concerned that if all of the easy money in high tech is undercut then there won't be any more profits to fund continuing innovation? As neat as something like Arduino may be, it's not exactly cutting edge technology.
Hi,

I am the author of the article.

I agree that time is valuable, but if you charge yourself out at, say, £600 a day, and you save 4 grand building a phone switch in 2 days, it's an easy decision to make. It wasn't time squandered. I save money every time I need to make a change to the phone list, as I dont have to call out an engineer.

If you are a 2 person company, then there's obviously no point. We built our phone switch when we moved into our own offices and hired employee number 5, which I think was about the right time to do it.
"Across-the-board pay cut."

So, in this scenario you've got the suits making 2x-4x what the people who build the product are making, yet everyone is expected to take the same percentage cut in salary. (Nevermind the fact that the lower-ranking employees are probably just getting by!)

Remember how just a few weeks ago, everyone was complaining that CEO pay is drastically out of touch with performance? This is how it starts.
Yeah, you're right, but it's the difference between Apple running everything, from top to bottom, and an open system where all kinds of devices and uses can be found for the code.
The most interesting bit of information in the article is the firm belief that the economy tanking is good for Sun.

This was a big meme during .COM 1.0 because IT helps you save money, and your top worry during down times is saving money, hence:

Recession == IT boom!

Obviously good times are also an IT boom!

IT BOOM for ever!
Ratpoison hardly nullifies the need for a second monitor. It's all about screen real estate. You're working on a tough programming problem, you want a few different files of code, a browser open to some documentation, and some extra emacs (in my case) buffers and/or terminals for various errands. You just want it all to be visible at once. It's much easier to just keep everything there rather than "put it away" somewhere that's not visible. This is true regardless of your window manager.
Lala.com - Social iTunes Competitor with 6 Million Songs, 10 Cents A Song
Thanks - I missed that part. I figured there was no scanning going on until he pressed a button in his app (of course, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty poor user experience). Apple really needs to get over the background app limitation -> a notification API isn't enough to solve this kind of problem.
I agree in principle, but the "introductory" programming classes I have taken were all so bad, I can't imagine anyone actually learning a bit of useful programming from them. Before we force people to take the classes we have now, how about rethinking Computer Science 101 so that it leaves you with some actual knowledge. A good start would be teaching it in python ;-)
I agree with you! And I've seen less of the behavior I've mentioned; I'm just wondering if it's because bikers are starting to get ticketed, or if bikers have been in near-accidents and have become more careful. Colleges and large companies should definitely hold sessions on safety.
So it is more of a scale issue then? I will admit, the 700B is arbitrary - an attempt to make it as inclusive as possible and match the magic 700B that is the number de jour. Perhaps you do 1/10th the numbers, do some of the things you talk about, and reach a similar result by funding the really good ideas to a greater degree - or spreading the program over a longer timescale.

The basic idea is to bridge the gap between fundable ideas and funding. There are a ton of people with ideas who are locked behind desks, but who see not a lot more left to lose.
I live near NYC, I was actually thinking of taking their arduino class in two weeks. http://www.eventbrite.com/event/190440613
Excellent point. While you're at it, make sure to include the salaries of the players.

Or are we applying corporate-compensation logic, in which all the money that a company brings in is credited to the CEO, who promptly gives himself a lavish raise?
When I use the word "hustle" or "hustler" I mean it as a compliment.

Another interesting related post by a different author:
http://www.ryanholiday.net/archives/hustling.phtml
SanDisk Becomes Music Distributor: Music on Memory Cards instead of CD's
Yeah I agree here. Putting that inside of your application and outside your web server config makes more sense to me. Especially using the reverse url matching, which is so amazingly wonderful (especially when you give your url's unique names like user-account-settings and can simply do {% url user-account-settings %} and be done with it). Hat tip to obeattie.com for all my django template ramblings above ;)
Anti-patterns
I found this list rather fascinating.
Procrastibation
Josh, how was half.com's compensation structured :) ?