skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now to make this multi-language :)
big enough user base

Just like Facebook, right!?
I answered you elsewhere: I think that "perfect" is not necessarily an absolute. It doesn't always mean "incapable of being better." It means "having all desirable traits." It's like if I call somebody unparalleled. It doesn't mean they CAN'T be paralleled, it just means they AREN'T.

Rand says in her works that moral values must come entirely from logic and reasoning, and that that's why her philosophy can be held as a moral absolute: because if it ISN'T logical, she encourages you to disagree with her. It's why people who agree with her seem to do so fanatically: because they're convinced by logic and nothing else that they are right.

And Rand admits from the start that her works portray ideals and nothing more. In her line of thinking if she portrayed only characters with flaws it would make her books subjective and less reliable as a philosophical guide. Nonetheless, there are people who try to live by her words, and many people who have succeeded immensely because of them.
"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. - Peter Drucker. As Steve seems to points out - Apple lost site of one of those while he wasn't there now they have it back.
> I'm assuming their innocence until guilt is proven.

They are extortionists and vultures. Their business model is to buy cheap patents from people who just do pure research. Then they go and sue the pants off people who do real work and make a honest living by doing things that make real products.

So I don't know how you can say they need to be proven guilty when they plainly state what they are doing.
Interesting side-effect of using * pairs for italics.
I'm worried some kid will read this and will be "enlightened".
Have any small or medium-sized businesses stood up to this bullshit in court? I would like to imagine that if I were in the situation of being sued by one of these patent-wielding cowards I would say no to licensing and the inevitable attempt at settlement.
This is not correct. Unless you think that female bowerbirds are just shallow...?
They're more fun, BUT they result in more work being done for less of a benefit.

Look at the sites that have succeeded the most and you'll see that they all solve basic problems, and that's resulted in most of them making tons of money. More specialized sites are more fascinating, but they attract fewer people and tend to be much less successful in absolute terms.
I have to disagree. This article gives very dangerous advice for the noobs.

It encourages shaving.

How are they supposed to attain competence if they can't even grow out a guru beard?
adblock isn't perfect.
Search for Tomorrow - Book Review of "Planet Google"
does anyone know if the updated version is only available in paperback? i've been meaning to read f@w for a while, and went to order it today, but i would really prefer the updated version in hardcover...
I think that the company succeeds for the same reason why their philosophy does: they are completely honest about what they do. When they say you're getting a project management system, that's exactly what you get. When they're asked about how they work, they answer it honestly. It's refreshing because they do exactly what they want to do and it works for them.

There are some things I don't like about them - namely, the splash page you get for their products - but there's no denying that they've made a set of utterly amazing products and that their blog is possibly the most interesting one I'm subscribed to right now.
He is a tech guru the same way the BTK killer is a relationship expert.
Thank you, that was courteous. I agree that we agree and certainly that was an off the cuff opinion not a rigorous analysis.
Which is why my comment was highly dismissive of this article as anything but parroting of anti-privacy propaganda. I'd bet that these scary Taliban transmissions are being intercepted just fine.

Requiring an overt backdoor for law enforcement would just encourage people to move away from Skype, diminishing the value of whatever covert backdoors it has.
I have picassa 3 and it has a face recognition tab. use it everyday.
lol, ya yikes, is there no escape character for using * ?
Ah, I'd just looked at the screenshots, not the text "log". Interesting that they'd screenshot all of the subjects that are totally personal/innocuous but the text log has all of the potentially damning subjects... Hrm. Why wouldn't you just scroll down and take a few screenies to prove the evil?

I've worked on the technology side of a few candidates and politicians-- they are almost without fail moronic about technology. I can imagine accidental sends to Palin's personal account. For all we know, the content of those emails are "You dumbass. How many times do I have to tell you that stuff like this should go to my work account?!", right?

I agree that the trend is interesting, tho.
Hopefully it's because google is working on real portals.
Nuclear Energy _is_ alternative enery - alternative to Coal, Natural Gas or Oil fired generation.

It produces polution in reasonably small quantities which, unlike fossil generation, doesn't get thrown into the atmosphere.

A mixed Nuke/Renewable infrastructure, backed with gravity hydro reservoirs and a smallish number of gas turbine plants to absorb load spikes, is probably the most realistic and reliable way to stop throwing junk into the atmosphere in the short term.
It really all does fit together now ...

The Explanation:
Goobuntu: the Google desktop operating system. -- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/31/google_goes_desktop_...
Glacbook: The first Google laptop (thats a joke)

(what do you need for an os)
Web Browser - Check! (Chrome)
Value Proposition - Check! (Android)
3d Rendering - Check! (OpenGL ES)
Windows application support - Check! (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080219-google-intoxic...)
Gaming Engine (valve)
Application Suite (Google Pack)
Tonchidot Madness: The Video
Yes, you'll be fine. But don't forget that the design of your user interface is an important as the design of your code. Learn it too.
Find a guy who cares about it, preferably in real life eg a sibling you rarely see. You eventually get addicted to the constant updates.

oh and get a client - i like twhirl & twitterfox
isnt this what swaptree.com does?
The taxpayers suffer. You have to eat the loss.
Probably the same kid who uses ed because they heard that "ed is the standard text editor". :)
Why is it that laymen don't mind writing commands like
@john message?

I thought people would prefer it if Twitter just add a To: textfield.
meh, I just have them meet me at one of the rest stops on the parkway...they show up, give me the cash, I give them the stuff and I drive away.

Its public so no slasher worries for the buyer or seller.
The difference is: name a web site that could POSSIBLY work as a replacement to Facebook.

New Facebook is still fast. It's incredibly effective. It's just new, and as such takes some getting used to. Once the change is done, people will adapt. And the reason they will? Because no other web site has TRIED making a platform as powerful as Facebook's. Not even Bebo or Virb come close.
Gold prices post biggest 1-day gain ever
Russ Nelson on Speculation WRT PG's "Mind the Gap" Essay
Federal bank insurance fund dwindling
Sadly it kind of does. It's surprising just how many governments have followed the same pattern.

First they grow and grow and grow. Reform is occasional and minor (at best), eventually they get so big and bad that a crisis forces real change.

The state is then transformed into a lean mean productive machine. Which starts to grow slowly and the process repeats.

Of the top of my head I can think of Sweden, where a crisis forced massive reform and now it's almost ready for a crisis again.

And Great Britain in the 1970, crisis -> Thatcher -> prosperity -> growing government -> less prosperity -> coming crisis.

Guess where the US is in that cycle.
Consoles are ALWAYS going to have a market, and possibly a growing market.

Games are getting harder and more expensive to make, but projects like Irrlicht and Ogre 3d are becoming more complex. As the years go on the paradigm will change from a content centric design in PC games, to a complexity and community centric design philosophy. I can see a time when the community builds the environment within the bounds of the rules of the game engine - and I'm not talking about second life.

And where do you suggest all the millions of Modders will go?

Consoles are becoming computers, and I can guarantee the operating systems will look more and more like a simplified version of windows, or OSX as the years go on.... OpenGL, DirectX will continue to be developed. The simple fact alone that Console games must be developed on a PC is going to keep the PC kicking - it has to run emulated versions of the software that the console (lesser hardware) runs - PC Gaming isn't dead at all ... All you need to realize that is an internet connection and a POGO account.
I realize this isn't the market segment you are talking about but the largest private website in the world is an online PC games site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniclip)
As long as there is a pc - AND THERE always will be a device that allows for open development, and deployment of software - there will be games (irregardless of how complex) for that platform.

Bottom Line: as long as people have computers they, and their kids are going to want to put games on them.
Again, have they sued anyone? Has any company/institution they've dealt with actually been wronged?

And, as far as the patent buying goes, I don't really see a moral hazard with arbitrage. Either the market for patents is really inefficient and they're reaping rewards for exploiting that, or they're actually (gasp) providing a service to the market by connecting companies to institutions, and they're being compensated for it. Either way, I'm thumbs up on the enterprise.
But the Rocky Mountain News has it figured out!
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=5790930&page=1
/sarcasm
If you're just getting comfortable with server side, I suggest Web.py, then Django or Pylons.
>> The patent system was set up to be taken advantage of in this exact way

Pheraps, but the question is should it be set up this way?
Two justifications of the patent system are

- inventors have more incentives, hence new ideas will emerge faster

- when these new ideas/inventions emerge, the patent ensures that it is openly documented and hence, can be used by everyone after the patent expires.

And the price that one pays for this is that noone can use the idea without a deal with the patent owner.
Is the price worth the benefit?
This depends on things like
a) how easy it is to discover the idea

Two extreme cases would be say , a cure for AIDS vs. one-click patent

b) the existence and the power of non-patent incentives for the discovery of the idea

Would the idea be discovered without patents?
Ideas/inventions are discovered all the time simply because one is working on some problem and one needs new tools to solve it.
The university system is also a strong alternative system of incentives.
But, there will be holes in what these systems incentivize.

c) how many things depend on the thing being patented?

This is a kind of an amplifying factor.
Say, there a huge number of systems which depend on an idea. If the idea could be discovered without the patent system, the economy loses a lot of value and on the other side if patents were what made the discovery possible, then the patent system has caused great gain.
Software, where ideas are built upon each other at great speed is full of these amplifying factors. A patent on say, garbage collection or oop, if granted, would affect a huge number of systems.(though, probably this would have expired before the 90's, but consider more recent ideas like say, stm.) the the rapid growth of the computer industry in the current phase increases this amplifying factor.

d) The negative effect of patents on the culture of open sharing of ideas. Precisely, because people are doing this without making money, there is little scope for licensing from the patent holder. And this culture has a lot of value, intrinsic, educational and economic.

Abolishing patents would probably be bad,(unless we can make alternative systems of incentives work. prizes?)
But the important point here, is that there are a lot of free parameters - the length of patent, limitations on licensing fees, the nature of things which could be patented(i have used ideas/inventions interchangeably, but this is a controversial issue)

Deciding optimal values for these parameters is a complex task and it isn't clear how one should be doing this. For instance, the length of the patent, if decided in a market would probably vary with the field in which the idea applies. For some fields, the optimal parameter might well be 0.
(a) Because the people who pulled off the attack are stupid.

(b) Because the people who pulled off the attack somehow lost access after getting the account but before archiving all the mail, and so made up the good stuff.

(c) Because the people who pulled off the attack are very smart, and are going to slow-drip this out to the media over the next month.

I know where my bet's at now.
show me a valid way of drawing conclusions in a humanities field where you have thousands of variables and are never sure of cause, effect and correlation.
The link to your RSS feed doesn't work either.
I see, I misread.
Having the right long term vision helps.

A friend of mine wrote to Google in 1998, offering to help them "pretty up" their homepage, and they wrote back saying they wanted to preserve a clean, fast experience, etc etc. Exactly what they're still saying today.

Then there's this pretty extraordinary interview which lays down exactly what they've followed up with: http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/09/googles_first_s...
I agree with your premise that too many demos are done over the wire. Using a virtual domain on a virtual server IMO shows respect for your audience. Even if connectivity is strong at the beginning of a demo, one rogue audience member on bittorrent can make the presenter look foolish. API and cross domain calls will still draw bandwidth, but at least the parts you can control will be fast.
Look at the sites that have succeeded the most

Is search not a hard problem?
Is this a recession?
worked for me, ff3
It also depends on what kind of hard problems you are tackling.

YouTube solved the video codec Gordian knot, Google did the same with relevant search. Not easy problems, but they have huge benefits.
Everyone says this, and meanwhile we're watching companies with huge user bases flounder around helplessly without finding a way.

I think it's time we stop taking that for the gospel and admit that it's actually quite possible for a company to get a huge user base and still fail to make money permanently.
in default install, OpenBSD never asks you to create user

The first-ever boot you can only log in as root

This 'reckless (read: diff from linux distro)' installation practice made OpenBSD got 1 point deducted from a linux review article

Despite the root thingy, OpenBSD is "Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!"
I like your shaving metaphor, but how is a new user coming from a Windows XP ever going to respect what an admin account can really do w/o ever test-driving what root can really do, given that I'm sure most Windows users are running as an Administrator. I guess my point is, given all the times I've screwed myself w/ root, is that root is only dangerous in context of somebody else, while the only cost of seeing what something does in Linux is your time and your file-system. Otherwise, how can one ever appreciate how delicate and fragile a system really is w/o a loving system administrator to cradle her in his key-strokes. ;)
Ie8 Viral: Microsoft Sends Out Weird Viral Kit For IE 8 Beta
Nobody is clicking on the ads either. When Facebook finally did do something that might make money and forced people to pay attention (Beacon) it was so odious that they had to quit immediately or people would have started moving.
Ahh, didn't realize that. Thanks for letting me know.
Those people are far too few to become a reliable source of revenue for Twitter.
Sell when my overexposed to an asset class what? I don't understand how that's relevant, anyway: if the price of one asset class goes down, you are less exposed than before -- and if you are still overexposed, why didn't you sell earlier?
Yes, you're on the right path, but you'll need to walk it many times.

If you already have a startup idea, or let's be informal and say you have pretty good idea for a website, don't build it first. You'll get frustrated, cursing Javascript for not letting your awesome thoughts flow from your brain to the screen.

Do like the game developers. Make Tetris, then Asteroids, then Arkanoids, then a Pitfall clone. Start it easy.

I would say make a... wow that's old in internet times, make a Guestbook, then a blog system, the add categories, comments, trackback, that stuff. You'll know what it needs to be added, and that clear goal (not to mention the abundance of online resources) will smooth your way.
Most people get confused by the difference between owning part of a business (and making money on the long run), and making money by buying and selling stocks.

A stock is a way to divide up a business. The distinction is that you can rapidly trade stocks, not that you should.

On the other hand, the Wall Street model favors the short-term traders. For example, in the case of bankruptcy the stock owner loses everything, while the short seller makes big bucks...

This doesn't make sense. If you short a private business, the same thing will happen (it is extremely rare to actually do this, but UBS did 'short' LTCM through a swap deal).
During our YC demo, we just used VMWare, dumped our server into it, changed the host file to point draftmix.com to the proper IP, and boom. So while investors were seeing our actual code in action (not some prerecorded, ideal situation version) it wasn't dependent on the internet.

Also amazing for us was the ability to snapshot. We started up a league, snapshotted, then ran from there, so that when the demo started, we could show a league in action.
Here here - In our project, its packed with generic features - most of them haven't be used ever and were released ages ago. Often they really complicate the application with lookup tables and weird logic that never sees the light of day, 'just incase'!
With $$ and a nice working environment!
Ya, I was not seeing this as a company thing. I don't believe that a Linux distribution is a smart way to start a company(although it has been done), I think it would be a fun project if I had the time though.
I think placing ads in the content (Messages) crosses a line of irritation. Imagine if gmail started inserting adverts inside your emails when you view them. How quickly do you think people would stop using gmail?
Dojo 1.2 and Django 1.0 on Google App Engine 1.1.3
They don't make money hand-over-fist by being nice. Licensing the patent is the first step. If a company doesn't agree to license, then the IP firm sues. So far they have gone after those with the deep pockets or insufficient intestinal fortitude it takes to pay up when these bastards come knocking.
Winning Eleven: Online Transfers Patch - Download
China. As a matter of fact, I am learning Mandarin right now and I am planning to move from Silicon Valley to somewhere in China in a few years.

The book "Silicon Dragon" is a fascinating read.
Joining investment banking in Sept. 2008 isn't buying low and selling high. It's more like buying Nasdaq futures at 3500 in Oct. 2000.

The industry will always exist, but "investment banking" will lose its rather singular cachet as finance becomes "just another industry", with a relatively normal set of trade-offs and paying normal salaries. What we observed over the past three decades was a bubble wherein financial professionals out-earned their counterparts elsewhere by a factor of 3-10. That's on the way out; finance is about to get much poorer, both in terms of the compensation it offers and the talent it can draw. On the upside, other industries, including technology, stand to get much richer.
Note that there's a lot of bad webdev information on the web. Go to the experts and the sources. Avoid random blog's advice on javascript especially.

HTML:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html1/

CSS:
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssdesign1/
http://www.css-discuss.org/

JS:

See this timeless rant for a tiny example (countering all the bad advice you see on a trivially easy feature):
http://youngpup.net/archived/popups.html

You may wish to do some JS dev without a framework just to get a taste for the terrible truth. Then get jquery or one of the other excellent tools.

JS quirks:
http://www.quirksmode.org/

Books:
http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor...
http://www.amazon.com/Pro-JavaScript-Techniques-John-Resig/d...

Also, some good tools:
wget
curl
firebug
wireshark (neé ethereal)
yslow

webby python code libs:
http://codespeak.net/lxml/
http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
http://code.google.com/p/simplejson/
http://labix.org/python-dateutil

Relevant validators:
http://validator.w3.org/
http://www.jslint.com/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
http://feedvalidator.org/
I'm applying to work in an US company, as a contractor; how much should I ask?
What's a valid measure for payment outside US, for a US company? I guess I wouldn't be paid as much as a programmer inside US, but how much less should I ask for?

Note: I'm applying as a C++ programmer.
Ya, but someone from the class of writers like Charles Petzold isn't hurting one bit from one book not going big. He needs to write more mind-blowing stuff like CODE or maybe find another audience besides hard-core Windows programmers, which some might say is paradox these days.
Also note that requests and responses are bits on the wire.

Do not assume you can trust client data. Do not put client data directly into SQL or back on the page. This includes headers. Nearly all aspects of a request can be forged.

Security info:
http://www.slideshare.net/simon/when-ajax-attacks-web-applic...

After you get security and basic dev down, you can start to worry about scaling. It's important, but it's a nice problem to have. Deal with it later.
Were the company you founded to be bought out, it would be very helpful. Then again, at that point you would no longer be a small business owner. Bit of a paradox, that.
(Edited, 5:46 pm)

Are you asking me to cite my claims about the AMA or about Manhattan doctors not accepting insurance?

On the AMA:

Here's a record put out by the AMA in 1961, starring Ronald Reagan, against "socialized medicine": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs

In 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1EG-I3QnCk

On doctors not participating with health plans: this is from personal experience. I had a rash of health problems six months ago and found that many doctors wouldn't see me unless I was willing to pay in cash. I would have to turn around and ask for reimbursement from the insurance company, which they might deny, since I sought the services of a non-participating doctor.

It makes sense that a doctor would not want to participate with insurance plans, if he's able to get enough work without doing so. Insurance companies add hassle, sometimes deny payment for stupid reasons, and generally wear up a doctor's time and patience.
" .... what is the advantage of Jumpbox over VMWare or Parallels?"

Jumpbox runs on VMWare and Parallels. (And Xen and some other VM environments.)
Unrolled linked lists