skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is rahter simplified. What brings large companies down is always a mix of things that go wrong. There are external factors that come into play, and will affect your organisation no matter how well prepared you are.

As an example one of the largest banks in my country has always acted responsibly, never done anything without careful consideration, and not been involved in the whole subprime mess. Yet because of external factors (in this case bad management of other banks) their stock went down 30% in three days and they were probably on the brink of bankruptcy.

Whether you act small or not as a large company it will not insulate you from external factors that you have no control over. The best you can do is to have contingency plans, which large corporations are extremely good at.
Besides the iPod I dont think Apple is dominating the smart phone or desktop OS industry yet. They have a fighting chance at taking over the mobile world. But they are a long way away from windows losing it stronghold.
Hah, that's exactly what I noticed and came back to comment on. I don't think it's specific just to successful blogs though -- it's amazing how different online advertising has become even in the last 3 years.
Hah, I'm really good at overanalyzing.
Check out PostgreSQL, Firebird and SAP/DB. I can't think of a single technical or commercial reason to use MySQL.
The new MacBook Pro is prepared for Snow Leopard
That's a very naive perspective. Briefly,

* There is tremendous pressure to juice for any athlete who hopes to go pro or even be competitive.

* People gamble heavily on collegiate athletics. Of course you have to worry about fixed games.

* Look at USC, Miami, or just about any major sports school: The players barely have to attend class to remain eligible.

* No, they're making money. Take a look at the salaries of coaches, athletic directors, and college presidents and think again. If universities cared about endowments, they'd spend the athletic dollars on academics, investing in contributions from future alumni.

I highly recommend "What's My Name, Fool!", specifically the section on collegiate athletics (page 230).

http://books.google.com/books?id=ut3M85a6yTMC&dq=What%27...
"I sentence you to five years in Federal, Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison for being a Douche. You... are a very bad man..."
If you want to share medium-sized amounts of timely information, blogs and screencasts are the best conduits that I know of.

As for "expressing yourself" with Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, photos, throwing pillows at people, and 140 character ephemera do not substitute for a solid, well-edited blog post.
They are also very entrenched in numeric computing. Sun Sparcs and all. The transition to Linux is very very slow.
Spam in Facebook Chat
I had seen people's walls being spammed on facebook, but today I came across spam via chat, the following message popped up from a person on my online friend's(fb chat) list, i asked another friend who i was talking to online and he confirmed it.

"whoa.. this is real... i just got a FREE $500 macy's gift card in the mail from this website: givemacys.com "
Every day im hustlin'.
it's true that apple is doing well now. it's true that they ship good stuff that people want (and believe me, i own a ton of). but i attribute apples market share gain to windows vista suckin the fatty. their only dominant market is ipod/itunes, the other stuff (macs/iphones) is still small compared to the overall market.
Yeah, the food problem must be solved first. Is there some way I could send you some money (say via paypal) you could use to buy food for him?

Longer term, assuming he has access to a computer, he should apply to kiva.org.
why not buying him a python book in Turkish? I know they exist. and yes you can get a computer related job in Turkey even if you don't have a diploma, pretty easily.. as a technician of course.
Newspapers and the A.P.
I agree that a scholarship has a nonzero value.

That said, let me propose a deal for you: Instead of being paid for your next four years of work, your employer gives the cash to a university. In return, the university gives you a four-year scholarship with a value equal to your deferred salary plus X%. Note that the scholarship is nontransferable, it cannot be deferred, and you cannot stretch it out over more than four years, unless the university agrees to give you a single extra "red-shirt" year. Also, if you quit your job, you lose the scholarship, so don't expect to be a full-time student unless you're really good at multitasking and don't need a lot of sleep.

How large does X have to be before you accept this offer? My guess is that it is considerably higher than zero.
That would be appropriate if universities were businesses with a responsibility to maximize profits and reward shareholders.
Counterpoint: deals are supposed to create surplus value. For example, if a house is worth $2M to the owner and $3M to the buyer, a sale at $2.5M creates $500K value for the seller and $500K for the buyer. Now, obviously, the harder a deal is to make, the less surplus value it creates. If the salesman is very persuasive, the net value created can even be negative, as I suppose is often the case with door-to-door sales. Is this really a skill to be desired? I like Henry Ford's view much more: "For something people want, if the price is right, there's always a customer."
Where are the "underemployed tech staff"? I've yet to work for a company that wasn't struggling to find talent. Part of the problem is that it's hard for small companies to hire H1B holders because of the increased paperwork overhead (perceived or actual).
As did Aaron Swartz:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Yes, I agree. The part where I start to get worried is that 1) the visas tilt heavily toward high tech, and 2) it's indentured. Both could be fixed...

Right now, we have a situation where Americans know that if they go into law, they'll be largely protected from competition. This also holds true to a lesser extent for medicine (my uncle, who is a radiologist, told me that licensing is a big factor in keeping the work in the US).

So if we expand this program, we should expect less interest among Americans in high tech, and more interest in law. This leads to a positive feedback loop (or negative, if you want to call it that). Fewer Americans -> more need for visas -> further deterrence to Americans -> greater shortage -> more visas...

The only real solution would be a global workforce where credentials and licenses are equally available regardless of nationality/border. But obviously, that's not happening.

As a result, I'd compromise by supporting a limited number of visas under terms that preserve the mobility of the worker. But a large expansion of the existing program? I think it's a bad idea.
Ask YC: Can you recommend me a good MySQL optimization book?
I have seen a lot of blog posts, presentations, etc. about the "bad" way of optimization, but there isn't much in terms of a good way. I'm really looking for a good book, not just a couple of blog posts. A resource on the proper way of doing things since I'm starting to hit a wall figuring it out myself vs. the knowledge of an expert.
People need to find out for themselves what they like the best. You like PCs, he spoke about PCs, you assume it's the best thing for him. If you find a kid who is a bit slow, why would you put him in a profession that tends to attract pretty bright people? And he is shackled compared to the rest of us PC users - we have steady computer access, comfortable homes and all that. However could he learn python when he has to work all day to $6, which I assume is essential for his family?

How about helping him find a training as an electrician? Let him start on the easy stuff and then know if he wants to progress to the more difficult stuff. It takes years to get to the point where you can actually make money with computer skills, and that won't solve his current problems.

If this guy is a friendly sort of guy, then teach him how to communicate with foreigners through jokes or so on.

You can't change the world. Just do the little you can.
Wow, TechCrunch used to look good.
I tried reading programming books in Romanian when I lived there and it made me cringe. I think fluency in English helps tremendously in a programming career and the earlier you start the easier it is to learn.
The post reminded me of Will Thimbleby's MISC, an experimental Lisp-like language with maps instead of lists.

Linky: http://will.thimbleby.net/misc/ (Java alert!)
"The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter."

One word: SUBMARINE.
This Post Will Self-Destruct in Five Minutes
Pepsi Plans New Logo, $1.2 billion Rebranding Campaign
Amazing how the slightest tweak in design, specifically in logo design, can affect brand value in such a monumental way. I like the new logo, but the old one seems too iconic and classic to be replaced.
i have been wanting to see an opensource media player that can compete with the zune and or ipod. using android would be a good OS for it and make apps portable so the largest difference would be if the mobile phone was installed or turned on. my hunch is that an openhardware product that had the following might work REALLY well.

-small form factor ~ 3.5"x2"x .25"
-flash based storage ( internal flash and maybe external port )
-bright LCD display with 320x200 display
-wifi
-supports OpenGL ES (nvidia tegra would be great)
-battery
-gps
-bluetooth
-wii based accelerometers.

nokia has a set of products that are a good start, but i think we could do better.
Financial model of startups - revenue part
For the benefit of non-American people like me, can someone explain what this thing with athletic scholarships in US universities is all about? To me it just seems silly, like a sports team having academic scholarships would be.
Over time it will become less and less of a catch. In my opinion, music_on_the_cloud > music_on_a_disk. I assume they'll come out with a version of the player that caters to Android or iPhone (or possibly any web-enabled device with a Flash player). It's not full freedom, but it's also not even close to full price.
Precisely my first thought on glancing over this article. What happened w/ the redesign?
Pirate Bay Tricks Anti-Pirates with Fake Peers
This is great news. Finally some real competition for Apple iPhone's SDK.

Google couldn't manage to get android.org? I'm split on whether Google is doing the right thing by not paying for it or whether they should buy it and protect their branding for Android.
Wow, are you kidding me? It came up, to look like it was a friend of yours when it wasn't?

I hate to practically dunk this in the bud, but that one thing kid made made me want to Quit Facebook. Can you do me a favor and take screenshots next time this happens?

I understand Facebook gets a lot of money from advertisers, and with this site growing insanely everyday it's not a cheap endeavor, but I'm starting to feel less and less like a user, and more like a customer.
Thanks, that's very nice... He is living in another city than mine (I was commuting) so I will likely not see him in person again. Plus, I'm leaving Turkey soon for India, I'll spend 5-6 months over there. There will be plenty of opportunities I'm sure.

I don't think just giving him money outright would be a smart move though. He's a teenager who smokes, and plays computer games (he said 1 lira/day, so 80 cents). I don't think there are many teenagers who could hold on to 500$ and budget their way out of the hole. Even giving it piece-meal would have me worried that it'll be wasted.
15 Linux Music Players - Download your Favorite
I think Paul Boutin might have a crush on me.

some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack

Um... "foohack" is only used by one troll, afaik, and I'm not anonymous. :P http://tr.im/h9f

This is the same Paul Boutin who was so impressed by my resume. http://tr.im/h9g
It seems to me that your view of the 380,000 U.S. student-athletes is heavily skewed toward on the 200 people you see on TV. Creating policy based on this view is the equivalent of designing child protection laws to benefit the one missing white girl on CNN.

I'll check out the book though.
Sure, this seems unjust, mainly because none of us are professional football coaches (I'm assuming).

But I'm not sure what point the comic is trying to make, really. If this imbalance in pay pushed top academics to drop their career and switch to coaching football, I could understand the argument that it's harmful. I highly doubt that's the case.
Why Are Some Places More Entrepreneurial Than Others? HBS Working Paper
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Eight-Year-Olds
Warren Buffet, of course
Opera Mobile 9.51 is Blazing Fast | TechJaws
And a Singularitarian!
A dissenting opinion:

Writing a blog helps you organize your thoughts, improves your writing skills, and teaches you to make good arguments (and recognize bad ones).

None of that requires having an audience. At least an audience larger than your friends and coworkers.

If you like to write, don't stop writing because it's not "where the buzz is at". There's more to life than following trends.
What I have always thought is dangerous is that class modeling only seems intuitive when discussing everyday concrete objects. Your average CS student does not have a problem understanding that a Car has an engine and 4 wheels and is a type of automobile. However, when modeling more abstract concepts getting the design correct is usually very nuanced.
I think the point of the article is obvious but I don't think the article is pointless. Too many procrastinators fool themselves into thinking they're being productive when in fact they are not reaching their full potential (PG's "type B" procrastinator). Recommending structured procrastination in the way that John Perry does is like telling a nicotine addict to switch from cigarettes to cigars. Also, the article doesn't say that it's easy to learn self control. In fact, it says just the opposite.
My previous camera had the one LED that was on/off and I never had a problem with it. When I first plugged it in I would insure that the light was on and then I'd just leave it alone until the light was off. I tend to charge my batteries though in an area of the room where it won't be disturbed and likely to accidently get unplugged or whatever.

I see your point but I'd still prefer one LED that was on/off than the LED that's red/green which I can't tell the difference between at all. They just had to use the two colors that make up the most common form of color blindness . . .
I agree.. but you also expect a poor teenager (who can't afford university education) to master second language alone so that he can teach himself programming.. well that's questionable imho..
He assumes blogs make media hard to upload. Posterous breaks that rule. Then there's my site, OurDoings, where the photos you upload form the skeleton of a blog, backdated by when the photos were taken. You can leave it as just photos or fill it in with as much writing as you want.
Really? Do you have trouble distinguishing the left/right turn signals that are shaped as arrows from a distance? I've never once had problems with that and, as far as I know, none of my friends have either.
It was from a person on my friend's list.
Yes .. but Apple had the largest market share before and lost it!

Being so closed while competition is open is foolish and history could repeat itself.

Personally, I never owned an iPod.. I just want my music streamed from the cloud, from sites like Pandora and other upcoming music services who allow me to cache the songs for listening when no Internet connection.

Hopefully this forces Apples hand!
Particularly with football, the players would not be able to afford to go to college without a scholarship, nor get into college without receiving some preferential treatment.
My favorite advanced MySQL book is the O'Reilly one by Jeremy Zawodny (formerly the chief MySQL dude at Yahoo, now of Craigslist):

http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-MySQL-Jeremy-Zawodny/...

You can learn the basics of MySQL online or through just about any book, but once you've gotten beyond that and want to learn more, this book is loads better than all the others.
I use Tuffmail. I think once last year the IMAP was down for a few hours but otherwise everything works all the time.
Was there ever a follow-up story to the VW post on your resume?
I had an offer to develop an library to compute pareto-optimal sets of parameters for car-engines at Bosch. (Pareto-optimal means that you can not get more of a good A (e.g. power) without less of another good B (e.g. efficency) at a point in the set.)

(Would have been quite interesting. But I chose to optimize schedules for a railway company instead.)
Conservation to Innovation:- Teak Garden Furniture Excell at Service
Why Traditional Recession Tactics Are Doomed To Fail this Time - Umair Haque
Me as well. I've started using the phrase more and more.
Kinda the point of UTF encoding is it's variable-width; if you only need ASCII then that's all you'll store. The MySQL people seem to have chosen to use the worst possible case every time regardless; this is not a "feature".
What does it matter? Rybka 3.0 (rated well over 3000) could crush them both easily.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybka
Introducing WysiHat: An eventually better open source WYSIWYG editor
IList Debuts Social Classifieds Across Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, And Pownce
Before making a move, white has a 52.8% probablity of winning in chess
Why are they mutually exclusive? Seems like they each work best when supported by everything else. The defining characteristic of 2008 is not twitter, as it was blogging in 2004, but rather the growing interconnectivity of all web services.
The Onion: "Ugly Girl Killed - Nation Unshaken By Not-So-Tragic Death"

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30112
I'm not sure that's so clear. Suppose we say $200K is the "6 figure salary." That's getting paid for 6 years of work right now, and even if you have to put in 12 months at the acquirer to fully vest the $1.5mm, that's getting paid $1.7mm for a year of work (reckoning from this point forward).

I'm not saying that's a slam-dunk deal, but it's a far cry better than 1/5th that amount...
Yeah, I thought about that, too. But even if the cut is graded, it doesn't seem right to cut the pay of people who are just getting by and living on their salary, when the executives are earning a comfortable premium over living expenses, plus equity.

Cut the pay of a $300k CEO, and maybe he waits a bit to buy his next $1,000 Eames chair. Cut the pay of the $60k graphic designer, and she takes roommates and eats ramen (in the bay area; obviously, the numbers change in Podunk, IA).
I'm actually surprised by the responses. In my mind, it's always the same few companies making bank off of SaaS apps (like 37signals).
Correction. There is one reason. Its a lot easier to find MySQL devs. than postgres, firebird, or SAP/DB devs even though the latter are a far superior product technically.
Seen on /.:

"This is a thread for talking about git, not for being one!"
More: http://mindbroker.de/wiki/SingularityUniversity
Democrats don't want to do half of those things.
Google Energy Savings Calculator with Halloween Theme
Why intermingle sports and academia at all?
To give an example on varchars. Postgres never uses more space for varchars than strictly necessary. In fact, it is common to use text columns which are varchars extended to 2 gigabytes. Furthermore, postgres is capable of automatically compressing and decompressing data on the fly, no interaction required.

It also has specialized data types for pretty much any task you can imagine and a very robust extension system in case you need to roll your own types.
That does not answer the question. You could just pick poor bright kids to give scholarships to, instead of athletic kids.
You like PCs, he spoke about PCs, you assume it's the best thing for him

No, I don't.

Apart from that, you're right. Python is not a great idea. At the same time, it could have worked for me if I'd been in his place. Maybe. I posted here because I'm short on ideas.

I think he's slow from the bad food, not fundamentally slow. He doesn't work all day, he goes to high school. It's not that desperate. He striked me as having drive. Maybe with the right advice he could turn things around slowly?
YourMinis Rides Off Into the Sunset
Will Technology Cure Health Care — Or Kill It?
Memo to Mark and Matt: Keep the Day Jobs
Over the years, I've had conversations with Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Hugh MacLeod, Howard Lindzon, and other hot shots out there, about ideas. In all cases it is the idea first, what can happen second, the possibilities beyond third, and money. These really smart people think ideas and game changing. They rarely breakout the spreadsheet. Our young people need more of this. Our planet could use way more take a shot and let's see attitude.
Yes, I think it definitely has to be in the culture from the start. I doubt people who have been working at a company for a while are going to go for switching to a completely different methodology for getting compensated.

In the beginning, when a startup is very small, everything is transparent. Everyone knows who's doing what, and their share of the pay/company can be proportional. Kind of like the way Joel Spolsky describes having compensation open, not a big secret how much every person is being paid. But as the company gets bigger, you might not even know all the people there, let alone what work they're doing. The transparency breaks down.

I was already considering ideas of how to measure contribution by analyzing source code that you commit. But this obviously only works for code. Not all value contributed is through code. Maybe each department or kind of work could have its own scheme. (Manning the phone, for example, probably _should_ be paid hourly.)

In the end though, some hybrid will probably make the most sense. I'm looking for other ideas too.
True, but isn't the combination of money, IQ, and courage to take a risk the world's only known universal hammer?
Google: Powering a clean energy revolution - Halloween Style
To take an example from the source I cited, Maurice Clarett wouldn't be very profitable without the other 54 players on his team, or the opponent for that matter.
Well said. In addition to that, I use my blog to host content I hope people will find via google, like how-tos or coding gotchas. I'm not going to post a coding trick to my facebook account, even if it has more active readers.
I haven't used it, but there's Django Cart:
http://code.google.com/p/django-cart/
I really liked yourminis and the team - hope it's working out for them at aol.
Not if you're an entrepreneur.
Chaining asynchronous Javascript calls
It's not a simple balance-book question. Can you have too many capable people in one country, if one group is politically organized to the disparagement of another? Yes, you can. Yes, history has. All of history.

Further, it is hardly a matter of just high-skilled people. The vast bulk of "guest workers" are basically peasants and semi-skilled workers. It's all part of a larger ploy to drive up asset prices, drive down labor prices, and prevent national unity, which is much-feared by the ruling class.

Futher, should it not seem strange that both candidates, and both parties are in favor of a set of immigration policies that a majority of the people have consistently opposed decade-upon-decade? I hardly think pure democracy is a valid form of government, but at some point, after years and years and years, it is time to do the people's will rather than the elite's.
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