skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This presentation was absolutely hilarious. Best quote:

"Obviously a big problem with the Django community is they're not smug enough. I figured out why. It turns out all the smug on the Internet is already being used [by Rails]; there's very little left to go 'round. I don't know how you'd overcome this. You're probably just screwed."

He had some valid points for general improvements to Django, many points that only really apply to huge-scale stuff which he himself pointed out is almost never necessary and a whole lot of hilarity. Best Django presentation ever.

Between why's "Documents Reveal Django Pony, Caught In Tail Of Lies" and this presentation, Django has not only fulfilled my Framework desires for the week, but also my humor desires. Can your community do that? (I stole some smug from Rails just there, did you catch it?)
Some presumably rational people are betting on the growth of any particular company. Most rational investors go with mutual or index funds, which bet on the growth of the majority of a certain list of companies, or type of company. In the history of the stock market, this bet has never failed over any given 20-year period, even the one starting in 1928.

Of course, the stock market's never before been faced with such a huge influx of stock-owning retirees, or plausible peaks in energy and some metals--without which growth as we know it can't exist--so you pay your money and you take your chances.
It also has trouble running tinyMCE correctly. I haven't dug deeply enough to figure out whose fault it is, but all kinds of strange things happen when pasting copy into tinyMCE while in Chrome.
[...] More than was ever earned in the history of banking? To me that would seem to imply that at this point every banking institution would be bankrupt.

Actually, all you would need is some subset of banking institutions to go _spectacularly_ bankrupt, and end up owing, in aggregate, more than the others have ever made. Of course, the institutions would have to be big to make that happen. Say, the size of Bear Stearns, Lehman brothers, or Merrill Lynch...

I'm not a domain expert (I'm sure we have a number of them around), but it sounds at least within the realm of plausibility.
"... Reproduction rights? ... This is like someone else borrowing your code, copying it and using it himself or selling it to third parties without paying you. ..."

In an academic context where I learn from books that are hard to get, expensive and I only use small portions or where this is a secondary text? Now if I was using ideas from textbooks to make serious money then I'd probably purchase the book. Two completely different scenarios.
Patroon - a Javascript Template Engine (Part 2)
Can anyone provide direct experience with hiring quants into a startup, be it consumer- or business-related?

My direct experience with folks in the finance sector has been limited. And each time I've been underwhelmed (if that's a word).
Related item from a couple of weeks back:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292607
Don't expect a paycheck
am sure about your doubt. Who has the patience to see 1 HR video and that too on youtube huh!
Sure it's dynamic and lucrative, but I think the last few months have shown that shilling securitized high risk mortgages is anything but an essential part of society.
"you can sell your soul to an enormous investment firm and they, in turn, will make you rich with not very much risk involved"

This has merit.

Most of the world is chasing a dollar, if not for survival then in the pursuit of a decent, good or great life. Glory and vanity plays a large part especially for high net-worth individuals. Fear too, for attaining some type of status amongst one's peers. Startups are no different in that respect. But, 'Selling your soul' is more likely to occur on Wall Street. If you want your soul, then 'do the right thing.'
One Tree Hill Episodes For Free
It is always a happy moment for some of us when it comes to the end of a Friday. This is because we are going to relax from that excruciating week. I personally chose to relax by watching my favorite TV Shows
Download The Sopranos Episodes Free
If it is truly possible to make a bunch of criminals, thieves, and cold-blooded murderers amusing and appealing, then the much-praised HBO serio-comedy The Sopranos TV Show did the trick. The title refers not to a gaggle of singers, but to a powerful New Jersey mob family who goes about it's business behind a disarming veneer of suburban respectability.
Watch the first ten minutes and see if you get hooked.
Google HTC Android phone to be unveiled
Short summary: People screw up.

Slightly longer summary: People screw up, particularly when they're trying to cover their (or their institution's) ass, and especially if there's any allegation of sexual impropriety involved.

I doubt that Dr. Wightman will return to an administrative position at Acadia -- working on a day-to-day basis with the senior administrators who fired him would be impossible -- but I'd place 100 to 1 odds on him being given financial compensation and offered his faculty position back.
Fantastic presentation. If only all presentations were this funny.
Yeah, I think this is a bit naive. Of the three SQLi cases I mentioned, only the first is due to the app language's handling of string input and query strings, and that case is just as easily handled by parameterized queries.

The second case is not due to the fact that the same type is used for input and query strings; when a web app passes DESC or ASC or LIMIT 100 in via POST arguments, that's a design problem type systems don't solve.

Likewise, type systems might fix the simplest XSS problems, but the nasty ones occur in code that is explicitly trying to handle input that has been laundered through the database and must include HTML characters.
Stack Overflow: None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us
Decentralized and clean/green. Sure there are problems to solve before it will get anywhere though.
Use GitHub as your Blog
BusinessWeek takes viral advertising a bit too seriously
Most Important Programmer Skills: Communication Skills? Uh. No.
Yes it has stuff but it isn't that to the point/find what you need.
And it doesn't seem to compare and link to prices/products.
And it is ugly.
I suspect that if these companies did declare dividends, they would be effectively announcing to the market that they didn't expect to be growing very much. And then investors would dump the stocks, because the high P/E ratios can only be justified by an expectation of future growth.
How Memories Are Made, And Recalled
"... seeing if you could create a single interface that did all that WELL ..."

Funny enough I've worked on this for a while and while it's a good idea the effort required is somewhat less than using existing application GUI's to enter data and extract data via feeds or API's. The idea I tried was creating an interface to update multiple services (twitter, flickr, delicious ...) via one page, send to a database and use the api's to auto-update. The hard bits ...

- how do you add more services easily?

- how will your display code handle lots of empty fields? Lots of conditionals in your templates. Is your templating engine up to it?

- how do you selectively and easily send data to one application but not another, some times? Can you change for instance sending links to flickr but not to delicious on a one time basis?

- how do you handle sites that have no API's or feeds? Like hackernews which had neither for a long time.

The one key advantage of this method is you capture data before you propagate it. So if your well thought out 100 word post (with references) dies because your browser crashes or you press the back button you have a local copy.
Sounds like a reply to our previous rant on his Firefox thoughts. Also, reminds me http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30know.html.

On the other hand, it is easy to say "oh, you have curse of knowledge and that's why you do not appreciate my idea" even if one has good arguments.

What is interesting that even so bright idea, as the curse of knowledge, worded by Seth Godin sounds so bad I'd assume it is wrong if not knew it before.
I think we're in agreement on that, and you just repeated my point =)
great link within article, on competence vs. the unknown: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/31/sgodin.html

Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent.
I wonder what was used to code TicketStumbler...
Over-promising title...Mr. Obvious can't explain, what the small-minded vision of todays tech elite actually is, nor did he say how to expand it.
Will the XVL format make online CAD apps finally feasible?
What I wonder is this - do I belong to that class of people who shoot down ideas because I am unable to see how great they are? How would I ever know?
It makes sound financial sense for large companies to manage risk. Betting the (very large) farm on new hotness results mostly in unemployed farmers. At the same time I see quite a few startups pushing boundaries and making plenty of things which don't work quite right just yet.
of course I watched all the way till flameworks..and his quotes about "most apps don't reach that stage"..best tech video to watch
Why you still need layer 7 persistence
Yep. This is too bad, because he makes a few good points amidst the train wreck comments like this.
พัดพันธมิตร พัดพลาสติกพันธมิตร พัดกู้ชาติ | พรีเมี่ยม.com | จำหน่าย | ขาย | โรงงาน
Seth's blog seems to always make it pretty high on HN. Am I alone in wondering why? They usually have great titles, but are seriously lacking in content. I'm not complaining necessarily, but I admit I don't get it. Can someone explain?
So what is the idea?
I can agree with this article... the harder I work, the more often I visit the fridge for snacks. :)
Ah. If you're interested, I'd be happy to explain via e-mail.
"Is X monetizeable", "can X generate enough traffic","does X have potential"

imho, the answer to these questions will probably take equal effort to the technical/development aspect. There are plenty of price comparison engines around... so if a domain expert in solar thought of this idea and did all the market research (to have the answer to your question), I suspect they would be developing a competitor.
I was going to make the same comparison. Both had a culture that encouraged scientific inquiry (within certain constraints), some fantastic libraries, rich local patrons that were willing to support research, and social and geographic circumstances that meant new ideas could spread relatively quickly.

Both environments seem like great examples of a general formula for encouraging a renaissance: create an environment that is attractive to geniuses and take care of anything that could distract them from bouncing ideas off each other. That sounds like good example of the sort of thing you can learn by studying history.
Hey, you got your loop in my recursion
Elephants and ants, big companies and startups.
HP announces 24,600 layoffs in wake of EDS acquisition
"In the face of change, the competent are helpless."
Surfin Safari with Gears
Tips For Buying Decorative Posters
Do some planning before buying decorative posters. Always buy them with respect to your exact needs. Do not forget to use popular decorative posters selling sites.
Conversion Assessment Services To Evaluate & Increase Sales
To increase conversion rates, evaluation of the same is considered as mandatory. Therefore, web developers are offering conversion interpretation and conversion assessment services to keep up sales level higher.
Make a website that you can order solar powered gear from. Not the stuff you need to assemble yourself, the stuff that is already complete. Start with solar generators like the SolarStik, or the one at KenSolar. Actually, both, be a reseller is my point.

Solar is a useful technology being handled by less than creative people right now. What they need are young, hungry young men to hawk their wares in a creative fashion. For example, it would be simple for an enterprising young man to fill a UHaul with SolarStiks and drive down to Houston an put a sign up on some well travelled intersections indicating the availability of solar generators. You would sell out in less than an hour, WITH the story on CNN about the fact that you did so. Free advertising. Everyone gets the point. The consumers are educated.

Every technology needs its Henry Ford, or Bill Gates . . .

Basically solar needs its Sylvester McMonkey McBean . . .

By the way, I live in Houston, and my neighbors think I'm pretty forward thinking right now since there is little gas for their generators.
Graphic organic led display running on an atmel arm7 microcontroller
I love your very candid and honest way of explaining where you are and what you need.

Good luck with finding partners - hope you succeed.
I kept trying to figure out if this was a deliberate joke.

The author sets out to be contrarian with this thesis statement:

Communication skills are completely and utterly overrated for the position of software developer.

Then the essay goes on to eloquently argue the opposite, complete with quotes from Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood as well as Diana Larson of 37signals, and with a fairly decent five-point argument in favor of communication skills. All of which takes up most of the post.

The impression is that of an author who is desperately at war with his own subconscious mind. It's like watching Doctor Strangelove write a blog post: The author occasionally has to seize his right hand with his left in order to stop it from undermining his stated goals.

Anyway, just in case this isn't all tongue-in-cheek: Yes, it's true that you also need to know programming as well as communication to be a good programmer, just as a good runner needs a right leg as well as a left one. But there are good reasons why communication is often prized as highly, or higher. The essay offers several; here are two more.

First, a great programmer who cannot communicate cannot argue with you. You'll tell him to build X, and with his brilliant insight he'll know that X is the wrong thing and that he should really build Y, but he's not verbally facile enough to win an argument with you so he'll either go off and build a beautifully optimized version of the wrong thing, or he'll sit around sulking until you finally figure out, weeks later, that his mumblings about Y were actually a stroke of genius. Either way, you waste time and money.

A more serious problem is this: The great programmer who cannot communicate will build you a fast, well-designed, robust piece of software that is almost entirely opaque. When you ask the other workers on your team to maintain that software, they will come back to you two weeks later with the news that they just can't understand it, that the Silent Genius can't or won't explain it to them, and that your company therefore has no choice but to throw it all away and rebuild it in Enterprise Java. This is a huge problem that happens time and again. Even hiring a brilliant communicator can't always save you -- PG can write and argue, and yet Yahoo rewrote his Lisp software anyway -- but at least it gives you a fighting chance.

Software is the art of building a structure inside your own head. (The computer is just an accessory.) But professional software engineering is the art of pinning that structure down, making it work, and keeping it working independently of you and your head, because your brain doesn't scale. And the latter task is all about communication.
Why is Seth Godin's stream of consciousness posted here so frequently? What he writes is not coherent, not noteworthy in any way and is below the level of an average comment on HN.
I can't speak for Sam, but right now I'm really really glad I left my finance job to do a startup.
I doubt it was that much of a screw up. People do casual hook-ups for fantasy play all the damned time, and only in a minuscule fraction of those does one partner later claim it was not consensual.
This seems like solid, practical advice. Especially #2 -- trying to swim upstream in someone else's river is embracing quite a bit of risk.
How about $1600 a month + 5% for 6 months instead? Sounds like that would be a better deal for both parties.
I just posted the article he references, and it is better...but he's still a marketing guy and I have to think that perspective is often going to ring hollow with technologists.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305741
Thanks. Yeah, I don't know what else to do other than to lay out the situation and see what people make of it. I'm currently working away on another news-related start-up by myself...and the "by myself" part is proving just as troublesome as everyone says. An opportunity of some kind is there, I'd like to find a few people who want to take a crack at it with me.
I'd be curious to see a percentage-wise summary of how much of your caloric intake goes directly into fueling your brain.
A share in a gold-hoarding dragon is worthless if the dragon is in control and never intends to pay dividends.

But if the dragon's actions are controlled by a board and the board is elected by the shareholders, then the share is suddenly worth a lot more. Now it's theoretically possible for the shareholders, acting en masse, to redistribute the gold to themselves at some point in the future, and so the share combined with the voting right is worth real money, even if the distribution never happens.

PS. Apologies if I'm missing a reference to something with the gold-hoarding dragon and the defunct Buddhist temple construction company.
Cisco's Next Big Bet
I'm intrigued. Could you email me? Email in profile.
I see a URL only. Is there an e-mail on the page it leads to?
What nonsense. Flagged.

brittney08: what the heck? This is tripe, not hacker news.
Schadenfreude is completely inappropriate. You were what, 12 when the dot-com shit hit the fan?

Go figure: 19 yr old php/python/actionscript hero at younoodle
i'd be potentially interested in talking/helping.

most people get ridiculed when asking for co-founders because the tone of their requests are "hi, this is my startup and i need a developer to flesh it out for me". an actual co-founder is not simply a code money sitting down and banging out someone else's idea.
I really want to like this article. Partly because I'd like to believe I fall into the (appropriately) incompetent bucket.

But it seems to me that I might have a lot of company in there with a large group of people that simply can't get anything done. And so drop projects before they're complete and "zoom" off to the next thing.
I actually went to DjangoCon, and this presentation was probably one of my favorites. Cal was hilarious, but he also had some interesting points about web frameworks and scaling, database sharding and using multiple db's within a framework. Cal should know what he's talking about when it comes to that.

It sounded like Adrian and Jacob really took his critiques to heart. During the "Future of Django session" they said that multiple db's on Django was a big priority for near future releases.

Other great presentations from DjangoCon were Mark Ram's presentation on problems with Django, and what Django can learn from Zope's failures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fipFKyW2FA4&feature=PlayL...

Mark had some interesting stuff to say about being careful having a monolithic applications that's divorced from the rest of the Open source community and trying to integrate prior work from the Python community instead of building everything from scratch.

For the non-Django people, there was a very interesting discussion on Journalism and Django, which talked a lot about the News Media, problems they are facing and possible technological solutions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgo8ZCHhMPs&feature=PlayL...

I just thought that panel was very interesting, because the panelists talked about a lot of interesting problems in News organizations that startups might just be able to fill.

All in all, DjangoCon on Google's campus was really great. It was heavy on the technical side of things, and light on the marketing/corporate rah-rah.
ha i did. and it was worth it.
Corporations actually can't give all that much money, something like $3k/candidate/election. However, their people can, which is what you see when you see "Enron contributed $2m to senate Dems". (PACs don't change this - they just bundle.)

There may be special rules for giving to parties, to "got into office" parties, and for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I agree with you. Regarding your question, if taken literally, I think the exact answer is: because he is a good marketer. ;-)
Job security for postdocs? I've never heard of a postdoc losing their job.

Sure, you might be only funded for a year at a time, but at least the money runs out on a predetermined date rather than unexpectedly one Friday.

Maybe my experiences are just limited, though.
This sounds really intriguing to me and I would love to get involved. Would you mind contacting me to talk more? My e-mail is drew -DOT- blas [AT] gmail
Wow Sam is getting crucified - this is even worse than when something about Co2scats makes it on Hacker News.

Here are my thoughts:

-I don't think I've ever heard of investment banking careers described as safe. When there's no deal flow, investment bankers are the first to go. If jobs could have finance betas (not software/website betas), investment banker would be around a 3.0 or higher, an accountant would be around a ~1.0, a nurse would be a 0.50 and a mailman would be a 0.25 (people have no idea how hard it is to get fired or laid off from a government job - reassignment is your friend).

-Market volatility, like a recession or oil prices affects nearly everyone directly or indirectly.

-You can "network" at any job, but I agree that it's probably easier to make friends faster at a startup due to the nature of the business. There's certainly myriad counterexamples, however.

-The tool bag line just made me laugh.

-Anecdotally, I think he's right about having a broader based skill set. Having had over 30 jobs (not a typo, I've worked since age 12) I've never picked up more useful skills in a shorter period than while at a startup. This could obviously vary.

-If you absolutely need to raise money as a startup, I think you're in one of the worst situations as capital is already drying up and people/institutions are becoming risk averse. Not good for startups.

-If you don't need to raise money and have enough savings/revenue to last for a year or two, I'm not sure if you're any better or worse off than anyone else. I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks on this.

-If you're young, without a family, sans serious medical conditions and geographically apathetic I'd argue you're better off working at an interesting startup for very cheap (stipend & equity & food & rent?) than you are taking a way-below market-compensation desk job. Why? Upside.

The lack of capitalization within the post and ping pong rub-in certainly doesn't help the cause, but I'm sure Sam has already figured that out. At least he inspired some interesting conversation; I've really enjoyed this thread.

Edit: Andr had some of the same points I did and posted before me. We've obviously both had a lot of exposure to the fun filled monkey business of finance.
I don't think this a marketing vs technology culture clash.

Seth just writes some very good stuff and a lot of stream of consciousness stuff. The later has a tiny shiny idea at its core, that's wrapped in a tone of crap.

Perhaps technology demands more precision when expressing ideas, but still we often see the same style from tech writers.

And that's just it, bad style. Not a culture clash between the great kingdoms of marketing and technology.