skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. A lot of it is semantics, but I consider co-founders the crew that comes on board and takes a risk with you from a pretty early phase. If we take anyone new on our team in the next couple of months, they'll be co-founders, with shares and all that jazz. When my co-founder came on, I'd already started hashing through the idea and asked if he wanted to take on some of the business elements of it.

I think most ideas originate with one person, then they pitch it to their circle of contacts and then once things get underway, the idea starts growing around the abilities and ideas of those persons. I'd again say that there's not enough, rather than too much info here.
It is cool that Dean pushed on anyways, but perhaps it would have been cooler if he had listened to Jobs, and spent a bit more time building a product that didn't suck.

Either way, it's tough when you have a big bang strategy like this, because you can't iterate, you have to just decide when it's cool enough and then launch. If that decision's wrong, you're in trouble. It might be necessarily to go big bang here, though, because you need the cooperation of so many large organizations (like, governments need to legalize your product) and the goal is to help that along through PR.
I suggest you explain your own comment in the first place. Who is closer to anarcho-capitalism in philosophy? The former central banker or the guy who wants to increase taxes?
That's a great essay.

I've since long forgotten where I first red the sharecropping metaphor for software development.
But I recall successfully convincing my manager that it was worth it to build on top of open source instead of proprietary platforms.

When you describe things in terms of business risk, managers understand.
Well I've never met Seth so my opinion of him is based only what I've read, but I'm not entirely sure I can pin down what it is about him that perplexes me...

Sometimes he seems to have fairly interesting advice and insight on various topics and at other times I've considered that these are the ramblings of a delusional man. I really don't think I can make an apt judgement of him, so perhaps that is why I keep reading? Maybe he is a genius in disguise.

That being said, he reminds me of someone I know and if he is anything like this person, then I think we all have something to be worried about.
I do recall Norvig saying that they use C++ for a lot of core code because even though Lisp would be cheaper to develop, they run so many servers that any decrease in efficiency would cost millions (can't find the quote though)
Real-World Anecdote: How You Drive is Very Important for Fuel Economy
This is why I shudder when I hear political rallies full of people chanting "drill, baby, drill!"

Do they know that they are tools for the oil industry?
Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī -- Medieval Islamic Scientist, quite a read...
Sun aims at Google with open-source project hosting site
If they don't have any input into the direction the company takes, I'd say that "fools" is a reasonable thing to call them.
If these entities want to be rescued like banks, they need to be regulated like banks. We need greater transparency along with smart regulation. Allowing these entities to merge to create bigger entities that in turn become too big to fail is no solution. I'm all for the free market, when it is actually "free." Not some bastardized version where its effect is to transfer profits to private corporations and the risks to tax payers.
Richard Wright of Pink Floyd has died
>Or the government can go the other way and regulate fiber too, and make it like bridges, paid for by the tax payer, free to use by everyone.

There's the rub. It works for bridges and tunnels and highways and all that, but for telecom, there's some sort of weird "we own these lines" crap.

Could you imagine if highways were run the way telecom is being run? You'd be okay until you had to leave the city, where you'd encounter massive toll roads, then, once you decided to leave the state, you'd have to pay even higher tolls because you'd be using "someone else's" roads. The literal "roaming charge".

Insanity. Government should nationalize all communications infrastructure and allow the ATT's of the world to sell access in a largely unregulated market. Low cost of entry, plus stiff competition and everyone wins.
At least it is better than:

"Hey, I know someone's son who can build me a video site for $300 and Google bought Yahoo for $1.65 billion, so I'm going to be a billionaire too."

I actually know someone who said almost this exact thing in November of 06, although I think it was spread out over about 4 sentences.

He then threw in that he wanted the site to "have Web 2.0 and Ajax" which I still remember the exact quote vividly, as if it was an afterthought.

If all it took was a couple hundred bucks, I'll take 2 or 3.
The budgets in 2008:

NIH = $28B

NSF = $6B

That's $34B. While surely there's alot of private R&D (and more government), it's rare that I see a paper from industry, but then my field is biased against it. And there are private foundations. Does enough published research come from those private sources to outweigh publically funded studies? I wouldn't bet on it. Remember, there's a perpetual cycle in most public funding with publications. In order to get funded, you have to show a record of publishing. The priorities of private research would seem to be a very different threshold.

Still, it's a solid point. You've paid for our research. Why should you have to pay to access our reports?

To be fair though, I have yet to hear about complaints from journals regarding researchers who post their reports on their public websites. But that makes it hard to find things. Journals would surely squawk if there were alternative repositories.
As a consumer, I will keep asking Google all my questions. If they will appear at the top 5, they might get a visit.
Thank you! I heard the expression "sharecropper" from Tim Bray:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

It came to mind again with all the posts about the app store.
Thx for helpful answers.
I doubt Apple will care, as ad-hoc apps:

- Don't show up in everyone's app store (the developer has to add you to the list.)

- Can only be distributed to 100 people.

If they did ban Podcaster for anti-competative reasons then 100 less people using iTunes podcasting isn't a big deal (I bet more than 100 iPhone users carry a Nokia as well as their iPhone just to use the excellent Nokia on-phone Podcasting software).

It also limits total earnings (in this case) to $10k, which is pretty bad.
Vaksel,

Do you happen to have "Private Eye" or "Ninja" as any of your qualifications on your resume? If not, you need them.

Karma for you good sir!
Lisp attracts the sort of people who want to bend the language to their will. As such, these same people bend systems, programs, and organizations to their will. Not particularly easy to manage.
The Scene at Lehman Brothers London on Friday
"Come on, dude. You can't argue with best practices. They're the best!"

Which is the problem, I think. Their name just screams, "Quit arguing, they know better." (for increasingly nebulous values of 'they'). Aside from trying to undermine the term as a brand ("Best Practices: Because Embracing Mediocrity Looks Good On Paper"), what can you do?
Forget the MB Air, Meet the ThinkPad X301
Ok, here I think you need to look at history rather than the languages themselves. Once Lisp (and Smalltalk, for different reasons) became branded as failures, that reputation was fixed in 90+% of people's minds, and it remains so. This is all the more entrenched because of the bias in favor of the newest things in computing. For most people, that a 40-year old failure might be better than something new and popular just isn't possible.
OS X style dock menu in JS and CSS
Measures of success for Google's acquisitions are probably separate from most companies, because it seems that Google is in the habit of grabbing other companies not so much for a successful merger of products, but more so for acquisition of technology and experience for use in new or competing Google products. See the purchase of a mapping/imaging company for data used by Google Maps, a blogging company for use in Blogger, Picasa, Chrome, etc.
Blackberry Pearl 8130 Pink Verizon CDMA
Blackberry Pearl 8130 Pink is a company that emphasizes efficiency. With their now famous QWERTY keyboard stretched across the bottom half of the phone this design is the iconic Blackberry that is instantly recognizable. For users who want a slimmed.
High performance java framework. Open Source
>I didn't get approved because, well, my credit is too clean.

Are you sure about this? I remember when I was just getting started, it wasn't the fact that my credit was clean but more the fact that I didn't have enough of a history of borrowing money that hurt me. (Why this is the case is completely mind numbing in today's economy, but I digress)

Do you know what your FICO score is? You should find that out first. Second, everything I've seen seems to point to a "credit start" being achieved only after a co-signer is brought into the picture.

Suffice it to say, the alternatives are to wait a few years until you are older, buy a used, less valuable car, or take on a nearly criminal interest rate from one of those high risk lenders.

You can always do things the old fashioned way and save up for your car in cash too, but that won't help your credit any.
My Intermediate Micro professor suggested McAfee's book as a great resource that would tell us all we needed to know about economics, and do so quite rigorously...

... the week after he told us we'd have to buy $200 worth of dead-tree textbooks for the class.
So, you think it's a legacy of the AI winter?
String similarity detection
I was looking for a simple string similarity detection algorithm and I did find the one on CatalySoft. Since I like it and I found it useful, I did create a groovy equivalent of it.
It's much faster to dictate to a person than to a computer.

FYI, computer dictation recently increased in speed.

http://www.gcn.com/print/27_23/47143-1.html

Although I can easily talk at a speed of 120 words per minute, I often found the program waiting for me to choose my next word because conversational speech and written language are different.

However, that was a pleasant reversal from past reviews when the program lagged far behind me.
My experience is that the founders are involved, and there are parts of it that can be negotiated. Though as in any negotiation, leverage is a part of it - the more you have to offer the more you can negotiate.
Your problem may also be dependent on the size of your allowable credit (credit limit on your card). If you have one major credit card, but your max credit line with that card is $5-10k you might have a problem. If you can get your credit card to raise your limit to 20k you might have an easier time with your lease. Alternatively you can open up another two credit cards each with a 10k limit to expand your available credit.
Only when there are good results to generate. Even then better to overload with information so that it won't look completely different from when we need to present poor results in the same manner.
I personally like scheme, because its beautifully weird. If something is weird, even if beautiful, the type of people that like it are not the best of team players. You don't write poetry in teams. I don't know how much of a team player i am, but from early childhood i got used to doing stuff mostly alone. I guess i could fit well in an extra small team, where one has more autonomy.
Gnip provides notification of activities (events) occurring in a variety of services
wamu smartly raised private capital to the tune of 7$ billion to ride this wave out (before all the other guys failed). Wamu might fail, but I'd bet AIG fails first.
Any idea where this guy did his act? I woldn't imagine that he'd get a laugh anywhere he went. Although I'd guess that his act would work a lot more places now than even a couple years ago.
Rebirth of the Employee Suggestion Box
Would you still be throwing a fit if he had just typed "an" instead of "my"?

As far as I can tell, all he has is the URL ticketfeed.com. Nothing says the company has been established yet, and I think this would still count as "early". I would imagine he is offering equity.

So he is guilty of calling his idea "innovative" and using "my" in reference to his startup.
In the words of Elton John: It's sad. So sad. It's a sad, sad situation. My best hope at this point is that the dotcom crash will do to Java what AI winter did to Lisp, and we may eventually emerge from "dotcom winter" into a saner world. But I wouldn't bet on it.
To combat piracy you have to deliver a better product. This is just delivering the same product.
Demand OpenID
It isn't up to someone in QA to determine what a company's product direction is. And no, I wouldn't hire someone who violated an NDA unless it was a serious life-threatening reason to disclose.
And what if, by having only a superficial understanding of the problem, the customer is wrong?
Java wasn't that crazy. The basic idea of using Java for the web seemed a sane one: the only other alternative was to do something like XWindows. And then what? Are people going to use web browsers like XWindows clients? That would never fly!

(oh wait)
Napster is so worthless right now that it is better to spend $1M (and save $120M) in a couple of seasoned developers and start from scratch with some new and fresh ideas.
Chrome's Javascript isn't really that fast (according to TinyMCE)
This article is truly fascinating. Having read Ayn Rand, and briefly taken by the stark ideology, it all falls into place. I suddenly have a deeper appreciation for the gameplay, the philosophy, and the artwork of Bioshock.

I love the commentary too -- it's both an homage and a cautionary tale. Bioshock starts as a utopia and de-evolves into an awful dystopia.
The Economist actually used Bioshock as an analogy for one of its articles:

"IN “BIOSHOCK”, a hit video game from last year that was heavily influenced by the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand, the main villain builds a fantastical city under the sea, where businesses can escape the stifling grasp of government. If you are an internationally minded entrepreneur looking to set up a small to medium-sized business, that is probably going a little far. But where should you set up shop?"

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
"too clean" typically means "you have the credit but you never used it". when people lend you money, they want to see that you, at least sometimes, will actually use that money to the end.

if you're the type of person who pays off a loan immediately or ASAP, that is lost money for the lending party. the time that the lenders' money is in the bank and not in someone's hands is interest not being earned. if you pay off your loans quickly, the lenders have to effectively pay for more overhead in finding another loan for that money you were "supposed" to hold on to for X years (but instead, paid it down much faster). lenders don't like to lose money, and therefore won't lend money to people that are effectively bad investments.
Bear vs. Bike: Cyclist Hits 300-Pound Black Bear
100 * $10 = $1000, no?
Thanks for your comment.

Nr.2 is possible, thus the reason I decided to detach and try to analyze the situation more objectively, and I think in my case the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I'm really sorry to hear this-- I hadn't heard that he was sick.
even afterpatching mine crashes and I can't figure out why. it only seems to happen when I am picking up money off a corpse.
C'mon now this isn't Hacker News.
I agree with some of the points above. Most people want to "1. Be Happy" and "2. Make Money" but not everyone needs to be promoted to feel happy or valued.

I have to disagree that "the best way to be happy is ignore the bad stuff, focus on the good stuff, and work on making everyone else happy."

You can only ignore things for so long, and making others happy will not necessarily make you happy.

There are just some places where the management is so screwed up that you're going to be miserable if you want to have any creative control or have your input considered and valued. In this instance you either have to try to change the management, which in most situations is unlikey, or find a new job.

Again, your point that he should "Refocus your energy on making you and everyone around you happy. Forget the technology - let them make the decisions" is not always the best approach in my opinion. The author mentioned that he would be ashamed to put this project on his resume. Do you think that he wants to work for a place that does an awful job and then put that on his resume? He can't ignore what the copmany is doing if he wants to put it on his resume. What kind of reputation will it give him if he has worked for years at a company that does nothing but put out crap?

I think that many of the ideas stated above work in certain situations and with certain people. But not eveyone acts and thinks the same and not everyone can live with the same kind of work environment or make the same kinds of decisions.
BackType Unearths Blog Comments to Identify Relevant Conversations
MacRuby 0.3 Released (Now With Interface Builder Support)
I think video games are held to a different (lower) standard than most other mediums with respect to storytelling. This is a shame, but there's a good reason: you can't embed a narrative inside emergent, non-formulaic gameplay. Either you tell a story with how you limit the player's actions, or you don't tell any story at all.

But even if you accept that as a fundamental limitation of the medium, most video games still have horrible stories. With the exception of Valve and a few others, it seems like no one's even trying. I don't think BioShock is the apex of video game development, but it's certainly a cut above almost everything else. That may not be much, but it's something.
ML: Lisp's type system could be much more powerful.

(Quite literally -- ML was made because Milner, et. al found Lisp to be too error-prone for proof-checking programs.)
Thanks @maxklein, this is really insightful.

You are absolutely right, complaining doesn't change things.

My priority in life is actually money (not wealth), since then I can earn freedoms I would otherwise not have, like working on what I like. And right now I don't earn much, but some of the people I work with have been great, so detachment is really hard to achieve.

I'm thinking, as other people said, to work on a startup, but until then your advice is great: I should work on improving the team's morale. That would help everybody, including me.
Twitter CEO: Revenue model? Who needs one of those?
there are maybe 3 people posting in this thread who have any idea what they are talking about.
Sure, among other things (like "it's too slow").
This is awesome. My Theory of Computation professor put his 150+ pg book online for free. Great stuff... go academia!
I know what you mean by this but with dropbox you maintain a copy of your files on every computer so I'm not sure I agree that you're handing over control.

That said, I think they could sell a copy of their software (server and client) to companies and make a killing.
Industry software "engineers" trained up in trade schools or worse, without any awareness that they are reimplementing solutions (poorly) to problems that were solved decades ago...and we get...horrible industrial monstrosities like Java

Since Guy Steele coauthored both the Lambda Papers (late 1970's) and the first three editions of the Java specification, I don't think that you can successfully argue that awareness of anything solved by Lisp or Scheme was a problem in the development of Java.

I always got the impression that the goal with Java was to make bad programmers better, not to create the ultimate language (e.g., see http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/03/17/halfway_between_the_...)

To use a golf analogy, consider cavity back irons. The average golfer, who struggles to hit it straight, will likely play a lot better with cavity backs. But a really good golfer won't be able to shape shots easily and will feel hamstrung without his blades.
Awesome New Rails Documentation Pops Up, Seemingly Out of Nowhere
I saw it on friendfeed.
Tim Berners Lee Launches World Wide Web Foundation - Will it Be Effective?
Ask YC: Startup Poker Night?
I know alot of us work hard, but sometimes we need to play hard too; and a game of poker with fellow hacker's entreprenuers seems like a fun thing to do.

I think i have about 5 people interested in a poker night, but i would like to have an interested group of about 10-20 so we will at least have 1-2 tables.

Is anyone here interested in a poker night a couple times a month?

Any recomendations on a place?

What social network should we organize on? meetup, facebook, upcoming, myspace, hi5, google calendar? yc news?
Your professor is a good person. Got a link so we can check out his book and perhaps send him a thank-you note (or donation)?
At least one game (NetHack) sets up the framework for a story but lets randomness fill in 99% of the details. It seems like everyone in the last 12 years has tried to steal bits of NetHack for their mass-market game, with mixed success. (Diablo comes to mind. Spore, too - bones files->Will Wright's "massively singleplayer" game.)
Would I be correct in supposing that you tried Mathematica?
He seems awfully biased towards Apple icons. Admittedly, some of their icons use better visual metaphors, but I can't help but wonder if his preferences have developed from his day-to-day use of Apple software, as opposed to objective evaluation of the designs.
> Copyright (c) 2002

So what happened in the ~6 years since then?
LG CB630 Invision Unlocked
LG has come up with yet another mobile phone model in its line, the LG CB630 Invision. With AT&T and LG being partners in this project, a candybar cell phone accessorize by amiable applications such as Mobile TV service.
Not really, considering that the majority of the textbook industry (that I've seen) is a blatant sham.