skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument rests on the notion that politicians are not representative of their cultures. Clausewitz defined war as politics by another means, but he never said politics is independent of culture. Whether intentionally or not, a country's culture and value system gives rise to it's political system which in turn gives rise to it's foreign policy. I would argue that the major wars are the result of incompatible value systems growing into each other. When one culture values something enough to die for it, and the other culture despises that thing and is willing to die to prevent it, there is not much that can be done. It's like icebergs colliding. The most deft political maneuvering will not stop two immovable forces from bearing down on one another.

The Confederacy was a largely grass roots movement. It did not rise out of a squabble between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. They died in enormous numbers because they believed that their economic future depended on slavery. Southern farmers risked their lives and livelihood to quarter Confederate soldiers and pass them intelligence on Union positions. It was not a political squabble that caused this. It was a deeply held belief that they were right and the other was wrong.

The Bolsheviks were disgusted with the ruling order and millions laid down their lives to change it. Sure Lenin was a clever old dog but it's not like he created something that wasn't already there. He merely capitalized on existing forces. Whether they knew it or not a the time the Russians chose the Soviet Union. Perhaps they didn't hold elections but they voted with their blood.

Hitler was the most effective manipulator of all but even he did not cause WW-II. German bitterness over WW-I and their sense of racial superiority caused WW-II. Hitler just really understood the German conscious and captured the mood. Hitler would not have been possible in England.

I'm reminded of the Sequoia slide show at startup school. "An entrepreneur can't create a wave but he can ride one." I think the same is true of politicians. There cultural forces that form a society are the politicians raw materials. If they are diametrically opposed to those of their neighbors then war is a likely outcome no matter who the politicians are.

An economy where grain is distributed from Moscow cannot coexist with an economy where grain is distributed by farmers and businesses. A culture where slaves are as important to them as laptops are to Silicon Valley will not be able to co-exist with a more industrialized culture who no longer needs slaves and simultaneously values human rights. And a culture that believes that they are the master race sent to purge the impure from the world can't co-exist with anyone at all. The politicians are just enablers. Diabolical and brilliant, to be sure, but they can't conjure what they steer.
This is a really well-written and comprehensive article. It reminds me quite a bit of the questions the YC application pushes you to think through. I especially like the last point about competitors. What he outlines about finding others and learning from them is invaluable. There is not better, cheaper test than to analyze what already exists.
Forbes on the causes of the current financial crisis.
thank you for your comments. Iam interested in hearing more about what specific content and customization you feel we should start offering. thank you. Armando
I would call that admitting defeat to an extent.

As it stands, pageview content ads don't generate enough revenue to run a paper using a print newspaper inspired business model.

They have experience with that via About.com. How much better could the NYT do then About?

Not saying they definitely shouldn't do it, but definitely not for the ads. If they could get archives-to-print conversion without cannibalising any other businesses that rely on owning content, maybe they could break even on lost subscriptions. Maybe not.
Be the first non pornographic pay site to make money.
At the bottom it says that these figures don't include the costs for the day-to-day expenses of Iraq or Afghanistan. Those costs, if my cursory Google search is to be believed, are around $9 billion a month. All told, that's about $600 billion a year, or twice the "peacetime" average of $300 billion.
The extension methods are very Ruby-like, which is kind-of scary. Don't get me wrong -- it's a powerful idea, but have you ever tried to get a complete definition of a class that is spread out over a dozen files in potentially a handful of third party libraries? Since MSoft also controls the IDE, perhaps they can create a single coherent view onto a class by combining the dozens of files that extend the original class into a virtual document of sorts.
Ghost town at the moment.
If you like this, take a look at "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler.

He takes over his father's manufacturing company in Brazil... Then he proceeds to implement a lot of radical (for the time) ideas - from abolishing fixed work hours to letting employees setting their own salaries.

Not only is Semco one of the most top "to work for" companies in Brazil, the changes allows Semco to make it through some pretty bad times in the Brazilian economy.
My guess at the one thing:

Aim at the use, not the truth. Think about what it's supposed to do. This is helpful at all scales, from code snippet to a whole business. It's similar to finding the right question, before finding the right answer. Sometimes, it enables you to simplify dramatically.
Havenco is gone. They never had more than a few servers hosted there (I managed one of them back in 2001-2002), and as far as I know, they aren't accepting new orders. They had pretty constant problems when they were up, due basically to not having the funding required to do what they were doing.

Ryan Lackey, the former CTO of Havenco, had a postmortem of the company up for a while, but it seems to be gone right now.
As long as you're posting anonymously, you should tell us all who your current (vaginal) host is.
MBA & Venture Capitalist Night at San Francisco Opera
War is immensely profitable today. For the contractors and civilian service-providers who live off the military-industrial complex.

That is besides the point made here. War may be good for some parties. I am sure that if we hit a depression, that will also benefit certain parties.

The point is that for either side, it is a negative sum game. So the idea is that to the extent that the macro effect is represented in decision making, wars shouldn't happen. The military-industrial complex may be an example of a failure in representing the public good. In contrast, War may have been for for Rome under Ceasar or Persia under Darios.

The second point is that economic warfare might be more efficient then actual warfare.
"Mediasaurus" by Michael Crichton. Google it.
Muxtape was not hosted offshore, and it dealt with music. I am not sure its situation has any bearing on that of the original poster.
Ask HN: iPhone friendly Hacker News?
I would love if HN had an iPhone version of the site. Anyone else feel the same way?
New MacBook Pretty, but Still Too Pricey
Solving 11 Likely Problems In Your Multithreaded Code
Testosterone could be an explanation, but Emacs users tended to be more hairy than vi users in all exposed areas. Testosterone would explain baldness in vi users but would not explain all the extra hair Emacs users have.

I am learning Emacs and growing a beard.
+1 bugmenot.com are hosted with these guys
Quality of the article aside...."But they probably do a better job of saving it for when they're talking with other doctors, rather than posting it on the internet where everyone can see it." Huh. Thing is, they didn't put it up where "everyone" could see it. Not even YCNews can do that. They put it up where "anyone" that found it could see it. Which is kinda part of the idea of an internet, isn't it? Otherwise how would they share it with other "techies"? (Or doctors or whoever) Well, some subsets of everyone won't find my post worthwhile so... I shouldn't allow it to exist? Seems like that would rule out all content ever, more or less.

Of course, beyond that, I suspect we need to have more inter-discipline discussion where techies and doctors can come to understand one anothers gripes in the search for a "better way"... but I don't know how well that could ever really work given human nature.
I haven't watched the third episode yet, but I think its better characterized as Keynesianism vs. the Austrian school rather than socialism vs. capitalism.
I, for one, am curious to play with the evidence-based scheduling:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

If that feature is useful at all it will be worth $200 per seat. Indeed, even if the data do nothing but tell me what I already know, but the software can turn that data into pretty graphs that I can put on slides and wave in front of my clients as I pitch projects, it will be worth $200 per seat. Clients looooove realistic estimates.
WSJ makes decent money from paid online subscriptions.
Surveillance technology: If looks could kill
It creates a culture of nonsense. How can a message based on facts get through this noise?
Yes you're right, that's probably more correct.
The Postal Service:

Amazon: Death Cab, The Shins
iTunes: Imogen Heap, Feist, M.I.A.
Perceptron: The Knife, Dntel, Bright Eyes

Eric B and Rakim:

Amazon: EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy
iTunes: EPMD, Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One
Perceptron: No recommendations

Fleetwood Mac:

Amazon: Journey, Bob Seger, Steve Miller
iTunes: Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, The Doobie Brothers
Perceptron: Vetiver, The Beach Boys, The Everly Brothers

Sepultura:

Amazon: Pantera, Slayer, Metallica
iTunes: Soulfly, Machine Head, Fear Factory
Perceptron: Moonspell, Soulfly (x3), Fear Factory

In none of these head-to-heads does Perceptron do the best job (the Dntel pick ties it with Amazon's Death Cab pick). I can intuitively guess that iTunes will do a better job of recommending for me than your website, because millions of people's buying habits make iTunes smarter every day.

It's not just that this space is crowded; it's that it structurally resists your entrance. You need features, lots of them, compelling features, or this isn't going anywhere.

Also, you're trivially XSS-able:

http://theperceptron.com/recommendation/artist/h%3Cscript%3E...('hi');%3C%2fscript%3E?h=true

Finally: "astute music recommendations" is a terrible tagline. It doesn't convey value. It tells me why you like your code, but not why your code matters to me.
I don't understand the business, it shouldn't take more than 50 writers to write a paper, pay them 100k , that's 5mm sell 500k subcriptions at 50/yr that's 25mm

And that's not counting ads (or printing cost) perhaps they cancel out though
Yeah, sorry if I was sensationalistic. I was just following the article's lead ;-).
The Cure To Our Economic Problems / The Best Equity is Sweat Equity
MYOB Indonesia - Re:convert format dat ke myo - MYOB Forum
I haven't used the css rules object in years... I honestly forgot about it's existence.
They only made gains because they were mobilized for war and their enemies weren't. That means they had an advantage for a little while, but they lacked the ability to completely defeat the US, USSR, and UK, so they were bound to be defeated once those three countries converted the full weight of their economies to military purposes. Quitting while they were ahead was not an option, unless by "quitting" you mean "surrender."
I don't like the simple, all text interface. I think an app like this needs a clean but graphical interface.
Take a look at this screenshot: http://skitch.com/rksprst/3t9q/the-perceptron-astute-music-r...

Am I supposed to understand any of the text there? It looks like a bunch of random works thrown together. No human will ever read that. No offense but this display reminds me of those "crack/serial" search engines that just list a bunch of random programs in alphabetical order just for seo.

I think you have a neat idea. But please get a designer.
Chromium Blog: Graphics in Google Chrome
Sea shanty recordings unearthed
Anybody else compete in RailsRumble?
If so - link your apps - I'd love to see what other HN readers were able to pull off. Our team submitted the following site:

http://meetinbetween.us/

The wrap-up of the event can be found here: http://andrewkavanaugh.com/?p=12

If you competed, let's see your apps and hear your stories. If you didn't compete, don't forget to go vote on http://railsrumble.com
The A-Z of Programming Languages: BASH/Bourne-Again Shell
>Germany had bread riots in the weeks before rolling on Poland.

I've never heard of that.. the closest thing I've heard of was riots by the German minority in Poland. Cite?
I think buxfer makes one. I forget the URL though.
looking for this as well.
"Every little bit helps. 0.01% of energy is still a lot of energy..."

Wrong. Spending time on spreading such an infinitesimal improvement has an opportunity cost. It's also lots of wasted effort and overhead on the part of anyone who will follow your advice.
Tesla teases freshly delayed Model S sedan
There ought to be a way to just upload a list of the music on your computer.
What's factually incorrect? When you have a charger plugged in with nothing connected, then 100% of the energy consumed goes to no useful work.

Did you see the original BBC article? It also doesn't claim that chargers are a massive sink of energy - it says that it's an indication of a culture that's not energy-aware.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/images/Britai...
Leaving mobile phone chargers plugged in and lights on were the most common energy-wasting habits.
Ok, so some researchers made a 20 second clarinet piece fit in less than 1kb. How is this not an overly complex reinvention of MIDI?
Misleading. The file is not actually a recording, but a set of parameters to drive a simulation. It's really just a glorified MIDI file.
Is it time to Buy American yet?
Hey, I think just being away from HN for a while is good for me. I haven't been here in a week or so and I'm pretty sure my productivity rose. Though it's fun to come back and read some of the stuff here when I feel burnt out :)
Time to Ditch Your PC for a Hot-E?
Your television consumes more power than your cell phone charger. Does anyone unplug that? Of course not.
I did.

http://inspiresme.r08.railsrumble.com

Solo developer, started 24 hours late. Was quite the experience though.

I'm thinking of organizing a distributed hacking weekend every few months that isn't with a competition or prizes or anything but it's more like a environment where there are a bunch of various hackers working on projects, with an IRC backchannel as the community.
Thanks for the info, I've checked out the latex pdf, and so far I'm impressed with it.
I don't use emacs simply because it's GNU/FSF; tried it but prefer vim so much because vi follows unix philosophy

I can't stand GNU unnecessary complexity, reflected in very long 17997 bytes GPL license (the COPYING file)

I do use GPL softwares (out of necessity); however, i try as much to avoid g* programs and use BSD/MIT equivalent
The NYT has a circulation of 1,077,256. Delivery is anywhere from $3.35 per week to $6.70 per week depending on frequency of delivery. Obviously many people just buy single copies at newsstands. They employ 11,965 people including 350 staff writers.
so to recreate, say, a beatles song, you'd need to model all the equipment at abbey road, all tge guitars and drums and amps and mics and exact positions and cables and consoles and tape etc etc... and once you have these terrabytes of data, the song is only a few kb. uh...
Because as far as I know, MIDI uses pre-recorded sounds to synthesize tracks. This, on the other hand, simulates the physics of the given instrument, which lets the program create much more complex sounds. This has the type of potential that MIDI cannot have in anything resembling its current form.
Yep. I have used both.
Maybe hackerweek - the 48 hour constraint was a bit too tight for anything with decent scope. I'm happy with what our team cranked out, but looking back, I wish we would have had more time to iterate the views further.

Either way - count me.
To be honest, I don't mind the site as it is on the iPhone. The pages themselves are simple, so it renders quickly and it's quick to navigate.

Not sure why - But a lot of iPhone versions seem to cut the number of articles/elements back quite considerably. Of the iPhone-friendly news sites that I use, most of them only display a dozen or so articles (rather than the 40-50 that are usually on the normal site).

I prefer to zoom around a page then be stuck with navigating through smaller pages.
I am not a physicist, but this rant sounds pretty clueless to me.

If I recall high school physics correctly, plugging an idle transformer into an AC outlet reduces available power of the current. This is because it affects a shift between I and U and thus causes the wattage (which is I x U integral over their period) to go down. It may also consume the energy if its assembly of a poor quality.

This applies only to the traditional transformers, those with a coil inside. I am not sure what a modern phone charger has inside.
> ... and once you have these terrabytes of data, the song is only a few kb. uh...

A few kb seems like overkill... I reckon you could get it down to 1 bit.
BTW, here's the $99 link. >> http://www.thinlinx.com/store#store_early
BEE3: Putting the Buzz Back into Computer Architecture
Robert Wright wrote a book called Nonzero a few years back that goes into this in more depth. The idea is that civilization's advance is defined by finding ways to turn zero-sum games (e.g. we kill you and take your resources for ourselves) into non-zero-sum games (e.g. we trade with you). War, as Scott Adams says in this post, isn't all that efficient a way of advancing your aims, especially as a developed country.
I know a lot of people that turn their tv off (rather than standby).

Why is it "of course not"? Why not "why wouldn't they"?
100M in revenue, how much in profit?
Dropbox website is down [fixed].
What's really pathetic is that Colin Powell described the future of asymmetric warfare in "Forward, from the Sea" in the early 90s. General Carl Stiner wrote how JFK founded the spec war community in the 60s to deal with the future assymetry of warfare. Note, JFK also founded the Peace Corps, no doubt to help with international relations before the warfare part of asymmetric relations kicked in.

And, as in every war, most people will forget about all of this. Most people who read this comment will forget about it. And the only thing anyone will remember is that war is bad. And they will forget that too. And then there will be another war. Most likely for treasure, almost certainly not for a anything that rises to the level of jus ad bellum.
Yearly auctions for limited ad space means advertisers take risk in your startup
You might show only 10 ads say and have an auction for each one to display the ad for one year say.

In this way, advertisers take the risk in your startup. If they believe it will get significant traffic in a year, then they might bid something substantial.

If you think one year is too short, then maybe do it on a 5 year basis.
Works pretty well through Google Reader.
http://buxfer.com/yc/ - this one is the fully featured one, but it has been down for a while.

http://code.seedlessmedia.com/iCombinator/#_home - this one works.
Does anybody know what's happened?

I've just recommended it to one person, emailed a link and ... oooops. 500 server error.

Update: now it's up, but I'm still curious.
Getty Forgets Times Are Tough and Buys JupiterImages for $96 Million in Cash
Frogmetrics: Handheld Surveys You Might Actually Want To Fill Out (YC Summer 08)
Do you know the typical students track record on meeting a deadline?
How Steve Jobs makes money from the iPhone
Most are probably not direct profiteers, like CEOs, they're mainly shareholders. But I'm sitting at Bethesda Naval Hospital right now, a nearly empty hospital with entirely too many staff, watching billion dollar buildings be built for patients that will never come (thanks to the admittedly much more humane TriCare system that allows retirees and dependents to be treated in their hometown civilian facilities). I have spent the last month learning about the desperately failed suite of electronic medical record apps that DoD has paid Lockheed Martin $20 billion dollars to develop (they fail on so many levels I don't know where to begin, just search for AHLTA).
Captain Capitalism:  Cup o Democracy (flash cartoon)
There's a good video he gave earlier this year at http://fora.tv/2008/02/04/Future_Has_Always_Been_Crazier_Tha...

Aimed at a somewhat more advanced audience.:-)
I don't think you're very far off with EmacsOS... except I'd imagine it as a EmacFox or Chromacs?
I couldn't get results for Mike Viola, Candy Butchers, Fountains of Wayne, Julia Nunes, Ghosts & Liars and The Salteens

cheers!
I must be using the wrong set of dice. I've rolled three different times and each time I get "use GPS to mine for virtual gold for lawful, evil magic-users".
This differential pricing helps satisfy demand (like student movie tickets). Most of the poor students/startups could not afford to buy anyway, so you lose little by giving it away.

But you gain potential customers, like MacDonalds targetting children: "get 'em while they're young [and poor]". Lock-in is stronger with software: UI familiarity (e.g. vi vs. emacs); data on their server.

If you had a dominant market position, this differential pricing can help a scorched-earth policy: by denying no-one, you don't start the seeds of copy-cat competitors - they have no fuel to burn (i.e. no customers, no interest). The danger with copy-cat competitors is that as they grow, they often differentiate into genuine alternatives in their own right. Better to nip 'em in the bud (or not enable the bud to grow in the first place).

Joel isn't in that position (there are several bug-trackers): here, it's just an earlier arena for the fight for customers (like employers interviewing earlier and earlier at university). For example, the Jira people offer free products for open source projects.

The above is a business interpretation, based on cynical self-interest, but I think the result is healthy: customers get high-quality yet affordable products; you get customers - to each according to his need; from each according to his ability (to pay). Meeting needs is a good thing.

But for customers, it's just as important to evaluate what they are getting, even though it's free. Otherwise, you watch free TV, browse free websites, and buy supermarket "specials" without making a decision about what you're really buying. You might have chosen to buy it anyway; you might not.

There are vulnerabilities with hosted data; e.g. if Joel had to change his policy, how would customers get their data out? These are questions common to all vendors, and it's not just because it's free - it's just then when it's free, it's easier to not consider these questions properly. It's up to customers to do their due diligence. All Joel can do is work hard to create something useful, and let you know about it. He can't tell if it's right for you and your specific needs or not.

Note: I think it's great Joel is doing this, and it's beneficial all round.
There's nothing wrong with vaginas.
Well, yes. That's what arbitrage is and in what you would expect hedge funds to engage. Only they do much riskier things than that. Hence my comment.
I actually prefer the portrait keyboard. After some adjustment and getting used to the iPhone virtual keyboard, I found the landscape keyboard to be more annoying because my thumbs had to travel more to hit the different keys.
I think the usage of floppy disks is a clear warning sign of a place you don't want to work.
Google App Engine Roadmap posted
IPhone or G1: Comparing Price, Speed, Keyboards and Specifications
If this is not a big war, it's pretty f*cking expensive for a small one.