skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And free operating system is going to save them how, exactly? At best this would get them a revenue stream along the lines of what Red Hat or Novell sees, which is a solid order of magnitude lower than what Sun was getting during the boom years. It's noise. It's like saying that the Zune (at best, an iPod killer) is going to "save" Microsoft.

I think there's a lot of confusion about my point here. I'm not saying Sun's products aren't cool. I'm saying that in the modern world, they aren't going to produce enough revenue to maintain Sun's position in the industry. The company is going to either fail or shrink into a tiny shell of its former self (which is basically the same thing).
so once they graduate, they go and ruin other companies. MBA = useless.
Unless something like finance, where it teaches hard skills, MBAs are pretty much BS. I have been reading "Ahead of the Curve", by one of the Telegraph's editors, that went to HBS to get his MBA. Very interesting, but at the end the real goal of an MBA is pure greediness, to make the students rich.

For many professions, get a master's degree, might mean maybe going to research, and do something good. Especially in hard sciences.
For MBAs the degree is only used to make more money, the rest doesn't matter.

Just a warning, to those people that are hiring, to really be careful to hire somebody with a shiny degree from a top MBA school.
So they're trying to replicate Bear? If they were, then paying $25-$30/share for Merill would be teh FAIL. Merrill most definitely has a better balance sheet (given the stockholder's equity section) than Lehman, and also less exposure to the types of risky securities that are failing.

I for one wouldn't want to be in ownership of any financial in this market.

On a side note, money seems to be going through almost a daily rotation of sectors. One day tech's up while everything else is down, the next day its biotech, commodities etc.. Tomorrow is going to be a down day for financials, which has meant an up day for techs in recent days. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
"All of the people I've known that I consider brilliant have also had an amazing amount of humility about what they didn't know, and have been fast to praise the achievements of others."

I agree. I think this has something to do with the fact that a "learning attitude" is actually necessary to become brilliant in a field. If you haven't jigged your brain up to be really open and accepting to new ideas, you become too rigid quickly fall behind. By admitting what you don't know & praising achievements of others, you're not just doing the people around you a favour by being pleasant, you're also setting yourself up to become smarter.

I like how with this particular quality, "social" considerations (ie. being liked) overlap strongly with "mental/learning" considerations (ie. you become smarter). You win both ways.

I've definitely erred on this one too -- misjudged situations and thought they called for too much forcefulness/rigidity. Leadership and openness aren't mutually exclusive, but sometimes people make them out to be (eg/ "a good leader doesn't change his mind"). Probably because if you are in politics, you frequently have to abandon your intellectual ideals for pragmatic results.

(This is the reason why Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is one of my favorite books. He rose to the greatest position of power in the world of his day, without losing his ability to be thoughtful and aware, at least with himself.)
I hack PLT Scheme and use the DrScheme editor. I've used emacs some, and feel guilty for not using it well.
One week since I quit a Fortune 100 IT Job--and I'm loving it
I was working on my shareware app for a few years and making great progress. My dad was laid off from his job in August 2007 after 12 years, and he was very depressed. I wasn't sure about my financial situation either. I tried helping him find a job and thought I should get one as well. (I went to his first interview with him, and they wanted to interview me instead, and kept asking me to come back.) He's since found a better job than where he was laid off from. I sure wish I learned Smalltalk for one of those YC Startups that has since been bought, but I think I needed to get a normal, local job to show my family I care (instead of trying to move to California at that time).

Now I've quit after working corporate for a year, and I'm loving this decision. :) I decided to start (and finish) a B.S. in Computer Science degree, possibly even this Spring (as a transfer student with an A.S. in Engineering and Science, Computer Science option), or next Fall, as a double major with Computer Science and Mathematics. It's been a week since I quit, and two weeks since classes started, and I don't regret it one bit.

The other side of the coin, and just as important, is that I want to have some time to make friends with potential future cofounders. Having cofounders and a completed degree will be awesome. I am very excited!

One of my classes this semester is in the high 400's, which is an independent project in launching one's own mobile app (if not several.) That is what I wanted to do this fall, anyway!

Paul Graham's articles, the last two Startup School events I've had the pleasure to attend, and the posts and people associated with News YC have been awesome motivators. Thank you all!
"Regardless of what this reveals about my personality, it's true."

Interesting. One thing I've seen in my personality -- something I didn't consciously choose to do, but I've observed enough times to know it's a part of me -- is that I am attracted to people who others typically view as intimidating. The more "intimidating" the person is -- the more attention in the room they command -- the more I seem to expect that I can learn something from them, and so I do the opposite of what most people do and address them directly and confidently.
I wonder what a similar test would reveal about chances of being hired by Google?
Not this time. The fancy pants bankers are going to be out of work for a loooooong time this go round.

The shenanigans are all predicated on cheap credit. Interest rates world wide will be going up, up, up!
User generated content won't kill the professional critic
Message Queues with Python and Stompserver
Emacs is a great editor, but word of caution: you will spend countless hours customizing it. I think after 15 years of use, I have gained those lost weekends hacking elisp :)
Hmm. How do you draw a line between respect for standing up for morals vs. pragmatic action that drives results?

I'm not criticizing the Tiananmen Square students -- I just spent a year in Beijing and I sympathize with their plight as much as you can imagine. But sometimes I think people are too quick to justify any action so long as it is done for honourable/high purposes, even to the point of setting themselves up to lose. For awhile now I've been wrestling with this balance between standing up for rigid moral codes vs. pragmatic getting-things-done. If you make something big and important happen, almost any means can be justified in retrospect. And if you do something with a high moral purpose, almost any pragmatic failure can also be justified in retrospect. What's more acceptable: justifying poor performance as 'honourable loss', or justifying questionable means with 'I made something important happen'?
Systemantics is one of my favorite books. Here's a brief review/overview:

http://www.daltonlp.com/view/264
I agree.

The whole idea of 'humility' needs to be unpacked (anyone know of a good essay or book on the subject?). It's one of the most frequently mentioned values in this thread, so obviously it's important to people (and to me)... but it can also cause a lack of self-expression or action based on fear of being seen as egotistical.

I prefer to avoid the word "humble" and instead use "pretentious" to describe its lack (pretending to be someone you're not, to know more than you do, or to be more important than those around you), and "open-minded, eager to listen to criticism and change your mind" for its positive side. I enjoy people who express their opinions strongly, but are good listeners and quick to change their mind as the winds of reason and evidence change direction.
Almost everyone in the financial industry has known about this for a while.

It seems your average investor who unknowingly owns some of these companies considered 'stable' and 'recession proof' traditionally that are falling apart. Usually after average investors get really burned it results in a lengthy downturn in the market.

However, the good news is that the clusterfuck of credit debt may finally be ending with some major institutions going under.
Add that to the fact that some people are estimating the facebook app industry to be making over $100 mil, while facebook itself still has trouble trying to moneterize, which is all conducive to facebook (legitimately in my opinion) charging app devs for a smiley face sticker.

But that also opens up an interesting business model for facebook: build the platform for users to use for free, then charge developers to use your platform to get access to the users. They could even go for a flat percentage of the app revenue.
5 Hacks for Closing an Angel Round
To counter your point - was talking with a Prep (ie - Grade 0) teacher last night.. She's doing MS Office classes with her Preps. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer.
(And this is a public school in a lower-middle class area - admittedly in Australia).

I'm sure there's probably more handwriting classes - but it's slowly changing..

Question - Which Do you think would be better to learn the structure of letters from? Learning to type first, or learning to draw out the letters?
Ask HN: What do you think about this Entrepreneurship program?
> people who appreciate themselves and other people and the universe around them as the mystery they are, yet who still try to make inroads of understanding

I like this sentence. Accepting and appreciating mystery seems to be a real key to unlocking openness and understanding... maybe because reason, as powerful as it is, often fails to capture all of what is meaningful and valuable in life? So many people seem to put 100% of their faith in a form of "reason" that is demonstrably incomplete... they think they're being rational by leaving out mystery, but I think it's the opposite.

I've learned that if I hold the belief that "reason is my only god, and I possess it entirely" I miss out on a huge chunk of what I actually care about. But when I accept that there's a vast swath of important stuff (relating to people and relationships and meaning-of-life in particular) that I currently have no way of adequately describing my thoughts on, or fully understanding, but that I want to experience and discover -- then I seem to be able to live in a much healthier way.
If you've ever looked at some of these 3rd string Internet marketers (the ones that mostly sell ebooks or talk about adsense arbitrage) you'll eventually see some non-expert talking about SEO and one of the first things they'll mention is Squidoo.

I think it is because Squidoo gives people a platform to put whatever contextual text they want in, with outbound links that provide link-juice to whatever site/affiliate link they want.

If you ask me, it feels more like a spam blog that has multiple authors that can sign up at anytime - but that is just my opinion.
It's not a "should", but a belief that everyone is the same, in some sense; an identification. By happiness, I mean an experience of freedom and clarity that tells me this is the right way: that to think less of another human being is to think less of this one.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
None taken -- we know there's a road ahead, but we're psyched and ready to take on the challenge.
iamah -- if you use posterous, I will read your stuff. =)
I'm a devoted FF user, and have been forever. But the response to Chrome shouldn't be to launch new features.

So, Firefox needs to add functionality that makes the surfing experience better for all users when more users use Firefox.

There are many ways to do this

Ok, so checklist for all you budding developers out there.
1) No additional features allowed.
2) Add new functionality that doesn't exist yet.
3) Come up with several solutions to achieve this.

Got it? Good.
Wow, good work! but there are still plenty of examples in nature where the fibonacci sequence does occur in the leaf patterns on plants. Very recently, there has been some beautiful theory explaining the appearance of the fibonacci sequence as a consequence of the balance of mechanical forces during the growth and development of plants

Here's a great talk on this at the Kavli institute
http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/pattern_c03/shipman/

See also this pop article in Physical Review Focus
http://focus.aps.org/story/v13/st18

And I also recall this Science paper from 2005 -- this is a truly amazing experimental test of these ideas - this group created micron sized silver particles enclosed in a glass shell and observed the emergence of fibonacci patterns as the particles were cooled.
Warning! hardcore mechanics knowledge needed:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5736/909?...
How many products or services are sold on the basis of making other people's lives better? Exactly one - charities

+Christmas, it's all about The Spirit of Consumerism... oops I mean giving - It's only 4 months til Christmas, make sure you've bought all those presents for everyone otherwise a magical fat man won't climb down your chimney and leave boxes full of non-biodegradable plastic wrapped in non-recyclable coloured paper under your tacky dead disco tree.

... I think the earlier it starts every year, the more of cynical I become.
It's a con game. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

They're going to charge you hundreds of dollars per course for the service of rephrasing some business books and feeding them to you one piece at a time. And it's online only -- you don't even get a human teacher or a flesh-and-blood classmate, so the experience will be literally indistinguishable from just visiting the library and reading some books, except that it will be more expensive and the books won't be as good. In the end you will receive an "Entrepreneurship Certificate", which is a kind of anti-credential: In order to succeed in business you will need to hide this piece of paper from anyone you meet, because it will literally be less impressive than your work experience as a 14-year-old running a successful lemonade stand.

Just go buy some business books and cut out the middleman. You can use the leftover money to actually learn a useful skill -- like accounting or programming or nursing or cooking or A/C repair or paralegal -- or get a useful piece of paper -- like a certification in a field that actually requires certifications, or even an actual college degree. And your useful skill will help you to solve the hard problem: How do you build something people want?
Next time you are browsing in a technical bookstore, I recommend Henry Petroski's tome on engineering w.r.t pencils: "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance". I couldn't get through the entire book but its exhaustively researched.
Ok. Deal is done. Acquisition sealed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122142278543033525.html?mod=...
In case anyone missed it (facebook apps vs. iphone apps)
In case anyone missed it (facebook apps vs. iphone apps)<p>http://developers.new.facebook.com/verification.php<p>vs.<p>http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/09/13/whyIphoneIsAnUreliablePlat.html
http://speirs.org/2008/09/12/app-store-im-out/
http://technologizer.com/2008/09/13/apple-to-iphone-developers-dont-compete-with-us/<p>Don't mind me, just making sure we get equal coverage for the FUD.
I wouldn't be surprised if Goldman/MorganS snap up the likes of Wachovia just to stay competitive.
If you think genuinely agreeing with something the author said is sarcasm, you should look the term up in the dictionary. I don't know whether the comment added value or not, but it certainly wasn't sarcastic and almost certainly wasn't insulting.
That's an interesting perspective.

So... if I think along the lines of "some ideas and actions are much better than others" instead of "some people are much better than others" ... I can retain my ability to differentiate from good/bad or better/worse, without heaping judgment on human beings themselves... I can retain the ability to empathize with others, even when how they act disagrees violently with my personal values? Makes quite a lot of sense to me.

It seems that we have our natural way of thinking working against us on this one... from Fundamental attribution error on Wikipedia: "People have an unjustified tendency to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind" of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces influencing the person"
If you need to take a course to learn how to use a CRM program you are in real trouble.

This is crock.
Search advertising works. It brings in more then is needed to fund great search long term with plenty of R&D, innovation, free services & free food.

But advertising online is far from solved. It's still not clear what sort of sites/apps can be funded by advertising & what types can't. Experimentation here is vital. We need advertising models that fund the rest of the web. Or at least the part that is ultimately going to be funded that way.

Search ads do a good job of matching ads to what you are doing (Looking for stuff about X, here's an ad for X). Maybe something can be built on matching ads to who you are.
Bank of America offers $50B for ML
Is tomorrow gonna be the second Black Monday? Latest pre-market figures are showing DOW down 300 pts.

http://money.cnn.com/data/premarket/
No more info & I honestly don't know if it annoyed the recycle-ee's as it was something I saw in passing.

Sorry about that.
TechCrunch50, the World Cup of Startups
Luck and instinct are important, but there's definitely skill, knowledge, and experience as well. Fail three times and you'll have a much better understanding of what it takes to make a startup work.
HP Claims 24-Hour Battery Life On Notebook PC
Time to reboot the universe?
they're just saying their service is about letting people get stuff done
They've changed their tune ever since the iPod (hmm unintentional pun). A huge industry exists to make iPod compatible products. Apple is never going to make an iDJ.
Wow great points. I don't know this with any certainty (I'm not a Google insider or anything), but I'm willing to bet that Chrome is going to become more of a default browser. Google didn't market Firefox near as aggressively as they could of. And with Android coming out, Google will decide the default browser. There's a lot more mobile devices out there than PCs.
Hacking The Hadron Collider.
Dunkin' Donut stores using facial-recognition system to serve targeted ads
Good catch - I completely forgot about that. I believe PNC bank also has a significant interest in Blackrock.
Quick question, if you'll indulge: where do you find those CDS numbers you mentioned?
I believe you can do almost all the things mentioned in the entry with Tumblr's email feature (flash-encoding is through Vimeo).

http://www.tumblr.com/goodies

http://www.tumblr.com/vimeo
Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr Doom:

If Lehman collapses expect a run on all of the other broker dealers and the collapse of the shadow banking system

Sep 13, 2008

It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.
I never did like that particular management strategy. If you use the word 'impossible' to motivate your employees to accomplish what is merely difficult to the point of improbable, what will you say when something comes along that really is impossible?
I like Mefi, but only for the Ask section. The lack of threaded comments makes it hard to have a discussion, so all the negatives associated with point-by-point debate (trolling, fanboi-ism) go away. On the other hand, the discussion is never really that interesting, except when someone writes an interesting story.

The rest of Mefi doesn't really interest me. I occasionally look at the front page, but it seems like it's a site for English majors that want to argue about typefaces. For technology-related stuff, news.yc meets my needs.

For random internet humor, I read the comments section in programming.reddit. There is some hilarious stuff there. It's sad that in a year or two, those commenters will be here :(
Historically basic research in corporations has been done by monopolies (Bell Labs for instance)--therefore there is no tragedy of the commons problem: they are the commons. Microsoft research is just another example of this. (edit: I'm dying for someone to bring up pharmaceuticals as a great counterexample to this--if I could be so lucky)
Dropping Feedburner For Twitter Follow Lists
Very true, but they've only been at it for 3 months and have come a long way since their launch.

I'm not going to lie, when they first launched I didn't understand what really differentiated them from everyone else. What ended up selling me on posterous is the fact that my Mom has a posterous. To say she's not a computer person is an understatement. My Mom is the person that very recently used to go to yahoo.com, type google, click on the google.com search result and then search for X.

At first I thought it was because I emailed it to her and she was just trying to appease me. But then I went through my emails of other stuff I sent her: Firefox, Ad-aware, Delicious, Google Toolbar, etc. Each of these was sent to her after she complained to me about a problem (IE is crashing, computer is slow [spyware/adware], accessing bookmarks on other computers, easy access to Google [surprise!]).

Despite this, she has to yet to adapt and use any of the above applications (ignoring her son's helpful advice :-D). However, when she wanted a way to easily post pictures and I suggested posterous, she started using it. I'm not going to pretend I know why, but something clicked.
Slashdot is interesting. When I read the comments there, sometimes it seems that they're just recycling content from 1999. The people there and their arguments haven't changed at all.

That said, it's nice that the culture there results in posts that are a few paragraphs instead of the reddit-style single-sentence replies.
Warren Buffett on what went wrong with Lehman and Merrill (2003)
The genesis of my startup, HubSpot, was the positive impact that blogging could have on a small business.

Today, blogging is a critical component of our inbound marketing efforts. That's how many of our potential customers hear about us, and it's what we use to establish thought leadership in our industry

If you're working on a startup, my advice would be to skip the business plan and go write a blog.