skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe the slides should be re-posted on scribd. Or maybe that would be just too ironic...
If you're creating something new, whether it be filling a need, or expanding an existing service, i'd assume the "aha moment" is necessary.

if you're able to refine an existing process to make it more efficient and dethrone an incumbent company, then the Aha might not be so prominant.

i'm sure even with your own startup you've had a few good moments where you realize what you can do to get ahead and compete in your market. it may not be one major Aha, but many small ones that have shaped the way you have progressed so far
This can mean that many startups now are avoiding vc money.
Maybe they are bootstrapping more since it is less costly?
Experience vs. Function — a Beautiful UI is Not Always the Best UI
We can build affordable housing. the right question to ask is: why is housing unaffordable?

First: look at more economical design philosophies: Rob Roy of Sauna fame, Lester Walker who wrote tiny houses, and somewhat less of Sarah Susanka. Oh, and who can leave a pioneer hacker out: R. Buckminster Fuller - who thought of practical solutions to house humanity and called our planet space ship earth. Bucky was so innovative he was taken as a quack by many.

The main ideas are simple: maximize volume and reduce surface skin - this makes for cheaper building and less heating/cooling energy. There are trade offs between the sphere and livability - but cubes(with slanted roofs) beat most conventional designs by far. Really think about the floorplan: rooms can serve two purposes or more, get the plumbing reduced to the minimum, bathrooms adjacent, and directly above on the next floor - these are worthwhile design constraints. All the while aesthetics can be improved - which I see evidently contributes greatly to quality of life. There is a science to living.

Then on to land. You know for all the worshiping architects and media give to Frank Lloyd Wright they don't mention his hatred of cities, and his explanations for why the rural life rules. I think there are strong media influences to keep people in the cities - while it may not be good for the majority it does keep more open land available to me.
It's ridiculous to pay more than half the building cost of a home to land prices. I understand people need to work and that is an artificial draw of the city. But, maybe we need to reorganize the way we live to make everything more efficient. The centralized industrial economy where we need cities of work camps is passed. Most jobs can allow people to telecommute, and we will find more physical and service jobs done by increasingly intelligent machines.

Second: the system is designed to make us debt indentured servants. Mortgages are often no more than the chains of slaves in their sheet rock cages. Look at how the housing market is manipulated by lending: if the majority can borrow more money to out bid for houses then the price of housing will go up. And they have.

Third. Standardization. We build houses like custom artwork. I'm not saying we need to live in prefab trailers, but we can economize buildings by far.

Think of your money in terms of sheets of plywood(currently under $20 a 4"x8" section for CDX) and drywall($8) and realize what you could build. The average taxpayer could build a house with money the government demands and uses to prop up housing prices.

The bottom line is that there is no constraint on building things affordably yourself unless it's imposed the government of the powerful in the form of publicly acceptable zoning, banking, and miss-education in the public schools - what would be a more valuable lesson than learning how to shelter yourself? I'd much prefer kids learn that than fluff social studies and all the other time wasting crap they feed them.
On Truevert and Solar-Powered Fridges
i have no idea what you're talking about. He's been highly critical of the plan from the outset. I've seen post after post criticizing it and only one or two which basically said, "this isn't perfect, but we need to act now, and this can get through the senate so it's the best we've got".
Found Easter Egg!!! Drag the title bar "Chiptunes release ...." downwards, and you'll find a another cool javascript app.
A reassuring quote for ever-battling founders:

"The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition."
Sequoia Capital are a bunch of idiots.
fucking shit!
I'm not sure if you are referring to the article I quoted or to its references... but the page that I linked to let me download the article directly for free, despite a sidebar link that purportedly also allows you to purchase the article. (I was surprised, too.)

I, too, wonder if there aren't more recent studies. The two studies cited were from 1985 and 1990, though; if that's the most they could come up with in 1992, it sounds like the area is sparsely researched.
But you'd love Tolstoy! The last third of War and Peace breaks off every five pages so Tolstoy can argue against the "great men" view of history. Then he has a fifty-page appendix at the end in which he reiterates his case, just in case you didn't get it the first time.

It's especially dull, since nobody really believes the viewpoint he's arguing against any more.
Its All a Sham - An Indian Techie's Take on Outsourcing
I'm not dismissing this correlation. I was even generous enough to assume that it's not being made up. (Only half of it is cited, and the citation is to a Newsweek article which has no footnotes of its own.)

I'm just finished with it. It doesn't have much explanatory power. It fits a big universe of hypotheses, some of which I have outlined above. It's provocative, which is not the same thing as conclusive. But consider me provoked. I'm curious. Bring on the science.

Until someone brings some more studies to the table there's really not much more to say. I'd rather spend my afternoon getting some carefully modulated sun exposure. ;)
Simple and Brilliant
It's not an attack on a straw man. It's an attack on Sequoia's logic and its presumptions -- a valid attack, if you ask me. Except for Sequoia's recommendation for stasis (bad advice in any conditions), all of its suggestions are how you run a startup. If you aren't doing everything that the deck suggests, your startup probably isn't going to do well. As a startup, you should not be taking stupid risks. Smart risks: you need those, even in "bad" times.

If a startup can only survive in "good times" (still trying to figure out what that means, given the past eight years), then it probably shouldn't have existed to begin with.

Google, while a startup, added value to the universe and soon enough figured out how to take monetary advantage of that value. Google busted out of the dotbomb era like a bat out of hell.

Pets.com did not. Turns out the world needed a better way to find information/ideas/people, but not a "better" way to order dog food.
Obsoletion doesn't come from nowhere. What's the problem with current LAN-cabling that warrants the coming of a new network technology? Yeah, wireless, but it's still nice to have some places to easily plug in the access points.

Pairs of copper wire is, if anything, a proven technology. And it's not like we're anywhere near pushing the limit of Ethernet technology for domestic purposes.

Even if a new technology will come along, the fact that entire cites are wired from top to bottom with cat-5, you're guaranteed that any new technology wil be heavily biased towards backwards compability on the physical layer.
Virtualization To Provide 1.8 Million Students With Computer Access
The references, of course. It's hard to operate without them. Particularly when you're outside of your own field, and can't just name the various schools of thought -- and the major authors and manuscripts associated with them -- off the top of your head.
The only thing that will ever replace a Cat-5 cable in the forseeable future is a wireless spec that works. Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about retrofitting a Cat-5 jack to transmit WiFi data :)
The whole article is based on the failed idea that the burbs are the way to go. Many people who have read A Pattern Language understand that the neighborhood is also key, though they often can't realize it alone, so they instead build really fancy and eclectic single-family two-story homes, (how novel /sarcasm).

I would be interested in connecting with more people who understand and want to realize Christopher Alexander's ideas, and encourage anyone who reads Hacker News to get A Pattern Language. It's not really made to be a straight read. It's more like a library of architectural functions with comments on how to apply them. Good to have at hand. The problem is that to fully realize what is clearly a better solution than the burbs, you would need to collaborate with dozens of other people, who all understand the ideas.

Here's a couple of starting points for those unfamiliar with the architectural ideas:

http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/

https://www.patternlanguage.com/
http://twitter.com/slicehost/statuses/957145230

@tipjoy Had a network issue affecting a portion of STL-B, had someone onsite and was resolved within 10 min. Apologies.
OpenOffice.org 3 released- brings down project website
I just went to download the new OpenOffice.org 3.0- and I noticed that "unprecedented demand" has brought down the community website. Apparently Sun isn't using their own SunGrid :)
FTA:

"The speed of light is either constant or not, and only measurement can decide what it is," Ohanian writes. For Einstein to make a postulation rather than propose it as a hypothesis to be tested may seem like a fine distinction. [...] But to Ohanian, the act was as outrageous as when Indiana lawmakers tried to legislate the value for pi. And so he adds it to his roster of Einstein's mistakes.

The reviewer missed something, here. Ohanian is an expert in the field, and clearly knows that the Michaelson-Morley experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment) predates special relativity by almost two decades. I think he must be making a subtler point that the review author failed to grok.
Are you suggesting the autism epidemic is a product of better diagnosis? If so, where are all the autistic 50 year olds?

The autism "epidemic" is largely being caused by an expansion of the definition of autism. Hence, lots of young people with Asperger's, and other mild autisms, but not many 50-year-olds. They're not being diagnosed. (Whether Asperger's is an actual syndrome or just a product of upbringing and personality type: that's a different argument. I tend toward the latter -- I am skeptical about its existence at all.)
Some of those were only moderately bad, some were awful. Without a doubt the worst was ooooooooc (and I'm not going back to the page to figure out exactly how many "o"s there were supposed to be in there).
I just went to download OpenOffice.org 3.0, and discovered that their site "struggling with unprecedented demand." Apparently they aren't using SunGrid?
Here's why we wouldn't: cheap houses = poor neighbors = various social pathologies and stigmas. You can get an affordable trailer now, but most people don't if they can afford not to.
You think it's a matter of choice? As CTO of a venture-seeking startup, I can assure you, it's not. Everyone would love to bootstrap, but you have to be practical and pragmatic. No one's choosing to avoid VC money right now, but the barrier to entry to the VC world has certainly gone up for the time being. Stricter qualifying criteria & whatnot.
The house I live in was built 120 years ago. Wanna bet that Cat-5 will still be around several decades from now?
I always considered memoization a type of dynamic programming, rather than something different from dynamic programming. Wikipedia at least uses this same nomenclature -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming

Anyways, there are cases when memoization takes orders of magnitude more memory. Consider a problem where calculating F(x, y) is dependent on F(x - 1, y) and F(x, y - 1). (Recursively calculating n choose k is one such example.) Let's say F(x, 0) and F(y, 0) are non-recursive, they just take O(1) time. If you use memoization, in order to find F(n, n) you will take O(n^2) memory. But if you fill an array, you can calculate all the F(1, x), then all the F(2, x), and once you have done all the F(2, x) you don't need the memory for the F(1, x) any more. Et cetera. So you only need O(n) memory.
A few reasons:

* To demonstrate the usefulness of a poll widget

* To mess with people

* To argue that the results are probably well off the mark

* To get downmodded for the first time in a while
200 release critical bugs isn't as dire as you might think.

I spent an hour with rc-alert reading through the release critical bugs in packages I have installed. They are almost all resolved but not accepted to the testing release or in some phase of being resolved and could not benefit from my help. I finally found one that had not been addressed and after three hours of study and an email exchange with the upstream author confirmed it was just some old text left in the man page when the API changed. It was demoted to be not release critical. Extrapolating wildly: a couple thousand man hours should finish Lenny.

I think in general, asking the users to use rc-alert is a waste of the user's time until they can filter out the bugs that are already being fixed.
I agree. I don't think he knows how hard it is to obtain a non ridiculous domain name these days.
As described in the article, autistic people are almost completely dysfunctional. Have you ever met one? It's a bit ridiculous to suggest full blown autism was occurring at current rates, which are having serious public school budget impacts, in the past and nobody noticed. And even more ridiculous to suggest that nobody has bothered to look for all these previously undiagnosed adult autism sufferers, who would have to still be living with their parents or institutionalized.
Frakking hilarious, and close enough to reality to be kinda scary.
How I Make Do With A BlackBerry
SNL sketches are a huge driving force introducing and moving people from user-generated video sites like YouTube to studio-backed sites like Hulu.

I personally find 90% of YouTube content abysmal. Hulu, on the other hand, I use almost daily.
The Enigma of Op Art
This was a pretty predictable and lazy post... "We were right all along. We are the best in the world, 37s kicks ass!!! We're awesome... we're wildly successful etc etc"

Reading the embedded slideshow was more interesting than the 37s ego post, so thanks for posting that anyway.

The point for me was that before, you could wait maybe 2 years or something building something awesome, building up traction before making profit. Now, you should try to achieve that a lot faster, as investment will be harder to come by. I think that's pretty sound advice.
Ask HN: Review our app, typd.in (a web-based Japanese IME)
Before kicking off work together on a startup, my cofounder and I have built two test projects to make sure that we have a good technical fit.

If there are any Japanese typers out there, we'd love you to check out our first project: typd.in. It's an unobtrusive bookmarklet that enables Japanese input on any textarea/input on the web, even on platforms without a native input method editor.

Any and all feedback appreciated!
Visletto 413m
Silicon Valley Start-Up Cost Cutting & Restructuring Action Plan
I had a minor remodel recently. The electrician installed cat-5 for everything, phones, ethernet, etc. He said he always does it. The wire is too cheap to mess with anything else.
Best part are the 'games' on the lower left of the desktop.
The Cluny did attract smart people and was fast growing and profitable. This, however, was in large part due to donations and endowments making it a charity and not a business and much of the wealth obtained by the Cluny was a direct result of state conquest as their greatest patrons were kings and royals. Another reason for its rapid growth was the fact that subordinate houses (priories) were given the same privileges of having no secular obligations (by Pope Benedict VIII). This caused many already established abbeys, of the Benedictine order, to associate themselves as Cluniac houses. This differs entirely from the growth of Google who received no special privileges from any governing bodies and relied upon a superior technology for success.

There is a tenable connection in the fact that a great deal of resources in Benedictine monasteries (not just Cluny) were used to collect, catalog and preserve information (mostly in libraries). The Cluny Abbey itself had what some consider to be one of the best libraries in Europe at the time.

A statement of the form "x is like y" is an invitation to consider similarities between them, it's also an invitation to consider their differences, which in this case out way the similarities.

As stated before, why is it necessary to compare the Cluny with Google? The Cluny is an interesting and important topic on its own. Perhaps the reason to compare it was to add sensation to the headline or so that the 'this is off topic kiddies' on YC News don't cry foul, but either way, not necessary.
I vote for Doostang and whatever Ebay's craigslist competitor is.
something very similar to the idea, as neoxr mentions in another comment here.
JSLint plugin for gEdit:
http://caolanmcmahon.com/blog/jslint_plugin_for_gedit
Silverlight Update Aims for Greater Adoption Through Developers
Defeating traffic shaping with encryption
Announcing follow cost: Is that Twitter celebrity worth the pain?
And since 2001, I haven't seen any actually succeed (i.e. iPod killers from microsoft, iriver, cowon, sandisk et al), although there are a fair number of worthy competitors :)
You're not going to be able to get the one you want for $7.95, but you'd be surprised what you can get for under 1k.

You could also take the 37signals route and slap an hq at the end of your domain and call it day.
GoDaddy Unveils Mainstream Social Web Aggregator
The "crises" will continue until the web is regulated.
Report: Intel to Dominate Ultra-Mobile Computers
Saturday Night Live to Get its Own Video Website
All the certified WiMAX equipment requires licensed spectrum, which the rural wireless ISPs cannot afford. Once unlicensed WiMAX equipment comes out the WISPs will probably adopt it.
Max is definitely a guy to admire.
Is the world class oriented?
It is technically true that the terms don't change when the house value changes, but it is misleading to suggest that house value doesn't affect affordability.

The distinguishing feature of most subprime loans is that the interest rate changes after a few years. A typical subprime loan could be 3 years at 8%, then 27 years at 12%. The assumption (made by bankers to justify the subprime model) was that after paying lower prices for a few years, the borrower would have some equity built up in the house, so they would be a better credit risk, and they could refinance at that point for a lower rate.

But, when housing prices dropped, many of these houses were now worth less than the outstanding amount on the mortgage, even after a few years of paying down the loan. So the plan of refinancing after a few years didn't work any more.

Basically, it is easier to afford a house if it maintains its value after you buy it, because the equity gives you more flexibility in refinancing.

Sorry if this is too boring ;-) But if you are curious to read more about the particular characteristics of subprime mortgages I recommend this paper -

http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/sympos/2008/Gorton.08.04.08.p...
Somebody's screwing up badly, that's for sure, be that Ohanian or Johnson. Einstein is (as Einstein says!) emphatically not making a point about the speed of light at all, but saying that he is taking "The light from two events reaches me at the same time" as the definition of simultaneous. (Although, only for a moment, to show that even as the best definition of simultaneous there is, it has fundamental contradictions. That comes later in the argument.)

Anyone who misses this has no place judging Einstein! This definition of "simultaneous" is critical to understanding the thought process that led Einstein to relativity. Ironically, whoever missed this fact shows themselves to be firmly planted in the very pre-relativity physics worldview that Einstein proceeded to shred so very conclusively...
i can't type japanese, but i think this is a great ... thing you have here ^_^

seems to fill a needed role
Open source is not a business model
Szeretnéd, ha ilyen könnyen eltűnne a "kellemetlenség". Amíg az SV hadiiparra koncentrálsz, addig nem lesz vége. Legalábbis nem lesz jó vége...
Mozilla Announces Developer Tools Lab for the Open Web
Measuring the true success of OpenOffice
Why SEO is not a job
'Black Silicon' Breakthrough to Change Solar Power Forever?
Before anyone gets too fired up about this, there are two major limitations:

1. Python code will only be executed from trusted sources (i.e., chrome loaded from the local filesystem). This means that you'll need to get users to download and install an extension to use your Python script code, rather than simply including it inline in a page on your server.

2. Because the extension bundles its own Python runtime, it has to be built and packaged separately for every architecture target. Right now, that means no 64-bit platforms, BSD, etc. -- so cross-platform compatibility is probably no better than Flash at the moment.

That being said, having yet another development language on the client for rich web applications is pretty cool. I can imagine all kinds of useful projects that could capitalize on Python's strong libraries. Hooking into native libraries using Python (either via the extension API or ctypes) is also a lot easier than writing an XPCOM wrapper.
Is Google really the most prominent "smart people magnet" organization today? That's pretty silly, imo. The Google love is way, way overblown and it's getting really annoying.
Is facebook really down?
I got a message that "Your Account is unavailable" when I tried to log in a few minutes ago... Is the site down, or could my account have been de-activated? I rarely go to facebook, so maybe they are cleaning up old accounts?
Where exactly did this get mentioned in his post? If you think we all get worthless as we grow older.
“Two people with the same genes correlate as much as a person does with himself a year later,” Plomin says. “Identical twins reared apart are almost as similar as identical twins reared together.” But these similarities also take time to emerge. “By the age of 16 these adopted-away children resemble their biological parents’ IQ just as much as kids do who are reared by their biological parents,”

I have always been a big nuture guy. I may have some back-peddling to do!
"Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience."
This is just the same thing as Faust: selling your soul for science is a devil's bargain by definition. Scientists aren't smart enough not to do it ;)
1. Google - They didn't even spell it right!

2. Yahoo! - Named for "a boorish, crass, or stupid person" OK, given the Microsoft episode, maybe.

3. Amazon - A river? Are you freaking kidding me?
in a nutshell, yes
KidZui Starts Youth Off Early on Social Networking
Who cares about names? As long as you can copy/paste them they work, right?
But the assets of the United States include the right to print dollars! That right is worth more than anything denominated in dollars, as pretty much all of our debt is.

The housing industry might be bankrupt. But that is a far cry from the entire United States being bankrupt.
Talk about nostalgic! Well done!
Hmm. Must be back up. Logged in without a problem.