skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aesthetics of these phones is not primarily about the design of the physical phone itself. If you ran Symbian on iPhone hardware it wouldn't be anything remarkable at all, it would just be another normal phone.

The hope for Android is that lots of different hardware will be running Android, as opposed to the iPhone model where only a small number of handsets will ever run the iPhone OS.
I remember how much better Mosaic was than Gopher!
No, but it doesn't mean they can be forgiven for using blatantly inaccurate terminology.
AOL Begins Shutdown Of AOL Pictures, BlueString And Xdrive
I disagree with the disdain for stock picking. If you have a longer term outlook (5 years or more), you will kick yourself if you don't buy now. I'd stage my buys (since I can't call a bottom) in individual high quality stocks.
My pleasure, and feel free to hit me directly if you'd like feedback as revisions are implemented. As for the character limit, 300 is much more appropriate I think. It's a catch 22 in a way - journalists/bloggers theoretically want a lower limit with the hope that they will receive a succinct message. Businesses/flacks on the other hand, will be put off if they have to keep revising their thoughts over and over to fit them into such a small space.

Personally, I might start with a limit of 500 characters but I'm likely in the minority. For comparison sake, this message is 593 characters.
Having seen tons of knee injuries from my army days, I would only say this: Don't get surgery.
Not really. I track 21 job boards and there is indeed a noticeable decline, though it did start already earlier:

http://joblighted.com/statistics

And there are more people looking for jobs: in the last few weeks my subscriber count went up at higher rate than it used to.
Replies to this particular entry are a demographic study on their own. Thanks everyone! :)
To me it looks just like you implemented a few parts of FB, and copied their style guide.
I'm professionally awesome. Which one does that fit under?
You'd need to see negative TFR's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate)(http://indexmundi.com/united_states/birth_rate.html) to even suggest that most people aren't having kids.

Sometimes, the obvious is exactly that.
Nope. I had an offer from a startup that I liked, but it was withdrawn last week, b/c of the hiring freeze across the board demanded by the board of directors.

Another one, that was looking for somebody with my skillset (which are not that common), had hiring freeze. The recruiter was very frustrated as she thought I was a "slam dunk", a good fit for the company, and exactly what they were looking for.

There is a flood of candidates, and not enough jobs. A lot of small and big companies have hiring freezes.

Some of these hiring freezes are justified, some are from pure panic, as there is a lot of uncertainity out there, and companies' revenue projections are out of whack (they really don't know how things will pan out next year).

I have a job, and staying put in my current company, but also there were these two opportunities that looked good, but they went away just b/c of the market conditions.
I remember hearing about Scribe last year from a FB Thift lecture and am really excited that they finally got it open sourced.

This definitely solves some design problems we have been having with news feeds.

Facebook's Thrift: Scalable Cross-Language Development http://blip.tv/file/446822

Thank you Facebook!
And I remember being somewhat fascinated by a coffee pot...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot
Questions For The Digital Music Business and The Rise of Band Blogs
Holding a hot beverage makes you trustworthy
Working, moonlighting on my own project
And you can trade individual stocks in your 401k.
Work for a non-profit.
Working at a startup that got acquired not an option?
Why doesn't this article have a picture of Bill Lumbergh and his mug?

yeaaaaa....
I don't think its so malicious. It's simply the case that MS has to support its own JS standard, in addition to the "standard".
Facebook in a crowd
Being a hack to make a living sucks, but hey - everybody has to pay the bills. So there's no need to apologize or feel ashamed.

If you find yourself bored silly with your programming gig, do yourself and other people a favor. Get involved in an open source project you like and feel you can make a contribution to. You'll probably start to enjoy programming again, and other people will benefit too.
That annoys me as well. I was born in May '81, so I'm voting you up instead of one of the poll options.
19,683 Tech Layoffs And Counting
Awesome - up about 15% from last month and about 22% from August.
Computing faces a trade-off between sovereignty and efficiency
I'm six, why is there no generation for me?
Stockmarkets plunge as evidence emerges of worsening economic conditions
That would be "not at a startup", I think.
Sure governments make mistakes, but most first world countries do a pretty good job of converting taxes to public services and a generally good framework for supporting the citizens.
You might consider some iPhone development. Strong demand for programmers and the work is pretty diverse.
Digital branding is key for the airline industry - Landor VP
The knock-on effects are why tax law is as (necessarily) convoluted as it is.
Vault, Wetfeet, Glassdoor, etc. If he doesn't think there are sites with company reviews he hasn't been looking.
In case of a starup that doesn' require so much money to run, like http://www.quotag.com it's not the recession that affects them most, but the moods of customers. I mean, in the pre-funding phase there is not much to screw up :)
YouTube - Current Issues in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Just start burying like crazy!
How To Be An Overnight Failure (Interview With Muxtape Founder)
Shai Agassi: The Next 'Better Place' Is Australia
This is a great idea - there's nothing wrong with neither PHP nor web development, but it's great idea to broaden your horizon.

First add another dynamic language to your tool-set: Perl or Python, preferably. This will be an easy transition and you will have a great degree of jobs open to you. There are dynamic language related jobs which aren't web-development: bioinformatics, data mining, toolsmith positions (build/release, qa, operations), platform engineering (creating custom OS images). Some of them may require domain specific knowledge for the more senior positions but would be willing to take on a strong coder on to a more junior position on the premises that you'd be able to pick up the knowledge and grow into a more senior role.

These positions will often either themselves involve projects in other languages (Java, C/C++) that you'd be able to pick up on the job or be in a larger engineering organization where you will be able to transition to these jobs.

And in all these cases your experience as a web developer will be appreciated and considered important.

I did the same transition myself: systems administration (involved in some internal web app development, lot of Perl scripting)-> undergrad (and becoming bored with systems administration after learning algorithms, operating systems, compilers, etc...) -> operations engineering (lot of tools development) -> Perl/C++/Java development. (At the mean time I've been working part-time on a Masters in Computer Engineering which is opening newer domain specific knowledge to me).
Wrong, Matt (and Mark).

Entrepreneurs "have business to do" as Mark puts it because they stand to make some money from their efforts. The less money they stand to make, the less incentive. period.

Also, you state the following as if its fact:

"what capital gains taxes really do is favor the ultra-wealthy who live off of their investments, rather than those generating wealth directly"

No. In order for the ultra-rich person in your example to have accumulated $5M, he EARNED $6,750,000 and paid the government $1,750,000. So, by paying tax on his investment income, he's paying tax twice on the same money. That simple error aside, you're also missing the point that capital gains tax discourages investing in companies! Which has an impact on a company's cost of capital which has an impact on the price of goods and services which has an impact on you.
I hate to point out that there are three words there.

Or is this comment some kind of joke that went over my head?
Further reflection -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268307
Job Boards Fell 46%
"... I don't have the answers, and I don't have much confidence in anything, outside of myself. That said, if I know one fact about the world, it's that very few of the self-confident 22-year-olds that I meet are going to get rich from their big brains and hard work ..."

You will gain answers with time. Your confidence will grow. But chances are if your average "self-confident 22yo" lives in a first world country they are already rich surviving the ardor an diseases of childhood, being feed enough to grow. To have the opportunity to be educated enough to read and write. All that time living in a relatively stable environment.

"... In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be ... the more things change, the more they stay the same. Youth and arrogance are eternal companions ..."

I'll take that back. Probably one of the most astute things I've read this week.
Actually I think it's the sort of a mark of a good salesman that you see in 'modern' self help from Seth to Robert Kiyosaki.

Take some things that are trivial, true, powerful & seldom put into practice. Take the reader through the logical process of what can/will happen & sprinkle generously with motivational story telling. I think the secret sauce is in the chasm between trivial & seldom put into practice. You can say 'that's obvious' to which you/I can answer 'why haven't you done it.'

'Rich Dad Poor Dad' is the perfect example. Everything is either trivial or rubbish. Definitions & numbers are fuzzy & the writing feels like it was plagiarised from real estate flipping sales letters. The core 'message' is trivial, true, powerful & seldom put into practice. He delivers it by using accounting terms with his own definitions (I'm sure accountants like that) over several books, tapes, lectures board games & infomercials (coming soon I hope) but the ida can be represented in a sentence:

"Spend your time & money accumulating revenue generating assets."

You can probably apply that kind of formula to many a self help book dealing with marriage, self esteem, sexor any other popular topic.
Wow, seeing someone born in 1990 made me feel old and I'm only a year older. Weird.

Wikipedia seems to refer to Gen Y and Gen M though for some reason?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations#Generation_Table
Maybe Google changed it, but given the result I get, the article is wrong...
Reading The Guardian, full-text style
Interesting. I honestly don't really know how newspapers work, but I feel like TNYT has something that's an order of magnitude better than most papers that just republish AP crap. Maybe I'm just misled by the brand though.

I'm thinking along the lines of reporters who are funded for long enough to go to a foreign country, genuinely spend time understanding what's going on, and writing thoughtful, lengthy articles (that then of course get parroted all over). Is that largely the responsibility of the editorial staff at a newspaper?

I guess Google should get those people and maybe get them to throw in the logo. :)
Can you say this about your startup?
We are building a " 1/ simple solution(s) 2/ to overlooked problem(s) 3/ that actually need to be solved, and 4/ deliver (it) them as informally as possible, 5/ starting with a very crude version 1, then 6/ iterating rapidly."

If you cannot, "maybe" you should revisit the idea, the implementation or the problem.

EDIT: This quote is PG. To better understand it you may want to read http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html
Ego is debatable.

'Coining of vapor words' is naming things, renaming things or creating concepts. These are very useful tools for assisting thought processes. We think with language.
I think the term you used 'marginal entrepreneur' is appropriate if the tax rate is a significant factor in going forward with a business.

As you said, if the tax rate was in some ridiculous extreme, of course that would be a factor. But then I'd wonder what kind of country/economy would raise taxes to such a high altitude.
Perhaps 90% of the money will be wasted on stupid shit like that, but at some point, someone has to fix the roads and service our national debt.
I'm not sure it's hers anymore.
By coding applications people want, you create wealth. There is not some fixed amount of software to be written, the rewards of which need to be distributed equitably. There is an infinite amount of wealth ready to be created.
I'm pretty sure that our parents had new technology, too. More to the point, I'll bet that when they were 23, they were bragging about how their new technology was going to allow them to change the world. It's almost a cliche, really.

Granted, our didn't have computers or the internet; technology has marched onward. But regardless of whether we're discussing the modem or the mimeograph, the story of the young usurping the old with 'modern' technology is a classic.
Is this some sort of mantra or are you thinking out loud?

:)
I am 1991, even more solid Gen Y.

I was the last in my class to get a computer at home, around grade 6, but I am the second most tech savvy person at my school.

I remember my first experiences with a computer. It was at my elementary school, on an old black and white Apple.

How times have changed.
Looks useful - I'd like to understand more... But not in the same way as the only response to the post announcing Scribe's release I saw. I love tender Diane's response:
"Do you have basic information on how to utilize facebook ?? I'm old and don't know all the different things I can do on it. Do you have some sort of instruction or expanation of all the different functions and wat they are for and how they work ??
Thank you for your paitence and help,
Diane Cheek "
> the other one just doesn't want to use her masters degree as a secretary.

Why not? Is it the kind of writing that she'd be doing (many secretaries write a lot) or is it that she doesn't want to be a subordinate?

I'm beginning to think that the difference between them is that you think that she's entitled to what she wants and he isn't.

After all, one could say that he just doesn't want to use his management degrees to be an individual contributor.
Absolutely correct! It's double taxation!
Someone below made a comment that they can't remember not having a computer at home. If you ask me, that should be the litmus test.

I didn't have a computer until I was in the third or fourth grade.
Ecologarchy?
What about the Pepsi Generation?
Google would've been doomed...
"If democracies decide to ban certain types of speech...they must be able to enforce their rule"

I think exactly the opposite.
Passion Party Products
A New Fighter Jet for Google’s Founders?
Not quite... check this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=343086 (also by sproutly):

While Startuply seems to be doing OK, other job boards have been seeing a decline in jobs. Joblighted, an online job aggregator, has reported its statistics, showing a clear decline in job listings.
Not all technology is created equal. The ability to communicate, coordinate, and compute has reduced the optimum size of the firm in many industries. What is more important, it has reduced the minimum size of a successful firm. Steam power and heavy industry, by contrast, had the opposite effect.
Wikipedia DVD Released on BitTorrent
I wonder how much that law applies.

The 20th century will be hard to beat. For one thing, we'll need to find new resources to exploit.
Enceladus up close - incredible pictures of Saturn's icy moon
This is exactly correct. Backwards compatability is a bitch.

Additionally, you need to account for Microsoft scale approaches. There are two Javascript engines (that I know of) at Microsoft: IE's implementation and Managed JScript [1] which is built on the DLR [2]. The DLR is a set of extensions to the in-development .NET CLR 4.0 to support Managed JScript, IronPython, and IronRuby. The DLR is the place for all these fancy pants modern optimizations that Google, Mozilla, and Apple are implementing. In fact, the DLR already has many of them. I believe that Silverlight 2.0 (now released) has some version of the DLR in it and .NET 4.0 is coming sooner or later. Who knows if or when IE will ever use Managed JScript or the DLR.

Remember: Microsoft is full of plenty of smart, non-evil engineers. You can try to call it ignorance, but really it is bloat, process, and scope. It's almost never malice ;-)

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed-jsc...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Language_Runtime
Most of the Gen-Y's that I've worked with have been pretty intelligent, but very arrogant and largely useless, because they hide their inexperience behind their arrogance and claim they're doing things a "new way" even when it's considerably worse than the "old" way.
Sounds to me exactly like Google was.
Ouch. Unsurprising though, when you consider how hard it is to organise your "real" friends to head out for drinks.
Working (as an employee) at a company that was a startup in 2004. Selected "... but not at a startup" because it's pretty hard to call > 1000 employees and billions in investment a startup anymore :)
1. no, it's hella complicated, but we're good enough to get it done

2. no, this problem has been discussed at length, no one has come up with the right idea yet. (which we have, of course)

3. yes, i mean it's not world threatening, but it will magnificently enhance shareholder value... :D

4. no, i think as a social site you have to either give people what they expect, or give them what they don't expect but will definately like

5. yes, we're going to roll into beta ASAP because it's a competitive market and we need to stake our claim

6. yes, we plan to grow our company and the community hand-in-hand and push new features as we grow and acquire the right team to accomplish what we intend as the encompasing design of our product (which may change according to user reception, of course. incremental build allows us to gauge user feedback and adapt accordingly).

the startup we're forming is a social networking webapp/site (challenging the myspaces and facebooks).
that line made me shiver a little...
That sounds about right. The programming tasks most of us get are trivial, but we end up spending an egregious amount of time on integration and configuration, so the projects still take a long time to complete, and the technical challenges we have time to deal with are rarely all that interesting.

(My current position is to some extent an exception, though I'm finding that getting things done in Java with its various bloatware frameworks takes a LOT more time and effort than in most other languages/platforms, including .NET.)
In my old line of work, we whipped up a spreadsheet model to show a new company's potential return on investment before we took the idea to investors. For any given company, there is a tax rate high enough that would have made it non-worthwhile.

Of course, we weren't in the web business, so numbers mattered to our investors.
Or you'll kick yourself when your picks tank.

Feel free to buy individual stocks, but only with money you can afford to throw away. Picking stocks is gambling, pure and simple. Fun as it is, you should not expect to retire and live comfortably from your winnings. Study after study has shown, quite rigorously, that there exists no method at all for picking winning stocks. Feel free to read A Random Walk Down Wall Street for a more detailed analysis.
Facebook are pretty bad at driving open-source projects. For example: their Cassandra project has had no code commits for the last several months ( http://code.google.com/p/the-cassandra-project/source/list )

While this code and idea sharing is good, it seems like they mostly use it for publicity stunts (i.e. release something open-source, generate press and keep on developing it internally).
HN meetup in Seattle next week
After meeting a couple of hn folks locally and being blown away by their awesomeness, I figured it would be fun to meet up with more local Seattle hn people over beer and food.

Agenda: drink beer, eat food and geek out (optional).

I'm not sure what the best time/place for everyone is, so I've set up a poll - just vote for all the ones you can make and we'll go with the one with the maximum votes.

Please suggest bars in comments.

Hope you can make it!
file under social-network-phobia
The Fed Should Buy Down Consumer Credit Card Rates - Fast
Venture Capital Financing Slows Amid Economic Downturn
Presumably no attacks on Microsoft are planned at this time.

:-)
then what to do when your "secure" job is downsized because company can't get money because greedy criminals broke stock market and now you can't pay for your mortgage so those same people kick you out of house?
I don't know which country you live in, but most of my tax money goes towards killing brown people and paying for other people's healthcare. I pay most of my taxes to the Federal Government and receive the most services from my state and local governments.
Unemployed :D
Depends also what you see as an entrepreneur.

What A lot of people see as entrepreneurship is a largely binary exercise: success/failure. Since tax rates do not really effect the venture in this way, they shouldn't effect the decisions of an entrepreneur.

A 'marginal entrepreneur' would need to be very marginal. Even if you consider complex effects (the effect of your uncle making $1m in the 80s vs $.75m on inspiring you). Cuban's talking about the 'within reason' limits based on practical choice a government is likely to make.

What might be affected by the tax situation is the flow of investment capital. Since Cuban is disregarding that as a factor, that has no effect.
If, by some miracle, you managed to simplify the tax code, then lobbyists would be there the next day trying to add loopholes to it for their clients. Without constraints on government (and ours has none de facto) there is plunder to be had in Washington, and people respond to incentives.
There are two feedback loops that need to unwind:

1. low consumer confidence->revenue drop->loayoffs->low consumer confidence

2. US market->world markets->US markets.

Both of these feedback loops will feed on themselves for a few iteration before the show is over.

It has only begun.
I should have qualified that - your company's 401k partner needs to support it. We use fidelity where I work, and you can sign up for a self directed brokerage link account. This is a relatively new option for us.
I'm not entirely sure what aspects of car computing they're talking about here, but from what little meat there is it sounds like they're talking about entertainment and some body control (heat/ac/radio/nav/dvd), not the (to me) more interesting engine/transmission/traction control units.

If my assessment is correct, they're missing a simpler and better opportunity here: the ability to standardize physical/electrical interfaces for these subsystems.

It will be great that they can save 15% (maybe) of their development costs on their nav system interface, but they're still going to be behind the curve when it comes to innovation in this growing space. For example, if the latest craze in in car entertainment were to be a docking station for your Game Boy, they're no further ahead than they were. If the standards were open, the aftermarket could sell a device that would plug in to the harness and integrate seamlessly.

The iPod was a lesson here, and I'm not convinced that anyone sees it as an instance of a generic class of problem -- only a technology that they had to eventually figure out how to cooperate with.