skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an update to this, Backtype integrated perfectly but I had to make some minor faux hacks in the db for the visuals to work properly. The only minor glitch I see is that Backtype isn't parsing character spacing or line breaks properly.

http://colinanawaty.com
I hope Paul and company also try to build an app that will serve the entire humanity and not just the small clique of technology geeks
Don't expect them to unite on protecting privacy any time soon. They are robbing our privacy "for our own good", remember?
To be fair, the numbers are not directly comparable. The football coach salaries are only for division I teams, which most schools don't have; the mean and median football coach salaries over all schools is probably much lower, and the academic salaries at schools with division I teams may well be higher than average.

In essence, this is comparing the average salary of the top 150 best-paid football coaches to the average for all academics. It would be interesting to see what the average of the top 150 academic salaries is.
Google Placing Links to own Election Center as AdSense PSAs
I like that he carefully avoids mentioning that most people would want to get the hell off a deserted island. I'm using the provisions I have to help me survive my journey home, and not to sustain life on the island.
Motorola's $2,000 Rolex Phone
ya, no doubt there is a ton of stuff in there that your average app dev guy/gal will not wade into. but what im generally gettin at is the way that they are going about doing things. more open = better, imho.
It's my opinion that college football players should receive salary, or at least be able to accept endorsement opportunities. There would be a decreased financial motivation to leave school early.

There's a ton of downside to this, I know, but I don't think that universities should be regulating what sort of money their students bring in.
75k Bonus!?!?

How about a liquidation event bonus?

That seems more reasonable.
FriendFeed is for everybody: http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2008-09-05
I'm not sure that "across-the-board" means the same percentage for everyone. It could just mean everyone's pay gets cut.

But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that in a company where the CEO is overpaid, he's not going to take a real big pay cut voluntarily.
I'll take Rhapsody's subscription service any day.

$15/month on LaLa: add 150 songs every month to my stream list.

$15/month on Rhapsody: have instant access to millions of songs every month.

BTW, I do not work for Rhapsody or any of its partners.
I believe pg wrote an essay touching on the idea of structured procrastination:
http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
Are stock options the same thing as equity?

If not what are the pros and cons of each?
I love that he takes that accepted and rigid view of the workstation market and identifies a bunch of other smaller markets within it. It seems too often that cynics will write off those smaller markets because they believe in a more rigid and less complicated view of the marketplace.
A visual history of 11 successful blogs
Does Your Website Suffer From These 7 Usability Mistakes?
Ah! I was searching all day about the app gallery and downloading android stack on the Google Code site. And co-incidently google releases the code today.

Just wondering why the source is 2.1GB?
How do mobile phones it as? 2.1GB or a compressed and tailored stack?
I think the article, and the above response are both reactions in the 'to a hammer, everything is a nail' analogy.
And as I use to say to my father, it only works for the hammer!

These two solutions are only address small parts of somewhat unrelated problems.
Will more start-ups strengthen the economy? likely!
Will more phd create more technology for the start-ups? likely!

But what is missing is the scale of employing thousands if no millions of people. I know history says the original trickle-down economics of the Reagan era didn't work, but that was giving people money in the hope they would spend it rather than invest. The new version is keep financial institutions alive so that they can continue loan/borrowing activities - though hopefully without making the same dumb moves they have made in the past.

Start-ups are theoretically small in nature at the beginning, and therefore are potentially a long road to recovery. Same with PHD's? How many individual auto-workers or even accountants are going to become PHD's.
Though you (nostrademons) do say 'many physics & math Ph.Ds ' are not using there Ph.D abilities, that will hopefully change due to the lack of potential in the new Wall St. Though you could also argue that this is the time when Wall St. actually needs those Ph.Ds the most.
There are a ton of things in the repository.
The true injustice is how much money universities make on the backs of athletes who don't earn a red cent. And the coach salaries demonstrate the value of collegiate athletics, adding insult to real injuries.
It seems to me that the group most heavily influenced by the media is actually the media itself.
As did Robert Benchley:

http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/how-to-get-things-done-des...

"Anyone can do any amount of work,
provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment."
How To Get Things Done (1949)
Profit margins will drop in software. It's inevitable. We just happen to be in a new market, and this is the kind of margin you see in a new market.
They receive salary in the form of a scholarship.
Post Series-A, it is somewhat common though not universal. Once you start adding employees who don't hold significant amounts of equity, you have to create meaningful performance incentives. The best way to do that is with a monetary bonus.

Also, remember, all of these numbers are for non-founding positions.
Well here I can say I disagree with both. Let's focus on utilizing our already underemployed tech staff and give companies incentive to retrain and retain our existing 'knowledge' staff. The U.S. has plenty of capable employees without importing more.

The only instance I have some agreement with H1Bs is when a foreign student completed a degree from an American university. Otherwise, special processing to import employees for consulting firms, tech companies, etc. should not be allowed at all.
Not to mention the fact that many of the top 150 academics would have side income as consultants, expert witnesses, etc.
In Defense of Network Neutrality
Yes, any amount of stock ownership-- or potential ownership, as with options-- is considered "equity." Although these numbers in percentages are skewed-- in fact, the actual equity compensation is obviously spread over four years. So to put the percentage equity share owned after four years next to the yearly salary is somewhat misleading.
I think you're mainly referring to using Google for Mail (as opposed to running and SMTP server). Actually that's what I'm going to refer to - its the one argument I have, using Google for mail gives you POP/IMAP and a great web interface, as well as robust architecture, all built in for cheap/free -definitely worth it. (Note you can just point your mail to google via DNS and still control your domain).
Second-world child - Need Advice
I'm Canadian, but I live in Turkey since last December. Yesterday I was chatting with a kid on the street. His story was not super-sad, but still. He's working every day after school for about 5-6$. He uses that money to buy bread for his family (the bread here is horribly white, it's not a great idea). Some days he doesn't eat. He could be a smart kid, but his response-time was slow, and he had that glaze in his eyes, presumably from the bad nutrition. He was also awfully short for a 16 year-old.

He has 5 brothers, the older 2 dropped out of school already. Here's the interesting bit: he wants to be an electrical engineer. Ambitious. From what I can tell, his chances of getting into uni are very, very slim. It's competitive. At the same time, if he makes it, he can probably get state support, and he has a shot at a decent living.

He was very enthusiastic about computers. There are cheap internet cafes here, but his English is very limited.

I don't have much illusions about his chances of pulling himself out of this on his own, even with the best advice in the world. Still, it's worth a try, so I took his email. So far, I'm thinking:

- Learn to read English.

- Replace the bread with bulgur. It has a good price/nutrition ratio AFAIK.

I also thought of WOW gold farming, and pointing him to python.org. It seems far-fetched though. In Turkey, you can't get a job without a diploma. Any ideas?
Or the barrier to entry for usefull ideas will be lowered.
There isn't money in making PIC demo boards - but there is lots of profitable innovation in things you could do with a PIC if a cheap demo board was available.
It's probably both happening in tandem -- it seems to be a gradual social change, in part due to rising gas prices. A noticeable percentage of college students have biked around for years, but it seems to have increased significantly over the last few years, and I see significantly more people biking around downtown Grand Rapids, MI in general.
This is the main reason Obama needs to win. I'm so fucking sick of anti-American republicans. Can we please allow the democrats to ruin the country? Please?
It doesn't have to be cutting edge. I do some hardware/embedded SW moonlighting. Since a lot of the smaller projects seemed to have a common platform, I made a run of PC boards so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel with every new project. If I had known about the Arduino at the time I wouldn't have bothered: I'd just have used their design with my firmware and saved a bunch of time.

The point of this is to build on someone else's work. Just like I can use Apache without having to build my own webserver, I can use the Arduino design and add my customizations to it.
Great article, I just bookmarked it, I think every startuper should do the same. I spend a great deal of my time on how to implement cost effective solutions, this is a great complement to my goal of running a startup that build great products for less.

I have witnessed firsthand how money shortage can ruin startup with great ideas; it’s not pretty.
What are the downsides to paying student athletes?
Respect to you for actually doing what a lot of people are thinking.

That said, I see the problem, and its not easy to solve on a one-child basis. There might, however be another way. What about setting up some small software shop? one used computer in a shed somewhere, with 5 kids using it at different times around the clock. Start them out with some simple stuff, like mechanical turk, and move them on. Maybe to python.org as you suggested. Eventually the will (hopefully) get up to speed. Once they know some english and some python (or PHP or whatever) things will start to progress. It might even be a viable business, and it doesn't cost much to set up.
Wireshark 1.0.4 Released
if you have watched Zeitgeist you know exactly why they're investing more of "our money" into losers and a losing game.

if you haven't then i didn't say anything, i love capitalism, and don't send the black helicopters please.
Looking at the issue with an objective eye, don't you think that if one took the very best from other countries that it would improve the overall skill level in your country, instead of taking the mediocre local talent and trying to train them to make them good?

The intelligence percentages are roughly the same for all countries (maybe 1% high gifted, 10% quite gifted and so on), so if you took the 1% from other countries, that would give the U.S of A a highly competitive advantage, don't you think?
You know, just go look at the info on facebook to see how much the average person cares about privacy.
I've been using the service for some time now, and I think the price point is right in the sweet spot. 10c buys you the capability to play that song an infinite number of times in its entirety (online). Plus, just like other music stores, they give you deals on the full albums. For instance, Queens of the Stone Age: Era Vulgaris (11 songs) is 80c. And, as the article mentions, previewing songs or albums (full songs, not 30s clips) is FREE. I think I've spent about $10 total and I've got 15 albums in my "web collection". I'm at a computer pretty much all day anyway, so this is the perfect solution for me.
You're preaching to the choir, I think the athletes should get a share of the pie as well.

Preferably, in fact, these unquestionably professional athletes would stop pretending to be students at all, with some sort of hybrid university-sports structure. (keeping in mind that this graph uses the top 150 college coaches; schools like Yale and Stanford unquestionably have true student athletes)
> This is true, in my experience, but isn't a very good argument against making bicycles available to everyone for free.

The majority of college students who walk between classes have bikes, so why would the availability of free bikes change their behavior?
This is a pointless article. What he's saying is 'learn some self control'. I believe that if procrastinators found it easy to learn self control, they would not be procrastinating.

It's like telling an alcoholic - only drink on weekends.
Right before launch, Google strips down the App Market for a bit of polish
i think dropping computers and internet access on poor countries is a great idea for them to bootstrap themselves into the 21st century.

i mean as long as their not limiting their options to gold-farming... (sadpants}
Can you really ever have too many capable employees in one country? This is not a zero sum game.
if irc isn't your thing, just install a jabber daemon on that unix server that is now doing your mail/spam filtering/cacti/etc. add the conferencing component to it and you'll have real-time group chat just like irc that works in adium/ichat.
Chatbot Game Update: fast bot response time, chat modes, create your own chat modes
Don't they remember the lessons of DataPlay? http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/P0000652.jpg
"- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also?"
IMHO, Shapes are hard to recognize from distance or at night (especially if the traffic light is bright)... As far as I understood from the article(s), making the green light a blue one could solve the problem...
There's a big difference between voluntarily sharing your personal information and a government taking it. Comparing the two is ridiculous.
> You say you can't be 30s faster on a bike than someone travelling at walking speed, even for short distances?

If you're more than 2-3x faster than pedestrians, you're a danger unless you're separated from them, and bicyclists are rarely separated enough on a college campus.

1mph is 264ft/minute. Reasonable walking speed is about 3mph, or over 750ft/minute. A safe bicyclist will cover that distance in about 20 sec, saving at most 10 sec.

Meanwhile, the walkers had a conversation.

And, since students have 10 minutes between classes, the time saving of faster transport doesn't buy them anything even if they're going 1,500ft..

That's why students who own bikes don't use them all that much. They're only useful to/from campus and for long-hauls.
I'd like to see someone go to court with this and set a precedent for a legal definition of "douche".
Ah, nice. We use SWFupload in our PHP apps and a different Flex uploader in our Rails app. Not sure if the Flex uploader is affected by Flash 10. I'll have to check it out.
Window's dominance had nothing to do with the niceness of the dev platform. Computer purchasers don't care about that.

Windows beat mac because there were more hardware vendors that ran it, which drove hardware prices down, increasing market adoption. Apple, in contrast, reaped huge margins on its products at the expense of growing their user base. From a developer's point of view, if you like making money, the platform you develop for is determined by how large the potential audience is for your software.

So, if Apple manages to continue to improve the iPhone, and drives the price down such that it attracts customers at a greater rate than Android, it won't really matter so much if the API terms are onerous. Developers will go where the largest market is.

I don't really know which approach will win. I'm an iPhone/Apple fan myself, but Android will be able to leverage the efforts of every handset manufacturer, just as MS did in the 80s. The real question to me is whether the outcome will be the same for Google. I tend to think it won't, since the phone is different from PCs in one very important respect: design and style matter much more than they did in the PC wars. What phone you choose to buy often makes a personal statement about you (like a fashion accessory).

Given this, Apple's superior UI and industrial design will probably be enough of a differentiator. That, coupled with Apple's demonstrated ability to relentlessly refine their products (witness the numerous iterations of the iPod), gives me confidence that they are on the right track - even though I wish they were friendlier to their developers.

edit: And one more advantage for Apple: iPhones will appeal to any consumer that believes mp3 players and phones should merge, since the iPhone is the easiest way to enjoy your existing iTunes/iPod library.
BTW simply converting a design to B&W will expose most of its usability problems related to contrast (just saying it in case it's not evident).
Exactly. The fact that I like sex doesn't mean that I wouldn't mind being raped.
Apostrophe S is not a plural!
I hear the points about query optimizers that you and the other repliers have made. (And they are valid points, all. I was just misinformed about MySQL.) I was more addressing the points made about database design decisions w/respect to data type choice and their effect on storage requirements and speed. I was wondering, specifically, if it is technically feasible to allow designers to specify 'text' or 'string' at design time, enter in some typical data, and have the engine choose the optimum type subject to its implementation constraints.

That said, it seems like I need to educate myself on the various products, though any prototypes I build will still use MySQL just because of the price point. :o)
Yes, I do remember why Windows beat Mac 10-20 years ago, but I also look at why Mac is challenging Windows today. And don't forget who reinvigorated this mobile ballgame last year. Your average consumer wants something that does a few things, but does them extremely well. The iPod and iPhone success stories are a prime example of this.

I'm not saying that I believe open markets are bad, I think they are necessary for maintaing a competitive market and nurture innovation. But as far as the consumer is concerned, they'll head in the direction of quality over quantity.

Apple is doing a great job letting technology fit into our daily life without making it a hinderance. I don't expect cell manufactures and carriers to work in conjunction with developers to deliver a seamless experience 99% of the time, and this is where I feel Apple wins in their development offering.
Thank you.

Another way to look at it is that the university is 'paying' them with a free education, and 4 years with no financial obligations. Depending on the school, that has the potential for massive financial equivalents.
But right there, you had the catch.

(online)

Now, if it was 10c and I could put it on my iPod, or use winamp or something, they'd have something.
Now that I've read the entire article, I think the author makes the same mistakes that the Chinese ripoffs do. He's talking about the guys selling the $400 museum monitor going out of business because they're so expensive. But price is only a small part of the solution. I'm willing to bet that the mfr knows his market, understands their needs much better than the cheap newcomers, has a better distribution network and reputation in the field. It's really hard to compete solely on price unless you're selling cheap consumer commodity goods which this is anything but.
Is Physics Better Than Biology?
Good to know. Our Rails app uses a Flex uploader.
Source form > binary form. In OpenEmbedded development (what I generally do, not that familiar with Android), my dev folder is >15 gigs and the image I create is <128megs.
Android Goes Open-Source
I don't understand this view that just because you're doing work you deserve to get paid. Rowing was the first amateur sport in the United States, and if you look back at the history of why Rowing when amateur in the late 1800s then you see there are some very good reasons. The reason the NCAA is amateur is because it creates a better experience for athletes. You don't have to worry about people fixing the games, getting stabbed, being pressured to take steroids, sports overshadowing schoolwork, etc. If athletes started earning a salary then you'd see a lot of the best student-athletes give up sports overnight. I certainly would have.

Furthermore, schools aren't making money on the backs of athletes, they're raising money. That money doesn't get redistributed to shareholders, it gets added to the endowment and spent on the university. If anything student-athletes should get an income tax credit on their first X dollars earned after college rather than a check, basically a modified form of the tax credit they would get for any other charitable contribution.
Sony Ericsson Z320i Silver Unlocked
Everything about the Sony Ericsson Z320 clamshell camera phone makes it ideal for fun-and-style seekers everywhere. So much so that you’ll never want to leave it behind. Share your memories - Discover and enjoy the fun of taking and sending pictures from wherever you are.
afraid of competition, huh? ;-) Maybe get to work;-) LOL
Kill your blog
Gotta love the military nerd (look at his profile too)
Very interesting and thorough article. I think these questions are particularly interesting to consider from the perspective of a startup. While smaller startups may not face these challenges yet, since them teams are still relatively small, it is a good idea to begin considering them. It makes me wonder if there is something an organization can do ahead of time to mitigate these conflicts down the road. Any thoughts?
Please maintain these pay rates. It gives my competitors and potential competitors higher burn rates, and makes acquisition much easier when the alternative is actually building.
Microsoft's SideSight: Something Apple Should Watch
I'm not really doing anything so far, short of sending him a "quit smoking and good luck" message...

I worry about the food issue, since concentration problems is a big deal in learning. He's not doing well in school so far, but he really didn't strike me as limited in that regard. Your idea is interesting though. Maybe I could get my own appartment and set up a room out there eventually.

There's a lot of these kids around though, so I should have some advice ready even if I won't commit to helping them any more.
Renesas M16C Microcontroller LCD Display
The G1 doesn’t officially hit the streets until tomorrow, but the 3rd and Market store in San Francisco will begin selling the first Android device starting today at 6PM PDT.
I think the confusion is in the definition of "safe" - when I read "safe", I understand it to mean "will not cause major injury, great financial loss or permanent poverty".

Most people considering a safe vs. adventurous route mistakes this kind of safety with "will not cause any emotional distress". In a modern guy's head, straying from "strictly" safe feels as dangerous as straying from "emotionally safe", probably because our modern society doesn't prepare us to deal with any reasonable amount of pain.

A "physically and financially" safe adventure isn't an oxymoron, even in business. But in most cases, adventure entails a certain amount of distress between the successes. For instance, I fly airplanes for fun. I'm pretty sure this hobby will never hurt me, but it sure as hell doesn't always feel like that.
In every single case, ads went from 0-10% of the space to usually around 40-60%. In most cases, the best above-the-fold space was re-purposed for ads.