skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... mostly because I’m going to be a father in March and need some stability, but also because I’m tired of the fight ... "Ha ha!" ..."

Apt.

Failing fast though is probably a good idea. Ted reminds me of the difference between Engineers and Entrepreneurs. The former is a subset of the later and playing Engineer is not enough to succeed. Part Engineer, part schmooze, play-acting business type and full time dogs body. I'm beginning to think founders of successful Startups are more chameleon than person.

This is the problem with Pressflip,
it doesn't turn up anything interesting
~ http://uncov.com/node/245

When Pressflip fails to deliver the goods instead of writing better software, changing the idea or looking for alternatives. Ted bails. Is it the realisation the idea was less than stellar? the market has turned? Or did he get the hard word from the misses who's looking at the lean years ahead? I'm making a conscious effort to avoid feelings of schaedenfraude to Startup founders who fail like this.

Then Ted writes articles like this ~ http://uncov.com/paul-graham-shut-your-face

Ha ha!
It depends. If it's at a venue with over 80,000 seat it's very hard to sell out. As amazing as it seems, WWE is still popular. Yes, fake wrestling.

UFC is super hot right now. NASCAR is already the second most popular "sport" (ugh) behind football, but UFC should be grabbing the third spot soon if they haven't already.
So that explains why conservatives have higher birth rates, live in low crime areas, oppose abortion and favor traditional family structures! Wait...
God I love amateur hour. The economic crisis stems directly from the impossibility of correctly modeling rare events in a complex system such as the financial market. You throw the gross lack of accountability fueled by many factors, including a few government backed loans used for leveraging, and no one has to ever solve the real problem. A new approach is needed for the financial markets, and it should have absolutely nothing to do with increased regulation.
I've never found the Ivy League that interesting - I'm sure they're all good schools, but beyond that they've never seemed particularly unique compared to similar top-notch liberal arts schools - but MIT and CalTech have always fascinated me.

In particular, the Rose Bowl incident from CalTech. I've always wanted to meet the instigators of that particular incident.
> But part of guiding society (as you suggest) is trying to push it towards an ideal even if you know it will never fully reach that ideal.

Right, but again, my point is that pushing for libertarian-motivated policies for no reason other than that they agree with libertarian ideology doesn't always make sense given the ecology of non-libertarian policies they have to interact with. It can make things worse.

If there's to be any pushing towards an ideal, it has to be done in a way that ensures the stability of the modified system. If it doesn't, those making the push are justifiably responsible for the problems that arise.
The future of email has been greatly exaggerated.
There’s Sunshine to be Seen in VC Land
No, I wouldn't go that far.
Yahoo’s Profile Mess
No. Maddox is far more talented than this. Ted has had a few brilliant articles and many good ones, but Maddox is consistently hilarious.
This is a great read. Thanks for sharing.
Summary: author defines a "self" as something with a fixed, consistent set of desires; observes that people have changing, inconsistent sets of desires; concludes that people are made of "many different selves." What an insight.
Making the curriculum broader and "focusing on synergies" is worthless. The real problem is that most high school programming classes suck. It is rare to find someone who's a good programmer, and also a high school teacher, for the obvious reason that high schools can't pay programmer salaries. So you end up learning stuff like "define a private variable... what does 'constant' mean... what is an object" rather than an understanding of how to write real programs.

Maybe a class where you actually build something would be better. The AP curriculum, though, is pretty worthless.
Hey adityakothadiya, nice articles.

Time to pony up the attribution of the photo you use in your article ~ http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/2008/09/thoughts-on-start... Username and link back to my original image of my flickr photo would be nice :) ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157602184871362/
Ah - I think its because of the success of companies like reddit and posterous. As they get popular, so does ycombinator...
Agreed, but you guys can have my cheese fries. That doesn't make me a communist. I just don't like cheese fries.
I believe there is no good or bad time to start a startup. As far as economy is concern, it's more dependent on the perspective you take to look at it. I work for a software maker up in northwest, and everytime I think about opening a startup, I meet a few people suggesting against it with economy as the reason. When the economy is good and our company's stock is going up, the normal advice is:"you know you will be much better-off sticking here for some more time because we are doing so good right now." And now when the economy is down and our stocks are hitting the bottom, the advice is: "this is not the right time to leave the company and open a startup. You won't get funding and with our stocks so low, you will be broke bootstrapping your startup."
My perspective: well I got a good idea and great co-founder, let's go for it. We will figure how to survive the economy on the way.
Wow. He argues that a financial collapse caused by two quasi-governmental businesses giving out loans too liberally due to a decade of government pressure is the end of Libertarianism. If anything, it feels more like the beginning.
Will YC fund a reconrd number as well this year?:-)
Leaving aside the moral issue, there's no reason to believe government intervention would have improved the situation in either the short or long term. It's easy enough to look back in hindsight and say what could have been done, but governments don't intervene in hindsght. And even if they could, it's quite possible that what we're dealing with now will make us stronger in the long term, whereas were it prevented we may have been weakened.

It's just too unknowable to say, and too easy to point back in hindsight and say "here's where government could have helped." Unfortunately, that's not very useful.
How to Build a Successful Social Game: Design for Play With Strangers
Could be that YC is being treated like Grad School. Something you do when it's not a great time to get a job.
Buckypaper is made from tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

It's really time for a new social contract, in which people who read Wired promise that they know what a nanometer is by now, and in which journalists promise that they'll stop describing things in terms of the width of a human hair.

Human hairs, for what it's worth, are between 20 and 200 microns in width.
Being unemployable.
For 64 bit architecture, the only big hole I found was the flash player -- it's simply broken, even with the npviewer plugin.

As far as wired networks/desktop hardware goes, I find that things Just Work(tm). Laptops, yeah. You do need to google, or buy with Linux preinstalled. thankfully, there are more and more places that sell Linux laptops these days.
Look, clearly people should use their best judgment when making decisions and I don’t think anyone is saying otherwise. But you’re pushing compromise as an ideal and that’s just wrong.

An ideal is an ideal and compromise is what people do to make their ideals compatible and create an actual system of government.

So what you want comes out in the process because, as you said, a society run by politicians is going to be interventionist by its very nature and people with Libertarian ideas are going to have to compromise. But if the people with Libertarian ideals don’t come to the table firm in their own beliefs they end up compromising even more than they normally would.

Which (bringing it back to the housing bubble) is exactly how we ended up in this situation. People with libertarian views were willing to compromise to the point where what actually got implemented is the polar opposite of libertarianism and the result was disaster.
I don't get this: "As is Michael Arrington's usual style, he is showing his personal vendetta against me to mischaracterize what I've said."

I didn't see anything vindictive or horrible in what Arrington wrote. Maybe it's slightly critical, but it's nothing compared to the stuff on uncov
Report: Google Reducing AdSense Payout to Make Quarter?
Such contradictions arise all the time. If you ask people which makes them happier, work or vacation, they will remind you that they work for money and spend the money on vacations. But if you give them a beeper that goes off at random times, and ask them to record their activity and mood each time they hear a beep, you’ll likely find that they are happier at work.

Hey, I'd be pissed off too if my vacation was randomly interrupted by beeps.
I'd love to hear more about this. I could see induction used to send power, but how would you send data? Zigbee or something similar?
You know, reading that made me think not of start-ups, exactly (where the rules of the game are so indefinite), but more so video gamers.

People who endlessly analyze certain parameters in order to maximize productivity in a system - perhaps childhoods spent playing strategy games is an unacknowledged criteria for attaining certain kinds of success.
I got lucky - I found him while networking - I was not really looking for a coach, but he helped me find new business so often that I decided to work with him professionally.
I think your last sentence is most telling. Neither the free agents trading in the market nor the regulators would have continued as they did if they knew what would happen. The answer is to understand and then set up more diverse, failure tolerant economies.
You forget about your own survival. You simply will die from hunger if you won't go hunting. Mating and children was always a second priority.

The most essential dichotomy is between leisure and running for your life, I think.
Amazon's MP3 downloader and the most recent student version of Matlab also do not support 64 bit architecture.

Most of the stuff in the repositories is good on 64 bit, much of everything else is not.
This doesn't seem so much to be 'What if the US Collapses' as 'How the US is like the USSR and why that will lead to a similar collapse'.

However, the USSR was not a free-market system, and there was very little incentive it seemed for citizens of the USSR to band together and solve problems.

Are there similarities between the US and pre-collapse USSR, sure. But the human mind is great at finding similarities and patterns. Postulating that the US will collapse JUST as the USSR did is a stretch.

The US may fall from it's height of power relative to other nations of the world, but a full collapse in the near term I think is unlikely.

Of course, every empire falls at some point, and I suspect we have seen the height of American power, but the American way of life is far from over.

By the way, I'm Canadian!
I agree that this proves nothing. I agree that the US financial system or market in general was never free in a sense that would appease a libertarian but..

Your sentiments are interestingly similar to what a lot of Marxists/Communists had to say (not too many left though) when that 'failed':

That is, point to the Soviet Union & say: 'That was never true communism. So it failed. If it was truly a Marxist regime, this never would have happened.'

As I said, I wouldn't personally take this as a 'proof' of anything. But what seems inevitable is that this is causing a swing (in public opinion) away from deregulation of financial markets. I think it's very likely that there'll be a wholesale swing against the suite of things associated with 'libertarianism.' That's a shame in a way. Whether or not financial regulatory policies are optimal or not, has very little to do with the moral theories of libertarianism for example.

Anyway, there seems to be a big shift in the sway these ideas hold.
answer?
Web designer available.   Degree in fine art, 10 years experience designing websites.
This could just be a ruse for attention and troll for traffic.

If so good job ... everyone is fooled! Are you that smart though?
Being something of a utilitarian myself, I see intervention being necessary when market incentives are not aligned with what's best for society. I've never seen anybody make a convincing case that such misalignments do not exist, or that a free market is always able to account for them more efficiently than the state.

EDIT: Feel free to make such a case or link to one. I'd like to be proven wrong.
Glad to see MIT kids have such a spunky culture.
Actually I think yters deals with your sort of complaint. He deals with it fatalistically. Libertarians will continue to say that libertarianism never had a clear shot. Communists will continue to say the same. Both are not particularly easy to test. This argument is stuck when you encounter this.

But we do have a situation that is not high level theory that we need to make a decision about: We can push Governments to be more/less liberation, elect libertarian politicians etc. etc. What are the likely consequences of these actions assuming that an imperfect world exists where there will be opposition from politicians of different opinions etc.
The Freudian model isn't simpler: it postulates three "selves" with constant, fixed agendas. This model talks about arbitrary numbers of selves with arbitrary agendas which pop into existence all the time.

The "short term self" vs "long term self" conflict is unlike the id vs ego conflict in that there isn't a "superego" to adjudicate it. The no-superego model fits better with my subjective experiences.

Of course the "long term self" and "short term self" are themselves composed of multiple selves... for instance I have one long-term self who is working towards one set of goals, and another who is working towards another set of semi-contradictory goals.
There is a problem with the type of ideal you describe.

If (as previous comments suggest) libertarian ideal is something that only works in its entirety, then introducing a 'libertarian law' outside of a libertarian system is damaging. It may be a step towards the completion of you ideal in a very general way, but if it doesn't get you closer to it, doesn't improve the intermediary state etc. etc. , then it's not a good law.
Prototype is something that can help to express your idea better. But, it really contradicts with what everyone always said - the best idea is the idea that can be expressed in one sentence or fewer words.
> However, the USSR was not a free-market system, and there was very little incentive it seemed for citizens of the USSR to band together and solve problems.

I don't think the freedom of the market matters much when you're trying to survive: you will want to solve this particular problem as soon as possible.

That said, I think the author underestimates the American people and their resourcefulness.
I honestly don't know enough about the situation to say what could have been done, if anything (which makes me incapable of knowing whether your claim of unknowability is true :P). But while governments don't intervene in hindsight, driving ideologies largely determine what possibilities a person pays attention to, and thus the capacity of their foresight.
You're both right. And this is something that is not emphasised enough. But as with most thorough ideologies, religions & such, their proponents tend to believe that they are the right course of action no matter what angle you look at them from. So from many libertarians' view, it is correct even if you are a consequentialist, utilitarian. etc.

I have yet to meet a libertarian that suggests that even though the economic policies are bad for society in a utilitarian sense, they are still morally obliged to support them.

Libertarianism is therefore associated with it's utilitarian arguments. They are in every way bar the most theoretical, the foundation of libertarianism.
Not disagreeing with you on the general idea but there are other factors pushing up. Mostly to do with rising population. 'Existing' houses stand in places that will over time become more central, more developed & therefore more scarce.
I suspect that says more about the applicant pool than the choice of fields in the application.
You guys are missing his points. Read his book and you will understand much better.

Tim Ferris is about CUTTING OUT THE CRAP. He is about efficiency. Tim ferris checks his email once per week. He did this while running a very profitable business. He got to where he is by employing these principles. And unlike other "gurus" that just make money on selling their "guru" information (like rich dad poor dad guy, tony robbins) this guy actually did A WHOLE LOT of things. Now he is sharing his experience on "lifestyle design".

His advice is meant to free up your time, to invest in things that actually matter, and actually produce returns. Do you mean to tell me that posting on yc, checking your email a billion times a day, and screwing around on your phone is productive? It's not, you can bash me all you want, but it simply is not.

Being up to date on news is bullshit. Sure its "nice to know", but does it really get you anywhere? Read his thoughts on "information overload" and you will understand.

All this stuff we are doing, its "nice" but its not efficient, and optimized. If you want to get anything done in this life, you need to be efficient and optimized.
5 years is a bit unreasonable. Take a look at the salary chart on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_firm#Salaries

Typically, you're about $160k in debt from law school, so the first year is spent paying that back. The next 4 years taken together is only $795k, nowhere near enough to retire for life. All the associate years together is only about $1.6M, still not enough to retire after 11 years.

Then you have to make partner; if you don't, you're out of the firm and usually have to set yourself up as a sole proprietor. If you do make partner, you're set for life, but at 11 years getting there, the road is nearly as long as becoming a tenured professor and usually longer than becoming a successful entrepreneur.
We only used induction for power, data was sent with an infrared LED and a photo sensor on each side.
Why Location-Based Apps Suck
Informal Python GUI toolkits overview
I wasn't entirely aware I was conveying sentiments ;) As far as economics goes, my creed tends toward mysterianism (though you correctly deduce I have a soft spot for libertarianism).

I don't think we will make much progress in the field until we make and analyse many actual experiments. Even then I doubt that economics can be usefully understood. It is simply too complex.

I think the best chance of real progress (i.e. something other than rhetoric) is in simulation, or even better, massively multiplayer games. Eve Online is an interesting step in this direction.
I certainly agree he has some good ideas--but like everything else, what he says should be taken with a grain of salt.

He personally outsources much of his life, including personal e-mails and dating (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/07/24/mail-your-ch...):

Online dating is largely a numbers game, so I hired virtual teams of people all over the world â€” India, Philippines, Jamaica, Canada, and others â€” to compete against each other and set dates for me on an online calendar. Each of them were assigned one of my accounts on either online dating sites like Match.com, or on social networking sites like Friendster, and there would be a $150 bonus to whichever team set the most good dates. Excluding the bonus, the entire experiment cost less than $200 dollars

If this is your thing then go for it, for me its too impersonal.
Hm. Never used the MP3 downloader myself, and Octave has been sufficiently compatible (ie, every bit of code I've encountered/written worked on both) for me to do all the Matlab courses and assignments that I've worked on. I suppose that I should have qualified my original statement -- all the software I cared about as an engineering-physics/computer science student that ran on Linux in the first place runs just fine on Linux 64 bit. (I miss CAD and a good GUI circuit designer, but those were also missing from 32 bit Linux)
Don't kid yourself the UK is one of the most heavily monitors countries in the word. What with all the cameras they have there.
Novel, clever, and breaks an accepted rule or convention, there-by doing something previously thought impossible or impractical. The idea that a hack breaks an accepted rule is what gives hacking its social significance, imo.
For those who don't know: Pyjamas is a working Python port of Google Web Toolkit.

To my eyes it looks like a hidden gem of open-source world, the post is from a guy who wrote Adobe AIR-alike overnight.

Of course it's not polished, ready for everybody, but for those who know Python and like to hack it could be a base for the next killer app.
Bah!

This knee jerk hysteria is exactly the same as the reaction to 9/11... A major shock to the system freaks people out because the work isn't conforming to (comfort-oriented) expectations and so they instantly look to someone who looks good who promises them a return to mindlessness.

The abrogation of responsibility by the many for their own lives and the arrogation of authority/magical-ability/etc. by the few (and the selling of that to increase power/profit at the expense of everyone else) is exactly the underlying mechanism that created the emergent, systemic failures.

An example people might want to look at is the examples in traffic management whereby busy, dangerous intersections have been redone so that there's less separation and therefore more required of all of the participants to pay attention.

I particularly like that example but there are plenty of other good examples from the driving and traffic world if you look around.

Sigh.
I think you may be hanging to tightly to the semantics.

Libertarianism is not being used (in this article or in general discussion) in its moral theory/political theory sense. They are referring to the derived economic policy theories.

Hype removed, it might read: 'End of government intervention as a taboo.'
Interesting, but very questionable.

The argument seems to be rooted on evolutionary psychology: when times were tough in hunter-gatherer days, men needed women who could pitch in with work to help them survive. Plausible in general, but I'm skeptical of the exact definition used for "difficult social and economic conditions". In hunter-gatherer days, this meant droughts, blights, storms, epidemics, and other disasters that made you starve or freeze to death. In contrast, even in difficult economic times, modern middle-class American men (i.e. who could afford Playboy) probably do not have to deal with anything approaching the level of duress needed to make this survival instinct kick in.

By the way, not to be dismissive, but I think the term "cute-o-nomics" was invented for studies like this.
My knee jerk hysteria? The public's? The article's?
Nicely done. some vids are not available. and a search would be nice too.
Probably. But you'd be surprised how many people decide to apply in the last week, or even on the last day.
Yes, Google had quite a significant time(but kept growing in popularity) before they started making money.
Poetically Whrrling Around the Northwest
AOL, for example, set off a user revolt in 2006 when it suddenly transformed the Netscape.com portal into a “social” news service. By the time AOL reversed course the next year, the Netscape portal had lost half its audience.

I remember reading that Calacanis was praised for his role in transforming the site before they switched back. Maybe I'm mistaken (I've always avoided AOL). But half of their audience? That's a very serious hit.