skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like HN because you guys are trying to work together instead of slinging mud at each other's projects ("but my version has foobar widgets!!11!").

(you guys)++
I agree that personal incentives are part of the problem. I’d also suggest that going public is another significant part of the problem. The public company becomes beholden to its shareholders and is pressured/incentivised to continually deliver growth in the value of the company or dividends, often in mature markets, which in turn can lead to the implementation of riskier strategies for delivering growth.
I would do it for sure. Most people probably wouldn't care about the links traffic being public, but they will be turned off by a registration process.
Directed towards dropbox devs: any chance of letting users specify their own S3 account? I'm a control-freak like that. Sorry if this has been addressed somewhere else, I'm out of the loop.
-Paul from dinner with 3 of you in SF 4 months ago at that chinese place that only took cash..
P2P insurance question, need to interview for an entrepreneurship class
Assuming a peer to peer insurance company existed, what do you think it ought to look like? Would you use it? If so, how?

Thanks.
Which ones aren't suitable for the web? Maybe Fortran, but I know of people with successful production web apps in most of those languages; Perl, Ruby, Python, CL, OCaml, Haskell, Lua, C++, and Java.
Astronomers capture image of a planet orbiting a distant star
When I was in school some of the (mostly) foreign students got a nifty idea.

1.) Pool money together to buy the book.
2.) Photocopy it -- this is the tricky part. nowadays we can scan it. The students would take turns scanning in the book. photocopying it will cost $20 or so for a few hundred pages.
3.) Return the book and disperse money back to people in step 1
Thats interesting.

I would say something like the credit-default swap market where you have individuals or institutions agreeing to insure new and existing debt. As we have seen, it would be a mess unless the P2P insurance company maintained a registry recording the transactions entered by the various parties.
the booms and busts have been continually made worse by government intervention. governments try to alleviate the effects of the bust and in the process make it worse.
Yamm'er I don't even know'er!

No but seriously folks... [rimshot]
I slogged through The Black Swan with the same attitude. He had some good insights, but he was so pompous I had difficulty following his reasoning. I'd continually get derailed when I encountered something that I thought was pure self-promotion.
Cliff Young, a farmer who inspired a nation
Chrome on Linux and Mac
I second that suggestion. I used McAfee's book last year for intermediate micro, and I found it far better at explaining the concepts than our mandatory textbook (by Waldman).

Waldman's book was certainly very colourful, but lacked some rigour IMO.
Everything you ever wanted to learn about term sheets
It's true that there are inevitable conflicts of interest regarding risk tolerance. This is especially true, for example, in hedge funds: the manager takes a 20% cut of the upside, but has no downside. Hence, there's an incentive for hedge funds to be risky. (Excluding a few top performers, hedge funds are not great investments.)

However, I strongly disagree with this article. First of all, bubbles and crashes seem to be an inherent property of market economies. They've existed for at least four centuries (tulip bulb, anyone?) and possibly longer. Overreaching optimism seems to be an inherent human trait. Overpaid CEOs are a relatively new (few decades) phenomenon.

The OP asks: Would you let someone fire and embarass you for a check for $20mm dollars ? So would CEOs.

I'm not sure this is true. The CEO is going to be out of work for a few years, and possibly be unemployable at his current level in the future. Given that he already makes $10 million, a potential five-year setback is not worth that amount of severance.

I agree that large company CEOs are overrated and overpaid, but I can't assign them all the blame for current economic problems, the sources of which are a lot more complex than the OP seems to think.
> 1. Twatter

I remember back when twitter came out as twttr.com, there were tonnes of comments on how people thought it was pronounced twatter. I wonder if that's why they changed names.
this part is relevant to startups: (see figure 7)

"A biotech company (usually) faces positive uncertainty, a bank faces almost exclusively negative shocks. I call that in my new project "concave" or "convex" to model error."

concave to model error: Bank, Short volatility, security

convex to model error: Long options, biotech, technology, entrepreneurship, etc
I disagree. A usable website matters. An Ugly interface matters. Certainly, only to a point -- if shit is broken, it doesnt matter how pretty. Nice interfaces lead to good brand equity which leads to trust which leads to use.

Brian
As stock market crashes, the Era of the Entrepreneur has arrived
Its Creator Seeks an Even Wider Web
Kleiner Perkins Starts an iPhone Blog
Totally agree - pompous. That's the word I was looking for. The kind of author who creates a fictional character based 100% on himself, makes said character the intellectual and professional superior to his peers, the only one who survives the ups and downs of the market; and to top it all off names the character Nero! Seriously!

I found that "When Genius Failed" gives a great story-telling journalistic perspective on some of the same incidents Taleb talks about in his book while "The Drunkard's Walk" provides a good mathematical intuition (sans math sadly) behind seemingly rare events.
I think it means he's the smartest guy in the room.
The SpringStage Opportuntity : Texas Startup Blog
I suppose I'd fall under the category of "baleful Eye." I still haven't heard a good argument as to why the ideals of her philosophy is flawed, and her ideas still make logical sense to me, so I'd identify myself as objectivist faster than I'd identify myself most other things.
Not like it matters at this point, but I was generally agreeing with the author because I used to be him. However, as noted in my comment above I should have elaborated.

It's always interesting when people declare what someone else is saying or thinking or trying to convey instead of just asking them to clarify :).
I'd actually bet that most people who really believe in objectivism would NOT call Rand perfect, because she most certainly was not. She was flawed both in writing and in character. It's just that she happened to do a much better job with both than most other people do, and she created a set of principles that are greater than she was.

"Just plain scary?" A lot of people exaggerate like that. And what's the downside in thinking that people are capable of being perfect? What sort of a situation would have that leading to a downfall?
Equitrader - Stock Trading Competition
That's a slight exaggeration. I think it reveals an exciting trend, but the game itself fails artistically. Its gameplay is more or less generic, and its story has a great concept but poor execution.

Portal, on the other hand, or Half-Life 2... Those games seem to get dismissed by the "games are art" crowd, or at least not brought up. I've never understood that. And Psychonauts, Killer 7, Shadow of the Colossus... But I think that the real innovative games don't get the same level of heralding because people who find those games know that games have been artistic since at least the NES stage. Final Fantasy II/IV, anybody? Zelda?
I'd like to put this in a slightly broader context. Meltdowns such as the credit crunch and the housing crisis are often used by self-styled 'progressives' to attack capitalism itself. But implicit in Mark's argument is the refutation of this accusation: such meltdowns are only possible because of the moral hazard induced by de facto government (i.e., forced taxpayer) bailouts of the guilty parties. In other words, it's precisely the lack of proper capitalist institutions that enables crises of this type.
Have you played Half-Life 2? That's a perfect example of telling a story and keeping the gameplay top-notch.

The voice on the speaker in the beginning are particularly well-done. And if you compare Half-Life 2 to BioShock, I think you find that there's no real comparison: Half-Life wins hands-down.
One Step Closer to Space-Based Solar Power: Long-distance wireless power demonstration
There IS a start-up that has full analytics support, though. I forget which it was, but it measured hits and visits and the like, and it was very easy to use.
Ask YC: if Haskell is the hammer, what should be the nail?
Hi, guys. I've been thinking of learning Haskell, and so have been casting about for a good project to start in it.

I found a top ten list of Haskell projects (http://haskell-news.blogspot.com/2008/01/top-10-most-popular-haskell-programs.html) and it looks like things are sparser than I might have hoped.

Anyway, if one wanted to break into that top-ten list by using using Haskell's strengths, what are some kinds of projects that one would take on?

Also, if anyone would like to join me, that would only add to the fun.
OK I'll ask him when I talk to him, but I'm 90% sure that Chemical Reviews is one of the journals which pay. Not Science or Nature, to be sure, but not exactly bad impact factor either.
"... Another predictor of bad news I have observed is when the ..."

But a lot of Startups don't have HR or departments.

The key indicator here is observing principals and noticing any odd behaviour. The example that comes to mind was a mass-sacking at a Startup I worked at where out of character behaviour of the founder(s) and various hanger-ons ("they all got short skin-head haircuts") the day before mass sackings. One day it was normal at work, the next day it was a meeting at an off site building where the difference between being sacked and keeping your job was being sent left up the stairs or right to get your termination notice. The difference being there is a definite "in" loop that had prior knowledge. The leader(s) did not have the balls to address the sacked staff and inform them management stuffed up, hired fast, let go slow and was running out of cash.

As for me, I got sent to the left ("and congratulated for keeping a job") a lot of other work mates didn't. I left after the work environment became toxic and invoked my "no working for dickheads" policy. You can read about the companies fortunes here ~ http://www.firstmonday.org/ISSUES/issue6_3/doheny/ and here ~ http://150.theage.com.au/view_bestofarticle.asp?straction=up...

Working in Startups is no guarantee to a permanent job but how you fire people is just as important as hiring them.
Cricket Liu: DNS is "Creaking" after 25 Years
Maybe the truly dangerous “LHC” isn’t the Large Hadron Collider, but the Lehman Holdings Collapse.

good one!
I bet. He is probably positive as someone finally moved his cheese and he has new things to look up to now.
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In Boston
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ci_10468916

and New York
http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/14/news/companies/lehman_worker...
You could ask question and answer it yourself.

It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own programming question, but pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question. </quote> http://stackoverflow.com/faq

If (if) you don't want to share you knowledge for the benefit of fellow programmers then that's another question.
No, the problem is that Congress does end up intervening, but the intervention is manipulated to favor the perpetrating companies. Read the Kolko book. Or if you want, I could link to a dozen real world examples.
"... 1.) Pool money together to buy the book. 2.) Photocopy it -- this is the tricky part. nowadays we can scan it ..."

In most cases you didn't even have to buy the book, simply look it up in the library or class copies. Simply borrow the book and copy it. It was laborious and I didn't do this for all classes but some texts are simply not worth purchasing for the value they give. Others are priceless.
That's true, but my main point was you don't really have time to react to something being 'out of sync'. It might feel a little sluggish, but only just. (I suspect)
Warren Buffett says this far better in his 2005 letter to Berkshire shareholders.

Relevant excerpt from CNN:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/05/news/newsmakers/buffett_fort...

Original source: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2005ltr.pdf
(you'll have to wade through to page 17)
any business books which are pleasure to read.
Welcome to the World Wide Web Foundation
Bentley's Rules from Writing Efficient Programs
Sciencedebate 2008: Candidates's policies on top science issues.
Personally, I think there are some very interesting possibilities for using Haskell in the highly-secure web application space. The most trivial example would be simply using the type checker to protect against SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks by representing user input with a different type than query parameters or HTML output.

I've also thought for a while that Haskell would be a great environment in which to implement a static analysis tool to check the security of existing application code. In particular, I think that the PHP community could really use an information-flow and type-checking tool external to the core runtime which could be used to run a quick "sanity check" over source code. The simplicity of the language (relative to, say, Ruby or Perl) makes it a prime target for parsing and analysis, and the large body of existing code in the wild makes for an interesting set of test cases.
I've just started watching the Simon Peyton Jones videos on the subject (from OSCon last year), and I've been kinda thinking I might tackle some systems monitoring problems (I usually use Perl for that sort of thing...and most every other sort of thing, lately). I, too, have been struck a bit by how low-level most of the libraries and such are, at this point (then again, compared to CPAN almost every language has a dearth of high level libraries). And I'm still far too much of an amateur at the language to do much about it. But it is an interesting language, and probably useful to tinker with even if no useful code ever comes of it.
>Big Business as we know it is history

No, not really. All that happened is that one set of big businesses (Bank of America, Goldman, JP Morgan) has devoured the other set (LEH, Bear Sterns, Merryl Lynch). WaMu is next on the chopping block.

The first group won, the second group lost. Big business runs as usual.
Then you'll get unused to it again is my favorite new phrase.
Leave WallStreet - Join a Startup
You may find systems monitoring to be a bit challenging in Haskell if you're accustomed to Perl. By design, the normal POSIX abstractions that are so tightly integrated into Perl are held at arm's length in Haskell, if available at all; something as simple as forking a child process or switching effective UIDs will require far more code in Haskell than in Perl.

That being said, if you want to be able to reason about system configuration states, and write concise deterministic rules that dictate the triggers for and transitions between between such states, Haskell may be worth some additional attention.
But I want to know: did he wear khaki on Friday, too -- or is this him "cutting loose" for his last day?
Thank you, Omar! And thank you for posting! See you at next year's Startup School. :) It is always fun.
Public Speaking/Entrepeneurship/Networking Club At MIT (Sloan)
Weekly meeting at MIT sloan building. (Tange Center) Entrance off Amherst Street.

E51-57. Tuesdays at 6pm to 7:30pm.

All are welcome! We meet to give presentations,
network, practice public speaking, discuss interesting ideas, practice leadership, have a good time, etc.

Location:
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=e51&mapsearch=go

Club Website: http://tuesdaytm.freetoasthost.com/index.html

I have been following Y Combinator for several years not and I have been part of this MIT club for some time as well. I would like to have some of the local Y combinator members to come check out the club and potentially make into a networking, discussion forum for startup related ideas among other stimulating topics.
Thank you for posting. It was great meeting you earlier this year and I hope we're both crazy successful the next time we meet. It's all about little steps, though. :)
MySQL Multimaster Replication in an Asynchronous Environment
Interesting. I suppose we can, in part, blame Arc's brevity on the fact that Paul Graham uses vi:

http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html
I agree, Half Life 2 is amazing. Like I said, Valve is a notable exception.
Agreed. After a number of thought experiments involving dragons that hoard gold, defunct Buddhist temple construction companies, and irrational exhuberance, I came to the conclusion that owning stock makes no sense if there are no dividends.
There's this meme about type checking defeating SQL Injection that I don't really understand.

There are basically three situations I see injection problems recurring in modern web code:

* The stupid cases where people are interpolating input strings directly into query strings, so that a query for "O'Neill" will accidentally break your SQL.

* The not-so-stupid cases where column sorts and query builders pass limits, sort orders, and groupings directly from user inputs.

* The cases where stored procedures resort to dynamic SQL.

The first problem is solved not by better type checking, but by switching to parameterized queries, where the query string is parsed prior to argument binding.

The second problem is solved by not passing SQL literals in and out of input.

The third problem isn't even happening in the application's programming language.

Which of these problems is handled well by application type checking?

As for XSS attacks, I'm again skeptical. If the problem was as easy as type checking, you'd solve it trivially by output filtering everything from the database, neutralizing HTML metacharacters. It's not that easy: there are lots of times when you really do need to honor HTML in input.
FTA :
Darwin was, in many ways, a model of good scientific method. He observed the world around him, developed a theory which sought to explain what he saw, and then set about a long and painstaking process of gathering evidence that would either bear out, contradict, or modify his theory. As a result, our understanding of the world is expanded, but the scientific process continues. In science, hypotheses are meant to be constantly tested.

Shoulda read two more lines...

I like this article. If all religious people were this reasonable, we'd have very few problems related to religion in this world.
how to get rich by Richard dennis.

Softwar - A bio on Larry Ellison, one where he writes footnotes responding to the biographer's text

Made in japan - Akio Morita and sony - written by Akio Morita - founder describes early days of the company
Well, regardless of the original intent, it's probably a pretty safe bet that people were voting for it because they perceived it to be a bash on MBA degrees.

My main gripe is with anti-intellectualism and other forms of low-brow snottery in general, not so much with your specific comment.
My personal interpretation of Hacker News is it's news that's news to hackers...
> If programmers were always that foresightful, programming in general would be a whole lot easier.

Agreed. That's what encapsulation is for, though. When code isn't separated into sections with defined borders, it tends to grow entangled and hard to change.

For a real (albeit simple) example, something I'm working on has several instances of an ordered collection (with a few irrelevant quirks). I presently have the type declared (once) as

type 'a coll = 'a list ref (* pointer to a Lisp-style list *)

for the obligatory quick-but-inefficient scaffolding, and wrote a few one-or-two-line functions inserting, checking for membership, and the like. (They're just aliases to existing funs in the List module.) I expect to swap out the implementation so I can compare e.g. skiplist, RB Tree, hash table, etc., performance later. Given the constraints on the problem, none seems obviously better (though I'm betting on skiplists here, space reasons). 'a coll is used throughout the program, but changing that line and those few short functions will replace it everywhere (and it will notify me if I miss something). 'a coll is also polymorphic on another type, because the whole module is a functor. (It's for a language-agnostic source code analysis tool.)

This structuring is nothing specific to OCaml, though; data encapsulation is main idea of chapter 2 in SICP. (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-13.html...)
Likewise, in an OO language I could swap in different collections subclassed from Collection, or just with the relevant methods, depending on if the OO implementation used class-based or structural/"duck typing" polymorphism. That's the same overall result as the above, though by slightly different means.

> If a compiler is smart enough to know what needs to be fixed then it should just go ahead and fix it instead of fobbing the job off onto the programmer.

OCaml's H-M type system doesn't try to guess whether you meant all references to x to be type A or type B, it just tells you that they aren't internally consistent. It would be guessing. (How would the compiler know if you're gradually changing from A to B or B to A from just a snapshot, anyway? That's analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.)
I see one flaw here: having people pick the best stocks can increase wealth by allocating money to where it is most efficient. For instance, going back in time to 1965 and investing in Toyota instead of GM would not only have been a very lucrative move, but increased Toyota's ability to create wealth by increasing its access to capital.
You're right that #1 is indeed just a matter of using the right API. (I actually blame the poor state of many database client libraries and tutorial docs for the proliferation of interpolated query params, but the point remains that it's basically a mechanical fix.)

For #2, the problem is a bit trickier, but again, it just requires attention on the part of the developer.

Given the limited use of stored procedures by most LAMP developers, I think that #3 may be the least critical, even if it is the most difficult to tackle with a simple code analysis tool.

As you suggest, none of these issues are particularly hard to avoid via careful programming. The problem is that programmers often aren't careful, and when working in languages which offer "one-size-fits-all" string, array, and file types, they tend to just shove everything into and out of those containers without thinking about type or flow checking.

Type checking isn't a panacea, but it can flag issues of either type 1 or 2 early, which gives developers a chance to catch themselves before they commit (or even worse, deploy) a potential security hole.

Part of my motivation for this comes from reading a lot of unit tests and specs for webapp code. If you step back and think a bit, it becomes obvious that a lot of the test harness is simply devoted to type checking, and that the verbosity (and easy satisfaction of coverage metrics such tests provide) often mask otherwise glaring gaps in the actual test coverage.
So what's the difference between lobbying and corruption? Are you saying Congress accepts money to keep hush hush?
For some reason the site is saying that its blocking me due to a "hacking attempt". I don't understand why it is doing this to me I wasn't trying to hack it or anything.