skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please. Disdain for shareholder value does not lead to incredibly low profitability. There are several examples of US companies who put shareholders last and still do extremely well (P&G comes to mind).

The primary problem of Japan's economy is lack of competition. In the US and Europe, exclusive contracts are illegal. In Japan, they are the norm. In Japan, the standard growth tactic in new product spaces is to gain market share as quickly as possible. Often at a loss. Then once a (small) group of companies collected up a critical mass, they would lock in some customers with exclusive long term contracts and segregate the contracts. Middle men are rampant. Export/Import controls are rampant, protecting the inefficient domestic companies from foreign competition.

Japan has a two tier economy. The extremely efficient export economy, efficient because it must compete internationally, and the extremely inefficient import economy. Inefficient because, for the most part, it does not even has to compete domestically.
Never underestimate Scoble's ability to rationalize the actions of his masters
That seems about right. My thoughts on the problem are that programs covering only the destitute are VASTLY cheaper than programs covering the whole population. I am hoping that by the time my generation retires with fat 401Ks, there will be the political will necessary to kill the burdens that FDR's legacy has placed on us.
I was born, raised, and still live in Iowa and I've worked for several startups for many years now - they are just all based elsewhere. One was European, one from the valley, one in Florida, etc. I haven't found a need to move just for the sake of working in this industry. The Internet is a wonderful thing. Coffee shops are my office. Total freedom.
Well, if you're looking for a textbook:

Kandel is the gold standard, but it is quite hefty and technical -- a great slimmer one is "From Neuron to Brain" (advanced undergrad/early grad):
http://www.amazon.com/Neuron-Brain-Cellular-Molecular-Approa...

If you're more interested in the computational end, try "Theoretical Neuroscience":
http://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Neuroscience-Computational...

And I'll also add in a great computational textbook on spike recording:
http://www.amazon.com/Spikes-Exploring-Neural-Computational-...

I'll also note that if you apply to a "Neuroscience" grad program, you're probably going to be doing biology experiments all day, or psychology experiments if you pursue cognitive neuroscience.

If you want to use CS and Math, the best you can do in a neuroscience program is data analysis. Hence, I would recommend AI or Mathematical Psychology (though the latter is about modeling high-level events).
Thanks robg & toddml, I was particularly interested in Principles of Neural Science and it's good to see both of you endorsing it.

I've already started teaching myself some first year biology (from a borrowed textbook), so I'm going for Principles.
Maybe I'm missing something but isn't the installer for Debian usually smaller and more tuned for servers, and isn't this command line only version of Ubuntu basically the same as Debian? Why use Ubuntu for servers?
This is my biggest argument, which is why I use Lighthouse since it integrates very easily with Github. I don't like my bugs to be meaningless text files; it's far more useful to have them tied to VC so I can see what work has gone into a bug/feature, which commit fixed something, etc.

I suppose I could retain the "never leave the command line" thing by composing e-mails to Lighthouse for new bugs in mutt via vim, but that seems like more work than tabbing over to the Lighthouse Keeper window...
And this is exactly what Murray is saying in The Bell Curve: over the time (20th century), the system became better at "bubbling up" smart kids, no matter what socio-economic background they came from.
I would have preferred a link to Paul Krugman's summary:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/james-galbraith-...
My entire life before college was spent in a suburb of Boston. I loved it but wanted to try something new for a year to get some basis for comparison. Frankly, I didn't know how much I liked it until I left. I am sure at some point I will be heading back to stay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XxmWTI4zWM
There are two hot beds in the "middle" where you can find strong activity. Austin, TX and Boulder, CO... I live in Austin for it's low cost of living, Univ of Texas resources, Texas' strong economy, and no state income tax. The only thing that bothers is me is that we're in the bible belt... :)
A how-to that shows you how to set some servers doesn't make the final solution "perfect".

And why don't they have any "perfect servers" based on Windows? Surely for some applications Windows would be a good solution too?
I agree on the first three and disagree on the last two points.

I know neuroscientists that do few biology experiments, if at all. There are other ways to get data if you don't collect it yourself. I also know folks in Psychology programs that don't do psychology experiments, based on the same principle. For instance, different types of modeling allow for contributions that coincide with data but as theoretical and analytic tools.

I wouldn't recommend Mathematical Psychology (too much theory, not enough application). I don't know enough about AI programs to comment.
I'm from Dayton OH and I work as a freelance programmer. The worst part is that it is very hard to find any kind of freelance work that doesn't involve using Microsoft products. I would love to do some Django projects, but everyone is hooked on asp.net or php.
A distinguishing fact about markets is that they let consumers decide what is useful and what is not.
Hacking Education
Happy to help. Focus on ions and channels if you're interested in neuron functions. That's a typical hangup for those new to biology. Some knowledge of the vascular system also helps. Otherwise, it mostly comes down to classifying cell types then brain and body regions.
How does that work? Is the page sent gzipped and my computer un-gzips it? (and what specifically does that..do browsers do that?)
Yep. The browser sends an "Accept-Encoding" header as part of its request (with a list of what it supports). And the server can respond back with one of the encodings listed. Most modern browser support compression I believe.
I've got a company in Chicago; we're in the process of outgrowing our third office in 2 years. I can (have, in fact) given a litany of reasons why Chicago can be a better choice than the bay area, where my last company ran out of.

(Half my company is in Manhattan, but our revenue isn't 50/50).

I have friends in Indy with a thriving, well-funded company in the telephony space; I'll try to get one of them to chime in with why they moved their company from NYC metro to Indiana.

Prior to Matasano, I spent 4 years at a VC-funded startup in Ann Arbor, MI --- Arbor Networks. Being in the middle of nowhere is great for the company and crappy for the employees; Arbor was the only credible option for a developer with a mortgage in Ann Arbor, so most of the team was stuck.
What's a precedent for an online market for downloadable apps, where that market is the primary venue for the platform, where users have enough control over the listings to prevent them from getting swamped with crap (such as individually packaged apps for each Project Gutenberg text), but not enough control to game the system?
Google now shows "35 posts, 20 authors, last post Dec 3" for forum pages
So it's recognizing and specifically tracking forum pages (pages that have regular additions to it)?
The problem isn't editorial control of their store, it's that their store is the only means to distribute a public app. If they allowed you distribute an app on your own (like you do for desktop apps) it wouldn't be a big deal when an app isn't accepted.
But there's a difference between having a phone that CAN play music, and a phone that's designed to make listening to music enjoyable.

My current phone has a music player. I would never use it. I would take a crappy unknown MP3 player to my phone's music player. It's awful. And a part of what makes it awful is that I don't intuitively know how to make it play music.

Compare that to the iPhone. Microsoft might try to make a competing phone. Right now, they've got nothing.
Thats pretty kickin. If I made websites for a living I would look into that further.
8 Ways to Hack Your Office Lease for Cash
Opera Mini Not Rejected?
No, I never said 'everything...relies on a domain name'. It isn't even the name that is the problem, it's the extension and what that says about your company.

You can look at all of the successful domain names that have little or no real meaning, but they are all '.com' , or '.net'.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly when users type your URL, they are gonna type COMPANYNAME.com - you are going to loose users instantly if by not having a .com name.
Sometimes users will know to try .net, but not everybody will, and getting people all the way to .biz is a stretch.

I suspect the only companies who have been able to grab traction without a .com name are the ones who have used clever play on words to make the .EXTENSION work with their name, like Del.icio.us

Don't take my word for it, look around, make a list of how many companies you can think of use a non-.com/.net name.

The problem is that you are creating barriers for your potential customers to get to you, and as a start-up you already have enough challenges, no point getting in your own way.
Fresh Apps for the iPhone
I figured out how to get my wireless connection back, but the NVidia drivers are still a mystery. I don't care about free software idealism, I care that my shit works.

Are we not seeing the connection here? This is why anyone bothers to write drivers for devices that already have binary-only drivers. It may work right now, but if something changes in the future, someone needs the source code to fix it. Free software is pragmatic in the long run.

(Disclaimer: I spent way too much time a little while ago getting some random binary executables from the Linux 2.0 days -- dynamically linked, 32-bit -- to run on a fresh Ubuntu 8.4.1 installation. The source code had been lost.)
Cool, but that doesn't substitute peer-reviewed research. His book and thesis is anything but that.
This really hit home with me. I'm suffering from poor teachers who are bored and don't care and a system that only wants my money.

I also was amazed that this came out a week after I started working on something that can solve this problem and do many of the things he mentioned. It makes me feel like my idea is 110% more valid, and that is exciting.
This site could match usernames with OS/browser fingerprint and IP address (location.)
Yes - the first mainframe I programmed on had a big box - 7'x4'x4', which held a megabyte, and cost a megabuck! I still remember the thrill of playing lunar lander on a Selectric terminal attached to that beast.
Yeah, but Adrian did it while he was living in Chicago - he never actually lived in Lawrence.

Of course, Chicago is in middle America.
"But the word “contract” is losing its meaning. Chinese spot prices, having traded above the contract price for five years, have crashed from $186 a tonne in July to $80 a tonne today and continue to slide (see chart). Buyers are breaking contracts, bankers are pulling financing and projects are, inevitably, being scaled back."
Austin is a fantastic place to start - and SXSW coming in town every year is huge.
I should have clarified further ... by and large, if you apply to a program in "Neuroscience," you are applying to a program in "Neurobiology." For example, MIT has a huge Brain and Cognitive Sciences option, with a beautiful new building dedicated to Neuroscience. However, a few years ago I was told they only accepted one new student who applied only for computational work that year, since they have very few professors who would support computational work alone.

The fact is that there are very few professors working on "Computational Neuroscience," which is basically modeling experimental results. (I consider this data analysis because most of your time is spent analyzing experimental data. But, its intention is to not only explain given data but to predict the results of future experiments.)

Hence, if you apply to a neuroscience graduate program, there will usually only be one or two faculty members who do computational work. (There are some exceptions -- e.g. UCSD, Caltech.) Many programs won't even take you if you're only interested in computational work because if you somehow don't get along with the professor or it doesn't work out, you won't have a backup lab.

AI programs are divorced from experiments, but they get at the "bigger issues" and are satisfying for CS people -- whereas computational neuroscience models very complex small systems. Unfortunately, computational neuroscience also seems to be struggling -- many biologists discredit it, saying that its only real breakthrough has been Hodgkin and Huxley's model of the action potential!
Those office space costs are comparable to Chicago. Indy is smaller and less desireable, but there's much more supply in Chicago.
I'm going to call you on that and ask for details on how SXSW is really huge for a startup. Got an anecdote?
The crowd that hangs out at HN isn't really the main problem, you guys make more than enough to be able to retire on your own. But for the rest of the US...

In Norway, which actually has a working health care and retirement system, that number somewhere in excess of 50%. (33%+ tax on income, 25% VAT on everything and any number of specialized taxes on most services people have to use). Social services are a lot more expensive than most people realize.

What is the total tax level in the US? If it is even 30%, you shouldn't expect that the state will be able to cover everything. Your real problem is that wages are lower than in the rest of the industrialized world, and hence that the average worker is unable to save up enough money to retire comfortably in any way.

The way I see it, the US has been living a dream for the last 30 years. It's going to hurt. The median wage has to double, and you need to save the excess. Or else you'll have a major poverty problem.

When I say this in other forums, people always bring up the discussion of private vs. public social services. This is a red herring. A well-run public system doesn't waste more than half of the money we put into it - if that is the case, you have more than one problem.
If you want to develop new ideas, do so before you read many books, otherwise your ideas will never break out of the orthodoxy.
Why was Ann Arbor "crappy for the employees"? I think it would be a pretty nice place to live.
the first ibook came out in '99, i would hardly call the last 9 years a brief flirtation.
You sir, are my new best friend.
US can just go back to normal historic policy and be open to immigration. That was it's growth engine in the past and can make it recover within years if properly regulated (i.e. make them pay taxes and slowly earn privileges.)

But suburban mild racism is in the way.
Of course not, there are always extreme outliers. But if you do a median net worth survey of the professions mentioned above versus that of of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, the results are indisputable. Very high intelligence careers have a poor comparative financial ROI, on average.
I think some of this rampant over-staffing is more cultural than the product of a funny economic buildup. If you've been to other Asian countries, you'll see people doing ridiculous jobs (sidenote: many people in Taiwan have someone else wash their hair, there are people who have never washed their own hair before and don't know how).

Also the second to last paragraph is so true. Japanese people are somewhat crazy about their savings. They tend not to invest but instead put it in banks (sometimes at rates below inflation).
driver update don't do shit either in VISTA
Ann Arbor is actually a pretty excellent place to live, especially if you have kids. They get what I perceive to be a better than average share of touring bands, both in Ann Arbor and in Detroit. The quality of restaurants is fairly high. Lots of good cafes. The city and central campus is walkable. Leopold's and Old Town are good bars, as is Ashley's on the off season. And you get Zingermans, which is a force of nature.

Housing costs are higher than average (lots of people move to Dexter and Ypsi to get around this, but then you lose "walkable"), and there isn't a huge amount of capacity, and you have to deal with students and avoid student housing.

Great school system. Good parks. Lots of kids.

It's a fine place live. But it's a crappy place to relocate to: if your job starts to suck, or god forbid you lose it, where else are you going to work? The University, for 40% of your current salary?

When you're 20, this is not a big deal. You lose your job, you move somewhere else. When you're 30, you start wanting to own a home. If you have a mortgage, and you don't have a lot of cushion in your bank account (young people with houses often don't), you need 3-6 months warning to relocate.

If you have kids, regardless of whether you rent or own, moving is A Big Deal. I moved back to Chicago instead of NYC because I needed to commit to my family that I wasn't going to uproot them again.
Thank you all for your excellent answers.

I just bought Principles of Neural Science (it's pretty damn expensive in South Africa), but I'll look at almost everything else mentioned here.

HN is awesome.
You can distribute apps on your own; it's just that the process to do it is cumbersome. I can make excuses for why that's a reasonable restriction (Apple has some reasonable restrictions for iPhone apps that would be hard to enforce in the presence of popular ad hoc app distribution systems), but they won't be convincing to you.

Look, I probably agree that in a perfect world, stupid apps like this one would still be listed for download somewhere. So I'm not going to argue that the circumstances here are a win for the app store. I'm just trying to recognize that Apple has an extremely ambitious and interesting strategy for iPhone developers, which complicates things in weird ways. I'd rather have the Apple-controlled app store than what OS X has, and I'd 1000000% rather have it than what the RAZR has.
I live in Pittsburgh, which is dangerously close.
I think the primary benefit, if you have a solid team, is the much-reduced cost of living possible in those areas. This is going to be a competitive advantage for small startups who increasingly are going to have to get profitable on their own.
I prefer books that are much the opposite, like Priciples of Mathematical Analysis. I like to fill in the gaps in terse presentations and poke around on the internet for applications and other things. A good professor, however, can make any book a good one.

I had a teacher last year that used Artin's Algebra. He made a game out of the massive amount of typos and errors:

Show that question X is false as stated. Give the correct hypothesis and prove the new theorem.

How can we strengthen question Y?

On page ABC, what is the error in the proof of such and such. How can it be fixed?

Honestly, any good professor can make even the worst of books enjoyable.
REPL for C#
My favorite text on Linear Algebra is Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra and Its Applications although the current edition is ridiculously expensive:

http://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Applications-Gilbert-St...
I'm at MIT. I don't think that's true. In my lab alone (neuroimaging), there are two students focusing on computational issues. True it's of data, but that's the challenge to any scientist - explaining the data in front of you and coming up with ways to collect better data. Modeling is just one form of that. Computationalists, therefore, have much to add.
Looking at the Table of Contents it seems fairly decent.

The most helpful Linear Algebra book I have used is Linear Algebra by Friendberg, Insel, and Spence.
MIT: Mending broken hearts with tissue engineering
Το χαμομηλάκι: Άξιον Αγάπης: Η Συλλογή
Το χαμομηλάκι: Σχολικό Λεύκωμα: Η Συλλογή
I think this is the most important point:

You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers.

The biggest cost is also the one that is often the least efficient. Add to that the power of the teaching union and the system stays in stasis.

I'd like to believe technology can make a big difference, but I'd be satisfied if we're merely able to fill some gaps.
Seattle’s Startup Lawyer: An Interview with Craig Sherman of Wilson, Sonsini
One one side, I feel resentful because academic professors and teaching assistants are crucifying Wikipedia as some source bizarre source of information that is the result of 13-year old children wreaking havoc on articles. Contrary to popular belief, the Wikipedia articles go through a review process. Even edits I've made that I felt were accurate had been reverted minutes later by a Wiki editor.

I typically make it a point to tell the whole class that Wikipedia cites many of its claims. Not all of the citations are 100% accurate, but it's a start for doing research. It gives you a high-level overview, and gives you a place to start compared to the messy online library systems. I go to one of the most research-intensive schools where every professor is required to be doing research in addition to their curriculum. And our online library is a bad place if you want to get a high-level view of the problem you're looking at.

On top of that, this article is dead on. I remember ranting about this topic back in 2006:

http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education-is-...

http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/school-sucks/
I'd second principles of neural science, though that's with the expectation that the reader has the appropriate background in basic chemistry, biology, and maybe anatomy. Out of the dozens of books I have on neurosci, that's probably the single most comprehensive.
New App Brings “Digital Drugs” To The iPhone
MIT Venture Capital Conference - Theme: Reinventing Venture Capital
To contrast, Unununium was intended to use python to make rapid prototyping of novel userland functionality a reality. Pycorn looks like it's primarily a teaching tool. Both are cool conceptually.
I'm in Indy, also. I haven't lived here long. I think that part of the problem is that there are more startup-oriented people than one would think, but everyone thinks there are no startup oriented people. (A couple weeks ago I found out my neighbor in the apartment above me had applied to YC, and is a HackerNews reader. Tim?)

Perhaps we should have an Indy HN meetup sometime. In what part of Indy are you (you being anyone in Indy reading this) located?

If you like Ruby, there is a monthly Ruby group meeting at the downtown library (which is pretty awesome, in my opinion). Search meetup.com for Ruby and Indianapolis.

Complaining is useless. Maybe we can improve the city's startup scene ourselves, huh? Who else is going to do it?

Edit: To clarify: the library is awesome. I've only been to last month's Ruby meeting, so far. I get the feeling many of these sorts of groups are in their infancy. The Ruby group is sponsored by DealerFlow (http://dealerflow.com/), which is a startup of sorts. The Indianapolis Star (newspaper) employs some Ruby hackers (Indy.com is currently Rails, for now). I work at a data center (ChaCha is a customer) writing our custom intranet apps using Ruby/Rails. There are bright spots in Indy, you just have to dig.
Don't forget Cleese as well: http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/14.html
New Yorker for Obama
NOVA | Hunting the Hidden Dimension (program about fractals)
Trac is amazing, I've been using devjavu.com for secure hosting, and it comes with svn+trac. But trac and svn are really easy to set up on a linux server if you have the time and interest.
Dating is Sweetr with skype