skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like they could have worked this deal out in advance and saved some user heartburn.
http://www.zetetic.net/2008/11/26/welcoming-sandy-users-to-p...

Hindsight is 20-20 and it's a challenge to run a complex service but instead of just shutting down with two weeks notice offering some migration options might have done more to maintain goodwill.
Web app scalability. Something is wrong here
To boil it down, a generic answer: "The timing wasn't right."

I still think it was a very prudent decision. Gruber said it best: "I’m not sure I’d sell a sandwich in exchange for Facebook stock." (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/24/twitter-facebook)
I think this para sums up just how byzantine and divorced the corporate software process can get:

In CS4, the responsibility for CS installers came into my organization and we focused almost all of our development time on one thing: make the installer experience more robust so that the vast majority of customers could install the software successfully and start using CS4 apps without any issues.

Um, no shit? Isn't that the primary goal of any program? Complete the task without crashing? This is a valuable insight you can only get by setting up a focus group after the software (the 9th or 10th major version!) has shipped?
Frank Herbert's Dune saga was correct much before that...
Right, that was my question -- Will I be able to avoid steep fees/taxes by registering the LLC elsewhere?
"Now it turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.'"

The pattern I see throughout history is that large organizations endure until some disruptive technology takes them down. (Greek hoplite armies vs. light infantry and archers, armored knights vs. longbows, cavalry corps vs. tanks.)

The modern age has simply accelerated the whole process. Technological change occurs increasingly quickly now, and so these "overturnings" happen more and more often. Because large organizations take time to form, the balance of power has shifted to small entrepreneurial organizations.
Why Unmaterialistic People Should Want to Get Rich
"Semantic" has been one of those buzzwords that people like to brand things with at the moment, or perhaps last year. The word itself has significantly branched out in academic terms as to where it's applied and that's been carried even further in marketing.

To be honest, the only reason that Directed Edge isn't branded as a semantic tool, which many others have labeled us as, is that I vetoed the suggestion from our business guys since we're not using any properly semantic techniques.
Seth is that you?
My reasoning for building this was that our community had a need for an online presence, and none of the tools were quite right. The main differentiator come from the assumption that the community members are neighbours, often with a pre-existing relationship. The tool share and skill share start to leverage that.
I'm in Europe.

I do understand that it is bad in US, but not how it became so.

It probably isn't just because of "credit" aspect of the credit cards.

Even here people buy stuff on credit. Just it is structured in a different way - credit is bound to products, not people. For example it's popular for retailers to offer payments over longer time for more expensive items.

If this stopped to work, nothing much would happen. Few people wouldn't have large screen TVs, or leather sofas, or similar stuff.

Maybe US problem is that credit was too fluid, so that people started to use it to pay for essential things (food, rent, bills, etc)?
Successful companies tend to grow. Could Google make just about as much money with 5000 people as they currently make with 20,000? Perhaps, but while adding people has a positive ROI they are going to keep doing that. There high value for large organisations to buy small ones and IP law tends to create cash cows which buy up all the interesting companies around them.

PS: When companies that can kill Google, IBM, and Toyota while staying small show up I might agree with you until then I expect things to stay like they are.
Twitter Tech Communities: A New Project
Some initial thoughts:

There's an extra 1/10th of the "Log in" button in Opera 9.62.

I don't like how the box on the right side of the home page looks like a pushed in button. The front page doesn't stand up and scream that you're offering something I want -- try updating the design. CSS Zen Garden is a great resource for inspiration.

Sounds like you have an interesting idea there. Have you thought about selling the service instead of offering it for free? I'd imagine you could get home owners associations and other similar organizations to pay for access.
I would agree with this completely but extend it to monolithic intuitions such as governments, legal systems, policing, armies, councils, schools, etc. I envision that the networking changes we are witnessing are much more profound than just for business, which will apply themselves just the same to the very structures that currently control nations.
Pretty cool concept, but this can't be the real video, right? A little too dry for your MTV/BET audience.
"If Internet startups offer the best opportunity for ambitious people, then a lot of ambitious people will start them, and this bit of the economy will balloon in the usual fractal way."

With the advent of open hardware and 3D printers, I think you can take out the word Internet and have the statement still be true.
Marketing can not make false claims. Claims such as "this car will get you laid" can not be falsified. Claims such as "this car can go 0-60 in 3 seconds" can be falsified.

I think "twice as fast" fits with a falsifiable claim. It's a figure of speech as well, but I'd rather err on the side of protecting consumers. If a company claims something is "twice as fast," it had better be, by some metric, twice as fast.
If you mean a "join-stock company", large corporations are probably less than a thousand years old. The first were alledgely shipping combinations organized in London and Dutch coffeehouses, but I have also read suggestions that Medieval Japan and China may have had something like a modern joint-stock corporation.

But what Graham means, is corporation in it's true sense of the word as a generic "body". The Catholic Church, Roman and Ottoman Empires, Hanseatic League, various hybrid religous orders such as the Teutonic Order and etc, can all be considered corporations. And in general, larger was better, with occasional shifts and retreats.

I think car manufacturing can be done by much smaller organizations. I suspect that pharmaceutical companies will have to change a lot; for all they spend on research, they simply don't prolong human life enough to justify being 14% of the economy.
In a linear regression model, r-squared represents how correlated the model is with the data, while beta indicates the relationship between an outcome (e.g., revenue) to an input (e.g., GDP). Thus, a r-squared of one in a model where profit is the dependent variable and GDP is the single independent variable suggests that profit is 100% correlated with GDP. A beta of 1 indicates that profit moves in the same direction and to the same degree as GDP.
A good Google ranking can't be understated. That is driven partially by blog exposure. I am #1 on "Free Intranet" and "Free Extranet". That probably drives half the signups each day. The rest comes from a low budget Google Adwords campaign and a low budget Adbrite.com campaign. As for other search engines it is like they don't exist.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that yes it would count as an invention. You need to address this with your employer before proceeding any further.

Now you're in touchy territory, you're telling your bosses that you have a side project which may one day take you away from them, but if you're going to do this and maintain control it's a risk you have to take.

Otherwise when you leave, if they know about it, they can take you to court for this project.

If you go in to talk to them, assure them that it is a side project and that you won't work on it during work hours or using work equipment (not even a company lent laptop is safe.) If the project is still neo-natal then they should be cool with it and have no interest in it unless the idea is that good.

If you think the company might take it from you and you don't want that. You have to work on it in secret, never tell the coworkers, etc. Then leave the company before it becomes known, and the term expires on your contract document.
pg isn't prescient, but based on his argument this isn't much of a stretch. It may not turn out to be true, but it would be an even worse idea to cripple the conclusion to your thought because you're worried about embarrassment.

.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- Alan Kay

YC is definitely working to prove pg right.
If you want to work with startups, you would have either do corporate/securities or IP work. Very difficult to do both, as each is a deep & separate field of law. Thus, it's unlikely that one lawyer could handle all a startup's legal needs (and thus be 'general counsel').

Of course, there is the capital resources issue of having a lawyer full-time. Even if the startup is funded, I doubt the investor(s) would be happy cash (or even the startup's equity) is going towards a full-time lawyer instead of marketing or product dev.
Is the Linux community watching a setting Sun?
What makes the camp and darcs VCSs unique
I don't think 'corporation' is a required title for the concept to apply. Large command-oriented economic drivers have existed for a long time. The Roman army was one, it's economic function the looting of conquered territory. Notice that when it could no longer accomplish that function, things began to turn south for Rome.

We are observing the decentralization of economic authority, common throughout history, but usually a side-effect of economic decline and/or societal collapse; maybe more correctly a side-effect of the movement from specialized occupations back to subsistence farming.

This decentralization seems to be different, and appears to be driven by the unprecedented communication, access to information, and wide audience granted by the Internet.
I'm not sure I like this approach. What's to say that the changes in line 4 don't really depend on line 2? I'd rather make dependency more explicit with some mechanism like feature branches.
"This doesn't mean big companies will disappear. To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/highres.html)
I think communication and transportation technologies made "huge" corporations possible;

If you can't ship your products to large distances, you can't have large manufacturing facilities.

Without all these wonderful communication channels, you can't have your workforce distributed across the globe.
The idea that all actors in an economic system are rational isn't a good one. A good example: the current stock market. Those people are really good at finances, they have an idea of what's a good stock and what's a bad stock. Emotions are playing a big part right now though, which causes the market to fluctuate in what I would call and irrational way.
This is why I was careful to distinguish between organizations and companies.
I think Paul is over-generalizing. Young, fast-developing industries tend to produce rich ecosystems of startups due to low cost of entry. But over time, as industries mature, companies are naturally starting to consolidate into larger and larger entities in order to survive. Paul thinks that just because we're seeing this early growth in web software, it applies to all economic activities of mankind.

Using Pauls's main arguments (historical perspective) it's not hard to "prove" the opposite: world is constantly moving towards consolidation.

Look: Desktop software development world looked very much like web scene today: one person could invent (and implement) an electronic table or an editor or a basic interpreter or an interesting game and do very well financially (has been done thousands of times). Yet in the early-mid 90s most software got prohibitively expensive to build for a small firm.

Also you can go back to early automotive boom in the US: there were myriads of automotive startups in mid-west (and in Europe too) and look what happened to all of them later. Same can be said regarding telecom, oil and railroad industries.

Developing industry = more startups
Mature industry = very few startups

Has always been like that.
Valve says DRM is stupid, but Microsoft still doesn't get it
SQL-as-a-Service with CloudSQL bridges cloud and premises
I think the trend here was missed. The fast change is not a new event but rather a continuous trend that moved laterally into business.

It's decentralization, and it's been occuring throughout history. For example, equality is a form of decentralization that has taken quite a while to manifest. You've also got decentralization in information, labor (specialization), and housing.

The next one that we desperately need is energy decentralization: we need to have smaller, agile, and more incremental methods of generating energy. The tech is coming along so we'll be able to do this, and some of the tech will only work well if it's not scalable.

My $.02
588 Kleiner Perkins iFund Applications Accidentally Published To Web
Stanza looks great. Thanks for the tip on this
"Free Agent Nation" describes this (or at least very similar) process/pattern as well. A world of free agents is at the highest resolution possible in that sense.
It's amazing how quickly things change. Paul mentioned the 70s as a heyday for big organizations, but I remember this going well into the 80s. You can see it in the culture. Remember how many movies were made that glorified climbing the corporate ladder? "Working Girl" with Meg Ryan, "The Secret of My Success" with Michael J Fox, "Big" with Tom Hanks. Those are just a few. There was an entire hollywood genre of climbing the ladder - movies that made it seem that making presentations with little arrows going up and down on a chart was the apex of human achievement.

I was in my teens during the latter half of this decade - I'd guess that at least half of the people who read hacker news are too young to have seen them when they came out. If you do watch them now, they'll probably seem as quaint as "Hair".

Don't ask.
I think its a question of math. If income - overall costs > 0 then there is growth.

So if the cost imposed by corruption is small enough that the entrepreneur can still profit, well he's going to keep going.
Ask HN: Javascript debugger for IE?
I've been looking around for a while but I can't seem to find an up to date debugger for IE6/7/8. All recommendations referenced the MS Script Editor, but that is no longer available for download. Any other JS engineers know of a solution for debugging in IE?
On why Apple won't allow Flash on the iPhone
In addition to this trend in individual industries, there's also an underlying trend across industries. The emergence of organized VC firms to supply funding for new startups (regardless of industry) is evidence for it. The funding of new companies used to be more haphazard, because it was a comparatively rare event. Starting in the 1960s it became more common, and more deliberate.
I believe that as a general trend, we are in a period of time where the large organization is collapsing, across wide areas of human activity.

Without writing a thesis on it, I offer the following disconnected observations:

* The US Military, one of the largest human organizations, was successfully attacked at it's headquarters for a total expenditure of less than $400,000 and a few lives, and has not and may never catch the attacker

* The Roman Catholic Church's sex scandals

* To be fair to all religious factions, punch in "baptist financial scandal" into google, or any other large religous denomination

* The disappearence of any sort of financial security in corporate employment or retirement

* The fact that there is no "corporate ladder" that PG refers to, and it has likely existed only in people's hopes and fantasies for two decades or so. The way to advance in most corporations is to have the corporation grow beneath you, or to leave for another corporation and come back to a higher position. Promotions and raises inside one corporation do not meet inflation when averaged over all employees. Loyalty is punished, almost as if in some sense the organization knows it is a bad thing and is trying to kill itself.

* The collapse of joint financial organizations that were once emmensely powerful and efficient:
* We used to all put premiums into large insurance corporations, and those insurance corporation used their economy of scale to invest those premiums, such that they paid out something like 109% of premiums as claims and still profited. Today most big insurance corporations pay out less in claims than what they take in via premiums.
* We used to all put money into banks, which then made loans and paid interest to the depositors. Now we don't save, and as of a few months ago, banks don't lend.

* The US Federal Government, arguably the largest human corporation, is bankrupt and disfunctional -- it was never a model of efficiency, but in times past it got some things done, built dams and won the wars it fought and etc. Now it does nothing productive at all.

* IBM, Microsoft, GE, GM, Exxon, etc -- the readers here don't need to be told of their failures, but I would additionally point out the trend that they don't want new additions to their organization, and attempt to hire mainly contract, outsourced, non-employee employees these days.

* The United Nations

One thing to note, is that I think if the trend is away from big organizations, the trend of integrating Europe into one big EU is a bad one. The trend of increasing Federalization in the United States is probably also generally the wrong direction.
You missed the point of the essay. It was written to support that claim.

Also, the 640k quote attributed to Bill Gates is folklore.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed
I definitely do not support a blanket ban on child labor. But I do support a different standard for workplace safety where it comes to children, so I don't think the question is irrelevant.

As always, there are unintended consequences. A great article in the Mercury News called "paid by the piece" demonstrates how sub-contracting circuit board assembly clearly has led to a circumvention of child labor laws. And of course, much of our dirty industry is now handled by children overseas. For instance, small children spend as much as a day sorting through junkyards in Cambodia in order to afford just enough food to stay malnourished. The alternative, of course, is starvation.
Lag.

It is fun to consider a problem where the speed of light is just too slow. Even when Mars is at its closest and the atmosphere is impossibly ideal, radio waves would take 3.1 minutes to get there.
Most of creative work at 'big companies' involves designing business processes. Which is in fact programming, only using people and resources. Another task involves optimizing the processes and minimizing the associated cost.

The whole raison d'être of a large organizational pyramid is cost of processing and transmitting information and handling the associated noise. Middle layers of management filtering and processing information for the upper decision-makers. Keeping the noise down by designing company 'policies', 'strategies' and 'missions' that can be easily communicated to every employee.

A manager who designs the most efficient and scalable organization structure wins over the competition or conquers a new market.

Here comes the internet with zero cost of communication. Here come high level languages that make it cheap to describe the most efficient processes.

Any large organization can in principle be substituted by a code because the organization itself IS a code written in job description language.
If you're not familiar with them have a listen to the podcast Roos did:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1556
Whoa. The snapshot of the sql dump that TechCrunch links to has not only personal contact information, but all the pitches too.
1) he hedged by saying probably

2) what fun is being visionary if you can't say anything bold for fear of being proved wrong?
Amazon Remembers Forgets Barcode Scanner
If you do business in any state, you need to foreign-qualify in that state, which involves the same and sometimes even greater fees than if you just register locally as a domestic corporation/LLC.

For example, incorporating in Indiana doesn't save you from New York fees if you do transactions in New York. Transacting has different definitions state by state, and may include anything from accepting orders to having remote employees who work in that state. Most importantly, having a physical office in a state always requires you to foreign-qualify, so registering in another state doesn't really work for companies that are not fully virtual.

Speaking of virtual... does anyone follow the development of Vermont Virtual Corporations? What are the advantages, limitations, etc?
You're absolutely right. But in the case of "twice as fast", if it is twice as fast under the right conditions then it's not exactly a false claim. Maybe the right condition for the phone being twice as fast is being within a short distance of a cell tower. The fact that at any given time a user likely won't be within that distance is certainly deceptive in that it doesn't present the entire truth, but it's going to be extremely difficult to prove it's a false claim.
Disclaimer: I'm a git fan.

Just to be clear - this does not have identical capabilities and benefits to gits branching model.

For one, it does not appear that you can push these branches, which means that you can't work on topic branches with anyone else.

Second, you can't _not_ push commits you have made under another 'bookmark' - in other words, you can't branch to try out some stuff, switch back to your main branch, do a fix and then push, without everyone getting all the crap in your 'try-out' branch. It may not be in the code that is checked out, but it is in the history, which does not look like it can be removed easily.

Also, it's awkward to use - you can't be working and then just create a bookmark, work some more, then go back to where you diverged easily - you have to create a new bookmark at the diverge point, which you have to look up. If you try to create two bookmarks at the same time (so one will stay where you where and the other will move forward) it will (for some reason) move both bookmarks forward (which is pretty confusing).

Apparently, the only way to _really_ do what git does with local branching is to do what the hg book recommends, which is to do a local clone. This takes orders of magnitude more time (depending on the repo), doubles the space taken up on disk and clutters your disk with a bunch of directories.

It may be slightly better than the local branches in hg in that it isn't recorded in the commit itself, but 'bookmarks' are very much not git branches.
I have a long, random password for every site, it is never the same.

I have a long pass phrase that unlocks the encrypted records of said passwords.

For most sites (most are not important) I make one note in my encrypted records and then make firefox remember them from there on out (long pass phrase for firefox master password keeper, too).

For online banks I remember something weird and arbitrary.
Guy Kawasaki on how he built Truemors for $12,107.09
This is a gimmick. You can get the same deal 365 days a year from other companies, just do a google search.