skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what other industries do you know of that buy ideas?

I can't think of any other than the book industry (and perhaps other art-focused fields), really...
The 7 deadly sins of IT management
I agree with #3 the most: know the difference betweeen CS and software engineering.

Specifically, if you want to do Software Engineering, be prepared to spend a lot of time learning it yourself. CS teaches you the fundamentals of programming, but applying these fundamentals is almost a completely different field.

CS to software engineering is like Materials Science to Architecture - sure you'll know what the molecular structure of wood is and maybe even the exact tensile strength of a 2by4, but you won't know even the first step to designing and constructing a house.
Preview: Windows Azure Services Platform gives wings to .Net
Toy and game makers.
I got the same damn letter. I would be more interested in seeing your application. Are you putting it up on squidoo?
Agreed. I don't know if you can find it online anywhere, but Steve Jobs's pitch for exactly this argument was put together quite well.
Microsoft releases its first-ever iPhone application
Microsoft sees 'huge increase' in IE attacks
If you have to lay people off, don't do it this way
Truck driver conducted a decade of research to build accurate replica of Hiroshima bomb
I'd actually be a little bit insulted to get that as a response. It reads like a load of over-dramatized crap.

Part of what's wrong with so many of these internet-marketers is that everything seems to be positioned as various degrees of "super rockstar ninja greatness". There is never any bad, unmarketable, stupid ideas. IE: no one wants to put their reputation on the line by making a potentially bad call. So, he won't say that your proposal was disagreeable, only that other proposals were even more "super rockstar ninja great".

IMO, if he actually had something great to offer and was bowled over-amazed-stunned at just how great an idea was, he'd find a way to nurture that, not blow it off.
what MBA program?
"Disclosure: All of the links in the following lists are Amazon affiliate links. If you're opposed to me making a few cents off this blog, but you're interested in any of these books, they're easy enough to find by searching Google for the individual titles."

The author is honest enough to inform you about it.
correction: Knuth did not make the comment about "premature optimization", I believe Hoare did.
That looks even better. I'm going to try this out in my pet project.

Thank you.
It does ring a bit empty, doesn't it.

Bad move overall, imho. I've lost some respect for Seth Godin because of that letter. A more normal rejection letter would have been more appropriate. This letter makes him sound a bit too kitsch.
This sounds a little like being dumped along the lines of "its not you, its me."
Startup banks on making money from free broadband
Final Chrome Version Boosts Speed, Compatibility
For #2, running off the walkway gives a greater boost to speed percentage-wise; since travel time is inversely proportional to speed, it is thus reduced greater.

(For positive u and v`>v>1, v`/v<(v`+u)/(v+u))
Putting the network back in social networking
very few buy ideas anymore, they prefer to have the people create a company proving that the idea is viable/valuable then they buy it out
It's true that I don't, but he does make an excellent example of a politician that put his own career/personal glory ahead of his duties to the electorate.
As a avid trekker and climber (I've trekked to Everest base camp - fun stuff) ~ if you're wondering why people climb Everest it can really be summed up best by George Leigh Mallory - "because its there".
too nicey nicey. It doesn't sound sincere to me.

When I was applying for jobs I used to get back all sorts of crap like this.. it's silly. One company got back to me within 24 hrs with a simple: "sorry your not for us because xyz"

I reapplied instantly and in the "why are you applying" space put "because your the first company not to reject me with complete bull and just gave me a straight honest answer. I trust you."

I got the job too :)

Rule 101 of rejections: don't be nice. Be kind certainly but tell them where they went wrong. They've already been rejected - sucking up helps neither party....
Many years ago, I was working as a consultant at a UK high street bank. My client told me a story about the last round of layoffs there. One by one, his colleagues were called into the boss's office, then they slunk out again, tail between their legs, packed their desks and left. He was determined to go out with some dignity, so he had stashed a bottle of champagne and a stack of paper cups in his drawer, when his time came he planned to walk back to his desk head held high and pop the cork. The poor bloke was the only one not to get the chop!
Raising Capital
> So what other industries do you know of that buy ideas? I can't think of any other than the book industry...

It seems that the time is ripe for a digital, networked app equivalent to be replacing books as a medium for ideas... something like Amazon's kindle library, but more revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary).
It's not you. It's not me either! Isn't that aweseome? I mean, it's completely stupendously awesome that we're both so amazingly awesomely cool but somehow this thing just isn't working. I mean, we're not working. Together, that is. OK, so I found some other super-cool kids who are even more awesome, but that doesn't mean you're not, and it doesn't mean that I'm not, just that we're not quite so amazingly awesomely awesome as a team, which is why I've decided to dump you. Well, not dump you exactly, it's more like I'm deferring the joint awesomeness we could have had for another day, when it will be even better. Meanwhile, have a cookie.
Just for the record, I'm not a believer in NAT, but I have worked for people who do, hence my using it as an example of a "feature."
Lots of industries buy ideas... They just prefer to do it in the "protected" form of purchasing / licensing patents.
just curious: did your trust last or did it turn out to be unfounded?
He seems less legacy obsessed to me than Tony Blair.

Large chunks of the UK media have had it in for him following some initial mis-steps (the will he/won't he election-call thing comes to mind).

As far as I can tell, their story then became the self-fulfilling "he's a lame duck who can't manage the media".

I don't like a lot of things the Labour govt (Blair and Brown) have done/are doing, but I don't think Brown stands out an as example of political self-interest.
What, you mean like the internet?
I should say that I don't think it will be removed by Guido. He doesn't appear to see a need. However, if the main developers in the Python community decide it is necessary and does the work, it will be removed.
The Joy of Concatenative Languages Part 2: Innately Functional
Yes. I just wanted to second that you can be stupid to a certain a degree in one area and to another degree in another one.
no, something more like wikipedia + lulu + ?
Liar's poker. Ask 2 people to pick a number and the one that picks the lower doesn't get paid. The number of people that actually play the game is the result of the experiment.
I will try your function in my code this evening. Another strategy I thought about is to have a small chance of replacing a polygon with a random new polygon. It seems that it would help get out of dead end situations.
I haven’t given up on PHP — yet
Microsoft: The Wal-Mart of software
I read a large portion of the Dragon Book in University. It was interesting, but I didn't get all the way through it. I've honestly found books like "Refactoring" to be a more valuable a read.
This sounds like Seth Godin trying to keep his "Tribe" Intact by not hurting anybody's feelings.
Google v. Microsoft, and the dev:test ratio debate
The Beatles vs. The Flock Of Seagulls - Is Your Company A One-hit Wonder?
The Beatles vs. The Flock Of Seagulls - Is Your Company A One-hit Wonder?
Absolutely true store: I once knew a professional hatchet man (a person spineless companies hire to fire large numbers of employees -- usually to fire an entire building of people). He told me once that he was part of a team that had to fire everyone working at an office building that held two-to-three hundred people from the looks of it. They were doing a lot of secretive work, so it was important that both everyone find out at the same time and security guards must escort them to their desks -- both measures to prevent anyone stealing documents or information of any kind.

So here's what they did: They pulled one of the fire alarms. Everyone, thinking it was a fire or drill, exited the building. Then this man, from inside the building, put a bullhorn to his mouth and said "Attention! This is not a drill! You're all fired!" (thinking, of course, that it was a clever play on words). They then let people back in one by one to collect their personal items and that was that.
"So what other industries do you know of that buy ideas?"

It depends on how you define an idea.
not so impressed with this!
I had a friend who applied, it's not something I'd ever want to do. I think Seth is a great motivational speaker and writer, but there are far more people I'd want to give up 6 months with no pay to be mentored by from an entrepreneurial standpoint.

Not to mention, I was pretty turned off from the whole thing the moment I read the internship he was offering. It all seemed a little self-serving (with kool-aid), and I get a little sick of MBA guys knocking MBA programs. Seems like a shallow self-marketing gimmick...

(His blog is on my reader)
It seems like a closer analogy would be allowing walmart to build their own private roads to walmart stores.
Seth has made the generous offer of allowing a select few people to work for him. For free. In exchange, you get to be surrounded by His Greatness every day. If you get accepted, don't forget to bring your lunch money and cab fare as well.

While this sounds like a revolutionary idea, if you're willing to work for free, and can sell yourself well (the two basic acceptance criteria for this program), there is a high probably you can weasel yourself into some simialr position a number of different places.
I've read a couple of Godin's book recently, this is pretty much just his tone. It sounds silly in a single example like this, but it works OK as he builds it up over a book. I suppose anyone applying to a position is pretty familiar with his works.

Oh, and Tribes needed way more than one sentence in the acknowledgements mentioning Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I'd just reread HCE before I picked up Tribes and I kept waiting to see something like "So, every example in the last three chapters and next two chapters came from this excellent book... "
The comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen has the best explanation.
I applied and got an interview. I sent in my application as a PDF, but I also made this lens which Seth apparently liked:

http://www.squidoo.com/Reading_Optional
Mogens Jensen's training regimen can be found here:

http://www.gsk.com/people/mogens/training.htm

That said, he was an asthmatic attempting to climb without O2.
Damn, that's condescending.

If it were delivered in person, I'd expect a lollypop and a pat upon the head after hearing it.
Native Client d**k-swinging met with fake Googasm
I was waiting to see a link to an ebook you could buy at the end of the letter.
Microsoft Releases Its First iPhone Application
Falling asleep in class? Blame biology
There's a story about a site named FaceStat that was linked on the front page of Yahoo! one day, and had to spin up several Slicehost slices, complete with load balancing and all (or most) of the trimmings. Unfortunately, the admin's site is suspended by bluehost (or someone), and I don't remember the details. Here's a post by Slicehost that is related: http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2008/6/4/facestat-scales-f...

It is definitely possible to create a VPS-based system to replace your dedicated servers. In fact, that is the direction a lot of people are going, because it's relatively cheap to spin up a new VPS to scale horizontally, as opposed to purchasing a new server. Without knowing what your needs are in more detail, I couldn't say with any confidence whether Slicehost or Linode would work for you, or something else.

Do note that many traditional datacenters are starting to offer some sort of "cloud" solution, or at least some solution involving virtual machines that they have made sure involves the word "cloud", for the buzz factor. So, you could find a reliable colo facility, and work with them to migrate to a VPS-like solution.
TechCrunch, Top Tech News Websites Feeling Economic Crunch
Despite familiarity with Godin's work, I'm still unsure how I feel about this particular response. It'd be great as an individual rejection (we love you, but just don't have the space!), but as a boilerplate reply requires a little suspension of disbelief.

Or maybe that's just because I got this reply not half an hour after sending in my app. :) Zing!
That was the single best thing I read as part of the app process.
Everything Seth Godin writes is either unactionable, obvious, or wrong.
Gift Buyers: $4 Off Any Threadless Tee for the Next 3 Hours
Incase you haven't done your holiday shopping, my company PleaseDressMe just nabbed a $4 off coupon until 1:30pm EST (10:30am PST).
Solution of project Euler #2
I think I finally fixed this problem.

http://groups.google.com/group/HAppS/browse_thread/thread/cf...

Basically it was a lazy io issue in haskell, fix was using a strict version of readFile for templates.

Hope it stays up now!
I hear stories like this over and over again. It's disgusting what 3 months of my labor per year goes to.
"Stuff" is my sending the given link to my female relatives to dissuade them from, or to reduce their practice of, being packrats. I'm pretty sure there are other users out there that do the same...
Animoto Video at Work (Footlocker Finals)
How about a dollar auction?
TwitOrFit is Twitter-meets-HotOrNot
Ubuntu solves terrorism
sort of lasted - the person that hired me was a good guy to the last. The CEO was a bit of a tit..... and in the end he got too involved in my department so I left.

But the day-to-day people I worked for/with were trustworthy.
How to end the recession (technically)
Wikipedia says: "In economics, the term recession generally describes the reduction of a country's gross domestic product (GDP) for at least two quarters."

So if we were to temporarily increase the number of working days per quarter by a small amount - e.g. removing some holidays or sundays - then we could technically avoid a recession. I guess the psychological situation on the markets will not be affected, though.
Social Networking Anti Patterns
The same could be said of NYC, San Francisco and Detroit.
please - twitter is actually a useful service (when you get past the big heads). Why cant this stuff stay on facebook :(
There is a problem with your analysis. Switch viewpoints to the reference frame of the traveling twin. In that case, that twin stays in a constant position and the other twin travels with a trajectory of x(t) = -0.9 c sin(kt) / k. The negative sign is irrelevant as we are only interested in absolute velocity and the negative sign implies that the movement is in the opposite directions. Then by your calculations, the other twin should now experience 0.74... seconds. Ie. Without accounting for the acceleration that one of the twins experiences, you can always switch frames and therefore cannot draw any conclusive results for both twins simultaneously unless you fix the reference frame (but in that case, differential aging really makes very little sense).

As to calculation the actual difference in age, I don't know GR sufficiently well to be able to calculate the aging of the twins but I know some people who do. I have contacted them and will get back to you once they send me an answer.
Holy ad attack Batman!

First when you load the page you get a pop up (which FF3 blocked) on top of an intrusive interstitial ad and then to top it off once you load the article there's a DHTML ad overlayed over the article that you 'have to' act on.

Can I make a motion to ban infoworld until they clean up this mess? I know times are tough and all but that's just excessive.
My point is there are plenty of large swings in the history of the S&P 500. It's up 15.38% from 10/9/2002, and down 41.33% from 3/24/2000. The BMW World for Iceland is down 99.44% over the last year which drastically changes their long term returns. But picking a peak or valley is not the best way to calculate returns.

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/spf/pdf/index/112808_Worldb...

IMO picking a peak or valley is less informative than what happens when you invest one inflation adjusted dollar every month over the history of a stock exchange. Add in selling off 1-4% a year and you can see what the stock market does for normal peoples investments.
I'd hate to sound like a digg-comment, but nice delivery there. It drew a nice lol from me. ;)
SV entrepreneurs are not a cohesive group. Neither are Europeans. It's just as ridiculous to say "Europeans are lazy" as it is to say, "entrepreneurs have a terrible track record". It's worse in the case of "Europe" because that's a group of groups. How about this: some people are lazy and some people thanklessly live off of other people's work.

Regarding iPaper, if they do build on top of OpenOffice -- which uses the LGPL -- they have a legal obligation to make their source available by request. If they don't, then I agree, those specific entrepreneurs are jerks.
Google off list of 20 most trusted companies
Federal government spending increased 47% under the Hoover administration and grew further under the Roosevelt administration that had initially criticized Hoover's spending. This fits under the paradox "If something isn't working, do it more." I feel like depressions are very misunderstood phenomena, partly because there hasn't been a big one of late.
Paginate by value, if not the main page, at least include this feature in our profile.
Federal government spending increased 47% under the Hoover administration and grew further under the Roosevelt administration (who had initially criticized Hoover's spending). This fits under the paradox "If something isn't working, do it more." I feel like depressions are very misunderstood phenomena, partly because there hasn't been a big one of late.
3110c Ringer Buzzer Ways Jumpers
110, 3110c, 3110c buzzer jumpers, 3110c buzzer problem, 3110c buzzer ways, 3110c ringer jumpers, 3110c ringer problem, 3110c ringer ways, Nokia, nokia 3110c
That doesn't make any sense. Who is going to pay for those extra working days? Not to mention that would really just delay the problem.
Not a death wish, but a survival wish. There are people who do stuff far more dangerous, like the first people to climb the everest and there are other even more dangerous mountains out there.

People who take those sort of risks don't think they will be in the n% of people that die doing it, but that they'll be able to survive despite it being hard and dangerous. Some don't survive, but those who do get their kicks for beating the odds, that sort of stuff. Of course, that's not for everyone. Most people want the most safety possible, that's why we live in cities and try to make the environment the most controlled possible.
You got a rejection with reasons on it?

I've always either gotten either "We are pleased you interviewed but we are continuing the search" or no response at all.

Was I terrible? Was I awesome, but you cut me out for unfair and irrational reasons? I'll never know, and never know how I can improve. Does a great job of wrecking your psyche when you've been doing it for months straight.
It sounds like he is living in a fantasy land.
yup most of the other responses I got were along the same lines as you mention. Some had some nice cut and paste "you did xyz wrong" stuff but nothing that was helpful.
What wizard is going to run your cheap adword campaign (or maybe adword is dead too?) How are people going to find your site? What’s your sale process and have you understood your audience? How are you going to answer those service calls and emails? Are you going to run the next Google on the cloud? There are costs associated with all of that, and, even if they are compressed by technology too, the investments required to keep differentiating yourself are increasing.

What’s worse perhaps is that, with all its focus on IT, Paul seems to forget that not all start-ups are web start-ups. How about biotech, cleantech, robotics? Is marketing and distribution free for those ones as well?

There is, as always, some truth in what Paul is writing - the man is smart - but in my view, VCs are certainly here to stay and scale those start-ups that can make it into serious money machines. What do you think?

Full comment at http://www.torevenue.com/?p=3
Heh. You picked the exact wrong author to dismiss summarily.
I'm new to this term "lens".

It seems like it's just a fancy word for "how-to" or "neat bit of information / call to take some sort of action".
This list might be a bit easier to scan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suici...
> can create purely syntactic obstacles to introducing important features, such like multi-line lambdas

The reason that python has problems with multi-line lambdas is that python lambdas are not like other python functions. The "body" of a python lambda is an expression while the body of other python functions is an indented statement block, with an implicit "return None" for fall through, requiring an explicit "return" for some other value.

Your lambdas could be like other functions. Or, horrors, you could define two forms, "anonymous" and "expression", where "expression" is like python lambdas and "anonymous" defines an anonymous function whose body is just like other function bodies (ie multi-line, requiring explicit "return" s).

do-while/until may pose bigger problems.
So people trsut Facebook but not Google.

Opinion like this is all very well but I wonder how much of it is based on what the public pick up from the media. Google have been slated a few times this past year over privacy issues (personally I trust them quite a lot) whilst Facebook haven't caught the media attention much. So it's not a surprising result.

Still I know who I trsut more....
Personally I recommend the first half of Ivan Horton's Beginning C++ for any beginning to intermediate programmer. It's a little dated, but it does a great job of explaining what things look like in memory and why longs are not all the same size etc. It's clear without being overly verbose. And more importantly it's examples are strong examples of what type of code I want to read.
Brute Force Search of a DES Keyspace
You see the same sort of environment revealed in the "good old days at Bell Labs" that was posted a few days ago.
The power of OS X hot keys unlocked
Was I the only one to be surprised at Godin's tech prowess? He "invented the first fax board for the Mac", as well as a wireless music player.

I've seen a lot of whining around here about Godin for his occasionally airy ideas and the popularity of his blog, but it seems he has some engineering blood in his past (his Wikipedia entry doesn't hint at this).
unintended consequences
You are right. It's mostly supposed to show one possible way on how to use CouchDB along with Nitrogen Bindings.
Switch to business major! The idiots that will be signing your paychecks? Guess what they majored in. That's right, and they were drunk most of time too.
Actually I would reccomennt Squarespace.com.
It's by far the best one and handles digg/slashdot traffic nicely.
I sent one in to John Carmack way back in the day (circa 1996-1997). I was massively underqualified at the time.

His response was personal and compassionate. It stung at the time, but long term I've got a lot more respect for the man for it.