skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That kind of hate is actually counter productive. It is really hate of assertiveness, and since people try to avoid what they hate, they'll become less assertive and less likely to be successful like Mark. Then, instead of most being like Mark, like we should be, we'll continue to get solitary Marks, and the hate will increase - thus we have a vicious cycle.

This problem is endemic in academia, and most other social settings I can think of where most people feel impotent, such as high school and socialist countries.

That being said, I am solidly on the side of the herd. I am horrible at being assertive and making things happen.
For the rails kids, we have Bort (http://github.com/fudgestudios/bort/tree/master)
> I think its professor dependent

Totally agree. Ours was not an active entrepreneur, though he was a friend. Additionally, I was involved in running the university entrepreneurship society, through which I was exposed to many excellent talks by entertaining entrepreneurs - those made much more of an impression on me.
7 Places to Find the Code You Need
As cool and useful as Pinax is, calling it "well documented" isn't entirely accurate considering the fact that there is barely any documentation to speak of.
Helps people ignore the fact they all look like big boxes. That being said, the designers have done well with their limitations, so I agree.
Battle of the iPhone Task Managers
Loopt (YC 2005) featured in iPhone TV ad
What drives our interest in space exploration? I haven't seen a convincing case that it gives us a lot of something, besides the excitement of having a new frontier to explore.

If we're looking for new places to live, I think on or under the sea is a more practical initial direction.
A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS
Gist, like GitHub, is quite useful. Unfortunately, I've gotten into the habit of just typing in a random paste site I happen to know anytime I need the service. He forgot LodgeIt! (paste.pocoo.org) -- it even has vim and emacs integration ;)
I read the article I couldn't find the point in it. Looks like a lot of rambling about methodologies.

Anyone got it?
Personally, I think the "Zuckerberg Curve" was Zuckerberg's First Law. That guy makes a lot of laws.

http://www.killnine.com/comics/25.php
You'll get the full story if you use this link instead

http://books.google.com/books?id=n7lwt8FKO7IC&pg=PA49...

the link posted is missing a couple of pages because of google books
Where's all the masonic stuff? Sheesh, rule the world indeed.
The Ray Kappe RK1 LivingHome looks pretty good, but the rest are definitely underwhelming to me. Even the RK1 suffers from some problems, such as a design made without reference to the site its on - so things like views and solar orientation will potentially suffer greatly. Also problematic is the flat roof which is never a good idea for long-term leak and maintenance avoidance. As good as the wood siding looks in the picture now, it will not hold up well and will look terrible in a few years and create a big maintenance problem.

I think the key to making the prefab promise work is to develop a kit of parts that can be assembled in a custom way for a specific site and client, thus optimizing functional requirements, views and solar exposure, and ideally integrating the house with the topography of the site (if the site is sloping) rather than building a very unattractive platform to put the house up on.
Yes the old de-risk test ...not for me, because people don't know what they want!
Gesture-Based Interface Ditches Mice, Keyboards
A little more info is here - not all positive

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/12/a_nuclear_hot_t.php
Not sure. I googled "pulp molding" and saw a number of pages on things like egg carton molding machines. But, solidifying a whole block seems tougher.
I think getting hands on experience with the marketing of your unborn product is a very healthy thing to do. It will probably influence what you eventually build. And if it doesn't, at least the work is stuff you will need to do down the road regardless.
Not much of need now that Hollywood has embraced the Internet. Sure you can't get new movies on Hulu and such, but almost everything else..which satisfies me and seems millions of other US citizens.
An alternative: http://hacketyhack.net/

Small Basic appears to have a rather clunky syntax, despite having a very small number of keywords and built-in methods. These odd little bits of syntax can throw newbies off.
I just reread the article, and you're right about the strawman. Got a bit carried away in the discussion apparently :-)
Jonhohle, I know what you mean, 3D printing always seems to be in the 5+ years portion of most technical reports by companies like Gartner. I'm not a big believer in the immediate application of 3D printing, but I think progress is being made. Companies like www.figureprints.com are starting to bridge the gap between science fiction and everyday commerce. While it is certainly "nichey" we should remember that we had rotisserie baseball on Prodigy before Google and Wikipedia.

You are also right that the low cost printers aren't much better. Their value is more in exposing smart people with diverse skill sets to the technology and from there bright entrepreneurs will find a way to commercialize it. We need hackers and marketers to understand the potential before we have Amazon.com

I wouldn't be surprised if the first big inroads are in toys and game related things, but quickly swing to critical areas like medical. In any case a fun area worth watching.
Yeah, typically the issue with molded paper pulp is keeping a uniform wall thickness otherwise the moisture is trapped and you have a crusty object with a slushy inside.
Doesn't coolness reach critical mass at some point, where the really cool people drop out and do something different? Which is why fashion changes so much?

Also, why not just dress the rally against boring sounding, but important things, in trendier terms?
A wise man once said that you can only be avante garde for so long before you're just "garde". No surprise.
Yeah, seems like a plotter with a z-axis control and a 3 axis glue dispenser. Pretty smart application of the technology. You can get a desktop plotter for <$300 at craft stores in the suburbs. this just adds an adhesive step and dept. Great way to solve the problem without relying on breakthroughs in materials science.
Take things said on treehugger with a large pinch of salt.
Nothing to see here. It just makes a branded site-specific RSS reader.
I guess there are a lot of Indians on HN. Or, is everyone proud of this accomplishment.

BTW, I am an Indian and extremely proud of the steps my country is taking towards the big league.
I was thinking about replacing my iPhone with the G1, but after having the same experience I decided to stick with my trust on-screen feedbackless keyboard. 40 words per minute is good enough for me!
Rocio Romero is one of the nicest and most affordable prefabs out there. EDIT: They should have added the container houses as well.
Cool Web App By Schick
Page 113, to be precise. Great book by the way.
Interesting stuff. I also noticed another article that explains how to configure and use Scribe for Hadoop Log collection:

http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2008/11/02/configuring-and-usin...

The e-mail address at the end of the article goes to support id. That is a good way to attract customers in startup mode.
I still have yet to meet any East Coasters who use Loopt (how twitterish). Hopefully this changes soon.
Heh...just saw that on TV. They're running it every ten minutes on certain cable channels.
Web 2.0: Al Gore needs a purpose
Al Gore is kind of cute. He tries so hard but doesn't quite get it.
Clearly produced by undergrads. What they don't realize (and why this mag was doomed) is that out in the real world, the more successful the alumni, the less they're defined by having gone to Harvard. The kind of rah-rah alumni who'd be interested in all these inside jokes are the ones who peaked in college, and who thus (if their selection algorithm was correct) didn't get sent copies.

If they'd sent this to the 50,000 least successful alumni, but told them they were sending it to the 50,000 most successful, they'd have probably had a very active readership.
What a stupid title.

Edit: what a stupid article.
Yeah. Tried it on HN and it just went crazy trying to switch back and forth between pages. Finally safari crashed.
Uh, can anyone tell me how "your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line" is a reasonable complaint?

We're talking economics here. Smart people familiar with basic economics don't risk 100% of their net worth.
Boxes can be good:

http://www.iaacblog.com/digitaltectonics/wp-content/uploads/...
I wrote that startups crafted in Facebook's image often produce next to nothing, but I think the same statement is actually also valid when applied to Facebook, now that you mention it. Attracting people's attention (as evidenced by traffic) is not the same as producing a valuable product, no matter the company. If Facebook did actually produce something of value, it probably would not have had any trouble extracting money from the site in the first place. As it so happens, the lack of an obvious, sustainable business model was the reason I decided to work on other things, instead.
This item's title is misleading. The original article clearly states that 02138 was not affiliated with the University.
That is a very cool way to have your product demoed (and reach the mainstream masses).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_...
Also: http://yearbookyourself.com/
I really don't understand Harvard. I've visited friends there a few times and I can't stand it. The whole place is like being trapped in the middle school cafeteria.
You can also view it as a proof that imparting knowledge is not the purpose of the schools that presently exist, contrary to how they're advertised. Because if they had anything to do with education, they would look like what Xichekolas postulates.
Wow! So Microsoft is now feeling threatened by _why? I didn't realize he was quite that important!
Wow, that's like twitter & facebook combined. And on steroids. That's a really scary app.
But I'm not sure what the point is. Arguments about pair programming in general never go anywhere. What was I thinking? Oh yeah, that it isn't "stupid".

You are putting words in my mouth. I didn't say anything about pair programming being stupid.
I want a word that means "the kind of junk that Digg loves". Maybe "crapp".
As numerous commenters on LH point out there are two obvious omissions from this list "Things" and "OmniFocus".

I personally prefer Things, paired with the desktop client it's easy to use and effective. Out of all the GTD apps it's the one I find I easiest to use daily. It really doesn't get in the way. My only small beef with it is the need to sync over wifi.
Looks cool. I just wish it was available for the iPod touch as well.
Is there a pool on when Cuban will start expressing buyer's remorse on his Chris Matthews-style leg tingling for Obama?

I'll take "last week of February 2009" if it's available.
Really liked the presentation style
Can you elaborate? I don't really know what you mean by "middle school cafeteria." If you're talking about obsession with status, I've got a few friends at Harvard and none of them are more concerned with status than any mildly ambitious person.
Robot plays the flute better than humans
What's so "exclusive" about being 1 of 50,000?
The "throw money at it and we might get some cool tech as side effects" argument that is often made for government space funding could be applied to any random research field.

It's one of those tired old saws that everybody believes, but I never bought.
Ah, fascinating. I was aware of Gandhi's actions on behalf of Indians vs. "Negroes" but hadn't heard this story.

Watch the interesting intersections of class vs. race vs. nationality. Gandhi was probably quite aware of the difference between the centuries-old Afrikaans (dutch-decescended) and the recently arrived British who would eventually destroy South Africa. This was very similar to the Scotch-Irish vs. Yankee schism in America today.

Gandhi was an Indian nationalist first and last, but would play any necessary games necessary on his way... I won't draw any further comparisons.
i've actually found that a really nice combo would be things for keeping track of dates, and then using evernote to document details + generally store info and more complicated planning elements
No, the original comment did.
Next step: use some simple data mining to recommend other movies I might like, and link to a site where I can watch/buy.
For prototyping we just starting using Axure. http://axure.com/

Adobe has a Thermo but it's still in labs. http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo
Consequences of Gorilla tracking
Are You A Bank Robber Or An ATM Operator? - An Entrepreneur Litmus Test
No prob, happens to me plenty:) Now, if Cuban was only arguing for a tech entrepreneur, I'd completely agree with you.
Yes, I guess I am showing off. But, for most of the books, the only reason I've read them is because I had too, not because I'm some kind of autodidact, and not that the list is particularly impressive anyways.
Could they build it in layers? Or is the best way to do that to just do gluing, so it's back to the original idea?
Indeed, I've nothing against boxes. I'm assuming your average buyer might be put off if all their housing options have the same shape, though.
The Economics of Media Bias
The actual paper cited is available at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/matthew.gentzkow/biasmeas081507.pdf
The mentioned paper is available at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/matthew.gentzkow/biasmeas08150...
well done to those guys but that is one app i would never want to own. talk about a tag!
Pretty cool. The ad was all about Loopt and they didn't even have to pay for it!
I am totally a bank robber - go in guns blazing and take ALL the cash...
For some reason the most important ingredient for success always seems to get left out in these lists: Luck
Or don't be a bank robber, but yeah, yours works too.
That argument is usually made as a reference to the original Apollo program which DID succeed on the metric of advancing the state of the art in multiple fields from materials science to physiology; with public funding.

The mistake many people make is thinking that that success can be repeated merely by giving money to NASA. The success of the Apollo program as an incubator of scientific and engineering accomplishment was directly tied to both the sense of mission that the participants felt, and the fact that it was widely perceived as a race with a rival power with potentially apocalyptic consequences for losing.

It's not categorically impossible to create that sense of mission anew, but recreating the overall context would be difficult. The closest we've seen to public programs that capture the competitive juices of the participants are contests like the DARPA robotic vehicle challenge.
Depending on how you do it. I'm currently in the first year of a rather well-ranked MBA program.

Classes are Tuesday and Thursday nights from 6pm to 10pm.
The rest of my time is spent working on starting my company.
And this degree is going to cost me $40k total, all of which is tax-deductible, of course.

I'd say its a pretty good deal.
I think facebook status updating is the twitter for the masses.
If there is one thing Microsoft doesn't care about it is saving money or resources.
It was just pointless IceWeasel bullshit.
Here is a bit of history on the language.

http://blogs.msdn.com/smallbasic/archive/2008/10/23/hello-wo...
Internet is no longer what it was, because it has entered the mainstream.
And not everyone wants to verb either.
And by keeping taxes and regulations light and minimal.

But no more than that.

I would like to point out that our government's investments in education and energy haven't gone very well, though its investment in general research probably does more good than harm.

It's also worth while to point out that many other industrialized nations have also made investments in energy and education and had better results. So, we shouldn't abandon the idea (as you seem to be implying) but rather take a good look at how we do things.
109P,evolution,space weather,K T extinction event ,exobiology..
You're correct, the OP made a strawman argument. However, Cuban is not exactly saying that he wants non-technical people on the team. He's saying an entrepreneur should be represented, as there are lots of them and they drive the economy (he then proceeds to list examples of many professions that are entrepreneurs.)
I really wish I could vote this down. Its a link to a craigslist post... Come on. Talk about ruining signal:noise.
The man himself!

Do you hate the trappings of the Big Rewrite as much as the rest of us? (the new domain, the redesign that replaced simple sincerity with YUI smarm)
I disagree, I think it's nice that someone trusts this community enough to invite some of them to share a part of their life with them.
How would you explain the resurgence of the Taliban then? They seem to be back and stronger than ever.
That was the whole point of my response. :) It would have been a lot simpler had I not edited out the first line of my post, which called your original post a strawman and linked to the definition. Since I had read the entire article carefully, and within the context of Mark's posts that I had read in the past, I thought Hacker News would appreciate knowning the actual views expressed in Mark's article.
Could as well be Michael Schofield's room from the first season of Prison Break....
http://santrajan.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-john-resig-did-no...

The JX author understands neither jQuery nor OO!
"Therefore, it is not qualifiable that entrepreneurs should not feel they should be represented by some economist or expert in finance who has entrepreneurial experience."

They're not really supposed to receive representation in a cabinet position. That is what the legislature is for.
None of this is going to happen without a more streamlined regulatory process to allow their sale in the first place.
It indicates that someone at Hotmail was using User-Agent sniffing to determine when to suggest browser upgrades.

Which is a fundamentally stupid thing to do.
The icon for a game I wrote (Otis) appears briefly on the home screen in the ad, before they start Loopt!
Passion Party Business | Passion Promises
Changing the User-Agent string, pointlessly removing identifying markers, that's not "fundamentally stupid"?
Definitely dig the Michelle Kaufmann homes. Her website is awesome in the sheer volume of information it has. Most prefab home sites seem to just have pictures and a phone number, whereas she has detailed pricing and videos and testimony and talks a lot about sustainable design and self-sufficiency.

Her story sounds like a good one for the YC crowd too. She and her husband were looking for their own house and couldn't find anything they liked, so they designed their own home and the business just kind of took off from there. Classic case of 'building something people want', since they solved their own problem.
The plausible speculation based on anonymous 'sources' makes the whole thing sound rather like celebrity gossip.
7 Stages of Scaling Web Applications
> Which is a fundamentally stupid thing to do.

Well recommending an upgrade isn't too bad... preventing users from accessing the site is just ludicrous.
Yes! Exactly what is at the top of my list.
Why do women always feel colder than men?
Yep, that was a bit overenthusiastic of me. But I noticed they are improving the documentation fast. It is a very young project after all.

Maybe I could rephrase "well documented" in: given the clarity and the good structure of the code I did not have problems finding my way around.
Goodbye trees :(
I am planning to do that. I just posted a quick background story and overview as soon as I had done with the marathon. More to come.
You do know that most browsers let you change the User-Agent string to whatever you like?

This won't keep out IceWeasel users who actually understand the machine they are operating.

And motivations that you don't understand are not necessarily stupid. If you don't understand why it was important enough to the debian core team to bother with the effort of maintaining a forked version version of the browser; you are not able to comment intelligently on the topic.
I'm really impressed. We've seen lots of partners create ads or marketing materials, but Apple really, really, really knows how to speak to its users. That, second to great products, might be their secret to success.
Great post! It points out up front that performance != scale.

The other scaling point is concurrency. You can't (for example) serially add features to a page. Eventually that page will simply take too long to render.

A lot of "dashboard" pages suffer from this problem. If you reach that stage you need to start thinking about decoupling features - using things like messaging.
Using Metrics to Take a Hard Look at Your Code
Scalability As A Functional Or Non Functional Requirement
Demo of Ruby in the browser through Red
Can you justify that claim?
Considering how expensive national tv ads are I think its unlikely Loopt paid apple anything for them. Loopt seems to have a prety good relationship with Apple since they were featured at the Apple's developer conference keynote a few months back.
Cool guys, thanks. It's all about the community, everything else is details.
I've always been fascinated by different types of orbits, and the math that goes into calculating them. Does anyone know what a good resource might be for learning about them? Are there any college classes that deal with them specifically, or is that just wishful thinking? Thanks!
Apple has one of the best advertising teams, or they work with one of the best advertising teams, that I have ever seen. Their web site, for instance: the single best product advertisement I've ever seen online. Friends (and I at times) browse through every page, just reading the product descriptions. It's entrancing.
Erlang for Concurrent Programming
I disagree.

It's true that "absolute freedom" and "no freedom" are polar opposites. It's a non-sequiter that their oppositeness prevents either of them from being true, somehow forcing us to find some utilitarian compromise.

There are well-written defenses of both lasseiz-faire and marxist economics (although I think the former is vastly more defendable than the latter). I've yet to read a thorough, consistent defense of some "middle way".
There are a lot items at the top of your list!
I never bought Things - I can't get myself to use productivity applications, they just seem too limiting - but I tried the demo, and it is BEAUTIFUL. I wish all programs had such a gorgeous interface.
The magazine had a fantastic article about Zuckerberg/Facebook a while back.

Here's some of the text in cache: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:T1nVmRXFAhQJ:www.02138m...

Anyone have the full copy by chance?
http://courses.uiuc.edu/cis/catalog/urbana/2009/Spring/AE/50...

The google bait you want is "Orbital Mechanics"
FYI, from the comments over there: "The Amazon data center was cancelled last week".
The Future of Startups
Any actual examples of useful new technologies that were developed during the Apollo program? Any that couldn't have been had two orders of magnitude cheaper if funded directly and not as a "side effect"? Not that I'm against manned space flight or public funding of it.