skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Most modern programming languages, including object-oriented languages, are imperative: A program is essentially a list of instructions intended to be executed in order."

That's silly. Anyone who has worked with a pure OO language knows that there's nothing inherently imperative about the approach. Just because the most popular OO languages (C++, Java) ultimately force you to have a main() doesn't mean that a procedure is required to write OO code. That's more a reflection of the OS execution model than the language used to write the app.

I've personally written CORBA apps that were asynchronous, distributed and multi-threaded -- in C++. Object-oriented development is more than capable of handling the complexity of multi-core processing.
PG, your use of the term "economies of scale" seems to be slightly misleading:

My understanding is that to benefit from "economies of scale", you don't necessarily have to be big in size. You can be a two people startup serving a huge user base with a small margin. It's possible to make huge profits in this scenario because of economies of scale in terms of the size of the market served.

Your use of the terms seems to indicate that you can use economies of scale to your advantage only if you are big in size:

Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones.

But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size.
I'm curious why you'd need such a thing. Are you dealing with a bug that shows up in IE but not in Firefox?
On one level I agree. There's a point at which no one cares about the news.

That's kind of the idea for this though, solving that problem. A memetracker/content recommendation system done right would just give you stuff that editors/bloggers/social media folks find interesting, so you'd get the local highlights every X minutes.
Another interesting read. I'd like to note that (while it wasn't the focus of the essay), many of the expensive "checks" aren't there for monetary reasons, but rather human safety and the dire consequences of a poor decision.

Working at Motorola on cell phone code could be a great way to give everyone in the modern world a cool new feature - or accidentally break 20+% of all phones out there. A terrible Mickey Mouse movie could destroy a brand. Take it a step further to NASA, vehicle engine design (and safety), oil pipelining and refining, etc. and the cost could be human lives.

That said, I'm very interested in the cost of these "checks" on those industries. Not monetary costs (although important), but rather the cost in stifled future innovation.

Thoughts?
Part of the reason—possibly the main reason—that startups have not spread as broadly as the Industrial Revolution did is their social disruptiveness.

I think a more abstracted version of the problem would be that, at least in western civilization, products spread much faster than best practices. If Nintendo releases a new videogame system they'll sell millions the first day, and yet 2/3 of American children still don't get their daily RDI of calcium.

The problem is that processes are much more important than products in terms of quality of life, health care, child development, business, education, etc. And while technological progress is increasing exponentially, the rate of best-practice adoption remains flat.

It seems like the American dream is being able to purchase the solution to any one of life’s problems in a big f*ing box at Wal-Mart for less than 200 bucks. Consumers are already really well trained at this, and we need to figure out a way to leverage this behavior to get them to adopt new processes. The problem as I see it is threefold:

1) People don't know about best practices

2) They know about a best practice but they aren't sold on it

3) They're sold on it but it's too hard

So far as I can see it, the only way for America to remain competitive with the rest of the world is to make the adoption of best practices an order of magnitude easier. We might be temporarily ahead of everyone else in terms of getting the smartest kids to go out and join or start their own businesses, but in terms of nearly every other best practice we're falling drastically behind.

The reality is that we live in a society where doctors don't wash their hands before surgery, where shoddy farm practices cause excessive soil erosion, where pregnant women eat fish high in mercury and PCBs, etc. America is certainly getting more high-res in response to change, but is the catalyzing change really technological? Corporations are great at buying stuff, it's the best practices they are really slow at adopting. The fact that corporations are breaking down into smaller units seems to be a synechdoche of society at large falling apart due to the same set of failures.
Not sure if you've ever incorporated. I have, a couple times. In most states, your info goes into the state database that is wide open to the public, so you don't really get any privacy anyway.
Bloopers like these are what allow new entrants to beat entrenched leaders.
VCs are an industry unto themselves: I agree that that implies a shift towards start-ups. My question would be: what's there to stop a shift in corporations' becoming merely comprised of much smaller modules? Google works by having many small clusters of teams working on big things, so they're able (in some cases, not all) to innovate as quickly as start-ups in their fields, but with the advantage of firm corporate backing. Not many large companies are doing the same, but what's stopping new corporations from forming specifically with modulation in mind? Or would you argue that a development like that is similarly higher-res?
Faust... that worked out well. ;p
The conclusion overreached a little bit. And there was something disturbingly California centric about it.

In my opinion there is not such a huge cultural gap that's responsible for the different startup rates.

Few (if any) cultures are so deeply authoritative as to be anti-success.

The valley's lead is much more the result of rather simpler causes. People - a whole lot of smart ones, two recession proof large smart people producers (the universities), and funding lots and lots of funding.

That's where the lead comes from and it will be difficult to close it. Culture doesn't have anything to do with it.
Stanley - as I said in another thread above, be careful of one common misconception. For most businesses, you need to foreign-qualify in the state that you do business in. The definition of doing business in a state varies, but if you have a physical office or a bank account where you live, you are most definitely considered to be transacting there. In most cases, the savings you get from, say, deducting your home office, will exceed the savings you get from registering in a cheap state.

There is, however, a way to save money that most people overlook. If you don't really need liability protection (say, you are a computer consultant doing projects so your clients can't really sue you for more than the project is worth anyway) you can always go to your city hall and get a DBA (doing business as). DBA's are cheap and usually have no filing requirements. The DBA will allow you to get a business bank account, which will in turn allow you to separate your personal income/expenses from your business, thus giving you the ability to deduct expenses, etc.
In case you are interested in the other questionable contents of that directory:

http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=kpcb.sql&...
Energy density isn't nearly the as big a problem as lifespan and cost. You have to move some things around, but if you stick the suspension and the engines in the wheels, there's room for > 500 liters of battery in most cars. Th!nk gets about 150 L in a microcar.
Yeah, but with no business model to speak of, Twitter has yet to prove they are worth as much as a sandwich.
Interesting! Did any other HN folks submit to the Knight Challenge?
now someone should write a blogpost comparing that to using http://pygments.org/
That is classic. If only so much effort was invested into eliminating the need for memory overcommit.
That's what FDIC insurance is for. You just probably need to have accounts in a number of different banks to ensure you won't lose your money.
Ever notice any 80s movie characters who were computer programmers? I can remember one - it's the weirdest thing to watch. He's socially awkward, which is reasonable, but he also has no money! All the cool kids in the movie make more than him. You could not have such a character today - completely implausible.
The Bro Factor - Intimate Relationships Can Give Your Startup An Unfair Advantage
Doing well by being nice...
Drugs and Wikipedia don't mix
Harvard’s Endowment Takes an $8 Billion Hit, loses 22%
Microsoft's radical 4th-generation datacenter design
Quantum physics is usefully sketched out for the layperson here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/the-quantum-phy.html

It's deterministic. QM objections are based on bad pop sci.

Undecidability in the context of physics sounds interesting, care to add detail?
Perl 5 Is Dying
Does any one know of work that suggests that advantageous experience during life can be encoded in DNA and passed on? That would be Lamarckian. What would not be Lamarckian: (1) the example of this story; (2) environmental factors increasing mutation rate; (3) viral infection inserting new DNA. Others that would not count?
Man, that would make a lot of internet-related things unusable from Mars and beyond: online gaming, flash, software updates, etc.

It would also make use of a DVCS like git a must for interplanetary hosting services.
Revenge of the nerds had programmers. God, I loved that movie. My younger brother liked it even more. Remarkably, my parents let him watch it over and over on VHS. Violent movies were more likely to get scrutiny: for an explanation, see "Hair" ;)
Functional languages are a red herring.

If you actually want to do something you still have to have side effects, and that's when all that Haskell-ish beauty goes out the window.

It is still absolutely worth it to learn functional programming, it will change the way you think, it will make a better programmer in non functional languages, but it won't solve the problems of side effects.
60000 new infections forecast in disease crisis
ohdo.tel, showand.tel, dontaskdont.tel
Right, if Retric's comment is correct, then the example of this story certainly isn't a vindication of Lamarck. But it might be a step in that direction.

I'm just an ignorant outsider, but the absolute dismissal of Lamarck always felt like a dogmatism to me. I'm suspicious whenever I hear words like "can't" or "never" repeated in a slightly too loud and rigid way. Remember when everyone "knew" that brain cells could "never" regenerate?
Hey, look What's this? Some hacker hacker news?
How about sue early and sue often?

Seriously, a law firm that deals primarily with tech startups and indie developers would be excellent. I'm thinking LLC articles of organization, EULAs, and website terms of use policies would make a good starting point.
And Jung's theory of the collective unconscious before Herbert was. (Jung was a bit more boring about it, though.)
That was the only thing I was worried about. Even if I don't tell anybody and work on it in secret, after I leave the company and say release this product, could they come after me and say : hey, you signed a contract .. this product belongs to us since you worked on it when you were with the company ?

I guess I am getting a little paranoid about this but I just wanted to understand if anybody had any good / bad experiences and the best way to go about it. Thanks for the advice
Cinpy - or C in Python
Depending on the terms of the contract, yes.

The good: They have to be able to prove you worked on it while working for them.

The bad: You'd still get saddled with legal fees if they come after you, even if you win the case and retain the project.
It looks like the article is saying there's a trend towards small organizations. That's a different thing than saying that the era of large organizations will never return.
Google Chrome to add WOT extension | TechJaws
"this isn't much of a stretch"?! from a sample period of a few decades to "never again"?
I think the limiting factor to growth of the startup culture is the fact that big organizations are good at providing commodity goods and services and the freedom and unconventional nature of startups doesn't seem to scale up to big organizations. At some point I'm sure even companies like Google and Genentech, which tried to maintain the startup feeling, start to feel pretty corporate.

So I would agree insofar as to say that startups will become the de facto standard method of commercializing new technology, but I don't think they will ever represent a significant portion of the economy as far as the number of people employed. Having such a small percentage of the population involved in startups doesn't afford them much opportunity to affect social norms on a large scale.

Short of complete automation, big organizations will always be best at doing commodity things like picking up your trash and making your shirts. Even once those particular tasks are automated, big organizations will grow (often from startups) elsewhere to tackle new commodity goods and services. Once something is no longer cutting edge, it'll be provided by a big organization.

Startups will always disrupt the way big organizations currently do things, but by being successful they will just become big organizations themselves.
How to squeeze your IT vendors ... and not by threatening or begging
I use the same password (OK, two passwords, one high strengh, one disposable) and have a bookmarklet that hashes the password with the site's base URL. Works well for me.
Buried among qualifications: "Aaron invented The Facebook while attending Harvard College in September, 2003."
In other words, dupe.
I think you're confusing "economies of scale" with what Taleb calls "professions that scale".
I had two responses:

- The Internet is different from other fields because of low barriers to entry and the ease of collaboration between groups (low transaction costs). This means that even if our field grows very large (and I think it will), the principles underlying its success might not successfully spread to other industries.

- Another thing that might happen is that large organizations gain enough power that they can control the Internet. If they're able to do so and prevent the rise of alternative, more free networks, then hegemony could come to dominate this industry too, as it did all the others.
This one is pretty interesting also... and from someone with real world experience.

66,'Rahul Patwari,'I am not a company, but a physician who works in an urban emergency department. Every day I see the costs of inefficient health care delivery. There is a monetary costs in unnecessary tests and the time delays they cause. There is a cost to patients in that the stretched resources end up inappropriately distributed. There is a cost to physicians who are burdened with an ever growing fund of knowledge which is impossible with which it\'s impossible to keep up. This eventually leads to medical malpractice lawsuits which are a drain to our legal and medical systems. ','A small but significant step in improving all of these problems is making it easy for physicians to practice with the latest standards-of-care. My solution is to use the iPhone as a platform to deliver diagnostic and treatment plans based on the current literature. For example, imagine a patient with a stroke. The physician, using his iPhone, can determine if he meets the criteria to receive blood-clot dissolving medication, or determine if that would pose too great a risk of fatal bleeds in the brain. X-rays can be ordered according to established guidelines instead of the gestalt/gut-feeling of the physician. These rules have been shown to be very sensitive in finding fractures, yet at the same time reducing the number of unnecessary x-rays. The applications are quite broad. ','There is no product like this available. The technology isn\'t difficult, just a bunch of algorithms organized properly: cardiovascular, neurological, orthopedics, etc. Right now the information is there in the medical literature and unwieldy text books. My idea is simply to bring them together into one easy-to-use program. The iPhone is a device many physicians already carry, and if not, are looking at buying. This would be a reason to do so. What makes this device unique is that these decisions/calculations can be done bedside (with the doctor holding the iPhone). When done, it can be easily slipped back into a pocket. ','There is no product like this available. There really won\'t be competition for this product as I intend to give this away for free. There is no reason that the patient in a poorer urban hospital shouldn\'t have access to the same care that a patient coming to a richer hospital would get. If everyone can practice the same degree of quality care, I sincerely believe we can improve our delivery of health care and possibly even to more people. It will be a long while before concrete changes in health care delivery will arrive, but this may help. ','Rahul Patwari, MD. Board Certified Emergency Physician, Chicago, IL. I received my BS in Engineering, Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Subsequently I did my medical training at the University of Illinois at Chicago and completed my residency in Emergency Medicine at Chicago\'s Cook County Hospital. ','','','New',0,20080306165443,20080306165443);
Ask HN: Is my little tool doomed to obscurity?
When people neglect to or decide not to renew their domain registrations, others will have a chance to get those domains. The list of expiring domains is of course very long, so I created a little script to help me find just the best ones. I used some dictionaries to match against, and for a while I also had some traffic data. I made a UI around this tool and posted it on the web. People seemed to like it and it got to the top pages of Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us. This was in December 2006. Just a few days after the initial burst of traffic, it was down to 100 visit per day, and is currently at 50 visits per day, making an incredible $5/month from AdSense.

I wanted to ask you smart devs whether there is anything you can think of that would make the tool more sticky, to turn the flatlined traffic into a growing trend? I find myself keeping the script somewhat operational, in hopes I would come up with something, but it's now been two years already and my mind is blank.

http://expired-domain.bemmu.com/
A university worrying about its endowment is a lot like a 30-year-old worrying about his 401(k).
If I read an interesting article on a site like DreamInCode I will usually check out the authors personal blog.
sounds like a service that people would pay for

start charging for it, or at the very least make clicking on the domains take you to a godaddy affiliate link or something
You could say the same thing about Facebook, they're currently losing $50m a year.
I have, I've played with various different ideas for generating revenue, but I think anything that charges for a community or for membership is doomed to fail. I'm going after hyper-local advertising. Members of a community can buy a banner ad for $4/month, and there's a nifty banner ad creator to make it easy.
Youporn.com traffic cut in half since June - anyone know why?
Do we know if any of these have gotten funded?
"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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=384690
Good. Let Python take over the dynamic scripting language space completely.
A Look Inside a Facebook for the Filthy Rich
There is a sample community ( http://sample.villagetoolbox.com ) that is linked from the from page. I'll also link it from the search results page.

Thanks for the feedback
True, but Twitter isn't even trying yet. I think it would be easier to generate revenue with it than Facebook. I'd rather be in Twitter's position than Facebook's.
Steve Yegge disagrees with your idea of Google's operations.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallow...
And the Buddha had a few words to say on that, too.
I did not think that pg said that big companies will disappear. He is saying they will never again have such a leading role. I think it's an exaggeration to think that just because start-ups have been doing well for a few decades.
I like the tool -- definitely useful for people who are looking for good domains.

I am not a dev, but I have a few ideas:

- Have a tool that limits the results by the number of characters in the domain

- Quick links on the front page to results starting with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet

- From a revenue standpoint, you could see if there is some sort of affiliate program with registrars, or work something out on your own with a partner firm.

- Add some sort of custom news feed on the front page for domain-related news, SEO, etc.
I do, using PasswordMaker. Plugs into browsers, runs standalone from a keychain drive, multi platform, etc. You use one main password that it combines with the site name to get a site-specific password.
Entrepreneur Pitchbook
Or __LINE__ or __FILE__. :p
He substantiates his claim with historical evidence and observation of current trends. Do you have anything other than your personal opinion?

"A few decades" is not a short amount of time. I don't think it's naive to believe that this trend is lasting.
But it's easier to program multi-threaded applications when the code doesn't produce side-effects...
Let us not jump to conclusions:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java,+c,+python,+perl,+rub...

http://www.jobstats.co.uk/jobstats.d/Details.d/Trends.d/SKIL...
You need to separate the stability of individual large organizations over time to the relative importance of all large organizations. The Mormon faith is growing and other religions are dieing, but on average about the same number of people are part of some religion. Google grows as GM dies, but the average number of people working at large 5,000+ person companies seems fairly constant. Individual government organizations grow and die but overall the government workforce seems fairly constant. Companies with less than 5 people are a wold apart from company's with 50 but after 5,000 it's all about the same mess.

PS: The Pentagon is just an office building NORAD is far more important.
Er...you don't want that. Competition is a good thing.
Skill vs. Luck in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: Evidence from Serial Entrepreneurs
Lesson learned? If a file is in the path that the webserver reads from, it could be compromised!

By default, you should never have directory listing turned on. If you have it on, you are just looking for trouble. (Want free MP3s? Google has lots of them it's found like this!)
I've always like reading Guy's material. He often has very thoughtful pieces with plenty of actionable advice.

That being said I'm not impressed with either of his 2 most recent startups, truemors.com and alltop.com.

I'm not sure if its the idea or the implementation--but neither jump out at me as significant. I guess I expect more from Guy considering he's a world-known VC/author/blogger.
http://www.wolfgreenfield.com/ ?
That's what he said!
Yes, I used to use an affiliate program until it was discontinued. I think it was 10x more profitable then. The only registrars people can really use to register expiring domains are registrars specialized in that, and currently none of them have an affiliate program.