skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article does miss out quite a lot of Google information gathering sites (Hosted gmail for business use, default search on the iphone, maps+GPS on the iphone, Picasa, youtube, ...), many are mentioned in the comments.

Still, it's not so much that I think Google is doing evil right now, but the more they gather, the more potential they have to do bad things with it. And since they're pushing into unprecedented data gathering, it's not limited to "bad things that have happened before that I can enumerate specifically", either. Who can predict what pessimistic delights lie in wait over the next decade?

And the more they gather, the more of a target they become for crackers, internal leaks, legistlation, and the more room there is for plain old mistakes. Maybe they really don't want to do evil, but on their way from virtue to virtue, some quantity of people will be barged out of the way, trampled upon and mistreated, just because Goog are huge.

Also consider that if you regularly use Google maps for directions, then you will tend to do home->place or work->place, focusing in on your main locations.

If you search Google for names, then the chances are you're looking for friends/relatives, or famous people. Google can tell famous people, because other people are searching for them.
From Peter Klein (via 37s)

"The proposed bailout of GM, Ford, and Chrysler overlooks an important fact. The US has one of the most vibrant, dynamic, and efficient automobile industries in the world. It produces several million cars, trucks, and SUVs per year, employing (in 2006) 402,800 Americans at an average salary of $63,358. That’s vehicle assembly alone; the rest of the supply chain employs even more people and generates more income. It’s an industry to be proud of. Its products are among the best in the world.

Their names are Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru."

I think that foreign automobile makers would fill the space rather quickly. Some brands would disappear, but most would be continued one way or another.

It would also open up for innovation in the car space, something america hasnt had for a long time.
Ask HN: From where do you buy a domain ?
Where would I find a .com domain at cheaper rate? Wheres do you buy domain from and why? who is popular, who is trustworthy ?
It deserves an upmod simply for using the excellent word "plebs".
This is called TrafficMaster in the UK ( http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/home.php ). It uses detectors placed at regular intervals along all major and a lot of minor roads and you can receive basic traffic data over the cellphone network without a subscription.Been operational for ten years or so. It's not quite as described here as it does not require the active participation of it's users.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339823

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369

I use NameCheap, myself.
The intersection of social media and the cloud
I hate rants with misspellings. One I found was "breaktaking". I'm sure he meant "breathtaking". Get an editor, you twat.
This kind of thing is just laughably stupid. Psychology is basically still a guessing game and claiming your iPod most played list gives an insight into a person is likely valid and mostly useless.

For example, when someone's asked to recall a memory they generally look up and to the right. When they lie they look down and to the left. However, if the person's left handed then it's wildcard because their cognitive functions are splayed between the two hemispheres. Even then this isn't even 80% accurate with right handed people.

Just looking at someones iPod doesn't tell you what they actually listen to. My iPod has songs in my most played that I've never played before because my wife uses my iPod when hers runs out of battery. Just because a woman's playing soft jazz on an iPod where the top 25 songs are death metal is likely to mean she doesn't try to have sex with someone everyday of the week. I mean if she plays soft jazz when she invites you back to her place, it not being in the top 25 means she doesn't invite people back very often more likely meaning you won't get herpes.

I'm a big fan of California Punk Rock, but it's one of the lowest scoring in number of plays. My father-in-law loves the Rolling Stones, yet I've only heard him play 1 song by them.

I'd hedge a bet that what's on someones iPod that they don't play says more about them than what they do play.
The 4 C's of Community
Companies like IBM tend to be most interested in finding high-ranking college grads to bring in. Additionally many startups appreciate and value someone who has solid experience at a large organization, coupled with a drive to do more.

Doing it the other way around (try a startup, then go to BigCo) is less optimal.
I think the "bonus" idea that Seth gives, the automatic sending of recorded reminders, is a feature that is available from www.traqmonkey.com. It is called "callback reminder", and you have to know to make the reminder go to a "distribution group" instead of just yourself.

On his main idea, I have one comment: why don't people who live where the primary impediment to their getting around just move ? In theory, the internet and modern communications should allow a much more dispersed population and economy, without the costs that come from overcrowding. In practice, everyone in that traffic jam has an economic reason to be there. I think that any services or business ideas that allow a more "free range" type of economy instead of the "factory farm" overcrowded cities will have a strong demand.
An employee confirms Bezos is not doucheproof:

When I worked @Amazon, Bezos celebrated Black Friday by doing "tricks" in the parking lot on his "amazing" segway. (Attendance mandatory.)
Led Zeppelin Releases Rare Bootleg Videos | TechJaws
I've noticed my brain queues up songs that match my walking pace.

And sometimes I get locked into a mood where I only find certain songs pleasurable. And my iPod can't break me out.
I was looking for that one, thanks! Balsamiq looks nice too!
late 1990s -- looking at the HTML and outward links
No porn, but didn't work as advertised.

It wanted to pop up four windows and then it wanted to move them around my desktop ... jeez, I almost felt sorry for it :)
godaddy.com
I dunno what's going on, but this link sent my FF3 into the nut house, with windows flicking across the desktop and creating new windows. I'm flagging it.
http://www.joker.com
The Global Peace Index
Webapp stacks
More people have bedrooms than iPods, and bedrooms are harder to get incorrect clues from than playlists (because the amount of information is much greater).

Therefore, the article's argument is crap.
In an ideal world, yes.

But we've just seen a couple of guys debate the next four year of one country in a very public way. It took them a year, not to reach any kind of common ground, much less agreement, but to get to the point where a few pct.pts. likes one guy better than the other. This was even made easy by pre-defining that there will only be two sides to the debate.

The climate debate discusses the future, not of one country, but of the entire earth, and if we end up on the side of the "alarmists", we're not trying again in 4 years - this is a 20-50 year plan.

So, yes, I agree with you, but my pragmatic practical side (the one that will not be allowed in a brainstorm session) argues that it's just not practical.
>His industry went into recession a year ago, so he’s had a little more time than most startup CEOs to think about how to deal with the current downturn.

Things are a lot worse now than they were a year ago, especially for housing related markets.
I think it's so easy to critique someone's piece of work. But quite frankly, it's pretty petty and childish to openly bash an author with such an article.

If people like what he's saying, if people find that Malcolm resonates with their perception of reality, then all the better. It should be a personal choice as to what we find interesting and not interesting, rather than some omnipotent pundit at the "Register" dictating it to us.

I think that the author of the article is just jealous that he cannot personally derive anything of interest to say without belittling a colleague.
personally I prefer to use photoshop...yes with Balsamiq you can do the thing in a few minutes to get a rough draft...but to me at least, it seems like the time you'd save on the draft, you'll lose in the coding process by not having a clear idea of what you are planning.

With photoshop you can get an exact idea of what you'll be doing. And the extra time spent on getting a good mockup, will be more than made up, when you actually start coding.
so basically killerstartups copy?
co2stats is just a greenwashing tool, and its utility will die as fast as greenwashing dies. by greenwashing, i mean the suggestion that users choose products based on their adoption of "green"-appearing means of production
Masterful hack by Adobe shows how to manipulate running video...
Andrew Orlowski has made the typical geek mistake of dismissing the value of presentation in relation to content. Gladwell may well twist soft scientific insights into "intellectual comfort food" (as said by Alex3917 above) and this might not be particularly challenging or clever, but it's easy to read, gets readers, and gets most of us thinking about the bigger picture. He's just joining dots in a way that helps idea and an interest in social sciences to flow.

Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and "idea spreaders" do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries. They are the lubricant of science, programming, design, management strategies, creativity, or whatever their respective niche is. They give us ideas that are easily digested but then force us to consider our own positions and ideas on their ground. This is valuable in itself.
Another Microsoft Yahoo Deal in the Works?
Nokia 3250 Not Charging Problem
3250, 3250 charge ways, 3250 charger ways, 3250 charging problem, 3250 not charging, charging problem, Nokia, nokia 3250, not charging
I think he accidentally hit the "Post to YC" bookmarklet on his home page
Dunno about that.

I read the first seven (I think) chapters of Outliers, and I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information: that sports players are born close to the cutoff line for their sport, and that violinists who have a chance to become virtuosos have uniformly practiced about 10000 hours, while the merely "good" ones have practiced about 8000 hours and the bad ones have practiced 4000 hours. (Incidentally, I don't really believe the second one -- because it implies that all kinds "effortful practice" are exactly as efficient as one another.) I'm not saying that there weren't others, just that I can't remember them.

I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes, though, and certainly I think anecdotes (and boilerplate) made up at least 80% of those first seven chapters. Plus his anecdotes kind of sucked. The Beatles prove the 10000 hour rule? Okay, I guess. Bill Joy? I don't really think so. Bill Gates? Hell no.
Amusingly horrible question. Functional programming languages don't typically have class-based or prototype mechanisms, so why on earth would a named set of object interaction mechanisms be relevant - let alone displaceable?

I also think it is funny the status quo in language design is to effectively combine objects and functions but programmers and writers are not acknowledging this fusion. Ocaml, Javascript, F#, Scala, Ruby, Nemerle ... with varying ease, these languages all let you create lambdas, compose functions, functions as values. Even mainstream languages like C# and Java are awkwardly moving in this direction.

Scala does some crazy stuff to make "fusion" interesting. They allow objects in pattern matching by providing a specific mechanism for allowing an object to expose encapsulated behavior (extractors). Functions all belong to a parametric set of classes and have an "apply" method e.g. def add(x:Int,y:Int) = x+y is really Function2[Int,Int,Int]{ def apply(x:Int,y:Int):Int = x + y }. Likewise, any class or singleton object can invoked as a function by providing an "apply" method implementation.
SEO  FAQ
Search Engine Marketing Frequently Asked Questions. Find Valuable information and definitions with our SEO FAQ.
Save on Christmas Gifts - Rental Toys - Vox
Pentagon to build robot soldier that 'won't commit war crimes'
Fat code is slow code
Macy's Thanksgiving Parade RickRoll'd
True. But 25% of the population isn't standing in a daily bread line.
10 tips for starting entrepreneurs
There has been. See here (Intelligence Squared U.S. - 'Global Warming Is Not a Crisis'):

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9082151

But whether even that helps is another question.
"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries."

I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.
It is logical. Search is where the money is at.

For me the biggest business mystery in the world is why the adsense/adword model was not exactly copied ASAP by Yahoo, since that was making billions to your direct competitor.
Neighboring flapping flags experience less drag
It's not a good idea to say the word "Bankruptcy" on the phone with a credit card rep. I'm told it triggers all kinds of Bad Stuff behind the scenes.

Not to mention, they want to negotiate with you. They have an obvious incentive to do so. You don't actually have to say the B-word - everyone understands the consequences of financial distress.
Is it news that a government agency is poorly run and corrupt? Look, one-third of Medicare equipment expenses are fraudulent. The executive branch gives out no-bid contracts to firms that used to employ its top members. The Pentagon has lost track of hundreds of billions of dollars, and NASA its billions.

In general, our response to a corrupt bureaucracy is to make it bigger in hopes that it will still get the job done despite the waste and graft.

It's nice that they are conducting these kinds of internal reviews. However, the FBI did one such review and determined that it had improperly used its PATRIOT Act powers 1,000 times for every time it used it properly. I don't think much changed after the report.
I don't think that is what he implied by "everything is open for negotiation".

What it does mean is that this situation makes you lose any bit of your laziness or ego or threat of embarrassment. Where as previously you may have been shy to tell your hosting company you can only pay $100 instead of $600, now you may have NO OTHER OPTION but to pay $100 instead of $600.

Of course the hosting company can refuse and pursue another route such as collection. But from my experience, most small businesses aren't looking to pick a fight if you talk to them genuinely and explain your situation. In hosting, this is even more true because it is a high margin business. ie. the $600/month you are paying may only be costing the provider $50/month.

We have weathered similar situation on more than one occasion in last one year. What has usually worked for us is to go "broke": tell the folks you need to pay that you cannot pay until x date or that you can only pay $y/month. Most vendors will work with you especially if you have been doing business with them for some time.
Great interferometry image, and the actual paper can be found at:

- http://www.physics.nyu.edu/~jz11/publications.html#

Background on the experiment setup:

- http://public.lanl.gov/wdaniel/science/turbulence/Rutgers01a...

For nearby rigid bodies, the leader experiences more drag than the follower. This work shows that for nearby deformable bodies, the leader experiences less drag than the follower, and both experience less drag than they would have alone.
Ressentiment, the Internet, and the Cloak of Invisibility
I see I'm being modded down by programmers who also can't spell.
Python Module Of The Week: readline – Interface to the GNU readline library
Paper and pencil?
So what? The use of the term makes it appear that you are equating getting a kid to do homework with the Gulag's arrests, interrogations, transport in unheated cattle cars, forced labor, destruction of families, years spent in exile, and the early and unnecessary deaths.
No, you are being modded down for being crude. That kind of thing might be common on other forums, but not here.
No idea why someone would downmod that but I have neutralized them. :) "Undiscovered" is of course a relative term. I'd cite the languages of Arthur Whitney here: they're "discovered" enough to have made a lot of money, but are unknown to the vast majority of the computing world and widely misunderstood even by those who have heard of them. Qi isn't absolutely "undiscovered" - here we are talking about it - but it's largely unknown and unused.

Tarver strikes me as a smart guy doing serious work in an intelligent way. For example, building Qi on top of CL (in such a way that you can drop in to CL whenever you want, though this point is redundant) seems like an obvious win. I don't feel a need to use something that right now, but I'm also skeptical of the "I don't feel a need to use that" feeling... perhaps we are all Blub to Qi!
This won't work like Seth wants. The problem is the following:

- Few users have the iPhone hooked up to a car charger when in their cars.

- The GPS receiver sucks up power like mad when it's on. A constant connection will drain the battery very quickly.

- The iPhone is also incapable of passively uploading GPS data to a remote source, nor is it capable of running an app in the background. This is to say, your users must keep their iPhone unlocked (disabling auto-sleep) and your app open at all times. This is similarly a large drain on your battery.

The amount of work (buying a car charger, making sure to hook it up, unlock the phone, and open your app, and disable auto-lock) every time the user needs to use the service is just absurd. This has no chance of working as it is.

It's a cool idea, and if we all had devices in our pockets that can, without excessive hackery, sustain a continuous GPS feed to a 3rd-party source, this would actually work. Sadly, the iPhone is not it.
It's probably for your language.
I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that.

But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me.

I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. The difficulty is predicting ahead of time whether they will.
I think you'd get a bigger payoff from not having the TV and games around to distract you than simply the $500.

Every hour not spent watching TV can be better spent somewhere else, even if all he's doing is reading.
In Denmark the car tax would turn a $60,000 car into a $168,000 one, right?
This is getting old, it really is. Will someone do a meta-study and discover that "mental activity stimulates brain," please? Then we can all cite that once and for all.

Whatever there is to say on this topic that's actually interesting has been said in "Everything Bad Is Good for You," a book I highly recommend.
You know all 300 men were killed right?

Just saying. :-)
The kind of bug big companies are concerned about is the kind that causes google.com to be down for 15 minutes. That's a significant amount of revenue. Or the sort of bug that causes a release of an infrastructure component to be rolled back, causing more work for every project touched by that release. It isn't the famous sort of bug, these don't get picked up by the news, it's the sort of bug that nobody really notices but costs the organization a lot of money or work.
Support for Customers: Phone or Email?
Why do you ask this? You already should know that, at IBM, you will be another brick in the wall. Do you need permission to do what you love?
I will get a job, and try to monetize what was left of the business.

Try again when the debt is paid and with some money saved. As someone pointed out: the knowledge of how NOT do it is very valuable.
It was probably a concept. A lot of marketers say, "I developed this product", when really they should've said, "I thought it up on a Sunday afternoon, wrote it down, showed it to about 10 people on IM, and thought about working on it later this week."
First of all, I don't know anything about python, my first experience with it was doing the django tutorial last week.
The small firm said they use python specifically because they found PHP programmers to be so different in level of skill, and that python programmers were consistently pretty high. I can't vouch for any of that, but to me, it does say that they're concerned about hiring good people and not just anybody. The owner/founder has an active development role so I'm thinking he's not too much of a "clueless wantaprenuer". Hopefully :)
I wouldn't lump Godin with PG & 37signals.
Bluefin Tuna on the Verge of Extinction?
I swear I don't say this for brownie points, but honestly, I wouldn't put pg in the same category as the other names you mentioned (though I admit I don't know them all, but most). I value pg's essays much more - he is not going for the daily quip, rather, his essays always treat something new in perfect fashion. Gladwell and Godin could be writing daily columns for womens/mens magazines, saying the same things we all already know over and over (yet we like to read them for our daily motivational boost). PG explores new things (or makes them accessible).

There are several pg essays that I wish everyone would read (not only geeks). Can't say that for the other names you mention.
Could someone write down the list? I don't get SlideShare at work.
1and1 - though I wouldn't ever buy hosting from them.
How Quickly Can Social Norms Change?
<sarcastic>
sounds like fun
</sarcastic>

Unlike Qi I, Qi II allows you to embed sequent rules within functions, evaluating them to closures. These rule closures are type checked and are permeable to having their variables lexically bound from outside the scope of the rule itself. These devices enable the student of computational logic to effortlessly code complex logical systems of all descriptions. Thus the rule

let PTerm/X (replace-by X Term P)

PTerm/X, (all X P) >> Q;

____________________

(all X P) >> Q;

allows universally quantified assumptions to be instantiated to new premises. This rule can be embedded into a Qi II function called all-left which does precisely this job. The rule is turned into a closure by the rule function which is then applied to the problem (list of sequents).

(define all-left

{term --> [sequent] --> [sequent]}

Term S -> ((rule let PTerm/X (replace-by X Term P)

PTerm/X, (all X P) >> Q;

____________________

(all X P) >> Q;) S))
Sometimes it takes an (admittedly erroneous) crude approach just to bring what should be an overt point to fruition. While this wasn't one of them, there are certainly times.

And on that point, that's the feeling I get when I read this article. The writer is trying to be direct and ride the fence of "condemnation by realization" but only comes off as wrongly crude. While I haven't read any of Gladwell's book, I've seen him speak and he's got his wits about him regarding these things. Let's put it into perspective: how many of us can effectively lecture on the things he does?