skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. Just because he's not an inventor does not mean that he is, by nature, a genius at what he does. His track record of success versus failure is incredibly impressive and whilst this is not done in isolation (ie its with other people) he seems to get the best out of people. I've just read iWoz by Steve Wozniak and strangely have ended up with much more respect for Steve Jobs. He gets a bad press, but thats probably because by the very Ying/Yang nature of his personality he's also a complete pr*ck at times. He's a businessman and isn't in it to make friends
"It took me less than two seconds to figure out how to use two companies to get to 100x, or three companies to get to 1000x, etc, etc." - me too. That one's so obvious even Congress would figure it out, and they'd probably make some perfunctory attempt to ban it. Which would then have even more exotic ways to escape from it, which Congress might eventually try to close, which would still have holes... this is one of the ways I think of Sarbanes-Oxley, for instance. You can plug and plug and plug, but there's just some things you fundamentally can't stop. Lying with your accounting is one of them; over-leverage is another.
How Can So Much Spam Come From One Place?
I suspect that the best long term stable strategie is to randomly assign a personal value for this hand. Something like .75 to 2x the actual value of your hand before the bet to reduce the amount of signal your sending out. If your both doing this and playing perfect poker then nobody wins.

Finding what the best random function might be would be an interesting test of machine learning. But in the real world few players are going to do something like this so finding out what their approach is is going to be a better approach.
Yes it does. You could play HD-DVD media on Linux - I have personally done it. I'm relatively sure you may play Blu-Ray too. It's just like playing WMV or WMA - all you need is a codec - plus a tool to handle the DRM, which, as we're all aware, is inevitably created the day after the DRM is released.
I personally know one person who enjoys Digg more than Reddit or HN, and when asked why, he just said, "Well, it's funny." You get my point.
There's a difference between relying on and being able to spot possible red flags.
I wouldn't consider this a failure. Guessing that you don't want to run into legally shady territory (assuming you're in the US) and start an online gambling site, it's hard as hell to make money in anything related to games, especially public-domain card games. For example, I'd doubt that the designers of card games like FreeCell and Ambition ever made a cent off their inventions.

I'll point this out, though: games do well when the economy tanks, so I wouldn't give it up just yet. (Monopoly was invented, in its modern form, during the Great Depression.)
Fashion Your Firefox
"I will be taking this to sequioa capital" Yea, good luck buddy.
We're in the same boat... submission process is killing me.

I wish we could have launched with some of our other iPhone products because right now our company looks pretty riskque... we have a lot more planned completely unrelated to the website I posted above.

what do you mean by dangerous time consumer? :)
Frankly, I think it's more than just misogyny that plagues Digg. I never read the commentary anymore. To my mind, the need is for a new Digg community, or a more vocal community of us sane people.

Some of the reasons that I find Slashdot a bit better are the labeled moderation system and the karma system. They help keep some of the worst trolling off the site at the cost of encouraging a sort of groupthink.
Yeah, it did. "Screw the environment. Those things are only interesting because of internet Male's bizarre fascination with them. Instead, let me write about whether Barack Obama is anorexic?! That's what real girls want to hear about..."

Not going to let it keep me down, though. We just sent out a bunch of letters to investors. Low and behold, we now have a pitch.
There are a healthy number (though minuscule in the grand scheme) of startups that use Flash, and I doubt you'd get the familiar "90%+ CPU crash" by going to those sites.

By contrast, I work at a major media outlet where a lot of folks with no coding experience are creating Flash interactives that are being viewed by (pushed on) a large number of people. It's painful.

Then there's the fact that 99%+ of all obtrusive advertisements are written in Flash.
Five Physics Lessons for Obama
There is a concept I've come to appreciate called "Code Debt", its the technical liabilities you've accumulated through using shortcuts and bad practices, things you've chosen to patch so they work in the short term but will bite your ass in the long term and require much more effort to fix than was originally saved.

Always remember the interest on Code Debt is brutal so the wise entrepreneur strives to avoid it.
PG's advice is right. Take down all the fences -- you have less than 20 seconds to impress the user into staying on your site.

It's an attention economy -- asking for signup/login before providing real value = squandering that attention.
Why is this so bad? The difference between what was said there and what is said behind closed doors is... closed doors. Many people in this community, or with similar goals to many in this community, talk that way. Perhaps many people are less abstract and more practical, but the end game is still the same.

Back when I was young and naive, a year or so ago, I'd talked with many about wanting to meet with Sequoia. Since then I've met with Sequoia and become a little less young.
http://cssdesign.s3.sitepoint.com/Art_Science_Of_CSS_Giveawa...
I think it is important to differentiate between knowing how to program and having a fundamental understanding about how technology works. Knowing how to program is hardly a necessity; if we have legislators, judges, and law enforcement who cannot comprehend technology on a basic level, that is a problem. It is not so much unethical as it is self destructive.
The money was "that" good
What's wrong with FLV? I don't know much about it but as far as I know it's a decent container format, especially now that it can wrap H.264 and AAC.
Well it looks like the labels have given up on attacking their customers (probably a good idea... /sigh) in favor of attacking suppliers. I think SourceForge would probably be at the bottom of my list of businesses I'd sue. If you sue them the FSF and any number of lawyers associated with open source code will be there to their aid.

So, as the article says why not internet browsers, email clients, etc.?

I am sure that is next... which court will allow it is the real question?
His guide is free... I've read it.

He explores all sorts of different ways of making money, some good, some not so good. He shares all this information on his blog.
I get a "403 forbidden"...
Many interesting quotes and thoughts on creativity in school versus life
"As I encounter graphic design in the ‘life-world’, both student and professional work, I have observed that I am drawn to work that resonates, that produces within me a sympathetic vibration, a bodily response. This resonance is not generated solely from a functional hierarchy of information, an eye-catching colour palette or careful typography. There is something more:
something that actively captures my attention, something that pulls me into ‘a certain mood, a certain receptiveness and willingness to experience, associate, transform, think’ (Hollein 1976, p. 13)"
Good point; startups owe it to themselves to avoid corporate fluff.
For those of us who dream about bringing a life changing product to the world, this article brings great hope in the form of understanding why most inventors need innovators.
Spelling is not fundamental in an age of spelling checkers. What do you mean by math? Being able to do basic arithmetic well is not all that important in the computer age.

Logic of course is important and it's something that would go well with programming skills.
You would never know what you are missing in today's society... It's kind of like not knowing the benefits of reading & writing. That's why it is unethical.
The current iTunes DRM for music has been broken. Google Requiem.
Just who are these mythical girls that are only interesting in such tripe, anyway? I've never met one...
This is the fun way to learn python.
We may end up 'finding' the magical secret of making money in any medium; make good stuff.

Are complete crap apps making tons of money? Probably not. I don't see the surprise in well-made or original apps being successful.

I guess the surprise may come from the fact that this amount of success is relatively unheard of in the mobile market. Shows that the iPhone is a new ballgame, or at least an old ballgame prettified and brought to the masses. Mobile sucked before, now someone's created something that doesn't, and there's not much to compare it to.
Yeah, they somehow managed to create a culture of militant literacy. Not bad.
"Eisner (1985) contends that schools tend to emphasize the development of a restricted conception of thinking: thinking that is mediated exclusively by words and numbers, although many of the most productive modes of thought are non-verbal and non-logical."

"As I encounter graphic design in the ‘life-world’, both student and professional work, I have observed that I am drawn to work that resonates, that produces within me a sympathetic vibration, a bodily response. This resonance is not generated solely from a functional hierarchy of information, an eye-catching colour palette or careful typography. There is something more:
something that actively captures my attention, something that pulls me into ‘a certain mood, a certain receptiveness and willingness to experience, associate, transform, think’ (Hollein 1976, p. 13)"

"...Descartes reasoned that ‘being able to
think constitutes our essence…that the mind is disembodied; and…therefore, that the essence of human beings…has nothing to do with our bodies’ (1999, p. 400). This view, the world-view of the West, forms the basis for our scientific thinking.
...Ironically, even as these authors present a scientific argument in support of an embodied experience, under the influence of Descartes, our popular culture and educational structures continue to dissociate reason from embodied perception and attenuate the emotional and
aesthetic life in our culture (Lakoff and Johnson 1999)."
Only a small percentage can fix cars, build bridges, prepare meat, cook fresh food, knit/crochet/sew cloths, etc...

so no, a programming minority is not the threat to our society that you might think
The Plan by Jack Handey
I'm an advertiser and I've spoken at length with Yahoo's display advertising department. Their costs are too high.

Search ads on Yahoo are great, however.
I don't know many either. My theory is that the interests of many were formed and set in cliques in high school, which I wasn't around to see. The few people I know now who are interested in such things also enjoy science and technology and art.

You know the phrase 'six degrees of separation?' I feel like it must be at least three or four. I have little to no contact with these people, even though they're all around me. I felt similarly when I went to a baseball game, once. Wow.
good point. perhaps we should allow people to design and engineer cars that know nothing of mechanics? or people to build space shuttles who know nothing of aeronautics? or people to build nuclear power plans without knowledge of nuclear physics?

i mean, all of that is just totally taken care of by computers nowadays, amirite?
http://kirsty.com (used to be called something else, I forget). They talked about that site when I took a tour of the Houston Technology Center.
You're totally right, and I appreciate the encouragement actually.

I'm really not the world's most phenomenal marketer or community organizer. It takes a lot of those two competencies to be successful in a social application endeavor. :/
I found this Time magazine cover from 2002 particularly interesting: http://bit.ly/17CJf

Apple and Jobs have changed a lot since then :-p.

For an even more extreme change, see: http://bit.ly/13h9T
The purpose of doing this would be to create a proof-of-concept, a piece of "hacktivism" if you will: showing that the analog hole is forever un-pluggable. In this case, "analog hole" would be a misnomer - a fully decrypted digital signal must exist in order to drive the LCD glass.
As long as you mean nodebox, not my code - I'd be embarrassed to present this code to a newbie.

If any impressionable proto-Pythonistas are reading this: don't format your code like this! I just did it to make it short for fun. Go read PEP 8 and be enlightened http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ .
Three Myths of Viral Growth
Man, CNN is sooo behind the news cycle. Steve announced this like a month ago. The private release of his Onyx platform is going into testing in a couple days.
Color me unimpressed. Encoding a buyer's name is fair game. You still have full control of the info you got.
Writing skills are still considered important even though most people will not be writing novels.

It's kind of like that here with computer programming skills.
I only type 65 WPM and use long variable names, yet I usually don't bother using autocompletion.

I feel thinking about possible word clashes and the resulting background process of continually estimating the optimal prefix so that I type enough letters to get the correct completion yet not too much to waste effort is slower and more distracting than just typing it out.

As I see it, autocompletion is just an aid for when you don't remember the exact name of something.
There is a python philosophy that says there should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do things.

You can do things in a million different ways, monkey patch everything under the sun but in the end, having just one way to do things makes code more reliable and readable.

If you don't like the way the framework is built, and its one preferred way of doing things, select a different framework or write your own. Trying to undermine the assumptions of an existing framework has a tendency to cause subtle hard to detect bugs. And trying to support all approaches tend to create stuff that is bloated, ugly and slow.
I never went to high school, so I never really grokked that kind of clique behavior. I mean, cliques can be good as they help us organize vast social networks, but I've been told they go way overboard in that environment.

Even though I have never been to a sports game (excepting a Harlem Globetrotters show, but that wasn't really a game), I kind of feel the same way walking around my hometown of Fairbanks. The population is small enough that I likely have no more than two or three degrees between myself and any random stranger. It's a very odd feeling, and one that I've never gotten used to.
Fair point. Let's assume that the only goal is to make the project go forward. All compensation and credit should be structured to further this goal.

I guess 100% is the best way to structure it. Possibly even with a disclaimer saying the founder would not create any company out of the source code - but could be hired by anyone who does. The founder's role would then, simply, be an evangelist for the project(s).

I think the last four people would participate in the hopes of entering the top six, but a more open plan would probably encourage more participation. I think the last four would participate with the goal of entering the top 6, just like the dozens of applicants for the winner-take-all Ansari X-Prize.
When Agile Projects Go Bad : Sins committed in the name of Agile
Google's 411 phone service was meant to get better voice recognition algorithms. I'm sure that's what they are using on the iPhone.
it's not the rationale that's important, it's the particular things that are incentivized that's important. I'd certainly argue that Python incentivizes a better set of practices than does Java, despite the fact that they each incentivize things.

Furthermore, language design by its very nature involves incentivizing some things and disincentivizing others. What this blog post is truly claiming, IMHO, is that Python did it willfully and well, whereas many other languages grew by accretion and without intentional thought as to what they were incentivizing.

So don't judge Python because it intentionally incentivizes some behaviors at the cost of others - every language does that - judge the things it incentivizes.
You're right that it's unencrypted, but I don't think it's well-documented. Every single panel manufacturer seems to have their own spec for carrying data to the LCD panel proper, and this is all proprietary and not-published. Short of someone reverse-engineering the data it's not quite SO easy to get your data.
Similarly - what happens if you play the same movie in a Virtual Machine?

Could you fire up the movie in a Windows VM on your Mac? Presumably it would play, and the output at the Mac end is unencrypted?
why? with grammar checking, computers make forming correct sentences obsolete, no?
Potentially, but grammar checkers aren't very good.

But yes, generally speaking, skills become devalued and not worth teaching much as computers help us with them.
Somehow I thought that Pascal is long time dead.

> Delphi 2009 - August 29, 2008 - Generics, Anonymous Methods, Ribbon Controls, UniCode VCL/RTL/String type, DataSnap 2009
Wow, is that by design? Why would you want such a side effect?
neither are spellcheckers or any programs that will do math/physics for you.

crutches won't help you walk if you never knew how to walk in the first place.
Agreed. There really is no debate here, as both parties need each other. However, I do agree with the distinction that Inventors are like "parents who enjoy 'making babies' but abandon their children once they begin to cry."

Great line!
Arguably, programming is as enriching a mental facility as reading and writing, and to be without this tool due to an educational oversight is tragic.

However, in a culture where lacking this skill is the norm (and many grew up without even a chance at it) you'll find this argument unpopular.
I'm guessing your problem is a miscalculation in target market.

People will be either

1: Very good at poker. In which case they can go through this mental, odds-calculating process in their head without the need for software. or

2: Not very good at poker. In which case your software is immensely confusing. They need to be able to put opponents on a range of hands (how does a novice guess what an opponent most likely has? half-likely has?) in less than 20 seconds (the time online poker software gives to each player per turn).

I play poker pretty often, and can tell you that odds calculation is never a fixed thing (so it's hard to replicate with software), and even considering my poker background, the screenshots of your program still confused me.
People Are From Earth, Machines Are From Outer Space
the most connected are "gh" and "start" ... that's very telling

thx
No yin for Jerry Yang
http://coolproducts.com/ has a bunch of different categories of gifts. You should be able to find a unique present for someone based on their interests...
Man I wish I had a nice Mac.
What tool did he use for watching the data?
Ask HN: Start-up idea - Pandora for U.S. neighborhoods
Thought I'd toss this one out there and see what people made of it.

I run a Chicago news magazine. When searching around for local stuff I've found many, many awful, adsense-filled, ugly, poorly-written "neighborhood guide" sites targeting people moving or new to an area. It's had me wondering if there's an elegant, scalable, truly useful way to get that sort of info across.

So what about a neighborhood suggestion engine? You build up a "genome" of US neighborhoods in major cities (i.e. included on Craigslist) and push suggestions out to a user based on what they're into. When they pick one, they get a clean layout that pulls from the real-estate sites, yelp, craigslist, flickr, youtube, everyblock, spotcrime and all the other local sites out there. You could scan these apis to serve up a "coolness" rating (social media activity relative to other neighborhoods) etc. On this point I've not yet figured out what you'd offer different from the real-estate search sites other than aggregating them all in one place.

So, Pandora for neighborhoods.

How would you build it? Monetize it? Market it?

Good idea? Lame idea?

Another way to pitch it would be as a hyperlocal media finder. Not sure if the content itself is compelling enough though.
Working on killer robots is the dream of about 90% of all engineers I'd say. Myself included of course.
I, for one, miss the social contract. But then I was a CompuServe sysop by 1990, and ran several types of online discussion groups (including ZDNet/AT&T's InterChange, which nobody else remembers). There was incredible value in the people who owned a stake in the forum's success (particularly anything vendor- or company-related) in choosing moderators who knew how to create a balance between being <a href="http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/6_stupid_mistakes_com...">both barkeep and bouncer</a>--not the least of which was a sincere welcome to the community.

Even when I haven't been involved in running an online community, I've always been a participant in several of them. And yes, some women need to feel "safe" before they will come out of lurkerMode. (Obviously I am not in that set, but I expect the woman who wrote the blog post to which I linked does count herself among them.) For instance, I'm a member of two women-in-IT tech groups (a general one and one specifically for web designers/developers, and believe me, you can't shut them up). The whole notion of women-in-IT and its reflection in online communities isn't going to go away just because some guys (and some women, too) say, "But really, you don't need a separate space."

(As you can probably tell, this is a topic very close to my heart.)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
So why isn't it unethical to not be a practicing medical doctor, dentist, physicist, mathematician, materials engineer, parent, charity donor, pilot, or an athlete.

If your job, hobby or passion is in set J of all possible jobs and vocations, it doesn't make it unethical to not be J-j, where j is your job.

And programming is nothing like reading and writing as you need reading and writing to be a functional adult. You absolutely can not survive and be affluent without reading & writing or know someone close to you who does. The same is not even remotely true for programming.

As a matter of fact, if something requires a layman (or customer) to program, it means that one of us who creates these programs and products, to put it bluntly, fucked up.
The Ron Paul fanatics make an exception for themselves.
The "digital service" comment takes me back to right after college when I took a job full of idiots using odd and just-plain-wrong terminology like that all the time. Made me feel really dumb until I learned they were all full of shit. Ha.
Agreed. Readability trumps creative styling.
Excellent post, and excellent blog! I've added you to my RSS shortlist.

Out of curiosity: is there a system that you use to set up those citations? Or do you hand-code them each time?
That wouldn't help unless they approached things differently this time around.

What do you suggest they should do for their hypothetical second shot?
does anyone have something from the BDFL on this?