skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He wasn't arguing that you could turn a Buick (cheap car) into a Cadillac (expensive car). He was arguing that if they can't entirely dispose of a brand, they could turn a Buick (car labeled a Buick) into a Cadillac (car labeled a Cadillac) with a simple label change.

A Cadillac is a car that has been labeled a Cadillac by the legal owner of the Cadillac trademark. Maybe "a car" is extraneous, too, though I suspect dealership contracts would have something to say about being turned into a Cadillac Pencil dealership. But still, I would imagine GM has a lot of discretion about what gets called a "Cadillac". (Maybe not, but that would be awfully far-sighted of the dealers to get a clause defining what a Cadillac is in their contracts and I would salute them for their legal prowess if they do have such clauses.)

Also, I have now typed "Cadillac" so many times it is no longer a word to me.
Sure he's a smart guy no doubt, but how stupid would it sound if the CEO of Toyota said the same thing? What if the Secretary of Defense had a plan to modernize our railroads? Or if Steve Jobs had a revolutionary plan to save the airline industry?

I'm merely sounding a cautionary note here. Are we listening to Schmidt b/c he's the best man to listen to, or because he works for a very popular company? If he has "the Chief of Staff's ear on this," should we be concerned or happy? If he is to serve some un-official advisory role to the government shouldn't he be advising about software, hardware and networks? To be sure he has experience w/ energy issues in running google but this hardly makes him the point man for overhauling our energy infrastructure.
So you want a big electric car?
Apple don't use DRM because they're anti-freedom.

You misunderstand me. I don't think that's why Apple use DRM. Clearly, Apple use DRM becasue they think they will make more profits if they do than if they don't.

Apple's end-goal is to increase profits. Their means-goal is DRM. Reducing my freedom is, from Apple's point of view, reducing my freedom is merely a side-effect, and not one they're particularly bothered about either way.

Similarly, a burglar steals my stuff not because he wants to prevent me from having it, but because he wants himself to have it; preventing me from having it is merely a side effect.

(I suspect the misunderstanding comes from my poor phrasing; instead of saying "The whole point of DRM to remove people's freedom" I should have said "DRM intrinsically invovles removing people's freedom".)

But they're perfectly entitled to try to stop people from doing these things.

It's true that the law allows Apple to make legal threats against those to wish to use their iPod or iPhone in creative ways. It's a bad law.
Reposting from a previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363509

Amazing. I have always wondered why micro-financed model isn't the solution for all the financial worries of startups and the VC play.

This is the "change" that would make a lot of things easier, ensure startups keep up their momentum and not waste in VC fund raising process. More you have angels who are truly angels backing founders. (I understand this can hurt lest rational thinking is lost)

Micro financing at angel level (be it 5 friends/colleagues or more) is great. Someone needs to institutionalize this or have some learnings on how to deal with accountability, resolving dispute and the like.

For people in India, Israel, Ukraine and the rest of east Europe the startup costs are quite low. $100K is like close to upper end angel funding.

I know of at least 6-7 ex-Trilogy startups in India - brilliant guys, doing it right, when it comes to funds Indian VCs are most risk averse they wouldn't invest in anything other than jobs, matrimony, real estate and travel. I have always wondered why would it really bother for couple of ex-Trilogy in US to invest. For 2 guys to put something like $50K it would be hardly anything.
Good point. The sort of people who use tarsnap are the sort of people who are likely to know what picodollars are. :-)
Under the Securities & Exchange Act of 1934, a private company must start disclosing financial results publicly once it has more than 500 stockholders and $10 million in assets.

That one.
Hyundai watch phone Mobilephone News
Few things-

First of, there is a way: if you're confident that a start-up you like will succeed, you can invest in it by joining at a sub-market salary and taking a high equity stake. This way you're investing ( $market_rate - $negotiated_rate ) * 4.

Yet this approach has issues: you can't join multiple start-ups at the same time and of course you're taking a long term and substantial risk. Yet it also provides a filter of "investors": if you can get hired in start-up run by competent people, presumably you're able to judge the likelyhood of a start-up's success.

If we take substantial public investments in start-ups, we'd have people with no domain knowledge and in no financial shape making investments in start-ups that generate the most (or the most targeted) PR. This is very much what happened during the housing bubble (people with no knowledge of real estate buying "investment properties" using borrowed money at prices they couldn't afford to pay).

Bottom line is that investment in a start-up is risky. There are tons of faux-entrepreneurs who'd abuse this method as a chance to flip a quick buck (take an initial investment, float more and more PR about the company and sell their stock for a profit to investors who took are hoping for a quick profit).

There is another issue everyone is talking about: public markets are effectively closed for <$500mm companies. M&A is slowing, especially at prices between $100mm and $1bn -- the types of companies that are too big for Flickr-style exit and too small for an IPO.

Running a profitable mid-size company may be great for the founders (take bonuses/receive dividends after hiring a professional to run the company while you either step-away or step-down to a CTO/VP of Engineering), but what about the employees? The employees in this situation are not likely to see anything for the equity, other than through secondary private equity markets (which are not common in cases other than Facebook and are limited).

This leave employees screwed: either wait for the "next Google", work at a public company (where the equity may be worth something, but the quantity of it isn't substantial and you have little ability to affect the worth of your equity), be employee 1-5/founder of a small "built-to-flip" company (limits you to, essentially, consumer web-start ups) or work for a salary/bonuses.

Here's an idea I'd suggest: allow limited sales of early equity by employees to non-accredited investors who believe that the company will achieve phenomenal growth later on making their equity worth something.
8. New transport-layer protocols will work across the
Internet. -- IP was designed to support new transport
protocols underneath it, but increasingly this isn't
true, Thaler says. Most NATs and firewalls only allow
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram
Protocol (UDP) for transporting packets. Newer Web-based
applications only operate over Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP).

Huh? This is a terrible example, since HTTP is on top of TCP. Also, isn't IP usually represented/considered as "the bottom" with TCP, HTTP, Comet, etc (to name a few) layered ON TOP of it?
Changes I would make:

- put the free plan at the right of the table in the same format as the others.

- possibly introduce a new column at the left of the table naming the feature and then either a tick or a cross to say whether it applies to that plan

- I didn't understand what the features "send directly to ProDPI", "Domain mapping", and "email tools" mean; these should be expained.
How do you guys think they find testers? It's specific to demographic and such, so i think it's beyond mechanical turk?
Eerie music Flash thing
Back in the 90s it seemed like you'd see these kind of art things all the time. This one reminded me I miss that stuff.

There should be a name for these things.
MultiView
Watching (Less) Television
The outer limits of the human brain
Ask YC: What would you tell your younger self?
If you could tell your younger self one thing what would it be?

I was curious what the YC crowd would say to this.

Personally, I'd tell myself to live for the moment. Don't worry about the future too much, as long as you have a good head on your shoulders things will work out. Before you know it years have flown by and you'll wonder where they went.

So, what would you tell yourself?
keep your day job while developing your innovations and funding
The Technical Founder
The financial crisis is more than half over, but the follow-on economic crisis in the real world is only about 1/10 of the way through, I'd guess.
I didn't downvote, I didn't upvote, I didn't vote sideways, and I didn't vote for the down-up-vote, etc. because I just don't care. You're thinking: what a jerk! Well, I care as much about this poor soul as I do about any of the other thousands of people who died today. I am a compassionate person, but I have some gripes, so please hear me out.

I live in the UK, and for the past several weeks we've had to suffer the media being obsessed with itself over [this](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7741322.stm) and [this](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7740926.stm). They've each consumed 4 or 5 days of consecutive news headlines at the top of the bill. Politicians even get themselves involved - no doubt to disassociate themselves from having to answer real questions about their calamatous mistakes! It's a real circus, with destructive consequences, and this too is a circus, albeit a smaller one.

Yesterday I clicked on a link regarding this whole saga; it was worded with (fake) outrage over the Justin.tv CEO's notable lack of compassion from the press release. Personally I always find that press releases are great vehicles to show compassion! Anyway, right there in the middle of the screen was a very prominent screencaptured image of that boy's dead corpse. Uh, yeah, thanks for that er suicide porn. Very appropriate. Very well considered decision.

There is apparently good reason why established media don't go in to the details and gratuitous imagery of suicide that it reports - studies show that it can inspire further tragedies to take place, perhaps by indulging the fantasies of those among us who may be contemplating taking our own lives. With journalism, professional or amateur, online or offline, comes a great responsibility granted to it by a free society that shouldn't be taken lightly.

I fail to understand why tdavis felt the need to post a "public apology" over this. I can just imagine him standing in front of a press pack, his humiliated wife by his side, trying to worm his way out of some scandal to salvage a career. It never seems credible to me when people retract something they've said - why didn't you just say that you acknowledge that you have a dark and twisted sense of humour and that you won't apologise for it?

I thought HN was supposed to be a community of tech oriented entrepeneurs collecting relevent content, but judging by the cumulative editorial process that I've witnessed lately it seems to be descending into becoming nothing more than just another category of foxnews.com.

Now, you can release the hounds and I'll just stand here.
Although its clear I'm not going to change your mind, I would only point out that the law you're talking about exists to allow companies to enforce other longstanding laws, specifically copyright.

Just because you would like to be allowed to copy any media off any device doesn't mean that should be possible. Your interests are not the only ones to consider. Under the law, content producers have rights too, and it's reasonable to expect them to try to protect those rights. Anyone certainly has the capacity to (attempt to) rob a bank, but that doesn't mean adding a safe is taking away their freedom.

Now, ultimately, I think DRM is both a waste of effort and bad business, but it's disingenuous to call it a moral issue; it isn't. It's a legitimate disagreement between competing interests.
Two guys on a couch may not be the ideal use for this technology.
Taking NASA's Digital Secrets
its not that expensive compared to other planes. + people always want to be the first to have the latest gadget
Don't worry about trying to impress people. Just work hard on things you like.

Don't get into debt.
I like Monopoly article better than this one on Poker, but probably b/c I like Monopoly and can relate to it better.

Keep the clever analogies coming, they are helpful to me.
Ask YC: Blog parsing (WordPress,Typepad,Blogger)
I'm trying to develop a crawler that knows when the page being sent to it is the actually a Post page, and not the index,search,tag,calendar(November 2008) page.

I want these pages ->http://1vibe.net/music/jim-jones-ft-lil-wayne-noe-twista-jackin-swagga-from-us/

Not this ->http://1vibe.net/category/behind-the-scenes/
Not this ->http://1vibe.net/2008/11/
Not this ->http://1vibe.net/tag/50-cent/

From the blog post page I want to grab the title and date of that post

The way I trying to do it was to look through the DOM of the site and look for consistency.
I found consistency in Blogger and Typepad but WordPress was all over the place in the formating from site to site.

So I figure I must have been doing it wrong and that there is the xml,rdf,feeds a.k.a, the intelligent way of doing it.

I appreicate it if anyone could help ( also I'm doing it in php).
Is Generation Y Too Hooked On 'Tronics?
I'd tell myself to save more, compound interest is full of win.
Guido van Rossum on Scala
take more risks. don't worry about failing.
Not to turn this into a religious/philosophical argument, but I've yet to hear a good definition for the soul that's congruous with the symptoms of brain damage. I'd appreciate any insights you have, though.
Cheer up. The people who say that your teenage years are the best in your life are the same folks that are beating you up, and life goes downhill fast for them after graduation.
Speak up more, and stop being such a slacker.
You don't need to be a qualified investor to invest in the general economy. Banks, mutual funds, and a dozen other easily accessible instruments willingly do that for you.

As for reduced taxes, I would argue that it seems like the ideal way to combat a global credit crunch. The government has the lowest cost of capital and the lowest default rate (at least the US govt. does). Thus it would be more efficient to leave the extra capital with private citizens and use deficit spending. Of course it would even more efficient to just not have the federal govt. spend as much but then its not like hell is about to freeze over anytime soon.
Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
I worry about News.YC being a time sink, so here's a crazy idea: what if it were turned off a few hours a day? Time zones are obviously a problem, but we can tell when most users are active from the logs, so if we went black for a few hours during that time we'd help the most people.

It seems worth at least trying. Just a few hours would be enough to break most people's cycle of procrastination. And if anything it might improve the feeling of community, because users would tend to all show up together at opening time.
Try closing the site for a couple hours in the middle of the day (US time).
Status quo.
I agree. Slashdot is not an adequate substitute for people who know what they are talking about.
I'm not against gay marriage, but after pattern-matching the particular story of your friend I don't see why he needs to marry. It's like getting a government-sponsored car that you don't want to drive.

Is it for the tax breaks? Think of it like this: they're a way to lure the provider into marriage. If you don't buy the traditional view of marriage, you'll have a hard time justifying tax breaks. I don't believe you can build a logical line of argument from romantic love to tax breaks :-)
Ask YC: Giving Clients a Premade Template
I feel pretty strongly about this: it's wrong.

However I just nabbed a client who wants a two day turn around on a pretty detailed site (blog, forum, mailing list). Sure it's possible to make something in two days, but it's not going to be functional, of quality and worth producing.

Matt here in the office kind of jokingly said "just give them a template". At first we kind of made jokes about it but this is the only way it's going to get done. Without going over budget, producing a site and configuring it for their business just wont happen in two days.

How do you feel about giving clients premade work?
I would say rather to your current self to live and work in such a way that the person you were a year ago would be proud to shake the hand of the person you are today. And every year both in the effort that you put and the integrity that you keep, your year ago self would would still shake your hand.

A personal note a little over a year ago I didn't know MySQL,Javascript, or PHP. I taught all three to myself and have become quite good or at least competent to develop whatever I can think of.
The problem with historically high returns is the usual past performance no is no guarantee blah, blah, blah...

And when VCs get flush with cash they just seem to fund dumb stuff on a grander scale: http://web.archive.org/web/20000510152036/http://www.pixelon... Too random a process to predict or control.
That Gibbs would come back, but to not get my hopes up too much for the Redskins.
Some day you will have the unique opportunity to talk to yourself from the future, don't blow it like I just did.
I like this idea. Maybe not permanently, but it would be worth trying if only because no one has ever done it before and I'm curious to see what would happen.

Also, does anyone have any interest in a news.yc book club of sorts, maybe a book of the month type thing? I'm guessing everyone else will read the new Gladwell book eventually so it would be fun to discuss.
don't waste your college years. That was 4 years of not needing to worry about food or paying rent that could have been used to launch and grow a startup to profitability.
If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently.

As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.
I hesitated to give an example precisely because I didn't want to get into that topic, but it was just too vague without it, and trying to find something innocuous was just too hard.
If my math is right:

(68sec * 1024) / 60 / 60 / 4
--- (68 sec for 1TB) (1024 to make 1TB) /60/60 (hours) and /4 as there are 4x as many computers....

So ideally taking the 1TB sort to 1PB on 4x the hardware would be 4.83hrs.

Google's 1PB sort was in 6 hours - So that's fairly linear. Impressive.
I'm 21 and plan on moving from Australia to the Valley next year to start on my passionate life journey. So this advice is really interesting to me!

Especially specific advice regarding working in this general field in the Valley or California would be fantastic.

Thanks!
I love this part
--
gearing up for acquisitions, especially of Internet startups that have plunged in value. "Six to 12 months ago, many of these companies were priced to perfection," says James Breyer, a managing partner of venture firm Accel Partners who also is a Facebook director and investor.
--

Priced to perfection? Obviously not. But then, the guy is obviously trying to keep whatever share his firm has in facebook's worth up.
Drupal devs deploy "premade", open-source code and templates all the time. Indeed, your client sounds like a typical member of Drupal's target market.
I like the idea (and voted as such), but doesn't that duplicate what noprocrast does?

Though, it would be an interesting experiment to do for awhile; I'd like to see if your thought about improving the community by taking it away for a bit each day would have any noticeable effect.

Also, among the sites to procrastinate on, I imagine that HN is one of the better ones - There's mostly intelligent conversations and submissions on here (as opposed to "Guide to Smoking Pot Around the World" on Digg, "Has to be the most disgusting crime ever... WTF!" on Reddit, or something similar on $insertOtherSocial"News"Site)
Learn more math.
"Think things through carefully, but once you're finished thinking, don't second-guess yourself. You're smart enough that once you've thought things through, you're almost certain to have reached the right conclusions, so just go ahead and act on your plans instead of wasting time worrying about them."
When Everyone Can Mine Your Data
> I like the idea (and voted as such), but doesn't that duplicate what noprocrast does?

It's a bit different - people come back as there is always something going on. noprocrast just excludes you.

If the site is blacked-out there is no reason to visit.
My Couch or yours? Shareable Apps are the future
I'm a fan of this old post (probably linked from Hacker News, actually, but I can't really remember)...

http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2007/07/the-limitations...

...that asks exactly how much better the experience will be for a particular customer if all this research results in a recommendation engine that's really 10% better than Cinematch. Undoubtedly the marketing value (to Netflix) of the challenge is incredible, and I don't question the reasonableness of their desire to eke satisfaction out of every potentially satisfied customer; but surely there's somewhere else in their business they could more easily improve their margin and their customers' experience.

I, personally, use Netflix a bunch, and love the service. Furthermore, I love the fact that they sponsored this contest and provided a large research database to support it. I guess I'm just always a bit disappointed by breathless mainstream press coverage that doesn't discuss these other meta-contest questions. That and I wish I could somehow get Netflix to send me season 4 of Lost before season 5 starts.
Given a choice between an engineering school with a great reputation or a school with a female to male ratio close to 70%, choose the second.
do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

Maybe there are other means to limit it - for example, only let users submit a max of (say) 2 links a day.

Not sure limiting comments would have a desirable effect - But you could limit the number of story/comment votes users get a day.

Might make people more frugal with their time - but still keep a high standard of contribution.
Free Online Bargain Shopping
What about an option to disallow override on noprocrast?

I find it a very useful feature, but sometimes I click override when I know I should probably be working.

A way to effectively ban myself by removing the override option (by choice) would be effective for those of us worried about YC being a time-sink.

You could log out of your account if it was that important, but it seems like putting another barrier in-place as an annoyance will accomplish the desired effect.

I often find noprocrast does exactly what it's supposed to do and reminds me that I should be working.