skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quick point, he's looking for a co-founder rather than an employee - which means that if (Gabor really means it) you'll have both the freedom and burden of choosing the right tool for the job.

Freedom as in you'll be able to make your case for it; burden as in the right tool for the job may not be tool you've liked using or have the experience using (in this case joining, as an employee, a company that uses the stack you'd like to work with may be a better idea).

Example: a big enterprise co may force you to use Java to parse text files (because they're by decision a Java shop) even if Java isn't the framework you like for this test. On the other hand, as a co-founder doing a mobile app you may have no choice but to use Java. If you're very determined to only work with certain tools or avoid certain tools altogether (or would like more experience with specific tools) you'd be better being an employee at a company which makes use of these tools (or doing a project of your own with those tools).

Of course I've also seen posts that say "I am looking for a co-founder with Python/Rails/MySQL/Oracle/etc... experience" - which seem to be more of "I want the first employee". Founders should be the ones making the decision which stack to use (and using a heuristic other than familiarity or personal like/dislike) - not following a decision that's already been made.
I doubt anyone will do jail time for this, if even any laws were broken. And if Porsche settles for the maximum 1 million Euro fine, that's not even 1/1000th of the profits they made on the backs of the shorts. It's not like their aspiration to takeover VW was any kind of a secret in either the auto or finance worlds.

Frankly, I have no sympathy for market speculators who got reamed here by shorting VW. I do have some sympathy for people who were short the DAX index as a broad-based hedging strategy and got trapped by the leap in the DAX. Then again, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is a true today as it was 75 years ago.
Good Things Come to Those Who Waited for the Android
Gapminder
We shall correct this aberration post haste!
I'd say that they were clever, but a similar short squeeze attempt on the United Copper Company in 1907 set off a panic that might have destroyed the US banking system if JP Morgan hadn't stepped in to prop it up. Playing games like that in a time like this isn't what I'd call 'responsible'.
Apple fanboys vs. Microsofties: A scientist's verdict
"I only use Facebook for playing a couple games anyway."

May I ask which? I've been involved with some of the bigger games on Facebook, so I'm curious to know what's got you hooked.
> Quite simply a patent can be invalidated by someone simply inventing it themselves, which turns something from 'original' to 'obvious' and thus non-patentable.

Just because an invention is re-invented, or invented independently more or less at the same time, does not mean it is unpatentable, obvious, or that an already granted patent is invalid. At most it is evidence of obviousness.
Okay I just tested it - to open Word and no document it takes 4 seconds. To open a 5 page document from being closed it takes also about 4 seconds.
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2008...

From this article:

Prasher said he has suffered from health problems and depression, some of which stems from being out of science for so long
Consistency: how to defeat the purpose of IEEE floating point
I wonder how to get one, though. I searched on Twitter but apparently nobody in my vicinity has a copy. The closest reference I have seen was on one of Guy Kawasaki's photographs of the Google Lab in Munich. Perhaps I really should try to contact them.
This was three years ago: http://kirubakaran.blogspot.com/2005/12/interesting-evening.... I still feel stupid for calling 911 (that I acted like some granny). You are right on about the stigma.
As far as I can tell, the problem with OLEDs at the moment isn't how thin you can make them, but how long they last; they seem to degrade pretty quickly.
This is exactly what I did when I met my co-founders. I actually flew out to London (from Portland) to work with them for a week. We worked on some random projects and did one all nighter. I think its a great way of quickly testing whether someone is a fit or not.

Actually, some of my friends do this at their company for potential employees as well. After deciding they probably want to hire a candidate, they fly them out (if they are not local), pay them consulting fees to work for a week, and if it works out then they hire them.
Morris Worm Turning 20
Facebook's business model: cross their fingers and hope very, very hard that someone decides to acquire them before the cash runs out.
Blog spam? Why not just link straight through to http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20081029/160349...

It has better technical details there too.
When people ask me why I'm not on Facebook, I usually tell them that Facebook is like a really high-maintenance girlfriend without the upsides. Twitter is the only "social network" (if you can quite call it that) I'm prepared to use, mostly because it's so loose and informal. I hope it stays that way. I hope the "Hot Political Topics" bar isn't a sign of future feature creep that plagues other sites. (I'm not even in the US, why can't I turn the damn thing off?)

As for whether I'd pay for Twitter: yes, if all the people who use it now continued to use it. Unfortunately, charging for it would almost certainly cause a lot of them to leave, reducing its value - which would lead to a vicious cycle. I think this is the main problem with monetising social networks that aren't targeted directly at who are prepared to pay from the outset.

Freemium is probably the way to go. The trick is finding a sufficient set of value-adding features, ideally introduced immediately as a premium option. Nobody likes to pay for something that used to be free. Of course, if it was easy, they'd already be doing it.
Then you'd eventually start burning up too much cash, would have to start charging, someone else would clone your facebook clone, and the cycle would start afresh. This is the social network predicament.
If it was the 5% of my Facebook network that I actually care about, this would make FaceBook more valuable to me.

(Okay, a bit more than 5%. Maybe 10-20%.)
and 10,000+ servers!
Thanks, Gabor. I think the email field is huge and it baffles me how many people can't see it. But when they eventually see a better way of dealing with it, they'll be blown away.

I have a whole UI prototype on the shelf that I can't implement currently due to my life circumstances (living in Germany instead of the US/valley, and other projects I have committed to).

I would bet money on that we have very similar visions for what problems to solve. Anyway, best of luck, I might join the email party in 6-9 months depending on how my other projects go.

I'm glad to see someone who "gets it" (based on your papers and posts so far) take on email.

Cheers. Ben.
My 8-year-old daughter was also fascinated, while my 12-year-old son was horrified.

I'm not afraid of spiders, but that looks like the biggest spider I've ever seen. I'm a little disturbed by the size.
I love posts like these. SmugMug is a great story to follow, along with 37 signals (though i can disagree), and others. Warren Buffet's quote from the other day still sticks with me:
"Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful."
Good point, I didn't really think about that. Perhaps somebody could build a new kind of datastore that takes advantage of that?
The 10 best free apps on Google Android
Guaranteed Profits in Stock Market Options
Too bad rule34.com is taken; it would make a good name for a startup.
US court throws out most software patents
> If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground.

This sounds neat, but is it true? Executing actions really does drive away fear, moreover it seems to be the only effective way to overcome fear. If you tried it, you know. :-) Quitting smoking or stopping manipulative behavior cold turkey really does work, while the gradual approach doesn't work and is self-deceptive. I have decisively and successfully driven away certain qualities, and other people agree when asked that I no longer have them.
Plenty did. This is one of those articles that pretends hedge funds are one big unit, but, in reality, you can find hedge funds on every side of every trade. I would be surprised if no hedge funds made money from this.
Great point. This is the case, and a major reason why I'm not listing specific technologies. Cofounder, not employee.

A superstar cofounder + myself should together have the technical judgement to choose the right stack to work with.
Why didn't you get a refurb 2.6Ghz MBP with a matte screen instead?
Yahoo already tried.
There didn't seem to be a whole lot of point, except that the author digs H. P. Lovecraft and, possibly, thinks Ubuntu's bug #1 will eventually be fixed.

But since Ubuntu went to the trouble of releasing a new version the day before Halloween...
If you had a good training set of a million or so actually used passwords, you could use some machine learning techniques to make this go faster when coupled with the insights you use from natural language processing. Tragically, I doubt people would contribute their old passwords to a data set just to prove this.
Managing Health Online..
Sounds like a good business opportunity.
CMS interface design and evolution
I used to think this too. but it turns out that maturity transformation (one of the financial worlds main businesses) actually is pretty complex.
"Hedge funds quickly did the maths, concluding that they could be caught in an “infinite squeeze” in which they were forced to buy shares at any price."

I don't get it. How can you force someone to buy a share at any price? If it's possible why don't more people do this?
I work with the guys who developed this new CMS, which truly has to be seen to be believed. It contains some great features coupled with a very lickable interface.

Here is a video recorded at our last user conference 2 weeks ago which goes through many features that I believe raises the bar for CMS design and development: http://www.vimeo.com/2040803
What's the difference between a hedge-fund manager and a pigeon?

Only the pigeon can put down a deposit on a Porsche 911.
Followup: looks like the Countach is http://www.google.com/patents?id=y9EpAAAAEBAJ -- patent number D324007, granted Feb 18, 1992 to Chrysler for a period of 14 years.
bullet points 8 and 10 are contradictory.
if you don't try to please others you invariably come off as kind of an asshole.
I guess since I live in Baltimore I could probably weigh in on WiMax. They've just recently started pushing it (so I wouldn't say it's flopped yet), but I definitely have some friends who live in the city considering it.

That being said, I won't switch away from Comcast because no one else offers decent speeds.
Seems all he was lacking was a great original idea.

I dunno. Maybe he wasn't lacking it? Maybe he had one and it wasn't what he wanted? Maybe what he wanted was a Lamborghini?
No one has ever given me a good answer on this. Why can't we just make screen readers that render Javascript? At least execute any javascript that runs on page load, and then read that modified DOM.

You could probably just hack the Firefox code to do it, no big project necessary.
I'm kind of impressed with [the stuff it's made](http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/ItemsMade).

Anyone know why it takes it hours to make things though? 12 hours for a door handle?
hmmm.... interesting, but still as soon as you need something untraditional that CouchDB doesn't provide, you are out of luck. There is a good reason why app layer is used almost universally.

Another way to simplify people's life would be using something like Oracle's Berkeley DB. Small app layer, with embeded database that can be called with simple api calls, makes more sense. No SQL, no separate database to maintain, yet it is a very powerful persistence layer. It would be just as easy to distribute, plus you can do your own custom coding, and fancy stuff that CouchDB would not be able to provide.
Reddit hires community manager
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335127
In fact rediscovery can be indicative of utility of the patent, which is a requirement too.
50 katrillion dollar company and no one brought a video camera? It's just a "curled display" if you take a still picture. "flapping" requires motion.
i like the javascript rich text editor idea.

you could also go with a basic regex removal of everything that isn't 'useful'. just strip out all tags except a/i/b/u and strip out all 'style="*"'.

since its drupal and all, its in php, so this is perhaps in order: http://us2.php.net/strip-tags
Otto the octopus wreaks havoc
"... The Morris worm was written by Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris, who was later convicted of computer fraud for the incident. Today, Morris is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT. Launched around 6 p.m. on Nov. 2, 1988, the Morris worm disabled approximately 10% of all Internet-connected systems, which were estimated at more than 60,000 machines ..."

That's a hard to beat hack.

"... Nonetheless, the attack was covered widely by mainstream publications such as The New York Times ..."

I remember not far back an old NYT article someone here posted referring to the incident, "Student Testifies His Error Jammed Computer Network" : http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4D91639F... I did a quick search again and found a few others

- Computer Stunt Helped Security, Witness Says: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEEDF1131F...

- From Hacker to Symbol: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D8173BF...

Reading through these articles with the quaint descriptions of legal authority you sense the outrage and hysteria of a single user disrupting 6000 computers seemingly at will.

Significantly, the Morris case may represent a
turning point in how society views its computer
wizards. Until the early 1980's, those who broke
into computer systems were widely admired, at
least if movies and novels are any indication,
for their combination of daring and technical
skill. Markoff, NYT, From Hacker to Symbol,
January 24, 1990.

Reading the John Markoff article, 'From Hacker to Symbol', writing at the time of sentencing, I found one legacy that I didn't previously know of - the point in time where term "hacker" became demonised in the press. Another detail was a reference to a book, "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner. Has anyone read this book and care to give an abstract?
By shorting the stock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_selling

Basically, the hedge funds thought the stock would go down, so they "borrowed" or "rented" the stock from someone else and immediately sold it. The idea is by the time they have to return the stock the price will have fell.

Ie, if the stock is currently worth $100, and they borrow 1 share and immediately sell it, they have $100 and owe 1 share. Later, on the date they have to return 1 share, they go and buy 1 share and give it back. If the share price then is $80 they made $20 on the transaction. If the stock went up to $120 then they lost $20.

So, they shorted the stock, because they thought it would go down, but then the amount of stock available to be bought plunged right as they had to return the stock. So, there was a huge demand for the stock right as the supply was drying up. As such, the price went very high, but they were forced to buy it anyways to due to the previous agreement (that they had to give the stock back).
1988 TV News Report on the Morris Worm
Not my bug, but my favorite story is the Mars Pathfinder bug caused by priority inversion:

http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Mars_Pathfinder/Mars_Path...
Microsoft faces uncertain financial future as it looks to the cloud
Yeah, but if I did it, I would sell for a billion dollars. :)
The article's punch line:

The bad news is that an outside investor must have some brokerage company execute the mixed strategy on an "all or none" basis. Unfortunately, this has proven to be virtually impossible. However, it is an example of the action in derivatives that many brokerage companies use.

Although different, this reminds me of the "guaranteed to win" casino strategy where you keep doubling your bets. This fails for two reasons:

* Losing streaks can be very long and requires that you have access to a large sum of money since the bets are growing exponentially.

* House limits prevents you from doubling indefinitely
Below 1mm I think this is all pretty masturbatory. You never hear anything about durability, tear/crease resistance or other packaging concerns.

It doesn't much matter (to me, anyway) if it's 0.0000001 mm thick if it has to be attached to another hard surface (window, wall) in order to not be damaged by simple handling.
thanks GeZe. That made a lot of sense. I am usually extremely confused while reading financial news, I can't make sense of the jargon.
Exactly. If instead of just copying a DVD, you hired actors, cameras, lighting and props and made a short-by-shot remake of your favourite movie, and then promised not to make any further copies of it, you'd be analogous to this guy.

Or, I'm reminded of that guy in that Borges story who spends his whole life trying to rewrite Don Quixote from scratch.
This sort of thing is irritatingly common when it comes to major scientific prizes (the most infamous example being that of Rosalind Franklin, whose research was probably stolen by Watson and Crick).

Frustrating as that kind of oversight may be, I think it's a far greater problem that a talented scientist is driving a shuttle bus to avoid unemployment.

We clearly have a shortage of scientists in America -- let's train more!
They used to be profitable, but they've killed off their profit centers (sponsored company pages, ala Apple's old group) in trying to score a home-run business model. Facebook can revert to the old model if need be, but they won't be getting that 15b valuation again.
Thanks a bunch for your excellent suggestions. I'll look into them.
Well, that's interesting. Looking further into it, the Countach had been built since 1974, but they never applied for this US design patent until Lamborghini was bought by Chrysler in 1989. By 1992, when it was actually granted, the Countach had already been discontinued.

Wait... looking at the pictures again, I'm pretty sure that's actually the Lamborghini Diablo -- that would make more sense with respect to the timing, since it was made from 1990 to 2001.
A car is not an original work of authorship. A picture of the car is...

Why not? A car is a sculpture which just happens to be banged out of sheet metal instead of carved out of marble.

Admittedly it's hard to think of a Toyota as a sculpture, but a Lamborghini is definitely one. And a damn lot better looking than most of the sculptures you'll see in galleries.
I'm going to stop reading Hacker News! Too many links to rambling posts with no payoff!
Hey, Porsche figured out how the US Government has allowed the banks to drain our 401ks during the last year!
"It was more important to me to hand over the tool to other scientists with the funding than to have individual glory," Prasher told London's Daily Mail.

Wow. Honest to goodness nobility. Don't see that every day.

Perhaps he's driving a bus not because he's not worthy of us, but because we're not worthy of him.
Asustek: $200 Eee PC coming in 2009
Google Short Links
Yes, yes and porn is art, but really everyone knows the difference.
"Google Short Links allows users to easily create descriptive shortcuts to web URLs"

I remember some time back I wondered to myself here why google had't created this kind of service. The reasons for inclusion are obvious. Google is already the most popular search engine and has significant infrastructure. Curious why this one isn't free to use.
Are you still seeing blank screens? That shouldn't be happening at all.

Higher levels unlock more items. You can see that on the Office page, but maybe we should make that more noticeable. We'll have more things too once we integrate some future features.

At the very end, much like Mob Wars, you'll have various virtual items and such. We'll probably mix in achievements and trophies and the like you can win. I should think more about that stuff.

Interesting thought about the friends, I'll try to think of that. Might be a really good idea if we can come up with a good implementation.

Tournaments are in the plans.

We've got some other unique forms of training coming up. I'll think about that though.

Thanks for all the great ideas.
The make-your-own-universe kit
The short-circuit had baffled electricians as well as staff at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who decided to take shifts sleeping on the floor to find out what caused the mysterious blackouts.

Electricians who had never heard of cameras. No wonder the octopus is in charge.
even 37s products embrace free/no-money strategy to some extent

she can charge $ because the products have business use

next, the challenge for 37s is to make a pay-for-use 'wasting-time' sites ... with NO free trial

impossible?
I'll trade you some of my stock certificates for some of your green pieces of....
Heck, I have over 100 "friends" and I don't do anything on Facebook except approve friend requests.
You mean like:

http://firevox.clcworld.net/

And there's this very exciting new development:

http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/wa.php

Just for completeness, I'll add this link:

http://www.nvda-project.org/

Really, though, the problem is one of established vendors with a lock on the market and, consequently, little motivation to improve their products. Sound familiar? At first pass, this would seem like prime breeding ground for startups, but there are serious barriers to entry.

The biggest obstacle for new products is just that visually impaired users are taught to use JAWS from the get-go: they have the educational market. Yes, they hate it, but when you can't see it's very hard to comparison shop. All screen readers have a big learning curve.

Then, if someone could find your product, evaluate it, and like it, well... most people in the target market are not self-sufficient, and would not actually be able to pay for it. (You would have to market to the charities and grant foundations that purchase the products for most users.)

Oh, and did I mention that it's not easy to write a screen reader in the first place?

As much as I would love to see a startup come into the arena here and change the rules, I think instead we just have to hope for the success of these various open-source projects, and be glad that there are people who take this problem very seriously and are working on it.

Until then, designers and programmers will have to cater to the various quirks of the market leaders. This article is one of the best guidelines for that I've seen.
also make sure to get a life, meanwhile...
I think the most important thing it is cost, and how cheap they are.

what if they were cheap enough to produce to be replacable.

If you can just stick on a display like a wall paper, in any surface, and if it was cheap, people wouldn't mind replacing them every 10,000 hrs. of usage. (If you watch 10 hrs a day, that's almost 3 years).
I really had high hopes for this article, but I think this ended up being Fortune's version of Linkbait/Title Bait

It's really a list of 9 tech products that people thought would be blockbusters, but perhaps haven't. I would hardly equate the Air with the Zune though. I think this list was set up to stir up controversy.

It almost feels like feeding the trolls, so Micah, while I respect your submitting the article, I cannot in good conscience mod it up =P
>> That would cast all what I have historically labeled as "cynicism" toward my employer away.

This is actually a letter to non-employee shareholders... making this much more cooler.