skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're absolutely right, it's way more likely here, and that's probably what's going on. Whether there's credible evidence or not as to a Google OS wasn't my point -- it's that the _idea_ of Google doing that wouldn't strike you as crazy, and that just brings up the question "what could they do with it?"

Linus did a very, very good job for the single isolated box. A kernel that had very deep ties to a greater infrastructure, a true internet computer, though, would have a huge value proposition for a lot of users, especially in business. I guess this thread could have been better titled, "Challenge HN: Extend the Linux kernel to do low level process splitting and handle a remote file system natively, to have the computer run partially on a distributed infrastructure as needed." I'd be amazed if Google aren't the ones to do this. If they aren't, though, we'll be welcoming some new names to the computing billionaires' club in the next few years.
Date more than one girl.
I've been working on a startup for a number of months now. If I could go back in time and give myself one piece of advice at the very beginning, this would be it:

Always date more than one girl at the same time.

This is symbolic of course, and couched in terms applicable to a heterosexual male. But what I'm saying is always have multiple paths to success. Always have more than one meeting lined up with a potential client or potential investor, and pursue them in parallel. (Edit: To clarify, this is business advice, not technical advice.)

This is way better than if you pursue each one serially, and here are the two main reasons why:

- You cling to any one option less, appearing
less desperate, and therefore more desirable.

- You always have something to hope for, supplying
optimism and motivation.

Also, some smaller benefits:

- You drastically increase your rate of learning.

- You can leverage work and preparation between
opportunities.

The trick, though, is that you need to line up good, viable paths to success. You have to believe in them, otherwise the magic doesn't work.
in Russian http://spring.jumpidea.com/2008/12/paul-graham-artistship.ht...
Its only the end of VC if you think that VCs only invest in Internet start-ups. Its great that its become vastly cheaper to create a new Internet product.

There are many other industries that can make use of VC; green tech, for example. VC isn't dying, its just going to focus on different industry segments.
but these are all superficial next to the damage done by all the absolutely atrocious Perl code out there.

The writer argues that Perl's being damaged by bad code examples, but if that were the case, PHP would be the least popular language in the world, no?

Perl's troubles are not just because of bad code examples, because the language is poorly constructed (in terms of v5, v6 is a lot better), or because its marketing is poor/non-existent.. but because of all of these things and many other issues beside (especially the difficulty of deployment). These issues are enough to make one jump ship after years of non-resolution.

(I was a nearly full-time Perl developer from 1996-2005 - haven't touched it at all in the last few years since I jumped ship to Ruby, so it's not as if I'm hating on the language without having once loved it ;-))
I'm not worried... for every home owner who bought an overpriced home, is another home owner who sold them that home.
It is not clear to me whether you should date lots of girls, or just know lots of girls who you could date if your current relationship falls apart.

I think I agree when it comes to clients and investors, but in terms of major technical (or business-plan type) components, once you have multiple avenues you'll need more resources, more planning, and it seems like you'll inevitably lose focus.

Date lots of women but only marry one?
The analogy you're making reminds me of the quote, "VCs are like women: they only want you if others do."

You're absolutely correct that, before a deal is sealed (signed term sheet, or relationship) in either arena, it makes sense not only to keep open as many options as possible, but also to seek out more open options. Your "game" will failbox if you only have one prospect, because this person has an incredible amount of power over you. Of course, eventually, you have to take the plunge and commit to one.

However, the analogy between women and funding is pretty weak. The most obvious difference is that sources of funding are pretty much interchangeable, and it's utterly necessary to get some sort of funding, so it makes sense to jump on the first reasonable offer. Women, on the other hand, are decidedly not interchangeable, while there's no need to be in a relationship, so it makes sense to be picky and hold out for an exceptionally good match.
It is not clear to me whether you should date lots of girls, or just know lots of girls who you could date if your current relationship falls apart.

I'm pretty sure his use of the word "date" means "going on dates with", not "be in a relationship with". Having 2+ girlfriends is a bad idea, especially if you're starting a company.
I've always done what you outline. It works great for me, and I like having many fingers in many pies, but I'm pretty convinced it only works because of my personality.

Would Google, Microsoft or Apple be where they are now if the founders had decided to work on several things at once? All reasonably single minded people involved there who threw their all into their respective companies.

I'm never going to found a 8 or 9 figure revenue company because I don't want to be that focused or that single minded. Fine for me, but the people who do want that option are probably best off not dating more than one girl, right?
Yeah, this advice definitely applies more to the business side than the tech side. Business is people, and people are unpredictable and driven by emotion.

On the tech side, you want to stay lean and mean.
I felt a bit of a connection to this post. Over the past several years I've seen things and thought of ideas that I've written off as not viable or outright crazy (or at least against the current trend), only to see people do them themselves a year or two on.

I know I'm not the only one. But, perhaps, for some of us it takes enough of these events to occur before we start to feel confident about our ideas - while those who naturally have confidence by the bottle are out there, "pre-stealing" our ideas and having a lot of success with them.

Lesson for me from all of this? Be bold, "just do it", be really fast, and actually listen to your gut instead of writing it off as nuts.
http://jaxn.org

I have been blogging since 2001, but it has not been the most consistent endeavor. The topical focus has shifted several times and the frequency of posts ebbs and flows. But I enjoy it.
"sources of funding are pretty much interchangeable"

I'd agree to a point... thefunded.com exists for a reason. :)
Management consulting firm
However, as would be the case with dating more than one girl, don't spread yourself too thin. If you start dating 10 people, and try to keep up a working relationship with all of them, you might find it hard to ever get any relationship to last very long. Feel free to pick up more than one, but make sure you give ample attention to each.
Insanely Great: What if Steve Jobs ran one of the Big Three auto companies?
Online local Monetization Challenges and Solutions
Nothing will be done

Not true.

Phthalates are banned in children's toys in the US starting on February 10, 2009. The ban needs to be broadened, as many of the effects happen in utero.

http://www.cpsc.gov/ABOUT/Cpsia/cpsia.html
An insult it may be, but it is definitely not an ad hominem fallacy. Please be a little less liberal with that overused term.
The Brilliance Of Creative Chaos
VC is working its way to irrelevance, due to the "no man's land" around $150-500k of initial funding. This is, uncomfortably, the order of magnitude which can give a serious start to a promising idea: 2-4 peoples' salaries, plus operating expenses, for 12-18 months.

Investors seem to either want to put up small amounts (~$20k) that equate to mere weeks of living expenses, or make multimillion dollar investments, forcing a company both to give up an unreasonable share of its equity and to grow more rapidly than most tech companies are ready for (just try adding 6 new programmers to a 2-person project). By having a blind spot inconveniently placed right at the amount that most startups need, investors are pricing themselves out of relevance.

Given this undesirable arrangement, the reason startups exist at all is that most tech people usually have some savings after being employees for a few years, and during good economies, it's so ridiculously easy for a talented programmer to get a decently well-paying job that no one's worried about risking some savings by working for equity and deferred pay-- e.g. quite possibly for free-- on a cool idea. If the economy continues to sour and the ease of finding a good job is no longer the case, startups will have a much tougher time finding people to work pre-funding, and if investors aren't willing to meet startups on their needs, there will be fewer of them.

One major trend (and a positive one, in my mind) that I'm going to call in the startup world is that many, many more startups in the 2010s will be starting in smart, low-COL locations such as Minneapolis, Madison, and Portland.
Wearing 'almost homeless' sign, ex-executive seeks work
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Since it was not in response to an initial argument, you are formally correct. However, a more common, less rarefied definition of ad hominem is "appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason." In this sense, any insult based on personal taste with no logical basis is an ad hominem attack, which by definition is a fallacious rhetorical device. In either case, I am not open to prescription.
True, and just as bad women can fuck up your life, bad investors can ruin your company. I guess the difference relevant to my point is that between the average and the exceptional. It makes sense to take funding from a source of average reputation and prestige, if the terms are good, rather than holding out for Sequoia. In dating, the "average" match isn't very good, and it makes a lot of sense to hold out for the mind-blowing awesome woman.
(from History of the World, Part I)

Bea Arthur: Occupation?

Mel Brooks: Stand-up philosopher.

Bea Arthur: What?

Mel Brooks: Stand-up philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension.

Bea Arthur: Oh, a bullshit artist!

Mel Brooks: Grumble...

Bea Arthur: Did you bullshit last week?

Mel Brooks: No.

Bea Arthur: Did you try to bullshit last week?

Mel Brooks: Yes!
The DIY saliva test that tells if you're catching a cold
Be Patient For TextMate 2
"Be the Change" is not a cliche' its how societies succeed. Again, identify a problem in your locality and ask your friends, colleagues, neighbors if they are interested in forming a group (officially with bylaws etc.,) and make representations as a group, which insulates you from getting targeted as an individual.
Higher than IT, but not higher than MIS or Computer Science. "IT" can mean a lot of things - much of the pure IT sector covers everything from being someone who plugs in the cables through to authorizing multi-million dollar purchases of equipment - not necessarily development or engineering.
I appreciate the advice guys. Thanks.
I'm not sure why Twitter doesn't start with creating a seperate API password like FriendFeed does. This would allow all the existing services to continue operating (user just has to change their password on the services to the API password) and would allow the user to generate a new API password when they wanted those services to stop.

OAuth is definitely a good thing to get to, but they aren't going to be able to turn off the access they are giving right now overnight when their OAuth implementation is done.
The title was subtle karma whoring (http://paulgraham.com/gh.html)
I've been meaning to learn Python for a while, and this seems like a good chance to jump in. Are there any books out on Python 3.0 yet?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388758
I understand the wisdom of this advice, but I can never bring myself to do it. Feels like betrayal. I guess I'm just too traditional for my own good.
I disagree with this blog article, and your response is dead on.
There's also http://macrabbit.com/espresso/ with is quite expandable and already starting to build a small community. It's at early beginning but it looks interesting.
No surprise. In the US, smart people tend to major in academic subjects rather than "get-a-job" majors, which the best colleges don't even offer (although economics at top colleges can perform that function de facto, much to the chagrin of professors and serious students within the field).
all of this kvetching is pointless. if you use and like perl, the statistic you really care about is the activity of CPAN, which continues to thrive. if you like perl and are productive with it, why stop? because some moron on hacker news says perl is "noisy"? if you stop using a tool you like because of a blog post....get used to changing tools often, because "...is dying" is popular with bloggers.
php became popular because it is easy to install and requires almost no configuration post-install. for ISPs it was a no-brainer compared to the relatively complex mod_perl install
If you do date two women at the same time, give each a present: a small bottle of the SAME perfume.

(Just passing on some advice from a smart guy I worked with)
> I like having many fingers in many pies,

I wouldn't point this out on here, but given the context of the article it's too hard to resist.
Just a gentle reminder - an article in the Daily mail is just about sure to be a complete fabrication and bear no positive relationship to fact.
I'm not sure this is really true, when PHP started to gain popularity most hosts had a default cgi-bin with perl ready to go.

The popularity of PHP has much more to do with ease of use for users then admins.
It also doesn't help that the semantics of Perl leads to some difficult to read code even if it is well written.
Sharing the Browser
Same advice applies to girls...
...unless it's inherited
Philosophy is a degree that is often taken by people going into Law. So my guess is that a lot of the Philosophy income is from lawyers.

International Relations (noted in the article) also sounds like a degree that would be popular for pre-law.

My guess.
Personally I believe in focus...you succeed by doing that one thing really really well. If you spread yourself in 10 different directions, you'll have ten different mediocre paths to mediocrity. Why? Because while you split your time between 10 different options, 10 different people will be spending 100% of their time, on each option.

Better to focus 110% on one thing...fail quickly(if its destined for failure), and go do something else.

as far as actual dating is concerned...who has the time really? If you were in a relationship before you started working on your startup, sure you might still keep it up(provided the woman is extremely understanding). But if you are just starting the whole process and are also focused on your startup...when do you even have the time to date?
Every businessman with an idea for an invention requires ten* engineers to slave away on the implementation while he takes most of the profits

*Number made up, but one should always remember that it's not only scientists and engineers that are coming up with ways to make our lives better and create wealth
Honestly, I'm so happy with TextMate v1 already that I don't really care how long TextMate v2.0 takes to get out.
The CIO Shell Game
I would be more convinced about potential fabrication with reference to the content of the article itself.
Game Trees and the Minimax Algorithm
I just received a collection of Vonnegut books, so I've been reading them. From the prologue to Jailbird:

John Figler is a law-abiding high-school student. He says in his letter that he has read almost everything of mine and is now prepared to state the single idea that lies at the core of my life's word so far. The words are his: "Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail"

This seems true to me--and complete. So I am now in the abashed condition, five days after my fifty-sixth birthday, of realizing that I needn't have bothered to write several books. A seven-word telegram would have done the job.

Seriously.
In case anyone is wondering, you can quit the game and continue from where you left.
Expresso looks great!

However, it's more web development oriented, just like Coda.
More than just his last book.
Google fires back at analyst claim it's a bandwidth hog
Street Smarts: Whose Business is It, Anyway?
> threw the global warming thing

This is the infuriating thing about the whole global warming crock. You have any of eight critical and completely uncontroversial environmental problems to focus on, but instead the powers that be have sucked all attention and money towards the red herring of anthropogenic global warming.
Is there any reason to believe that the founders of Microsoft, Google, etc did not have other side projects ? And that if one of those projects had succeeded, they would never mention the others, because pretty much everything writen by or about them is various forms of corporate propaganda ?

If anyone would know the answer to that, it would probably be Stephen Levy, I respect his books on the history of the tech industry a lot.
I've always done this too, to good effect, but I think there's an important distinction that the writer didn't point out. When you're playing the field and gathering options, date many girls. But once you've found a good one, settle down and focus on it, er...her. ;-)

When I'm hunting for a job, I try to always have at least 2, preferably 3 possibilities (when I've tried 4, though, I dropped all the balls and didn't get hired by any of them). But once I'm hired - or once I've got a promising startup idea - I drop the others and concentrate on the job to do. Otherwise, I can't get any work done. Multitasking is incredibly inefficient.

When I broke this rule (first 9 months of my startup's existence), it turned out badly. I somehow managed to avoid getting fired and seem to have gotten a decent recommendation, but I had to throw away all the startup code I'd written part-time (it sucked) and my job was a lot more stressful and less successful than it otherwise would've been.

To extend the dating analogy - a couple of my friends have tried the whole poly thing, having serious relationships in triples. It always ends in tears and/or broken friendships. It's just not possible to devote that much attention to multiple startups...er, girls.
They did have other side-projects - Bill Gates and Paul Allen did the course scheduling for their high school, and they had a consulting contract for software to control traffic lights, and they each took part-time jobs at Altair before Microsoft took off. However, except for the Altair/Microsoft split (where they were working on very closely-related projects), they worked on them sequentially, finishing one before they did the next.
The real Silicon Santa is Ron Conway.
The only nuisance is keeping medical records straight. There's no central database to drop this information into, and subsequent health-care providers need to know exactly what you've had done in the past (regarding vaccinations). These would be good problems to solve.
My guess would be that either:

1) They had side projects outside of the company that we never hear about because they ended up being orders of magnitude less than their respective companies

or

2) They had "side projects", but everything they did was under the umbrella of the company. Things like the Google Appliance; Microsoft's many lines of products besides the big ones(it was years before DOS/Windows came out) etc.
I'm a visual learner, and I think in terms of images, even when programming. I am also decent at drawing/painting.

The concept of "empathy" makes me think of mirror neurons and makes me imagine nervous systems of human bodies.
it does? really? are there any? (mind-blowing awesome women)
Rich Array jQuery plugin
I know the difference, it was just a minor mistake. Lot of nits here today.
And lots of houses.

I'm guessing some lucky entrepreneur will come up with a good use for all those empty houses, once they've all been foreclosed upon and prices have adjusted to reality.

I had an idea last year that I'd act upon if I had a spare $50M or so lying around: mixed-use coworking/residential spaces for young professionals. The increasing mobility of the professional class means that more and more people aren't tied down to a central office. Why not create intentional communities out of abandoned subdivisions, where young professionals could live and work with other young people? I'd pay a premium for being able to roll out of bed and walk to work, yet I don't like the brick & concrete of dense city neighborhoods. Park a couple ZipCars in the development, and you solve their transportation/shopping needs as well.
It's often said that the countries that score better than the United States in internationally standardized achievement tests are only testing a high-ability sample of their population, while the United States is testing a representative sample. But this is baloney. One example of a webpage about this issue is

http://www.wgquirk.com/timss.html

More generally, I know the assertion is wrong because I can read the languages of other countries and I have lived overseas and I have observed their school systems and how the common people of other countries live in daily life. Several of the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia have a much higher level of numeracy, such that algebra is a standard curriculum subject for all students in seventh grade, including the below-average students, and such that people from those countries think it is bizarre that American store clerks count out change from a purchase for their customers, as if the customers can't calculate their own correct change mentally. Simply put, the policy analysts and journalists who say the United States is behind other countries and thus behind where it should be (given the very large expenditure on K-12 education in the United States) are correct.

A good point made by a previous reply here is that sci-tech skill sets are relevant in more than just sci-tech jobs. It would indeed be good if more lawyers, physicians, business managers with business degrees, and technicians and industrial workers without college degrees had strong knowledge of math and science. That is what makes manufacturing successful in many developing, low-wage countries: the workers on the factory floor and their foremen have a basic level of technical skill that allows efficient manufacturing that can produce products with a finished cost (including shipping to distant markets) and level of quality that is competitive in international markets.
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Just slowly walk in to their large office, look around with wide eyes, and scream "I need some shoes!"
Checkout stocktwits.com . I use the application regularly and have nothing but good things about the app.