skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done.

That's where you lost me. Sure, there are companies who add checks without thinking of the consequences, but as a company goes from a startup that is not making money to a more mature company that is making money, the cost of breaking things becomes very, very high. That is why most post-startup companies add more checks, to protect their revenue stream. And any company making decent money has a revenue stream that far outweighs the amount of money that the programmers would be willing to pay to have a faster release cycle. And the risk of the company losing their revenue stream for any significant amount of time far outweighs the risk in losing decent programmers because they aren't happy with the length of the release cycle.

You seem to say that these particular programmers would never have broken anything, but I find that impossible to believe unless they are working on something that is not at all complex or is inconsequential to the revenue stream. Every programmer, even the best programmer in the world writes code with bugs in it. The more complex a system is, the more likely there are to be bugs in it and as a company grows and makes money, the more complex their systems will become.

As an example, let's say that you were responsible for a web application that brought in a million dollars of revenue a day and you had these supposedly perfect programmers that never made mistakes who were responsible for the code. Would you let them just throw out whatever code they wanted onto the servers because you trusted them to not make mistakes? Or would you be more reasonable and put some checks in place first to make sure that the application worked correctly?

Obviously there needs to be a sane balance between the risk of breaking the application and the opportunity cost of not updating the application and the frustration of slowing down development is one of the costs that should be weighed, but to say that there shouldn't be any checks added as a company matures is almost laughable.
This was a good post: a lot of Susskind's analysis and predictions are applicable to other knowledge workers who charge by the hour as well. Legal advice is much more about balancing different business risks than right and wrong: you need to integrate legal considerations into the overall set of risks your startup faces.
He's not the first person to make this point in the last couple of months, but it bears repeating in case anyone's missing the point.

I think some of the points are poorly timed though:

The market is flooded with good people.

I don't think it is. All of the truly good people I know are still gainfully employed or doing well with their own gigs. The economy hasn't hit that hard yet to force good people (and I don't mean "good people" in a virtuous way but a virtuosic way) back into hunting for a job.

Ditto for all the "cheap stuff" the article mentions. Sure, there are some deals to be had now, but try in six months - it'll be nuts!

What really makes the current time good for startups is not the economy, but the fear surrounding the economy. Google's clawing back the 20% time - a serious source of R&D for them - and many companies are reducing their research, halting the release of new products, etc. Work on that fear. Develop and research while other people aren't.. and you'll be in a really strong position by late 2009 or 2010.
Silver Lining or Silver Fleecing - Falling Oil Prices Frighten OPEC - Associated Content
I had the same thought. I'm torn on that.
Awesome. There's also a 2008 Ruby Advent Calendar at http://advent2008.hackruby.com/
The author claims this quote has something to do with 20% time, but the quote says nothing about 20% time.
Or Nodebox :) http://nodebox.net/
Adobe to lay off 600 workers
Indeed... handingover.com seems like a good fit:

http://expired-domain.bemmu.com/d/handingover.com
How about NEW domain names as opposed to expiring ones? See http://hotNameList.com
Ridiculously short summary: Different markets respond to different techniques.

This is as true in taking a restaurant from NYC to the boonies as it is in shifting (or porting) a Web app from B2C to B2B.

Part of getting a business advantage is to realize this and to take advantage of your competitors who don't realize it ;-)
I would probably read this in the opposite direction. All of the points you mark in favor of twitter are similarly true for facebook (they have more competition, but are pulling away in most important demographics.) The difference is that facebook can create a twitter competitor themselves and with their chat system have already shown that they know how to handle messaging, while twitter is nowhere close to getting into facebook's turf. The dangerous point about waiting for someone to sweeten an offer is that they probably have some internal "how much would it cost us to do this ourselves and just crush them" numbers to look at as well.
This worked for us (Dropbox) too. Google's another example of this progression, though they also partnered with companies that already had big mainstream audiences.

Also, make it easy for existing users to invite new ones. Better still, design your product to be viral/users bring in other users as a natural consequence of using the product (e.g. PayPal, etc.) This sounds obvious but often isn't done well.
Carbon credits, a projected trillion dollar market
But what if you could somehow reach inside the video and swap the offending photo for a snapshot of your current love? How perfect would that be?

NO NO NO! Enacting revisionism on your life is a dangerous game. We're all products of our history - changing history is to fail to learn from and appreciate our mistakes.

It's the equivalent of going through a photo album and cutting out the heads of people you don't like. It's an activity fueled by bitterness and emotion rather than practicality - and one that's often regretted later on.

The technology is cool but this particular implementation is a sad reflection of society - a bit like the advances in face recognition, really.
Defensive programming? You still don't have any guarantees that your code is in fact free of side effects. There isn't a way to easily test for it either. So, even if you don't use any libraries and write all your code in this style, you could have bugs that will be very hard to track down. Functional languages ensure, by design, that this doesn't happen.
Brilliant article. This quote is going to be posted somewhere I can see it, daily.

"You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do."

I can't count the number of times I have read a tid-bit or passage in a book on a topic for insight and later, realized that when I actually follow the advice given, layers and layers deeper is the real meat. This is the meat I would have missed had I not done the actual act rather than simply read a tip.

The times I got better by leaps and bounds were when I practiced, and showed my result to someone better than me who took the time to critique.
On the other hand, you can get hilarious mixed messages like this set of headlines on the front page right now: http://i35.tinypic.com/1z3cv1h.jpg

CNET: They're selling out? Business week: No one wants them any more? Apple 2.0: It's definitely one or the other!
Ouch, that's a pretty big cut :-( The biggest in tech since KLA Tencor in mid November (okay, only a few weeks, but with the pace of change at the moment, still a big deal).

Adobe are also not going to exhibit at the next MacWorld - some real cost cutting going down.. http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/03/adobe-not-exhibiting-at-...
Customized GI Joe Action Figures: 3D scanners put your face on Destro's body
This is good so far, but it is really irking me that the interviewer keeps sticking in words edge-wise. "uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh", constantly interrupting Taleb.

edit: The more i watch, the more this interviewer is annoying me. It's like he's trying to divert the conversation to irrelevance and annoy Taleb.
It's not that hard to check for. Simply do a regexp search on your code for "variable =", where "variable" is one of the instance variables in the class, and ensure that all occurrences are in the constructor. Also need to avoid calling mutating methods of built-in classes - this is easy with Strings and Dates, but you need to be very careful to make copies of all your collections. I could write a simple script or Eclipse plugin that does it all for me.

This, again, assumes you can trust your libraries. A single method that doesn't follow this convention will pollute anything that calls it.

I've done things like this, in Python and to a lesser extent in Java. It works. It is pretty easy to slip up - I've had some bugs introduced because I forgot to copy a list - but it's at least a tractable problem. Gets easier if you use things like list comprehensions and slicing, which copy by default. Though Java's lack of support for closures can make this difficult.
For those without hands, there's Air Guitar Hero
What tip would be useful before you started using Photoshop?
Software 'can identify' unknown unknowns
Even with Twitter one has to wonder what will happen if
it doesn’t come up with a real business plan other than
being bought up.

Nah, we don't have to worry about Twitter.

Twitter is not your usual startup. Like very few startups, it's gained gigantic amounts of cultural exposure. Pownce, JotSpot and DodgeBall were barely known by the general Internet populace. Twitter's appearing in comics, TV references, news articles.. all over the shop.

I play around with Twitter but I don’t plan on making it
a real part of my daily computing and communication life.
I use FriendFeed but I don’t expect it to really go
anywhere. I insulate myself with this attitude because I
am fed up with seeing all the effort and time people are
putting into these so-called businesses only to see
nothing of any value coming back.

With such a cynical attitude, why use anything? Nothing is permanent! Enjoy the now. Refusing to make Twitter a part of your "daily communication life" is like refusing to buy a new PC because a better one will be out in a year's time. There will always be obsolescence - use what's in the now and get ready to change.
Jeff Clavier actually put on his blog that digg was built for $200. Since then I file pretty well everything he says as "not credible."
units isn't a shell function; it's a program that's a standard part of Unix. You can install GNU Units on Linux.

It even lets you define your own units in units.dat. Pretty cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_(Unix)
Of course memories are stored in dna -- the successes, failures, stops, starts etc of evolutionary history. I wish NS would kill these linkbait-style titles and stick to disseminating information...but I suppose they have bills like the rest of us...
Pollution is bad. Pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad. But.. won't there be incredibly crazy costs in enforcing these limits? There seems to be a lot of trust in companies "measuring" their CO2 outputs, but that's going to need a lot of enforcement and regulation.

It's not like finance and taxation where the money has to go somewhere and can usually be traced. Once you've thrown a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere, you can't tell who put it there - so regulating the initial output would be necessary, to great taxpayer cost.

I expect a lot of scams and corruption to occur around carbon credits. If it's going to be a "trillion dollar market", you can bet some real nasty pieces of work will want an unfair cut of it.. and when you can't track pollution with any accuracy (yet) will the costs of enforcement be worth it?
The new media landscape (top 50 online media groups by traffic)
Tips or resources that might inspire me to use it. I know there have been some impressive tutorials that have encouraged people to get more into using Photoshop by their effect. I enjoyed a lot of them myself in the late 90s.
Site's already down. The site has "The Ship was hit. We're offline." in <blink> tags.
One of Steve Yegge's old rants includes the suggestion that some of his favourite systems are those that have both extensible-while-running and doesn't-crash - one being emacs.

Uptimes of up to a year aren't totally wrong - having to shut down and close everything to manually work around some memory leaks and gradual flakiness or to guard against crashes isn't a great or desirable feature, even if it is extremely common.
Pretty sure he was lampooning that point.
Guy got robbed
Terrific Tables With CSS
It seems perfectly reasonable for me to have emacs open for a year. Why do you say it was wrong?
Why are you posting this when I can't even sign up to try it out? It looks good, but "We will send you an email when the beta program starts." = FAIL.
The Big Brother state – by stealth
Musings on oil markets and increasing tanker transit speeds
Considering the DJIA is down 24% on the last four months, this drop sounds about right - assuming they keep some of it in property, bonds, or whatever.

It sucks for them, but a 22% drop in a large fund over the last four months isn't exactly news :-( (which is sad in itself)
Goal: beat twitter. Outcome: fail.

You can change the goal post-outcome, but it doesn't change what really happened.
I would definitely take it, and make sure that you do very well giving your relatively low GPA. You'll also want to do very well on the normal GRE too, since most schools look at that first and fore-most. The subject test is almost never required except for in the very elite schools, but a good score definitely will increase your chances anywhere.
Why Wall Street Always Blows It, by Henry Blodget
+ the holiday season is there for gift giving...most people won't gift a music album on a blank cd
Yaw, $399 for a logo is insane. I'd have made it another of those things that you skimp on to brag about.
PG should also read The Third Wave by Alvin Toeffler. This sounds very much like his thinking.
"To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them."

A startup can have a goal besides becoming a big company or being acquired by one. If the company meets that goal, it is successful.
Agreed. Languages like OCaml are actually higher-order imperative languages. They have a very rich, expressive system of "values". A value can be a function value, partially un-curried, and closed over arbitrary data. They can also be data values but can be arbitrarily complex. How many languages let you say:

let tree = Node (Node (Leaf 3) (Leaf 4)) (Node (Leaf 7) (Leaf 8))

This value is constant, just like an integer or string constant in many languages. In other words, the right-hand side can be arbitrarily complex. And this data structure gets passed around in a very lightweight manner (by reference, not by copying).

The Java notion that values are either primitive, or objects... is limiting.
Loopt Has Become a hook-up Application
"Have you run tcpdump or strace?"

If you're curious about where to start debugging, this blog post gives a good rundown:

http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2008/12/sysadmin-advent-day-1....
"..there were already a handful of countries past that stage when the Industrial Revolution happened. There do not seem to be that many ready this time."

Speculation: This factor may be the difference between life and death for the trend towards high-res. There's today a good chance the US will weaken economically, energy will get catastrophically more expensive, a city somewhere will experience a suitcase nuke.

'should', not 'will'.
By intelligently, you mean by letting the text vanish instead of putting in a horizontal scrollbar? While this is my preferred behavior, I don't think I'd necessarily call it intelligent.
Python 3.0 Released
Add a yahoo link count for each domain name so you know how many links are already pointing to the domain name.
I guess it depends on your operating system, but there are few where it'd be good operational policy to not have key system updates at least a few times a year. They do exist, of course..
another nice example of a patent troll...
I was implicitly referring to routine kernel updates (desirable on most OS - though not all), or other key software updates (especially on OS X or Windows) - rather than forced restarts for stability reasons.
It happens. Remember Cuil?
Forced to eat marshmallows == Suffering from overhead imposed by the management little at a time. It looks like no big deal when viewed individually... but quickly becomes nauseating in aggregate.

Also you can feel the helplessness that management creates perhaps inadvertently in the engineering team.
http://spaces.live.com provides a Microsoft-branded and run blogging service.
As much as you might not be keen on the guy, he proves that good implementation is more important than revolutionary ideas. Neither Truemors or Alltop are really ground breaking in what they're trying to do, but their implementations are pretty good.
righto, but, i mean, we can tell you good chairs, or you can look them up in past threads. good chars for people without spinal injuries/issues. i don't think anyone's going to have much experience with chairs for people with those problems. best bet is to likely ask the person what they think.
Why the capital on "Hookup"? I only read the piece because I thought it was an acquisition or "Hookup" was a new framework Loopt had switched to :)
This almost makes me revise my deadpool opinion of Loopt. One of Zawinski's Laws was, "The secret to a successful social app: get people laid." They might have a slightly larger market if it was het, but they're well on their way...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=384897
I considered writing a counter-point to this on my blog, which is about actually starting a business on a shoestring. ($60 budget, ho!) However, I realized that I have users, revenues, and profits and thus my business bears about as much resemblance to Truemors as it does to fried jellyfish on a stick.
Yeah it's old but I never did figure out how his geostatisticians knew how to see if the email went further than 500 miles...I mean, that'd mean they know to measure where the mail servers are rather than the actual user, right? oh well.
So by JWZ's maxim they are really poised to succeed.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
How difficult were the regulatory issues around your software? I've been lead to believe that the FDA is quite difficult to work with on this type of software.

Furthermore, wouldn't legal liability be quite high?
yeah the directory listing is still available on yahoo cache - http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=%22kpcb.sql%2...

Inappropriate or could be funny file names over there. No wonder this guy did a blunder in letting the KBCP file go public.
His posts are, however, often insightful and usually feature a fresh observation.

While these rarely give you step 1 - do this, step 2 - do that type advice, enough insights, when compiled together, can help you come up with ideas and inspire insights of your own.
And I was fairly certain I
hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.

That would be a great feature to have as part of a "new admin initialization" program or something :D
Australian Android phone specs announced
I think you should worry more about inflation since Uncle Sam is printing new greenbacks like there's no tomorrow
yeah that's why I've been converting any Perl apps I've been assigned to Python hehe
You could be right, but I don't think you can completely separate your CPU, Motherboard, and RAM. If they are each 50$ and one fails then replacing a 50$ component will rescue two 50$ components which is a net gain if it cost's less than 100$ in manpower to do the swap. Without temperature control the failure rate will increase some. I guess they could work on a 3 month cycle and move the container to a nearby repair location. Thinking about it there is probably some interesting trade offs depending on the local labor supply etc. But giving up the ability to repair PC's is a significant cost.

In the US 400,000 square feet of warehouse is around $19/square foot and you could avoid weatherproof all those containers and electric cables. You could also use larger more efficient fan's to move all that hot air. And you could use the space for other reasons if you don't want to use that land just for a data center. Unlike this custom building which is going to be hard to use for other things.

Why would you get increased failure rate without the roof? Bugs, animals, and weather, combined with a defective container. Then again if they only need to last 3 years the failure rate is probably going to be low.

PS: I think of a rack as 100k+ worth of equipment that lasts for 3 years that has a vary small footprint and uses a lot of energy. But, when you start building data centers like MS or Google I guess the buildings start becoming expensive on their own.
> Have a tool that limits the results by the number of characters in the domain

Currently achievable by editing the Regexp search, though admittedly not user-friendly:

^[^.]{4,8}[.](com)$

(Minimum 4, maximum 8 characters)
software dev - $4500, legal fees - $4824.

Even on a shoestring budget, the lawyers get half.
In this podcast [1], Steve explains that this was a story of an Evil Manager who "slipped into" Google, and took a long time to be discovered. He suggests that he was fired after the story (although he doesn't say it outright).

In this interview, Steve also points out a point along the lines of the ancestor poster's - that Google encourages employees who are ambitious enough to start "startups within Google".

1. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/podcast-25/
Whatever you do, learn to respond quickly and when you can't proactively notify your clients and offer a referral to someone good but less busy than you are. Just this thing alone will put you head and shoulders above most other lawyers out there.
Which, given the current conditions, means "they didn't offer any cash."
yep. that's better.
... and Plenty of Fish is a Hookup site. This can't be bad.
> routine kernel updates

ksplice
FaceBook too, and HotOrNot. This seems to be a universally encouraging development...
Apple removes Mac antivirus warning
But, if you're using one of those systems, the best security practice is to not be on a network, and everyone follows best practices, right? :)
Facebook has a couple of hundred million in revenue, as I recall. They're just using it to finance growth. They could be profitable tomorrow just by laying off half the people there.
Ask YC: Good People or Projects to Follow on Github
I've been noticing a bunch of interesting repos on Github lately, and not just of the RoR variety.

I'm sure that a HN thread could turn up a bunch of great projects to follow.

I'll start:

Processing: http://github.com/jeresig/processing-js/

Python Plotting Library: http://github.com/astraw/matplotlib/tree/master

Python Physics Tutorial: http://github.com/llimllib/bitofphysics/tree/master

WYSIWYG Javascript: http://github.com/37signals/wysihat/tree
I think you need one more piece:

Mature industry = chance for disruptive change = developing industry
I'm not really impressed with this standard
Best explanation of the financial crisis
Thanks for the memories HM: Extensive textbook example of anterograde amnesia passes away
Yep, but they don't write down all of that debt they first charge insane late fee's and interest for a few months and then sell that highly inflated debt to a collection agency or package up that debt before it defaults and sell that to wall street.
Auditorium Backstory
Very interesting. Just submitted that to HN as a separate link. A very new technology though.

If you fancy leaving a comment with any insight you have: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385225