skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line." false, warren buffett's wealth is on the line. from this forbes magazine in front of me, he also has the MOST wealth to lose too. and i'm not sure having desperate types on board give the right balance. me personally i suck at making good, sound long term decisions when a colt .45 is pressed to my head.
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I had the same thought as Mark Cuban. A PhD in Economics, even winning the Nobel Prize (see my critique of Krugman) doesn't give you the real world feel that starting and running a business does. Economics is full of unintended consequences. Couple of examples, which every start-up person here can appreciate: if you make it very hard to do a lay-off, that leads to businesses becoming extremely cautious in hiring. The minimum wage directly leads to entrepreneurs not taking a chance to hire a less skilled person and train them on the job. These are easy enough to see when you run a business.

It would amaze you how many things that are "common sense" for an entrepreneur are hard for someone sitting in their ivory tower.

This is not just a problem in economics. After I got out of Princeton with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, it amazed me just how orthogonal to the real world much of my adviser's academic work proved to be - I happened to land a job that directly dealt with one of his core areas of research, though I wasn't involved in that area during my PhD myself. My realization led me to write a paper that pointed out that his work was dealing in mathematical models that were not very relevant to the real world, which predictably led to our intellectual parting of ways.

I felt experience working as an engineer should be mandatory for anyone aspiring to be an engineering professor, yet you will find that most engineering faculty have never worked outside of academia.
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Not arguing your underlying point, but the examples you chose are poor--all economists are well aware of the effects of a minimum wage, and of barriers to hiring/firing. It's people with no background in economics who don't understand those things.
Any sources for the 'sitting rooms'?
Porsche does not pay pensions directly.
The Origins of the BitC Programming Language
For the 'law' to be stated equivalently to Moore's law it should state: 1) the rate at which consumers will be able to organize their information, for a given cost, will double every year, or 2) the rate at which facebook will be able to evaluate a quantity of information, at a given cost, will double every year.

The percentage of information consumers choose to share is more of a question of market adoption.
10 Inspirational Offices
While this list is interesting, many of these so-called facts are statements of disagreement with common practices in large organisations, rather than "fundamental facts".

Perhaps this would be better labelled a list of fundamental mistakes and misunderstandings...
Looks good and quite useful (my wife was recently laid off).

My only question is whether you intend to run it as a business or not? It seems that the recently laid-off won't be the most generous with their cash and neither (hopefully) will they be long-time customers.
Micro-Apps
http://wsjclassroom.com/archive/06may/auto2_jobsbank.htm 15,000 workers are paid to do nothing.
I would agree if you said "most economists" instead of "all". On the minimum wage, a couple of Princeton economists wrote a scholarly paper pointing out how that didn't suppress hiring (sorry, don't have a handy reference) or increase unemployment. On barriers to hiring/firing, I grant that most economists would agree they are bad.

On the other hand, Krugman himself has been a strong advocate of nationalized health care. Milton Friedman argued how the health care problem is really one of licensing regulations designed to maximize pay for doctors. Imagine an American Software Association that decides how many licenses to grant every year, and you need those credentials to be a hacker. Yes, Friedman addressed the "quack" argument too.
Meanwhile I realised that probably one could just overload all offending objects (like XMLHttpRequest), JavaScript being a dynamic language.

Another target audience would be the mobile phone browsers, don't think they are enabled for plugins yet.
These two stories at the Economist may help:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11090197
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
Thanks hopeless! If your wife ends up using it I'd love to hear her thoughts too (my email is daniel at flyingmachinestudios.com)

I've considered charging for it eventually - something like $8 for an account, for life. I agree that it needs to an amount the recently laid-off are willing to part with, and definitely agree that it hopefully won't be used for a long time. So charging a monthly fee definitely wouldn't work, because it would be too much of a hassle for a user to come back and cancel the account.
Fully refundable, meaning you get a check back from the government if you aren't paying enough taxes? Awesome, I can't wait for the handouts to begin.
Yeah, I was being facetious. "aeii" wouldn't really be very descriptive as a name. I'm thinking something like "worksearchtool.com" might work (just got it). Not sure when I'll have the time to test out domains, but that's a good suggestion.
1 - in general, higher risk => higher reward (if the risk comes off ok)

That's why we look at risk-adjusted returns.
Sure, it may evolve around it, as there already exist some strains that infect directly via the CXCR4 receptor and bypass CCR5 receptors all together. However, this isn't reason to not include the mutation in "designer babies". It will still be effective, and provides resistance to diseases other than HIV (though it also makes you slightly more susceptible to others). In other words, there really isn't any reason to NOT include it, especially since there is a definite benefit achieved by including it.
Thanks for the feedback. Seems like there's a consensus that it could use a better name :)

I agree that having a bookmarklet would be helpful. Another possibility is to have the user add RSS feeds, and automatically add those job items.
Blogging is no longer what it was, because it has entered the mainstream
I have been asked twice, once was in a job interview, way before I began starting companies. The other time was two years after a VC started investing in our operation. But then I am generally quite upfront about my background, so he probably knew enough already.
Yep. It's a giant $40/hr work-study program. Considering my university only paid work-study kids about $6/hr, this will obviously be very popular.
Sure, if you don't have anything better to do with your time.
Value != REAL money.
C# is the Next Python: Duck Typing and C# 4.0
Why did you imply that Mark Zuckerberg would be the candidate? A commentor in the blog post did the same, but I did not expect this from Hacker News, when Cuban did not imply at all it should be Zuckerberg or anyone else inexperienced.

The people you talk to about matters of economy and finance are people with a background in finance and economics.

Cuban did not say there was anything wrong with such experts, but that the team should have someone who runs a small business for a living, that's all.

For example, I just thought of an almost identical situation.

Ron Paul's campaign advisor on the economy, and one of the two people who predicted the economic collapse in detail two years ago, is also an active entrepreneur. Now, Cuban did not say it has to be someone who is much of an expert, but it doesn't mean it should be some entrepreneur with zero economy experience.

I honestly don't see Mark Zuckerberg lecturing Robert Rubin and Warren Buffet on how to save the economy...

Cuban clearly implies he wants a good candidate, and not for example, a 23 year old web 2.0 hero.

Also, Cuban went out of his way to include franchise owners, mom and pop store owners, and independent contractor's all over the country in his definition of entrepreneur.

Besides distorting Cuban's points, I think it is very limiting to think that entrepreneurs are 20 year old founders of web startups, when they could be 45 or 65-year-old economists who have also started multiple startups in their life, whenever you hear the e-word.
Economist are no longer what they once were because most bloggers don't blog for dough. I understand what the article is getting at, but from over here it feels like I'm watching the E! television network. If anything blogging is bigger than it ever was except no one can tell if it's a blog or not since we've become so adept in using it as a tool rather than a blog.
The MBA is an investment opportunity - costing 2 years and ~$100k.

Surely any would-be entrepreneur is better off investing 2 years and $100k in starting a company?
Ironically, once you find a good domain you'll most likely have to buy its misspellings :).

http://instantdomainsearch.com is pretty good
good idea but I and Id fair to guess everyone else is lazy I dont want to enter bookmarks. Import the ones I have saved now in Firefox or read my stumbleupon interests or other data sources about me and recommend, so I can click and build my magazine.
Does anyone else see this as a thinly veiled partisan rant along the lines of, "Democrats are Ivory Tower elitists who hate Joe the Plumber and will destroy free enterprise in the USA"?

In what sense does this article have any practical value for entrepreneurs, or even the Obama administration? Seems like Schmidt, Page and Brin have been offering plenty of informal advice along with lots of other successful entrepreneurs.
Who do you think is more likely to have the kind of
persistence needed to carry a product forward?

Someone who is confident that he is building something people want.

You have to make up your mind on whether you're building something people want, or something you want. Either is fine, but you have to walk into this with open eyes.
But if the risk pays off, the returns are there right? And give the risk-taking company an advantage over it's competitors?

It seems companies can't affored to account for low-probability, high-impact risks. If they do, they'll be out-competed by those who don't (unless/until such an event occurs).
As a business, it's certainly not a success.

It gets massive number of page views, and is very popular, but business isn't a popularity contest. If you can't figure out how to make money, you're not a successful business.
Widget Advertising has Arrived
Damn, you just know these are Windows systems with their multiverse of vulnerabilities. Why are governments so exceedingly incompetent at everything?
Chandrayaan 1 captured by Moon
Nine Cool Manufactured Houses
I like the reference to the hot dog venders...They definitely know way more than college professors.
Mark Zuckerberg was just the one that sprung to mind, but I think the argument would be pretty much the same if I had used Jeff Bezos - who was a stockbroker before he founded Amazon, and thus should be somewhat experienced in macroeconomy.

My point is that making economic policy, especially in the current environment, is a difficult and specialised task. The people that have the best shot at getting it right are the ones that have the experience, connections and know-how of how to do it. And entrepreneurs don't - they are in a completely different business.

This is nothing bad about Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or any other entrepreneur - I just think that you should get the best man for the job. I wouldn't want Robert Rubin to be the CIO of my startup either, even though I know he's as smart and dedicated as anyone. It's simply not his expertise.
If you define success as making a lot of money quickly you should go into sales and cut out the middleman.

You can buy one lottery ticket and make a lot of money. You can buy many lottery tickets every day of your life and never cover the cost of your lottery tickets.

Most of the time the opportunity for "overnight success" is sold by folks who are interested in making a profit on your dreams without actually fulfilling them.
Tools for rapid prototyping: a webapp in 1 week
How Gandhi argued his way into first-class rail car in apartheid South Africa.
Wow. So this post is seriously suggesting we make Joe the Plumber Treasury Secretary? Man I'm in the wrong business. Maybe if I had gone into plunging toilets instead of testing software I could be an economic guru too.
"... Other than this is written by a programmer, does this story have any relevance to Hacker News? ..."

Yes I think so.

Firstly it shows Zed follows the "Be good" mantra. It's simple to follow, harder to practice but worth the effort.

"... I know many programmers are not religious, and I’m not really either, but many churches and houses of worship do good things for people. They feed the poor, take in the sick, and help people who need it most. When you need help, a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple will most likely help you ..."

Secondly we can practice our sharp analytical skills noting that just because there is a good family that happens to be religious, it does not logically follow that religion itself is good.
C# has adopted a lot from dynamic languages like python: "lazy" genexp ("yield return" in C#), lambda, map/filter/reduce (LInQ) and now Duck Typing. The nice thing is that now you can program dynamically or statically and inter-operate between the two styles and the framework.

There are still couple of problems that it would need to overcome to become my favorite language of all times:

1. Windows Tax.

2. Brevity. C# is just more verbose than python even with LINQ et al.
From the linked article:

"While GM often blames "legacy costs" such as retiree health care and pensions for its troubles, its Jobs Bank SHOWS THAT THE COMPANY HAS INFLICTED SOME WOUNDS ON ITSELF. Documents show that GM itself helped originate the Jobs Bank idea in 1984 and agreed to expand it in 1990, seeing it as a stopgap until times got better and workers could go back to the factories. The idea was to help train or find jobs for senior UAW employees who would "otherwise be permanently laid off" because of better technology or higher productivity. Ford later matched the plan for its UAW employees."

(emphasis mine)

I couldn't have linked to a better article to help make my point -- the management is so incompetent that they would rather have senior employees sitting idle than simply giving them retirement or severance packages. That kind of goofy, short-sighted thinking wasn't imposed upon GM management by the UAW.
Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power (2006)
One and three are debatable, they depend heavily on the nature of your business.

Having a stats fiend, however, is not. The amount of actionable data available to online businesses is staggering. Ignore it at your peril.
While I don't doubt that an MBA can increase one's earning potential, I'm really skeptical about its value to employers. I've worked with over a dozen MBA holders from all the top schools and I've never been impressed with any of them.

Some people mention accounting and finance knowledge as one reason to pursue an MBA. Paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for such knowledge seems wasteful.

I have also read articles in the past indicating that there is no correlation at all between corporation performance and whether or not top executives have MBA degrees.
I think you're expecting too much from this method. This is a means of checking the pulse of the market. When you approach an injured person to give them first aid, checking their pulse is one of the first things you do. If they don't have a pulse you take appropriate action. But if they do have a pulse, you don't continue checking the pulse again and again, using ever-more-sophisticated pulse-testing technologies. The quality of a paramedic's care is not proportional to how precisely and accurately she can measure your pulse.

This test might tell you whether your marketing is going to be very difficult. If you can't get anyone to click on a teaser for your product you've obviously got a problem, and you might want to refine your pitch a bit before doing anything else. Or at least make a plan that involves a relatively long, slow, profitless period during which you shop your minimalist prototype to people and try to build word of mouth.

You're right that the real size of your market is hard to estimate with this technique. Tim Ferriss goes so far as to recommend that you take potential customers' emails [1] before putting up the screen that clearly informs them, with great sorrow, that you're "out of stock" and offering to email them when you've got product to ship. I think he's right that this is the only way to be sure that the rubberneckers on your website are actual potential customers, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to do this. (Even though it looks, to my surprise, like the FTC would condone it if you used the right fine print...) And I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for software. People don't pay for software unless someone has reviewed it. They're not fools.

As for the fact that this model is "mechanistic"... That's why it's a useful spiritual exercise. The tendency to fall in love with your first idea is strong, and the tendency to build the thing that most inspires you -- as opposed to the thing that will cause customers to give you money -- is strong. But it's often easier to make a profitable thing lovable than the other way around.

[1] I originally stated, in this post, that Ferriss recommended taking down credit card numbers as well. After looking closely at this part of his book, this turns out not to be true. The fine print matters a lot in cases like this, so I'm sorry for the mistake.
Everyone is confident they're building something people want. The question is, how do you propose to tell if it's true? Ultimately, the only way to know for sure is to bring it to market.

Measuring sign-ups on landing pages from Adwords did not (in the cases I observed) live up to its promise as a short-cut in this process, for the reasons cited.

Edit: I certainly believe in adapting what one's doing in response to market evidence - e.g. listening to one's customers - rather than stubbornly assuming that one knows what people want. That, however, is not the point of the OP.
This probably isn't Google's fault, it's probably the fault of someone on the T-Mobile team or at HTC who accidently left this running on the OS image put on the phones.
How the Thundering Herd Faltered and Fell
1 and 2 sound like MBA advice.
Complementary product. Print more PDFs => sell more printers.
Tim Ferris goes so far as to recommend that you take potential customers' credit cards and emails before [telling them] that you're "out of stock"

Tim Ferris recommends lying to your customers? That is all I need to know about Tim Ferris.

(I don't have any objections to your quite reasonable comments - you may be right that such tests are useful if you don't expect too much from them.)
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Very nice post! This applies to real world startups too.
A piece of paper is added to the stack and cut. Adhesive is applied. Another piece of paper is added to the stack and cut. Adhesive is applied. And so on.
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What I meant to ask was is this an issue with MzScheme or the Hacker News code? The reason why I'm asking is because I have a project I'm writing in Arc on MzScheme, and it would be helpful for me to know if MzScheme has a garbage collection bug that was biting you ;-/
Amen on #2. Since brevity isn't just aesthetics, this has always been a problem for me. The last thing I built in C# was the last thing I built in C# because it became hard/annoying to maintain and debug, even with VS.
My family survives on G.M. salaries.
Governments don't fire people.
Finance != Economics.
Oh! Thats nice. I'm a music freak and use my phone to listen to a lot of music.

But is the g1 available in countries where tmobile isnt present?
"Turtles all the way down."

check out vpri.org (Alan Kay's current organization) and Newspeak, the programming language (see Room 101, the blog).
Precisely. The membership list of this advisory board is a marketing document, not an exclusive list of the people who get to make the policy. This isn't the NBA, where the people on the roster are also the ones who have to play.
How-to: Simplify Python shell scripts with setuptools
I thought he pulled off the perfect crime but alas the moral to the story is buy your wig and other needed materials from ebay or at least space your purchases out over time locally.
thanks for the original link.
Quite a funny tale! Rather ingenious on this part, too.

While the "accomplices" were innocent in this case, it makes me wonder whether "crowd-crime" will become common in future. Rather like flashmobs, 30 criminals could easily co-ordinate a mass shoplifting operation and the sheer numbers would overwhelm (and even intimidate) any security that was present. I read a story a year or two ago about gangs of hundreds of poor children robbing tourists on beaches somewhat along these lines.
All good points, but I don't see the genre-specific connection to the sort of things we usually discuss and find interesting around here :)

All of those things are general things that everyone should pay attention to.
I see your points, and what your goals are with this, but I think that you and Cuban are getting in on the wrong level.

He wants to make sure that tech entrepreneurs are heard in the new government - which I certainly agree is a good idea. Both for the entrepreneurs and the economy. My grudge with the post is that he finds it perfectly reasonable that tech entrepreneurs should be represented at the very top level of the economic advisers to the president. My argument is that the tech entrepreneur expertise should be represented one level further down. Both because, as I've argued before, that the expertise that's needed is very different from doing startups, but also because tech startups don't account for that large a portion of the overall economy. Cuban's arguments could just as well be applied to mom and pop stores, which are probably more underpinning of the economy than startups, the biotech sector, the defense industry, the automobile industry, agriculture, advertising, aerospace, big oil, clean energy, food products etc. etc. These are all important, but none of them, including startups, are big enough in an economical sense that they should be represented at the top level.

Yes, an argument could be made that startups are the future of America. But the same argument could be made of mom and pop stores, clean energy and many others.
Why else do you think Magus joined up with the bastards who invaded his home, beat up his friends, and nearly killed him? He was out of work and looking for something to do.
The internet basically started with a 'lo' and the data transferred on it hasn't got any more useless since then.

Claiming there's too much junk on the internet is like claiming there's too many shops in the world. I find new and interesting websites every day, I also find a lot of crap every day. If anything I find less crappy websites now than I did several years ago.

With the advent of Wikipedia I no longer spend hours searching for credible sources of information from unverifiable websites. I mean wikipedia has problems, it just has more good going for it.
Since when does "dumb" mean "open-minded"? The novel parts of the post are flamebait.
GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I clearly tells us they are only concerned with the first death star...not the second.

Future versions of Android may feature GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_II
Why should I think about using Merb for my project as opposed to something like Rails?
do they have supermarkets in Japan? If not then, this might explain that.