skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although, the nature of this model seems to leave room for a bunch of different people to do it in different areas/markets. That's kind of neat. If it worked really well, I could see some kind of talent agency trying to organize the efforts--though my gut says that would likely cheapen the effect.
This is the fundamental conflict here. Liberals look at marriage and see something people do to be happy. Telling some people they can't marry and be happy is just mean! They fail to see the deeper consequences of messing with tradition.
Man Writes Software, Blogs About it, Makes $100k in 5 Months
This reminded me of the "subprime explained" comic as a novel way of getting the complexity across:

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?revision=_latest&fs=t...
And furthermore, nothing in the law really makes sleeping around "illegal"
Entreprenurial Trade Show Tips
Trade shows are not vacations, nor are the the right place to try to outspend your competitors.

Nice list of tips to maximize your trade show investment
> because it's been changing fairly rapidly over time

No, it's been changing fairly rapidly for less than 100 years, and usually with serious unforeseen consequences.

> Look at marriage in nortic countries

I'm tired of hearing about nordic countries. First, they aren't nearly as great as the pom-pom crowd thinks. If you do an apples to apples comparison of middle class whites in northern US states to nordic countries, they're really not so fantastic. And there is plenty of hand-wringing about social degradation in Sweden. They're, what, one generation in to their shift away from more conservative arrangements? Give it time and you'll see problems.
You've got my point exactly backwards. You don't need a billion to hit "millionaire" status now, whereas (adjusting for inflation) you did when the word first became popular.

Actually, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaires, inflation has been by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, rather than 3. That doesn't change the point. The reason "billionaire" comes up here is simply that we don't have a good word for money between 10^6 and 10^9, other than "multimillionaire" which is the same order of magnitude as "millionaire". The Wikipedia article lamely suggests "decamillionaire" and "hectomillionare", which only confirms that there aren't any words for this that actually get used.
I'm not going to voice approval for things that are taboo. I am going to stand my ground in claims that there is little benefit in laws about such taboos.

Your examples are debatably child abuse in the likely of troubled pregnancies, and so could reasonable be treated as violence. I'm all for laws against violence.

One take away is that you don't need laws against taboos. They are taboo and so largely self enforcing.
I actually didn't want this article submitted so I flagged it. Kidding, kidding. There are, however, some out of context quotes and a ridiculous looking picture (the photographer was nice, but quirky). Oh well, I <3 press.

To clarify:

-We've never said that we'll never take money. In an ideal situation, startups would not have to take money and if we can get away with it great, if not that's okay. We're well aware that the odds are against us on this one.

-We've been very open with this with our potential investors. The sharp money is still investing in this economy and luckily some of them are still interested in us. You think a VC will argue with you when you say you want more months of operational information so you can make a better informed, data-driven decision? Nada. I've talked to four potential investors this week alone.

-Due to the economy, sales have stayed relatively flat as average sales have gone down while volume has gone up. However, we're still working out bugs and have over $1 billion worth of tickets on the site. Most people don't even know we have concert tickets yet, which is by design. We'll be chasing more PR soon, which will hopefully lead to real salaries for myself and Tom.

-We don't have a model, a deck, a pitch book or executive summary. We'll make them on demand if they are ever needed. If you want to do it right, it's a very time consuming process. In the short term we thought it was a better use of our time to talk to our users (I respond to literally every non-form letter email), create content, develop and sell.

-Obviously models can reflect growth rates. My point was: when you are growing quickly in the early stages, by the time you get to the final boardroom meeting, everything can very easily be out of date. This is especially true when you haven't spent any money on advertising.

-Month over month traffic is up 67% as of today. This is largely due to Obama Tickets, more pages being indexed, SEO and good ol Google.

-I haven't had a haircut since I quit my job. \m/

Edit: Of course as I write this our contact page is down. We're on it.

Edit 2: It's back up.
Entrecard Slowly Fading Away | TechJaws
It was illegal as recently as the 70s in many places. I think it was pretty much everywhere in the 50s. The cops would throw you in the slammer for "carrying on with a married woman."
Underground Wonders
I would say things went wrong with the choice of Semel to Hollywood-mediaize the company, not with his departure. Yahoo lost its soul while Google didn't.
so pretty much focus on a sub-niche if you want to be successful as a blogger?
Tokyo Cabinet looks intriguing. One major limitation of Berkeley DB is that it cannot reliably store its files on a network filesystem (NFS or CIFS or what have you) because of unreliable POSIX semantics. It's a tough problem, but any idea if Tokyo Cabinet tackles it?
To my ears you're saying, "Nerds are high status; They're valued above CEOs and politicians (or historical equivalents) for most of history."

I'm saying, "Suits are overvalued. And nerds are undervalued even by themselves. That's always been true with periodic exceptions."

And I don't mean "suits" as a pejorative; I'm not using it in contempt. It's a fact that people of that class wear them.

Actually, I like wearing them.
> WTF do you care what three forty year old people do in their own home

Have you read ANYTHING about these polygamous communities? They produce cast off boys and a trickle of 15 year old girls fleeing rape by 50 year old men. I would argue these are long term consequences of polygamy itself, not features of communities that happen to practice it.
Yes, I think that's exactly right. To elaborate, I see the attitude of not wanting to mess with tradition as being the same attitude that used to make people say "if God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings".

Perhaps messing with tradition is risky, as was trying to fly. But I'm ok with that.
I'm planning on taking a course in electrical engineering, merely because I've been fascinated with technology all my life and I've already been playing around with circuits and what not since I was young. I built a transformer when I was like 13 years old, it worked for sure... until I melted the core, and now I know to always use laminated cores, not spoons. I also made a capacitor around that time, although it weighed like 2 lbs and held like 1mA charge.

I'd have to agree. I don't think someone solely interested in passing a course is going to help the industry. There's lots of people who go through university solely because they're afraid to enter the real world. I got a job as an electrician because I didn't want to be one of those losers who finally finishes university at 23 years old and realize I have no clue what to do and I wasted a good 5 years of my life.
Well, that's not strictly true. Marriage is different things to different people. The State, the Church, individuals, all have their own meaning.

To the State, marriage is a mechanism for forming binding contracts to create viable economic units for raising small children. All the stuff the State tacks onto it, like tax breaks, are in support of that primary goal.The State does this because it needs a fresh supply of well-raised kids in order to fulfill its responsibilities, which range from schools to manning the military. In the eyes of the State, if you take the benefits of marriage and don't have kids and raise 'em good, you aren't upholding your end of the bargain.

Equal rights for their own sake is a laudable goal, but someone is going to need to articulate to the State what the benefits to the State of gay marriage are. Once that's done, you'll see some progress.
Hadoop Is About Scalability, Not Performance
Edit: Deleted double post.
My comment was aimed at HNers, who graciously post the link directly to the print version from time to time. Just wanted to encourage this :).
So what are the deeper consequences of allowing homosexual couples to legally marry?
While SSDs do wear out, it's very rare to actually end up with enough bad blocks to run out of spare space. The write limit comes up whenever you mention SSDs, but on a desktop or laptop computer it seems to be pretty much irrelevant.

I do have to wonder why people still recommend 7-pass zeroing of hard disks when The Great Zero Challenge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117588 still stands, and there is no evidence that it's possible to recover from a simple dd if=/dev/zero.

With SSDs, there is the issue of certain blocks remaining untouched after zeroing due to the wear leveling logic, although I doubt you'd need 7 passes to flush it out - 1 pass with random bits and 1 pass with zeroes ought to suffice. (the assumption being that this will touch even the masked blocks, whereas two passes of zeroes will be detected, and already-zero blocks won't be blanked, whereas a zero pass following a random pass will start by zeroing unmapped blocks; if anyone knows the wear leveling algorithms better than me, feel free to confirm/refute)
> I would say exactly that. I would even go so far as to say that a marriage where it is known before hand that the heterosexual couple is infertile is not a "real" marriage.

Wow. So a couple that chooses to be married yet chooses no children is also not a "real" marriage?
I would say that's so.
No, it's been changing fairly rapidly for less than 100 years, and usually with serious unforeseen consequences.

Woman's rights have been on the rise for much longer than 100 years. (I hear they can vote, own property, and even work in the theater.)

I used to be a crime to have sex outside of marriage but that's been on the decline for a long time.

There used to be limits on who could marrie based on class and or race lines. (Duke's don't get hitched with just anyone you know.)

Dowery's used to be common but now it's mostly just the wives family paying for more of the wedding. (This trend has been going on for a while.)

Divorce was introduced by one of the Henry's (he killed most of his other wives but their was one he liked.)

I could go on but most of these trends are a lot older than 100 years. One of the few things that does not really seem to change is infidelity. Genetic tests have shown that married women tend to have about ~20% of their kids from someone other than their husband. This does not seem to have changed much over time.

PS: Nordic marriage traditions go all the way back to the vikings, but they don't look much like "Christian" family values.
My problem is trying to find which things I want to devote effort to. (I am also 21). Right now I try to put as much effort as I can toward every part of my life, and I usually become burnt out very quickly and get stuck in a sort of "waiting place" for a month or two. If I could figure out some solid priorities as far as what I really want to devote my effort to, I feel like it would pay off a lot in the long run. Right now I'm still trying to figure out how to do that...
Haha yeah HNer's aren't exactly the type of people who click on ads.
Fantastic. I'll go tell three married couples I know that their marriages are invalid.
I think you're the one here who is redefining marriage.
And that he just wrote a book about it.
Almost certainly the no-sign up. Why go to the hassle if I'm not even sure I want to use it yet?
The betting didn't just spread the risk, it magnified it.

For every dollar the banks lost on bad loans they probably lost 30 dollars of bets on those loans. No one even knows the exact number because the market is completely unregulated.
Tom,

You drew conclusions from the data. It's not advice, but the conclusions were unsupported, so I consider it unsupported data mining. I'm not questioning your motives. :)

1. Yes, the appropriate question is whether we can generalize from this data. One should prefer uncorrelated data points when sampling data, which is why I say you only have 26 data points. Is it "better than nothing"? Depends on what conclusions you draw. "Tea leaves" are better than nothing if you just think they're pretty. But if you think they have meaning, then they're worse than nothing. In this case, the study has zero predictive value because there is no scientific result.

2. I understand what the N means, but it's misleading since in statistics one usually thinks of N as referring to the number of independent data points.

3. What I mean is: a "real" data point would be an actual market decline of 20-50%. In your model, some of those declines may be represented only once (say, because there was a market recovery the following month), and others are represented up to 11 times (because there was no recovery for the next 11 months). So not only do you have a (much) smaller sample (by a factor of between 60 and 360 depending on which analysis) than your "N" reports, but you also have a biased sample because each buy signal is represented for a varying amount of time depending on how many months it lasted for. This means that, of the handful of market declines which actually occurred in the last century, you might really be representing an even smaller sample.

4. You did draw the following conclusion: "For 10-year investments, investing when the market is down 20% to 50% is probably going to produce better returns than a investment at a random point in time, but it's a close call".

Anyways, thanks for your reply. Sorry if my initial comment was a bit too snide. :)
Not invalid, just inferior to "real" marriages, which produce biological children.

Again, this is a critical distinction between liberals and conservatives. Liberals are obsessed with making sure everyone feels equal and unoffended. Conservatives do not shy away from the reality that not everyone and everything are of equal value. From the perspective of society a biologically fruitful marriage is a superior thing and deserves special status. Sorry if that hurts feelings.
Quality picture on top of the article Dan...if your hands were feet they'd probably be size 26.
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Who cares if two slackers succeed? The whole argument is that talent is inherently pointless. I wasn't a talented writer as a child, hell my 3rd grade teacher told my parents I might be dyslexic and I'd need to take special needs classes until I graduate. Before the end of the summer after I graduated I got a job as a journalist, and at the same time my friends who in 3rd grade were supposedly phenomenally talented in English were going to take a 2 year introduction to English at university and then a 5 year journalism course.

I wasn't born with an uncanny writing talent, I was thought to be retarded but I liked telling stories. So I spent a lot of my childhood from 13 years old, when I realized that I wanted to write books for a living, practicing writing. I read huge amounts of books to learn how different people write and taught myself.

At 17 (I'm from the UK I graduated at 16) the editor was telling me I was the most talented writer they had. I surprised him one day, he sent me an email at around 6 saying one review I did wasn't how they wanted it (which was the reason I left, the product I reviewed sucked ass but because it came from a big company we couldn't offend them) so he said it needed changing. An hour later I emailed him back with the entire thing rewritten the score from a 1 to a 8. For everyone who doesn't know the review game; for example a video game review, if it takes 10 hours to play the game it will probably take you around 20 hours to review and edit it, so getting an essentially new review in an hour was amazing to him.

The reason why I could do a review in an hour that would take anyone else a day to get back. Well because I'm driven. I'm sure there were more talented people on the staff, but that doesn't mean shit when I can consistently out perform someone 10:1.

So yes being talented will help you, but if you're a slacker you're not going anywhere to begin with.
Willikers, Dan, you're like the uber-caveman in this picture!
Well, there's two ways to look at scalability:

- The ability to handle lots of load at all, which comes down to a stability and fault-tolerance issue.

- The performance of the system under load.

Both are pretty valid.
"Schwartz has spent two years overhauling Sun, which posted five years of losses under former CEO Scott McNealy. The company continues to lose market share in servers, the computers that run corporate networks and account for almost half of revenue."

Convenient excuse for a company that was already in trouble. This way they can just say "oh it's the crappy economy" and hope to get a free pass for generally sucking (see GM)

Look, if they didn't make tons of money in the last 7 years there's something majorly wrong. I can understand if the last year was down, but the last 7 years? Please.
Frameworks are big in Java-land because you need an enormous amount of scaffolding to make any non-trivial application work. That's less true in other languages. Libraries and interoperability with other languages are more important, and where LISP has traditionally suffered. Clojure has a lot of potential, but there are a lot of languages poised in the wings right now, all jockeying to be the next big thing. F# for example is functional (it's descended from OCaml) and has full access to the .NET libraries, which are as comprehensive as Java's, and has the backing of a major vendor. Now if Sun were to pick up Clojure and make it the official functional language on the Java platform, that would be something.
No, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I just think the assertion that marriages that produce children are automatically better for society than those that do not is ridiculous.
In all fairness, I was the second type when I was in college. I'm a card-carrying first type now but it took a few years of experience, meeting the right people on- and offline, and reading the right books to get me there. I think having more people in engineering will lead to more better people in the field.
Yeah I'm 6'3'', 220, but I don't have Shaq hands. They should have had Garry Tan take the picture.

Here's what I actually look like:

http://danhau.posterous.com/

Here's what PG actually looks like:

http://danhau.posterous.com/our-fearless-investor-paul-gra

Here's an older picture of Livingston, but she still looks the same...adorable:

http://danhau.posterous.com/when-ticketstumbler-met-living
PG prefers to call us "barbarians".
Tribes are great if your goal is be an Internet celebrity. There are other models, like creating great content, providing helpful resources and tools or simply entertaining your readers.
There's nothing suboptimal about a stable same-sex family for raising children. If you want the law to maximize benefits for children, outlaw divorce.
Agreed, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364245
I am one of the people helping to pull this conference together and appreciate your feedback. We are trying to build the conference in such a manner that it addresses the core issues of the community instead of glazing over them like most big name conference pushers. The content and conference style will be edgy and will most likely not appeal to some people. That is fine, there are many big name, high sponsor vendor conferences out there where you can hear the redundancy of the corporate drone.

We are trying to make something different. Take it or leave it.
You forgot to end with ", I assert without evidence".
_Prop. 8 passed mostly due to the high turnout of African-American voters as a result of Obama's candidacy._

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com points out that first-time voters voted against Prop. 8 by 62-38, while experienced voters favored it by 56-44. Therefore, if Obama's candidacy had not boosted turnout, Prop. 8 probably would have passed by an even higher margin.

Yes, black voters voted 70-30 in favor of Prop. 8, but they were only 10% of the electorate, and lots of other demographic subgroups favored it as well. (E.g., 22% of the voters attend church weekly--I bet that 22% includes the vast majority of the black voters--and they favored Prop. 8 by 82-18.) So I think treating the black vote as the reason for Prop. 8's passage is unfair.
I wasn't defining Freemium; just using it as a jumping off point for talking about social good (because the blog author mentioned "do good" and "do well").

I'm concerned about social good, for the reasons pg discusses (morale, confidence, people want to help you). It feels good to do good. That's my topic. Freemium is not my topic.

I agree that Freemium could be used by a "totally ruthless business person" - but that explicitly isn't the case I was talking about (though evidently not sufficiently explicit).

Therefore, you aren't addressing the part of my comment that I'm interested in - that's because you saw it as trying to define Freemium in a way you disagree with. Maybe I could have been clearer that I wasn't defining Freemium. Actually, I consciously chose the qualification "But for selling software" to distinguish my subject from Freemium - I happily concede that this qualification may have been inadequate to the purpose. Maybe also I shouldn't post that in a comment on an article about Freemium - but the article also was about doing good and doing well, so there is a relation - though clearly not the one you expected. BTW what you say about Freemium seems pretty reasonably to me from my wider reading, although I don't take a position on what it is or isn't; I'm not arguing that.

At the moment, the issue of doing good is very important to me, personally, and I can't afford to let it slip away. If my topic wasn't wasn't so important to me, I would happily switch to your topic (definition of Freemium) and discuss that.

PS: That also explains why you give advise me to be careful when I start describing or defining what something really means or what it's benefits are - it's because you thought I was doing that. I wasn't.
It devalues real marriage. The consequences will be much the same as past developments that devalued marriage as an institution and an oath, for examples no-fault divorce and much public welfare. One can reasonably anticipate more out of wedlock births and more divorce.
And the reason why banks, and not only banks, lost so much on the papers is because the loans were basically worthless. Banks knew that loans were worthless but the paper's ratings created a different impression, boosting the loans.

The spread part is very important. If there were no betting, selling and reselling of the papers, then only bad lenders would collapse.
Single founder + non-startup hub + non-web2.0-buzzworthy product == everything you're told not to do.

I've said this before, but the biggest takeaway from the balsamiq story seems to be: put your head down and focus on making a great product, everything else will follow.
...provide the optimum situation for bringing up kids...

The fact that roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce (at least in the U.S.) makes whether or not marriages create said optimum situation the decision of a rounding error, more or less.