skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having anything with GPL in it in a startup is a red flag during diligence. Goes double for Enterprise level. For that reason, most companies won't use GPL software or, if they do, they have it all "fire-walled" from all their other software. The fear is that someone inadvertently includes it in the companies other code and causes a huge legal mess. Or you patch something, and now you need a way to open source stuff -- companies are built to prevent code from leaving, getting stuff going the other way is a bureaucratic nightmare.

Overall, even if you're complying with the GPL (using the software in an approved manner), it's not usually worth the hassle of proving you're complying with the GPL _in a way that is legally defensible_.
I don't think it's a false piece of mind. Managers at Dell, for example, know all about the bullwhip effect. They also know that when buying commodity parts, you can generally source from more than one supplier. If you squeeze one too hard and they die, you just get another one because they're lining up to serve you.

You can't "solve" the bullwhip effect - you can lessen it. You can use IT, training, etc. And you can force (through market power) the consequences of it on your suppliers. Doing so doesn't mean that you're blind to the pitfalls of the practice.

None of this has anything to do with being American or Chinese.
Absence of test cases? Surely this is not a function of the license in use, correct? There can be shitty BSD-licensed swill with no test cases just as easily as there can be that as GPLv3.
The "google" variable is often not loaded for people who use Adblock or similar extensions that block social media plugins. You can simply check that "google" exists before running the code that depends on it:

if (typeof google !== "undefined") {
// run google code here
google.magic();
}
Illegal maybe. Juvenile? If illegally making use of hacks is juvenile, someone better inform the Mexican Zetas. Very politely.
I think you're reading too much into that part.
I would like to see those bar graphs, without them being normalized to % of income. For example, a huge difference is the fraction of income spent on food: how much of that is food costs going down, and how much is income going up? Non-noramalized stacked bar graphs of (inflation-adjusted) dollars would answer that better than normalized ones.
I know this is cliched, but of the ~30 students who started the Computer Science Ph.D. program at Stanford in 2006 with me, maybe 10 have dropped out. A few of those ten have gone onto successful startups and are now far, far, far wealthier than any of us who remained in the program could hope to be :)
Why the NoSQL vs. SQL hoopla is just #nonsensql
It has no restrictions for developers, only for redistributors.
I would guess they are not taking into account employer contributions, as that is not money I as a consumer ever see in my paycheck. my medical bills (including insurance premos) the past few years average out to $1200/year (significantly less than 7% of my income). If I didn't have a job/insurance, they would be zero. I would guess there are a significant number of un-employed/un-insured, that don't have medical bills, averaging this number down.
Legal test cases for the provisions of the license that scare the lawyers. Not software tests.
What started as a nice thought that could have been transformed or applied by the author into something useful (In the sense that it could have helped someone to create something great) launched into another "I hate Google and you should too" ad by some Microsoft employee.

I wonder what kind of developers are they targeting? (as this blog is obviously targeting developers)

Do you have to properly hate something to be a good fit for Microsoft? Seems so, especially when you look at other campaigns (Gmail man reading your email etc.)

And then theres the grave accusation of Google distorting the search results, again with no evidence whatsoever.

This "former professor and startup founder" couldn't even come up with 5 or 10 test queries to prove his point.

But still this ad was well written, it tricked my built in spam filter and so i read it from start to end. Well done.
What is the monetary exchange rate between tweets and Yelp reviews?
Living expenses vary in a lot of complex ways, yeah, depending on your lifestyle. I find cost of living here overall cheaper than in the SF Bay Area for my own lifestyle though, mostly due to transportation and healthcare. I was able to sell my car, ditch my gasoline/insurance expenses, and no longer have to pay co-pays or employee contributions for my health insurance. People with other lifestyles may find it more expensive, especially if you want to buy a car (which has its own separate, very high taxes).

I'm not sure VAT is a big component of the difference. I think housing costs and high wages are the biggest factor. Grocery prices are slightly higher (perhaps due to VAT), but we're talking differences there that add up to maybe 1% of my income annually. Eating out is much more expensive, mainly because everyone employed in the restaurant is making at least a lower-middle-class salary (~$40k or so... nobody's working for $7/hr). Rental housing in Copenhagen is more expensive than most of the Bay Area, but cheaper than SF proper or NYC. Housing to purchase is actually quite cheap; you can get a 2bd in reasonably central Copenhagen for $200k, which is completely impossible in SF or NYC.

I suppose the PPP comparison is made against the U.S. as a whole, in which case cost of living is definitely higher than, say, the midwest or Texas. But I don't think it's particularly high compared to coastal US prices. If you want to buy housing, if anything CoL is considerably lower.
I read the comment he wrote on HN where he said he didn't. But if Egor Homakov says he did, my next question is "who did he report it to?"

I've been doing this for awhile, maybe there's useful advice I can offer him.
I'm all for old money getting into tech. However, there was one line in the article that makes me wonder how successful they'll be...

"While many of them don’t know how to program code, they have a powerful combination in the start-up scene: wealth, wits and a well-connected family."

I'm not going to dispute that things like money and connections matter, and of course wits are essential. I'm not going to claim that there's no chance of succeeding if you can't code, either. But you do put yourself at a disadvantage if you can't. Having a great idea for an application is a great way to get started, but I'd put it on a par with having a great idea for a novel or a movie.

I'll still put my money on hackers in a run down dorm room above heirs to a fortune looking for someone to code up their next social networking idea.
Nice try, but the logic doesn't quite cement. Overvaluations are fueled by hype that's resultant from scarcity. Facebook is so "hot" right now because the average person can't get a piece of the pre-IPO value. Upon the IPO the scarcity is decreased, but by then, a lot of the value has already been extracted and returned to the high tier investors.

The JOBS Act is going to be awesome for startups and entrepreneurs. Any company that has even an infinitesimal chance of becoming a publicly traded company will be able to attract investors (few or many) to raise money and grow. And as that company raises money and becomes more prominent on the radar, those who got in early will realize a greater return.

It's going to create an incentive for investors to seek out and invest in the obscure. Not to mention, it'll likely create an ancillary benefit: reducing the cost of IPO-ing.
Why not? That kind of job is boring and repetitive. You would not do it, would you?
What does he suggest, though? If having a "decision" engine is what he thinks is best, I'd say that usually the top 3 organic results in Google for just about any search are much more relevant that the technology Microsoft has to provide a decision.

Small example off the top of my head. The query is "Who uses LLVM?". 3rd result on Google is the "LLVM - Users" page that lists all the companies using it. Definitely the page that I need. This page is no where to be seen in the Bing first page results for the same query.

Saying that search is dead isn't right because for many queries, you need tons of results. Like someone mentioned here, if you're searching for a plumber, you want a selection. And implying that Google is broken isn't right when they do the best of both worlds: unobtrusive search with a ton of relevant results, and top 3 results that are about as good of a decision tool than what Bing currently has.
Should scientific undergraduate degrees exist? 
So I'm sitting in my materials science lecture at Stanford and my professor bluntly stated: "all of you have to go to grad school to get a job."

There's a decent debate around not going to grad school for the "fuzzier" studies (language arts and so forth). E.g. http://www.martynemko.com/articles/case-against-graduate-school_id1528

However, since everyone seems to agree that all hard-science and science-intensive engineering undergrads need grad-school to get a job, why not combine the entire B.S. Degree + Master into one degree?

Oh but what about PhD candidates? Simple: get a master equivalent with that first degree and skip straight to the qual exam.

thoughts?
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. "Semantic Web" was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the first couple paragraphs of the article. I thought he was going to head that direction as well. I was sorely disappointed!

There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc.

Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current.

Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns.

Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.
I'd love to fund a startup without going completely broke (something like $1-2000 or something). It's just nice to have even minuscule fraction-of-a-fraction ownership in something that might be the Next Somethingorother. Kickstarter isn't really an angel investment vehicle, and Prosper is mostly for people who are trying to repair their credit or buy a car/house, not really as sexy as funding a startup.

What are the options?
The thing is, companies often keep patents alive by coming up with little variations or extensions of existing patents.

The fact that people can speculatively patent anything to begin with is a glaring sign something is severely broken. (Do a patent database search for Internet and Video. Note how many and how vague they are and how far the dates predate Youtube.)
The only way to stem the tide of downvotes here is going to be to stop repeating yourself in other comments and directly address acslater00's graph.

There's nuances here to be explored in what exactly is being manufactured, and there's some other interesting ways to extract bad tidbits of news out of that data, but it is certainly the case that the data does not justify running around shouting "DOOM! DOOM!" about manufacturing qua manufacturing in the US.

Personally I'm upbeat about the future. As robots and automation continue marching forward, the US goes from having a major labor cost disadvantage relative to poor countries to having a significant educational advantage. (Not a unique advantage, Europe and Japan also have good stories here, but China is not as well off on this time frame per capita.) I don't expect the broad direction of that curve to change anytime soon.
List the most popular licences and have an "Other" option. Simple.
Despite being one of the people quoted in here, I especially like Larry Hitchon's advice to use paper lists.

200+ years ago, the USA was formed with paper and pen. A country was created via paper! (OK, and a few bullets...)

Don't forget the value of simple tools. Not everything has to be a Google Doc, or in a task management app.
100 million+ page views per day, 950TB streaming video - just 1 adult website
Wow. I obviously knew adult websites were pretty big, but the stats are pretty astounding. The number 1 site is 3x CNN or ESPN....
Face and Eye Detection in OpenCV
Facebook Timeline: love, hate ... and creativity
If I lose, my logic is: "oh, I can't be good at this? Fine, I'll be good at this! <goes back to work>"
A recursive fibonacci implementation in DCPU-16 assembly
Completion of London’s much anticipated Shard building is in sight
Twelve years ago, the idea for The Shard was born – scribbled on the back of a postcard in a restaurant in Berlin.
Now, 11,000 panes of glass later and after years of planning and construction, this impressive 1,017 ft. building is up and running, thanks to the efforts of 1,300 workers from all over the world.
Bughouse is the greatest variant ever, closely followed by Kriegspiel - the other extreme. I would play constantly and had a fairly high bughouse rating (in New York state at least) back in mid 1990's.
It's not possible to distribute GPLed software on all platforms, which it the hitch for many of my customers.
That's one piece. The other huge issue is that a Chinese worker can produce an iPad for less than a robot while an American worker costs more. A lean supply chain looks great on the books, but it's also a huge bet that nothing bad happens. However, add flexible enough automation like say having 500,000 humans and you are far less dependent on any one customer so you can ramp up and down vary quickly. Which both reduces the need for a large supply chain and cuts the response time to changing market conditions.
nerd crushing so hard this team and their work.
Maybe. At the very least, shoes are a separate category on that chart. One rolex makes up for a ton of less expensive accessories.

I think it's more like, the vast majority of clothes are socks, underwear, jeans and t-shirts. Simple, everyday stuff that wears out. I'd bet the sales of this stuff pretty much equals out. However, there's a layer of "nice" clothes. mens stuff is more expensive, but lasts and is fashionable longer. Suits vs dresses might be a good example.

I'd also guess men are spending more on clothes than they have historically.
Oh. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks :P
gokgs.com was a great place to hang out in to play some games, if you can make online friends.
Rengo is also easier to get set up online. ^_^ But it certainly is crazy!
And also wrong. My wife left academia from philosophy and is pulling in north of 100k right now doing project management stuff. She got there within 3 years, though we're in NYC so it's easier to get more cash here. It was a hard to transition, most employers don't know what to do with a humanities degree, but she was able to do it. A programmer coworker of mine also worked in philosophy, and transitioned to programming and is doing rather well for himself. He did this over the past few years, so long after computer science was well established. Transitioning out of humanities academia into non-academic jobs is difficult, much harder than for those in the sciences, but it's quite doable
Sheldon can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
Here's something that easily woke me up after a day of coding:

It's a card game called SET - here are the rules: http://www.setgame.com/set/rules_set.htm

It's for 2+ players, and it's all about how quickly you can find the set in 12 cards on the table. Finding set is not so easy, read about it in the rules.
Sometimes. The description really means "up to 75%" - so they can send you on that many, although they may not.

The more PSEs we hire, though, the more we can keep people closer to a home region. So this situation improves itself as we grow.
Doubtful, or a lot of consumer demands are technically extortion. In particular, the model jury rules for extortion tend to refer specifically to property (usually money).
Follow-up Case Study to "Need For Speed" Ad CTRs
Could we get 20 more "DCPU-16" submissions? Sure can't get enough of them.
I think it depends on the team dynamic. If he were technical it would likely be different. Don't think there's a "list of things to do" but communication, mutual respect, and being absolutely driven animals does help.
Check out his Design Patterns book on Singletons. It's a little more thorough and has a different focus.
100 Reasons to Jailbreak your iPhone: Apple Needs to Watch This Video
Who is the marketplace for these new crowdfunded startups?
They are restrictive: It is impossible to release Apple Mac Appstore or iOS Appstore with them even if you release your source, as the binaries can't even have DRM on them even if you're giving away the source.

The license needs changing. It isn't protecting anyone with the requirement that the binary that someone gets isn't DRMed. There are many software channels (Apple, Xbox, Sony/PS3, Nintendo, just to name a couple big names) that don't have a DRM free way to run them.
Presumably the 1.5gb facebook binary is deployed as a daemon listening on port 80. Seems unlikely that they are cgi-ing a new process for each request.
Actually, the people who make the McDonalds burgers do count as manufacturers, since the burgers are made offsite and only warmed up at the restaurant. But it is stupid that doing the same thing in different places could change something from a service to an manufacturing job.
Our office has been on a big Banagrams kick, I get pretty similar mind recharging benefits.
Show HN: BuddyMeme - Create Memes of Your Facebook Friends
Couldn't the factory have hired temporary/seasonal workers?I know that only helps for these cases where you know something about the demand ahead of time though.
For those interested on well documented complements to this, don't forget to check the "Do the math" blog: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
Valentine’s Day celebrations across the world
Grocery spending versus restaurant/ deli spending stands out to me: 8.6% on Groceries vs. 5.7% on some version of eating out.

In a better scenario, groceries, being cheaper and generally healthier than food "eaten out" would make up a bigger percentage of total food spend.

That said, as a 20something single guy, I don't remember the last time I went to a grocery store and i think i manage my money pretty well.

I'd like to see these food spend #s (and the rest of these #s) broken down for income levels and other demographics
Udacity Talks A Huge Game
WIPO Defies UN Sanctions To Give Computers To North Korea
It seems to me that there is currently a gap in funding options between "sign away all of the company for buckets of cash (that you need to spend now)" and "invest all of your own money and grow slowly because you're cash starved".

I know that angel funding can bridge some of that, but doesn't JOBS create an opportunity to raise smaller amounts of money on better terms so you can build a more sustainable company and still retain a lot of ownership?

This seems like Kickstarter on a grander scale, and Kickstarter has made a lot of interesting business ideas newly viable.
What about negative anecdotes? Has anyone here regretted his or her decision to leave academia? Particularly, have you found the work less rewarding or interesting?

I ask as a grad student with a background in chemical engineering. I’ve known two professors who’ve done the inverse – industry to academia – and they’ve provided convincing stories for academia. In both cases they found academic research (in engineering and the physical sciences) to be more interesting and personally rewarding than industry.

Is the situation different in software and related industries?

I ask, as I’ve been considering transitioning to such a career myself after grad school (my research is in computational modeling and simulation). My biggest fear is that I’ll find myself in a job that I find boring and will regret my decision. Doubly so, as such a career transition will make it very difficult to reenter my academic field.
A Pledge: Building a new start-up every 30 days
See I don't mean to be defensive here, but it's the first post. Might not be too constructive knowledge-wise, but it would be appreciated if you could point out the mistakes politely. I guess this is what this forum is about. I agree the topic name is named inappropriately, would be corrected soon.
I don't think "This will probably get downvoted" is necessarily a fish for guilt.

To me, what it signals is that the commenter is aware of the unpopularity of the idea. They've given it a second consideration and still believe in it. By saying so, they're asking the reader to also give it a second consideration.

It's saying "this is more than a kneejerk reaction for me, please respond with more than a kneejerk reaction".
Cheers Tyler :D Hope everyone enjoys it.
Correct. The retail price of imported consumer electronics in brazil is literally double that of the U.S.
Just saw the AT&T's "You Will" campaign. Wow, it's amazing how far we moved in such a small amount of time. Almost everything in that commercial was spot on and only a few was a little off (who uses a fax machine or a pay phone?). I'm pretty sure when those commercials were running (I was about 8) that they seemed impossible or expense. Now that it reality, not only did it seemed the logical step, but impossible to live without. I mean, can you really imagine a world without inexpensive wireless technology?

This is the reason why these futuristic videos are so important. To get everyone an inspiring glimpse into the future be it AT&T or Google. Of course AT&T didn't deliver all of these products. They did spur up the debate and got folks working towards that direction.

Technology is great that way. We are a global community and open source is a godsend. I'm sure the first iteration of the glasses will not be that great but it does get better. That's the great thing about building things, you can always learn from your mistakes (or in a lot of cases, lack of knowledge).
1,000,000 Daily Users and No Cache
That's the first sensible and ethical suggestion in this thread.
Evolving Database Design and Architecture: Patterns and Practices
I can understand some of the logic but it sounds like someone is afriad of competation. Startups like ours (I4 exchange ) will be able to get the funding and support we have lacked so far due to limited exposure to investors.
Bicycle Blenders Make Smoothies On The Go
I'm learning Scheme by myselfy using "The Little Schemer". Do you think something like this would be a good tool for a beginner like me, or would it be confusing?
Ryan Funduk: Our Culture of Exclusion
sounds like a fun game.

recently i have been using a desktop widget from stretchclock.com to remind me to get up every hour and stretch.
While I agree there is no speed limit, there needs to be some quality assurance right?
Peter Thiel is awesome. This is a long read, but well worth it.
PinRocket, The Pinterest search engine.
I'd love to release source, and USE gpl software, and even make a unsigned binary available that if you could hack your own hardware to run, you could. But even if I did, the GPL would prevent me from releasing said software using GPLed libraries, as the actual binary they get has to be trivially copyable. That's crap. That's restrictive. Why can't I supply you with an alternative binary on a website just like I can with the source?

Restrictive isn't hate. It's a description. GPL licensed code is useless code to people who develop for top tier gaming platforms other than the PC.
How To Count A Billion Objects Using Only 1.5KB Of Memory [Probabilistically]
I that before or after you gave him the know-how and IP to do so? </snark>