skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists."

A better way to put this is to say that the starting point of competitive strategy is to start with a sustainable competitive advantage. "Competition Demystified" by value investing guru Bruce Greenwald covers this point in its first chapter (available free on Google Books -- http://books.google.com/books?id=NZYuAyW8M-sC&printsec=f... and summarized by me in a series on political strategy, where the concept also applies -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-primer-strategy and with an important diagram here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/the-first-step-in-strategy)

Finding a sustainable competitive advantage doesn't require creativity, so Brooks's essay went astray at that point. But having a sustainable competitive advantage gives you the local monopoly he alludes to that allows you to avoid competing and, in business, charge higher margins without getting stuck competing on price and efficiency.

I highly recommend "Competition Demystified" to understand strategy.
That would be quite cool , even if not I hope they provide a command line tool.

The steam GUI always feels sluggish to me.

'steam offers -genre=fps -orderby=price'

'steam buy halflife3 -cc=saved'

'steam install -all'

'steam showfriends -online'

'steam playwith myfriend'
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I've got two things to say on this.

1) I'm not that surprised. For example, I know that half the recruiters who call me are asking about positions for which I'm blatantly unqualified and which simply don't appeal to me. When I've carried through to an interview, this often becomes abundantly clear to both sides.

2) If you're only even interviewing such a tiny fraction of the many, many applicants you hear from, you simply don't get to claim there's an engineer shortage. There's a shortage of engineers you like.

If you only hire the top 1% of applicants, you will never hire more than 1% of the applicant pool... no matter how large it is. You'll just get the vast majority of the engineering population pissed-off at your hiring practices because you reject 99 resumes for every 1 you offer to while complaining of a shortage.
Does anyone have any idea how much traffic Bing gets from their integration in the facebook search?

Would be interesting to know on what scale they are already capturing this type of intent & relevance search traffic. I'm guessing from the fact they integrated web search back in 2008, and it's not been made more prominent since, not a huge amount.
Yes, the style inspector is vertical for exactly the reason you cite. We're also working on a better solution so that it doesn't cause issues with responsive designs.

Firebug is still actively maintained and continues to have new releases and improvements. Firebug 1.10 (currently in alpha), for example, is now restartless and has less impact on page performance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing
There is no evidence that any individual, oligarchy, or organization is driving the country towards a dictatorship. The truth is actually quite a bit scarier - it's the massive, complex, screeching, unstoppable human system that happened to have evolved a set of incentives that have nothing to do with dictatorship but drive the country towards one anyway.

The congressmen are concerned by the next election, and the primary concern that currently drives american voters is the economy. So they're working to protect the intellectual property since it's pretty much the only thing we produce. That's a tiny assault on the constitution. The president is terrified of another terrorist attack because it will probably mean the end of his administration. So he has massive incentives to expand the rights of security organizations. That's a tiny assault on the constitution. The mayors are concerned with looking tough on crime, so they incentivize the police officers to stretch the concept of probably cause to clean up the streets. That's a tiny assault on the constitution from the other side, the municipalities.

This goes on, and on. If we had a person or an organization to take a stand against, things would have been much easier. But how do you take a stand against a massive system that includes every commercial organization, individual, municipality, and state and federal agency in the country?

Ultimately, a small group citizens concerned about individual freedoms cannot fight a massive system head on. There isn't enough energy or resources for dealing with millions of little issues one by one. The only way to make a difference is change the minds of the electorate in a scalable way. We haven't figured out a way to do that yet, because the right idea, the right meme that resonates with the majority of the populace hasn't been feed. This is why things may seem hopeless. But as we've grown to appreciate, this can change in a matter of days.

TL;DR: freedom needs a viral YouTube video.
I just want a newsfeed that isn't useless =\. These graphs are nice, but there seems to be higher priority things to be fixing.
ShopLocket is teh awesome. I can't wait for if/when they add search & browse functionality to the site. It'll be like a beautiful, payment-enabled alternative to Craigslist. Can't wait!
Xonotic: Quake 1 Game, or why a company should open source it's code
I love the weekly summary report. "The Week That Was" and "The Week to Come". Really useful!
I don't think this post is valuable if you take it to the extreme. Obviously hiring a private chef, or limo service for a small startup is not a good idea and you will quickly run out of money. However, if you are smart with your money. Know how much runway you have, and can easily send off simpler tasks to things like Mechanical turk, etc. You can focus on what really matters... building a great product that people actually want to use.
Congrats to Michael and the hard working folks at Socialcam, who fully deserve their success. I've been using it since V1 and it continues to be one of my most used apps.

Also kudos to them for not over-associating their company as the Instagram for video, which must have been tempting recently. While that is one description, Socialcam seems to have its own original vision and is clearly chasing it with gusto.
"Supposedly, co-founder and CEO Katherine Hague was part of that group herself."

Really, "supposedly"? TC: How about "CEO Katherine Hague says she was part of that group herself."

I know it must get tiring hearing dubious founding stories, but come on.
VMware confirms ESX source code had been stolen and published
> All this supposed stability doesn't seem to be reflected in a growing number of desktop products for Linux

You're shifting the goal posts. Nobody was claiming that ABI stability would lead to an increase in products, I was replying to you claiming ABI instability as a significant obstacle. As for the number of binary-distributed desktop products for Linux not having grown lately, I think you're completely wrong on that: See the Humble Bundle games.

And the userbase being so much smaller is, again, why Steam for Linux is such a big deal: It's an extension to a platform publishers are already familiar with, which makes it easier than ever for them to add the platform.

On top of that, Steam is more than just a distribution platform, it's also an SDK for things like multiplayer lobbies, meta-game systems like achievements and savegame sync. Dozens of titles are using that SDK now, and getting it ported to Linux maikes Steam for Linux also an important middleware port.
It would have been helpful if you had read the legislation we're commenting on before forming an opinion about me based on my position on that legislation.
You neglect to mention why Rand opposed altruism and considered it inherently immoral: because it means putting other people above oneself and therefore self-sacrificing for others.
They can always use cs5 and below..
That is exactly what parent said. spherical geometry is locally Euclidean but not globally Euclidean. (It is a manifold).
I take it you think one should donate to charity anonymously, but humblebrags are ok? ;)

I just wanted to add that I actually think wealth and investment accomplishments are somewhat relevant in this discussion, regarding your comment on fallacies. Especially given jimmyvanhalen's very strong opinions on what "a VCs job" is, what a16z "should" do, and his confused ending statement on that what they did would be fine by him if they did... Exactly what they are doing.

Don't you agree?
Both things are competition. One is competing with established rules while the other is competing creating or changing the rules.
I sold something! And I never sell anything! Go ShopLocket and go Toronto!!
I live in Japan 1/2 time. Apparently, when a driver here hits a pedestrian or cyclist, he's got a lot of explaining to do.

As a result, the drivers are so attentive that it is not at all unusual on reasonably busy secondary routes to see a mother pedaling her bicycle with an infant in the basket and another small child following behind on a kids bike.

And like most parents, we let our son walk to school by himself from about 2d grade along a route where he had to cross some fairly major 4 lane streets.
Sorry, but that's simply not true. I used to maintain the Linux port of adventure game studio (among other projects). Even when I statically linked all dependencies it often wouldn't run on one of the Linux distributions because of changes in glibc or how x libraries had been compiled on that platform.

Ask Ryan C. Gordon (icculus) what he thinks of those supposedly stable ABIs. Ask nVidia and AMD users about how thrilled they are to have to get new drivers every time the Xorg ABI changes.

I've been developing on Unix and Linux platforms for almost fifteen years now. Linux distributions (and the kernel) still don't have stable interfaces. The kind that lets users run games and applications made 10 years ago on other platforms while Linux distros some times can't use binaries from just a few years ago.
Thanks for the reply. I've thought about this sort of thing a lot. I made a super-basic personal web app a few years ago for recording the movies I've watched and keeping a queue of movies I want to watch. I never added multiuser support or rating, but I gave ratings a lot of thought. My main problem is that a lot of words end up being tied together semantically: "good," "enjoyable," etc. really just end up meaning personal preference. I experimented with the whole gamut of ratings: from the most granular (rating camerawork, acting, humor, effects, etc.) to the least granular ("good" or "not good").

Should "quality" be affected by your film preferences, or is it meant to be an objective (and testable) hypothesis about what some group of people (critics, film bloggers, etc.) would report? If the latter, then I think the quality/rewatchability metric potentially misses information about "first viewing enjoyability," which is what I personally think is much more important than rewatchability.

In the end, I still have trouble with the "quality" metric. If it's meant to be objective, why use user input rather than some aggregation of real data (e.g. Metacritic or Rottentomatoes)? If "quality" is meant to be subjective, then it doesn't seem much different than "first viewing enjoyability," since "enjoyability" and "personal opinion of quality" seem by definition equivalent.
Actually, I sold a domain name. Two firsts for me.
Survey isnt really a great way to form a scientific opinion. The presence of disagreement is relevant. But majority vote is not.
Ask HN: Code worth reading
I just graduated with a degree in CS, my school only taught me Java. I'd like to broaden myself first by learning C deeply.

Can anyone suggest any good (C?) code to learn from? Specifically, I would like code that doesn't deal with GUI stuff, and possibly related to networking/os internals. Hopefully something less idiosyncratic than the Linux kernel, because I'm not smart enough to grok any of that really.
That's true, but there isn't really much argument for that position in her work (certainly not argument I found convincing). It's almost assuming the consequent: you prove that putting your own good above collective good is moral because the alternative would be putting collective good above your own good. Well, yes, that's definitionally true. But what's wrong with putting collective good above any one individual's good (including your own)?

Her answer wasn't the consequentialist one that Adam Smith and other market-economy defenders proposed: that self-interest produces the best overall outcome. It was instead somehow more metaphysical, that somehow self-interest is the highest good, and putting any other goods above one's own good is corrupting the greatest good. I see it as a kind of take off on Nietzsche's master-morality/slave-morality dichotomy, except, unlike Nietzsche, she ties it to the free market and commerce. (Nietzsche believed in great people putting their own self-development ahead of the masses, in the elitist sense that if you're better than everyone, you should focus on your own development first... but he considered business and money-making to be a dirty, mass occupation that in no way qualified as "great" or "elite".)
Alright - It's nice to know that Facebook has an industrial strength login system. Nobody would know that unless, like here, someone like you chimed in to mention it. (And thanks for that)

My point was more that - as a user you should not expect a site like Facebook (or Twitter or FourSquare) to spend as much time firming up their login system as you would your bank.

The fact that you actually do so is a nice bonus. But users would be well-served by not expecting the same level of attention to security from social sites and treat them accordingly.

(And sorry if I came off as being unfair to Facebook. I meant my comment to apply to that genre of sites in general)
You Made Your Choice. You Won’t Use Google Drive.
You're right that they're different, but I think they probably use the same CS concepts, which is why we keep seeing the see-saw between thick and thin clients. Keep in mind that the thin-client trend that we saw in the late-90s/early 2000s was driven by Sun, who was selling a ton of big iron in those days (you weren't serious if you didn't have an E4K), not because there was some grand new technology that required them for functionality or usability.
The worst thing we've learned is that all we have to say is "we followed standard procedures" and we get a free pass, regardless of how egregious standard procedures or implementations may be.
Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130

This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it.
But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did
something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding
nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.

Lessons from Yishan Wong, Director of Engineering at Facebook:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-determine-if-you-are-ready-to-join-a-startup

Working at a startup doesn't necessarily mean long hours,
but it does mean that it's not the hours that count, it's
the results. If you need to work 80 hours to get
something done by next week, you will need to do it
because otherwise the startup might die - in a large
company, this might just result in some mild consequences.
Startup life tends to go in bursts. You should be
comfortable with this.

Had Mark Zuckerberg left at 5pm in the middle of the news feed crunch, the company probably would have died before it was able to pay Sheryl Sandberg so much money to work 40 hours a week. Instead they coded 48 hours straight.
Amazing work!! Bravo Sir, just Bravo!!
That, or, we built one of the most (econ) productive decades in the history of the country on a foundation of hastily constructed and sloppily deployed technology that is riddled from stem to stern with security vulnerabilities and are now belatedly realizing that most nation states can rally together a group of local teenagers and use them to plausibly cause 9-10 figure damages; that, unlike when Wargames was filmed, in the world of 2012 it might actually be possible for a "hacker" halfway around the world to disrupt the electrical grid or shut down trading on an electronic market, and now we're all going to spend 4 years arguing about who's going to pay to fix it.

Unfortunately for the thread, what I just described is an economic and engineering problem, not the narrative arc of a Cory Doctorow novel; in other words, my comment is boring, and so surely scores lower than its parents on HN.
This makes me (even more) happy to work for an a16z portfolio company. Though in a long-term and indirect way, more of the product of my work will go toward a great cause.
I remember reading somewhere that the founder of this company initially pitched YC and was rejected. It's great to see her giving this a solid go, despite what must have undoubtedly appeared to be a setback at the time.

And I imagine she's feeling more than a little vindicated, now that her company just hit the front page of HN.
I almost went down that route. I interact with a lot of Automattic employees, and all of them are extremely talented.

I'm not sure what they get paid, but I tend to doubt it averages $160k, because if I were Automattic I'd probably pay relative to where the employee lives. And even though I'm sure most of them could command top dollar where they live for what they do, I'd bet in most parts of the world it comes out to less than $160k / year, because most parts of the world just are not as expensive as SF.

Also, I'm pretty sure they have thousands and thousands of servers. I have no idea how much that costs, but an uneducated guess would be that it's not as much as the $16 million in salaries you mention. So... $45 million - $32 million for salary and servers is indeed a hefty profit.
Can anyone explain a little more how it works?
I recommend reading the source code of Linux command line utilities and continuing with the kernel source code.
I think that one of the biggest advantages with software, is that you have access to the best distribution network, the internet, immediately. With hardware, and physical products in general, there's many hurdles (ie manufacturing, regulatory, shipping) to overcome before you can reach an end user. Furthermore, iteration is much, much slower with a physical product.

I think that that is one of the reasons we're seeing such a huge shift to the virtual world. Problems that used to be physical are gradually becoming software problems. A great example is how media is starting to largely be distributed through online channels, ie iTunes, or what Amazon is doing to retail. I recently started http://www.AudioNotch.com, a site that provides tinnitus therapy through online music. Before the proliferation of mp3 players, this problem would have had physical elements, I would have to mail CDs with the audio therapy for example, and users wouldn't be able to change their music easily. But now, due to pre-existing technology, I can do everything virtually.
Unfortunately, it looks like the medical devices industry will be one of the last to make this change.
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If 90+% of the shareholders voted to distribute that quarter's profits to charity - the equivalent scenario to the general partners so voting, no? - who would be firing the board?
Love || Hate fat's JSConf talk.
I'm mostly responding to your comment here.

"un-minifying or un-obfuscating JavaScript is not a trivial exercise by any means."

I think you mean that understanding obfuscated code is not trivial. Un-minifying is certainly trivial. There are tools to do it for you. There's no such thing as un-obfuscating, if you consider that you can't get the original comments or all the semantic naming back. So I'll concede that it's more difficult to read through this obfuscated code than the original. But the original comment in this long thread seems valid to me... that an entirely client side app puts you at much greater risk for cloning than an app with a significant portion of code in back-end, just because your javascript is out there for all to see.
Returns to VC and PE
How did you go about finding a printer and distributors?

Btw, love the book.
The President can do that, and when the American people realize that the issue the President is taking a stand on is far less important to them than the rest of the bill (for instance: far less important to them than the timely payment of wages to soldiers and their families), the people would simply punish the President and the President's party, removing them from office and replacing them with the very people the President is taking a stand against.

The check-and-balance situation at play here is why the notion of a "line item veto" is so controversial. The legislative branch of the government likes that the executive really has to mean it if it wants to shoot down a provision the legislature voted in favor of.

In this case, no part of the NDAA was interesting enough to not pay soldiers over. A previous comment on this thread is correct: the authority Internet people were freaking out about came not from the NDAA, but from the AUMF.
So We shouldn't have pat-downs for kids? this article reminds me of the saying "Security is only as good as your lowest hanging fruit".
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5 Principles for Building a Maintainable Web Application
>However, a single holographic video call on a one-square-metre portal would require a data rate of approximately 200 terabits per second

I guess they just wanted an actual number to say, but that's complete nonsense. It says nothing about compression, frame rate, resolution, or anything you'd actually need to know to make that calculation. Besides that, as far as I know, there is no way to actually record holograms in real time, much less portably.
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This is Katherine - Co-Founder of ShopLocket. Basically you go in and create a product (name, price description, photos) and connect any PayPal email address and you're ready to publish. We give you a link to where your product is hosted and you can also embed your product into any web page or blog post using the iFrame we provide. Note that more payment options are coming soon.
The man who hacked Hollywood
Sugar 50x more potent than total calories in explaining diabetes [video]
Tim O'Reilly's reflections on Obama's notion about government as a platform
Now that I think about it, even Apple's new campus symbolizes walled garden with utter perfection.
I don't know. If decentralisation of control, increased use of bottom up feedback, and less corruption to increase the innovation cycle is really the way forward, I don't feel that the current Chinese model of government has any significant advantages

Currently they rely on the rest of the world to find the best designs and practices, then cherry pick the good parts and make the whole thing efficient with centralised control. For them to pull -ahead- permanently they need to start fostering their own innovation. Capitalism and transparency have been shown as the best way so far to achieve this
Isabella had just learned about “stranger danger” at school

What? Does she use a time traveling bus to visit 1990? I thought schools had wised up to the fact that virtually all harm to children (excluding traffic fatalities) is brought people the child knows.

I hate the TSA, but I see the dark humor of fear mongering on both sides of this story: Americans' fear of terrorists and children's instilled fear of strangers. As a traveler, I'm tired of the former, and as an adult male who happens to like children and strikes up conversations with strangers, I'm tired of the latter.
7 programming myths — busted
We're selling Ladies Learning Code t-shirts [1]. And I also sold a Brazil guidebook. [2]

(NB: I was ShopLocket's first investor)

[1] http://ladieslearningcode.com/swag
[2] http://thingsidontwantanymore.tumblr.com/