skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies change. CEOs leave. For example, the thing that made Fannie Mae succeed (being able to manage risk) was abandoned with the loosening of the credit markets in 1999 and beyond.

Discipline is hard and success in the past gives you a false feeling of security. Interestingly enough, this is covered in the book, but a dismissive blogosphere article isn't going to admit that.
The solution is to build new towers without guy-wires.

To operate a communications tower in the US, you need a permit from the FCC. To get a permit or renew a permit from the FCC, you have to file an Environmental Impact Statement. Based on this study, it will likely no longer be possible to claim that a tower with guy-wires has no significant impacts. This means towers without guy-wires will likely be the preferred alternative in an EIS, and what you will have to build if you want a new permit. To renew a permit, you will likely have to have blinking lights, or at least have a very convincing reason for not using them in your EIS.

Also, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, with a few exceptions, outlaws all take of migratory birds. That will likely also come into play.

Activism and lawsuits may speed up the process, but assuming this study is replicated by future studies, the wheels have already started turning.
It is sad that a large percentage of people who seek common interests can be so dark to each other. Why does disrespect and self pride seem, at least in the nerd culture today, to be tolerated by so many? I have been in environments where it was cool to be a bully but where the stereotypical computer scientist are known to have been bullied at some point in his/her own life, I am surprised to find such negativity here. I know I shoot myself in the foot when I decide to read the comments from the feeds but maybe I am just looking for a bit of chat and thoughts from fellow people who share my eagerness. I look for guidance and influence from people like the regular viewers on HN.

You do not know it all. You started from somewhere. Your opinion is an opinion. If you are more fortunate in your experience or knowledge then the contributor above you, do good with it. These logical statements above should be a mantra before submitting a comment anywhere online. The web can not be dictated or controlled but a common culture and mass influence can make it a happier place within its communities.
I would recommend looking at rooms/shares and finding a furnished sublet. There are a lot of those at a reasonable price, and that's a much better option when you know you'll be moving in a few months. I tried this and it worked really well for me.
How do you feel that putting a link to the Freakanomics article doesn't provide perspective on this statement:

"Much of the entrepreneur blogosphere would go up in a puff of smoke if people would simply read the business books that stand the test of time."

I think it does and is appropriate. I've been around long enough to have read "In search of Excellence" which Levitt refers to this way "These business books are mostly backward-looking".

What the books that are backward looking don't reveal is the companies that follow the same practices that have failed. There is never any data on that.
Nelson Mandela indulged in books: http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/17/nelson-mandela-con...
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So to be clear, a man writes a book purporting to identify the characteristics and behaviors that make companies great. He calls out some number of such great companies and shows how they all fit into his analysis. Said companies go on to do objectively less than great, and someone calling that out is engaging in FUD? Interesting.

In my opinion Jim Collins has made a career on identifying success in hindsight, plunging headlong into a classic case of survivorship bias in order to divine the root causes of these successes, and then publishing his analysis. Can you point me to anything he has written that is predictive instead of simply retrospective? Can you actually claim that there aren't likely to be hundreds of businesses that exhibit all the traits that make businesses 'great' and yet failed?
What's annoying to me is not that companies choose jurisdictions based on taxes, but that they get away with playing shell games to fake moving between jurisdictions entirely on paper, which also gives them an advantage over smaller companies and individuals that can't do that.

I lived in California for some years. If it were possible for me to open a P.O. box (or even rent a small office) in Reno, book all my non-California-sourced income (e.g. AdSense) to the Reno P.O. box, and avoid California taxes, maybe I would've. But that's not legal; my attempt to produce a fake domicile in Nevada for tax purposes when I clearly lived ~11 months of the year in California would be correctly judged a sham. If I wanted to claim I'd moved to Reno for tax purposes, I'd have to actually move to Reno in real life, too. Yet Apple can do effectively do that, opening a sham office where no work is done, solely to dodge taxes, because the rules for individuals when it comes to those kinds of fake domiciles are much stricter than the rules for corporations are.

If Apple actually moved its main operations and employees from Cupertino to Reno for tax reasons, that would be another matter entirely, and a more honest example of jurisdictional competition.
You dont't have to actually answer the question. Use a secret code word. If Apple will let you, use the same code word for all three answers.

In fact that's even more secure because a person who knows you well might know the answer to a question about you. Might not be able to guess what is essentially a second password.
Nice, this reminds me a bit of the recent Lua integration in redis.
"What can you be the best in the world at? "

Ridiculous and idealistic. Is Porsche the best sports car or the best selling sports car? Is Avis the best car rental company and on what metric? Is Burger King the best fast food? What is the definition of best? Best selling? Most profitable? Highest quality?
Interesting viewpoint. Can you expand on it a little bit though? How does porn do each of the things you listed?
In private industry, you promoted and seen a valuable if you make money for the company. In the government, you are promoted and seen as a power player if you spend more money. There are lots of super-competitive A-types in govt work who will spend a million dollars just to get another feather in their programs hat.
How do you feel that putting a link to the Freakanomics article doesn't provide perspective on this statement:
"Much of the entrepreneur blogosphere would go up in a puff of smoke if people would simply read the business books that stand the test of time."

I think it does and is appropriate.

I don't think it does.

The problem of business books being mostly backward-looking is interesting, but completely orthogonal to the question of whether many lessons written about in blog posts have already been covered by classic business books.
Art is whatever the janitor decides not to to throw in the trashcan. In other words, it have to be beautiful. It have to be something that an everyman want to buy. It does not matter what kind of meaning an artist put into a painting.

Erotica is art because it's beautiful. Sex stories, however explicit, is beautiful. Hentai are often beautiful because they are drawn by artists who care about beauty.

Porn are usually not beautiful. They have ugly characters and they are often completely forgettable.
Porn is just a method for physiological release

I don't think that holds true for everyone. My observation is that some people are primarily seeking emotional release, which may or may not lead to or involve "physiological release". It seems to me that emotional appeal is a large factor in much of what we call art.
And lot of stuff we use routinely today, like video streaming, on-demand content distribution, secure pay-gates and various subscription models were if not created at least stress tested and used by porn ten years ago, maybe even before that. Who knows whether there would be youtube if there were porn in the 90s.
I always used to charge devices while I slept (and the plug is pretty close to my bed). Then a few weeks ago my MacBook magsafe adapter literally burnt through the insulating material and the metal wires. Fortunately it happened during the day so I could react to it, but needless to say I won't be charging anything over night again!
I had one of these and the touchscreen on my phone while charging was indeed unusable, as he warns can happen. I almost wrote off the phone as broken before I realized what was causing the problem...
So are you impressed with the phone itself or the OS? I get the feeling that all this interest in WP7 started because people really like the phone. WP7.5 has been around for at least 6 months, and style wise its the same as it was late 2010. If Nokia didn't make a nicely designed phone, WP7 would still be as little talked about as it was before and with just as little interest. I agree with Joshua Topolsky that a lot more people would be interested in it if it had ICS on that phone.
In practice, the "SFW" standards on 4chan are quite lax. Case in point: /g/ (the technology board) and /v/ (the video games board).

I'd think twice before browsing either of those boards at work.
12 TV Shows Every Entrepreneur Should Watch
This is nice and all, but does anyone really want an ingame experience where only a tiny portion of the centre of the screen is in focus?

The nicer parts of shading are from the mods that he is using (in modified form), http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/120261-125-glsl-shaders-... and http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/940974-125sonic-ethers-u...
Note that welfare benefits can cancel out a lot of taxes and restore the progressive effect.
Errrr, If that's true then it's astonishingly unacceptable. (I mean - official chargers should never be dangerous.)
Rather than Jim Collins, I'd vote for Michael Porter as the management guru to read. His idea of generic strategies is a great way to deal with this.
Essentially he says there are 3 generic strategies - cost leadership, differentiation, and focus (market segmentation), and that you need to pick one and follow it 100%. Doing that really can focus the company on what needs to be done now and what is irrelevant to your success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies
This is a start: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/05/10-usb-power-outlet-leave...
Jobs is dead.
That's a different beast. Not that there isn't TV movies and books that are a waste of time, but in general people who read and watch the right movies become quite a bit wiser. Porn is always the same. Frankly, if you 've read De Sade your knowledge of the genre is complete. In contrast to good culture, porn is addictive like a drug: it doesn't get you anywhere.
Your tax dollars don't pay for that. The government onflatess the currency via borrowing, so everyone's dollars pay for that.
I think this quote captures his implied response to your point:

»for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued.

Wikipedia, Google, et al are innovations in the way the stock market or ECN were - undeniable leaps forward in the factors of production, i.e. allowing tangible innovation to happen.

These innovations, the latter in capital and former in information, hold their social value in the tangible progress they enable. What is enabled has not materialised with the force that was expected.

This will be an unpopular point on HackerNews, but most people live in the tangible world. That is why the iPhone and iPad have propelled Apple so far, so fast - it is a clear manifestation of tangible technological progress. The author laments that these factors of innovation are getting so much attention intrinsically at the expense of follow-on, arguably harder, tangible innovation.
So to be clear, a man writes a book purporting to identify the characteristics and behaviors that make companies great. He calls out some number of such great companies and shows how they all fit into his analysis. Said companies go on to do objectively less than great, and someone calling that out is engaging in FUD? Interesting.

Nothing in the article actually shows that the Hedgehog concept is bad or wasn't a factor in these companies' past success. It's little more than a glib, cocktail party-sized nugget of contrarianism with no real substance. That's why I dismissed it as FUD.

In my opinion Jim Collins has made a career on identifying success in hindsight, plunging headlong into a classic case of survivorship bias in order to divine the root causes of these successes, and then publishing his analysis. Can you point me to anything he has written that is predictive instead of simply retrospective?

That's the whole point: it's not predictive, it's retrospective.

I said the article you linked to is FUD not because I'm a Jim Collins or business book industry apologist, but because the article attacks a strawman, namely that the book claimed that companies' past success implies that they will always be successful. It'd be great if one could prove business success by induction, but it doesn't work that way. This article doesn't even attempt to address whether or not the failed companies it mentioned continued to use the concept described in the book.
This Blog is Like Hacker News and YouTube Combined
I would not be surprised that most USB devices will actually survive that without any damage. It's usually not possible to use USB's roughly 5V directly (because it's not actually reasonably exact 5V and modern logic often uses lower voltages) and thus most devices contain some kind of switchmode power supply (linear regulators essentially cannot be used due to strict input current requirements of USB specification) that tends to be designed to work up to input voltages of tens of volts.
Try Netscape Navigator.
That's really not the reason short term and long term are taxed differently. It's based on a perceived notion that we want to reward long term investment as a preferable activity over shorter term speculation.
Well, I don't think there's any point in discussing this. We're obviously not going to change our opinions about it.

But I'd like to say that personally, I prefer to let women decide for themselves what degrades them, instead of taking the position that I know best, and considering that many women nowadays watch porn (1 in 3 porn viewers, according to Nielsen), I'm not sure if they feel that way.
The iPhone UI looks a lot like an updated Palm Tungsten T3, I'm not sure how innovative it actually was.
Yes, but too single-minded of a focus can lead to opportunity blindness. Daily pivots are bad. Never pivoting is bad. Building a successful startup is highly nuanced.
That's silly. The government does lots of inflation adjustments andbracketing and phaseouts in financial programs already. And "long term" starts at two years, where inflation is just barely relevant.
Sure, but have you analysed these cases to see that is what happened or are you just saying that happened because they went on to do poorly? People have, for ages, been purporting to identify the secrets to success and sell you something that will allow you to predict the future/replicate the winners, and yet it is still rare. You could claim it is because it is hard and success breeds hubris, both of which are likely to be true, but it could also be because Jim Collins, like others before him, has not stumbled upon the secret to being great and found a way to distill it into a book or a simplistic maxim that actually works.
That's kind of BS. Porn is popular and addictive, and the internet is a huge megaphone, that doesn't make it respectable, the same way that pooping is not a respectable genre, despite the huge popularity of the act.
I just got a Galaxy Nexus a couple days ago, and my first thought after turning it on was that I wasn't sure where I could touch to do things. They try to be so slick with the UI that it's hard to see the boundaries between UI elements some times, especially with editable text fields, which are just a bottom border---the background color isn't different and there are no other borders. Another example is going back in applications. There's the back button, which takes you to where you previously were, but then there's another button that seems to take you to the parent menu (at least in the Play store, not sure if it's true in all apps). The latter is easy to miss. I didn't notice it the first few times I opened the Play store, because the back button is the application icon. All they do is add a tiny grey arrow next to the application icon when you can use it to go to the parent screen.

I'm used to it now, but it can probably be improved by installing an aftermarket firmware like CyanogenMod. I haven't looked into it.
Because it's too easy and does not lift you up (does lift your junk tho)
Exactly. And this extends down to the personal level. Elizabeth Warren, a millionaire Senatorial candidate who supports the Buffet Rule, nevertheless did not voluntary pay a higher tax rate:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/04/20/warren_...

I think a number of people reading the article have the tacit impression that if the government taxed the money from Apple, that they would somehow benefit to a greater extent. But given that the US Government spends $11.5 billion more per day[1] than it receives in taxes, even seizing all of Apple's worldwide profits would just be a drop in the bucket.

A separate question is why the New York Times has declared war on Apple. It looks like with the departure of Steve Jobs, the Times has started to treat Apple with the hostility normally reserved for Exxon, what with this article and the iEconomy series of articles. It would be interesting for a large technology company to turn the lens on many of the Times' own abusive practices, or the Times journalists' entitlement complex. It would be particularly interesting to look at the tax status of the pensions[2] which rather well-paid reporters like Charles Duhigg and David Kocienewski wish to keep receiving.

[1] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/19/new-york-times-vide...
If governments wanted to solve this problem, they could do so trivially by setting wealth taxes on the human owners of those corporations
Personally I think I'll wait for the movie adaptation.
I remember reading about a study that showed looking at boobs raised men's self esteem. There is also a study that showed that apes (or monkeys or some animal like that) likes to pay for porn (ape/monkey porn of course).

Also the sex drive is quite important for the human species. It's a huge motivator.
I assure you if I would paint something, it wouldn't be very beautiful either. Does that show that paintings are not art?
Takeaway:

"... the tallest 2 percent of the towers accounted
for 71 percent of the mortalities."
Boeing moved less than 1 percent of their employees to Chicago.
I agree entirely. Nonetheless, here's an interesting story about someone being killed by 9 volts: http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
Claimed, thanks!
You can say the same about any art. Is a still life of fruit subject to such complex valuation?
Sure, if we stop trying to tax, we will stop failing. But that doesn't actually help.
These cheap pay-as-you-go phones are subsidised by the network--normally, you have to buy at least a £10 topup to get it, and if you look at the website of a phone shop like Carphone Warehouse, you'll find the exact same phone listed at different prices on different networks.

Of course, once you actually go into the shop and buy it, you find it's the same (unlocked) handset. But because you bought it on, say, O2 instead of Orange, you get it cheaper.
Tape.

Tape is a sign of bad design that can be seen a mile away. The cans on the caps underneath are being kept away from the board with tape.

That and the bare lead WTF in it.

That and it's that retarded and dangerous 2-pin design (no ground/earth) that people in the US rely on.
Top 100 tags and contributors on StackOverflow 
It is amazing that john skeet answered 8542 C# questions on stackoverflow.

http://hackinghabits.com/2012/04/28/top-100-tags-and-contributors-on-stackoverflow/
Sex drive is the way evolution works. Porn usually results in masturbation not evolution.
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Who's in for a HN meetup this long weekend?
The OS, it's absolutely solid. I was using the 710; which isn't nearly as impressive hardware as the 800/900 (I've yet to see one in person).

I should note that Silverlight is equally pleasant to work with, can't say the same for Android's SDK.
but obama said he will revive Jobs
Really nice implementation, excellent work guys.
I think a pretty great sandbox game could be made out of this effect alone.
Agreed. The article is definitely an oversimplification. Sure, anything with informational or entertainment value can be optimised, so to speak. Fast food optimises for taste at the expense of balanced nutrition, and so on. But just because a thing can be optimised does not mean it’s not also subtle and nuanced. Besides, pornography does not work well in the analogy: the variety in human sexual tastes reduces its vulnerability to optimisation.

The fact that there is a significant movement toward legitimacy and depth in pornography is a testament to that fact. And I have considerable respect for sites that encourage amateur content, in the (perhaps naive) hope that it will encourage more realistic expectations among the sexually inexperienced.
Rich people can afford good accountants and lawyers. Tax avoidance[1] skirts the edge of tax evasion[2], but that's what the good accountants are for.

Putting different taxes on the owners of some corporation just means that no-one owns the corporation and that everyone is an employee.

[1] Avoidance is legally using loopholes to reduce a tax bill.

[2] Evasion is illegally using loopholes, or just plain not paying tax.
Don't complain that others provide the same service at lower cost, try to innovate and outcompete them.

This is assuming that others are providing the exact same services for lesser cost. Right now on the front page of HN there is a story about a cheap iPod charger that can burn your house down or kill you because of the corner cutting done to make it so cheap.
Right, but they may not be the most effective means to do so. If I mow your lawn, then break into your house to steal $20, I might justify that on the grounds that your mowed lawn is worth $20. But in most sensible economic relationships, we do things in the opposite order: figure out if the service is worth the cost, and then perform it in exchange for payment.