skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows 7 seems to combine the relative modularity of XP with the ability to quickly access storage and transfer data, as evidenced by this informal benchmark:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236

I haven't taken a look yet, but it seems promising. Is this going to keep Windows competitive with OS X?
Looks like this is the original article:

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/4245/Startup-Tips-...
I would definitely recommend starting with some other text. I agree with everything you said about its turgidity.

However, I really think people should make their way through it anyway. Part of this is because most intro textbooks seem to gloss over it: I remember suddenly finding myself studying aggregate supply and aggregate demand in my intro macro course, and thinking "Wait...this doesn't make any sense. It's not at all like the equilibrium models we were just doing. And it directly contradicts what we were just taught about the interest rate being the equilibrium price in the loanable funds market." I can only speak to Mankiw's textbook, but the presentation seemed very disconnected.

The other reason I think people should read it is that there's a very widespread tendency in Internet discussions for people to say "Those dumbass Keynesians. They didn't get anything right" and then discount everything in the theory. But their arguments are usually based on a misunderstanding of what Keynes was really saying, and he has rebuttals and justifications in the book that would make you think a little harder about what you're trying to discredit.

I view Keynes as being a lot like Newtonian physics. There're edge cases where it's wrong; you certainly can't take it as a universal rule. But his basic insights were mostly right, and you need to understand them to understand the more precise models that came later.
You might be asking the wrong crowd. I think it's a bad idea. I'd invest in a couple startups and/or work with them part-time.
Hmm, its requiring me to register and login to read an article? I thought the major news sites were past this childish mentality.
Some examples of small businesses that aren't startups might help clarify the issue. When I visited a local small business advisory centre (in the hope of learn something to help my startup, before I understood this difference) the other founders who I met were selling (purportedly) gourmet dog food and therapeutic massage. Most small businesses are like that: providing goods or services to localities. Tradesmen, delis etc are other examples.
Hear, hear. It's strange how often we have to get bitten by date and time bugs. I think people ignore the wisdom of Peter van der Linden in the excellent book "Expert C Programming":

"Anyone who thinks programming dates and times is easy probably hasn't done much of it."
Twply - From Alleged Spammer to Sold on Sitepoint in Less Than 24 Hours
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:A9H3pqjznZwJ:en.wikipedi...

This page has to be deleted and undeleted by admins, yes? So editors with privileges are helping to write this and reinstate it from time to time? Interesting.
[undent]

By my count you've used the term "wild fluctuations" or "wild market fluctuations" in four assertions / reassertions, and this started with my question to you based specifically on your use of this term. Its actual meaning and your intended meaning are certainly relevant to the conversation.
As the article points out, you can set everything to act like XP. It also gives good rationalization for all of the changes discussed.
Well, when it was demo'd at PDC, it was on a Netbook, and it was still snappy, and had the eye candy. (http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/10/28/ars...)
The difference often manifests itself like this: startups make something people want; small businesses make something people want to pay for.
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/20/happy-anniversar...

They were inspired by some of the things in Windows 1.0
If Google's site as a whole would tell everyone to upgrade their browser, then we would actually get somewhere in killing IE6.

Gmail is a small and fairly tech-savvy minority of Internet users, while google users overall are most Internet users, including those that might still be using IE6.
You're still talking about a world where dividends still exist. They're being generated & reinvested. This is in order to create more dividends in the future. Once reinvesting becomes expected, it just means that dividends aren't getting paid. We blur that issued then reinvested concept & just readjust our expectation for companies to grow.

The issue is that a situation where dividends are the norm, this keeps the system honest. Cash is harder to fake. If people own stock for dividends it's harder to get carried away.

The reality is that many companies will probably never pay dividends justifying their current valuations.

You can't just say that you've abstracted away the middle part & look at indicators of indicators of indicators forever. This isn't engineering. There is an enormous psychological element involved. You wouldn't get Uncle Khaled to invest in your shop if he visited & saw that no one walked through the door.
Good luck guys... don't think you'll have any problem filling it with hackers, that's a great price in a great location.
This place is great for asking for math help on IRC.
Well, yes. Perhaps I should have explicitly mentioned Rule Zero: "You can call your company whatever you want. It's yours." :)

I'm not sure it's possible to objectively identify a startup, except perhaps in retrospect. To borrow PG's fun metaphor for a moment: You can look at a tall redwood and conclude that it was once a seedling, but you can't look at a seedling and conclude that it is destined to be a tall redwood. And that's not just because some seedlings get eaten by beetles before they can grow tall. Sometimes seedlings end up living for many years as bonsai trees, where they are carefully pruned and tended in their tiny indoor pots.
Yay you're smart. You get a gold star.

Did you even read the part where he said his code was intentionally simplistic and not optimized? Making a fast/efficient simulation was not the point at all.
The Aeron is actually a good buy if you agree with Spolsky's math.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...

Next time I have a chance to buy a chair I'm going to consider the Aeron. Having to fidget every 5 minutes because the chair's not comfortable has an annoying habit of making me forget exactly what I was just doing, and the Staples/Office Depot chair du jour always seems lacking.
It was a slow for a while, at least. :)
Too much thinking 'can make you fat'
Crazy as these sound, I think we may see some of these come into play.

I am having a hard time separating fact from fiction. But if some combination of what seem to be relatively mainstream predictions are correct, this is probably a real choice. A way of buying an extra 10-20 years.
I would argue startups are a specific subset of businesses that initially are "Small Businesses" with the defining quality being the capability to scale to something much larger, obviously when faced with a market opportunity that allows it do so (whether that market is existing or is completely new).

Of course, the "term" startup is often used loosely but most often is used to define the usual: Tech-oriented, "innovative" businesses seeking to raise millions of dollars and eventually become companies that can make hundreds of millions of dollars (or billions) and can make the large exit (as PG pointed out above).
How did these guys (pastie.org) get hold of he Zune source code? I don't think Microsoft gives away any of their source to the public (except for some programs covered by MS's shared source license).
That analysis leaves so many things out of the story that I would hardly even know where to begin pointing out the problems, including ignoring or misunderstanding compound interest (your analysis only holds for someone stuffing dollar bills in their mattress, not under any other feasible holding model across 100 years, which in truth is simply not approximatable in any simplistic fashion anyhow) and the fact that a dollar in the past is intrinsically worth more than a dollar in the present, because the dollar in the past can be leveraged to generate more present wealth. (Typically, this is looked at from the point of view that a dollar in the present is worth more than a dollar in the future and future dollars must be discounted in value when compared to present dollars, but the tense-shifted statement is equivalent, barring the fact that you can't actually spend past-dollars in the past. (In which case a past-dollar would be REALLY valuable...))

Finally, you seem to be claiming that the US (either collectively or per-citizen) is no more wealthy today than it was in 1920 (or 19xx), which is one of those results so absurd that it should be prompting you to reconsider your viewpoint, not prompting you to post on the internet.
You should attempt to escape to Africa and get busted at Grand Central Station and then get shipped off and be a cast away in Madagascar island, where you can see thousands and thousands of stars instead of helicopters :-)
That's exactly what I don't like about Mankiw's book, it's a bit all over the shop. I prefer Olivier Blanchard's book, which sacrifices some completeness for clarity - he makes it very clear that IS/LM is a short run model, AS/AD is a medium run model and Solow-Swan is a long run model. In fact, the book is presented in that sequence.

In Mankiw's book, Solow-Swan is presented before AS/AD. Mundell-Fleming's open economy model is tucked somewhere in the middle too, which I think should be presented as an extension once the core short, medium and long run models have been established. It was hard enough for me to get my head around price expectations and the AS/AD curves, much less doing it out of the natural sequence.
Innovating in the Great Disruption
2009 Will Be an Economic Engine for Change
I think it is not so simple. It is not enough to have a good OS. In my opinion, what Linux needs from now is:
- a stardardization of APIs (drivers, UI, etc...)
- stardard technologies (such as C#, C++)
- a very good development environment such as Visual Studio
- very good documentation
- show the world how to earn money using this

The wide audience needs straight ways to do things because most people like to execute, not to decide.
that's an awesome exit, cause that service has a 99% chance of being pushed out and included by twitted itself or being banned for spam
For 99% of users, the OS is the transparent windows and colors and user flow.

No one cares about the "underlying OS" as long as the experience of using it is good.

The reason I think it's amazing is because they have managed to add all of the new effects/colors/transitions in Vista/xp/7 while maintaining compatibility with a UI that is ten years old.
Helio Display: Open-air hologram
EDIT: Guess I should have read the $200 limit. I know of no chairs in that range which are any good. If you're going for $200, you might as well shoot for $50-75 and get something cheap from Office Max; I don't think the extra $100 or so would buy you anything much better. You could probably get an improved surface type (leather instead of pleather, etc.) but that's probably it.

==== HERE BE EXPENSIVE CHAIR ====

I love my Humanscale Freedom (get the headrest, too). It has gotten to the point now where I can't really sit in anything else without my back killing me because I've become so used to the perfect support it provides.

Definitely pricey (mine was $1,200 I believe, after a $200 rebate), but wow has it been worth it. The only complaint I have is that the quality of the arm rest connectors are pretty poor; I had to have a replacement shipped after I leaned on one while getting up and snapped the thing off. My ~160 lbs frame shouldn't do that.
Would be nice if we could solely blame corps for this as its a relatively easier problem to solve. Unfortunately, "joe home user", even with genuine Windows installs, do not update their PCs. The little update notifier just sits there and joe user takes no action.
You're right, but I wish we could get past the value judgements.

A startup is a company that just started.

A small business is a company that is small.

A large business is a company that is large.

Why do we have to build a speculative growth curve into the term "startup"?
No need to be so harsh. It's a natural reflex to rewrite code-- a way of understanding it.
There's a few issues with this study.

1) I thought that heavily using one's brain did use a little more energy than neither moving nor thinking hard.

2) It's not at all a representative sample. It's just 14 students. There could have been a lot of reasons that would have messed up the study when that few people are involved.
sounds like a blog network or unoptimized adsense
I've seen this before, and I like the idea, but Seinfeld's calendar was for writing jokes, and he's a comedian. It's not at all clear that there exists an X for which the statement "A hacker/entrepreneur should X every day" is true. It's even less clear that X = "make a contribution to open source".
Interestingly, Kevin Rose recommends keeping your job. He also recommends outsourcing development though :/
Also here's a pretty good video of it: http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=XOSx7v87JCA
The joy of getting things done..
Use bugmenot and you won't have to log in agains either.

Compulsory logins are stupid; all they achieve is alienating people. Whenever I have had to do one, I've deliberately given false information to pay them back for their obnoxiousness.
Is Google App Engine Ready for Prime Time?
Google Product Ideas: In 2009, You Could Be Working with Google R&D
If you're arguing that most companies are not generating anywhere near the cash flows needed to justify their valuations, you'll find no argument from me. Even after falling 45%, S&P500 P/Es are still around 12, which implies an earnings yield of around 8% assuming earnings stayed constant. Given the historically record earnings of recent years, that seems to be on the high side of reasonable.

But if there were a company that traded at a P/E of 7-10, had no red flags like excessive debt or discrepancies between cash flow and earnings, yet paid no dividends, I'd have no qualms about investing. That actually describes Berkshire Hathaway pretty well, if its stock price were to drop a bit.
I'm still trying to decide if ruby is an acceptable OOPL. Sure, the language itself is, but the way people use it? not always so.

So far as the idea "Ruby is an acceptable Lisp"? This is as wrong as the idea "Time is Money".
You love analogies more than a trucker loves his big rig :)
Juggle and ride a unicycle at the same time, and be more creative when trying to sneak a tow up hills in traffic on my bike.
Renovated; Easy to I-787; SAFE AREA; Hardwood Floors; Beautiful conver
Just finally testing what people already should know: the quality of the company you keep changes who you become.
Rapidshare Downloader
> Several wireless networks

Several? Are these your networks, or your neighbors'? ;)
Perhaps you should include the "no-rape assurance" as a selling point.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360910
OALIoCtlHalInitRTC -- yeah, there's a great function name.
Port iFart mobile to Android?
You're right, but he shouldn't have titled it "Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp".
Unusual disk latency
Freelancing Tips via Rails Camp 4
That site is a reseller for io2: http://www.io2technology.com/
Wrong, wrong, WRONG. You DO NOT understand the problem, if you think that this means the probability of the other child being a boy is 1/2. GB and BG are equivalent linguistically, but not mathematically; they do not represent identical possibilities in the space of all conceptual representations of a family of two.

Here, I'll prove it for you:

;; Have a child, with an equal probability of the child being a boy or a
;; girl.
(defun make-child ()
(if (eql (random 2) 0)
'boy
'girl))

;; Make a family of n members, with each child having an equal probability
;; of being either a boy or a girl.
(defun make-family (n)
(do ((family nil)
(i 0 (+ i 1)))
((>= i n) family)
(push (make-child) family)))

;; As in the story, meet someone at a party who informs us that (1) she or
;; he has two children, and (2) that at least one of these children is a
;; girl. E.g.,
;;
;; Me: "Hi there, what's your name?"
;; Cute lady: "Jennifer"
;; Me: "Nice to meet you, Jennifer, I'm Mark. What brings you here?"
;; Jennifer: "Well my husband is out of town on a business trip, so I
;; wanted to come here and catch up with some old friends of
;; mine. Fortunately I was able to get a baby sitter for my
;; two kids on such short notice. One of the kids, Meg, has
;; to be up early in the morning for dance practice and..."
;; Me: "Husband? Damn, all the good ones are taken."
;; Jennifer: "What?"
;; Me: "Nothing. Hey, hang on while I work out the probability that your
;; other child is a boy, based on the information that you've already
;; given me."
;; Jennifer: "You're weird. Have a good evening."
;;
;; This function works by calling (make-family 2) repeatedly until we get a
;; family that meets both of these criteria, then returns a representation
;; of said family. This is a precise analogy for the story: just as the
;; fictional person at this party, here we take the space of all possible
;; conceptual representations of a family of two, then discard any of these
;; that *does not* include at least one female child. THIS IS THE ONLY
;; REASONABLE WAY TO HANDLE THE INFORMATION THAT JENNIFER RELATES IN THE
;; ABOVE EXCHANGE.
(defun meet-at-party ()
(do ((family (make-family 2) (make-family 2)))
((find 'girl family) family)))

;; Perform the (meet-at-party) scenario num-total times, and then return
;; the fraction of those times in which the family contained a boy.
(defun run-test (num-total)
(let ((num-with-boys 0))
(dotimes (i num-total (float (/ num-with-boys num-total)))
(if (find 'boy (meet-at-party)) (incf num-with-boys)))))

Just call (run-test 1000000) or something. The result is approximately 2/3.
I don't think you get severance if you quit.
And this is flat out incorrect.
Reading the comments on that blog entry, I can't help but think Lisp is Blub. The Lisp users posting there simply can't comprehend that anything is wrong and have no tolerance for anyone who says anything is.
Why do people call non-holographic 2D displays "holograms"?
nice, thanks for that, didn't realize.
Superb! Just what I wanted some months backs and had given up on.. I am surely gonna send you visitors by the truckload in coming weeks.
Once global warming ended quickly; why? New Evidence of Meteor Bombardment
From my own limited experimentation I came to same conclusion as the author. I think that the platform is nice for toy projects because you do get a fair amount of resources for free. However, there are too many limitations for even a serious personal project. This may change once we finally get official pricing.
The final and insuperable issue that drove me from Windows Vista to Linux a year-and-a-half ago was Windows Explorer doing away with the incredibly-useful "up" button in favor of breadcrumbs.

Yes, I understand how breadcrumbs works and I am aware of how to use it. However, what I wish to click on is always changing positions, its length varies, and is sometimes not even there at all.

Without an "up" button, I will never use Windows 7.

(And no, before someone even brings it up, the "up" and back button DO NOT do the same thing. Most of the time, yes -- but not always. Check it yourself on XP.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries
Do you actually know anyone who uses GWT? I have not heard good things about it. I personally would rather ues plain javascript with jquery.
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink

is handy when posting NYT links
Overcoming Bias: Against Interesting Details
Is there a Ruby implementation?
What's so crackpot? We're already running huge, poorly understood eco-engineering projects. Coal power generation, for example. The idea here is that for the first time some big projects will be aimed at restoring equilibrium.

Taking our chances with nature is hardly an option, if it ever was. Nature's solution to excess CO_2 is mass die-offs.

Worrying about these projects after what we've been doing to the atmosphere seems like eating week-old junk food until you hurt and then refusing to take an aspirin because it might be tainted.

(That's not to say they're all great ideas. Some of them will probably turn out to be foolish. But I don't see anything wrong with the principle behind them.)
Javascript will be the new basic. I would tell any high school student to pick up javascript over any other language. They can graduate to something else later (bonus: javascipt is not a crippling first language unlike basic).

I'm not sure if javascript will become a big target language. The only framework that I know of that compiles into javascript is GWT and I don't think that it is receiving widespread use.
I went to OfficeMax and Staples and sat in every chair they had. The fifth-to-last chair I tried at Staples ended up fitting me perfectly. I think it was $100. I ended up turning the arms upside-down because I don't use them but they're still required to keep the back from breaking off.

Before going, I had researched the proper ergonomic position for a computer user. The important parts were legs at ninety degrees, chair can't put pressure on underside of your hamstring muscle (otherwise blood pools in your leg), lumbar support, and (for me, at least) vertical neck support allowing me to read the monitor while my neck muscles are completely relaxed. To complement this, I built a two-tier desk where my elbows are at 90 degrees while using the keyboard. I also have a wireless mouse[1] to use when sitting in a different position (because different positions are the key to being comfortable).

[1] The Perific wireless mouse http://www.thehumansolution.com/perificmouse.html which I just discovered is discontinued. sorry, and I really hope mine doesn't break.
Is it madness? No, prices for everything are down because of the recession. Now might be a good time to do a startup. The other side is that it will be difficult getting VC funding.
Live Chat: Actor Arvind Aakash @ 4PM IST on 2nd Jan '09
You can have a close and personal chat with actor Arvind Aakash @ 4PM IST on 2nd January 2009 exclusively on Galatta.com
Indeed, you only need one instruction to be turing complete. Subtract and branch if negative is turing complete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer.
I had some furniture from Crate and Barrel that was excellent for my old home office. I'm not seeing the exact chairs I had, but these are similar:

http://www.crateandbarrel.com/family.aspx?c=897&f=4469&#...

http://www.crateandbarrel.com/family.aspx?c=897&f=3393&#...

Mine were on sale - I got two for like $120 each. It was good because they were exceptionally comfortable, durable, and they looked quite good with the rest of my kit. I'm normally Captain Frugal, but I spent a bit to my home office together since I had a lot of people coming through there and making a good impression was a definite plus.

If you have a Crate and Barrel near you, might want to poke around there and ask when their next sale is happening. Durable, comfortable, and clean modern aesthetics is my kind of thing.
"The final and insuperable issue that drove me from Windows Vista to Linux a year-and-a-half ago was Windows Explorer doing away with the incredibly-useful "up" button in favor of breadcrumbs."

They seemed to go out of their way to hide or remove useful info. Free disk space on drive? Not an easy thing to see.

Consistent, full-detailed file listings? No matter what I do, Vista will eventual decide that (this8 folder needs to not show size or last modified info.

And what's with search not showing the actual file location by default?