skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to dispute the notion that the "initial seed" is irrelevant. Given a fixed "interest rate", the number of users at any time will be proportional to the initial number of users; and given that the initial number of users can easily vary by an order of magnitude based on external factors, I'd say this is pretty significant. (Of course, it's quite possible that the growth rate is not independent of the initial number of users.)

There's also a more dangerous factor to consider: The number of users of a startup is far more visible than its growth rate, so it's entirely possible that great startups end up shutting down due to a disappointing apparent lack of traction when -- if they had stayed around for longer -- their inherent advantages would have produced enough growth to make them wildly successful. Even if we suppose that the ultimate potential of a business is entirely dependent on the inherent quality of the product or service it produces -- which would be rather stretching credulity -- then the external factors of marketing and luck still have a significant impact on whether companies remain in existence long enough to reach their potential.
Apple and Steve Wave Goodbye to Macworld
Ideagist: I want to work for Mashable
And Arc would be Zn Bdsm: basically the same as Zen Buddhism, only more terse.
why is online gambling illegal anyways?
I agree. He starts off making some good points outlining the vulnerabilities of our economy due to our capitalistic ways. Then he talks about the most ridiculous predictions for the future of the economy, workforce and government regulations. I don’t believe we’re going to be seeing the type of restrictions Scott Adams claims, it would kill America. The only valid prediction he makes is the stronger credit requirements banks might impose but he backs it up as if it was because we were spending too much.

What stood out to me as completely ridiculous:
“Depending on how bad the economy gets, you could also see rules banning single passengers in cars.”
my comment was towards the use of the word "irrational" in the parent comment.
Every time I see some supposed solution to "the Africa problem" proposed by a European or North American, I have to think that this person has very clearly never been to Africa, or he or she would realise very quickly that armchair economist's ideas are completely out of touch with reality.

I have tenuous family ties to southern Africa and have visited on numerous occasions; now, I gather that the south, on the whole, is in much better shape than central Africa, but even here, the problems seem clearly rooted in the cultural clash: the west (globalisation, technology, free markets, powerful invaders) collided with the old tribal system. Both survive to this day, and in some areas this results in a particularly toxic mixture.

I don't claim to have a good understanding of the situation, but I know that cultural change is very slow, and I think that's the only thing that might end this mess. But then I only need to look a couple hundred km from here, where until recently Serbs and Albanians were slaughtering each other over Kosovo. We haven't even outgrown the tribal culture in Europe, how can these people seriously believe in macroeconomic solutions for Africa?
i believe, without having done any research, that credentialism worldwide has GROWN massively as the middle classes try to protect their positions for the selfish reasons PG states. less biased, more thoughtful research would make for a more reasoned debate about an important topic, to Y combinator, and to wider society.
Forget Selenium, Windmill nears 1.0
Just did this piece on Windmill, an open source Web testing framework that seeks to right the wrongs of Selenium.
idiocracy, here we come!
aapl stock is down a lot because of it.
Music production. Video production.

Any industry where the capital costs are low, or where a small group of niche specialists can add a significant multiplier to the value chain are candidates for this sort of effect. As more industrial tasks are farmed out to large companies that specialize in flexible production it is possible that you will see this show up in industries that are currently have strong vertical integration.

For example, ten people can't mass-produce a car. Ten people can provide spcialized bodywork and personalization of a mass-produced car. Ten people could probably design and oversee the outsourced manufacturing of discrete components in the car. Ten people could probably manage a company that deals with other small firms to create bespoke vehicles based upon mass-produced frames and engines. As you increase the specialization and make more parts interchangeable it is possible to decentralize and distribute a production chain to the point where a large collective of ten person companies can provide a higher-value good at a lower per-unit cost than a single large company.

Certain activities will always need large, high-capitalization organizations, but it seems that more and more of these companies and factories are being forced to become more flexible and nimble which is leading to a point where a larger and larger part of your world can be serviced by smaller teams than by large enterprises.
Honestly is there a reason, besides nostalgia, that technology companies need to do trade shows any longer? It wasn't the internet that killed the trade show, it was Digg/Reddit/Slashdot/HN/Youtube/rumor sites...in other words, viral marketing FTW!
"... Just because it [BA's replace programmers - my addition] has not worked until now, does not mean we stop trying. Unless there is proof of impossibility, we should try new attacks ..."

Alexandros I'm in agreement with you because there are many instances of inventions where they displace on-mass specialised knowledge or skill. The tools & understanding we have to tackle the problem are too crude.
Ask YC: Has anyone raised VC/Angel funding recently?
Has anyone raised VC/Angel funding recently (i.e., in the last two months)? Specifically has anyone raised Seed/series A funding? If so, what has your experience been? Is it significantly more difficult now or is it still somewhat doable? Do you know of any VCs/Angels that are still investing in Seed/Series A rounds?
EPSON ARTISAN 800 MULTIFUNCTION  (COLOR)
Epson Artisan 800 Multifunction color offers power and performance that's matched only by its sleek and chic appearance. Not only does it fax stacks of documents and produce stunning, Hi-definition prints at ultra fast speed.
California has banned noncompetes for a matter of weeks, and has a lot of compensating assets that other locales don't.
The problem with not signing anything you don't fully understand is that the corporate entity you're dealing with has dedicated lawyers on hand to draft and revise these things. I'm one guy who's trying to live life. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have the time to decipher every EULA, every contract, every service agreement, and all the rest of the fine print that we wade through.

Personally I try to hit the high points of standardized contracts but at some point you have to operate on trust. If some entity wants to screw you over, it can be done over subtle things.
I was just noting why you would need the DVI-to-Mini DisplayPort connector. I don't have the newest MacBook or that display, but there was confusion as to why that adapter would come in handy.

I am not interested in the display, I'm happy with my Dell 24".
At the risk of being a hypocrite (mortgage, student loans), why not eliminate credit? Can't afford a $200,000 house or $20,000 car without credit? Guess what, no one else can either. Prices of those goods would fall back to reasonable levels. Can't afford cable, data plan, or fancy clothes? Guess what, you don't need those things, so learn to live without them.

What good has credit brought the individual? Inflated prices, slavery to debt. What good has that done for corporations, banks and governments? Trillions worth of good. (Not saying that corporations, banks, and governments are bad, just pointing out that they are the winner with regards to credit.)

I realize prohibiting credit instantly would be a huge jolt to the system, but wouldn't it prevent similar problems in the future?
Evidence in favor of your theory:

Bernard Madoff's son, Mark Madoff [has been] identified as the firm's senior managing director and chief compliance officer. [...His] other son, Andrew Madoff is the firm's director of trading.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/madoffs_fi...

Hard to imagine they didn't know.
What is the name of your Wi-Fi network?
I've actually been wondering the same thing. With our current economic situation (being in a recession), are investosr mostly closed-minded and looking for ideas that (a) save money, or (b) provide boost to bottom line?

Would also be curious to know what startups have done early rounds of funding recently, and what their revenue model looks like (if applicable).
Well, from a personal perspective, trade shows are a great place to meet people. If you go to niche trade shows year after year, you get to know the other people who go. I've made some good friends in the trade press who have really helped me out in the past.
I think that in case of tarsnap it is relatively hard to make the decision if you don't have basic knowledge in cryptography, at least. That's why the information assymetry occurs and thus signalling has much more impact on it.
Just more proof that humanity is not destined for a malthusian end and that doomsday predictions based on lack of resources are misguided. People who claim that human needs grow exponentially and thus must eventually go unsatisfied fail to account for human ingenuity.
No, read the press release. It actually makes sense. They get a pretty large audience with their own activities and don't need the events anymore. Arrogant, yes. Smart, maybe...
At first I thought this was a garbage comment but it's actually a fairly clever reference. The article is about harvesting methane gas hydrates (which can be thought of as methane gas trapped in ice).

But I question the use of methane gas hydrates. There is no denying methane gas is one of the worse gas responsible for the green house effect. The article makes it seem like methane gas hydrates is a solution but in the end it's not a renewable source of energy. It would still be harvested and drilled for like oil and even though there's the trillions of cubic feet of gas to be had, one day it could run out.
"Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers."

Translation: we no longer need our core group of supporters, we have accumulated a snowball large enough to roll itself.

I did enjoy the Macworlds. Won't be the same without them. How will products be unveiled from here on out? Just regular press releases and TV commercials?

Think Different.
Will miss Stevenotes :'(
Foodzie Raises $1 Million For Its Specialty Food Marketplace
> I think Law, Medicine, and other professions will be the holdouts against the trend away from school-based credentials. It's probably no surprise - these are the few sectors of the economy that can actually ban someone (with the full weight of government behind them) from practicing based on degrees and exams.

These are also fields where the actions of a single bad/incompetent actor can have very, very serious consequences for their customers. Death and long-term incarceration are pretty heavy negative externalities and most of us do not want to wait for "reputation" to sort out the bad apples. These are also fields with large bodies of knowledge that an applicant in the field needs to master, with relatively easy mechanisms for testing this knowledge.

There is a reason your doctor has copies of his diploma's on the wall, and a reason why your eye searches them out when you are discussing your problem. Sometimes knowing that the other party has passed through several well-regarded and reputable gatekeepers is a good thing. Will the "wisdom of the crowd" ever replace the bar exam, medical boards, and graduation from an elite university? No.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, but the "long term" could easily be quite long on the timescale of a startup's solvency. FogBugz, for example, might well not have survived without the initial user base provided by the readers of Joel on Software. Having that promotion channel could easily have meant a factor of ten in the initial customer base compared to a "normal" startup. And that factor of ten represents more than three years of growth even if you double your users each year. Of course, with growth like that presumably you could raise money to increase your runway, but that adds the complexity of dealing with investors and adds more time for things to go wrong.
There's no social or economic benefit from forced non-competition - society wants as much competition as possible, and it forces employees to take extra risk.

What he company gets is extra power over employees, and possibly avoids competition, neither of which are valid goals.
AAPL drops a few points every time Jobs sneezes.
Apple will unveil netbooks next month, says analyst
You'd think from the name that it's like Java, which is analogous to Judaism, but it really has nothing to do with Java. Maybe Madonna-style pop Kabala?
I think the general maturing of your service is all that's necessary. Checkout 99designs.com if you're looking for web design help.
Not a rumor: No Steve Jobs keynote at this year’s Macworld — which will be Apple’s last
> You might want to hire someone to help QA your application. You might not want that person to take their test plan, bug list, and design documents to your next nearest competitor, or to use your internal wiki as a blueprint to start their own competing company.

Confidential information agreements, which are legal in CA, seem to handle that case.
LOL, that's awesome! A few years ago I had a similar idea and registered googlefor.info, but like so many of my "site ideas", time got the best of it.

Now I just need to remember to letmegooglethatforyou.com'ify every question someone asks me before I tell them "just Google it!".
these guys were at some point richer (on paper) than the google guys, when their stock price was inflated.
I think live in-store events would work well. I'm not sure about other Apple stores, but the two I've been to both have large projection screens and seating.
Guitar Hero on Hard or Expert exercises the pinkie finger pretty well. No joke.
"... It wouldn't be pleasant to spend time to write an app, become popular (and everyone hopes to become popular), and then have Google turn around and say, 'Sorry, you blew out of your free quotas, and we aren't ready to bill you to extend them.' Just as bad: 'Your free app is popular, congratulations! You owe us $10K for the bandwidth and storage you used last month.' ..."

At the same time the entry level cost for exploring an idea in code has been reduced yet again. Explore an idea, create something and see what happens. If it works then inject some funds. If it fails, the outlay is time and effort only.
Google: A little more like Microsoft every day
But then again, how many of those students would have studied alone if not for the class?
I suppose it would prevent similar problems, much like having one's mouth sewn shut would prevent food poisoning.
RIAA Just Keeps On Suing Students: Conversation At The End Of A Gun Barrel
I'm finding it difficult to square your assertion that Reddit is "unique" in this respect with the assertion that it's the web that's "making marketing and distribution free".

The only way that web marketing is "free" is if product awareness spreads between customers, or is pushed through the founders' personal contacts. Wouldn't this imply that we could expect this phenomenon - the initial user base being in some way close to the founders - to grow as the industry approaches the asymptotes you assert it is heading for?
I think this ia a bit naive. Some kind of credit's required to get through the ups and downs of the normal business cycle. Otherwise, "gee, can't make payroll in the last week of a quarter, whack the staff and rehire them in 3 weeks..." Many historians argue that an organized financial market (England, Holland) enabled rapid economic growth and resulting political growth.

Yeah, credit used badly is a problem, but used correctly or well it's grease for the system.
I'm glad they finally launched. Site looks good.

I have a similar startup in the works.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a good Emacs tutorial? Or recommend a book?
I'm not a startup-er, but I do know some VC's and firms. Their take on things right now tends to be cloud-focused. With things like AWS and other cloud-styles out there, building a large data center, or renting out standard servers per month is becoming less and less attractive. They certainly still like Cloud startups, but even if you aren't a "Cloud company" (whatever that means), you should still be hosting your stuff in a cloud. Cheaper server overhead and easier dynamic scaling mean less risk for these guys.

It's not so much about belt tightening as it is about having solid fundamentals. You show up with a hosted app that earns money on day one, and you'll find someone to dance with.

If your app is up and running when you go to the VC out of the blue, that makes it easier, too.

But you all knew that already. Crispygamer closed a round of around $8 million a few weeks back. Deals are happening. They might take a little more time, and be a little smaller now, but if you have good fundamentals, VC's see this as a great time of opportunity, too. They're just going to bet a little more sanely on fewer things.

But make no mistake, they are still out there, still evaluating, and still looking for opportunity.
I think the idea is that leftist policies retard the shift from credentialing and large organizations to small, nimble organizations by being anti-business. Therefore, by default leftist policies stick us with credentialing. This is not a conscious goal of the left, it's just what happens.

I'm sure the left would disagree with this, but that's the right-wing point of view.
More people on S.F. streets newly homeless
Reading is another activity done in sedentary solitude. A seven-year old shouldn't spend all day reading or coding, and most wouldn't want to.

I wouldn't fret about how young to introduce programming to a kid. I learned to program when my dad worked from home one day and I asked him what he was doing.
If the results are proportional between trials and are well-accepted (which these seem to be), I'll admit that I'm less interested in the specifics. If I saw aberrations, I would dig deeper, and I'll admit that my analysis was not rigorous.
This makes Ruby sound far more attractive than it really is to me.
Will they still do the keynotes somewhere else? I'd miss those. But any IRL audience isn't technically required to make them.
Gnosticism
Rather than use .emacs, use .emacs.d/init.el. Put any extra modes or Emacs apps there, too. Then throw your whole .emacs.d under version control. Finally, stick it on http://bitbucket.org/ or similar. Now you can easily lug your whole Emacs configuration around.
http://www.applecanceledchristmas.com/
KPSS 2009 SINAVI
So without doing any research, you arbitrarily take the opposite position and demand that more research be done? Feels like a non sequitur...
Apple has had several live press events in Cupertino.
What’s Next for AppJet
It's possible that they'll just hold more Apple Town Hall type events, like the recent "The Spotlight Turns to Notebooks" and "Let's Rock" events. Those work just as well for the majority of the Apple fans who get their news via the press and I imagine they're far less expensive than a trade show.
Hypy is a fulltext search interface for Python applications.
Because Las Vegas casinos and their highly paid lobbyists want it to be illegal. They'd actually prefer it to be illegal for anyone but them to run a casino online, but having it be illegal for everyone is the next best option.

The government (both state and federal) would also prefer to get a cut of gambling profits.

On a state level, the three states with the most explicit anti-online gaming laws are three states with sizable casino operations: Nevada, Louisiana, and California.
IE7 Offers Another Reason To Use FireFox
I think the whole post is needlessly inflammatory.

Sex isn't appropriate for a 7-year-old.

Programming? Whatever.

(Not to mention he assumes that any interest in programming comes from the parent leading the kid to do it. I discovered programming on my own at 6, thanks.)
I don't know, this might be a little more than a sneeze...
Learning Java from Oreilly was a good start for me and continues to be a decent reference as time goes on.
I started programming when I was about 11.

I don't remember which one of us found out about it first, but a friend of mine and I came to the realization that the Apple IIe computer in our school classroom had this thing called a BASIC Interpreter on it, and we could write files of instructions to tell the computer what to do.

We loved playing the Infocom text adventure games, and we figured out that we could use BASIC to do text input and output, and put in IF lines to direct the computer to print out this line or that line based on what the user typed in. So we started writing our own text adventure games. Very simple, of course, but we loved it.

Variably, one or two other people would hang out at the computer with us, offering suggestions and trying out some lines of BASIC. We decided that programming the computer was more fun than going outside to play at recess, so we began to stay inside when the other kids went out. At first there was no problem, but eventually our teacher became concerned that we needed more social time outside with the other kids, but agreed to let us stay inside to program every other day.

A kid who spends time programming probably isn't on the path to being a social butterfly, but very likely wasn't on that path in the first place anyway. Programming is not inherintly "anti-social" or (completely) "solitary", but it may be harder at a young age to happen upon peers who are interested in it as well.
"...The economy is now too complicated for even the regulators to know when a con or a huge mistake is happening..."

I stopped after this sentence. The economy has always been too complicated for experts to understand. That was the beauty of what Adam Smith identified -- with billions of people, billions of "unseen hands" control the division of labor.

The current crises is the 15th crises since the civil war that involved some sort of mortgage gimmicks. We have fraud and economic panics going back to the 1600s.

Nothing new here to see, Scott. After you blew it with the statement above, you continued to go off the rails with the rest of the article, all because of your belief that economies can be engineered. That's a farce that Smith observed in his day. You'd think that a basic education would take most people beyond that point.
What he's talking about is essential Corporatism; its been tried, and it doesn't work. In fact, its more of a continuation of our current trends which have caused these problems in the first place.
Possibly because the UK is obsessed with league tables for universities, secondary schools and even primary schools. The University of York send me an annual survey to find out what I'm up to - I'm pretty sure they gather this data on all (willing) alumni, and where the data shows them in a good light they certainly make no secret of it at open days, etc.
> Any industry where the capital costs are low

How do these things change with time, though? Do they always, invariably drop? Might computing conceivably go through another phase where things get consolidated into some kind of big servers that cost a ton of money? Doesn't sound likely to me, but I'm not very good at predicting the future. Actual research into these trends would be interesting to see.
Scalability Strategies Primer: Database Sharding