skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Accepting doesn't mean standing in the corner picking your nose for the duration of your life.

If you are really interested in this concept, I highly recommend reading Katie Byron. All her work is about accepting life as it is.
"Do not seek pleasure for its own sake." What do you think he was trying to say?
This one is a bit of a double-edged sword (no pun intended) but the way I look at that precept doesn't preclude doing something to change the situation. It just means being willing to stare reality in the face and accept (eg. understand) it for what it really is.
I generally worked from about 10pm (after tucking the wife in) until 2am. I have a full time job in the R&D lab at the New York Times, so I was super careful not too push it too far.

I found that I can function pretty well on 5-6 hours of sleep.
you need more than good intentions to make a success

Does this point really need any more demonstration? You don't see Mister Rogers manning the gears of capitalism, do you?

However, don't be so cynical as to think this is a Law of the Universe. It is simply a fashion of our times, and might very well change.
This might be a sign of the times (26 year old engineer means apparently I was negative six when they started publishing), but I've literally never heard of it. On the other hand, ironically, I'm quite well acquainted with ericsink.com .
Whose intentions? Let's hear some names here. Nicholas Negroponte's intentions? Walter Bender's? Mary Lou Jepsen's? Samuel Klein's (who put up this blog post)?

How did you decide the main point from the beginning was to stick it to Microsoft? You certainly wouldn't have heard it directly from anyone working there. Do you see inside their heads? (Note that all of these people worked at salaries dramatically lower than what they'd get in industry or even academia, for at least a couple of years of their lives. Would you do that just to "stick it to" some company you didn't like?)
"That would be boring," she told me, "it's always they same thing: they just stop working on it."

Isn't that like saying "Everybody dies the same way - their heart stops beating." Yes, but there are many, many ways to die.
I think he meant don't peruse pleasure for the pleasure's sake - e.g. like having sex with a women only because of sex.
i don't think he meant it as "do nothing." rather, he meant something more like accepting the world as it is given to you, accepting the truth instead of rationalizing, etc

acceptance is a big part of moving on

this isn't just an idealist guess on my part. just from the little I've read from his "Book of Five Rings" it's clear he was a pragmatist. his style/philosophy was essentially "do the best thing in the given situation," not different in spirit from Bruce Lee's style
once we finally made the tough decision to abandon the first product, then designing and making the second product was so much (3-4x) faster, as we knew exactly what sucked the first time around and how to avoid all the inefficiencies as well.

so i guess, actually failure was very valuable. i actually see 3-4 much larger / better funded startups in our field who now are repeating the mistakes we made in our first product, but somehow I guess they won't be able to make that decision to change course.. easy when you're smaller and flexible.
> These guys have failed to meet every deadline, gone over every budget and missed every price point they've ever tried to hit. It was going to catch up to them eventually.

That's because (a) all of the deadlines and price points were wildly optimistic from the beginning, and (b) all five of the countries who committed to buying a million laptops each in the first year backed out (in Thailand there was a coup, etc. etc.). But the achievements so far have been quite impressive.

You'd also have trouble meeting a price point estimated for a scale of tens or hundreds of millions of laptops when you were only shipping a few hundred thousand. There's a big bulk discount that comes with 2 extra orders of magnitude in purchasing.
Some are still around, See for example http://www.caelo.com/
> (even without meaning to)

Actually, if you go listen to Negroponte's first few speeches floating the idea publicly, encouraging other companies to build el-cheapo laptops and ultimately getting them into children's hands was explicitly mentioned as a way for the project to succeed even if no one bought laptops from OLPC itself.
They were selling to governments. That's a core part of their strategy. These Governments are concerned about unemployment in their countries. They are concerned about low wages. They are concerned about not getting a piece of the info economy. They want windows because it increases employability. You might call them short sighted, but no more so then every other educational body that uses MS.

BTW, it's not just about MS vs OS. It's about Sugar. The OS is (I hear) very different from other mainstream OSs. Education ministers in countries where computer literacy is low here "Use a computer that is so different from every other computer that students will not be able to use any other computer."
Ask HN:  Need a good employment / disability lawyer
Hi.

Does anyone know of a good employment / disability lawyer in the Chicago area?

I was told by an employer that the company was changing and that my disability would not be accommodated.

My manager asked me "What would happen if we don't accommodate you?" I replied that I would "have to quit."

He came back with: "We have no intention of firing you, but, we will not accommodate you."

Three months later I had to leave.
I'm not one to peddle my own wares, but Alchemy (distributed memory array storage) fits the bill for a slightly more elegant solution. Think of a hash with key => array pairs.

With Alchemy, you can just stuff the times of your most recent "actions" into a key. Here's a Ruby psuedocode example:

alchemy[ratelimit_72.26.203.98_2009-01-07] << 1.minute.ago
alchemy[ratelimit_72.26.203.98_2009-01-07] << 20.seconds.ago
alchemy[ratelimit_72.26.203.98_2009-01-07] << 5.seconds.ago

alchemy[ratelimit_72.26.203.98_2009-01-07].select{ |e| e > 30.seconds.ago }.size

In that brief example we've defined a true rolling window (30 seconds) with the ability to grab the true count of actions performed (size) with only one cache query. And similar to the pure memcached version the article suggests, you don't have issues with race conditions.
"My first publication was in Dr. Dobb's so it'll always be special to me."

Even though the magazine had been moving more towards pop tech and less focused on hard-core lasting-code topics I was pretty excited to be published in Dr. Dobbs (30th ann. issue!).
A User's Guide to 21st Century Economics - Umair Haque
> The example in the post is a case in point - it is way simpler to just grab the little margin widget and set it where you want it. Way simpler than a conversation with the software anyway.

Depends whether the point is also to communicate with other users of the script later on. It's hard to convey "he grabbed the little margin widget" in a compact way without writing it somehow.
Well, this certainly flies in the face of the sensationalist tone of the linked article.

TechCrunch Layoff Tracker? Seriously?
Don't look at it as losing 4%. Look at it as you are losing 20% of your stake (4/20). Are you willing to leave 20% of what you were originally supposed to receive to Austin?

Another point to consider: In the end, 4% worth of equity won't make or break anyone (unless it tips the balance of power), seeing as if the company is successful you will all be "rich" in some sense. The issue is not 4%, but working with someone who demands it, and demands it from you only it appears.

Why is Michael ok with Austin getting more than he is? Was the startup all Austin's idea? Did Austin contribute more? Is it all a seniority thing (Austin was there first, then Michael, then you)? Also, you never specified what Michael and the Angel's shares were. I'm assuming that the Angel got 40% while the three founders originally planned for 20% each.

I would stand my ground and say I was working for 20% + stipend and that's what I expect AND now that it was threatened I want it in writing before moving forward. It should take the 3 of you no more than 30 minutes to have a meeting to agree on it and write up a simple contract for each of you. Then again, contracts can be messy and you should cover your bases (what work is required of each of you, how long the contract is good for - until incorporation when a final contract is created I would imagine - and what happens is someone doesn't deliver). Sorry if that sounds like conflicting advice. Get a lawyer.
Insurance and hosting is the best he can come up with? I pay for BOTH of those on my own now despite being chained to a company for a paycheck.
Kenya was in Africa last I checked.
I was under the impression that VCs only get paid their management fee on the portion of their fund they've got in play. I thought that was the explanation for why they still like to invest a lot of money in each company. Doesn't that come into play, at least for the lower tier VCs, who probably won't do well on actual returns?
"The second trend is that the combination of a housing bust and a two-thirds fall in the mainland Chinese stock markets over the past year has resulted in moves by many overseas investors - and even some Chinese - to get money quietly out of the country. They are doing so despite China's fairly stringent currency controls, prompting the director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Hu Xiaolian, to warn in a statement Tuesday of 'abnormal' capital flows across China's borders; she provided no statistics."

There is interesting news throughout that article about pressures on China's economy.
I am trying to reconcile "angel funded" with "we're incorporating soon."

Was Austin not happy with 20% or was he not happy with you and he each getting 20%? The difference between 20 and 24 (or 16 and 20 for that matter) is going to be hard to detect for the likely range of exits.

Also "not happy" before you've incorporated is not a good reason to change equity: you should have a rationale based on expected contribution and degree of risk (and/or whatever other factors you three feel are appropriate). But "I want more than you" is not a good discussion to be having now.
> purity and laziness. These may be worth learning about since they're theoretically interesting, but their practical value is pretty dubious

Purity is important if you care about safety, maintainability, or paralellism. Also makes transactional memory tractable.
The thing I don't get with all dating sites is they all seem to be exactly the same - mediocre design, some plugged in dating script. I can't tell if this means there's room in the marketplace if you did it the right way or if it's just totally over-saturated.
They were selling to governments. That's a core part of their strategy

Sucks for them. Selling to large organizations is an art people perfect for decades.

BTW, it's not just about MS vs OS. It's about Sugar.

Sorry, I was generalizing, I stand corrected. Bah, if what the education ministers want is "computer literacy" in the sense of "how to use Windows, Word, and Excel", that's their mistake to make. What sucks most is that they sure as hell won't be affected by it.

Maybe if government were run more like a company... where salaries were dependent on change-in-per-capita-GDP under one's tenure (plus a smaller piece of long-term deltas).
Game Developer Confronts iPhone Software Cracker
"All I did for marketing in 2008 was email existing users"

Seriously? That does not make any sense. Why not try a paid search campaign? Or networking with teachers via twitter? What is the purpose of building a business and then not doing anything to market it?
The biggest reason founders stop working on their startups is that they get demoralized. Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).

I'd say about a quarter to a third of founders we fund have never-give-up morale. The rest are mostly in the middle group.

For the people in the middle group, I think the big danger is not knowing what to do next. That's why it's so important to launch early. Once you get something in front of users, they tell you what to do next. Not that you should do exactly what they tell you; you have to guess what they really need. But at least you start to have some data about that.
LYAH was what got me really going with Haskell. Highly recommended.
My experience is that these things are best hidden inside large applications, and especially hidden from customers. This lets us customize the applications for some customers, or when there annual changes (think of taxes and tax rules changing annually).

Some of our applications are "partly" customized: the application does about 80-90% of what the end customer wants, but we need to do some customization to get that last 10-20% of the way to "done" for the customer.
Aaron Swartz: Felten for CTO?
Stack Overflow Podcast with Eric Sink of SourceGear
Textures in Modern Web Design
They get a management fee based on the total size of the fund, not just those that have been invested. It's typically between 2 and 3% of the fund per year and in addition to 20% of the profits made, if any, from investments.
How to Impress an Oriental Escort Girl
Escort service has become a preferred and commonly seen service in most of the countries worldwide. Geneva escort agency & models are professionally trained to serve their clients in different occasions. These escort girls are as well trained on how they should behave with clients from different cultures and localities. These girls can simply be called the best choice to have a tension free and entertaining evening. The escort girls normally present themselves very well depending on the occasion and location of the date. They are basically trained and asked to impress the client in the very first look.
VCs make money two ways: management fees, and a cut of the returns. The best VCs expect to make most of their money on the returns.

Yes, the bad VCs are mostly interested in management fees. But we avoid those. So YC-funded companies rarely encounter them. Actually the distaste is somewhat mutual: the lamer VCs prefer to invest in companies founded by suits. Not sure exactly why. Could be because they're all about looking good on paper. Or it could be just because the VCs are suits themselves.
A longtime smalltalker is definitely an experienced user.
A “short squeeze” sounds innocuous enough...
"One of the most masterful hacks of the financial system in history."
I really hope he's wrong. This is pretty scary stuff, to me anyway. The last company I would want to have all this power is facebook.
I'm a fan of the "throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Build lots of different things until one starts to get traction, and when one does, focus your attention on that.
Same jobs, less pay -- firms cutting salaries
Yeah, that's actually a really good point. I can't think of any good examples though where this would work. Like if you go to Borders and look at their magazine racks, there are tons of specific niches that cater to mostly, if not all, female (there are like 8 different magazines on knitting), but I'm having trouble seeing how you could apply it in the dating realm.
I've always felt that the logical conclusion to be drawn from the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect) is that top performers are plagued by self doubt.
There's a product that acts as an external battery for the iphone (my brother has one - can't think of the name) Bulkier when in use - but less extra to carry around than a spare...
Surely it would be better to school children in ethics and philosophy instead of indoctrinating with primitive, irrational belief systems?
Please don't call people names.
Kenya was in Africa last I checked.

American blacks tend to be (mainly; averaging 83%) Bantu, whereas Barack Obama is (half) Nilote.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aisteve.blogspot.com+ni...

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/01/east-africas-tall-vs-aver...

The tall black Nilotics generally see themselves as more intelligent than the shorter brown Bantus. Obama's Luo relatives in Kenya told him: "The Luo are intelligent but lazy." The Bantus tend to fear that they will be outsmarted by the Nilotics if they give them a fair shake, so they often treat the tall people like the Jews tend to be treated in Eastern Europe.

The dividing lines between the Nilotics and Bantus are not sharp. There's been lots of interbreeding. (This is Africa, after all.) But, they still exist. The situation is rather like that in Latin American, where after five centuries of interbreeding, the economic elites are still pretty white-looking, and the indigenous masses occasionally organize under demagogues like Hugo Chavez to fight back.
Ivan Krstić was the security lead for the One Laptop Per Child project. Here's his completely unrelated retelling of the downfall of Adolf Merckle, one of the world’s richest men, who committed suicide yesterday by throwing himself under a train. Merckle is actually ancillary to the story; it's really more about how Porsche perpetrated "one of the most masterful hacks of the financial system in history." It's fascinating!
I see a lot of folks fail because they don't give up...on their first idea, and look for a second or third. Most teams that succeed make adjustments.
Actually this was a big feature of the new PC intonation that appeared in the late 80s and early 90s. Undergrads started saying declarative sentences with interrogative intonation-- as if they were actually questions. This allowed one to disclaim some responsibility for whatever one was saying, and yet at the same time to compel a response from the other person.

This way of speaking has now passed down to high school students and isn't associated with any specific sort of ideas (unless you count the empty set as a type of idea), but it was originally quite a nasty piece of conversational jiujitsu.
Japanese Firms, Flush With Cash, Step Up Deals
http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/4065/astroturferoi5.jpg
My apologies to anyone who doesn't have a WSJ account. It's an interesting story given the current VC environment in the US.
I've noticed this trend as well.

I think the lesson here is that the simpler the idea, the better. Let communities of people who care do the work for you. If you can provide some sort of platform, even if it is something as simple as: "140 chars or less text comments, sent to people who choose to see them, and allowing these text comments to be sent from multiple sources."

Don't get me started about how over hyped twitter is. It's got a great name and got insanely lucky with its adoption... and if someone could write up a blog entry about how they got so popular that would be great as well. They must have had some popular early adopters.

Back to the "app a day" (pun intended) topic. I wonder to myself, are these apps meant to make money, or are they just people playing around? Have any serious twitter apps, besides summize, been acquired?

I think the more abstract trend, at the moment, is "hack something together in a few days and see what happens." Things along the line of http://nowdothis.com.

My gut tells me they see a spike in traffic, then nobody really cares. What people want now is stuff that connects them to other people, easily. JuicyCampus, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. It's about being social in the right way.
The audio got distorted when I corrected pitch on videos > 2x. The videos < 2x have pitch corrected.
That's the part I was unclear on. So if they take a billion dollar fund they're earning $20 million/year even if they've only invested $50 million of it so far?
I'm sorry, just irked me at the time. Like peter/webwright said, not enough info. No excuses, I messed up.
unlimited self-generated morale

I have seen people learn this talent from two sources:

1) A deep, abiding conviction that they will get what they want because they always get what they want.
2) A cheerful disregard for other's predictions of failure (or well-founded empirical observation that the project is anything but a success) -- because "you've only failed once you quit".

Type #2 are much easier to have dinner with but I've certainly seen #1 work.
The Pope Mobile seems pretty pretty compared to this monstrosity.
Facebook will have a big 2009 because there is no time to have a business model based on not-charging poor college students like during the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed.

This sounds like 16PF Second-Order Factor IV: Subduedness vs. Independence -- also known as "field independence".

.

From Page 119-20 of the "Handbook for the 16PF":

Both the ratings and the primaries in Q-data support this pattern, describing a person who is independent, radical, autistic, projective, and a law to himself (hence the alternative designation of this dimension as "Promethian Will").
Veterans of the Second World War and then the Korean War sought inexpensive homes of their own, far from the urban scrimmage that must have been, for some, a cramped extension of real combat.

The author has clearly never seen real combat.
I think that the slogan is a bit ambitious. After all, our lives present way more complex problems...
"There's a long history of being able to caricature the suburbs and get away with the idea that you're doing something that's deep and profound."

From an NPR report on evil suburbs:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6215779

Then again, if American Beauty sells, keep making more of it with the stars of Titanic. Beautiful, I love it, let's do it, see you at The Grill tomorrow. So I can't fault them from a business perspective, but artistically this review sums up my assessment of American Beauty:

http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N44/American_Beauty.44a.html
Second. We're 2 guys. We started doing just fine at about 5k/month. I ran down his checklist going yep, yep, yep. I don't have my own jet or live a a half-million dollar house but its been far and away better on all fronts than the job I quit.

Too cautious is just as fail as not enough. (And less fun)
Why don't you look up the lineage of his parents.
India's Madoff? Satyam Scandal Rocks Outsourcing Industry
I'm not a fan of Basecamp. It lacks the analytical aspects of project management.
Thanks for posting that. I read Book of 5 Rings a couple of times when I was younger and still obsessively practising martial arts. I hadn't come across this though.

I don't stack up well against #13 unfortunately! (Unless that's intended as an extension of #2 perhaps; "don't be a glutton")
Ask HN : What print magazines do you still subscribe to?
Given the demise of Dr. Dobbs, just curious what print magazines people here still subscribe to?

I subscribe to Circuit Cellar and Make Magazine.
It is free only for 2 persons.
When I read "Skribit", my mind substituted it with "Scribd".
So Facebook is the new Gmail?
Gmail has a lot of power and they don't seem to have done anything bad, so far. It's the users who decide to give all this information to a site, and there is nothing we can do besides trusting them. Well, it's what the Internet is about: a lot of benefits, a lot of vulnerabilities. The cool site everybody signs up on can be Facebook, Google or whichever, but things are not going to change for some time.
Actually, the flash platform is largely open source. The AIR framework (along with the rest of Flex) is open source. See http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Get+Source+...

The AIR compiler is also open source. The only thing that isn't open source in the stack is the flash player runtime, which executes the resulting SWF file. However, the SWF file format is open.