skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Solid list. I've read maybe 1/5th of those. There were some glaring omissions though:

-Strategy & Innovation: to leave off Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" and "Innovator's Solution" books is sacrilege
-Psychology: Roger Dawson's "Power Negotiating" audio series is a must-listen for pysch and negotiating tactics
-Business History/Ref: Founders at Work by YCombinator's own Jessica Livingston is a must-read for tech startup founders

There's digests on handful of others I recommend here: http://www.scrollinondubs.com/notes
OS X 10.5.6, Safari can't maintain session at Gmail, Facebook, others
It's a good pointer to the recent sales figure releases, but it doesn't seem like the author ever gets around to revealing how to reach the top of the App Store.

I wish he'd tell us. ;)
The future is here
and it's not an iPhone...
...it's a big ass table!
take that Apple
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
I'm starting a educational software company right now, and while I think she's on track with her criticisms of educational effectiveness (let's face it, I went to public schools and learned veritably nothing), it seems like a supremely silly way to go about proving the market need. Who is going to buy these educational products again? Parents? And who do parents listen to? In our experience, parents listen to the teachers. So it doesn't look like a valid marketing strategy to start and educational company by saying "teachers are stupid and can't teach." Our goal in marketing ourselves is to give teachers some degree of control, but avoid the stultifying effects of "fun classroom technology" by mainly targeting self-motivated learners. Who knows if we'll make it to profitability, but having just attended a conference with over 500 teachers, pitching on the basis of teacher stupidity wouldn't have made any sales.
I remember seeing this earlier and my thoughts are still the same. This license scares me.

It tries to close a "loophole" in the GPL that I never considered a loophole. Consequently, we have a brand new license that I don't want to learn because it's mentally exhausting to be reading legal documents when I want to code. I bothered with the GPL because there was enough points of view to feel relatively confident in what was happening. I don't want to bother again.

I hope the painfulness of having yet-another-license outweighed the perceived slights from the loophole they tried to close.

I'm happy to be an early adopter of a new technology. But not a new license. No thanks.
Postmodern Programming
I think the core idea was just to make money exchange easier via electronic means. their implementation was a good bad idea.
But I think it depends on how much resources you are going to commit to it. building a widget = no risk. starting a company based on moneybeaming was a bigger risk. With cheap implementations you can afford to play around with bad bad ideas until you at least get a good bad one. :)
Extremely intresting article on how digg users have managed to bend the algorithm to their whims. I wonder if any social news site is really immune to this.
Twitter Going Mainstream? 5,000-10,000 new accounts a day
The banning thing is dumb.

http://digg.com/how: "Digg is democratizing digital media." Riiiight...
They should make them bigger. In Detroit. My floor isn't lighting up rings around my feet and telling me to buy shit when I walk on it. Why not?
Any algorithm is going to end up being exploitable. It's an arms race, but like with evolution, it's the only way.
Rails + Merb == (Fun + Frolic) * (Beautiful Poetry / Holidays)
Indeed! I am on the leading edge of the boomers and I can tell you we are just as concerned and just as angry. When I was growing up the WWII generation was lamenting how badly they had screwed it up (Vietnam, etc.) and were hoping we could do it better. Well we didn't and the generation after us, the current screw ups, didn't either. If anyone, I would blame Isaac Newton. His legacy is the mechanical universe and the philosophy the everything is perfectible. Hence the endless series of ideological laws and regulations and deregulations that will fix the problem du jour. What we need to understand is that people are greedy, short sighted, and selfish. They are also altruistic and caring. We need to diminish the unfavorable traits and emphasize the favorable. That's what antitrust and regulation do, keep the destructive side from becoming dominant. But we also need to avoid stifling society by tamping down the ability to innovate.

The fixing of all this is cross generational. If we don't fix it, every one will loose, including those who have it. Have you seen the projections for social security? The angst isn't fatal. We survived the depression of the depression, we survived the post-Vietnam crisis of confidence, and we survived the crisis that Japan was going to suck up all our mojo. (OK the auto industry didn't.)
I like Zed. He writes some seriously good code, he answers technical emails (mine, at least) and seems to really care about his fellow humans (read up on past threads if you're missing this).

However, I don't think that every item he posts on his blog is worthy of news linkage. Comments on stuff that someone said on IRC at some point? Ehhhh, colour me 42 kinds of uninterested.
And funny.
You know this how? Being threatened with being taken away from her family would be any better?
Ask HN: would you (founders) use this service?
I want to offer localization services to startups (for free/affordable), especially in the mobile arena. The idea is that startups often neglect this in their early focus and loose valuable market share when they can't test stuff (and adapt to local customs, special cases, etc.) in other countries.

Initially I can only handle UK and Germany properly, but if successful this can be grown country by country with new subcontractors or whatever.
to be fair, he is comparing a financial capital, to another one. He didn't compare Hong Kong to West Virginia, Alabama... or other rural backwaters of this country.

Plus Hong Kong didn't always use to be a part of China, so it is a fair comparison.

While people in china might live in poverty and suffer of malnutrition, in here people are suffering form junk food. Fat and obese, compromise more 70% of the population in the states, and fresh healthy food is too expensive.
Civilization is possible because we redistribute our lessons learned from experience.
Also: how do you currently solve this problem, if you do. And if you don't, how do you feel about staying within your own country?
> Buy gold and/or silver

And if you want to keep it, store it in Switzerland.
How lazy the writing, which cloaks itself in a thesis reinforced in conventional wisdom and flits about a series of misleading and superficial anecdotes. Is Friedman "right"? Either way, he serves his argument poorly by comparing the wealthiest splinter of southeast Asia to the whole expanse of America.

Or engage his column elsewhere: are we really losing our most promising engineers to "financial engineering"? Perhaps a less famous writer could support that argument with evidence. For instance, that writer might marry Friedman's argument with the fact that people like John Meriwether managed to nearly destroy capitalism with nothing more than an MBA.

Are there nuclear physicists on Wall Street? Of course. Are most nuclear phsyisicists on Wall Street? Prove it! Are the nuclear physicists on Wall Street the ones responsible for speculating on netted-out credit default swaps? The CDS racket was no more complicated than the MBS racket Michael Lewis wrote about in "Liar's Poker", and the BSD's on the Salomon trading desks were definitely not rocket surgeons.
Zed did poke a hole in the Rails hype with his "Rails Ghetto" rant, and I think it did Rails nothing but good in the long run - this merger, for example, would probably never happened otherwise.

Funny how Rails' actual value grew in contrast to the hype around it (a lot of it by the type he calls biz people - but also a lot by non-coding writers, bloggers, publishers etc) subsided.
This isn't always true. When I was 12, I became the youngest Apple certified tehcnician. And I can tell you very clearly: my parents did not force or encourage me to do that at all.

I am an American and I was older than this girl, but I don't think you can totally discount the possibility that she just wanted to do it for herself.
Having worked in both Cali and NYC, I totally get Zed but at the same time understand how nobody else seems to.

Walk down the streets of Manhattan some time, and you'll realize that Zed's just speaking that particular dialect of the English language.
this is the single most important thing for humanity to get right if we're going to make it. power and responsibility MUST be commensurate. the alternatives are quite literally insane.
Interesting idea, and something I've considered doing myself, for Italy. The "downside" to it is that it's a linear-growth consulting business, rather than a product business. Still, it seems like something that US companies ought to think about so as to avoid having their lunch eated in other countries by clones. I'd be interested in talking more if you want to look me up through my profile.
"...That's what antitrust and regulation do, keep the destructive side from becoming dominant..."

People game systems. It's odd that you mention Newton -- the idea that some combination of regulations/deregulations will engineer a better economy is why our tax code is currently incomprehensible. Perhaps it might work if we try it again for the 50 thousandth time?

It might be better to look at the economy like a chaotic system, with billions of independent agents all working randomly yet somehow creating a greater whole. The trick is a minimalist yet-changing set of constraints to allow the chaos to continue and be productive. Once you start trying to put it in a box, or choose special parameters, or try to understand or constrain the entire thing in some fashion that you can understand, you're kidding yourself.

My opinion only. I can tell you that history is littered with really smart people, governments, and political parties who thought they could understand/control economics. Sometimes people mistake what I'm saying for laissez-faire or free-market philosophies. It's not. It's simply acknowledging that the over-engineering of things we don't understand usually ends up in stagnation and corruption, not growth and opportunity.

We're in quite a mess now in the U.S. because politicians get elected promising more things than they can deliver. If you ask me, we started heading down this track once the federal government usurped the states back in the 1860s. There's no more sharing of power -- people slowly are figuring out that they can directly vote themselves whatever the government can borrow. No kind of market or tax policy is going to be able to get us out of this larger problem. That's the meta-issue.
It's fair to compare the showpiece financial crown jewel of Southeast Asia to the largest, most diverse metropolitan area in the US? Hong King has a population of 7MM. NY Metro has 19MM. And NY Metro has to serve all its citizens through democratic muni, state, and federal processes; neither Michael Bloomberg nor David Paterson can declare "wi-fi bullet trains for everybody!" and keep their office, at least not while there are schools to fund.

I don't disagree that America needa a new approach. I just think Friedman chose an easily sniped-at rhetorical device to make that point.
I don't know, but every time he writes something like this, it becomes a little bit harder to buy his "it's all an act" spiel. But he's not at all unhinged! I mean, who are you going to believe, Zed Shaw or your lying eyes?
I wish he wouldn't have dodged the question on Web Applications.
And your point is what?
"He's right that we need to reboot -- but the irony is that it's his generation (and his mentality itself) that is forcing this."

I grew up just a few miles away from where Friedman grew up, just a few years later. Friedman and a lot of his neighbors in his generation were early in urging their fellow Americans to have environmental concern and to be aware that America is just part of the world. I have good evidence for this, because my fifth-grade class made a time capsule in 1969 to be opened in the year 2001, with predictions of that year.

Perhaps Friedman's elementary classmates and my elementary classmates were part of a minority in America, but maybe people who share those concerns are still part of a minority in America. Anyway, these days it's easier for more Americans to see what is going on in the rest of the world, and there is plenty to learn from.

P.S. People in Friedman's generation and mine will be retiring at substantially older ages than our parents did--that's already a settled change in the Social Security law.
I don't think this is your fault completely - the OP should have clicked and at least looked at the article (or even the URL it was from on the same page) before commenting.
When I was writing my first paper, I legitimately tried to write it so anybody could understand. My test was to have my girlfriend read it and tell me what she thought it was about (not that my girlfriend isn't smart, but she had absolutely no clue what I was working on). When I showed it to the PI, he said I had to revise it all because it was "too juicy."

More specifically, he said there were two reasons against understandable writing:

1) Scientists are lazy, and do not want to read long passages. Coupled with the fact that they are usually pretty smart, they can understand the terse language.

2) Scientific (read: incomprehensible) writing removes all biases. There is no room to interpret something incorrectly if the precise words are used.

I agree though, it's not a very inviting culture that promotes these ideals.
I call it "Not Impressed By Zed Shaw's Ruby Web Server".
I'm all for a serious discussion of the energy crisis, but this author is really pandering to the audience with his talk of the disappearance of "car society, suburban living, big box stores, corporate-run government, global empire, or runaway finance".

That's exactly what the kind of people who read Energy Bulletin want to hear.
Happy holidays. =)
Oh, like Brecht -- Verfremdung! I should have gotten that -- sorry. I love the Milton quote (and I wonder what it means in the age of technical hyper-reproducibility online...).

I also wonder what could accomplish defamiliarization nowadays, when satire and Dadaism have become commodities and every crap sitcom breaks the fourth wall. But perhaps utter economic collapse will do the trick?
I think a product's sensitivity to serving a number of different locales often has to be sacrificed during the start-up phase, as otherwise the product development could end up, well, unfocussed.
I think your service would be most beneficial during the expansion stage - but then of course, with internet start-ups the lag-time between start-up and expansion can be very short, so your service could really be onto something.
All that effort just to front page a story on a news site overrun by idiots. What sad, sad, waste of time.
The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver Anniversary Edition)
What any server-side javascript implementation needs to thrive is a set of solid, fast database client libraries (MySQL, etc). That, to me, is why some of the JVM-based alternate language implementations are so interesting -- because the database support is built-in.
eGifts for shopping procrastinator
I'm waiting with my family for Christmas Eve dinner and ... I have no gifts.

Procrastination. But it's the good type: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

And I was also, http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html

I'm sure there are others out there. Here are some other places that have eGifts:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20071112_e-card_results_a1.asp

http://shopping.msn.com/content/gift-certificates-center-all-stores/ctid54/?contenttext=contentname:gift-certificates-center-all-stores
Somehow I missed this update of one of the real classics until now. Just ordered it from Amazon. I highly recommend it.
it's just about studying for the GMAT

It might be a good place to start and then build out. Teaching smarter kids is more forgiving, in that the smarter they are, the more they can recover from your mistakes.

It is also helpful to have a concrete, measurable goal. Aiming for the score on a standardized test keeps it simple. They don't have to worry about the more 'fuzzy' aspects of learning, such as conceptual models of the material.

So it may make some sense.

[edit: fixed a typo]
This list recommends Zinsser for writing; for a hacker, I'd sub in John Williams "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace", a Richard Gabriel recommendation with a more systematic, almost engineer-y bent.
Yes, I would love an affordable version of this service. I think of XHTMLized as a potential model for you. I think there are some parallel types of services popping up in testing.

I think it's more important for you to be convenient then it is to be perfect. We have foreign-language users who struggle with our english version. Any translation would be a huge upgrade for them. And the users would be our test bed.
I don't know when you went to public school, but these days you can get a first-rate education there. Even in the non-magnet sector.

I used to hire kids from Thomas Jefferson HS in Alexandria, VA. They were amazing--but that's a public magnet.

But you are absolutely correct in recognizing that you can't sell educational software by saying to teachers: "you're too stupid, so use this."

I'm amazed how many people try to do this.
This article is essentially the political version of pg's Submarine essay. Once you read both articles, you will never look at your Sunday Times in the same way.
Yes, I acknowledge what you're talking about is real (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400286), and the two phenomena are quite different, though they may be difficult to distinguish from the outside.
Where to begin?
* the almost total lack of development of Interface Builder
* ouch Java
* iPhone application approval yumminess
* Hi Konfabulator!
* Hi Watson!
> Because most people hate Microsoft, they fail to recognize the magnitude of the impact Billy has had in their life.

What impact? If Bill Gates had never been born, Moore's law would still have been in effect and computers would still have got ever cheaper. The Apple Mac would still have been built; the IBM PC would still have been built -- but probably running CP/M-86, DR-DOS and (later) GEM. The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga would still have happened. Unix and C would still have been invented, and their intrinsic wourth would have let to them becoming popular. HTML and http (or something very like them) would still have been invented.

The only difference is that their would have been no baleful, anti-competitive Microsoft watching over all and limiting progress. (How many startups weren't started in the 1990s because their putative founders thought Microsoft would strangle them if they showed signs of success?). So, minus Gates, if anything today's technology would have arrived quicker.
Perhaps when she is thirty-three percent older she'll be more creative, too!

Or, instead of showing off her chops, perhaps she'll prefer to quietly rake in the cash as a Windows programmer. It's not like she'd be the only one to make that choice.
Pretty grim stuff.

Let's hope this stays a work of fiction.
Gates' never refers to 'them' as Google - which in a funny way dramatises Google as a sinister force - I've noticed Steve Balmer avoids saying Google in interviews too, as if they feel just saying the name is giving Google extra promotion.
Good points. The decline we should be worried about is not in the currency, but in the competitive advantage of the US relative to other countries. If it gets more affordable to do business elsewhere, you'll find fewer and fewer good companies on US financial markets. (Many claim SarbOx has already done significant damage here.) If emerging economies can continue to reduce costs -- by tackling security problems, corruption, red tape, improving education and infrastructure, etc. -- faster than we can, US equities may lose their world-leading position. That's not to say it's a zero-sum game; it's quite possible that all the world's equities markets could do well, and the US could lead without being dominant. But equity investments are more strongly tied to their country of origin than globally traded "real" commodities like timber or oil, so if you think the US might lose some competitive advantage -- like if it got significantly less appealing for valuable workers to immigrate here -- you might want to skip the stock certificates and instead buy the paper they're printed on.
Seller's remorse: How I nearly lost my company - and then got it back.
if only there were a place where posting a story instantly puts it on the front page at least briefly, and where people actually vote for submissions because they're good, not just so that the submitter will reciprocate.
It would be an added bonus if the comments weren't filled with mindless drivel.
But that's clearly a utopia that could never exist.
When you get to the last boss of a video game you dont stop and think: "What was that command that was used to whip out my stape gun so I can staple his tentacles to the wall since I havent used that gun since level 1?" Then go though 10 manuals, google, and a buch of other crap and find out the command was:
^x+' obvious right? Just like copy-paste in vim.
Sounds a lot like politics. Just with more hotpockets and wizard capes.
An entrepreneur agrees: 'To get rich is glorious'
Lesson to learn: don't 'sell' your own company - always get a professional exit lawyer with a good track record to take care of the negotiations - it also takes off some of the stress, which is pretty substantial.
Look, they do it for the high. That's a lot safer than pretty much any other addiction - gambling, drinks, drugs, WOW, whatever. At least he recognizes it for what it is.

It's the same thing as we free speech zealots say about TV - if you don't like it, change the channel and let those who enjoy it have it. You don't like Digg? Fine. Then don't go there. (I'm sorry, but people getting all holier-than-thou about things as stupid as which social news site is better really gets on my nerves. Let's fight about something useful, like the Yankees signing Tex or something. :) )
Yes. The article gives the California Public Employees' Retirement System as an example of extreme losses due to over-leveraging. I didn't see anything in the article to suggest that HMC itself was dangerously leveraged, though. Considering the long-term outlook and vast wealth of Harvard, one wouldn't expect it to gamble anywhere near as much as a hot-shot hedge fund, or even as much as a pension fund with an implicit government guarantee. That's just speculation, though; real data would be welcome.
do you distribute your work under GPL? If so, then you wouldn't see a change under CAPL.
Looks awesome. I wish they would have taken photos that were less 'artistic' looking and more interesting. The photos are mostly of them moving it, then using it at odd angles..
Would that be the same feelings I'm experiencing? Namely a conviction that now all the easy-money one-offs have been done and this time there can't be any left?