skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You deliberately misread or need a remedial reading course: I was clear, totally clear, crystal clear: My point was that the DoD research shows that research can be powerful for finding solutions to practical problems.

Your point does not contradict what I wrote and is hardly even relevant.

Also I was totally clear that venture capital might not want to fund research. Instead my point, my recommendation, was that venture capital should consider and evaluate research that has already been done. But in information technology, Sand Hill Road will NOT do that. A-H won't do it. Menlo won't do it. KP won't do it. Sequoia won't do it. Founders's Fund won't do it. Silicon Valley will NOT evaluate research. PERIOD. No wonder their returns suck.

For the DoD, actually, if do some arithmetic on something like ROI, their deployments and even their research look good, MUCH better than Silicon Valley.

Let's take a simple example: If read Richard Rhodes, the atomic bomb project, The Manhattan Project, cost about $3 billion. And there was a LOT of duplication and failed directions. But apparently the Bomb saved about 1 million US casualties by avoiding invading the islands of Japan. So, we're talking $3000 per casualty. We're talking a financial bargain.

Want to do some ROI calculation on, say, GPS? How about the ROI of GPS and laser guided bombs? So, roughly get one bomb to do the work of some power of 10 bombs without GPS and laser guidance.

Want to do some ROI on, say, packet communications networks, i.e., the Internet, and just for the DoD uses?

Again, yet again, my point was that DoD has shown in rock solid terms for over 70 years that research can provide astoundingly powerful solutions to important practical problems. So, in my 'algorithm', the key in Step 2 is just such research, and the DoD has shown that such research is possible.

Just what part of this simple argument is too difficult to understand?

Look, guys, I know that it's possible to dream of typing in some Java, Python, C++, etc. for a social, mobile, sharing, app and hope to get rich. But, PG's essay explained how tough it is to evaluate such work early on, and the averages along Sand Hill Road just SUCK.

But the DoD has done well in essentially my three steps for 70+ years.

Gotta tell you, in broad parts of our economy and technology, what YC and SV use as project evaluations won't pass either the giggle or sniff tests. Instead, projects in applied science and engineering receive careful, detailed evaluation early on and, when a passing grade is given, execute with high success. We're talking dams, bridges, tall buildings, airplanes, and much more. Net, the evaluation techniques of SV are back in the paper airplane days.
Ugh...same old shit, no new data to suggest that this might be possible within the time span mentioned. Moore's Law, Exponential Growth, blah blah blah.
Bower: A package manager for the web, from Twitter
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/apple-ad-spending/ quote "And while $691 million may seem like a massive amount of money, it’s still less than half of what Microsoft spent on advertising last year. And it’s less than what Dell spent last year."

I'm not sure what the case is like today, I'm sure its gone up a bit but would be surprised if they surpass Microsoft yet. Apple doesn't pay for product placements; see http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/apple-the-ot... quote "The cast’s (Gossip Girl's) sudden conversion cost the Cupertino (Calif.)-based iPhone maker nothing. Apple has spent decades strengthening its subtle but powerful grip over Hollywood, and unlike many companies, says it never pays for its products to appear on television or in movies."

Apple doesn't SPEND much on marketing, but the marketing done is incredibly effective. Turns out, just having the best product makes the job much easier.
You mean my programming skills? What are hacker skills?
'so Blizzard wouldn’t have a long gap between game launches.'

You've already lost me
it's really rare to find a lifestyle technology business.

The traditional challenge you'd level here is "Name three" (37signals, Fog Creek, Balsamiq) but, due to the type of people I hang out with, I could get to fifty before having to slow down and start checking my Gmail. A friend of mine who is in the selling shovels business estimated that there are 30,000 firms selling SaaS. (That number struck me as crazy until I realized that, oh yeah, I'm routinely in rooms with several hundred of them at once.) The overwhelming majority will never raise outside capital.
They're good, but I don't think Firefox Android has grabbed much market share.
I've had a swopper for a good five years or so in my home office. It's good for a time, but I ended up getting a second chair to go with it. Seems ridiculous but I like to switch between standing and sitting in various ways. I guess I just can't sit still.
5 Crowdsourcing Platforms Every Developer Should Know
I don't know too much about competition of Google Talk and IM apps on iOS, but http://imo.im has been good. One of Google's first 10 employees is behind the app. It seems to be the only iOS multi-IM app to support Skype text chat (including group text chat which is good for me).

Though can't deny Verbs is beautiful.
If you want to commit something to memory, read it, try reciting it in your head, try writing out, and as long as you can't, refer back to the original thing.

If you want to record a passing thing to later commit to memory, write it in a notebook.
We Have All Become Parallel Gamers
There's no proof that there's isn't an algorithm that could efficiently break it on currently existing classical computers.

But we could also say that about the cipher used to encrypt the bulk message data.

I'm just saying that QC for the forseeable future seems complicated, expensive, and fragile and at best only addresses one bit of the overall puzzle.

Again, I'm not talking about credit-card-transactions here.

That's always refreshing :-)

I'm talking about critical information that you don't want to gamble with. ECDH, however good it is, is a medium-term gamble and practically certain to be broken in the long-term.

You probably know some things I don't, but conventional and EC DH seem to be the more conservative choice to me whereas QC seems like it's barely out of the lab (i.e., we have less than a decade of real-world experience with it).
I also fail to see the attraction of SF. It's foggy, cold, filthy, crowded and expensive. Sure there's perks like great food and awesome beers on tap that are hard to find elsewhere. But is it really worth it?
"It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a disproportionately low probability of the latter."

The "not merely not" phrase here is a little confusing. What PG is saying is that the probability of it succeeding is inversely related to the probability of it being a big success?
Which is completely irrelevant because whoever does have the original copyright has already licensed them to everyone under publicly available conditions.
Feel free to drop that bit entirely, and discuss my central points; it was a tangent.

I disagree with your claim, regardless. It is always both. Sexuality is influenced by lots of factors; the word "sexuality" itself refers to quite a lot of aspects of behavior and preferences, some of which are strongly influenced by things that happen before we are born, and many aspects of which are affected by things throughout our lives.

A woman who is strongly heterosexual, and at some point as an adult starts sexually abusing little boys, might find those relationships far more appealing than with adult men for reasons that include her own abuse as a child, the power balance, etc. etc.. Another woman with the same childhood abuse might have normal adult relationships. Nothing's JUST nature OR nurture; everything is affected by both.

But a clarifying link, if you're interested in correlations for child sex offenders who were abused themselves:
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/42...

From that: "A study by Simons et al. (cited in Simons 2007) found that 30 percent of child sex offenders responded in the affirmative to the question ‘have you been sexually abused?’ Descriptions of the act of sexual abuse, however, produced prevalence rates of 58 percent (Simons 2007)."

(but read on if you're curious; it get muddier; I doubt I should just say most of them were abused as if that were a known fact)
I don't think it's purely the urban planners, as if they've usurped power against residents' wishes. The desire of would-be new residents may be for density (which is what markets would reflect), but in much of the SF Bay Area, the desire of current residents is in the opposite direction, which is what their elected officials and planning boards therefore implement. So that's another kind of collective desire, but of a different collection. Places like Palo Alto, for example, retain rules requiring single-family homes with certain minimum lot sizes, because that's what Palo Alto residents want their city to be like.

You actually get that in the private sector as well, if a municipality doesn't set such rules. The neighborhood I grew up in in Houston had minimum lot sizes and restrictions on subdividing houses for rental, all implemented via contract law. When the subdivision was built, all buyers agreed to set up a homeowners' association and certain rules, which are now conditions attached to the deeds. In an alternate world where Palo Alto had been set up that way N years ago, with subdivision organizations and contract law mandating lot sizes, rather than municipal government setting them, the end effect seems like it would be largely the same, so it doesn't really seem like a government vs. market distinction (at least, unless you restrict freedom of contract enough to make this kind of private-sector zoning impossible).
But does it have protected memory? Can we write into it the things we want and need?
No matter how much you might wish it, a purely meritocratic system is not possible, not when there are people involved. There will always be subjectivity and biases. SV is more meritocratic than most other industries, and I do believe that most people in SV honestly try to be impartial, but that doesn't actually pan out a lot of the time.
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About HTML5
Irrelevant, though. Sure, there may be no copyright preventing anyone else from ripping off his reformatting work, but that doesn't prevent him from charging for it. He just has to endure the risk that he may not get for it what he charges for it when somebody else rips it off and sells it for $0. This is analogous to selling a nice, commercially pressed DVD of a linux distro for $5. You have no protection against the next guy giving an equivalent item away for free, but there is no law preventing you from charging money either.
What Happens to Your Money When Kickstarter Fails?
The pixel analogy doesn't quite hold here. The only reason pixels have a certain size if because the maker of the screen didn't make them any smaller. With quantum mechanics (at least by my undergrad understanding of it), those "pixels" are due to angular momentum, and properties of standing waves.
I've spent the last year with one of these at work. Though I haven't tried any of the others mentioned here, I absolutely hate this thing. Not only does it break easily, but it quickly becomes uncomfortable, and have had incredible back pains because of it.
> The solutions you are offering are so general that by following this high-level point of view we can solve world peace, world energy and world poverty and still make the evening tea.

Nonsense. I'm talking applied research. There's rock solid, highly developed, high quality education for that called a Ph.D. in applied physics, applied science, applied math, the mathematical sciences, and many fields of engineering. The education is for 'doing' and is fully 'practical'. The shelves of the research libraries are stuffed with peer-reviewed journals of original research with 'applied' and synonyms in the titles. These journals state strongly that they like papers with actual applications. There is nothing too "general" about what I described.

It is true that the HN community and Silicon Valley are short on Ph.D. holders in applied physics, applied science, applied math, engineering, etc. But, as I stated up front, YC is unusually well qualified in these directions.

My post made some rock solid points but was written in a way to raise 'attention' although attacked no one. Instead, I was attacked. Likely the attackers were mostly just HN mods. I've seen such before at HN: There are some strong, secret PC norms sometimes enforced here. Thus HN is nothing like free and open discussion of IDEAS.

PG's essay raised some questions about some pressing issues, and I gave some rock solid answers, and was, thus, attacked. Piss poor.
Laws against drug possession are supposed to have a similar deterrent effect, but we know those don't work terribly well.
I don't think it's that simple.
IANAL but AFAIK it works like this.

Prostitution is illegal, therefor paying someone to have sex with you while filming it would also be illegal.

In porn, two people have sex consensual sex with each other for free. A third party pays the couple for the rights to record the event and commercially exploit the recording (that in theory might have happened anyway).
I am really tired of Moore's trend being referred to as a Law.
Sort of ditto gizmo686; the article cited confounds primary caregiver and mother, and I would be surprised if the authors of the source articles had the kind of data that would disambiguate the two. Which women are better than which other caregivers? The idea that every women/mother is automatically better suited as primary caregiver is a old stereotype that continues to do harm.
Ah, your age of majority isn't 16?

Re the false dilemma claim, I didn't present it as an only option; changing both laws is, like you say, consistent and was in mind when I made the argument I did.

Whilst it would be consistent to change both laws that doesn't make it any the less inconsistent to specifically alter your laws to allow for relay of erotic images for those considered to be under the age of sexual maturity. Or do you disagree?
For once, an indie developer wants you to torrent his game
>Women are empowered creatures who are just as capable as men, but also horribly oppressed and in need of special consideration.

Great point, but I don't see the dissonance here - partially because I don't understand the phrase "empowered creatures." To say that women are just as capable as men, yet are horribly oppressed and in need for special consideration to offset that seems to lack any contradiction at all.
Sure but whats the killer app? What can the internet improve significantly? What is really useful to an average consumer? Not someone who is just looking for ways to spend time on a computer.
Except since the cost of production for individual units is $0, it's more akin to crafting a really nice distro, not a DVD.
There is a key asymmetry you're missing: people who already live in a community and people who want to live in a community are all stakeholders, but zoning boards are controlled by the former. People who want high-density housing in a neighborhood can't get on the board to change the zoning.
I agree with all of your points except GMail. I often use Apple Mail, but if I need to find something, I have yet to be happy with its search. I use GMail directly for search, and then I often stay there to write my reply.
Saturday Soapbox: Adult Gaming
AndesBeat ‘unconferences’ TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 for South America
Neither is it rape nor is it necessarily a sexual crime for them to exchange sexual images of themselves in many jurisdictions, most I'd warrant.

You need to specify the jurisdiction you're referring to.
These sorts of restrictions are all wildly inefficient. Buying property doesn't buy you the right to control how the composition of the area changes with time. If you've got 10 people in a neighborhood with single family homes, and 100 people who want to move into the neighborhood into high density apartments, why should the minority be able to override what the market demands?
Here's a simple JavaScript/native bridge implementation: https://gist.github.com/3688560
These people are closet creationists. The thought of there being no reason for the universe is probably quite frightful for them.
The native vs. web arms race reminds me of Movies vs. Television. To attract people into theatres, the movie people made movies wider, added stereo sound, &c. &c., always trying to keep the theatre experience better than the TV experience.

But TV wins for convenience, cost to develop, and ubiquity, so there's plenty of content developed directly for television.

It's not a perfect simile, but there's enough of a resemblance that thinking the Movie/TV history through stimulates my thinking about native/Web.

JM2(anecdotal and inexpert)C
Photograph from Syrian war zone
I am sure that you knew that browsers were finally getting good enough. Getting the timing right is still difficult but it is not pure luck. I suppose you also need some luck (and skill) to convince others that something is now becoming possible. Finding an investor that also sees the opportunity can be hard.
I absolutely was saying both could be factors (see more above), though obviously some child abusers were not abused as children, and many, many children are abused (especially girls -- the figure is something horrific like 1 in 4 girls experience some form of sexual abuse) who do not grow up to be abusers.

That was a parenthetical tangent that was intended to humanize abusers, not stir up a new debate (i.e., "what are the causes of pedophilia"), which is far less important than "what's the best way to prevent child abuse".

As far as I care, the causes can remain obscure without affecting research into how people can manage pedophilic urges effectively so that children aren't hurt, ideally while still treating the people with the urges as human beings.
But the market is what set up the restrictions in the first place, in Houston's case! They're just private-sector agreements in contract law that you agree not to do X/Y/Z to your property, in return for your neighbors agreeing to the same.

Is the argument that people shouldn't be able to agree to a contract saying, "I will not subdivide this land, and will only sell it to someone who agrees to the same condition"? I'm not entirely averse to that, but it seems like it's a more complex issue than just allowing whatever the market demands, because there's market demand for these restrictive covenants (people really do sometimes want reciprocal agreements with their neighbors about what each will do with their land), which would have to be prohibited by restricting what kinds of contracts people are allowed to sign.
People who want to live in a community have their say in getting to pick the community in which they live. If you have already made the commitment to move (which comes at a pretty significant cost), you are in a much better position of being able to pick a place to live than if you were to make changes that impose on others a desire/need to move.
Are you certain? Im under the impression periods in email addresses, anywhere, do not affect delivery

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-awesome-gmail-tip-you-dont-kn...
"I do care about would-be founders' opinions, but surely I don't have to use every essay I write to convince people to apply to YC."

The essay reminds me a bit of the argument that the Native Americans actually got a great deal when they sold Manhattan for $24, because that money would be worth about $30 trillion today if it had been invested at a return of just 7.5% for the past 385 years. I think it's interesting and worthwhile to explore these sorts of mathematical ideas, but at the same time it's impossible to make good business decisions without fundamentally basing them on human needs, human scales, and human timeframes.
As a smaller guy, I find the Mirra to be the best fit for me.

The Aeron small is too narrow, and the medium seems to fit, but doesn't (major pain within an hour or so).
Microsoft, it seems, will never learn it's not about adding features, but solving a problem better than your competitors. That, more often than not, is about removing the bad stuff, not adding even more bells and whistles.
Tiffany CuffLinks Cheap For Sale
> not a big enough market to justify the development costs of a native client

If only 3rd party developers could develop them for free...
Communities use zoning restrictions as a way to purchase rights they don't want to pay for up front. The people who first move into a neighborhood could bargain for and purchase the air space around surrounding properties to ensure they continue to have a view. Instead, they achieve the same result without paying for those rights by implementing zoning requirements that have hight restrictions.
I invite you to argue that way against Sony among others, who have taken works out of copyright and republished them in alternate forms establishing their own copyright. They argue that converting the work to the new format meets the transformation standard set by existing law.

Somehow I don't think Walter will go out and sue people if they make copies of this e-book but I do expect that should he do so he would prevail.

So off list one of the Gutenberg folks pointed out this exception:

"Chuck they get away with this by adding a new introduction or critical essay to be book, delete that and its back to public domain."

And notes that every republished work by various publishers that use public domain material does add an introduction or a bit about the author to establish that Copyright.

So I take it all back, Walter you should introduce your book with your thoughts on how appropriate it is and then charge what ever you want :-)
Go native, HTML5 is going to lag for a while
No but it's not because competition isn't allowed, but because users are no more likely to manually switch browsers on their phones than they are on the desktop. Google's emphasis on Chrome in recent versions of Android is certainly a step in the right direction here but it will likely be another two years before the majority of Android users are running a really first-class browser thanks to the slow uptake of Android updates.

But I really think the discoverability advantages people cite for the app stores is highly overrated. If you can squeeze your way into the top twenty then maybe there's some real benefit but for most apps the app store is just an opaque box with primitive SEO and analytics.
The Elderwood Project
http://paulgraham.com/determination.html

startup founders win [...] more on determination than brains. The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. [...] A good deal of willfulness must be inborn
Reminds me of this:

"The underlying thesis behind Andreessen Horowitz’s investing strategy is that in any given year only 15 companies will make up more than 90 percent of the returns. So it pays to get into those companies at almost any price."

(Source: http://techonomy.com/2012/08/the-andreessen-horowitz-effect/)

I guess once you figure out who the big winners are going to be, getting in is worth it at basically any cost when the returns are going to be so high. If others aren't comfortable with that much risk, you can win big because the price isn't driven up to expectation, leaving room for more profit.
What I Wish I Had Known About Entrepreneurship Freshman Year
Did this guy only just now watch The Matrix or something?
I hate those chairs, mainly because you can't take off the armrests. We had a designer propose the EQ3 version for an office, and there was almost open revolt -- some people love aerons and some people just tolerate them, but there wasn't another single chair which was at least ok for everyone and liked by most people.

I've really never understood Eames fetishization in general.