skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you get out of your tech-bubble, you'll notice this as very far from the truth.

Suits are the work dress in consulting, financial services, pretty much anything where you're clients demand respect and are not in IT (IT and personal visual aestethics have an inverse relationship, in any big company you can easily tell who is in IT).

Try to attend a management meeting in Europe, China, Japan without a suit.

Within the suit world people from the US are also highly visible as the art of fashion seems to have been lost. While the rest of the world went with tighter forms, US men still wear balloon shaped trousers, as if the 80s never stopped. And the number one tell are the shoes. Italians shape the shoe world, pointy and long have been the way to go for some time now - but US men go in with big black round things, often not even polished properly. This goes up to CEO level.

There are certain elements of a push-back right now in the US as well, the first one being the success of the tv-series Mad Med which is a big advertisement for fashion and representative clothing. The second being a resurgence of elegant, masculine fashion - see blogs like the Sartorialist for a glimpse into that: http://www.thesartorialist.com/

A well-fitted suit does not signal money, it signals TASTE. Which is very hard to talk about in tech circles. Like looking at a well set up VIM instance, it tells you about the owner's habits.
I'm neither Paul Graham, nor a venture capitalist. I've never invested in a startup.

However, I have been involved in the process with potential investors deciding whether or not to invest in a company -- on both sides of the table. I can't answer your question, but I might be able to lend some relevant conversation on the topic.

Investors, especially those who specialize in early-stage startups, take a lot of risks. We all know that most startups will fail -- and those that don't are not always wildly successful. There are plenty of ramen-profitable startups that will piddle out, and plenty more that never even get to that point.

Because of the inherent risk involved with investing in general, it makes sense to take as risk-averse an approach as possible. That's why YC-backed companies are built on such solid, great ideas (the best foundation possible) -- and even many of those, even with Y Combinator's full support, still fail.

Whether or not pg has regrets is a question that only Paul himself can answer (and I hope he will), but my opinion is that his approach is the same that I take towards my investment portfolio: maybe a slight tinge of missed opportunity, but the decision whether or not to put money into a company is calculated rationally. Because of this, there's no real regret to be had.
Where do you get it? I couldn't find it on the site...do you have to file a FOIL request with them?
The best thing about this is that the conversion rate of Bitcoins is relatively unaffected. And that's good, because this is not a failure of Bitcoin, but of a single service provider.
Five Kinds of Marketing for Tiny Web Businesses
Just upgraded to 2012RC, don't see any styles which work with that yet.
Eztrader review, bbinary review, binary options brokers
Bbinary forex platform review. They have offices in New York, Rome, Paris, Istanbul and Luxembourg. Binary options became available to the large public since mid-2008.
Since all bitcoin transactions are traceable, it will be interesting to see how this money gets laundered.
W3C released the HTML specs on Github
What does it take to earn Michelin stars?
"Technology and the Web are destroying far more jobs than they create."

Sorry to be skeptical, but neither this article nor the original that it links cites a single reference to support this claim. How could you even quantify how many jobs the web destroys? A business can go under for many reasons other than direct competition from web-based businesses.

"The Internet is destroying vast income streams that once supported tens of thousands of jobs in industries from finance to music."

Yeah, we've heard over and over again that the music industry is being destroyed by the internet and that draconian copyright enforcement regimes are required to prevent the industry's demise. But it doesn't seem like less new music is being produced today than in the 1980s. And for every record store owner that went out of business there's now an RIAA lawyer or lobbyist taking his place. As for the financial industry, yes, some stockbrokers have been put out of business by online trading, but that seems to be a really good thing, since I now get to pay $10 for a trade instead of $400, and I can spend that extra money to support the employment of sushi chefs.
Who's involved in the CSSWG? How does one become a contributor? Who are our CSS overlords?
I think I get your drift. Thanks.
Greenlight wasn't an effort for Steam to become an open marketplace. It was specifically an effort to unclog their submission pipeline (which was previously being handled by a handful of employees). Now, these employees can pay attention to the top % of submissions and ignore the crowd-designated chaff.

In that respect, it's working marvelously well.

And it's working even better with the $100 fee, since developers are already stepping up to the plate and offering to individually (!) vet submissions to loan them the $100: http://www.dejobaan.com/greenlight100/
I believe that is was from you I learned about a book, "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing", which I think everyone in this thread should read.

Why speculate about how to set a price when you can apply some structured, thoughtful analysis to the problem?

It turns out that pricing is at once a slightly mysterious art and yet can be grasped in a few hundred pages. And that almost nothing else has as much leverage over profitability.

The book was actually overkill for the reason I bought it (settling on prices for a SaaS project); but I've started recommending it to every small business owner I know. It's that good.
Ask HN: If you use Ubuntu, which backup utility you use?
If you use Ubuntu Linux on your development machine, how do you backup your system? I'm looking to put a backup & recovery system in place for my laptop that runs Ubuntu 12.04.
Democratic National Convention 2012
> On one hand, yes, this technology would easily protect you from brute-force and dictionary-based attacks.

I highly doubt that.

There will be a finite number of possible patterns. So brute force will be possible. There will likely be some types of patterns or some pattern components that do not follow an even distribution, so dictionary attacks will still exist. (Really, a dictionary attack is simply a brute force attack that takes advantage of the non-uniform choices of passwords.)

My guess is that such games would be chosen based on techniques that produce the best (aka, most uniform) distributions of responses from users, but I doubt that it will be perfect. A brute-force attacker would probably be able to do noticeably better than blind brute-force.
I'm pretty sure he's thinking of something like this:

<p>
<div class="active">Short Form</div>
<div class="inactive">Long Form</div>
</p>

,where clicking switches the classes.
Nice blog. Keep us updated
Oh it is traceable, just unstoppable and ungoverned.

I assumed that "federally insured" was code for inflation, but the wikipedia article revealed that it is actually insurance: banks pay insurance fees to be in the FDIC.
It's hand-curated where the curator has a strong bias. That's not really curation.

I'm very rarely looking for a search result that takes me to a place to spend money.

Even with commercial queries, I'm usually looking for a review of some sort first, and only then am I looking for the opportunity to buy.
99% of the mentions of Atlas Shrugged I've seen use it as a target for mockery. Not just the "philosophy," but the writing style: it's practically a byword for turgid unreadability.

BTW, here's my favorite comment on Atlas Shrugged, starring Bob the Angry Flower: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
Or the jury can just do whatever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification . We had a case like this in NZ a few years ago, activists broke into and damaged an ECHELON spybase, admitted to it but said it was for the greater good, Jury agreed.
I'm not sure how to do all of that, but the bit about reducing the dynamic range resonates. I think syntax highlighting should exist to highlight three categories of syntax:

a) comments. What is never run?

b) literals. What is just plain data?

c) punctuation -- mostly so it can be deemphasized.

Sample of my minimalist 'scheme': http://imgur.com/NrrS9.png
Unfortunately, yes. But it's >60GB of data for 2011 alone, hosting it might be prohibitive.
And how many of those displaced workers will be able to design?
Sorry, but this isn't the case for me. IssuedAuthSubTokens shows a google talk authorization (bitlbee...), google calendar, and chrome.

But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.
EE-UU, Japón y Canadá se quedan solos en radiaciones
dialcloud.com (cloud, voip, sms)

localbux.com (SoLoMo, barter, deals)

blinkbot.com (generic)

busypad.com (tablet or saas application)

cylindr.com (database related)

dronegear.com (the drones are coming!)

peerworlds.com (social, gaming)

whenup.com (events)

xlsquid.com (generic)

zapfacts.com (informational)
Excited to hopefully make it! I've only been able to watch the streams previously.
My next one ;-)

Edit: joking aside, I cannot comment for pg but there are a number of startups I regret not funding - funding with my time and effort. Whatever strategies or not people use to invest in others companies we can all invest in one - our next one.

I am minimising my regrets, by investing in me.

(I do worry about that management team though !)
Chrome Turns Four: Team To Create Five Foot Logo Out Of 10,000 LEGO Pieces
Part of finding if there is infringement includes deciding the validity of the patent--that's why prior art was introduced in this case.
Japan agrees to buy disputed islands from China
The response is much appreciated!

Suggestion:

Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?
Revenue != Net Income.
This problem is as old as the Industrial Revolution, not exactly news.

I moved to India and here I can afford tons of household help. For example, I have a chauffeur, who comes from a community of highly skilled weavers who make traditional fabrics like this: http://bannacreations.blogspot.in/2012/02/ilkal-story.html.

Basically, there is simply not enough demand for those skills. So he chucks his skill - handed down from father to son for generations - learns English and driving, and moves to the city. He now hopes to soon move out from his slum to a real house. I wish him luck - he is ambitious and hard-working, and is making a niche for himself in a challenging world.
If no labour is ever required, it means there is basically no real reason why resources can't be automatically recycled.

False- recycling resources requires energy, so unlimited resources is generally going to require unlimited energy.

You're right though about the option of recycling, which is why I have always figured "post-scarcity" essentially hinges upon unlimited, free energy. Or, well, at least so cheap as to be essentially free and so unconstrained as to be virtually unlimited.

So, get going on that cold fusion reactor.
The Thin Blue Lie and how police avoid consequences
Please don't misinterpret anything Michael Church says as being informative. The man is crazy. Like, paranoid schizophrenia crazy. He was banned from Wikipedia not just for vandalism, but for trying to blackmail wikipedia admins by threatening more vandalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mike_Church). He will, of course, claim that this was all a conspiracy against him by the Wikipedia admins, just like he claims that Google management was out to get him. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Isomorphic/Minions_of_the_....

At Google, Michael Church is infamous. Practically everyone has heard of him. He is known primarily for having posted many insane rants to a company-wide mailing list. These threads literally consisted of Michael Church writing a wall-of-text rants followed by leagues of coworkers replying to say, in effect, "For the love of God would you shut up already?". He had few, if any, defenders, yet he pretty much ignored everyone and would keep posting unapologetic follow-ups. He would say the same things internally that he now says externally. He is the best proof there ever was that Google employees can say anything they want and not get fired.

To this day, Michael Church is still a popular meme. As in, literally, we have a meme template that is a church with an M on it, and we (his former peers) use it to mock him. He is that crazy.
I was reminded today of the kind of tricky things google gets up to when I went to the download page for "Win32 Disk Imager" on Softpedia (as linked to by the Raspberry Pi's Download page).

http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burnin...

Check it out for yourself. You see that big, prominant "Download Now" button - that's an ad served by googleadservices.com.

I don't know how they get away with crap like this, it surely must be against their own ad policy.
I think the fee does need to be higher than a somethingawful-level price. Ten dollars is not going to be a significant barrier to casual trolling. One hundred is.

If you have a solid game, you should be able to sell enough copies off of greenlight to pay for the fee.

I don't think there will be much issue with chargebacks. People might make them, but unless the credit card companies are completely off-the-ball they will treat a donation to charity as a donation to charity. But maybe I'm too optimistic there.

Greenlight is supposed to be a popularity contest. All the games get thousands of views which means good games are not easily missed. Then people take the good ones and share them to friends and friends of friends and blogs and news sites etc.
Your description matches my perception of facebook ads, but not google ads. When I go to a search engine looking to spend money, I actually do expect ads and evaluate them first. Despite having the technical know-how to install an ad blocker, I haven't done so.

(Your statements imply majority or near-consensus opinions; I see no evidence to support these assertions.)
Answered my own question - https://blockchain.info has an online wallet that works just like this.
It's interesting to read this list of attributes after reading the Ventakesh Rao series "Entrepreneurs are the New Labor": http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...

In some ways the aqui-hire pathway is mentally supplanting the previous middle class road to economic comfort. The old script in medicine, law, and academia have been weakened by over-subscription and the middle class mindset is looking for a new sure thing.
That's the $100 billion dollar question.

Someone will do it better than Google is doing it now. It might be Google that improves it, it might not.
That it's a widely read book is not controversial, but Atlas Shrugged is generally considered to be a very polarizing book, even by its proponents. It tends to bring out extreme opinions when discussed. It's not surprising given that Ayn Rand very neatly divides her characters into good and bad, and does the same with society at large.

That said, many people, including Rand supporters would agree that as a work of fiction it's mostly a thin structure to put forth Rand's ideas. It could almost be a collection of essays, as the book is a collection of monologues and improbable conversations with very little time devoted to character development.

That said, lots of books with big societal ideas tend to have these issues but Rand is particularly ham fisted. Reading Atlas shrugged one gets the impression that she set out to write a novel but kept meandering onto the editorial page. By way of comparison, 1984 is a book with big ideas about society that are more subtly expressed (though Orwell can get preachy as well).

To reveal my own bias, I find her point of view a rather flimsy sort of egotism. It's the internal narrative of the tortured, misunderstood genius projected out to society at large. The galling thing about Rand's writings is the complete lack of understanding or compassion wrt the structural causes of inequity in society. It's a heavy handed, hateful, and facile way to view the world once put under a lens.
The issue with the fee is not whether you will make the money back. The issue is that it's $100 being spent for literally nothing unless you get lucky enough to get a Steam contract, and if you get that contract, it will be months (or years) before your game actually goes up and sells copies. Then, finally, you can sell the few hundred copies it will take to earn $100 after valve takes their (reportedly as high as 40%) cut of the revenue (after they discount your prices during the Steam Sale).

Again, for someone like you or me, that money probably doesn't matter, but I know a few devs who have spent time homeless. It's not exactly a profitable line of work to be in.

Re: Chargebacks:

For Valve to know that you donated, the payment will probably have to be processed by Valve.

This makes it more likely that CC companies will honor a chargeback, because Valve has an abysmal customer service record that includes explicitly telling customers that chargebacks are illegal (when they're not only legal, but appropriate in cases where Valve refuses to refund customers for nonfunctional products).

I do agree that it is unlikely to be a big issue.
We've got links to a bunch of talks from previous years archived on Lanyrd. Take a look at our series page for Startup School: http://lanyrd.com/series/startup-school/
Play HD Camcorder and DVD Videos on Galaxy Player 5.8
Digiarty offers a useful solution to watch HD camcorder and DVD ISO image videos on Samsung Galaxy Player 5.8 by converting HD videos to AVI, MP4, 3GP, WMV, ASF, MKV and FLV supported by this Android device, allowing users to enjoy more HD videos on bigger screen in portable way.
> For someone earning minimum wage, a $100 donation - which seems tiny to me, used to Silicon Valley salaries - is over a day's worth of take-home pay.

In the US federal minimum wage is 7.25. Try 2-3 days of take home pay.

> Note that services like Apple and Microsoft's marketplaces at least provide some value for your $99: They host your game, they perform basic quality certification, etc. In this case you aren't getting as much for the expense.

Steam hosts the games for you and provides basic quality certification. How are the services different?
> But that's sort of my point; today's optimisation can be tomorrow's performance regression, security bug, or be outdone by an update by the OS vendor.

Code should be written for today, not for tomorrow. Sure, link time optimization may cure the issue but it's not mainstream yet.

Software has to be maintained, it can be changed later if a performance regression or a bug is found.

> It's very rare that a program's performance is being held back by a standard library function (speaking of libc here). I remain highly skeptical that the algorithm isn't the real issue instead of the implementation of standard library functions.

Benchmark it and see. I've done several benchmarks like this and in general proper function calls can be surprisingly costly. Not because the function itself would be expensive but the function call also inhibits compiler optimizations in the call sites.

Any libc function is probably faster than a hand written naive implementation, but that only applies when you have large inputs, like megabytes worth of almost equal strings. A good optimizing compiler can (and in this case, will) make a naive loop implementation perform better.

> It's just not worth it.

The benchmark says it is worth it. Why argue against?
This would be awesome, but I feel skeptical of how practical it would be.

First, the biggest problem today isn't password quality, it's protecting them.

1) Hack the password verification/storage database. If you can do that and recover the user-provided input, who cares what type of data it was?

2) Be the man in the middle. Convince the user to give you their password. No password is immune from being entered into, for example, a false bank website.

That said, this type of password input opens up a new set of side-channel password attacks:

* What about people who can record the audio of you pressing keys? If you share an office with a co-worker, could he set his cell-phone to record when you enter your "password" a few different times and learn to copy your rhythm?

* What about extenuating circumstances? Stress, unfamiliar "password entry" layouts, or personal injuries may cause your "password" entry rhythm to get goofed up (I don't know in detail how resilient these schemes are, but I'm assuming that something as drastic as switching hands would mess it up), so you need a fall-back. If you have a traditional password backup authentication, this scheme simply offers an alternative to passwords and not a replacement of them, so what else do you do? More potential "I can't input my password" problems means that it will be easier for an attacker to con his way through the password work-around process. It's already a weak-point of security infrastructures.

It sounds awesome, but might be better suited for covert agents who need to be able to not be capable of giving up a password. Not sure how well it would work as a replacement for passwords in an enterprise or for GMail.

(Also, for the curious, at least one of the authors of the original paper is a high-profile cryptography researcher from Stanford. So this paper isn't just another "hey, this might have security uses" after-thought from researchers outside the field.)
By starting their "thermonuclear war" in the first place, Apple has already, practically speaking, leveled the patent system against small players. Almost by definition, small players don't have bombs to respond with nor do they have sponsors interested in protecting them. How do you think they will respond to bombs flying?

Do you really think anyone is going to touch Open webOS in the US after this? Do you think Jolla even dreams of bringing MeeGo here someday? Or will they think "We're not Samsung or Google. We can't survive, let alone make money if any of the big players toss even one bomb in our direction (and they're stockpiling them now). Let's stick to China and India and other markets with saner patent policies."?
Pixelhead - the ultimate in anonymous?
The Ruby 1.9 ARGF 'Class'
Please clarify "arrogantly, blatant copycats." And please don't tell us about rounded corners or tapping a touchscreen.
"During page render".

Render the page, identify the regions of the resulting bitmap which are ads, and blank them out. The browser can always just lie at the end, even after running all of the JavaScript and marking all of the DOM elements to visible.