skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the point of this post is that if the idea has zero chance of success, then you shouldn't work on it for equity. That's cool but Bill is such a caricature that the result seems obvious. Maybe a more interesting question: what bar would Bill have to cross before you would consider taking equity in whole or in part as compensation?

Would he have to show customers in the pipeline, for example? Interested in peoples' opinions and experiences recruiting others. If you were in Bill's position and convinced someone to work for equity, what put you over the top with the potential hire?

For my case, I have done a cash/equity split in cases where I know the people involved and trust their competence. I haven't pushed on the business model at that point, since I have figured that usually it's hard to predict how the market would react to a product/service at early stages.
Vandalism Vexes Paris Bike-Rental System
Facebook appraisal pegs company's value at $3.7B
I wonder how fast the debris will be pulled downward and if it will damage other satellites, which will damage even more satellites.
Surely, in most cases the vector was attachments that ran when clicked.

Could this also not be fixed simply be requiring that launchers have the execute bit set? Actually, having read the article properly, I see that the post makes the same suggestion.

As he also says the smaller Linux desktop user numbers and the diversity of desktops mean it is still a lot safer than Windows. How many actual Linux user have actually been infected by malware?
Designing Successful Products: Jeff Hawkins of HandSpring
Generally speaking, this isn't an entirely crazy idea. I'd argue that YC is primarily a networking service too. And it takes a much larger cut from successful startups.
Thing I Learned Living on a Lean Budget
He may not just be outside the "drop zone". You could argue his motivation for taking that position is because he trusts his ability to rebuild himself in an free market recovering from the ground up, instead of an economy that is stabilized by government intervention but has limited growth potential.

Both approaches involved regular people "bending over", either through a bad economy or through taxes/inflation.
Anarchy, dawg. Right on.

Anyways, I'm reminded of the time in kindergarten when I brought my piggy bank to school for show-and-tell, and dropped it like a stupid fucking clumsy five-year-old. My teacher, a government employee, glued that shit back together good as new. So, anytime you find yourself glum about the ineffectiveness of government, about their chronic inability to fix anything, please remember my piggy bank and take heart. They fixed that good.
http://business.theage.com.au/business/surprise-jobs-jump-20...
"Employers took on an additional 33,700 full-time employees in January, the most in six months, spurring hopes the economy may yet avoid a recession.

All up, the economy added 1200 jobs last month as firms cut part-time jobs. Even so, the result was much better than the overall 18,000 job losses economists had tipped."
Stupid grammar, making that sentence ambiguous. I can't decide if I'm annoyed that you would post one sentence saying you agreed with the article (there's a little arrow for that), or if I'm cowed into meditating on the idea that quests for perfection are doomed.
5 Tips for Managing Security in a Recession
How can security be managed, and even drive innovation, in the current economic downturn?
i.e., serious martyr complex.
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I've used ASP.NET only for one project, for about 8 months, 4 years ago, and I remember pretty clearly that you can configure your View State to be stored server-side [even in the database], and not being passed around as a hidden form input. That way it's no different than Rails' session hash.

ASP.NET is huge and very powerful. It takes a lot of time and hands-on experience to become proficient in it. I would have googled around or dropped into an IRC channel before lamenting anything of significance in my blog based solely on my lack of knowledge in a very specific corner of this framework.
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Is the startup scene in Portland that bad, that people have to compete for the privilege of paying for startup advice?

How's this for startup advice? If things are that bad in Portland, move to Silicon Valley. Come to the Hackers and Founders Meetup, or any number of other meetups in the area. We'll give you all the advice you want for free, and we'll probably buy you a beer in the process.
Have had this discussion occasionally with friends of mine.Always a little confused where they are coming from, since where I sit in academia most of the innovation I see is built on open source.

In particular, open source software tools provide platforms for experimentation that would not otherwise be available. For example, the Linux and BSD kernels made it possible for operating system researchers to try out lots of different ideas on everything from security to memory management with real hardware and real workloads. Without this open source software, your options are 1) write everything yourself, 2) license a kernel from someone, or 3) go work for a company that writes a kernel (e.g. Microsoft, Wind River, Green Hills).

For another example, the Valgrind memory checking tool includes a platform for binary analysis and translation. That platform has let people innovate by building tools that run on large, real Linux programs. I know of at least two academic theses that build on Valgrind (including mine), and there's now three community-contributed data race detection tools.

Both of these areas also have closed source software with innovations, of course. Still, they seem like cases where the open source software platform has lowered the barrier to entry and made it possible for a wider range of people to contribute, therefore spurring innovation.

So I don't buy the broad claim that "open source" software fails to innovate. Maybe we could talk about more specific segments, like office software or microblogging to focus the discussion?
The high deductible insurance isn't only for emergencies -- many of these plans offer significant discounts on prescription medicines regardless whether you've met the deductible. This alone is worth it!

Also, if you submit doctor's bills through your insurance company, most of the time the insurance company will negotiate a better rate. So, even if you haven't met the deductible you'll end up paying less.
It is still possible to provide similar functionality while still innovating. The author provided two web browsers, Firefox and Chrome, as examples. Both of these applications let you browse the same websites as Internet Explorer, but both also bring more to the table (Firefox has tabs and extensions; Chrome has a streamlined UI).
That's precisely why I don't want NY Times or WSJ or Washington Post to "die" and why I have never believed in "citizen's journalism" and "user generated content".

Because citizens and users aren't producers nor journalists, they're just bored programmers dying for a drop of publicity.
Except for that the money doesn't come from the people, since it is fiat money

Don't you mean "seigniorage" money? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

as opposed to money being collected via taxes.

Isn't seigniorage a type of tax? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

seigniorage is also referred to as an inflation tax [...] the "inflation tax" is paid by those who hold the existing currency, which results from their holdings of currency becoming devalued through inflation because of the introduction of additional money supply.
U.S., Russian satellites collide in space
You buy virtual goods
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That's sorta the problem. No one can buy them, so nobody makes them. End result is that the economy stops functioning, nobody builds anything, and a perma-depression occurs. This can't be a good thing...

As for what stops company B from competing - it's the cost of tooling up all these automation centers and the risk that after all that, your "prey" may itself get better and nobody will buy your product. Microsoft was massively profitable for the 1990s. Google was massively profitable for the 2000s. Why did nobody compete with them? Because if they did, Microsoft/Google would crush them like a bug.
Martyr assumes an ultimate sacrifice. His argument seemed to be out of self-interest, where he'll ultimately benefit from a different approach compared to losing everything because he's idealistic.

(I'm trying to avoid a free market vs government debate and provide a contrarian perspective to the article.)
You edited to add the "Both approaches" sentence, so I'll respond to that, too:

I wasn't arguing that the bailout means no bending over; I would hope that there was still plenty of that, just for the right people. I'd prefer it be the executive who ran his company into the ground and is now scared shitless of living on 500k a year, rather than my neighbor with 2 kids who lost his job b/c of said executive's incompetence.

But maybe you're right, maybe everyone's going to end up with it. We'll see.
It never really happened here (Boulder, CO). A couple of the big guys with offices here (Sun, IBM) laid off a few hundred, and all the engineers and tech guys were snatched up immediately. We've been looking to hire for 6 months, and have yet to find any decent candidates in the area.

There's lots of startups here always hiring, and large government labs to fall back on.
Open source hardware club ships Gumstix-based handheld
Martyrs kill themselves because they think they're getting a boatload of virgins in the afterlife.

Arguing for an action that will bankrupt you because you think you'll rise out of the ashes like a Phoenix? Seems pretty close to me.
I think you linked to the wrong video?
This guy is a real hacker!
This could be an attempt by companies to become more efficient by replacing positions in HR and Support with software solutions.

So while this might be representative of the SaaS industry I strongly doubt that it would represent the tech situation as a whole.

Actually I think the tech sector is going to be slowly winding down for quite a while to come. There were lots of big contracts locked in before the recession hit, and that existing work is going be finished off over the next year without much to replace it.
The short of it: in a fully automated society, it is simply infeasible to have 100% (or even 50%, with most jobs moving into the service sector) employment.

Thus he proposes a $25,000/yr/person stipend funded from a combination of sources, including high marginal rates on new tax brackets for multi-million-dollar corporate salaries, various sales taxes, and the full reallocation of social spending in almost all other areas.

The result would be a complete elimination of poverty, the stigma of welfare, wage slavery, and the social security solvency problem, leading to a "supercharging" of capitalism via massive increases in consumption and ultimately "true economic freedom".

I find this proposal very appealing, yet lacking in other core respects; e.g., those countries and entities with the greatest access to natural resources will continue to be the root sources of growth, and as money is simply a tool for distributing wealth, it inevitably adapts to reflect the availability of wealth. Maybe he's also assuming energy from pervasive nuclear fusion?

I was waiting for him to mention gift economies, but he seems to love the profit system too much to accept its fundamental infeasibility in the long term.
ASP.Net is awesome for when you need a quick-and-dirty, internal application to do something and you don't care how good the code is or how efficient it is. I used it (with C#) to build a customer service portal used internally at Fog Creek and was able to build something "good enough" very, very fast... this is the kind of application where you don't care much about speed, you don't care about fonts and layouts, you don't even care about error checking because if it crashes, the person using it comes and asks you what happened and you ask them what they did, and then you tell them not to do that any more if they don't like crashes.

For shrinkwrap apps, internet apps, and anything where you really need polish, you care what your URLs look like, and you want a lot of control over what's going on so you can make it fast, shiny, professional, and bulletproof, the still-beta ASP.NET MVC has proven itself... stackoverflow.com is implemented with MVC and the team is loving it.

Stefan makes an excellent point that ASP.NET's original model was meant to be familiar and comfortable to old-school VB programmers, by providing a thick abstraction over HTML and HTTP that leaks really, really badly. For example half of your app stops working if JavaScript is turned off... even things that look like hyperlinks stop working because they're javascript under the covers... and for a timid VB programmer they suddenly have to deal with much, much more complexity to solve these last mile finishing touch kinds of things.

Conclusion... need a quick and dirty CRUD app for internal purposes that just has to be good enough? ASP.NET is fine... you'll barely have to write any code at all. Building a public-facing app that needs to be slick and polished? If you're using the Microsoft stack, start with ASP.NET MVC.
Easy, fast, and clean all in one little packet of geek joy. I like this suggestion a lot. Thanks. (The whole code-generates-code thing is still taking me some time to get used to... even though I spent several hours yesterday writing code-generates-code-generates-essay.)
So because my previous submission was killed for the first time in 500 days in a row of live submissions, you decided to kill this one as well?

Nope. I wanted to show my personality, which is what I thought the point of the video for YC was. Either way, it's my video of Startup School 2007. It's current and was uploaded yesterday. I just found the tape from back then and edited it over the past three days, which should be useful to everybody. Finally, this is the first video of the kind so I can't imagine why somebody would be trigger happy. There will be more such videos posted for feedback by others.
> That's precicely ... why I have never believed in "citizen's journalism" and "user generated content".

Ah yes, only people with formal training have good ideas. Everyone else should step aside and make way for The Real Authors.

> Because citizens and users aren't producers nor journalists, they're just bored programmers dying for a drop of publicity.

Some people enjoy writing. Not every person who goes fishing on the weekends needs to be a commercial fisherman. Similarly, not everyone that writes need be a professional author.
Hi Eric is there a good way to get in touch with you, always read your blog posts. =)

Great article as well.
I agree with you, but Jeff Atwood is a really harmful influence. He just doesn't know anything, but continues to make stuff up and pass it off as fact.

He can write his blog the next time he writes some code to go with it. Or does some research. Right now, the only reason he is popular is because he says what people want to hear. That's pandering -- not intellect.

Anyway, I guess I don't care. I realized a long time ago that most people are stupid, and stupid likes to travel in hordes. There is plenty of real education out there for people who seek it.
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My Post-Startup School 2007 Video - Xobni, Justin.tv, Dropbox, Divvyshot in March 2007
Not sure why parent was upmoded. Is there a reason why one would not want this mode added?
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I just found tape from that day, and edited it over the past three. See Justin.TV one week after launch. Also, see the first 'office' of Dropbox and Xobni in California. It's very funny, and shows why I want to live in California.
I was waiting for him to mention gift economies

Isn't Brain's "Australia" basically a gift economy? http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna6.htm

In Australia, these people could completely fulfill themselves, and humanity would be much better off because of their contributions. Creative people want to -- need to -- create. That is their passion. Instead of millions of talented people working in jobs that had nothing to do with their dreams, simply to make ends meet, in Australia they could follow their dreams.

The goal in Australia is to encourage and nurture creativity and innovation. [...] It meant an amazing level of creativity and innovation in every product category -- food, housing, architecture, vacation resorts, restaurants, furniture. Whether it was basic research or final consumer products, innovation was everywhere. The innovators had the ability to take their research/inventions/ideas as far as they could.
Looking back, I'm glad that ASP.net sucked so hard. If ASP.net were half-way decent, I probably would have fallen into the void of programmers who continue to use a mediocre tool, without ever trying anything new, because it "works good enough for me".

ASP.net got me off of closed source software & frameworks, off of windows, IDE's, and drag-and-drop design. It made me learn linux, http protocol, html/css, the shell, and a real text editor.

So thank you ASP.net, for turning me into an OSS developer who will hopefully never use a Microsoft "solution" ever again.
'We, the Economists Without Answers, are sick and tired of being asked about what caused the current global economic crisis and when it might end. The short answer is: we don’t know. We had nothing to do with its onset and we don’t know how to end it, either. If we knew anything, we’d be rich and wouldn’t share the information freely. But we’re not rich. Our asset portfolios have taken the same hit as those of everyone else. One thing we DO know is that the economists who claim to know something about the current economic situation don’t have a clue. In the immortal words of William Goldman (writing about why certain movies become blockbusters and others bombs): "Nobody Knows Anything".'

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50432051369&ref=mf
Has the author used songbird?

Granted the interface is purposefully similar. Also it plays music. Outside of that though songbird is greatly different then any music player I have ever used. The entire idea behind songbird is to integrate music listening in with your browsing. For this purpose it works great.
this is an interesting social problem: how to get people to care about shared property. finding a successful solution here is not so different to finding a successfully scaled social news aggregator.
I don't get the first point: Were the banks forced by law to be bailed out in terms attractive to the government? Or did the CEOs of these banks take government money because they were the only lenders available.

If it's the latter (which is what I thought it was), these guys should look for better investments. The only way I see government using force here is by taxation and devaluing currency by printing more of it. But that's not what these guys are whining about.
Executive summary: Free money is harder to come by now. You'll probably have to focus on building your product before you can raise money.
>> "...The remaining source of hugeness turns out to be a list control that you databound to a giant list of things from the database. The database can give you paged data, but the list control doesn't really like to be given anything but the full list--even if the control only shows a subset. At this point, you can either dig into the inner workings of the list control and try to trick it into doing what you want, or you can write your own list control. Either way you have a ton of work ahead of you..."

That nicely summarizes what I experienced in frustration (and wrote about http://lexicalclosures.blogspot.com/2009/01/paging-in-aspnet...) when attempting to bind paged data to an ASP.NET GridView (list) control.

The only difference is that I used an ORM (NHibernate) and not the database to provide the paged data. It was frustrating because the GridView control just did not want to play nice if I did not play by its rules.
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let us know how it turns out or if the plot thicks. i'm curious as to what's going on.
You believe it's skewed because it doesn't fit your particular model of world. The fact is, an entire generation of hackers got their start through tinkering on a gaming console in their pre-teen years.

I think you're just so out of touch with how a 10-year-old learns that you can't comprehend what the article is addressing. A kid that age doesn't pick up programming the same way that a person in their 20's does. He's still mastering reading, figuring out the fundamentals of his operating system, and making real-world analogies for objects on his computer that you might already have at 24. He doesn't understand what an algorithm is, he doesn't even really know what a programming language does or what role it plays. He doesn't know algebra.

Most kids are not scholarly. They don't seek out information and work through tutorials. They're never going to hear about alice/scratch/squeak/LÖVE. They stumble upon things and their curiosity drives them, but their attention span is relatively small. They do things because they're fun and not because they want to learn.

When you began programming you probably read books and tutorials, followed-up on documentation, and relied heavily on examples. Learning through your teenage years is evolutionary. It's almost all trial-and-error at that stage. Computers are a incredibly complex place to start, that's why so many of these anecdotes are about programming BASIC.
Will do. I thought I was better this morning until it hit me again with a vengeance. Doctor tomorrow. Neurologist Monday. Should have more data and better chart soon :)
...because nothing has ever been accomplished by small teams of smart people working against the good reasons of behemoths, right?

I mean, you do realize you just made that comment on a site whose reason for existence is to promote and recruit people to the idea of 3 people with 4 months and 5k each?
Comparing rudimentary 19th century financial system to present is quite absurd and misleading. Back then it was a very self contained economy fueled by production and agriculture. There were no billions of foreign bonds, volatile currency affairs or even electronic debt transfer, which can practically run the country bankrupt in a few hours if unsupervised.

I don't think I've seen a more mundanely written and ill-supported essay on financial crisis at top of HN before.
Great video vlad. Brings back a lot of memories for me personally (startup school 08).

You should move to California if you get the chance. It was the best 9 months or so of my life. It's a culture you can't replicate and it's a ton of fun.
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Conclusion... need a quick and dirty CRUD app for internal purposes that just has to be good enough? ASP.NET is fine... you'll barely have to write any code at all. Building a public-facing app that needs to be slick and polished? If you're using the Microsoft stack, start with ASP.NET MVC.

So ASP.net has become the "toy" framework, replaced by ASP.net MVC, a framework inspired by monorail, which in turn was inspired by rails, the original "toy" framework. Ah, sweet, sweet irony.
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