skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll give it a shot (full disclosure, I have not been to Russia but have a keen interest in the country):

"and oh, goodness, weren’t there just a great number of these in unregulated America?"

Europe which is much more stringently regulated has the same (or even bigger) problems than the USA – so does Japan. So to blame everything on the Americans is not a 100% correct. Some of these regulations (e.g. Community Reinvestment Act) even had a hand in the cause of the economic troubles. Europe's “well regulated” banks are falling just as fast as American banks.

“Here he was, blowing up civilians in apartment buildings in ...”

Blaming Putin for the Russian apartment bombings is standard conspiracy stuff. It is like blaming Bush for 911.

“nationalizing all resource companies, “

The Russian oligarchy obtained most of the state assets in a pretty corrupt way during the Yeltsin era. I am pretty sure that pure nationalisation of assets would not be bad. (even though Putin is corrupt).

“working on re-constituting the old Soviet Union,”

What did Putin do to “reconstruct” the Soviet Union? Even its closets allies (and component states of the Soviet Union) were forced to pay market prices for natural gas (e.g. Belarus) – i.e. Russia stopped subsidising them.

“while people like me were warning investors for the last couple of years to get as far from Moscow as they could (too bad BP didn’t listen). “

Hindsight is always 20/20.

“The system, instead of being diverse and robust, is a monoculture with no life to it.”

The economy was in pretty dire straits when Putin took office (1998 Russian financial crises). It can be argued that the economy now is in better shape than it was before Putin took over from an alcoholic.

“I don’t think this will save Putin or his current ideation of Russia. “

As far as I know, Putin was extremely popular when he was president and he is still now pretty popular. State ownership of television stations may help with this. The United Russia party (of which Putin is the chairman) won the last elections in 2007 by an almost 2 3rds majority.
Did the Navy Spend ~400k on Facebook? (Why Bulk Data is Important)
Basically. I had a list of about 10 classes that would satisfy a requirement in the 'Social Sciences' and econ just happened to fit into my schedule so I took that one and it just happened to be the econ class with an amazing professor. I guess 'serendipitously' would be a better word.
Actually, the article (among other things) expresses concern about one of these nominees having taken part in one of the most notorious acts of scientific censorship in our time. I didn't know that, and the author's concern seems reasonable.

Edit: I'm talking about Scientific American's vendetta against Bjorn Lomborg, during which they not only refused to publish his response, but threatened to sue for copyright infringement when he put it online, denying him permission to quote the passages he was defending himself against. If I recall correctly, Lomborg did as SA demanded (crippling his own rebuttal), which prompted one of the founders of Greenpeace to put the whole thing up on his own website, saying that while he didn't agree with Lomborg he disagreed with censorship more.
Well said.. its interesting, a surplus in groups is created by the need to survive and a stroke of luck. With this excess, groups of people could dedicate some time to song, dance, art, and other expressions - initially used solely for the purpose of communication and passing down communication between generations. This is likely how the human mind evolved language processing abilities (http://www.amazon.com/Singing-Neanderthals-Origins-Music-Lan... and http://www.amazon.com/World-Six-Songs-Musical-Created/dp/052...)

It wasn't the only choice though. Maybe some members of the tribe used their free time to kill more salmon. Maybe they killed all the salmon because it was so good, or because they could bag the prettiest girl in the village because they had all the fish.

One way (song/dance/art), you are enhancing survival for the group and future generations. Another way (using survival skills to create excess), you are profiting in the short term.

Hundreds of years from now our era may be remembered as the generations that killed all the fish, and took all the paint brushes to make more fish hooks and spears.
Well, his only example was this, so when the shoe fits...

Tierney frankly conflates political agendas with making your best guesses about the future given current knowledge and resource constraints. He's a global warming denier version 2.0: it's happening, but we're not sure where we'll end up or it's too expensive to fix, so the best thing to do right now is nothing. Impugning the current best science by claiming it to be politically motivated is par for the course.
You are _always_ a representative of Facebook. You can't get away from it, and every thing you do reflects back upon Facebook, just like everything that guy does represents Christianity. This is important to know.

That said, there's no contextual distinction here; using a personal account isn't enough to dissociate your professional responsibilities. Especially not when you're replying to a Facebook user's inquiry directed to you specifically because of your employment at Facebook. Any response to that is obviously going to directly reflect upon your employer, and responding to customer inquiries is obviously a part in line with your duties as a Facebook employee. There is no contextual distinction simply because your response was posted on your personal page and not an official company-sponsored page.
Would you typically recommend the use of a blog to YC applicants? I suppose I'm seeing it as a simple — but effective and fulfilling — way to build some visibility for the project.
Yes, I have worked with mechanize before. I was using mechanize even when there only was the perl version. I added a comment to the article explaining my choice.
He wants companies to give students homework? It sounds like he just wants companies to bypass college completely.

I mean, isn't that the professors' jobs? They design a course, assign work (solo or in groups), give tests, and then give you a grade based on how well you did. Then the companies look at your grades.

Also, I'm not sure what type of students he's met, but me and all the engineering students I knew were, generally, not "quite motivated" to do homework...
We think there’s a third alternative which is much more enticing for the consumer and the manufacturer – make a netbook that is a pleasure to use and can serve as a gateway to lucrative subscription services.

How about making a netbook that is a pleasure to use and can serve as a gateway to data I serve from my home computer?
I actually almost wrote one today. Basically, if you're doing a JS API, you're likely going to end up with a pattern like:

<script src="api.js"></script>
<script>
MyAPI.userID = 4000;
MyAPI.Start();
</script>

That's how most everybody does it, and it's guaranteed to throw ugly script errors any time a network error causes the .js file download to fail.

It's really easy to work around though. Somewhere in that .js file, simply declare a variable, or better still a method that sniffs for DOM dependencies like "does this div that I need to function actually exist". So you end up with something looking like this instead:

<script src="api.js"></script>
<script>
if (window.MyAPI && MyAPI.CheckDependencies())
{
MyAPI.userID = 4000;
MyAPI.Start();
}
</script>

That way, your thing will only run if it has fully loaded and has a reasonable chance of actually working.

Here's an old article I wrote with some other ideas:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/one-rule-of-dh...
It is recommended that you use the API that google provides for searching, but I fail to see why telnetting would be illegal. After all, both firefox and telnet use sockets to do their job.
And not saying it makes me feel like I'm not a procrastinator! I rue the minute you commented and ruined my few moments of not feeling like a procrastinator.
He he, ok. You can put the pitch-fork down :) I like Russians and I like Americans. It's OK... deep breaths...

So Russians don't need "my" individual tutoring, lol. Of course that's not what I meant. The point is that there are basic economic principles that seem to be ignored by governments and individuals and it can be frustrating to watch. I'm advocating in a round-about way I guess for basic economics to be taught to more than just a relatively few students that happen upon it at University.
Has this guy considered that it was just coincidence?
That the founders were going to start a company anyway and just didn't let the fact that it was a down economy stop them? I mean, really: how many of you are specifically not doing a startup because the economy is bad now?
Can we get past calling honest scientific skepticism "denial"?

Or is everything black and white?

Because that was the point -- if you're going to spin things, you're politicizing it.

There's a lot of dissent, and there are a lot of questions that remain unsolved. Then there's the whole cost-benefit thing. Then there's the wisdom of trying to reverse-engineer something we've supposed inadvertently done. Then there's the question of what's the "right" climate. Then there's the question of what's natural or not. The list goes on.

The entire issue is deep in the political swamp, no matter how you slice it. Science advisers should stay clear instead of being part of the rabble. Science is better than that.
agreed.
as the costs of collating data goes down, traditional businesses are going to realize that there are a wealth of customer data there that they aren't using. i can't help but think most business will move in this direction.
New AWS Public Data Sets - Economics, DBpedia, Freebase, and Wikipedia
Paul surely is responsible for a large part of what FriendFeed is today, but the parents who were there at birth are Bret and Jim: http://friendfeed.com/about/team
Positioning Linux In The Desktop Market (or Why Hendrix would have used Linux)
New Product From 280North: Atlas
How to Raise Money in a Down Economy
Great start there. Thanks a lot for the response.

Some of our widgets actually do it the other way:

<script>
MyAPI_userID = 4000;
MyAPI_something = 2;
</script>
<script src="api.js"></script>

With the embed script itself doing what it needed to initialize things further.
I think that's kinda the point of the article. Why was Leo focusing his energy on something that he had to know wasn't possible in his lifetime? For many, that would be waste of talent: a boy in a man's body. What we may fail to recognize or appreciate is that product B couldn't exist without unrealized product A... and that product D includes elements of A, B, and C.
Release early, release often is great when products released under that philosophy are labeled correctly.

Facebook's API does not have the typical warning labels about shifting API calls, development releases, or technology previews; these are the final, real versions, and they're expecting people to just roll with it when they whimsically decide to rename an API call or database field. If you expect people to just roll with that kind of thing, that's cool, but you have to provide fair warning -- you can't just recruit tens of thousands of corporations to use your software and then go making API-breaking changes willy-nilly.

The open-source community, where _all_ development at every stage usually occurs out in the open, takes stability, etc., very seriously. It's good and important that early versions of software are available, but they're tagged as such; ext4 had been in a stabilized "experimental" mode for the last two years or so, and it was relatively stable during that. Very early work on Firefox is available, but it's not pushed out until it has a year or so to mature, and it's billed as alpha and beta, despite the fact that the Fx 3 betas were rock solid, as are the 3.1s. When KDE released 4.0, they gave everyone fair warning: despite the name, it was still an experimental platform and release.

This is serious business. There's nothing wrong with releasing early and releasing often and sharing your contributions and collaborating -- that's good, and would probably help Facebook a lot if they would take it to heart. The bad thing here is that Facebook is actively promoting and encouraging new users to adopt this platform for incorporation into live, production-level applications, and then breaking the API and engaging in other assorted mischief without notice. That's horrible. :(
Weird to see a "Top 5" list from the same guy who said "Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice"
Sorry about that. We are working on a build to fix this now.
I think to some extent it depends on the kind of thing you're doing that necessitates the additional activity of a startup.

Linus did not start a startup to make Linux. He still hasn't bothered with one, though he certainly could have done so at various points. Similar stories exist with a huge number of open source projects.

Basically it seems like you only have to start one if:

-You don't get enough time any other way.

-You need additional resources to build the project.

-You like the people and energy.

-You want the money.
I click on one and it wants me to run an executable, and that in no way could be a trojan or anything right?
Do executives ever try their services? (My experience trying to watch LOST online)
wordpress and posterous, both rock. wp for general day to day blogging, posterous for mobile blogging, sneak peaks, and other little bits of content I capture on iphone and want to post. twitter as well if that counts.
I'd upvote this more than once if I could. The standard-issue Western line on Russia is seriously off-base. This myth of a 1990s liberal democracy, subsequently destroyed by Putin in a kind of gradual neo-Stalinist coup, is a good example. I'm not saying this as a fan of Putin; I just don't think our propaganda smells any better than the other guys'.
Thanks for the kind words. Always love feedback and suggestions for how to make the presentation better, esp. when giving it to a more technical audience (the MBA's are a little easy ;).

If anyone knows folks that might be interested in hearing (and, more importantly, ripping to shreds) a version of this talk, do let me know.
Indeed: This service is unavailable on your device.
Java build system written in Ruby
I have nothing against people discussing their start-ups, and even posting that up to the top of HN, but the attempt to obfuscate is, in this case, what is irritating.

Half of us are entrepreneurs. We know you want to pitch your start-up. So pitch it already and be done with it. Don't try to make it into an "interesting article" unless you're able to write a genuinely interesting article (which this is not).
Not really very insightful. And the don't need virality if your product is good bit really hasn't been proven out.

There are many superior products out there that have lost to the competition (especially in the social network space) because they never gained enough early traction.
It's extremely helpful as a web designer to be able to check compatibility across all browsers without having to install them. Installing IE6/7/8 on the same machine is not recommended.
http://www.metroflog.com/glory-mar
From that thread, I wonder if create_account would change their advice now?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35277
That's pretty amazing. It's like Interface Builder but for Cappuccino ... and as a web app.

I can't believe how awesome these guys are, I hope Apple acquires them and starts using their technology for MobileMe + iWork.
One of their papers, about how easy it is to implicate an innocent host in a BitTorrent exchange, was kind of interesting. They managed to get DMCA takedown notices for their printers...
The hardest part about his first point, "launch a scaled back version first" is determining what, exactly, that means to your product. For me, it's not at all a challenge to think of 20 incredible features that would completely blow away the competition. Does that mean I should only pick 10? What if I'd though of 50... should I now only pick 25?

I wish he'd talked more about the purpose of scaling back. I'd presume that it's to save time, and to have something working with which you can improve. If that's the case, I'd much rather heed the advice of "launch early, launch often" then "scale back." The most difficult decisions to make, for me at least, are what features to spend time on. I consider every version of what I make scaled back, because to me, it's never done.

About his argument for scaling back: "there are people in their garages building an electric car." What does this prove? It doesn't convince me that these people in garages are on a better track than Tesla. If, however, one of these people manages to build a better company than Tesla, based on their garage-built prototype, then maybe I'd take his point more to heart.
To be fair, one point at least seems accurate -- falling oil prices will probably doom Russia's government. This has happened before: see this very interesting book by economist and former Russian PM Yegor Gaidar: Collapse of an Empire. I can't recommend it enough. But basically, his thesis is the reason communist Russia fell was oil prices fell below the level needed to support spending and because of structural deficiencies in the Communist government they were unwilling to confront this problem. Hopefully this is a lesson only for Russian and Venezuela, and not the USA :(

Link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815731140

You can read an excerpt for free here:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25991,filter.all/pub_d...

or here: http://scribd.com/doc/12796808
Actually wanted to ask here. What does this mean for app engine? Sure django can be used in appengine, but to me, I still keep flipflopping between the two when prototyping projects quickly....
If it were that simple and obvious, people wouldn't be making these mistakes over and over again.
Use the arrow keys, duh!
What are editors for?
Why pretty much negates its potential usefulness.
I rolled my own with Django, which I kind of regret now. A blog is really about the content (in this case, news about your product) and not the technology you use.

If you're going to host your own, I'd recommend WordPress. If you don't mind someone else hosting it, try out Tumblr + Disqus.
I don't like the tabs on top either, I can't use them when browsing in full screen with mega zoomer.
Just recently installed (Downloaded? Activated?) offline mode. So glad I did. I can't wait for Google Calendar to start this, then I'll have outlook effectively replaced.
I use this:http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php which makes screenshot but is more than nothing
Microsoft demos new photosynth for videos (in realtime)
You're right. It's not like we weren't aware of making these mistakes, we were so clouded and close to the project that you become blind to them. You need to force your way out of that...
Social Networks and Web 2.0 Papers at WWW 2009
http://browsershots.org/ lets you get screenshots of your website from many more browsers. (but its screenshots, so you cant interact with the website.)
I agree. I'm really irritated as well that when you click the any of the tabs while Safari is in the background, it will bring Safari to the foreground AND make that tab active. I primarily use the "title bar" area of my windows to switch around. This is a huge annoyance.
Fair enough. I guess the surprised reaction you're getting is because web testing frequently involves doing this kind of thing, so, being a community of web programmers, everyone here knows it backwards. I didn't really think of the angle you mentioned where someone wouldn't know all the relevant techniques and just want to get something working ASAP. For that, taking the cookie from FF might indeed be a time saver.

Anyway always good to see everyone chime in with their opinion so thanks for the conversation starter.

BTW, is anyone else nervous about the day the teenage h4xx0rs discover how easy this kind of thing is these days ..
Furthermore, the fact that Leonardo is a procastinator and so are we indicates that we are all merely human and somewhat equally capable, regardless of how human history has elevated the status of one being over another.
Oh my gosh, how annoying is the video at the bottom? I was hoping to just see the interview with Paul, not a sliced and diced version that screetches like he's pulling a needle over a record..
I can live with the current level of 'politicize' as it is vastly better than the previous level of 'theologize'. As you I would much prefer an atmosphere of point and counter point but those days (if they ever existed) may be hard to come by again.
I don't disagree, but they cite the two sales from last year as validation of their numbers. The thing is, Ars sold for ~$25 million (vs a $15million valuation). I just looked up the PaidContent.org sale, and it looks like it sold for $30 million vs their $3.5 million valuation. Neither of those make them sound very credible. :)
Really?

I think the whole point is to launch as early as possible. "Release early, release often"

Plus you want to get up and running, get some users, and start building momentum (which comes from people using it, talking about it, giving you feedback, etc.)

I recommend building the app for yourself. You will know what features need to be done first.
Microsoft offers language-agnostic coding technology
FreeVoiceLine.com challenges telcos for long distance market
IonLogix Systems recently released FreeVoiceLine.com, a free long distance service for the US and Canada that has social ties to blogs and facebook. "It's been 12 days, and FVL has already handled several thousand calls", said Cashton Coleman, CEO of IonLogix Systems and the maker of FreeVoiceLine.com. "FreeVoiceLine.com is built off of my singular vision, that if people can use services such as Yahoo or Google, then there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to call and talk with people for free either", he said.

Be sure to check out FreeVoiceLine.com - it's a really high quality, free calling service that is growing extremely fast!
Running IE6 under Vista is still valuable, but this tool still fails where IETester fails-- the fonts are not rendered at the same size as they would be in IE6 on XP. Useless for developers/designers if you can't trust their renderings.
Though he accomplished it by altering the requirements. His solution does not work seamlessly with HTTPS sites -- it requires a server-side changes to the code. That's a pretty big issue for a script that's supposed to "just work."
I agree.

Then I think it's time we called political science appointments for what they are -- political appointments. Their job is political, not scientific.

This is the same as political appointments in other branches of government. The clear idea is that the appointee will uphold and support the politics of the administration, not pursue some other agenda -- pure science, clean waters, cushy prison cells for corporate crooks, etc

If those are the ground rules, then I can live with that. But it seems that when the guy was saying one thing he was political and when a different guy in the same job was saying another he was not, and that's clearly not the case. It's all politics.
Why do people insist on bringing politics to HN?
If you knew anything about what happened to WebObjects, you would be hoping that such a scenario never occurred.
This is incredible, excellent work guys
You are delaying facing your fate too!
Just do it man. If something is told here over and over, is that theres no perfect business idea. You pick one direction and correct your course every time your market tells you so. good luck. :)
One of the ways we've used in the past is that FeedbackArmy service. For $7 or whatever, it's a great way to ask a few questions like "What does this site do?" to a lot of random folks you'll never know or see.
Twitter should buy Mr. Tweet