skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are there more biotech startups than 30 years ago? Sure. But probably not more than 20 years ago, and certainly not more than a decade ago.

There's plenty of evidence of a shift toward entertainment. Look at the big startup successes of the last decade: Google, Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Digg, Bebo, etc. Save Google, nearly every major success story has been an entertainment/media play. In fact, I don't see this argument as particularly surprising or controversial, given that the web has been the dominant technology of the last two decades, and that the web has always been about media.

I think we both agree that personal ambition is pretty much constant over time. My argument is that if that's the case, then it's not reasonable to argue that people preferentially sought out "safe" jobs three decades ago. Smart, ambitious people have always sought out the opportunities that make them most successful; today those opportunities are clustered in industries that reward ephemera.
Good practical advice--also useful for bootstrappers--boiled down to 83 pages.
I've found the thing that helps me get into the zone with first-person-shooters, especially with CTF varieties, is knowing the map well enough to be able to predict where everyone is on the map based on where you last saw them -- how long a flag run takes, what the major routes are through the map, getting hit from that angle at that location means someone is sneaking around over there... and it doesn't even need to be exact, not "it takes 18 seconds to cap if you can run at full speed" (which is useful in its own right), but rather "the flag was picked up just as I respawned, and I'm here, and that's when a cap occurs..." or "I saw that guy when I died on that side of the map, and he should be crossing this area just as I respawn..." or "when I'm holding the flag here waiting for our flag to return, attacks usually come from that location, so let's pop a few grenades over there to keep it clear...".

Unfortunately, many FPS maps are created to be simple and _fair_ in the extreme, which ends up severely limiting the kinds of routes you can take (everyone's instinct is always to take the shortest/fastest one, or all routes are roughly the same length), or where the serious choke points are, so if you spend _merely_ weeks playing the same map, you can get a really good feel for the basic attributes.
The only line that matters and you should put this everywhere in your house and office: If you can’t sell your product, it’s not a product–it’s a hobby.
I left Google almost 3 years ago. Keith is the person you want to bug about Gmail now: http://friendfeed.com/keith

Why would you want keystroke playback in Gmail though? I'd rather have "undo send", among other things. (yes it's doable, just add a small delay to the actual delivery -- I usually realize my mistake within a few seconds)
If I were the publisher of the Economist I'd highlight these chaps in an article and include the paragraph: "The Economist is sensitive to the desire of the Chinese state to avoid offense regarding certain controversial topics, for example political issues in Taiwan or Tibet. The Economist has no desire to offend the Chinese state.

Accordingly, The Economist hereby renounces any economic interest in the publication rights in China, and translation rights in simplified Chinese, to any article which any governmental organization in China determines is illegal or otherwise contrary to the public interest. Putting these rights in the public domain makes it absolutely impossible for The Economist to ever profit from their exercise.

No need to thank us, China, your continued high opinion of us is more than thanks enough. And believe us, the feeling is mutual."
I'm surprised he didn't add Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet". It and the essays in "The Mythical Man Month" should really be required reading for anyone working on large projects, imho.

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SoftwareEngineering/BrooksN...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
What Does It REALLY Take to Be Making 6-Figures as a Service Professional?
Agreed. What practical use is it?

While they are at it, they could do the same with email (delayed send for certain tags) that you could easily cancel the sending. Also, "did you mean to cc everyone on your list, this is frowned upon" type prevention :)
I was interested as well, I discovered this:

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/Donohue_Measur...

Down the rabbit-hole we go!
No, there are no silver bullets, but it seems to me that people reach for Mysql a bit too quickly, without considering the pros and cons. And while it's improving, Mysql has had many frustrating things in the past... to me it's always seemed like a "worse is better" kind of thing. Sure, it's "fast", but at what cost? Once you go to InnoDB, you lose that speed advantage.

One thing that's not a tech tradeoff, and is generally a Postgres win, is the BSD style licensing. You can take Postgres and do whatever you want with it with no worries.

> Google tried to switch their ads system from MySQL to a "real" database once,

I hope the part that actually handles money has been fiddled with by Google to be robust.
Knuth: Selected Papers on Computer Science

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Computer-Science-Language-Inf...
A pretty similar design was my first try for a simple whiteboard system but switched to another misuse of memcahced with prepend and append. Timing out of old messages is a nice feature of this solution. These are dirty hacks comparing to a "proper" solution but sometimes they are OK enough.

Beanstalkd has a memcached like protocol but designed for simple queues. It's a fine system but I'm missing the timeout feature. http://xph.us/software/beanstalkd
But what if you don't need a full RDBMS but all the nice characteristics of a REST interface? Think about CouchDB and friends.
The key is having a marketable skill. With a good education, you have both a skill, and a certificate saying you do.

Without an education, you might still have a marketable skill, but people have to take your word for it.

Personally, I don't have a university degree. I do have a marketable skillset, but it's up to me to prove it, and through a bit of luck I'm in a pretty good position. But it's certainly not a path I would recommend others to travel, you leave too much to chance.
I flew from the East Coast to Europe to speak at a big conference, and we got sales leads there. I was sitting there with my sales guy, and I didn't like something he was doing on the calls - I forget what exactly, but something didn't sit right with me.

I couldn't quite articulate what was going wrong, so I just I started dialing up a bunch of people myself. "Hi, this is Sebastian... yeah, me, I run things around here... anyway, how'd you like the talk? Oh cool. Anything I could've done better? No? Nothing? Come on now, don't mess with me dude. Oh, that is interesting, thank you. Anyways, I wonder if our company can make your life better. Where you at right now? Uh-huh... and how about this particular solution? Uh-huh... yeah mate, I got something good I reckon we could do for you."

People love hearing from the high-ups in a company. And you completely lose track of real life if you're not actively spending time in the trenches. That means doing any role you yourself can do periodically, and buying tea/Japanese food for engineers and technical people whose jobs you don't understand, while really testing their patience with your dumbass, Luddite questions. And constantly reminding them that you know you're a Luddite, but you really want to understand what the hell is going on in the trenches anyways.

Call people. They love it. You won't come across as desperate unless you actually are desperate, and even then, the desperation vibe will fall off if you call even more people.
Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone
I don't understand how that scheme can work, since changing the number of shards changes the location of most users.

e.g. we have 4 shards, so user 5 is on shard1. If we go to 6 shards, user5 is now on shard5.

I guess it works with downtime to move the users, or another layer of indirection, where the newly created shards can "point back" to existing shards, but otherwise I don't see it.

My understanding of sharding is that it's best to have a global lookup table user->shard. That's not a huge amount of data, even for millions of users.

Anyone care to educate me as to how they get user%num_shards working in practice?
Because the Columbia river, and specifically, the Columbia Gorge are probably far more suited for power generation than pretty much anywhere else in the country? You have the 4th largest river in the country very near to its outlet going through a deep gorge in a mountain range. It's pretty hard to beat that. The PNW, in general, has a lot more water than California does (something all too obvious to anyone who has ever spent a winter in western Oregon or Washington). Of course, all those dams have done their part to kill off the salmon runs, and that industry, but that's another story.

Anyway, this article is politics, though, as can be seen by the resulting discussion, so I went ahead and flagged it.
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This is a lifestyle thing. It's not just alcohol, but yeh, out partying and drinking leads to 2am takeaway, hangover foods and the calories in and of itself in alcohol are bad.

Like everything, you will find people who tell you "the best way to lose weight is X" ... employ a multi-faceted approach and you'll get the best results. There is no silver bullet. Some people will not stop snacking, some people will not stop eating greasy takeaways and some people will not stop driving 3 blocks instead of just walking. Try "Being healthy" and if you find it difficult to do everything at once, take baby steps. Eat healthy food on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, building up one day at a time every two weeks. Sometimes it can take a while to get used to not being full of MSG-ridden salty foods and stuff like removing caffeine from your diet can be difficut. Getting used to the taste of wholegrain this and low fat that takes a while. It's better introduced slowly... you'll find it more difficult to keep to some sort of strict that requires that you eat stuff that you don't like 3 times a day.

It is important to do as much as you can to increase your metabolism. This means not being sedentary! Get out, go for walks, exercise, go for a jog. Whatever. Measure, rinse, repeat.

Take a sensible approach to changing your lifestyle and it can definitely come about. Fad diets, exercise machines, stomach crunchers etc. are useless without you recognising that you want to be healthy. It's not just about losing weight and remember that! There are people of average weight living extremely unhealthy lifestyles who will die younger too.
Beer and the soda sugar (added to liquors) have a lot of calories and carbs.
what difference does it make if it's a Goog company or not?
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You had a startup of 12 people, with 2 middle managers?!
Jaiku was (relativelly speaking) stillborn - just like pownce...
The Marriage of RFID, Satellite Communications and GPS, ST-694 GlobalTag
How about a tag which includes the best of everything? Here is an intelligent hybrid tag from Numerex and Savi Technology which is a combo of satellite communications, active RFID and GPS technologies. This intelligent tag is good enough to track goods anywhere within the global supply chain. Dubbed as ST-694 GlobalTag, this intelligent tag can switch automatically between active RFID and satellite communications and at the end of the day one can check the data using single back end system. Here the motion sensor does the trick and in case motion is detected for at least half hour it automatically switches to satellite communications mode.
In junior high, I used to play Counter-Strike competitively, and awareness (knowing the probable locations of opponents in any given scenario for any map) was the name of the game (apart from accuracy and overall competence). It was fascinating how teams would watch opponents' videos to pick up strategies and patterns much how high school football teams study scout tapes.
Indeed. This is not a RDBMS problem. Its a MySQL problem and the correct solution is to use a mature DB.
Shame on you.
I wish I could down vote your comment.

What is your contribution to the place where you were born? Please don't criticize, if you cannot contribute
He must keep thinking he is relevant, you know...
It's pretty much like "you know I'm responsible for the credit mark crisis because once upon a time I bought a house"
What country, if you don't mind my asking?
Actually we're on postgres... It just makes me nervous when the migration is taking upwards of 10 minutes to complete since some of our tables have millions of rows and lots of concurrent read/writes are happening.
I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too...
Japan's 40 Richest
You didn't say what you were drinking. You can get a lot of the benefit by switching from beer to Gin and Tonic / Vodka and tonic / Whiskey / Bourbon / any alcohol without the added carbs.
The question is: should we adapt technology according to national characteristics, Technology seems to make cultural borders disappear, but sometimes these borders are very strong.
The linguists at Language Log don't think too highly of this article (and the BBC radio segment on the same topic):

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1186

Choice comment: "This is probably one of the most abysmal failures of science journalism ever."
Maybe that works for you, but most of us in the real world have been trying that for years, and with little result. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. A simple, easy to understand, but certainly cumbersome at times system like the hacker diet works well.

Also, you'll stick to your diet longer by eating smaller portions of the food you like than by eating large quantities of food you hate (I'm looking at you, salads). You're better off being hungry than dreading meals.

As always, YMMV.
I think it would be better to take advantage of JavaScript's flexibility instead of trying to make Java on steroids of this language. People began to use dynamic types to speed up development and make it more flexible.
But I agree that sometimes we have to check variable types in JS, so this library can help. But for me these cases are rare.
Exactly. technical debt is a great tool for explaining to non-technical management why you'd want to invent time in refactoring, reviews etc that have no obvious tangible result in the finished product (short version: it's a drag factor makes it harder to add features and keep the bug count down later).

It's also a good tool to allow the management to do what management does best: take the technical information and make management/financial decisions based on it, on how much investment can be made now.

It turns a binary either/or choice: devs saying "Our code is bad, we need to rewrite" into a quantitative one: "How much technical debt do we have? Is it increasing? Can we reduce it?".
Writing was more widespread in classical Latin than in modern Spanish. Classical Latin, the type that we read today, was a high brow language, used by educated people. The normal people used Vulgar Latin.
Another interesting detail is that this is roughly the 4th iteration on the FriendFeed backend since we launched 17 months ago. If you look at the the graphs at the bottom of Bret's post, you can see that our previous system was about to die -- average pageview latency had increased from about 135ms to 260ms in less than a month! (not a good trend) This new design also accommodates some important upcoming features that would have been problematic in the old system.

This experience reinforces my belief that it's better to be quick than brilliant. If we had wasted a lot of time trying to build some really smart, super-scalable system right from the start, it would have inevitably been over-optimized for the wrong things, since the product and requirements have changed quite a bit since launch. By continually rebuilding the system, it stays relatively simple and close to our actual needs (plus it incorporates everything we learned from the previous iterations).
I find the minimalist lines of the iPhone much more pleasing than the Panasonic P905i, which except for the colour perhaps, looks pretty commonplace: http://www.feelphones.com/2008/01/02/panasonic-p905i-picture...
How We Actually do it: Accounting for Bugs in an Agile World
I believe it's because it's one of the words that has a great many variations in the pronunciation. Compare an Indian saying Bad to an American, to an Irish person to a South African.
So basically... we live in Europe, right?
I followed this Diet back in 2003 and lost 40 Kilos (about 88 pounds) over 6 months, most of them in the first 3. The key things for me were:

Giving up alcohol for two months
Not eating much at all
Doing the fitness regime to boost metabolic rate

By the time I stopped I was on level 45 of the ladder, had never felt fitter in my life and wasn't ripped per se but was certainly toned.

Since then my weight has gone back up largely due to work and old habits coming back - I've taken up cycling which is definitely having a positive effect, but I'm not sure it'll be as effective without consideration to other areas (crap food, booze etc.)
Then they do you for contempt of court.
Eric Schmidt has a PhD in EE/CS.
that's exactly what I heard from a big customer, when I was the CEO of my small business and used to make the cold calls...
But you're talking about existing customers, right? Which is an entirely different kind of beast...
You right. So you do not need to eat less. You need to eat less calories, right? Eat meat instead of burger - you will be satiated for much longer time with much less calories. Also you need to eat vitamins - they will help organism to convert fat into energy when necessary and you will be less hungry in average.
Excellent article. I work in an environment where we have serious vendor lock-in and the people in charge of infrastructure have a real fear of change. I have free reign to implement in any improvements in our performance and code so long as I don't make things difficult for them.

Thus, the idea of a MySQL cache system is something I've been planning to look at for a while as it plays with the existing infrastructure. This (seemingly proven) system will make things a lot easier, so thanks for sharing.
Can Games Teach You To Program?
Microsoft into the cure for HIV - with support from Bono Vox.
It's not even a case of less calories. Let's say you need 2000 calories a day. You could eat that in two larger meals with lots of fat and refined carbs, or you could eat in in six smaller meals with protein and complex carbs. Diet 2 is massively better for you.
This is great stuff - many thanks!
The the netbook market booming and iPhone is basically the most popular mobile phone in the world right now (not only for high end users, like Nokia smartphones tend to be)... I'm sorry to maybe point this out, but maybe your personal 'requirements' (5mp camera phones, super-sized iphone-tablet-stuff?) are not very much in line with the rest of the world...

Agreed on the Communicator/N800 fad, though.
Thoughts on Change
Frequon Invaders - Arcade Fun with Complex Exponentials
I'd agree with that - I haven't developed for Apple, but we run quite a few old applications for Windows at work, and it would be a big problem for us if they stopped working in a new version of Windows.

Removing the old cruft means that old apps stop working; some of those old apps are quite good, and it seems a shame to reinvent the wheel (rewrite new versions of old applications) for each OS release, so I'd definitely favour a balanced approach to removing old APIs (where balanced means trying to assess the amount of applications still in use that are likely to be affected by the change).
in this specific case, it's a bit more than 'just because you can'. Maybe it can be more like 'just because you don't want to have bugs popping around when you add new servers to your infrastructure because you forgot to setup a cronjob'

also, other languages usually offer the same kind of stuff - like Java EE's cron-like mechanisms, for instance (with or without DSLs)..
> It takes a fraction of the amount of time to do native data structure stuff than it does to touch the DB several times.

And app processes are much easier to scale than a database. Even in "slow" languages (Ruby in my case) array operations are extremely fast, definitely "fast enough".
Yes, that's how I read it and most people here seem to operate under the same assumption.
But presumably you have to learn the new syntax?
Created accounted just to say this:

Titles like this are not only terrible generalizations, but they are completely misinformed (the 2 not being mutually exclusive).

I live in Tokyo, and I can tell you, more than a few people have an iPhone. It's popular to the point that its ridiculous.
Now you may wonder why are the sales are so poor. A casual walk into a mobile shop will show you. It's variety. There are too many phones to choose from. While the iPhone still wins hands down in sleekness, there are a host of other decent phones (with greater capabilities) to choose from.

So there is no 'hate' involved, it just boils down to market saturation of comparable phones.
Apple took a piss in the sea...no surprises on the results.
Very cool. Thank you.

Thanks also for exposing me to screentoaster.com, I've been hoping for a service like this.
Yes, sure, the author's statements are technically true. The problem is that the arguments are very ill-considered.

You can say any law is job-killing -- a legal prohibition on murder puts all the assassins out of business. Damn the government! As for the "enviro impact fees", that's life. We can't just keep raping the environment and expect our kids to fix the problem. We need to pay for it now.

Nobody wants to pay taxes, but if we want to keep our society around for more than a few more years, it's a necessary evil.
Somehow I managed to anticipate something like this 9 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485620
The Economics of Time and Effort and OpenSource
QXchange Integrates SAP Business One and Salesforce.com Successfully for AccessData
San Mateo, CA, February 18, 2009 -- CellarStone Inc., a provider of sales commission and data integration solutions, today announced that its Extract, Transformation and Loading (ETL) tool, QXchange, has been successfully implemented at AccessData to ensure data integration between Salesforce and SAP Business One.
That argument kinda hinges on hypothecation, which is something that no Western government practices to any significant extent.
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India: Where Angels Fear To Trade
Impossible is a step
Lift(Scala Web Framework) 1.0 Released
I'm totally in favor of having higher-ups help existing customers (I know a few companies that do this, and I like it too).

I'd even be OK with a CEO sitting in on late game sales calls/meetings, but that's a whole different issue than having a CEO make cold calls (or even having a CEO on early sales calls). It gives the impression of a one-man shop, which prospective clients will, in most cases, try to avoid.
WOT Makes Web Search Safer | TechJaws
Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?