skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about Richard Branson? Who has created more $1Bn companies in different marketplaces (and had fun along the way)?
I count 4/5 so far Virgin Records, Atlantic (& Blue) airlines, Radio, Mobile/Media... and counting (for example Virgin Galactic & Rail are getting there).
Interesting, but our recent conversations about eBooks seemed to indicate that plain, non-graphical salesletters with a straightforward flow worked far better than "traditional" webshop layouts like these. I wonder if there's any comparison here -- does that format only work better for eBooks, or could these guys be making more money by cutting out the chimps?
No, they're trying to say that using GCC's intermediary representations in your own code (both as output from GCC, and as input from GCC) counts as LINKING.
The distinction I'm making is between logic that is purely symbolic, where conclusions follow mechanically from assumptions and rules, and logic that is applied to verbal argument. You can describe verbal argument using symbolic logic, but applying symbolic logic to words easily results in ludicrous conclusions unless you apply other filters.

I'm not saying that mathematical logic is more heavily mathematical, I'm saying that philosophers are only interested in mathematical logic concepts they can extract from their mathematical context and apply in words. Aside from that, they are not interested in mathematical logic at all. Whether they are interested in mathematically defined concepts such as "complete," "consistent," and so forth depends entirely on whether the concepts have suggestive names that seem to imbue mathematical results with meanings beyond mathematics.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not exactly sunshine and roses. It is forgivable to surmise the author would not be a happy camper. I was glad to know Orwell shared some happiness with his tyke in his final years.

(On the other hand, the great spreader of sweetness and light, P.G. Wodehouse, who I also like, seems to have been pretty quiet and unadventurous in person.)
"I don't see where Ruby syntax is particularly more concise than C# 3's."

1.upto(10).each{|x| print x}

I'm curious - how would you print 1 through 10 in C# 3 by comparison?
"Even Microsoft certified open source software to run on it’s platform."

They've done a lot more than that- they actually release open source software.
If the FSF wants to change or clarify restrictions on GCC, they should modify the GCC license. Putting restrictions on GCC in the license of the GCC runtime library seems unnecessarily confusing.
The point I want to make is that I think it's rediculous to not negotiate for raises and salaries. That is what a free market does.

The link captures what Paul said 5 years ago and it's the point I was trying to make. That some people are more productive than other people and that they should be payed accordingly.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

In the United States, the CEO of a large public company makes about 100 times as much as the average person. [3] Basketball players make about 128 times as much, and baseball players 72 times as much. Editorials quote this kind of statistic with horror. But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.
Three of the four members of the US's team to the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) last year also attended Canada/USA Mathcamp. Take from that what you will.
This server appears to be from 2005; it looks like Google is still keeping some secrets.
'The “phone” in “iPhone” is much more about ubiquitous always-on wireless TCP/IP networking than it is about the 20th century conception of telephony.'

Recently, my 7 year old son asked me "Dad, can you call people with an iPhone?"

(We don't have one, but he sees the commercials on TV.)
Google Unveils its Data Center Containers
if it is a "bad trade" then the salary levels are wrong by definition
Video: Google's Custom Web Servers Revealed
This was not the case at all where I did my undergrad, judging by the OpenCourseWare it doesn't appear to be the case at MIT and I would assume this is the same at any of the other major universities. Arguments were consistently and constantly described using symbolic logic and derivations.

I don't understand the animosity you have for philosophical logic. I've always felt it was an interesting compliment to what I did in computer science and it made me appreciate discrete math concepts to a greater degree. The fundamentals building blocks are the same, just a different application.
Actually, I remember reading sth about a hedge fund that employed just that approach. They had every analyst or broker send in their predictions or collected them from somewhere and kept track of who did well and who did not. The better someone did (the article did not say which measure the fund used), the more business the fund would send their way (in terms of order flow), betting on their recommendations to go long or short. Presumably, their portfolio would have been optimized to account for forecast accuracy, expected gains, and some measure of risk. The difficult question here would be which measure to take as "forecast accuracy", and that also touches on the site. How wrong is wrong, and how right is right? You would need some measure of dispersion to judge whether someone was right. If there is a lot of noise in some variable (say the oil price), then basically anyone will have been right sometime when the forecast horizon is long enough. On the other hand, you couldn't really say someone was "wrong" in his forecast if he said X and, by the measure of dispersion used, the actual number lies within reasonable bounds around X. Another question I already mailed the site's creator is how the variables are actually defined and tracked. Yet another question is whether and how the forecasters can adjust their forecasts. Obviously, you should be able to update your 5y forecast if tomorrow something happens that topples your assumptions. It's totally legit to do that, and I would argue such a mechanism is the real point of the otherwise pointless forecasting game.

EDIT: There is one more question I find interesting. The measure by which forecast quality is judged should also somehow account for time dimension. Concretely, if the process you are tracking conforms 9 times out of 10 with your forecast path and then "explodes" or "collapses", are you good or bad? How far does it have to collapse or explode that you are "bad", how is the situation if the granularity is finer and you can observe 100 times instead of 10 (so the process is 98 or 99 times fine and then explodes)?
Smalltalk and Lisp are both well-designed languages, whereas Java's not.
"Look for the crufty kid who looks like he sleeps in a cardboard box with his skateboard. Look for the fat guy with the ponytail and beard. Look for the quiet guy who never talks much. "

Look for the person who can express themselves coherently. If you're going to partner up with someone in a business, good communication is essential.
"GCC intentionally ties the front and back ends into the rest of the code quite closely, to avoid "semi-proprietary" forks."

You've gotta be kidding me...
I for one am surprised that those are 2U servers and they haven't gone to 1U to double their space efficiency.
SGI bought by rackable for $25M
The hard disks are dated Nov 2007. The motherboard is from 2005, but it's got decent specs http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Networking/Products_Spec... so they may still be using them.

Although I'm surprised they went with Xeon CPU's, and I don't see anything on gigabytes page about 12V only for the board.
Please provide links to articles, like

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/googles-entrance-into-ventur...

...and not links to comments, like

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/googles-entrance-into-ventur...

It's quite annoying to click a link and end up 25 comments down in a thread, and then have to page up to figure out what the heck the actual point is.
Well said, both of you :)
We're currently looking for some front end engineers at our London based startup 1click2fame.
If I remember correctly, he's interviewed in John Stossel's "Greed":

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C30B787FF5E0C1DD
In an Inc column a while ago, Joel mentioned that his offer for new grads is $75k/year. Not sure how that scales with experience, but Glassdoor might give you some idea about going rates in the NYC area.

As a sidebar, I've discovered that the cultural reluctance to discuss wages is not shared with other countries. In China, for example, it's quite common to compare salaries.
I find monkeypatching happens because the framework doesn't utilize proper baseline OO techniques. By "baseline" I'm excluding mixins. I have rarely found a case where mixins do a better job over well factored inheritance. I don't think mixins are "evil". Just over utilized and inheritance heavily underutilized in Ruby.
The article says the battery backup was a secret but: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-492779.htm... and at the time at least, he had linked to a picture of the board (but it's down now).
Certified by the State or not, they are still open textbooks.
Yeah, apostrophes seem to turn into some wierd jumble (e.g. â€™) and so do other charaters. Aside from that, very nice work. Added to my reader.
it looks like two of them may fit side-by-side, like this they get to use the big ram sticks and a cheap psu, as well as fans that will last a lot longer than those pesky 1u fans.

They may also use 'deep' racks to the machines have the PSU's in the middle and the fronts on the facing sides of the cabinets, one front, one back. That would make it twice as efficient as 1U, it would also explain why the cables go out the front.
I'm not sure I know what a "bonus" is in a freelancing context.

I buy graphic design / interaction design work from freelancers. If you quote me N*$1000, I'm not going to pay anything more than that.

I sell application / software / hardware security review work. I've never been paid a "bonus".

So it's not that this sounds arrogant to me, it just sounds weird.
Collaborating on a generalization here, I'd change the last statement to:

"confidence is asserting while arrogance is imposing."
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542017
Scientists worldwide admit global warming is a hoax
It's quite possible that they got Gigabyte to do a custom design for them, given their volumes. Or, the 5v conversion is done in an extra device between the power supply and the mother board power socket (ATX or whatever it is).
As I was reading the article, I thought how terrible it would be to be fooled into believing that global warming was a hoax... but on the other hand, I prefer to be fooled into a hoax than for global warming to actually be true.

And then I realized that it's April Fool's Day. I guess global warming is here to stay!
Given all Google's talk about power efficiency, it's debatable whether power-hogging NetBurst processors are "decent".
I love FOSS. But realistically speaking, the more complex a license is the more expensive it is to get sound legal advice on it.

I understand what the stipulations are supposed to mean: don't link with GPL unless you're going to release the source. But the legal language has a life of its own and it gets the final word. With all the stipulations around linking and compilation, there's got to be a lot of corner cases to consider and defend against, not an easy feat.

Granted FSF are not the most litigious guys around, but that doesn't make the license any less legally burdensome.
In companies I have worked in that 'cleaned house' during lean times, it was usually a reason to get rid of the dead wood in the organization. People hired for projects that were cancelled, non-performers and other non-productive staff. It's always been my hypothesis that companies use bad times to jettison staff because doing so in good times attracts bad press.
ah cool, thank you!
Yep, I just wish people could bet on these predictions too. Unfortunately, that is illegal in the US ...
A few thoughts:

- Kevin Rose went to a coder on elance to build the first version of Digg, so that route can be successful
- Try posting fliers on the kiosks or in the CS buildings at college campuses. I'd recommend giving as much detail as possible about the idea on the poster; merely asserting that "I HAVE A GREAT IDEA!!!1!" isn't likely to get you far.
- Network, network, network.
semi-dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542459
Didn't Kevin Rose go to elance
Creating a simple framework to build on is probably the best way to create a compelling complex product. One can see this pattern in other things such as RoR - Basecamp, XUL - Mozilla, etc. Over time they seem to become more complicated and people move on to other things.
Can you explain why? Are you saying that this system would make it difficult to pay the most talented people what they are worth?
Also, keep in mind that asking for a high rate can provide credibility in the absence of other data.

Think about the way many people buy wine: the pricier the bottle, the better it must be, right?
I'm arguing that the application of logic to arguments and ideas that was part of philosophy has greater impact on high level application design and architecture than math. Taking a real world concept, need or set of actions and translating them into a structure that can be constructed with a programming language uses logic in fundamentally the same way philosophy does, although in an academic setting this area is computer science. Math is most useful at an implementation level, generally coming into play when dealing with components, algorithms and other more narrow implementation details.

The point is that logic used in computer science/information science is a hybrid that is informed by other forms of logic (including linguistics), not just math.

I'm saying that philosophers are only interested in

I don't know what philosophers are only interested in because I don't know what a "philosopher" is.
Same here. If someone quotes me their hourly rate "plus bonus" my first reaction would be to ask "What bonus?" and silently mark him as fishy.

Most customers are very concerned about getting an exact quote. I can't imagine that throwing around such statements helps with anything.
Plus you can do a custom Google search like this:

http://ruby-doc.org/q/<your search string>
I think the comment was edited because looking at it now I don't see any long part that would potentially force scrolling.
I still find this clearer:

for x in range(1, 10): print x
The really amazing thing is even the sales we've had so far represent just 0.2% of the total iPhone OS user base - it really is a huge market.

Games are killing it, there is no doubt about that, and it's also a strong reflection of the slant toward a dominant, younger demographic that's downloading and purchasing on iTunes regularly. Our web stats for BreakkUp underline this tremendously.

I would recommend any developer on the fence or working on his first application to READ the conclusion statement twice. It's what I've been bitching about on HN for awhile, as have many others... the volume-driven charts are the real sales challenge to overcome. Get on em, stay on 'em otherwise, bye bye sales.

Once in a blue moon the charts will give opportunity to new entrants to receive 'popular exposure' but currently the system is honestly hurting far more people than it's helping (1 out of every ~8 Top Paid Business apps is a .99 VOICE RECORDER [A]). However, here's the counter-argument: whenever you release a new app or push an update, your app is on Page 1 and listed under New Additions, so I consider the benefits of the charts a moot point... the charts should reflect quality and movements over at least a week, not strictly unit volume over 24 hours (which is a freaking joke).

I feel Apple likes the churn as it compliments the disposable habits of the youth generation dominating the AppStore, and what I feel to be intentional reluctance to switch to a more stable and quality-focused approach for the top apps.

[A] Voice recorder is included as sample code w/ the SDK.
Article seems to no longer be available from the original link, but it's still up here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html?part=rss&#...
Note that the publicly available Gigabyte board you link to is the GA-9IVDT, the name on the board in the photo is GA-9IVDP. Moreover, they look nothing like each other.

I also can't tell where the 5V rail for the hard disks is coming from:

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20090401/Google_server-1.jp...

The only wires from/to the PSU are those running to the battery and the 12V and ground wires for the motherboard.
The gopher readme is full of gems:

The http protocol cannot effectively distribute files however, whether they be documents (.txt for example) or programs (.exe for example).

It is bad form to refer to Gopher nostalgicly!

..to refer to Gopher only in the past tense is to do the protocol a great disservice. The protocol has NOT degraded over time, and today it actually functions better than it did in its heyday of popularity.

Referring to Gopher like something from the stone-age subconciously puts out the message that Gopher is somehow not useful in the new millenium!
SGI didn't switch to NT they switched to Linux. Their Columbia supercomputer isn't a Windows machine, it's a Linux machine.
Had the read the article carefully to see if i wasn't "getting" the joke. It's legit, and very cool that they were so innovative with their data centers.
(5747 unread) Yahoo Mail, pavlos1909
A New Factoring Algorithm: breaks factoring based crypto-system in random polynomial time.
Oh they tried NT. Even played with one of those machines. They even looked ugly. They do a lot of Linux now, and have been playing with hybrid architectures. Another bet of theirs that failed were their Altix systems since the Itanium went nowhere fast
Ask HN: How long until ramen profitability with iphone apps
I'm considering dropping out to focus full time on iphone apps.

I'm curious to hear stories from people who've already taken the plunge.

How long did it take you to ream ramen profitability with iphone apps?

(Responses like "3 months ... long insightful story ..." is much much better than things like "3 months")
How is this a Sam Altman story?
BlackBerry is doing something I wish Apple had done. Their $200 application fee (Apple = $100) entitles you to only 10 applications. Your next 10 require an additional $200 payment.

Had Apple done this, I think you would see far less junk apps that are repurposed fifteen ways to Sunday. A lot of indies and students would probably think twice about releasing useless crap if submissions were limited and had value.

Most .99 apps that are not on the Top Charts make less than ~$75 a month.
I suppose I could try to go to each linked article and find their RSS feed and see if they normally expose the content but that seems quite complicated. I don't know if missed click-throughs is why pg doesn't do something similar for the existing HN rss feed. I suspect that it's hard to make it always have the correct content. This is clearly evident in the fact that my page doesn't get parsed correctly. :)
Conversely, live by public ridicule, die by public ridicule. One could say that all 37S did was the same thing that GS does as a business model.
"What Andreessen didn't highlight, however, is that, were Facebook to actually 'turn on the spigot,' its members would flee in droves. Banner ads are not how Facebook people relate to the site."

I use ad-blocking on Facebook at present. Right away I found out its ads are really trashy. If Facebook had inescapable ads, it would find its users escaping.
I wouldn't dismiss the "learn to code" advice altogether. Can you do/learn enough to build a prototype? Perhaps one iteration level beyond? Then you're good to go, IMO. Getting to that prototype, you learn what is difficult and what is impossible for you. During the time it takes you to build the prototype or first crummy version of your idea, you are learners and as such can more easily connect with your local gurus than as business types who WANT something. You learn what is difficult and what is impossible for you, that is you get a grip on your coding problem. You will also learn to appreciate who of your gurus is helpful or has the expertise you need. Not to forget, someone who "just" wants a stupid technical monkey to code his brilliant business idea will always be resented by the good monkeys. A modicum of knowledge or passion for the subject makes a huge difference in perception and respect, for both sides.
Any clues as to why that happens? The code simply inserts the HTML of the content sections of the linked sites into the RSS feed. It doesn't seem to happen with all sites.
Well that kind of ends the discussion doesn't it? If a group of employees of the State says it is true it must be true...

The disconnect stems from the fact that in Ann Arbor there is little shared ground to communicate the actual milieu in place.

Michael Nifong had a lot of people supporting his charges, unfortunately that didn't mean that they were actually true.
Ah, but is it really a joke? I'm not too sure.
So what happens if your points get decreased. Do you start earning less than? I don't think that's even possible here (Europe)
Please post printer-friendly versions: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em...
While they are certainly a shadow of their former glory, remember what day this is. I will take such news with a grain of salt.
Wow, combining my favorite bookmarklet with my favorite news site. Well done!
One way to do this in Scala:

def print[T] (value:T) = System.out.println(value)
1.until(10).foreach(x => print x)

This is a fairly uninteresting example, however. Something more interesting would be, for instance, the use of structural types to implement type-checked duck typing.

Scala example:

// Declare a structural type for any class implementing close()
type Closable = {def close(): Any}

// Executes the provided function with the given
// closable generator, creating a new instance which
// will then be closed on completion. The provided
// function's value will be returned.
def withClosable[T, C <: Closable] (c: => C) (f: (C) => T) = {
val closable = c
try {
f(closable)
} finally {
closable.close
}
}

// Example usage
def usage = {
val updated = withClosable(db.openConnection) { conn =>
conn.update("INSERT INTO example VALUES (...")
}
System.out.println("Rows updated: " + updated)
}

This could be compared with Python's new 'with' syntax.
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Sony Ericsson W710 is a great presentation of Sony Ericsson with great countless features and also unbelievable look attracts you with its suitable dimension. It includes 2 Mega pixels camera and a music player.
good point. I was doing a simple "how many 'dollars' are in 'circulation' / population". of course, most money isn't money, it is, like you said, digitized debt.
IPv6 over Social Networks
Hulu begins encrypting HTML content to thwart non-browser apps
No, this isn't a joke. This is straight party line Jeff Atwood. Atwood babbles about his pseudo "intellectual curiousity" all the time. Jeff posts a lot of strange stuff. I think Jeff doesn't know C nor any other non-VB, non-.NET language and doesn't really know how computers work and does not math and tries to justify this lack of knowledge on his blog. It's one thing not to know something. It's quite another to pat yourself on the back for not knowing it. But he does this with quite a lot of words, usually not his own. He does this with many other things too; for instance, he essentially applauded himself for not knowing or having any idea once explained what the phrase "begging the question" meant.

Yet, somehow he is making a living off barely visible ads and no real job that he discusses; surely Stackoverflow is not making that much money.