skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let’s face it, most startups fail. Not just 50% but probably more like 90 or even 99% fail. I remember reading somewhere from a reputable venture capital firm that they would get about 10,000 (yes ten thousand!) business plan submissions in a year. And would invest in 2 to 5. And of the investments, odds are that 1 out of 10 is successful. in a way that employees and founders make reasonable money as opposed to simply the investors. The math on that is 5 plans out of 10,000 get funded and 1 out of 10 of the 5 is a success. 5/10,000.1=0.00005 or in other words a failure rate of 99.995%.*

Ah, c'mon, that's hand-waving maths at its worst.

First of all, the same 10'000 business plans are submitted to every VC out there. So if there's, say, 100 VCs and they each select 5 start-ups, that's already a 5% rate of VC acceptance, which translates, based on his numbers, in a 0.5% rate of success.

But of course, VCs and "success" are not directly correlated. Most successful businesses out there go there without VCs. Many got there without even needing external investment. So actually VC-backed business is probably itself only 0.5% of actual existing business.

Even if you were to limit yourself purely to technology start-ups (why should you, though?), there are many start-ups that succeed without VCs. So, basically, this bit of statistics is bollocks... and this is without even scratching the surface of what exactly is meant by "success".

The rest of the article, unfortunately, seems equally handwaving... It begins with a point about memory loss (which could have been interesting) but finishes with the true but fairly trite "you should do what you love". Shame, could have been good to explore this whole "we remember only the good times" theme a little more.
The way to build a solid enterprise app in 30 days is to build a Web 2.0 app that solves an enterprise problem in 30 days, and then spend 5 years marketing it as "enterprisey". ;-)
67.44% use IE http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...
It's a research tool, you're totally going to run Xcode and build iPhone apps on it...
I knew I'd seen something like this before...

http://www.pluraprocessing.com

Launched on HN (where else) a few months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347359
I think the lack of fanfare is mostly due to the fact that these are mostly upgrades of the specs/reduction of price of existing products: the form factor stays the same so there's no real point in making it a big event if there wasn't anything else to announce otherwise.

They have been doing that for many years, always more or less quietly.
The thing is that people still talk about it anyway...
Sounds like a great idea and, according to the timestamp, was proposed in 2006 already.

Well, considering the incredible pace at which W3C and browser vendors operate I'm definately looking forward to see this implemented within the next 15 years or less!
> Interesting viewpoint. Would you have a problem with having your photograph and fingerprints taken whenever you boarded a domestic flight? I'm sure they'd catch plenty of criminals that way too.

It's interesting that you think that domestic travel and crossing a national border are the same.

I know that Australia is concerned about young women visiting. Does it also care about criminals? Does it have any checks?

And, if it does, I'm sure that you're fighting any that aren't applied to domestic travel, right?
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?ned=us&hl=en&q=...
Dutch Supercomputer Establishes New Go Record
If its anything like the G4 and original Intel Minis (I own and have opened both), 2 putty knives will open it right and leaves no marks.

From discussion I remember reading way back when the g4 mini was originally launched, this will not void the warranty, but take that with a grain of salt.
Ease of Doing Business Rank
I can honestly say this is not the case in my experience. When we visit someone who has cable, its a shock similar to the one I feel when I install a new Firefox that doesn't have NoScript yet. There's all these interruptions, lame cliffhangers, and sometimes you can't even rewind it if you missed something. WTF?

One strange habit I've noticed as a result of no commercials is an increasing impatience for the interesting bits of the content. We've gotten into the habit of FFwd through the slow bits of shows though. There's a surprising amount of non-content in what gets sold as the actual content of movies, TV shows, etc.

I'd pay for legitimate TV if I could FF everything and get all the shows I like on demand when they actually air. Life's just too short to sit through 30 minutes of maybe-interesting content, 5 minutes of total filler, and 25 minutes of commercials and interruptions. The industry needs to start respecting the viewers' time.
Twitter, Google Maps Used To Track Down Two Missing Skiers
Check out my flicker app written in bash
For me, it turned out to be a waste of time that could have been spent on literally anything else at all. My experiences were sufficiently negative that it probably would have been more constructive for me to sit on my ass and drink beer than go to high school or college.

Temperment matters. You are not me. Your mileage will 100% certainly vary.

Asking us whether we regret our choices should not inform yours.
Hmm, in general I agree that the proper action would be to simply not do buisness with those who cannot add value (the looters), but within the logic of the book it is clear that this is not an option. As someone has pointed out, it is a given that the looters are waiting till the mine is producing to nationalize it and the railroad to it.

D'Anconia has agreed with Galt to stop carrying the looters and so he plays the spoiled playboy. Sure, he has a certain duty, but that goes both ways, and if the investors are not adding value then what duty does he have to them other than to do as he pleases? They are trusting that they can make money off of him based on his family history, nothing else. That is, there agreement amounts to: "Go make money as you always have. We would like a share, but you do the work."

I agree with the comments of unalone and guiles. They point out what I don't like about the book, but I didn't see anything wrong with this subplot within the logic of the book.
It's okay to totally screw-up.

Coincidentally the two times I have seen SCRUM at work so far it was deployed precisely to serve as excuse for the constant screw-up. Neither of the companies seems to have improved over that year of colored post-it notes either. But the CTO and product managers since then have new buzzwords they can use to justify why they still miss milestone after milestone...

YMMV.
Pirate radio 'puts lives at risk'
RIAA Undergoing Massive Layoffs
Unravel The Music - a song meanings startup
Why TV Lost
I said 20% of our IE traffic is IE6 which is 20% of 70% which is more like 14% so that would be a pretty large deviation from 26% when I'm trying to determine where to put resources. When you factor in trending over the next 6 months you have to realize that number is going to drop probably another 5-10% of overall traffic.
Another thing BOINC does is make sure the work is backgrounded and interruptible. Given the propensity for heavy Javascript to lock up browsers (other than process-per-tab browsers like Chrome), I wonder how well this could be executed in terms of not ticking people off.
And Buffett doesn't single out bailout money. He just says that the crisis makes government-backed entities, such as FDIC-insured banks, safer for lenders. Not really surprising.

Quote:
"Funders that have access to any sort of government guarantee -- banks with FDIC-insured deposits, large entities with commercial paper backed by the Federal Reserve, and others who are using imaginitive methods (or lobbying skills) to come under the government's umbrella -- have money costs that are minimal."
> I think we'd be better off throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people. There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.

If 'throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people' was an actual option, would Detroit be in the state that it's in?

> There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.

How do you think Detroit got to be the way that it is?
No, there will always be some facet of the world that will apply pressure to continue progress on new technology, be it corporate, private or defense. I do think however, that the possibility exists for the available CONSUMER products to slow in their development cycles somewhat.
Good to see they're finally running out of money.
In 2001 when I was traveling in Asia, I installed Seti@home (now a Boinc project) on every computer I could in internet cafés.

Google Gears is also pretty good way to do this your self since there's a DB and a background process - although full apps in the client changes the security model - as with google native client - http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/

Nice post. Oh, and I like the rainbow butts iconography. :)
You could also use the fn key to forward delete. fn+delete will do what you want.
Don't all iMacs support a second display?

Can't you daisy-chain two (or more) external drives in the FW800 port? I do that with FW400 on a PPC iMac. Doesn't OSX support RAID? I am quite sure the server version does.

And, you know, that Dell box will have Windows pre-installed. OSX is so much nicer.
A tip for all programmers
I Just had to twitter about this video and this comment.
Glad they didn't totally get rid of the wired numberpad version. Now I'm just hoping they do the opposite and make a wireless numberpad version!
I found the original linked page much more descriptive than the Ajaxian summary: http://www.cjohansen.no/en/ruby/juicer_a_css_and_javascript_... Juicer is written in Ruby. You need Java too if you want to use JsLint and YUI Compressor.

Read the Ajaxian comments before you use. One personal rightfully noted that you shouldn't add parameters for cache-busting because it'll also bust server-side proxies/caches. The right way to do this is to rename the file, which Juicer supports.
Does this mean I can expect a deal if I go laptop shopping in the near future? 'Tis an ill wind that blows no one good.
I'm in Mountain View, California now.
How Entrepreneurs can Save Over $60k with 45 Free Programs
The Grid: A Journey Through the ... - Google Book Search
You can argue about whether he will or won't - I'm on the "likely will" side - but the only way to know is for Riverbank to say something.

The maintainer of PyQT has said on the mailing list he's "thinking about it", and when I emailed them awhile back I got no answer.

If Riverbank doesn't do LPGL, someone will make LGPL bindings - he would be smart to just do LGPL himself.
Why Amazon Will Make or Break Twilio
Moore's law was ALWAYS about the number of transistors. Speed was a side effect.

The original formulation was that the transistor count on an IC doubles every year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#History
Nice quote:

"CEO Jeff Lawson’s faith in Amazon might provide some comfort ("If I say, 'I'm a startup and I run my own data center,' you should run like hell," he joked to me)"

Also note the comment from Twilio's CEO under the article:

"note that we maintain infrastructure not only in Amazon's 3 geographically distributed data centers, but also at other cloud hosting providers, including Rackspace"
Good idea, bad implementation.

XmlHttpRequest was as bad a name choice as JsonRequest.

There should be a data agnostic API used to communicate any kind of data across web sites, with security in mind.

Name it HttpRequest, period.
Superheroes Defend the Data Center
Faster and faster was never part of Moore's law. It was all about transistor density. Faster and faster stopped in part because of heat problems. Feature size will continue to get smaller for a while, but the schedule will be subject to economic conditions. A new state of the art fab costs in the billions and the price goes up as the feature size goes down. At some point feature size reduction will seriously slow down because of physical constraints.

Intel and others switched from bigger CPUs to more cores because the were hitting the wall in design complexity of the pipelines. More cores is a more efficient use of the real estate.

There are still tricks to be tried like 3D chip designs.
Really? Like what? Like forcing you to throw out the 24 inch LCD when the computer is obsolete? Like a lack of upgradable anything (besides RAM)?

The iMac might have a unique form factor, but it doesn't necessarily convey any advantages other than aesthetics.
How do they measure this? (They have different latency between the same nodes depending on direction)
The Second Age of SMEs
My Guest Appearance On The PowerScripting Podcast Is Live
Academics in Europe have an addiction to grants/funding (and that's as much their fuel as coffee). I've met a few academic people who were astonished that I'd work on software for free, for sale or glory.

There's also a perception that you need a PhD to commercialise your ideas and run a business.

Footnote: I'm from the UK.
Most iMacs support "Display Mirroring". Yup. Two monitors, in proximity (basically next to each other) showing the exact same thing. Very useful.

(Note: Apple tends to change this every hardware revision. So basically -- every OTHER revision of the iMac supports dual displays.)

I hadn't considered software FW RAID. I don't know if it would be better/worse than SATA RAID chipsets on modern PC motherboards these days. I have a feeling (being software RAID) that it would be slower than hardware RAID 1. And still, saying its capable to jury rig RAID (i mean, c'mon, for an additional fee, I could just buy a FW RAID array and just attach that.) is different from saying it supports it out of the box, like its price-competitive PC counterparts do.

Yes, OS X is nice. But the premiums on the hardware are looking a little dated considering everyone is slashing margins during a recession. OTOH, my Mac Book Pro is doing so well, I don't feel the need to upgrade, so I can afford to wait and buy used.
IPhone accounts for 67% of mobile web use; Android at 6%
Anyone know if there's something similar written in python?
It's okay to screw up if you're continuing to improve. Sounds like these guys weren't.

I tell my PMs that I train that no, I do not want them to be the CSM. I want them to work strategically, to work on all of those organizational obstacles that get in the team's way. You can't change the world, but good agile teams are going to be constantly reminding the CTO and everybody else that certain constraints are killing team performance.

You can treat it like a fad if you want -- just throw new labels on old crap. But whether it's Scrum, Agile, or Bob's New Process, at the end of the day the teams must communicate back to the organization frequently about what's screwed up. And the organization must listen. Or you can just keep throwing money and fads at problems you won't acknowledge. Reality is reality. The reason you end up with poor understanding at the CTO level is because nobody has the balls to tell him what's really going on. That conversation is the toughest part of adapting in a nutshell (pun not intended).
Off topic or maybe not, but I've never understood monarchy and how it still survives in the 21st century and how people bow before the king/queen.

A friend once told me monarchy is a kind of religion and we should respect them for that alone.

Fuck religion then, as well as the military and the monarchies.
In my junior high, there was a reading program where you could get some fairly dinky prizes for passing a test to prove you had read a book.

I cheated that system pretty savagely - I would skim a book, look up cliff notes on the internet, and then pass the test. I can't say I really enjoyed many of the books I "read", nor remember much about them.

In my opinion, any sort of extrinsic "performance"-based reward system is just going to lead to optimizing to the system (rather than learning) and to the system being gamed.
Control in the Place God Intended. Now I want a version with "BELL" written on top of the G key.
We're building our own ad network
I want both versions to light up in the dark.
You can use asterisks to make italics.
Pass the lmaoaise!
I've taken out two patents in startups I founded, and it was probably the least creative experience of the whole venture.

I don't think I'll take out patents next time around.
Skype To Give Away New SILK Audio Codec
The investors added value by providing D'Anconia with capital. Once D'Anconia accepts their money, his duty is to manage it in good faith. Whatever character flaws the investors have (e.g., excessive faith in D'Anconia's management skills) do not excuse him from his fiduciary duty. If he doesn't like owing a share of his profits to people who don't contribute any effort to the company, he is free to liquidate his own shares so he can start a privately-held enterprise.
I went to a public school that had a programming track like Spencer but we started at BASIC and ended in an "advanced" C++ class.

I jokingly referred to our classes as learning "skills" since we lived so close to the poverty line. We had well taught and well funded tracks in dry cleaning, construction, cosmetology etc. I joke but they provided job placement and it probably gave many people a decent living.

I also remember how great it was have an army recruitment office inside the school.
We like to think ML is a fact of nature, but it's entirely a human construct.

It's a nitpick, but I get a bit annoyed when people speak for 'us' and then give their personal opinion.
Moore's Law is just an estimation of progress speed that happens to fit fairly well so far, and I haven't seen anyone taking it like a fact of nature.
Cloud Wars: Is There Room for Google and Microsoft?
So wait, the mini can do a dual display setup or does it just have two display ports?
WebSocket is a step in the right direction although afaik doesn't deal with different domains.
If they held a big event to introduce these new models -- or just about any other product -- the headline would be the absence of Steve Jobs, which is probably not what Apple's PR department is hoping for right now. If they bring out a tablet PC or something equally dramatic, they might want to risk that, with the spin 'Even without Jobs we can still generate excitement.' But for ordinary improvements to the existing hardware line, a big Jobsless presentation would be a negative, on balance.
The asterisk requires 2 keys, SHIFT+8, the / requires one key, so I use that. Plus, the slanted nature of the / implies that everything between them should be slanted.
Me too - I'm building a presentation on Agile Design (designers integrating into agile groups) and could use more research into other people's setups. My contact info:

http://alabut.com/contact.html

I've worked with scrum, agile and xp groups, and have been gathering feedback on real world pros and cons.
Best step ladders
Step ladders at best possible prices from slingby.
How many ice cream glove submissions are there to VCs from people with no ability to follow through whatsoever?

100% of startups that don't start fail. That is a huge impact on the numbers.

Personally, I have 100% chance of succeeding with my startup (with my definition of success).
New York Times' "The Local" uses Google Docs to gather user-submitted content
Linkedin Teams Up with Twitter Through Company Buzz
Our Troubled Economy Is a Response to Barack Obama's Policies
We don't worry about relying on electric utilities. Eventually people will stop worrying about relying on computing utilities.
Here's the java version extended to work for various input/output types (I also renamed some things to make the code clearer):

public class Z {

public interface Function<In,Out> {
public Out apply(In param);
}

public interface RecFunction<In,Out>
extends Function<Function<In,Out>,Function<In,Out>> {
}

private interface FixBody<In,Out>
extends Function<FixBody<In,Out>,Function<In,Out>> {
}

public static <In,Out> Function<In,Out> fix(final RecFunction<In,Out> r) {
return (new Function<FixBody<In,Out>,Function<In,Out>>() {
public Function<In,Out> apply(FixBody<In,Out> f) {
return f.apply(f);
}
}).apply(new FixBody<In,Out>() {
public Function<In,Out> apply(final FixBody<In,Out> f) {
return r.apply(
new Function<In,Out>() {
public Out apply(In x) {
return f.apply(f).apply(x);
}
});
}
});
}

public static final RecFunction<Integer,Integer> fact =
new RecFunction<Integer,Integer>() {
public Function<Integer,Integer> apply(
final Function<Integer,Integer> self) {
return new Function<Integer,Integer>() {
public Integer apply(Integer n) {
if (n == 0)
return 1;
else
return n * self.apply(n-1);
}
};
}
};

public static void main(String[] args) {
Function<Integer,Integer> factorial = fix(fact);
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
System.out.println("Factorial " + i + ": " + factorial.apply(i));
}
}
}
Hmmm, well the mistake that Yahoo made was identifying themselves as a portal, and that the portal was the core of their business. What they failed to realize was that the driving force behind the portal was the fact that people were still trying to find information (i.e. search). Yahoo started as a search engine that lost its focus. Did Facebook start as a "status update" site that got lost somewhere along the way?

So the article begs the question: is the real reason people are driven to Facebook is to see their friend's status updates?
I would offer to play the world's smallest violin, but I don't have the rights to any appropriate music.
"Do we need a new search paradigm that prioritizes publishing freshness higher than page rank?" from today's NYT. very intereseting article on search and page rank http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/03/02/02re...
Excellent point. The downside, however, of not having Tim MC an smallish event such as these upgrades is that it puts more pressure on whatever attempts to be the standard Apple-fare fanfare.

The longer the wait the more Steve's absence at such an event will be felt. But... if they can get him back in July or so... and they have a major announcement... that'll make for a huge hype opportunity. And yes: it's just playing with fans' minds. That's okay by me: I'm just up for learning about marketing - and Apple's certainly one place to do it.
It hasn't even been two months...it's been six weeks.
> it makes a lot of sense

No it doesn't without proof. Can you show me proof that the methodology works when compared to others? Stats, studies, etc. where are they?
Why are Good Developers Hard to Find?
Yes. I developed the most complex UI site I've ever seen, Twiddla, on IE first followed by Firefox.

I never understood all the IE hate, to be honest. Until Chrome came out, I used IE7 as my daily browser. It's just better than Firefox in my opinion.
People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers.

Is that really true? Source?

(Uhh. I have no idea how to quote things correctly. :)
Actually, I recently read an article about how people have been watching more TV while also increasing how much time they spend online. There are as many TVs as people per household in the US. I don't think the two will ever converge. I mean think about it -- people are buying fewer desktops and more netbooks now. Netbooks and the cloud are the future of "computing" as we know it. TVs will just get bigger, and they'll be things we use at home. So... the two will coexist peacefully as always.

Though, Paul has a point. Computers can serve the function of TVs.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html