skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is not much substance to this article. It doesn't really even build on the title. It's just a bunch of quotes about VC funding and startup culture by a couple bloggers who live in Wisconsin and China. And, a video of a random investor from Texas.

I feel like they're riffing about an imagined startup culture that died out in 2001.
FTA: the $1 houses that still go unsold

Is this true? $1 houses?
I plan on writing up some thoughts about this in a series of blog posts over the summer. However, maybe I should make it a paid e-book? I kid, I kid... maybe.
I disagree. Have you taken a look at the culture in the valley? They are all about helping each other.

i.e. I think this story was told at LeWeb.

Seesmic founder lets Friendfeed guys know that their products would work really well together. The Friendfeed guys call back and tell him to drop by to discuss it. Loic hops into his car, drives 10 minutes to the Friendfeed offices, and after an hour or so of meetings, Friendfeed adds Seesmic to their site.

Outside of the valley, something like this isn't possible. The spirit of startups lets companies be a lot more relaxed and open to new possibilities.
I still don't get it:

A. I guess correctly 25% of the time (via some method) and make money because of the skewed payoff. (0.25 * 5 - 0.75 * 1) = 0.5

B. I flip a coin and guess correctly 50% of time and make EVEN MORE money because of the skewed payoff. (0.5 * 5 - 0.5 * 1) = 2

Why should I ever go with option A?

Furthermore if your method lets you guess correctly 25% of the time, why don't you simply make the opposite trade and now you are guessing correctly 75% of the time!

Are we are talking about something fundamentally non-binomial? (buy, sell and do nothing or something even more complicated?)
First start-up success is very rare as well, so perhaps it should follow that it involves a rare breed of people.

I didn't say all his startups were successful ;)

His third (I think) startup, the current one, is quite successful though, and he hopes to be able to sell it for at least a billion eventually. Current estimated valuation is a quarter of a billion with at least 50m in VC (don't know the exact numbers). About ~60 employees.

On the topic of the GP post: you talk about a "businessperson who magically acquired hacker skills"--but is it somehow more likely to have a "hacker who magically acquires businessperson skills"?
The home block is a little less important to me as an Emacs user, but I find it very important in applications that don't have Emacs keybindings. I really don't understand why most laptops don't use a layout similar to my Thinkpad. Even the very compact Thinkpad X-series gets this right.
I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days.

Yes in part, but there are also some coders out there who take genuine interest in these things.

Take, for example, me - I'm not the best coder in the world by any stretch of the imagination but I've had a unexplainable passion for animation for about as long as I can remember.

I originally thought the way to "make it" was to follow in other's footsteps, make a web app, flip it etc, but I wholly believe that for this kind of thing to work your heart really needs to be in it. For me this wasn't the case.

This is why I'm following a path that I'm genuinely interested in. The kind of thing that makes me jump out of bed with excitement in the morning and keeps me going until the wee hours in the evening.

It's not a case of thinking about the payoff at the end of day as the only motivation for me to do what I'm doing (although its never too far from my mind) but it's the process I'm obsessed with and the potential of changing the game that keeps me intrigued.

There's just so much ground that has yet been unexplored and I think really, this is the most exciting part of the whole process.
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The internal USB on the TouchBook is a great idea. I have to wonder, though, what happens if I plug in 500mW to 1W worth of radiator in the form of an EVDO card.
Cursor Gravity
I found myself cringing watching this talk. Berners-Lee seemed so nervous, stressed out. Certainly under strain, for whatever reason. I hope he is/was okay, you know, generally, and that it was just that big red timer and the VIPs in the audience, or something equally obvious. I watched the video a couple of days after Bill Gates' talk about malaria, and sure, maybe linked data may end up saving the world'n'all, but I did cringe when he invited the audience to shout "Raw Data Now!". Especially when compared to Gates' letting mosquitoes out into the audience, it just seemed silly. Mmm. Now I'm sounding all holier-than-thou, huh.
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OTOH being out here is great for meeting other startup minded technical & business people. You're out here too, what's your experience been?
Look, you get one bite at the apple per idea/situation. A random sample isn't an appropriate counter-factual. Your job as an entrepreneur is to maximize your chances for success given the situation at hand.

I suppose "chances for success" wouldn't have set you off, and I acknowledge that. But we're at the point where we mock people for using "beg the question" incorrectly and ignore the substance of the argument, which isn't really productive for others reading this thread.
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Thanks for the replies, I'll keep this page bookmarked for future reference.
How to Make Adsense Ads Open in a Popup Window
FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver on life post-election
May be Its fault of education systems and corporate jobs..I don't buy it for sure
AT&T doubled network capacity for SxSW in four hours last night
Late rumor has iPhone 3.0 getting copy-and-paste, multitasking
How Two Friends Built a $100 Million Company
Use the exception notifier plugin instead of going over your error logs.
Make Your own TinyURL Service
If you are wrong, then anyone who does censor themselves is in for a major competitive gain. If you are right, they haven't lost much. Facebook isn't a very big part of life.
Forget watermarks; new technique "fingerprints" paper
2-Weeks Notice On A Cake
I have. Of many bugs, the random irretrievable code deletion feature was my least favorite.
You're being very frequentist (http://www.statisticalengineering.com/frequentists_and_bayes...).

You don't have to have a random sample to estimate a probability. In the Bayesian interpretation, you can have a reasonable prior that you update as you collect more data. For example, a meteorologist can look at the clouds and "guesstimate" that there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow. A frequentist would object and say that you can't take lots of random samples of tomorrow to estimate that probability. The Bayesian is willing to take the meteorologist's guess as a prior, and update it as & when more data becomes available. In this case, I think Sachin's statement is reasonable in the absence of any real data.
The rebuttal writes itself, doesn't it.
Also, mental dexterity and knowledge are probably inversely proportional to each other because once you learn more you draw on more to make decisions. So, if we could rid our minds of our knowledge we might improve our thinking speed.

Anyways, for people who feel down about their age, remember that nothing anybody does will last forever. Our judgment of significance is significantly colored by our finite sense of time. Just think of what seemed like a long time to you at 3 vs at 30. Thus, it is ok to primarily aim at happiness in this life instead of achievement, though aiming at achievement is also good if it makes you happy.
You've got a point, in the sense that a lot of the "probabilities" are just best guesses based on anecdotal evidence. But pragmatically, I don't see much of a choice; it would be paralyzing to try and gather all that data before making a decision. And, in my mind, it's usually better to make that decision on imperfect information- like the aphorism that "Your probability of success is higher in the Valley"- than no information at all.
Try the non-annoying printer friendly version:
http://www.inc.com/print/44?partner=rss

That slideshow is maddening.
He gave moving C programmers on to OOP as C++'s positive legacy.
Depends on your definition of life.

You could argue that you can lock yourself away from people, stay in solitude, and spend all your time learning and trying to make money, and that gives you a competitive gain. But that ignores how important and useful friends are.

Like it or not, people today talk a lot on Facebook. I talk to people back at my high school fairly often. I keep in touch with people I couldn't keep in touch with otherwise. And with the various dramas and photos and notes that appear on Facebook, I've both had some interesting experiences with people and I've preserved memories of things that've happened offline.

Maybe I lose something by having that all online (mind you, in a place where only 90 other people can see it, rather than in some place public), but I gain far more. It's similar to how I'm willing to write about personal matters on my blog. I can imagine an employee coming across my writing about a failed relationship or about incidents about college, but I gain more from being able to publish my thoughts candidly than I lose from their disapproval.

My line of thinking goes: if my employer is such an ass as to search through my past to see if I've done questionable things, then either I've done a piss-poor job of making myself into a good candidate, or he's not somebody worth my working for. Either way, the fault is not my past: it's my, or my employer's, present.
A problem with rationalists is that to make oneself truly rational they have to somewhat kill their instinctive, spirited side. But, the instinctive, spirit side is based on millions of years of evolution. So, the rationalist is missing out on a massive chunk of life.

A good combo is Kirk/Spock, Hamlet/Horatio.
The initial claim was that Eisner nearly killed Disney animation. When I provided evidence showing that Disney animation got significantly better under Eisner's reign, the claim becomes "someone else made it better" and that Eisner did nothing. Note the unstated retraction of "killed".

As far as Katzenberg goes, he wasn't created by Imagineering - he was hired by Eisner. And yes, he eventually left. That's what successful people do in Hollywood - they move upstream.

While the Pixar came to resent the original deal, that deal made them and it was a better deal than they could have gotten elsewhere. Everyone who breaks big has the same complaint about their early deals and they're all wrong.

> Katzenberg ended up founding Dreamworks with Spielberg and they're doing quite well for themselves.

Actually, Dreamworks is circling the drain. They sold the animation division in 2004. They sold the studio in 2005, and the "independent filmworks" division is having trouble raising money for a Spielberg film. The distribution deal with Disney is not from a position of strength, but to keep the company afloat. (If DW becomes a success, they'll hate Disney for that deal when it comes time to negotiate another.)

http://www.alexburns.net/2009/02/dreamworks-debt-finance-bat...
What about an HN API ?
For instance, the user may define a cgi perl script that gets called with the name of each submission every time the front page is loaded...
...outside the Valley, most people have heard of neither FriendFeed nor Seesmic. ;-)

The big advantage of living outside the valley is that you're closer to real customers - people who don't live and breathe technology 24/7. That can help you or hurt you, depending on your target market. Could something like MySpace, AOL or PlentyOfFish have started inside the Valley, considering that they succeeded by catering to idiots?
Maybe the cost savings of tagging the more expensive items can make paying for the cheaper items part of an honor system. I.e. pay $X monthly to have unlimited access to item Y.

Or, untagged items are locked. They are unlocked with a credit card, and the weight difference is billed to the card.

Those are just a couple off the top of my head. I suspect there are many creative ways to deal with untagged items.
Sigh. This might be a good guide on how to learn the general premises behind college. It is not a "college education."

The college process is about communication between teachers and students. It's about meeting peers and having the freedom to try things you wouldn't ever try as part of a job. You can't get that online, and you can't get it just by reading books.
When RIAA 'thinks' that people outside US fall under US laws - thats ignorance.
But when people think that those outside US do not have copyright laws - well, thats kind of ignorance too.

You're only guessing the 'worst' or 'extreme' scenarios. And as for 'white collar prisons' - just google the stanford experiment.
Nope, the semantic web was about reasoning. Linked data is about linking data, and in effect creating a large distributed database. One way to think about it, is to consider building a system that stores a tracking code for a package. Instead of storing XXX-XXXXXX-XXX use the URI so that it can just be deferenced to get more information. In effect you are linking your store data with shippers data.

This could allow you to write trivial queries to quickly identify if there are bottlenecks in how your packages are shipped etc.

Also the development of SPARQL was a significant milestone, that really changes how one works with rdf.

A linked data web could then be used to for reasoning on top of it, but it would need to be large and thus it needs to be useful before the reasoning can be used. For instance, imagine the original web when people were working on search engines with only a few pages... The pages need to exist first.
The problem with ideas like RFID is that without a global method of tracking people a global government is unworkable. However, once we can electronically track everyone, then global government becomes much more feasible.

That being said, I doubt RFID actually can allow global tracking. The infrastructure cost and maintenance to make that happen is way too high, and not worthwhile.
Living in the Valley is not especially expensive for founders. Buying a house in the Valley is notoriously expensive, because there is so much speculation built into prices (even now). But renting a two-bedroom apartment in Mountain View is no more expensive for equivalent quality of life than in Boston.

We gave groups the same amount of money in Boston cycles as in Bay Area cycles, and we never noticed any difference in how long it lasted.
Vertical halves or horizontal halves? Personally, I use maximized vim and browser windows. Alt + tabbing between vim and the browser is trivial, but I need the extra screen space for vim because I often need to split vim between several files. I'm sure I don't need to make a case for how alt + tabbing between different vim windows quickly gets old.
Interesting lecture.
Fact is it is a lot more than that. I remember reading on a forum that it is $4-5M a year, which would make more sense because that is what you get when you multiply out 19M pageviews per day by 10c CPM and 50% sales rate.

They are, like a lot of other companies, simply under-reporting on their tax obligation, since ad revenue is easy to manipulate/hide.

Launching sites like 'snotr', on the other hand, assures that these guys are going to be one-hit wonders.
It's surprisingly fun for such a simple little thing, especially since the lack of friction makes it so much more compelling than the "marble in a bowl" demonstration I got when I was a kid.
Put simply, computational convenience trumped empirical findings.
One of J. K. Rowling's truly great accomplishments (that is, one of the things that if anything isn't praised enough) is that she takes a very liberal worldview and she portrays it in such a straightforward manner that very few people think to argue with the things she's talking about.

She describes a world where there's no difference between men and women. There are heroes and villains on both sides. Furthermore, women aren't made out to be fundamentally superior or inferior in terms of emotion versus ration. She makes the difference apparent - you get dumb guy moments and giggly girl moments - but at the same time, every character has dumb blind emotional moments, and moments where a clear head prevails.

She does similar things with racism and libertarianism. (That's not to say Rowling is ultralibertarian, but she expresses certain views - like the fallibility of government and the acknowledgement that people aren't created entirely equal - that promote the agenda, while simultaneously being mature enough to acknowledge that government isn't inherently bad and that people are defined by more than just their talent.) The funny thing is that the one thing she's accused of - promoting witchcraft - is the least radical of the various things she tries to do. Combine that with a very adult understanding of death couched into a book series that, for the first few books, was considered fluff kid fantasy, and you realize that Rowling is very underrated as a kid's author. People ignore her merits for her popularity, which is a shame.

Eddings, from all I've heard, is a talented writer, but he's not good at reaching out to a wide audience. He's a niche writer. Rowling, meanwhile, has a talent for making people fall in love with her writing that I've rarely seen in any writer, and she combines that with surprisingly mature plot development.
Raw execution speed does matter, but like any incremental cost, is often ignored.

Off-the-cuff benchmarks I ran on our Scala-based webapp on a four-core desktop system demonstrated 5,000 req/sec @ 2ms/request after the JIT warmed up.

5,000+ requests/second -- scaling up with available CPUs -- means not having to worry about performance, complicated caching, and the slew of other things that developers do to eek performance out of frameworks based on poor interpreter implementations.
27.. phew .. my guess was 16.

I feel better now.
Viceland's got a compelling set of pictures, too, about a closed high school in Detroit: http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/schools-out-forever...
I doubt he was thinking in those terms. More likely this was a concept that he'd already started to think of, and so the things he wrote about concerned things of that nature.

It's like how programmers designing registration systems become obsessed with talking about registration forms and CAPTCHAs. It's just where their minds dwell as they work.
It may be similar to Boston, but it's far more expensive than living in many other parts of the country (or state).
Since we're on a meta-discussion, I'd point out that this raised some flags for me:

“A large project in C would implement the Lisp run time?” Oh really? You mean each variable will have the type LispObject (or PyObject or whatever)? Never happens, unless the C code is written by a deeply disturbed Lisp weenie (gcc and especially BetaPlayer, I’m talking about you). The fact that some people write C code as if they were a Lisp back-end is their personal problem, nothing more, nothing less.

No, that's obviously not what people who say that mean. Usually, they're talking about what I've most recently seen sold as an "IoC frameworks" like Java's Spring.

Meta-comment: He is awfully confident at ridiculing a claim he doesn't understand. If it's intentional, it's straw man rhetoric. Either way, it raises a flag.
Living in the valley was actually much cheaper for me than Miami. That's from housing to my car (the lease was cheaper out there, so I waited till I was situated to get one) to food (jack in the box value menu ftw). I'd suggest living with others, as the 1 bedrooms do seem to be higher priced to rent. Gas is never fun, but that's most of California. Take the 22 or 522 bus. It runs 24/7 down el camino and costs 60 bucks a month for an unlimited pass.
Neither Twitter nor Facebook are who they are for technical reasons; their popularity was more about timing the market and being the right company at the right time. Unlike say Google, who are on top for technical reasons and dominated by being smarter, faster, and better.

Since their popularity isn't based upon their technology, beating them requires a hell of a lot more than just duplicating their technology.
Rationality also doesn't provide you with goals, only means to achieve goals.
Fred Trotter On Preventing An Anti-FOSS Policy In Health IT
With the US government releasing their pro-FOSS stimulus package one would think all is good. However, there is a possible spanner being thrown in the works regarding the medical industry and open source. To find out more about the situation and learn how the community can help influence the situation I hooked up with Fred Trotter, Chief Architect at HealthQuilt, about the situation.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "large degree," but the story of Detroit is more about race than it is about any of those things. (It's also about the auto industry, of course, and poor government.. but those are intertwined with racial issues as well.)
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I prefer Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. Wizardry is hacking. Oh, and teleportation spells can take you to other planets. It's excellently written, and as addictive as Harry Potter. More information:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YoungWizards
It looks a bit like one, but it could be any group of others. Poisson distributions would be used normally in a circumstance that resembles an arrival process (say hits to a web server), but not for a distribution like ages on a site like this.
The Size of Derivatives Bubble = $190K Per Person on Planet
Oh, Gandalf definately wasn't human - even the LotR itself was surprisingly clear on this point, considering how much magic was presented obscurely in the book.

On the otherhand, I would have thought that LotR was the perfect refutation of Pratchett's thesis - I mean Galadriel was one of the bad-asses on the White Council, with ambition to boot! She was one of the holders of the three elven rings, marking her a peer of Gandalf's, and it was she that was tempted by the One Ring's power.

And then, in that other grand fantasy series, The Belgariad, there was of course Polgara, another strong female magic-using character, even though she ended up playing second fiddle to her father any time some direct application of power was required.

Overall, I can't help feeling that the speech was in response to Pratchett's own innate tendancy against female magic-users, as a close examination of most of the major series shows that many, if not most, had strong female magic-using characters, both good and evil. At least Pratchett was able to see that he had a bias, and apparently fought against it to create Granny Weatherwax - full marks to the man :-)
My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that tinyurl looks through their links for ebay/amazon urls that don't have affiliate link id's, and if not, they add their own to them. Pretty ingenious, as it monetizes transparently.
Use a window manager that supports multiple independent workspaces. E.g., on a Mac use Spaces.

That way you can arrange your windows as you like and leave them that way.