skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sun was borderline struggling for as long as I can remember, and to date survived anyways.

Once there were even tougher times for them and it was then when they developed Solaris 10 and the Niagara processor. Shareholders were pissed nevertheless and McNealy had to leave.

On top of that I hear Sun has some $2bn just in a bank right now. Back then they had two times that, but were two times bigger too (ca. 20000 employees).
Does it make sense to sue a gun manufacturer because someone used their guns in a shooting rampage?
I combine that with the quote "I'm a company starter, not really an empire builder". The author couldn't see the bigger opportunity for the business, and the staff starting banging their heads on his limited vision.

If he'd had a much bigger vision, he probably could have (as you indicate Fog Creek has done) included future levels for growth.
NPR Interviews the Guy Who Helped Blow Up Wall Street
What makes this an interesting comment?

Someone posts your same urgent insight on every tenth story that makes the front page... Come on folks, please read the guidelines:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'd try to negotiate with Cornell. Might be worth going there in person. If not, your scheme of starting at Tufts and transferring seems reasonable. If you worry about lame peers, take upper-level courses as a freshman. Audit them if they won't let you register because of prerequisites. I suspect most profs would even grade your work in a case like that, so you'd get the full intellectual benefit of the class, just not the credit.
There is a rule of thumb in UI design wherein if someone blames operator error, that's shorthand for system failure. Obie's call that Alex's code base is bad is classic blame the operator behaviour.
He means they're not completely selfish, and the anti-DRM stance isn't just a cynical front.
Are you joking? I can't even tell!

If not: I thought OpenID was supposed to make things easier! How does ssh'ing into my server and starting and stopping services make anything easier!?

And why stop the service, anyway? If it's not being used, shouldn't consume much resources. Unless it's hopelessly insecure or something, in which case it should be abandoned anyway.

If you are joking: har har.
For deeply technical conversations I research answers I give and back up what I say with links to source material or a log of the commands I ran. This seems to be quite unusual, and I believe most technical discussions would benefit from a similar approach.
The Water-War Myth
The definition of the population wasn't clear in the quote. Note that the actual definition doesn't support the "more public charters" conclusion because the breakdown of the turn downs tells us nothing about the relative number of accepts and turn downs. (Of course, the preferences of the "turn downs" are likely to be at odds with the preferences of the folks who accepted.)

Still, the fact that 20% of the folks who turned down vouchers did so because their kids got into public charters doesn't imply that we shouldn't have vouchers.

I happen to think that we should have more public charters. Since vouchers can let parents choose public charter schools for their kids....
If customers took the loss when stocks were traded with the money, did they also take the gains?

It would be pretty bad if Zecco stuck customers with the loses from losing trades, but took the gains from the profitable trades.
Two parts here.
1. Scripting languages might be too slow for Twitter? If they say so, I'll believe them -- the right tool for the job.

2. Too large and sloppily written code base, so there are problems with keeping the APIs between modules clean? That is a risk with loosely typed languages.

I don't get why this is a problem.

Other people has written large systems with Perl/Python/PHP/Ruby/etc and gotten around that problem. Also, I assume Ruby (like all other scripting languages) has some simple module to assert parameter types -- it's only needed for the externally called methods anyway.

Edit: Another thing hit me, regarding what I comment on. The memory usage should be different for long running Scala and Java code. Has this been tested and tuned..?
I like this site, not because it is at all ethical or because I have any interest in partaking in its over-priced services but because it makes this society as a whole more upfront about its hypocrisy.

Human beings has often been polyamourous with cheating. If ostensible monogamy becomes more obviously just ostensible, then open polyamory becomes more appealing.

Down with cheating, sure but things that let us ease out hypocritical monogamy with less emotional blow-back are good.
If you're laid off or fired, and you owe money, you will be stopped at the border from leaving. It takes about a week for the notification from your employer to get into the financial system, which is why many westerners drive to the airport and leave their cars in the parking lot with the keys in them - never to return to Dubai.
Right now, I am having trouble believing that this was a prank. I just can't believe that anyone would be stupid enough to do this. And if it were a prank, why would Zecco let trades be executed? I doubt that any prankster would want the company to be executing millions of dollars of invalid trades. I have a lot easier time believing this was an untimely bug.
> Bank of North Dakota. A government run one..

Majority-Scandanavian states seem capable of lots of things that other states can't manage. Since the majority of US states are not majority-Scandanavian, we can't use the majority-Scandanavian ones as a model.
Unfortunately I can't say the same about my nicotine addiction! ;)
I’m still curious as to what might have sunk me at those places.

How did you describe your plans for the future in your application?

placed in top ~50 of my grade nationwide in math competitions

I follow a lot of math competitions, as a math coach. Which competitions were the ones you participated in most avidly?

the "too-intense guy" I come off as at my high school

What specific behaviors are your high school classmates observing as they come to that conclusion about you?
Non-blocking I/O + coroutines handles this problem without the overhead of threads or the complexity of preemption.
Why are you being downvoted? This story is incredibly poorly-reasoned (as almost all the comments here have pointed out). Why is this even worthy of our discussion?
Of course! Yahoo and Sun should merge, and become Snafoo!
> I was talking about how the FDIC creates bad incentives.

And I'm pointing out that the bad incentives affect depositor behavior. Thanks to FDIC, you have little incentive to find a trustworthy bank. Instead, you judge entirely on other criteria.
Why not just password protect the staging site? Would that not help?

Anything publicly accessible is fair game. It's your responsibility to protect it.
This feels like SGI 5 years ago :(

(except the Computer History Museum already has a nice home)
Similar startups that have emerged from the YCombinator and TechStars stables
OT: Out of curiosity, why do you pride yourself on having nearly no ethical or moral constraints?
It's easier for some folks like myself, probably not everyone.

I am not sure if it's secure, either. Regardless, shutting it down helps me sleep better at night.
I'm not sure what you mean by "establishment" in this context, other than my guess that I'm not part of the establishment.

After edit: Quite a few scholars contend that for a long time the student characteristic that has set college availability even more than SAT scores is family income. Laura D'Andrea Tyson, one of President Clinton's economics advisors, called for taking student family income more into account in admissions back in 2003:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

Several studies and journalistic reports have shown that in previous years, student income limited college choices more than student test scores:

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

Now some colleges claim to have outreach to increase socioeconomic diversity on campus:

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...

Based on what I have heard in anecdotes about this year's admission results, Princeton, which was the first college in the Ivy League to announce a no-loan financial aid policy, is in earnest about admitting more students from low-income backgrounds.
I wonder what materials he read to come up with that beautiful pink aesthetic and unreadable title font?
Top 8 April Fools websites of 2009
Each and every the web produces some of the best April Fools jokes across the globe, some go all out and create fantastic often highly involved and well thought out pranks. Let take a look at the top 8.
I hope he DID give his real last name...

"Don Deshizzle", that's a sweet name
The INS is despicable. I hope I never have to deal with them again.
A roommate of a personal friend was allowed to keep ~$600 in profits from trades using this 'fake' buying power after making a large stock purchase. Perhaps hearsay, but I'm inclined to believe that this really happened.
I guess bid withdrawal is just a standard negotiation technique to piss the shareholders and force the board, like Yahoo/MS and I believe Oracle/BEA
Ask HN: Why have a "Terms and Conditions" on your site?
What sort of legal protection can such a document offer?
Apart from the fact that it is very difficult to prove that a person actually agreed to a TOS when signing up, the TOS itself can't be proven to be the one agreed to.

The internet is transient, and there is currently no way to have a 3rd party "endorse" that a /specific/ agreement occured between two parties like with normal paper contracts, what is the point of offering a TOS on your site in the first place?

I can think of a myriad of possibilities where both the site and the user can exploit these issues. Like for example a website sending spam despite claiming in their TOS that they wouldn't.
News Corp Fires Columnist for Reviewing Pirated Movie
My theory on higher ed in the USA is that you should make an effort to attend a school with a great brand name reputation like Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford or Berkeley.

If that doesn't work you should go to the best place that costs you the least amount of money.

I'll probably offend the alumni of the schools I mention, but as someone who has assisted with hiring for startups, I don't believe HR really distinguishes between places like McGill, Amherst or Tufts (or even places like Cornell and Brown.) However, Harvard, MIT or Stanford will definitely get you an interview.

I didn't get into anywhere good and instead went to a no-name private school in the midwest that essentially paid me to go there. Since then I've worked alongside, and been paid the same as people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley, as well as people who dropped out of high school.

I would have preferred paying for Stanford if that had been an option. However, I'm very glad I'm not 200K in debt to a "2nd choice" school.

In your situation I'd probably go to Tufts if Yale doesn't come through. Living in that area definitely beats Amherst.
Sorry for trying to hijack, but I was going to create a similar thread for myself too, and I don't think it would be a good idea to create two. (I got waitlisted at Rice too!)
Right now I'm trying to decide between UCLA, UCSD, and Univeristy of Washington. Which one would be best for a CS major?
> the EU as a whole has muscle but no individual country can match the US militarily or economically.

Collectively, the EU may have economic muscle (well - they have GDP), but there's no collective military muscle.
That doesn't sound all that different from turn-of-the-century America, where debtors were often forced to work for their creditor until the money was paid off. I guess the difference is that now it seems like everyone's a debtor, but if you choose to live by the standards someone from a century ago, you have much more freedom and purchasing power, not less.

(Seriously, when did living debt-free go out of style? If my grandparents wanted something big like a summer home, they saved for it, they didn't go out and get a mortgage.)
Well... if you know a bit more about Card outside of Ender novels, you tend to take what he says as wrong by default. He's so opposite to what you'd expect him to be I often fantasize he's trolling.
Y'know, I think that most of the time what looks like a coincidence is, in fact, a coincidence.

YC lists about 70 startups, and TechStars about 20. I think with that many companies coincidence is more or less guaranteed -- a sort of weird permutation on the birthday paradox. Or, put another way, there's 1400 "pairs" of startups between these two first, and 3 coincidences. Hardly damning evidence in my book.

Further, the startups in question seem like fairly obvious given the current tech climate. Geolocation is an increasingly big deal these days, as is local, high-quality food. And who doesn't want better comments on their blogs?

Remember: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is probably correct.
This site has the exact same problem as AdultFriedFinder, which is that no woman needs it. If one really wants some NSA relations, all she has to do is go to a bar, rather than publicly post her picture on the net where anyone (including her husband) can find it.

I suspect both of those sites are almost entirely men chasing fake accounts.
The idea is that anti-ship missile technology has become more widely distributed since the gulf war. Is it crazy to think that Iran can match Argentine technology from the 80s?
> Remember: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is probably correct.

Occam's Razor.
in particular, a deepness in the sky and a fire in the deep are excellent.
Establishment meant WASPs. Brandeis was set up as the Jewish Harvard because high-performing Jewish high schoolers were getting passed over for Ivy League admission for legacy WASPs. After World War II, the Ivies opened up considerably and the "need" for a Jewish school diminished although it maintains its identity (the same as HBCUs, for example).

The issue of the SATs still being a fantastic determinant of first year college success says something, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps the colleges would let in more minorities, but they'd not perform as well? Would those minorities do better since more of them would get in and they wouldn't be as isolated as they are now?
Another in a long string of articles critical of a non Y Combinator incubator. Paul Graham/YC worship at the expense of all other incubators is pathetic. YC is good. Other incubators are good too. You aren't buying yourself cool points by hating on every incubator that isn't Y Combinator.
"I suspect most potential users have the same reasons for not giving Ruby a go."

Reasons I've heard for not using Ruby:

- Already know and like <Python|Lisp|Blub>

- It's like Python, but Python has more robust libs, so I'm learning Python

- Dynamic typing leads to serious bugs in non-trivial apps

- It's slow

- I hate the syntax

- I'd like to use it, but my boss insists on <Java|PHP|Blub>

Slow isn't usually the first concern I hear. Besides, JRuby and Ruby 1.9 alleviate the speed issue; JRuby alleviates the library concern.
Yeah, this whole situation reeks of the Yahoo/MS deal -- lots of testosterone and people leaking negotiation status to see what it does to the stock price. Ugly.

The difference, of course, is that IBM doesn't really need Sun, it just sees a good company at a good price, or it thought it did.
History has shown that disruptive technologies have the potential to drastically alter warfare. The invention of the gatling gun, for example, single-handed turned the line-based warfare of the 19th century upside down.

The invention of the tank as a self-sufficient mobile force was also an incredible blow to known combat tactics at the time - the Nazis wielded this to incredible effect in Poland. The onslaught of fast-moving tanks made the cavalry-heavy Polish military look downright pathetic.

While I'm a bit skeptical of the article, I have to accept that it's entirely possible for a single technology, if disruptive and innovative enough, to complete obsolete the aircraft carrier in only a few short years.
I don't understand what the implication is here. This is just a list of 3 completely obvious spaces with a competitor from each firm. Um... yeah? So the fuck what? Total linkbait.
Wow, this article isn't very well thought out at all. In trying to rebut it, I'm literally overwhelmed by the sheer ignorance of it.
See if you can find a course catalogue- they tell you exactly how the school structures its CS program.
Not intending to speak for the poster, I think he's referring to have no ethical or moral constraints when it comes to a business.

There is certainly a lot of money to be made in areas where morals are gray or downright black...
Yeah. I read them and occasionally re-read them when I start thinking that the explanation for WTF these stories make it to the front page might be that the criteria have changed.
5 years ago, UW, far and away. They were ranked #12 when I was looking, and even higher before that I think. Seattle is also of course a great town for technology, and not just for Microsoft hangers-on.
Sure, people sometimes misuse the term ad hominem, but not in this case. The comment said that:

"Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum"

I fail to see how being liberal implies the bizarre views in the article. Bringing up the political leaning of the Guardian was a bit of a cheap shot and not at all germane to the topic.
As far as I remember it was the third biggest, not the third best.
Nobody's hating on every other incubator; you might need to read the entire article over.
When the YC movement began, there were just a handful such incubators and they've proved their integrity through their portfolios.
Scores of new incubators are popping up each year.
With the same ideas being submitted to a whole host of incubators now, confidentiality and intellectual property concerns rise to a new level.
Forgive me as I'm unfamiliar with lower-level details like this, but isn't this exactly what Ruby Enterprise Edition is meant to solve?
> Truth is, no one country should be holding that bag, which is why a proper UN (not necessarily the UN we have today) is so desirable and inevitable.

Not so fast. Desirable? In what universe would you want the Chinese, Americans, Russians, or even French to share authority over you?

Yes, police to deal with "bad people" is good/desirable, but mission-creep and the definition of "bad people" is important because you really don't want police dealing with you or good people. Since large organizations can't resist....

> Hopefully the USA, realising that playing the role of global policeman is not the fun career it envisaged in its youth, will come to realise that a supranational pseudo-government is actually a very good idea.

What experience with supranationals supports that theory?

Isolationism is the least bad choice. Occasionally, it doesn't work, and it sucks for countries with neighbors who have bad habits, but intervention has only two outcomes, and they're both bad. (There's nothing that breeds hatred better than actually helping someone who didn't want to be helped. And, if they actually want to be helped, there's really very little to do for them.)

And no, it doesn't matter that the intervention is coming from folks who belong to a supranational.

This is without even considering what the fact that the greatest evils come from folks who "meant well" means for a supranational.
> Hopefully we'll arrive fairly soon at a point where we have 10 or so major blocs sitting around a table, almost like elected officials representing their electorate, and they can duke out this kind of stuff with real authority and the power to back up their words.

Good ghod, I hope not. Why would I want folks representing some foreign power to have any authority over me?

If they've got a good idea, I can implement it without doing as they insist. If they've got a bad idea, why would I want to implement it?
BrowseCMS - like Drupal, but in Rails
I am especially fond of near-future scifi. Reading Stross, Stephenson, and Vinge always leaves me with a feeling of wonder - their novels are brimming with technological & sociological insight.

Often a novel is a thought experiment. If you read Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows End_, you will find a plausible and well thought out speculation on wearable computing. This is the kind of thinking we have to do in a startup - we take the current state of things and extrapolate.
I thought the slideshare thing was funny, although probably not good for business. This, on the other hand, is borderline malicious; there is no way in hell I would use their service now.
Programmers tend to value tangible evidence of technical expertise. Your best bet if you want to operate in software is to build impressive things and go to school wherever you feel most comfortable.

Engineers tend have a more limited idea of how technical expertise ought to be acquired: at a top 10 (maybe 15) ranked university. So, Stanford, MIT, and Cornell are very fine choices for mechanical or electrical engineering. For you then, Cornell is the only way to go for engineering.
Hundreds of users to millions of dollars? Incredible monetization ratio.
> that EC2 is as efficient as (or, conceivably, even in the same ballpark as) Google's datacenter infrastructure

Google's users don't care how efficiently it runs its datacenters.
You should really rethink having this article up. It's the worst kind of crap that absolutely poisons reasonable discourse. You don't have the balls to come out and actually accuse anyone of anything ("All in all, we’re not speculating"), and you have no evidence of anything besides the fact that "some companies" do "similar stuff", and yet you're unabashed about your insinuations, and you post it under a completely inflammatory title. Kind of ironic, for a blog that's supposed to be about ethics, don't you think?

This looks like your blog's first post, and you've been on HN for less than a month? You're not off to a good start.
How to Make Homemade Brownies : Uihao
Actually, Tom's a crazy psychopath.

(This will be downmodded by reasonable people; YC founders who actually know Tom will upmod. :) )
First of all big congrats on Cornell. I was crushed when they rejected me, luckily it was my one rejection.

I am currently having to choose between Georgia Tech (nearly free) and Emory (50k/year). I'm not a math/engineering person, while that background would be nice I see myself as an Econ major. I hate to hijack the topic, but I'm in a tough situation as well...

Would YC prefer a non engineering grad from Emory or GT?
What technical limitation prevents a language from being fast, easy to use, and well designed? Alex seems to argue that Scala is 'fast, good, and easy', and I would tend to concur.

What I've seen of C# 3.0 and F# also implies that those languages could meet this criteria, but my experience with them is limited.
I must say I regret applying there. I got in, never really planned on going for a pure management education, but they sent in the fanciest most personalized acceptance package. A very "feel good" acceptance.