skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't comment specifically about Facebook, because I don't know much about its internals.

But, there is one thing I can comment on. The role of any Software Company CEO is to create a system that translates brain waves into dollars.

That's what software companies do. Creating software isn't like creating a car. It's about generating "abstract ideas" that can be understood by a computer and are useful to humans.

You take smart people, give them the environment they need to do great work, and say "ok, now think me up some software".

Discouraging dissent, in general, is equivalent to turning off brain waves.

The thing about smart people is that they have ideas. A lot of them. By definition, thinking is what smart people do best. In a software company those are the kind of people you want, because that's what you are selling: re-packaged thoughts.

When you say "this is the way we are going to do things, because I'm the boss and I know best, so please don't come to me with reasons why this might not be good, instead just shut up and do what I so, or else go away" you are explicitly encouraging people to not think.

Encouraging people in your software company not to think is stupid. It's encouraging them not to produce the one thing you need them to produce in order to make money.

I'm not saying you want a democracy. The CEO, at the end of the day, is responsible for the company's performance. He's the one who makes the decisions. But, being responsible for the company's performance means the "burden of greatness" is on you. If you hear a voice of dissent, it's not the dissenter's responsibility to prove her case. It's your responsibility to listen to what she has to say, and figure out if there's any hidden merit to it.

The goal is to build a profitable business, not to be a powerful executive. Leave your ego at the door. If the person who is suggesting "maybe there is a better way" had a perfect, well crafted message, that seemed obvious and completely brilliant, why on earth would she bring it to you. She could just take her perfectly formed product to the market and wipe the floor with you.

You are the boss precisely for one reason: because you can take other people's brain waves and convert them into money. Because of this, your goal should be to get the people who work with you to generate as much brain wave activity as possible. That means encouraging dissent.

If you aren't doing that, then you are not leading.

So, if this is happening at Facebook, then it's a shame.
> Amazon's model wasn't obvious when they started.

Simply not true. They sell things, how that translates into money is quite obvious.

Whether people would choose to trust and prefer online ordering is was the risk, but the model was obvious.
Main problem, electricity arcs to ground ASAP. This means that the system can basically only have two connections in range of each other, so 1 power plant to 1 user. The economics of this doesn't really work well.

Generally electricity only arcs once, and it requires 30kV/cm. This means to arc to two things at 10 cm you require about 600kV, but again this requires a small amount of energy to be transferred to ground.

Transferring through the ionosphere would likely resolve some of this problem, it's like dipping electrodes into salt water. It works, it's just omni-directional and subject to the environment. However, you basically have to build every antenna 50km high.

The technology I believe is credible, but the practicality of it isn't very high. Below the ionosphere this technology has the problem that the ground is usually much closer than the next persons house. This would work great above 100 ft, due to the fact that the whole ozone production would poison most people. Above 100 ft, I can only transmit power in a range of less than 100 ft, but generally only to one person. If I want to transmit to two people it has to be below 50 ft.

At 100 ft the voltage limit is 90 million volts before you're arcing directly to the ground. The safe limit would probably be 45 million volts as you'd be arcing to peoples heads at 90 million volts.

Basically how the system would end up breaking down is that you'd use hundreds of feet of cable to connect to your antenna, which we currently use less to connect to the one down the road. I believe mine is about 30 feet away. The substation would require a few thousand feet or so of cable to connect to the main transformer, again which we use considerably less to do today.

So the only practical usage I see is on the long distance scale, where you're using the ionosphere instead of arcing through the air. However, it would all have to be over 100km apart. Yet at such extremely high voltages to be practical we wouldn't have a strong enough insulator to stop the arcing anyway.

Unless we end up with like 2 power stations in North America and a super electrical insulator, I doubt this technology would ever become truly practical.
ARIA for Google Calendar, Finance and News
While it's a nice site, especially taking into account the percentage of research projects ever reach its level of usability/commercialization, I am not quite convinced that there is ground breaking underlying technology -- how is it fundamentally more novel than a Craigslist marshup (e.g. http://www.housingmaps.com/)?
It is not as easy as it seems. I use facebook because it easily allows me to see what is going on in a lot of people's lives. There are no huge technical or design hurdles to beating Facebook. The problems are social.

Only sites with a lot of users, like Myspace, could quickly become a threat to Myspace. Facebook has surpassed a critical mass of users, so they probably would have time to respond to any technical challenges.And Myspace seems to have a different and less successful focus than Facebook that would need to be changed. I don't really care about telling everyone who my top friends are, designing my page, or using Myspace as a blog. Basically, I just want to quickly and easily find out the major events in my friend's lives. It does not matter how brilliantly designed a site is, I cannot adequately meet my needs with a site until it has a good portion of my friends as users.

So to go against Facebook successfully, a company would need to start in an extremely small niche and grow, or provide value unrelated to social networking. It is a lot easier to reach critical mass in a very small niche. And if you aren't solely in social networking, people are going to be using your network before it provides decent social value.
But the article provided a solution, too:

"You can't just [use the] "turn on the floppy drive light and make grinding noises" technique, at least not without displaying a warning to the user that you're about to do this—users tend to freak out when the floppy drive light turns on for no apparent reason." (emphasis added)
I disagree with #2.

I think that 37signals did the right thing. This issue doesn't just affect 37signals, it affects a lot of other companies.

In my opinion, 37signals were obliged to talk about this publicly. If they sent some private mails, a lot of people and companies would still be in the dark regarding the issue. They had a responsibility to call bullshit.
It would probably work better as a television mini-series than as a theatrical release.
Article: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23...
DiggBar Is Here. Go Shorten Those URLs
I expect OpenID usage to increase as sites adopt usable UIs for it, but I am an optimist.
FYI The Fountainhead has a movie:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4619025/The_Fountainhead
> 50 Plus "Hair costs for women aged 50 to 75 include single process hair coloring at $63 per session, six times a year; salon haircuts at $42 per session six times a year; and blow dry/styling six times a year at $35 per session. The total cost for hair over this age range is $21,840."

Then look at the breakdown:

> "Hair: $169,274"

Ahh... consistency!
Why is this linkjacked via aweber (an emailing service)?

Flagged for the attention of a moderator to fix the link.
LiveView: an iPhone app for on-screen prototyping
ob correlation != causation

Another hypothesis may be that the "Sexy Combo" box is the only one where a picture of the opened drop down does not appear, necessitating a visit to the actual site to see what it looks like in operation.
Perhaps GS could just shut down it's service and redirect all customers with problems or questions to send an email first?
Mark Shuttleworth on Free Software and Wealth Creation [podcast]
Is it just me or was getsatisfaction nowhere to be seen on those links?

If so, go google!
I think this advice matches up really well to one of the things you say in your "5 Founders" essay about Paul Buchheit:

"PB made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup we fund: that it's better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you than a large number kind of like you."
Looks like they just mixed up the Hair and the Face numbers. Should be $21,840 and $169,274, respectively.
Of course they have a way to cooperate. All they have to do is make their offers expire later.
Honestly, for all I dislike Rand's work, as a writer I'd have to agree.

From a sociological point of view, ignoring your history (either physical history like WW2 or economic and political history) is likely to cause the problems to repeat.
It wasn't a business school professor, it was Allen Morgan at Mayfield Fund. Here is the Wired article you're thinking of:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/mayfield.html
Good Credit Is Sexy
If you believe that their offering was like a netbook, then they were early. OTOH, if you believe that their offering more more like WebTV, then they were quite late.
Shouldn't whether a company CHOOSES to do it be their choice? The law would say yes. I'm betting a bigco will C&D them in the near future if they don't make it company-opt-in.
The philosophy behind the book is good, the politics are stupid from whatever point you look at it. It typifies both stereotypes of capitalism, for the left wing 'capitalism = evil' and for the right wing 'capitalism = glorious'.

From a literary stand point, Rands work is the pulp fiction of politics. It plays the traditional stereotypes and helped make the woman famous (specifically in the USA, I believe the word is infamous elsewhere) without contributing anything truly new or unique to the discourse.
It's a valid enough point that a lack of regulation caused many of the current woes in the US, regardless of whether or not I happen to agree with it.

Hell, I'll even give you supporting evidence: Canada. Not a single bad bank.
I would rather not rely on "local leaders" (aka government) to do anything that private enterprise stands ready and willing to do.

I'm sure people do use payday loans to go score weed to be happy and temporarily reduce the stress of their situation. IMO, they are better off for having that choice than not, and it's not my place or yours to force them to choose in way that we think is "more wise."
RubyMine 1.0 Beta Released: A Solid, IntelliJ Based Ruby and Rails IDE
The monetization need not be direct (i.e. charging people to use the site). It could be better ad placement, a search engine that knows more about you than google does, monetary transactions (auctions, payments), as well as other stuff...

Like it or not, facebook has real utility (just like central park), and people are willing to pay for real utility in one way or another.
Does Mark Zuckerberg think he's Steve Jobs?
Undoubtedly the UK needs some YC-like schemes.

The YC FAQ does say “There already is a Y Combinator in your town: Y Combinator. The seed funding business is national, not regional.” and we know that in fact it is international as UK teams have taken part. In fact as far as I know, all the YC-like schemes will consider international applicants.

However, as jlees says, that does not benefit the UK. I believe that a lot of it is to do with national culture differences - the US just has a much stronger ethos of innovation and investment. People are just more likely to be entrepreneurial in the US. Entrepreneurs built America and it’s been part of their culture since colonists first settled there.

Meanwhile, in the UK, most individuals with large amounts of money (enough for angel investing) are either “old money” or have gained their money through conventional high-paying jobs (lawyers, investment bankers) where entrepreneurship is not part of the job per se. Those that do try angel investing, just don’t quite “get it”. Technology is completely alien to some farmer with 100,000 acres who happens to have a spare £100,000, meanwhile biotech investments (my current sector) will scare the bejesus out of most sane angels.

I would love to start a UK YC equivalent, but I would not want to do it without having experienced considerable success through starting and exiting some companies, or through gaining significant experience through VC work (which is closer to my current job). If anything, these experiences are needed just to build the network which we know is more important than the money in these programmes.

As has been mentioned, there are some schemes around in the UK, but there is nothing that /really/ fills YC’s concept-PoC niche. There will be eventually though - once I have got a spare £100 M from successfully selling a few companies I will gladly start one!
Incidentally Bank of Montreal actually ran a profit on interest from bailing out the US' system.

A considerable amount of money spent in the US bailout of banks actually ended up in Canada, Europe and Japan due to debts the US banks had already accumulated.
I always think of Bob's take on it all:

http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
I thought I was going insane reading the comments. "What are these people talking about? THERE IS NO 5!"
I hope the most valuable thing isn't the connections. I hope it's that we give good advice.
Tsk! He's not the next Steve Jobs - he's the messiah! (or is that the same thing? hmmmm)
Maybe you could link a legitimate copy, rather than the pirated copy?

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Gary-Cooper/dp/B000HWZ4A2...

Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Fountainhead/70055755?trkid...
I'm sorry, CNBC lost all credibility with me with one word: "Richistan". Who ever came up with that one needs to go back to Efftardia.

It's hard to take them seriously when they think I'm an idiot. (I may be an idiot, but they don't have to rub it in!)
I don't quite get why it matters. Guess, then when the drive is properly used for the first time, test, change over if required.

After that, quietly stop spinning up and grinding the floppy drive when not required.
Why? Then less people will watch it.
The last suggestion from BoingBoing uses "disemvoweling", which gets my vote for word of the day.
What's the point of #6 if you don't do anything with that talent?
Agreed-- EXCEPT in certain cases where there are only N slots to fill (like TechStars and some others).

Techstars, for example has 10 slots (I think). If they have 300 applicants and 10 slots, how do you think it'd work if they said, "take your time, let us know whenever". If they accept you, they aren't accepting the next startup on their list... And basically, they can't send accept/reject notices to folks until they fill all of their slots.

Or am I missing something? If a YC competitor has a fixed number of slots, is there a way they could NOT have an exploding term sheet (other than not have a fixed number of slots)?
Study after study has shown that read meat increases the chances of dying early, both from cardiovascular problems and cancer. Just one of the recent studies :-

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03...

How much clearer do you need the evidence to be?
> 5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds more than 20% of the company

Really? I've never heard this. Is there a condition in the companies charter that forbids it?

Usually all you need is a majority of the board to vote the CEO out and since he only has one vote and there are more than 2 people on the facebook board it seems like he could be voted out.
Is Microsoft Office Coming to iPhone?
Okay... I'm wrong apparently, would you care to posit the 'correct answer' to the problem instead of your diatribe?
In 2 month's time, we'll look back at Digg's traffic graphs and see a kink around today that marks a period of significant growth.

Congrats to the Digg team. Very nice implementation.
Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you downvote them. This is exactly the kind of attitude that fosters groupthink and drains the life out of forums.
I suppose the next patch for conficker might block those URLs, except for the images.
Ugh, such a gross misinterpretation. One of Rand's big points is that it doesn't matter what you're doing as long as you do it well. One of her physicists becomes a janitor, and when the misguided protagonist expresses horror at that, he says that there's nothing wrong in doing menial tasks.

Bob is incredibly stupid because he makes fun of something that Rand expressly says is a good thing. Furthermore, the Rearden parody ("I only know how to pay people to invent alloys") ignores that in the book, Rearden is the scientist who invents the alloy himself. He's portrayed as a very skilled mathematician. So it's a good parody IF you're okay with laughing at something that Rand never actually wrote.
This article is reminiscent of Tanenbaum's famous quote from Computer Networks: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." Stating the concept of bandwidth in that way was particularly illuminating for me.

How do these numbers compare to the big CDN's like Akamai?
But it takes a much more friendly approach to some pretty heavy philosophical things. I and my friends moved from Rand to Emerson. Reading Emerson (or his contemporary Thoreau) at 16 is a pain unless you have motivation to read his thoughts, and Rand provides that motivation.
Rise of the entrepreneurial consumer
Thanks for the heads up. I just checked to make sure my frame-breaking JS is working properly. Death to framers.
Apple doesn't release simple things because they wanted to ship as fast as possible. In fact, I'd say Apple behaves in the opposite fashion. They take as long as necessary to release something intentionally simple. Arguably the iPhone started out as a hugely complex system that needed to be paired down to what was really essential.
All kinds of essays and graduate works
Seminarski radovi - Izrada seminarskih radova,izrada maturskih radova,diplomskiradovi
Apple and Google have a long list of failed products that at least in apple's case was hyped by the media.
Maturalni radovi
If someone replaced the drive, then if you erroneously detected a floppy's in the drive, you try to access it and.. nope, no disk there. So then you flip the system. Fixed.

As far as I recall, the error codes for no disk versus an erroneous read were different, so you could just figure it out in case of a false positive.
And what constitutes a usable UI? Have you ever seen any stats on usage jumps between one UI and the next?
If you have 1 10 minute job that runs on 1 machine, freaking run it on your laptop or desktop.

And if you spread your job across N machines so you get results in 10 min then be willing to pay for your impatience.
Fresh passwords, every 5 seconds
So you need a password now. Want it long, copy/paste save and secure? Here you go: http://p.squidshot.com.

Passwords are refreshed every 5 seconds. So no excuse of using bad passwords anymore.
The app is like VNC for your iPhone with an added virtual iPhone "frame" on the host machine. It's a cool idea that seems like it has a lot more utility than just prototyping. If you didn't have the iPhone frame on the host, it would be great for remote control -- desktop apps suddenly become mobile without any code!
If you have a fixed number of slots you have to have a deadline. The problem is when the deadline occurs. If the firm in question made their first round of offers expire in 20 days instead of 2, it would be a moot point.
This is a perfect testament to the masses of people who think they understand (and thus have license to lay valid criticism on) Rand because they read the first 30 pages of Atlas Shrugged.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing some pseudo-sophisto unload on Rand at a cocktail party, their insults and blind lambasting only to abate when confronted with questions about Rand's actual philosophy and works as opposed to her reputation.
Well, high-paid CEOs are one of the things laissez-faire capitalism didn't really do well. Not the salary per se, but the very caustic obsession on short/medium term profit over long term. You can't really blame regulations here: the most important one was forcing companies to disclose CEO salaries 20 years ago, and we know how that turned out (they exploded because of competition).

I'm very much in favor of Rand's ideas, but we must admit they do require a rather hard to find mix of idealism and dedication for all parties involved in order to work out. They're a good start, but far from a final solution.
Does anyone have more details on this? The article has no actual substance.

If I were to guess, it seems like it's doing something like a genetic algorithm -- try some things, see which ones do something interesting, try variations on those. But the article doesn't say.
Ah, I hadn't realize this had been hashed out in another thread. I took exception to that excerpt because it sounded pretty hand-wavy; I've read your justification of why you ask for an immediate decision, and it makes sense up until you start introducing the possibilities of multiple offers.
Did Canada push its banks to give mortgages to people who could not afford them?
It's easy to think that things in non-Westernized countries cost peanuts, but it's rarely true. Haggling is almost never over "a few cents" (certainly in no example I've seen - someone who haggles over less than a dollar for a >$10 purchase is probably just a dick).

Take Morocco, for example. They'll try and charge you hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a carpet ( http://www.ehow.com/how_2318956_moroccan-carpet-less-than-mi... ). Even t-shirts in China will go for a few bucks or more.
And interview later unless they want to make long-standing offers. Perhaps making YC have an explicitly longer acceptance period would encourage the reputable funds to interview concurrently, causing the games played by the disreputable ones to become more transparent?
Betaworks Launches Chartbeat To Track Who Is Paying Attention To Your Website Right Now
Baby chicks do basic arithmetic
I use Chartbeat for http://tipjoy.com

It's pretty fun. They should incorporate user ids, and the ability to chat in real time. It would be awesome if you could track that user X was doing Y, and had a 404. Imagine a chat window that pinged them to see if everything was OK.

This obviously doesn't scale well, but for a good number of users, you could give them a delightful experience.
>It's what you know, what you are willing/able to learn and how hard you're willing/able to work that matters.

In turn, what causes people to be willing/able to learn and work on certain things? Our preferences and aptitudes are primarily stored in our neurological makeup. So neurological differences (whether inborn or acquired) will cause people to behave/emote differently.

Of course, there will be lots of people with Asperger's who love interacting with others and enjoy great interpersonal success, but that's the point of a pre-disposition -- it refers to a correlation, not a hard-and-fast rule.

I don't have statistics for people in the autism spectrum, but I would not be surprised if they trended heavily toward professions that focused on intellectual work over interpersonal interaction.
Those aren't unrelated. The alumni and network are an invaluable source of good advice.