skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
no one can draw a line like that. everyone wants to see their own investment reap profits.

secondly, VCs mandates are not to rape your business. their goal is to make money. whether they end up raping your business by trying to make money is another topic all together. that is why it is important to find the appropriate VC for your business. if you find the right one and play it right, you should not get 'raped'.
Winamp's 10th Anniversary
The term was in common usage before this book was written. I'm not sure if it was coined by him or others in response to his earlier research. Here is his faculty page:
http://www.otago.ac.nz/politicalstudies/jim_flynn.html

The wikipedia page is also good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
"Beyond" the Flynn effect. He acknowledges the term, not introduces it.
Even the "global warming skeptics" aren't actually skeptical about the fact that warming has been happening. Rather, they're skeptical that there's a sudden uptick in the last few decades, and/or that global warming as it exists is human-caused.

It's well understood that several hundred years ago, it was colder (at least in the northern hemisphere), simply because of historical records we have that don't make much sense otherwise. Also, it's well understood (though recently challenged) that it was warmer than twentieth century levels before that for some amount of time.

So the controversy is all over whether humans are causing any significant part of the warming that is currently happening, and whether that can or should be fixed by reducing greenhouse gas levels.
How do BuzzTracker-style news sites work? Isn't it by reading the RSS feeds from other sites like Google News?
Verizon Wireless to FCC: We'll See You in Court Over 700MHz Spectrum Auction Rules
Verizon Wireless has appealed the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) rules for its upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction, charging the agency with overstepping its boundaries in requiring wireless carriers that purchase spectrum to open up their networks to any mobile device and any third-party application.
Craig Mundie, Bill Gates' successor: "...there would have been no Google without Microsoft."
This is yet another long, distorted tirade by Senator James Inhofe -- and a year old, too!

It would take hours to debunk every logical fallacy and twisted fact that Inhofe uses to justify his silly views; for brevity, let me recommend the book "The Republican War on Science" for a good overview of the level of intellectual dishonesty that Inhofe embraces.
Four brilliant mathematicians whose genius has profoundly affected us but which drove them insane. [bbc]
Great Computer Science Video Lectures
For those who haven't seen the site, it contains a great collection of video lectures, with many notable computer science lectures. If you want to brush up or learn something new, check it out.

Right now I'm personally enjoying the series on pattern recognition, specifically Gregory Chaitin's talks, but there are many areas to choose from.

The site also contains other areas of interest, go explore!
People ought to stop saying "game ending" all the time. It's turned into a cliche.
Walt Mossberg Reviews Dell Ubuntu: "...still too rough around the edges..."
Checkers Is Solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw
Carmel Valley venture lender fills 'gap between banks and private equity'
In the six years since Miller and Wilson co-founded Huntington, the firm has provided $29.2 million in funding to 25 companies based mostly in Southern California.
Apparently I missed the news in June that Google has acquired Zenter. I was curious what will happen to Zenter when Google announced that they will release a web based presentation software back in April. I'm glad things worked out for Zenter. I know the amount wasn't disclosed but are there any rumors about what the amount might have been?
I'm not sure that we will ever find the one silver bullet. IMO, you need to choose the right tool for the job and sometimes that means leaving your favorite programming language behind for a project or two.

Speaking as an Erlang advocate it is great for communications and concurrency, but the string processing leaves a lot to be desired. It is good enough, but if you are doing text manipulation as your primary task Erlang may not be right for you ...

But if you are working on communications technologies, you really need to look into it ...
In the long term, we're all dead.
The adjective's fine. It's supposed to be used in the same sense you'd use "serial killer" or "serial drinker," as in, someone who continually engages in some vice. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, since there's really nothing wrong with starting companies, which makes it even more enjoyable to use.

I do oppose its misuse, however. PG's clearly not one, having only done one startup. These guys actually are, though.
You're correct that the junkiness does not stem from age. It stems from this piece being mostly name-calling, not information, and from the fact that the renowned scientist in question misrepresented the research he cited, according to the researchers.

http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/Claude_Allegre.html
There are pretty good competitors in that field, My startup is one of those :P.

I will post a link in a couple of days to have some feedback from Y-Combinator readers.
Google streetview may be illegal... in Canada.

It's perfectly legal in the US.
Like anything, we have to be responsible about manufacturing processes and renewable raw materials. Biodiesel does not have to come from rainforest plants. Its unfortunate that some people decided to tarnish the reputation of an excellent alternative fuel by going the cheap and irresponsible route to raw materials.

Just like you wouldn't buy paper or wood products that came from rainforests, don't buy biodiesel that comes from rainforests. Much of the biodiesel that's available in the U.S. is made from domestically grown soybeans, or even better, used restaurant oil from deep-fryers.
introduces -> mentions
It's the Bay Area. Hard to say more precisely than that. But only a small percentage of the businesses in the Bay Area are tech cos. Most are the same businesses you have everywhere else: roofing tile manufacturers, trucking companies, industrial cooking equipment distributors...
In fact: I can't think of any 'sins' that aren't exactly what a cynical person would do to maximize long-term gain.
How to make money off Facebook Apps?
Just wondering, what different revenue channels are possible with a Facebook application? Say: advertising (not sure if its allowed to embed it in), direct sales (the existing $1 gifts app for example), referrals/affiliates etc.?
The mystery of China's celtic mummies
>I evaluated it strictly from the point of view of an average user, someone who wouldn't want to enter text commands...

It's a little sad that "average" means "prefers to express thoughts as a series of connected images and actions, rather than as text."
So I guess justin.tv is illegal north of the border too.
Advertising is allowed.
YouTube, Viacom bow to light-sabre-wielding defender of online justice
Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis
I'm Canadian, but I'm of the same opinion as you guys(Americans) unless I'm holding up my ATM Card while entering my pin number or something what's wrong with seeing yourself on Google Streetview.. who knows perhaps a new spinoff marketing company might be created..lol picture it, someone chasing the MS live recorder with a Y Combinator T-shirt on. priceless.
By all accounts and info available out there, advertising on Facebook produces horrible revenue. Your best bet of making money with FB apps is by selling it to someone else :(.
You could say that to every single open source project that is submitted to Google Summer of Code.
To a certain extent I agree. Researchers shouldn't be big self promoters in this fashion -- reasons I don't like the attitudes of Wolfram or Kamen, despite their excellent work.

The ideas should be the message.

But there is substance in Flynn's work.
Unless they inherited their money and are on the path to lose it all..
Interview with Peter Norvig, Google's Head of Research: "We Don't Do Hardware"
I think one of the most amazing things about Ubuntu/Debian is the apt-get based packaging system. Neither Mac nor Windows have anything nearly as good as that. That's its biggest advantage in my view, and if that doesn't matter to you then Linux probably isn't for you.
Mint.com: The most useful site I've seen in a while
I've recently had the opportunity to try out the mint.com private beta and I have to say that it is really awesome. Hopefully it changes the way I spend my money(allowing me to save more).
Cantor and Nash went through their mental health problems at a time when diagnosis of mental issues was much worse than it is now. Lots of people suffered the same thing, genius or not. I don't think it has much to do with the fact that they were brilliant mathematicians.
Here's the essay, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False: [http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docum...]
as for the justin.tv thing.. you can watch justin.tv, but if they ever decided to come up to Canada and film an episode, etc. pretty much the only thing you'd see was alot of blurred out faces and license plates. it's like watching American "cops" then watching Canadian "To serve and protect" it doesn't compare.
I am learning Common Lisp recreationally to familiarize myself with functional programming using Mr. Graham's books (they are fantastic by the way). But Lisp does not seem to be in favor in industry. I do however hear a lot about OCaml and Erlang. Which of the three do you recommend I focus on?

I am leaning towards Erlang now. It seems to be a network programmer's wet dream.
Joe Armstrong's thesis "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors" (http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf) is a really excellent introduction to Erlang and the ideas behind it. I'd recommend that, along with "Programming Erlang", to anyone interested in learning Erlang or in simply becoming a better programmer.
They've been around for a while now. Great service though.
phrases like game ending for startups indicate anger and envy
Hackers welcome at software companies (Forbes report)
An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
What we need is a massive meta-study. Here's how it would work: take 1000 randomly-selected studies, each of which had a 95% confidence interval. Repeat all of them. You should then get some idea of which 50 of the 1000 studies saw noise and treated it as data. Then compare the media attention accorded to the 50 versus the 950 -- that should tell you what you probably already know: that since we're drawn to interesting results, and implausible truths are interesting, we all pay disproportionate attention to studies that happen to be wrong.
In my field, I've watched as the statistics have been invented to deal with the data. Papers from the early neuroimaging days may not have the best, or even correct, stats, but we know if those studies were on to something if the findings were replicated. I think that iteration in science is as good an approximation of 'truth' as we can get from the world around us. Without replication any individual finding is suspect, no matter how much play it gets in the popular press.
They are biting the hand that feeds with this move. It just shows how much the telcos fear Google and Apple that they would go to these lengths to try and keep them out.
The Puritan Paradox: Why Sin Pays on Wall Street
Worth pointing out is that, while the studies are almost certainly wrong, they develop into less wrong that builds on the old more wrong.

Take the Bohr atom, horribly wrong, but immensely valuable in it's time (and still pedagogically). Then you add sub-orbitals, orbital hybridization theory, and the quantum mechanical model, all almost certainly wrong.

Even in the social sciences you have results like "if we make charitable gifts tax deductible, revenue will go down, but gifts will go up more than the lost revenue" later studies came along using people as their own control by studying their behavior through time instead of just over one year, and the opposite is true, tax revenue goes down more than giving goes up. So the original study was "wrong" but to get the right answer you have to start with the simple and build up.

There are certainly areas that are so entangled with inter-relations and data difficulties that make empirical studies worthless until someone comes up with decent models to untangle it all, but I think those are the exception rather than the rule.
You know I really do like apt, but it isn't perfect, and 'rough around the edges' isn't a bad description for it (I know he meant Ubuntu as a whole).

I've had multiple times that by using apt-get autoremove, my entire Ubuntu installation has been fubared. It is almost nicer how Windows and Mac apps ship with all the required libraries and functionality they need, and you don't have to worry about it (both as a developer and a user). Add to that the confusion where programming languages have their own package managers (should I use Python's easy_install or the .debs?) and there's even more of a mess.

I've never had any difficulties on my Mac or on Windows due to a lack of a package manager, but I have had problems using apt.

I don't understand, what advantages does using a package manager have over simply shipping an app with the libraries/programs it needs? Yeah, you save hard drive space, but with hundreds of gigabytes of data, is that even important?
Cringely: Google planning to build a 700-MHz and WiFi mesh network? Watchout ISPs and telcos!
The math material was interesting, it's a pity they thought they had to spice it up with the insanity angle.
Humans are not rational beings, their judgments are driven by certain inbuilt heuristics and biases.

Excellent intro to the topic:
http://singinst.org/Biases.pdf

Excellent blog:
http://www.overcomingbias.com
As the letter states: Yahoo paying FB $100 per user, and not every FB user buying anything worth $100. So the Yahoo offer is much more lucrative.

Is it a justifiable to work on this idealogy for an acquisition? Say, for xyz.com, if each user brings in $10 on average (through advertising or sales), should the acquisition value (per user value) be more than that amount?

I'm not quite aware of this, so thought I'd ask.
Just get a basic knowledge of each of them.

CL is pretty special and has features you just won't find in most other languages (macros, interactive error-handling, generic functions), and raw speed (SBCL).

OCaml...I hear discussion about it, but personally having evaluated it, I don't know what kind of a future it has (I really doubt it will ever be a 'big' thing). It has some real cruft around the edges, and I can see Haskell or Scala picking up real momentum before OCaml ever does.

Erlang: learn it. It is a simple language and as a programmer you'll probably find it very interesting. Also if you haven't done much functional programming, Erlang will push you into it. Erlang obviously has an advantage when it comes to parallel processing, but we'll have to see whether the string support ever gets better, whether it gets more mainstream libraries, and whether the complete lack of objects is an issue for adoption.

Right now I think Erlang is being hyped a little prematurely, but that might change if other languages can't adapt adequately to multi-core programming.
In Your First Meeting With A VC Don't Ramble
In previous posts I have talked about the various ways in which you can stay focused on the objective of your first meeting. However, one way in which entrepreneurs frequently get off track is by trying to squeeze as much information as they can into the conversation with the hope that some of the details will hook the VC.
This is another semi-misleading title. The article points out that Ubuntu on Dell, as with all versions of Linux, is still not ready for the mass market. However, as the readers of this site are not "average" computer users the "too rough" comment does not really apply to us. Yes, I have to hack a bit to get my multiple monitor setup to work. Yes, I expect to.

Although I have a recently purchased Dell Ubuntu and am quite pleased with it I would never recommend it to say... my mom.
Is The Bubble Back?
Apple Excludes ITunes Music From $100 IPhone Credit
I had a problem due to Windows not having a package manager. I had emacs and RCS installed, and it worked fine. Then I installed a CVS package that included the programs it needed, including RCS programs. Its version didn't work with emacs. If there were a package manager I would have been warned about the conflict.

I've been using Debian for years, and Ubuntu recently, but I had to look up autoremove; I've never used that apt-get feature. I have used autoclean, which is benign. It does sound like there are problems with autoremove that should be fixed, but for now why not just avoid that feature?
>Say, for xyz.com, if each user brings in $10 on average (through advertising or sales), should the acquisition value (per user value) be more than that amount?

The gospel is that the value of a company is the total value of expected future cashflows. This generally applies to publicly traded companies.

AFAIK acquirers typically pay more than the market value since the acquirer usually perceives more value for it. Eg. Yahoo and MSFT may be able to make more money with facebook than facebook can by itself. Their bidding can drive the price up.

There are also strategic reasons. Eg: Yahoo might die if MSFT acquires facebook instead. This can also drive the price up.
Aaron's a great guy, you guys should also check out the NYT article about him: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01facebook.html...

It's refreshing to see someone NOT jump at the chance to sue FB, and arguably his case would be most likely to succeed.
If the price of gas goes high enough (i.e. global peak oil with sharp declines like the North Sea), people will pay up front to lower gas consumption one way or the other. Even in Mississippi. That doesn't necessarily mean buying hybrids, but hybrids, especially plug in ones, seems like nice transition technology while another 'supply grid' of some sort develops.
eHarmony? IPO? Oh god...
Say it ain't so.
Google isn't going to get the spectrum! Kevin Martin (FCC Chairman) crafted the auction rules in such a way that it isn't attractive for Google or any other third party to bid, plus the incumbents have so much power in D.C. already.

Sure, they would like to build-out in the 700MHz band, but it is very unlikely to happen.
"We gotta screw it up and waste money," -Paul Kedrosky

People actually give this guy money to invest? Maybe the reporter is taking the quote way out of context?
OS X has both Macports and Fink - not quite as great as apt-get but pretty close
I wonder how Ubuntu will be reviewed by an user who is using a computer for the first time and has no OS exposure of any kind before?? hmmm...
Why you (entrepreneurs) should trust your gut. Always.
What is Technical Harassment? 
In our complex technical environment there are many opportunities for a competent technical individual to be the subject of technical harassment. Sometimes it can be so subtle that you may not even be aware you are being harassed. Worse yet, you may inadvertently technically harass another person by accident.

Following are some guidelines to help you determine if you are being technically harassed.

If you are repeatedly asked the same technical question you may be the victim of technical harassment. While it is most common to be asked the question repeatedly within the same conversation, some instances have been identified of habitual technical harassment. Habitual technical harassment is not uncommon and has been known to exhibit group tendencies where members of a group may ask the same question repeatedly. Untreated, these instances of group technical harassment can continue for years.

If you are asked a technical question by a non-technical person and they do not write your answer down it is likely the question is frivolous. Most non-technical people are not capable of remembering a true technical answer for more than 30 seconds.

If you are forced into a discussion where a person uses more than three (3) buzzwords in one sentence the person is most likely a fake and you are the unwitting victim of technical harassment. One note of caution, competent technical people have been known to inadvertently use buzzwords after reading mindless drivel like PC Week or LAN Times. If the person has been known to use more common technical terms in the past such as "stuff" and "things", they are most likely victim of computer magazine brainwashing.

If during a troubleshooting session a person uses the term "trick". For example "maybe we could trick the database into thinking it has been updated". This is a sure sign of technical harassment.

If a person explains that a needed feature will be provided by a vendor and that person is nontechnical then you are at risk of being technically harassed. If you believe that person, you have definitely been technically harassed, if you don't believe them you have only been technically annoyed.

If when trying to resolve a technical problem with a product from a vendor and you are instructed to call the salesman that sold us the product you are being set up for technical harassment. It is a common reaction for a non-technical person when they have purchased technical equipment to call another non-technical person. The dialogue between two nontechnical people usually provides some sense of comfort that they aren't the only ones who are confused.
Sometimes I feel sorry for VCs. It's not easy to come up with ways to invest your fund that sound at least halfway coherent. These guys have clearly run out of ideas.

The mistake people make is conflating the ideas of a social network and a social networking site. The former is simply an awareness of who and what you like, and it's hugely useful to almost any sort of application. The latter is a site that makes use of that information, with Facebook being the most prominent example.

The option for a company building a social app is simple. Build it on your own site, with its own interface, and tie into social information from all of a user's sites; or build it on Facebook, with Facebook's interface, and only use the user information that lives on Facebook.

Why on earth would someone choose the latter? Facebook is great, but the hype is a little bit silly. For instance, Digg and Delicious both made Facebook apps. They average less than 175 users a day.
Yeah, I've never heard anyone promise this before. Ever. This is truly brand new.
I think I agree with your main point, but it's important to distinguish between various kinds of "wrongness".

The Bohr atom is "wrong" in the way that a cartoon is wrong.

Newtonian mechanics (and non-relativistic quantum mechanics, for that matter) are "wrong" because they are approximations: at certain length scales or time scales they work perfectly, but at other scales they break down and need to be replaced by something more precise.

The kind of "wrong" that this article is discussing is much different: biased experimental design and lousy statistics. Unlike the other two kinds of "wrong", this is actually a problem. I've seen thousands of hours wasted - some of them by me - due to lack of knowledge of the principles of statistical significance, or because someone found a way to fool himself into cherry-picking the most interesting data points.

Public service announcement: If you're still in school as you read this, take a stats course!
A lot of business books, like some of the ones on this list, suffer from overly anecdotal arguments. All the books that have actually affected the way I do things tend much more towards theory and frameworks of thought.

Our little startup has three holy texts: "Nonzero" by Robert Wright, "The Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz, and "Fooled By Randomness" by Nassim Taleb (which is even more sanctimonious than "The Seven Habits...", but a lot better, too).