skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Swisher is entitled to her skepticism but it's a little absurd for her to be offering Zuckerberg valuation advice, implying parties to the negotiation are 'delusional' and 'insane'.

A company is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Those with ultimate say over whether FB is worth $X billion are those who buy and sell $X billion companies, in whole or significant part. That includes people advising and courting FB, who know a lot about its internals, prospects, and strategic value.

As Swisher notes, a few months ago, when speculation centered on a $6 billion valuation, she suggested in that range, Zuckerberg would be a 'fool' to not take the money and run. Well, if the latest WSJ report is to be trusted, now valuations over $10 billion are on the table. So what was the foolish advice?
Virtualmin, Inc. sponsoring logo design contest for Webmin (your work seen by millions of users)
Also of note, I've wrangled Kevin Hale, of Wufoo/Particle Tree fame into being our celebrity judge. If that doesn't make this contest awesome, I don't know what awesome is.
Without a change in the law that allows them to do so, doctors and lawyers will be creating and editing all of their important documents on private machines and LANs for a good deal longer than 5-8 years.
TJIC's advice on startups is worth exactly what you're paying for it
Javascript Arrays or Lists?
Found this particular post after reading a Joes: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=joe preceding submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60128

The response from this coy founder

- http://heavyink.com/blog/

- http://smartflix.com/store/about_us and

- http://tjic.com/

was worth reading in its own right.
What happens if all the logos you get suck? Do you still have to pay a winner $500, even if you don't use that person's logo? How are you going to handle revisions?

The best designers are far too busy getting paid to make a logo that probably won't get them any money and they also don't need the publicity. I have a friend who had worked with a positively brilliant designer from Uruguay. The designer's quote for a logo for me was $500 for delivery within a month and $600 for less than a week.

If this gets you extra publicity, great. But I think you'd have a better chance of getting a great logo if you just found a logo designer with great style and paid that person $500. Does Kevin Hale do freelance logos?
Floating-point to decimal conversion is a little bit trickier than usually thought (cf. Steele&White, "How to Print Floating-Point Numbers Accurately", SIGPLAN '90, pp.112-126, 1990. and also Burger&Dybvig, "Printing Floating-Point Numbers Quickly and Accurately", PLDI '96, pp.108--116, 1996.), and tweaking the algorithm can easily introduce special cases in the code path.

Now I don't have any idea why Excel had such special cases around 65535, but this incident seems to confirm my growing suspicion that it is wrong not to test 100% of code paths. Some of you may say off course it is, but I've seen programmers that just test a few sample points and then bombarding the code with random input and say it's working. I myself have been bitten by some bugs hidden in rare code paths since I was lazy to construct a special input that tests the path, which sometimes takes some effort. (I haven't used automated test case generation tools; any opinions?)
And now to Python - it's use of forced indentation is great.

Uh huh. There's the problem with fashions in programming languages. Even the purest BS misfeatures are celebrated. Hey, if you really like bondage and discipline, I've got some languages you might like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL
It's not merely $500! The winner also gets a T-shirt. Pay attention, man! ;-)

We've tried the direct route. All of the logos we've gotten from designers sucked so far. Besides, we're having some fun with it. If you don't think design contests are fun, that's fine.

No, Kevin doesn't do freelance work.
This article really hits the nail on the head with why I think there's a Web 2.0 bubble. People are not starting firms because of they think they can bring something both unique and compelling to a particular area, but because they want to have a start-up. Oh, and get filthy rich too. The investors are as much to blame by throwing cash at them. Facebook. 10 billion. My ass.

I love having my own company, but I also know what a roller coaster ride it is and that if you're not in it for the right reason, you're just going to come away with trauma and bruises.
Well-defined, strong, extensive type systems (such as Ada's, OCaml's or Haskell's) are test cases
Programming.Reddit.com
Logoworks (now owned by HP) will give you a logo with unlimited revisions for $400 US.

I used them for the VentureCake logo. and they had what I wanted after 3. Don't expect a lot of the initial concepts.
A new logo and look and feel would be nice, but there are a lot of other ways to improve your product. Virtualmin doesn't really differ from Plesk in a significant way.

Have you checked out the features Splunk or Google Analytics offers in terms of log analysys?

Say I have a lot of users and servers where authentication fails.
I'd love to be able to pick a period (by dragging along a timeline of logs), zoom into to a period, and get any messages regarding LDAP from that time. Then I'd like to take that group of server and regenerate a certificate for each of them to fix the problem.
I tried LogoWorks for Virtualmin, Inc. over two years ago, and the suggestions I got back were horrible--really, truly, awful. One was the Verizon V-Cast logo (literally...not even a little different...same colors and all). I even paid them extra for additional concepts and such. It may have been a fluke, and really, SitePoint contests are the same basic concept; as far as I know, LogoWorks is a bunch of freelancers that work on spec, too.

The difference is that we get to have fun with the contest. we have a mailing list and a forum both full of users who'll get a kick out of discussing the logos. They'll also feel some ownership in the new logo, if they get to take part in picking it. I don't see how we can possibly lose on the deal (holding it at SitePoint assures that the worst case of nobody showing up doesn't happen).

There's also the tradition of Open Source projects choosing their logos via contests to uphold. Now that Webmin is a wizened old-timer in the Open Source world, it's got a responsibility to uphold the finest traditions of its community. Or something.
I would take the new job and use the money to hire a coder, along with any coding you can do on your own. You have to be willing to risk everything, if you really want to make it work. No risk no reward. If it was easy everybody would be doing it.
"A new logo and look and feel would be nice, but there are a lot of other ways to improve your product. Virtualmin doesn't really differ from Plesk in a significant way."

We're not talking about Virtualmin here. We're talking about Webmin, the Open Source general purpose web-based system administration tool that Virtualmin sits on top of. Webmin is more popular than Plesk or cPanel by a large margin, but it doesn't really compete with either (it's a different kind of product--Virtualmin competes with Plesk and cPanel, and nothing really competes with Webmin because nothing has the range of functionality of Webmin). Webmin is downloaded over two million times per year. We're not desperate for users here...

"Have you checked out the features Splunk or Google Analytics offers in terms of log analysys?"

Of course. Virtualmin will setup Google Analytics tagging automagically (along with several other popular analytics services like Clicky and MyBlogLog, and it'll also configure the Open Source AWstats and Webalizer analytics tools). But neither Webmin or Virtualmin is an analytics product (and cPanel and Plesk do not offer analytics functionality).

That said, we've built in system data analytics in the most recent version. See screenshot: http://www.virtualmin.com/images/screenshots/statistics.png

And we have other analytics tools in development. But again, this isn't about Virtualmin at all. We're just giving our favorite Open Source project a new logo. It's not at all motivated by trying to make more Virtualmin sales--we were Webmin developers before Virtualmin existed, and Webmin is important to us. It needs a new logo, so we're holding a contest to get one. Nothing sneaky here.

"Say I have a lot of users and servers where authentication fails. I'd love to be able to pick a period (by dragging along a timeline of logs), zoom into to a period, and get any messages regarding LDAP from that time. Then I'd like to take that group of server and regenerate a certificate for each of them to fix the problem."

I have no idea what you're talking about. But I wish you luck in your endeavors. ;-)
Ah, ok, I wasn't clear on the distinction between Webmin and Virtualmin... a logo contest makes more sense for an open source project.

For anyone else looking for a logo, I'd recommend you post a logo request on http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/. The last time I posted I got a broad range of bids, from $30 to $500 to price unlisted. Then you look through everyone's portfolio and pick the person with the style you like the most.
"there are two dozen spiky places in the world that account for 98 percent of innovation."
It is actually a scientific documented phenomenon that many people believe outrageous claims as long as they seem to be justified by random neurobabble . PDF: "The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations" http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Edls73/Assets/Weisberg-neuro%20ex...

Quote:
"Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the
underlying logic of this explanation."

A summary from Language Log here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004578.h...
http://www.secnetix.de/~olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk
Yeah, I've never used SitePoint contests before, and may never use them again (we'll see). It does rule out some of the best known designers, because the best known don't need to work on spec, but the hope (as with any of the methods being discussed in this thread) is that you'll get the "soon to be best known" designer working on your project.

If the logo we get sucks, it'll hopefully suck less than the current one, and we'll try again in a year. The entries so far aren't great, but they aren't all terrible either. We're only a few hours into the contest, and there's already at least one that I think is better than the current logo. So, we're already ahead. The other neat thing is that the SitePoint contests allow everyone to see what's already been submitted--it's a constant refinement process where everybody knows what everybody else is doing. I dunno if that'll really encourage everyone to bring their A game, but it certainly is more fun than staring at the 12-15 logo ideas I got from LogoWorks was.

I'm still groping to find the best way to get jobs like this done--so far, nothing has been satisfactory. But then, until recently, we had very little money to spend (I was going to put up $1000, but it seemed pointless--$500 makes ours the highest paying logo contest running right now...I might bump it to $750 before it's over, if it needs a little extra oomph). I still managed to waste plenty of money and time on logos, though. ;-)

Best case, the logo will rock, and we'll have found ourselves a little known designer who works reasonably cheap, but whose work we love. I'm not holding my breath, but it could happen.
"And for every doubling in city size, there's a 14 to 27 percent increase in productivity per worker--meaning that individual workers are far more productive if they live in cities than they would be out in the sticks."

This is a really broad statement. I would be incredibly impressed if it applied in >95% of cases. How do you measure national productivity anyways? PPP adjusted GDP?
Microsoft's New Bet on Search
I'm looking through SitePoint now and I'm actually rather impressed by the functionality and surprised at how well the contests seem to work, even for much lower dollar amounts. I have no doubt that you'll get some good entries and I imagine watching the logos come in is a lot of fun too.
Agreed. I had been there in the past, and it seemed pretty slapped together...but they've used their success wisely by investing in better technology. The contests system is, so far, top-notch.
If you are the idea guy and you are not bringing in new ideas then what are you contributing to the startup?
I think it is a bad idea to have a designated idea guy.
I always felt much more mentally engaged in Italy than I did in the bay area. First of all, I actually know more, and better hackers there, second, I interacted with many kinds of people, most of who were fairly bright and resourceful, even if not in the same field. Furthermore, as an environment, it's far more stimulating than the endless burbs that comprise most of the bay area (san francisco excluded). Also, it's much more invigorating to ride one's bicycle or walk, rather than drive everywhere to the same sorts of plasticky, fake, establishments that most other people frequent (or the conspicuously "alternative, look, we're different!" sorts of places where the remainder go). SF is a bit better, but it's so expensive, that it tends to only contain people at the edges - either really rich or really poor. It's not a livable place if you're not wealthy and want to have kids, for instance.

Woah.... I guess that turned into more of a rant than I meant to write. I appreciate the article's sentiment, but a think there are some nuances to it...
In my late twenties I was brought in as the superstar on a startup. The "idea guy" was a former professor of software engineering and a former VP for a large electronics firm. Hey -- he was a teacher! And a VP for quality! What could go wrong?

I staffed a very small team and we took off. Every day my idea guy would wonder around the office, (his basement) coming up with some kind of new thing or two that was cool. It was distracting as heck.

I finally took him aside and told him that we could do a certain amount of work each time-box (which I believe was 3 weeks) but we couldn't work in an environment where we didn't know from day-to-day what we were doing. Interestingly, the other main programmer said that I was being too anal. So the idea guy and I had words and I left.

The company never did pan out. Being agile is what it is all about, but you have to actually _do_ something for that truism to work. This is like the guys who sit in the stands at major sporting events. It's easy to have some master plan that changes whenever the mood strikes when you don't have any skin in the game to make something happen. This is why it's better to have geeks who are also idea guys -- they realize the cost associated with the ideas. Just because you can say it easily doesn't mean you can create it easily.

Dude -- I'm sure these guys are your friends and you've been through a lot. But there's lots of serious, focused work involved with making a startup happen. It sounds like what you've got is more of a painful group hobby. I think it might be time to consider a better format for being productive.
Ever wanted to withdraw an email you just sent?
Has it ever happened to you that you sent an email, and right after, you wanted it back?

It occurred to me more than once. Either that I found some spelling errors, or just feeling like rephrasing a paragraph, or whatever.

The question is why not let the sender pull back a message in case the recipient had never read it.

Even if it would be hard to modify the SMTP and POP protocols it can be still done with in the same server/domain, e.g. gmail.com.

I think this feature is a good one. What do you think?
I don't believe that row_number() is standard, and I thought it couldn't be relied on for being monotonically increasing with inserts. It will also fail if you need to use a date column that may not be ordered by time.

And, for me at least, cursors are definitely in the range of "advanced-ish" SQL.

My point isn't that it can't be done -- empirically, many blogs do it -- but that it points to part of the impedance mismatch.
I think there must be some mental process associated with the 'sent' or 'submit' button. It's as though the brain gets new information once those buttons are pressed that was previously unavailable prior to those buttons being pressed. Maybe it's called hindsight, or some type of reflective process.

Does the unconscious mind adopt 'regret' only at specific times, that is, after making a choice?

As an idea to improve emailing, maybe an email client that renames the send button draft 1 then draft 2 then draft 3 before ever showing 'send'. Also, there would be a time delay buffer to stop one's overriding of that 'delayed sending' feature through pressing the button 3 times rapidly in succession. The idea could even be implemented as a Thunderbird addon if one was serious about it, or a greasemonkey script.

Also, I like Digg's submission process of giving 90 seconds to change a posting before it is made permanent, that is, after pressing the 'post' button - it kind of adds a type of pressure which some people need to improve their output given the feature allows textual changes to be made in that time.

Ultimately, the need to proof read and reflect on any written communication multiple times without others' feedback can be a test of one's patience and tenacity. Regret only happens after commitment, so who can ever be certain about a choice...
Yeah, looks like BS to me. It probably just means they earn more, which is natural because you don't run big, low paying factories in the middle of expensive cities these days.
Most mail clients can be configured not to send messages immediately, but to hold them in the Outbox until you hit the main Send/Receive button.

Also, I believe Lotus Notes had the feature that enabled you to take a message back (it literally removed the unread message from the recipient's Inbox).
Those that don't know the history of philosophy are doomed to repeat it. For example Marx wrote in 1845 "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." This is almost exactly what PG is proposing.

Also, that statement that "all previous philosophy is bollocks" is a literary device used by numerous philosophers.
Notes and Outlook both do this badly.

You may be able to build a reasonable business by using HTML email with includes that can be recalled before they're read.

After they're read, game over.
Even if it would be hard to modify the SMTP and POP protocols it can be still done with in the same server/domain, e.g. gmail.com.

Unless you can make it universal, i.e. across all domains, it's unlikely to catch on.

Microsoft had (still has?) a similar feature in Outlook, but it was dependent on the recipient also using Outlook on the same network (or something like that) and few people used it.

FWIW, I'll never forget the advice I got about email from a mentor at an i-bank where I used to work: don't write anything in an email that you'd be embarrassed to see show up in the Wall Street Journal.
Yes! All it would take is a slight delay (1-5 minutes, even better if the user could set it) after sending the email before it's actually sent. Too many times I've forgotten to attach a file or something else stupid like that and realized it immediately after hitting send.
Welcome to the crack cocaine of geekdom.

Once you figure out you can bill whatever you can negotiate, it makes it really hard to do startup work. The most dangerous part about it is that you always know you can pick up a bag of cash if you need it. When you've always got an attractive and easy "out", it's always out there calling to you. Yet another reason to do your startup when you are as young as possible.
bigstring.com
let us know how your talk with co-founders goes.
How Y Combinator Helped Shape Reddit
Wired or not wired, we have no idea. That would involve very expensive longitudinal (or perhaps genetic) studies. And the claims you see are no doubt filtered by the popular press. Be careful with sweeping generalizations there. But don't ignore the fact that very good work has already been done, and we know much more than we did even five years ago - even for something as seemingly ephemeral as "morality" (though we'll never get to "why" - that's a space I'm happy to leave to armchair philosophers around the interent).

What we know is that solving different sorts of moral problems (of the JS Mills or Kant type) involves different brain systems. And these experiments were conducted by a Ph.D. in philosophy who bemoaned the state of the modern field, and went on to do excellent neuroimaging work.

Read for yourself: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/
Quite simply, try resending the message, have [resend] in the subject line.
Is it a journey of self-discovery? Or were those people simply the right people to make the observations they did?

I would be careful with cause and effect. It may be that brain structures allow one person, say, a greater ability to see in the dark and notice the tiger that is about to pounce while another cannot. But the tiger is not a result of that person. The observation of the tiger is a result of brain structure or whatever. The tiger exists with or without the person noticing it.

This is beginning to set off my BS alarm, but suffice it to say that philosophers seem to have made discoveries quite apart from the structure of their brains or personalities. They've also indulged in a lot of pontificating and wondering about based on their unique brain structures, no doubt. But I would be careful in using neuroscience to explain philosophy. I've read some studies that show that some brains are more conservative than others, and some are more liberal. This might be really cool in 100 years once all the noise comes out of the experiments, but for now, it poses more of a danger than a benefit to the layreader, imo. We're just at the stage of correlation. Nobody that I know of is talking about causation for some of these higher-order effects.
7 Reasons Why Second Life Should Matter For Biz Executives
Well, you could just discipline yourself to save outgoing emails in your `drafts` folder for a bit and read them again before you actually send them. That's what I do for most emails and it works pretty well for me.

I really wouldn't want my email service to delay my emails when I actually click `send` - I sometimes rely on them being sent immediately.
Turn Gmail (or any E-mail Account) Into a Social Network Hub
Web Apps Hit the Mainstream
Fuser: Manage All Your E-Mail in one Convenient Spot
I'm not sure why you're not sure that I got the point of your article. I agree with pretty much all you have to say here.

What I think is "stupid" is not your article, but the fact that some programmers don't like relational databases (for whatever reason). I'll try to pick my words and make my point more carefully in the future.

I understand much of the theory behind these technologies, but, as a practitioner, I'm not in a position to base my actions solely upon theory. I HAVE to deliver. I wish I had a nickel for every benchmark I've conducted over the years. You may have noticed that I tend to avoid theoretical debate here; I'm more interested in what works.

And relational databases work very well, very often. Whether you like them or not.