skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If you want to do consumer-based software, work somewhere where you can hear a lot about what consumers want in software -- perhaps a Best Buy?

One could get to know consumers very well by doing in home spyware removal and general "computer lessons." You can charge as much as any other consultant if you present yourself professionally to the right people.
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That article seemed rather low on content, but the fundamental question remains: how could the carriers be replaced. Would individually operated antennas be feasible? I think it is more an economics problem than a technical problem. Some kind of Micropayment scheme would have to make it sustainable for individual antenna operators to allow users to log in.

Things like that exist for WLAN hotspots, but how well are they doing?

Another problem would still be the frequency negotiation, we wouldn't want more antennas in any one region than necessary.
I love the fact that you referred to "low-level firmware" in our brains. :)
Maybe, but somehow Sim City seems very suitable for the OLPC, don't you think? Especially the way it seems to be projected, it would be cool to use Sim City for scientific experiments.
Sorry -- I had read this earlier in a less detailed article and replied without reading this one. It sounds like Sim City is being rewritten to be scriptable in python which puts it well within the aims of the OLPC project.
I'm already a nurse, so I'm planning on working as a nurse after I finish my CS degree this summer. I have an associates degree (2 years) in nursing, and pay in the Bay area for nurses starts at about $35 an hour + 10-20% shift differential for working nights and weekends. A nurse fresh out of school starts at about $80,000 a year in this part of the country. And, there's a nursing shortage on, so if you have a pulse and a license, you can pretty much get a job.

I work 3 x 12 hours shifts each week in the Bay area and I started with 4 weeks paid vacation a year and 1 week of educational leave. If I'm broke picking up a extra shift or two isn't hard, and if I'm plush, I can cut down to part-time fairly easily. I already work the night shift and sleep during the day, so keeping hacker hours and coding all night coding is no problem at all.

Mind you, cleaning up other peoples effluvia is not my idea of a good time, and it's hard work. I've injured my back twice in twelve months. But, I don't think about code all day, so when I come home, I really want to program to get my mind off of work.

I've really disliked my job for years (thus the career change), but in 6 months, I'm going to have 4 days a week free and clear to start my start-up while getting paid for full time work. So, that makes up for some of the down-sides.
Is xobni's business model to eventually sell their outlook plugin?
I wish they'd work on their crappy gfx chipsets instead.
Reinteract - Better interactive Python
NYT graph of historical price of gas since 1920
Best book for a gifted existential crisis? "Man's search for meaning." I wish I had read it as a teenager.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
Sorry to reply so slowly, I read your comment already quite a bit earlier...

So you have these two points, right?

1. Each character is important

2. Lining up things

As a disclaimer, I must say that naturally this is really up to personal taste more than anything.

About 1), I'd say that you are correct, but that depends on the type of thing one is working on. I guess working on some obscure Perl code (that's where I have seen most examples with lots of code that looks like !%&[$tes]) you need to focus much more on single characters than working on for example C++ code with long named variables/function names and mostly calls to them. I am working on the latter, and have found that code like this is easier to read with variable width:

---

TFileName refName;

TXxxYyyInfo* info = iXxx->info->GetPathAndName(refName);

refName.ZeroTerminate();

---

Ok, not too good examples, but maybe you get my point?

2) is something I totally do not care about. I am way too lazy to start lining up anything by hand -- I want my editor to line up my code automatically. And it does a nice job, and I use external tools if I have to work in an environment where I can't select my editor. I don't thins my time should be spent adding spaces.

So to summarize: 1) doesn't seem to matter for me, and if code tends to have many special characters after each other it is probably better to rewrite it for readability anyway. And I don't want to do any lining up by hand anyway.

And descriptive (i.e. quite long) variable names are easier to read with variable width font.

YMMV.
Why Personal Websites Matter
Social Media By the Numbers: reddit
I've been working on being able to switch the direction at will.
Silicon Valley is just a state of mind
I noted recently that gmail puts a big red banner on top of the page warning about firebug. I just disabled it for gmail.
Massage your jaw under your chin with your thumb before you go to bed and/or when you catch yourself clenching.

Also use your fingers to massage the outside of the chin at those times.

Find out the source of your worries and destroy your fear by making those tough choices that you may be avoiding. What are you worrying about if you love the startup? Would you rather be somewhere else? Do you sense something bad?
I read it. I'm not sure it's very specific about gifted existential crisis, or about existential crisis at all...
Did you notice SimCity is going to go open source too? I'm not sure it was mentioned in this piece of news...
IBM to Acquire Cognos for 5 billion
to Accelerate Information on Demand Business Initiative
Interesting that in the beginning most article submissions were by the founders themselves. I don't use reddit, but I wonder if the frequent bemoaning of "when Reddit still was cool" I read here really refers to that time in the beginning when submissions were primarily made by the founders?
You don't think Frankl tackles head-on the meaning of existence? I mean, he's the father of logotherapy, which, as Wiki describes it, is "a type of Existential Analysis that focuses on a 'will to meaning' as opposed to Adler's Nietzschian doctrine of 'will to power' or Freud's of 'will to pleasure;'."

Can't get much more specific about dealing with existential crises than that, right?
Hmmm... yes, you're right, my mistake.
Coming Soon, Free Hosting for Facebook Apps
Confessions of a Failed CEO
Agreed. I'm currently working 50%. I work every other week on a consulting job that pays the bills for an entire month for me and my family. The other 50% it's my time (and some extra time with the little ones).

John.
www.canadiens.it: quando vedi l'inukshuk sulla tua strada, sai di essere arrivato
California sues US over car fumes
Sounds interesting. Is image analysis/search a part of the plan? (Just curious, I don't need a job.)
Sound and Fury: Slow Down and Focus on the Message, Not Messaging
Python browser applets!
Just a state of mind? States of mind are the most powerful forces in the world (way more important than e.g. natural resources) and one of the hardest things about a place to change.
Google Options Make Masseuse a Multimillionaire
Home Page Instruction Manual
In all my ignorance, I'm reposting to say that I disagree with the approach as said in the article. If one needs to create a personalized profile for a product, then one needs to friend, or fan, the product profile, it is a less efficient strategy. There are better ways to do this. But anyhow, it's facebook, so they'll probably get it.
What's the point in reading this... everything gets Dugg in the end...
Just focus on her extended foot.
http://www.amazon.com/MAN-WHO-LOVED-ONLY-NUMBERS/dp/07868840...
Can the moron who posted this translate it for those of us who do not understand Italian.

The profile of the guy who posted this was created an hour ago and matches the domain of the post. This looks like blatant but unintelligible self promotion.
Never tried yoga, but meditation is fantastic and not just for relaxation. I haven't meditated for awhile but I did very frequently for a few years and it taught me a lot about myself.
Glam: The success of the network
Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's image
IBM Buying Cognos
Yes, yes, during free-sparing absolutely. You get that flood of adrenaline and have to learn to control it. And perseverance, I agree completely - to keep going when you think you have nothing left to give.

I'd say it took me three to four years to really start to understand the power and force of relaxation. But even then, people practice these skills for a lifetime and I still have a ways to go.

For me, practice became a solace and timeout. Just stopping from thinking about work for those 6-8 hours a week was extremely helpful. By focusing on the techniques, it became a meditation.
I'm sure many people will disagree, but long-term I found running absolutely wreaked havoc on my knees. And studies I've read say that modern shoes are part of the problem.

I enjoy yoga but it always leaves me wanting more.

To each their own, I guess.
SocialAds Implications: Facebook will Acquire iLike and Flixster
"Both iLike and Flixster are looking to exit somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Given that Facebook has around half a billion dollars in cash, it would be feasible to acquire these companies but is it worth investing close to 50% of their available cash?"
http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/facebook-to-acquire-ilike...
Yes that hits pretty close to home I must say... Here comes the depressive cycle again, LOL!
Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers to bolster their green investment team
A contest perhaps? A Palindrome that makes the most sense that is at least 20 words long; the palindrome in the comments with the most votes wins.
Ask YC: Will YC compete with YC?
The title might be a bit misleading so please read on. How would YC treat a proposed idea that is in one of the following categories:

1- direct competition with one of its current companies and/or products

2- possible future competition of one of its current companies and/or products

3- if the new proposed idea is not really in competition with any of YC's companies, but it does have some major ideas, that another YC company could take advantage from, or add in as new feature to their system?

of course, if there is already competition then your idea might not be as interesting, regardless of whether the competition is a YC company or any other company. I guess the real question is whether they review any new application without considering what they previously own and give it a fair treatment or not?
ILike connects across OpenSocial, Facebook, iTunes -- new music empire?
Technorati CEO Jalichandra: You Blew It
The 10 Commandments of Fake Steve Jobs
Last Batch of Tickets for TechCrunch Meetup 11 in Boston
I think there's a simpler word for it: 'spam'.

Those who monitor this site are usually pretty good about axing this kind of thing, although it often takes them a bit.
Loophole in Windows Random Number Generator
Overlap is always a matter of degree. We deal with it by warning startups with substantial overlap about one another, and then leaving it to them to decide how secretive or open to be.

We try not to tell startups about the ideas of other startups working on related things, including applicants we turn down. (Usually this isn't an issue, because few applicants have genuinely novel ideas, but one applicant this last batch had cooked up a trick I'd really like to tell a startup from summer 2007 about.)

I was worried about funding competitors when we started YC, but it has turned out not to be a problem. In most good markets there's room for many companies, and it's unlikely that two we fund will take exactly the same route.

But even if we told everyone about everyone else's ideas, it wouldn't be as bad as you might think. Secrecy is not as important as beginning founders think, because (a) ideas are less valuable than they think, and (b) the most common form of death for startups is suicide, not being killed by competitors.
Yahoo, Carnegie Mellon Switch On Supercomputer
This is great news for those that want to give their app a try without too much costs, it will also solve the potential scalability issues for some apps that might have unexpected growth rates. Although, I doubt any new application would experience what iLike did at the beginning.

Its also interesting, since for developers the hosting issues was one of the major advantages of OpenSocial to FB which is now solved.

Although this is not that important of a news but theoretically it could potentially change FB as a platform. As Marc Andreessen introduced his views on platforms and categorized FB as a level two platform which is a plug-in API. One of the disadvantages of this platform was the cost on the developer in terms of bandwidth and hosting of their applications. This problem was solved in the ultimate platform which is the level three. So maybe in Mark's definition, FB is now getting somewhat closer to a 2.5 platform! http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-three-kinds.html
Android developer challenge ($10 million in awards)
7 Things No One Ever Tells You About Raising Venture Capital Financing
Interview with Joe Hewitt on the new devphone.com
Hey John, do you mind expanding on what sort of consulting this is? How did you manage to arrange your word schedule that way?
I especially like point 7. A more succesful team where you make a smaller percentage is better than a failing team where you make a larger percentage.
"We deal with it by warning startups with substantial overlap about one another, and then leaving it to them to decide how secretive or open to be."

In this case since the YC company is already launched, and the new applicant hasn't I would not think warning both parties about the overlaps is to the best interest of the applicant. But I guess this is for major overlaps, and the applicant would probably already know the competition and should try to offer something different and new.

"(...but one applicant this last batch had cooked up a trick I'd really like to tell a startup from summer 2007 about.)"
I guess this is precisely my question 3. And my question was whether the YC company was told or is going to be told about this trick? And more generally if you have any rules and guidelines you would follow in these scenarios.
OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "Micropolis"

from http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/08/200234&...
As a young (19 year old) co-op Computer Sciences student currently stuck in cubicle hell for 4 months I'd like to say that re-reading this essay just saved my day. I really wish I'd discovered Paul Graham a few years ago.
Google Android SDK now available
Yes, that's an anecdote. It was meant to be an illustrative point, not a scientific factually valid point. You should read the EvPsych literature to get the scientific argument. I don't know enough about it to cite the papers, etc. Another book that looks at factors involved in the evolution of the human brain is The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon, http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language...

"The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)"

Yes, memes exist, and they do quite a lot, but it's not like as soon as memes showed up, everything else went out the door! Even if we assume that memes had some ability to thwart further biological evolution, that wouldn't reverse all of the built-in stuff that existed at the point memes came on the scene. Everything that memes do is layered on top of the huge amount of pre-programming that we're born with; memes exist solely on the highest thin layer of a big multi-layered system. Don't forget that we're actually primates with primate brains, and mammals with mammal brains. Millions of years of mammalian brain evolution weren't discarded just because we invented a vehicle for meme transmission (language). That high-level idea transmission mechanism resides on top of a regular ol' primate brain, with all of its complex builtin emotions for survival, reproduction, social interaction, etc.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I can't put together a really convincing argument citing specific experimental facts and whatever. I'm starting to repeat myself ... shows how little I know about this stuff. You should read some of the stuff on EvPsych to draw your own conclusions about the validity of the field.

Check out this blog post on Overcoming Bias: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/evolutionary-ps.html
Your basic assumption that DNA is unimportant is wrong.

Basic counter examples are:

Reflexes.
The variation in human reaction to drugs.
Down syndrome and other genetic defects.

It's the similarity in the basic human genome that lets most people assume we are blank slates. Generic mutation can alter an infant's reaction to their environment and people don't notice X-Ray's due to basic biology. Thus we are not blank slates even if environment seems to dominate the picture.
One word: Smokejumper.

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

VC: So, what did you do before your startup?

You: I jumped out of airplanes into remote wildfires with nothing but a shovel and an axe.
Hmmm scriptable Sim City... That could be interesting
If you go back far enough, there were no cities at all. Nevertheless, I think there is a wonderful "city" concept in many old towns around the world, and especially in Europe. If you move to Silicon Valley, and you spend some significant fraction of your life there, then your day to day quality of life is seriously affected by this. This discussion thread may be getting "off topic", although it is about an article telling entrepreneurs from all around the world to come to Silicon Valley if they possibly can. I am warning them. It's not a paradise (in my opinion.)
After having spent 7 years in BayArea and still struggling to get a US green card I gave up and moved to Waterloo Canada. I saw hundreds of my ideas going stale because according to immigration law I had to work with similar job profile and always getting paid. I could not even fund myself and work fulltime on my ideas.

I am surprised that the locational freedom that internet offers (I have hired people in India and elsewhere whom I may never meet) has not been embraced by investor community as much as I would have imagined.
Hopefully that will change in future.
This is an interesting post. There are a couple of points that I'm hesitant on, though. I wouldn't necessarily say I disagree with his position - just that I think there are some points that might need a bit more elaboration (ok, a bit more defending).

First is that the Hollywood model for talent may be an improvement over Silicon Valley in some ways. Kathy Sierra wrote a great post on this a while back:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/0...

In short - the Hollywood model where everyone comes together to complete a project and goes off looking for a new gig after it is completed may be a better model for tech work than the employer/employee model. This model heavily rewards talent that gets things done, and has no place for seat warmers. I do agree with Marc that it's good for the creators to be stakeholders with a share in the output - so that would improve things. Maybe this explains so much of the job hopping that goes on in Silicon Valley. Perhaps developers should vest at the completion of a product? After all, top talent at Google may be sitting around with golden handcuffs when they could be working on the next great release...

Another factor is the extreme expense of producing a truly professional film. Yes, technology is getting cheaper and more available, but tens of millions is still a small budget for a feature film. I'm not a big fan of special effects for their own sake, but I thought "Jurassic Park" was pretty much awesome, took trememdous technical expertise and innovation, and was ultra-expensive. I suppose this capital could now be raised from VCs rather than studio heads.

Think VC's in the film industry would be willing to give the same kind of creative freedom we (only sometimes) see in tech startups? It's a tempting idea, no doubt about it...
Engadget looks at Google's Android
Make Younger VCs Your Champions
I took a negotiations class in business school. In one of the lectures the professor talked about the degree to which the age of a counterparty matters to negotiators from different cultures. The professor claimed that the American culture is far less focused on age and far more focused on performance than other cultures. However, this doesn't mean that business professionals in the US are not somewhat focused on age...
Existentialists should stay true to their natures.

http://madelyn.utahunderground.net/links/jeanpaulsatrecookbo...
Notice the G symbol up by the service bars? Is Google running it's own cell network somewhere?
It amplifies your power and enables you to embark on projects beyond the scope of lesser languages like C.

Like Unix?

Oops. Bullshit detected.
I always wonder why the people who write this article fail to compare programming salaries to other professions. The writer gets all confused that the best and brightest young Americans aren't chomping at the bit to get into a field that pays "top programmers upwards of 100K a year" (paraphrasing here).

Really, a whole 100K? Is that really so great, when you consider the options that the best and brightest young Americans have? A law grad from a top school with no experience whatsoever typically earns over $150K in his first job out.

I'm not here to complain - there are all kinds of great reasons to be involved in technology and programming. If I wanted to be a lawyer, I'd go to law school. There's huge money to be made in software, especially in startups.

But c'mon. Do you think the writers of these articles (because they happen over and over) just haven't thought of this? They do this every time, and never seem to consider the context (ie., other career options). Is it a deliberate omission?
Al Gore's next act: Planet-saving VC
Just swap out the GC implementation for a moving GC! Oh, wait, ... there is no GC.
Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins as a partner "to push green investments"
You're missing the point. It amplifies the power of a single individual to do something ON THEIR OWN beyond what they could accomplish with something like C. Last time I checked UNIX wasn't written by ONE person.
I wish they did the same for M.U.L.E. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.
I feel as if this article was written about me.
This article feels like it was written about me as well!
another irritating one is the way they quote 900K engineers out of China and India without considering the way the US/India/China define "engineer". I did math as an undergrad followed by an MS in engineering, and I don't think I'd be counted (certainly if I'd done a grad degree in a math department - studying the same material, I wouldn't be counted). Meanwhile, it sounds like a 3-year trade degree in China would count as an engineer.

Again, there are reasonable interpretations of these numbers - I'm not saying the writer has to take my point of view. But to just chuck them out there as fact without any discussion is at best lazy journalism (again, it's such a loud omission that I start to wonder if it is deliberate).
I am excited to see so much of handset functionality exposed directly through the API. So much low-level control..

RIP JavaME.
Ruby: Testing Private Methods by 'publicizing' them