skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BSD is great, with some caveats.

Pros
Stability & performance are noticeably better. BSD's virtual memory system doesn't leave tons of pages in the Inactive bucket. The TCP stack is the best of class, and the UFS2 filesystem rocks the house. Jails have been in BSD more than a decade and don't waste so much $#$@ memory compared to virtual systems. Performance under heavy load is much much better.

Cons: SMP and 64-bit support. :( Linux is the Golden Child for new hardware, so BSD lags behind. I remember panicking my 5.1 kernel with a USB drive, as late as 2004.
SAI has a "Recession Watch Timeline" you might be interested in: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/recession-watch-morgan-s...
I've written a long response, http://cowoh.org/~craig/perfect_project_management_app.txt.
I would say recession is kind of here, and coming (but def not depression, technically speaking the economy is going through depression, when it has been in recession for a couple of years and not coming out). but in terms of should you wait for it to go away, I really don't think so. If you have an idea then you should def implement it now, otherwise it will be too late for it. But you have to realize that if in case there will be a recession, then finding jobs might not be as easy either. So if you don't think you can live and sustain the startup life for a while, then you should be careful quiting your job.

Also, there is a lot of talks of online advertising revenues going down, and this might even damage companies like Google a lot. But if you feel like you have a product that would attract many eye balls then you should implement it without worrying too much about online ads, and also you might be able to either find a business model for it that doesn't solely depend on ads or find other interesting exit options for yourself,.

In terms of venture capital, it all depends on how much money your project needs. As many of the "web 2.0" companies don't require much capital to start, I wouldn't think it will dry up, but if more and more of them fail to eventually generate revenue, I would assume the VCs will get more selective. But since the capital needed is much smaller than the dot-com era I would hardly think that vc's will dry up. Of course that is IMHO.
Build an entirely owned subsidiary in a respectable place, the UK for example. And funnel the transactions through it.

Had the same problem in a startup I built 5 years ago that was based in Costa Rica.

The entire process should take no more than a couple of days.
Albania has some great coffee too. I think it is the Mediterranean thing, when people are more calmed down, go out with friends every day, sit down for a coffee, talk and enjoy life.

Coffee to go, or in a paper cup is a very foreign concept. Impossible to find actually.

When I visited Instabul, I was really suprised that people didn't drink coffee at all, but mostly tea after meals.

Figure it out. The people that introduced coffee to europe, don't really drink it.
So, the phase "Turkish coffee", is pretty inacurate. Should probably be called "Ottoman coffee".
To my five-armed 250-IQed blue-haired children that play audio constantly? Sure.
How very Socratic of you :) I would:

Mainly

- Spend more time with my wife (including doing some of the rest of these things together), when she's not working to achieve her goals

- Hack on several ideas that I have, work with/invest in interesting startups (what I would normally save or put into less risky investments)

Also

- Help my friends out of the rut

- Read more math, physics, sci-fi

- Learn to fly planes

- Keep my thumb on what's going on in the tech world via the web

- Build cool stuff: electronics, etc.

- Buy cool gadgets and hack on them

- Maybe some political stuff, EFF or atheist issues

- I like the OLPC project, I think they should work with American kids too.

- Pick up the piano and violin again, maybe travel a bit

- Say what I think more often

- Some normal leisure stuff now and then

Of course, this would be after 2 weeks of sitting around in awe that I had arrived at what I dreamed of as a teenager.

I can do many of these things in some capacity right now, but I can't really dig in to most of them. I do my current job in hopes of freeing up a half-of-my-waking-life time slice so I can, but that is definitely a gamble. Self-determination is an enticing thing.

I imagine that, even though I've done a fair share of it, there is some introspection to do when you arrive. I wish I had more time to think about this question. What's the view like from there?
Bubble 2.0: Expect a tech spending slowdown in 2008
Seems like the wildwest of coding back then. I love reading this stuff. If you are into the history of computing check out Steven Levy's books, http://www.stevenlevy.com/ I have read hackers and crypto and they were decent reads.
I don't think it's "simple" at all, because you have to look down into the details: doing what costs what, what are the worst case projections, how much it costs (theoretically) to avoid them, what are the best case projections... all that kind of stuff, as well as look skeptically at margins of errors on various projections. Not as exciting as yelling "doom! gloom!" or saying "problem, what problem?", but ultimately more productive, in my opinion. From what I've seen, some sort of middle course is likely the best approach for the time being. Start doing something, but maybe not going all out, just yet.

On an interesting, and related note, an economist points out that property prices aren't falling (or at least relatively more where all prices are falling) in coastal areas that would be hit by rising sea levels.
Some of the most interesting writing on this subject was the Copenhagen Consensus (www.copenhagenconsensus.com), and the critical responses to the Copenhagen Consensus.

The CC was a group of economists who got together and tried to figure out which world-problems were most economical to solve. I.e., if you had a fixed amount of money where would you spend it to do the most good. The list was something like:
1. AIDS prevention in Africa.
2. AIDS treatment in Africa.
3. Generalized healthcare in the 3rd world.
etc
etc.
Last. Climate change

There are a lot of problems with the approach they took (considering only at the monetary value of lives not the "spiritual" value, assuming that charitable giving is a finite resource), but their approach of trying to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis yields some very interesting results.

If I really thought the cost was equivalent to "counting beans" and the benefit was avoiding a situation where we could no longer find arable land, I would agree that we should act quickly and strongly to halt CO2 emissions. In fact, I suspect that allowing the third-world access to cheap (fossil fuel) energy will benefit them more than avoiding small changes in climate.

Of course, when it comes to American's perceived god-given right to drive around in monsterous SUVs...I come down firmly on the side of the environmentalists!
I'm fairly sure this is illegal in the UK. Can anyone confirm this?
The ports system is markedly inferior IMO to Debian / Ubuntu's package collection: no real stable tree, build from source, tweaking options at build time is encouraged. This is a moot point for things you were going to build from source anyway.

Niche pieces of software are absent; valgrind for FreeBSD is a fork that doesn't support amd64 last time I checked.

There are less people out there running the exact same application binary + underlying OS as you, which means you're less likely to find people who've had (and solved) the same issue as you.

Using it for your desktop is a bit masochistic. Widespread virtualisation means this isn't really an issue anymore - you can have a VM that mirrors your production setup.

We're still using FreeBSD and aren't likely to change anytime soon. I agree with everything aristus said.
PayPal doesn't support receiving funds for the Bahamas. We could only send paypal funds...
Talked with Worldpay and it's not one of their supported countries.
We're running FreeBSD on this server. We've never had a problem with the OS.
If by the Sami people you think "blue eyed and blonde", you are wrong. Not that there aren't blond and blue eyed Sami people, but the stereotypical Scandinavian is not a Sami.
Copenhagen Consensus - 'Cost efficiency' of tackling world problems
This came out in 2004, but provides an interesting approach to thinking about which world problems would be most cost-effective to solve.

Spoiler: AIDS is at the top of the list and climate change is at the bottom.
So long as the parent company is not doing anything that is illegal under UK law, it is totally legal as far as I know or at least it was 5 years ago. What part of it do you think might be illegal?

But then again, I am not a lawyer so please confirm with your legal staff.
I bet it feels good to be paid to support pollution.
I am still amazed by the fact that ebay has become a legitimate sale avenue for entire startups/businesses.

Now that is brand/name recognition.
You realize this isn't much of an argument, don't you?

That's because I'm no longer arguing with you. You haven't pieced together much that's cogent enough for me to debate and your conclusions are nearly as despicable as they are preposterous. You're trying to argue that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites and other races, a view controversial enough that the burden of proof lies with you. Let's review how you've set out to prove it.

You tried to discredit Gladwell's article with fuzzy math and attacking the strawman; I exposed it. You failed.

Then you tried citing other people's research into IQ to support your views. Unfortunately there's no serious research that supports your world view, so you were left citing "studies" that have been widely discredited and debunked. (For example, "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" literally concludes that most of Africa is functionally retarded.) Reductio ad absurdum, you fail.

Then you gave up citing research into IQ and g, and started citing cultural phenomena that clearly are not relevant to the biological innateness topic at hand. Even the cultural phenomena you bring up aren't particularly compelling. (For example, you're comparing the plight of cultures conquered by the Ottoman empire that fell in the 1600's to that of African nations occupied and conquered by the British empire, which didn't leave in many cases until the late 1960's and, in the case of Zimbabwe, until 1980.) Failed again.

Finally, you got frustrated and started blurting out that it's "trivial" to conclude that blacks just aren't intelligent as other races, figuring that a few upmods on YC.News will make you seem right without proof. Fail.

I'm sure you're going to find another flawed study funded by known white supremacy groups to justify your beliefs. Or maybe you'll start citing phrenology or Nordic theory. I don't know what you'll pull out next, but I can assure you that I won't care, unless it's got some legitimate scientific basis.

You're making a fool of yourself.
The Copenhagen Consensus looked only at a 5 year window. Since most of the likely costs of climate change take place farther in the future it is unsurprising that they found so little benefit for mitigation.

While economic analysis is very important in this case it is also very difficult. You can get any result you want be fiddling with the discount rate.
The reason fighting climate change scored so low in the CC was not that the problem is not real, its that the damages are still pretty far down the road and that we don't have any really cost-effective ways to do it.

We need to keep spending on research in the area until we can find a solution that will make financial sense.

PS: look up the TED talk on the Copenhagen Consensus for a quick review of the issue
I'd say we're very close to recession. Even Morgan Stanley says we're gonna enter recession soon:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&...
There was no '5 year window', but the discount rate was a subject of much debate. Actually, to get climate change out of last place, they had to apply a much smaller discount rate than for any other subject.

I would argue that the consequences in breakdown of African civil society due to a continuing AIDS epidemic will have a similarly long-term consequences as climate change...and thus a similar discount rate should apply to both.
o!

I'm not sure if there is a standard emoticon for raising a hand. But that looks sorta right.
"Who cares if Erlang starts slowly?  It was designed to start once and never stop."
The worry is not that China becoming rich will make us poorer... everyone will become better off financially.

The worry is that China will get to #1 economic power while staying non-democratic. The world economic superpower can control/influence a lot of things worldwide, and people worry about a repressive state that can impress it's will upon the world (instead of just it's own people).

Not entirely sure I worry about that. I think that any mass economic progress of the people of China will eventually lead to a self-interested middle class that will simply overwhelm the party's ability to control it.

It's like the RIAA and downloading. The RIAA member companies control the keys to the music kingdom (or at least the mass music kingdom), but they can't resist the overwhelming tide of people that want to download music and play it on any device they own. Eventually China will have it's overwhelming tide moment. Either that or the regime will change itself over time to avoid that moment, until they become what the people want anyway.
If you take a look at how access to cheap fossil fuels has molded the post-WWII American landscape, I don't think there is a very strong argument to support the claim that such access to inexpensive oil is going to benefit anyone, especially countries just beginning get into urban development.

In the context of newly developing countries (i.e. third world countries that won't be third world countries in a few decades) the development of greentech is of paramount importance. The technologies and research behind preventing climate change (as theoretical as it all is) is very, very related to smart growth and green technology. By researching and implementing such tech, helping the reversal of our earth's possible climate change will (hopefully) be a useful side-effect.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that by arguing that we should sit around and do nothing, we are setting ourselves up for disaster, and not just in the context of global warming. Sure, there is plenty of room to debate not only our contribution to the earth's warming, but even if we are warming at all.

There is not room to debate, however, whether or not we should pursue green fuels, smart growth, and to begin visualizing how our society is going to react to the end of the era of cheap oil.

These are some great Ted talks on the subject.
The tragedy of suburbia. Hilarious, profane, and spot on. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/121

John Doerr talks about the importance and profitability of green tech, the $6 trillion 'mother of all markets'. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/128
What do you think is going to happen when the dollar crashes, oil costs US$200/barrel, and we can't borrow money from the Chinese (or anyone) anymore?

I, for one, am buying a bike while the steel is still exchangeable for all that green paper I have lying around.
I have had that feeling for about a year that there will be a pretty sizeable downturn coming, and it will probably last a fair while.

But only time will tell, there are a lot of factors, it could be delayed with interest rate cuts or forcing the teaser rate givers to honor those rates for a longer period of time, etc.
It's really irrelevant from your p.o.v. when you really think it through.

All a recession does is trim the excess baggage from the economy. Companies that aren't the most efficient, and from the startup world, the concepts that aren't the most profitable or capable have difficulty. The rest make a little less, but get by.

IMO it's the best time to start something, since you'll be thinking "worst case" right off the bat. This should help your decision making. You'll naturally want to risk less and will be more deliberate with the directions you follow. You'll have a stronger, more efficient organization than you would if you started during a boom time.

Then, as the economy brightens and you emerge, it'll be gravy train time!
A recession is the best time to start a firm. Most companies make more mistakes and develop more bad habits when times are easy than when times are tough. It may take tough times to uncover the bad habits you developed and the unrealistic assumptions that you made when times were good, but it's the bad habits that are responsible, not tough times.

Focus on customers and revenue and a value proposition that's compelling even when times are tough. Sooner or later your startup will face tough economic times, sooner is better.
Very interesting. I'm more of a tea drinker, and highly recommend Adagio.com for that.
Registration sucks, thank you bugmenot.com :D

Login: aplufant
Pass: asdfgh
We haven't taken Merb into production. Yet.

We did have a production Camping app for a time though.
Maybe i'm a noob, but I couldn't get it to run under cygwin :(
FreeBSD was my first choice, until I realized that the text-to-speech s/w only ran on linux. There is a linux compatibility mode for BSD, but I'd rather avoid an extra layer of complexity. So our server is running Ubuntu right now.
No person's dying words have ever been "I wish I had spent more time at the office." It seems to me this article serious confuses ends and means. You have to set priorities for everything that you do in life, but postponing marriage and starting a family--once you are ready for it--because you want to do a startup is a serious mistake in my opinion. In August of 1994 I left my job just as my first son was born to start up company with a partner. I learned a lot and have no regrets for any of it. I can't imagine postponing starting a family, because the time was right, and I can't imagine postponing doing the startup, because the time was also right.

People can always find excuses to avoid their family or do poorly on their job. Last Thanksgiving (2006) I posted some quotes that I think are relevant:

"Many men can make a fortune but very few can build a family." J. S. Bryan

"He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little." Horace

For more see http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/11/23/quotes-for-thanksgiv...
Reminder: Peter Seibel is talking at the Justin.tv office on Thursday (Dec 13th, 12pm)
If you ask 100 people and you will get 100 opnions. There is definately a chance for recession, but it is hard to judge the scale and do the timing right.
Eight features you didn't know about in Ubuntu/Linux
I already said this below, but check out Adagio.com if you haven't already. They have a plastic tea brewing device somewhat similar to a french press but easier to clean.
The Economist's View: Priorities for Saving the World [video]
Amazing talk - examining doing very little good for a huge cost because it makes you 'feel good' or focusing first on problems where a huge impact can be made for very little investment. A classic problem whether you're talking about solving world problems or solving problems in your own startup.
Exxon Still Funding Climate Change Deniers
Charlie Munger is definitely worth learning from. A coworker and I gave him a series of web software demos back in the 1990s and, bar none, he's the smartest person I've met. Check out what he has to say about mental models:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4669

"You've got to have models in your head," he explained, "and you've got to array your experience-both vicarious and direct-on this latticework of models."
The Art of the Startup Write-off
I'm not educated about this, but I'm guessing that recession means less mobility and smaller spendings. Perhaps a good project would help people save money or make wiser purchases. Perhaps Netflix will eat everybody up (although I don't know much about it). Perhaps services that facilitate something between people who are physically in proximity, like Craigslist, will eat everybody up.

I generally agree with shayan... and I don't think this is something you can just wait until it's "over" -- it won't just come and go like one of those cartoony storm clouds. The other thing of concern is, suppose China sustains hyper growth during the recession. Your competition is now over there, and they won't wait. What a dilemma.

I hope pg replies to your question; would love to see his answer.
Nespresso is great. At $0.50 per pod, it's pricey, but for such painless cleanup and consistently good shots, worth the price. Hands down the best teas I've had come from Upton Tea (uptontea.com).
Great, someone has figured out the recipe for high-performing, cookie-cutter drones. They might as well submit their super-early-action resumes to Wall Street alongside their college applications.

I have so many more snide remarks to make about this, but I can't say there aren't upsides... at least it tells you there is always a way, if you're willing to find it.
Looking through the screenshots, I thought the page with graphs and charts was pretty nicely done... then I realized it was ga...
Why I DON'T regret getting straight A's in college
Point 1 is easily attacked so I will. Definitely not a waste of time.

Suppose you don't deliberately study "raw intelligence" but are interested in autism. There are a bunch of genes related to the manifestations of autism. You have a relatively low-functioning empathy circuit, for example. You develop obsessions with numbers, for example. This could be a malfunctioning orbitofrontal circuit (which is also dysfunctional in OCD patients).

It is not a coincidence that some people with superior memories exhibit very similar symptoms as autists, but retain most of their social ability, and there you go, innate, genetic intelligence, almost as a side effect of an impartially developed disorder.

What's the benefit of researching Viagra outside of pleasure? It was an accidental discover during heart research (IIRC).

You don't even have to be curious about discovering what genes are responsible for "superior" mental functions. That's almost like trying to solve a puzzle with the expectation that you only connect the pieces that you consciously set out to connect.
Article is incorrect. The Academic Index is an agreement between the Ivies about the minimum GPA/SAT necessary for recruited athletes. The cutoff is different for each school, based on the average of the overall student body. However the AI has nothing to do with the general admissions process.
Wow, thanks for all the comments!

@nickb: That Morgan Stanley report is what prompted this post. I think it is prudent to question the source, however.

@shayan: My team and I have 6 months of savings, meaning we can pay the bills for 6 months before we either need income or investment. Do you think that is long enough?

@skmurphy: This makes a lot of sense to me, there are a few anecdotal stories about 2002-2003 being a great time to have started a company. And theres that report that ~50% of pre-1999 companies are still around. Good point.

After thinking about it some more I came to several comclusions:

1. I am very unhappy at my current job. I'm young intelligent (or so I think), hard working, and I have big dreams. I am capable of doing much more with my life than this job.

2. If my startup fails, I can blame it on the economy.

3. Maybe it is a bad time, and maybe it is a mistake to start a company right now. But its a bigger mistake, even a tradgedy to be afraid of the unknown. I won't let my life be run by fear.

I'll keep the YC crowd posted about our progress ;-)
Hey, glad you enjoyed the post.

I'd recommend that you poke Brian on that post, though -- he's got an update that has been sitting in drafts for about three months.

~~ Robert from EnfranchisedMind.
Nope - while I've played with Rails I wasn't impressed enough to move away from Django.