skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Grab this: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/colortheo...

You'll never get colors wrong this way.
Telepresence: the next killer app (Cringely)
I saw something in print about them last night and just googled "sergey larry montessori" today to find this page. There are other pages farther down the search results that seem better researched, but the basic idea is still that Montessori gave them freedom to explore interests.

One additional thing in another article is that Montessori let Sergey learn at his own pace, important when he was first learing English:

http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-02/200702-BrinF...

There's a 20-minute video here, with a synopsis that credits Montessori with inspiring the 20% time idea:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/118

Many pages repeat the "friends since childhood" line for whatever reason.
I'm a former lawyer (corporate, technology, IP) who started a s/w company in 2000 and sold it for $120M in 2005. So I've been there and done that. I help (for free) Atlanta-based hacker teams think through the "legal issues" involved in starting a business, but I'm not really a lawyer any more. It's not that complicated:

(1) IMHO you should think first about the founder equity vesting issues. On the one hand, it wouldn't be fair for a co-founder to bail out after 2 months and keep all of her equity. On the other hand, it wouldn't be fair if her co-founders kicked her out after 2 months for no reason and left her with almost no equity. So there's a balance that needs to be reached, and the discussion can be emotional. With the lawyer's help, the team can strike their desired balance in an agreement that governs equity vesting, such as a restricted stock agreement. I can send you a sample agreement to illuminate the trade-offs. waytking AT gmail DOT com.

(2a) If all founders can't agree on the founder equity vesting balance, you do not have a startup team. Form another one.

(2b) If all founders agree on founder equity vesting balance, your lawyer can easily form your Delaware C-corp for a few hundred bucks. If you want ultimate flexibility, he can form a Delaware LLC and create your LLC operating agreement for around a thousand bucks. But a C-corp should be fine. Pay in cash - don't pay in equity.

In any city with a decent-sized tech community there will be lawyers willing to do the above for just a few hundred dollars, in the hope that you'll be successful and get big and give them significant legal work later on. You may need to dig to find such lawyers in your city, but they are there.

You will also be tempted to engage lawyers who promise to introduce you to VCs, angels, etc. IMHO this is not that valuable. If you are smart and resourceful, you will find the angels and VCs. If you are building stuff people want, the angels and VCs will invest in you, especially if you make them think you don't need their stinkin' money.
Setting Up Your Home Office for Your Business
I am not sure, it sounds more like a solution to sell your own music? Unless you can become a retailer somehow? What I mean is something that allows you to create an alternative to iTunes and sell popular music.
Joe Armstrong's book (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Erlang-Software-Concurrent...) is a great intro.
1, 7, 9 and 12 are universal.
Solar power is hot - a roundup of latest action
"She Said Thank You" (Avoiding Procrastination)
I don't think you can really call Montessori school 'education.' The word education comes from the latin e+ducere, meaning to be lead. The entire concept of Montessori schools is that they're supposed to be an environment for autodidacts.
This assumes all the cars are charged at night. The grid is heavily taxed during the day.

Check out http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html on a hot day (A/C load has a huge impact on system demand), and this article might look a little optimistic.

Ironically, SCE is in the CAISO, not NEPOOL (i.e. Maine, where the reporter lives.), control area.
Sure. And we'll have cold fusion by 2010, and a man on Mars by 2012.

Fiber-to-the-home has been promised for over 10 years. It may be getting closer, but widespread availability by next year? I doubt it.

But the biggest problem is that no one actually WANTS a videoconferencing unit in their home. The technology's been around for decades; ok, maybe not a high-res large screen TV, but a 5" screen over POTS. To put it simply, people don't want to have to dress up and do their hair just to place a phone call (and what do you do if someone calls when you're in your PJs?)

The only real application at home are long-distance calls with family members or friends who live far. This works okay with webcams, and I can't see enough demand to buy large-screen video-conferencing units for this purpose to make it a killer app.
The problems with social news
Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach
Teachers have a more active and leading role in Montessori education than in other non-traditional methods such as Summerhill. Montessori was described to me as a triangle with the student, the teacher, and the environment at the vertices.

See more here:

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2006-01
"How do you handle claims of neglect from your significant other(s)? "

Tell them you don't have time right now to talk to them about it?
Nice one!
Really helpful.
The etymology of a word and its meaning are not identical.
I really liked that article, and it really got me thinking about the software industry as well.

If you liked this article, there are a couple of good articles you might want to read (just use google, easy to find them).

1. "The way the music died" - this was a PBS show about the decline of the music industry. One theory advanced is that as lawyers and accountants (without much real interest in music) took over the studios, the product suffered. It took a while, but eventually, that caught up with the industry.

2. A salon.com article titled: "the greatest week in rock in history" - about a week that a truly remarkable line-up of top-selling albums. It's amazing that this much talent was compressed into the same moment in history.

Anyway, the reason I dig reading about this is that it is a cautionary tale for the technology industry. It's very tempting to put suits in charge of software, but in the end, it tends to fail.

The main difference: the music industry had such a good catalog of existing product (a led zeppelin album is still good to listen to today) that they could limp along without innovating for quite some time. Whereas most software companies that stop innovating will be dead quickly. Yeah, monopoly positions can hold reality at bay for a while, but reality always wins in the end.
Cool, we just signed up our son for Montessori. I can see the success already.
He's not talking about video-conferencing with a dinky webcam which yes, has failed. He's talking about a system where it really feels like the person is there. The attributes of life size-ness (sp) and eye contact make the difference.

I don't think people will want this to replace telephone calls, rather to hold business meetings. A Thanksgiving dinner would be pretty cool too. So it feels like everyone is at the same table.
My college standardized on Eudora several years ago and it has served them well. It never made much sense for Qualcomm however.
I had a very similar type of education. WHERE ARE MY $$$BILLIONS???
Design Patterns are dead! Long live Transaction Patterns!
Google's Newest Role: Venture Capitalist
Ruby is terser, and yet still very readable. In addition, you will not be getting any performance gain by using a JAVA regex over a ruby regex unless you are using a DFA implementation (if there is one for JAVA), in which case you won't get text capturing.

How many lines of Java code would it take you to read a file given on the command line and print out the prefixes of words ending in 'ing'

ARGF.readlines.each do |line|
puts m[1] if( m = line.match(/(\w+)(?:ing)$/) )
end
The article mentioned Apple as the company who might sell these systems, but I wonder if a start-up devoted exclusively to this business model might do it better? One could use off-the-shelf hardware (to a large extent) and be almost purely a software company.
A big problem with the article is that they throw up "Trust" as this gigantic, vague moral litmus test and anything you "can't trust" is evil and To Be Avoided. In typical fox news fashion the article is so laden with presuppositions that it's hard to discuss rationally.

There's an important distinction between what happened with WGA and the "Software as Service" model in general. Namely, that WGA is a mostly superfluous add-on only there to protect against piracy. The fact that the system shuts down or locks up when WGA is not available does nothing to support what the users bought the OS for in the first place.

It's true that you can't trust 100% uptime from web servers. Millions of Myspace users are pretty solid evidence that people can live with this. The advantages of the server-based method are generally appreciated by customers, who are also generally aware of the drawbacks. In contrast, users tend not to appreciate being treated like criminals and having their OS crashed on purpose because it couldn't complete a minor validation step.
Observations From a 3-month 1-Man Startup: Part 1
Although arguably the meaning of a word and its definition are also not identical. (That is, words are defined as used, whereas the meaning is, according to some, the impression the word creates in your mind.)

Personally I just hate the idea of being forcibly lead.
Also, the photos are currently mislabeled. (Brin and Page are reversed.) I expect the author will fix this at his own pace.
Where's the middleman? - Content intermediaries on web2.0
We use Java. It seems a great alternative for us but you do need to know how to work with it and how to integrate it.

We didn't use ruby because it would take us some time to learn it, and I wasn't sure on the maturity. I also prefer strong typing. I have experience with C, Smalltalk, C++, Perl and Java.
it seems like an option for casual music listeners, at best. once you stop paying, your music is gone. i don't want to have that kind of relationship with any company, because sooner or later, their interests and mine will not be aligned anymore.

personally i own over 700 cds and 300 vinyl lps. i'm not letting anybody else be in charge of my music collection. but then i'm an oddball, so i can't be called representative.
Touch-screen iPod to take center stage
Just one of Larry and Sergey's excellent adventures, or is there a Google recruiting angle to the Burning Man jaunt?
Does anyone know who they funded in this manner?
I totally agree. Digg, Reddit, and "Hacker News" for that matter, don't actually implement the "wisdom of the crowd". The true hypothesis of a WotC is based on a random survey or sorts. How many people actually look beyond the first few pages of these social news sites, or maybe their friends (or other reputed users) links. Social news is still in a stage of infancy, much like how web search was (maybe is).

Throw 10 random stories to the user on the homepage, let them vote, and the best stories will emerge. What's point of actually showing them the "popular" stories as the first go.
I don't understand why self-directed education stops so early. Why aren't there high schools and colleges employing Maria Montessori's profound insights?

I wish I had been lucky enough to attend a Montessori school as a kid. :-(
I know java since ever and when I think code, I think java.
Thats why I use it. For me it is the most productive environment.

Why do you ask at all? If you know java, use it. If you know c (well, not c) - if you know python, use it. If you have to learn something, because you don't know any language, get a job first and think about a startup after you dream in (put here any language).

Any scripting language basing on java will be slower than java. My opinion is: if you can avoid another software layer, avoid it. It makes you depend on more code that you don't control, slows down your apps.
They will come up with some simple html to get some access to phones, libraries would probably install a MS application so I doubt if libraries would cut people off from the MS services. Especially if they make all of the Hotmail users download that extra exe file of mystery code.
The economist just had a story on this:

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

Doesn't really look like startup territory to me.
Jotspot to Re-Launch as Google Wiki?
sergey's wife's company (23andme.com)?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/22/google-takes-stake-in-s...
Last FM (http://www.last.fm/) Has a great search tool where you can enter a band you like and it will suggest other new artists that you may enjoy listening to. Its pretty spot on and I've found a few new groups from the several times i've tried it. Its user driven so its virtual word of mouth.
There are, it's just that they're fairly rare and you need to know where to look.

I went to a high school with very similar methods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Charter_Essential_School...), though to my knowledge they were developed independently. And I do think that whatever limited success I've achieved so far has been largely because of it.

On the college level, there's Hampshire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College.
I like the color schemes that Muller predicts, but I don't think it's for Muller's reason. I like color schemes that have exactly one saturated color that catches the eye, like the bottom amber and the top blue in the "good" schemes. The "bad" color schemes don't have any.
Looks interesting, but I don't have a Mac anymore. Do you know of anything similar for Linux?
How about a web app? :)

http://www.colorjack.com/sphere/

Enjoy!
Use version control?
Fake Steve Jobs explains how iPod is the gateway drug for Mac
A few companies are working on that, but I don't think the results will be free.

http://rightscale.com/
http://www.enomalism.com/
There's a (I don't know whether to call it a fallacy, but I will)...there's a fallacy that Jumbo Jets are safer than automobiles. This assertion is easily derived from looking at death statistics from each vehicle. But then, such statistics involve random parties. You or I aren't random drivers and so we may be very safe or very dangerous on the road [1].

Anyway, the average person's data is much more likely to disappear than that on google's server clusters. But if you are diligent, you can have backups that work 99.9999999 percent of the time quite easily.

[1] Of course, on roads, the guy driving in the other lane is pseudo-random, so... But there is no other lane with computers.
The reason Reddit and Digg are implemented the way they are is that they rely on people's need for attention to generate a constant stream of incoming links. Making it to the "front page" of whatever site you're dealing with is a badge of honor and indicates some sort of social significance. The incentive's just not there for people otherwise. The only people who'll submit links without any guarantee that anyone will see their submission should be using del.icio.us.
Thanks for the link! Apparently I've got a Google funded competitor now...
The design of that site is shockingly similar to this one...
It's like "Da da dah-duh..."  Simple notation and web search for tunes in your head.
Cory Doctorow: DRM vendors are pushing the impossible [DRM explained to non-geeks]
IMHO, the language is the stronger point in all of these. I don't care if the JVM is well specified, this brings me nothing to my daily productivity.

What is the advantage of using Rhino on JVM against using native Ruby or Python? In Java, at least I know I will be very confortable doing automatic refactorings with Eclipse, which is the biggest advantage of Java against these other languages. Having coded a tool in Ruby with some good testing coverage, I still don't feel as safe to refactor as I was using Java.
HBO buys US TV rights to Second Life machinima series
Article could neatly be summed up as "social networks have a chicken and egg problem, this makes it very hard to compete with the big players."
When you are born, you know nothing
I'm amused by the implication that The Wisdom of Crowds is a Web 2.0 textbook. It's like "obviously this is not the wisdom of crowds, have they not even read the book?!" I'm not sure that's what they're even aiming at. For my part, I just want a few interesting news stories.
Prediction Markets put the Money back in Politics
I am ALWAYS concerned about this (some may call it fanatic). I back up everything twice every night. Hit the safe deposit box once a week. Always have one thumb drive with me, another hidden. Print hard copies of recently changed code.

What if I have a break-in? What about a fire? How about lightning? (Already lost 2 servers that were protected - it happens.) What about a flood?

Sometimes I wonder why I don't just store everything on the "cloud". One of these days...
Ah yes, selection bias. In surveys of centenarians (people 100 years or older), a surprising number of them credit their longevity to eating onions. Now, onions are good for you, to be sure, but will they make you live to 100? Yes---if you have good genes, do a bunch of other things right, and are really, really lucky. And so it is with all these "multi-bazillionaires attribute their success to X". Are they smart and savvy, with possibly unusual backgrounds that give them an edge? Sure. But a bunch of other things have to go right as well---and even then I hear that the most successful people also eat lots of onions.
That's a fair comment. I must admit that it's specifically Kevin Rose who uses that term a lot.

John.
The camera and microphone can make a huge difference. Businesses use brands like http://www.tandberg.com/ or http://www.polycom.com/ and some of their hardware is very good, if expensive. I'm not sure how off-the-shelf hardware compares.
Interesting encoding. It's so lossy (no absolute pitch, no relative pitch, no rhythm) you're bound to run into problems. The space of a 5 note gesture is only 81 unique song snippets.
Print hard copies of recently changed code.

Okay, that's nuts. ;)

Source code shouldn't be a problem. It practically backs itself up: 1) Production server(s), 2) Test server(s), 3) Development server(s), 4) Source control server.
Proving that no matter what the topic - everything on Fox News is knee-jerk, under-reported, and over-simplified.
Wow, I need to come back to these old threads sometimes. I didn't realize this got any comments. Thanks
I remember in the early days of reddit some people claiming reddit/digg were a good idea because they used the WoC idea, and thinking that wasn't really correct. I've always thought a lot of the problems with social news could be solved by following the WoC model more closely (ie: it would be a better way of getting "a few interesting news stories"), but apparently I'm one of the 20 or so people who isn't hip to facebook, so I don't know if I'll be trying wildfire.
But, with Rhapsody, you don't have an equity interest in the music to begin with. The whole investment is the intellectual one in your playlist, which you can keep. At worst, if you discontinue Rhapsody, you could go and buy the music to replicate your playlist if you feel the need to own it.

I would be more concerned about the potential obsolescence of my investment in music in a physical medium or a particular file format.
What good is a list of books without any explanation of what makes them worth reading? Not one of these descriptions goes beyond what you'd find on the dust jacket.
80% of RAZR owners would not buy Motorola again
As far as research that shows a causal relationship between X and success, all we have that I know of is YC.

For research on the results of Montessori education, look here:

http://www.montessori-ami.org/research/research.htm
How Marissa Mayer Almost Killed AdSense (and she names Paul Buchheit as the real AdSense inventor)
Why would she? So you can avoid procrastinating by not feeling the urge to procrastinate? Isn't that entirely useless advice?
i didn't click through any of the links because they looked spammy. if i go in through a location it looks like yc with craigslist-like sections.

i didn't get it. anyone?
Wow. Marissa Mayer is a serious self-promoter. When she can't take credit for an idea, she tries to take credit for "not killing" an idea?
Evil Third-Party Social Graph Analysis
Seeing as how it is of interest, if I may trouble the crowd here with yet another summary, "The Wisdom of Crowds" (which is actually sitting on my desk, next to "Good to Great") says that to have a "smart" crowd, these conditions must apply:

- Independence - people don't look at one another's answers prior to submitting their own.

- Diversity of opinion

- Decentralization

- A way to aggregate the results

The independence thing is the problem with digg/reddit/yc.news etc... - instead of a bunch of people voting on their own, and then seeing what comes out, you see ahead of time how everyone else has voted, and reddit groupthink ensues. News.yc is better because of the high quality of the people, not the algorithm.

Oh, the book is at:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/23/the-wisdom-of-crow...

But I haven't finished the summary yet... contributions welcome:-)
So instincts don't exist?
I think it's ridiculous to claim that this book represents the ultimate truth in the subject.

This subject is in its infancy indeed.
The conclusions on this are pretty weak.
"55 people polled."

Not that I disagree with the poll's conclusions, but its methodology is pretty laughable.
You can't accept this practice as reasonable unless you accept that publishers can also block, or attempt to block, users who block ads.

If you ask me, both are fair game.
Actually, this seems to be from PC Magazine and just reprinted in Fox.
The article's content diverges from the headline quickly. It's worth reading, especially if you're interested in AI.
The JVM being well-specified is what allows other languages (like JavaScript) to be compiled to run on it. It also makes it easier to extend.

Rhino on JVM has the advantages of having access to any java library you want (sun distributes many standard ones, and there are tons of other open-source ones on the internet). Another advantage is that the JVM does hotspot optimization which leads to speed improvements. Most other interpreted languages, such as Ruby or Python, are not as far along with their runtimes.

As for Java vs. scripting languages, that's a matter of taste. In my experience the way to minimize bugs is to write less code, and I explained above why Java programs tend to be verbose, so I believe the benefits of terseness in scripting languages outweigh the benefits of static typing in Java.
Dvorak makes it seem binary. You either have a local solution or you have to rely on a web server. I bet many successful apps in the future will have a slightly thicker client (e.g., based on Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, etc) that syncs with the cloud but still operates locally. Google Gears is one step in that direction.
Appealing stories are often not true, and if true, often not important. Unfortunately, the demand for stories is based almost entirely on how appealing they are. So any place in the media where editorial judgment is absent tends to be filled with speculation, rumor, myths, triteness and trash.
My startup. Comments?
Wondering what you all think of this. Does it make sense? Would you use it? Comments in general?
Dopplr, Social Network for World Travelers, Gets A-List Seed Funding
She was the Program Manager, and I don't think that she's taking credit for anything here.

She's obviously open to reviewing her decisions and opinions, and that's more than most people are able to do. I think your criticism is a little undeserved based on this article.