skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
heh, I'd like to see Anybot's Dexter bounding around on the moon. "One small step for man..."
The advice in this column doesn't seem so bad.

Looks to me like Apple has taken some of these tips, partially taken others, and taken others farther than James Daly even suggested.

3. Start pampering independent software vendors: Taken -- what could be more pampering than switching the underlying OS to one programmers like?

7. Don't disappear from the retail chains: Taken farther -- They certainly have a retail presence now, with the opening of Apple stores.

8. Buy a song: Taken farther

10. Get a great image campaign: Taken

12. Build a fire under your ad agency: Taken

15. Dump (or outsource) the Newton, eMate, digital cameras, and scanners: Taken

18. Stop being buttoned-down corporate: Taken

25. Portables, portables, portables: Taken farther

34. Port the OS to the Intel platform: Taken

50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development: Taken

That's just the most obvious ones (to me) from the first 50. I bet other people here could note more of them. Point is, though, many of these tips were beneficial.

And finally he makes a prediction:

101. Don't worry. You'll survive. It's Netscape we should really worry about.
Flirtomatic Reports Surge in WAP Impressions
I thought you couldn't keep a teenager's hands off their assets...?
I can remember thinking back then that Apple ought to get out of the hardware business. It might in fact have been the right move under any other CEO than Steve Jobs. He has beaten the Japanese at music players. How many other American CEOs could have done that?
Some of us aren't as incompetent as most people believe.
On the day the iPhone launched, at least one IED killed at least one person in Iraq. It's the same thing every day in Iraq, the iPhone gets to launch no more than twice a day.
Awesome. But it costs much more than that to do a soft landing on the moon.

The heat differential from night to day is the hardest engineering part. The launcher from earth is just a matter of money.
This is a copycat service, I think, of BagBorrowSteal.com
Yahoo! MapMixer
Answer by "When will you?", then do a "tsc tsc tsc" sound with that "I feel so pity for you" face and finish with a long sigh. It usually disturbs them enough to send them into coma-like contemplative state while trying to understand what you meant.
Privately expose the voting power on account profiles.

I think it would be bad for the community to know how powerful someone else's votes are, as folks would bias voting according to whether the poster had high or low voting power.

But I'm curious how much my votes influence hotness and match the oracles.
"> Nobody asked.

Actually that's how this whole debate got started -- I asked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52613"

Yeah, I took that as smart ass sniping. If it was a sincere question, I'm glad I've now answered it.

"So in your opinion would YC be better off doing both batches in Silicon Valley? My impression is people would be better served living there and flying to Boston for Demo Day 2 than vice-versa."

Yes, and I've told pg as much (he asked everyone in YC their opinion on the issue a few months ago). But, I don't know as much about the startup business as pg, and I'm given to understand that pg likes living in Cambridge...he brings the money, he makes the rules.

"yada yada yada, Guy Kawasaki sucks, blah blah blah"

Who cares? Have you actually read his books, or watched him speak? If you're too stupid to know a good writer and an amazingly good speaker when you see one, I'm not going to waste time trying to convince you. At the very least perhaps you can learn how to speak to people in public without pissing them off.
Why is every google story starting to sound like a segment from one of those documentaries about a lottery winner who blows it all?
Personal genomics isn't affordable yet, but it will be in five years. By bringing a product to market now, they're situating themselves to be able to capitalize on the rapidly decreasing price of genetic sequencing.
People are the same all over the world. But they are just under different conditions. That is all.

Tell me who's your friends and I'll tell you who you are.
How can you be an enterpreneur if all your relatives and friends suppose that stable and reliable job is the only way?
Google's investment in 23andme's Series A paid off a loan that Sergey made to the company.

http://www.forbes.com/home/sciencesandmedicine/2007/09/12/ge...
I did NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago, as well. It's an awesome experience. It definitely teaches you about writers block and the only guaranteed way to prevent it (write every day, no matter what...kind of a don't break the chain kind of thing).

I'll definitely do it again sometime, when I have more free time. (It does consume a lot of time. If you've got a startup, you don't have time to spare.)
If 23andme brings their product to market in the next year, it's going to cost at least $1,000. But the cost will certainly go down over time. And it's so expensive because they are testing for a lot of things at once. If all you want is a test for one specific mutation, it can be extremely cheap.
The thing he ignores here is the value of your own time. Call 8-10 dealerships? Two FULL weekends? On a run of the mill kind of car (like a Honda, Toyota, etc) the most you can possibly save this way is probably $500-$1000 (getting bank financing and selling your old car yourself are more, and probably worth the time it takes).

I don't think it's worth my only non-working time to save that kind of money. Now if I were buying a BMW or other high-margin car, maybe....
This kind of stood out:

"Read this instead: 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli.
Why: It will provide you with the precise moral foundation you'll need to be successful on the corporate ladder."

I dont recall PG ever bringing this up in his essays. But I think this is why a lot of hackers gravitate towards startups. They cant get themselves to follow the advice in that book.
From: http://www.solarviews.com/eng/moon.htm

Mean surface temperature (day)	224.6 F
Mean surface temperature (night) -243.4 F

Brutal!
EFF wins suit against DirecTV's attempt to suppress security research
" ... yet another example of a company that made something people want, and succeeded despite other factors because they understood their customer. " --- from briewis

Thanks for that comment. That's the point ... provide a service or a product that your customer wants and is willing to pay MORE than what it takes for you to provide, then you have a business. Once your business is profitable, then you are in control of your own distiny and that's why we do STARTUP.

Luck is a funny word and everyone can disagree on what it means and whether or not it should be called something else.

The bottomline is that when you do startup, there are a lot of things that are really outside of your control. And if you are hoping that they will come together just right without enduring the hardship and disappointment in between, and it works, then it is just dumb luck and power to you.

But if you work many years and things don't work out, but you persevere regardless and then one way, pieces magically fall in place and success is within sight, then you can call it what you want.

I call it luck even though I know better.

Thanks again for reading my article and for commenting.

--Denny--
How MRI works. Fun safety video with simple explanation.
$30M prize that probably won't get paid till 2012? This doesn't sound like an expensive PR stunt.
Read it more carefully. It's satire.

Edit: I'm referring to "The Prince," not the list.
I didnt dispute that. Its still true.
The problem isn't the concept -- the problem is their ability to execute on the concept.

As I said above, "affordable DNA analysis" has been a holy grail for almost as long as DNA sequencing has existed. Literally everyone in the field of genomics is working toward it; there's even steady research progress.

Unfortunately, saying that you're going to start a company to create "affordable genomics", or whatnot, is a bit like saying that you're going to start a company to sell affordable hydrogen-powered cars. The technology is maybe-kinda-sorta-almost there, and the field is potentially lucrative, but the reason that no one is really doing it is because the technical, social and legal hurdles are still overwhelming. And once they're not overwhelming, the field will be flooded with competition from big, established players (i.e. don't you think that ABI, Affymetrix, Merck, Pfizer, SKB, Amgen, Celera, etc. don't want to be in this area, too?)

Even with all of that, I wouldn't discount 23andMe, but for the fact that the company was founded by two people with absolutely no experience in the field. They have George Church as an "advisor", and he's a big name...but he's also a big enough name that he would be starting his own company, if there was a technology worth serious investment (most likely, 23andMe paid him a nice little sum of money so that they could throw his name around).

Basically, this is a company with high-profile investment and a "wouldn't-it-be-great-if" business plan. I can propose brilliant, high-concept ideas, too; unfortunately, I'm not married to Sergey Brin....
Mechanical Turk Officially Closed Outside of the US
Particularly when you consider that:

a) Most likely nobody will be able to claim the prize.

b) $30M is like a rounding error to Google.

c) Google will make $30M in ad revenue in the first two hours after they put up live HD movies from the moon.
Fight For Kisses
Have you considered instead selling your customer a source code license? When we checked out the price of escrow services, we decided the revenue stream of source code licensing was worth more to us than keeping the code strictly confidential.

Obviously it depends on the price of your product, and how unique you believe your code to be, and how trustworthy you consider you customer. For us, because our product was relatively low-priced, and being a .NET app it was fairly easy to decompile it anyway, the decision was pretty easy.

Incidentally, my understanding is that a lot of the price of escrow comes from the pain if the counterparty tries to execute the escrow contract - I think these things can be pretty contentious. Also, some escrow agents will verify that your code builds, as I recall, so this isn't an entirely commodity service.
I wonder how much it's really satire. You'd definitely be better off with their replacements than the original list.
None of this is in any way specific to Ajax. It seems to me to be just another example of jumping on the "Ajax" bandwagon.
http://23andme.com/about.html

One has a BA in biology, the other a BS. Aside from the people they know, their primary qualifications are that they worked in pharmaceutical sales and investment.

This is a field involving cutting-edge research in biology, biochemistry, computer science and mathematics. There's a reason that drug companies have doctorates in their top executive positions....
Usually there is an online archive of mass email. I turned off my subscriptions with the thought that a search on google will equal any search in gmail for archived subscribed email.
All true. I meant more my comment more from a qualitative standpoint.
The Lunar Lander Prize. Probably more useful than Google's.
Malkiel's book on investing is really good if you want to understand how the markets work, but it's not really necessary if you all you want to do is maximize the returns on your retirement fund. Dilbert's 9-point financial plan gives the exact same advice, but in only 123 words:

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7BBE5...

The only exception is that if you are young then instead of investing in the index you'd probably be better to invest in the index of small cap stocks. Your returns will probably be much better over time, although in any given the variance will be much higher. You can't do this when you get older because if you need the money and the market has been down three years in a row then you're in trouble. The only other thing worth mentioning is that Roth IRAs may be better than traditional IRAs depending on your tax bracket. (And also there are some special retirement vehicles you have access to if you run your own business, though I don't really remember the details.)

The Malkiel covers some technical stuff, like what it means to invest in assets with a negative beta. (Negative beta securities tend to move against the market, so for example when the index is down gold tends to go up.) However there isn't really much reason to invest in these obscure securities unless you're running a hedge, so knowing about them is really only good for intellectual curiosity value.
The title is misleading. MTurk requestors must have a US address. MTurk workers can be outside the US.
I think it's meant to be snarky, not satirical.
You can watch Ramachandran explain this and much more of his research into synaesthesia and the brain in this excellent talk: [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4684607596399338611]
New Environmentally-Friendly PC is the Size of a Phonebook 
The tiny, "green" ThinkCentre A61e desktop PC from Lenovo can save users up to 50 percent in annual energy costs--and it can even be powered by a small solar panel.
I've noticed a significant increase in the amount of blog posts I've read about programming/startups/hacking written by Indians in the past few months. One persons view, certainly, but I have a feeling I'm seeing the beginnings of a trend.
While 'The Prince' is a better read, I think the business community takes it too seriously. The prevalent episteme at the the time of writing and the audience for that book effect its interpretation. Today, we live in a completely different world and that book is not suited for business, neither is Sun Tzu.

PS: It is possible to find some advice, thought or concept in anybook which you can apply to business.

Also, this list isn't the best list of over hyped business books.
"We're now at a point that business plans really don't matter.." - Kleiner Perkins
I haven't really kept up with the latest in image processing, but I've usually seen 3 points as the minimum for image registration. They do it with two. Anyone know of any recent advances in image registration, methods/papers?
I'd go for 'tongue-in-cheek'.

(not sure if that's largely an English phrase, or if there is a similar American term) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue-in-cheek

edit: oh, the book
Showing old films in cinemas tends not to work well. The hire of the reel is cheaper but an old film draws a smaller crowd. The cinema still has to allocate a normal sized screen to it (150-400 seats) which it could be filling with this weeks new releases instead. This may work however in combination with smaller capacity screens instead (20-50). The exception is when sequels are released. Showing spiderman 1&2 the day before 3 was released made some tidy profits
Jesus CEO?
> a) Most likely nobody will be able to claim the prize.

I'm pretty sure that Armadillo could do it if they decided to. They've spent about $3M to date on their development, but they're attacking a very different problem of (eventually) manned VTVL.

I'm still trying to get my head around how funding for this, and subcontracting / collaboration would work.
Talk about a straw man argument. The ten "over rated" books are - on the whole - a pretty poor list. I'd also call them over-hyped, rather than over-rated (who honestly would rate 'Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work' as a serious business book)?

I'd have been far more interested in seeing books selected from the 'recommended reading' list used for (say) Harvard Business School, and then an examination of the merits of those. It could also be very interesting to compare the reading lists of the top b-schools to get a glimpse at their emphasis and biases.

Like most 'top 10' lists, I suspect this was intended more as a space-filler than as a serious contribution.

This just made #1 on my '10 Overrated Articles'. Now I just need to find what to read instead...
I think you got this impression from William Clinger's proposal. He seems the most diplomatic from the gang, and still he isn't talking about migrating to R6RS, but cherry picking redeemable features from R6RS to enrich a design mostly based on R[45]RS. Most explicitly ((de)emphasis mine):

The development of Extended R5RS Scheme might even provide a practical migration path from the R5RS to some future standard that supersedes both the R5RS and the R6RS while unifying the Scheme community to a degree that might be hard to imagine at this moment.

http://scheme-punks.cyber-rush.org/wiki/index.php?title=ERR5...

Note, anyway, that Clinger's manifesto, while probably being an inspiration for the initiative, is not that prominent in the front page. See the opening paragraphs there:

On 29 August 2007, the Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on Scheme was ratified by the Steering Committee. This has made a lot of people quite angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Many programmers believe that it was created by some sort of community process, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Standard was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. This theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI, and so, standards being the puzzling documents that they are, other standards are being designed.

http://scheme-punks.cyber-rush.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main...

And some more aggressive statements of purpose:

To support the development of new standards for Scheme that fork from R4RS and R5RS in parallel to the R6RS.

[...]

To agree upon a new name to clearly distinguish it from The Language Formerly Known As Scheme (AKA R6RtlfkaS AKA R6RS).

http://scheme-punks.cyber-rush.org/wiki/index.php?title=Char...

So..
> The heat differential from night to day is the hardest engineering part.

Well, aside from getting a significant payload into orbit.
... and getting it to the moon
... and landing it
... and moving around

... and navigating the regulatory maze so you can:
... store, work with, and transport hazardous propellants
... actually do engine tests
... actually do test launches
... transport your test or launch stack across national borders

So, no, not really.
I said it was the hardest, not the only hard part. You didn't say why other things are harder.
More info here:
http://www.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-10/ff_moon
Present!

Most of the Indian hackers in the US are on the west coast (Silicon Valley and Seattle).

Most of the Indian hackers in India are in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. Some have startups but most are still working at big companies and plotting on how to get funding. The culture of entrepreneurship is still very young in India and getting funding isn't easy.
What a bunch of fools. But they have a pretty tight patent so it will be hard to operate in the same space as them.
Creating your own language. For example, Toki Pona has just 120 words.
Well said euccastro. The reason why I said it was the 'dissenters' is because if you take a look at the votes, you will see how these people voted.

http://www.r6rs.org/ratification/results.html

dfranke, no, these people do not have any plans to move to R6. R6, in their minds, is an abomination of Scheme and they will develop a parallel standard that's a lot less invasive and heavy.
At the first company I worked at after graduating, many of the supervisor and manager cubicles had little certificates on them saying that they completed some sort of "Who Moved My Cheese" seminar. I remember seeing copies of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" as well. Right before I left I saw someone with a copy of a book like "Love 'em or Lose 'em" a book about how to keep good employees. It's cover looked suspicious to me but I don't know much about it.

Honestly, though, most managers simply did not read, and those who did certainly didn't read anything about how to become a better manager, unless it was forced on them from corporate. Even those who took the initiative to read the bad books on that list will probably benefit.
Okay, good point. I'm stepping outside my area of expertise, but here's my intuition:

Radiative cooling and thermal isolation seem to be fairly well understood. They can also (unlike many, many other parts of the problem) be tested on Earth. Basically, any satellite needs to deal with this stuff, and designers have been dealing with it for a long while.

Now, if you add lunar dust to the mix, sure, that's a complicating factor, but I don't see it being as bad as some of the other things I mentioned.
Google Funds Race To The Moon (what?)
Yes, but what about:

1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game.
2. License the Apple name/technology to appliance manufacturers and build GUIs

A lot of the stuff is generic advice too
How a Millionaire's Brain Works
The Little Prince > The Prince. :)
It's all about the smaller screen sizes with this business model. Let people choose what films they want at what time, let other people buy tickets, serve beer, etc.

Then again.. that's what you do with netflix.
Cue scene of 1000s of Indian hackers cresting a hill, each holding a copy of SICP.
Maybe this is a bit simpler, since you know that UP is North.
Two thumbs up for the Dilbert financial plan. May it spread far and wide.

If you're the kind of person who can't bring himself to follow a simple and sensible plan like Dilbert's, I have the book for you: William Bernstein's "The Four Pillars of Investing".

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfo...

If you follow Bernstein's advice you will end up with Dilbert's financial plan, except that instead of one giant index fund you'll have a bunch of smaller index funds - some small-cap, some large-cap growth, some international, and so on. Plus bonds, of course. In other words, you'll be a Vanguard customer. But there's nothing wrong with that.

This additional layer of complexity might be good for an additional point or two of growth. Or it might turn out to be a useless exercise in micromanagement. But it's a nice safe way to satisfy your urge to pretend that doing a lot of higher math and complicated bookkeeping is making you richer. The book is careful to steer you away from stupid stock-picking strategies, stupid stock newsletters, and advisers who work on commission (who are, by definition, not on your side).
Unfortunately, no one has ever needed to ask me this question. I grew up poor and started working at a gas station straight out of high school. About a year after that I finally landed a job as a web developer, and I've been able to do that ever since. I've never really been without a "real" job.

One of my friends, however, once answered, "when the trust fund runs out."
Prize money isn't intended to finance people's efforts. Its merely an incentive.
I'm an old fart (42) who's been working for myself in various capacities for 20 years. I find there are two people that ask the question.

1) The jealous/conformist. They are asking you why you are not participating in the rest of the system as they understand it. A polite smile (as you would give an idiot or child) and a "So far things are going really well. I find I don't really need a regular job" works, because it lets them feel like they know what a "regular" job is an reinforces their value system. It also makes them even more jealous, and that's a nice benefit.

2) People who just don't understand. My mom and stepdad fall into this category. They don't mean anything -- they simply have no concept of how a person could exist without working for some other organization. I've been working on my parents for the entire 20 years, to little effect. With these people, just be patient. An 80-year-old without a computer is not going to understand Web 2.0 no matter what. So it's not like even if you had a "job" they would even understand then. To them, you'll probably always be sitting around playing pong or watching Star Trek TOS and having money for some strange reason.