skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Letting people start businesses and reap the rewards is probably all that is needed. A great deal of business in China is either state owned or heavily invested by the state (which are effectively the same). The banking sector that could power an entrepreneurial caste doesn't exist. Credit in China is extremely bad.

Opening China to foreign banks would help a lot. The first consumer banks move into China on 2009, I think, but that might be pushed back.

People are smart there. Given the choice between a state owned bank which had 25% non-performing loans just a few years ago, and a citibank, they will choose the citibank almost every time. This transition could be blocked by the people on top.
I'm seeing "Agile Web Development with Rails 3rd Edition" coming out soon!
There is a huge logical fallacy in saying our good jobs are going to China and the stuff China produces is junk. They produce things we buy, which means it isn't junk. They make it cheaper than we do, which means they are better at it (environmental concerns aside).

Have you seen the growth curves from China recently? Sustained double digit growth for _decades_. It is unprecedented. China isn't "doing a Japan". They are doing so much better than that.
Loose also means "to unleash". The intern is probably a mole.
Yeah, I'm totally with you here. Not sure there was much to recommend about the world protrayed in Gattaca, but they sure did look good in those suits.

All my lawyer friends hate it, though. I think it comes down to associations. I never wear a suit to work, so when I "suit up", it's typically because I'm going to a wedding or other formal party where I'll drink free booze, dance a bit, and listen to a cool band - usually surrounded by very attractive women who are also dressed up.

If I associated suits with showing up at work every morning in a stuffy work environment, I'd probably hate them too.
Facebook deal was "rich" and Microsoft "paid a premium" exec admits
Microsoft sure of Facebook's value
Wisdom of the Crowds at its finest.
The OS "community" cannot defeat the laws of economics in any real way--there are x number of programmers stupid enough to donate their time for the benefit of corporations, but that number is probably more limited than thought. Many OS programmers are bankrolled by companies that benefit from software commodification--companies like IBM. It's very, very sad that OSS has such a good reputation among programmers, when it can only hurt them.
Providers question 'neutral net'
Yeah... I especially "like" this new trend in hiring: best programming jobs now REQUIRE candidates to participate in some open source project, while very few of those companies themselves make any significant contributions to OS community.
Next Gen Nuclear Reactors
uhmm .. didnt know that ! thannks !
I think he meant your career as a global entertainment icon. And yes, I make less than Hannah Montana, so my career as a global entertainment icon is shot.
> Letting people start businesses and reap the rewards is probably all that is needed.

My poorly-expressed point is that that's not really a "push" so much as it is a pulling back by the leader's organization, a giving up of power. Worse yet, it's allowing potentially competitive powers.

Orgs and their leaders gain power by controlling. Creating by giving up power is very different.
I like how you just post every single TechCrunch entry.
Change Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Buddhism and Happiness)
Ponder or plod
The Deconstruction of a Failing Startup
If recent news reports are accurate, it appears that Wikipedia may be devolving into a Web 2.0 version of "Lord of the Flies"
There's some good information there if you're trying to choose a web framework. I would just ignore the ratings.
Virginia Tech Urban Challenge Presentation (ppt)
Techdirt: There's No Such Thing As An Anonymized Dataset
Well said. Wikipedia has become a giant mess full of hidden agendas and now that we've had a peek behind the curtain, I'm worried about the quality of information that's there. Powerful interests have managed to infiltrate Wikipedia and are changing the reality.
Well... you're not alone. We had a couple of phone calls from "customers" who (we are 99% certain) were our competitors almost immediately after we launched.

They weren't intelligent enough to "control the conversation and information flow" though :-) But it was nice to pause for a second and realize that two guys with some spare coding time had built something to make existing businesses a bit worried.
How retail stores are scrambling to catch up with shoppers empowered by the Web
Pretty sure she (Montana/Cyrus) can actually sing.
One new thing is the ActiveREST module, which provides a lot of neat support for creating RESTful services.

Between this and Ruby 1.9 there's some fun new stuff for RoR folks to play with.
This is a weakness of user-generated-contents. We have seen this on Reddit and Digg and now Wikipedia.
All real booms in history have to do with people in power stepping back and letting it happen. Even government sponsored R&D requires a free market to blossom. Of course growth of truly creative forces requires a pull back of power.

Put another way, you'll never get dynamic distributed growth through top-down decision making.

Yes, they need to give up power. If they don't, the change won't happen.
It's certainly a reassertion of michel's iron law of oligarchy.

That said, the article seems a little overzealous, a little like the accused poster's editing. Still, it's good to sully wikipedia's reputation a little because some people put far, far too much faith in wikipedia's "facts".
If anyone doubted that going with the x86 architecture for the OLPC was a mistake, this should convince you.
Fred Wilson: Social Blogging (more "lightweight, social, and interactive" than just blogging)
Why shouldn't he be allowed to be annoyed by it? Consider somebody enticing away your spouse, would you be annoyed?
I'm quite hesitant about giving any third party access to my personal data, although Facebook clearly has a very accurate profile of me. However, OAuth seems quite cool if I ever were to do so on a more extensive level (for instance, I've never given facebook access to my gmail account for it to obtain my address book).

I'm not keen on OpenID though. At the moment if someone grabbed my facebook password I'd be understandably annoyed. But if someone grabbed my OpenID password, and I used that for lots of sites, I'd be devastated.
Far from boring. An Emacs that had javascript as its extension language would be very interesting.
IBM System to Scan Streets for Crime at Beijing Olympics
I know we're pretty excited. Performance is going to be a major issue for us once we get into providing live stats for people. We'll see how this helps.
Or whorepresents.com.
Last Chance for M&A Dealmaker Growth Strategies Course
Being a thoughtful, rational type, I'll suspend judgment until I've read the whitepaper. Then I'll vote on the article based on whether the conclusion supports my preexisting biases... ;-)
c) because other people are reading this.
I did read the article, and what he's really complaining about is words that are "meaningless" and "silly", and still are not "catchy" (oxford: instantly appealing and memorable). He's most concerned about the fact that the names are not memorable.

There is obviously an implied claim that startup names matter to a degree, but I think he makes it clear he doesn't think it's priority number one. Not to mention, it wasn't a whole article, it was a blog post. He writes for the Times, and he certainly didn't choose to make this the topic of one of his printed articles. He certainly isn't the first, nor will he be the last, to complain in his blog that web startup names these days kind of suck. I'm not naive enough to think David Pogue's blog is anything like mine or most, but it's useful to gain some perspective.
Great place for Christmas shopping.
Fractals in African cities [TED]
Overall I feel that the paper is good and accurate...

There is one thing that annoyed me though (having used both Python and Ruby extensively):

"Ruby and Python are really quite similar. For example,
Both are strong object-oriented languages."

That is NOT True. OO was probably not part of Python's design from the start. It feels really tacked on when you have to call 'self' everywhere, and try doing inheritance past a parent (to grandparents and so on...); that's when it becomes really obvious that OO was an afterthought in Python, though this may change with Python 3000 (haven't seen it yet)

For the record I still feel that Python is a good language (for my C friends), it's just not for me - or for most people i know that like OO
So use a good password, and don't use an untrustworthy OpenID provider.

Most sites will send auth details by email if you forget your password; having your email password taken is just as much a risk as having your OpenID password taken.
Meebo + Platform + VideoEgg Ads Suddenly Makes Business Sense
The grass on the other side of the fence is surely greener. Indeed, I find myself perusing nuclearphynance ( the "chat room" that a member speculated about Rentec analyzing audio frequencies) often. Somewhat like hacker news, it is full of intellectuals. However, unlike hacker news, everyone there is unabashedly pursuing money.
Flot: client-side plotting library for jQuery
FTC orders AdultFriendFinder and affiliates to cease popups
Haven't read the whole thing over, but they make no mention of performance comparisons in the conclusion. How could you miss that!
Can Feedsync Gives Microsoft Social Networking Props?
When AI goes bad: Microsoft pulls plug on potty-mouth Santa
I've been using unfuddle. They rock.
That's true but at least Digg and Reddit have been working on busting up these "mobs" while Wikipedia has been supporting them.
Rank idiocy.

A nation that exceeds its natural carrying capacity (like Japan) has to trade for food, or the deficit will result in hunger. Yes, giving them food will temporarily work, but it will make the situation worse through time--which is exactly what many people want, as it perpetuates foolish aid habits, to preserve their do-gooder non-profit jobs.
Use your Blackberry and WiFi on JetBlue
We use cvsdude.com
Yeah, that could be right. Of course, "intact" doesn't mean that they will have a profitable exit.
Many GMail accounts being mysteriously disabled
A: No one really knows, but it's in the same complexity class as taking out the garbage.

(got that one from my algorithms course professor)
Justin.tv Blog: Second live tech talk - Peter Seibel
Tap McKinsey's Brains for Your 2008 B-Plan
Programming is about logic, building software is about communication
discuss
Want A Seesmic Invite? Come and Get 'Em!
I think in a lot of cases (me, personally, for example) the motivation for contributing to OSS is just plain fun and education. Sometimes, I also end up improving some software that I personally use. That is the reason why OSS has a good reputation among programmers. The fact that some big companies stand to gain from it is inconsequential to me.
-Ofun
Don't Focus On The Exit
It's not uncommon for entrepreneurs to start talking about their exit strategy in detail during one of their first meetings with a VC. While it's generally a good idea to indicate your intention of eventually exiting, VCs do not want to hear...
my short experience with SVN on dreamhost was that it was very slow and a bit flakey.
Commodore 64 still loved after all these years
Haven't you heard? Performance doesn't matter; it's all about scalability these days. After all, what's the difference between 100 servers and 200 servers?
Uranium supplies and the claims about breeder reactor efficiency are far from certain. Nuclear would never even be where it is without massive government subsidy. Its cost effectiveness is questionable. The whole business smells fishy.

Back of the envelope calculations on tidal power and ocean wave induction are tantalizing. Truly massive amounts of energy are there to be tapped with relatively simple technology. Existing river hydro-power production, which is substantial, could easily be dwarfed. For whatever reasons the boys with the billions have chosen not to explore this route.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9344
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/26/1096137100758.html
You might not want to generate the chart for each page view - you'd probably store/cache the png at your end.

Of course if you need to generate > 50K dynamic charts/day then you're right.
VMware Server is free, so there's almost no tax on virtual appliances now.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6383715741
A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems
If all software were proprietary, programmers would have less control over their own profession.

Most worthwhile programming projects entail modifying existing software rather than only developing new independent software from scratch. Mostly this existing software is very widely used and because of this "popularity", if it were all proprietary, it would almost all be the intellectual property of corporations, which means that a programmer would need the cooperation or permission of executives and sometimes marketers, accountants or even investor or investment analysts to modify it. Since most people capable of making a technical contribution to a programming project do not have the (communications and impression-management) skills or social contacts to obtain this cooperation, in an all-proprietary-software world, programmers would undertake their own initiatives less often than they do now. They would be restricted more often to supporting the initiaviates of executive, marketers and owners of intellectual property -- as employees and contractors. If you have been reading conversations among programmers on the net for 15 years like I have, you will have noticed that the retired or older professional programmers of 10 and 15 years ago had a more fatalistic and passive attitude than programmers have nowadays, and it was a sad thing to witness.

Lawyers, marketers, investment analysts and executives mostly do not trust or understand programmers (or engineers, or scientists, or artists) and consequently will try to reduce the influence and autonomy of programmers (which explains parts of intellectual-property law, the harshness of criminal penalties for computer vandalism and computer trespassing and the rush 10 years ago to outsourcing).

Even though most programmers have never participated in any programmer-led initiatives, the initiatives have done much to make the day-to-day experience of being a professional programmer more satisfying and more dignified -- by preventing other occupational groups from dictating to programmers as much as they would have done otherwise.

For example, much of the internet above the transport layer before corporate executives "discovered" it in 1993 and 1994 was created by the initiative of programmers working more or less with open-source practices. The internet has created working conditions for many professional programmers more pleasant than whatever corporate alternative (think Compuserve, AOL and MSN) would have arisen if the internet had not arrived first.
This is more like dmoz, once great but too few developed too much power and never let go. Now unless if you know the right people it is impossible to get listed on dmoz.
Let me get this straight. So you would choose the framework with slightly better plugin support and larger community even if it meant it was three times slower and consumed twice as much memory? If you have deep pockets and have no adversion to unnecessarily managing huge server farms, then go ahead.

I've presided over two rails websites in the past and topping out at around 15req/s on average was not fun. Rewriting to Django and getting 45req/s and less memory usage was definitely worth it. (I'd rate my development experience in other areas to be about equal)
Whew. The airlines are aware that Voip conversations in flight would be bad. I'd been worrying about that. The downside of not allowing unfettered Internet access, though, is that the airlines can do crooked little choice-limiting deals like this one. (Brad Garlinghouse, the guy in the picture, is in charge of Yahoo Mail.)
I use http://www.devjavu.com/ Subversion and Trac hosting.
I have a social website. How do I market it online effectively?
My main experience is programming and I've finished a website that provides a fun way for people to read the news, vote and discuss the issues, and connect with other people with similar interests.

Could you share some of the effective ways to market it online to get more people to know about it? How to build buzz. How to get press coverage...
Digg.com/celebrity worthy.
You can try submitting to Mashable and Techcrunch for press coverage.
whats the url? that sounds like a great place.
Powell's turns the page
I heart Powells
http://www.gatherama.com
Sun Guru Foresees Data Center Disaster in '08
check out these articles, it should give you some ideas to get started.
How can we build buzz: http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/24/smbusiness/build_buzz.fsb/

4 ways to market your business online: http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/04/magazines/fsb/online.marketi...
Anybody who buys into this needs to do a self-check on their critical-thinking skills.

First, as others have pointed out, the King is responsible for his actions, not you. That means in every one of those scenarios, it's better to just take your stuff and keep it. Any King that set up such a cruel situation is not likely to keep his word anyway.

Second, it might be reasonable in the abstract to make some kind of concession to help other people, but that's in the abstract. Look at it this way - I might choose to give 20 bucks to a bum on the street, or I might not. There are lots of factors that come into play, and there is no universal rule involved.

Finally, there's a neat bit of jujitsu that happens, he switches from asking a question about what _you_ might or might not do in a weird situation to a general principle about what _others_ should do. Last I checked, we aren't in the business of ganging up on our neighbors to impose our morality on them. It's perfectly fine to save your life and let the others die. It might be immoral, it might be bad, disgusting, shameful, sinful, yucky -- pick your adjective. But that's the beauty of freedom. Without that ability to chose, there's nothing moral in the choice anyway. If you start adding up and subtracting lives here and there, you can justify about anything you want to.

It's just a dishonest story. Hunger does not exist because I choose to live a free and productive life. It exists because political systems are broken. The fact that we feed people by acting selfishly is a tough thing to grasp, but once you get it, you realize that it's about a billion times better than just giving a guy a fish.
I disagree that it is a "very small step up" from the book application. There's a pretty big problem, I think, with web applications being pretty much unable to communicate with each other or with other types of services. Facebook is attempting to solve that with the most "complete" system created so far, Beacon.

I think we'll see a lot more like it in the future. With extremely good privacy controls, no doubt.
Very biased article on Rails vs. Django that makes some good points --> http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2007/07/12/red-vs-blue
Ask YC: What's the best way to meet an angel investor?
Hi,

We're a startup based in Palo Alto. We've been working on our project for more than 6 months and now close to a private beta. The problem is, my partner went to a full time job to pay rent, and can only work on the project on weekends. He does all the development and thus our progress was stalled.

I figure if I can get some money (15k~20k) to support him to work on our project for a few months, it would go live pretty soon. A little money would really help a lot.

I wonder if you guys know how to get in touch with a angel investor? We have presentation movie and prototype but can't find someone to pitch.

I've tried:

- Email VCs

- YC winter funding

- http://gobignetwork.com

- Also considering taking a loan.

Thank you,

Leo Lin
i've heard people having decent luck with the angel forum.

from what i've heard and found myself, the best way is to be introduced to one. if that were going to happen in your case, it probably would have already happened.

a loan is really your only option. get it live, get some people using it, and then angel's will be much easier to come by.
wow good work
>He does all the development and thus our progress was stalled.

My suggestion: Learn to code.
Yes, that is all valuable information, but it's a long way from forming the basis of an economy.
New Startup Promises to Help Bloggers Monetize Digg and Reddit Traffic
FrontPageBids.com is launching a limited, invitation only, private beta today at PubCon 2007. This service allows website owners who create popular content, a new method to monetize those quick bursts of traffic.
I love Powell's. On a recent trip to Portland, it was all I could do to walk out of there without having spent over $200.
My trick was to go there just before lunch or dinner, so that eventually I'd get hungry enough to leave. It's really a wonderful place.
Yes,the Register is shrill to the point of borderline tabloid status. But they do put out a significant amount of original work.

Just to see for myself, I went to the Wiki page for Gary Weiss' bio and saw numerous attempts had been made to add a link to this Register article and all had been undone immediately.

Hopefully, Citizendium (like Wikipedia, but no anonymous editors and there is an editorial board) will be able to gain some traction:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
Nice summary for you:
http://blog.viget.com/whats-coming-in-rails-20/

A big part about Rails2 is also to take the cruft out of the framework. In other words, moving things out into plugins and cleaning up the core.
This writer (http://www.oftwominds.com/asia-crises.html) has some interesting perspectives on the challenges China will face such as availability of energy and water, and the impediments to advancement posed by corruption in the current industrial-government system.

I don't know if the author I linked to is knowledgeable, just something I read a couple days ago which seems quasi-relevant.
Does anyone have anything to add about the security of this:

Action Pack: Cookie store sessions

The default session store in Rails 2.0 is now a cookie-based one. That means sessions are no longer stored on the file system or in the database, but kept by the client in a hashed form that can't be forged. This makes it not only a lot faster than traditional session stores, but also makes it zero maintenance. There's no cron job needed to clear out the sessions and your server won't crash because you forgot and suddenly had 500K files in tmp/session.

This setup works great if you follow best practices and keep session usage to a minimum, such as the common case of just storing a user_id and a the flash. If, however, you are planning on storing the nuclear launch codes in the session, the default cookie store is a bad deal. While they can't be forged (so is_admin = true is fine), their content can be seen. If that's a problem for your application, you can always just switch back to one of the traditional session stores (but first investigate that requirement as a code smell).
we like junk then ! I am just tired of buying a dvd player a year. Of course it is so cheap it may as well be free with a disc, but still, maybe I am old fashioned and think appliances should last ;)
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency
How did you know I had one? ;) yes, there are examples of really good stuff. That is very encouraging. So its not all bad, I am probably just paying more attention to my bad experiences and ignoring the good (despite statistically being wrong).