skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is even when you discount future earnings (accounting for this growth rate), GOOG is still overpriced. So then you start trying to justify the value on other lofty factors which are more difficult to quantify. This practice is totally deja vu from 2000...
Said that, I love this image for my desktop.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Promote_MDC
No URL yet, but I should have something up by next week. I'll be sure to post about it.
Yeah; it takes time for /everyone/ to see something for what it is, what it can be.
Thanks for offering to help.
I'm really psyched for x-ray / Instruments (built on dtrace:)

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/5
I wasn't necessarily saying that it would be an AdSense killer, just that it could be an equally interesting take on targeted ads. I definitely agree that it'll take time.
> The interesting thing is that Kaiser probably bought the software at the lowest possible price, choosing the crappiest company to develop it.

More likely, the software dates back to 1984, and they've been trying to upgrade it for 10 years, but since it now has 25 years worth of cruft in it, it will still take another 5-7 years to completely migrate all their internal and external partners to the new system.

See the comment from Jason Schulz on the original article. He's nailed it.
Privacy issues aside, this would be awesome. If I'm reading this properly, this isn't just Orkut 2.0 -- it's essentially building a "social networking" API for every part of Google. I dunno about you, but an app that integrates with GMail somehow sounds more useful than your typical Facebook app.
For most users it will simply be a place to find new things or peoples' opinions on things, much like people go to Wikipedia for facts. I would also like to point out that we are working to help users that create lists to be able to use that information to help them discover new things. If you have a list on your favorite movies, we could suggest users' lists with similar movie tastes. This would help you to find movies on other people's lists that have similar interests to your own. Along these same lines we plan to eventually add features letting you view merged lists other than the entire community, allowing you to view merged lists on groups like your friends, people from your state, or other groupings that users might find interesting.

In that way the site will be rewarding to users who build up communities to express opinions on any common shared interest.
Because understanding is almost always easier than data collection and tool-building.

Pure lack of understanding -- having all the data and having no idea what it means -- can keep a problem open for a generation or two. Einstein is famous because he solved a problem in EM physics that was at most 30 years old.

Lack of data or meaningful investigative techniques can keep a subject crippled for centuries. Physics went from rolling marbles to detecting radio waves in the two hundred fifty years since Galileo, while biology was pretty much stagnant. Without organic chemistry, even scientists were willing to believe that living organisms were made of some special God-stuff. Contrast that to the last 20 years. The human genome has been sequenced by biologists on their way to designing new organisms while physicists have been stuck throwing models around since the 1970s. Petri dishes are cheaper than supercolliders.

Now let's look at AI and machine vision. Our primary tools, brain imaging and computer simulation, are getting better every year. Maybe new ideas in algorithms or parallel architecture will bring "real" computer vision closer. In fact, they probably will. But even if they don't, this approach will definitely succeed eventually:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6600965.stm
"[Steve Jobs] did Breakout, one of my favorite games. I had the original concept, and he did the execution of it, together with Steve Wozniak."

Wow! Is that common knowledge? That's as surprising to me as Orson Scott Card writing the sword-fighting insults for The Secret of Monkey Island.
But Facebook generates more pageviews per account.
A startup or small company is actually the wrong place to go if you want someone to learn from, because any master programmers you meet will be so busy with work that they don't really have time for mentoring.

I was fortunate enough to have a series of pretty accomplished mentors, and I picked up some very valuable tidbits from them. However, tidbits (and the privilege of looking at their code) was all I got, because we had to ship product.

Ironically, the only time a skilled programmer in a startup will have time for mentoring is if they're being marginalized by clueless management and can't get any of their own work done. Unfortunately, top-notch talent under bottom-rung management doesn't tend to stay very long...
1. Leveraging means putting it in your face. Anything on Google.com right now will gain quite a lot of leveraging (except for Gpay, I don't know what kind of conversion was attained when that link was on the front page). Google has made it a mission to avoid that because people everywhere will instantly complain and bitch when little notes start popping up asking you to join Orkut.

2. As for paying all that money to News Corp? Maybe the same reason Microsoft is paying all that money to Facebook? They're paying a giant game of expensive keepaway.
PhD student speeds up Internet by 200 times
I did not know that. I had thought it was an external buy.
If possible go for the company with the larger number of people. Small companies have lots of work (because of less people) and even though its good for learning, as a startupper, you can use some spare time.
No, I think Marc is referring to why in the world Yahoo shelled out $5.7 billion for Broadcast.com.
Is this a reason for Google to be scared?
Thanks for the info.

I hack a fair bit (mostly LAMP, where P = perl). I've created a few apps, both web and desktop, and have built a few various departments for companies, and have hired hackers in the past to work for me.

I've been on both sides of this 2% equity "problem".

If you guys all want to rally around the idea that the first developer in any startup is worth a double-digit stake based on nothing other than a spirit of camaraderie, that's fine with me, and I'm not offended by being modded down.

If you look at my various posts, I never said this guy WASN'T worth more than 2%, but I did say that there are more factors to consider.

Anyway, thanks for the info.
I am only halfway through, but I love this gem: "I was flattered by his interest, so I thought it over. That is, I indulged in what young men frequently mistake for thought. In imagination, I saw my name over the door and myself in a fine glass office looking out and watching clerks taking in money."

His conception of brilliance is different than mine, but there is clarity in what he is trying to communicate.
If you actually are interested in building productivity software maybe you'd be interested in this user's anecdote.

I use a wiki to stay organized at work. Basically I use Textile as a substitute for neato Ajax todo lists:

h4. Stuff I gotta do today

# Item 1
# Item 2
...

I don't think productivity software is for people who can't stay organized. A wiki or some other simple, flexible tool like that (Backpack from 37Signals seems good) has a lot of advantages over typing in Notepad: accessibility from mobile devices, version control, and all the goodness that comes with a simple data-driven web application.

I don't need the software trying to be a clever bugger telling me what to do and when, that's for me to decide. It's mainly just I don't forget little things and always have an extremely clear picture of what I've done and what I'll be doing in the near future for my boss and for myself. (Yes, my boss, I realize that's a quaint notion on this site.) Sticky notes, I've found, just don't scale.

I think simple wiki-like apps like Backpack are good enough that it would be hard to displace them as the best general solution for most people.
HMO? Kaiser? That explains it. It doesn't matter. They are in the health care, er a, money printing business. Nothing matters. Every cost gets passed on. Nothing makes sense in that industry. It is an oligopoly protected by a monopoly (the AMA).

Enter that industry at your own peril. Anything logical you ever learned in business no longer applies.
The Last Supper: 16 Billion Pixels (172181 x 93611)
Nobody I know cares about that. Nobody even realizes that Google stores every single search you do. People should care, but they don't, and they're not going to either.
Note there is music at the link. (I have no idea why).

The group singing is the Swingle Singers, if anyone is curious.
I thought Google was overpriced when it was $170 a share, and I shorted it. Lost me quite a bit of money. I was wrong, it wasn't overpriced then. It is overpriced now, but I've stopped speculating.
What's so ridiculously hard about indexing and searching? Google does it well, but if I had to use MSN or Yahoo I'd hardly notice.

It's very hard for a startup to beat Google at general search, but by choosing a subset (cheap prices, reviews of consumer electronics, vacations, flights, symptoms of illnesses, mailinglists and forums, blogs, movies, music lyrics, torrents, shareware, etc etc etc) startups will slowly encroach on Google's territory.

Finally, it may be very difficult to build a better Google, but I find it extremely easy to imagine one.
Business Models for Music Distribution after the P2P Revolution [pdf]
Automattic Spurns $200 Million Acquisition Offer
About #1 you said: "They just seem like a perfect fit." I'd go with your gut.
Based on my experience this summer as the third programmer at a small startup, I have to disagree. If you already have something of a background (i.e., you know enough to at least hack together something that works) and are willing to work hard, a startup can be an incredible place to learn. It provided 1) good example code I could conform to, 2) the knowledge that other people would be reading and working with my code, and 3) an environment where everything I did mattered to the product. For me, this was an unbeatable learning-by-doing environment.
Maybe you could try what Leonardo da Vinci did, and sleep 15 minutes every 2 hours. I haven't tried this yet but it's on my list... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
There is something in what the original author wrote. It sounds like what he means by "brilliant" are the kind of people who describe themselves as "idea guys." And though Google likes to hire PhDs, I hear they too are suspicious of idea guys.

The author is mistaken about Edison, though. He might have had a hard time working for a boss, especially later in his life, but he was not merely an idea guy. Oddly enough, Edison's own PR may be to blame for this. It left people in the early 20th century thinking of him as a lofty genius rather than the tireless tinkerer he had in fact been.
>and my doctor doesn't believe my claims at being depressed and needing anti-depresents to "perk things up a bit"

If you want a drug solution to your problem, time release amphetamine as prescribed for ADHD is your best bet. Also look into Modafinil -- it literally takes away the desire to sleep and feeling of tiredness without amphetamine-like stimulating effects. It's FDA approved for narcolepsy but feel free to ask your doctor for an off-label prescription. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
Porn in Exchange for Captcha Work
It's not the title, it's the reward for risk and contribution.

Right now, it's an unfundable idea. If his contribution makes it fundable, that's significant.
well for a contrarian view (correct me if I'm wrong) besides OS X, I don't know of any other OS other than Solaris that actually ships with Java or includes it with the OS's updates.

Neither Windows nor Linux does this (or has this changed since Java went open source?). Both users and developers on those platforms have to download java separately (unless the OEM PC maker has a deal with Sun).

Not to mention that most companies that use Java, typical stay one version behind the latest one anyways, to make transition from one version to another as painless as possible.
This is just plain brilliant!
http://reddit.blogspot.com/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep-groggy-j...
yeah Amazon should take notes for Mechanical Turk haha
http://unspun.amazon.com/
Trying to reach Hacker News readers located in Mexico City.
It would be nice to meet likeminded people in Mexico City, you can call for programmers/web devs/web entrepeneurs/whatever, but my guess is if youre a HN reader, youre covered; so, if youre in Mexico, drop a line to losdosplebitos at gmail.
Gmail 2.0 Screenshots
I thought Zen was something one applied to circumstances, or had a bearing on how one dealt with events or activities.

Question: Do you think Zen has something in common with archery?
The Aaronson $25.00 Prize
"...they get excited over revolutionary developments but grow weary at repetitive small tasks."

Blast! He's got me. I'm not claiming to be brilliant, but, boy oh boy, do I ever tire of repetitive small tasks. If only there were some way to automate them!

Perhaps, one day, some wondrous machine will be created that will relieve us of the burden of empty, mechanical processes. Mayhaps even a small industry might be built around the design and construction of such machines.

What were Larry Wall's 3 programmer virtues? Impatience, laziness, and hubris?
Really? This is funny? How funny is it that some people are getting kernel panics when upgrading to leopard? (kernel panic == bsod)
Aren't tons of little specialized search engines the problem Google was made to fix?
hmm the author (of the original article) seems to have a weakness for falling for schemes sold to him by people possessing what he thinks of as "signals" of brilliance (a PhD, a rumor etc). And then he gets screwed by following their advice. he is susceptible to people possessing a combination of these signs of brilliance and good salesmanship.

I think the article tells us more about the character flaws of the author than make any insightful comments about brilliance vs hardwork (say). To paraphrase PG, even good hackers find it difficult to recognize other good hackers and it is impossible for a non hacker to distinguish between the really good hackers and the poseurs. I would be surprised if the dynamic didn't hold in other fields as well.
Somebody not hire this man!
I've worked with CODASYL network databases, which are essentially the same as object databases (except no storage of methods in the database, which most OO databases don't do either).

Pros:
- very fast for queries/updates along the designed network paths.

Downsides:

- not necessarily fast if network path is complex,

- proprietary API,

- corruption can be difficult to impossible to fix,

- corruption _does_ occur,

- depending on data structures used, DB may need re-organization (resizing),

- design requires skill: not easy to redesign or modify once deployed.

While fun to work with, I would hesitate to recommend using such a database unless absolutely necessary. Relational databases are much easier to set up, reconfigure, query and update. These characteristics alone usually preclude the use of an object database.
When you are already on the main page it should not be a link.
This is well known.

Hmm. It would be nice if someone released a benevolent trojan that basically informed everybody that infinite porno is available via bittorrent. All in all, it would be nice to close down the manufacturing end of that business...
Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine Proof of Universality Flawed
Feature Request: Sort By Date/Time
I go back and read new comments on posts that I've already checked out quite often, but trying to find the latest comments is a doozy. Could you guys implement an option to sort comments by date/time added on a per post basis?

Anyone else have this problem?
(unofficial) YC Meetup: Boston, Sunday, Nov 4, 2007
We thought it'd be fun to have a meetup this weekend for anyone in town - forum members, applicants, friends, whoever.

Time: Sunday, November 4th, at 7 PM Eastern (don't forget that daylight savings time ends at 2am that day)

Place: Inside "Lobby 7" at MIT - enter at 77 Massaschusetts Ave in Cambridge, MA
http://maps.google.com/?q=77%20Massachusetts%20Ave%2C%20Camb...
(come up the big steps and inside the lobby - don't wait out in the cold!)

The Plan: Come meet other news.yc'ers, maybe grab some food, talk about cool stuff, share ideas, and who knows what else could happen with this awesome mix of people.

If you're interested in coming, just show up!
(Better yet, send us an email at ycmeetup@unquality.com, and we'll give you our cell numbers and more detailed directions if you're from out of town)

My friend Rob and I will be there no matter what - hope you can join us.
See presentation by Luis von Ahn at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

He talks about how spammers use porn sites to correctly input captchas back in July of 2006.
It's very interesting how much elbow room (or is it rope?) these mathematicians give Wolfram regarding his new theory. I've read NKS, but cannot claim to understand it. I am not qualified to judge his other theoretical contributions. Does anyone here have the math chops to explain the, as it were, political situation?
Thanks for the recommendations, I'm checking it out.
Scheme implementors' response to R6RS: none plan on supporting the whole standard
AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
But Google hasn't fixed it. If you're looking for electronic parts, Octopart works much better than Google.

But how to find Octopart? How to even know it exists? I envision a search engine that gets to know you, asks for clarifications, and delegates to a suitable specialized search engine.

I bet a startup is working on something like this right now.
Why do you say that? Sounds like you have some battle scars from first hand experience in health care. Care to share them?
Thanks for the heads up. We have been looking around for competitors (and have already shown the site to a large number of people) and you're the first to point out Unspun (so at least they are not really well-known yet).

There are a number of existing competitors out there, but this one definitely looks the most similar to our concept. We'll just have to differentiate ourselves with features and usability. Thanks!
But building an indexing system that google already has set the standard for is a little more than what any "little" startup can do.
Personally, I believe that they are worth more than $200 million. There is something about their goal to make an amazing blogging tool is what makes me smile.
Where Designers Rule
Fedora does (or will, at least with F8).

And OSX never shipped in line with java versions - it has its own schedule of course. I don't know what all the fuss is about. People can still run what they run now.
Or not? I do not have the expertise to evaluate the disagreement.

http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=c34045c0fea...

Wolfman responds as well:

http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-October/012149.html
Sorry .. that was just a random thought in my brain .. heres the reasoning in reverse .. assuming the company is worth $50m after an year with a probability of 33% and worth zilch with probability of 67%, and assuming that u have a 2% stake .. expected payout = 0.33 x 50 x 0.02 = 330k.

the estimate was optimistic in my opinion. so i wud say a 2% stake is not worth it. its probably better to spend 1 year building ur own company i.e. one in which u have a significantly higher share.

but of course it still doesnt answer the question i guess
i think that's the problem: having idea people working on details. by definition they're not good at them -- it's like forcing a shape into the wrong hole. their powers are best used in creative positions

but those sorts of positions aren't very standard or given to people just starting out, so it can be hard for them if they start out doing detail work and their difficulty with it gets the better of them and they're perceived as incompetent. even if they manage to stay afloat in the monotony, their strengths are likely to remain invisible in the detail and the higher-ups never see their potential. worst-case scenario of course, but i doubt it's rare

i heard this second-hand, but supposedly IBM has a particular genius somewhere in california. he is very sloppy, is probably a night owl... but when he gets a spark of an idea, whether it be in the middle of the night, a 'task force' is summoned to jot down as much detail about the idea as possible. if that's true then IBM knows the specialty and significance of these sorts of people

looking at it from another perspective, Einstein is probably the most extreme example of an idea person. but despite being terribly lazy, he was able to do many great things because he _didn't consider it work_. an idea person with a passion is something of an unstoppable force

funnily, the lazyness is likely due to the overhead of the mind organizing data into a format which allows specialized (sensory/intuitive,) instant retrieval later on. the overhead is significant, but the gift is powerful. it's present in varying forms and degrees in different people and in extreme cases (like these 'brilliant' guys) is risky like min-maxing

i've found that jungian psychological theories such as MBTI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator provide a good lexicon with which to think about these sorts of things
Perhaps. You and I don't care, not yet. I use just about every mainstream Google product/service available. But, we're not most people. Most people are already weary about what they do with their personal information.

There will be a time in the not too distant future when this barrier will be crossed. Giving any large, corporate entity too much information is often perceived as dangerous, because they have a greater ability to utilize/mine/profit from that information than a new startup. I guess we'll just have to wait and see...
"I don't think that the details of which particular Turing machine is or is not universal are all that significant. What is significant, though, is how widespread universality is in general. And currently the only way we have of establishing that is to do the hard work of proving the universality or non-universality of particular Turing machines."

I smell a rat. His "Universality" and how often it occurs is what he has yet to prove.
I _just_ commented about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71337
It's like electric cars. As long there's some oil out there, no one will find them feasible.
He also talks about a lot of other stuff which is pretty damn mind-blowing.

Folks that haven't watched this talk... you should. It really got me thinking in new ways. There's a reason why von Ahn won a MacArthur ("Genius") Grant for his Human Computation work.
I'm so sick and tired of reading about this shit - pardon my french.

D-Zone has been plagued with the most pathetic whining I've seen on blogs for a long time. STFU already, it's going to be coming. Soon.

PS. Isn't this Sun's responsibility anyways?
Awesome! Thanks for organizing this.

I'll see you guys there.
Ahh, now I see. Yes, that's very clear. Cool.

I think that this would be very useful. My biggest complaint would involve having to sign up and create my own lists in order to see lists that best match my own. That takes a lot of time and energy.

Perhaps utilizing lists people have created elsewhere on the internet, just to supplement things? I mean, I have all that stuff already in facebook. Perhaps you could use that information, and allow me to find other people/movies/books/magazines without having the feel like i'm putting time and effort to join a new community.

That's the only thing that would stop me from signing up and doing it all right now. (I'm playing devil's advocate just a bit, sorry for the harshness).
an amazing example for building something people want, someone should get them a shirt.