skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of using their 20% time like that is pretty cool. Do you guys know of any other companies that use a similar approach, or is this unique to Google?
More here: "System overload - Choosing JSON over XML: XML SUCKS!" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55345 ) and here http://www.couchdb.com
I like the idea of Microsoft organizing more like Berkshire Hathaway... Warren's whole idea was that he only buys brilliantly run companies, and why would he change anything after he bought it? It's already brilliantly run. Microsoft could probably benefit from the idea of trusting the unit to be responsible for itself.

However, they will not spin off Windows or Office. I saw some stat once that these two products make up over 90% of their profits. They will milk those cash cows until they die, which will eventually happen, but not anytime soon.

What throws me is why he mentioned stock price and splits. Everyone that knows anything about stocks knows that splits are just masturbation. If anything they are a waste of money and obfuscate historical data because you have to keep track of split adjustments. A higher per share price != higher market capitalization.
I know National Instruments here in Austin has something similar. Not sure of the exact percentage, though.
Twenty percent time is great, and obviously it has paid off nicely for Google. But was anyone else taken aback that the Times would run this? It's a bit...puff piece-ish. It's good, obviously, to report on good ideas that companies have pioneered. It's just a little irresponsible to let an employee of one of those companies write the report. It reads a lot like a press release.
"... Do you guys know of any other companies that use a similar approach, or is this unique to Google? ..."

I know Zuckerberg (un-official) take on this is to encourage employees to "hang-our" together to foster better communication. "Educators Corner, From Harvard to the Facebook with Jim Breyer (Accel Partners), mp3 1Hr, 26Mb" http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=156...

Not exactly as left field as google. Maybe they cannot afford it or the culture is different?
"... By BHARAT MEDIRATTA; as told to JULIE BICK .... Bharat Mediratta is a software engineer at Google. ..."

If you read carefully the NY TImes writer was Julie Bick who most likely from the byline at the top of the article. The story teller does work at google. But it it probably the best plain language description of the 20% rule I've read.

"... It's a bit...puff piece-ish. ..."

Could be viewed this way but it's a first-hand story from a google engineer.
"... I think Steve Jobs is more than merely lucky. ..."

"... A reality distortion field. In his presence,
reality is malleable. He can convince anyone
of practically anything. It wears off when he's
not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic
schedules. And there's a couple of other things
you should know about working with Steve. ...

Well, just because he tells you that something is
awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll
feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass
filter his input. And then, he's really funny about
ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell
you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually
likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to
you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought
of it. ..." [0]

Reality distortion effect at work?

Andy Hertzfeld has probably the best description of how Jobs does what he does best. http://folklore.org has the best articles describing the inner workings of Apple from the blokes who worked there.

[0] http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
and here http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?name=Macintosh&topic=...
Not entirely sure myself. I'm just saying that low testosterone levels can be raised if one is willing to make an effort.
Powerset Testing Search Results At Mechanical Turk
In most of the cases I've heard of it's more like 20% out of 120%. Some managers like it to be very formal, so you have to dedicate a whole day in the week to your 20% work, which is (almost) impossible to do if you are working on a product that has to meet a deadline.
I don't understand the last sentence of the article. So they made 10 millions on download sales, and still are supposed to have to hope for selling T-Shirts to make real money? I would have thought that without the middlemen, a higher percentage of those 10 millions would end up in the artists pockets.

I can't accept that the only way to finance music is supposed to be to sell stupid T-Shirts.
User Interface Design Lessons
They don't say anything about what Live Nation is going to do differently than other labels.
I agree, but I liked flow|state's concrete critiques by example better: http://miksovsky.blogs.com/flowstate/2007/08/openid-great-id...
In the classic struggle between being relevant now vs.being original, the laws of motion and momentum tend to favor being relevant.

That is why we hold original thinkers in such high regard, but usually only after we know it is safe to do so. So, tip your hat to guys like Dave Winer, who repeatedly suffers the slings and arrows while waiting for the rest of us to climb out on the limb with him after we know it's not going to break.
I don't understand the article? What is broken about ranking the output of established bloggers higher than other output? Is he implicating that those bloggers are bad at picking good stories?

Also he seems very much caught up in Google-think, as if PageRank was the only way to do search.
It's completely off topic, but after reading through this thread, I have to say it: I love this community.
I was going to argue against this too because using integers to index loops is such a huge convention in C and then I realized that he's absolutely right.

On LP64, integers are 32 bits and size_t must be 64 bits (or you could overflow it with otherwise legal code).

Even when integer and size_t are the same size, using an integer as an array index is dangerous unless you make sure that it is not negative and can never become negative.

Here's what easily exploitable code looks like:

void pad_ten(char *array, size_t length) {

if(length < 10) {
error();
return;
}

for(int i = (length - 10); i < length; i++) {
array[i] = doPadding();
}

}

It's exploitable by either choosing a 'length' which becomes negative when assigned to the integer or choosing a 64 bit 'length' which becomes an entirely different (and incorrect) value when truncated to an integer.
But one is always guessing. Or always should be. You can't wait till you have complete information. You have to act on hunches.

Case in point: most of what Robby wrote was correct, even though it's based on a small amount of data. He's a smart guy, so he was able to extrapolate.

I think you have it exactly wrong. The mark of a great mind is not how few mistakes it makes, but the magnitude of the new things it discovers. Newton probably spent more time on pointless theological controversies than on physics. But we still consider him smart.
That's probably an accurate description of the median item of advice. But there are people who are good at advice just as there are who are good at math or writing. The recipe of the best advice = limited life experience + great perceptiveness.
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I was working till recently for a startup that is in a supposedly "hot" area (technically, that is). A couple of things I learned:
>>A-list bloggers can drive lots of traffic towards the company's website.
>>Companies place ads on friendly blogs, even critical ones .
>>There are bloggers that companies will wine and dine to get some good press. Contrary to popular belief,that BigCo's don't understand blogging, they go out of their way to make these A-list bloggers happy. I am not taking about folks like Scoble who are generalists. These are bloggers who specialize in specific technologies.
>>Unfortunate Fact - there is astroturfing going on in tech support and discussion forums.There are some slime balls who are very good at it, and get paid to do it.Companies use these shady characters both to plug their products and downplay their competition.
>>If the customer puts your product through a genuine technical evaluation, no amount of plugging by A-list bloggers can save you, unless your product is good. But, then, there is shady enterprise style "high-touch" sales, that bypasses the end-user.
Agreed. I was being satirical in my agreement with you; imo, yard work and lawn mowing, in the grand scheme of things, is doing nothing, as you stated. Sorry my attempt at comedy didn't come through. BTW, I am knocking married life.
No websites, probably, but lots of papers. A good start might be http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/spring07/lec.html (lectures 8 and 9 or so).
Actually, Office and Windows together make up more than 100% of Microsoft's profits. That's how Microsoft can afford things like MSR and entering new markets where they're taking big losses initially (like Xbox and Zune).
Tokyo soccer robots don't quite have Becks appeal
Start-Up Company Will Pay You to Read E-Mail
Yes, some blogs are profitable - very profitable
Nick McKeown on how he can finance an altruistic spam blocker
"We are looking for Bay Area people with innovative ideas who have put them to use. Please e-mail candidates to brightideas@sfchronicle.com."
"We are looking for Bay Area people with innovative ideas who have put them to use. Please e-mail candidates to brightideas@sfchronicle.com."
Tech's time of tumult - shifting to a mobile, ad-supported, on-demand, socially-connected, truly global network in technology
"The recent moves by old-line enterprise firms SAP and Oracle to buy other vintage software companies are just the last gasps of the old regime. The remaining players are consolidating, and the agglomeration is about capturing maintenance revenue from longstanding customers who can't move quickly to the new.

But the future is software delivered as an on-demand service over the net by suppliers like Salesforce.com (Charts), who sell on a per-user, per-month basis."

I think this is the next big trend in tech - on a par with business flocking to Lotus 123 when it first launched. I'm guessing the adoption numbers will skyrocket next year - time will tell.
I think the article posted on reddit is probably more honest (it uses the same numbers):
http://www.theseminal.com/2007/10/16/so-one-week-later-is-th...

Along with the top comment:
> Yeah, I'll wait for something a bit more substantial than "a source close to the band" and "an Internet poll", if it's all the same with you.

Plus, to equate 1.2M downloads with 1.2M albums sold... That's RIAA logic.
A lot of interesting viewpoints in the comments, but no one mentions the real reason for Walmart's floundering: that most people would rather go to the dentist than Walmart. IT has little to do with it. Implementing back office and supply chain software is like striking out the pitcher; everyone can do it. Where is the real business innovation based on technology? That's what people here want to talk about.
I'm a true believer in the dis-value of pictograms representing words. I lived in Japan for about 1.5 years, and was amazed that you need to memorize at least 6000 kanji to be able to read the newspaper well. I was able to speak and answer the phone after about 6 months and learned their two phonetic alphabets (1 for Japanese words, and one identical in meaning but not in look for 'foreign' words. But the kanji were overwhelming.)

My theory is that all of this memorization has a cost, and I think it is no accident that languages requiring so much memory expense tend to have users less able to innovate and integrate ideas given the mental overhead required. (I was in Japan because, for those of you who have not visited, Japan has some of the ugliest urban environments imaginable and they need help architecturally. Ancient Japanese architecture from the Imperial days is beautiful, but modern work tends to be completely non-integrated and non-harmonious with a few notable exceptions.)
I remember only 2 things said by professors in business school:

1. "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."

2. "25 years after graduation, 500 Yale MBAs were asked what was the most important course. Organizational Behavior was their #1 answer." Ridiculous, I thought, it had to be Finance or Marketing. They were right. Nothing is more important in business that your relationship with other people. Nothing.
Water sounds simulated with sine waves
"at a very particular time"

...that doesn't hold a candle to today. Make no mistake about it: the stunning success of the microcomputer was caused by businesses, not individuals. And that success took quite a while... Microsoft-1975, Apple II-1977, IBM PC-1981, adoption by business 1984-1990.

Fast forward 2007. A reader of this post with nothing right now could conceivably have millions of users within a year. You said it yourself: "inconceivable". That word no longer exists. THAT's why today is "the best of times".
13 things that do not make sense
Beat Detection Algorithm
most people would rather go to the dentist than Walmart

Yeah, that's why all of Sam Walton's kids are billionaires, because no one wants to shop there...
Scientific American's 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsens
"The Mac was Jef Raskin's baby, Steve tried to kill it multiple times because it inteferred with his pet project of Apple III and Lisa."

Raskin's Mac was wildly different from Jobs's Mac. Raskin's idea for the Macintosh was a sub-$1000 consumer appliance. No GUI. It's really only because of the cross-pollination between the Lisa and Mac teams that the Mac became as revolutionary as it did.
Windows Startup Sounds - 1.0 to Vista
They're billionaires because they inherited the money he made when people used to like to go there.

They haven't screwed it up yet.

Stay tuned...
Mike's Awesome Amateur Astronomy Photographs
Yes, that's why it didn't become any more revolutionary.
"I am not sure what can be done to fix it with the exception of no longer reading Techmeme.com... This means reading the 600+ blogs I used to read each day instead of going straight to Techmeme.com."

I think I've spotted this guy's problem, and I'm not surprised that he can't find a technical solution. What this poor fellow needs is an intervention, a 12-step program, and possibly some methadone.

Here's a rule of thumb: Dunbar's number is approximately 150, so if you are reading significantly more than 150 RSS feeds, you are indiscriminately reading the work of complete strangers. Delete your feeds and start over.

[footnote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number]
Carr is still beating that dead horse. His silly assumption that IT is a commodity has been refuted by dozens of researchers, CIOs and CEOs. Carr still doesn't wanna let it go... He's like a more cultured version of John Dvorak.
Why limited life experience? Wouldn't more experience make for better advice?

[Edit: I suppose you mean that advice with less experience is more valuable by coming earlier.]
Gobuntu has already failed
thanks dude, for clearing it up. I don't know why I always get confused on easy things like this..
You're both right. You need the balls to trust your hunches, to put yourself out there, even when there's limited data. But you also need the balls to throw your previous assumptions out the window, in the face of new data.

In the case of startups, it's true that everyone's advice is extrapolated from one or two data points. The key is to look at a lot of those data points -- read Founders at Work or listen to VentureVoice.com, for instance -- and try to find recurring themes and patterns.

This is part of the idea behind YC, right? I get that impression from your essays. These days there's less "At Viaweb, we..." and more "Out of the N startups we've funded, X have..."
He fucks more beautiful girls than you.
haha! my dad tried to start a company in the late 90s with this exact same model.
Graphical representation of Startup Hubs around the globe
i'm going to go out on a limb and dispute the claim that itunes is the best music player.

i feel that the design is non-intuitive, convoluted, and places much too much emphasis on visual appeal rather than functional design.

Qoove, however, looks pretty cool.
I've deployed one production Helma site http://preachingtheword.net/ for a client. I have been a PHP developer for many years, but I have switched to Helma for all new work. (I spend a lot of time maintaining and repairing other people's PHP sites, and my current new projects are relatively large, so that's why there's only the one so far.)

I care about the Java-ness of Helma principally b/c it lets me leverage a gazillion existing libs if I need to. But my experience programming Java itself is limited to writing a client/server othello game just to explore, and I have no legacy Java systems to integrate with, so I'm useless on that score. I was already a very competent JavaScript hacker (and love the language) before I started with Helma, but only in the browser till now.

preachingtheword.net probably took me longer with Helma than it would have with PHP, but I'm pretty sure that's all down to first project vs. years of experience and my own framework. Of course I haven't actually written the same site in PHP, so it's hard to be sure, but I believe my LOC are way down and I know that my mental grasp of the project at all levels is better.

I'm only just getting into the ORM--I actually did preachingtheword.net entirely with the built-in object DB. My feeling so far is that the ORM is not particularly interesting--it's more the mapping of objects to URLs that's unusual and brilliant (different from and better than the one in my PHP framework and in other frameworks I've seen). For the ORM, I think SQLAlchemy is more powerful and flexible in useful ways, but Helma 1.7 (under development) is planned to have some new power and flexibility in that regard. (Still.not as powerful as SQLAlchemy... maybe time to port?)

If you use the ORM all the time you are, of course, protected from SQL injection and Helma does some smart things with caching and lazy-ish retrieval, but if you need to run arbitrary queries the provided DB lib is woefully underpowered with no support for parameterized queries or retrieving results any way other than all at once. I plan on doing something about that myself in the course of this next project. (The DB lib, similar to most Helma libs, is a JavaScript wrapper around JDBC, so the power is there, but it's been over-simplified away.)

I think the templating system in Helma ("skins") is insightful but doesn't go far enough and makes some wrong decisions. I'm not using it in my projects in favor of using E4X throughout, which gives me XML as a native data type in a way not possible in any other language. E4X itself is a sometimes-frustrating mixture of brilliance and madness, but one thing it gets 100% right is the basics of templating: Among other things, you get perfect, no-thinking protection from XSS and other HTML screw-up attacks automatically just by doing the most obvious and reasonable thing. To me, that's extremely valuable.

E4X is just the biggest of many cool recent JavaScript features that you can't use in the browser b/c on Firefox supports them, but you can use them in Helma.
It just gets slower and noisier as time goes on.
It's hard to work on more than one thing at a time. However, from what I understand, you can accumulate your 20% time so that you can work on your own project for a month at a time say.
No thanks, I like my language the way it is... it was tough enough learning cursive as a kid, no way in hell I'm drawing tiny pictures just so you can better understand my language ;)
I have found that most disagreements are artificial; these are the result of a poorly framed discussion. I bet we agree, but are talking about two diffrent things.

I chose my words carefully. I did not say "the" mark of a "great" mind, but "a" mark of an "important" mind. I think we can all agree that Newton was a great mind, but I think the questions of what makes a great mind and an important mind are different.

I think there are many important minds in the myriad fields of human enterprise. These are people, like yourself Mr. Graham, who are able to understand their corner of the world and shape it.

I have observed that a lot of the people I see who are leading their fields have the quality I mentioned above. (These people have other qualities as well, but that exceeds the scope of the conversation.) They are in a position to lead, in part, because they have made a great many good decisions. As far as I can tell, the people who make good decisions are those who are not wrapped up in superstition and who are disciplined enough to make rational decisions whenever practical. Rigorously rational decisions require boundary conditions. It is important to know what degree of certainty is important. It is important to make a separate equally rational decision about how much time to spend thinking about the first decision (but be careful with this recursion.)

I can identity this pattern of decision making in your writing. You say that start-ups shouldn't spend a great deal of time worrying about their idea: "[if it seems good enough, then build it and find out.]" But, you rationalized that idea at length with the idea that implementing a project is less costly than researching the market. So, in this case, you are carefully making a rational decision to recklessly make other decisions. I think this suits my model (which is, of course, not certain).
Life experience is always limited (almost by definition). You've only lived your one life. Broadening your experience is generally a good thing, but it's still extremely limited. In general, people can't even comprehend how limited their perspective is.
Startups Sharing Office Space?
I've been given a lot of advice lately to forgo a traditional office and instruct engineers to work from home and meet together once per week with everyone.

Do you think other, similarly cash strapped startups would want to share an office? Consider this:

One firm would rent a small board-room sized space, with perhaps one small executive office. These are available for around $500-1000/month. The space would be shared with about 5-7 other startups, each paying around $100-150/month to use the space once per week.

For the firm leasing the office, the space would be almost free. The firms subletting would have access to a very cheap, fully furnished office.

Does this sound like something people would be interested in? Any other thoughts?
The Casimir Effect - Proof that universe will expand forever
Ryan Singer on creating forms that delight your users [video]