skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tsally, I'm don't see how 10:31 and 10:35 correlate. Starting a business has very little to do with being intellectually curious. Relevance, added value, business savvy, determination, good idea plus excellent execution, etc... all apply to starting a business. Intellectual curiosity in a startup, hm... certainly makes for a better office environment, but necessary for success?

You can live an intellectually curious life anywhere with a decent library and enough time to pursue it. It helps, but isn't necessary, to have others around who are pursuing it too. It's why almost all the early scientists were from families of rich people. They had the free time to pursue their curiosity. If a grad school is willing to pay you to have the free time to do that, it's a good place for it. It's what you make of it (as others have said).

Now, on Vally startups. Very little software today will change the world; in fact, most is just incremental improvements, and all will fall by the wayside. We have no idea what the internet/computers will be like in the future, but I guarantee you it won't have a trace of web 2.0 left (except for the designers who then decide to go "web 2.0 retro").

The great thing about being intellectually curious is being able to look toward the future and bring something from there to the present.

My prediction? HTML, CSS, Django etc... are temporary placeholders for what the web will be. Things like neural computation, quantum computing, etc... will be game changers. Such things will first find a niche application, but then someone will bring them to the broader world and it will change.
32 Rack Resources to Get You Started
How to sell free software
One little step:

http://www.freestateproject.org/
'I was exploited by Google'
The (private) financial industry is the minor player here, although still culpable. The Federal Reserve, a government agency, has wildly inflated the money supply (just as it did in the Roaring '20s), setting off (just as in the '20s) a speculative boom that led (once more with feeling!) to a stock market crash.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government controlled agencies, are at the heart and soul of this as well. They bought every crappy sub-prime mortgage that they could find, and now they're gone and the American taxpayer is holding the bag.

Then there was the Community Reinvestment Act, which you'll be excited to hear is still very much in force, which allows "community groups" to coerce banks into making mortgage loans that don't meet traditional standards. Example: ACORN used to break into bank board meetings while chanting their demands for more loan money.

There was Chris Dodd, head of the Senate Banking Committee lo these last 2 1/3 years, running for President and paying no attention to what was going on, while accepting vast bribes, sorry, "campaign contributions", from the financial industry and blaming everyone else for the problems.

Oh yeah, then there are the banks (e.g., The Bank of Marin) that want to give the TARP money back but can't, because the TARP law requires government permission and Obama won't let them. Power and control.
IMO, Sharepoint is Microsoft's next big thing. They are becoming indispensable to midsized and large companies and creating a foundation that helps them keep selling copy's of Windows, and Office while setting up yet another revenue stream. Granted selling to other companies seems to be what large organizations do when they die, but it's still a huge source of revenue with little real competition.

So, if you are building a web app you can probably ignore Microsoft, but if you are building an OS, or Office product there is still a huge shark swimming in those waters.
My email address is in my profile; please email me if you do the site.

Yes, I'm aware this is an example of a bad comment for the rest of you, so don't feel bad about downmodding me. :)
Stanford CS "family".

Without knowing the story (but knowing some of the players), I'd guess that David Cheriton is also involved.
A Social Alarm Clock :)
Also misleading...it is purely speculative.

Google MAY cut off support for urchin.js. But with that many sites still using it, it seems unlikely.
My new site: Fun for all ages (onehaikuaday.com)
I'm a corporate IT guy, we're on IE7 and chrome (for it's application style shortcuts) and my users get about a gig in their inbox, but only if they need it. We had to wait to upgrade to ie7 but eventually the webapps we needed to use decided to "certify" ie7. Before that point we upgraded a few people for testing and nothing seemed broken but we still needed most everybody to run a "supported" platform.
Clash of the handsets: Seven smartphones for business compared
Technology startups don't have to worry about what Microsoft is doing? Microsoft is losing in a few fields but is still the world's largest and most lucrative software company. Just because it's no longer the youngest, hippest, and fastest growing company doesn't mean that it is dying.
A prediction: outrage at "Wall Street" fat cats will, in the next few years, become outrage at "fat cats" everywhere in the country. Especially more visible ones. Like, say, Silicon Valley "fat cats". The hungry maw of populist resentment must be fed.
Honestly, this could be a good thing.

A minority of "the rich" are those who got there by being productive, innovative, and talented people. As long as we nurture a culture in which they can thrive (e.g. Silicon Valley) they'll stay, regardless of whether the tax rate is 35% or 40% or even 50%. They're working for subjective reasons, not more money.

If the greedy, stupid, and criminal rich leave the country en masse, that wouldn't be a bad thing. "Losing" the uncultured, conservative, whiny and entitled real-estate new money who fuck everything up (like the OP) would be a benefit, not a loss.
Advice to those who did not get into Y Combinator
Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, if you were trying to convince someone to invest in you, the question on their lips might have been "What if Microsoft move into your market?"

Now the question is "What if Google move into your market?"

Far from being a threat, Microsoft is now an opportunity target... "We're going to steal this market from Microsoft" is a plausible claim. And so, they are no longer a big worry.
Tutorial: Hadoop on Windows with Eclipse
I think he should pay Google 22 cents for every time they play Rick Astley, because he's getting fre publicity.
"Waterman, whose fortune was estimated at £47 million by The Times in 2004, compared this treatment to the "exploitation" of migrant workers in the Middle East."

I like this line.

Presumably Waterman signed a contract with his publisher that allowed his song to be played by Google. If that contract is exploitative, surely that's his publisher's fault (or his own, for signing it), not Google's.
Some people like to complain about how companies end up depending on home-brewed Access and Excel applications. The IT guys didn't have the time/resources to do "a proper job" so the business workers just learned stuff on their own and wrote their own apps.

My suspicion is that Sharepoint and Infopath will be the next generation of home-brewed company apps. Companies already have them, so they don't need to be buying X, Y or Z to start writing apps to keep their company going.
Where do the foreign born work?
How I understand it is that Paul is saying Microsoft is irrelevant to those trying to build at the forefronts. That it is not going to spot you, the startup, and eat your lunch, because its core business, its competencies are not where you are "feeding" (for want of a better metaphor).
X is Dead.
X Considered Harmful.
Why X is the next Y.
How X dies.
Just in case anyone is still using X for Y
X doesn't know Y, does something that sounds shocking
X or Y concerning Lisp
Is X a systemic risk?

Any others? I wonder how the Y Combinator story generator would differ from the Slashdot one?

http://www.bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/index.html
maybe I just don't get it, but I don't think this site will be stealing any of Amazon's thunder. while Ztail's concept is interesting, it's way too complicated for the average consumer.
"X is a ponzi scheme" has been popular as of late, too.
Don't worry - they mostly care about Islam. In particulary, you can still harsh on Christianity and Judaism. In fact, that's almost encouraged.

Harold Koh, Obama's nominee for Legal Advisor to the State Department and currntly head of Yale law, thinks that the US should take such concerns into account. He's not alone in this.

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_04_05-2009_04_11.sht...
Unfortunately, I think it will soon become all too relevant. As government becomes an ever greater part of our lives, more and more becomes about politics.

The government has just committed for $7 trillion and will probably go to $12 trillion before this is done. Either taxes are going to explode in the future or the government is going to have to turn on the printing presses. We certainly won't be able to borrow that kind of money anymore. Either way, I don't want to be around, and I'm a long way from rich. Unfortunately, I'm also a long way from young, and most countries strongly prefer young immigrants.

The famous investor Jim Rogers recently sold his NY condo and moved to Singapore. He believes that China is the wave of the future and that America will soon be broke. America will soon be Argentina, the fifth wealthiest country in the world a century ago, now broke and unable to borrow money.
My technical IQ is pretty high, and this article is spot-on for me. Persistence is a huge concern for me, and EC2 just doesn't offer anything close to what Rackspace can.
Wonderful bit of commentary. Thanks for sharing. He even predicted many of the replies, like "Good luck moving away! We'll tax you no matter where you go"

I don't know how many stories you have to read about how people actually stop being poor before you figure it out -- centralized charity giving never works for the same reason socialism never works. Distributed small intelligent adaptive systems will beat overengineered centralized systems hands-down. We know this without a doubt in technology, yet when some politician tells us they have the single plan to deal with poverty, or homelessness, or whatever somehow our critical thinking skills go to sleep and we sit there with a dumb smile on our face.

It's good to see a good writer talk about his own experience in such personal terms. The whole point (for me) in startups is helping other people and by doing so moving ahead financially. I don't know how we got into this mindset of us versus the rich. It's sad to see it continue.
"...because I earned less for a year's work..."

Yeah, I'm sure he was working hard full-time for those royalties. Not that he doesn't deserve royalties, but I think it's a falsification to consider waiting for a royalty check to come in, "work".
I was living off of the charity of friends. The charity of friends - do I make myself clear? I never applied for welfare or food stamps because - silly me - I thought that was for people who really needed it.

This is the strongest point in the article. I was commenting on the Washington Post site yesterday in response to somebody complaining about Virginia rejecting $125M in blood money, who said:

"it sucks I cannot find a good, full-time job in my line of work"

I responded:

"Yes, it does, but you're being picky. I don't like the idea of my taxes going to people like you who are hunting for a dream job. It should go to people who actually can't find work."

A good segment of Democrats in the US are talking out of their asses because they are not truly for redistribution of wealth, but rather are driven by a bizarre sense of entitlement. Case in point: All of Obama's nominees who have cheated their taxes.

Steal from the rich when you're poor, then steal from the poor when you're rich. At least Republicans don't advocate the former.
The issue is far more complicated than just file sharing, the issue of file sharing has simply brought the anonymizing services to light to the general public. Sweden recently passed a law that lets our government perform targeted mass surveillance and is in the process of passing data retention laws. Essentially our government are bullying its people into civil disobedience.

Now all the studies and polls I've seen in Sweden since the file sharing debate went mainstream a few years back is that people think file sharing for personal use is ok and my own anecdotal experience suggest it's no longer something you brush under the table it's something you do openly.

This is going on at the same time as the Cinemas in Sweden reported no loss in ticket sales between 1997-2007 (also consider this is the time when home cinema packages went mainstream) and SF the biggest cinema company reported record ticket sales for 2009. This is in a country where virtually everyone have access to at the least 24mbit DSL.

Personally I like going to the movies as does my friends, we see 3-10 movies a year even though we take no moral issue with piracy and don't mind watching movies on tiny 12" laptop screens when we feel like it. You go too the movies for the experience it sort of like why would you go out and drink in a crowded bar where you have to que for overpriced alcohol and possibly be hassled by random drunks when you can have a party at home with whoever you like.
15 years ago, Stac Electronics was on everyone's mind. Where Microsoft might say they wanted to buy your company, or license your technology, then go on to steal it anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
NYC Entrepreneur Week is hosting a Business Plan Competition
Downmodded for picking out parties.

You can talk about economic theory without pointing fingers. Once you start identifying real parties and real people, other commenters will turn off their reasoning skills and start yelling "It's politics! It's politics! We can't have that here!"

And they'll be right.
I think these competitions are a great way to get public exposure for your company and learn a lot in the process. I'm applying for this event myself. Has anyone had previous experience with competitions like this? Is there a downside I'm not seeing?
Seesmic-TweetDeck Battle Heats Up
Vietnam Travel Guide Online 24/7
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In summary, a retarded article bragging about billions and market share without any substance at all to dispute PG's assertion.

M$ is dead, nobody fears them anymore, their products are no longer required, for every M$ product there are many competing products that work as well or better.

Like saying IE is the best browser because it has 60% of market share without saying it had 90% a year before.

Nobody uses it anymore and nobody cares.

That's the real issue.
This is possibly pg's most misunderstood essay ever, largely due to reactions like this one. He didn't say Microsoft is "dying," just that they're not a threat anymore.

And ultimately, it's for their own good! Microsoft's rapaciousness was hurting them, indirectly. Innovation in the Windows space dried up. Who wants to make the next big successful thing on Windows, when Microsoft will surely swoop in and eat your lunch for you?
Unfortunately, we can only have true separation of concerns in our software. American economic policy is intrinsically attached to partisanship, and this article is all about policy.
That's weird. I remember reading about 'brown fat' in the 80's in OMNI magazine. It was the same deal, fat that was burned first, before storage fat.
I didn't see PG 'revisiting' his post.

Did he write a follow-up I missed?
Run server-side JavaScript on Google App Engine using Rhino & Helma NG
One important difference between credit card buckets and marijuana legalization is that the latter can be done in increments. With credit card buckets, you'd have to produce a complete working system before it benefits a single person. With marijuana legalization, you can make relatively minor changes to the law with immediate benefits which don't have far-reaching repercussions.

For example, the federal government can stop making raids on places that provide medical marijuana to cancer patients. Eric Holder has already announced this, and he's not even in favor of legalization. This has immediate benefit without interfering overly much with the other systems mentioned.

Also, many (though not all) of the issues described are state issues rather than federal ones. Whether you can smoke cigarettes in bars varies by locality, and presumably this would be the same for marijuana.

Ultimately, many of these issues would be decided by the courts rather than the legislature. We have a common law system that thrives on vague laws being interpreted and refined by rulings on specific instances of conflicts between different laws, principles, and common sense.

Obviously I'm hand-waving, and the essay is 100% correct about how difficult this would all be. I've thought about some of these issues before, but others were mentioned that had never occurred to me, and I don't have good answers for many of them.

Still, we can legalize incrementally, let states and localities handle the minutia, and allow the courts as always to hammer out a set of standards over time. This legalization a lot more doable than the impossible-once-you-really-think-about-it credit card buckets.
I believe that with systems design or politics, people are able to talk about it in the abstract much more easily than in the concrete.

Politics is an unusual thing -- it demonstrates how basically irrational people are. For me, that makes it an interesting problem in communication: because may times the difficult things to talk about are the most important.
What you cannot do using Java in Google App Engine ?
Its entirely possible that it's something to do with my browser - I was looking at it from work where we have to use ie6 :(
Twivie.com: Your tweets rating movies
For Windows, KeyTweak looks like a helpful free utility for remapping the keyboard:

http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/
Visual representation of Java support in Google App Engine
"Because laws are pretty much like programs. You have to specify their behavior at almost (not quite, but almost) the same level of detail, using a language that's almost as crappy as our programming languages today -- English."

A very important point. This is why writing a new law to regulate behavior on some controversial issue doesn't do the whole job of resolving the issue.
Get Satisfaction: Help us review a new page design
Why PHP is Still Better than Ruby
Remote control of a radio station using realXtend virtual reality platform
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553834
Ask HN: How do you do time estimates?
I've been a web developer for 3 years now, just starting to get a hang of the standard flow of a 9-5 job. I'm getting a firm grasp on the technology, scope, and implications of the work I do.

One thing I have trouble with is doing time estimates. How do you do time estimates now? Did you start with something different to get to where you are now?

Comments from different industries or perspectives are appreciated. I'm of the firm belief that programmers don't know everything.
Google Eclipse Plugin released
Just 40lbs, wow! That's some great engineering, I'm guessing keeping the wight down was part of the design process.
Just after reading the latest Steve Yegge rant (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...), I read this article. Steve explores the hidden complexities of seemingly simple projects.

What's hidden in ztail?

Insurance companies hate adverse selection bias and have actuaries work to control its effects. Won't those who beat up their stuff be most interested in a "put option" on their investment? So, ztail must control for this somehow. They can stipulate that the item must be in like-new condition, but that would make the stroller customer mentioned in the article unlikely to place value in the ztail guarantee. It's hard to push kids around in a stroller for a year without some damage occurring. So, ztail is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They could stipulate "normal" use, but how many scratches should an iPhone have after a year?

Do consumers really want to purchase a put option on their stuff? If something's cheap enough, I don't worry about the manufacturer's warranty claims -- I "self insure" by taking on the risk myself. Options are insurance. We know that that $900 stroller (hopefully a quad model for that price!) will likely have some value two years from now. And, most mommies (at least my wife) take a lot of time when shopping for a stroller, so they know approximate resale values by brand, etc. So, one could easily calculate the likely value of the option at the date of expiration. The option doesn't seem like its worth that much given that most items aren't likely to be worth nothing in a year or two.

As another poster pointed out, the whole process is complicated -- both in terms of comprehension and execution. Is it worth incurring this fixed cost to purchase an option that will be a pain to execute?

I have a $2500 deductible on my home insurance for two reasons: (1) it makes the insurance cost less (partially by proving to the insurance company that you don't think you're likely to incur a loss!) and (2) because it's a PIA to file a claim for a gutter bent by a fallen tree branch.

I don't get this much like I don't get BillMeLater.
That is pretty awesome, yet at the same time, it's kind of a shame (in an ideal way) that he used samples rather than generating the whole lot programmatically... now that would have been pretty mind-blowing. As it is, it was more like setting up a sequencer that happened to be controlled via lisp. That's impressive, but the other option would have been even better (and is definitely doable)...
The problem is they became less about the news and more about opinion/personalities.
Oh god, not another attack from redmond disguised as retarded journalism.
You are correct, we've known about brown fat for a while.

Inuit have more of it compared to other peoples. The body can convert it more readily into heat, without shivering.

That article is not exactly chock full truth.
Actually, no; the PRS is authorized to negotiate mechanical rights rates on the artists' behalf -- otherwise Waterman would have to sign a contract with each and every local radio station, pub, etc.

The PRS negotiated the agreement with Google at a rate close to .022p per play (note: pence, not pounds!), which is well below the legally mandated minimum (I believe this legal minimum was introduced after the agreement with Google) for radio stations and other users of 0.22p per-play. Google, so far, has been getting an excellent deal compared to other redistributors of music. That they can't manage to eek a profit out of their business model is not PRS For Music's fault.

I applaud Waterman's looking out for the interests of musicians and songwriters -- considering how much mullah he already has, it's quite clear that he's not doing this out of self-interest. He's interested in protecting the community of musicians and songwriters. And rightly so, in my opinion: they are being fleeced.
How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data)