skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hypothetical cannot win. This article spelled out what everyone already had some fuzzy idea about. But there are too many variables to draw any valuable conclusions.

Many founders share at least one goal: to get rich. To a lot of first time entrepreneurs this means, "Whatever works." If YC has a 50% success rate (if) and your option of angel investment has a 27% success rate, what would you do? OK, maybe you need to hire programmers, but 3 months of undivided attention and 2 quality hackers can produce results stunning. Goldenson is right, he is biased because he has been in the game for a while now. His advice may be helpful to some, but a lot of smart people go through YC's program. Why?

I hadn't even heard of Goldenson's self-described failed startup before yesterday. Yet, YC companies consistently get press as long as they are churning. If only we could factor these kinds of things into the equation. In his blog about his startup, Goldenson mentioned he spent $5,000 on PR. So what is YC's PR worth? This is just one example.

Too many variables, many not easily expressed monetarily.
>Actors are cheap, you know. People with name recognition are expensive, but the actual acting is pretty cheap.

In other words, actors that people actually want to see are expensive.

>Sets and animators can be replaced by software.

That may be true in the future, if filmmakers ever get the open source ethos and create a large library of models that covers most situations. Otherwise, anything short of strong AI is not going to replace the artist.

>People prefer reality!

Some people do, some don't. I don't. If everybody did, there would be nothing but reality programming.
I don't think these people are mocking those who have died, or the potentially fatal outcome of the disease. Let's be honest, this new swine flu craze is to somewhat a degree a fad, and I think this is nothing more than an attempt to ride a fad. I doubt the people behind these efforts are cold hearted.

In any case, good luck to them.
I know they both exist, and that they're related but I thought Defcon was the more informal conference and the ad seemed to allude to a more informal target audience. That said, you are correct, most of the research gets published at Black Hat.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I have no first hand knowledge of either conference. My father is an Information Security Architect and we often talk shop. One year he went to Black Hat and mentioned the complimentary Defcon passes, and I perked up. I love playing with Nessus and decompiling C code to hex and editing ASM like any other self respecting geek, but I'm far from that league.
Is Prezi the Best Business Model in the World?
I wasn't trying to get at JWZ, I was just making a silly unrelated joke, almost a pun. I don't have anything against him.

But I'll try and be more clear next time.
OK Hackers it's our responsibility to inspire Charlie. He said so. I personally liked book 2 of the Merchant Princes and Accelerando, but that's not really inspiration.

I recommend his blog http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html because of the discussions of ideas.
Don't need to. Look at the workspace of an experienced Mac user (who's using a large-ish display) and you will see that there are almost no maximized apps, and that plenty of different apps share the screenspace at once.

Beginner users (and non-Macheads) hate it, but I've yet to meet a switcher than didn't like it in the end.

It's a matter of paradigms - Windows doesn't really have a lot of inter-app interactions via the default UI, so there's no real need for multiple apps to be visit at once.
cll has been this way for as long as I can remember. Erik Naggum was around a lot more back then, and he was just as bad as these guys.

[Edit: by "bad" I mean he clearly knew what he was talking about, and was irate that people didn't always see it his way. He never did give someone some code to delete all the files on their hard drive though.]
> Windows doesn't really have a lot of inter-app interactions via the default UI,

I think you're on to something there. Good point.
I don't know how useful this is to you, but here is a list of Java numerics libraries (and assorted other information):

http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/
The revolution will be localized
the version I've heard is "Emacs is a great operating system. Shame that it lacks a decent editor.."
Every single screenshot there has the content padded by about a meter and a half of empty background, though. Many, many websites have stylesheets that do that by default. The same space would fit a separate browser window with the same amount of content (or an editor, etc.).

Also, many people find text that wraps at roughly 70-80 columns or less easier to read than longer lines. (This is probably why the stylesheets set the column width.)

I used to do everything in fully maximized windows (I was using ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/) at the time), but it seemed to make less and less sense as monitors got larger. A widescreen 22+ inch monitor is practically two page-sized screens side by side.
Maybe not _popular_, but Recruitment Consultants always seemed to have the best business model :: For the Consultants.
Its kind of disappointing that they aren't trying to parse natural language. I know that would make it a ton more complex (and possibly beyond our capacity to do), but to me that would be truly the next generation from our current flavor of search engines. If I could truly ask a question and have the computer understand what I'm talking about to return an answer, rather than just trying to match keywords. That's Wolfram's goal, I think, but I don't know if they can really get there without parsing human language.
When I was younger, around high school, I thought leadership wasn't very important. I thought things like football coaches mostly acted as a drill sergeant, and what really mattered was the individuals on the team and whether they pulled together and made it happen.

I have since learned that this is unmitigated bullshit. The team's performance is bounded at the top by the raw talent of the team, but the coach is the primary factor determining how much that talent actually manifests. A leader sets the tone for the community, no matter what the community is, but most especially in voluntary communities.

Those who like the leaders stay, those who don't leave. Over time, the community becomes a reflection of the leader. Not a direct reflection in all cases, as some leaders can build diverse communities, as the Ruby leaders indeed have, but nevertheless, over time the community is largely determined by its leaders.

Leadership matters, and the damage done by the leadership here is quite significant, and no amount of protest by the ones led can really change this. (And remember the damage here was the reaction, not the initial problem; one guy can make a bad choice and we'd have all pretty much moved on; the choice to double-down was the bit that is the real problem.)

If you are seriously concerned by this, I would suggest the path of least community effort is for some of those names to step up and become the leaders. Open source leadership is quite fungible. The path of least individual effort is to go join the Python or Perl communities. Because yes, leadership does in fact set the tone for the entire community, and if the community doesn't like that, it's time to change leaders, or change communities.
For extra credit, explain why the Levitron DOES work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05FDGCis-Sw

(no camera tricks in that BTW, it's just a magnet top and a magnet bottom. The weight in the top must be carefully adjusted in order for the device to work. It will continue levitating for as long as the top keeps spinning fast enough - if you carefully blow on the top's side to speed it up, you can keep it levitating for many minutes.)
Peter Thiel on the future of Libertarianism, politics, and technology
Should I switch jobs to learn better development processes?
the best thing about these css frameworks is because they are built to be maintained and such, reading through them can give you ideas for coding practices.

if you can't write your own css, then you're a document creator, much like someone who edits a word document. of all the complexities involved in web development, css is a minor one, and you don't need a framework (javascript is a different story). someone had to say it.
Seeking your advice on my current programming situation
That's a totally arbitrary list and leaves off some of the world's most recognizable brands and/or biggest companies. In comparison to Google, HP and IBM's revenues are off the charts in excess of 100 billion. In terms of profits, for tech companies, Microsoft is in a league of their own.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/04/30/the-money-made-by-big-te...
Palm Eos: super-thin, 3G, and headed to AT&T
There is something to be said for that, but IMO you should maybe be using the minimize button instead of the maximize.
I almost skipped clicking the link, i thought it was yet another article/blog on code design patterns. Really nice collection.
How Would Twittering be in Real Life?
Why is it that when someone tries to "cash in on death" in a negative or satirical way they are evil, but when they do it in a "good" way, say by creating "support our troops" magnets, nobody cares? They seem equivalent to me.
Reality programming is quite a stone's throw from reality
> if acting on one datum was always fallacious, you'd think
> it would be bred out of us by now.

I think that we're set up to predict and act on N data points, and sometimes N happens to be one. The point of the article, to me, was that you have to understand this behavior in yourself and watch out for fallacies.

Just as if you know about confirmation bias, so you keep an eye out for contradictory evidence, if you know about the statistical problem of generalizing from one you can watch out for that, too.
Unix To PowerShell - Dirname
While I don't mean to hurt Indian sentiments, possession of nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers is hardly an indicator of the state of development of any country.

Any reasonably sized economy can own them even if half the population is starving. That is the power of aggregation. What matters is per capita income. Can India really afford to buy a laptop for all its children? $100s is almost three months salary for a primary school teacher in many parts of India. And there are hordes of qualified people willing to work at those wages, if the government gives them the job. Yet there are so many vacant posts, and if what I hear is right there are so many schools without any teachers at all. Why is it?
Content businesses suck IF you are the one developing the content.

TripAdvisor is a content business and I think they are doing okay. ;-)
Managing Your Boss: Your Biggest Job
It's not about can or cannot, it's about productivity. If you choose not to write your own assembly language / compiler for every project then you're just a code monkey?

CSS is very complex. It's true that you only need to grasp a few concepts to be productive in coding CSS for Firefox, but once you need cross-browser support, and even better, IE6 support, well, you need to learn about all the pitfalls and inconsistencies and how to avoid them or how to fix them on each platform, and that is a menial, unrewarding, frustrating, time-consuming task. Books like Bulletproof Web Design are helpful, but in the end the message there is, "Don't do what you want, do what is easy". If you need pixel-level design precision, you're going to be spending a lot of time and pain getting things ironed out.

Or you can see if a framework meets your needs.
sounds like you should look at haskell for a few design ideas about reifying state
Or take software. Does anyone actually believe that it was harder to write code for the ActionScript interpreter than it was to get Dowd's exploit (http://bit.ly/13OjyR) working?

It's not my intention to disparage Dowd's work in the least, but yes.

For all the cleverness involved in breaking software, it still takes years (decades?) of clever man hours to produce a secure, well performing virtual machine.
I find the machine you use dictates your writing habits. I've used many different computers/keyboards over the years, and I find it helps.
Hard Work and Practice in Programming
I used to live in emacs, so the startup time was a one-time penalty in the morning. All subsequent interactions were opening new buffers from within that one instance. (This was the X11 version of the interface, not the one that runs inside an xterm.) I loved it. Eventually I weened myself off of emacs because I felt that I needed to become intimate with one of the fancier IDEs, a move that I do not regret.
But is your advice worth (50-12) 38 thousands of dollars? Of course, it's not only advice, so I assume experience+popularity+connections. Is it worth that much money? Maybe, I don't know.

If startup is so freaking awesome it was accepted by a rich Angel and the YC, it can "buy" all that stuff for $38,000 from you.

The question of whether non-monetary YC experience is worth that much money is a hard one and it would probably involve calculating probability rate of success at YC vs Angel, non-monetary factors (well-being), externalities (with all the benevolence), and other things.

On the other hand, there is $38,000 just laying around, waiting for you to grab and multiply your runway by ~5 (50,000/12,000).
A lot has been said to rebut the math in the article.

One more smart thing I'd like to point out about YC is that by making it a standard 6% for all, it removes any discussion on valuation.

Those discussions tend to be very counterproductive: as the investor, I offer you X%. You feel insulted, you counter-offer. Repeat. By the time we are done and agree to terms, there is bad blood.

The YC method? No discussions. You know the terms when you apply. End of story. We can all stay friends.

Simple and elegant.

Is 6% the right number? 1% would be rip-off. 5% is essentially the same as 6%. It's small enough that it doesn't impact the founders in the grand scheme of things, significant enough that YC gets some upside. Sounds fair to me.
Interceptors add flexibility to JUnit
Oh kyro Your secret is safe with me and #startups :)
You're my hero now. Mining financial disclosures is right at the top of my list of projects that need doing.
For those who like Kurzweil's ides, might I recommend books written by the author Greg Egan.

His books, in particular "Diaspora", discusses the story line of ai-humans that live to invent, create, and discover. Their journey takes them through 10^10 universes just to solve one problem: the destruction of the Earth.
Using Java libraries from a non-Java language on the JVM is one of the happiest parts of my day, every day.

However that being said, the real reason why Clojure is going to become the most important Lisp is the same reason why Java has been displacing the theoretically-faster C++: multicore.
Emacs is not just a text editor, but a way of life.
They'll also give you much more money :)
Well, it's not about absolute percentages but relative. If YC owns, at the start, 6% and the founders 94%, there will still be that roughly 15-1 ratio on cashout. It might be 15% and 1%, rather than 94-6, but it's still the same % less that the founders get.
Exactly. Spending programmer time to gain some marginal improvement in CPU cycle efficiency is almost always a bad call, except when that code is going to run on a GAJILLION CPUs all of which use a lot of electricity etc.

I still think that this is only the case for a tiny fraction of all the code out there (Java is f*ing fast these days), and will become less and less true with each passing year.
I'm astonished that angels would put in $50K at a $2M valuation for a first-time team with a working prototype. That valuation seems waaaay too high to me.
Man, if my D: drive had emacs installed on it, it would be a :D drive.
Any idea where I could find that program. I think that would help me. My problem really is visualizing it.
What IDE did you switch to? Eclipse?
Stephen Wolfram 'as self-important as all get-out'. Wolf has been cried; A New Kind of Science left little doubt that "expert opinions" of Wolfram's work are worth a piss-hole in the snow.
What, she didn't say, "O Fortuna"?
It's the One True Text Editor
I think the argument is that Microsoft, HP, and IBM's revenues aren't as dependent on their brand. If Microsoft changed their name to "Bill's Awesome Software Company" their revenues wouldn't dip that much, people would still use Windows and Office.

With a company like Google the rules are different because the value is in the domain name. I think they're equating brand name with domain name, which makes for an apples to oranges comparison with companies like HP.
The most intresting mistake with the signularity concept is the idea that you can get a liner return on intelegence. While a computer with x processing power might be able to compute 10 moves deep in a game and a system with 10x the power might get there in 1/10th changing the goal to 11 moves might not be reasonable.

Another mistake is the assumption that the universe can support "unlimited" intelegence. Their might be a lot of room at the bottom but nothings says computing power can't hit a fundimental limits at some point in the not to distant future.

PS: When people assume exponential growth continues indefinatly they tend to ignore the growth limiters that only apply as you increase the scale.
Apple may become the new Commodore.

That's how Commodore revolutionized the computer industry -- by acquiring MOS Technology and designing their chips in-house to drastically lower costs.
There was a time when a person could have the entirety of human knowledge on their bookshelf, but then Gutenberg came along and screwed that all up. Since then, even the most ambitious person has had to settle for less than complete knowledge. We rely on experts in their respective fields to make their knowledge palatable and useful for everyone else.

Is the singularity the point where this ceases to become possible, or the point where we rely on the expertise of machines? The latter seems possible, at least, but I don't understand how the former is supposed to come about. People place a pretty high value on remaining naive, and there will probably always be a market for that.
I can recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Plain-English-Updated-Expa...

"Mindfulness in Plain English"

It's a great book that is easy to read and explains why and how.
any tips on gently telling management to back off, they
don't know what they are doing

In this circumstance, "gentle" can be totally useless. Firm, declarative, crystal-clear assertions based on reasoned arguments sometimes are the best way to hold a line and engender respect.

This works best if they've already seen you succeed a few times.
I actually want more code links ... there have been depressingly few of them lately. Currently only one of the top ten is about code (talking about code community or drama of the moment isn't code ...)
Android 1.5 "Cupcake" release begins
Google Becomes Default Location Provider For Firefox
I got mine last night, and tried out the video recorder right away. I can see lots of polish. Looking forward to getting into the details.
It may be harder to build a "secure" system than to break an "insecure" system. We'll know when someone builds a "secure" system. Even qmail fell to integer overflows.

But that's not a useful axiom. Is it harder to build a "secure" system than to break a "secure" system? Well, that seems to describe cryptography vs. cryptanalysis pretty well.
Your post is filled with absolutes, where in reality, it's rarely that clear. I understand it's what gets the people to read and pay attention, but I'm gonna have to disagree that it's always harder to break something than to build it. Writing complex software securely is hard.

I'd argue writing WebKit is much harder than attacking it. Even Miller bragged about how easy it was to break it. Especially now, fuzzing is so hot exactly for the reason that it lets people collect vulns from software they just shook without too much insight.

Writing exploits is getting harder and harder with modern operating systems, I'll give you that, but classically, defense has been harder than offense. I'm not exactly arguing your position, I'm technically in the security industry myself, but limiting examples of breaking things to Dowd's super-human exploit or cryptanalysis of modern algorithms is just as disingenuous, just as making absolute statements like "That's because it isn't easier to break things than to build them". I'm sure you had the experience of walking into a pen-test and delivering a list of vulnerabilities in laughably misconfigured and outdated software.

I just don't understand why one field has to be harder or more elite than another. Both have hard, interesting work with brilliant people.
Ask HN: Anyone need free help to build an online community for your startup?
Hi,

I would like to help to build an online community for a startup (or 2) in the northeast (NYC, Boston, etc). This is a free offer.

What I have to offer?

- I am a geek but not a developer :)

- I have good communication skills

- I have excellent customer service skills

- A commitment to building your user-base and community

- Improvement in seo

- Engagement with your userbase and experts in your niche

What I am looking for:

- Opportunity to learn and apply community building techniques

- Your app is useful and easy to use. No offense but I want to believe in it so that I can support the community

- An openness to making feature improvements based on community needs (eg. address book integration, etc.)

If you are interested, send me an email at raheemm1 at yahoo dot com. A little about my background. I live in NYC, am a Windows admin and a fan of open source, Hacker News, the internet and entrepreneurship. You can check out my site at http://fewtureweb.com

Advance apologies for the soliciting nature of this post, but I love the community here and would prefer to work with folks here.

Disclaimer: I don't have prior community building experience but have read lots on the subject :)