skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are already signs that startups may not spread particularly well. The spread of startups seems to be proceeding slower than the spread of the Industrial Revolution

Government was much smaller at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

The theory of "regulatory capture" says that government is responsive to those firms that are affected by government regulation and have the money to buy favorable legislation.

Thus, it's much easier for big-dumb-and-slow firms to use government to put roadblocks in the way of startups than it was for inefficient firms to put roadblocks in the way of factory production 200 years ago.

Want to sell wine over the Internet? The established players will make sure that it's illegal for you to do so.

Want to cut a deal with your early stage employees where they get no pay for 6 months? It's illegal in most places to not pay someone a wage. In MA it's illegal to fire someone for blatant incompetence and they pay them their final paycheck on the regularly scheduled payroll 4 days later - you need to hand them a physical check then and there.

Want to buy a bunch of servers? In a lot of locales (MA, again), you have to pay taxes on the assets every year.

Want to sell real estate on the Internet? Hope you're a licensed broker!

Want to write an expert system that generates legal documents? You'd better have passed the bar exam. Actually, wait, even though that was good enough for Lincoln, these days you need to have actually ATTENDED lay school - a mere demonstration of proficiency is not enough.

Etc., etc., etc.

If this is how things are in the free-wheeling US, I imagine that it's far worse in Europe.

I think that people across the globe have what it takes to launch startups. I just think that the legal culture makes it very hard in most places.
How to Swagger Jack the Magazine Rack To Do Your Niche Blog
Surprised that technology & tools didn't poll higher, I guess I'm just a brat
Re 2

You could also use the google maps geolocation feature. You could implement that in 10 minutes. I agree it would help a lot, I clicked around for two minutes or so and couldn't navigate the site to non-clustered content near me in that time.
Advice for Obama from the Hemisphere
Not sure I'm following you... the article talks about how the US can switch to wind and solar energy (as well as biofuel for the lulls on non-windy, cloudy days) and meet 100% of our energy demands that way. So yes, the author is advocating solving our problems with sun and wind instead of coal, natural gas, and radioactive material.

If done right, this will be rather transparent to you, the end user[1], it will reduce our dependence on non-renewable fuels, and create jobs in the process. You will still be able to plug in your TV to the wall and have it work.

1. Except perhaps for the price...
It helped with connections and I think that's the way to view it. Being there is definitely a win. The investment side of things is a bit shakier. The thing I'd say, if you happened to get to the final phase, is to think seriously about what terms are acceptable to you and to have a lawyer on call for the final evening that can review the terms.

At this point we've not sought major investment, though we are in contact with a few VCs that have been tracking us. We pitched to one of the VCs that came to us and then realized that we weren't ready for such and how much time and effort was going to be involved in trying to raise a round. Since we weren't in a money crunch decided to put that off and continue to focus on getting our product further along before messing with investment.
I've paid real money for some virtual good in a game, where the good had some active "function", but I've never bought something like a facebook gift which simply sits on your profile. I do wonder if there might be some market for "active" social networking goods: for-pay applications, or integration of a low-price digital music store, etc.
Do you have updated the drivers of your graphic card? What card is it? On which OS? Can you send the crashlog to the contact address on the website? Thank you very much in advance!
To play devil's advocate, I would say that perhaps the benefits of being radically honest haven't been made apparent to you yet.

I don't know anything about you but let's have a little thought experiment here:

Sure it has seemingly destroyed your life in the short term, but I would argue that having a less kitschy life might be good for you.

Let's take your situation claim by claim. By being open and honest with your boss, you indirectly put an end to your career. But had you lied and remained there, would you have always been happy? Surely your dreams were to start your own business.

Now your gf. Again, I don't know anything about your relationship. But if your gf left due to financial reasons, wasn't it better to learn that lesson sooner rather than later?

Your credit. With the same disclaimers as above, perhaps having your credit destroyed was a forceful way of telling you to refocus your priorities in life. no?

You can always wonder what your life might have been like if you made a different decision. I do that all the time. But I'd like to think that honesty opens doors, not closes them. You might disagree with everything I just wrote, but I would like to see your response a year (or 5) from now how your life has changed.
What's wrong with that? I don't blame them for wanting people to upgrade. The new version is probably easier for them to maintain.
I felt the effect of being in Silicon Valley the moment I moved out here. The area is not only teeming with endless talent, energy, and enthusiasm, but (and this is important) we have an entire culture that makes this talent, energy, and enthusiasm possible in the first place.

When I moved to San Francisco from Chicago, I felt the change immediately. People simply get me out here. They understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. They ask intelligent, insightful questions. They give me invaluable advice. They share their knowledge freely. And they do all of this because they believe in -- and belong to -- the same amazing culture that I now do.
Good and simple UI. I would use it.

Bug: I created an account and clicked on 'settings' in the top right, and my email address displayed in the "city" field.

Also, both the city and the password fields had a green background initially, but once I clicked in them the green went away.

Also, the "Upload New Place Photos" page doesn't have a back button.
The idea also is to write iPhone applications in C++ instead of ObjectiveC/Cocoa which as a steep learning curve (not objC per se but the way cocoa works takes time to learn...)
cool. thanks for porting it over, too.
Link: http://www.padmapper.com
Print Link -- One page, mostly text: http://www.esquire.com/print-this/honesty0707
"I had difficulty getting past the 'my tribe is better than your tribe' stuff."

Agreed. What really bugs me about this sort of piece (and about a huge number of comments in this thread), is that they tend to fetishize introversion, and make it a crutch. Introversion is clearly a real trait (and I'm one of those people who needs quiet time to "recharge"), but it's too easy to turn introversion into an excuse to avoid challenging situations and personal growth. I don't believe that's a habit to be celebrated.

I used to be much more "introverted" than I am today. Looking back, I can see that a lot of my formerly quiet behavior was a consequence of plain old shyness and fear, and I wish I had gotten over it a lot earlier than I did. For me, those years are lost.
Stability probably should be on the list. Not very important to me personally, but I know it's a huge consideration for a lot of the people I've worked with and interviewed over the years. The largest employers in the world (governments) have that as their main benefit.
"Bookmark your favorite places, and explore places your friends like to find new favorites."

What? I think this line needs to be rewritten.

Your map is a little confusing for me. Clicking through to Texas shows me 32 places in Austin and 10 in San Antonio. I assumed this meant that there were no places listed in Dallas, but if you continue to click down, 2 show up. I probably wouldn't have gone that far if I wasn't exploring.

On the plus side, the design is great. There was just an article at the top of HN that mentioned being "Pixel Perfect" in web design. Your site is a good example of that.
I had an error trying to signup for the site. Here is the traceback posted on dpaste.com - http://dpaste.com/33427/plain/

It ended up that I was registered fine, but I still saw the error rather than be redirected.
Thanks for the ideas! Especially #5, which triggered a discussion between us on how to do this the best...
Every time it gets posted, it will be news to a group of readers that just joined, became interested and capable of digesting the article. 8 O'clock news is news for only a short time. A good article or essay can stay news for a much longer time.

Sometimes it may even take a while for something to become news: early 20th century philosophers already had sharp insight into the way we would be dominated by technology, but it took until the 80's for it to really sink in how right they were.
Good idea, though when I tried to sign up I got an error page titled:

KeyError at /signup ...
The alt-text speaks the truth.
I think the environment/atmosphere is key. If you're getting hassled all day, horrible coworkers, management issues, etc, it takes a really resilient personality to deal with that just for the money.

As such, it surprises me that compensation and challenging work go above it. Even if I were being paid $200,000 a year to do cool work, if I had to deal with mega social and management issues, if I had to stay there I'd be deeply unhappy.

(Of course, the flip side is if the perfect environment offered a salary of, say, $10000 a year, that might be just as useless.. which makes polls like these a bit pointless really).
Then your stack is exactly like our stack: www.trailbehind.com

We're more focused on hiking and indexing existing information on the net.

It's cool to see other developers ideas in this space.
The Naib is a babbling idiot. What you and he need to do is "start" local and grow from there. This means installing wind and solar generators at your own homes and cutting yourselves off from the power grid.

I think that living like this for a few days and paying the bills you would be paying to live like that is probably the only thing that will finally convince you that the ideas presented here are total nonsense.
>but they simply can not create it.

I seem to remember reading that that's not the case anymore. As in, we actually can make gold through transmutation. The amount of energy required to do so is bigger than the "value" of the resultant gold tough.
I can say, w\o hyperbole, that radical honesty ruined my life.

Do you truly feel that your life is ruined? It sounds like you are/were in a bad situation, but do you not see yourself bouncing back eventually?

(some brutal honesty here, if you'll permit me) You need to take responsibility for your life. You got dealt a shitty hand, but what is past is past. You have skills and aspirations and you are the only person that can apply the skills toward the aspirations.
>We have to store the bits somewhere.

+1 for the fine, fine irony. Intended or otherwise as it might have been.
There could definitely be a market here for 'plant-sitting' while owners are on holiday.
Yes, industrialisation "spread" in the sense that it was possible to use an engine anywhere, but in practice most countries developed tightly clustered industrial areas (as in heavy industry being the predominant economic engine), while others areas of the country remained either agricultural or mercantile or service economies.

The reality is that in any human endeavour (steel production, summer blockbusters, LCD screen manufacture, grunge, salmon farming, dadaism) there are clusters of activity - they do not preclude the activity being carried elsewhere, but the people who do carry out the activity at the cluster have both synergy gains, and act as a magnet so create a snowball effect.

Obviously the SV is a cluster of excellence for startups. Why is this expected to have a social impact, even if they do represent a new economic phase? (which personally I doubt - the numbers of people involved are just too small). I don't get it.
Photos: The 10,000 Year Clock
Rather than ranking the proposal against some version of protection, I evaluate it in terms of: would more good stuff happen with the proposal than without it?

Clearly it would. Clearly having SOME additional number of people admitted who are at least doing SOME version of a startup would be a positive step.

The number of things that have to go wrong to make this proposal a net negative are unrealistically perverse and pessimisitc. If EVERY policy proposal is held to a standard of "we will only do this if there is NO CONCIEVABLE WAY of ever making it be bad," then no policy proposals would ever be implemented.

Think of it like a business. It is better to do something that is approximately right in a non-optimal fashion then it is to do nothing until you are exactly right or, as the poet says, to optimize too early.
Wow, that's really weird. I'll try to figure it out.

Edit: Figured it out, I hope. It should be fixed now. :)
Yeps - I also thought the map was a bit confusing to use. It was great until I got to the city level...then it was weird.

I didn't read the catch phrase, but totally agree with you. Thats a mouthful, and it makes me think too much. Something like "Share your favorite hangouts, and discover new ones through your friends." or "Find and mark the hottest hangouts in your hood" Heheh
I hope someone else can remember this, but wasn't there a link around here recently (possibly elsewhere) about how it was speculated that the ability to lie was thought to distinguish us from other animals? That is, lying is a concept associated with intelligence?

Of course, I could be wrong, and am merely trying to make a point without standing behind it, so that I can avoid the humiliation of being called out on it.
I think its moreso hackery enthusiasm for a pretty piece of hardware joined with a hackable yet (relatively) user friendly OS
mwhahaha
Nothing's wrong with it. It just contradicts the tone the rest of the article tries to lay out.
I also wouldn't advise one other form of lying he partakes in:

I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified.

He must be nuts to state this publicly.
Re 5:

We did this on our new startup, and had a few complaints we are dealing with now. Just to make sure you avoid them:

1) if you redirect them to a signup page, make it SUPER CLEAR that their post/content wasn't deleted, that it is being stored until they register.

2) give them an alert as they are writing that they will need to be logged in to actually add it.

We had users complain that it wasn't clear that logging in would add their post, that they were afraid all that work had been deleted and it made them not want to continue. That wasn't the case, so we just had to add a little note, but still.

(We're also working now on just a lil ajax box that floats up above the post asking you to login, so you can see that your post is still there...)
I honestly think she did a bang up job assessing what might be a threat, and then seeking help before making a rash decision she wasn't comfortable with.

She articulated her fears pretty well, and she had a clue that Linux was a platform for savvy individuals that would put her at an immediate disadvantage to him.

I wish more people let alone motherly aunt figures could articulate their fears that well.
The other question to consider is if the revolution is local, does that really matter for the society at large? The startups are creating value for the rest of society, regardless of where the startups are located. Using the internet as the means of distribution, decouples the location of the business from the consumers of the product, thus allowing the startups to have a central location.
The business revolution will only matter for a subset of companies, mostly software companies.
Taxing: a Ritual to Save the Species
"Startups don't seem to spread so well, partly because they're more a social than a technical phenomenon"

It's this social aspect that makes me think startups will spread beyond some major centers. The Internet has proven to be great for "finding the others," be it for social/political/transactional kin.

Also, as pg suggested in an earlier essay, vc is only growing less necessary for many startups. The shrinking dependence on vc, and the social lubrication of the Internet suggests more startups will bloom in all sorts of places.
Hilarious bargaining (Luis von Ahn)
So having taken a quick look through the site, here is my feedback:

1) Great look and feel, very nice and clean.

2) Process is simple

3) Not a fan of the single percentile fine-grained rating. At the finest I'd do half stars, but really I spent a good 10 seconds trying to rate my favorite comedy place 100% and could only get 99%. So I'd say roll it back to 5 stars or just half stars.

4) A small pet peeve: Just put the USA at the top of the country list. Your greatest majority of users are going to be from there.

5) Copyright is out of date, it says 2008 in the footer.

And to be honest I'm not sure why I'd use this over Yelp right now. I understand your separation, one is for reviews and long-winded info, but I mean even with an iphone app I don't really see any added value for myself.
Ouch. Thanks for the error report. Should be fixed now. :)
1. Find a rich spouse
2. Choose to have a job or not
3. ...
4. Profit anyway
In practice I doubt any government would have the balls to try this

I'm a bit surprised to see a metaphor about testicles used.

A few thoughts:

This isn't a revolution if it is localized.

Also, there might be a way to create a government that had the will needed.

It is going to get easier to start countries. Rich individuals like the leaders of Qatar are buying their way into a good university system, e.g. http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/

These two trends mean an empowered individual could start kickstart a startup hub with a clean slate of government. Immigration law, taxes, and other burdens could be removed, making it particularly appealing.

Schools for the kids of founders and university employees would be the hardest part, because we haven't seen an efficient pattern for schooling that is also effective.
Whatever else you can say about the original post, WHEN will people putting things up on the web realize that "Today at 6:00am," becomes ambiguous real fast on the web, when nowhere else on the page is there a date? I see this constantly, even on news sites. Gag.
"The most likely scenario is (1) that no government will successfully establish a startup hub"

Take a look at HaiDian/ZhongGuanCun in Beijing, chock full of startups big and small. From my understanding, the reason entrepreneurs flocked there originally was because HaiDian offered huge tax breaks versus the rest of China (for the explicit purpose of developing a high-tech industry).

In my eyes, HaiDian is a huge counter-example for the first point--not forgetting of course that the economic climate in China is one of urbanization unseen since the American Industrial Revolution.
A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis: MapReduce vs. DBMS benchmarks
What do you mean, you couldn't find a new job? It sounds like you had at least a year from when things got icy to when your life was destroyed. If you can't find another job in a year, perhaps the great disaster wasn't all your employer's fault.
Here's some tips from on your mapping site, from a guy who's been there and is there :)

1. Don't spawn a new page for Google Directions. You can show directions on your site and your map:

directions = new GDirections(map, gel('directionsId'));
...
directions.load("from:" + startLoc + " to:" + endLoc);
})

2. You should use a little ajax to fetch waypoints on pan and zoom. For example, using YUI:

GMap2.prototype.getSurroundingData = function () {
size = this.getSize()
center = this.getCenter()
var dataURL = '/get_quadrant/' + center.lat() + '/' + center.lng() + '/' + size.width + '/' + size.height + '/' + this.getZoom();
var cObj = YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest('POST', dataURL, { success: function(o){ this.fetchQuadrantCallback(o)},
scope: this
});

3. Use the new Google zoom control, instead of the old one you use:
this.addControl(new GLargeMapControl3D(), topLeft);

4. Use a function to clear input boxes (such as your search box) when they are clicked:

function clearInitialValue() {
this.value = "";
this.onclick = null
this.style.color = "black";
}

I have other suggestions, and if you are interested email me at andrewljohnson [AT] trailbehind [dot] com.
It would certainly be nice to be able to hit the 10-year goal, but I think it's going to take longer than that. The thing I wonder about is how hard it will be to scale up the manufacturing of the required components of such a system: PV cells, wind turbines, etc. I can't find any good numbers right now, but iirc a lot of the factories and material suppliers are oversubscribed as it is, with multiple-year waiting lists for parts like high-quality solar panels. Building more factories is of course possible, but will take a fair amount of time considering the processes necessary to produce components of the required quality.
EBay plans IPO for Skype unit
Here's how we do geolocation:

GMap2.prototype.displayHomeMap = function(geo_locate) {
if (geo_locate && google.loader.ClientLocation != null && google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude != 0) {
center = [google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude,google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude]
zoom = 6
} else {
center = [39.25, -96.6669]; //center of the US
zoom = 4;
}
this.updateMap(this.baseMap.nodes, null, center, zoom, null)
}
Wow, yeah, that is confusing. Seeing it out of context makes me wonder what I was thinking when I wrote that.

And thanks for the feedback on the map. It looks like I've got some work to do there.

As for the design, the credit goes to Metalab for doing a great job: http://www.metalabdesign.com/
Grid systems are a staple of tool in print graphic design, but only seem to have been picked up by the web design community in the last year or so.

It seems there is a lot of misunderstanding, grid systems are an invisible structure for laying out content with some consistency. Every newspaper, magazine, book or poster you see is usually designed to a grid of some description.

What we're seeing at the moment is a lot of web design taking the idea of the grid very literally, applying it in a very self conscious way, treating the grid as an aesthetic afterthought rather than as a functional underlying system.
Can anyone point to some more info on this? I was excited to hear about it when it was first announced but it seems to have gone awfully quiet.

Are the ARM developers just not big bloggers? It seems there's a fair amount of work in bringing up a distro to target the various ARM hardware out there so it would be good to hear an overview from someone in the know.
Location is a huge one for me. I'm an outdoor fanatic, so living near good places for outdoor adventuring is a must.
Good point. Which makes me wonder if there are further disadvantages beyond the one mentioned in the article. Perhaps panic-suppression is actually a disadvantage in most life-or-death situations? Or that it's such a desirable trait in high-risk professions that people with it tend to enter these professions and die young?
Thanks, I'll try to figure out what's causing those problems.
I agree to an extreme level. I also worked at a large corporation that didn't tolerate negativity, and it was miserable.

There's a difference between attacking an idea and attacking the person advancing the idea.