skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is you don't get to control the algorithm. When I interned in the Massachusetts State House, I sat through a meeting discussing the algorithm that decides how much state money each local school district receives. Now I'm sure you or I could come up with a quite elegant algorithm. But the actual algorithm was a complex beast that no staffer at the meeting could begin to understand. It was the evolved product of years of power struggles.

In politics, the organized faction always trumps the general interest. Say Faction A is 1% of the population. The faction wants to preserve a barrier to entry that costs every voter $100 and nets each faction member $10,000. The members of Faction A will be single issue voters over the barrier to entry. But to the rest of the public, the issue is lost in the noise. Average Joe does not even realize how much the barrier to entry costs him, because no interest group will fund ads to tell him. Thus the politician always supports the faction in order to prevent the 2% swing. ( I've spent time in both the state house and Congress, and this is exactly how the decision making process works).

The life cycle of any government policy ends up being the following:
1) Program is created to benefit the public good
2) The program inevitably directly benefits a small group - employees of the agency, contractors, etc.
3) The beneficiaries become dependent on the program. They organize in order to protect themselves politically.
4) In any policy battle where the interests of the beneficiaries collide with the public interest, the beneficiaries generally win.
5) As the beneficiaries win battles over time, the program ends up serving the beneficiaries at the expense of the public.

This is basically the life cycle of every program that has ever come out of Washington. The once mighty NASA now only exists to provide employment to NASA engineers. The school system exists mainly to provide employment to teachers. The AMA exists to erect barrier to entries to the medical profession. Etc, etc.

Your algorithm proposal is amusing because it is basically the same solution to the problem of corruption/factions that the progressives tried during the 20th century. The idea was that "scientific policy" based on algorithms and formulas, designed by academics and civil servants, could replace control by politicians. Needless to say, it was a miserable failure. A classic example of policy via algorithm is the creation of Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization's who used algorithms to dictate which loans regulated funds were allowed to invest in. It did not take too long for Wall St. to figure out a way to structure the riskiest loans imaginable in ways that would pass through the algorithm. The rating agencies are a high profile example, but there are hundreds of other similar failures. In practice "scientific public policy" ends up being the worst of both worlds. It combines the downsides of algorithms (lack of intervening personal judgment when the algorithm gets gamed) with the downsides of politics (corruption/factional power struggles).
what's the point of approaching keyboard typing speeds? i keyboard replacement needs to surpass keyboard typing speeds.
I wonder if there are any Aspen VCs / Angel investors.
Sony Ericsson K510i Midnight Black
What happens in a second can be remembered for a lifetime. Capture it with the K510i. Take quality photos or record video clips with the 1.3-megapixel camera, save them and share them. Edit your images. Use the Face Warp application in the phone.
I'm suggesting accreditation be decided by the investors themselves, not the government. Works fairly well for universities.
I wasn't claiming it's intrinsically virtuous, just that it's also something you need in a startup.
Unfortunately, I rarely agree with harsh military action, but when it comes to matters like this the non-military action is largely too complex to consider. We cannot guarantee any money paid to a country like Somalia in aid or whatever would prevent piracy.

The best solution would be to launch attacks on the pirates supply ships. Sadly the cost of keeping a naval ship in the region is likely too high, especially with aircraft carriers being ridiculously large and little to no capability on the small scale.

A craft capable of carrying 2-3 aircraft would be capable of hitting these pirates where it hurts, but a ship carrying 24 aircraft and 5,000 people isn't cost effective to have sit in an ocean for a handful of attacks.

This problem is likely only to get worse, the next carrier in the US fleet will have ~75 aircraft, which if following current metrics will mean a crew of ~15,000.

Honestly, if this situation continues, I wouldn't doubt if companies started spending the money to defend themselves. ~$16 billion is lost in piracy a year, which is enough to buy 3 Nimitz class aircraft carriers and their full compliment.
1. Ron has invested in several YC-funded startups.
meandering hyperbole.
perfect is the enemy of better.
agree, if you've got this far, why not show it real time, as an option maybe
I start when I think of the first sentence. After that, as you can see, it's two steps forward and one step back.
Sure. I didn't mean to imply that said campaign was the crux of the winning-over, but it was part of IBM's strategy to become cool again in the techie world. Just embracing Linux as a business strategy wouldn't have done it -- a lot of vendors have done that and remained uncool -- but what IBM pulled off was a strategic shift while bringing in the hacker community at the same time, which is pretty impressive.
They could easily release it for everyone, and they probably will at some point, but right now they're busy working on the version that lives inside companies' firewalls:

http://etherpad.com/ep/about/pricing-eepnet
I'm not sure why we're supposed to feel bad about it no longer being profitable to produce news content. Stuff changes. Old forms die and new ones appear. In total, we're incomparably better off than we were before the web. Google's power may be problematic but they played a large role in making that happen.

Buchheit was over-optimistic. I'd have suggested "Be Less Evil". Then everyone would say they're doing a great job!
Warner Music Targeting More than YouTube
If I could make ~$800,000 a year for doing some morally duplicitous acts, well I'd be earning more than your average lawyer so I guess there'd be a lot of people who wouldn't have a problem doing it.

I can see where these Somali's come from, I likely can't make it through the 10 years to become a lawyer or doctor. However, I could probably pick up a rifle, be good enough of a shot to actually be capable of doing the job and probably wouldn't hurt any more people than if I was a slimeball lawyer or incompetent doctor and would make a lot more money doing it.

It's quite depressing that shooting someone can become an acceptable way out of the society you're placed in. Be it a third world nation (piracy) or a first world nation (going postal).
How so? Seems a thoughtful piece worthy of consideration.
sqlite also provides sqlite3_busy_timeout() and sqlite3_busy_handler() to customize its contention handling behavior.

http://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/busy_timeout.html
http://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/busy_handler.html
"When a middleman controls a market, the supplier has no real choice but to work with the middleman"

Google dominates its market, but it doesn't control it in the classic monopolist fashion.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose the government, for the public good, built a service for searching the web. If they did it really, really well, would it not work just like Google, minus the ads?

The newspapers aren't being destroyed by Google. They're being destroyed by the evolution of technology. Google is just the messenger. And a pretty neutral one, as such messengers go.

(Indeed, that neutrality is one reason Google is so successful. They approach business with the intellectual detachment of scientists.)
Someone Figured Out How To Compromise VMware From Inside
Finally seems there is code in the wild to step up and compromise a hypervisor from the inside.
Incoming instant messages almost always fall into the "urgent, but not important" category. This is a tripple whammy: a single IM can simultaneously destroy a developer's mental context, give him/her a "reason" to procrastinate, and accomplish nothing in the process.

The proper way to use IM at work is to set it up so that you notice you have queued messages, but this doesn't distract you enough to leave the zone.

This needs to be coupled with a policy that truly urgent AND important requests or questions come via phone or in person, and that there should be no expectation of an immediate response to an IM even if the person's status is "available".

But, as usual, the good programmers have already figured this out for themselves. The rest of your programmers (the ones you need to worry about), aren't going to figure this out for themselves and probably won't follow the policy when no one is looking.

I'm not saying "down with IM", but it can be a REAL time-waster.
Well put smoody. I've been trying to decide where I wanted to go next (boston and boulder among them), and my choice just crystallized. Thanks.
Busted: The sneaky moves of anti-social smartphone users [video]
Ever hear of Wilhelm Reich's concept of the "emotional plague"? Many human beings react with antipathy when others express a greater aliveness than they themselves feel capable of. Reich's idea was that this was because their feelings were being stirred to a greater degree than they were able to tolerate, provoking a clampdown reaction. I've noticed something like this many times in companies: when a small oasis of creativity spontaneously forms, the larger organization often acts to destroy it.

Jerry Weinberg told a great story once about a company he consulted at where every software project failed, except for a handful of successes. He looked into the successes and found that they had all been the work of one team. The team had intentionally covered their tracks (I forget how) and actually pleaded with him not to report on their success. He didn't heed this request, though, and told an executive about them, presumably with the intention of encouraging more such teams to develop. The executive responded by disbanding the team! Shocked, Weinberg asked why. "Because I didn't understand what they were doing." Weinberg said, sarcastically, "Would you rather they succeeded in a way you don't understand or failed in a way you do?" The executive replied, quite unironically, "I would rather they fail in a way that I understand."
How are H1B visas an alternative? I don't see any reason to believe that if H1Bs were less restrictive then we'd see H1B holders leaving their jobs to create startups. You obviously have personal feelings about the H1B, and I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, but it really has nothing to do with the idea of a founder's visa.

Comments of the form "the article is loosely related to one of my pet issues, so I'm going to say my schpiel" are not interesting.

For what it's worth, I think the founder's visa is a great idea. I know this sounds corny, but it's an extremely American (entrepreneurial, meritocratic) idea.
I believe it. In 2003 there were around 23 million businesses in the US. Only 5.7 million of them had employees other than the owners, though.
Visas are issued by the government. All my criticisms still apply, even if the government delegates the decision to the investors.

And no, it works terribly for universities ( or rather, it works great for the universities, terribly for the public). For example, the number of medical schools in the country has actual gone from 162 in 1906, to 129 today, despite a three-fold increase in population. The artificial barrier to entry created by accreditation constricts the supply of medical schools, resulting in higher tuition and higher medical costs.

Or consider law schools. The cheapest law school in Massachusetts costs 38K per year for tuition. If you wanted to create new a law school as a startup, think you could create one just as good for much cheaper? I bet you could. It's not like law schools need expensive equipment. But you're not allowed to, thanks to accreditation laws.

Accreditation started off innocently enough - it was just a good housekeeping seal of approval. But then the professional organizations managed to make it illegal to practice at all without a degree from the accredited institution. The bar associations lobbied for laws that made it impossible to practice law if you simply studied on your own and passed the bar, or if you went through a correspondence course. In 2008, Abe Lincoln is out of luck. Now he has to take on 150K of debt in order to practice law.

History shows the slow is indeed slippery. What if your startup accreditation body follows the path the law schools, and in 30 years ends up lobbying Congress to ban all non-accredited startups?
I think pg's point of investors accreditation system is that it's not the government you have to cheat, but the group of pre-selected investors. (I'd imagine something similar to professional guilds... you have to be recognized by peers to be in part of the investor group of deciding who can get invested with this visa, for example).

The obstacle I see is that the stake of having authority to say who can get visas for work is very high these days (not like student visas); lots of people are seeking ways to get working visas desperately. So there would be lots of political frictions to introduce investor's accreditation system.

But yet, if politicians are convinced that this is crucial to revitalize the economy (which is probably one of the highest priority items), much of such muddling of power games may be avoided.
It reminds me of Dr. Seuss as well as another guy who used to do a learn to draw show on pbs when I was little, I think his name was Mark something. I really hope more people change from Web 2.0 style images to something more friendly or minimal looking like they decided to do.
Paying the ransom is cheaper for these companies than buying a new ship to replace a destroyed one:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9717063...

"The ship owners and insurers have found that it's more cost-effective to pay ransoms. They are currently averaging slightly over $1 million per vessel, and that's cheaper than buying a new ship," Pham says. "The Saudi tanker that was seized [Monday] was just launched six months ago and cost $150 million to build and the cargo on board is worth $100 million, so I suspect the ship owners will be willing to pay some fraction of that to get it back."

Continuing to pay the ransoms is much better for everyone involved than destroying the ships, except for the governments who want to enforce rule of law.
At first glance I thought these were somehow controlled by Twitter. Has Twitter monopolized all words starting with Tw?
Well, if we get 6.6 million a year, and we only have 23 million or so, that means that the companies have pretty low half-life.
The UI is great, love the simplicity, but I really don't want to use Paypal for anything. Freshbooks mails me a check or hooks up to any payment gateway I want to use, meaning I don't shell out for Paypal's fees. I'm also not seeing what this is doing that Freshbooks is not, other then having a nicer UI.
I've worked as a writer, and am currently in the process of writing a novel (the first I actually think someone would pay a penny to read) so I was actually about to comment that it does look like the complete process.

I'm sure a video of me writing would appear very similar. It can take me a long while to think of that first sentence, sometimes even a few days, but once I've got it in my head it usually comes out onto the page near-completed. Frequently I hit the first key and don't stop until 200 words later. However, it's once you get past what's sitting in the buffer in your brain that things drastically slow down.

As a slight aside, not knowing your personal history or the grades you got in high school, it's quite rare to see someone with a clear and (what appears to be) a natural writing talent coming from a programming background. From what I've seen, programming has a propensity to decrease literacy skills. It's especially impressive that it wasn't your standard five-paragraph essay, some people manage to succeed at those and fail at anything a hint more complex.
An Unbreakable Code?
We actually do have a free plan. If you look on the plans page, it's in the blue bar "Or, sign up for our free personal plan".
We used a really great app called ScreenFlow for the Mac.
I was a bit disappointed that the author of the article didn't address the difference between what he was proposing and the existing investor visas. They seem pretty close, to the point where what he's seemingly asking for could be achieved by tweaking existing programs rather than creating entirely new visas. The intent and purpose of the investor visas are exactly what's being discussed: bringing talented people to the U.S. so they can start businesses that employ Americans and contribute to the economy.

If those programs aren't doing what they're supposed to do, or if they have capital/investment requirements that aren't in line with what modern high-tech companies require (i.e. modern startups don't require as much as the minimum investments for the visas) then we should address that, but I don't think it needs to be done from a blank slate.

(Information on immigration through investment <a href="http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f..., assuming that link is stable.)
Can you elaborate? I'm the designer. While I definitely drew some inspiration the way that Basecamp is laid out, I don't really see any similarity in terms of the styling.
I recently finished reading Mythical Man-Month. That book is awesome. It's like Sun Tzu's Art of War, but for programming complex software systems.
The corruptness of the university accreditation system only makes the threshold unnecessarily high. If that happened with startup investors, it would still be a great improvement over the current situation.

Currently, there are zero investors whose money gets you you a visa. Expanding from zero to an unnecessarily small group would still be an improvement, even it if wasn't optimal.
Ronin looks cool! We're glad to have some solid competition, and FreshBooks could really use some.
Agree, they should tear down the walled garden, and implement a new version of skype interoperable with something such as xmpp/jingle.
Nice demo video!

One nit-picky detail, at 2:57, the VO says the Dashboard will "show how much money we received this month, last month, and last year, in addition to all the money you expect to receive in the coming weeks"
The video shows 'received year to date', not what was received last year.

Probably not worth re-recording the VO (it sounds professionally done), and re-encoding, but I figured you should know :)
Short of a government mandate, as done with over-the-air TV, it will never gain significant marketshare.
I agree that the immediate effects of the policy would be beneficial. But you have also created a government sponsored body that is now deciding what is a startup and what is not. That is very, very, very dangerous. This organization over time may lobby Congress to actively ban all non-accredited startups. This is exactly the path followed by the law schools, medical schools, architect schools, dentistry schools, interior design schools, etc. The track record is not good.
I think the key differentiation is the fact that Ballpark is built for teams. This might not resonate with freelancers (who might just use it because it works well and looks pretty), but, in most small businesses, more than one person is usually involved in the process. For example, we run a design firm (www.metalabdesign.com), and while I don't personally send out estimates or invoices, I can easily keep track of incoming payments via the dashboard, give sign off and comment, see what the numbers for the month were, etc.

Regarding PayPal: Nobody is required to use PayPal - it's totally optional. We're definitely planning on looking into offering payment gateway solutions, but at this point we are focused on polishing the core functionality and adding some really cool new features that will help differentiate us from the pack.
if you want to read a good mathematical exposition, check out chapter 6 in Mackay's (the guy giving the presentation) book "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms". It covers stream codes and, specifically, arithmetic coding.

I've recommended this book in other threads... its an amazing read.
Quite right. Take away Google and everything like them and you've killed the technology that's killing the business, not the middleman strictly.

As a thought experiment: Imagine that Google was unnecessary. Every person had a device that found exactly the page on the internet that they were looking for without using any centralized service. It just went out and scanned the whole public web in a snap. Is there a middleman now? Nope. Is it still going to kill people that choose not to participate? Yes sir!

His second point is quite accurate though: A reduction in supply of highly redundant articles will behoove journals of record. Specialization and reduction of repetitive effort will see the day through.
I can't speak for anybody else, but to put it simply: I do not want to modify my page to work around Digg's stupid shit. I do want Digg to stop doing the stupid shit. Your suggestion is less likely to lead to my desired outcome.
I love it! I'm inspired. There are so many problems out there to be solved with Web applications, and money to be made.
Cloud providers vow interoperability
The funny thing is that I'm a math guy - actually doing more math programming finally - but I also realize that "quants" are utterly bankrupt. Paul Krugman is right - Obama has made serious error in trying to restart the finance machine.

That doesn't mean we won't go up that hill again - just that if we do, the end after that will make even the present circumstances look cheery.
I don't know Mathematica, so I can't quite tell exactly what algorithm is being used in Patrick's code, but I do know that Markov chains are a useful way of generating similar names and are easy to program in common languages. (Patrick may be using Markov chaining - I see a RandomChoice from CharFreqs.)

Basically, analyze a word corpus and create frequencies for letter pairs, considering word start and end as letters for convenience. Then, starting with a word start, choose letters randomly based on the frequency of the pairs where the first letter in the pair is the last letter in your current word. Continue until a word end is chosen.

Building frequencies using letter triplets rather than letter pairs can get better results, where pairs may choose unlikely match-ups such as "cth", taking e.g. a"ct" as common, and "th"e as common. Longer tuples can be chosen but a slight adjustment of word start and end strategy is needed.
You can check the US economic census. Great stuff in general and quite useful for market research.

http://www.census.gov/econ/census02/
You should really have some more sites in your portfolio that don't use H&FJ's Gotham Black for all the headings/buttons.
ITunes Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings
i really like their style too. it looks like they use mootools and jquery for most of the javascript effects, and as far as the look goes... you could play around with PNGs, bevels, gradients, and strokes to get a similar style.
What this is really for, I think, is retinal-tracking input for the disabled. If it's not there already.
Facebook scales new high, registers 200 million users