skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this every year or so. (Usually about the same time I re-read cryptonomicon.) Best travel writing ever.
Myself having been born in the 70s this article didn't make much sense. Cars are nice, to be sure, but so is having clean air, a sustainable future and not spending decades of my life commuting in one.
The only "truth" to any of the "three truths" is "ideas are cheap".
I think you're perhaps expecting your cofounder to approach problems exactly the same way you do. You shouldn't be looking for someone just like you to be your cofounder. Differences are often strengths.

What you need to be doing is looking for someone that delivers on the things you need them to deliver. Not someone that works in the same way and to the same exact schedule you do. My cofounder produces a helluva lot more code than I ever could, and he's always been part-time in the company (but he has equal stake, for a number of reasons beyond being an absolute monster at producing code).

That's not to say you don't need someone who will be all-in. You do. You definitely need dedication. But, it doesn't necessarily look the same as your dedication.
I guess my point didn't come across clearly, I used Xbox for the same reasons you mention. It started out trailing all major consoles, now, as you mention, it's pretty good.

Xbox is an example where it worked out, that probably won't be the case with search.
The Incredibles - The Chairs
Ask HN:  Why would a company with stellar employees pay salaries?
Why not pay employees for significant achievements only and in proportion to those achievements? If they create nothing worthwhile, they would receive zero income.

Everyone at the company would be aware of who is getting how much and for what. If they are not happy with the results, then could just leave.

Presumably stellar employees would have enough confidence in their abilities to consider such an arrangement.

If they need money in the short term, then they can work on something that they can finish in a month or two.
Uh, TV tuners? RFID emitters? Biometric readers? 2D bar code scanners are standard. They had 3G networks everywhere 3 years ago, while 3G in north america is still only in major urban centers (Not at my house, for instance). Also, the form-factors available in Japan are GREAT.

Don't know if you're trolling, but the iPhone doesn't even support background tasks or multimedia messaging. My Moto RAZR (from 5 years ago) has those features, and supports google maps, video recording, text messaging, full web browsing (via opera mini), and music/video playback.
I don't think much of an article that uses the word 'surface' as a passive verb, as is 'Bing does more to surface information you're probably looking for...' ...uh, no.
Get 15 minutes of fame for your startup on new web TV show
How do you measure the achievement of a groups of employees, some of whom have worked on more than one project?

Why should they trust you to pay them appropriately from the profits?

How do you entice employees to work on less glamorous projects?

How do you entice programmers to work on risky projects that may not pay off at all?

How do you get a better employee to work with rather than against a less stellar employee?

Contractors offering fixed-price contractors do this, but they don't do the grunt work that underpins much of the continuing work.
Check out FlyerTalk. It's not "that easy" to upgrade, but int'l business travelers do it regularly.
APE: Ajax Push Engine - realtime streaming on the web
Wow thanks for that! I had no idea such new cars where selling for so very very cheap. I was always looking for hondas or toyotas but wow this is a steal.
>Despite our constant fervor to rush, nearly everything involving the military is ridiculously and irreparably inefficient in ways that outsiders probably wouldn't even believe.

Try us - I'm curious.
"In the 4th century BC, Aristotle asked why the heat of the sun prompts us to sneeze, whereas the heat of the fire does not. A partial answer came two millennia later, when the English natural philosopher Francis Bacon showed that his photic sneeze had nothing to do with heat at all: if he closed his eyes when going into the sun, he didn't sneeze even though the heat was still there. While Bacon's application of the scientific method was beyond reproach, his conclusions are distinctly iffy to a modern nose. "The cause is not the heating of the nostrils," he asserted, "but the drawing down of the moisture of the brain."

- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227041.400-why-some-...
Risk has to be proportionate to authority and reward. Responsibility without authority is a recipe for disaster -- any overworked assistant or salesperson can tell you that.

So... the greater the risk you ask other people to take, the more reward and authority you must give them. At the extreme you are talking about ("they would receive zero income.") the "employees" would basically be cofounders.
tl;dr.

Ok ok, sorry. I love Neal Stephenson (I believe I've read everything he's written, including Zodiac, Big U, etc, except for his newest one), but he is one verbose guy and seems to be getting worse with age.

I hope to read this sometime in the future though.
But consider a company that works in the way I mentioned that employs 10,000 people. They would share IP and infrastructure. And employees can change teams very easily.
You don't see the difference between not taking a two hour lunch and getting drunk, and not being allowed to sit down at your desk?

There is a happy medium somewhere between anarchy and militarism...I'm inclined to say it involves being allowed to sit down, and doesn't involve a few pints at lunch.
Can you get around (at least some of) those restrictions by wrapping things in function expressions? Here's a for loop:
((function(){ for(x in [1,2,3]){print(x)} })(), 42)
At the time that this article was written, what you're saying was not true. I struggle to see how your response makes any sense in the context of my comment or the article. Word was not dominant, WordPerfect was, Windows was not dominant, which was the point of the article. MS-DOS was dominant, but there were lots of DOS alternatives.

And when you say "Finally see some competition" you're just demonstrating exactly what the article is talking about, discussion that sounds knowledgeable of the history, but isn't.
There were lots of DOS competitors at the time. 4DOS was a biggie.
It may be that my information is out of date, but I am genuinely surprised. It was declared legally impossible when I tried to do it - some years ago admittedly - and that was confirmed by my lawyer colleague.

Perhaps it's changed. I would think it a legal minefield.

It's a moot point - the other contributions have given sufficiently convincing reasons for getting your own car rather than borrowing one.
Features like the biometric reader and the TV tuner exist because the "inmates are running the asylum." The general phone buying public doesn't care about any of those things. Japanese phones were 10 years ahead of the game 10 years ago. Like you even state, your crappy RAZR does most of the things people actually care about, and it is 5 years old. None of the recent "innovations" have sparked much interest amongst consumers. As everywhere, the thing people care about most is text messaging. Handset sales were a 20% decline last year in Japan.

Takeshi Natsuno, the inventor of Japan’s i-mode mobile web service and former Senior Vice President NTT DoCoMo, said in an interview, “I believe the iPhone is closer to the mobile phone of the future, compared with the latest Japanese mobile phones.” Natsuno also said uses the iPhone 3G himself.

Signed, a guy who used to work at a japanese telco research lab outside of Tokyo.
What is wrong with exchanging money for work?

It gets you into economical thinking, makes you think harder of what this exchange of service entails, when you're done, and manages any asymmetries in the value of work done.
where are you going to find 10,000 stellar people willing to work in this way?

anyone willing to work for no collateral at insane risk either know what their doing and wont be working on this risk, or are probably not really that stellar ;)
Invitation-only events don't belong in the technological scene.

There is an all-out, bitter war going on between property (connections, inherited wealth, resources) and energy (talent, ambition, hard work). One is past, one is future, and each wishes to demote the value of the other. One side has power but lacks the vision and talent to use it; the other has the capability but not the means.

Nerds are supposed to be on the side of the good guys.
Last.fm Overheats, Goes Offline
I don't know what the point of going to a conference is, if you can get videos of the talks afterwards, like TED.
Sort of like French proverbs or Zen koans, I suppose. The fact that they are often too general and contradictory doesn't seem to stop older, wiser folk from repeating them.
I have my name on it - but my phone # and address are protected for various mundane legal reasons. So I get to omit them from commercial sites too (well, holding addresses etc. get used).

EDIT: I actually like the idea that people put their real details on the DNS. Were it not for my job I would list it - but it's a bit too risky.
"Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 2:11)

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible,_King_James,_Ecclesiaste...
anyone really good at doing something will be able to find much better terms to work in other than "we'll pay you what we think you're worth" which carries the negative connotation every time you receive a paycheck that "i'm only worth this much to the company"

no one would stay very long unless they are consistently receiving more than they think they're worth.
It has been hot as hell in the UK today :)

EDIT: heh, lastFM tweeted this May 20th "The server with the longest uptime at Last.fm: 1244 days (3.4 years!) Can anyone beat that? http://bit.ly/I3M7B

hehe
Networking. Meeting people. It's very important in scientific research to present your research, see others' work and exchange ideas. Conferences are a good way to do it.

I guess hackers and programmers are quited used to doing this over the web, though.
He has a replacement SMTP library downloadable at the Lamson website.
Live Your Best Life Ever
Getting to talk to speakers, meeting people, swag.
Submitted as an example of how the mainstream media can respond to pseudoscience in popular media.
Flagged because I didn't know it was a video link.

(Is that to be assumed for all links from the submitted domain?)

"If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"So I avoid those most of all. Back in the 90s, I was unkown to the powers that be and could not get into TED. I don't forget that and that's why I'll never go to it. I don't want to play that game."
I did at first, and you are right that it is a mistake. The key problem is inconsistency. Nothing wrong with working differently, taking weekends off or whatever. But girls and freelancing are higher priorities to him. Why shouldn't they be? From a perspective of psychology immediate rewards drive behavior; distant rewards have little effect.
June 2009 for Sony Ericsson PlayNow with Movies
It's not taking notes, it's paying attention. It's listening. It's letting the speaker know that you are interested and value what they are saying.

If you've ever tried teaching someone something, this happens to geeks all the time, someone asks you a question right? How do I calculate the average of all the values in this excel spreadsheet? So you tell them. Then the next day, same question. Then the next day, next week... same question.

People just don't pay attention. They don't want to work. They don't want to work to rearrange their neurons so they can remember things. They'd rather remember what they have programmed to record on TiVo when they get home.

If you don't really value what the person is saying, don't waste their time by making them think you care because you are taking notes.

Take notes if you care. The irony is, if you care, you'd be taking notes without reading this lifehacker stuff. You'd be taking notes so that you don't have to waste that person's time with the same question over and over. You'd actually take the time and put the energy into learning and committing to memory inside your brain what you are hearing.
If Your Phone Requires A Headset Adapter, Your Phone Sucks.
Lessons Learned while Planning an Unconference
> Are We All Synesthetes?

Well, probably. See taste vs smell. But on the whole, not the interesting types, since by definition the interesting types are rare.
Participating. Talking to the people, exchanging ideas, having a beer with them, convincing them to do things your way because your ideas don't suck, and so on.

Conferences aren't so much about the presentations as what happens after the presentations.

Of course, this guy is a VC, and he's not so interested in the technical scene. He also seems to be talking about invitation only conferences, which are slightly silly.
Gladwell's article says that the underdog can win by using unorthodox tactics. One of his examples is a team of undersized, unskilled 12 year old girl basketball players that made it to the Nationals by employing the full court press and running the other teams into the ground. The emphasis in their training was in conditioning. Another example was T E Lawrence's use of mobility to defeat the Turks in WWI.

Mill criticizes the article by saying that no team has made it to the NBA championships by using the full court press. It seems that Mill has missed the whole point of the article: if you are going to lose, do something different. You can beat the incumbents by introducing disruptive technology.
Taking notes at university has become one of those odd analog vs digital tasks where my preferences fall uncomfortably with neither.

I find software leaves much to be desired. I need the ability to tack graphs, formulas, side notes where ever I please, like Photoshop. Yet I need better text editor support, like Word or OpenOffice.

Doing it by hand is fine, but I can't take notes as quick as I can by typing. I have full control over a page, but there is no Ctrl-Z for spelling mistakes which can leave notes disfigured and unsettling to study from.

The solution to all of this would be to copy by hand and then re-type on the computer but this again takes a lot of time. Perhaps something like LaTeX etc. would help but again.. too much time spent on actual documentation preparation when it should be spent on note-taking.

Can anyone relate to what I'm ranting on about?
I think I get what you're talking about, a kind of Randite All-Star team. It's doable at a small scale -- that's what a startup is. But some models do not scale to 4 orders of magnitude.

There's the measurement problem. With 10,000 salespeople or 10,000 artisans, sure, you can directly measure the value they create. With everyone else? How about the truck driver? The receptionists? HR?
John is a genius. No doubt about it. But he didn't come up with it, he just recognized it as a useful optimization: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/
Definitely my favorite book about startups, but it really doesn't talk that much about the day to day reality of running a startup. Most of the stories are over months or years. Documentaries would be a great way to see what it's really like. Unfortunately, I don't think there are very many about well run startups. I guess Aardvark'd was a decent glimpse: http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie/
If I am shouldering 100% of the Risk and getting 100% of the rewards then I am not an employee I am a business owner.

If I am shouldering 100% of the Risk and getting less than 100% of the reward then I am a business owner who has been conned out of my fair share.

Also what sort of portion does the receptionist get? They need to be paid something and yet I don't believe anyone considers answering the phone a "significant achievement".
Random example:

You're given a semi-trailer-sized shipment of heavy "product" (whatever it may be). You're directed, along with a half dozen other troops, to empty the truck (by hand; nothing is on pallets) and put the items in the "yard" at location X.

You get about half way through with the truck 2 hours later, and you're told actually the items would go better at location Y. You start moving them. An hour later, it looks like the contractor screwed up and sent you some of the wrong stuff; nobody bothered to check beforehand. You re-load half the truck.

Another hour or so goes by and the Commander decides that since the contractor screwed up one item, you're just sending it all back. You spend a few more hours re-packing the entire truck.

You just spent hours doing something you should have never done in the first place, but it was really important to finish it quickly, which actually, ironically, caused it to take far longer than it should have, due to constantly conflicting orders.

In general, there is a lot of "move stuff here, okay never mind, move it here." or "do this, okay new orders from the top, do this instead" or "do this because it was ordered, even though everyone here knows it will be reversed next week".

You can see this taken to its logical end when it comes to in-country Units replacing each other. Basically, anything and everything the previous Unit accomplished is completely negated and thrown out by the incoming Unit, as they Do Things Differently, Thank You. People wonder why we don't make any lasting progress and the answer is really simple: Ego. Ego and people covering their own asses constantly instead of doing what they know needs to be done.

</rant>
There is a huge difference between watching the talks and actually being there.

50% of the value is the content of the talks, which supposedly described the latest and greatest.

Just like in academia, the talks are actually dated: they have been prepared months before and don't really represent the latest. To know the latest, you need to chat with various people to find out what they are working on right now, that they can't quite announce yet.

What's on stage is canned, in a sense. If you want to be in, you got to be there in person to catch where the future is.

This has held true for me both in academia (research) and web 2.0.
Old article, but I love it so.
That comment suggests an interesting study: how many experiments published in papers are actually repeated by other researchers. I think in computer science it is very low. I would bet that in the physical sciences it could be even lower given the cost of physical laboratory equipment and time constraints to publish "original" research.

Does anybody have data or experience to suggest repeat rates?
Then he should probably raise that fact on python-ideas if he hasn't already. The SMTP library hasn't been tried and tested to any significant degree in the real world, so the likelihood of having it accepted right now is slim -- but it's the usual approach for getting stuff like this on the radar...
Website Marketing Turnoffs
When I studied math, I tried transcribing my notes into LaTex, but found that, while enjoyable, it was too slow, and I got behind. Maybe a tablet PC with some type of note-taking software would work, but that's pretty annoying. I like to use PC's for things that humans can't do themselves, like crunching numbers while I sleep.

I got fast enough at hand notes, and found that if I kept my book open during the lecture, that I could skip note taking on a portion of the lecture if it was covered adequately in the book.
Invitation-only events are not only for people with "property". They also allow those with "energy" to keep an event from being diluted by those without it. Why shouldn't a group of hackers be able to get together with people they choose? Wouldn't the YC weekly dinners fit this category?
I don't think TED is as hard to get into as it seems. You just need to have the $4,000, apply right after they open applications and make yourself sound interesting on your application.
What was your darkest hour like?
I've been a freelancer for, like, 5 years. And during that time, I've always dreamed about starting my own "web 2.0" thing (that's what got me here in the first place). However, lately, things are going in a totally different direction. The business is slow, I'm out of cash and I'm considering getting a job. I've hoped that day will never come, but right now, I have my email client open (actually it's another Firefox tab :) with what should become a job application. Still I just can't seem to be able to do it yet.

Have you ever been in a situation like "thank god I didn't get a day job back then"? If so, how did you manage to get back on track? Is there a silver bullet?
Timely for me as I'm missing TWTRCON (which costs $600!), but following the Twitter stream as I write this. Yup, conferences are great for networking especially for newbies like myself who don't have existing contacts in the industry. The best way for newbies to go about it though is to find all the free or inexpensive conferences available, or offer to volunteer. At least in the Bay Area, there's no shortage of opportunities. I'm volunteering at two in exchange for attendance, and have another four lined up that are free or under $25. The BarCamp movement and related is great for tech newbies and really speak to unbannable's points above.
I'm obviously a fan of HN and by proxy, YC... but to be a devil's advocate...

The people at the HN weekly meeting didn't choose to get together with each other, the rich guys who gave them money chose them and told them to be there.

In contrast, superhappydevhouse is open to anyone who shows up.
> if you are going to lose, do something different.

Rather, I say if you're going to lose, build for the future. Don't optimize for seventh instead of ninth place, try to win the championship a few years from now.
Bing's Early Reviews: So Far, Not Bad
I agree to some extent. I have yet to find a note taking killer app. FWIW, most advice says to recopy notes after the lecture to cement the knowledge anyways. That being said, it would be nice to have a better way to do notes.
More reason to believe JavaScript is going to be huge on the server-side. As concise and (nearly as) powerful as Python, Perl, and Ruby, but getting faster at a much more rapid clip...and already required for the front-end, so everybody on the team is already familiar with it. Library coverage will take another couple of years to reach a reasonable level, but I'd bet on it happening.
I thought the appeal to the 'linearity' of blogs was a bit funny, especially since this very post that I'm writing now has a parent-child relationship to TomOfTTB's post above.

Some blog engines don't have hierarchical discussions, but many of the best do.
So you've missed the rounds of "name 5 things you don't like about Python" posts by prominent people in the community, many of which harp on various modules in the standard library?

That there are things in need of improvement is not disputed. What to do to accomplish the improvement, well, that's a topic to go 'round and 'round about...