skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think Christensen claims that big companies can't generate disruptive innovation, only that there are immense organizational forces that gear it toward incremental improvements rather than disruptive improvements.

The exceptions seem to occur with exceptionally headstrong CEOs who can see beyond who the existing customer is, and create products for markets that don't yet exist (or are at least immature). Jobs is an example of that. The problem is that headstrong CEOs with a fantastic ear for future markets are not a systemic business solution, or else there would be many more examples.

And there's a more specific problem here. That Apple currently has a CEO like it does is due to a historical artifact. Had Jobs not been a co-founder of Apple, would he have been brought in as CEO? If not, would Apple's board have brought someone in similar to him? It's unlikely -- usually the top candidate is the "safe" hire who has demonstrated immense leadership in incremental business domination, not the rough radical. Eventually, Jobs will retire or pass away, and that historical artifact will no longer be relevant -- and the immense organizational forces Christensen describes will begin their work on Apple.
Yes, commercial leases are routinely 10 years or greater.

Sears would actually ask for 100 year leases on property, and at first the landlords were pretty excited about it. After some time, though, the market value of those leases became much higher than Sears was paying. I doubt the landlords were quite as happy when Sears turned around and subleased the property for much, much more money.
This seems overblown.

If you look at the attached graphic, you'll see that the dollar is back to where it was at the start of October, two weeks after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and started a panic that drove flocks of investors to U.S. Treasury bonds (whose yields fell almost to 0). This seems less an indication of weakening confidence in the dollar than a sign that the fear of putting money into anything but U.S. Treasuries is abating.

The article cites a couple of people concerned about inflation, but offers little evidence that it poses a danger.

The economy is still vulnerable, but neither inflation nor a weakening dollar should be our biggest worries.
The United States spends $2.5 trillion a year on health care, more than any other rich nation, and yet has poorer outcomes. About $700 billion is wasted each year.

The reason is simple: Artificial controls on supply and demand of medical professionals: http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/06/23/prsb0623.htm

I can't count the number of friends I have had who applied to medical school and were denied entry due to insufficient seats. There are vastly more individuals qualified to be doctors, many I would much prefer to have as doctors than I have had in the past, but with these artificial limits on supply - governed by the AMA itself - there will always be a shortage of medical care and high medical care costs.

Furthermore, the healthcare industry lobbies congress to prevent individuals for caring for their own health. We cannot for example buy our own insulin without first getting a prescription from a doctor. We cannot get our own blood tests or request our own CAT scans. We are forced, by law, to visit a doctor before we can manage our own health.

As long as doctors are the gatekeepers to health and the supply of doctors is limited by doctors themselves, there will continue to be healthcare problems in the United States.

Our society has pitted the doctor in a competitive role against the patient through litigious means and pharmaceutical industry pressure on doctors to overprescribe unnecessary medications.

It's a horrible situation, but the solution isn't difficult to implement for anyone except the medical industry itself. They don't want to lose the power and control they have over every single life in America.

Visit most countries outside the U.S., Canada, and the UK and you can walk into nearly any pharmacy and purchase the drugs you need to survive, cure disease, and prevent pregnancy for a tiny fraction of the cost Americans pay and without the time delay of a doctor's appointment or the added cost of the doctor's visit itself. And healthcare for the average citizen is higher in these countries. Infant mortality is lower and people live longer.
To Be a Baby
And presumably you want that for only first marriages.
It's funny because that's actually what I liked the most about an intro economics class (at an engineering school): that it was more philosophy plus illustrative math than anything like a science.

But I had to laugh at this line:

The textbook answer to recessions is simple...the central bank can cut interest rates.

That really depends on who wrote your textbook
I don't do flash, but I was under the impression that there's some kind of compilation going on and ActionScript isn't just interpreted. How on earth does a modern compiler not optimise

a / 64

to

a >> 6

? I could understand it in a dynamically typed language, where a, and therefore the result, could be non-integer, but ActionScript seems to have static type declarations for variables.
I have been using Google Chrome on Linux since about a month ago. I installed it so I could test JavaScript programming with it as well. As Google Chrome was still a very work-in-progress (it still is though has improved a lot) at the time I also built a WebKit nightly to test JavaScript with a WebKit process. Since about two weeks ago I have stopped using the WebKit standalone process to test things as Google Chrome is not crashing and considering its roughness it is working well enough for testing JavaScript at least. ;-)

It is super important to have Google Chrome supported on Linux as well as it is going to make it all the more cross-platform and help with getting WebKit quality installs everywhere so we all can share some common ground.

That said, when I am on Windows, Google Chrome is my preferred browser. Despite being unfinished, the Linux version is coming along nicely and it's always open right beside Firefox for me. Opera never enjoyed that status for me however many features it came with. As a matter of fact, programming JavaScript with Opera has been a little awkward when comparing the same code that works OK with Firefox and WebKit and does not quite work with Opera.

I appreciate the Linux version, Google! Thanks! :-)
Almost half of your citations come from one source, and they're all essentially opinion articles. I'm willing to take your assertions on good faith, but honestly you've hardly given me any serious proof. Your view is exactly the type of view I have a problem with. You're making broad claims about how all the research in eight fields is garbage? You're not even remotely qualified to make such as assessment; few people actually are. Let's get serious for a second and examine your claim about English.

One of America's greatest modern novelists (as demonstrated by the awards he's won) works at a university [1]. Further, actual literary criticism doesn't exist as an activity outside of university. All of our poets and novelists that we praise? College educated. Famous literary critics and commentators? College educated. One of the most famous American novels about diversity and racism? Written by a college professor [2]. One of the most revolutionary scholars on colonialism and African literature? A college professor at an American university [3]. And let's not even get into Native American literature, which is basically studied and read only at university.

I've given you several university scholars that are doing cutting edge research in English on diversity, racism, technology, and other important issues. I've also given you an example of a type of literature that lives on only though the efforts of college professors. I could do the same for the other seven fields you claim are producing garbage. It's unfortunate how wrong you our about our university system. I'm sorry to be harsh, but your words are quite dangerous and need to be debunked.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloved_(novel)

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinua_Achebe
"What did I miss?"

You just have to do it.

You came close with #2 (It's Not a Job, It's a Mission).

The best analogy is could think of is the question, "How hard will you try to teach your baby to walk before you give up?"

The only answer I've ever heard to this was, "Huh?" The idea of giving up before your child walks (with obvious exceptions) is alien to parents.

The same thing is true in great startup culture. "Not succeeding" is never an acceptable alternative.
So would many people (especially in today's economic climate), which is why gold is much more expensive than it was in the 80's and 90's (see: http://goldprice.org/30-year-gold-price-history.html). If today's uncertainty subsides, gold could cheapen considerably, inflicting large losses on anyone who invests in it now.

Of course, if you think dollars are even riskier than most people do, it may still be worth investing in gold. But not simply because it's not a "fiat currency".
I've always suspected this was part of the reason. How different are these sorts of things in countries with lower costs?
How is comparing Google Chrome 2, Safari 4 beta, and Firefox 3.0.10 fair? Firefox 3.5 or 3.6 should have been tested instead.
Can anyone decode this jargon:
"The performance metric is the lift at 20% review rate."

By the way, ... the contest is only open to students.
I like to call this the difference between "Ready, Aim, Fire" and "Ready, Fire, Aim".

In the past, I would never "fire" before "aiming". I knew all too well that the cleanup would take longer than the up-front planning would have.

Today, I'm not so sure. Just getting something done provides feedback you didn't have before. That feedback could drastically change your plans.

How do you know when to Aim before Firing or Fire before Aiming? Use your best personal judgment. If Firing before Aiming doesn't get you killed, it's often the better alternative.
I figured as much. :-) Just a thought I had the other day. I imagine it's difficult, if not impossible, to prove a relation between any numerical metric on this site and start up success.
It's probably worth noting that the US also currently has the highest GDP of any country in history. While our debt is catastrophically high, we also produce more per person than any nation our size.
FFmpeg binary is compiled with "--enable-gpl". So yes, either author should recompile it with GPL disabled or release the source code of his application.

Anyway, with LGPL (I assume the point of your comment is educational, and you don't really need the source code for FFmpeg SVN-r17142), author can just provide instructions for downloading the source code for this revision from FFmpeg SVN, as written here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AnonFTPAndSendSourc...
10+ years are common for more mature businesses. Usually the leases I've signed are 3-5 years (three is the shortest they usually come for commercial space). Most leases are 7-10 years; bigger or more established companies will do 10+.

Sometimes people go for long leases because the landlord will pay for tenant improvements (which can be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars) or rent abatement. Long leases are occasionally engaged in by excessively optimistic entrepreneurs who see an opportunity for free money (rent abatement or TI) and who assume they'll be able to pay for it out of revenues by the time the abatement ends.

You're right about Sears though. Some investment analysts look for real estate plays in non-real estate companies when they have very long undermarket leases that could be worth a lot of money if sublet. (Or owned property at very low historical cost, but that's a separate discussion.)
Please continue using ZIP.
Well, more like:
Why the American Civil War is Important ... to Americans.
I personally really like Opera's MDI interface in general (note that they no longer have it in OS X, but the Windows and Linux versions still have it). Being able to tile pages is nice, especially tiling vertically, what with the huge widescreen monitors we have these days and the way so many web pages have a small fix width. Yes, I know that you can achieve the same by opening up multiple windows and arrange them side by side, but if your operating system / window manager doesn't have good tiling abilities, this can be a chore, especially if you want to quickly switch back and forth between layouts.

I wouldn't say that straight MDI is really ideal, I'd like to see some sort of split-pane type thing. Like Emacs, where you can arbitrarily split a pane horizontally or vertically and change what buffer you are viewing in each one. The buffers in this case being all web pages that are open. For extra points, because its probably technically difficult, being able to show the same web page in multiple panes would be cool; especially if you could do something like "Follow mode" in Emacs.

This is probably not something with mainstream appeal, though.
Reading this article I realized I always put `find .`, i.e. explicitly specifying the current directory. I guess this is like saying `ls .` all the time, but oh well.

Sometimes I find that I need to chain a few actions for my search results that aren't possible with multiple -execs, so I employ the shell script loop:

for js in `find . -name '*.js'`; do
dir=`dirname $js`;
cd $dir && make;
java -jar jsmin.jar "$i";
done;

Unfortunately if you've got spaces in your filenames, this will throw off /bin/sh and you have to specify delimiters or work around that.

Lastly, I've found with find that if you have a n-sized conditional where n > 1 and an -exec, you'll want to use escaped parentheses or otherwise the conditionals won't evaluate properly.

Edits: addressing formatting woes.
If you're going to commit, run tests, and then commit again, I don't see a problem with it as long as you use git-rebase to squash those two commits together before you push them. The goal should always be to have the code in your main repository passing all tests at all times.

I've personally never worked this way, I don't commit until all tests are passing and I can't think of any time where I've ran into issues with this process. To each his own.
Yes, assuming they haven't modified FFmpeg.
*(sorry the reply button wasnt under your comment before)

just because they dont have harddisks doesnt mean they dont run a database, remember when I said databases dont need to touch the disk.

mnesia for example was built with exactly high throughput in mind, it can sit in memory only, I do believe mnesia is used inside various routers and switches, is it not a database?

and wow, twitter isnt cool so I guess my argument sucks, the point was different people have wildly varying requirements, and while we are talking about apples vs orange, a web chat vs a router, really?

"x isnt fast enough", "y isnt scalable enough" are inane statements, there isnt enough information to possibly make that distinction, as I said in my first post, if a database gives me extra functionality while satisfying every other of my constraints, its by definition "not doing it wrong"
"When it was over, it was over"

This is important and astonishing to people from other countries. I was an interpreter for some official visitors from China some years ago, and we took a day trip out from Washington, DC to a very near place in Virginia (Alexandria, if I remember correctly) where United States Highway 1 has a monument right in the middle of the highway to Robert E. Lee. And the monument, significantly, has Lee with his back turned to DC and facing the state of Virginia. My Chinese companions were AMAZED that such a monument would be allowed so near to the national capital. The United States allows a lot of expressions of dissent, so even actual civil wars can calm down over time so that people can get along. The contrasting situation in many other countries, where wars from hundreds of years ago are still the basis for grudges today, is a large part of what makes those countries less stable and less prosperous.
sweet app... i'd pay money for this
It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world.

This couldn't be farther from the truth, well... perhaps it could, but it is not the truth, nonetheless.

The evolutionary reason that human children are so helpless at birth is because the hole through the female pelvis got smaller to support walking on two legs. This need for a stronger pelvis, combined with the relatively larger head of the human baby, prevented full development of the baby before birth.

All human babies are therefore born premature. Other similarly sized babies throughout the animal kingdom take a year or more to be born and they are born able to walk and care for themselves.
It's difficult to judge. The US has the highest GDP, but it's also the largest western country in terms of population, which makes direct comparison difficult.

It does not have the highest GDP per capita (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...).
"Instead of thinking how different people were in the 1800s, it's much more useful to view mankind as basically the same species that came from the savannah eons ago."

Oddly, that's the biggest thing I've noticed when studying the Civil War. Even though our DNA hasn't changed much since then, we certainly have.

Life was so different then, it's hard to imagine. Most of the soldiers had never been more than 20 miles from home before serving. And without much technology, they only know a few dozen people before the war. This was supposed to be a great adventure for many of them. But...

Their sacrifice and suffering are unimaginable today. They marched through mud for days on end, eating only salt pork, hardtack, and coffee. They fought brutally with obsolete technology. The numbers are staggering (by American standards): 1/2 million casualties, Gettysburg 50,000 in 3 days, Antietam, 30,000 in one day.

Every American should visit at least one Civil War battlefield. As I walked down Bloody Lane in Antietam, I imagined the thousands who had died in the same spot, a very sobering experience.

Somehow I can't imagine something like that happening today. I don't think we Americans would put up with that much pain and suffering, for any cause.

We have it pretty good now in our air-conditioned homes with a table full of food and a broadband connection. It's easy to forget that we got that because of the sacrifice of so many others.

Great post, even for hackers, on Memorial Day. Thank you.
Nice, that reminds me of "tracer bullets" - special ammunition that gives off a lot of light so you can see exactly where it's landing and adjust your aim quickly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracer_ammunition
The solution is marvellously simple:

"But the larger problem, as in California, is that the public also recoils from spending cuts and tax increases"

The American public needs to stop acting like a bunch of petulant, whiny children and start paying up.
The "test first" extreministas write a test, write code to make that test pass, make it green, then commit. Lather, rinse, repeat. So the window for loss is exactly the work done for one small step of improvement.

I concur that it's nicest to then squash all of those tiny steps into a single feature/bug-fix chunk.
Dogs are fun. War is not. I'll take the dog.

Your war analogy reminds me of a comment a startup CEO once made to me: "A startup is a war. I am at war, and if one of my men can't keep up I will shoot him."

I'll take the dog.
So, is TDD really the key? Should you really always (or nearly so) write your tests first before writing any code?

It would seem to me that doing so would seriously interfere with workflow.
ReferenceBot: designed in 1 hr, built in 1 week
Shmoop: Study Guides, Teacher Resources
We pay a fraction of the cost Americans for drugs because our governments aren't as owned by the pharmaceutical companies as the US government is. They're called price controls and they work pretty well, maybe someday the US will wake up to that fact.

And of course, blaming the AMA and doctors is another great diversion. The same professional association exists in Canada and other countries, yet our health care expenditures are under control. Like price controls on drugs, it is the kowtowing to free-market ideology over practical policies that work that gets Americans a shitter health care product for nearly twice the cost.
Default setting is <America>, no qualifier needed. Also, <America> == <U.S.>, please learn to live in Ascii ;-)
As an Argentinian I see a core point missing: evolving Corruption
In this crisis US can't differentiate between free market and corruption. Why S&P and other rating agencies gave AAA to AIG? it was really a miscalculation?

But to be realistic Argentina is infinite far from US. US has the opportunity to heal itself while Argentina future is very dark.
there isnt enough information to possibly make that distinction

The author generously provided his prototype which conveys enough information for me to judge the implementation:
http://jchrisa.net:5984/toast/_design/toast/channel.html#Cou...

And my judgement is: The author is doing it wrong. Wrong as in eating his soup with a fork.
I don't care what you do with Freshman Economics as long as you keep it out of the Sciences.

After 6 Economics courses and an MBA, I'd prefer these sentiments: (sorry, I couldn't resist)

"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today."
Laurence J. Peter

"An economist is an individual who can tell you 364 ways to make love to the member of the opposite sex, but never has done so."
Quoted in John von Neumann by Norman Macrae

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain."
Mark Twain

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
Gandhi

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.
The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
Thomas Sowell

"What is studied [in modern formal analysis] is a system which lives in the minds of economists but not on earth. I have called the result 'blackboard economics'. The firm and the market appear by name but they lack any substance."
Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics.

"Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, "on one hand... on the other."
Harry Truman

"Every time history repeats itself the price goes up."
No name

"Teach a parrot the terms "supply and demand" and you've got an economist."
Thomas Carlyle
Social Media - What Needs To Be In The Cloud?
OK, I'm going to stop this now. It's been running for more than 4 hours, and still isn't halfway through step 1.
Tech entrepreneurs [including Ward Cunningham] defy recession
Hunt/Thomas use "tracer bullets" as a term for prototyping in The Pragmatic Programmer. It's not an uncommon analogy.