skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe this article was released right at the peak of the economic boom/bubble. While I agree with his answer:

"Absolutely. Remember, Compaq was conceived at the House of Pancakes. But before throwing in with the group, I'd advise the 28-year-old to think carefully about the business opportunity, the markets, and the technology. And think hardest about the team."

I think the most important part now would be the markets. Market timing can determine if your technology is ahead of the curve or already on the road to being quickly replaced/replicated. Business opportunity is also largely determined by whether there is (A) a market that wants the business and (B) a market that can financially support the business.

Potential customers could theoretically want a business but not be able to afford it due to their own economic problems. This is probably a common occurrence and is one of the reasons we even have economic contractions.

An argument could be made that market timing/identification is more important than the original founding team.
Great to see IE7's significant drop, should make life easier on developers.

Does anybody know how these stats are gathered, or what they mean when they say 'market share'? Is it % of internet traffic requests by browser? or % of downloads/installs?

I'm wondering if browser market share is based on users primary browser, using stats from companies like compete, or if it is based on downloads or some other metric.

I have IE, Safari And Opera only for testing purposes, I do most development in Firefox due to firebug, and use Chrome as my main browser. So how would I be counted in this survey?

I think this is important because if it is based on % of traffic, non-OEM browsers (Firefox, Chrome) could appear to have more traffic than default installed browsers (IE/Safari) simply because the users of Firefox & Chrome spend more time on more sites.

Thoughts?
same w/ me
I agree this is the ideal method; however, there will be people who will refuse to clear their table/throw away their trash ... then others will look over and say if he isn't doing it, why should I?
In fact, IE's market share fell 17% (65.8-55.4)/65.8. Oh Techcrunch.
Hummingbird uav
Wow. You left me speechless. In your earlier post, you mentioned that Government excels at wasting the taxpayer's money and you still want to give them money for the 'common good'. [Personally, I am scared of everyone who talks about common good.]

Have you ever thought about why government wastes money? As Milton Friedman put is succinctly,

There are 3 ways to spend money.
1. Your money on yourself. [e.g. buying a car for yourself]
2. Your money on someone else. [e.g. buying a birthday gift for your friend.]
3. Someone else's money on someone else. [Your beloved government.]

Ask yourself, out of these 3 scenarios, which one will get you the most bang for the buck? Yes, scenario 1, where you make sure that you get most out of your hard earned money. And you can bet that there will be tremendous waste of money in scenario 3, no exceptions.

So my friend, tell me, why should I give my hard earned money to Government when I know that it will be wasted?

Keeping the waste argument aside, let me talk about your comment that you think you are terrible at using your own money. Have you thought that not everyone thinks that they are not good with their money? [e.g. I think I am good at managing my money]. Just because you are not, is it fair for you to suggest higher tax rate for everyone? What about my freedom to decide what should I do with my own money?

Mind you, I am not suggesting that there should not be any taxes. Only thing I am suggesting is that government taxes & their role in our day to day life should be minimum.
What if I'm willing to pay someone $2 to clear my table, and someone else is willing to clear it for $2?

Are you going to say that we can't engage in this voluntary transaction? Because this is basically the system we have in place now and a lot of people are willing to pay and be paid.
There's a difference between being bored and thinking, erroneously, that your life is boring. It's much easier to complain about being bored than it is to actually be bored.
Came to US when I was 12 from Ukraine, came to Ukraine when I was 1 or so from Russia.
What currencies can be chosen other than USD or Euro? All of the rest have no long-term performance record to draw from, or are based on a single country's current activity. To avoid single-country currency manipulations, choose the Euro. I don't think the US Govt has repudiated any debt to date, which gives large-scale investors some comfort (although this is backwards- not forward-looking).

However, the customer base tends to be in USD or Euro (particularly the former). Thus, there is an argument for dealing in USD so as to sell to those dealing in USD.
Tashkent. So its in Uzbekistan now.
That's a fair point. I think the article was more saying "You should only take stimulants if they're prescribed to you. But whether they were prescribed to you or not, here's how to get the most out of them."

At least that's how I read it.
Some people have a similar reaction to porus/holey objects like http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1406/1093460880_2af2500cc8.jp... . It seems common enough that there's probably some instinctive reason for it. The image of the triangle has a kind of similar feel to it.
"But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?"

Because there is no society so rich that it can't misallocate even worse. Yes, I include full post-Singularity societies in that statement.

I think rather than saying "socialism can work then" or even "X can work then" for X in (socialism, anarchy, capitalism, etc.), it is rather worth saying that in that case, the foundation will have changed so radically that it is, correspondingly, time to completely reconsider society's economics from scratch.

The laws of economics will still be in play, and for a very long time there will still be the challenge of deciding which projects we wish to engage in, large and small ("which star do we colonize?"). That is not the problem that goes away. The problem that goes away is the lack of resources for basic happiness for some entity, a world we still live in.

Edit: Actually, for proof I point to modern society. We are already, not to put too fine a point on it, "fucking rich". We have massively more resources than we did even twenty years ago. Yet many of us feel poorer today, because an awful lot of that excess is getting tied up in various things that I will put under the umbrella of "economically unproductive". For instance, in the context of recent state government funding troubles, many people have observed that almost across the board state governments are spending radically more than they did in 2003, yet it hardly seems like they're performing that many more services than they did in 2003. A lot of that is because we are being terribly economically inefficient.

Health care has some of the same problems. We have radically more resources than we used to, but thanks to some systematic failures in the system (pick your choice of excessive centralization or insufficient centralization, for this point I don't care), we are spending way more than we need to. This is proved by people's ability to fly to, say, Argentina, and get virtually identical surgeries (even in a clean and safe environment) for one-tenth the price, give or take a bit. (The exact ratio doesn't matter, what matters is that it is large.)

We should be either getting massively more from our government, or paying massively less, than we did ten years ago, but we aren't. Health care expenditures may still be going up (it is a potential economic sinkhole just by its nature), but it still should be costing less per procedure than it did ten years ago, but it doesn't. (On average. There are exceptions where medicine has advanced so far that it is cheaper for some procedures.)

Unfortunately, it's just not possible to "wealth" your way out of needing to put at least some thought into economic efficiency.

(Also, I personally do not feel poorer and believe that we are still better off than twenty years ago. I am merely observing that A: I appear to be in a minority there, at least among people motivated to post in online discussions and B: we should be even better off than we actually are.)
11% of the total, right?
Comparative advantage is the biggie. Everyone wants to be the astronaut.
The really, really good news is the fall of IE6. Currently 7.6%. 5% should be an important milestone in its decline into irrelevance. Hopefully when that is attained - and it looks like it could be soon - we can all kiss that nightmare of a browser goodbye for good.
How to Set Up Your Community Manager to Fail
It's not cheap, and you don't have to be Google for it to matter. Most of the time, the costs are just non-obvious to engineering.

Here are some rough numbers.

Power for a single 48U rack usually runs $200-$300/month for two 20amp circuits (possibly +2 for redundancy). A modern 1U server draws anywhere from (roughly) 1.66 to 2.5 amps, and you can only use 80% of a circuit's maximum supported load due to safety regulations, resulting in a total supported count of between 12 to 19 mid-range servers per rack. Higher-end servers have a significantly increased power draw, but potentially higher efficiency, and there can be a significant advantage to leveraging multi-core systems.

In addition to rackspace and power, each server must obviously be connected to the network. The switches draw enough power to potentially decrease the number of supported servers.

Each rack costs roughly $500/month (plus power), and often requires advanced provisioning to ensure that rackspace is available, and if possible, located in the same area. It's not unusual to buy an entire block of space well ahead of actual use to ensure that the business' growth can be accommodated.

Additionally, one requires an operations staff to maintain the servers. Hard drives fail, backups must be done, hardware must be ordered, tested, and finally, deployed. Simple deployment of a single server, including the networking configuration, travel time, and physical work can easily consume 4-8 hours of operations staff time.

When you add together the operational and capital expenditures, I'm not really convinced that the idea is so simple as "servers are cheap, programmers are expensive". Servers, electricity, physical space, and the labor necessary to install and maintain them are not particularly cheap.

I'd propose a new mantra: programmers are expensive, and so are servers and IT, and so let's try to not be monomaniacally flippant about it. Software can be easy to write AND perform reasonably well, and to say otherwise simply appears to be a false dichotomy fronted by those who benefit from it most.
this emperor has at best, some scanty underwear on. the jack deal is to prepay for a service that is many time more inconvenient than its substitutes and saves a few cents. what that means for customer renewals and business sustainability should be pretty obvious even if it remains undisclosed.
What do you mean by being better? Having better grades than him or being a better problem solver. Because most of the time, these kind of people follow their own agenda and don't really bother to be at the top of the class.
I ticked 0 because I'm a Swede living in the US, but that's not entirely accurate because I'm just a nonresident at this point, not an immigrant (at least in the eyes of the state).
Where you looking for positions at military contractors or directly DoD work? If so, you should know that there are very strict laws on who can work in US military (and government) positions. Very often, you must be a US citizen to gain even lower level employment in sensitive military contracts. I know for a fact that not only do you have to have to be a natural American citizen (born in the United States), but you also have to have lived abroad only temporarily for a certain amount of time and lived consecutively in the US (for 10 years, I think?) to be eligible to earn the highest security clearances. Government work will probably remain the domain of US citizens, as very often its viewed as a national security risk otherwise.
I think it's a bit simpler than people being wired differently.

Stimulants feel good, regardless of their other effects. People will always want to rationalize continuing to do something that feels good. Again, regardless of the other effects both positive and negative.

The difference here is that this rationale is culturally acceptable. It's become good to use these drugs for this reason. The PR submarine[1] is out in full force[2], building positive associations (Take these drugs and you'll get into Harvard!) and diminishing negatives ones ("Progress often carries risk.") That, to me, is what makes this tend unsettling, far more than the drugs themselves.

[1]:http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[2]:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mindenhancing-drug...
It's a platform-as-service deal. Like Google App Engine but with JavaScript rather then Python.
great to hear David's attention to the "motivation" & "aptitude" of the founders during the diligence process compared with other firms that tend to focus on the numbers. i'll take passion in a startup any day of the week..
Let's imagine that God's Book contains not only proofs but also the other good Ideas of the Universe (QED, Enlightenment, Mozart's Requiem, etc..) For one of these Ideas to become known to us, a human's brain must at some point "think" it - by entering some physical/biological state (firing pattern?) which encodes that idea.

Then the human search for these Ideas is really a search over an enormous state space of all possible brain states. Some factors that can affect one's odds of being first to exhibit an Idea:

- Wiring: some brains are born prone to Idea states. Through plasticity, brains can increase their propensity to represent Idea states. Also, some brains are wired to acquire new states and evaluate them more quickly.

- Hard work: entering & evaluating more states than other people, usually in a small area, through disciplined investigation.

- Inputs: the right knowledge at the right moment (Ideas are similar to each other - cf. beauty as a correctness heuristic)

- Blind luck

Some apparent characteristics of Idea states:

- It is hard work to represent an Idea state (presumably, the easy ones are those we are born to, and appear trivial to us)

- Idea states appear to occur in clusters (cf. beauty as a truth heuristic in physical theories)

- It is difficult to define a distance metric between Idea states

- Corollary: it is difficult to tell how far away any given state is from the nearest Idea state

As far as I can tell, the author of this article is arguing that it is unreasonable to stop searching simply because one's brain is not as Idea-compatible as F-E-H's appear to be. This seems to be sensible advice - but one must appreciate that it does diminish the odds.
The ironic part of your post is that the artificial, chemical vitamins and potent herbs that you take are probably more dangerous to your health than 10mg of amphetamine: a well characterized, safe, single substance. :) Herbs contain so many chemicals we do not understand its not funny. Many thin the blood and can cause bleeding. Herbs kill more people than pharmaceutical doses of amphetamines ever have.

A family friend just died from a random brain bleed, well before his time. Guess how many herbs he took? There is a strong correlation between random brain bleeds and herb use, it just isn't substantiated well enough to pull them from the market yet. I hear about them all the time. Which is a damn shame. Herbs kill.

So do yourself a favor: go get a Ritalin or Adderall prescription and cut the vitamin overdoses and herbs. You'll probably live longer ;)
Since January IE7 went from 53.7% down to 30.79%. For a net drop of 22.91%.

In that same period IE8 went up from 1% to 15.23%. A net gain of 14.23%.

So the upgrade there cost Microsoft 8.68%. And then there is an extra 10% drop for IE6
How exactly do you explore the online communities though?
I'm an immigrant myself, and the 3 generations before me have all emigrated from a different country before having kids. I guess I have the immigration gene.
Ask HN: Gambling & smoking limited but not entrepreneurship and stock trading?
There are dangers involved in gambling and smoking. Consequently, governments provide limits/warnings to mitigate those dangers.

But why do governments not do the same with entrepreneurship and stock trading?

For example, 3rd party developers could receive a warning that gives them the expected profit from a particular platform. Without such warnings and in cases with very low expected profit, companies would be essentially getting free labor to promote their products.
I say kick it now. Only 9% of people use IE6, that # will continue to dwindle. The current rate of drop for IE6 is 2% a month. So it'll probably go down to 5% within 4-6 months.

No sense in supporting a browser that will become irrelevant in 6 months.
Isn't jumping out of an aeroplane exploring? It is exploring a different experience and so are all the things you mentioned and I think that was the point of his post, go find out what is our there so that you may experience different things.
Announcing pyvcs, django-vcs, and piano-man
OK, now you want to develop a desktop version of your application with a snazzy graphical interface. Good luck.
I bet hiding $100,000 on an IE-only website would totally do the trick, though.
This is good advice. ankp's comment is also good advice.

A well-run technical organization shouldn't have to choose between good programmers, code that performs, and the ability to quickly operationalize new hardware when necessary. If you're having to choose, you've got more work to do.
I've used Chegg and I have to say they are going to be a winner/already are. Quick summary:

-Fast Shipping
-Great Prices
-GREAT service
-Easy to use app

I file them under the "if I had money" I'd invest in them.
This guy seems pretty awesome.
I'm worried about the full scale psychological break down that's likely to come from not requiring anything from anybody. pg mentions 'Manhattan house wives' somewhere in his writing. It's that psychological affliction writ large. Some people can auto-impose the structure necessary to not sink into an orgy of escapism, but I'm guessing it's less than 3%.

Imagine the popular culture in a world where it's trivial for people to endlessly indulge their most idiosyncratic whims and vices - where hard knocks no longer cull delusional and generally ineffective behaviors.
I don't really think that it's okay that our society penalizes people who are bad at taking tests, because test-taking isn't actually productive work. But the fact remains that it does, and they're something that a lot of people have trouble with, and have a lot less trouble when they're on speed. While we're working to reform the education system, we shouldn't deny people the chemicals they need to cope with the system as it is.

When it comes to taking tests, 99% of the population seems to me like they have serious brain problems. They perform far below my level, which I arbitrarily designate as normal. The kinds of "real brain problems that need some intervention" that we're talking about here are defined pretty empirically; we mostly aren't talking about things that show up on an MRI, we're talking about things that are "diagnosed" by people scoring 1½σ below the mean on an IQ test.

To take a concrete and fairly extreme example, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with people that they can see a word spelled correctly dozens or hundreds of times and still not know how to spell it. But that seems to be the case for 99% of the population.

The function of correct spelling in modern society seems to me to be essentially the same as the function of good penmanship a century ago: to demonstrate to the reader that the writer is properly educated, i.e. approximately that their parents were rich enough that they didn't have to pull them out of school in 1950 when they were 10 to work on the farm. Fundamentally, this is harmful to the social fabric. Either prejudice distracts from the quality of the writing — there are any number of Nobel-winning writers with terrible spelling and penmanship.

(I was expelled from eighth grade for picking a particularly inopportune time to explain this point of view, somewhat less articulately: coming in second in the regional spelling bee, if I remember correctly.)

It's fortunate that this particular neurological deficit doesn't happen to cause any harm, and unfortunate that we choose to stigmatize the 99% of the population who's dramatically worse at it than I am. But given that there's a relatively safe drug that allows many people to escape that stigma, it seems reasonable to let them have it until such time as we can expiate the stigma.
I don't think this has to be USA-centric. Immigrating is not a small decision, or an easy one! It would be interesting to know if there is a correlation between the willingness to do this and general creativity/ambition. I guess the flip-side would be to ask the question: Do people that stay in one place tend to become less creative or ambitious?
Coffee is a much less effective stimulant for this purpose than amphetamine or methylphenidate.
I assume you are joking. Gambling is a closed system with fixed rules. The expected winnings form a Gaussian bell curve. Entrepreneurship is an open system. You can change the game. The idea of expected profits assumes that profits will follow a bell curve. But in fact they don't. There is really no upper bound. To use the terminology of Taleb's Black Swan, entrepreneurship profits are Mandelbrotian. The outliers can completely change the average, to a point where the concept of the average or expected becomes meaningless.
Who says you can't upgrade without reinstalling on Ubuntu?

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade
As per trash bins, imagine all materials used in all products were bio-degreadable. Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth. No need for complicated garbage pick-up robots.

Simple, simple.
I posted a similar idea a couple years back:

http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2006/07/guns-germs-and-happiness...
Yes, but suppose it fell 11 percentage points from 90%. That would be a smaller real drop.
Well, the most obvious candidate is either SDRs, or some new basket currency:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights
Air France Jet Hit Water Largely Intact, Investigators Say
Again, why do I have to reach farther than "the nature of the Gaussian distribution says there will be outliers"?

(Also... "there was only one Mozart" is rather more hero worship than truth. There are many factors that coincided to make Mozart, and I fully expect there have been multiple people since then that have been every bit as talented, but didn't have the same factors coming together. Going into that would be a long, long post about music theory and music history, though.)
Nothing quite helps you to understand the vibrance of an ecosystem like witnessing decomposition and rebirth first-hand. I live on the lower floor of a duplex, and last fall people blew leaves from their lawn that ended up on my stoop which is about two feet below ground at its lowest point and is well-sheltered from wind.

Most of the leaves have now decomposed into what appears to be a rich soil about half an inch thick with a fine covering of very dry, remaining leaves. You wouldn't believe how many earthworms I find if I explore even a small patch of this new terrain. Clover-like lichens are spreading down the three steps and have begun to take root on the stoop itself.

All on top of brick!

What this guy is doing is pretty awesome.
One other thing just occurred to me: the books from the courses I really enjoyed I wanted to keep. If the books are mostly for resale, maybe the subject is not important enough?