skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for a great comment.

It's true that we are attempting to solve quite few problems in one go, but this just reflects the nature of the challenge - rather than any particular desire to blow ourselves up.

If you look at AWS, they spent $2 billion implementing their vision of cloud services. They understood that you can't just graft a business model onto existing technology, so they created a platform where the technology and revenue system go hand-in-hand.

We're trying to do something similar for the browser. We don't aim to own or dominate the platform. It will be very open, with space for any number of compatible billing systems.

D.
By all accounts, Erdos was a dysfunctional human being and hardly worth immitating :-) a great mind, yes, but he had way too many eccentricities to make him a bit odd. For example, Erdos found sex disgusting, in an squemish "I am gonna vomit" kind of way.

You actually see the same thing in artists. Sure, the top geniuses are prone to hard-life and drug use, but there are plenty of phonies abusing drugs and living the "life style" without producing any work of value. My gf is a musician and every time I hangout with her friends I feel like I am the dirty unhealthy one. Nearly all the musos are vegeterian yoga freaks, even the rockers, while I the computer programmer chase cigarettes with spirits like a "rockstar" :-P
I'm not really sure how to answer that. I am an American, and live in Italy, so I suppose that makes me an immigrant. We may go back to the US at some point, but my daughter is Italian/American, so I guess I'll check the first one: either I or my wife will always be an immigrant (or maybe both, like when we were in Austria).

In terms of the US, some of the people on my mother's side were involved in founding Providence, RI, where Roger Williams went after being kicked out of MA. On my father's side, they were Danish immigrants at the end of the 19th century, or at least the ones we know something about.
I disagree. My interpretation of Shirky's thinking is that the dialog is the issue, rather than the payment size.

The key is to create an almost friction-free and fair method of payment. People are happy to pay a fair amount for content (cf. the piracy argument) as long as it's hassle free.

The usage component is essential so that people don't end up paying for services they don't use. If you stop using a service you stop paying for it. No lock-in.

D.
Sorry but that's nothing but an excuse, "I could do great things, too, if I had a great domain name..."

Unless, I guess, you really think linkedin.com is a better domain name than business.com
Some years back, someone posted official-looking signs around the Stanford campus containing a "confession" from the bookstore admitting that it had been gouging students for years and offering them refunds.

The bookstore had to hustle to get out its own signs telling students that this was prank and that no refunds would be issued.

I normally don't condone pranks but this one was pretty clever and it did send them reeling for a few days anyway.

Anyway, it is probably students' pent-up frustration in feeling trapped by this system that is the real "secret sauce" behind the success of this service. Lots of demand. All that was missing was an elegant solution.
Inspired Interview: Mills of UsTwo - The Studio of Dreams
Much depends on the exact phrasing. Offering negative interest rates on consumer accounts is ludicrous to the point of rendering it impossible. For a national bank, nah, not so much.
Russian? I could have sworn it was a Soviet vessel from the Soviet space program. A not so subtle linguistic framing there ..
People with fundamentally different belief systems are not hostile to each other. I have seen people with very radical beliefs who are very accepting of people with opposite views. Almost always it is the politicians and people in charge of nation-states who divide so that they can rule easily (us vs. them mentality). We can achieve harmony and unity through means other than tyranny (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolence) .
I'll bid $500. For real.

HN is likely one of the worst places to try and sell something like this. We all believe we can rewrite 80% of something like this in a couple of weekends, given sufficient caffeine.

The $500 bid is based on the likelihood that if you find a buyer on HN, some tech bloggers will likely pick up the story, and the PR value itself might be worth it.

Let's see.
John Doerr's Startup Manual (1997)
I'd probably say 5 or more generations, considering the whole slavery thing. Not sure about the part of my family not of African descent. The topic's actually never really come up before. Our family trees are a bit... obscure
I came over from the Soviet Union when I was 5 with my parents seeking political asylum.
Nothing to do with "Clustering"; it's a multi search-engine result filter, albeit a fancy one.
Yes, here's my reasoning: The Government has the ability to hire subject matter experts on a wide range of issues. They come up with plans to spend it and compete with each other about whose plan is the best and try to make compelling arguments to elected or appointed officials to get funding. The inefficiencies come from the inevitable systematic abuses of bureaucracy: nepotism, greed, personal interest, etcetera etcetera. But, they still end up doing something and it's at least been thought through.

Now, we come to my spending. I'll go through several hypothetical situations.

First, no income tax has been taken from me at all: I spend the money on stupid garbage (video games, comic books, movies, camera equipment, etcetera) or squirrel it away in an investment (as I noted, nice to have more, but I'm making investments anyway). The common good is not served, I have more stuff I probably don't need anyway, the world falls into chaos.

Second, I don't get to spend my taxed money on myself, but have to spend it towards the common good as I so choose: I put it towards a pet project that I think is worthwhile. In my case, it would be to sponsor free programming education for kids. I always thought the computer classes in school were lame and I'd like to see kids get a better introduction at a young age. Scale this up by 300 million people: Nice sounding projects to feed the homeless and provide specialized education to kids and plant gardens etcetera are supremely well funded, but there's no public police department, no public fire department, no public roads, public transportation, center for disease control, EPA, FDA, and all the other acronyms that ensure that you don't get fucking raped by some business that has enough money to buyout the private landowners to do whatever the fuck it wants to do.

Finally, I'm tasked with spending the money in such a way as to form the most ideal society as possible: Shit, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, can't someone else take care of this? Thus, the government.

So, no, I would definitely be more incompetent than the government when it comes to using money for the common good. I would be terrible.

Also, don't go telling me that the private sector would be better at it, because brother, I've worked in a private organization that's as large as a small government, and they are filled to the fucking BRIM with bullshit.

Personally, I've always been of the mind that we should be working on automated systems to handle this sort of thing. Cold, unfeeling automata dedicated towards the most efficient dispersal of public funds. Unmotivated by emotional pleas and the suffering of the individual. Steely, ruthless, determined.

But no one else seems to like that idea and I don't know how to build it.
Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.
David,

When I wrote the original article I was already aware of Shirky's views on micro payments, but it's true that the comments both here and on my blog made me understand that this issue was more important than I had previously thought - and so for that I am certainly grateful to you.

As to my use of a 'thought experiment' - well I've been doing them ever since I tried to get my head around relativity 20 years ago. I can't remember if Shirky uses a thought experiment in his original article, but even if he does, I don't see it as being particularly relevant.

As to you wanting to short our (yet inexistent stock) - well, I can see you're upset, but isn't that a bit harsh?
I'm not sure what 'editorssuck' was trying to accomplish with this link on his 1 hour old account.

In case someone was actually interested...
http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/carpal-tunnel/preventin...
I'm still in school and this is one of those things that I have seen countless people do.

General intake is a snort of half a ritalin pill when your body is beginning to tire near 12am before your early morning exam or big term paper.

It isn't just ritalin either. I've seen people snort so many wake-ups (an over the counter caffeine pill) that they are too busy zoning to even study.
Hi theoneill, thanks so much for your comment. I don't mean to create a sales-letter page style and I also understand this research was not professionally conducted. Probably has a lot of statistic errors. Yet I don't mean to imply any causation based on my research. I just want to share my findings with people who have a strong passion in entrepreneurship. If my post has offended you in anyway, please accept my apologies.
I don't think he meant literally "make good jerky and sell it on the web..." He is pointing out someone who is doing well, serving a small niche. This shows that small success is within the reach of most, and that you don't have to have a idea for the next Google to succeed.

Unless you really have to have that private jet.
The relational model:  of tuples, relations, rows, and tables
Summary: Someone goes trolling Zappos' customer support with stupid questions and is supprised when he receives a polite reception.

Flagged for being useless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15
I agree. I think that after automation, whatever residue of crap jobs in society should be shared in an equitable way. Participatory Economics (parecon for short) offers one decentralized way of doing this; maybe people know of others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
That's in there too, but basically the idea is a lot less work, as in 99% less.

It reminds me of geography class when I was younger and I learned about the primary, secondary and tertiary parts of the economy. We were taught that economies with a large tertiary sector were "better". The tertiary economy mainly produces goods that are not fundamentally important to peoples lives. (Although obviously I think peoples lives are better than they were 50 years ago when it comes to longevity and other health issues, that's not what I'm getting at.)

With developed economies, there were two options that I can see. One was to lessen work hours and maintain consumption levels as technology improved, and the other option, which exists today, is to keep work hours the same (or increase them in many cases), and create more jobs in the services sector, which in turn requires more consumption to keep everything going.

I saw two options instead of two choices, because people were never given this choice.

Basically I think it boils down to this: You can work your ass off to buy stuff you mostly don't need and make someone else rich, or you can be an anti-consumerist, work less and...do whatever you want?
This already exists - it is called the reference section of the library. I have never purchased a single calculus textbook or one of those huge $150 dollar physics textbooks.

Instead, I can just go sit at the engineering library for my two hours and answer the problem set.

As far as studying goes, you can usually find most information you need for class online that comes from a reputable source. Just make sure to double check that you didn't miss anything by reading over the chapter the next time you take out the book.
The thing is that amphetamines are some of the most well understood medications prescribed by doctors. They've been prescribed for almost 80 years. Doctors know their effects better than most "conventional" medicines. And it has never been proven that they have seriously harmful side effects when taken under appropriate medical supervision. Although it's hard to objectively diagnose ADHD (just like any other psychiatric condition), doctors know what they're doing when they prescribe stimulants.

Therefore, the choice isn't "brain damage vs 10 points on a test." It's more like "performing like a normal human being vs failing at life."
The term 'Kamikaze' crops up frequently in the media out of its original context. For example, the UK chancellor used the same term to describe the bankers who created the housing bubble (http://bit.ly/Qdmlj) - so I don't see how it can be tasteless.

I'm sure if a company started giving away free cars in the hope of charging for premium petrol then they would probably attract similar (if not stronger) adjectives. And the workers in the plants making cars for money would certainly get caught in the shrapnel.

As for my blog being ugly - I couldn't agree more.
'scuse (I'm not very MS-Windows literate). Why doesn't rdesktop fit your RDP needs?
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.

Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
What an absurdly awful headline. The Soviet (not Russian) spacecraft crashed, not landed into the moon one day after the American pair of Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the moon. Did the headline writer even read the article?
The problem happens when everyone does this and there aren't any copies in the library. I ended up just buying key textbooks because neither my college or department libraries sufficed.
There is plenty of secret sauce to Chegg’s business, including logistics and software to determine the pricing and sourcing of books, as well as how many times a given book can be rented.

Doesn't really sound all that defensible to me...
Come on, you sound like you're dismissing "many years of research" and analytic work as the fringe result of Ritalin use.

I left slashdot because of the in-crowd, story cross-referencing "humor".
I did, in fact, read the entire article. Hawking says:

"""In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."""

See? He's not talking about evolution. He's trying to redefine a biological concept in terms of something much more. What he's describing is learning, and specialization of behaviour through learning.
Windows/IE runs Flash well (much better than Linux/Firefox), so you'd never need that option.
It uses 6 megabytes of memory

1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.

2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.
First of all- the definition is not mine. It is what is in the books. The terms "recognize" and "recognizable" is defined in the context of complexity theory. So are the terms "decide" and "decidable". "Accept" is not. So when you say you don't think some definition is good please read the exact definition first. There are many serious and great mathematicians and computer scientist involved in that theory and it is irrespectable to them to comment it without being familiar with it.

Second - What I meant to say in my first comment is that the way P?=NP problem is defined it is provable. The fact that it is provable can be proved easily and I will leave this as exercise to you.
Trust is certainly a big issue with web applications. Before building GetterDown I used Basecamp for an instant archive. Their functionality didn't quite suit my needs, but I did trust 37 Signals with my data. Anything that needs extreme protection (banking account info, passwords, etc) I just keep in file folders at home.

Our user permissions and access system forbids us from looking at your user data. As a user I would not want some admin peeking at my personal data, and we want to ensure that users trust our system 100%.

Thanks for your comment, RiderOfGiraffes.
grrr damn web designers .... I need to READ not to watch nice shadows everywhere!

... aw a Cmd+ resolve this, but the whole design do to hell nicely :)
From what I"ve seen based on the number of customers we have who bring in computers so riddled with viruses that they won't function (about 500 so far this year in a town of 15k people), it's dangerous to rely on Symantec, because about 90% of those computers have Norton anti-virus installed on them. The rest are McAfee or nothing. I've never seen a computer with a free antivirus program like AVG or Avast as badly infected.... not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't see it. My guess is that a lot of people who know enough to hunt down free antivirus software probably no enough to fix their computer when something does happen.
excellent points. plus the author's writing style is direct and if not humble, than certainly not arrogant.
I'm not really sure, but we should be from this country since 300 or 400 may be! (In paper there's more than 6 generations! => 500 years at least)
Voted up for being accurate about the evils of work. Pity the author has absolutely no clue what to do about it, and so little knowledge of economics as to not even be aware of his own ignorance.

It's all about incentive structures, professional specialization, and comparative advantage. If you want to replace work, you have to find something better. The author shows no sign of understanding why they are important.

If you could come up with a better incentive structure that gives people a reason to try, while still exploiting professional specialization and comparative advantage, without creating bosses and managers to regiment life, you could systematize it and start companies that used it which would outcompete existing companies.
Business Lessons I Learned from Playing Dungeons & Dragons
lotsa good info for devs, dig in searchyc

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199493

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224604

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427743

Key for me is angling up my keyboard and elevating heels of hands on a rolled up towel. Also 3 exercises: wrist curl, and the dynaflex and rubber net thing i got here

http://www.fitter1.com/Catalog/Category/35/HandWrist.aspx
If you have upgraded all your servers without consolidating, year after year, you will notice that your electricity bill is going through the roof.

I don't know, you can buy an awful lot of electricity for an hour of my time, and I'm cheap... I think the largest deployment my day job supports probably causes an electricity bill in the hundreds a year range. If you had a meeting between one PL and two engineers to discuss what to do about the electricity bill you could cancel the meeting and pre-pay the next few years.

Adjust if you're Google... but you're not Google.
The only time I have ever seen this happen is days leading up to the exam. Which, if you take good notes, shouldn't make a difference because you'll be able to just study from you notes. Plus your notes are usually a much more efficient study material than a textbook anyway.
An interview with David Lee, SV Angel, on the Valley Advantage
I think it's worth noting that Fresh Jerky does what it does with a relatively poorly designed website (half of which is in Flash) and only PayPal for ecommerce.

I doubt Gus does much a/b testing on his site ...
Symantec is in my list of top 4 worst software manufacturers in the world along with Intuit, Hewlett-Packard, and Adobe. I would never -- ever -- trust my computer to Symantec.

Their software is bloated, it's buggy, it believes it owns your computer and it fails at doing what it is supposed to do.

Choose AVC or ClamWin and only download and install software from trusted sources. Disable autoplay.

It's just like the real world, avoid dangerous sources. If you have sex with random people and don't protect yourself, you're more likely to get a biological virus too.
This was a really great interview with David Lee of Ron Conway's firm, SV Angel. They're making 40-50 investments in real time internet in the next 18 months.
"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive."

Mediocre programmers are expensive.

Good programmers are the bargain of the century.

If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is probably one of the main reasons the best programmers go off and do their own.
Five Important CSS Hacks Tips for IE, Every Designer Should Know.
You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.

Still pretty tiny.
Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Or better detection of viruses.
I fail to see how doing basic HTTP operations from the command-line constitutes anything new, and seriously doubt anyone would care about this at all had it not been about twitter.
what separates a good programmer from a mediocre one?
I'd read this before, and was a little frustrated with it, since I'm a fan of C++.

However, the points in the OP linked article make a lot more sense to me than some Linus rant.
The tighter you squeeze your fist, the more that slips through your grip.
The only thing missing in windows that effects me is you can't use the track pad to do things like two fingers to scroll and two fingers and click for right click. So you basically need a external mouse for windows to be useable. I haven't updated my boot camp drivers in awhile though and never use the windows any more so that might have changed since the release of the official boot camp with leopard
Instead of wasting(http://tr.im/pX87) 10,000 crores tax payers money on this UID project they could have issued PASSPORTS to all Indians at a nominal fee of 10 rupees.
I'm not a Windows guy and I can't confirm this, but my windoze-guru friends always say one thing to people asking for advices:

don't install Symantec products
I find it funny, especially when Symantec is usually in the bottom half of every antivirus banchmark made, surpassed easily by antivirus like Avira or Avast.
Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus.

It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)

I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/
A nasty little bug