skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What surprises me most is not just that this is Sequoia, but that it's Mike Moritz, one of the most respected VCs in the biz, and not just Amazon but Jeff Bezos, probably the greatest tech CEO today.

This seems terribly shortsighted from Moritz for 2 reasons:

1- Zappos could definitely have exited through an IPO later, which would probably have delivered a better return for Sequoia (a 3.5X return on one investment is good but not great in the context of a VC fund; 5X is a MINIMUM if you want to return the fund). We're talking about a company with negative working capital and a tremendous brand, perfectly positioned to take advantage of the economic upturn if/when it happens.

2- Moritz should have known that his forcing the sale would have come out, and he should have known that this would have tarnished his brand, and Sequoia's. VCs are nothing if the best entrepreneurs won't take their money. This can have far-reaching repercussions. Just one example: Peter Thiel had a falling out with Sequoia when he was CEO of PayPal so after he invested in Facebook he steered Zuckerberg away from taking their money. Wasn't that enough of a lesson?

The only thing I see is that LPs are putting a ton of pressure on Sequoia to perform and that they needed a big liquidity event yesterday, but if that's the case it's bad for all parties involved.

And it's also terribly shortsighted of Bezos:

- They're both etailers but Amazon and Zappos actually have very different value propositions. Amazon is about buying consumer goods for cheap on the internet. Zappos is all about great service/customer experience. So there aren't that many synergies there because they're actually in very different businesses. Amazon succeeds by being ruthlessly efficient at building infrastructure, slashing costs and converting visits into sales. Zappos succeeds by being ruthlessly efficient at customer service and "soft" marketing (word of mouth, etc.).

- Integrating the two would mean a culture clash which would destroy a big part of what makes Zappos so valuable, ESPECIALLY when the sale was forced against Zappos' highly visible and very beloved CEO's will, which means that Zappos' employees won't have much loyalty, which means a crumbling corporate culture, which means a dilution of the Zappos value proposition, which means FAIL.

Unless Bezos has a plan to be fanatically dedicated to preserving Zappos' culture (as dedicated, if not more, than Hsieh is) and/or some secret master plan I don't know of, this seems like the classic "empire building CEO" M&A mistake that someone like Bezos should be immune from.

I really don't get it.
6 Helpful Tips on Losing Weight Quickly and Safely
Clearly the main issue of the post is the answer to the interview question. Although I think it's a very good answer and that to me it would probably mean I would be hiring a guy which is humble, which always views his knowledge has something that still could be better and has a view of his own code has something imperfect, and so he tries very hard to always know more and improve, and that would mean in the end he is just one of the best choices to hire, I think that in most companies that guy would never be hired.

Although it sucks, nobody gives any value to humility anymore. They want the confident, "I'm an expert" kind of guy, so giving as answer that the worst code you've seen lately is your own, without any kind of explanation of why you think that (that you view your knowledge has something which as always a long way to go) would probably be a instant KO to the poor humble interviewee.
I'd like to see CUDA Cloud Hosting. The contest's result are showing that'd be an awesome solution for heavy computational problems.
im getting a blank page white page, hilarious right?
The FSF can't very well target IBM anymore though.
Why would you think that? They charge retail price for their shoes, but don't have retail stores. Second Day Air is a lot cheaper than buying a store in every town.
You're only partially right. The GSM standard requires a SIM, but it doesn't say anywhere that it's required to be a card or that it needs to be removable. The SIM could just as easily be built into the device.
What I found strange -- The heatmap seemed to go from "eye to product" in the left heatmap.

However, on the right heatmap there wasn't any significant distinction in the heatmap at all. (I presume the heatmap is a differential, therefore it's a net on that one map rather than an absolute difference between the two).

Either way, from the explanation I'd have still expected the right heatmap to focus on the eye-contact of the model? Whereas the actual example seem to suggest when the model is looking directly at us we somewhat ignore it?

Edit: Oh ok. For some reason, the non-linkjacked article does have a more significant heatmap around the eye contact... I wonder why this article has a different map? have they modified it?
http://www.bunnyfoot.com/articles/not_focus_groups.htm

See http://www.bunnyfoot.com/img/sun4.jpg vs http://www.grokdotcom.com/wp-content/uploads/Bryan/heatmap_s... (right map)
To be fair, the segway wasn't the initial problem they were trying to solve. It was a byproduct of something larger. His team was working on a wheel chair called the iBot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT) while making the wheel base they realized it was fun on its own and expanded that idea to the segway. The iBot is actually trying to solve a real problem.
Really nice. I've sent a link to my girlfriend to see what she thinks as a "user" :) Comment was that she can't send a link to a ring (gasp) to me, until I've explained she can when she clicks on the product and that font is a bit on the ugly/unreadable side (firefox). thought you might wan't a feedback. Keep up the good work.
I think MLC vs SLC can take a different number of writes which might be important if you are using them to store log files that are constantly overwritten.
Guesswork (Apple, Netbook, Tablet, Gaming)
This bit:

"one of the problems with letting people go is, they lose their equity, so it can create quite a few angry people out there and it’s part of the pains of growth and building a business.”

So give them 'equity' so they work hard and then get rid of them? Nice practice
But if Amazon is ruthlessly efficient at its infrastructure (running warehouses/shipping efficiently) then won't the result be that Zappos can continue to excel at personalized customer service, but cut costs and distractions by taking advantage of Amazon's shipping infrastructure?
Maybe it's just me, but if the FSF's existence depends on Microsoft being evil, then it deserves to die.
This from the publisher that used to have "no lisp books" in their submission guidelines. :)
When I was a kid we called these types bums.
I can't think of one good reason why you would use MySQL on Windows

Licenses can cost quite a bit when you have lots of systems. A former employer of mine saved several hundred thousand dollars by moving from MS SQL Server to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Indian moon mission eclipsed by Apollo 11 anniversary
> I think Microsoft would be most likely to start firing patent lawsuits at a time where Mono started to gain real traction in the free software community. So, if the community did start adopting Mono as a major platform and developed a lot of good software for it, that is when Microsoft would pull the trigger.

You know, it is possible that Microsoft has some grand master plan here. But I have to invoke Occam's razor here: it's more likely that MS is ok with Mono.

After all, they don't make money off of .Net directly. They give it away. They make their money by selling Visual Studio. If you were on the fence, wouldn't you be more willing to buy Visual Studio if you knew you could use it to write programs for Windows, Linux, and OS X? And of course, if you have to buy Visual Studio, you have to buy Windows too.
Not said: "Of course, we have been in negotiations for many months, and your job was the first one we decided to eliminate."
I suppose that's the plan. But I think it's going to be a lot harder to pull off than they seem to realize.
Maybe because I'm a little older I'm confused on this one Paul. Why so much competition for 20k? Why are young founders racing to give away up to 10% of their business for such a small amount of capital? I can see the value of the YC network and that's worth a lot to me right now. But rent and fast food money for 3 months seems a little low of a reward on "winning" applications. Is the success rate of YC founders low? (success measured as sustainable/viable business in 5 years or a liquidity event)
From an outsider's perspective, both RMS and Chris are genuinely interested in supporting truly free models of sharing and communication and I applaud them for their efforts.

However, when RMS says free software shouldn't depend on Mono, he gives a very good explanation for it: http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

On the other hand, after my friend and I spent 10 sleepless nights developing the original version of Sched.org in 2008, we woke up to read this: http://www.iminta.com/intas/show/214894

Think about it from the developer's point of view. How do you think we felt? While everyone from Wired to aviary.com teams were loving Sched, here is someone saying we deserve to be in a hall of shame for making a free, unique product that helps people manage their schedules. Is a negative post like that supposed to encourage me to stay up two more nights to support OpenID? You know what would have worked?

> Hey guys, cool app! Thought about adding OpenID support? Lot of people can benefit from it... More info on implementation here: http://example.org - Chris
That's a feature, not a bug. Code you write in C++ today will probably compile and run 30 to 50 years from now with very little (if any) modification. Same is true for C. These are serious languages used on major projects (Joint Strike Fighter, Mars Rover, etc.) by governments, militaries and space agencies. They do not evolve quickly and when they do it is only after much careful deliberation. Don't get me wrong... I enjoy the new, fun, expressive constantly changing languages as much as anyone, but when I'm doing serious, mission-critical code, I use C++.
This is one of the better posts from the 'techcrunch' family. I wish they write better posts like these, they definitely have the talent, just need the will.
[x] [related to point one] "They love us just the way we are" [until we stop raking in profits for them]
"Fear of failure" oversimplifies it, I think. As an anecdotal example, the other day, I was at a rock climbing gym and saw an extremely attractive girl climbing. I didn't approach her, because

1) I was new there, unfamiliar with the social mores, and didn't want to earn an undesirable reputation

2) She was with a group of friends, any one of which she could've been involved with--and, indeed, did embrace one of the guys about an hour later

3) She was intent on what she was doing; I wasn't at my most impressive; I'd likely have a repeated chance, and a failed intial approach would negatively bias later chances

4) Likely other more or less subconscious, more or less rational reasons as well.
Nice pitch Drew. And of course, I use and love dropbox.
Finally I understand why women are repelled by me.
The problems discussed in this articles are very much in existence in WAMP.
The question isn't whether someone has the ability to call his point an overgeneralization (i.e. wrong, misleading, actively harmful, worse than useless); the question is whether it actually is or not. When faced with overgeneralizations, the most useful thing you can possibly do is to point out examples where those generalizations don't hold:

- It helps you by preventing you from accepting the false statement — you learn where it's true and where it's false.

- It helps other readers by preventing them from accepting the false statement, and in blatant cases, pointing out that the person who's writing is just trying to get traffic to their blog rather than writing something of value.

- It helps more careful writers by diminishing the reputations of the ones who are just bullshitting, which counters the audience-getting effect of boldly stating bullshit to some extent.

It's probably true that you can get traffic to your blog by making bold generalizations without any concern for whether they are true or not. The question is, what can we do to fix that, so as to reduce the temptation to jettison intellectual honesty in the quest for attention?
I empathize with you.
http://watrcoolr.us/ http://hacker.watrcoolr.us/

Sites I made for myself to deliver the most interesting news to me.
mwexler, I appreciate your stance. This is the real world situation.
You gota like the guy, maybe he did save the world seeing as Financial Times is being optimistic about a recovery this year.

A global society however is not achieved by rhetorics and heart felt stories of children. China, a country with 2 billion people has only 300 million users on the internet, compare this with America or Britain which has almost 100% internet access. Not to mention the censuring of the internet by the Chinese government, and recently we heard by the German government also.

The internet is mostly English. You are able to find original articles in renown peer reviewed journals on about everything, but mostly in English. Unless we can improve our automatic translating technology, the whole world misses these advancement in knowledge, and falls behind, creating a virtual environment of haves and have nots which mirrors rather well the real world.

Yes we should have stooped Rwanda and Sudan, but Iraq had oil. In a world like ours where government is governed by corporations rather than people, what is sane to do will always fall behind what is most profitable in the short term. This government has given billions to banks, yet there are so many young people who would do with some of that money at the interest that the bank got them. These young people are the ones who create a global society by improving the translating technologies, by improving the cables through bringing competition and innovation. This government is doing nothing to help these young people, it is instead left to Prince Charles to fill this gap and although his trust may be doing a good job, the funds available are minimal.

Trade might have gone global, but a global society is in its very infancy and we need the government to support it with concrete policies and not rhetorics and heart felt stories.
How Acme Packet invented an industry (session border controllers)
I've been working on a project integrating SugarCRM with the application we just wrote for the client. This describes EXACTLY how i get any work done. I could go on for hours describing every facet of that application that was done completely wrong.
> Also neighboring countries would be willing to accept refugees if they had a high demand for labor.

Japan, being as nationalistic and xenophobic as they are, chose to invent and develop robots rather than allow as many foreigners into their country as was "needed."
The opposite is true at 40. 30 is where the balance of power starts to shift.

I'm in my 40s, and happily married, so I'm not in the game anymore, but I can tell from the people I know that in the 40s and beyond the entire teenage/20s power situation is reversed. In fact, I'd guess it starts mid-30s or so.

It's weird and unexpected. So for all you nerds out there who can't get dates now -- immerse yourself in what you love and work hard. If you can wait now, in a decade or so it'll be a whole new game.
> If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver? That's a voluntary exchange too, but you're still a dick for doing it

That's a pretty reasonable analogy for the cycle of debt that one can get stuck in with "payday loan" stores.
Because their EBITDA is only 40 MM on Revenue of 1 Billion.
MySQL on windows is huge. Did you know that Windows downloads outnumber other platforms by a huge?
Coincidentally, what a great way to protect your content from linkjacking, a la Digg. Post the article with intentionally wrong content and than fix it afterwards.
starving children, vs children working 16 hours a day in a tomato field? That's not a good choice to have to make.

I'd be careful where you draw the line in your judgment.

For instance, the next generation of people will start with a 6th grade education and a minimum standard of living. Their challenge is to move the goalposts further.

That's just how the rest of the world did it, in fact, starting off with child and virtual slave factory labor and slowly moving to better and better conditions. If you've got some kind of shortcut to make it happen inside of one generation, I'd love to hear it.
Review my app - Guestlist: online event registration made simple
Guestlist is an online event registration app that focuses on making event registration simpler by removing as much as possible. Our team consists of two programmers and one designer working on it in our spare time for the past 7 months. A lot of effort was spent making our app enjoyable to use though great UI, engaging copywriting, and lightning-fast reflexes.

http://www.guestlistapp.com
The student in the highest class should go to something that isn't a class. Real mathematicians, after a while, don't spend much of their time taking classes. Instead they collaborate with other mathematicians to discover new mathematics.
The reality often is that acquisitions are good for the founders who cash out after their holding period expires, but aren't good for the employees who are left holding the bag.
This is exactly what I want to know. Must be the networking to sharp folks and help building the business from concept to concrete.
Link is http://www.guestlistapp.com
Magic of Indexing
Every project is a startup
I think they're on the case with that:

"Some of our hardware designs make it easy to photograph all the pages in a book without harming the book. Other designs allow you to remove the binding so the pages can be dropped into a sheet-fed scanner. Whichever method you use, the resulting images can be processed with our software to make user-friendly files in a variety of formats."
India's ID project catches fancy of US lawmakers
And the origin of this problem is hidden in his first paragraph: most MBA-types do not have a real conception of their jobs. (Just compare that to athletes, teachers or those technicians that even have a cute name for their profession.)
You're unwarrantedly assuming a total order on team member qualities, even though in your fourth sentence you point out that in a vector model of skills that assumption is invalid. It's not the only one.
> Gigablast plans to be the best and most popular search engine on the internet within the next year and if you are interested in being part of such a business then this is the place for you!

Copyright © 2000-2005 Gigablast, Inc
HN itself is kinda covered, http://hnstatus.net
How long before someone moans about it not performing tail call optimisation, do you reckon?
Some folks don't know how lucky they are at meeting the right people at the right time, but you don't sound like one of them Paul. It's hard finding folks to cover all the needs of an early business. I've written about coupling social media with relevant ads for months, so far I've only discovered one business type interested. I gave up and started coding it myself (very limited web programming, desktop c++ for a little under 14 years).
I've tried using it in the past, but it wasn't very helpful. The site I wanted to visit wasn't "down" according to notify mee, it was showing a very friendly and approachable server error page.

If notify mee can't magically figure out that the site I want to visit is down, it doesn't do me much good. (I say magically, because I have no idea how they could figure that out if the site isn't sending the correct response headers)
I cannot answer the question, but I immediately thought of 4-hour-work-week, because in that book the author describes a system involving 2 goals which I found quite handy.

You choose 2 goals, than you set a dreamline for each one. The first gets a dreamline 6 months from now, the other 12 months down the road. Now the nice thing is, 6 months later you can set another 12 months goal and will have again, one 6 month goal and one 12 month goal. That's nice because that way you have one project more in the beginning phase and another one in the finishing phase.
The support for standards is broken on IE8.
There are a lot of useful tricks for finding formulas for the rate of change and its inverse, though. You could probably teach them in a more socratic, leading-the-student way than is traditional.
If they would have iframed 10 search result pages embedded within themselves it would have even been cooler.
Woah, People Really Don’t Like IE6
I think this accurately describes everyday for me in an IT department:

Windows-only, Java-only, enterprise vendor-driven web development that must work in IE6? HDD indeed.
Yeah, it would have made more sense. All I see here is an infinite loop.
Ugh.. it doesn't do tail call optimization? What is this, Python? Scheme has had this for years and is actually required to conform to the spec! Get with it Google!
Same here! My business partner and I recently launched an e-commerce site selling gun supplies and accessories. We're doing very well, but still text message each other when we get a new order. Still get that same thrill from the first order!
If that's the non-linkjacked article, how come it has lower res pictures? Good find though.

As for the stronger heat intensity on the shifting eyes (on either source), I guess one could explain it as the subject going back and forth investigating (probably somewhat subconsciously) what exactly she is looking at.
You're starting your rebuttal from the wrong point. Those who earn more are indeed contributing more tax. But why are they earning more? Is it that their contribution is worth so much more to society? Doubtful. More, perhaps, that much more, unlikely.

For example in the article the guys earning 30million a year (10% of their gambling wins) are only able to earn large amounts because they're on a buoyant market. It's largely random fluctuations - they win for 15 years and then lose it all (except they don't personally lose of course); others win for 15 days and lose it all.

So, the guys paying the most tax, the investment managers &c. are adding little to overall productivity (except some lubrication which could be provided without the ineffecient losses of traders wages) but are creaming off inordinant amounts of wealth from the top all the time simply because of a mathematical glitch -- if you waited 100 years and analysed the gains of any investment firm I'll guess they do marginally better then inflation but extract far more worth for the traders.

Those doing productive work, even the highly paid Harvard professors are earning pennies compared to the investment teams.

So are the investment managers pulling their weight in society by creaming off the wealth by gambling with other peoples money? I don't think so.

Capitalism means the rich get richer, some clever people manage to use other peoples money to be rich first. The rest of us are being suckered.
This is my preferred model as well. Is it too conservative to to build a product that users will like first before seeking outside investment?
Touches like this make me like Google even though I'm a Microsoft man really.
I learned calculus in high school from Howard Anton's textbook, which presented some kind of informal proof for everything it taught. It might have been different if I'd taken a class in it instead.
Economists don't know what they're talking about
What Fishing Tackle Do You Need
My current favourite example of this is getting HTML newsletters to work in Outlook 2007.
Its just human nature. Avoid doing things as long as we can. We can only hope that in environment issues, we don't avoid doing the right thing too long. Might be very late then.