skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Impressively scathing of both the Obama and former Bush administrations. I'm not sure how he would go about implementing some of his ideas since on one hand he argues against additional regulations and on the other he argues for a ban certain types of complex financial products (ie who would be the arbiter of what he calls a return to products that dependend on trial and error?). He is however a great writer and more importantly, he, even more than Peter Schiff was right (from an FT article that echoes some of his points in the letter and in some cases is a bit more specific - http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/tenprinciples.pdf) :

"Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies,
richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and
companies are born and die every day without making the news."

Having been on both sides of the coin, I do wonder how much those who allocate the capital (bankers) should make relative to those who generate the ideas and innovation - but clearly in recent years, it was skewed towards the former. Lots more from Taleb at his site: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
Advertising is inherently persuasive, but persuasion need not be deceptive.

The Will Rogers quote may be spot on, but even it doesn't evince deception in advertising but, again, merely persuasion. We don't, after all, only buy things we strictly need.
The Great American Bank Robbery
I have helped run a linux users group for years, and been involved in other various groups. Here's the sort of approach I would take:

First, start with a regular, weekly or monthly meeting. You can call it a technologists group or linux group or whatever, but given the size of your community you don't want to limit it to a single topic. I advise calling it a "Futurist Society" or "Optimist Club" or something along those lines.

Remember that the kind of people you want are less likely to think in terms of the words "startup" or "entrepreneur" or "hacker" or such in a rural area. They will describe themselves as "inventors" or "tinkerers" or say "try lots of small business schemes" or not recognize themselves as a group deserving a special label at all.

The meeting has to be scheduled and held at the same place very regularly, and that place has to be free. At first people will come infrequently and on the spur of the moment, and people will not join a mailing list to get announcements on the next meeting, so it has to be something like "Thursdays 7pm back room at Joe's". If appropriate, you can use your own house for a while, but that will eventually get old.

It's good to have pre-scheduled presentations and topics, but you don't have to, and you should allow walk-in topics of any sort.

Start by giving tutorials on things you know, such as installing linux or programming or whatever it is.

Solicit short show-and-tell presentations from whomever you can. One idea I would like to try, but I would need to write some scripts to dig the patent database and find them, is to find people in your area who have been awarded any sort of patent, and call them up and ask them to give a talk on the device, or the process of getting a patent.

Another good idea is to find someone who has had something manufactured via e-machineshop.com or mfgquote.com or something similar, and ask them to talk about the experience.

Keep a web page or blog and update it with a few notes about each meeting.

Once this has gone on for a while, and you have developed enough connections with good people locally, try having a barcamp style event on a particular technology or just starting businesses in general.
I'd take that bet because they built a great product. It didn't work out and they want to move on to better things I'd happily be a part of that if I were an investor. They seem to have learnt the lesson that investors keep screaming and founders keep ignoring about trying to find the right market.
There's something I don't quite get about the 301works idea - don't they need the domain in order to do anything?

Let's say I run a shortener, and it's quite popular. For whatever reason, it goes bankrupt. I can give all the redirect info to 301works, but unless I also give them the domain then what's accomplished? A hijacker could still buy the domain and send all the shortened links out there to his AdWords page. 301works would know that /hjk87 goes to cnn.com, but when they hit a link to shortener.com/hjk87 it's still hijacked by the guy who controls the domain, no?

Or is the premise that if I have to terminate my service, I give both the data and the domain to 301works - in which case how is it different from just saying "give us what small assets you have left, now that you've shit down your service"?
Can you make it so that the top fifty list is a series of links that allows one to play the songs in the list directly?
Speedup loop:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Speedup-Loop.aspx

And this one is even better:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/It_Must_Be_Broken.aspx
The takeaway here should be: if the book doesn't systematically examine the differences between winners and losers, drop it and walk away. Sentence by sentence, it's making you dumber.

So forget In Search of Excellence. Try books like How To Be a Star at Work, which is based on a pretty rigorous study of employee productivity.
> It is a low-probability, high-impact event that, because of its rarity and the instability of the environment, cannot be scientifically evaluated in terms of risk and return.

I stopped reading here. The only objective evaluation of economic matters is in scientific, risk-and-return terms. Anything else is quackery, fear-mongering, or worse.

A great deal of evil has been done in the last decade or so in the name of protecting us against horrible things. We are told that much good has come of it, because nothing horrible has happened. While I'm sure this is partly true, I wouldn't mind trading a few more horrible things for a little more autonomy.
I've got one, but instead of linking to it and self-promoting, will put in a vote for yours (because your topic is more important than mine for the YC audience).

Cheers, and good luck.
For those using Optimum Online, you can opt out of their "DNS Assistance Service" by going here: http://www.optimum.net/dnsassist/optout
Top VoIP Blogs
FWIW, the Whole Foods markets in both Mountain View and Palo Alto seemed to be doing normal (heavy) business when I've driven by over the weekend. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. John Mackey has never been secretive about his libertarian leaning politics, and he's pretty well-informed on most topics on which he comments, whether one agrees with his conclusions or not. He's not just shooting off his mouth, nor is he an insensitive bastard who doesn't care about anyone but himself (as seems to be the accusation against most folks who oppose socialized health care; you just can't level it at Mackey, because he's done so much in his life that proves otherwise). He also agrees that health care in America is broken.

It's unnerving that when someone does attempt to have a rational conversation about the subject, either Democrats or Republicans or both shout them down (Mackey is neither, so it's particularly galling that folks call him conservative or accuse him of being nothing more than a GOP mouthpiece).
Unless you're an entrenched partisan, I think it's still a tad too early to call Obama's economic policies "disastrous" or "calamitous."
It's not fair to combine the two since there will be some cross searching and Yahoo users who will not use Bing but like Google, and all that. When the actual merger takes place, I'd bet the combined total actually goes down by a few points.
What I really wanted to say was this "news" of a 3/10 point increase is not relevent, much like Bing results.
So, basically FriendFeed for the consumer-facing part of online retail?

Having a good understanding of co-op advertising could matter a great deal here. Retailers get paid by manufacturers for product placements... Someone going after this model could try to reach similar deals with both the manufacturers and the retail-fulfillment entities.
It's not enough that the mixtapes "imply" free release. You actually have to get permission from the artists (and songwriter), or you're fucked. Statutory damages are in the hundreds -- per song.

BTW, grooveshark's model was not to pass liability onto the users. It charges premium subscriptions, and sells ads, and uses that money to pay the web-music license to the music licensing corporation.

Monetization is possible, using Amazon affiliate links. Just be aware that if you don't seek permission, you're liable for every penny you earn (regardless of costs), plus the above mentioned statutory damages.

EDIT: note that for songs distributed by a major label, the artist may not own the copyright, so you may have your work cut out for you.
The easiest way to avoid the hassle of getting individual permission for each song is to sign a licensing agreement with the music licensing corporation.
The most expensive way to go would be to do nothing at all, since the record labels will go after you if they think there's any money to be got.
A decent solution to
#2 Register a company
#9 Founder vesting

http://www.fairsoftware.net/

Here are some details: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10035989-2.html

IMO there should be an extra point.

#10 pick a leader: there should be one person on your team that should have the final say from the start.
Yes, and the selfless rescue / recovery workers had to brave the raging 39 degree water to look for his presumed corpse.
> To make money as a trader, assuming your motivation is to make a profit, you need to buy low and sell high.

Not to pic a nit but most traders also sell short, i.e. reverse the order to make money; (borrow stock) Sell High and Buy Low (return stock). The guy seems pretty smart so he probably left this out to keep his explanation simple.

Side note; Short selling serves an important function in price formation and liquidity and is not the primary cause of a stock price to fall. In fact, for the short seller to make profits there must be an independent cause of the fall apart from the short seller's actions or they lose money.
You need to learn more about the industry. It's a big, deep, and technically demanding business, and the biggest players have tremendous economy of scale benefits that you won't have (like practically free bandwidth, because of their size).

I've worked for the hosting industry for 12 years spanning two different startups. I've never once thought, "Hey, hosting looks like an easy way to make some quick cash!" If you don't love the technology, love working with people (because your primary function will be support), and have a high tolerance for long hours and waking up in the middle of the night to fix problems, you probably don't want to be in the hosting business.

That said, if you still do want to go into the business, now in the best time in ten years to start a hosting provider. Your competitors are flailing trying to figure out how to solve the cloud computing problem. If you start with cloud computing offerings from day one, and never have to deal with the legacy of traditional shared and dedicated hosting, you can outmaneuver a large percentage of providers. You will spend more than you expect (so you'll probably need to raise money, or have a steady stream of incoming consulting revenue to keep the lights on), and you will sleep less than you'd like or is healthy, but if you move really fast, make smart partnerships early (contact me, if you're actually serious), and figure out how to make revenue from everything your customers do (domain registrations, SSL certificates, DNS hosting, etc. in addition to the hosting itself) you can build a business in the new wild west of hosting.
I'm not going to get in an argument with you over the merits of TechCrunch. The article contributed more to an interesting discussion than did your original comment.
IBM harnesses DNA to pattern nanoscale circuits
So, is "Why I don't use x" the new "X considered harmful"?
The Falsehoods
"The things that people know already often need to be removed from the brain prior to teaching new stuff. This may seem a little offensive to some, but really, it is easier to just admit it."

A thought-provoking pair of sentences. I like how he develops the argument in his blog post.
From the Wired article:

That undercover operation, known as "Operation Firewall," led to the arrest of 28 members of the site in October 2004. After the site went down, Gonzalez changed his nick to "Segvec" and moved to Miami where he allegedly resumed his life of crime under the nose of authorities who were in pursuit of "Segvec," while being ignorant of the fact that he was their old informant.

Incredible... like something out of a movie!
That is true. On the other hand, saying that someone "just doesn't get it" until they've used it implies that anyone will 'get it' once they've used it for a while.
The main frustration seems to be lack of jobs.
6000 intriguing people you want to meet before you die
I think if you put that statement in context, bin Taleb is saying that such "black swan" events can't be understood in the absence of a suitable behavioral model for the economy -- and furthermore, you don't want to rely on any global behavior models because they ultimately prove limiting. Communism anyone?

There is a lot going on in finance every day that simply cannot be objectively modeled or understood in scientific terms. That's a problem, but we also need to accept that there may not be a globally valid solution. Viewing complexity as the enemy sounds like as good an approach as any.
FTC Serious About Privacy, Hires Researcher
This post really came at the right time for me. Such a moral boost.
I created and is currently operating a startup in orange county, ca. I am also in the middle of a divorce. So to sum it up: Though times. Personal advise: If you believe your idea can provide value to clients, end-users, or to the community as a whole: Never ever give up. It will eventually pay off.
> I saw it there hours before even the first rumor blog picked it up, let alone ESPN.

Does it really matter that you got the rumor/news hours before the story 'hit'? I can understand that getting such news as fast as possible might be a utility if you are a sports gamble, or sports reporter... But for the vast majority of people, do those extra couple of hours really matter?
Interesting, but flawed to the point that the opposite conclusion is true. The median time zone for Europe is CET, which is GMT+1, not GMT as is put in the graphs, and the median American one is probably something like GMT-6.3 or so. If you move the graphs by 2.3 hours, they look pretty similar, except the European one has a steeper drop off. This can be explained by the fact that the majority of the U.S. population lives in either GMT-5 or GMT-8, but less in between. This tends to smear out the dropoff of people going to sleep in the U.S. On the other hand, the majority of European internet users are all in the CET time zone, so there is a sharper drop as they go to sleep.
Spent 1.5 years as lead Product for Yahoo HotJobs and this post is spot-on -- nicely captured. To put it rather bluntly there is more innovation happening in most small sized municipal utilities (see the Palo Alto Green program) then in the online job recruitment space. Given how incredibly important talent is to companies the CEO needs to reset incentive structures for their HR organizations.
Ask HN: What do you listen to when you code?
I like to listen to indie rock whenever I'm writing anything, other people I know think that classical or tribal (ugh.) music is the way to go.

What gets your mind going? Do you need total silence or are you incapable of coding without your favourite tunes?
Black Swan theory isn't about denying science; it's about recognizing the limits of science.

Taleb's position (and argument in this paper) is that we need to recognize instances where we don't know the answer instead of making decisions based on assumptions that we do.
Timely post, I'm in the middle of building a checkout at the moment and there's some good advice there.
My fee, was substantially more than $2000, as I was going for

(1) Highly competitive single word phrase.
(2) 10 two wrods phrases.
(3) Bonus for No.1 ranking.

All of which were achieved. I LOVED the small despoit, then no payment till results achieved, and in my case because it was a large amount (10,0000) they let me pay it off over 6 months, which was fine by me because the rankings saved me thousands in adwords so the reality is, if you take into consideration i was able to pay it off with reduced adwords spending, it really cost me nothing
Metro Ethernet Providers
T1 Line Providers, Metro Ethernet Providers, High Speed Internet Service Providers, ISP - Internet Service Providers, DSL and Hosted VoIP Solutions, MPLS Solutions, WAN, MAN, LAN, SAN, DS3 Bandwidth, Broadband Services, Telecommunications Carriers, WISPs.
very nice. volume selector would be nice.
Obviously there's a point at which it could, yes. If you lose civil order, for example, you lose most of the economy. That's what really destroyed the economy of the Roman Empire. There were of course deeper underlying causes, but the proximate cause was plundering and brigandage.
"The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society."

Says you. I think the relevant role here is "deterrent". Stealing a million dollars needs to carry more risk than "If I get caught, I'll have to spend a lot of time picking up trash." Letting this thing go lightly is a much larger net gain when a lot more people decide it's rational to try their hand at insurance fraud.
The Cheat of Structural Profits
> In any case, you see a lot of people -- in particular the delicious guy who has been on here -- who've made choices for financial reasons they've ended up regretting.

Can you elaborate?
NYC is still plenty dangerous, just not anywhere you've been yet. It's such a different city than San Francisco that it's almost impossible to compare their safety in any general way. But for someone like you, who probably lives and works in Manhattan, you'll likely be more safe than you were in San Francisco. Just don't take this safety for granted or think of it as a joke. NY is a much bigger city than SF and bad stuff happens even in the nicest neighborhoods.

Here's an illuminating map: http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map
It's a little suspicious how many of the intriguing females are physically attractive.
With epoxy? Did the rebar add weight, change the sound, or what?
Previous thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760477
I think anyone who believes that the system America has in place is capitalism has been deceived, so in a way, yes.
A note on #1: not all states have laws that specifically protect IP you generate outside of work hours. I have a friend who ran into this exact problem in New York.

Here's a list of states that do have laws that specifically protect IP created outside work:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/401269/states-having-nona...
Reader’s Digest to file for bankruptcy
Well argentina isn't the only economy in the world ;)
Article is from 2004.
I'm pretty sure that Taleb isn't a partisan - having also been pretty critical of Bush/Republicans (though he did point out the Obama administration's spending is magnitudes larger than his predecessor(s)). In the lead up to the crisis, Taleb was one of maybe only a couple people who not only forecasted the crisis but bet right on how it might occur. He used similarly dire language and was laughed at by many of his detractors. For this reason alone he shouldn't be so quickly dismissed.
"Taleb's position (and argument in this paper) is that we need to recognize instances where we don't know the answer instead of making decisions based on assumptions that we do."

Have you ever worked at an investment bank? I suspect you have not. Wall Street does not run on the scientific method. It runs on greed, fear and politics. The ones who check the assumptions and know the limits of their models don't have the power to make the decisions. This is the problem. And the Taleban apparently haven't yet figured it out. Quoting Janet Tavakoli: "malfeasance, not models, disrupted the global economy, and Taleb still gets that part wrong."

Last but not least: there's not such thing as a "blackswan theory". You can't steal ideas from probability theory and statistics that have been known for centuries, rename them, wrap them up nicely, and call them new or original.
"The only objective evaluation of economic matters is in scientific, risk-and-return terms."

That's not the problem; I suggest you read up on his theories. His point is, to put it more mathematically, that using inappropriate statistical models to try to model future events can lead to catastrophe. In particular, assuming something is a normal Gaussian process when in fact it's something that's almost a normal Gaussian but has a slight propensity towards total disasters that occur more often (and much stronger) than the Gaussian distribution would imply can result in you creating a system that is terribly brittle when those "black swans" occur.

"Scientifically" applying the Gaussian distribution or other advanced mathematical constructs when they manifestly do not apply is the real quackery, if Taleb is right. And it's hard to look at the evidence and conclude he's wrong here; it's simply objective fact that many of the interesting distributions are in fact prone to "black swans", there's a statistical test that shows it (kurtosis) quite clearly. It's really more a question of what we are going to do about his point than whether or not he's correct about the distribution. (There's no guarantee that his prescription is correct, but it's probably a better idea than listening to the "experts" who advise you to mortgage to the hilt because the worst case scenario can't possibly happen and you are 99.9% percently likely to be fine. You know, that worst case scenario that just happened and we're still living through. Yeah, that scenario that can't possibly happen.)
A month in the clouds-Engine Yard Solo is Heaven
The final Delta II GPS rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral today
I agree, this site will likely violate various copyright laws, in the US and abroad. Check out http://www.soundexchange.com/ to find out information on how to comply in the US, etc.
"Here at FairSoftware, we are watching closely which platform developers are most interested in, and iPhone is almost 10X ahead of Android."

Why do you think that is? The sense I get from people interested in iPhone dev is that they think they'll make good coin from their apps.
Malfeasance enabled the models, the models enabled malfeasance. Declaring one thing "the culprit" and not the other is to fail to recognize the dynamic nature of the system. Even in a world of perfect angels, Taleb shows that broken models would still bring the system down. Even in a world of perfect models, unscrupulous jerks can bring the system down. It's all too related to pull apart.
> Java with .... never mind

Creating jobs.
The increase is not relevant to what?

Also, for what it's worth, I now use Bing as my primary search engine and find it produces highly relevant results. I attribute this to performing tightly targeted search queries. I feel that Google is still better for serendipitous (exploring type) searches.
The entire site is actually quite interesting. Quirky in places, but worth the read.