skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's cute and all, but your mood is influenced by chemicals (influenced by, or is is beyond the scope of this conversation) and an imbalance in those chemicals will lead to a disorder that you can fix by improving that balance. I'm also not saying loving someone won't do that.

No one says you can solve a malfunctioning liver with love.

edit: Also, depression doesn't just mean being down and the cure for it is 'cheering' up. Depression is an overloaded word.
The article claims that "an internal site with old code that has sat there running fine, doing its job for years......costs zero dollars to maintain", versus upgrading to Firefox. But that is not true.

Let me tell you what the cost is. Sure, your admins can CYA for a few years, but eventually that old, unmaintained app will implode for some reason (maybe just from hardware failure, at which point you can't buy a machine that runs IE6). When it does, at a completely uncontrolled time with countless business processes dependent on it, the cost will be HUGE: maybe enough to kill the business. So by all means, go on deluding yourself that it costs nothing to keep on using outdated stuff that seems to work just fine.

Edit: I'm focusing on the zero cost argument, web apps are just one example. The costs/risks apply to any upgrade or lack of upgrade.
I run in to this every now and then, I really want to read a paper but either it is in a language that I don't have enough skills in, or, alternatively the paper requires so much background terminology that I can't work my way through it without spending half a day in dictionaries and reference material.

Whether I would pay for it or not would be dependent only on whether or not I was being paid to understand the paper. I read plenty of stuff that is interesting but outside of my main field of interest (IT), but since I won't be making any money on collecting that knowledge it is not worth more than my investment in time.

For those papers that I can't get through there are plenty of alternatives, the amount of interesting information out there is staggering. It isn't rare at all to come out of the week with a much longer reading list than going in to it.

HN is quite a large contributor to that :)
I view "respect" less as a fluffy handy wavy answer, and more of a super general meta answer. It's almost a cop-out, except that I completely agree that The Most Important Collaboration Practice is respect.

I live in a coop with very little conflict because we strive to respect our multiple perspectives. My husband is also my partner on multiple (serial) startups. The heart of working with people, and thus multiple perspectives, styles and experiences, is respect. How else could one properly listen, learn and share?
If you do WSGI web-applications then I can recommend following for debugging memory leaks:

* Finding and fixing memory leaks in Python's WSGI applications: http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19420

This is a more general technique on debugging memory leaks using objgraph.py (that can be used in non-WSGI applications):

* Tracing Python memory leaks: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/11/14/tracing-python-memory-...
...and translate it to other languages, like they did in the Library of Alexandria...

I can't even imagine how long it would take to translate the contents of en.wiki to 240 languages (current active editions).
concur. I stated off on workstation and when i tried to revert to VMPlayer i was dismayed. its barely usable for even running VM's.
I plan on reading this yesterday, thanks for the link.

"The Time Machine" was a great book, Between Wells and Jules Verne I could stay busy for days.
While not what the original poster was looking for, I've found this insanely helpful and am really looking forward to implementing it. In fact, I can see this being useful to increase my household productivity as well.

thanks edw.
(You might want to edit the link; it goes to your comment, not the entry.)
John Walker is always a good read, and I had missed that essay before. It seems to be the same message that some of the writings around Ycombinator are saying that you let the customers tell you what they want, and it may not be what you first think. So perhaps we think of this approach as making the point of first feedback as early as possible. So far as I can recall, there was no market research for the Apple II.

My favorite reference from the article is "...I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Disney to Acquire Marvel Entertainment
Upvoted for presenting a perspective I've not read too often with enough vitriol to keep it interesting. I confess to giving IT guys a hard time every now and then. I feel a little better informed for dealing with those situations now.
I think that the value of a college education has been waning for years as more and more people acquire college degrees. The recession just made it so that if you get a degree that cannot directly lead you to a job it will probably not pay off for you. A coworker of mine is paying 50k a year to send his daughter to college to study social work. I cannot imagine allowing my daughter to throw away that kind of money chasing a job that you can get with a degree from a community college and will likely burn out from in a few years. I think many people just assume that if it's college then it's a good thing.

College has many merits but one of them isn't really the promised good job, good career, good life that many people believe it to be. I think many companies just use a college degree as a sign that you were capable of sitting through something for awhile without giving up on it. I'm not sure a degree in journalism says much more than that to most companies (outside of that field of course).

I feel bad for the people who have tons of debt and virtually nothing to show for it. I just hope their guide their children in another direction when they get to that age.
Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential Mortgage Crisis
How to Lose Weight Systematically
Might I recommend going back to the source on "sprezzatura"? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dst...
Goodness. He takes money?
Somehow this story reminded me of the well know known quote about regular expressions: "... Now you have two problems."
People often don't consider how regulation decreases the number of new entrants into a field.

In the present case, we tend to spend all our time talking about how this will impact current VC firms. Existing VC firms have the advantage. The real question is how this will impact VC firms yet to be formed (or even yet put on a napkin).

At some level of regulation, new competition will be completely thwarted (imagine having to spend the first $10M and the first year of your startup achieving regulatory compliance), but what is often missed is the marginal effect. Any marginal increase in regulation will create a corresponding marginal decrease in new entrants just as assuredly as if you could artificially raise their expected cost to get to profitability (because that's exactly what regulation does).

This is why existing players in a market often lobby for regulation of their own market, or at least acquiesce to it without too much of a fight.
Consumer Centric Health Care
Not only would there be costs associated with complying with regulations, but simply from a capitalist standpoint there is little reason (as discussed in the article) for the government to have a say in VC practices. Investors know the risk they are undertaking, have a solid financial standing, and are not trading in public securities.

I feel like the article wanted to point out the side-affects of this new legislation as it applies to VC funding. I don't think the intention of the law was to necessarily monitor VC operations, but with such a broad regulation that's what's going to happen.

Keep in mind though that at the same time there are some things the government is doing to promote small business, such as providing billions in funding for the Small Business Association. Not all bad I guess, but still not a fan...
Furthermore, there is the opportunity cost of the site users. I had a job where I had to use IE for internal wiki's, whereas I used chrome and firefox for my actual work.

There was something seriously demoralizing about switching to IE to use an ugly, neigh unreadable and unusable wiki to document my beautiful work. i don't mean to get into a discussion on how good design and efficiency are coupled with beauty and elegance....suffice to say, i felt like the poor internal sites reflected the companies view of my work, represented our whole philosophical and prideful differences, and i ended that contract asap.

edit: ps - i accidently downvoted you when i meant to click reply AND agree with your good points. i know, it makes no sense. eit.
Disney To Acquire Marvel Entertainment For $4 Billion
Gmail Search Fail, Readers Respond
Wikipedia To Experiment With Color-Coded Quality Warnings
The article you quote there to make your point clearly states that the 1.7 million dollar figure is an average taken over a group of companies, to make a meaningful statement about this you'd have to take in to account how big the revenue streams were in order to gage the impact.

taken by itself the 1.7 million figure is useless.

There is a cost to running a VC operation, reporting is part of that cost. if - and it remains to be seen if it really will go that way - these laws will be made to bear on VC companies then you can bet that the cost of compliance will be a small fraction of the size of the fund.

No need to start saying that 'venture capital is in danger'.

Venture capital companies possibly slightly less profitable would be a better title.
The way I memorized it was to associate it with #{...} in ruby:

def my_gimme(thing)
gimme "select #{thing} from something"
end

Of course, in lisp, the "interpolation" (and macros in general) is structural: you can't use malformed strings to inject unexpected code like you could in my silly example.

Incidentally, Stuart Halloway uses this same Ruby syntax as pseudo-code when he first introduces macro syntax in his Programming Clojure book.
How to beat Amazon's Kindle
Disclaimer: I'm a VC at Atlas Venture (http://www.atlasventure.com/).

The Patricof article echoes pretty much exactly the position of the National Venture Capital Association (its statement to congress is here: http://bit.ly/M92Ux [PDF]).

Essentially:

1. Venture capital firms are not interdependent with the world financial system - we don't trade public markets, we don't rely on banks, we don't insure things

2. The venture capital industry is small in size and thus not "systemic" in relevance

3. Venture capital firms do not use long-term leverage or rely on short-term funding - i.e. we don't punch above our "equity" weight

4. Regulation under the currently proposed act would significantly increase costs and change the way venture could operate - insofar the parallels drawn to SOX or anti-money laundering are correct

In particular, we'd have to add more administrative staff and would potentially face issues in performance-based contractual relationships with some of our investors (limited partners).

The argument in a nutshell is that the Act seeks to address problems caused by buy-out and hedge funds. We're being lumped into something because of our similar structures, not because of what we do. Transparency is a laudable goal and I think the venture capital industry as a whole would be more open to thinking about making itself more transparent if such regulation recognized that venture is actually not a part of the problem, but an essential catalyst for growth in our economies.

I am personally a subscriber to a libertarian, subsidiarist principle of legislation. There is no need to regulate VC in the way intended by congress: why should we erect barriers to entry, dissuade new investors into venture capital, make it less profitable (than it already is)?
Eliminating Credit Card Debt
"forces"? You clearly don't have much experience with groups of monkeys.

Some of the known-successful ways to get around said "benchmark" are "this time it's different", "this government is good", "group C deserves it", and "we're not doing B".
> "enough vitriol"

i stopped reading because i correlate "unprofessionalism" with "thoughtlessness" and "one-sided-ness" and general "youthful-anti-wisdom." i tried reading a bit more after reading your comment. i don't mean to offend when i ask the following--i almost always miss online sarcase so i have to ask: Is your comment sarcastic?

maybe i've missed the point. What have you learned for dealing with "these" [IT upgrade] situations?
Heise.de picked it up on the 18th:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Petition-verlangt-Entschuldig...
Ah, thanks for that. In Perl and shell scripts, it's the equivalent of $ - that is, "my name is $name".
There is a time for each solution. In 2004 it probably wasn't seen a necessary enough.
A Dentist of a Different Color
I would find that more than acceptable. But I think it's a little dismissive to say that Alan Turing didn't get stabbed in the back more than other gays. Here's a man who serves his country in an outstanding fashion and _then_ is violated and mutilated. I'm not trying to belittle the suffering of other gays, I'm just trying to highlight the exceptional pettiness of the government towards one of its greatest thinkers.

It's like what happened to Oppenheimer during McCarthyism. Thousands of perfectly fine people forced out of their work because they were socialist or communist or even just didn't hate communism as much as was expected. At least Oppenheimer got something of an apology. That's not as bad as being chemically castrated, but I think the situation bears some similarities.
i don't see a difference between /opt and /usr/local , I just think it's a matter of preference
From the moment Bertrand Serlet first started talking about Snow Leopard many, many months ago, he said it "hit the pause button on new features", and was intended to make improvements primarily under the hood.

Apple didn't just "realize" this at some later time, as implied by the article.

The difference with Vista is that Microsoft had created half a dozen overpriced variants of an operating system with changes that primarily benefited companies (e.g. Microsoft itself and DRM proponents), not users, but was trying to sell it as an OS that users would want.

The last line of the article is also insulting...to think that Apple is in any danger at all of not continuing to offer a "compelling alternative to Microsoft"?
What would Roissy do?

http://roissy.wordpress.com/
Freakonomics: Craigslist - A Company of Makers
It's very hard to respect people while trying to get them to work when they aren't working as hard as you are and aren't as capable.

It gets a lot easier when your team mates are at least working as hard as you are, or if they're on the same page knowledge- or skill-wise.
What about 'sudo port install mysql5-server' ?
Right, well in 2004 the total traffic was probably 5% of what it is now. That was before the whole Siegenthaler thing, which is when Wikipedia hit it's inflection point for traffic. The average article had maybe only 5 or 6 edits. That's why it made more sense to judge quality based on the entire article rather than the individual sentences, because for the most part each article was written by a single person with a few other people having fixed spelling or whatever. But yeah, I guess it just annoys me for some reason.
Tool of the Day:Minimize Your Downtime with Pingdom (useful tools review)
Well, in a very real way, delaying your entry to the job market by four years right now is a very safe bet. It's brutal out there for people without in-demand skills.

But what this article dances around, but doesn't quite realize, is that college no longer confers in-demand skills a priori. A journalism major that made six figures as a recruiter? That's a combination of personality and luck, and very little element of 'college training'.

If you want to consider college an investment (which is not crazy), you can't just think of it as a checkbox. College, done, now give me a job that pays well! Not realistic. You need an actual skill that people want to pay for. Science and engineering degrees always work well for this. Practical business skills (like accounting), medicine and law, these are the things that pay off.

You know, the ones with _hard_ classes. :)

I don't want to dump on humanities - if you love it, do it. If you're one of the best in your field, and if you're smart and passionate you should end up there, you'll do okay. Some even more than that.

But if you aren't the kind of person whose eyes light up when someone else at a party wants to talk about French Poets, don't study French Poetry and complain about the job market. Passion is fantastic, following it is great - and most people aged 18-22 don't have one. And if you don't, it's idiotic to take classes in a low-job field where you'll get trounced by those that do honestly care about the material above and beyond the grade.

If you aren't following your bliss (and that's okay), go into a hard field that you don't absolutely hate. And you might not love your job until you figure things out, but at least you won't be miserable _and_ broke. But for the love of god, don't major in Philosophy and complain that you didn't get your money's worth. (And I loved my philosophy classes in college.)
That's an interesting point, that the company's opinion of employees is evident through their (lack of) IT investment. I have personally come to the decision that life is just too short to put up with Windows, and if I look for a job I intend to choose it based on the existence of Mac or Linux.
The Truth About Nokia, Symbian, Maemo, the N900 and N97
5 milestones to reach before raising venture capital
For as much sense as this deal makes, I can't help but feel that the Mouse is starting to subtly acquire all my childhood memories.

On the other hand, I welcome our new mouse overlords.
"Ghost" Black Hole - Equal to One Billion Supernovas
The difference is stuff installed in /opt is encapsulated inside its own folder, whereas everything in /usr/local is shared (one bin dir, one lib dir, etc).

So if I want to uninstall Ruby from /opt I do something like this:

rm -rf /opt/ruby-1.8.7

To uninstall Ruby from /usr/local is a lot more work.
this story is amazing in so many ways. but mostly for the shakespearean drama of a nerd huffing over-the-counter products.
The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 1)
> Since the IRS and other arms of the government already have this insight

Actually, they don't. The IRS doesn't get much of anything that isn't directly tied to income and expense.

Note that this regulation treats VC funds more harshly than criminal enterprises.

Yes, criminal enterprises can report income and expenses and pay taxes through the IRS without any fear that the said reports will be used against them. (In fact, in some cases one can even pay the drug-for=recreational-use tax and avoid most/all of the criminal sanctions. Few bother because the tax is extremely high. However, I suspect that a few rich stamp collectors have paid for the relevant stamps just to build their collection.)
It depends on the field. Some fields prefer 4 year degrees, some prefer portfolios, some prefer graduate degrees. Computer science is probably more of a 4 year + portfolio. Yeah, MS degrees are nice, but unless it was in the topic a company is interested in, it is probably better to have some code examples.

In general, it seems college education has been over-inflated and over-hyped. It is the next bubble to burst probably. The more Uncle Sam was willing shell out money for student loans, the more collages started increasing their tuition. And one cannot just declare bancruptcy and wash away these loans.

My college, at least, increased the tuition every year since 2000 then started building bigger stadiums, shopping malls, and recreation halls.

At the same time crusty old professors stuck in the 70s didn't teach anything relevent to today world, while at the same time boasting how easy they personally have it, how stable their job is, encouraging students to become professors, so they can also get tenure and stop working and become a new generation of crusty old professors ... Somehow I got a feel my college was not unique in this respect.
What was done to Turing was disgusting and probably we should be ashamed of it as a nation but it was done to so many - any apology must be to them all.

Sure, but it was hardly a phenomenon unique to the UK. That kind of treatment of homosexuals (and indeed, much worse treatments) were sanctioned by every government on Earth. In addition, just about every religion, club, society, private business and the vast majority of individuals. And not just in that era, but from the dawn of time until very recently (and continuing 'til today in many countries). So any apology needs to be by everybody.

Ah, but why just homosexuals? All sorts of other groups have been treated unfairly throughout history, often in far more horrible ways than happened to Alan Turing. And let's not forget all the individuals who were treated poorly in their lives for reasons that have nothing to do with membership of any group. So ideally, any apology should be from everybody to everybody -- nothing else would be fair.

Oh, okay, fine. On behalf of the human race, I'd like to apologize for every bad thing ever done by any now dead member of the human race to any other now dead member of the human race. Also, on behalf of the human race, I accept that apology. Can we get on with our lives now?
I pretty much agree. This talk did nothing to me. It didn't really break any new ground. Yes, you must be persistent and "show up for work" to be an artist. Who hasn't heard this before?

I hadn't heard of this author or her book, so I checked it out on Amazon. The most useful review is titled "Glib, narcissistic and lightweight". That's kind of how I felt listening to this talk. How many times did she mention the "freakish success" of her book?
What about Australians and other Commonwealth citizens who are nonetheless the Queen's subjects?
The problem with SOX is that it has a large fixed cost component. This disproportionately hurts smaller companies. You may bet that costs will be proportional to the size of the fund, but I see no reason to expect that.

There are also knock-on effects: if VC becomes less profitable, some investors will put their money into other instruments. The problem isn't just that we might get smaller profits on existing VC funds, the problem is that we might get fewer investments into VC.

The sole benefit is that congress and the president get to pretend they are doing something about the financial crisis.

If you want to say my title was a little overblown, fine. But it doesn't change the fact that this proposed regulation poses a significant risk of reducing the amount of VC invested into startups.
Is there any reason to believe that regulators who can't figure out how to handle institutions that they've been regulating for decades will know how to handle VC firms?

We know how this is going to play out. VC firms with ties to congress critters are going to get special treatment, just like banks with such ties do. Firms that don't make such ties are going to be penalized.
Unfortunately as a society we still have discrimination. Either it is against one's sexual preferences or race or color - we still have a lot of ground to cover.
Fluidinfo - a database aiming to socialize information
Our brains already do this for us. It's called the bullshit detector (technical term).
Why your firm can't innovate