skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I poured my heart out for "you" a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762531

Alibaba is a hub, but it's a very Chinese company; I was there in Hong Kong during their IPO and I can assure you, HK and all of China was abuzz. Nearly every Chinese factory has an account with them. You should be safe dealing with .cn firm through Alibaba, specially if they have verified accounts. You can use that post of mine to look for scam clues, but generally, your order will arrive, albeit a little bit overpriced. If you want fair market you should be at the market, in person, taking long rides to dusty villages like the rest of us ;-)

The price hikes are usually done by resellers, middle-men and brokers. Not all "Chinese" are Chinese; there are plenty of Overseas Chinese (Honkies, Malaysians, Taiwanese, Singaporeans, Vietnamese, even Filipino Chinese, who do business in the mainland and act as brokers to foreign companies.)

Indians are pretty safe too. The guidelines for doing business with Indians is different than doing with Chinese, but not by much. Indians are usually less polished in appearance; the Chinese spend a lot of money on image, so they have bigger office buildings, fancier sales brochures and the like. In my experience, specially in generic drugs and pharmaceuticals, the most efficient Indian "companies" have been a few guys, usually cousins, usually Punjabis, who did business outside a shared office in Hong Kong or Dubai but they did a great job delivering the goods as promised. Indians also have trained practitioners as salesmen; my pharmaceuticals sales guy was an oncologist (In China he would have been an English major, for example.)

Usually the best way to conduct an important business is to fly there. Even if you budget is $10k; I would say spend half of that on travel expenses and your eyes will be opened to the many possibilities out there.

I also dabbled in scrap metal and used cars; those two are the FOREX of the import/export world, rife with scammers and sometimes violent criminals.

Avoid any business that offers you "government connections"; this is where you will likely be robbed. If a partner hints at having government links and tells you he has the ability to avoid customs or shipping expenses, this is their way of appealing to your greed. There are plenty of Westerners who are dying to be friends with a rich 3rd world dictator, it's like an undocumented fetish. Play ball, and play by the rules.

More than Alibaba, I would be weary of any firm that has the label "drop-shipper" anywhere on its site. Big manufacturers don't sell to EBay kiddies; that's just weak and disgusting.
There's a pleasant irony here, too, since the hallmark of Paul Graham's essays is overgeneralizing from personal experience.
Multiple Programming Language Implementations - This Annoys Me the Most
Apple, do the right thing and approve Rhapsody for the iPhone pronto.
No problem at all fsniper..

I'm an eternal optimist so I don't suffer from having failed. It makes one feel alive actually.

Economically I'm wounded but still alive and healing. Without being too specific I am 10s of thousands in debt because of my failed startup but not all is lost. There is a lot of reusable code and designs for the second time around =)

My family and friends understood when I told them what had happened. I have pointed them to this article actually.

My situation now is revving up for round 2..! ;)
It's surprising how "cold" and professional the Chicago logo feels. I'm definitely a fan of Madrid's logo - IMHO the Olympics needs to focus on unity now moreso than ever. A more "human" logo certainly helps.

Plus the symbolism of the handprint is much more universal than any star or ribbon can be.
for all its beauty, clojure is losing its culture fast! You can already see Design Patterns being shoehorned on top of it, Java programmers will embrace it and extend it in earnest.

Can you give an example of this?
Seconded. It all adds up to normality. I wish someone had been there to remind me of that when I was going through some of this.
Profits aren't determined by how much value you create, they're determined by how much value you can capture.
> I firmly believe that if we (the collective we) don't start paying more attention to aesthetics, we are not going to survive this mess.

Do you really think that living in a double wide vs living in the mill house is a survival issue?

> I know that not everyone can afford one of these but if there was more desire for them in the market the prices would come down and possibly be more competitive with a double wide.

Yes, if more people wanted houses like that, they'd be cheaper. So what? (I'll note that "it's not common" drives much of what is considered "beautiful", so if it became more common, it's likely that it would lose a significant amount of its snob appeal.)

I agree that it's a nice looking house, but I don't see anything wrong with someone who would rather spend the difference, no matter how small, on something else.

How about you - would you rather someone be homeless because they can't afford to live in something from architectural digest and buy food? How about someone who'd rather spend the money on grad school?

I'm sure that you have a list of things and amounts where you'd say "it's okay for someone to buy that instead of what I consider a pretty house", but why should anyone else care about your list?
Learning algorithms and statistical inference do not in any way supersede or invalidate the scientific method, they are products of the scientific method.

The are very interesting though, that's for sure.
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Sigh

It's not Alibaba that's spamming you, it's the vendors themselves.

If you're in the U.S. take a trip to any commerce fair for your industry. Before I got into electronics I was doing lighting and green building products; I called one of the Chinese companies attending the New York Lighting Fair and told them I wanted to come to their booth. Next day I drove to Manhattan, walked to the reception area and told the lady there I was a limousine driver here to take my Chinese company out for lunch. She printed a $100 badge out for me for free and I went to Eddy, my friend, we shook hands talked for hours and he invited me to his factory and his home in Shanghai. I did the same thing several times in different trade fairs and by the time I went to China I had organized orders from Arab and American companies for their products and we're good friends and brothers to this day.

For Chinese companies, it's best to call your sales person up and become friends. But don't sit on your ass and chit chat all day long, they want salespeople, get up and make calls on their behalf. I paid good money getting their product photos edited and printed on glossy materials. If you can organize enough buyers, the Chinese will let you tack your profit ON TOP of the cost of the products. Or you can get your clients to by X units and your factory will sell you X+N units, where N is your own free inventory to do with as you wish.
Does'nt smalltalk have code=data behavior without s-expressions. I'm not an expert, but I thought that was the reason why Smalltalk has the IDE that everyone raves about along with image persistence

Or can Smalltalk be modelled as an s-exp based language?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persisten...
BTW - you do realize that that house is okay in a wooded or rural area, but is a privacy disaster in urban/suburban area. Also, walls aren't just to keep other people from looking in, it's to keep protect them from seeing you. I'm glad that my neighbors have opaque walls.
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A learning algorithm creates a specialist filter, usually in classification problems, that can discriminate between the various classes.

That doesn't mean that because you didn't manually tune each and every weight in the classifier that its behaviour is not solidly governed by scientific principles.

Science and the application of the scientific method are what got us there in the first place, and has given us the keys to understanding these systems. Genetic Algorithms are a another area where you could easily be tempted to think that you are not doing science, the same thing happens there.

Science is the key to understanding. The scientific method is the ultimate arbiter between what we know to be true, and what we can not prove to be either false, fantasy or outright lie.

I feel that you think that somehow these computational models somehow supplant the scientific method, but you are forgetting one crucial bit here, those models themselves will need to be understood, and only the scientific method will allow you to do so.
C) is two very different things. As previous articles/threads (try google search) have suggested, quitting because you hate your job is not the right place to start but maybe good motivation to take the final leap. The satisfaction of seeing something you built from the ground up can be satisfactory and keep you motivated.

I don't know about D). I don't know what you are imaging about the lifestyle but all of it is hard (and hopefully enjoyable) work. If you are looking for less or easier work, look elsewhere.

I think you need both A) and B) to the extent they feed off each other and when your not hitting on cylinder A) for motivation, you are hitting cylinder B) and vice versa.

I didn't see anything on target market, but from a business perspective... Investors are going to ask you about this.
I think you need laziness to be a little more prevalent than that before it makes a difference. Haskell's super-concise Fibonacci sequence illustrates that:

let fib = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fib (tail fib)
I'd guess that since quite a bit of research is funded through universities by government grant that you'll still see a trickle of new tech. of course you can never know whether you would have had more innovation given competition.
The scientific method is alive and well, according to that same article you linked above these are the steps in 'doing science' following 'a scientific method' (of which there are many, but they all share the same basic characteristics):

1. Define the question

2. Gather information and resources (observe)

3. Form hypothesis

4. Perform experiment and collect data

5. Analyze data

6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis

7. Publish results

8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

So, even though because of the majority of fields and scope of problems we can not use a single methodology to give us all our knowledge (that would be so convienient) we have come up with a series of steps that if you adhere to them will give you meaningful results.
It has been said that a large part of what commonly makes a startup successful in the end is the persistence and determination of the founders. If you can generate more persistence in yourself by being passionate about what you are doing, then I think you are more likely to find a way to be successful.
Lifestyle.
Money can buy happiness—if you spend it right
Nope - the declaration of independence.

The DofI was part of the revolution, which led to the articles of confederacy. They were later abandoned in favor of the US constitution.

For what it's worth, pretty much every bad thing predicted by the opponents of the US constitution came true.
A) is really about target market. I had written "target market" first but I edited it out. I think if your only worried about target market then your essentially doing it for the sake of selling it off.
I don't think it was a fake product, but most likely a fake brand.

You should only be buying original brands from their manufacturers, or generic commodity items. For example, you can get great prices on LCD screens on Alibaba, but you will get a fake Samsung LCD screen, unless you were buying from Samsung or a reseller.

People who get fake stuff from Alibaba willingly do so. Counterfeit is a huge business, and every minute a moron gets ripped off on EBay, so he decides to rip off others by importing counterfeit products with the intention to resell them. What he doesn't know is that he will be ripped off again, this time wholesale. It's for this reason that generic, white-label products are hard to come by in certain markets; it might even be cheaper, sometimes, to buy new cases for knockoff products and rebrand them yourself as Acme.
If everyone has to use the cheapest tech, that basically means they're forced to be your customers if you invent a cheaper and/or more efficient way of performing something. That'd be a pretty good incentive for innovation - a free customer base and a monopoly in return for a good innovation (until someone else thinks of an even better way).
This is a pretty scary subject for me. I used to have pretty much total recall of facts from my youth aged roughly six up to the present. Lately I've been discovering holes in it and it scares the willies out of me.

How much of it is true casts doubt on the remainder, a thought that I find even more frightening. A short while ago I had to do a write up of a bit of my history and I found that without spending some serious thought about for instance the order of events I could not instantly put together a sequence of some of the major events in my life about 2 decades ago.

Maybe memory works like 'RAM', if you don't refresh some bit frequently enough by thinking about your past it fades slowly over time.
I think they were going for a fusion of Olympic iconography (the torch) with the Chicago flag ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Chicago )and a bit of a skyscraper motif.

While the Chicago flag is a bit inside baseball (and probably included solely as a sop to the Chicago political establishment, who intend to own the Olympics as thoroughly as they own everything else that ever came out of Chicago politics), I do think that incorporating a bit of the local flair into the logo is a good design goal. I like Madrid's logo, don't get me wrong, but couldn't it be San Fransisco's logo, or London's logo, or Moscow's logo, etc, without modification?

I kind of like Tokyo's -- the ribbon is togetherness but the design is distinctly Japanese. I expect the prominent inclusion of the hinomaru (the red disk in the center of the Japanese flag) probably will get a raised eyebrow or two from some quarters, but the Olympics is not exactly a celebration of anti-nationalism now is it.
Another incentive for starting a startup is because you have some cool hack you want to try out.
OK so you didn't mean you were 'weary' of mind blowing drugs then.
I think the journal system did an excellent job for its time. At some point, though, we will have to switch to a better reputation-assigning system.
A sample from this mornings batch:

From: Alibaba Trade Alert <tradealert@service.alibaba.com>

Three exactly identical messages. To three totally different names...
Great little essay until the last line.

Yay:

Conversely, if you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.

This is exactly my primary article of faith in life. (By faith I mean the stuff I fill the missing gaps in my knowledge with in order to make actionable decisions.)

Nay:

See randomness.

1. I'm not sure what this even means. How does one learn to see randomness and just what are they seeing when they see it?

2. It's not the positive version of "stop inserting yourself in the chain of causality". (Is there even a positive way to say "stop doing that thing you're doing"?)

I say pick b.

b is not random. It's just not about you.
http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/jeditable

used it several times... excellent; flexible.
you aren't back to reading moldbug are you? :p

anytime an organization transitions from accomplishing its original goal to a jobs program there's no going back. you have to start over.
In my case it really was a fake product but I wasn't buying electronic components.
+1 for admitting screwed up, -10 for laying it off on his single source. Why didn't he second-source it, like real journalists do?
You know you can probably disable that by clicking the link at the botton of the email and then clicking a radio button. (I never do it myself either)
Changing the world. I can make money in far less risky ways, and I can pursue my passions in my free time. I am actually somewhat surprised that you managed to fit the word "lifestyle" and "running your own successful company" into the same sentence.

Having said that, I seriously doubt I will ever found a startup - I plan to make a chunk of money and have a life first.
Unfortunately, I honestly think that Chicago has the worst logo of them all. But I really do hope they win the bid for the 2016 Olympics.
I felt that the interesting bit of rashmon is that you don't know how much of each alteration is intentional or not.
Props to tptacek for his comment a few weeks ago, when discussing this exact issue:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779099

He nailed it.
Actually it is a complete coincidence. I'd always meant to repost this on paulgraham.com eventually, and I posted it mostly unchanged.
I can't imagine well-sourced rumors are all that commonplace about a company as secretive as Apple. Probably you have to go with what you're given on the rare occasions you get precious little anything at all.
This was posted here yesterday:

http://www.brool.com/index.php/snippet-automatic-proxy-creat...

A neat hack to get something working quickly, but very unlispy. I can't even make sense of the AUTO-PROXY macro. A syntax barf mixed with a gratuitous breaking of LET. Also note that Rich Hickey decided to use the proxy design pattern to interop with Java, instead of doing all business with Java through FFIs; in a sense, Clojure's type system is embedded in Java.

http://clojure.org/java_interop#toc25

This is a minor aesthetic nitpick from a concerned Lisper, mostly for selfish reasons. My thinking goes: "Today I have Common Lisp for my projects and I am happy with it. But tomorrow if I need Clojure, I hope to find it in a sane, Lispy world. I don't want to learn Java so please don't make me" ;-)

For a far more alarmist polemic, albeit a satirical one, see this:

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-08-19-011225_clojure_...
you should be suspicious of your certainty about your younger memories.
Not many real journalists have even one source as reliable as Gruber's has been.
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>when you train a computational model on half of your dataset and test it against the other half (which the author claims is Not Sufficiently Scientific), how is that qualitatively different from training it on all your data, and then "testing it on Nature"

it would be essentially the same thing if you took half the data, made a model, tested it on the other half, got good results, and stopped.

but thats not going to happen. your fist model will stink. you'll refine it and try again. and you'll keep doing that. unfotunatly, this mean your model ends up being dependent on all the data.

the easiest way to prevent this is to build a model and the test it on real world data that occurs after you build the model. if it doesn't work, tweak the model, and then find new data again.
Makes for good testimony if the person gets back on the straight and narrow though.

The part about going straight to hell, all sin is the same but repenting of what you have done (adultery, steal a pack of gum, whatever) is the ticket out of the dark place and back into a place where you can be of some benefit to others. It is hard to be a person who can make a difference and be a person who steals packs of gum at every opportunity. A person who is repenting but is falling short, that person is still in good enough shape to do whatever (work charity for instance) one can't expect to always be repenting and falling short for the same thing though. Luckily once one major sin is taken care of there is usually another big sin to work on next.
Varies a lot between particular companies. When I started at Google, one of the nearly universal comments from my fellow Nooglers was how much higher expectations were than at their previous jobs. (The workload is a little lower than when I had my own startup but higher than at both of the previous startups I've worked at, which was quite a bit more than I expected.) The two-hour workday seems fairly common among large companies in the valley though. I've also seen it at poorly-managed startups - those are the ones that either go bust or become small businesses.

I think that 20% time has a lot to do with this. I dunno about other folks, but I view 20% time as "All those other things I could be doing with access to Google's data that I try to squeeze in when I don't have an official project to do." Given the near infinity of nifty things to do with the web and a few zillion computers at your fingertips, that's quite a lot.

Another big factor seems to be whether companies assign tasks to individuals or to products. The number of tasks you're assigned is limited by your manager's bandwidth: if you're a fairly talented worker at the bottom of the totem poll, it's very likely that you'll be able to complete tasks faster than your manager can dream them up. But if tasks are just assigned to the product - "Well, we could be better in X, Y, and Z ways. Oh, and anything else you can think up" - there are a potentially infinite number of ways that the product could be better. If you just pick them off one by one as soon as you finish your previous task, without worrying about who owns them, you end up perpetually busy.
:-(

Yesterday my girlfriend bought me a electronic shaving kit from a reputable chain store and I remembered seeing that same product in China for $10; I was asked to export it. I have even seen Australian mobile phone company booths selling knockoff phones without realizing it.
Beyond the civility issue, if you think your competition is doing something wrong, don't criticize them, just do it better and capture more of the market. (This doesn't apply in his illustration of France Telecom's tactics, but it's the first thing that occurred to me before I actually read the essay.)
PG, would you and Y Combinator be in a place to improve this situation?

A coalition of influential and prominent Silicon Valley companies could really have an effect on things (hopefully).

Edit: Seems like some of this is already happening, nevermind.
Im not a hacker, but I understand. And Im glad that YC is here to support and develop startups like my own. And I hope to have the opportunity to work with YC in the future. My startup is just that. A company that is a tweek or "hack" on various other web ideas that have been developed and maybe even successful, but that I feel have dropped the ball on various aspects of their site's service, and business model. And with the right tweek or hack (my startup, mindUNsigned.com), can capitalize on the competition's turnover, and deliver a game winning dunk at the other end of the court.
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