skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Companies succeed with single founders all the time. Just look at Digg, Craigslist, eBay, Netflix, Wordpress, Wikipedia, Amazon, TechMeme, PBWiki, TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Etsy."

Is this true? I know it's hard to define "founder" precisely, since some co-founders may get involved after the idea is partly baked, or may not have as much of an impact. But several of these seem to be questionable. (And Techmeme is misspelled... twice.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress - "It was first released in May 2003 by its co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a (considered the official) successor to b2\cafelog." (Or if you meant Wordpress.com / Automattic, it also has multiple co-founders.)

http://etsy.com/about - "Etsy was founded by Rob Kalin, Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell in June, 2005."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix - "Netflix was founded in 1997 in Scotts Valley, California by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software, along with Mitch Lowe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg - "Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBworks - "PBworks (formerly PBwiki) is a commercial collaboration service created by David Weekly, with Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt joining shortly thereafter as co-founders."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia - "Launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger..."
There definitely needs to be a very powerful reservation system. Some high-paying members might be able to rent out certain pieces of equipment for days at a time, while others would only be able to access it when vacant. You would not want somebody monkeying around with your C&C machine while you were taking a 2 hour break.

It would certainly require some good software, and community support. Maybe the different pricing levels would allow you to book equipment further and further in advance, to ensure availability for big projects.
This is a very interesting observation. It might be amusing if PG rewrote some of his more controversial essays in the second style, then made both versions available. Think of it as "skinning". Since the discovery version was written before the persuasive version, the persuasion needn't interfere with the discovery.
The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years. This means that the methods for making us immortal would have to be perfected in 10 years, at most. The only way this is going to happen is if human-level or better AI is finished, like, next week.

Meanwhile, in the real world, medicine has made only incremental advances in the past few decades. Witness the fact that pharma is falling off a cliff because they haven't come up with many blockbusters recently: http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff-a...

Kurzweil is 61. He's fantasizing that something will be ready in 20 years, which is about his life expectancy at this point. Sad.
I've met Michael Arrington once & talked to him on several occasions. He was never short or rude, only seemingly, endlessly occupied.

In fact, all of the staff @ TechCrunch seem to be nice, people of the few I've met.
Because a clone will take about two decades to mature? And if it's a full clone, will in all likelihood have its own ideas about who occupies its head? And will probably physically develop different from you, as development is partially environmental?

All sorts of problems with the cloning path to immortality.
one other thing i noted:

(Modules page just above "More about modules") you talk about compiling to Hipe, but it doesn't say that you ahve to ./configure it in. This seems to be a common configure:

./configure --enable-hipe --enable-smp-support --enable-threads
I think the best argument contra Kurzweil's timescale is that business organization and the human element in infrastructure processes is incompressible below a certain threshold. I make this argument here:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.p...

and here:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.ph...

I don't think there's a good argument to be made contra what Kurzweil expects to happen. At this point a transhumanist society of enhanced, long-living humans+ seems fairly inevitable, arriving in probably three to four decades rather than two.
definitely. If your parents'[1] have Google (or Yahoo) as their homepage then give them a url to access and watch them enter it straight into the search box.

[1. Or other non-tech person that you can watch web-browsing]
The Nielsen Company and Facebook Form Strategic Alliance
It does if you are Cartman :)

Good find re the Simpsons! I will remember that one.

Edit: what I love about those two lines is that not only are they equally brilliant, they are brilliant in a way that captures the difference between the two shows.
People'll pay for a humaniform body for at least the first few decades.

Then the Grinders get involved, and the cultural body image paradigm starts to shift ever so slightly...
I'm suspicious of anything said to be 20 years away. It's far enough in the future that you can be a little hand-wavy about how it's going to happen, but not so far that no one would care. A variant of Occam's razor implies that when something is described in a news article as 20 years away, the 20 came from the demands placed on news articles rather than the nature of the subject.
How to properly increment a counter on Google App Engine
Yes I've seen it. But it clearly shows some of the problems existing with GAE. It is possible to avoid them, as well as most of the rest, but we cannot deny the fact that there is a problem.

Also, there are read-only tests which are also not amazing.
I would love to know how other Hackerspaces have succeeded making their equipment available to different groups with distinct needs.
Knowledge you need to have changes every three years in programming.
They have no chance to catch that up.
I'm never interested in women working in the same profession than I'm working in, having the same views, etc... I don't need someone to acknowledge everything I say. I can do that myself.
Interesting board. It has ethernet, usb, and can as native interfaces plus the usual sort of stuff one might expect of a microcontroller. 64k ram, 512k flash so it can go places the Arduino can't.

At $50 I'd have ordered two on my first visit to the page to have ready for my next project, but $100 seems steep.
... you should ramp up slowly when load testing an application on App Engine. Ramping up too quickly won't give an accurate picture of how App Engine scales; you have to accomodate our load balancing code ...

The problem with this is that the test is written to accommodate known limitations of the architecture. Performance tests need to take the opposite approach. In this case that means specifically revealing the performance implications when App Engine scales up and down.

That said, I don't expect a Google engineer to reveal App Engine's limitations :]
I am not denying the fact that it scales. I am saying that on the per-box level it is slow. And if you get slashdotted, you get that "synthetic" load peak, which might not be handled by scaling.
Find a lawyer. It looks like you're definitely out of 'hey forum friends, what should I do' territory.

Make sure you build a case, keep copies of any and all communications (emails, contracts) that you've had with this character and make sure you don't lose a thing.

A single email can make all the difference if this ever goes to court and it might be a while before you get there, ideally you'd have started building a case long ago, but now it is definitely time to get organized.

If you should go to court, the major advantage you will have if you are organized is that you can present your case in a way that someone can follow. A case is like a piece of software in that respect, if it looks like 'spaghetti' then you will have a hard time arguing it, if it is nicely structured with layers building upon other layers you will stand a better chance to come out ahead.

Good luck with this!
A tale of two projects:

One one project (RoR), I have a BIG-IP load balancer in front of 4 dedicated servers, one of which is a db.

On another project, I am running a straight Python app on App Engine.

Guess which one I've had to wake up in the middle of the night to fix on occasion...
Or you can assume that by the time you figure out how to download the contents of a brain, you'll have figured out how to speed up the cloning process. Or just start growing a "mindless" clone when you're 30 and start inhabiting it when you turn fifty and then repeat the process.

Technically, these are all doable. Now, ethically and morally... that's a completely different story.
How much $$$ do you bet on certified developers making fewer (less severe) mistakes reliably?

Would it be ten? Thousand? Your yearly salary?
Do you think there might be another category of writing, that fits in an essay: story telling?

Some of the most compelling talks I've been to are stories winding through a narrative. Conciseness doesn't really fit it, and it is certainly designed for discovery more than persuasion. But it's a bit of both, characterized perhaps by discovery of the audience - though not necessarily of an intended idea, which would make it persuasion.
The idea of GAE: we do care about scaling instead of you.
What I prefer to think: write proper code, and you will never need a cluster (probably not for all cases).

There are just 6.5billions people on the earth, so the maximum traffic is limited anyway.
The thing that bothers me about TechCrunch is that the comment section is a cesspool. Every time I scroll down there I regret it immediately.
At a distance you'd stop-down the lens aperture, stick it in manual focus, and set it to somewhere around infinity.

(and big, fancy yachts are always moored somewhere sunny, off the coast. So no problem there.)
An easy solution is to split it off to an "Unused" pseudoproject in the source control system. This avoids archeology on historical versions.
Actually, that's what makes it better. The argument against Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation isn't that those WWII heroes were so special; it's that no one generation could be.

I could have been more precise with a modifying phrase such as "by accident of birth", but that was too unwieldy. The upvoted comments are specific to the GG argument, which are suboptimal, because they don't work as good writing unless you've seen PG's original.

(Yeah, I'm a part-time writer/editor to pay the beer bills, and I can get defensive about my writing. Sue me. You're better at design/coding/picking up chicks than I.)
4) Talk to people and listen to them closely
The world, collectively, is smarter than you are — pay attention to it.

I feel like a lot of great companies would never have been built if the founders didn't ignore a bunch of naysayers. That said, if you get your product into users' hands early and often and nothing you do can persuade anybody to like it, you're probably better off not wasting any more time on it.

5) The fewer heads, the better

I'm going to have to agree with pg and say that going it alone is a bad idea. You need multiple, complementary skill sets. You need to balance out mood swings. You need varied backgrounds and bodies of experience to provide multiple perspectives on all the problems you'll undoubtedly face.

However, I can totally relate to the author when he says, "On many occasions, I’d come up with a new, inspiring idea, only to get a knot in my stomach before pitching it to my team."

I think it's important to cultivate a culture where it's perfectly acceptable to throw crazy ideas on the table and get them shot down. In fact, I think the more ideas you can burn through, the better. Creativity is an iterative process. Often times your crazy, will-never-work idea will spark a brilliant idea in the mind of one of your cofounders.

On a related note, we've found that getting a 3 person consensus on everything is a broken model. For any given decision there should be exactly one person responsible for making it. You can either divide up the problem space or you can just defer to the same person on everything. We even decided to rotate who gets to wear that hat every 4 months, to give everyone a chance and to make sure we don't stagnate.
although it's not clear why this isn't a huge vector to cause all sorts of havoc.

First the larger question: Is the Silverlight sandbox safe? The Silverlight CoreCLR security model is a simplified version of the full CLR security model [1].

Some callouts:

- C# "unsafe" code blocks, which let you access raw pointers, are not allowed.

- P/Invoke and COM Interop are not allowed.

- There are whole categories of the .NET class library that have been removed, a notable example being local file access. Silverlight is not like Adobe AIR, which gives you all sorts of native APIs.

- Socket communications are restricted by default to the original host from which the Silverlight app was downloaded. Cross-domain access can be granted by supplying either a Flash policy file or a Silverlight-native policy file. [2]

Therefore, to say whether this could be used for DDOS attacks on other hosts, we need to look at the network access policy file. Here it is: http://www.wiki-os.org/clientaccesspolicy.xml . As configured now, Wiki-OS allows incoming HTTP connections from any host, but outgoing connections are only permitted to the original host (and outgoing connections can only use the WebClient-- outgoing raw socket connections are not allowed).

This is interesting. If I'm reading that file correctly, it seems you could write a Wiki-OS network server but not a DDOS vehicle.

[1] "Security In Silverlight 2" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc765416.aspx

[2] "Network Security Access Restrictions in Silverlight" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645032(VS.95).aspx
it's gonna get crowded.....
A bespoke in-memory database,

They use memcached with some nasty kernel hacks.

(Caused some friction when they forked an old version, added new code which was then suddenly unleashed on the community without warning. Each new feature then had to be manually added to the current version)
Since hardware hacking is in some ways similar to making (and practicing) music, perhaps the shared band spaces where many bands group together to share practice space, equipment and recording studios would be a good model to start from.
That's probably why the title of the essay is "Persuade xor Discover". pg started out thinking about Arrington, but, since he was writing to discover, he explored other ideas. Those ideas became the main point of the essay.
something to note.. vhs is not only GPL we have been taking about rewording this for a while. Anything developed by VHS as a vhs group project is CC/GPL/BSD/etc. That being said members are free to show up and work on their proprietary projects. Also, open/group projects do get priority when it comes to shared tools.

p.s. there is alot of awesome aside from the junkies in the dtes. ;]
CBD is sortof a hassle. You have to think too much about your schedule, and be ready to be called to a date on short notice. It lost my interest very quickly. If they dropped their overhead I think they would do better, and be close enough to what I had in mind.
Sounds great. I can't get there until about 9, but sounds like a good time to meet-and-greet-and-clean.
It does indeed include V8 and a big shiny 'Speed Up' button might actually be one plausible way to get people to install the required plug-in.
You're right -- "founder" is a tough measurement. A lot of times -- as in the case of my own company, RFOP -- one person starts a company, sees a bit of success, then quickly brings on a small group of peers who join with the "co-founder" moniker.

As a company grows, it quickly evolves from a solo effort to (some variation of) a team effort. This can mean bringing on employees, or people who join as "co-founder." At PayPal, for instance, more than a half-dozen of the first employees were accorded "co-founder" status, which is why the company appears to have so many.

Further complicating the matter, many companies change their story after they reach success, presenting a company as a joint effort or team project, rife with co-founders and collaborators, when the truth is closer to one visionary bringing an idea to life, and assembling a team thereafter.

For instance, Digg. I was at a dinner a few years ago and had the pleasure of sitting next to Owen Byrne, one of the people mentioned above. Owen wrote the original code for Digg. He told me that Kevin Rose found him off of ELance. Until then, he was a fairly unknown Canadian programmer. His success has surely increased since taking on what started as a $2,000 contract gig, but I hesitate to call him a "co-founder."

99 times out of 100, companies build teams in order reach success. However, in many of those circumstances, that kernel of success starts not with a small team reaching consensus, but a single visionary with a single vision.
That's a great thought. They are very similar (high capital costs, skilled machinery, loud).
Though I don't have aggregate data, I don't think Amazon has this issue. People seem able to differentiate within the 2-4 range when there's an actual purchase involved.

Then again, Amazon doesn't account for the statistical uncertainty of votes, so it's a little odd as well.
"Generally the prediction comes as far as possible in the future while still being within the lifetime of the predictor." I don't recall the source of this paraphrase.
Thanks for the clarification. That seems far more practical than what I was imagining.

Encouraging open source and group projects is definitely going to be a priority at whatever we end up building. I'd love to chat more with you about other ways of doing that.
This quote speaks to the validity of the person making this claim. From TFA:

Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen.

BATBOY FOUND!! Page 33! NEW PICS!
Magazine covers from the soviet era
I agree. One of the common traits of a 'discovery' essay is you don't end up answering the question you asked.

And I should mention that the reason I don't like Mike involves a very poor way he treated someone I know.
Grinders?
I want something lean, dirty, and productive as hell.

But does anyone else with money want that? Selling to YC startups is probably not a good idea, because they have no money.

Corollary: there's a reason there are so many bland, boring office spaces -- they sell.
The way to make ratings more valuable can be seen on a site like www.rateyourmusic.com . You only get one vote per item, and voting again just changes your previous vote. Furthermore, you can see your voting distribution (this usually cows people into not just voting 5 on everything, because that makes you look like an idiot). On the other hand, youtubers probably aren't too concerned with looking like an idiot...
Well, with the last sentence I tried to write:

Unfortunately userspace file systems like NTFS-3G are lot slower than their native counterparts.

Which is understandable, regarding kernel calls are still quite expensive.
Ok. So I have another theory. In place of false there was previously some ugly condition and he wanted get rid of the things that were done on this condition with minimal necessary effort hoping that someone in the future with more time (maybe even himself) will clean that up since doing cleanup in such case is not hard thing to do.
* I would hold off on adding this to your iphone for now. It's very slow and buggy.
Psychology is yet to answer how brain is capable of simulating future, how does it work with time or just the "simple" question—why we sleep among other things. Kurzweil overestimates our understanding of how we work.
Pair programming is good for UI/HCIish code and so so for other types of code. Studies have shown that human are not good at multitasking even though it makes them feel productive.

Personally I think pair programming is overrated while code review is still underrated.
If your blood replacement (whatever it might be) was able to store 50 times the amount of oxygen per volume vs real blood then there's no reason why things like this might not be possible.

They've already made headway toward something like this with artificial blood substitutes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycyte
>The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years.

That's for U.S. regs only, right? They could (dangerously) release for broader testing in other countries.
The fact that the essay is mostly about the other ideas and titled as such does not discount the fact that the argument therein that most people dislike Arrington simply because he is curt is flawed.

pg cites his own curt/succint approach to writing as a reason people dislike him and speculates that people dislike Arrington for the same reason, thus using Arrington as an example for part of his argument. While pg's central thesis in the essay stands, the Arrington example does not.
wikipedia and craigslist are such outliers in so many ways, they don't add much support for the single founder argument at all
The one where you haven't outsourced the server support? Thats not a win for GAE so much as it is for outsourcing your server support.
The boards are currently on offer at $60 for preorders from Digikey.
Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said:

This is the UK equivalent of 'Writing in the National Enquirer...'. I like Kurzweil, I own a few of his books, but most Sun readers think a transhuman is a man who wears dresses.

Here is the entire Sun 'story'

Robo-swot 'will arrive' by 2028

MACHINES will “soar past” human intelligence within two decades using a combination of computers and biology, a visionary scientist claimed yesterday.

Dr Ray Kurzweil said nano-robots – microscopic units of artificial intelligent hardware – will eventually become “deeply integrated” in the environment, our bodies and brains, he told a meeting of top boffins in Boston, US.

Speech recognition pioneer Dr Kurzweil said two dozen regions of the brain had already been modelled and simulated by “reverse engineering” intelligence.

Better informed now? No, didn't think so. BTW, a swot is a nerd and a boffin is a professional scientist, in UK gutter-speak.
The intellectual contradiction of Google Voice
Haskell does well in benchmarks but this hides the fact that its performance is very unpredictable. Try it and you'll see what I mean. Also, Common Lisp does well in benchmarks but only after a lot of declarations are added which make the code nearly unreadable.

Personally I get the best results from the MLton SML compiler. OCaml is also pretty fast and more practical. YMMV.
This FailCon advertised on the blog looks like a terrible idea. Why are the Meebo founders speaking? Meebo isn't profitable. There are only like two people from profitable companies there.
> Can an essay whose explicit purpose is not to persuade even make a straw man defense?

Yes, it can (and does) make a flawed argument, which to most people would seem to be a defense of Arrington even if not intended as such.

What you take away from an essay is obviously up to you.
This is all nonsense anyway, but if you're going to do it then I would suggest a way that does not introduce generational noise between copies, or you might find after 'n' generations that you are not immortal after all.

Best to keep 'cloning' from your original cells, not from the ones that have gone through possibly many such cycles.