skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm about as much of a free-marketer as you're going to find, but it's not administrative red tape that's stopping you from choosing between bunches of wireless ISPs: operating one is really hard. The startup costs are immense.

Satellite? You have to launch satellites. You have to get spectrum allocations (which aren't going to disappear in any regulatory environment; the results would be chaotic and bad for just about everyone, except maybe the purely wired services). You have to either subsidize receivers, because they're going to be more expensive than most consumers will ever buy outright, or you have to manufacture millions of them to get the per-unit cost down. And, of course, you have the backhaul problem.

WiMax is probably the closest to being practical, along with cellular-type services, but it still has a very high natural barrier to entry: you have to get spectrum, you have to rent space on towers in the areas you want to serve, you have to somehow ensure that enough people are going to have WiMax equipment to be able to use your service at all. Again, lots of natural barriers to entry.

Wireless mesh networks have significant scalability problems if the content most nodes want to access isn't evenly distributed around the mesh. A lot of people put a lot of effort into getting community mesh networking working back in the late 90s, and nobody could really make it work. And this was using 802.11 equipment (mostly) that didn't have any regulatory burden at all.

3G and 4G cellular are competitive, at least in some ways, with wireline services, but in many markets they're owned by the same company that owns one of the wired services! (That'd be Verizon.) So even if you have the choice between cable, DSL, and 3G cellular, your choice of companies might still be Comcast or Verizon.

It's not regulation that's stopping these alternatives from existing, it's the inherent complexity and expense of offering high-speed data service. The regulatory burdens should certainly be kept to the bare minimum, but they're not to blame for the lack of choice in Internet access. Even in some sort of perfect, minimally-regulated market, you'd still be dealing with a very Hard Problem.
That's a truly fascinating take - making investment look more like home banking.
To those who want to differentiate between the next Google and Joe's Lemonade,
- At present the same wannabe entrepreneurs are waiting in other categories (EB2-EB3) for 5-7 years and paying the govt and the immigration attorneys over 10k in application and legal fees. The paperwork is extensive.
- I believe the same individuals will be more then willing to submit the paperwork in support of their entrepreneurial efforts and be willing to pay for review of the application. The process does not have to be completed in a weeks time but 6 months is better then 6 years.
- On the govt side if we already have a process in which we place our trust to ensure our safety (assuming the process works and does not let malicious individuals into the hallowed borders of the territorial united states) then we ought to place trust in the govt that it can put a process in place that distinguishes between a Joe's Lemonade and something that shows job creation/positive economic potential ... yes ?
Indians speak 300+ languages and practice 6000+ castes aka cultures.
this is a poorly thought-out scheme that seeks to create private initiative via government intervention

But that's absurd. It's trying to lower a government barrier to individuals who are the very definition of private initiative. And I don't mean that in a moral sense. I mean it in a dictionary-literal sense.
Billionaire SAS co-founder keeps on coding
"The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing – building for scale isn’t the problem anymore. I can build a hack protytype that works well into the "validation" stage to establish a funding event or customer revenue stream then use the new capital to rebuild, hire and grow."

This interestingly follows my own career growth. I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU for a long time, but eventually our bottleneck clearly shifted from reliability back to marketing/product development. Around that time I switched teams, and have since been the tech lead for our marketing team. It might sound less sexy to other engineers, but getting to be on the bleeding edge of marketing for virtual economies is constantly challenging and fun; especially with IMVU's data driven culture.
How to setup a DNS server with bind in Ubuntu linux
1. Saying "actually cheaper" is not the point of the remark, it's just a secondary remark about the specific comparison case, the point is that populist and relatively crappy journalism has a comparable cost to to the consumer as high quality journalism.

2. Everyone knows that big book deals are edge cases. Why is he arguing the outliers.

3. He's answering the flowery anecdotal part of the essay as if it's a serious evidential point? I presume he doesn't ever use anecdotes in his writing? I hope not because all anecdotes by definition can be denied (i.e. what is truth? i.e. incompleteness theorem)

4. He valiantly tries to defend his position to a commentator on his blog who points out that this is about cost to the consumer and eventual failure of a model that treats the content like print on a fabric. He's pointing out the very same thing that PG is pointing out, that this is their strategic plan, and that is doomed. This is the part where the author's retort to PG's piece really crashes and burns.
Egyptian govt. wiped out pigs, cities now overwhelmed with trash
I've been fooling around with this idea for a good year now. I've never found the time, but I think about doing something like it all the time. If I come across free time after my thesis, I hope to write a simple typed matlab-like clone that targets llvm code (which supports vectors). To me it seems that there is a vacuum for a simple typed fast numerics language with native vector support. Writing numerics in Matlab is great, but if you ever have to loop, it ends up dog slow. Porting the code to C is usually not terribly difficult, but is always a big pain, but usually yields a factor 10x or more speedup which is pretty significant. It would seem that applied mathematicians and physicists around the world would love a new, modern and fast numerics language to replace coding in C/C++/Fortran.
He left out:

"Immediately: None of these events would be judged positively or negatively based on human ethics."
I was talking about the previous standard. Here's a proof: http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/PythonStyleGuide#Indentati.... It says:

Note that this differs from PEP8 and instead follows the original Google Python Style guide from which this style guide originated.

Indent your code blocks with 2 spaces.
As a senior developer in a start up, I'll have to say good enough. But then again it depends on the founders' attitude a lot.
Pair debugging is very productive.
I can second that, particularly for IMVU. The economics in play there are deep and complicated on many levels.
If the New York Times is a "printout of yesterday's news", does that make The Economist a "printout of last week's news"?
This sort of line that people take, "Humans are destroying the planet". Annoys me.
The thing is, the only damage we are doing to the planet is making it harder for ourselves to live on it, life will continue to thrive after us in some form or another.
Could you post a link to Parsec. Quick googling didn't come up with any compiler tools. Thanks!
Howard: Graham's insult is correct only if he thinks only generic facts and events are "news." That's a small fraction of what the New York Times presents every day.

Reality: All of the "analysis", opinion, reviews, and other content is also fairly easily replaced with free alternatives available online.

Howard: Famous, popular authors make LOTS more money than others. Laura Bush got $1.7; by some reports Sarah Palin got $7 million. Graham's contention is just plainly wrong.

Reality: Graham's contention was not that all authors make equal amounts of money, but rather that all books are priced the same, based upon form rather than content. Go to a bookstore. Similarly bound and printed books cost similarly regardless of differences in content.

Howard: The decision to price all movies or CDs about the same is a marketing decision that says absolutely nothing about the relative value of the content.

Reality: The market value of a product is its price.
Yeah, here's a little known fact about IMVU's economy: Most products allow derivation, which gives content creators the ability to tweak/remix/reskin the product and publish the changes back to the catalog. Pick a markup for the remixed version and presto, everyone in the derivation chain gets paid their respective markups for every sale. There are only a handful of root nodes; nearly every product is a derivation of another product.
Walmart has a deal with RediClinic. The Walmart RediClinics are apparently using eClinicalWorks, the rest might be Athena Health. I expect these clinics use technology as much as possible. I don't think they can lower cost much more by using more, and if they did I expect any profits would be kept with no change in price.

http://ecwblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/walmart-rediclinic-eclin...

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1501613/rediclinic_to_le...
Man, these journalists are so nice compared to the Internet trolls I'm used to. I barely feel goaded into responding. But...

- Do Time and The Economist actually switch lengths? It's true I only looked at one week, but I found a clear trend of constant cost per weight of paper used, not just between those two but also for heavier mags like Foreign Policy.

- Laura Bush makes more by (and only by) selling more copies, just like a popular fabric pattern.

- What I meant about the "printout of yesterday's news" was not that events they covered happened the day before, but that it was literally a printout of stories that had appeared the day before on the Times's web site.

- His last point seems a repetition of the one about Laura Bush, but with more uppercase.
I agree. I studied in IIT. Calling me IIT-ian is same as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_calling
The comparison is not apt; you seem to be invoking airlines in the belief that they are a similarly capital-intensive industry. This is not really true. You can start up an airline with a bunch of rented or chartered planes, so you don't have to buy much of anything. (And even if you do want to buy them, investors know that they can be sold later and take that into account when loaning you money.)

You can't really do that if you want to be a modern ISP. (At one point, due to line-sharing rules, you could be a DSL ISP without too much infrastructure investment, but this is no longer true; the rules were gutted a few years back and with them went most of the small mom-and-pop DSL operations.) It's a hell of a lot harder to get investment for a fiber deployment---which won't be worth much of anything if the business folds---than it is to buy an aircraft, which at the end of the day will still be a valuable asset.

The industries in question have very little in common, so it should come as no surprise that strategies to induce competition within them look totally dissimilar as well.
Alice in UNIX Land
I agree. This is a sign that health care is in the process of fixing itself.

If you have 45 minutes to kill, you can listen here (http://dpcare.org/wa_health_underwriters) to a Seattle doctor talk about the issues, his company's approach, and why direct primary care is such a good thing. He advocates concierge care as opposed to the Walmart care discussed in the article, and I find the approach to be more sound. His approach is like Performace Based Logistics for medicine--the doctor that keeps you healthier makes more money, and I like that incentive. Nonetheless, both his solution and the Walmart solution are attempts at taking advantage of the same idea: paying directly for primary care can both lower costs and improve quality because the time and money required to pay for routine things with insurance is so terribly high.

I am convinced we are witnessing the birth of a revolution in medical care. I pay out of pocket for primary care, even though my insurance would cover everything if I went to a traditional provider. The new way is that much better than the old way -- and that cheap.
Generally speaking, PAs and NPs must technically be "supervised" by a physician. I think the degree of supervision varies by state, but it's typically not case-by-case supervision - rather more of a general sign-off sort of thing, with availability for the "tough cases". That sort of sounds like what you're describing, though obviously there's a wide spectrum of how involved the doctor can get.
I liked the 'The Dip' explanation way better: there are some things that are worth doing and others that are not. Most people do a lot of worthless stuff just because doing the worthy stuff is harder, even though it might yield a higher return in the long run.
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Hacker News Demographics
I skimmed more and read less of the original article as I went along, but from what I got, it just seems like he's trying too hard to make a clean, academic argument regarding the publishing industry. It's been around so long that it's full of exceptions, caveats, inefficiencies, and idiosyncrasies, not to mention the countless people wrapped up in it financially and psychologically, and this, I think, makes it too difficult to reason about as generally as he tries.

My biggest beef, though, comes when he claims that publishers don't sell content. Of course they do, and if they didn't, why did he even bring up the price difference between Time and The Economist (is one printed on shinier paper? Probably, but that's not why anyone buys The Economist). Some of the price is obviously determined by the medium, too (just as in music sales), and of course countless other factors, and there's no reason to try to narrow it down to just one. When the method of conveyance disappears, everything will shift around a bit and make everyone uncomfortable (like it's doing now), but eventually settle down not far from where it started. These systems aren't static sets of rules being followed blindly by their executives, they'll adapt to fit their market.

This whole thing seems weird. When did Paul get this faultily academic?
In a similar vein, I've always admired D. E. Shaw. who still publishes single author theory papers.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/110562316/abstrac...
"Repealing existing regulations" would not suddenly make the entrenched entities who grew powerful under the protection of those regulations vanish.

Sure, you'd have a level playing field (of sorts), but some of the players would have had years to practice: the result would be anything but a fair fight.

The only way deregulation would work is if it was accompanied by demonopolization. Since that is not politically feasible, it would be a mistake and probably lead to worse outcomes to go ahead with only the deregulatory part.
Beyond the product side of the economy, which is fascinating to me in it's own right (for some of the reasons you mentioned), the service economy around room rental, sales positions for goods and modeling services are just as interesting as well (let alone the complications of exchange rate, credit inflation, and other economic concerns).
Great, thank you for that link. I look forward to listening to him during breakfast tomorrow.

I agree that concierge practices sound like a better approach, at least as a primary source for health care. It would be the same as insurance for the smaller things. Leaving insurance to cover larger things. As far as I can tell the worst of the problem is caused by insurances and the related need for medical billers. Another interesting group are the Ideal Medical Practice Doctors. They work with minimal staff and use cheaper technology so they can lower the cost per patient and spend more time with the patients. One doctor I have heard has zero staff.
SAS institute is one of those rare companies where the founders did not sell or go public, but still created a hugely valuable business. Just comes to show that there are other routes you can take with your startup and be successful with enough hard work and preserverance.
"Technology, however, isn’t the driver any more for startups. The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing"

How true is this? Sounds like wishful thinking from a non programmer to me.

(Please note : I am not saying that marketing/product engineering is not important. They (obviously) are. I just think "Technology, however, isn’t the driver any more for startups" is too broad a brush)
JUSTICE Act would roll back telecom wiretap immunity
More evidence that TechCrunch is trolling the entire web with garbage rather than actually trying to get at the truth behind the stories they cover. They'd prefer to fan the flames than answer any questions. Given that Apple already explicitly listed VoiceCentral as one of the applications that they have chosen to keep out of the store, what news is this story really conveying?
Quoting David E. Shaw:

"Maybe it was because I was in the financial field. It's a zero sum game. You cannot make money unless someone else is losing money. That's one of the reasons why I like science: it doesn't work that way."

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080116/full/451240a/box/1.ht...
Increasing our chances of survival as a species should be a high priority

Why?
Apartment buildings already have simpler options: an in-complex office that receives all deliveries on your behalf and checks them out to you. The problem is, you've changed the problem to "redoing how the country builds apartments, and rebuilding all the apartment buildings" when the original problem, "find a way to deliver packages at more convenient times", was an easier problem to begin with.
Weekend codes: Browser cache invalidation with Javascript and querystring
Even if you have a business partner - I wonder if you should really be writing your own apps instead of working for someone else if you consider the business side of it SO boring. After all, no matter how deep into coding you are - if it is your business, you WILL have to get involved.

OR build a kickass app, use it as a portfolio and secure a good job somewhere. Maybe someone else's startup...
Can we get an option in HN to hide all posts on techcrunch.com? (Or just a GreaseMonkey script...)
Top Ways to Kill Innovation
I wholeheartedly agree. When so many seem to be seeking exit strategies, like an IPO or an acquisition, it's refreshing to see that some still think in a more long-term basis and battle to build businesses that will grow more organically throughout their entire lifetimes.

It's a bit like planting sequoias versus planting eucalyptuses. OK, I concede that the analogy may be sketchy, but you get the idea...
I found the article was rather long and a bit confusing. I wanted to summarize and clarify it:

There are more companies these days, but VCs are funding the same number of companies as before with the same huge expectations. Why not instead fund more companies with a lower amount of cash so as to not miss some opportunities.

My answer: putting all your eggs in one basket in a competitive environment will likely lead to better results than spreading the money out among a bunch of different baskets. Most startups are going to fail anyways, even with $200K of funding because the markets they are hitting are not that huge, not to mention all the other hurdles. What funding a bunch of different companies does is make a clear market winner harder to come by, which screws everybody. It's better if there was one clear winner sooner rather than later. My bet is handing out smaller investments like $200K would actually make the IPO market worse since most companies would get too tired to ever make it big enough to IPO.

The quick answer to why IPOs have not been good recently (other than the economy sucking): Sarbannes-Oxley made it very expensive to IPO with big requirements which means that the next best exit is selling. To sell, you have to get big fast to become attractive to suitors. Profitability/revenue is not a requirement/important for selling to a larger company (they use startups to cheaply get new talent and good ideas rather than quickly adding new revenue streams). So why don't more companies focus on revenue as a backup plan? It's very distracting and doing so means you might only scrape by. With such a do or die environment, the goal is not to create good businesses which will survive, just ones that will become great.

The good thing is that as it has become cheaper to run a startup, people have more options and can create self-funded sustainable businesses aimed at smaller markets. You won't become a billionaire doing that, but you'll get by. That's fine with VCs though, they are after big returns. If you are comfortable with creating such a business, by all means do so, but don't be pissed when a VC is not interested, even if it does make a little money. There is clearly room for both. If you do hit on a massive market opportunity, they can always catch up with you later.

So what is something like Y Combinator? It is a cheap way to vet companies for VCs and angels who see too many startups without enough information on them to make a good value judgement on whether they'll succeed. You don't need $200K to do that, you just need a small amount of money.
So, the real question then is why does that matter ? If they decide to cut out the P2P backend shouldn't that be their freedom to choose to do so ?

If ebay wants to unload skype I can imagine that the best candidate to unload it to would be the one that knows the most about it.

Most parties that want to buy something will want to know everything there is possibly to know about it before they buy it. Technical due-dilligence would normally look exactly at factors like this, and as far as I know it is ebay that is selling, not J&F.
It would be somewhat hilarious if the use of French becomes the inside thing to do as a programmer; it wouldn't be so impossible since the best programmers are likely to read that blog post.
I think his point is that scaling up on the web is a solved problem, which is mostly true. If you look at most startup's pitch/plan the biggest risks are not in technology.

Steve Blank would say there's Market Risk (will your customers want it?) but minimal Invention Risk (can you deliver it?). Contrast this with biotech where you're trying to cure diseases. Minimal market risk, tons of invention risk. Read more here: http://steveblank.com/category/vertical-markets/