skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gave me a good laugh !

These same people also tend to bring this mind set with them to wherever it is they end up working.
They seem to have a huge need to "kick others in the balls repeatedly" to feel better than others.

Have you ever noticed how no matter what topic(it could even be about fingernail clippings) is being discussed with these types the conversation almost always degrades into them having to make repeated points to prove that they are right and you are wrong. Apparently this indoctrinated part of their identity is what they call 'education'.
I guess they also need this to justify the 100-200k of debt they have after graduation and the calls they will receive for the rest of their life from their alma mater each year for donations.
Bear in mind the time it would take to load the results page on a dialup connection.
An elitist disses people who he considers inferior to himself. Stating that you are Among the elites doesn't make you an elitist.
http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2008-05-01-000046_work-eth...
But that's why we shouldn't do manned missions first!
The more you have, the more you waste.

If you have a lot of your working hours available, there is a greater chance that you'll waste them on useless crap like freaking out and stubbornly making useless misguided things.

It's better to be a bit lazy and treat your work as scarce resource and think about ways to allocate it better.
It's often hard to predict just how much a niche of a niche of a niche you are in. It's easy to think of one million. But where there's a million, there can be a millionth.
Feel free to downvote, but at least bother to type some reasoning. The number of tier-1 PhD grads that end up in teaching posts at state schools is pretty tremendous.

And as anyone who reads this site knows, good schooling != life/work experience.

Unless Mr. Guo changes his attitude a bit, he's unlikely to find success outside of academia or pure research departments of large companies.
In Memory of Java
That didn't stop you when you were suggesting bands make sure everyone at a live show get a CD, even if that means giving some of them away. http://sivers.org/livecd

You were confident there that telling the audience how much the CD mattered to the band would increase sales and future popularity, to the point that in the comment section you repeatedly waved aside people's worries about the short-term financial risk for the band. Now here's a blog post less than a week later saying 'investing money in putting yourself out there and planning for success? what a maroon.'

I can believe that maybe the guy's ad sucked, and he'd have been far better off booking more gigs and passing the hat around, but c'mon Mr Sivers, you promote optimistic marketing strategies as much as anybody out there.
Kahneman Interview - Questioning a Chastened Priesthood
Wouldn't it be great if we could get to the point where the opinion of others didn't matter so much?
> That's like saying, "Much more important than breathing is having a beating heart."

According to modern resuscitation guidelines this is actually true and meaningful statement.
> Working hard does not guarantee success, but it improves your chances.

Not a bit if you are doing the wrong things, as you may learn from many startup failures.
There's a lot of information that's missing here. There are many steps involved in making a sale, and we are only presented with numbers for the first and last ones.

How many hits did the website get? Did he have free samples of his music? Was there an annoying login process to get through? Did the user have to enter their credit card information into a sketchy-looking form? What was the CD priced at? There are so many places where he could have screwed up and failed to make a conversion. It is entirely possible that 1% of the audience did intend to buy his CD, but he made it not worth their effort. Based on the post, we have no way to tell.

Similar concerns were raised by commenters on previous posts by Sivers, and I believe his response was that he heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend and so he didn't have the details. Sivers: since you're probably reading this, your posts are certainly thought-provoking as they are, but they would be a lot more useful if you included the details.
Sorry, I did search to see if I could find anything from the past week or so, and since it's on the BBC from Friday, I concluded (perhaps wrongly) that this was new.
I feel not that I'm trying to change the subject, but reign it back in.

I assumed people would recognize that what I meant when I said "more successful" in the context of an objective metric like grades. I hoped that pointing out that the author was more concerned about success in a general endeavor than in the specific example he used would clarify the point he tried to make. I was wrong.
You're new here, so please read the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Doctorgreen
http://searchyc.com/four+color+theorem
Note that PyPy supported LLVM as a backend until recently. It didn't get nearly the love that the C backend did, apparently, and was removed because it wasn't being maintained (see http://codespeak.net/pipermail/pypy-dev/2009q2/005143.html). It was apparently 5x slower than the C backend.

I believe the difference is that unladen-swallow generates python code (JIT) using LLVM, but PyPy generated the interpreter that way.

The JIT approach taken by PyPy is quite different than that taken by unladen-swallow or other projects. Once completed, it can supposedly "turn the interpreter of an arbitrary dynamic language into a just-in-time compiler for the same language". However, as far as I can tell, the only working "backend" for the JIT is x86. Why they don't leverage LLVM, I'm not sure, but it's likely that they have good reasons.

PyPy is a very cool idea in that it provides RPython (a non-dynamic subset of Python) as a DSL for creating dynamic languages. In theory, one could write clean, beautiful, intention-revealing code that specifies a language, while the JIT generator handles all the hard parts of making it fast. Unladen swallow has the much narrower goal of leveraging LLVM to make Python bytecode run faster.

Whether PyPy is too ambitious is hard to tell, but it's certainly way behind schedule from what they had hoped when the project began. It's certainly a really cool project that's worth keeping an eye on.
the problem is that the media only reports on successes, so people have much higher expectations built up in their heads.

You read techcrunch, and you'd think that all you need is to throw out there a crappy iPhone app, and you'll make 2 million overnight.

The dirty little secret, is that success is rare as hell. And people tend to be very selective in what they remember. For every successful startup, there are dozens of stories of ones that failed. But even those failures have managed to achieve quite a lot, simply by being featured, for every one of those, there are THOUSANDS of startups that you haven't even heard about.
The dollar is dead - long live the renminbi
I think you're right, actually - I also couldnt find anything using YC Search. I think the discussion was on the post reg. 37signal's satirical blog post, but that submission/ discussion was flagged.

People seem to be voting it up though, which is weird.
> The dirty little secret, is that success is rare as hell.

That's why I have serious respect for anybody that makes it work more than once, those are the real entrepreneurs. For the rest it really is mostly luck.

I've scored pretty good with my first 'real venture' and I can testify to how unbelievably hard it is to do it again. So far no success :) But that won't stop me from trying very hard.

One thing definitely has changed in the last 10 years, back in '95-'99 most things you put out on the web were operating in an almost competition free arena, some of the stuff we got away with back then we certainly wouldn't be able to do today. Users expectations are a lot higher than they used to be and there are a lot of parties on the lookout for good ideas so if you 'launch early' with an incomplete product you just might give someone the last bit of the puzzle they were still missing.

It's a tricky situation and there are no easy solutions to any of this.
Berners-Lee's design for URLs, etc. is spectacularly elegant and carefully thought through. It's not a good example to illustrate the alleged superiority of "duct-tape programming".

There are different kinds of design, useful in different situations, harmful in other situations. Whipping out small web sites, patching bugs in messy business apps, etc., don't call for great elegance. Seeking elegance would only get in the way. Duct tape wins. On the other hand, remember Gopher? Gopher was a simple, functional predecessor of the web, designed without much insight. The WWW needed the kind of simplicity that you can't get from duct tape.
Interesting semantics/pragmatics question. Journalists are often remarkably loose and imprecise in their use of language. In this case, however, they say

"... the firm still has no way of making money."

This is, in fact, true. Currently the firm has (note - present tense) no way of making money. (of course, raising money from investors is a way of making money, but that's clearly not what they mean!)

You're right that there might emerge a way of making money, but the report is right when it says that they currently have no way of doing so.

So it's true that

is not currently making money != no way of making money

but they never asserted that.
when i was a kid i used to go to sleep with the radio on. in the country town i was from all we had at the time was an AM station that played classics.

as a teenager i found that i knew the words to _heaps_ of classic tracks. i'm not sure if its because of the conscious or the unconscious (ie sleeping) (or a combination of both) listening i did, but found it weird.

remembering this (in my 30's now), i thought it would be and interesting experiment to try it again, pretty much trying to pick stuff up by osmosis.

I have some learn french audio books and put them on in my ears while performing various tasks. the idea is that i dont concentrate on the book per se, but the other task at hand.

for me in my 30's now, there wasnt the expected "kung fu, i know kung fu" moment, so i thought, as i dont use french in my normal day to day activities it didnt really work so well.

later on (with my french speaking GF) we would have a chat and i would ask things like "is this a french word" etc etc... i'm not sure these words were from previous conversations, or whatever, so from a scientific POV, its pretty much a negative... in my unscientific opinion however, i think that i have absorbed a bit of french from the osmosis type of learning.

i guess it depends on your goals and what you want to achieve.

if you want to pick up hard facts quickly, then learning by osmosis, at least in my experience, is not a very efficient way of doing it.

if you just want to pick things up "along the way" the learning my osmosis may work for you, however keep in mind you may not have the "kung fu, i know kung fu" moments.

as always YMMV :-)
More information on this please? That's exactly what I'm planning to do.
You calculate it to make sure it's not a small number. Anything above "small" doesn't matter, but you want to make sure you don't work a year to sell a $19.99 app to a maximum of 500 companies.

Happened to me once... after half a year of development we realized the total grand market for the app, in the form we built it, was 5 (five) companies. Wasn't as stupid as you't think, we found over 100 companies listed when we first did research. Only when we started actually selling we realized how many were big enough, still in business and close enough to actually make use of what we offered. We got 60% of the market, btw.
One of the upvoters here, I've been hellishly busy in the last couple of days with something else so I neglected the HN stream for a bit, it was news to me, hence the upvote.
Depends. There are a couple of ways the sentence could be interpreted. One, of course, is the way that you are looking at it - that the statement "has no way of making money" is equivalent to the statement "could not possibly make money even if $name rose from the grave and demanded it." The second way to look at it is as a simple, present-tense statement: That Twitter, at present, doesn't have much by way of a revenue stream. I suspect the article is using the second one.
If anybody it ought to be Vannevar Bush or Doug Engelbart, not Ted Nelson.

But Ted Nelson had a bunch of stuff figured out that the web is still struggling with today (such as proper attribution and an automated royalty system based on fractional contribution and derivation).
Is this really a realistic age group to be questioning for employment rates?
Wouldn't most 16-18 year olds have been employed part-time or summers. The article says it excludes students, but what about students who work? Have more of this age group remained students due to the lack of available work, resulting in the total number of people counted in this age group to shrink?
I think you're wrong. In my experience, even in one-on-one tuition there are huge variances in the effectiveness of different teaching techniques. A variant of this particular one worked really well for me (in another context) whereas several previous tutors had failed to make any significant impact.

Anecdote != data, but I think you're dismissing the article unfairly, and would like to see any evidence or arguments you have for your assertions.
The author sounds like a real jackass. Who else would be so concerned with the alma mater, "intelligence", or "technical skill" of other people that they feel the need to write an article about it.
> That's why I have serious respect for anybody that makes it work more than once, those are the real entrepreneurs. For the rest it really is mostly luck.

See the recent article on survivor bias:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768297
I agree. Search is how Google builds its product, which is advertising. It's their competitive advantage. Because they have the best audience (targeted, biggest, etc.), they can use that to sell their advertising. By this measure, their product is superior to others, since they have put a lot of time into developing and refining their 'product' of advertising impressions, via the input of search traffic.

The company has an advantage, and it's using it to help sell something. Of course if they didn't have adwords, I'm sure Google could have found other ways to make money from their search.
"Software companies that want to change the world have to be free, at least initially."

Why? I can think of plenty of software companies that changed the world with a paid product (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
Anyone with experience with both this and Oracle Coherence (formerly Tangosol Coherence)? I'd dearly love for this to be a reasonable alternative to Coherence, which I love but which is fabulously expensive.
Inside the Van Allen belts, removes most of the radiation problem (GP -- "antiradiation shells").

Also, the space station get resupply from Earth. Doesn't solve GP's "autonomous and sustainable life-support".

The space station isn't a complete waste, but it just doesn't tackle those problems. (Disclaimer -- I'm very much not a rocket engineer.)
Sure, some of the 'survivors', especially the serial entrepreneurs will be there only because of a series of instances of having luck. But not all of them.

Some people really have an uncanny way of perceiving which business opportunities are good ones and which to stay away from.

I think a big part of the 'mystique' that hangs around successful people directly relates to that.

People hope that by adopting strategies or even mannerisms that worked before that they will somehow be able to 'copy success'.

This is analogous to an alien analyzing planet earth coming to the conclusion that people get rich here by sending their clothes to the dry cleaners, hiring maids and driving fancy cars.

Having a realistic goal for your business and a good plan on how to make money are not the way to 'score big', they're a way to create a business and slowly grow it to a success, this may take a decade or more, with added luck you can maybe do it faster.

But the bigger portion of the 'fast company' crowd isn't looking to building a business, they're looking at the 'exit' before they've gone through the door at the entrance.

This is - in my belief - also the reason why the scoring chances of people with high profile advisors are not significantly better than those without, and it is possibly why successful entrepreneurs would rather become investors than to prove themselves by starting another company and build it from the ground up.

Much easier to improve your chances by spreading the money that you would put into a single corporation (all your eggs in one basket) into many smaller ones and hope you pick up a winner.
Review of a Linux laptop: Thinkpad T400. Do not buy it.
> To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't need to exist for these things to exist.

This is an extremely bad example. Ogg Vorbis came years after rival standards (such as mp3). It is not state of the art at all.

The development of the basis of Theora (VP3) was done by a company (On2) that protected it with patents. VP3 was a very old decoder that On2 released (all of their current state of the art decoders are protected by patents).

There are actually patents on Theora but On2 granted a licence for its use (from WP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora):

> On2 also made an irrevocable, royalty-free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives

> To answer the second question, why would companies deserve patents?

The same reason as copyright – to protect innovation.
Do you want to relocate to NYC and work on exciting product at the already profitable startup? We offer great salary, meaningful equity and I guarantee you the product will get you excited. See my profile.
This article reeks of fuzzy numbers to me. I can't find the exact data set needed to determine this rate, but the BLS unemployment tables are here: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm
This resonates with my recent experience. I got bored of the 9 to 5. My job was alright, sometimes fun even. But last Wednesday I woke up and just couldn't do it. So I quit and started working on my own project.

When it's repeated a thousand times, it starts sounding like a cliche, but it is true - life is short. Do something which fulfills you.

So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.

- http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
If the system in question permits it (unix accounts do, at least) including spaces in passwords--making it technically a pass phrase--is another nice trick.
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When everybody respects you,
Without need for you to compare or compete,
You will be content to be simply yourself.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky (that's right - ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY)
"... it helps when you have other people like Rosalind Franklin working through the nights doing X-ray crystallography and taking the "pictures" that shed the real light on the structure of DNA. ..."

The 50th anniversary of the finding of the DNA structure meant a lot of new documentary information on the background to the race to find the structure of DNA. Firstly it shows the high degree of competitive rivalry between the players (Chargaff, Franklin, Pauling, Watson/Crick and Wilkins) to find the structure of DNA.

The key to finding the DNA structure was not just a fact of experimenting but assembling the pieces of the puzzle to create a workable theory. Each player had different pieces required in the puzzle

* Wilkins: who's earliest X-ray diffractions meant the dimensions could be calculated & who supplied Franklin with DNA samples.

* Franklin & Gosling: the X-ray diffraction pattern clearly showing the structure.

* Linus Pauling: Who's triple stranded DNA idea which turned out to be wrong but tipped off Watson & Cricks idea of a double helix.

* Watson: who knew the base pairing (AT & CG) fit all the dimensions

* Chargaff: who deduced the DNA ratios of A, T, G, C are equal

Then there was the technique. There is no doubt Franklin was the more analytic and systematic scientist compared to Watson and Crick who bumbled around like many of the others in the field building models. But Franklin had two things going against her. Firstly she working in a male dominated field. But more importantly she missed out on the benefit of teamwork. A lot this appears to stem from the personalities of Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. They simply didn't gel as a team as well as Watson & Crick. [0]

So the winners in this case could have been any of these players but it was Watson & Crick who happened to be at the right place and time understanding the smaller picture but more importantly having the imagination and freedom to think about how the pieces fit. Others supplied the information, they found the right theory to tie the information into a coherent idea. Watson and Crick didn't get the Nobel prize for just doing the basic science of discovering the structure of DNA. The pieces of the DNA puzzle lay in front of them. They get the recognition because they re-organised what information they had around them, come up with a theory that matched the data and wrote it up.

[0] Cold Spring Harbor Lab, DNAi, "Finding the Structure, Players", http://www.dnai.org/a/index.html
I think the hate is there because the stated YC/pg ethos is "work really hard so you can compress your working career into 4 years then don't worry about it".
G20 Protesters Blasted By "Sound Cannon"
What I find truly misleading is that he labels "name-brand universities" as a form of adult elitism. He then goes on to explain that it is actually those that did not attend the best schools that are outwardly elite. I have heard stories of name-brand universities' alumni not even giving those outside of the best schools the time of day.

Perhaps there is a cockiness to those that strive to prove themselves beyond grades and diplomas. Sure. However, I'd heavily argue that this is not elitism. Elitism requires grouping with those of similar backgrounds (e.g. Harvard, Yale, MIT, whatever). You cannot be an elitist unless you claim alumni from only your school - or brand of schools - are better than others. The author does mention that he went to a FEW prestigious schools and so doesn't follow his own advice on the matter.

(Elitism can also be displayed by a position that only wealthy are better [1]. This unfortunately may plague these so-called name brand schools.)

So, go be cocky and stop name dropping your prestigious university (or giving said university/universities more weight). Then you'll stop being an elitist, but you might just improve your former school's brand...

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitism