skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anybody seen exactly how "taking control of your brand" works? It would be interesting to know how exactly replying on the left sidebar, or whatever, works and how it impacts the original tweet/forum/etc. I see a lot of people are commenting here about how this is blackjacking because the company would filter out the bad information about them and let only nice stuff show. So far I don't see evidence of that or even how that would work so if somebody knows please share.

The way I see it this brand site would be more interesting for the marketing/public relations department of a company that wants to see every discussion about them in one place and jump to the actual content where they want to reply, and not as interesting a page for other people outside the company.
I'm not a pro Lisper, but I think reasons offered for this include:

* The AI winter (with Lisp, at the time, being seen as "the AI language")

* The heavy-cost and closed nature of the toolchain, and lack of standardization between toolchains, when industry was searching for a language to rally behind several decades ago

* The continued lack of standardization on all the "included batteries" when the open source movement was looking for languages to adopt for scripting a decade ago

* The deep semantic rabbit-hole a Lisp codebase can turn into when any macro-like functionality is used, meaning that a programmer has to basically learn every project as its own language (that is, DSL) before they can get to work—further meaning that projects grow a sense of individual stewardship/artistic direction, and become harder to work on by hiring committees and one-off contractors

* The continued outside impression of Lisps as slow, pure-functional and academic (even though most today are none of those)

* The unwillingness for most Lisps to embrace the Unix philosophy (meaning that it's easier to write a web browser in e-lisp than to loosely couple to one already written in some other language. Clojure is basically the only Lisp that escapes this, cleanly interoperating with the APIs of other languages... on the JVM, which itself throws Unix design principles out the window.)

I'm sure there are more well-founded answers, but all of those came to mind on my road to accepting Lisp.
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It Took A Year, But Fitness Gadget Fitbit Will Finally Launch
How Health Care Affects Filing Bankruptcy
Over the last 30 yers medical costs, in the USA, increased significantly faster than other necessities. Today, the Consumer Price Index of medical care is 75% higher than the second fastest growing item.
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Good tip... now if only there was a trick for portrait mode.
Which States Have the Best Startup Environments?
Look, apologies for their behavior aren't enough.

I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.

This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's their decision and their company, but I'm not going to accept apologies for them lightly.

They want to change their image, then they should play nicer with their competition and with us. I don't know how they could do that, but off the top of my head ... why not open-source Silverlight to make it a true standard? But they won't do that since they need control. And round and round we go.
The efficacy drops with junction temperature.
Incandescent lamps are at 15 lumen/watt and CFL reach 40 to 50 lumen/watt. LED still has a long way to go and system efficacy are now reached up to 60lumen/watt. Key players like Nichia have parts in the lab running close to 200lm/Watt.
There are single LED packages on the market like from www.luminus.com generating 6000lumen in one part. That is about 8 times of a 60W incandescent light bulb.

Problem is more the LED itself still has a 10cent/lumen cost. Many LED manufacturer are bringing more and more fabs online and with volume the prices keeps dropping. So far the Haitz law is still good for the LED world.
In the next 4 years the LED illumination market in the US will go from couple million dollar to $5B per year and the 60W pulp replacement is expected to be around $16 retail price. Calculating the energy and invest cost a LED replacement in 4 to 5 years you will have an ROI of less than a year for LED light product.
One of Sridhar's articles about the placebo effect of college education

http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2005/11/03/college-educati...
My tech talk on Tornado (video and slides)
There's a huge difference between respecting credentials and filtering based on them. The former is not binary. I am simply arguing that an IIT degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a successful entrepreneur.
What is very interesting in this is that the case was won despite the GPL license being available in English only in distributions that I'm aware of.

In France this could have been a serious hurdle to overcome, but instead it seems as though that never even entered the picture.
Not comparable to YC.

Having said that, I think the initiative is good, though its not mature yet. They are evolving over time, they have come from saying something like "we will put in a big place and give you a bed, table, pc and Internet connection so that you can work whenever you wake up" [treating as kids or just coders, 2008] to saying something like "we will give 5L and open an account for the company" [treated as entrepreneurs, 2009]. Still, a long way to go.

The 2008 archives with some photos http://www.ciieindia.org/blog/category/iaccelerator/ .
I do agree that they have a bad choice of photos on the blog, it does effect PR.

Moreover they will need someone like PG to make it like YC, that ain't happenin' that easy. :-)

Still, I wish them luck! We do need "worthy" YC clones in many countries.
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Google want your help deciding where to invest 10 Million Dollars.
> the GPL is just a conditional disclaimer of copyright -- it doesn't even pretend to be a contract.

Whatever else the GPL does, it absolutely does not disclaim copyright. It maintains it, but gives you a license, if you follow a certain set of conditions.
I'm using it on Slack's KDE4 and it opens Dolphin by default. Once I had it to open the folder with Firefox, dunno how though, probably a bug.
On the other hand, 25,000 hours at 2 hours a day gives the bulb a lifetime of almost 35 years. I think you could really sell people on the "just set it and forget it" model.
37Signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion After Bold VC Investment
Did you mean:
you want to start a top-tier incubator program in India ?
or
get into one for incubating your startup?
Heh, like they have memos or anything more than a verbal communication and private notes in that company. I could have referenced commit hashes, but decided that legally it'd be more prudent not to.

I did consider the succinct route but decided against it. Yes, I understand that makes it less likely that management will read it all or that it would come off whiny, but I think it shows more involvement and seriousness.

The executives already know everything is weeks behind schedule. I wanted to give them an idea why.
> The greater the involvement, the more you reduce corruption and even out influence.

I think you have a naive view of how the United States is run. The majority of the people in this country simply do not have the time/money/inclination to participate meaningfully in the political process beyond (possibly) going to the ballot box. Furthermore, most policy decisions are actually made by unelected career bureaucrats. What ends up happening is that vocal minorities who DO feel strongly about a particular topic end up having disproportionate influence. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture for an example, although the phenomenon is more general than that.

From the article:

"...regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether. When this imbalance of focused resources devoted to a particular policy outcome is successful at 'capturing' influence with the staff or commission members of a regulatory agency so that the preferred policy outcomes of the special interest are implemented, then regulatory capture has occurred."

That's democracy in a nutshell - except it applies to governments, not just regulatory agencies.
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Yeah, that may or may not be true. The only reason we have those people in IT is because the bosses don't know better. Everyone is really scared of the bosses; they both have tons and tons of money, and rumors circulate about the ruthlessness of at least the primary administrator. I don't know if anyone has ever given them a plain overview of the situation, so I decided to see where it would go since I had nothing left to lose.

I hope something good comes out of it, though I realize that the probability of such is quite low.
Are all pines edible or only the Eastern White Pine discussed in this article? How about other trees?
It doesn't bother me that it isn't open source per se, but what does bother me (and the reason I don't and wouldn't use it) is that I have no way of independently verifying that their security measures are adequate. I would never trust sensitive data to a third party provider unless at a minimum they had undergone a security audit by an independent third party. As far as I can tell, dropbox hasn't.
37signals Valued at $100 Billion After VC Investment
Yeah, I agree generally, but the letter contained no direct personal attacks and I hope that it can generally be understood as professional criticism, not an indictment of personality or a refusal to interact with the involved players later down the road. Of course, that's the most likely interpretation, regardless of the situation.

The company had already hired me as a contractor; I quit, they hired me back for a short contract, and this letter was written and sent after they terminated my services forty-some hours early this afternoon.

You'd think the six months I worked there previously would have been sufficient time to decide whether my work met their standards or not, but I guess it wasn't.

I wanted to try this largely because I don't know what kind of reaction I will get. The most likely is the cold shoulder, but the executives are really frustrated with IT right now, and I was hoping this letter would give some insight into the reasons why, and they just might be frustrated enough to change something. The letter isn't really angry, it doesn't go off on personal inadequacies or annoyances, just professional misconduct. We'll see if anything comes of it.
The interesting thing about this case is that the infringer was sued by a company that used their software, not by the copyright holder.

I'm not sure I'm happy about that, given the way a few rabid free software fanatics have acted in the past. In particular, I remember the QuakeWorld GPL fiasco, where zealots in the community took it upon themselves to harass the leader of an open source project, rather than giving a chance for a much more level-headed John Carmack to sort things out.

See: http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200...
This isn't useful... The first graph has Iowa above Texas. The founders of the company make a much bigger difference than the state of founding.
Netflix data shows shifting demand down the Long Tail
Land Rover LRX Concept SUV Starting Production.
> They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.

This is very true and I've always felt it is a strong condemnation of what goes on inside Microsoft. I neglected to mention this sorry bit of history in my posts above mostly because it's a bit old news. Today, IE is a fully-staffed, heavily armed, etc.

I don't think I apologized for Microsoft. There is no excuse for having previously shut down IE, or for having such poor execution now that the IE team is back. There are, however, explanations... ones which hopefully help to dispel the myth that Microsoft is, today, intentionally holding the browser back. The truth is much more mundane.
The whole concept is awful, but somewhere, someone will host a party in exactly this vein, and that scares me.
Convention, uniqueness, and truth
Interesting... I have an almost morbid fascination with how this will pan out. I use and love a Mac, and I don't plan on switching to a different machine, but I'm curious as to how Cupertino will respond.

I'm betting this doesn't get much traction, and that Apple with individually prevent and manage infections through Software Update. I also doubt that the Macintosh market is big enough and easily infected enough to be significantly targeted by malware.

We'll see.
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I was hoping this wouldn't burn them, but I realize that's the most likely outcome. It is sad indeed, but I think that these things need to be said.
I'm not a customer yet but I agree on it being indispensable. It'll be an easy decision to pay once I run out of disk space. There aren't many products which I actively promote to my friends, but dropbox is one of them (the extra space for referrals helps too).
[erlang-questions] Erlang vs. Haskell
I don't think it's intended to be campy or controversial. I just think they're using multi-level marketing/infomercial techniques, which very likely work for average people (otherwise they wouldn't be so frequently used).
They either have a heart attack or walk off a cliff. This is rare, but there are a lot of these spiders. In areas where they live, it's common to see them sitting in giant webs above streets and hiking trails. Waiting.
I suspect a lot of this is due to California's employee-friendly laws that prevent non-compete agreements and prevent "we own every thought you have" intellectual property assignments.

As a libertarian I naturally lean towards freedom of contract, but some things are properly inalienable.

Are these common in other states?
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Thanks for this post, I like it a lot and generally agree with it.

But, it wasn't possible in my circumstance. I did try to talk to the super-high-level bosses (the bosses this letter was addressed to) once, and my immediate superior (Rocky in the letter) requested a meeting for me and the boss said "Absolutely not", and Rocky warned that I would be terminated by super-huge-boss if I pressed the issue further. This is the way they governed -- they had no care for what the peons thought and strongly believed in chain-of-command. Huge boss called us in one day to basically demand that we never address him and always go through Rocky.

As such, I was scared to talk to the major bosses the whole time. They know what Rocky is like; they deal with him every day, too. I just don't know that they understand that overall impact it has on the quality of their product.

I let Rocky know the issues as they materialized, of course, but as mentioned in the letter, as my favor with him waned my influence was eventually diminished to nothingness.

The bosses just like to get in and out -- they run it as a business should be run, that is, with some amount of autonomy, but they also do a really, really bad job of keeping personnel informed, controlled, and happy. Everyone there, even the VPs with whom they interact daily, is scared of them, and this leads to bad business decisions because the subordinates do what they can to make things appear better than they are out of fear of retribution, not to mention all of the negative effects of bad morale.

I did ultimately leave on principle and refusal to submit to disrespect and scare tactics, unlike everyone still there, and everyone who's been there for years.

I'm starting my own thing now, and it's getting some traction and clients, and that makes me immensely happy. I'm hoping that it can stick so that I can be free of all of these petty concerns, and if I get a job that turns south, I can just blow it according to my will and dictates without any concern about how I'm going to look after my pregnant wife's physical needs.

Independence is my real goal in the money-and-career part of life. It'd be great to be super rich and able to start programs and groups and schools and companies to promote peace, love, kindness, intelligence, reason, and so on, but that is all just a perk on top of the ability to not be held hostage by my employer. I must amass enough money that I can be a free person, and can choose who I work for, and not be forced to torture myself for months on end as described in this letter.

If anyone would like to help me meet this end, my consulting firm is happy to hook you up with programming services, etc. cookiecaper@gmail.com . : )
Microsoft has no sense of identity as a company when it comes to marketing. Every campaign is some new weird angle or a copy of another companies tactics. If they are trying to make it lame & campy on purpose its a questionable move. How often does that work? Simple social factors preclude most people from strongly identifying with something that is marketed as being lame. The only time it works is if the product/service your selling actually is lame and/or boring and it's impossible to change that perception. For example, insurance. It's puzzling because Windows 7 is one of the few Microsoft products that actually is somewhat fresh and not just a minor version bump.
How to lie with statistics
This is a perfect ad for Windows users. If you took away the Sony laptop and had them talking about something else, and then had me guess the type of OS they used ...

they've all got windows written all over them.

Oh a and did I mention, my non-tech savvy parents would probably like this advert ?
Yeah, then why is it that you're so completely wrong when it comes to this case?
It's per-capita funding, so why would state size matter? There's actually been considerable startup activity in Des Moines and Iowa City, so I'm not surprised to see Iowa passing Texas on a per-capita basis.
I would like to ask, if someone can compare DropBox with Live Mesh. I tried DropBox in the past, but at that time it could not get over our company firewall.

I use now Mesh with satisfaction, and just comparing the features, in Mesh I have 5GB web storage (while can sync also over 5GB limit, in which case it will just not be stored on the cloud), and it also has remote desktop. Now the question is if there is some reason for me to re-evalute Dropbox again.
Quite true, but terrible analogy. You want to make a point about the bank, great, but the bank's teller whom you have a crush on is a poor analogy for the bank's social web engagement.

It is hard to balance relationship building with marketing (just as it is hard to draw the line between writing great code and shipping product). That's why some of us get paid to do it.
I voted for banking.

One of the things that keeps poor people poor is transaction fees, high interest rates on loans and, most importantly, difficulty understanding and accessing more advanced financial tools and tax rebates.

I voted for this one over other more noble causes, because this is one area where Google has the capabilities needed to make a difference.
Every time i see some code examples of tornado i am getting even less exited about it.
Nothing new there, nothing neat, it just doesn't look as modular and flexible and object oriented as other frameworks.
Am i the only one?
Well, if you take this as direct marketing, no. But this is a 6-7 minute video, not really an ad. OK, so call the launch party a cheesy idea (although I'm kinda kicking myself for not pretending to host one and getting a free copy :) ), but if people are going to hold one this is a non-bossy way to give some hints on how.

They could have sent out a pdf with a bunch of how to tips but that would have been too corporate. Or they could have just done a page with a bunch of tips, but that might not be very engaging for people who wanted to try the idea. This strikes an OK balance. It reminds me of something like a tupperware party (MLM for plastic kitchen appliances)...maybe a bizarre way to market the product, but also a very low-risk one that follows the most basic and down-to-earth marketing principles - friend's recommendations are the most trustworthy, eye candy only impresses those who have already converted, etc.

Same way the cute little girl commercial is aggravating if you wanted muscular tech information, but makes it really easy to envision a family computer than runs Windows. The underlying idea here is that MS wants to be part of people's lives, rather than inviting people to build their lives around their product. It's a subtle difference, but a powerful one.

Open bet: MSFT is just under $26 today. I say it'll be $35 by Dec 31.
Sort-of, although states with similar laws tend to be more ambiguous, which results in messy legal battles where the employees are often outgunned by corporate lawyers. California's is fairly clear and has been tested in court on several occasions.
It occurred to me recently that 1959 is the 50th anniversary.. - did you/he mean 2009 is the 50th anniversary? The talk presumably was in 1959.
Looks scary, but are trending search terms still reliable when those terms are all over the news?
The title is "Which States Have the Best Startup Environments." The metrics used in the article are not the best.
It's always a thrill to listen to Steve Ballmer talk about the company roadmap and it's hard to imagine that anyone could do a better job in that role. The company faces the law of large numbers and an uphill battle against perception (at least on the consumer client side) but the innovation and execution strategy for incumbent slots and catch-up slots is dialed in (as it seems to always have been).
HN, I'm out to fix urban loneliness, help me.
Three weeks ago I posted here that I'd be resigning soon and asked for suggestions what to do: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=798206 . You gave me some great advice - thanks! A week ago a hair-on-fire idea occurred to me. By yesterday I set up a teaser site and announced it on my little blog. Today I'm here to share the idea and ask for your advice again.

The idea is to fix urban loneliness, picking random people by their self-descriptions and making them party together. The site is http://randomparty.ru . It's in Russian and aimed at Moscow specifically; I'd be actually very glad if other startups stole this idea and used it in other locales. Here's a translation of the homepage text for your convenience:

"Life doesn't have enough variety, as my friend Timer says. Well, we'll make you meet new people. Launching in Moscow on December 1st, sign up in advance. <registration form>"

It has three signups so far :-) Now the battle will start in earnest: I need to reach the demographic of young, pleasant, urban-lonely people in my city. The next few weeks will probably involve no programming, only talking to folks, writing well-crafted text, printing flyers/stickers and distributing them in well-chosen places. Promotion isn't magic - it works by cause and effect, like everything else in life. Still, I wish there were some kind of shortcuts to make my nights and weekends easier (I haven't left my current job yet). Do any ideas spring to your mind?