skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The American Booksellers Association's obvious (if unstated) concern is that pure-play bookstores like Borders and B&N will be driven out of business since they don't have many other goods to subsidize losses with. If the price war spills over from the Web to brick and mortar stores, I would be concerned about the diversity of books available in real bookstores compared to Target and Wal-Mart. In other markets, publishers have all but stopped producing products that Wal-Mart won't carry since it is assumed that such products won't make money; it might be a shame if the same thing happened in books.
Weirdly I was just reading about an Australian version of this concept:

http://www.startupschool.com.au/
I've read many books about hypnosis. Here's a way to describe it. When I shake your hand your mind goes into "shake your hand" mode. "Shake your hand" mode happens at a subset of the set of conscious awareness - it exists from the start of handshake to the end of the handshake. There are exploits a super-conscious person can do to you during those points.
Poll: Useful or Garbage  | WebFail
So I've been collecting screenshots of failure pages from some of the big internet properties. I've added positive failure quotes. We all fail, so get back up and do it better, do it again. http://webfail.tumblr.com
VCs Look to Royalty-Based Financing to Fund Startups
Ups, sorry. Huhm, well, maybe they "disagree"? I don't know. My guess is they don't get the conncetion between Zeldman's blogpost and your comment here. You posted something unrelated, they think. Or maybe you are just an asshole who comes over here mentioning a writer and his philosophy, go away with that book-crap.
Mean.
It only takes one cheater for the collusive agreement to collapse.
Ask HN: Where can I get good powerpoint/keynote templates?
Say you are pitching your startup to anyone (investors, partners, Y Combinator audience, etc.) where is the first place you go to get nice templates for your presentation. Yes, I know you should customize it - and if you have access to a graphics person that would be awesome, but what if you don't? - but where do you start?

I am talking about Wufoo & 37 Signals quality presentations - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wufoo/2985775820/ & http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-money-online respectively.

Also, what are some tips for other sites where you get good photos/font ideas/any other ideas that go into making a presentation good...not bland and lame.

Also, it seems that everybody sticks to Guy Kawasaki's rule of 10/20/30 - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

Feel free to add as many tips and links as you would like, that can help everyone make better presentations.

Oh and by the way, I know that presentation zen is a good resource - http://www.presentationzen.com/ - but they don't typically have templates and other downloadable stuff (or that I can find anyway...if you have contrary info please provide links).

Thanks :)
Yes, many people tell you this, including VCs. That's why I wrote the post. The problem is that much advice you get as a startup is bad. If someone's done it before listen closely and make up your own mind whether they have the right answers. If someone has only sat on the sidelines be more circumspect.

The unfortunately reality of life is that most advice is bad and it takes people who swim against conventional wisdom to do great things.
That's fine with me, if it's a small fee and they drop the ads. It would seem like a bit of a waste to pay for cable and Hulu, though.
It's too expensive to hunt down everybody involved. The world isn't able to go after millions of people at once. The more people use it, the harder it is to track.
Serving pages is not the bottleneck at the moment. The biggest bottlenecks are (a) garbage collection, once lazy loading has loaded 800k items into memory, and (b) that some requests, notably voting, are very expensive. I just have to rewrite some code.
Listen, you have a point. But for starters I think it would be hard for me to say that in a post without pissing off too many more people.

But the reality is this - for young people it's not always about the upside. I tell people, "you need to decide whether you want to learn or you want to earn." If it's the former go work as a 0.1-0.25% owner in a startup. You won't make retirement money.

If you want to "earn" you need to be there at the start or near to it.
You're totally right. But for young people it's not just about the pay off on the first company. The can learn at the first company or two and earn on the third or fourth.

But the truth is that unless you hit the lottery ticket (e.g. Google) you only really make big money at startups by founding them or being a senior exec.
Wait. Youtube's struggling? I thought that report was founded on an oversimplified bandwidth-cost model.
Reads like a whos who of... fill in the blank.
The people who give this advice have never built a successful startup IMHO. It's bad advice. Many people give it. Conventional wisdom seldom pays.
The New Microsoft Store launches with Windows 7
That would not work, because the Apple experience is a whole sum greater than it's parts. There is now way of having a "light" version of that on a Crapdell machin running under XP or so.

Also, your basic idea is already executes: iTunes for Windows.
The point of my article is not to hire the "perfect" person - to the contrary. People will advise you to hire the "perfect" person based on what they did in the past. The point of my article was to say hire the person who hasn't done this level before but is high potential. In every group hiring discussion I've ever been in people argue for the most senior person. I always argue against it.
I'd say that makes them geeks or wonks, but I think nerd has a "socially inept" connotation.
I don't mind using code folding when I'm doing this. Trying to fold the code down that I don't care about, this way there isn't as much to read and get lost in.
Hi, OP here. Thanks for all the replies. Unfortunately I don't have anything to show at this stage. I always keep rewriting this thing in different languages, then leave it to do some other stuff.

It would seem that the most efficient thing to do would be to develop a data entry + reporting solution for some vertical first, while keeping the back-end flexible enough that other verticals can be added later. It's just a matter of finding the right vertical (ha ha).

The generic DB idea has the virtue that to implement it one doesn't need to get out of the house, so to speak -- to go look for a specific problem in the real world and develop a real solution.

Thanks again, and if you can think of any vertical in need of an almost-generic DB, please let me know.
Elephant has various backends, a Redis backend looks inevitable, imo ;-)
Maybe it's because they're not in the same branch.
Splitting evenly might not be an option at the time being (the business founder is opting for contractor rather than a cofounder).
Translation Tips from English to Symbolic Logic
According to RampRate, YouTube is losing $174 Million. Not as bad as losing $470 Million as originally reported by Credit Suisse but still a loss.

Ref: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-fa...
Whoops, meant to upvote but hit down instead. The human web app analogy is hilarious.
I just hope this thing takes off and with it, so does IE8 adoption.
I use TED (torrent episode downloader). It has a large list of tv shows and when they come on, and starts searching torrent sites for the shows you select right after they air.

Fwiw, I used to pay 15/month each for the Daily Show and Colbert on iTunes. But they posted the shows the next day, usually very late in the day, so by the time you watched it was 48 hour stale. With TED, they're automatically downloaded often before they actually air on the west coast.
It's a great mix of rising stars and longtime veterans in a wide range of fields.
Ok, so the "unveiling" is on the 28th. Fuckers! I can't get the droid till the 9th.
And have you ever read back your own program after a few months of doing something completely different?

'accidental complexity' = 'essential complexity' / 'your intelligence'
You are forgetting accidental circumstances, like your current involvement with this particular code and the particular problems it solves. Code should read like a mathematical proof, exactly because it allows you to follow the steps in between.
World War one - simple version
Also, using a debugger (if it can be used) can be really helpful
Spend your time doing something productive.
As a life-long resident of California, I should like to say that if this is where the rest of the country is headed, then the Republic is doomed. Adopting the policies of California will bankrupt any other state in the country as it has this one. If this be the future, then we as a nation are headed straight off a cliff.
It always cracks me up when I read a research paper with a new definite answer on human sexuality and find they used college kids as test subjects :-D
The secret to LinkedIn's success ?
With 50 million members, including Richard Branson and Alan Sugar, LinkedIn's success story quietly rivals that of Facebook.
I wonder: do these people follow Hacker News?
I would have thought the idea that CDO sellers keeping the most vulnerable tranch protecting against cherry picking was a fairly obvious non-starter anyway. (The following will be massively oversimplified for easier explanation, but I think it still applies in the far more complicated real life equivalent)

If I make 10 CDOs and I think 5% of the underlying assets are bad, if I share them out equally the top tranch takes all the damage for each CDO - if the top tranch is 5% then I make nothing basically. If I make one CDO with 50% bad assets, and 9 with 100% good assets, then some of those losses go to other people deeper into the bad CDO tranch, suddenly 90% of my assets pay off instead of 0%.
Its actually adobe rtmpe streams. These are encrypted so you have to find a way to pull the keys from the plugin's memory as well. No one's got it just yet.
NewsCorp leveraged their equity in MySpace to force them to increase revenue at the cost of quality. Now it seems they are following the same pattern with Hulu.

However, I think with Hulu they stand a better chance in the face of competition for two reasons. First the revenue model for streaming content is well established. Secondly, copyright law provides too high a barrier of entry into the space for competitors.
Then it would be someone else's cousin's friend that would be horribly injured. With nothing but the press of a nintendo button. I'm not sure that makes it better.

Hold the evil robots please. Do not want.
Isn't the lack of significant revenue one of the reasons why networks hold back from posting more than a handful of episodes from popular shows?

My thought was that if the networks saw there was money to be made, it would encourage them to make more content available.
Monopoly World Championship
Same name but not the same concept.
Interesting, they claim they own a bunch of patents related to 802.11, does that mean they can sue every laptop manufacturer, and any other device that is wi-fi enabled next?
There are clearly downsides to dynamic linking but static linking would fail spectacularly when there is a bug in a common library, like libc. One of two things happens:

- Some applications are not updated and retain the bug. Extremely dangerous if it is a security bug.

- Suddenly your package manager needs to update almost every single application on your system. All the packages in my Ubuntu system is a total of ~1GB. Now that you statically compiled them prepare for a very long download.

The problems presented are largely solved in integrated distributions (like Linux distributions or Apple software). Where this isn't as clear is when external parties are trying to distribute software in a non-coordinated way (most apps in Windows, non-Apple apps in OSX). In those cases static linking probably makes sense but even then I'd say you are better off linking dynamically to fairly standard stuff like libc.
I know what I'll be doing this Saturday!
ESPN Baseball Analyst Steve Phillips Scandal
I just don't trust SEMC to pull it off, however.
Scott Macgregor who used to head up the Thunderbird team seems to have built another email client (proprietary).

http://www.postbox-inc.com/
Font designers imagine a better-looking Web
Read the comments, but don’t believe them

Love that one. A grad student friend I work with, whenever he catches me poring over documentation, always tells me to read the code. Such a seemingly simple tip, but so valuable.
I can't see the video, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the claim implied in the title: people have been arguing about the Industrial Revolution's causes practically since the Industrial Revolution. My favorite recent book on the subject is A Farewell to Alms (see http://jseliger.com/2007/09/10/a-farewell-to-alms ), but there are countless others.
Do you find working for google better preparation for your next startup?
The disconnect is a very serious concern. I worry about war crimes being committed using these weapons without any accountability or risk. But, I am actually comforted by them saying that the soldiers experience disorders like PTSD just like deployed soldiers.

Before you think I'm a heartless bastard, here's my reasoning: it tells me that the soldiers become psychologically embedded in the situations they experience just like if they were actually there. It tells me that they're not treating it like a video game, so their moral sense should still be engaged.

It's not much, but it's some comfort. I still think we need to be very, very careful about the psychological effects of remote weapons, and how it affects the decisions soldiers and their commanders make.
That's the problem though. We have a very narrow definition of what a journalist is, and that definition describes someone who does something that doesn't contribute a whole lot of value more often than not.
Interesting to see that they put their logo in the center instead of the top left-- I think it's a little distracting, but maybe this will become a new trend.
The alternative to Prop 13 is that people who lived their whole lives in CA can't afford the taxes to retire there.
I don't think they could have made it look more like Last.fm.
I worked there for three summers. During my first two summers for the most part all the campers were on one level of authority, then they'd answer to the assistant counselors who would answer to me. It was a very flat organization.

My third summer I created a structure where every 5 "first summer" campers would report to 1 "second summer" camper and form a "squad." Every 3 squads then reported to a "third summer" camper and formed a "platoon." The two platoons formed a company and reported to the best third summer camper that week, who reported to the counselors.

Then we pitted the squads against eachother in room inspections, sports, percentage of members who had dates to the weekly dance, shower frequency, all sorts of weird stuff. We collected a crapload of data on the squads and posted it up publicly where they could all track it.

The winning squad each week got a big rock that I painted green. The counselors and I sold it to the campers as an old camp award that had been unfairly forgotten by previous counselors. The squad leader could keep it in his room for the week after his squad won it.

Results:

1. The kids worked a lot harder at the things we were grading them on.

2. They spent a lot more time talking to each other and less time talking to the counselors.

3. They generally became more proficient at all of these tasks.
It might be my relative newness to software, but I enjoy looking at other peoples code to see what works (pick up new language features) and what doesnt.
Which Religion should I follow
One of the reasons I don't write comments is because it gets outdated so quickly. And I don't need them myself, because I read only the code, even my own. Reading the code makes also for reviewing the code. Quickly changing bits so it makes better sense (like counts outside the for-loop instead of in the statement) etc. And use version-control system to make changes, test them and roll it back (revert). TortoiseSVN helps a lot with this for me. I also try to make the code more readable by adding my codingstyle or the codingstyle by convention (I still think mine is best ;-)
It's the Windows App Store, right?
If you can't do it with objects, what structure do you use in-memory?
Laser Monuments Colorado
Sterling Edge Industrial Cutting LLC a leading Denver waterjet company, features industrial cutting services including custom laser engraving, metal marketing and unique office artwork.
Mozilla Wave? Who is next? Apple?
I've seen 5x used in pro audio from BOM to retail.
if the original code writers had used comments and asserts to not only assert their assumptions but then maintain those assumptions over time, then you wouldn't have to. plus, they'll probably introduce less bugs and debug faster in the future.

i can only speak from my own experience, thought processes and developing skillset. everyone's different. some people can keep track of numerous complex relationships in their head for months on end.
If top-of-function comments like:

/* Does everything required to initialise the UI (DO NOT CALL DIRECTLY - see class foo) */

Get outdated quickly (without being updated) you have big problems.

Equally a one line comment before things like:

// Do this if we can be certain we are in month X

if (!(!x || ($chk(diff(y,o)) && (z<p))) {...}

Saves you having to draw out a truth table each time. Even if the logic gets tweaked a bit when bugs are found the purpose of the code is likely to remain and so the comment won't age too badly.
Hmmm... sounds shady... $998, only ten participants, and they imply that one of the reasons the fee is that high is because they spent it on advertising?

One of the speakers founded rentoid.com - which seems pretty cool at first glance. The other apparently founded a startup that sells ideas for $423.

Actually I'm sure they're legit, but it's a ripoff compared to the real Startup School. Even if I lived in Australia, I'd still pay for a ticket and fly to California.
Well they get points for honesty, the word "news" doesn't appear anywhere in their heading. But they have have a huge entertainment section. I guess they are the new MTV where the original meaning of their name has been lost, it's just branding for any content.

(The only time I watch CNN anymore is before 9am when they have CNN Asia/Europe on which is actually real news.)
Somehow this was enabled on my Jaunty install at work. Things I found out a couple of days ago (when I ran into probs):

* Ssh keys have caveats with this setup.

* You need to login at least once (locally,ssh,etc) because it needs your system password to mount the ecryptfs on your home directory. So you can still use the benefits of ssh keys if you need to login to the same machine with the same user account multiple times. You'll just need to use the system password the first time.

* If you only need to access something outside of your encrypted home, you can created a ~/.ssh directory in the unmounted home directory and cat your public key there. (Your login will have have an empty home directory unless you manually mount eCryptFS)

* Because the mounting can happen in a PAM module, this is leaps and bounds ahead of Apple (at least a couple of years ago). My experience with FileVault was that you needed to login through the GUI to get a mounted home directory. SSH logins were a no go (except for an empty home dir).
Think how much money invested in content alone - billions and billions. When a fraction of that amount would be poured into a mobile content - it will be completely different picture. Financial and market news channels for mobile devices is a simplest idea. Time-wasting (passing) reality shows and sports translations are another winners.
This logic suggest that Windows 95 is 88 times versions ahead of Windows 7, which is only three versions ahead of Windows 3, an OS released on 1990
Another Possibility:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
XML.gov Registry Business Case Analysis
zlib security vulnerabilities, anyone? Or gecko, for that matter...
If you're not folding functions, but parts of functions, that's a sign that it's poorly divided up, and a refactor would benefit it.
a lot of governments actually have a policy which sounds like "Exempting food sales but taxing prepared food sold for immediate consumption unless it is take-out except taxing hot take-out."

This sort of thing is absolutely true here in SF. For example, buying a sandwich at Subway doesn't usually incur a sales tax. But answer "yes" to "Would you like it toasted?" and suddenly your $5 footlong is now ~$5.50 courtesy the State of California. See http://thomashawk.com/2008/06/cheap-bastard-says-dont-order-...
I think that relates to how smart is synonymous with lazy: it's because smart always try find the easy way out.

The hard way to do something would require a lot of effort, but actually very little brain power. An example would be trying to modify a set of data. The hard way would be to do it by hand. That's the most obvious method and thus requires little brain power to arrive at. However the faster way is to write a Python script that does it.

Probably part of the de-emphasis on smarts is society's general attitude towards innate intelligence. We don't like to believe that some people are simply born better than others, so we stress that more effort is better instead.

There's no arguing the fact that not everyone is equally gifted in terms of brain power, so I think it's kind of silly to try to ignore intelligence. Intelligent people are creative, open minded, and flexible. But an intelligent person who's allergic to actual effort is the real problem we want to avoid. Also we're probably more equal in intelligence than we are in our ability to work hard. So in practice, this is probably why effort is a better indicator of ability to succeed than intelligence is.
I was working for a big corporate when I had a start up idea. The route I took was to jump ship to a smallish start up for as long as it would take to feel comfortable (I figured around two years, it actually took a bit longer than a year).

There were several good things about doing it that way:

- I got a lot closer to customers and the sales/marketing process and saw product development cycles much more akin to the kind of thing I would be doing on my own.

- I met a lot of people and made some great connections.

- I picked up some related skills and qualifications and contacts (on my own time) which have cut ~£1k+ off my business admin costs and made me more competent technically.

- I saved up a nice healthy seed fund at the same time as moving (myself) to a city that's better for start ups.

There were some negatives to go with it as well.

- I burned out a little bit on the really long days, which made it hard to work in the evenings. Oddly enough that's no longer the case now I'm doing my own thing - it's too much fun.

- I couldn't carry on with product development for contract reasons. It did give me time give the product a serious review and to pick up some other skills I would need though.

- I lost a year's first mover advantage. It's a big market though, and a year hasn't radically changed the competitive picture. The niche I want to steal is still under-served and stuffed full of people with money.

On the whole it was a good idea for me, but everyone's circumstances vary.
Educational: Worlds Worst Website
I think you are both right.
Hope this helps http://www.netmba.com/econ/micro/comparative-advantage/
In the first case, perhaps the function should only be accessible by/from Foo, or those that share a Foo-ish interface. In the second, I would really hope to be able to abstract that into a call to s.in_month?(m), with s perhaps being built from some combination of $chk, x, y, o, z, and p.
You can't use Clojure's libraries from Scala?