skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be a bit cynical, most controlling ideologies are against any new way of living. Your argument needs that all the groups of leaders/high priests fails to control their subcultures, even far away from the central system/culture.

Note that the argument needs that most every subculture fails at controlling its faithful in most every technological civilization...

Doesn't really sound likely -- consider a North Korea or Salafism in the Oort cloud.

Edit: A bit clearer and more grammatical, etc.
My company (Freytag & Company, LLC), won a DARPA Phase I and Phase II STTR (just like a SBIR but 30% goes to a US univesity). Phase I was for <$100K/1 year (at least 30% to a U.S. university so its $70K which has to in fact last you 18-24 months IF you win Phase II - YC-like if you ask me) and Phase II was competed with second-contract award a year after Phase I ended for < $750K/2 years (again 30% to university).

Topic DARPA ST061-004: ttp://tinyurl.com/yzuqxwh

This was our fourth SBIR/STTR proposal and only win. SBIR/STTR topics are very competitive (winning teaches you how so you are more likely to win again). This particular topic received ~30 submissions of which an unusually high number were awarded (3) Phase I money. Winning Phase I does not mean you win Phase II because of poor results or no Federal funds available. For this topic we also had two competitors for Phase II funding. You cannot win Phase II without first winning the Phase I.

The marketing, regulatory, and compliance process that comes with this money has been VC-pitching-intense but the advantages and cautions are very, very different. One advantage is that the Federal government pays in a recession. The catches are important and I found surprising (e.g it is non-trivial to negotiate a contract with a U.S. university under a deadline and to do so while complying with the Bayh-Dole Act). Also DoD SBIR/STTRs train you to become a government contractor (NSF might be different). Selling commercially is unusual but laudable - just don't expect people to be very familiar with what you need in the way a VC is "supposed" to be.

As a result of this process, my company (Freytag & Company, LLC), has products, enough money for one other employee, and huge experience going to the government market.

Since, our Phase II contract was "cost plus fixed fee" (most bigger government contracts are), and most costs are labor hours, regulatory compliance means tracking labor hours with contract codes. We passed our first Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) audit just before we won our Phase II and are about to undergo another audit less than two years later. As a result we have probably one of the tightest accounting systems for a company this size you will ever see (and a damn fine accountant).

Because we took a lot of money and are doing something that might fail despite the money, we (well, -I-) decided to give our time-tracking tool away free. Figured it was a certain way to: 1. help the SBIR/STTR program grow our economy by 2. helping other firms immediately solve one part of their compliance problem - that of being able to track employee and contractor hours in the particular way the government expects.

If you need to track your labor hours over a distributed team of developers and would like to use a tool that has taken at least one firm through a government audit (and soon another - joy!) email me at timesheets@freytag.us. Please tell me who you are and what your problem is when you write.
This is the single biggest change in how I filter ideas these days. Few years ago between two competing ideas, I would go with the "cooler" one(ie. one I liked more).

These days I start out thinking about any idea from the perspective of distribution. If I have an idea with no clear path of distribution(and revenue), it is an automatic no-go. I think a lot of Valley folks have learned this in past few years.

It can't be a coincidence that VCs in general are blogging more about sales:
http://southeastvc.blogs.com/southeast_vc/2009/11/vcs-hear-i...
That "draft" tick box has been grayed out for me since I got into Wave.
Help me to get PaperTrail out the door
I am not a designer. There that's out of the way. What I am is a one person shop working on my own project when I'm not working for the MAN. I hope that some day I will be successful enough to hire a great web designer at $10000/hr but until then It would be nice if the author would help to improve the general knowledge of design instead of presenting it as a black art only bestowed upon the eleits.
The challenge of creating a new category
Even the the Japanese will readily admit that the Japanese system is a nightmare. Because elements are either named arbitrarily (the name of the town, or prefecture, or area, or whatever) or are named in the order they were established (district 9, or block 4, or house 2) finding them is essentially a hash lookup at every level.

"Sure", you say, "but streets are also arbitrarily named". Occasionally true. But there are many fewer of them than there are of blocks or buildings. Streets are long. If I say I need to get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a taxi driver in DC knows exactly where Pennsylvania Avenue is -- or only needs to look up that one name -- and can go right there. If I say I need to get to 3-14-13, Higashi-gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141 Japan, then the taxi driver starts pulling out his street atlas. Okay I know where Shinagawa-ku is. Next, where's Gotanda, okay. Where's Higashi, district 13? Okay. Where's block 14? Building 3? Now, how do I get there? That's a lot of lookups, every one of which is randomized.

The opposite of this hideous mess is how things are laid out in, of all places,
Utah. Mormon settlements were laid out intelligently on a grid. The axes of the grid are the only streets with names --well, in the original plan anyway -- (In Salt Lake City it's State Street and South Temple Street). The remaining streets are named for the tick location on the grid on which they reside. Heading west from the origin, we have 100 West, 200 West, 300 West, etc. Heading south from the origin, we have 100 South, 200 South, 300 South, etc. Your address is also a number: if you're on 200 South, and your house is, say, a quarter of the way between 200 West and 300 West, then your address is 225 West 200 South. In a design like this you don't even need a map.
Investors can tell a bubble when they see it, but we must consider that hindsight is 20/20 in these situations. And perhaps investing in a bubble is okay, just as long as you get out at the right time?

A lot of the press makes this look like the end of the world. I don't want to make a hasty comparison, but let's contrast it to the $700bn dollar bailout that we saw earlier in the States .. $60bn exposure isn't quite as bad as it seems.

The question is in underlying value. Aside from the world's speculation and the good word of the ruling family, there isn't so much backing Dubai. AFAIK, nobody owns a huge share of the markets, just the royal family.

At the same time, it doesn't take much to apply some startup thinking to Dubai -- put a couple people together with some good ideas on how to shape the markets there, and Dubai could look drastically different 24-36 months from now. Islamic Finance could be an interesting starting point.

Dubai will be very interesting as soon as all of this smoke clears up.
It seems like the real shock to the world markets was that Abu Dhabi stood quiet instead of immediately stepping in to guarantee at least some of the money.

It happened before http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123532630416442781.html so why not again?
Sounds like you're playing it right...
8) Gmail is life changing. Thank you google.

I am also a gmail fan-boy. It makes me crazy to see otherwise intelligent and tech-savvy people use yahoo mail or hotmail. You know who you are. It's almost as painful to me as seeing somebody use IE instead of FF.

I'm transitioning my sister, by allowing her to pop3 it into her MS Outlook, which is how I got started. Then the day came when I just quit firing up Outlook.
An interviewer has no obligation whatsoever to tell a candidate why he or she "failed" an interview. In fact, I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find one who would tell, for legal reasons. Companies hate being sued, so they're not going to tell you anything that might potentially give someone a reason to sue them.
What do you imagine you would want to be?
Dubai and Abu Dhabi haven't always had the best relations - they're both Emirates but that doesn't mean that they agree on everything. Fiscal policy could very well be in this set of things.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8382275.stm - have a look through the section titled "Competition".

Also, oil is relatively inexpensive right now. Abu Dhabi exports a lot of oil. I don't want to risk making a false correlation, but that could have something to do with it.
I agree - even if the emails were illegally obtained, one need only look back at all those national security leaks over the past few years to see the glaring double standard.

That being said, I think there's a questionable assumption being made that these in fact are hacked illegally obtained emails. From CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent... - "It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)"
Fascinating article.

My biggest take away from this is that the traditional publishing industry is no longer the route to go.

Basically, if you want to be a writer today you should keep your day job and just blog. If you blog is successful you'll have a much easier time turning it into a book (almost as simple as sorting posts by most popular and sending to a publisher).

Lulu.com is a great option as well for self publishing. You've got to self-publish (blog, lulu.com, etc) until you're successful. Only after you're successful should you look at traditional publishing I think.
Not if the submissions are anonymous, right? Although, it doesn't seem that way so far since you have to blog your rejection and tweet the link out to this new site.
The djangocon videos are all recorded (obviously :P) and edited, but they can't be released for some reason. I don't have a clue what it is though :(
No they can't. They are so anxious to beat their quarterly earnings estimates and get their bonuses that they will invest in anything that pays an extra quarter of a percent. Hence the huge losses in the 70's from investing in South American dictators, the savings and load crisis of the 80's, the Mexican devaluation, the collapse of the ruble, the Japanese real estate collapse, the southeast Asian collapse, the current derivatives mess.
Do you also not see this as a political scandal given the policy measures that are being proposed in response to the conclusions some of these people make? These political measures being proposed have a real impact (financial and social) that far exceeds any war in recent years.

Personally, I suspect that the AGW thesis probably stands given that it's more than this handful of apparently corrupt scientists. That being said, where does the science stand if we take out these suspect models and the ensuing research that was based on them? Given these scandals, why is there not more of a movement to make these climate models and data in effect open source?

The level of secrecy, defensiveness and arrogance as shown by example in the Scientific American is especially troubling when you realize that practically all this research was publicly funded. Why are there non disclosure agreements on the data to begin with? (A real question - does anyone know?)
They may have changed the rules since the the 90s. They payment was to be triggered by the phase I report.
The problem with investors in the developing world is that investors have always had a not unreasonable expectation that if anything went wrong, someone would be there to bail them out. Someone almost always had - whether it be the World Bank, IMF, or some other organization - and I suspect at the end of the day, we will see some form of bail out by Abu Dhabi. To worry that this sets a horrible precedent ignores all the previous examples you point out.

If we started to allow some of these countries to see the consequence of their governance, perhaps we would see significantly better governance. This has as much to do with investors as it does with the governments and multilateral organizations that enable them.
Performance comparison between EC2, Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace Cloud, Prgmr
Would be nice to have summaries or reviews of the talks so we know which ones are must-sees.
I use the method that joelonsoftware suggested with Password Safe and Dropbox. It's allowed me to use much more secure passwords and have all of my passwords available no matter which of my computers I use.

I haven't tried installing it on a phone.
Anecdote: while the environment is probably a contributing factor, the 25-30 teenagers and adults I know with IQs of 130-160 (gifted children's program) basically make the same career and life choices as others in the same socio-economic group, with the exception of post-graduate degrees, which they mostly avoided.
Ever since before Adam Smith, this model of countries not being able to produce everything that they require, but instead, focusing on a few things, and trading for the rest, has been accepted as a more efficient system, where everybody benefits from the savings these efficiencies allow.

I think this model works extremely well ... until it doesn't. Until some event keeps trade from occurring, whether that event is a currency collapse, a drought, or, more often, a war.

I don't know what the right answer is. We seem to be muddling along fine, however, with the system as it is, but there's always a specter of catastrophe hanging over our heads.
Because it a kludge and not very efficient. I just can't believe the huge step backwards we take when we go to do "web programming". I guess I'm just wishing the web browser had evolved into an open cross platform thin client that is not dependent on one language.
will you be my advisor?
Personally, I suspect that the AGW thesis probably stands given that it's more than this handful of apparently corrupt scientists.

I think there is a risk there. Much of the work in the field is reworking and resplicing old results -- for a graphic illustration of this, see McIntyre's graph of which tree-ring series are used in which papers.

http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/slide18.jpg?w...

Primary data are hard and expensive to collect. Computer munging on existing data is, relatively, cheap to produce -- you only need grad students, pfft, they work for ramen. So the papers tend to gradually build up more series, more stats, more regressions on the same existing data sources. Then you get into computer modeling, which takes the assumptions gleaned from the 43rd reworking of the source data and combines it with the 27th reworking of other source data to predict that in scenario N where X assumption holds...

What if we're building a skyscraper on a foundation of rotten timber?

P.S. That being said, where does the science stand if we take out these suspect models and the ensuing research that was based on them?

I think the scientists are very, very reluctant to do that. Look at the amount of remixing that has to be done for these papers. If you were to draw a graph of all the results in this field, connect all papers via citations (or a less promiscuous method of your choice, such as "Did I use their numbers for a calculation of importance?"), color one early result in the field red, and then floodfill -- I think it is quite likely that the whole discipline goes red. This is presumably why, when McIntyre et al have demonstrated problems in earlier research, they always get fobbed off with "Pfft, yeah, maybe, but we had 200 data sources and that was only two or three of them."

P.P.S. There is no incentive for a scientist to go back and check their own papers for errors introduced by a paper or data source they relied on suddenly going bad. Heads they spent a lot of work and their paper survives scrutiny: good news, but defending results from 1993 didn't get them a grant now did it. Tails, they find an error, can't correct it, and admit so. BAM, loss of professional reputation, funding, etc. And then they get to the really sticky business: calling up all their friends who cited them for the "Bob, got a bit of bad news for you..." conversation.
Your code will only end up with all those variables if you program in an imperative style — why are you creating unnecessary state?
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Why websites look so ugly
I would pay ~ US$10.00 per month for fiber in a heartbeat. I would offer to subsidize some of my neighbors to help make it happen, as well.
I think Josh's point was not that you needed virality. Virality is just one way to get distribution (albeit a very efficient way). Josh's point was that distribution (aka Customer Acquisition) is hard and you can't just 'bolt virality on' as an afterthought.
Godfather of spam gets 4 years in prison
To be fair, you can get the small EC2 down to $30/mo if you prepay, and Slicehost can go down 20% too.
Not that I disagree, but there are conceivable cases were it seems natural to not keep the "base data" around. For example consider a classical thermometer: temperature data is collected by reading the height of quicksilver in a pipe and transforming it into a temperature according to a device specific scale. I don't think many people keep the actual height readings around, most would probably just keep the resulting temperature.

Not that I know that the same applies to the data in question here, just saying. I still wait for the full story.
Or maybe because it doesn't contribute much to the discussion?
I posted this article precisely because I'm not one of "the anti-warming folks". The tribal aspect of this debate somehow manages to be both boring and corrosive, so I ignore it when I can. This article is special because its facts aren't in dispute, and yet still tend to cast doubt on the consensus view that I, at least, thought was the truth.

The discussion between "the anti-warming folks" and "the other guys" has been ongoing for some time on this site: http://searchyc.com/submissions/global+warming

Have you always taken the position that global warming is not hacker news? Or has something changed so that is was hacker news before and isn't any longer?
No, I don't mean that. If you want to have a design work across different browsers, one of the first things you have to do is find a common baseline. This is where things like reset.css come in, which overrides many predefined styles.

I'll try re-wording my post:

I suspect <aside> and <article> will have the same styling possibilities as any other block level element for a particular version of CSS.
It nevertheless is confusing for somebody who doesn't know erlang. Even prolog uses different symbols for matching a variable and for defining a clause.
Summary: Time to switch to Linode.
This is kind of disappointing for fans of Slicehost :( Any reason that we shouldn't switch?
Yes, "comparative advantage" this is called. Everyone should try to do the highest-margin thing they can, even if they are capable of doing lower-margin things more efficiently than their competitors. The article is worrying about downstream effects, i.e. that by giving up a low-margin business in the present, you cut yourself off from future high-margin businesses.
This author leaves out that the Kindle could be a loss leader for Seattle based Amazon to sell a shit load more book downloads that cost them just a sliver of bandwidth.

Plus, Amazon is getting a foot hold in a new industry they have created from thin air.

Further, do you think the foreign E-ink disdlay maker is the only game in town? A lot can change in a few years.
This is where 37signals shines.
Benchmarks is benchmarks, you should take them with a grain of salt. Sign up for a Linode account and test how it fares on HTTP requests (siege/ab) or test suite for your own application.
Were there emails that actually talked about deleting data? I've seen the emails that talked about deleting emails, but not raw data.
>Fallacy of bringing absolutely nothing to the debate and asserting to the point of ad homonim that scientists would have skipped basic statistics on their data.

I thought that's what you were asserting. My assumption is that scientists have correlated tree ring data with other sources and found it to be unreliable. But of course, neither my nor your assumptions about what's possible and impossible in this area are worth a damn, because we __don't know what we're talking about__. That is my point.

Also, all this talk about fallacies, ad homonim, etc. etc., is very "internet". Especially since you only seem to have a vague grasp of what these words actually mean. Do you think we could maybe leave all that stuff out and have a serious discussion?
Psystar promised investors huge clone sales, actually sold only 768