sandee

His company is geared towards a clear mission which is very motivational to the engineers and managers in team. When a company drives towards a goal with a fanatical zeal, nothing else matters than achieving the milestones. Motivation towards achieving breakthrough achievements will mask the tendency which creates underperformance.

It would be wrong to compare it with any other traditional big company. The structures built around traditional big business work because of some reasons.

Once they achieve the goals of easier space flight and mission to mars and when it become easier or less motivational, probably they will face similar issues like most companies. But i don't this Musk cares a damn about that ... and he shouldn't

The good man was trying the opposite. Which is to make things as simple as possible for early students and get them do the hardest thing they will ever do: "solve some problems using these tools"

Instead of chasing after some title ("data scientist ..."), find ways of solving some useful problems with whatever you learnt. The article argues that becoming an expert is difficult, which may be true. But that does not mean you don't know enough to start digging at your problems in hand

"We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly alarmed."

This is the gem.

"should" be allowed OR is it "may" be allowed (if apple pleases).

Another technique could be to split the ranking into two modes, a general mode and a power mode(where rules are much strict and biased towards a filtered set of core community users). Using the power mode, readers would view the community core (who defines the site ethos) but may not be able to interact (vote,comment and submission not appearing here without upvote from core members).

Such an approach should be taken with a goal to gradually adhere the general user behavior towards the community core. May be add a tab for this.

The thinking is based on the premise that the site still has a lot of its core users and community values have not changed over time.

Basically a solution looking for a problem.

They are right, the complexity that big data caters for requires expertise at both technical and business level that would be costly (though may not be at infrastructure level). In the current economy, it looks even more difficult where businesses want to squeeze the maximum out of dollar investment.

IMO, its too early stage for big data solution adoption. However stage could be set for startups who can come up innovative solution that brings the cost level down together with simple and useful easy to grasp solutions.

congrats to guys. I subscribed some months back. Have been out of perl development since a year. This newsletter really helped to keep me updated. Infact i started re-looking again into cpan modules and filed a bug report recently for one of the modules. thanks again

"We have already shifted .., from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. "

While not agreeing to the article broadly, i agree to the statement above. Infact, i believe this is a desirable thing and we should see more of this in future. Past 200 years were about discovering the physics of things. The next 200 years would be about the discovering the working of "mind" which makes physics discoveries possible. Basically about neurological sciences , thought process , perception and more. This trend has barely started and we have a long way to go.

>at night, over an ocean, in a storm, with no visibility, in possibly significant turbulance

Instead of finding out strategies on how to fly under these circumstances, why can't the plane change its course, if they anticipate the flying route to have these conditions. How about running some reconnaissance drones in the popular routes if they suspect a bad weather and want to check out. Or try out better weather monitoring methods and tools on these routes.

Edit : Ok my mistake.On reading again, the article states "Unlike other planes' crews flying through the region, AF447's flight crew has not changed the route to avoid the worst of the storms. ".

Yes. Ask Stallman, Linus et al

Yes. "Smart people make more money but don’t end up any wealthier" is the more accurate statement

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/smart-doesnt-...

"The only institution that can provide immediate relief is the ECB. As the lender of last resort, it must do more to save the banks by offering unlimited liquidity for longer duration against a broader range of collateral."

This line of thinking is been pushed a lot. Its a one sided view. Why is it so difficult to understand the German point of view, or at least put it across to readers ? Germany insists that covering up the problems by printing money is just treating the symptoms not the root cause. The root cause is the bad monetary policies at some of member nations. They correctly understand than politicians guarantee of fixing the bad monetary issues (once printing is done) is wishful thinking. What they want is either go through painful process of austerity in these nation or tighter political/financial integration where member nations have say on finance budgeting in countries (in which case there could be common bonds).

I am neither a US or EU resident. I am not a finance guy. But the approach taken by Germany seems very sensible to me. What i see over and over again is the US/UK media and economist pushing for the solution that they have taken in their countries (monetary easing), to solve EU problems. Is there a agenda in this or whether its just that they want to make their policies appear right is open question.

I for one think that if Germany gets through this crisis (without blind printing) it will open the new era of EU dominance in the world. EU would come out as the most financially prudent currency and society (a more integrated union, almost like a country). In such a case the high debt, bad finance strategies of US/UK appear foolish.

Keep going Germany ! Long live EU

> Links to any blacklisted site will get removed from US search engines, directories, and maybe even blogs through lawsuits. Google, Twitter, maybe even HackerNews.

It doesn't work that way anymore. Google, fb , twitter etc operates across the world. Assuming the worst case, US residents will face the some error page like "This website is blocked" etc .. but rest of the world will be OK.

If even that is restricted, then this will raise a opportunity for clone solutions across the world. Like china has its own search, social software, blogs etc , now rest of the world will have a new opportunity. Many in HN would mint gold if this happens!

All in all this looks like the familiar path to take for US politician. (remember how the created the platform for screwing up the economy.

> Non-US sites can get cut off from US-based payment processors and advertisers. This will push sites you use into bankruptcy, and discourage others from starting.

Its the competition from US sites that is restricting clone solutions in local markets. US is not the target market for many-many businesses !( is it so difficult to understand)

Nothing wrong to marvel about getting 120K readers to your post.But in a startup community like HN, people put much more value on how many conversions happened, or in this case how many real critical comments from which you learnt something , how many new feed subscribers etc

"Tweaking a button and seeing conversions increase 8-fold is a beautiful thing. Seeing an hour of work turn into 120k visits is magical."

If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.

Sorry, but a true geek never "pretends to know".

There is something unique about tablets like iPad, which is tough to understand. When Steve Jobs released it, he emphasized that this was a major event. However at the time, it looked like a overblown iPhone. Personally for me, there are days when i never miss using my iPad, but without PC i cannot do even for few hours.

That said, i still feel that there is something i don't understand of this device. Something which old-guards like steve and gates, who have seen it happening once, feel about it and how its going to bring in some big changes in future. Hat's off to Ballmer to call in the right person for task.

Hallmark of a good leadership is often about understanding the gravity of situation, know your limitations and find the best person for task. No-wonder companies with leaders like that lead the industry for decades.

"situation" is about putting a different level of constraints on them and asking them to optimize within those. And not necessarily involving only buying stuff.

"He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. "

Instead of charity, if the billionaires or super smarts like gates, larry/sergey, bezos,pg etc can live in ordinary people situations for 2-3 days a year, their imagination will fuel creations that benefit all. Is this not tried already ?

That is only for sending the SMS of secret passcode for account security, right ?

(Yes if they scrap someone's else phone and your phone number happens to be there then ya there is some issue. Is there any precedent of google scraping phones through any means ?)

Is there really a YC list of 100 things that can kill a startup so they can be avoided ? Very interested to know

The infographics data is deceptive.

1.8 Billion Minutes of Video calls (All people minutes on skype for year); 916 hours of movies made per year (movies made by production house); 9 years of average time spent on watching TV (Time spent by a single consumer)

How these things are related are beyond my understanding. It looks like somehow the 1.8 Billion had to be made appear bigger , so they put some filler data along with it.

Why the date is shown as "Oct 1st 2011" ? (Current GMT is Sept 30, 6:06 am)

Why treasuries and bonds are purchased ?

" A real engineer applies physical laws to create a product with some certainty of functioning properly."

"Most/all people who call themselves software engineers are not engineers. I'm not convinced that software engineering itself is actually a field of engineering, for that very reason."

Extracting meaningful information from a corpus of documents involves dealing with physical laws.Identifying spam deals with physical laws. So do a lot of other problems which often have strong mathematical theory. Mathematics is lot abstract and often comes before the physics of things.

Back in 2009, it was estimated that t Total US financial obligation is around 65 Trillion. Recently i read somewhere that the figure is excess of 100 Trillion now !

src: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=88851

"I believe the successor to the desktop is the room, that instead of thinking that the computer is just something on the desk that you go and sit in front of, [in the] future basically the whole room is the computer and you go in it."

Think he meant bathroom

It will not be possible ever, to keep handling cases of escalating complexity one of top of other. When things get complex beyond certain level, a kill switch should be triggered. The Kill switch should not depend on If-else cases ...

> At least FB is a little more fun to hype than Gold.

There is no fun in hyping gold. That's simple because gold is not a hype

The average of both Google and Apple = (0.033 + 0.045)/2 = 0.039

Assuming a profit of 500M over a revenue of 2B , the valuation should be = 0.5/0.039 = 12.82B

The valuation of Facebook is 3.9x over this, which does not look so bad !