skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just took a look at my referrers for the past year on my blog. Without a doubt 90% of referrers are social bookmarking sites like this and reddit.

It might be the psychology of it all. You visit a social bookmarking site to find interesting links; you visit a blog to see what they have to say more than click on the links.
Controller - an event delegation library
Epistemology from The Fabric of Reality (to start)
Derivatives the new 'ticking bomb'
Well don't encourage that ;p
The US is itself a huge market with relatively uniformity (you mention the address information as one example, the currency is another). I don't see anything wrong with a US company deciding that US customers are reasonable target. Yes, they are missing out on business, but they are also missing out on hassles with deal with the RotW.

So my take is that for many US companies the answer is "Why bother? We have a big market here".
I don't know of any silver bullet, but this is something I've spent some time thinking about regarding my own startup. Our approach is to prioritize quality over quantity, to encourage the type of community-driven content we're looking for down the road. Generic or low quality content populating an unfamiliar site can't result in a positive impression on your users.

Basically, the challenge is to find someone/people with strong writing skills and domain knowledge pertaining to whatever your site is about. Is that you? If yes, why not just crank away for a week or two on the keyboard? If you're satisfied with the content you've produced, but conclude that you need more, then at least you'll have some sample material to present to prospective pre-launch contributors.

I'd be happy to discuss this issue further with the OP or anybody else directly (check my profile for contact info). Our pre-launch content creation challenge is quite different than needing lots of reviews, but it is similar enough that perhaps some mutual benefit could come of a discussion with someone dealing with this, or a similar, issue.
My Dell's an Inspirion and was top of the line, on par with a MacBook Pro. It weighs like 5kg (vs a 1kg LifeBook) and is anything -BUT- a mobile computer. The battery lasts 2 hours with internet, 3 hours without. Not to mention, with upgraded graphics drivers (which dell won't provide) you only get about 20 minutes before it freaks out and the monitor stops displaying.

I'm travelling in just over two weeks and I have to revert back to old drivers, which don't do onboard T&L but a simple upgrade allows them to perform like a dream. At 1440x900 and the FPS it runs games at, I think it's actually beating the nVidia card the same model came supplied with... when they worked I mean, because they made a recall and switched them to ATI.

Right now I'm looking at a nice refurbished MacBook, or maybe a LifeBook; if I can justify the price for the usability. It's actually spurred arguments between me and my girlfriend, she likes a large screen on her laptop and I've come to disdain it, perhaps two years in college will set her straight.

Desktop = Power. Laptop = Usability. Those are my new golden rules for buying.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Therefore, when all you've got is a dev and management team that doesn't have an office outside the US, everything looks like a US-targeted website.

Besides, haven't you heard of all the credit card scammers outside the US? Boo, scary.
Oversight and pragmatism. You have to start somewhere - and it's usually quite sensible to start with the biggest market, and then expand to the smaller ones.
Widescreen Monitors Can Save Companies $8,600 Per Employee, Per Year
I've had a few stories I've tracked on the TC effect.

Recently they wrote about my company, GotCast.com, and we had about the same reaction as Paul saw.

Before that I wrote a story for TC about a company in the photo sharing space (Jan of last year) and they had significantly more traffic from it.

I think anymore the spike is a lot less noticeable than people give it credit for.
This doesn't run on PHP, it runs on ego.
Physics, topology, logic and computation: a Rosetta Stone
Marvin Minsky: What makes Mathematics hard to learn?
Well, 1 or 2 isn't bad, but eventually it would become noise, not signal.

I don't think that that goal of this site is quantity of users or stories, but quality.
Because Europe alone is a much bigger market than the US, and it's not that hard to simply localize an app. I think this is a huge market -- localizing the most successful apps out there. In fact, you can get the users to do it for you. Just open the admin to allow for translated versions of pages.

Big oversight. Big opportunity.
Announcing Google I/O: A two day developer gathering in SF
Consume non rails-style REST API's
Look at it as an opportunity to get into other markets first, as an entrepreneur:-) There are lots of "copycat" sites making good money in their home countries.
Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass (YC summer 07)
New Beta 4 Puts the Fire Back in Firefox 3
Absolutely.

But a company the size of AOL surely can't make the excuse that they have to start somewhere. According to internetworldstats North America is only 18% of the global market. Even Europe is bigger with 26%.

Sourse: (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)
Alertle - Simplified and Customizable RSS reading
Ask Public:: Does Google remove websites from search?
My website was coming in the google search.

But a few days back, it is not coming. I had given some negative comments about Google Adwords ... in the adwords forum..... is this the reason for it....

Website is www.worlditday.com.
Search For World IT Day in google and yahoo ...
Virtualization Benchmarking
1. I could learn how to be attractive to women. Everything I learned when younger was wrong, and relationships don't just happen, you must work to make them happen. Intelligence actually can be used for sexual attraction.

2. When I am sure I am being totally logical, something analyzing myself shows very clearly that my motivations aren't what I think. People who deny their irrational humanity the most often are extremely irrational humans in many obvious ways (to someone other than themselves). A whole lot of extremely complex things are really a form of very simple, and often counterproductive, fear.

3. I really don't have to be what other people want me to be.

4. A lot of deeply held and complex human phenomena have extremely simple explanations, which you aren't allowed to say, but which can be extremely useful to know nonetheless. (For example, take the tapestry of specific social and philosophical beliefs about religion, all constructed out of transparently motivated falsehood or meaningless gibberish.)
AdSense predates the Applied Semantics acquisition

That's not what your press release says:
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/applied.html

What was the idea of an intern?
The self-service approach to buying AdWords, IIRC. The mail-order lobster nonsense that led to the streamlining of the horribly broken logfile/MySQL system when it became popular. I may be confused -- 'intern' may be the wrong word.

But if you want an example of a 'tipping point' or a critical decision I can't think of much better than Google and their ad sales mechanism.
True. Here's an example:

In Denmark bask in the 90's a couple of guys decided to do a site like yahoo. It was called jubii. Today they are much bigger than Yahoo in Denmark, and are making good money, basically riping off Yahoo's concept.
World of Warcraft is completely down
3D pannable video - Click and drag to pan the camera around
Announcing (Formally) Alltop
I didn't think that was even possible with an international operation of that size.
I thought he launched this months ago? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Uh...AOL = America OnLine.

Point taken, but AOL isn't a great example - it started when Americans really were (practically speaking) the only netizens (and overseas connections were expensive).
Let's go viral already!! It's the air, it's the air ...
The irony of FOSS project's Windows support
There is still quite a bit of friction at the borders. As a company that ships equipment both into and out of America, we still find it difficult/expensive to get goods and money into and out of this country. Actually difficult to the point that a profitable product in US is not profitable outside because the profit margin is more than absorbed by the cost of getting the goods out of the country and getting the payment back in.

Instead we've had to set up a rather convoluted system where our hardware is sourced and assembled outside of the US. It was so much of a pain that I can easily see why some people might just decide its not worth the hassle. The economy may be global now, but if you're not in Asia or eastern Europe, your country didn't get the memo.
I doubt software patents contribute much to the totals, or would change the rankings if left out. Same for business method patents.

And you might disagree with patents entirely but still see them as correlated with a certain type of intelligent opportunism.

Pretty sure Idaho owes its ranking to a few key corporate research groups in patent-heavy fields -- HP, Micron, ?
Where on the earth we are?why people have ego,when they are just nothing!
Thanks for the advice, everyone. I think I'm going to go ahead and announce it on news.yc (when the app is ready), but with the caveat that half of the intended features are missing. One factor not mentioned in other comments is the fact that I hope to get some hackers interested in co-foundership with the alpha release.
You are doing the same thing here in this post.
America and US are two different things.
Warm fuzzy things for random simulations
any one ...
Isn't Tuesday morning their normal maintenance window?
FeedBurner Introduced a New Service to Transfer Feeds Between Accounts
EU clears Google-Doubleclick deal
Please consider that the era of cheap energy is over (www.theoildrum.com). And the cheap energy is one of the main inputs into economy (including startups).
<slightly off topic>

The thing that gets me is that there are a lot of US companies that expect people to use credit cards. I'm guessing that this is because (AFAIK) most US citizens have credit cards. However, over here in the UK (rest of Europe too? I don't know) credit cards aren't so prolific. I wish people would start allowing more international forms of payment, such as PayPal. I REALLY want to start using the paid versions of some of 37 Signals stuff as well as some of the Amazon Web Services, but I can't because they don't accept Paypal (or something similar). The thing that gets me is that I can buy something online via Amazon, but can't use their web services.
</rant>
Congrats! Clickpass is going to be big.
And it works with news.yc.
When I read this I also thought about the differences in the physics of the 'very big' and the 'very small'.

Though, I prefer the cogency of your analogy. Good read.
I discovered VirtualBox a few months ago and am now migrating to it away from VMWare Workstation. It's stable and performs well.

It also offers the Parallels-like feature which allows you to run application windows from your VM in your host desktop environment. This is very handy for doing cross-browser web app testing, where you can (for example) put a Win IE7 browser window right next to your Linux Firefox one to compare things side by side.
Are you YC startup guys keeping some notes about your day to day activities? I had to piece most of that article together from some old graphs and an old, non-work focused blog I had. Looking back, just a few lines a day in a text file about what I worked on and what I learned would be a great resource now.

Heck, asking folks to keep lightweight journals might help pg identify better ways to help you guys out. It might help point out where people get stuck and how they are spending their engineering time. Just don't put anything in there you wouldn't want to turn over to a subpoena. :)

Anyway -- there are two more segments of that story on the way. Hope you guys enjoy it.
A couple of days ago, Fred Wilson made a relevant post about his near escape from the auction rate bond market. Its an interesting read, with more detail on how these bonds usually function and how the recent malfunction developed. From what I understood, these bonds don't lose all their liquidity overnight. After they lose their "primary" liquidity (by failing an auction), there is a secondary market that kicks in because of the high interest rates that the bonds are contractually required to offer once they fail an auction.

Fred says he got a call from his broker saying "your bonds have not yet failed an auction but you should know that the risk of it happening has gone up". I imagine that a lot of startups must have got a similar call, but perhaps the founders were too focused elsewhere to pay attention. Or maybe the smart ones did listen and were able to avoid this sorry mess.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/our-run-in-with.html
>For that matter, you can get the same effect with the MySQL prompt and a shared-nothing PHP architecture.

I see how you could, say, drop a user from the users table using this; but how would you fix a login bug like the one under discussion?
the "formal" announcement was today: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/03/announcing-form.html
Have you really visited the link? How can you say that spam?
No, it was mostly due to a design flaw in the account creation code.
This seems pretty obvious to me (as a european resident). The amount of stuff you have to figure out to reach the US market is a lot less than the amount of stuff you have to figure out to reach the european market. That's a lot of the impetus for tighter european economic integration. If the cost of reaching the US market is a fraction of the cost of reaching the combined european market, it doesn't matter if there are a few more people in the EU. You also can't really measure online market size by GDP or pure head count. Some corners of the EU (Bulgaria, for instance) are less developed than Mexico.
I'm new here, but it seems this site is less about karma-whoring that digg and reddit.

In any case... is it that difficult to reverse-engineering the points system? For those who care...
Having been an intern/co-op with both a very large and couple small/medium startups. My experience and interaction with student interns (mostly from public universities), have led me to believe you must pay your interns. Most students in the current economic climate, particularly those attending college for the first time in there family, simply cannot afford an unpaid internship.
Why don't you watch the peepcode screencast, it's only 9 bucks but very worth it.

He explains how to use iMovie, iShowU and Omnigraffle for creating them.

The link is https://peepcode.com/products/screencasting-on-the-mac

(BTW I don't know or am affiliated with the top funky guy, just a fan of their peepcode screencasts)
There are also liability issues. This service is offered to US citizens only, possibly because their billing practices don't conform to laws of other nations. Localization of legal issues is costly and time consuming. If you examine the member agreement linked on that page, you see the following:

3. QUALIFICATIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP

To use the AOL Services, you must be a U.S. resident and legally able to enter into contracts. AOL reserves the right to limit you to one free trial or promotion of a paid subscription plan that cannot be combined with other offers.
In English, "America" is the correct short for for the United States of America, and "Americans" for the residents. That's not true in other languages languages (Spanish, for example). I assume your moniker is less than accurate as in German "Amerika" and "Amerikaner(in)" are standard terms as well.
Actually, Olber's Paradox can also be answered by assuming the Universe is fractally distributed.
There's been plenty of valid criticism directed at Guy here at news.yc (for example, he gives startup advice but hasn't had a successful startup of his own), but I really don't think he has a large ego. In fact, what I like most about his presentations, interviews, and moderatorships is that he's always poking fun at himself. He always mentions his stupid mistakes in a way that's funny and endearing.

I've also emailed him personally a couple times and he answered the email himself, which is not a characteristic of someone with a delusional sense of his own importance.
Natural language considered harmful
Time is very similar to space; what you are saying is like saying you don't see how it take up any space at all.
Seems to me now that the HN post yesterday on Techcrunch was more of a preparation to announce Clickpass and lure more TC users on its service.

Nice one-two movement.
Warren Buffett: $516 trillion bubble is a disaster waiting to happen
I just set this up over the weekend. I hadn't heard of it before and was a little skeptical but it's a lot like the VMWare I've used at work.

It's performing very well and offered some pretty flexible install options (I had an iso file I was going to burn until I noticed VirtualBox could just use it directly).
The study that came up with these findings was commissioned by a company that makes widescreen monitors so that's a bit weird. But I have a widescreen and I am significantly more productive using it than I was in the past with my tiny 15 inch standard format display.
There’s only one workaholic here . . . me!
Well if startups from small European countries can deal with that, the I'm sure large American companies can as well. If they choose to do so of course.
An iPhone interface for Hacker News
email me at the address in my profile and we can talk
Tilton's Law - solve the first problem first
Get Back to Your Mac Without Paying for It
A Guide to New England Angel Groups—The List
So you're saying that America is a bigger market than the world?
We are on Disqus, news.yc and plaxo at the moment.

If you want to skip the intermediate pages, http://disqus.com/login and https://www.plaxo.com/signin :)
I still think SVN and Norman are in violent agreement. Look at the Southwest Airlines example. I agree with mixmax, this is mostly for marketing purposes. Not that there is anything wrong with that...
Please let me know if you like it! I presume quite a few hackers out here are like me constantly checking hacker news on their iPhones while they are out. The pinching and zooming is great, but it gets tiring after a while; so I figured I should do something about it. Given that Buxfer already had a good iPhone interface, it did not take that much time to build it.

Of course, this is unofficial. Hopefully, PG won't have a problem with it since it does not create any additional requests for the HN server; just routes request through Buxfer.
>Naturally some concerns arise with any centralized login system. Doesn’t this mean a thief only has to steal one password, your Clickpass password?

Clickpass with two-factor security (e.g. SecureID) might be worth paying a subscription fee for
Privacy and Power
I assume you're joking, but in case you're not: it was a coincidence. We didn't ask to be TechCrunched.
Maybe in the case of AOL they offer those free email accounts to Americans only so they can guarantee a more homogeneous audience to their advertisers.
Team Whiteboarding with Twiddla
Clickpass feels more like a single-sign-on service, wasn't the purpose of OpenID to negate this? Or am I missing something here?
Wow! Rough attitude there. Less coffee, more Cheerios :) Hopefully new users who find Hacker News from Tech Crunch will be good contributors, but eventually there will (hopefully) be more users, and I'm not sure the source properly indicates the quality of the user referred.
They can, for sure, and many of them do (just not all of them). It's a decision based on the cost of legal vs. the income benefit of providing services to the international market.

AOL has apparently decided the US is its target market. You can get better free web mail from other sites, anyway. :)
This sounds like the article from yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133356), but the conclusions this one draws are a lot more detailed.

They both reference the same study.
Yes, in English: America = US. In Spanish: America = The Americas.
Dropbox launches (YC summer 07)
10k new users wouldn't be so wrong...

10k new users posting xkcd and penny arcade comics would be. I can go to the xkcd/PA site to view the comics when I feel like it. I can go to fark/reddit/digg for humor. There is no need to make this site equal in content to them. I'm not saying they are bad, but I don't see the point in duplication.
Yeah, NEC funded it, but the study was vetted by the University's research board, so it theoretically shouldn't be too biased.
this is gonna lead to a lot of dumb old ladies sending you spam because they gave away their password. Can't wait!!!
Forbidden Fruit - Is the Government Against Local Food?
If ever there was an existence proof of why flowcharts disappeared from engineering discourse, this is it. Seriously, which would be easier to understand: this monster or the 80 lines of code that it would take to actually implement it?
Yes its their Tuesday maintenance. For those who aren't in the know, this happens like clockwork every Tuesday.
I like it. Congrats guys.
How to Build a Mobile Office and Work From Anywhere
Am I the only one, that actually likes it :)
Everyone wants to sue the billion dollar company, no one will bother suing the broke, gone-tomorrow startup.
Web Mission '08 - UK Startups to visit Silicon Valley
Paypal is a terribly troublesome service.
I'm excited about drop box. Congratulations guys!
Traffic boost is not normally much more than 4k in my experience. I've had two startups on TC (multiple times each) and worked at a third startup that also got coverage. Ranged between 3.5k and 7k uniques (so you're right-- it's on the low side).

Regarding investors, I think you might be right there-- TC coverage probably helped our YC app, for example (you'd know more than I!). But, in conversations with investors, I've NEVER had one say "Oh yeah-- I saw you guys on TechCrunch." It's a nice bullet point in an email/execsum that lends credibility.

Arrington literally has talked about founders calling him crying and begging for coverage and busting into his house to plead with him. That just seems wrong to me.
I can't seem to find a description of what the text or spreadsheet tasks were that were used to evaluate the efficiency of the users. Judging from the screenshots in the PDF linked to the story, though, they significantly involved moving things between two documents or pages.

Granted, it is useful to know the relative efficiency of doing such tasks on different monitor configurations. But, unless this is the only thing all of your employees do all day, it's highly misleading to turn the efficiency improvement into a dollar amount based on percentage of employee salary.
NEC also make standard monitors, I really don't think they'd give a crap which one you buy. It isn't a study of NEC performance versus Acer or anything, it's just Standard Vs Widescreen and they make both in the same factories so I don't see the bonus.

Perhaps they make more profit on a widescreen than a standard, but if widescreen sales were actually boosted then market competivity would wipe anything like that out. So I really see no possible benefit from biasing the results.
It'd be much better if they de-aggregated this information over the surface to create a true 'heat map'. If they did this, you'd probably see true hotspots of patent innovation which I'll bet correspond nicely to startup hubs.
To only localize is to fail on so many levels.
Thanks for the nice comments guys, we're really excited. Total coincidence about the Techcrunch mention but incredibly lucky too as it rooted out a bug that would have slowed Clickpass to a halt today. Sometimes you just get lucky!
Congrats, folks. Get a linux client soon, will ya? :)
Web programmers everywhere should put this on their cubicle wall, to convince people how difficult their job is. (I saw a seven-layer-networking-cake diagram which served a similar purpose).