skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only lasting impression Opera left me with was not about price, but about bloat. I always perceived Opera as a jumble of too many disjointed features. A far cry from the much leaner (not faster but more focused) alternatives.

That may no longer be the case, but that's why I don't even try to use Opera anymore.

Opera was always very much unlike all the other alternatives to IE out there. Which might explain why some are very loyal users but also why Opera may never be able to attract the masses. The recipe for success was to make it simple and to make it fast.
Dear Mr. Thomas Pynchon
I worked on the original design for Kublax. I think there are many reasons why they entered the deathpool.

I second the Clayton Christensen recommendation. For those of you who want a quick look into his thinking I would recommend his speech "Capturing the Upside" http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail135.html

Also the book "The Innovators Solution" is good.
I don't find this argument compelling. It doesn't matter why you take the money. It matters that you took the money and keep saying it doesn't matter. If it doesn't matter, why did they take it? For the benefits and they did benefit from it, so they can't keep saying they haven't taken investors money and be credible.
Cell phone subscriptions to hit 5 billion globally
The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics
Top Best Presentations Ever
So boiled down to its fundamentals, lucky people are really those who open more doors to opportunities, notice the opportunities, and then take advantage of the opportunities. By increasing the possibilities, the probability rises that you will find good opportunities. To increase your ability to recognize opportunities rather than doubt and ignore them, you must be willing to fail many times in order to succeed the really good times. This is where the optimism and self-confidence come into play.

We see this same philosophy preached in other threads here with regard to successful businesses.
I was actually a charter member at the Union Square Crunch gym (the one on 3rd anyhow). Quitting was easy though, they only asked why (because I hadn't been going) and that was that.
Just submitted this, a personal favorite.

Ten amazing presenters and their presentations. Many different styles.

Steve Jobs, Dick Hardt, Guy Kawasaki, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lawrence Lessig, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Andy Kaufman, Rupert Everett

http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best-presentati...

Also, the 10 best that the Readers nominated. Hans Roling, Sir Ken Robinson, Al Gore, Majora Carter, John F. Kennedy, My Name is Joe?, Ze Frank, Douglas Englebart, Steve Jobs, and lastly, Crosby, Stills & Nash

http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/10/01/top-10-best-presentati...
Opera used to be great, but with the latest release, I find web sessions terminate prematurely and the browser crashes a lot. I switched back to firefox.
After reading this it struck me that no revenue model could really be complete without some statement of the level of uncertainty. In science, for example, you would never make a prediction without also stating the uncertainty in that prediction. But none of the revenue model frameworks I've seen have included uncertainty.
My cousin asked my friend what he did, and the response was as follows: “I have a startup in the advertising market.” Obviously this response told my cousin absolutely nothing, and so my cousin began to “pry” a bit… “can you tell me what the model is, how does it work?” Again, said entrepreneur sort of deflected the question: “I help take an offline process in the advertising market online.”

Well as the final response told the questioner nothing I'm not surprised..

I love talking about my projects - you just have to talk about it in a clear way!

There is no such thing as "founders" and "normals". The same scenario's would develop if the founder pressured the PHD Biologist about his research work! It's just social dynamics.
Opera has some really great features built in the browser, but it also lacks the ability to add new features via plugins.

And perhaps things have gotten better recently, but last I tried there were still sites (like my bank) that didn't work at all in Opera. And not many people are going to devote resources to Opera compatibility unless more people are using it (a real chicken-and-egg problem).

That said, I should add that I've met a few of the people from the Opera team and they were really cool. Seems like a fun place to work.
I would be very interested to know the breakdown for HN users.
This is from 1997. A lot has changed in real-time graphics over the last 13 years.
fasp-AIR: A Faster Wireless Web
SQL to MongoDB MapReduce Cheat Sheet
I agree with the concept of same thing happening in other direction...but at least "PhD" is a known vocation...easier for non PhD to classify him as "scientist, academic, Brown University, Smart, etc..."
You're right that the current Congresses have been extraordinary in their dysfunction, but a little late on your timeline for Supreme Court appointment battles: Reagan's Bork was shot down 42-58, GHWB's Thomas was confirmed 52-48, with both debates waged in the media.

Obviously I'm aware of Bork and Thomas but they are irrelevant to my point. My point is that, in general, we usually confirmed justices by a large margin. That hasn't happened for 3 appointments in a row. 2 Exceptions in the last few decades doesn't make my point any less valid.

In the times of 90-vote confirmations, horse-trading of variegated appointees just went on behind closed doors. Now that things are so fractured, a president can only get away with nominating a slate of judges all partially partisan in the same direction.

The idea that a president has to nominate a partisan set of judges is not correct. All of GW's nomiations were conservative.

It wouldn't be the constitution being amended anyway, just Senate procedural rules, but Harry Reid is never going to go for that.

No, I meant what I said when I called it a constitution amendment. 3/5 to confirm a justice should be in the Constitution. The founders failed to foresee how politicized the Court would become.
My Dad's favourite joke is this:

Man walks into Paint shop and asks for some black paint. "Sorry we only do white", says the guy behind the counter. "Not a problem", replies the man, "im on my bike".

It's great if me or my brother are there when he tells it because we instantly crack up laughing and no one else joins in :)
Will the Official Steve Jobs Biography Tell All?
These industries will use iPad.
Oh, YOU are mad?

Downvoter: there's a little more context here.
If you read the Blogspot profile of the author of this article, it looks like he lives in the USA.

That said, he makes good points. I agree that the UK and USA are face the worse economic problems, but it may take several years. Here in the USA, our leaders will do anything to push problems into the future rather than working on them.
Well... "I run a company" then. That is an understandable concept.

Or "I am a programmer, I have my own company working in X field"

The key is in the communication.
In this context you're giving a subset of a general category a name precisely because it has meaning. Some but not all art is Art because it is of higher quality. Similarly with work and Work, but separated by importance to the worker.

I think in general you'll find people name things because they have meaning.
Not at all the same thing.
Interesting insight, thanks for sharing :)
Can you build any sort of CPU or any sort of car from scratch?
I would argue that opera is more simple then any other browser available. Heres just an example. Say you want mouse guestures. In FF and Chrome you have to search for an addon in opera you just use it. Want to subscribe to an rss feed? just click it and there is no need for an external rss reader because its built in. Accidentally close the tab and need it back habit says hit Ctrl+z so you do and its back. Want to go to your normal sites? open a new tab and you see them sitting right there in your speed dial. I could go on but I will stop.

btw the 10.5 beta is the fastest browser available, even faster then chrome.
odd I had the opposite. The new FF 3.6 will not run for more then 10 mins without crashing. Even if its just idle.
In business school we were taught to incorporate uncertainty into projections and models, at the very least by including multiple scenarios. I'm surprised this isn't done in the real world as it doesn't require that much additional effort once you've set up a baseline and identified your assumptions.
Python re-write of the GISTEMP climate analysis
But how is this a unique function of the Android OS, if I might ask?
Hm, this is an interesting peek into your world view for me.

To me, it does not make sense to describe yourself as a "founder", "startup builder" or even "entrepeneur." That is not what you do. You are a founder of something, and that is what I am interested in if I ask that question.

I have no idea whether people actually say something like that, but I can certainly understand someone asking for more information if the answer to "what do you do?" is "I am a founder" or "I work at a startup" instead of "I work for Goldman Sachs." I would!

So, anyway, perhaps part of why you seem to get into the types of conversations described is the way you initially respond.
One of the biggest complaints I hear about Firefox is the startup time. I startup Firefox twice a day normally - once at work and again at home - so it's definitely an issue for me.
yea, i hear you...would be interesting to hear some non-founder accounts of their experience w this question...
Had to build a CPU from "scratch" at CMU. Of course, we were allowed to use 290x bit-slice parts. And PALs or FPGAs (we didn't use FPGAs; if you were sufficiently clever you could get the whole thing in one FPGA.) Designed our own ISA though. Had to be able to do a 16 bit multiply. Looked like a multicolor explosion of wire-wrap.

One of the other groups built a fully asynchronous machine. Ours was a single board, but theirs had a backplane (using an 80 SCSI cable.) Each unit had a value line and a ready line, so the system advanced to the next state as the parts were ready.

Happy days.
One advantage to the Caterham is that it actually comes with a roof :-p
I consider the Chrome to be the best browser (I use Windows XP) since version Beta 4, when extensions support was added. I switched from Firefox, mostly because it is considerably slower. As I see it, Chrome just out-innovated FF.
Why hack up an entire router? Surely there is a better solution for a networked light switch.
It's about 24% Chrome for my blog, which I imagine is a pretty similar audience for HN.

Chrome is outstanding. Blazing fast, instant boot, never crashes. Firefox was a slow hog for me.

What I want to know is-- How many people who work at Mozilla believe that Firefox is a better browser? How many of 'em use Chrome at home?
I've wanted to build this for my garage door for a while. I'm always paranoid that I left it open.

Wish I didn't have to rely on the internet being up, though...
My experiments in lean pricing
"Chance favours the prepared mind." (Can't remember who said it, but it is the crux of this article in many ways.)
Verizon to allow unlimited Skype calling over 3G starting next month
Introduction to the Reactive Extensions to JavaScript
Unplug the Buzzsaw Over Buzz Or, Why I Still Trust Google
I can understand this sentiment.

But I actually love to talk about what I do. The problem is that most "normals" just ask about the tip of the iceberg without really having a genuine interest. That always offends me because of how passionate I am about what I do.

I am usually teased into excitement to talk about something I love only to have the conversation changed.
I use Opera for most of the browsing, it consumes less memory and generally more manageable than anything else I used before (IE 4+, FF 1+, Chrome 1+)
To be pedantic, scheme is garbage collected, and several use a VM.

PLT already has weak references, and the author assumes the Scheme implementation already has them.

As far as I can tell, this is somewhat like a weakHashMap, except each ephemeron only handles one key value pair.
Fish out of water
System Design and Organization
I don't know what exactly was lacking from Bill's software presentations, but I really don't think it was passion about the subject matter.
One of Mozilla's focusing with Firefox 3.6 was improving the startup times (see: https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/01/21/f... http://autonome.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-perform...). I believe they're going to continue to focus on this in future too -- I remember reading that some patches improving startup times have been completed but didn't land in time for 3.6, but I don't have a citation to hand.

This matches with my personal expererience - anecdotally, Firefox feels noticably quicker both in terms of startup and rendering since updating to 3.6.
TLDR:
When asked your options are a 30 min conversation describing it to the 'normal' (yawn) or shrugging it off (looks aloof). Answer: Do both! shrug it off and extend an offer to talk about it later.

Comment:
Thats a really useful article, I was expecting basically a bitch fest for the problems he describes. But it's actually quite sensitive to both the asker and asked AND solves the problem.

A+++ would buy from again!
Interesting. Although not the point of the article, it led me to think that if the "normals" don't understand your business, maybe that should tell you something...
Making Firefox play nicely with Laptop Mode
What Content Consumers Will Pay for Online [STATS]
Are they being apologetic or did they have this planned from day-1? My theory is that they knew that this would be incredibly intrusive, but they did it this way anyways to get the necessary traction they needed to get a social product off the ground. Now that they have the exposure they need (since everyone checks gmail daily and they were on max invasion for a week) they can go back to being nice and apologetic to save their brand image.

Well played Googs.
I'll stick with firefox, it has all my extensions, and toolbars, and greasemonkey scripts that I use for work.

And to be honest I like the user experience a lot more, it's much more intuitive.

I still use chrome, since it's my tor proxied browser, but the user experience is just horrible compared to firefox.
Holy crap, look at that high number of Safari users too! Are they all Safari/Mac?
There are still a few minor niggles I have with Chrome, mostly relating to bookmarks:

- Chrome doesn't support bookmark shortcuts; I use SuperGenPass in FF as a bookmark with a shortcut of "p", so in any form, rather than needing to click the mouse, I can do Ctrl-L, p, enter

- Chrome doesn't "support" unorganized and tagged bookmarks like FF3 does. I like being able to file/search bookmarks by tags, separately from a small hierarchy of most-used bookmarks on the toolbar.

- Chrome doesn't support bookmark separators, which are a "nicety" for organizing bookmarks in folders on the toolbar. Something small like that really does help with visual recognition and hand-eye coordination.
IGotaBigAssPocket: pants designed for iPad
i think that depends on whether you're building a consumer application or an enterprise application...
Out of curiosity, what extensions do you use that you would have missed if you had switched to Chrome before beta 4?
But there's no lack of demand for light bulbs that are 10 times costlier than incandescent bulbs.
I agree, the devil's advocates irritate me the most. It's not just the combative nature of the questioning (does no one know about the other five hats of de Bono!?), it's the underlying assumption by the "advocate" that they are doing me a favour by bringing this new point of view to my attention.

In fact, they are saying the first superficial thing that comes into their head, which is pretty much the same thing every other person before them had said. If I am trying to close a sale, then great, I love a challenge. But when I am trying to relax, it is just tiring to have to run the gauntlet again without any benefits.
For the few times I have Chrome crashing, it is due to Flash... But even then, Chrome handles the thing very nicely and either the plugin is stopped, or ony one tab is broken. The rest of it being still available. Amazing !
totally agree...it's just there aren't any crystal clear one line answers...
It was funny, but that's beside the point. On any other site you wouldn't have to explain that it was tongue in cheek, and nobody would point it out.
Nice job!
I did something like this awhile ago too. I wrote a scraper that pulled all of the reviews from Pitchfork (scraping was necessary before they updated their site with rss feeds). My app currently just display a random set of reviews on each visit.

http://pitchforkd.thirtymontgomery.com

I was actually thinking about updating it to add playlist functionality. Thanks for pointing out 8tracks.com. I'll have to check it out.
The sad part is that I think a biography would be a waste, but a book on his approach to product design would be a classic.
The Myth of Efficiency
He has come a long way since this: http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/it_...
That doesn't seem very likely.

I'm sure lots of people became active users after having Buzz thrust upon them, but lots of people also went out of their way to opt-out of the service (and are unlikely to return)
It does actually support this, it's just not a bookmark, it's a "search engine".

For example, if I want to type "yc" in the address bar to get to news.yc:

1. right click address bar, select "edit search engines"

2. click the add button

3. give it name like "news.yc", keyword is "yc" url is http://new.ycombinator.com. The "%s" in the url isn't required.

When I imported my bookmarks from firefox, it did this automatically. It took me forever to figure out how to add new ones.

edit: formatting
Lawrence Lessig does presentations like this [1]; I've always been a fan.

A great example of this type of presentation done well is Cal Handerson's keynote at Djangocon in 2008 [2], "Why I Hate Django". Previous discussion on this presentation here [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig#Lessig_Method

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305630
I think this may fall into the "chocolate covered broccoli" thing that was mentioned but I've always thought this would be a good idea for studying: make a fun turned based RPG that asks you study questions whenever you attack or defend and give you a small boost if you answer correctly.

It would be cool as a web based RPG you could play from anywhere, or an extension to Moodle (http://moodle.org).

I could ramble on and on about the ideas I've had for this but I'll cut myself off here.
An article I wrote recently got on Hacker News. Here's the segmented referral traffic from HN to my blog: http://i.imgur.com/7gnH0.png
Your comment is a nice summary why exactly Opera will continue to win over nerds but not moms. Bravo! :-)
Ask HN Freelancers: How do you bill your work?
I've just begun freelancing and am now landing my first few larger gigs. Projects are around 50 - 100+ hours, so I'm not comfortable with my previous check-at-the-end strategy.

What's the standard for this? Milestones? Charge-by-feature? Get paid for every X hours of work? Contracts to guarantee the project completion?

Also, have any of you taken stock options as part of freelance work? Is this common?
I haven't seen theories of "philosophical anthropology" independently verified by MRI very often, so it's very interesting to see this -- confirming that all human beings experience humor and find it in incongruity, and thus, among other things, that we learn where a civilization finds a lot of incongruities by looking at the subject matter of its jokes. (It's also refreshing to see something like this with science, not culturally insular pop psychology, behind it.)

So, I'd predict that a civilization with more, stronger stresses should have simpler forms of humor, and one with an easier mental life should range further afield in its search for laughs. This looks like it's confirmed in the contrast between, say, Monty Python and Seinfeld on the one hand, and Restoration English, classical Greek, and Golden Age Spanish comedy on the other; does anyone know enough about East Asian or, say, Aztec (properly Mexica) humor to be able to say whether the pattern holds there, too?

This also suggests that LOLcats reveal intensifying pressures in American social life. Of course, such pressures do exist, so the question is whether we can plausibly suspect causation...
Kind of like Brad Fitzpatrick's Android proximity garage door opener? http://brad.livejournal.com/2394220.html
Sometimes helpful, but no one should use this method as authoritative. There are plenty of wrong constructions in English (or any other language) that are more popular than the correct ones. Using an "old style" grammar and/or dictionary is still more accurate.
eh, there's one in walking distance to the mountain view 'hacker dojo' - silicon valley is, well, kindof suburbia.
I'm wondering if the model shouldn't give the United States something of a host-nation boost. Vancouver is only about 30 miles from the U.S. border.

History should be able to tell us that. When the olympics were held in Turin (where travel is easy through Europe), did the surrounding countries get higher medal counts than the model would have predicted?
Google Buzz and the Open* Web
Not operable exclusively from the keyboard, and it ignores your window manager and draws its own window decorations.
I can only give you my opinion which may not be the best suggestion but something that benefits children or the environment. I think it would be great if others had suggestions on what charities they'd like to see it go to.
As someone who isn't likely to be an enterpreneur, I only want to know about the tip of the iceberg at first because I don't know if the rest of the iceberg is interesting or not.

If you're designing a series of games for the iPhone, that's kind of cool, and I can relate to that. If your startup is writing accounting software to analyze discrepancies in employee lunch spending when away from the office, my eyes might start glazing over after 45 seconds.
Nice post, so true. I'm going to leave a comment over on your blog too. I was just thinking about this last night and wrote a post about it:

http://www.petelatshaw.com/post/392030379/your-startup-idea-...

I think maybe the "normals", who don't read Hacker News every day and aren't immersed in startup culture, just aren't used to visualizing products. It's not second nature for them to consider the usefulness of a product to a market they are not personally a part of.

That said-- I agree with your conclusion... you never know when someone can share an insight or help, so don't hold back!

Pete
You know, I have a very similar attitude toward Facebook's Beacon. I figured, there's no way they didn't see it coming. In fact I can point to an article that did, in fact, see it coming, before it happened.

I never forgave Facebook, because I'm assuming their apology was disingenuous (and indeed they continue to do things that are disrespectful of their users, so I feel like I made a decent call). Boycotting Google is way harder, not sure what to think. Is this as bad as Beacon? Was it as obvious that it was going to blow up in their face?
Open Source Open World
HTC Desire Review
"you can do it too" should be rephrased as "you can do it too if you have my kind of connections". Good advice for hustling things along, but only if you are already solidly "in the game".
"It is feasible Google did this on purpose too."

Hey, if they're gonna keep up with Facebook, they got to catch up with Facebook's disregard for their user's privacy.