skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For example, I'm typing this on a Lenovo brand thinkpad; It was Assembled in China by a Chinese company.

Can we make an argument that Walmart is a middleman between China and American consumers?

"Everyday, Low, Low Prices"
Perhaps that's a reason to have a non-technical (or at least non-programmer) co-founder; different perspectives, different life histories, different work histories.
iDog

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html
What a horror story. What sort of program offers $100k to that many groups and doesn't follow through? "Whoops, we were $500k short."

That goes beyond just being embarrassing.
That's not what I said, please to be not putting words in my mouth? kthx.

You are trying to one-up illumin8 to support your argument that sweatshop labor was good. This is the gist of your argument: Your parents suffered even more and said it was great, so illumin8's argument is invalid.

Straw man - "sweatshop" labor produces a whole lot more than mere trinkets and souvenirs - they are, in this case, producing valuable electronics in great demand elsewhere.

I think we can live without the 4th or 5th shoddily crafted electronic mouse or hand-held gaming device so someone can profit by a couple of cents.
Hmmm, I'm not sure I agree that every popular platform "devolves" into gaming if you're implying that gaming is a step backward.

I have fond memories playing games on my computer before computing was ever consider popular. Gaming got me into programming, not visa-versa, and even tech startups (my first real taste was a gaming startup). And, I'd argue that gaming has been a significant contributor to the speed at which modern computing has been adopted by consumers. Honestly, if it wasn't for games during the 80's and 90's, my upgrade cycle would have been significantly longer.
I switched to Ubuntu as my main OS a few months ago. I still run a WinXP VM so I can run a few windows apps and Photoshop. It's an ideal situation, I definitely recommend it.
I really like the idea of not being too concerned with a problem seeming initially too small. A funny thing I've found about small problems is that they are almost always connected to other problems. If you can solve somebody's small problem really well, they'll be much more likely to give you a shot at their bigger problems.
Authors@Google: Randall Munroe of xkcd
What is the total value of the search market? What percentage does ask own?
> That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

That's an interesting collection of suburb streets because they're counter-examples to the claims made by urbanites about suburbs. (With the exception of University, they have restaurants, grocery stores, and so on within walking distance. Since University goes through downtown PA, one might guess that there's a grocery store within a block or two - which there is.)

I assumed that the urbanites making those claims were making them out of ignorance. If those are streets that they experience, my assumption is wrong.

> What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

I can see that the houses are packed close together, where there are houses. I can see the apartments. I can see the street life.

Note that most workers experience some aspects of the pedestrian life at lunch. They walk by the restaurants, the neighborhood grocery stores, and nightclubs.

Not everyone thinks that having a couple of nightclubs within walking distance is a good thing. If you do, great - you should live near them.

My point is that there's nothing wrong with someone else having different priorities.
This is just my gut feeling, but I tend to believe that the massive percentile of inactive twitter users is a strong indication that most people are looking for a different platform.
The Robot Chicken guide to Apple's developer relations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=BwF7n8WyOoU&feature=rela...
Sound like bullshit. Apple didn't mandate the use of XCode, they mandated the use of C, C++, or Objective C. They also said you can't use a layer that generates C, C++, or Objective C.

If all they want is for you to use their compiler/linker, etc. then there should be no reason you can't use a tool that compiles actionscript, javascript, lua, etc down to C code which you then compile with Apple's compiler.

Face it, there are no credible explanations for the new TOS other than simply blocking a competitor (ie, Adobe) from having access to your platform.

Frankly, I'm more than a little surprised to see such a pro-free market crowd as HN so supportive of the new iPhone TOS.
Because bit.ly took on a round of funding which probably made them too expensive for Twitter to buy.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/01/bit-ly-1-5-million/

Would you pay millions of dollars for an URL shortner or build your own?
"Ripped Carbon out"? ... well, yes, but they gave people many years of warning, and still support it in 32-bit mode in 10.6.
Oh, I saw this film! See if they are prime numbers!!
They could be running the iPhone OS as a hardware-virtualized VM!
would this warrant a redesign of the t-shirts? "make something people want" -> "make something you want"
The free markets argument in favor of the new TOS: it's a free market, and Apple should be able to ship whatever product they want.
I'm not sure what problem this is trying to solve? 400lbs seems low for warehouse use..
Application/Interview?: I'm going to make something I want.

Demo day?: Make something people want.

Acqusition?: I made something people wanted.
I wish I could just "extend my sleep to 10 hours a night". However tired I am, I don't seem to be able to sleep more than 7, sometimes 8 hours tops - I just wake up naturally even if there are no sounds, distractions etc.
I don't have problems with having a 1.5-2 hrs nap during the day, but even if I have no naps and am very tired by evening, and go to sleep when I feel like going to sleep - I'll be awake in 7-8 hours and won't be able to sleep more.

My wife, on the other hand, is quite happy to sleep up to 11 hours whenever she gets a chance ...
It's a problem, but unsolvable in China's current state. This is a problem that cannot be repaired by the United States.
The "toy" aspect may also be related to finding an under-served market - it may be a "toy" to someone is because he or she may be unaware of a huge need for the product.
Apple does not support any development environment other than XCode on an Intel Mac.

Thus, if you want to do Objective-C development, your best bet is to get your hands on a Mac. Barring that, you could rig up Hackintosh, or Hackintosh VM in VMWare/Virtualbox.

If you are willing to consider some zanier options, there's a open source project that's attempting to create a portable iPhone toolchain: http://code.google.com/p/iphone-dev/.

If you're willing to forgo Objective-C, and try cross-compiled development, there's stuff like PhoneGap, xmlvm, etc.
Does anyone know why they haven't implemented the ability to insert good old-fashioned hyperlinks? Links embedded in the text would save some characters in the message and improve legibility.
has the org been flattened in the past 4 years?
They also announced their own android app. Photo sharing is likely next.
Keep in mind this was written almost 4 years ago. How many reorgs has Office been through since then?
I am originally from China and have lived in the United States for 20 years
Squad is a web-based collaborative code editor.

Looks nice.
What sort of program offers $100k to that many groups and doesn't follow through?

Not to be facetious, but: A program which doesn't have as much money as they're offering people.

The founders of Bootup Labs put some of their own money in, but they're raising money (or trying, at least) from VCs for the rest. They're paying themselves [EDIT: or not -- see reply from dannyrobinson below] from the $50k/startup management fee, not just from expected future profits.

Are there any other startup accelerators which do things this way? I'm not aware of any.
One word: Sharecropping.

This is my big concern with the current trend of turning websites into platforms. Any share-cropped idea that would be profitable to do in-house and is in line with the business goals will eventually be done in-house.
World - Songs from independent labels will be available for purchase in EUR. Unfortunately, no major labels license songs on a world-wide basis. Countries not covered by the rest of the regional stores will use this store.

Well, in that case, bittorrent would still be the best distribution channel for me. I hope someone working at music labels realizes soon that there are people like me who are willing to pay a fair price for music but would be forced to download it illegally because no legal channels are available. Not that I download music these days given that I am so sick of these guys and their bullshit.
It's hard to justify working on just an idea (rather than a startup) full time though. And not working full time undermines your ability to execute on the idea (since you're slower, less committed).
I think I'll have to disagree.

Organic Startups have one huge advantage: They're significantly easier to build.

Organic Startups have one huge disadvantage: They're significantly easier to build.

The space for people-like-me startups is severely crowded due to an over-abundance of people scratching their own itch. On the other hand, markets that are the diametric opposite of silicon-valley-tech are ripe for the picking by any halfway competent team. Look at Club Penguin, acquired for $700M, all because they focused an "unsexy" niche.

The second type of startup is harder to build but it's not that much harder to build. More importantly, it's variably harder to build.

Some people are going to be naturals at it and not see what the big fuss is all about. Others will never have the necessary social intelligence. But the vast, vast majority of people will suck at it to begin with but then get better the more they try.

I've always been a big proponent of taking the road less taken. While every other uber-hacker is learning erlang & haskell, why not learn how to become better at designing for people who are not yourself?
Unfair question: I'm a developer so I would very likely to build my own :) But from a business perspective I would definitely consider buying it; Bitly in particular has a lot of valuable technology that Twitter could monetize on.

Bitly seems to be the default in these discussions and it's clearly the market leader, but there are other companies to consider. I think even starting discussions with another company would force Bitly's asking price down considerably. They may talk about how Twitter is _only_ 30% to 40%* of their traffic, but no business wants to lose those kind of numbers.

* http://www.businessinsider.com/google-and-twitter-wanted-to-...
MS internal system. Shows you a graph of who people report to.
The Tyranny of Dating Choice
Yes. I meant "penultimate". I did not mean "ultimate". Nor did I mean "antepenultimate". I happen to love that triad of words (three years of Latin and two of Attic Greek in high school) and am sometimes accused over over-using them. I do use them with accuracy, though. The contract was the second to last reason added to the heap. The straw that broke the camel's back was a different matter.
I can relate to that. I get enormous personal value out of my little startup, most recently yesterday:

http://blog.swfstats.com/post/Trickochet-launched-today-or-w...
From @bootuplabs on twitter:

> HI all: we're moving up the blog post we were going to put up tomorrow to this eve - please stand by
I second this, Vancouver is really sorry and we hope you will come back and visit.
In the Pixar film "Ratatouille", there is an amazing visual sequence where Remy the cutely digitally-rendered rat runs through the hidden spaces between houses/walls/interior.
According to Andy Singleton, CEO of Assembla.com, he said:

We did offer free private workspaces in 2006-2008. We didn't have a clear business model at the time. We started out with a goal to get to know programmers who worked on distributed teams. We supported this for three years, working nights and weekends. However, it turned out that the demand increased exponentially, and our costing and admin costs were out of control. So, we had to cancel some of the free services and ask our private users to pay a small subscription fee.

This time, we have been much more careful with the business model. Some of the things that are different are:
* The package is different. In this free repo package, you do not get all tools. We have many opportunities to sell our premium tools to serious projects. And, we have more and better tools to sell.
* We are using affiliate sponsors - essentially advertising. We are offering cloud hosting services to our users, and we make affiliate fees when we sell them. In the future, we will offer other cloud services that you can add to your "code in the cloud."
* We have a profitable subscription business that pays for our admin and support team. We only have to make sure that we have a high quality service that attracts a few more of the customers that appreciate the complete service and pay for it.
Wouldn't a marriage sort compare different keys as time went on? It would start sorting on "hair color" at the start, then "wants kids" towards the end?

;)
Key point is that it has to fit in 1 SMS message, that's where the whole 140 character thing comes from.
I can see Mark's commits. It's just much easier to ask him what it is when it's 2am and I'm not VPN'd into our corporate network.
Also, speculators add value to the market because they push prices toward the true values.

Like what the people flipping houses did to housing prices?
Is there software that does what we are seeing in that image?
Not all hackers have the same itches. Also, easier to build != less valuable.

The other thing is that there is a continuum between yourself and random people: yourself - family - friends - coworkers - acquaintances - random people.

And so even if hackers had similar needs/wants (still doubtful to me), it's very unlikely that their family and friends would all also have similar needs.

Curiously, PG has mentioned this before in a few essays, but for some reason omits it here.
New site knows what your'e singing
How did the Japanese empower the KMT? When the Japanese left Taiwan after WW2 the incumbent Chinese government (KMT) took over. How did they actively help the KMT in any way?

I already explained this. They appropriated land, crops, and positions of power from people like my relatives. When the bulk of the KMT took over shortly after Japan left, they didn't return the land to previous owners. The wealth was never redistributed back.

When you have $1, it is much easier to be taken advantage of than when you have $1000.

Keep in mind also, we did invest in extremely lucrative industries, including the at-the-time burgeoning electronics manufacturing industry. The expertise in semiconductors developed via production industries

Many of those industries were "bootstrapped" by families who had money and never worked in a sweatshop.

No offense, but I think you've really got a hate-on for the Japanese, because a huge portion of what you seem to have against the Japanese make much more sense when pinned (IMHO rightly) against the KMT.

How you manage to completely overlook the Japanese role in this is completely baffling. I give up trying to explain to you the connection which really isn't very difficult to understand.
Qwerty, Dvorak and Muscle Memory
"...indisputably superior to H.264"

Is that really the case? Indisputably? I'd like to learn more about that.

Also, even if VP8 takes over Ogg Theora's position as a competitor to H.264 as a web standard, it will still face some problems.

One is that in moving to HTML5, many videos being served through flash are already encoded as H.264 and could be served through HTML5 without re-encoding. VP8 would still require conversion for a full transition away from flash to be made.

Another problem is IE support for VP8... hopefully they'll be willing to support it in a timely manner.
One would thing that it would be standard practice that they give you a term sheet on acceptance. As soon as you sign the term sheet, money should be transfered. At the end of the day they are investing in your company, and term sheets are typical. This is how YC works.

Sorry to hear about your experience.
That's probably why Twitter has been visiting links in tweets recently: http://www.jongales.com/blog/2010/04/14/whats-twitterbot0-1/
Investors with no perspective will definitely believe that the "twitter ecosystem" is a good idea. In reality, what an awful concept .. Let's spend a few million dollars building a feature, and calling it a company. Because if they do that, they can leverage their home field advantage to crush you. Sort of like how Apple kills anybody who builds an iphone app that they would like to build themselves oneday.
"To finish every project I start"
I'll bite. I've worked several years doing .NET and web development. Sure, desktop Windows development with C# in Visual Studio is a really, really nice experience.

But shoot me dead if I ever have to do a real, actual, useful, standards-compliant website in Windows with Visual Studio. I'll take me screen, shell, Vim, Python, and SSH over it any day.
It's no different to Firefox/IE though. Nothing wrong with being relatively better, either.
Another point that's important to raise is that, if you have aspirations for your product to grow in number of users, it also has to grow in diversity of users.

At some point, the institution as a whole has to gain the ability to design for others or be relegated into a ghetto (cf: Crossing the chasm).

Now, a reasonable argument could be made that by the time this happens, it'll be possible to hire talent to help you scale, diversity wise. It's certainly possible but I wouldn't call it easy.

OTOH, I thinking baking in the assumption that you-are-not-your-user at the very early stages of the corporate culture makes that transition process significantly easier.
Really? I mean to me, it seems like Twitter is really holding all the cards here.

Unfortunately, it seems like an acquisition of Bitly would really amount to charity because if they wanted, they could easily come out with their own competing service which would likely be adopted simply because it's easier to use. Presumably it would be right there on your twitter page or better yet, automatic.
Link shortening on Twitter only makes sense when it is provided by third-parties (to fit inside Twitter's length restrictions) or when tweets are being consumed over SMS (due to SMS length limits). If Twitter only shortens links when sending them through an SMS gateway, then this will be a very positive change over what 3rd-parties are able to provide. However, if Twitter's link shortening service continues to inconvenience all users just so they can try to build an analytics business around that inconvenience, then that will be a clear sign that Twitter isn't interested in optimizing the user experience--which they claimed was the reason for taking over the roles currently being occupied by 3rd-party software and services.

Also, if they're goal is top optimize UX then they'll need a very short domain name like 3.ly or j.mp. The domains suggested in this article don't make any sense for a link shortener since they're twice as long as necessary.
SaudiCommerce.Com Sell Sinful ( s-xl) Long Sleeved T-Shirt
Ruby Metaprogramming Example: Sort on attribute for objects stored in an array
Jamie, I have a friend at Digg who is trying to contact you. They're looking for designers, if you're interested in a job.
When I was in school we had a program (I think it was this: http://www.dynamicgeometry.com/) that let you do pretty much exactly that. We were never that ambitious, but it was pretty cool. I remember using it's animation functions to create some limited spirographs by tracing out lines defined by pairs of points moving around circles and things like that.
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okay, sorry to have doubted you.

but i have to say, this is no way to win friends and influence people. i read your account at basiscraft.com, and you seem to have a real chip on your shoulder. this makes me think that the other people in this drama might also have a story worth hearing.
yes but is it worth the illegibility and extra step of shortening? how many of those sms recipients make use of the link by retying it in a browser? if there is much of a use case why not have special handling for it?
It also kinda sucks. Past loading the page fast, it is just hard to use, and everything renders so poorly. Proof of concept at this point.
I don't believe we've heard anyone calling for the government to step in and force them to. But people are free to express why they think its a bad idea, for them and for Apple (in the long term), just as you are free to disagree with them.
Thanks for the advice. I am planning to use a Python/Django/MySQL/nginx/EC2 stack initially.
s/XCode/Xcode/g
Good point about the snapshots! Also given that getting the dual-boot setup correctly with Windows 7 and my "FakeRAID" hard drives already consumed a weekend I wish I had thought of the VM route sooner..
You raise a good point; machine guns weigh a lot less then 400lbs.
I have sometimes wondered if I could sell sysprof (http://www.sysprof.com). It's an open source profiler for Linux, and as such anyone can just download it for free.

However, I could see embedded shops being willing to pay for it just so that (a) they have someone to call for support, and (b) it will continue to be developed.
I wonder if it will replace Google for real time news?
Why did bootup labs offer funding that is almost 7 to 10 times the 'industry' standard? It's disappointing that an incubator close to home really wasn't.
A.D. XV: Content Provider Iterator
When will it integrate Answering questions right into the site, I can't wait to answer all the questions it is finding.
HN looks better on Opera Mini compared to Safari. On first load I no longer needed to fiddle with the zoom level. It also wraps comments to fit the width of the screen when zooming in.
Also the news classification thing is kinda cool.