skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have a rich platform that is network and context agnostic. If they earn a strong position in the IM world, they will have a plethora of ways to leverage their position: business services (thing online support for consumer facing companies), branded experiences, and yes, advertising.

I think they're well on their way to have a firm position in the space. They've got a great product and Time Warner is investing, which is tellingly great for Meebo / tellingly ominous for AOL.
Another pointless troll post. Takes trolling to a completely new level.
Best advice ever: Put a single paragraph of content on each web page! You can increase your ad impressions 10-fold!
Well, all "things" are made up of smaller "things"... Because the DJ is made up of smaller things, it's not subject to any growth rules? I'm not sure why you'd draw a line there.

The question that Buffett is addressing is, "Is there as much potential for growth among these companies (and the economy as a whole) as there was 100 years ago?" His answer is no. While I'm not convinced, I don't think it's a "dumb" conclusion.
Adobe is already one step ahead. They just announced the "open screen project", which opens up the swf and flv file formats. This also lets people create their own swf runtimes.

Nitot seems to be a little disconnected. He mentions "In HTML 5 there will be video and audio; you won't need Flash for video and audio". However, video and audio are only a small subset of sites that require flash. I think there is a general need for an optimized runtime, especially for things like web-based games and rich presentations, and HTML has a long way to go in supporting these.
I am pretty sure that lovd is db agnostic. And it uses no proprietary or "non-standard" plugins. Can someone tell me what a "non-standard" plugin is? For that matter, what is an "esoteric" plugin? This smells like fud me.
heh that just fails though. I use the DVD drive in my macbook maybe once or twice a year. Same with the USB ports.
Saving up for a MacBook air...
The Norvig quote is very misleading. I thought he was both forthright and realistic about what SW and sw mean today, and to Google especially, during the Q&A of that talk.
Rock, Paper, Twitter
I don't know about you, but i've gotten this advice tens of times, at least.
I didn't say it was a dumb conclusion, but just that the particular argument made to support it was dumb.

In particular, I qualified with Now there may be reasons not to expect similar returns in this century as compared to the last, but this is certainly not one of them. and This is not a discussion about whether we are actually in for similar, higher, or lower returns.
"And dammit foosball doesn't play itself."

I dunno. With some spare parts and a few hundred lines of code, Trevor Blackwell could probably make it happen.
Berkshire Hathaway 2007 Annual Report, pg1: Overall Gain – 1964-2007 400,863%

That being said, I agree with your underlying point: bigger things are harder to move % wise. However, when you consider the overall economy, it isn't as clear cut as Google (and Google isn't that clear cut!). There are so many factors to consider, including population growth, rate of integration of certain populations into the "developed world," resource constraints, innovation growth %, etc. etc.

The Dow should increasingly roughly move at a small multiple of the growth of the global economy. So if one says you shouldn't expect the same returns, one is essentially saying that the global economy is going to slow down as a whole relative to the past century. I just haven't seen any compelling evidence for this claim. Sure, I have seen wild speculation and isolated scenarios, but I have not seen any well-thought out arguments that really attempt to capture all the factors in a probabilistic fashion.

The best evidence I have seen is that developed countries tend to have slower growth rates after a certain point. But this is a recent trend, not universal, and of course not perpetually written in stone.
I am from the East Coast,. Atlantic Canada wasn't left out, there just aren't any entries in that region yet. It is available to be added to however.
I am about to complete my CE degree. I chose the program because 1. my school has a weak CS program (which is part of the business dept.) and 2. I was already familiar with programming out of high school, so I wanted to get some hardware experience. I have found CE to be a nice middle ground between CS and EE, with an emphasis on engineering principles that you probably wouldn't find in a CS program. I also learned a lot more math than I would have otherwise. If you find your CE program lacking in theory, you can always take a few elective courses.

As a Bachelors degree, I think CE is a great compromise between CS and EE. I don't believe you would have any trouble pursuing a graduate degree in CS or EE, given that choice.
Could it be that he's fibbing, knowing that his words will affect the market in some way or another?
A useful link is to this transcript of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee:

http://talis-podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.htm...

And particularly this passage:

Paul [the interviewer]:
06:05	OK, sounds good. Going a little bit broader than those questions then, back in 2001 in that Scientific American article, you and the other authors painted a very broad grand vision of where the Semantic Web could take us. Did you think we'd be closer to that seven years on?

Tim:	Well, for one thing that article was, I think, too sci-fi. I think, that really what we have... the message has been... it was looking too far into the future. It imagined the Semantic Web was deployed, and then people had made all kinds of fairly AI-like systems which run on top of that.
Basic hits 40
This is true, but unfortunately only really with the iPhone. Flash Lite works on all of the other handsets that matter right now. And its really Apple keeping the gate closed on Adobe, not the other way around.

I agree though, widespread mobile adoption of Flash (and any other browser plugin) will be seriously slowed while Apple does not let them in the iPhone. The thought of having to make completely different javascript and flash versions of a web app is not very attractive when you could just focus on a javascript version that works on both.
Psystar OpenPC: $550 Leopard PC NOT Sold By Apple
4% isn't in any way an unreasonable share for a first or second hire, especially when they're asking you to take no salary.
This types of products always fail because the more you dumb it down the less control you have and the less like what you want you will get. Thats ignoring the performance issues and design flaws non-professionals will make. I've worked on a number of very expensive consulting jobs where my only role was to fix an in house application that Jenny from sales wrote and the company now depends on.

I just listened to the short video intro as well as I suspect it will have the target audience(non-programmers) saying "WTF?". Iceberg makes it easy to connect your objects to your forms. Great but will your audience know what an object is? Will they understand why this is useful?
Since the title of the post is "You" have 7 years to learn Mandarin, I'm going to assume that the title is not referring to the Chinese.
I think I know what Warren Buffet was trying to say. There has been an equity premium in the capital markets for a long, long time. Stocks have tended to return more than most other asset classes even after adjusting for risk. That equity premium remained in place for so long because most investors didn't even realize that it was there; essentially they thought that stocks would be more risky than they really turned out to be.

Now that the equity premium is more widely recognized and understood, traders have mostly arbitraged it away. So if present trends continue for the next 92 years then stocks may not return much more than bonds, real estate, commodities, etc. (At least not after you adjust for the actual risk.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_premium_puzzle
Out of curiosity (as an East Coaster and StartupNorth reader), where on the East Coast are you originally from?
the paper was published in the 1970s but the device itself has been fabricate in Hp labs so there is a very good chance that they got a provisional patent on this. They are probably working on a full patent at this time.
It sounds more like a dig on their programming experience.
Summary: invest in an index fund.

It was pretty cool of the Google v.p. to organize investment seminars. Also interesting to read their list of presenters--the Googleplex is definitely on another planet.
I'm having difficulty understanding exactly what it does... And I'm a technical person.

If your product does a better job of being simple, you can beat them.
Any significant 'raise' will require you to either change jobs, or to get a new position within the current company that suddenly takes on a lot more responsibility, and even that will limit you to maybe 10%.

Get a bit of experience and start shopping around, that's how you'll know what you're worth.

Note that the real value of a salary is almost entirely dependent on your location and cost of living.
Where did you find this information on Delaware's site? I'd like to look it up for the company I work for.
10 Tips To Master Google AdWords
WOW!!

Here's adding a few more billions to goog's revenue.
I hate NYT for requiring me to register and login to their site. I have created about 30 logins and I always forget them anytime I use a new browser, or am at a new location, after a fresh install, new computer, whatever.

F you, NYT. I don't read any of your crap because of it.
Our next app is using Flash. Another one goes that way..
Who says you have to invest in Dow Jones' market during the 21st century? I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to get a 5.3% return in a more emerging market like, say, India or China.
For the record: It just occured to me that, with memristors, we would be able to implement large parts of the computational characters of the future directly in hardware. Which would really be swell.
This is long overdue. The fact that we're still tracking and basing TV ratings and buys on 300k people in 2007 is absurd. Finally we have accountability, immediacy, and a common denominator to integrate ad campaigns against.
I'd agree, the average is 50 but any decent grad should be able to grab 60-65
I was trying to satarize all the people elsewhere complaining about the last paragraph. As you can see, I am not a very funny writer.

I like the post very much. His point about Lotus taking over MSFT reminded me of Jamie Zawinski's story about Collabra taking over Netscape:

"Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"

"To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

"And then they went off into the weeds so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". (So yeah, 3.0 didn't just seem like the bugfix patch-release for 2.0: it was.)"

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
How Much is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?
Focusing on permanent features in both real estate and business - (37signals)
I work in finance. This is well put. :)
For Meebo to really monetize all their traffic they'll have to start extracting information from conversations. Google and Facebook already do this to an occasionally creepy effect, notice the content of your talk/messages and your ads are often identical.

They'd be better off providing this demographic information to a third party advertiser than trying to sell anything on their own platform.

I love Meebo, and use it every day, but there's no way I'm going to click an ad in an IM window. As soon as AIM started throwing ads up I ditched their client and went with GAIM(pidgin now), I'd do the same thing with Meebo if they started plastering crap blinking ringtone ads all over.
He doesn't seem to be taking into account new markets that might soon exist. We had TV's, space travel, the Internet, Y Combinator and wireless communication in the 1900's alone!
This is an interesting area of study, but I don't see how it concludes that bonds should do as well as stocks if the premium is truly arbitraged away. That is, if the premium is really gone, then it seems one should still expect stocks to do better than bonds because they make up a faster part of the economy’s growth curve relative to bonds.

Yes, they are riskier investments. But that is why you buy and hold them for the whole century (or at least as long as you can so the day to day risk smooths out a bit).
Nielsen Launches TotalWeb - Cross Platform Internet Measurement
Cool, the product I work on made hacker news.
Touché, it was a bad example.
I totally agree that the use of all those ifs is bad. That said a switch statement will be faster than the code you posted(Though you were thinking in another language when your wrote your snippit methinks) if speed is your concern.
Yahoo Buzz Introduces Widgets and RSS Feeds to Take On Digg
$30k + $1300/month rent?? Dang... Are other countries an option for you?
Live Search : New Product Search gives you more options
Charlottetown -- Grew up and started my first startups there.
I've never used the product (I've never considered Outlook an acceptable mail client, and I haven't had Windows on the desktop in over 10 years), so I can't say. They seem like smart guys willing to evolve--I think it's hard to over-estimate the importance of the big market+rapid evolution in building a really big business. Email is a big market. Whether they've hit on a big need yet, is questionable--I don't feel an urge to install Outlook in order to be able to use it, but I'm not the target market. But they are evolving rapidly, so if they find that killer need before they run out of runway, they'll do fine.

A lot of folks over-estimate the value of consumer users and greatly under-estimate the value of commercial users. Xobni may be a product for commercial users. In fact, I suspect it probably is. Monetizing those kinds of users is much easier if you provide value, and you only have to sign on a few of them to make the business make sense. I hope they'll be careful not to get too caught up in the Web 2.0 "hai guyz, can has viral adopshun plz? kthxbai" stuff. It's tempting when you're in the industry in the valley to fall for the blogs and press saying that the future is in X (where X is some combination of: social networking, locality-based mobile services, etc. but universally consumer apps, because those are the ones that get lots of readers when the blogs and press talk about them), but there are many futures. And businesses buying useful products and services is one of them.
Thanks! I see an "Atlantic Canada" option has been entered.

You might want to add in a few other population centres (Quebec City springs to mind) and break "Atlantic Canada" out into separate cities (Halifax folks aren't likely to meet up with those in St. John's any time soon).

Even if a region doesn't have any entries, a new visitor is likely to check their current location first. Seeing "No listings yet!" is much better than the "This isn't for you!" impression given by leaving a region out.
This is a really good essay that I read long ago. My view is... you got nothing to worry about. Between how hard Chinese is to learn, and the eagerness of Chinese to learn English (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/28/080428fa_fact_...) and the fact that even at current rates of growth it'll take decades for China to catch up means English will be the default international language for a long time yet.
Are you saying that $30K is like $40K after taxes? It'd be closer to $55K, I think. Taxes are insane in the US (though nothing like northern Europe).
In 2005, I had two offers upon finishing my master's: one in Austin for $61K and one in the Dallas area for $64K.

My officemate took an offer in Baltimore for $75K-ish, I think.
I would say that after a few years, even if you went to a top-flight school, no one cares. The only lasting benefit is the collection of connections that you made while you were there.
Sounds to me like prime motivation for a startup. If you're not getting paid much, you have more motivation to try something a little risky to improve your lot in life.
As the 5th member that's pretty low. Last year I was offered 1.5% and would have been the 12th employee at a company that had been around just under a year, the only reason I didn't take it was the salary was too low to live any kind of half-enjoyable life. Now of course the company has about 35 employees and they seem to be doing well, although they're in a saturated market and I can't imagine them fairing very well in an economic depression. At this point I'll only kick myself if they get acquired and my 1.5% is suddenly worth upper 6 to low 7 figures.

If you're to be the 5th and crucial member, I'd fight for more or don't bother. The fact is most startups don't get acquired and you aren't going to get rewarded for your 80 hour weeks and below market salary - but you will have learned a lot and you'll probably have less hair.
Looking at this thread, I think it would be very useful to link comments on news.yc to disqus (so they show up on the blog post). I'm sure the disqus guys can do that.
"there will be a lot more people going into CS as a major"

Sadly, increasing quantity will probably have little impact on increasing quality.
Ok, I'll name it: my damn knee joints.
Just out of curiosity, do you not think every fanboy would say this?
9 Reasons People are Leaving Yahoo!
So it’s obviously no surprise that Yahoo is in trouble right now and people are leaving in droves.
Next time that happens, just clear your browser cache (including cookies), and reload the page; you'll see the full article without logging in.

And there is, of course, this: http://www.bugmenot.com
iPhone's keyboard is terrible. I can name 100 phones with better keypads, because they have QWERTYs with tactile responses.

I too have decent experience with plenty of notebooks and find the MBP to be lacking in many areas. Maybe I'm stupid?
As a developer and an end-user, I don't like anything that requires a plugin, and I feel that is the consensus among everyone but desktop developers.

Well written AJAX & Java just work better and don't require some annoying plugin, download, or upgrade.

And on a sidenote, if you're on a Mac pay attention to CPU and memory usage anytime the slightest amount of flash is being used on a page, it skyrockets, totally inefficient for no particular reason. It seems SLIGHTLY better in Windows but it's still a total resource hog.
McCarthy 91 function
Try rowing or cross-country skiing instead of running. Much easier on the knees. It'll probably help your joints.
Looks like they gamed the system.
No Git support. No sale. Next?
It's pretty impressive of Fred to talk openly about Microsoft being evil. Very few VCs would do that, because they wouldn't want to alienate such a powerful partner and/or potential acquirer for the startups they fund.

Founders: this is the kind of VC you want on your side.
In fact, you can use any fab to make these things right now

Whoa. I didn't expect to hear that.
I think they just applied the same marketing there and nobody ever challenged them on it after they achieved ubiquity. That's why I think they're vulnerable to their own tactics there.
There may well be reason to conclude that there is less potential for growth -- the problem is that his reasoning for making that conclusion is based on the absolute value of the Dow index, which is what is dumb.
John McCarthy has made 19,751 posts to USENET
I'm not really clear on how you think this whole 'fanboy' thing works.
Do you think I have been brainwashed by Apple? You think I only bought an Apple to be in the 'in' crowd?

No. I bought a MacBook, thought it was fantastic compared to all that I had had before, and kept using it. I played with an iPhone in a shop, and for the first time, thought to myself "wow. I would actually use the browser and email on this phone", so I bought one.

I'm not arguing this to persuade you that Apple products are actually good, I'm arguing because by labeling people 'fanboys' you're effectively saying they have no clue. It's offensive.

You obviously don't like Apple. You've made it clear you hate things like font smoothing ;) That's your choice, but labeling people 'fanboys' is just lazy.

Arguing any more is pointless. It's like you calling me a fascist.
Adobe - Open Screen Project - Compete with Apple and Googles
does look awesome, perhaps it will play into affiliates hands though - as google probably doesn't have a quality score for it yet ..
I've heard a similar BS line before "Oh, here's 100,000 shares, but we can't tell you the total number of outstanding shares because _________" (fill in the blank excuse: it's confidential, Mr Rogers likes chocolate, I'm constipated, whatever).

If you don't know the total number of shares and the percentage stake of that you've been offered, and the price of your options, the number of shares is worthless.

I think in this situation, a startup will usually say this when they're trying to screw you, but that's just my opinion. Keep in mind they will likely fail and your 30k options will be nothing but a piece of paper.

My advice? Find another company to work for that is less shady.
If you're talking about me, I recommend the X series, not so much the T. You're right about the backlit keyboard, it is one great feature of the MBP.
No -- they have a small percentage of the market because brand loyalty doesn't overcome perceived savings for many people, and because Apple's falling down on the job when it comes to game support.
Ask YC: Would you stay at Yahoo or would you go now?
If you were a Yahoo employee (I'm not), you would leave now or stick it out until there's an acquisition? Is it likely for you to get a severance package offering or is that only in the case when you are laid off, not voluntarily leaving?
On second though, you're right, Starbucks was a bad pick...

My general intuition is that Apple seems so unique because we're tech-oriented and mostly surrounded by techno-centric people. If we were into fashion, coffee, or cars, there would be other companies which would seem just as fan-boy-ish. It's hard for me to pick companies, because I don't know the first thing about fashion, coffee, or cars :)
Cool -- so your EmacsOS can do 128 things at the same time! My FreeBSD OS only has 104 open processes right now, according to ps. On the other hand, one of them is Firefox with more than 100 tabs open, so it's not like I'm slacking.
Maybe so. The Zune marketing is an interesting case study, since it's in a lot of ways very un-Microsoft. They've tried their best to hit the hipsters with the campaign: launch parties at Stussy stores, commercials featuring trippy video sequences and a song from the Shins, customized engravings from various artists, and a general "too-cool-for-school" vibe. And it's not worked very much at all. Maybe because it's too late?
E-Bay Obsessed with Profits
They have a small market share now because their market share shrank to tiny under the bumbling CEOs before Jobs returned. Their market share is growing fast, but tiny x fast growth = small. Wait a few more years.
Don't think E-Bay is applying the "Be Good" mantra on this one.