skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yahoo's MO at the time was to swap in the current "cool kid" of algorithmic search to fill out Yahoo's own search results. Google didn't really have much of a business outside of selling their results to folks like Yahoo, so I think many logical minds would've agreed that Google was heading for failure--short of being acquired by Yahoo or something other big guy in search.

At the least, you'd have a hard time making a believable argument that they'd be making billions of dollars a year in less than a half decade. And, truthfully, an even harder time trying to make that same sort of argument if they were actually acquired by Yahoo.
Dealing with An IT Bully
This might be a long shot, but I'm assuming it has something to do with http://mowser.com/
Mowser = Mo(bile) + (Bro)wser

http://mowser.com is the right link. From their about page: "Mowser lets you view the Web on your mobile phone."
So far, the "design spec" for the next-generation vc seems to be:

1. Invests $250-500k

2. Gets back to the applicants with a yes/no decision in 24 hours (can't find the pg essay).

I'm thinking there should be some kind of software, an algorithm, to help such a vc make decisions... what kind of factors would be part of it, and what else would be needed?
How to Find Research Problems
7 ways to be a better developer
Sad. He was working on an interesting problem relating to time and the two-slit light experiment, last I heard.
I've always thought applications which need progress bars should ask you if you would be willing to share your progress data in exchange for seeing how your progress compares to that of other users. Not only would this allow you to get much more accurate estimates, it could also tip you off to potential issues. If others are getting past the progress stage a lot faster than you then it could mean it's time for you to investigate what's going on. Perhaps everyone else using that application has a better system than you or perhaps it's time for you to optimize your system a bit.
In the hacker world, there have always been people who try to make things that they think ought to exist, regardless of whether they can figure out how people will pay them to do it. On one end of the continuum, you have projects like Linux (and the original Unix), Lisp, Perl, Python, Apache, and so on -- projects where the originators never really worried about monetizing the result at all. On the other end of the spectrum are things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, where the originators always planned to find a way to make money, but didn't worry too much about the details until they had developed a product that a lot of people wanted to use.

In any case, there are an awful lot of businesses that don't make their customers money. Consumer products, retail, mass media, home construction, automobiles. Making your customers money is basic in business-to-business, but unless I'm missing something, it's rarely a core part of a business-to-consumer model. Perhaps it's B to C in general that you're not comfortable with?
yeah, that's one possibility -- I was hoping to find out if that was what happened or not. :-)
KML, the HTML of geographic content
1. Every logical mind (even within Google) in 1999 would have seen that Google was heading for failure - there was no money in search. They got lucky in finding one -adwords - that worked.

Lots of "logical minds" invested in Google in 1998. In 1999, Yahoo was profitable; Excite was bought for billions; Compaq and then CMGI tried to relaunch AltaVista. The best ways to maximize search revenue were not yet clear, and many thought the existing search incumbents would be harder to displace, but many smart people saw there was "money in search" and clearly did not think Google was "headed for failure".

Google didn't "get lucky in finding" a model; they looked around for what was working for others. They first tried CPM ads -- "text banners" starting December 1999 -- and later in 2002 moved to Goto.com's wildly successful CPC formula. And they were making money outside of advertising before the AdWords rocket took off.

2. Had the timing of their discovery been off, or had the dot-com bubble busted a few months earlier, they would have died.

Google raised money in 1998 -- so even moving the 2000-2001 bust forward a year wouldn't have put them on thin ice. And the search-linked ads market didn't collapse post-bubble; Goto.com reached strong profitability on search CPC ads in 2001, a "bust year" of very low overall ad spending.

Anything as successful as Google is, at some level, sui generis. Survivorship bias also makes it hard to draw lessons from winners. But your characterization of Google as being just a lucky discovery and a few months' timing away from inexorable failure is inconsistent with the real events of 1998-2001.
Haven't noticed it. but I mostly access YC through rss.
Personally I think biofuels are a red herring. Only a fraction of the US agriculture production goes to biofuels, and part of the cost of importing food is transportation anyway.

In any case, this could dwarf credit problems if it keeps getting worse.
I usually only get it if I have a comment reply open for a long time before clicking add. Feels like the continuation lasts for about 20 minutes.
Companies have been saying "write for our platform, it's all good, we won't screw you over in the future, honest" for years. Sometimes it's true.

I'm not sure what they're "up front" about. What have they said, exactly? The most prominent thing I see is "preview", and I have no idea if that's supposed to sound more or less permanent than their typical subtitle, "beta".

I think what concerns people is the combination of (a) it's a very different platform than just about anything else, so you have to really commit, and (b) there's no guarantee, no roadmap, no nothing. Oh, and (c) Google will keep track of your users for you (how nice of them!).

It looks like a hiring tool. They like to buy companies with hot products, which is a good way to get hot programmers, but these programmers didn't (and couldn't) know the unique Google infrastructure. This is the logical solution to that.

On a personal note, I go have a beer with my friends at Amazon and they tell me "such-and-such a service will definitely be around for at least another year, and probably much longer, and we're planning X and Y and Z for it". But on the rare occasions my friends at Google hang out with me, they barely even tell me what project they're on; everything is ultra-secret. The whole corporate culture makes me suspicious.
Gotta appreciate the candor here.
"There were three founders – me, Steve, and Alexis. Steve and I did the programming and Alexis handled promotion and customer service and office management and business development and the myriad of other tasks that came up."
-a chat with aaron swartz
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html
They've been hard restarting the server a lot lately, so the sessions are getting lost more frequently.
DevHouse is always worth it. Postpone your party so you can attend!

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/472612/
My current employer has been on a pretty tight budget so I haven't done this in a bit but back in 2006 at my previous venture-funded company I made a point of going to local interest group meetings that had something to do with the technologies our company used. Whenever I found someone presenting something that could be helpful to my company I would ask for their info and pass it along to my boss.

So I would say get out there, let people know what you're doing and have plenty of business cards on hand.
This is a problem where "Homo Logicus" runs the company, act like "jocks" and run amok. Alan Cooper describes the psychology of programmers in his book "Inmates are running the asylum", CH-7 ~ http://www.lavoisier.fr/notice/gbFTOKRX3J23YLXO.html
"But on the rare occasions my friends at Google hang out with me, they barely even tell me what project they're on; everything is ultra-secret. The whole corporate culture makes me suspicious."

I wonder how google inculcates this culture in its developers? Serious question.

Most developers I know are more like the amazon devs than the google ones. Not that they blab about what they are doing to all and sundry, but most of my friends don't have any problems talking about what they are doing.

Interestingly enough I haven't encountered this "secrecy" in my friends who work at Google Bangalore. I guess Indians are a more garrulous people! (or my friends really trust me).
I asked Google for permission to use their logo, but they said no.
And this is hacker news because... ?
This has the sense of a ploy to spur on companies to buyout for huge amounts - furthering YC's interests. Also suggests VCs should take on more risk - furthering YC's interests. Urges entrepreneurs to hold out even longer - furthering YC's interests (if these entrepreneurs are in YC).

I don't disagree this message - but the motivation for writing this seems extremely transparent.

Not every buyout makes sense. Buying out Facebook for the valuation given to them roughly by the MSFT investment looks ridiculous considering Facebook's inability to monetize their traffic.

VCs fundamentally are trying to be risk adverse in a high risk environment. They all want to have a slightly higher success rate than average and do great.

Entrepreneurs always will hit a point where it makes sense to sell out and get rid of the risk on their end of holding on. If you have a portfolio of 100 companies, it makes sense to want each to hold out as long as possible. If you have one company you own a major stake of, it makes sense at a much lower value to liquidate.
| p2p IM infrastructure that leverages the basic human need to connect.

I think that might have been done.
definitely having problems with the more button
I edit my replies a lot. I rarely manage to post without seeing expired link and needing to refresh.
It usually isn't a big deal, because the fix -go back, copy, refresh the page, paste- is trivial. For a less technical audience, this would be absolutely unacceptable.

Are there elegant solutions to fix this? Could someone link the explanation to how the continuation sessions work, please?
This reductio ad absurdum would be appropriate if they argued generally that reducing the work week increases employee productivity and satisfaction. They don't.

They've tried an experiment and they're reporting that they're pleased with the results. They haven't controlled for the Hawthorne Effect, but there's no reason to without empiricism. Heck, sometimes it's better to just use the Hawthorne Effect itself to improve social environments.
Pretty sure that's what pg's said it is. Personally, that's way too short, as I'll leave threads open for half a day without reading it, then can't comment.

I don't see any fundamental reason why continuations have to expire so fast.
google docs is still usable. it just won't be quite the same as zenter.

that subprime cartoon (link: http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?revision=_latest&fs=t...) is on google docs and its a pretty effective powerpoint-like presentation. imo.
How many of you do systems administration in addition to programming 
I am curious to know if you do your own systems administration or do you rely on hosted servers or friends to maintain your servers.

Please don't list personal computers with development environments you installed but actually full production servers where you run your code ?

I am only curious because I have always been curious about number of programmers who are also systems administrators or their application servers.

thank you all :)
Lots of people here are interested in general business/market news.
It's pretty similar to other session-based systems. Users get an id that they resubmit at some point to the server, and the server pulls the data associated with that id. In the case of Arc, that data is a closure (basically, a function and its bound variables).
> The only people who are really squealing are the hardware/software vendors (Tim works for Sun) and ISP's who have effectively taken a pay cut.

That's not my impression. I've seen some concern from service consumers, as well. When you buy service from AWS or conventional hosting providers, the costs are out in the open, and you are paying as you go and free to switch to something else.

With Google, all the costs are hidden or down the road, which is especially scary given the lock-in. Does their service get too expensive when you scale? Don't like Google having full access to your account and traffic data? Need to extend your application with features Google's platform can't provide? Well, you'll need to rewrite the back end of you application. And ask all your users to re-register, since you can't exactly take Google's accounts with you.

Yes, in theory, you can move your site later on. In practice, good luck with that. Personally, I wouldn't touch this service for anything.
Because they take up ram on the server. 20 minutes is standard session timeout for most session based web frameworks.
There's no set timeout. They're kept in a queue.
I believe the specific code has to do with "fnid harvesting". See the comments here: http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master/srv.arc line 330 or so.

The general idea is described here: http://dresese.thehyatts.net/archives/000253.html

pg's original patent on this scheme: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6205469.html
No sorry you have to be available on the internet. In order for you site to be available to browse from our service it has to be available for anyone to browse. You could put it in a hard place to find... but yes it must be public and available.
Camtasia
I work in the news media and "when it's done" works great for us, even when we're responding to breaking news. I make sure I break down my estimates and provide options on what can be cut or enhanced, and my project managers (I work on a couple small 1-20 day projects at a time) set their priorities.

It works great for all involved: I get to do quality work I'm happy with, and they always understand where their time goes. I admit it doesn't work with all PMs: some will try to mandate a due date. I'm really lucky to have a boss who'll help me push back, to explain that wanting things more doesn't make them go much faster. And I'm doubly lucky to have a boss who's right when he (very infrequently) has me work overtime to get something that's actually urgent done.

I find stress much less motivational than the pride in doing things well.
It's a hard problem. It's an immediate problem. It's an important problem. It's an economic and logistics problem. Hackers like hard, important problems.

Also: ignore desperate, hungry people at your own peril. Hunger is not some sort of vague hand-wavey rich/poor gap concocted by a university professor with an agenda. It is an outright decrease in standard of living and it's something people will fight to restore.
Or in short form:

"Your failure to plan, does not constitute my emergency."
With the load going up so much (causing the crashes) it also means the links expire faster. I would guess in under 10 minutes sometimes, maybe under 5.
I use Mowser to browse on a slow connection.
It's so much better than the alternatives (google mobile, phonifier) since it scales images as well.

Sorry to see it go.
Interesting choice of analogy (research as "bone finding", which is research itself).

The thing is, researchers rarely set out to find a T.Rex -- at least, not in a way that their career success is predicated upon finding one. Good scientists make a career of the "small bones", because they know that they'll stumble upon the "big bones" only once in a while. Truly great researchers will assemble a whole skeleton over the course of a long career.

A few, exceptionally lucky people will discover a whole mammoth on the first day of their expedition; counting on this is like counting on winning the lottery. Bad researchers set out to find something big, and refuse to "waste time" with the "little bones" along the way.
Explanation: http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/PDF/www...

A possible elegant solution is suggested in the paper: store the continuation on the client. I don't know what problems this presents in practice.
Control your computer at a distance by waving your hands in the air (for $39.99)
"... With Google, all the costs are hidden or down the road, which is especially scary given the lock-in ..."

I'm not going to start advocating this google model is good for everyone. If fact I'm pretty sceptical of google ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/google/page2/ but I found this particular tool good enough, now for me. For example. If I want to get a site up and running with django, python 2.5, a scalable db, with a domain name with an isp right now, I'm pretty sure I'd either a) have to host my own, $$$... (cost of pc, cable, time with admin) or b)
get some rack space at an ISP that has a later version of python (if I use CGI) and django again $$$, $$$. Now looking at the tools available I'm pretty sure you could get users to register their details with your application & keep the data & export it later. I haven't read the license details about this. (there's one problem, checking for and asking for permission) As for the tools I'm pretty sure you could re-create the db access on another system.

What I do say to myself is, "could I prototype an idea here" then investigate moving if I move to the next level that may incur hidden costs.

"... Need to extend your application with features Google's platform can't provide? Well, you'll need to rewrite the back end of you application. And ask all your users to re-register ..."

I think you can solve the later problem as suggested above. As for the first. Well there seems at the moment things you cannot do with this platform. Computationally extensive applications that use 'C' based code. It appears what google is offering is the front-end tools that scale. Not the back-end computational processing.

"... The only people who are really squealing are the hardware/software vendors ..."

Tim O'Reilly argues this maybe a lock-in play ~ http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/is-google-app-engi... Until I read the license to verify you have access to your data I'm less worried about this than google fighting the Internet. I think we are going to see more "level 3 platforms" which have ' runtime Environments' ~ http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-three-kinds.html so they are not going to go away. Trying them out might allow you to see a problem to work on exploiting insight you have gained.
"America is easily the world's largest maize exporter—and it now uses more of its maize crop for ethanol than it sells abroad."

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10250420
Thanks for the note. To support your reading, I met a guy from NASA a few years ago. According to him, NASA is a bureaucracy run by accountants.
With GET requests, you frequently run into URL size issues. IE has a roughly 1800 character limit, which is pretty easy to hit with machine-generated data. I remember going through hell with JSF charting frameworks, trying to squeeze the serialized data down under 1800 characters. Eventually we gave up, pulled everything out of the serialized data (it still took up over 1K though, just through framework metadata, and so only left us around 500-800 bytes to play with), and threw it into query parameters that we could control ourselves.

This isn't an issue with POST, but then you run into the normal POST issues with refreshability, bookmarkability, and portable URLs.
I love the term "sub prime" - its such a humorous form of NewSpeak to mean lending money to greedy people who can't afford to pay it back (done by greedy people who can't ...)
"the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history"

"ways"

I hate it when I put time into creating a good response and a grammar mistake makes my writing look retarded.
"Interesting choice of analogy (research as "bone finding", which is research itself)"

I think the "bone finding" is less important (for the purposes of the analogy) than the distinction between actively looking for small vs big results.

I know there are many PhDs on this board so I'll ask something I have always been curious about.

Is it possible for a hacker to teach himself to do research?Is "research" fundamentally different from hacking? ( in terms of learning how to do it; most good hackers are self taught)

Or is going though a structured process or some kind of apprenticeship to a good researcher a necessity?
Some reasonable points, especially if you're already committed to Django as a platform.

BTW, I meant back end as in data store, not computation. From what I understand, using BigTable differs markedly from using MySQL or Postgres, and you would have to port to one or the other to leave Google unless you want to do some serious development work on your data back end.

I hope you're right about being able to salvage your user data, but I would study both the license agreement and the technical capabilities very closely on this one. It would be a shame to build an early site thinking it was just a starting point and then discover that you could never change key aspects of it.

In any case, good luck with your site.
My thinking was that it might be easier to judge the risks involved since starting a hardware company usually requires getting an EE degree and then spending several years learning by working for an established company. Whereas since it is possible do a successful web startup with no previous experience or credentials, VCs have less data points to evaluate the chances of success.

In any event, this debate only underscores my point about the clarity of the sentence in question.
I work at a research university/hospital and manage my own servers for my department. Each server runs Debian or Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL.

I can't imagine not being able to admin my own servers. That's part of what being a hacker is all about.
I was going to print my own but the cost would have been the same as Vistaprint if not more expensive (cost of perforated business card paper + ink is not insignificant) and not as professional-looking, so I was going to go with Vistaprint for the cheap prices. But I spent a good few hours browsing flickr "businesscard" tag looking for card designs I liked and where the people got them printed (if it was mentioned). I found that Print100.com was named a few times by some of the people with really beautiful cards..not only the design but the whole thing. I went with them...they're based in China and the last time I used their site it was pretty awful and slow, but they throw in free shipping.

I got http://www.flickr.com/photos/chix0r/1409350187/ at around $30 for 300 - not the cheapest around, but I love the results (double sided 4 color plus spot uv varnish) and it arrived via fedex in something like one week since I ordered them. I got a bunch of the cards braille embossed by someone else (I deal with a lot of visually disabled folks) and the paper was decently thick for that. Maybe I'm more partial to them because I was really disappointed with the quality of the cards I got printed the first couple of times around (local shops in LA)...hmm, dunno.

I will note that moocards are adorable and awesome for casual uses..like my personal email and number, as opposed to my business contact info. Got a whole bunch for free before and the size is tiny but everyone loves them :]
i know how to do administration, but i prefer to pay someone else to handle that stuff. its more economical, to me.

or maybe i'm just bad at it and do it slower than everyone else. i can't tell.

i also don't have any app that runs more than 100 concurrent users, and i develop on my own local servers. i deploy on hosted servers. for reference.
David Hornik is in Boston.
How on earth could you write an article on the Internet in 1993 and never mention Usenet?