skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real genius and power of China lies in its armies of low-cost and brilliant engineers. Seen a Lenovo box lately? Heck of a lot nicer than anything Dell is pooping out from its factory in Round Rock.

Yeah, right. AFAIK all Lenovo engineering and design is done in the same ex-IBM engineering US-based campus and I am personally get scared every time new Thinkpads come out, because when Lenovo transfers engineering to China or/and turns into Dell, there won't be any usable laptops anymore and I'll have to go back to a self-made desktop PC.

Sorry Apple, but your keyboards and touchpads aren't in the same league with http://kontsevoy.com/ultranav.png and Dell... let's just say they'll never bounce back.
Ok... Let's start from the start.

What problem are you trying to solve here?

And how do you know the problem actually exist?
Yahoo! buys Safari 3.0 browser search plugin
EBay Australia Users Riot Over Forced PayPal System | Tech Jaws
Best Reason to Wait: Early Adopters Tax | Tech Jaws
Windows SP3 Screws AMD | Tech Jaws
I'm a big fan of Xobni (the company), but a couple of the points in this article bugged me:

1. There's not clear evidence yet that they've landed on the "killer app". Yes, it's likely more killer (killerer?) than what they started with, but it's too early too tell. Lots of things seem like the killer app, but few are. They may have a couple of iterations left before they hit the true killer app.

2. One of the the stated reasons for not supporting GMail yet is that "Outlook users are more likely to have business credit cards". Although that's true, my guess is that there are enough users on GMail that also have credit cards for it to be interesting.

On the other hand, the "are you happy" box is cool.
The SmartPen is really cool.
Unfortunately, it works on Windows only. No Mac support (yet), not even Parallels compatible.
http://livescribe.com/smartpen/techspecs.html
That's an excellent point. One of my favorite bloggers Michael Mace put a very detailed argument to that end:

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2008/02/mobile-applica...

[quote]
Summary: The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles. [/quote]

The web, alas, is slow.

One interesting idea I have is potential of convergence between two worlds,manifesting itself in Flash mobile and Silverlight mobile. Maybe these are the future then.
One more idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186884
Ask YC: IPO requirements?
I might be able to post more info. The company is 10 years old, VC backed, cashflow positive, growing revenues the past 4 years, enterprise software. Are there any benchmarks for when a company should consider IPO'ing? minimum revenue, growth, number of employees, etc?
This one is currently 5 hours old and has the down arrow: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186872

It must be 5 hours and some change.
I think these guys will make money, but not as much as the 20m they just turn down.

In a year these features will be developed in every email client.
Great job sir. Thanks!
wsj.com, nytimes.com, ft.com, etc.
That four hour trip you are talking about is not you daily commute, right? Either it is your weekly trip or you made a typo.
Who want to invest another answers.google.com?
I have an idea where monthly payments from users who search for something distributed between people who are creating answers.

Give a thought how far it can go.

vorandrew@gmail.com
Its also alot easier to write a plugin for outlook ( a desktop program )... than it is to modify the functionality of an existing website that is not yours in a nonbuggy crossplatform way.
dell may make functional machines, but they are not cheap. maybe cheaper than apple, but u can already see Asian companies starting to beat dell at their own game
"1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

The ideas are only as good as thier implementation. Many good ideas fail because they are poorly executed.
if you can't beat them, join them?
I'm not sure of what can be added to something like gmail to be honest,

Gmail search: fantastic, threaded conversations: fantastic, search for attachments etc: all works fine.

For me, Gmail just works great.
I'm not really interested in seeing a graph/analytics for emails to be honest.

Obviously it makes sense for outlook, since that is a very very painful thing to use, but I'd be surprised if ms don't just fix search and add threaded conversations in the next version.
Yep, I think those are called branding exercises. Only big companies engage in those types of advertising since they are not easily gauged for effectiveness. It's very hard to convince some smaller company that they should spend $5M on some blimp and slap their logo on the side or something crazy like that. Big companies (car companies spring to mind) have that kind of money and advertising budgets and they do run these kinds of branding campaigns all the time.

But the issues with these campaigns is that they're the first to go when recession hits. In times of recession, first thing you cut is branding advertising since you can't measure it and you can't track it.

Online banners, and especially google adwords, will fare better in slowdowns since a company must advertise if it is to survive and get some revenue in. They will probably pick something that's effective and something that they can track right away.
Maps of the US made entirely of roads
You should ask your VC's.

Few (if any) people on this board have taken a company public.
Want do you want to test, exactly? If it's the 'usability' of your application, you should read 'Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users' by Jakob Nielsen:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
Two words (or is it one?): VentureHacks

I've found this site to be an awesome resource.

http://venturehacks.com/articles/deck
Where Do You Draw Inspiration From?
After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers'
"this is really dumb, because most people don't want to date people with the same interests; rather, they want to date people with any compelling set of interests as long as there aren't any red flags."

I´ve found that in my own personal relationships and those of friends, that in many relationships the partners share a core interest or set of interests that unite a partnership. Could be something as simple as having attended the same University, holding the same religious/theological beliefs and practices, or speaking the same non-English language (in the US).

To assume that "most people don't want to date people with the same interests" is a very big assumption, but then again, I guess you can always put your money where your mouth is. :)

That being said, I do think many dating sites are broken, but in my opinion it has more to do with the structure of the sites, and also the ratio of men seeking women to women seeking men is often unworldly disproportionate.

You are defining dating and relationships in your own eyes "show me everyone within 10 miles of 14850 except those whose profiles contain: jesus, single mom, smoker, republican, pulp-free orange juice, george bush, herpes, bbw, us weekly, horses, etc." but that may not work for everyone.
or maybe this is a ploy to raise awareness/ draw traffic to your startup :)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned NearlyFreeSpeech yet. They offer very reasonably priced a-la-carte hosting solutions, with no monthly plan requirement, so you don't get screwed for going over maximum bandwidth... or under. It's great for small sites. And for only an extra $0.01 a day for a "Respect My Privacy" service to hide your registration information. Domain registrations are fairly cheap at $7.99. They also have great tech-support.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
Goodbye to Linens and China
I rather think this idea would be better deployed in an existing social environment. (Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, etc.)

I'm not sure how much people would trust a NEW dating site, especially with all the information out there about fake profiles -- how will you gain enough organic traffic not to turn people off with fake profiles? And if you use fake profiles, then it's self-defeating, and although monetization should be easily achievable, won't help people find a potential partner.

Why not a dating application that doesn't intrude in people's lives?
Xobni search for Outlook is much better than Gmail's native search, and they have no native platform for managing attachments well, which is, imho, one of the value props Xobni has.

I don't understand why all focus on the statistics/analytics features. It might be smart of the company to either remove it or minimize its presence because I've seen so many take the route of "analytics? whoop dee doo."

Also, if Xobni would like to be a stand-alone email/CRM one day, integration with as many email applications is quite necessary.
I'd hope their plan is more than to reach some critical mass then start inserting ads into people's blogs. Will it be "put our ads on your blog, and we'll split the profits" or "pay for Disqus or we'll put ads on your site"? I guess we'll wait and see, perhaps they'll manage to productise it, if they've not reached the maximum price point yet.
I meant from university to where my parents live, which is a trip I make ten or so times per year.
Having more threads than you have CPUs is just sloppy inefficient overcomplicated programming :/

If you have control of all the pieces, and don't need to interface to things that block, there's no reason to use more threads than cpus IMHO.
Matt is friends with Natalie Portman? Is this an Easter Egg? ;-)
I bet that you've never written an Outlook plugin :)

I'd much rather try to hack Gmail JS, which many people have done, btw (see Remember The Milk for a popular example).
You are dramatically overestimating the speed with which large products develop (especially Outlook). Even if they started last year, it still wouldn't ship for years.
Have you heard about coworking?

To learn more about coworking, check out this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/business/businessspecial2/...

If you're interested in the concept, find a Jelly near you:
http://workatjelly.com/

You can also read more at the coworking wiki:
http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

I think you should go to a Jelly. Seems like it would an especially effective way to alleviate "boredom" you are experiencing, which may not be stemming from the work you're doing, but rather just the lack of social interaction as a result of working very hard by yourself for an extended period of time. At a Jelly, you are working "by yourself," but amongst others.

Also, if it really is the marketing-type work that you find unsatisfying and boring, going to a Jelly will possibly help you find a cofounder/designer/marketing-type person with which to team up.
"""If you have control of all the pieces, and don't need to interface to things that block, there's no reason to use more threads than cpus IMHO"""

I only partially agree with this.

It certainly makes no sense to have many threads running if you're talking about very CPU intensive application. We (Polar Rose) do very intense image processing (Java combined with native C++ code) and never have more than NCPU worker threads running at the same time.

We do have a whole bunch of threads running around that for network services like JMS, JMX, etc. But you can basically ignore the overhead of that. It's like having idle UNIX processes. Or are you also saying that having more then NCPU processes running is sloppy?

S.
they need a hot UMPC or Android Phone to jumpstart the company.
Access Time Machine internals with a CVS-like utility
In addition, after it ships, it will take years for the new version to be deployed to a significant portion of existing users.
Not to worry, there are still some good jobs in Europe.

Like, say, being a journalist for the Guardian. You can spend a week travelling around Europe, collect a few quotes from people who feel like whining about their financial situation, throw in a few fairly-meaningless numbers (Spain's government cut its growth forecast slightly!) and call it an article.

One interesting fact though: he had trouble finding a German with much to complain about. The best he could do was some guy on a perfectly reasonable salary of 2700 a month (about $US50K a year) in Berlin who admits his money is okay but isn't doing what he "dreamed" of doing. Yeah, you and everyone else with a degree in history and photography, buddy.
"We simply don't know."

Largely, I think, because there is no actual way to assign version numbers to the Web.
Where in Germany? $50k/yr in San Francisco or New York metro is what McDonalds store managers make.
Ideas can indeed be worth a lot, and I'm tired of this macho entrepreneurial culture which tries to disregard their value as a way of motivating better execution. If you have to trick yourself into believing that ideas aren't worth much to properly assess the value of execution, you're just telling yourself one more lie than you really need.

As it happens, we live in a time where there are so many (potentially) good ideas that there isn't enough time or talent for us to work on them all. But good startup ideas aren't like dollar bills, where the more you have of them, the less each of them is worth. Nor are they like most goods whose marginal utility decreases with consumption. We call them "ideas" as a way of lumping what they are together, but each is unique and arises from the perception of very different needs/pains/wants in the world. They don't lose value because many other similarly worthy ideas exist.
The Evolution of the Press Release
>The final straw came when he put $100 of gas into his Pontiac over four days a couple weeks ago. "Finally, I was able to trade my independence for the savings," he said while waiting for the bus.

I leave my city apartment at 720, walk briskly to the train station (3/4 mile), take the 737 train, arrive in the suburbs where I work by 830ish, take the bus, arrive at work just before 9. Why? Because I wanted to escape the suburbs and my cube and experience life in the city and keep my decent software job. Because I choose to outsource commuting to my local public transportation authority.

Most people think I'm insane to spend three to four hours a day commuting. I usually don't bother to mention it to my friends who live and work in the city. Taking public transportation, your life is driven by the schedule - which is fine since most workdays are pretty structured. The more I use public transportation, the cheaper it is (unlimited use monthly pass)

I am writing this to explain that it doesn't matter how illogical your commute is - you can always (emotionally) justify it (as with most things in life)
Maybe It’s Time For Twitter To Go “Freemium”
apple's "expensive consumerist lifestyle fashion," as you call it, is now the de facto standard hacker machine, used by dhh, the inventor of ruby on rails, by pg himself, and too many others to mention.
You should ask your VC's.

And your lawyers, and your CFO, and your bank.

I'm inclined to say that if you're asking news.yc whether you're ready to IPO, you're not ready.
I find myself explaining to people why they should care about Twitter quite often, so I recently wrote up a comprehensive blog post about it.

Twitter-Me This: http://www.gee.ky/blog/2008/05/twitter-me-this.html

My reasons include: Social Network, Keeping in Touch, Minutia Can Be Meaningful, Mobile Chatroom, Information On-The-Go, Privacy Shield, Accessibility, Forced Short-Form Communication, Pulse of the World, Proxy, and Brand-Monitoring.
Trying to find 100 happy users. Inspired by Paul Buchheit.
300 requests per second is pretty slow for database queries, isn't it?
Anyone from the HN community want to help? Would love feedback - get in touch! shafqat[at]newscred.com

Update: Someone asked what I meant by 'help.' I was referring to trying out our alpha service, but any tips/advice about how YOU got 100 happy users would be great as well.
The problem with Mainstream Media
Berlin, which is actually one of the cheaper cities in Germany (at least it was two years ago when I was looking at moving there).

It's still not great money, but it's hardly terrible.
It's a fairly standard theory (search for "Boom, Bust and Echo") that the generation after the baby boomers are hurt by demographics - compared to not just the generation before, but also the generation after, they suffer from lower salaries, less job prospects, and less satisfying careers overall. But as soon as they mentioned someone 24 years old - part of the "echo" generation who, in general, can expect the exact opposite - I decided they were just making shit up.
When Will Amazon Start Shipping Cash?
I might be totally wrong (and if I am, I apologize!) but I sense you're implying $50k is low because it's what a mere McDonald's manager makes?

If so, McDonald's outlet managers might not seem culturally important or as well qualified as historians, architects, and the like, but in terms of raw capitalism, they provide a lot more value and have control over a real cash cow and provider to the economy. This is why their salaries are pretty good compared to the minions below them.

$50k/yr is a good salary on almost any part of the planet. It's the median personal salary in the United Kingdom, for instance.
I really like Xobni too. I use it at work and it does make Outlook much better -- primary because of the better search and threaded conversations (the social networking and analytics features are less useful for me, though).

However, I think Xobni's market is largely hypothetical, and it's not clear how Xobni can make money. The fact that I have a credit card doesn't mean I will use it in Xobni, especially because the app is free and it already solves my Outlook problems.

(Btw, I would be happy to pay $20 for Xobni if they charged me for it :) )
Why is this here? Is this "Hacker News" or related to startups? This isn't reddit, digg, etc.
Use http://www.domize.com which is hooked up to GoDaddy, but you get a steep discount at $6.95.
Before moving to Silicon Valley 5 years ago, I grew up and worked in Italy and I confirm those numbers. The only employment available in Italy right now is basically temp contracting paid a fraction of the relative full time position, with no job security. These "precarious" employees are often Master's Degree holders forced to accept those shitty jobs because, well, they are the only one available -- either that or leave the country, as many do. It you're thinking "why don't those smart people start a business then?", suffice it to say the government makes it extremely complicated. There's a lot of bureaucracy involved that is a big deterrent for many.
Careful - a lot of people (myself included) won't click and will often downmod for such use. Use their preview feature if you like but anything can hide behind a tinyurl :)
I agree with the other posters that this probably isn't an appropriate question for the news.yc crowd. IPOs are rare. So you would be much better off seeking out experts.

That being said, check out http://www.softwareceo.com/attachments/softwareceo/com021908...

Unless you can do something like Google does in not giving out guidance, which seems highly doubtful, the bottom line benchmark seems to be a) a revenue threshold and then b) being able to give decent guidance about future numbers on a quarterly basis. I've always thought the revenue threshold was around 100M, but that link argues it can be smaller for software companies in the right situation.
Why? News.yc already truncates for display.
Is there an easy way to get past the login page, or do I have to sign in to NYtimes.com?
I don't see the point of comparing Facebook to Google. Even if Facebook's advertising is less targeted than Google's, so what? Facebook's revenues = pageviews / 1000 * cpm. Nothing about the effectiveness of Adsense says Facebook can't be a thriving business.
The statistics and analytics features serve (IMHO) as initial attraction hooks. For example, a lot of people I know went to GMail because of the 1GB space thing rather than all the revolutionary features inside. They discovered all the goodies only as they started using it. I think a similar thing happens with the colorful graph that Xobni shows. If you think about it, nobody would give a damn about what that graph is showing. But as Gabor points out in the article, if I am passing by, that's the first thing I'd get attracted by. It just looks really really spiffy.
That's impossible! A simple mathematical paradox
Desktop software has the benefit of perceived privacy and being easily scalable, as you pay for a filehost and installations are done on each user's computer. However, the problem with this is that once any user sees a bug, screws up their registry, deletes a file, upgrades or installs a Firewall that starts blocking ports or an Anti-Virus program that's over sensitive or slows your application down, installs a new or different Service Pack, then you will receive questions that you now have to answer and debug that have nothing to do with your program. Then you have to create and release an update, making the customer wait, instead of being able to change things on the fly, as is possible with many web app frameworks.
Can't speak for Berlin, but I was just in a few different smaller towns in Germany, and prices for most things were (in Euros) about equivalent to what they are in USD. My friends who live in Cologne confirmed my observation. For example, my friend was paying about 1300 Euros for an apartment that would probably go for about 1300 USD where I live. Shoes were roughly 100 Euro per pair, Bread was 3-5 Euro for a loaf, etc.

Assuming that the greater social services in Germany are largely offset by their significantly higher tax rates, someone with a 32k Euro job is getting by, but not likely saving very much...unless they're somehow buying everything they need in the US (and hence at a 60% discount, thanks to the exchange rate).
Well, boo-urns for Frisco. I would say that in most of Germany 50K would be enough.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

GDP - per capita (PPP): $34,400 (2007 est.)
The future of PHP
"On Friday night, Lorenzo, 35, was on a train heading to work a nightshift for a major American sales website's Berlin branch."

This part of the article is pretty useless, it doesn't actually tell us what his job is. It sounds like it's not related to his qualifications as a historian/photographer (whatever they are, again there are no details), in which case you would expect his pay to be lower than if he had relevant skills.

On the other hand, if it's a white-collar job, he's working nights regularly, and only getting the $50,000 salary, this would be low pay.
So, you've decided that generational phenomena are so exact that a difference of six years (30 vs 24) means that the reporter was lying?
How does having competitors with a lower price make you not cheap? I don't see the correlation.
"Cheap" is completely relative. 1000 dollars is cheap for a car, but expensive for a sandwich.
We also use procmail for this sort of thing (along with a lot of other things, like spam and AV filtering, advanced delivery logging, etc.). It's a bit of a learning curve, but once scaled, is a very powerful tool. It also has the benefit that it can be a dispatch table, of sorts, and call different scripts based on different contents or subjects or whatever, and provides logging and other stuff reasonably cheaply. And, it provides security via its DROPPRIVS directive. Yep, procmail is a good choice.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to Europe. I'm 31, I have an advanced degree in a highly technical field, and it's unlikely that I'm going to earn enough money to afford to buy a home (w/o ridiculous leverage) in the places where I can find work in my field.

When my parents were my age, they had two children, a house and two cars on a single electrical engineer's income. There's no way that's possible today.