skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Didn't expect that one to turn into a karma burn."

That wasn't the intended effect of my comment. Sorry!

The only part I was disagreeing with was (emphasis mine)

"Most of the people who end up on here, or in PG's orbit in general can find themselves in this quote (by Ayn Rand)".

When you say

"Just saying that Paul attracts a certain kind of person that has a strong tendency towards technical competence. These types of people often like to hang out with others of this type and so it has less to do with the man himself and more to do with finding people of like mind"

it sounds much more reasonable, and more importantly the quote's luridness doesn't obscure what you are trying to say.
I don't want to go into details, but I'll say what we didn't do. We didn't spam and we didn't do anything that we wouldn't want done to ourselves. We just got creative with advertising.

I agree with zkinion, many startups use "legal spam". Our site was around before MySpace became the social networking behemoth that it is today. They used to make fake accounts on our site all the time. And we would do it back to them.

You don't read about it much in the stories in Founders at Work, but from what I've seen a lot of very successful sites did whatever they had to do to win. If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to advertise it. But there are a lot of social sites out there, and a lot of them play dirty.
It seems to me that if a company which manufactures a "solid product" can be run that way it must be possible to run a software company this way.

An interview with Semler:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gJkOPxJCN1w
I have never used pageflakes, but if they don't already have a social component like being able to see your friends start pages then they should try adding that, investors might like the idea.
I have to spend a not small part of my time dealing with various forms of spam, and dealing with people that hate dealing with spam, and dealing with people that hate missing out on something because somebody somewhere was dealing with spam on their behalf.

I guess it would be easy to say, "Eh, what's the big deal?" if you never have to deal with the cumulative effects of everyone promoting their products in spammy ways.

At the very least, it's disrespectful to the folks that don't get paid enough to keep all the networks running everywhere.
Myspace was a well known spam outfit with a history of spamming for a living and a very large database of emails.
Rightscale's take on EC2's new persistent storage
What grinds my gears is that you can't have files in your application over 128k due to an uploader error. Thats not even the size limit, its just a standing bug.
Yeah, cool, got it. The parent mentioned Rand, so I thought I'd throw some in. The context actually works in the book better than the quote might appear in the comment. It depicts someone who does know what they are doing in a job surrounded by people who don't wishing for a change. That's what brings me here at any rate. Ayn's typical over-the-top-ness obscured it in the book as well, but by then you'd read hundreds of pages and were quite used to it!
Here's the basic problem: you're writing an operating system. Stop doing that. It's 2008.
'm not a big fan of "brain teaser" questions, but the logic of this rant isn't very solid. It's a little like complaining that the Olympics are completely stupid and irrelevant because in reality I never need to pole-vault or whatever. Difficult but arbitrary challenges can often be a reasonable gauge of strength and ability.
Honestly, if you do a good job, a customer is likely to recommend you anyway. They don't need a monetary incentive to, and I know a few customers of mine that feel that this would cheapen their word of mouth. But if you want to increase the word of mouth going around, then go ahead and ask them directly. Give them a handful of cards and say that if they liked your work you're trying to grow your client base so if they can refer anyone they know please do.

As for other things, hard to say. My business operates on people finding us online and by word of mouth. I tried Adwords and other things like that, but it's been a long time since I've bothered with showing up at conventions to hand out business cards or had my sales guy cold call anyone. I never really got the hang of those anyway...

I would also say to be careful though. If you're looking to increase your clientele on the consulting side, that can quickly turn into a full-time thing you're left managing, with little time to pursue your startup. And there is a big difference between a consulting business and a startup - one has its revenue directly tied to someone's billable hours and the other creates some sort of recurring revenue stream with the goal of exponential growth.
David, the turkey and the butcher story? That's Taleb's story, not mine. And it's important because it shows that to see a black swan coming, you often have to look at things from a different perspective.

Second, sure the US dollar won't be as bad as the Zim dollar. That's hyperbole, but the truth is that it's going to get much worse before it's over. That's doom and gloom, but it's less so when you raise yourself above turkey-level and at least attempt to manage around it.
"We are talking about this service at this early stage because we believe this will help many of our EC2 customers with setting their development priorities for this year."

translation:
"Contrary to what we usually do, we decided to announce this still under development features so Google App Engine doesn't continue to steal headlines, or any future clients choosing a platform, from us - you know how the press loves to champion Google innovation."
How about an exokernel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel
Hey, it can be a good learning experience and just darn good hacker fun!
I've said it before and I'll do it again: a successful blog is a project on it's own with exactly the same kind of problems: attracting users, being relevant, being original, etc. You're offering him to double his working hours only to have two (2) identical problems at hand.
Why Are Manhole Covers Round? (on Microsoft brainteaser job interviews)
37signals champions working remotely here is one example of their praise of the topic, but you can find many more on their site.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_real_the_alon...

For me, in my limited experience in the area I would have to say that it is completely dependent on the quality of the people and the level of autonomy their job responsibilities can afford.
http://pikluk.com was built out of 5 different locations in 2 different countries without even a central office. The only "central" thing we had was a Subversion repository.
WoW exceeds 1 million concurrent Chinese players
Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best?
I agree -- but this is a pretty content-free YC news story. This would be notable if the guy actually gets anywhere -- writing "I'm going to write a new OS" on your blog is the trivial part.
Hi gaika,

I really like the layout and how clean it all is. I also like the fact that you take some design cues from Google with your logo/search box (nothing wrong with using design patterns!). I also liked the consistency when you clicked on a link - ie, the header and title didn't move.

Is that "What is Jaanix?" always the default link at the top? If so, great! In these nascent stages you should definitely be accommodating people with questions and establishing what it is you do. When Digg first came out people had a lot of questions about how that worked as well.

The tuners are great. I really dig how they're analogue - a lot of people make the mistake of stepping sliders for "tuning" functionality.

Such a small thing, but any chance of making the comment box slide out rather than pop out? Everything else looks so slick it was the one thing that stood out to me. Actually I also noticed videos seemed a bit clunky (click on one and then scroll to see what I'm talking about).

What would be great in terms of functionality is an Audioscrobbler style thing - name a few blogs and have the tuners get set for you.

Also have you done the pre-requisite widget for people to embed into their blogs, etc?

Not sure what other advice I can offer to be honest, you guys seemed to have nailed your concept quite nicely.
Yea, I've been thinking about that too.
Yea, I agree.
Heh! No, not that much capital, and I think americans are actually fairly ambivalent about trains (although IIRC, Warren Buffet says he's been investing in them).

It's a food item(s). If anyone's that curious, write me and I'll tell you about it. I guess for me 'lot of capital' is pretty much anything outside the software industry, not 'lot of capital' in more objective terms. I have no idea if it'd be realistic for me to attempt to do something with it, but I know people would like it, with a certainty that I've never had with any other product, which is why it amazes me that no one else has done this particular thing, as there are plenty of established players in the space.
Why would you post a link to your blog promoting the fact that you're thinking about writing an OS? That's like me posting a link to my blog promoting a startup I haven't thought of the idea for yet.
Much like writing a text editor?
This new feature addresses what I think is the biggest complaint about EC2, as seen on their discussion boards. People used to complain about the lack of static IPs, now that's no longer a problem. Once they get around to rolling out this feature to the public, the only legit complaint that people would have for them is the base cost when starting out.

When your traffic is zero or very low, as in the case of when you're just starting out, a conventional VPS host is still a lot cheaper. But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform.
I agree that if you're starting a new venture and you don't have optimism, you won't get anywhere. But if you also hide from reality, you're toast as well. This stuff isn't from 'sky is falling' kooks -- it's from Warren Buffet and Jim Rogers and Paul Krugman... a long list of the great financial and economic minds. Here it's Soros. But they'll all be ignored until it's too late. People don't want bad news, just good news.

In my mind, that's why this is, actually, hacker news. A start up is a little boat. We need to know when the storm is coming earlier than others and take action:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/battening-down.html
If you do agree, why did you post?
This is the way my startup is currently operating. There are certainly challenges that come with that. You need to be internally motivated on a day to day basis, and it's important for the team to have a high-level plan that you can work towards so that you know whether you're "late" or doing well, but overall it's working fairly well.

Another key element is to ensure there is a touching point each day, where all the team members are online at the same time.
* Blog

* Speak

* Ask for referrals

* Pay Per Click Ads on Google

* Read "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi

* Host a dinner party at your place, invite a few well connected friends and ask them to bring a friend or two.

* Write thank you notes to people who make a difference in your life (such as refer to you.)

* Get business cards that help you communicate what you bring to the table

* Understand they don't care about hiring a consultant. There's always a reason behind the reason.

* If your prospect is a growing company, look at your local business magazines. They are probably featuring companies doing well in your area. Call them.

* Put together Worksheets that your clients can forward to their friends (i.e. your future clients)

Here are a few sources for good sales & marketing info:

* http://www.volcanicmarketing.com/blog

* http://www.ducttapemarketing.com

* http://www.marketingsherpa.com
Can't read the article for some reason, on Firefox 3 beta 5 on Mac. Keep getting a blank page when I click on "Take me to the full article".
This is true in some instances, but not generally. I think most advances are made gradually by very experienced people who understand exactly why things are "unsolvable" and what paths may be more fruitful.

Secondly, it is doubtful that a student will solve a millennium problem or make any other advance of that caliber.
Because he felt like submitting. This is not a big deal. Consider it a discussion thread with an incidental link.
"Yea, I've been thinking about that too"

perhaps a separate post for that? seeing as this post seems to be essentially a content free "I am thinking about ... " ?
aah for a second there i thought you were talking about consulting in lead generation in pharma.
Thanks! Who needs "unconventional methods" when you can get feedback like this? :)

Will be fixing the things you've mentioned, hope to see you on our site more often, let's continue the discussion there.
Well I think it is interesting. But I agree that it would be more particularly news worthy and notable if I had something more to show about it. I've been researching for 3 weeks and its going great.
Current Git Branch in Bash Prompt
The only revolutionary that didn't sell out?
"Get your friends(like 50+) using it..."

I see what you did there. Nerds don't have 50 friends.
So you can roll them out of the way more easily. Also - no orientation required. My physics is kind of rusty, but isn't there a strength benefit from the shape as well?

Incidentally, many sewer covers in Australia are square, only the larger ones are round.

Okay, I'm done taking this article literally now. :)
30K application lines + 110K testing lines: Evidence of...?
Hey man, a lot of code comes from thinking about things for awhile.
"Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them."

Seems rather topical for this site...

Although the referenced article seems to have its facts mixed: "Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo - what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time - didn't sell out."

As I recall, Google tried to sell to Yahoo early on but Yahoo wasn't buying...
Well, the social news sites I already frequent have some central theme. Reddit is for general purpose news (so the most generic theme is already covered), Programming Reddit is for programming and technical articles, and Hacker News is for interesting articles and startup related links. What's the theme for your site?

To be honest the site lost me in the first minute because it didn't seem like I'd be interested in it. The theme wasn't apparent in the first 10 seconds. If it was a slickly designed site where people could upvote/downvote cool pictures of exotic sports cars, then maybe I would have stayed. There has to be a niche.

Plus, since there are a lot of other social news sites out there, and I already visit a bunch of them, it's going to be really tough to pull me to a new social news site. Perhaps try building something in a domain that nobody has really ventured into yet? We already have social video sharing, social image sharing, social news, and social profile databases. Maybe there's some new category of social websites that you and I haven't considered yet? Your chances in that new category might be better than with a new instance of the social news class.

"I built it but they didn't come" is probably the leading complaint for the large percentage of startups that fail. You just have to be brutally, brutally honest and straightforward when analyzing your site. Put yourself in the shoes of an average visitor to the site: what does she read that catches her attention? How does she tell you apart from all the other sites on the Web that are similar to yours? Are you solving some burning need for this user that no other site can solve? What are you offering her that's going to make her bookmark your site and keep coming back? It's a really hard thing to do.

I'd suggest not just building one thing and waiting for people to show up. Rather, build a hundred things, each of which you think are pretty good, and then maybe 2 - 3 of them will become amazing hits.
the problem is not with thinking about stuff. But if I were to write blog posts about "I am thinking about X" and then submit those posts to news.YC.. well.

Let me not discourage you though. if you think your cogitations deserve the attention of the folks at news.YC, please, go ahead and submit one link per thought. News.YC is an essentially self correcting system, in my experience, and can probably handle such content free links just fine.
I predict here today that Paris Hilton's fame will outlast Digg by many, many years.
I'm beyond thinking of writing an OS. It's currently what I'm working on in my spare time. I'm interested in people's ideas and comments.
Yeah, I tried to do some reading about plentyoffish and couldn't find anything about myspace spamming. Though I don't doubt he had a ton of fake accounts at the start, and probably did some deal of spam.
Because they are easier to manufacture than other shapes which will not fall through the hole either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle

Want to attract nerd tourists ? Build your city with Reuleaux manhole covers in the streets and Penrose tilings on the walkways.
Well, that may be true. But from the perspective of one trying to gain a little traction, spamming might serve well, especially after hearing that the persons behind facebook and plentyoffish probably used the same tactics.
This is basically the same as spamming people's physical or electronic inbox with junk mail. Only this guy is spamming Amazon. Just because there are some people who click/buy the junk does not mean it's OK. In the article, the guy did not cite one satisfied customer..
Dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160923

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160732

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160925
The theoretical processor bandwidth is one thing; the actual throughput on motherboards with existing slow memory chips (DDR2-667 according to the specs page) is quite a different matter.

This becomes a pretty big deal when you have that many cores all hammering on it at once. Divide by 32...
They certainly do measure abilities in a certain area, the question is whether that measures whether knowing why manhole covers are round can add value to an organization in the way that is currently desired for that position.

I don't see what connection stupid puzzles have to turning a spec or a vague, contradictory set of requests from a user into working code and working with other people.

Judging from friends who used to compete in mathematical olympiads, my educated guess is that the people who sail through the brainteasers are the ones who practice working on them (the way you prepare for a mathematical olympiad is to solve old mathematical olympiad problems).

Do you want to hire someone who spends their spare time working on job interview puzzles? Do you want someone who's delighted by answering "why are manhole covers round?" with the pointless, trite response of "because manholes are round!", which only begs the question? I swear to god those Joel on Software forum people get off on this crap.

Microsoft's problem is that you get fired if you look at open source code, so talking about neat open source side projects you did the way more enlightened companies like ThoughtWorks do is completely out of the question, which shows that they have much deeper problems than just figuring out the right interview questions.
Maybe you should submit it to some more social news sites. I personally found it to be very interesting!
The classic anecdote about solving the wrong problem is asking engineers to deal with bicycle handle bars getting cold when it's cold outside: they design an expensive thermal heating system that weighs down the bike and makes the bike more expensive than the competition.

The non-engineer's response to the problem is to wear gloves.
In France 3 strikes your out program run by ISP's for RIAA
Maybe there's something taking superlinear time.

Out of curiosity, how high is high?
I viewed your site and I had a case of information overload. I would suggest having a feature where a person can type in what they like (cars, technology, etc) and that you feed them what they want rather then dump everything on them at once.
The problem is whoever voted it up. Would that we could unmask the bozos;-)
I miss Facebook in the article!
I highly recommend his book Maverick.
Ask YC : java template engine for generating source code?
Have any of you used stringtemplate, velocity, freemarker or others for generating structured text of any kind? Any experiences or thoughts? Stringtemplate seems to be purely functional and claims to enforce strict model view separation. Is StringTemplate good in real world?
Continue; - the forgotten statement
Non-linkjacked: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=126326
3 months to install Linux?

You can't be serious.
You do not need RL friends, fortunately.
Good catch. The most revolutionary award may actually go to Apple for the Apple II... although they tried to sell out to Commodore before that!
Leo Laporte did a show for 10 years and it got cancelled - here's how he blogged it
Have a look at http://code-generation.net and Manning's Code Generation in Action.
Damn. I go sleep for a few hours, and look what happens...
Perhaps he's doing a stage 1 of Gentoo and wants to configure and compile everything himself.
Logo Design Basics: The Five Types of Marks
U.S. housing collapse spreads overseas
Some comments... http://reddit.com/info/1cqi4/comments/c1ctfp

"Better still, check out Grey Walter's precognitive carousel projector experiments. He implanted electrodes in patients' heads, and gave them a slideshow to watch, with a button to push to advance to the next slide. But the button was fake. What really moved the slide was a motor potential building in the brain before they were aware of the desire to move it. It unnerved the patients, because it seemed to them as if the projector was always advancing just before they'd consciously decided to advance it."

" Also many said that they had not yet decided to change the picture, but were just about to make that decision. These findings were replicated by German researchers, who found the time delay between the brain trigger and subject awareness that a decision had been made, to be between 0.5 to 1.0 seconds

[...]

The results here however, indicate that the self-aware part of thought is only informed of a decision after it has actually been made by unconscious processes. Your mind has made a decision before it lets you know what it is, (the precognitive carousel manages to bypass the inbuilt delay necessary to maintain the illusion of free will)."
Inventor's Paradox: an ambitious plan may have more chances of success
I couldn't install XP on a new laptop that easily (problems with SATA disks when they are set in RAID mode):
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/01/21/install-xp-se...
I guess someone should come up with "a plan for book spam".
Quoting the classics:

"During their operations they seem to focus entirely on the process, but very little on the quality of the code. Sorry guys, but having a 1:4 code:test ratio is not focusing on code quality. It’s focusing on test quality."

http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html
Do you mean this one?
"Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB"(http://tinyurl.com/57gfot)
Would you still recommend the book?
I wonder why ? but that is what author is explaining at the end
i am speaking for myself. i am generation Y
Pretty interesting :-)

Can any of you recommend other good tech- or startup-related podcasts?
This makes me think: Now I really want to use this!
Can anyone recommend a way to learn using AWS? Is there a useful book? Do I have to learn Ruby first?
7 Google Cafes in Two Hours
Bob Ippolito's Erlang Presentation