skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That makes sense, but I think the opportunity cost should not be ignored. If the opportunity cost of continuing on the current track is higher than the expected returns (both on the short and long term), then it might be better for us to either sell or cut our losses.

But yes... when somebody approaches us (instead of the other way around) we have a much stronger position during negotiation. So the problem is really in the "eventually" part.
New Reddit UI and Features Leaked
Yahoo Refunds A Customer 9 Billion (Yes, with a B) dollars
This was validating: on self-financing, on being cheap/don't like to spend, outsourcing, holding off on getting incorporated. Yes - will definitely tell yc about it. Thanks.
Still too expensive. Why charge for transfer costs?
pg, once you made a comment about working on search. Until that is done, can you link to SearchYC.com from here?
holy fucking shit. The fridge rack we installed in the Herndon datacenter is there, large as life, in one of the slides, with the entire (circa 2003) hwops team's signatures on it. I have trouble believing that it was in fact the optimal rack design (given the cooling and power that GOOG favors) but I guess if it ain't broke, and has several patents on the genius features that make it easy to service, why 'fix' it...

The 'never seen a petabyte of data, never used a thousand machines' slide was funny. I'm not a particularly strong CS guy, but I happened to work on molecular dynamics right after getting my undergraduate degree in chemistry, and can note for the record that I got allocated 1000 CPUs during a test deployment... which we promptly soaked. Whether the exercise was a useful one is hard to say.

But the genius of Google (and Amazon) is that now it doesn't matter. You just have to find the right model for your code so that it harnesses an arbitrary number of unreliable nodes, and the libraries (and infrastructure) do the rest. It's really amazing how far things have come in 10 years.
Taking Web Apps Offline (Talk about Gears/Air)
If everything were available in microformats, wouldn't that dramatically lower the barrier to entry for search startups who want to be the next Google?

That said, wouldn't it be in Google's best interest to keep microformats at bay? Natural language processing + strong AI is how Google stays on top, no?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
Darn it Paul, every technologist has to dream about his or her technology making the world a better place. We want to think the Internet will improve how people communicate. If you were around back then, whoever invented television would have instead gone home sulking.

Of course, you would have been right. And maybe that would be a good thing. But stop raining on our parade anyway!
You Need Business Cards
Why relational databases end up being the bottleneck
I see half-and-half solutions as more possible: slightly smarter markup and much smarter web spiders would reap about as much benefit as a fully semantic web. I mean, just marking headers properly in <h\d> tags rather than <font size="\d"> and quotes in <quote> is a pretty decent hint for sniffing out semantically important text, and having grammar parsers for named entities like proper names and addresses and dates and such that are as forgiving with that text as BeautifulSoup is with the terrible HTML out there is a good amount of work in the right direction. I worked on a research project doing just that for two years and you can get a LOT of useful information out of a lot of modern HTML pages just by applying some simple statistical/AI magic to it. Anything more sophisticated would be near impossible without a breakthrough bordering on miracle.
Apple Steams Ahead On Strong Q2 Financials
Ask YC: Startup School attendee seeks followup with Adam Selipsky
At Startup School, Jeff Bezos told me to get in touch with Adam Selipsky about getting an exception to the 100 Domain limit in SimpleDB (See http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos ). Adam Selipsky turns out to be a hard man to reach. Does anyone know how I can get in touch with him?
Recommendation Nation
I have two pet peeves here.

One, this wasn't a rant. It was neither bombastic nor over-emotional. It seemed to me to be wholly uncontroversial. If anything, the relatively conservative steps he advises (starting a business with only moderately successful aims) seem downright boring.

Second, the failure rate for new businesses is not 80 or 90%. Even a little bit of googling would put that to rest. To wit:

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/news/coladvice/ask/sa99...

And, as the article points out, the very buyout scenario that many YCers (HNers, really, unless you've been accepted) dream of would be counted among the failures. Fewer than 10% of these failed businesses were the dreaded bankruptcies.

Seriously, nothing to see here. And if any of you really were convinced that you've got a 90% chance of failure, you would stop complaining about 37 signals "rants" and get to work shoring up your (apparently) failing business.
I just updated the site with more details about the implementation. If you are using restful_authentication, it may be as easy as just making 3 one-line changes to your current user code (lib/authenticated_system.rb and app/models/user.rb), depending on how my notion of an Account lines up with how you're managing your customers.
Careful with reusing stuff from previous jobs unless you carefully negotiated to make sure you retain ownership over what you create.
True. Googlers with kids / spouses tend to bring them in for dinner quite a bit. Which is a pretty fair compensation for the kind of hours Googlers work, IMO.

Doing this regularly is officially frowned upon. In fact, you're supposed to register on an internal website if you're planning to bring any guest at all. It's the honor system, but there's technically a limit on the number of guests per month.
Microsoft is entering this market?
Well, one part is that it's a Dutch startup - targeted primarily at Dutch customers.

300 million people in the USA. 16 million in the Netherlands. So ppc campaigns are far less effective here.

The obvious question is: so why aren't you targeting the global market then? We originally thought that a local approach would help us get off the ground more easily. Perhaps we made a mistake there.
We are doing A/B testing with our business cards, because we couldn't decide on which design we liked more.
Will Facebook be ready for business?
show of hands - how many ppl made bcards for the first time, just for startup school?

(i wasn't there)
totally, their e-book also seems to take a "our way worked so it must be the best" tone while ignoring the fact that a big part of their success relied on recognition from the previous projects the founders had worked on.
People are natuarally drawn to the 'life is to short to do X' line of argument. But is it really? I'm in the middle of a startup, following my dream so to speak, meanwhile putting off my career, and not taking VC. If it succeeds, great. If it doesn't, I'm 3 years behind where I could be, an opportunity cost, and I've lost a bunch of friends and family money. Life is too short to be miserable all the time, which is sometimes what I think the 'life is too short' line of argument is all about - making people feel miserable if they aren't living up to some exalted paradigm of meaningful existence. Sometimes I wonder if my day job is really that bad or if I am I just being made to feel miserable b/c of some appeal to an aspect of human nature that will forever be restless.
Agile Web Development with Rails: 3rd Edition available as PDF
If be entering the market we're talking about the magical platform that will sync all your data and applications across all your devices, wait no, just Windows devices, then maybe. But I hardly see that being anywhere close to S3.
Sam Ruby is now a co-author.
The statistic I heard was $20/day. And there have been cutbacks over the years -- one day they removed a lot of the more exotic snacks and replaced them with bigger bins of bulk cereals. Oh, the outrage on internal mailing lists that day!

Google's cafes are so efficient so I wonder how much the labor really adds to the cost. You have chefs and line workers that could work in a high-end restaurant, so salaries are higher, but it's all set up for maximum throughput, so perhaps that makes it cheap.

For example, at Yahoo's cafes, there's a lot of made-to-order stuff. You end up waiting up to 10 minutes sometimes, and there are lineups. Everything at Google is premade food done buffet style, or self-serve, like a sandwich bar. At Yahoo I have waited for a long time for someone else to make the sandwich, and sometimes that person doesn't speak English well enough for me to make her understand that no, I don't actually want meat in the sandwich.

The Google taqueria is made-to-order, but that is run like an assembly line and you add your own condiments at the end.

In the boldest move, Google does away with the checkout line too, which makes throughput incredibly fast. Finally, for whatever reason, Googlers are more conscientious about cleaning their plates before returning them to the cafe. Yahoo has the same sorts of prominently placed garbage cans, but nobody seems to use them.

The only reason that getting food at Google might take you more than 3 minutes are

a) lines -- a growing problem

b) indecision because everything looks so great.

Caveat: this is my experience circa 2005-6.
I don't know about Adam Selipsky, but Amazon Web Services' "chief evangelist", Jeff Barr, has been able to get people into AWS betas and suchlike in the past -- so he can probably help you here.
Well said. I am going with the 25-something-model :-p
"Let's get right to the core of the problem: prototypical based inheritance is worse than class based inheritance."

Can you defend this?
Twitter is small talk. As much as I sometimes cringe at the banality of "How are you?", it's important because it is not important.
A small percentage of users are trying to get $10k/month bandwidth for $60/month.
Thanks, I'll contact him.
Drop us a line at sellingstartup@gmail.com and we can give you more details about our situation.

Thanks a bunch.
Pet rant: I hate business cards the way I hate suits. Just because you like them does not mean I need them.

I'd rather be (and be around) the kind of person who is way too focused on making a great product to give a fig about paraphernalia.
Google Maps seems to do a pretty good job of parsing addresses. Given a database of say, US city names, state names and zip codes, could an API not be built that would recognize something like that and wrap it in a microformat either by a stupid simple API call or just as an auto-expanding template type feature?

I agree with you that the average user (which includes business, etc.) will not do it significantly unless it's effortless so I wonder if app platforms or frameworks can make it more effortless in this way. That combined with some level of justified business value in some sectors could be our best stab at a practically, usefully, partially semantic web.

Being pragmatic, I'm not one to say that unless the whole web is semantic then we give up. I'm also not one to believe the whole web will be semantic or that all of it really needs to be.
Don't know if it really makes sense for companies like MSFT to follow these tactics. Microsoft has around 80,000 employees compare to 16K employees at google. Besides, I think, average age of Microsoft employees is higher than google employees. Free food is not as lucrative for a middle age family man as compare to a new grad.

I heard from MSFT old timers that though Microsoft never had free food, they were quite lenient with food in their early days.

However, you have a point, in my opinion google has able to attract best tallent. Not sure how much free food accounts for it.
I didn't know that about Roger Moore - well you learn something every day ;)

I read the book by patrick naughton on the history of Oak etc, quite an interesting read.
Had I been awake, I would not have asked such a silly question. The answer is "Of course there is!" Google is your friend. There is a semi-generic Mod-Lisp package and at least one wrapper for it cl-modlisp... The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
They left off Charles Murray who incidentally derived a novel way of measuring intellectual influence semi-objectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
and if you can't remember the name of that person on the way back from wherever you met them.. that's why i keep cards handy.
When I use it, it always feels like you are forcing OO on something that would rather stay functional. I would agree it seems artifical, but then maybe its just familiarity.
One for scheme as well--- mod-lisp.scm
Well done on getting some additional information on the site so fast!
The Pareto principle (aka the 80/20 rule):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I've noticed this in my own business as well -- 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
But this is an S3 price cut, not an EC2 price cut.
Interesting! I'd investigate further, but my needs have not yet required a framework. Were that so, I'd certainly ride a rail or two...

--hsm
Because it costs them money to transfer the data to you.
Ask YC: Canadian, Set up US Office?
Anyone know how a foreign company, Canadian in my case, goes about setting up a US based company? My purpose is to be able to use all the great services out there (YPN for instance) that are only available to "US Citizens or Companies".
It's a general data transfer price cut. It applies to both S3 and EC2.
I don't need business cards as much as I need a business!
Franky I can see why. I used Vista for the very first time today at a clients. All I was trying to do was set up some email accounts and I realised that Microsoft had gone crazy during the years of development. I moved from Windows to Mac (and Linux) and don't regret it one bit. Now I've seen Vista I wonder how a company of that size can get something so wrong
Thanks for the info, gone part of the way to instilling trust into a previous unrecognised (to me) brand. I'll have to check out their blog.
Twitter may not be invaluable in itself, but as a signpost indicating the direction the social world (and the world at large) is heading, it's not bad.
companies are capitalizing on the huge subset of windows users who want a more OSX like experience but either can't (work) or won't (expense) get an apple.
That's because the algorithm is from New Jersey. If you know what I mean.
It has worked well for me. 8 years ago I met a Russian guy in a forum and we've created several products together and been reasonably (though not stratospheric) successful. We only met, for the first time, two years ago. Sometimes it comes down to gut instinct, even thousands of miles away. We couldn't do it without the technology, but it works really well with it.

One interesting point is that we get on better remotely than I ever think we would if we were in each others faces day-in-day-out
Some people just aren't satisfied :)
I publish data in microformats whenever I get the chance. It's not hard, it doesn't take long and the added classes aren't doing any harm.
If microformats drift away and the possibilities never eventuate, what harm has been done? It's just semantic markup.
I just bought a 3-year-old used iBook G4, that the previous owner had upgraded RAM and HD for, and the performance is just fine (I don't play games or do heavy media stuff). It cost half of what my new cheapo PC laptop did and it seems like quite an improvement. So I don't think that the price should be an excuse.
I recently got a laptop from CDW from work with a Vista install. It would only boot up half-way, then start over... infinite boot loop. I spent five minutes checking the BIOS details, before I broke the labeling on the XP downgrade CD and did LiteStep shell replacement.
1) Well, that depends what you want to call "next version". If you called "Web 2.0" next version, then you can call the Semantic Web next version.

2) He was obviously talking about the direction of the technology, not implying that "everything" as it is now is going to become semantic. I think that was pretty clear.

3) Same line here. "Standards" are never going to fully be implemented, it doesn't mean that they mean nothing. Semantic web is just one step up. Most standards-based websites are designed semantically anyway, plus from a back-end perspective, REST is on the rise.

Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Technorati are using microformats already. They're all pushing the technology, they have plans as to how they want to use them. It's up to the developers to come up with solutions as to how to make them easier for the general public to use.
Sounds promising. Would this be able to support a scheme like this:

Rent n units at price y for x hours, where dollars per y-hour is dependent on the number of units n(volume discounts)? Show the user an interface with their current unit-hours and let them draw down against it?
Great, a poop joke! When did Digg rename itself to Hacker News?
> it's less powerful

Actually, in some ways, JS-style prototype-based inheritance is more powerful. You can emulate class-based inheritance, but you can also use a variety of other models, such as adding in only a single specified method from another class or adding in capabilities on a per-object basis instead of per-class.

Yes it's different, and maybe it's a pain to use -- especially if what you want is for it to be language x (for some value of x) -- but I don't understand how you can justify the claim that it's less powerful.
I wish this was posted just before startup school so I wouldn't have arrived with two business cards in my wallet and boxes at home.
In my experience, JavaScript has tremendously powerful capabilities both in terms of OO and in terms of FP, and if you can get comfortable with it, you can mix the idioms seamlessly. Using something like the Prototype library helps -- it adds power for metaprogramming as well as for more practical things like DOM and event manipulation.

Once you figure out OO idioms you like using, the main limitations are random annoyances like the lack of a clean idiom for linked lists and the fact that the JS spec doesn't require tail call optimization, so some functional idioms are going to be dog-slow.
For those of us on a student budget, VistaPrint.com cost me about $7 for 250 cards (and that includes the $2 it costs to take their logo off the back).
The Growth of College Entrepreneurship
You might need business cards, but do you really need to put the phrases "blogger" and "tech maven" on them? I think it would actually be more tasteful and relevant to say "has HUGE penis" and "awesomest person evar!!11" on them. Okay, maybe not :)

Just stick to your name, your company's name, and some contact information. Nobody cares that you're a blogger. Nobody cares about meaningless-but-grandiose titles either.
I have specific business cards for all my different projects (software, music, a volunteer position) and we're making cards for our upcoming launch as well. It's just the easiest way to give someone your contact info when you're out and about, and makes a more professional impression when networking.

gruseom, it's not about someone being a "suit", it's about making it easy to transfer your contact info in different situations. Sometimes a little piece of paper pre-printed is easier than finding a pen and paper or expecting someone to have a blackberry/iphone on hand. Plus, they're cheap. Not having a business card means throwing away offline word of mouth opportunities. To me, I want to see smart people focused on making a great product. The impression you give also factors into what people think before even seeing your product.

I actually just ordered a holder for my moo cards, since I've forgotten once or twice recently to stock up before going out...
Uh, I guess so... if you implement it. :)

Kidding aside, you can do whatever you want on top of the base application -- it's a standard Rails app, after all. But what you get "out of the archive" is a bog-standard customer pays $x/mo for access to the app which has some limits based on the value of x, and the limits are up to you to implement (aside from the included one, which limits the number of users that can be associated with a customer's account).
I have to agree with this. I used to recommend TrustCommerce to everyone, but now I recommend BrainTree to everyone, primarily because of their responsiveness. Of course the payment gateway works -- you'd hope that would be a given, regardless of the provider -- but their excellent service really sets BrainTree apart.
Let's face it. Most of the "reading" people do online is in the form of "omg pictures of lolcats". There is no analysis going on here, it's just time killing.
eh. i wouldn't say it was a poop joke so much as it is a satire of some of the more inane twitter users.

i don't like the negative energy associated with the penny arcade guys, but i sometimes laugh at their comics in spite of myself.
I think any information is a valuable information even if that means that "twitter-shitter" is talking about poop jokes.

Tools build on top of twitter which will mine the sea of this information, filter out interesting data and the extract some sense out of it will really make the experience better. Don't see too many creative tools build yet, but can't see why they would mature given enough time.
I'm never using them again. I ordered from VistaPrint and then started getting flooded with spam and phone calls (someone tried really hard to convince me to buy their website and SEO package).
Vista hate is amazing lately. What does setting up email accounts have to do with the underlying OS, again?
What's the best Rails book out there? A couple years ago I was told this was it, but I've heard otherwise.
good data, more people should be aware of these findings.
Google refuses to let Laughing Squid get promo photos of its booth at Blogtropolis
and a large percentage of users are paying $60 a month for $10 of bandwidth. And if ISP's have a problem keeping up with the demand why do they always block attempts of other players that want to enter the market? I'm perfectly happy with having ISP disconnect heavy users as long as there are plenty of other alternative ISPs.
I find it very hard to believe that Slavoj Zizek is better known, or more influential, than, say, Linus, RMS, PG, Joel, ESR or many others in our field.

Silly, vague, badly defined list.
My stock answer :)

http://toohardtopronounce.com/2008/2/7/the-three-must-have-r...
That's good news . . . he's a great writer.
People who make their livelihood out of writing about the tech industry understandably find it an invaluable tool. The rest of the world does not.

I actually enjoy Twitter, I just don't need it, and I can see why most people would just be annoyed by it.
First gen macbooks should be quite affordable now.
...because serving static HTML pages uses lots of database queries...
> Let's get right to the core of the problem: prototypical based inheritance is worse than class based inheritance. It's nothing like what all other languages are using, it's a pain to use and it's less powerful. That's the only language feature that is wildly inconsistent from other popular languages.

Fortunately, it's easy to build a real object system on top of Javascript's "default":

http://code.google.com/p/joose-js/

Perl is the same way. The default object system is garbage, but when you put Moose on it, it's the best of any language. (CLOS is a very close second, but it needs roles/traits!)
Who cares what the "next big language" is? Learn a language you and your coworkers like, use it, get good at it, improve it, etc. That's much more productive than switching languages every week because some blog told you to.
got a link or cite for the "microsoft abandoning vista" thing?

if that happens, my evil glee my well burst out of my gut like a baby alien.