skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading this message reminds me to be humble because I was an "idea guy" up until a few years ago. I even had a Great Big Idea that I wouldn't tell anybody about. My hacker friend wouldn't go in on a business with me and he wasn't tempted to build my site for $500, so I decided to learn how to build websites myself. Boy was I shocked and frustrated by just how much there is to learn. I started the process 2005 by learning where websites lived (I discovered servers) and have progressed from there.

Unfortunately the pressures of making a living slowed me down for a few years, but today I feel like I have a good perspective on what I know and what I need to know to build what I want to. People have started to "steal" my Big Idea in the intervening years, but that's okay because I've come up with new ones. I'm actually pleased that the process was so hard because I have learned so much and it has led me to attend graduate school in Computer Science this fall.

Anyways, this message is very personal to me. I have learned to admire those who are good implementers and to strive to be one myself.
That should be a really fun project, I wish I had those kinds of problems to solve.
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Netbeans has early access PHP support, Python is still waiting ...
I've seen a few people mention the idea that you could buy every venture backed company in the valley (including facebook) for $45B. That might be a bit much, but if you went on enough of a buying spree you could probably consolidate the advertising properties in a way that could be competitive with yahoo.
MS requires a young visionary who is creative enough to take risk and understands the dynamics of the new web arena.
Twitter has been mostly not Rails for a very long time. You can't build a service like Twitter on top of a traditional relational database stack, so much of their infrastructure is based around custom message queue stuff.
whoever takes over the market share in mobile/cell phone advertising will be the winner eventually - this is very new in north-america but in asia it has become a huge market concentration and the key local players are already trying to tap the market. MS should buy one of those companies who are good with that platform/technology.
you know, the more and more i get into this business with my own start up I am realizing this. But because I am not even 20, (1 week, may 8) I equal make this stereotype true atleast on some level.

It boils down to experience. 'kids' as ill even refer to myself as, create these applications, websites, whatever, and they think they can make the millions. Sometimes this is true, but what usually happens if they begin to talk to VC's is they tell them they are not capable to run their own company.

"Get a degree, get your ass kicked at a company, then start your own" - Guy Kawasaki

I think people think this because, yes it does happen, but more times than not its people with M.B.A's or a lot of experience that team up with a vet technie to start these.

-William Kasel
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That sounds like a recipe for failure.

A new search engine marketed with Apple's style, while building hardware and converting apps to search/ads?
if you are microsoft, you need to realize that you will never do anything that is going to win over the tech community. Refocus on the young, un-opinionated demographic. These 16-24 year old average college student doesn't care if you ripped off seattle computer company, or if you have a crappy OS, they like your gaming console, so buy some things they are interested in, and make services that bundle with the OS. Ive heard rumours of a socialized OS, this is interesting, this could make $$$. Dont even need 45B.
Try to salvage their desktop market. This means licensing or purchasing the necessary software to make Windows usable out-of-the-box. DVD, MP3 codecs, compression and decompression utilities, basic compilation tools and more should be included by default in every Windows installation. Also: speech recognition, translation software, telephony applications and more.

Set up a commercial software repository and get into the business of managing a marketplace rather than just providing desktop software. Prepare the company for the day it will need to give away its operating system to attract users for ancillary services.
Still 500.

And to think, I nearly based my company on Rails... Not a great advert for what appears on the face of it to be such a promising Framework.
Build a proper operating system.
I try to never do super mind-heavy work late at night because I dream in whatever that was alllll night long. When I did have to do marathon code sessions all day and late into the night, I did yoga to flush my brain of coding. It helped a lot and I slept like a baby.

Exercising a lot helps me fall asleep better at night. Lately i've been too busy with work to get much in, and i'm having a hell of a time falling asleep. When I train for something (some sort of race) I sleep like a baby.
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"You just can't buy that sort of entertainment" - https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000959.html
unless it's a major mistake, most publications don't really publicize corrections (especially not with blogs being able to edit their content.) UPDATE
The importance of pigheadedness
I'm a 20 year old college student - slap bang in the middle of your demographic - and I care they have a crappy OS, enough to move to a Mac. But that might also be because I'm also part of the tech community - by the virtue of reading YC?
The Iron Man film is astounding; better than expected. It is bursting with comedy. The visual style of the film is similar to The Dark Knight. The gadgetry is amazing. For example, you'll love Tony Stark's multi-monitor desktop. And I've never seen Gwyneth Paltrow looking better. I'm expecting a sequel.
That is nice. But the best feature is the address bar - it's a smart search bar, with functionality close to wundrbar. It takes into account how often you visit sites to rank the urls it displays when you start typing.
But taking a slightly longer term view - how is your productivity the next day? What's it average out to over a few days with a big loss of sleep?
Yes I agree, much laughs. I've never been a fan of Paltrow, but I must say she's lookin excellent in this movie.
I went and had a look at the slides for their 'scaling twitter' presentation, and it looks like they had a look at Erlang and reacted with some silly "ooh, it looks ugly" sort of comment. Seems pretty silly to reject something out of hand that is very much along the lines of what you need.
All hackers should read this book...
That's the theory. Sometimes the practice isn't so simple, when you have 32423432234 lines of spaghetti code, all tangled up. Surely twitter isn't that bad, but I've been in situations where someone cited that very idea and it just wasn't feasible.
Say what you will about Cringely, he's had pretty stunning accuracy at predicting Apple's biggest moves for several years now...even the stuff that seems unlikely except in hindsight.
Yeah, I just couldn't resist the snark and he was the first soft target that came to mind :-)
Sun Microsystems' third-quarter loss stuns Wall Street
"Sure, I don't know many people with whom I can talk about my work."

You're in the wrong town. Even in Austin, which is a startup hub and the second home for many of the world's biggest tech companies (Sun, IBM, Motorola, Intel, and the list goes on and on, even Google has a small office there), I felt the way you feel. In the valley...it's a different world altogether. You never feel like the odd bird out here, and if you ever get to feeling that way, search the web...there's an even happening within the next week where you'll be able to rub elbows with people even more caught up in it than you are.
Shouldn't he be using median rather than average values? Zaitratsu could have just had one mega-posting and a bunch of mediocre ones. AFAIK, the conclusions he's drawing, while they may be true, aren't supported by the data he presents.
No, that's too harsh. Splog is automatically generated website with the help of blog CMS, while he actualy writes his own articles.

The guy was quite helpful in the past with articles like how to build a habit of geting up early etc., but later shifted his focus to maximize his own profit from the site.
Well, it's not a permanent thing. It's a short term sacrifice for a specific goal. They are like athletes preparing for the Olympics.
The so-called paradox is happening only because a sentence is claiming its own truthfulness or falsehood.
This discovery should lead to very cheap NVRAM. What new ways of doing business will arise when a computer with 32x4GHz cores and 16 TB of memory costs $2000 TCO/year?

Disks will no longer be the performance bottleneck of cutting edge systems. Instead it will be network latency. I think that a very important problem will be the geographic distribution of information to minimize latency for users and maintaining consistency of those replicas.

Additionally, the current model of software installation will become obsolete. A very important current problem is how to deliver applications over the network with good performance and stability. I think that we need something better than the browser/DOM/JavaScript and the proprietary offerings from Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun.

These are two important problems that I am studying. What hard problems are you working on?
Convince me to use Python
Once you have kids, the answer is no.
They're having problems with their database servers. It has nothing to do with Rails.
sigh

I admit, this is really hard to resist.

But please, can we try?
The edges aren't really directed, but those with an arrowhead at one end indicate CEO-hood.
I would like to re-thank you for your advice!
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Motorola's PR site hacked, links to porn
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Honestly, I am not a MS hater. Really.

But Outlook is not going to ship similar features.

Outlook SEARCH does not work right. It is broken, go
try it.

How many years has it been since Lookout?

BTW, I am a full time Visual Studio user, not a hater.
I think the ideia that entrepreneurs are in their early 20s comes from the media: a dude still in college "makes it big" is big news, but when someone in his 40s "makes it big" is not such good news, or doesnt sale as many magazines/pageviews.
Hard to believe. I don't know anything about this movie except for the poster ads, and every time I see one of them I feel amazed at how ridiculous the movie industry has become.

OK, a recommendation on Hacker News, that is quite something. But nah - I think I'll still pass for the time being. Maybe if I had a 12 year old son, it would be a different matter...
Sneaky Safari Update Triples the Browser's Windows Market Share
How interesting that you got voted down.
Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m
"Randi weighs more than 300 pounds and has borderline diabetes, but she controls her blood sugar and keeps her bright outlook on life by swimming every day for about 45 minutes."

Something is wrong with this picture. Not denying that exercise is good, but clearly, in this case, it is not enough.

I am confused - I have read several times that diabetes (the acquired type) can be controlled with the right diet, so that you don't have symptoms anymore and don't need medication (for example in Kurzweill's books, and in "The China Study"). So why are there still people like that? I don't think they are getting the right treatment, and they are kidding themselves with the 45 minutes exercise.
More than 200 Videos from Defcon 15 Hacker Conference
i should have been in bed 3 hours ago...
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Microsoft’s real problem
He cropped his photo, which was a good move.

Can we concentrate on the merits of his argument this time?
Buy any and every Internet company that looks remotely interesting and let them do their thing.

Have the dudes at Microsoft Research re-write the OS from scratch and see what happens.
I thought your original comment was funny, but now I realise you mean it. Oh dear
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And, I don't know if you've heard Joe Kraus speak, but he almost always tells the story of the serendipity that led to his success with Excite...and the first step in that series of unlikely events, the kind fellow who spoke to him was Cringely. He lined up their first customer and first investor and offered them lots of (bad) advice. But Joe obviously still feels very positive about it, because he's brought it up three times out of four that I've seen him speak.

Cringely's telling of the story:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/1999/pulpit_19990121_0005...
1. It's obvious that Xobni has more stuff planned, whether or not they're "features." I'm sure the "leak" just happened to be timed before the acquisition rejection.

2. "especially since there is no clear revenue stream opportunities with the product - do you really want ads inside Outlook or would you really pay in order to get the "information" being thrown up about email traffic?"

I'm pretty sure there are more ways to potentially monetize Xobni than advertising or b2b/b2c SaaS.

Than again, if I remember correctly, this guy didn't really do his homework last time either, so why should I think he's done it this time?
This all based on a ton of speculation. There are three big unknowns as I see it:

-Nobody really knows the details of the offer.

-Nobody really knows what Xobni has in store.

-Nobody really knows how much say the VC's had.

Most companies start with a feature that becomes a product which becomes a company. The Outlook plugin could be the tip of a much bigger spear. I have never used xobni b/c I don't use outlook but I can see a bunch of possible directions for them. Who knows though? Maybe it is a minor feature. But anyone in a startup knows enough to know how little they know about the inner workings of another company. And anyone who's tried to raise money knows how thoroughly you have to explain your long term plans and revenue models. If you can't say I'm going to be a $100 million dollar company in X years b/c of Y and Z reasons, you're not going to get a series A. You'd also know that $20 million is a small offer after a series A.
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was surprised at the quality of the film. very entertaining.
Sucking all the juice out
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I hate the last paragraph!
It is positive to see that all of the presidential candidates with a chance of winning, support increasing the number of H1B visas available. Should make it a little easier in future.
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I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer.

RAM is nothing more than just a cache mechanism for slower storage devices, and as such it could have been made transparent from the programming perspective (roughly the same way as other caching devices - Cache Level 1 ... Cache Level N, CPU registers).

The reasons RAM is still directly programmable are probably historical rather than technical. There is clearly a tendency though in many modern dynamic languages to hide direct memory allocation from the programmer.

So, my first guess is, memristors won't affect much the world of garbage-collected dynamic languages - they are sort of ahead of time already.

There is an interesting perspective, however, if you look at the OS level.

Firstly, some part of the file system which is read-only - mostly code - will not be copied or "loaded" anymore, it will be read directly by the CPU from where it lies in the FS.

Another important change here would be that memory pointers will persist. It is difficult to speculate on the possible impact, but it may be huge. It may even give rise to new programming languages - with or without direct pointer manipulation, I don't know.

As for data files, my guess is that "open", "save" and other common verbs will be eliminated. Instead, we'll work directly on the file and the system will somehow keep the modification history (and here's where the analog nature of memristors might help, or maybe not).
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i guess, i would get rid of windows os-core, replace it with linux/bsd (more likely) and provide a nice skin on top. this would most likely destroy all hopes of having linux / osx having any resonable dominance on the desktop anytime soon. and a unix-y core would be quite welcome among the hackers too. world-domination with a vengeance :o)

edit: one thing that i realized is that _is_ possible to dress unix up quite nicely. an iron fist with a velvet glove.
Wow. Thanks for the insight. From the outside, I thought the I-bank business was the zenith. Looks a lot like my vision of hell, given that info.
Now Microsoft "Leaning Toward Hostile"
It would be interesting to attempt to run some regressions and see how connectedness affects the performance of a company.
Being on call out of hours isn't the same as working (too) hard. 40-hour week, plus being paged a few times a month to deal with 4am crises, is perfectly reasonable. So is pulling the occasional all-nighter to meet a deadline.

The article is talking about something completely different: putting yourself in a state of constant sleep-deprivation through working ridiculous hours. And the author is right: that's not half as effective as people claim.
Depends how you manage it. When I do this, I go to sleep mid-afternoon the next day, and sleep for 12+ hours. When I wake up after that (early morning), I feel absolutely fantastic.

The end result is probably only about 20-25 hours work in two days - i.e. not much more than normal working days. The advantage isn't in the total hours, it's in having the same problems rattling around in your head for a long time.
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I tend to agree with the analysis here, and think that Xobni missed a nice chance. I'd be surprised if Microsoft comes knocking again, and I don't see any reasonable way that they can build their tool into anything that is not parasitic on Outlook, much less effectively monetize it...
For me, Facebook often seems very sluggish and slow - I have a pretty useful 4Meg connection and others sites are fine - maybe 10,000 servers is part of the problem - it seems like a ridiculously high number. I wonder how many transactions/pasge views per second they get ...
Cool - soon you can be friends without even knowing it.
I didn't even know Infospace/Dogpile/Metacrawler still existed. I think my dad kept using Dogpile for a few years after Google came along, but I never saw anything of value in any of those products--an aggregate of bad results is still bad results, and an aggregate of mostly bad and some good results is pretty much bad.
From TFA: "What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook?"

The core problem with this commentary is that the writer doesn't understand that Xobni can be more than just an Outlook feature. I think he has a hard time seeing beyond the UI that's been presented.

I am reminded of VitalSigns that many people saw is just a toy for looking at how well your dial up connection was working. Others realized that the underlying technology was interesting, that it applied in the business environment and VitalSigns was bought out for a good price.
I'd make virtualization go straight to the core. Then I'd extend the virtualization into smaller and smaller places until you can run indivual apps/windows in micro VM's without "feeling it." I'd also work on making the VM's interoperate securely via a bridge to allow seamless copy/paste and networking and remove the feeling of being different VM's. So long as the bridge is secure, the OS itself will be more secure. I would open source the bridge code.

Now the problem of legacy compatibility can be contained to VM's with support for the previous gen and the latest kernel can be free to update itself.

I'd clean up security and put out some smaller security X-prizes to make reporting exploits more profitable than selling them elsewhere.
If your company needs to scale to the level of twitter, using rails will be a nice problem to have (it would have got you that far quickly).
Raganwald weighs in? Or Raganwald approvingly quotes Jamie Zawinski and Joel Spolsky?
"always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent."

Ouch. I've gotten (seriously) burned on that one more than once. I'd hope for something more nuanced, like "assume positive intent, but protect yourself anyway."
Hell, I wake up most mornings "leaning toward hostile".
So what if it's parasitic on Outlook?
He's got the same "classic archive" problem that anyone with a long blog archive has. Last time Pav mentioned it, he had written over 500 articles, so now he prob has 700+. His most successful articles are posted on the front, circulate around the internet, etc. But if you go back sequentially through his archives, maybe only 1/3 of them are good and 1/10 are great. But those stand out in memory of the "good old Steve Pavlina". Same for pg, raganwald, and Joel.
"You could roll Slashdot back to 1999 and it would be the same people with the same views talking about the same thing. We get your point, enough already :)"

1) Roll Slashdot back to 1999
2) ??????????????
3) Profit!
How come nobody mentioned business? Microsoft is about the enterprise.

I think many criticize Microsoft from a consumer standpoint, but the CEO of Microsoft is going to know where his bread is buttered.

If any of us was the CEO we'd realize that we couldn't make the kind of radical changes we crave as consumers.

Changing course will take them some time, but I believe we'll see MSX eventually (in some horrible form).

In the meantime I'll keep using Mac/open source at home and (barely) tolerating MS software at work.
Wall street types are used to working on serious hardware though (I am not a wall street person, but work for a fortune 500 type place).

One of our Oracle databases sits on a 24 core itanium box

That sort of hardware + Oracle can munch through some serious work - perhaps that is the database solution, but I believe it doesn't come cheap!
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good for them!!
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