skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So let's take Taiwan electronics manufacturing as an example here. They absolutely dominate in quality and skill at producing electronics, most of the high grade lcd panels in the world are produced there.

You are suggesting that Americans buy panels manufactured in the US. I have no idea what the benefit to this would be. Worse panels at a higher price? What does this solve? It would create unsustainable and irrational employment.

The way to solve economic downturn is not to close your borders like you suggest. That is the self-centered and naive way of thinking. The way to improve your economic situation is through innovation and wealth creation.
There's also the so-called Cupertino effect in which spellcheckers suggest words that are similar but completely wrong, e.g. "worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth", or "the third yesterday of January". Basically, one form of sloppiness or illiteracy replaced by another :)
When Spellcheckers Attack: Perils of the Cupertino Effect
The nearest Tesco is a few thousand miles away. Cheaper for me to just buy an Aeron.
Declining Dollar Hurts Remittance Recipients Abroad
Great parody of this column at http://cringelysucks.blogspot.com. Sure, lots of IT consultants suck. But Bob's thinking is, as usual, really lame. Read Cringely first, then read the parody.
Wow. I was in the exact situation you were in. U of T gave me a generous offer. Waterloo gave me bupkis, except admission. U of T was close to home so I would be able live at home, and be able to afford it. With Waterloo I would have had to work for 6 months to save money for first year, and then work part time during school to afford the rest.

I was an arrogant little bastard and didn't want to settle for U of T. So I picked Waterloo.
It was tough, but I still think it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Search engines off
you can't expect less developed economies to meet the standards of ours. Its not as if some "sweatshops" avoid healthcare provisions, sanitation. They exist in economies where it doesn't make sense to provide this, if they were to have full benefits as we have it wouldn't scale with their cost and they would either go out of business or not be able to employ as many people, thus some people would be unemployed while some would enjoy great benefits, which seems even more "unfair"
Slightly off-topic, but still related to Lisp: what do you guys think of ML (as compared to Lisp, for example). I learned this in my first year at college and I like it better and better the more I work with it. It seems that Lisp is much more common, though. Any ideas why that's the case?
I respect separatist movements and would be willing to add them to the list. America was founded by separatist radicals.
What you're saying is that the workers in other countries demand lower wages for a given amount of work.

>When standard of living starts to rise in one country (or in the relevant segment of it), it risks losing those same jobs to offshoring itself. E.g. India -> Vietnam.

But the original country (e.g. India) tends to maintain a permanently higher standard of living than when things started.
>When people vote for labor laws that make a product expensive to manufacture then go buy one made in a country where they don't follow the same laws, they are not being true to their stated values in my opinion.

How many people base their vote on a candidate's position on labor laws?
In other news: unemployment is still well below historical averages in the United States - as long as you're not a mill worker.
wow I did this a month ago, cool to see it make it into top 10 of HN...
What MySQL (and really, Sun) can learn from PostgreSQL
github seems pretty cool so far,

BUT I don't like that their webpage is kind of sluggish, or that they delegate issue tracking out to a pay service (lighthouse)

in a related note, committing/branching all the time locally and then just doing "git push origin" when I feel like pushing all those changes to github is AMAZING. it really changes the way you deal with rapidly changing code. I'm just learning git but the nerdhype seems strongly justified with this one :)
I've dropped 60lbs over the last year and over half of that was within the first two months. All I did was be mindful of my weight and convince myself that losing it was important. From there I just stopped eating as much crap and bought an exercise bike and made a simple rule. If I'm not watching tv / movies with friends, I'm on my bike.

As a note of interest, if you do nothing but watch all the star trek episodes and ride an exercise bike with minimal effort you will end up burning over 50 fat-lbs worth of calories. I still haven't made it through the first series I picked yet ;)
just in case you guys are just following your own threads (like I do), we have http://dallas.startupdrinks.com
The Business of Startups Is Business
You mean, you don't...
> Eventually my motivation will return to whatever it was that I should have been doing

How do you do to keep a coherent direction, then? My problem is precisely this, and I am so driven by motivation that I end up doing a kind of Brownian motion, in retrospect... ;)
Against News
Why being the latency monkey makes you want to shoot yourself
I really like this idea, but one problem I see is in building a user base. What are the chances there's going to be someone local to respond the first time a user tries your service? It helps that once they've added you to their friend's list, that'll remind them to try again every once in awhile, but needing them to have the patience to try several times would seem to dampen user acquisition.

It'll be neat when it has a large following, but kind of useless in the beginning.
A bunch of my friends were early VMWare customers (1999/2000). They were almost totally a consumer/small business company then. VMWare Workstation was their first product, and they only got into server virtualization and enterprise solutions after the dot-com recovery, when folks realized "Hey, our servers are sitting idle most of the time, let's put a bunch of additional virtual servers on it."

They've followed the path of many, many other successful disruptive innovations. They come out with something that's innovative & technically hard, release it as a low-margin consumer product, and then gradually move up-margin into enterprise systems as their product gets better & more widely known.
I love the pre-beta badge.
Ask YC:  Unconfirmed friend connections + explicit friend rejections result in more registered users?
The idea is that you can make anyone your friend and it would appear as if there's a bidirectional (i.e., confirmed friend link). If someone appears as your friend but isn't, you can reject that friend to break the link.

The idea here is that unregistered users would have to check out the site to see who their friends are and protect their reputation. And if some of them aren't friends, they would need to register to break those friendship links.

One might imagine that this would result in more registered users than bidirectional friendship links.
>>And the cheap chairs are always the most
>>comfortable, believe it or not.

>Surely spoken by someone who has never sat
>in an Aeron...

I've sat in many an Aeron. It's the Slackware of chairs. IMHO it takes weeks to get all the settings right, and at the end of the process you've still got the unsettling feeling that your ass feels really hot for some reason not fully apparent.
My guess is that the brain is trying new combinations, so that if you hit a new idea during the day, it will get reinforced (you get "excited"). So the brain "shuffles" stuff during the night (dreams) and during the day selects. It is like evolutionary modification of behavior, in a way.

But to do it, you have to reinforce a little the nonsensical stuff for a while (and at speed). This semi-conscious state in which there are inconsistencies is "pre"-dream, in which almost everything is quite nonsensical, but it kind of "makes sense", so it gets reinforced a bit. The interesting thing is that this is done in parallel, so what you remember about a dream is like a small part of what your cortex was "thinking", a massive recombination of ideas.

Well, I could go on and on with my speculations... ;)
How Big Is Google? Here's Another Measure
Sorry. The chatserver is unstable. It runs ok on our staging server but there seems to be a problem on our new host. I have an Internet connection at Stanford now, so I'll keep an eye on it. Thanks for your patience.
Google seems to print more money than the Treasury
Google Profit Advances on Overseas Sales
Good point. I think heavy adoption would be around events where a lot of people are co-located and don't know each other. Here are a few examples off the top of my head:

-college freshmen moving into dorms
-natural disasters
-concerts
-sporting events
-political rallies
-seminars like startup school
Interesting quote, I think:

Google sells more advertising than any company in the world. This year Morgan Stanley estimates Google’s total advertising revenue will be $21.9 billion. Excluding the payments it makes to companies that display its ads, Google’s total ad revenue will be $15.7 billion.

Time Warner, the largest media company in the world, earned $8.8 billion in advertising revenue last year. Viacom had $4.7 billion in ad revenue last year. I’m still working through the numbers at the other big conglomerates, but it seems clear that none of them sold more than $16 billion in advertising.
Some of us were discussing this on IRC, and we think that having a "fire missiles" button would be a great revenue model for Justin.TV. I'd pay for it:-)
Google is nice answer why the US recession does not matter in the long run: the best diversification is to stay global.
Extending The JavaScript Date Object with User Defined Methods
Notes on JavaScript Compression
Nomads at last
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere
The limits of Django
Google App Engine Helper for Django
Small Memory Software Book
We got a better internet connection - it should be ok now.
Microsoft gets SaaS-y with Albany
This is a huge news when it comes to popularizing SaaS software. They'll create, or at least hugely expand, enterprise SaaS market.
It would be nice to be able to have a 'more' button on our own comments pages.
Chatterous Startup School live Chat
Live chat using the web/IM/Email/SMS for startup school is also available here:
http://www.chatterous.com/landing/ss08/ss08/
lol!
Actually with ning you can sell your app since Network creators would love to add new and enhanced features on their networks, and willing to pay to get it.

there are 1000 networks being created everyday (based on what ning says) I would assume at least 900 are useless and would never come to anything, 75 would be small 7K+ users, 20 will be a good size 25K+, 5 will be 50K+. all these numbers are completely pulled out of my ass so please don't hold me to them it just to show you that there is a big potential there, at least I think there.

I own a network on ning(for fun) that has 2500 members and it has only been around for 5 months, the site caters to a specific type of profession (court reporting) and so far I have bought 2 apps that I installed on my network and I can assure you I would by more if there were around.
passcode: ss08
Live Pictures from Startup School
very cool. makes me want to do the same.
Mission Eternity: Crossing the Deadline
...and contribute to the album by emailing your pictures from your mobile phone to yc@erclab.com
I liked both of the lists. As usual, both of the articles could be elided and the lists would do the trick (of communicating 99.9% of the information present)

I'm tempted to hand Cringely's list (with "find yer best nerd" precaution prepended) to every last one of my clients. And then up my rate a little.

There are companies with whom I work where I would dearly love to implement a big-data-on-the-server, pay-as-you-go service model (eg. digesting microarray data, normalization, preprocessing, PCA) talking via HTTP (as deltas/resultsets) to a lighter-weight client. It's got to the point where any implementation of consequence basically has to be like this given the amount of processing required. I'd do it for free, for fun, if it weren't for the fact that I need that time to work on papers and other paying jobs... plus I like spending time with my daughter. It's one of those "shit, if I knew back then what I know now" situations that I figure old people find themselves in all the time. (Because I am now over 30 and, therefore, OLD)

Once upon a time, I hated my job(s) and needed to be paid exorbitantly just to show up. Now I need to be paid exorbitantly to turn down the 'other' jobs that pay well but are less interesting. I guess that is a good thing. I guess it also means that I am no longer an 'IT consultant' because the 'IT' part of what I do is ancillary to the meat, which is algorithmic and (multi-)domain-specific. Hmm.
Beat me to it.

Although I discovered recently that someone had written a Trac backend plugin for Git, which rules. Trac kicks the living shit out of every other issue tracker I have ever seen. You should look into Trac and/or Trac integration regardless of what VCS you us; all useful VC/SCM systems appear to be supported nowadays (alas, no Visual SourceSafe)

http://trac.edgewall.org/

Trac kicks so much ass. Moving to Trac legitimately made my hobby site real amounts of money because people entrusted us with more goodwill as a result of our quicker responses and better communication under Trac.

OOOH LOOKY HERE! A trac-lighthouse comparison:

http://warpspire.com/tipsresources/web-publishing/lighthouse...

AND someone produced a Trac-Lighthouse mirroring tool (not unlike the very useful git-svn SVN-Git mirroring tools):

http://github.com/shayarnett/trachouse/tree/master

This is just too awesome. Maybe GitHub is truly The Way. I haven't been involved with a Big Project on GitHub yet, only Google Code, so take the following with a metric fuckload of NaCl please.

My experience with Google Code has been closest (in terms of communication and transparency) to that of running my own Trac installation. I assume they're converging towards Trac simply because it's the lowest-effort option at a Python shop with an SVN-centric offering.

Github is neat but I have begun to wonder if Git and its toolchain isn't a little discouraging for new/dabbling developers on a germinal project. I use both, although I'm beginning to drift away to Git for new work. Then again, I've been using Unix toolchains for 14 years now. I'm the target demographic for Git.

Oh, fuck it. This post has just become a catalog of useful links and migration tools for me. If it helps you too, so be it, but writing this much means I have to help myself :-)
Hackontest - a 24 hour programming competition
The demo screencast is just a big grey box for me.
Yeah, ebay + skype seemed silly at the time. Right now it is like $3 a month for me. Even if it was $20 - $30 I still would like it. :)
How Can Creatives Best Interact With The Web?
Great article. I do all my work entirely from home and up until this point I couldn't pinpoint precisely what was missing. The article uses an excellent phase I was trying to articulate: "casual serendipity". Effectively, this is about casually describing your work to random people and finding serendipitous connections to other projects or learning unexpected, but relevant information.
you know 2000 years back people might thought what would be psychological effect of living more that 40 years on average...
David Heinemeier Hansson's Speech about Making Money at SS2008
If a facebook app is done right you can make a ton of money. Incentivized offers are a huge money maker when creating facebook apps.
Contributing towards Ubuntu
One really intelligent thing is his rule forbidding more than two people to share office space. Oftentimes, I've noticed that the telecommuters often suffer at the hands of their in-office colleagues, due to that whole insider/outsider problem.
This is so great. I've been in bed with a fever all day watching the talks, which are excellent. Had I made it out to Stanford I'd probably only have ended up in some other bed with the same fever watching them the same way. Thank you so much!
whooooooooooo
nice replies
cant read them all :)
...

anyhow, as as engineer I understand what you are talking about. I have same problems.

#1 Solution ( that works for me ) : HAVE SOME FREE TIME for yourself. I do this my simply getting up early ( some days around 5:00am ), then do great training ( walk, running, martial arts, swimming, dog walk...). Then healthy breakfast and you are ready to go, energy for all day. Good sleep, friends ( NO WAY TO DEVELOP WITHOUT FAMILY&FRIENDS ), and important thing is to RELAX sometimes.. Daily spend min 45mins in nature and always remember to look at the sky&stars&moon...

And don't waste time on PC. Get the work done and simply fuck off from it :) forget the games, the movies, the web..

all you need is love ^_^
> tends to maintain a permanently higher standard of living than when things started.

I am sure you have insufficient data to establish anything approaching "permanent".
Fliiby : file browse
run your ass off and portion control. that's it.
I wish I could download them in an iPod-friendly form (I watch a lot of stuff while flying). Even better, a podcast, TED-style.

That would be great.
> you can't expect less developed economies to meet the standards of ours

If a wealthy multinational corporation can afford to build a factory overseas, it can afford to implement health and safety regulations that protect the workers. It's not like a country has to be ultra-rich to provide a safe, clean workplace.

As for actual sweatshops, let's not pretend they are bestowing some great benefit upon the poor who they ruthlessly exploit. They use people up and spit them out.

In this country people fought long and hard for the workplace rights we have today. The higher-wage jobs depend on the lower-wage jobs like an ecosystem. Shift away the foundation and everything collapses. Offshoring is like economic global warming.
Keep being an arrogant little bastard when it comes to getting the best for yourself and never settle. Never ever settle!

I think one of the tragedies of post-Waterloo culture is that it is not entrepreneurial enough. This is ironic given RIM is such a Canadian success story; but remember Lazaridis technically dropped out! I have far too many friends that graduated from Waterloo and are allowing large (albeit successful) employers to milk the best years of their lives. Consequently, I highly expect them to all be just another employee for the rest of their lives.

On the other hand, you have the U of T with MaRS (http://www.marsdd.com) situated across the street from it helping smart people commercialize their work.
Wow, this typed version destroyed the power of his talk. Please wait until you can see the video (on justin.tv?); his presence is huge.

It has been the best talk by far.
I prefer the term, speed semian
Founders:  live with cofounders or not?
Here's the situation: I have an extra room at my home. A developer I have been working with overseas is now excited about the idea, and is willing to fly here and live in the extra room to accelerate the project. We're doing ok in our current working relationship - he's consulting to pay his bills -- my stuff is 2nd or 3rd priority -- things are getting done but slowly. He knows about my boyfriend, and my boyfriend knows him. So, here's the question: is living with cofounders a good idea or not? One friend says, do it - it would accelerate the project. Another friend says don't - it would make things personal and make it difficult to make business decisions. I'd like to hear about others'opinions on this - thanks.
Right now you can only download the video in flv format, but this is definitely something we'll be working on soon.
I would vote for 'no'; you will spend so much time around each other, with no way to really separate your own spaces, that it will make you sick and reclusive. If anything goes south, you then have more than just a business that dies -- you have to deal with tenants, and there's likely additional legal ramifications as well.
It depends. A few months ago, my current room-mate had an idea for a startup. We decided to move in together as it would be easier to brainstorm ideas, code, and plan what we needed to do. Both of us have full-time day-jobs and we work on week-nights and week-ends on our idea.

We have been pretty good so far in seperating work from our personal activities. We both make sacrifices to move our project forward. At the same time however, we don't interfere with each other's personal issues and activities. It takes some time to have a good arrangement and the best thing to do would be to communicate your expectations to the developer, and also listen to what he wants in terms of a working relationships. Lastly, I would recommend doing social things together with your developer. For example, you could have dinners with your developer and boyfriend. Such activities strengthen the working relationship and inspire everyone to continue working on the project.
Wow! I recognised the lyrics, how scary is that....
Software startup Zenoss opens Austin development center
Startup School Reception Dinner
bingo. renting your labor has always been the least efficient way to make money. more efficient is renting your land, more efficient than that is renting your capital.
music is the most shallow of all art forms. the way people interact with music will not work when applied to other art forms.
The credo of a tycoon of old (think JPMorgan or Vanderbilt) was to build an empire. His own empire, in his lifetime.

Tycoons of today have build their own empires (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle etc.), same principle, same philosophy.

When and why did it happen that flippers took over this market's mindshare? A young entrepreneur today dreams of selling out to Yahoo/Google/Microsoft as soon as possible. Quite often even before his business is profitable.

Hey, if you have a growing business that is profitable, you should keep it for yourself. Many people with money I know (so-called 'professional investors') dream of having such a business in their possession. Such business is not listed, so you cannot buy it on the market. What you can buy on the market (what is listed) normally grows slower and is over-researched and over-valued.

But of course, if you focus on building the cash flow for yourself, and keeping the option of striking it very big at some time in the future for yourself, then the whole industry of undervalued option-buyers (VCs, angels etc.) will be left without work. So the propaganda is put to work... When is my next funding round?.. A round of what? When is your next client subscribing to your app - that should be the question.

DHH thrives on being controversial, but the point he makes here is simply a well forgotten truth about entrepreneurship. Building your business slow and taking full credit for it for yourself used to be the norm before the flipper ethics kicked-in.
There's also Djago Dash for pythonists (http://djangodash.com/).
I don't think his speech was that great. Loud and arrogant doesn't make for a great speech. He kept stressing the ease of settling for the middle and just asking people to pay for your services. He used the analogy of us paying for cars but I think there's one huge difference. There is a huge barrier of entry into the car business which ultimately results in us having to pay what we pay, but I'm the web world, your product can be copied on the fly, look begged and be free, and that's why people want to horde the masses, something he criticized, so they can offer a free service and yet monetize using advertisements.

It happened with his product, the launch of huddlechat, but that as you know was taken down.
These are just my notes I chose to share as the speech came to an end. I apologize if I offended you in any way.
i wonder if they come back and sue you if your idea takes off. i know i would in their situation.
Live pictures of the event also here:

http://www.futurique.com:8080/pingplog/yc/