skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can really see this startup succeeding: unlike most web 2.0 companies, they actually have the technology (if it works as they say -- I believe they are using some quite sophisticated NLP/AI stuff on the backend) that provides added value to the users.

Currently it only support a few blogging platforms, but I believe Joomla and other CMS support is also coming, as well as an API.
i noticed that u r new here, dont worry, eventually u will learn freedom of expression.
I'll return the volley one more time. If you want the last word it's yours, but I don't think either one of us wants this to go any farther.

Like it or not, this site is at times as much about business as it is about hacking (see an Entrepreneur/Builder conversation vis a vis the top post on News.YC at the moment). That's owing to the culture PG has created by virtue of his writing.

The fact that you don't like TechCrunch isn't the point. 3 million others do. So getting noticed -- or at least having the potential to get noticed -- on that scale is a great business/marketing feat for Dragicevic, Ramos, Bibliowicz, and the other professors behind DimP.

At the very least a story like this is encouragement for the guys putting in thankless hours on a startup most of us will never see or hear about.

And as for posting an "echo story" every time a service that's mentioned here ends up moving on to other mainstream outlets... of course I'm not for it. Not at all. But you make it sound like getting picked up by big bloggers happens every day (or even every week) around here. For better or worse it's just not that frequent. So I believe this one had merit. That's why I shared.

I know you have solid intentions and I admire your inclination to defend the HN community from what you interpret as a potential threat. I don't agree here, but I understand your position.
You forgot to mention the antigravity generator so that it has negative net weight. Levitation also allows better airflow.
A lot of the refactors I see being voted most popular are optimizing only for LOC not speed or clarity.

I would recommend putting a higher focus on the last two to the users of the site than the first one.
Only moderators can vote. Anyone can be a moderator. But isn't moderation frequency controlled by Karma and meta-moderation scores?
You can't predict traffic up or down meaning your conservative estimates might be 10X high or low.

Conversation rates depend on a whole bunch of parameters like the content of your site, traffic, etc. I have seen conversion rates as high as 5-15% and as low as .5%.

Take a look at Powerset's growth modeling: http://www.blognewcomb.com/blog/2007/04/how_is_powerset_pred...

That said, as antiismist mentions, model your traffic and conversion rates 10X higher & than lower starting from what your predict.

If you are making claims it should be easy to substantiate :-)
I'm not generaly a client side coder, but stuff like this is the reason I like javascript. Rapid development of fun ideas. Nice work!
It depends on your intended audience and how perfect you need your video. If you are delivering a standard screencast then a few mistakes during the recording may make it seem more real. If you are looking for professional output I agree with the splitting into chapters and working on a more detailed script (as already mentioned). You can then integrate your into a more comprehensive compositing program like FinalCut, AfterEffects, etc. Overall, I find Camtasia to be the best option available at the moment for screencasting.
fondlr.com is still available...
Wow. Talk about flamebait.
Memo to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & AOL: How to Turn 500M email logins...
Generation Y Has No Culture
Live Call with Seth Godin - Download
(+ 1 2) vs (+ 2 1) is a far cry from "map(lambda x: x * x, numbers)" versus "[x * x for x in numbers]".

I call straw man. I am not asking for zero syntax, or that everything be done in Scheme.

For one thing, I'm not a Lisper, which you think I am. For another thing, Lisp has syntax, so you are incorrect. For yet another thing, I am decrying Too Much Syntax that encourages too many ways of doing things, not taking a dogmatic stand for absolute syntactic minimums. True one cannot make a syntax so pure that there is only one way of doing something. That's a straw man. But on the other hand, one can make a syntax so complicated that it seems to strongly encourage doing the same thing in many ways. Perl and Ruby are guilty of this. Python not nearly as much, but still more than I would like.

Syntactic constructs are a tool. Tools have overhead. Why have redundant syntactic tools? It's enough to get one's head around the problems to be solved.
I sincerely hope that HN will not turn into another Slashdot.

Having said that, if you have some substantial argument to back (or challenge) this point, let's hear them.

I will offer a backing point: Microsoft technology rarely comes up on HN or Techcrunch. Not that it's being despised, it's more like hackers and entrepreneurs don't seem to care. Making a leap of faith we will conclude that those are the people who will shape the future, and conclusion of Microsoft's irrelevance is within reach.
I've written about this at length in the past:

http://www.obsceneart.com/?p=30

More recently, I'd say that Debian is still superior to Ubuntu on the server (the changes Ubuntu have made actually make it less comfortable on the server). But I tend to deploy CentOS 5.

But anything with a long life-cycle, good package management (yum or apt-get), and is popular enough to have lots of coverage on the web, will work fine.
Steve Wozniak was not an entrepreneur; he was an inventor and a great engineer. He didn't even want to leave HP to start Apple. Steve Jobs was an entrepreneur but I would argue that he was also an inventor and a great engineer (great product engineer). Obviously the two Steve's are different. Not being one doesn't automatically make you the other one. And that's what I mean by false choice. You are who are you are and all of us are a little of both if not a little of everything. Entrepreneurs by definition do not fit nicely into slotted description. That's why we decide to be entrepreneurs.
I like the idea, i think its a wonderful way for programmers to come together and collaborate. I do wonder how different this would be from any other programming forum except being better looking?
Instinct is a type of emotion. Instinct is the opposite of intuition. Instinct is from the past. Intuition is from the future.
I have found out that unit testing is great if you use it sparingly, that is only use it on public methods of public API. So, if I write server-side software, I unit-test only facade methods that are invoked by clients. And I always run the tests before committing new version, which is a pretty good safeguard.

It has saved me some headaches - especially when software grows in size and you simply cannot predict what impact even a simple change can have.

Anyway, I wanted to say that I agree with most of what you said :-)
This seems to be a typical problem in all forms of video creation. Movie or television scenes are shot dozens of times for this reason. Reshooting for the perfect take in unavoidable, unless you simply lower your expectations.
It was even more impressive to see the rate at which they responded to issues raised, i.e. http://datainsightsideas.com/post/35695346/tumblr-why-cant-y... (Tracks the entire day's events).
I was surprised with how much I received from listening in on this conference call and wanted to share it. I appreciated the forward thinking Seth offers.. starting with: this is the time to jump on board the internet revolution... people that don't jump on board get stuck in between the last thing and the next thing.
I suspect the "underdogs" of the web browsing world may be more common than statistics currently show.

To track statistics, don't these systems rely on the same JavaScript features that allow so many sites to artificially break on browsers they don't like?

If you don't configure Firefox (or in my case, OmniWeb on the Mac) to lie and say it's IE5 on Windows, a percentage of the web is basically closed off. It's sad that this is still true in 2008, but it is.

I do try to contact site maintainers when I'm forced to lie, hoping they'll turn off their JavaScript junk and realize what the browsing landscape really looks like. But I never expect anything to come from it.
Poll: Are you a builder or entrepreneur?
Please vote using only one choice:
mostly builder
mostly entrepreneur
I noticed that you're new here, don't worry, eventually you'll learn proper spelling.
Technologies that Connect - How Communication Technology Creates Wealth for the Poor
I can't help but blurt it out with the current blog coverage, but Twitter comes to mind as an example of this.
let's see whether i can explain properly - the biggest market of 21st century is asian market along with brazil and russia. people over there are increasingly using open source stuff only - linux is becoming popular day by day so much so that government organization only want open source solutions. Also very few know that most of the hotmail users also have gmail as their primary email app. More and more people are using open source docs like Openoffice or StarOffice (free with google app) ... online web-app is also becoming popular (google doc , zoho etc.). MySql is way too popular than anyone can ever imagine. BRIC countries are 3rd world countries and they cant afford XBOX - also this gaming box from MS is not doing that well in north america either. So I wonder if MS stays the way it is right now then in 5 years I don't see anybody buying anything from MS. do you?
I use iShowU on a Mac. I also have a nice mic which makes the audio quality vastly higher. I recently started recording just the screens and then recording the audio separately (then combine in QT pro). It seems to take a few less takes.
Trust but Verify
I agree. Once you get past the idea phase of an early startup, everyone is essentially a builder. Even salespeople, business developers, and negotiators are contributing towards "building" the company. Once a company moves beyond the startup phase, the role of the founder begins to change -- the founder then needs to find a place in the company or move on to the next challenge.
What does "social" really mean?
"Instead, the emphasis in these notes is to draw attention to how the production of non-antagonistic social relations has become central to economic production and social control. To take a typical target, the politics of Facebook, with its 59 million users, reveals how social exchanges are mediated by the wider culture and political economy. Personal information (ID and consumer preferences) is voluntarily submitted and can then be accessed by agencies reflecting pervasive viral marketing techniques, hegemonic corporate ownership and capitalistic economic principles – all designed to derive profit from friendship. Furthermore, the social relation is based on weak ties (as opposed to the relatively strong ties of peer production for instance) and an 'unstable social contract' between users and platform owners. That services are provided on the basis of latent profitability indicates the capitalist logic of producing value as cheaply as possible and making sure ownership is kept in the realm of private property. A closer look at terms of service agreements reveals more detail here and confirms that ownership is carefully managed. The contradiction is clear, as Michel Bauwens puts it: 'The social web facilitates an unprecedented level of social sharing, but it does so mostly through the vehicle of proprietary platforms.' In such ways, the social relation is produced in restrictive form." - March 2008
Why everything has to be the next Google or the Google of something even they cleary are not?

They don't have the same significance as Google. What they have is a content creators(1-5% of english(?) net users?) nice-to-have tool and Google has a essential search(+ more) for everyone(~100% of users).
For the sake of balance I will also offer a counter-point: Microsoft has quality server stack.

* C# is making progress towards python in friction-free coding
* .NET has great performance and decent set of libraries
* Visual Studio is a good IDE for small-medium projects
* Windows Server 2008 is a modern, solid OS. It's also reasonably priced
- Web Edition (which is what this crowd cares about the most) is about $400-$450 if memory serves.
* You can also have pay-as-you-go http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default.mspx
some like water, some like wine. to each his own.
the history repeats itself - what microsoft did to ibm - google and apple are doing to microsoft - so to survive ms has to do the same what ibm did for survival - i.e. change in leadership, change in vision and change in path.... unless this happens ms is on the way Non-MS.
Natural language != logic.
Maybe the following answer is not what you would like to hear, but anyway:

I am a Microsoft customer. I use Windows XP at home, which I am fully satisfied with, it never crashed and I haven't had any virus in four years. Maybe I am lucky, but I really had zero problems with it. I also use Microsoft Office 2000, which I consider a very good software.

In work, we also run Windows XP, and developing software using Visual Studio 2008, which I consider a very good development tool.

Other than that, I mostly use third party shareware and open source software.

If I will buy something from MS in the future, you ask? I will very propably buy Windows again with new computer I will purchase. Any other questions? ;-))
Honestly, you should use something like the Drake Equation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
I have been writing a book based on my own entrepreneurial experience. I am half way done. My last chapter is entitled "The Nail that Keeps the Air from Leaking" and that pretty much describes my own experience as an entrepreneur building a company from scratch.

http://www.StartupForLess.org

Once the company is profitable. It is really boring. Then the challenge is to find a way to leave (without others feeling that you have abandoned them). And there are so many ways to do it wrong but the main one is that we tend to overstay our welcome which is human nature, so the founding entrepreneur becomes both a bug and a feature.
Help, I can't find the hide link or down arrow for this post.
I think she is right about graduate school, though. Going off to grad school because you have nothing better to do isn't really a good use of time. Most post-grads would be better off by working in their field for a number of years, as that way, they get some pretty valuable experience in dealing with the 'real world', and they have a chance to try a life outside of academia.

If a recent grad can't figure out what kind of job they want, there are a lot of other opportunities -- the Peace Corps, for one, or moving to another country to teach English for a few years. Anything is good, as long as it requires that our hypothetical graduate stand on his own two feet.

Honestly, I'm finding myself facing the 'what do I do now?' conundrum. I left a rather nice job as a sysadmin and went back to school about four years ago, and in about an hour will finally be done with my second BA[1]. I've been programming since I was a kid, so it seems like a natural career path, but I'm not sure that I want to just go back to the corporate grind. There are so many problems out there that need to be solved, or at the very least stuff that could be improved, and while I'm far from being the smartest guy on the face of the Earth, I'd like to have a go at doing something more useful than pumping out Java classes.

So, rather than 'soul-searching' and doing nothing, I'm using up what remains of my savings to have a go at starting a company, and spending a lot of time doing things that I've always wanted to do, but shoved off -- like traveling in Europe, getting back into martial arts, and so on.

I know more than a couple of other people who are in my position, and many of them have opted for the 'do nothing' route -- they spend their entire day playing video games. So, her 'secret', of making sure that you do something, is good advice, I think.

[1] My first degree is in Mathematics; I'm rather proud of that one. The second is in Japanese, and I've asked if they could print the diploma on toilet paper, so that it might be useful for something...
agreed - all the above stuffs helps you to build new products but then you need customers to buy it and if they dont put money in your pocket because they want something that is cross platform and open source then these stuff won't sell or help you to survive. MS has to change the attitude and the path - just like they have to bow down to ODF couple of days a go they have to do the same with all their products.
We don't use unit testing because
1) it kills agility. We're small, new & rewrite our software base every year. Complete code coverage slows us down by a factor of two and doesn't give that time back (so far) in reduced dev time.
2) we have a graphical application that's hard to unit test.
3) it's shooting bugs in a barrel & assuming that because you don't hit a bug there aren't any.
Beautiful Guts - Dissecting a First Generation iPod Nano
Very cool idea, and nice, clean implementation. I have wished for something like this before without knowing this was what I was wishing for. Looks like a better solution than pasting into IRC chats.
I've posted the script here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198216
In other words, you are saying that increasingly pervasive connectivity adds a lot more emphasis on interoperability and the good old lock-in is not as convincing anymore. I'll buy that.
my servers are all setup as debian 4
It's an antifeature but if you send PG wads of cash he might deactivate it just for you.

In other news, profits from YCombinator soared up 15% this quarter. The phenomenon is thus far unexplained.
Yes, that's true. In my experience doing batch sms-emailing (with relatively small batches -- several hundred at a time only), we would take use two strategies: 1 -- queue the messages and send them slowly, maybe between 5-25 every minute. and 2 -- distribute across carriers. Group the users by carrier and then for each queued batch take from as many of the different carriers as possible, thus limiting the number of times you sent an email over any specific carrier's gateway in a given queued clump of messages.

This seemed to work but it was hard to guarantee message delivery.
A downmod? Good grief.

No arguments to counter my point then, I suppose?
I recently recomended at my project that we should be using regular text files for documentation over word docs. I was looked at like I grew two heads. The only MS product I use outside of work is my xbox 360 which (in my opinion) is a great product. I will surely by the next model in 5 years.
Many of the submissions seem to have code with lines a mile long. Maybe it's less of an issue nowadays with high-res, widescreen monitors, but I find code that stays within around 80-100 columns to be most readable. Plus it's easier to peruse when you end up seeing the code in other, non-editor environments (terminal, source control, browser).

Does anyone actually prefer longer (100+) lines over LOC? Maybe it's a Windows thing. I know I started to become stricter about line length when I moved to OS X (and started using the command-line more often).
The Bass Model - Forecasting Product Adoption Part I
flexibility and understanding the change is the source of progress and survival ...
read "Microsoft Should Know Money Can’t Buy Love" at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/microsoft-should-kn...
For me, it's about passion and interest. I'd much rather be in a creation role: building, coding, designing. [Middle] Management, on the other hand, seems to be more about babby-sitting other people's kids.
Three levels of addressing the Netflix Prize
A Funny 404 Page | Tech Jaws
There's a fat chance you'll ever have a slim chance of applying that universally to natural language.
Norton AntiVirus 2008 Falls Short | Tech Jaws
What's A Web Video 'View'? Whatever A Video Site Says A 'View' Is
Open Thread: Rethinking Detroit
Now what I _really_ want is a way to identify all the people who voted this story and substract their votes from all future posts. Can I? Please?
Think of it less as a "projection" as much as a "what if" exercise.

Do a few different scenarios: Single-digit, Double-Digit, Exponential, Hockey-Stick, Shark-Fin, and explain how you would operate in each of these situations, and how you would perform financially. Then show them what you think are the most likely scenarios.
This is not just for bloggers: it is (or better will be) also for anyone publishing content on the web. Newspapers are moving (or better, moved) to the internet. This can bring a lot of value(reduce costs) to big companies so it is a valuable startup.

In my opinion a lot better than any of the YCombinator startups yet. It has a cool (non-trivial) technology underneath and it actually brings value.

edit: About it being the next Google - granted it is far from being the next Google, but I can see it being very sucessful.
This is one of the topics I always touch upon when talking to web entrepreneurs who've launched sites. I usually ask it in terms of scaling and how fast someone should worry about it. What people tell me is that they were either surprised by how fast their site grew or they've been disappointed by the slow uptake. In either case, the models they've created were pointless.

So worry less about modeling and spend more time planning for the best (or worst) case when you have so much traffic coming in that you have to scale up. Modeling is useful IF you're paying for the traffic. If you're buying traffic and you have X amount of dollars to spend per month, then it's fairly easy to project numbers. I'm assuming most of us here are building community sites and are depending on either viral or SEO traffic so you're left to more guessing.

Edit: I just looked at the Powerset modeling they released and looked at their actual numbers on alexa/compete and you can see they're absolutely nothing like they projected.
the reason nobody wants Zune will be the same reason why nobody will like to have any other product (whether it is from MS or google or yahoo or apple doesn't matter) - if you understand why there is no appeal and demand for Zune then you will know that same could happen to other MS products.
Microsoft Book search winding down -  Lacks "High Consumer Intent"
What to expect from Steve Jobs on June 9