skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved from Austin to Silicon Valley. I now know that Austin is not a startup hub (and nowhere else is either). I used to think it was just a matter of degree, but Silicon Valley is really a dramatically different environment for starting a technology company than anywhere else in the world.

I think it's worth noting that even though Boston is considered the "second place" finisher in the startup hub races, not a single Y Combinator company has been funded in Boston, and about 90% of those from the Boston YC programs who keep working on their businesses move to the valley. I don't believe either of these things are accidents of history.

I'll move back to Austin when I "retire", or maybe even sooner, since a large percentage of our customer base is in Texas, but while we're in a position to need to raise money and to stay on top of the technology world, there's just no other place to be.
Thanks for this. I'm just selling my Macbook core2duo on ebay at the moment. I use a mac mini with a 23" screen at home, and I don't take the macbook out much because it's heavy and valuable, so mainly it just sits there doing nothing.

I have been planning to get the new eeepc (when it comes out in a week or two) - I hadn't considered a second hand thinkpad.

Thanks very much indeed for a great tip.
Self help books sell well because they tell people whose lives are not all right that it is all right, that it's really not their fault and that, if they really want it, they can still fix them.

People want hope. In a time when religious belief looks suspiciously like superstition (which it is) some people crave for tools to deceive themselves that do not involve burning bushes or flying zombies (a thought curiously appropriate today).
Or billions of dandy robot suits made out of people: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Borg
Bee Keeping - Why Bees Swarm
In Little Rock, Arkansas, one spring, a swarm of bees estimated to be about 7,000 strong forced a hospital emergency room to shut down. A beekeeper was called to vacuum up the bees and take them away.
Why the World Needs a New Database System
An interesting collection of tech. There was someone from twitter at the scala lift off day I noted.
How will they compete with microsoft?
Microsoft Should Know That Money Can’t Buy Love
Its not free speech. Free speech is protected by law. By framing it as "free speech" you are saying anyone against this man is against free speech. He can say whatever the hell he wants, but it is not protected free speech. All the people who cry "BUT FREE SPEECH" on the internet whenever someone gets banned are idiots. The constitution protects you from the government, specifically the federal government, not from corporations acting within their own rights. If you can't understand something that basic, then I truly don't value your opinion.
I hate it when there's some stupid, dreadfully stupid entry, whose only point of interest is the potential complaints in the comment section, and then finding that such complaints are downmodded so hard.

I don't know if a blacklist is the answer, but this 'toon wasted more of my life than it deserved to.
Get a refurbished mac. If you are going to program you should have a mac. The 21rst century computer company.
Bram Cohen on Version Control best practices
wow. that's a BIG button there.
I predict those kinds of problems will only get worse and more numerous on Twitter because going easy on assholes and not standing up against them for the benefit of your good users is a great way to send a message that you "want" more of the former and less of the latter.

Wait until the word spreads. It won't be pretty.
The specs on the newer vostro line of Dell laptops are pretty impressive for the price. Best value in my opinion. Dual core processors, 2GB RAM, separate 256MB video, choice of screen sizes/weights, DVD+/-RW, built in camera, 160Gb+ HDD, choice of OS and that's starting at around $700 new.

They're not pretty, but they are highly functional, don't suffer from the quality issues Dell had circa 2002 - 2006, and if something breaks or you need a peripheral of some sort, you won't be in hock to Apple for half the cost of the machine or more.
In some sense, isn't Twitter email with message length limitations and multiple interfaces? Is there really a need to store this in a highly relational single storage way? I'm not enough of a power user to have seen the nuances around the more advanced features to know for sure. Can anyone enlighten me?
http://ofthenow.80concepts.com/feed/1440/monthly/?q=twitter

....

Search any site feed, or monitor live...
A little decent is always good. The comments are good too.
Crowdspring: marketplace for logo design, graphic design and website design
Ask YC: Good Bookmarklets and Extensions?
Of course, Firebug is a must.

Would you vouch for any development-oriented Javascript bookmarklets or other types of extensions that might not be so obvious or well known?
Blogs = the paparazzi
Twitter = Britney Spears

They fester off each other. We're seeing a relatively new phenomenon in terms of coverage because people inherently love talking about nose dives. It wont' last...nobody talks about Friendster anymore.
When the first bill came due.
Tahitian Noni
If you really care about your health then you need to check out Tahitian Noni.
Media coverage? I haven't seen anything about Twitter on the New York Times or CNN or any other media outlet targeted at "the average person". Even mainstream-leaning "tech" sites like Wired or CNet haven't been covering the outages/scaling problems.

People who read sites like TechCrunch most definitely know what Twitter is, and coverage that talks about why they have scaling problems as opposed to making a soap opera about it is very useful for that demographic.
Man, the kind of stuff I read on overcomingbias makes everyday life feel vapid and onerous.
Kind of makes me shudder to think that that is where we're headed. ADHD to the max.
Scaling anything to twitter-like traffic levels is hard

But we've had e-mail working fine for years, and Twitter is just e-mail.
Seriously man, it's 2008. Time to move to 3.5" floppies already.
Amazing technique for browsing video by direct manipulation [video]
Skills.Equals(null)
More information about this system can be found here: http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/, including a longer video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib_g7F6WKAA) and paper from CHI 2008 (http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/dimp-chi08.pdf)
Translating Twitter's business speak on outages
It's the future as much as VB is the future.
http://www.madmimi.com/ is new / neat / ajaxy. Check it out, it's got some nice features.
FYI, we are actually doing an event next Wed at the OpenCoffee Cambridge for co-founders. It's from 9-12pm at Andala's Coffee.
I was just shopping today and found that a Lenovo T series can be had for about the same price (within $100, to one side or the other depending on specs) as a comparable Dell Latitude, and the Latitudes don't seem to be available with Linux (only three models can be had with Linux). I'm using a Dell at the moment, and historically the price has always convinced me...but it seems like you can pretty much get a comparable Lenovo for about the same price as a Dell. (And Lenovo also offers occasional coupon codes that keep them pretty competitive even if Dell offers slightly bigger special deals on occasion.)

Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are.
One caveat on this: I believe you can get a 30 day trial of the commercial version.
- Shannon limit.

- Genius: perspiration vs inspiration and how much genetics alone can affect this.

- Relativity: if we're traveling near c that makes us less intelligent because we think more "slowly"?

- Tractability: here comes the heat death of the universe.
How come there isn't an YC company doing pretty and easy to create and manage email marketing?
I also didn't get it at all at first, but am now quite addicted.

Twitter feels a bit like a 24/7 cocktail party full of intelligent and interesting people, where you can chose who to listen to. I think they've also evolved (or perhaps resurrected) a cultural norm of openness where you can listen to and engage in conversations with anyone. I think that, along with the asynchrony and discoverability, is what makes it slightly magical.

That being said, it has problems:
- It can definitely be a waste of time.

- There aren't good tools for filtering, prioritizing, and contextualizing the feed.

- There's an excessive density of 'professional' social-media types who seem to spend all day twitterring about nothing but Twitter.

- I don't understand the appeal of the IM-type clients at all. They look pretty, but I can't imagine anything worse than being constantly interrupted by windows popping up all over my screen with random, disconnected tweets.
I use ConstantContact for my email distribution at http://OnStartups.com. Has worked well for me.

Disclaimer: Gail Goodman, the CEO of ConstantContact is on the board of my startup. But, I was a fan of the company well before that.
Mediasurface for my job, but they are seriously searching for a good replacement.
It seems to me that Lisp-generated websites tend not to have valid HTML. I've often wondered if there is something about Lisp that makes people averse to valid HTML.

Are there easy ways in Lisp to make sure that you are outputting valid HTML? Like good libraries for escaping text and making sure the proper tags are closed the right ways?

Anyway it's not such a big deal since the sites work fine in browsers. It's more of a passing observation, that really probably extends to other programming languages as well. I just think that something about the structure of Lisp makes HTML/XML feel sloppy and thus there is an unspoken bias towards not worrying about it.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.roxority....

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...
Not sure why you got modded down because it's essentially true and I took their post to be alluding to as much. My intuition tells me that though they are huge, they aren't remotely in the same area as AIM, MSN, GMail, Yahoo Mail, etc. Twitter hangs right in the middle of being an instant messaging and email service.

I'll leave the armchair architecting to others.
just remember. In the long scheme of history corporations aren't that old. None of 'modern society' is.
If some actively develops it, we all can get free hosting!
There have been a lot of speculation and analysis about the challenges that this type of site will face but I think twitter's problems are much simpler. It was built by a group of people who had never scaled a site to that level before. They've been trying to cope with their success but it sounds like they don't have the right people to write scalable software and don't have enough operations people to keep their systems up.

I attended Railsconf 2007 and two of twitter's developers held an impromptu session to discuss the scaling challenges they faced. Twitter had just experienced several days of downtime and the room was filled with people interested in hearing all about it. It was pretty obvious from that one hour session that their issues are more than just technical.

At one point they showed some code that was used to balance some of their load among a group of servers. Unfortunately they wrote the function in such a way that it was limited to a maximum of 10 servers. Once they exceed the capacity of those 10 servers the whole site came crashing down. They seemed like nice guys and were excited about their work but it was obvious based on their comments and the crowd's reaction that they were out of their league. I got the impression that they are doing whatever it takes to keep the site up and running today, even if it brings the site down tomorrow.

Slides from the session I referenced: http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/scaling-twitter-railsconf-200...
read the first sentence in the wikipedia article on existentialism before you downmod please.
oh this I'm aware of. mine has this feature. I still think touchpads (all that I have encountered) suck.

and infact on linux you can modify the area of the touchpad that does this. I think you can even add horizontal scroll if your touchpad didn't previously support it (not 100% on this).
increased existential depression...
I don't know, I think most of us can tell the difference between XKCD and lolcats.
the only thing that was quicker 'maybe' about the touchpad was speed of learning, and ease of use. The 'nipple' is much faster and more precise if you invest more time in it. much like linux ;).
Everyone should read this blog post and the 2 followups. It brings a lot of insight into the parts of Twitter that bring it down and it has nothing to do with the message pushing part of Twitter.

I have a Jabber bot running that is hooked into the entire public timeline and it continues to run even when the main website has gone down. I don't think you can directly compare Twitter's issues with issues of Meebo, AIM, GTalk, etc.
ECMAScript, Mashups, and Security
That just rocks. Now combine this with multi-touch surface technology... Minority Report here we come!

Seriously, another example of cool new technology that actually catches your attention and makes you wonder how they did it.

Between what they're doing with music over at www.celemony.com, What Jeff Han is doing (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65), and what Trevor Blackwell is doing at Anybots, I'm really starting to get excited about technology again!

It sure is better than when they told me the future had arrived and it was pet food by mail.
Because there aren't that many YC companies, and because email marketing is usually spam, making it morally questionable.
For some reason the previous lines resonate with me better. Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
That's really impressive. It puts me to mind of that image resizing tool (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/27/i-want-this-in-photosho...) in as far as it's an exciting way to work with an old, familiar medium.

TechCrunch covered the former tool, whose co-founder was eventually hired away by Adobe to build it into photoshop. Wonder if MA will pick up on this one...
Wow, you said that word. It's unfashionable.

Existentialism isn't popular as self-help because it's not optimistic. There's no natural law that every truth must be shiny happy. "Existence precedes essence" accurately describes our world, but doesn't motivate. A good antidote against religion and propaganda, though.
I don’t see why you guys think it’s amazing? They have just connected all objects in video to videos timeline – you can’t really change anything but just rewind and forward the video. Amazing for me would be if by moving one object in the video the end outcome would be different...
Also, does this remind anyone else of Donnie Darko? The way the trail of an object is "projected into the future".
LiveHTTPHeaders is another must-have: http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/

CookieSwap and MeasureIt are pretty useful, too.
Completely agree, but I'm refraining from upmodding you because it would surely be ironic if this becomes the top comment, instead of some real discussion on pursuing our dreams!
"They have just connected all objects in video to videos timeline"

The technology is awesome if it's powered by software that interprets what elements of a video constitute an object, and then connects those elements to a timeline in a single, automated swoop. I've assumed that's the case, but I could be completely wrong.
This would be easier to understand if Aster Data's website (http://www.asterdata.com/) didn't seem like a bunch of marketing jargon.
If you think there's really a need for it, start one yourself and apply to YC with it.
Tahitian Noni
Noni Juice is made from noni puree. Other companies use powdered or dried noni. Since we use the fruit pulp, the active ingredients are retained.
Not to take anything away from Jeff Han, because he's done some great work, but most of the techniques he demonstrates in that video were invented by other people. For example, the use of the pinch gesture for resizing was first published almost 20 years ago. Multi-touch interaction research has a long history, but since the techniques are only now coming to consumer devices, Jeff Han and Apple seem to be getting all the credit.

See http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html for a thorough review of multi-touch research.
Microsoft exec: Survival is all about research
PEOs tend to be expensive but will allow you to offer much better benefits that otherwise possible. I've used TriNet and they were good. But pricey.
I think where this technique really shines is when you don't have any idea when a particular object moved. Like in the parking lot example, you could just click and drag on an arbitrary car to immediately jump to the time when that car moved.
Ha. Definitely. Sometimes karma catches you off guard. I didn't expect to get any upmods for that. It was a bit of a rant really. When I got here, it was just about entirely a discussion about blacklisting xkcd and I thought the comic had brought up something that was really worth talking about.

Of course, as soon as I post this the karma discussion effect will begin and it'll be downvoted back to something reasonable I think. Just don't - me bro... :)
I went to a mac reseller and told him I wanted a mac laptop for $200 if he had anything, even if it needed a repair, like a hard drive. He did. In September 2006 he had a late 2004 ibook G4 for $200. The hard drive was wearing out but still usable. Ended up replacing the hard drive for another $100, and put another 1GB ram in it (for a total 1.25GB ram) but totally worth it. Upgraded to Leopard and it's even better. Firefox 3, and it's even better. Total of ~$550 and I've got a pretty decent laptop.

I got my wife a Dell under the Tulane student discount, loaded Ubuntu dual boot, and she chooses Ubuntu. I wouldn't recommend a Dell, but it sure attests to the usability of Ubuntu.

I'm not sure I would get a macbook simply because I can't stand the short screen, glossy or not. MBP is definitely not a budget buy. Thinkpads seem awefully nice. Since you can run linux on a mac now, I would think the question comes down to do you or do you not want OS X?

I have to say though, I have never been more please than getting a $200 iBook. It used to get deadly slow if you leave firefox 2 open for days, but with firefox 3, it got a new breath of life.
Yeah, I don't think Trevor invented self balancing systems either but when someone does something so well it looks like magic, I think thats exciting. It gives me hope for the future and a renewed sense of "I can't wait to see what's next".
I agree that a memorable name is important. I'm just saying that a memorable domain (may not be|isnt) as important.
=(submar|ne)-
a little submarine surfaced
obeying the rules of it's peek-and-fall,
it lived out it's self eliminating loop,
under dressed for future refer.

knowing if one read and saw
...others might see:

a short and little,
ephemeral-submarine
Introducing HitLinkz.com
Introducing HitLinkz.com

I'm not sure about you but I often end up looking for links that are famous and relevant for the stuffs that I was looking for. For example, a couple of months back I was looking for web sites that are good at ASP.NET web hosting. I could find some but those are based on some one individuals' review or a sponsored review. When I went and searched Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search there were a whole bunch of web sites turned out that are good at SEO but not relevant and reliable to what I was looking for.

That's when we developed a system to let you and me discover links that are famous and relevant for what we were looking for. That's when we developed HitLinkz.com.

HitLinkz.com is an online utility that aspires to address the problem of finding the famous links on various categories. It is a simple, social utility that purely strives to help you discover the famous links across a myriad of categories.

We truly wanted to solve a problem of us but it turned out that it's a problem of others as well. So we strongly believe HitLinkz.com is something useful to you and to your loved ones.

You can visit HitLinkz at http://www.hitlinkz.com
The OpenSUSE models are a fairly recent addition to the lineup, and are still quite limited in terms of hardware options.
Ask YC: Stealing domains from the big dogs
Some time ago, I acquired a foreign tld name with the intention of doing a memorable name/url branding for a site I'm building. After I became attached to the name, I realized that the bottom level part of the domain is the same as the one for a rather large american .com (think sun.de but not sun or de).

My question is this: could the big company litigate and/or take the domain away from me? The branding of my domain is quite different from theirs, and it's done in such a way that it would take some effort to notice that they're the same.
For people trying to run a Thinkpad with Linux i can recommend ThinkWiki (http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki).

It helped me alot in setting up my ThinkPad.

Back to the original Question: IMHO Thinkpads are very good and especially reliable Notebooks, but they also aren't cheap. When getting a Thinkpad then a T-Model most of the others don't differ that much from Notebooks sold by HP or Dell.
PostMessage API Changes
either way, I would try and document, (ie. submit to some exterior time indexed service) some branding details, drawing etc

these things can only help a litigous battle should it arise, and reserve for yourself, as long as they can't prove your infringing on a trade mark, a defense under copywrite...
Thanks, but no thanks.
Tootsie Roll Pops And Term Sheets
meh, perhaps you have a better way of describing someone incapable of figuring out that the way to get a high average is to post a low volume of high quality stuff, not to spam the list. Personally, I think that 'struggling with basic maths' is a succinct way of describing this.
Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures
Are you in an industry competitive with the large American .com? The only way you can argue it's not a trademark violation is if your company and products are really different.
Just to be clear, I'm one of the co-founders of Conjunctured.

What we're trying to do is eventually get to a YC model or something fairly similar; we're definitely not a non-profit, btw. While initially the coworking space might not be able to provide seed money, what we do hope to provide from the very beginning is an environment where startups will thrive. Maybe these startups will come from two guys working as a freelance designer and developer within the space, but we want them to meet, collaborate on a random project, pursue an idea and have their idea take off. They'll move out of Conjunctured and right next door into their own offce. "Support" from Conjunctured will start out as vouchers for free rent within the coworking space, but will turn into different kinds of support (money, advisors, etc.) given some time. First the coworking space. The fund comes later.

So, calling it exactly like YC is probably incorrect. Kinda like it? You could say that.

I encourage you guys to look at the district idea right from John at his blog: http://blog.think27.com/austin-startup-district-story (and to a lesser extent here: http://blog.think27.com/austin-startup-community-vision).

And any Austin people on Hacker News we definitely want to meet, so make sure to follow us on Twitter (I'm @cesart). We're always up for meeting and usually at least one of us is at every tech event in town. The fact that we don't know each other already, given how damn small the city is, is the main reason for trying to rally everyone together in the first place. There HAS to be a central location for everyone to go (startups and VCs alike) in order for good stuff to happen.

Feel free to contact me with any questions or arguments. :)