skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought an iPod a few years back just because it has, in firmware, a program just like WinAMp that let me play CDs I ripped to my hard drive as well as stuff I could download from the Internet.

Is that close enough?
Maybe not a computer, but I have it on good authority that a LOT of young males got internet access for porn, especially broadband internet access. The porn industry was streaming video on the net way before YouTube.
>... find resources (both material and human resources). There is no inherent ceiling.

Well, you just stated your ceiling. Material and human resources are both finite. Positive thinking cannot just make that go away.
I don't know what an investor should do--I just watch the money move. Money will always flow somewhere, because it has to.

Where will it flow next? Probably wherever it isn't this time.

Right now commodities (a.k.a. "stuff") is getting the attention, as some have predicted for years (someone's always predicting something for years, until it comes true).

Recently: Tech -> Housing -> Stuff -> ?

A problem for people with money to worry about. ;)
is it better than spotrunner?
with GOOG's market cap, they could just buy a network outright :)
This is really cool. I'm a big fan of data visualization.

It's interesting how Microsoft is far away from the other tech companies.

Does anyone know what was used to create the plot given the data?
I don't see what myths this is busting. Presumably their definition of a tech company included a lot more than web startups. No one doubts that founders of biotech companies or hardware companies tend to be in their 30s or 40s.
Primarily PIL (Python Imaging Library). This is the guy who wrote 'Programming Collective Intelligence'. How he creates such graphs is well documented in that book. If you haven't read it already, I'd whole heartedly recommend it.
I think Yahoo does have some promising products, but is facing an AOL-ish future of scatteredness. Also, the employees might be patient enough to wait it out, but are the shareholders willing?
I always wonder when people list China among the most powerful nations in the world.

For sure they the most populous with 1.5 billions; it’s a big market of people to sell stuff to and unlimited cheap labor;

Here is my point 1.5 billions with a middle class (by world standards) of few millions, a large majority under the poverty level (by all standards), the shared revenue per head is as low as most poor countries. Is China powerful because of its population only?

Personally I think China will pull the whole world economy down the more it opens to the world (it’s already started with Gas and food); the growth will be tempered by humanitarian need.

Put aside the option of a bunch of cheap labor China is still globally a very poor country and not yet in the position to make mandarin a great commodity.
Also what do you guys think timing wise for an acquisition? It's moving at a far slower pace than I thought, though with such huge companies, I shouldn't be so surprised.
Awesome thanks. I'm really interested in this stuff so as soon as I have some time I'll definitely give it a go.
So, with a $30 Million exit, you'll probably get enough out of the deal for a nice latte at Starbucks. Or, if you do the math: 30000000*.0006=18000. Or, after the dollar devalues a bit more and the price of coffee goes up, about enough for a nice latte at Starbucks.

For my time and money, I'd look for a different gig that paid more. That is unless you really want the startup experience and the company is really cool.
Yea. Well at one point most of the non-facetime work should be done from home. I'm trying to ease myself into that now.
Thank you, sanswork. That's exactly what I was thinking.

Aside: That's 2 excellent responses to comments I made today. Please be kind enough to put an email address on your profile or contact me offline. Thanks.
Fox News Thinks Lincoln Debated an Emancipated Slave
So TechCrunch should stfu? And CrunchBase and TradeVibes should be razed? =)
But this argument is subject to exactly the fallacy I was talking about. Namely it assumes the following:

1. The increased consumption will happen without a corresponding increase in the ability to provide resources to fuel it.

2. Absolute per capita consumption of scarce resources will remain the same or greater.

3. Everyone on earth will someday have the same level of consumption.

To answer all these:

1. Without an increasing ability to provide resources, consumption levels cannot rise (there would be nothing to consume).

2. As innovation and environmental consciousness progress, absolute per capita consumption of scarce resources will hopefully decrease, in favor of consumption of non-scarce resources. (When we can transmute dirt into energy for instance, or finally have solar-powered transportation.)

3. The upper end will always rise. Someday the entire human race may on average consume at the rate Americans do today, but there will be some group/nation/whatever somewhere that consumes at a much much higher rate still.

---

He is right to argue that we shouldn't just assume everyone in the world could live at Western standards right now with our current ability to procure resources, but it takes a long time to raise living standards, and our ability to procure resources steadily improves as well.

The current consumption rate in Central America probably pales in comparison to America, but would also probably seem really extravagant by US standards circa 1800.

I think the implicit motivation for all this hand-wringing about how much more the West consumes compared to the developing world has to do with some misguided assumption that it is somehow unfair. Equality sounds great in practice, but it'll never be a reality (short of a perfectly altruistic benevolent dictator). Instead of focusing on how unfair it is, why not try and do something to help those at the bottom? Innovate... pull a Dean Kamen and figure out how to cheaply purify water. If his invention works as advertised, he will turn a scarce resource (clean water) into a non-scarce one, which means it can more easily be consumed.
It's supposed to be a way to build web apps without programmers. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like another Visual Basic IDE.
However, video and audio are only a small subset of sites that require flash.

Granted, in terms of "number of Flash files downloaded" or "number of sites serving Flash content", the percent of video/audio-only Flash files may be small.

But in terms of "number of Flash files downloaded that people actually came to the site to see" or "number of Flash files people would watch even if they were running Flashblock", I'd guess that audio/video-only files account for almost all of them.
I worked with Koreans for a big project for a device manufactured by one of the big Koreans OEMs, where my company was providing some of the applications.

it was a problematic project, as the Korean wa having lots of bugs. The Korean guys worked everyday from 9:30 am, to 3:00 am! I am not making this up. And saturday, was only a half aday (8hrs) work.
These guys were not getting enough sleep, and you would see often colapsed and taking naps in front of their computers.
They were like walking zombies.

This was a important project, and I guess it is a cultural thing to work so much. Needless to say that their long hours were very counterproductive. They would fix something in the morning, and break something at night.
I have spent the last several years writing apps for small and midmarket businesses (accounting, inventory, order processing, etc.) I want to convert my service business into a product business; that is, an app that does what I do.

I know, it's a tall order. It also looks like what these people are trying to do.
They've taken $5M in funding, which probably means they took it at at least a $10M valuation. Furthermore they're already a mature, established company, probably moreso than any other YC company besides Loopt.
(For once) I agree with 37 Signals. I'll go ya one further: if you plan well, there is no need to chronically work 12+ hour days. Really.

In pre-dot-bomb startups, we used to work like that -- mainly because we were writing tools and infrastructure that now exists in generic form. For free. On the inter-webs.

I'm just saying. :-)
I understand both his and yours argument. He's just saying given the current technology/resources, it's not possible to support a world population of 70B.

Clearly they are linked since the world will not move to a 70B population given the resources in the world today - there's just not enough at the moment to support that.

I think one of the points he was trying to make was that when the politicians claim that the goal is to get every country to consume at the same level, it would be challenging, if not impossible, given our current technology.
Of course, it was "don't be evil", but that's just semantics. Mr. Buchheit (sp?) came up with that famous motto. He meant it literally, from what he says: don't be like the other guys. Don't be evil. I don't think that's the same as "be perfect", but at least try to have pretty good intentions -- that's far and away better than most big companies.
It could easily happen, but only if things get very, very bad. http://mises.org/story/2532
I think that this service in its current state will be about as successful as google's radio ad business. So not very.

The problem is that mso's control the feed from the station to your house and they will be loathe to add a middle man. Google struck a small deal with a smaller satellite company a while ago(sorry i forget the name) to offer their ads which this is probably using and im sure google is paying a rediculous premium.

Anyways, cable and satelite companies by large will not go for this. They will make their own and are probably actively doing so. In other countries there are some deployments. Their each pushing their new interactive platform, ocap for cable, mediaroom for satellite and with good ad applications could offer services far superior to what google currently offers.

For example, they could
-target specific ads to specific set top boxes. So you could target demographics better. Why must I see tampon commercials!?

-allow the user to give feedback so to make ads more relevant or blacklist shitty ones they dislike. like fucking heads on commercials.

-instant/impulse purchase feature for products

-allow the user to choose which ads they want to view by category or whatever

-get better demographics on who is viewing their ad, not just the generic "300k cpm which google does."

-give viewers discounts for providing personal info

-interactive ads, forms to get feedback

-ability for user the equivalent of a cpc. if they like an ad they can get more info on it, watch it again, save it, etc.

-allowing customers to place ads by location so you could target a block around a pizzeria

-allow customer micro purchases so 50$ and it gets shown to ~500 houses once. cheap high quality camera ppl can make their own. Youtubeish. Googles requires like 8k.

All the above will make ads more relevant, increase demand and make a lot more money.

Google seems to just be a nice UI connecting ad agencies to people who want to purchase the ad, and a more clear way for someone new to put their ad on tv. The first feature, connecting to ad agencies already exists, otherwise known as a phonebook. Plus google is a middleman here probably taking a cut when there doesnt need to be one. Second feature already exists. This is nothing exciting imo and if it didnt have the google logo it wouldn't of made it on those blogs.
"... most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged, well-educated, and hold degrees from a wide assortment of universities."

You mean there's hope for me? :-D 8-D
The right kind of exercise helps a lot. Ultimate as a sole source of exercise is clearly not the right kind (though it's probably much more enjoyable).
Totally. Im thinking of going with a standup desk.
Thanks. What browser and Flash version? Does this help: http://openphotovr.org/index.html?detectflash=false ?
I guess I should have clarified that I meant there was no inherent ceiling on the size of the economy (other than the amount of mass and energy in the known Universe, although I hope we'll figure out something else to do before we consume all that), but yes, the growth rate in any given year is limited by resources available and human innovation. Sorry for the ambiguity.

I guess my point is that the reason high percentage growth is easy for small companies is because they can rapidly expand to fill an existing market that is much bigger than the company. The reason it is hard for big companies is because of market saturation.

The economy as a whole doesn't work that way. It just relentlessly grows with our ability to acquire resources and never-ending human desires.
I've heard about "investing in a mutual fund" a million times and I am surprised these seasoned professionals advised googlers to do that. With enough humility, hard work and emotional control you have a better chance of beating the market. I've never been satisfied with investing in mutual funds because the average returns will be lowish - 5-7%.

So I studied Buffett, Peter Lynch and few other well known investors strategies. It took me about 4-6 months tracking their histories and the reasons behind their decisions. From this I developed my own strategy based largely on Buffett's and its worked a treat. Generally getting about 15% growth a year.

But then I spend weekends looking at annual statements, reading investment forums and have even gone to the Annual General Meetings. For me its all fun.

I guess the Googlers may not have time for that but I believe it makes no sense buying stock of companies you can reasonably assume will perform badly for the next 5years or so (e.g. mortage companies!). Thats what you do when you buy an index fund. You get the good with the very bad.
You can get a studio in a nice part of town for a lot less than that.

Two years ago I had a great studio in downtown SF for $650. I can't imagine things have changed that much since then.
did you have any professional experience prior to that? i graduated in 05 with a ba in english, but will have my MS in CS in early 09 (so it'll have been about 3.5yrs of CS)... my professional experience is limited, so i anticipate a weird situation where i'm looking for jobs that i seem over qualified for (on paper) but may be under qualified for because i don't have the 3-5 years professional experience required...
Identity 'at risk' on Facebook
Intro to Lisp Workshop: Chicago, 5/31
I have the same tossing and turning problem when I work close to bed time.

I find that reading a fiction book, even just a few pages, helps flush my brain's "cache" and relax.
I wonder what their analysis would look like if it was only web startups.

At Startup School I found myself older than most of the people I befriended. Was that because mostly younger people are doing web startups or mostly younger people make up this community? (Or both)
Maybe import some cheaper labor to replace journalists and cut costs? [ <---serious suggestion ]
This post has negative points and no one responds with a comment? Back yourself up people!
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/happ...
The advice is to invest in an index fund, not a mutual fund. Most mutual funds are exactly the wrong things to invest in, because they eat up much more of your investment in management fees and they also have a history of usually not beating simple index funds.
Tech Founders Not All In Their 20s
Startup Camp 5 SF (May 4-5)
The 'badge of honor' concept rang true for me while working the videogame industry - The crunch period was often times discussed with great pride, 'Man, I was up for two straight days fixing the item bug!'

The ironic thing was that more bugs were being introduced during this period than the 'regular' development period (We measured it during one of my last projects).

Our conclusion was that we'll work as hard as it takes, but sleep was necessary - We mandated that everyone get rest after 10 hours at the office (on the couch, under the desk, or at home). Though since I left, they went back to their old ways.
I found this read refreshing (and reassuring). As an "older" hacker/entrepreneur, I have never figured out what's stopping me from doing what so many 20-somethings are doing. (The answer is "nothing".)

Sure, I don't know many people with whom I can talk about my work. (Probably why I'm here.) But I make up for that with lots of hands on experience. Almost every day I run into some technical or business problem that I've encountered somewhere before, making it a little easier to solve this time.

For a software startup, lots of things are important, but most important is what you can build, which is poorly correlated to age, education, or location. So no surprises here. Just nice to read about the other 90% once in a while.
BBC exposes Facebook flaw
my buddy just got a job in san jose w/ a salary around ~$86K
Are you studying for the LSAT ;)

Agreed though, my sense of well being is always greater when I exercise regularly - Lately its been pickup basketball games and a mini routine of pushups and situps in the morning
I think it's valid up to a point.

But the playing while injured metaphor has some parallels as well. Not only is this a badge of honor, but it's flatly expected of you once you get past a certain level of competition. This is generally good and right.

However, past a certain level of injury, you're hurting both yourself and the team, and you're better off taking time to heal.

My personal experience with sleep deprivation is that if I go too long and too hard, I am doing less work than if I had rested, even in absolute (and not per hour) terms. And DHH is 100% correct that as most people get tired, their solutions to problems get worse -- that's definitely true for me.

I've tried various levels of sleep over the years, from a solid 8 hours a night to so little sleep that I would literally hallucinate during the day. For me, except in short (2-3 day) bursts, at least 6-7 hours of sleep a night is most effective for my ongoing productivity. Any less than that, and I would have gotten more done net if I had slept.

Having said that, everyone is different, and if you're one of those people who can get 2 hours of sleep on an ongoing basis and still be highly productive, then cool.
No, its because you're 80 years old! Just kidding. I think that the people attracted to Startup School might be more suited to younger people partly for networking. I didn't feel the need to go as I knew that it would be online afterwards and I'm comfortable and confident in the network I have now (not saying it can't be expanded) but when you're young and just starting out its all about building knowledge. Anyway, thats my take on it.
Bachelor's CS from Rutgers: IBM $75K, MS $90K offers. Took IBM because of a signing bonus and you work less hours (doing a startup in the other hours), and work from home. Living in East Village in Manhattan for $1900/month studio and i'm fine (except when a girlfriend is in the picture).

Know a few others for IBM BS CS (all over US) that start at approximately $60-$65K. If you want higher, do an internship with the group you want to go fulltime with, then get your manager to go to your VP for a higher starting (that's the only way in IBM).

Know a few Rutgers BS CS who started with financial companies in Manhattan (e.g. Merril Lynch), and they started at $60K, which was a bit surprising b/c NYC ain't cheap. Apparently, you get whipped around for a few years in the financial district and then you start getting huge bonuses and raises.
Yeah, and I totally agree with that point. My problem is that a lot of people seem to hear things like that and mentally translate it to: "everyone needs to consume less or we are screwed".

To me, the better thought would be: "how can we acquire more resources in an environmentally and socially beneficial way?"
Animated CSS Homer
One thing we (CrunchBase) offer is search engine rankings. We rank pretty high on startup keywords (try 'facebook' or 'scribd'), and so we find it's worth 5 minutes a month to keep the data relevant.

StartupIndex has some good stuff going on, particularly the geography features.
Why PHP and JavaScript IDE's Suck
Design Patterns are from Hell!
Just to spell it out a bit: to criticise Microsoft or PC vendors is hardly the same as criticising whoever jrockway is. It certainly doesn't imply he's a hypocrite, since I don't know him/her and cannot, therefore, comment on their morals or integrity. It was merely a flip comment pointing out that yes, Apple do indeed release imperfect products, but so do dozens of other companies and basically we see it as not such a big deal.

Even if I were criticising jrockway as a person, why on earth would you GAS? I'm sure he/she is quite capable of repudiating me him/herself if it were necessary. Fortunately, he/she probably has the good sense to see my offhand comment for what it was: just an offhand comment, not a personal criticism.
Material and human resources are only finite if you believe in a finite universe. And even then, we can keep growing as a species indefinitely in the medium to long term, and keep growing resource wise as well. We have only just begun to tap nuclear or solar energy, and we can expand beyond the Earth to Mars, and eventually to other parts of the solar system and beyond.
Raganwald Weighs In on Architecture Astronauts
I'm not sure if creativity can be taught, but it can certainly be practiced.
Yeah, it's concerning, but it's not news to any developer. Any facebook app developer knew they could store user information for a long time.
Actually, that's how I interpreted it, but I appreciate the clarification.

But I still disagree. Anecdotally, I've found that coding for 6 hours a days gets more features implemented and bugs fixed than coding for 14 hours a day.

The loss of mental acuity, clarity and creativity (again, this is for me, and anecdotal) is simply too high a price to pay.
Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails
It would be interesting to know what happens to these students once they actually get to Havard/Yale/Princeton. Do they find themselves able to cope in an environment where they have to learn on their own, without anybody to hold their hand? Do they run amok once they get out of that strictly controlled environment, and turn into drunken party animals? Do they become disillusioned when they realize that everyone around them is getting by just fine by putting in one tenth the effort? Or do they keep up the habit of insanely hard work, shoot to the head of their classes and go on to have stellar careers?

No doubt it's some combination of all of the above, but it'd be nice to know.
"I'm comfortable and confident in the network I have now"

I'm not. Whenever I talk about what I'm doing, I get the "Why would you want to do that?" response or look.

But not at Startup School. Two days talking with cool people about stuff that interests me was like therapy. When you talk about substance, no one cares about the superficial.
Sometimes the term paradox is used for situations that are merely surprising.
how do you reason that?
> "The average and median age of U.S.-born founders was 39 when they started their companies. Only about 1 percent of U.S.-born founders of tech companies were teenagers."

Yaay for me!
#1 is the best part. Personally, I'd be glad to host a forum without ads just because the conversation is worth the $20/month that a slicehost costs. My life is more about enjoying existence than having a high bank account balance.

But hey, since pg wants to pay for it, that's fine with me :)
+1 for PHP + memcache + Thrift.
I don't know. Does anyone know if HP managed to patent it before they published it?