skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
49 Million U.S. Gamers Buy Used Games
Beta Feedback should be much easier
Even if the software is commercial as long as it is open source, you have motivations to tinker with it, to adapt it to your own problems and preferences and people will still look at it to learn.

Why is the fact that would the fact that you paid for this source-code make you not want to change that color there, that shortcut here etc...
Internet Users Are Sick And Tired Of Hillary And Obama
Development tools tend to be an exception in general. Apple provides lots of development tools free of charge, ostenisbly because it's good for the Apple platform if more programs are written, thus attracting more users... but on the other hand, Apple charges a non-trivial amount for their other professional software packages.

Microsoft doesn't give away as much in the way of development tools (just "lite" versions, I guess), but maybe they don't think they have to, since they already are the dominant platform?...
That sounds like a great system, thanks. I'll take a look at ebates.com and see what I can find.
HA, nice one! Any suggestions on where to start?
Quote: "These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

What is that supposed to mean? The issue is way more complex than that, and how can you paint all the legitimate open source companies with a big red "pirate" brush like that? That doesn't even make sense! The issues are connected, sure, but not the same! It's because of insipid stuff like this that I quit reading Coding Horror.
Swastikas and other similar designs are very common, especially with one Chinese group I think 'Hakka'?

The Nazi's use of it in propaganda really is a tiny part of its history.
So is the contest over? How can I contact you?
I didn't even think about that. Have you had some bad experiences or do you just enjoy burning things? :)

This is likely a very flammable structure, nice catch.
>and successful non-legal enterprises

...and without Russian mafia, where would the inspiration come from for Grand Theft Auto IV? :)
All very true. I would add that server-side parsing of JSON is very easy.

I think they're hinting at something by calling it "and other non-JS environments". My first reaction to that was "you mean like PHP?"
Thats the thing though. The vast majority of Yahoos seem to indicate that they won't work for Microsoft, even if it means a pay cut to go elsewhere. So in reality, Microsoft-Yahoo merely means Microsoft with Yahoo's domain names. Some of those are probably pretty valuable, but if Microsoft is to offer a realistic challenge to Google, it needs brilliant engineers and ideas, not domain names.
Make a cardboard cutout press with your son in your garage using this layout or a similar one.

The cutout press could be done relatively easily, and building that could be more fun than the bloxes :)
Have you read the specs of his "utu" protocol? (check the "saving the internet through hate" link: http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/design.html).
Coming from the man who coded mongrel, I know he understands protocols (at least http).

I think he is doing remarkable stuff.
Carrying the anology a little further and throwing in some metaphors liberally:

1. You could get a potential cofouder pregnant with your idea.

2. The hornier you are with your idea, the sooner you'll find a cofounder.

3. Work hard in the gym of coding so that a hot, I mean, skilled cofounder will find you and want you to screw her brains off until acquisition.
I can see where the language and platform could have an affect on an acquisition. Both for ease of integration, and scalability. If you have a small app written in .NET, and an acquisition would suddenly increase your userbase by an order of magnitude or two, this could be a cause for worry to the acquirer.

Also, as more and more web-based platforms are going to cloud computing architectures, ability to slide into a LAMP environment would reduce cost and make integration much easier (MHO only).

I'm sure that much of this depends on the size of the company doing the acquisition. Google or Amazon probably have more overall resources and ability to deal with oddball platforms than a much smaller company, ex: if LinkedIn were to buy another social networking site based on .NET.

Bottom line, everything matters. Language, office location, user base, founders, team, etc. However different things matter differently in each situation, so it's difficult to structure yourself for easy acquisition once you get much beyond the "3 founders in the basement" stage. So, work on building a strong company that can stand and scale on its own. Make smart decisions to the extent you can, and hope for the best.
I think he has taken this a little too far. I don't see Yahoo destroying their market value with this 'test', they are just trying to stave off MS.

I've actually switched to Yahoo search in the last 3 months and find it better than Google, it definitely seems to be updated more frequently and the results are always as good, and sometimes better, than what I get at Google. There ads aren't as well targeted apparently but I never click on Google ads either so I don't really notice.

I think more than anything Yahoo needs a brand refresh. Like Ask did with the 'its the algorithm' commercials. I tried Ask based on those commercials, the problem is Ask doesn't have the quality results that Yahoo does.

With the new open search platform and support for microformats I think Yahoo is in a good technological position to take on Google, they just need better marketing.
Fortunately for startups,

E = 1/2 mv^2

So, your energy rises with the square of your velocity, while the incumbent competition only rises linearly with their mass.
Since it is much more expensive and difficult to create traction on a product and to win customers than to port an existing product on another platform or technology, it should not be a show stopper for a large aquirer.
Things may be different, when a small company considers to acquire a project in early stage.
"But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries - but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity."

I may not be a fan of MS products, but I have a lot of admiration for the person Bill Gates has become.
huge exodus is not the end of the world for microsoft... they get the traffic and products, and the work force has reduced itself for them with no need to pay severance or benefits.
Write in whatever gets you the largest amount of marketshare the fastest. If you're making big $$$ or pulling in redonculous amounts of eyeballs the acquirer won't care if you wrote it in assembly or cobol. More importantly, don't worry about acquisition - concentrate on a business model that makes $$'s. Acquisition is for the lucky few and she's a very fickle suitor.
The Basics of Hashes (perl and awk)
We wrote our product in Smalltalk, and our company was bought a few weeks ago. In the eyes of our acquirer, the speed with which we could implement features far outweighed any disadvantages (and was one of the main reasons they were interested in us). The "problem" that Smalltalk has a small user community never really arose.
This is a great idea - thanks to this, I can see that there is at least one person coming from my hometown of Ottawa :)
a bit of inside knowledge here of multiple recent acquisitions and acquisition talks: being in an acquirer's preferred language definitely helps. as everybody mentioned, there are dozens of factors that can be more important -- you can't argue with 100 million users. but given situation (a) where you're written in PHP and situation (b) where you're written with GWT or in python, all other things held equal, Google will value your startup much more highly with their preferred languages.
Of course it does. All other things being equal, you're more likely to be bought (and at a higher price). Of course, if you're much better with Lisp than other languages, you'll likely make something much better with Lisp so all other things won't be equal.

While I don't think language is a big thing to overcome, do realize that you will have to be just that little bit better if you've chosen an unpopular language.
That and "Maybe journalists will do proper research again".

This guy has some decent points but in the end has his head so far up his, well you get the idea. The internet is far from 'shit'. Here in America it is single handedly saving our political system because the only way anyone can get any sort of information is through the internet. That doesn't mean that ALL information on the internet is always right. Far from it, but to cast aside the entire internet, THE ENTIRE INTERNET, because there is a lot noise is just nonsense. Its so much more than just political too. All kinds of people with all kinds of interests can connect in ways never before. In the end its always how one USES the tool, not the tool itself. How about a bet, if you think the internet is 'shit' lets log every site you go to. If you go to anywhere close to visiting 10%of every website in the entire world, I'll give you a $10. If not, you have to retract your statement because to even suggest you have seen it all and have the right and ability to judge it all is just, well, 'shit'.
The Atari ST, Part 2
Maybe it's just his students that are like this, and not all young people.

Considering how mediocre and ignorant most journos are, is it that surprising to consider that the same may apply to journalism students?
When I say mediocre journalists, I don't have Hunter Thompson or Helen Thomas in mind, but the people that invariably make you cringe when you read their newspaper article on a subject you're familiar with.
The Victorian Internet is a fun book that talks about the reaction to the arrival of the telegraph and predictions about how it would bring about world peace.

http://tomstandage.com/vicnet.html
Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to believe. In an age when anyone can broadcast anything, we end up with almost nothing.

Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data.

OTOH, maybe this is just another opportunity for those of us who would rather build something than spend time watching American Idol, facebooking, and partying. (Spending time on hacker news is OK.)
Brain Workout
Your tour makes good points about your product, but doesn't show off the product well. I think you should have a "features" page with links to pages on individual features or groups of related features.

It helps you be more confident - show how.
It saves time and effort - explain, and show, ways it does that.
Helps you live longer - don't believe it - just say it reduces stress, show how.

A point Ogilvy used to make over and over is: customers want information.

Peak their interest, then let them explore. Currently, looking at your website, it looks like it might be a useful product, but I'm not sure. I want more details.

Note: I couldn't watch your slide show because I'm using Linux, so if it already addresses these comments, please ignore. Hope it helps.
Ok, while I did know the answers to all of his questions (just left college), my reaction was such that I just thought: "Another person who is lamenting about the education system, in regards to current affairs, big deal"

I closed it after the second paragraph. I wonder if he also gathers statistics on telia tequila as well as the civil war...
Ummm... nothing wrong with discussing whether we feel like paying for software, but if I may throw a different question into the mix:

What does this mean for startups and business models? Is this effect stronger in some niches (programmer tools, for example) but weaker in others (enterprise integration applications)? Does SAAS change the game? Does pricing a product so that it is credit-card-ware change things?
Another level of simplicity is licenses and DRM. I've got multiple computers and OSes (Win, Mac, Linux). I'll have more computers in the future.

The words BSD, GPL, and public domain simplify my life enormously. There's a tradeoff when I have to pick which open source implementation is best, but I would much rather do that than read legalese.

And unlike proprietary software, I do not pay rents based on operating systems or have to think about how many computers I've installed something on. Ignorance is bliss.
If they've good hackers in abundance then why there are no emerging startups? Don't they look at the business side of technology ;)
Just curious? Can anyone share some insights about startup scene in Russia?
No problem, if you have any suggestions just let me know.
From the article: "Besides being annoying, cold calling is no longer effective"

A friend of mine does this for a living, and he earns around $20.000 a month and has a 30 hour working week. In a previous startups I cold called potential customers myself and closed roughly 1 in 20.

I don't know where the author gets his numbers from, or if he moves in radically different cirsles from me, but I strongly disagree. I would say that cold-callling is one of the most effective sales methods out there. Depending on your product of course.
That sucks:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html
I think of this differently. Assume that there's a situation where your language has to change, whether because of acquisition or scaling or hosting or lack of developers or licensing or whatever.

How do you switch? And, more importantly, can you do it in a granular manner?

From Spolsky:

"First, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking code is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should have been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can be done by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at once, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn't introduce new bugs or throw away working code."

Think about your system as a series of pieces and keep the as (appropriately) decoupled as you can. Then, when you find a technical/business/legal bottleneck that is tied to a language issue, you can swap out that piece and keep moving.

I love being able to confidently say:

"Well, our integration point is always through the db, so if the mixer needs to be faster or rewritten in C++ we can do that. If retrieval needs to be pulled out onto another machine, we can do that. If you need it rewritten in Python, here are the five big pieces, and each one can be moved over independently."
Beneteau Monte Carlo 27 hit the water!
Piwik - an open source web analytics software
Many of them leave and create startups else where, for example Google or Parallels.

Then there are startups you probably know about, like Art Lebedev: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus
Most of their startups target the Russian market, for example, Google is in 2nd place among Russian search engines, trailing yandex.ru.
In any business discussion, it is critical to separate issues from details at the outset. In most cases, revenue, market presence, customer service, profitability, and financial status are issues. In most cases, your language is a detail. The problem is that many business people don't know the difference between an issue and a detail (in this discussion and many others).

In my experience, those who were concerned with what language something was written in were also concerned about a lot of other details instead of the real issues. Exercise caution with such people.
Amazon AWS, Google App Engine, Zoho Creator: A Continuum
Ruby on Rails Elastic Server
We Need A New Path To Liquidity
What did I ever do to deserve that?
Personally I wouldn't. If I tinker with open source software, at least I can publish my results, so it is that much more efficient than tinkering with closed source software.
Here's the thing: keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep up.

The right way to understand things is slowly. This is why I don't watch the TV news, I don't read mainstream news web sites.

I have two major sources of news: Le Monde (which I have daily) and The Economist (which is a weekly). Of those two I get the most information from The Economist because once a week I can read considered opinion and news not Breaking News which is irrelevant.

I also don't follow Twitter and I have a very limited set of RSS feeds. The only social news site I read is this one.
OpenX: Open Source Ad Server
With respect to Nobel laureates, the US has ~304, Russia has 22, and China has 5. In what sense are China and Russia "right up there", particularly on a per-capita basis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_by_country
Some people also have to bother to earn the money first, before they spend it.
Europe rejects proposals to criminalise file-sharing
Marketing 2.0: Can Meebo Make it Real?
True, and that is a very valid reason for avoiding commercial software.

I was however questioning the suggestion that the reason he doesn't use commercial software is due to the difficulty/time consuming nature of purchasing said software.
sounds like another baseless patent in the making with no actual engineering work done towards it...
Ask YC:  "Think out loud" - like twitter/justin.tv but audio-based and for your thoughts.  Good idea?
The idea is to reveal what people are thinking about at this very moment. It's sort of like twitter/justin.tv but for your thoughts. And perhaps it would work better using audio than text.

For example, consider listening to what people are thinking while watching a TV show, solving a problem, chatting with their friends, etc.
Ford to Introduce Two Technologies to Aid Drivers' Vision
Django Pluggables: Find reusable applications for your Django project, quickly and easily
App Engine data migration?
My biggest reservation concerning App Engine is data migration. What if I want to move my app and its data off-of App Engine. And let's say I have a half-gig of data spread out over tens of millions of records. I can't simply write a python app to dump it in a single request because it would terminate before completing. So would I have to resort to writing an app that dumps it in small batches? Has anyone see this issue discussed anywhere?
I think Microsoft is really the only acquirer where language/platform choice would matter. They're the only acquirers that have a real stake in the success of a particular language.

Even still, they bought Hotmail, who was using FreeBSD.
One wonders how the assimilation has gone for the YC companies
The most popular ones make perfect sense, and not just for Ubuntu but for all linuses:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/most_popular_ever/

Power Management, Suspend/Resume, Network management via UI and booting time are all huge issues on all distros I've used.
Whenever I read about Bill Gates's philanthropy I always feel slightly depressed.

I get the distinct feeling that he is using his money in a way that maximizes social approval, rather than in a way that maximizes benefit. I haven't spent very much time looking into ways to save the world, but I suspect, like in many other fields, the most effective way to do it is not the way that provokes the greatest emotional response.
interesting...I did a search too and came up with a different source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Worldmapnobellaureatesbyc...

Trouble is, I can't finding the right page on the official Nobel site that would confirm/deny the information on wikipedia.
for reference, openx used to be called openads, up until recently.
I think he was referring to the people who use open source software rather than the people who create it.
Scientists are abusing mental performance enhancing drugs.
Do you know why they keep changing their name? I remember phpadsnew, openads, and now openx?
As a college student, I can't help but feel that he's exaggerating the issue. I refuse to believe that most of my classmates couldn't answer 90% of those questions. The only question I couldn't answer myself was who is the current SoD, and I was at least informed enough to ask myself who took Rumsfeld's place when he resigned. It makes me wonder whether the problem is with my generation as a whole or with his particular sample of it.
Fascinating...but I've read you need to upgrade to Ruby 1.9 cuz the code is parsed by it?
Microsoft Introduces Tool for Avoiding Traffic Jams
Gmail? :)
Rapid image sorting by monitoring brain activity
Hidden Video Courses in Math, Science, and Engineering
For people who like lists... some full courses in computer science, machine learning, math, and physics with video lectures you might find useful.
Dramatic Twist in Yahoo Battle - Microsoft, Google, Time Warner in play; stage set for tense finale
how do you know that you knew the answers to all his questions if you closed the article after the second paragraph?
i think the major overtone is that life is getting easier and easier
But people have no trouble paying for real life stuff. It's just software that people just will not buy if they can at all avoid it. And while that includes me, I cannot come up with a satisfactory explanation.
Uh...I'd wager Sun has more staked on Java than MS does on any of the languages it supports.
"Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data."

Right on target. My generation had 4 hours a week, for 2 school years, of what was called 'Philosophy', but was actually how to think logically, how to lie convincingly, how to identify falacies, how to parse a newspaper headline and articles, how not to be a fool in this world. Learning directly from the legacy of the masters of the past.

Two years after us, the Spanish government decided that reducing this "horrible" subject that "nobody cared about" to a mere 1 hour a week, and watered down, was a good idea.

They did so following a schooling model that was more flexible and nice with the students, and the "standard" in the most powerful economy in the western world.

9 years after that decision Spain has finally started to regret and revert their decision.
It would be less helpful than you might think. Strange as it sounds, there's often no answer to the question of why groups are rejected. I tried to explain it here: http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html
Where did you get "abusing"? That word appears nowhere in the article.
The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
aw, man. i submitted part one of this awhile back, and have had the author rss-bookmarked since then, waiting to post part two. i missed it by an hour.
Care to tell what did you build in ST?
It looks to me like the best way for a talented cs guy in the US to get ahead is to found startups until he achieves commercial success.

Whereas the quickest way to get ahead in poor countries is to be noticed, get out of your country, and found a startup/join a company in a richer country. I know MS scouts these competitions for new hires. I'd imagine that for many this is their way out, so they're extremely motivated to win.

The smart people go where they can best leverage their talents.
Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to believe

Come on, he claims that students can't name a single country that borders Israel, don't know which country Kabul is a capital of and their timing for WW-II is off by a decade...
There's no friendly start-up culture in Russia, and it's hard to get visas for the US.