skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless you're already extremely proficient on [your tools] but would take a lot of time and tweaking to learn the ins and outs of [other supposedly better tools].
The 37Signals model is a valid model and it is honorable that they evangelize it. I would say, it is the "30-something-model" for people you can't affort to deal with high risks and prefer to slidely glitch into professional independence.
That said, the "20-something-model" (Google, Facebook et al.) is particularly attractive for young people that like to play big. Up to you to decide, which one fits better to your personal situation and your risk profile.
Atwood gets a lot of crap from the HN crowd, so it's great to hear a reasoned, dispassionate argument about the pros and cons of Coding Horror.

The "shoot from the hip" comment was that while Spolsky might go over one of his showcase pieces 30-40 times, Atwood would look at it maybe once or twice while he was writing it and the hit "Publish".
Monitor earthquakes with the motion sensor of your harddrive
1. I think your app is awesome
2. A browser window around your screenshot would make it easier to get (I started clicking on it ;-)
3. Drag and drop would make rearanging easier
I'm not annoyed. It's only been a few days of their "rants." I'm sure they'll talk about software again soon.
Comment 87 on TC: It’s another nail in the coffin for Rails.

Does that even make sense? Man, people are drinking some serious Haterade today.
I thought this was interesting because I have WP on a shared host. It sure is slow sometime but I didn't know if it was the host or WP. I guess the answer is probably ... both :) Makes me wonder if part of WP's success is that most people don't have it on their own server so they don't have to care as much about performance.

Now I'm resolved to install WP-Cache!
...and I miss a dedicated stylesheet for printing
"Since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one."
"No, notepad can't do all that"

That's why I like it. To each his own I guess. There's nothing like a blank white page that is lacking any UI clutter at all

Folding is already borderline for my tastes ^^
I don't see how caching in the DB would improve performance much. The best you could do would probably be to cache the most expensive queries.
The main advantage of having caching in your application is that you can cache your data in a more high-level way, i.e. taking into account the way the data is going to be used. So you can pre-process your data as much as possible and store the result of this.
Compared to that a cache in the DB would be rather dumb. This isn't to say that a database cache is useless but just not a replacement for having caching directly in your app.
Twitter is a more private and lightweight version of justin.tv's lifecasting. And unlike lifecasting, Twitter gives you access to people's thoughts -- not just their spoken words.

At the very least, it's a fascinating experiment. Let's see where it goes.
I think their model carries a lot of weight, but its not the only way.

Besides, show me 1 successful business and I will be able to show you 9 that failed (if the 1 in 10 success statistic is correct) - most businesses will fail, not matter which way you do it.
Microsoft Reveals a Web-Based Software System
I think he could provide more understanding to his readers (and possibly for himself) if he were to explain exactly why each of those queries are made.

Wordpress is meant to make online publishing easy for non developers and it has to make sacrifices for flexibility. Wordpress serves most people very well and there are many high traffic sites running it. Surely he will be able to do the same for himself if he chooses to run Wordpress.
It only lets me launch IE 5.5 and IE 7 instances on 64-bit Vista. It's also not independent from existing IE settings (from registry), so if your IE is locked down, this will be locked down too.

It would nice to run each version of IE with application-level virtualization, where each has its own fake registry to mess with.
Twitter lowers the barrier to entry in that respect. Most people don't have the patience to write reasonable blog posts. But with Twitter, a single sentence will do.
This is what you get for deifying TechCrunch.
What happened in Q1 2007 is not relevant here, and neither is Alibaba, because those are things that analysts would have already taken into account. What is new is that they exceeded the analysts expectations, and usually when that happens the stock goes up.

I'm just saying I find it unusual that because of the circumstances, exceeding expectations, that is, doing better than people thought they would, actually makes the stock go down.
That is what I am saying. That Yahoo is being valued in such an unusual way that by doing better than what everyone thought, the stock goes down.
It would be interesting if he could provide similar usage graphs for Movable Type and do some real data-backed comparison instead of ranting.
Or trust them, and let them change their email later (or verify it later), if they decide they can't live without the features that need a valid email.

I've found that the vast majority of users enter a valid email to start with. Those who are really security-conscious might use a one-time email just to register, which won't work later on anyway.
It seems like Bezos wasn't joking when he said Amazon is actively looking to lower their costs and pass the savings to the consumers.
A theory as to why many startups are done by college kids.
It is really hard to make libel stick when there is a journalist talking about a public figure like Mr. Cook.

Also, defamation is a set that includes libel and slander. Slander is something that is spoken (both start with an s, that helps me to remember it), so it doesn't apply here. I can dig up the legal standard if you are curious.
Next step: Prescription Porn
Also noted on the comments: Blaine had no authority over operations, and they spent a good part of the last year on Joyent, which ended ugly.

Short of a tell-all from Twitter's side or Blaine, we're never going to know what caused the scalability problems. Arrington sarcastically mocks people who question his journalistic cred, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant not to see their point.
While 1 in 10 might be correct across all startups, I'm pretty sure that of the companies aspiring to be the next Google or Facebook the failure rate is far higher than 1 in 10. Otherwise all it would take is about 10 tries and statistically you would have a pretty good chance of being a multi billionaire.
The problem is a lot of the advertising related business don't start actually making money until they get HUGE, for example YouTube. I'm still not sure if YouTube is actually making money yet. And even if you're lucky enough to make some income from ads chances are it will barely pay for the cost of living of the founders at first. So if you want to hire additional employees you probably need outside funding (if you're going for the get big quick model).

On the other hand I don't understand why some companies raise as much as they do. What did Xobni need 4 million dollars for?
I've got admit I've been looking for something like this but its $250 for one site. Are there similar free kits (even for other languages)?
I just run a copy of XP inside VirtualBox to test things in IE. It's not application level virtualization, but I definitely don't care what happens to the registry, as I can just swap in a fresh disk image whenever I want.
Hey, thanks for the details. I'm not sure Mr. Cook though is a public figure per se. The average person wouldn't have a clue who he is.
Making it easier to 'say something' doesn't always improve the discussion.

That said, I think twitter is amusing. Game changing? Who knows. But you can't deny it's a case of something that on the surface seems downright worthless, yet people have done some really creative things with it... like the story written one twitter at a time, and the twitter poems, and the fact that it seems to be a new PR outlet. Anything that people use in ways not envisioned by the creators is bound to go somewhere... whether that place is 'mainstream profitable enterprise' is yet to be seen.
why not put the sample widget on the front page? And make it a realistic list too.
Erlang to power a new betting exchange in London
When Google and Facebook got started, they weren't trying to be the next Google or Facebook.
That's funny - I actually feel sorry for all the guys in their 30s living in SF (and that includes me)! Technology, nightlife, and dating seems pretty great in SF. And when you have no obligations, you can take advantage of all of that.

Most of the programmers I know are now in their 30s with small children. We're trying to figure out how to pay a mortgate and preschool costs that easily exceed $1000/month.

Salaries are high here, and two income families can swing it. But I have realized that high costs are toxic to freedom. Yeah, if you score huge with a startup you'll have enough money be free of the daily grind, but that isn't really in the cards for most of us, even if we take a real crack at it.

I know people who have cashed out of the real estate market in SF and moved to Austin, and they absolutely love it. I think I'd enjoy it there, too. I think that it's probably easier to gain financial independence and start living on your own terms in other cities. And these don't have to be crappy lame places - these are really entertaining places to live. In some ways, I think the cost structure of SF makes it a less entertaining place to be, because people have to make more decisions based on paying the mortgage than doing something creative.

But my wife and I have a huge extended family in SF (parents, grandparents, cousins, nieces, nephews, etc...). I've actually tried to leave, but just I can't do it. And to me, cost is the only problem - if you have the dough, then for a certain type of person, SF may be the most pleasant place to live in the US.
Grou.ps Launches Public Beta
Project Management Disasters
He would probably be a limited public figure, because he did engage in actions (public speaking, having a blog) that generated publicity within the field of twitter performance. So on the topic of twitter scalability he is a public figure.
AMD's Triple-Core Phenom X3 Processor Launched
I'm angling for Lisp, as I'll be working through SICP over the next N months anyway. Even if it turns out that I never develop anything real in it, I think it would be more beneficial to really understand Lisp than it would to be proficient in Python.
An amusing case where lowering your price raises the bar to entry for competitors. Well played Amazon, well played.
Remind me--- is there a Mod-Lisp for CL? Or any (Scheme etc.) other?

--hsm
Ask: Why do people need Twitter, anyway?
People like Dave Winer are getting pissy about Twitter - http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/04/22/howToDecoupleFromTwitterNo.html

"How will we manage without Twitter? Necessity is the mother of invention, imho."

What a bunch of bullshit. 98% of stuff on Twitter, is, as Matt Maroon pointed out, "Going to the gym"/"Ugh, clients are so lame"/"At elitist convention/party/etc you weren't invited to, I am so awesome".

How is this valuable?

It's the information equivalent of sugar water.
Sure. It just seems an odd choice. It's like using a blog to do revision control, by posting your source code as a new blog post each revision.

Each to their own though...
Sure, but then you release, show users, and they have a completely different definition of 'usable' than you :)
Wow, that's a lot of open source technology. Erlang is really getting popular these days.

Out of interest how are they handling unicode support?
Back to the PowerPC? PA Semi's only announced product so far is a dual-core PowerPC: http://www.pasemi.com/processors/index.html

I was working on PowerPC processors with IBM and Motorola in the late 90's. Back then, Apple's investment in Exponential was big news: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_/ai_17921250

It seemed then that Apple was using Exponential to put pressure on its partners (http://www.allbusiness.com/electronics/computer-equipment-co...), but Apple dropped the project abruptly (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n2168_v43/ai_...), leaving their project so broke that it couldn't even offer severance to its laid-off employees.
Is MySQL really free?
Also covered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171292
Flickr Video Browser
That's good advice, provided that the product is good, and something people would/will want to use.
Write it off or ebay exit - you are unlikely to recover significant money from this. If you aren't doing well, and don't want to do it, then get out!
there is a great series of papers published by Intuit and the Institute of the Future called the Future of Small Business, the third paper is called the Artisan Economy - it speaks directly to the trend they are referring to, exciting stuff, especially if your targeting the fortune 5,000,000.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/38r7us
reddit (sigh)
Valleywag is leaking over to TC, I guess.
> Subsistence farming - grow your own crops and eat them.

So how did you buy your land again? Or is the Soviet Government still encouraging settlement in Siberia ... ?

I think supposing that you need money to stay alive in our society is a fairly air-tight theory.
is it inconsistent? i'm in the same boat: used to waste a lot of time, now buckling down to get something done, and i'll waste time again once i'm filthy rich.
Your Karma speaks for itself. 428 days. 268 karma points. 1, really 1 submission.
Which is a great argument for why we turned down the 30+ venture capitalists who came knocking on our door. We weren't interested in those kind of setups. And I wish more people who think through exactly those implications: Getting a traditional VC involved means aiming for an exit. Whether that be M&A (more likely) or IPO (less likely).

For people who are just interested in building a business, not searching for an exit, the traditional VC is just not a relevant option. 37signals is amongst those people.
One can ban Valleywag from Hacker News, but one can't ban Valleywag-style articles such as this.

Shameless hit job.
The overall impression I'm getting from this post is that this product you've created works, but you don't believe in the business case for it. You seem to have at least one other project about which you're passionate, and which you would be pursuing all-out - you seem to be getting all hung up on the guilt involved in abandoning the first one.

I say this is a classic example of the "sunk costs" fallacy. You're holding onto something bad because you've already put effort into it, instead of doing what's best for you. I say drop it like it's hot, and throw yourself into the new project.

You're in a fortunate position, as students - rare is the startup that can afford to realise it's working on the wrong product, back up, and change direction. Don't waste the opportunity!
Turning Netflix into a social network
New: Video Comments On All TechCrunch Blogs
MA@TC made an appeal at SS08 for less snark and critical sniping in comments.

Maybe he could start with his headlines and articles?
This is a pure publicity stunt by Arrington. He was probably suffering from a lull in traffic...
I would prefer you to use a different username. i am 100% sure jkush is not your real name, but is close to it. now why don't you drink your own koolaid and not morphed words. You have done the same with your username as I have done with "u". jkush. are you serious?
get out of it....and side note why are customers hard to find...if its optimized at all or your running even a lame duck ppc campaign they find you...am i missing something here?
Ask YC: Feedback on startup's Facebook app
Myself and another developer have been working on a Facebook app and wanted some feedback. Do you think it would be useful? Any missing features? Any annoyances? We'd really appreciate any feedback or comments!

http://apps.facebook.com/mycareerscore/index.html
What does it do?

Dont want to sign up before i know....
Arlington should apologize to Cook for this disparaging post.

Downtime is obviously a serious issue, but implying that Cook is an amateur is as irresponsible as it is false. Are we supposed to believe that, while Twitter became a rock star application - literally the crack cocaine of conference attendees - Cook's primary role was help it go down from time to time?

TC is a powerful voice and really should not be engaging in the sorts of personal attacks that one would not even furl in a private setting.

Thankfully, many people have come to Cook's defense here and in the comments of Arlington's nuclear-powered trolling.
Not trying to troll, but isn't lowering prices always a competitive pressure on other players in the market.
No Revenues, No Product, But still $720 Million
He's right, one hell of a case study for HBS...
SearchYC 2.0 Released
I love VirtualBox, but it's takes up a lot of space to keep several XP images on my notebook. The fact that this lets you test in IE5.5 through IE8 on a single image is a nice win, IMHO.
what is "moar"? Drink your own koolaid
I just started using its embedded feature to manage the "latest news" micro blog on a production site.
If you're the only person behind simplist, why are you referring to yourself as "we" throughout the site?

Along those same lines, I'm not sure how this qualifies as a start-up as such. It's nifty side project, but it would do you better to present the thing you've created in an honest way.
I've worked with Ben as well (actually working with him currently on a project). This is going to be a great kit.
Only one computer scientist in the world's top 100 public intellectuals
... and zero mathematicians.
I guess what I was going for was they were forgoing profits in the short term to preemptively shut out possible future competitors. They already have a big lead here... so they are trading some profits (realized through cost savings) for extending that lead.

Don't feel like a troll for pointing out that I was being redundantly redundant.
Microsoft CEO willing to walk away from Yahoo bid
You can make any kind of list with tadalist as well, and the interface is much cleaner. You could argue that yours has more features, but to me, they're just unnecessary clutter. I don't want to have to guess at what your little icons represent when my needs are so uncomplicated. All I want is someplace online where I can put lists of text. I like what you've written, but none of it would compel me to use it over tadalist or other established sites.
People don't seem to understand the social dynamics behind stuff like this. First, understand that people are becoming increasingly more comfortable with exposing themselves online. Second, people really want to brag and let others know about themselves, despite what they say. They feel their lives are important and want to weave their lives into the entire cloth of social happenings. Third, think of twitter as a widdled down Facebook wall. It provides a mediator to both communicate with close friends with closeness and acquaintances with a comfortable sense of distance. This all compounded with the fact that many people like to feel like they are a part of an extensive community makes understanding sites like Twitter a bit easier.

Twitter is providing a more efficient way of letting people know what you're doing. The same was done using a phone but no one really complained about the garbage spoken over phone lines. Think of it as a less dynamic version of instant messaging.
Introduction to Django: Helping Perfectionists With Deadlines
Still evil: Microsoft gives customers who bought DRM'd music on MSN servers the shaft
Javascript will be the Next Big Language
Actually, link counts are pretty much worthless.
Sorry, I forgot you can't see the about page before you sign up!

It's a career evaluator - you can use your Facebook profile or a resume and the skills/experience in those is compared to what is being asked for in current jobs for your title on the market (from company sites, Monster, HotJobs, etc).

You get a score for how in demand your skills are, and you can also see if you'd better suit other titles, see what jobs matched well, etc.
Chirrp - Adds a Mic to twitter
I would say that there's a continuum based on what you're trying to build.

If you're trying to build something that needs huge networking effects to succeed (general-purpose social networks have been an obvious example in the recent past), trying to bootstrap it past a certain point is going to be counterproductive. You have to try to shoot for the moon.

Other types of businesses are likely to never have a use for significant financing: the blog includes an example of a pet daycare. Starting a web design consultancy is usually in this same category.

Of course, many tech startups are somewhere in between. The company could blow up huge, but it can also be sustainable with gradual growth and limited capital. Then it's basically a tactical decision when and if to seek capital.
I'll sit this one out, since I'm more interested in code than in startups. I'll likely pop into the Ubuntu release party in C-base on saturday, though. Anyone else planning to be there?

http://www.ubuntu-berlin.de/hardy-heron-releaseparty_26.4.20...
I wish this site showed more of what is involved. 250 bucks might be reasonable, but I would want more reassurance that my time isn't going to be spent learning an interface whose limitations may haunt me or that is nearly as involved as writing the braintree code myself. I might buy something like this, but I would want to be convinced it would reward me for giving up flexibility, so I know the time savings would be real.
5 Billion Stumbles by 5 Million Users
Your color selection was painful to my eyes. I use firefox. But somehow you pallete of blue on black was really annoying. I am sorry but my reaction is so strong, I cannot imagine why you would do that.
You might want to look into why www.mysimplist.com doesn't work.
The Open-Source Boob Project
If thats the same people that were at the london yc meetup, I think one of the developers worked on a built in library for starling, which is an icu wrapper

http://code.google.com/p/starling/
HowTo: Marketing Efforts of a Startup -- Part 2
twitter takes its value from the people that use it. if you use it as a tool, its useful as a tool. if you use it to bullshit, then what you get out is bullshit - it won't magically change that.

just like, for example, a boat is useful if your profession is fishing or something that requires you to be on the water, but a boat is a hole in the water where you throw your money if you have a boat for recreational purposes.

such is twitter. use it right, and its useful and good. use it for fun or trivial purposes and its kind of silly.

another good analogy for twitter, i think, is the boy who cried wolf. i'll read peoples tweets when they only have one a week or something, because i know its meaningful/profound/etc. and thats the purpose -- to be able to quickly and easily contact a lot of people via a lot of channels. but if you have 30 a day, i won't read a single one.
Twitter’s Business Model: Japanese Style
Congrats, it looks great.
Watch Fitt's law in your design for the icons.

The smaller the icon, the harder it is for the user to click on it. Expand/collapse is realllly small -- too small for users to click on, and probably too small to make them want to.

The other thing from a visual standpoint you should watch out for is too many horizontal lines of alignment. (tab stops) The eye is hardwired to want to scan for order -- but hierarchical ordered lists like that make it hard for users to absorb the most important thing about your lists-- the content.
Hail to the Twitter
how can I contact you to further discuss this?
Internet Censorship Coming to Russia