skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A computer is basically something that helps me think outside of my head, like pen and paper or a chalkboard or camera and printer. The difference is that a computer helps me write, draw, and design things, and play around (with abstractions like words, numbers, diagrams, pictures, audio, video) in often easier and unique ways.

The internet is a way for me to do these types of things on a computer with other people, observing and interacting with their abstractions and letting them do the same with mine. Often, this creates an opportunity to make $$ because maybe I or others have or can come up with information and other stuff that is valuable or desirable to someone. It also provides ways of finding out about what people in general are thinking, doing, making, and wanting.

Of course, many forms of media also function similarly, but often more slowly and with less integrated ways of communicating. Take YouTube, which combines ad-driven and searchable video with discussion and polling in relative "real-time". Without the internet, a broadcast TV network might air a program which allow viewers to call-in to discuss and rate various aspects of the show. However, many aspects are not only different, but asymmetrically so. Here are some of these aspects:

- YouTube viewers register their contributions themselves - little or no effort by the "network" and certainly not the producer/provider
- even if the network had someone transcribe the discussion, it would not be available soon or cheaply
- ads (which drive so much of the web and so the internet for many) are simultaneous, usually unobtrusive, targeted, and often interactive as well
- the act of viewing/interacting on YouTube itself is a contribution (via logging/cookies) which in aggregate and dynamically drives further content/discussion
- eventually the network company can focus on advertising and let viewers budget for content :-)

Much of the above applies in large part to organizational use of computer and internet as well, though philosophies of management, security, IP, etc can determine whether the technology is a boon or dongle. Then again, the same could be said for how I or anyone else tries to make use of the technology...
They sell lots of other stuff, for example Office. I think if Microsoft were not paying the vendors, more vendors would offer PCs with Linux or without any OS at all.

Weren't the first Linux PCs by Dell even more expensive than the Windows variants (I am not sure if I remember correctly)?
Taggylicio.us - the power of tags
Just type a tag, taggylicio.us will show you what is currently submitted (pictures, videos, posts) on the web.
Piwik: Open source Web analytics
The Internet is a tool that shrinks the world: it lets you communicate with whoever you want no matter where they are, read any document wherever it is and whatever the format (book, txt, html), manage every aspect of your personal life (everything from editing photos to tracking your duties with something like Google Calendar) from one single computer and even have fun with on-line games.
Spent today looking into this. I think, ultimately, the problem is how the founder set things up. The board consists of the founder, the head VC, and two people who are employed by the head VC.

To me, this is three wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner. My feeling is that the appointment of the president (my initial concern) is simply the natural outcome of the overall power structure - and likely just the tip of the iceberg.

I appreciate your feedback (in particular, thank you Dennis for the excellent link). I'll let YC know how this all pans out...
The definition shouldn't assume the reader has any technical knowledge (think tribal medicine man, or most people's grandmother)
I've found that there's typically more benefit to be had from sharing an idea, than there is from hoarding it and believing you can perfect it on your own.

When I've done the former, it's been way less painful than I imagined, and when I've done the latter, the project has felt like it was stuck in tar (totally my fault).
What I mean to suggest is: try exposing some ideas earlier than you're comfortable with now, and see if you weren't being a little over-protective.
Really cool bash one-liners by Nat Friedman
I'd call it "a mechanism of world intercommunication embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity."

This was written by Shoghi Effendi in 1936 predicting the technology of a future world commonwealth.
A New Category: "Personalized Life Bookmarks"
I've worked with this before. At a previous startup I was the only startup member that had deployed a significant web application. I had always used the FreeBSD platform. We deployed on Windows Server 2003 because despite my personal experience and the ability to pay for FreeBSD support the powers that be were nervous. At the end of the day 'you don't get fired for buying Microsoft' won the day.

As you can see, this wasn't a healthy startup environment to be in where fear wins over experience.
[updated]: for some reason wuth all this login/acct creation, i lost first half of the comment. here it is:

I liked the essay even tho toying with the word "natural" is pretty funny, considering Paul's own later article on debating and arguments.

However, to talk about the main point: show me any startup/group that has succesfully REMAINED small as their service/business started to succeed and expand.

There is an upper limit of task switching and competence one can achieve in diverse areas.8-10 people? Fair enough until one after another they start doing something completely unrelated to their core professions just because the idea is to keep it small.
Slinking to the bottom (how to prevent the inevitable fall of social news sites)
Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda?
Crawling through HTML forms
Adventures in Shitty Marketing at SxSW
the head tracking thing was done before johnny lee. it actually made it to market but was unpopular. his version looks easier and cheaper to implement. hopefully we'll see some support for games and tele-conferencing apps.
>So then I asked him why Vista sucks so bad and he says, "Who cares? We'll do another one but the desktop is dead. Office apps are dead. We'll milk them for another five years and we'll use Yahoo to generate ad revenue to get us through the next five or ten years but the real game is a decade out when we'll be running clouds and the Internet will go beyond the browser and beyond the PC and will be embedded into everything. Ambient, persistent connections, with billions of endpoints hooked to the network. You'll be there. But so will we. Wait and see."
There is definitely a need for this service. Having machines running three OSes, and a plethora of browsers, on your desktop is not yet an option. While it certainly is possible to _have_ a server farm with all these OSes, why not just let someone else maintain that nightmare? Sysadmin hell is what I call that.

The service is slow, but that will change. It "just worked" for me running OS X 10.5 with Firefox 3b5 - I didn't even check if I had Java or which version my Java was, everything went smoothly. There were some artifacts from moving the mouse, but it let me view several of my pages and gave me some good views of how others see my sites.

I think the pricing model is reasonable.

Perhaps what you can do to extend the service is allow users to pay for a set of mouse movements, record them, and run them on every OS/browser/flash combination. Then allow customers to play those files back on their own machines at their leisure, instead of doing it in real time. This would allow a web developer a way to create a 'use case' for their page, and see how it behaved across various platforms. Also, you would not have to supply so much bandwidth, just compress the results and provide them for downloading later.

I'm a little disappointed in Hacker news for the negative comments on Java. While I don't write Java, and lots of my perl colleagues dis Java, I would have thought that this Lisp-centric community would be more tolerant and agnostic when it comes to choice of programming languages. After all, it the innovation of the final result that matters, not the tools used.

I wish you luck Tony with your service, I am sure it will be a success!
Twitter / venturehacks
Just tell them it's like a highway, for information, oh yes...

http://www.acme.com/jef/netgems/superhighway.html

"...A highway HUNDREDS of lanes wide. Most with potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member VIGILANTE POSSES with nuclear weapons. 237 ON RAMPS at every intersection. NO SIGNS. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. AD HOC traffic laws. Some lanes would VOTE to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a CAPITAL OFFENSE on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just SHOOT you without a trial for talking on a car phone..."
'Amazon Tax' Lands in New York
I really think that this is going to end up showcasing J.TV's biggest strength. Media companies have had a hard time doing live video streaming right.

The advantage of streaming live events like sports games, is that by the time the copyright owner is aware of what you're doing and sends to a cease and desist letter, the even has been over for weeks.

There's also a huge advantage in serving ads over live video streams: You control the video content that the ads are playing next to. The reason that advertising on online video hasn't taken off is because corporations really don't want to play their commercials next to a video of a teenager lighting a fart on fire. You can avoid that problem by streaming live.

Any thoughts on streaming live events like Startup School? I'm sure that you'd have tons of viewers. It'd be a great service to people on hacker news. And, I'm sure it would be great exposure for you. Just a thought.
Interesting, the main thing i take away from what pg said is there's a need for more YC clones. Clones that can handle the talent that YC can not accommodate
I think we're going to see more and more advances like this where the chief obstacle to adoption is social, not technical. (This came up a couple weeks ago during a discussion of self-driving motor vehicles).
>> Sooner or later Valleywag will write something particularly informative or amusing and Hacker News readers will miss out.

In my opinion, if the news is really worthwhile, it will come to the readers regardless. The news will still travel through one channel or the other, but yes, the readers may just miss out on an opinon (Valleywag's).
Why is this posted on HN? It's a link to a Twitter account.
> p2p IM Firefox extension that leverages a collapsing IP regime.

Sounds reasonable. :)
as if Zuckerberg is running around yelling "My company is worth $15 billion!" because he's definitely not doing that

well current hires are getting their stock at that valuation so the net effect is the same
LifeBlob: Social Timeline
> Sounds reasonable. :)
Isn't this scary?
That was not the point being argued here. He stated that web ads cannot be measured any more efficiently than any other form of advertising, and I provided evidence on how they can.

You're probably right about that being the only form of ad they can monetize, though. The question then becomes when do companies spend as much in that space as they do on tv, if ever?
On FB the advertising runs all the time, which is why you expand it to the full hour. The brand awareness banner ads can just sit on the side all the time.
Wireless really is a sore point. I think only the Intel drivers are quite reliable. Some companies are more open source friendly than others...
Craigslist Gone Bad!
"Forget all that...you know how the pipes in your toilet work..."

The sad part is, you would likely also get a blank stare to this as well. There are people who float through life with nearly NO understanding of any of the things that make their lives possible. Some even consider this something to take pride in.
Hhmmff. Wishful thinking. My grandmother knows nothing about tribal medicine...
Sorry but there is no logic in this article. If the top 50-60 "stellar" applications will put the other 250 down, this 250 applications are missing something compared to the top 50-60 or they are not very strong in some point, so you can at least reply with an hint, like: The idea could work but you did too little things in the past compared to the best applicants, or for example, the way the application expose the idea give us the feeling you are not addressing the problem in a way we like.

In brief once you are able to see a difference between the stellar and the non-stellar ones you know why the rest is non-stellar and an hint can be a nice feedback for a people that spent some time writing the application.
Cripes! Now even our states are resorting to protectionism!

I wonder how long it will be before an online retailer just refuses to ship to certain states because the tax code is too complicated there to make the sale worth it.

That brings up another interesting question, how does New York State prosecute someone in another state for a violation of NY state laws?
by the way something I noticed, clickpass breaks the back button (the same happens in Hacker News and Disqus login page). My guess is that a hidden iframe is loaded by clickpass which is redirected, therefore requiring you to click the browser back button twice)
The Guest-Host Industrial Complex (a.k.a. "Evite Sucks")
Ask: ERP/CRM software for small businesses
I'm helping out a consumer goods startup mfg in China, and selling in US/Canada.

We're looking at solutions to manage inventory, warehousing, order tracking, finance, customer relationship management, ecommerce, etc... the whole package.

Does anyone have experience in this and have some recommendations/thoughts? Our top two options here are Everest and Netsuite, which are "all-in-one" systems.

I've just started researching this today, so I'm all ears! Thanks..
What happens when google starts editing wiki pages and filing new bug reports/tickets?
Could Facebook Steal $1B/yr from the Mobile Phone Industry?
I wonder how long it will be before an online retailer just refuses to ship to certain states because the tax code is too complicated there to make the sale worth it.

I bet they are hoping not long.
6u3k, its a joke, laugh
Computer Science Careers--do they still exist? (1982)
Isn't that apples to oranges then?

If we used the full time then we'd be comparing a modal form of advertising, the commercial break ad (which takes control of the channel) to a passive concurrent advertising akin to a translucent logo in the corner of a TV show.

I'd wager both those things are worth different quantities.

Now if Facebook used click-through modal advertising, that'd be a different kitten.
Top Lessons I’ve Learned From Starting My Company (So Far)
Tells you how much an idea is worth, and how much is execution.
Worked for me, and seems like a great service. I will be using this in the future.

I'm working a lot with mobile phones, especially S60 Symbian stuff, so I have found Nokia RDA* very useful. I have wondered why something similar would not be available for website testing. Well, here it is!

*)
http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/technical_services/testing/r...
From a bottom-line perspective, I bet Amazon would be better off if they simply dropped all affiliates based in New York and ban future New Yorkers from being affiliates. It then a) saves them the work of complying and b) eliminates the tax for consumers (my personal favorite). I believe fewer people in New York will buy from Amazon if they don't get the tax discount (except for certain books like tech books which are much cheaper than they are in stores here). And how much does Amazon make from New York affiliates anyway?

I'm surprised Spitzer had time to write up this memo given all of his other activities.
I agree they aren't clearly equivalent things. But where they come down in value is also unclear. That is, I wouldn't say out of hand they were orders of magnitude different.

One example. Suppose it turns out that if you are exposed to a certain type of ad for 20 min, it really has an effect. (A bigger and possibly more interactive ad than a translucent logo.) You could get that on FB, but it would be harder to get that on the TV.

Also, there are things like people often get up during the TV, talk during TV commercials, etc. And FB ads could be more interesting than the translucent logo because of programming abilities and more screen resolution. I think a more equivalent comparison might be some form of yet-to-come interactive TV. Hey, maybe we'll get that on FB.
Meet the Echo Boom hackers
FYI (as promised in the post), the second back of the envelope calculation thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=161810
The Myth of 'Superstar Cities'
Area Man Makes It Through Day (Onion, but could have been my day)
Our conversion rates from Facebook were low compared to other methods like AdSense. That might be hurting them as well.
I just converted a client OFF of Everest to something 20 years OLDER and much easier to use. Frankly, I was stunned to see how difficult Everest was to use and how poorly it was designed.

Examples: Even though Everest maintains 160 columns for each Order Header, "Time Entered" is not one of them. So go ahead and try to schedule a call center with no Time Of Day history. To review a single customer's history (and presumably answer their questions while they're on the phone), you have to open up 6 different windows!

My general suggestion: Write a "Test Drive" based explicitly upon your client's business. Have them enter an order and take it through every stage of it's life (reserve or commit inventory, print, pick, ship, confirm, bill, collect, post, etc.) The test drive should also hit every function needed to do this, setup a customer, SKU, GL Chart of Accounts, etc. Then have the appropriate person working for your client do their job on that system. DO NOT touch the mouse or keyboard. DO NOT let the vendor touch the mouse or keyboard.

If they can't enter, ship, and bill an order in a couple of hours with less than one day's instruction, eliminate the system and save yourself a lot of expense and headaches down the road.

Naturally, most sales people will object to this approach and use any tactic to avoid it. Make it clear to them and your client that this must be the plan. The test drive method is infinitely more effective than the old RFP approach. When the poor systems are clearly failing the test drive, the saleman may object with questions like, "Are you going to train your people or not?" which you'll calmly answer, "Not if it takes until 2012." Good luck.
Paul has created exactly the opposite effect he was hoping for, talk about giving Valleywag free PR.

I'm sure Owen and crew are plotting a year's worth of articles just to ruffle Paul's feathers now.

I guess there's a hidden PR lesson here:

If you don't like someone or something, just ignore them. Or better yet, create a system so the group can collectively tune them out.

Corollary:

If you want to get someone attention, create drama.
Have you checked out TinyERP?
You might have a look at Apache OFBiz.
scaling Ron Paul Graham
Alternatively: buy a composition book. They're usually littered with examples.
This is exactly the problem my startup is trying to solve.

We'll have the materials management portion (purchasing, inventory, warehousing) soon- June is the tentative target.

There seems to be a pretty big gap between excel spreadsheets and huge business ERP/MRP/SCM/CRM software. Unfortunately, I think what you describe is right in the center of it.

My first client is transferring off an amalgamation of Intacct Small Business and Salesforce.com. I wouldn't recommend it based on my experience, but it has worked out OK for them for about two years. They're at about 8M/yr in sales right now, and if you're under that, that pair might work OK for you.
Have you considered a bell curve?

- At one end: the posts from new/under-participatory users, where spam and linkbait is more likely.

- At the other: the posts to popular domains.

What I love about HN is that it manages to uncover interesting content from all over, but I am inclined to believe this is due to its current user base. With an algorithm in place that reinforces this behavior, I think we can continue to grow in the right direction.

I believe the first point may already factor in, but does the second?

The solution could be relatively simple: the more "popular" a domain name is, the more votes a submission requires to become "relevant."

Popularity could be determined a number of ways, at least using the number of submissions under the same domain, and perhaps the average number of votes the domain receives. The actual formula would take some tweaking over time.

In theory, a site with multiple submissions, like Valleywag or TechCrunch, would require more universal and active interest to warrant a front-page appearance. Valleywag (the more volatile of the two), would probably fade away, whereas the interesting TechCrunch articles would still come through.
Thanks for trying it out. Do you have java on your machine? Go here http://javatester.org/version.html and then you can email the results to info@crossbrowsertesting.com. We really want it to work for everyone.

Thanks
I think an interesting market for this product would be religiously observant vegetarians. If killing an animal is morally repugnant to you, perhaps eating the protein byproduct of a bacterial culture wouldn't rub you the wrong way?

As prices come down to near hamburger level, I would be willing to change to vat grown to spare cows the feedlot unpleasantness they are exposed to now. Of course this would reduce the worldwide population of cattle, so its a moral judgment whether a smaller number leading better lives is preferable--is welfare measured by the sum or average--I'd lean towards the smaller and better camp to the tune of about 15 cents a pound.
I completely understand the Java comments. For some it just works and for others not so much.

We do have some thoughts about adding the ability to record a session but that will come later we think, mac support is the next technical thing for us.

One other thing that is coming sooner rather than later is a client that we hope will help the "slowness" that you see through the java applet.

thanks again for the comments.
> After all, anything creative requires greater mental effort on behalf of your users to understand and is unlikely to spread as quickly.

You can always consider design as usability: Apple and 37signals are the "big" names we know that follow and lead this mantra. Their products are creative, but intuitive. You could even consider the intuitiveness itself a major creative element; user understanding is at the forefront of their products, so they are profitable, as well.

In the end, it's an issue of quality.
I agree with the first comment by Xichekolas and also Raphael's comment (4th). MSFT is a very very large company. Most news sites paint the picture that everyone is switching to online word editors... the only people who I know use online editors are advanced tech savvy users who hate the load time of MSFT Office. However, I would still always use Office for doing any type of professional document such as essays, letters, resumes, etc.

Just because there are alternatives, doesn't mean the main competitor is doomed. Perhaps in the long term, with Bill Gates no longer at the helm since 2000 (which is when Google came to rise), MSFT might be in trouble in the next 15 years or so.

Cheers

P.S. I used to read Digg many years ago when it was still up and coming but now I cannot bare to read that site. The news posts are always the same predictable things and the commentators are so unintelligent it's almost mind numbing just being there. Great site here, will try to comment every once in a while and weigh in.
Virtually everything is free of cost
Choosing an Extension Language