skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential
What you did wrong? You broke our chain of groupthink! How dare you!!1one!

[insert jealousy for company with no business model]

[troll complete]
I appreciate the effort, honestly I do, but even though that page is entitled "Who is using FB?" it appears to be a list of firebird enhancements and how-to blogs. I'd kinda like to see "company foo.com chooses firebird as its portal's RDBMS," or "company XYZ uses firebird as its embedded database engine," and I can't say that I've ever seen anything like that. Although, in all honesty, I've never tried very hard to find that information. :)
oh I see ;-)
Are footnotes the subroutines of literature?
Tcl isn't that bad. We've got a few web apps running quite happily on AOLServer. In the late 90s/2000 AOLServer was a country mile ahead of everything else.
does it account for someone else having a big photo of your face?
Dilbert.com relaunches with Web 2.0 flavor
Web2 expo: Torture by Information Overload
Matt, here's an example of money in the social graph: What movies have your friends and their friends put in their netflix queue? Friends of friends might have interests similar to yours, and you might end up renting a movie you might not otherwise have rented.

Friend-of-friend recommendations have a tremendous commercial potential, whether Facebook or FriendFeed have realized them or not. My example above is actually from FriendFeed:

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix

Beware of using "If P then the Facebook guys aren't imaginative" as proof of not P. Also, don't use examples of the usefulness of the anti-social graph to negate the usefulness of the social graph.
Ex-Googlers working on stealth social search
Image Processing Troubles.
Twitter, Disqus, and my own implementation with GD tools processes this PNG the same way, anybody know what's going on here?
I tried it out at work this morning, and couldn't get anything to play on either firefox or safari. I can queue up music, and hitting play changes it to a pause button, but the song never starts.
Am I the only human being alive that reads articles like these and has next to no experience programming? I read the whole thing and got the gist of it, but I'm not a programmer. Still, I find rants, tips, and other things of this nature enthralling reads.
Very corny, but it is by Fort Minor which I think has one of the dudes form Linkin Park.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169772
have you seen http://www.tableausoftware.com

I see tableau doesnt support google docs as a datasource, but still, your software seems pretty close to what they offer

the BI (business intelligence) arena have man big players Cognos, MS, SAS .... so watch out

my suggestion is you might wonna consider supporting more datasource other than google docs

most data that ppl seriously work on, is usually stored into a db, of course people do use spreadsheets sometimes as an export format for this data for adhoc querying but nevertheless you do need to support more datasources

so my suggestions would be, watch tableau software demos, add support to more datasource, make it open source and good luck .. there are so many way to go :)
The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
6 Intelligence Myths Exposed
Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower
Firebird: The Name Eternally Re-Used
Okay, okay, I'll bite. Hear me, before the rotten tomatoes hit: I. like. TCL.

In fact, I'm going to go out on a dangerous limb and say that complaining about the [expr] syntax - which seems to be his only concrete complaint in the whole article - reminds me of nothing so much as saying, "But Lisp is horrible - look at all those parentheses!"

You've heard the trope that languages, as they get more advanced, begin to resemble Lisp? PG reckons we've seen every other feature but macros, but I beg to differ. TCL is the only other language I've ever used where I could be coding, spot a common pattern, and just define a first-class construct that lets me go:

with-db-transaction conn {
select_1_or_error $conn "SELECT ..."
...
}

Sure, TCL lacks a heap, and garbage collection, which make it untenable for big programs. But if there's one thing Lisp should have taught you, it's that an initially ugly syntax is often hiding something truly golden.
but seed money isn't geographically constrained. even if i live in pittsburgh, i can apply and get yc funding or any other kind of seed funding and bring it back to pittsburgh. therefore, any government funding program still has nation-wide competition.
The funny thing is that with 20% investments come board seats (usually). With board seats come influence. Influence affects outcome.

It is completely possible that had any of these VCs actually put money into these missed investments, that the "investments" could have taken an entirely different (where different == bad) path.

The end outcome of a startup is often the result of several key variables. Change any one variable, and so changes the outcome.
BBC Launches Social Media Music Chart, rivals Songkick's Battle
Tcl have uniform syntax

Tcl have a small number of basic concept that you can learn in a very small amount of time

Tcl allow you to easily create new commands that look just like built-in commands

Tcl have uniform syntax, yes again. I love this about Tcl.
they are good citizens too - big up for the YC News meetup last Friday :-)
An NBA Fun Fact About the Shot Clock Software
Defense wraps up closing argument in Hans Reiser trial
facebook has become a useless spam machine. Doesn't work for me anymore.
Are Google's Webmaster Tools Designed to Help Prevent Startup Search Engines?
Google to invest $105,000 in Drupal
Geez, I was at the same event and didn't meet any of these people.

Maybe I have no powers of observation whatsoever. OTOH, maybe OP should spend more time noticing what's important than what's meaningless.

Honestly, this was one of the best lineups of speakers ever. In any forum. For free. If OP prefers to cruise the rest of us, maybe he should just hit the bar scene and give up his seat to someone who couldn't get in and really cared.

Spooged?
Versatility Made Twitter What It Is Today
I often decry how so much technology hasn't really added much value and miss the good old simple days.

This is a big exception. I can't wait until our roads are filled with these. It seems like the electric car is taking forever; I guess those with a lot to lose are fighting it every step of the way.
is ruby better than php?
It would be interesting to see results over a broad range of subjects. The study seems to be limited to politics, which does not necessarily translate to other topics. Try with medicine, perhaps?
Wha? You are advertising your proxy here? This is spam.
Among the worst craigslist jobs
We had Interbase (which is Firedbirds predecessor) as our customer information and warehouse system. It's incredibly robust and (at least on Linux) quite fast. We chose it because it already supported triggers when Mysql did not, allowing us to put the complete business logic into the db rather than into desktop applications. Today I'd prefer Mysql (now that it also supports triggers) because it's faster, you get better support and it's default for most frameworks.
I think for a smaller shop / startup the easiest way to go would be to have users enter their own google adsense client number and use that a certain portion of the time.

By making them sign up for Google you get G to do the footwork of verifying they are eligible, and managing payments...etc
Agree. Women in their 20s have guys in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s courting them. When women turn 30 everything changes and suddenly their possibilities shrink, partly because guys in their 30s are chasing younger girls. It is a big shock because suddenly they are not the last coke in the fridge.
Is this true?

"You need 100–200 MB of dedicated RAM to host even a low-traffic Rails application"
Web Startups: The London Scene
Be careful!

That might lead you down the path of <gasp> learning to program, or worse liking programming, or even worse yet changing jobs so that you program full-time.

Pretty much the path I took. Though, seems to be working out, particularly with some startup plans slowly taking shape.
Economic deja vu hitting tech startups
Luck is when opportunity meets preparation
Ask YC: What to do when the competition surfaces?
I think everybody who's been through the startup game knows this point: You've been quietly working on something you think is novel for months, planning to take over the world any day now. And then there's the painful moment where you realize there are others doing something similar.

We just hit that. There are two groups, both with unlaunched products. They've got bigger teams. They've got more money.

What do you do? We were tentatively planning on a public beta for the first useful application about a week out. Neither of their groups has that. Should we focus on differentiation or try to build momentum for a head-on collision?

We've been keeping quiet about what we're doing because we're not ready to launch yet, but they've just started breaking radio silence. Should we care? Should we start making noise?

Looking forward to your answers.
Google offers Search, Feed, and Translation APIs to Non Ajax Usage
It's a Rolodex for people under 27. Stores contact info, likes, dislikes, etc. of everyone we know, and lets us keep in contact with them so the connections are reasonably fresh when we need them.
Has anyone actually set up a charity for arming genocide victims? It could obviously backfire in a really nasty way -- maybe the difference isn't that Tribe A is more evil than Tribe B, but that Tribe A is better-armed.

I haven't seen anyone suggest arming at-risk ethnic groups outside of Cryptonomicon: (http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/stephenson-neal-crypton... , search for 'HEAP'; there's a description somewhere in there).
The article doesn't contain about what you can learn from them. I don't know if I like the name calling.
What do you mean? There's the Pontiac car. And Mozilla temporarily used the name for the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox project but changed because the database was already using the name.
Dare to do it,
its this time on your blog life when you just wonder what to post,or blog about.
Don't be intimated by potential competitors--that's exactly what they want. Wait until you think what they are doing is going to actually impact your company before reacting. Continue as planned.

Additionally, the competition might not be all that bad for you. They may help flesh out the market for you. You might be able to ride on their press and their advertising dollars. You might get ideas from their products.

Finally, pretty much all good ideas will attract competition. That is the nature of a free market. So it was going to happen sooner or later. The good news is that there is usually room for multiple competitors in a market. And in the low-cost startup world, I haven’t seen any great evidence that bigger teams and bigger money win out on average after you control for the # of startups in each category.
I always like the calculus on Aristotle's virtue ethics...
First impression is that it looks like a MFA page also I have no idea what the site does which makes it hard for me to want to sign up. Maybe put up a demo or something and drop the ads from the landing page?
Here's one that was successful, though not in the traditional sense: Damien Katz applied to YC with his Couch DB idea and got rejected (http://damienkatz.net/2006/11/how_not_to_pitc.html), but now he works for IBM and gets to do CouchDB full-time (http://damienkatz.net/2008/01/new_gig.html).
There're only two questions that are important for trying to put a price on Facebook:

1) How much are Facebook users worth to advertisers (brand and/or CPC) on average and in aggregate?

2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties?

Matt's answer to both, based on his recent two articles, is "right now, not much relative to the internet heavyweights." That actually isn't controversial at all.

There's a lot of optimism about Facebook's future, however, that allows people to argue against Matt based on the "just wait until you see what they come up with" line of reasoning.

I'd be interested in hearing from both sides about this future Facebook. As in, what facts, specifically, might change about the world that would make Facebook worth $15 billion, and how likely is it that those changes will come about?
Good question - I'm encountering something similar with what I'm doing.

The way I see is as a validation of my concepts and a way to add features/improve our offering.

It may also give you some ideas on how to differentiate yourself.
New Onion headline? "Area man constantly bringing up how overhyped Facebook is"
A proper answer would take a whole book :)
You need to find _your_ central idea about what you are best at, what you value, and what you care about.
Focus on that. Not! the competition.
The competition is largely not relevant, early on. Do what you do best. Don't react to them. Do your own thing!
Let the competition find the potholes in the road. You may then avoid the problems that they were bogged down solving.
If you have solved the right problems, your value will be apparent. If not, adjust, and repeat :)
Don't let the competition define you!
CNN website. What’s so good about it?
I doubt that Citi uses AWS for anything... their auditing requirements are extremely strict about using any external services. When I was there (CitiMortgage, 2006) all of the heavy lifting was done on Big Iron IBM hardware.
If you're going to put your email address at the bottom of the page, there should be something more than a parking page at the domain. The first thing I always do with a new email address is check out the domain in my browser. I expect to find a site about you, your company, or your project.
The rumour mill is a good thing - if possible, it's nice to get a feel for what they're doing, and specifically what they're doing differently. Not, I note, for check-box copying, but to see how your products are going to stack up, and see if you're lacking big-time in one harea.

For my tuppence (although I haven't been in this position yet), launch on time, and make noise. Even if they're making noises, a genuine usable product will speak louder. And even if they launch in turn soon afterwards, as the established service you could well ride the PR coat-tails. Of course, the longer you're established before they launch, the more likely you are to be cited as their main competition when they do launch.

Kiko described this effect wrt Google Calendar here (which is a different take on the story than some I've heard):
http://www.height1percent.com/articles/2006/08/18/actual-les...
Elastic IPs and persistent data storage (with snapshots and replication!) eliminated my last reservations about using AWS in a startup setting.
Have you worked with the ACS (ArsDigita Community System), and/or with AOLserver? Or have you and the ACS simply converged on the obvious idiom?

ACS code looked a lot like what you just typed. In the hands of a bunch of Lisp programmers from MIT, Tcl could really be made to sing. It had, at best, the same relationship to Lisp that PHP has to Perl... but IMHO it was a much better Web programming language than PHP, if only because the designers were a bit more careful to avoid inane inconsistencies.
I'd say launch as soon as you can. Post your product here, digg, etc., and try to get it blogged, and hopefully TechCrunched. Watch Mike Arrington's video at startup school on tips to get your site blogged. Have someone leak a twitter message to Mike about your startup. Good marketing can be done effectively without any money.

With competition on the horizon, launching something less than perfect might be in your best interest, because you'll not only get the first jab at the market, you'll have the ability to iterate based on user feedback so that your product will be more tuned towards users' actual needs by the time your competitors start trying to gain momentum. Differentiation will come as you begin to mold to your users. It's a matter of agility.
There are two groups, both with unlaunched products. They've got bigger teams.

Sometimes bigger also means much slower.

We were tentatively planning on a public beta for the first useful application about a week out.

Go for it -- your key advantage is that you're faster and more adaptable than the competition, so get your work out in front of users and start adapting based on the feedback you get.

We've been keeping quiet about what we're doing because we're not ready to launch yet, but they've just started breaking radio silence. Should we care? Should we start making noise?

You'll probably get differing opinions here; but personally I've never been very interested in vapour. Don't talk up a product which doesn't exist; instead, put a product in front of users, and let THEM start talking about it.
BBC: Dull jobs really do numb the mind
I am so making a rebranded google search engine when I get home.
It's faster than PHP too, or it was several years ago. Rivet blew PHP out of the water in my benchmarks.
While it was indeed a "fact" I have to call into question the "fun".
" Damien Katz applied to YC with his Couch DB idea and got rejected (http://damienkatz.net/2006/11/how_not_to_pitc.html), "

His blog entry on the YC rejection is dated 11th January 2006. The one on the IBM job is dated 1st january 2008.

So Damien essentially took the rejection in his stride, didn't bother whining, and kept on hacking.

Very impressive.
I'd just start setting up meetings with major online retailers. Especially ones with offline components.
Wow, this was terrible. First off, he meant "9 Stereotypes I put people into at Startup School." Second, he didn't include anything that you can learn from them. If he was too good for the event, he shouldn't have gone. Space was at a premium and someone else could have benefitted from being there in his place.
http://hexayurt.com is our approach - open source design too (well, patentless-and-published, rather than "in a patent pool" so technically it's public domain.)

The key is thermal rejection. Sandbags absorb the energy slowly, so it's thermal buffering. Hexayurts have a shiny outside, so they just reflect the heat off into the ground.

Thermal performance is surprisingly good. We're talking to the Netherlands Red Cross about field testing right now (I just came back from a meeting today.)

The other thing we do is infrastructure, and you can read more about that here:

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/TIDES%20-%20Hexayurt%20Infras...
Actually, that was a custom app built on the tcl httpd (whose procs-as-paths structure was a revelation to me at the time). I also did some fun things like a Java-style try/catch/finally system, which was useful when playing with xmlrpc. (Plus, the rest of that distributed system is in Java, so it felt like a nice idiom).

I gently dispute your "bunch of Lisp programmers from MIT" characterisation - but only gently, because I know what you mean. TCL can give you The Macro Enlightenment (aka, "Oh, that's what 'code is data' means") before ever seeing Lisp - after which, of course, Lisp macros feel conceptually familiar - but the latter is definitely n times more powerful.
I would say launch NOW.

I was in a similar situation, I was just plugging away at a site and about 1-2 months before I planned on launching a competitor (with an inferior service) launched. I decided to work as hard as possible and launch about 2 weeks after that.

What a mistake, the competitor always has an inferior site, but I never caught up. I would have been much better off had I just launched and not tried to make things perfect. The users were perfectly content with the competition.

My advice would be to launch first if you can and get the users to market for you.
Ach, it seems like the obvious answer is that the browser autofills your OpenID url and, if the site is set up all Ajax-like, it then goes off and logs you in on arrival.

Very simple. As transparent as Basic Authentication with HTACCESS in fact!

(oh yeah, this is progress! progress I tell you!)
Advice from Coudal on how to transition from client work to products
It's hard to say precisely, because there are a lot of startups that are currently angel funded but will go on to do a series A with VCs. Maybe a quarter to a third eventually will.
Look at what problems they claim to solve, how and why. Try to assess whether they are conceptually and technically better than you.
They have more money than you, what I consider an advantage over a bigger team in terms of marketing (i.e. grow fast). So they will create the market. But now it depends:

When their business model and techniques are inferior to yours, customers won't get stuck to them. You will win them later. So be silent and have no fear.

When their model and techniques are better than yours, customers will stuck to them and you won't get them switch over to you. So make noise and let potential customers know they should wait for a maybe better alternative (that is you).
Haha, well you met me and I am definitely number seven.

But I am ok with being number seven at the moment. I'm in no hurry to be some '1337 1n51d3r' like this Larry Chiang guy. I mean, he spends so much time stereotyping other people he doesn't even have time for grammar, or, you know, forming a readable English sentence.

But numbered lists work as blog posts. Give the guy a break: he was just using a formulaic way to say nothing... memorably. I'm sure he had to hurry up and publish so he could go sign his term sheet from Sequoia.
Another YC, partnered with Mozilla to support the open web
This isn't necessarily a bad thing: your novel idea just increased its potential for market acceptance.

From here, speed is of the essence. Focus your intent and make sure to delight your customers.
I don't know of any offhand, but I bet there are some.
The logic behind this, "acquire a piece of knowledge, then don't forget it" is similar to the description one of my university professors gave for learning how to fly: "fall over and don't hit the ground."

I suspect that physics may remain a limiting factor for the professor's suggestion, but SuperNote is an intriguing application. I believe the Pimsleur language courses use a similar method of 'staggered reminding' to encourage your retention of knowledge.
I am reminded of the poem by Matsuo Bashou -

古人の跡を求めず、

古人の求めたるの所を求めよ。

kojin no ato wo motomezu,

kojin no motometaru no tokoro wo motome yo

Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise;

seek what they sought.

(aside: argh! typsetting poetry with the HN markup facilities available is frustrating.)
How well does this scale to big data sets (like millions of rows)? My impression was that companies who get the most value out of this type of product are very large, and deal with lots of transactions.
Dilbert Creator Outsources His Work - To His Readers
No it's not true at all
Ask YC: Your Opinion on this startup
This is a friend's startup. Just wondering what do you people think of this.
From their website,
Fuse on a topic contains a collection of bookmarks formed by groups of people interested in that topic. These bookmarks are maintained across different areas of the topic, which form the sections of the fuse. In addition, these bookmarks are also being rated to promote quality bookmarks (or links). HttpFuse contains collection of fuses on a variety of subjects.
Tcl had a bunch of things going for it that made it an excellent embedding language: a lightweight runtime, simple, consistent semantics, and (for the time) an excellent C API.