skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's actually a valid argument. I disagree (I will concede that they are extremely nice looking products, but in many other ways they are nearly as pitiable as Microsoft products), but it is certainly a valid position to take. And, of course, no one begrudges Apple making money (well, I don't anyway), I just don't think they are a benevolent factor in driving down the cost of computing, which was the original direction of this thread about ultra low cost computing.

Apple have as much motivation for systems to stay expensive as Microsoft does. The lower prices go, the larger the premium becomes for their products vs. one running an Open Source operating system. There certainly are companies pushing the price of computing downward, but Apple is not among them. Apple does, however, occupy a vital role in keeping Microsoft busy on the "expensive but pretty" front, while Asus and others chip away at the low end of the market, eating MS from the bottom...the very same way MS and the PC market ate the mini-computer and mainframe market from the bottom and the way MySQL is eating Oracle's market from the bottom. (I'm picturing Daniel Day Lewis with a really long straw at this point, though I don't know that that is an entirely apt analogy.)
Comeon, seriously? Let's stop with the blatant sockpuppetry. If you want to promote your own site, that's great, just be upfront about it - this approach is lame.

The fact that your account, and the accounts of the three other raving endorsements were created all within the last hour is just a bit suspicious.
I represent PingMyCompany.com and yes I did asked/pushed everyone I know to vote for this, so I wont be surprised if these accounts were just created.

But to be honest I didnt pushed to write good reviews :-) they just did it in good faith.. i guess.
here's something related: http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-mandatory-i...

(re: indentation-sensitive languages for teaching)
As I represent PingMyCompany.com so I will be honest.

All your concerns are true but the perspective of this site was to get all the possible views without the fear of finding out who did it.

Its just a fun site we put up in 2 days so we plan to make it more reliable if we get good response.

I will appreciate your suggestions if it can improve the sites credibility.
I've had a couple trackballs throughout the years and they just give me finger strain to control accurately (thanks, tremors).

What I would dig a lot is some sort of multitouch touchpad like the one on my laptop, except bigger. I have a 6x11 Wacom tablet that's great but it's not the same.

Of course, I would love a multitouch display, but those are far off into the future.
Guess what this isn't...
Their idea of a lightweight computer starts at $1800.

Well, no. Apple's idea of a cheap, lightweight computer costs $300 to $500, fits in your pocket, and (optionally) doubles as a cellphone.

(If you don't agree with this interpretation of Apple's product line, wait a couple months after the official third-party iPhone apps arrive and consider it again...)

You can't type on the iPhone very quickly, of course. It won't run emacs or vi very well. It probably won't run a web development stack, or a decent Java compiler. So if what you really want is something like an EEE you should buy an EEE. There's no reason why Apple's idea of a cheap, lightweight computer should match yours...

Whether or not the iPhone is in the EEE's market segment depends on what you think that segment is. I'd say that it's squarely in the "super-light super-cheap portable box for checking mail and web" segment. If you're talking about the "light, cheap portable box for fixing your website via SSH from a coffeehouse in the Florida Keys" segment, it's a lot less clear.
Yes, you can put Disqus comments on anything that's for public consumption and has a permalink.

If you enable Disqus comments on OurDoings, any photo you deem worthy of a caption will get its own comment thread.
Very helpful thanks :-)
I've found that since moving to an agile approach with weekly/fortnightly deliverables, my estimates have become better and clients expectations are managed nicely. Clients can constantly see progress and can easily see how my time is going to be spent week-by-week. If new features are requested or problems hit, it's easy to communicate how that's going to effect the current timings and next deliverable.
None of those sites create buzz.

Make your site worth talking about and you don't have to spend any money (at first).

Read "Made to Stick" (great book on the subject of sticky ideas).
Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first): Google, Apple, Craigslist, Ebay, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube... I could probably think of more, but you get the jist.

SEO is important to a lot of businesses (especially ecommerce and UGC plays), but not worth early focus for a lot of others.
This article is a very transparent shill for Powerset. The company is clearly using an influential blogger to say they want to be bought, because it would look desperate if they did so themselves. They must not see any light at the end of the tunnel, because there is none.
I reallly, really wish that were feasible and that simple. But it's not.

Where I live (quiet little residential nook in Los Angeles), I have the choice of AT&T DSL maxing out at 1500kbps/256? for like $50/month, Time Warner cable 10mbit/1mbit for $45/month and..well...speakeasy offers DSL at speeds close to what TWC offers for um, something like $180/month. And given all the stuff I do, dialup is not really feasible. I could go with a wireless provider, but they're not that different from AT&T or TWC.

$45. $180. That is not "a little bit more". That difference of $135 is enough to buy groceries for a week for the three of us living together here. Sure we could suck it up and get ripped off by that much more for another ISPs services, but $135 is also money for gas, fun dinners, nights out, just short of a share of Apple, some games... $135 a month over one year ends up being enough to buy a nice little MacBook Air..or upgrading the hardware I have now...you get the idea.

As much as I'd like to tell TWC to suck it, like I did with AT&T when my DSL disconnected for the hundredth time in the past year and I switched to TWC for the savings and speeds, I can't because nobody else offers speeds like it at a more reasonable price. Hell, I am still complaining about only getting 10/1 for $45/month. But I should consider myself lucky, because some of my friends don't even have a choice and are stuck with one ISP that'll provide service in their area.

So I wish people would stop with the whole "switch to another ISP" argument, because everyone wants to but they can't. In the US they are ALL just as bad as each other, and the only ones that aren't are either unavailable or extremely expensive.
Running on low battery
Thanks. I guess the key point is to manage clients expectations. Any reference about tools/formats that you use in reporting your progress?
Precisely. And he'll teach you how to be one! It all works out.
Spend nothing, at first.

The first thing you need to do is create an "engine". Something where you can reliably introduce a user to it, and have that user ultimately invite at least 1 other user (on average). In modern hype-infused parlance, this is a "viral loop" (with a viral co-efficient of more than 1). But really, it's as old as the Internet.

You can achieve this in one of 3 ways:

1) Be surprising, controversial, funny, or useful. People always tell their peers about fabulous products.

2) Get scientific about viral marketing. Widgets, facebook apps, etc. This is hard for most businesses (but for others-- it's laughably easy... I know a guy who is serving up hundreds of millions of widget views on a product that essentially didn't evolve past the first 20-30 man hours of work).

3) Get smart about SEO (if your biz is a content play). This is really just a different flavor of viral marketing. Yelp, Digg, and other UGC sites have a great viral loop. Visitors come. Some create content. Content gets indexed. Indexing generates google traffic for new page, which brings in users. Rinse, repeat. Wait 2 years and you have a vast pile of indexed content.

If you can't do these, then you're stuck buying attention with time or money-- which scales VERY poorly unless you have a great opportunity for revenue/profit. If you can pull these off, then marketing dollars/time is just adding gasoline to a healthy little fire.
I think you're committing a sort of broken-window fallacy. You're seeing what is there, and thinking it's alright. I'm seeing what's not there, and thinking it could be so much better.
The "reset" you mention is not the kind of reset this article talks about. This article talks about ignoring RST packets (which are used by some ISPs to selectively terminate TCP connections). You can't really ignore the fact that your ISP disconnects your DSL line every 24 hours.
It's funny, because saying "Here's a PDF link" in response to a Scribd document is to me almost like saying "here's a WMV version" to a YouTube page.

// in fact, it's almost exactly like that, since the latter (Scribd/YouTube) is just a presentation layer for the former (PDF/WMV)

EDIT: Could the person who downmodded me please explain? I'll delete my comment afterward. Thank you.

EDIT2: After reading the two posts below, I now redact everything in this comment. :) I didn't say what I meant. I agree, I have no problems with PDFs either. However, I don't have a problem with WMVs either, since they open flawlessly in VLC. My point was that it's funny because I've gotten used to the worldview of "Oh noooo, PDF!" (and similarly, "oh noooo, WMV!"), and now it's kind of funny to see the opposite happening ("here's a PDF!" instead of screams of anguish).

Also, Paul, this is why I add a comment edit requesting clarification each time I get downmodded to 0 without a reply (and suggest my peers do likewise). Not because I disagree or find it questionable (I don't), I would simply like more feedback than that and hope it instills that habit into people reading my edit and the person who modded me down, since feedback is what makes Hacker News.
This might offer consumers a cheaper alternative to buying Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate and 'downgrading' to XP for new licenses of XP. That way, you get a cheap, Linux-ready laptop along with your OS license.
The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon
ah you're right, it's love
There's software called Palo Alto Business Plan Pro, available for $99 I think or illegally. It will do all the numerical calculations involved in a business plan. You can use it to crank out a bullshit business plan in an hour.
Microsoft To Set Up Own Internet Search Business
Pre-release iPhone firmware 2.0 confirms 3G iPhone is coming soon
If you can't run the software of your choice, it's not a computer, it's an appliance.
namecheap is great.
OK, thanks.

To make it constructive can you provide a brief summary of what you think is missing?
Good comment. We should add it to O'Reilly's list
I didn't downmod you (nor can I, heh), but...

PDFs don't bother me at all. Years ago I would occasionally accidentally click on one and be filled with dread and loathing as the Adobe Reader plugin slugged to life, but that was a long time ago. I use Safari's PDF reader now, which does what and (more importantly) behaves like I expect it to.

Scribd documents don't behave like I expect them to. Pressing down arrow scrolls further than I expect it to, mousescroll is cadenced differently (and jumps around), and I can't press space to page down.

Scribd is definitely a solution to some problems, but—for me—reading PDFs is not one of them.
All this hypothetical talk is very nice, but there actually is a wowbot that Blizzard has been unable to effectively use countermeasures against, called MMOGlider. They've decided to simply sue after repeated failure to solve it technically.
I have a similar problem. A lot of the time I merely find myself developing infrastructure instead of developing features. Part of the problem is writing in PHP without a framework (or, rather, a semblance of my own); a more significant part, I believe, is that I just really, really like building architecture. In that way, I'm probably being an architecture astronaut.

The key, as you've said already, is managing client expectations. At some point you must have given a timeline, given a prediction for how long you thought something would take you. At some point you must also have deviated from that timeline/prediction; mine, as far as I've identified it to, is being an architecture astronaut. Hence, the first step, I think, is to narrow the problem down to those deviations, and question why you're deviating so. The deviations may even be something useful or necessary. Rather, figure out what is breaking, then step back and look at the whole picture to see what needs to change.

Agile might be the answer here. At the very least, there are several very good ideas you can steal from agile to build your own approach to engineering.
Drobo is great. I have one sitting next to me with 4 x 1TB drives in it and it works exactly as advertised.
Probably the latter. Having Firebug IN the IDE would be invaluable and (r)evolutionary. A lot of the times I 'develop' by writing CSS in Firebug, then copy-and-paste the result into the actual CSS file.

Hm. That means I want a WYSIWYG, actually. Time to fork Firebug?
Thank you! Scribd is quite annoying for viewing PDFs with the non-native behavior, the flash plugin which I block by default, and the inability to save easily for future reference.

I hope people directly link PDFs in the future. Thanks.
> EDIT: Could the person who downmodded me please explain?

I upmodded you to balance it out, but it seems lately that some people are using downvoting to mean "I disagree", regardless of the quality of the comment. It seems that most sites with up/downvoting eventually turn into popularity contests for opinions, but I've always hoped news.yc could do better than that.

That said, I do disagree with your comment :). While I do like the Scribd reader, the problem of viewing PDF documents has been solved by a number of third party viewers which do not suck as much as Adobe's (as others have mentioned).
Cash-Burning Facebook Borrows $100mm...Because It Couldn't Sell Stock?
you know, what good will this do if new users don't see this when coming to the site?
Yeah that would be great. I haven't found a CSS editor I really like.
> I hope people directly link PDFs in the future. Thanks.

FYI, at one point hacker news would change PDF links to Scribd links automatically. There was a poll about it a while back.
One part of Agile that may help here is continual incremental delivery.

If you can deliver new functionality to your client each week, a little each time, then they should be happy to see progress, and each week you could re-evaluate how many weeks there are to go?

Just a thought.
Began, the phone wars have.

RIM: $150m VC fund

Apple: $100m VC fund

Google: $10m in give-away prizes

Microsoft: ???

Nokia: ???
know anything about digestors?
Apple will always limit the potential of the iPhone because of it's ability to cannibalize MBP and MBA sales.

True competition will come from a company with no such issue to worry about.
Being able to code fast one-offs to solve problems or automate tasks is one of the strongest reasons to get into programming in the first place. This is hugely useful in engineering for example, not just in minimum wage grunt jobs. Scheme/Lisp facilitate this VERY poorly.

Python is maps far better to how problems are commonly presented, very rarely has gotchas that would make you drag out some advanced programming construct, and has batteries included at a level which scheme/lisp may NEVER catch up with:)

All of the world is not calculus! Spend all your time playing in that area and you won't become a very well rounded or capable programmer/engineer.
I find this comment ridiculous. I don't think anyone, including Apple is worrying about the iPhone cannibalizing Laptop sales. A Laptop and Cell Phone (even the iPhone) are complementary. People will buy both, not one or the other.

The iPhone is capable of doing quick mobile browsing while you are standing in line or at a bar, but there's no way it replaces anyones laptop in its entirety.

arn
"Developers, Developers, Developers..."

It reminds me that we as developers are the king makers in the platform wars. Developers that make killer apps make the platform the standard which in turn makes the platform makers very, very rich.

The best quote of Startup School for me was from Sam Altman (paraphrased): "The VC's know that there's nothing quite so powerful in Silicon Valley as a developer who knows how to make a great product."

I'd add that the platform makers know that, too.
It seems that the only reason they would consider selling is that they are not confident enough in their product. If I felt that I was going to revolutionize search, I wouldn't sell out.

At the same time I am not in this situation so this may just be my idealism talking.
Usually, but that is because I have learnt to...

a). add a little extra time to projects to buffer myself.

b). not take on projects I cannot do (beyond my skillset).

c). interact with clients regularly with updates so they are in the loop, know what is going on, and constantly happy.
Blackberry has been around for ever, and development around their devices has been meh.... at best. I actually developed an app on their eariler 3.5 os version, and it was a nightmare. Network connections in some companies have to go thru this thing called Bes (blackberry exchage server), which can bllock anything, even your app, let's not go thru the "split pipe" problems, which the only way to fix them was for a user to wipeout all the date in their device.

Definelty not a user friendly experience.

I had to add:
All these incentive funds exist for the simple reason: Mobile development is totally broken, and not profitable to startups. So many hooplas,workarounds, and redtape from the carriers.
I didn't downmod you either, but I'll explain why I posted the link.

In my opinion the difference is that PDF is the lesser of two evils when it comes to PDF vs. Flash, whereas Flash is the lesser of two evils when it comes to Flash vs. WMV.

You haven't considered the difference in the formats. A key advantage of YouTube over WMV is that it loads instantly, makes streaming-while-it-downloads simple and transcodes into a quick-to-load low-bitrate version, which just completely doesn't apply to PDF - viewing PDFs using Scribd actually makes things slower and more clumsy /not/ faster or more accessible from my end. PDF is also a open format, a de facto standard and cross-platform compared to multiple codecs for video which can make life harder than necessary for viewers. Another key difference is that Scribd is used by the site as an unwanted front-end to content readily available elsewhere - compare this to YouTube which is often the exclusive host of their content and so there isn't a choice.

FWIW, when an alternate format is available for a YouTube link I often use them too as it makes life easier for managing windows or deciding to keep on the desktop knowing I won't need a net connection or have to buffer later. A recent example was John Resig's talk on the future of jQuery which was available as a download on Vimeo.
The Blackberry is losing customers quickly to the iPhone I think. Apple's more enterprisey plans with the iPhone, like the Exchange integration, must scare them a lot.

Getting a small chunk from a 150 million fund is nice. But it does not change the fact that developing for the Blackberry is so much less fun than developing for the iPhone :-)
If what you used was for bug tracking it would be clearquest, rational clearquest. A program only the darkest souls of the empire would embrace.

I was held at gunpoint (exaggeration) and had to administer it. Note, this was a 7 year old version of clearquest at the time.

JIRA is clunky but it is effective. I ought not say more as it would be impolite.

I've had to formally evaluate bug tracking and issue tracking systems. They all suck to one degree or another as each has a fatal flaw, in my honest opinion. I probably ought to write a blog entry on the trackers I evaluated and the level of spam that the commercial versions send out to evaluators.
I agree, and that's not what I meant by my comment. I agree it was poorly worded. Read my second edit. Thanks for the reply!
They should, but that isn't a solution to the problem in hand, as getting to the file I'd have to load the URL, click to load Flash, wait for Scribd to load, hope Flash on Linux doesn't crash, then click on the save button, then download it again.
use that like an outline then make your slidedeck:

Company Purpose

* Define the company/business in a single declarative sentence.

Problem

* Describe the pain of the customer (or the customer’s customer).
* Outline how the customer addresses the issue today.

Solution

* Demonstrate your company’s value proposition to make the customer’s life better.
* Show where your product physically sits.
* Provide use cases.

Why Now

* Set-up the historical evolution of your category.
* Define recent trends that make your solution possible.

Market Size

* Identify/profile the customer you cater to.
* Calculate the TAM (top down), SAM (bottoms up) and SOM.

Competition

* List competitors
* List competitive advantages

Product

* Product line-up (form factor, functionality, features, architecture, intellectual property).
* Development roadmap.

Business Model

* Revenue model
* Pricing
* Average account size and/or lifetime value
* Sales & distribution model
* Customer/pipeline list

Team

* Founders & Management
* Board of Directors/Board of Advisors

Financials

* P&L
* Balance sheet
* Cash flow
* Cap table
* The deal
Facebook is unique because, unlike other 'giant' silicon valley startups, they don't really offer anything new in terms of revenue. They are a sophisticated billboard. Google, on the other hand, built something new - targeting ads by keyword/content analysis.

Here is a thought experiment: If all of facebook's users came to your website tomorrow, chances are you could monetize them just as well as facebook. However, if you took all of google's users, you would not do as well because you lack their technology.

Facebook is like any other site on the net, just with more pageviews.
How I used 2 YC companies to quickly raise money and awareness for a recent injustice
godaddy (blindsided with fees) did the same thing to me.
I've started using namecheap, as it was a few cents cheaper and the interface is an order of magnitude cleaner.
I have to agree... Safari + Preview provides for a much better user experience than any other combo. Adobe Acrobat/Reader is what most of the Win people have to suffer trough understandably might appreciate alternatives. I just don't think Flash-bases stuff is much better (even though Scribd has done a great job and pushed the tech to its max).