skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not at all. I've often thought of how irksome it must be to learn English to a very high level and have one's mistakes judged by unilingual native speakers. My greatest envy of Europeans is how much easier it is to acquire languages over there... almost like it's in the water. Whereas here (I'm in Canada, US even more so) it's like pulling teeth. I've studied a few languages, some of them damn hard, and pretty much every European I meet speaks English 50x better.
I only clicked on this thread to see if was satire that picked the product using a random web 2.0 buzzword generator script.

I was wrong and that is sad.
Why should a product want to be "the next VisiCalc"?
Cool, but it stops every 15 seconds for me, making the music unlistenable (the "Popular" category is already 95% unlistenable due to the horror that is average taste in music...but searching turns up all sorts of good stuff). Since the major labels aren't historically friendly to this kind of thing, I suspect it won't last long even if they try to make it profitable for the labels. Indie labels are far more open-minded.
e.g. http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/account_locatio...
I'd just like to point out that Ian Hogarth has the face of a man.
"is it legal"

Good question. Hope someone can answer that here, for those of us who care about that sort of thing.

This looks like the best thing I've seen to replace napster. Good job!
Do you have a specific criticism of the idea?
Why is everyone so concerned about people not using RDBMSs? Database management systems are not magic, they are just a query parser on top of some smart data structures. They are a generic solution, and might not be suitable for every situation, and that's why people are examining other data storage and retrieval methods.

It's kind of odd, but I've noticed that databases are a touchier subject than most things in the computer world. If someone says they're not using a RDBMS, there is always someone who immediately jumps down their throat as though SQL is God's Gift To The World.

Anyway, RDBMS aren't going to go away, so if you like them, use them. Some of us are willing to experiment with other solutions, however :)
Pickup-chicks stuff I have to give very mixed reviews. Yes walking up and introducing yourself to people will make you better at talking to them. That much is certainly undeniable. But the online communities associated with such things have some significant downsides.

I hate to do this but I'm going to advocate acting classes. The reason I hate to do it is there's always somebody in an improv class who's obviously just there to become more spontaneous. If you study acting because you have a genuine interest in doing it, people who are there to become more spontaneous, or better at public speaking, or whatever, are just annoying as hell. Acting classes do make you socially adept but PLEASE avoid serious professional acting classes in favor of weekend workshops at community colleges. Also if you are "that guy" and you're taking acting classes without any real interest in acting please understand that the serious actors want you to die.

I think the best option suggested here is user groups and presentations in front of other geeks. Not because talking to geeks is going to expose you to incredible social skills - far from it - but because sincere interest is a much healthier motivator for any type of social activity than the desire to be social for its own sake.
I wasn't referring to Microsoft's ability to compete with quality. No sane person would argue that.

But I can think of 34 billion reasons why I wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs. And those are 2008 Benjamins.
Exactly - two parties with different goals that can be brought together using technology.

You can make active noise cancellation software using speakers, microphones and smart software that will solve their problems.
Sounds cool. let me know when you launch I'd like to take a look.
Be sure to donate to Obama.

Also, go to programmer meetups. It will be many people that you can empathize with. You'll have a lot in common with the crowd an it is a good way to start.
That's too bad. You do have a knack for it, which is a great thing for this site.
I thought it wasn't all just data. Don't some cell networks still have circuit-switched voice and packet-switched data?
Doesn't work on my mac + firefox. "Play song" doesn't work.

Barring that, I am impressed with the clean UI, very iPhone-esque.
It's also a different culture. No one could possibly claim that vim or emacs aren't "quality" software. UNIX/Linux users also place value on quality, but the form of value is just different--historically the value you pay for something like vim or emacs is you send patches, you add syntax support for your favorite new language, you file coherent bug reports, etc. It's not in dollars, but it has a price. So, there's this somewhat smug notion that Mac users are arbiters of quality and taste and the only honest computer users in existence...but there are different means of valuing software than money.

And, saying that Windows users are universally pirates is simply disingenuous. Paint Shop Pro made millions as a small software development shop, and then sold to Corel for millions and became part of a big development shop. This wouldn't have been possible if Windows users never paid for software from small shops. In fact, I suspect one could find more Windows-based small development shops making a good living than similar Mac-based shops just based on the size of the respective markets. (I'd never want to do it...but it's a viable model.)

I'm just saying, "don't be a smug Mac weenie". Many people are making a good living building and selling software on many different platforms.
I dunno. I think ideals exist, and that's what altruism is based on, at least the genuine kind. And I do think genuine altruism exists. However, I also agree that Nietszche's notion ressentiment also gets called altruism.
This book is great. It's by no means written in plain english; It's definitely an academic text, but Shriram does a wonderful job of explaining how programming languages can be implemented.

Certainly worth a page-through for any hacker.
Rape and murder and the like aren't the biggest problems. If you get rid of them by emasculating men and destroying human relationships, I'd say that's a bigger loss.
Good point. Perhaps that's simply an instance of a more general rule: women, on average, have stricter requirements than men, so they have a smaller pool to choose from.

There may be other preference-related explanations. Perhaps men are more likely than women to opt out of heterosexual relationships (e.g. by being gay or happily single).

Then there are demographic explanations. Our species is not perfectly gender-balanced; there are (slightly) more women than men.
It'll catch on when articles don't include so many if/but/maybes. My eyes tend to just glaze over whenever I read about OpenID, so many fuzzy caveats.
Ask YC: Best ways to pick up chicks?
follow up to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169295

(what us geeks really care about)
It is much easier to learn English because most communication is English? Movies, the internet... I am confronted with English every day, whereas for another language (except my native language), I would have to make an effort.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/ers/?query=w4m
Or as the result of poor nutrition as a child (see China).
I don't know. I shut down around the more social, outgoing people. It's partially a vicious regression of awkward self consciousness, and feeling ashamed about said self consciousness.

The other part is dreadful boredom, which I know sounds way arrogant, but I'm not saying I'm bored because I think I'm better (though that's part of it). I also seem to lack something, not sure what. I've heard about people with small souls and no chests, and I think that's me.
Pure in-the-hole-hacker thinking.
Do you have time for an existential crisis tonight?
Let her know your HN karma.
I think that's good advice, but I also do think I'm missing something. For some reason I am just not at ease around others, and I don't get it. I think I lack a sense of self, there's always a need for confirmation from others, not that you would think so if you knew me.

Essentially, there is something missing and I feel disconnected from others. I cannot engage them on an intuitive level, I engage them on an analytical level which tries to look natural, because my intuition is not normal, i.e. doesn't sync with most people. I think this is true for many introverts, and is why they tend to be exhausted by social interaction.
Rubyonrails.org was not hijacked
While this point is true, it is moot to DHH's advice. Why?

Because marketing plays the same roll whether you are trying
to build the next Facebook or simply gain a couple thousand paying customers. It has to be there, and its gonna take time and effort.

As DHH points out in the comments of the post, the final line references a mathematical error and not a fantasy world .
Chatting with Chris Wanstrath (Github)
Interview with Chris Wanstrash, from Github-fame.
Specialised Human Information Processing: The Case of Scoble and the FeedReader
The idea of charging for web apps has been tried to DEATH. This "revolutionary idea" has come and gone 50 times over. It is extremely hard to make _more_ from this model than through advertising, being strategically aquired, or just about any other model. I personally have tried, hard.

If people aren't in the spending mode when they go to your site then just forget it.
Interesting. When I listed the examples, I wanted to choose things that were probably in prototype somewhere but maybe not in widespread use. Can you tell me about that equipment? I'm genuinely interested and my Google queries didn't bring up much.
Yeah, I've tried this to some extent, and I'm no social recluse. Right now my main source of socialization is attending a church service with people my age (who aren't a bunch of cloistered preacher kids). I do this at least once every weekend. I also meet with an older couple, interact with classmates and teachers, etc. I've also tried going clubbing with groups of people, but the clubs depress me. I seem to be able to get along great with people outside my peer group (i.e. older and younger who don't see me as equal), but I strike out with anyone my age.
5 places to spend money on your start-up
Introverts do not have a shell that needs breaking. We're not (necessarily) antisocial. We don't refrain from 'doing things'.

We just don't get energized from being around people. This doesn't mean we can't or don't. Like any aspect of temperament, it's mostly immutable: even a socially adept introvert (which I like to think I am) is still an introvert.

Wikipedia puts it well: "Introversion is not the same as shyness, though introverts may also be shy. Introverts choose solitary over social activities by preference, whereas shy people avoid social encounters out of fear."
You're probably right about all of this. I'm obviously in DHH's camp: after several VC-funded startups, including an abortive attempt to weasel VC for our current venture, we're bootstrapping and aiming to build what we want, not what VC's tell us they want.

It's the orthodoxy that gets me. "You can't cite DHH's speech without watching it in its entirety! You can't talk to your team about DHH without everyone sitting down and watching it! What would PG think?" And yet, at the same time, we're willing to toss around totally unsubstantiated factoids about the success of brand new Rails apps as proof of a business model.

Rant off.
That numbers game he was playing is equivalent to the classic flawed thinking:

> If we just get 1% market share of this billion dollar industry then we'll be rich! 1%, that's tiny! This will be so EASY!

Just 500 customers! How easy! Give me a (*(&#$ break...
Boy, yeah, I have that problem. In my undergrad, there was a teacher I really respected, and I really wanted to get to know him, but I always felt like such a waste of his time. Happens with most older guys I really respect who don't go out of their way to befriend me.

However, if it's a matter of professional self interest, there's no problem. I'm quite bold going up and talking to people very senior in rank.
Smaller==better right?
Eh, or if you're me people think your weird and aloof, or some kind of aspie.
there are a lot of replies kind of like this. but wouldn't it be better to learn to accurately judge people, and not socialize with people who aren't worthwhile?
This is like trying to teach martial arts through text:)

Hmmm.
Ask PG:  What makes the Wufoos such animals?
74 days ago, you said:

"the Wufoos are such animals that, on their territory, no one could compete with them, not even Google"

I asked:

"Can you be a little more specific? Maybe 5 or so bullets. What kinds of things should the rest of us be focusing on to be more Wufoo like competitors. I'd love to be so good that pg would never want to have me as a competitor."

You responded:

"Thanks; I think I may have just figured out what to talk about at startup school."

The link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110725

Since you changed your mind about your Startup topic, how about a bonus essay? Or even a short answer here. Aspiring animals want to know.

Thanks.
The Top Start-Up Mistakes
I suspect you're right about the analytical approach causing me problems. But, I've had a lot of "step out of your comfort zone" type advice throughout my life. I've done this, but I guess I'm not persistent enough. At any rate, I'd like another approach if possible.
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby
That's actually a brilliant idea, IMHO.
What he says is my problem though. I can't connect at the small talk level. I have an easy time talking with people like xlnt about abstract ideas and philosophy, but I suck at talking about "real" things.
I'd like to take this opportunity to plug our social network customizable homepage, ClutterMe.
The problem with most "traditional" RDBMSs is that they were not designed with modern web server environments in mind. In order to scale to handle the frequent and speed sensitive requests needed to serve web pages, techniques such as sharding or clusting are used to spread data across multiple DB instances. When you do this, you lose much of the traditional RDBMS functionality such as being able to join or order. Without this, how much do we really need SQL anymore?

It also makes for a scaling nightmare for startups who's #1 scaling issue is typically DB related.

In this respect traditional SQL is starting to show its age. My prediction is it will begin to become phased out for most web application purposes in favor of more easily scalable cloud-based and services such as SimpleDB and BigTable.
What makes you think he changed his mind about what to talk about at Startup School?
Yeah, this sort of suggestion is motivating. Actions that shatter everyone's mental rut and bring newness to everyone's experience motivate me. I might do what you say, or something similar.

The thing that turns me off in interpersonal interaction is the rote manner of interaction that I don't know, and don't want to learn. When people interact as they really are is what interests me.

For instance, a teacher challenged me to ask a girl out, so I made a dare out of it with a friend. Girl turned me down though:P a couple of them.
No 10 goes digital with a spot of Twitter
So I get on, search for "costello" since he was on the radio on the way home, and listen to "watching the detectives". Cool!

But then the music stops - shouldn't it continue playing on down the list? Seems to me the right default is to play until told to stop.

(Oh and that's Mac + FF2, worked fine for me unlike the other guy on this thread)
My guess is because your competitor having "benevolence" does not exclude you from having it. It is not a scarce resource that only n parties can use.
I did Toastmasters and was pretty good at it. I've also given presentations to large groups of people and high ranking people. I don't think public speaking and spontaneity are my problem.
"it's a feature not a bug"

what do you imagine would be the great benefits of having more casual social interactions?
The final talk grew out of that idea. I didn't end up mentioning the Wufoos by name, but they are extraordinarily dedicated to their users.
Saving Seconds
Dear All, as the originator of the blog post that has sparked this thread may I begin by apologising for my sloppy spelling errors on the post, which I've corrected and thanks for highlighting them. However, to correct some of the misunderstandings and prejudices of other contributors to this thread

- I was testing the add-in using BUSINESS email and sadly have too many attachments on incoming emails from people who don't use online collaboration services.

- I've never tended to use an email inbox to store documents, preferring windows file folders instead. Hence the attachments get saved off on receipt. Personally I always found Outlook quite flaky as a file storage system and would also hate to rely on remembering who sent which document.

- I had to test Xobni on a family desktop as I've migrated away from Outlook for all my work activities and Xobni only works in Outlook. Why pay licence fees when you can use identical services online for free and access them from anywhere? Hence, I simply downloaded business emails onto the home machine to test over a couple of weeks.

- Google desktop search is what I use to find anything on a PC, albeit most of my docs get stored in the "cloud" these days. Hence, Xobni "search", which is restricted to Outlook content, was superfluous.

- As for the photo comments, sadly it's the face I was born with and the photo was taken by Ian Forrestor of BBC Backstage fame at the London BBC Backstage & Geek party in 2006. That my opinion is diminished coz you don't like my picture...........wow, tough crowd

- Oddly enough, I was writing as a past Xobni user and of my experience of the product - my comments had nothing to do with being an investor.

- I'm delighted that some people could derive use from this product. Evidently we have considerably different needs or have settled on alternate solutions.
Plus, Microsoft is dead, and hence Outlook is dead, too.
Way cool, fast and responsive with a clean interface. I was impressed when I drag and dropped an album to my playlist, it's nice to see such an intuitive GUI.
I skimmed that book. I did feel pretty energized and powerful after reading it, like I had the inside track on things. I feel weird about that sort of thing though. I don't want to get laid or anything.

One guy gave me roses to pass out to pretty women at a bar to try and hook up. I passed them out because I do like the idea of recognizing beautiful women, but I shut down when one actually was interested in me and tried to make contact. I also tried drinking and another tried dirty dancing with me, but I mainly just got depressed and I was pretty much a fish.
And yet, none of their competitors has as much benevolence as Wufoo (certainly not Google). The Wufoos are on a mission from God, and you really don't want to get in the way of people like that (you can see what happened to all the cops chasing Jake and Elwood...those guys never stood a chance). Wufoo is kinda like that.

It seems pretty obvious to me that pg's talk was exactly about what makes Wufoo such a terror. They have a near infinite supply of morale built right into how they approach their business...they can't fail because it would never cross their mind to accept failure because what they're doing is The Right Thing--as long as they do The Right Thing, they have succeeded. And as long as they have that approach and you don't, you wouldn't want to try to beat them in their space. And, of course, having "beat Wufoo" as one of your guiding principles you would have already lost.

pg may be getting a bit zen on us, but I think there's a real kernel of truth in there.
Thanks for the comments, this is kinda cathartic to see that you guys care. I haven't really seen anything new though, so I think advice is useless for me.

- EDIT -

That's too strongly worded. I'm being moody.

Really though, I quite appreciate the concern. And I'll take the advice seriously and put it into practice.
I enjoy the downingstreet twitter account at those moments when they lapse, stopping regurgitating press releases and start discussing muffins It reminds me that governments are composed of nice people with the best intentions. Now if only the Prime Minister was to update his own twitter account.
"It seems pretty obvious to me that pg's talk was exactly about what makes Wufoo such a terror."

It wasn't so obvious to me. Now it is. Thank you!
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "rote manner of interaction that I don't know, and don't want to learn."

If you mean the talking about the weather thing, that's what talking people in bars should teach you to get beyond.
Focusing on Focus
I would agree, except everything else was 1 month or a year, and this would have been 6ish months. Kind of random, and doesn't make sense in context. Also, why round from $120 to $125.

If he had said $250k I'd chalk it up to rounding for a year and accidentally saying a month.
I see. I'm just not convinced a good AI can be built by a massive amounts of if/then statements. I guess if it can, crowd sourcing might be the way to accumulate them.
Don't try too hard and be yourself.
That's a good idea. I'll tell you how it goes.
Sumon, thanks for your kind comment on my "standing". I look forward to seeing you again in London in person, perhaps at Open Coffee, and maybe we can compare our respective CVs. Meantime, perhaps you can elaborate on what relevance my employment has to my comments on my user experience of this Outlook add-in?
I don't really know. I suspect you are right, that it is part of my nature to be this way. But it is hard for me to be convinced, since almost everyone I respect thinks differently and encourages me to be more social.
SSL-enabled Name-based Apache Virtual Hosts with mod_gnutls
I just wish they'd clear a path to faster H1B->GC conversions for would-be startup geeks!
I have some reservations about your claim that "having "beat Wufoo" as one of your guiding principles you would have already lost.". Namely, it scares me that we're so willing to just assign the high ground to one group, and say that they trying to dislodge them is not "being good".

I realize that what you are saying is that your goal should be to "be good", and that if your goal is to beat Wufoo, then your goal isn't to be good. But that's a slippery slope. My goal might be to make the best product in this market, and that implicitly means that I want to beat Wufoo by the simple virtue of being better than them.

(Disclaimer: I have nothing against Wufoo. I haven't really used their product either).
No, it isn't small talk. It's people expecting me to act in a certain way and not liking it when I don't.

Maybe I'm just wanting two conflicting goals. The expected way of acting is natural for most people, but not for me, and I wish I could interact in a way that is natural for me too.

I think I'll give the bar thing a shot. Any types of people I should watch out for?
New search on reddit
Let's not forget, technologies like SimpleDB and bigtable are primarily designed for "read only" environments. Rebuild a multi-terrabyte data base every week or so, then read it millions of times. Cool.

But what happens with dynamic apps, when you need to update that data base as often as you need to read it? Don't pull the plug on your RDBMS just yet.
Henning, I think you have hit the point that will eventually bring Microsoft to its knees unless it changes directions.

Unrelated: I've been womdering for a while where you are from with that name? Can you tell us?
Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First
I think it has to do with the substance of the criticism. I've been critical (not drastically so) and not been banned yet.