skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a dinosaur, I know, but I use kmail on SuSE linux. I have 9 specific email folders in mbox format, and when I read an email I either reply or not. Then I file the email, either away, in the trash, or in a "delay for n days" folder, where "n" is from 1 to 7.

Every time kmail gets started it rotates those folders, so the delayed emails get closer and closer, and then come back into the inbox.

In this way I achieve everything you mention, unless I've missed something. The things you suggest are really, really useful, but I achieve them using technology I already have.

There are extras I won't go into here. Maybe I should blog about them.

If I had a blog.
he can't be that good of an online marketer...if he didn't leave his url in the blog post.
Physicists Dream Up the Antilaser
Dive into Rails 3 - Useful Books
Here's a bunch of links that I've come across on HN and Google searching over the last few days. I'm learning Rails at the moment, and these links look real useful.

If you have good links of your own, please add them in the comments! I would imagine many readers of HN are interested to some degree in Rails 3, so hope you find this useful.

Videos Discussing Rails 2 vs Rails 3:

http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts/rails3

Great Rails 3 Guide:

http://railstutorial.org/book (free online, paid PDF)

List of Freely Avaliable Programming Books:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-books (many books lited, not just Ruby)

Free PDFs for your eBook Reader:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172380/programming-texts-and-reference-material-for-my-kindle-creating-the-ultimate-re (again, several flavours available)
Apple intros Mac Pro with 12 processing cores
Can you please post a link to this 'discussions' page? I can't find it.
Funniest headline I've read all week. I doubt there's meat to it, though. Has the customer in question tried to, you know, call Apple (1-800-MY-APPLE)? It's entirely possible that there's something wrong with Apple's online ordering system, but surely a live person will be able to process the order.

Apple's Shipping & Delivery page clearly states that they will ship to Puerto Rico and other US territories:
http://store.apple.com/us/help/shipping_delivery

There are also some service centers and AVRs in Puerto Rico that one may want to try:
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/service/us/
http://latam.apple.com/buy/lae/find.php?r_pais=Puerto+Rico

And lastly, the 'free iPhone 4 case' deal is valid wherever the iPhone 4 is sold, not just in the US, but also Canada and Europe etc. Even if Apple has some bizarro atlas that has Puerto Rico pegged as a separate country, surely they will still send cases there, because AT&T in PR offers the iPhone 4.
Good thing we intervened, because now it is no longer possible for an Afghani to be shot in the middle of the night by the Taliban.
That guy is, uh, annoying. I like the original link better.
Their history with Windows is not an advantage if the design of it is cumbersome and full of compromises. Which, more than anything, is what the point of the article is getting at.

Microsoft has had a decade of chances in this market to pull off the "business tablet" market you're suggesting. And, well, they just haven't done it yet.

If this is such a competitive advantage, why wasn't the iPad put on a Mac OSX architecture? Sometimes, an interface reboot is downright necessary. The Xbox 360, I'd argue, is the most successful non-Windows-related product they sell because it's clear that the interface design was tailored for the product.

That's their problem. They don't know when to let go of their legacy and start fresh.
This title is completely accurate. I happen to have some inside info on this, actually. Steve Jobs went on one of his epic rants after a person from Puerto Rico tried to order a free case. Everyone at Apple agrees with his basic sentiment: Puerto Ricans can suck it. It's like a new company mantra. Good thing the kind folks at consumerist are on the job!
I'm sure the marketers face the same probability of failure as more tech-based startups - they just tend to invest less time for probably a lower expected reward. They don't need to think about seed capital or taking on employees but not too many have >$10 million exits or grow beyond a lifestyle business either.
Awesome, yes, I think these are quite easy to hack into existing mail clients. As I mention in the article, I hacked up Snooze in Pine.

I think your "delay for n days" feature is indeed what I (and http://HitMeLater.com, it turns out) call Email Snooze. I don't think you've got the other two proposed features though, based on what you've described so far. Maybe those wouldn't be so useful for you -- sounds like you have a great system.
Definitely a brilliant essay, but I might take issue with a possible interpretation of:

"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."

I definitely understand his point, but I am afraid others might not. This sort of mentality can lead you to under price your services greatly. I see it everyday. Our customers sell downloadables and just the other day some guy was trying to sell a brilliantly manicured and useful spreadsheet for $2. His competition charged $10-$15+ and looked 10x more confusing and horrible. He said he wanted to "sell the most possible and low price was the way to do it".

I think I may talked him into raising his price and testing a few different pricing schemes.

In short: "owning the low-end" isn't always the best way to go about it, you might be leaving a lot of money on the table and selecting a different set of customers.
Hi there. I'm working on something similar. We're not starting out with questions, simply with friends-of-friends whom you haven't yet met, but there are a lot of interesting next steps we are contemplating, that being one of them. Consider signing up for the beta at http://Kliq.in; we're launching next month.
So as an interesting anecdote, a Squidoo lens I have has for the last several years been the #2 Google result for the phrase 'start a startup,' after this essay. The page gets on average 45 visits per week, and has sold about 40 startup-related books total over the last 3.5 years.

I think it's interesting because

* The number of people looking to learn about starting businesses seems to be flat or even slightly declining, at least if search traffic is any indicator.

* Based on what I can extrapolate from my analytics and well as my experience playing around with Google / FB ads, it seems like the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is on the order of a a couple hundred per week. This is pretty disturbing for a nation of 300M people.

I'm not sure how much validity there is to this, but I've always been a little disturbed whenever I've done things like, say, comparing the number of parenting books sold on Amazon to the number of children born each year.
Sigh. I’m as happy as everyone about blogs and all that stuff but, you know, sometimes some real journalism would be appropriate. It’s not that hard, dial (408) 974-2042 (Apple’s PR hotline, not at all hard to find on their PR page which has a short and memorable URL [+]) and ask if they have a comment.

[+] http://www.apple.com/pr/
I'm midly intrigued given the lack of obvious astroturfing when Googling for the Brand Currency site.

usually its pretty transparent what makes self-appointed internet marketing "gurus" successful from the amount of shill blogs with affiliate links pointing to their latest eBook.
Hands down the best of his essays, at least among the startup focused ones.
Chup Chup Ke
The weird thing is that Microsoft seems to have all the pieces necessary. If they just make a new shell the multi-touch, gestures, system-wide search, etc, etc is already there. WPF apps are probably easy ports since they are coded in a pretty semantic way. How hard could be to make a shell inspired by the Metro UI scheme?
I like the idea of organizing and expanding the idea of "Anyone want to grab dinner before the concert?". At least you'd have stuff in common, and you'd avoid the feeling of desperation.
Interesting talk. I note the caveats Ryan Dahl gives at the end of the talk about using Node.js for a high-performance site. I haven't been able to find any other stats than his on performance and stability. Does anyone use Node.js for a web service? Do you have any stats that you can share?
Hardly. They offered a very solid competing vision for what an MP3 player should be. It was a risky vision, involving a subscription and the innovative ability to share songs you haven't bought legally, wirelessly with the person standing next to you.

I really think the failure was purely marketing, judging by the accounts of people who used the service, that and people's assumption that anything from Microsoft cannot be innovative or interesting - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a lot of ways. Microsoft could have released the iPad, and it probably would have been a total flop, even if it had all the hallmarks of the iPad ecosystem. (There are a few things that could stand-in for the iPhone's app store like Flash and WinMO apps.)
This is a clear demonstration of one of the main drawbacks of webapps. If you don't like v2, there's nothing you can do about it except switch to a different product. You also can't wait for v2.1 for all the bugs get shaken out. You're at the mercy of the webapp developer.

This is probably fine for free, consumer apps, but if Google wants to get serious about enterprises using their software, they need to come up with a strategy for serving multiple versions at the same time.
eat your own lunch before someone else eats it

Look at Apple, they are not afraid of killing the iPod market with the iPhone.

edit: s/no/not/
From the article:

"There are various emotion category sets, the shortest one being Paul Ekman’s, containing six basic emotions having facial expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprised."

Tags are fine ofcourse, but how does one go about mapping these to something useful to a user? Images? ASCII emoticons?

Lemme take a stab at it:

anger >:(

digust D8

fear 8-[

happiness :D

sadness :'(

surprised 8O
Maybe its just that I'm getting grumpy and old, but I'd lose the "cool" in your pitch. For some reason, with "cool", it sounds almost desperate; without "cool", it sounds interesting.
So what? You may just discover that your friendship isn't that strong. If it is, it will endure and grow, whether your business succeeds or fails.

I wonder why people are so afraid to put their relationships on trial. An old adage says that you should not trust a friend of yours until you have tested it.
Where should our energy come from?
Cambridge physicist McKay computed that the average person in the UK spends as much energy as 125-135 light bulbs (on all the time). But where should that energy come from?
I've been building a recommendation engine that takes what you eat and gives healthier substitute recommendations. http://foodmarkit.com.

Still in alpha mode, any feedback would be appreciated.
I suspect a blog post from the Consumerist will attract the attention of Apple's PR team much faster than even two dozen phone calls to their PR call center to complain.
I'm not sure how thoroughly you skimmed the book, but in the introduction as well as throughout, it claims to be a straight-forward guide for any sort of human, young or old man or woman, and that purpose is at much a fundamental survey of nutrition, exercise, and everything else a body needs as it is a refutation of all the misinformation out there. Considering the 'average' person assumes P90X and the Ab Circle are proper exercise and that dietary fat makes your body fat, that doesn't seem too outlandish a claim.

As you didn't learn anything new, I trust you are well-read in fitness and nutrition, but since being a professional computer user doesn't explicitly require physical fitness, this might actually be a pretty useful resource for some of the readers here. And even if it weren't, said readers are likely to have mothers, fathers, significant others or children who could benefit from it. It specifically declares itself an "owner's manual for the human body", not some sort of secret hard-living comrade method for muscle growth or whatever; since you are already versed, your response would be like a Mathematics Professor writing an amazon review for "Fundamentals of Algebra" and saying "this stuff is all rehashed, there's nothing here I haven't seen before". Or you know, for a programmer to slam a "Computers for Dummies" book as being too basic.

Anyway, I respect your opinion and appreciate you giving it a shot, but I feel like you either were looking for the wrong thing or just didn't look too hard. Possibly since it's free, you got what you paid for it.

By the way I'm the author. I'm not trying to make a secret of that or anything, I just didn't initially feel it was relevant to the discussion.
It looks like at least one paper has tried, but received no response (the post was filed originally on the 27th, and I don't see an update with a response):

>> El Nuevo Día se comunicó con AT&T a nivel local y con Apple para recibir una reacción sobre esta noticia, pero al momento de publicarla todavía no habíamos recibido información al respecto.

(Translation: El Neuvo Día contacted AT&T locally and Apple to get a reaction to this article, but at the time of publication, we have still not received any information.)

Link: http://www.elnuevodia.com/applecancelaordenesapuertorico-748...
>I bet they would

I kind of doubt it given J Allard was forced out of the company over the Courier.[1] Frankly, I think that's one of the single most boneheaded moves Ballmer's made -- Allard is largely responsible for reviving Microsoft's brand image with the under 30 crowd heading up Xbox and Zune development.

A decade ago, nobody would have described Microsoft as a cool brand, but flash forward today every frat boy in the country owns an Xbox 360.

Robbie Bach, head of the E&D division, went out at the same time. Then again, E&D was largely dysfunctional because there's been an odd combination of failing to leverage MS technology when it would make sense while trying to shoehorn MS techs into places where they just didn't work. See buying Danger and then pretty much scrapping their technology to build the Kin as a prime example. It pretty well illustrates the institutional schizophrenia the company shows to the world.

[1] http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/25/microsoft.over...
> We are not as interested in smaller revenue focused companies that aim to be sold for $25mm to $50mm ... Even so, we will certainly end up with more than a few companies that will sell in that range. That is a successful outcome for us too if we can own 15-20% of the business and have less than $5mm invested, which is the case for many of our companies.

At the high end, $5mm invested at 20% would mean a post-money valuation of $25 million. That's 1-2X. Or am I misunderstanding this?

Though, the multiplier doubles as the amount invested at 20% halves. Since most of their investments seem to be further away from $5 million, that could be what I'm overlooking.
Shopping high and low: Upgrading and treasure hunting
That Apple pulled off the interface reboot is, I think, the most astounding thing about the iOS devices.

You can't beat the PC for breadth, depth, and availability of specialised apps. They've been evolving for 30 years now. But when the iPhone SDK became available there were 0 applications, and in less than 30 months the industry's grown an entire replacement software ecosystem that covers a great deal of what users want to do.
There was a site called Simler (http://simler.com) that attempted to do this. Its goal was to help you find new people who you might be friends with. It worked similar to Facebook or Twitter, via status updates.

People tagged themselves with dozens or hundreds of arbitrary tags, then their engine would recommend people who share same interests.

The challenge they faced was getting anybody to come to their site. You are not going to get people who feel they are already "friend full" there, which means your percentage of "abnormal" people (hey, I'm one - people who don't make friends easily).

I think the algorithms will be easier to overcome than the problems with the self-selected population.
In this case, abbreviating both 'Puerto Rico' and 'Public Relations' to 'PR' is kind of confusing...
Before people get too bent out of shape/excited, the data within the files is just people's names and counts as well as the URL to their profile. All of these profiles were already public.
Thanks for linking this. As the book says, it's a survey of the fundamentals of proper exercise, nutrition, rest, recovery, and most of the stuff in between. It's short and to the point, and it's free.

Even if someone reading this post is immensely strong, has single digit body fat, and will live to 200, chances are good they know someone else who could benefit from reading it. And the ebook is complete and free, so if you decide you don't want it you don't even have to call for a refund. :)
MIT/BSD does preserve the freedom, just doesn't guarantee the preservation of the ability. The GPL guarantees preservation of the ability by removing a bit of the downstream developers' freedom. The GPL exploits copyright law in a clever hack to negate most of the harm of copyright law, but it isn't actually providing more freedom than the BSD license. The freest code is public domain, but some countries don't even allow their citizens to publish in the public domain, so...
Maybe "start a startup" is just not a popular phrase. I'd guess people are more likely to search for "startup", "start a company", "start a business".
The sad thing is Microsoft could succeed so wonderfully here, but the reality is almost certainly they won't.

Create a stripped down, simple OS based on Windows (even iOS is derived from OSX), create a compelling app store, and a framework for writing apps for it based on Silverlight. Bam! Very compelling piece of hardware. Not only that but these type of apps are what Silverlight was destined for. I'd much rather write these types of apps in Silverlight than Cocoa Touch.
I don't know why it is, but the straw poll looked like an ad, and I skipped over even reading it.

I'd change the first action (delete) have archive as the action name, and remove delete altogether.

I'd change the Inbox Zero link to _Inbox Zero_ [Video] (or otherwise do something to distinguish that they're two different links.)

The article itself is an kind of weird mix between rather specific details ("For any message, type sN..."), and the broader concepts. As it is, your point comes across fine, without needing to define N in sN allows for fractional days.

--

Auto-expire's an interesting idea.

First off, it doesn't actually 'process' an email - after setting an auto expire, I'm still going to see it in my inbox, just now, I can willfully ignore it. It would be interesting to hook it up to a calendar and allow things to auto-expire after events or activities (w/ confirmation in case the activity did not occur as scheduled).

Allowing the user to set auto-expire 999 for 'really important stuff' sounds like in that case, the user should file it away as 'important' (or star it).
Omnia vs iPhone 2 | Tech News & Articles
Sure do hope they find a way to extend that to 2055!
Because he is not selling it. How can you expect to make money on a product by giving out it for free? Google make gobs of money giving out web search for free, but Google's product is not search, it is advertising, and you pay for it.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to hang out with too many guys/gals who are 'just like me'. Their algorithm would need to account for that or adjust based on user input before the query.
Generating Pie Charts in Java | Tech News & Articles
Development doesn't make money, selling does. Choosing the right things to develop is the first step.
I'm more upset that the Consumerist doesn't know that Puerto Rico has no Representatives in the House. (Or Senators, or anything really. Of course, they probably could if they wanted to but they keep voting to retain their commonwealth status.)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=startup <-- Kinda interesting.

That said, whatever you are using to determine that "the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is... a couple hundred per week" is very very very far off the mark.

Here's a list of some related US searches in the adwords tool: http://skitch.com/webwright/dxyg5/google-adwords-keyword-too...
http://guides.rails.info/index.html
Freshbooks (indispensable to me), Mailchimp, Outright.com, Basecamp and Backpack. And those are just the ones I use for my day to day business.
Nothing like link bait. I share rubymaverick's sentiments that this might be making a mountain out of a mole hill and WAY overstating the case.

My guess: some poorly implemented back-end system automatically canceled the orders or, even more likely, some dip in shipping said "Umm, port o reeko? Wazz that?" and canceled the order.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, unless it can capture a few more eyeballs.
The one thing I've learned in the years I've worked with Perl is to never underestimate the ability of the Perl community to achieve the incredible.

To compare the performance of the mature, optimized Perl 5 core to the freshly baked, feature rich Perl 6 is shortsighted in the extreme.

The Perl 5 runtime is hard to extend, meaning that using the modern additions to the language (notably Moose), comes with a significant start up penalty. This can not be easily overcome.

Perl 6 has a Grammar, Perl 5 only has an implementation (only perl5 can parse Perl5). There is a lot of opportunity for making Perl 6 nice and fast, certainly fast enough for the larger complex applications it is designed to support.

Perl 6 is not trying to compete with Perl 5 on one line throw away scripts. Not yet anyway.
I don't, but much of the rest of the world does.
I agree with this... only I want to add one more star

* open late.

where do I get food at 2am? silicon valley is full of Engineers who don't have to stumble in to work until 11 or noon, yet most places that serve food close at 9pm. what is with that?
Also, how is it determined that the downloaded file is actually the copyrighted content in question?

And, how is it determined the infringer has downloaded enough of the file to infringe?

Due process still exists.

Also, depending on your state, you can file suit against the law firm for defamation.
Eat slower?

(edit: removed a superfluous link, so instead I'll just be anecdotal. Cooking and eating are great social activities when done right. In my mind it's incredibly relaxing to cut vegetables and manage a meal. Conversations can spring into new inspiration or just better bonding with friends. I understand that not all meals can put striving for that kind of bliss as a major goal, but I'm not trying to defend all meals.)
Most influential economists (Top 10% Authors, as of June 2010)
Google Trends: Clojure
Finally got to connect, it seems... bloated to me, the fact that they state only 100kb when embedded into a webpage? only?