skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I think some commenters noted, he's badly misunderstood what the W3C folks meant by "least power". JavaScript doesn't remotely qualify.
Having an appealing brand name is a part of the way a company positions and messages itself to potential customers, but I wouldn't isolate a brand's catchiness to the detriment of a conversation about marketing. Positioning/messaging is tied to sales, but URL choice was just one of Wesabe's marketing failures.
You're also discounting the notion that competitors don't "execute". Even if you're not "executing" everything as well as your competitors, people will come back to an easy to remember name (easy to remember, spell, say, repeat, etc).

The name, imo, was/is a huge factor (as one of the OPs wrote) that I think helped snowball the other aspects of execution - being able to build on customer feedback - precisely because it was such an easy pass along name. Having loads of people come to your site gives you a lot of valuable info that a 'better executing' but poorly visited site doesn't get.
Yeah, sorry, but I just don't believe that. I've worked with plenty of programmers who, when faced with a perfectly acceptable off-the-shelf solution will happily slog out lines upon lines of code to roll yet another CMS, authentication, syndication, blog, social... you name it application. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying all programmers are this way, but a large part of what makes a good programmer is a self-belief that their ideas are superior to what already exists. External motivation is certainly a factor, but most of the best programmers I know code because of the rush they get from refining their own ideas.
Anyone got some kind of listing of machines using UEFI already ?
I checked Wikipedia, but it's quite scarce on concrete info.
Solid state drives can boost boot time quite a bit, and there are plenty of metrics online to prove it. I suppose a bios upgrade could improve the time it takes to go from POST to the intial OS bootstrapping, but once you get to the OS loading, I don't see where the bios can make a difference? The OS load time seems to be the biggest bottleneck to me, which is where the solid state fast access times get their big wins.
It's not hard to understand their direction looking at their patent filings and incremental UI updates (such as multitouch) to Mac OS X.

Although Steve Jobs isn't yet standing on stage gushing about it yet, Apple clearly plans to bring the touch paradigm to the desktop.

Interesting links:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/23/apple_filing_s...
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/10/01/apple_rumored_...
EFF, Apache Side with Microsoft in i4i Patent Case
Presumably, you base your decision on which to patronize on whether they are screwing over other customers -- it's also difficult to stop eating at Poisoned Hamburger once you're dead.

I think you're confused a little -- I'm not the OP, so I'm not the one proposing a false dilemma between single-payer and free-market. In fact, in the US we have both, and we just got a nice new law that enshrines the worst features of each.
(as someone who hasn't yet started a startup)

I agree with advice 1 ("Be good. Be very good."). But do you really believe you have to be -that- good to start an online business?

Also, I believe breadth of knowledge is also good (not only depth) - I've studied and worked in networking and most of the parts of the software platform, so when something fails I have a decent idea of where to start looking (I guess you cover that base with "Don't be the "front-end guy" or the "back-end guy"").

And you very likely won't get that knowledge from college - you have to learn it in the "real world" I agree with the other advice here about working in a challenging environment like another startup.

Also, point 2 - "the internet will bias you to think that the world is full of great people - this ain't so", I suspect that it's true as well.

Which brings me to point 3 - I'd do what's more comfortable for you and the way you want to live your life.

What I don't entirely agree is with not being worthwhile to start your own business unless your change is that dramatic.

I believe that wanting to be your own boss is a good enough reason (bringing a 1000% change TO YOU) - see the guy who quit Goldman Sachs for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690001 .

Or doing something that eases a pain point to 10 users (say, bingo cards for teachers :) ).

Not everyone has to change the entire world :) (though it's good to try!)

Just my opinion, 4 years after college (and 8 years of corporate jobs).
Holly shit, Brazil has a extremely high homicide rate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_r...

I knew it'd be high, but I didn't think it was going to be 5 times the homicide rate in the USA (with all those gun nuts). Time to move out here (I live in Brazil).
Ask HN: can a web 2.0 app succeed without social media integration?
say I'm working on a web app which has features that make it useful as a standalone product (i.e., it doesn't obtain its value from a community element or some sort of integration of user data from external sites). is it a must to have some sort of facebook/twitter/blog/whatever integration at launch to have a shot at success? it's obviously a bit of work to write and manage code hitting various external APIs, so I'd like to avoid it if I don't think it's a useful feature. I just wonder if not having this integration is some sort of sign to user that it's an amateurish product.

I admit I'm a bit biased, because I make very little use of social networking sites, so I'm not sure how to assess the value of these features. I can see potential value in terms of free advertising, e.g. pushing activity updates from my service to a user's twitter stream. but I just don't know how to guess whether anyone would actually use these features.<p>I know the answer is "maybe", but just wanted to get some opinions, or examples/counter-examples.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6904J720101001
Right, that's the point of the HSA. HSA's don't expire every year, you just put money into them, keep the money, and have the option of taking it back out and paying taxes on it.

And at least in my state, $5000 is a high deductible--my provider offers a $5000 deductible plan with an HSA. You do end up paying more than $5k out of pocket before hitting the deductible since there's coinsurance and copays and shit like that, but keeping $10-15k in an HSA--knowing you still have full access to that money and it doesn't expire every year (and then perhaps topping it off every so often)--is not a bad plan.
Good to know. I haven't played since, I just always seemed to see changes mentioned on news sites.

Someone also told me there were 360-like achievements (with perks) and there ended up being servers with custom maps to rack them up with minimal effort.
So, how do you do that then? Some extension I assume?
This and the battery performance while sleeping are, in my opinion, some of the main attractions of macs today.
Great point. Build a good reputation (both online and in person), hopefully while trying to help genuinely :) .

It really pays off much better than just being very good.
Investor using automated trading software sparked the "flash crash" on May 6
It will become a free trial premium for those enrolling from tomorrow. Today its really free.
Good idea. I'll see about getting that information added. There are some International carriers that offer it, among them are Qantas, Ryanair, Air France, Singapore Airlines and Emirates.
Forget Just Copyright, Now People Are Trademarking Music As Well
AGItate: Asterisk AGI apps in the cloud
My response to this: My favorite programmer likes to code so he can create tools that allow him to create facebook clones by just telling the computer to do so, though instead of verbal, instead merely a: phing deploy-fbclone
or whatever so chosen.
I've got a Dell Vostro 1510 w/ Vista sitting in front of me, and coming out of sleep is "almost instant."
"not have to move back into my parents place while I job hunt"

In your position, I would strongly consider moving back into my parents' place. I got married right out of college and my wife worked in resident life while she was a grad student so we could live on campus for free. But if I had been single and struggling to make a freelance career work (instead of married and...), I probably would have moved right back home. Saves a bunch of money (don't forget food savings), which gives you time to build the life you want.

FWIW, I did end up 'giving up my freedom' and took a full-time job in retail so we could get decent health insurance and have a baby. I did that for a year and a half, then split work and childcare with my wife for a couple years, and for the last 2.5 years I've been supporting my wife and three kids solely with my freelance work. So even if you have to give up freedom for a while, you can bank the experience and work your way back.
Has someone tried to do this? Google?
"It's because those dirty, rotten scoundrels are greedy" isn't a sufficient explanation of why a sector is expensive. Greed drives prices down in at least some markets (food and computers, to pick two very different kinds of markets), so the question is why greed isn't making healthcare better, cheaper, and more widely available in the way that it has made groceries better, cheaper, and more widely available.
I would say this, some languages are easier than others when it comes to helping you follow good coding practices. You can create crap in any language but some make it easier than others to write good code.

As an example, Javascript. You can write beautiful code in Javascript and it isn't that hard but to do it, you need to to understand closures. Closures aren't the easy topic for a new programmer to grasp immediately so it might not be the best language. I would say that python and ruby are better for making it easy to learn good practices compared to php, perl or javascript and would suggest either of those as a first language to start learning with. It doesn't have to be the language you stick with but both are good for getting you going. You aren't out of the woods by picking either of them but I think you will find the experience easier. Of the two, I would lean towards python as it has a very 'one proper way to do it' approach which is easy on beginners. That said, you can't go wrong with either. If you want to venture slightly further afield, both scheme and smalltalk are excellent languages to do as a first language. If either of those tickle your fancy, I would look at racket for a scheme implementation and pharo for the smalltalk. Pharo has learning tools when you fire it up and racket has a ton of learning materials.

The first two languages I learned where a Forth variant and a straight up machine language. So any language can be your first one. I realized later on that while I had learned to program, I hadn't learned to do it well and went back and studied the hows and whys which I think any of the 4 above would be very good places to start with.

EDIT:

One last note, if you decide to go with Javascript, I strongly urge you to read 'Javascript: The Good Parts' very early on in the process.
I was being facetious, but I do partly agree with you. A bad name does hurt. Wesabe isn't a good name; it comes off as syllable salad. Mint is a much better name.

On the other hand, plenty of successful companies have terrible names. 'Google' is just as bad as 'Wesabe' - and Google's early adopters had to find them without access to a good search engine! I'm sure that Wesabe could have succeeded in spite of their name if their product had been competitive.
I find this a little hard to believe, because American licensing and board exams are expensive and usually are taken over the course of many years.

For example, the licensing exam (USMLE) has 4 parts, one of which involves travel to the US for an in-person oral exam.

Edit: It looks like Canada might be accepting USMLE as equivalent to their exam. In that case it would make since to only take the US exams, allowing you to be potentially licensed in both countries.
Live from ICFP: Johan Tibell's Tutorial on High-Performance Haskell
If we're going to be doing that, wouldn't it maybe be better to compile to something that was actually designed as a compilation target (like the JVM/CLR - which are apparently the dread scourges JavaScript saved us from - or LLVM) rather than roping in an HLL not designed for the job?
Has anyone used this?
Yes, though be careful since Amazon is slowly rolling out a lot of generic services themselves.
And the validator is actually Apache's.
Reminds me of a Science Fiction novel I read, where one of the characters was a starship based super-AI. At the bottom-most layer of software was an emulation of MS-DOS. In software, in the name of backwards-compatibility, our worse mistakes (almost) never die .
I challenge anyone to name 5 successful entrepreneurs who followed this formula. It sounds to me like a recipe for becoming comfortable with $180K and unwilling to take risks, and it seems very narrowly focused on a small class of highly algorithm-oriented problems.
I'm a software developer who lived in San Francisco. I highly doubt you'll find anything for $1,000 in the city. You can get a studio in San Leandro for $950. For $1k you can probably find a nice room share in just about any neighborhood.

I highly recommend not having a car. Parking is a nightmare in San Francisco, I actually find it much easier living in Williamsburg/Brooklyn. Renting a space is anywhere from $125-250 per month.

I really enjoy living in the sunset, but it's always overcast. I also lived in SOMA and the heart of the Mission. I would advise against SOMA.

You need a bike. San Francisco cyclists are well respected by drivers and once you learn the routes (ie, the wiggle) you are set. It's the fastest way to get around the city.

Good luck
Sure I was being sarcastic, but why a downvote? It is a legitimate issue. If it is jailbroken and you put apps written for iOS on it, how you would perform pinches and swipes type commands via remote? I'm not saying that iOS was the wrong choice, but it seems like it needs to be geared towards a completely different input device and screen.
Why not keep it simple?
I love the RedHat model. You only pay for the value they provide. Otherwise, you can run Fedora. Same with Jboss.
What does it prove? That you can succeed with a mediocre name, not that picking a good brand doesn't matter.

That is what I intended it to prove.
Hi, I was one of the early Mint.com product guys.

I just want to say thanks to Marc for sharing this. I know how difficult it is to be objective in a post-mortem analysis, and I think your post is a very balanced (and dignified) assessment.

There's one more important differentiator, however, that hasn't been discussed yet and which pre-empts a lot of this commentary, that I thought I'd share: Mint intentionally targeted a different market.

Most consumer spending in the US is managed by middle aged men and women that are not especially financially nor technically savvy. It was our view that previous personal finance solutions (Quicken, MS Money, and the following web-based solutions) catered more towards the technically/financially proficient, and had therefore missed the larger market opportunity.

So we tried our best to ignore the Silicon Valley drivel around "viral distribution" and "cloud security" and focus instead on issues like "How can we make it easier for a soccer Mom in Kansas to set and meet her monthly grocery budget?".

The Mint brand (including the name, visuals, and user experience) were all designed with this in Mind. They were definitely supportive, as Marc correctly points out, but in no way were they determinate.

I think Mint and Wesabe were both strong products that served their users' needs well. We just happened to target different users, and ultimately there were more of ours.
Well, BIOS is floppy disk's peer (same age), and it contains code for accessing floppy drive, and in many cases is most easily updated via floppy disk; so this part makes sense.

Though today if one is using floppy disk at all, it will most likely be a 3.5" 1.44 MB High Density version, which is much younger than original model that is BIOS peer (maybe it would be more exact to show older 5.25" floppy?) But in general, they belong to the same age.
This is the most important comment in this thread. Wesabe should have listened to potential customers like you without being defensive of their offering and adjusted UX/positioning/messaging accordingly.
My Ubuntu boots in 5 seconds off an SSD, but the BIOS takes 15 seconds.
I'm not a Flickr user, but was wondering what does it offer that Facebook doesn't?
I do fear the paperclip maximizer.

And did they have to make it solar powered? When will people learn?!?
And you can do antivirus on PC, so virus and malware is not a problem, right?

:-)
Programmatic deployment to elastic mapreduce with boto and bootstrap actions
>hey, why not switch to a private army then?

it's happened half-way in Iraq and all the way in Afghanistan. Contractors have 2 unbeatable advantages:
1. KIA contractors isn't a political liability like KIA soldiers
and 2. contractors are outside of the law, thus can do things regular troops aren't allowed to
Aren't we past the idea that "ability to instruct a computer and/or runtime via a programming language" comes with a preconceived set of personality traits? Chester describes a certain kind of programmer well, but the idea all programmers conform to this behavior pattern (and, by extension, if you don't conform to the pattern then you're not a programmer) is silly.

Put another way, A lisp hacker, a java developer and a priest walk into a bar ...
The SEC/CFTC report itself: http://www.sec.gov/sec-cftc-prelimreport.pdf
Also seen them pretty regularly in NY, Boston and Atlantic City. Typically can't use them to listen to music off an iPhone, but it will still charge.

Definitely saved me a few times.
Great site. Just today Ezra Klein of the Washington Post did a piece on a proposal to mail a 'receipt' to tax payers for services rendered, so people stay informed about the proportion of their dollars spent annually. I think it's a good idea.

Post Article: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/09/shouldnt...

Tax Receipt Proposal: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://content.thirdway.o...
U.S. apologizes for syphilis experiment in Guatemala
In almost every country, social security payments go toward paying the current recipients, not to paying one's own way. This was, I guess, done in this way to make it possible to set up a social security net in a couple of years instead of in a couple of generations; unfortunately, it gives us the problems of too many old people for the active people to support that we have now.
Launched Today Printing Facebook  | All Your Friends on Your Real-Life Wall
Pressing the home button on an iPad?
My point here is that "Google" attains a level of adequacy that "Wesabe" doesn't seem to, for the reasons I pointed out.

Past adequacy, I agree that "Google" was a worse brand than its competitors and that it didn't matter.
It's a shitton of money, funding what is ultimately a pyramid scheme where I'll never reach the top of the pyramid.
This discounts the other algorithms that don't think about price confidence and are only reactionary.
First it's 8.5% of GDP in 2009, but in absolute numbers it's only $14.3B (including US aid, which has to be spent in US).
This peanuts for being a regional superpower.
About half of the budget goes to salaries of officers, permanent servicemen and civilian contractors.
Sigh... Proper link: http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-conve...
Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
I have asked myself this question.

However I do not want to give up without making a sincere attempt first. I intend to set up my own infrastructure, load test it, and see if it's working well enough. If I fail to do so, Heroku/EY remains the backup solution.
High-Freq is usually the label used for prop trading. Algo is usually the label used for agency trading.

The differences between the algos used isn't really pertinent.
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)
Please lead with the positions' locations.
I enjoy coding my own ideas and not that much others ideas. Basically from 9 to 5 I just code, from 5 to 10 I enjoy (coding).
IE9 beta not enough to keep IE market share over 60% mark
It's a cool idea.. I like it too!
Doesn't seem like much of a paradox. By definition, people who immigrate are:

--smarter
--wealthier
--better educated
--more ambitious. take-charge people

than the general population. These are people who have taken the initiate to uproot themselves from their current NATION, leave everything behind, and negotiate a difficult and expensive immigration process. These are people that are deemed worthy in the receiving nation: people who have advanced degrees or other skills, for instance (legally immigrating to another country is basically impossible if you are a ditch-digger).

Why wouldn't these kids do well, as a rule? Their parents are people who valued education and who would enforce that in their kids.

And then in the second and succeeding generations, the effect disappears.
I made Where My Money Goes last night, which is a more visual take on the receipt idea, if not as in depth: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748042
Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315819
Off topic, but the Microsoft Office 2010 Save icon is still a floppy disk. Crazy.

http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ukschools/WindowsLiveWriter/...
Nokia C3-00 software version 04.60 released
Realtek and JMricron were in the same building, maybe the third company is as well?
So much debate around simple thing. A private enterprise (including medicine) is driven by profit motive, that means decreasing cost (bottom line, quality) and increasing margin (price).

In a free market, quality decrease and price increase is balanced by competition. Once competition is severely limited and the minimal quality is enforced through things like FDA - the sky is the limit for the price.
And a paper going into more detail: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/publications/buechley_DIS_10.pdf
Perhaps, but most high-priced domains will retain a significant chunk of their value if not appreciate over time. In the worst case, you resell it.
Not necessarily. That hypothesis rests on the basis that the market is still majority human-traded. Quote the article:

High frequency traders, devoid of any real demand from buyers of the futures contract, began to quickly buy and resell contracts "generating a 'hot-potato,'" the report said.

So this is algorithms-against-algorithms. I would wager that in intraday trading, human minds play a relatively small role, because mechanical methods break through the emotional barriers that plague pure discretionary trading. Most good daytraders will develop a signal system to guide them, even if individual trades use manual entries and exits.
You can suggest someone take anything they want if it's available without a prescription. You just can't say on the label that it's effective.

What exactly is being argued for if not that prescriptions should be allowed even when efficacy is unsure?