skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
true/funny but one factor is the relative costs involved. the cost to create the basic "technology" for a new social network is basically zero (ok, assuming one talented programmer, working for self/equity, one weekend to write the core, plus several more weeks to flesh it out incrementally, etc.). Whereas the cost to take the JTEC to a productized, profitable, polished device in the marketplace could be many millions USD.
What I would love to see is a comparison of CivV and the modern design with the design decisions made by Stardock on Galactic Civilizations which game out for OS/2 in the mid 90s. At the time, it was pushing the barrier for turn based game AI.

I do miss that game...unfortunately even their remake in 2003 only targeted Windows rather than Mac/Linux.
The strange thing about this article is I read the first patch of job descriptions and I thought you were poised to make fun of them - not the latter one.

Those first descriptions make me wonder if it's really OK to run the same startup template again and again, even if you say that it makes you "human". I expect to read that first job description amongst a million three-person startups - besides maybe the profitable part. Is that really who you are? The cool start-up?

The inability to show discernible qualities in this kind of company kinda worries me as it comes to differentiating yourself in product - are you also the same company that's the next Google that can do better SEO and just loves that Lean Startup philosophy? I mean, they're all real and we want to do them, but what does that mean? At least those automated, robotic startups aren't pretending to be something else. They're automated machines. But if your straightforward nap-centric job description is trying to adhere to a standard professed in this forum, I wonder about your true ability to imbue the unique competitive advantages that will ultimately make you successful.
Mozilla's JM crosses Apple's Nitro threshold
I've never used the default panel configuration.

I use a single, skinny, left-aligned panel. I replace the default icon+text 3 section menu with the single icon GNOME menu.

I replace the window list with Talika. It makes it similar to windows7. The only other thing in my panel is wireless, recycling, time.

I use no shortcuts or pinned items. Instead I access everything using Gnome-DO.

edit: on topic of actual changes I noticed\like I think the show desktop key might have been changed from CTRL+ALT+D to CMD+D
I love my Thinkpad. It's had all sorts of tortuous treatment and just keeps on ticking. It was kind of amazing the first time I spilt water on it to have it drain out through the holes in the bottom of it and just keep going (I've also stepped on it, dropped it, etc; I'm actually very careful with my computers, but when you work with it 14+ hours a day for a few years, sooner or later you're going to do something stupid with it).

I have the x61, which is great. If I were buying one today, I'd probably get one of the x300 series; they seem to have a slower CPU than the x61 (and x200), but faster graphics, and better screen resolution. CPUs are fast enough that it almost doesn't matter these days (for web dev anyway), but faster graphics are always good -- I really feel the screen redraw when switching desktops with it plugged into my 26 inch monitor (still, this machine is like, 2.5 years old).

For me, having a lightweight and portable machine is pretty key. I also have an MBP (15 inch), but it's so much more work to throw into my backpack and lug around. I always have my Thinkpad with me, which is a huge part of what makes it valuable.

... Man, I am such a fanboy! :)
Middle management has its uses.
Linux Wiki: Condensing how to install on various platforms.
off-topic, but this reminded me of an idea i had for a firefox extension: when visiting a questionable url, be able to tell firefox to blur the page/image heavily before rendering it. as you slowly decrease the blur and realize that it's something obscene/gross, you can close the tab before seeing the gory details that your eyes cannot unsee.
Unfortunately the underestimation of time behind technology is nothing new and not just an issue with mobile development. We get the same thing at work nearly every day. People come in, want a 50 page website designed from scratch, branded, built on a CMS, and programmed with lots of forms, Java functionality (simple jQuery stuff usually), and SEO and expect to pay $1000. When people like this come about, it's the professionals job to educate the client and help others understand how much really goes into development. Looking at a "simple" app or website that they'll spend minutes on (or more in some cases) makes it very easy to think, "Well it took me 60 seconds to navigate this page OR I picked this game up in a few minutes and beat the first couple levels, therefore it must have been simple to build."
Oh, forgot to mention: I've been running Ubuntu on it exclusively for the last few years. Suspend and resume has been flakey in some releases of Ubuntu, ok in others (I've given up trying, honestly), but otherwise the hardware support has been flawless.
I guess it depends on the size of the place you are at. I don't doubt that the rates are considerably lower than Vancouver-proper.

In general your highest rates are going to be in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, and Montreal (not necessarily in that order).
(Not to get all Reddit up in here, but) your username is fantastic in this context.
It can be difficult to draw a line between what constitutes "good" and "great" but I think Sokanu does a good job in this article. And Spencer takes it a step further with the introduction concept of adding a third level: Exceptional. Very thoughtful piece.
I'm unable to replicate this on Chrome under Mac. Can you post a screencap? Was the root domain the URI you got the error on? Are you able to access the following URLs:

http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushPerl...
http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushBash...
I can't help but think of "640k should be enough for everybody" when I read this. Desktop computing isn't as sexy as mobile computing, but it isn't dead yet. There are plenty of innovations left to be made.
blasdel brings up a great point.

we actually did a kickstarter project for our startup @ http://gorankem.com in august 2009 when kickstarter was still pretty young themselves.

we had no clue how it would turn out so we set our threshold at $1,000 to be raised over 30 days. Before we knew it, we had hit our goal in under a week. unfortunately, it became a lot tougher to justify soliciting donations once our goal had been met.

in hindsight, i wish we had set our initial goal higher, but at the same time, the kickstarter search in fall '09 didn't exactly net us any donations outside of our network of supporters.

this past summer i helped a great band out of nashville put together a successful $10,000 project so they could get a van to tour the country: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slowmotioncenterfold/slo...

needless to say, i'm a big supporter/believer in the crowdfunding model!

-adam

p.s. a bit embarrassing to look back at our video/project for Rank 'em (we've come a long way since), but here it is for anybody that's interested: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003234199/help-us-keep-...
I actually do like them for labels, button states, and other what I'll call "scalar" widgets.

For collections, though, I feel like they're more likely to get you into trouble than to actually solve your problems.

I think you could do something substantially less complicated/powerful than bindings for the cases that bindings handle well, though, and I'd rather Apple did some innovating there than bring bindings over to iOS.

I'm also with the other folk who would much prefer to see Garbage Collection first. I rarely get into trouble with the reference counting system, but when I do it usually takes me forever to track down why my app is crashing without a single line of code written by me in the stack trace. Usually it's because I assigned an autoreleased value to an ivar in an init method while failing to retain it (a stupid mistake that I still make once every few months even after 5 years of Cocoa/Cocoa Touch work).
Right now our biggest competitor is non-consumption

You think like a winner, my man. You had your opportunity to rag at the "competition" but you were wise enough to see the big picture. Cheers!
Ever notice how much easier it is to talk straight when what you've done is legitimately impressive? Google's press release is held up as an example. I bet that press release would be every bit as interesting if they just said "Oh, umm, hi, yeah...look at this!" followed by a video or in-person demonstration of the cars driving themselves.

As my 3rd grade teacher always said - actions speak louder than words.
I think there is too much risk with a traditional hedge fund model so Goog is going the route of seed-investor, angel investor, VC - bigger risks, bigger rewards ... less muddying of the legal waters (potentially).
That job posting stood out to me as well, and I think for startups this is great advice. However, the elephant in the room is what a pitch for Windows Mobile actually should look like?

It seems like acknowledging the shitty past would be a huge gamble, because you would be reminding customers of how bad Windows Mobile was in general, which makes the customer question how much it really could have improved. Granted, everyone appreciates straight talk in theory, but they also have to weigh how many people will correctly interpret a straight message versus how many would be sucked in by the BS. Of course it would have been much easier if they had something truly interesting to offer, but let's face it, most products are not world-changing, and for a company with the kind of political overhead Microsoft has, it's already a major success to ship something that brings them up to par with other market players.
But speaking bullshit is so comforting, it makes you feel safe.

When you're synergizing your core competencies dynamically, nobody understands what you meant and nobody is going to challenge you. You have the power. You must be important, people are paying attention to you, or at least doing a good job of faking it.

Besides baffling them with bullshit is what makes meetings work, and meetings are where things get done! (aren't they?)

//Gur nobir jnf fngver
AOL Attempting to Buy Yahoo
alley insider had a good post on this subject with CEO adam d'angelo: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-i-learned-from-being-cto...

i think it's one of those group coupon-type industries. the potential has always been there, but nobody has fully executed on the potential.

to dan's point: i'm a big believer that some of the best ideas sprout from areas in the larger corporation that just don't get enough attention. yahoo is focused on a little of a lot, whereas quora has a lot of a little in mind.

i personally think quora is the next big thing, and to that end, i've already started including my profile in my email sig :)
And you don't make friends with salad, i.e. you certainly won't make tenure when your paper is demonstrated as flawed due to errors in crunching the data that would have turned up with testing.
It seems like you're being intentionally obtuse. He asked a general question about startup valuations. A general answer is perfectly possible. Whatever...
You're getting a lot of upvotes. It seems Inkscape is pretty popular. However, I'm afraid that it has been the source of most of the disappointment I'm talking about. I found it to be difficult to learn, and difficult to use once I learned it. It also produced files that wouldn't print. Of course, the latter might be a problem with my printer driver (or whatever), but, strangely, when I took an Inkscape-produced SVG, and printed it to a file -- an SVG file -- then the resulting file would print. (This was on Ubuntu, BTW.)

In any case, I'm glad lots of people have found an SVG creation tool that they like, but I'm still looking.
Not to mention that there are more top-notch data engineers in a Google cafeteria at any given moment, than there are in the entire CDC payroll.
You're right in that its not completely just the issue of technical solution or implementation.

When your friends come to you, they trust YOU to understand their problems, and know that they can lean on you (ahem, extra features please!) and that you won't run them wrong. It may be a matter of intimidation; they're too scared to ring up a web design/consulting place because of embarrassment, price rates, whatever. After all, if they really just wanted the site done, they'd have already looked at some solutions before coming to you, but often, you're the first stop.

So I wouldn't go ahead and necessarily say that their needs are being unmet, and that this is a billion dollar untapped market. I'd say your friends are ignorant of a bit of knowledge, and simply exploring their relationship network. Its the same way we'd go to our mechanic friends for an idea about getting our engines fixed, or the same way we'd ask other expertise friends for their advice.
Thanks, I'll take a look at that.
In my opinion, SquareSpace (and others) is missing the boat by not having a white-label system for web developers to resell their services invisibly.

People pay web devs because they don't want to take the TIME to learn it and do it themselves.

The reason people offer $200 is because they really want to pay someone for 8 hours of work for $200, it has NOTHING to do with web design.

If you are starting a candy store, that's the business you are in. Candy. They don't want to be web developers. At the same time, they don't have much money.

A hired hand who can do the work, manage the content, setup the design, but still use the easy tools available would be perfect. Then we COULD charge $200, be done in a few hours, and have happy clients.

Most people won't care what you use to create their site as long as you get it done and it was affordable.
They pretty much had me at profitable.

The way I read it: You're not a bozo, you know what you want your candidate to do, you make money. Pretty good to me. There isn't perfect clarity on the product, but they're keeping that under wraps for a reason.

That posting gives you a better idea for your prospective gig than 99% of posts for launched companies.
> Developers require a lot more knowledge and skills than mechanics

Oh? Care to elaborate on this statement or stop while you're ahead.
This is fair, but I also think about an essay I read (from Kevin Kelly? It might be in his new books, _What Technology Wants_), in which he points out that, basically, we've hit a plateau of about 60 MPH landspeed for most journeys. If you chart a graph of "how fast people get around on land" from 1715 to about 1950, you see a steady rise. After that, you just see... us being steady.

Ditto for air flight: from the dawn of aviation to about 1960 or 1970, you see steadily increasing speeds. Today, most planes still fly at about ~500 MPH (I think), just like they used to.

Although there are still lots of micro-innovations going on with cars, rail, and planes, they've basically hit a maximum airspeed.

I suspect something similar might be going on with the current paradigm of desktop operating systems. Since around ~2005 (when Windows XP's service packs finally caught up to virus / worm writers and OS X Tiger brought stability and full text search), nothing in operating systems has made a tangible difference in my life.

Compared to the jump from DOS to Windows 95, or from 95/98 to XP, or the late versions of Mac OS to the early versions of OS X... the current changes in operating systems just aren't that great. Which isn't to say "consumer OSes are dead"—but they've probably hit a spot where the major problems have been solved. The innovations are smaller than universal protected memory, fast, full-indexed search, and the like.

The key words above are "for this paradigm." Mobile represents the next obvious computing paradigm, and that might be a good thing. For better or worse, Microsoft has "won" the desktop and will probably never lose it. The company appears to mostly be competing with itself these days (I say, writing from an iMac).
Ah, that's a good idea. Thanks!
Right, I'll be ok. This was just my attempt at discouraging people from upvoting the next 20 such articles without resorting to the this-isnt-hacker-news-please-sandblast-me meme.
Kids who stare at screens have psych problems
As in startup? Thanks for the suggestion.

I did sort of try that a few years back, but it appeared that I would need to spend a majority of time doing marketing, which doesn't really appeal to me.
When All Else Fails, Put Up The AOL-Yahoo Trial Balloon
Personally, I am at a crossroads. I have suitable spare time to start pursuing ideas I think will provide the basis for a good idea or even work on the side with an interesting startup. I'm into boring backend things like pipes, data, security and infrastructure (software not hardware). However, owning a house and living in the South Bay puts geographic limits on where I am willing to engage with companies on a daily basis.

In addition to people starting their own thing, I've also noticed that a number of people are trying to focus a bit more on the work / life balance. Trying to get out more and enjoy nature/work out/etc. instead of working 20 hours a day. And, in some ways, this is impacting their decisions between startups and large companies.
Completely agree - brevity of thought make for a punchy article that is better to read and more likely to have an impact.

The three main killers are (1) passive voice, (2) long words and (3) jargon.

If you can write something that avoids the above (except when necessary), you're on your way to reducing any waffle that your reader may have to wade through, and if polished enough can turn into prose that shines.

Looking at the Microsoft article I can't help but think that they've said nothing at all, but the Google article has just the facts ma'am and leaves you the better for it.
That's actually pretty funny.

But I think you'd get annoyed by blurred pages taking forever to unblur and then not having anything bad on them. I think most people are desensitized anyway, and just look off-image until they can close it.
I like this white-label idea... It's essentially what most web designers do now for static websites, just using a 3rd party system. I'd bet money that most of the sites using SquareSpace, etc. have been sold BY the web designer. If you win over the hearts of the web designers, then you'll win the clients...
I would like to try to make one just to experiment a little bit; I've never really made a javascript driven website before.
True, but most of the referrals I get are friend of a friend (or more layers). However, if my mechanic friend said "Here's a really easy way to figure out the problem yourself" I would definitely take it.
Face it people! if all the internet looked like this it will be boooring, not beautiful.

If all the internet looked like any one thing, it would be boring.
Has the size of Africa changed since the last time this was submitted? It was only yesterday, and also the day before.

http://searchyc.com/submissions/size+of+africa
I think they mainly chose it because it's what the community wanted. Git is very popular with Rubyists, and Pythonistas like to be a bit different than Rubyists. Instead, they chose hg, which is essentially git, with different names for things. Hg is a perfect fit for Python, as thats about how different Python is from Ruby or vice-versa ;)
I am either giving up a huge secret or revealing how little I actually value my time...

You guys are giving up a huge opportunity.

It is easy to make a thousand or more per week from these types of jobs. A thousand isn't a lot, but it is easily done in a few hours.

If they are paying commodity prices, then you give them a commodity.

The key? Boiler - Plate. Have a standard contract. Have a standard website theme, perhaps with multiple skins. Make it easy for them to enter their own content. You can build a decent CMS in a few hours or a great CMS in 10-15 (for clients like this that don't need extensibility). Amortize it over the 5-10 websites you're selling each week and you're time costs go down drastically.

I stumbled onto this strategy accidentally.

I had nothing else to do for a few hours.

My BATNA was earn $0/hour. I wasn't going to let my pride get in the way of easy money.

So I took a small "build me a website" job. Knowing they had small requirements, it was easily done in a few hours. I kept getting more requests, I kept sending out virtually the same website, over and over. I was getting them onto the host I use also and making an additional $50-$100 for each client as well.

Eventually it was only a matter of explaining how hosting works and how to add new pages and content. After the 30-45 minute explanation, it was coming out to move like $400/hour rather than $200 for a website.

Big Tip: Record your phone calls and meetings when you're explaining how hosting works and how to work your CMS. Go over what you said each time and work to actively improve it. Take 30 minutes, record screen capture videos with voice over. Give these to the client when you give them the minor training required.
This reminds me of: http://37signals.com/02

Unfortunately many people think that bullshitting is required and it is the secret to marketing and making money.
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This doesn't help as much as you might expect. To be a decent JVM-hosted language developer, you still need to be a reasonably handy Java developer, even if you aren't writing pure Java. You need to know a fair a bit about the basics of the JVM, the core Java class libraries, the Java ecosystem in general. So, a junior Java developer, which is what the author is looking for in the first place.
that's pretty delusional. Users don't care about protocols, they care about interface usability. And the ONLY thing that makes a social network valuable is its users. There will always be more room for more niche social networks with well defined UX constraints if developers continue the facebook trend of bloat sites with ambiguous constraints.
What insider trading information does Google aggregate?
Ah,

and that brings us back to why many scientists don't publish at all now...

As long as not publishing code is standard, there's a incentive to do it since it might open you to career-withering criticism...
Seems like he discovered Riemann's hypothesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
Just one more important thing about Social Bookmarking sites
see a lot of people who participate in social bookmarking sites and create new account just to submit their links, then never look around or vote for articles, and I must say that this hit and run strategy is not good!
Linux is also driving the increase in cloud computing though, those web services that are replacing OSS code are being ran on linux, meaning it's really a special case.
"something that set Diaspora up for a far more epic failure"

Is Diaspora a failure? How did the Kickstarter model set them up for this failure in your opinion?
Impact of Google Instant on paid search
Blu-ray DVD to MP3 Ripper
Just the mere act of taking a payment increases workload in weird ways(tax/negotiations with venues etc.). Also, you could charge a penny and it'll flip the switch in some people's minds that YC owes them something.

So let's say YC delays the announcement by a day...no matter how good the vast majority of folks are, there will be those whining about how they paid and didn't get what was promised and sigh were ripped off. It's a hassle YC can probably live without.
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