skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have decided to change the name of my web application. The old name was just not good enough. I have been blogging and building Google pagerank on the old domain for close to a year. What steps do I hvae to take not to loose the traffic/pagerank that I have built so far?
How To Find New Books To Read
Baltimore, 2, 29 & 30
Microsoft dead?  Please.  [Apparently not everyone agrees with Paul]
This blog is like many of the comments ( http://programming.reddit.com/info/1fyou/comments ) on the Reddit discussion about Paul's essay. I think a lot of people are missing the point. Microsoft has lost, perhaps irrevocably, their overwhelming dominance over the industry.
Well said. I have a couple of blog wrinkles on your view from a year ago:

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2005/11/msft_will_not_b.html
OpenOffice on /Windows/ actually has the ability to perturb the revenue stream in interesting ways.

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2005/11/i_started_the_w.html
Why they can't just spend their way out of the hole, and why they can't actually motivate the troops under Ozzie.
I remember reading an article that alleged microsoft had "gifted" few bloggers with some laptops. Is this author also trying for that ;-)

MS word or operating system, if people are given something better and they adapt to it, then MSFT will be history. Regarding huge tons of money in MSFT reserve, those will turn to dust. Money cant buy or stem things
Microsoft will still be THE MAN on the desktop and enterprise for a long time (I just switched to Mac however. Parallels rocks).
And .Net is what will keep them ticking. (Office too, but that's a different post. Have you seen what MindManager has done with Word?)
If anyone wants to put the last nail in their coffin, build a better .Net. And do it with Lisp.

.Net shows what we have needed for a long time. A consistent development platform where it doesn't really matter what language you program in. Everything gets compiled down the same way, everyone uses the same API and libraries.
But the syntax is locked away and guarded (big surprise coming from a monopolist). You can't easily find it, and you sure as hell can't easily change it. And even if you do, the byte-code doesn't offer any more power than the over-language.
All you can do is beg for a change, and maybe a year later you will get a watered down version.

Free us from our syntax chains.

You've gone on at length about how cool Lisp is. How it can be morphed into whatever language is needed at the time.
So prove it. Fix .Net by describing the language syntax in Lisp. Give the end programmer the ability to see and adjust their chosen language to behave as needed on a project by project basis. And do it in a way that will actually get used.

Instead of making a 100 year language, make a 100 year platform where the language can shift as the problems and fads do.
It won't be easy, but it might just change the world.
This could quite possibly be one of the worst written articles I've read this year. The points your bring up are beyond childish and really have little information to back it up. So you claim a few groups of yours are using Apple computers, my god that must mean everybody is! I really am not going to argue with you here, Microsoft is clearly not dead.
see also http://profilelinker.com/
MS is dead that in that it doesn't need to be feared anymore, yes. Nowadays, when MS peceives a startup to be a threat, they rather them acquire them than out-compete them; it's cheaper.

Also, I can see Microsoft changing already. .Net Framework v3.0 is actually impressive (which follows tradition: MS always needs three tries to deliver something that is any good).

They're definitely catering to the web now with WPF+WPF/E+XML+Atlas+Expression tools, etc.; these are acually great tools (even if rough around the edges) and they can exist and be used alongside all the open source and standards stuff (yes, WPF/E runs on say Firefox on Linux as well); there is no conflict anymore.

So, take your average Windows developer/ISV: they know Windows stuff and now they get a bunch of extra tools to help them develop for the web. Why on earth would they switch to Linux or Apple development? By staying with Windows they can slowly migrate their apps and their customers to the web without disrupting anything.

And MS has both the resources and the patience to go the distance with this.

MS Dead? Nah, don't see it happening. MS no longer to be feared? Sure, but, uh, in what way does that matter, except to incumbent startups?
"A duck can swim, walk and fly. But an eagle flies faster and more skillfully, fish are better swimmers and just about anything on legs can outrun a duck." In other words, ducks can do a lot of things but they are not experts in any of them. So, in your business, don't be a duck! "

Great analogy! I've gotten similar advice from a number of people. Must be worth something :-)
IT. MIS. Automation. It's the only career whose objective is to make yourself obsolete.
Quote: "It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web."

Well..........
1. I don't trust the web providers server security.
2. I don't trust the network security on the Internet.
3. I don't trust that the Feds - they can obtain my "web-based" stuff through subpoenas or other means.

....so I won't be usimg web-based applications for anything personal any time soon!

Sean
Hamilton, New Zealand, 1, 24
A dead snake can still kill you.

-Ramon
well, is IBM dead?

It seems to me that the word dead really sends people off the edge.

IBM is doing better than they were when they made computers. To give them credit, Microsoft could be in the transitional phase. I mean, can you honestly say that you've never played 20 straight hours of Halo on an XBox? I know I can't.

Call me optimistic or just crazy, but I still believe that Microsoft is a competitor in technological innovation. I think Google will suffer from the same condition that plagued Microsoft during 2001-2005 (massive egos). This will help other companies (including Microsoft) get their footing and potentially launch a comeback (as Apple did).

It seems easy to denounce Microsoft as an evil corporation. It's harder to recognize that they have battles of their own. Remember those antitrust cases? Microsoft was given grief for packaging IE into Windows (let's see, who else packages a wad of their own software into their operating system? hmmmmm.....). Do a search for torrents and you can find the latest Windows (or any windows version). Did geeks believe that stealing someone's hard work was cool? Hell yes. Microsoft is the paranoid old man that it is because we helped put it there while we give graces and laud Google and Apple.

I use a Thinkpad running Windows XP (and Ubuntu).

To address your Apple computer usage by geeks: it's the same problem with most amateur photographers, they still think fancy toys are vital in making a photograph (ie having Mac OSX in no way improves your abilities as a designer).

Like many others have said: stick around and let's see what happens.

Meanwhile, anyone up for a game of ultimate frisbee?
Maybe the best solution to avoid all the confusion would have been to title the essay: "Microsoft's Monopoly is Dead", but this is far less eye-catching than the title used. It also wouldn't have stirred up the attention the article is getting nearly as much.
The language makes it sound more like they are going after people who mass-produce illegal copies of windows.
MS no longer to be feared? Sure, but, uh, in what way
does that matter, except to incumbent startups?

What kind of world do you live in, jvdvyah?

Suppose you spent considerable resources learning Java, and one morning M$ wakes up a says; "what company or technology should I kill today?" and they decide to kill Java.

Suppose M$ bribes a public (or private) manager, or a State Senator (Marc Pacheco from MA comes to mind) because they don't like ODF. If you were betting on ODF you are suddenly collecting unemployment.

-RFH
See:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/012409.html

I don't think users like name changes though. Is the name too long?
I think the link from the essay to this comment page caused an enormous number of dumb users to register here, much like the Web 2.0 article with reddit.
Will the corpse of Microsoft be considered toxic waste?
London Valley Map - Google MyMap of London startup locations
I think not selecting anyone would be bad for reputation. They're already starting out "in the hole", so to speak, and failing to select the ten they say they're looking for would confirm evilness for some people, and raise the question for others.
To rephrase, does Paul suggest that Apple is dead as well? If not, how are they going to survive according to paul in the Google Apps/Web 2.0 Era?
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada;2;26,28
Microsoft Expanding By 1 Million SF in Bellevue
Why Google IS afraid of Microsoft, big time
Lessons from Greatness
"Shielded in a cloak of ignorance and enthusiasm we're arrogant enough to think we can change the world and not yet jaded enough to understand the odds against us doing so" - Peter Nixey on Startups
"Demo or die" - 5 secrets to success
I have no idea what you're talking about. To me, this looks like a classic Brockmann-style hardcore Swiss grid design. Very conscious of macro- and micro-typography, negative space, hierarchy. Beautiful - to say the least...
Bristol, UK; 2; 21, 20
Great writing! I guess there are VC's like that. Very entertaining read ;)

Fortunately there are others that seem quite a bit better. For instance, Greg McAdoo's (of Sequoia) talk at Startup School was pretty impressive - a good look into how one of the best VC firms really works.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/106570487/Startup_School_2007-Greg_McAdoo.mp3
Lotus 123 and WordPerfect were also crushed by Microsoft.
Huh. I just read about this, after following the track about "Magic Ink" to look for where the idea of GUIs came from. A lot of what's in Engelbart's demo looks surprisingly modern. Considering that it's been about 40-50 years, that's pretty amazing.
Great article on EC2! The author misnamed the article though since it hardly mentions anything at all about Rails specifically. Regardless, definitely a good read and introduction to the pros/cons of EC2 for beginners.
"what can a user do with my product that he can't do without it?"

Not clear to me. Do you mean vis-a-vis the competition?
For example, with juwo, you can see the table of contents of the audio/video clip. This functionality is also available in some of the flash players. Do you remove the overlapped feature?
NYC, 26, 29, 32, 35
Just because they're like that in Founder Hell doesn't mean they're like that on Sand Hill Road.

You could choose to read the joke as meaning that "They're only like that in Hell" ;-)
Facebook's 'young' and 'technical' performance requirements must be off the wall ;)

For the vast majority of apps, the latency will not be an issue. Especially since S3DFS has caching built in.

A good example is SmugMug who switches over to use S3 to serve out images when they are working on their own datacenter. Don McCaskill (their CEO and head programmer) says that switching back and forth was completely transparent to their users with no human-discernible latency. For more, see:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/03/08/amazon-s3-the-speed-of-light-problem/

http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/files/ETech-SmugMug-Amazon-2007.pdf
Visual Confusion

The main flaw I see, using clarity of communication as a standard, is the lack of right justification. This is compounded with the quoted material that is also not right justified. It looks confusing.

Hierarchical Differentiation

Also, the quoted material is slightly smaller than the main text. The text size difference should vary in a greater degree if the idea is to have the text size differentiate between the kind of message being expressed. (In this case differentiating the source of the message.)

Lack of Consistency

The article uses a blank line as a way to differentiate paragraphs. This rule is broken in the fourth paragraph.
LOL! Let's see...three years of beta... Talk about plausible deniability. Hey, we can't vouch for the quality. It's only beta! :)
With regard to the thesis Microsoft is Dead and it was Google that killed them, some food for thought:

How Microsoft could crush Google in one easy step: http://tinyurl.com/2y8dbh
Stick it out, yo. Cross your fingers and hope for the best. Otherwise, keep on trunkin'
He he, good point ;) Once again, great writing!
How did you find your business partners?
VentureBlog: Paul Graham is Today's Prius
Florida and Chicago, 25 and 31, respectively.
O'Reilly Radar:  Startup Centers
what's race got to do with it? - Cyndi Lauper
I will assume that showing the table of contents for a media clip is more of a feature in your product rather than your product itself. I would not remove a feature just because the competition also has the feature. I would remove it if the feature isn't critical to the central idea, the main motivation behind the product. So in that sense, the competition is irrelevant in this discussion as long as your central idea is reasonably unique.
Remember, that this data representation was only a 'smell test' as they defined it - and for most purposes here that's all that's needed ;)

Here's the original article with much more info:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup_centers.html
No, its just a name that have nothing to do with my application. The name misrepresents what the application does. and I don't have many users, so I think it will be fine.
The Programmer's Stone
The "Big Ball of Mud" Pattern
If you've ever worked with mediocre developers, you've seen this.
1. I guess full justification on the web is not a viable option (no hyphenation, no control over rivers).

2. On my machine PC/Firefox the font is considerably smaller. Just checked: The anti aliased Mac version is still obviously smaller. The indent also helps. I guess if it were too small it becomes difficult to read. But again, this is a matter of taste (among specialists) and not so much an objective design flaw. This site is 100 times superior in terms of design to anything I have seen in the last couple of weeks.

3. As far as I can see this line announces the update, thus a harsh break. That's why it's so loud. I have no problem with that either.

To say that the form contradicts the message is WAY out of line.

Just checked your website www.gibson-design.com. You must be joking...
Paul Graham, you are so Not Enterprisey. Thank You!

What some of the (ok, us) "older" folks don't realize is that the younger generation will bring their technology to work with them and it will eat away at the corporate desktop from within despite all the "we need a big vendor to cover our asses when the Fed regulators come a knockin'" attitudes that prevail in that world. And IBM is still there to beat them down from above.
Mark Cuban: Success & Motivation Series
Is Microsoft dead? Feh.
Google Maps adds "My Maps" - you can save a map with a bunch of placemarks, lines and shapes
I'd love to see a mashup of O'Reilly's list of cities with the locations of funding applications sent to VCs. You could throw in another one with all the YC/Techstars applicants.
I was joking!
Looks like you can share them: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&om=1&z=15&msid=110242485016184900177.00000111ced0521a41949&msa=0

And there are kml feeds for everything

I wonder how flagr feels about this.
There just isn't enough space here anymore!!! From my 11x22 at Live Search to a 11x11 WITH 6 others at MSCOM!!! Someday, I am gonna have to call the fire department :-D ....
Well the truth cannot be shut down, it will come out eventually. Just like this author says there are more talks of PG, i ahve lately noticed a rise in anti-PG stuff, its rather sad to see people trying to obscure the truth by false statements and rumours. My only question to PG/YC bashers is

if ! (PG/YC)

whatelse can you offer that is better?

else

STFU
I owe my perseverance to this book and the team at 37Signals.com !!!
I met mine through a mutal friend. He had the product idea and could do everything needed except for the technical side of things. My name was eventually brought up and I got a phone call later that night to go over the idea. A week later I had a prototype version ready to demonstrate and we moved on from there. That was 5 years ago and we're still business partners to this day.
An exploration of the art of computer programming.
Mark Cuban on his entrepreneurship experience.
What disclaimer statement should you release with your software? (one line or one page?)
"No Warranty is implied, express or implicit"

Is this enough?
Just when you think you might never need to see a <scroll> tag again ...
I would like to accept that MS is dead, but I can't until MacOS and Linux start making a better showing in my webserver logs. MS can't die as long as they still have a lock on the end user.
SecondLife: Revolutionary Virtual Market or Ponzi Scheme?
'... Microsoft is not dead, because (come on get real) it's a company, and companies aren't living, and they don't die ...' [0]

It's always good to read a collory argument. In this case Dave Winer.

Can't help think that Dave misses the point. MS is dead in the sense they are no longer the dominant force in software technology. Especially true in the eyes of the young consumer. Remember when MS was a consumer OS company instead of just another supplier to (Big) Business.

I do like the idea of cycle of tech companies and appeals to the empiricist in me.

Reference

[0] The Corporation, a film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot, Joel Baken, 2003, "'... Corporation lawyers gained rights through the US Supreme Court using the 14th Amendment (set up to protect slaves) that gives them the rights of a person ...' As for corporations not living, they do have the the rights of a living person, distastefully garnered from rights assigned to liberate slaves. PDF 34Kb"

http://www.thecorporation.com/media/DVD_Chapters.pdf
25 years ago I grabbed a job writing for ComputerWorld Australia and quickly settled on a methodology of getting two more names from anybody I spoke to. Within months I had had contact with just about everybody in the local computer industry with the exception of IBM. No leads led there, at least not until much later when I heard from Boyd Munro who had been our IBM rep back when I was learning to program (Assembler) and to analyse and design systems, but even he did not provide much in the way of links back to IBM as he was busy with his own software company by then.

A generation later "They're in a different world." clearly applies to M$ the way it did to IBM in 1982, though IBM's shadow was still large enough to inspire Apple's 1984 commercial.
Dude, have you seen that WaPo thing?

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/washington-post-redesign-as-a-wiki
1. Is this something that can be fixed? One solution many sites use is to have a color differentiation (or a graphic element) that defines the right side of text, making it easier for the eye to scan the text.

2. Mine is also PC/Firefox (very high res monitor). (I tried it on a lower res monitor, and it looked much better (ie more differentiation)

3. On my high-res screen, 2 of the paragraphs at this location ran together. On my low res screen, they do not.

-The page looks much better in lower res.

For my site, you are right, it is vastly out of date. (I was the 7th architect on the web in 1995, and used front-page.) I am holding off on the overhaul (there are so many pages) to make the entire site active using the technology my startup company is creating, probably won't get to it until later in the year. In spite of the retro look, I do get a lot of traffic on it.
Google Voice Local Search Launched (pale in comparison)
I think what he's referring to is not so much 'small nasty' vs 'big hard' but rather the work to reward ratio.

If you solve P = NP, your work and reward are high.

If you solve 'My website is having performance issues' the work may be hard, but the reward is getting to do it again next week (if you're lucky)
http://labs.google.com/goog411 for those that want the url. I've seen the sms version around for a while.

'... The service can't understand me. What should I do? ... if you own a mobile phone, use Google SMS instead. ...' [0]

I like the comments in the faq if you cannot get the system to understand your query.

Reference

[0] google labs, "Q4, 411 faq"

http://labs.google.com/goog411/faq.html#not_understand
Gainesville, FL; 2; 21, 18.
It's pretty obvious to the MILLIONS of developers and hackers that not only survive but thrive in the Windows world that you really have ignored them for your entire career. You live in one ecosystem we live in another,

The main difference between us and you is that you feel it necessary to throw stones at us (or in this case verbal diarrhea) every so often and we are happy to let you live in your world, and respect you for it, while we happily go about our business shaking our heads at how absolutely uninformed you are about our world.

You are part of the problem not part of the solution.

See you in a couple of years when you pop your head out of your hole and shit all over us again.
True to a certain extent, but I would say that the XBOX also features pretty nifty software. Its Dashboard and Blade-UI make for what is arguably the best entertainment computer experience. Oh, and don't forget XBOX Live.
Note #1 of "Why to Not Not Start a Startup" implies that YC also does convertible debt. http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html#f1n
I also think it helps to note that Microsoft is now breaking even on XBOX console hardware (this may have changed given the announcement of the new Elite model). Barely, but still a good sign that they knew what they were doing when they released before Sony without a proprietary video disc player.
We worked together (directly) in a corporate IT department.
Alpha test a fellow news.yc startup: Wamily.com
Wamily.com recently went into alpha... I know the founders would love it if you gave it a spin and posted your thoughts.

If you need an invite code, try VAYNK9.
Upmodded, since we drink too much of the yc kool-aid as it is :)

That's not to say the Microsoft hasn't jumped the shark.. but it is refreshing to hear the other side.
'... The biggest danger in committing one or more years of your life to a startup is not that you wont be as rich as you could be, but that if things go wrong you will have to re-enter the employment market with no observable career progression and the stigma of a failed business behind you. ...'

An observable cultural difference b/w Anglo cultures in the UK and Australia and the States. Not so in the US where you, 'fail to success' (by observation). An important point to consider why there are less startups. It's not for the lack of talent, but ultra-conservative business culture.
The most important rule
It is one of the legs of the dog (as in the blog post). If you are interested, I can email you a demo link.
Great points. I think that part of what microsoft doesn't understand is that it's no longer completely about the bottom line. Customer satisfaction is the driving force of the web 2.0 movement, and while I think that microsoft is hardly dead, it needs to evolve a great deal (basically reiterating what Paul said). I disagree that the desktop is dead though, I think that many people overestimate the capabilities of the of the web as it is today (give it a few more years). This might just be me overreaching and being completely wrong, but I believe that desktops will have a greater role in the far future because people will be able to host and manage their own slices of the internet. In a few years the desktop will be the equivalent of a glorified facebook profile and weblog hosted by the individual, and the user experience will be something of an integrated desktop/internet environment with web 2.0 companies reduced to widgets downloaded onto the desktop. Maybe. Thanks for the good essay Paul.