skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the biggest problem with this hope is security -- whatever you expose in the api will be available to any arbitrary web site you visit. They can't expose contacts and other private info without major problems. There might be some ways around this (e.g. asking for permission, trusting certain sites) but it is hard to see how this will be completely seamless as they want the experience to be.
Thanks dood. Excellent advice.

Everyone, pg included, agrees that I talk too much. So I'll definitely cut out some of the unnecessary exposition. Now that you mention it, it seems obvious that I don't need to tell people why they would want to see the demo or the introductory video. It really takes another pair of eyes to spot these kinds of things (maybe design gods can do it all for themselves, but I never would have figured it out for myself).
I finally have to accept that pg was right...I talk way too damned much, and everyone agrees. So the text is getting a serious pruning.

I'll make the demo more visible. The demo is, in fact, on a slow machine--it's a qemu instance on the server itself. I'm moving it to a much faster xen or EC2 this week sometime. It is now doing double duty as the Webmin demo server, so at any given time there are several people logged in. It's working pretty hard for such a wimpy system.

As for the quote being little risque, that's OK in my book. We're not the stodgy choice (that'd be cPanel), so the stodgy "nobody ever got fired for buying cPanel" folks won't buy what we're selling anyway. I think it's downright wonderful that a customer said it on a whim, so I couldn't help but take the opportunity to share it.

I've renamed Docs to Documentation.

I'll try bumping the nav links up a notch.

Thanks for the great tips staunch.
I knew you'd say that (about the too much text). Everyone seems to agree, though. Somehow I still manage to talk too damned much.

Text is being pruned as we speak. I'll see what I can do about the screenshots.
the article seems more nostalgic than practical; languages/technologies that provide higher layers of abstraction generally prove to be winners in the medium to long run. i don't know if flex is the next big higher layer of abstraction for the web (and the analogy is a little broken because flex isn't really built directly on top of html/css/js.)

but i would love something that abstracts away the arcane bullshit that you have to deal with when manually dealing with html, css, js, browser incompatibilities, etc. in the same way that python/other HLLs abstract away the details handled manually with lower level languages (e.g. memory management, creating data structures more complex than a linked list, etc.)
5 Ways to Improve Your Pricing
Hey comatose,

Thanks for the pointers. All good advice, and I agree with most of it.

I won't comment on the too much text any further, since all YC newsies agree. I will cut text with reckless abandon.

I've rejiggered the "four ways" paragraph to put what those ways are in the first sentence.

I agree about more color...being weak on design limits my capacity to actually do so without making it look like angry fruit salad. I've forced myself to use a very limited palette of carefully selected colors to avoid that problem. But I'll see about getting some more accent colors in their. I do plan to add screenshots to the About/Find out more page.

As for the "new Virtualmin.com" part, I think we probably do need it for another few weeks. We had 4000+ registered users, and 500+ paying customers, on the old site, and I had to issue them new usernames and passwords (derived from the old...but the new policies prevent the old from working as they were). So, even though I sent them all email about the change, not everyone got that email, and might need some guidance on getting logged in with the new details. It will go away soon, though, to be replaced by a "news" section, probably.
Interesting. By those descriptions, using different prices is almost like matching different products to different sets of customers.
You said it in your summary: "...it's just as much work to maintain your social life while doing a startup as it does to maintain your startup itself."

Don't be discouraged though. You're at least bringing up important topics.
PG is going to sue You...
In particular, you can hide a bounded stack in a State monad, so you could prevent the thing from leaking unbounded memory without any garbage collector magic at all. I guess it would be nice if you could bound the total heap rather than one particular stack in your program, but I don't think that in practice that would justify the added complexity in the garbage collector. It would be interesting, though, and that has been known in the past to be sufficient reason for people to try and extend Haskell...
plug this into a google search:

foo site:news.ycombinator.com

Most site's search features honk. I use this all the time.
Flex has severe graphical performance issues on big surfaces: think of a giant 100% flash website, maximized 1600x1200. This is why most flash games, even simple ones, prefer to run in a tiny window in the middle. (as originally designed). In other words, it does not scale to a "web site" level, but rather allows you to have richer "components" on your page, like advanced charts and such.
That is a classic blunder.
Well, lacking any other details in your post: a coin;-)

I'd pick the one I liked the most.
Hrm. I didn't like the quote at the top myself. I thought it focused too much on the people making the thing, rather than something like "Thanks to Virtualmin, I can manage 31415926 servers in just 10 minutes a day!" or "Here at hornywetsluts dot com, virtualmin has been a blessing - it let us take our business to the next level"... Something customer focused, in short.
'... pg implemented the search feature ... foo site:news.ycombinator.com ...'

My thoughts exactly about 5min change with a bit of static html. Not much effort for search. It doesn't have to be permanent. We sure need this functionality, now.
You're about three months late: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780
See also http://tastyresearch.wordpress.com/work-stories/
I like this comment

"yawn

I work at Google, am fully vested, and could retire tomorrow if I wanted to. I continue to work here because it actually is the most interesting place in the world to work at.

Once again you've written a sensationalistic piece based on cursory research that only serves to confirm your preconceived notions about the world. Only this time, I don't suspect you're wrong, I know you are."
The screenshots need to NOT fly by. Put a link, "Next ScreenShot" at the top. I call this the "Forbes Magazine slideshow problem", because forbes does that to a ridiculous degree.

One thing: I've used products like this in the past, and really didn't like them. Yours certainly looks nicer, but the big problem is that most admins (most good admins) like to stay closer to the command line. So, a quick suggestion: When someone envokes this or that command by clicking around, stick it in a rolling log, clearly visible.

So, if I press "Start Tomcat", I see a little box that says:

/etc/init.d/tomcat5 start

...and if I press "Restart Machine" I see:

shutdown -9 now

...if you know what I'm saying. This will allow people to see precisely what's going on, and let them ditch the admin screen as needed and replicate the commands manually.
Just a small point, but on Firefox on Linux the "Lost Password / Register " links don't render properly (unless you make the font really small). Makes the page look a bit messy.
Actually, it's remarkably easy to upgrade a bad team when you have a great market.

Cisco.
Looky here, somebody speaks French i see...Hehe, I recognised the same translation on the front page. I am sure it is a common word but it would be nice to change that indeed. So it does not offend anyone.
5&1/2 lessons that legitimate retailers can learn from pirates [dive into mark]
This is really just a big ad for Squidoo. Still interesting though.
I bet you could get creative enough with the law to allow foreigners to work without a proper visa.

I am not a lawyer but I imagine if the team can get a tourist visa for three months, their new company was incorporated off-shore, in Ireland or the British Virgin Islands, and paid them in their home countries in advance for three months work that they could live in the Bay Area and participate fully with the added bonus of lower corporate taxes.

Or everyone could go to jail.
Is the video currently being delivered using the P2P tech? The platform note indicates that the P2P is still being tested.

Congrats on being techcrunched, I actually graduated about a month ago with a couple of the founders.
Working at Microsoft compared to Google compared to Yahoo
I'll point out the non-obvious fact that everyone is seeing a different quote, every time they load the page. So, the quote you didn't like is probably not the same one the parent did. ;-)

It's just nice things people have been telling us lately. The selection of quotes will grow over time.

I should probably grill you two to find out exactly which quotes you did and didn't like.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. That was due to some other suggested changes. Should be fixed now in the style sheet.
Quick summary: http://tastyresearch.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/newchart.png
Not to kick a dead horse, but I agree with everyone that there's too much text. It isn't just a problem on the front page, but all across the site.

On another note, why is your software better than cPanel?
I would advocate adding the ability to ignore users who join after a specified date. This would allow everyone to freeze the community just the way they like it. I think it would be an elegent hack in lieu of competent recommendation.
Stunning presentation of superfast inkjet printer
Hey mynameishere,

Thanks for the suggestions. I was kind of worried about the screenshots, myself. I'll add forward/back clickies.

Actually, we're pretty much with you on the "show people what's happening" train, though we don't always show the command being executed (it's often not actually commands, but processing of configuration files and such--restarting services is a tiny part of what we do), we do generally show the command line output of the commands we run. So, restarting a service does give you back the results from the initscript.

And to go further on that theme, my book (published by No Starch in '03 and now combined with Jamie's book from the Bruce Perens Open Source series and online for free at http://doxfer.com/Webmin) is pretty heavily focused on connecting up the GUI to the command line. We're not into hocus pocus and hiding the system from the user--our interest is in making it easier to get things done right fast.

I'll also mention that Virtualmin is based on Webmin, which is religious about being polite to command line editing of configuration files. You can twist your httpd.conf into a tiny little ball and toss it in a corner, and as long as the syntax is valid, Webmin will deal with it correctly. It respects comments, the order of the file, and won't overwrite your changes (except where it has been told to do so). It is a wholly different kind of product than Plesk or cPanel (which are pretty much all-or-nothing, and don't permit anyone else to touch the config files). Webmin's got over 300,000 lines of code to deal with all of that stuff correctly...nobody else even tries.

But, now I'm talking too much. ;-)

Thanks again for your thoughts.
I also use ehealthinsurance.
Nope, still there for me :( Although it's broken in a different way now...
In theory P2P sounds like a nice idea, on the other hand, why bother, if other services (YouTube) offer to host the video for free?

I mean what is the incentive for the user to run the P2P network?
Stevey's Blog Rants: Rhino on Rails (straight from the horse's mouth)
I agree it's pretty ad-like, and that's an amazingly great marketing lesson itself. Most founders squander their interview opportunities talking about stuff that's far too boring for potential users to care. I'll take a passionate pitch-like interview over a boring dry one any day.
Would you delay your education for a startup?
I see. If you've forced bigger fonts it pushes things around some. I'll have to work on that. A white-space: nowrap for that div makes the login form unbreakable, but it can break the rest of the page with fonts even two notches bigger than what I've specified. That's a problem (I force bigger fonts myself, quite often...).

Thanks for pointing it out.
How strong must a business plan/startup be before you would consider delaying your undergraduate education by a semester (possibly indefinitely) for the sake of pursuing the opportunity? To narrow this down, assume you're a sophomore in a well-known college and it's a 6-7 person startup with plenty of big-name backing (no, of course this doesn't apply to a real-world situation I'm in :-D).
The book "Information Rules" goes much more in depth into the theory behind the pricing of information goods. I attempted to capture the gist of it in my summary:

http://tinyurl.com/ys99ah

(hopefully not being spammed at the moment)

Wikipedia, as always, has more information as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Aaron Mentele: "The good touch / bad touch of small business growth"
Aha, wasn't sure, should have quoted it. It was something to the effect of "I'm sure you already know this, but you rock".

Not to comment at all on your degree of 'rocking', just that as a quote it doesn't do too much for me:-)
Right on Aaron! Too many of us get buried in work resulting in lower productivity even as we think that we are keeping on top. I'm a big fan on the 'one day off a week' rule. No matter what, take that day off. Turn the cel off. Go to the beach. Make love with your significant other, or whatever else takes you out of yourself. After all the ultimate goal of business success is enhancing our quality of life . . . isn't it?
I'll go with the basic thesis. Long before the internet boom (yes I'm over 50) I was scratching ideas out on the back of an envelope and developing new businesses. Of course ideas are a dime a dozen. What counts is the ability and the tenacity to grow the business and see it through. Most savvy investors understand this, even the VCs that demand detailed business plans.
"From what we managed to figure out on our own, the key is to make sure your app works well in Safari (duh!) and to make sure you optimize fonts and layout for iPhone's resolution 480x320 (it has a very high DPI count though)."

It seems the slowness of AT&T's EDGE network will be a big constraint too. 100s for the Amazon.com homepage to load, 2 minutes for yahoo.com, according to the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html
In the state of Hawaii, tax breaks make tech investments nearly risk-free?
AFAICT, private investments in software (or other tech) startups up to $2 million are basically repaid by the state. (Over 5 years, front-loaded, through refundable state income tax credits. Credits against taxes owed, not deductions from taxable income. And refundable, meaning if credits exceed debts, the state will cut a check to the taxpayer.)

So it works likes this: Investors give you money. The state gives it back to them. Any amount you do not piss away is profit for them. Am I missing something? Why haven't I heard of this before?

Side note: Any other n.ycers in Hawaii? If so, anyone going to the Hawaii Venture Capital Association lunch this Thursday?
I think "no career path" means that how exactly you become a manager is not formally defined. I haven't seen a good formal requirements for managers yet.
Contracting rules of thumb from one of the Postgres guys, plus database advice
Say NO to Google.
Say NO to Microsoft.
Say YES to your startup.
The Pmarca Guide to Startups, Part 5: The Moby Dick theory of big companies
Wow, what an effort. I'd like to think he could have taken one [Pylons | TurboGears | Django] and reworked them into something closer than Rails, but to each his own.
Create a classifieds/auctions listings only for Facebook apps that is a facebook app in itself :)
Apple stock will not grow until Leopard ships? Their stock is up 100% over 1 year. It's up ~50% YTD.
Facebook App users have 5 apps installed on average
I make trivial money from them. Enough for hosting and a bottle of wine now and then. But that sure beats paying someone to host them.
dukudu.de sells for $58,192
Which "arcane bullshit" do you have in mind? People talk a lot about browser incompatibilities, but the most serious ones are no longer real (nobody uses NS4) and the others are mostly covered by libraries such as jQuery. (though it is true that some of the browsers are simply lacking certain features)
I guess IIT Powai had started KRSIT course for this sort thing. Although, it seems thats not very much successful.

Anyway, the main reason as already stated is that such people land in US rather than in India to become rich!

And even if someone builds such product in India, US is the main market to sell it. Selling the product remotely is not that easy!
Programming a hurricane-tracking website from scratch
LinkedIn IPO Looming?
Another problem with the rotating screenshots...I clicked on the small version to see it bigger and got a different screenshot.
Facebook Frenzy: Facebook Apps Getting Acquired
Help test this facebookIM. what do you think?
I love the last paragraph:

"On the user experience side of things, we're not even close to tapping out the potential of HTML. The majority of web sites and applications still suck. And if most developers and designers can't make a clean run with the training wheels and constricted playground of HTML, then we probably are in no rush to start playing with a Ducatti on the Autobahn."

So true. For example, lots of web pages have a screen version and a print version, and in most cases they could have just used CSS media to have just one version.
You just add the app and ask a friend or two to do the same, then you can test it.
Valleywag Jobs: Engineers Wanted (a few startups)
Is the bubble back?  Bleeding red CampusU Files for IPO
Warcraft "Support Group" Funded
Why the downmods? Isn't it reasonable to expect that anyone reading here would recognize "What do you know" as a joke?
Marc, you're totally on a roll with these essays. One typo: "quit pro quo" should be "quid quo pro."
Thanks for the comment pg. I will apply for the next YC funding cycle,and will bother about the Visa and all after getting called :-).
but he owns a memorable domain and I don't use bookmarks that much for some reason.
Ouch... I guess systems change quite a bit from place to place. In Italy, health care is pretty much just "free" for everyone.
I did say it was "..as much WORK!" - as in, it's really hard to maintain a social life.
"Page not found" as of 9:43am EST
I emailed Daniel and Jason a few days ago. Daniel says they hope to make some improvements to the search in the future, I requested more filtering, e.g. by poster's name. He said Jason would know if it was behind in indexing -- I thought it was.
Nice. I like how it searches the text of the links instead of just the titles and comments.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077
After I wrote this comment, I deleted it...
MySpace Videos To Become MySpace TV, YouTube Competitor
Me too. I worked out I can spacebar over them.
What Really Happens After your Company gets Bought
The Lean Blogosphere (Lean can be and actually has been applied to practically every industry)
I'd like feedback in the list of clues as to what ones have been filled in so I can scan the list of clues looking for the next one to work on. Perhaps indicate which ones I have answered compared to everyone else.
When developers design (be invisible: don't create something that some people may love, but the majority completely hate)
Timing Ain't Everything
Yup, definitely a good idea - I'll get it working soon. Thanks!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30919 points out that it is quite a bit behind in indexing news.yc posts.
Yeah, I need to work on that.
Also, it was a little jarring for the clues to be all lower-case. I think frequent crossword solvers may be used to each clue being a sentance with a full-stop, even if it's just "Begin." Unless that varies by nation.
MySpace, Chasing YouTube, Upgrades Its Offerings (MySpace TV will be set up as an independent Web site)
I wasn't aware of the search feature the Big Head Labs hacked together until recently. Unlike the work Jason has done, ycsearch.com has absolutely no technical achievements (on my part). I spent 30 minutes to put it together because I want to use it. ycsearch.com does provide a different set of results since Google cse will crawl all ycombinator.com and also partial external sites news.yc link to.
Positives, not negatives
you should make the other one dead; this one is a permalink to the article, whereas the other is just a link to the homepage.

edit: I see you've fixed the link on the other article. that works too.
Silicon Valley building boom under way ("You can't add 5,000-7,000 jobs a month without there being growth.")
US-VISIT to increase number of fingerprints on entry to USA
For some reason, Google doesn't index a lot of the older stuff. I can no longer find some links that I was able to find on news.yc using this technique a month ago. IMHO, PG should at least make the site easy to crawl for Google, or add his own search feature.
I was already dubious about travelling to the USA from the UK. That the US government is planning to increase their pointless measures just makes me more convinced. Am I alone in thinking that any benefits for running a start-up in the USA aren't worth the hassle of entry? I think start-ups can be successful in Europe, e.g., London.
He seems to have preferred the 'momentum' and quality of the Rhino codebase over Jython - although he admits Jython might have seemed like the right choice at first glance. See the section about 3/5ths down.
I would like to comment your (P.G.) other essay, about Unions (An alternative theory of Unions): I'm sorry i'm posting here, I did'nt found the link to comment the exact essay.

What you said (and what you usually says) is right from the point of view of a person non really interested in the quality of other people's life.

Is quite obvious to see that the world is producing a lot more than before and that the difference between poor and rich is becoming wider (in USA, your country, more than in Europe, but we are copying you in this too...): the question is not if they were paid more than they were entitled for, and now their price is "the right one".

The question is: which kind of society are we building? Which kind of countries are we shaping? Which world we want to live in? A world made of people who can stand, one beside the other, without slave (official or unofficial...).

You want a society where the stronger eats the weaker. It's not the world I want.
I don't want to earn so much, it's not there happiness. Is not buying things that brings happiness: I'd rather prefer a society where the state take part of the resources to take care of people that are lessa ble or lucky or whatever...

I want a better Atene not a better Sparta. And if you have studied philosophy (that you wrong said not teaching nothing to people...very unlucky words) you would had known that no society can resists in such a disparity. You know history better than me: our time, in the west, is not so full of revolutions, but just few years ago we were killing each others...remember that if you push someone's shoulders against a wall, you force him to fight or die.
noregistration@requirements.com / noregs2
Google Maps and the rise of the Hyperlocal web
Newsweek reviewer uses Heysan as IM workaround on iPhone
Using the iPhone keyboard
New Spam Fighting Plugin Better Than Akismet?
Seed Camp - A YC style startup bootcamp for Europe
What The Shawshank Redemption Can Teach You About Entrepreneurship
Just say no to Ruby on Rails (or at least think about it)
Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone