skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the alternatives to capitalism have an even nastier problem: absolute instead of merely relative poverty.

Incidentally, the Chinese wouldn't starve without sweatshops. They'd be peasant farmers. The reason they work in sweatshops is the same reason workers chose to work in the "satanic mills" of England in 1800: being a peasant farmer is a very hard life.
How the collaborative Internet shapes technologies of the future (Niklas Zennstroem, Skype)
Why Alexa graphs disagree with your logs. (Your logs are wrong!)
No more sockpuppet upvotes please.
Tech capitals of the world
Is there a resource where one can find sample 'Terms of Agreement' between partners?
I'm setting up a loose partnership in order to explore an idea. Having proper contracts drawn up at this stage is a bit pricey so we're thinking of using Terms of Agreement for now.
People Over 30 Don't Invent Online
It's a myth that capitalism concentrates wealth into the hands of the few. In reality the opposite is the case: Capitalism is better at spreading the wealth among everyone than any other economic system. Look at the Gini coefficient, the freer the economy (the more capitalist) the less economic inequality there is:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/efw/efw2006/efw2006es.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/2gd7ue

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/64/375px-Index2006_EFCapita.gif

Also the gap between rich and poor has been essentially static for the past 50 years, and shrinking since the 80s
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/12/images/walton3.gif

http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=859

Yet more proof is in the Economic Freedom index. All rich countries have free economies, and all poor countries have un-free economies: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm for me that's the smoking gun that capitalism works.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060111094731/truckandbarter.com/tb_images/ef_in.gif

"Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth."

There are only 2 choices in economics: Capitalism, which is really just people trading freely (and seems to distribute the wealth the best) and communism/socialism, which doesn't allow anybody to trade (and has the worst distribution of wealth). The only other options are systems which are somewhere between, and evidence (from the Economic Freedom index) shows the freer the economy the better off everyone is.

Further China isn't particularly capitalist, it's still very heavily socialist: http://www.heritage.org/index/country.cfm?id=China (although that's changing year by year). So if people are starving in China it's not really capitalism's fault.

It's also a myth that capitalism causes starvation. In fact there were no famines in the 20th century in any capitalist countries. All the famines were related to Marxism (China, Russia, Ethopia, North Korea etc.)

(This has an indepth look at famines through the ages: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf)
Not to mention that wages in the mills were much much higher than in farming.
I personally enjoyed this article. Thanks!
How is that different than millions of other McJobs out there.

They're getting paid to play video games.
On that note, here's a hilarious link to a South Park episode which nicely illustrates your point.

http://video.glath.com/view/southpark.Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft
So is it all right with facebook Paul? You are an icon for many people ...
My definitions:

Web App: Application developed entirely using open standards, which (aims to) run in any browser, requiring no additional vendor plugins.

Desktop App: Application designed to launch from the user's desktop, without reference to a web browser.

Thick Client: Any desktop app that makes heavy use of the Internet, or any "Web App"-like thing that makes use of non-standard extensions to the browser.

Reasonable people may disagree on this, and the differences are pretty fuzzy, but my distinctions are based upon the development problems I feel each type of approach must address.

Web App: Works on (most any) platform, no installation, but you have to deal with cross-browser issues, and you're limited by the technology of the web (no local FS access, for instance.)

Desktop App: Tied to one architecture (or worry about JVM incompatibilities), installation hassles, but you get an incredibly rich set of capabilities.

Thick Client: If it's a desktop app that talks to the network, you've got all the desktop tradeoffs, plus richer data, plus worries about what happens when the user works offline. If it's a "Web App" using non-standard extensions (Flash, Silverlight) you've got to worry about whether the user has the right version installed, and licensing hassles and/or fees on the server side and/or in the toolchain. You're also constrained by the capabilities of the extensions, but, in practice, development seems easier than for a pure Web App.

I realize that these definitions mean that lots of things (YouTube) people think of as Web Apps aren't (to me, anyway), but I'm okay with that. It seems a crucial distinction that, once you're targeting the Flash client, you're not really solving the same set of (technical) problems as someone targeting a browser.
Hi Ulfstein, here is a sample document:
http://www.podnikanivusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/partnership-agreement-sample.doc
... but always consult with lawyer :)
What are you using guys to authorize and track your users? (encrypted:) cookies or sessions?
Another example of the Joost marketing machine. We can all learn from Nik Z.
[ I hesitate to comment, because this is all steering away from 'startups'... ]

I think the rebuttal to rms' comment that "Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few" is very simply this:

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

While some kinds of wealth are limited, it's generally not a zero sum game.
How many people signup for sites like these, and return rarely or never use any of the registration-enabled features? Are those "real" users as opposed to FacebookApp-enabled users?

I add an app in my Facebook. If it's popular enough, every few days I get a bump in my newsfeed from a friend who's actually using the app (albeit within FB). Splash some ads on the landing pages or figure out a freemium model, and all of a sudden it starts looking like a real business (embedded via iframe/fbml!).
$1000 MacBook Pro price difference.
17" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro price:

at Apple Store = $2800

at local reseller in Slovakia = $3880 + 19% VAT
:(
Good call.

Startups are all about capitalism though aren't they. They are capitalism in action.
I don't know about China, and not about the satanic mills, but as I have recently about the industrial revolution: back then actually it wasn't possible for everybody to be a farmer anymore. On the one hand, there was an enormous population explosion (which had also been encouraged by Feudalism, I think, the "owners" of the people had an interest in owning more people for a while). Then Feudalism was abolished, and nobody took care of the people anymore. hence the poverty and their willingness to do awful work. In that sense, I don't think Capitalism was really to blame. I suspect a similar thing could be going on in China.
Can you give examples?

I do have at least one idea which is not consumer-oriented... My problem is that since these domains are not in-your-face advertised, or talked about here, it's harder to evaluate the market and the competition.

Plus, these apps usually need promotion of some kind, word-of-mouth doesn't really spread otherwise.
What's preventing me from Fedex'ing you 20 of them so you can resell them for less than the local reseller?
Doesn't it depend on the contract, of which there are many flavors?
Nice idea, probably nothing :), but the seller must provide the buyer with 2 years warranty services and pay some customs fees. That price can be more than real.
The Power of Yes: A Simple Way to Get More Out of Life
Most of the time, in the US, a divorce results in a 50/50 split of all assets. I thought that was an amusing thing to point out, others seem to disagree :-)
Yes, I'd kind of assumed that being pretty comfortable with capitalism was a given for those using this site, even though we may all have differing views on exactly how to best run an economy/country in terms of the details. (And that discussion is most certainly best left to some other site, or preferably, over a good bottle of Italian red wine:-)
So Apple mandates that the sellers themselves have to repair broken hard drives? That would certainly eat away profit margins...

Apple products might not be the best thing to export from the USA to Slovenia, what about video game consoles? How much does a Wii go for?

Email me if you'd like to discuss this...
Thoof "is an attempt to improve on sites like Digg and Reddit"
I attended the Startup school in March and since I'd flown 12 hours to get to SF, I thought I'd try to meet up with some companies to drum up some interest in my startup.
Amazingly this ended up with me pitching (my first ever - eek!) to Barney, Ron Kaplan and Lorenzo Thiel - the main guys at Powerset

They liked my idea - not enough to give any cash though:( - and I'm on their beta testing list.

They're keen to use Powerset as platform for other applications to exploit their NLP index via APIs.

I'll update you when I get my first play with it...

P.S. Bit late Paul G, but Barney sends his regards...
Seller usually send your laptop to authorized service in the UK, I think :) and you are waiting month or two to get it back. I send you an email in the evening to find right goods. Current Wii price is approx. $400 + VAT
Another tracking idea I once had: a browser plugin that tracks what web pages know about you. For example, if you visit web page A and afterwards web page B, and both pages use Google Analytics, the plugin would tell you that Google now knows that you surfed from A to B. If you then login to B with your user name, the plugin would tell you that Google now knows your name. And so on (not specific to Google, there are lots of services that span multiple pages, typically advertising). It would be interesting to see how web pages cluster together according to such "spanning" services.
I said "in the mainstream", not academia. I'm talking about when personnel departments heard of it and when marketing departments started labelling everything OO.
its important for Facebook developers to remember that they are investing their time and effort into a closed system that is controlled by individuals whose interests are not necessarily aligned with theirs.

That is a great point, and one which is being overlooked in all the excitement about the API.
If this guy thinks the fact that so many Americans believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 is evidence that a new news site is needed, he's off to a bad start. They believe that because they want to, not because there are no reliable news sources available.
"""Now, myspace I always considered lamentable crap, but the appeal was fairly straightforward"""

Wrong. It had superior, free picture galleries and allowed you to quickly find people in your area (via the "browse") _so you can get laid_. Those were THE killer features.

Roughly the same for facebook.
I didn't realize Powerset was based on technology licensed from Parc. That probably means they're doomed. In software (unlike biotech) few startups succeed based on licensed ideas. The founders have to be the people who have the ideas.
[ veering off topic again... ]

Slovakian customs, presumably. In Italy, they're real bastards for this kind of thing.

Once, they tried to charge me for a birth certificate that my dad sent me, wanting to tax the declared value, that only reflected what my dad paid to have the government issue it. After a bit of hassling, they finally agreed that its resale value was indeed zero.
Off-topic: is there any CSS that can be added to stop long words like URLs from causing a horizontal scrollbar to appear, i.e. to force the word to be broken in two?
Are you implying that the Industrial Revolution was caused by population pressure? That would be an amazing coincidence, wouldn't it, if jobs in factories appeared at just the moment it "wasn't possible to be a farmer anymore."

In fact the history of every country that industrializes is the same. People work on farms till jobs appear in factories, and then they move to the cities-- not because it isn't possible to work on farms anymore, but because it's such a grim life.

And incidentally, feudalism was over in England centuries before the Industrial Revolution got started in the late 18th century.
Exactly. The guy above got it back to front. The population explosion was because of the extra wealth from the industrial revolution lowering the death rate due to the end of famine. http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

Feudalism ended in England in the 16th century, hundreds of years before the industrial revolution http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006447.html
Bloat is different from complete (or "feature-full"). Bloat means very long installation processes (Microsoft is the champion here), long startup times, slow software, huge memory requirements, crashes, etc.

When you install a typical, cheap consumer device under Windows (anything: a printer, a joystick, etc.) from the vendor's CD-ROM it usually installs megabytes of bullshit, including automatically-started craplets with shiny but useless owner-drawn GUIs, etc. This is bloat. When I plug-in some USB stuff in my OpenBSD laptop, the kernel spits a few lines on the console to tell it has recognized the device and that's all.

edit: the last releases of Acrobat Reader, huge, very slow and buggy are a very good example of bloat.
[Disclaimer: I work for a MMOG company that is not Blizzard.]

I'm with you, and still I can see how it makes business sense for Blizzard to discard your suggestions:

- WoW is doing well, gold farming and all. If Blizzard can contain the problem in tolerable levels by playing whack-a-mole with the most ostensible farmers, then it's not a huge deal for them.

- Actual plot and compelling narrative aren't what Blizzard brands are made of. The more personality a world has, the harder it gets to keep it appealing for everyone. Stereotypical/generic/mildly cartoonish themes are easier to mass market.

- I believe allowing scripting would make any MMO better (long story, and this is not a game design forum; email me if you want to discuss this further), but it would favor programming savvy players, discouraging the vast majority of your audience. This would also make problems like security or game balancing harder to deal with.

I believe you could make an interesting MMOG that has mass appeal, but unfortunately it's a harder design and execution problem than if you relax the 'interestingness' constraint.

I wouldn't want to come across as cynical, though. I'd rather make something I love even if it makes less money, and I can see how smaller studios can make a niche for themselves, and even get a shot at big time eventually, by committing to outstanding game design.

But WoW? They won't mess with their cash cow, and it makes full sense.
Thoof (were all the names in the World taken or what?!) was started by this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21863

Anyway, I looked at Thoof when it was posted on TC and I got an invite. It's a waste of time. It just requires way too much work from the regular user to be worthwhile and viable. Only redeeming quality was the endless scroll :).
Sure, automating the grind is easy; the problem is other humans noticing you're a bot. Turing Test anyone?

The surest way to make a game less automatable is to link progress to social factors. It would also make the life of everyone more interesting- including sweatshop workers. If someone is making my game more interesting and meaningful through human interaction, they're legitimately earning their dough in my book.

Of course, easier said than designed.
The new litmus test for Silicon Valley startups: How little can you spend?
Well then it wouldn't be a coincidence, would it? I mean if population explosion was caused by the industrial revolution. I didn't mean the industrial revolution was started by population explosion, only the squalor was (among other factors) caused by it.

Sorry I don't have the books with me right now (until next week), and I didn't learn them by heart. I seem to also remember that there were machines before the "revolution" - maybe it still was a change of political circumstances that permitted the revolution (free trade between countries, possibility of ownership giving incentives for entrepreneurs etc.). Certainly several factors worked in combination, it's not like the invention of a particular machine triggered it all.

I also seem to remember that China has the fewest farmland per person of all countries in the world. I don't think anybody can simply be a farmer. I know I couldn't just be a farmer in my country.
Believing reality is generally closer to the mean sets you up for manipulation. By adding extremes to the voices you listen to, I can move your perceived reality in either direction.
I get the feeling these guys are more hype than substance. One thing I don't understand is why drum up _any_ hype before you've actually released anything? Seems like when they finally release, it'll be a huge anti-climax.
Headline: The value of paying big $$$ for PR: Yet-another-Digg-copycat gets NYTimes mention.
Ok, this is too emotional, but here are my two graying cents.

The truth is that kids, however innovative, create sites for kids. I never really used any one of the startups everybody's talking about, except maybe Flickr, but then Flickr wasn't created by kids.

On the other hand, adults, however slow, are capable of creating systems for everyone, if they are capable of anything at all.

And most importantly, adults can build infrasrtuctures on top of which kids can play their games. See the difference? Or show me a protocol, a platform, or a decent programming language created by a 15 year old.
They already are. Look at iLike's numbers and the HUGE drop in their hits to the website.
There is a lot of buzz recently for outsourcing software development (thank you Guy Kawasaki), and it still bothers me somewhat. At one point someone made the observation that outsourcing tech is fine as long as tech isn't supposed to be your core speciality.

I can't imagine outsourcing the foundation of a project that I might have to work on for years to come. Maybe this is a bit overly romantic, and it would be more efficient to outsource the initial version, and build a custom one if and only if interest emerges.

Much of my discomfort about the outsourcing stems from the fact that these people are charging 5-10k and taking 4-8 weeks to build something really unspectacular. Then again, its easier to build a slick technology demo than to create a reliable tool...
It's time to open up networking, again (Dave Winer: explosive unbundling of services making up social networks)
The only dubious thing is how are people who install Alexa toolbar representative to the population as a whole. Do they collect some personal info, so they can correct the bias in the sample?
The next big thing (Dave's timeline of entrepreneurs)
Buy O'Reilly Books by the Chapter
Another way to step out of your comfort zone is extemporaneous speaking. Toastmasters is an organization with meetings all over. There is a "table topics" section in each meeting that lets people give 1-2 minute responses to questions posed on the spot. Their Competent Communication program is great for learning to write and deliver speeches.

Find a club near you, yes?

http://www.toastmasters.org/find/
Two Guys in a Pickup Truck: The Future of Web Advertising?
Why Port Safari to Windows?
'... I'm just wondering if someone wanted to go the Gumstix route instead of a laptop, would it be possible? ...'

It is, if you are Steve Mann ~ http://www.eyetap.org ... but having said that it's not easy ~ http://www.eyetap.org/resources/faq/faq_building_eyetap.html
Winer is wrong to say that Steve Jobs disproves Fred Wilson's hypothesis. No one doubts 50 year olds are good at running big companies. Fred was talking about who's good at starting new ones.
I think you're asking about authentication, not authorization. Are you asking whether the cookies are compared to server-side state (as with sessions) or contain authentication information that only the server can encrypt and decrypt?
Steve Jobs in a Box
Is Ford the Reason for Microsoft Bloatware?
It seems more likely to me that the origin of this article is explained in the last sentence.
How Age Matters In Media, Web Services, And Social Networking (Response to Fred Wilson)
Books? What Books?
Poll: 9 percent of cell phone users want iPhone (AT&T the only option for a long time - see comments)
Where do you draw the line between improving on an existing idea and creating a new idea? Most, if not all, new ideas have their basis in existing ideas.
You can't bring a shovel onto a soccer field. You can't drop kick a basketball during a game. Why shouldn't Blizzard prohibit tools and activities that are not deemed fair?

My only problem with the Warden is that they did it without telling users it's there and what it's doing.
Sigh: I talked to a friend of mine this weekend who is on the Iphone software team, and he was telling me how much better the phone is than the commercials are portraying. He is desperate to take his Iphone home from work. I told him as much as I like the product as seen so far, I really don't want to switch from Verizon. He made the point that Apple chose AT&T because they have the best GSM network, and Verizon doesn't offer GSM and probably won't for a long time. So for anyone really interested in the Iphone, the AT&T switch will be the only option for the next 5 years because of the exclusive agreement apparently.
My reaction as well. Building the application is orthogonal to publicizing it. Their objection was about how he did the latter.

But there is a reasonable complaint here: that fb is not communicating well with developers about precisely what is and is not kosher. It's one thing to simply give the rules in the ToS (nobody reads them, and they're phrased to give the website broad discretionary powers of interpretation), but another to proactively educate developers.

But fb has really good support in my experience. This might just be a transient glitch while they catch up with demand.

---

The (arguably misleading) title reminded me of an experience of mine: http://programming.reddit.com/info/qy9l/comments

There too documentation was incomplete, and I was ignorant about what they considered ok. But the way the company dealt with my ignorance was much more unfriendly.

(I don't mean to badmouth anybody, these guys might well have improved since. I keep thinking about how the way startups interact with users, and how it is a key differentiator. This story is just part of that thought process.)
Yes, if you do shoddy analysis of your logs, your logs are wrong. Spoken like an Alexa-zon employee. If you know what you're doing, and recognize the assumptions that go into proper log analysis, logs are a much more reliable tool than a panel.

The only useful thing a panel gives you is a supposedly fixed standard for doing competitive analysis... same methodology used across multiple sites. But even then you have no guarantee that the sample is representative. This is why companies like Comscore and Hitwise who buy under-the-table clickstream data from major ISPs (however sketchy and frightening that is) are probably more reliable than Alexa's panel.
Mozilla exec calls Apple's Safari plan 'duopolistic'
"As a format, the book is becoming less and less popular in the modern world."

Any figures to back that up? What with the internet's biggest shop being an online bookstore, and the proliferation of Borders I wonder is that is really true.

Besides the web is just one big reading machine anyway.
Dell apologizes for remove-this-blog-post-or-else nastygram
Grab pics from Flickr for a DIY book
25 Web Sites to Watch