skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Do you think this is a variation of "make what users want"?"

Absolutely. "Make something users want" is really the fundamental principle of just about all of business. Everything else is just details.

It's surprisingly difficult to know what users want, though, unless you're one of them. It's usually the most mundane details that lead to success - things like YouTube and Reddit enabling comments, or FaceBook keeping your information private outside of the college, or FictionAlley hosting Cassandra Claire's fanfics. A lot of consultants will tell you "Do market research! Make sure people want what you're building", but the fact is, most people are unable to verbalize what they want. They know it when they see it, and they might be able to tell you if you sit next to them and walk through how they use it, but a bunch of questions over the phone isn't going to get any useful feedback.
Cringely: Is Google on Crack?
I don't agree with this article's conclusions, incidentally. I doubt there's much the telcos can do to Google, no matter how vengeful they feel. But the article helped me understand what this controversy is about.
We're planning on renting a dedicated server for our web and database servers, and using EC2 for red5 instances. The red5 machines don't need to store any persistent data, and the number needed will vary according to demand, making it a good fit for EC2.
I get pretty pissed off when my google search results come out in dutch just because I am sitting in an airport in Holland.
I'm in the market for something in a ... table. I don't want to spend any more than $15k.
West Kootenays, BC
A guy by the name of Ryan Allis ought to be on that list.
What podcasts can people recommend?
Apologies if this has been discussed before but what podcasts can people highly recommend?

I've listened to nearly all Tedtalks available and all the good stuff I can find on itconversations.com. Have gone through all episodes of Venture Voice and regularly listen to a number of well known tech news ones. I'm starting to struggle to satisfy my audio addiction now though as filtering through the noise of bad podcasts is getting harder.

I'm sure I'm missing out on some great stuff somewhere. What are all the smart people of news.yc listening to?
Everyone rent a dedicated server on ServerBeach and use my referral code so I get more free service (and you get $100 credit): 7XYHDMBU8A

http://www.serverbeach.com/catalog/cust_ref_landing_new.php?...

Seriously though, just because EC2/S3 are useful things doesn't mean you should use them for everything. Dedicated servers are unbelievably cheap and powerful now. They're also way more straight forward to work with. Scale up for a while, then scale out if you're hugely successful.
Still in stealth mode.
Sex is the killer app of life, yo.
More integration between desktop and web environments. Eventually becoming a one inseparable instance.
Yah, it all seems pretty paranoid. Talk of Facebook being a "walled-garden" really doesn't compare to what we have to deal with on mobile platforms. I heard on the radio someone mention the days of "phone rental", where there were the exact same concerns you hear today about security and control. But then it was monolithic AT&T saying only the three models of phones it designed could possibly be safe to use. Ridiculous.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
10 automakers to jointly develop OS : National : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri)
Pencil and paper are a clear solution. But that doesn't involve wasting a great deal of money and promising control. Lots of folks are pretty paranoid about fixed elections. I try not to attribute something to malice which could easily be incompetence.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon
iinnovate.blogspot.com is pretty decent. I really like the one w/ Eric Schmidt.
Sure hope Google gets what it is asking for here. We need this kind of network. I would love to give away a phone which carries my applications on its "desktop" straight out of the box. Imagine the possibilities. Free cellular for anyone willing to purchase $200 bucks a month worth of widgets from my sponsor.

Talk to Verizon about an idea now and your sure to see your idea pooped on or stolen. An open system would let everyone have a hack, and talk about investors opening wallets for companies with ideas. Deja Vu, the internet reborn yet again....
Study Predicts Upswing In Dynamic Language Use
IDEA #62 - Reincarnate Yub.com, but on Facebook
Jason Calacanis' "CalacanisCast Beta" is generally decent and the most recent one with Ron Conway is amazing. Charlie Rose's "Technology" interviews are good. iInnovate, VentureVoice, IT Conversations, TalkCrunch, Scoble, TWiT, Diggnation.

VentureVoice is by far my favorite, but it's slowed to a trickle. There is just not much good content for people who like this stuff. I've listened to everything -- twice. I've had to resort to (gasp) reading on my commute most days, for lack of audio content.

Lots of great stuff in here: http://wiki.ycombinator.com/presentations/ if you haven't listened to it yet.
I think Cringely makes some valid points about the risks Google is taking but I think he is being overly paranoid. Even if he is not and the world is run by the telcos, I still say good on Google. Even if only some of the rules Google is proposing are adopted for this new frequency band we would be looking at a new way to network. A better way. An open way.
Summary: Google should bow down to the big telcos and not spend 2.86% to 6.22% of their market cap to open up a gigantic market because there's a danger that Google will hurt the telcos' feelings and cause the big telcos to no longer do special deals with Google.

Google is entrenched enough that they aren't going to wither and die just because they don't get preferential placement on the default landing page for the cell phone's browser. If Cringely is saying that the telcos would actually block Google, that would be an indicator of much bigger problems with the telco cartel.

Sounds like it's Cringely who needs to put down the crack pipe.
I also dont think the demands set by google were a brash mistake like this article suggests.

The general public is becoming more aware that the carrier's chokehold on them is stunting innovation and choice. The iPhone is a perfect example. When the iPhone was released, groves of people with existing contracts signed the 2yr AT&T contract anyway, but not without a feeling of bitterness. Everyone wants the Apple iPhone, not an AT&T phone. Everything AT&T about it is a downright annoyance.

Statements like the one made by Google over the spectrum restrictions reach the ears of the public. Google is saying: "We will stop the telcos from raping you over the coals if the FCC will accept our rules to help you, the end user, by giving you freedom of choice". I think now, more than ever before, people are standing up and demanding action like this. Google is shown as "good cop" who will help fight back the oppression that the telcos have imposed.

Regardless of the outcome of the 700Mhz auction, the carrier's restrictions will crumble, its just a matter of time. Just like Ma Bell and so many other examples in history, you can only hold back innovation and competition for so long. By making their stance known, Google is positioning themselves as the company who will be active to do things right, just like they have done in the internet space.

The issue at hand though is the importance of this spectrum in particular... Yes there are talks of utilizing the "white space" spectrums to get every inch out of available wireless freqencies (which Google is also interested in), but 700Mhz is the real meat. It is a BIG deal. Not only is it the last "prime real estate" that will likely come available in a long time, it is a lower frequency than the other wireless phone bands and therefore propagates better. Google owning this spectrum is far more important than internet search, and I know they realize it. I just hope they put their money where their mouth is because like the article suggests, now they have stirred up the bee hive by pissing off the carriers.
Uh Oh. Another Smooth Move from Microsoft: Watch out, Ruby. Watch out OSI
{ 'Buzz Out Loud', 'Cranky Geeks', 'NPR: Technology', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Science Friday', 'TWiT' }
TalkCrunch: A Talk With James Hong, Co-Founder of HotOrNot
I disagree. Location Based Services will never be that big. Simple fact is that we're not moving much so LBS uses will never be that great.
How often do you search for something and need to input your location?! Looking for a restaurant or something?

99.99% of your searches don't benefit at all from location.
I'm surprised Mashable is pulling in so much. I've been a big fan Pete Cashmore because he really does what Arrington did in the beginning and without the strange attitude. Through no particular connection or authority he's done a really great job at keeping track of startup development. Arrington has become very slow and complacent in comparison. Glad to see it's paying off for Cashmore. The underdog wins again.
Anyone interested in a casual meetup event in Vancouver?
1. Stanford educator's corner
2. Venture Voice
3. ACM queue
4. Steve Pavlina
..the author is on crack.The whole article is nothing better than a soap opera:

"Google, the "little search giant" feels like bidding. Doesnt have enough cash to win the bid. Rolls out evil plan in sheep's disguise demanding 'openness' ,so that the winning bidder will have to Open up everything.Auction day.As expected Google doesn't win the bid.The winner and gangs in retaliation blocks Google.com from the service. Google dies ."

Honestly, WFT?
Inventiveness
Beyond the Garage: Rational Real Estate Moves for Start-ups
A Solution for Startups
The current surge in demand for skilled resources has created another barrier to entry for high tech startup's. Startups , already constained with cash flows, find it hard to employee resources in office. GeniTeam (www.geniteam.com), specialize in working with high tech startups and provide software engineers, who work from offshore location , forming virtual team.
The company is focussing on web2.0 startups, but wants to expand to other area's as well. The company is already helping various startups develop their products using virtual team model.
From Parties to Payoff:How I Got My Funding 
Just days after Laurel Touby's bank account grew -- by a lot -- the mediabistro.com inc. founder sounds exhilarated and still a bit unbelieving.
Many suggest Google's mobile plans exceed the cell phone's browser however, which is why the carrier control issue really is of importance to them. I agree with the article in this regard. Several respectable analysts believe a Google phone is ~6-12 months from being unveiled, and that Google has interests in more advanced on-deck applications such as context sensitive searching (based on location, time, etc). Both of these objectives are definitely "blockable" by the telcos under current conditions.
How can engineering schools not teach startups?
I mean, every revolution in history has been driven by tech. So why do the business guys get taught entreprenership, capital markets, etc, while the guys with a chance to innovate are taught to crank turn and think in terms of bounded small problems. WTF?
Newscientist.com has some eclectic stuff.
Does anyone know of a good college with a healthy balance between the two?
http://www.olin.edu

It's not much easier to get into than MIT, though.
Stanford Educator's Corner has some good stuff. A high percentage of the speakers don't really belong on stage talking about entrepreneurship though. Reid Hoffman's talk was good.

http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
Bug Labs (initial review)
Yes, definitely. From a UI perspective, the power of the desktop is something no web app can touch. Web apps are around because the thing they do that desktop apps don't--pulling information from other computers into the cloud--is hugely powerful, obviously. The developments of the past few years notwithstanding, I think the future of front ends is tipped heavily in favor of desktop apps that are tightly integrated with information culled from web services. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates alluded to this in their interview at D. The iPhone, incidentally, is a great, early example of how local apps can trounce the sort of UI you'd find on the web while still adding value to the web apps they integrate with.

Also next, I think, is going to be users increasingly expecting that any site they visit should recognize them.
My university began offering a minor in "technology-based growth venturing" last year, and it was certainly worth taking. The school of business and economics organizes it for the sciences departments, which allows it to be properly framed. Only afterwards could I appreciate how the classes focus on marketing and VC.
Big problems are made up of small problems. Who is going to be able to solve the small problems if not the engineers?
mikesabat,

I think negative things are happening. Too many "younglings" are living a false dream that they can make money by redoing a myspace, a blogger, a youtube. Seriously, there is no value addition between one project and another. Younglings are trying to figure out if they can do NOW what, say, youtube did 2 years ago. And other friendly younglings flock to these web sites for no apparent reason, other than friendliness.

I think the VC-s need to send these guys back home and request them to send a mail to, say youtube, on how it can improve its service, in stead of pouring other people's retirement money on useless idiotic-video-clip sites.

I think I can count really useful web 2.0 services on the tip of my fingers. Meebo obviously counts as first (and possibly a truly innovative service). But, most others better start reporting to f*ckedcompany.com soon.
I always wondered what made you want to go to art school.
I have started and abandoned RSS aggregator projects 4 times in the last 4 years. The first was in C++ and MFC, then Python, another Python, then Scala.

Certain things about feed aggregation that you might think would be cool wind up not really working out well in my opinion. It's not until you try to aggregate together thousands of blogs that you realize that the best blogs are very much cults of personality, and can't be easy clustered together like mainstream media as in Google News.

You'd also be amazed at how poorly implemented simple markup specifications like RSS 2.0 can be. I forget what law it is that says the easier it is to implement something, the worse the prevailing implementations are because of barriers to entry, but I think it's very much true.

Thirdly, I'm very throughly convinced that the browser is the best environment for consuming hypertext, not special desktop applications. Therefore apps like NetNewsWire get it wrong in my view.

These aren't instances of business failure, just reasons I abandoned things and opinions I came to have by writing code and seeing what happened.
There are an infinite number of small problems. How are they going to know which are worth solving in their finite lifespan? How will they learn the value of anything if they are not given context?
I don't know much about the University of Waterloo (I'm a Mudd ITR), but they do have one guy there who is very big on startups, Larry Smith. Of course, he's in the economics department:

http://www.zachbaker.com/articles/2006/11/30/larry-smith-the...
If you had to design an engineering school from the ground up where the input was an 18 y/o w/ HS math + science and the output was a good engineer, it would look nothing like universities do today. Engineering is diced into its core components and those components are diced into their core components until you end up w/ a prof drawing lines and dots on a blackboard that have no connection to the lines and dots being drawn on all the other blackboards you saw that afternoon. All the while your goal is to predict what lines and dots will appear on the test in a month.

I don't deny the need for a thorough and disciplined understanding of math and physics. But... I didn't understand the need for calculus until I needed a way to go from pos/time to velocity/time. I didn't understand linear algebra until I needed to transform vertices in 3d graphics. Personally I don't understand a hammer unless I see the nail. Engineering school is all about showing you everything there is to know about a tool except what to use it for.

I think E-schools should be like obstacle courses where you have projects that REQUIRE understanding of a concept in order to complete them. Classes about said concepts are given as the NEED arises.

Most E-schools suck. Just take as many project based classes as possible (CS is decent for this) and get a degree. Universities also have lots of grants that nobody knows about where you can get money to build cool things.

Maybe this is just me, but I don't think I'm alone. And it probably explains why I failed to hang my pictures with a chainsaw.
At Stanford, E145 is a pretty high quality class on entrepreneurship. Actually working through cases that involve startups trying to make tough decisions about funding and deals was a valuable experience for me, and it's not something that a lot of engineering undergrads get to do. If anyone who goes to Stanford wants more information about the class, shoot me an email.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/e145/
So what's stopping you?
The Story So Far (Y Combinator Startup Auctomatic)
This is possible using the S3 storage engine for MySQL, which is currently in beta. Your database lives on S3, your hosts live in EC2 Xen VMs.

As I understand it, if your VM is powered off, you lose cached data your database will then start re-pulling from the storage engine.

You can fetch the storage module from here:
http://fallenpegasus.com/code/mysql-awss3/

A relevant Computerworld article:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...

Have I done it? No. It's something I'm investigating for a startup which may have a need for elastic scalability. What's the speed like between S3 and EC2?
This is possible using the S3 storage engine for MySQL, which is currently in beta. Your database lives on S3, your hosts live in EC2 Xen VMs.

As I understand it, if your VM is powered off, you lose cached data your database will then start re-pulling from the storage engine.

You can fetch the storage module from here: http://fallenpegasus.com/code/mysql-awss3/

Relevant presentation:
http://fallenpegasus.com/code/mysql-awss3/presentations/

Computerworld article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA....

Have I done it? No. It's something I'm investigating for a startup which may have a need for elastic scalability.

My main concern: you'd need a list of consistent speed between S3 and EC2. Any current users know what this is like?
You just described Olin, at least as I understood it from the visit.
Feature Req: Some UI indication for news.yc internal posts (like this one)?
I would like to know if a given link points to an external article or is only a news.yc thread. Currently I use the status bar to check. Anyone else feel the same?
Right on. I wish I had gone to Olin...
Google will inevitably stand up to the telephone companies. Fighting for the old TV frequencies is as good a place to start as any.

In 25 years, do you think that Google or the telephone companies will be more relevant?
Why isn't it done yet?
Engineering Managers
I am already working on my own project. Plus I only like to work on mobile tech. But if no1 does within 2 weeks I am gonna use joomla and put this up quick
What is Google doing with all of their dark fiber?
Warp drive.
On the Amazon forums, people wrote about 10MB/s throughput between S3 and EC2.
Pmarca: Why brainstorming is a bad idea
Sure. And to propose a design: Simply don't link the title, as there's the "discuss" link anyway. To indicate submissions that contain editorial text, "discuss" might be replaced with "read and discuss".
There is a UI indication--there is no domain next to the title.
FutureTense: http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/. It is only a few minutes long, daily, and always interesting.
Ah! I had missed that. Thanks for the tip.
Doesn't work for me at least, not explicit enough.
Even if used 24/7 is EC2 that bad value wise? Assuming it costs about $70/month for one instance it is a lot cheaper than most dedicated servers. EC2 is a lot more powerful than the average VPS, that is not really a fair comparison. I would say it is pretty good value if you need (almost) 2gb ram and a fast processor.

If Amazon sorts out the other issues EC2 could be really great.
The Mullet Strategy - "Business up front, party in the rear" - applies to websites too
Every revolution in history has been driven by tech, and the revolutionaries where NOT taught about startups in engineering colleges. So ..you get the point. For revolutionaries, its not required.
[and why did you plugin that "wtf" at the end of your rant ? Trying to get that Diggitude? ]
If we believe this to be a general rule, then a single founder will have about as many ideas as two brainstorming co-founders.
I'm also from Vancouver. E-mail me at greenbuilding1000@gmail.com re a meet up. In fact, if you all just e-mail me then I can reply to all of you on the cc list so we can arrange a time/place.
Software Runs Into Iceberg
Iceberg on Demand is declaring war on software, according to Co-Founder and head of product development Wayne Byrne.
There's no discussion of cause and effect. It could people being embarrassed, for example, something that would hopefully be less of an influence over two co founders who knew one another well, compared with a random group of strangers.

Incidentally, apparently that's the reason why collaborative efforts between musicians often don't work out too well. In their own group, they're not afraid to say exactly what they think, or be highly critical when called for, but with a relative 'outsider', mutual respect gets in the way of that.

In any case your hypothetical two co founders could simply brainstorm on their own...
Bebo: An In-Depth Look
isn't the iphone a google phone? i thought SJ and ES were on each other's boards. google is trying to create the platform and capitalise on the traffic (by betting it can build better products) - that's their business space. apple makes consumer devices which use traffic. sounds like a pretty solid proposition to me.
Points taken, admitted end in bad taste, newbie mistake.
...and 200ms lag.
No, not really. Possibly this depends on where you are at but here in Portugal (where I am), I can get a better physical server for about 80Eur/month, which is only a bit more for what I would pay for an EC2 instance (including network traffic). Is it worth the extra dollars? I think so.

Also, even though S3 doubles as a backup medium (and you _must_ backup your database), if you want a database running on EC2 you _must_ go for S3 to store your information. That too will increase your costs.

And on top of all that, you have to spend some time tweaking and testing your configuration (and testing again). If you're short on working hands, the time you spend on this activity may not be worth it.

I think that, unless you're doing it just for fun, you should let someone else help Amazon sort out the kinks of their system.

In the end, having your entire system on EC2 will not give you an edge over your competition, but the time you save by not doing it probably will.
Why You Should Watch Harry Potter at Least Twice
Her question also made me wonder why we like to watch the same things again and again when we're kids, but when we get older we watch it once and we're done with it.
I think that if Google does have a phone in the works, it will be a no-frills, inexpensive phone that will cost a lot less than the iphone. That way, google won't compete with the high end of the market that iphone has covered.
12 month study in Social Media Optimization generates a 1,427% better ROI than Paid Search