skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one who is not that thrilled by Aeron chairs? I took one over from my father, because he didn't like it, either, but I am also not happy with it. I find the plastic parts tend to cut into my legs and hurt me, because I sink into the rubber net too deeply. Also the settings are unstable, every now and then the chair collapses and I have to reconfigure it again.

OT: does anybody know how I can determine the exact model type of my Aeron chair, as I would like to put it up on ebay?
I agree the reasoning sounds wrong, but the quote sounds about right. If insuring $10M for one earthquake costs $10M x 1/5 = $2M, insuring for two symultaneous ones should cost something around $10M x 1/5^2 = $400K.

Another surprising thing in that example is that the guy says he could get away with quoting $4M? If insuring either factory for $10M (or insuring both for $5M) costs about $2M, I'd suppose that's the upper bound for a cost evaluation, even if you're lazy.
*my* software is upgradeable:
so, for Mark it's exciting only as long as things don't work and you have to worry about them... nice point ;-)
I completely agree with the points.
Those "little color swatch thingies" are an international color matching standard for print. Every prepress shop and printing press on the planet has those swatch books so they can communicate spot colors consistently.

However, the rise in recent years of cheap 4/C digital presses and ICC profiling has made Pantone systems less indispensable.
I am the only one to see the irony in this? What's the point of posting information about a website that is down? I can understand if its a service like Skype but digg...
YouTube Down at 9:00am EST
First Skype, then Digg, now YouTube. Who will be next?
LukeW: Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms
In 1850, America was like China today
37Signals and the Paradox of Success
The reason it's posted is probably because information on the cause of the outtage could be useful to startups. An opportunity for lessons learned...

Obviously this only applies if the outtage is a result of problem with their infrastructure or software.
PG on Y Combinator
aul is a great guy and has built a huge following in the startup community. I have a lot of respect for him and what he has done. Y Combinator is a great story. Paul agreed to share some details with me. Here it is live and uncut.
Where's my CloudBook?
There is a lot of value in lessons learned. In which case it makes sense to post a link to the fix/solution rather than point out that its broken.

my 2 cents.
Ability to check if one URL is submitted already, but then submit another.

E.g. you want to submit
http://example.com/#part2

But first check if someone has submitted
http://example.com/

Right now you either have to submit your less-preferred URL, or browse around and use google to see if the less-preferred URL has already been submitted.
This is way better than the original article. Takes a more detailed look at what might be going on over there.

I think the key point (for me) was the notion that great developers like to build new things.
I think it's in the transition right now. For the past couple years, it mostly has been an exploration of different forms of the web.

A lot of people anticipate mobile platform to be next, but things are pretty grim so far--but people make due. RFIDs are another thing that has people excited, as well as 3D printing.
Huh, never seen that before. And as usual, when I (or anyone else) sees a new language construct, you wonder--when would I use that?

The blog post is right though. I imagine if you needed default values that were more dynamic, you can move that code into the method with R's function-call semantics. Therefore, you'd need to do less preparation of dynamic default values outside of the method, thus making libraries and APIs easier to use.
An interesting take on hackers vs. businesspeople
I have the exact same problem with "sinking in" and I'm not especially large (I'm 6'2", 180 lbs). I haven't had any stability issues, and I like the Aeron much better than most other chairs I've used, but it has some drawbacks in addition to the front of the seat jutting into my thigh:

The plastic on the sides makes it difficult to sit cross-legged in the chair. Granted, I've never had a chair that let me do this very well.

It's impossible to kneel on the chair comfortably. This sounds silly maybe, but the last chair I used had a very soft cushion to sit on, and the back was adjustable such that there were spaces where you could dangle your feet. It was possible to kneel without causing much strain on feet or ankles.

I've found both kneeling and cross-legged positions to be very stable, comfortable, and conducive to proper breathing-- so long as you don't wind up losing circulation in your legs.
There's Still Money in Web Retailing
Anyone up for building a "ViaWeb 2.0" ?
Well, the economies of faraway countries have indirect effects on the economies here, especially in this day and age where the wallets of countries are all tied to each other.

But for something more concrete, the Japanese mobile sector and robotics sector have more acceptance and dare-I-say-enthusiasm than American(or European--with the exception of the Nordic countries for mobile) ones. That's nothing new, and any scan through the headlines in the last 10 years will tell you that.

But of these two I mentioned, mobile phones would have the better potential of infiltrating US markets--especially those catering to pop culture. For anyone looking to do mobile phones, the Japanese have been pretty innovative with their mobile phone use. Currently, phones and phone networks are somewhat walled inside a country. But if those ever come down, Japan's mobile services are something to watch out for.

Threats most dangerous are the ones you're not paying attention to, and the article is merely mentioning that in a long winded way focused mostly on economics and politics.
When I say Threats, I mean threats to you as a startup, not threats to the country.
oh come on, the man's name was Seo
I am also not "large", but tall. Probably I have the "oversize" version of the chair, as my father is also very tall. Perhaps the normal version works better (smaller size of net -> less sinking in).
Top 10 Tips for Using Web 2.0 to Promote Your Business
Is Web 2.0 just for kids and tech-hipsters or is it something we business owners should use to help promote our businesses?
What is Time? (An Entrepreneur's Definition of Freedom)
Other one you can't talk about == Parakey?
Encrypted file-sharing app
Lets you easily share and exchange huge files (and entire folders) with friends, no size limits.
buzzword_a + buzzword_b = distinct_lack_of_imagination_from_a_hack

By the way, it was called "Usenet", and it devolved under the weight of the commons.
Useful Web Tools
> They aren't systems thinkers. They are the business equivalent of a bench researcher that simply pours blue stuff into green stuff, watches to see if it turns yellow, and then informs his boss of the result. In both science and business, most people aren't actually innovating.

Hypothesis: I think that this is the most important thing to a startup, regardless of whether you can write code or not. Startups need systems thinkers and innovators on the code side as well as the business side, people who can grasp a problem and come up with unique solutions. You can find these people no matter their background and this trait is likely quite tied into creativity in all its forms.
"we carefully picked the business members of the teams for their excellent technical savvy"

At what level of expertise in both areas do you stop pigeonholing people?
I think the place where business people in startups get a bad name is when you have "salesmen" with almost no technical understanding filling "business development" roles.

The startups that succeed seem to be the ones that look at the process from a "best available athlete" standpoint. In other words they hire the most intelligent people available and let them morph into the roles themselves.
Everything you wanted to know about QWERTY layout
Skype Outage Dials Up Conspiracy Theories
The biggest (meaningful) number of them all
Neither does Ruby on Rails.
Quantum computers a little bit closer to reality
01000111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00100000 01010111 01100001 01110100 01100011 01101000
sort of close: readr.com.
This whole hacker vs. suits thing is lame. Lets please post more insightful material. Most writing on this subject has been boring and repetitive with a lack of depth.

PS: I make this comment because we can't down mod stories.
it's probably from a bidirectional or right-to-left character set. some languages go from right-to-left, but (incredibly) some can go in both directions, depending on the context.
No version for MacOS 10.3 :-/

I've resisted upgrading for so long, since 10.4 never had any particular appeal to me, but it's getting harder and harder to find apps built for 10.3.
Phew! Now I can go back to wasting time consuming scraped linkbait blog posts.
I learned this in my History of Technology course a few years back... Ever since I've been very amused by the outrage over China's disrespect for "intellectual property" on sites like Slashdot.
The best summation of Searle's argument I've heard went something like "When you run a simulation of a rain storm, nothing gets wet. So if you run a simulation of a brain, does any 'thinking' happen?"

Of course it's just word games. But it is equally word games to say that a machine 'thinks'. We use thinking to describe certain processes that happen in human brains, so to say that machines 'think' is really just a sort of metaphor.

And if you think this is overly pedantic when discussing the possibility of the Singularity, consider this question. If someone told you that your brain could be 'uploaded' into a computer and run as a program that for all intents and purposes would be 'you' except much smarter and immortal, would you be willing to go through with this process if it were irreversible and your current brain were destroyed as part of the process?

Just what is 'you' anyway?
Yes, I'm planning on doing business in the US, predominately in smaller, more affluent communities in coastal Florida.
Thanks for bringing this up. I am now using FF3 and it seems faster, lighter and the Gecko engine re-build makes the rendering a lot cleaner. Even the fonts seem cleaner, that maybe the default CSS file though.

Cons: The bookmark piece needs some polishing, especially in the 'Organize Bookmarks' window.
Using brain surgery for a headache when an aspirin would suffice
how you're working

Ass goes on chair.

They'll fix your chair

Ass goes on chair.

remind you how to sit

Ass goes on chair.
Building Your Startup Team
After reading my post Management: Competency one reader asked the following question: How much of a weighting do you put on an executive's technical knowledge, or lack thereof?...
The Role of Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web
When you place a big bet on a new model, it's always nice hear that smart people are thinking about the big trends that underlie that model. So it was great to hear Robert Scoble, Paul Graham, and Larry Kramer thinking about human-driven information filtering on the Web -- and particularly the role of TRUSTED humans.
I like the idea, but what an ugly face!
Or huge yoga ball (http://cache.lifehacker.com/images/2006/06/exercise%20ball%2...)
I see the certified color coordination evaluation engineer made a stop by her office.
Does the new rendering code decrease the instances of bug 263160?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263160
Google Reality Not Reality
No error correction? Not even a parity bit? Big-endian only? I'll pass.
Probably, but you should decide which is more important.
No, Parakey is public knowledge. And the reference to "one we can't talk about" first appeared in "Why to Not Not Start a Startup" (http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html), which was written before Parakey was acquired.
This is a good, but flawed argument. Intelligence is fundamentally an information processing function. [Simplistically,] your brain receives bits of information from its sensory inputs, crunches on them, and outputs some bits of information. It also stores some bits, to create what we call memory.

The bits don't care if they're processed in a silicon-based computer or a meat-based computer. The computations and transformations are what matter. Again, this "simulations aren't wet" is relying on a hidden assumption of a false distinction created by Searle. He distinguishes between the "real thinking" and "fake thinking", then with that assumption in hand, creates an example in which the "real" vs "fake" distinction is clear.

Here's the real question:
When you run a simulation of a Turing machine, does any computation happen?

The answer is obviously "yes".

NOTE: I mean "information" here in the sense of Claude Shannon's Information Theory. I'm not saying that literal 1 and 0 bits like in a computer are used by the human brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

And I'm really curious: what, in general terms, is so special about brains? Do they contain souls? Do they tap into some mystical forces of Consciousness as in Cartesian dualism? As far as I'm aware, brains are intelligent systems built out of matter. So let's figure out how to build intelligent systems out of matter, and build one.
America was communist in the 19th century?

I learn something new every day.
The impression I got when pg gave the talk at Startup School was that it was some kind of "big company buys little company because they were scared of what they were making" situation. But as far as I know that's all they can say.
The thing I care about most is my keyboard.

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productde...
45 Excellent Blog Designs
The link is down, so I can't read the details, but...

LiveJournal?
This isn't just good for blogs -- a bunch of these are nice inspiration for site design in general.
Things that can be easily quantified tend to be overvalued.

Corollary: Both the smartest and the dumbest members of society tend to develop unhealthy obsessions with numbers.
Haha, well, more startup relevant than, say, a history lesson by a guy who flaunts vocabulary like salaryman while glossing over modern history and comparing big Japanese corporations of zaibatsu background to China, who is still a new player but already plenty strong.

Yeah, the article is about Japan's comeback and not China, but if you want to talk about Japan's comeback it didn't just start with interest rates. There are a slew of other things people have been talking about and claiming to be the signal of Japan's comeback. Interest rates were discussed on magazines around half a year ago. And how in the world can you miss Toyota in that list? They're in the forefront of the comeback.

So I thought "make way for Japan" was about something other than the Japanese excelling in "traditional industries." Everybody knows what the Japanese are good at. Nothing surprises. The title led me to think Japan has grown startup clusters. That would be a big, big deal.
Didn't Paul write something along these lines as well? I've read something similar that was more fleshed out... Anyone know what it was?
Police 2.0? Hitting Back At The Online Mafia
The article seems to imply Google has backed off from ad targeting. I don't think so. An email I got about the death of someone's mother caused gmail to put an ad in the sidebar about grief counseling in his city.

People accept google's targeted ads because the info isn't passed back to advertisers; the system shows a relevant ad based on text and then (as far as I know) forgets it. If Facebook eventually works the same way, I think objections will subside.
What markup is available on news.yc?
Is there any?
New Billmonk Feature: Debt Shuffling
South Korea set to build "Robot Land"
For the lazy, headline translates to "Geek Watch"
I had that for a while, but stopped wearing it because a) I can't wear watches, and b) it takes just a little too long to convert in your head. It would work much better if all our amounts of time (minutes in an hour, hours in a day) were powers of 2.
Hey, a fellow mnt (molecular nanotechnology) enthusiast, cool!

Yes, I've read EoC and Nanosystems (well, I skimmed Nanosystems; it's not a very easy read, being so informationally dense), and follow the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN, http://crnano.typepad.com) blog regularly. As an entrepreneur, I think a startup that comes up with a molecular assembler would be a truly disruptive one, and I'm looking forward to sufficient advances in technology that this is feasible.
I find the coolest geek stuff to be where it's more subtle. If the average person I run into can tell I'm geeking out, it's not worth wearing.
asterisks around words make italics, and if you start a line with a space (and put an empty line above it)

it looks like code().

PS: The italics deal makes it hard to insert more than one *. Although I _think_ there's a workaround (I just don't remember it).
Amazing image resizing and manipulation demonstration
I'm surprised this wasn't a feature right out of the gate. The uncool part is the potentially large checks certain people may have to bear in order to make things work.
Kashif,

I think you ONLY read the article.

Here are todays prime rates . . . Enjoy . . .

Prime Rates in Worlds Largest Economies

Germany 4.00%
US 8.25%
Hong Kong (China Stand-In) 8.00%

And Your Favorite Apparently...

Japan 1.88%

Now . . . Which of these nations do you think is playing unfairly?

...

Take your time . . .
FotoFlexer Raises The Bar On Online Photo Editing
I didn't count Parakey because they were not a regular YC investment. We didn't seed fund them. We were just one of many investors in their series A round.

We usually wouldn't invest that late, but Blake and Joe were so good that it was hard to resist.
Wasn't there some article somewhere that mentioned a rumor about textpayme getting bought by amazon?
You know, it is on my profile. At least, I filled out the "email" input box. But that doesn't actually show up on my profile.

I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug. Either way, you can find me at aguvench on gmail.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't understand Unicode and doesn't understand how to code in such a way that I avoid discriminating against people who happened to not be born in a country where a language with a Latin alphabet is used.
Walt is probably the most successful businessman ever to follow the mantra "Make Something People Want".

He wasn't a big fan of budgets, business models, and the like. He built things he wanted, and believed other people wanted too. He was a workaholic and a visionary, and never settled for just good enough. It shows in his work and it shows in the work that happened at Disney after his death.
I'm struck by (and commented directly on the blog) how much the author wants "Extreme Blue" to be seen as comparable to YC...where the similarities are superficial and the differences are vast.

That comment hasn't shown up, so I'll point out the highlights here:

- EB encourages kids to build things. For IBM.

- YC encourages people (not just kids) to build things. For the people building them.

- EB teams must have "business" and "technical" people, selected by a random manager at IBM.

- YC teams are self-selected, and are judged by what they produce, not what label they use to describe their abilities.

- EB teams build something that may, or may not, ever see the light of day in the market.

- YC teams build something that, if they work hard, can hit the market whenever they're ready. No manager ever has to sign off on the project.

In short, EB is a corporate internship and YC is an opportunity to build something great (you don't need YC to build something great, but for many folks it can help). Corporate internships are fine, and I'm sure everyone has a great time and IBM gets its pick of some great talent discovered through the process, but it is just a corporate inernship. It is distinctly not a radical new process to encourage spinning up new businesses.

I'm not disparaging IBM here. This sounds like a great idea for them. But don't pretend it is something that it clearly is not.
Well, You are right, I didn't read the rates, but clearly 1.88% is not zero - also consider Japanese inflation levels and add to bring it all in context re-read the pieces on the Japanese recession. 1.8% will seem just fine then.

Cheers.

PS: You don't need me to tell you this but you can't sensibly compare interest rates across currencies.
5 Marketing/Business Lessons from Houdini
The problem with making your blog the hub of your social network is that there is no concept of private groups or private friends for a blog. Everything is public.

The post gives an example of uploading photos, and then automatically notifying friends via RSS that new photos are up. Sounds like Facebook, except on Facebook, only my friends could see the photos, not the whole world.

I don't think you solve this problem until there is an Internet-wide system for managing your identity. (Obviously, OpenID and OpenAuth are steps in this direction.)

Plus, I also think that it is psychologically more difficult to start a blog than it is to create a profile page on a social network. With a blog, you have to overcome the "Blank Canvas Fear" ("What am I supposed to say?") and the "Public Speaking Fear" ("I'm speaking to the whole world, not just my friends.") Filling out a Facebook profile and writing on your friend's Wall is a much easier way to start.
By the way, the headline reads "Geek Watch" if you convert it to ASCII.
The Facebook Economy
You bring up an important point. However, I disagree that this particular problem requires Internet-wide identity management. If unlisted numbers are good enough for friends-only phones, then unlisted URLs are good enough for friends-only web resources.
This sounds like a serious competitor to Snipshot, even though FotoFlexer doesn't have an API yet, AFAICT.
Chicago News.YC chat channel finally
https://pibb.com/go/geekchicago

Saw Pibbs TechCrunch writeup this morning and it seems promising. lets give them some support for this. Especially like the OpenID
The 3rd Commandment of Supporting Your Family
Draw on the energy of your family or you'll never have enough energy. What's the difference between a workaholic and a supportaholic? For the workaholic there will never be enough work.
Bandsintown at it again
Today Bandsintown launches the first major update to the site since our launch in june. This major update officially launches Bandsintown as a "Social Network"
The updates include the ability to add friends, message, and comment. All users now have profile pages, and an upcoming show widget to be used anywhere they like. We also added a page called Fansintown which displays live music fans in your area. We are still in development and will continually be updating and realeasing new version of the site until the beta version is complete. We are listingin to all our users comments and feedback to help guide our development so please let us know what you think and what you want in a live music community website! thanks again for all the Ycombinator help!

Check it out at Bandsintown.com
Today Bandsintown launches the first major update to the site since our launch in june. This major update officially launches Bandsintown as a "Social Network" The updates include the ability to add friends, message, and comment. All users now have profile pages, and an upcoming show widget to be used anywhere they like. We also added a page called Fansintown which displays live music fans in your area. We are still in development and will continually be updating and realeasing new version of the site until the beta version is complete. We are listening to all our users comments and feedback to help guide our development so please let us know what you think and what you want in a live music community website! thanks again for all the Ycombinator help! check out Bandsintown.com
I haven't heard that, but it would make sense, considering Amazon's release of the Flexible Payment Service.