skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel your pain. Was a CI Host customer for YEARS and then left them. They got BAD. An old company of mine still has a half-rack with them, but only because of cross-connects in place we don't want to pay to move. We also put gaming servers up there on occasion, since we are paying for it.

Took a lot of customers with me when I left. I couldn't afford to support them on CI Host anymore. Too many problems. They pulled the power on our servers without warning and pulled out the power backup to upgrade it (without warning, mind you), then realized they didn't have a spare unit and left the whole rack unplugged. Had to drive out there and fix it myself.

Moved my stuff to The Planet, but have had problems with them after the merger with EV1. The support panel has slightly reduced functionality and some broken pages. Their support team takes up to thirty minutes to respond to issues. Just sad. It used to be great.

Colo4Dallas has pretty much non-responsive support teams. My employer is moving our remaining servers out of there. Took them forty-five minutes to get around to a down production box. That wasn't even to fix it, just to check it.

Have GREAT luck with Rackspace at work, but definitely more expensive. Very responsive. Preemptive maintenance. Prompt notifications of hardware issues, often before we notice them. IMMEDIATE support.

After they resolved some network instability issues, Sagonet was really good for an old venture of mine. Good prices too.

Geez.....I feel like an unfaithful lover after listing off all these hosts I have used. Probably even a couple more I can't remember.
Well, I certainly didn't think he was, but that's an odd thing to ask considering the article we are discussing is basically some guy refuting the literal interpretation.
I think the truth is that Microsoft is not dead but simply no longer relevant. Eight years ago you would expect a VC to ask you why Microsoft would not choose to compete against you. Or alternately you would make the case that Microsoft might buy you out as an exit strategy. Today you would substitute Google or Yahoo for Microsoft. So in effect to startups Microsoft has truly become irrelevant.
'In fact "Microsoft is Dead" was what we in the trade call a metaphor.'

It kind of saddens me that this clarification was necessary, but at least I got a good laugh out of it :)
I would like to second, third, or fourth this. Having the page jump around when I vote on something really makes me not want to use the site.

Normally I hate "me too" posts, but I feel this feature is important enough that I wouldn't want you to think other people didn't agree. Thanks.
Self policing for "delete me" posts
7 years ago, we started a company called Collaxa. At that time, all our intranet servers and developer machines where dell/windows with a couple of linux machines only (CVS, build). Most people where using Office.

This year, we are starting a new venture. This time, all the developers run on Mac and all the servers are either hosted or running linux. All the presentations are make using Keynote, the intranet is a wiki (no more word) and some google spreadsheets. No one is using Office. The end result: we have not payed a single dollar to Microsoft.

Although big corporations are locked in, the trend is clear. MSFT is going to need a major turn around to get back on their feet.
It seems like this guy is a big fan of the [Ben and Jerry's] (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html) organic company model, and is deriding YC for being more of the "amazon" big burst type model (or at least accusing YC of creating small startup companies that follow the Amazon model). This analogy is slightly flawed, because, like ViaWeb, most of the startups that YC funds don't really seem like Amazon model companies. I would say that the author of this article is drawing the line between "organic startup" and "explosive funded company" much closer to the side of startups that start small, and including YC funded companies on the "explosive funded" side. That may account for some of his anger.

FWIW, his piece does have a good point: that a viable startup should be able to continue along a successful path even if they get rejected by YC. But as other people have noted there are benefits to being funded by YC: firstly they can [remove some of your distractions](http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9439) and give you good advice; and secondly, applying to and being rejected by YC might just [force you to step up and improve your company](http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9486). While there certainly are (and should be) companies that don't need YC to become successful, I think if you can get ahead by getting funded, then you should do it, and that's why YC really matters.
I think you're thinking too much in sort of "playground politics" and not about capitalist systems. It doesn't matter who is afraid of who, or who the big mean kid is. Microsoft dominates the charts in the Amazon software bestsellers: google doesn't have anything in that list. What does that tell you? You're comparing apples and oranges. The "IT industry" is no longer a single industry, so it's no longer about getting a bigger slice of a single cake.
When Microsoft does a major product launch that bombs (in the sense of Battleship Earth), then I'll take this proposition seriously. While they have chart topper after chart topper, there isn's a case.
I can see that your response to the "well they sell lots of software" argument is dismissive, but the fact that they do says a lot. It speaks to: market dominance due to historical monopoly; continued product development and support; and continued acceptance of Microsoft products by the marketplace.
This might sound simplistic, but these are the hard, cold facts. It's fun to predict the demise of a giant (and exciting and controversial). It's boring to predict that they'll lumber on, giant-like, for years to come. That's not interesting or newsworthy!
But sometimes the boring predictions are the most likely ones to occur.
Ironically, the fact that Microsoft apologists didn't even understand pg's explicitly clear article in the first place is yet another HUGE indicator of why they're dead:

They just don't GET IT. ;)
That's a very sick and twisted view of the world-- and it is from Karl Marx.

The reality is, you make money when you bring happiness to people. You make people happy and they want to give you money they want to buy more of your products because they want to keep being made happy again, or made even more happy.

Thus, the happier you make your customers the more money you make.

Further, making people happy, and making money are intrinsically moral things. Trading with people is honest and moral.

Those who talk of altruism speak of violence. Altruism is the destruction of your self to benefit others. (Literally). Thus socialists throw around the word "altruism" (and "Sacrifice" and a lot of other code words) to try and make it seem moral-- but at the root of it, what they are doing or advocating is putting a gun to your head and taking your money (and your money is just a representation of the labor you put in to earn it.)

So, don't you talk to me about morals-- when its clear you are advocating an immoral ideology.

The bottom line is this: Free people trade with each other and profit by trades that make people happy. This trade is moral, it is honest, and it is right. It is intrinsically peaceful.

Socialists oppose free trade, they believe in forcing people at gun point to "trade" on terms that the socialist approve of. This is not peaceful, this is not moral, and obviously the people who are having their lives threatened are acting under duress--- duress is not compatible with happines.

So, the next time you hear "sacrifice" come out of the mouth of a politician -- realize its not him that will be sacrificing-- its you and he's putting a gun to your head to get richer.

That is the language of the thief and the looter, the socialist and the immoral.

This is so obvious that I shouldn't have to say it-- but its amazing how twisted people's minds get when they are subjected to socialist propaganda day in and day out.

To think you just said people doing things that make them happy, because they make them happy is immoral!
San Jose and San Luis Obispo, CA; 2; 24,25
It was a running joke on Slashdot for years to say "FreeBSD is dead".
I have always enjoyed reading Paul's articles/blogs. I was enjoying reading this till I got to the line "All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s."

Having used gmail since March 28, 05, gcal since it came out, and other web software as appropriate for a while, I'm a big believer in software-as-a-service because I hate the idea of having desktop software on one computer and not the other. I also own both, an Apple PowerBook and a Dell laptop. I find Windows a lot more keyboard friendly, since I like to fly around with both shortcut keys and the Mac just can't keep up with me. On the other hand, I love Mac's Zen-like environment and the rock solid BSD underneath it -- Windows can seem pretty cheesy with all its pop-up baloons and MS-DOS prompt. However, given the apps and hardware available for Windows, I still prefer Windows because I'm a developer and business guy. I also disagree that Windows is for grandmas. I mean, Paul, which world do you live in? Just because a niche of designers, developers and a few affluent folks use Apple, doesn't mean EVERYONE is using Macs. Your bias clearly shows through here.

I personally am not biased to any particular hardware/OS because I use them all (even Ubuntu/Linux for servers). Having worked with 5 flavors of Unix since 1991, I feel equally comfortable with the nix world, Windows and Mac OS.

In the end, Apple is a cult -- it always has been. Apple isn't any better of a company than Microsoft and neither is Google. I've always had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft. I hate how they try to break stuff (e.g. Java, JavaScript) but I absolutely don't mind using MS Office to get stuff done. And, the fact that I almost entirely use open source for my development/deployment and not feel hampered on Windows combined with the fact that most of my personal information management is done using gmail/gcal, I can use Microsoft to get the best of all world: i.e. MS Office, web 2.0 apps through Firefox, anything open source (e.g. eclipse, rails, mysql), etc., etc. I strongly believe OS will eventually become less relevant for desktops, whether it is Microsoft, Mac, or Linux.

In the end, consumers have personal preferences and corporation want to make money. That's as simple as it gets.

On June 2, 2006 (thanks to gmail's quick search engine for locating the email/date), I sent an email to a bunch of folks pointing them to Paul's "How to start a startup" article (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html) because I absolutely loved it! On this article, I have to agree with the previous commenter that "Paul Graham is the Ann Coulter of the Web 2.0 world." :-(
Paul says he wanted to be the first to call MS's decline.

I think John Walker did this more than 10 years ago:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/msapogee.html
I was a bit surprised at so many people jumping up in arms over the declaration of Microsoft's death. The article was quite clear in what it was getting at -- I could only guess that people are inferring the wrong things because they didn't actually read it. And even then, when I first read the article title, I thought: Yep, sounds about right.
Oh man, that commercial is pure cheese.

If you guys ever somehow drunkenly decide to blow $2.5M on a commercial, make sure to include gratuitous explosions and an extended car chase sequence. Then, of course, relate it back to email somehow at the end.
You would really be surprised how many people don't know how to do certain things. I spent one year working as a floor coordinator (RA to most people) in the dorm and it boggled me. I don't know why, and I don't blame them for it, but things I took for granted like knowing how to do laundry or cook were not skills known by the majority.

On the subject of food in particular, I love to cook. I've held down two cooking jobs, and one of my plans for after I become a startup millionaire is to open a restaurant. Cooking is a lot like hacking. You build up from very simple frameworks, experimenting as you go. Also like coding, if you've never tried it, it looks scary and foreign. Have confidence and just do it.
Wow, they changed it since I said that. Good for them. Their robots.txt blocks the Wayback Machine, but the current Google cache has it (search for "The main - usually whiny - argument"): http://tinyurl.com/26o3nq

Edit: link syntax.
The less pieces you have the lower the complexity. The lower the complexity the easier it is to fix when stuff breaks. The easier it is to fix bugs the faster you can get a real product shipped. You would be amazed how much load a single box can handle. I wouldn't split until I had to.

My current setup is a single FreeBSD box sitting in a colo downtown that putters along without a hitch.
I'll pass on whatever Paul is smoking. I guess there's a psychological condition (I'll coin it Slashdotitis), where the downfall of Microsoft is just right around the corner - or in Paul's case it has already happened.

Here's a cluestick. HTML (even with AJAX) is not a freaking platform. Wake me up when Google has an actual platform. Until then, Paul can go live in the fantasy world with Larry Ellison where the networked thin client was going to take over years ago. Yawn.
Students: yet another summer founders program (due 4/19): Highland Capital Partners
Someone saying 8 years ago that web apps would take the majority of desktop applications out of the picture people would say she is crazy.
If today you accept that fact, then possibly u accept that Microsoft has at least been minimized as a potential threat.

But, if someone even today haven't seen the move away desktop apps, then they will never understand what PG meant.

If you compare the 17 acquisitons Vs the 9 that Google did in 2006, the conclusions are obvious...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corporation#2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions
Boston, MA 3 22, 28, 45
You're a moron with an MBA. There is very little substance in what you said, just speculation. You clearly do not understand the Software and IT Services space.
Very insightful! Microsoft will become completely irrelevant once the desktop/laptop becomes history, which may take another 5 years. Mobile phones will have enough smarts to run the apps that most folks need, wherever they need them, and will be able to deliver them to big screen docking stations via Ajax web apps when we need to see the detail. Check my blog at http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/02/after-desktop-what.html and http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/03/mobilizing-mobiles.html
Highland was one of the VC's that ripped into govWorks (startup.com) in 2000 If I remember correctly ~ http://www.phfilms.com/index.php/phf/film/startupcom
Like I said, Yscraper makes sense. The article says "scaper."
Good God, another one. At least these guys didn't copy our application form.

The funny thing is, both Highland and Lightspeed are copying an aspect of YC that we later realized was a mistake: focusing on people currently in school.

People who copy you always end up copying a slightly old version of you. I noticed that with Viaweb. That's one reason all these imitations don't freak me out too much. Viaweb must have had at least 10 of them-- many of which copied stuff nearly verbatim from our site.
I'd like to make a difference in the world, and have enough money.

I first started hawking things to old ladies when I was six. Both my parents have owned several businesses over the years. Finance, law, and business have always fascinated me. Aside from a brief stint where I wanted to be an astronaut, every single ideal future I've seen for myself has had me working for myself.

I also really don't like 'working'. I like being in control of my own destiny, having a boss isn't good for that. I like feeling useful, most jobs I've had I didn't get that feeling. I want to be exemplary, but doing tech support made me feel mediocre at best.

As for web startups, it's a simple matter of math. I can't be passionate about something I don't care about and it costs less to start a startup than a restaurant. I'm not a genius by any stretch, and reading about some of the people who have been picked for YC... I'm a little in awe. But I do get computers and coding very well. It's something I know how to do and is hard enough to be challenging.

I want it for the freedom, the challenge, and a chance to make a difference in the world. A pile of cash would be a nice bonus, but isn't needed. Just as long as I have enough to live comfortably.
Product Reviews: Everyone Wants A Piece Of The Market, But PowerReviews May Get It
Most of my ideas come out of things in my life, or from friends and family, that I want to make easier or in some cases possible. I don't really using reading as a resource for this.
If being "not feared" means being dead, then Google was never born. Who is afraid of Google anyways, except that they might misuse our trust by breaching our privacy !

People are no longer afraid of MS because technology has now grown into areas (e.g. web) where they can work without competing with MS.
Important question: what state are you in? California has some limitations (not the strictest, but some) on what employers can lay claim to. Still, yeesh.
Nice to see Poor Charlie's Almanack on there, I was wondering how many people bother to order it. I went to the Huntington Library on Friday and was reminded to pick the book up there from a link I saw on News.YC which you should read to get a great taste of Charlie Munger:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9364
"In most cases, though, it's better to work with people's illogical expectations.... Perhaps that's why Lisp never caught on."

I appreciate the insight here. I think that if the goal is to create a general-purpose programming language for consumption by the average population, it might be better to meet the expectations of the average person. I'm not saying that it needs to be C-like necessarily, but I think that you're right that things like order of operations and other expectations should probably be properly preserved, at least for mathematical operations.

I also realized that my approach was still wrong. If the goal is to be able to build any programming language, the left-to-right approach would already be limited to building a language which evaluates from left-to-right. So it seems that I still have work to do in order to figure out how best to design a language which is able to look like whatever the user desires it to.

One possibility is to sacrifice ease of macro-writing for making other areas of the language more consistent (but not Lisp-like). That is, I would like to keep the expressive power of macros high (even if it involves modifying the read table in some way) while keeping the language intuitive for a beginner. This would likely make it a bit more difficult to write macros, but by the time you are using macros a lot, you are probably a bit more advanced, anyways.

I'm thinking that there has to be some kind of grammar theory that I can leverage here, where the programmer could actually modify the language's parser in the program while maintaining consistency and lack of ambiguity, or being alerted to the potential ambiguity in case they fail to.

In any case, I am quite convinced that Lisp is probably one of the most ideal languages. This means that my hypothetical language may be an example of the phenomenon pg describes, where the best languages are those which are designed for use by the designer, and languages like Java and Cobol are the result of designing for others. I would like to hope that's not the case here, since I'm approaching this with a use-case in mind: to design a language which can be used to design any other language.
I've used cari.net/complexdrive.com in san diego. They are pretty good.
Right now, the threads page is sorted by the creation time of the leftmost comment (I think). Could it instead be sorted by the creation time of the most recent comment in the thread?

Example:

I write a comment (1)

I write another comment (2)

I write another comment (3)

I write another comment (4)

Someone replies to (1)

I write another comment (5)

Current sort order:

5

4

3

2

1

- reply to 1

Proposed order:

5

1

- reply to 1

4

3

2
People can copy what's out in the open, so the important thing is to make sure that you're the one who's constantly setting the pace.
Microsoft may be dead, but it's also a zombie and it wants your brainesszzz....
People always copy that which is popular. Only difference being that they are giving space. This is so obvious that they are pushing to attract the crowd. But there is one thing they missed out, anyone with solid idea and attitude will get into YC, whoever lost their chance of YC will be gobbled by immitators. This explicitly means they are always 1 step behind.
While there's some overlap, Lightspeed and Highland aren't directly copying YC in the same way as the complete plagiarism of Techstars.

Lightspeed and Highland are doing this more for marketing than profit. They're not even taking any equity. It gets their name out to entrepreneurial students at colleges and that's about it. Anyone that gets a grant will pitch future startups to the VC that helped them get started. To the VCs, it's worth spending a mere $150,000 to build a strong relationship with some of the best young entrepreneurs. Sure, most of the startups will go back to school after the summer program instead of dropping out and being successful but they'll come back to Lightspeed or Highland for funding after they get their degree.

Highland also funds biotech and provides lab space in their incubator. Neither one is targeting the same uber-hacker that YC prefers.

I think you should be flattered you began this trend of micro-investment. It's a great idea. I'm grateful because it's better for all us young entrepreneurs to have as many options as possible.
(Submitted under comment in Don's blog. Hopefully it will be approved.)

Don,

I believe Microsoft's demise is more closely related to Apple and Google than you have thought.

Google - easy one, GMail and Google Doc basically replaced the MS office suite I purchased in '98

Apple - based on Paul Kedrosky's observations, Vista sales is highly correlated to PC sales and once those numbers are normalized, "it looks like Vista sales are tracking on par with XP, and no better than that" (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/03/26/playing_parse_t.html).

So from the indications of recent AAPL stock price - what if Apple continues to gain shares in the PC market? Upon purchasing a new iMac, my dad (retired) have found out that switching to Os X is easy as long as solitaire is installed.
This could be possible with a mouseover description, simply throw the description into the "title" property of the <a> element.

e.g.

url: http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html

title: How to make a demo that people will truly consider

description: Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.

This would result in --

<a href="http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html" title="Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.">How to make a demo that people will truly consider</a>
I mean, I've seen a commodity dating site script available that came with an option for generating fake profiles.