skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a Lenovo T60 running Windows XP, with Ubuntu 6.10 running in a VMWare virtual machine. VMWare Workstation is really cheap and VMWare Player is free. You can find many preconfigured Linux virtual machines on VMWare's website.

Power management and battery life in particular suck on Linux. Even if you can get it to actually work (lots of Googling + configuring) you will get at best 2/3 of the Windows battery life. Plus, I don't have a lot of faith in the quality of the suspend-to-disk functionality in any flavor of Linux.
I understand the legal point, but I don't think incorporating should be a barrier to building another application. I wouldn't be afraid of pursuing different web 2.0 apps under the same company, but would definitely consider a spin off if one became successful.
Joy's Law: "No matter who you are or what company you run, the majority of smart people do not work for you."
I wonder if it's not an outsourced Oracle employee who is not even aware of what company he works for.
get someone to mentor you?
7. local shortcodes in international locations. i.e. twitter now has a shortcode in .ph - 8990, they make money everytime someone sends an SMS
Akamai Releases FoxTorrent 1.0 - Firefox BitTorrent Add-on
Yahoo pig and google sawzall
The smartest hackers are too smart to work for the man. In fact they are too fringe to even be recognized as the 'best'.
Tell us more ;P
http://buzzboston.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/i-know-y-combinator-and-crv-quickstart-you-are-no-y-combinator-it%e2%80%99s-hard-to-change-your-stripes/
I haven't looked much at Slashdot lately, but they have certainly put a lot of work into designing a good system for moderating comments. You are right that they have some dimensionality, and a way to "fade" trolls by adjusting your settings so you only see highly rated comments.

Still, for me at least, I don't find their dimensionality very helpful. "funny" and "informative" are rather broad categories. If all the content on Slashdot could be simultaneously ranked on a scale of "value to startup entrepeneurs looking for seed funding" and "online video content"...that would be useful to me!

I don't have any particular ideas about what should be done, but limiting your choices to "up" and "down" seems so narrow. Maybe I should jsut be happy it works as well as it does!
I'm not sure I understand the point this author is trying to make. I don't see CRV trying to pretend they're YC in any way.

PG--do you know these guys? What do you think of their Quickstart/loan program?
Features can be products as Twitter and Wufoo show. I think the power of them is that they're extremely focused. If you're on Facebook, you have more than one thing to do and probably won't use the status updates much. But if you're on Twitter, you're there to update your status and that's it.

#5 is messed up. He did 1337 speak instead of doing the prpr thng lk ths. Fscntng hw mch smllr wrds lk.
No, Jesus wouldn't be so cruel :P
Knowing When to 'Whack It'! - Found+READ
I just stumbled upon this: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythonwin32/chapter/ch12.html

And this:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/440661

Don't you just love Python?
I was interested in this topic, namely, conversation theory or something with that sort of name, and read a little on it. Standard textbook stuff you can find in intro level linguistics or sociolinguistics.

Slashdot's model follows some theories surprisingly well. The designers really put thought into it.
Yes, I work on a Mac.

The nice thing about VBA was that you could mostly work in Excel, only using VBA to supplement when neccessary. (Open another file to import data, for example. Or take a value from cell X, and plug it into cell Y a couple hundred times until the answers converged.)

You are right about the Larger Issue, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise as an opportunity to wage my own personal war against the Microsoft Monopoly.
Because they didn't.

There are too many of them to be hired by one company, regardless how big google is getting.
And you will never work as hard as an employee as you would when you're working for yourself.

No matter how much you like the company you work for.
I'm guessing juwo downmodded us?
Looks like a fine way to get data out of Excel...but how do I get it back in?!
well its a few ideas, including some mobile and a web portal, tho there just simple ideas and not much,i will give a little bit more thought to them first to see if its not just utter crap :s if i like how it turns out i'll post bout it later maybe ill find cofounders here cause im far from technical and hackerish :P
How Google keeps its database ticking
To bloggers: those numbers in your titles (Top N reasons...) are annoying and superfluous
Zawinki's covered his Netscape time pretty extensively on his site.

One of the better sources for financial train wrecks is "When Giants Stumble" (http://www.amazon.com/When-Giants-Stumble-Business-Blunders/dp/0788199439 ), which is a bit dated (lots of retail/manufacturing/finance, not much technology) but thorough.
Change your idea into one your friends would be interested in. I'm socializing more now.

Start losing sleep tonight, then two days from now decide whether it was a good idea or not. It depends on you.
... and no wonder most of the articles that mention some number in their headlines are useless. Of course some of them aren't.

As for the articles themselves, numbering your thoughts means you can't really write. Try it, you'll see that it is harder not to number them, but at least your text won't look like a schoolbook.
Talk about stealing ideas: AOL rips off Yahoo
Forget about inventing new stuff, Google has problems keeping the current apps running: http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/26/2030239.shtml
Google hasn't hired all the best hackers. They have hired the best hackers that don't have the balls to start their own company.
Building a data warehouse with MySQL and Perl
AOL One Step Behind Again: New Home Page Identical To Yahoo
You say Launch Early, but what about browser compatibility?
Only AOL would rip off a company with no revenue growth.
My app is close to ready to be launched, but it only works in IE. Is it ok to launch with it working in IE only? Do you think I should let users know that it only works in IE?
From the website:
Background Downloading

Continues to work even after your browser window has been closed.

This is a BUG, not a feature. When I close my web browser, I certainly DON'T want any extensions kept running, especially when they accept incoming connections.

When you launch foxtorrent, it spawns a child process that listens on port 9421. I had no idea that firefox extensions could spawn processes.
This is a perfect example of how big companies that rely on design-by-committe are incapable of doing original, creative work. But I doubt they will lose any subscribers because of this!
"If you're reading this, you're not working hard enough." -Me
I would fix the FF bugs ASAP. You'll have to do it eventually so put that at the top of your to-do list. The fixes probably aren't that hard. Thanks to firebug you could probably pin-point the bugs really fast.

It's probably better to put off the launch for a few days to avoid making a really bad impression to potential users.
Should be easy enough if they're using COM objects. But don't ask, ask Google. I haven't run a Microsoft product for a while, sorry (sorta :P)
Google 'frantic' about Personalized Home Page glitch
See here: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

What you can take from this is while being IE compatible only will give you about 58% of users, you can see that FF is growing steadily and will probably catch up someday in the not too distant future.

It also depends on what kind of web app this is. If it's something for younger people, or people more technology inclined, the FF visits may be a lot higher than the graph suggests.
No revenue growth but they still have a lot of innovation going on there, with yahoo pipes, yahoo dev network, Hadoop etc. It's a shame such a good tech company is run my media folks.
For some reason I cant connect to mashable today, anyone else getting this problem?
Kinda reads like a Microsoft PR piece, IMO. "In case you've been pressured into using those damn Macs at your company, here are all the ways in which it's going to be really sucky and expensive!"
Easier said that done. My app relies heavily on AJAX and has lots of Javascript...
When did Yahoo redesign their webpage?
Before today I haven't checked out yahoo.com in years.

It used to be my home page before google came along.
Did you use a library such as open rico or something based on prototype? If not, consider porting your existing code to use them as those libraries have solved many of the complexities of writing cross browser AJAX code.
They should have ripped off Google. Way less work.
I guess they should allow you to export your settings and take your data with you. That is a Web 2.0 rule after all.
Arch Linux on a Dell Inspiron 600M (also not sold anymore, I believe)
Google rejects hiring loads of "the best hackers" every day through their way-too-high standards.

Then when inevitably some of these "not quite the best" hackers build a popular site, Google is forced to come crawling back and pay several million to acquire the company, instead of the several hundred thousand they would have payed them as salary.
I feel for you. When I wrote my first AJAX program, there was a lot of javascript controlling the UI. It was almost complete before I looked at it in IE for the first time. Two days and 10,000 alert boxes later I had it working.

It's a necessary evil. No one enjoys it, but if you don't make the fixes you'll prevent a lot of people (including myself, a FF user) from ever even trying your website. If I try it once and it completely breaks, I'm never going to come back.

If there are one or two non-critical features that are creating all of the bugs, then perhaps remove them initially and add them once you've fixed the compatibility bugs.
Would you buy an expensive domain name?
A domain name that would be perfect for my next project is already taken, but for sale for 4500$ (9 characters). Another one is available for 1500$ (15 characters :-( ).

Which raises the question, would you ever buy a domain name (for that kind of price)? Something in me doesn't want to do it, but then again it is hard to find good names that aren't taken. 4500$ is too much for me at this stage of the project, but in principle?
Are you sure that AOL didn't contract to license it from Yahoo! and rebrand it?
"There's no way this can fail!" One of many famous last words of business
Another question: is it mandatory to have a .com domain name? I kind of feel it is, because otherwise your customers will just go to the .com domain even though they might have been looking for you. Perhaps one exception would be if the TLD somehow is part of the name? But even then, I wouldn't be sure.

On the other hand it seems inevitable that in the long run people will get used to other TLDs, because not every valid business will be able to aquire a good .com-name.
This is bad news for any company trying to build trust in web hosted applications and data (such as mine). I hope they can fix it and restore the data, otherwise a lot of trust in general will be lost. Wouldn't they at least have data backups? (Does Amazon's S3 backup their data?)
For ubuntu & ati check this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1773544
Also, if you don't have this book yet, get it now. It lists all javascript and css methods and which versions of which browsers support them. I relied on it heavily when writing/debugging my web app user interface.

http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-HTML-Definitive-Reference-Html/dp/0596527403/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-3913841-7071807?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177690841&sr=8-1
Maybe members of the news.yc could help you brainstorm and choose an alternative?
I'm just saying... the whole "Linux is too hard" argument doesn't hold much water with me anymore, since both my wife and 8 year old have been using it with no problems for a while. =)

But yea, OS X does seem pretty nice, I'd probably give it a try if I didn't care about things like openness [1] and vendor lock-in [2].

[1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks

[2] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/09/18/Apple-XML
No - buying an expensive domain name is not increasing customer value when so many names are still available - use your money to make your application better. My cofounder demanded a .com name, and I agreed - .com is the way to go as long as you can still find a suitable name. For example, our company makes a project management application with the essential feature that it focuses on customer valuestreams. After brainstorming for hours and bouncing around about 30+ different dot.com permutations (and using a thesaurus extensively as well as the greek-english dictionary) we ended up with the simple name: StreamFocus.com essentializing what our app does. (We just finalized the name last weekend)
Talk about the frustration of your game not working properly under Vista. At least some pieces of DX10 would be brought back in XP at the end of the year.
Yes, I'm looking at incorporating outside the United States as well (HK to be precise) and would be very interested in hearing this point addressed.
Depends what you call expensive.

Our default advice is that buying domains doesn't work.
The owner either wants a ridiculous price, or doesn't want
to sell, or doesn't answer your emails. There are also
plenty of good names still untaken. We can often find one in a few minutes using instantdomainsearch.
MySQL hits $50 million revenue, plans IPO
No, but the answer is relative. If you have a million dollars then $5,000 isn't "expensive" for the perfect name. But if you have $20,000 spending $5,000 on the domain name would be insane.

I just went through this myself. I started negotiating with the squatter and I came to find out that we went to the same school and we travel in the same circles. Even still we were not able to agree on the price so I walked away.

Last week I finally had a new inspiration for the name. It's just one character longer than the perfect name. I was able to buy .com .org and .net with this minor variation from a registrar (not a squatter)!

Keep thinking!
Well since they have come from the portal background. They wanted to show off alot of properties at the same time, so Yahoo matched the intentions more than Google`s vanilla homepage.
I paid about $100 for mine. I went to either sedo.com or afternic.com and looked for domain names that were selling for a single price. I may have typed it in and saw that it was for sale--I don't remember the details now.
Heres the text of the post, caught by my RSS reader. Looks like a repeat of the rumour going round during FOWA:

Some murmuring in the UK this this week says that Viacom is continuing its negotiations to buy Last.fm for approximately $450 million - a huge sum, but partly justified by the fact that Last.fm is really the ÂYouTube of musicÂ these days.

The royalty rate hike for online radio stations in the US, which is now being countered by a bill that aims to overturn it, doesnÂt seem to have affected the purchase price.

Based on a corroborating story from DealBreaker earlier this week, I guess we can upgrade this one from Âvague rumorÂ to ÂpossibilityÂ. More details appreciated.
Let them know it works only in IE and be honest about your plans for getting it to work in other browsers.
Having used laptops with both ATI and nVidia chips inside, nvidia support is definitely the way to go between the two, especially for multi-monitor setups. I actually returned my old laptop with ATI graphics because their Linux drivers and support was terrible.

I hear that the new Intel graphic chips are also quite nice, and the fact that they open sourced the drivers should make them the ideal Linux graphics adapters, but I don't have any experience with them.
I agree with you that the writing is often not great.

On the other hand, I see a disproportionate number of "Top X reasons"-like posts hitting digg and delicious/popular which leads me to believe that lists resonate well with readers. I'm not a blogger or link-baiter, but I'd prefer to write a mediocre article which is read thousands of times via prominence on social media sites versus a 'well-written' article with no numbers/lists that no one reads.

It seems like consumers of blogs and social media like lists, so bloggers logically satisfy that need.
Thank you. I visit Yahoo! many times a day, but I type in mail.yahoo.com directly and was about to post the same thing. I thought, "is that what Yahoo.com looks like?"
YScraper not so friendly? - Justin.tv getting evicted, Auctomatic denied apartment
Good Presentation on how to scale ROR web apps
Because there is more to building a tech business than just tech?
Didn't somebody else get an eviction notice?
I agree.

While it's amusing, it's not the type of content I expect to see at the top of the list at this site.

Has the reddit/digg over-popularity effect kicked in here, too?

Maybe we need the ability to down-vote submissions.
This is really great.
Schmidt on scaling Google
While using the lottery is a poor choice of analogy (as others have pointed out), I think his basic message is right: thinking that acquisition is the exit is foolhardy, particularly when you have neither revenues nor a plan to generate them.
too many good domain names still available

I would never get a domain 15 characters long

I actually got a great one today :)
We are All Open-Source Billionaires
Good ideas and companies are not always created by the best hackers in the world.
As someone who doesn't use IE, I'm more impressed by a site saying "This site is only compatible with IE right now - we're working on it, though!" than with a site that is obviously broken and incompatible. And if you don't intend to ever make it work in the other browsers, say so up front.

And users will figure out very quickly that it only works in IE; better to be up-front about it.
LifeLock Raises $6 Million From Kleiner Perkins To Protect Your Identity
I would steer clear of .org, .net, or many others...but I think that .tv domains can be a great choice if you're doing something video-related.

.tv is different enough from .org/.com to be memorable, and can be quite descriptive about what you are offering.
I used this service when I could not dream up a cool domain name. http://www.pickydomains.com/ It works wonderfully and real people think up your domain name. Its well worth the $50 and also one of the coolest simplest startup ideas I have seen in a while.
What about sleep support and battery use? That is a big selling point for the Mac, my MacBook uses more or less 1% of battery per hour and fully wakes up (wifi included) in a matter of seconds. Is there any PC notebook with similar sleep performance under Linux? This is not a troll, I actually prefer Linux for most things, and would gladly use a 12", <3lbs notebook running Linux if it had fast and reliable sleep.
How to Not Crash a Startup
I could see a few more episodes like this forcing Google to focus more on 'reliability' which could decrease the amount of risks they take and increase their cycle time for new products. Has to happen eventually.
yes, the Octoparts.
oh, good point! i just meant, if you are on the fence about whether or not to do it... do not share the idea with someone that has a 100% chance of shooting you down at a critical stage.

startup lore is riddle with ideas that were ridiculed by people who couldn't see the vision early enough. (hotmail, for one)
The hardware it takes to handle 60 million hits a day
Nathan - yes, exactly.

I think there's a huge market for something like this.

Not to mention partnering up with other big boys in the space to leverage their networks / customers.
Well, the first problem is North Beach. The last company I started worked out of a cold ass basement in Bernal Heights. That felt about right. The Mission's an even better idea.
Right, but how good is their app after 3 months? Not very.

There are always exceptions to every rule though, re: the original point.

i.e. MySpace. Talk about crappy technology (or so it would seem; they've managed to scale well), and a has-run idea.
Supersize Your Stock Vesting with Microhacks
No... crazy names are Web 2.0ish anyway... so just think of a weird way to spell it, or make up a word. Both those strategies worked out fine for Yahoo and Google.

Closer to home, I imagine this was the strategy employed by Loopt and scribd too.
hey mojuba, sure.

it was kind of like what's being described in this thread.

the difference was that the creators wanted to somehow compensate (with stock) both all of the people who submitted ideas / feedback.

you can't do that though without coming very very near to violating SEC regulations. (Agloco will surely run into this issue as well)

Net result: The Business Experiment had a hard time finding anyone to actually code up the ideas.

While their first idea was still in development, a competitor came out that totally demolished their potential app's functionality.

The idea was something like Google Answers meets Wisdom of Crowds.
How did it work out?

Can you share any links?
Skeptical me: PR stunt?
Qantas ditches Linux for AIX
Websense offers to buy rival SurfControl
the point is. the press compares the two but they are far apart in actuality. A VC emulating YC would be this
http://www.hcp.com/news/newsdetails.php/id/49812
Images: Mozilla revs up Thunderbird 2
Joost signs major advertisers for TV-over-Web plan
Well, yes.

The key points are (a) when one interest starts to run in the red, you don't want it taking down your other interests; and (b) when your app takes off, you don't want to have to worry about app scaling and availability and converting from a sole proprietorship to a corporation or spinning off a company at the same time.
Definitely let users know, and block access from other browsers. It's better to see an "Sorry, IE-only for now, please come back later" message than a broken web app.

Personally, I can't imagine starting up IE just to check out a new web app, unless it seems insanely cool... so if you're looking at not alienating FF users, it's a good idea to get it working in FF asap (Firebug makes JS coding sooo nice).
Yes. I spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase FreeDrive.com. It was a web 1.0 company back in 1997 that raised $20 million dollars and went bust.

I'm building the web 2.0 version of this company now and I am starting with a memorable domain that has over 200,000 backlinks already built-in.

If you are a web business, your domain name is your most important asset.
[video] Marketers embrace user-generated content revolution
Ok this I see, good post.
This is the upshot of putting your software on the web. Word or Access bugs b0rk user data retail. The same kind of glitch in a web app is magnified because it happens wholesale: everyone is affected at once.

But I would class this with the Yahoo/Google DDoS blackouts and the eBay scaling blackout circa 1999. Teething problems that will soon be forgotten if they are fixed correctly.
I imagine they aren't very excited about all the press they got about people running businesses out of the building.
"The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations."

What's with the unncessary bashing "hosted application providers"? I think it's safe to say that many more users would be affected by bugs and dead hard drives had they been running this on their personal computers, had this been a desktop application, like Frontpage.
TechForward Raises Series A Funding from First Round Capital for Consumer Electronics Trade-In Service
Sadly, no. I've seen the notice, and am currently housing a few people who got rejected based on their "association" with Justin.
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