skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a lot of respect for you (at least, I follow you on Twitter, and I don't follow many people!) so keep that in mind reading this..!

The pitch has a number of problems.

It takes 20 seconds before you mention the problem that your product helps resolve, and then another 12 seconds before you start to define what that problem even is. Show rather than tell. You say it's a painful problem before stating the problem (it's also probably far too early in the pitch for any humorous photos). If it's painful, it will be apparent when you just describe the problem.. if not, you're not describing the problem properly. Second, it takes over two minutes for you to talk specifically about any feature of your product.

Describing your product as a "online social workspace that allows companies to better organize and share information by leveraging the connections around them" is Dilbert-esque, and it doesn't tell us anything concrete about what your product does.

I really want you to get to Startup and Foo Camps and think you are on to something good, but I really hope that when you do come face to face with investors, your pitch is concise, to the point, and really, really tight. I sense that the lack of these qualities can be the nail in the financing coffin unless your idea is extremely revolutionary.

On the plus side, you definitely come across as enthusiastic and knowledgeable in the pitch. Your voice is engaging.
These might be worth a look:

http://www.assembla.com/
http://unfuddle.com/
perhaps an easier solution would be a little IDE plugin that checks in the code whenever a key is pressed.

I don't know if you can beat ~40 check-ins per line ;)
Live From All Things Digital: Gates and Ballmer Preview Windows 7
Did a quick test. Works in IE6 and FF2. Anyone willing to give it a try in IE7, Opera, and Safari?
don't know who came up with this first, but it looks strikingly similar to 'nifty corners':
http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html

Here is a technique I have used before to add a 'snazzy border':
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/boxes/snazzy.html
That was a very good writeup. Yes, cities do mould people. What I am excited about in the Bay Area is the possbility of success and recognition. The thing here is, if you are good, you will most probably and in all likelihood be recognized for it and valued for it. Also the geeky combination of Asian Americans and the tech sector makes life more interesting at work. I've never returned home on any day without having solved something interesting or without learning something new. That to me is the essence of Silicon Valley.
What argument? Your complaint is that it's subjective -- I'm saying yes, it is, and everybody else knows that. It's just that nobody cares because the very crowning phrase "intellectual capital of the world" is subjective.

It's like saying "Chicago is the best city in the world to get a hot dog" -- it may not be backed by objective criteria but that does not render it meaningless, and you can find plenty of people ready to make or agree with that claim without a formal argument.

The burden is on you to explain why it makes a difference in the context of the essay, as it's unclear how you distinguish between it and people in the comments agreeing with it -- in neither case is it presented as an objective determination, and yet you're treating it as if it is. (see also:"tilting at windmills")
why would any developer who didnt want to lose their job use this? There are lots of things you can do that you shouldn't. So what I can do with one background image and 2-3 divs and look good, you can do with a series of bold tags to look bad. Sorry to be critical, but this is not the quality of content I have come to expect from HN. Digg maybe.
"The result of choice, not circumstance."

There seems to be this popular belief that admitting you are influenced by your environment is a sign of weakness. I just gave a presentation for my ethics class was on why the "trolley problem" is a logical fallacy. My argument was that you could create a system to flip the switch that completely circumvented the individual as a moral agent. For example, you could create a system whereby the individuals on the track could bid ebay-style on which direction the switch should be flipped. Or, alternatively, you could create a system whereby the direction of the switch was determined by a dice, with a 5/6 chance of the single individual being killed and a 1/6 chance of the other five individuals being killed. I then argued that A) social systems, not only individuals, should be considered to be moral agents and B) the morality of a system should be judged based on the behaviors it promotes via its extrinsic rewards. So, for example, the ebay-style system would be a universe that encouraged its inhabitants to create things of value for others so that they could bid their way out their predicament, whereas the dice-toss universe would be completely amoral as it would neither encourage nor discourage any set of behaviors. To me the lesson of the Milgram experiments, the Asch conformity tests, the Stanford Prison Experiment, etc. is that moral decisions are the result of both the individual's intrinsic nature and their external environment (inc. extrinsic rewards). So the trolley problem has always struck me as a false dichotomy because it assumes that the only two options are for a single individual to flip the switch either left or right, which implies that morality is completely intrinsic within the individual and the external environment plays no role, even though this is completely counter to what social psych teaches us.

Anyway, this was sort of a very long was of saying that I like the idea that people should consciously choose their environment because they realize that their environment does have a very real effect on their actions.
Yeah it is essentially the same technique that all those JS rounding libraries use. The nice thing about the libraries is that you don't have to see all those extra horseshit DOM elements you need to make this work.

Either way you're going to make a standarista cry.
Viral Political Video impacts NZ voters
I must admit the descriptions you give for Amsterdam, London, Barcelona sound off to me. I think you have to live or spend a lot of time somewhere before you can understand it's 'message', if it has one
works in opera and safari.
Yep, a lot of us would have to adopt the hobo life and cut other people with our hobo knife.
Advertising Revenue Math - How much traffic is needed to generate $1M in ad revenue? It all depends on how well you can target your audience and how much you can charge for CPM rates. For social network sites let's assume an average CPM of $0.40. You would need 2.5 Billion page views per month to earn $1M in ad revenues. That is 2,500,000,000 page views...how many sites generate that traffic?

1- $1 million per what?

2- 2.5 billion page views -- if Facebook isn't doing that, it's pretty close. Is Facebook's cost of operation > $1 million per month? It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be anywhere near that. Therefore: profit. Where's the problem?

All booms eventually go bust.

Little booms do, but big "booms" last longer, at least, if not forever. For example, that little boom they call telephony. Or the personal computer. Or this whole internet thing.
Places I've lived:

Mountain View, CA: We're not the Barrio (any more).

Toledo, OH: We're close to Detroit.

Bowling Green, OH: Attend a real university with your real high school friends!

Columbus, OH: Love Ohio State football (and basketball, if the season's wrong).
Too much white space. Won't be visiting any longer.
my list:

brooklyn: you should be hipper

cambridge: you should be smarter

berkeley: you should only eat organically grown vegetables

tokyo: you should be japanese

san francisco: you should become as crazy as most everyone else, but not quite as crazy as the homeless people
I lived in Columbus, and I concur. Columbus says: "watch Ohio State football."
What would you say those cities' messages are? (I'm especially interested in Amsterdam because I'm thinking about moving there.)
'Did she get two and a half times as effective at "external affairs" over that year?'

I imagine she did. I'm not exactly sure what "external affairs" entails, but it sounds like the kind of position that would benefit greatly from being politically well connected.
There are a number out there already. Compete.com is the one installed on my browser.
That's hard to say. One can make the argument for a price crash as speculators have flooded into the oil and commodities markets and bid up prices. There is a lot of fear of peak <insert finite natural resource>. Once people got tired of it, prices would drop.

On the other hand, oil is a finite natural resource that has been pumped out of the ground for decades at an increasing rate. Only severely retarded politicians don't believe in peak oil or believe that oil is an infinite resource (they also believe in ghosts, so there). Thanks to China, India, and other countries deciding they want some basic level of civilization, the rate of increase in the rate of increase of demand means oil supplies and proven reserves are going down fast. That means there might not be a price crash and in a few years we will look at $6/gallon for gasoline as the good ole days.
Programming Nirvana, Plan B
me: I'm sick
doctor: here's some anti-biotics.

repeat for 20 years.

me: realizes doctor prescribes anti-biotics for allergies, the flu, and the common cold.
I'm just tired of being prescribed meds for things when I obviosly don't need them or as much as they give. Or they won't give me what I need. I can't sleep here's and anti-depressant with a side effect of making you tired.
The problem with Scalr is you need to run several EC2 instances...if you can afford that (and need that) you're probably cool paying $500 for RightScale's fee service.
It'll never happen, that's the reality. I wish it would, but at this point I have very little faith in government, in fact I have none. They're corrupt and the system is setup to keep it that way. The foxes have been running the hen house for a long time.
Flash or Ajax?
Hi. I was wondering which of the two you would prefer to use to display photos, Flash or Ajax (javascript). And any cons and pros of each?
By the way, there's a config option to revert the whitespace back. Go to preferences (upper right) and check "compress the link display".
Everything is finite. It all depends on /how/ finite things are. Technological advances, increases in efficiency, and the influence of competing technologies (electric, hydrogen, liquid propane gas, and so forth) will all have a role to play.

It is typically very hard to accept that these things can have a big effect, but that doesn't mean they won't (nor, of course, that they must, but the odds are better that they will). The price of oil will be as "immaterial" within 50 years as the prices of horses or gas lamps were immaterial in 1940 compared to 1890.
"Pittsburgh: You should be nice."

Being a native Western Pennsylvania, and living more of my adult life in Pittsburgh than anywhere else, I'll take that as a compliment :).

I moved to NYC with my wife right after we were married, and loved every minute of it. But decided to return here to raise our kids after they were born.

An interesting thing about Pittsburgh is the number of large non-profits of every kind, especially considering the reduced population. The major industrial titans that made their fortunes here in decades past (Carnegie, Mellon, Heinz, etc.) have left behind many cultural institutions like libraries, museums, universities, parks, hospitals, etc. that are still well funded and high quality.

You'll find some of that in NYC (even from some of the same benefactors) but Pittsburgh I think has a higher cultural dollars/resident ratio. This is a wonderful thing in terms of raising children. My kids think hanging out at the zoo, library, conservatory, kids' museum, etc. is a perfectly common thing to do. I think in NYC (and other cities?) you could find many of the same things, but it would not be possible to enjoy them in a leisurely manner, or afford family yearly membership passes.
IE7 seemingly handles it as well.
Anyone offer thoughts on Asian cities?

I lived in Japan for a year, and mostly agree with shiro's summary. I guess I would only add that Japan's identity is far more tied up in Tokyo (and vice versa) than any one U.S. city is indicative of the U.S. as a whole. Generally, when people cite Japanese culture, it is Tokyo culture they are referring to (and given the emphasis the Japanese themselves put on Tokyo, not inaccurately).

What about cities in China and India (must be some natives or expats lurking here, no)? Africa? South America? Middle East?

(Some cities from these regions have been mentioned, but very few compared to U.S. and Europe.)
Did it really have to be said that he was considering cities in the aggregate, and specifically the things that distinguish them as opposed to the things they have in common?

I'm picking on you, but several people have made similar points. I think we all know that any given city has different communities within it with different values, levels of affluence or lack thereof, etc. Did it really need to be made explicit?
I know what you mean about Cambridge. Hanging around Diesel Cafe (okay, Somerville) I saw a lot people hacking on web apps, but also a lot of copies of Derrida and Bhabha carefully positioned on the table so that people would notice them. cringe.
You'd quit using an app over whitespace?

Really?

Seriously?

But no, really though?
We have been using this technique on the Freshbooks login pages for a while now. (example: http://reason.freshbooks.com) It enables our customers to customize their account colors while maintaining the elegance of rounded corners.
Job: UI Designer at Weebly
Job: Web Developer at Weebly
Yea, once I started thinking about the obvious kinds of things you mention, I couldn't take the article's premise seriously any more.
The most important part of your presentation describing your company/product as "Publictivity is the online social workspace that allows companies to better organize and share information by leveraging the connections around them" needs some rework and you need to come up with a better one liner. Your description might fall into what Greg McAdoo from Sequoia refers to it as "This is technically accurate but totally useless"

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/greg-mcadoo-partner-at-se...

Good luck with getting into Startup and Foo Camp
I've never used Flash extensively so I'm not sure of the exact pros and cons of each, but as a user, I will go out of my way to avoid sites that use Flash. Javascript can display photos just fine, and doesn't slow down my entire computer.
Some of these are fascinating.

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Pers...

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Nori...

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=botu...

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=chaf...

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=lorg...
Related to this, people might want to take a look at Doug Crockford's suggestion:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB...

Basically, he suggests that every script tag have an option attribute called 'hash'. Whenever the browser downloads a script, it computes the hash and caches the script. For any further requests that specify that hash, the browser can used the cached copy instead of downloading a new one. The main benefit here is that everyone can continue hosting their own scripts, yet still take advantage of caching.

Brendan Eich (creator of JS) proposes a different solution:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/04/popu...

In your script tags, you would specify both a local version (using the src attribute) and a canonical version (using a 'shared' attribute).

Brendan's concern about the hash solution is the poisoned message attack (http://th.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/People/lucks/HashCollis...). However, I'm not sure that applies here. I believe that you need to be able to generate both documents in order to easily find a collision. Anyone else know if that's true?
"Graceful degradation" is pretty important, and there is no way to even display Flash if a user doesn't have a player. Whereas, it is at least possible to do fancy things with AJAX that can be dumbed-down for clients that do not support JavaScript.
I could get sick of any homogeneous personality type, if that's all a city had to offer. I've been bored by money-chasing materialists, superficials, monodimensional "intellectuals",etc. Try it. Try to hang around 1 personality type all day every day and see if it doesn't drive you nuts, no matter your personal proclivities. Best to get a variety, it is indeed the spice...
double numbers on the left are confusing
Hey Wave,

That's exactly where we're struggling/working on. Greg's talk at Startup Camp was awesome, because it gave no bullshit/ straight forward advice. We know what we're making is useful, but bringing it down to one sentence that makes real world sense is key. That's why I even say in the presentation "to get past the mission statement speak", and then explain the product. Off the cuff, if I could sum it up in other words:

"We Give Entrepreneurs The Tools To Run Their Business".

The organize + share, is really more on the technical side of things when I think about it more.

Thanks for the feedback, it's exactly what we need.

-jlb
No more $100000000 movies is a small price to pay for no more copyright. I could happily live the rest of my life without another professionally made book, program, or song. In fact I would be ecstatic.
What the hell is up with their version names? Once you go to random code names you can't go back to version numbers...
We've added RSS to http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/ and the web service released on Thu 8 May 2008 ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184707 ) already supported CDV and JSON.
Any sort of fancy transitions flash gives you more options(easily).
Facebook's definitely spending more than $1m a month. Way more. They have over 500 employees. Do the math, at $1m/mo and only factoring in staff costs everyone would have to be making 24k a year without any benefits.

I would say $10m/mo is a conservative estimate.
Hey Peter,

Thanks! Read more on your bio, and the same respect goes both ways. We're nowheres near perfect, and what the criticism rather than a simple "oh that's great, definitely send me an invite" response you usually get.

- This pitch was meant to be longer, but my goal is to really make the problem the first priority. Quicker is definitely better. The one liner needs to be improved significantly.

-Normally we'd sub in the screenshots for an actual demo of the product if it were a live pitch. We're thinking of cutting down on the pictures in the problem part showing the investor, entrepreneurs, support agent,etc. in order to get to the product a lot faster.

-See my response below to TitleWave. I hate the organize + share information line we use, and want to find something that really evokes exactly what we do. There's a few ideas bouncing around. No lies, this part keeps me up at night.

-I sense the same problems, and that's why we make our pitches available publicly. This lets us get the feedback we need. We know we suck in certain areas, and want to get rid of that.

-Glad I came across enthusiastic. I'm passionate about the product we're building, and think it's going to change the way entrepreneurs work. We're product driven for sure. Would love to send you an invite when we're ready.

Thanks!

-jlb
Gates and Ballmer: Live From Carlsbad
Wow, SC people hang out here? Sweet.

Columbia, SC doesn't really send any strong messages. Only the young people in the area have anything to do with USC, normally, so not even the frattiness comes across that strong.

College football tailgating, however, is a state-wide sport.
At this point in time, it is far easier to just rely on CSS extensions well supported by Firefox and Safari, for instance:

-moz-border-radius-topleft:	0.4em;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius:	0.4em;
-moz-border-radius-topright:	0.4em;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius:	0.4em;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft:	0.4em;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius:	0.4em;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright:	0.4em;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius:	0.4em;

This doesn't mess up your HTML with divs, and degrades seamlessly to "not rounded corners" in any other browser.
because hackers like to do things with less work. creating images means work. the code does look long though. it should probably be abstracted into a server-side view helper function.
I'm normally a little reluctant to give feedback on these things because I often "don't get it", so I don't think I have anything to offer. Because your video is so well done, I'll make an exception now...

I don't get it.

You talk about the problem, the pain, and your offering, but I can't recall a single thing you say about your customer/user. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I sure would feel a lot more comfortable with a story or two about someone's specific problem and how they solved it with Publicitivity. Maybe I'm a little old school, but I'd really rather hear about them first, not you.

You say all the right things: pain (get rid of the soccer pic, ouch!), problem, product, but I don't "feel" the problem or pain. I just think that a good example or two would paint a much better picture. The more common the example, the more people you'll reach.

The good news: Great start. With your tech and presentation skills, once they understand what it is, you oughta knock 'em dead.

Does this make any sense to you, or am I missing something?
most people, excluding hackers of course, probably use ie.
I Blog, I Tweet, But Why
(Regarding footnote 3) Someone I know who hates wearing suits made reservations at the French Laundry a couple of years ago and reported that when he pressed them to be specific about their dress code, they said, "Well, we think you'll be more comfortable wearing a jacket."
What would be the proportionate number of white bums?
Nerd or Geek?
No API? You suck.
Why I'm following MS Windows 7 Via Twitter & Not the Blogs
link? it is not scala i presume since noone corrected the spelling.
aha:
http://code.google.com/p/scalr/
Cybersource. Far and away. They're great assuming you don't need support, but if you're reading this then you probably don't need no stinking support!
My reaction was similar. Later I found they were useful as a communication medium when you worked in a team that were doomed to use Java or C++; walking may be a natural thing for you that wouldn't need an explanation, but knowing that action is called "walking" helps when you explain to someone how you get to somewhere.

Of course, if you're using more succinct programming languages, it may be much faster and accurate to write a line or two of the actual code to show what you mean, rather than remembering all those names of the patterns.
Seattle: You should be unique.

Logan, UT: You should be one of us.

Denver, CO: You should be healthier.
I think the arrows for voting should change color when you hover over them and the number should not.
I already know why I need a scalable database, it would just be more interesting if I knew something about the tech underneath.