skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Silicon Valley has densest tech worker population, NYC has largest
I think Twitter is in great position to start a contextual and geolocation advertising from the SMS messages been sent and from the phone numbers been used. Now or later they will need to move to a sustainable business model.
This is something I've thought a lot about since I've been in a pretty serious indie band.

A few bands have contracted me to develop download forms like the Girl Talk/Radiohead forms, and it would cost them $400 for a custom script. I thought that it would be cool to make a startup similar to Wufoo that would let indie bands customize their own forms for $20/mo and host everything for them. Then the bands could embed the form on their MySpace page and website. They could also allow blogs like Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Gorilla vs. Bear to embed it in their reviews/coverage.

You could get creative with revenue sharing and advertising, but that's the general idea.
You should pay to check whether the message is available because your requests cost Amazon money. That way, if you don't care to poll frequently, you won't be forced to pay some average price that's driven up by other users who do need to poll often. In fact, this is more fair.

Disclaimer: I used to work at AWS, though it was 2+ years ago and I didn't work on SQS.
I don't like straightforward names, as you've described them, period. For one thing, they aren't really straightforward with the way human brains work. For instance, is it carprices or carprice? Similarly, I'd recommend you stay away from cute names like karprices.com or qarpricez.com. I realize that their intention is to describe their business category, and let the user figure out what the business is about from the name, but what you really end up with is something generic, something that doesn't stick in the mind, and that is vulnerable to a competitor with a memorable brand that can stick in a consumer's mind.

Some specific advice would be:

1) Make it impossible to mis-spell. I know, this was said before in one of the threads above.
2) Does the name have the potential to be used in a sentence, like, "can you google that for me?" or "can you xerox that for me?" or "Did you see x's latest twitter?"
3) Does the name suggest the business category? For example, twitter sort of suggests what it is that the product does, if only on a subconscious level? Same for a lot of Proctor & Gamble brands.

Probably the best thing to do is pick up Ries & Trout's "Positioning." I know Ries has some newer stuff out that speaks directly to naming Internet companies.

Good luck!
No kidding. A lawyer two years out of school will earn $128k in London, compared to an engineer two years out who will be on closer to $80k.

With rent running at $2k+ a month for a double room in a shared house the difference is pretty significant.
New Ideas on Managing 20-Somethings Needed
I disagree strongly with you on this. Google is a great name, better than all the examples you've mentioned for one simple reason: How many times have you been lost and called a friend and asked her to google an address for you? How many times have you googled a girl you met to see where she works of if she has any pictures you can send to your friends?

Back when Yahoo was the only game in town for search, nobody ever aked me to Yahoo something.

Flickr is a great product with an easy to mis-spell name.

Reddit is good, though.

Regards,

Fred
The Digital Home of 2013: 10 consumer technologies that will succeed, and five that will fail
The first rule of the Navbar cool club is to never talk about the navbar cool club.
Original post is here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226738
Nice post. The author's list at http://www.usnews.com/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2008/6/24... is great. I wish my workplace understood this, especially #3. Few businesses are ambitious enough to tackle #7.
will show you the source code of the Perl script instead of calculating your results

FinalScore = TempScore * AbilityToReadCode

so all posers evaluate to "0".
Java One Liner - Reading a Text File At Once
I've seen the voting=bookmarking discussion on reddit too. If it's such a big deal, why does neither site offer a bookmarking link? Any other reason except feature trimming? Looks like a sound idea to me...
Ads, ads and ads!

Everybody hates them but everyone wants to use them in their apps.

How about someone actually make an application that is actually capabl of making revenue by its own, meaning the service they offer is something people pay for rather than somewhere down the line someone is supposed to click on some thing that sends them somewhere where they can buy something?

(Not a bash on wave you might be right for twitter and it is a good post, just seems generally most startups just make something which seem to have no chance of ever making money otherways than perhaps on some ads.)
Thoughts on DVCSs
I'm puzzled by this whole "external" vs. "internal" dichotomy that you've built. Perhaps noticing that your plane isn't being unloaded quickly is "external", but the likely solution to the problem (building some sort of high-performance, distributed database-backed scheduling architecture that track thousands of bags, flights and people in real time) seems to become "internal" very rapidly. Where's the line?

Moreover, what you describe as "external projects" sounds suspiciously like "walk around and fix individual problems in the world". That's great, but it's not scalable -- it's consultancy. Somebody hires you, and you tell them to move their Coke machine to save 116 steps per inspection. To me, the difference between that and an interesting software problem is the difference between noticing that a Coke machine needs to be moved, and writing a pedestrian traffic simulator that can be used to optimize the positions of Coke machines in any context...but maybe we're saying the same thing?

In any case, it's never a good idea to let your spoons rust.
Doggonit
NYTimes.com: DealBook: Social Networking on Wall Street
Ahh! Broken back button! Really, really annoying.
Arc-speed development in action, right?
Is this really a "dark secret?" I feel like people have been going on about IT & Asperger's for years. Also, wasn't this exact same article published in a different paper about a year ago? edit - 2 months ago, i guess.
Fellow website owners, lend me your [best] feedback emails
Is that really the rent for shared housing in London? Yikes. Even Paris isn't that bad....
Hello. I'd like to talk to you about life working for Bloomberg if you wouldn't mind. jdennis@gmail.
Simple answer you don't have to, just don't use SQS. If Amazon did the check internally and queried all servers for you the cost of each request would have been much larger and they would have scaling problems. This approach is the most easily scalable.

And even polling every second costs 8.64 cents per day or 2.59 USD a month, stop bitching and get to work.
Start-up sues Google over e-mail switching tool
Can't explain, playing WoW.
I'm keen on physical media failing, personally I thought bluray/HDDVD was a step in the wrong direction. Stream good 720p content with digital audio and I'll be happy.
Twitter Quick Reply
Broken back button?
They are using surveys from 2006 to predict future of 2008?
Also, the scoring system is shown below the test, so you don't even have to press the button or read the code.

The scoring system annoyed me, because it turned out that the time I'd spent soul-searching about whether I "strongly agreed" or only "somewhat agreed" with certain statements was a complete waste. Do I definitely agree that I'm not very good at remembering phone numbers, or only slightly agree?

An odd question: "I am fascinated by dates". Which kind of dates are we talking about here? It's possible that your interpretation of that question is an Asperger's test on its own.
The app is a game, it's social, it's networked. It's more like, why is toyota so successful, i want to replicate it's ideas for a motorcycle company...
Schizophrenia - Science fiction/cyberpunk author...
Thank you. I think a cause does not have to mean a Save the Whales type cause...bringing your product to a doing-without marketplace could be your cause. Most companies, however, can and should identify a bigger deal. I always think of our people going back to grandma's house and answering the question "what do you do?"
Those were just examples of what others did to influence me. That's all.

I used to have to write the tools I needed first just to be able to do my job. No longer. Almost all of my tools are available.

What you call "walk around and fix individual problems in the world", I call "find problems anywhere, then build scalable solutions". Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

It's the antidote to OP's original complaint of "me too" solutions.
What belongs in a helper method?
I've accidentally upvoted one of the worst posts I've seen on HN before, because I was using a mobile device. Maybe the arrows should be two or three times as big when a mobile browser is detected?
You always have the option of implementing SQS yourself. It might cost you a fair bit more of time, money and energy. Much, much more than the few extra cents you'd pay.
Thank you! So many people miss the point that while it might be a useful ideological and labor saving decision to not support IE6, it also limits the size of your market (possibly drastically). That's a decision that should be based on business principles, not just taste. Sure, if you're targeting geeks, ditch it, but if you're targeting "mortals", you'd better darn well support their browser if you want a 2nd (well, 1st I guess) look.
If you're receiving funding from anyone other than your brother-in-law, presumably you had to shop around to people who don't sign NDAs. For all intents and purposes, the cat's already out of the bag.
A lot of good thinking about design of virtual worlds can be found in the archives of the mud-dev and mud-dev2 lists. They've run for ~10 years and include many of the game designers of the current hit games.
There should be a popup confirmation and the action should bring you back to where you were last, instead of the top of the page. Ideally, the row where the username where you clicked flag (starting from the point total and ending with the flag link) would turn yellow, and also keep you on that same page, like the voting buttons (which use ajax).
What I've learned from this is that nobody has a fucking clue what any of this stuff means.

You now have necessary and sufficient qualifications to be a patient advocate.
WoW is a commercial success, but I have to say "Is it a moral success?". Is it good for people to get so immersed? To spend their life playing a game like this?

I've seen a lot of people get absolutely addicted to the point where they will do nothing else.

I think the best thing in terms of profit, and worst thing in terms of decency etc, is that the game never ends. You never win.

Personally, I don't think games like WoW are healthy.
I play WoW about 20+ hours a week (Selecta on Spirestone) and I have played through most of the pre-expansion pack content, so let me comment on this from personal experience.

Things that make WoW successful are part of many good games:

1) Feelings of accomplishment - you come back to a character every time that you yourself built up. The persistent nature of the game (rather than a first person shooter where every game is a blank slate) is compelling.

2) Working with others to achieve a common goal - it's fun to team up with people and take on hard bosses that none of you could defeat individually, or even in smaller groups. The later stages of the game feature god-like foes that require dozens of people working in very, very tight cooperation to defeat, or else everyone will certainly be killed (Sunwell Plateau, etc.). In other words, 50 people randomly banging on the harder bosses will not suffice because the bosses are so powerful they can simply divide and conquer. It really is challenging.

Many games have those qualities. What makes WoW better than them?

Well, basically WoW corrected a lot of EverQuest's flaws. That's basically it. They had the second-comer advantage in that. It had Blizzard's name behind it, too (Starcraft, Diablo - both highly successful franchises in their own right).

Plus, there's a real in-game economy, with a value-added chain and everything (gather or buy raw materials -> turn them into a valuable item -> sell the valuable item at a higher price than the cost of the materials). The game's currency is valuable even up to high levels in the game (although there are many guilds sitting on hundreds of thousands of gold with nothing to really spend it on -- it doesn't scale that high). But, it is definitely valuable to have thousands and thousands of gold.

You can't easily "replicate" something you have absolutely no comprehension of.

Don't fucking try to treat it like a business application, because it isn't.
What's missing from the Twitter funding announcement: Revenue
> But if [the market]'s not worth anyone's time to do research, the market will no longer be efficient.

I wonder if we will get to the point that publically-traded companies will have to be perfectly transparent, and the needed research will be trivial (and automated)?
I don't think the whole "Desktop in the Web UI" fad is good for the web.

A lot of apps that are used in the desktop could be easily ported to the web without the need of windows like this. There are other ways to do it, AJAX allows for them.

What works in the desktop doesn't necessarilly work in the web.
You'll stuggle.

You won't even touch the professional markets dominated by reuter/bloomberg/etc. They're playing a whole different ballgame.

Which means you'll have to go after the google/yahoo/ms finance market. Which might be possible, but you don't look to have any competitive advantage over those services at all. While on the other hand they have vast competitive advantages over you.

My gut feeling from your site and your comments is that you've gone into this project without a good understanding of the market (what's currently available, why people use it) and without a clear user in mind.

My personal opinion is that you should scrap it, chalk up the experience, and have another go, but this time concentrate on something you have domain knowledge of.
This is similar to my brother's experience. They had all these "ideas" of what was going on because he wasn't like the other kids (note that this was a private religious school).

They made him take an IQ test so that they would have an excuse to move him to some remedial classes.

After he got a 136 they ended up leaving him alone but he moved on to a better school.
Short answer: you can't.

Long answer: some of the answers in this thread would in theory apply to any MMORPG, but the obvious reality is that most MMORPGs aren't huge successes like WoW.

Some of my best guesses:
- great art direction. All the locations, characters, monsters and weapons are colorful and unique. Look at any screenshot and chances are you can tell at a glance WHERE in the game world it is - that's not true for many games out there.
- Blizzard has perfected an effort/reward system more finely tuned and addictive than that of any other company out there. It started in Diablo and they perfected it in Diablo II - WoW is just a continuation. Advancing is easier than in other games, but you know that the next reward is just around the corner so you play "just 5 more minutes". In addition, the rewards somehow avoid being repetitive - it doesn't feel like you're just replacing a 5 with a 6 somewhere, like in other games. As another poster mentioned, it's incredibly Pavlovian.
- Something for everyone. WoW actually manages to be engaging for both casual and hardcore players, for two friends or a couple playing together and for a large clan who know each other from previous games.

I don't think Blizzard put in any really innovative ideas in WoW, but their execution was far, far beyond what anyone else has done. Of course, after all their previous hits, they also had the resources to pull it off.
It takes incredible amounts of time, but when you get to Tier Six gear or the highest-level PVP rewards, the game is pretty much over and you can't go any further.
Regarding #1, there's definitely no complete winner out there yet so being on all of them is the best a band can do. Services like cdbaby.com propagate your tracks to dozens of such services (44 in all currently including iTunes, amiestreet.com, etc.) and also take care of other things for you like selling physical discs online and taking credit cards from sales at concerts, so that's probably the best thing going for a band right now. And once a clear winner in the online music sales appears, cdbaby.com will I'm sure also deal with them too on your behalf.

And as a comparison of profits from something like iTunes, I've heard major label artists make less than $1 on their digital album sales, and pennies on the song, whereas through the cdbaby.com submission to iTunes I get paid about $0.64 per song (up to $0.89 for a sale on iTunes UK after currency conversion!) or $6+/album.

For #2, I guess that's where booking and promo agencies come in, but they only tend to work with artists once they've built a following and can get people out to the gigs they set up.

In either case though, the only benefit added by major labels is advertising dollars (which also amounts to mainstream radio airplay, very hard to get without a major). This is basically VC for the music industry if you look at it that way. So maybe just getting some angel investors interested in your band might be a better approach too...
I've yet to meet a serious investor who didn't care about the consensus view. Groupthink impacts the prices of stock as much as fundamentals.
You are correct about people hating ads, but people are also reasonable about websites using ads sensibly. I personally don’t visit websites infested with ads, but what you see on reddit, digg, and Google are very reasonable.
I thought they kept building new worlds and challenges etc? I haven't played it though...
This is all just a reply to the fanciful first paragraph of this article (I won't bother replying to the article itself; it's mostly correct, save for the fact that, no matter how online our permanent storage is, we still need caches.)

I shouldn't have to unlock my garage; it should identify my car by the same way my car identifies my keys as soon as it gets within range, and open automatically.

The TV should only turn on if "watching TV" is what's on my web-published calendar for the rest of the night; otherwise, it's just a distraction that might suck me in while I'm trying to do something else. If my calendar says "create presentation," though, by all means fire up Keynote just in time for it to be ready and waiting to receive my input.

My favorite songs can already follow me from my living room to my kitchen--I have very loud speakers. I want them to follow me from my car. Either by a pair of cooperating satellite radio devices, a pair of 4G devices streaming from my online music library account, or more likely just an MP3 player that, upon being unplugged, scans for wifi audio speakers to start streaming to (with the possible optimization that if it finds the computer it syncs with, it can just command it to start playing the track where it left off, then shut itself off.)

The phone should have already told me what it needed to tell me when it was in my pocket; however, now that I take my cell into my home, I should be able to answer the line of my cellphone's number on my home phone lines (without an additional plan, and perhaps cheaper because it doesn't have to connect to a cell tower but can instead ride my coax). My phone's (both cell and land, and perhaps work as well) e-mail inbox should be my computer's e-mail inbox. I should be able to use my cellphone as an extra screen, speaker, and microphone for any and all of my computers, both over Bluetooth and securely connected remotely.

My computers themselves should be able to intelligently know where I am, locking themselves when I'm not sitting at them, and unlocking when I sit down (unless they detect someone on the blacklist is also in the room with me--then I'll need to use a password.) They should wake up when they detect my voice (even from a different room, depending on what is said), just as if I'd moved the mouse or pressed a key.

I should be able to use my cellphone to send hand gestures to devices from anywhere, as if it was a Wiimote.

And the fridge really should have messaged me about the milk when I was in the store; that's why I carry the GPS locator, after all. It's too late now. Maybe it could message one of my friends who is planning to come over that they could do me a favor and pick it up if they're close.
Ahahahah... Snippet from a comment:

"This beats perl by long shot:

Java:
FileUtil.getContents("filename") // short but tells you what it does

Perl:
<> # yea I know what it does, but really, do you need a non-intuitive built-in operator? And besides this only works for reading from the command line"

It seems that some people are so intent on never learning new things or adopting different languages that they will say "beats by a long shot" when they should say "still doesn't even come close to".
It is fair.

If it wasn't fair, it doesn't matter ... it's their product, and it doesn't infringe on anyone else's life/liberty/property.

They are also free to trade their services under whatever conditions they wish. Currently that is ... may not be long before a bunch of idiot collectivists (like this blogger) seek to curb others freedom b/c of a lack of understanding of basic economics and an irrational desire for everyone to be altruistic.

Let me guess dear blogger ... I bet Amazon's being "greedy" as well. Oh the humanity!
I would suggest that if you don't like the flag feature, you might create, or modify a Greasemonkey script to remove it locally.
Greasemonkey is perfect for this sort of application- You're removing an entirely static element from the rendered page.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=ycombinator
++ for YC Blog platform
Just. Wow. I've never seen anything like this outside of a sandbox like Flash/Silverlight.
What's with the weird backlinks on the bottom of that page?
Missing dots don't kill people, people kill people!
Because you're a free customer who can choose whether or not to use the service?
It offered people who are too scared of living to get out and do something in the world an addictive way to enjoy the illusion they have accomplished something without requiring them to engage in life?

If you are really sitting around thinking "I want to know how to put ideas from WOW into facebook" you have bigger questions you should be concerned with then "why is WOW so successful." Like "Where is there an actual problem I can solve?" "How can I use my logic and critical thinking skills on my process of deciding what problems to be concerned with and what is important in life?" "Why the hell do I even exist in the twenty first century, with this limitless possibility, and what do I really need to get done before I die?" and "Is mixing facebook apps with WOW really better for the world, from a big picture perspective, then suicide?"

I think if you focus on those other questions, this WOW question will clear itself up like magic.
The High-Tech Job Capital Is The Big Apple?
Also keep in mind that your users may be viewing your webpage with their phone, which is one big reason to not go the desktop simulation route.

Still, it's a very cool demo.
"javascript Guitar Solo"

Nice phrase. I really like it. Also, apt.
When I click to go to an outside article (say a company profile), it shows in something like an iframe, and the only way to return to the front page is to click the "Return to reader" link provided. My browser back button doesn't do anything.
Computer program helped searchers find autistic man (alive, lost in woods for 7 days)