skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
build something that your users will tell all their friends about
Techmeme’s Leaderboard is Shifting: Nearly 33% of Leaderboard is New
Use SSL for every page.
The credit crunch meets Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
"Others may thank their lucky stars that free markets are able to deliver a tasty, healthy, peel-intact fruit to their corner stores at very affordable prices."

Free markets != banana republics (the OP is aware of this).
I'm stuck on level 15. I found the key is to alter as little as possible and make each life of your bot do a simple action repeated for longer than you think you may need to.
The best part about flying into LaGuardia is landing parallel to Manhattan's avenues. Seeing each street pass by is excellent.
Facebook's Thrift vs. Google's Protocol Buffers
This game is pretty awesome. You can actually get yourself into a paradox, in which case, a big Paradox warning sign comes up reminding you to be careful with causality.
While you're at it, please also dispose of "functionality".
If Graham is right, a great hacker is someone who believes that his own preferences are more important than doing what is best for the users. Small ISVs don't need people like that.

If Graham is right, a great hacker is someone who is not willing to do any of the un-fun things that need to be done. Small ISVs don't need people like that.

If Graham is right, a great hacker is someone who is not willing to help the people who use the software he creates. Small ISVs don't need people like that.

I've read "Great Hackers" too but noticed nothing of the sort.
Google lets users log into other sites with their Google Account, there's an API for that. So just use the service that's already available; then the users don't have to trust you.

ClickPass bottles this all up into one convenient service, so why not use that?
But he's not storing hashed versions; he's taking their gmail password and using it to try to log in to gmail. Users should worry about this, because it's a bad idea.
Say what you will about Christianity, it does encourage people to lead clean lives and reinforces that message with effective social pressure. To people with certain kinds of problems that can be incredibly helpful. There's a reason why Christianity has so many turn-around stories.
>Smelly? How do you know that?

Dude, I'm pretty sure everyone was smelly back then.
If I read the literal question here (ignoring the article), my response is: "I expect to die at some point, horrible horrible reality - but i'm going to fight against it with all i've got"
Junk Food isn't going to hurt you in moderation. I used to get Pepsis once a week when I stayed after school for Chess Club and it didn't kill me. My school would have been up in arms if all the self-righteous anti-junkfood moralizing busybodies around today took that away from us.
My friend pointed me to your thread. I am in a very similar situation.

I've been out of school for a little of 2 yrs and work in LA as a mgmt consultant. I've been developing sites for a number of years, and currently run a couple social networking sites and a search engine, among others. Send me an email if you're interested to meet up for coffee or something. My email is dtang4 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks.
It's probably worth noting that Eric Sink and PG are in different industries. Eric Sink started a company that sells software. PG started a company that sells a service enabled by software, and invests largely in similar companies.

One of the reasons PG suggests building server-based software is that you have more flexibility in language choice, and hence more ability to hire great hackers. But there are other reasons to go for that business model: recurring revenue, fewer distribution hurdles, less chance of incompatibilities, ownership of customer data, network effects, etc.

I think there was an article about open-source software and Sun's cash hemorrhage that made it to Hacker News recently - it was either here or Proggit. That's another instance. Google was cited in the article as a company that supports open-source - well, that's because Google's business model is selling services supported by software, and so it behooves them to get the price of software down as low as possible.

For that matter - hardware, software, and software services are all complements (in a microeconomic sense), and so each of them has an incentive to commoditize the others. Hence we have Google supporting open-source and buying commodity hardware; Sun and RedHat supporting open-source; Microsoft training lots of developers and providing plenty of tools for them; Apple basing OS X on open UNIX instead of proprietary MacOS 9; and great hackers everywhere supporting open source, because it drives up the value of the service they provide.
Yeah, I've used that...but the problem I was referring to is more general, and more difficult: given blocks of plaintext that compose a resume, how do you render these blocks into any popular format (i.e. Word, PDF, text, HTML) in any of a number of different styles.

HTML and text are easy. PDF is do-able through several different tools (including LaTeX). Word is hard. Supporting multiple resume styles is harder still.
The one routed in perseverance to serve your users the best. Serve them, and they'll tell everyone else and do the marketing for you.

If you think about it, it's actually easier to reach and convince your users than to get new users...
Santiago is more expensive, but you're otherwise correct.
Like-minded people appreciate and respect each other (e.g. hackers praised other hackers, developers praised other developers). But that doesn't mean they're the answer to all software development issues.

Case and point: Software development process at Google vs Microsoft. The former is more like code-n-shoot (not all, but some), the latter is more disciplined due to years of experience. The former is close to the definition of "hackers" while the latter is more of "developers" type.
It's a great ide but there is too much timing involved in it. I prefer either timing or thinking, not both.
"There's a reason why Christianity has so many turn-around stories."

In absolute terms, sure, because there are lots of Christians and of course some of them will have a turn-around story.

But if you take the ratio of turn-around/number of Christians and compared that to other religions or atheists I'm not sure you'd get a very impressive number.

This is all because of confirmation bias again. It's easier to see the couple thousands of success stories attributed to a religion than the millions of failures we don't hear about.
I think it's corporations that have to pay tax twice, not LLC's... Or maybe I'm reading what you wrote wrong? But seriously, llc's are much easier than s or c corporations to manage, and frankly your chance of hitting the IPO lottery are pretty bad, statistically. You'll save time and money on the llc and as long as you manage things properly a decent lawyer ought to be able to switch you to c or s corp status should you hit the big time.

One other problem with a Delaware corporation, specifically, is that if you're in California, you may be subject to their tax in addition to Delaware.

Also, one other point. Investors love Delaware corporations because they know them and also because they tend to be favorable to the investor. You probably want to read that last sentence again. Also I watched a presentation by some lawyers from Reed Smith who argued That California may actually be preferable to non-investors.

But the best piece of advice I can give you is to pick one and go forward quickly without dwelling too much.

fred
Guitar Hero Aims to Take on iTunes
Most of academic life is predicated on your ability to bullshit. ;-)
Languages are especially irrelevant these days. If you want to write a Java desktop app, you don't have to use the Java language anymore. Clojure, kawa, JRuby, ... are all options.

If you want to write a server app, which is pretty much what everything is these days, you can use any language. They'll all do fine. The choice of language is never going to be your scalability problem.
Can you edit your post to not stretch the page? Surround the text of the article with asterisks:

Here is a direct quote

Here is my reply.

this->is_for('code'); # not direct quotes

Edit: thanks!
This would be a great way to teach kids programming if you combined it with Logo.
Results of the two approaches: http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...;
what's the song playing in the background? i'm tired of leaving the window open and letting it loop lol
I am interested but still struggling to digest that...
I will have to read it a few times.
Is that what they term "moral hazard" ?
Details on each?

Western Canada is housing construction and oil, right? Calgary?
The difference is not so much where the software runs as what the goal of the company is. I'm interested in startups: companies that at least try to grow huge. Whereas the "small ISVs" he writes about are just ordinary small businesses that happen to write software. Since in the latter there's little scope for brilliance, you're not willing to trade other things for it.

An ordinary small business doesn't need people so smart that they can redefine the problem. They just need people who are cheap and reliable. Whereas startups generally try to hire the smartest people they can, even if they're difficult or expensive.
actually current implementation is nothing but a simple videomail service. We want to really streamline the process and take away all unnecessary steps. Asking users to create an account just to send a videomail seems to be unnecessary.
The Blind-Spot Between High-Level Decision and Low-Level Muscle Movement
In the spirit of full disclosure, where would I go? Brazil. While I'm painfully aware of the many problems -- infrastructure, crime, capital, corruption, etc. -- that the country still has, I love the dynamism, growth, optimism (mostly -- see my trip notes for more), etc. And it doesn't hurt that the economic numbers are generally good too, with some exceptions.

I have thought about this a bit, and disagree. Going where there are problems that have been solved elsewhere is counterproductive. Something I think about frequently is "when is the US going to have real public transportation, like Japan". I think that's basically never going to happen, so the solution is not to stay here and try and fix it; you'll waste your whole life. The solution is to move to Japan where they've already solved this problem.

In his example, he mentions Brazil's problems: infrastructure, crime, capital, corruption, and so on. Do you really want to be distracted from your real work by crime and lack of infrastructure? Do you really want to be distracted from your real work by trying to fix an entire society? You just aren't going to do it. Go somewhere where these problems have been solved, so you can use your brainpower to solve new problems.

I think this is the same reason tech startups want to be in San Francisco; the problem of finding like-minded people has already been solved. Sure, I could try meeting technical folks in Chicago, but there just aren't many of us. Why try and fail to solve this problem when there are other things to worry about?
Yes we tried that too. However, people just don't know ClickPass or even never heard about OpenID. It doesn't make them feel any safer
I like the bias of the article that becomes apparent from the beginning:
"Leaders of seven of the world’s richest democracies, plus oil-and gas-fired Russia"

First, these "richest seven" aren't really the richest if judged by their GDPs, even among democracies. Second, there was no need to put Russia into special case: it also is a capitalism-fueled democracy (despite media's preference to suggest otherwise) and their GDP is bigger than Italy, UK and France.

And finally, this G8 thing makes no sense without India and China in it, both are nuclear powers with economies that are in top 5 largest.
yeah same here, I think it has to do with most people being completely gullible when it comes to the web. Which explains why you get hundreds of nigerian scam email per month
The Issue Of Trust Is With Google, Not Viacom
Yahoo! went down from $300 at its peak to what now?

Wasn't Google went up to 700 and went down to 450 ish. I see they rebound now, what about tomorrow and in the future?

On another topic: http://valleywag.com/5018349/googles-either-in-a-hiring-free...
http://valleywag.com/5024181/google-cutting-costs-hiring-slo...

Someone who works inside Google confirmed me as well.

By the way, their main money making machine is written in a non-hacker platform.
Apple Explains How To Extend Battery Life on the iPhone 3G
I don't see this happening. Guitar Hero is just a game. Sure it's quite popular, but with the popularity of the iPod, making something that competes with iTunes is quite difficult.
Yahoo never had a lot of great hackers. That's the main cause of their trouble, in fact. They regarded hackers as a commodity.
http://i-love-cartoons.com/snags/clipart/Casper-Friendly-Gho...
Is anyone else reading his book?
"But the essay causes concern. I worry that lots of small ISVs will read his article and believe that they need to hire great hackers."

Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.
Viacom vs. YouTube: Beyond Privacy (law is increasingly siding with rights owners)
Ya that's the API docs, but it doesn't give an example of bullet graphs.
Google continues Big Brother quest with activity recognition
not a fair comparison. You are comparing a 5 years old company (publicly) that had huge growth, to a mature one. If you compare current google with msft of the 80s, you will see that msft actually performed better.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&hl=en (expand the chart to the max timeline, to see the huge ramp growth MSFT had on its earlier years).

If you put a dollar in msft in 86, that would have turned into $6.02 in 1990 and $11.09 in 96.

If you bought a dollar is shares of goog in 2004, you would have about $3.93 now.

So the MSFT of the 80s and early 90s hugely outperfomed the current google. But Microsoft was probably a very different company at the time. As it gets bigger, it would be much hard to sustain the same path of growth.

And all those people that say "google is different", and wont make the same mistakes as MSFT, probably are wrong, as at some point, the sheer size of the company will make it harder to grow, and it will slowly turn just like any other larg corp.
IPhoned: a story of shiny new gadgets and lousy customer service
Couldn't agree more. What dismays me is that no one else can do better - but like you, I hope it changes.
It isn't fair to paint Fannie/Freddie with the same brush that you'd use for (say) Bear Stearns.

These guys have been serving as the de-facto buyer of last resort for all of the bad debt that other banks have accumulated. They're acting as the US mortgage-banking safety net, and as such, have knowingly taken on a huge amount of bad debt that other commercial banks wouldn't touch. If it weren't for Fannie/Freddie, the mortgage crisis would be much worse than it is.

(That said...if they had the good sense to raise their lending standards back in 2003, we probably wouldn't be in this mess.)
I misunderstood.
The business models are different anyway. Microsoft makes money because they convince people that there is no other choice. Nobody actually likes Windows. It's just the only option.

I think people generally like Google's products; they build value by actually building software. Microsoft builds value with marketing.

So you can't really compare the development styles and making money. If you compare software quality, I think Microsoft loses big time. Ever use Vista?
2010-2015? Fuck, haven't you seen the chart?

http://www.retireearlyhomepage.com/hdent.html
>But everything it does do, it does so damn well that it's hard to argue with it.

Its amazing how many people don't actually GET that point.

>Someone may run off and ignore your in-shop standards and make something using weird tech or using a different protocol

Yeah thats the great thing about skunkworks. Lots of great (now mainstream) stuff came from skunkworks.
I find the combination of timing and thinking is what makes it very interesting.

Really superb game. Few games make you think both logically and philosophically.

Very cool mindbender!
maybe it is a mix between GDP and GDP per capita, and sheer product output.

If you count GDP per capita, then Qatar should be there, but honeslty they are not an industialized country, they just have oil.

So, if you count by GDP, then china, should be there, but it can barely feed its own people and its GDP per capita is in 100th place. Heck even my country is better than China.

I am not sure what the exact formula is, but I bet is it is a combination of

GDP, GNP, PPP(GDP per capita), and Nuclear Capability

Like every velvet club, if you don't care about it, than it doesn't matter. Actually if you are cool enough, then you can open your own club, and the other people will start comming to you. China would be smart to create some kind of economic bllock in east and south-east asia, to give it even more clout. But other countries just don't trust them that much.
When I first read Eric's essay, I noticed the same thing. It seems words like "Hacker" are so emotionally charged that when you use them, people read their preconcevied biases--good or bad--into what you are saying without bothering to actually listen/read carefully.

See also: Liberal, Conservative.
Location Awareness on the iPhone
It's largely because Google is a young company and Microsoft is an old one that they have the different approaches to development that they do.

The early Microsoft, from what I've heard, depended more on good hackers and less on discipline and organization. So it's not surprising that when they were more like Google, they had growth more like Google's.
Can you recommend a good introductory book on the subject?
"Nobody actually likes Windows." -- Really? Maybe Vista yes, but between 95-2002 Windows was probably one of the best choices for average Joe. Mac Os, before OS X was not that great (and expensive), plus it was available to only limited hardware, which was way behind wintel peformance wise.

And there was of course Linux, and Unix versions, but really would execpt average Joe to have to manually configure drivers, and go back to the 80s and start using command line just to get their computer the net.

Sure, now both Mac OS X and Linux are much better choices than Vista, but at the time Win 95/90 then 2000/XP were the best choice for general productivity.
I got to level 13 and saw another see-saw thing and decided I was done. It was really cool while it lasted though.
Conceptually reminds me of this game:

http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html
Is it just me or is it funny that the title says "Step by Step" and the homepage for dropbox (drop.io) is a list of steps?

EDIT: I'm stupid
Built-to-order Artificial Bones made from metal alloys are coming
"the best choice" is not equal to "good". (Have you ever had to vote in a US election?)

Windows has always been buggy as hell, and has really made people wary of software in general. If Windows never crashed or did weird things, people would be a lot more comfortable with computers. Actually... Mac OS was slightly better than Windows back in the day. So really, there were better choices than Windows. Windows just happened to be popular, and it got that way by marketing and business tactics, not by software quality.

(Did you ever notice how the Mac users in that era were really confident in their abilities? It's probably because the computer didn't treat them like shit. If what you do always works, you'll probably be pretty confident in your abilities. Windows barely worked, so people were afraid of computers.)
Put a little yellow lock icon somewhere on the screen. I used to know a sleezy internet marketer who swore that it makes people trust you.
the game is way too easy. even high levels are repetitive and simple and there is a lot of waiting.
reading comprehension...
anti-semitism isn't funny because it's still killing people.
That's not the homepage of Dropbox. It's http://getdropbox.com.
I like the YouTube analogy. I could look the other way when people start copying Zelda and Mario...
After reading that article both protocol buffers and thrift sounds suspiciously like a rehash of BER encoding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Encoding_Rules a standard that has been around since the 80's and is used in things like the LDAP protocol among others.
Funny that the only person who actually says something even semi-relevant is downmodded.

Like Zacharye says, it's about your target. Are you selling something? are you trying to attract advertisers? are you trying to drive signups?

I've found that, for some reason, driving user signups is HARDER than selling something.

With selling, adwords, ysm and adcenter work very well!
I didn't get the references for most of the examples, but is the point of the article "if you spend any money, your company is going to fail"? That's what I got out of it.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-psychology-of-cupholder...
This is where I'm pretty screwed. The current engine uses SVG. I don't see a solution for animated SVG in IE. Right now it only works in Firefox, but I'm sure a little tweaking would make it work in Safari and Opera. And that means iPhone!
Signs Point to Facebook Payment Platform Launch

Existence of an SSL version of a website means they're launching a payment platform? That's not the first thing I'd assume. I'd assume they just don't want accounts being compromised when people log into facebook at an Internet cafe' or whatever.

I guess that's why I'm not an A-list blogger, though. Too much thinking, not enough jumping to conclusions.
It's a bit much to jump on someone for giving a frivolous answer when you've posted 2 on this thread yourself.
You can't. And don't use market penetration of OpenID or ClickPass as an excuse. It's the old chicken and egg problem.

"People don't use it yet, so I won't implement it!"
"People aren't using it because no-one is implementing it!"

And like hell I am giving the passwords to any of my mail accounts or anything, TO ANYONE.

Just implement OpenID and ClickPass and use APIs and such.
What, so people.. might start to use smaller providers, or perhaps as things used to be, make agreements with the sellers themselves in a kind of rent-to-buy agreement?

Good lord, whatever will happen. Poor, POOR traders. Frankly, I could give less than two shakes on whether you depend on it for your livelihood. It's besides the point.

Their primary business is to help people get homes. Or at least, it should be. Not to make money for traders.
I know everyone is going to describe building something people want or building something that is easy to use or excellent. And this, of course, is the best strategy as it encourages word of mouth marketing (free and effective) and has a wonderful product to fall back on (i.e. it isn't vaporware).

However, something else you should really focus on is bloggers. I don't me spamming them or anything like that. I mean determining exactly what benefits your product offers and who would care about it. Chances are there's a lot of good blogs and bloggers out there that will. Way before launching you should contact them. If they are writing about something that interests you or you think you have something to offer email them or comment. Build a relationship, just make sure it's not forced - anyone can tell if you're being fake. Make sure you're providing value of some sort to them. Then when you have your product or site or whatever run it by them. Even if they don't end up writing about it the fact that they have a decent blog is indicative of their willingness to express their opinion and offer articulate feedback.