skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parallel Programming, Math, and the Curse of the Algorithm
Microsoft vs VMware: The New Battleground takes Shape
I'm not a fan of the religion either. If you develop large projects, you'll probably find the power of emacs to be a huge time saver. Instead of having 4 terminals open, each with a vim session (something I typically see), you can just have 4 windows open. Tramp is also really slick for easily editing remote files. Having a python interpreter in running in conjunction with your editor is slick too. Probably worth fighting with for a few days to get it. If you still don't like it, now you know why!

Just sayin.
You're right, my post had less to do with exceptions and more to do with venting my frustration at the less-than-helpful C error handling system. It's not good when the API makes you think you're losing your mind.
I had this happen to me with my last startup right around the time we were dealing with some angel investors.

Every single of one of them called me to say "Well, Microsoft is going to be doing this now, we don't want to throw our money away."

It's one thing to have market validation by companies you could theoretically catch up to; it's an entirely different beast to try to compete with Google or Microsoft.
I use eclipse for Java still. Our project has something like 100,000 source files. Memorizing this lay-out is hard! There isn't much sense to it. Having the open-type shortcut is a life-saver. So is the type hierarchy browser.

Emacs is great for pretty much everything else though!
Ford Sales Slammed By High Gas Prices
He may not be the smartest person they could find but he's a damn smart 12 year old. So, perhaps you're right. Either way, I wish my 12 year old had that much interest in anything at all. Very impressive.
I swear I read this article (or a similar one that they ripped off) about a month ago...

Ah yes, was an article about data being more expensive to text than to send to the hubble:
http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html

In any case, a google for sms megabyte turns up a ton of hits for this, most of them at least 6 months old.

Good job TechCrunch!

(is that sarcasm I smell?)
How Twitter could be worth nothing in a year
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/01/powerset...

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco

That's good.
I'm in 20%. At the day job my boss is great as are two guys higher up (not sure about #4 and above - too hard to reach those). They are not without their issues but they are listening to feedback and keep improving. I usually fill detailed feedback for them each year and follow up in person (for the first two guys in the chain of command) to make sure the message was read right. This year I found very little to criticize them for, which is quite unusual for a crank like me.

In the past I had couple of so-so managers at the same place and our collective feedback saw them managed out of their roles back to what they were good at. But this is the product of workplace where feedback is being listened to, if you don't work in a place like this your options maybe limited.

If you want to change the place where you work and your boss (not leave but make it different), I recommend "The Possibilities of Organization" book

http://www.amazon.com/Possibilities-Organization-Barry-Oshry...

it will help you inderstand what's going on in the heads of your managers and why they act like they do. I was thoroughly moved by this book.
Pete, I think you and the Tapinko team have made an excellent decision. I like it because it's a step in the direction of acknowledging that we're all connected and that the "winner take all" model of modern corporate capitalism -- in which trust is an expendable commodity and which has contributed substantially to the current meltdown of the financial system --needs to be re-imagined in important ways. The 1% contribution doesn't change the incentive that any DreamIt team has to succeed but adds a small tangible reason for every team to hope for the success of all the others.

Neil (from blog)
Microsoft buys search start-up Powerset
It's not real - don't get excited, haters.
:q!

heal wounds

emacs &
Cute for about 10 seconds. Then what?
That's good and that's bad. It's bad because it means you'll have to move much faster to get your site out the door. It's good because then that makes your site much more valuable as an acquisition for one of the large search engines that falls behind the leader in this space. Specifically, I would target trying to be acquired by Microsoft, Ask.com, or A9.

Don't be intimidated by Google and Yahoo! as they're both trying to juggle too many balls in the air at the moment to design something that does a great job at dealing with this specific type of web content. If your service is done well, I really don't think you'll have any problem with the acquition.
I'd guess they're still building out the library. Much better to make a huge splash than be another youtube.
Ouch. I feel your pain.

It's probably too late to help much but when I look at product initiatives my first criteria to do something that is never going to show up on the shelves at Wal Mart and that none of the big boys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc. would ever consider doing.
Unfortunately, it's not really all that funny either.
Maybe I should change my previous comment on MSFT Plan B for search a bit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233260

My comments from 51 days back, still stand though:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186752
Thanks, we were looking for that.
No no, I mean that I don't use the Emacs bindings because other things don't work the way I want, like tabbing. So when I'm using the c# bindings I find myself running strange commands accidentally.
Joke would've gone over better if news.yc didn't clip long url's. And if people read more closely.
How to Save Gas and Money | ServiceLive Blog
Actually, naa, don't think so. Not enough "LOL"'s in his comments.
Management is a social activity, so you will have to embrace social interaction. Rule #1 is to actively encourage feedback. The difficult part is not getting upset but acting on opportunity when you are told where you screwed up. You'll get over it. It will take some time (6-12 months) before people will be comfortable with telling you what they think, and they will start with small things. Make sure to follow up on these by either addressing or making it obvious that feedback was given serious consideration. Everybody likes beign listened to. Be prepared for the first 6-12 months beign very awkward. It's ok.

One trick I learned from my boss is to ask people two questions: "how could we make this better?" and "how could we make this worse?". It's important to ask both questions as this creates proper frame around conversation. It also avoids the whole conversation beign 100% "negative".
Yahoo and Microsoft Dazed and Confused | Tech Jaws
Good point gojomo. Sometimes it feels like they are making that much but a coming soon page shouldn't be all that big a deal to put together.
Rhapsody is looking to steal iTunes thunder | Tech Jaws
IP ban certainly isn't the best way to deal with it. Its just what I could do untill you guys told me how you did it. Thank you for revealing your method so I can repair the hole.
Can you make the case that your solution is better than what Adobe and Yahoo or Google engineers have put together? (If not, I'm not sure why you're mailing companies already strategically linked with Adobe's solution.)

I wouldn't count on Adobe limiting access to this special player to just Google and Yahoo. Adobe wants Flash/Flex accessible by all crawlers, so it's just a matter of time.
No, I don't think that have that many...though Hulu does work with the industry rather than outside of it, so I suspect there are a lot more lawyers and MBAs on staff than you or I could possibly imagine.
We send in our print orders at the end of the month. This is by far the weakest link in our business model.
You might lose yourself some middle-American soccer moms that way, while gaining a memorable name that does well with some part of your market.

Is there some way you could present the same backend product with more than one brand to get around that compromise?
$3854.96 (net) :-)
Then you send it to someone else! It isn't supposed to be deep or anything...
After much debate, the TapInko team has decided to contribute 1% to the common equity pool.

Out of curiosity, why are you asking after the fact?

What will they do about founders that drop out, have vesting for the fund? And for each class of DreamIT [by being titled DreamIT'08 I imagine they plan on having more classes] they'd essentially be running a mutual fund.

Related to me from someone else.
Nah, you're not lame. We expected that some designs wouldn't appeal to some people. This is especially pronounced with the one-design-at-a-time business model. Just subscribe to get a new design notification and come check the next one: http://blog.200nipples.com/2008/06/shirt-reminder/ :-)
There are also open-source projects for reading (and thus finding the text and links inside) SWF files -- see Gnash, JavaSWF, and others. So there's a practical cap on how much other crawl/search teams would pay for such technology, unless you've got something really advanced.
Disabled Menus Are Usable
There are also a few of these in Kansas City.
Primeval C: two very early compilers
Awesome, I love to see developers using some of their time for the small stuff like this. Let's just be glad it doesn't distribute independent music. Nice work, it looks really clean.
Hey, if it's this funny, submit it!
A Thousand Layers of Abstractions - How Should We Teach Programming?
I agree, having the first is valuable, but also getting the last one before they're never made again is also valuable. Maybe the middle ones should be $1, and the ends cost more.
The difference between a developer and a programmer.
Notice that what they are suggesting is the key component of your solution (taking links from a page and producing the parts to index) not the indexing itself or the search term parsing &c. I think if you offered that aspect (as a web server or licensed, shared-source software) then you could carve out a good nice whithout having to rebuild the rest of the "search" infrastructure. Basicly, I am suggesting that you forget about

"Our search results are not very good right now. We are in the very early startup phase of our website. The crawler has only been crawling for a while, we only have crawled a handfull of websites, and our search query technology is only in the keyword phase. All of these things require time and money to implement. As things progress we'll improve our infrastructure and ramp-up as quickly as we can."

and focus on what you are apparently good at.
Bill Gates & Steve Jobs living together (comic)
FriendFeed Released Interface With iPhone
This is something my company may eventually be interested in as well. Indexing Flash is a huge deal.
Can't stand crap like this. People who reinvent the wheel (poorly), or try to, make the world a worse place... something related to 'visualization' -- psychological stuff. People who fail to visualize and truely, intimately understand things will often invent breakthrough technology as JavaScript 'sockets.'
The vast majority of niche file types are currently not indexed by Google. Even though these file types make up only a fraction of a percent of what people are looking for, if you were able to create a search engine that covered a wide variety of these then there might be some opportunity. For example, if your search engine can index .sfg files (for Go players), .mm files (mind maps), etc.
I hear Textmate is pretty darn good, but it doesn't work in the terminal on my Linux box, and it doesn't run on my windows machine in my cube. I decided a year or two back to learn an editor well, and decided against Textmate for those two reasons.
Actually, could you leave some of your recollections in the comment form on the original article? In the "Where are they now" series on The Industry Standard, we often have former customers and employees leaving notes about their experiences, which provide an interesting contrast to the high-level views given by the company founders we interview.
You might at least want to get an original logo. I like bluebison.net as much as the next guy, but you should probably have something original if you're going to have a bunch of traffic.
The problem with Sony's two-front HD war (Blu-ray and streaming media)
I used vim for about 5 years. I decided to give emacs a roll about a
year ago. The first few weeks were hard, the next few were
interesting, and the rest was just fun.

I suppose it's because I've always been a tinkerer and I love the fact
that the wall between editing with emacs and editing emacs is so
small.

Anyways, this is all old news. Everybody already knows the arguments
for both sides and they're both true. I still use vim when the job
fits (configs or quick edits) and I use largely emacs for my
development (even if though I work at a vim shop and everybody gives
me dirty looks).
Hi5 Acquired PixVerse To Enhance Real-Time User Interaction
I like TextMate and it is probably one of the better GUI editors that are available on OS X, but I wouldn't claim that it's almost as good as Emacs.
To answer, I'm simply looking for additional input. Another opinion and set of eyes/brains. You do ask some valuable questions though; ones that I'm not sure I know the answer 2 right now.

I do think the general idea itself is a nice factor, differentiating DreamIt from YC.
If you want a more modern tool in the same class as Emacs and Vim, take a look at Sublime Text: http://www.sublimetext.com/
Unfortunately, it's Windows only for now and the author is charging for it which is probably a deal breaker for now.
There have been many occasions when the large players like MS or Google announced something and nothing usable came of it: e.g. OpenSocial is mostly vaporware.

Also, Google AND Yahoo, i.e. two huge corporations working together raises flags for me. When's the last time that worked out? There'll be a lot of managarial communication, overhead, bureaucracy, stupidity, etc. Assuming they really are doing this together: having worked at large corporations and knowing how inefficient even internal management is, I actually wouldn't worry too much about this.
Except that your brilliant friend, being your friend, gives a damn about you personally, and Mac OS X, being an operating system, doesn't.
BTW, why does it matter 'From someone well respected, who I won't name here." ? It is not an offensive comment, is it?
I won't know what they put together - as far as I know, there's nothing concrete on the Google or Yahoo end, but you know PR - just being in talks with Adobe gives the PR department to promise a product. It's also very possible that we could easily get squashed in a very short time. Mainly, I just wanted to open the communication channels with G and Y to see if they bite or even acknowledge us.
seriously, i had to think twice (nsfw .. when I saw the url).. please change it.
Good point not....

I've worked with venture capitalists off and on over the years and what everyone looking for funding needs to understand is what they think is a "good rate of return"..

They'll never tell you during the application process but what they are looking for is $10 in return in 2 to 5 years for every $1 they invest.

They really don't care how they get it. It can be from capital gain or operating revenue but they always want 10 for 1........

Things haven't really changed all that much since Shakespeare wrote "Merchant of Venice".
At this point, I'm tired of typing the code. Checking for errors after every function call is way too much work

Think of what the exception code ends up as in ASM. Basically try transparently wraps system calls with the same type of error handling code as his example. However, if you want to write stable code you need to account for each of these errors anyway. So when your DB connection fails you need to know if it’s a TCP/IP error or a Bad Password etc which means either wrapping each line with its own try catch or decoding the exception within a catch block. Granted, exception handling let’s your write code for the ideal case and avoid crashing when something messes up but as soon as you want to recover from an error without starting over you end up writing the same code anyway. And because the happy path works it’s not obvious just how far you are from high quality code.
Puzzle: 1200 Baud Archeology
> Why not contact Google and Yahoo and see if they
> are interested in acquiring you? It couldn't hurt.

You should never do this. When buying or selling something illiquid, the side who brings up the idea of a deal starts off at a disadvantage. So if you make the overture you will get hosed. Except you won't even get that in this case, as an offer like that coming in over the transom to a big company is never going to reach anyone who matters.

But your other advice is good.
Slide Partnered With VH1 To Bring the Web to TV
I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue.

I don't have any real good answers for you there. We're still pretty much a two man shop, though we've just hired a part-time support and documentation person (five hours per week--extremely part-time, but enough to free me and Jamie up a bit from support roles so we can focus on other revenue-generating tasks).

I may have gone in an abnormal direction by hiring someone really experienced for the support role, rather than hiring someone really cheap and training them. He costs more, but we don't have to train him and I've got great confidence in the support he provides. He's a technology jack of all trades that happens to fit our business very well, and I believe he'll provide far more value to our customers than he costs us to keep him working.

We're torn on the "stay small" vs. "go big" question, as well. We know we're going after huge revenues...we're just trying to figure out how to maximize those opportunities without bogging down the company with a lot of unnecessary head count. I think the key is to boil it down to your core business. Our thinking is: "Why do people pay us?" And the answers are: Powerful software that gets better all the time, great personal support via our website, less painful licensing processes than our competitors.

So, those are the things we need to spend money on (plus marketing and advertising in order to let people know those are the things we provide). Everything else is not our job--we'll outsource it. In the next week or two I'm planning to hire a part-time bookkeeper to come in once per week to clean out my inbox, pay bills, and enter our accounting data into the accounting system, etc.

But, then again, that still doesn't answer your question, and doesn't solve the problem--at some point, if you have success, you have to hire more people. Full time legal, accounting, sales, support, etc. It just happens...but I do think it's worth fighting a few aspects of that. Hierarchy can be a problem, and should be fought against pretty strongly...I've seen an organization that brought in a new CEO, and she looked around at the general messiness and inefficiency of the organization (a ~60 person non-profit with a few tens of millions in managed money), and decided that what the company needed was more C-levels. Last I heard they had seven C-levels. That's less than ten employees per C-level, for those keeping count at home. I'm pretty confident this did not improve the efficiency of the organization.

I get the distinct impression from people I know who work at Google that they have a similar problem. MBAs look at the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around...
OK. OK. I got a little carried away with my cost estimates.

But, you have to understand some of the developers I've worked with over the years. No question they would have that much into before the darn thing worked right.
Wouldn't it make sense to first check if there are different conclusions before you declare "it's too bad" the writer failed to mention them? Google has this new feature called Search. You might like it.

I strongly suspect our happiness is controlled by drugs in our water system, but the author failed to cover research in the area of "I make shit up on the internet".
I think the price points should be adjusted a little bit. Very few people are going to want to pay more than $30 for a shirt. This means that for almost all of the shirts, 3/4ths of them will never sell. It kind of looks bad.

Its not as catchy, but $10 + (Shirt Number/4) seems like a better formula- $10-$35.
It's one thing when miniapps actually do something clever or useful, but...
Actually, that is quite a mouthful to type
It's a great way to fine tune ip-gloc data :)
I've heard nothing but negative experiences from those who outsourced to India, or anywhere remote for that matter. Could it be that the author is so gun-ho about it because he has a consulting outfit in New Delhi?
I must admit I wouldn't be using your search when Google has flash search support.

But as you can see below, licensing your technology to other companies would be a big step. If only you had it launched 6 months ago you would be in a better situation by now, but I see now evidence to say your a dead startup if your claims stand up! ;)
It says you'd be open to other names, so here's my suggestion: flashiefind. It describes what you're doing, has a sort of alliteration and ring to it, and feels natural. And the domain name is open. Eh?
Gender Inequality and the Math Gap
A good enough rate of return is 10% - most companies operate on 10-15% IRR. What you need to rememeber is that this 10-15% is AFTER adjustment, ie write offs for risk, overheads etc.

In government contracting (fairly low risk), with a target profit margin of 10%, gross margin required can easily be over 25%.

> $10 in return in 2 to 5 years for every $1 they invest.

Over a 5 year period a 900% total return is 58.5% anual return. Assuming they get a hit one time in six this would equate to a profit of about ten percent (gross - before overhead costs etc), which is pretty low. Any less and they would be better off doing something else with the money.

Of course if all six startups are a hit they make out like bandits - but if you take the risk you get the reward. They could just as easilly end up with six losers.
Awesome. A barebones site that does what it is supposed to do. Great job.
I'd venture to guess nearly all developers using unit tests would say they are helpful, otherwise they wouldn't be using them. This isn't meant to be snide. I'm just saying that if you already suspect koolaid then any feedback is basically worthless because the only people responding are the ones who have seen measurable results and idiots who drink koolaid, and there's no way to tell the difference. The feedback from non-testers might be a little more useful, but it's still a little suspect considering it's from people who are confident more testing would improve their software yet still don't do it. Furthermore, unit tests are only as good as the test cases themselves and a survey can't account for quality of tests. I guess my point is that while surveys can be interesting, at the end of the day they're just a popularity contest and not very good for determining what works and what doesn't.