skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you make a great point here.

The thing I find interesting is that looking back it feels to me as though they did indeed get their first traction by carving a niche and being the best at one thing.

In my mind, Posterous were the best at blogging via email. In my mind, they were the blogging platform for people new to blogging. I personally introduced a few people to Posterous simply as a way to blog without using anything they didn't already know. It was simple: the headline is the email subject, and the body is the content of the post. They chose to steer away from that being a USP, I am assuming for good reasons.

You're right about it being hard to focus, however perhaps there is a strategy amongst it all. If they try and do a number of things maybe they can find one thing which people like the way they do or which Posterous find they are particularly suited to delivering a potential "best at" solution for. Then they could focus. It is almost like instead of systematically pivoting from idea to idea, they are doing all the pivots at once. This could, of course, be a complete misreading of their strategy.
There are other calls they make completely behind the scenes that, as far as I can tell, are completely secret. I don't use Yelp very often so I may be getting the terminology mixed up, but if you link your Yelp and FB accounts, and you "star" or "like" (or whatever they call it) something on yelp, it will automatically like it for you on Facebook _without_ sending any traffic between your computer and Facebook. They're obviously hitting Facebook from the server side, which would imply to me they're trying to keep the API call secret.
That's actually a really good question. France is relatively isolated when it comes to participating in the international technology scene. There are a few very large French technology companies but for the most part it seems to me (that's not proof) as though France is an island.

One possible reason for this is that using English is discouraged inside of France both as a culture and by all kinds of funny rules and regulations.

Another reason is that France had a headstart over the rest of the world with a system called MiniTel which gave pretty much one in three French households access to a service with a lot of the functionality of the early days of the net but on a system run by the French telecommunications monopolist. When the internet and the web became popular the French lagged behind because what they had was good enough to cause a lot of them to stick to what they had (a French system for the French available everywhere versus a system that was mostly geared towards the English language users). For the rest of Europe there was no such alternative (Local variations did exist but were not as successful and widely adopted as minitel was in France).

Finally, due to labor legislation France has one of the worst environments to do start-ups in.

Taken together that should explain some (but probably not all) of the reason why France with the exception of Paris is a little dark on that map compared to the rest of Europe.

One HN'er that I know lives in the South of France actually commutes to London for work, that's how anemic the tech scene in France outside of 'la banlieue' is (that's French for 'the suburbs' which they use to refer to suburbs in general but specifically to those surrounding Paris, inside that border is where most of the French tech scene is located).

Possibly someone from France can jump in here and give some more background and/or correct me if I'm wrong.
Ask HN: how many entrepreneurs here are over 40?
How many HN'ers are over 40?

If so, when did you start your first real business?

I started at 26 and now 43. Still plugging away.
Cara beriklan di internet
Banyak cara beriklan di internet, atau cara pasang iklan di internet. cara beriklan di internet ada yang gratis ada juga yang berbayar misalnya yang paling terkenal adalah dengan membuat iklan di Google adwords dan facebook.com kedua raksasa website dan social network tersebut merupakan favorit bagi advertiser untuk menjajakan iklannya.
/sigh, that simply isn't true.

1. IPO investors are taking on a risk by investing. For that they get a return. IPOs can drop on first day too.

2. The bank typically underwrites the IPO. That means if there is a shortfall, the bank kicks in the rest. That is a risk for which the bank gets a return.

3. By "close friends" you mean the bank's clients. If demand exceeds supply you can sure bet their best clients will be first in line.

4. A price band is determined ahead of time. Its required for the prospectus. Determining demand is aguessing game. Better to be oversubscribed than under.

5. Having the press of being oversubscribed is good for the bank and the company. Lookup the illusion of scarcity.

6. For the same reason a big day one jump is good for both and it sets the tone for the stock to the markets.

Auctions have been tried, famously with Google. Even then there was a big day one jump.
Good Catch, I think you've caught a data cleaning bug, the geo ip location service used to make the map probably returns '0,0' for IPs that it does not have a location for.
Bucato il sito dell'Istituto di Commercio Estero
Questa volta è più grossa del solito... mi sono imbattuto in un brutto incidente.
Il sito dell'Istituto di Commercio Estero è stato bucato. C'è stato un defacement, pubblicato su Zone-h, in data 28 gennaio che è, purtroppo, ancora in linea mentre sto scrivendo.
Come potete vedere nella figura a fianco, il defacement è stato rivendicato dal gruppo 1923Turk che...
If you've already convinced yourself that this idea is worth pursing by doing things like talking to 5 strangers about the idea, then I think that you should teach yourself the programming skills you need to implement the idea. If you are truly passoinate about your idea, this won't be a big obstacle.

Almost all of the people that you could pay to work on your idea are in the business of getting paid by clients to write programs, not in the business of implementing business ideas themselves. They don't have the investment in your idea to work the nights and weekends for free that it would take to turn your idea into a business. That means that you can probably trust them. However it also means that they aren't as committed to implementing your vision as you need them to be.

If you teach yourself to program, you can make sure that your vision is implemented correctly. I also guarantee that your idea will be improved by the process of writing the code yourself.

The reason I can say this with such confidence is that six years ago I had an idea. I took some money and found some developers and paid them to implement the vision. They happily took my money, but kept running into obstacles and telling me, "It can't be done." Each time they did I'd dig into the work that they'd already done and do a ton of research and come back a week later and say, "I think you can do it this way." They'd get back to work and then after a while they'd come to me again and say, "It can't be done." Unfortunately I ran out of money before anything useful came out of this process.

However, I was still passionate about my idea. I assumed that the problem was that I had the wrong developers. So I wrote everything I knew about my idea down in a PowerPoint presentation and showed it to some friends and they gave me more money. So I founds some other developers and quickly reestablished the same pattern. At this point I was used to it. They'd say, "It can't be done" and I'd find a way to move the process forward. This time I had enough money to get a crude prototype out of the process. Unfortunately, when I showed it to people, they didn't like it. It was an implementation of my idea and solved a problem, but it was awkward and slow and largely unusable. I was out of money again and didn't have anything more to show for it.

However, I was still passionate about my idea. About 18 months ago I decided that I was going to teach myself to program so that I could implement my idea on my own. I'd learned BASIC as a kid and took a few programming classing in college, but it wasn't my major and I'd never attempted anything on this scale before. It has taken a lot of time and hard work, but I am closer to the achieving my vision than ever, and more importantly, my idea has been dramatically improved by the process of writing it myself.
Not that simple, no. Profit-sharing is not the same as worker ownership, since if shares are available to non-workers, then it's not a socialist system. Also, if workers are required to "buy in" to shares, instead of collectively owning the results of their economic organization, then that is not socialism either.

What you're thinking of is still capitalism.
Why no mention of "Sandy Bridge" quad core? That's the most significant performance boost I'm expecting.

(I'd comment on the page, but there are no comments enabled).
An idea in itself doesn't worth much even if it is a great idea. What matters more for you is to determine how you can contribute in the successful implementation of idea and then look for others who can compliment to your skills.

Ask these questions to yourself -

1. Is my idea really good?

- Is my taget market new or underserved?

- Why will customers use my solution - is it cheaper? is it better than existing ones?

- Is there really any demand of my solution ?

- Is my idea feasible? Do I have the capital, skills, man power, etc to implement it or can arrange it somehow?

- Is my idea profitable?

2. How can I contribute in implementing my idea?

- I can write code. (Try learning if you don't know programming. It will help you in long term. )

- I can design my web application.(Try learning if you don't know.)

- I can do marketing. I can get a first few clients/users and then keep bringing more.

- I can handle finance. I can provide/raise money to successfully run the business till it becomes profitable enough.

- I am good and experienced in management. I can fit in the role of CEO.

If you are unable to contribute to the business in any way then you aren't yet ready to startup. Make yourself ready. Learn the skills required.

If you can do some of these but can't just program, you need to write a good business plan, develop a prototype(paper or html), and look for a good technical cofounder(its better if he is in your friend circle).
This is an issue we have discussed here at Hacker News. Shameless plug: I for one have tried to push the cause of No-Degree-MBA. For example, you have The Success Manual which contains actionable summaries from 200+ greatest business books self-improvement books of all time. http://thesuccessmanual.bighow.com
No Strings Attached
Excerpts story No Strings Attached 2011 : No Strings Attached Film is limited to ages 17 years or older. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher had sex a day without planned. They both are not lovers, though in reality, Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher could say the same attention to each other.
Have you thought about investing into advertising (not sure of your product, so you would have to gauge where the best place to put your money).
Wireless sucks if the carriers around here are any indication. My brother-in-law uses one and his connection has been throttled twice already for using too much bandwidth during peak hours -- and his usage is relatively small. The normal download rates are slow, a little less than normal DSL speeds (150k-200k) and the upload rates slower. You have to put up an antenna. They firewall you at their place and you have to call to get ports opened.

Really there's no competition to cable. Comcast is the only decent provider around here, it's much faster than DSL. Sucks.
I spoke once with the MBA program manager (or something, I don't know what, he wasn't the dean for sure) at my university. He summarized that an MBA is a professional degree, not an academic degree. As such, the value from an MBA depends on who your classmates are, not what your profs/textbooks say. He said that it's often the prof actually learning from the students. They can discuss case studies and business issues in class, and each student can add something special to the discussion. "Well, we experienced this exact thing back in our 2004 expansion push, and these were the issues that we encountered and how we dealt with them." "That's funny, we experienced something similar in 2005, but it was in Japan, and dang, we had a totally different set of experiences, this is what we had to do, but we failed at this and that in the attempt. These were our results from the whole thing."

Joe Schmoe with no real experience can try to mumble something that he learned back during his Marketing 303 class, but nobody will care. If the university is worth anything, Joe Schmoe would not be accepted in the first place.

So the guy emphasized to me that the real value from an MBA is not the fancy 3 letters, nor the fancy job prospects, though those are all nice bonuses. He emphasized that the real value was the professional network that would be accumulated (the better the school, the better the network as a general rule), and correspondingly, the wealth of information and future opportunities that could be gathered from that professional network.

So it sounds very similar to a comment someone made about why they found university to be valuable in that other thread about whether to attend university.

On the flip side, I knew a director of marketing from when I worked in telco. He had an MBA from Phoenix University online. His class included a hotel clerk, for reference in terms of their student quality. But he wasn't expecting anything out of it. He came from an engineering background and had gradually transitioned into sales and marketing. But he found as he moved up the chain in sales and marketing, he lacked some of the fundamental aspects of business that many of his peers seemed to possess (simple things, like even vocabulary; what the heck does managerial accounting mean, and how does it differ from regular accounting?). So he enrolled into Phoenix just so that he could talk shop properly with his peers. He's a lifer at that telco, a rising star, so getting an MBA from Harvard wouldn't help him achieve his goals any better than Phoenix would. His goals were just to keep growing inside the company, not seek a high-profile exec position somewhere else; Phoenix provided him the tools he needed to do exactly what he wanted.

So in the end, it depends on what you're looking for.
Interesting because the results were so surprising. I would not expected Baltimore to come in first in per capita income growth, nor San Jose to come in last.

I'd sort of like to see how these compare with the period from 2001 to 2009, however. 2000 was the peak of one economic cycle; 2009 was the trough of the next. Therefore, this could simply be saying that "Cities with a reputation for high growth tend to be pro-cyclical, doing well when times are good and poorly when times are bad. Cities that are dependent upon government spending tend to be counter-cyclical, doing relatively well when times are bad and relatively poorly when times are good." This wouldn't surprise anyone.
Good question. I didn't see Juno. I loathed what I saw of Joss Whedon, so you're probably right there. But IMO the Coens are far greater artists than that. I don't have any unified theory of why, but I'll point out one thing. Lebowski has lots of zippy writing (different than Sorkin's, but I'll concede the point) but True Grit, to take the obvious recent example, does not. Neither did No Country. In other words the Coens have the discipline to subordinate their cleverness to the needs of the genre and the story. In fact this is one of their distinguishing features. Sorkin by contrast seems to have this adolescent need to prove how smart he is in every context, and is quite willing to turn his characters into caricatures in order to do it. It's a form of incontinence.
This is breathtaking.. An automated tool would definitely be useful and welcomed, but half the challenge and reward is also staying the 30+ hours to capture the image.
I've recently got a feel for this whole "barrel of a gun" thing with taxes. This month marked the second year in a row when my increase in income is being offset by an increase in taxes (I'm not in US btw). I've never felt there's anything wrong with paying taxes: I was born in a state-funded society, and I enjoyed free education and health care. But now I do. I actually feel the hand going in my pocket and taking more then it's supposed to. And the complete lack of trust I have in the political class to responsibly use this money, hell, to just not plain steal half of it makes it all the worst.

Sorry the rant. Point I was trying to make, the devil is in the specifics. Taxes are social contract, yes, but overtaxing and then wasting the money is still stealing. Same with draft - 3-6 months of learning military skills which might be useful in case of an invasion is reasonable social contract. Drafting in order to be part of an invading army is not.
Apple had 60+ MBA summer interns in 2010.
How many HN'ers are over 40?

I'm 45. But I don't really qualify as an entrepreneur at this time. I hope to eventually make enough money online to leave my day job. Not there yet, and nowhere near as close as I would like to be.
21, now 43. And sometimes it feels like a disease. I can't shake it.
CodeIgniter 2.0.0 Released
In addition to adapting to a new place and working with all types of people who you would never have come across in your prior role.
> where I didn't have to hear generalizations about my country's right to exist.

I'm not sure where you inferred that from. Criticism of Israel's policies and structural flaws is not existentialism criticism unless you have a very paranoid mindset.

> could be the one online forum

There should be no place on this globe where you should be free from the consequences of your actions. It would certainly be nicer if you could retreat somewhere and not have to listen to the grievances that people have and maybe just maybe the way to do that would be to change Israel itself and then the chorus of complaints will be silenced.

> but please keep the snarky one-liners to Reddit.

I'm sick of pro-Israeli policy supporters always using clever language and smear tactics to voice dissent. How about you try to move the debate forward and help us understand your point of view instead appearing as someone who gets touchy when the little "problem" of the ghettoization and subjugation of a whole population is mentioned.
Plenty of Fish Hacked
Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and YouTube are redefining heavy internet usage. My brother-in-law (who lives with us for the moment) recently got Netflix hooked up on his Xbox and he uses 10-11 GB if he watches all day or 5-6 if he watches for a few hours.

My normal usage, downloading updates for my PCs (Arch Linux, so heavy ones come often), browsing, watching a handful of videos, doing git pulls, lots of text-heavy sites like HN and docs, etc. plus my wife's normal usage, which is YouTube and Facebook, usually ends up somewhere around 700MB-1GB of usage per day. When I torrented from home, the average consumption was maybe 2GB-4GB per day, so Netflix is even more taxing than that for me.

As the web becomes increasingly media intensive, the "normal user" threshold of <100 MB per day is going to shoot up to something around <10-15 GB per day, especially once everyone in the house gets TV and movies over web-based services instead of cable/air/DVD.

The cable companies, which incidentally are usually the only good residential ISPs, are going to lose cable subscriptions to Netflix subscriptions and on-demand rentals to iTunes rentals, and consequently we'll see moves like this one seeking to penalize net-based media providers since they take customers away from their TV offerings.
If flashing screaming crap becomes the norm, I will be busy working on a pair of Adblock Plus Glasses.

I'm not quite sure how they'd work, but were there's a will there's a way!
'will not pay for' is not the same as 'law preempting' and countries don't have 'best interests' only people do, so speak plainly: you see greater financial equality as a good thing.

Insurers who share your philosophy would drive men away. So you advocate market-meddling as the solution. Which adds regulation, compliance, bureaucracy, etc, costs that are pushed onto everybody.

OR realize that women marry men (and thus buy share insurance). OR charities exist to support single mothers. OR they can use contraceptives --- unless you're arguing that women have a right to take risky business ventures while pregnant on other peoples dime.
I'd be glad if they changed the glass on the 15" to plastic.

The glass has caused me two problems so far: I was in bed with it moving around, and the notebook went off balance. The edge of the screen part hit me in the nose. If it was plastic, it would have been a lot less heavy.

Next, the glass broke when the lid was closed with a USB cable near the hinge, between the top of the keyboard the screen. It didn't take much pressure. Plastic would have, I think, saved me from that.
I have an expresscard SSD[1] in my 2006 MBP that really made the machine usable again. I run OSX and my apps off the SSD, and keep my user folder on the internal drive.

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161...
Waiting for the 15" upgrade too. But don't want to loose the optical drive, don't use it that often but don't want to shell out a lot of money for an external one. Also I need a ethernet cable slot. In some companies I work they have flaky wireless lan's so I prefer to use cable. At home I also use cable to transfer big files. But I could upgrade my old G wireless lan ;)
I asked a similar question on LinkedIn few months back and got some good replies. Here is the link to that discussion -

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/st....

I think it may help you.
And if you are wondering if it's for you or not, here is an excerpt that might help you think it through:

I’m sure everybody has their own definition of the attributes of an entrepreneur. Some of the ones I would identify are:

Not very status-oriented
Doesn’t follow rules very well and questions authority
Can handle high degrees of ambiguity or uncertainty
Can handle rejection, being told “no” often and yet still have the confidence in your idea
Very decisive. A bias toward making decisions – even when only right 70% of the time – moving forward & correcting what doesn’t work
A high level of confidence in your own ideas and ability to execute
Not highly susceptible to stress
Have a high risk tolerance
Not scared or ashamed of failure
Can handle long hours, travel, lack of sleep and the trade-offs of having less time for hobbies & other stuff
You could always switch to oatmeal. The non-packet kind, instant or steel-cut, has much less packaging, and it's almost certainly healthier for you.
The author mentions the new CPUs in a footnote: "Except new CPUs, but who cares? CPUs are the least exciting (and usually least relevant) upgrades in modern mass-market personal computers." For the vast majority of users, including many power users, moving from a "very fast" processor to an "extremely fast" processor is much less of a performance gain than moving from a HDD to a SDD.

That's not to say that I don't wish compilation times were faster on my current Macbook Pro...
Wajam: Make every search a social search
Startup Opportunity: Social Search
Talk about edge cases. Have you ever considered applying to be an Apple tester? ;)
As Marco says in the article:

"CPUs are the least exciting (and usually least relevant) upgrades in modern mass-market personal computers."

It's quite probable that the MacBook Pro gets a faster CPU, but for mobile Macs, that's never a major sales driver. What is? A slimmer, lighter enclosure and better battery life. Switching from HDD to SSD will allow that, like it has for the MacBook Air.