skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In order to succeed, all these start-up companies will have to sell a lot of product (whether it be advertising, services, apps or tee-shirts). However, the general economy looks like it will be in a sad state for years to come: the unemployment rate is still around 10%; it will be years before the housing market works its way through a glut of inventory; consumers are saving more and spending less and have sharply reduced access to credit; etc. It's a pretty difficult business climate even for established companies, let alone companies that are starting from scratch with no paying customers at all. Who's going to buy all this new stuff?
Twitter has about 200M users, of which about 20-30M are actually active.

That's $50 per user. Or around $400 per active user.

Nuts.
>so the military removed the bases, and built tourist resorts instead. Which they ran.

Any sources for this? The Sinai peninsula did not have many military bases (certainly not Egyptian ones) on the coastline. Are you referring to another area?
Isn't it possible that this is why it comes out of the military industrial machine? Surely a lot of advances in trauma treatment, bandages, surgery, and all kinds of other medical advances have come from the military industrial machine as well.

I don't see the need to politicize this, and I don't think the numbers associated with the wars would be little known to people here.
I am Egyptian American - both countries are extremely self-centered :)... That's probably why I never heard of the other revolutions in your links.

Regardless, this is something that is unprecedented in Egyptian history, which is 7000+ years long.

Honestly, I always thought the Egyptian revolution will be the poor rising up and slaughtering the rich. So, I am pretty impressed and proud at how peaceful this movement has been and is lead by educated and enlightened young people...

Isn't surprising that you don't hear the usual middle eastern chants "death to america/israel/obama/blah" or "jiha" or other sort of religious calls, etc... It has been all about democracy and human rights.
Yes - the entire office is covered in decorations, themes and general craziness.
It's as if it takes time - years - for crazy consumer propositions to propagate from early adopters to people outside of the tech world.

When Jorge Lorenzo has his Twitter handle printed on his Yamaha motorcycle, its safe to say that Twitter is used by people outside the tech world.
You're welcome!

and phone support is about the only difference as far as I can tell.

Its nice to be able to call someone
Because a position as researcher is usually not considered to be a "job".
might want to try another webkit based browser to test, but maybe just you. Are you using chromium or chrome ?
Ask HN: Facebook browser?
Many online giants have created browsers after establishing a significant presence or before in some cases (ie. Netscape, Aol, MSFT, Google, etc.). Has anyone heard of, or do you all see potential for Facebook to follow this trend and create a social network integrated browser? I have to believe many individuals, especially university students and less techy facebook addicts, would use a browser by FB. Undoubtedly productivity would go down, but I doubt that's what Mark Z is concerned about. I am interested to hear your thoughts.
Perhaps use something like uservoice.com as a simple way to track feature/monitor plugin requests.
OTP is a massive part of erlang applications stability and OTP is written entirely inside userland, it needs a VM which provides process isolation and message passing which isnt (obviously) beyond the JVM, sure it wasnt design from the ground up to do so but that does not mean it wont (and doesnt) work
This is great - and it begs the question why my brokerage and banking accounts don't offer something similar, especially considering I have iPhone apps from both that could be providing the second authentication factor.
Its the users. Quora started out as an invite system, so as invites percolated outward from the founders, many Silicon Valley technologists and their friends came into the fold and sort of defined its current culture. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand is full of, well, Yahoo users, and its culture is literally a joke: http://www.epicfail.com/tag/yahoo-answers/
That seems a bit backwards to me, though it explains the higher investment at lower stake.

One of the attractive parts of YC is the mentorship in exactly this category[1] that comes with the program. Between that and the pay-us-for-space incubator model, it's something of an apples-to-oranges comparison to YC, anyway.

[1] Or at least how to approach getting funding, if not networking in general.
I worked at EA as well and it's exactly what I thought of when I saw the Zappos offices.
Interestingly, Rackspace--another very service-oriented company--has an office culture very similar to Zappos. I wonder if it's common to more companies highly focused on customer support as a differentiator.
I send out invoices through Freshbooks and get paid by snail mail. I've tried to move clients over to subscription billing, but I get major pushback each time I try.
The Germans Are Coming To Take Over the New York Stock Exchange
Mainly because the DDNA looks for indicators of potentially malicious activity, but I have used one of the tools before on exploit dev for a demo.
We're similar in that we're simplifying the server monitoring process.

For now, that's all I can say...
The Business Insider reported that they were told this by an HP spokesman: After the event, a spokesperson explained that WebOS would probably ship as a customized user interface running on top of Windows, very similar to HP's TouchSmart today.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/hps-webos-pcs-will-run-on-win...

I would also note that the linked Fortune article is referring to HP's mobile future, so it is not really discussing the PC business.
Fair enough, I can see the frustration with that... and I do understand from you and the article that recruiters do have it tough, too.

I would usually pick out companies who I would want to talk to and research them a couple of days before the event. The key here is that I'm looking for something from the recruiter that I can't get from the website, be it an edge or further insight with experiences about the company. Simply repeating the company's mission statement and handing me the website equivalent on glossy paper isn't all that much of a help(this isn't too frequent a case but it's happened).
Raising capital isn't like dusting crops, fanboy :-)

Given this venue, there are a lot of VC minded developers. Going that route isn't a requirement to being successful. Ive started several companies without taking any outside money, and most of my clients are the same. No matter which way you go though, if you try to do everything yourself you are more likely than not to end up with a failure. Find one or two others who share your vision, who also bring critical skills to the table.
Respond.js: Fast CSS3 Media Queries for Internet Explorer 6-8
Valid point: seems that a "social browser" of sorts, from within FB's walled garden, would accomplish with far greater effect -- and success -- the idea behind Flock and RockMelt.
SwipeGood (YCW11) Raises $500K From Michael Birch And Others
AOL and the Huffington Post: Content couple
Internet blackouts: Reaching for the kill switch
I'll probably read the whole article, but the first line of the abstract is already losing me:

"The unemployment rate for PhDs in science, engineering, and health is about one-fourth that of the general population."

Oh, come on, you're comparing this against the general population? People who get PhD's in these subjects are typically great high school students who get into good colleges, major in difficult subject matter with high attrition rates, score high on standardized tests, survive a highly selective admissions process to grad school, spend up to a decade in an immensely difficult academic program with astoundingly high attrition rates compared with elite medicine, dentistry, law, or mba programs, and do some unpaid postdoc work.

A low unemployment rate compared to the national average. Gee, now there's a good control group.

For a more sobering viewpoint, take a look at a recent RAND study about the employment prospects for scientists and engineers relative to professions:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
This looks cool. How does it compare to something like Big Brother from Quest Software? And would it be available for use on internal networks?
BofA uses something similar when transferring funds between accounts--a unique code is texted to a registered mobile device to complete the transfer. It seems feasible that they could extend the technology to logins.
Hehe: we finally found a guy to run the Indian team who had worked in the US and he filled that integrator role. It was honestly an order of magnitude performance improvement after he was in place, plus he (partially) solved the time zone issue, which you are right was quite frankly a major pain. If I never have another 11pm or 7am conference call I will be forever grateful.

Communication was a serious issue: even in English it was bad enough, and I shudder to think about what it would be like with a non-English speaking country. I guess ultimately you CAN make it work and there are SOME cost efficiencies to be gained but even in India we see large companies like IBM and Verizon who end up building out these massive facilities (regular power generation comes to mind: Delhi had these huge power outages and we eventually had to buy our team there power inverters just so they could work part of the time between 11am and 4pm) to normalize the development experience: I question if there are any cost savings left after that kind of infrastructure build out.

And yes, it completely destroys your personal productivity, but the hope is that the multiplier effect gets you more value than writing the code yourself: I'm as yet unconvinced that it really works that way, but what do I know.
Cisco: The anti-Nokia
I think you're getting at a very interesting conflict here that the author of the article attempted to explain. While user metrics can gauge the success of a web startup, that's often all they can do. Those metrics will (potentially) tell the company if they're improving or declining, and if they should be taking action.

However, it will not tell the company what actions to take. They're nowhere near as useful as a targeted, action specific metric in determining what to do. If my website's # of visitors drops 50% over a week, there might be something wrong, but I don't know what action to take without more information. Figuring out what engages users on the site and what keeps them coming back and measuring those things would be way more useful than simply knowing how many users are visiting.
They rolled back the fail. Vista was a glitchy monstrosity similar in problems to Windows ME, 7 is remarkably stable. Or have you forgotten the endless problems people were having, attempts at refunds, and battling with PC makers to continue offering XP instead of only Vista (eventually succeeding, for the most part)? Why do you think Microsoft has continued to support XP for so long?

Yes, 7 builds off Vista. But that's because Vista was a half-complete version of 7. If they used Vista to test the waters and experiment, then yes, it quite likely helped 7, but it also screwed their image something awful, aiding in the slow adoption of 7. As a huge amount of people have demonstrated, stability and consistency are more important than shininess.

If they had run the 7 pre-release public betas earlier, they probably could have done away with Vista entirely, and been better off in the end. People are more accepting of problems in betas, especially when they're free. Instead, they essentially got ripped off for hundreds of dollars with Vista, only to be nailed with more costs to upgrade to something usable when 7 came out.
Looking at the terms of use, I couldn't find any prohibiting downloading its content for offline use. As I understand it, there appear to be two semi-related rules:

* Don't make multiple simultaneous API calls.

* Each thing added must be a result of a specific user action. I'm not sure whether this applies to things retrieved from the API.

Also, the dollar per month is for the subscription service, not the purchase of the Instapaper iOS app. Current Instapaper for iOS app users do not need the subscription service, but users who use apps that use this new API will.
Obama outlines $18 billion broadband plan, aims for 98% coverage
Interesting points. I also think that most mid level managers do not have the technical skill set to review remote developer's work and thus it is easier to walk into a room of developers and yell "Go do X! And it better work!!" :)
Ugh, this is why I don't use facebook. I'm tired of big websites adding these extra "security features" to make it that much easier to track me while adding friction to your site experience.

I'll be impressed if this actually works. Google can't even figure out how to authenticate half of their services off of your google apps domain account.
And I definitely know that Twitter ain't worth 10 billion dollars.

That's a lot like saying "I know x startup will fail." You are probably right considering vast majority of startups shooting for the stars fail. But you also don't get very many points for predicting what's gonna fail. And so it is better to invest in 30 companies where 29 turn out to be absolute crap and one turns out to be Google versus investing in 30 average companies that have average returns or NOT investing in any company at all.

Of course you can invest in one solid company and have that be google. But I don't know very many people that have done that.
Congrats guys... great product idea and excellent team, I know you're going to do well.
I still don't see how this should really change how an entrepreneurial hacker behaves, at least very much. Yes, money is cheap now, and might get more expensive later. It's a good time to start a company for that reason, but bad because there's a lot of competition for other resources with those dollars. Maybe raise a little more cash now than you otherwise would, and make sure you have a plan to get to profitability or exit in some form if you can't get follow-on financing. If the market declines, it's cheaper to hire people, rent space, etc. and a lot of firms will want to find lower cost alternatives to products. Running a tech company in 2000-2002 was interesting in a lot of ways.

Still, build something people (with money) want to buy.

The big thing right now seems to be that the overall economy (at least in the US) seems much weaker than the tech economy, so there may be opportunities to arbitrage this somehow ("offshore" development using non-internet programmers from industrial companies in the midwest?).

IMO no one is going to be a more successful tech entrepreneur because he's better at predicting macro economic trends. Those cycles are better spent learning something worthwhile in your problem domain, or actual tech or entrepreneurship skills.
I'm having trouble sifting through the wiki info regarding the German revolution to find similarities I think you might be pointing out. Could you cliff note what your referring to?
CARTÃO DE VISITA - PANFLETO - LETREIRO - BANNER - ARTES GRÁFICAS - GRÁFICA
Very important distinction, but I think we're already seeing these lofty valuations being passed to individual investors (via "special vehicles," secondary markets, limited partners, etc.)

Most bubbles trickle down. VCs will gladly partner with companies at high valuations because eventually banks, accredited investors, and secondary markets are let in on the deal to drive the valuation higher. The first two groups pray for and/or plan an IPO to dump an even higher valuation on the public market.

Boom is the transfer of wealth from the bottom 95% to the top 5%. Bust is when that transfer is complete.
KPCB slides on top 10 mobile Internet trends
I tried to understand where the article is coming from, but there is no data, and the conclusion seems to be "SSL will increase load on your server when you use 2048 bit keys". Well, yeah. A couple of things smell fishy about the argument in the article, and the author seems to equate "Web server" = "Apache".

The only quantitative speculation (without data) from TFA:

"A typical server that could support 1500 TPS using 1024-bit keys will only support 1/5 of that (around 300 TPS) when supporting modern best practices, i.e. 2048-bit keys."
I agree that employer exhibitors have to be just as prepared! Our company treats it just like any trade show. And any good exhibitor will tell you that you need to have one specific goal to work towards. Without it, you're just the talking head with a brochure.
Show HN: Monitor For Me, an alarm monitoring service
A more accurate comparison would be using a compiler rather than writing machine language code by hand.

When computers first appeared, everyone wrote code in machine language. People thought that's what programs were. When the first compilers appeared, I'm sure a lot of people were grossed out by how ugly and inefficient their output was compared to the hand-written machine language code they were used to. But people who thought that were solving the wrong problem. What matters is how the code looks to the programmer writing it, not how it looks to the machine executing it.

People who think HTML should be elegant are making the same mistake. HTML is object code. What matters is the representation the programmer sees, which in this case is the source of HN, which is quite concise.
A few years ago I was reading "Growing a Business" by Paul Hawken[1], in which he shares his experiences in entrepreneurship (which are quite dated, but interesting). One thing that stuck out to me was that in his first business, he used $1000 to get up and started, and in the latest one at the time of writing, had used over $100,000. He said in the first he would have felt uncomfortable with more than a grand in the first experience and uncomfortable with less than a hundred grand in the last example.

I took away the point that the amount of funding needed to start a business is variable, and so are the needs of the founders. Founders shouldn't deal with more or less than they are comfortable with. Personally, I lean more in the direction you do, wanting a business to be cash flow positive before I took any outside capital. But that would be extremely difficult in many situations, and limiting yourself to having a product that is very small profitable now may limit your ability to build a product that is hugely profitable in the future. My thinking is that a founder needs to take time and evaluate carefully whether they should seek investment or bootstrap.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Business-Paul-Hawken/dp/067167...
The Explorer and the Farmer (perhaps relevant to entrepreneurship/taking risks)
This wouldn't work for me. I own a mobile phone, but I only use it for specific purposes and don't carry it around with me routinely. Mobile phones are not something that I care about to any significant extent.
Really fascinating tool but:

They are either overloaded or something is wrong with their network connection. Their waterfall is showing an 800 byte image on my test is taking 6 seconds to load in Safari.

I know that doesn't happen on any other waterfall test because I was reviewing it last weekend.

Same site, same page, 10 seconds on Safari and then 2 seconds on Android?
The Goldman Sachs/Facebook deal makes that distinction a bit murky. I hadn't heard whether or not they allowed investors into their deal that weren't playing with their own private equity. It's quite possible the reality isn't so open-and-shut.

And if we hear about more of these 'special purpose vehicles', the public/private distinction may well be on its is way to irrelevancy.
> I've been wondering if Microsoft's stock price is low due to the perception that they aren't sexy.

Stock prices are (usually) set based on two factors: The current earnings/revenue situation and future expectations.

MSFT and APPL both have similar current earnings. Future expectations may be an entirely different matter.

If twitter is being touted as a $10B corp, then someone must have some expectations of increased future value.
Overall I agree with your points - in general people should stay focused on building something useful that people want.

I think the macro trends become increasingly important depending on the stage of your company. E.g. Paypal raised $200 million at the peak of the bubble, and this money saved them from burning out in the downturn when raising capital became very hard. If you are 2 people bootstrapping this does not impact you as much. If you are a later stage company that is not yet profitable, and you need to raise money, macro trends are incredibly important.
This highlights one of the weaknesses of the list -- the apparent lack of an editor. Whereas shou4577's comments explains the book's strengths and target audience, the original submission's description was so concise as to be near useless ("Coherent overview of all of pure mathematics.") This isn't intended as a slam of the original suggester, but to point out that the blog listing is only a starting point and in some regards less useful than the topic book lists some Amazon reviewers compile.
How CoinWhale built a 1000% ROI business with AppSumo
it probably helps to work in an area with "applied" in the name. ;-)
Great point. This was a total pain to deal with. I would argue that hiring folks as contractors first would help test the waters to see if they are employee potential? (and thus worth this headache?)
This is the new service I mentioned the other day. No bites from the big guy I sent it to, so I'll just start by showing it here, get some feedback, and go from there.

The first 25 folks can use the invite code: HNFTW for a 7 day subscription.

The blog explains why I built it (http://bit.ly/ginK1e), so I won't repeat it here.

I look forward to any feedback you guys can offer -- it's definitely an MVP at this point, but I think the idea is sound. I hope you'll agree!
Which Cities Are The Most Generous? (Using Craigslist as Benchmark)
Requisite: http://xkcd.com/810/
We used to use Scout. They're a great group of guys, but ultimately, we ended up just falling back to a Munin install. The biggest challenge for monitoring software seems to be the wide variety of environments you'll encounter on various servers. Scout does a nice job of focusing on Rails apps, but their scripts required just enough of my time tweaking that I ended up deciding that it wasn't worth the effort for the added insight we gained. Keep that in mind when developing your service. Make your documentation top notch, and provide an accessible support conduit for when users encounter issues.

Just to be clear, our decision to not use Scout wasn't because their service was bad. To the contrary, the service itself was very good. It just required a little bit too much setup and required a high degree of inference from the sysadmin. You more or less had to read the code in some of the plugins in order to make things work. That added up to more effort than I felt we were getting in benefit when compared to something like a local Munin install.
the only thing necessary to enable gzip is to enable it in the front facing web server

Somewhat more is necessary in this case.
No downvoting here, I have known both co-founders of LetsLunch for quite sometime. Its a very capable team, with a solid track record, and tons of industry support behind them. Anyone joining such a team should consider themselves lucky to be part of the ride.
Getting Started with MeeGo
Does anyone know of any nice online teacher resources?
I am thinking something along the lines of generating worksheets and stuff like that. Wondering if anyone in YC or elsewhere are working on that problem.