skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to be another way of describing disruption (and I like it):

Companies serve their customers. They improve their product along a dimension that their customers want. Equivalent to your "weakness" - as soon as their customers care about this, they work hard to fix it.

If you create an alternative product for those very same customers (and for the very same use) that's not as good in that dimension, they won't buy it. If it's better on that dimension (a sustaining innovation), the incumbents will work hard to beat it - and historically, they usually will, as they have all kinds of advantages over you.

But if you build for different customers, who currently have nothing, they will be delighted, and the incumbent won't care because you don't threaten their customers. Now, usually such a product will have other benefits that the competitor's product lacks - at the very least, a cheaper price, but maybe also convenience, flexibility, customizability, simplicity etc. This benefit is usually a result of a tradeoff against the above dimension - a "drawback".

Over time, you naturally will improve your product, and (perhaps) it will approach being good enough to threaten that competitor. But even as they see you approach, they really can't fight you, because it would require they let down their customers. And, what's even worse, at this new way of doing things, you are now the incumbent, with all the experience with engineering, customer acquisition and business model etc, and they are the entrant.

But I think you add a new idea to disruption, that the "drawback" is incompatible with the value proposition, as opposed to being orthogonal. Different business models are often like that; also many engineering tradeoffs. It's exacerbated by when you improve at something, you often specialize in it; and specialization in one thing implies de-specialization in something else.

Note that such incompatibilities are not restricted to engineering issues: if Apple somehow became dependent on tethering, or on iPad users requiring an Apple desktop, as part of their business model, it would then become a "drawback", that you could attack on.
"The leaders of the world’s great religions -- Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses -- all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude."

Regarding Jesus, the two times of solitude that immediately come to my mind, based on the Gospel accounts, are his time spent in the desert and in the garden of Gethsemane.

In neither case did he have what I would call a "crucial revelation." (And I'm sure some theologians would argue that it's not technically possible for Jesus to have had a revelation.)

I wonder what the author had in mind.
In the U.S. at least, graduates do still seem to do pretty well at getting some kind of job, whether good / relevant to the degree or otherwise. Unemployment is only 4-5% for people with a 4-year college degree, considerably less than for other categories: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Of course, just those numbers don't say what the cause and effect are. It's possible the graduates getting jobs could also have gotten jobs without a degree. But I suspect having a degree still boosts employment odds.
KDE 4.5+ has really come into its own, I highly suggest trying it out - I've been using it as my desktop for over a year now, and I've never looked back. One not very strong point is the KDE 4 application launcher, I'd suggest using a dock like cairo or you can configure the old gnome like launcher behavior to be default. I'm not sure how kubuntu looks, but fedora 14 and opensuse 11.4 both provide great kde experiences.
Well, I've done that, too, but I still had to have a job. Where did the $15,000 come from? That is what I meant.
Is it really easy to be recognized as a decent developer without charging at least $50-$75/hr?
I'm placing my money on company X, you know, that company that's barely a twinkle in anybody's eye but will grow up to dominate the web 3.0 landscape.

In 5 years, I'll bet you'll see Facebook and Google teaming up against X, how crazy a prediction is that?
My site manages to get 1-3 search landings a day despite the bulk of it being less than 6 months old, and with me not knowing anything about SEO until very recently. Difficult, but possible. Sometimes it feels a bit like voodoo though. Most of the things I rank for are things I wasn't even aiming at.

The niche site I started as an experiment a few months back is actually doing better than the older site.
Coming from Fox News certainly doesn't make it much more credible. But I don't think it makes it less credible, either. You should figure out whether it's credible based on other evidence. If you think that coming from Fox News "kills all credibility" of something then you are going to disbelieve many true things.
check it out: http://www.nodrr.com

some of the very basic stuff is there now
Unless your Google account just does not happen to include your 11gig photo library, 10gig music library, etc. Which it likely doesn't.

This is about the fourth post on HN I've seen whining (yes, I think it's whining) about this issue. Apple is going all-cloud soon enough, if the rumors are true. In the meantime, if I'm going to sync 20-25gig of stuff to a new device, I really don't mind plugging it in.

I also don't mind plugging it in occasionally for an OS upgrade. It's just not a big deal, at all. The device is wire-dependent on a daily basis, anyway, folks: it needs a fresh new supply of electrons to keep running. Get over it.
Agreed. And it's valuable to play around and discover what voodoo works to get that up to 3-5 search landings/day and continue to build from there ...
There was a flash game a while back that someone drew up a concept for that, to me, looked really compelling. It included buying coffee machines, source control, hiring developers, etc.

Anyone know if that game was ever actually made?
I have been using bzr for 2+ years now. For personal projects I am quite happy with bzr+launchpad. At work, we have been using bzr on Linux.

The move from 1.x to 2.x brought in significant performance and memory improvements.
Would you be interested in working with me on a couple of Twitter related projects? Currently outsourcing on ODesk, but can definitely consider using you. Let me know!
Nice observation, I never tied Reis & Trout's explanation to disruption quite like that. They were describing a "Flanking Attack" which really fits with what you're describing quite well. And yes, the incompatibility is the key.

Going back to The Innovator's Dilemma, this explains why companies become trapped by their customers: Their existing customers hate anything that addresses the drawback because it is incompatible with the value proposition that appeals to them.

Although Microsoft won the battle by burying Netscape, they seem to have lost the Internet war, in large part because the Internet is incompatible with the value proposition of operating systems and desktop office productivity software. For example, the Internet does away with installing software binaries. Which is a drawback of desktop software and operating systems. But that is incompatible with the value proposition that an IT department gets to control what runs on an office computer.
Same here, and if you try that first and then go into a tutorial, it seems to have the same result.
Disclaimer: I'm the original author of eventserver and an employee of Shine Technologies. These are my thoughts, I'm not speaking on their behalf, yadda yadda yadda.

I wrote this over the course of a couple of hours yesterday morning based on thoughts I'd been having for a few weeks about HTML(5) server-sent events and the possibilities that come with it.

eventserver effectively listens on two ports: a "publisher" port and a "subscriber" port. The subscriber port implements the interesting bits of the server-sent events working draft. The "publisher" port simply accepts (JSON) messages over HTTP. These messages are then forwarded to all connected subscribers using the server-sent event protocol.

The server itself is written in NodeJS, messages are not stored, and things like Last-Event-ID are not (yet?) implemented. Just a toy for now, but perhaps an interesting one all the same!
Facebook's server-side code wouldn't work on Windows, either. IE support is coming according to the page, but it makes sense to develop initially for the more standards-compliant browsers.
You need to reframe this. You aren't an unemployed developer willing to work for minimum wage--you're a former self-employed developer looking for his next gig. As such, you're going to charge your usual rate of $75/hr, because you know that the fastest heuristic for "Is this guy worth it?" is "What do other people think he's worth?" and the fastest heuristic for that is "What is he comfortable charging?"

Of course, you're not interested in internships, or non-programming work. If you have to widen the net, you're giving people a great reason to reject you.

Start your negotiation from a position of strength, and you'll get somewhere. You're starting with surrender--don't be surprised if you lose.

As other people have said: post your Github. Post a link to anything you can about your startup. Start acting like a valuable programmer, so people will treat you like one.

(If it's any comfort, I've been in your situation in another industry. When I started doing what I've written above, rather than what you've written, my life improved dramatically.)
Down voting me because you don't agree with me is stupid.
SEO should not be "the strategy", it should be one of many customer acquisition tools in the startup toolkit.

I also believe that the notion that you can't have a great user interface and optimize for SEO at the same time is wrong. Well optimized websites have a lot of additional content below the fold on their home pages. Most users don't see it, but the search engines do.

Re: Jonknee - SEO is tough in general to do it effectively and build backlinks you need to be createive.

RE: artisdb: He does provide a link in the comments section for what you're looking for. I'd also take a look at McClure's Slideshare for other ideas - http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir... (acquisition part of diagram is on slide 3).

Re: Sawyer - that's a very interesting point. I'm surprised modern search engines haven't found a way around ajax and other modern techniques. i would assume they're close since they rolled out ajax tools for adsense recently.
My favorite kind of programming is when I solve an esoteric little problem that no one else will ever care about but makes exactly one person's life better. Mine!

Its not that I'm being selfish or anything, its about rejoicing in the fact that I had the skill to do it and better my own lot, instead of sitting there helpless, wishing there was someone who could do it for me.
Precisely.

It's not like 30-inch monitors and ergonomic keyboards are going to magically become portable tomorrow. Desktop/laptop computers are sticking around for a while.
I would agree with the author, but I am still wondering why other platforms do not win. I mean, for example, SourceForge or code.google.com. Except for the first point, most hosting sites provide exactly same functionalities.
Then, I guess, the point is 'easiness' or fancy/cool user interface.
> BYTE (badly missed)

Coming back apparently: http://technologizer.com/2010/12/22/good-grief-byte-is-comin...
Apparently Facebook is working on a real-time analytics platform.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/big-tech/cloud_ho...
I found the same to be true with a 30" monitor. It's too big to not move your head - I wound up using just the middle and having a sore neck much of the time. So I sold it and bought a 24" which is perfect.
I love last.fm

I don't even use the scrobbler or anything like that, I've just found last.fm to be the best "make me a radio station that sounds like an artist" service.
Exactly. And if you know that you just want the SVN/HG commit-everything, just add a -a. Pretty intuitive.

Once you get used to having the ability to create arbitrary commits from a huge changeset, you'll find it aggravating when everyone else commits "3 bug fixes to core, swapping out a style sheet, and cleanup in database code" :)
yawn

That's the best you can do? How I initially transfer over my big photo/music libraries when I buy a new toy is of vanishingly little significance to me. (BTW, Apple has a few well-known applications for this, like iTunes and iPhoto and Aperture. Perhaps you have heard of them?)

Talk to me about a superior user experience. Talk to me about a superior applications base. Talk to me about a more responsive, reliable device with better battery life. Then I'll be interested.
I saw this the first time it was submitted - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1318781 - but I don't think the significance of slide 39 hit me then. It shows a simple home page in an early beta, which Dropbox then figured still wasn't simple enough.
Analyzing Ustream's Redesign
5 of the last 10 superbowl coaches were black.

2011 - Mike Tomlin, Steelers
2010 - Jim Caldwell, Colts
2009 - Mike Tomlin, Steelers (won)
2007 - Tony Dungy, Colts (won) & Lovie Smith, Bears

Before 2007 no black head coach ever coached in the super bowl.
Assange's rage against the state
A lot of the skills you've picked will be marketable. Take a look at your resume, and ask yourself how well it communicates what you learned about: databases, web servers, system maintenance, typography, design, AB testing, payment systems, Apps (facebook, iphone, android), well known software/libraries, git, unit testing, agile, business development, networking, marketing, blogging, and sales.

You're in the business of selling yourself. Try writing about the 'benefits' you provide your employer, not your 'features'. For example: 6 years of startup experience is a feature. Ability to bring products to design-completion/code-completion/market is a benefit. Knowledge of several key technologies is a benefit because you don't need training nor time to get up to speed. Your startup experience means your used to working without much direction, you're used to working hard, you are flexible/resourceful, you understand the role and importance of sales, marketing, and customer service in an organization, and you are connected to the startup network -- a connection your employer could benefit from when hiring.

You should try to present the benefits you feel will maximally impress your future employee.
To my memory, all of Fox News' bogus stuff is directly related to one thing: partisanship. I can't think of any lie or mistake they've published that would make me doubt the legitimacy of this article.
Enforcing things at the type level certainly has its place, but I have to think that wading through that TicTacToe API would probably introduce a lot more cognitive load than a nice simple dynamically typed one that raised errors when you did the wrong thing. You can still have correctness guarantees if you validate actions at runtime.
WRT to alien life, FOX has an established reputation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_autopsy#Alien_Autopsy:_Fa...

I can still remember my father sitting me down and explaining to me how this was going to change _everything_ about our understanding of the universe.

While my father should have exercised more incredulity, it was pretty irresponsible of FOX to pump the damn program for as much attention as possible.
Good to know, thanks. It appears that all they've done here is change the surface UI to make it lighter-weight by not doing things just because they've always been done. Makes sense to me.
Great offer! Out of curiosity, are you guys starting your own consultancy or app to improve landing page optimization?
Works in Firefox 4. The RC arrives this week. It's finally done.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta
I'm not in SF but from what I can see, the programming job market is only good these days for "rockstars" willing to work for entry-level salaries. There aren't very many good, high-paying programming jobs these days. Everything is entry level and low pay. This is why I think there are so many startups -- the qualified people are exiting the job market en masse.
What is your startup? What does it do?
I have only recently become a major convert into the DCVS world coming from Subversion and CVS before it. When I first started going I found that git was rather hard to for me to wrap my brain around, especially since it so radically changed the way certain commands worked. So I looked at Mercurial and felt much more at home as it felt like Subversion.

Since then I've wrapped my brain around Git and absolutely love it. I now have accounts on both Bitbucket and Github and both work equally well for what I want. The only feature that I feel is missing from Github is the ability to create unlimited private repositories for free, if not at least, on their lowest paid tier.

I tend to create random projects haphazardly, and while I like to have it versioned and "backed up" somewhere where I can invite friends to collaborate with me, I don't want some of these projects out in the open. Some of them are research projects for new products I am developing, others are projects I am working on with friends that could potentially be monetized.

Don't get me wrong, I understand where Github is coming from, and being familiar with both Git and Hg is not going to hurt, it is annoying on a context switching level to have to remember how to do something in hg and then in git when switching between projects.

At the point where I am in my career I don't yet make enough money (after paying student loans, car insurance, etc...) to spend money on monthly billing paid services.
Sticky feet send insect-bot climbing up the walls
Already discussed in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287980 as mentioned in the geek.com article at the end.
I know several, and most of them are pretty good...
(disclosure: I founded BuySellAds.com)

I think it's a great idea, actually. At BSA we've been talking about newsletter ads for a while, but haven't been able to commit to executing on it properly. We went as far as acquiring the NewsletterAds.com domain, but have since stopped there. One of the biggest hurdles with selling ads in newsletters is getting enough valuable inventory. Even with our existing publishers (and with 150-200 new sites submitted every day) we would struggle to have enough meaningful inventory to put together to sell. That being said, I had many people tell me the same thing before I started BSA - that I would never be able to get enough inventory together to make it work.

The other piece of advice I can give you is that operating at 25% commissions (like BSA does) is definitely a bootstrapping path. If you can sell ads in newsletters that they aren't already selling, then it's something I would do at a 35-40% level. Maybe that sounds crazy, but if you're able to make sales that are normally not made you can charge whatever you want.

So, I'd say go for it, hustle, and make it happen if you are passionate about it.
There was a good, balanced piece on On The Media a few months back titled "Is Warrantless GPS Legal?" that you can listen/read here http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2010/10/08/segments/15824...

In short, existing laws are ambiguous and the courts are divided on how to apply them. A solid test case like this one could very well end up in the Supreme Court.
Typical HN downvotes. Far too busy circle jerking over your failed statups that rarely lead to anything other than wasted youth.
> It's useful if you have stuff on the desktop (like I do). If the desktop is nothing but wallpaper space, then minimizing windows make little sense - just get your windows on the front (which is hard to do without a dock)

At times (especially at work) I will have many different windows open at the same time. Exposé at that time will become very cluttered and it will be very hard to find the window I want, minimising removes that because now the windows I do want are bigger than the small minimised ones.

From looking at more screenshots from Gnome 3 it looks like their "activities" overview is a lot like Exposé.
I have seen people with eye problems use projectors. One person was legally blind (could not drive at all), but is damn fine programmer. I wonder if inability to see too much at once forces the code to be terse, and easier to understand.
I know it's not exactly what you're looking at, but it brought The Deck[1] to mind. Carefully curated high-quality advertising on select sites.

[1] http://decknetwork.net/
Twitter Reacts to the #Dickbar Uproar
this isn't just normal bathub-curve component failure

What part of "unless you can back it up with data" didn't you understand?

How are you protecting against your SSD's firmware?

Just like against any other hardware fault: By having backups and redundancy. Bugs happen. You're making it sound as if this was somehow specific to OCZ - which remains bullshit until you provide data beyond anecdotical evidence.

And FWIW I'm neither affiliated with OCZ, nor emotionally tied to the brand. We also run X-25s in production, my Mac Mini has an X-25 and my Macbook has an OCZ.
As I have mentioned elsewhere on HN, one of the purposes behind our new startup is to help entrepreneurs like you find great co-founders: we ensure that you only get connected with the most qualified candidates for your purposes, immediately. This means that you don't have to spend weeks filtering through hundreds of resumes from people who never even read your job description. And, you don't waste time interviewing totally useless candidates who shamelessly over-marketed themselves.

We're not quite ready yet, but if you sign up you can give it a shot! venturocket.com
Old KDE fan where, moved from KDE to Gnome, then back and using Gnome for about 4 or 5 years now.

Last week I tried KDE 4.5.1 that comes with Ubuntu (I do so every now and then to see if I'll move back). After 30 minutes of trying to get Network Manager to start a VPN connection, and Googling for answers and reading the docs, I gave up and started the VPN connection from the command-line.

Now, I'm confused, how hard can it be to start a VPN connection? I clicked, I right-clicked, I reapplied the settings. Or it so simple that this long-time user can't figure it out?
Article is surprisingly lacking in logical rigor:

Observe X (Trip Advisor above Oyster)

Observe Y (Trip Advisor has a cluttered ad-strewn page)

Conclude that X is a result of Y.

One counter-example to refute article: Wikipedia
A few notes:

- You don't get a programming job by applying at In 'n Out.

- Reframe your pitch. You need to signal to employers that you're worth hiring; "Hire me, I'm desperate and barely competent" doesn't really push that message.

- What's "real" job experience? Did you write code for 6 years, or not?

- I'm out of touch with what junior engineers get paid (hopefully it's less than $100k), but I'm guessing your friends have accumulated track records over the past few years and are in mid- to senior-level positions. I don't think you're likely to get one of those given your history (to say nothing of your self-presentation). If that's been your target, maybe aim a little lower, at junior-level jobs? Still difficult since there are so many junior engineers.

- What everyone else said.

When presenting yourself as someone of value, remember that it doesn't matter if you believe it. Just say it with authority. =)

Good luck!
I have no idea why you were down-voted. Your explanation is cogent and similar to what art historians mean by "postmodern art".