skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But he has learned that instead of arguing his case with Page, a better strategy is “giving him shiny objects to play with.”

At the beginning of one Google Voice product review, for instance, he offered Page and Brin the opportunity to pick their own phone numbers for the new service. For the next hour, the two brainstormed sequences that embodied mathematical puns while the product sailed through the review.

This was pretty much my experience with getting to choose my own GV number, albeit from a long list of "pre-screened" numbers. Had to stop myself from going through all of them (within an area code) in trying to find a number that was neat / punny / significant.
That depends on your definition of "can't." Technology-wise, yes, if the phone supports it. Terms of service-wise, no, but that's true of the smartphone plans also, they've just never enforced it before.
I definitely see that... turning down a big offer wouldn't even be smart in some cases. And even for those who want to "change the world" there may be a point where the money just makes too much sense to walk away from...because you may KNOW you could make a difference in another way with $20million.

I also think a lot depends on how you're wired. I'm relentless & tireless when I believe in what I'm doing and good things tend to happen when I'm in that space. But I can't see myself getting there from a starting point built only on $$$.
But they don't match the chrome wheels on your cadilac esplanade!

Drug dealers are fashion victims too
When I first started with Javascript I used to think it was an awful excuse for a programming language, with its weird prototypal inheritance and functions pretending to be classes. The more I get to know it though, the more impressed I am by how all these features can be used and built upon to create an easy and flexible language. It has been taken in so many directions and I think Backbone is a prime example of how it can be built upon well. I love coding using the Backbone framework but I like that it's not the only option for doing things in an object oriented way.
Dude! I so want this scanner as it will clearly be the best.
Show HN: namespace.js - a 250 byte open source project.
Doing enough to 'get by' is not failure. Sometimes you do what is necessary to make ends meet to feed you and your family, and helping others in significant ways has to wait.

A large hole would be left in most modern economies without the 'lifestyle' business and 'solo-preneur'. If you believe in this so strongly, is BankSimple going to reject anyone who is 'wasting their life' by your account?
A healthy economy needs a balance of small and large businesses. Today's technology is making it easier to make incremental improvements to existing ideas, which are usually small businesses. This is a safer strategy and people could flock to it like they flock to safe corporate jobs today.

It becomes a problem when there is an imbalance. Many domains/markets are crowded. Today we have too many CMSs, fart apps, MVC frameworks etc.. At one point we had an abundance of word processors.

It wouldn't be healthy if every programmer tried to make his own word processor, progress in the domain would flat-line. It's only after the dust settled and people had time to think about the concept that we have some genuine innovation, like the no-distraction trend.

Too many small businesses in the same niche is just as bad as a monopoly if your goal is technological progress. The money is distributed differently of course, so if your goal is to create a healthy middle class, small business overcrowding is better than big business monopolies.

It's hard to judge what the right balance is. People working on ideas that don't scale don't crowd the space for ideas that do. Like all matters of complex systems, it's complicated. We won't get to the bottom of it with essays alone.
If the operator gets its way, the .xxx TLD will reportedly have three sunrise periods[1]:

The first period would allow owners of porn-related trademarks to claim their .xxx domain names and use them as normal, ... the second would enable non-porn companies that don’t want their brands associated with adult material to basically “turn off” their trademarks in .xxx domains, paying a one-time fee. ... The third proposed sunrise would allow owners of non-trademarked porn domains in other TLDs, such as .com, to get their equivalent .xxx using an automated Whois check.

A comment from the author on this item indicates that they hope to begin sunrises in June, landrush in September. I have a feeling they will be expensive.

[1]: http://domainnamewire.com/2010/12/07/xxx-will-have-three-sun...
It's a utilitarian argument and it's not very sound.
Except you could do better-than-time-machine, cheap, continuous replication.

You could even TimeMachine-without-additional-drives... I mean, why should my snapshot system and my backup system be one? How about letting me use TimeMachine locally, and if I plug up an additional drive, TimeMachine asks me if I want to backup to it as well?

Not a game-changer exactly, but a nice-ish upgrade potentially.

The biggest upgrade would honestly just be quicker/continuous replication that doesn't drag the rest of your system down.
Strange to read analysis of Apple that's actually insightful and not a fawning apologia or a wild eyed attack.

On the topic of free apps allowing in-app purchases, I noticed recently that I felt trapped by in-app purchases in games I downloaded for my kid. The apps control the screen and seem, at least on apps aimed at kids, to make it intentionally easy to misclick and purchase something, having tiny, well hidden controls to cancel back out or continue without purchasing or upgrading. Since the only hardware button takes me right back to home I feel trapped like I'm browsing the seedier parts of the web with a pre-popup blocker IE. Not really an "Apple" experience.
It was only flawed in that I compared C# with SIMD with plain C. But the point was to give a flavor of what our SIMD extensions could do.

It would be great to redo the tests, now that we use LLVM as our optimizing compiler, and now that we have an option to disable array bounds checking altogether for speed junkies.

Other than the GC intervening and perhaps some extra fine tuning requires for inlining, with LLVM/SIMD/UnsafeArrays we really should not be any different than C++/LLVM.
This actually inspired me to see how nice of a theme you could do with ThemeRoller alone:

http://gemdash.tumblr.com/post/3941893390/cupertino-a-jquery...

It's not great but I think it came out pretty good.
There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time on Twitter and breathlessly tell everyone that it's great. Apparently it's not useless to them (although I've never used it, and you probably didn't either), and I don't think there are many big downsides to Twitter. (I'm not so sure that the "no harm done" applies to Facebook, in particular wrt privacy.)
Oops, I meant to reply to this. It would especially appeal to me right now because my wife stays home with my 4-year-old daughter.
I agree with most of the other comments here regarding the over-generalization of the $20 million offer.

"Would you sell it for $20 million?" There are so many variables for consideration in answering this question that can result in anything from a symbiotic relationship with a bigger player to augmenting the market using the buyer party's core competencies to just forfeiting the rights to the other party (which is the only viewpoint factored into the author's answer- "find a new idea"). Don't need to necessarily find a new idea as much as be a master of the idea's fate.

Nonetheless, I heartily agree with the last section- mastery of a domain of knowledge. Advice needs to be slapped as a layer on top of hardcore expertise. I've made this mistake in the past of letting the allure of a tech lead me to an area where I didn't have the necessary expertise and idea dissipated quickly. Now I'm focused on an area that my partner and I have deep-seated expertise in and the advice is very easy to cut through to take only the nuggets that apply.
I like this post, even though I disagree with it, because it gets at the fundamental moral motivations and justifications behind starting a business. Alex is an altruist, and from that perspective it indeed makes sense to try and go big. If it's your duty to improve as many lives as you can, why not try and go big? What's interesting is hearing it from that perspective rather than a more selfish perspective.

From a more selfish and individualistic perspective, I think a small business makes sense if you consider your moral duties to only go as far as producing more value than you extract from the world. From this perspective, it might be praiseworthy to try and provide as much value to as many people as possible, but it's not obligatory to be much more than a net positive contributor. And I think a lot of people go about as far as living up to their moral obligations and then satisfy their own desires after that.
What do you think is it a good investment to buy any, if they are cheap?
For many people (sometimes myself included) the choice for keeping yourself occupied on the plane is to buy some magazines, books or games before getting on the flight. This not only costs more than $6, it's often not as satisfying as watching TV to boot. In the realm of "last ditch get something to keep yourself occupied for 4 hours", $6 for TV is a great deal.
ZFS Self Healing (Community Group zfs.selfheal) - XWiki
This is certainly going to be the most blocked TLD ever.
I wish there was more uniformity with the way JavaScript libraries manage the global namespace. So, I stripped down the library I use to the bare essentials, and made it a stand-alone open source (public domain) project.

I'm hoping that by removing the idiosyncrasies of my earlier version, I can actually get others to adopt this mechanism.

Is it crazy to have such a tiny open source project?

(BTW: the gzipped/minified version of the library is less than 250 bytes - hence the title).
Right, that's how I'm pointing out that Sprint's approach is different. They just charge all smartphone users an extra $10/month and don't care whether you tether or not. Andriod phones come with the mobile hotspot app preinstalled.

Sprint segments their users as non-smartphone vs smartphone (+$10/mo)

Other carriers segment their users as non-tethering vs tethering (+$50/mo)
Check out your local startup community on events going around and you can also ask various tech influencers in your area for introductions to possible cofounders
Irony so thick you can taste the rust.

No, seriously, I believe most reputable papers had foreign bureaus until something like the 70s or the 80s (at least that's the impression I've gotten).

Maybe if CNN focused on making important news relevant to the mass public, it would do better.
The IE team is resource constrained because it's not in Microsoft's interests to build a good browser. If it was in their business interests, like XBox, then they could throw tens of billions of dollars at it. But it's not, so no spellchecker and no WebGL and no IE9 for XP.
It does. It was a bug on language detection.
Just fixed it ;)
Update.
Mac App Store brings in huge revenues for Apple.
Might want to drop the '6' out the title: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

and it's 'Syndromes' ;)
Ok, it's time to pour some cold water here: there's no such thing as the "true spirit of the entrepreneur". This phrase is reminiscent of the "you cannot grasp the true form of [X]" meme. Cool it, Giygas.

An entrepreneur needs confidence, freedom, and opportunity. There needs to be a problem for him or her to solve, he or she must believe that it can be solved, and he or she needs the resources and freedom to do it. Then, he or she needs to be right on the solubility of the problem given available resources, and able to capture the value created (if he or she cares about being wealthy). That's all. It's not wizardry. It is something that few people have the freedom to do.

I think 20-year-olds' garage startups are very cool but overrated. People write about it because it's rare. The best time to start a business, for most people, I would put around age 35-50, when one is still young but has the experience to judge whether it will work, enough years to one's name that one can hire experienced people (no one wants a younger boss) and the connections to pull it off. (I'm 27, by the way; not an older person trying to justify himself.) Y Combinator gives the people in their 20s a bump by providing connections they'd otherwise never have, and that's an awesome service, but that's atypical for people of that age, and the prestige and contacts of YC, if not singular, are something most of its brethren don't have.

Also, I think it's very naive to believe anyone wouldn't "sell out" for $20 million personally. At $20 million, that lie school tells smart people about the world being their oyster becomes true. Ideas come and go, but being rich means you actually own your life instead of renting it from a series of employers (or, if you're lucky enough to be in a startup, VCs). The second-best thing about being rich is having the freedom not to work, but that (from what I've heard) is like a toy that gets boring after a few years. The actual best thing about being rich is having the freedom to work. (The shuffling around and taking orders from others, in an artificially stressful office environment, that most people do? Not really work. Real work improves the world and matters.) I can think of very few legal and ethical things (and some ethically acceptable but illegal ones) I would not do for $20 million; I'd have the confidence of knowing that I can do real work for the rest of my life. Seriously, I'd love to kill all of life's stupid anxieties and dedicate (most of) my existence to useful work.
I guess I can understand Alex's perspective when I consider he's one the lucky few to be on the 0.0001% side of the equation and raised $2.9 million first round funding. (Must be nice.)
There are very few things that people truly need: food, water, air, arguably shelter. Unless you are a farmer or building houses, you aren't making something that people need. This whole discussion seems a bit silly to me for this reason. Anybody who is building a tech company is building something that people want, not something that they need. Do you really need Amazon or eBay? No, of course not.
Thant's something to think of. The extension page now has the list of languages supported. Maybe I'll add some more soon. ;) Share and enjoy.
Paul Allen is worth a fraction of what Bill Gates is worth.

And Bill has a not-exactly cheap mansion and assorted toys to play with. He just also had gobs of money left over.
thanks! hetzner was already in my list of options, and I think I'll go with them :)
That true but I think what's more interesting is the number of incidents (timeouts, exceptions, and significant slowdowns).
He might also be financially independent (at least on paper) thanks to Twitter stock. That could completely excise one's interest in lifestyle businesses.
rightmost 0's

... which Pi doesn't have, since it has no rightmost bits at all...

the last bit of Pi [if it has one] is a 1

This is true; it's also true that the last bit of Pi [if it has one] is a forty-two. A falsehood implies everything.
One of the big reasons for Time Machine is to make it harder for Mac owners to lose data, either through hard drives failing, or user error. Backing up to the same drive only protects against user error. Instead of displaying a checklist of things you're protected against, Time Machine is an all-or-nothing deal, which makes the interface a lot simpler.

It also enables retail locations extra options to make users happier quicker: if a customer comes in pissed with a logic board problem that's the "third strike" for that computer, the support staff can simply ask if the customer has Time Machine backups, and send the customer away with a new-in-box computer without having to worry about moving drives around and migrating files in-store.

Apple's vertical enough that keeping Time Machine simple saves them employee hours around the world every day.
My Google Voice number ends in "HAXX" if you type it on the phone keypad. I couldn't resist either :(.
This whole TLD thing is stupid. Why do I have to choose amongst the .com/.net/.org buckets? (Or even worse, register all of them to pre-empt squatters.)
See my earlier comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342006

It's actually pretty easy to make better jQuery themes.
It's human nature more than marketing (or rather:marketing follows human nature in this). We're hardwired to be social and care deeply about what people in our group do and what happens to them, especially the leaders.

Unfortunately, we're also hardwired to think that our group consists of those whose faces we see most frequently and the leaders are those we see others pay attention to.

The result: millions of people unconsciously believe that Paris Hilton, Snooki and Charlie Sheen are socially closer to them than most of their family, and thus deserve most of their attention and trust...

And of course that's what makes celebrity news so popular and endorsement marketing so effective.
Hmmmmm my local seamstress is one place i haven't asked for a quote. Go figure.
Kickstarter looks interesting too. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks! I wasn't aware of Amy Hoy before this but now I've got a new role model to aspire to :)
1) Keep working on your depression: therapy, consider meds (but only w/therapy), exercise (even if just walking a mile a day), hydrate, eat healthy, etc. Talk with people. Force yourself to get out of the house. This stuff matters.

2) On focus: start with a one hour block a day when you can do no facebook/hackernews/etc, and instead, you have one thing you have to get done. You will feel good about getting this one thing done. Make sure you get at least one non-trivial thing done each day. Work your way up to two hours a day, and then when you can, three etc. (Most non-depressed people are probably only productive 3-4 hours a day anyway:)

Good luck!
Whether or not any of the companies you mentioned (or other vc companies) have made the world better is irrelevant to the question of "Why did Alex react as he did to Justin and Amy's articles?"

Alex provides enough information about his beliefs and about why he thinks those articles conflict with them that I, at least, trust he knows why he reacted the way he did.

What is the point of questioning his level of self-awareness anyway? How does it further the conversation? Really, I don't understand the point of maxklein's comment.

First, he takes issue with the phrase "vocal minority". OK, mISV people are either in the minority or the majority. Why does that matter either way?

Then he ignores the major premise of the article (which I find interesting), and instead psychologizes Alex from behind his computer. What's the point?

The main issue which Alex brings up is far more interesting. What should we value more, personal happiness or improving as many as lives as possible? What organizational structures are most suited to these different goals? Are these goals mutually exclusive, as Alex seems to assume they are?
People spend hours on Facebook interacting with their friends. I know people who have met significant others through Twitter.

And what about Groupon? Google? There are countless examples.
when did email addresses become like social security numbers? so someone finds out your email? block them, problem solved. yes they can find your FB account, but that shouldn't be public anyway...
Isn't the same thing possible with almost any language?

Of course this is the case for C/C++. And basically all other native languages for systems where you have some libc-like interface. And then there is Java which should also run just everywhere (I don't know about Xbox360, though). And basically all other dynamic languages which have some native implementation would also work just everywhere. Most dynamic languages also have some sort of GUI framework, sometimes a common one for several systems, sometimes a separate one for each system. And even if not, most languages still allow somehow to just use the system GUI by using the native C interface.

And if you thing about LLVM, you can make almost every language work anywhere also, even if you really only have JavaScript, JVM, .NET or whatever available. (Actually, I haven't really looked at LLVM->JVM/.NET translators yet but I am quite sure that this is doable and probably also already done.)
Actually, I feel more comfortable now with Twitter after this.

Why? They have come out and said it. We know their direction now and what they intend: don't make another client, but make a /unique way of using twitter itself/

If anything, this is exactly what we need as entrepreneurs. We now have a mandate from the source to take their platform and ecosystem to the next level. If everyone else wants to quake in their boots over this silliness, then I say go for it.
I disapprove of this cause it will make it easier for antisex campaigners to try to censor the internet.

You could hack the system by only using a .xxx domain for your personal emails when dealing with the state. Tax man: "we can't send you that legal notice because our software blocks that domain" me: "not my problem"
There is a difference between multi-master and circular replication. To me, Multi-master is that I can write to both masters at the same time, which implies there is a way to resolve conflicts. Databases like Cassandra (timestamps) and Riak (vector clocks) have this, MySQL does not. If you write to the same record on both masters bad shit happens and its very hard to sort out.
I work at Amazon - a lot of teams are like this. They're stuck managing a woefully broken product and spend all of their time propping up the beast, leaving no capacity left for meaningful fixes (in these cases, meaningful fixes are always gigantic engineering projects).

The team develops a reputation internally for being glorified firefighting, and have trouble recruiting. More senior engineers eventually flee (having, well, choice in the matter) leaving a team heavy with junior talent with no seasoned gurus leading the way.

The company is also growing at ludicrous speed, and hiring is difficult. When the product is in such a painful state, attrition from the team is high, and with slow hiring you are barely countering attrition (exacerbating the junior talent problem), and not even close to growing the team to be in a position to take care of the problem for good.

I suspect this is an industry-wide problem though, and is hardly unique to this place.
The world is not better because of Twitter or Facebook? They played a role in the recent revolutions and help people connect with family and friends. Why do you think these governments tried to shut down the internet?

They may not have been helpful to you but to others they are.
I can relate to a lot of what Jon is saying in the article, but quite honestly the impression I've gotten is that investors are only interested in the "quick flip" and don't want to hear the grandiose plans.

It seems like if I were to talk to a potential investor and tell them the ideas I have to change consumer behavior for the better and connect an industry in a way that hasn't been done before, they'd tell me to stop dreaming and to forecast their 10x.

If every company sells to Google when they get a chance, who becomes the next Google?
To make more money for ICANN, probably.
Obama may appoint Google’s Eric Schmidt as Commerce Secretary
1967: Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage'
Pet peeve: the first Gulf War began over 30 years ago. It did not involve the USA directly, though they were providing military aid to Iraq.