skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pdf, courtesy Brian Enigma: http://brevity.org/pic/chrome/Google_on_Google_Chrome.pdf

zip of pngs: http://brevity.org/pic/chrome/google-chrome-mccloud-comic.zi...

or, all in individual png files: http://brevity.org/pic/chrome/
Origins of "wine, women and song"
Getting your first Merb app up and running.
Why Apple keeps its iPhone 2.0 SDK under NDA
I stopped after 4 paragraphs and then went to the bottom of the article.

I guess good writing is in the eye of the beholder? There wasn't anything wrong with it, just I've read many articles with this same pattern and unless the details of the chase interest me, I'd just as soon cut to the end.

EDIT: And don't you mean "gripping" instead of "griping" The first, I believe is to grip something, whereas the second is to complain. I hate to be Mr. Spelling Bee Person, but it was bugging me.
I get the impression that Seth Godin is a really smart guy.

I've got a few of his books and I have to say that he makes some great points.

I also think, like most (or all as he said in one book) marketers he is a liar (I mean that in the sense of the book, not in the ad hominem sense of the term).

I don't believe for one second that he eats all of his own dog food. Whilst he's great at what he does (marketing), he's not great at doing what he tells others to do.

Let me take the example from the article regarding the B52s as a case in point.

One commenter has already mentioned that similar items are listed in Amazon.

Another point is that in doing the CD giveaway, you're not making a sale (unless you sell the whole package at a profit, which may be lower than your normal profit due to differences between new and used CDs).

Yet another point is that the CD giveaway is only effective if you know your target market. If you think you sound like the B52s, then great. If the buyer only likes Rock Lobster by the B52s or the Flintstones you've not really gained much (unless your 'giveaway' was profitable).

My final point is this. In the example of the CD giveaway, he missed something: What you really want is dedicated fans of the B52s to talk about your music. This means that you may need to start the conversation. You'll need to get bloggers, community forums etc. to talk about you as an Amazon seller, to talk about your band and to use the opportunity to raise awareness. Giving away the CDs to people who buy B52s music on Amazon alone is not going to achieve this.

As usual from Seth Godin, it's interesting advice in a kind of 'why didn't I think of that' way, but the applicability of it changes substantially once you give it some thought.

On a final note, has anyone else noticed a distinct increase in the amount of Seth Godin material linked to from here? I get the feeling that not all this is strictly relevant to HN...
The patent system is clearly broken. Case in point the drug industry where derivative, "me too" drugs get through a system, and they are clearly not innovative. Plus some patents are so broad that they completely stiffle innovation.

Patents, per se, are not necessarily bad, but the current system is so flawed, it likely hinders innovation rather than helps. I've been in situations where someone came up with something very interesting but there was the possibility of patent infringement due to some broad patent, so you had to either license the technology) or reimplement.
John Derbyshire on "The Rapture for Nerds"
I think you are missing the important part of this idea, probably because Seth wrote way too many words for something that could be compressed into a paragraph with an hour or two of careful editing.

Of course you can get the idea that people who like one thing also like another from Amazon -- but Seth's senario presumed you knew that already. The problem is, figuring out WHO those people are that like both bands, particularly, the people who like both bands but don't know about your band to like it yet.

The fact that there is an intersection of sets is easy to come across or guess, the actual MEMBERS of the sets are hard to find.

Seth's idea seems like a good one to me because it fits the general pattern, that many good computer revolution ideas allow small people to do what huge companies, institutions, or governments were already doing. Putting the "desktop" in desktop publishing, personal computers with spreadsheets replacing custom code on mainframes, ebay replacing the Sears catalog, etc.

Previously, the information of who these people were who bought CDs of band A and might like band B was available only to the big distributors. But since ebay, half.com, and amazon's used section allow us small guys to be distributors also, now we on a small scale can get access to that information too.

I don't have any product that I can use to make use of this idea now, but I'm going to keep it in my bag of tricks.
scored 0 on acer laptops' lcd.
Plus, a little less altruistically, it lets Google embed stuff like Google Gears and Google Toolbar directly into the browser, set Google.com as the browser homepage, and add a bunch of buttons linking to various Google services. Companies like Google pay a lot for defaults like that.

Plus, like Apple, they've got a mobile platform now so maybe they'll use some subset of Chrome in Android.
It's hard to overstate the impact of going from conventional bombs (killing groups of people) to atomic bombs (wiping out entire cities).

Actually, overstatment of the impact of going from conventional to "atomic" bombs is the norm.

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2008/05/philip-j-dolans-former...

‘The wide publicity given to the appalling destruction caused by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has possibly tended to give an exaggerated impression of their effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to counteract this impression, and to help to get the atomic bomb to scale, is to consider the numbers of atomic bombs that would have to be dropped on this country and on Germany to have caused the same total amount of damage as was actually caused by attacks with high explosive and incendiary bombs.

‘During the last war a total of 1,300,000 tons [i.e. 1.3 MEGATONS of bombs] were dropped on Germany by the Strategic Air Forces [of Britain and America]. If there were no increase in aiming accuracy, then to achieve the same amount of material damage (to houses, industrial and transportational targets, etc.) would have required the use of over 300 atomic bombs together with some 500,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs for targets too small to warrant the use of an atomic bomb
I would argue that there is indeed some kind of "color affinity", if we don't want to call it color intelligence. My father is a painter, and at some workshops people often asked him how to get some specific color or another. He told me that it was a problem he didn't understood, because he never encountered it even when he started painting. Colors just come easily to him, in a intuitive way, he never had to read theory about it.

To me, there is some parallelism with the guys who are gifted at math or logic : there are a lot of things that come intuitively to them where others have to struggle. The difference is that we are more prone to call them smart than people with other sort of abilities (musicians, painters, etc.).
It's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The more telling phenom is that the nytimes, an ancient media outlet, put a reporter on the big "Palin's wiki article" scoop rather than, say, Obama's wiki article.

I wonder if any of Obama's campaign volunteers edited his article... I wonder if the nytimes would try to turn that into a scandal. If they haven't turned his black theology/domestic terrorist associations/Chicago corruption scandals into scandals, I'm guessing...no.

...

Here is what "shaping the flow of information" looks like:

Sen. Barack Obama is warning TV stations and asking the Justice Department to intervene in an attempt to block the airing of an ad by a non-profit group that links him to an unrepentant domestic terrorist.

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=73448

...okay? BHO is trying to muscle a private group from publishing information about him that the nytimes (etc, etc) is all too happy to suppress.
Strikes me as a very catchy name for the typical user, who most likely doesn't have "browser chrome" in their vocabulary already. And I doubt it'll be that hard for the rest of us to keep straight.
I think Google is pretty threatened by Microsoft and Firefox, they are afraid platforms will one-up them in the future and they know it very well.
I don't like the idea of YAB, yet another browser. It's absolutely necessary that we have competition but it's way too easy to dilute the market.

It's like the problem of too much choice. We all face it. We go to the store and are greeted with 10 slightly different versions of the same product. Mint toothpaste, mint with extra-whitening, mint-flavored baking soda toothpaste. I don't want to buy one that tastes bad. This stuff is going in my mouth 3x a day, after all.
So I'm confused and cranky because I just want my normal toothpaste. My brain remembers the box had the certain logo and the certain white swish of box art. Found it! What size, big or small? Done, continue on to shopping decisions I actually want to think about like what's for dinner.

These days, the choice of a browser by 90% of people is the same kind of commodity thought given to toothpaste. They know what they're familiar with. They identify it via the shape and color of the icon, and maybe whether it says "internet" or not.

We've had to take 4 years to push Firefox to ~20% marketshare. Internet Explorer still has 75% total, with 30% of that being IE6. Safari, Opera, and all other browsers squeeze into the rough remaining 5% of the market. Adding YAB to the party won't serve anything except to dilute the last 5% some more.

What we need is not new browsers, OSS or not. We need marketing. Microsoft had easy marketing for IE. An icon on the desktop called "Internet".

We need Apple-style ads with Jason Long as Firefox and John Hodgeman as Internet Explored. Boil the message down to the barest essentials of the message and make it as clear to the "other 90%" as the Big Blue E meant "internet".
Page 9: this is exactly what Bram Cohen was asking for (http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/51080.html).
I'd guess this is probably only secondarily for PCs, and probably more likely targeted at mobile platforms.

Also, all current JS engines are doing conservative GC? Really?
Summary: Author doesn't know linux and apparently used Virtualmin's product to avoid learning it.
So wait. He doesn't know Linux and he wanted a GUI front-end for apache. So he downloaded a free gpl'd product from Virtualmin. But this is a blog about companies who make money. How do they make money?
You're probably right, but there are so many other potential catchy names that aren't the same as Mozilla's interface layer, so I don't know why they couldn't have just gone with one of those and made it easier on everyone.
There are some very interesting technical points in the presentation, it's a good thing to redesign some of the core elements of such an important application as a browser. It's sometimes easier to implement something new then rewrite legacy code.
I've been in situations where someone came up with something very interesting but there was the possibility of patent infringement due to some broad patent, so you had to either license the technology) or reimplement.

No. If one can improve upon an existing patent, one can potentially collect royalties on that improvement.

http://www.nolo.com/article.cfm/objectId/EFF260E8-76BA-438A-...

You can also get an improvement patent for an innovation that provides a new use for an existing invention.

A party leveraging the improvement would then simply pay royalties to both the holders of the old broad, and the new less-broad, patents.
http://lighthouseapp.com has an excellent email to task/bug feature. This is what I currently use.

http://www.acunote.com also supports the creation of tasks via email, which is good if you're doing agile type stuff, but it's accepted format is a bit clunky.
The javascript cheat sheet from visibone has received some good reviews in the past, however, it's not free:

http://www.visibone.com/javascript/card.html
They seem to be using their own javascript engine, so it might need separate testing because of that. Although if it becomes popular enough, most javascript libraries and frameworks will surely support it.
> what really matters is...

"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."
Perfect 0

http://www.ur-ban.com/galleryv2/d/15493-2/perfect_colour.png
'porn mode' if adopted by the major browser makers will be a major blow to adult advertising
Is Cuil Killing Websites?
I'm glad I didn't become a graphic designer.

I would suck.
Bruce Schneier: Why Cryptography is Harder than it Looks (1996)
The browser war was based on distribution, not marketing. Now this will be a war based on money, not distribution.

Will Google continue to pay and support Mozilla Foundation? Because once that's gone...
Did ever European teams get YC founding?
Did ever European teams get YC founding?
Would be encouraging to know anything about that... thanks!
I wonder if Chrome will hurt Mozilla's well reported search income.
This browser looks great - it has a ton of features (mostly security/stability related) that I've been wishing for.
It is amazing how entirely frustrating this is to developers.

We are using a new platform and this is the point that we need access to as much information as possible, and this is the period where Apple is being most restrictive.
I'm not sure I understand why this is "huge." If the working set of the program is stable over time (or slowly growing), it seems like this isn't a significant win: it's only a win when the working set shrinks, and this change allows the freed memory to be returned to the OS more promptly. Your examples of "long running processes" or "generating millions of unique ints/floats" wouldn't necessarily qualify: ISTM that the normal generational GC should handle both those cases fine. Am I missing something?
Strong Opinions Weakly Held
Yes, pretty much every cycle has groups from Europe.
I think you underestimate Google's ability to push their goods. They've shown time and time again that they can enter a cluttered market and make a name for themselves nonetheless.

You seem to assume that the average person isn't going to want this rather than Firefox. That's patently false. I dislike Gecko: in my experience WebKit works better and faster. I dislike Mozilla: they seem to me to be manned with incompetent workers who are each brilliant at one small thing, poor with everything else.

Above all, I dislike Firefox. I think it's extremely ugly to look at. I've had more crashes with that in Windows than I've had with Safari, and Safari on Windows isn't nearly as stable as it is on OS X. Its developers focus too much on hype and not enough on reliability and ease of use. They're arrogant about it, too.

So if Google makes a web browser similar to how they made their chat client, they'll find a market. All they need is something simple, uncluttered, fast, and efficient - and that's what they're offering up here. They don't list one feature here that I don't think is essential, and they don't miss more than one or two features that I wish they had. I think that, in terms of browser design, we've just seen Google announce that there's finally a competitor to Apple's browser. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who dislike Firefox but use it for plugins. If a browser appears that's better-designed AND open, Firefox is going to get hurt.

Also, how do you think Firefox got 20%? Google. Google Google Google. And I'm certain that they can push Chrome much faster if and when they want to.

The solution isn't advertising. The solution is figuring out just how to make a browser that users will actively seek out. Firefox was like that for a while, before other browsers got tabs. Beyond that, though, it's never had anything that new users really care much about, with the slim exception of the tech market. Most Firefox users can't tell the difference between it and IE without a hacker friend pointing it out. And I think Google is aware of that.
I love the comic book format of this - great idea!
I'd bet on it.
what the hell...? 38 pages of #@%$ing comics??
This is the Best Article I have read on the subject.

I've bootrapped (Consulting) a start-up for 9 years...
We were early...otherwise it would not have worked.

Now we are shifting gears and productizing.
Our new product is less than 12 months old and is already 20% of revenue.

We were a young management team (25) so consulting allowed us to cut our teeth and learn all the topics mentioned...poor advisors, account every expense, learn what net income really means, and how to manage cash flows...

There is nothing magical to starting a business it's just really hard. As one of our Angel's says "Nothing to it, just alot of hard work!"

I have comprimsed alot, haven't started a family, don't own a house, still sub-market income.

My advice: Scope the your vision relative to your ability to take risk. If your wife will only let you run for 24 months don't try to create google.
Totally agree. There is a huge cost to supporting hardware combinations and a huge perception problem that it generates (what if mac osx takes 3 seconds longer to resume on a given hardware platform? what impact does that have on their image?)

Also what about the software maintenance costs? Right now Apple has all sorts of shortcuts they can take with servicing because they have < 15% share, low penetration in enterprise, etc. The costs on that will go way up if their share increases dramatically.

I think the problem with articles like this is they come from this altruistic "osx seems nice so it should be everywhere" idea. This is exactly the idea that has made life hard for windows - that it must support a huge software and hardware ecosystem, and it must work everywhere, and MS must pay the costs associated with that.

And at the end of the day MS makes less money per PC sold than Apple makes per Mac.
A Pair Of Dice Which Never Roll 7
Ten Questions About Google Chrome
"Another reason for locking up iPhone details behind NDA is that Apple can't seek to patent any inventions after they are publicly published. By keeping the iPhone's details under NDA, it can retroactively seek patent protection for ideas that it discovers are more novel that originally thought."

I think Apple could ship frozen turds & appleinsider would find a way to spin it. "They're saving on development costs!"
LG KP202 WINE RED
A bright and vivid 65,000 colour 128X160 pixel internal screen displays images and animations perfectly with the minimum of effort. Take photos wherever you are with the KP202's built in VGA digital camera with 4X digital zoom.
Thanks, do you know any concrete startup?
Wow --- it really did mail me my password.

Why are you storing my raw password? Stop that! Most of your users are using the same password for their Yahoo Mail account, which is effectively their bank account. What you have now is a brand new application which hasn't been reviewed for security that is building a database of bank-account-equivalent passwords, which you will lose entirely to the first person who finds an SQL error on your site.

The convention is for your email address to reset your password, mailing the new random password or a code that can be used on your site to enter a new password. Unfortunately, the convention you adopted betrays the fact that you're not storing passwords safely to begin with.

If you're using Rails, start with bcrypt-ruby for your passwords. If you're using PHP, try PHPass, which is also bcrypt. Django or Python, try py-bcrypt.

Not even your administrators should know what your users passwords are.
The Comic Book: Google Unveils "Chrome" It's Open Source Browser
Native or Custom UI?
Yeah, I got a 4 the first time, and then a 0 doing the magic-eye trick. (On a Macbook Pro LCD.)
Similarly, the DMZ between North and South Korea has become a habitat for wildlife:

Endangered plants and animals have thrived. The Asiatic black bear, leopard, Eurasian lynx, and Goral sheep have made a comeback, and perhaps even the very rare Amur tiger - which some US soldiers say has been captured on video by surveillance teams. Many migratory birds, including the white-naped and red-crowned cranes and the black-faced spoonbill have made their homes in the DMZ. Environmentalists say over 1,100 plant species and mammal species exist in this wildlife sanctuary.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/20/conservati...
Auctomatic, Heysan, Songkick, Clickpass, Baseshield, Snaptalent, Webmynd,
FathomDB, and Scoopler are all from Europe.
The few COBOL programs I've seen (or had to deal with the output of) always seemed to handle fixed-width fields. Does COBOL have support for variable-width fields? And how would this lessen the verbosity of those record definitions? Modern regular expression and scattering assignment in scripting lanaguages

(name, address1, address2, city, state, zip) = record.split(/\t/)

is somewhat self-documenting also. Dealing with fixed-width records even in modern languages can be pretty verbose

name = substr(0, 40)
address = substr(41,60)
...

as well (and the regular expression for fixed-width record parsing can easily become visibly unparsable, sometimes even if you use things like the /x modifier in perl).

I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison of COBOL vs modern scripting languages for some common tasks like report generation. And I'd like to see how COBOL tackles something hairy like extracting data from consistently defined but unregular inputs like HTML or wiki markup (this is fresh on my mind: I just was writing some perl/shell scripts last night to generate structured data from a bunch of pages on wikipedia), which is a more "modern" problem than the stock COBOL example of fixed-width reports.

Any links to show how COBOL really shines? Where using COBOL is a significant win from an understandability and maintainability standpoint?
Your score: 0

You have perfect color vision!
Hulu has flaws, yes. However, they're not trying to do everything at once. Right now, they're trying to offer high-quality programming in place of each company having a separate site. Offline watching would be great and all, but that's not an enormous setback, sorry. That's not a necessary feature, that's a luxury.

I was deadset against Hulu when it was first announced, as was essentially the entire Internet. I think it's one of my most-visited sites, now. The presentation is top-notch: few sites look or work better. And the video content is all to die for.

Even the social aspects are excellent. They stay out of the way unless you really care, and they tie into Facebook, which means that they've got a good social plug-in for when you want to send things over to friends.

If you want a good video site, though, check out Vimeo. Grossly underrated site, and it's got excellent features and content.
Poor Nick. He really tries. He puts an insane effort into his three sites. It's just that he's picked niches that are either full or too newsless.
Me too! Surprised me, actually :)

I wonder how many other people in my age group there were, it didn't say... It does look like men from 20-29 mostly fared really well according to the graph, but it would be cool to see more detail anyway.
Ask YC: Single founder company with prototype, how do I improve my odds of being accepted.
I am getting ready to submit my application to YC and I am interested in the advice of others. I already have a working prototype but the people who were going to develop the company with me aren't ready to commit 100%. In your opinion, what can I do to improve my odds?

thanks
A New Battle Is Beginning in Branding, and Trademarks, for the Web