skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The reason there aren't more Googles is not that investors encourage innovative startups to sell out, but that they won't even fund them.

The core problem is how investors are compensated. A managing partner's performance is directly linked to how many bad deals they avoid - avoiding "true negatives", minimizing "false positives". Because of this performance metric, investors are risk-adverse and I can't blame them for it. If we want innovation to be funded, the LP's need to tweak how the managing partners are measured. Managing partners are paid for their "insight" into emerging industries. Well, then penalize them for great deals that they passed on - the "false negatives". They should be accountable for the "false negatives" as much as the "false positives". That's what they are paid to do.
Ask HN: Pointless Spam?
I've noticed that a substantial amount of spam that I receive doesn't make sense -- that is, I don't understand why spammers would even be motivated to send such spam since there seems to be no gain to them.

For instance, a spam I received just now contained only the following ASCII text:

damps sonnet quaked.
cols merged gage.
sadism heroic silly.
libyan tannic pagan.

There weren't any URLs or tracking images as far as I can tell... just nonsense text. What's the benefit to the spammer? If there's no tracking image and no link to click... there isn't really anything the user can do other than be annoyed and delete it.

The only reason I could think of would be that they expect people to reply to the sender (to verify e-mail legitimacy), but that seems rather convoluted.

Unless some spammers just like to annoy people, rather than make money.
Humanoid robots may make people feel more at ease than other designs
ovh, vectoral (netdirekt dc, not reselling), leaseweb I've had personal experiences with. their support generally sort of sucks (at least they reply to you..hehe).

oh, ovh doesn't sell to people living in certain countries. they said they'd change their policy sometime soon, but have yet to see it..
Maybe it's to throw the email system's bayesian spam filter off?
This guy's interested in drinking, cars, and football.

His job status is professional detailer. Nuff said.
a lot of spam nowadays is sent with the explicit purpose of pinging email names and bypassing filters, just to find out of the address itself has a person that checks it. war-emailing, as it were

perhaps that email had something like an embedded image or javascript that could/would dial out to tell the spammer that your email address is active.

other tactics i've seen are the "unsubscribe to this email" links on blatant spam which are social engineering attacks to trick the unwitting into telling the spammers that yes, someone is home at this address.
Media Temple launches Django Grid Containers
Useful ideas, thank you for this article!
"X makes your life easier".

Examples: Washing machine, stove, dish washer, hot water heater. More recently: cell phone and computer

If it doesn't fit that test for them, then it's probably not worth trying to convince them.
I have recently heard people saying Python is too slow and Java is preferred for some thing. Since I'm a bit of a newbie in the python world I'm not sure what to suggest.

Do y'all have an opinion on this?
As I said, deep background. I realize it was a bit off topic.
See Google Adsense text, image or video ads displayed on any given website
That was a bleature, but we could re-introduce something like that down the road (we've gotten a number of requests for it).
Without knowledge of JRuby, IronPython or Jython, I'm curious how Python's low tolerance for code formatting flexibility has helped here.

Anyone?
How do touch screens work, and where are they heading?
Here is an explanation of cross-validation and bootstrapping: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pliang/cs294-spring08/lectures...
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One really cool thing about "Don't make me think" is that it is short and highly readable. For some reason books of this genre often seem like Russian novels of the 19th century in thickness. Probably the most usable book about usability out there.
I think people also forget that that's isn't really unusual.

Anyone who were early adopters of OS X went through a lot of pain.

Course, the thing is, Apple took the right risks on OS X - a lot of the pain was to end up with the right end result. I think that is really the part that sets them apart.
How Much Would You Pay For Prime Real Estate?
Slightly related:

South Africa's Roundabout has devised a way to harness the energy generated by kids playing (ingenious in itself), as they spin on an outdoor merry-go-round
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000446.html
Every Business Has Information That Requires Destruction
If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: Python cares about indentation not whitespace. You can format your code any way you please, but it turns out that arguments about where to place curly braces don't actually contribute to getting real work done, and Python people don't miss them.
Addendum, directly from the design docs, http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-...:

"Web content has evolved to contain significant amounts of active code that run within the browser, making many web sites more like applications than documents. This evolution has changed the role of the browser into an operating system rather than a simple document renderer. Unlike current browsers, Chromium is built like an operating system to run these applications in a safe and robust way, using multiple OS processes to isolate web sites from each other and from the browser itself."

Emphasis mine.
The same way you convince anyone else to do something you want. Read "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini.
Uh Oh, Made Google Drop an 'O'
There's a lot to be said for your work not living on your local desktop, but Sun have already said it with Sun Ray and no-one was listening - and that was fully under the organization's control.
Why don't we just get more people to join a movement giving a cut-off date, like http://iedeathmarch.org/ ? If enough people get behind it, it could get the media attention needed to make it a realizable movement.

The PHP community did this with PHP4 -> PHP5. Giving notice of a future date also allows companies to plan ahead, creating more credibility in the movement as well.
Rackspace does also have a datacenter in UK. We have a small server there to satisfy certain EU privacy laws.
Why are you trying to talk about "the least amount of money I can get in order to get by"?

I don't really understand this whole "my odds of doing something really small are high, so f* you all, I'm doing that. F* VCs, f* the world, f* working a lot."

That's a terrible attitude if you actually are in this because you enjoy it and want to make a meaningful contribution to society, and not just make some petty money.

And I can already feel the downvotes. Everyone angry at Mr. Cynical because he crashed the "F* VCS!" rally.

In the words of 8Ball and MJG: "Yo stupid ass ain't gone live twice. If you do anything, do it big. If you do it small, do it big."
DomainFactory works pretty well for me.
http://df.eu
I would negotiate to an equity stake of at least 150% of 0.
The main thing that Python users complain about in CPython is the global interpreter lock, which restricts all the threads in a Python process to one CPU. (Ruby has this too.) So concurrency over multiple CPUs has steadily become more of a concern over the years.

Stackless came up with a solution, but Guido shot it down, and it appears be surviving somewhat in parallel. (No pun intended.) Jython gets rid of the GIL and uses native threads like Java, and is scheduled to come out of its half-decade coma sometime this year. The mainline CPython implementors insist that getting rid of the GIL would cause infinite headache, but they're offering a reasonable substitute in Python 2.6: the multiprocessing module, which has a thread-like API but uses separate OS processes behind the scenes. So, I don't think there will be a mutiny over this.
None that I'd want to read.

In the earliest stage, if the CEO's not either technical or the product lead, he's a waste of space. There's nothing to run before you have a business.

The early stage CEO should be a product designer (or programmer), and then eventually move to the side to bring in someone who really enjoys "running the business" as a CEO.
I avoid JRuby just because I'm never very confident on a non-standard platform. I'm not a bleeding-edger, especially with things that I don't like debugging the hell out of.

Just like I don't swap out OS libraries for fun, I don't replace the underlying bedrock of a language for a giggle either. If I had a compelling reason to use JRuby (for example, to get access to all the great Java code that's been written), then it would be more compelling. Until then...if it ain't broke...
I continued to read on, only to see that most of the remaining look like either Backpack or Basecamp rip-offs.
www.pushuptheweb.com

"A subtle upgrade link is shown when people visit your website using an outdated browser. They can click this link to visit the upgrade website for that browser, or choose to be reminded after a time you specify."

I have this installed on several personal sites and a few business sites. It's classy and unobtrusive. Highly recommended.
In perl you can write 'if(!bool) { ... }', 'unless(bool) { ... }', or even '... if(!bool)'

As I said, I'm not an expert in the languages in question, but the scope of code formatting flexibility is larger than just whitespace.
Just get my competitors to do it first.
yep we have a windows mobile app were refining and working on multiple platforms!

See this video here ... http://www.vimeo.com/1629637

An alarm clock that tells you to go back to sleep, saves lives, reminds you, motivates you, provides greetings/well wishes on special days, allows you to remain close to those who are far away, provides personal information.... that is http://Sleep.FM!
from the article:
"I mention this because I’ve been thinking about what makes good software documentation."

one man's opinion - the best source code doesn't need documentation. the code itself should be expressive.

while not everything can be as nice as rspec (example: http://pastie.org/266866), some descriptive and expressive syntactic sugar can make code more readily understood as well as convenient to write. you can be as obtuse as you want as long as you're the only person looking at the source, but the minute you add a second programmer to the project, you have to think about making their lives easier.
10 Home Automation Ideas
This is designed to distort Bayesian filters. From an economic perspective, this is fairly interesting, because the spammer that sends this gets no rent, or direct profit, from it, but helps the spammer ecosystem.
Even if you don't reply, typically the spammer will receive an 'undeliverable notice' from invalid accounts, so silence ought to indicate where an addresses exist.
I used JRuby on a few projects and was able to sneak it in the door in corporate america cause it was still java.
> David Moxon subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff

Then why not making cheap electric cars that make exactly the same sound? I mean, just attach a stereo wired to a embedded chip that makes the length of the sound wave depending on the speed of the car.
While i don't think many people will go to such an extent with bootstrapping (i think most people would be happy if they had 1 profitable company next to their startup) it is a perfect example of how you can use bootstrapping to make a little empire (at least in my eyes).

And while a essay is always inspiring (a good one anyway) it's also quite encouraging to hear such a success story, it makes it gives the whole idea a more realistic feel to it.
A new online game uses crowdsourcing to find out how to save humans from extinction.
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Long live the great science of commissioned studies.
CIA, FBI push 'Facebook for spies'
Java vs. Ruby on Rails - It is a Dead Heat
Python is intentionally simple to parse. The whitespace thing (if that's what you're referring to) goes like this: if a line is indented one more level than the previous line, that span of indentation becomes an <indent> token, applied for the rest of the indented block. So to figure out scope level for a given line, look at the number of leading <indent> tokens. That's it. Google knows more.
Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes
In addition to that, maybe some spam filters work by automatically putting a sender on a whitelist if it gets through once, and then after the sender is on the whitelist, he can spam with something real later.
It's not the sound that increases the testosterone but the visualization of the nice fancy sports car. As soon as all cars started sounding like that it would have no effect.
Gogle - Google Search (check the Google logo at the end of the page)
right, and what better way to ping for active accounts than with a (in this case, pretty crappy and almost worthless) bayesian poisoning attack?
Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=Gogle&num=100&start=9...
Top 75 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever
Very nice site, and in the same industry as my startup...

/begin shameless self promotion/
www.OtherWeather.com
/end/

Would love to have reports from people in the path on my site as well.
So, spammers who altruistically help each other might gain some sort of competitive benefit? And this propagates the behavior in the spammer ecosystem. I find this highly ironic, since spamming itself is the opposite of altruistic behavior.

I guess what is "altruistic" is highly contextual. This reminds me of a quip from a Raymond Smullyan book. A friend of his did codebreaking in the Pacific theater in WWII. There was one code they couldn't quite figure out, but they eventually settled on "pro-Japanese" as the meaning, but nothing really fit for them. After the war, it turned out that the code meant "sincere."
"However, NOLOH is a server side platform, the opposite of Cappuccino, but this has the benefit of allowing your application to truly be written in a single language, rather than having to write parts of your application in Cappuccino, and other parts in your server language."

That argument doesn't really make sense, since you can run JavaScript / Objective-J on both the client and the server, but you can only run PHP on the server (though from what I understand you translate PHP to JavaScript?)

Objective-J runs on a number of JavaScript engines that can run on the server, including Rhino (check out the "objj" executable in the "Tools" package: http://cappuccino.org/download/). While we don't have a good web server solution yet, it's certainly a possibility.

But even once that is a reality, Cappuccino will be totally server agnostic, so it will work with whatever server side technology you are comfortable with (or stuck with)
Big data: The next Google
The Importance of the Side Project
I agree. Having your work outside your desktop can be a great boon, but look at the synchronization industry that has been active and entrenched for years. Just one case in point: Lotus Notes.

Aside from data security, established synchronization solutions are something else that online web office software is competing against.
Beware! If you google google you break the tubes of the interwebs!

Seriously, though. Neat! Made google drop an O!
Very unlikely. It's almost certainly either to check if the addr is live or a broken spam in which the spammer forgot to insert the payload (not uncommon).

I've never seen evidence of spammers trying to poison filters. This certainly isn't. If you were trying to poison filters you'd want to include a lot more words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb did, so you're wrong: http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/the-world-according-t...

Sorry about making this slightly pointless comment :(
The Law of the Garbage Truck at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Idea: a widget that loads only when IE6 is detected, going to a page where you can upgrade. Sites that want to support this movement can add it to the bottom of the page.
I don't support IE 6 in any project I do and don't plan on it. If anything I do gets big enough that it makes business sense to support it, I'll just outsource the work. IE6 is a monster that is not worth my time.
Concentrated Solar: Simple, Cheap, Efficient
Right, I'm definitely getting a Maserati as soon as I can afford one.
If you’re in the Coast Guard, you’re using Internet Explorer 6
Seems like you have the strategy nailed down. I think you can pull it off by having few very focused areas. Try to get as much expertise as you can in one area so you can win all the big contracts.

Best of luck!
Social Media Marketing - An Overview - Video
There's no connection between searching for "Gogle" and the "Gogle" at the bottom; type in "thing" for the search and the same thing happens.
For those who don't know what eternal September is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
From Patenting Launching Startups to Modular Innovation
Six Dating Tips for Attracting Luscious Life Partnership at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Tracking the reasons many girls avoid science and math
Apparently gasull is The Inspector-Very-Very-Specific.
In the Harvard Business Review book on entrepreneurship, the first question is, "What are your goals as an entrepreneur? What are you hoping to get out of the business?" That's an important question.

If you're wanting to build a company that will have a higher chance of survival and where you'll retain control, and ideally aren't going into a market that's about to tip and become something highly competitive, then bootstrapping can work well.

The line that investors use when you're talking to them, at least in my limited experience seemingly universally, is, "Speed is a key factor in this market." That doesn't mean much coming from an investor, but if you know that it's true then taking investment can be an important step. Also at an early phase the money that you get isn't all that important. If you're lucky enough to find a good investor, it's the connections, advice and reality checks that make all the difference.
Fantasy Author Neil Gaiman Offers "Neverwhere" ebook for Free
Then he's not the CEO. He's the Founder and Product Lead, which still doesn't mean he should be designing user interfaces.

Now, if the post said "What should a budding user interface designer read?" then the other answers are all great. But that's not what the post is.

Thinking that a "CEO" needs to be the user interface designer is pretty obvious start down a VERY VERY bad path, IMO.
For me, IE6 being the "corporate standard" is just more evidence of corporate IT departments slowly slipping into irrelevancy.

The last two contracts I've done have been what I (tongue-in-cheek) call guerilla contracts, where I've been building fairly big IT systems for parts of organisations that aren't IT.

I think as the younger generations get more senior in business, they won't have any time at all for corporate IT managers holding them back, or for arbitrary IT policy.

There's also the SAAS movement, too.
So, if you won't do the code cause you don't know how and you never will, why do you think you can also do the design?

I've never really understood this. Most of the time this line of thinking leads to even worse design than your code could ever be.
"I guess the crowd prefers a wider topic scope."

That, and pretty much everyone is tired of "this does not belong on HN" comments.
It appears to be 'Facebook for spies' the same way Amazon.com is 'Facebook for people who want to buy things online, and do not want to do social networking'. I would assume that the Facebook for Spies is here: http://www.new.facebook.com/s.php?n=-1&k=100000020&a...
Interesting concept. I started my company as a self-funded/bootstrap system. We did consulting for the first 10 months and were very successful and got our company honed to a very solid level not only financially, but conceptually as well. We were able to come up with a lot of development methodologies and standards that were in a sense a "warmup" for what we plan to do in the future.

However, I am glad that I spent the last 10 months mostly working for other people? No. As of today, we no longer do any consulting and are moving forward with our first product development title that we plan to launch in the first quarter of 2009.

Honestly, I felt like the consulting held me back, and if I had to do it over, I'd probably limit my company's involvement with outside consulting to maybe 20%. You'll waste a lot of time not focusing on the goals of your business.

Its pretty idealistic to think you can run two companies at once, its hard enough making sure you do a great job with one, unless you are MAJOR balling and can hire essentially an entirely different staff, you'll end up dropping one of the balls.
From the home page: "It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon say like, March 2009"

All aboard the fail-boat! March 2009-ish should be a specific date, with some sort of counter to give people a sense of finality and impending doom.
pg's opinion (it would seem):

[9] There are two ways to do work you love:

(a) to make money, then work on what you love, or
(b) to get a job where you get paid to work on stuff you love.

In practice the first phases of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less secure.

http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Liking the new performance. Glad you were able to work in the SQLite support.

Now all we need is a way to get a Chrome extension...
What's non-standard about JRuby? There's a language specification and there are various implementations. The only "standard" is the specification.
Adobe Genesis: "mini-portals on the desktop"
A little story, some what on topic about fast/expensive cars.

A developer friend of mine, who is much younger and less 'attached' recently bought a new 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX STI. Fantastically fast, pretty expensive compared to most mainstream cars and sure to get attention wherever he drove.

However, his first girlfriend post car purchase didn't even have a clue what a WRX or STI even was when asked and therefore wasn't impressed at all with his ride. He was slightly disappointed.

The lesson here is to buy something that is shiny, flashy and sure to attract females (think Mercedes, BMW, Porsche), not an understated best bang-for-your-buck pocket rocket like the STI.
Doesn't matter how clueless he is, perception=reality when it comes to users.
Entrepreneurs and Startups in Baltimore/Washington?
I'm a developer in Baltimore looking for people to network and work with. I have 9 years experience of software development and business experience, the last 2 of those with a startup. If anyone is looking to get together in Baltimore and get something started, let me know.
I would agree if it were funny. It's really not.

And people stopped reading long books 10 years ago. Now it's all Dan Brown type crap you can polish off in a day.
You know... I don't really like the idea of sharing my browsing activities with my friends. It just feels creepy. It makes me feel self-conscious about what websites I can visit. If I want to share a site with you, i'll let you know via email or IM. Having said that, I do like the annotated links feature.

Sharing music with friends is great though. I thought the best aspect about Napster wasn't the fact that you can get any song you want online but that you can peep inside your friends' hard drive and see what songs they have.

The current soclal music apps like Last.fm just doesn't feel as lively as Napster was.

Having said that, doing a Napster now would be a bad idea. I don't think anyone would bother to download a software to share music when there's sites like imeem.