skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TechShop: DIY workshops for making, hacking and tinkering
4 Startups + 4 Months + 4 People = Mayhem
I've been thinking about that a bit. The fact that Chrome needs to 'sell' to users that haven't even made a switch from IE6.

But is that really the case?

Maybe the issue is 'will it be compelling for developers?' (Maybe this's more of a question for gears). But Salesaforce.com is a good example. What if you told users that they need to download a new browser to use an app. Still probably easier then downloading & installing a piece of desktop software (and it's by google).

If a modern browser really enabled things that are just impossible to do in IE6 (or a browser without chrome), developers would develop for them and that would push user adoption.

IE6 is annoying, annoying pushes user abandonment. But it's not enough to push developer abandonment. For that, you need 'prohibitive'.

I think the day developers are making a choice between developing for certain browser(s) or developing for desktop, is the day we have a compelling reason to switch.
You can set your site to "Editorial" mode which can be found on the "Settings" tab and then go to the "Users" tab and set the users that you want as "Editors". So the only thing missing is having it so other users don't have the ability to comment or vote?

Out of curiosity what is the reason for allowing users to view but not participate in any way?
I would have to disagree with the Philly bashing here. If you think all we have are cheesesteaks you are grossly misinformed.

Philadelphia has a long history of being at the forefront of the technology curve. It was the birthplace of the first commercial computer in the US. It was home to Commodore Business Machines. If you owned a PC in the 90s there was a great chance it had an ENSONIQ sound card in it. If you take out your iPhone and make a phone call its powered by Interdigital technology. Odds are your digital TV is using a set top box made by Motorola. And like it or not your broadband and cable are powered by Comcast.

If you are really interested in seeing what other companies are in the Philadelphia area check out http://www.phillytechhq.com.

The high tech community is alive and well in Philadelphia
Advertising is one of the only ways to monetize free visitor aspects and paths. Advertising is one of the last American innovative markets. As soon as you start trying to bring any type of content that that is free, I am sure you will change your ways.

Blocking ads is like anti-bacterial soap. It makes your immunity to these things much lower if that is why you are so bothered by ads. Block ads on sites that you don't frequent, but ones that you do, throw some pennies in the hat.
> So the only thing missing is having it so other users don't have the ability to comment or vote?

Exactly.

>Out of curiosity what is the reason for allowing users to view but not participate in any way?

Certain subcultures on the internet have very... interesting troll types, and what we're doing on one of the sites is essentially starting over on a forum that's been tainted by some of these trolls. Thus the lockdown on any write-participation. On the other hand, we want to be transparent about what we discuss, and attract the members in the community who are not the trolls. (We are envisioning a registration process where new users tell about their names IRL to discourage trollish behavior.) Thus the read-only availability to anyone who comes by. Does that make sense?
http://www.google.com/search?q=alarm+clock
Ditto. However, I switched from FireFox and I'm starting to miss FoxMarks. (I have four computers that I switch between.)
I personally didn't say it was a bad thing. Just that the title and the linked page were misleading.
The iPhone is a test platform to prove to yourself/investors that your products have merit and can sell. You can do without it but the iPhone means press which means users which means money. Android would be a good platform because of the App Market and so will Windows Mobile and Blackberry but it will be a lot easier on those platforms once a store comes to the OS.

There is a lot of room in the mobile space but my biggest fear is that instead of developing substantive companies, businesses pander on the spam/one-hit-wonder line. Don't be one of those companies, spend the time to develop an idea that has value and meaning.
I would, but there are FF extensions I can't go without.
Yes, having the problem with trolls is obviously understood, this is why we give you the admin the ability to "ban" a user, kill comments/submissions, as well as set any other user as an admin to police the system as well. Granted this could be time consuming for some, which is where I can see your use-case coming into play (which we will look into).

My only other question is, if "good users" are coming to your site but now have no way of participating (commenting/submitting/voting), how are they able to prove themselves and get an "invite" to participate?
This is why I didn't buy a white MacBook. I have a feeling the palmrest discoloration problem that the white MacBooks experienced a little while ago will only be the tip of the iceberg.
I'm writing apps for people with browsers. Right now that means I have IE and FF on my machine.

If Chrome gets a big following, I'll download it. But I don't have a particular problem that I need fixing. If the JS performance is as slick as they say, then perhaps a killer web site will come along and cause me to download and use Chrome more. So far, that ain't happening.
$98 Linux Laptop - The HiVision miniNote
popups and intrusive flash
We plan to include a link to a submission form (similar to this: http://www.emailmeform.com) in the sidebar.
That's like saying "Do you think there is room for web startups that neglect Facebook." Except maybe Facebook has a larger portion of the web audience than the iPhone does in mobile.
Seinfeld / Bill Gates Microsoft Commercial
Cool. We'll look into it.
What about "corportate" or "enterprise" users who are severely locked down and at the mercy of IT departments? I imagine they are large percentage of IE6 (and 7) users?
good, the last thing we need to do is give Google more power in the internet space
You Are Not Listening To Whispers
You see this rock? It keeps lions away...
I can't live without the vimperator plugin now. It's so nice to browse without using the mouse. I can't go back. If only Firefox had Opera's password storage interface I would be ecstatic.

Chrome offers nothing new right now aside from potential performance gains. If the beta version is crashing, that is worse for performance than slow-loading pages.
20 Real-Life Challenges In Grid Computing
That leads me to believe it is a bullshit field of study altogether, if the only metric of worth is the school name.
Not sure yet, I need a Mac version and extensions (with a very active community building cool stuff) before I switch (or try even, don't have a Windows machine!)
NASA JPL: Use Sats to Track Terrorists by Their Shadows
Yes, especially because "iPhone" the platform is only partially about "mobile." How many iPhone apps are really "mobile" apps? How many are really PDA apps? Or tablet apps?

a "mobile" startup is a company concentrating on "mobility." There's a lot of opportunity there. And also, the fact that most phones suck is an opportunity. Apple is cashing in on that by making a better phone. You can cash in on that by making the existing phones suck less with your app.

By definition, making an existing phone suck less is a mobile startup opportunity that involves neglecting the iphone.
Well only a couple people responded, but if you have friends who you know who might be interested in such things, let me know and maybe we could get something started. ross.jett@gmail.com
I agree with what you have said about Firebug. I absolutely cannot live without it. The Inspect feature of Firebug is priceless especially when working with the DOM. It's easy to use and it is in the same window. I do not have to switch windows to look at the html source.

For now, I just use Chrome for my "24/7" tabs like feeds and online email. I never have to close them and it loads at "notepad-like" speed :)
1. Work Computer
2. Home Computer
3. Home laptop
4. ???
I'd venture that the author has a firm grasp of the economics of complements. I'd also point out that thrust of the article is not about "new grand markets" [although that is certainly a potential outcome]; instead, the point is to answer the question "What shared resource have you invested in - or should you invest in - to expand the pie sustainably for everyone over the long-run?"

At any rate, what is far more interesting to me is whether or not this comment would have been posted as-is in context (i.e. on the comment thread on the original article), which the author is clearly paying attention to.
"Maybe Microsoft is just in the same stage of life that Ma Bell and Xerox was in awhile back?" => Not to mention Kodak, General Motors, Lotus, and many others.
I'm a die-hard iPhone proponent, and here's my take:

iPhone is a medicore phone and a sub-par email device.

It's an ok line-of-business platform, but subpar to competition.

It's a beatuful web device, a great multimedia platform and decent entry-level gaimng platofrm that grownups can carry around unashamed (a "suit" will not carry PSP, but iPhone is Ok). It's also a fashion gadget and a status symbol, especially aborad.

So, depending on who your customers are...
A productivity tool for extreme procrastination. Nice.
First the good: sounds like a lot of fun and a good way to generate ideas and see how they stick.

Then the crotchety: website != startup. Building a business is a lot harder than hacking together a website (wonderfully groovy or otherwise). Paul's mantra of "build something people want" is a precondition, not the endpoint. It's next to impossible to build a business in a month.
hi Paul,
I have translated this post into chinese for noncommercial use. Following is the link:http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/pestwave/13301

Please tell me if there is any problem with this, I will remove the translation.

To be frank, your words inspired me a lot, though I am neither a programmer nor a hacker, the principles and the way you analyse how to start a startup is applicable to other industries than programming, too, Thank you, dude.

Best regards,

pestwave
I'm going to disagree with people here and say that if you're just starting now, it would be unwise to ignore the high-profile iPhone. Though the device may be new and may not have significant market share, there is inimitable hype surrounding the device and the corresponding App Store. If you're looking to sell applications, you may find the iPhone to be quite a lucrative platform given the seamless integration and ease of purchase that users enjoy.
Not yet. I wanted, but it's still too beta:

- I got hard crash, real BSOD, not just browser
- constant disk trashing (comes from "Phishing and malware protection" feature)
- Flash is actually much slower than FF/Opera/Explorer
- no way for me to import Firefox bookmarks (it doesn't appear in menu)
- don't try "about:%"
Now this is a hacker
Snarfed while slumming on proggit. Not quite up to the level of writing "most pessimum" algorithms, but it brings a tear to my eye to read about someone this deeply technical.
An impressive piece of tech but I'm not really convinced this is a good approach, especially after comparing their photo demo with Sproutcore's (http://cappuccino.org/learn/demos/FlickrPhotoDemo/ vs. http://www.sproutcore.com/static/photos/) which suggests to me that Cappuccino has serious speed problems. The situation is likely even worse on old machines with older browsers as I'm on a relatively up-to-date machine using FireFox 3.
Why? Care to explain little more. Are you implying that iphone will reduce the overall use of sms and hence sms based services?
Submit a prototype under a different application name. Then, pull the prototype after it has been approved and after a few people have tried it. You can also experiment with pricing this way.
Well, we just need to decentralize identity, then. Basically, PGP signing of our more "regular" identification mechanisms using our DNA and a password as the biometric key for the private keyring--other people won't know who you are unless, and until, you want them to.
> As other search engines catch up with Google on quality of results and usability

That was quite a while ago, in my experience. I often fail to find technical information with google that I can find via other search engines.
Chemists create 'powdered methane' using 'dry water'
It's true that there is a permanent record, but the judge's ruling focused on how people perceive the comments. In this case, consider two bloggers Alice and Betty. If Alice writes something and Betty posts a comment on Alice's blog, the judge eems to be saying this is more casual than if Betty posts her reply on her own blog.

It will be fun figuring out where "Ask HN," Twitter, and Tumblr fit in all of this.
Javascript is pretty dynamic. You can probably just do some aspect-oriented programming if you want to log every request. If you're using jQuery, for example, alias the $.ajax method so that it calls the standard jQuery method, but then also calls the code snippet to Google

Then again, you probably don't want to log every single AJAX request.
Sustaining a hacker lifestyle
Now I'm going to RegEx my voting?

This is an awful idea.
Already have.
It would be the final admission of failure for Microsoft to attack competitors on antitrust grounds.
cheers wheels

your "crotchety" point's a good one. in fact, it's a frequent point of discussion within the team. the website!=business comment is a common rebuke for us.

my position is agreement with your statement. "something people want" is a starting point, a primer for the business. rather than four business in four months, I argue 4 seeds, some of which may grow into viable business, and most that won't.

Further, trying to grow 4 business at a time (come November) is equally insane. The niches are small (we call them micro startups - one month to address the core need, the "one thing"), and the end of the year might be a good time to weed.

nevertheless, we are learning a tremendous amount about the process, about users, and about how much we truly don't know. and damn it's better than working in an office!
Dramatic headline with little-to-no information. Sounds like utter scaremongering.

I don't really see how Google can face an antitrust challenge over Chrome: they don't dominate the browser space, they aren't product-tying or doing anything that could be construed as abusive, they don't even force you to use their search engine within Chrome, and the entire source is offered permissively and they've encouraged other vendors to use it in their products. If anything they are /encouraging/ competition in the browser space.
I disagree with the Slinkset guy about reddit just a destination site. This year, reddit has rolled out features that let you (1) create your own reddits, (2) theme them, and (3) publish them on your own domain. Those features are a clear indication that reddit doesn't want to be just a destination site. The next logical step for reddit is advertising revenue sharing.
Agreed. Personally, I find advertising much less annoying than having to pay for things directly, especially online where it's still easy to phish. The only ads I block are the obnoxious Flash ones.
SharePoint?
Google has a popup blocker, I'm thinking something like Flashblock is probably next.
It is definitely faster and has a nice interface to boot.
People whose ancestors were conquered by Ancient Rome are more vulnerable to AIDS
Drawbacks -- Adobe doesn't support MIPS processors, so this laptop can only run the FOSS versions of flash and .pdf. That's still more flash support than the iPhone.
My only addition to this is that we hope to be doing more pruning as opposed to weeding come end of the year :)
Our World of Middle Earth
There are lots of ways to monetize free sites. See Kayak or TicketStumbler. There's also the freemium service.

The reality of ad blocking software (which is spreading quickly and won't stop until it's as ubiquitous as popup blocking is now) is that you'll have to find a better, more integrated business model at some point.
Hey Jason --

I'd really recommend taking one of the ideas at the end of the four months and seeing how far you can run with it. The trials and errors of building a business have really been the eye-opening part of our own startup experience. There's nothing quite like that first flopped investor pitch or learning how to incorporate or doing semi-long-term planning to really change your outlook.

Best of luck. :-)
Really?
Try this one for "thorough"

http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=79859
The 'ne plus ultra' car detailing.. Taking cleaning a car to fanatical levels.

It almost warrants it's own HN submission - but part of it's just fancy car pics... not sure how it would fly.
Its got a pretty anemic processor, so I don't think the lack of flash will be that devastating. It wouldn't run it very well anyway.
I'd say that Mozilla and Google doing it are effectually different. Yes, the end products are both open source and browsers.

Practically, especially from the perspective of the business community, I think these are very different things. One is a product from a foundation which may or may not decide to keep operating. The other is from a very heavy weight company perceived to be a dominant up and comer.
The V8 control the resource allocation which makes it a VM.

If it was an interpreter it would have execute the code directly, and would have leave the resource allocation to the OS
Starbucks supporting Fair Trade coffee?
Yeah I saw this commercial during the Giants game. Horrible, horrible commercial considering all the buzz behind it. It definitely felt like a commercial for old people.
But you don't know that url A and url B in fact point to the same file until after the file has been downloaded. At that point, why not just load the javascript instead of performing an md5 checksum.
19-square-mile ice sheet breaks loose in Canada
98$ Laptop
Jon Stewart and PC Guy on Net Neutrality (oldie video)
I will be moving to chrome when it gets extensions!
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How Compete.com kicked everyones Ass
Wow, you asked the WRONG geneticist. Gould is regarded as worthless and possibly dishonest by many/most professional evolutionary biologists (which is not quite the same thing as genetics).

John Maynard Smith, possibly the preeminent evolutionary theorist of our era:

"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/beware-of-gould.html
I'll take it further.

What google are trying to do is to impose standardisation.Now days web developers need to test a web site on IE and firefox.

What google are doing is testing it only on Chrome and forcing IE and FF to yield and render web pages in the same way as Chrome.

If a user browse to a google app and it won't work he'll go: Bloody MS can't release decent software I'll use Google's they can't do no evil!
Assuming it's the NB0700 from the manufacturer's page: http://hvsco.com/sp_qx.asp?id=75 It has a VIA C7-M 1.6GHz. Assuming this RISC is comparable to the 900MHz CISC intel processor of the eeePC, the eeePC is fine for (most) flash, including (some) games.

Flashlessness is a killer IMHO.
Multiple threads don't buy you crash protection. If one of the threads crashes, the process and all threads in it are terminated.
The first Microsoft Seinfeld spot: The ad about nothing
Reduces to one sentence: People prefer Compete to Alexa because it's more accurate.
My hunch is that ad blocking is a huge threat to Google. So if they can control the browser space...

I still don't know why IE doesn't ship with ad blockers. Would it hurt them? Perhaps in the short run. But in the long run, it would do far more damage to G.
In FF it helped keep some sites from dogging my cpu
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Is it possible to write an ActiveX app that runs chrome inside IE6?
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"it seems like the same thing: a way to give Mac programmers a way to express themselves comfortably on the web."

As a designer, every time I've seen Obj-J, I've thought about it being possibly useful as a bridge in the other direction: as motivation to learn Cocoa and go from the web to desktop and iphone.

I've been interested in developing native OS X apps for a while but haven't had the time or inclination to pick up a set of skills that are parallel and disconnected from web development, so finally being able to develop in a similar language for multiple platforms is very enticing.

Personally, I wouldn't mind letting go of the html/css if I could get pixel perfect precision in a different manner (can you get do that with Cappuccino?) that would also translate across platforms. I don't care about recycling skill sets - it's not like I can 1) use stylesheets on native apps today, other than for gimmicky crap like Dashboard widgets, or 2) will forget the html/css that's been hammered into my brain over the years, especially since I'll still be using it for informational and content-centric websites as opposed to web apps.
Well that's no big surprise. Nullriver's NetShare already was rejected for limitless utility.
I think the message is: windows will make you want to adjust your shorts
Secretive Storage Company Dropbox (YC Summer 07) Took Sequoia Funding in 2007
i like to think that i have a good memory. :-) in all seriousness, it's nice to see other usc people making cool stuff up here. i think it's hilarious that my company is also named after a road. man, scary stuff.
I could care less if ad-based websites come or go. Communities will emerge regardless.
OEmbed: An Open Standard for Embedded Content
Moore's Law is exponential

If you believe it will continue, and that clock speeds won't increase, then you get exponentially increasing #'s of cores (or some other use of silicon estate).

An alternative scenario is that there will be no mainstream demand for more computing power, and only niche markets will buy them. The mainstream will favour cheap, less powerful CPU's. The rise of eeePC and clones is suggestive of this scenario.
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I think the biggest way this is escalating is the telling "download google's new browser" link that tellingly found it's way onto the (famously traditionally sparse) google homepage.

For many non-tech-savvy people, Google is the internet. Just like people type URLs into the google search box, if they see a message saying "download new browser from Google" they're likely to interpret it as "download the new internet"..!

Fair to say that never before have so many "mainstream"/consumer computer users been exposed to such a simple call to switch browser..?
What game changing does a $98 laptop do? (Apart from the OLPC mission.)

For example, does anyone think that laptop price is holding back mobile phone business models for laptops (free with broadband)?