skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually agree with this post. I went through every site and nothing stands out.

It doesn't take more then an hour or two to set up a nice splash page with some basic information, maybe a screenshot, and a way to accept emails.

I thought these events were about marketing online businesses. How is a basic site not the first step?
100 Must-have Web Tools for Telecommuters- Best of the Best
In this collection, you’ll see 100 tools for taking care of business from anywhere in the world, whether you’re in your home office or on a Tahitian beach.
Call me stupid, but how would it make money? It's not big enough to go mainstream advertising revenue,... what do bird watchers buy?

I don't know, maybe they are so passionate they would pay for membership. It just seems like a niche inside a niche inside a niche to me.
There are two assumptions you're making that may be invalid:

1) That the 100 stocks are picked at random

2) That studied (non-random) investments beat out index (random) investments

Even mutual funds are managed and carefully studied by financial institutions. And Warren Buffet, at least, seems to think that the S&P will outpeform the majority of hedge funds over a long period.
i listened to quite a few presentations from fb game developers at w2e a few months ago. they are largely ad-revenue driven. powerchallenge is making $8m. friends for sale makes around $1m. yeah, ad revenue is viable.
Do either support microformats? Maybe there's a microformat for politics, like hLiar or hBullshit.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+b...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...
At first sight it's nice, simple and needs a bit of polishing.
It's a bit annoying to not being able to delete groups.

I know that you want the app to appear when you need it, but I personally would like it to stay as a normal app after I unhide it and cmd+tab on it.
Post on Hoaxes: Sokal and Wine Spectator
That's David Barrett's project. He's the guy who wrote P2P media distribution engine for Red Swoosh, and then got subsequently "let go" from Adobe (that acquired Swoosh) over some anti-DRM remarks. He's also one of more interesting participants of p2p-hackers maillist.
I wonder if they plan to abandon the use of cheap commodity servers for these data centers since the cost of replacing a malfunctioning server becomes much higher.
I certainly don't mean to say you're even remotely 'stupid'. It's just that I've been a birder so I know that this is an enthusiastic group and wanted to share that perspective.

As for what they buy, they do buy a bunch of things like books, binos, recorders, clothes, travel to those places etc. etc.

I have no idea if this particular TC50 company will execute well. And even if they do, whether they'll make any money at all. But you seemed to be questioning the very premise of such a site and I think you should reconsider that. Birding is not that small a niche within a niche... Perhaps a site for Latvian poetry that was written after the Soviet Occupation but before Gorbachev - that's a niche! Not birdwatching.
How dangerous are the first Google Chrome vulnerabilities?
Thanks, I'm hoping to give it more of a polish for the 1.0 release. It's still missing some features that I think are necessary.

To delete a group, select it, and click on the "gear" icon on the bottom left. There's a menu item to "Delete Group".

Did you expect the delete key to delete a group? Or did you right click on a group looking for a menu to delete? I should implement those features, I want the UI to be clear for everyone.

If more people request it, I might make an option in the preferences to have it act like a normal app so you can cmd+tab to it.
Sure, I could be wrong. It just seemed to stick out a bit. Do you think a social news site for birdwatching would be a hot acquisition target? or get a few million funding? or turnover millions in revenue?

I don't know about birdwatching... maybe everyone apart from me is doing it and spending a lot of money on it :)
Hugh, your app looks promising. I will try it out for a week and see how it fits into my workflow.

One side question: what is the terminal icon in your menubar? I must have that app (whatever it is).
But it didn't work that way at all. Government action didn't start with the Worker's Council; it started with the Poliburo.

They liked the term 'democratic centralism', which meant that it was just like a Democracy except that you couldn't vote, but you were allowed to say anything you wanted as long as you didn't say anything negative about the state. It's very streamlined!
It's one place to collect all of your thoughts so you can organize it later. It's from David Allen's GTD method: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
I think events like these give crediblity and opens up conversations with the investors.
In the Oil Rigs, there are people working daily.

Who are going to be the sysadmin or security personal working on this data center?
What is worth its weight in gold?
I love this argument. One guy says X. The next guy says "No, not X." Your response is "But people are saying X."
It's deeply irrational to live like you're going to die tomorrow unless you actually are.

If you have a bunch of money in stocks and savings, and no dependents, and you are going to die tomorrow, then it's rational to cash that all out and spend it in the most pleasurable way you can. (Or, if possible, spend it on figuring out a way out of my 24-hour countdown predicament!)

The "die tomorrow" applause light has got to be put out. Please. It's just a silly thing to say. It's not death that makes life special; it's life that makes death tragic.
Doesnt ning or FB communities exist for niche social networks? I do lot of stuff Im passionate about, but its hard for me to create a profile for each one of them.
Looks like these guys already invented that spec, BSML, as specified in the BSDK: http://www.gdifc.com/2006/03/11/bsdk/
I think it would be great if more Voter clients supported microformats other than hApathy.
Heh, it's called Visor, from the makers of Quicksilver:

http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor

You can hack Terminal.app so it becomes a background app too, like Quicksilver/ActionGear:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200107011915182...

I also made it a "login item" to start on system start up. System prefs -> Accounts -> Login Items.

So now, I always have a command line prompt handy =P.
I believe that he is indeed a participant.

His work speaks for itself.

Now, his personality might be a bit abrasive to some (to say the least) yet - as I have stated on /. before - let the first geek/nerd/techie/hacker with the all around pleasant personality cast the first stone.
I hope this is satire. Please tell me you're not trying estimate how good a president they'd be based on how their websites are designed.
fossil fuels [is] a limited resource.

To put this in perspective: the Earth' crust contains 2.1 quadrillion barrels of oil. At a consumption rate of 80 million barrels per day, world-society's oil supply would last 70,000 years. In addition, oil is rechargeable:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajuliansimon.com%2Fwrit...

contrary to common belief, category 3 resources (including oil) are all renewable.
Your first assumption is incorrect. I never said they were chosen randomly, and specifically mentioned researching those 100 stocks. Since I did not say that the stocks were random, and also said that they were not random, I am not sure where you got that idea.

It seems fairly unlikely to me that there is no value to research. The average person's research may have low marginal value, but I cannot help but notice that some folks are able to research a company, articulate why it's a good company to invest in, and be right. It would be kind of funny if stocks were the only financial transaction in which doing less research was an advantage. Of course, for pecuniary reasons I won't discourage you from investing on that assumption.

The average hedge fund is not necessarily trying to outperform the market. Many of them are looking for higher risk-adjusted returns (i.e. being up when the market is up, and up less when the market is down). And to some extent the low future returns of hedge funds can be blamed on outside investors: a fund with a good record can scale up tenfold within a year once investors start chasing them -- that hurts returns, but their fees can convince managers to take on the extra money anyway.

Finally, the hedge fund comparison is silly because you (probably) don't pay a 2 and 20 on your own personally selected investments. If you do, I would suggest switching brokers. Since Buffett's bet is at least partially a bet that the high returns don't justify such high fees, you might pay attention to the gross returns rather than the net returns.
hilarious. thanks for the great read!
Do you think a social news site for birdwatching would be a hot acquisition target? or get a few million funding? or turnover millions in revenue? - I have no idea. You might be right after all. I do think that if well executed, it is in the category of something people (birders) want.

When I was into it, I bought a few books, a nice pair of binoculars, took a trip to a National Park in the north of India in the middle of winter and often woke up at daybreak to watch birds. That last thing required real commitment. I guess we'll leave it at that.
Agree 100%

Now, I do find that his values and politics and opinions are rather typical of hackers . . .

While he has deleted my comments on his blog (and arbitrarily and unfairly so in my opinion) and is not the nicest person, he is quite generous with his time and energy - I have learned a lot from his writing. As a matter of fact, it was through his writing that I found PG, and many, many other sources of enriching, life-changing information - I have a lot to thank him for.
Did anyone else hear Calacanis freaking out on someone (my best guess is 5-10 F-bombs in 30 seconds) during an intermission when his mic wasn't turned down?? I had the live stream running in the background, and during a song they had playing, some sort of swear-frenzy started breaking through which was pretty hilarious.
Great satire has that quality that many of the people it's targeted at don't get that it's satire.

However, in this case, I think it's just a bit of light humour. Cheer up!
That feels insanely fast on my MacBook. Isn't there a way to run it on a 30 fps timer and slow it down a bit?

Great look though.
The knee-kerk reaction against this event (and marketing/pr in general) on News.YC is pretty daft, IMO.
There are some (very social) services that require "critical mass" to be engaging. The spike of TC50 MIGHT just push a service like that into having a self-sustaining/growing user population. Example: What Twitter experienced at SXSW.

And for anything inherantly, viral-- an event like this is a big bump... It's compound interest with a larger initial principal. If you have a viral service that starts with 2 users and I have a viral service that starts with the 10k I'll get at TC50 and we both have the same viral co-efficient, who wins?

And for any company that is fundraising, the visibility/credibility provided by this event is HUGE.

And for any company that is actively looking for partners/bizdev deals, the visibility/credibility provided by this event is big.

Is the value big enough to be worth shifting your launch date dramatically? Probably not. But if your launch date is in the neighborhood, trying to get it done at TC50 (or a similar event) is a low-cost/high-value proposition. Hell, even DEMO is low cost compared to most other PR/marketing spending you could do.
I was expecting right click menu.

Thank you for taking into consideration my option, it's not a requirement for me. I'll play more with your app see how it feels.
I wonder if it is that much higher. Oil rigs are a long way offshore since that's where the oil is. These just can't hit the bottom, and closer tends to be better. Less cable, easier access, etc.
All I know is when I try to go to Obama's homepage at work and click the link for my home state, IE7 tries to download it rather than view the page.

Clearly Obama doesn't give a crap about us average middle-class working Americans stuck in rough jobs (forced on IE instead of Firefox/Chrome) or anyone from Pennsylvania for that matter.

http://www.imagesocket.com/view/obama_pa_fail0ac.PNG

Edit: Oh wait, the satire is only legitimate when it supports Obama?
We use FlexCel (http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcel.asp) for some very complex .NET excel and PDF generation, and have been very happy with it. Nice clean interfaces and easy to customize.
joke ---- whoosh ---->

O <--- Yuo
--|--
|
/ \
Here is what Paul Thurrott has to say:

http://www.winsupersite.com/paul/whatiuse.asp

I think it's important to keep any eye on the Apple side, though I've always found Windows-based PCs to be more productive, given my work style (not to mention my job). But it's not really about work: I just prefer Windows, sorry. That said, Apple makes good stuff, and of course I'll be evaluating Leopard soon.
There is a "Hackintosh" VMware image, but you didn't hear that from me. Just buy a Mac mini.

(Mac zealots, cue complaints about "iPhone carpetbaggers".)
Sure... I wasn't meaning bird watching was in any way not cool, or a waste of time, but as I say it stood out on the techcrunch list for me :)
I'm voting for Obama because he knows about bubble sort!
Quick, does anyone know where Jeff can buy an Extra Small Aeron chair??
If you click "Show ActionGear" and then bring another window to the foreground, the menu says "Hide ActionGear", but clicking the item brings the window to the foreground.
Honestly, I'm not going to vote on a candidate based on the version of HTML their website uses. Nor do I care what web server they use, or what their 404 page looks like.

I don't think anyone else cares either.
I think this article and the one before it is great, but I have a hard time understanding real world usage with Erlang.

I know Facebook chat and other high-scale applications were done with Erlang but apart from that, how is it useful over say Python for more simpler applications and systems?
Antimatter, most expensive substance on Earth. $62.5 trillion an ounce according to nasa.
Thanks! I'll get that fixed for the next version.
Environment-friendly ... solar or wind energy

In what way(s) could diffuse fuels such as solar and wind be considered environment-friendly?
IF TC 40 was a VC what would be their rate of return?
No, we don't. But this article was humorous and awesome. Geez, lighten up.
Somewhat OT: I used to play a bit of puyo puyo (USA: puyo pop), a game somewhat like Tetris. I like it much more than Tetris but haven't met many people who play it. Are there any puyo fans here?
A 5 person board seems like a bit much for an angel funded startup. There are some other weird terms in there, too - the vesting schedule for example.
What I said:
"I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses about the state of the world so far into the future."

You quoted as:
"I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses "

Not the same...Try to keep an honest debate, shall we?

---

No on the contrary I am not taking it literally but with a big grain of salt.

Of couse there is guessing. But there are educated guesses and blurbs.

Your guess is pointless, it has no validity at all. You could just as well say "blahaba" because it is not based on anything(at least it doesn't seem to be).
I always thought Open Source was fairly conservative, at least in the Burkean sense. It's a decentralized set of customs, handed down from person to person without being imposed from above or overthrown from below.
I was going to say roughly the same thing as swombat... you need to distinguish more. In particular, you seem focused on the fact that your app stays in the background. OmniFocus does the same thing. I hit
Who cares about TechCrunch, though? The site is mostly where people with failed startups go to wank.
he's gonna get introduced to a new way of programming
i like obama, but what i will like even more is watching his die-hard cadre of valley-based obamatrons go on suicide watch when he loses, which i think is in the bag since mccain put a pair of tits on the ticket
I think this is a fascinating concept.

That said, I've seen equipment that comes back from vessels and oil rigs. Aside from the sheer messiness of the oil rig, the environment (salt, corrosion, water) can be pretty brutal... Solvable naturally, but a hassle.
Especially if you consider the time it will cost you to setup a hackintosh. I believe VMWare now supports emulation of OS X on a macintosh so you should be able to use one mac mini and an external HD to test several different versions of OS X.
The TechCrunch40 list is here: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2007/

... just in case you forgot the names.
Of course it didn't work that way in reality, but it was meant to work that way. What I'm saying is exactly that a corrupt undemocratic top down system can be the result of a dysfunctional bottom up system that has too many layers. But I see that my post didn't make that clear at all.
Yeah, it's hard to tell these days whether someone is being funny or if they are just being stupid. Usually it's the second one, especially when politics is involved :)
It may be me but it seems odd to be measure antimatter in terms of ounces. I'd measure it in grams but then the fact that it's anti matter would indicate that we should measure it in anti grams. Hmm..
it looks bad for me in firefox on unix as well. make properly scaled thumbnails of your images, don't rely on the browser to scale them down.
Paperclip (ActiveRecord plugin for simple file attachments) ported to DataMapper
I think this article is a joke. Right?

("Genius playlists" instead of "smart playlists"?)
We are also in the Washington DC area (http://sharememe.com) and a Launchbox Digital company.

There is an interesting event in Baltimore tomorrow: http://www.refreshbmore.org. Me or my partner will be in attendance.

I also want to point out http://dctechevents.com . It's a great resource to know what is happening in the DC Tech Scene.
Holy crap, he's a centaur!
Please don't start pimping politics here. Save it for Digg.
What hardware requires iTunes?

The iPod doesn't even need to run Apple software on itself, much less on the "host machine". (Yes, I use Rockbox on my iPod and rsync to sync my music.)
includes != relies
A 10m mirror in orbit is not a big issue if it was done as a segmented mirror (e.g. what is planned for the Webb telescope) but to get to the "really cool" stage I would say that they would have had to deploy some sats that can work together to perform long baseline optical interferometry to get the same results as that 100m lens.
David Stutz's Resignation Letter (2003)
This is pretty cool (useful). Thanks.
I wonder how much of the practicality is land/electricity costs and how much is regulation/taxes flight?
This may be useful in the database domain, but I don't think it applied to most web contexts.

Most web applications don't bother with database security - it muddles the logic and prevents things like pooling, scale, etc

For more traditional web apps - typically you have two sources accessing the database - the Web Application and the Administrators. Both of which have access to nearly everything anyway.

This might stop some malicious code from accessing the database improperly - but the fact is, if someone can manipulate the code you've already lost anyway (they could simply just capture the passwords at entry for example).
The perils of DMCA notices: YouTube snared in Scientology dispute
Instead of untested wind farms on liners, why not just use nuclear power. It is well tested (think aircraft carriers). Furthermore, while such a reactor may need fuel and disposal services, the wind farms will likely also require spare parts so the self sustenance thing may come out to be even or even in the favor of nuclear. Furthermore, nuclear reactors have a significantly better space/watt ratio allowing for more space for crew and servers.

There are other factors. Wind is intermittent -- not good for servers which have to be active 24/7. To use it would require massive (bigger even than what is already there) batteries which themselves would entail a massive extra cost. Nuclear power also allows easy desalination of sea water which (I assume) would be required for cooling sensitive electronic equipment (expensive servers).

The red tape associated with such an idea would be pretty scary though.
Looks really cool :) I'm not in front of my mac right now, but looks promising, will definitely try out.

One thing about the website though, please please resize your screenshots into thumbnails!
It never ceases to amaze me that all of these things that Google does are built on the backs of people clicking advertisements.

They are building floating power plants so we can find out what Abraham Lincoln's favorite color is faster!
QGtkStyle now part of Qt
A slightly, conservative, review of Hardy Heron
The site has some very amusing sections, like their Linux section
http://www.shelleytherepublican.com/category/education/technical/linux

The other sections are mostly offensive. Please don't pay attention to them.

But what I want to know as someone who is not from the US is: are the people joking? or are they actually for real?
This article seemed to come to the conclusion that TC50 is not worthwhile and that working out of the east coast is better and then wrote up a piece justifying it.
Unbundling media.
I read about the Wine Spectator hoax a few weeks ago, but there's some new information here -- damage control from the editor of the magazine, and also additional details from the hoaxer in the third comment. The magazine does not look come off looking good from this affair.

The NYT writer also ties in the infamous "Sokal Hoax" which riled academia in the mid-1990s. Well worth a read.
... especially if you look second hand.

I'd expect you could get something quite capable of iPhone development pretty cheap.
A bit of context from Cory Doctorow:
http://www.boingboing.net/2003/02/13/stutz-says-farewell-.ht...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF206-Game_Boy.gif
WaTunes 2.0 in Beta
Thanks bdotdub, I resized the screenshots so they should look better on Windows IE/Firefox now.
Xobni has gotten quite a bit of very favorable press. I don't know enough about their market or their product to say whether they're doing well...but the acquisition overtures from MS seem to be indicative of something good.

And, I suspect Mint will be a huge success story. It's a gigantic market, and Quicken leaves a lot of room at the bottom (and, frankly, Quicken fails the online thing in so many regards that even if Mint were to cost more, it'd probably still gather some customers...but Mint is dramatically cheaper than Quicken, practically infinitely so).

Flock and Docstoc had some good press a while back. But, I don't really recognize any of the other names. And, other than Mint, I've never used any of them (and I knew about, and was a fan of, Mint before TC40).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8
And Korean, apparently.
You can't know yet. It's only been a year. The average exit for a VC-backed venture in the valley takes seven years. Very few companies, even those with smaller angel or seed level investment, have an exit within a year.
It looks good. I currently use Things (http://www.culturedcode.com/things/) for a similar purpose, but good global keyboard shortcuts might make me switch.