skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Such incredible hubris.
Yes, let's be friends :). I'm grateful somebody mentioned "trust relationships". That's a good start. My email address is ben dott seeley att gmail dott com. Email me some contact info, and I'll mail you mine.
personally, i don't think so.

http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows
Has anybody found tag clouds useful as a UI mechanism? They're just a giant blink tag as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not making an argument for political correctness; there's a difference between censoring a community because its speech might offend someone, and moderating a community because it's trying to hurt someone.
I disagree. I think with a market like start-up jobs, browsing is more important than searching. If I was looking for a new job in a start-up, I'd probably approach companies because they seem interesting and say they have openings, not because they have a job that matches some keywords.
LEAP: SingleHop’s Ajax Server Administration Tool
More businesses considering 'wisdom of crowds'
How to Avoid the Curse of Vision Overload
The problem with OpenMoko IMHO is too much hype and lack of direction.

The idea to have an open phone, is great, in principle, but executing it is much harder.

FIC is a hardware company and OpenMoko Inc. spun out of it, they made the hardware, and then hired a bunch of open source developers to make the software work on their somewhat broken hardware. As if that wasn't bad enough, they started drinking the kool-aid and spreading the hype about the OM phones being iPhone killers and gave their dev team _impossible_ goals. When v1 (the 1973) came out, it was pretty much useless but it sold out just because the community was so excited about it.

Fast-forward to v2, still a lot of iphone-killer hype (like that idiotic fsf article) and no working software, OM changed directions multiple times and the Qtopia abortion is a result of that, and almost everyone is disappointed, but for the first time you can actually make calls (if you run a non-smartphone distro). The community is now beginning to form and take ownership of the fact that the OS won't go anywhere unless they make it. But the prohibitive price is probably preventing the community from reaching a critical mass.
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but the 4th and 5th column are overlapping each other in Safari (my browser's width is about 1000 px wide).
Sorry, by doing this funding, ycombinator (being a startup) has already implemented your idea.
pg, we are a startup company with patents which address personalized search and semantic advertising. We are also a music startup www.yooglimusic.com with many tools to support independent artists (emotion sensing tool, commerce engine, and promotion). All no cost to the artist.

Perhaps you can give us some advice on a raise - $20K doesn't cover two weeks burn rate.
And now these articles are starting to come thick and fast.
There is complete silence on one important topic: the reclamation of design space.

Every major technology that has been standardized upon has constrained the design decisions of future thinkers in some way. Nowhere has this been more true that the computing field. Certain problems (esp. re: the web) are architectural and cannot be fixed without major demolition work.

Who will fund me (or anyone) to replace TCP/IP? POSIX? Who will even entertain the thought of wiping the slate clean of the foul residues from a quarter-century of The Wrong Thing?

Laughing? Enjoy slaving away, wasting your creative juices, while standing on broken paradigms. Or start thinking forbidden thoughts.
Then I disagree. I don't think there are any new worthy ideas being come up with these days. I think pretty much everything we do is a refinement on existing ideas, and different approaches of implementation. All the really interesting ideas are already out there, and have been for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The process of their evolution has been one of evolution, variation and refinement - not of creation, not for a long time.

You fund many start-ups. How many have come up with a truly original idea? How many have, instead, taken an existing idea and given a new spin to it, or even just taken an existing idea and applied it to a new market? In fact, if you can't express your idea in a few words, is probably not a great start-up idea. And if you can, then it's probably fairly close to an existing idea. "Search engine for parts" (Octoparts). "Job site for start-ups" (Startuply). "Automatic time-management tracking" (RescueTime). "Configurable, hosted e-commerce platform" (Viaweb). "Social news for hackers" (YCNews). All potentially great businesses or worthwhile endeavours, but not because of any originality.

Obviously this doesn't apply to all intellectual fields equally well. It very much depends on your definition of "idea", too. But I think for a definition of idea that maps fairly closely to "start-up ideas" as well as "book/story ideas" or even "wise ideas" - all the good ones are out there for the picking, and have been for eons.
I see three red flags just in this brief message: high burn, lack of focus, and overemphasis on patents. The high burn is the most urgent problem. That will severely constrain your options.
How about:

(osx market share) * (percentage of clueless osx users)

is much, much smaller than

(windows market share) * (percentage of clueless windows users)

Each of those factors individually might not make OSX sufficiently uninteresting, but in combination it's probably just not worth it.

Once that ratio drops below ~1:10 we might start seeing more OSX malware.

I don't know enough about OSX internals to judge on its technical security precautions, but beyond a certain point, the user becomes the weakest link. I think that even Windows has crossed that stage by now. Remote exploits are becoming rare, and even browser exploits increasingly require some user interaction.
That's the best counter to the market share argument i've ever seen.
Carmack talks about Wolfenstein and iPhone
And as predicted ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245275 ) here come the "gold standard" links...
Something your company needs that doesn't exist

Don't forget the more obvious something you need that doesn't exist.
A bad job in my own ideology. It just creates a system for elites and let them inbreed. While I prefer a system for anyone has a chance to beat the house or lose their pants fairly based on his/her contribution to market.

If a startup for startups to serve their needs will be successful, it will not be like an elite club (because as a young startup, it wants all old businesses out and be replaced by it and it will be there until it will be replaced by other startups). But a new business that requires much lower fee like recruiters/VCs but provide better benefit/cost for startups to acquire resources.
I'm really confused by your question. I'm really curious how you position your mouse relative to the keyboard.
This essay has been around since at least August 2001.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010802062551/http://www.jelovic...

It is fairly well-known. I wasn't too surprised when I saw it show up on Reddit recently, but I was disappointed to see it show up here. It's getting harder each day to see any kind of difference between Reddit and Hacker News.
They don't detract at all because they're true. McCain has some serious anger/temper problems and that's not really a secret. He's had numerous outbursts on TV and on Senate floor.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/27/famed_...

So I don't really why stating that simple fact would take away anything from its credibility.
Anyone still using their wrist, elbow or should to move the mouse is asking for repetitive stress injuries. I highly recommend you try a trackball. Using your fingers to move the cursor is a lot more convenient, the mouse itself stays in the exact same place relative to the keyboard making it easier to switch between them, and takes up less room on your workspace, as it doesn't need room to move around.
Use Google Mobile To Rate Stuff In Your Neighborhood
Amazon S3+SQS are down, bringing down Scribd, Docstoc, Twitter, SmugMug, JungleDisk
Speed still maters. I still wait for my laptop to boot up. I wait for my compiler. I wait on Word when I have a long document.

Ummm, yeah, C++ can magically access the disk faster than Java. NOT!!
"If the music companies could make security that actually WORKED"

Except they can't, and they won't, and in the end, no one can. As some security expert once said.. "Trying to make something digital non-copyable is like trying to make water that isn't wet." No matter what they come up with, history has shown it'll be cracked in no time and become worthless.
The word angrier implies there is an objective way to measure anger. There isn't. Ask Howard Dean.
a scary thought, is to look at Argentina, when the country defaulted its imf loans, had to unpeg their currnecy to the dollar, and the value of their currency went down the drain overnight.
Lots of unrests, people lost their life savings (well, they were worth a lot less).
Java allows you to write better multi-threaded code etc where as C++ lets you fight with all those details therefore losing productivity for some perfomance, which thanks to multi-cores the slowness comparing to C++ will be insignificant
You're getting a lot of comments about how it needs to be easier to search by location, and I admit I was going to post one, too. Thinking about it, though, it's a mistake. Searching by location is the kind of searching you do on regular job sites, where the goal is to convenitenly get out of your current lousy job and into a less bad one.

If startups are about passion and commitment, why even list location? Founders need that kind of dedication, but I guess that's a pretty small market so you may also need to help companies find early employees. Hm.

Maybe the whole concept of a job listing is the problem here. It's not a job, right, it's a startup? How do you present startups that makes them different than any other workplace? Instead of jobs, you could just list companies. Pull in news items from their blog, use daylife.com to pull in stories about them. Maybe I'm just retartgeting visualcv.com for companies.

I'd like to see a site that sells me on how great it is to work at a company I can be passionate about, and I fill in my interests to find a company that could be a calling for me. Right now Startuply just another job site that happens to have the word "startups" at the top.

Also, your favicon looks a like the Firefox error icon at a
Amazon S3 and SQS currently down
that's certainly part of it.

i had a friend once who was describing symptoms that sounded a lot like her windows computer had been compromised and was busy sending spam to other windows users. i told her various things she could do about it, all which she described as "too much trouble." she lives too far away for me to fix it myself.
I don't know the science of it but female fertility peaks between about 16 and 25.
That idiotic FSF article was the reason I recorded the video. I was extremely upset at the article for exposing the OpenMoko project to too much expectation too early in the game.

But it's not just that article, a lot of defensive open source fans are saying, "I am happy with my FreeRunner" and trying to look at it in a positive light. But when they talk about it to those uninitiated into the situation, it ends up as praise with faint condemnation. "I love my FreeRunner, and it's free! It's wink wink nudge nudge nod nod knowhatimean not ready for primetime, but I'm enjoying the device." And this subjective experience might be true, but it's extremely misleading to someone who wants to actually use a smartphone in day-to-day operation.

The hardware is the most disappointing part to me. Everything else can be fixed. I really harped on the keyboard because I just can't envision how anyone looks at that thing and doesn't laugh, but it can be trivially fixed. The hardware problem for the planned revisions is not something we can wave a magic software wand at, though. I would have preferred it if they included a better touchscreen with hardware multi-touch and a flush glass surface and dropped the GPS.
The hiring strategy for a "stealth" startup is to already have a good team (and maybe to hire from their friends). Why should any good candidate take an interest in working for you, based on a website blurb, if you're not willing to share basic information on what you're doing?
This is a very good summary. I especially like the points on enterprise software 2.0 and CRM, and the fact that they are mentioned separately as CRM, in itself, represents a huge untapped opportunity. Right now there is nothing other than Salesforce.com and a whole range of email marketers. These are good technical applications but there are a lot of varied CRM business processes that need to be addresses with a "solution" that is not just a one-size-fits-all application.
Ardit33 is right. Generally not a good idea to welch on a bet in global financial markets. Argentina is still not back.

The interesting thing though is if Fannie and Freddy fail the rent on your apartment will probably go down, and houses will be worth less. Of course, you will practically need to pay for the house in cash in the worst case scenario. Think permissively inexpensive homes, that no one but the French and the Germans can afford, if that makes sense to you. It is the opposite of what we have had the past 10 years, prohibitively expensive homes that every one could afford. I'm speaking in terms of values and not dollars though.
It's unfortunate that "but it is free!" is the number one feature bullet point, even if we wave all the software problems and assume great software for user experience.
More gloomy news on the advertising recession
12 proven ways to get your post to the top of digg
I tried to read through the comments on this page but just gave up after loosing track of the context and reply and reply-to-reply. Can someone as HN make these comments appear as collapsed thread like in Gmail AND with a title so if I am posting a comment I can add a title to it that defines the context of my comment. There's probably a lot of value hidden in the replies here but I am pretty sure there are others like me who find it tough to read through.
SQS too. http://status.aws.amazon.com/
Thanks, added that!
> Basically, as I mentioned above... if open source doesn't work for you, it's your fault for not fixing it.

Uh, I'm releasing other open source software (really free as opposed to shotgun-free, btw) which I have labored on in both private and professional time. I am already part of the "open source" community in my own areas of expertise, and that's more than most people do. It is not my fault nor my responsibility that the OpenMoko FreeRunner's UI is in a primitive state, nor am I obligated in any way to fix it. Every developer has their spheres of expertise, and you can't expect everyone to contribute to every project. Nor do they have to contribute in order to have the right to an opinion.

My video was certainly more constructive and fair than it had to be, I could have really laid into them. All I'm doing is pointing out that the FSF's contention that the OpenMoko project is anywhere near ready to challenge the current gen of smartphones is totally absurd.

> The developers will love you forever if you help them fix it. So will everyone else.

Fortunately I have a feeling of self-worth driven by other projects besides the OpenMoko project. I don't have to be involved with the project to express an opinion about it. And can anyone who has watched the video say I was inaccurate with either of them?

> So get off your ass and start helping, or at least stop criticizing the people that are donating their time to help keep software Free.

I am not criticizing the people, I am criticizing the product and the FSF's assertions. Completely different things. The OpenMoko guys are great, and I wish them luck. They need it, the smartphone market is in high gear with a lot of competition, and Apple has set the "good" UI bar and "quality" hardware bar extremely high.

So stop making excuses. A spade is a spade, and the FSF's bullshit "5 reasons to avoid iPhone" article is an atrocious me-tool hype-grabber on the order of RMS's criticism of Gates's philanthropy.
This is interesting. Why do you think the prices of homes will go up and not have significant downward pressures in a credit restricted environment? Or am I reading your post wrong?

PS - I voted it up by the way because everything else strikes me as spot on.
Amazon should give their sysadmins bonuses tied directly to uptime.
I've always been curious as to how ubiquitous domains like .ca are in country.
sounds like he read every Paul Graham essay and then decided it was a good idea to do the exact opposite of everything in them.
Yes. Here's one user interface that should exist but doesnt: marionettes.

An old-fashioned marionette lets the puppeteer control all four limbs, swivel the puppet, and move it in three dimensions - using only one hand.

Connect that to a console and you have a killer game interface.

Alternatively, pitch it at high-end CAD people, and all those little tech shops doing work for Hollywood.

I have no hardware background, so no idea how tricky this is technically. But, conceptually, it seem like a no-brainer.
It's not that the price of homes is going to go up - it would likely go down as we're seeing now. The difficulty of buying property is likely to increase.

So, with a good banking system, I can afford a $300,000 home. The banking system collapses and that home is now $200,000. The only problem is that without a good banking system, I can only afford a $50,000 home because without a mortgage, I can't pull together $300,000 or even $200,000. This becomes a problem for renters because the number of people who can afford to become landlords/ladies decreases. Where you had plenty of people who could buy a place with a commercial loan and pay it back over time from rental income, now you need people that can pull together cash.

Something is only expensive if it's hard for me to buy. A $10 dinner isn't expensive in absolute terms, but try selling that to the majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. Likewise, if home prices decrease, but the difficulty of getting a loan increases by more than that, it becomes more expensive to buy a home.

I'm hoping this won't get so bad so don't read this as my money is evaporating. Economics can be a delicate balance though. Very good question!
Some Startups Just Don't Need Starting
SmugMug too, apparently.
I've got a friend working on #28 with his product called awayfind.com
Use this post with more votes / comments, we don't need two:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=251472
John Gruber: WebKit Performance on iPhone OS X 2.0
Right. That makes more sense to me. In dollar terms the prices go down. In value terms, they sky rocket. Cheaper houses that no one can afford would be my guess at what would happen as well.
Yes and no. There are two sides to uptime - there's that the infrastructure is up, and there's that the application is running. It sucks to be a sysadmin bonused on service uptime when the network is up, the servers are up, the database is up, but the application won't stay up and as a sysadmin there's actually nothing you can do about it; all you can do is wait for the developers to patch it.
We're seeing that here in the UK too, along with the widespread belief that if prices fall more people will be able to get on the property ladder. It's economic naivety of that sort that got us into this mess in the first place.
Your comment isn't fair. Creating a great product is a delicate balance being sickly perfectionist and crazily pragmatic. You have to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. And if you want to feel at all inspired by your own product (which is kind of necessary to inspire others, e.g. users), you need to believe that you are building something great.

It's a very complex dynamic and it's very easy to find yourself giving in to one side or the other. Even after having learned the lesson, it's still very easy to fall back into it time and again.
Interesting, since they like to talk a lot about how they expect S3 to go down once in awhile and supposedly can handle it:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/category/amazon/
Besides being very old, as heroev well pointed out, this is a quite obvious article.

Just like C++ is slower than assembly, which is slower than using microcode, which is slower than coding at the logic-gate level.

It's not that writing Java code is easier than writing C++. The fact is that writing memory leaks is a lot harder in Java than it is in C++.
I'm not sure if they're running SquirrelFish (http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/) yet, but that could explain the increased performance.

If they're not running SquirrelFish, then wow, once they do it will be even better.
I believe it does. Innovation almost always comes from the human spirit being tested to its limits. It is then when humans are pushed to their breaking point that they truly innovate.

For instance, there are alot of people are hoping for $8/gallon gas, since $8/gallon gas would catapult the US into seriously investing in alternative energies.
It's about time someone created a blog like this. I've been saying for a long time that mastering some aspect of technology has the secondary value of making valuable insights of one's opinions on everyday life. I've been wondering what the Top 12 Myths About Sleeping were, and I've been needing 8 Great Ideas To Get You Inspired, and I hope you'll be able to address these and other topics you as you proceed.
i cant find any jobs in atlanta ;-/
I think american are getting a bit too anxious. The trend the last hundred years have been that we talk less about depression and more about recessions. In fact, if the worst thing that could happen is that a couple of banks close down and a couple of millions have to start renting, well, that isn't really so bad. In my view, that's a picture of a pretty resillient economy.