skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point he makes is good, but the calculation seems wrong. He's using odds interchangeably with percent ownership, when the two are clearly different.

50% odds of making $1 million = you have a 50/50 chance of walking away from the company with $1 million at some point -- not that you're guaranteed to walk away with $500K. You could just as easily walk away with $0.

So if your two options are:
1) 50% odds of making $1 million
2) 20% odds of making $20 million

...then you're more than twice as likely to make money on the first deal than on the second.
Summary: "Enterprise" has built itself up around IE and Windows. Chrome doesn't support ActiveX and doesn't work on some sites that were poorly written and only tested on IE. Therefore, Chrome is "not ready" for enterprise.

First, I really hate this "X is not ready for Enterprise" meme. It's basically a way to push conformity on businesses. By doing what everyone else is doing you don't have to make any real choices. It's a weak strategy.

Second, the story should be "Enterprise not ready for Chrome". Writing tools and webapps that only work in one browser is not a winning strategy.
I remember ASP 2.0/3.0 supporting server-side js! I've never seen anything though where you write the js code once, and the server determines where to execute the code.
Wow, that is crazy cool. Well done.
Great story. This shows that bootstrapping can work, but it didn't guarantee that it will go that good.
So, if you have enough luck it will work, sometimes even that great. :)
Since when do ads need to make sense?
Thanks. My friend (who is joining the Stormpulse effort) submitted this article but the site was co-founded by myself and another fellow out of Chicago. Just as a bit of background, we started collecting data for this in 2004.
Except that with multi-threading you give up the OS-provided process level memory management and are back to having to track down all those memory leaks which at least Mozilla never can seem to fix satisfactorily. Even though Chrome seems plenty fast to me, I'd gladly give up some speed if I never had to close the browser and restart it because it was taking up 3/4 of available memory.
Google Chrome doesn't want you to visit google.com securely
Which of the books say that a CEO shouldn't be meddling in User Interface Design and should worry about running the business instead?
Man, now I have to downmod you as a reaction against those who say they'll get downmodded so as to get upmodded, so that people no longer get away with saying such things and taking advantage of reverse psychology.

Sorry dude.
Yes and no.

While I understand your point about meddling CEOs, having one that is aware of the ins and outs of UI and can understand the competitive advantage of having good design can only be beneficial.

Why you assume that devs not understanding anything but code is a good thing though is beyond me. This is what happens in the enterprise, and look at the products they give us.
Ask HN: Recommend a server co in Europe
I've got a couple projects that require a dedicated server/VPS be physically located in Europe.

Right now, I use Rackspace, Joyent, and Slicehost for projects. Looking for something similar in the EU. Thanks.
10 Reasons Google Chrome Becomes Top Browser
"The Inmates are Running the Asylum" is a non-techie book which covers more of the business-case 'why'.
Is releasing early ever a bad idea?
The current advice for a web start up seems to be: Get something up and running ASAP, listen to your customers, iterate, profit.
However, if you are making games an early release it usually death as a game that is 90% complete is often on 10% fun.
So, if your startup is games based should you still release early?

EDIT: Several commenter have pointed out that I shouldn't have said 'Get something up and running ASAP', instead it should be the 'minimum value adding set of features at good quality'. It's a bit less pithy though.
25 Years Of Conventional Evaluation Of Data Analysis Proves Worthless In Practice
Stencil for designing iPhone interfaces
Nice work, both on getting techcrunched and on contining work on the site. And I see the site is popular, I wouldn't have thought it, considering the limited demographic.

Anyways, congrats and do milk the techcrunch traffic!
Server side javascript isn't completely new idea, but I really like the option. I'm happy in PHP, Python, but it simplifies architecture if you can create a library that blurs the line between client and cloud.
Any comments on why you think you weren't accepted?
Yes, good point JoseFresco. It's possible I didn't phrase my original question perfectly as I was trying to be concise. In a perfect world there would be a budget to hire proper specialists, but for me, right now, I'm an army of one. And a cash poor army of one at that! So at this stage I've gotta do everything myself. It's tough not knowing how to write code- I'm actually quite interested in learning but I don't have the time, and I will never be any good compared to you guys. I'm building a prototype/demo so I can convey my idea properly in order to get funded, I anticipate doing most of the design myself at this early stage, and I'm assuming it will all have to be redone later for the reasons you already mentioned. Thanks so much for your input, I agree with you completely.
Does a Tech Manager Need to Be Tech-Savvy? Developers answer...
OpenBSD 4.4 is available for Preorder
It looks like Google is removing some of the EULA wording:
http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Removes+Big+Brother+Clause+i...
I don't know for sure. I imagine there were a number of things not working in our favor. I don't want to suggest anything unfounded, but what I can say for sure is that I wasn't willing to move to Boston/SF (I am happily married with two wonderful children and settled in West Palm Beach, FL).

Also, we did apply late, and rumor has it that late applications aren't treated as thoroughly.
Should be rephrased.....getting "lazy" reporters to call you.

Any editor I've worked for would be ticked if he/she knew I was begging for sources on a list like this.
I grew up in South Florida, so I figured it would be popular down here. But we are blown away lately by the amount of nation-wide and international interest. TV stations in Washington state have hurricane coverage. Who'd have thought that?
Whether you're a startup or established company, I would say "no" for games-related products, but that hasn't seemed to stop Microsoft.
Web-based Joost video player in closed beta, no word on public release date
You probably don't live in hurricane country. When there is a storm bearing down it's the most important thing in the world to potentially millions of people. One of our local papers teamed up with these guys and were linking them quite a bit (perhaps in a frame, I don't remember) when Fay was coming our way. It's a handy site.

So perhaps a limited demographic, but hurricanes are huge news a few times a year and as such get a lot of mindshare.
In my experience? Make sure to read this one, ancient Jakob Nielsen article:

"Why You Only Need to Test With Five Users"
(http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html)

The biggest problem I've seen so far isn't necessarily that clients and programmers have no taste, or no idea what makes a good UI. It's that we spend so much time bikeshedding, sketching and resketching UI ideas in meetings, trying to impress each other with our ability to divine what is going on in the head of an imaginary customer. All the while avoiding the task of observing any actual customers!
It always takes them three goes!
On this topic, I've only ever heard people who don't have fuck-you money call it fuck-you money.
yeah maybe - but from a purely humor standpoint, it wasn't that funny

I prefer "wtf" AND funny, like these skittles commercials:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUJ4uorYPoY
Word Processing: Most of You Still Use Desktop Software
Ask YC: Startup regrets?
This question may be out of place here, but ...

You always hear that startup founders never thought about quitting and have no regrets about what they've done, even if the startup fails. I'm curious to hear from people who HAVE regrets about starting a startup or feel like they would have been better off not doing it. It's hard to imagine NO one having regrets about taking such a high risk.

Anyone hear of any stories like this?
rotten to the -core-? may they have a -worm- in the company? do you think they'd give out -seed- financing? do they -tree-t their employees well?

i got nothing. and need coffee.
In one word: Cuil.

How would you rate their chances now that they established themselves as a high-profile failure?
Don't release early unless the features you release are really polished. I never used Flock because it crashed when I tried it first.
Hmmm, so Mozilla is taking the Java Swing/Squeak Smalltalk strategy of ensuring cross-platform compatibility by doing everything yourself?
I think most handheld devices will be application-based in a few years, instead of relying on SMS, which is basically a cell's version of the command line.
You know who destabilized the Weimar Republic?
Google didn't release Chrome till it was good enough to be released. This, from a company which completely believes in releasing early! Of course Chrome is still beta, but there's a world of difference between "Google releases another mediocre product" and "Chrome is amazing!"
The idea of "release early" is to get early feedback from a customer. In the context of games, you may want to present the idea of the game or some screenshots to a small circle of gamers to get their feedback about if the idea is funny enough. It probably does not make sense to release more than one version of a game, except your game is evolving permantently with new levels, new creatures, new ideas.
What Firefox Can Learn From Netscape Navigator
Releasing early doesn't mean releasing crappy software-- it means trimming your feature-set down to be as lean as possible while still offering some value.

That's a starting point that can help you learn about what makes your users tick.

For a game, I don't know how this applies. If you know your game isn't fun, I don't think you should release it. If you aren't sure if your game is fun ENOUGH, I think you should.

FWIW, "releasing" isn't all-or-nothing. Start by releasing to 10 friends. Then 100 strangers. Then 1000 strangers.
i have my own personal regrets about a start up i cofounded.

the idea was great, but we were bootstrapping ourselves in addition to working a full-time job. the other founder was flaky, but they were the business end of it and i didn't need frequent input to do the tech work. the flakiness eventually lead to lengthy delays and two years later, we were beaten to the market by a very similar product that is making plenty of money now.

my regret isn't about the high risk or financial loss, its about the substantial time lost on a project that is now, essentially, not even worth putting on a resume. in retrospect, i could've done so much more with that time if i'd have followed some of my other ideas instead.
> So, if your startup is games based should you still release early?

No. DAOC had a great launch and continues to be fairly popular. Vanguard had an AWFUL launch and will likely never really recover.
Damn you beat me to it. They may have gotten away with it too if they'd laid low for a bit before to let the dust settle before the PR push.
Normally I'd agree but I don't think Godin would be doing that. But what do I know?
The "release early" people are advising a black/white solution to something that is very 'gray'. What they mean is don't spend years on your app and then only release it when it's 100% perfect.

My advice? Don't let perfect ruin good (see DNF).
Wireless Communication using FLEX and ERIKA Enterprise Basic
Wireless communication is becoming more and more pervasive, that's why new development tools for wireless applications are welcome. The goal of this demo is to provide basic tools to develop more complex wireless applications, using the Erika kernel in conjunction with the FLEX Board {with a microcontroller from Microchip}
Unemployment Rate Rises to 6.1%
The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August, its highest level in five years, as the erosion of the job market accelerated over the summer.
working on a startup is like working on a recipe for cake. bake your cakes, let people try them, adjust and add to the recipe, and then bake another cake. the point isn't the cake itself, the point is the recipe.

so, get your recipe together and bake a cake. maybe to start its just a plain, vanilla, one-layer, only bread cake. you bake it and give it to people to try. if you give it to people to try before you bake it, they're eating raw batter and will get salmonella poisoning and die. if the people like the plain cake, now add some frosting or some berries or another layer. if they don't like it, fix it.

i'm hungry
Bonds rise as jobless rate hits 5-year high
Labor market trouble continued to boost U.S. treasurys Friday after the national jobless rate shot up to a five-year high, according to a government report.
Google May Define the Future: What's to Come in Next 10 Years
I think the Tufte books are deep enough background that they might be useful to execs. Philosophy rather than UI specifics.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
Why is the Internet so infuriatingly slow?
For a game, the fundamentals have to be right, and you can usually tell that early on, but the 'fun' can take a long to get right.
I'm going to polish to a point where I can take feedback from friends and iterate from there.
Gosh, I remember providing feedback for this site way back when. It's been much improved. Clearly stormpulse is a labor of love and hard work. Congrats.
I agree. Games tend to be much less malleable than web applications. For one, web apps are much easier to change after release than other products because there is no distribution problem - just push the code and you're done. And in general, users have a more well-defined set of expectations from a game than from a web app - if you miss those expectations, you can be toast.

I guess one way to push the release date up would be to cut some of the content and pack it in an expansion pack or later update. But the 1.0 version has to be solid, otherwise no one will stick around long enough for the expansion.
I absolutely find it interesting aswell, even though I'm not a car nut by any stretch.

I saw a very similar thread that was linked to me about 18 months ago, where the man in it was doing it to the nth degree - which I found very fascinating. One of the differences between the two was in this one he was taking measurements of the car and mapping it out on a laptop to work out the thickness of the paint.

Quote from thread

This showed that the roof panel was 155 microns at the thickest point compared to 120 at the lowest.....

I asked Paul why this was so important and he explained that for maximum reflection you needed to take away the peaks in the clearcoat to a maximum point of the lowest trough microscopically which should flatten the clearcoat to a reading of + or - 2 microns across the board and take no more than 8 microns from the clearcoat for fear of clearcoat failure in the future....

from http://www.corsasport.co.uk/board/viewthread.php?tid=347865&...

Perhaps the Lamborghini guy did the same thing aswell which could be how he was talking about how many micrometers he was taking off. Maybe his measurements were based off experience. Hard to know really.

For the record, I think this kind of variety can definitely be interesting every now and then. There's only so many Google Chrome threads one can take.
Heretic and Hexen Sources Re-released Under the GPL
why is prostitution considered anti-feminist?

aren't you making a sex-ist generalisation there? Is male prostitution also anti-feminist?
TipJoy: "$1299.05 from 479 people"
I think it's safe to say that perhaps this application might be breaking TipJoy into the mainstream (e.g. hurricane-news-hungry public).
to answer the article's question:

$440k. done.

here's the rationale:

$200k pays off all the debt i have: mortgage, car, everything, and should leave me with $50K in a working capital cushion. i would continue to work on something, because i'd go crazy if i didn't, but it'd likely be another startup idea of some sort. maybe work on student incubation.

$240k goes in a ladder of 1 year certificates of deposit at $20k each. at around ~4% interest, each one will yield an income of ~$800/month. i can leave that in the bank, or take it out as income. given that we're at record low interest rates, that rate can be expected to go up. it's not the best rate that could be earned, but it's a guaranteed rate.

my monthly expenses once housing and car payment are removed are right at $300. $800/month leaves me $500 for food and incidentals, assuming i don't have other income. no, it's not lavish, but it works. and every single penny i make from paying work i can then blow on hats.

of course, if i just keep rolling the yield back into the CD by retirement age (i'm thinking 55) each CD will be worth $70K, yielding 2800/month.

so in short, if my fuck-off-you money is $440k, i'm in pretty good shape for the rest of my life.
Great metaphor!
Perhaps the benefits of division of labour outweight the inconvenience of paying for patents, or - say - taxes?
Farming Innovations in a Slum
It's interesting that when the iPhone was cheaper than a free smartphone, and way cheaper than a $99 smartphone, the story was "Most expensive smartphone!"

But now when the bitter fruit of these demands for lower starting costs via subsidization is harvested, the cry is still "Most expensive smartphone!"

Tech media can be terribly depressing sometimes.
SkyGrid and the Emergence of Flow-Based Search
super+drag (ubuntu) and Flickr
My iPhone's been working great. 3G coverage is great in downtown SF where I work and also in North Oakland. Berkely coverage is not so great, but with t-mobile I couldn't even use my phone inside my apartment. All the apps I've downloaded are currently working. I've had a few issues where I've had to do re-installs of apps, but overall I'm extremely happy with this phone.
The Phaidon Design Classics, although they are not specifically about web interface design, are AWESOME. http://www.phaidon.com/designclassics/ They are great to look over for inspiration and to see examples of products that really pushed the envelope of design forward. BTW, if you shelled out for the box set you would score major brownie points with the CEO ;) as they are very accessible to people who aren't actually doing the grunt/brain work of design.

More along the lines of computing, Rules of Play: http://tinyurl.com/554oj5 is a great read. Probably not what you'd want to give your CEO, though. Very inspiring and thoughtful writing.
Article was a thin on detail. What I take to be the actual paper http://www.signal.uu.se/Publications/pdf/p0804.pdf [Cross-validation and Bootstrapping are Unreliable in Small Sample Classification (PDF)] from http://www.signal.uu.se/Publications/ppapers.html [the author's list of journal publications].
there are two sets of percentages in the article, they just happen to be the same. 50% ownership in a company with a 50% chance of making $1 million, versus 20% ownership in a company with a 20% chance of making $20 million.

using the same percentages for both thing is maybe a little confusing, and it's not explained terribly well. the numbers are really immaterial to his point -- going for short money on good odds is better than going for ridiculous money on long odds. keeneland teaches me the same thing every spring and fall at the meets.
w00t serverside javascript again. I remember using this one one of my earlier web projects using Broadvision 4.1 10 years ago. Here is a press release for that application server for those history of technology buffs - http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/19472/broadvision-shi...
Smart of them to give the interface a 24 type look. I think I'll dub it the SutherFace.

Everyone using it, in the back of their mind, will think they have access to the whole world, even if it's only displaying the weather.
I think it was a good idea. Now they can move on to more productive enterprises instead of working longer on a bad idea.
I've been doing that with Rhino and Jetty for a while (and so have the folks from Spring, Helma, et al.)

I still want to try v8 though, and webkit is definitely a more mature engine for html than tagsoup and cobra.
I'm making web based games so it is very easy to tweak and re-release (people don't even have to know you've changed it) but there has to be a minimum level of quality and fun to begin with.
Starting with a single, well polished level, and going from there sounds like the best strategy. I can add more or change it based on feedback.
Releasing early needn't be the same thing as promoting early.

But every case is a special case. In the case of a game, you might want to get it in front of someone who isn't a developer as early as you can, but that doesn't mean you want to spoil your big marketing splash with a long, slow public beta. This is what roommates are for!
> This is especially important in US because the cost of living is high

Cost of living in the US expensive? Have you traveled to Europe or Japan? Life is way more expensive in Europe, and in some European countries salaries are way lower than in the US.

It's raising kids what is more expensive in the US than in Europe:

* ‘Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke’
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3079221/

* The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

* The Two-income Trap By Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=_IFTf-_9fSsC&...

Solution: Move to Europe. I did the opposite. I moved from Europe to the US, but that's because I don't have kids.
People love emergencies (meaning that everyone wants to watch and see if this will be another Katrina). It's kinda sad, but national emergencies get great ratings - everyone wants to know what's happening, especially considering Katrina and the recent devastation.
Do you trust your or your organization's private or proprietary information to Google, or some other online office software? Can you imagine the formula to Coke stored in a Google doc?

I really, really, really like the idea of web based office software. I want to use Google office. I use Google notebook for mundane stuff and love it. Aside from speed issues, which will get better, there's the issue of private or proprietary information getting lost, stolen, or otherwise undesirably released from your or your organization's sphere of control. Until I have confidence that my data is stored redundantly and well encrypted at all levels outside of my control, I will be using either desktop software or web-based software within my own intranet or the walled garden of the organizations I work for/with.

More than bandwidth, reliability and usability, I see trust as the biggest issue we face for business/enterprise adoption of online web office services.
As interesting as the cleaning, for me, was the fact that there is such a thing as detailingworld.co.uk

Never underestimate niches.
I think his point was that individuals who aren't already wealthy have to make their decisions based on the odds of payout on that deal, while investors can simply engage in more deals, thereby reducing the "odds" to a simple payout multiplier.
Chrome's process model explained