skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
since you have a desktop, get decent average laptop(dual core, 2gb ram, big HDD, internal cd/dvd-rw-unless you don't mind lugging an external one, wireless card, and comfy keyboard).I tried coding in eeepc 7" screen and it didn't get me far. I used 12" asus ultraportable running linux for years and they are good and has pretty solid build. Unless you're getting a linux certified one or buying from a linux-laptop vendor, chances are some features won't work. I just recently switched to 17" mbp because my coding activity has demanded it (more horsepower and screen real estate), but keeping my 12" for fun hacking and cracking. Both lappies has one thing that's very important for coders: NICE keyboard. That being said, choosing a personal laptop is like choosing a GF/BF: it's personal, only you know your coding habit and which feature is the most important for you.
The geographical size has its advantages but it is more about the culture and people. The society in Japan embraces technology (and the change and progress it usually entails) more readily than almost anywhere else, so such continuous early adoption creates the virtuous circles that continue to feed it.

If the markets in other small countries (especially those with similar economies) behaved in the same way, the demand (and money to be made) would fuel industry to do the same.
Angel investors, then.
I did, and got rejected as usual... automated rejection emails ftw
Even as a self-proclaimed math nerd, I'll be the first to admit that certain things just don't lend themselves well to predictive models. You can probably predict success in aggregate, but the individual cases are really tough to predict in situations where a lot of luck is involved (dating, starting a company, etc). Stop trying to find a mathematical formula for the success of a startup. It's hard to find a good one.

I think they're overestimating the valuations. Most startups' valuations will go to ZERO within 2-3 years, and yet YouNoodle tells you anyone is worth millions. I played around with their numbers: a startup that hasn't done anything yet, and that the founder is working on 2 hours/wk gets a valuation of over half a million dollars.
This is called "Braess' Paradox"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox
Raphaël, small javascript library for manipulating images and charts (svg/vml)
Speaking of spamming, creating an account and immediately posting a link to your own blog is generally frowned-upon.
I applied to Y Combinator.
Startup2Startup: Hot Ticket for a Good Reason
Unless you use your API as the core of your own interface development. We do this at Yahoo.
Am I the only person that's annoyed that he just blogged this? When Kaminsky discovered the original flaw he kept it quiet and got a ton of nameservers patched before it leaked. Now this guy finds a problem with the patch, so he posts it on his blog immediately with helpful exploit code attached. What the hell?
It's the next step in phone companies bowing to Apple's vision. They copy Apple, they create something less capable of succeeding, Apple gains ground.

Still, I'd like to see how well they pull this off. As you said: getting it to work on everything is a little bit tricky.
But they don't all have different development environments. J2ME takes a huge chunk. There are thousands of existing apps, this just makes distro easier. Unless you were a big firm you probably weren't getting on the deck (and even then it wasn't easy).

If T-Mobile does it right it will be easy to target a specific platform (Sidekick, BlackBerry, etc) for apps that use features unique to certain platforms. No one has a real track record for doing it right, but there's always a chance.
This reminds me of an old episode of Scientific American Frontiers.

http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript904.htm#5
I would recommend checking out Tom Coates' "Web of Data" talk. Presentation: http://www.plasticbag.org/files/native/ Audio: http://www.webuser.co.uk/carsonworkshops/TomCoates.mp3

It explains that the data is the web site (app), or at least the most important part of it. By building a web app on top of an API you are immediately exposing the unique and interesting part of your service, the data.

This leaves you, or anyone else, free to build whatever interface on top of that data. At Yahoo we absolutely use our own APIs internally to build our sites. That means most of the APIs we make publicly available are the ones our own developers have been using.
"Either you have to let the carriers control things or you have to have regulation"

Apple proved this wrong, and I expect Google's android to do the same (well if they deliver what they announced)
"This guy's never said he's smarter than everybody else, even though it's obviously true. The fact that he went to college early on comes up once in a while because a lot of posts on HN have to do with education and brains, but I have yet to see a post where he rubs it in anyone's face."

Ah, I'd hit "parent" a few times on his link. Up the tree he says:

"I'm a heck of a lot more competent than 90% of startup founders. Or even 90% of YC-funded-startup founders for that matter -- and YC-funded startups have distinctly less than a 90% failure rate."

Link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35068
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168525
Mitch Kapor speaks at Y Combinator
“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?”

Nice tidy quote there. "Typical white person." Yep, when the government terrorizes your neighborhood, and animalistic thugs threaten your very life, the first impulse of polite people is to feel guilt, and question their own motivations. Let's see how this happens:

1. You have a nice neighborhood, and suddenly there's a spike in the black population. If you've seen this happen, you know that going from 0 percent to 5 percent can result in an astonishing increase in the frequency of ugly attitudes, bad behavior, noise, and general violence.

2. The "racists" move out. They are attacked as "racists" and everyone agrees that they are "racists". However, they get out in time before housing prices collapse...

3. As the population shifts, serious crime is high enough that, racist or not, everybody who can get out, including middle-class blacks, gets out.

4. Property values drop to next to nothing. The neighborhood is basically a spread-out inner city.

5. Eventually, given the super-cheap houses, adventurous young men and homosexuals (ie, people who don't have to worry about their wives being raped) move in and clean up the place. Gays are great because "ganstas" don't want any association with them. Gentrification occurs...

6. The poor and violent people are still poor and violent, and so the government tries to "fix" them by introducing them into a new nice neighborhood.

The upshot is that there is constant churn in the real estate market. Continual soft ethnic cleansing from city to suburb to city moves literally 100s of billions of dollars of houses. It's a great marketing program.

There was some black writer who suggested that the real problem with the black community was the move from southern farms to the cities. Rural blacks simply don't have the same problems, and never have...
It's nice that they've improved by nine stones in a year, but what I don't buy is the idea that this means they're going to get up to winning an unhandicapped game against a 9th dan player anytime soon.

As I understand it the game is currently playing like a very good amateur player. If the experience with chess is anything to go by, it took an awful lot of work to get from the point of beating most amateurs to the point of beating Kasparov.
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I get the feeling that the startup predictor is just a marketing gimmick to garner some press and that more useful services will be coming... It's certainly not a bad way to get people to talk about their company and register on their site. If / when they do come out with a more useful service they'd likely to get some good press simply because they've already been on the blogosphere radar.
Orwell diaries
Many of the research projects into automated highways concluded essentially the same thing and that average journey times could be significantly reduced, and propagation delays effectively removed, by everyone travelling at near similar constant speed.

The problem however is not everyone will do this e.g. some people simply love to speed, and changing behaviour in people is harder than changing the rules they should follow.

Some of the projects successfully proved the concept in real world usage of the technology, but issues due to insurance (who will be liable in case of accidents) and infrastructure cost seem to be the main barriers at present.
That's a read API, then - it's a fixed URL that returns XML results... You might not need an API outside of this at all, unless you want to allow write operations.
Who is killing slightly controversial comments here? What's wrong with the following dead comment?

They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing business, etc.

The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure crack dealers to go away.

As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day. This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?
for the academics part, it's no different from google.
"Apple proved this wrong"

Not really, some of the control shifted from the carriers to Apple, and the result isn't much better (or all that different overall)...
For academic jobs, 7 page resumes for entry level positions are not uncommon. They have stuff like this:

Prizes:

1. Best (and only) dissertation, 2005

...

12. 6'th grade spelling bee champion

Employment:

Teaching Assistant, Hicksville College

Assisted in the teaching of a variety of courses, including Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Calculus 3, Differential Equations, Discrete Math and Precalculus. My teaching style reflects my commitment to diversity, technology in the classroom, helping my slowest students succeed and making sure the strongest are challenged. In addition to teaching, I held office hours to assist students in learning material they had not mastered in class. Additionally, I graded homework and exams and tracked the grades using Microsoft Excel. I was also responsible for writing Excel macros to add up the grades.

Instructor, Hicksville College

...

(Note: that part about excel macros isn't an exaggeration.)
Yes. Sridhar Vembu and Zoho.com
Except that, in this case, the Zune actually is crap.
The issue with targeted ads isn't the targeted ads, but the information collected and stored to generate them. AFAIK, Ad Block does nothing to help with this. Also notice that opting out likely doesn't help either.
Even if it's relevant, give it some serious thought. There are very few audiences that are going to respond well to the "I am more competent than 90% of you", as evidenced by responses that it generated (one of them being one of the highest ranked single comments in the history of HN).

Sorry for being pissy-- there is a constant barrage of people on HN who say the equivalent of "Yes, startups are hard for normal people. But I'm really smart-- it may still be hard, but my chances are waaaaaay better".

That's such a destructive attitude (more for you than for the people who read it and walk away shaking their head).
What else are you going to do if you spend 2-4 hours a day standing still in one spot trying not to look at anyone?

Read a book? And indeed, there is about an even split between people reading books and people playing with their mobiles. Remember that a lot of the trains run underground, and not every line has a cell phone signal for every provider.

I think the reason for the popularity of the mobile Internet is that there is no complexity involved to use the Internet from your phone. Everything is designed for the phone; you can buy things, you get billed for it, and it shows up at your house. On the computer, you have to type in details every time, and credit cards aren't very common, so you have to arrange some other way of paying. It's a pain.

Some other nice integration -- if you buy a JAL ticket and check-in with your mobile, you can use the phone as your boarding pass. I can check in for my flights on my US-based cell phone, but that's not going to get me through security. (Note that Japan also has realistic airport security, unlike the US.)
This reminds of the anti-singularity thesis: increasing wealth from technology enables a decline in cultural values. ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisin... ).

In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, London - all these cities had homicide rates that today you can only find in Pleasantville suburbia. It was the age of stern Victorian values and law and order policing. People did not have the luxury of giving criminals the benefit of the doubt, nor of allowing any kind of public disorder, lest their neighborhoods turn unsafe.

The trouble is, law and order tactics are a blunt instrument, and they are likely to offend and hurt good people too. Today, we are generally wealthy enough that moving away from crime is a possibility for the middle and upper class. Running has become easier than coming together as a community to solve the crime program. This especially true when "coming together as a community" means navigating big city politics, and cracking down on crime can get you labeled as racist. Today, when a community suffers from high crime rates, decent folk move out. First it was moving from the inner cities to the suburbs. Now, in many cases, people are moving from the suburbs back to expensive neighborhoods in the city. High real estate prices have become a substitute for crime control.

I think at some point we're going to have to stop the running and figure out how to stop the ongoing warfare in our cities. Allowing the crime is not doing anyone any good. Inner city men have astounding deaths from homicide. And the middle class is spending ever increasing portions of their income on housing. Everyone loses.
I manually visit their sites and sometimes setup google alerts on their company name.
Japanese culture still seems to prize intelligence, whereas places like the US require you to hide it some of the time. It's almost like they're an entire nation of nerds.
An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability
The two are not mutually exclusive.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/01/72329
Sounds pretty cool. So why don't you make a mobile phone app that recognizes some sort of useful object to recognize? That doesn't sound like it's too big of a project for a startup.

Even if a large company was to throw a huge amount of resources at this, they would still probably have a team of a few people make a demo first. They go through the same process as a startup in a sense, first having a few people trial and demo and if it seems good then give them more money and/or engineers.
"I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service?"

Kexter does a pretty good job at mashing up GIS data with Craigslist housing.
I heartily second the recommendation.
It's hard to find a lot of respect for someone who steals his employer's idea and makes billions off it. I mean, I guess that's OK in this "money is everything" society ("he's rich!!11!"), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
The bitter taste of nickels and dimes
I'm mildly curious about whether you have any actual data to back up some of this, because frankly it sounds like you are really overgeneralizing in an unreasonable and very emotional way. You could have more accurately noted that poor people moving into an area drive property values down and bring crime, and are not created by the "spike in the black population."

Instead, your anecdotes focused on black people as the culprit of all this evil. Why?
Here are a couple of quotes from his talk:
http://dcurtis.posterous.com/

He really is an an inspiring guy.
The main reason is the complexity of Japanese language, namely technical barriers that existed for text entry and displaying the characters on personnel computer in 80s-90s (http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-th...)

Thus there is a strong culture of complex specialized gadgets and a weak general-purpose personal computer culture.
none of the other major Unixes (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OSX etc) even have a need for something like this

Those systems are less compatible with all of the Linux distributions. If you're building applications for a customer base that is almost entirely Linux, then those other possibilities are even more difficult to support (and justify supporting) than yet another Linux distro.

And, of course, you're also wrong: To compare apples to apples, OSX, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are about as different as Red Hat, Debian, and SuSE from one another. All come from the same core codebase, if you go back far enough in history (OSX being the odd man out, being willfully stupid on some counts for legacy reasons, I guess...maybe comparable to SlackWare, since OSX has even less useful package management tools than FreeBSD) and yet you can't generally run software compiled for one on the other unmodified. Rebuilding is usually trivial, but it pretty much always has to be done.

The thing you don't seem to get is that each Linux distribution is a different operating system, built by different teams for different purposes. Just like OSX and FreeBSD are different operating systems. Incompatibility goes without saying...it's just that Linux folks have looked at the fragmented market, and decided that it'd probably be better if software makers could build a "Linux" package and expect it to work on all "Linux" systems. That's pretty cool, though it's a rather formidable task and takes more cooperation than operating system vendors (UNIX or otherwise) have ever really been able to pull off.
Another piece of "common sense" that seems all too rare.

It may seem like such an obvious point he is making, but it's definitely a point worth making. Focusing on short-term return at the expense of the customer relationship will never give good longterm results, and may not even give good short-term results.
No worries - that's what happens :-)

And yes, blatantly stolen from Kurzweil, I should have given credit where credit is due.
As someone who knows a lot about Japan, I can tell you that you're partially wrong. Japanese culture prizes intelligence as much as Western culture: only in those circles that would appreciate it.

Read up on traditional Japanese saying: "The Nail that Sticks Up will be hammered down." and conformity of Japanese culture.

http://www.snorko.org/cyberwrite/eng103/students/dianec.html
Doesn't everyone think execution is more important than idea alone? Even he stole the idea, but after he unveiled his site, he definitely could not steal the idea from connectU any more. So if founders of ConnectU really competed their service against Facebook with a better product, will Facebook be like today? I guess most likely they were just sat and waited and maybe did not treat it seriously until it was too late.

And we see ConnectU's founders are much better in enjoy life outside their startup.
Looks like me and markbao submitted at the same time. Or rather, I was slightly ahead.. since my link shows 4 hrs and his shows 3 hrs.

But I'm not complaining, you guys can kill off whichever link you like. Since he's the more established user, my link should die.
So you're a startup news junkie? Startuply Social Newswire with Slinkset
One of our features at Startuply lets startups import their blog RSS feeds into their company profiles. We think it helps give you a little extra context about the company and some insight into what they're thinking about. We also aggregate all of the feeds together into our little Startuply Newswire.

Well, the RSS stream became a river, and the river a flood. With hundreds of startup blog feeds, our newswire has overflown its banks. To help keep it interesting, we used Slinkset (which is amazing) to build our own social news site: check it out at http://news.startuply.com. This is startup news straight from the source, told by the companies that are making it.

The feed has been in my reader since launch, and I've already found a load of fascinating stuff that hasn't been covered or reported anywhere else. We're pretty excited to see what rises to the top with your help.

Personally, I'll be down-modding just about every Etsy story that comes through. Don't get me wrong, Etsy is great; I'm just tired of reading about handmade dreamcatchers that only let neon hipster dreams through.
"There is only one Steve Jobs and there is only one Apple. You’re never going to build something as cool as Steve, and as such there is no need for you to talk about your product for five or ten minutes."

What a ridiculous statement. I don't want to get into the "power of positive thought" or something but seriously does anyone actually limit themselves like that? "I'll just plug away and hope to develop something mediocre that takes off.."??? If you aren't shooting to make THE coolest thing you can imagine why bother? And if you are why limit your imagination to be up to but not greater than some other persons imagination? Other than paying the bills etc. etc. but you get my point (but at that stage get a corporate job or make porn sites, seriously).

Also I disagree with the point that demoing google would have been as simple as "enter text press enter - wow results." Surely they would have had to demo WHY their results were more correct/ranked etc. to differentiate themselves from yahoo, lycos and who ever else was floating around in the search engine wars.
Post on the site, explaining the situation, asking for donations. If the users are enthusiastic about it, as it sounds, the money will come.
Of course. No risk, no reward. No guts, no glory.
Maybe I'm not understanding the article here, but could this apply to the problem with aggressive lane-changers on a highway?

When people (I find this in myself) get on the freeway, it seems like they tend to get clear over to the fast lane right away. Shortly thereafter traffic starts to back up in that lane and the next slower lane looks like it's winning -- so a bunch of people move over, causing that lane to slow and the original lane to speed up. The resultant pattern is an oscillation of stop and go traffic in the lanes in question.

It seems like if this doesn't exactly apply that it at least speaks to what might be going on. I wonder if there has been any research in disallowing lane changes in areas prone to stop and go traffic.