skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I think the real problem is entrepreneurs who are primarily looking for money/recognition don't look for problems that need to be solved, they look for problems that can be solved. I would love to see more cross disciplinary startups instead of companies solving problems using purely software.
Chrome Boosts Support for Greasemonkey Scripts, cross-origin XMLHttpRequest
The most neutral resolution to this is instead of comcast denying service to this user, they need to install fees for excessive amounts of data used. While this person thinks of bandwith as a utility and a right, a utility is not based on a flat rate, and the writer obviously voided their agreement of their right to use data.
> The issue isn't "word choice" it is tone and writing style.

Forgive me, my vocabulary failed me when I was writing that particular sentence.

> Writing in leetspeek is equally objectionable, for instance, and people do downvote those who write that way on HN.

Good point, although leetspeak kills readability, whereas "this." is just a way to say "yes, I agree with you.".

In my opinion, a comment that is simply "this." should get no votes at all, whereas a comment that is entirely in leetspeak should be downvoted into oblivion. Killing readability is a far greater sin than simply failing to realize that the upvote button exists for a reason.
From the looks of it, the program merely learned the rules of the game by doing textual analysis of the manual, and maybe got a few strategic hints as well. As for actually learning to play the game _well_, my sense from the article is that the program then used more conventional machine learning techniques to test and adopt winning moves.
Good points. Having extra options through the games is a great addition here that I don't recall seeing before (but I'm not exactly researching this topic ;-)). The problem is, grabbing a quick 1000 points for doing a "like" is pretty tempting.

I know I'm in the minority here, though. These sorts of things clearly work, but I'm the guy who'd rather put down $10 for something than send a tweet to get it for free (or pull out one of my "spare" accounts I don't care about, of course ;-)).
This is pretty vague. Do you mean that they had trouble interpreting the accelerometer data to detect bumps?
This algorithm is also used in a certain University in Ontario's Co-op Job Board.
How does that even makes sense?

If I make an open-source heart rate monitor, doesn't that benefit people who want heart rate monitors, hurt people who make for-pay heart rate monitors, and divert my resources away from solving anyone elses problems?
If you ever end up in court for patent litigation, drop me a message. I'll be there to applaud you when the plaintiff lawyer reads it.
I really don't understand why so many tech savy people fall for google+ at all. I believe its simply a privacy nightmare...
The circles feature allow for a lot more precise data collection on a persons social network and thus better ad targeting and profiling.
Patent pools are no defense against trolls.
I actually went well over the cap last month, 315GB according to both Comcast's metering and Tomato on my router (I'd rebuilt the server that runs my Tor relay, but hadn't cranked the bandwidth settings back down, and it ran for a while flat-out). I was sweating bullets, but they never said a thing to me. Most months I do get into the 200GB range, so it doesn't take much to get close to the cap.
I think it's easy to get this impression but the reality is that there are many thriving software businesses with mature open source alternatives.

I work for Atlassian. Our two biggest products are a wiki and a bug tracker. We have dozens of open source competitors. There is also a long list of commercial competitors. Many of our commercial competitor started up in the last few years and they seem to be growing or at least they haven't gone out of business.
My point was that you seemed to have purposely made that 'headline' that you thought he should have used needlessly verbose, to the point where it couldn't be considered a headline.
Make Moving a lot easier with Packaging Boxes
Using packaging boxes is not a life changing aspect but is one of those small things that make a major difference. They are easily available from any hardware and superstore and are there to be taken advantage of, so why not? We offer cheap packaging boxes globally.
Look at it from the point of view of business, financial, and lawyers familiar with how auctions work. This type of behavior is "weird" and not according to convention. The rebel in a lot folks is ok with this, but it goes against "normal" behavior in these situations. Wearing a pink tutu to the opera might make you feel rebellious, but it likely make other opera goers think less of you. Think of all the times business folks have messed over programmers in stuff that should be a programmer's prevue. An auctioneer would take Google's bids to be crazy or dismissive. You bid the increment, anything else is screwing with others and your shareholders.
Actually, I think her perspective as an outsider makes her more qualified to point out what's wrong with the Silicon Valley startup scene.
That's why "this has failed before" isn't a good heuristic; a lot of ideas that failed in previous decades are now viable due to changes in technology or society.
Just decided to check on the unlimitedness... My father's company has Comcast Business Internet and I setup their network. I think they have 15 employees, 5-6 of which would regularly be using a computer/internet connection.

The Buffalo DD-WRT router they're plugged into---Comcast gives you their own, but I wasn't trusting of a router that they likely had remote access to, so I installed an inner network---indicates that he's been doing a little over 500GB of transfer per month for the last five months. I haven't heard of any problems with him getting notices of going over (but I am going to have to ping him about those numbers... they're a manufacturing outfit and I don't think anyone there knows what a cloud service is ... most likely they're unwittingly becoming a cloud service for a botnet).
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If you’re on OSX you can try out Time Sink. I liked it.

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/time-sink/id404363161?mt=12
I think you're being a bit flippant here, dismissing out of hand a point that she's not making with some examples that are only tangentially relevant.

Google was "just" another search engine, sure. But it was far better than any of the other search engines out there. You can't say that of the groupon clones. They're all slightly different ways of doing Groupon, and none of them at this point look like they're offering any significant advantage over eachother. They may be more or less sustainable or profitable than Groupon, but they aren't game changers in the sense that Google was.

She wasn't complaining that startups have exits, she was complaining that startups are being designed around exits. None of the counter-examples you listed, nor any established company that anyone can name off hand, was designed for an exit. You can look at the guys who did 
gmail
 Google Maps* or Youtube and say yes, they got a good exit, but both companies were designed to do something new, and their exit followed from that. A lot of startups these days seem to be designed to show off design skills and the ability to write an app, rather than actually do something unique and useful.

Which brings me to your last point. Writing Basic interpreters for hobbyists wasn't trivial in the sense that the author meant. Finding a cupcake or sharing a photo is trivial: it doesn't much change anyone's life, and it's been done a thousand times before. It's trivial in the sense that a fart app for the iPhone is trivial. Microsoft's innovation was not that it could write basic interpreters, as people wrote basic interpreters for new architectures all the time. Their innovation was that they were an independent software firm who contracted their services out to hardware manufacturers. This is how they came to land the DOS contract with IBM that catapulted them to success. That innovation was as big as the innovation where someone first said, "why are we hosting this on a server in the basement? Why don't we throw it up on some server out there that doesn't care where we are or what device we're using to access it?"

If you look at any of the big tech companies around today, they got their start by doing something either a) no one had done before, or b) an order of magnitude better than anyone had ever done it. Most of the startups you see today don't make any effort at a) or b), but they are c) designed to be flipped in a talent acquisition. This is what the author was complaining about, and if you don't accept it as a legitimate criticism then you at least have to address her actual point.

*Edit: see response from protagonist_h
I agree with most of what you said, but I think you are trying to assert that academia is altruistic ? Academia is not altruistic. The Universities are in the billion dollar education business. They are just labeled non-profit yet they make hundred of millions collectively in TV contracts but none of that is used to help the poor communities and families many of their athletes come from. They are no better than bankers and consultants, or entrepreneurs trying to make a buck.
Actually, Stallman is pretty clear in his stance. He doesn't care what kind of monetization scheme you use, but your customers have a right to see the source code. You could ostensibly only give the source out to paying customers.

You might argue "but then the client can take the source and change it and redistribute it", but how is that any different from real life? The fact that you can charge so much for scarce copies of physical goods is a flaw of physical objects, not a flaw of digital objects. The digital world doesn't support the monetization schemes of the physical. Fighting that seems to be a losing battle (see RIAA, MPAA, et. al)
Crap. Now I need to go buy some legos and relive my childhood.
I want to exit so I can have enough money to not worry about if something I work on or come up with isn't 20 years ahead of it's time putting me in the poor house.

I worked in big corp thinking I could make a change but that didn't happen. Reached the top technically, and that was it.

So I can't blame these guys as I know some of them think like I do. However, like any good thing you can get caught up in it and forget why you started it in the first place.
You can reasonably value a company that may be killed soon for $1 billion if, in the case that it survives, it will be worth much more than that.
While I disagree with the title (even in the hunter-gatherer days there was always a leader), I agree with the theory that people work better in smaller groups. I actually thought the number was more like 4-6, but 8 is pretty close to that.

I was actually just remarking about that the other day when enumerating some advantages that startups and other small companies have over large ones.
MMJ Kush takes on Weedmaps by offering Groupon Style Daily Deals 100% FREE
Google Plus - a Minus on blocking and privacy
Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to see things clearly.

The article may be right or wrong or both, but I've found myself thinking the same thing about a lot of the startups I've heard about recently. So far I've assumed I was antisocial or "didn't get it", but perhaps most of them are just as silly as I'd imagined.
yes please I am interested.
Pretty sure pg said somewhere that it's a fool's game searching for the next Microsoft, because to get that you need another company to bend over at the right time to be the next IBM. I doubt YC has ever been expecting that.
State Of The Internet 2011 (HTML5 Infographic)
"Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Financing a startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debt stupidest of all. Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish." - pg
Thanks for sharing! It looks like it would have done what I wanted.

The other one mentioned is still in development, though, and I think I'll see where it goes.
is 24GB vRAM per license low?

Several people have calculated that a vSphere license costs much more than the RAM itself.
Zuckerberg and Google elite hit Google+ privacy button
I also don't really see the investors pushing startups which could be 5-10 year IPO-track big successes into early exits. An IPO or even late-stage M&A into a very related company (e.g. Mint's "takeover" of Intuit...) is really different from a 6-12mo flip talent acquisition, but both are called "exits".

If anything, investors want the moon shots more than most founders do.
Sure thats true, but small companies dont have 300 servers but still need a sysadmin. Thats why platform services that dont require sysadmins like infrastructure services are so compelling and seeing so much innovation. There is a huge value there.
As an ignorant observer, I feel like the Silicon Valley has to avoid becoming Wall Street--billions of dollars given to geniuses to make a profit while filling an existing but trivial need that truly helps a small portion of the population.
USA's Toilet Paper Shortage
I've only been using HN a short while, and even though this issue is terribly annoying, I will stay for the interesting articles.
It only hurts the monitor makers as much as any other competitor would. Even though they are competing against a competitor with a price of $0, that just means they need to make their product worth its price with extra features or specialization for clients. It only hurts a company that can't compete or improve, and that's a good thing for society.
Agreed! We're a bunch of hackers; publish on github and let us do our thing!
Patent law reform is a must.
The headlines are of course exaggerations to sell ads, but LTE is the next step and Android just got a bit more expensive to use. The question is does this reduce the profit for handset manufactures to a point where other OS options are more profitable.
I don't see any difference between hardware and software here. The difference to worry about is whether the patents are defensive or offensive.
Fair response. I am not sure I buy the "slippery slope" argument, especially with the intensity of the change you suggest at the end, but fair enough.
If you look at robotics(which is probably a game changing field as the PC or more), Boston is a big robotics cluster , Pittsburgh is another. silicon valley is definitely not a robotics leader.
It's annoying, but overalI don't mind it.

What I will kill for though is a simple "return to homepage" link...or better yet a timed redirect...on the expired page.

I often browse with my laptop on the coffee-table and a wireless mouse in my hand and it's a pain to have to reach forward and hit the backspace button (or go all the way up to the back button) AND click the link at the top again.

Seriously, this is something that gets me EVERY DAY, and it's frustrating.
That is not Stallman's stance. His stance is that you must give customers your source code as well as the right to modify and distribute that source code and products derived from that source code without limitation so long as they preserve those rights for others. That's a big difference.
A talk I gave at Melbourne Perl Mongers last night...

"Pre-release" code can be found at:

http://h4c.kr/mysql-replication-0.0.0.tar.gz

It will be up on GitHub and CPAN hopefully this weekend.
I think Paul makes some great points in this article. One thing he might overlook, however, is that people can have great mentors even in large organizations. Freedom is great and all, but is it really detrimental to work in a large organization? There is a reason that the organization as a whole is still around. Not everybody has the ability nor drive to run wild, come up with brand new ideas, and be revolutionary straight out of college.
No fields were found in any search_indexes Django
I think benblack's argument is that Adam can recommend disabling DHE because he knows what it is and what it does and can make an informed decision about whether or not your average SSL-enabled site needs it.

Matt simply says "I messed with my settings and leaving this one out makes it faster", without knowing whether or not turning DHE off is safe (or if he does know, clearly he's making it seem like he doesn't). The fact that it is safe -- in this instance -- isn't particularly relevant. The point is that someone who doesn't understand the security implications of something is making a recommendation about security, just cloaked in a recommendation about performance.

Anyway, I don't know any of the people we're talking about here, just trying to help clear up what I believe benblack was trying to say :)
GripFun Follow Focus
GripFun Follow Focus is a great gadget for perfecting your photographying
Spotify will officially launch in the US tomorrow morning
2.7 is on the roadmap as well as SSL for custom domains.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
She is simply suggesting that startups today aren't working on anything important. I somewhat agree with the article.

A criticism like this is difficult for tech-minded nerds to accept, since "importance" is a fuzzy concept lacking clearly definable metrics. But we can test it this way: Pretend a company disappears tomorrow without any warning at all. Do you care? If not, whatever it is that they do isn't very important. I think it's fair to say that those groupon clones and photo sharing apps wouldn't be missed.

I don't know what "important" is, but I know it when I (don't) see it.
Learn about RenderScript from Romain Guy and Chet Haase
The food analogy is ingenious. Like junk food kills my real hunger and makes me a less active hunter/farmer, so the "junk" job makes me want to learn less and keeps me with safe choices.

Both in the not so long term destroy me as a competitive creature.
The Chinese Way of Hacking
What am I missing here? (Why is this on the front page?)
Are you still? I'm able to access it using Chrome 12.0.742.122 for Mac.
Apple Updates Prices in International iTunes Stores
Most of the time, game changers don't look like game changers when they first start. So they're often dismissed as being trivial. It's true for anything that we depend upon today. cars, radio, tv, computers, internet, social networks, twitter, etc.

Most people, investors (and myself) included, are also not the most imaginative bunch. You can't hope to raise money from things that are more than one hop away from things that they know.

And lastly, innovation from a startup's perspective, is almost never a brilliant flash of insight. It's usually a gradual iterative process of discovery and learning that looks like a brilliant flash of insight in hindsight, especially to people re-telling the story. Everyone wants to hear about what was going on when the meteoric rise was happening (relatively short time), as opposed to all the time spent laying the ground work and exploration and deadends beforehand (relatively long time). You can only hope to do iterative discovery before breaking the ground somewhere. What the author complains about lack of innovation is really just what innovation looks like on the ground--feeling around in the dark. You have a better chance of finding something if you work from where you know, rather than just taking a giant hop. And really, innovation is never immediately obvious. It usually is just an inkling--a tickle.

On a macro level, innovation has flashes in the number of people that are working on it. Lots of people are doing groupon "clones" because it's still an area where variants are to be explored. If you think about us as a colony of ants, we're all looking for food (ideas), and once we find some, we'll exhaust that before looking for more. Where there is food is likely to be more food. It's not exactly a bad strategy.
Yes. I'm saying: you're more likely to hear them talking about patient numbers, or bitching about billing systems or medicare reimbursements.
Cease and desist.
You weren't meant to have a boss. You also weren't meant to read, work on computers, drive cars, fly, or even practice agriculture. Its very easy to criticize any modern institution on the grounds of, "Our H. Erectus ancestors didn't do it, so it must be unnatural." Rather than snark about how the phenomenon is bosses is somehow unnatural and antithetical to human existence, why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages?
Google Sparsehash
Ugh, don't remind me. Now THAT's a student-pessimistic system if I ever saw one.
This makes a lot of sense seeing as the Australian dollar is now worth more than the USD.
I came to the exact opposite conclusion - I figured the author probably just doesn't have access to the quality startups. It's very easy to meet hundreds of low quality startups in SV, but it would be a mistake to generalize that experience to the entire population of startups in SV.
I think the insidious thing about large organizations is not a lack of freedom or an inability to exercise your creative muscles.

The insidious thing the large organization teaches you is that this is how things operate, and that a successful career means never having freedom and never exercising your creative muscles on a succession of larger and larger projects for a larger salary, so that you can buy a house you can't afford that's just barely close enough to the office but still so far that it takes you two hours to get to work.

If someone decides they want to trade freedom and creativity for job security and a stable paycheck, that's perfectly fine, as long as they're making the decision. If your first job out of college is an entry-level gig at a bigco that you barely managed to get, 8 years of inertia later you'll be coasting along at some mid-level position at a bigco, doing basically the same things. Inertia combined with the peer pressure of seeing everyone else doing what you're doing can be a powerful thing.
Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Pants aren't shirts. It's clear Ben doesn't think Matt is qualified to write the post. But he should have holstered the impulse to gripe about it until Matt wrote something wrong.
Seriously? Having 'paging' tied to the GC in this way, or any way at all for that matter, does not sound like a good idea to me.
What people don't seem to remember is that Google came out of the last bubble and became what it is today. It captured and hoarded a significant chunk of the value that existed back then. The value of the Google of 2020 could be split across 30 companies worth 5B each today. 29 of them could die, one could be worth 300B.
What did Lodsys get that patent in the first place!? Who were the idiots that approved the patent?
Also worth noting that Simon Willison of Django fame is also cofounder of a YC company.
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=you+weren%2...

How is it that this article is getting reposted? It's a great article, I know. But couldn't the HN community submit and upvote new and current articles? Wouldn't the community be better served by this? I suppose if enough members haven't seen it then the upvotes and front page placement are a net gain, but please don't let this stuff rise to the top just because pg wrote it. If it must stay up here, let it be because users who have not read the article prior find value in it.

/self-righteous rant
Spotify to Launch in U.S. July 14