skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There seems to be an explosion of these online storage services. They will become much more useful when/if there is a standardized API with per-app isolation and access control. The closest I've seen to that is Openomy:

http://api.openomy.com/2.0
Fotonauts will appeal very much to the wikipedia crowd.
Like wikipedia, I expect a small minority being responsible in generating most of the content.

In no time, Fotonauts will start attracting the masses in being a reference photo site. Eg. if I want to know more about tattoos, I won't go to Flickr. I just get pictures of tattoos at Flickr. At Fotonauts, I'll get to see the photos and relevant content about tattoos.
invite please?
Carbonite Steps Up the Competition in Online Backup
If you come from an enterprise background, you'll find that most enterprises are really serious about controlling their network. So they will pay. $1/user is like tea break expense for them.
I like it. It'll appeal to those who finds Yammer lacking (eg. no group features).

But if i have to make a choice, i'll go with Yammer because

1) I don't have a need for those advanced features that presentlyapp provides

2) Yammer feels more fun
"Ed. Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2003 issue of Esquire."

the editor actually went "Holy &#!! it's 9/11 coming up! Quick, what can we post?!" five minutes before going to press.
Same thing except a lot more cuts, and it ends right after the dad says 'Gates and Seinfeld...!'

The long version of this ad does a better job of conveying the 'normal people' theme, but the short version is as confusing as the first.
The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course
Live webcam from inside the LHC
Wire wrap jewelry, hand made and one of a kind designs.
Actually, a single pair of eyes can be enough, depending on who they belong to...
This brute force approach to bug fixing can be applied to Linux because it's so prevalent, but it's the exception rather than the rule in the open source world.
BUI: The internet's dirty little secret
Did any one try to run javascript with llvm ? javascript without dom and with FFI might be interesting to use on server side.
way to go, Leila!
A company whose well-being depends on the public charisma of its leaders is buying a ticket for a big crash.

But then, software companies are short-lived, compared to any other kind. Software technology is all about getting obsolete quickly while selling the next big thing. The trick is perhaps to keep doing so from within the same company.
Packages, the concept, make me say "hmm". Why do you need a separate sort of namespacing entity than objects?
Or one could start by writing about the issue, and bringing people's attention to the problem.

Writing convincingly about an issue you care about is probably the most effective thing you can do, unless you're already powerful in the domain you want to change.
Your first paragraph (the second part) is your opinion and how you perceived the ads. Fine. Everyone has (and should have) an opinion and a perception. It's personal. But for a marketer, the opinions and perceptions of the mass is what counts. If the "herd" doesn't move (preferably run) in the same direction then either my cowboys don't know the destination (the aim of the campaign, which is not to be funny or be talked about or be hip - those are the products of the campaign) or if they do, they don't know how to drive the cattle (which is, communicating where to go). In many cases (campaigns), the cowboys fail at both.

Ad hoc I don't have any ideas for a good Microsoft campaign. Any suggestion of mine, out of the blue, is shooting bullets in the air. Yeah, but it would be a nice way to feed my ego. :-) Using "hard" (like Mac vs. PC ads) or "soft" approach (by not mentioning the product explicitly) for the execution of the ads is almost secondary.

PS - I have spent most of my life as a developer and entrepreneur with Microsoft products (by choice). And I'm a Seinfeld fan-boy. But, that is not relevant when we're discussing this campaign.
YouTube vs. everyone else: No contest
How is that? He's identified that Google's corporate interests are not aligned with your personal interests, if you value privacy and control of your information highly.

You may not share these concerns, but his argument is by no means irrational.
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NetFlix Origami: The fun way to recycle your NetFlix flaps
FYI, el bulli is #1 restaurant in the world, fat duck is the second. And afaik fat duck is much more expensive if you include wines.

The important thing here is wines because yes you can find menu for that price but wine list that is meant to go hand in hand with the menu usually doubles the price.

Alinea is at number 21 btw.

http://www.theworlds50best.com/2008_list.html
Why it's so hard to secure JavaScript
Gorgeous Iolite Jewelry and Iolite Rings, in silver and gold.
An Interview with toonlet.com's Craig Schwartz
First impressions: Very positive

Dropbox will probably take over gmail as my primary file storage on the go... ;)

Now, one question though, is Dropbox smart enough to only access network when I am actually doing anything with it(ie transfering files from/to Dropbox), or will it occasionally do weird sync type of things even when I am not using it(but have Dropbox folder open on desktop)?
I'm just loving that YouTube listed "Firework scares my punjabi neighbor" as a "Related Video."
exhibit a) cuil

I rest my case.
Now that's just silly. You clearly didn't use both the 1st generation iPod and its competitors.

I fiddled around with the Creative Jukebox or whatever it was called before buying the first iPod: the forward next buttons barely worked, the LCD could barely fit the name of a single track on the screen, and the entire UI was barely responsive. The click wheel for scrolling, the large LCD, the great battery life, the incredible form factor... the iPod was 5 years ahead of the competitors.

There were the Rios which were well made, but that was a different league... they were more akin to the shuffle.

And to top it all off, I was using Windows at the time, so it was at a software disadvantage. I had to use some hacky 3rd party, unsupported software to even sync the thing.
I do like the idea, but perhaps a few more people could have been convinced to join before the link is spread around more widely?

I know, I know, chicken-and-the-egg problem, but it looks a little bare.
This map can't be accurate... I've never heard anyone say anything _other than_ soda in the greater Boston area.
Rate/Review my startup - textbin
How do you order say an orange drink? Do you say you want an orange coke? Or worse pepsi - do you order pepsi coke?

Sprite coke? Coke sprite?
Meh.

I never buy anything drunk. When I'm drunk in front of my computer (rarely), I either sleep, waste time on Reddit, or talk crap on IRC.

I doubt this is a widespread problem.
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1. get a partner if possible, esp if he/she will invest real $$ as well. if going solo, get a peer review group set up (beta users, your friend who is a web designer/technical type, your mom, target market, so on). The longer people hear about your product or service, the more likely they will jump on board as soon as it is ready. And people are really good at finding other useful people. Actively network (not necessarily like crazy, more just reality check * small multiple)

2. focus on the business, not the software (freshbooks!). This also means that if you need more than your 15K, start hunting for financing or cash _now_. Cash flow > everything else. When you're sweating laundry money and forgoing Starbucks or a pint at the local NOTHING gets done.
You just have to punch past the line where you're "adding features" and instead "fulfilling business needs". A business that's bleeding red has more value than a finished product w/o customers and their attendant baggage - sales marketing support etc.

3. show off the product to many before you think it's "ready", because otherwise your baby will never be ready. Don't even think about competition until you have something competitive - and if you're in internet business, the market is big enough for everybody. Never lie, but do promote your shit to anyone who will listen.

4. Set up a proper dev and DVCS from day -1. Write functional tests so you can at least know if you break functionality while adding features. And docs rule. (Almost) always write code like you won't read it until 3 months later.

5. outsource and manage-host _everything_ reasonable

6. If it's consumer facing software and not middleware - UI IS EVERYTHING. And UI always takes way longer than the so called "hard stuff".

7. always push yourself: not to the limit, but just beyond where you think you can go. The "I can't believe I did that" feeling is my personal favorite.

And there will be a lot of feelings. This rollercoaster ride will be rough, but when you're on the way up or at the top ... BOOM ... spring in your step ... pebbles in your shoes ... Michael Phelps ain't got nothing on me (ok, that was extreme, but the "I AM KOBE" effect does rock).

In case you didn't read it, Young Money intervied Mark Cuban recently. He says it all better than me: http://www.youngmoney.com/entrepreneur/entrepreneur_profiles...

All the best!!!
Now that Google has used an open source component from Microsoft, MS could scrap the engine they use in IE and use WebKit-V8 combo instead. Would be nice...
want the souce? get it:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/5143/nautilus-dropbox-packages/0....
An alternative pair of products: Wuala and KeePass (Windows, Linux, MacOS X, PocketPC, J2ME (Symbian), BlackBerry)

http://wua.la -- online storage (files are encrypted on your computer before uploading, GUI is more clattered compared to DropBox, 1GB by default, additional space can be bought (money) or traded in exchange for local space (free))

http://keepass.info -- password manager (it works almost everywhere)
There's one mention of the word "suicide" in an article that should have been 1/10 the size.

I don't think that was suicide. The article described his posture and how he wasn't flailing around like the other jumpers. Rather here he falls, staring straight down, saying "fuck you. I choose." In those last moments he refused to have his freedom denied by awful circumstances.

At least that's what I got out of it.
It's esquire. Of course it's overwritten.
You're asking the wrong guy man.
I myself am waiting to try out the service.

My opinions about them were based on the demo they gave at TC50
That's not Dropbox, that's the Nautilus integration. That is, you keep the essential parts proprietary and closed, and open the parts where you hope others to do work for you. It's not the oddest strategy, but it doesn't live up to the promise either.

On the other hand, if you freed the daemon too, you could get included in Linux distributions, and people would know what all Dropbox is doing on their computers.
The really early days of computing (How I shot down VisiCal)
In some domains, big failures are better than small failures: you learn more.
Related, 'Girl Turk' - Girl Talk meet Mechanical Turk:

http://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/
I stared at the homepage for a couple of minutes and still couldn't figure out what it did. So I thought I'd try and create whatever a bin is and I'm asked to login. I stopped there.
I've been using Syncplicity, which offers similar functionality, and that works too. Clearly, their PR isn't as good - it's been launched for some time.
There's an assumption in this blog post that underpins a lot of semantic web stuff, even the biggies like Powerset: that people can, will and prefer to type out "correct" semantic queries versus simply throwing a few keywords into Google. Granted keyword searching is a bit of a skill and individual searches can often take some massaging to get the right info, but I'm not sure that everybody prefers to type out full questions instead.

On a related tangent: has anyone here ever had one of the semantic web search startups actually answer a question they had? I mean a real question, not a demo one cooked up to show off tailored results. I haven't, I even gave Powerset a try the last time I genuinely had a question - "are dogs carnivores?" - retarded example I know but I genuinely couldn't remember. Here's the results:

http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/are-dogs-carnivores%3F

Useless. Interestingly, the older mainstream search engines had no problem answering the question right in their search results - both Ask and Google even suggested various questions in a drop down and auto completed my query.

ask: http://tinyurl.com/4wu9z4

google: http://tinyurl.com/543t7h
A First Taste of InvokeDynamic
>I doubt this is a widespread problem.
I think you're the wrong gender. Apparently, for females it is. All the interviewed subjects were females, after all.
I've use jungledisk and MobileMe/iDisk, but on seeing this story this morning I thought I'd give dropbox a try, and I was blown away by how well it 'just worked'. Things like sharing, proper diffs, public folders all done properly and simply. Really need Mac Finder integration. I'm a convert!

Shame that someone else has the dropbox.com domain though ...
Having lived in the south (Tennessee and North Carolina) most of my life, I haven't heard that one. I can believe is coming from a heavy southern accent sounding like "dope" instead, though. People are strange, nonetheless.

Before I was born, the majority of my family made a move from Iowa to Illinois to Tennessee (A weird transition on its own.) My brother almost got in trouble with a fast food chain when he ordered some "pop". The cashier misheard and thought he was asking for some pot and freaked out. (It didn't help he was a teenager at the time.) Nowadays, I think he's given up and conformed to just saying "coke".
"A company whose well-being depends on the public charisma of its leaders is buying a ticket for a big crash."

Not always. If it is done correctly, the company can live off their legacy for very long.

But it has to be done right.
I wouldn't recognise Steve Ballmer if I walked by him on the street. Unless he was begging..
The message is clear: "Windows, for IQs 100 and below".
Yeah, sorry - I was planning to add a "What is textbin" link and provide various help pages.... doing that now...

But at the login page there is a link to register - isn't that enough?
Snap. Also, the tour thing doesn't load on the PCs here at work (probably the firewall), so I still don't know what it is! The site could do with a bit of simple plain boring old html text which tells us poor people behind firewalls what all the fuss is about :)
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FTA: Map based upon 120,464 respondents. (Which they spelled 'Respondants')

This isn't enough to draw a meaningful map of just Alaska. There are likely whole counties colored base on a single response.
Crispin Porter is once again rebranding through awkwardness.

It's making me feel like Microsoft is a company from a Wes Anderson movie.
while thats true, it isn't going to be the case for every company. thats why there are things like XP and code reviews and such.
Oh very nice! Here I am with my recursive trees looking like a fool.

You win a big hunk of cheese.
All the people interviewed were female and worked in media in one form or another.

If that is the only demographic where "BUI" is common I can't say it's widespread. Difficult to know from this article.
Ok, I've added a "What is textbin?" bin which briefly explains the idea. It needs work but it's a start!

This is a really simple idea and it's not really ready for release yet (which is why there is currently little explanation about what it is!).

I guess I am hoping the comments here will help me to decide whether this is a waste of time or not! I keep changing my mind myself so I thought I'd get some constructive criticism and see what happens!
Perl making people more POLITE (at least perl monks thinks so)
Over the years people kept telling me that the magic wand just selected lots of pixels, yet I still believed there was something magical about it.
Marketplace for brand identities. Good idea for a new startup?
> Some wise lisp programmer once said - I'm paraphrasing - that one of the reasons his company was able to compete in a market of 30 odd players was that they could often duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release.

That was YC's own Paul Graham talking about ViaWeb i think.
This article talks about an interesting observation, that the behavior of people exposed to Perl (or any programming language for that matter) tends to be affected by it. I think there might be something to it.
or yelling at people and throwing chairs..
See, to my eyes, that photograph and the story surrounding it is very far from a reflection on fear.
That giraffe has been in our family for six years.
Discussion: What type of (programming) challenges do you enjoy?
I just gave that app a try there - I like it.

I second (or third now!) that I don't like the meaningless words. Makes it much harder to type them I reckon, and some of the words seem to be real words, but with missing letters, so you find yourself typing the real word, which is wrong!!
We talk about Microsoft all the time, but rarely is it as positive as this.

Bill Gates actually made me laugh.
WeGIF Valuation
I must admit I've done this a couple of times.

Going out with mates and getting hammered on a weekend, then a couple days later getting several emails from ebay informing me I've won some stuff that I really didn't know I'd bid on.

So far I've purchased a hula hoop, a giant talking ET doll, several pairs of marvin the martian socks, a replica hanzo sword from Kill Bill and a tupperware set.

Luckily I have cheap (and tacky) tastes it seems, so the damage has so far been relatively contained.
Just curious: what websites impress/impressed you?

One of the most entertaining parts of working at a big company was seeing the HR people & other managers do the sandwich during employee reviews. Painful.
What if he was throwing chairs?

Edit: damn, I should refresh before posting...
Can you build an enterprise-only Web app?
My point was more, how the hell could there be that many bugs?
Any plans for a standard phone java app?
Introducing the IE8 Developer Tools JScript Profiler
Maybe it's because Perl has never been fashionable, so you only do it because you want/have to, rather than make big money (Java) or make a fashion statement (H*skell, etc :^) It also has deep roots in Unix-land (I tend to find Unix hackers more friendly than Windows people).

Unfortunately, I've known many awkward, unfriendly and arrogant people who use Perl, such as that guy who used to literally shout and punch the filing cabinets if you went to him with a bug. Or the guy who took pride in writing obfuscated code and would never explain it clearly, even when you asked him. Or code snob who thought he was evolving into a being of pure light while us mere mortals cleared up his mess for him.

Perlmonks is a great site though. They've always been friendly and incredibly helpful.
I like Perl hackers.

They do stuff... cool stuff... even lispy stuff... but they remain practical and relatively humble. The TMTOWTDI philosophy seems to have hardwired a certain degree of open mindedness in them-- they just don't appear to be as arrogant or argumentitive in the usual internet wars. Just an impression, YMMV, etc....
Joel's point is that this now allows you to put an additional layer between you and the security weakness. No this isn't foolproof but it's better than what most people have.

love, sex, god, secret, password - sad how many people use these still.
Isn't Flickr the perfect example? I know a lot of people that pay for it, and a lot of people that don't. Some blogging platforms also use the model successfully.
The malicious assumption is in the parent post ("Jobs didn't get the market share he has by being nice") -- I'm saying that's unlikely, hence I agree that Apple's problem is most likely due to incompetence.
List of Successful Companies to Get Your Startup Juices Flowing
Yahoo's desperate strategy blitz
I sometimes wonder how prevalent selection bias is in articles like this and the demographics they feature. If you're a magazine writer in NYC writing an article like this, how do you find people who buy under the influence? Stop people on the street? Go to a crowded bar and chat people up? It seems likely that a decent percentage of your interviews are with friends and friends of friends. It also seems likely that many of those people would be in similar careers.
Paul Graham mentioned in one of his essays that although ViaWeb faced tough competition he knew that working hard enough, his team could implement features that would force his competitors to drag themselves over rocky terrain just to try and keep up.

If you think there's a chance in hell, give it a go. Otherwise you'll always wonder 'what if...?'
Why is the Web still so U.S.-centric?
I've picked up a few programming books on amazon sometimes, stuff that'd been sitting on my wishlist for a while.
Mercury - The First Planet | The Astronomy Blogger
I think The Onion covered this several years ago...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39045
Is Pluto a Planet? | The Astronomy Blogger
Wheh its good news that jruby will get a lot faster, but that article went straight over my head. Not enough coffee yet.
Monitoring the conversation is a win-win
You know, at this point, if I ever meet Bill Gates in real life, I'd be way too tempted to call him "Dave Thomas" while I shook his hand.

Here's hoping that never happens...
The most amusing thing I remember from the cold war, was the prevalance of pepsi in communist countries. That and the saying "coke for jews, pepsi for arabs" in the middle east...
no doubt he is a bit over the top but that passion and energy is really exciting.
Personally, I think Apple will have a really hard time after Jobs leaves (much moreso than when he left before).
You should be able to watch closures in Firebug within the scope of the function using breakpoints.