skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of the Greg McAdoo vs David Heinemeier Hansson debate at Startup School. It totally polarises 'the VC approach' and 'bootstrapping' and talks in very general terms.

I don't believe there's a right answer to this. Surely the answer is always "it depends". And what it depends on is the interesting part of this whole debate.
This is exactly the idea behind BarterCard
http://www.bartercard.com/
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Love and Hate with Java
Possibly, if it were being distributed via the App Store, but this is not. Instead, it is aimed only (at the moment) at paid up iPhone devs who can build and install it on their own hardware without approval from Apple.

I'm interested in how they're going to make the Squeak UI usable on such a small screen. Guess I'll have to try it :)
Is there any data available on the avg no. hrs/week [insert type of user here] puts in?

I've been surprised at some of the readings as well.
Now this is just cruel to Sun, giving them a false sense of hope for their iPhone JVM...

I sort of hope Java doesn't ever make it to the iPhone, but I'd love to see some other languages.
I think it depends on your time line and whether you can create a working, valuable website/application/product/whatever by bootstrapping. Some industries you can, some you can't.

We could have easily done http://TicketStumbler.com by bootstrapping, but YC moved our time line up by at least six months to a year, which we deemed very much worth the equity we gave up.
i just think that as it developed from the hot new thing to the ubiquitous language, things got tacked on and wrenched in just to get the functionality in there.
Because the input device is so small that there is no room to use multiple fingers effectively? Because that is the way people use mobile touch screen devices? (Hold the device with one hand, poke/type with the other)
He fucked a founder over...and over...and over...
The Big Ideas of Computer Science, Part 2 Permalink
Human Genetics is Now a Viable Hobby -- 23andMe Cuts its Price to $399
Those are interesting changes.

It's true most headers don't change. One I can think of that usually changes between resource types is Accept. Usually it will be slightly different between <img> <script> <link> and <iframe>, but this probably wouldn't make much of a difference if you allow only to send changed headers. I'd be curious to see how much bandwidth you save with this. You also might want to allow for header removal as you do header change. I can't think of a scenario where not removing a header would cause a problem, but there could potentially be one.

For the gzip as a whole instead of per request, there's one reason I can't see many browsers taking advantage of that. Most browsers will make requests like, write request, read response, write request, read response. Instead of write, write, write, read, read, read. So I'm not sure how you could unzip everything together unless you wait to display the items till the entire connection is finished. Also, this would require the client to give an indication when it is done writing requests to the stream, so that all the data can be fetched from the server and then zipped together. Which would require a much bigger change to the protocol.

Is there anything I'm missing?
Why do I have a feeling that they did absolutely no programming at all...
TC50: Postbox Takes On Outlook And Mac Mail With Smarter, Faster Email Client
A Random Walk and Efficient Market Theory are misunderstood and misrepresented.

People equate efficient market with perfect market, meaning the market "knows" the right price. All that efficient market theory states is that information is communicated efficiently, not that the information is correct. Other bubbles would never happen.

Proponents state that prices are only correct in the long run. Malkiel (author of A Random Walk) advocates whole market index funds simply because you cannot know what information is correct and beating the market is a fool's errand. Again the case in point being the irrational run up in tech stocks not based on fundamentals but based on the greater fool theory. Information as pricing was communicated effectively but the information is not guaranteed to be either correct or rational.

The stock market is a weighing machine not a voting machine - Benjamin Graham.

However, I do enjoy Cuban's take on this as he's been there and down that. I think he could write a great book at some point.
And thus, by definition, it is NOT universal! (sorry, couldn't resist)
Retailers Reprogram Workers In Efficiency Push
Student loans can actually be deferred for 18 months at time. And, if you go back to school for one semester, the deferrment period for those student loans gets reset, and you can take an 18 month deferrement.

So, you could go back to grad school for a semester, and then reset your student loans. It's a pain, but there's cases where that's worth it.
He's not necessarily saying to bootstrap. Only during the initial stages. Lack of money gives you a much more realistic picture of what's going on with your company.
wget. Integreated it with a C# application just fine. It outputs the pages to file and produces a nice parsable crawl log. It is single thread but unless you're crawling wikipedia, you won't have a problem. Small tools that work well are a good start. I had problems with many of the multi-threaded crawlers, they seemed to trip over themselves, wget was fast and rock solid.
How many new touchscreen-only devices are coming out with screens so small that this solution is feasible?
Michael Arrington seems best at promoting himself and the TechCrunch brand. This is more of the same, and it's not all that surprising.

Now, maybe he wanted to rub elbows with Kutcher, maybe he wanted the celeb name at his conference to raise awareness of his brand, maybe he wanted it there to raise awareness for the other start-ups. Anyway, this article sounded like sour grapes. (Aaaand it seems to me like having Ashton Kutcher attached to a celebrity rag site is probably a good idea.)
Why is it 3d? That makes it really hard to figure out what shape it is.
A text input method for devices I think I could actually use...
Watch the video here to be impressed

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10037202-1.html
I read the whole thing, and I just don't like it. The beauty of HTTP headers, cookies, and elements is their simplicity (or primitivness). They are easy to implement.

This proposal will introduce a huge complexity to the HTTP spec. If you have implemented caching in a client, it is so easy for things to go wrong, even if the clients are right, the server, content managers could mess this up roaly really fast.

The other thing I don't like, is that when using raw sockets, and try to implement HTTP over it, (many reasons to do this, especially in mobile), now you have to deal with more complexities.

As somebody mentioned above, eliminating duplicate http headers, and addressing the duplicity issue in the markup language itself (i.e HTML5 or XHTML2), and not the transport protocol.
Why is this significant? Mail clients suck. It's time for a really good one. Also, Scott MacGregor is awesome.
Top 11 Global Internet Ad Markets in 2008
I like webkit a lot, but with my amazing marble mouse I am unable to middle-click scroll. That's pretty much a deal breaker as far as I'm concerned.

Same thing with Opera for the Mac, I just rely too much on the middle click (living without a scroll) that it makes sense that I continue to use Firefox.
here is somebody's counterpoint:

"It seems to me that AJAX can be used to solve this problem in a simpler
manner. Take Gmail for example--it downloads the whole UI once and then uses
AJAX to get the state-specific data. The example from the PPT showed a 40%
reduction in the number of bytes transmitted when using SDCH (beyond what
GZIP provided) for google SERPs. I bet you could do about that well just by
AJAXifying the SERPs (making them more like GMail) + using regular HTTP
cache controls + using a compact, application-specific data format for the
dynamic parts of the page + GZIP. Maybe Google's AJAX Search API already
does that? In fact, you might not even need AJAX for this; maybe IFRAMEs are
enough.

I also noticed that this proposal makes the request and response HTTP
headers larger in an effort to make entity bodies smaller. It seems over
time there is an trend of increasingly large HTTP headers as applications
stuff more and more metadata into them, where it is not all that unusual for
a GET request to require more than one packet now, especially when longish
URI-encoded IRIs are used in the message header. Firefox cut down on the
request headers it sends [2] specifically to increase the chances that GET
requests are small enough to fit in one packet. Since HTTP headers are
naturally highly repetitive (especially for resources from the same
server), a mechanism that could compress them would be ideal. Perhaps this
could be recast as transport-level compression so that it could be deployed
as a TLS/IPV6/IPSEC compression scheme.

Regards,
Brian
"
I suppose it's a bit of an image problem - "startup" has a "small guy" nuance to it, a group still struggling and fighting to get their model right.
If it begins with already well-established industry players, I would less associate it with "startup", and perhaps simply classify it as a company.

It may very well be a meaningless bias from frequenting hn and the groups I hang out with, reflecting a bit more.
As Guy stated, for most companies, going the YC route qualifies as plan B more than plan A. Two guys living in their parents basement and giving up 6% for 15 - 20k so they can scrape by for six months is a far cry from giving up 30 - 40% for $1-2m so you can hire five people and burn through that money in less than a year building a product for all the users you're sure you're going to get.
"...but YC moved our time line up by at least six months to a year..." - can you explain further - in broad terms of course - was that because of the focus of the YC process; the connections being a YC funded company brought, or something else?
Oh yeah sure - I was able to leave my job and focus on the startup with 100% of my time (instead of say 10-30%). The connections and being able to bounce ideas off of other really smart people was invaluable as well.

What's really hard for many founders (myself very much included) is telling your friends and family you're leaving this good job with health care benefits to do a startup. Having a name behind you makes this a lot easier; the YC money was almost irrelevant.
Skyhook knows where your access point is because at one time they drove by and mapped it. Google is probably collecting the same information from their street view vans. All you need is a laptop with a GPS receiver to log coordinates and MAC addresses.

So why not do it yourself? http://wigle.net/ is a public access point MAC address mapping site run by community contributions of location information.
I definitely agree. I was responding more to langer's comment than the article itself.

Now the decision is: does the money, leverage and ability to expand faster (in theory) we'd receive from plan A outweigh the amount of additional equity we'd have to give up.
They just need to work on getting consumers educated more than T9 did. It's amazing how many times I have explained and demo'd T9 to people--vast numbers of people just don't get it and use multi-tap instead. After a couple of minutes T9 is way faster, but there is usually no tutorial and people get frustrated when it's not doing what they think it should (multitap).
Python Is Not Java (2004)
That might be borne out by the stats - these figures can vary greatly between packages. For example, Swing is quite significant.

However, that implies that these figures would be higher (greater levels of abstraction) if things had been designed holistically...
I looked through the wiggle database. A TON of their information is super old. Of course there's no way to know how old SkyHook's is since it's totally private.
A lot since the iPhone shows how well it works.

How many people use more than one finger on the screen and how often?
it depends how you define sacrifice. If by sacrifice you mean having random evenings taken away from you because your 1st sgt had a hair up his as and made you clean the floors for 3 hours then yes.

I had no problems with valid sacrifice, and I spent a year in Bosnia sleeping in a tent with no heat, but it was the arbitrary power that people had over me that made me hate it. Ever cut grass in the pouring rain? Ever sweep a parking lot in the pouring rain?

On top of that I hated that I accomplished absolutely nothing day in and day out. Today we clean the motor pool, tomorrow we have an inspection of our clean motor pool, the next day we do pretty much nothing again, etc, etc, etc
Does this mean that if you upgrade your router and put the old one on eBay and sell it to someone across the country, Skyhook's data is inaccurate (until they next drive by)?
Page size varies, but when I was doing the initial speed tests, pages were around 20k each (guestimate).

Yea, the crawler uses libcurl, which supports gzip compressed content.

My comcast link is (theoretically) 7Mbit down, 385Kbit up.
I like it's well accepted that garbage collection is a huge boon for productivity and stability
apples and oranges. Linus writes OS code. Good luck doing your next web 2.0 startup if you write it primarily in C
Drupal for Firebug extension
+1 for Nutch. We're using it at my startup HubSpot and it has worked well for us.
A comicbook? Maybe Joel Silver, film producer, will make it into his next movie...
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Curious as to how this compares to standard GZIP compression over the course of a hundred pages on a website.
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10 Everyday Technologies That Can Change the World
Skyhook loves to tell you how recent their data is. They re-drive high turnover areas (colleges) a few times a year. Everything else is quite recent. With Skyhook's high profile use in the iPhone they can't afford to be out of date.

Last I checked they had over 45 million access points recorded. With enough users, the system can become self sustaining. You upload all the detected access points in your area for a request so it's trivial for them to auto-update their system if you submitted a newly discovered or changed MAC address.
*hear hear
Yahoo Open Hack Day Sunnyvale
No, I was serious.

When I look at a variable in Python, say, p, to take an example from the code shown in the Python documentation, there is no way to tell what p is. Is it an array? A dictionary? A tuple? Something else? With Perl I get more information just by looking at the variable. That makes it more readable.

Python, on the other hand, is still very nice. Maybe one of these days it will get me, especially if the libraries grow to match the breadth of CPAN.
this catches on, i say within 5 yrs this tech is on virtually all touchscreen devices. people adapt. thats just how it goes. before txt mssgs came out , how many ppl typed mssgs on the key pad of a phone?
Artificial limits don't seem like the correct answer. The community is the filter.
I wonder if anyone has ever used it to find a date. I have an idea...
TC50 interview with Mark Cuban
i'm not sure this is true. I've been at a couple of startups where the scaling issues came from the database growing everyday with a relatively fixed set of users.
Because it is. It's much easier to blow your foot off in C than in Python or Ruby. I think it's pretty well accepted that scripting languages are far more maintainable than C. Sure you can write maintainable C, but that's best case, I think it's more revealing to look at the worse case.
Kind of surprised myself by how much I enjoyed this. It's refreshing to see Guy writing in his old style (the way he wrote for his personal blog around 2006). Great storytelling to demonstrate the point: that bootstrapping's the word for serious entrepreneurs.

The best piece of advice comes in the form of VC money for expansion, not creation... it's easy to look at VC as the key to all your grandiose plans, but that's almost never the way things play out. Better to take some or no money, grind away, and only take the funding exactly when (or just before) it's absolutely essential for your survival.
Try http://www.greedypeople.com that may be more of what ya need.. heh
Wikipedia partially disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty

It slows you down to prevent jams. The guy's name was Sholes.
Hmm. No math book suggestions but I recommend reading anything by Milan Kundera.
Where the TechCrunch40 Companies Are Now
He's a straight talker, no BS. He knows his worth, but isn't arrogant about it. That's a recipe for being well-liked and respected.
I looked into this -- didn't know Seth wrote a boostrapper's bible. Turns out it's available for free now:

http://www.changethis.com/8.BootstrappersBible
Do you really believe that? The implementation requires skills too, and without those skills, you get terrible and buggy code, even if it uses pretty names and if it follows your descriptions more or less.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw this preso was "What algorithm are they using to find the words?" The problem looks something like: Given a string of characters, find all possible words that start and end like the string of characters and use any number of characters in between.

The best I can come up (after not so much thinking about it) with is using Bloom Filters. Precompute the bit vector for every word in your dictionary, then after they swype, compute a vector for the string of characters and run it up against all the words in your dictionary that start and end with the same letters. Still kind of an expensive linear search, albeit fast (since it's just boolean AND).
This interview was inspiring and really cool. My favorite quote:

"When I die, I want to come back as me." --Mark Cuban
i'm also interested in the solution of this question. i'm looking for more like a posterous.com kind of email submission. no password or secret word, and email is sent to a common email address. suggestions? pointers?
My suggestion to those thinking about this: do the math. Having just quit my job, I found that health care is cheaper than you'd think. COBRA ensures that you are covered for 18 months under your existing plan.

I can't think of any other benefit I'm missing. It seems to give a warm and fuzzy sense of security to a lot of people.
Okay, there is a lot of noise in this thread, so this needs to be clearly stated:

Good job, scumola.

It's impressive that you diagnosed the architectural bottleneck of your design and solved it with the least amount of effort (from your standpoint) and achieved a 48x speedup. There are many developers who simply can't do that; they have tunnelvision, wasting a ton of time on improving portions of their systems without first thinking deeply about the problem they're trying to solve (and about simple ways to sidestep that problem).

In your case, you identified the correct problem, which was "How can I maximize the number of sites crawled per day?" and not "How can I optimize [the database, the perl scripts, etc]?" And then you did the most straightforward optimization you thought of, accomplishing your goal in one or two nights. Your solution is valid, maintainable, and most importantly works, and so I personally don't see anything wrong with it. Again, nice hack.
my friend actually just posted to my posterous blog (as me) with a simple one-line php script
Men of mathematics (E T Bell) and A mathematician's apology (G H Hardy).
Today seeing Mark Cuban speak completely changed my opinion of him. I also assumed wrongly he'd be an ass, but damnit he's now my hero. Really insightful and hysterical funny. His advice was spot on and I loved the honesty.

Highlight from today's tc50 "Maybe I’m missing something, but that just sounded like the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life." Reference below to Imindi.

(http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/09/imindi-wants-to-get-ins...)
curl --header "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "<?xml version='1.0'?><LocationRQ xmlns='http://skyhookwireless.com/wps/2005' version='2.6' street-address-lookup='full'><authentication version='2.0'><simple><username>beta</username><realm>js.loki.com</realm></simple></authentication><access-point><mac>YOURMACADDRESS</mac><signal-strength>-50</signal-strength></access-point></LocationRQ>" https://api.skyhookwireless.com/wps2/location
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
And the time and effort expended in the process of fundraising.
Five reasons to start delegating more today
Nowitsky? Nicks? I know this isn't ESPN, but come on!
In theory, but the whole point of this article is that future cash flow will be exactly $0 when there are no dividends paid. There is nothing concrete to which you can actually tie the current value.

Therefore, the price is what someone is willing to pay in hopes that when they but it now there will be someone willing to pay more in the future.
My favorite Cuban quote: "I can't tell you how many girlfriends I’ve had that said: 'me or the business', and I said 'what's your name?'"

I actually emailed him my freshman year of college asking him about happiness and what he's going to do now that he has all the money anyone could ever want. He told me (and I'm paraphrasing) that he's just as happy now as he was living in a dumpy apartment living off of happy hour bar food.

I'll never forget it. God I wish I still had my .edu email :(.
This is a very well reasoned argument although it is rather depressing. I'm actively evaluating a few stocks to invest my meager savings. Mark Cuban has made me think one thing... bonds.
Thanks for the wiggle.net link... I've got a place to put my wardriving data now! :)
haha cmd line ftw, nice

except you have an extra xml tag at the end
"Some languages ... can perform very favorably compared to C, but tend to be much, much easier to maintain and debug."

Keep in mind that each language has a learning curve. As you learn more languages, that curve becomes much easier to traverse. However, the goal is to Get Stuff Done. The most straightforward engineering tactic to accomplish that is to become highly skilled with a few choice tools, then use those tools to solve almost all of your problems. (Note: that's different than a "one tool for every problem" mindset. You can solve most problems with a small toolbox while still avoiding the trap of using an inappropriate tool for the job.)
SlimTimer is an app that does the same and runs in the sidebar of your browser. You just need a bookmarklet and don't need to install anything. I use it daily.

http://www.slimtimer.com/
That particular comment made me walk away thinking he was rather jerkish. I didn't know who he was at the time of tuning in live, but there's about 10 different ways to say that without making the poor startup guy feel like a humiliated loser. He has a dream-- maybe Mark will bring him back down to reality, but I personally think the same sort of response could have been said about Wikipedia, Knol, About.com, Mahalo, etc.

Just because Mark and Kevin Rose didn't quite follow the long-term vision, it doesn't mean it can't catch on or grow. Hopefully the imindi guys will figure out a better way to present/grow their technology such that people won't have that kind of reaction, but that kind of comment didn't give me any new respect for Mr. Cuban. (I did enjoy the transcript of his one-on-one interview, though.)

I guess I have a lot of dreams like the imindi guys and can empathize with them. I also think there's a lot of long-term value in gathering cross-related/semantic data.