skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way to have ideas is to understand the field really well. That sounds kind of banal, but I haven't seen anyone approach startups this way explicitly.

So, I would study history of technology and of money, and especially recent history of computing and the Internet. Then I'd try to simulate it all in my mind, and try to see patterns. and think of all the alternative ways in which it might have happened. What were the good ideas of any given time? Which of them were inevitable? Which of them relied on timing? By what chain of reasoning could they have been foreseen?

I don't really know if this would help. It's a big undertaking, and I have other stuff to do now, so I haven't tried it.
Another good idea resource from PG: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

That serves as a helpful litmus test. Not falling somewhere onto that map doesn't invalidate your idea, but the 30 items cover a lot of ground.
As a recent switcher to git, I like your fashion analogy. It's like I'm wearing what others call the latest fashion, but it sure looks the same to me. All the colors are different, but I end up wearing it the exact same way.
A big cultural problem also amplifies this: a majority of the middle and upper class families want their children to become engineers.

Our country does not need any more corporate drones, we need better politicians.
Yeah, but we really ought to stop using extraneous punctuation.
Yes that is what I took away. I think the article was highlighting the get it out and often mentality. Like a build early and often type of iterative approach rather than work on things you think the customer might want without some experimentation with the product/market insight.
And take those books with you on a journey
Creating a Virtual jQuery Keyboard
Yes, while I don't see it as something I would do, I can't find any fault with it. I'd guess it's probably just the cheapest price point for meat available to him. If he bought a pallet of horse meat from a butcher, it would seem far more ordinary I think? That said I can't fault the logic of just going right to the source and saving money.
An aphorism about babies and bathwater comes to mind.

To pick one concrete example, great musicians often have perfect pitch and are rarely tone-deaf; and, great musicians always work hard at music.

And so it goes with everything else.
Now that's a maverick.
ok, step one skip the great idea thing. the reality is that the internet is a large enough for competitors in any market.

step 2 is build something you know well, it will make it easier to copy and you might find a few things to innovate on later. i have tried the big bold approach and i end up having to scale back my plans, its so depressing. Looking back i would rather be dealing with problems as i grow.

step 3 repeat

eventually you will find a team of people that are doing things that are interesting.

step 4 end loop, profit, retire
Definitely interesting. So far, I've used Lisp more as a teaching tool (e.g. SICP, Little Schemer) than a production language. Not that it isn't production worthy, but I hear such mixed things about every dialect that I've yet to commit to one. So as an outsider, Clojure sounds compelling.
I pay the 7 bucks / month for github mostly for the private repo's

That's about it
The horse was described as tired and old, so its fate may have been no better wherever he bought it from.
ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) Module for FPGA Design
GitHub Helped Train Google in Git
Howto interface an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) to the FPGA board. In this post I will give some ideas about interfacing an ADC to the FPGA design. One of the Digilent Inc.’s product is the ADC module codenamed Pmod-AD1.
Rackspace acquire Slicehost
The Rackspace Cloud Event
Lots of corporations still stick to IE6, and the fact that they put it under the "genuine advantage" wall made it that upgrading to IE7 wasn't as easy & automatic as it should of been, much to the dismay of the internet.
Absolutely! Take a week or two to drive someplace you've never been, alone. The time spent staring at scenery with your hands on a steering wheel may stir up some creative juices.
Looking for cash?  Call on small VCs.
i think the best thing about tables design is that you can design something to work on multiple platforms and to flow better.

when using tables you are stuck to the resolution you are designing for, but in a good table-less design you can accommodate a number of form factors, which is important in the emerging mobile device platform.
Sometimes talent can be counterproductive:

http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
Made Canon 30D SLR Camera Armor
This is no ordinary camera protection, not by a long shot. With the Canon 30D SLR Camera Armor, not only do you get touch protection for your camera, but you can use it at the same time.
True. But being a division 1 athlete is significantly more difficult than most 50k per year white collar jobs.
I just started playing with git, and yeah, it's definitely better in a few ways, but it didn't jump up and start writing code for me, so your approach is a sensible one. My guess is that companies are not made or broken on the differences between vc systems - as long as you have a decent one, you're ok.
Very interesting and helpful. Thanks.
It's inspiring to see how far the GitHub guys have been able to take what started out as a side project done just for fun.
It may be true that you mix semantics when you mix tables and html, but you lose little if you do it while you use RoR/Django or any other of the frameworks where there is a central template because you still only need to make changes in _one_ file to affect the hole site.
Follow up on the new design with a bunch of pics: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/pepsi_re...
Its the same cultural problem that some people have with eating dog. Its just a different world. The meat in this case even walks to the place where its needed! If it was a cow or a pig, it would probably seem less objectionable. Horse seems to ring up as "pet" in my mind and so colors the issue for me.

If you think about it, he doesn't need to shoot the horse first. Dropping it to the bottom of the ocean with cinder blocks attached would do the trick while possibly attracting more sharks. It be cheaper and cleaner boat-side as well. He would probably find it morally objectionable to do so though.

If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more vegetarians.
Fine. Call it the killer feature of distributed version control systems. Works for me, in any case.
Interesting to see along with all the other organizations with a strong customer oriented culture, a few that come to mind include: Whole Foods, Starbucks and The Container Store

Although, it is hard to aim for a sustainable culture in a startup that you're going to flip in a few years, perhaps it applies better to the so-called lifestyle businesses more. Nice read nonetheless!
Thanks for the support, you guys.
Why do you prefer Git to Mercurial? I've only used Mercurial.
The languages of the next 1000 languages
Like the rest of the body, the brain exists in the physical world. All "talent" is based upon physical attributes.
Interesting article. Where did you find it?
The vast majority of my spending is not on consumer goods. I accept your point that I don't know the actual numbers for typical people.
Ask YC:  How long will you see IPhone hype?
Hi
We are an IPhone application service company that also submitted business model for YC. We see, a lot of hype around IPhone applications currently, and i wanted to inquire how long will we see the IPhone hype. Any clues ?
Pretty cool. TradeKing.com uses a browser-based keyboard for sign-in now.
Android Source Code released as promised
Joe's is the Wal-mart of grocery stores. Mark my words: There will be one every decent-sized town in two decades.

I just wish I could buy stock.
Interesting article, but is there some reason this is posted in its entirety here instead of linked to?
Rackspace acquires Jungledisk
http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/channel-mar...

Hurt my eyes last night as I clicked through subsequent pages, so I figured it would be easier to paste here on one page.
Please, please, run http://github.com/training through spellchecker.
> Silicon Valley duders

What is a "duder"? Is that equivalent to "Silicon Valley dudes"?
AND they rolled out 8 GB and 15.5GB slices. AWESOME.

AND Rackspace also bought Jungledisk.

Rackspace is suddenly a whole lot more compelling.
I just hope Rackspace doesn't mess up slicehost to make it as "good" as mosso. I tried mosso before running away to slicehost.

Fingers crossed because moving sites ain't fun.
Awesome, but I hope they don't change pricing too much.

edit:
Looks like they will be under the Mosso line?
http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp
I was thinking the same thing :-\
Google announces Android App Market paid application details, revenue share model
Rackspace Acquires Slicehost and JungleDisk: Challenges Amazon's Could Computing Services
Scientists Erase Specific Memories in Mice
"The wasters of bandwidth will win..."
If you want to talk about some ideas just send over an e-mail and we can discuss.
Am I missing something? What's misspelled?
6 months to a year. that will probably be long enough for the industry to properly catch up, as well as long enough for the shine to fade, turning the special and new into the standard and expected.
I've heard really terrible things about Rackspace from quite a few people. I'm really hoping they don't mess up the people they've bought.
Find Your Passion in Life and You Will Come Alive - Fence-Building on Esperanza
Review of AssemblySys dataServices
Mark Cuban invests in CitySquares
Signaling strategies
Very nice implementation. In terms of pure technical features, you guys are near if not at the front of the pack. I'm hoping something makes it feel more personal eventually, because this is an incredible featureset.
Top Ten Android Launch Apps
I'm not an expert in git (still learning) and I've hardly used Mercurial at all, so right now there's no particular reason. There are probably better people to ask that question. :) I'll try hg in a project sooner or later, but learning to get to grips with 2 version control systems at once while trying to do something productive seemed a bit much. There wasn't really anything on the feature lists that tipped the scales; the Linus Torvalds association and the resulting curiosity probably did.

I can't believe I fell for a celebrity endorsement. ;)
Actually this article was more about how there is no real way to fight the MPAA and RIAA when they invade your privacy by looking at what you are downloading. It is sort of scary - they have this long list of things they can get you for and all you wanted was to watch a movie.... Sort of like the guy in that long french novel who steals a loaf of bread and then 20 years later he gets out of jail and steals some silverware. it just does not make sense...
Earth to omfut. Do you read omfut?
Very well deserved. Congrats Slicehost!
The .framework actually can handle this. The xml registry can list versions and version aliases.

Maybe you're implying that .app files tend to keep local .framework files inside their bundle. I'm not sure how common this practice is, but one thing that's true about OS X apps is that they're almost uniformly equipped with something like Sparkle (http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/). Most of my apps self update without me even trying.

I think that part of 0-install is self-updating.
Yeah, maybe my kids will have the luxury of coding with CSS tables.

Think of the kids!
I've been on 2 dedicated servers with Rackspace for a year now and have no complaints, there service has been very good thus far and their rates were very competitive.
That Dweck book is indeed a good one, if not a bit touchy-feely in its take. It's really important finding in Dweck's studies that this mindset distinction has a huge effect in the effort people make. The people who believe they're bound by their inborn talent (fixed mindset) do not push hard and usually just give up when hard problems come up. People who believe the opposite (growth mindset), that your abilities are not constrained by your inborn talent, tend not to give up when things get difficult but just put more effort until they actually do manage to solve their problem.

So, in this sense it's actually irrelevant whether or not inborn talent is necessary, because the mere belief that it is could have negative effect on your effort.
A "duder" would be a person that made dudes.
If I recall correctly, part of the way that NASA is setup is to be deliberately spread out across many congressional districts - making it hard to cut it's legs out from under it because it will effect jobs in too many congressman's districts.

The downside to this is that it's also a great way of bringing lots of bullshit jobs into a district, and makes things VERY expensive.

Not surprising that India can do this cheaply - hopefully some of our private sector space companies will learn from what they're doing and improve on it.
The great thing about Slicehost was the size. They were big enough to be reliable but small enough to give a shit when you had a question on #slicehost on freenode.

PickledOnion's posts on the Slicehost articles page were top notch. I hope the quality continues.

It got to the point that I'd only recommend Slicehost, after a few bad experiences with media temple and the like.

DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.
"I Only Use Vim" Screencast
Sling to launch video portal with social features
Layered Technologies of Plano Texas REFUSES to Read Abuse Complaint Emails
Nopes - you have to cleanup the result of the paste.

As soon as you enable designmode on a document, every paste coming from something like Word will be transformed into delicious tag soup for you to deal with. No way to just disable that 'feature'.
Competition in cloud computing.

Price race to the bottom here we come!

That's great news for everybody who's looking for cheap hosting.
I'm psyched to see what people are doing with Freebase...and what other cool things we can dream up!
Or you could just use html tables.
Question about terminology:

Is a slicehost slice considered 'cloud computing'?

Scoble and others are comparing slicehost to EC2 and amzn web services, but doesn't slicehost compete more with traditional dedicated hosting and other vps providers?
Rackspace is on a spending spree :-)
I can't believe I let that up with those spelling errors. Thanks for pointing that out. It's fixed and will go out with our next push. I really am better at training than I am at spelling :) For the longest time, I had been spelling 'carat' as 'carrot' (referring to the '^' character).
On a business note, congratulations. On a personal note I'm not looking forward to this acquisition. For one I like the current price model, which is very reasonable. Rackspace is extraordinarily expensive. In my experience the customer service from the small slice host team is fantastic. I usually send a support email and receive a response within an hour. Hopefully we dont end up with account managers now.
His point is that the iPhone is making apple boatloads of money and that their phone platform could potentially eclipse their PC and iPod sales. The point, (and worry perhaps) is that apple could reasonably start focusing on phones more than on PCs and make boatloads of money. They clearly make a better [smart/media]phone than anything out there and this has shown in sales.

They don't "feel" the need to charge people for Touch updates, they have to legally, or at least thats the way Gruber presents it and I'm pretty sure that is the case. Why else would they count iPhone sales on a subscription base? I'm sure its a pain in the ass for the accounting dept.

Do these "Normal" people live in "real" america. Other touch screen phones are totally lame and anybody who has used an iPhone can attest to that.

(I don't own an iPhone. $90/month is out of my budget)
Namecheap!
> If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more vegetarians.

For about a week until we got over the social conditioning. Then we'd start wondering what else we've been missing all these years, and start killing and eating koala bears, kittens, and people.
We need programmers
Silicon Valley startup taking on ebay and craigslist and yahoo. We're seeking programmers (all kinds) with experience in html, css, javascript, Coldfusion8, SQL Server, SQL,
and using ebay. No salary till we start making money. You can telecommute from anywhere on earth.
Familiar with Subversion and Model-Glue.
When the site starts making ample money you will have a full time job if you are contributing and getting results and helping build modules. You will be going through the project manager Nolan
and not me the founder.
We're also looking for web developers with extensive experience in CSS.
The site launches in 2 to 3 weeks and is being built in stages since it's a massive site.
Send me your resume and cover letter.

Contact Blake Southwood at brashrhino (at) gmail (dot) com
Let's hope they don't do to Slicehost what they did to Webmail.us after acquiring them. If they do, you can expect huge increases in prices and a focus more on corporate/"big" clients.
I think this is the right general idea, but asking customers what product they want is not usually the best way to get product ideas. Customers often don't know what is possible; it's better to find out what is difficult for them and design a solution yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to customers, but don't rely on them to tell you what to build.
I'm sick of this 'cloud computing' bullshit already.

I adore Slicehost, and have a few servers with them, but if I hear that term one more time...
A nice thought, but it also hurts my eyes to read stuff in tiny mid-grey-on-slightly-lighter-grey italics.
At the risk of sounding totally clueless, how do you find local hubs like that? I live in the twin cities in MN, and all that I know of is the ruby.mn ruby group, which is pretty talkative on the ruby list. Is there some online startup community that's arranged by region, or do you just have to know the right people?
Oh yes, many many times. It works, if you have the stamina to stick it out (it's painful).
I think slicehost is definitely close to EC2 in that you can programmatically bring nodes up and down so you can build a flexible infrastructure.
Interestingly, googling "Shackleton insurance" gives this New York Times article from January 16, 1914:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E...

It's not clear to me from the article who actually took out the insurance policy, though.
that would be useful if this article was about Rackhost.
i hate to endorse that behavior, but i actually tend to agree.

the pie is huge. taking small crumbs of marketshare as an individual is plenty.

might not be the model for your million dollar idea, but there's a subtle, guilty fun in beating people at their own game.
Good call. I missed the first Dallas meetup and then complete forgot about it. I'll be at the November 10th one for sure.
DynDNS lets you set very low TTL. It's not cheap, but if that's what you need it's very good.
Now I'm just waiting for GitHub to be acquired by SourceForge so another one of the companies I love doing business with can fall in the hands of one I'm trying to avoid like the plague.
Google Analytics Gets a Major Ugrade (AdSense, Custom Reports, API, Bubble Charts)
Yammer has 60,000 users within 6 weeks? I find that number unbelievable, especially for a paying product that's generally arcane (it's not arcane compared to similar services, but it's hardly at Facebook's or Flickr's level). Good luck to them if this is a valid indicator of their success.

[Update: Further down it says, "though only 200 companies with 4,000 users are paying so far." That seems more realistic in terms of paying customers :)]
It's already dying down as far as I can tell...
Yeah, this is something I'm working on. You've reminded me to fix my blog index - I meant to hint at previous posts without just doing a huge dump of entries.

That said, I just set it up after I left my job, and I haven't really started. I just have three mostly pointless posts (mostly for myself) to get the ball rolling. I'm definitely more tech side than entrepreneur (so far?).

http://friendfeed.com/bretthoerner
Thanks socmoth, I'm gonna go with gandi.net.

It's a little bit more expensive ($15 vs the usual $10 a year) BUT it has a great interface. And you get free private domain registrations, which I think is worth the extra $5/year.
It's right here, scroll down: https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new

This is the simplest order form I have ever seen; it's amazing.
Probably because they have incredible support, an amazingly simple interface and programmatic access. They've obviously built a great reputation among developers.
I'm interested. We use email currently which is not very flexible.
+ Talent
Yeh, balkanization of LISP is one thing that keeps me from engaging. I'm more willing to try out haskell (http://learnyouahaskell.com) or F# for that reason.
You could but that would clearly be a very big mistake! Sure it will work perfectly in every browser and it's really simple and easy to work with. But it's a big mistake! You'll have to deal with the fact that it's not trendy and cool. You will be looked down upon by those who are flogging themselves at the altar of cargo cult methodology. Come to think of it, quite similar to the situation those of us who still think Perl is awesome face. Try using Perl and HTML tables in 2008! You won't get invited to any of the cool parties...
I think proving something like this is unfeasible. What is shown in studies of expert performance is that there's a very strong correlation between the hours of deliberate practice and expertness in some field. That is, pretty much without any exceptions, experts in any field have been practicing for thousands of hours, the number typically quoted is in the order of 10000 hours. This doesn't prove anything particular about the necessity of talent, but it proves that at least hard work is necessary.

But, on the other hand, nothing in these studies suggest that some talent-like property is necessary.
I imagine this will be lost in the fray, but thanks everyone for the great replies.

More ideas about how to uh, have ideas than I had ever imagined. Thanks a lot, seriously.
Rackspace Makes Cloud Computing Play
Not in Google Apps. I tried, and I don't have the "labs" link. I can enable it for my regular gmail account though.
Maybe Yahoo Shouldn't Have Bought All This Sh*t
The 'Trophy Kids' Go to Work
Just got back from the Rackspace Cloud event in Austin and was pleasantly surprised to say the least. Lanham (CEO) came by and talked with us at length... very genuine about delivering a fanatical experience for Mosso, and it's very evident to me that they're putting a lot of beef behind that statement. Looking forward to migrating to Mosso soon...
Maybe you're implying that .app files tend to keep local .framework files inside their bundle. I'm not sure how common this practice is...

If your app requires a library that is not included in OS X, you have to ship a copy of that library inside your app bundle. (Or you can use an installer .pkg, but that defeats the point of no-install.) Self-update helps, but the app developer has to actually build the update.

There's a tradeoff here between the simplicity and reliability of OS X app bundles and the other benefits of Linux package managers where an app can just express a dependency on a library and that library will be kept up to date globally.
Anyone else bothered by their private labeling practices?

"...the chain also tests branded products to see how well they sell in the stores, and then approaches the manufacturer to make a private label version. The manufacturer's awkward choice is to do it, or let his competitor have the business. (Not to give them a free plug, but several observers say Trader Joe's has a penchant for knocking off or tweaking items...