skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily 'indie' music (by label independence or genre), but the songs I know on it are fairly good, so I assume the rest are too.

At least it isn't 95% trash like Hype Machine.
Kickstarter: remaking old-school games
There is a gap between native and the web, but it will not last long (have high hopes on FF OS) and it is currently narrow enough not to matter in many applications. Haven't dug deep enough in the code to know if Twitter is one of the apps where it matters. That would be interesting to know.
The web is still the place but I think desktop web browsers could help out a bit here to fill in the gap between full-page websites and native clients. I loved Mozilla Prism before it was discontinued. My best alternative is using Chrome in app-mode "C:\..\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --app="url://my-todos" but it is still not enough. Chrome now has Growl-style messages that web-apps can use to notify the desktop. Trello uses that wonderfully. IE lets websites add options to the tray context menu. iOS Safari has an 'Add to Home Screen' option that makes web-pages behave more like full-screen apps and provides caching.

All of these things are disparate and desperate attempts by browsers to be more useful and desktop-like without any standards or forethought. I would love if the major browsers could agree on some tags/JS to enable (with permission from the user) better integration with the desktop. From taskbar/tray-icon and windows position/size to run-at-startup and multi-monitor support.

This way Twitter can just use a slightly different CSS file and a few meta tags to pretty much replace their native app. Browsers are now fast enough for most everything you need a desktop app for but the 'app' experience is lacking. Chrome's apps are not quite cutting it. Web-apps need to be able to break out of the browser without having to use window.open().
Gamechanging Natural Gas Tech Gets Green Light
I don't necessarily disagree, but there are a lot of other factors that make those kids' childhood precarious.
Doesn't Skype run in the bacground to receive calls and IMs?
But you have to convey the sense that annual profits of one million is not your idea of "success". Because if that is your idea of success, you will not likely be the "big winner" that YC is looking for.

Put an evil twinkle in your eye and make internet VC think you want to rule the world and will lie, cheat and steal to achieve this, when truly you're just an honest kid with good morals who'd be happy living a modest but financially secure lifestyle.

Founder 1
Internet VC 0
Thanks for your comments (and everyone below). I've just broken my home office chair about a week ago, so I might start looking with your suggestions in mind.
my devs launched a kickstarter to remake puzzle fighter (in HD) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/378280693/god-of-puzzle

but unfortunately, unlike the post article, it doesn't look like people are so enthusiastic about 15 year old action puzzle games as they are for 15 year old car shooters :P
If you are worried about climate change, it seems like our problem in the future might not be running out of fossil fuels-- it will be having entirely too much, making renewables very expensive in comparison.
FB has no redeeming value. Twitter has little.
Zeus: Boot any rails app in under a second.
More attacks. No thoughts. WHAT a flock of bird brains.
oh, and if anybody wants to help point out what my team's kickstarter is doing wrong, I'd appreciate it.

I personally think the gameplay is too nitche, but if you think something else is/contributes to the problem, please say!
> If your startup ends up making you a million dollars a year you will probably be very happy and rightfully call yourself a success.

I see this a lot from various corners of the startup ecosystem, particularly 37 Signals and their followers. The problem is that it's not really true, by which I mean there are not very many examples of it begin true, and there is an excellent reason to believe that it may never be true. Which is: you need to find a market big enough to support "lifestyle income" (or your million dollars a year) but not big enough that a startup or growth technology company that is really good at doing things at scale isn't just going to eat it, and kill you in the process.

One of the reasons Jason Fried needs to yell so loudly about 37 Signals being the model for lots of other companies is because it's really not -- it's really rare to find a lifestyle technology business.
This article implies that many potentially successful start ups will not make the cut. Another reason not to get down if one's team doesn't make it in YC.
My recollection of Drew's YC app was that it was posted on HN before he applied to YC and it received wide acclaim, so I went and Googled it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Turns out my memory was only half right. DropBox had many people that loved the idea and thought it would revolutionize filesharing. It also had a large number of people who pointed out all the reasons why it wouldn't work.

I wonder if there's a lesson here in that good ideas that seem bad tend to be highly polarizing. I've recalled Paul Buchheit say here that GMail met a lot of internal resistance, with many Googlers saying it was a distraction and would never work. I also recall Larry saying that there was significant support for GMail at all levels of the company, going up to the founders, and many Googlers loved it.
I had one of their chairs, the gas cylinder went out, and nobody could or would fix it. I was disappointed.
thanks!

i purposefully keep the playlists small and vet each track to keep the quality high. this is the listening experience i want for myself.

hype machine is more of a firehose which makes it a bit harder to find the gems.
Screen edge pointer wrapping for X
For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it.

This is partially why I think the YC application process is flawed. If you think about the idea for 20 seconds or so, what good is that? You may be wasting 20 seconds trying to rectify an idea you can't logically determine to be good.

A better process is a continuous one: you'll get an excellent stream of actual data and not just made up answers to "What is your best non-computer hack?" The YC partners could start out the morning looking at their Twitter-like feed of what have potential startup teams done today? At some point a partner would say, "We have to pull these guys into our next batch."

Incidentally, this would be better for startup teams looking to break the threshold of project to startup. By updating this proposed feed, the startup feels obligated to not only continue to put out data, but good data. Eventually the team would realize they can't cut it or they will keep mutating teams or changing ideas until one has great prospects.

EDIT: I'll buy someone a smile and a coke if the above hypothesis is implemented and tested. The following is exactly why: Instagram is the one we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd talked to them. They were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd talked to them even a day after they launched we would certainly have said yes. But before that it might have seemed too speculative.[1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497561
Yeah, I love music and the whole art behind finding new music and enjoying something unique. I like when artists release their "influential tracks/songs." It gives me some new ground to explore.

I will use this Royksopp as an example. I liked "Melody AM", their first album. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melody_A.M. It was chill and atmospheric. When they released "Back to Mine," a compilation of their favorite tracks. I understood "Melody AM" much better. http://www.discogs.com/R%C3%B6yksopp-Back-To-Mine/master/294...
I love the Steelcase Leap that I've used for the last ten years. Not sure what you mean by "the company is long gone" though? You can buy a Steelcase Leap today: http://store.steelcase.com/brochures/leap/
I know which Demo Day I would go to! (The Black Swan one.)
Right, the original article by Priceonomics was submitted weeks ago. This is a follow up by NPR that included an interview with Priceonomics' Rohin Dhar and some other interviews including the SFPD, etc.
I use a range of postures throughout the day. I spend a lot of time in an armchair in a common area, where I alternate between crossed legs, legs in front, or sometimes legs lying on the short table.
I spend some time standing at my (not high enough) desk. The geekdesk looks amazing ... I am going to ask for that next week.
I think you can get away with a lot of bad posture stuff if you get out and exercise during the day. I take a 3-4 mile run followed by a workout most days. That keeps me feeling great even when sitting with "bad" posture.
It's a shame you had to experience that. Unfortunately, there are some folks who still haven't gotten the "it's ok to answer your own questions" memo [1].

But don't be discouraged. Ignore the trolls, flag for mod attention and we'll sort out crap like that.

[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-exc...
That seems like a lot of work for you - finding twenty tracks each day good enough to put on a playlist. I could probably do it comfortably once a week, but every day would be a struggle.

I would maybe consider a .fm TLD? For some reason I naturally associate .fm with music and .io with more tech/HN-oriented stuff.
How to Remove Admin Password for Windows Vista
Here we are talking about how to remove your Windows Vista password if you have problems keeping your password. There are two possibilities.
It's really the web platform, aka HTML5, that's write-once, run-anywhere, and Twitter is still keeping The TweetDeck client (for now), which is heavily powered by HTML5. So they will still have desktop presence and will probably converge to TweetDeck being their one official desktop app. I realise it's overly complex for many users, but it seems they've made this decision and will probably work to support a more minimal experience to fit the needs of people coming from the deprecated client.

BTW after a long period of lagging behind the old Air client, the new TweetDeck is actually working great imo.
This misses the point that the native OS X Twitter client is awesome. It allows you to easily manage multiple accounts. That's not something the Twitter website does.
If you're talking about the Eames Management chairs, I've done it. They're surprisingly good, given that the arms are fixed and, well...metal. You just have to adjust the height so that your elbows aren't clonking on the armrests while you work at a desk.

The Eames put a lot of thought into ergonomics and quality, so their stuff is better than your standard OfficeMax special. But I'd still pay for a Steelcase Leap or an Aeron (especially since they're cheaper on the used market).
While we have your ear: just wondering what the thought process behind the latest redesign is? Yes it's really~pretty...but the functionalities that made the older app attractive are mostly gone.

- cant long press to copy a tumblr link (heaven forbid I'd like to share a link OUTSIDE of the app
- cant post YouTube urls in video post
- reblogs won't let you delete prior comments by others (sometimes you have to clean up cluttered reblogs)
- you took away options to open in safari in many instances as well.
Peeing in a park where there could has been children can put you on the list, with the rationale being that while urinating in public you're also potentially exposing yourself to children. It's definitely outrageous that it's on the same scale, but it's not like peeing on a dark alleyway at 3 am will do it.
If everything is to go to the web, then what is the point of an OS at all besides running a browser? If you answer FF OS or Chrome OS, then is it only a matter of time before they too try to distinguish themselves from each other, and face the same issues as native desktop OSes, and another layer of abstraction on top of the browser must be built to achieve the holy grail of "write once run anywhere"?
Well this is the first 4.x release to the general public, compared to the old stable 3.x platform.
Yes -- this is why, for example, we (at A16Z) have such a strong bias towards technical founders with strong personalities, typically with a background of accomplishment of some reasonably strong form (even if very young). You have to screen at the founder level since there are too many bad ideas from less qualified founders otherwise.
I have a wobble stool that's slightly less insane than the Swopper, and I really enjoy it. Stools are great for tall people, since you can sort of lean rather than sit. Ideally, this would be coupled with an adjustable-height desk.
When did he claim they were born that way?
A lot of acquisitions are funded via stock. I imagine YC owns a sizable amount of publically traded stock through acquisitions.

My point though is that in 50 years, their minute percent ownership in Google they received via an acquisition could be worth far more than their much larger percent ownership in Dropbox.

So which was the better investment?
Except the concern isn't about satiating the pedophile's need; it's about the pedophile becoming desensitized and eventually normalized to the thought of having sex with a child. They experience "loli" or virtual children, and that would be the gateway to real ones.

If you're talking about a trained psychologist prescribing the material to a pedophile, that would be fine, but the vibe I'm getting from this discussion is a bunch of people think if you just open the loli flood-gates, all the pedophiles will stop raping children, and that just won't happen.
bonjour!
Airbnb Tech Talk: Spike Brehm on Backbone, Node.js, and Single-Page Apps
Stools are totally under-appreciated for tall people
> I wonder if there's a lesson here in that good ideas that seem bad tend to be highly polarizing.

Yes -- exactly -- and they tend to generate a lot of heat in group discussions. One of the indicators we watch for are people getting visibly angry during the discussion -- either angry that other people aren't "getting it" or angry that other people ARE "getting it".
All native clients are better than web clients in some way. But if managing multiple accounts was awesome in a way that mattered to Twitter, I suspect that they'd release a multiple accounts on the web feature.

That doesn't strike me as a web vs. native issue, but rather a product management issue.
One of the reasons Jason Fried needs to yell so loudly...

Another reason: marketing. People don't get that.
On chrome it looks amazing !
What's your thought about it ?
How AT&T’s FaceTime Blocking Hurts the Deaf
> Predict is something you can do if something is "correlated"!

This is false. I saw a puddle, so I predict that the puddle will cause rain. See the problem? You can't "predict" until you have a cause-effect relationship.

A correlation is not a cause-effect relationship:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

A quote: "The opposite belief, correlation proves causation, is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are claimed to have a cause-and-effect relationship. The fallacy is also known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "with this, therefore because of this") and false cause. It is a common fallacy in which it is assumed that, because two things or events occur together, one must be the cause of the other."

> You can see how "predict" is a word for an action you can take if something is correlated.

You may be able to do that. Scientists require evidence.
I am quite critical on something like this. In fact I would even expect startups to break quite a few of these suggestions you make.

I personally think that startups face enough challenges already and anything that goes beyond legal limitations and restrictions is just reducing the chances for startups to succeed. Startups are there to break the rules, be disruptive, and should get some slack to "fake it until they make it".
Skype is a VoIP app and gets special privileges for that. It's just a plist entry of course, but apple is known to reject apps for claiming to be VoIP apps when they are in-fact not (like Sparrow - http://buzzingpixel.com/article/2012/03/sparrow-push).

Also, be mindful of what you ask for. Skype is a terrible battery drain. This could be because Skype just has some bugs or it could be because iOS relly sucks at dealing with background apps which would mean that GTalk would use as much battery as Skype.
GTalk's big feature is the voice/video chat, so I don't think a VoIP masquerade is the issue.
Cringely is at his most prophetic in the comments when he says: If Facebook drops much lower Microsoft might make a play.

Try to list all the reasons Microsoft should not buy Facebook.

Try to list all the reasons Facebook would resist acquisition by Microsoft.
Not equally high, but skyrocketing for sure.

When I first moved to the Menlo Park/Palo Alto area two years ago, rent on a decent two-bedroom apartment was around $1400-1700 per month. Currently (two years later roughly), it's $2350+ a month and still climbing.

In fairness, a lot of that has to do with Facebook moving into Menlo Park and the crazy demand for space in Palo Alto / proximity to Stanford University.

I'd move farther south, but there's too much urban sprawl which makes it inconvenient at best to get around unless you drive everywhere. Mountain View is going up too thanks to Google.

The last place of refuge is pretty much Sunnyvale and San Jose. But the rent there is still a few hundred higher per month at least than it was two years ago.
Yes, this survey design is questionable by most standards.

But, it's not a survey design disaster and is likely a "directionally correct" reflection of internet users' actual behavior.

Are exactly 34.5% of the US Internet Population not using fb/twitter? Of course not, but I suspect that number is pretty close.

If you're building a social networking app, this is an opportunity.
“Few people think about it or are aware of it. But there is nothing made by human beings that does not involve a design decision somewhere.”

Rest in peace Bill. Copper Hewitt remembering Bills work. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/remembering-bill/life-work
Re point 3.

The article mentions a letter from Chemtura saying that there were 1400 deaths from furniture fires in 1980 and only 600 in 2004.

So what that actually means is we've saved 800 or less lives a year for the past 3 decades while exposing basically the entire nation (and presumably a lot of non-nationals with exports) to a whole host of chemicals that we don't know the effect of because the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act declares that all substances are to be presumed safe.

I can't begin to understand how in the universe it is acceptable to subject everyone to "shit thrown together in a lab" and just assuming it's safe. It's unbelievable how often the USA makes laws like that. I presume because "regulation" is "bad for business"...regardless whether the products of business are killing people (albeit somewhat slowly in this case).

It just doesn't make sense.
Consider 'winner' as being shorthand for: "someone who, given the right environment, timing, and support, can take over the world. Given two of the three, they will manifest the third."

It's just something you are. A bottom of the org chart stinky sysadmin doesn't just wake up one day and have the personality and determination of a world class CEO.

In a more grim outlook, it's genetic. The disconnect is when people want to be 'winners' but are, at heart, bottom of the org chart stinky sysadmins. You can work your way up to lifestyle business, but the next step of multi-billion pants in the air growth company is probably out of reach.
> So it seems for investors, the big winners are simply based on luck...

That's not quite right. It's more a question of taking enough of the right kind of chances in funding the companies that you do fund, as opposed to all the companies you don't fund.

I think of it as the concept of "search space" -- you need to define your search space properly, so that you have a good chance of having some big winners in the search space. You have to define your search space because you can't invest in everything. The investors that do the best job of defining their search space (having the most accurate criteria, best judgment, best mental models, etc.) have the best chance of funding some of the winners -- almost as a side effect.

When you talk to old successful VCs, what they tell you is that they had almost no ability to judge which of the companies they funded would go on to be the big winners in their portfolios at the point of funding them. They only learned that later. The challenge was to get enough of the right kinds of risk "above the line" and then give the portfolio time to develop.
"What this means is that YC is not looking for sustainable businesses, but homeruns. Which is entirely fair, that's the business they're in."

I think it means more than this - it means if you invest in companies the homeruns will dominate your returns no matter your preferences for it to be otherwise. So there might be no model of systematic investment that makes sense investing in companies with no homerun potential. At least at the risk levels of software startups.
* The place I worked is no longer.

Yeah, I'm looking at getting another for home.
I agree, but the unfortunate reality is that the thing that makes browsers on desktop so great -- fierce competition -- is virtually non-existent on mobile. It's why vendors can get away with only shipping updates to the browser once per year. And the chances of this changing aren't great. It's widely accepted that for "security reasons", browsers competition can't be allowed.
"So why bother with a native client? What’s in it for the user?"

Well, if there were nothing in it for the user, no users would be complaining, and we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.

The author is certainly right that multiple heterogenous development platforms incur an increased headache and expense, and that the web can get you a pretty good experience on lots of platforms. The argument then is that "pretty good" is good enough, and that the decreased support costs dominate the software quality and user experience.

Maybe they are, maybe not. But as a software engineer, it's hard to get excited about the prospect of making our software suck more to save money.
I've had several of the Office Star branded chairs over the years. As another big fellow (height and weight) I have found every one of them eventually failed. It usually starts with the pneumatic cylinder leaking as they aren't rated for more than 200 lbs.

I eventually bought a Hon 7800 Series chair (http://www.hon.com/Products/Chairs/7808.aspx) and haven't had any issues at all for the last 3 - 4 years.

I easily spent more for all of the Office Star chairs that I discarded than the one Hon 7800 Series.
That's lethargy, not idleness.
What do you think the job of a DBA is?

I have one customer who has a couple of sysadmins do all that for both MySQL and PostgreSQL servers. If that's all you need, you probably don't need a dedicated DBA unless you are running Oracle and that's just because with Oracle your DBA can always find something to do.

If MySQL can be said to make DBA's obsolete because it doesn't take that much maintenance, Informix beat them to that by a few decades.
How coffee is affecting your mortgage
Interesting take on how to reduce debt