skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no way that money alone would be sufficient to recreate a Silicon Valley. Of course, it would help, but some of the other obstacles are daunting.

* Non-competes. Within the U.S., California is by far the state least inclined to enforce non-competes. This happened as a historical accident, well before Silicon Valley arose. Getting another jurisdiction to adopt a similar attitude toward non-competes would involve, not money, but politics, which is far messier and more uncertain. The existing large companies in a given state generally perceive, rightly or wrongly, that it is in their interest to have non-competes enforced as vigorously as possible. This, in turn, has two effects detrimental to competing with Silicon Valley: (1) employees often can't go off and start a competing company in their area of expertise without a two-year waiting period, and (2) the really ambitious among them may get around this by moving to California (often Silicon Valley), where their non-competes are unenforceable, thus furthering the Valley's lead.

* Specialized insfrastructure. Whatever a hardware or software computer startup needs, it has access to in the Bay Area. Legal services, financing, management expertise (useful as a startup gets bigger), and above all the hardware and software engineers skilled in even the most arcane (but sometimes needed) technologies. This sort of infrastructure cannot simply be bought, it must be grown.

* Many of the metro areas that conceivably might be able to make a run at competing with Silicon Valley (i.e. those that are not economic basket cases) already have a different industry that is their specialty, and have no good incentive to try and supplant that industry for a clone of Silicon Valley. And without the other industry being supplanted, it's unlikely that the density of computer/web startups will even approach that of Silicon Valley.

With all this to overcome, one billion dollars doesn't seem anywhere near sufficient.

Silicon Valley will eventually be rivalled by a metro area that specializes in something related but not quite head-on to what Silicon Valley does. For example, it's conceivable that Seattle, with its focus on more consumer-oriented software and web companies (such as Amazon), could gradually ooze its way into having a bigger share of the more purely web-based startups (such as Google). But that's very different than trying to create a Silicon Valley rival from nothing.
I don't know, but this is the type of shit that really makes me mad. If you decide to do business with a large corporation that has enough internal resources to deploy a half-assed product that is based solely on the decision to add competition to an existing market, then this is what you get.

What kind of crap is netflix(and microsoft) trying pull here?
-There is no reverting back to the old-player (a subtle TOS)
-No Mac support
-Silverlight has to be installed on all PC's that use the netflix service
...this list goes on

Microsoft's primary focus has always been to use tacky business strategies that will increase shareholder profits rather than building great, dependable products....and it really needs to stop.
Perhaps somebody would have discovered hyperbolic or other non-Euclidean geometries before Lobachevsky? Through the lens of modern mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry seems like such a simple extension/modification of Euclidean geometry, yet it was only explored and developed in detail in the early 19th century.
This is a pretty flashy commercial but I don't think we will come close to that in 2019 I mean ten years comes pretty fast and the newest interfaces we've come up with for the average consumer are flat screen monitors on computers.

I know there is the iphone and other such things but most people I know can only afford the basic plans on phones let alone a fancy 200 dollar phone.

But if I was wrong that would be a really interesting world to live in, one wonders how lazy one would get and if it would follow pixar's walle.
If they could produce the real thing instead of just concept videos, I might even switch back from Mac... if of course Apple doesn't delivers amazing competing stuff like it has in the past. Both probably won't happen... but who knows...
What's wrong with the Silverlight player?

Runs fine on my Mac, except for a strange interaction between it and the NVidia chipsets that causes it to tear video (apparently it doesn't happen on ATI-based Macs.) There's a workaround you can use with Firefox that fixes that, at any rate.

Certainly seems to suck less CPU than Flash, which can peg both cores of my MacBook Pro just playing a YouTube video full-screen.
Given that Eric Schmidt was, only about 2 weeks ago, actively campaigning in favor of The President's stimulus package I find it highly unlikely that the US Justice Department will be going after Google. This could change if Google does something egregious, or there are significant changes in the 2010 mid term elections. However, I don't find it likely.

Also, I think it more likely that companies would pursue action in EU courts rather than US courts, because the EU courts have been more receptive to this type of thing.
Just happening to be reading the book at the time. There's so many pathetic pieces of prose. "He lighted his cigarette."

Just to chime in on all the other stuff, Francisco inherited all his wealth, and spent his life quite literally destroying it (rather than give some of it up to the "looters"). I can't think of a better allegory for crony capitalism.
Seems like it could be useful for a researcher or something. It screams "vitamin" to me. I'm very reluctant to install a new plugin. It has to be very compelling and this just isn't (for me).
Do you have any example that web startups which had massive user base died during the web boom?

But, I don't think that I have to show any startup example which had a lot of money but died during the web boom, right?
Some quotes from disguntled Netflix customers:

"You can bet I won't be renewing if they don't fix this garbage"

"lower connection speed and lower quality than before Silverlight"

"uggh, Individualization failed. Unable to playback protected (DRM) content. Error 8152. Still does not work on the Mac."

"horribly pixelated, sporadic and painful to watch at times"

"Never really had a problem with the WMP player. Now, I was forced to "opt" in to the new player. Video is jerky/choppy on all Starz titles and many others. And by jerky, I mean unwatchable. Thanks Netflix!!!!!!!!!!!!! What worked fine yesterday is now worthless. Amazing that they can actually make Blockbuster an option again."

If the studios want to push people into downloading over BitTorrent, they're going the right way about it.

Having said all that, kudos to Netflix for not pulling all the adverse comments from their website.
>No Mac support
There is Mac support, but only for Intel based systems. PowerPC systems are out of luck.
I think it's a good idea, and FriendFeed has a decent search facility. It would be interesting to get a historical snapshot of the top news stories (e.g. scrape top page -> submit to scribd -> submit to friend feed)

Also check out Atul's FriendFeed (Atul is the top Techmeme tipper):

http://friendfeed.com/atul
Why would you expect better from Wired? Have you forgotten "Push" (what, was that 1994?)? "The Long Tail" (which turned out to be based on completely wrong estimates of Amazon's sales data)? MJD's qrpff sidebar (http://perl.plover.com/qrpff/)? The Cypherpunks cover with the guy with the big knife (was that 1992 or 1993)? The "End of Theory" lies about Norvig? Wired has always been about sensationalism, not meticulous accuracy, from the very beginning.
They've hit such a chord with the mainstream that they'd have to be morons to screw it up at this point. I'm sure they will do fine.
Editor should probably switch link to the much less ad-happy source: http://www.macosiphone.co.cc/
More information about this launch on our blog - http://blog.webmynd.com

The main points are:

- We're now focused on building personalized search applications on top of the existing search infrastructure, rather than just web history (though that is still part of it)

- Launched an Internet Explorer extension

- New sharing features in the Firefox extension

- Supports Live Search and Yahoo as well as Google

- Custom browser extensions for publishers (e.g. the HNSearch one for Hacker News)

- New demo page so you can try it without installing: http://www.webmynd.com/demo?query=economy
From my understanding, HIV is already near the max mutation rate that is sustainable, this is what makes it so hard to kill. But it's on the edge of the cliff, if it mutates any faster then too many of the mutated cells aren't viable and not enough live on to the next generation to maintain the population.

You have to understand that most mutations are harmful, beneficial mutation are extremely rare so there is a maximum rate of mutation before mutation itself becomes deadly to the virus. Pushing it over this limit by hijacking its replication process and damaging the DNA is brilliant.

Consider how long the human race would survive if our mutation rate was 80%, things like mental retardation, autism, physical deformity, infant death, etc. would sky rocket, it wouldn't be long before most people couldn't take care of themselves.
That is just more awesome than I can describe in words. Man, what memories of OS7
Taking advice from blogs: differences between actionable tasks and passive tips
It's hard for me not to read "pb" in a Python serialization context as anything other than Perspective Broker.
Technical Content on the eSlick Reader
I saw a really good presentation from a group of 5 designers making a digital wallet credit card like what briefly flashes in this video. I would have told them to apply to Y Combinator but they need a hacker.
Judging by the number of comments saying that it needs to be more explicit, it's quite obviously not obvious to everyone.
Public Colleges Get a Surge of Bargain-Hunting Applicants
Sentdiff: Diff for Writing
I guess you're right that it isn't cut-and-dry, but my hypothesis would be that a great X-er can most of the time inspire children to be great X-ers themselves. Hence, whatever she would accomplish on her own, she can accomplish tenfold by inspiring her students.
We actually think that trying to get people to change their behaviour to keep going back to a different search portal is a greater barrier than getting them to install a plugin once and improving their experience on their current search engine.

Even if we can improve the search experience on Google just a little, we think it could be huge. And the lowest hanging fruit seems to be the RHS of the results page - there must be better uses for that space, especially with screens getting larger.
While I'm not a marxist, I think she goes too far in her opposition to this. All of the protagonists are capitalists (mostly with inherited money) and those who actually work to advance the cause of the "great men" - i.e. Eddie Willers - are given short shrift, and little chance to advance. Instead we have great men with inherited fortunes, doing very little actual work, preferring whining about "looters" and in one case (Hank Rearden) spending a month flying a plane over the Rockies looking for another great person.
I think you'd be far better off to swap the "About" page text for the statistics on the front page. I doubt the average visitor to your site cares how many searches have been run in the last 30 days (especially since they all seem to be zero), but judging by the comments on this page, the average new visitor probably would like to see something explaining what this is.
Niche Web Sites Buck Media Struggles
Way too much hand movement is necessary to interact with the interfaces.
I don't understand why there's so much hate for Microsoft. There's much more to Microsoft than just Windows, Office, and Live Search. For one, I'm impressed by some of the stuff coming out of Microsoft Research that was shown at Techfest 2009, their internal research conference, in the last couple of days: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/techfest2009/vide...]
Were you expecting him to say:

"Actually, Twitter has no business model, and their mindshare will evaporate as soon as they start charging. We're truly boned, and our only hope of profitably exiting this deal is to unload it on a bigger sucker. Sadly the big suckers are hurting for money at the moment, and unlikely to try running another major site as a public utility, which is annoying because despite the fact that the web part is nearly free those SMS charges for 180 character messages are nearly killing us. So basically we have to keep up a facade to justify our valuation per user of about $75, which is about equivalent to the present value of, say, a WoW player, despite the fact that they have proven their willingness to pay money every month, are intensely engaged with the service, and have low churn rates -- absolutely none of which we can boast of. Oh, God, somebody please hand me a martini."

?
Thanks, that is a much better link.
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I think it was Philip Greenspun who originally said it, but I could be wrong. "How you're treated by the police is primarily determined by their expectation of you having access to a lawyer."
Software spy spyware
It is interesting to consider how effects like this operate at different levels.

For example, if I picked up a coin, flipped it 6 times, and got heads each time, then I might reasonably be suspicious about the coin. On the other hand, when someone claims to have flipped a coin 200 times, it is the ones who never get 6 in a row that are suspect.

Similarly, a tax return that does not have numbers beginning with 1 is certainly suspicious. On the other hand, if you gave me a million tax returns, and all of them had lots of numbers beginning with 1, then I would be suspicious of the collection as a whole. Benford's Law deals only with probabilities, after all; we should expect some deviations from what it predicts.

Given the sizes of data sets that governments deal with, the ideas outlined in this article can certainly be useful. However, the virtual certainty of false positives is something that also needs to be dealt with. It is to be greatly hoped that these ideas are implemented in the context of human wisdom and manual fact checking, and not merely as a yes/no way of determining who gets treated like a criminal.

In any case, this was a thought-provoking article. Thanks for posting.
If the studios want to push people into downloading over BitTorrent, they're going the right way about it.

Yeah, I only use Netflix out of utter desperation. If I really want to watch something, and just can't find it on Usenet or TPB, then I grudgingly accept the fact that I will have to use Netflix. The UI and video quality are both terrible. Why is it that I can stream full-HD video for free, but I am only able to pay for low-quality DRM'd crap?
groovy feedback form, more sites should have something that easy.
I think you're right that a plugin install is smarter than trying to get people to stop going to Google. I think you need to make it very clear why it's worth installing the plugin initially. Something concrete that we all wish Google did.

Reassuring people that the plugin is lightweight and won't compromise their security is also very important. The history recording might be great, but it sounds creepy.

I don't know if it's true, but a dark themed web site might not be a good idea when trust is important. A/B testing on install ratio?
Twitter has one thing going against it that is virtually unique: costs are super-scalar to the number of users, whereas in almost any other content-based website they are logarithmic.

The reason is SMS charges. Every user who signs up for SMS costs Twitter real cash money to service at the margin, and their cost increases as the size of that person's personal network increases. If Joe SmartPhone signs up to follow me on Twitter, every one of my status updates starts costing them money, too, despite the fact that I only use their web interface.

There is literally no other web service I use that costs my provider a per-use fee, except my brokerage account -- and they, quite sensibly, pass that per-use fee and then some straight to me.
Mac OS 7 was the reason I hated mac's from 1996-1998. I am curious what virtues it could possibly have because I just remember having to run around the UCLA computer lab troubleshooting that OS futzing with the network printer daemon.
Some suggestions:

- add options for UK/US English

- add an option so that you can solve anagrams and find scrabble words
agreed. Sadly, I cannot change the url, only the title. Editors/PG feel free to change to the less ad happy source RMS provided: http://www.macosiphone.co.cc/
Perhaps, if you're interested in the business-level angle - but binary plugins have had a long (and blighted) history, so they're less relevant.

If you're interested in technology and creating something new using the common elements of the web, on the other hand, stretching the limits of what's technically simple javascript + canvas is indeed important.
Great comment from site: "Man, the future’s going to be full of fingerprints and smudges"

But seriously, some highlights from the clip:

Interactive wallet (credit cards and business cards all in 1 paper thin device)

Cell phone with video calls

Seamless file transitions and interactions between tablets and future versions of MS Surface

Speech to text that really works

Coffee cups that tell you how hot the beverage you are about to enjoy actually is

And finally, virtual newspapers
I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but if you did it just as an exercise to see if you could, why are you soliciting feedback?
What makes you say they're gearing up to flip?
30 Billion More For AIG
Microsoft mapping course to a Jetsons-styled future
Read some of the comments.

* Silverlight doesn't run on PPC Macs

* lots of video quality issues: poor picture, blockiness

* lots of audio syncing issues: audio is several seconds behind on many videos

* can't revert back to the old player once you "upgrade" and most customers are saying that they were conned into "upgrading" by Netflix.

Finally, this all started in November of 2008 and comments are still pouring in and it's March of 2009.
A friend and I had a long discussion about possible models for local investigative journalism online.

The best we could come up with was something along the lines of a modified subscription plan with a low yearly rate (n < $40 usd) funding automated collections of government data with a very small cadre of reporters writing stories and editing each other.

Either that or beg-a-thons like public radio.
Connexions: An Open Source Initiative to Kill Textbooks
A different way to think about creative genius
Here's my simple attempt at a similar idea: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/41872

It puts a search of my del.icio.us bookmarks above my google search results.
Infochachkie (www.infochachkie.com) does appear to be a legit startup site. There are no ads and, as far as I can tell, nothing is being sold.

Not sure why you would block this content. I discovered this site on HN and I have shared it with a number of my friends.

Is it possible you have too heavy a hand here? I scanned the long list of banned sites and most appear to be very smarmy (just based on the urls).
Here's one obvious use case: social apps. Most apps on facebook, myspace, etc don't really require perfectly normalized data, most of the stuff is just for fun, or games to generate ad revenue etc. Plus, you don't have to worry much about the scalability issue other than making your queries run fast, once it's on app engine, a million myspace users hitting your app won't even make you worry.

I've got my own colocation facility with virtual machines and the like as well as an amazon ec2 account with several vms, but I still make use of google app engine any time I want to write a facebook/orkut/myspace app.
The most salient point I saw there was that Google is using its search power to subsidize Gmail, gDrive, Google Office, etc. In my opinion, search is a narrow, competitive enough market that you can't break it up, but you can force Google to separate Gmail from search, and make Gmail pay for itself through its ads.

Will it happen? I'm not sure. But I think he had a pretty strong start to a case that argued Google controls too much of the general online market.
I thought this is exactly how protocol buffers worked with non-fixed length fields. Doesn't it start the record with the length of the string? I'm not sure how thrift works, but probably the same way.

(Not speaking from experience, just from what I remember of the format when I read the specs).
I don't like it because the video skips about every 5-10 seconds. The audio is fine. It's really annoying, especially if you're watching an action movie.

Hrmph.
Definitely seems interesting, though as staunch said, the barrier to installing a new plugin is significant.

I wonder how Google feels about the widgets covering up the Adwords ads in the right column. Enough people start using it and that could impact their revenue. Is there even anything they could do about it? Maybe they would acquire the company, or just clone the best advances in search interface for themselves.

I also wonder if some of the widgets might be redundant. Wikipedia and YouTube, for example, are already heavily represented in search results. In the screenshot TC posted a few results are duplicated.
We have about 30 sites hosted with them and I have been none too pleased. The service is shoddy and disapointing. Currently, they are running Subversion 1.4.2 on the gridservers packages, which is nearly 3 years old. I've asked if they can upgrade to 1.5.x with no avail.

Our customers constantly complain that their sites are down, even if only for minutes at a time. I know we're only paying $20 a month for about 10 separate accounts, but I get better service from Dreamhost.

I think they're overpriced. I've dealt with tons of shared hosts for much less with better service. It seems like people get suckered in with their pretty website and the fact that a lot of big sites us them without doing much research.
Third that as an ex-MTer currently on Slicehost/Mosso. I've personally had sub-five minute resolution times with Slicehost support. If you're reading this, fantastic jobs guys.
Arbitrary, blocking, transitional animations get old very quickly.
Tsvutils, for manipulating tab-separated tabular data
as terse and glib as this post is... i think it should be obvious he means Richard M. Stallman... given the context, and that this is hacker news...
Why don't they just hold pull out whips and make us slave for them? It would make this a lot less embarrassing.
It it is a problem to solve. Hackers need little excuse beyond that. I think that's why most people appreciate the hack.
If that's true, why would any publisher not discount their work by 30%? Does Amazon control the discounts?

Only 35% rev share for the publisher seems extremely low to me.
Has anyone hacked the streaming format? It seems like it should be possible.

Netflix on Tivo works well.
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I find it far-fetched that a kindle will replace a phsyical textbook. There is something about a physical book that just can't be replaced in my head just yet.
Agreed, MacOS 7 brings back more bad memories than good. I think the virtue here though is not Mac OS 7 itself, but rather the interesting exercise in OS porting.
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