skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think this is a classic business model problem with consultative services: 60-80% of the work is, in fact, cookie-cutter stuff that can be executed by any barely-competant practioner...

The "cookie cutter nature" depends on whether the client thinks s/he knows what s/he wants already.

A real, good design consultant will come up with awesome, non-cookie-cutter shit taht the client would never think of. That's why the client is not a designer.

A "barely competent" designer will implement the client's mediocre, pedestrian request in a barely competent way.

And when you hire somebody "barely competent," even for something "cookie cutter," you get things such as a brochureware cafe site that talks about its beautiful gardens but does not list an address, hours, or a contact number.

The problem, for clients, for hiring based on spec work, is the fact that the designer "wins" by shiny, not with careful consideration of the "problem."

And if design is any part of your strategy (and it ought to be), you're undercutting your own success.

EDIT: This is not to say that anybody calling themselves a design consultant is any good. There are very few truly excellent people out there -- in any field.
git could do it ;)
Scoble may be bringing it to more people's attention, but it is the Michael Malone post (http://pajamasmedia.com/edgelings/2009/02/13/turnaround-time) that really documents some hopeful statisitical and behavioral evidence...

Maybe Tech will be the core of the turnaround? None too soon for me.
It's probably time for this Depression-era law to go away. I don't think there's a single person on earth that's waited until age 18 to look at porn. Why criminalize it?
but can you name them all? ;)
Knitting is an Acceptable Lisp
The intent, when searching for porn on Justin.tv, is presumably to find "xxx" "channels". Being redirected to porn is exactly what the user desires, since that's what he searched for.
I wouldn't be so quick to point out mediatemple alone, nor that a separately-hosted status site would have necessarily...been available. AS 47868 was causing issues for all sorts of providers worldwide.
The users that search for porn get porn. Justin.tv gets money. I fail to see how this is a poor business model.

Oh yeah, sex is evil. I get it.
Looks like an interesting spin on friendfeed, from a resume perspective.
# So when you type "git commit", your repository will contain something that has never been compiled or tested.

rolls eyes

If you don't like a feature, don't use it. I can easily commit crap that doesn't work to CVS or SVN repositories too.

But seriously, some people have the ability to reason about their code without having to run their unit test suite first. Not committing this patch:

(defun foo-bar (baz)
+ "Here is some unrelated documentation that I don't want to commit with my other changes."
(let ((quux 42))

is not going to break anything. But it will keep my doc change isolated, in the history, from other stuff I may be working on.

If it does break something, you can always rewrite the history at a later date. (In Git, history is a tool to make development easier -- not an indelible audit trail for the suits.)
Agreed. I liked the way the product conception was laid out.
Over 30 million people come to the site or view JTV embeds every month. I don't think the community will disappear because of any one news story. We've had our fair share of bad press, but I'll be the first to say it's not the end of the world and that today's sensational news will be forgotten when the next story hits.

Lots of people inside the tech industry don't get it, but Justin.tv is bigger than Techcrunch, gets more pageviews than Digg, does about as many video streams per month as Hulu, and is largely used by people outside the tech sector who neither know nor care about the politics of Silicon Valley. Those people are gamers, music fans, and social networkers from all around the world; they like the site for what it is and for the service it provides, not for how it is portrayed in the media.

Lastly, this isn't a monetization method. If it was, we'd remove it from the site because it doesn't really make any money. What it does do is serve as a tarpit for users searching for content that doesn't have a place on our site. And ultimately we've found that in conjunction with our other community moderation tools, we've significantly reduced abuse incidences on the site. Which is a win for our community.
there is a dating site that uses a mechanism like that to match up likely candidates.
Why stop at 4.0?

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
And English.
This is a really good question and one that I'm having trouble answering. I find that I don't read through code in a definable way, it's more organic. I think it really comes down to (as previously mentioned by someone) why I'm reading through it.

Example, at work sometimes I need to read through other peoples code for reviews / bug fixes / enhancements. In that case I'll read the bits that matter or that I'm not sure what they're doing. Other times I might read, for example, the source to jQuery or a site or something to find out how something being done. In that case I'll try and follow where it does things by jumping between function as the compiler / interpreter would.

Where I read code is, again, something that isn't hard and fast. I'll more often than not just open it in a text editor (notepad as I'm a Windows man) but sometimes I'll load it into an IDE if it's particularly long or I'm having trouble following it in notepad.

Good question though!
Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom (video)
I guess it depends on which stage of your website development you are in. When I'm bootstrapping it and I'm not even sure whether the idea will be a success, I'm not willing to invest in anything more than good enough. When I have some empirical evidence that the idea will fly (e.g. a/b tests, first sale closed), only then will I get in touch with a great designer to do custom work. As a plus, I will probably have discovered what I really want from the designer by that time and will be able to drive the design in a better way.
You've made a fun thing there !

But I really think you should go and flesh out the theme a bit, just answering a bunch of questions does not make it a social network, there is a bit more to it than that.
What is Agile, really?
I wouldn't worry too much about that resume, if you keep going like this you'll be the one to evaluate others' resumes.

And you can always list it as 'an experiment in user generated content sites that pulled in 1000 signups per day on the second day', I think that ought to do it :)
A Virtual Unknown (moot of 4chan)
What about network effects? I'm aware that SV is the best, but perhaps there are some benefits to diversifying their presence? Additional exposure to local mentors, raising startup buzz in the area with media/event coverage, even interacting with other local businesses? Since YC decided to leave I imagine these probably weren't very big effects, but I'm curious.
English-Chinese dictionary based on Wikipedia
Medpedia’s Health Platform Could Be Just What The Doctor Ordered
Somebody should tell T-Mobile. How can you own a color if it ain't a color? ;)
Turnaround Time: Starting in Tech?
I always wondered why there was never a Web 2.1 or some such -- do people not like evolutionary steps?
Would you really want to show drunken photos on facebook LOL
How difficult would it be to just put your LinkedIn url on your CV
A professional, informative, non-trivial social networking. Let's wish it well. Techcrunch synopsis of the startup:

MedPedia is a free collaborative encyclopedia of health, medicine and the body.
MedPedia has partnered with top medical schools and organizations such as Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, U. of Michigan, American College of Physicians.
Sometime it makes you wonder if going for a properly sharpened straight razor and a real soap is really worth, or if you should start manifacturing disposable blades and crappy foam so that the people will keep on having to buy them and items to deal with the side effects of your bad products -- for the whole duration of their life
That certainly looks interesting. I skimmed through the Hello World tutorial, and it looks like they use many of the same concepts as Cocoa. Will keep this in mind when Apple drops Cocoa ;)
Nokia 7370 Brown 
Nokia 7370 Brown stylish,slim phone with GSM 900/1800/1900 network support. The TFT 256k color display phone is specially released in favour of decorative design.
It appears there are two ways to submit design briefs(job offers) on 99designs, one guarantees money to winner and one does not. Former seems to me the "right" way.

OTOH, it does seem "wrong" that 80 people are competing over one job. Insert a mental image of a multitude of starving artists in their huts...
Still, 99designs must not be too bad for young up and coming designers, similar to how getacoder "exploits" young overseas programmers.
You can actually select some friends from facebook. I have 100+ friend @ facebook but have added only 10. Here is my sr - http://social-resume.com/s/11865
you can actually put your sr badge in other sites like blogger ...
http://hitecweb.blogspot.com/
I take his words seriously: that their philosophy is to preserve contributor ownership.

But Zuck may not always be in charge (isn't completely now, for that matter). So his words ought not to be taken legally: i.e., they offer no protection to Facebookers from corporate decisions.
Telstra rolls out 'world's fastest wireless broadband network' (Australia)
Why we test software
show me a demo how it looks and works
Web 2.0 Design
Eclipse E4 M1 SWT: JAVA to Flash
In my experience, concentration produces the most powerful network effects. E.g. the closer the startups are brought together, the more they help one another. This is true both within and between cycles, and between startups and the greater community.

Though this isn't the reason we decided to be in CA year round, such interactions are much increased here. I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto recently having lunch, and in the course of one hour I ran into 3 YC founders and 2 angel investors I knew, all 5 of whom were there independently.

The thing we used to like about going back to Cambridge in the summer was the lack of this, actually. If you had to overhear the conversation at the next table, at least it was about Derrida and not virality.
Don Basile: The man who wooed Woz
Continuous deployment with downloads
In the absence of a salary, they are not concerned with receiving a fair substitute for salary. They are concerned with the other issues.

That's because "working for equity" is exactly the same as "working for free". Equity has no value until the company has proven itself. If you were working for a company that said that you have a 95% chance of not getting your salary, and a 5% chance of getting your salary 2 years later, you would consider that working for free.

If you accept the idea of working for free (which many of us founders do), then it's the other things that matter.
I think YC and any other incubator are operating in the same space, but not necessarily in competition. That sounds like a contradiction, but the way I see it that funding startups (and I only have limited experience in this field so be gentle in your rebukes :) )is more about getting the right mix of people, ideas and money than it is about just the money.

A vc should - at that stage - bring a lot more to the table than just cash, and if the chemistry isn't working out well then that can be because of the team, but it could also very well be the vc that doesn't work well with a specific party. So, more vc's in a certain region will make it easier to find the right 'mix' without any competition taking place.

One startup I'm involved in is now in its third year, they have raised about 200K in funding from 8 different parties, mostly angel investors but also one corporate investor, the team is working out quite well after some initial shake-out.

I can fully imagine that the past would have looked different if we had not 'clicked' on a personal level with the founders, but if we had not and they would have found traction with other investors I would not have seen that as competitor running away with our business, simply a mismatch of characters.

I think most vc presentations that bomb will do so on a personal level rather than on the ideas presented, in fact I would be surprised if there were not several teams pitching roughly the same idea to a number of vcs at the same time (and sometimes even to the same vc...).

The short version of all this, first of all it is about you and the vc getting on the same page, second there is the quality of the idea and your plans for executing that idea, third there is the money.

The last two are 'fixable', the first is not.
Notice the first comment, by Alan Kay.
Pretty soon we'll need an assigned names and numbers authority for buzzwords. Sign me up for the good old stuff, like Cyber and Meta.

About the text, though, I am not sure if this is simply the art student/hippie reformulation of the Web 2.0 talking points (Look! There are people here and they are doing ... Stuff(R)!) or whether the idea that the web needs to invent its own form of (post-pop) cultural dialogue (beyond /b/-memes) is actually an interesting thought to follow up on. Although I think that this challenge is real, it probably won't happen in a blog that is obviously hunting for reach and it won't have a version number on it.
XenServer vs Hyper-V vs VMWare
However, I disagree with the notion that it is simply because of the lack of a fancy title.

It's nothing to do with the title. It's to do with the level of equity involved. Someone with 2% equity is a sucker. Someone with 30% equity (in a 3-people start-up) is a founder.

If you're looking to hire someone who has the ability to pull a whole start-up out of their ass (through their competence and extremely hard work), then it means they could just as well work on their own start-up (where they'd have 100% equity). So why should they join you, unless you're offering a significant portion of ownership and you add value to that start-up equivalent to your share ownership?
kragen's comment below sums up my thoughts.
login using google id and follow the steps - It looks like this - http://social-resume.com/s/11865 ... it actually takes 10 mins to host a page @ social-resume
Justin, the same Justin as the one that did lf ?
Blogging Product Reviews - Ready made review site a scam? « Micha101’s Blog
I'd add that the "hire a contractor to build things out" thing works well for an easily defined thing like a cafe, but much less so for a web application. If the contractor is honest, the first thing they'll say when you try to fix the price is:

"I don't know what you're trying to build (even though we've spent an hour talking about it). That's in great part because you don't know what you're trying to build. We'll find that out as we go along, once we get some users in front of it and figure out what they really want. Therefore, it would be dishonest of me to quote a likely cost. I can timebox it for you: It will take less than two years, and more than a month. But that's all the accuracy I can give you. I can also tell you how long it's likely to take to build the first iteration - but not how many more iterations there will be after that."

Unfortunately, most contractors won't do that and so you'll find yourself with an ever increasing bill or with a piece of useless code.
I wonder how much of this is "we need your experience" as opposed to "we need a poster child"
Give up your car
I love archetypal 70s hackers. Just add rock.
Oregon Event Planners | Corporate Events | Conventions
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I'm not sure how relevant these speeds are going to be for several years - except maybe to keeping shaming the U.S. into making just the basic steps toward even adequate broadband a reality for its masses.
I think it is a fine strategy. WW.com does much the same thing, has been doing that for years and we think it is one of our better gimmicks, to get our 'abusers' to fund the site for your 'users'.

It functions as an escape valve for an element that you will attract anyway, no matter how much work you put into keeping things clean.

Your observation about the news is spot on, we once had a guy hang himself on camera before we caught on to what was happening, lots of bad press, angry letters from users and so on, within 5 days of the event things were back to normal. Still one of the most shocking experiences in my career.
When I was younger, I never understood why, say, day-glo colors didn't show up in the spectrum. Jim King's color science tutorial at http://home.comcast.net/~jk05/presentations/color.html helped me understand.
If only the article had any of the info promised in the subtitle, "How Don Basile, the CEO of a storage start-up, convinced Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to go back to work."

But the CNN article mostly only has such as:
"Steve is going to help us productize the technology, and also explain it," says Basile. "He's a very good speaker and evangelist for the transformation we're trying to do here."

Not much hacking news here.
I read those comments before making my post here, I realize it was not a new dependency, hence my 'less'. By adding more cruft that makes the mozilla build more dependent on python there is not 'another dependency' created, but it is harder to get rid of that dependency.
Yes, and I am not above plugging my own articles. ;0)

Glad your brother likes PerfectTablePlan.
PG's argument as I read it is that there's a shift in comparative market power towards entrepreneurs qua producers because the barriers to innovation have fallen so their funding needs are less.

I agree that companies pursuing small opportunities (web 2.0 features, iPhone/Facebook apps, etc.) will face little competition from funded competitors. That's because there's little money to be made out of those innovations. In the short term, that may even apply to situations where the prize is large (Skype, Google, Facebook, etc.).

But in the longer term, economic systems operate in equilibrium, so you have to think about marginal not absolute factors. In equilibrium, competition will increase, and in turn cost of supply (of developers, airtime, etc.) will scale, in proportion to the size of the prize. Only proprietary cost advantages offer sustainable competitive advantage, whereas free software tools, cloud hosting, and cheap airtime benefit all contestants equally. When credible signalling costs are high and transparency is low, relative early advantage tends to be self-reinforcing. So when the pie is big enough, unfunded start-ups will find their marginal rate of growth just as constrained by a lack of capital as it's ever been, and will lose the initiative to better-funded rivals accordingly. Which means VCs will be just as essential in supporting high-value product development as ever.

Of course, you might say that the rate at which the marginal utility of wealth declines is high enough that few rational entrepreneurs will be motivated to pursue big new product innovations given the higher likelihood of failure compared to developing iPhone apps. In practice I tend to think that success for most entrepeneurially-minded individuals is as much about recognition (a positional good), as it is about absolute wealth. And again, in equilibrium, position goods are definitively scarce, meaning the arms race for status will continue ad infinitum.

There's an old adage about how to make money: sell bullets in the war without end. That's what VCs do. And the invention of the taser doesn't put gun makers out of business. On the contrary, it increases their utility.
I wrote a brief article on the topic:

http://www.swombat.com/recognising-and-learning-good

I think that the best way is not just to read, but to try to recreate the code or part of the code using the original code as a guide. It's fascinating how many decisions you'll come to that were taken in the original code too.

The good thing about doing it this way is that you'll really understand why those decisions were made. Imho you learn the most this way.
Simplicity wins here! You can add all sorts of fun stuff later once you have a base of returning users (and you clearly don't lack creativity for that).
After all, why bother waiting for 4.0 before producing its manifesto?
it isn't your photo to use, though.
I think the only fallacy I'd point to in that argument is the idea that "more money helps" when building software.

In practice, I've found that adding more developers to a team actually makes it less likely to succeed. Imho, the ideal team size for a software start-up is three - three excellent, top-notch hackers, but just three. More than that and the communication overheads start to hurt your early progress and flexibility.

That's not to say that the three hackers won't want additional help later, which is where you could come in. But that's only the case until the tools get good enough that the three can continue as three pretty much forever.

The increased productivity of tools like Rails means that larger teams are actually at a disadvantage. This to me is the greater threat on your industry. In my start-up, I don't want us to grow to a mega-team of hundreds of people. In fact, we've already had numerous discussions about having it as part of our business model to keep the company as small as possible and outsource any work that's not core to the business - so that we can ensure that the only people we employ are top notch.

Otherwise, your analysis is good - but imho this factor could be the chink in your armour.
What scares me is that 10 of the 'business ideas' are twitter-related, therefore relying on the service.
I think part of this talk is directed at the messed-up American legal system which has trickled down to affect a lot of life in America. You can't make an exception for fear of a lawsuit. The rest of the world doesn't have a culture of lawsuits, and as a result, wise exceptions flourish.

If we remove lawsuits with large monetary penalties, leaving small penalties and, of course, criminal penalties, frivolous lawsuits will die on the vine.

Does anyone know of a movement to make this change? And if it doesn't exist yet, who's with me to start one?
10 out of 999 is not too many.
Play & Forget
Stop your work, do some fun, play & forget!
I want my next phone to have 2.5 times more pixels than the iPhone. And it might.
Lots of chaff to sift through to get to the wheat... but it's at least an interesting display of divergent thinking.

Worth keeping in view is the reminder at page top:
"Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution."
60 years of wait; Pak fails to payback Rs.300 crore
What I like about techstars - they don't pretend to be unique. Instead of going to some bizzare place like NY or whatever (they seem don't like SF) just to generate buzz they go to Boston, the most logical place for them to go to to attract more healthy attention. But people still generate buzz :)
The Neo Freerunner already has twice as many pixels as the iPhone.
Leading, Managing, Administering, Manipulating and Using people require different skills altogether.
Let's hope this moves to iPhone and others in U.S., since the post's bad-news punch line is:

"Toshiba doesn’t sell handsets (like the TG01) in the U.S., and has no plans to bring this one stateside."
OK. But for now googling "neo freerunner" brings up only its 2 company sites.

Neither ready for prime time nor reviews ?¿?
This is like reading a review of a music concert:
It seems wonderful and amazing, but you have no clue what it actually all means.
How Do You Build A Synthetic Brain?
It's a symmetric relationship. If a note looks like a chord then a chord looks like a note. Both a mix of frequencies and a single frequency can produce the same colour, so they both look like each other.