skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends... If my contract runs out and an opportunity doesn't line up, there is a backup startup plan. How many people are writing iPhone apps due to unemployment? How many engineers are willing to take a chance on a startup because there's nothing else out there, or are willing to take lower salaries?

I would be more concerned with these examples being black swans: we notice them precisely because they're rare. I would like to see a fortune 1000 list by date compared to upturn/downturn of the economy to feel more comfortable about the observation.
"-enterprise IT as a business with no future. He'll be right, in more ways than one."

Can you clarify? Because that seems very misinformed. Unless you mean on-premise deployments, which has been on the way out for years.

With SaaS + cloud computing, Enterprise IT is just starting to get interesting again.
Very cool to see somebody from Mashable writing here - I like when a writer follows their discussion places.

In writing you get told to focus on a single core idea: a central theme that you revolve everything else around. It works similarly for web design (or at least that's the model my cofounder and I are using): you find out what lies at the heart of your system, what everything else revolves around. Every idea has one, even complex ideas. You figure out how to create that idea, and in theory every feature you add should revolve around that central concept.

Sam: your idea is based around commenting, right? What you need to do is figure out exactly what your big idea is. It's never something vacuous: it's one specific thing that you think places you above the people who are out there now. Everything else you do revolves around that core.

(As for people to interview: you could always try the 37signals people, and I'd also recommend the contrast.ie team: They have a very good sense of how to focus a concept.)
Believe it or not, but setting up business in Russia is incredibly simple and welcome. The overall entrepreneurship environment is very warm, the taxes are very low (as a small business you can choose to pay flat 6% or 13%) and you don't need to hire expensive lawyers or tax accountants (to file all the innumerous IRS forms), cause you can do all the paper work on your own easily! Even if you cannot or not bother to, you can alway hire a part-time accountant girl for cheap. What's more, there are no problems with tech savvy talented people in Russia, you can hire a really good hacker just for $1000-$1500 a month! And yes, there is a lot many web startups and software development companies in Russia, ours is one of them :-).

The only problem for startups here in Russia is lack of venture capital, as all the capitalists were frightened out away by Putin, who sued YUKOS to death for not paying taxes and hiding crime. So, most startups here are bootstrapping self-supported profitable busineses, as there is no way other.

I pesonally know a guy who developed mobile IM client and sold it to well-known russian internet giant for $1MM. He's now starting a new company for developing desktop client :-).
Trotting around Venice, CA at the moment, after I got sorta ejected from the UK for coming and going too frequently. Lived in Basque country for a year, moved (unsuccessfully) to England. But yeah, I guess I haven't been writing too much about travel of late.

This might help a bit:
http://www.blogabond.com/jason
That's a great listing of topics. Do they usually post the recordings of these anywhere (or are they going to, this year?)? I am sure a lot of us wking in the Web2.0 area would like to hear it.
Those get hardware acceleration, which is more power efficient than doing it purely with the CPU.
I like the location bar completion. It's a mixture of Safari/old Firefox's completion (+ faster speed) and the new Spotlight/FF3 style autocomplete. I think this is one example of good attention to detail on Apple's part.
> Is Russia blind to basic economic principles?

How has told you this bullshit ? Nowadays Russia is more capitalist than US ever was.
Yes, and it seems to have gotten to the point where the prosecutor has made it a point of pride to carry on the case.
I actually quite enjoyed that style of video interview. It broke it up for me and clearly separated each chunk of information, letting a few seconds for it to set in and moved on to the next question.
> Can you point to other situations where an advanced infrastructure created by government led to an increase in entrepreneurial activity?

Military spending has spawned huge amounts of both direct and indirect innovation. Aviation and the space program, the internet, scores of "trickle down" consumer electronics such as GPS, Popeye (created to sell a surplus of canned spinach after WWII!), the list goes on and on. Plus there's the education of large numbers of the population that would otherwise lack opportunity.

The doctrine of "small government and a strong military" is an oxymoron. Military spending is an extremely effective form of high tech government subsidy. Of course the downside of having a huge military is the temptation to use it inappropriately...
Adobe asks laid-off programmers to try Flex
man wget

wget --save-cookies cookies.txt ...

wget --load-cookies cookies.txt ...
can't seem to get on right now.
For frontend web coder, here's yet another browser to test on.
I can't give this topic the justice it deserves in an HN comment, but yes I'll clarify.

In 10 years time, the "IT Department" virtually won't exist at most small-mid size businesses.

I think a lot of business software is going to be taken off-the-peg, or plug-boarded from open source software as interfaces approach ubiquity and organisations like government, banking and b2b start to expose consistent "APIs". It's already happening now.

We also have gen X and Y moving into senior management and the internet generation actually moving into work. Computer skills are getting to the point of being virtually innate.

Acquiring computer equipment will be analogous in business to buying a photocopier or some other office equipment.

</crystalball>
Spore API
Are we going through green fatigue?
if you'd teleport that thing back two decades you'd be burned at the stake for witchcraft. Simply amazing, that kind of tech in such a package. I'm pretty sure they could make a it lot smaller and cheaper still if the demand is there.
I have a surprising graph to show: here's the OS makeup of Hacker News traffic from a post I recently had on the front page:

http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Operating_Systems_-_Goog...
Why don't they have %'s in the graphic?
Every digg application that asks users for their credentials is conditioning users to fall for phishing.

There are enough people that don't realize the underlying architecture of the web and think that their browser is to be trusted, not a particular server (if you think I'm kidding ask your parents!).
Find competing services and make sure you can user their api's as well. Never too good to have all your eggs in the one basket.

Monoculture = stay of execution
> To be fair, one point at least seems accurate -- falling oil prices will probably doom Russia's government.

I believe it will not. Only 38% of Russian GDP comes from Oil and Gas industry and this figure is contantly lowering, means the gov doing its best to devercify incomes. What's more, Russia has saved significant amount ($400B) of currency reserves. This will allow Russian government to support economy and stay afloat for a couple of years no matter what prices on energy resources will be. How much did US gov save ? ;)
IE would be the poster-child for leveraging the OS. The products that leverage the OS seem to be the free ones, now - so I guess that hits a price/performance sweet spot. What else is there besides IE that falls in this category? Media Player, maybe. But even though it's free and the default on windows, everyone I know has at least one other media player they use regularly (e.g., iTunes). IIS? Personally, I think IIS is quite good and can stand on its own merit. Sharepoint? I still don't understand its popularity in the corporate world, but you can't really claim it's leveraging the OS - maybe it's leveraging SQL Server?

Products that stand on their own merit: MS Office (though PowerPoint looks like the one most in danger of being passed), XBox (it's not #1, but it's clearly competitive), Visual Studio (destroyed the competition)

To me, it looks like Microsoft's winners by and large win by delivering a quality product, not being bundled with Windows.
I don't think netbooks work as a primary / your only machine. They are a great replacement for a PDA and let you get work done on the go, but the comparing a 300$ netbook to a 900$ laptop is a mistake.

PS: IMO, you can see the bias when you look at the machine they compared the netbook to. You can get a lot more machine for 475$ than the laptop they chose: Dual core at 2ghz, 250GB hdd, 3GB ram etc.
drupal.

Though I have to say that their policy towards upgrades leaves me underwhelmed.
> if you'd teleport that thing back two decades you'd be burned at the stake for witchcraft.

You mean by the denizens of 2009, for violating causality by teleporting things into the past? :-)
Can you point to other situations where an advanced infrastructure created by government led to an increase in entrepreneurial activity?

I think this has been covered by other posters and I can't add much to what they have already said.

I ask this because about every state nowadays has special departments and programs to promote hi-tech startups. But of course they are actually only flourishing in a small number of spots. I've worked with a few of these programs, and some are led by extremely talented and skilled administrators.

Right, because the initiatives I have in mind are national and, therefore, unlikely to have targeted local effects. You're talking about a separate issue, which is that it's very hard (impossible, in most cases) for a city to become a startup hub if it's not one.

Government intervention is not going to turn Dubuque, Iowa into a startup hub. There are too many ingredients necessary-- good universities, venture capital, entrepreneurial culture, good hackers, the ability to reach relevant customers, and reasons for a startup to stay there once it is successful. It would be possible to upgrade cities that have some or most of these ingredients (e.g. Pittsburgh or Minneapolis) to full-blown startup hubs, but most cities will never reach that level. However, the nearly impossible problem of turning Dubuque into a startup hub has nothing to do with that of increasing entrepreneurship on a national basis.

Seems to me, and it's just my opinion, but societies with lots of government-provided goodies actually have less startups.

I would imagine that you're talking about the European countries, but the government benefits have nearly nothing to do with the EU having fewer startups. Regulation and a less entrepreneurial culture take more of the blame.
You know what would be really cool? Not canned music played in dynamically chosen snippets. Music that is dynamically generated.
I agree with Paul's point. Google's early growth was due to the product being superior and not because it had any sort of virality. I don't recall seeing any Google ads on TV/print/billboards yet soon everyone was talking about googling instead of searching the web.
No you wouldn't. Go back two decades nobody will be able to tell that the GbE and USB2 actually work -- or even know what you're talking about if you tell them what those two sockets are for -- so the reaction you'd get would probably be along the lines of "ok... so you have a $100 box which plugs into the wall and lights up a red LED?"
Ask YC: Anyone in Stony Brook, NY area?
If anyone here is in Stony Brook University area, let's chat and make this place a bit more entrepreneurial.

Post here or shoot me an e-mail and I'll set something up.
But was NeWS a good idea? It seemed excessively complex to me, just like AJAX.
Military spending is fine if it's making the country and the world safer. I'll pay for that. But the recent multi-billion-dollar handout to Bush's and Cheney's contractor friends has made the world a lot less safe.
I can. There is nothing new about A/B testing -- the statistics available to do it have been available for centuries, the techniques for applying it to offline business have been available for decades (direct marketing, principally), and copy/paste Javascript code to do it has been available for years. And still plenty of people have never heard of it.

It is an absolutely amazing tool, one of the most powerful I have available. But its also hard, in a lot of intractable ways: you need to do things twice or twenty times when the first time was "good enough", you need to commit to looking at data and (scary part) making decisions based on it, and you need to learn to accept that reality and your perception of reality are very different things.
Space X tests re-entry material
Too bad it doesn't natively support homeplug networking:

http://www.homeplug.org/home
"Another internet bubble" would probably be less damaging than the flattening of the IPO market, which has decimated venture capital.

When something that is essential for subsistence experiences a bubble (e.g. food, housing) it causes an incredible amount of pain, as we've seen in the past decade. Stock bubbles are, in comparison, harmless. Some people get hurt badly, and some make huge gains, but they aren't so ruinous that one should make huge sacrifices in order to avoid them.
Were currently using it:

http://stylous.com/
I read that as Wal-Mart launching a $100 Linux-based PC.
5 Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don't Work)
Why does nothing grow if you pour water on a rock? How are large plants able to grow in the desert?

You need a mix of many factors in order to encourage tech startups, and startups can't "flourish everywhere" because many of those necessary ingredients are only found in half a dozen "star cities".
Nice. Any pros and cons that you can share?
I too am a big Vimperator fan. Plus, it forces practice of the number bar, something that I'm still not awesome at even after all these years.
There's a decent chance that the GbE can fall back to 10Mbps ethernet, just as it can certainly fall back to 100Mbps ethernet. The 10Mbps Ethernet standard was released in 1982 (http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/05/09/19FEether.sb2_1.ht...), so I'm going to guess that by 1989 there must have been at least one 10Mbps card.

Edit: It occured to me I should check the timeline on 100Mbps ethernet. According to http://www.broadcom.com/company/timeline/ , the first 100Mbps ethernet product was shipped in 1994, so we're definitely looking at 10Mbps. (Note even if that's off one way or the other by a year or two it doesn't matter for this discussion.)

USB will be a problem, because they'll have to reverse-engineer the protocol, but I'm sure with work they could get it to fall back to a USB1 speed that they could figure out how to work with. The problem there isn't so much the USB as figuring out how to send keyboard events, but even then I bet they could figure it out pretty quickly since I'd lay money the USB keyboard standard is deliberately as close to the old keyboard standards as possible.

However, you are grotesquely underestimating the people of 1989 if you think they're going to be shocked by the idea of a "faster serial port with some defined standards for devices", and you're just factually wrong that they'll be confused by an ethernet port. RS-232 serial ports date back to 1969, and survived into the mid-to-late 1990s, for instance.

This is another one of those "there really isn't anything new in computing under the sun" things. It's hard to name an idea that someone from 1989 wouldn't have heard of or understand, they just lack the hardware to experiment with it for $200 1989 dollars.

Have more respect for your predecessors. They were not stupid. They just had much more expensive cycles.
SharedStatus.com - easy team management
I think it’s smart business because when your customer base is huge you don’t know everything that will be needed ahead of time. All those people out there trying to solve problems will find the pain points and need solutions - that’s the whole point of listening to your customers. The catch is that other people may be listening to your customers as well. Thus innovation and competition.

I think Microsoft sees itself as a "platform" company, not a "product" company. In that context, it doesn’t need to be first to win - it simply needs to be the best at integrating the pieces into a cohesive unit. Platforms are for dealing with general problems and not specific ones, so individual features may get copied or innovative companies may get bought when you’re trying to build a common base that a large number of people can build on. The strategy of keeping an eye on what’s being done and incorporating the best and trying to improve on it sounds like a smart business strategy for a platform company to me.
SSLStrip is now available
> And the don't need virality if your product is good bit really hasn't been proven out.

Great point. He really skipped over Gmail's marketing strategy, which wasn't just being good. Gmail didn't get a lot of attention soley because of something as abstract as "it was good". Gmail combined artificial scarcity (invite only) and an outlandish offering (1 GB space) to spark demand. That is the core of the hype machine that drove the word of mouth. Being good was only a multiplier on that, not the base.
I hope not too -- Russians seem to keep getting the short end of the stick. Nonetheless, Putin has burned through something like 1/3 of the foreign currency reserves in 6 months, trying to defend the ruble and rescue the stock market. Further, the Russian national budget assumes, IIRC, an oil price of greater than $80. This, obviously, is no longer the case. Last time I looked, oil and gas were supposed to account for some 30% of the federal budget; I'm sure that is no longer operative. See:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/budget.h...

There are hard times ahead for Russia, along with the rest of the world.
Discussed on HN before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487028
This tool is now available: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=493912
You'd have trouble with speed autonegotiation, though. That wasn't developed until 1995 and GigE won't work at all with peers that don't support it.
It’s all about utility: Social media apps grow up (for advertisers, too)
In Silicon Valley, Recruiters Are Sending Out Their Own Résumés
At least with AWS you have availability zones.

Personally, anything I code against these APIs, I make as encapsulated/swappable as possible. Downtime aside, I am worried about being cancelled or if someone goes out of business or if someone starts offering a piece of the puzzle that will save me a signficant amount of money. Got to be able to adapt as fast as possible.

Fortunately, Linux lock-in is not something that keeps me up at night :-). This is the beauty of IaaS (VMs) vs PaaS (framework X).
appssavvy is great to work with! (disclaimer: i developed the snow reports app mentioned)
http://www.bash.org/?5273
I don't believe that any job exists a priori in any person. Although if I were born with a better voice I would be a better singer. Bob Dylan wasn't blessed with a beautiful voice (as opposed to Bocelli) but he is still a great singer because he had the passion to learn how to sing. Nobody is born to be a dancer or accountant, these are skills that must be learned and developed.
My fiancée, who is fairly computer savvy but not a programmer, is a big fan of her new netbook because it fits into her purse. Something that perhaps the mostly-male engineer population might not think about.
Alex Payne — Why I Don't Allow Comments, and More on Everything Buckets
Search: Still The Internet's Unknown
If you don't feel like parsing the article:

It's a tiny linux server that plugs directly into the wall like a night-light called the SheevaPlug.

It has:

512MB of DRAM

512MB flash storage

gigabit ethernet

USB 2.0

1.2GHz CPU

Nice little device - I'd love to see how folks plan to use it.
My sampling of Jersey was high school and my early twenties, so I have an especially bad memory of the area.

There was also a completely irrational market and bid up of low quality stuff due to shortages. The attitudes are proportionally high-maintenance. It is a very bad place for a young man to be. Avoid it at all costs. The only place I can think of that could be worse is possibly silicon valley.

As far as the Pacific NW, I don't know much of it and what the prevailing attitudes are. I'm guessing the distance from NY can't be a bad thing and you are more likely to run into females with a more naturalistic, feminine affect. Never been there though, so I am not the man to ask.

I'm dead serious about the dilution hit. Something happens around 30 that suddenly puts you incredibly at ease at the same time that the women are getting more anxious. Also, the younger ones (early 20s) start making themselves more available. I can't tell you how many propositions I have gotten from women who wouldn't look at me once in high school. The funny thing is, when you don't need them, the options keep increasing.
I believe some if not all of the guys working at 280 North are ex-Apple engineers.
You can have physical access to your servers and still watch them go down. Your upstream bandwidth provider had a technician trip on a power switch. Your city suffers a Katrina-level disturbance in normal operating conditions. etc, etc Its all a matter of what risks you tolerate.

Anecdote: Google Search has had more downtime in the last 400 days than my main Slicehost slice. This demonstrates to me two things: a) Slicehost is awesome and b) you are the weakest link, whether "you" are Google's whole engineering team or one guy coding from next to a rice paddy.
I agree w/r/t to the facebook apps - I don't think they have any lasting value.

And I think any product that completely revolutionizes a domain doesn't need to "go viral" to succeed - ultimately the excellence or game changing experience will cause these apps to succeed, Amazon, and the iPod are two great examples. Google was a success because they created a game changing search product - it was (and still is) vastly better then anything else out there.

I think however that while everyone tries to create a game changing product, the vast majority of products are really incremental improvements and in these cases going viral helps. Twitter being a great case in point - really just an iteration somewhere between IM/Email/Blogging - but went viral enough to be important, over some better platforms such as Jaiku.