skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the best review I have seen in a long time on HN, Harsh and constructive. Take it with a positive mind and go back to you drawing board and remake it for the better.
Liddell Hart is good, though sometimes he reads like he's giving his subject a reach around when writing about him.
Jobs In My Local Area
I am in the DC metro area (specifically Arlington). Yes, I am not networking enough - it takes too much time and is not as fun as coding.

Seriously though, I just started this whole raising money thing a few days ago. So I am learning.

Speaking of networking, I am going to a happy hour tonight in DC.
Only items 1 and 2 represent sources of gold's 'value'.

Item 3 is simply a property of gold (which you may or may not find advantageous). For instance, the same thing can be said about granite. It does not rot like paper, but that has nothing to do with it's value as a currency.

Item 4 is simply an extension of item 2. The reason a single government cannot control the value of gold is because all the other government's of the world don't go along with it. This is great if your government is somewhat careless with it's money supply, but doesn't have anything to do with 'intrinsic value'.

Regarding 1, using gold as a currency drives up the costs of using it for industrial/electronics purposes, just like using granite as a currency would drive up the price of countertops. But the fact that gold has a practical use does impart it with some value.

However, the value of gold as a currency is entirely due to Item 2. Gold is worth something because everyone agrees it is worth something. It would be interesting to see how this came about. I'm willing to bet gold's value originated in it's scarcity (and the exclusivity of showing it off), but obviously it has nothing to do with anything 'intrinsic' to gold. It's just as likely that an accident of history would have revealed some other rare metal that royalty desired to show off, which would have imparted 'value' on this metal instead of gold.

The reason gold holds value today is entirely historical. People value it precisely because people have always valued it.
A wise man once said that a man would live in a cardboard box, were it not for his need to impress women.

Sexual competition will always drive work out of men. And women only recently started working, as a way to avoid depending on men (and a few other good reasons, but I digress).
Thanks for the feedback and I understand your critiques.

The 10 most popular were only elevated to that level from people testing out the site (all of those were on the front page when people were testing it). I don't think they accurately reflect the best domains the site has. It should as the site gets more traffic. Plus, eventually some will start to get registered, which I'll highly prominently on the homepage. It needs time though.

As far as releasing before it was ready, all I can say is that there's a lot more I'm going to do, but wanted to get something out there to get feedback. This is not a final product by any means; it's an iteration.

Edited to add: While Domain Pigeon may one day be popular with domain collectors such as yourself, I'd consider it more successful if it becomes popular with non-collectors. If you go to the site expecting to find domains worth thousands of dollars, you'll likely be disappointed--most of those are taken. My objective is to make a good place to go for people simply looking for options.
We use Google Apps Premier, Salesforce (which is awesome) and Gradwell for VoIP (similarly awesome).

We're just about to start using Amazon S3 with some encryption for secondary backup.
I was reading the other day about how companies use patents like countries use nuclear weapons: As a deterrent.

Palm probably has a few patents on mobile internet-enabled devices or some such, which it could then use as a bargaining chip against Apple if need be. They all carry around these patent portfolios and agree to play nice. At least thats the way I see it working out.
Startup versus fun or useful application
It seems like "startup" is a term whose meaning is getting fairly broad on this site. Both of these front-page submissions were advertised as "startups":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456471

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456503

When does an online application become a startup? Is this just a semantic distinction, or is there something more to it?
What do you like about Salesforce?
I was a on a project a year ago, when we had a failing business model and the technical team lead was calling for the same thing saying the code is awful. Seriously who cares, bad code doesn't hurt anyone ;) Get on with making some money!
Tampa preps for Super Bowl with BI tools
The holistic view is exactly why Adobe Air is bad.

It's not standard and it limits accessibility.
If i am not mistaken, you cannot down mod stories, just comments.
Blogger Infighting Played a Role, Says TechCrunch Founder
Yeah, I know :D

Here's a start:

1) You don't have to type in any keywords, you can just browse and see what you like. Soon I'll add the ability for people to generate lists based on keywords similar to those other sites, but I wanted to get this out there.

2) Sometimes you don't know what type of domain you want. For example, consider a domain like "posterous.com". That's not something any of those other sites would likely show you based on your keywords. Domain Pigeon would.

3) You can quickly tell what's popular based on the shading, making registration a kind of game. At the moment, the recently added list is mostly white, but it will light up as more people visit the site. The top 10 will change accordingly too.

4) Usability is valued and the site isn't littered with ads.
Us: OneBox virtual PBX, Basecamp, Campfire, bit of GitHub, Slicehost for one-off servers, a managed colo.

I'm not sure Animoto was such a win for this guy; looks like a video just for the sake of having a video.

I'm not sure AngelSoft was a win at all; this seems even less effective than resume blasting services are for getting jobs.

If Basecamp was working well for him, I'm surprised he also needed RTM and "Joe's Goals".

Would really like a solid recommendation on a mailing list hosting provider (something like StreamSend); it is surprisingly hard to run even a private mailing list without landing in the Yahoo and Gmail spam folders now.
Between their demo and the youtube video in the wired article, Kiva couldn't ask for better PR.

It really is an interesting system. No RF technology used as far as I could tell. Simple solutions combine to make an efficient reliable scalable system. I'd love to talk to the programmers that got to build this system, what fun!
You might want to check your irony detector.
i can't speak for pclark, but i can tell you why i'm against flash/air/etc: the web should be based on free and open standards. the fact that no single company controls the internet is what makes it great.

does anybody remember what things were like before the internet was widely available to everybody? personally, i used compuserve. they were able to charge hideous rates per minute, because they were a de facto monopoly.

allowing a company like adobe to control such a huge swath of the internet is a step backwards towards the compuserve days.
This is like Google for blue-collar workers. I love being able to think of something and have it appear magically, and this should let people that work with their hands do the same.

Ironically, taking the time and cost out of finding parts should make more room for creativity in manufacturing and distribution jobs.
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/jfkhat.asp
iTunes: Crime Against Humanity
QTP Tutorials & Interview Questions
We've had "lights out" manufacturing centers for decades now. There's a lot more automation out there than most people realize.
Loved it!
To all the harsh comments, do not forget it's not a google beta. These guys are probably working their ... off to create an original gaming experience, that as far as I could see, is really adictive, took me 1 minute to start playing and really really liked it.
Great work. Congrats!
Better Ideas to Earn Money in Worse Economic Conditions
Software written while wearing a tie has bugs.

That's my story and I am sticking to it.

We needn't focus on the small inconvenience that software written while not wearing a tie also has bugs. Obviously, even the threat of having to wear a tie causes software bugs. I shudder to think what the threat of having to wear a suit AND tie could do to the quality of software we produce.
Background processing coming to Google AppEngine
awesome. Good luck - you've switched me :)
I think part of the problem is that we now spend most of our lives interacting only with people our own age. As a 26-year-old grad student, I spend the vast majority of my social life interacting with people 23-30 years old. We have to find our values anew with each generation, we don't have the presence of older, wiser people to teach us such values as class.

This is at least one area where I think the new secular, educated culture has regressed from the old, traditional one. Interaction between people of different ages is natural, and I think healthy. It may prevent the sort of inbred cultural environment where perspective is lost, such as was demonstrated by the spitter in that assaulted Arrington.
at a guess, by affiliate links from when users buy domains
It must be kinda good, because I just bought one of the domains I just saw on your front page - rollwall.com. Sure I can find a use for it :)
GMail seems pretty fast to me, often faster than Outlook on my desktop which is synced to it.
I don't find these reasons to be compelling. Surely there are other reasons against web apps like security.

I would actually like to see a more in-depth critique of web apps and a corresponding one on local apps.
Membership, affiliates, and maybe some quality ads. There's a lot of options down the road depending on how things go.
Oh, you said "Don't worry," it's OK then.
Addendum (since I can no longer edit): I reread the story. Never mind the above reference to illegality.
Here are a few critiques solely from the game & Facebook perspective:

- You've got an iframe app and you have both horizontal and vertical scrollbars (on mac FF at least). Get rid of them, they drive people insane.

- First time experience is pretty horrid. The "tutorial" is 20 click beast that goes through every aspect of the game at once. Make the game learning process a little more progressive. Don't let me do all 50 things at once. Give me one thing to do, and once I've done it, unlock another 2-3 things I can do.

- User interface, as has been stated already, could use some re-work and some polish. That being said, my old app (Warbook) looks terrible and still got pretty big.

- The virtual goods + advertising model is solid in this space right now. Ignore what other people are saying against it, you're pretty close to a great revenue model. Just remember - people buy virtual goods for two reasons: to "speed up" time and to gain social status.

With all that said, I think the game concept is pretty novel. Hopefully other people find it fun.
I searched for a couple of old co-workers and got a torrent of garbage results. Also, slooooooow.

There is good, and then there is not good. This is not good.
I mean, yeah sure, it's like this other reply below:

> Profit is down 95%, not net revenue. If they made $1,000,000,001 in revenue on $1,000,000,000 in expenses last year, and had identical expenses but made 95¢ less this year, then their profits would be down 95%.

The absolute numbers are still striking: profit last year was $2.2 billion, dropping to $115 million. That's huge, not $1.
Great suggestions. I use RTM for personal TODO and basecamp for project management and collaborating with my team.

Like StreaSend is OK, I just chose them because they are cheap. But they do the job.
His argument about employees shopping and browsing during work hours is easily taken care of by firewalls and work policies. It actually becomes moot when you take personal mobile devices into account anyway.
In the wonderful future I live in, I wear sweatpants and slippers every day, but that's not the point.

When I worked in finance I lived off the Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts and Dockers khakis; it's easy to rationalize it, but it's still unnecessary time & expense.
Worked for me, and really, the results are not that great. In fact, the only result that was somewhat interesting was what popped up in the peoplefinder.com sponsored link - the rest of the results were wildly inaccurate. And, seeing as they are just a Google custom search anyways, I would say that they are "no better than Google", despite what the TechCrunch article says.
//And I tell you one 'hell of an organization to beat' is the company that on their first attempt at a phone, came up with a device that everyone else are now following as the way forward. Apple have nothing to worry about.

I totally agree
To me, Sugar was the essence of OLPC. The hardware was absolutely necessary and cool, but I cared about OLPC because I thought that constructionist learning could significantly improve the lives of persons living in developing countries. Sugar seems like a good way to advance educational goals, in stark contrast to the MS Office training that sometimes passes for education. So, when OLPC seemed to shift its focus from learning tools to Windows machine production and distribution, it became much less interesting to me.

I gave less to charity this year because of my personal circumstances and the broader economic condition, but that just means that my giving was more carefully targeted. I think serious differences in values between OLPC leadership and the interested public accounted for more of the g1g1 drop off this year than Negroponte realizes or is willing to admit.
I know these are a lot of assumptions, but they held up until now. Actually, the most important assumption is that technological progress does not obsolete people as workers. As manual workers, the time will surely come. As white collar, intellectual, or knowledge workers, I dare say never. There are simply too many difficulties.
If you know the passwd then tools going through the drive will not change.
If you have to remove the PCB and replace it with one from another drive or you have lost the passwd then you are stuffed. Unless of course the drive maker has built in a backdoor - from past experience of security on PCs the unchangeable security passwd will probably be 'seagate'
Everyone in this forum is stupider for having read this. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
The newsstand that spawned Microsoft won't close after all
I found all these US Army manuals in the emule network. They still must be there.
One very good manual to have is the Seal fitness training one (if you are into this).
I hope they are human-eatable? That will control their population for sure.
SEAmail: Applying Semantic Technology to Email
What is so surprising about that? Some companies make a profit in one year and have a loss in the next; more than 100% decrease.
I just tried playing your facebook app. I've gotta say you should just do this a facebook app and nothing more. 86 the website or hire a designer. Do not waste people's time: i am not going to enter text into any inpot boxes to get started playing your game. Perhaps this is because you hit me with too much text to start out with. Pictures are worth 1000 words.

People see login fields and cringe. On the facebook app a instructions form came up. I clicked through as far as i could but I'm very ADD and there was nothing to keep my attention, and since the app didn't catch my attention, I didn't even read the instructions. It needs to be painless. My suggestion for you (and anyone that wants to build a facebook app) is to add e.g. MobWars , Playfish and play them. See how long and how many gestures you have to do to start having fun.

Kudos for googlemaps integration though... and releasing! Its tough i must say.
Actually it's the demand that makes it valuable. (And the demand stems from everyone agreeing that it is valuable.)

There is a finite amount of uranium on earth too, but the only reason it's considered valuable is because there is demand for nuclear applications.

Only a little over 10% of gold is used for industrial applications. Without the demand provided by people agreeing that gold has value as a currency, the price of gold would plummet. The high value of gold is self-fulfilling... it's based on people's faith that everyone else thinks it is valuable.
It is but there can be so many factors that go into something like that. Because of the economy many companies (And I can't say Sony has done this) are writing down some huge acquisition and infrastructure costs this year while expectations are low which can artificially affect this number.
1. It's client-server all over again.

But without the problems of deploying an application to thousands of desktops.

2. Web UIs are a mess.

These arguments are the same for the desktop apps. Powerbuilder looks different than .NET looks different than Swing... Besides, maintaining an open stateful connection to a server is very very expensive and limits scalability.

3. Browser technologies are too limiting.

Wrong! Having to go into the office because your desktop app is installed on the computer in your cube and you can't VPN is too limiting. Web apps enable the freedom to access information securely from anywhere much much easier than desktop apps.

4. The big vendors call the shots.

A little bit of truth here. Browser incompatibilities are a real hurdle, but so are desktop incompatibilities. I'd rather solve incompatibilities between a few browsers (which in an organization is usually just /one/ corporate standard browser) than thousands of different desktop configurations: laptops for the execs, desktops for the front line, etc...

5. Should every employee have a browser?

Just because you have a web browser installed doesn't mean it can browse the "web". Install a firewall or block problem domains -- all the cool corporations are doing it!
Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing
Why the world's economic leaders at Davos blame the the system instead of themselves
Techniques for an effective 'call to action'
<Slashdot>I for one welcome our new invertebrate overlords</Slashdot>
I think the headline at the top is longer than necessary, too much of a sentence.

So instead of:

"We help you find an unregistered domain name for your website"

Maybe:

"Find the best unregistered domains"

Or something else short and sweet?

Just a thought. Best of luck!
I wasn't trying to keep it secret; I've just already mentioned in other comments that I work at the Washington Post. Most of what I was relating I've heard from other journalists I've met, I just haven't really talked to any coworkers about Arrington/TC.
The Way I Work: Bob Parsons, Go Daddy
Fan starts campaign for Windows 7's immediate release
How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage
ahh, my bad for reading in one direction and not thinking. A is like B, not B is like A. good point.
Gold arose as a monetary standard through the decentralized choice of the marketplace. Metallic standards have been in use for more than two millenia.

In contrast, a pure fiat system has only been in place since the 1970s, and all previous examples of fiat systems in history ended with disaster. This one might be the first stable fiat system, who knows?

But it is a lack of perspective to deem a gold standard as kooky, strange, and new and consider fiat as proven, reliable, and stable. Our system is a bold new experiment.
I'm a huge fan of Jott over RTM... I can't understand what's so great about RTM ;-)
They just need a GTA version.

Replace the Taxi theme with Drug Running or Bank robbery escape... etc. Heck every town has a bank in it and a spot behind the gocery store...
not new. I spent a couple weeks in a HallMark warehouse in the mid to late 90s. The actual warehouse was about 4 football fields with shelves about 60 feet high. Automatic pickers running on rails would go along the aisles and up the shelving to grab boxes, and deposit them on conveyors. The conveyors read the bar codes(they were talking about rfid at the time) and delivered them to the proper loading dock. No one was actually in the warehouse and they had to turn up the lights to give us a tour. All run off of two three crappy tower servers.
Depends on your browser. From what I remember, the pre's do properly size and have scrollbars in FF2, but not in FF3. The problem has to do with td cells expanding to fit their content I think.

There is a GM script that fixes this in FF3:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Were? Even if they are part of a fad, it's pretty clear that the fad is still in full swing.
I'm confused.

If you don't incorporate "correctly", the author says, then you run the risk of being "very sorry" down the road when one of your founders wants to leave with all her stock in hand.

On the other hand, if you don't incorporate at all, then you can't work with other companies in terms of PO's and invoices, you can't get professional liability insurance for your group, you can't get group health insurance, you can't offer equity to employees, and you can lose your house to a frivolous lawsuit.

What part of the risk of writing that $75 check to Agents & Corporations in Delaware am I missing?

On an unrelated note: you guys got rolled by your attorney.
These are mostly straw-man arguments or issues that are even worse in OS-land.
I feel like "great quotes" are the only good thing that comes out of Guy Kawasaki.
I'm reading The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene now and am enjoying it, I have also previously read the 48 Laws of Power by him which is written in a similar fashion. Very extensive and uses a lot of historical examples from both military and other fields such as politics and business.
Another thing is control.

Having a gold standard means that gold mining companies can manipulate your currency. Suddenly find a huge new vein? Inflation! Go for a decade without any new discoveries? Deflation!

Ask someone who supports a gold-backed currency if they would be willing to back their currency with oil, and they look at you like you are crazy... as they should. But it's no more crazy than gold. Oil producing countries just have a more visible bad rap, so the problem with that particular commodity is more obvious.

I'd rather be in control of my own money supply thank you very much. Why you would want to leave it up to fate and potentially hostile entities is beyond me.
I'm almost done reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island", by Griffin. Having had little background in finance or economics, much of what's been happening in the financial markets the past several years was just a mystery to me, and about a year ago I decided I wanted to understand how it worked. CFJI has helped quite a bit. It's not an easy read, even though it's well written, simply due to the subject matter (I had to read ch. 10 three times). It nevertheless does a great job of explaining how modern fiat currency systems work, and the mechanisms used by nations' central banks today.
What do you like about it? If you paid $250 for something other than getting in touch with investors if not actually securing investment, I'd definitely like to know. Otherwise, it seems that "liking it" is not a useful evaluation of their service.

I have a 1-yr startup and we fight tooth and nail to go to career fairs and conferences for free. $250 is not something we spend lightly, especially on something that doesn't give us a good chance of meeting people in person. It all depends on your situation, though. Ours could be quite different.

> "I signed up and paid $250 to have my application submitted to thousands of potential investors and investor groups. It has only been 3 days, so I don’t know how effective it is, but so far, I really like it."
I don't understand your question. Do you have an AIR app that you want to embed ads into?