skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather than beat up your site, I'll take a stab at answering your question:

I highly recommend reading: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198

Peldi's advice and the links he give are dead on. I pitched bloggers before reading this and got a zero response rate.

Then I adjusted tactics. I added a phone number to my website and a mediakit. Some of the articles Peldi links to talk about having a media kit.

I also added the ability to give out codes for people to try the service for free. This is important as it takes replying to me out of the equation. The blogger can try things out (if they choose) at their leisure. The code also makes it easy to tell who is looking.

I started looking for bloggers via Google Alerts, Technorati, etc.). I then sent tailored messages to a few and included the "try it" code. I also tried to say something to show my site added to the dialog of something they already wrote.

Overall I kept my pitch short (unlike this reply :))

I mentioned nothing about writing a review or any such thing. I merely asked for their opinion. Some folks reviewed my service, others sent me their opinion. Still, I had responses :)

My mediakit is at:
http://www.feedbackarmy.com/about.slp

And my welcome page for people with a code is:
http://www.feedbackarmy.com/tryit.slp?code=theircodehere

Good luck!
A reminder that some startup fundamentals don't change even in this economy
I kind of wonder what the situation might look like if graphed. I think there is more than one maximum: in today's world, there is a lot of flexibility, which is good. However, in yesterday's world, that loyalty had value for both employer and employee. Costs, too, which is why I wonder exactly how much we lost and gained in the transition. I suppose it depends on the employers and employees in question, but you could, still, hypothetically look at the aggregate effects.
Frankly design (as in look) does not matter as much as design (as in usability). You can get away with a very basic design as long as you are providing a valuable service. In other words what you can do with great programming and basic HTML skills will always be superior to what you can do with great Photoshop/CSS skills and little programming experience. This is the same reason why small restaurants with great food, but crappy look can easily outscore a million dollar establishment with poor food quality.
How about letting the Board decide whether or not its a Shareholder issue? Isn't that partially the responsibility of the board to determine what is or isn't a share holder issue?
The more I read about The Cloud(tm), the more I'm convinced it's just Far East outsourcing all over again. I worked with an Indian outsourcing firm as one of the few American programmers, and I can tell you Cloud computing is going to hit the same wall: communication. No matter how much money you save upfront or ease of prediction that the contract could give you, you WILL lose time and effectiveness due to the increased communication the inserted organizational layer will introduce.
The lack of change does not have much to do with Vista. The main reason is that businesses are slow to make changes. Once they are comfortable they will not want to touch anything, specially if that means coming out of pocket. Now that being said, yes, Vista sucks.
As I'm probably overly fond of pointing out, Vista is what caused me to switch to Linux.

I know the businesses I work with have no interest in Vista, and probably won't switch to Windows 7, either -- at least not anytime soon.

I'm advising all those who can to go to thin clients. That is actually about 90% of the business users who can easily use thin clients. They're often just as fast, far more secure, and so much easier to administer.
It might be interesting to see something like this mapped onto a globe (take, say, the blocks of IPs assigned places to get an idea of the worlds "internet lights")

It also would be interesting to see this graph normalized for population (or GDP/capita?).
Beautifully clean design. Looks like it is already quite popular, too!
Want a Wireless Plan with Your Netbook?
There is so much tech work going on in Herzliya!

I lived there 15 years ago, and was amazed by all the big companies going in. It's good to see that it's becoming a respectable startup town. It's such a great city - good food, nice beaches, near enough to Tel Aviv to be able to say there's good night life as well.
This would be great if the telecommunications companies would offer a flat-fee monthly data access plan for all devices.
Neil Mix implements similar transformations in Javascript in Narrative JS: http://www.neilmix.com/narrativejs/doc/. However, as I recall it aims more to provide some of the main benefits of continuations rather than a complete implementation of continuations on top of Javascript, which is more where I was trying to go with jwacs.

Jwacs introduces very little new syntax to Javascript; I'm curious to hear which bits you find jarring, and what you would have preferred to see.
Remember the strop
And why don't we have that here in the US?

How about the $200 billion rip-off:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

And now there's going to be more and more bandwidth caps while people are ramping up usage. I expect the US, at least, to go backwards while the rest of the world is moving ahead.
but very efficient

It's not efficient for a country to have low rates of literacy, and indeed low levels of speaking proficiency in the national language.
So it looks like this system has people use simple textual markup. From the patent:

"For example, the developer may specify: <prosody style="bad news">Well, \sigh I cannot answer that question;</prosody>"
Foreclosure helps homeowners and the economy
I agree wholeheartedly. It takes effort on the part of all of us to maintain a useful and constructive environment here at HN, and I have GREATLY appreciated the thoughtful, insightful and provocative discourse here.
i love this new feature ... might as well take the retry button since refreshing the pages accomplishes the same thing
dude - that is sweet! have you posted this on hn before as an article?
My technotard mom raves about them for their technical support. They don't aim to be a developers dream service rather the much larger mom and pop population.
I made a graphical wrapper a few years ago -- call it from a terminal, but if you have X it won't munge stderr.http://akkartik.name/bash.html#pipeview
Don't these guys know how to keep a good secret?
Why? It would seem to me that you should always pay as little as you can get away with, and that that statement can always be made true by revising the qualification "as you can get away with". In other words, if paying as little as you can get away with causes some negative effect, then you aren't really getting away with it, so to speak.
There is more than one axis on which coffee shops compete, though. Price is one of the least-critical, IMHO -- ambiance, service, and "extras" like a decent menu or late-night hours will earn you a lot more loyal customers than a $0.25 price cut on coffee. Remember, if cost was the major deciding factor, people would be making their coffee at home. Going to a coffee shop is a social act, so the "scene" matters at least as much as the product.

The problems (and attempted solutions) the article's author described sound to me like they all stemmed from a lack of interest in paying any attention to the market. He admits that the most prominent and loyal types of coffee shop customers (commuters who just want to grab a cup for the road, and laptop warriors who want to sit tight and work for several hours) weren't interested in his business, and then seems surprised that he failed to make a profit? Color me unsurprised.

You can make money in the service industry, eventually -- but you have to provide something that people want. Simply being in love with your own clever ideas is seldom a good path to profitability.
Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.

I don't actually know how long the teachers I had in grade school had been teaching, but if experience can be roughly estimated by age then I am not convinced there's any correlation between experience and quality. I had a lot of great young teachers and a lot of rotten old ones.
ModBookPro = MacBookPro + Tablet mod
It works in as much as we have the chance to reply and amend our comments if they are taken differently than intended. The same problems exist for phone calls and email as well but it doesn't stop people from figuring out ways to communicate wry or witty comments, it just changes the conventions that are used.
ftp? it has resume built in lest u got disco while uploading
IIRC He embezzled something like $65 million in kickbacks from suppliers.
but there is no reason to spend 100k on high elementary school & high school teachers... Hell you could have a grad student teaching the course -- the material isn't hard.

I would have thought it obvious that "hardness of the material" has little to do with what makes a great elementary school or even high school teacher.
It looks like O3b (funded by Google, HSBC, and John Malone) is actually building a new satellite Internet infrastructure. They're launching satellites into Middle Earth Orbit instead of Geostationary Earth Orbit to cut the latency in half. The maximum download speed will apparently be 10Gbps. I think the idea is that they'll use this infrastructure as a backbone for ISPs in remote regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b_Networks,_Ltd.

http://gigaom.com/2008/09/09/google-invests-in-satellite-bas...
I don't think it is possible to implement continuations as a library.
The best thing about that part is that the labels should have been very accustomed to the divide between suppliers and distributors...but they were accustomed to finding themselves on the other side.
So, he doesn't like Python because he thinks multi-line lambdas read slightly better than inline functions? I mean, ok, I don't agree, but whatever.

So why did 26 people vote this up? There's almost no meat to it at all.
It was a demo promoting a gangster film.
How is cygwin worse (more bloated or 'crap') on Vista/Server than other Windows versions?
A better question would be "How many potential drugs have not been developed because they cannot be patented?"

Oh, and a zero regulation environment? There's always going to be liability for "your drug killed people". In a zero regulation environment that cost is going to be incredibly high. Or your placebo drug is going to CAUSE economic damage by killing productive workers.

Your model of regulation/no-regulation is far too simple. As always, there is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where both the public (consumer) and the corporation (producer) benefit.

And as always, if the cost of new drug (say an AIDS cure) is prohibitively high, a government may subsidize the process. Or even simply provide capital incentive (say a $2 billion winner take all prize, like an X-Prize for drugs).
It's for the users of the website who are potentially not familiar with ftp, not for me.
San Francisco isn't on the sprawl model. It is not a typical American city that's been hollowed out to be a workplace for people who live in the suburbs. It's pretty dense with a mixture of residential and business. There are other weirdnesses though - people who work in the suburbs and live in the even-further-out suburbs come to SF for entertainment.

The Mission district is particularly local-oriented since there is a large youth and student population and a lot of professionals who either consult or work from home. Hence... cafes. Although this is more of a district that people live in during their 20s rather than their whole lives.
The wikipedia link does not work. Cutting the latency in half is not saying a lot, because satellite connections have huge latency on the upstream. Any concrete data on what the latency will look like?
You cannot do client side resizing with flash < v.10
Indeed. There's also the pattern, first anecdotal but since confirmed by at least one survey [+], that a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs are dyslexic, and thus have to rely on verbal communication and gut trust more than others.

[+] http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/media/stories/story_8_45816_44300...
Do you know Italian? If yes, it's a book I'd recommend to everybody:

Author: Antonio Socci (a really good and meticulous italian journalist)

Name: "Indagine su Gesù"

It's a plain scientific research about the life of Jesus (with many many citations from every direction, including many atheists).

The book sells very well these days...
What distro do you use? What apps and desktop?
Adam Shepard is mentioned casually at the end. Adam voluntarily placed himself in a homeless shelter and 'made' it out.

Old and good thread about Adam Shepard: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116079
Some interesting quotes from the interview...

"The Macintosh will die in another few years and it's really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made--or any other product at Apple. They've just been living off that one thing now for over a decade..."

and

"Apple could have lived forever and kept shipping great products forever. Apple was for a while like Sony. It was the place that made the coolest stuff."

So Jobs had essentially given up on Apple's ability to succeed, since there was apparently no drive to create great new products after Sculley took over.

I've seen plenty of organizations grow stale. And whether or not greed is the factor, the result is the same: the people who were truly passionate just leave, and what's left is an empty shell with clueless people in charge.

Fast-forward to 2009, and it's clear why people are worrying that Steve's not at the helm, because Steve is good at this kind of "push" for progress. Still, he's not the only one who is. As long as Apple leadership doesn't start to "live off" the success of the iPhone, etc., they will survive and attract good people.
Some [...] might say that people who choose to live in the country have by definition chosen to live a technologically backwards (and, importantly, increasingly unsustainable) existence. That the responsible and ethical choice for any modern human is to live somewhere easily and affordably accessible by wires and roads and mass transit (and food and water)

I find this attitude galling. I grew up in the rural American midwest. We bought our beef, a half-cow at a time, from families within a long walking range (maybe a five minute drive). My next door neighbor and childhood best friend lived on a 40 cow dairy operation -- I drank milk that hadn't been out of a cow ten minutes. My water came out of a hole in the ground maybe 250 feet away from our house. Food doesn't come from big glass boxes and isn't grown on trucks. Water doesn't come from pipes or big processing plants. My daily commute in Seattle is longer than any normal commute I would make into the city as a child. In fact, small town America looks a lot like the mixed-use urban utopias that all of the enlightened people are trying desperately to recreate -- small groups of people each near the resources they consume, banding together to collectively look out for each other and improve their world.

End rant.

What’s more, I really don’t think people who lack access to technology have any idea about the user experience they are missing.

My largest gripe with living in the midwest (until ~2000 when I left) was that, as a geek, I wasn't able to find a lot of other people who shared my hobbies -- kind of a recreational version of the advice to live in SFO if you want to start a business. Threeish years after I left my parents were able to get broadband internet, via 12 mile (!) 802.11b shot from a hilltop to a tall building in the nearby city. I certainly knew what I was missing, and I think easy access to internet in a lot of the smaller communities (say, less than 25,000 people) could have a transforming effect on the USA in both directions -- culture in to and culture out of rural America.
you can make sql-like data management using programming languages (see practical common lisp ch 3); however, you can't use sql alone to accomplish what languages can

sql is very limiting ... to me, that's enough to justify not investing more time in sql
Windows XP is actually a very good product so why switch?
I think it's a matter of staffing. Cafes in San Francisco have a skeleton staff, particularly the ones on Valencia. It's just not economical to pay the high rent and more than one person at a time. Especially when people linger over tea & a laptop for about 5 hours.

To take an extreme example, the Muddy's cafes (near 16th and 24th) are one step away from dissolving into chaos. The people who work there seem to hate it.

RR has better coffee than average, and more foot traffic. I'm not sure why this hasn't been replicated. Maybe the beautiful people who seem to live there perform the same function as go-go dancers at clubs; they delude you into believing you're as hip as they are.

The best coffee experience in the Bay Area, as far as I know, is actually in a strip mall in Cupertino. Really!

Barefoot Coffee Roasters have many people on staff all the time, and they even hang out there in their off hours. It's got a very strong community feel and their baristas win a lot of awards. Much more laid back attitude compared to RR. I can't figure out why they haven't taken over the universe yet. Possibly they have higher staff costs, but choose to keep it like that rather than sacrifice to efficiency. That's just a guess though.
Lets Go Deep - 2009 Fantasy Draft Rankings For 1st & 3rd Base
There's a reason French, Spanish, Italian, and others are called 'Latin languages'.
Yes. When the perceived value of Apple stock is so tied to Steve Jobs, the company must disclose it to potential and actual investors. It is not a privacy issue. If it turns out he needs a liver transplant, many people, who might not have invested, may loose money, and Apple will be open to lawsuits.
"Traffic is not enough to make any real money"
I found this phrase while reading this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461296

Do you think this is true? If so I am wasting my time.
We went to 'anything but Vista'. Which mostly meant a mix of XP and Xubuntu. We've probably saved between £1-2,000 per host that would've otherwise been upgraded and extended the refresh cycle by a year to accomodate Windows 7 and Core i7 when it comes out and becomes cheap enough later this year.
7  Solar Boats
In Redmond, Windows Current has generally been regarded as the biggest competitor to Windows Next, and there comes a point where people won't pay $hundreds for another dialog box prepended on the workflow for changing your IP address.

You'd think that Embrace, Extend, Sell would be a better mantra than Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but I guess that's why I'm not a Windows product manager.
save threads and a most voted links section by month

Great site anyway
I find M-. (on most keyboards, hold Alt and press .) to be faster than Esc,. although using Esc as a "metafy-next-key" is useful for broken terminals.
Jamis is a cool guy, but his newfound obsession with wood carving is a little off-putting.

This article actually seems quite lame, like it's trying too hard to find a way to fit wood-carving with some sort of positive message about 37-signals, and ends up with some sort of religious parable where you almost expect DHH to come in near the end and turn water to wine or walk on water.
> Coupled with a bias towards an employee's best interest, I think saying "can't" is reasonable.

I was pointing out your bias, and now I will point out that even your expression "an employee's best interest" is likewise biased. Not that I feel differently, of course, however there are people who are fiercely loyal to companies for a variety of reasons that you or I may not embrace.

The OP, for example, wants to go back to work at Microsoft. Why is this wrong? He obviously identifies strongly with the company and obtains some emotional satisfaction from his association with them.

Let's compare and contrast to relationships. Many people fall into relatinships I would consider asymmetrical: One person is more fiercely loyal than the other. Many people feel this is a bad thing, and indeed some peopel are hurt in these affairs, especially if they secretly wish the other person to reciprocate in kind.

Yet there are people who are perfectly happy to be in these relationships where they are the expendable party. The movie "Adaptation" featured an example of this where one of the two Nicholas Cage characters describes having a High School crush on a girl that despised him. His "twin brother" felt differently, of course.

Please don't misunderstand, I fully agree with you that being an "expendable asset" is not financially advantageous, however I can't ignore the fact that may people out there seem to derive some satisfaction from such employment and I'm not sure they are ignorant of the potential consequences.

I conclude that there are people who are being perfectly realistic and rational about such employment choices, even if they are not the choices I would embrace.
It's only pyrrhic if his victory caused the loss of his wife, which isn't apparent from the story. It is however sad.

I think many people dull the sadness of loss with sour grapes. He has not. Respect.
> What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?

Music is more than a product -- live performance is a social experience, not just private consumption. People go to see bands live for many reasons other than the rendition of notes they could get from a recording: they flirt with other concert-goers, they experience mistakes and improvisations by the artists, and they drink and dance in public.

Similarly, good teaching is not a solitary or entirely reproducible event. The best teachers I've ever had were the ones who could get students talking to each other, generating and assessing ideas faster than any one pupil could alone. You can't get the same experience reading a textbook or watching time-delayed streaming video of a lecture. I'm not even entirely convinced that online interaction can pull it off, at least in areas like history and the arts, where subjective and emotional arguments are just as critical as hard logic.
I love this idea. Nice work.
Point that he's trying to make is that you can still make money the traditional way by charging customers for wood figures as 37s does, instead of going down the more common path nowadays of etching adverts into them
start with typing 10 fingers and numbers (~ to +) and then taming the steep learning curve on vim (and/or emacs)

do it like 4 - 10 hrs each day ... come back a month later, if you find yourself still doing it then go for programming
Defense Department sets up its own SourceForge
I'd link directly to the site but it is "403 Forbidden" right now (hmm).

http://forgemil.com/
In my experience, PR companies help with messaging more than press releases. They help your company to have a cohesive message so when you talk to press, it is very clear what your comapny is doing. This can be very helpful as it can be difficult to explain technical concepts to a general audience. They give media training to prepare executives to talk to the press. They also draft speaking and awards submissions for your company.

Pricing varies and sometimes they charge retainers and other times they charge hourly fees. It can be a big expenditure for a startup, but PR companies often have relationships with reporters that can help get your name out there.
But in the 37signals style, the wood carvings only contain about 4 cuts maximum. Anything more and it's overly fussy feature creep.