skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is all subjective, Brian.

For me the lack of management (malware, registry, NTFS) was a big boon back in 2005. The magical UNIX terminal where you could get new functionality by piping pieces together into your own customized tool was hard to start with, but grew on me in a couple of months. That was the point when I couldn't really go back -- Windows didn't run my favourite software -- the bash shell coupled with transparent mount-points for FIFO and tools like SSH, VIM and Python. Yeah, I know Python runs on Windows. It makes little ice-weasels cry, though.

And later on, my Wacom + Painter/Photoshop (I really hate Photoshop, I do) doodling hobby required too much effort to support with Linux. As of late this has gotten better, including Linux apps for painting, but by then I was gone.

Then I sort of bought into some of the software specific to the platform, such as Panic's Coda, the iTunes on the Mac, and now I'm stuck here. I could move onto a Linux machine for the web-development, even now I can.

But I don't want to. It's very cozy in here. "Everything just works" -- there's some emotional truth in that.
Ughh... I wish there was a HN feature: custom filters, i.e. a regexp one could use to filter out irrelevant (to him/her) news: twitter, facebook, .+ionaire - all these would be in my filter: I'm an engineer and I'm not interested in media/entertainment/advertisement business, yet sometimes they occupy well over half of the front page. I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days. Twitter, Walt Disney, Austin American Statesman or AutoTrader - there is no difference and all of them are of no interest to a programmer: they're not "high-tech" companies. Sure, they employ programmers and can't be run without computers, but that applies to every business in 2009

Custom filtering would also allow me to see promising submissions to bubble up to my start page, taking the spots of killed media/hype/iphone/getrich-with-3-lines-of-javascript stories.

I wanted to write such UI myself and just let it be - i.e. I'd crawl HN and generate my own front page but I suspect Paul wouldn't be happy about it.
Talking Business - Investors Were Victims of Madoff, and of Their Own Folly
Um... you might want to use Ctrl-[ instead.

The sad thing is that these days window manager or whatever tends to take away lots of good old ASCII to control-char mappings... (Ctrl-h IS backspace and Ctrl-i IS tab, damn!)
Tech Startups Don’t Need the Valley Unless They Need VC
Even if Twitter Search somehow becomes useless due to spam, Twitter itself will continue to be useful.
Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.

I suspect that is what will happen. Going off on a tangent, the idea comes to me that perhaps some sort of meta-Facebook site might appear in the future that will be to the children of today what Facebook is to the "oldsters".

We join Facebook and encounter old friends and old photographs posted by old friends. Maybe they will join meta-Facebook and find old profiles of old friends that link to their own old profiles.
Jay Abraham might be the reason why so many sales-pitch websites look the same (giveaway: red text headlines)

Example inspired by him: http://salsadancesecrets.com

Some of the best sales letters I've seen are direct mail.

For example, get on the Nightingale-Conant mailing list. Their 'This audio program will change your life' letters are supreme examples of the genre. And once you get on their list, I think you will get more examples in your mailbox (BottomLine Personal, Jay Abraham)
Haircuts
This site has tons of celebrity hairstyle pictures. There is a good forum too.
I dislike the free-form overlapping windows, but tiling is still worse. Tiling could be better if windows had a 'reduced' mode: which needs minimal screen area to show status. Some examples: I like the last two lines of IM and terminal windows to show. I like to see the folder status on Thunderbird peeking out from behind other windows. I only need the smallest portion of the top left title bar to show for plain documents (they have no 'status').

Three screens help. :)
You're giving a very shallow comparison overall. This is a set of trivia rather than any detailed analysis.

installation of apps can be confusing to people not familiar with macs

Either you run an installer, or you drag a file to Applications. Are you joking? That's actually one of the easiest things.

no reasonable way to uninstall software along with its data

Not built-in, no. Get AppCleaner, which is free and very reasonable.

disk volumes (dmg files) can be confusing to people not familiar with macs

Each family member of mine who's used a Mac figured this out instantly. They treat it like a plugged-in device, which is a really nifty way of simplifying a complex process.

not clear whether installing a virus checker and/or firewall is important to people not familiar with macs

It's not, which is why it's never talked about.

window management not as nice as win 7 although Exposé is very cool

Something like this doesn't give any information. Does Windows 7 attach its notifications physically to the generating window, sliding the window into view if the notification needs room? Something like that adds significantly to usability, and there are a lot of small window features like that.

strange that closing the last window of an app does not quit the app

The rule on the Mac is as follows: if there's a reason you'd keep the application open when the last window closes, it stays open. That way I can hear iTunes with the window closed (and without some crap about minimizing the window), or I can close a TextEdit window and immediately open a new on. iPhoto, meanwhile, closes instantly, because it's a single-window system.

pdf files are not shown in the browser window

Yes? They do? Preview is built-in.
It's one reason to go to the valley, but not the only one. When I moved to the valley last year, everyone asked me why? I said "People". Those people could be new friends at other startups, future talent for my company, future informal advisors, potential investors, or an awesome bartender at the Olde Pro in Palo Alto. The Valley exposed me to people that I couldn't have met anywhere else.

If you love technology and startups, you should probably give it a shot out there. Just because you move doesn't mean you'll have magic VC genies grant you three rounds of funding. You will definitely meet some awesome people along the way.
What, out of curiosity, would prompt them to leave a service that all their friends use? There needs to be something so useful that I'll join a new site and leave behind all my old friends. I don't see that happening with Facebook.
a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" - I've noticed that too, and I think it's bollocks.

It's much smarter to go after a niche market where you can easily make milliions instead of shooting for the one in a million chance that you'll make the next facebook. Chances are you won't.
I'll confirm this. Many of my friends and I keep in touch entirely with Facebook. Getting all their email addresses seems too much an effort when Facebook has their names already mapped to their accounts.
The non-spamming Twitter community might be able to handle the problem collectively.

I think a 'Flag' API/feature that is similar to Craig's List would work. One vote does not mark you a known spammer, but if many users flag you and your tweets as spam, Twitter could throttle/disable your reply capabilities.
33 1st time entrepreneur.

Yup same :-)
I would be more worried about the "it" that is facebook providing a better experience for their core usecases.

From what I can tell, given the new Facebook UI, all Facebook needs to do to implement twitter is:

* Streamline directed relationships (fan versus friend) for "follow" functionality

* Streamline status privacy settings (so that changing your status can be equivalent to a tweet)

* Write lite.facebook.com that looks just like twitter/jaiku/etc

In addition, it seems to me that Facebook has the following advantages over twitter:

* Funding: 500mm versus 50mm

* Scale Facebook has many more users and engineers

* Platform/Apps Facebook has a rich platform, twitter doesn't

Thoughts?
Is it surprising in any way that a bunch of people not from the valley say that being in the valley isn't important?
Agreed.

I live over in Australia -- My cofounder and I are in Bay Area (visiting) and the access to having access to the people/minds here is astounding... And as you allude to - it's not just hackers, it's a whole ecosystem of people that can contribute to your idea.
You can block those spammy users. Kind of a pain though... and the various clients would have to add a quick user blocking button.
The main problem with psyco is lack of 64-bit support. While a new psyco would be nice, what really would make sense is a boost-like tophat on rpython so you can drop into it and compile your performance-critical routines. Today people do that with C++ and boost. Cython/pyrex don't cut it because they don't allow you to create C-style strongly typed objects with Python-accessible methods.

Maybe you can do that today, but good luck finding out by reading the pypy docs.
The biggest difference between Twitter and Facebook updates (at the moment) is that your Facebook news feed is limited by who you have some connection to (albeit possibly very tenuous). The beauty (and ugliness) of Twitter is that it's interest or topic-based - you don't need a pre-existing connection to start following or viewing someone's public tweets.

That being said, I will be sad if Twitter is subsumed by Google or Facebook.

EDIT: Technically easy but Facebook is a good walled-garden (privacy controls). I don't know if they'll let some public weeds in just to compete with Twitter. Twitter allowing Facebook users to auto-post an update to their Twitter identity could work.
Once you've got an intuitive picture of how something works, you will find that the details just fall into place. But often that intuitive picture can't just be gifted to you, despite the best efforts of our best teachers to concoct the perfect metaphors. It takes time. You have to fiddle around with the concepts in your head, sometimes for years, before they really sink in. You might have to repeat them several times, or approach them from several angles, or encounter them in unusual surroundings, or find the one book that finally explains the subject in a way that clicks.

Once you really understand something, trying to remember what it was like before you understood it is like trying to forget how to read.
I think this is a great tool, but once again the problem is with the data. It's very hard to compare entities because the methods each uses to compute their statistics varies between countries and time.

This can often be seen when people look at infant mortality rates (different by country), or the number of those in poverty (definition of poverty changes). So the danger of this is that it requires a nuanced understanding of the data to actually get a fact based world view.
Wealth.
You obviously didn't get the memo last week.
MyPhillyNetwork » Kevin Rose + WeFollow = Mainstream Twitter
Los Altos man's career plan: 50 jobs, 50 states, 50 weeks
Digg - Create an Account - Email Sent
Your probability of success is higher in the Valley. Doesn't mean you can't be successful elsewhere. I don't understand why people can't reconcile these two statements.

If you like your lifestyle where you are, by all means, stay. If you can find investors, lawyers, and accountants (assuming you want them) that you trust, stay where you are.

But if you're just a couple of crazy kids with a work ethic and an idea to change the world, and if you are willing to do everything possible to give your startup the highest probability of success, go to the Valley.
I'd love to read a book styled along the lines of "The Millionaire Next Door". Call it "The Entrepreneur in the Woodwork" - profiles/statistics on eBook sellers, ISVs (especially niche business apps), niche site owners, niche iPhone app studios, the mythical highly profitable subscription sites (salsabootcamp.com is one), the gadget blogs that make mint from affiliate links (coolest-gadgets.com), maybe even some non mainstream blogs. Cap the success level though - no outliers - Leave out the JohnChow.com Adwords or Dooce.com anomalies.

I think it might be hard to find these people to interview though. Domain records and traffic stats and presence can be false starts.
Fed Chair: Growth Probably to Resume in 2009
So Facebook makes it easier to post public news feed items, and then writes a twitter-like UI on top of that data. There are obviously subtle usability issues here, but technically it seems straightforward...
This redirects me to: https://secure.news.ycombinator.com/registration/?rPage=logi...
?
There is also no way to tell how many people saw the poll, but chose not to vote.
Our web site sends registration information directly from my cofounder's email address. (We don't like private messaging systems.) The plan is to start really personal conversations with all the people who sign up, until that gets too overwhelming.
Especially a niche enterprise market. Consumers are fickle and frugal. Companies are looking for a way to do more while paying less. A lot of times, what is "less" to them is a huge amount to you.
The next thing that is about to happen to it, is that Facebook ripped off its model completely with the new front page and status updates. Although it doesn't allow for a lot of means of tweeting, it is already happening - I noticed several conversations today that spawned off status updates. None of my group is on twitter, it will offer no compelling reason to switch now.
Little known fact: some Catholic priests are permitted to marry.

Theology, like programming, has edge cases. Here's an example: you're an Anglican. Anglicans have apostolic succession -- i.e. if you're a priest, you were admitted by a bishop, who was in turn once a priest admitted by a bishop, who was in turn ... by St. Peter who was chosen to lead the Church by Christ Himself. Despite the fact that Anglicans are not Catholics, and do things differently (such as permitting priests to marry), under Catholic theology their claim to holy orders is good if a little misguided.

But what if one who is married converts to Catholicism? They're still a priest until they forsake it. Their marriage was licit when they entered into it. We're famously touchy about dissolving marriages -- either it was illicit when it was entered into (perhaps due to reasons that were not discovered yet) and thus requiring an annulment, or its good and binding until death.

Which means married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism (slightly more complicated -- you need the bishop to sign off on it) are now married Catholic priests.
Agree about the other benefits in addition to access to VCs, but it's still arguable if they're worth the higher cost of living. If you're a bootstrapped startup, you'll hit ramen profitability much sooner elsewhere. When you have an infinite runway, you'll have infinite time to find people as well :).
The guy in the video makes a point about external funding: a lot of well-known, large tech companies accepted money only after they were already profitable and did so in order to expand. That seems really sane to me - capital seems like a magnifier for a process that either produces money or consumes money. I suspect a lot of companies that succeed with external money would have succeeded without it and that a lot of companies that fail without external money would have failed with it.
It'd be cheaper to get your degree via CLEP, DANTES and GRE Subject tests and get a degree from Excelsior College, Charter Oak State College or Thomas Edison State College, the only three regionally accredited schools that don't have a residency requirement (meaning you can take one class from them and graduate coupled with credits from anywhere else that's regionally accredited)

It's the only reason I finally got a degree after coupling credits from 4 years in the Air Force and 3 years of undergraduate work @ 3 schools. It would've been cheaper had I done it entirely that way and probably less than $7000.
Mentally young, physically old.
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I will tell you my story. A few months ago, I got all excited about these ebooks and all. So, I picked up a topic I could write an ebook on 'How to Start An Online Business'
http://paraschopra.com/business/

First I tried launching it as a premium ebook, priced at $65 with some 6-7 pages long copy (see the source code of the page, the long copy is still there)

I didn't sell even a single copy. (Though I must admit, the traffic was really low, not even 5-6 visitors per day as I didn't do Adwords)

Then I dropped the price to $5, and did a short copy of the sales letter. Still nothing happened.

Now I am offering the ebook as free download and I get 2-3 downloads per day thanks to Google First Page Result for the term 'How to Start an Online Business'. Nothing sells like free stuff!

Maybe it was the ebook or maybe it was the sales letter or maybe it was both, but the fact is that I didn't sell even a single copy. With stories of an ebook making a million, there are a million (untold) stories of ebooks making zero.
To me the valley seems like a good place to grow if you're already profitable and can't find enough talent in whatever location you started. For a business with a few guys doing product development in an apartment and counting every penny, I just don't see the justification for the cost of living.
Thanks! I'll look into magazines.

It's real Public Domain. In fact I'm already using the CC 'No rights reserved' button.
You think they're horrible bc you see the world from rand/mat/perrin's eyes. If you were aes sedai & a bunch of ignorant kids with that much power popped up you'd do anything to control them. Brandon Sanderson said that as he gets older he finds himself thinking more like Moiraine. I feel the same way.

link:
http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/599/WoT-Read-Through-EY... (running off to shadar logoth without telling anyone!)
Use GreaseMonkey/UserScripts. You wouldn't have to crawl Hacker News, just visit it normally, remove the offending posts with JavaScript. I think there's already some out there, just search.
Some people like Silicon Valley, some people don't. To each his own.

Silicon Valley has a huge population of smart tech workers. There are certainly advantages to running a tech startup there. Other aspects of the area detract from the quality of life, however.

I live in the bay area, but can't stand Silicon Valley's feeling of endless suburbia. I don't think strip malls and sprawling apartment complexes make a good living environment for me. Some people prefer it, however. Silicon Valley is for them. It is not for me.
except that, for me at least, the new Facebook is filled with noise to an extent that Twitter won't be for a long time.

I only follow people that I actually want to know about. But being a Facebook friend, up until now, has been much more than seeing occasional newsfeed updates. I've never said "I'll be friends with this person so I'll see their stati," it's always, "I'll be friends so that they can invite me to parties and write on my wall."

Over the last couple days, I've been frantically hiding newsfeed updates from people that I don't care about.

Twitter has the advantage over Facebook in that really the only reason to follow someone is to get their tweets. Soon, friending someone and hiding their updates will be something I think of as one action on Facebook.
> All I wanted was a 22'' wide IPS panel with a decent resolution and no bells.

Have I got the LCD for you: http://www.displayblog.com/2007/09/20/lenovo-thinkvision-l22...
Makes you wonder if (ironically) Sony won the format war simply because the others saw the writing on the wall.
TweetCongress wins at SXSW - Squeejee
They already kind of do that, mostly targeted at spam-following (following lots of people to get their attention for your spam). A large number of people blocking the user and/or having a high following/follower ratio (following many times as many people as follow you) get you looked at for spam.

But for now, neither spam @replies (which happen occasionally too) nor spam #hashtags violate the TOS, I believe.
Well, I would guess that his primary demographic is still young males, which would explain the male coming-of-age messiah/hero figure.
If the card didn't require a PIN, then they wouldn't need to torture you for it. They could just steal the card. So the risk to security has been moved to your physical person, making you less safe.

All biometric security systems have the same issue.
Where do these people get the testimonials? Are they even real or is it another Betty Crocker?

I would think that faking a testimonial is a snake oil salesman tactic.
I've been hungering for an OMAP laptop too, the TouchBook is quite clever and should be out soon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500365

For the handheld / pocket form-factor there's http://openpandora.org/
I went to college in Cleveland (CWRU) and fell in love with the area. There is a certain beauty there that no booming metropolis can match. The old, industrial architecture of the buildings and bridges is amazing. It has that classic beauty that can never be achieved with modern architecture.

I think that Cleveland is able to rebound. Just look at its neighbor, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is reinventing itself as a new tech hub. Cleveland could do the same. It just needs smart leadership.
The grapes of math - Science is putting new wine in new bottles
As they point out, number of followers is, unfortunately, a very poor metric. Yesterday someone posted an article called "Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back" (http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/).

As an experiment, a sort of Twitter honeypot you could say, I followed every single one of them on a fresh dummy account, using a simple Ruby script with the Twitter gem.

Less than a day later I already have more followers than the original 237 I added. I haven't posted a single tweet, so no one has any valid reason to follow me, except to try to gain more followers.

I suspect many of them will unfollow me shortly, after they realize I won't follow them back. I'm saving all the "new follower" emails I get from Twitter, and in another day or so I'll compare them to my remaining followers to see who's guilty.

The vast majority of the unsolicited followers are people peddling some sort of bullshit get-rich-quick MLM scheme.
You can set Twitter to only show @replies from people you follow, but that's obviously less than ideal.
Facebook nearing statewise dominance of Twitter
Some of use just don't want to use facebook. Personally I find it like myspace, ugly and annoying.
I couldn't agree more with these points, particularly the last line.
Your probability of success is higher in the Valley

Your probability of flipping heads is higher than your probability of rolling 1 on a six-sided die: X = .5, Y =~ .167. I have yet to even hear of a good setup for measuring X or Y, to say nothing of actual numbers for them, for measuring "probability of success in a startup". Heck, I have never even heard a defensible universalizable definition of success for a startup.

Incidentally, and this has always bothered me about statements like "give your X the highest probability of Y": do people routinely get the opportunity to run a simple random sample of startups, marry a simple random sample of women, raise a simple random sample of children, etc? No? Then why do we bastardize statistics in this manner.