skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are three books that I have loved reading

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

I know its been mentioned already, but truly this is a book worth mentioning twice. For the introverted or the arugmentative type and for anyone else, this book hits alot critical and sometimes overlooked human traits that everyone should be aware of in their daily interactions with other people.

A few quotes by Carnegie.
Avoid arguments
"you can't win an argument, because if you win it you lose it, and if you lose...well you lose it."

"few people think of themselves as bad people"
-means regardless of how they look,dress or talk, most people are appproachable with a smile and a "hi".

"people will always strive to justify themselves".

All three of these quotes are connected.

2. The Innovators Solution - Christensen and Raynor

If you've ever heard the quote "First they ignore you,... then they fight you, then you win." by Gandhi. This book puts it in perspective in relation to how small companies over take large companies.

3.The 48 Laws of Power _ Robert Greene.
Go Go read if you haven't yet. This is a great book! It pullls lessons which you can learn from various types of people throughout history from painters,generals to presidents.

My favorite was Law 28: "Enter action with boldness". Be bold in your ideas, be bold in how your carry yourself in life.

I know I said three 3, but Seth Godin still deserves some mention with All marketers are liars. Which simply I take to mean for us here is if your developing a startup, make sure it has a good...no a great story to tell.
How to Keep your Rookie Startup Company from Riding the Bench
First impression:

My requests time out an awful lot:

Read timeout. Please try again later. If this persists please visit the
AWS developer forums to see if it's the result of a known issue.

That and doubts about permanent storage are downers.
The One Minute Millionaire by Robert Allen and Mark Victor Hansen : it explains you what exactly works if you want to be financially successful - I would strongly recommend it.
Joel is basing his argument off the book "Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations." In points out that in situations where the employee gains natural satisfaction from serving the customer, measurement often makes performance worse. The additional effort spurred by the measurement is offset by the distortion to the effort based on what is being measured. However, in the case of doctors, measurement is already taking place, and because it is highly distorted. Thus switching the measurement from number of procedures to increase in health would be a substantial improvement. It may, however, be even more of an improvement to pay a flat fee, regardless of the number of procedures.
"While CPUs are getting faster and RAM is growing like crazy, bandwidth is not growing..."

...in the U.S.
Websites as graphs
Freakonomics is a great book because it introduces fundamental principles of economics on intuitive grounds. So you're not talking about incentives with respect to society or some other abstract entity, but with respect to specific cases.
Plus, as I mentioned above, it's an extremely fun read. Very well written and the ideas presented are definitely compelling. I'd recommend to go as far as to read the original research papers that the book is based on. Especially the abortion-crime one.
I've had the same curiosity. The GWT compiler essentially parses the Java source code and uses a series of complex rules to convert it to JS. This is why whenever you use any client side libraries you must have the source code itself rather than just the binaries. If the source code cannot be parsed directly, it cannot be converted to JS.

In order for GWT to work for other languages it would need to be totally rewritten, unfortunately. That is unless you could somehow write an adapter for the core GWT JRE emulation library (java.lang & java.util classes). But like you say if the language your adapting to the Java code is not statically typed, you will have a hell of a time b/c the compiler is based on the assumption that the language is still java and therefore static. Like you say, you might end up having to force the programmer to follow certain conventions. Like always naming certain datatypes a unique way, so your adapter could map it back to specific static Java datatypes. But then doing this kind of defeats the purpose of using a dynamically typed language anyway..
"...but too old to have a grasp on technical details..."

Huh? Am I the only one the notice how illogical this is?

We are not basketball players. Some of us do are best hacking in our 40's and 50's. (Lay off the drugs - you'll see.)

Joel has forgotten more than many here have ever known about hacking. His only problem with this essay is that he has the balls to make a prediction.

There is only one prediction that is always 100% accurate - that no prediction will ever be 100% accurate.

Great read, Joel. Now back to my ramen.
MySpace: Launching Interest-targeted Advertising
Hey, Facebook: Create a Platform for *Advertisers* to Subsidize Apps
"Unless maybe you've done lots of SWT/Swing programming, then you will at least have a general understanding on how to layout stuff graphically and use event listeners."

Now I DEFINITELY don't want to use GWT.
Web 2.0 VC deals spread beyond Silicon Valley
I'm not from Germany, my name is German (it's a Spanish name).
We will have the site translated to German in a couple of days.
"All you have to do is convince users to download your C++ app that DOES contain a Ruby interpreter and runs in the background..."

Good luck with that.
The key paragraphs are the last 4. Like Umair, I believe the huge value is not in "monetization through advertising", but making marketing itself useful to consumers.

AdSense/AdWords is only the tip of the iceberg:

"But instead of seeing widgets as a separate, third side of the platform, and then subsidizing them, Mark Z should have realized that widgets and advertisers are one and the same side of the platform.

"That is, widgets from advertisers are really the second side of it's platform: advertisers will subsidize widgets, because they have a massive incentive to build widgets that create value.

"See the convergence? Here, we begin to see a redefinition of marketing: 'ads' that benefit people."
Web 2.0 Deals Spread Beyond San Francisco
Possibly Paywalled, so:

Venture-capital investment in so-called Web 2.0 companies, generally ad-supported Web sites in fields like social networking or blogging, is showing signs of maturity, with deals spreading outside the San Francisco Bay Area, according to new data released Monday.

The Bay Area, known for producing some of the most high-profile Internet companies, exploded last year with $413.7 million over 69 rounds of financing, which easily trumped any other region in the U.S. or overseas. However, in the first half of 2007, venture capitalists invested just $90.5 million in 25 rounds there, according to data from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young LLP.

Meanwhile, New England topped the Bay Area in dollars with $102 million in the first half, over 10 deals, compared with $62 million and 12 deals in all of 2006.

Overall, the research showed that investors directed $646.2 million into 101 deals world-wide in the first half of the year, a 6% increase in investments over the same period in 2006, amid a rising interest in Web 2.0 in Europe and Israel. U.S. investments were virtually unchanged from the first half of 2006 with 67 deals and $357 million invested.

The data show that $52 million was put to work in 20 European Web 2.0 deals in the first half, roughly double the deals and investments seen in the same period last year. Israeli Web 2.0 companies raised $15 million in five deals in the first half, up from two deals and $5 million invested in all of 2006.

Investment in Web 2.0 start-ups has skyrocketed in the past two years as inexpensive technology has made it easier for people to communicate through the Internet.

"If you're a venture guy, there are few areas you can look now and find an equally attractive place to put your money," said Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Park, Calif. "You can't beat an investment of $5 million in a company that could get acquired for hundreds of millions."

Mr. Raney said companies better understand how to monetize the Web and are moving on from building a Web property -- like a social network that attracts a particular demographic -- to building a Web business that knows how to deliver targeted advertising to that demographic.

Meanwhile, valuations for Web companies continue to rise, a worrisome factor for venture capitalists in a much-hyped market. Mr. Raney said investors are split on whether it is best to invest in an unproven company at a low valuation or invest a large chunk of money at a high valuation in a company that is already gaining traction.
Once people realize that online banking makes life automated, they'll see how much MORE secure it can.

Bank of America has an excellent online suite. It can grab other banks information, automatically make monthly payments, and can automatically categorize certain purchases.

The security comes from getting rid of an older and better established method of low tech identify theft: I elect to stop paper statements from every service and bill I use. No more mailbox snoops.
Venture-capital investment in so-called Web 2.0 companies, generally ad-supported Web sites in fields like social networking or blogging, is showing signs of maturity, with deals spreading outside the San Francisco Bay Area, according to new data released Monday.

The Bay Area, known for producing some of the most high-profile Internet companies, exploded last year with $413.7 million over 69 rounds of financing, which easily trumped any other region in the U.S. or overseas. However, in the first half of 2007, venture capitalists invested just $90.5 million in 25 rounds there, according to data from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young LLP.

Meanwhile, New England topped the Bay Area in dollars with $102 million in the first half, over 10 deals, compared with $62 million and 12 deals in all of 2006.

Overall, the research showed that investors directed $646.2 million into 101 deals world-wide in the first half of the year, a 6% increase in investments over the same period in 2006, amid a rising interest in Web 2.0 in Europe and Israel. U.S. investments were virtually unchanged from the first half of 2006 with 67 deals and $357 million invested.

The data show that $52 million was put to work in 20 European Web 2.0 deals in the first half, roughly double the deals and investments seen in the same period last year. Israeli Web 2.0 companies raised $15 million in five deals in the first half, up from two deals and $5 million invested in all of 2006.

Investment in Web 2.0 start-ups has skyrocketed in the past two years as inexpensive technology has made it easier for people to communicate through the Internet.

"If you're a venture guy, there are few areas you can look now and find an equally attractive place to put your money," said Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Park, Calif. "You can't beat an investment of $5 million in a company that could get acquired for hundreds of millions."

Mr. Raney said companies better understand how to monetize the Web and are moving on from building a Web property -- like a social network that attracts a particular demographic -- to building a Web business that knows how to deliver targeted advertising to that demographic.

Meanwhile, valuations for Web companies continue to rise, a worrisome factor for venture capitalists in a much-hyped market. Mr. Raney said investors are split on whether it is best to invest in an unproven company at a low valuation or invest a large chunk of money at a high valuation in a company that is already gaining traction.
SocialNotwork.com

A social network for all the people building social networks. It's perfect--now they can talk about how they are building the next Facebook to people that actually believe it can be done! It will also allow you to import all of your existing social networking profiles into one place. Widgets. Video. Wikis.
Crashed Firefox for me.
I don't get it personally. What problem does it solve? How is it better than gmail? Why do I need it?

Listing "It extracts phone numbers" as a feature seemed to be scraping the barrel a bit to me. Gmail extracts loads of things. Heck it even recognizes parcel tracking numbers and provides a link to track them afaik.

Am I right in thinking it plugs into outlook express? eugh eugh and eugh.
I forgot to say desktop email is pretty much dead or soon will be. Who uses a desktop email client these days?
Fascinating. Were the THI students segregated from the rest of everyone? Sounds like you enjoyed it? Any criticisms?

I suppose it doesn't surprise me that a conservative Christian would offer a Western classics program. Still I am surprised I never heard of it before, especially since it is based on D. Sayers philosophy of teaching (whom I adore).

FYI my university's English program followed the reverse track, recently removing Bunyan from the curriculum.
I'm waiting for their next coming.

When they rise from the dead, as it were.
I'm very skeptical, esp about New England beating SV. The numbers they quote are not that high; a few big deals could be responsible for this "trend."

In our sample, which is getting to be quite big, the SV investors are much more aggressive than the Boston investors.
I talked to a guy last night at TC40 who swears by EC2. But he recommends using RightScale on top of it. I've given only a cursory glance at RS, but it looks interesting. And the guy just sold his company in the past week so it definitely worked for him.
Paper airline tickets to be dead by May
Mint has obviously thought this out. They use yodlee, which provides bank/credit interaction services and is secure. Yodlee has your information and Mint only passes your info to it, it is never stored on Mint's servers.
I'm pretty tired of this discussion. Hopefully this is the last post on it for a while.
Similar commenters mostly appears to be Paul. Why did you choose that criterion?
would you be willing to use an online writing community where you could share your own fiction or poetry with others?
Bubbles don't require a "stock market", only a market and some sort of insulation from bad choices for a while.
Of course that's writing but I was thinking more along the lines of fiction and poetry.
Incidentally, I doubt they'd be able to get Alitalia off paper tickets by May. Italy seems very attached to the concept of little bits of official paper.
Pitching VCs: Present Flexibly
When most entrepreneurs practice these presentations they focus on smoothing out the pace of the presentation. While it's good to practice and get comfortable with the content of your presentation, it's important to keep the order and pace flexible; I can guarantee that you won't go in the order or at the pace you expected.
Micro UAV, rugged with ducted air. I can't wait until these are childrens toys.
It is much faster now.
Online Customer Service - Share your ideas
Pls share your ideas what model would be the best for providing customer service on the web ...
Processing apps that have zero text options are frustrating. News.yc had a central hive with a conspicuous branch. What was the branch? Who knows...

Here is a screen grab for those who probably need to update their java plugins:
http://kirigin.com/pics/ycNews.siteGraph.png

But I'm a sucker for growing trees.
Very neat. Some of the demo slides ( I think the 9th one) disappeared faster than others.
Hah, I got the same impression when in Rome last year.

The little bit of paper handed to the parents of a little girl whose tiny pink bag they searched for 10 minutes was accompanied by a snarky smile.
Gordon Moore predicts end to Moore's law in 10 years
Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity...
Hey, if it gets them laid then they'll format their computer for you. I never said it would be easy.
Let's dumb it down a little further.

http://www.complextoreal.com/chapters/fft1.pdf

Check page two.
We've built our development infrastructure with virtualization technologies. Our main development server is a Qemu image which runs as a process on my desktop under linux kernel virtualization (KVM). Inside that server, various resources we use to organize development such as subversion, trac, irc, build system, etc. are isolated into separate vserver partitions. Later when we need to move everything onto dedicated server(s) it's clear and obvious how to do it.
Note that an alternate view of Moore's law might continue: processing power per $1000, .

Kurzweil might be a hopeless optimist, but his choice of such metrics was smart.

Massive multi-core and dedicated hardware for physics, math, video, AI, and graphics, could make effective system power increase despite constant transistor density.
Thanks, it's powered by php5 and mysql5.
Shopify has some really nicely designed sites. I like the way they focus on letting web designers shine. I've looked into them, and have implemented a similar (and simpler) templating system that is easy for designers to use. Eventually I would like to have lots of built-in customizable web2.0 style templates. I cannot compare too much though because I put in way more features. I modeled it more after amazon and newegg.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've updated it.
$689 million fine is a cost of doing business for Microsoft
From reading the comments, it's kind of difficult to figure out what gets persisted and what doesn't. I mean, if it's persistent until you shut the machine down, that's not so bad... it's like having a VPS somewhere, no?
GPhone 'Definitely' In The Works, Says Vague, Uncited Source
Joel is light on the technical details. He's old enough to remember when C was going to be the language for everything. But not guru enough to mention or properly analyze anything else from that time. (Eiffel, Forth) Joel is just one of the mainstream programmer sheeple, just louder and with a bit of panache.

Dvorak has enough balls to make a prediction. Does that make him clever?
What about [New York](http://informationarbitrage.typepad.com/about.html)? There are plenty of rich ex-bankers/traders throwing money at new ventures (Wallstrip, for example, was funded with $600,000 -- for a video blog).
It's starting to sound like xobni might replace loopt as the "most successful" yc company?
That's pretty cool. Do you know whether it's been effective?
They should just let Alitalia die, but it's not looking likely... all the politicians keep conspiring to keep it alive. Here's another one railing on about keeping it in Italian hands:

http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Economia/2007/09_Settembr...
http://www.buildv1.com
I use EC2 and I do swear by it. I see the initial extra effort you need to put in to get it to work right (designing for failover etc) as: 'the more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle'.

I first ported a toy app that I wrote (http://www.instantwordsearch.com) to EC2 - as an exercise. I personally learnt a lot in the process. Now I use EC2 for everything I do. It is a LOT of fun (imho).

Interesting links:
http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-prefe...
http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/custom-debian-ec2-amis-from-xen...
Now Issues Done is deployed to a new faster hardware and we're tuning it to achieve maximum performance possible.
Maybe because the U.S. along with Europe, Japan, S.Korea and some other countries already hit today's bandwidth limits, while the rest of the world is just catching up in this regard.

Although I'm a bit more optimistic about the possible application of Moore's law in communications. Some 20 years ago 9600bps seemed to be the physical limit for phone lines, and there was even proof for that based on physics. But see how many new protocols emerged since then. ADSL, for example, would have sounded like an alien technology 20 years ago, or take any high-speed wireless protocol in use nowadays. Essentially it's the same medium utilized by much, much faster protocols.
The local storage is persistent until Amazon shuts down the virtual machine whenever they want. (They say that it only happens due to hardware failures or EC2 platform upgrades, but you have no control over those events.)
http://startupflames.com
Can you please give more details about your set up, the country you are accessing EC2 from etc? I am curious to know coz I am in the process of putting all my eggs in the EC2 basket now.
We were segregated in the sense that THI took the place of GE. Otherwise, we were even more involved in campus life, representatively, than the normal students. Plus, we all had normal majors.

Yeah, I thought it was an incredible experience, much more interesting and fun than any schooling I'd received before. The professors worked hard to encourage the students to take ownership of their education. In a way, the fact that it is a young program works in its favor, since it hasn't been encrusted by tedious layers of administrative BS. My main criticism is of myself, that I did not take the initiative more and was not brave enough during discussions.
So how'd you deal with its ephemeral nature?
oh...I found mint.com instead.
You can design around this, given the upside of using EC2+S3. It is anyway better to design your app with potential failure in mind, don't you think?
I haven't used EC2, but the complexity would worry me if I was on a schedule. If you only have a few months of runway and you spend most of them sharpening your EC2 tools rather than coding features you could be doomed.
Yeah, nothing matters besides me and this life. Which is why people sin.
Wow, thats cool. So it just uses thrust vectoring to move around and hover? It would have to be pretty advanced to cope with the rotation forces of the impeller.

Seeing this fly reminds me of Armadillo Aerospace's Pixel:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home

But obviously Pixel is intended to fly into space and is rocket powered..
There is only one prediction that is always 100% accurate - that no prediction will ever be 100% accurate.

Nice Godelian statement :)
Really? Pride, sloth, envy, wrath, lust, etc. all seem to cause more trouble for the person who can't control them. How do they maximize long term gain, or are you thinking of something else?
I have my own AMI - so, I can bring the instance up as soon as it craps out. (This has never happened so far - which means I am either lucky or the fear is overblown). I have another server outside of AWS babysitting EC2.

I am designing a little bit on the paranoid side and making automatic incremental backups in S3. Recovery script will automatically restore using this too. I've simulated failures and I know it is safe. (this is something you need to do anyway - there are no guarantees in life!)

I still haven't automated the DNS change that needs to be done when you get a new instance. I will be handling this soon. There are some cool hacks already out there if you google for ec2 dns
Depends where you're looking. pg seems to be common to the south. However, up at the north there are a bunch that are all gwenhyfaer, while to the west is joshwa and Readmore. Which makes sense, since the plot tries to cluster by common commenters along the angular direction.

I chose this criterion mostly so you could see who's participating in other threads similar to the articles you like.
I would say you can grok the whole thing in a weekend.
I wouldn't have used these words (that too in the home page): ecommerce, web2.0, Ajax, HTML, CSS, rich text editor, admin. Is it just for web programmers?
The U.S. is behind much of the world in bandwidth to the consumer. Are you talking about server bandwidth? I think consumer bandwidth is more relevant to Joel's essay.
Reliance on mail content for search and ad placement makes it less than ideal if the world is moving towards encrypted mail, which it ought to.