skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Feedback on which market to focus
We've built a 2-way sync platform (for any file types), an iPhone webapp and a web console.

Because the technology is market flexible, we can focus on a number of products/markets. However, the team can't seem to make up its mind and focus is necessary.

These are the markets that we are considering and we need YC reader feedback as to which market and why?

* last.fm meets documents
* document management for SMBs
* digital asset manager for designers
* work/home/laptop synchronizer (think Dropbox)
* mobile document management (think Blackberry for docs; what we have now - http://itenna.net)
* file management and sharing with clients
* document versioning for SMBs

Preferably, you test iTenna before commenting so you get a feel for the current product.

Early access:

http://itenna.net/signup (need a Mac, coding Windows)

We are using our savings, loans and credit cards to fund our startup so honest feedback will be appreciated :)
URLs aren't turned into links in the text area :)

So here it is: http://itenna.net/signup
I think the next hot social networking site is your own website.

I've been improving my blog with stuff like Twitter/Jaiku widgets, OpenID, Gravatar, photo albums, etc. I can push my presence out using RSS. Piece by piece I'm adding all of the useful features of Facebook.

I can own all of my own data and control all of my own privacy.

I use the Wordbook plugin for Wordpress to bridge to my Facebook profile.
Standard platitudes. He's a decent speaker though. I hope the latter isn't confusing the former.
The thirty second summary:

"We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Our unification is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. We shall prevail!"

edit: My point is that the speech was complete demagoguery. It didn't contain a single concrete idea, just hollow bromides and feel-good bullshit.
You can visit other sites you know. I'm pretty sure Paul won't mind. :-)
I agree, but this story doesn't transcend politics. The candidate who was leading in the polls in Iowa won Iowa. This is his victory speech, and its content is typical political victory speech content. The only thing remotely interesting here is the color of the candidate's skin, which shows we still have a problem with racism.
Another interesting finding:

You gain less weight if you liquefy your food in a blender than you would eating the same quantity of that food prepared normally. Your body absorbs less calories because it doesn't taste as good. There was a good writeup of this in Emotional Intelligence, and the people who advocate the Shangri La diet mention it in a lot of their writing as well.
You've built a what? (Seriously, I had to take a look at the site to see what it was... how many others didn't bother?)

If I were you, I'd focus right now on the iPhone fanboys. A big issue you will have is that the iPhone hasn't really found a home in the business world yet. (And may never, although you may help that :-)

I'd focus on the Apple using web designer crowd. These folks love their iPhones and gadgets in general, and have the small freelance businesses that would find need in the product.

I'd ignore all the rest and just focus on them. Keep in mind as well that you aren't doing anything new outside of the iPhone market. (I can already run all my MS docs on a palm, smartphone etc.) There is definitely a need for the early adopters though.

Good Luck
The VR Hypothesis in Science
U.S.A! U.S.A!

Just a point: they rest of the world considers that chant the most annoying one ever. Seriously, we do! :-)
"The researchers say that it holds promise for mind set related weight loss. However, since you now know about the study, it'll never apply to you. Sorry. "

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2007/03/030207.html
I have no idea why my font is a lighter color on your computer. It looks fine on mine.

I'm not sure if there are any up on Docstoc, that site wasn't around when I wrote mine. I did a lot of research in making mine, typically the designer is the one who writes it, and then you look over it and tell them what parts you'd like to add, remove, or change. I can put mine up online for you to see/use once I get back to my main computer. I'll let you guys know.
I've used it before because I've wanted to separate my Html code from my Lisp code. It works well enough. It even automatically updated itself when I changed either my Html or Lisp code.

I did have to bundle all my variables up into a hash table though.
I would vote -1 on it too. There are 50 primaries and winners from both parties in each one, for a total of 100 victories. Sure, of course this one is more important, but still, you have to put it perspective (Bhutto's assassination wasn't mentioned here, for instance, and that was a pretty important event). I'm very wary of politics rearing their ugly head on this site. I'm sure we all have an interest and opinion in them, but I think that discussions about politics are only likely to damage this community.
Thanks for your comment.

RE: "you aren't doing anything new outside of the iPhone market" -- actually, there doesn't exist anywhere on the smartphone market the ability to wirelessly 2-way doc sync with the web and your computer. That's what we've built so can apply it to iPhone, Blackberry, etc.
This is just a list of frameworks. It doesn't contain any useful information about when to use them or how to make a good selection.
Well put. To summarize:

1.Make sure they are Contracted (and look up the IRS's definition of a Contractor).

2. Get the PSD, CSS, images, and javascript if applicable. Also, get at least a couple HTML's all styled up so you can put it into your dynamic template more easily.

3. They'll need a lot of access to the app to figure out how it's assembled and constructed and they'll need to study every element that's present in the whole app so they know how to style it. I'm a designer/developer, so I'm not extremely familiar with the whole process of getting someone who is ONLY a designer. Also, the estimate is just that, an estimate. Don't trust anyone who says otherwise.
Very motivating! It helps to know that media companies are buying early stage startups.
Similar effect to what Guy Kawasaki's highlighted: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/12/how-to-not-chok.html
I'm surprised to see this at No. 1, too.

"President Obama" (if that happens) is perhaps a transcendent enough event to make it here, but not a caucus victory speech.

FWIW, a better synthesis of politics & technology is Michael Bloomberg's take on the results http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/bloomberg-parse... particularly this comment about all the major candidates:

"I don't want to disparage anything, but let me say this: If you have complex problems, there probably are no simple cost-free solutions to them, because if there were, somebody would have solved them ... You know, the people running for office always say: 'I don't want to bring that up now. If I do, I won't get elected. But if I don't mention it and get elected, then I can do the difficult stuff.'"
I really don't care for news about crashing planes, unless they crash on my city. I hope to never read a plane crashing story on news.yc (which also implies I hope that there will never crash a plane on my city).
Sorry, I missed the web part. Yes that would be unique, although I'm not sold on it's value. Why would I want my documents on your site when I've already got them on my phone and on my computer? What's the value add there? Backup? Sharing? I get the feeling that the only reason for this is that both my PC and my Phone are clients to the "master copy" on your server.

I do like the personal PC sync though, that's pretty nifty.

(EDIT: You know, back in the day there was no way in the world my comment would be downmodded. A shame.)
My point is that a plane crash (killing hundreds) would be a top story around the world, even if it happened on the day Obama wins the Iowa primary, hence, Obama isn't plan crash important.

If he won the presidency, that would possibly be plane crash important.
Beware of slippery-slope arguments. Once you accept one slippery-slope argument, you have to accept them all.

The people you're worried about are all happily typing away, posting juvenile comments on the story I submitted to politics.reddit.com yesterday. They have no motivation to come here. I think news.yc is safe regardless of what the editors decide about political stories.

P.S. My second sentence is a recursive joke. I didn't mean it.
Ah, so this is why YNews wants to avoid political points, the horrible comments.

Obama's race is irrelevant, he is a very charismatic and thoughtful candidate. He seems to have the spark of greatness to him which I think is what makes this good enough to cross to hacker news. A lot of successful entrepreneurs also have great charisma.
Blog/Poll are both certainly good examples of common uses of a framework.

I personally did the blog/poll test on a few frameworks I evaluated.
7 Types of Blog Posts Which Always Seem to Get Links and Traffic
OpenMoko To Unveil Open Source Smartphone next week
Robert Scoble Is A Corporate Spy
Apache Wicket 1.3 set for Java Web development
I suppose that win made top news in a lot of countries, though. It did in Germany, I know as much.

The news item was actually interesting for me, because it was the first time I watched a video of Obama. Also, I think he is under special scrutiny, and his speech seems to refer a lot to that, doesn't it? At least I thought the "change" meant that there might be a black president of the US after all?

Not trying to argue that it belongs on news.yc, but so far news.yc did a fine job filtering out the most interesting mainstream news (including the best xkcd cartoons, apparently).
He sounds to me like a southern Ontarian who moved to southern California 15 years ago, and used his dot-com winnings to devote more time to surfing.
"Jigglins" has to be the worst name applied to a product ever.
I just wonder, on a practical level, how will people organize their music. If all they ever did was purchase individual songs, how will they go about "just listening to music"? Just playing one song will be unsatisfactory, so they need some kinds of playlists, or random shuffle over their whole collection. I have witnessed friends going the random shuffle route lately...

Creating a huge amount of playlists seems like (too) hard work.

Edit: OK, if music is free as in no purchase necessary, a whole new host of applications comes to mind. I think creating playlists will still be a valid task. Essentially it is already happening today, in the form of internet radio stations? Creating a playlist is basically what a radio station provides?
SlingPlayer Mobile Lets You Watch Your Livingroom TV via BlackBerry
Now you can watch whatever TV content you get at home on your BlackBerry no matter where you are--as long as there's cellular or Wi-Fi signal.
Ones with numbered lists indicated in the title.
Okay, we'll change it.

O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! ;)
A Survival Guide For The Hobbyists
I don't know which is the right market, but I have a suggestion on approach: Choose an application/market that you, as founders, personally find appealing. E.g., if you're not designers, don't do an asset manager for designers. It will be way harder to get it right, because you have to make product decisions based on guesses and feedback, rather than intuition. It will also be less fun.
I love how Bloomberg is setting up his campaign ahead of time by teasing the news about maybe running. I'm really hoping he jumps in as a third candidate after the primaries and puts his personal fortune to use.

Not sure why, I just kind of like the guy. He seems like a problem solver and not a publicity solver.
RE: web part - yes, backup, sharing and create/edit docs from anywhere (just in case :)
New Year's Tech Resolutions
Buxfer is giving Mint, other personal finance sites, a run for their money
I agree with your point (and with the EDIT). All the big guys (google, MS, yahoo, ...) want to host our files these days, and they provide us with sharing, storage and simple editing facilities for docs and pics. They also do communications, calendaring, news and blogs, etc. I think SMBs will want to use that infrastructure and the big issue will be (as usual) integration.

So, terpua, don't add your servers to the picture in terms of where the files live. That just adds complexity and another point of failure. I'd much rather you help me sync my devices with those services or the services among each other. Sure, this is being done already, but there are a gazillion special cases that people will need support for, and a lot of them involve syncing. I would try to find a few of those cases and make your solution simple for end users to understand.

You may be doing some of this already but I can't tell from the info on your website. There should be an exhaustive feature list on your website.
As an SMB: I'd confirm that there is need for document management & versioning. As a technical person, I'm trying to craft time to build a document versioning & collaboration utility from existing open-source management & versioning (think of writing a desktop app to talk to a subversion back-end but as a document management & collaboration app) aimed at the various project teams in our org.

There might be that not all that visibility of SMBs of the problem. If you can clearly articulate a pain point that they will respond to, you'd have a potential winner.
Accessing SimpleDB using Java and Erlang
Facebook Champs Win Iowa
SETI@home: Why the Search for E.T. Needs Your Computer
The mammoth radio telescope searching for intelligent life beyond Earth just got even more powerful. Now more volunteers are needed to help sift through data.
We'll know soon enough: by law, he has to file in February if he runs.

Based on his performance in NYC, I think he'd make a great President: he's willing to tackle problems, and he's got a rare combination of intelligence, pragmatism, and competence.
Static content faster than dynamic content - YouTube at 11!

I guess the real story here is that many people have become so accustomed to using dynamic techniques (with the added benefit of no caching whatsoever) and/or the world's slowest Web server software to serve essentially static content, that they don't even see the overhead.
Obama's race may be irrelevant to you, but it certainly mattered to him: he claims that his drug use was an effort to avoid thinking about race, he became a 'community organizer' working in low-income areas (in a neighborhood that is 97.8% black), his legal career focused on "community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases," and the subtitle of his autobiography is A Story of Race and Inheritance.

If Obama matters to you, you'd better start thinking about his race, since it's been his obsession for decades.

Edit: and don't forget his scary church: http://www.tucc.org/about.htm . It's as bad as Romney's church was thirty years ago.
There doesn't seem to be one-shot pricing. Only a monthly subscription.
David Hirsch Leaving For Startups. He set up Google's NYC Office Years Ago
I've long wondered why GrandCentral doesn't offer this feature; it sounds like a good fit.

As for TossableDigits, it looks like a feature masquerading as a company.
As I read it (here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22445078/), he can't even file as an independent until March 5, when Texas starts it's independent nomination process. He has to basically petition each state to be on the ballot.

If that is the case, he has a whole month after Super Tuesday (Feb 5, 2008, when 20 states have primaries and the winners will most likely become inevitable on both sides) to decide whether to run.

Last night's victories are actually good for him. His dream situation would be any of the top three dems vs Huckabee... since this would leave a very wide middle ground for him to vacuum up.
I don't agree with nkohari, but he shouldn't be voted down this much. A 0 or a -1 is enough to say "no, we don't agree". It's not as if he said something horribly offensive.
Hacker meditation sessions
Performance? Deployment? Enterprisey marketing BS?
So a PC, Mac, and Linux walk into a bar
What would you say in a victory speech? He was basically just thanking Iowa; there's not much more to say.

It's not like he was expected to describe his policies or anything.
I believe if Obama becomes President his wife is really going to run things. It will be her and Oprah running the White House, Obama seems fine but his wife looks really controlling.
Politics is so polarizing and so destructive for a community (since it involves hard divisions into camps) so I think that this is a wrong forum to consume and promote stories such as this.

I do agree that political theory/philosophy articles are pertinent and good reads... if they offer some insight. But this video is blatant demagogy. Is that really worth wasting your time on?

PS: This is exactly the type of stuff that caused reddit to degenerate so quickly.
...and in other news: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12...

Let's all run out in the streets and shout words of praise now. The battle against evil entertainment industry practices has been won at last!

Seriously, I don't even know why we discuss this anymore. The record industry sucks. As usual.

Wake me up again when they get de-listed. I refuse to throw a victory party before that happens.
Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks
I think you have the makings of a good red state email forward .
Coming from Python and Genshi templates I found HTML-TEMPLATE to be incredibly ugly. It would appear that YACLML seems to have an implementation of TAL (which came from Zope) that seems a bit closer to Genshi. Otherwise you have a higher chance of generating proper XHTML with CL-WHO than with HTML-TEMPLATE.
I agree! I actually stayed up all night the other night doing that. I registered www.jeremyraines.com and it just uses ruby's xml and rss parsing libraries to scrape certain pictures from my flickr account, certain kinds of posts from my tumblr, and it has my friendfeed widget on it. I had more fun building it than I've ever had on facebook -- I learned some stuff about XPath, Ruby, CSS and regular expressions.
I just use it to split up bills and such, but I really do love buxfer. If you guys ever want a third, I'd probably work for you for free... I'm a nut for personal finance...
Uh, it wasn't directed at you.

If it was some kind of international forum with a delegate of Americans, granted, that would be pretty annoying.

The subtext here is that Republicans have obviously tried to claim that criticism of them is criticism of your country and therefore distasteful. Some liberals, progressives, have responded by taking the bait and basically, saying "Yeah, we do suck. The world should hate us. Etc."

While you in the rest of the world may think that statement is exactly correct, for some reason it has not led to electoral success.

Obama has been clever enough to side step the whole thing. He has been withering in his criticism of the current administration. At the same time, he has made a theme of not running to be president of only the "blue" parts of this country. And he has backed this up with speeches about issues that, while not changing his more or less standard Democratic positions, express respect for people who disagree with him.

So, the spontaneous "U.S.A" chants were directed at both the current administration and its supporters, and whatever parts of the opposition that have given up on this country. It was a way of saying that we can get past partisanship and actually start thinking about doing what we need to do to fix our real problems as a country.

And, I did see your smiley. But I thought an explanation of what this means to someone living in the U.S.A. (speaking only for myself, of course) might be useful.
I still don't understand how these sites access the banks' data. Is it screen scraping?
"The only thing remotely interesting here is the color of the candidate's skin, which shows we still have a problem with racism."

The fact that a black presidential candidate won with a substantial margin in an almost entirely white state shows that "we still have a problem with racism"?
We use the Direct OFX protocol for accessing the data. We use screen scraping only for 2-3 banks which either don't support OFX or charge their users exorbitant fees for OFX access.
Programmer's Cheat Sheet
OK - I just clicked through to the article and if Cool Kids means "high-profile bloggers" then no, I'm not.

Other than that - I wish people would post disagreements rather than downmodding. That ought to be reserved for really dumb comments or abusive ones or off-topic ones. Not that I give that much of a crap about my karma, it just makes me go, "WTF was wrong with that?!" When somebody downmods a perfectly on topic, personal response to the article.
Get a free Macworld Expo 2008 pass. Code: 08-G-PC152
I'm not certain I'll actually attend the expo this year, but since we're only a couple blocks away, I nabbed a pass. I remember ten years ago when I would have killed for a free pass to the expo!
I see a lot of complaints about "platitudes" here, but I think this glosses over the impact of the Obama campaign.

There is not really much disagreement about what the important issues are. Get out of Iraq. Stop using fossil fuels. Get everyone affordable health insurance. Inflation and stagnant wages. There is a general consensus now that these are the U.S.'s big problems and we need pragmatic solutions to them. (The other consensus is that the Republican party has collapsed and needs to be removed from power as soon as possible.)

What Obama is offering is a way out of the broken record of baby boomer liberal vs. conservative rhetoric. If Hillary wins, we're in for 4 to 8 more years of the same old partisan story line that has played out since her husband was elected. Many Americans are more than sick of that and that is what Obama is appealing to and that is why he won.

And I think his attitude is basically right. More than specific policy proposals at this moment, Americans need a new mindset.
I'm not certain I'll actually attend the expo this year, but since we're only a couple blocks away, I nabbed a pass. I remember ten years ago when I would have killed for a free pass to the expo! (pass found on istockphoto forum)
You don't have to build it, we have it already :) We just need to add the webadmin layer for user management to make it SMB usable.

How about giving away a free version with support for 1GB? Have a free, professional and business versions.
good point. Thanks Evan!
Metaphor alert!

"Gong side by side with the above, the danger any new industry faces is that instead of the powerful companies or parents and guardians for want of an analogy, looking after the young, supporting them with their wealth and helping them grow from acorns into a wild symbiotic forest, they cannibalize them, treating them as cattle that they feed from, inevitably leaving a baron desert in their wake."
The real story behind Zed's rant...
I completely agree (ironically enough). I always seem to be taking a critical view of ideas, but I'm also extra diligent to base my opinions in logic and fact. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that I'm just Mr. Negativity; I don't feel particularly inspired when I'm critical, but I can't let go of the need for rational thought.

It's fairly well-established that creativity thrives in an environment of support and optimism -- is criticism truly poisonous for success, or are we all just fooled by survivor bias?

(for example: let's say that 99% of ideas are bad, but 99% of all ideas are generated by blind optimism. Thus nearly all successful ideas are generated by blind optimists, but the survivors don't accurately reflect the success rate of optimistic thinking. If this is true, it's easy to be critical, hard to be successful, and the enormous successes are so rare, that they don't accurately reflect much of anything, other than luck....)