skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
eric, one of the shoutfit guys, recently changed his occupation on linkedin to Hiker at Appalachian Trail (Health, Wellness and Fitness industry).

sounds like pretty much the coolest job ever. =)
Joel explains how a new monopoly will emerge around AJAX
Good feedback. We do sort the connected people by how connected we think they are. We're also exploring more advanced ways to rank connections, as well as bringing you the conversations you actually care about.

Please keep in touch with us and let us know what else you need! We made our platform just to develop the stuff you are asking for. As our first beta stabilizes we will be integrating more features and improvements (especially w.r.t. culling the cruft).

This beta is really just the first step in our mission, to get feedback on something that is in the hands of real users.
http://startupping.com/
Among all books since the printing press? Can you be more specific?

Actually, I take that back. I do know some great ones that you ought to read no matter what your situation.

The Little Schemer http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/

Master and Commander http://books.google.com/books?id=rx_yw5iMtnIC&dq=&pg...

Lord of the Rings (you can find this one yourself)

and probably a lot more, but I've got to run. Good luck!
Cool product - still not sure if positioning itself as an Outlook plugin may limit it's appeal. They do mention future support for other platforms but given that Xobni is developed in .NET this might be difficult - and how do you integrate this into web based clients?

Yes, I know that Outlook is the most widely used email client but I'm always wary about startups that aren't universally accessible.
Title doesn't match the article:

"Permafrost areas hold 500 billion tonnes of carbon, which can fast turn into greenhouse gases," Zimov said.

Only a fraction of that carbon will ever be converted to CO2.
How many people in here like to write? Casually or as a hobby? (relates to my startup).
Poetry, fiction, etc. Just wondering, has something to do with my startup. Thanks.
In fairness, the title says "carbon", not "carbon dioxide". The article itself fingers methane, though, which is even worse.

Not that the title here isn't quite misleading enough, of course - it's just not misleading in that particular way. ;)
Ha! I just re-read it. Good call. I totally misread pg's comment, but still stand by the points I made.
I don't think there's a tech-specific downturn on the way. I think the lessons have been learned from last time, and the arrival of widely available always-on connectivity (some of it at halfway-tolerable speeds) has made the web as valuable as it wasn't quite last time around.

However - I think there's a much more general economic downturn right around the corner. The sense I get about the economy in general is that it's all built on smoke, mirrors, and a whole lot of playing cards... we might still be in good times, but only in the sense of everyone being so scared of the hangover that it's safer to stay drunk, but the booze is really close to running out, and there aren't any more friends to bring fresh kegs around. And I fear that no matter how strong it is internally, the tech world will end up being dragged down when the rest of the economy crashes.

The bright side of starting up during a recession, of course, is that if your business can survive the recession, then you know it's pretty damn strong. :)
New Yorker on Clive Wearing: man with Memento-like memory retention of a few seconds
wow. a pleasure to use and look at.
And there is already more than enough features to be useful.

Only one thing: it would be better to me if the site would fit in one or two windows. Now I have:

1- the web site
2- the working presentation
3- the running presentation

That's a lot of windows for one website.
I seem to be writing a web-app framework. Any advice?
I didn't mean to do it - I really didn't! I'm using Hunchentoot and CL-WHO to create a fairly simple web app that has to handle file uploads, file management, a simple database, user logins and the like. I had to modify a bunch of utility functions from previous projects and write a few new ones. They're almost general enough to be used in any web app and it quickly became obvious that I should modify them so they are and extract them to a library. Here are some general features:

- Not opinionated - this isn't Rails. Not every web-app consists of creating, maintaining and displaying lists. Users should be free to structure their apps however is most appropriate.

- Nested component architecture - pages are made from re-usable components, which can contain other components. A component should contain the data-structures, logic and presentation details for given type of operation. This is a bit ad-hoc right now, but my attempt to write about it has convinced me to formalize it.

- Modular - the various parts of the framework will talk to each other in clearly-defined ways, so they can be replaced when they're not appropriate.

Do any of the things I've mentioned sound like especially good ideas or bad mistakes? What kinds of features would you like to see in a framework? What kinds of misfeatures would you like to never see again?
What's always bothered me about the global warming debate is that everyone seems more concerned with who to blame, rather than how to solve the problem. One side is spewing absurd doomsday scenarios completely out of touch with reality, and the other side is just pretending the problem doesn't exist.

The doomsday side is essentially advocating atavism - shutting down economic activity, and relying on grossly inefficient sources of power (how many environmentalists advocate the only sane option i.e, nuclear?) This will obviously have profoundly negative economic consequences. Especially in developing nations. No serious economist disputes this. In effect this argument is like saying that because car accidents cause a lot of deaths, the solution is to stop driving.

The "ignore it" side is basically claiming that this isn't a problem and we should just keep doin' what were doin'. So if this problem does end up biting us in the ass, we would be completely unprepared to deal with it.

But there are numerous solutions here. Nuclear power is probably the simplest. Helping developing nations industrialize is another - it's pretty well established that industrialization = wealth = less pollution. Then there are more radical solutions like installing CO2 scrubbers.
The point is that technology always has costs associated with it. Nothing is free. What we should be concerned with is how to deal with the costs, rather than eliminate the life saving technology.
All made possible by 6000 packages of ramen noodles provided by pg:

"And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things."
Wait until you write the second webapp, and see which bits of the first one you really do reuse without modification?
This post is based on my experiences writing my fourth web app with this tool set. I've found quite a few bits that I reuse with little modification. Noticing this is what made me realize I was unintentionally writing an almost-framework.
Too bad they already hired a bunch of developers for the revolution and paid them with a huge chunk of the company. When a leader raises an army, he had better go to war.
The winner of the Techcrunch40 event is Mint
This is my objection to many "high-tech" companies: in many cases it boils down to grunt work, mindless labor. I don't want to get rich off the backs of poor people doing menial jobs. I think moving humanity forward is going to involve obviating exploitation, and if you're not doing something progressive then you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Not everyone. Just the people in a position to do something about it.

(We need new people in those positions.)
> my married friends complain that they feel like hermits

I'm a hermit, and I never feel married. There's something fundamentally unfair about that. :)
http://www.foundread.com
Because "asocial networks" tend to be kinda small?
Sometimes, automated analysis is weird in that it gets you see questions that you'd never have thought of otherwise.
It's not misleading at all now, but it originally spoke of 500B tons released into the atmosphere yearly.
I'd contend that the vast majority of the world pretends to be genuinely religious, and is genuinely superstitious.
Er, no, Oliver Sacks wrote the article. The article is about Clive Wearing.
lol @ this line:

"...you'll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they'll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB."
"... They really should have used YouTube. Clip is unavailable now.. ..."

while I can agree on the YouTube bit, I cannot with the clip. I just checked and it's playing for me now.
I don't understand why people care about this sort of thing. Frameworks are just tools, and sometimes the most expedient tool for some particular job might not be the flagship toolchain for the technology company in question. The handling of promotions on the Apple site might be outsourced to another company which might just happen to use .NET, for example. If some small part of apple.com runs on .NET, that doesn't seem like an earth-shattering revelation to me (apple.com itself is running Apache 1.x + mod_perl on Darwin, it seems).

The odd machine at the microsoft.com domain is probably running Apache on Unix, and similarly for various servers at other technology companies. The web framework/OS is just a tool -- get over it.
I second the master and commander series. I read all 21. Amazing.

Afghan history Books, both incredible:

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-Septem...

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Struggle-Central-Kodansha/d...

Why:
While the Master and Commander Series are historical fictions they teach you A LOT about the Napoleonic Wars, The British Empire and the British Navy.

The Afghan books are also incredible adventures that happen to be entirely true. I like books that teach me history in a fun way.
These sound pretty specific to MS SQL Server.
Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.

Revenue is revenue. I don't know who's saying Facebook is worth $6 billion, and I think it's overhyped too, but I'll bet Facebook is cashflow positive. Twitter's a joke? If it never becomes more than it is, then quite possibly. But perhaps its engineers plan for more than what it is today. And quite possibly, surrounding technology (cell phones, what-have-you) will advance in ways that will make what Twitter is suggesting more interesting.

Overhyping != a bubble. Companies making stuff no one wants != a bubble.

A "bubble" refers to a stock market bubble. We are not in a stock market bubble. If startups make things people don't want, then they may fail. Or better, they'll learn from their mistakes, improve themselves, and make things people want.
Wait, isn't the industrialization of China/India greatly contributing to carbon emissions? Without any industry, what is there to do the pollution?
Haha I know! I was just about to post that quote myself!
The Search by John Battelle. Then, just for fun, Neuromancer.
Mint Wins TechCrunch40 $50,000 Award
Joel just blew my mind. Awesome article.
I assume you're asking about books for startup people.

Paul's essays couldn't hurt. I am not a karma whore. ;-)

Mindset, by Carol Dweck. It'll change the way you think about the way you think. Incredibly relevant for justifying your yes-I-can attitude.

The Four-Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss. You've never thought about life and how to live it quite the way Tim does.
So what would it take to make NewSKD? and could it realistically be done by a YC style startup?
Frank Soltis used to gloat that Microsoft ran on as/400. They supposedly even tried to port to NT, but failed miserably and had to roll back.
http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc/.5bfa7907
Weird I thought the coming web ui monopoly was this little thing called Flash... I guess that's why MS came out with Silverlight and Google's paranoia came up with Google Gears...
In fiction:

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart. Easily some of the best storytelling I've ever read. 1/3 comedy, 2/3 adventure, in an ancient China that never was. http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0345321383/

Homer's epics. I prefer the translation by W.H.D. Rouse, which you can find at http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0451527372/ and http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0451527364/

Heading even further back in time, I love this rendition of Gilgamesh: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0618275649/ Even in 2000 BCE they thought the world was ancient.

Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder has one of the best treatments of post-singularity life (and what makes life in general worth living) that I've ever read: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0765350785/

Nonfiction:
The Mythical Man-Month. A little dated (it's directed at mainframe developers and their managers) but still relevant.

The Elements of Style (Strunk and White). Learn to write clearly -- it's valuable no matter what you do.

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Easily the best programming text I've read in the last year, and it's sold me on Erlang.
HEY -- how about drugr.com, to hook up dealers and users? Talk about a $billion idea ...
Tim's a bit of an ass, though. His method is sort of like a Ponzai scheme -- most of it will only work for the first X% of people to adopt it, after which it's no longer sustainable.
Oh, like you guys don't all speak English anyway. :-) C'mon, admit it: you only speak Dutch for sport.
What's his method?
Almost non-existent. The problem isn't licensing (any more than the current licensing issues they're having). The problem is access to all the CDs.

You read that right: I know for a fact that Pandora gets its music by ripping CDs. No, really. I've been there and seen it happen. Crazy. You'd assume the record companies would send over the digitized files -- no such luck. They have one person dedicated to ripping CDs, full-time.

Anyway, last I knew, Pandora was trying to work out a deal with some guy who owned thousands of classical CDs. So as long as the company can manage to stay in business, Classical is probably coming.
You're right.

We did it because:

- The working presentation was easier to work in a new window (bigger workspace).

- The running presentation needs a new window to be in full screen.

We are thinking in previewing the presentation in the editor, so you will have just 2 opened windows.

Also, if you just want to run the presentation you can do it directly from the website.

What do you think about that solution?
Russia, China and India are some of the worst polluters. So are many countries in Africa. The problem is that when you're absymally poor, you don't have the resources to worry about how clean your wealth production is. Which is why they clearcut their forests without replanting and don't process their waste. And you can forget about things like recycling.

Here's an interesting fact that you rarely hear. Air and water quality in the US has been going up for the last 80 years. Right through all the industrialization and double digit increases in life expectancy and productivity. The reasons are simple - improved waste management, more efficient production, better recycling programs etc.
Nested components sounds like Weblocks, http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/, but I'm guessing you're already aware of it.

I just started working on a site using Hunchentoot and CL-WHO as well, send me a note if you're interested in collaborating.
WeChangedItToZ.com: a site that translates English-language text written by Brits into more modern and acceptable spelling. "Organise" (which appears to be pronounced "organ-nice") becomes "organize" (so much more modern and cool!). "Colour" (pronounced "col-ooor"?) becomes the trim and becoming "color".

Simple idea, and it's worth $6 billion! W000t! I win.
"... What kinds of features would you like to see in a framework? ..."

explain to me how you intend to let users get to the data? Not pages but raw data (xml, rss, microformats etc). Oh that and cool-uri's. URI's created in a lot of frameworks suck. How are you going to create cool uri's? ~ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
I used Outlook a lot in various companies and definitely this is very useful.
Hook up your GMail to Outlook :)
I don't know Tim, so maybe he's an ass, maybe he's not.

But I don't think he's suggesting that entire societies live according to his prescription. Obviously that wouldn't work. He's betting that only a small percentage will try his life (and he's probably correct), in which case it'll work just fine.

Example: if 25% of US citizens moved to Rio to enjoy the value of the dollar down there, it'd ruin everything. At least in Rio. Since <%1 of Americans are actually going to try living in Rio for any length of time, Tim's plan will work really well.
if he's right isn't this a good thing? most of the startups that are successful now, started during (or close to) the dotbomb or some other economic crisis/recession (I think both MS and Apple did the same)...
Gotta read the book -- totally worth your time.

For a sample: explore http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/. You have to ignore the stock photos. Tim doesn't realize that some of his promotion comes off as get-rich-quick. He is not a huckster -- nor is he promoting any kind of scheme. Just explore his world. Even if you don't do what he suggests (I haven't, so far, as a 44-year-old father and husband), you'll love living vicariously through him.
GEB (Godel Escher Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid )

Read it because no matter who you are, what you know, and even whether or not you've read it before it will make you think critically and you will learn something.
"... Nice clip. The bit about the payphones reminded me of an interview with Jonathan Ive where he talked about why they put a handle on the first iMac. ..."

Stirling really has a great sense of what design is really about and talks about things thoughtfully. It's from him I learnt about thinglinks ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/209837076 ), spimes. Stirling even writes intro books before he writes for real. Funny though, the last time I heard him talking about google was about how it sucked ~ "The Internet of Things", ITConversation, 57min, 26Mb ... http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail717.html
cool! can anyone hook me up with a xobni invite?
A couple of problems with his argument:

1) Web entrepreneurs working now still need to optimize for speed. It's not like the desktop world where you are launching a year or two from now and can wait for the computers to catch up. You are launching a month from now and it needs to be fast. I would prefer to use a web mail client other than GMail, simply because I'm scared of my Google dependency. But every other web email client I've used ( Yahoo, Joyent, inbox.com, Zimbra) feels much slower. Google spends enormous effort optimizing their javascript load times and it really pays off.

2) Broadband speeds are not growing at Moore's law. Terrible regulatory law trumps technological gains.

3) It be hard for a company to lock everyone into its javascript platform when the entire source code is downloadable.

4) The trouble with javascript is not cross browser incompatibility. If you use a good library and have learned common gotchas you should not have to spend too much time debugging IE ( I probably spend less than 10% of my javascript coding time on cross browser issues). The trouble with javascript is that there are still a number of things it just can't do, and won't be able to do until the browsers change. For instance, there is no way to detect the exact pixel size of a character of text. This makes it impossible to build a real word processor in javascript. Nor can you detect a collision between the opaque regions of two png images (this is needed for most simple 2-d games). Well ... it's almost impossible to do these things. I suppose you could define your own image and font formats completely in javascript, and render the entire screen using 1 pixel divs. But that's just crazy talk. It would be a huge library - maybe 250 MB - and would be very slow until computers got faster. And it would require eating at least 6000 packages of ramen to build the thing. Hmmmmm .... maybe I have an idea I can apply to YCombinator with ... :-)
Sure will do. By the way I should have mentioned things I loved :-) "Previous conversations" panel is very useful even though it has a bit too much noise in it. Connected people started to make sense a bit later (because of your sorting) - all hardware guys are at the bottom of that list: the top 10 are software/HR people. HR got there because of the company-wide announcements, I suppose.

"Previously attached documents" panel is priceless. And, finally, your search is the bomb: just don't over complicate it later on.
Unfortunately I really think this monopolist might just be Microsoft again. The web operating system is the browser, and when Microsoft start shipping silverlight with IE...

The biggest challenge to this will be getting high performance out of javascript in firefox. Also a combination of svg for graphics and access to the local system via a google gears type api (I see firefox 3 has something like this planned or implemented). While this would all be nicely backwards compatible it wouldn't give you cut+paste support, some sort of MIME support for edit boxes/forms is needed perhaps.
Right now, it doesn't create URIs - you write the dispatch table yourself (like web.py). I might keep it that way, or I might make them optional attributes of components (not all components will have URIs, some might use more than one).

As for raw data, right now, I'm only outputting HTML, but JSON, XML and RSS are on my to-do list. Making a component that spits out something other than HTML won't require anything special.
http://biznik.com/
http://www.konnects.com/
http://www.AdvisorGarage.com
(never used any of them.. also try YahooGroups and Google Groups)
It would simply take a browser plugin for every type of browser. NewSDK code would be inside HTML comments, just like conditional comments are. The browser plugin would parse this code and cache it (aka compile it). From there, it would be trivial to implement image copy and paste.

Keep in mind that I have no idea what the limitations of a browser plugin are, but if one can:

1) parse the raw source code that's sent down from the server, including comments

2) manipulate the DOM

3) open an outgoing connection

Then you could do, well, anything. Embed Ruby into pages, for example. The reason you can do that is because the Ruby interpreter doesn't have to be a part of your browser plugin. All you have to do is convince users to download your C++ app that DOES contain a Ruby interpreter and runs in the background, then your plugin communicates with that via a socket. Your app then issues commands back to your plugin (you can think of those commands as assembly instructions) which manipulate the DOM or whatever else a plugin can do.
Or how about http://code.google.com/webtoolkit
Nothing of what I have written above applies to these 3. Neither can be written by a 14 year old over a weekend, YouTube is a lot of tech to handle. Flickr never nad problems with users paying for their services.

Finally, del.icio.us does not even belong to a group of companies this thread is all about (over-hyped startups with venture millions, producing crap) - it was a personal part-time pet project of a guy who didn't live in the Valley, didn't ask for millions for coding it. He wasn't even a professional programmer as far as I know.

In my view, you can be either a technology company (YouTube) or a revenue company (MySpace). Or both (Google).

Overwhelming number of Web 2.0 startups are neither.
Yeah, Flash kept coming to mind as I read the article.