skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't disagree more...how was it incoherent at all? The comparison to me was this:

1. Visicalc reigned supreme. They got all the press and had all the market share for their vertical (like Twitter today)

2. Visicalc got complacent and didn't really innovate (like Twitter today)

3. Someone else did it better and took over the market (he's betting that this will happen to Twitter)

I think his "improvements" to Twitter are debatable, but to be fair, he does make the point in the post that the specific improvements aren't what's crucial, just that users are going to demand innovation and Twitter hasn't really done much in that regard.
In summation: all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Winer is pointing out the cycle of birth, stagnation and rebirth from his perspective. In regards to twitter in specific, I believe that it will take quite a lot to dethrone the reigning king. Any new service will have to be compatible, incorporate and be a superset of twitter providing more functionality than the original without altering the simplicity.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/04/24/30-sites-for-fanta...
A pioneer in the areas of RSS as "Really Simple Syndication", XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and the MetaWeblog API, he is also the author of Scripting News, one of the oldest weblogs, established in 1997. He is generally credited with the exposition of RSS as "Really Simple Syndication", now a world-wide phenomenon, and the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer
Eventually, yes, I'd say so. GeoCities had a good 10+ year run. USENET lasted 20 years or so until it was overrun. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter can beat these, but they will certainly be killed off at some point, considering the rapid changes happening these days.

The key is that it's not a sudden shutdown -- it's the result of a painful decline over the span of a few years. The same thing will probably happen with FB and Twitter, as they lose users to the new thing.
Marketing Plan - Lifeline to Your Loan Modification Business
If you own a loan modification business or are preparing to become a loan officer you should have a marketing plan in place. The success or failure of your career or your business depends totally on your marketing plan. In today’s financial environment, loan modification has a great scope and you will be able to tap into the potential of this niche only with a perfect marketing plan.To start, your marketing plan should incorporate learning about the latest market trends.
He's right up there with Aaron Swartz.
What about reading a good old book ?
It's probably better suited and distractions are important too...
Would many people have taken Blogger seriously if its founders were unknowns? Yes, it seems they would.

You're asking us to know something that is impossible to know. But, I've met Evan, I've read the story of Blogger, and I've heard him talk four or five times about his history with all of his companies. I don't think I would ever bet against him, regardless of whether people take him seriously or not.

And, of course, Evan was finished with Blogger before he embarked on other things. Twitter wasn't an old company that he revived after selling Blogger to Google. It was something new. He tried other things along the way, and when they failed or didn't succeed the way he'd hoped, he moved past them and tried something new. He's practically a poster child for doing the opposite of what you're suggesting.
It's amusing to see that for the author the unix philosophy means that it comes with no convenience features.

The problem, imo, is that his browser is still made to be used by humans. I see interesting uses for it though, for instance it could relieve the pain of parsing html with a script.
This is good, if a bit short.

Having tips for getting it to compile with free tools was especially useful. I would like more info on the rendering engine, etc, along the lines of the Wolf3D review posted a few days ago.
On Bots - large scale experiment on search engine behaviour
You can read between the lines and see the work being done on Wolfram Alpha during that time period.

Very interesting article to read. Plus I'm a UIUC grad and I remember driving by those offices so many times. Who would have thought they were up to such grand goal.
Exljbris: http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/

Make sure you read the licenses; most just require an attribution link if embedded.
Why don't the driver manufacturers make their own speakers? Seems like a vertically integrated high-end audio company focused on competing with super-end high-end speakers at 1/4 the price could be a paradigm shift in the industry. The "super high end home audio system in three or four boxes".
Tanishq Launches World’s Smallest Bhagwad Gita
oh! So what happens when you run apt-get upgrade or something similar ?
1. Will the upgrade fails because there are running databases?
2. Or can you dump using the new DB version and restore again ?

Upgrading mysql was a breeze.
http://www.urbanfonts.com/free-fonts.htm
Michio Kaku On Aliens Physics
In Person or Online, the leading professional experts in world Ufology come to San Diego.
You're right that accounts are abandoned or go idle. It's substantially less than 75% though =)

Also, well over 100K users actively sync a file each and every day.
The article does say, "I’m not talking stupid risks. But smart, calculated ones." :)
where was thiel bitching about the Fed and its liquidity binge when it was goosing his facebook stake into the billions? haha it will be amusing watching this guy circle the drain with all of the rest of the lauded paypal mafia, whose paper-tiger web2 "empires" are individually going nowhere fast
I believe browsers do one thing and one thing well, and that's browse the web.
Absolutely inspiring. It is going to keep me up tonight. Crazy easy to use.
This stems from a three page[1] discussion on the Arch Linux forums. And there are the five pages[2] discussing its developement.

It could turn out pretty good, as the *box window managers compare to heavy desktop environments. It could also turn out pretty bad, like if someone thought emacs was too kitchen-sinky and so rebuilt TECO.

[1] http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=67463

[2] http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=70700
Ask HN: Best keyboard for programmers?
I'm a fan of the old-fashioned "buckle-spring" IBM keyboards, but they are no longer made/rare/expensive/etc. I'm looking for a great keyboard with a focus on key feel but I want to avoid "gaming" keyboards with extra functions, gizmos, etc. Any suggestions?
The guys who are worth telling popular stories about are the 'good guy' exceptions. The typical large-scale cocaine trafficker is not a nice person.

That being said, you're probably about as likely to get busted as you are to go broke, but at least in a startup you just lose all your money.
I think I would tell my 21 year old hacker self to consider the possibility of getting more involved in the business side of things sooner than he ended up doing, and to consider the possibility of striking out on his own.
Seems like a bit of an issue costing money & efforts. They are running ads "Dropbox (Official Site)" on both Google Search (maybe no longer necessary) & the sponsored listing on the actual site.
Summary: there are several twitter clients. Some show more information and some show less, but you can easily switch between them!

I still don't understand why this and other articles from that site (daringfireball) are popular.
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/ - current manufacturer

Old Model-M keyboards are still sold at http://www.clickykeyboards.com/ - or ebay.
The article might be interesting but his "grand goal" not so much.

See the customer reviews on Amazon about the aforementioned book:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/15...
experiments in physics
Joking aside... they don't talk too much about the development communities of the two systems, and it's more than likely that they will have to 1) hack the system to work with their infrastructure, and 2) may want to feed some stuff back, and perhaps hg is easier in that sense, being in Python. Also, while I don't know this, perhaps the authors are easier to work with than Linus, who is a very busy dude and extremely ... let's say ... sure of himself (which is mostly deserved).
I'd be interested to hear more from the administrators who wouldn't let him run his program how he wanted to run it. Were they just being trolls or was he causing problems for everyone else at the school?

Anecdotally (not so much from my own schooling, but from talking to teachers), it seems that primary and secondary education is full of petty, childish people who are so threatened by anyone competent that they try to sabotage them. I have no idea if that's what happened here, though.
I think its more important to find a starter application or site that you care about. If you are interested you will find a way to make it work and learn the language along the way. I ended up learning a lot from my first site, scrapping the whole thing and rewriting twice. I think that's just how it works. Find an idea that you care about and make it work.
Neither. You need ActiveMQ.
Whole House Softeners, and UV Sterilizers
Isopure Water, a California registered company, was founded in 2005 with one mission idea: "Pure water for Pure life."
I would like to argue this, as if a project fails does not mean that it was a bad idea. It could have failed because of bad timing, lack of experience and so on...if one thinks it is a good idea and has the passion for it, then no harm in giving it a shot...
That's a load of crap. There's plenty of Linux & FOSS talent outside of California. I'm actually overwhelmed with how much of it is here in Atlanta, since I had a similar prejudice initially.
Creamy/White Microsoft Ergonomic/Split keyboard.

does the trick, comfortable as well.
"never waste time trying to raise money or build a product nobody wanted to pay for."

I have to (somewhat) disagree.

The problem with Steve Blank's advice (and I say this as someone who thinks it is very good advice) is that the more innovative/ game transforming companies don't get created this way.

"By asking them if they'll pay for it, and iterating until you come up with something they will?"

Take Google.
If in the hey day of Lycos and Alta Vista and all those vanished search engine companies, Larry and Sergei had started looking for "customers" and "asking them if they'll pay for it", they would never have built Google.

"Would you like better search" "yeah sure" "So how much will you pay for it?" "Uhh ...Nothing".

Sometimes the "how to make money" becomes obvious after you make something cool.

Steve's advice is good for a certain kind of startup. Not all of them.

That said, the book is (very) worth reading as long as you don't blindly accept everything he says. I for one found parts of the book too "marketing organization" centric. Which is all right, because I as a discerning reader am supposed to think for myself.
It's not really YC, and it doesn't mean this is bad. Adeo Ressi (who is the founder of TheFunded) has a proven record in this space already.
I like matias keyboards from Ontario, they're a little clicky clacky

http://matias.ca/products/index.php

also see (some long threads)

http://searchyc.com/keyboard
Totally agree.
In fact, it would be interesting for someone to measure the difference in a room's acoustics from having your body in it. Then measure the difference due to swapping cables.
The content-based image retrieval problem
Adeo mentioned that they'll provide limited scholarships also.
HTC MAX 4G (Unlocked), 5MP camera,GPS, WIFI, E-mail,Games,Mp3
HTC MAX 4G - the world's first integrated GSM/WiMAX handset. Supported by a broad range of services based on Yota’s Mobile WiMAX network.
Yeah. I'd say read the Fountainhead first, as to not get scared away by all the character-drive philosophy in AS. The Fountainhead is a pretty inspiring read, and a fun way to get your mind thinking a bit.
It's not like other company's haven't been trying to beat twitter at it's own game already though. Pownce, jaiku, laconica, etc. Twitter's api is really a killer feature that helps things stay fresh with new apps coming out all the time using their platform.

That being said, I agree with the main point of the article, innovate or die.
It's been long a long time I've dropped the habbit of watching TV. Was not much of a fan even when I was a kid & then found this line in a productivity tips article.

"Avoid the tube" - I like to have statements on whatever I do :)
Google's New "What's Popular" Feature Aims to Clone Digg
If you visualize the graphic as five columns, you can see Oz appears in every column. I have been playing with Mozart/Oz for a while, it's a very small kernel language that you can learn the syntax of in a weekend, just like Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk and Prolog. But Mozart/Oz is a complete mindfuck.

People "get" Lisp and Smalltalk in the appreciative sense; you see how cleanly they allow you to engineer software and you have a smile on your face. Forth is cute, specially as soon as you peer inside and see how little implementation there is to it. Prolog is the one that will make you sit up and take notice. Prolog is interesting .. until you need to get work done ;-)

Oz makes Prolog look boring. It has no syntactic gymnastics fun like Perl and C; the text of the language is clear as day. It's when you start to evaluate the code in your head, scrolling down slowly and sliding each line of code off the visible screen and into your mind, that your eye brows begin to rise .. slowly at first, then soon your face is stretched long, like Edvard Munch's The Scream.

A highly recommended beautiful thing, best taken slowly with the company of van Roy and Haridi.
a couple recently-uploaded videos of Gates Sr. talking about the book http://www.youtube.com/user/TriFilmProductions
Microsoft is getting over their failures, but not the lame fanboys. It's clear.
I've used allot of similar things, and I can say that Dropbox has been the one I've stuck with the longest.

I've even managed to loose data using USB drives (mistakenly wiped the wrong one, or lost it) but I haven't pulled an "unrecoverable boner" yet with DB.

Working with the same code across multiple OS platforms (rails code mostly) it's been a lifesaver always having the latest copy (even offline).

I'm considering a paid account (reaching my limit) but like the others have said, it's just beyond the "impulse buy" price-point for me these days...
A concept I took from the article was how interesting it is to see what people come up with using the API of what is at heart a simple service. I may be bias as this is my personal view of course :)
But I would object that TV often only gives an illusion of pleasure and relaxation.

Sorry for nitpicking; This is a little confusing use of the word object. You are actually saying that "TV often only gives an illusion of pleasure and relaxation.". Using 'I would argue/say' instead of object would have been better.

+1 for the reference.
Cool.

How about the other way? I like the Slicehost image management system but it seems you need to roll your own to backup things to another geographic region.

(The largest quake in US history was in 1812 about 150 miles south of St. Louis, and if repeated that region isn't as prepared as California... and there are all sorts of other lesser mishaps that could take a whole datacenter down.)
I wonder what would happen if the competing apps made an abstraction layer for their APIs to map to Twitters, allowing App developers to develop for both.
I'm reading an outstanding book that addresses this issue. It's called "Your Erroneous Zones" by Wayne Dyer. The general theme of the book is "Break Free from Negative Thinking".
And even that claim was baseless as it was made based on a filename: GNUMakefile is a filename that GNU Make looks for before "Makefile". This allows the same directory to have a Makefile for traditional make and one used for GNU Make.
This is really going to help Win7 adoption. It's a really nice OS, and if you have application compatability with XP, there's going to be a lot of reasons to switch, and not so many to hold back.
Yeah, anyone have a solution for that one?
Well, he was flouting union work rules routinely. Whether that counts as "causing problems for everyone else" depends on your point of view. Union officers generally consider it to be pretty darn important. They work their entire lives to make sure that nobody can pull a stunt like a) creating a separate advancement path outside of their control and b) negotiate higher pay as a result of it. Note how that is a recurring element in the story -- "Hey, we're demonstrably the best math teachers in the country. How about more money?" "Nope, pay scale says you're less useful than a clock puncher who stayed in one place for the same amount of time. Sucks to be you."
I must admit that by now there are some really good series out there. I prefer to watch them not via TV, though - DVD or bittorrent to the rescue. I guess that still counts as watching TV, though :-(

But really, some series do impress me - they have a lot more options to go deeper than a movie that is limited to 90min. Not that I can mention many examples, since I don't watch TV, I don't tend to stumble on new series. Buffy is still my favorite...

Also, a lot of documentaries are breathtaking. I keep thinking someone should build a portal for all those documentaries. But then I talked to one documentary maker and she said "it is not that easy, rights belong to TV companies and so on". I guess I shouldn't have let her dissuade me.
Exploits aren't malware. Not in the sense we're talking about here, at least.
Ask HN: Do you like reading about startups more than doing one?
I struggled with posting this question. Not so much the question as to whether or not have something here in the text box.

On one side, the question begs to be asked. On the other, I'm thinking it must have been asked in the past. And for maximum effect, it would do best without any commentary.

So what to do?

Have you started your startup, or are you waiting? Will you ever start it?

It begs to be asked.

(Interestingly, these came up in the cursory google search.
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)
Ask HN: Learning to tune a database
I've been wanting to expand my knowledge around databases and sql/tuning. I've worked mostly with Oracle and would like to learn Postgres.

My problem is: With a programming language, I can do the 'Hello world' app and progress from there. With a database I need a different problem to solve or a different dataset to work with. I'm not going to learn much about tuning if I release a little used webapp :)

I bet there are plently of datasets around that I could load and mash up but I'm not too such on where to start.

Any suggestions?
I don't know many documentaries (unfortunately), but have you watched the "Planet Earth" series by the BBC? I guess one day movies like that will be priceless, when the things they show don't exist anymore (hope it'll never come to that). But seriously, some scenes are just incredible, I don't know how they did it (finding certain animals doing certain things, they must have had infinite patience).
I think his main improvement to Twitter is not debatable at all - being able to host your own and determining who can join and who can't - is key for microblogging like this to really take off. Twitter has shown the world that microblogging can be tremendously useful. Most businesses, however, will not use it if everyone can see what their employees are posting. Not to mention that a lot of businesses I know simply feel uncomfortable if they don't in some way own the servers that run stuff that's important to them.
I am a huge fan of the full size Apple keyboard. I use dvorak and don't look at the keys but the feel is great.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB110LL/A?fnode=MTY1NDA1Mg...
I was like that and now, I don't read as much anymore. A lot of them are pretty much the same anyway.

I'm working on my startup but been very scared of putting it out to the public. (Well, I hope that is going to change soon.)

That's another obstacle to hurdle. You work on it but releasing it is a different thing.
I'm pretty sure that the capacity problem is due in no small part to pollution control regulations, like the EPA effectively stopping new Coal power plants: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1859049,00.ht...

"The board's decision will force the EPA to consider CO2 when issuing permits for new power plants, potentially making it at least in the short-term all but impossible to certify new coal power plants. That's because the EPA will need to reconfigure its rules on dealing with CO2, which is found in greater concentrations in coal than any other fossil fuel"

About half of the U.S.'s electric power comes from coal:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/figes1.html

I'd love a cleaner world, we need it, but there are trade-offs we need to face.

Ask a Las Vegas area resident what he thinks of all the fresh water demands that the solar cells require because of cooling needs.

http://current.com/items/89979048_solar-power-and-water-issu...

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Want a nuke plants? where are you going to put them? and how long is it going to take to build?

So yeah, it's lame that the power grid is close to capacity. And yeah there are potential new and evolving energy supplies but the solution isn't so simple as "add 50% more capacity and have no worries."

To paraphrase Steve Yegge, "Have you increased the energy grid significantly and simultaneously reduced greenhouse gases ?"
Spider "Resurrections" Take Scientists by Surprise
The Long Now Blog : “Endangered Languages, Lost Knowledge and the Future”
I started my startup. It's more fun than reading about them, although reading about them is fun too.
Someone once said "Twitter clients are the 'hello world' of Web 2.0"

(or something along those lines. I forget who)

edit: well, lots of people have said it, actually: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22twitter+client%22+%22hello...
Clay Shirky did a fantastic talk at Web 2.0 last year on this very topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ
Interesting as this is, it's 3 years old, I presume the bots have evolved since then.
What's your point? Malware is enabled by vulnerabilities. Nobody is arguing that Linux has lots of malware. Linux is safer than Windows. But it's not more secure.
Sure. Make an app that stores a very large amount of data. A good example would be spidering web data (unstructured), parsing some structure from it, and storing it in a database. Then, do some analysis on it, expose it to the web, etc.

The important thing is either to:

a) Have a lot of data.

or

b) Have a lot of traffic.

The first is a lot easier to get than the second.
I am in the middle of a pretty product intensive startup right now, and I truly miss the glory days in college where I'd dream with my friends about all the great ideas that we could do.

Reading about startups brings back a lot of those feelings.

So to answer your question. I have started my startup, but I still like reading about startups, sometimes more-so than actually doing my own.
Latino girls
10,000 Gorgeous Latin and Colombian Girls
Robotic "Luke arm" being tested at Chicago Rehab Inst. [video]
AOL's New Plan: Content, Content, Content
For my own situation, I've not started one. It's still a dream, but one I've kept on the wayside by working for startups as opposed to having my own.
Being 21 I can't help but feel quite useless. I'm still working to get out of my university and future doesn't seem to be really bright, although perhaps it's just my mind playing tricks to me. But the mere fact that someone like me is (or was, when he was 21) already established in some position, even if "just" in the position of being independently bringing in money, kind of seems to set the bar too high.