skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to this example: http://demo.vaadin.com/Coverflow/
It seems like you can add custom widgets easily. In this app they started using a Flash Widget for custom graphics.

I'm not a GWT developer, does anyone have any experience adding custom GWT/Vaadin widgets to your applications?
There was a time, not too long ago, when people was hyping aspect-oriented stuff. I never got a chance to read up on it. Is it a paradigm shift? Or just hype?
Lesson: Where there are losers, there are winners.
I think this sounds awesome.

However it is odd they didn't link to GitHub or something. Looks like they just launched the site, so hopefully that's coming soon.
I think a few Good Guys somewhere in Colombia or Afghanistan could use zigbee enabled farms. Just saying.
Probably the best thing posted to Hacker News so far. RIP Bill.
I'm not sure how directly useful a Smalltalk runtime is, these days, but Smalltalk the language has several really good ideas in it that are just waiting to get brushed off and taken for a ride.

Of course, so few programmers seem to care about ideas from more than five years ago that there are tons of such gems hiding in plain sight.
Yeah, maybe they have had it built for months now and were just as mad at twidvid.io for copying their idea as the twidvid.io people are now that twitvid.com copied them...

They both copied twitpic didn't they?
Heh. Cool. By the way, if you need an iPhone app for Virtualmin, my contact info is in my profile. We got an interview but we didn't get the $5000. :)
Something bothers me about Bill Hicks, and I don't think it has anything to do with his material. He was (IMHO) a moderately funny comedian who eventually fell off the deep end. The problem I've found is that he was more a mouthpiece for his era, and now is being quoted without that context (by, uh... random people on the internet).

I like taking it easy and enjoying life as much as anyone and posting this (mostly inflammatory) quote probably wouldn't have changed my mind anyway. So don't be an internet douchebag and quote Bill Hicks.
Hey I go to CSU Pomona, too bad this guy isnt teaching the GUI class this fall
You think that's bad ... try search for help for R ;)
The lack of a push-button solution for all scaling problems does not mean that Rails doesn't suck at scaling.
I agree, competition is somewhat of an after-thought when building a successful company. However I consider the comments "work hard, run faster" to be general knowledge, something that every blogger will tell you, what you'll hear at a start-up seminar. What I am interested in, and the reason d'etre of my post, is to hopefully read actual, real-life stories from the users of HN. I am sure there has to be at least a few interesting stories based on personal experience, considering most people here are hard-working indivuduals, driven to see their business succeed, not just write a few lines of code.

What I mean by start-up, is its literal definition - a business starting out, with very limited resources, small market share, no brand recognition. Nike and Adidas are already established brands / companies. I am assuming though, that they had similar woes when they first started out - its natural to have competition and to differentiate yourself and your brand from it.

What I would like to see, is a discussion along the lines of "Nike used special stitching in their shoes, and Adidas didn't, because they didn't feel it was important. The stitching caused the shoes to gain popularity." Preferrably for internet-related start-ups, not shoes. :)
You said it the best. It is clear that the "clone" had been around for a long time already
If I only pay for the server hardware, I don't care how inefficient the client is unless it's completely unusable.
Eatlime.com
"But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that -- ever notice that?"

Not sure what he is referring to.
Embedded Markup Considered Harmful
If life is just one big game and doesn't matter, who cares if we spend money on guns and war instead of food and education? Why does it matter? Why does anything matter?
[2 year-old E Ink raised] some $150 million [in eight rounds], before it finally arranged an exit scenario for its backers [when it sold for] $215 million.

Hmmmm. $65MM. For all that effort, and god knows how many people are involved, I think they're barely breaking even.
How North Korea Survives
As an ex-smoker I see two preposterous ideas in this e-cigarette:

(a) That if one wishes to shake a drug addiction, they should do so by using the drug. Addicted to heroin? Start by doing a little less heroin!

(b) That this is somehow "better" than smoking. The only thing better than smoking is not smoking. It isn't smoking less or smoking electronic cigarettes. Just stop smoking.

Nobody wants to smoke; not even smokers. If you think otherwise you're deluding yourself. The only thing the e-cigarette does is give you two options instead of one: social leper, or weirdo nerd smoking a battery-powered cigarette.

I respect peoples' decisions to smoke and I don't complain to those who do (unlike non-smokers did to me), but come on people. This is just one more addition to a multi-billion dollar industry based on the ability of people to infinitely delude themselves.
Yes, the average server thread is going to spend far more time blocked on I/O than not. But the server should be able to handle more than one request simultaneously.

(Or you can use an event model; the point is, if your server is spending all of its CPU time blocked while under load, then something is wrong.)
I had the honor of taking Programming Languages from Dr. Fisher in 1990 at CSU Pomona. He is an effective teacher and a real visionary. It was one of my favorite classes. Thanks Dr. Fisher, keep up the good work.
How much does the sims 3 cost
Dog Bite Lawyer
When it comes to dog bites in the state of Illinois you will find that Lane and Lane attorneys take their jobs very seriously.
I wonder if this will someday be a trademark-law case-study. Two teams work on similar ideas, same name except for the internet TLD, one launches about 2 weeks earlier. Who -- if either -- has earned the 'TwitVid' trademark?
Battered Hill District ball yard reborn as Josh Gibson Field
You know the email address field doesn't appear in your profile, right? And your websites don't provide contact info.
Funny video! I watched it on my iPhone using the built-in YouTube app...
Yes, you are supposed to hold a 20 year old to the same standard as a 30 year old - otherwise it's discrimination.

This argument begs the question. To discriminate is to treat different things differently. The real question is whether age discrimination is justified, and despite the negative connotations "discrimination" has picked up, that's exactly what we're arguing here.
There were already several threads about this on here in the last day or two, and this post adds nothing to the conversation.
This must be one of the most inappropriate articles on HN. Not that it's wrong or that I disagree with it, but is there anything that goes against the grain of this site's spirit of work hard, work long hours, "change the world" etc.
Has anyone considered that maybe Eatlime was developing twitvid.com parallel to twitvid.io, and they just happened to launch a few days later?

After all, it's not like the concept is particularly original. And, the name is a spinoff of Twitpic. Twitvid is a very obvious name for a Twitter video-sharing site.
who thinks of these names?
Always the money thing. Although, yes, in theory I advocate spending money on peace and not war, there's a problem with this concept.

It's a fallacy.

99% of the time, throwing money at a problem will not solve it. The only way to solve a problem is to change the way you approach it.
This is the last JavaOne
JavaOne will probably not exist this time next year.
He isn't talking about 'life' per se, but more about culture, civilization, economy, and all the other bs we created and confuse with life.
Thumbs Up for Portfolios of the Poor
Then Wikipedia is wrong. There is a video of the founders at Arrington's house over a year in where they talk about this.
Design - The Demise of ‘Form Follows Function’
Culture Crunch: Arts hit by recession. (Your startup to the rescue?)
Timeless classic.
One possible answer: because that sometimes, in some way can be fun, too.
The author doesn't understand form or function too well and it's remarkable at how he equates moving towards more intuitive ways of doing things as the "The Demise of Form follows Function." Weird part is that it's in the New York Times.
A world based on the idea of constant growth and rabid consumerism doesn't look kindly on people who preach the opposite. He could have been referring to any number of people - Ghandi, MLK, (Jefferson's) Jesus etc.
my mistake, they check URL as well as host: parameter.

the GFW will RST your again and again even if you Google for twitter.com
It is most likely, as these sites were probably not built in a matter of days. The concern is not about that, it is about copyright - about the look and feel, and the name. What is the likelyhood of twitvid.com just happening to design the same exact layout as twitvid.io ?
You seem to assume this is a win/lose game rather then (as the article suggests) a huge market that can be split into slices.
In my experience, that line is pretty fuzzy in this business. E.g., take all the various mafia games on facebook, myspace, iphone, and now twitter. They're more or less all knockoffs of one another, but nobody seems to care. In fact, consumers seem to love them all.

In this case, shame on twitvid.com for using the exact same name (and filing a trademark application for it), but I think copying features and design elements is fair game. Ultimately the one that provides the best service will win.
"scribd-haters"

The company is cool and interesting, sure, but I still hate anything that brings my browser, and, at times, my computer to a screeching halt especially with something as trivial as viewing a PDF.
If they can get the trademark, they can maybe win a domain dispute via ICANN:

http://www.icann.org/en/dndr/udrp/policy.htm

if they can prove registration in bad faith and that the owner has no legitimate interest.

If the twitvid.com guys really did buy the domain and design the site after twitvid.io got started, maybe they could somehow prove that stealing their thunder was the only "legitimate interest" and that the domain was acquired in bad faith.

Sadly it sounds like an uphill battle -- and even in the best case it might be a Pyrrhic victory as trademarks take the better part of a year to issue (if not more) and the UDRP procedure probably isn't speedy either. And then they'll fight it, and you'll spend all your time in court instead of building your company.
You can't. You just have to make sure you're the best. Nothing has stopped people from trying to knock off Google, but because they're the best, they thrive. Same with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other pop startups.
I thought that, and I'd have believed it if it wasn't for them basically coping the text...

However, to me it's irrelevant, the Twitvid.io guys were very stupid to assume nobody would launch a similar service on the .com domain…which was already registered!

I honestly applaud them for jumping at the opportunity. I actually think they have a better design too, so I wouldn't call it a clone...they could have changed where the login box was and stuff, but that would have been an absurd waste of time.
Software bug may have brought down AF 447
Against the grain builds character, I don't think it's inappropriate, but rather much needed.
Look at the links. The main link is directly to the PDF. The [scribd] link is to Scribd's rendering of the document.
And he's under 30 still. Was 26 when he went out to YC. Spread the word.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor

I don't believe either groups were stupid, merely ignorant of the other's existence. But maybe I'm stupid and they are both malicious.
"Don't puke me bro!"
that's really just google's fault for having such weak tech. Not everything in the world is /[a-z0-9]{3,}/
Now you're not following me, timr. An evented server can handle 10,000 connections simultaneously. Run it under load, profile it. Select is at the top of the profile. The program spends all its time in the kernel, waiting on I/O.

That evented server is also faster than the threaded version of same.

What's the compute task you think a program is bottlenecking on in an application that does nothing but shovel data out of a database into a socket based on a btree key?
Real-Time 3D in Javascript
Commerical Broker Attorney 
Commerical Broker Attorney
If the .io guys send out attack lawyers, it will be the biggest waste of time and money ever for a startup.

Neither of these services have any traction, and TwitVid is a mediocre name anyway (it's way too derivative of TwitPic). So what prize would they be fighting over?

And while they're busy consulting with lawyers, someone somewhere will launch TwitTube / YouTwit / Twideo and kick their asses.
Oh give me a break. All your examples are hugely popular people (except maybe Jefferson's Jesus but Jefferson himself was hugely popular). Millions of people love and support these men then one nut job kills them and you conclude society didn't look kindly on them? Both men had thousands upon thousands of people attend their funerals (I know MLK was 22,000+ and I understand Ghandi had even more)

Ghandi and MLK both have holidays dedicated to them for God's sakes (in their respective countries). They were so beloved that they caused an ENTIRE NATION to change it's beliefs. While Jefferson routinely ranks near the top in lists of greatest Presidents. In fact, the men being named here are almost universally considered men that no one thinks badly of. They're modern day heroes.

To say society doesn't look fondly on them is ridiculous.
The phone call you receive will give you a three-digit security code. Enter the code, and you'll be logged into your email account immediately.

3 chars. There are only 1,000 ~ 250,000 combinations depending on if they are alphanumeric or not, and if they are case sensitive.

They should make the key expire after about a minute (or 3 attempts) to slow brute forcing.
>"Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, into a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defense each year and, instead, spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would do many times over -- not one human being excluded -- and we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever. In peace."

How facile, saccharine, and trite. "Just stop making weapons and we'll have world peace" - it's so brilliant, why hasn't anyone thought of it before? You people act like he was the first one to ever eat mushrooms.
A lot of what I do revolves around online advertising. Some things, such as redesigning sites & the like (which is also really a form of online advertising) have softened a little.

Things like Adwords have gone sideways: Some reducing spending to cope with reduced income, some increasing for the same reason. I think slight net positive.

Client growth is to irregular to know what's going on without looking at years instead of months.

Put the two together & I read it as deferring bulky expenses, but overall strengthening slowly. Anyway, the areas we deal in there's a lot of cash still stuck in legacy budgets: yellow pages, local newspapers& crappy online advertising. New companies aren't going there at all, but all of them are going online one way or another.
Inside Facebook - Life Work and Visions of Greatness
True that the site is a large proportion of design enthusiasts right now, but since that is who normally designs cars, are we any worse off than a normal car company.<br><br>
If you were to jump a Bronco, it would be nothing like the Rally Fighter and we have plenty of Bronco Jumpers in our team to prove it. Short wheel base short travel, Bronco's make for a spine pounding ride over 35miles per hour on a baja desert.<br><br>
As for the site having more than pictures, I recommend clicking the build tab. The Rally fighter will be debuted at SEMA (Nov 09). <br><br>
Many kit cars take 200 hrs to build...Lone Star (7 days), Factory Five same, etc. You must be good to make this time, but 2000 hours is excessive (though possible for certain people on certain builds). The whole point is that we started Local Motors to addres those scary long build times. Come aboard and give it a little try before you declare so unilaterally that it will never work. Are you so desperate for it to fail? We are pretty good at listening to our faults and appreciate all of your criticism. Hope to see you on the site. (www.local-motors.com)
PHd Student Uses Google Maps To Uncover N. Korea Secrets
<flip>Iterating and improving really, really fast.</flip>

I have nothing remotely resembling any real insight into this, but for something like a pure play internet startup where the barriers to entry are pretty small, it seems like app quality, luck and bloody-minded perseverance are probably the most important factors and you only have any real control over two of those.

Web focused analysis follows

Patents - This is obviously great if you can get it, but I'd say the space of possible startup ideas that are coverable by patents that enable you to exploit monopoly power is a lot smaller than the ones that don't.

Copyrights - Well that'll stop someone stealing your name, but what else have you got? Maybe "look and feel" but even that pushes it. It also requires lawyers, which are well, expensive.

Creating a Strong Brand - Requires you to have enough users who like you to use your product and get some buzz. Reduces to building a good product.

Creating a Following _^_

Blog - That'll really help with your page rank in the beginning if you update regularly and is a way to build community but it doesn't really have anything to do with preventing knockoffs. If your stuff is good you'll get to the stage where the vast majority of your users aren't even aware you have a blog.

PR & SEO - Worth doing only if you have something people will stick around for after they get to your site. You must have something there first.

Making the Product Complicated - You mean having solutions to non trivial problems baked into your product? Now that raises the barriers to cloning substantially. And unless you're solving a Hard Problem that has no value proposition (which would be a kick in the teeth if you discovered that was what you'd done afterwards) you've made your product better. As has been mentioned by pg, if you're considering two ways of doing something, one of which is harder, the harder one is almost certainly teh one to go for, because you're only considering it because you know it's better.

Trade Secrets - I was going to diss this one but it's actually among the best on the list, and is I think more or less the same as above.
I can't upmod this comment enough. Regardless of whether they got some inspiration from twitvid.io they both copied the idea from somewhere else. It's not like twitvid isn't super-obvious as a name considering twitpics success.

Also, how many ways could a service like this be built? It's obvious what features you need, what look you are going for etc.
The Narwhal project (http://narwhaljs.org/) attempts to make JavaScript generally more useful and pleasant outside the browser, adding a module system, standard library, package manager, etc.

It's designed to be interpreter agnostic, by implementing as much as possible in JavaScript, only dropping down to native modules where necessary (file io, etc). Currently Rhino is the best supported platform but people are working on V8 and Mozilla support as well.

It's still a work in progress but it's at the point where you can start playing with it. All of the Cappuccino build tools use it now, btw.

Then there's JSGI and Jack (http://jackjs.org/), which is how you interface with webservers. JSGI is a standard interface for JavaScript web applications and middleware, and Jack is an implementation of several web server adapters, middleware, and utilities, essentially a port of Ruby's Rack.
I don't mean to dismiss this or say it isn't positive. But at the same time this doesn't do much for me. The court, as opposed to say Congress, is charged with interpreting the law in place. But I think most know the law itself needs to be done away with and completely rewritten.

So while a positive ruling from the Supreme Court might give a little temporary relief things won't be improved until the law is changed (which will invalidate the ruling anyway)
twitvid.com looks more like twitter than it looks like twitvid.io. twitvid.com also looks more like twitter than twitvid.io looks like twitter.

I don't believe twitvid.com copied anything at all from twitvid.io.
People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write
He's making a dig at 37signals apps. Campfirenow.com, highrisehq.com. I think also at getdropbox.com
Both sites took a ridiculously generic template for designing their page. Bubbly letters, Twitter colors, show users, 1-2-3 list. The designers for both products lack imagination and created products that fail to stand out. Maybe that works because they're making such a "widespread use" product, but you can't accuse people of stealing genericism. Not when every Twitter site works the exact same.
Me too! You'd better not steal my idea.
Of course there is no single magic pill, but I'll try anyway. :)

Google - PageRank. Google was not the first with the product anyway, there were many other search engines in play already at the time - AltaVista, Excite, AskJeeves...
Google's infrastructure is not easy to replicate, by the time others caught on to PageRank, Google was already growing exponentially, past the "start-up" phase. By the time others replicated the functionality, Google was a house-hold name.

Twitter - SMS, simple interface, API, brand. Would you rather tweet, or send jaiku's?

YouTube - progressive Flash download, reply features, similar videos actually worked compared to other sites.

Facebook - clean, organized interface, college accounts validation.

One point to mention though, none of these sites had direct knock-offs, icon for icon, like the twitvids. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. had all grown in popularity before they were knocked off. Or at least that seems to be the case, unless there were knock-offs that simply were not nearly the same caliber and just never made it past grandpa's blog as far as spreading use. What I am talking about are early-early stages of a start-up, like the twitvids. And looks like they have similar caliber potential judging by their features currently offered.

P.S. If you want to see a nice Facebook knock-off, take a look at vkontakte.ru. THE most popular site among the Russian internet users. Probably the only thing it's missing is the API, and the fact that it found it's niche with the Russian language.

There is something to be said about knock-offs, and that is why there is reason to be concerned about it. When listening to presentations of enterpreneurs from successful start-ups like Facebook and LinkedIn, they will often talk about "what keeps them up at night."
To me, form follows function means no unnecessary ornamentation. This doesn't mean NO ornamentation, one of the things persistently misunderstood by engineers is that all ornamentation is frivolous. What it means is the ability to carefully consider and justify each design decision that you make and to not be mindless about your design.

I think the NY Times article had somewhat of a point. Sure, the original iPod needed to have a wheel and a screen and be easily held in your hands but it really could have looked like anything apart from that. The loosening of constraints upon design is at both liberating and slightly terrifying for those who believe in form follows function.
Are you one of the people behind Twitvid.com?

You would have to be blind to think there was no blatant copying here. Even the icons are the same.