skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really disagree with you. If you have a revolutionary idea in a city like Atlanta, and you are determined to build it without customer contact - you should probably move to Silicon Valley. As one VC I interviewed in my research, Mike Maples put it, "Silicon Valley is the place to create 'Thuderlizards,' but you can build a great company anywhere."

Most startups, however, have bad ideas, so keeping them secret doesn't help anyone. PG has talked about this repeatedly. Usually your 'Big Idea' turns out to either be total shite, is different enough from what customers want that they won't buy it in its initial form, or the market for your product is not the one you expected.

So as a non-attorney, I can't possibly disagree with you. As an entrepreneur, I know in my GUTS that the key to succeeding here is to get your 'Big Idea' from a customer asking for it. That doesn't mean you come into the conversation with a blank page - you still start with your initial product vision. You just iterate until someone is dying to pay you for it.

Do it any other way here, and you'll miss most opportunities when the market moves on or someone else with funding does it before you. The same applies for building a demo without customer contact to get early stage funding - your time is better spent.

This is not a place to pursue the kind of idea that you are talking about, unless you can break it down into a minimum viable product people will pay for very quickly. Fortunately many opportunities are not the kind you describe.
Definite improvement :)
Didn't know Mr Stubblebine was here. Good job, sir.
The Wall Street Journal should be taking notes.
The future is a big-ass table: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
Introduction to using Patterns in Web Design
and Bebo
How does any of that justify branding a whole stack of books that someone else finds interesting as "junk" and "BS", for "those who need self-help", and now "for the sheep"?

I'm not talking about the quality of your selections here, or the submitter's, I'm talking about the exceptionally obtuse way you have chosen to express your opinion.
From the tone of many in this thread, it seems that people don't understand that non-commercial copyright is not a crime, but instead is a civil infraction -- hence why Thomas was not arrested, and not tried in a criminal court.

But the copyright industry certainly wants everyone to believe it is a crime. Looks like it is working.

Sad.
anyone have particular splitter recs?
prohibited from using a computer I know, it sounds like something from 1987. I imagine that right now it's a condition of his bail rather than a sentence subject to appeal.
I began my first two companies in Atlanta in the early 90s. Both began as contracts for Big Blue. I had no legal counsel of my own. It was not in my client's interest to hamstring me with complex paperwork that allowed them to own my IP. They had paying clients that needed my software solutions. Large companies know they can't fill every piece of a large solution to their customers. Most are happy to allow little guys to "fill the cracks".
Doesn't gmail allow for HTTPS? Isn't that the same equivalent security?

I'm sure I don't fully understand your value proposition, please elaborate.
There is a theme park aspect to Silicon Valley but the Detroit analogy isn't a very good one. Plus, wasn't Digg in The City? The SF startups have traditionally been sillier and more prone to the party and gossip scene than the ones in the South Bay.
My god sir, we NEED you. We need you to tell this story. We need to learn from you. Please contact me. I want you in front of a room full of people telling this story.

russell.jurney at gmail.com
> but if you are ever around kids you'll realize that every 7 year old knows about google.

This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read here. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 1.8 billion children under 14 years of age. Divide such a number by 14, and we get what might be the number of 7-year-olds on the planet: 130 million.

I do not find it at all plausible that 130 million 7-year-olds on this planet know about Google. A large fraction of those children have never used a computer, why should they care?

If I knew you personally, I would worry about your children. Do you act like this around them?
When I say SV, I mean the entire Bay Area. I should probably clarify that in future articles. Thanks for the feedback.

As to the theme park comment - it really felt like Disney World to me. I don't mean that in a bad way - I love Disney, and would live at the Contemporary Hotel at Disney World Orlando if I could. In terms of a supportive environment for building startups, it really is like a theme park ride.
LA Times has had something like this for quite some time: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/homicidemap/
I received an email from Apple asking developers to test out a version of AIM with push capability. It drained my battery faster than checking email every 15 minutes (that is, the phone didn't last a day without requiring another charge). I turned it off pretty quickly.
I think if you take a look, you'll find that the history of Silicon Valley goes back more than 100 years, and it has continued to boom despite short-term boom/bust cycles.
The only problem I have with one of the start-ups I'm working on is the fact that it's a complete first mover advantage play. We would have to go big fast to capture and hold the market before other "larger" market players get involved. I've been told two polar opposite things to do by two seasoned entrepreneurs, one says, bootstrap and go a year, the VC's will treat you very well after 50 contracts (should be very easy to get, I have two lined up with only concept and Accenture is interested). The other says, go west young man, the idea is a market changer and it will go big fast but will needed to be well funded to keep from hitting the cash wall. That's were I'm torn at the moment. PS: As you can guess by my previous tweet, I can't sleep tonight)
'The IT Crowd' spoofs threatening ads about file sharing.
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This seems like bad advice. The next-big-thing model is not in fact the default model in the Valley. And the kind of startups it works for, like Facebook and Twitter, it would work for outside the Valley.

It's certainly true that trying to force a startup into the next-big-thing model will generally destroy you. But the way it destroys you is by failing to get users, and that is not a function of your location.

My advice would be simply to use the right model for the kind of startup you have, regardless of where you are. Make something people want. If you manage to make something people want so much that it grows explosively, go for it. But don't assume you will.
7 or 8 years ago I read the Book "In the Pond" - Ha Jin. Its a story of a Chinese man that pushes against society and gets his butt handed to him countless times. While reading it, I didn't appreciate the subtle wisdom I would gain from many years since of reflecting on it while living in China.
Pogue says he uses "typing expansion software" -> http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/typing-expansion-s...

That must take some getting used to. I use a similar feature in Netbeans for Ruby programming but didn't know there was a feature like that for regular English words. Pogue has said previously that he has suffered severely from RSI so it must be related to that. He has advocated Dragon Naturally Speaking so much that I assumed he didn't type at all.
The list was supposed to be for "those who love to learn". Well, if it's learning one cares about, then anything that is not deep knowledge is suspicious. Truth be told, the OP did not sell his reading list as one for "those who love to learn".

A book that can be read during a flight cannot be deep. OK, I agree that my choice of words was not the most fortunate, and that "BS" and "junk" were distasteful... but on the other hand, compared to the monumental works of Feynman and Vladimir Arnold (the kind of books that take years and years to grasp), I can't help thinking that the OP's list pales by comparison. There are books of this time, and there are books of all time. Just like Homer and Marcus Aurelius or Euclid, some great thinkers' words shall be cherished for centuries and centuries to come.

As for me, I am a mere mortal. I am not of the caliber required to write such great books, but I would be very happy if I could live long enough to read all the great books I want to read. Life's too short to read bad books.
What are the factors that will lead Silicon Valley down a long, uncompetitive decline like Detroit?

The big ones that got Detroit -- an entrenched oligopoly of giant organizations, adversarial and inflexible unionism, years of recourse to political favors rather than competitive adjustment -- don't seem to be in play in technology.

California and the bay region have some governance issues, but those come and go. There is international competition, but unlike Detroit we will import workers, outsource activity, and lower wages if necessary to adapt.
Bingo! I would peg the gold rush as the real beginning of "the California mentality". It's interesting to compare and contrast California with Oregon, where I'm from. Oregon was settled by boring farmer types who set about creating schools and churches and gave dull names to everything[1]. That mentality is still there... people lead good, and often quiet, happy, modest, productive, lives, but there is nothing like the "big bet" startup mentality in the bay area. Even Portland, which has lots of bright tech folks, and isn't that far away from the bay area (flights are plentiful and relatively short) doesn't strike me as having much of a startup scene. And where I'm from, in Eugene... it always seemed to me that no one did much of anything outside of protesting for the cause du jour, despite having a reasonably large, and reasonably good university. Perhaps not in terms of companies/startups, but people are far more "doers" here in Padova than there, to say nothing of the bay area.

[1] I would love to do research/find articles on surveys of place names. For instance, the Willamette valley is full of boring biblical/someone's daughter/back home names, but once you get to mining country in southern Oregon, you get more names like "Jumpoff Joe Creek" (look for it driving on I-5 north of Grants Pass). Even the geographical terms change: there are no 'gulches' around Eugene, but plenty in southern Oregon. I wonder about the significance of that.
Huh, were you looking at the same plot I was?

If two sites cater to the same clientele, and stackoverflow has gone from zero to some significant fraction, how is that not a market share going from 100% to ~70%? Just because there is no huge decrease in ee doesn't mean they are not losing market share, because all those stackoverflow hits could have been ee.
and LearnHub
So how much of that Billion+ downloads is not free? The freemium sales should figure in the statistics somewhere as well I suppose.
Which causation are you saying is not equal to correlation here? As far as I can see, there was no hypothetical cause mentioned, only the fact that stackoverflow is catching up.
I doubt whether there is any conclusive empirical data on this question. Feel free to guess.
What evidence do you have for believing that this is the peak? Or more precisely, for believing that things will decline from this point?
Are the actual numbers secret?
Thanks for letting me know.

I have just found out that I cannot delete my post.

Cheers.
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AT&T iPhone Tethering to Cost $55 Per Month
Twitter's search share
23andMe gets another $2 million from Google
Who's winning the search race?
CommNexus: The Free Incubator
Hey thanks for the free link, I wasn't going to pay $5 to read it, but now that I have, it would have been worth it.

It is definitely an interesting analysis and the author has taken some pains to isolate confounding variables. The one thing I would have liked to see is some cross-cultural data. For example his theory is that the interval available for innovation is being reduced due to upward pressure at the low end (people take longer to get academically qualified to start "real" work) but no corresponding expansion of the upper end (just because people are starting 8 years later than they used to does not mean they keep being innovative 8 years after they used to stop). He attributes some of this to the extended training period, which means PhDs don't really get going until 31 whereas a century ago they started research at 23.

But their is a large cultural diffence in this value right now. Back when I was getting my academic training, the typical age of a US PhD was 30, whereas in the UK it seemed to be 24-25 [I do not know whether this is still the case]. So if his point is that the squeeze in "fertile years" is linked with a social drop in scientific innovation, he should be able to show that in countries were the academic qualifications happen faster, those countries are more scientifically productive.

But without looking up his secondary references, I have to admit to being very surprised at the thought that R&D is less productive now than it used to be (per person involved, I guess). If anybody can figure out how they measure that and in what areas of endeavour and can explain it in a few words, please do so.
Depends on the business. Most companies don't need or qualify for venture money and believe they need it because of what they read on teh blogz. Building a high growth 10x return potential 9 figure company doesn't come easy.

Pretty sure Loopt bootstrapped to start and worked their ass off. I'm also pretty sure, they couldn't do what they need to do without $13.3m or so in funding. Having sequoia and NEA also helps a lot beyond the dollars. The value add from those VCs is significant, not bullshit by any means.
No, 37Signals, Planning Is Not What You Think
Microsoft take legal action over $250000 click fraud case
Microsoft are again in the spotlight this time hoping to recieve $750,000 in charges, concerning their ad system.

Software giants, Microsoft are prosecuting three people from Canada who according to Microsoft, produced a huge online scam by penetrating their pay-per-click ad service.

The culprits were Gordon Lam, Melanie Suen and Eric Lam who felt they would get away with it but were oh so wrong.

A spokeswoman commented on the topic saying this was the first ad-related law suit Microsoft have pursued,

“Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement team has a long history in enforcement efforts on issues such as malicious code distribution, spam, scareware, child protection, and other Internet safety issues, but this is the first case we have filed with respect to click fraud.”
I was thinking something similar. But my question is this. Are these lower prices the result of a better functioning market, or are profits just shifted away from developers to a new even more powerful middleman, which is Apple? Do scrabble playing customers end up paying less overall, including hardware and software? It's not a rethorical question. I really don't know.
Having sequoia and NEA also helps a lot beyond the dollars.

How do they help beyond the dollars? I did two startups backed by Sequoia and they didn't provide any help besides the money.
Finally someone steps up to bat for DiSo!

Although, I'm not seeing how this fits in with OpenID or OAuth.
Or better still, actually say something useful.
That is very nice, and I think two modest (17' or 19') widecreen monitors, rotated to portrait, would be good for coding. But it's my understanding that sub-pixel smoothing only works when the monitors are landscape.
Is there a fix for that? Or is the best way just to switch it off?
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'The next big thing' may not be the default model in the valley - in fact I was impressed by the thousands of startups building tools for the guy at the 'next bench.'

Unfortunately though, the 'Next Big Thing' is pop culture, and we here in Atlanta tend to draw the game plan that I oultined from what we THINK we know about the valley. Even when what we're pursuing isn't a 'next big thing' opportunity, and even when nobody here would ever fund such a thing - we have the reality on the ground in CA in our minds, and look forward to raising money instead of getting our first check from a customer. Our ideas are larger than our budget. Its there in most everyone, at a deep, deep level because the stories of the icons we look up to enforce it.

Therefore I would submit that my advice is good, because I've seen the pattern play itself out here a hundred times. We need customer driven development in Atlanta. Those are the kinds of opportunities we can pursue and do well at. But I don't presume to give advice to SV startups - I don't know anything about those. Obviously someone like you can pursue any idea he wants and make that work - you and your companies have a thousandfold more resources than we have available to us by virtue of your experience and location, and you have first-rate talent for building and picking startups.

The 'right model for the right kind of startup' is right - but most people mess that up terribly, so the advice is insufficient. My suggestion is that Customer Driven Development be the default that we hold in our heads - rather than the California State of Mind, which is ruinous to us.

Bad advice is espousing and embracing the Valley model (as we understand it) to the rest of us, because it does not apply. How many of your companies raise series A's right out of Y-Combinator? Do you have any idea how unlikely that sort of thing is here? A Y-Combinator startup has options other than customer-funding once they reach the stage of exiting Y-Combinator. An Atlanta startup usually does not, unless they leave. The sooner we accept that reality and deal with it, the sooner our rate of growth will increase.
But who determins what a sustainable price is? What you say could be used as a general purpose excuse for never lowering the price of anything. That cycle of lowering prices, shaking out some players leading to consolidation leading to higher prices leading to more competition leading to lower prices is just how things work in capitalism.

I'm just not sure if the price for the user has actually dropped or just shifted towards paying Apple.
Something like this will inevitably become popular at some point. No one should really want any closed site to dominate.
This recession tracks the Great Depression
You're basically saying that lawyers shouldn't take cases for murders, or anyone else morally suspect. But that completely defeats the purpose of having a justice system. It's not the lawyers fault that someone's life was ruined -- if you want to blame anyone, blame the jury. Or blame the politicians that made the laws in the first place.
Another take on 'copy' is to take an idea that worked in one market and do it another market with appropriate localizations applied. Say a successful product in US done right for India.
Your $5.99 isn't enough to support developing anything but a cheap, top-50 hit of an application

I can hear traditional airlines grumble: "For 50 USD/EUR we can't even serve proper meals, assign seat numbers or use central hub airports"
That is why I have avoided clicking on Scribd results, no matter how alluring the document is.
Blood, turnip. Anyway the riaa has moved on from that misguided tactic.
Good joke, guy!
Yes, I do, and so do everyone who have read the article.

> The Task Queue API is Python-only for now; we'll have a Java language version available soon.
which are they?
"The user must trust the server that is hosting their identity"

That's true with DSNP, but given current p2p technology it should be possible to create a social networking application without data on servers. Where is my Facebook-on-XMPP desktop application?
Also - Paul... of course you can buy a Silicon Valley. Stanford bought theirs ;)
Self-organized helical equilibria and ohmically heated fusion plasma
I'm wondering if everyone is as annoyed as me when the press consistently gets the crux of the matter incorrect in its headlines:

" Woman illegally downloads 24 songs, fined to tune of $1.9 million"

The issue was the _sharing_ of 24 songs, not the downloading.

Thomas-Rasset also is not the most innocent of those who have gone to court... Great write up on the entire case here:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jury-selecte...

"Thomas-Rasset had used Napster for a college course and had written a paper on it, arguing that it was legal. She also admitted that she followed the court case that shut Napster down and knew that it was not legal. Given her knowledge and experience with file-sharing, her claim never to have heard of KaZaA and never to have downloaded files might seem suspect."
Pixar grants girl’s dying wish with home viewing of 'Up'
I suspect she wasn't fined for downloading 24 songs but for distributing the songs to others. Still, that's an excessive fine.

All legal systems that I know are completely broken because the consequences of losing are so different for the parties involved. For that woman, losing the case means total financial ruin for the rest of her life. If the RIAA had lost, it would be just a blip in their legal budget if anything.

In my view, the right way to set fines would be to ask, what percentage of their profit have record companies lost due to the actions of that woman. She should be fined that same percentage of her disposable income (excluding minimum wage).
Most of the people I know who have reading lists like this are a personal and professional mess.

Yes, but they read those books, because they are a mess. They aren't a mess because of reading those books... I hope.
I would be very interested in this forum too, but since there is none that I personally know of, would anyone be interested in working with me to get one going? I have some contacts that I could pull to get operating managers to CEOs involved. If your interested, send me an email at jason.erik.green@gmail.com.
But it's still a head-scratching investment. Not because of the family ties between the companies, but because why does Google want or need to own a piece of a biotech company?

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Google wants to own a piece of a biotechnology company because it is owned by the wife of one of the founders. If nepotism were a phenomenon unknown to the human experience, we wouldn't have a word for it.

Theoretically, adult supervision is supposed to intervene at some point and say "Um, this is both embarrassing and a waste of our shareholders' resources bordering on embezzlement, perhaps we should reconsider?" but, even in a straight-laced old-economy company, it happens occasionally. People also occasionally get thrown on out on their rumps for it, and for less than $2 million, too.