skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point about the irrational reliance on brand names. You mention Microsoft, I could mention Google too, but as long as it helps to dilute this reliance, I think it is healthy. Let a hundred brand names bloom.

The situation with linux drivers is much better these days than just a couple of years ago. I do agree it may help, but it is not so critical as it used to be.
"There is a tiny little downside here: no local software. Browsers don’t yet do everything, and there are two decades of Windows applications that have been written, performing functions that can’t yet be replicated in a browser."

There are a few problems with that view.

One, the applications that matter to people are changing. For many people, programs like web browsers and iTunes are now opened frequently, whereas a decade ago those apps either didn't exist or weren't nearly as relevant. So who is to say that 2 decades of Windows software adds up to much these days?

Then there's the fact that many desktop apps were not written to coexist, so a legacy on Windows means something much different than on, say, Unix. Unlike Unix, where very old programs are still part of the ecosystem of utilities, Windows apps are just too random and fleeting.

Then there's the fact that desktop programs have grown and grown, and most users don't seem to adopt even a fraction of the features. What took two decades to develop will not take two decades to "replace", because only a fraction of the features will really be required for most people to make the jump.

And most of those huge apps should have been stopped at version 2.0. After awhile, big version numbers are meaningless; even for Apple, what on Earth makes the latest iTunes worthy of a version 8? They're still over-hyping the software, but not much is being added, so these old apps are not really as sophisticated as they appear to be.
Thanks for that, it didn't even occur to me. :) Yeah, the social awkwardness factor kinda blows it in some instances, doesn't it?

If you could run it as a background service on the iPhone (which you can't without jailbreak), you could cut 15 seconds off that time.

Maybe given the current technical limitations it'll work better in some social settings than others. Informal ones where time isn't pressed, like hanging out with a group of people. Or at a convention. If you're sitting in a booth you could have an iPhone sitting on the table with the app open and ready to go. A passer-by might want to shoot you an email later, so they pull out their iPhone, bump yours, and away they go...

I guess thinking about it more it probably works in some situations better than others. It's niched though, and that's the stuff of entrepreneurial gold. ;)
Chrome can have whatever it likes?
Rumour has it that Google wants to ditch X. If that is the case, no other GUIed nix software will run without a rewrite.*

Not exactly: few modern GUI applications are written to use Xlib directly. If Google ditched X for a new window system and then ported GTK+, Qt, and a few other widget toolkits to their window system, a lot of software would run with relatively few changes.
You sparked my curiosity. What do they do in Japan with them?
Chalkbot Versus GraffitiWriter
Some decent points in there. But also the most misunderstood and misrepresented business statistic of all time:

> Some 70 percent of businesses fail within seven years, according to the Small Business Administration.

Wrong. Very wrong. 70% of businesses are not going concerns within seven years. Doesn't mean they "failed". They might have been acquired, or closed, or a different project might have taken the entrepreneur's focus. If a guy starts two companies as small side projects, and one takes off, he closes the other. That'd be reported as a "50% failure rate" for people who can't get their head around the statistics. But they didn't fail - they served the entrepreneur during that part of his life, he learned lessons, hopefully made some money, and then moved on to bigger and better things. Starting a business is hard, but it's not this impossibly bleak predicament that people make it out to be.
Well, that's what happens when you pin your business model on content you don't own.

It sucks, because labels and consequently artists will be missing out on the revenue and promotion that might come from wider web broadcasting.
What will Chrome OS watch you do?
Nokia N97 Wallpaper : Vista
Use Skype - Go Directly To A Chinese Prison (2008)
I typed a password, It "stood out" so I had my wife see if she could read it and she couldn't. I had her type a password and I could read it no problem. once she had typed it she could read mine no problem as well. It seems once you've "seen it" it stands out. Sorry, maybe I missed something?

Still cool JS trickery none the less.
This is just the kind of news report about a new research study that should be examined with Peter Norvig's checklist of issues to consider in scientific research:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Put together one jpg and some xml in one package, standardize it and share it with everybody on the web, mobile, bluetooth, wireless, etc.

Kind of like a vcard on steroids.

Let everybody show it on their webpage, blog, etc.

Show it, share it, send it, shake it, transfer it.
Mutual Aid Society for Young Entrepreneurs
I'm not sure how ironic that is. If you think this was simply a post giving props to Rackspace then you're nuts.
It may happen, but it would compete with the well established Ruby and Python (in addition to C# and VB). Anyway, I am glad that they will be added to the bunch.
I agree. While one can quibble about what a "micropayment" is, at 5% + $0.05, this isn't very micro at all. It's more like "dollar payments".
I think it would be interesting to use Bluetooth to automatically exchange business cards with nearby people (e.g., at a conference) to determine whom you might want to talk to.
Javascript can be used that way, and some of Javascript technologies suggest that, but it can and usually is used in the mainstream imperative way. People who have not been exposed to functional programming before touching Javascript (which is an overwhelming majority) may not even know about its functional capabilities.
"Or is there something special about Windows and its applications for which you’d be willing to pay an extra $50?"

Years ago, I started using Windoze (rather than DOS) because of a specific application. I just read the sentence I've quoted above from the submitted article, and I quickly reviewed which programs I regularly use to get actual paying work done. I can see a definitely possibility of giving up Windoze entirely--my son already runs Linux nearly all the time, rather Windows, but for a few sorry applications that don't have Linux ports--and I would like that. I've never enjoyed computing on the Windoze environment, but for the clipboard, which of course will be replicated in Google Chrome.
Using Google Chrome OS, means that we throw Windows and OSX away. Windows or OSX (Desktop-application) are not good, flexible because they are dektop applications, but because they have dozen of years of user experience. Throwing this user experience away, means we are starting the OS history again, which is a lose of time and money. In my opinion!
+1 to this.

I like the point of that "Miles" made in the comments: that there really is such a thing as a lifestyle business, but there needs to be a new term for businesses too small to interest VCs.

A "lifestyle business" is something that makes you enough money to get by, perhaps somewhat passively.

But no one should call 37signals a "lifestyle business" -- they are a small company with millions of dollars in revenue. But VCs probably would not have been interested in them because they didn't plan to take over the world.

Just wondering...what are the options for funding a business that isn't VC sized but could be successful in its niche? Bootstrapping? SBA loans?
After being fat from early childhood, I lost 160 pounds by eating 900 calories a day. Eventually I got down to the weight I wanted (normal weight for my height) and was running 5 miles a day. I couldn't take the diet any more. I'm a fellow with tremendous willpower. But it was the strangest thing -- I couldn't force myself to stay on an easy 2100 calorie a day diet even though that was what I thought about every day, nearly every moment of the day. Even though I had managed 900 a day for more than a year.

Anyway, while running 5 miles a day still, I immediately began gaining 15 pounds a month. Eventually I couldn't run anymore.

I'm sorry, but the argument from thermodynamics is as bankrupt at explaining fat gain as it is in explaining height gain for adolescents. For height gain, the fact that energy in equals energy out is a true statement, but the explanation is growth hormone. If you calorie limit a growing child, the child will be somewhat (not very though) stunted, but will make up the energy difference through lethargy and by consuming all sorts of internal tissues.

For obesity, the explanation is insulin. I cut carbohydrates almost completely from my diet in January. Otherwise I ate what I wanted when I wanted (I measure my consumption in pounds of red meat per day). I'm amazingly healthier. I've lost 50 pounds. I've gained so much muscle that I can do pull-ups. Fucking pull-ups at my weight. With low-calorie dieting, I couldn't do pull-ups until I had lost another 70 pounds past that point. I'm putting on muscle and losing fat, and I'm eating huge quantities at every meal. Plus I have a desk job and barely exercise.

The argument from thermodynamics assumes that the fat tissue is a trash can and that weight homeostasis doesn't exist. It's a bankrupt theory that can't explain diseases like progressive lipodystrophy (a disease which makes people obese and emaciated at the same time). It can't explain why people who starve the calories off are not the same at the end as normal thin people and almost inevitably gain the pounds back. It can't explain why 1950s treatment to get anorexics to gain weight was through injecting them with insulin and not feeding them any more than they had been (during treatment).

In summary, you're seeking a psychological explanation of a physiological problem. Kind of like the discredited quack Sigmund Freud often did, eh? A physiological explanation might lead to the suggestion that we eat the way we evolved to eat -- no refined carbohydrate.
One, the applications that matter to people are changing. For many people, programs like web browsers and iTunes are now opened frequently, whereas a decade ago those apps either didn't exist or weren't nearly as relevant. So who is to say that 2 decades of Windows software adds up to much these days?

Ignoring old applications that an enterprise needs to use, the amount of aplications that Windows has in the last 2 years are very vast, and lots of people need them.

Then there's the fact that desktop programs have grown and grown, and most users don't seem to adopt even a fraction of the features. What took two decades to develop will not take two decades to "replace", because only a fraction of the features will really be required for most people to make the jump.

Not everyone uses the same 20% of features. Joel Spolsky said it better than me: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

Besides, develop the core of the programs doesn't mean they are useful or polish. Or that people who hates change (like the ones who hate the Office ribbon) will like to learn to use another program.

And most of those huge apps should have been stopped at version 2.0. After awhile, big version numbers are meaningless; even for Apple, what on Earth makes the latest iTunes worthy of a version 8? They're still over-hyping the software, but not much is being added, so these old apps are not really as sophisticated as they appear to be.

Versions are usually overhyped, after all they need to sell. That doesn't mean they haven't do anything worthy. The majority of software is very different between 2 major versions.
My impression was that it had a faster Javascript engine, and it has spurred on other browsers. It's a market threat (users might switch), and an engineering goad (hey, it's possible - why can't you do it?) That serves Google's purpose as much as getting market share themselves.

Another aspect is blue sky: what webapps would become possible if the installed-based of javascript was an order of magnitude faster? What's good for webapps is good for google.
The article raised exactly that question in the last paragraph.
Whoa, you're right... they don't want adblock. I don't see any google ads these days. Not even on google search... (occasionally in gmail's webclips).

Could it be... that not having adblock is a major motivation for google chrome/OS? I suspect the market share of adblock is relatively small, but it's the kind of thing that can only grow... and unlike anything else that has been discussed, adblock directly threatens revenue.
While I see where you’re coming from as an application programming, people who do primarily scientific programming ∑ is much more intuitive than 'sum'. When I was doing scientific programming I would have killed for unicode source support. There isn’t always an obvious way to transform a math variable into ASCII. Consider,β for example, which can mean “the ratio of the thermal energy density to the magnetic energy density of a plasma”. In conversation people generally pronounce that as just “beta”. You could spell “beta” out in code, of course, but what if you have a β sub σ and a β sub s to juggle? And what if you have a prime or a superscript on those variables too?

The hairier equations can juggle several similar variables and carry on for several lines of code. It isn’t always obvious how to break them apart into smaller functions like you would in a normal application. Using income literals instead of spelling variables out can save a lot of space. More importantly, it makes the code look more like the source material, which makes mistakes much easier to spot.
First of all I have to admit that that I'm pretty clueless when it comes to startups, entrepeneurship, running a business (of any size), etc. Zero experience or first-hand knowledge.

I have two questions that are likely pretty basic after reading this article:

1. If the company was successful enough to be around for 20 years and have 40 employees, isn't that "successful enough" to be able to incorporate the company or form a LLC so that all debt is taken out in company name, and that the owner was on the line for debt personally?

2. Is there no recourse for hiring accountants (especially a firm) that completely failed at it's job to properly book revenue?
Just read on Doc Searls's blog of the death of a friend of his who fell off his tractor...

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/07/07/a-good-man-is-ha...
I too work for a Microsoft shop. Installed Emacs, perl, MinGW/MSys with bash, cygwin (do not use it, though), python (do not use it), etc. JVM is already installed on all computers except the production servers. So the work that is of a "personal" scope (editing a file, analyzing a log, etc) I can use any technology which is available to me.

Of course, when we are talking about a group effort, we need a technology that everyone in the group is understanding. It is more difficult to convince others (including management) in a Microsoft shop to use non-Microsoft technologies. But it is possible.
Google OS will, I'm sure, be really great for the average netbook customer. However, the people who use Linux for the increased privacy, customization, and individuality aren't going to find any of that in Google's apps. So I think the OS will be hit for its target market, but expecting it to "destroy" any other part of the market is quite silly, IMHO.
Ironically?!

People always behave the way they're incentivized (unless it's egregiously immoral).

I've always found it pretty easy to predict the eventualities of markets based on how the system works. You can't predict the twists and turns along the way, but you usually know what the end looks like. Sadly though, not when.

On average people behave pretty predictably...
I guess someone has to mention the scene from American Psycho:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y
I think HTML, Flash or silverlight won't be enough to build a highly flexible system like Desktop applications (whether it's OSX or Windows) So Google needs to create a new platform to support its next generation Web App. This means we need another 10 years to get a high performing OS. "Good Software takes 10 years" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html). so this means a waste of time and money.

Why do i really need Google OS, Windows or OSX are flexible enough and the features that will be made available in Google OS, can be cloned in windows or OSX.

About Speed: If Chrome OS is going to use Remote Web Applications, it's going to be slow, whatever they makes it light. Network traffic is the thing that most slows down a computer.
And that's why you plow every spare penny into the retirement account.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Retirement_Account#B...
While I'm not personally excited about Chrome OS itself, an increased range of devices available without a Windows tax will be nice. I'm really hoping for a Thinkpad netbook and an increase in ARM-based netbooks.
I would have agreed with you once, but I changed my mind since Google started advertising Chrome like crazy. You can hardly use a Google service these days without having Chrome suggested to you somewhere prominently. It seems like Google is really pushing Chrome to the mainstream. Whatever their reasons, they really do want to capture a significant portion of the market for it.
Local Motors: Crowdsourcing Automotive Engineering Competition
Google Voice Invites going out now
Although still invite only, after submitting a request on Google Voice's website, people are now being sent invites; I requested one two days ago and got an official invite today. Go get yours!
Chrome OS is scary enough to quit Google.
I like Google's UI. I like the results.

But I absolutely hate that with Chrome OS they are making a continued subversive attempt to turn you and me into a "node" that exists only for the purpose of consuming advertising.

Any for-profit business in this space, Bing / Ask / Yahoo / etc included will follow Google's lead into that arena eventually, but give me a break.

I would sure rather pay a couple of hundred bucks every few years than trade my personal HD for the "cloud".

Google scares me. The AOL search release debacle a few years back showed how easy it is for them to identify you by name / by address / etc but I always feel an odd sense of security on my disconnected PC.

Am I suddenly a luddite?
I use Chrome to the point that I fire-up FF only when I need certain addons such as web developer, etc. FF is great but it cannot match the speed of Chrome.
New ABC TV Show for entrepreneurs to secure funding - Shark Tank
I'd imagine that Segways are useful for police officers doing crowd control duty. First off, standing on that platform gives you an eight inch advantage over everyone else -- you can see pretty well.

But more importantly: you can be SEEN. I think that most of a cop's job is done when s/he is visible.
I think they are holding back on plugins because this is what causes the various speed bottlenecks that FF is suffering from. Plugins are nice until they slow down the browser.
Rethinking the term "Lifestyle business"
Somehow, quoting almost exclusively from a satirical parody site does not add weight to the OP's argument.
Self catering holidays
self catering holidays by keycamp.co.uk
Still no system wide spell checking in edit fields. The simple word processor, write.exe doesn't even have spell check after all these years either.
Knowledge and technical knowhow about lazer/semiconductor/biotech fields is not cheap/easy. You are involved either as a researcher, teacher or student working on a phd in those fields.

If that is the case, corporate funding for your research (assuming it is going somewhere) is fairly easy to obtain. Also, if your standing in the field is good, and you can articulate your ideas/goals well, angel funding should also be obtainable without much trouble.

In both cases, you are not borrowing money which you have to pay back someday. It is others who are taking a risk funding your ideas. If the risk is good, they get returns, otherwise its their money down the drain. And unless you commit some sort of fraud (embezzle the money as opposed to using it for real product research), you cannot be sued.
Potential ulterior motives notwithstanding, this is admirable. Inspiring, even! Can you imagine Microsoft giving Apple props, without condescending overtones? Can you imagine Apple giving ANYONE props, without condescending undertones? I can't. Well, I can, really, but that doesn't mean it'll ever, ever happen.
Google's approach vs. MS or Apple's approach to product development offer an interesting contrast - feature rich apps vs. feature-poor but faster/stabler/simpler apps. Betting on a faster/stables/simpler OS is a worthy and possibly successful endeavor. Atleast it offers another alternative.
On the same token, do you know anyone who breathes too much air? Could the average person use willpower to cut their air intake for a year?
I <3 business cards. One of my weaknesses is buying expensive business cards. And I even suspect that they have some impact on my dealings. All part of the brand...
Ask HN: Becoming a credit card "aggregator" or avoiding it?
I want to process credit card payments on behalf of other companies. How can I do that legally? Do you always have to become an aggregator? Is hard and/or expensive to become one?

If I wanted to create my own version of Authorize.net, what's the cheapest/easiest/fastest/legal way I could do it?
Another thought occurs:

What percentage of jobs "fail within seven years"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a comparable percentage. Yet, somehow, no one ever says "Are you SURE you want to be looking for a job? X% of jobs are terminated within seven years, you know".
Re your idea: I believe Evernote.com has that capability.
Looking at their VPS prices and features and comparing to slicehost (my current server) I feel like I am doing it wrong. If I could get more info on how much processing power is allocated to each VPS and more option than just centOS I can see myself moving right now.
I think you're being way too paranoid. Just because you use Chrome OS doesn't mean you have to use Google Docs, Apps, etc... If it turns out that Google uses an evil key logger, then use the fork of the project that doesn't. If you don't like their cloud, use your own, or don't put your files online. It's up to you.

Google is nothing like Microsoft in this case. There is no lock-in. The OS (Linux) and the browser (Chromium) are, and will continue to be, open source. If you don't like Google's version of the quick-launch browser, just switch.
Yes. Why should something which is NOT written in prefix notation in math be written in prefix notation in code? What is so impressive about that? All of my programming languages (who has just one?) can define nice looking functions. None of them use obscure prefix notation, and I think that's a good thing.
What a joke. So we should now laud companies who take responsibility for messing up? Of course they should take responsibility, this doesn't add anything to the conversation at all. That is the minimum they should do, and something they should be congratulated. Sure, they didn't bury there head in the sands, and deny it all, like Nvidia did with its video card problem, but that should not be encouraged.
The more people that are using free software, the better for all of us.

but if the entire point of this exercise is to build a thin client gateway to google's web-based applications, which aren't open source, are you really gaining anything?
So? Microsoft has never charged for any version of IE.
Personally, I plan on booting Chrome.
I'd like to be able to search submissions