skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where does the money come from? Mostly Windows and Office. This revenue streams are beginning to dry out. They will still makes billions with them over the next years, but all in all the revenue from these sources will diminish. Other income streams will come from server stuff which will be sold via services of different kinds. This will change the MS business model to something akin what Oracle and IBM are doing.
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Projectnatal is a demo, not a project. It is overhype. Surface is innovative? How so? What can we do with Surface that is new and well, brings some kind of advancement?
Apart from the fact that it has been posted on HN an estimated 1000 times before, I find it strange that it does not even give you the actual RegExp. Instead it shows you the code that will generate the RegExp.
The Turing Test and Prejudice
> Now, the TSA doesn’t even trust pilots

I'm sure they trust pilots. It's random people wearing pilot uniforms they're trying to stop.
Impressive story, despite the Django and EC2 plugs.

Of course this suggests a start-up project: a business service that does crowdsourcing. The service would be customized for one task and would have various forms of cheat detection (e.g., CAPTCHAs, user profiling, meta-moderation and maybe some secret sauce).

Mechanical Turk is fine in many cases, but this story shows sometimes it's better to roll your own (or have somebody else roll it for you).
I know that logo from somewhere: http://www.ampelmann.de/ Ah ja, Berlin!
Amazing collection of Free PHP Frameworks and CMS
Screw 28, if you're a high school senior you'd miss graduation for something like this.
I think Microsoft has great taste... if they steal their design elements from other companies, that is :)

Like Picasso said. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

The Windows 7 Beta seemed pretty good when I used it.
Yeah, psychology must have something to do with it. I think it has something to do with knowing exactly what sort of effort went in to the project.

We tend to think of Commercial Software as this Big thing that Big teams from Big companies spend years to develop. Windows took 400 man-years or whatever to develop and it only costs $79 a copy. Why should my thing that I spent less than 500 hours on be worth that much?

From the outside though, nobody else can tell how hard it was to build. They only see that it solves their problem and that it's valuable.

It's a false dichotomy (hard to build vs. valuable). We all have stories of the 3-day hack we built that made the company $400K, and we've all seen marketing guys go nuts thinking that our little internal tool could be re-packaged as the Next Big Thing. If only we could muster that sort of enthusiasm about our own stuff, we'd be a lot more likely to put a price tag on it.
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There are three things I would look at first and foremost
1. Name - pinkdy really isn't that memorable and has little to do with getting pregnant. With competitors like fertilityfriend and knowmycycle and mymonthlycycles you probably need something that is a little more descriptive
2. Landing Page
3. SEO

When I first read this I thought you were going into a market that was way too crowded for you ever to succeed (in English at least). But actually the top search results for "track menstrual cycle" and "track period" and several other searches are not that strong and with the right SEO you should be able to break into the top results. The landing pages of your competitors are awful. Too much text and too much of it in light pink which is hard to read. A simple high impact landing page could help you beat a lot of your competitors - but that isn't going to help if you cannot drive people to your site with the right SEO.

Two other ideas for you to think about. 1. what is the market like for other languages? Maybe there is a lack of Spanish language competitors etc - it might be easier to get going with them first. 2. I don't know if you can create a widget that can be included on forums, but there are a lot of womens forums around where they discuss all sorts of things. A lot of these women are trying to get pregnant and if you can tap into them on those forums it could be a good marketing opportunity.

Obviously as everyone else has said here, do get the English right, and it could be worth checking if someone in a foreign country uses the site and for some reason feels they want to sue you that you are safe.

Good luck.
"What can we do with Surface that is new and well, brings some kind of advancement?"

You mean the things like where you could put your credit card down on the table at a restaurant and divide up a bill between people easily, and pay, without involvement from a waiter.

Or the part where you can place phones down on the surface and interact directly with them via the touch screen interface?

What about object recognition that the surface does?

It's not your average touchscreen. It has potential. It's just a damn shame the technology is so damn expensive to gain much traction.

As for Project Natal, I can think of some very good ideas off the top of my head that it can be useful for - not just gaming. It could end up being one of the things that turns the 360 from a gaming console into a central home computing platform and communications tool for you and your family (like was alluded too in one of the advertising videos)

Microsoft attempting to commoditize 3D cameras like they are could make interfaces like you see in minority report a reality much sooner than was previously thought.
Apple's iPhone 3GS: What It Costs to Make
My business partner recently gave me the book "Confessions of an Advertising Man" (by David Ogilvy) and one thing that struck me is that ad research data shows that using photos of people (as opposed to nothing or to sketches) in marketing dramatically increases interest in the product/article.

Your home page is very informative - great.
But maybe sprinkle one or two photographs alongside the text?
If you're going to write a blog post about charging money for software, you can afford the $1 or whatever it is to actually buy the iStockPhoto instead of leaving it up there in all its watermarked glory. That aside:

I'm going to run some quick numbers for B2C software, based on the 1k downloads a day estimate and a few guesttimates from my experience:

Page views: ~4k

CPM rate: ~$2.50 ~ $5 (CPM rates for OSS sites that target businesses which spend money on big business stuff can be fairly high. For consumer OSS, not so much. The salient feature of consumer OSS users is that they like getting things for free -- how much would YOU pay to advertise your software to them?)

Ads: $600 per month on the high end

Donations: 10 a month or so, average will be for below $5.

Paid Support: For B2C software? I consider myself an incurable optimist. I am feeling cured now.

My suggestion: if you want to make money selling software, then you should try selling software. You're worried about your community forking it. Your community is not capable of forking it, nor do they have the inclination to do the amount of work required to do so. They are here for the free stuff. It is highly likely that there is no copy of your source code anywhere except on your committers' computers and whatever your centrally accessible repository is. If you were to turn that off one day, the source code would no longer be available. And if you were to disable download of the free version, somebody might actually notice.

You are worried a pro edition will make you your own biggest competitors. Welcome to every shareware business ever. We all compete with ourselves, effectively. It isn't trivial but it isn't impossible, either. (Hint: feature limitations on behavior which identifies the people who most need your software work great.)

[Edit to add: You may consider white-label versions to customize to the requirements of studios&etc needing marketing devices. Take a look at http://www.mediabrowser.tv/images/gallery/g5.jpg for a second. I wouldn't want to have to be the guy who made the sale, but I could sure see Paramount or whoever deciding "What the heck, that would be worth one hundred thousandth of the marketing budget for Ironman" ]
Ins't there a risk that the exoskeleton produces muscular atrophy?
Not much to add to that, it's pretty much exactly the way I feel things ought to be. I.e. be sensible and use your head: if you've got things figured out, spend some time putting together some good tests, they'll save you in the long run. If, on the other hand, you're still exploring, writing code and tests is likely to be a waste of time if you end up throwing things out a few times.
No, there's another option: Fair use.

If you create a book compilation of "Wikipedia's greatest hits", then you're stuck releasing the book as ShareAlike or negotiating with the copyright holder(s).

If you write a book about a particular topic and you use excerpts, quotes, or ideas from Wikipedia (and properly cite them), that's fair use. I'm sure there's some sort of ceiling on that (IANAL) which prevents you from copy+paste-ing broad swaths of text into your work and "citing" it.

The key is the citation, which is where the author screwed up. If you're using text/ideas from a particular source and not citing that source, then you're not covered under fair use and are obliged to follow whatever licensing system the original author wishes.
Flying car takes off in upstate New York
The Three Eclipses in July and August 2009
Naïve question I'm genuinely asking my self: why?

What is the reason it is so difficult to implement WYSIWYG not top of HTML/CSS (i kind of feal it thinking at latex,but can't put a reason other than "organisation of the source")? on top of which kind of serialisable representation would it be easier, is there any..?
"Where does the money come from? Mostly Windows and Office. This revenue streams are beginning to dry out."

The great thing about people responding to posts that have data with generalised assumptions is they usually don't add data. Do you have any data to support your claim?

I know that this year, MS has had a drop in sales as a result of the global economic slowdown, but so has pretty much everyone else out there, so before you say "But XYZ company hasn't...", realise this, they're probably one of the outlier cases.

In an economy that has claimed several banks, 2 automotive institutions and countless other businesses, Microsoft is still able to maintain a profitable position even after having to fork out close to $300 million in severance packages, in a down market.

You also forget that Microsoft has the Xbox platform, their Windows Mobile empire and they are attempting to diversify their businesses further into many more markets.

They're not in a bad position. Their growth alone certainly seems to contradict everything you're saying.
If Z caught most of the cases that X missed, but not many that X caught then it would be very useful.
Microsoft has a history of pressuring computer manufacturers to not install anything else. This is well documented in court.
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Ask PG: Any plans to make the YC talks public?
I saw that Kevin Rose came and spoke at YC last night, and of course we know that other entrepreneurs do regularly as one of the benefits of being in the YC family.

I can completely understand that the talks take place in a safe environment such that companies may reveal details they don't want public, or that the entrepreneur may be giving sneak peeks into their own upcoming projects, but even so I was wondering if these talks are recorded with the intent to be published sometime down the line?
Right, so what he said is not advise? Cus I was beginning to think that the guy is deluded, because well there is nothing to support what he says. I mean, if I want opinions I can turn on the telly and listen to politicians parrot all day!
I think the best comment is one which explains an ugly edge case which forces the code to look like it does.

//window.update; is not used because of API bug #12345 see: bugs.mysql.com/12345 so use xyz instead.

Nine times out of ten I can read and understand good code with little effort, but code often starts out looking clean and becomes messy for a reason.
50 interview questions answered like you always wanted to answer them
This isn't the typical interview tips article.
Well, they are entitled. Its their world. its their life, they have been educated of such high ideals as democracy an human rights and they are richer than any previous generation.
Poor people are not lifeless bricks.
This is a genuine problem, but it's not just for Ruby on Rails. Every framework in every language has this problem. It's just that the ease of developing the "custom app" portion of the site in RoR throws the wasteful yak-shaving wheel-reinvention of writing a CMS in sharper relief, IMO.

Trying to find a generalised "CMS API" is a nice idea but honestly I wonder if it's even possible. Maybe it's just at too high a level to standardise. I can't even think of a good CMS, let alone some paradigm I'd want as the "standard" ..

Got to agree with him on one point though - stay away from things like RadiantCMS, they're a trap. You think they will save you time, but they will not. These days if I had to write a small business site I'd just write some basic editing pages on the back end and who cares how it looks - the clients sure don't.
Bullseye jason. The value is not what you perceive it to be, what what users are willing to pay. He needs a good monetization plan.
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Request for API scripts & a dynamic advertising aggregator
Looking for scripts for fast (twitter/friendfeed) API status calls. Also any potential dynamic advertising aggregators (does Google adwords accept dyanmic text and return a relevant ad?)
Maybe not an "amazing" [this blogger seems to need to use that descriptor for half his posts :( ] collection - but some new (to me) offerings, along with established oldies.

What is amazing is how many people continue developing independent approaches to web-dev CMS.
This guy really does not like his job! I suggest he starts working as a waiter, or bar attender, or whatever job he considers fun albeit low paid and work on what he really wants to in the evenings and weekend.

What's the point of working in a company where you'd rather flip the coin than do your work. I mean the tasks that he has to do can;t be more boring than flipping a coin!
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If you are not comfortable closing the source code then don't. Leave it open, publish only the master branch, sell the binaries.

You will be charging for the installers and branch management / stabilisation.

Those who want your software for free will be able to build it. Some will probably publish their own binaries, but I bet they won't maintain them. In the best case they will just build off the master branch from time to time.

Many people want software to just work and are ready to pay for the convenience.
I tried to have a crack at the testing issue as it applies to startups in my last blog post
http://unfeatureddocuments.com/content/unit-tests-headlights...
Loosely put, my feeling is, that for a startup, you need to focus testing on those parts of the code that you believe will still be being used in six months time.
Couldn't he get a job with Microsoft? He made the project to have something to put on his resume. So presumably it will pay off when he lands a top job via said resume.
It'll be great, if you could do that
This was not uncommon in with mainframes. However as systems became more efficient a supplemental power source was often needed. The problem is buildings often outlast what they are used for over which is why they are often fairly generic. Who knows what computing will be like in 80 years or how long that place will even house computers.
Well, hopefully simonw (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) will drop in on this thread himself...

But the Guardian were certainly (justifiably) pretty delighted when Simon started working there - check the press release: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/22/guardianmediagro...

The Guardian are really, really good people - and I'm not just saying that because our startup works with them. The fact that they're working with HN-reading startups says quite a bit anyway, though, doesn't it?
Never mind using the waste heat to warm buildings. Let's use the waste heat to power the air conditioning.
I think the answer has to be 'no', or they simply won't get people to be as candid.

Not that I wouldn't like to see them too, but this has been asked before. At the end of the day, YC is a business, and this is part of the benefits of getting in, so those of us outside will just have to live without it. C'est la vie.
The copy on the home page is good, thumbs up for that!

I am not so sure about the color-sheme. Do you think redish is the way to go with that topic? I am not sure myself but somehow I have never seen a packaging for baby-pills or so using that color. I think it provokes un-good associations. (Yeah, while beeing the perfect fit, but there are moments in where not stating the obvious is the prefered way).
...in long-running loops. I wonder how large the start-up costs are, though? Granted, non-long-running loops are by definition not running for long, so it's ok if they're a bit less efficient, but 2x faster in hotpots is still different from 2x faster overall.

FWIW, LuaJIT runs everything 2-4x faster for me, and more so with long-running loops. Lua's semantics are simpler, though, so it's easier to determine which optimizations are applicable when. (The only downsides for LuaJIT are that it's only for i386, and that it uses about a third more space.)
What about "let's not use it" instead.
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From the page:

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In case you want to know more about these things for real, rather than the "Astrology Predictions" then you might try here:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_July_22,_2009

http://www.hermit.org/Eclipse/2009-07-22/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2009_lunar_eclipse
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Yeah, 'cause it's not like your username gives away your intent or anything.
I think there are a few things everyone suggesting a monetization scheme should consider. Here's a big one:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html

That's the post where Jeff Atwood explains the 90% software piracy rate. I think it's one of the most illuminating posts he's ever made. If you close the source, you will probably immediately begin to experience piracy, and it will probably be at a rate around 90%. Make sure you have a solution for that problem in your monetization scheme. (This also disproves that notion that most people are willing to pay for software. I myself haven't paid for a piece of software in years [though I don't pirate ANYTHING either].)

Consider also the GPL, which clearly states that the rights it grants are irrevocable (section 2). Even if the source were closed for new versions (and if the source were closed, and this is absolutely vital, the GPLed parts would have to be rewritten since the GPL prevents inclusion of GPLed code in closed-source projects [section 5]), the old versions would still be open source. If the software is popular, I do not find it hard to imagine someone would fork it... or just keep using the old version.

Keep in mind the author's comment that the software has benefited from being open. Closing the source would also mean decreasing quality.

Finally, the goal of keeping your software hackable is noble. Hackable software is a gift to programmers everywhere. It's not unreasonable to want to continue offering this.
My friend does copy writing and editing for a living. These are her thoughts:

(8:33:14 AM) Laura: this editing software is cool but impractical
(8:33:28 AM) Zach: why?
(8:33:39 AM) Laura: you have to highlight to delete things
(8:34:00 AM) Laura: where with track changes you can just write over it
(8:34:45 AM) Laura: it looks cool once you've changed stuff
This seems like a lesson in too-early publicity.

Also if I ever talk to a reporter I'll take my own notes and send them to him/her and post a version on the web so it can be Googled.
You mean the things like where you could put your credit card down on the table at a restaurant and divide up a bill between people easily, and pay, without involvement from a waiter.

How does it do this, and when, and where? Are you sure it's not just some fiction from a demo video?

Or the part where you can place phones down on the surface and interact directly with them via the touch screen interface?

Because it would be easier than interacting with the phones' own touch screens?

What about object recognition that the surface does?

What about it? :)

What is it actually capable of now? If there's no useful concrete application for that feature now, does it even matter?

I've seen a "demo" video from Microsoft with graphical illustrations and animations of things that would be exciting if they were real.

But before those things are actually happening, the video amounts to nothing more than just a video.

I keep getting surprised by the Microsoft-Love that's present even here on HN. It should be painfully obvious to everyone, especially here, that they really don't deserve any admiration as a company.

No, it doesn't matter if their R & D department is tinkering with something interesting. It's what the company does in general that matters.
I've been doing freelance CMS-y sites for a couple of months now to pay the bills in between jobs (back to FT in July. Salary!) and I generally agree with your sentiments.

I will say I wished I had a decent command of Python and Django as, in my limited experience with it, it seems perfect for building a tailored CMS-esque site quickly and not worrying too much about the admin component.
New Scientist in stating the obvious shocker!
Good news - Microsoft fixed that search problem over two years ago by handling it on the server in Exchange 2007, so you can search quickly from Outlook / Outlook Web Access / your ActiveSync mobile (Windows Mobile / iPhone).
I was pretty sure I'd seen this before too but writewith isn't ringing any bells ...? I do have a terrible memory. But the tag-line then puts me off before I've started.

Why wouldn't someone just use Zoho or Google Docs?

I do like your handwritten-style annotated edits, but that doesn't seem enough.

You definitely need to lose the mouldy pink though, with that heavy gray too, bleurgh. Don't take your design cues from hacker sites! Gray for the edit box parts that you're looking at all day, fine, not for whole site - it's bad juju!

Your logo is the inverse of Zoho's - which appears to be an attempt to create confusion (or it will to a high paid lawyer) and is also that of Novell's Zen application distribution system IIRC, I think they have lots of lawyers too. Why didn't you choose "R"?

fwiw
I didn't know I was worth spiting. Thanks for the compliment.
The Flight of the Startup
Do you really want to tax ability?
Doctors Baffled, Intrigued by Girl Who Doesn't Age
who doesn't buy when they see a hero shot ...

;0)
Why We Need Steve Jobs
Knight News Challenge: Local Journalism Tool Development