skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking long and hard about doing something similar to Fever this year (with the main feature being the granular updates I've mentioned below) but w/ Reader being absolutely free I really didn't think $5/month or $30/year had much of a chance. Plus, hosting all those feeds w/ a one-man shop would've really been a bear.

I think Shaun's $30/one-time cost + you deal with your own feeds is a really smart approach. Wish I'd have thought of it.
Building simple MVC PHP framework 1 - Introduction
Yes, but everyone was happy with the status quo of MP3 players at the time. Nobody wanted the iPod. Everybody said it would fail. And certainly no one was asking for a centralized music store. Pfff!

I don't really agree with OC on other points, but the iPod really didn't scratch an itch. It changed the game by creating something new, not something that "solved a problem."

To say the iPod solved a problem is pure hindsight.
Finally, the return of web pages that only render correctly in IE! I've been missing that terribly since all web designers started using Firefox a couple years ago.
I wonder if the person who accidentally lands on this page will dismiss the notification as just another 'you are the millionth user' scam... Wasn't there an XKCD comic about that?
For me personally, the content of the blog was a bit common sense, however the "clever way" of promoting the book was educational.
When student debt is a good thing
How can one take seriously someone how needs _145 slides_ to teach about simplicity?
Only had 1 cup of coffee so far, but I think I'm following your A, B, C story.

What you did verbally, without documentation and contracts, is of little realistic value (other than to maybe help verify the fact that it looks like you're getting screwed).

From what you have written above, it looks like your company A can't do any business with C, without a penalty and a lot of legal scrabbling.

Having no idea what the realistic business value of working with C is, it's hard to give much advice.

You could lawyer up on this, and maybe make some progress. By law contracts are supposed to be mutually beneficial to both parties. There may be other laws and such in your region that prevent you from signing away certain rights, and override this contract. This is most likely an expensive pursuit, so you should be REALLY sure of the value of C.

If B is a corporation and not a person, what are the chances that they go out of business? (that would pretty much invalidate this as well).

My gut feeling is that this is probably one of those expensive lessons that you can't help but learn in real-time in the world, and you should probably do your best to push back, but not waste too much time/effort fighting it.
You're forgiven! (Plus... a packaged food product from Mexico being super-premium? Interesting idea.)

For reference, here is the deliciousness Coke spectrum, from best to worst:

YUMMY...

Coke with real sugar in a glass bottle

Coke with real sugar in a can

Coke with real sugar in a plastic bottle

Coke with HFCS (yum!) in a can or glass bottle (makes no diff)

Coke with HFCS in plastic

...GROSS

For the record, Dr Pepper with real sugar is even more amazing than Coke with real sugar. And you can't apparently make Mtn Dew with real sugar because it'd be so saturated it wouldn't stay in a solution. Rock on!

Yet another reason to move to Canada and/or Europe.
Stanford University EPGY Online High School
Yes - and I think that the number of people who buy bottled water exclusively for home drinking are vastly outnumbered by all of us who buy it when we're out because it's convenient and not full of HFCS/sugar/evil.
"LucidDB is the first and only open-source RDBMS purpose-built entirely for data warehousing and business intelligence. It is based on architectural cornerstones such as column-store, bitmap indexing, hash join/aggregation, and page-level multiversioning. Most database systems (both proprietary and open-source) start life with a focus on transaction processing capabilities, then get analytical capabilities bolted on as an afterthought (if at all). By contrast, every component of LucidDB was designed with the requirements of flexible, high-performance data integration and sophisticated query processing in mind. Moreover, comprehensiveness within the focused scope of its architecture means simplicity for the user: no DBA required."

Unintentional hilarity is hilarious.
Awesome. Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if you (or anyone) think it would be more fruitful to take a holistic approach i.e. factor in ebay, twitter, HN and create an overall score, or stick with a simpler, more streamlined karma counter type thing that would be "widgetable". Or does the latter necessarily lead to the former?
When you are bootstrapped, how to find a good lawyer? my last startup had all the whistles and bells. it went from being just me and my partner in my kitchen to a useless staff of 40. we had wall street big wigs and a lawyer with company equity who turned out to be a dud by the way. and that company went under due to waste, greed, etc, laziness,
it seems the new team brought in, just spent 2 years trying to push us out, which we were fine with-if they could grow the company, but these people could not even tell me what files we keep the contracts in, who were the interns and staff, and what is the internet and why should they care. i may leave this start up world, because now broke, and restarting, i am acting as our own attorney, (i am not an attorney) and trying not to get screwed until we get funding. but looking at shit like this amendment- just makes me disgusted with the whole thing.
Criminal "protection" "taxes" were common 15 years ago and even then it was nothing like "20%" for everybody, it varied greatly from place to place and from business to business and depended on who you know and where are you from.

Small-to-medium businesses are free from anything like that by now AFAIK.

To conduct a "serious" business in most fields you still have to know the right people though, if you don't want it to be taken from you.
2 inital thoughts occur.

Firstly if this takes off it will make my job insanely difficult (nigh impossible) because identifying where content came from will probably be even harder (aka impossible).

Secondly it will make my job even busier because it's a hot bed for virus distribution, cracking and intrusion... they better damn well secure this! :D

From my perspective I suspect this will be another Google Hello episode :(
So... Aren't trolls going to watch for clues on that Twitter feed and then setup fake sites that match the clues that say "You won!" and phish or confuse the poor users?

Or, just as likely, give ads for Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari?
I don't have any problem with people mentioning ethics; however in this case it has NOTHING to do with the point the writer of this article is trying to make.

If you feel so strongly about ethics, write an article about it and post it here.
I didn't use the word evil, you did.
You're missing the point. It has nothing to do with the correctness of the data, and everything to do with the means used to collect it. See also: torture & search warrants.
I think its more of a change in the thought process. A lot of times identifying the problem you are trying to solve (lets say u did start thinking of that as an idea) - provides you the solutions for the market, positioning, pricing and more. So the author's point is if you don't have a real problem you are solving - you are probably not headed anywhere. Eventually even if u call it an idea - you still got to figure out the problem to tell the user why to adopt it.

The way I see it the take away is more about the way you think about your product than about where or how you started or what terminology you give.

And also as edw519 there would be very few outliers and of course they are a gamble. Every invention is. As you mention google and twitter you should also note that figuring out how to build a business out of these ideas is hard. All search engines faced the problem - advertising made it a huge success but did come very late. Twitter for a long time now has been on the same Q.

So it does make sense to think of your product as an idea to create something ground breaking but for most part, figuring out the problem you solve simplifies a lot.
That won't fly - ignorance isnt a get out of EULA free card any more.

Besides it clearly says "web server" so... ;)
Wow, the title here really down plays what it actually does. Wireless power has been around for a while, my electric toothbrush uses that. But scavenging power from existing RF in the environment, that's just cool :)
Or, of course, Google Adsense paying site owners $1 per Firefox download. That was going on quite a long time.
Without wires, and without a dock. It's drawing power from ambient radio waves; this is brilliant. This isn't another one of those wireless charging attempts where you need a dock to blast it with EM radiation.
(modifies user agent string and begins hunt)
This is outstanding. It's simple and logical. You don't need to learn any new language. It doesn't "fix" CSS but it provides a lot of very useful features to help clean it up. The nested rules and variables are really useful. The mix-ins seem like they are already "sort of" available in CSS by just assigning multiple classes to an element.

Any plans to port this to other languages?
...and there the page was gone (although I did get to view the comedy page). The possibility of getting $10k (american or austrailian?) to tempt people to use the newest deficient browser from microsoft.
Does anyone have a cache of that page? The link appears dead and it sounds really interesting based on the comments :o)
I agree. It's a surreal combination of front-end polish (I'm sort of amazed) and difficult multi-step DIY installation(wtf?). I'd buy a desktop version or subscribe to a hosted version right now, but I don't want to deal with all that crap if I'm paying someone for an application. (If it's open source like Wordpress or something, fine. I'll deal with settign up my own cron jobs and creating databases.)

I hope it does well though, so that it will be worth his time to develop a desktop platform or something I can just purchase from the Apple App Store. (Hopefully both.)
we have a contract. this new amendment has come out of nowhere. "B" is a joke, just some guys wanting to go around and saying they have a startup. there is an agreement between us "AB interactive"and between us as a group with "C" signed, but they are claiming a new agreement was made somewhere, i told them yesterday that would not hold. i am ready to walk away from this right now and have. "C" holds no value, even if it gets the funding, "B" holds no value and i am quitting, after a year of stress and seeing no lessons learned by my small team. They are actually mad at me for being VERY FIRM with "B" about this amendment and this amended agreement. i am in another city now dealing with a very sick family member with connective tissue disease, and they are pulling this crap. I wonder how many other startup companies have dwelt with this
TwilioBot: Bringing Phone Conversations into Waves
"B" is an LLC
I think may be you can get away without actually downloading IE8. Use whatever browser you are using and view the source of the page.

How are they going to find out the browser the you use if you change the User-Agent-String?

Anyone up for the challenge without actually using IE8?

It would be really funny if someone using firefox/chrome won the prize.
OH and just for fun,
the "B" company
3 people
one guy calls himself the "chairman"
You're right, I shouldn't assume that she had to overcome any additional obstacles just because she is a woman. But let me say that it wouldn't surprise me if she did. I also didn't mean to suggest that it would have been any type of overt discrimination.
"good design being design one doesn't notice"?
I do know about compass, but I have a feeling compass will be to less what Prototype is to jQuery, at least for me. When I first learned Prototype I thought it was awesome, but jQuery just ended up making a whole lot more sense to me. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
2 thoughts.

Firstly it will make FB security laughable because people are dozy.

Secondly the concept (minus the everyone button) is something they should have added ages ago. So it's good to finally see.
I think the trick here consists in not sending a compressed image in any way, but rather a pre-calculated dataset that allows the image to be rendered on the client with low calculation power. Maybe just sending the polygon coordinates would be enough.

(A good exercise can be to get some figures about the polygons/s on a modern game, but I lack the data ;-)

The latency is the big problem here, but with network improvements and good algorithms, this should be solved. VoIP also has this limiting factor yet it works reasonably well.

Game development companies can only benefit from this shift: instant deployment, pay-per-play, 1 single version for all platforms (Apple, Win, Linux,...), no distributed SW (so no piracy), direct feedback of gaming habits, etc.

For the user this would also be beneficial: no need to acquire state of the art graphic cards and CPUs, instant playing, game zapping.

I foresee a brilliant future for this real-time "Computer Cloud Gaming".
Can't people with Australian domains just mess with people and serve up IE8 detected pages that tell users that they are big winners?

How can Microsoft actually inform the users that they have won? Will they deliver malware through ie8's security holes that hack into the users PayPal account and deposit the money?
This is the same Justice Eady who ruled against Simon Singh [1] and in favour of Max Mosley [2].

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jun/04/simon-singh-li...

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7523034.stm
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Lark previn cause of death
Retired police officer receives free clones of 9-11 search dog
What Exchange 2007 SP2 brings to the table
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I don't have a cache of the entire page, but I do have one of the image with the contest wording on:

http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/junk/copy-firefox.png

(The original is still available at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/images/co... too)
I love this kind of thing. It's effectively a "perpetual motion" machine, but because it uses waste energy generated from somewhere else, it avoids that pesky "laws of physics" thing.

I really think we'll see more of this in the future, perhaps even on much bigger scales.
yeah it's dead now. weird.
Let us say someone posts something like this: "Hey guys, I wrote a webapp in C and used Google AdWords to get traffic. I spent $n and made $(n+m) (where m=|m|). This is what I learned about AdWords using my analytics..."

Your comment is like talking about why it is not best to write webapps in C. Yes, you will be correct in saying that it is not a good idea to write webapps in C. Everyone knows that already! For whatever reason and under whatever circumstances, this guy wrote his webapp in C. It perhaps still is a Bad Thing™ but here we are talking and trying to learn about AdWords and analytics!

I didn't downvote you btw :) And let me preempt anyone about to reply "are you saying unethical behavior is only as bad as language of choice of webapps?". That is not what I am saying.
How Executive Compensation is Like the Weather
You were probably downvoted because:

1. People don't come here for education in ethics. They might decide to discuss ethics if they find that discussion interesting, though, which leads me to my next point.

2. The first two points of what you said were completely obvious and, by virtue of adding nothing useful, devoid of interest.
It's a funny contest, but not much to get worked up over. Unless the contest grabs the attention of CNN, we're talking about a contest in a relatively small market, and at a bargain for Microsoft.

While it would be nice if every IE user switched to Chrome, better folks download IE8 than plod along with IE6.

Still, I wonder why IE8 is "the only browser capable of cracking all the clues"...
When I first landed on the page I completely ignored the text, and I searched for the "Skip Ad" button for about 20 seconds.
Journalism still baffles me. It seems all too regular that important details are carelessly reported incorrectly.

"then house those startups for a short period of time."
This is commonly misreported and so easily gotten right since everyone at YC points out this is not true.

"strategic input from the Y Combinator team (Graham and his wife)"
Overlooking Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris is understandable I suppose since they're not always around as much as pg and Jessica but, really? They left out 2 of the 4 people heading YC? They couldn't just, you know, look at the "people" page on ycombinator.com?
Screenshot of page: http://imgur.com/OvQNp.png
Referenced twitter feed: http://twitter.com/tengrand_ie8
edit: thing sees to work again
What's hilarious about this?
This is an inflection point. The thread only goes downhill from here.
On the other hand, a lot more people die from cold, so if you decrease that, it could be a net win...

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/global-warming-the-grea...

Let me be even more sarcastic and snide... maybe people who are afraid of global warming are close minded and afraid of change...
Ask YC: How will 'Unequivocal Warming' provide new opportunities? Technology is our hammer, so what can we start making now?

A weather aggregator and tracker (and projector)?

Information services that decrease carbon emissions? Ex: http://neighborhoodfruit.com

Let's brainstorm right here.
How odd, it appears to be back up again.
I haven't heard of this case before, but it sounds like a newspapper figured out who the anonymous blogger was and the blogger sued to keep them from publishing his name. This isn't like the court is forcing him to reveal himself (which is what I first thought), the court is just saying that if you want to remain anonymous, don't leave enough clues for someone to track you down.
Not sure why it would lower crop production.

Also not sure why maple syrup is worth mentioning.
Congratulations! You have found $10 Grand buried right here!

Now just click here to pay $4.95 through PayPal
to cover mailing charges, and we'll send you the cheque.

Isn't this marketing scheme open to wild scamming??
If nobody knows what the "You've won!" screen will look like, then it opens the door to scammers. You'll just "know" when you've won. "When you find it, it'll be obvious that the $10,000 is yours."
Here's a grab of the site http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeresig/3635860872/in/set-72157...
Because the American syrup tappers will lose their jobs to Canadians. 80% of syrup already comes from Canada.
If your startup is not gettin’ busy growing, you’re gettin’ busy dying.
Good advice for start-ups on the concept of perpetual growth.
But all of the examples you gave solve problems. With Amazon's kindle and associated service, they helped solved problems related to distribution of books, storage of large collections and portability. After having just packed up and moved my book collection, I can see real value in having something like the Kindle.

The iPod solved the problem of poor user interfaces and managing your music collection, and it did this better then any other current mp3 player on the market.

The main point of the article is to make something because it is of actual use and not just because it seems like a good idea. He never says only confine yourself to well defined problems, and he explicitly says to consider making something which is better then any of the existing solutions.

Your own idiosyncratic views of the status quo can allow you to see the situation in a different light and how things can be better. You may be the only one who thinks this way, and others will only understand that there was a problem only after seeing your solution. But that does not mean that the problem did not exist or that a better solution did not exist.
Ahahahahaha.

Stay classy, Microsoft. Stay classy.
The tech requires multiple GPUs per player -- which consumers are unlikely to purchase just to play a particular game, but the costs of which can be amortised over a number of streaming users.
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Humorously they are clever enough to detect my browser and take a pot shot at Safari, but not clever enough to detect my OS and realize I can't download IE 8.
How are you prevented from buying your own domain and using it for your Unite services?

What is your proposed solution?

AllPeers required an AllPeers client on both ends, right? But then you undermine the whole Unite concept, don't you?
Wouldn't that easily be offset by gains in citrus production? After all, more people drink orange juice that consume syrup. Heck, most of the syrup you get doesn't come from trees anyway.
here's the chrome version: http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/9072/chromep.png
It was downvoted because people anticipated you'd be whining about downvotes, and no one likes whining about downvotes.
This is going to be a popular idea but I don't think it will work if MS has their act together. You can profile a browser based on things like plugins. Maybe there is a plugin that only works in IE8 and is used for nothing but real browser identificaation. (I think this is what http://www.the41st.com/default.asp does)
My warp drive has no eyes.
Then how does it look?
Terrible!
Yep, there's obviously a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about. The people really behind the Twitter protests is just one part of it.

http://kheirkhah.ir/media/Image/Weblog%202/Keyhan-ehtics.jpg
Ooh, now that's ironic. Someone just did a drive-by downmod of all my posts!

edit: and again. I see the Reddit and Digg refugees are out in full force!
Unreal are doing fine for themselves. So are Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, more-or-less.

The sales pitch for this stuff is you can sell high-end games to people who don't have consoles or high-end gaming pcs; eg, play whatever on your iphones or netbooks or whatnot...think also the existing internet gaming-cafe market in most of the rest of the world.

It seems pretty dicey imho but it has enough logic to it I can see why people'd try it.