skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it is not direct profits but it is indirect profits and strategic intentions as the reason google bought it. google wants you to use its services, the more you do the more you depend on them. video, voice, data, etc. they make profit as a whole, so you cant look at one unit and say it doesnt bring in profit. the longer you associate google with your video, voice and data needs they win.
Using a Mac for a month completely changed my perspective on PDFs. They're fast, look great, and integrate well into the system. In fact, all standard print dialogs even have a "PDF" button for quickly saving anything that's printable as a PDF.

Moreover, it's not a black hole. Text can be selected, copied, pasted, searched, and links are preserved. It's a handy, portable way to archive something, and without much loss of fidelity.
post it on github. i can see this being quite the fun distraction for many people.
"Most modern programmers are smart enough to gure
out that there must be something better than Java.". Funny!
I am adding what I said on a previous thread. it is not direct profits but it is indirect profits and strategic intentions as the reason google bought it. google wants you to use its services, the more you do the more you depend on them. video, voice, data, etc. they make profit as a whole, so you cant look at one unit and say it doesnt bring in profit. the longer you associate google with your video, voice and data needs they win. brand recognition and dominance.
Dave Gorman on the 118 800 mobile phone numbers directory
what always gets me, is why in this day and age we are still stuck on localizing everything. In this day and age, you should be able to run everything from a small village in spain from your iPhone.

Teleconferencing with investors and other CEOs, having programmers work remotely, etc. Instead the culture is so localized that everyone is pretty much expected to go to SV.
Everyone is watching Bing vs Google while the fact of the matter is that Yahoo may be the big loser in all of this. Yang passed on the opportunity to merge / join forces with Microsoft and now Yahoo is paying the price.

I think Bing will soon surpass Yahoo, in searches, given their advertising and IE advantages. What will remain to be seen is how Yahoo reacts. Do they launch their own counter campaign playing the Linux to their Apple/Mac-esque war?
Logo on Steroids - The new video game Kodu
At this rate it will be only another 4 weeks before bing will be larger than google.

Really, let's wait for a while before drawing conclusions like this. A true lead for bing over yahoo search would be that for some extended period of time (say a month) bing was consistently above yahoo. Until then this is just statistical noise.
Ah, that illustration is a classic.
> growing primarily plants for food is far more efficient than meat production.

Dairy cows and egg laying chickens and farmed catfish are much more efficient at turning vegetable matter into complete proteins than humans. If you accept the premise that humans need almost a gram of complete protein per kg of body mass per day, animal production is more efficient and quite necessary.
Distracted by whatever they consider as culture. Live music, community agriculture, hipster bars, lifestyle emissions reduction, New Age hippiedom, Christianity, drugs, you name it. There's quite a spectrum, but Austin is a place where people are concerned with living well, helping others live well, and generally working to figure out what "living well" means. That kind of exploration is where most of Austin's restless spirit takes it. Startups are pretty diametrically in opposition to "living well" unless you consider it a spiritual exercise like a monk living in the desert and whipping himself ;-) (Mostly kidding.)

Sometimes I think all these intelligent questers are going to raise a generation of really smart hippie-raised kids who roll their eyes at their idealistic parents and decide to take over the world. Is that what happened in California? Is Austin just one generation behind?
Yep, you are right, FF 3.5 is being provided with location by the Google Location Service (http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-locat...). Also, this service implements http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html, which should, once widely adopted, void the need of a wrapper library such as geo.js posted here.

Edit: Typo
I don't understand how your company works. Your product is free. You've maximally leveraged yourself personally. You have no recourse in negotiations. Your BATNA may be bankruptcy. Your question is, "how long can you survive on bootstrapping". But you haven't booted yet.

Figure out something your team can do that will make money. Then think about the long term.

If you can strike a licensing deal with your technology, you should do it. You can't hurt your valuation any more by creating cash flow than you can by driving your company to the brink.

You can talk to companies that have expressed interest, and set up a contracting arrangement to build things for them. There are tons of mobile dev consultancies. Do that for awhile.
Flickr started as a chat room, made as a quick side project using technologies developed for a MMORPG. It just took over the company's energy, in much the same way Twitter took over Obvious Corp.

[edit before someone gets as pedantic on me as I got on the parent: Flickr was a series of chat rooms. Not sure what the term really is... in the MUD/MOO world they used to just be called "chatters" I suppose? Because the few other features they had were intended as social toys, the same way Flickr was intending people to use photos.]
Of course all this has been discussed at great length by PG, not specifically to London but generally SV vs anywhere else.

The fact is that London has most of the ingredients to be a successful startup hub: capital, talent, location, and plenty of potential exit targets. What it needs is some sort of catalyst.

AFAIK London has never claimed to be some sort of startup mecca though, so I really don't know what his point is.
> I'd rather pay a lawyer $500/hr to do the 10-20 hours of work closing a deal.

Where does buying a house require 10 hours of paperwork? (It seems endless while you're doing it, but it's way less than 10 hours and almost all of the paperwork is canned.)

Do you really think that a lawyer has 10 hours of expertise that's relevant to buying the typical house? (How many houses have you bought?)
Interesting, do you happen to live in Austin?

I live in the Fort Worth Area, and I've seen things a lot different than you make them out to be...in fact I've lived in Texas my entire life, from the south tip, to where I am now and some in-between, I've been to the major cities and driven all over south-central Texas, and I have to say, I think you're letting personal feelings skew your viewpoint a little.

There is a cultural rivalry between cities maybe, but never has anyone ever shown me disrespect from not being raised or living in their city.

And it's rather offending that you would say Austin is the only place a sane person would want to live, that tells me that your viewpoint of Texas and it's culture is already skewed and bias, it's also a little elitist to suggest that there are not plenty of smart people outside of the Austin clique, does Baylor, or Texas A&M, or Texas Tech, Rice, not count? Is UT the only school that attracts smart people?
The graph of goodwill: when to stop listening and start asking
The ^8 is a footnote, and a constant factor inside a theta is meaningless.
I am fairly certain that does not require complete access but applet security is a pain in the ass and I am sure few people know how it really works. They probably opted for full permissions over granular permissions because it is easier.
Thanks for your reply, Jacques. This was helpful.

We released on GAE and we're also using Amazon SQS. At our peak load, we were getting over 1.5-2k users streaming in during the initial price drop. CPU Time was our biggest drain: we've combined instant messaging with a local and global search option which eats up resources fairly quickly. I was very surprised at GAE server costs given a userbase that is <10k at this point (given the costs I had to put the breaks on growth very quickly).

The VC approach was for seed-stage capital (~100k) - I found a few "programs"/funds targeting early stage companies. Basically, I'm looking for a business angel that could assume a mentorship role and provide some "smart capital" at this point to scale.
I agree 100% - I have a hard time remembering when the metric for success was profitability, at least as far as internet startups are concerned.

Google comes to mind, but only because such a huge deal was made of their IPO. I think prior to that everyone considered them successful based on their popularity alone (figuring that Google was barely breaking even before their financials were released).
having programmers work remotely

From my fairly limited experience, not having the people you work with in the same physical space is a huge annoyance.
I agree - I had forgotten about what's necessary to even get a running kernel. I was thinking about the distinction between things that any usable system needs (like a shell, or programs like ls) but are not actually part of the operating system.
Flickr is still an MMORPG -- the social features are still pretty great and the primary focus of the site, but Facebook is taking that market. Flickr made a number of huge mistakes too (like the NIPSA bullshit).

It's absolutely awful for actually looking at the photos though -- to look at photos at a decent resolution you have to click through to the photo page, then click through to 'all sizes' without knowing whether there will be a larger size on the other side, and then maybe click a larger size again from there. Now you're at a dead end, and have to start the process all over again!
I have dabbled in all, mastered probably none.

An older friend of mine made millions from an RTOS he wrote in the 80s. He also wrote his own tcp/ip stack, cross assemblers, built his own ICE debuggers and other stuff. However, he knows very little else :-P He is almost always surprised by "what computers can do". Specializing did something strange to this man; he does the impossible and remains ignorant of the trivial. He only programs in C and Assembly languages but was surprised to discover there were syntax-highliting editors for assembly. He knows most algorithms that we toss around in conversation in chip form; to him MPEG, AVI, MD5, and SHA1 are all silicon things, never "written". I taught him what a "packer" was for executable binaries.
If I'm not mistaken, he simply meant that Chrome OS will not be "a Linux" just because it uses the Linux kernel.
Will Nokia be Doomed by 2013 and in 2011 Will Apple Pass It?
Haskell has solved these problems quite nicely for me. You can use infix or prefix. And you can make any operator prefix by enclosing it in parens. The other way round, you have to backtick your function to make it infix. And it uses typeclasses to (mostly) allow the same operators for all numeric types.

> (+) 1 2
> 1 `add` 2
I might feel the same way if I didn't buy a Kindle specifically so people on the train couldn't see what I was reading.

Not out of any kind of principle or anything, I just don't want people knowing that every book I read has a dragon or a spaceship on the cover.
Amazon.com: as frugal as ever?
Please review my twitter clone
Hold on. You've been here for almost two years. You registered 8 months and 11 days after News.YC launched. You are in no way a newcomer.

PS: Cool, an excuse to use Wolfram Alpha! It does calendar computations quite nicely. "Feb 19, 2007 to X days ago" to figure out when someone joined relative to the launch of News.YC.
Yes, I am quite aware that modern-day German has an army. And a draft.

I just doubt the Bundeswehr is necessary. (Disclaimer: I was drafted, but refused to serve.)
How hard would it be to port away from GAE and get your costs under control ? The 'cloud' is a great place to be when you want to scale but it can also be quite expensive.

So far for the projects that I'm involved in I have yet to find a single case where I can make a case for a cloud solution vs hosting the stuff directly. (but there are other reasons than financial ones to use a cloud).

Where are you located ?
It is a great list, but I have this itch. Some of the advisors are major investors in the winners' list. Also, I don't really know what counts in, the design, the value, the potential, number of users.

Also, seems that most of the winners have taken investments. I wonder why the awards went to those that have somewhat put themselves on their feet with major investments, while the others that have not, or not disclosed any have ended up low in the list.

It's not to complain, but if Europe wants more entrepreneurs, those that start up should be supported and preferred more than those who passed the investment age.

Personally, I didn't even think we'll be there among the finalists, and it's great success for a 2 months old "idea" (won't even call it a startup yet). However, I see a lots of "investment protections" and commoditization of startups and innovations.

However, it is the first round, hope next year it'll get bet better and more precise why these have been chosen. I'd like to see a written opinion from the advisors why, and disclaimers of the stake taken. Otherwise it seems like a show for the masses, a propaganda for own investments (nothing new though) :)
Thanks for your well thought out comments, cmos. And I apologize for not including the link in the original posting!

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...
I would strongly consider the licensing or acquisition. Couple reasons for this:

1. Compelling products tend to have willing buyers. If you saw a 20x increase in your user base when it became free, it sounds like people really like the product, but don't see it as a must-have (it's not addressing a serious pain for them). On the flip side, it looks like it could be a great nice-to-have for an existing device/product.

2. You'll be much better-positioned for future endeavors if you're able to realize a positive exit. Past success can give you a lot of credibility. If you can get positive returns, it'll be much easier to raise money for your next venture.
> I just can't imagine people loving nuclear weapons and such so why vote me down for speaking out in favor of pacifism.

Because HN doesn't reward cluelessness even if it is riding a unicorn. Spouting false choices, attributing strawmen, and self-righteousness doesn't help.
Ask HN: Please Review our Webapp Congrelate.com
Maybe they are just consumers of culture. Wearing art as tattoos, t-shirts that say 'Keep Austin Weird', painting their houses unconventional colors. None of that seems very creative to me. Its too easy to buy stuff to be act creative than make it.

The problem that has to be solved is instead of everyone in Austin priding themselves at how laid back they are they need to realize they are actually just being lazy. People in California seem more driven.
Interesting new keyboard design by samsung
I second this. It makes the team much harder in coming up with innovative solution. Instead of taking 3 days, it might takes 2 weeks.
Perhaps the startups that are doing well arent going to the same self congratulatory parties and meetups as Paul Carr types are.

Far too many of the popular London events are overwhelmed with social-media-enterprise-consultants and as such those who do have snuck away into smaller lesser known events and are doing their best not to invite the flotsam.
What you really have to love is the complete lack of comments.
It has some math in it, is about the singularity and cites the Economist. ;)
Personal communication is better. People evolved to detect all sorts of subtlety in in person communication that you just can't detect when it's filtered through some other medium.

Lets say you have 10 million dollars at stake. If in personal communication is 10% better, and communication accounts for 10% of costs (i think both are higher than 10%), you're looking at saving 100k just by being near by. Suffer now to boom later.
Ok so what is Fred saying here? Defending generalizations by specific examples is fairly pointless. He almost confirmed the argument by citing examples!

"Deep down inside, every entrepreneur working outside of the bay area worries that they are not as competitive and will not be as successful because they are not in Silicon Valley" well, if it is indeed easier to meet people in the Bay Area and to meet other entrepreneurs, then sure you are at a disadvantage being elsewhere. Doesn't mean you won't get anywhere, just means you'll need a different plan.

Generalizations will always have counter-examples and I think it's very silly to take them to heart as I believe Fred did.
OT:

kragen, Opera de-hearts your website: says you destribute malice :-(

http://i27.tinypic.com/2s6svap.png

wtf?
In my ideal world a software (or any other) team would agree that any decision, spec, design, procedure, etc., would all live in a wiki (e.g. download and install http://twiki.org). It's structured but very flexible.

The team would use IM, e-mail, etc. to discuss these things, but anything of substance would be kept in the wiki. The wiki would be interlinked with a source code repository (e.g. subversion), a bug-tracking system, and a large file-share (the share is only for storing common data sets, DVD/CD images, documentation, 3rd party source, large data files/file-sets too large to store in bug-tracking, support info, etc. ... BUT NOT DESIGN OR OTHER DOCS, except maybe snapshots of Perl-pod or doxygen or javadoc or other auto-generated documentation from source code). Everyone would only work on stuff in that federated system ... no critical docs floating around in e-mail or file shares -- everything's in the Wiki.

One would structure Wiki to track these things:

* dev teams & their to-do lists & related stuff & diaries

* research into systems with which software being
developed must integrate

* software procedures (how to build, continuously
integrate, etc.) ... any new team member should
be able to consult this and know how to build,
test, and deploy the product

* products and product lines

* releases

* fun stuff, links to online videos, restaurant reviews,
pictures from Friday afternoon margarita fest, etc.

I look forward to Google-Wave maturing ... they'll take the wiki concept to the next level.
+1 to dropping the free version.

It sounds like going the free route was a mistake. Bootstrapped startups have to charge something to somebody, and you-pay-me-for-my-product is a time tested way of doing it.

As for the rest, you need to tamp down your costs. $30/day is extremely high for a bootstrapped, no-revenue startup. Find a way to cut this down. Based on your comments about GAE and SQS, see about moving to a standalone VPS (Slicehost or whatever) and running your own ActiveMQ server, probably on the same machine. It's hard for me to imagine a web app w/ less than 10k users needing more than a single big VPS.
Just consider it a preloader for your other Mono apps. Once you go to launch Banshee, all those dll's are already mapped and ready to go! And hey, it happens to take notes, too!
Except this isn't an Apple story.

It's more than just not using X that will make Chrome OS "not a Linux." Describing an operating system distribution as "Linux" implies an entire eco-system of software that Chrome OS will probably not have.
Does This Blog Get More Traffic From Google or Twitter?
Seriously, I almost gave up in the middle of the third paragraph and I regret not having done it.

This guy goes on and on and on about parties he's been to, champagne, tiny bits of cow on sticks and the state of his liver. Total waste of bandwidth.
One weekend is all it took me. It's not as hard you think.
Strangely, Boyd's strongest area is real estate law. I have no idea what the reason is. But like almost all law schools it focuses on creating general JDs.

Again I caveat that I am neither a lawyer nor a founder, but I think there is an advantage to having a law school that is not one of the top 10 present (hence no Stanford). People graduating from one of the top 10 law schools generally expect and are frequently able to command exceptionally high salaries straight out of school.

What a lot of startups need in regulation-heavy fields (those dealing with gambling, government contracts, healthcare, etc) is large numbers of competent lawyers at the lowest price possible. In fact, I have seen cases where regulation requires a lawyer review certain types of documents and certify them, but they are not actually expected to reveiw them for anything in particular as far as I could tell. It was simply a requirement that a lawyer certify them.

Now naturally the presence of a reasonable (by which I mean good enough to be competent but not so elite as to have graduates overpriced for a startup) is an advantage shared by many cities, but I think it is an advantage, and some of the other points I mentioned in favor of Las Vegas are somewhat more rare.
Nuclear technology is not something you can just build in your garage. You can't just download the specs off the internet, pick up some plutonium and cooling rods at the Home Depot, and do it over the weekend. It requires an immense amount of knowledge and skill that can't be easily acquired, and billions of dollars of specialized equipment and raw materials.

No one short of a sovereign nation has the resources to even potentially acquire a nuke. And no sovereign nation would attack another nation with a nuke, because the backlash would far outweigh any gains. Even Kim Jong Il realizes this, and he's about as mentally unstable as leaders get.
I find Safari 3 to run very well on Windows, and I've been using it at home lately. It passes the Acid3 test at 100 percent.
Do's and Don'ts of #FollowFriday
The like search will still be faster than hitting the db repeatedly to get each node's children which is how most people seem to implement retrieving a tree.

This "path" method is straight out of SQL for Smarties - Hierarchies & Trees" and though the nested set method is probably better for most uses, the path column has its uses.
Anti-pattern one was critiquing using values in table definitions, the second was using attributes in table definitions. These are not the same thing. There isn't a similarity between values and attributes in the relational model, which is the whole point of avoiding key-value strategies which are confusing an attribute with a value.

A big part of why the modelling of data that you don't know the shape of in advance in a relational database is hard is because reasoning about data you don't know in advance is hard, and the model exposes that difficulty up front.

(Also, if like has its wildcard at the end of a string not the beginning, indexes can help you as they can look into the sorted trees.)
The new video Kodu game will teach you (or your kid) about programming
Reminds me of the Thinkpad 701 from ~1995 that had the keyboard that sort of folded out when you opened the screen to give you a larger keyboard while maintaining a smaller device footprint for portability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_Butterfly_keyboard
I believe Sierra Wireless tried something like this in the 2nd gen Voq, which I don't think ever got released. Here's the 1st version.
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/articles/AT9343931131.html

The problem with this layout is that it is unbalanced to have the weight of the phone in the center with the smaller and lighter wings splaying out to the sides. The difference in widths/weight, results in a rocking motion of the device and it gets uncomfortable trying to hang on to the thing (I built myself up a prototype once of a very similar design, and it didn't feel good at all).
I didn't say it would be a difficult port....

It would sure look different, though.