skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mac developer Roundtable and Late Night Cocoa (http://www.mac-developer-network.com/) - thanks to Scotty.
lol, I think you commented on the wrong article ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717002
I think what pg means by this question is: "how resourceful are you in getting want you want/need?" I believe Entrepreneurs need to be creative and relentless in finding exactly what they need to succeed.
It's actually hard to avoid them no matter what you buy.
The community aspect is neat -- a step in the right direction. What about for users with a large number (3000+) of photos on Flickr (or a similar service)? I don't want to re-upload them, and honestly, I'd prefer the original copy to stay on Flickr. Do you have to make a deep-copy or can you just keep a link to the original source?
I think that market share is usually a bad way of looking at Apple's numbers.

Macs are only x% of computers, but that means nothing when comparing with Windows or Dell. Apple sells the OS and the hardware. To look at it as market share, you would need to compare it to both OS's and hardware. With hardware, the market share outlook hits more problems. Apple can get a higher margin when it sells say memory then Dell can. Market share is not indicative of much.

Iphones are (not soley) in the category of phones that people buy because they want that phone specifically. They'll switch carriers, delay purchases etc. The majority of phones are sold to consumers that will pick a phone in-store, get the cheapest one, choose flexibly from a range, etc.

That kind of leverage gets you higher margins and better deals with carriers.

Basically, you can't look at market share without looking at margins. Nokia & dell sit at 2%-4% while Apple & RIM sit at around 15% - 20%.
I'd be interested to hear his proposed solutions. If controlling a platform on the internet is impossible, what is twitter to do?

Is their only chance at longevity to publish a protocol spec and allow twitter to become a decentralized messaging system like email, for which anyone can write and run their own server?

That might actually be the case. Internet services rarely last long, but protocols often do (relatively speaking), for better or for worse.
I laugh. I'm not exactly laid off, but I quit a pretty decent dev job in January to do some traveling. Since then I built a gmaps mashup for a library, a wordpress twitter widget, a custom wordpress widget, and $80 worth of elance work. I'm in the process of learning python/django in the hopes of releasing a pretty fun twitter app with no revenue potential. I can say of all of the technologies I used to build these things, I had zero previous experience, and still don't have enough to list it on my resume in good conscience. So where does that leave me? My travels are coming to an end and I'm scared to death I'll never find a job.
I like the interface, pretty easy to navigate.

You should add a way to search the picture titles.

Regarding payments, whats stopping users from making a fake account to extend the life of the free room? 2 weeks is long enough to make it worth doing
"I find myself drawing a blank about what I'd blog about, though. Who would I write for? What would be their purpose in reading?"

I hate to self-promote like this, but seeing as how I run a startup (in profile) dedicated to helping bloggers find stuff to write about and "cure writer's block" (our little slogan), I figure I should say something.

Yes, you should definitely, definitely start a blog. If you're comfortable with it, I'd say get firstnamelastname.com. I got paulstamatiou.com four years ago and have been writing on it consistently since then and I kept it professional and devoid of too many personal things. I talked about stuff that interested me (technology) and often lots of little guides showing how I was able to do this or that. A lot of my posts have just been about things I've been working with over the last few days. New piece of software that I find really handy.. blog post, but I try to add info that others wouldnt have.. tips on how to use that, or getting it setup quickly etc.

Over the years my subscriber numbers slowly went up and now I have a decent following. It's still more or less "professional" in terms of the content I put up there and it has ended up being a portfolio of sorts for myself. Was it worth it? DEFINITELY. It got me a Yahoo internship in California (and several other job offers), I've been flown around to check out various events for different companies, got invited to speak at a conference in Europe (and expenses paid), and I was even in a Nike commercial as they found me online as a "real" user of Nike Plus. Again, I dont want to make this like I'm tooting my own horn... just trying to say that you need to start a blog!

only reason why you might not want to start a blog:

*you dont think you would be able to write consistently

The only thing worse than not having a blog IMO is having one that hasn't been updated in weeks or months.

I could go on and on but I'll just point you to my HN profile where you can email me. :-)
I was actually immediately reminded of the Onion article : http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
Sorry, I was a bit vague. I also use grep -R to search through files. I meant searching for files. As in, I have hundreds of files and I want to quickly open bar.rb which is buried in some directly. In project.vim I type '^wh/bar.rb[enter]\s' and boom, I'm in that file.

I guess that's honestly the main functionality I get out of project.vim. I can't comment on how it handles others' needs.
I'd like to see the breakdown of account sign ups they get from this coverage.
"Java" and "performance" together at last?
#11: is Guy Kawasaki on the board or associated with your company. (serious) I wouldn't be on a start up with him; seems too willing to whore his name out for anything, perhaps I just respected his earlier days more than I do currently.
This isn't exactly what he was going for, but I'd reduce his point to "No player on the internet is more powerful than the internet itself, and therefore no player is immune to upset."
"Do many people follow blogs?"

Feedburner stats indicate that blogs do have followers. But do they get read? I suspect the number of readers is far lower than subscriber count.

In particular, I think nobody reads tweets, no matter how many followers you think you have. Twitter is mainstream perhaps in that many people write. The only people who read are PR people scanning for a few keywords at a time.

I've been thinking about this for a while: http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc
I think 'startup' has (at least) two definitions:

1) any new business enterprise
2) a new business enterprise with high potential for growth, with an untested product/service

So porn would be included in 1, but 2 is more for 'untested' models like software, web services and biotech. I imagine this is what pg is talking about when he says that startups are a new economic model - I imagine he's less interested in 'established' models like porn, since such businesses probably have many more options for raising cash.
He's noting the arrogance of Microsoft in thinking it can out-maneuver and out-think the Internet, and to a certain extent FOSS. He then compares how Twitter's concerns of wanting to both introduce a new message platform but still be able to control/profit from it to Microsoft's fate, which is losing out to this all encompassing and continuously innovative Internet platform.

So he thinks that no one can really has control over anything once the Pandora's box has been opened.

Or, actually, he's saying that no one can beat nature. Because, you know, it just goes on and on.
They'll get a lot of signups but having them as regular users is another matter.
I don't know anything about their (Divvyshot and Picurio) strategies, but what's wrong with a little competition?
Brute Force Programming
Musicians Find New Backers as Labels Lose Power
I think you mean complicated not complex, but either way gmail's advantage isn't only the UX, there are many other advantages of the mail being hosted on the web. I think for most these other advantages far outweigh any UI/UX considerations.
From http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html:

9. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are "word sharing" apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It's less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.
Seems to be a lot of hate on this trick here. One difference between this trick and "I just press <shortcut key> in my IDE" is that this will comment out one block of code, but will also uncomment a second block at the same time.
I think you just wrote your first entry.
IETester is useful, but I've found it gives different results than a clean installation of the relevant IE version.

For example (dimly remembered so details may be off), I had a site with one of the standard PNG transparency fixes for IE6. In "real" IE6, as expected, the PNGs rendered opaque, then turned transparent. In IETester's IE6, the PNGs rendered opaque, then... disappeared completely.
Perhaps karma should decrease with time unless it's "replenished" by upvotes.

The idea is valid because one can "game the moderation system" by having multiple 100+ point accounts and use them do downvote comments they don't agree with while upvoting their own comments.
Many folks disagreed with their decision to post the Twitter docs, but it didn't affect our decision for launch coverage.
Why create a new 'room' methaphor? How is the traditional 'album' one insufficient?
Don't blog for money, blog because you want to write. If you try and make money doing it, you'll either lose heart fast and stop, or you'll start doing the slimy marketing stuff to squeeze every last cent out of the site. I went that way for a while, trying to make money blogging, and still regret some of the things I ended up doing to get traffic and sell ad space.

The best thing I ever did, at least in terms of blogging, was to get rid of all the analytics stuff, get rid of the ads, and start ignoring completely the question of whether or not anyone was reading it. Yes, that means I don't know if its getting read by anyone but me, but I'm writing better, more interesting posts, and I'm not nearly as stressed about keeping a schedule.
There's also a merger of the two on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geometric_series_14_triang...
Right now it's a deep-copy. We have sync with Facebook but if we start to hear from other users like you wanting Flickr we'd want to integrate with that API also. In that case, you wouldn't be re-uploading, rather we'd get them from Flickr's servers directly.
Is there a situation where you would need this instead of "#ifdef __cplusplus"?

e.g. http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/mixing-c-and-cpp.html#...
It helps to position the product as something new and different.
Hiring A Remote M&A Advisor May Cause Transaction Failure
When CEOs and boards start looking for an M&A adviser, they often begin in one of the big financial centers, like New York or Boston.
It’s a natural mistake – and one that’s often expensive and regularly fatal.
I'm not sure I follow completely - we imagine users to keep the most recent photos that need "swapping" in a room and delete old ones.

We've learned that sites attempting to store unlimited photos for unlimited time get costs that are too large, even with dropping storage/bandwidth costs.
Thanks for the offer on the beta invitation program. We could actually use that, as we don't have a developed "invite system" yet. I'm jonathan@picurio.com
Nothing preventing it at the moment. Go nuts. :)

In seriousness, if we find it's a problem we'd tackle it then. We tried to prevent premature optimization.
If Dave Winer's writing ability was half the size of his ego, he'd be the next Shakespeare. I still get a kick out of the sheer arrogance of putting permalinks on every paragraph.

This is a typical piece of his. Not very well thought out, kind of rambles for a few paragraphs, ans basically says that so-and-so is lame because they're not internetty enough. (Now, if Twitter could do something really awesome like inventing RSS, then maybe they'd be worth talking about.)
We want people to upload all the pics, not just some. Albums are typically for only the "good ones."

Example: we had several wedding beta rooms. There were multiple albums for rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and after-party. The group collaboratively chose the best photos from each part of the wedding to put into the albums. This isn't possible with other "group album" type sites.
Thank you for this very helpful thread of feedback. ShopTalk is better than Campfire in many respects (and there's more to come), but we definitely need to communicate that better on the site. We also need to do so without relying on the screencast.
One of the first startups I was asked to work for was doing a Java widget for decoding video in the browser -- no plugins required. This was before Flash took over that area. I didn't get how it was supposed to make money until they hinted at porn. I suspect that's in the category of "things one step removed".
750mm sounds crazy until you read that they have raised 119mm so far... thats only a 5.5x ROI if sold at that valuation.

*Ning has 29.5mm registered users, but is adding 1mm every 15 days, to me this says fluff ...
Are people saying "John thinks he's sad" or are people saying "I'm sad"?

Because the former is a bit nutso whereas the latter is a form of self expression and want of communication, regardless whether there's a recipient or not. The anonymity afforded by Twitter/blogs/websites/whatever to broadcast is what drives people to those products. It's not the same as a random person randomly dialing a single phone number to say the same thing.
No. It's just for hack value.
Yep, I had a similar problems when deciding to write a blog. First of all personal stuff may not be important/interesting to others OR maybe you may not feel comfortable putting too much personal details. I wrote a couple but always shut them down soon. Finally I started http://socialapp.wordpress.com

I have been going to a lot of meetups in the Social Space (Facebook, Myspace, Web Startup's etc) as my side projects/interests lie in the same area. In the process of these meetup's I have learnt a lot and seen a couple of good demos. So, I started to blog about those events or the demos that I see there for everyone else's. After any meetup, I typically have a descent number of topics to write about.

The primary reason for me to start a blog was to get better in writing skills and convert the thought process to text that fellow reader can comprehend. I am not really looking to make any money via blogging at least in the near future.

Another theme I have seen is that a couple of people write on funny incidents that happened to them during the day or weekend. It could be a funny/embarrassing incident, but they do a great job of expressing it that even strangers will find it amusing to read it.

Edit: In the process I also opened a twitter account (@socialapp) to see if I would be able to promote my blog. It's been a descent passive experiment as well =)
> CouchDB should not be compared to these.

Does CouchDB use SQL? No. So it may be mentioned in a post about "NoSQL".

> Description of Cassandra is misleading.

Defend your claim.

> He also misses the fact that Cabinet has real master-to-master replication.

When you start to need real master-to-master replication, the kind that Tokyo Tyrant offer is simply insufficient. It has no versioning, no way to resolve inconsistencies, no quorum write/read, etc. By the time you're at that scale, you had better be looking at Cassandra, HBase, or Hypertable IMO.

> Feature overlap between Redis, Cassandra and Tokyo C/T is too big.

Maybe I can buy that Redis and Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant have too great of feature overlap (and note that I'm only interested in Redis as a high performance count server), but Cassandra is in a completely different realm with completely different sets of tradeoffs. To suggest that it is similar to the others is simply naive.
(connect '("localhost" "" "username" "passwd") :database-type :mysql)

(create-database :users)

(define-view-class user ()
((id :initarg :id :accessor user-id :type integer
:db-constraints :key :not-null :auto-increment)
((name :initarg :name :accessor user-id :type string)
(passwd :initarg :passwd :accessor user-passwd :type string)))

(create-view-from-class 'user)

Then in the REPL

CL-USER 1> (list-tables)
("users")

Now for some interaction:

CL-USER 2> (make-instance 'user :name "Popeye" :passwd "sailorM0n")

#<user> ; <- instantiating an object creates a users.user record

Some time later, perhaps after a machine restart

CL-USER 1> (select 'user)
((#<user>))
CL-USER 2> (select 'user :where [= :name "Popeye"])
(#<user>)

Say, you wanna change Popeye's password.

CL-USER 3> (setf (user-passwd
(select 'user :where [= :name "Popeye"]))
"new-password")

But typically you would just define a function, say, FIND-USER which will get you an object corresponding with a user record.

(defun find-user (by val)
(caar (select 'user :where (sql-= by val))))

That way you can find an object by ANY slot (or in SQL, find a record by the value of a column.

CL-USER> (user-name (find-user 'id 0))
"Popeye"
CL-USER> (user-id (find-user 'name "Popeye"))
0
CL-USER> (user-passwd (find-user 'name "Popeye"))
"new-password"

That last value is due to our last update.

So you're bored with this class, and the auto-incremented primary key ID is MySQL only. Fine, redefine the ID slot mapping its value to a sequence

CL-USER 3> (create-sequence 'user)
CL-USER 4> (defclass user ()
((id :initform (sequence-next 'user)))

The rest of the class definition stays the same.

mysql > show tables;
user _clsql_sequence_user

:-) so you're bored with the database. drop the classes/tables one by one or just drop the whole database.

CL-USER 5> (drop-sequence 'user)
NIL
CL-USER 6> (drop-view-from-class 'user)
NIL
CL-USER 7> (drop-database 'user)
NIL

You can use the same code in MySQL, Postgres, DB2, Oracle, ODBC, Sqlite?, and an in-memory Sqlite3 implementation. This shit is industrial-strength eye candy. Scan the manual:

http://clsql.b9.com/manual/

Tutorial:

http://www.ravenbrook.com/doc/2002/09/13/common-sql/

It comes in fully open source and corporate supported versions: The OSS one is called CLSQL and its compatible with LispWorks' CommonSQL.
I can't speak for YC investment strategy (see the numerous posts on how to apply to YC for this), but there are certainly problems with the existing photo sharing solutions.

None of Flickr/Picasa/Facebook allow you to view and download a collection of photos accumulated from a large group of people from a single page.

I personally dislike having to click through a half dozen facebook profiles/albums to view an event's photos. Similarly, I dislike having to visit multiple different photo-sharing site du jour's to attempt (and sometimes be unable) to download all of an event's pictures. Having a one-stop shop for this task (which I do regularly) is a valuable time saver.

As long as people are still being frustrated by problems in the photo sharing space then there will be room for new startups.
Interesting...I use FuzzyFileFinder for finding the files themselves right now, but I can see the value in having a feature like that built-in.
For the tone of the original Techcruch's article about Twitter, he must be referring to the 'world domination' flavor that those published documents have. Although in my opinion they are more brainstorm like. Lists of possibilities, ideas, etc.

He also names Schmidt & Zuckerberg as heavy players that are trying to 'fight' internet.

Google, with its resources and the data they have about all of us, certainly has the best position today to try to control/conquer the internet (as MS was in 1995). Dave is sure they'll fail (I hope he is right)
I have to say that usually it is marginal talent that has hard time finding a job

Even if you're correct, and I'm not saying that you are, so what? Most of the "talent" out there is marginal. Meaning most people laid off will have trouble finding a job. You see this as a good thing?
Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.
Also, just because a bunch of puny humans manage to convince each other that the world must be a certain way doesn't mean it actually is.
Robozzle, a programming-inspired puzzle game [Silverlight]
Valley job-clingers: Why you need to get fired
(Karma) Comes Around (Online)
I don't have a DVR and have never been on Hulu. Yet I too watch what I want when I want.

The difference is that if what I want to watch isn't on when I want to watch it, I just turn the TV off. What's so hard about that?
Here in Japan, this socially manufactured platitude has real teeth. I'll explain the long version some other day if you're interested, but the short version is that it is extraordinarily difficult to land a seishain (full-time company employee) job if you've ever voluntarily left one before, and keiyaku shain (contract employee) is a materially worse status in a lot of important respects.

I have a... quirky relationship to these social norms as a foreigner, but that is another topic altogether.
Winner of the Engineyard contest
I don't use databases myself, but the discussions over the last few weeks about "no-SQL" have gotten me curious and I have been nibbling at Codd's "The Relational Model for Database Management" since I had it laying around, and it is mostly theory I am interested in right now. He spent a great deal of time complaining that no vendor actually produced a database that was at all close to the relational model.

My question is whether any DB products, especially any free software, matches the relational model any better than the ones Codd was complaining about nearly two decades ago? Which databases, if any, are the closest to being really relational, not just sort of?
750mm sounds crazy until you read that they have raised 119mm so far... thats only a 5.5x ROI if sold at that valuation.

Perhaps, but that doesn't make $750 million any less crazy.
Yeah, I always get nervous and literally forget everything I know in interviews. It really sucks.
The problem with philosophers is not that they can't find solutions, it's that they're incapable of rejecting bad ones. There are plenty of good ideas in philosophy, but you can't pick them out from the flood stupid ones without thinking everything through from square one on your own. Hence the reason that millenia later we're still here debating Zeno, while physicists no longer have to bother giving much thought to 100-year-old rejected theories.

A university dean approaches the chair of the Physics department and tells him, "Look, we really need to talk your budget. Every year it's particle accelerator this and supercomputer that. You're bleeding the college dry. Why can't you be more like the Math department? All they ever ask us for is pencils and chalkboards and wastebaskets. Or better yet, why can't you be like the Philosophy department? They don't even ask for wastebaskets!"
Soooo, people shouldn't drive with kids in the car? I can tell you that if you let them, small children can be much, much more distracting than any electronic device.
Yahoo looking to sell HotJobs & Yahoo Small Biz
i've been running PGP WDE encryption on my X25-M G1 no probs... http://paulstamatiou.com/pgp-disk-encryption-safe-for-solid-...
http://paulstamatiou.com/review-pgp-whole-disk-encryption-fo...

but yes, built-in encryption would be awesome
Imagine how much faster the G2 of the X25-E SLC SSD will be.. yikes! I can't wait. Hopefully it'll be considerably > 64GB this time around.