skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I extract three major points to his argument:

1. The 'web platform' is difficult to write for because there are many different browsers and operating systems.

2. The programming language environment for the web is immature and has sharp tools.

3. The people who write web apps are poor quality.

#1 is true enough. It is painful. That why we write tests, use automated systems and are driving for standards. Of course, he could help by persuading Microsoft to play nice with others on web standards.

Also, he's forgotten the days of programming in assembly language where you had to pick the processor and BIOS you were targetting. That was really ugly, but that's where companies like Microsoft got started.

#2 is also true enough. It is an immature environment. But that will change.

#3 is totally true. There are poor engineers working on the web, but that doesn't mean that there will always be poor engineers on it. It's a virtuous circle. The better things get the more the good people will move to it.

It strikes me that he's in real danger of missing an 'innovator's dilemma' situation. Yes, programming for the web is 'crappy' compared to picking a single operating system with very mature advanced tools. That could be the equivalent of the non-hydraulic backhoes and massive hard disks detailed in the Innovator's Dilemma. Perhaps he just hasn't seen the change that's coming, coming.
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You must admit, this scene is a lot more on topic than a lot of other submissions.
You're Not Crazy--You're an Entrepreneur
Ask HN: How effective is porn branding association with latest technologies?
Found this funny strip on xkcd. But all jokes aside, how successful do you think this strategy is in terms of branding? Have you tried to market your product through association with other popular technologies? If so, can you share your success/failure stories with everyone?
A legitimately elected government providing services that its citizens may choose to use or not use is not communism. It's also not nazism or the boogeyman.

You seem to have a strange definition of communism, as well as the history of nazism. Rather, you seem to be buying into the American propaganda that "democracy is the great good".

A pure implementation of communism is necessarily democratic. Think about it. If all goods, and all production, are controlled by the body of people, then everything must be done by consensus.

And you'll recall that in Germany, Hitler was democratically elected to power, and later assumed complete control again by election.

You understand the the US is atypical in the way that it treats health care?

You're just using the eight-year-old's "but johnny gets to stay up late" technique. And the answer is the same: just because one party does something really has not connection to whether it's the right thing for a different party to do.

Anyway, the problem here politically is that the treatment of disease will immediately become politicized. In fact, it is already. People with mundane diseases will plod along, without any real progress made in cures.

But diseases having real political constituencies -- AIDS/HIV is the big example -- will get enormous research, despite the fact that they account for a relatively small portion of the populace. Today, AIDS gets many times more funding per-sufferer than does, e.g., breast cancer.

Today the government is the largest single funder of healthcare. But once they crowd out other actors, the entire medical profession will be political. That means that treatments will be put onto the approved list, and research dollars will be allocated, as a way of pandering for votes.

This isn't an abstract fear: the government does this immediately upon getting involved. For example, look at the recent GM takeover. Despite Obama's claims (continuing to this day) that they don't want to micro-manage GM, Congress immediately set out preventing measures to make GM financially viable, such as closing dealerships. Local car dealerships are a surprisingly powerful constituency, and they get the bureaucrats working in their own interests in no time.
Though you say it's easy enough to pack up and move, there are numerous issues that come to mind. First, being in University for a few years and then living on the opposite side of North America for the purpose of playing rugby has not give me enough time to pad my resume - I know I can pretty much do anything I want, but I would have a difficult time actually proving that to someone with concrete evidence to back it up.

Faced with the problem of finding a job with my weak resume, so that I can support myself in a new area on my own, leads me to believe it is much easier said than done.

However, you may be right in saying that by staying here I am limiting myself to something I CAN do opposed to what I want to do. But what I am asking, or even suggesting, is it not possible to stay here AND do what I want? There happens to be tons of industry in the area as far as farming, forestry and trucking go, there is just no apparent 'tech-sector' in my area. It's not that I am entirely opposed to moving, it's just that it would take one awesome opportunity to force me to move, something I couldn't turn down. [offers accepted.]

So to better revise my question; I am more or less asking how I can find people like me who already exist in my area, without relocating.
If this doesn't exist, I smell an opportunity.

You smell right.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767509
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=765950

Hello mseebach and welcome to the club, I am one of your would-be competition ;-)

I do it for healthcare records, credit card records will require a change in our press releases ;-)
Found this funny strip on xkcd. But all jokes aside, how successful do you think this strategy is in terms of branding? Have you tried to market your product through association with other popular technologies? If so, can you share your success/failure stories with everyone?
This is a definite solution, something I might even try to organize in the short term. In fact, I should have mention but I have a very nice 'in' with the Editor of the local newspaper which gives me ample opportunity to get exposed of little, to no cost. Maybe I will organize a meeting at the pub, or local cafe and gauge interest level based on that?
I don't think what you would have done would be trolling, it'd be making a pass at him.
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If your an iPhone user this works well on your homescreen: http://www.icombinator.net
How do you get the benefits of shared resources in a private cloud?
I can see why they chose Facebook as a brand because that is the kind of site you associate with building relationships and making much more personal connections.

So when they say the "Facebook of sex" the idea is to infer a personal connection to excite punters. Sites like Suicide Girls rely heavily on the same tactics - though in a more traditional (some would argue more ethical) way :) I know blokes tend to claim they just "follow their dicks" or whatever but it's been well known in the porn industry that a more personal approach (one reason POV videos are so popular) gets more punters.

I think Facebook of Sex is a scam or rip off site though (or has something dodgy about it). Not checked it out but all the ads feature fairly well known images from other sites / collections (some of them actually borderline indecent imagery). [disclaimer: I come across a vast amount of porn in my work and have to categorise a lot of it - this is just the impression I have got from there]
> the only "standards" that matter are the ones that are used

Right, like upper case html tags and the iframe tag...

It's a difficult time for the web, and real standards are hard to come by.

The 'standards that matter are the ones that are used' attitude is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place (Microsoft up front with their 'extensions').

I'm all for waiting for the dust to settle and then refactoring using whatever the standards body decides, even if that would be against my personal preference.

Using something on purpose to try to subvert the process to me smacks of driving on the left hand side when the standard behaviour is to drive on the right. It creates a lot of trouble for no good reason other than to prove that 'you can'.

Of course you can. But do you really want to aggravate others just to show that you can ?

There is plenty of stuff in the current html standard that goes against my personal preference but I won't let that get in the way of at least trying to comply.
Nope, no idea, sorry.
Thank you for taking the time to put some actual recon into your answer. I have been in contact with Dan before, he seems like a great guy. At the same time, he seems to have a lot on the go, rural New Brunswick development probably isn't high on his list.

As for propelict, they mostly concentrate on the 3 city areas of Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton. Again, not much going on in rural NB with them - perhaps I could leverage them, maybe they have some ideas for me.

Regardless, +1 for the info.
I don't think this has as much to do about porn, than about being able to explain what you do by linking to a known entity.

To create a powerful elevator pitch you try pack as much meaning/punch into every word you utter. The semantics of the word 'Facebook', for example, conjure up networking, friends, messaging, profiles.

Now, how successful this kind of marketing/branding is I cannot tell you in numbers.

Anecdotally, though, I can say I prefer people get right to the point. So, if the app can be compared to something I already know, then please don't wrap it in bullshit and just tell me.
Sometimes I do find google better, atleast it comes with some relevant answers.
There are decisions and priorities in all reporting.

First, often there's no canonical truth. Was the Honduras "coup" a coup or a functional democracy? It's pretty hard to report on it without deciding. The more detail you include, the more you'll come out in favour of the democratic argument, the less, the more you make it sound like a coup (there's no point of including all the details of the parliament deliberating if the essence is that the military took over in a coup).

Second, there's deciding what news to report. There was some criticism of the media focusing much more on set-backs of US forces in Iraq, and only casually reporting progress - the media loosing interest in Iraq. How do you decide what to report from Iraq without letting your own opinion of the war influence you? I can't see how.

I also can't see how you can reliably report on complex political issues without having a deep passion for these issues - and I believe that no one can be deeply impassioned about e.g. the Iraq war without forming an opinion that will be at odds with at least some.

The solution: Quit pretending. Have an opinion. Care about what you write about, and let it show. Stop competing on "most fair" and "least biased", but on "best arguments".
There certainly are a lot of areas in which the model you propose has been and will continue to be extremely successful: providing a specific group of people - preferably domain experts of some sort - with the knowledge they need remains a business model. In a way, this is also what the 'hyperlocal' people are trying to do; everyone is an expert on their immediate neighborhood and thus information about that should have a great value to them.

But there's another side to news: it's also the glue for society and this part depends on not being targeted at any specific group but at the "mass" as a whole. That's the part mainstream news has been trying to serve. But now that eyeballs are only worth something if you know who they belong to, this model is collapsing. In my previous post, I wasn't trying to argue that what these organisations are doing is sustainable, but thus far it seems to be the only pattern we have to commercially serving the whole of society. This mechanism failing is the real problem, because it's a central part of our democracy and culture.

Also, the quality criteria in this area are only tangentially related to factors like "truth" and "depth of reporting". A lot of the emphasis, instead, is focussed on aspects of commonality and actuality. Yet, when people argue that "good reporting" is what we need, this is often not what they mean.
That's the old Web 1.0 startup scheme. Web 2.0 changed phase 2 from "?" to "Banner ads/Get bought by Google".
Hard to deal with recoil issues when firing from something that is not anchored. You'd have to have a pretty massive balloon.
Hey Matt,

As someone who has lived in NB (Fredericton) for most of my life, I feel I can relate to your problem. Even though F'ton is a university town, and known as one of the more tech-centered places in NB, it is still seriously tough to find like minded individuals.

Consider that similar interests are just the first step in a successful collaboration. Finding someone you work well with, who also likes using the same technology, is difficult enough as is, especially in a small town.

I think it's a great idea to have a startup weekend. You probably don't need funding for an event; a meetup at an apartment or even a library meeting room would be cheap enough. Sites like http://meetup.com/ can make the planning easier. A good place to look would be your local universities and colleges.

That being said, I scratched my itch by moving to Vancouver. I couldn't be happier. There is much of the wilderness here that you enjoy, and it's not uncommon to walk past a bar while overhearing whispers of yet another start up idea.

Good luck!
haha, I love the reference to POV videos. You're right, these personalized porn is changing the whole porn landscape.

Here's my question back to you... why did the industry wait until recent years to have a sudden surge in personal approach porn? Was it due to a technical barrier? Or the increase familiarity with personalized content on the internet? Any thoughts?
yes, it lowers the barriers to entry. I think it's a great thing that a musician working at a conservatory can throw together her own web site using PHP and shoving some SQL into tables. I think that's success just as an accountant can hack spreadsheets with macros and so forth. That's also success.
Tell HN: Go to Google with IE, it offers Chrome DL, but not from Firefox
If you go to the Google home page it offers an icon and a Chrome download direct link if you are using Internet Explorer but not if you are running Firefox.

I tried it on two different machines. Interesting.
Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'
Hey,

I am just 50 minutes up the river in Woodstock, I also attended UNBF and I am very familiar with Fredericton. You make a valid point in that finding a like minded individual is only one step, finding one you can collaborate with is the obvious next step.

I have never spent much time in Vancouver, but I did live in the Victoria area while I was playing rugby and I did notice a vast technology sector without even looking for it. Props for scratching your itch, but I don't know if I am ready for that just yet.
Which versions of IE?
If you're only going to give users what they want soon all news will be as shallow as Fox News.
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Why managing risk is a risky business
Micropayments for content providers, advertising revenue for aggregators, and the legal system to protect the copyrights.
And comments by new members: http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
And Phase 3 has been removed. "Agile" teaches us to simplify, after all.
Wikipedia goes into far more detail about the technical definition of irony than I care to, but I believe the important part is that a statement is ironic when speaker's words have a relevance to the situation that the speaker is unaware of.

I'm assuming that nobody could read HN for very long and remain unaware that the site is targeted at programmers and entrepreneurs. Because the author of the original blog post knew the purpose of HN, he would have recognised the incongruity between his statement (that coding and startup articles be filtered out) and the reality (that HN is all about coding and startup articles). Since he was aware of the disparity, and irony requires unawareness, there was no irony.

I'd have given you "sarcasm" or "incongruity", but "irony" is one of those topics that triggers my "Someone Is Wrong On The Internet" reflex, I'm afraid.
This reply will let you know that I don't know anything about its origins or who said it.

Sorry, I don't know.

We've just learned that Jim doesn't know anything about the origins of that writing advice, or who said it.
Which is why you run it up the Himalayas, right? :)
So, we can get a native MirageOS? Nice.
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imo, yes, the quality/type-of/whatever of submissions has become very different from what it was 2 years ago. but then again, that's a subjective analysis.

but imho tags/categories are awful. there has to be a better solution to this.

i don't think filtering domains will do much good either.

editors like slashdot aren't exactly great (and require an editor staff).

voting schemes reflect the taste of the community (more specifically the percentage of people that vote - not taking into account bots/cheaters). there's always slashdot's semi-random karma system, but it's not really that great either.

so really, what's the solution? no effing clue..

-----------------------------------

on the other hand, i'd really like to know the stats on the number of people who click on an article and the number of people who voted on the same article..
also, average points stories get and so on..

edit:
oh yeah, nevermind that, forgot that only after some X karma you can downvote/flag

-----------------------------------

oh well, information overload.. it's a joy
But why doesn't it offer an Opera download? What about Safari?
Dell just unveiled its China-only smartphone “Mini 3i” (the first pictures)
I did not search for anything, just went to the homepage.

So you tell me.
Bear in mind this are only ideas I've come up with - I'm not linked to the porn business so I can only guess :)

I think a combination of technical limitation and then the sudden hit of certain sites. When porn hit the web it was still something of a niche. It went from being fairly socially acceptable in the early 20th Century to a bit of a stigma around the time of the web (before my time so only what I have been told). Of course the web changed all that turning an already successful industry into a huge one.

So the makers had to find a new niche (edit: I mean before the web it was a niche - or rather what I really mean is that it was nowhere near as accessible). Suicide girls is a huge success because of the personal touch (I would say that 90% of PC's I see have porn on them and a vast majority of them have at least a few SG's images). Another popular one was the "wild girls" type spring break porn (soft and hardcore) - pretty much for the same reason, they werre girls you could see on a beach somewhere all the time, not super-made up pornstars. Again the personal touch.

And finally the customer base is more discerning? or perhaps more demanding :) Im guessing a lot of people prefer a personal touch to their porn to help get over that social barrier.

All just educated guesswork :)

EDIT: anyone happy to admit to being a regular (pay-for) porn consumer (I dont think HN will be judgemental in the way society seems to be!) and throw some light on these ideas from that side of things?
There is this strange notion in the industry that, the closer you are to shifting and flipping bits directly, the farther you are from the end-user and the closer you are to the machine, the higher you are in the programmer pecking order. I wrote enough C and Assembly to know it's hard, but in my experience being a "web guy" is just as hard. In fact, it's a harder kind of hard for us introverted folks, because it involves understanding why people interact with your CRUD app the way they do. You can't just poke them with you oscilloscope probes and expect to get meaningful answers.
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6K people is a rather small set from which to try and find like-minded people to do tech startups. Especially since most of these people presumably are either children or are adults having a fairly established life-pattern.

Furthermore, there's a selection effect working against you. Those people in your area most ambitious and talented with tech have likely already moved somewhere else more condusive to their ambitions.
Dell Mini 3i – Leaked Images and Specs
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Im sorry this all came across in the way it did, reading it back I threw the comment too loosely.

I'd never want to condone the sort of thing that went on in ZImbabwe.

Those white farmers have a perfect right to be where they are. But the way the article presented that one guy made me think they sound like part of the problem.

If the minimum wage is so low and they are "rich farmers" recognising the problem (as he does, admittedly, do) then surely they could raise wages. Charities always talk about stimulating the economy in a sustainable way - surely better wages and decent working structure is a good idea!

It could just be how they worded the article but it sounded to me like that farmer at least was somewhat abusing the super-cheap local labour to turn a big profit. Hence: part of the problem.
Opera: While there were times when Opera was a decent broswer (the pre-Mozilla Suite era), these days it can be a real pain to maintain support for Opera as it has the tendency to do the dodgiest things at the most unexpected times and the small userbase just doesn't motive many web developers to work around these problems, hence offering it as an alternative to IE6 maybe isn't a very good idea as a considerably large amount of pages are broken in Opera.

Safari: We're talking about IE6, so we have established that this is on Windows. Safari is a great browser but it's not a very great experience on Windows, the UI looks out-of-place, the fonts look weird (for users used to Windows font rendering), etc. I honestly don't think that it's a wise thing to suggest Safari for Windows users still using IE6, especially since the release of Google Chrome. (But I wouldn't hesitate to suggest it to anyone using OS X.)
Find the CD
"my tech people to get the ads implemented." - Ad Server, like openads or even a service like buysellads would probably save you a ton of time & hassle.
What about my oldskool TI-86? No love for that? :(
I think that might be a usage thing: over here in the UK they're both plastic surgery, but you see it qualified as reconstructive plastic surgery or aesthetic plastic surgery.

Still, take birthmark removal: it's purely cosmetic, in a sense, but it makes such a difference to peoples' quality of life psychologically that it totally should be on the NHS if you ask me.