skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd suggest that if you're looking for a technical cofounder, at the very least you should write more about the value you'd provide.

Being more clear about what the idea is ( / the problem it solves, the market it's for), and how much equity you're offering to the person who you're expecting to do all the execution, would be good, too.
you can install xen on a couple of linux servers, create instances and have your private cloud.

Eucalyptus would be even better since it provide a AWS like api.
here's the DOT press release with more stats:
http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2009/dot13309.htm
This is a very simple way to structure gui applications. Kind of like an imgui... but with a context.

Definitely easier than the callback model that javascript/html provides.
Perhaps that's true in general, but all I can say is that wasn't true in my case. I had several relationships after becoming fanatical about it, and never stopped dancing.
Boo is a similar project with Python and .NET:

http://boo.codehaus.org/
Thanks for the instant analysis.

FWIW I was referring to his assertion that choosing only the candy projects is the recipe to success. It's not. There are plenty "Hell-yeah" projects that you'd better not touch.
Hah, I like how I tried to read the article from the NU wireless when I'm literally less than a building away from the guy but the ACM still required me to sign in.
I initially read that as "Amazon pushes frustration-free parking..." and thought, wow, what is Amazon not getting into?
I strongly agree. I also strongly recommend the flip side, which is to operate the automatic process so you can better understand what will make it even more friendly and effective for its users.
Hell yeah!

HN should setup a weekly contest for the best "n worst startup mistakes", "n ways to motivation" and "n ways to hire the perfect $whatever" post. And filter out the entrants please, only post the winners...
I have an idea that's related to (4) - actual last minute flight deals.

You go to the airport you want to travel from, and go to a "last minute" lounge, preferably behind security. Then, every time a flight is about to leave that has empty seats, the seats appear in an auction (available on smartphone devices or via wifi in the lounge) that will last maybe 10 minutes. The winner gets a digital boarding pass and is required to report to the gate within 10 minutes, or the flight is lost. The idea is that almost any revenue from an otherwise empty seat goes directly in the contribution margin.

There are any number of problems, especially getting not-yet-travellers through security, as well as baggage, but the essense of selling a very-soon expiring product is the same.
Love it!

It would be nice to have a desktop "app" that launches all/some of the installed browsers and automatically opens the required tabs. This way it will be much easier: I'm going away...better share some CPU first...double-click, I'm done.

Update: on a second thought, it can even prioritize, e.g. open the browsers that are "Most Wanted" in the moment.
If I'm understanding you correctly, TestSwarm handles this, actually. If you watch the video walkthrough you can see the tests being split apart and run against multiple browsers simultaneously. Not only does this allow the results to complete faster but it also helps to make error correction easier (only re-running a sub-section of tests to try and get a good response, rather than re-running the entire suite).
I wonder how much GM's badge engineering hurt/help them - no individual model is on the top 10 seller list, but they sold more new vehicles than anyone aside Toyota: more than Ford or Honda.
Why's dead. Ruby lives on.
Nice, but why not allow integration with common authentication devices available, such as SecurID? I don't want to end up with 5 or 6 of different authentication devices.
They already sell several solutions to frustrating packaging:

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Steel-Caledonian-Edge-Md/dp/B000N...

http://www.amazon.com/Poulan-400E-18-Inch-Electric-Chain/dp/...

http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp...
That's fine because I don't particularly want commercial projects running on TestSwarm.com. I'm keeping it exclusive to large, trusted, open source projects. Honestly, if commercial projects wish to get help from general users who donate machines they should be willing to pay for the service.

But, as you noted, it's also completely open source and anyone is perfectly welcome to run their own swarm on their intranet or public site.
Part of the opportunity for Zoho lies in differentiation. It has 19 online productivity and collaboration applications, including customer relationship management, project management and invoicing. So it only competes head-to-head against Google with five offerings.

So what exactly differentiates Zoho? The breadth of its product line? That doesn't sound like much of a differentiator.

Or is there more that this article doesn't mention? Any special processes, APIs, or features? It's relationship with VARs?

It must have a great differentiator to have $50MM in revenue without funding. It's just unclear from this article exactly what that differentiator is.
But Zoho, a company based in Pleasanton, Calif., that offers similar services, is solidly profitable, with revenue of more than $50 million a year. And it has never taken a cent in venture capital or bank loans.

I would love to hear from someone more in the know on how Zoho was able to pull this off. Conventional wisdom seems to be that bootstrapping a product company to tens of millions is near-impossible. Is Zoho just a random aberration or do they offer lessons to others trying to do the same?
I'm actually starting to work with some developers on this (likely a Java app). I absolutely agree that having this tool be made available to those running the clients would be very useful.
"Nearly every computer purchased has Windows pre-installed -- but not by choice."

There isn't much choice. Nothing else is as good. It just isn't.

1) Make free software better than Windows

2) Problem solved.

"Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office"

The last time I tried to do a CentOS yum update on a little used server it failed with an unhelpful error message. Turns out it was to old and the repository mirrors had been moved.

By the way, you can freely download the Office 2007 Compatability Pack for Office 2003. Don't let that get in the way of a good rant though, will you?

"Microsoft has attempted to block free standardization of document formats, because standards like OpenDocument Format would threaten the control they have now over users via proprietary Word formats"

And they've also opened up the new Office document formats for anyone to use. Yes, they do have fields like "interpret this control character as Word for Mac 3.1 did", but that's the same problem that means they can't "just switch to Open Document Format". It's not (necessarily) malicious, just the culmination of decades of program specific cruft.

"Threatening user security: Windows has a long history of security vulnerabilities"

Yeah and so has Apache, OpenSSH, and virtually all software with the possible claimed exceptions of Ranum's custom code and OpenBSD.

Good thing Microsoft delayed the release of Vista while they changed their development processes to focus more on security, eh? Like how they block network connections on a fresh install until you do a Windows Update (or tell it to unblock them), and how Outlook blocks script and executable attachments unless you explicitly allow them, and how they put UAC in to address the problem of people running as administrators, and how they include Windows Defender in Vista and nag you to install AntiVirus and switch on Automatic Windows Updates and reduced website privileges in IE8 ...oh, yes "a long history of security vulnerabilities" that sounds bad, let's make it a Windows Sin.

This makes using a free software operating system the best way for users to escape Microsoft and avoid becoming victims of these seven sins.

The best way to ensure you can't open people's email attachments, the best way to ensure your staff haven't a clue how to use their computer anymore, the best way to lose an awful lot of business advantages that Linux et al can't replicate.

Look... I would be on your side, if you weren't so smugly hawking the same old same old all the time. 2001 wasn't the year of Linux on the desktop, nor was 2002 or 3 or 4 or ... nor will 2009 be at this rate.

One company I saw yesterday who had broken away from the Windows mould? Mac + Firefox + Zimbra + Google Docs. Another I know of? OpenOffice ... on Windows. All the customers I deal with who evade the usual Windows way of doing business computing are Mac Laptop users.
Three words:

- Routine

- Routine

- Routine

That's the only thing that keeps me disciplined. Throw in disruption to my routines and my coding productivity plummets.
I expected this to be for freshmen in college. I liked it anyway.
Interesting. Look at Blackboard hanging on for it's life. iCollege sucks ass, so overpriced.
Worth pointing out that this is Mark Bao's company, and that Mark Bao is a regular here.
Proves '10,000 hour rule' and 'fortune favors the bold.'
I don't want Linux limited to looking like Windows, Microsoft doesn't want "looks like Windows but wont run your programs". Who would benefit from that? How much traction did Lindows get?
I studied Java at College. I knew C, Pascal and some C++. I remember VERY CLEARLY hating it. But it was long ago, and I had long forgotten why, so I recently (like 2 weeks ago) decided to give Java another try. And I remember now why.

When you have fscanf, or cin, doing a new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader()) just to read a key from console seems pretty stupid. I know Java has System.In.Read, but why doesn't it have System.In.Readln? (forgive me if it does, but the course I took specifically said it doesn't)

Also, why the redundante names for enum constants?
What was the guy thinking when he designed swing? A method that returns you a MessageBox object instead of simply a MessageBox class? I'm sorry about the rant, but Java style feel ackward after coding for a couple years in C#.
Well, in specific instances you could make a case... Like not patching a huge vulnerability for months. But this claim is way too broad. Most of the security problems plaguing Microsoft today are the results of decisions made years ago. The Microsoft ship doesn't turn on a dime, and unfortunately their large codebase isn't the only thing causing this slowness (internal politics,redtape,etc).

{edit} s/cases/instances/ {/edit}
I think its great that these guys appear to be genuinely interested in building a company rather than building it quickly to sell it. I haven't used any of their products, but this article has prompted me to give them a go
I never heard of Qt. What's good about it?
If you allow OpenID, users can choose an openid provider that has a hardware authentication option, like Verisign.

Most won't, but it at least is an easy way to provide this option.
I think by "differentiation" they meant "diversification."
Hurts. Always has.
All the extra overhead from the redundant dealer networks, the overhead from maintaining multiple 'differentiated' products, redundant marketing, etc. I'd be surprised if that nonsense didn't eat enough off their profit for them to still fall beyond Toyota and Honda.

I'm starting to think that the only reason they killed Pontiac instead of Chevy (despite being more popular), was that it allows them to axe more dealers from the network.

I also hope they'll incorporate more 'Saturn' lessons into the remaining 'Chevy' car lines. But given how long they've refused to do that, I'm not exactly optimistic.
Interesting that 8/10 new cars that were purchased where foreign. I wonder what percentage of that rebate trickles into American pockets and which goes overseas.
I think the problem these days is that there is a lot of talk, on sites such as this, that VC is the way to go. I don't think that Zoho are unique in being able to do this - I think with software/web there are a good number of companies that have managed to quietly build their business and get great revenues.
Looks like they have 2 other product divisions. What would be nice to know is how much of the $50M can be attributed to zoho.com.

http://www.zohocorp.com/
Early Stage Hiring
A Linux user's review of Windows 7
The MBA was designed more for engineers than "business-guys".

The GMAT is a computerized, adaptive test. I have no idea what the math is like on the GRE but the math on the GMAT doesn't get much trickier than algebra and geometry. A lot of the questions involved deciding whether or not the problem gave you enough information to solve it. It would give you two sets of information and you'd have to pick between something a long the lines of:

Info A is enough to decide
Info B is enough to decide
Info A & B combined is enough to decide
Info A & B combined is not enough info to decide

So even in the "quantitative" section you still need to apply some amount of logic and reason and not just solve equations.

I know engineers who did relatively bad on the GMAT quantitative and folks from degrees that aren't so math oriented who did well on it.

I'd guess that GRE math is a lot more straight forward.
I don't quite understand the use case. Do you want to backup data and then delete the local copy? I think that's more like archiving than backup, and it's not clear to me what "incremental" even means in that case. Or do you intend to keep your 1 TB of live data, but you don't want the backup tool to use any additional disk space?

Speaking of catalogs, I wonder if Duplicity is what you want.
The more important metric is how much impact. Money is a byproduct of impact derived from novel solutions to 'dinosaur' problems.
Information Aesthetics - http://infosthetics.com/

The Frontal Cortex - http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/
I thought it was a great hack, too. I suppose we should stop passing out opinions here since they get down-modded. Folks, you can just not mod posts that offer no inheriant value to you.

Do you want someone down-modding your posts simply because you are expressing how you feel in the moment and had nothing else valuable to say? I looked specifically at the comments in this post because I wanted to up-mod someone who said "great hack" because I felt the same.
> I don't think it's fully settled, but I think the assertion "Medicare has lower administrative costs that private insurance" has a much better shot at surviving than the negative of that assertion.

It doesn't matter whether that assertion is true. It's almost a dumb a question as wondering about whose check writing costs are lower. (I've never seen someone wonder about that wrt defense spending.) The closest relevant question is whether govt healthcare is more effective. The folks currently covered by US govt paid healthcare aren't being covered for less and aren't having better outcomes than the folks covered by the private system. (I'm ignoring horrorshows like the Indian Health Service. They'd almost be better off if we gave them blankets infected with diseases and cases of whiskey.)

Then there's the "fairness" question. I know several folks who pay a lot of taxes who are "heavy" and/or old. On what basis are you planning to deny them govt funded healthcare?

On the other end of the scale, your choice to subsidize an activity does not obligate the recipients of that subsidy to minimize your costs.
Eric python IDE, free and effective.
Milton Friedman interview
An older profile of Ted Kennedy by GQ in 1990 - "A Sober Look at Ted Kennedy" by the late Michael Kelly: http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5585

Not a flattering portrayal at all of Kennedy the man. Then again, not a great legislative record either - from Reason - Ted Kennedy and the Death (Hopefully) of an Era: http://reason.com/news/show/135658.html
I apologize for any offense. I don't mean to imply that all "backwoods Christians" are really baffled by Hinduism -- I also know some of the type you mention, the serious students who learn ancient Greek.

I was using the "backwoods Christian" stereotype to make a point in a (hopefully) humorous way, that people who are totally wrapped up in their own worldview often completely fail to understand the point of other worldviews, and don't even realize they're missing the point.

For what it's worth, I was raised in the back woods, and grew up around the kind of people I caricatured (who were thankfully always a minority). But since intent is hard to convey on the Internet, it would have been wiser for me to use talking animals like Aesop, or something else less likely to offend.
Instead of an authentication device, why not have an iPhone app that gives the authentication digits? (warning: i have no idea how these devices work and may be missing something obvious)
Sites I like from my feeds, aiming for variety:

* Joseph Miklojcik (emacs, lisp, languages) http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/

* Mauricio Fernández (functional, with ocaml focus) http://eigenclass.org/R2/

* Colin Percival (tarsnap, freebsd security) http://www.daemonology.net/blog/

* Matthew Garrett (mobile linux, power management) http://mjg59.livejournal.com

* Brad Fitzpatrick (memcached, pubhubsubbub) http://advogato.org/person/bradfitz/diary.html

* Chris Neukirchen's Trivium (all links, great jumping point) http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/
PSA. Escaping html only helps if you're allowing user-generated text outside of any tag.

If you're allowing user-generated text into a html tag (ie. this case.) Escaping html tags won't help.
We use Zoho and while I can't speak to the author's intended meaning I can tell you the two factors that keep us with them.

1. Zoho's APIs are more mature. Especially the Remote API which allows you to use the Zoho tools but keep the data on your own servers. That's something Google has no competitor for (last I checked).

2. The customer focus. The company has always been responsive to our requests and there have been occasions where they actually added a feature pretty soon after we asked for it (in fairness others might have asked for it earlier, I don't know)

It boils down to Zoho being focused on creating a great product for their customers while Google seems more interested in proving a point about online software.
Spend 80% on developing a story is so true. Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind discusses how today's world is making more use of their right-brains; the creative/intuitive half.
You must realize that in a corporate env. (where software is not the core product), you are simply a maintainer of highly convoluted systems. You aren't a maker anymore, even though you occasionally create code. If you can embrace this, as I have recently, it will save your life.
It took me 1 second to leave the website. The design is just horrible(with all due respect :D). I suggest you make the website with a simple statement, I want to know what the hell this website does without having to read all the text.

My suggestion is that you grab yourself a neat "Coming Soon page" from a template.
I don't know about carpenter rates, but it's cheaper to get a custom-tailored suit than to buy a factory-made name brand.
I could be wrong but I suspect most small companies in the United States are funded by business loans not VCs. If you have decent credit and real faith in your idea it makes sense not to give the valuable shares away.
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I think what's slightly more interesting is the fact that the top 10 purchased cars are all small cars, given that the majority of the cars likely came from suburban America.
This reminds me of the "Shut Up and Code!"-argument when it comes to comparing programming language features.
Qt is a really nice cross-platform gui lib, some consider it to be one of the best examples of how to write an API.

Its written in C++, but has bindings for other languages. It is very mature and robust, has lots of nice tools, and recently was purchased by Nokia, who actively support development.

It is also the platform on which KDE is built.

I've played around with it, the developers seem like very capable people, and the capabilities of the library seem top-notch, but I haven't done any non-web development for a while so I haven't had a chance to really exercise it and see how I like the workflow.
I think part of that comes form being so darn interested in he world. There's always a new thing to discover and explore.
One thing Zoho does very differently is "outsourcing." I put that word in quotes because Zoho is partly based in Chennai, India, where I believe the CEO Sridhar is from. In fact the majority of the employees are based there, which keeps cost way down.

Now, they don't treat their Chennai office as a second-rate sweatshop to whom you parcel off grunt work and forget about it. That is a recipe for disaster. At the same time, they are very open about the fact that CS education/programming skills in India aren't nearly as good as in the U.S. So what do they do? They train their Indian programmers in house for 9 months. You can definitely take smart people without a great educational background and bring them up to speed if you're prepared to do that.

Sridhar is http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu, hopefully he can give us more details and correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.
I agree with this, but it would be nice to hear some opinions on how fraud could be limited as well. Reason being that I like this idea and would love to see other people's take on it.

I used to manage a pizza shop and we would run into issues from time to time where we would have extra food. Occassionally it was due to fake orders, but more often it was due to mix ups in the prep area where our cooks would forget to take down a ticket after putting a pie in the oven and the next cook would make it again. If we didn't eat it ourselves, we would call up the local bars, fire stations, police stations, repeat customers or anyone who had a large order in the past and offer it to them at a substantial discount or free. We generated a lot of repeat business that way. We were a small, horribly unorganized shop, so I don't how much that would spill over into the average food business - but it does happen.
It lets you specify scale without any unwanted precision
That and we configured all the servers to cloak 'buu' as buu@mtfnpy because it wound him up.

But as Alias notes in the comments asdagd was already using mtfnpy in his whois, so it was already an in joke known to the target :)
Wow, yes it is. I wish I had read this two years ago.
Over the last few years I've tried their products out now and then. I'm always disappointed with how little unification there is when moving from one app to another. The design (both UI and UX) always feels a sub-par to me as well. I've never been able to stick with any of their products for longer than a month or two without giving up in frustration.

Apparently a lot of people feel differently though.
nice .. thanks
Did you watch the recent TED movie about the effectiveness of rewards?

When you reward yourself, is it for finishing creative tasks, or tasks that you just need to apply grit to?

This is something I have been wondering about myself when it comes to 'autorewards' (or whatever it is called when rewarding oneself for tasks accomplished).

I spend so many evenings avoiding doing the things I know exactly what I need to do.
Rather than on open vs closed, native apps vs web based apps app war win will be decided solely on the number of users a given mobile platform has. For that some android manufacturer would have to stand up to design an iphone killer.
BadaBingle = BingGoogle²
Where FriendFeed Went Wrong
I wonder if there is any language that a corporate environment could not make to suck.