skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually the guy that started the thread, and I really appreciated your well-thought-out response. Since putting that up, things have picked up tenfold for me, I had been doing a lot of the things you mentioned, but our customer base was small, and all the little stuff really hadn't reached a level where it was challenging to organize. Boy did it change, and I'm really happy for it. These days I'm finding myself getting buried in an ever-deepening list of must-do items. It's sometime stressful, but then I think about having too little work and smile, so it all works out. A couple of specific comments about your post:

1) You said that the business guy should keep his eye on the macro focus. I find myself doing this to a point of fault. One of my cofounders works in the same room as I do and one day he just had to say: "Look, I can't work with you talking about the future all the time, we need to keep our heads down and develop at this exact moment." I'm curious: do you guys have physically separate work spaces or are you just better able to control your forward looking urge than I am?

2) Customer service: I've taken over most of this, and it's been great. I love interacting with customers (even if I get some requests about a hundred times), and as we grow, I'm ecstatic to report it's eating up larger and larger chunks of my day. Eventually I'll have to figure out a way to continue producing new content (I double as the designer, but I traded that workload with our third guy for the book keeping), but for now it's great. I was curious, we have a one day policy so that people always get a response in a day, oftentimes it's much faster, but sometimes we'll be focused on designing a new feature together, it slips. People have told us they don't mind getting a response one or two days after, do you think it's worth investing high energy in making sure it's super fast?

3) We've been having troubles with our user's guide and we're thinking about pulling it altogether in favor of a more dynamic feature-specific overlay system. We're keeping the FAQ though. Do your customers appreciate a user's guide because it's a collected resource, or do you think it would work as an enhanced tooltip system? This is just personal style, but I was curious.

Again, I really appreciated your comment back when I posted, and this blog post is great. Thanks for helping me out.
There's also the fact that these logos are on the front where they would annoy me, whereas the Apple logo is on the back of the iPhone where I couldn't care less about it.
The real key here is Google's efficiency and innovation. They're not simply providing free data for the masses to consume, making nothing off of it and paying to obtain it (as they must, to map the highways and byways of the US).

At it's heart, Google is an advertising company which creates products that use data to place other companies in the eyes of those who use them.

TomTom and Garmin may offer an equivalent (or better) experience for a price, but Google offers an excellent experience for free, the only cost being a little inadvertent exposure to advertisements.

It wouldn't be inconceivable for another company to more efficiently display data and create a better experience for consumers, but profit through advertisements as Google does. Companies do this already. There simply wasn't another model in the mapping industry that could compete. Yet.
My moment happened while I was trying to explain how the statement "all movie critics are stupid" is not true. It occurred to me that no matter how well you write, or how articulate you are, that a good portion of people simply don't have the capacity to understand something as it is.

So my Aha! moment came when I realized that communication is like a game of catch. Not only does the speaker need to throw the ball well, but the listener needs to be able to catch the ball well.

So, I adjusted my throwing strategy -- instead of repeating the same thing with minor modifications. I explained the similarities between an NFL commentator and a movie critic. That both have experience that makes them credible and respectable and that is why people feel safe reading criticism. And then the person understood! It was amazing.

This was a huge moment for me.
I work with my notebook and 3G modem. It works well enough to VPN into work - wish I could do some paid work on the side while telecommuting :-)
Sounds like you're ready for a good sales book or two. I think one of the best is "SPIN Selling". It's not what it sounds like. It's almost the only sales book based on real research.

http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil-Rackham/dp/007051113...

I see advice in this thread to make a great product or know the product really well. I'd say the focus needs to be on the customer, not on you or the product.

Better to know the customer really well than to know the product really well. Of course if you can do both, do both.

Read a few good books on sales and you'll start noticing how inept almost all salesmen are. They just want to talk about their product, and don't ask the "obvious" questions about the customer and his needs.
Create a perfect sketch of your car accident
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908201
It works well until something goes wrong and each claim it is the other's problem.
“Who are your peers?” A response to Joel Spolsky
Embedded Figures Test confirms that stress hurts cognitive ability
When I first heard about UnladenSwallow I cheered. Then read that it was not targeting Python 3, and realized that this is really throwing a wrench into the works for Python 3.

I mean, switching to Py3k for the clean-ups and features is nice, but it's going to be hard for many to migrate if they've got to leave a 5x improvement in speed behind.

The people behind UnladenSwallow certainly must realize the repercussions for Python 3, no?
I think there are now already two Soyuz docked all the time, not one as shown (there is now six people up there, Soyuz is the lifeboat).
JQuery overview
Does it make sense to replace all disks with SSDs?
I use it, it is good.

I like the spreadsheet better than excel, and the word processing gets out of my way quite nicely.

I use it on ubuntu linux and it is rock solid.
Spiders kill pesky insects.

EDIT: Google is a new predator and the other insects have to adapt or be eaten alive. In the end we get a better more resilient breed of insects. No more lazy insects.

EDIT: It's good 'cause it forces companies to be more useful and less annoying (if they were annoying).
Would You Pay $199 for a Mobile Twitter Device With “Lifetime” Service?
Most people seem to regard corporations as moral entities.

These companies screwed up. We bailed them out. We expect them to lower their heads in shame, tighten up their belts, ask forgiveness, and promise to not do it again.

When they don't act according to our "moral" expectations, we turn everything into a public spectacle, articles start pouring in, blogs are on fire with outrage etc etc..

The problem is that we screwed up at the first step -- companies are not moral entities. They like to present themselves as such (ex. Google's "Do no evil, except when you have to turn in a couple of Chinese dissents over to their government to be imprisoned for life...")
Entrepreneur vs Flu - What's Plan B?
Regarding impress, the transitions and effects are indeed pretty horrible, but I've never seen any serious presentation with bouncing words and spinny slides. It looks corny and unprofessional.
I second that. Mac's Export to PDF is uh-mazing.
Custom build of OO, with added features: http://www.go-oo.org/
A Few Things That May Shock You About The LOL Cats Network
Some fine points. I agree about the quality of the people and the passion, but I disagree that distributed teams only work for routine work. I worked on a large, complex project wherein we re-built a company's internals from scratch. The details are moot, but the point is we executed like a startup -- we had protection from management, and it worked well. There were bumps in the road, but we continually evolved the process (yes, we did agile) to make the team more and more effective every iteration.

Standup was done via phone every day adjusted to meet time zones.

Pair programming was done with VNC when we needed it -- mostly used to mentor / bring on new employees who need hand-holding.

We did not use index cards to map objects. We did do the following things at a one-week-long co-location: 1-2 days of planning and 2-3 days of whiteboard/design. Iterations were typically 2-3 weeks long after that.

I've used this same model at the last couple of contracts I've done and it can work very well if done right (e.g. right people, right tools, right process, right mgmt).
Facebook Platform: A Roadmap for the Future
I like the idea too. Luis Von Ahn has done some work on tricking people to do useful things through play. 2 examples I can think of are Google Image Labeler(http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/), in which people provide useful metadata about random images on the web, and reCaptcha (http://recaptcha.net/), where captcha solutions are used to digitize parts of books where OCR fails.
It looks more jello-shaped than tofu-shaped to me, although I concede it is more tofu-colored.
According to http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl,
$8m in 1972 was the equivalent of $41m today. They had 4 partners then, so $10m in present day money per partner. That is definitely lower. Seems like the big funds have at least 4x that now.
SHDH35: Nov 7th in Palo Alto
quote from the article:

"Unfortunately, there's no indication in the paper of what software was used to develop the process (although the scatterplots in the paper do look decidedly R-like)."

I used to work with Avery Wang, the guy who devised the algorithm. He used Matlab.
Why China has no real advantage in electric vehicles
Phone-based GPS can't completely replace specialty units, but it can drive them into niche markets like backcountry hiking and boating.

Most people spend 90%+ of their time with cell coverage, though. Garmin's going to lose those folks.
I think "engorged" might be a better word to use.
Motorola makes a crapload of GSM phones, and they sell to virtually every major carrier. I would expect a Motorola Android 2.0 world phone sooner rather than later.
This is just a timely example of Google's monstrous growth, and the destruction it causes

Ugh, how overly dramatized. Cars killed the horsewhip industry, too.
When you "lock your phone" to prevent others from using it, the G1 has a system for unlocking where you could draw a pattern on the screen rather than typing a password. It's pretty nice. Not sure why the grandparent thinks it's not available on the Droid.
I'm much more surprised that the stock holders saw this as news. Something like this coming along should have been beyond obvious as soon as the iPhone launched - with more memory, a faster processor, and a higher quality screen than those crappy TomToms.
How to learn Flash
During the last few years I have seen more and more web sites that use Flash not just for media, but also for UI interaction -- in the same way one would use Cocoa or Win32. It looks like Flash is becoming the "low level" API for web apps, that is, whenever something is not available as DHTML/Javascript, one uses Flash to achieve it.

Considering this, I am thinking that learning Flash is really necessary. Do you have any good resources to do this (books or web sites)? Also, is it possible to develop Flash sites with open source tools?
Has anyone from Yahoo or Geocities contacted you, officially or unofficially? I'd imagine there must be some worker bees within the organization who were glad to see you doing this.
Yes, one
Startup Visa - 5 Ways to Help Out (very easy)
Finally got a Mac so I'm having to unlearn some assumptions/habits. Thanks for the FYI.
(2) Is most certainly true.

If A == B, then B just is A, we're saying A == A. A possible world where B != A is a world where A != A. You seem to believe that A != B even in our world.

(1) is the essence of the physicalist claim. You can certainly declare it bullshit if you want...

The leap in in (3). While brains and mental states as we know them must be identical, according to physicalists, other worlds may do brain-like and mental-state-like things not as we know them.

For instance, we may have misunderstood our own world.

Oddly, (4) gets back on track. If zombies can be proven to be possible (which conceivability does not do) then physicalism is false. (Although, this generally implies epiphenomenon, which also implies causality is false, which puts consciousness outside of logic {P -> Q} let alone physics.)
The Perils of FDS: Fun Deficiency Syndrome
This reminds me of an article I read a few years ago, which talked about cities designed for walking.* Most cities have a code that requires that every new development must supply X number of parking spaces per Y square feet of land. However, all these required parking spaces spread out a city's points of interest. By requiring fewer if any parking spaces, some cities were able to achieve a higher density of points of interest. By two points of interest being closer, they are therefor more walkable. The article mentioned San Francisco as an example of a city that doesn't require many parking spaces, and consequently it is rated as the most walkable city in the U.S.

Personally, I always walk when I go to San Francisco. That's partly because it is so walkable (my points of interest are usually near Market St or along the waterfront), but also because it's impossible to park there. I often won't go to San Francisco if I want to stay out later than the public transit (BART) runs, because it's usually too much of a hassle to park. That second reason is the point of Slate's article.

* I would post a link to the article I read, but I couldn't find it after a few minutes on Google.
Open source tool: FlashDevelop.org (Windows only but runs on Parallels/Mac)
It's probably correlated with working in fashion.

http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html
This would be more fun if there were animation and special effects and stuff. I opened this expecting to have a really fun time creating a detailed account of a made up accident (as I haven't been in an accident yet), but instead it was kind of like playing with clip art in Word or something.
(significantly less exciting that I had anticipated).

I'm not saying that it isn't a useful tool, but honestly, There isn't enough wow factor to make me use this instead of my own lavishly embellished sketches.

Also needs something in addition to the arrow to indicate that you hit something or that that something hit you.

Thanks,

-Jon

edit:
I'd also like to note that you can't really do multi car collisions.

For example, what if my car had been plowed into by a city car and then my car was pushed into a pedestrian?

Right now, It seems I only get one 'Opponent party' type of thing (like a crowd of pedestrians or a flock of trolleys).
If only life were so simple as having an accident with a flock of trolleys (or a single opponent party).

Anyway, hope my suggestions help,

Thanks again,

-Jon (again)
http://kansascity.bizjournals.com/kansascity/mobile/stories/...

Garmin competitor TomTom NV, a Dutch company, on Wednesday reported a 15 percent drop in revenue and a 48 percent plunge in earnings for the third quarter compared to the same quarter of 2008. However, earnings rose 42 percent compared to the second quarter.

Let's not ignore the possibility that todays drop in Tomtom's stock price (and by extension, Garmin's) might had something to do with an earnings drop.
An interesting app.

Airtel, a leading telecom provider in India had a SongCatcher service long back (3 yrs ago) http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Catch_a_Catchy_Song_with_...
I never tried it - may this one worked for a predefined set of songs.
Sorry, but I am cynical. The ratio of press-release-about-amazing-new-technology to commercial-availability-of-amazing-new-technology seems to be about 100 to 1. Whatever happened to under-promise and over-deliver?
Thanks to everyone with your comments. I downloaded it and so far it is working great for me. There are many little things that I like much better than excel and word. I am glad I don't have to deal with the ribbon anymore. And also it appears to be faster. Help is very useful and unlike excel help, it is well organized, and very easy to find answers. I think overall this is a better user experience than MS Office.
Don't I feel vindicated:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7310&cid=823710

(from 2000).

I remember this because I got in a big argument with someone about whether this could possibly work. Of course, I never got off my ass and implemented it, which I guess makes me a huge loser.
I would argue that the fact that Google causes such drastic, irreversible shifts in business practices is a good thing. Simply put, Google isn't raising the bar - it's setting a higher baseline for consumer-level performance. Forcing better service and performance across the information industry can only be advantageous in the long run.
No Safari support? What year is this?
A Call for Data Visualization
China already has a Silicon Valley in progress - Pudong New District - and it's growing rapidly ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudong , http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/191907622_... ). The Pearl Delta region is also an entrepreneurial hotbed.

(although wouldn't call Chinese officials politicians, so your point technically stands)
An A/B testing tool is on the roadmap, but we just haven't had time yet.

The best way to do tests right now is by utilizing funnel properties. You can test the whole length of your signup funnel and just add a 'button-color' property.

This lets you see the difference in conversion rates between your two treatments pretty easily.
The BellKor Solution to the Netflix Grand Prize
Does anyone know what Schwarzenegger's objections to this bill were?
You're absolutely right, and there is certainly a lot of money to be made. I don't know what the answer is; but I know I personally would have to think twice before putting all my eggs in the Facebook or Twitter basket.
Apple's 2009 ad budget: Half a billion (Microsoft's: 1.4 Billion)
IBM 2020 Hybrid Truck Project
I think even the "bare metal" runtimes/languages are going VM-like with LLVM due to the benefits others mention.
I'm cautiously excited, but am withholding judgement until I see the quality of their products:

From the article:

"Howcast, one of Demand’s largest competitors, also produces explainer videos and how-tos. Unlike Demand, the company employs a staff of editors and writers and gets freelance voice-over pros. Filmmakers can earn a couple thousand dollars shooting the videos, and the difference is noticeable. (Howcast’s “How to Make Friends at a New School” includes such useful tidbits as “sit in the middle of the classroom to surround yourself with as many potential new friends as possible.” Demand-owned eHow’s “How to Be Popular in School” video, in contrast, offers such vague guidance as “be nice to everybody.”)"
Sizzling Hot Indian Actress Rare Unseen Photos
Grains of Sand Reveal Possible Fifth State of Matter
As LLVM gets closer to being the de-facto VM...
I worry about this sort of thing - the entire genome is so non orthogonal, there is no telling that other effects this thing has.
I frequently have issues opening word documents from some users of Word 2007. I know this is likely an MS Problem, but if interoperability is a concern, I would be wary. That said. I use it for most of my tasks. I also find OO spreadsheet's csv import to be superior.
This didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it was pretty entertaining, will definitely use it as a fast and engaging resource to explain to people I need to bring up to speed on it.
The point being made is not bad, but the example of the barmaid is awful. It is not a sign of adulthood or leadership to show compassion to somebody earning pennies to your dollar. It is a sign of improvement in character, which is not the same thing.
In addition to car nav, the last Garmin thing I bought was a Forerunner, which is obsoleted by "My Tracks" on Android (and undoubtedly other things on other platforms).
Wow! Brilliant article. Love it.

"On one level, the difference between the two points of view is simply the difference between selling one on one to a very targetted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will match your own "strawberry" profile."
Android No Longer Has The Competitive Advantage, GPS App On iPhone As Well
"... I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff ..."

There are possible explanations to this idea in an article I read yesterday ~ "Welcome to China's millennium", Martin Jacques ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/23/china-ma...
Jeffrey Gitomer has a lot of good ideas (and a free weekly newsletter):

http://www.gitomer.com/

You might find this helpful too:

http://www.amazon.com/Outfoxing-Small-Business-Owner-Relatio...
For someone just starting out, I would recommend checking out haXe.[1] It's certainly not a traditional Flash development environment, but it offers some, to my knowledge, unique advantages in the space particularly in terms of offering multiple output targets. And it's got plenty of open source tools to help you along.

However, first I would ask myself "If I can't accomplish my goals in DHTML and Javascript, is the web the proper place to deploy my application?" I'm pretty sure this is an unpopular view in these parts, but it may be worth considering.

[1] http://haxe.org/
Supply Chains visualized in Google Maps
What is the last kernel which supports Xen dom0?

And the slogan is: We put outdated buzzowords together!
Cheap plus size prom dresses
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Aww man, when I read the headline I was expecting a SpinVox-like scandal. Like a room full of idiot-savants in Bangalore that knew every pop hit for the last 50 years or something.
You are well within your rights. I read a thousand articles about new technology ranging from graphite that is a super conductor to this. I haven't seen most of the technology I have read about and would appreciate reading about something coming out....Next year?

But then again- if it is coming out next year, it is conceivable that I would have already heard about it.
No Chrome support either.
See the previous discussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892290
This is the modern information economy equivalent of a manic episode.
Garmin and TomTom are hallowed brands?

This article was written ten years ago, about Microsoft. At that time, the hallowed brands were the likes of Borland and Corel. Sure, Google is dominant in search and advertising, but things have a way of changing in this industry. It seems that the when a company comes to dominate a category, the category begins to lose relevance.

Microsoft's dominance of desktop computing comes to mind. They controlled the platform. Then, the applications and development tools. Eventually, no one entered the desktop application market without dealing directly with Redmond.

Google's not going anywhere soon, but rest assured - the next Google is being developed (or thought about) right now.
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Through the infinite banking system, you be the bank! This wealth creation program is intended on helping you finance the future through cash value life insurance
It doesn't seem to be able to handle certain road designs very well, for example, a four-lane road with two turn lanes on each side.
For some kinds of customizability, certainly, yes. Why not?