2008-05-26 front | Hacker News

Stories from May 26, 2008

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		dcurtis on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Twitter’s business model is to sell the company Not a single YC company that I know of has made any remarkable amount of money without being sold. But, in fact, many YC companies have made considerable amounts of money by selling themselves. Why is having the goal of being sold while making things people want not that great of a strategy?
		aston on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix. Nobody should be nagged by NYT to login, btw. Clear your cookies.
		jonknee on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: NASA - Phoenix has landed The lander is powered by a 33MHz computer that costs $200-300k. I love how much gets done with so little power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD6000 I couldn't find what language they were working in, does anyone know? Ada?
34.		Valtrex For Geeks (mattmaroon.com)
		11 points by kyro on May 26, 2008 \| 9 comments
35.		The Oxbridge Fallout Effect (twak.blogspot.com)
		11 points by xirium on May 26, 2008 \| 8 comments
		menloparkbum on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Would You Want This Job? Hard work, middle of Kans... I spent 18 years in a rural farming community and this seems phony. Any farmer who is that dialed in and successful has already been doing what all the other farmers in america do: use seasonal & migrant labor. The "free beef" part really pushed it past the point of believability. It reads like the author is practicing his writing skills to land a gig writing polemics for the National Review. Assuming it is legitimate, this job sucks because whomever accepts it is becoming an indentured servant for a land-owning farmer.The skills the person learns are not transferable to any other occupation, and no other farmers are hiring this sort of person. If something goes sour in the relationship, the worker doesn't just lose a job, he loses a house and is stuck in rural Kansas.
		aston on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Tipjoy: Why Didn't it Take Off? Pathology of a Flo... A word geek aside: The distinction between the verb forms of "flounder" and "founder" is kinda interesting, as the former implies you're struggling against the water, and the latter says you're already sunk. Not to mention the homonyms that make it possible for startup founders to founder.
38.		Why hackers FLOSS (milkingthegnu.org)
		10 points by TheBigRedDog on May 26, 2008 \| 5 comments
		adduc on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: NASA - Phoenix has landed 'Probably' does not constitute a black and white line. Although this topic will be covered on the news over the next week, it is one that pertains to majority of the users' interests, and is highly tech related.
40.		Atari Founder Proclaims the End of Gaming Piracy (gamesindustry.biz)
		10 points by arvernus on May 26, 2008 \| 16 comments
41.		Memo to a Young Leader: What Kind of Boss Are You? (hbsp.com)
		10 points by jaydub on May 26, 2008 \| 1 comment
		demallien on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: NASA - Phoenix has landed Yup. Personally, my brain is having a real hard time putting the concepts of NASA and spam together.
		lsb on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn Strictly speaking, it's Lempel-Ziv coding. LZ compresses text by replacing the second occurrence of a phrase with a pointer to the first, as above, whereas Huffman represents more frequently used characters with shorter bit strings, like Morse code.
		diego on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Twitter’s business model is to sell the company I was thinking of a model similar to the Pope commissioning Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel's ceilings. It's not bad if it's something that you like to do and the Pope will pay for it. In this day, the Pope could be Google (after all, they do no evil...) The problem with companies like Twitter is that they don't know if the Pope will like their art. My point is that if you are going to create one product to sell to the church, you should try to attract the Pope's interest as early as you can to reduce your risk.
		mynameishere on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Tipjoy: Why Didn't it Take Off? Pathology of a Flo... let nice Uncle Google pay Google makes money when you click on the ads. It's the company being advertised that pays. .............. As for tipjoy, I wonder if they haven't tried to get a deal going with wordpress or similar to allow bloggers to automatically attach tip jars.
46.		Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise (readwriteweb.com)
		9 points by markbao on May 26, 2008 \| 3 comments
47.		Ask YC: YUI for CSS grid
		9 points by ra on May 26, 2008 \| 7 comments
		davidw on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: NASA - Phoenix has landed I think these mars lander things have been some of the coolest, most inspiring technology-based endeavors in our time. In terms of 'current news', the problem is that it's usually about politics, and thus not really more relevant to hackers than anyone else, whereas this clearly is. The politics articles also quickly degrade into boring, tired, rehashed debates, too, whereas something like this shouldn't. (That said, voting people down that much is just lame, people. What happened to the old hacker news where a -1 was sufficient to say "no, we think you're wrong"?)
		pg on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Twitter’s business model is to sell the company I think Loopt makes quite a lot of money, actually. The bad strategy is to build a company few buyers would want.
50.		Installing Ubuntu on the OLPC XO-1: "My XO went from being a novelty toy to a useful tool" (locut.us)
		9 points by edw519 on May 26, 2008 \| 2 comments
		mark-t on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Science vs Religion (humor) Oh no, not again.
52.		Science vs Religion (humor) (photobucket.com)
		9 points by nreece on May 26, 2008 \| 11 comments
53.		Is the Eurovision song contest rigged? An investigation using simple data visualisation. (successfulsoftware.net)
		9 points by hermitcrab on May 26, 2008 \| 14 comments
		pg on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: New York Times API Coming I'd settle for just being able to see their stories without logging in.
		teamonkey on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: The Oxbridge Fallout Effect I grew up in and around Oxford. In my summer I worked for a laundry service that cleaned the sheets of Oxford students. I know for a fact that they often made the wrong decisions in many different ways.
		tlrobinson on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix. http://bugmenot.com However, NYT regularly blocks usernames that appear on bugmenot, so pretty much every time I go to nyt.com I have to go to bugmetnot. It would be much easier just to register for NYT, but I continue to use bugmenot out of principle.
		a-priori on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Tipjoy: Why Didn't it Take Off? Pathology of a Flo... C'mon, give the guys a chance before you declare them dead.
		jauco on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Ask YC: YUI for CSS grid From http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/: On the advice of our designers, the 100% grid (#doc3) has 10px of margin on the left and right sides. This prevents the content from bleeding into the browser's chrome. If you prefer, you can set it back to zero by adding this to your document: #doc3 {margin:auto;}
59.		Harvard Negotiation Project: 5 Lasting Rules For Negotiating Anything (gigaom.com)
		8 points by naish on May 26, 2008
		ojbyrne on May 26, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Would You Want This Job? Hard work, middle of Kans... I find this article to be interesting in light of your comment. It's about 20-somethings scrimping, working crappy jobs, lots of sacrifices, just so they can live in NYC: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/nyregion/25scrimp.html I'm sure that it's a quality job, but most people are more interested in a quality career, and they generally perceive that not too many quality careers happen in rural Kansas. Not that aren't any, but there are probably exponentially fewer than in the nearest large city.
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