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Not even sure where my clothes are made. Probably not in America.

There are several reasons for buying American:

1.) For the price point I buy at (low to middle < 30k) the American cars have the same quality as I can get in a foreign car.

2.) Given equal price and quality, keeping the money in the US keeps more Americans working.

There are lots of foreign products and services where the price to value ratio isn't even and for those purchases I am more than happy to buy from anywhere.

It is kind of why I typically support local businesses in my town rather than go with large franchises if the price/value relationship is equal.

As a person that only buys American made cars. The "Made in America" reliance had allowed the industry to escape improving the quality of their products for some time. Fortunately for the automakers the NASCAR viewership will always buy American as most drive American trucks which are superior over the competition.

The issue is now even though the quality has improved, it is hard to get the higher paid individual and foreign born consumers (which their are lots) to buy a US cars.

The "the CB radio of web 2.0" quote is fairly accurate for a few reason:

1.) Everyone communicates with handles. CB users: would saying "Snowfox this is the blackwolf will be in your area tomorrow?" Twitter users: it is basically the same "@Snowfox this is the @blackwolf will be in your area tomorrow?"

2.) Every message is short. CB users: Every channel is shared so the conversations are done in short bursts. Twitter users: Can only communicate in 140 characters.

3.) It is communicated on a 1-many basis, any one listening to a specific channel can hear the conversation. CB users: turn their radios to channel 15 and talk everyone listening on channel 15 hears the conversation. Twitter users: have their own channel but anyone can follow them and

4.) The language of the conversation is modified to fit the small message size. CB users: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_slang Twitter users: Has twitter specifics like "#" and "RT" also incorporates sms and chat lingos.

There are a couple variables that may make twitter not meet the same demise of CB radios (Cell Phones). Twitter has a global communication net and it is logged. Which means you don't need to be tuned in to not miss something.

If the CEO can't use the product, they need to rely on others to - 1.) Communicate accurately the state of the product (is it good, why is it bad) 2.) Also communicate effectively both down (employees) and outwardly (partners, press, customers) the product direction.

It is always interesting to read an article by someone that doesn't understand the software much less development.

"Java's creators borrowed ideas from the widely-used language known as C" "C" not so much. Weird the article doesn't mention profitability.

"What turned Java from a modest evolution in computer language to a full-scale business phenomenon was savvy marketing by Sun."

Really - Java's success was despite the marketing that was applied. The Java Community Process and the alignment of big partners drove Java's success. Not sure where Java would be if it wasn't for J2EE and the application servers.

Java didn't make money because there isn't any money in development tools and even less in languages.

Even though it will be changed back, I will still say I don't like it. Hacking and IT don't need political correctness, they need freedom of expression.

Ask yourself, "What would Katt Williams say about this change?" He would probably say something like - "Hacker Please!"

There is a fundamental problem with RIAs; the open web is a much better platform to build applications on. Every day browsers get better and the things you can do with HTML, JavaScript and CSS are for 90% of the applications a good solution. The other 10% of the applications a developer has a choice where RIA might make sense but 5% of those applications are probably better off being a desktop applications.

This leaves 5% of the applications which would benefit from an RIA, these apps are typically internal data entry or dashboard applications which don't get a lot of press.

Over the last 6 years I have worked in the RIA space and it really comes down to a simple question. "Would you want Google to rewrite the Google Analytics or Gmail in Flex/JavaFX/Silverlight?"

For me the answer is NO!. The best applications today are open web with Ajax / Flash enhancements to improve users experience.

Google Analytics uses Flash and Ajax in this exact way; Flash for the charts and the time span widgets but the rest of the application is HTML. Ajax is used for doing sorting and paging of data.

This is why there will never be a killer RIA application.

My revised headline for the article. "@oprah signs up 1.2 million people to twitter; 800k of them to dumb to actually follow @oprah."

She only has 377k followers. If people signed up because of her you think they would follow her if they could figure it out.

I am calling for all people to stop following both @cnn and @aplusk.

Porn

Read the stories

Don't need the employee discount... It's all free.

The development tools I use for AWS are the Amazon Eclipse plugins and the plugins available on Rockstarapps.

http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/

http://www.rockstarapps.com/

The Amazon tools are good for working with J2EE apps on EC2 and the Rockstarapps tools are good for general application development but don't have EC2 management.

Yeah he probably should not have create the worm. I got bit by the worm today. But... the real problem is Twitter, they constantly demonstrate their inability to run a prime time website.

Outages, security issues, multiple times a day the page renders in different unusable ways. The only real reason they get a free pass is the site is mostly an entertainment product and has marginal usefulness.

I use the site to communicate but if it doesn't work I just go to Google trends to see what is happening or just ask people via skype whats going on.

"Would you agree that under ideal conditions, if everyone behaved, it would be better to be a larger group such that you could share disucssions, or would it be better to remain small, so that you know all the posters?"

I am not sure if everyone behaved it would be better;

Comments would be better - there are two types of disruptive comments; people that are just being jackasses in comments, if they are over-the-top and constant, I say smoke them out of their cubes or basements and boot them off the site. Make it possible to just kill a comment chain. The others are either new or stupid and not much you can do to these people except mentor them and give positive re-enforcement.

Stories are the biggest issue because they are the basis for what I think is the most important part of hacker news and that's the comments. One reason I really like hacker news is the "Ask HN" feature. This allows me to skip the story and read the concept, question... and dive directly into the discussion.

People are not malicious in their story submission - It's not like there are links to child porn or nazi sites. So people aren't knowingly misbehaving. The problem is that there are lots of things that a lot of people won't find interesting.

I know personally I won't be offended or concerned because you or everyone thought my submission wasn't interesting. The reason being is that I most likely didn't write it, if I did then pride-of-ownership would come into play would I would be disappointed.

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The topic of online community preservation has many parallels with "real-world" communities and even biological diversity, which means it will need to be solved by someone more advanced than me. If we could come to a conclusion on this for hacker news and apply it to the real-world we might get a noble prize.

I like the identifying people idea but don't think it will have the preservation affect. If the preservation of the "Hacker News" is the goal then moving to "class" system would be more efficient then identifying people.

As hacker news grows, there would come a time when a new news.news.ycombinator.com would be created taking with it a certain group of people that would form a more tight knit community similar to the way it was in the beginning. The stories and comments would flow up to news.ycombinator.com but not the other way.

Then repeated...

The UI is kindof cramped.

When I see the screen there isn't any statement containing information about the site. I see the info in the browser's title but not on the page.

The page doesn't fit in a 1024x786 monitor. Site gets an F(37) in yslow (too many files). Not a big fan of inner scrollbars when clicking on a state, it would be better to utilize the browser window's scrollbars. No easy way to go back to the map unless I click home again.

The login bar clutters up the screen. Might be better as a popup dialog.

If everything boiled down to money, then it would be simple as simple as the author stated.

I would look at it a little differently; people join companies for many reasons, if you are deciding to leave because of money. You probably already made a few errors; choosing the company, in the hiring process by not getting the salary you deserve and during your yearly review not fighting for more.

Once you joined the company though, you will most likely be working off your balance of intrinsic desire to accomplish everything you can for the company. If at any point your motivation turns to a purely extrinsic (i.e bonuses, cashing out) it is time to leave.

It is a funny thing how different things seem when you are using intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation. The best way I can explain it is simply: You will walk through hell with seem like heaven when it you are motivated internally vs. even the simplest of task will seem like hell if you are staying to receive a bonus.

Fuck That! - EDIT

I think that they should at least mention what the benefits of such an arrangement would be. Just hanging out with cool people doing work for free people isn’t really that beneficial.

Everyone also knows, once a developer starts working on something like this it will be more than 15 hours of work; they will work all night and day to get things done. It should be more formal and give the developers something in return. The companies will be looking to sign up "real advisers" during this time but they will get something in return. Also this will need to be very carefully orchestrated because if people are working on things that are patentable; the volunteers will need to be listed on the patents.

Google (Docs, Site, Mail), Skype (Communication), Unfuddle (Repository), AWS (Runtime), drop.io (File exchange), Vimeo (Video), Scribd (Docs)

Contention brings integrity to the design process.

It's not the positive or critical things that are said in meetings that will harm a company. It's the things that aren't said that will eat away the core of a company.

When things that should be said aren't; there are typically a few reasons. 1.) the person isn't capable of leading 2.) the person is passive aggressive and will use there dissenting opinion in a private and undermine way. 3.) they already said the same thing many times and have had no luck in getting their opinion across.

Now that you mention it, I can't think of anything better for humanity.

Rockstarapps.com also provides a general set of Eclipse-based tools. You can configure S3, CloudFront, SimpleDB and Simple Queuing Service, little I mean no EC2 support.

There isn't a basis towards any one language just trying to make it simple to work with AWS in eclipse.

http://www.rockstarapps.com/joomla-1.5.8/products/amazon-ws-...

I wasn't talking about zipping up your files on a CD and putting them in a draw. There are companies like IronMountain, which give you off-site physical storage.

I am sure the deletion protection Jungle Disk provides is good but what if somebody internally deletes a S3 file or directory of files they are gone for ever. This isn't an S3 problem just a issue with the strategy.

S3, Mosso and other cloud providers are not an appropriate back up mechanism. These are good for sharing files and a temporary storage system. The only legitimate backup is a physically stored disk. S3 doesn't provide versioning nor deletion protection.

The problem is I hear about these new "Cloud" storage companies claiming backup, but when asked what do they do. They rely on Amazon to move the files into different data centers. But anyone can delete a file or directory by accident and poof the files are gone forever.

If the storage provider does have permanent physical storage in there backup plans, don't think your files are forever.

Not sure about this. I am currently building stuff on Amazon and only use the REST interface. Even when it comes to needing my own Java API, converting to Java to XML isn't a big deal anymore.

It would be good to see the proportion of SOAP/REST usage there. WS/SOAP is good but in the beginning when a lot of innovation is going on there will be some flux and supporting both would be costly.

I had the exact same problem a while back. It was while working full time and creating a startup on the side. The stress of every thing resulted in the same symptoms. Every day I needed to resist the urge to go to the emergency room because I thought I was going to die of a heart attack. This lasted for about 7 months and I didn't tell anyone until eventually I couldn't take it and one night drove myself to the hospital. After a series of unpleasant tests, it was just to much stress.

So what did I do to fix it?

1.) Realized the deadlines and pressure I was putting on myself were self imposed and definitely didn't need to be that aggressive. One thing I have learned, all time lines and deadlines are made up (know one really knows, its just a best guess), unless there is a contract attached. Doesn't mean be lazy and slack off.

2.) Better time management, context switching in life is aa expensive as it is on a computer, Set aside time for each thing.

3.) Task lists, every day create a list of tasks you want to complete and cross items off when done. The sense of accomplishment creates a good feeling. Tomorrow create a new task list, don't add to the old one, this is a good way to clear the list of all the shit that doesn't matter or has changed. You are going to be behind schedule, the goals is to make progress and create milestones that can be reached.

3.) Balance your life, being heads down can only last for so long. Enjoy family, friends, people on the street, talk about what you are doing, get ideas and feedback. Get a way for a weekend, see #1 shit can wait a weekend.

4.) As soon as possible find someone that can start to use the software and give you feedback. It is amazing how one person giving feedback will help energize you. They will think the progress you are making is far better than you. This is because what you are doing will hopefully help them in some way.

5.) Started exercising, eating better and stopped drinking Coke. Caffeine increases heart rate and only added to the problem, but I was drinking Coke to cope with the sleeping issues. Exercise is always positive, don't need to run a marathon just get out and walk around, enjoy the sun.

6.) Massages, I made my wife start giving me massages and that worked really well. No wife, no worries, you can pay money for a professional.

How do I page through the questions? Seems like this could be offered with a modified version of wordpress and you would get way more functionality. Just change blog to question and comments to answers.

I guess I would put it this way: The growth of societies needs and wants have far outpaced the capacity to deliver those. Not from a physical resource capacity but from an intellectual one. Combine this with the greed that is part of human nature, these large spikes and collapses will be common place until a new social-economic model is created. One that is a steady state model, which allows for the obsolesce of the antiqued without punishment.

I typically utilize Alexa and Compete or others as a good way to compare sites of a similar demographic. Having access to google analytics for two different sites; one being my blog and the other site is the company I work at.

I know that my blog gets about half the traffic of my companies site but the corporate site is ranked 370,673 and my blog is ranked 395,487. I would think there would be more of a difference in the two sites ranking.

But if I compare several of our companies competitors sites the numbers seem to line up. The numbers also make sense as trend data for a single site. I know from monitoring my blog when there is a spike in traffic; Compete and Alexa show a spike in their rankings.

Because Alexa captures their information through a browser plugin you want to make sure that the set of people that visit each site are equally likely to have the plugin installed. If people that read hacker news are half as likely to install the Alexa Plugin then people that read the new york times then there would be variability in comparing those two site.