skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do?
First, the context:

I just started building an MVP for a piece of software with a co-founder. We have a couple of clients who will pay, including one who is actively involved in sharing insights on the problems she faces and why she would need this software. We're looking to have the beta into our customers' hands in about a month. It will have taken 6w to build on nights and weekends. I'm starting marketing efforts in earnest, and ranking highly for key keywords is doable.

The software is for self-employed people who do a certain type of work (let's call it A), but it can be used by self-employed ppl who do other types of work too (B-Z).

There is a market for this software for organizations that employ many of these individuals under a larger brand (let's call them BigOrgs). The problem is that this software is overly complicated for self-employed people like my initial customers. So, we're aiming for simple and focused on the self-employed market. Also, most of the offerings in this space are visually complex and don't leverage the things many of us take for granted (social media marketing, APIs, Ajax, widgetization, clean interface, etc. Not that these make for a good product, mind you, but when used in the right doses they can make for a much better experience than one built in the late 90s, which is when many competing products were built).

Me and my co-founder are not trying to build a multi-million dollar biz. A biz with $500k of sustainable annual revenue (it's a high margin biz) would put us in a great position to build more products without taking on outside capital.

Now, the issue:

Just found a competitor who knows what they're doing. They're funded (a small round) by the who's who of SV angels. They're aiming at the BigOrgs, but their software appeals to the self-employed folks I'm building for too.

They're ranked highly for valuable keywords and have been around for three years. Their marketing strategy basically emulates mine, and they've gotten press amongst the usual SV blog suspects, along with sites like the NY Times. Articles claim they have 10s of thousands of users.

Their site looks pretty but isn't as easy to use as ours.

My analysis:

I'm not worried about the funding - we're happily bootstrapping off of a long term, flexible consulting contract. It also means they are required to go big (growth uber alles) and land big clients, which excites me - we're not interested in the BigOrgs market. The self-employed one is the underserved one in my analysis.

Their high keyword rankings are worrisome, as are their press mentions and 3 years of learnings.

My question:

Do we continue on as planned, nichify (market our products for self-employed people who do A, B, and C even though D-Z can use it, and then grow after we have a stable base?), or pivot (there are a bunch of other lucrative products for the same market that we can build, but aren't related to the core product we're building right now).

Thanks for your help!
Twitter is hiring a software engineer for their "Monetization infrastructure"
How is it beneficial to Heyzap?
The ability to diff two environments would also be useful, it would allow you to find folks that were close to yours but different (e.g. same tools different settings) vs. different tools.
If nothing else, it points to one possible viable exit.
My thoughts are that "regulars" deserve special treatment over normal users. It creates loyalty, and you want the regulars to be loyal.

Look at airline loyalty programs, for example. Ask a once-a-year traveler how much he likes "Foo Airlines", then ask someone who travels 100,000 miles a year on Foo Airlines. The person who travels 100,000 miles a year will like Foo Airlines a lot more than the once-a-year traveler because Foo Airlines rewards his loyalty with lots of free stuff that "normal users" don't get.

I don't see why the people involved in the open-source community would be any different.
None of this helps against physical access to your machine, at all.
I have seen mst in action, and his techniques are pretty effective. I think I have had just as much luck with newbies by being nice, however... but perhaps not.

(My reaction upon being yelled at would be to leave, but this is not the behavior I observe in other people. mst has quite a few fans that started off as "victims" of the techniques he describes in the artice.)
YOU USED ALL CAPS, DUMBASS!!!! ;)
Essentially all appeals to culture as an explanation are "X does Y, because they do. We have no convincing explanation at to why, but ??? is unsatisfying so we're putting down the reason as 'culture'." For this argument at much greater length, see "Making Common Sense of Japan", which is sadly out of print. (I go back and forth on how much stock I put in it.)

Speaking of which: if book learning and rejection of religious rites makes startups, then you all should be working for Japan, China, or Russia by now, and I should be getting drunk or whatever it is us papists do when not steeping ourselves in dogma. ;) This of course invites the cultural non-explanation: well, granted we did just say that book learning mattered, but there is another offsetting feature of Japanese/Chinese/Russian culture which means it doesn't quite work for them. Oh, except you've got stats which say that Japan actually does have a lot of startups? No problem -- it's what you would expect given their culture and all.
The Fake Freeway Sign that Became a Real Public Service
Thanks for replying. I'm not really an IRC person, but I find that the best online communities are ones in which real names and adherence to real life social norms are encouraged. You're a rare person if you would say what you did to the newbie in your example in real life. Personally, I feel it would be just as good if the conversation went this way:

newbie: I'm trying to parse out the td tags in this HTML and I can't get the regexp right

expert: Please don't parse HTML with regexps - try HTML::TableExtract.

newbie: my regexp is /<td>(.*)</ but it doesn't work

mst: newbie: You can't use regexps to parse HTML. Look at this module: ... Now we've answered you twice. If you ask again, you'll be muted for a few minutes.

Continued persistence on the part of the newbie should be met the same way you would in real life. Tell him if he keeps bothering you, you'll uninvite him from your club, and then follow through. The community's purpose is not to educate outsiders who don't wish to receive an education, but for the enrichment of people who will participate as equals. Establishing a norm of unpleasantness, even on the periphery, for the sake of a dubious chance at helping out is not a tradeoff I'd make.
How about them being smart enough to recognize the good idea and find the talent as well? Am I naive? I understand that VCs are not the ones that need the money but also they want to make money.

"While some members of Grotech's team liked Wieler's idea, they said he didn't articulate his vision for the company very well."

If they liked it where is the problem then?

T.
During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.

- That pretty much sums it up for me. I'm totally convinced. You guys?

Honestly though if we're going to post politically charged articles to HN can we at least get some from more respected columnists like Seymour Hersh or Thomas Friedman.
Yep, agreed and I believe they created the MochiKit and SimpleJSON projects as well.

FWIW, MochiWeb is also used by CouchDB and some other Erlang projects too.
Successful competitors are God's way of signalling that there is money to be made in a field. Most markets are not winner take all and can support several firms, so if you're trying to demonstrate to a skeptical observer that your idea has value, you can say a) "Look at X, they're successful." and b) "You can't buy X at any attractive price, but happily for you, we're still cheap. Comparatively speaking."

That assumes you care about acquisitions. If you don't, though, same deal except you get to convince yourself. If one of my competitors mentioned they're making, say, a few million, that would be great news for me: it would mean there's a few million to be made. (I used to think my entire market generated probably $100,000 in sales a year. I'm thinking that probably substantially underestimates the current total, and think the size of the pie can still be increased.)
I'm glad that this technique worked for a few people that are now friends with mst, but I think an even better outcome might have been achieved with a gentler approach. Naturally, how mst goes about his business is his own affair, but I think it's worth having the opposing viewpoint especially in an article like this.
Near the end of the article:

One source noted that the reason VMware was interested in nabbing Zimbra is that its execs want to expand “up the stack” from the Silicon Valley software company’s position in virtualization.
Google is essentially forcing Survival Of The Fittest without having to spend energy to fight themselves, or in geek history terms, Google is forcing Microsoft on Apple.
Once again: disagreement doesn't equal down vote people. The orange Y at the top should tip you off that you're not on reddit.
How To Hide^H^H^Handle Security Vulnerabilities In Your Products
The Jewish tradition may be learning-based, but it's ideas about learning are extremely deferential & scholastic way. A Jewish scholar can quote sages the debates that they had.

If I had to use common sense to guess what a traditional Jewish education would qualify for, I would guess lawyers.

Anyway, this is all very theoretical. Most Jews do not receive a traditional Jewish education and most of those in the Tel Aviv startup scene are probably at least 2nd generation seculars or more.
How many customers do you need to hit your mark? it is less than 10% of your competitor? Think about churn and picking up their scraps, as it were. You may be able to survive as a small fish, if you are trying to build a so-called lifestyle biz.
What's wrong in your example is that you supply no reasons to pay attention to you, then fly into a rage when you are not paid attention to.

A better way would look something like this:

Grasshopper: I'm trying to parse out the td tags in this HTML and I can't get the regexp right

Master: HTML allows many variations. Making a regex to handle all possibilities is too hard.

Master: Instead use HTML::TableExtract. You can learn to use it faster than you fix all the tricky problems in a regex.
Don't be put off by the verbiage/newsprint up top. The meat is available here below from 167 contributors:

http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_print.html#responses
Thanks. I will look into that. I was reading about solr, lucene, sphinx etc. I guess I just have to pick one.
So let's setup a system whereby a customized email is sent to users every morning: "Today was a great day! You walked 25 miles before a thrilling and ultimately triumphant encounter with an aged caribou that took 30 minutes of fierce running. Clean water was extremely scarce, but you managed also to find some grubs along the way. Feast away, the meat rots in 24 hours. Injuries included minor laceration to the left quadriceps and some blistering of the feet. Your search for a mate goes empty handed."

It's left up to the user to replicate the salient details in reality. Although perhaps with a mobile device, this app could be real-time.
It's not inevitable for everyone, just the majority. And guess what: you will support them one way or another. Either by providing a retirement they can live on or by paying for their housing/food stamps.

You could try making household economics an education focus, but countries with a much higher average IQ still have Social Security-like systems, so it seems that people simply wont do this for themselves, on average.
Though it seems that being a 'natural law' doesn't prevent you from getting a patent though. See the human gene/dna patents.
Calling Android a rip-off of Windows Mobile is hilarious. If Windows Mobile were one tenth as good as Android, I doubt anyone would be considering non-Microsoft smartphones. But the fact of the matter is that Windows Mobile is a nightmare to use and a nightmare to program for -- and is very, very outdated.

Android may be a rip off of iPhone OS, but it's certainly not a rip off of Windows Mobile.

(I could barely even make calls on my Windows Mobile phone, much less browse the Internet in a meaningful way. On Android, those two things both work wonderfully.)
This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's piece about his discussion on the Black Swan theory[1] with an Italian colleague. The colleague argues that he would not have come up with the theory had he grown up in a Protestant culture because of its Platonic tendencies. Suffice it to say, Taleb uses hard evidence to prove such causality doesn't exist.

In Outliers[2], Malcolm Gladwell shows why Jewish lawyers tend to be more successful. A few decades ago, it was difficult for Jews to find work at the top Wall Street firms because of the WASP[3] tradition. So instead they established their own firms and handled work that the WASP firms refused to touch, such as corporate takeovers. This work later became big in the 80's, and the Jewish firms were the ones that had all the experience, so the money went there.

It would be easy (and naive) to attribute the success of Jewish lawyers to their cultural heritage, but Gladwell's explanation is much more convincing, and he actually uses data to back his assertions up. I do think culture influences mindsets, but I also think it's practically impossible to discover how it does so. Arguments like the author's are absurd. However, it is fascinating how successful Jews tend to be overall, as pointed out in the article. I wonder what alternative explanations there are.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant
Make doing screencasts with voice easier and then I'll get back to you.
The thing is, the people he yells at tend to stick around. There is not some tiny in-group of mst fans.

To be fair, though, you can only have so many msts in a community. When the other people are nice, a dialog like:

newbie: I'm dumb and can't read, do my work for me
mst: PASTE YOUR CODE IDIOT!!
nicer_person: newbie: good idea... although to be fair, there isn't much to read on this subject

often emerges. Now newbie has a friend in nicer_person; someone who probably wouldn't have said anything if mst hadn't yelled at the newbie.
Assembly Language Step By Step, for Linux
The next line in that conversation is:

newbie: WTF. But I just wanted help with my regexp! Quit being a nazi! You have no right to ban me I'm just trying to ask a question!

or them quitting immediately. Or at least, it has usually been one of the two in my experience. But I'm not going to claim that means the technique doesn't work; just that it hasn't, for me, so far. I should probably experiment more with it but I suspect it will, oddly, come across far more heavy handed than a bout of profanity.
This will make essential reading:

http://businessofsoftware.org/ebook.aspx

Although it's primarily concerned about pricing, the process of pricing requires consideration of your product placement with regard to the competition. Enjoy!
Grendel: free/open source software for protecting your cloud data
"LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot."
This post is great; right on, in my opinion.

Remember webmail before Gmail came along? My free Hotmail account stored something like 2 MB - it was a joke. Google gets into lots of different domains to scare companies into action, but I'm pretty sure most of their revenue still comes from search advertising (maybe someone can verify that?).

It's a fantastic long-term strategy as they're setting the stage for even more success. More than any other company I know of, Google has an eye towards the future.
1. Do some market research, actually having some competition will make market research much easier - phone their clients and simply ask them which new features they would like and what things do they have trouble with, then target clients with similar profiles.

2. You could build a migration tool so that you can approach their smaller clients, offer a cheaper package with the guarantee that you can migrate their existing data.
Ask PG: Feature request, down/up vote history
Hello,

I would like to request that a given post has not only the total score, but a link to show exactly who voted and how. I think this might help to bring back accountability for people who are misusing the voting system.

Thanks for your time,
Ytinas
For exactly zero of the twelve users listed, no.
Hence the interest in genetic programming ;)

Edit: Most systems seem to lack any sort of intelligent design
people often cite patents as the reason for this (lack of multi-touch) but I don't think it's the real reason. For starters almost everyone else is using multi-touch, and from what I understand (I haven't any dev experience with Android) multi-touch support is built into the OS, just that the default apps don't use it
That is a completely separate task from learning to develop software.

You need platform source code access if you're doing low-level integration work, which is precisely what you don't do as a beginner.

Windows isn't the best platform for writing software but it's just fine. Python and Emacs work on it just fine, as do MySQL and other important software. Categorically asserting you can't learn how to structure code without having access to terabytes of C code is total fucking bullshit which is why I stand by the original statement.
Sure. And in the IRC channel where that sort of question is common, we have a factoid that points this out, politely, with plenty of links.

However, your point that the example sucks is good; I've fleshed it out somewhat (and still consider it representative of what I'm attempting to describe)
Cars. Why spend years designing a better engine if your competitor will just copy it in six months?

Aircraft. Same.

Basically every time you need a huge assembly line or factory to produce a product that can be regularly updated.
I think this will give people more incentives to misuse the voting system. What if I start down-voting everyone who down-voted me? Of course then you can see that I down-voted you, but that would not help much other than further deteriorating the quality of the votes.

If you are worried about voting rings and such, I guess the admins should have tools for that and we should let them do the housekeeping.
Works great when the artist is smart and safe.

Works poorly when the artist doesn't think the edits through, doesn't take adequate safety precautions, or makes a worse mess of things.

And don't even get me going about the people who think highway signs need more "creative" editing (the first "STOP ... Hammertime" sign was funny; the 15th wasn't).
Moral Responsibilities
I learned Assembly from a book called Mastering Turbo Assembler by a guy named Tom Swan. That was for DOS (early nineties). I'm definitely going to buy this book even if it's just for nostalgic reasons.
Old-time or bluegrass 'jer ?
The facts that Facebook saves and keeps all interaction and user generated data and their engineers can access that data should be nothing new to you: Google, Amazon and every sane internet company do it too because they want to make decisions based on data.

The author clearly doesn't understand what he is talking about and doesn't try too hard to understand it; he wants to be sensational instead. Oh well.
+1! Thanks for the reminder. I'm fairly new to python and couldn't remember the keyword. I guess this is a reasonable argument for the time deadline - to get it done quickly I didn't look it up, instead doing the simplest thing I knew would work and thus exposing the pitiful state of my python experience :-)
How do you know that the responses aren't all paraphrased?
Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.
Can anyone help with this? From what I've gotten from google I'm meant to contact PG somehow.

It's not exactly clear how and if there's some channel I can use that doesn't clutter his inbox I'd like to try that first.

Edit: Thanks for the tip - title changed, hopefully that helps.
HiHandle?
Edit: I won't delete my comment, but yes I failed at counting.
It probably means its a good idea. Nobody ever gets total market and at the beginning you both have essentially zero market share. So compete hard for the clients they don't get. Or rope in people who've never heard of them. Just b/c they have nice uniforms and helmets doesn't mean they've scored lots of touchdowns.
Edit your title to add Ask PG. Hopefully PG will read those.

If you don't mind me asking, can we know why anyone would want to delete their account?
plus I always WANT to eat. NOM NOM NOM NOM
I wonder how many people are going to use this as an excuse to be a bastard.
That's a good one. We definitely don't want to be making native clients for every platform out there. It's on the to-do list, I'll see how far up we can push it.
First, you have to decide if you want to compete with them head on. This means beyond just having a similar product. It means going after the same customers and same everything.

If you do go that route, you should make use of the upsides. One upside is, you can reduce your risk by emulating their proven product design/market strategy. Steve Blank has a post on how he was able to get sooo much out of his competitor's catalog/specs.

Simply put, if there is a company with a product and lots of customers and you want to compete with it, you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you can emulate individual components of the competitor.

Now that you are close to even with them on product/marketing, you can find an area where you will be better than them. Pricing is weak. May be you can offer an added service. May be you can make some component more efficient and highlight the fact that you are more efficient than that competitor.

Competition can be real good if you know how to use your (successful) competition as free R&D.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Google just want that more people will use internet, and for longer time. That way, their ads will gain more exposure.
If these two are more respectful, I say let's better stay away from "political charged" articles entirely.
We aren't doing OCR right now. We are using your bookkeeper's eyes as the OCR. It is close to 100% effective, if not as space-agey.
Acquisitions are a time when companies get distracted and in some cases change direction completely.

For instance, Slicehost dropped the ball (just a little bit, not a lot) when they got acquired, and people have been moving over, or starting fresh with Linode.
Fixing a Hole in the Web
Well, humor may be misleading and easily misunderstood, but this article is not a scientific paper, and the rules of which things look better and which don't are different.
Last I heard, grinich (HN username) is starting one in Boston.
Thanks for the heads up. Is there any chance you'd be able to send over the diagnostic logs. It is an option in the Application Menu in the app, and would help speed along our fix.

Admittedly, we haven't tested it on a Storm yet. We'll get on that.

Thanks for the support. We'll let you know when you can properly use the app.
Ask HN: What Lisp dialect should I learn?
I don't know any functional language and would like to get started with Lisp. Which implementation should I go with? Maybe Clojure? It seems pretty popular on HN although it's not mainstream yet...
My invention for Phone Loss
Interesting both of my co-founders (tolmasky and boucher) showed up on most of my lists. I guess that means it works, since we tend to talk about similar things.