skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In college I helped run the office of a non-profit that attempted to find jobs and homes for the homeless. The people we dealt with tended to have a massive number of problems. Sometimes it was outright drug use or mental illness. Other times it was simply never having any pattern of success in life. They wouldn't know how to make appointments, present themselves decently, be consistent, or talk intelligently.

I came to several conclusions:

1) You can try to infect them with a can-do attitude all you want, but the concept of working hard to build the good life is so alien they never buy into the program. Yes, the guy in the story is right, success does come down to attitude. But changing someone's attitude is much, much harder than just giving out money.

2) The existence of the minimum wage hurts the homeless. The people I worked with were incapable of producing $6 an hour of value for an employer. If there was no minimum wage, they could work $2 an hour of value and then gradually work their way up. I don't know how many would actually do this, but at least they should have the choice. Because they are legally prevented from getting a job, they usually end up doing black market work like selling flowers or collecting cans which has no path of upward mobility.

3) I tend to think supportive housing is the best you can do. Give them stable place to live and gradually push them towards being more productive. It often ends up being cheaper than the cost of shelters + emergency room care + police monitoring of the streets. Of course, few cities want to build this kind of housing for fear of becoming a draw for the homeless.

Keep in mind, I'm talking about the hardest cases. There were people who managed to have a good attitude and rebound very quickly. One great example was a woman who just got out of prison from drug use and was looking for a job. We helped coach her on how to answer interview questions about her past, and she ended up getting a job at Sears.
Microsoft researchers make me cry
That depends on what you mean by the word 'a'.
He also had nothing to lose. He knew he wasn't going to starve, so he had no reason to fear failure.
African-American woman. Born to teenage unwed mother in rural Mississippi. Later raised in Milwaukee ghetto. Molested by relatives at age nine. Runaway, living on streets as teenager. Pregnant and gives birth to son (who died in infancy) at 14. Drug user in her 20s. Extraordinary stage presence and social and Oratorical skills since early childhood.

Oprah
Video startup Revver sells to unpredictable ex-MySpace boss
A Data Point on Every Block (Interview with Adrian Holovaty)
Response seemed a little slow to me, but I don't know what the quality of the staging was by the time it got to my browser so I'll reserve judgement.

I hope this framework does not make the mistake of that other Windows-look framework has done, is overly model everything down to a setter/getter for the minutest datapoint -- end result is an uncompressed codebase that drags during creation and freeing.

Cut some corners, leave a few nodes out of those object hierarchies, and put more code on a single line - won't bother me any.
The Google Myth Rolls to Mobile
Google: mobile searches will outnumber fixed searches within several years
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
The youtube video the author is referencing is this one: http://youtube.com/watch?v=juOQhTuzDQ0
In the city where I live, some of the homeless are mentally ill. A friend who works for one of the city hospitals says a lot of homeless hang out near the hospital, they scare her when she goes to work there early but they are desparate to be admitted and taken off the streets.
so what? are you saying the reason poor people stay poor is their fear of starving?
Hiring Linux hackers who like to write
I am looking to hire writers for my Linux related Blog. For contact information, look at the bottom of the post. :) Flames are welcome!
guys please don't downmod him. he's not trolling. he expressed an opinion and wrote it with some clarity. that's interesting even if you disagree. we shouldn't dissuade people form expressing unpopular opinions well. only from expressing any opinions badly.
This was going to happen eventually. I'm startled, but not surprised.
Unsolvable by me.
I'm guessing Microsoft has invented a two-wheeled gyro-stabilized personal vehicle which will revolutionize transportation.
he sais he doesnt have someone in mind, so taking the risk to do it on his own is an indication at least of passion.
You should NOT use any library that messes with Object.prototype or Array.prototype, then this won't be a problem and the for loops will work just fine.
> Get a travel visa and a sham marriage.

It's difficult for me to say that I support this but immigration regulations are so rediculous and I have seen this technique used very successfully several times so I must say that I agree.

This isn't unique to the US' immigration regulations either.
Points well taken
Wow, this is very interesting and informative and inspirational at the same time. Much respect. Is there an elaboration somewhere?
have a day job and code at night
This is definitely a valid point.
"typically those are extremely remote/rural areas"

This study (conducted in Chicago and Boston in 2002) indicates that resumes with names like Todd and Brendan get a 50% higher callback rate than names like Rasheed and Kareem:

http://www.chicagogsb.edu/pdf/bertrand.pdf

Presumably it's worse in the south. Not that I've ever been there.
I'd be interested in hearing why you prefer OTP over asymmetric crypto...because the way I see it, one huge problem with OTP is that the authenticator needs to know the 'shared secret' on the device...Smart cards and similar devices using public key encryption have no such requirement.

I guess one benefit of OTP tokens is that they don't need to be physically connected to the computer (hence no software to install period), but when it comes right down to it, they're really not much better than just username/password when it comes to phishing or real-time keylogging attacks...not to mention the fact that you have to type that huge number /in addition to/ your regular credentials...
Ask News.YC: I need remedial marketing lessons
I know there are some people on news.yc who are not only hackers, but have business savvy, and I really need some advice.

I started my project because existing photo-sharing sites didn't do what I wanted. Like a lot of parents, I'm busy and don't have a lot of time to organize photos. I made a site that automatically organizes in a nice layout that scales easily to several years' worth of photos. For anybody who has a backlog of photos that tell a story (kids' activities, travel, etc.) I strongly feel I've made the best site.

The problem is I've chosen the worst market. Yes, there are lots of parents out there with piles of photos on their hard drives. Yes, they're interested in sharing them. But no, their hair is not on fire. Photo sharing is one of many good things they'd like to get around to some day.

I have about ten people actively posting photos to the site, but they're all people I've directly talked to and/or shown the site to. What does it take to go viral?

Or where do I turn next to find the right customers? What I've ended up with is a lot like a blogging site, but with much better photo support. But bloggers tend to pick one platform and stick with it. Where do new bloggers come from?

Some private schools want to draw parents in more to what's happening inside the school. School administrators have little time. I have something that lets you instantly document recent events. Is that a market I should pursue?

I've integrated with Piclens for slideshows. I can send traffic their way; perhaps I should get them sending traffic my way. Are there other services I could integrate with that might boost my marketing/sales efforts?

Is there some other way to go viral with busy parents that I haven't thought of?

If any of you have a few months' worth of digital photos that lend themselves to chronological organization, could you take 5 minutes to try ourdoings.com and see if there are any rough edges, or if you notice any points where I'm missing an opportunity to make things viral? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Honestly, to write a book about it is a little self serving.

- Better Option: Blog about it.
I've been looking at Google Checkout. One compelling advantage is that they don't charge CC processing fees up to 10* what you spend on AdWords. Has anyone here had experience integrating with that?

They don't explicitly handle subscriptions now but that wouldn't be hard to build a recurring charge process.

http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer...
Its a tad strange to read such a story, about new york times, on its own website. Guess its a tribute to journalism; to say something hard to say about your own company/industry
Ask YC: Your opinion on webpy for web programming
I am new in web programming using python and i will like to have this forums take on webpy. i know python and i find webpy to be light on the brain, but i dont know if it can handle a digg effect. please advice.
(PG) said get a co-founder,and yes he is The Authority.
The first time I went to Cambridge to visit MIT (and was incidentally first getting into Lisp), I noticed the Massachusetts slogan on the automotive license plates: "Spirit of America".

This, of course, made me think of the Beach Boys song "Spirit of America," which includes the lines:

Once as a jet it played in the stars
But now on the ground it's the king of our cars

and thus I now have this interesting and seemingly permanent cognitive mapping in my mind between Massachusetts, the Beach Boys, MIT, Lisp, and "car". Lisp without car, to me, would just be awful... but for reasons that likely don't apply to anyone else on the planet. :-)
I think they are releasing something new like 'online/offline' (think Google gears) for their flash alternative silver light. The problem is having something that users must download.
I hope Nasa & CSPAN team up to make a video
Ok, now that i think about it. Maybe a chemical response is more effective.

What about having a risk, recovery time.

If you post, you can have karma at risk, if it gets a few negative responses, it can recover, but if it gets 3 or more, the karma is lost.

We can all know what it means to give 3 strikes, so it only takes 3 of us to call it spam, while the post is risking karma for each link.

I feel like this has a lot in common with learning systems in how neurons sum signals and vote an outcome.
I tend to use car and cdr when I'm writing functions with some kind of list recursion, and first and rest when I'm using lists as a data structure - not so much of a difference really, but seems to be a useful way to see quickly what a function's doing.
An extensible Windows XP with a proper CLI?
>>I have about ten people actively posting photos to the site, but they're all people I've directly talked to and/or shown the site to.

I don't know about going viral, but marketing is hard work. You have to budget time for it every day, especially early on. Of course, I'm an advocate of working smart, and hopefully some other people on here will have the kind of tips you're asking for; I'm just saying that pounding the pavement, especially for something that isn't inherently viral, is a necessary but not sufficient part of marketing.

There was a good article on Techcrunch a while back about how most of the "viral" videos you see on the Web actually have had a lot of effort (and in some cases dollars spent) in getting them out there.
Very nice, I always wondered the same thing about chaining together conditionals.
Why You Should Let Users Define Your App
Dayum that sucks! But I agree that web apps should look like web apps and desktop apps should look like a desktop. Not that there is anything wrong with the latter. So how did the project go?
I found Django easier to use with better support from the community and documentation.

I wouldn't worry about the digg effect. Worry about making something good -- which means making anything as fast as possible and asking people what they really want.
OK, then let me try another example.

The whole time I read the OP, I felt like I was watching a trapeez act with a safety net. The young man KNEW he couldn't fail (just like the trapeez artist can try something extra difficult because he KNEW he wouldn't die.)

Kinda took the wind out of what was otherwise a good story.
Another thing to consider:

We've been about 70% complete for version 1 roughly half a dozen times now. We were 70% complete in April of last year, which we actually did release (it's getting users now, but not many). We were 70% complete in October, when we sent along a demo with our YC app. But we realized that it wouldn't work for the general case, so we went back to the drawing board. We were 70% complete in November, when I realized we were rewriting things too much with each additional feature and stepped back for a week to actually design the thing. We were 70% (well, more like 50% by my reckoning) complete in December, when we switched web frameworks. We're about 70% complete now, though if this is anything like past 70%s, it's probably more like 40%. Now I don't trust any estimate that's not backed up by Trac tickets.

Always remember the 90-90 rule: "The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90%."

Many startups have to go through multiple rewrites before they have something useful - Reddit's on their 3rd (though they launched with their first), I heard Xobni had to redo their first try to be more ambitious, YouTube completely revamped the site to make it stickier, my last day job went through about 4 rewrites before we launched the product (which is the 7th product it's launched...none of them really got product-market fit), the job before that changed directions 4 times in the year I was there and completely rewrote things about a half-dozen times, never actually releasing anything.

I'd look at the stuff you do now as exploratory programming; your job is to find out more about the area, so that it eventually gets to the point where it "clicks" and you can just crank out code that works. You're still very early in the product process; a cofounder could add a lot of value down the road.
A few years back I would have agreed with you. But since the birth of jQuery. I can't say your statement holds any weight now.
Well, yeah: If you pay them to be entertainingly ignorant, Americans are very good at being entertainingly ignorant.

I mean, geez, the show is called "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader". If I were a guest on that show, I would damn well find a way to make the fifth grader look smart. Otherwise I would be a spoilsport, a far greater sin in American culture than pretending to be stupid.

Replace Ms. Pickler with the all-time Jeopardy champion, and the show is boring. The guy just gets everything right, the kids get frustrated, the premise falls apart. Then they leave him on the cutting room floor. Not much of a way to get ahead in your career.

I'd say that Pickler did an excellent job -- her bravura performance as an idiot seems to have landed her a mention in the Times, made her extra famous on YouTube, and probably boosted her asking price for her next gig. Now even I have heard of her, and I've never watched five minutes of American Idol!

Whether or not I think that such a show should exist is a different question, but that's kind of beside the point. Who am I to decide? I am pretty sure that, in a culture that has spent fifty years promoting egghead-positive television like Jeopardy and the more recent Millionaire, this kind of parody is bound to become popular now and then.
I don't know how the issue of fear would affect him, but as far as not having anything to lose, I believe that he had the same if not more to lose than people who are actually living in those conditions.
The best way to get users is not through marketing jujitsu, but simply by making great things. Word of mouth was good enough for Google. So go talk to your users. What do they like about the site? What would make them like it more? What do you have to do to make the site so great that they not only use it, but gush to everyone they know about it? When you get to that point, your problem is solved.
Ok Gumtree is a better name than Kijiji.
I agree...actually nobody should be allowed to submit 10 in an hour!
A little googling later..

http://peteremcc.wordpress.com/2008/02/15/scobles-mystery-so...
You definitely have to agree upfront on what stake/salary your employee would get. And when you say "this is my vision and things should be done my way" it makes me think you're looking for more of an employee than a cofounder. Which is fine, by the way, just be aware that that isn't a very cofounder-like mentality.

You're still very early stage, so the first person you brought on would probably need a significant chunk of equity, unless you're paying a nice salary.
It would be pretty strange for you to give a cofounder more than 50% equity.
Upmod for arbitrary free association. Now I too cannot imagine Lisp without car. I might say you've consed me into your way of thinking...
The article seems to say:

Theorem: If someone has been educated on how to operate (and succeed) in the current microeconomic environment, then that person can succeed in the current microeconomic environment.

Proof: The author knows how to succeed, and he does. QED.

Only problem? It needs a larger sample size.

(Also, there are skills and habits you learn in college that cannot be put on a resumé.)

The article is not saying that the American Dream is either "real" or "possible" for most people; on the contrary, this seems to be a contrived situation in which unjustified conclusions are drawn from the experiences of one example.
Yeah, American's are meta-stupid!
I think the talk might be good for people who don't see what the big deal is, or how being distributed leads to interesting possibilities.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, powered by Windows
I bookmarked your site and may get around to trying it sometime, although I may have almost as little time as a new parent. :)

Quick thoughts, no intelligence guaranteed:

Your pricing plans are organized backwards. Click the link, glance at the leftmost column where the cheap option always is, see "$52", have a 500-millisecond heart attack. Then keep reading and notice that it does get cheaper. Great! Except that the damage has been done: the $52 sticks in my brain. Not good.

$52 is too much to quote. Especially with your wacky (nifty?) "pay for what you use" plan. If you have that plan, use it! Quote a price per picture! Or, if that's too late-night-infomercial a tactic for you, quote a price per 250 pictures, which is conveniently about $26. (Price of a 1 year Flickr Pro account with unlimited pictures: $25. Unless I'm missing something. If I am missing something your site needs to explain it to me or I'm just going to buy Flickr.)

"TBD" is bad. Flickr doesn't give me any of this "TBD". I can tell exactly what the limits of my free account are. You should pick a number and put it there... having "TBD" there gives the subliminal impression that you're a newb and haven't figured it out yet. :)

You have a hard row to hoe. Flickr has the mindshare, they've got the network effect, they've got deep pockets in the form of a giant corporate owner who may soon be sold to an even larger corporate owner. You might consider positioning yourself as the perfect place to move to when you get sick of having your Flickr photos owned by Microsoft. I'm only half joking. How's your Flickr import tool? :)

Finally, if you have good photo support for bloggers but can't get the bloggers to move to you, can you move to them? Can you take any small bites of Photobucket's market? Is there any point in a Facebook app? (Doubtful, but what do I know?) A plugin that lets you embed slideshows into a Blogger/Livejournal/MySpace/??? page?
That's where I find myself now. I'm trying to bite the bullet and just use emacs for daily tasks, but it's hard to switch!
You can add:

4) The guy is cautious because he has been burnt before. Every cofounder he has had has in previous ventures has either: failed to fully commit, failed to perform, reneged on their agreement, suffered personal tragedy, or died.

Just because someone doesn't have a co-founder doesn't mean that it must be 1, 2, or 3. Personally, I'm tired of hearing #1 - I've always thought it was without logic.

And don't forget - it's a lot easier to find co-founders when you're still in school with like minded people with time on their hands. Things get a lot tougher when your peers (if you can find any) have families and mortgages. Not being able to miss a paycheck is a tough hurdle to overcome.

Finding a co-founder is more like getting married than dating. I'd much rather be alone than be with the wrong person. I'll either find the right person or launch alone. In the meantime, I keep working.

If you have a good team, consider yourself very fortunate! You've already completed a hurdle that others struggle with through no fault of their own. So they keep on working and reaching out to groups like this. OP is looking for suggestions, not a diagnosis of what's wrong with him from a stranger.
What you're saying is true, but not simple. Suppose I'm providing a shoe-shine service. I understand my customers well and make every improvement I can think of, but still don't generate excitement. How do I tell if (1) the next improvement will lead to the tipping point or (2) no improvement will generate excitement until I target a different set of people more likely to get excited about shoe shining or (3) Nobody else is as excited about shoe shines as I am, and to generate excitement I need to take my service in a different direction? There are three possible paths. Which one leads to making something great?
This is excellent advice. Funny it comes from the same person I disagreed with above. Oh well.
You said it much more elegantly than I could. To add to reasons why it's hard to find a co-founder, it's harder to find a hacker co-founder when you've just started on the path to hackerdom, as is my case.
Excellent news. Now there is something for Novell to collect on SCO's infringements.
This one is a big one, and still full of fuel. It is possible that it poses a small danger. That said, the military just loves its toys...
Sept 2007 isn't very long ago. It seems this person you know would be interested in adding features and you should let him. Even if you don't like them all you can make them optional. It just doesn't seem like you have a lot to loose and only stand to gain a great deal in this. His work will "make the pie bigger" so to speak, raise your valuation in the end.
I don't think going viral works as well with busy parents as it does with teens and college students.

If you want to focus on busy parents, I think working this from a different angle would work best. If your service has any special features that you feel are newsworthy, you could try submitting it to local newspapers (used by busy parents much more than the internet still).

Another angle to consider: What if you could partner with a camera manufacturer to bundle a client-side program that integrated with your site? If you could convince a manufacturer that your service is worth partnering with, you will see a tremendous amount of growth and revenue (if things are done right).

I think in order to successfully market to busy parents, you have to be a seamless link in the chain that links the picture from the moment it's taken to the moment is arrives in grandma's inbox (which represents what the majority of busy parents want to do with their photos - that and archiving). One product I've seen that has this in mind is a wifi-enabled SD card that automatically sent pictures to your network when it was in range. Your service is the next link - the one that brings the images from the computer to the internet, and even to grandma's inbox. Keep that in mind as you go forward and I think you'll do well.