skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How's it different/better than something like OFBiz or one of the other open source systems? What's your edge over all the other project management things out there?

With open source, you're essentially foregoing any revenue from licensing in the hope that you'll make money consulting, unless you do something like have a GPL library where people will pay to be able to link to it in proprietary apps.

I'm not entirely convinced that the world needs yet another project management thing. I think it had either be really good and far better than what's out there now, in which case you can charge for it, or... perhaps another direction is best?

PS: YC's formatting isn't very advanced.
Hard choice. One other factor you didn't mention about is community. In releasing your code to a wider audience, you are trying to create a community around your code. Community requires support; a wiki/bug-tracker to post problems and solutions, a mailing-list to support conversations and questions, a robust source control server to host your code, and a understandable release process to push out new versions.

Also, you will need to write a lot of documentation about your code, how to install, how to extend, etc. You will probably want to write a FAQ first to fend off first-time newbie questions about installation, management, etc.

You will also have to make conscientious decisions about what versions your software will run on, and which requests you will support -- we run a stack on Tomcat 5.5 with Java 5, for example, but we have gotten X amount of questions about support for Java 6, JBoss, JRun, etc etc etc.

My two cents: it's rough to get other people involved. The good karma for open-sourcing can be more trouble if you are not organized about how to handle and attract new members to your project.
$15 billion / 50 million users = $300 per user.

That's a bargain compared to GeoCities, which, I believe was purchased by Yahoo for $1100 per user.
loopt has serious revenue. others might have more potential but that fact alone makes them the biggest yc success so far imo.
I only still have one because they won't let me delete it.
The history of Hello World on the web
As they say in Yorkshire - "wur thuz muck, thuz brasse"...
This would be circumstancial evidence for school being a popularity contest ( http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ).
Look at how well that went. For both companies.
No, but in my last job, I ran an internal FaceBook Haters mailing list. Predictably, the people who worked the hardest didn't have time to create a FaceBook account. So, every other member of the mailing list was a member of FaceBook and didn't want be on the outside of this group.
You think people want Facebook to fail? My impression is the opposite.

Seems like everyone with money invested in web 2.0 really wants them to succeed. Your argument works equally well there. Don't be so sure of Facebook's infallibility, either.

Basically, everybody just chill out.
You're awesome. Thanks tons.

(I'm trying to keep the "front-facing" pages session-free to benefit shared caches, but that tab needs a different label than "Log In".
This could work, but I'd recommend scaling to sqrt(karma) or log10(karma) to offset the network effect a little.
I think a major factor for you guys, which davidw referenced as a motivational engine, is rapid development cycles, if you release SOMETHING quickly you are not discouraged so easily.

4-6 weeks is generally my max. time for spitting something out, otherwise I get bored and slowly stray away and eventually leave the project/app alone. Like if it's 12, 16, 24, or 3 months etc. to get something out, by that time my attention has been moved elsewhere.

My answers to your questions should definitely not to be considered as advice(except for 2 and 3), but:

1. I make them the way I want, or very close too it. Or I leave.

2. After I get feedback from people other than the ones involved in the development of the product, or after you release for use and there is no/a negative response from your users.

3. Once again, after you release and it doesn't work, try to fix it. Ask your users what they want, can you give it to them? No? Call it quits. Yes? Keep on going!
Some people keep using FaceBook because it doesn't easily let you delete your account and your peers have an expectation that your account should be current. In the long term this may work against FaceBook. The popularity of a social network site evaporates when the proportion of inactive web pages hits a threshold. A similar phenomen occurs in online games. The online worlds expand with the number of users but then interaction becomes very sparse when the number of users declines. This creates a downward spiral of decline. Anyhow, if FaceBook can reduce the prominance of dormant accounts and rely on peer pressure then an active user base can be maintained. However, social network sites don't have natural monopolies because sooner or later, you'll encounter a stage five clinger.
Scons is a good hint. I'm fairly happy with AAP but it is not really maintained anymore. Scons seems to have the same compact and to the point build files. Thanks!
Seth Godin’s New Standard: Does your product lower stress? « FoundRead
Google’s Flawed MSFT/YHOO Strategy
This sort of thing is often heard and there is a little truth to it, but people who think this way reveal more about themselves than the state of the art.

An assembly language is just a nice presentation for machine code which regulates the load, compute and store activity of some kind of processor and in a sense the familiar "crud" part of SQL expresses similar activity in some kind of database. Both are widely used and both are also fairly old and often automatically generated from higher level abstractions.

Whether or not either is modern is more of a function of what "level" you're operating. "Modern" has a different meaning to someone working at the level of Hadoop processes and Amazon services then to someone working with GPGPUs.
There's a coastal bay town in the UK called Brighton where furniture moving is very profitable. This may be because distance travelled is very small and this allows a greater number of tasks to be completed without diminishing value.
> I think it had either be really good and far better than

>what's out there now, in which case you can charge for it

That is what we plan to do. The idea is that over time, we will have a full service, not just a project management. A hrms system, a payroll system, a project management system, which all tie together. That is what makes big ERPs be able to charge such high licensing fee. This is what we plan to bring to SMEs
Dogbert recommends golf because it is on the intersection of people with too much time, too much money and no taste. I'm sure that they'd click on your ads.
10 teams in Google's $30 million race to moon
I always find it useful to go back to the roots, i.e read again that book that made you like programming, play that album that got you into music, watch the movie that made you fall in love with your significant other, read the parts of your code that were the most gratifying to write, and just remember why you initially thought that your startup was going to succeed.
Is it legal to tip candidates? I thought there was a $2000 maximum donation per person per candidate, and only U.S. citizens could donate.
That would explain the following quote:

From the article: "I put in two, maybe three hours a day on the site, and the checks pour in," he says. "What's not to like?"

My first reaction was that if you spend three hours per day and earn a huge amount of money then why not spend six hours per day and earn twice as much money? He cannot do that because he's maxed his niche. Any additional effort obtains diminishing returns and he cannot scale this success as a business with employees.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. - Mahatma Gandhi
SCons, for sure, is the way to go. I use Emacs/c-scope as my editing environment, and keep a browser and terminal (man pages) open for API reference (dinkumware.com is a good one. They have full C99 an stdc++ library documentation)

Definitely make sure you're not coding something that's already been done in boost. The boost libraries (most of them) are very nice. If you're using one of the latest versions of GCC, then you can use some TR1 stuff (although I think boost has a more complete TR1 implementation (http://boost.org/doc/html/boost_tr1.html)

Also, I don't know about most folks, but I also keep an IRC client open connected to #<whatever language> and a pastebin (http://pastebin.com/) tab open to discuss code with people when I don't have anyone else to work with.
First off - don't let me put you off - you are managers of your own destiny but...

I am not sure that SMEs do a lot of formal project management - they might just possibly buy a copy of MS Project but that's as far as it goes in the main. I am sure there is a generic ERP market among SMEs but those folks are careful with their money - spending it in areas that are more central to the areas where they make money. One problem area is going to be the sheer diversity of the market place - large corporations are remarkably similar (hence the wide adoption of SAP perhaps) - but SMEs tend to run leaner and making more use of individual skills - thus shaping their operational procedures around people rather than corporate "this is how it's done". I would look for a vertical market to tackle first while striving to make each ERP component as generic as possible. Good luck anyway.
Hollywood and the Internet: There will be blood
"First you need to stop asking such questions. These are just negative thoughts that you have and because you don't want to say them, you put it in a question form. but that still has the bad effect. so stop that right-a-way!"

That is very simple-minded and idealistic. One should look at their product ideas and development objectively to determine if they are building something people will use or not. Simply saying "build it and trust the process" is too faith-based.

What does "things are not going well" mean? It could mean the implementation of an idea doesn't work, the developer can't bring the idea to market, the developed doesn't really want to do it, or the market is telling the developed they don't want to use his/her product. It could mean other things. If any of these conditions are met, then it's time to change or call it quits (hint: quitting a doomed venture is not a failure.)
If
1. your head and heart are not in it and you can't make them get back in, or
2. you didn't do a minimal level of marketing research to determine who your competition is, who your target market is, and what your product's value to the market is compared to the competition,

then maybe you should quit or regroup.
I think 1 business geek + 1 hacker has better chance of success than 2 business hacker. Paypal was founded on a similar model. However, what often happens is one partner tends to underestimate the hacker - either the business geek finds the hacker useless or vice versa. I guess some level of understanding and respect is an important element in any partnership.
True. If Facebook fails then it's all the "web 2.0" world that will be affected, I hear a lot of people talking of another bubble about web 2.0. Some want their convinctions vindicated, others want to save their start up and money.

My bet is that the truth is in the middle as usual, just like when the first bubble bursted, it was a godsend who cleaned up all the mess produced by the basical non-understanding of the internet.
In general I may agree. if the idea was bad to begin with. I would have said cut your loses and get out soon. But in this case it looks like there are some other companies that have entered this market as well. So the problem isn't realy that the idea is bad.
They do not right now, but if we provide enough value above what can be achieved with MS project, why would they not be willing to part with their money? (Ah, or so I wish :) )
All the time. Just recently one of guys I work with got stuck because he was using an STL priority queue to maintain a scheduler's data. The data was keyed on the time a scheduled event needed to run. The problem was that sometimes an event's time needed to change. Normally theses priority queues do not let you change items on the fly. Things get added and they come out based on their priority. He figured out how to override this behavior but couldn't understand why the priority queue was broken after he modified an item inside the queue directly. So, I had to explain to him how heaps and priority queues worked.
Considering the fact that SQL is a declarative query and data definition language, I don't know what kind of nasty, low-level stuff you would want to abstract away.

SQL may not be perfect, and there probably is a mismatch with the programming language, but is generating declarative statements from procedural/OO languages the best solution?
I was thinking along the same lines. You could scale based on karma, or even something similar...like when the account was created or how many times it has logged in.

It would encourage group think to a degree, but since we like the community the way it is now, that would probably be a feature instead of a bug.
"That said, the 38-year-old doctorate and millionaire (he made a bundle selling his Internet storefront system Viaweb to Yahoo! in 1998) sounds like those guys who pine for flying cars."
So, the Trevor Blackwell guy is PG's pal?
Is Google's Enterprise Software Too Cheap?
I'm just curious how you came about this site? This doesn't seem the most general entrepreneurial site out there.

sidenote: seems googling "news yc" no longer asks if I meant "news NYC"
I actually played this in the arcade! I was doing well until I got to hydra, where it posed questions in japanese that I didn't know how to read.
SCons is good but a few things can be quite complicated, especially if you have complex builds. It took me some time to figure out how to structure things and use Repository and BuildDir correctly.

edit: I do use SCons for cross-platform development on multiple architectures though, so it's probably much easier for straightforward builds under Linux.
Pentaho (Open source BI) Takes $12 Million Series C
A really cool tool is Natural Docs (at www.naturaldocs.org). It's a program like Doxygen, to generate very nice-looking HTML documentation from embedded comments. The nice thing is that comments are (as the name implies) "natural" (there are no tags that make the comments unreadable in the source code).
You're thinking of abstraction as a way to hide low-level details that aren't pertinent to your thinking about how to solve a problem.

If you think of abstraction as a way to hide anything a Blub programmer doesn't want to think about, then abstracting away the relational model makes sense.
Wow...slow down. You didn't like that after you clicked the "Done" button, we thought that you were done? And no, we don't currently have a way to delete your account, but NOTHING in your account is currently public! We will have a way to delete accounts in the future, but we need to figure out what to do with the events you've created, comments you wrote, etc. So settle down, and if you have specific concerns, let us know and we'll work with you.
Go to someone else's offices who are doing a startup. That will get your ass in gear when you see how hard they are working.
Ok, that game wins. Now I want to play it. Apparently it's on GameTap.
I'd rather have a few good books and "tons and tons" of quality libraries.

I also think that having a choice among frameworks is a good thing.
"Plenty of great literature" Agreed

"Plenty of great arguments" Disagree. AFAIC, credibility is lost as soon as you resort to this. Many don't think like I do, but many do. Is cursing really worth losing those of us who do?
http://ycombinator.com/people.html
WTF Dept: DataPortability Project Sued By RedHat
500 Million Downloads of Firefox (almost)
Deploying Rails Applications book by Ezra is finished and available
I was close to tears... Sniff...
A few of my hard earned lessons:

Time spent working does NOT necessarily = amount of work completed. It's easy to get discouraged when you "sense" you're not spending enough time on something. Two days ago, for example, I came here 827 times (well maybe not that many). But it was a very productive day! By the end of the day, I figured something out and the flood gates opened. That's just how it works for hackers sometimes. If you don't care anymore, that's one thing. But being frustrated about time spent is a signal something else is wrong, not your commitment.

Some experts think we are either preprogrammed with "moving toward" or "moving away" internal metaprograms. OK, whatever. I'm a very positive optimistic person, so I just assumed I was a "moving toward" person. Wrong! I am HIGHLY motivated by that which I do not like, but I never realized it. If I see something I like, I think, "that's cool". But if I see something I don't like, I think, "That sucks. I can do way better than that." So I do. It may be one of the 7 deadly sins, but jealousy is a great motivator for "moving away" people. I'm older than every speaker at Startup Weekend, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and possibly our next president. But I'm just as smart as any of them, and I haven't got mine yet. That just pisses me off! (See, it works, I'm ready to hack right now.) What about you? How are you programmed? What can you do to stoke yourself (or piss yourself off)?

"When do you know its time to call it quits?" Never. I realize most people will disagree with me. Walt Disney and Colonel Saunders went to a thousand banks before getting a loan. How soon would you have given up? When do you quit trying to teach you child how to walk because it's not going as well as you'd like? Jerry Seinfield jokes that it took him 20 years to become an overnight success. I've seen the same thing with many hackers I know. If you know deep down inside that your project is a winner, you must do whatever it takes to get it to "walk". If you're not sure, then maybe you shouldn't have started it in the first place. Only you can answer that one.

Hate to be like Oprah, but if things aren't going as quickly as you would have liked, maybe you oughta read this:

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Secret-Getting-Absolutely-Eve...

It's amazing what you can make happen if you follow the simple advice of this book.

Collect data from everyone. Then go with your gut. Best advice I ever got.
I may get down-modded for this, but I suggest not releasing it given the scenario you described. I love open source, but most open source contributions are made for joy of creation, pride, fame, sometimes naivete (by assuming you'll get the benefits described) and finally, money. Many projects are created because they're ancillary to some business need--like SUN paying Charles Nutter to work on Jruby. These motives don't really apply to your case, and the benefits you list don't materialize for most projects. It costs you time to open source things properly and limits your options. Rightly or wrongly, some companies will be reluctant to buy you with your code released.

Statistically, most open source projects do not gain traction, significant users, free features, or free QA. They sit there on SourceForge, unloved. I wish I had a citation here. Try browsing SourceForge projects. Publicity-wise, consider how many you've heard of. It seems likely you'll get little in return for open sourcing. It's like a dance, and there's a decent chance that Baby will be put in a corner.
Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On?
I meant to ask this question myself but I just couldn't find the motivation.

Seriously, procrastination is the way your subconscious tells you something is wrong and needs to be fixed, or all of your work is for naught. So either stop, talk to your buddies, and fix it so that you can get re-motivated, or check all the code back in unlocked and go find the next challenge. Your subconscious is trying to tell you something; listen to it and address it, because it's almost always right. The answer is not here, but you already knew that, didn't you?
A correction to the correction - Joel on Software
Rails Messaging Tutorial
It really depends on what you're working on. One thing that I've figured out is that you don't learn software engineering in college at all. Even if you took a bunch of courses in it.

However, a knowledge of algorithms can be invaluable. I've been out of college for six years and I can remember using at least:

- String search algorithms

- B-Trees, Tries

- A handful of graph algorithms

Other times stuff that I learned in college put me in quick striking distance for stuff that would be more work to understand without a CS background:

- Open key cryptography

- Word stemming algorithms, text coding

- Writing a query optimizer

- Digital signal processing

You can always find cool stuff to hack on without drifting into that territory, but if you actually dig CS-nerdiness, and are good at it, you'll sometimes get some of the more fun problems thrown in your direction.
Interesting story, but Niche Geek scraped this plagiarized story from another blog. Give credit where it's due, and recognize that the original source -- USA Today -- probably does have contacts with Google PR.
Rush is a replacement for the Unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax
Raw materials are less limited than most people think. The usual scenario is that as a raw material gets scarcer, the price for it goes up. With the price higher, firms are incentivized to spend more on technology to reach formerly unreachable raw resources, etc. This is why we've been running out of oil for about 100 years - the price goes up, technology is deployed, etc. And if we really did start to run out of oil, then the value of energy would go up creating demand for alternates as the price now pays for greater technological breakthroughs, etc.

So, to make a long story short, the idea that resources are a zero-sum game is also incorrect in the sense that the underlying value can be found given enough ingenuity unleashed with the profit motive.

So the lego example is in no way a reflection of the real world, and if I could give this blog post a larger up vote, I would.
Just because you can build something in 24 hours, should you?

(Don't mean to pick, a legitimate question.)

I wanted to use "speed" as the key differentiator in my startup. (We can build it in n days!) The feedback I got was universally negative. The general concensus was, "Then how good could it be?"

As hackers, we see the possibilites with all this new technology. But is the rest of the world ready for it?
Good security advice, or FUD? Web 2.0 startups "need to police usage and actively scan content"
I added one of those missiles on my christmas gift list. I hope the price drops until the end of year.
Black Hat: Attacks and wireless security
Then that's an yes. Damn, I feel dumb (more than the norm).
Ask News.YC: Any other hackers out there amateur lockpickers?
I've always been fascinated with locks and lock picking, ever since high school. I got my fist set of lock picks off the internet a couple of years ago. Apparently, there's this long tradition of hackers picking locks (c.f. The MIT Lockpicking Guide) . Anyone else into this?