skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's not obvious which way is better. hours spent working isn't a great approximation of productivity, but it is one.

if you don't use it, you need to gage productivity in some other way. one way this is done is to agree in advance on a price for a certain agreed upon amount of work. but that isn't going to work (at least straightfowardly) for a startup that wants to work in an open-ended, semi-unstructured way.

you can also ignore it. if everyone seems to be working very hard, then that's probably ok. but if some people seem to be working more than others, then it can start causing problems.
In my computer room, I use one of these with a "white" light bulb - a traditional bulb with blue glass that makes the light much more white. They seem brighter, too. I don't care as much for florescent lighting, so that's worked best for me so far.
I have another problem with the wired article, It assumes economy scale, but here in Europe, we have at once one bigger market than the US, but way more fragmented for web stuff : social websites market border are language border (27 languages here).

This means that when I launch my service in French, I'm stuck with France and Belgium (70millions people, too bad Switzerland is not in EU). If I add, say German (80millions people more), I won't leverage on 150million people because of the linguistic border. Moreover, adding a language costs me almost the same price each time, it doesn't really drops with the time, since I start with an audience of zero in the new territory.

This means that here in Europe, economies of scale are not as easy as in the US, where there is a continuous market for 300 million people.

Moreover, with the worthless dollar, Adsense revenue tends to drop, but this not a structural issue, I have to seek an euro-based ad system.
This is definitely the best way to do it that I've seen in this thread. Kudos!
This feels a lot like the other posts I've responded to in the past 4 days. Sorry if I'm getting redundant.

We use a scrum-like backlog methodology based on ROI:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122203

At some jobs, I've used very complicated spreadsheets for this method (to track dependency costs, etc), but lately Google spreadsheet works pretty well for individual assignments and status. There are some Scrum-based software solutions out there that somewhat support this approach. (e.g. http://www.acunote.com ) There's also a scrum plugin somewhere for Microsoft Project, but I haven't used that either.

It depends on the size of your group, probably, what will work for you. Also it depends on the size of the upward corporate group that needs reporting.
Do you have an example of a company undercutting prices to kill competition and then later raising prices? Gmail is still free. I'd worry about a company establishing a monopoly by using government coercion. It seems to me a company that figures out how to improve my standard of living by offering services free is a good thing.
It well might be. Maybe my testing bench could use a little color . . .
I also have the feeling Iskold is wrong in several places.

The one thing he got right is the GMail case, where big companies are "ready to take a loss to kill the competition" (as said by dkokelly).

His tale about the DVR implies that if it's free, it's going to work. But consumers still have the ability to figure out which of 2 free products is best. Free does not preclude quality. Same rules as before apply.

His tale about startups worried about not being funded is far from convincing. VC's will always fund bright, innovative, potentially profitable startups (with the freeconomics model or others).

His tale about advertisement is not clear. If your ad-sponsored business is going well (during an economic downturn), there is an argument for advertisers to focus on you, and not others that fare less well.

His tale about complex transactions is wrong. Paying only for what you use is far from a bad concept: it creates several types of demand among your consumer-base. And it seems to work, as several European low-cost airlines showed during the last years.
Psh, oxygen is overrated . . . :-P
"But consumers still have the ability to figure out which of 2 free products is best. Free does not preclude quality. Same rules as before apply."

That's why his argument that free will impact innovation is wrong as well. If anything, this promotes innovation and kills incrementalism.
Of course not.

It's practically requisite to understanding Rails or Django and is not so hard a project that you can't start to tackle it quickly (by reading any of the hundreds of simple web server tutorials online)
Ask YC:  Will software development ever be so cheap, that we will waste it?
Basically is anyone of the opinion that we will ever be able to create software development methods which are significantly (orders of magnitude) more productive than what we have now? And if so, will we ever reach the point where users/customers/clients can have very capable and sophisticated custom made or customized applications for a price that warrants "wasteful" or "trivial" (for trivial reasons) software development?
Wiki Your Genes
I shouldn't have used "profits"...

I guess I'm thinking of what is called "Net Present Value"...which basically factors in short term losses for long term gains. Which kind of is what you're saying with "value creation" I guess.

In which case, yes, they decided to give away Google Search for free (as well as GMail) because they saw future revenue streams in another area.

My point is calling it "free" is BS in terms of NPV - which business decisions are all about, which valuation is all about, etc.
Philip Greenspun on Money and Investing
Internet Ad Revenue Exceeds $21B in 2007
Eat a sandwich.
I've never had a problem with closed source.

I bet the majority of hackers here don't mind it, as they're all working on their own startups and only a tiny fraction of them are likely to release their source code.
The IAB report with a nice graphic: http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press...
Even better, I just moved from Boston to SF, and now I have an awesome view of Golden Gate bridge, and the bay, and the rest.

When the sun is setting it is just beautiful. The whole office area is well lit by natural light. It makes me a happy person.

(Having cubes with low wall also helps alot).

In Boston, I was miserable, working in a cube with high walls, away from any window, and when you go out, it gets dark by 4:30 pm. I just had the winter blues. No wonder Bostonians are so cranky and rude. You could tell when the weather got better, people were happier and nicer.
Surveys are a lot more effective. The best part is that you can be very vague about your next steps and find out what the users think of the different aspects. That way, you can modify the feature to what they want and what you want without asking them.
Let's Make This Personal, Please
He got GMail wrong, too. Yahoo Mail is/was not "perfectly good". Yahoo Mail was pretty poor. Slow, packed with blinking ads, lacking important features, poor spam filtering, etc.

GMail won because it was a superior product. The storage was a marketing tactic - the limits Yahoo had were low, but not that low. GMail wasn't even free at first - I paid $6 for my account to some guy on eBay, and would've happily paid Google for it.

How much were Yahoo/Hotmail making from premium webmail? Not that much, I would guess, and it seems inevitable that charging for something so paltry was going to last anyway.
Take a deep breath, pat yourself on the back, and prepare for round two: gaining traction.
Perhaps, but donna's been around here for a while, I give her the benefit of the doubt.
Your Chances Of Not Getting On Digg's Frontpage Today: 98.88%
Google Disaster: Comscore Reports Awful January
Take founding team to dinner.
Life after page views: Web analytics 2.0
I am a one man band so I just use http://backpackit.com not going to be that useful for teams. basecamp is pretty cool.

have you looked at liquid planner that was showcased at demo 08? that looks pretty tidy.
Microsoft’s Mundie: Lots of Yahoo, Microsoft redundancies
10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed
depends on what method you mean by "we" Do you mean agile methods are not working for your team or do you mean the old waterfall method is not working for you?

I think it doesn't matter to much what method you use just as long as you have excellent communication between client and the end development team.
backpackIT.com is nice -
I know the founders of Expensr, they've already given up on their webapp.
Ask YC:  Why doesn't adsense look at all the pages on your site when picking ads?
Currently, you could get non-relevant ads because adsense only looks at the current page when picking ads.
Yeah, Schonfeld is now of course writing for Techcrunch.
Ask YC:  Who is most likely to click on ads without even knowing they are ads?
It seems that building a service that attracts people of this type could be quite profitable.
Things we actually like: This Game Is An Entirely New And Better Internet
The pickles must be on the side.
I really wish we had a down arrow on the main news screen.
You can source a generic 6500k light (try to get close to 98 color rendering index) for pretty cheap at most local hardware stores. My guess is this is all what these "full spectrum lights" essentially are, re-branded and marked up.

I use 2 6500k lamps as a bias lights (reference white) when coding and also for watching movies. The light will appear a bit "blue" at first (compared to most other lights), but you will get used to it. Color temp is like you are always working outside in the midday sun, its great.
I'd recommend giving yourself 1 extra week from the point you originally wanted to launch. Make sure everything is finished, and give yourself 1 week to actually use the product. Fix all the little things, and add the extra polish, things you really wish you had time to do before. But don't delay more than a week.
not letting users downgrade, seems a broken model. Let them downgrade then - gray out.
Iskold is CEO of a startup that is boostrapping a semantic web framework through top-down crowdsourced information from free plugins and widgets
http://www.adaptiveblue.com/overview.html

It seems like even if a few points are off in this article, his company is using free in an intelligent fashion.
Drink a bottle of Cisco RED:

http://www.bumwine.com/cisco.html
> His tale about advertisement is not clear. If your ad-sponsored business is going well (during an economic downturn), there is an argument for advertisers to focus on you, and not others that fare less well.

I was listening to NPR this morning, and this scenario is exactly what happened to No Depression magazine. Rising customers and interest, but declining record industry advertising budget, leads to a magazine no longer being published.
Do you think the fault lies in the practitioners, the system, or both? (This is not a rhetoric question.)

And how do you know those downvotes have all to do with the submission and nothing with the comments themselves? Personally I downmodded for lack of relevance.
GitTorrent Protocol version 0.1
Most software development _is_ wasted today.
The question is what applications you consider trivial - and herein lies the answer. What is considered hard now will be trivial in the future, and what is considered impossible now will be considered hard in the future.

Take a simple calculator application for instance. If you asked a team of engineers to build one in 1950 they would consider it hard but possible given some months of work programming their punch-tape spewing tube-filled constantly overheating monster of a computer. Now it is considered trivial.

In the future it will probably be as simple to build what we consider a complicated application as it is for us to program a calculator application. But the only thing that has changed is that the bar has been moved up a few notches.

They call it progress.
Zink sounds cool, but 20 cents per a 2'' x 3'' wont make it past middle school kids.
Agile works well enough for our teams at work as long as everyone is aiming for the same goal. I used waterfall only once and it ended up a "failure" or a "qualified success" depending on your point of view. What we produced wasn't really what the users and customers needed or truly wanted even though it was to the spec that we all agreed to.

Think beyond agile and other current cutting edge methods. What I'm really asking about is will software development ever become so productive that significant, useful applications could be created for such a low cost that "throwaway" one-time development that occurs only to take advantage of fleeting opportunities or needs is fairly common and is not considered "extravagant" but rather a smart thing to do?
i'm still a bit confused by your point, but advice has been very helpful for us. generally, the person giving advice tries to formulate their advice in such a way that it applies to more than just one situation. advice seems to be most useful when it applies directly to a situation you're currently dealing with. but maybe i'm missing your point entirely.
When working the way Network Solutions has; expect lawsuits quickly and often.
I think that's the same point the article makes... If you worry about opportunity cost... then you aren't going to want to join a start up.

Did you even read the article?
After the Singularity we'll have unlimited custom software development. ;-)
I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users
Reading through the source for a simple http server might be a good first step. srv.arc (the server that runs this site) is only 360 lines and is pretty readable without a deep understanding of Arc or Lisp.
What about whole databases and the various applications that use them? one time complex system models for climatology or finance or spread of diseases? Simulations of alternate systems designs for traffic and infrastructure to optimize particular attributes? Will that ever get "simple"?
break up with your girlfriend
It would be interesting to know if they filter all DNS requests or only DNS requests to their own servers. Like if they see someone using a service like opendns and filter those dns requests as well. Perhaps they just block DNS servers too.

You still have to make a DNS request for secure connections if you use a domain name... so some of their filtering would still work on secure connections.
I don't have any problem with the control key position, I just swap it with caps lock.

The real pain for me is the meta key mapping. If I'm using Carbon Emacs I use one mapping, if I'm using emacs in a terminal I have to switch to another mapping. Things work a little differently with my external keyboard v.s. the built in one. I find the whole thing really irritating, almost enough to make me switch back to Linux on my laptop.

Anyway, I use http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/ to map keys that aren't handled by the limited built-in mapping choices.
Further: do this dinner at a cheap, stable, unpretentious place.

Come grand success or crushing failure, this will become the spot for founders' reunion dinners in the years or decades to come.
I think most yc'ers know the different ad schemes and actively decide if they are going to click on them, provided they even see it because they aren't using adblock.

I think standard joe user will click on ads if they think it will get them to 'destination', which is why I think text links are very successful in creating the idea that the ad(link) is just another page within a website.
The paragraph at the end of the notes is possibly the most relevant to startups:

"After a talk at Harvard, I told them to work for who they admired the most, so they all become self-employed. It’s important to go to work for someone or some organization you admire."
Am I seeing things, or does this guy specifically argue that it is theoretically impossible for Ryanair to satisfy its customers?

That reminds me of the urban legend about the aeronautical engineers who calculated that the bumblebee cannot possibly fly.

And anyone who complains about the impossibility of competing against a free product needs to explain the bottled water industry.
But that adapter is only $19. It's nearly impossible to get DVI output from most non-Mac laptops, no matter how much you spend.
Yeah, but we won't be able to pace while working out problems in our heads, or drink mighty draughts of our favorite brews after a successful launch.
Yes, but who is most likely to do this among the joe users?
Mingle http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence
Microsoft sites (Hotmail, MSN etc) down world-wide
The very young and the very old

I saw this cited in a study years ago, it's out there somewhere
Given enough time. The problem, of course, is that enough time might be quite a while...
1) If you make something (i.e., a software development tool) that does everything, it will do it really badly. That's unlikely to change soon, if ever.

2) When you put the invisible hand at work, if developing software of type X becomes too easy, there will be a surplus of X apps, so it will get unprofitable and people with good software development skills will start pushing the envelope and invent Y apps, etc. Because every piece of software depends on another one, the software that interacts with Y apps will also need to advance, so it's an infinite loop, if you will. :)
Well, you're just about to give birth to one! Can you handle two?
Last task: get rid of your fear, doubt and disbeleif.
i´m trying fogbugz, after getting nowhere with msproject or basecamp.
i´ll report to you when i have more data
I think there will be types of software that folks will be able to bark orders into their microphone and have the computer barf out software. Maybe an iTunes app creator. "Make it pink! Ok, now put the play bar on the left. No wait, the right. A little more. Good, right there. Now I want my playlist to be black with yellow text and put pretty stars everywhere."

In engineering land, we continue to get better tools for building certain type of applications. Ruby on Rails has shown us the benefits of constrained thinking. A blog in 10 minutes! But Rails only excels at building one type of application, standard fare web apps, with loads of standard database-driven tables/forms.

It's very very hard to generalize programming. We have a long way to go still. Software gets the job done today, but often, it's not pretty and often fights against the user.
At least be honest: tip Tipjoy and any site you chose while you're on it. Tipjoy does take a cut, right?
My Favorite Liar (Econ prof's lectures include a lie that students must find)
OSU's CS program is good enough, I suppose. I think it was good that the intro courses did not focus as much on learning any certain language (e.g. Java) as it did on learning to properly specify and program component-based software. While I'm not completely sold on their style of specification, the approach is undoubtedly better than "here's how to build a linked-list in Java" approach.

Now that I'm a grad student, I find that I'm a bit unsatisfied with Ohio State, however. There is a giant bureaucracy in the way of many things you want to do, something you might expect at a university of more than 50,000 students. One example is that the CIO of OSU recently implemented a minimum security policy for all computers on the network, one that allows only the use of certain operating systems, requires the use of antivirus/antimalware software (even on Linux systems), and requires that you allow them root access to ensure that these measures are in place. That's just one example.

In general, though, I find myself largely unhappy with grad school, but I think this may be true of many schools. It feels like much of the popular research is in corporate-programming areas, and there aren't many people interested in things like dynamic or functional languages, which I happen to be interested in.

Basically, I'm about ready to be done with grad school, but I don't think I'm representative of everyone. I'm just ready to have a higher reward/work ratio, and I'm ready to program productively, where the end result is something useful rather than a paper.
Nokia and University of Cambridge launch the Morph - a nanotechnology concept device
If you don't know how much nanotechnology will change the world go read Eric Drexlers classic: "engines of creation".

It's available online here: http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.h...

It blew my mind when I read it ten years ago.
Thanks, but you'll understand if I choose not to take my advice from someone who misappropriates Richard Stallman's initials as his user id. Looks like Linus is available. Any takers?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linus
We take a small cut. Smaller than other services, like PayPal. We're open about this:
http://tipjoy.com/faq/14/#q14

I stress the bookmarklet not because of our cut, but because it will grow our userbase -- people receiving lots of tips without being Tipjoy users will probably soon become users to claim the tips.

edit: I should also mention that our effective cut is small when you consider that tips can be recycled back into the community. Tip receivers can tip other things for essentially zero overhead. We take our small cut when someone cashes out.
This was just released Feb 12th: http://www.smvgroup.com/news_popup_flash.asp?pr=1643

"The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. "
that was exactly my point, the advice was valuable because it was applicable relative to what you are experiencing.

the advice is not as important by who is said, as much if the person giving it is identifying what to tell you relative to your current experience. Otherwise any other advice will not matter.
Emacs Lisp API for Facebook Developers
Nick Douglas' writing has gotten a lot better since he started working for Gawker instead of Valleywag. Sucks that along the way he stopped posting here.
Friends aren't really friends in social networking
Using very low prices to undercut competition and then later raising prices only works where there is some way to lock customers in. Japanese companies do it all the time (they have exclusive contracts to provide lock-in). This is extremely common in game consoles because the dominant console will have the most games which will tend to make it stay as the dominant console. In general, anything with high switching costs can make use of this. (Phone and cable companies also used to do this). I would argue that these kind of monopolistic practices are bad for the economy but should only be dealt with after it can be proven that a monopoly exists. Thats because government stifling of beneficial businesses is a far bigger danger than monopolies.
If this sounds like a good idea, you are already drunk. But if you're drunk enough, it tastes like fruit juice! DON'T DO THIS!!
very true, but it does matter who gives the advice: some people give bad advice that sounds good on the surface, but isn't. you always need to follow your gut, and listen to all advice no matter who gives it, but we always listen especially carefully to people who have dealt with our situation and been successful.
quit your job if you have one, and tell everyone you know about your startup and how you will make thousands/millions soon.