skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Second of all, we’re not in the winner-take-all software world of the 90’s anymore.

I'd say they're wrong. The laws of economics don't change. Winner take all markets with big positive network externalities are the same whether it's now, 100 years ago, or a 100 years from now.

However, I think they have picked niches where there are network effects, but not huge, crushing ones, so they're not going to see that.
I'm not sure about this one but you should definitely look into Orange if you're considering Python.
http://magix.fri.uni-lj.si/orange/
I think the book is very hit or miss from chapter to chapter.
I'd suggest traveling to a country in the developing world before making a statement like that.

Clean water (ie, no Malaria), soup kitchens, human rights, no shanty towns, opportunity to improve your life, and the availability of public education provide a safety net that developing countries often lack.

Being poor in America is surely difficult, but I'd much rather be poor here (or in the developed world in general) than be poor in a 3rd world country.
I think you're suffering more from a people-don't-know-you-exist syndrome.

My suggestion would be to target all the contract/consultant Accounting/CFO firms and show them your product. Offer them a referral fee for every client they bring onto your platform. Show them how it will make their life easier, and listen to their feedback.

I think you'll have a harder time convincing individual SMB "owners" to use your product/platform. But, I know very little information about your app, so it's hard to say for sure.

My point is that people who are "afraid" of taxes/payroll will be less likely to trust an unknown/new player because they can't appropriately evaluate the product. Consulting CFO's might be more receptive to the idea and might see value in a new platform.
I think a great way is to befriend the business executives (or better yet, founders) at your current job. Impress them, be their go to guy, put in your time, and then be the one they pick to go with them when they leave to go do their next big thing.
it doesn't matter who gave the advice, if you can't realise it on your own. And you usually do, without needing someone to tell you.
This post is too vague. How are you different from every other start up that wants me? What industry is it? What have you done to validate the need for your idea? Here are some tips in becoming more descriptive:

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/3673/Mediocre-Mark...
Because new tech costs more? To create differentiation between two models that are already really similar?
I don't have much first-hand experience with Haskell (I pretty much know only what I've read about it), so I'll address only OCaml.

Scala does a much better job of unifying object-oriented and functional programming than OCaml does. OCaml's OO-system feels tacked on; an afterthought rather than a careful consideration of the original design. In Scala, a function is an object and an object is a function. There are many ways in which the line between functional and object-oriented fades.

The C/Java/Python/Ruby school of syntax that Scala comes from is much more familiar to me than the ML school of syntax that OCaml comes from.

Scala doesn't have the distinction between "+" and "+.":

powerbook58:~ jeortiz$ ocaml
Objective Caml version 3.09.3
# 1 + 1;;
- : int = 2
# 1.0 + 1;;
This expression has type float but is here used with type int
# 1.0 +. 1;;
This expression has type int but is here used with type float
# 1.0 +. 1.0;;
- : float = 2.

Scala has access to any Java library.

That said, I don't want to come across as bashing on OCaml; I'm merely pointing out some differences. OCaml is a great language (that was a joy to learn) and for many applications it can be a better choice than Scala.
Why A Music Download Tax Is A Bad Idea
No offense, but personally I think this is the one sentence a person in charge should never permit him/herself to utter... :)

On the other hand, bad luck happens.
iPod/iPhone firmware update 1.1.4 released
innovator go work later after the brunch
sushi-eating valley lovers packed in a bunch
bring your ideas get a ride here don't gotta shave
meet the founders money movers in this enclave
social webbing two point oh bling VCs galore
advertising monetizing eyeballs and more
keep it frugal win like google no time to fail
epic times and bustin' rhymes with xobni email
hackers coding hits exploding ride the new wave
servers melt your hand is dealt now roll for the save
Would have to disagree with you there. Network effects are more valid in systems where value is increased by every additional connection (user or service) in 37 signals case, the network effects are not that much inherent to their product.

I think this is a conscious choice on their part. Just like there are many other "niches" in the long tail that can be served without hazard from network effects.
eBay Desktop 1.0 released
I'll give some YC hacker a good deal right now for my 1st gen macbook pro (2 GB RAM) :)
None taken.

But I do find that humor goes a long way in management. In the above example it was the only way of dealing with it.
Automating Product Launches
Beware, the source code to CRM114 ain't no freakin' Cadillac.
I agree that the most valuable learning happens when talking with smart knowledgeable people, but how many RTMs are really out there at universities? Most of the people I've learned from were people I met online, either on IRC or by exchanging emails. Of the people I consider impressive hackers, only two of them were introduced to me in meatspace: one at UC Davis, and one at a YC party (pc).
+1 for Weka.

It's not just a Bayes classifier. It's got every machine learning algorithm you can think of. Once you get the file format right, you can drop-in any algorithm you want. It's amazing.
Google Talk chatback
hang out with PB for 10 minutes and you'll hear 10 things that make you say "aha". you've got to be humble enough to realize that you don't know everything, and you won't necessarily stumble upon every realization on your own.
Sharpening Your Skills: Starting a Business
That's obviously and English sentence, but I have no friggin' idea what it means.
awesome logo

http://crm114.sourceforge.net/
We're offering this $$$ opp, sell vi@gr@ from home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, why is this on the front page? I hate down arrows, but this post makes me desperately wish I had the option.
Beware of Freeconomics
I think that you would have to compensate these new partners with a reasonably large share of stock (of the same class as the founders). I think that you should shop around for people (or a person) who can handle as many of the roles as possible.

I would start by sharing your email address and talking to people who are interested. Good luck.
>> Second of all, we’re not in the winner-take-all software world of the 90’s anymore

I'd say they're right. The web is expanding markets. The remaining fraction of the market after the giants have had their lion's share is still larger in the 'web' world - perhaps not in percentage terms but in absolute dollar terms. Which is what matters.
"where investment of time = percentage of revenue stream"

So the longer I take, the higher my percentage? :)
Google - but they are clearly an exception.

I remember reading a study (can't find it right now) that actually tried to investigate how good your product had to be to attract users without marketing. Their finding was that if your product is 200 - 300% better than what is already there you will win. Google fits that description pretty well.
Everyone's reservations about proprietary software go away when it's Apple. Closed source isn't a bad thing when it isn't Microsoft doing it.
To those who don't get the Xobni reference:

At the end of the article:

""I don't usually get up this early on Sundays," said Matt Brezina, the 26-year-old co-founder of Xobni Corp., a San Francisco start-up that helps people better organize and search their e-mail and contacts, as he worked the room. "But this gathering is very powerful.""
Try to find the sweet spot between QuickBooks and enterprise. 10 to 100 employees. $1 million to $10 million in revenue (depending on SIC Code). It's there. And it's huge. Try Chamber of Commerce, local tech groups, industry trade associations. Your prospects are out there, they need more than they have, but they don't know who you are. Tell them.

Oh, and don't call it boring. Show a little passion.
It does "just work" and all, but this is hacker news! We want to know why and how it works. Plus, we're willing to tinker to get it working.

I certainly appreciate when things work immediately, but my overall curiosity means that even if I use Apple hardware, I put linux on it.
Is this a service you'll be selling or are you relying on advertising?

Since you have no cash to pay, I'll take all the revenue generated from the time I start working with you up to 250k/yr. In addition, I'd like a significant equity stake.

The time I put in isn't important. What matters is how many dollars I help the site make.
Ask YC: What is the last task one should do before launching a startup?
See title
the same thing happens with hourly rates. known problem.
Henry Ford has a great quote on this:

"If I asked users what they wanted they would say a faster horse"
In blow to Microsoft VMware signs deal to embed software in HP servers
The rewards and risk of startups' "friend spam" marketing
View erlang module source in TextMate
I think you guys missed the point of this downmodded guy's argument because he focused on the wrong thing. In the world economy today, if you're born poor, whether in America or the third world, you're not going to end up like Warren Buffett. It's impossible to go from the lower class to being an uber-capitalist.
Excellent article. It seems what he said about classmates would also apply to choosing a startup founder:

What if you could buy 10% of one of your classmates and their future earnings? You wouldn't buy the ones with the highest IQ, the best grades, etc, but the most effective. You like people who are generous, go out of their way, straight shooters. Now imagine that you could short 10% of one of your classmates. This part is usually more fun as you start looking around the room. You wouldn't choose the ones with the poorest grades. Look for people nobody wants to be around, that are obnoxious or like to take all the credit. If you have a 500 HP engine and only get 50 HP out of it, you'll be beat by someone else that has a 300 HP engine but gets 250 HP output. The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can't change at 60; the time to look at that list is now
Wrong topic, should be "Why isn't University in the USA free".
In many other countries, university is free, or so cheap, that nearly the entire population can afford sending their childs to university, without going into debt.
current macbook pro price: $1999 + taxes
some thread perusing on macrumors: $1500-1600 shipped
Just pick the ones you're yourself most enthusiastic about first.
"my overall curiosity means that even if I use Apple hardware, I put linux on it."

You'll be wasting your money.
It is, and this is one of an equity-driven startup's key advantages over institutionalized competitors. Seems like a bad idea to introduce it at this stage.
There's that oxygen thing too.
Ask YC: What do you use for Project Management?
I've been fighting with Microsoft Project all day and I'm getting fed up. What does everybody use for project management? We do Agile development.
Story of the Playaway - a new book reader
If I may be so bold, it's not a chat room here. If you agree with some post and don't have anything more substantial to say, consider just upmodding it.
(Note: This is a little bit of a plug for ideas I'm a big fan of, but it's not for anything I make money on.)

I recommend you setup a project and encourage your users to use a feature voting site like the one we have for startups/hackers to use:

http://featurelist.org
http://featurelist.org/projects/add/

There you can have your users upvote features and you can really see which the majority like best (rather than tracking all of them via email).

Once I know what the users want, I rank the features internally using the method I mentioned here for getting a rough notion of ROI for each feature:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122203

The enthusiasm of your users on those features can help you calculate the business value (though other things should factor in). But you shouldn't decide to code them unless you've also calculated the cost (including some factor for long-term costs) of implementing them into your product.
Sure thing - good luck - they're pretty quick =)

What I was working on morphed into http://www.tunesfortrees.com/ once we realized GoodSearch.com owned the search space.

Your next thought was my next thought, verification for charities would be great to have as long as you could get Google approval, and as long as enough people cared =)
you missed my point

e.g. Hearing someone talking about fear is entirelly different from living it on your own.

The same goes for many stages in a startup. If you don't experience it, any advice in the world will not matter.

I wouldn't be here if I thought I knew everything, but If you/I expect someone else to tell you how to understand if your product is ready then you lost already.

For example if you want me to be more precise.

In the certain advice everything is obselete and relative.

What is the competition? Have they already launched? How easy will be for them to just replicate you and crush you? When do you know you are better from the competition? What would make sure you will avoid crushing you?

All these questions relative to that advice are so crucial that makes the advice broad enough unless you are already experiencing that pressure and already have the realization of the market you are trying to enter etc.

Thats why advices are meaningless until you experience them.

You need to value the essence of the advice, not always upon who gives it.

You will get many good advices from many people if you don't undervalue them.
"Everything that can be invented – has already been invented."

- Charles Duell, United States Patent Office Commissioner, 1899

Any relation?
I question the premise that a fast moving market is negative for startups. In fact, its precisely these things that makes it possible for startups to compete with big players. A quickly changing market will just make it easier for small companies to grab a niche and hold on to (or sell) it.
Basecamp from 37signals, love it.
Realizing that you're not at the end of the journey, you're at the end of the start of it.
Genius man, it's a good idea and looks fantastic.

Good luck to you, too!
That all depends on what you haven't done yet. Assuming that all you need to do is tell people about what you've got and the money will come freely and nothing will break, I would just send out a press release announcing your launch.
This guy keeps getting stuff wrong.

Instead of fearing free, take some time to understand it.
I use "Project Management" or "Planner" available in Ubuntu's repositories.

Their site's at http://live.gnome.org/Planner if you like, but I don't think it's available for windows.
For the last year I have been thinking about how to do a proper project management app on the web - and once you start thinking about it you realise that it is a lot harder than you think. Basically the problem is that if you have 100 project managers they will manage in 100 different ways. Which makes it extremely hard to do something that will have exactly the features each manager need.

As it is now you can basically choose between project (great with gannt charts and dependencies, but you can't do much else and have to spend loads of time updating it), excel (lots of lists but nothing else, and no interaction with other people), or something like basecamp, which is pretty simple and really just an extended to-do list.

Whatever project you do, and whatever you choose it never quite fits, there's always something missing.

The real killer, of course, is that even though you need a gazillion features for all the different sorts of projects and managers it still needs to be simple to use.

So this is what I spend my time developing - who knows it might even work...
List of Vulnerability Scanners
Vulnerability scanner does automated search for security weaknesses in web applications, computers and theirs services and reports them in details about possible vulnerabilities and probable defense or ways to prevent it.

This is a list of both commecial and free scanners out there. It is hard to rate which is better than other so there will be no ratings or comparisons but only listing of vulnerability scanners:
I don't know. He has a point about the monopolistic policies of taking a loss on something to kill the competition, but that doesn't exactly work the same way with information products. If you can make money from free, then by all means it's not monopolistic. If you use free to clear the market so that you can charge later, then it is monopolistic.
Usually, yes. But donna is the OP, so I think it's ok for her to acknowledge helpful comments rather than anonymously upmoddng.
Ask YC a very vague question ;)
I can not over-recommend crm114. I've been using it to classify some database entries and its accuracy is second-to-none, and its custom language makes working with strangely-stored data (like database entries) easy (after you learn the strange language)
When do they announce the winners of the spectrum auction?
I've seen references saying the bidding is over "later this month." Are we there yet?
What is your problem?
ak (at) semigeek (dot) com

Always like picking up more hardware - send the specs.
I highly recommend load testing. Good luck.
And this thread is bringing out a behavior on news.yc that I really don't like -- people downmodding recent comments of the OP because they're mad they can't downmod the post.
I really hate to say it because I like this forum so much, but this is the one kind of thing I DON'T like to see here.

If you're going to be in business with someone, get to know them.

This seems like a pretty good place to get to know people (especially if you can arrange in-person meetings).

Probably not a good place to be "making deals".

One step at a time please.
:) The question was hypothetical. Besides being of interest to any small cash-strapped startup, your answers are being used in the construction of an AI system. Knowing the factors that are most important to a venture's contributors will help us determine an algorithm to value the contributions.
Is there any documentation that stands out for learning the alien language?

No doubt, I'll be combing through all of the CRM114 information on the website. Is there anything that is not referenced there that will be of use?
This project uses two really nice bits of kit:

1. Arduino (which is a cheap, open source design, microcontroller board)

2. XPort (a system-on-a-chip ethernet connector which contains a web server and a serial interface inside an ethernet socket).
Get a good night of sleep -- it might be the last you get for a long time.
Agreed - there's nothing really to "understand" here, as the grandparent called for. Businesses like Google are just doing what will maximize their profits. They aren't trying to be free or partaking in some "free!" revolution - they're just saying "Oh, ok, that will make us the most money, let's do it." It's a side effect rather than a goal.
Free Love: the ongoing rise of 'free stuff'
I wonder if this guy actually believes what comes out of his own mouth. I sure he thinks others do.
From this page (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index2.ht...) at the World Health Organization:

"In high-income countries more than two-thirds of all people live beyond the age of 70 and die of chronic diseases: cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive lung disease, cancers, diabetes or dementia. Lung infection remains the only leading infectious cause of death.

...

In low-income countries less than a quarter of all people reach the age of 70, and nearly a third of all deaths are among children under 14. Although cardiovascular diseases together represent the leading cause of death in these countries, infectious diseases (above all HIV/AIDS, lung infections, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases and malaria) together claim more lives. Complications of pregnancy and childbirth together continue to be a leading cause of death, claiming the lives of both infants and mothers."

Still think that being poor in America is as terrible as being poor in the developing world? How many kids do you know of that die of diarrhea in America? I'm not saying either situation is a panacea, but seriously, everyone in this country won the 'ovarian lottery' just by being here.

Anyway, this is getting way off topic...
1. Does that mean if you spent 6 months working on it, you would expect $125K from revenues?

2. How would you determine how many dollars you helped the site make?
Pick out your favorite brands of personal jet, caviar and champagne.
I totally don't get it.
"one that had a heart attack and quit, one that got pregnant and quit"

If you had put locks on your office doors, chances are both of them would still be with you.
I was attempting to point out that this post has all the qualities of spam. It's vague, it uses symbol repitition ($$$), non-standard abbreviations (opp), and seems like a scam.
Nokia working with Cambridge University to create morphable phone
Time to look for a new job?
Well, not really - free is maximizing value creation, not value capture. Chris Anderson explained all this: "the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets [attention, reputation, etc] for the sake of a business model to be identified later"

It just so happens they already have a great business model, but they didn't when they released their search engine. They didn't make their search engine free to "maximize their profits"
Paying is not synonymous with getting screwed over. Money can change hands in a win-win situation.
You are probably right... I think all the opportunities to pull a Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates or Sergey Brin/Larry Page in our current economy require education, (some) resources, and free time to tinker, which is really hard when you are living hand to mouth.

The ability to social climb probably requires several generations at this point. First getting into the middle class, then the upper middle class, then finally into the owner class. I still say it's possible, but yeah, it'd require a brilliant mind and a lot of luck to do it all in one leap.
"If you want a great business, take Coca-Cola. The product is unchanged, they sell 1.5 billion 8 ounce servings per day 122 years later."

1.5 BILLION servings of Coke a day?! That's 1 for every 4 humans on this planet. Now that is a crazy stat (and I thought Starbucks opening 7 stores per day was crazy)
Have kids :D
yeah, but one would be dead, and the other would be busy feeding her baby :-)
Why don’t we have a word for it?
Request clearance from the tower.
Well he is talking 8 ounce servings, which means I had eight servings myself today (medium coke at Taco Johns for lunch, with one refill). So I'd guess Americans make up about half of those servings, since our drinks are so absurdly large.

Was an interesting aspect of living in Spain. I had to get used to making an 11 ounce bottle of coke last a whole meal, or pay another $3 for a 'refill'.
All your base are belong to Paypal (and its plugin)