skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He was posting to his network of friends/subscribers and the columnist grabbed the thread and decided to show it to the world. Twitter is an odd medium, most people's audience is their friends, but then it is also a public forum. Like having a conversation through a megaphone in a crowded public park. Everyone can hear you, but it is still a chat with friends.

That line about people whispering because they are afraid to find out who is gone is fantastic. Perhaps it isn't Twitter, but the way journalists have been using it?
Yes, large companies do that. I'd rather pick the lower hanging fruit. Small and midmarket companies often approach me with ideas and questions. THEY are the ones I'm targeting.

(Just for a laugh, go to any local Chamber of Commerce or Tech meeting. Ask how much they like their business software on a scale of 1 to 10. Take plenty of business cards and find a way to deliver "something".)
You're right. It's hard to get started. But they're out there. Everywhere. They just don't know what to do and where to turn. Finding a way to get connected is one of the biggest early challenges.
Yahoo Announces mobile Service
"Here's the biggest challenge I think you face. Because ERP is so entwined in a how a company does business, it's really hard to create a "bottom-up" solution."

Right! That's why packages are the default.

The way to break the "software package mindset" is to learn how to conduct analysis. There are a lot of good hackers out there, but hardly anyone knows how to do analysis anymore.

There's not much magic here. Just unrelenting legwork...

"So, Joe, what do you do with the Work Order Traveler when Julie runs out of X17 components? You give it to Fred? Fred, what do you do with it? What, Joe doesn't really give it to you, he passes it by Jose first? Is this true, Julie? Why does Jose need to see it?..."

"Then what happens?"

"What do you do if...?"

"How do you know if...?"

How do you know when you're done. When everyone agrees that you're done. Then you build it.

Ever seen anyone do this well? I didn't think so.
Enjoy: full control w/o investor interference

Hardest parts: Balancing job, family (3 kids), and startup. Only having 10hrs/wk to work on it. Figuring out marketing on my own.

I think taking investment could be good depending on the investors.

I'm going after a very tough market -- people who are too busy for the effort traditional photo-sharing sites require. There's this narrow band of people who have 5 minutes but not 30 to share the last few months' photos. If it were a more attractive market I would have serious competition from full-time startups.

http://ourdoings.com/
Business Idea: Car Service Mashup
In my experience, the best way to break in is to find a process that either isn't handled or handled only tangentially by existing ERP packages. It helps too if that process represents a new way of doing business for your customers. That way you get to pitch for growing the top-line (i.e. creating dollars that didn't exist before your software came on the scene) vs. bottom-line savings that just cut costs.

Not to throw cold water on your idea, but I have deep reservations that pure technical expertise in generic enterprise development/implementation will win anyone over. All of the big guys plus numerous other consulting companies already offer this, with much more name recognition (deserved or not) than you will have. Additionally, one of the main features of packaged software is that customers not only are loathe to manage a development process, they are reluctant to even engage one in the first place.

But if you can distinguish yourself by being The Smartest and Best (TM) in a particular business area, all of your skills in execution can back that up and create a winning operation. But without that domain focus and expertise the story is much less compelling.
Drunken Monkey Photoshop Tutorial
PicLens Brings Cover Flow-style Photo Viewing to the Web
StumbleUp: Dine and Dash Surfing
No. Also, I try to never read newspapers or anything written by journalists. It's basically all lies made to evoke "feelings" in you. There's no shortcut to the truth, no alternative to actually learning the facts and the most extreme and sincere arguments for every side, and choosing for yourself.
Ask YC: What time zone are you in?
Am I the only one to notice that responses here are not only related to the quality and interest of the content, but also to the time of day? Seems like a lot of activity while I sleep (U.S. Eastern Standard Time GMT-5). Maybe I need to shift my "hacker.news day". Where is everyone at?
Dell Acquires Adam Dell’s MessageOne For $155 Million
Besides software... compose/arrange/perform music; photography; write prose; occasionally dabble in drawing or painting, but not as much as I used to.
It's a new way to kill the last remnants of thought out sentences.

Paragraphs are SO last year.
I agree. This happens outside of the hacker world too. In general I find people are very boastful about the fact they don't watch TV.
Cool link. Thank you.
Web 2.0 is about user-generated content/discussion. They were ahead of the curve in realizing and/or stumbling on that. Yes, user-uploaded pictures barely meets minimum standards for "user-generated content" and hot-or-not voting barely meets minimum standards for "discussion". And you might say it was the first Web 2.0 site that spread virally..
Rebecca - a ruby on rails server manager
After the final surge to get my CTM and moving office locations, I dropped out. I still do get a public speaking fix through some storytelling gigs. I'd rather not say which specific club (I like to think I am a wallflower) but that Toastmaster club is/was a fantastic supportive environment to practice public speaking. For the only way to learn public speaking is to actually do it. The value of the feedback (handwritten comments that you get after a speech) was tremendous - where else can you get honest supportive feedback - people want you to succeed. The fact that it was a corporate club that was not my company was a plus - felt safe to talk about whatever - no coworkers (except the one guy I carpooled with).
During the Q&A period at a talk by Jeff Barr, the Amazon Web Services evangelist, a venture capitalist made an insightful remark. He said how they had given a company $4 million in financing. $1 million of that went to purchase/lease server hardware and storage.

Amazon.com's web services flips the traditional startup/venture capital financing paradigm. How?

#1 You can test out your business model on a small scale without investing heavily in infrastructure. Why build it before they come? Is your business model working? Is it profitable? You can find this out. As a side effect, the businesses built on amazon.com's web services may be more self-sustaining than one that is simply siphoning off from a pool of initial capital funding .

#2 You can scale as needed with EC2 and virtual machines. EC2 lets you go from 10 to 100 to 1000 virtual machines in real-time, all running your virtual machine image. The caveat is: you need to learn how to build the right virtual machines and manage your virtual machines. Jeff made a remark about how erlang and map-reduce (both esoteric languages that deal with managing scalability) will be valuable skills in probably just a year.

#3 Your costs can go down. Why? Moore's law and whatever law/maxim regulates storage. As storage costs go down, Amazon.com can transfer on the savings to you - you can actually pay less per gigabyte of storage in 6 months. Compare that to having storage hardware that steadily depreciates and heads to slow obsolescence.
I am steadfastly in GMT. Wherever I go, my watch, phone and laptop remain in GMT. Even in the summer, in the UK, which goes to GMT+1, I stay in GMT.

What hours am I awake? Whatever hours are the most productive. If I have admin tasks then I'll be in daylight hours. Otherwise, I'm most productive doing extended stints.

I've noticed there is a large contingent of UK hackers on this forum. This could account for some activity outside of US office hours. The remainder is probably people doing irregular hours.
Using Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, Lucene, and Ruby for Web Spidering
GMT+1
We're bootstrapping 100%. My full-time engineering co-op (required for graduation) pays the bills. I also do marketing and web consulting part-time. And sometimes, my band makes decent money as well.

Our startup itself, though, is funded by winning competitions. We've won business plan competitions and we just recently added 1st place at a statewide marketing competition (it's funny when engineering majors beat business and marketing majors at business and marketing). Now we'll be going to Atlanta in April for nationals.

Whenever people ask us if we're considering funding, we typically reply that we prefer the type of funding we don't have to pay back, though I couldn't see us turning down a serious offer.

Sometimes I think it'd be cool to be able to work on our startup full-time, but I already work on it for probably 6-10 hours a day, so I'm not sure how much we'd really gain.
CET which is UTC+1
I was just thinking the same thing while responding to the bootstrapping thread which seems to have made it to the front page since I left work yesterday, with a ton of comments.

I'm right here with you at GMT-5.
Ask YC: How many hours do you sleep on average ? 
Since years I tried to wake up earlier and reduce my sleep time. But it is a daily struggle for me. By reducing sleeping hours I hope to be able to do more everyday. I know that some people need only 4h sleep and they are full of energy. I wish I could do so but I usually need 8.5 hours. I would like to know how many hours you guys sleep and if you have some tips to reduce sleep time. Do you think we are "born" with a needed amount of sleep or can we change it? I am also interested to know at what time do you wake up every morning.
GMT+2, EET
Taking on a personal challenge and then writing about it
Retrieve All website Colors
Last chance to bid for Startup Insiders website
I'm the exact same way. I am most productive from about 11pm to 4am. Luckily my 9-5 only requires me to work "just hard enough to not get fired." I'm also still in college, so my college roomies don't mind the music at 3am, as long as it's not blasting.
Access your music from anywhere without uploading
"Hello World" with Lightstreamer
I find it depends on whats on my mind. Many times I will wake up earlier then I wanted and cannot get back to sleep because I start thinking of things I need/want to get done.
Currently I probably get around 6 - 7, 8 would be a good sleep and 4 - 5 hours on a bad night...
I wouldn't worry about it too much, even sleeping 9 hours leaves 15 hours for the day.
Pacific Time

http://www.kirubakaran.com/phr0zen has twice-a-day snapshots of Hacker News front page. May be that will help?
Different people do need different amounts of sleep, but also, the same people will need different amounts of sleep at different points in their life. Young children don't need as much. Teenagers need quite a bit because their body is growing rapidly. College level people through their 30s can usually get by with little sleep, then you need more as you get older.

I try and shoot for around 8 hours of sleep each night. You could argue that I could get more work done if I only got 5 or 6 hours, but the quality of the work would not be the same. I also find that going to bed at 11 and waking up at 7 is not the same for me as going to bed at 2 and waking up at 10.

Einstein and Donald Trump supposedly needed very little sleep which is why they could work so hard.
GMT -8 (Pacific Time). I'm surprised that there aren't that many over here it seems.
Studies have shown you need at least 8 hours of continuous sleep if you are on a traditional monophasic sleep schedule. Anything less and you start to accumulate "sleep debt" and performance decreases, among other things.

If you are very very serious about reducing total sleep time, you can attempt polyphasic sleep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

I recommend trying to find Why We Nap by Dr. Stampi. Its the only detailed research on the subject. Basically, dont trust much of the info about polyphasic sleep around the net as much of it is false.
Rarely more than 9, rarely less than 6.
TrustBearer OpenID - Two-Factor Authentication With OpenID
PG: Can we have access to the actual timestamps on submissions and stories?
I'd love to run some analysis and produce a heat map like I did for Digg: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/digg-heat-map.html (can be a hidden field if you like)
Proposed Yahoo-News Corp. Deal: Details
Intel puts $3.5 million into ‘bragging rights’ startup
Charlie O'Donnell to Fired Yahoos: Come Work Here
I usually sleep about 7 hours.
So do I.
I hate to sound harsh, but there's nothing here to disagree with. You're not taking any deep principled stand. You're saying "I like puppies." and "Ice cream is yummy."

What is your system NOT going to to do?

What are you going tell you customers you WON'T do?

If you're just saying YES to everything, there's nothing left to argue. And, from my experience, the company will die a death from a thousand papercuts as your sunk under the weight of over-promising.
This is all about business processes, application integrations, and integrity (and security) of data.

Think SOA, ESB. Combine that with Utility computing (Amazon EC2, IBM, Microsoft, and Google also entering that space eventually) and many many provider's with connected or disconnected processes but with compliant interfaces into the extended (internet) service bus...

Big fat ERP is so 4 years ago.
I'm sure there are plenty but most are still in bed.
If you procrastinate your tasks, it means you sleep not enough. That's all.
What goes up must come down.
Let me get this straight... it replaces PDF files with Flash. And that's good because..?
9 hours. But I can easily sleep up to 10 hours!

Anyway, I don't care about my time of sleep if I can be very focused in my work for several hours. And this does happen often (when I'm not reading News.YC, heh).

I believe there are enough hours to work each day if you are really focused in what you do and if you're really feeling rested with your sleep time.
Analysis of Programming Language Trends
I usually sleep 6-7 hrs, but I need 7.5 to be at my best. I wake up at 6:45 normally, 6:30 this morning to shovel snow.

If you are at your best after 8.5 hrs, listen to your body and don't try to reduce sleep time.
I usually sleep 6.5 hours each night. I don't have a set "bedtime," but I'm awake every morning at 07h30.

One of the most important things that you can do is just get up, once your alarms rings don't hit snooze, just get up! It's easier once it becomes a habbit.

I usually drag myself out of bed with my blanket, turn on the kettle and do some stretching on the lounge floor. I drink tea, eat cereal and then I shower.
"Einstein and Donald Trump supposedly needed very little sleep which is why they could work so hard."

Interestingly, I read in a magazine from my country that Einstein slept at least 10 hours each day (and more if needed).

So, reading your statement, I decided to search more about this typing "einstein hours of sleep" using Google.

I found some links like:

"... while others have been known to require 8 to 10 hours (such as Albert Einstein)."
- in http://webhome.idirect.com/~readon/sleep.html

"She points out that Albert Einstein sleep nine hours a night and was still able to get plenty done."
- in http://evenstaronline.com/resources.html

"Einstein, on the other hand, demanded 10 hours of sleep every night for himself."
- in http://www.quickiesheets.com/

I'm not sure if this is really true, but I do believe that a lot of hard work people can easily sleep during 10 hours.
GMT+2, SAST
Yes, ynot?

the only reason i have seen to avoid amazon as your hosting platform is if you are heavily database dependent. you can design around that if you can think a little bit around the lamp stack model.

for us our largest challenge will be how do we webscale the site.

our assumptions are
dynamic dns and round robin load balancing will get us to split any dns record to up to 5 machines reasonably
amazon now allows us to scale vertically to 8 core VM with 16gb of ram
*this should get us to a point where we are either making money, or getting a good funding round out of someone.
PDFescape - Your Online PDF Reader, Editor, Form Filler, Form Designer, Solution
I worked at Black & Decker for 5 years implementing SAP. I also wrote custom software to integrate into SAP when their modules didn't "fit" B&D's needs. A Manufacturing operation is really an incredible orchestration of different people in different departments, but those departments incentives and measurements aren't always aligned with one another. A large ERP system like SAP makes these departments tightly integrated and there is a lot of battling for territory. One department may make and entry to move inventory around for their own purposes and that will affect another department adversely. My experience makes me believe that ERP systems should take a more loosely coupled approach so that each department can have it's on custom software and communicate with other departments via a standard interface like XML. Also don't discount the fact that some corporations benefit from the inflexibility of ERP software. Most high level people I worked with liked the fact that they could dictate from a high level how things were to be carried out, even if they weren't the people who knew the process the best. I can promise anyone who interviews 4 different people in a manufacturing plant, at different managerial levels, about processes in the plant, will receive at least 3 different answers. Every guy there thinks he knows what is best and he controls his fiefdom how he sees fit. Very often the Corporation uses software to dictate to him how he will do his job, and that person will usually bitch about the ERP system because if they bitched about the plant manager they would get canned. You are tackling a huge problem and I would be interested in keeping up with your progress, so if you need anyone to bounce anything off of...feel free to drop me a line.
maybe Y! canned him because he was drinking too many free lattes and twittering at least 18 times a day.

/tongue firmly in cheek
"6:30 this morning to shovel snow."

... and you guys were trying to convince us that the NE isn't so bad?;-)
I took a cue from Steve Yegge and traded in my terse blog style for more creative, verbose writing:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12

I also like taking pictures. The ones on the following page came from several different parents, but the ones that were obviously taken without a flash are from me:

http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/2008-01
5-6 on weeknights, 7-8 on weekends. Wake-up time is all across the board, which is not a good thing, but I spend a lot of time in different time zones.
4-5 hours per day.
If you like sports, that is one sports game a night. When I was in university we had 4 tv's and the ultimate cable package (a benefit of cramming 6 people into a tiny house, things like that become cheap) and a few roommates would commonly watch about 8 hours of tv per day.

However 'watching tv' was more doing school work on the couch with the odd bit of discussion about a good play.

90% of my 'tv watching' then was doing schoolwork.
It doesn't work. You can't change the amount of sleep you need by any significant amount. If you consistently shortchange yourself by a small amount each night, you may be able to convince yourself that you're getting more done ... but you'll actually be less sharp, less productive, less healthy, and much less happy (seriously -- it has big effects on your mood).

Read a book like Maas's Power Sleep :

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sleep-Revolutionary-Prepares-Per...

I'd recommend a better book but I don't know of one yet. I spend my time sleeping rather than hacking sleep.

You can tinker with when you sleep (using naps, etc.) to try and improve the quality of your sleep and adjust the times of day when you are most awake for maximum productivity. Just realize that you're basically rearranging your sleep and not magically reducing it.

If you can't find time to sleep the 8.5 hours that you need, you need to fix something else. Find a partner. Hire an assistant. Outsource. Prioritize. Postpone unimportant features. Get a better paying job with fewer hours. Play less World of Warcraft. Kill your television. Read David Allen or Tim Ferriss. Set noprocrast to numbers like "1024".
Misdirection. If you accomplish enough when you're awake people will assume that you must not sleep.
Shoveling snow is my favorite chore. It's quiet, solitary, beautiful, moderately but not overly hard work outside.
I did polyphasic sleep. Three days. Got a stomach ache and colitis...

Don't recommend it.
In college, I experimented on myself to see how much I needed. I found that <5 hours over time led to bad things for me (hallucinating, shaking), and surprisingly that >7 made me groggier than anything in between 5 and 7.

So that's what I shoot for.
Start working if you're satisfied with the salary alone, but assume you have 0% equity until you've something on paper. If you really want equity, then it needs to be negotiated now.

"It's all bullshit until it fits on a paycheck."
The guy hailing from Innsbruck, Austria has a problem with snow? ;-)
is this your site?
Tonight, I'm going to write myself an Aston Martin
I so almost distroyed my keyboard with coffee.

Well except I read that there was an emacs macro that business folks at Amazon used for years. Hmm, maybe if there's an ArcEmacs rewrite?
So then, all I have to do is deliver what I promise, right?
You have to go at least 200-300 meters up to get some snow, there's none at all in town and really hasn't been for more than a day all winter:-/
Have you always sleep that few?
It doesn't seem to matter to me how much I sleep, I just feel like crap when I have to wake up early, and for me that's unfortunately any point before 8 in the morning. Sometimes I sleep 9 hours, sometimes 6... the only way to not feel crappy is to wake up at 9 in the morning.

Same goes for waking up after, say, 9:30 because then I feel guilty about wasting so much time.

I have a job and since I need to be there at 9, I have to wake up at 7:30, which means setting the alarm to 6:30 and snoozing for an hour.
Did you try polyphasic sleep yourself?
I did a fast search, this book seems not so easy to find...
Competing for tips: Tipjoy & TipIt.To (oh, and Paypal)
FastSessions Rails Plugin Released
Restful Authentication with all the bells and whistles
Lately, about 4 hours a night. With a full night rest every 3 days or so.
Trade restrictions, high taxes, institutional corruption, ambiguous private property rights, lack of viability in contracts...

You'd be amazed at how badly it seems some 3rd world countries want to fail.
are these guys a YComb startup?
5-6 hours a night, I use up until 12 or to work and then wind down for an hour or two playing games or watching a movie with my wife

I should be getting more, but there is just too much to do and not enough time to do it all in.

8:30-9 commute, 9-5 work, 5-6 commute, dinner, then work again on my startup, then some games for the icing on the days cake.
...unless you live in Maine.
Please throw an iPhone compatible interface on top of this
I'm PST, and I've been up for quite some time, but that was for the purpose of talking with JST.
That's so funny how most of my ideas already exist ...

Mine might be better because I'd make it dead simple to use, and only target adsense. And I'd target small publishers, bloggers, etc.
I'm a student and was working on this exact idea, except I didn't want to force the user to download a desktop app, e.g., upload through your browser.

Competition is a good thing, though, I guess.

I need to kick it in the ass.
How come? Can you explain?
Data Breach Notification Laws, State By State