skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that it's because open source coders

1. Have the time to do it right (there are no deadline)

2. Could potentially be judged by anybody who uses the project
Challenging? The problem is getting the entire entity legally registered. It takes more than a weekend, apparently.

That said, the barriers to starting a business in the US are not unreasonable. Having read "The World is Flat (2.0)" and recalling the hurdles encountered in other parts of the world, The US is pretty good, but not the best, and far from the worst. No place in the world, though, allows it to be done in a weekend.
Great idea, jraines
What a lot of people miss that the hacker is actually the starting capital of the company.

If you have an idea, and can't programm you can:

1. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs money, i.e. capital.

2. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it with little pay, or only equity.

If you have money, you can buy the programmers, but if you have no capital to start off, no matter how brilliant your idea is, it will go nowhere, and remain nothing more than a day dream.

See people value what they know, and for businness types they would like to think that "ideas" are worth more, and that programmers are just little disposable things that they can just hire anywhere.

As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers, and not businness types.
Wow I went to one of these , if this is true its a good thing nothing ever came from it. It was a fun experience though
Sure. I wasn't suggesting not doing anything until the next funding round. Ideally, mixmax would continue working on the idea, while hopefully getting to know potential cofounders and making other contacts. That way, when YC hosts its winter round, their team will have the benefits already mentioned in my above post.
Paying someone to read an email about your startup is essentially advertising, very very targeted advertising. You are paying Michael Arrington X$ to take notice of your company.

I think your money would be better spent building a userbase and proving your startup in the market. Build your product before you build your marketing.
Wow, I haven't thought about trade wars in forever. I used to play back on "The Berlin Wall" in Berlin, CT.

(P)ort
(T)rade
Buy (E)quipment

That's about all I remember
Yes, something similar to OpenID and Googlecheckout. The problem would be that the Yahoo!'s, Microsoft's, and AOL's of the world would not allow Google to centrally manage all user IDs and registration information on the web (or they would not be willing participants in the centralization of the information to another for profit company).
Ah, and a lot of people mention Jobs as a non-hacker, which is simply not true. He was a hacker, but with great businness sense.

"Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[9] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[12] In 1970, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[13] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.[14]

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak.[15] He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls."
Outrageous!
It's absolutely relevant, and I would generally agree with you.

There is one exception though. If the system is surrounded by a well designed testing framework, it can be overhauled piece by piece as necessary, no system rewrite required. Test code illustrates what the original programmer expected, and enables a system to be extended without necessarily understanding the theory behind it in its entirety. Of course, most legacy systems don't have good testing frameworks in place these days, so it might take a few years to see if this exception actually holds true or if the testing frameworks tend to get scrapped with the system.
You wouldn't start coding something before you'd fleshed out a design, right? So why would you start designing something before you identified the market for it?

Marketing is the social component of design, and you need brilliant marketing before you can create that brilliant product.
"Why would a buyer's agent be a good faith representative in negotiations if it was in their personal interest that the sale price be higher?"

Because, for the good ones, their professional reputation and license are on the line. You won't stay in business long if you get a reputation for screwing your customers over. Look for an agent with an ABR designation if you are really worried about this.

"it's 6% everywhere... there is no price competition"

Wrong. There is no rule that says 6% is mandatory. 5.5% and 5% are very common now. Some homes take a lot of work to sell and find.

"They also actively try to control entrance into the profession to make sure everyone tows the line."

Also wrong. There are a plethora of agents in the profession. That there are licensing exams to ensure agents have a requisite level of knowledge about the law, contracts, financing, fair housing laws, etc. and continuing education requirements does not mean they are controlling the entrance into the profession anymore than doctors, lawyers, or accountants do. It means they have serious professional standards because you are screwing around with property, titles, and people's homes.

Agents do a lot more than simply list things in MLS and the newspaper. There is a lot of networking behind the scenes that can sell a house quick that FSBO and Redfin are not keyed into. Once you get to negotiations and the closing process, an agent really earns their money by coordinating the necessary inspections, title/legal functions, financing functions, etc. It is naive and risky to think that most of these things can be automated simply.
Philip Greenspun wrote convincingly about how programmers are under valued because they fail to treat programming as a proper profession. They don't dress and otherwise present themselves professionally. They fail to interface professionally with customers and analysts as a doctor or lawyer would. Programmers themselves tend to demand a management style that treats them as a cog in the machine, where they are fed detailed requirements and produce output for others to deal with.

The nature of programming work is not so far removed from what a corporate lawyer or financial analyst does. Yet programmers have a much different public image. I think it's fair to say programming attracts certain idiosyncratic personalities that affect the general perception of the work.

On the same theme as the grandparent post, don't undervalue the soft touch. There are people who bring to the table little more than that they're nice and likeable. I've seen such people in analyst roles responsible for retaining or creating substantial business.
http://twitter.com/xugglybug
I was pretty young at the time, but I got in at the very tail end. There was a BBS for farmers called FBMInet that my parents were on. I don't remember much about it (except that there were lots of pirated games). I still use the same password that I chose there for sites I don't care about.

My first web access was via a BBS run by an organization called Edmonton Freenet. For a (very) small yearly fee you could dial in and use (amongst other things) lynx and pine. Very rustic, but considering that a decade or so before we were on a party line...
These points are exactly the struggles I had at my first major development job. And from talking with others I know that I was not alone in them. My poor communication skills were a huge blind spot for me, but fortunately I had an excellent manager and team who worked with me to turn weaknesses into strengths.

I learned to swallow my pride and ask questions of the people I worked with. I started to recognize when I was getting stuck on a problem and needed a fresh perspective. I learned how to write clearly for an audience which doesn't have all of the domain knowledge I have accumulated. And I learned that sometimes it's much better to say "hey! I found a bug here!" and move on to more pressing concerns than to try to fix every problem you come across.

As I look back I'm glad to be able to say that I've grown significantly as a developer. I won't say that I'm perfect, but I'm definitely accomplishing more now that I've learned how better to interact with my teammates and collaborators in a larger business setting.
Commenters here talk as if no successful business was ever started by a sharp businessperson who hired software developers.

Clearly, many such businesses exist.
I was there on the 2400 baud, wishing for that 9600 baud and a 486
Nothing.

I would, however, spend a fair amount of time doing some social engineering to make sure he would take note of my email when I send it to him. Before I sent him an email I would make sure that he had heard of my company. I would achieve this by posting to comments on his blog under pseudonymes, sneak references in on blogs he probably reads, etc.

When he receives the email from me with the subject "We just launched mylittlepony.com" he will think "aah, I read about that somewhere, I better check it out - it's the buzz"

Believe me - this sort of thing actually works.
I wonder which is really harder, becoming a good enough coder, or becoming a good enough $specialty.

Computers are, lets face it, logical things. How much programming skill do you _really_ need to build a prototype? The ability to logically think through a problem, the ability to decompose it into small enough chunks, and then to make those chunks work. Sure, it won't be pretty or elegant or scale if you suck at data structures and algorithms, but it doesn't _need_ to be pretty and elegant to get through the prototype stage. Heck some major sites are ugly, inelegant, and scale like a man climbing a wet glass wall.

Fortunately computers are viewed as 'super hard' (genuine quote) by the general population... for now. If that changes, by virtue of people being introduced to start-simple-get-complex coding (eg excel macros, flash) or easier creation tools being developed, geeks who bang out simple web apps could be much less competitive as startup founders.

That's not to say they won't be valued - someone will need to clean up the huge pile of steaming junk thrown out by Dreamweaver 6. And there will still be genuinely hard problems to solve... which is one reason why I'm basing my startup on a problem set that requires efficient graph coloring and traversal :)
Thanks for the article. It bears out the experiences I have had working for small and large companies. Engineers in startups are closer to the business and (sometimes) to the customer. They are solving real problems and inventing new things. Though it can be stressful, it also gives you a sense of worth. The other thing is does is allow you to "play" in the sense of being creating - making new things and having fun doing it.

Large companies tend to be political. Folks want position, title, etc. As one person put it - "I handle 250 off-shore engineers". My instant reaction was "but what have you, personally, built today."

There is the notion that hierarchies are good. That as you move away from coding you are "rising" in the hierarchy. This substitution of image for ability while gratifying to the ego, kills creativity and promotes mediocrity.

As you state, and experience bears it out: software works best with core (small) teams with creative innovate people working for a common goal.
To remove all and then hand pick the ones you like, it seems that you can "select all" and then move them over, then add the ones you like.

I guess a better way to do this would be to default everything to "not accepted" and then ask the user: "what do you want to import?" with the option: "Everything!"
4 Questions for Tim Ferriss (mentions RescueTime, YC08)
Very true - my experience is that "the soft touch" that you so eloquently call it is far more important than people generally think.

If people care about what they are doing and come to work happy and ready they will produce much better work.
That is interesting. Does that mean that advertising for a co-founder runs into the same problems? Or advertising for 2, or for 99 co-founders?
> It takes more than a weekend, apparently.

It sounds from this writeup that the structure they wanted to have, which is frustatingly vague, is actually illegal. Not just difficult.
25 karma is really not very much, even for someone who's consistently in the minority, I think the point is not to let totally new accounts use downvote.
Good design is about choosing which features NOT to implement. This process lends itself very badly to large groups since everyone will want to implement their pet peevee and eventually the design will end up cluttered and inconsistent.

In an ideal world a product will be designed by one person. Preferably Philip Starck or Jonathan Ive.
TED: Looking inside the brain in real time (video)
1. The page is too wide

2. The address bar breaks with http://fusecal.com as input.
Payton,

Of course considerable resources spent would be better spent on building a userbase and proving a product in the market, but if we're talking about $100 or so, then it's better spent on getting a prized journalist to take notice of your product. All in all, 100 bucks maybe would make a difference in getting the targeted press you'd like, but it will not even make a mark towards the monumental efforts you mentioned that would take way more than a measly 100 bucks.
I took the observations in this article as arguments in favour of doing a startup straight out of school. Having experienced the problems it mentions first-hand (since I was not so wise as to do a startup straight out of school), my logic is:

1. You will be inefficient at a corporate job due to the overhead of integrating with a team, an organization, and understanding a large codebase.

2. Startups don't have inefficiencies due to large teams, large organizations, or large codebases.

3. You will be more efficient in a startup.

4. Through greater efficiency, you can create more wealth in a startup than in a big company.

As a side-effect, when you spend time in a big company, you become better at dealing with the large organization and the large codebase. Thus, the marginal value of leaving for a startup decreases, which creates one more lock-in.
Sysop in ATL.
When you're worth billions of dollars, what's the point in having a million dollar salary.
yup, i believe you, these things definitely do work. Far and few though can execute it right. Obviously there's the whole: If you haven't met him personally, and can't get in front of him, then you probably shouldnt be pitching anyway. What about the guy in Iowa with no connections, but a great product that should somehow get his attention.
yes, obviously. I'm saying, product is built, you're ready to go. You could spend $10,000 to talk to arrington (ie- hire a PR firm that is pretty good), and still fail because of a shitty product. hehe, happens all the time. I'm saying outside of that.
I know of businesses who look like they were started by businesspeople who hired hackers because the hackers were later ousted (like digg). The businessperson displaced the hacker after the fact. Can you think of any businesses were there where this clearly didn't happen? Can you think you any successful software company started by a businessperson who paid consulting fees to thoughtworks or IBM, set up a booth at a CS department to recruit techies, or paid a headhunter?
I really like this application. It works very well for the stage it's in.

I want to point out a simple error I found. Use the link http://www.canyons.edu/Offices/PIO/NewsReleases.html to see events on that page. These are the news releases for my college. Notice that the application doesn't find all of the events on the page.

If I could tell the app "This area includes an event not already found. Please add it." then I could work with any events that are missed (and there will always be one somewhere that doesn't work).

A feature suggestion along this line is a way to see the events in the source preview (maybe highlighted in some way) so I can see what the event is and get any background information from it.

Good luck with this. I really like this idea!
You just might want to make sure you have some people interested in buying your "great product" too.
That's actually a fascinating idea.
I think you've stumbled onto something genuinely interesting: twitter's users are the kind of verbose early adopter that write reviews, and you're using an interface they're already familiar with. Furthermore, if I understand twitter correctly (not a user), you've got a viral spread mechanism built in, in that all followers of twitterate users will see the @rating and wonder what it means (though it would help you if the tag was @twitterate).

If you're interested in pursuing that, you should rewrite twitterate.com as a destination site for people looking for ratings. It'll be depressingly bad now, but it will expose what you need to do to make it work. Or you could leave it as the entertaining toy it is. Good work in any case!
While we're on it, these two quotes are famous for being famously wrong:

“I think there is a world market for about five computers.”
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”

But they were both completely true at the time, right? Bugs me that people act like the quoted were short-sighted when they were merely accurate.
I don't know if the stupidity of the message correlates to its vote tally. For example, a comment with a negative rating may hold an unpopular but valid view.

In fact, if the mapping was that good, one wouldn't need to run a 'stupid filter' on the message body in the first place.
'inject', 'each' and 'times' methods much slower in Ruby 1.9
Facebook Tidbits From Snap Summit In San Francisco
Did they got co-founders? How does this work out?
I wouldn't work for rates "competitive" with those at eLance or Rent-A-Coder. I've done projects through those sites, and despite explicitly stating, "Don't bother with lowball offers--we're looking for good work, not low prices. We are developers, and we will be judging your experience and code harshly." I still got bids of 150 bucks for a project that I would have billed a weeks worth of hours for. They, of course, would do a horrible job, and not even worth that much...but you shouldn't try to compete on price with those folks.
I'm addressing them. They can still view HTML, and submit forms, and even click my (few) ECMAscript controls. I'm just not going to spend any extra time making sure everything lines up perfectly. I'll spend my time on actual functionality, not glitz.

If you want to enter my market just to handle the IE6 users, more power to you! You'll validate our business model, and we'll hire somebody to make our site look pretty in IE6. I suspect that will be a lot easier than it will be for you to reproduce all of our back-end work.
A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images
I went a bit more in-depth here:

http://subwindow.com/articles/12

It turns out that Apple is a totally perfect example.
"these sample comments are then compared to “smart” text from a body of work on sites like Project Gutenberg, an online catalog of great world literature. Mr. Ortiz says he took snippets from classics by such authors as Jules Verne and J.D. Salinger to serve as a baseline for “the edited English language."

Did anyone else laugh at the thought of setting Holden Caulfield as the paragon of English prose?
Thats a really hard task to accomplish. Is it poor english stupid? What about foreigners writing in english? Are they all stupid, they won't write 100% proper english. What about misspelled words?

I think irrelevancy and inaccuracy are the best way to distinguish stupid from smart and the key to know what is one what is the other is probably on the subject of the comments and that would be a related/non-related filter not a stupid filter.

Honestly, by the name it got I think it is more intended to get a lot of buzz than to really become a real product. Isn't Mr. Ortiz just trying to get some attention? The definition of stupid is directly related to the reader so you can't have a filter for that, it would have to be personal.
Atlanta's startup weekend company is apparently in the clear. Not sure what the difference is between the two.

In Atlanta's, the actual startup was an C-corp owned in part by Startup Weekend, LLC, in part by Atlanta Startup Weekend LLC, and the rest by the "core team" that existed after the weekend. People who participated in the weekend were given shares in Atlanta Startup Weekend, LLC, and not the C-corp. I think this was done to avoid any complications with the SEC, since LLCs are governed far less strictly.
local Edinboro BBS - Bases Loaded in 814 area code.
It's a good idea with an intuitive UI! You could offer a simple API/javascript button that event organizers (eg. Boston Symphony Orchestra, Ticketmaster or StartupSchool.org) could place on their websites. A guest clicks on the button and gets the opportunity to add the event to his/her everyday calendar app.
The audio in your screencast could use some help. It sounds generally dead, and sometimes goes high, or low, or skips.
Looks good! On the "import calendar" page, I would put the source page below the detected events, and separate it from the rest of the page (by adding a border).
Stuff like that makes me wonder if I should start a "Never ever work with that person, no matter what"-list.
I would rather support 70% of the market and let the 30% download the upgrade. By supporting 30% of the market, you're neglecting the other 70% to a certain extent.

If 30% of the market still ran Windows 95, would you support them too? I don't think so. There is a time to say a product is obsolete, and IE6 is qualified and should be left out to pasture.

Your answer makes me wonder if you would say the same thing for 25%, or 20%. What about 15%? Or 10% where do you draw the line?
I don't see where I insulted IE6 users. I think you're referring to where I said they don't care about having the current version, but that wasn't meant as an insult.

I was making the implication that maybe they aren't as concerned about having the latest greatest in other aspects of technology as well, which would make them a more difficult market to encourage to try your latest greatest.

And in the first place you insulted IE6-wary developers by implying their reasons boil down to laziness. I was offering up what I think are legitimate reasons for ignoring IE6: the huge amount of dev time you save, and the freedom you gain to make use of dev shortcuts.

I think my VHS analogy is apt: you could spend extra time and money publishing new releases to VHS as well as DVD. You would probably even make money from it. But if you research who still primarily uses VHS players I don't think you'll find movie buffs who buy a couple movies every month.

And ultimately I don't see the big deal: I'm not suggesting a developer block IE6 users out of spite and then sit on his ass: I'm saying a developer can choose to ignore IE6 and then have loads of time to devote to making an amazing product.