skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bring in as many testers as will be useful, as soon as they will be useful.

In my case, I have a codebase which meets the "minimum feature set" criterion of "is this something people would like to use"; but I've only invited in a relatively small number of testers, because having lots of people test my code right now would (a) result in me spending time creating accounts and explaining things to people instead of writing code, and (b) result in people being misled about certain key aspects of the functionality.

At the point that I bring in lots of testers, I'll still have issues of accounting (not a problem, since at least the first wave of beta testers won't have to pay), scalability (not a problem, since the beta testers will be a small enough group that I won't need as much scalability as I will ultimately have), and performance edge-cases (which will be documented as "these things don't work very well; don't worry, they'll be much faster soon") left to address; but overall I want my code to be in a state where the vast majority of beta testers say "wow, this is amazing" and run off to tell their friends about it as soon as I let them in.
Ask YC: Recommend a Web Based Scheduling Software
My barber is looking for a way for customers to schedule appointments. Something simple and reliable.
I should be able to check his current availability and request an appointment.

He should be able to approve it (with email notification to me).

He currently keeps his schedule in his phone (Verizon on the built in calendar). So access from the phone is important.

A reminder to me the day before my appointment would be nice.

This isn't hard stuff, but it seems silly that I'd have to write it.

Anyone have a recommendation for something that already exists?

I've hunted google, but mainly it looks like some salons are easy to rip off because the software sucks, but my searches haven't been exhaustive.

I'm hoping someone has come through here with just the thing I need or someone has seen it already.

thoughts?
So what constitutes odd behavior?
Reactable demo (synthesize and perform electronic music in real time) [video]
I was talking about the world view that appears to underpin his opinions - not specifically what he was trying to say in the article.

So what if 'symmetric exposure to information is not equivalent'? If the net result is benefit then isn't that a good thing? By net result I mean

i.e. net result = gain/disadvantage for cop + gain/disadvantage for non-cop

His argument is that a smaller gain for members of the public plus a larger gain for cops if somehow bad. But if both parties gain what is the problem? Well if you don't really believe that extra 'value' can be created in the world (zero sum game) then you don't see it as both parties gaining. You view it as one party gaining value (power) at the expense of another. This appeared to be the assumption he was making.
Hmm, a here's why my favorite environment will dominate piece. I think the proliferation of this type of opinion piece points to something even bigger on the horizon.

There is no clear successor. There doesn't need to be. The computing ecosystem in general has grown big enough now the we don't need to, as he said, elect a new market leader. The rise of server side programming and web apps means we can choose whatever tools get us to market fastest in the domain space we've chosen. It might be rails, it might be lisp, and we might just hack it together in perl. It might be a mashup of all 3 running on different servers at different companies in different parts of the world!
"Do as I say and not as I do."
To talk

To write

Gravity

Newtonian laws

The scientific method

Although only now I'm starting to realize how amazing all those things were. And I took it for granted for all my school years... They were all just means to pass a class. What a shame.
There's also Metafilter. Or more spcifically, ask Metafilter which maintains one of the highest quality, large communities I've managed to find online.

http://ask.metafilter.com/

The $5 price of admission seems to be beyond most 1337 hax0rz with funy p!cs and LOLZ.
It seems like maybe traditional incubators are closer than VCs to competing in the same niche as YC. Is there any reason why it would be misleading to look at YC as an innovation in startup incubation -- namely to move the model a little bit closer to VC in terms of the independence of the founders?
The universe rewards boldness
The Really Terrible Orchestra
Or: The Beauty of Amateurs.
True. Perhaps I should have put quotes around proves. Still, I remember what a big impact Zeno had on me as a young philosophy student.
Taffy DB : A JavaScript database for your browser
With the author's attitude in mind, I think I'd retitle the article "Should Liberal Arts Colleges Be Saved?"
I didn't have one, but thanks to this article I'll be wasting the next few days reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes
Anyone can. pg included the sourcecode to news.ycombinator in his latest release of Arc.
Existence.
In fact it was a design flaw, though not in the server.

The code for checking whether a username was taken was inefficient, so it was taking a huge amount of time to create a new account. The culprit was this line:

(some [is dcuser (downcase _)] (keys hpasswords*))

The reason the TechCrunch post slowed the site down so much was not the traffic per se but the number of those visitors who were creating new accounts. I pasted a fix into the repl, so the site should be faster now.

Thanks to Rtm for narrowing the problem down to account creation.
The thing I'm most thankful to have learned in 2007 is that there is a _lot_ more that I don't know about programming than I thought there was.
That Munger speech is excellent; it's a great summary.
How much effort is put into into collecting, tracking, and analyzing lunch orders?
Mysterious slowness fixed.  Sorry about that.
OLPC XO to Run Windows in 60 Days or Less
How did that rock your world?

I'm not asking you to explain the theorems -- I understand them -- just indicate why or how they are significant to you.
Stack three polarizers. Orient #1 and #2 parallel, orient #3 perpendicular. See no light come through.

Rotate #2 to 45 degrees. See light come through.

Remove #2 completely. See no light come through.
8 Premium One Line Css Tips
Most people do not like when I'm telling them about my startup. Especially online. Somehow talking about what you care about is taken as a self-promotion and counts as spam in their eyes. Go figure.
Yes, and in fact you can see from that exactly what editors can do. (Look for calls to the function editor.) Editors can basically edit titles, kill stories and ban users.
There is a link to it at the bottom of every page.
It's not really paradoxical [1], but I've always thought Gabriel's Horn was pretty cool. It's a (non-fractal) object with finite volume and infinite surface area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel%27s_Horn
LittleEngine: Small Business Social Network
The one I like least.
Reminds me of Klein's bottle
I didn't consider old-style incubators because as far as I know there aren't any left. At least, I can't think of any startups that came out of one.
If you have to ask, you might be creative. Congratulations!
hey ericb, can you tell us how you learned social psychology?
maybe what books, sites ... etc ?

also im checking the material that FleursDuMal mentioned ;)
We have actually thought of a system that predicts your future orders so you don't have to enter them yourself.
From my experience, you want to really as early as possible once you have enough features to present your core idea. My partner and I spent so much time fixing every little thing, identify every little bug, because we were afraid of launching an "incomplete" alpha may turn users away. To our surprise, the early adopters are actually your best friends, they will provide you with great feedback that may change the direction of your idea completely. In our experience, our users' feedback really changed our focus on which area of the site to develop.

We wish we released earlier. So my recommendation is, once you have all your core feature to demo your idea, you should released to a group of friends/family to test it out.
The hangman paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox
The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT
I take that back. Though the problem was not in the server itself, the inefficiency in the account creation code was bad enough that it should be called a bug.
It might be overkill for what you need, but the open source Freeway (http://www.openfreway.org) ecommerce platform does that natively. There are also a number of bridges for Joomla! to bring specific Freeway functions over without wrapping the whole thing into Joomla!.
I thought it would fit given that Obama seems to be the in candidate with the tech crowd.
When to incorporate
I have developed the web app for my business idea and released it to friends to get feedback. I am now working on the executive summary to get a small angel funding.

I want to ensure my idea is feasible before investing money into incorporating the business. But some websites I have been reading say this is wrong and incorporating should be the first thing to do.

Could I run into potential tax issues if I don't incorporate asap?
Flying Planes by Day, Yoking Video Feeds by Night
Another BUZZWORD created by BIGBULLS like IBM, Oracle, MIcrosoft etc. to scare away the customers and make more money. Thats how they have been minting money all these years... Technically SOA is not a rocket science, primarily uses webservices but these companies have wrapped it around too much of BULLSHIT to make things looks scarry so that customers would run towards them to adopt SOA. Instead of trying to keep things simpler..they are making it more complicated each day since i started follwing SOA 3 years back
Magpul Flashlight Gun Transformer Concept [flash movie]
InLine - a 100% Ruby solution for console inline editing
I don't understand the "not practical" sentiment. During the pursuit of my BA, I learned how to research, perform analysis, communicate, and most importantly how to rapidly switch contexts. I use those skills every day. I'm not saying that is exclusive to a Liberal Arts education, but I would definitely call those practical skills.

Today I got wrapped up contemplating the terminology I was using for a UI. I was worried that it was counter to the ontology of the system. Sure, maybe a CS grad would say "consistency of language" or something, but my philosophy-major-addled brain said ontology.

[editted to say: HA! a-priori!]
There's a key difference between Chatterous and Twitter/Pownce/etc.: Chatterous works even if your friends aren't part of the service.
The Fight for the Second Click
Wait. Remember that you get only one chance to make an initial splash and attract the attention. First impression lasts. There's no reason to waste the opportunity on something that is not ready or does not work 100% flawlessly.

If you really want to test the system on live people, do a round of closed alpha. However if you want to demo the stuff, wait until it's ready.

(an update)

Hmm .. I should probably add that the above is based not only on a common sense, but also on my personal experience. The project I was involved with grew from zero to a couple of million users in 1.5 years out of a single public announcement. If the project were not as polished as it was at that point, I really doubt the viral propagation would've as massive.
Google Focused Linux PC’s Fail At Wal-Mart
Four Social Media Lessons from SXSW's Mark Zuckerberg Interview
VOVO brand new travel social network FIRST LOOK!
As long as we're listing weapons, the ideal choice is "startup tactical nuke".

It's the model that has been woefully overlooked for 50 years.
I can highly recommend Thunderbird. It's open source and I've been running it solidly for a number of years now.
Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science
lay off two members of my personal mariachi band
Boston Startup Does 3D Photo Sharing from the Desktop
Ask YC:  Do you know of any web 2.0 sites where most users are computer illiterate?
And do these computer illiterates contribute much content to the site?

This is interesting because the ad revenue from such a site could be much greater than average as computer illiterates are more likely to click on ads (not even knowing they are ads).
Curry's paradox is cool:

"If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/curry-paradox/
Stuart Kaufmann's "order for free" in complex systems.

His books are insightful and also a pleasure to read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman
Absolutely. I was a psych major. Another huge thing I learned, btw, was that my persistence (stubbornness, if you ask my wife ;) lets me learn most anything, which is how I came to be a developer.

Instead of how I learned it, I'll point you to some topics in social psych:

Read Cialdini, the psychology of influence.

This doubles for attracting investment and women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

Social skills-the parens are part of the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_(psychology)

Halo Effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Interesting experiments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

http://www.prisonexp.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

If an area I listed here or in the original post is of particular interest, let me know and I'll reply with the specifics of what I meant, or pointers to some info on it.
It's in the footer on the list pages under "guidelines". footers don't appear for comment pages, for some reason. It's even more important that they're there in comment pages, I imagine.
MySpace. I can't count the number of people have asked me some version of "Dude, you're good at computers? Can you help me make a bitchin' MySpace page?"

Admittedly, as the saying goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but it seems to me that MySpace is a wealth of user-created content primarily created by the computer illiterate (incomputerate?).
pg:

But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the company could have died.

Actually, it's even more interesting than that. Prior to AdWords (and, more importantly, the acquisition of Applied Semantics that gave them AdSense), Google did not have a real source of revenue. At all. Google Appliances were cute but negligible.

After AdWords and AdSense, they began to replace magazines, the yellow pages, and 411.

It is difficult to underestimate how important Ad(Words|Sense) has been to Google's success. And it was the idea of an intern.
thanks!, supercool! ;)
if you are young, and single and with a normal job:

1. Make sure you are in good terms with your parents, or sister/brother, so if you loose your job, you can live in their basement for a while.

2. If you loose your job, now it is the best time to work on that idea... for reals. Necessity is the mother of all inventions.
I'm a big Atwood fan, but this is the first thing in a while that I thought actually belonged on HN. Real nice intro (I had heard of it but had no idea how it actually worked).
David Mandelin needs a theorem prover
The FMG-9's been all over the gunnie blogs lately. As LawDog put it: "Now, that's just flat neater than kitten toes." (http://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/2008/03/want.html)

Admittedly, it's just a concept gun and, even if it weren't, entirely unlikely to survive the political and technical trials of getting to market. But still, how friggin' cool is that?

It's amazing what people can do with a glock, some ingenuity, and one too many screenings of the transformers movie.
programming.reddit is not bad.

But, yeah, if you're a hacker, hacker news is better yet.
Ah, so it is. Thanks! (I'm fairly option-blind. If what I'm looking for isn't pretty obvious on a webpage, I usually never find it.)

And adding the Guidelines link to the comments page in some way might well be a helpful addition. At least there IS a link to it, though.
You might like KDice if you like dice wars. Same game, but multiplayer. http://kdice.com
I really think it is important to do a alpha round and it is even better if you do it before you have all the features on. And you know why? Because your friends that come and test your alpha version will tell in what direction should you head. They will now better than you. Maybe those features that you say will make your app complete on a minimal level is not what your audience is looking for.

My best!
Release early. Release often. Listen to your users, not commenters.
I thought it was pretty impressive that a flight simulator in 1966 was accurate enough to replicate a real-world engineering failure in extreme conditions. What language/systems were being used back then?
moved comment to other thread.
I have used it before, and Camtasia is really good. It exports video in a bunch of formats (flash is one of them) plus it has a 30 days no limitation trial.
Banach-Tarski paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

This has always blown my mind. From Wikipedia: "The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set theoretic geometry which states that a solid ball in 3-dimensional space can be split into several non-overlapping pieces, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball."

Trippy.
I'm a little surprised that someone wrote this. I guess I'm still stuck in the mode of thinking that javascript is a language for writing client side code in browsers, when in fact, you can run javascript on servers.

If that's the case, then I suppose decentralized architectures are possible if the javascript engines in browsers get faster. You can possibly run an entire mini-server in a browser that talks to other mini-servers to share files or location information on mobile browsers.
We're trying Chatterous tonight
Well, I'm saying this but I'm not based on any data, it is just my opinion. You will find tons of computer illiterates on Facebook and MySpace. When I say tons I really mean it. Those users, based on my observations, really have a higher ad-click rate but social networks at the same time have a low click rate. When surfing those sites people are usually just "wasting" some time and they know what they are looking for: they wanna know more about life of others...
A better intro for the beginners would be nice have. How is the whole thing moderated ? What are the points assigned to the post ? What is karma ? Etc. I clicked around the site, but aside from the Guidelines page, I didn't manage to find any sort of FAQ or similar.

Thanks
That's denying the impact the US economy/foreign policy has, for better or for worse, in the rest of the world.

I'm not "american", but considering the Internet Neutrality will be decided by the next administration I really care about the US elections right now.
That's the trick. Sometimes the deals aren't deadly, you just have to point out how they are beneficial to everyone. Sell the value. Unfortunately some friends feel that seclusion is the best route.

I'm notorious for aggressively pursuing side deals with my friends.
William Feather on "Perseverance Rewarded"
This is probably a dupe, but still .. it's a widely accepted notation outside of this site that enclosing the word in * implies 'bold' decoration, in / - 'italic' and in _ - 'underscore'. Seeing that here * italicizes the word strikes me as odd.

I realize that bold and underscore decorations go against clean appearance of the site, but it'd be nice to add standard slash notation for italic.
Mousetrap was my favorite. I pretty much ignored the actual game though...
I find Hilbert's Paradox is handy when thinking about infinity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_...
can twitter be added as a method of chatting on chatterous then? I haven't used it at all yet, so i'm not entirely sure if that even makes sense though.
"... Chatterous works even if your friends aren't part of the service. ..."

This point keeps getting missed (I did as well). [0] Maybe it needs better explanation or something to counter this? It can have some weird consequences if you don't comprehend it. On thanking a founder for fixing a prob I had I SMS his phone & interrupted his lunch ~ http://www.chatterous.com/history/hnyc/1/

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131728
I'll second Zeno.

Sooo applicable to software development. I love it so much, I wrote a blog post about it.
If you create a good product, some people will take you seriously and buy it.
In a downturn:

1. advertising dries up completely.
2. people tend to curb risky financial moves, such as early stage capital
3. businesses will cut back on almost all new development

The big question isn't, "Will it get bad?" but "Just how bad will it get?"
What was the idea of an intern? Ads were part of the plan from very early on. Also, AdSense predates the Applied Semantics aquisition.
How much did your school pay your for your efforts there?
They are dying under SXSW load and fairly new, but
http://sched.org/ seems like one worth keeping an eye on.
Not to rain on your parade, but your statement is a lie and not a paradox.
I think that golf is a big waste of time. It takes too long for a game, and it is not physically active enough. No wonder it is waning in popularity (and mostly only old people and the "business" types like it).

I'd rather talk about "work" while having a beer and listening to some good music and playing pool for a couple of hours after work, rather than spend a whole day on the golf field.

Af for hackers, I really don't know a single good programmer that knows golf. it's like they are way to impatient for that sport. They'd rather hack :)
I think that's misleading. It will definitely be a stripped version of Windows. Maybe some adapted version of CE.
What about PlugAndPlay Tech Center? They have an office in Sunnyvale that seems successful.
The reason [the site was slow] was not the traffic...
but the number of visitors who were creating new accounts.

The only better startup problem than that is "the site was slow because so many people were trying to give us money that our credit card processor crashed".
Life lessons from Client #9
I would open up the alpha only if you have third parties (or customers) who want to write to your API. Then you should get it into their hands as soon as possible.

Otherwise, wait until you have a solid beta. If you screw up your first release (whether, alpha OR beta) you may not recover. Better to make them wait. After your first solid release, you can go agile-style incremental.
How about "Startup Catalyst" You don't provide the raw starting materials but you help them to combine more rapidly and more effectively. Dictionary definition: "A substance, usually used in small amounts relative to the reactants, that modifies and increases the rate of a reaction without being consumed in the process."
I wish my webserver had a repl.
What country are you at ?
So I guess I'm creative. Neato.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_and_hats_puzzle#Count...

"In fact, even if we allow an uncountable number of different colors for the hats, the axiom of choice provides a solution that guarantees that only finitely many prisoners must die."

This is by far the craziest result coming out of AOC.
I second Euler's equation.

Also, two books that really rocked my world (though I guess it's not really an answer to the question) were Dune and House of Leaves.
Similar thread on project management software: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124253

Top 3 were Trac, Basecamp from 37 Signals, and Fog Bugz.
Little Known Hacker News Is Boring As Hell
Thundbird used to have a lot of problems coping with voluminous email accounts. A volume of 50 emails a day quickly became unmanageable. Or at the very least it was a case a couple of years ago.
It's curious how you thought his question was odd, while I found it creative / insightful, and in the terms of the article, it doesn't matter whether it was one or the other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Sinfonia