skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There may be a bubble in that lots of money may get wasted on ideas that will seem foolish in retrospect. However, iPhone/smart phones have as much potential as the web.

One, iPhone is white-label hardware that will get more and more powerful. I believe that property of the iPhone is nowhere close to being fully explored, and we'll see more and more apps that replace other electronic devices, or make a whole new kind of device out of the iPhone.

Two, iPhone (and the iPad) is also a new medium. Even the web on the iPhone is not quite the same as the web on a computer.

Those two mean there's plenty of opportunity for disruptive innovation in this space for years to come.
Problem is with many of the replies up here, how many have been part of an IPO or buyout?

If you're bought, depending on the terms, you may not be able to "do as you please". They may give you a VP title with some guarantee of 5 years or so. After which they (their board, shareholders, etc) may vote you out, or you may want to quit yourself after seeing your baby run into the ground.

Especially if the company (or VC) wants to take your company public. I've seen founding finance and marketing guys pushed aside with new faces that are what "the [wall] street want to see". How's that for a thanks?

Further, if you are lucky enough to get bought out/funded for huge sums, its even rarer that lightening strikes twice with your next startup.
32k packed is pretty fucking big for a JS ORM.....
First, go read Steve Blank's book (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...). It puts a comforting amount of structure around the sales process and turns what's normally a big ball o' confusion into a set of tasks with concrete steps & goals.

It also helped me to spend a lot of time in bars and cafes talking to strangers until I was comfortable with both the approach & conversation.
Should Your Startup Give Performance-Based Warrants?
I agree. I also find it interesting that someone hiding something so big about himself was so interested in exposing other people's secrets.
...in January.
I agree. We were playing with different styles earlier. It's in the to-do list on basecamp, but I'm not sure where it is on the queue (ie- next hour or next day).
HNRFS: Help me help you; whats missing from your day?
Greetings chaps,
Going along with YC's RFS series, I'd love to know what you guys think is missing from your daily routine. Regardless if it is at your job, startup, personal life; what kind of service/website/app would help with this?
That said, feel free to leave any ideas you might also have.
I think the key is that Wikipedia's definition of notability is not about "judging what's important and what's not" and the name notability is actively misleading.

I was under the impression that it was about what could be easily confirmed in reliable secondary sources. However, when you read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability page itself you see they've fallen into the trap of their own poor naming choice and the text veers between saying the information needs to be easily checkable and the information needs to be worthy of being in Wikipedia.

I think a rebranding could fix this, but I'm generally over-sensitive to the particular meanings of words.
Actually as someone with degrees and experience in both fields, you face unknowns FAR more often in the physical world than the software world. Man if only I had a step debugger and some logs for that turbine that just exploded.

There are a lot of reasons for the difference in disciplines but saying that software is "unknown and unsolved" is pretty far off the mark.
That definitely looks like an attempt to bind you to them for a period of three years with a termination fee of 250 usd + the remaining monthly fee's due immediately. More importantly, because they wrote it in all capital letters they are super serious and extra aware about this clause ;)
Olden but golden? In fact it looks like 0.6 realease is really far along. It's read performance got so good that a bunch of sites are ditching memcached(db) in favor of it.

Speaking of Cassandra, can anyone confirm that facebook is actually moving from Cassandra to hbase?
If you consider that every Nexus One ad I see is space that could be used to display other, more relevant ads to me and the ~200k N1 owners, I'd say that it is worth a few hours of an engineer's time.
It's keyboard driven.
Hey guys, is this true? please check out the link
Just got it from another friend. Any ideas what's it about?
Thanks
Are you sure? (python)

>>> a,b=1,0
>>> a/b
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
* Billing system? Though Chargify.com isn't doing a bad job.

* We hate chatting via IM and tried Highrise, it isn't for us. I guess that could be a starting point ?
I had to "come out" as straight live on BBC Radio Manchester when I was running the Alan Turing apology campaign. The interviewer assumed I was gay and asked me a question about the gay community. Didn't have any clue and figured the best thing was to "admit" that I was straight.

During the campaign I received hate email suggesting that I was gay, the Prime Minister told me that I was "brave", and many, many people assume I'm gay because of Turing.

It's such a shame that people think that way, after all, it couldn't possibly be the case that a straight man thought that treating a gay man badly was the wrong thing to do.

Good on Randi for coming out. Now let's move on to other things that are more important.
By 'will' do you mean 'would'? What comprehensive immigration reform do actually expect to see passed?
And physical engineers don't have users with even more complicated interface problems? Most computer systems are not real time. Airplanes, cars, factory processes, cranes, power plants, even chairs have an interface with users that is more complicated to design.
What's Next In Marketing & Advertising
As for our pricing, it's actually very competitive. It may look higher because we disclose all our fees. Nearly every provider we know of obscures fees both during the sales process and in the monthly reporting statements so merchants never really understand what they're paying.

We're with SecureTrading in the UK and I can confirm that they have no "hidden fees". This is scaremongering at best. Braintree is expensive. You may have good service (so I hear), but don't make claims of being "competitive". You ain't. Braintree is a premium payment provider that costs extra compared to the competition.
Actually, I think it's double that right now.
I can't speak for the grandparent poster here but for me, the killer difference between the N1 and the iPhone is that the browser is far, far faster in the N1.

The rendering speed of the N1 amazed me the first time I pulled up a page. It also has enough RAM to keep more than one page open at a time without having to re-load as you switch windows (as I discovered with the iPhone). This may have been addressed somewhat in the 3GS but I only had a 3G model.

I also appreciate OTA syncing for contacts and calendars that doesn't cost me $100/year.

The integration with Google Voice is also a plus (having it auto-switch your voicemail over, and make all outgoing calls through your GV number).
Just out of curiosity, have you ever thought about adapting your bingo card creator to make cards for plain old bingo. You know, with the numbers and not words?
I think it's pretty relevant. For example, something that is absolutely trivial in other languages (making super calls), is incredibly difficult to implement generically in JS, partially because of the way this behaves. This is something every class system (and of course just using prototype chains alone) in JS seems to run into. We ran into it early with Objective-J, and then CoffeeScript had the same problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014524
The categories right now is very limited. You should add the option for people to enter a new category when they submit their app.
Trying to figure out the balance between categories and tags. If you get too many categories then they themselves become sparse. Any specific example? I agree with you as a whole, we do need to add some more categories. WE might change the submit from a dropdown to a just plain text field. We can categorize there after.
What about Glengarry Ross?
"'Cause only one thing counts in this world: get them to sign on the line which is dotted."
Link leads to some kind of affiliate marketing scheme.
Wait, BitBucket is on there but Github isn't?

.......
Some languages are nice enough to provide functions that parse the text into native data without the need for evaluation (like erlang's erl_parse/erl_scan; I guess lisps can do the same)
Huh (just checked), it is indeed $25/$20 right now.

Even better. grin
Because of your obvious lack of knowledge about "real world" engineering. Think of the planning that goes into just simply replacing the guardrail on a bridge. How are you going to cut it off, replace it, and install a new one on a changing bridge while least affecting traffic? In the case of the bridge I drive over every day the answer was to remove each ~100'x100' section of road deck (there is one in each direction) and replace it in its entirety, one a night, for months. This was to widen the 5 lane bridge by about 3' and raise the guardrail by about a foot. Sure a "minor" revision but I guarantee you could have paid for Flickr and a pile of VC backed startups making a hundred different projects for the cost of having a crews of guys working for months, a barge crane, and thousands of tons of steel and concrete. It just isn't even comparable. Specs changing are a constant fact of life in real world engineering too, they just aren't the #1 issue that has to be dealt with.
Hopefully they're working on new social media addictions.

I quit Reddit almost a year ago, and have rarely looked back since. In the case of HN -- my last "addiction" -- I've written a nice RSS reader in the usual LAMP-AJAX way, so I'm getting the articles sans comments and karma, and in a better presentation, which is nice.

I'm now only visiting HN itself if I think there might be interesting enough discussion on a topic to warrant the effort.
Indeed. I meant to say (sane) static typing.
Great movie, but I don't think people should use Glengarry Glenn Ross for sales tips, unless you want to end up like Shelley Levine.
This guy is absolutely genius. The fact that he can think that quickly in front of a crowd shows a lot of skill. No doubt he will become an internet superstar.
I added my startup Guestlist (http://www.guestlistapp.com) which is event registration. I added it to meeting, but that is really not what it is at all.

I guess my point is that categories are a bad idea. You put MailChimp in sales, but it should be in marketing. Then again, what is the difference between marketing and sales? Productivity is really a subcategory of all the others. You could have a productivity app that focuses entirely on client management, but then that would be called a CRM.

Don't really have a solution, just found it confusing as it currently is.
Almost nobody? Seriously? I'd be interested to see some data to back that up.

'this' takes all of about 5 minutes to understand in Javascript. It's pretty logical and there aren't really any surprises. Same with the prototypal inheritance.
Please review my web-based Emacs color theme generator
Great work Andres and the team. Did you built all of the webapp during one weekend?
Initial/Trivial Node/Express/Django+Apache benchmarks
The trouble I see here is you're equating a propensity for high school kids to push the envelope on _everything_ with medical residents and shift workers.

Sanctimonious lecturing? I think you need more time in the field. Stop by any house with kids on a Friday night about 2300 and you'll see kids and adolescents alike dozing off, barely able to keep their heads up. When bed is suggested they sit up a little straighter and protest "I'm not tired."

What you missed in my original post (somehow, it was only a paragraph) is that I spent 4 years in high school quoting these sleep studies. Just like I spent 4 years quoting the Tinker decision, and debating Hazelwood.

But the truth is that staying out past curfew and putting my homework off until the last possible second and staying up to watch Conan and the Daily Show had absolutely NOTHING to do with my "biological clock." It was me, dozing off, and snapping to, my backbone stiff, saying "I'm ok, i'm not tired."
Blippy sounds incredibly stupid. Hence it will probably be a hit as a service.

The question is when they will be bought by Facebook? Or Facebook can spend a couple of months to push out their own service.
That's funny - I simply assumed you were a geek. Whether or not you were gay didn't even cross my mind.
* Have you tried (http://recurly.com/) or (https://cheddargetter.com/features) ?

* Have you tried Campfire? What more do you want from your chats?
The Problem with Threads
One more way: Limit your time on HN. ;-)
I think this is how VCs select startups as well. They are investing in the people. That's why Loudcloud can get $45mil valuation after 2 months from founding and anyone else with the same idea would get laughed out of the building.
I think in many cases "random hoops" are useful in interviews - they show that you can modify your solution to accomodate unforeseen problems, and make sure you know the full scope of the problem (by asking questions about it) before jumping in with a solution.
Cool! Which one, out of curiosity?
I'm curious, how does this differentiate from the armies of spam directory sites that already exist to game search engines?
I think the point is that it's possible to get pass poor programming and filtering. A smart developer would've been aware of intval() and used it instead of mysql_real_escape_string().

I certainly worked with my share of developers with just enough brains to know they need to validate the input and might have done their own regex method to filter instead of relying on far simpler built-in methods. Prepared statements being the next step up.
As found in the SQLite FAQ, behind the assertion "Threads are evil". http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q6
I've seen this before; I've always felt really strongly about homophobia and will speak out about it when I see it happening - people often just assume that means I'm gay (as if it matters...).

> Good on Randi for coming out. Now let's move on to other things that are more important.

Couldn't agree more :)
I'm also looking for a better chat platform for my team. We've been using a Skype group chat for the last 8 months (there's just three of us, so it's not SO bad).

I'm trying to find a chat platform (either native mac based or web app) that keeps really good chat logs.

Any suggestions?

EDIT: Do you know what kind of logs Campfire keeps, and how long it keeps them for?
Add doubleclicking to that list, because that's my preferred way of selecting a line of text. Unfortunately a lot of people also doubleclick on links.

I guess there's a lesson here: don't try to chase a higher conversion rate by getting in the way of "savvy" visitors. Still, it's a good idea once you cover all the edge cases.
Very cool, is it missing the seleced text colour?
Well, at least they didn't out you live on air as a "CS" person :)
Hmm... I wonder if it had a 140 character limit.
so scorciapino created a new account just to repost this (the dead post, with identical text from that user is visible if you have "show dead" enabled)? why? they want to trash the guy anonymously? they're worried about the 37 karma they have?

strange / sad.
That's essentially my assessment. It sounds incredibly shallow, dangerous, and unappealing in general. However, I'm not the target consumer for the vast portion of services and products out there. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, Anheuser Busch products, Windows, etc. yet these products are all widely popular. While this doesn't prove that Blippy is appealing, it demonstrates that the fact that I consider it inhumanly dumb has no bearing on whether the general public will be drawn to it.

I think Blippy will be huge - invest now, and be sure to use your 'Blippy Card' so everyone knows.
N.B. I don't have much experience in enterprise sales.
Downloadable, searchable daily chat logs. It also allows you to upload attachments and lists those next to the daily chat logs. Navigating the raw text logs isn't that great, but it keeps them forever.

I find the search really useful to pull out tidbits of information we discuss, phone numbers, ideas, command lines, etc.

I'm still on the free plan.
Apple pulls $349.99 game after developer bashes App Store at GDC
This is a very basic editor. I'm planning to add more options (fonts, decorations etc) and more languages.
fixed, thank you.
I'd agree, after all, Google, Apple and Microsoft all got to be the massive companies they are today, by not selling out early on.
Campfire has extremely good searchable chat logs, which are a single click away from any chat room. It has good authorization controls on chat rooms and access to transcripts. It associates uploaded files to transcripts, and has very good UI for finding files across transcripts. Finally, it has a solid HTTP API, which we've used to put chatbots for commits and such on channels. I recommend it.
He's amazing at improv stuff - another example where he just wanders into a studio and creates something out of nothing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KI78874qbU
Early galaxy went through 'teenage growth spurt,' scientists say
My immediate thought : HN readers are mostly highly informed hackers. If there is an obvious product need to satisfy us, we would have already created it.

I'd turn my attention to those who don't frequent online discussion forums such as this.
As a Canadian, it's the first I hear of them. Wish we had something like that here (in the meantime, I use ING and TD Canada).

For others needing background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA
For products above 100K in particular, introverts do much better because they are much more willing to listen to the customer and then work on meeting their needs. It's a dangerous myth that introverts cannot sell. You sell with your ears.
another thread on same topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1205239
Can anyone point to proof that they are in fact different people? I know Merton claims to not be Ben Folds, but the voice, style, and facial structure are extremely similar.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/columnpic/ben-folds1.jpg
http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/piano-c...
thou ask and thou shall receive: http://cloudomatic.com/collaboration/github/

(stupid oversight on my part. there's a LOT more for us to add. we tried focusing on the obscure over the obvious fan favorites for day 0)
I have taken CO-Q10 for a period of 6 months several years ago. It is bit on the expensive side, as far supplements goes. I used to take it to help me stay alert. I didn't see any difference in my general alert level. I kept on taking it because I was under the impression it might take me longer than couple of months to see any improvements. I increased dose, changed brand; nothing happened.

Currently I am only taking Fish Oil (Omega 3&5) and St. John's Wort. Both helps me with my anxiety and sleep.

I used to stay awake for 24-36 hours at a time quite often with 12-16 hours sleep in between. Relied heavily on caffeine and my anxiety was off the roof. I completely stopped caffeine from my diet. Drink decaf. Tea. Exercise first thing in the morning to burn up most of my energy so that I get tired by the end of day and help me sleep. I still end up staying awake for ~20hrs a day, which is closer to my goal of ~16hrs and better than previous habit of staying awake for ~30hrs.

If you have problem sleeping, kill the caffeine and it will solve half of your problems.
YM 10 - Download Yahoo Messenger 10 Final Terbaru Offline Installer
This is beautiful and navigable. Well done. A few product suggestions:

* Accounting is really important; Meetings less so. Think about your main headers.
* Make it clearer what the order is you're listing the apps: alphabetical, by rating, newest, etc. and let users toggle between them
* Have curated lists of apps for various startups and small businesses: freelancers, web apps, consulting firms, bakeries, dentists, etc.
* Have "you might also like" or "consider these" apps on any particular app's page
To clarify, you're saying super is difficult to implement in JavaScript? I think the power of JavaScript's design is borne out by how easily one can recreate classical inheritance in the language, a view shared by Crockford.
Interesting keywords on Google's Go language
Focus on asking the right questions and then giving good answers (this may often involve follow up in a second conversation). Work as part of a sales team so that the presentation burden can be shared. Develop and maintain an extensive FAQ for your product so that others can also speak knowledgeably about it. In the end introverts can make excellent sales people because they are willing to listen and give thoughtful responses. Most of the time you are "selling with your ears" so help your team succeed. SPIN Selling by Neal Rackham is a good intro book on sales.
>> "If there is an obvious product need to satisfy us, we would have already created it."
Although you're generally right. I'd have to say if startup founders are working almost around the clock, and said product would take longer than 100 lines of code, there's a good chance that it's a project being worked on in someone's spare time or the idea has been left behind entirely. That said, I haven't exactly seen an example of either yet. I'm just trying to get a bit of feedback from the HN crowd, even though as you said, it's a longshot.
I am that guy, just fyi. I am 29 years old and this is my first company.

Honestly, I was just curious if this is how others approach the problem. My father has a saying in spanish that roughly translates to "Each man's mind is an island." As a newbie, I'm curious how others brains work when they approach this problem.
I wasn't just talking about memory leaks. Memory allocation in C is a rich source of bugs. Even assuming they are "easy to fix", that's still a poor second to "never happened in the first place". GC isn't free, sure, but it has definite advantages.
We have these things because people repost them from Reddit. If you ever want some karma, you can do the same.
I'm reading this book now and highly recommend it - I think it's important to think of developing your business around your customer(s) needs, not your product development.

If you know (not guessing!) what your customer needs/is missing, you can build something that makes sense from a business perspective.

Of course, I'll definitely agree with another reply regarding hiring someone who excels in and loves sales. It will quite likely be worth the salary/commission.
What about actually reading what you are linking to? At least the first paragraph?
I think you're illustrating my point perfectly. An absolutely minor change to replace a guardrail is more expensive "than Flickr and a pile of VC backed startups making a hundred different projects".

Engineering projects do not change frequently and radically. They can't afford to - but more importantly - they don't need to, certainly not at anywhere the pace of software.

A bridge may undergo some changes and facelifts over a 200-year period, but it's still basically the same bridge. But there isn't much software that could last even a fraction that long and not be completely obsolete (without most of it's code getting replaced). In the case of a bridge, the underlying geography isn't going anywhere. That's just not the case with software - even if the platform still exists, the rapid pace of technology means that the software will stop being of any practical use.

A piece of software needs to keep evolving, or it's dead. The same just isn't true of most 200-year engineering projects.