skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a BillG review a few years earlier, when he came to my high school to review student work in the new math/science building that he and Paul Allen funded.

I demoed (one-on-one!) an RPG that I made in Hypercard on a Mac Plus. ;) To his credit, Bill asked some good questions and seemed to understand the Mac/Hypercard paradigm pretty well.
They seem to know a lot about how the credit card system works, which is why the following puzzled me:

"Finally, always be sure to request identification when a customer’s credit card is not signed. A driver’s license or other photographed, government-issued ID card will verify whether a customer is authorized to use the card in question."

In fact, you should insist that they sign the card. Contrary to popular belief, the signature on the card is not there primarily to provide a reference signature to compare to (though it's often used that way)---that signature is your proof that they've actually agreed to the terms of their credit card agreement. The card is not valid without it.
For females, don't get too excited.

If you're pretty, sexy, and all that, they will continue to respond you, and supported you in every endeavor. But, if you're not pretty, you would be judged only by your appearance. Not your brain.
I also like the simplicity of jQuery's modules. Take a look of what else they have, it's solid.

YUI has some really amazing things as well, but it's a bit bloated with too many options. You can probably drag and drop something in YUI about 50 different ways, which is neat, but in the end you'll only really need 1.
Start charging. 3 plans -- good better best. use the money to hire another developer. maybe eventually build an iphone app; charge $5 for it. build an iPad app. charge $15 or $20 for it -- you're still selling to early adopters who have money so they will buy. i think the Getting Real book would be a good read, as @steveklabnik mentioned.

How many visitors do you get to the site currently? With a decent landing page with the paid option you could probably start out around a 0.5% - 1% +- conversion rate, and improve from there with some intense A/B testing. What's your free conversion rate?

Other random ideas:
1. Partner with a small company that has a popular paper day-planner but no technology. Grow together and cross-pollinate.
2. Partner with a huge company that has a popular paper day-planner but whose technology is lacking.
3. Partner with another planning company, Apiggo (ToDo) and work out a deal to play off each other's strengths somehow
4. Add team-tasking and sell that version to businesses
5. Partner with somebody that sells to people that love productivity stuff, like David Allen. There's probably somebody at HN that knows him, or knows somebody that knows him.

Anyway, you're an awesome designer! Great work. Good luck.
140 doesn't include the user name, the app name and probably some more info.
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Standards. I can get a random module and know it expects these objects to have the same properties and methods I do.
Your argument is indeed not new; I was just somewhat surprised to see "corollary: <general statement>" mean "this is a corollary of <general statement>" instead of "<general statement> is a corollary of this". I see that you meant the first.

EDIT: sorry if this sounds unnecessarily snippy; I honestly wondered if you meant the second.
I do. I'm my own boss anyways ;)
I'd like to be on the list :)
There just happens to be a natural connection between organic ideas and young founders.

We've funded lots of people in their 30s.
Evidently, the VC's investing in BootupLabs are 'W media ventures' and 'growthworks'.
http://blog.bootuplabs.com/2010/04/14/wertz-joins-board-firs...
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For my very small case which is a software available as GPL with a free limited in space hosting and a paid "more space" hosting.

1) the offer is a freemium offer and the free part is something I would personally use, the free offer gives traction and users are happy using it. Some are also slowly (no stats yet) converting to paid customers.

2) I had already my company so this was not an issue. The only thing I had to do was to get a merchant account and a payment processing gateway. It took a bit of time but it was way easier than expected.

3) No way, the customer service is telling you were you need to code and in my case helps my development momentum. When I have a paid customer who ask me something I wanted to implement but were procrastinating, it is the small kick pushing me ahead.

What is also helping me is a paper in front of my desk with just the 13 sentences from here: http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html (minus the first one, I am a single founder).
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Regarding translating both ways, I disagree. Myself, I am pretty decent at French --> English, but awful the other way around.

Your other points I totally agree with. At this point, I'm in the midst of bootstrapping, so it'll be awhile before I can do some form of community moderation. This will of course present some new problems to solve, so much time will have to be spent thinking about the pros and cons :)

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.
Hey Armando:
We're looking for someone to help with front-end on a project basis. Would love to talk. Drop me a note.
Jessica
Why Accountants Don't Run Startups
pedalpete is right about the number of other online todo lists available, so you need to be quite careful about your monetization, but I think it can still be done.

The Covey model is more than a todo list anyway, right? It's kind of like todo plus. It's already a premium entity. It takes more effort to use, but with the promise or more return. I think your users - your repeat users - will already therefore be slightly more convertible than the users of any other todo list.

If it were me, I would sell things that are not necessarily features but which still emphasise the premium aspect of the service, and allow the user to demonstrate their commitment to their own self-improvement through committing monetarily to you. Kind of like people going out and buying a very expensive filofax, if you know what I mean.

Some examples of things you could charge for:

- Themes for the plan page (see Tumblr and their premium themes)

- A small visual token of my premium status, e.g. a star icon that appears next to my username or the logo (you may think this is worthless, but it has been known to convert quite effectively when users of a website are committed to it - see kdice for example)

Also, you could take the rememberthemilk strategy of selling certain extras, like mobile apps. I think that would work quite well for you. Just don't sell yourself short. You don't want to compete at the bottom end of the todo list market - you want to be a far more sensibly priced Covey system, so the low end of the top end of the market. A $5 iphone app (maybe more?) wouldn't be out of the question if people were really finding your site useful.
found a bug:

"There are ideas that obvious lying around now."
Recently, I read an article about how soccer balls, most of which are made in a certain town in Pakistan, were no longer sewn by children, thanks to pressure from Adidas and other international firms. The children now work making bricks. There was a quote in the article from a local decrying this as a mistake, saying that the children were learning a trade to support them for life, by making soccer balls.

But, last I checked, China, Pakistan, et. al. have a massive unemployment problem. Now, there's two ways to solve this -- the first is to make more jobs, the approach we see here. The other would be to reduce the size of the labor pool through enforcement of child labor laws, limitations on number of hours worked per week, mandatory and free schooling through age 18, social security programs to encourage the elderly to retire, etc.

These reforms happened in the US and Europe a century ago, when most people were objectively poorer than the people in these articles -- no television, electricity, cell phones, etc. Depressingly, I have to speculate that there is a fundamental break in expectations in the national zeitgeist of these countries that allows things to get this bad.
Late 1980s. In a speech from September 1997, BillG says:

"I wish I got a chance to write more code. I do mess around. They don't let my code go in shipping products. They haven't done that for about eight years now."

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/speeches/1997/...
I was hoping you'd pick the other logo with the librarian looking caterpillar! Anyway, site looks really clean and fresh.
What is getting good at designing stuff for others?

A central part of it is being able to put yourself in other's shoes. You can do that by already being in their shoes (designing for yourself), physically putting yourself in their shoes (becoming a direct marketer) or do it empathetically.

I agree that it's harder as you go down that path. But it is interesting that they are all relying on the same thing. You either design for yourself or you simulate designing for yourself.
That sounds a bit exaggerated, even before the reorgs. There are currently ~5.
I trick could be to change the interface:
from [combo] to [combo] (and viceversa [check box])

This way you can keep your preferred default of only one direction but allow adding the other more easily.
The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development
My first job in IT was with PC Magazine in London. Guy Kewney was one of the top columnists at the magazine and I was a lowly technical assistant. Despite this he would sit around and chat over a beer.

When I visited the magazine many years later, he was one of the people that took the time to come up and say hello. He was an excellent public speaker and wrote some visionary editorials.
It's good that people are repairing instead of replacing. I hope this trend starts again in other areas, too.
This is awesome! I just added myself as an English->Hindi (and vice versa) translator. Is the $0.05 per word rate standard in this kind of service? I have no clue about it, so I just kept it at your default. Do you have any customers yet?
I suspect that many people are planning to pass under the radar with their own custom made solution. The reason why we haven't heard more about it is that it depends on secrecy, and if that's your plan then writing a blog post about it would be about the dumbest thing you could do.
The author refers to creativity as thaught in creativity seminars to BMAs, project managers etc. He elaborates on the concept as used in these classes.
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If anyone here is interested in playing when it comes out tomorrow, let me know. My email is in my profile.

I don't know how this works with playing with multiple other persons. I hope I don't have to buy more than one copy.
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Adam, thanks for taking the time to answer.

An iphone application has been a frequently asked feature from my users and I considered setting up an API for them to develop the iphone app.
I don't like the iphone/ipad model (one-off sales versus subscriptions) but it is true that it would make my application more Premium.

I haven't thought about it but what @nudge said is true, the Covey system is more than a todo application and my application can have a premium aspect.

I thought of the team-tasking and it sounds like a viable idea to me too.

I am getting enough traffic per day to get relevant data from A/B testing. The reason I haven't started them is because I am not sure if this is a viable market or not. I should probably survey the users to ask them.

Thank you, your message was very helpful.

(I consider myself a developer, not a designer :) I can barely use photoshop so I guess it is a nice compliment, thanks)
Just have a quick "test" and have a few bi-directional translations with multi-choice they have to get right. 100% pass or nothing.
This is why on Indefero I offer only a limited space free account (still with your own domain). The percentage of people using for free such large offers is too high. This is because you are dealing with people who know how to integrate with different services (googlegroups, wikispace, sourceforge, etc.) and can get a really nice setup for free.

From a business point of view, I definitely prefer to have less visibility but a higher percentage of paid customers. This allows me to create a product which is of high quality on the long term because I have money to do so. And in fact, discussing with my customers, they prefer it that way.

Note that the free offer of Assembla is not free, you get direct advertising when accessing your space.

But if we do small maths and we consider that Assembla has the incredible 5% conversion rate from free to paid. This means that on average they will have for 100 users:

95 x 1GB of "free data"
5 x $49 x 2.5GB of paid data

I take the 50% usage as on the long run it what my personal stats gives me.

So about 100GB of data for $245 per month. As you need a triple backup to be robust. It means 300GB of data to maintain for $245 per month.

It is possible, but the margin will be razor thin if you want to provide quality. It is a bold move, I am eager to see how it develops.
I will re-read them, thanks for the reminders.
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This has been written about on RWW now:

How to Burn Bridges with Bootup Labs and Other Investors

http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/04/how-to-burn-bridge...
160 7-bit characters.

Twitter usernames are 15, the ": " takes another two, and three are reserved for future sigil retardation.
Clever advertising or not? You decide
Your answer made me realize something important. The Covey system is premium, and targets a different group of people.

Thank you for that, it is very valuable and will probably shape the way I present my web application to the world :)
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Hanson is distinguising creativity as that flash of inspiration, that occasional lucky bit of genius from the humdrum of tiny, everyday improvements in process.

Or

A good idea and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, a good idea and great execution will make you rich, famous, or whatever else it is you want.
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So would that imply that the founders could try to collect part of the $50k from Bootup Labs? It sounded like when they got kicked out of the program, Bootup Labs only covered the previous months rent, when Statusly should have already paid for rent and services for the entire length of the program.

Now if Statusly was only in the program for 2 out of the 8 months, then it seems like the founders could be owed around $35k (50k2/8.95) for the money that they paid to be in the program for the rest of the 6 months.
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I gotta agree with you on translation not being commutative. I'm at least competent German->English, but doing the reverse brings me the pain.
The return of lisp huh ? :-)
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Actually, I don't think that the latter kind is harder to build -- sometimes it might be easier. What is more difficult is defining a solution for a problem someone else has; but in that case make sure you have one of those "someone elses" on board.
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Quite the same here. I can read French pretty well, but I make a fool of myself writing it.
cool!

i would love to see a feature (eventually) that allows you to easily hire a "team" of translators to either collaborate on a translation or translate them individually in parallel (you would have to work out the granularity here) and rate each other's work. I'd love to have more than one opinion for critical / tricky pieces.
Hm, I'm inclined to think it would have taken me somewhat less time than that. I made this site in about one month:

http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/

Then again, Django is an awesome web framework, I copied someone else's recaptcha integration, I worked my ass off, and the code is generally full of hacks, such as discarding all but the longest keyword when a user searches.

But I'm not the fastest:

http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries

I could use a forum dedicated to programmer professional development. I'm not interested in TopCoder because I'd rather work on my own projects, but I am interested in discussions of how long other people take to finish things, what the right place to be on the coding speed/code elegance continuum is for various project sizes, how to make fewer stupid mistakes that cost you 5 minutes, etc. It seems possible that some of the supposed 10x productivity differences in developers are due to trainable aptitudes, doesn't it?
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Happy to help. Come back and let us know how you're getting on from time to time!
That makes it so much worse. If they were bankrupt, they would have had no choice but to send you packing. To break their promise to you to raise additional capital is a super-dick move and I hope that future startup founders don't make the mistake you did. Thank you for warning the community.
Just want to second this, for anyone without the patience or time to go through a 100+ set of slides on the official site (seriously) :-)
Or perhaps beauty is hard to gauge when all you have is the corner of a mock-up/screenshot and a few comments.
Can I be both a Customer and a Translator? Using the same account balance? So, can I translate stuff and then use that to pay for having my own text translated? That would avoid going through PayPal and the fees involved.
Didn't Google just commit to funding Ogg Theora on ARM devices, not two days ago?

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Google-funds-OGG-T...

Not sure how that would qualify as 'killing' it..
If you were "in the way of apple in some way or other," they would just drop your app from the store, with no explanation given (or required.) They don't need to add a clause in their contract to prevent you from publishing your app in their store; they just don't publish your app. The only reason 3.3.1 exists is so they can drop developers from the store for something Adobe did, instead of something they did. In other words, it's actually a "this isn't your fault" clause—if they didn't have it, they'd just be banning individual developers who happened to try submitting Flash-compiled apps, and that would suck for those developers much more than just being told "make an actual, iPhone-native app from scratch and we'll talk."

But more importantly, a rule that is selectively enforced only upon your competitors gives you an advantage. Those who live off the Apple sharecropping gold-rush know they could be kicked out at any time, for any reason; in such an atmosphere, the best thing that can happen is all your competitors being kicked out while you're ignored. The fact that there's a rule against what you're doing doesn't change the fact that you could be kicked out at any time—it just heightens the risk/reward ratio for both you and the other people doing it.
This is like apologizing for the Patriot Act. As long as you play nice with the feds and you don't look like one of the undesirables, we won't mess with you.
there were not a lot of other startups doing Facebook at the same time as Mark.

Actually, I'd say there were. Not "doing Facebook", but scratching the same itch Mark was, which is connecting students on campuses. Some of them failed, some went in different directions -- Facebook itself has grown into what it is over the years.
I would assume that Statusly never paid Bootup Labs the $50k, due to Bootup Labs never giving them the $50k to give back.
Ask HN: Is it just me or is GMail and Yahoo Mail are really slow?
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Really? Everyone?

Can you back up this gigantic generalization, or is this simply rampant cynicism?

I know people of both sexes who judge people on appearances, but most folks I've dealt with don't let that get in the way.
Funny - why do you expose all emails on your site?
Yeah - seems like a great resource for spammers :(
Live from the Arctic Circle
Serializing (And Deserializing) Objects With Ruby
you fail to realize that windows has codec management built into the system.

a browser should never concern itself with codecs. that's what system APIs are for.

you can teach IE6 about VP8 by just installing a codec into the system. if that's not done by the IT dept. or your neighbor's kid, you either don't have the need to play back VP8 or whoever gives you VP8 content also tells you how to install a codec.
Although I'd say the slides are definitely worth it!
Surprise, surprise.

I doubt Boris Wertz pulled any strings to get the positive spin from Techvibes -- my impression is that Techvibes would find a way to give a positive spin to "meteor headed for Vancouver, is expected to destroy city".
You guys are getting confused with the "rent" word. We paid Statuslys out of pocket expenses (i.e. their apartment and food) because they had no money.
How to Burn Bridges with Bootup Labs and Other Investors
The problem with the Segway is that it is too slow for a motorised vehicle. Even though it moves a lot faster than walking, I bet it feels really slow because you're not doing anything else while riding it. If I'm not exerting physical effort to move, I want the damn thing to move fast. Unlike with a bicycle or car, there is no link between what you are doing and your speed.

Maybe they should add some kind of stepper thing which speeds up the thing. So, old people can just cruise at the base speed and others can step up the speed.