skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In any case, it's deplorable to promise two people jobs
as lifeguards in Virginia Beach, only to bait-and-switch
them into something that was, at best, a job in a
disgusting strip club (as the google street view of the
address would indicate)

The guy in metafilter who furnished you that streetview, couldn't even get the city right. This club is on New York Ave, in DC, and that guy showed you an address in New York City.

If you actually google "Lux Lounge Washington DC", http://www.google.com/search?q=lux+lounge+washington+dc you'll see some lovely pictures of a very nice place. Go on, look at it, I'll wait.

It looks to me like a very nice place, and it's definitely not a "disgusting strip club". It's not even a "really nice strip club". It appears to be a regular club, with lines in the street of people (women and men) wanting to get in.
Congratulations. You have solved the problem really well.

My biz partner is currently some one I went to school with and a good friend for years, some one I can share my bank account password with.

Connections are important but my personal thought is if you have a great product and achieved the market-fit hiring a professional or an advisor to help is at your disposal. But don't partner if the only asset they bring is connections.

I recommend looking in your circle first, some one you've worked with in the past, understands you really well, shares your vision and trust you.

There is some great advise on http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder that might help you.

Good luck with the search.
This is very interesting. Do you have any sources?
That isn't true; read the article. There's also a Lux Lounge in NYC, and that's where they were heading right up to the point where they changed their minds at the last minute (at which point they were in NYC).

They were in regular contact with the person they were supposed to meet ("George"), who told them to meet in NYC. They took the greyhound to NYC. Given that there is also a Lux Lounge in NYC, what would make you think the existence of the lounge in DC is anything other than a coincidence? Everything we know about this situation indicates otherwise.
In humans, mitochondria have at least 615 distinct genes. Interestingly how these guys decided only 13 of them are important.
That's a pretty awesome niche you've got yourself in, and your website/product looks better designed than most industry-specific software I've seen.
If you're interested in a techie startup partner, I'd be happy to tell you more about myself. dan at danmunro dot com
Can you describe how you got your initial traffic?

I'm very curious, and will probably be helpful to the community :)
Well, maybe we didn't go to the same school then ;)

There are no words in the English language that should be dismissed with prejudice, but is one of those.

I'm not a 'native' speaker (or writer), the dutch for 'but' is 'maar', and it indicates a modification of the first part of the sentence, a qualifier.

It does not negate the preceding part but it detracts from it, so I mean that to read (and I'll try to avoid the use of 'but')

I take your word for the research, HN will have some of that that, given the general level of discourse here and having read extensively in both articles written by HN'ers and the comments I have yet to see your point proven but it is bound to be true to some extent.

Better like that? ;)
My experience with prepaid phones is that they're cheaply made (as you'd expect for a phone you can buy for $10). I used prepaid between 2001 and 2008 (and am still on a month-to-month plan), but most of the phones were crap. Volume doesn't go up far enough, or the screen has dead pixels, or the keypad stops working unless you push really hard on the numbers, or it can only hold 20 contact numbers, or the battery lasts only half the day after a few months of use (when it started, I could charge it only once a week, but...).

On the plus side, if I had these problems with my current smartphone, I'd get it fixed, whereas with those, I just threw them away and got a new phone.
Interestingly, from across the street, it's Lux.

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=lux+lounge+washing...

If you go closer, it's Venus

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=lux+lounge+washing...
We launched a product recently http://sociaholic.com and applied lean startup principles.

Problem Hypothesis: The existing Twitter to Facebook integrations and apps don't preview links/videos when publishing to Facebook from Twitter, thus by limiting the desirability to click on a link on facebook pages.

Execution: Design to launch along with a video in less than 2 weeks, the goal was to validate our solution has a market. We update your facebook page from twitter in nice way (previewing links, converting @handles, etc)

Validation: Our first week: Over 200 active users out of ~250 signups, conversion rate (homepage to adding twitter account) ~30%. 2% dissatisfied customers (5 out 250 people uninstalled)

The product has a much bigger vision and Customer Development is doing wonders and we plan to do this for every step we move forward.
Hey, does anyone here have the AirBNB founders' info? It'd be really nice of them if they could help to arrange a donation of an apartment(s) through July in NYC for these girls.
Why does it have to be a web app? I've used some of these for the interface in my game engine...
Thumbs up for that.
Well, it was basically just getting featured on big blogs, driving links and traffic. Then keeping it going on Twitter. What I do is find junior writers on the blogs, and then discuss the site with them, my story, etc. They will usually do a post.

Now my job is to keep it going.
IF you were to actually succeed, the speed at which you got it done wouldnt matter as much as how easy it was to maintain.
The A View from the Bridge essay
A view from the bridge essay is a common literature assignment. In order to write a good essay you need to have an in depth understanding of the play which will come from studying it well. As it is a difficult essay to write, buying a custom essay will help you out.
Can you please elaborate how YC Alumni network helps?
Probably to limit the damage if somehow the rollout is destructive, as sometimes they are.
I have wondered this before too. I can think of a few reasons why this might be the case:

* US phone operators charging for incoming calls and messages, which make prepay phones much less useful.

* Standardisation on GSM in most of the rest of the world, which reduced control by the networks, created a market for unlocked phones, and increased competition by making it easier to change networks and phones.

* Cultural differences that mean that more people end up on contract phones. For example, teenagers often end up on 'Family Plan' contracts rather than Pay-As-You-Go, at least partially influenced by the above two factors. This helps creates a cycle where people consider contracts 'the norm'.
I see, finally, in his original post, he mentions NYC at the very beginning.

Quite a coincidence, isn't it? They're in DC, there is a Lux Lounge, and it is on New York Ave., but they're actually supposed to go to a different Lux Lounge, in New York City.

We have people speaking their non-native tongue, and a guy who is texting and talking while driving. Can't wait to find out the real story.
Notes on SciDB and scientific data management
This guy got an Evo 4G at the Google I/O -- are we sure he didn't also get a N1? Google did mail out N1s and Droids in advance. If it was an N1 handed out at IO, not really surprising if it got the update early.

I'd like to hear reports of non-tech-reporters-who-went-to-IO getting it. For the record my N1 is still telling me no updates are available.
What was the deployment stack like for Rails? The numbers are way off.
any numbers on direct/referring/searchengine percentages?
Personally, I'm unhappy with the SciDB project.

It's supposed to be open-source, but the source code is not available. To volunteer or see the source, you have to email them. I did, noting that I'm an physicist with a database startup and I'd like to help, but they didn't even bother to respond. They're already talking about commercializing it (the open-source project), but as of now it's not even out!

I'm not sure who the "SciDB Community" in the letter on their site's frontpage actually refers to.
And to avoid having millions of phones hit the update servers and all other parts of the serving infrastructure at the same instant. Internet-scale engineering involves more than just the size of your widest pipes...
I wonder how many new Chrome users used to be Firefox users.
I've used T-Mobile prepaid for years and converted dozens of people to it. You can use any (compatible) phone you want with it, just insert SIM. The minutes never expire as long as you buy minutes at least once a year, which will cost you as little as $5. I spend around $100 on my phone service per year, total.

Unfortunately AFAIK, you just plain can't get data plans with prepaid, from anyone. So prepaid doesn't work very well with smartphones. Also, T-Mobile coverage leaves a lot to be desired compared to other networks.
http://snapplr.com/pmnf
I'm going to have to repeat "Ideas are worthless without execution". Current technologies lets you turn your idea to a product and launch in a very short period of time.

I'm not sure if you are aware of "Lean Startup" methodology but strongly recommend you get aquatinted with some of the principles. Web 2.0 companies like Dropbox, IMVU, Aardvark, KISSMetrics etc have applied these techniques to be successful.

You don't necessarlity need to share your idea with anyone but SHOULD build it and launch as soon as possible, your goal in the first month should not be to get lots of users but validate your hypothesis and collect data on usage (like if your users like your offering and wanting to come back)

I posted this comment on a different thread but re-posting here:

------------

We launched a product recently http://sociaholic.com and applied lean startup principles.

Problem Hypothesis: The existing Twitter to Facebook integrations and apps don't preview links/videos when publishing to Facebook from Twitter, thus by limiting the desirability to click on a link on facebook pages.

Execution: Design to launch along with a video in less than 2 weeks, the goal was to validate our solution has a market. We update your facebook page from twitter in nice way (previewing links, converting @handles, etc)

Validation: Our first week: Over 200 active users out of ~250 signups, conversion rate (homepage to adding twitter account) ~30%. 2% dissatisfied customers (5 out 250 people uninstalled)
The product has a much bigger vision and Customer Development is doing wonders and we plan to do this for every step we move forward.
The same library has done some other cool stuff.. including "remixing" a James Brown to be 60 minutes long: http://soundcloud.com/teejay/james-brown-forever-60-min-vers...

And mixing between four distinct songs over about 45 seconds: http://soundcloud.com/teejay/capsule-of-the-paliament-to-the...
HN Feature Request:
Feature Request: PG pls consider making the submitted urls which are listed to the right of the submissions as links which would take you to a page where all submissions from that site were listed desc.
I'm doing (or at least trying to do) customer development on a B2C startup.

Why? Because after a fair bit of product development experience (mostly agile, mostly outside of the startup world) many things about CD resonated strongly with me. For one quick example, the bits about listening to your customers but not necessarily doing what they say are handled with more insight and nuance than most methodologies. This (and Blank's resume) gave the process enough credibility to me for me to attempt to follow it.

I don't feel I'm far enough through the process to answer "the most useful aspect" part yet, although I think most of the core process that I've tried has been useful. CD is actually a pretty small process: It doesn't really that many steps, it just takes time and discipline to execute them.

The hardest parts for me so far have been

(a) getting really crisp on the problem/solution hypothesis

(b) approximating customer visits in a B2C environment
Yesterday my goal was to live 150 years. I am expanding it to 250 now :D
Prepaid is rarely advertised in the US, especially the good prepaid. Companies want you on costly voice, data, etc plans and locked into a 2-year contract.
Yeah, I never understood the charging for incoming calls but more so the charging for incoming messages, you have no control over that. Insane!
Like this: http://chrismckenzie.com/ ?
Our product webnographer.com is very much following Steve Blanks ideas of testing the Hypothesis. Webnographer is a online tool for remote usability testing. To start off we have been offering the tool combined with a consulting service, this has led us to to actually get very close to customers and understand their needs. From day one we have been charging customers, and therefore get rapid feedback if people will actually pay for it.

What is hard? All start ups are hard, but compared to the other start ups I have been involved in following the "customer development" mantra has been easier, because the feedback is faster and you can alter coarse faster. No business plan is ever going to be spot on, and no Hypothesis is either. Blanks ideas means that feedback is faster, and therefore risk is lowered, without reducing profitability. The more traditional seams like the waterfall method compared to agile.
Feature request thread, at bottom of page
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
What’s prepaid got to do with the phone you use? I bought a nice unlocked Nokia 6300 (now in its third year of production but quite small, built like a tank and even good looking – works great for phone calls and the occasional text message) for 100 Euro and just use my free prepaid SIM with it.

That’s perfect for me. I hardly ever make calls but it’s still nice to have a phone number where others can reach you and since my university has great free WiFi, spending all that money on some 3G plan would be a real waste. I can nearly always just use my iPod touch.
The only problem I find with chrome is that it doesn't work with every website. Particularly complicated ones that require a lot of steps such as payment, which you don't want to repeat if the site breaks on chrome. I recently got a 3.2Ghz cpu so I can put up with firefox for now.

Also chrome has been getting slightly slower than its initial releases. I hope it won't slow down further.
thx! i tried reaching out to you with the email on the website, but it bounced :\

please shoot me an email at hi@jeff.otherinbox.com if you'd like to chat!
I will gladly pay for a phone outright if the carriers offer a data-centric plan for $50 a month with no commitment.

Until then, I'm hiding out this year with Google Voice and my Virgin Mobile prepaid. So far, it's been awesome and works out exactly for my needs. It sucks that I don't have decent mobile data: but I can wait a little longer until carriers realize they need to offer better and customized services.

I've saved about $400 this year so far by switching to my new setup. With the saved money, I have some new shiny clothes and have been enjoying eating out more!
Love it. Great app.
I use chrome because it's fast, and the multi-process browsing is a game changer. I would much rather have to restart a tab than restart a browser. Graceful crash handling is important.
I actually was grandfathered-in from eons ago, so if you used MeFi a long time ago, you might still have an account sitting there. I didn't know about the $5 charge until a year or so back.
Have been hunting around for prepaid plans, as Verizon is currently screwing me for all I'm worth (2 people ≈ $90/mo for 700 minutes, texts 20c each way). Problem is, I need roaming, so Virgin is out, and we hit roughly 300 minutes per month.

About the best one I've been able to find thus far has been Net10... anyone use it? Anyone care to chime in? The website is a bit frightening, but I'd be willing to survive that.
Much :)

We are now quibbling over magnitudes, which is moot since there is no data either way.
Provide feedback on my start up
I've recently launched my site (undertenner.com) which finds products for under a tenner in the UK and US (using Google Products) and would welcome any feedback. There's also more background detail on my blog http://undertenner.com/blog/?p=13 if anyone is interested.

thanks!
It's a good codec. But as you can see, the specification was clearly not finished. So On2 sold a codec package that wasn't very polished. Doesn't mean it wasn't worth the money. It just means that polish needs to be applied, and now that it's open, it will.
I'm beginning to think this whole Android 2.2 thing was planned from the get go to take as much wind out of Apple's sails as possible.

Google knew when Apple's big announcement was going to be and most likely they had a good idea what it was going to be about (iPad / iPhone 4.0). So they let Apple do their thing and then after the media frenzy had died down a bit, made their big announcement. Of course Google I/O was already planned so that made the perfect forum to make their announcement.

Now to add insult to injury, the week after they talk about all the new features, they actually release them. Apple's iPhone 4.0 OS is not due until this summer and now when it comes out it will already be behind Android 2.2.

I'm not taking sides here, but certainly see it as a PR victory for Google. What I'm seeing out there is more Android news than iPad news.
Some of the first few comments are from evolution-denialists and climate-gaters. However, I have to agree with the point that the article places the church in a bad daylight for the first item. Galileo wasn't refused because what he said was against scripture (was it even?). The main argument from the church was that his theory was methodologically flawed.

First there was no good reason to assume that telescopes provided a good image of distant bodies, so observations made using them had no credibility and could thus not be counted as 'evidence' as the article states. Secondly, if the earth moved and we with it, why did an object that was dropped from a tower, land at the bottom of that tower and not a good distant away from it? Assuming that the earth and the tower moved with it, but not the object since it was touching the earth nor the tower.

Galileo had a lot of explaining to do: the observations he made simply could not be placed in the prevalent scientific model. The easy way out is was to refute the evidence because it did not fit, the long way out was to rebuild the model.
I was at I/O. They first gave out N1/Droids in advance, then announced we could all have Evo's as well.

My N1 says "Your system is currently up to date" :/
This is one of my favourite explanations:
http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/04/trivial-monad.html
If you buy one of our games for your child you're a terrible parent
The main argument from the church was that his theory was methodologically flawed.

True, but this is from an organization who accepts appealing to the revealed devine word as a methodology.
It's striking how mature mobile phone technology is. You can buy a phone that works really well as a phone for quite reasonable sums of money. I have bought prepaid mobile packages just for the phone.
I clicked around for a minute and couldn't really figure out what the point of this sites is. Please enlighten me as to what this thing is for.
OK< maybe "trivial" was a little too strong. All human languages need a certain grammatical complexity to function. What I was trying to say that, being isolating languages, the grammatical complexity of Chinese languages pale in comparison with those of Indo-European languages, which still carry most of their inflectional heritage.

English, due to its unique development history, has lost most of its inflectional forms, it used to be heavily inflected. So, in that sense its basic grammar is said to be simpler than, say, Ancient Greek or French.
Order Online Now
I use Firefox because of six reasons: Firebug, Grease Monkey, NoScript, Flashblock, Sage, and Chatzilla.

Other reasons include; Colorzilla, BugMeNot, YSlow and Pencil.

Nothing comes close to the Firefox Add-On market. I can do everything within Firefox. I think FF is the #1 reason I no longer download shareware or bother with building open source software. If there is a firefox plugin for it, I don't bother with the standalone app.
It's okay; I disabled the back button.
From one of those comments:

I'm still a teenager, so I've got plenty of time. Who am I to say it's wrong or right? For the most part I believe everything here, but that's because of what I see with the media and everything. This is good. :)

No you whipper-snapper, it's not good.

Sweeping generalisation: I weep for the teenager of today.
With FTC’s Blessing, Google and Apple Poised to Dominate Mobile Advertising
We track our search term rankings daily and they frequently drop off the frontpage google results for a day than come back higher up or at the same rank the next day.

Google is constantly testing sites and seeing which ones perform well.

I wouldn't be worried unless its still not back in 2-3 days.
Feature Request: PG pls consider making the submitted urls which are listed to the right of the submissions as links which would take you to a page where all submissions from that site were listed desc.
The example for the echohandler is wrong, to solve, replace

req <- getRequest
writeBS $ maybe "" id (getParam "s" req)

with

param <- getParam "s"
writeBS $ maybe "" id param
Good PDF Search Engine
since iPad is a registered trademark...you can lose that domain at any time

Milk it as much as you can...but don't expect to keep it forever.

I think a big problem with trying to rank for trademark terms, is that you'll never beat out apple for the #1 position. So even though "ipad case", is searched 70K+ a month, #2 position will only see a 1/3 of that if lucky.
Think of it as dating with handicaps.

A good business partner is my opinion about as hard find as a good marriage partner.

And you only really know how good your partner and you work together when you hit a serious obstacle.

Take your time, better to work a little harder and keep your options open for a while than to say 'yes' to someone too early.

This is probably even harder than finding a live startup, you seem to have that one licked though :)

One down, 50 to go or so!

btw, it's 'dilemma'.
Mangiare pesce aiuta a restare in linea
Seems to be a cookie cutter of RSS feeds with a basic voting interface.

I think the idea is to consume many RSS feeds easily and to have them ranked by some kind of importance indicator so that influential feeds go to the top and as a result you discover hot stories first. At least, that's what I think it is supposed to be.

A Google Reader for mobile, but stripped down and given community voting and an iPhone interface.

I don't like it much, but mostly it's because:

1) There's still a hell of a lot of feeds to navigate.

2) You still have to jump out to read any article.

3) The voting interface seems clunky.

Oh, and some of the feed links are broken.
In my opinion, Chrome's developer tools are much better than firebug. Grease Monkey functionality is built in and GM scripts are usable. No-script functionality is built in. Flashblock exists for chrome, too. No idea what Sage and Chatzilla are, but perhaps equivalents exist?

Then again, it seems like your mind is already made up...
Acer Aspire One netbook dual booting Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7. I do mostly web development using Python and Django on my Ubuntu partition, gedit, terminal, firefox and chrome are pretty much all I need. I come from an ASP.NET/C# background, so I have Visual Studio on my Win7 partition, but honestly the only time I boot into windows is to watch netflix.