skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was coming from an entirely American POV, so my apologies for ignoring cricket!
More Startups Does Not Equal To More Money
Someone was pointing out to me that the NHS bureaucracy will probably cut front line services first - to try and reinforce this view.

It's such a crying shame - the NHS frontline staff can be utterly wonderful, I just hate the layers of parasitical managers gaming the system of daft metrics to get their bonuses.
Same thing happens in the USA, even in Pennsylvania.

You hire a bunch of people, then after a few years, you can get money from the state on a per-employee basis to keep your people here and not move to say, Ohio. The startup business does not have such access to those funds. So your per-employee costs drop but the startup's costs do not.
What potential competing tool? You've been taking a rather ridiculous stance, lionshare. In order for your arguments to hold true, justify the following: a) that Diaspora (an anti-Facebook) is a Basecamp competitor, which implies that b) Facebook is a Basecamp competitor; c) the rise of node systems == the fall of centralized server systems d) that Jason Fried isn't just weighing in as a 3rd-party startup founder.
Not a bit. They are a great company, great products and great inspiration.

I just think that this post is ugly. He could wait a while, let them finish the finance, let them work, and in a few months write about the results.
The rush, the hurry, the strong word ("a curse") is - to me - too bold to be pure "startup/product advice" issue.
KumoFS looks like a good Cassandra equivalent
Wow! In one sentence, Steve Blank elucidates the feelings I have always had about the chasm between academia and the "real world":

The Business Model competition measures how well students learn how to Pivot by getting outside the building (not by writing a plan inside one.)

I have always appreciated theory and thought much more was needed in the corporate world. Too many people waste time reinventing approaches they would have easily known if they had just a little more education.

At the same time, I have often thought academics were in some kind of fantasy world. You gotta get "outside" and understand what's really happening.

Magic can happen when theory meets practice.

Great post! Thank you, Steve.
Does anyone else think this guy is making a mistake going for ad-based income. Looking at his income report, he is already making 50% of his income (and almost all his passive income) from stockphotos and ebooks. Comparing this to his current income from ads, it is obviously more profitable. I accept that he has more ad-based projects coming up, but in terms of effort, is producing ad-based software really going to be worth it? Another downside is that photos and books don't need the same level of ongoing maintenance as software.

Perhaps someone here has some insight into how much money software with embedded ads can realistically make.
That same segment of the population still supports off-shore drilling. Environmental concerns don't matter to vocal members of the conservative movement until they actually start coughing up smog.

On the other hand, liberal President Obama's drilling plan might actually collapse now. At least, one might hope that the oil industry can't successfully bribe Congress anymore — er, excuse me, make sufficiently large campaign contributions.

(Blatant politics and off-topic for HN, I know. Sorry.)
You've not making any sense. Diaspora is a Facebook competitor. Arguing that Diaspora threatens Basecamp implies that Facebook itself threatens Basecamp. Which isn't true.

And, even if that were true, it will be still be wrong because vaporware isn't a threat.
No, they don't really care but I'm sure they won't be too disappointed to have the publicity for "standing up to the RIAA" in new customers' minds.
What America spends on food and drink
Tony Blair wanted a private jet too but the media derided it as "Blair Force One" and the idea was quietly scrapped.

New Labour got a lot of credit from some for scrapping the Royal Yacht, but they neglected to point out that in wartime the Royal Yacht was a actually fully-functional hospital ship. When we're not at war, why not use it for diplomatic functions?
What's the bug up Apple's @$$?
I have participated in some of the same international healthcare IT standards bodies as UK NHS staff, attempting to resolve those incompatibility problems. It really is that difficult to solve. Unless you've worked in the industry for years it's hard to appreciate how complex the data is, and how many different forms it can take. In most cases these aren't accidental differences, they're driven by real requirements for patient care.
There's an MIT OpenCourseWare class (6.00) that is an introduction to Python and computer science. If your friend wants to do the problems in that course, there are people working through it together on Curious Reef (disclaimer, it's my website):
http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

You can post your work, view others' work, leave comments, and ask questions. 29 people have done at least the first lesson so far. It's one of the most active classes on the site.
And, as much as Ubuntu generally gets out of my way on the desktop, I find that Mint is pretty good out-of-the-box for the media PC hooked up to my TV.

After looking over those release notes, nothing really stands out as a must-upgrade feature though, other than picking up the latest package versions from upstream.
My brain tells me you shouldn't start your first date by asking the person to move in with you. I have a feeling you've already heard this, and you will only accept this knowledge after your experiment.

Ahh, how wonderful it is to be a skeptic.
this is awesome but for the annoying number of sites that demand short passwords.
I am still going to work on my photos and make as much income as possible with it. But I do not feel good with ebooks for a long term. If ads will not bring me a revenue I expect I will rather move only to photos. But I really believe in long term income with ads.
I can attest to this. In fact, this article sums up about 75% of what I learned at college (the other 25% is that it's okay to lie and cheat).

Sad.
The Lobster Font - Ligatures, alternates and Free
Combining OpenID and OAuth with OpenID Connect
Strategery for iPad: Have little dot men fight wars for you
How Childhood Has Evolved
London is a bubble politically speaking, and can be an echo chamber. Many of these consultants probably were Guardian-reading champagne socialists.
I agree that many constructs (s///, tr//, ``) will be familiar to someone with Unix background, but I'm not sure if they would qualify as a novice (many CS first years are unfamiliar, and in fields like bioinformatics -- where Perl happens to be the most commonly used language -- it's a rarity).

But anyway, what about $_ and a host of other special variables? Pulling arguments to functions out of nowhere? Using regexps for simple string operations? Strings not being array? Using a special comparison operator for strings (without complaints when == is used)? length() not working on arrays (again, no warning) and $# returning index of last element rather than length? 'if' not being able to take a single statement? 'Last' instead of 'break', 'next' instead of 'continue', 'continue' doing something else?
You're rambling.

Basecamp alternative: http://lessprojects.com/ - Status: Not shut down.

Basecamp alternative: https://www.hoisthq.com/ - Status: Private beta

Free, open-source Campfire alternative: https://echowaves.com/ - Status: Not shut down.

And these are just the ones I know about (OK, I had to Google for a second to find EchoWaves).

Final nail in the coffin: If 37S was "competing" by shutting down competitors, why are they innovating their products at the pace they are? The Campfire of today doesn't look like the Campfire HuddleChat ripped off.
Hey, thanks for the feedback.

I think you're right in that I need to do a better job at addressing the pain points. One of the interesting dilemmas about it is that people are using the app for many different uses, which is great, but it makes it hard to sell to a specific audience. You might be right in that I need a business section, similar to what I think RescueTime does.

I'm not sure about charging folks to keep their data from disappearing though. As a user, I think I'd get really frustrated with an app that did that. It's kind of like ransoming off the user's data, isn't it?

Bingo Card Creator has been a big inspiration for me. That's where the $29 price came from.

Again, appreciate it.
And you tell me, please, why there is no project management solution in Google Apss
80legs participated in a business plan competition at Rice University while I was still getting an MBA there. We were one of the finalists, but not the top winner.

That was a year ago. I have since done some basic searching to see what the other finalists have done since then. As far as I can tell, only one (the winner) has done anything significant so far, and that's just raising money. Granted, it's just a web search, but it seems the rest have just done things like win other competitions, get grant money, etc.

We are the only ones actively engaged in business. And we only entered the competition for fun. (We used our winnings for free lunches.)
How Pixability found its groove - ushering SMBs into YouTube era
我是从新加波来的. 你们呢?
But not in Google Apps!
Google had no problem to add tasks (talk to remember the milk).
But why not project management?
BTW - it's fair. J.Fried is using his ammunition to protect his business. But let's just call it what it is.

Reg innovative: Huddle chat was written in weeks. We can only guess where it be now. Basecamp is great, but very similar to what it was 2 years ago

Anyway guys, we all should only hope the best of luck for this Diaspora thing instead of bashing them. That's all I'm saying. Mr. Fried could wait at least until the finance period is done.
Redis weekly update #5 - RC1 is near
Err, jackowayed said they are (probably) screwed, despite having momentum, support, fear of failing, and no financial problems. Because the initial odds were really bad.

You may disagree with him about the initial odds, but I think you agree with his main point: the massive funding is good for Diaspora*.
Ironic last line:

"Now he spends most of his time drawing",

because an earlier line was:

"He hated it it ... he wanted to be an artist.
Paying bribes went against his principles, he says".
Send Fax Via Email | Receive Fax Via Email  | Send Fax Via Web
Exactly. And I think there's a corollary: If officials can get bribes for doing something, they WON'T do it WITHOUT a bribe. So nothing will work the way it should. Bribes perpetuate the same red tape problem they appear to "solve."

Her statement is like saying "what you need is some alcohol to help you deal with the pain of your alcoholism."

Seriously, corruption is maybe the worst possible thing for a country's economy. This article argues that it's the single biggest reason why poor countries are poor. And it's a hard problem to solve.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are...
Keep Wildlife in the Wild - Photos By George Logan
Animals have a lot of habits that aren’t possible in the cruel world of people so photographer George Logan (Official WebSite)come to idea to create outstanding ad photos to save the animals and to provide some funds for their happy life in the wild.
Why Flash on iPad wouldn't solve anything
Ok

Can you give some examples of the difficulties?
YouTube hits 2bn daily downloads
Mobile operating systems and browsers are headed in opposite directions
his price is way too low. All the "check out this ebook" sites I've seen, always charge $29 $37 $47. The reason for that is because most of these things get sold through affiliates, and with a high price you can offer someone $20-$30 per sale.

So web publishers will promote them more, since with an ebook, they have to sell someone a $37 product to get $30. While with Amazon, they'd need to convince them to buy a $1,000 product to get there.
The problem I have with most language software is they don't take advantage of spaced repetition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

I looked at Rosetta Stone a year or two ago, and the best they had was occasionally bringing you back to a previous lesson.
Out of curiosity, why are you reinventing the wheel on search advertising? Is there something you find fundamentally flawed with AdWords-type ads?

Seems like monetizing a search engine is shooting fish in a barrel, getting it to grow would be the business challenge.
On a mostly-related slant, Grassroots Mapping is working with local groups to take home-made high-resolution aerial photographs of the oil slick (from balloons and kites): http://grassrootsmapping.org/
Uses in Haskell and ML seem to follow its math origin, but why in C++ they have come to call it functor?
I use a similar method; the "algorithm" is different of course, but I too use a unique password for every account I have anywhere, which I calculate in a similar fashion.

My algorithm is a bit simpler than the one you described though, I can figure out a password I don't remember in just a few seconds. That also makes it less secure of course, I just think its sufficiently secure.
Its a classic mistake to try and make a large IT system meet all the individual requirements of a large heterogeneous organization - witness many ERP disasters.

You have to rationalize the processes in an organization then make them use the same systems. In fact, I've seen scenarios where having totally inflexible IT systems was actually a bit of a blessing - there was no endless wrangling over requirements, people were told "you are going to use this and like it" and they had to change their processes to fit in with the systems.

I wouldn't have believed how well this can work unless I had seen it happen in a fairly large multinational.
Some people care about the difference between "_why" and "Why". (Probably including the man himself.)

Some people care about similar variations in brands.

So far, so good. What's not clear (to me, at any rate) is how you get from these to "Therefore, _why's name is a brand". That would be reasonable if no one cared about details for any reason other than branding, but that's obviously false.

Compare: "... then you're definitely in programming-language territory." (Almost all implementations of almost all programming languages care very much indeed about the difference between "Why" and "_why".)

Or: "... then you're definitely in religious territory." (Some Orthodox Jews care very much about the difference between "G-d" and "God" even though the former is just a lightly modified version of the latter.)

Or: "... then you're definitely in music territory." (In a musical score, adding or removing dots, little lines, funny characters, etc., can completely change the meaning.)

Or: "... then you're definitely in vanity territory." (Some people just care a lot about appearances.)

So ... why "branding", specifically?
Why I Switched to Git From Mercurial
I'll second namecheap. I've used them for years and really like them.
You have to be cruel to be kind.
Facebook ’sexiest video’ malware spreading virally, notify experts
really, is this HN material?
The Three Types Of Education
personally, I really don't get the complaints about git's UI. OK. I understand the confusion about what checkout does, though on the other hand, once you know that, it won't happen to you.

But a revision control system failing to not corrupt or crash depending on the data you put into it is, frankly, no revision control system.

Just like a database failing to return the same data back that you told it to store and without telling you a problem occurred at store time is no database either (cough mysql cough).
i think the best option is medium sized projects. These have the potential to become big projects, and at least you won't rely 100% on SEO traffic.
There's a 67 minute video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU) where they're introducing the idea (with more details and exploring some possibilities) to a couple people (professors?) at their college and end up showing their very basic prototype. They did this before they created the kickstarter page, raised all this money, and got all this attention.
I personally like to use tinymode[1] for such things in order to reduce map pollution (if such a term exists).

[1] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2223
Intelligent Designer: Gaia
Entrepreneurs turning tiny ideas into big blogs
LLVM and GHC are, at least in my book, currently the most exciting developments in the open-source world. I haven't been this excited to track a changelog since the Linux 2.0 series.
I think that Wall misunderstands the policy of least surprise and I even think Matz might agree with the principle of the quoted statement (although he probably wouldn't agree with the overall point Wall is making). From an interview:

"I wanted to minimize my frustration during programming, so I want to minimize my effort in programming. That was my primary goal in designing Ruby. I want to have fun in programming myself. After releasing Ruby and many people around the world got to know Ruby, they said they feel the way I feel. They came up with the phrase the principle of least surprise. But actually, it's often misunderstood.

...

Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, "I was surprised by this feature of the language, so therefore Ruby violates the principle of least surprise." Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprised me."

http://www.artima.com/intv/ruby4.html
Actually the bureaucrats are quite open. A (real life) movie was once made on the IAS (English, August) which poked a lot of fun at them. It was later shown as part of the IAS training (perhaps still is).

The writer of the book, still is in the IAS and continues to write as he works.
Facebook for conservatives?
That is exactly what I believe in. I am trying to do project that can be run in 2-3 weeks from start and if it got some attention then I work on it to make it bigger.
Does that goal of $1,000 cover your rent and other living expenses, or are you living off of previously saved money while trying out your new business?
I was involved with planning a large, nationwide business plan competition (mitcep.org). Steve raises some very good points, and I've forwarded his post to the current leadership with the hopes that we can incorporate some of his advice to improve next year's competition.

However, I think Steve misses the point of what these competitions are doing. They are taking students who've never before considered themselves entrepreneurs (and who've gotten to where they are by getting A's in classes or being consultants) and encouraging them to become a part of the startup world, by forming a team, attacking a market need, and pitching to investors. Everyone involved (including the judges) knows that the static business plan is merely a demonstration of the team's ability to pitch, not a rigid guideline for what the team would do for the next few years. At the end of the competition, the winner is not the team that gets the cash (although I'm sure it doesn't hurt their egos) but every student who participated and pushed themselves to learn about startups and themselves.
I've worked at both, and a problem that can occur as an employee at start-ups is the lack of peer-level comradery. If you're not getting the best benefits or are disgruntled about some decision, often the best way to move on can be by turning to your co-worker and muttering, "what an a##-hole." But at a start-up, that co-worker might be the owner's best friend, with 10% equity.

Is there a way to fix this?
Diaspora's curse is that it is a solving a problem that only exists in the eyes of people who don't need somebody to solve it for them.

Does anyone think my mom or my sisters give a damn about facebook privacy issues? NO! The only people that seem to are the types that come to HN and we all, for the most part, run our own webservers with our own blogs and pictures and soforth anyway.
They don't call it the ivory tower for nothing.

To academics, ideas are everything. For a startup, an idea is merely a jumping off point.

This is why you so often see breakdowns in attempts to spin something out of a university. A professor thinks they deserve a huge chunk of equity for contributing to ideas, but has no time to truly contribute to execution. The entrepreneur team and savvy investors know otherwise. Enter huge hissy fit cap-table fight, stage right.
No, I'm alluding to having to work for 30 days without pay. I won't agree with anyone whose opinion of a good programmer depends on how much money they have in the bank.
IZUP App Shuts Down Driver Cell Phones
That closely echoes what I've seen locally; one business plan competition has had the the majority of winners (for the past 5 years that I've tracked it) not even bother to start a company, they just go get consulting jobs.

The contest doesn't even bother to list the old winners on their website, they know what's going on.

Business plan contests really don't seem to work.
I'm a Unix-type, and Perl still makes me want to cry.
Weird Clouds Look Even Better From Space
I'm excited by the Python support in Perf.
People like him make it tougher for the common man to survive, because we all have to pay bribes or nothing is done.
Poor, or old or retired people are forced to pay bribes for basic amenities. We have to pay a bribe to get our income tax +++return+++. My old mother (78) was hospitalized and had to pay a bribe to get her insurance money. The list is endless.

For the last month, we've been out of +water+. This is because all the neighboring houses have an illegal connection which pulls the water from the main line. Of course, they've paid a bribe for it.

Its not funny, and its not fun. And it does not make the economy go smoother, _except_ for the rich.
Ask HN: Review My App - heyhub.com 
Hey guys, wanted to get your feedback on my now working and out in the wild prototype. I think I'm at a good place with all the foundational pieces created.

Trying the bring the "dating website" experience to a local service provider directory. (it shows more once you're logged in). Simple, easy-to-use and personable.Currently its limited to just dogwalkers/pet services but eventually I would like to broaden the scope and support tutors, babysitters, photographers, artists, (see craiglist's services section). I'm also trying to create a deeper integration with facebook. Alot of these business work around a word-of-mouth network and I figure facebook is can be a natural extension of that. I think I'd be more inclined to use a dogwalker that I know my friends use.

On the business side, got a lot of ideas around a business model, the most obvious one to me seems like a paid subscription or lead generation. Still crunching spreadsheets on that one. Would like to get some real users and see what works first.

Also trying to come up with a sustainable traffic acquisition strategy. Link building? Any one have any ideas?It's challenging running a one man show doing design, code marketing, business analysis, marketing etc etc. Definitely a steep learning curve there which is probably why a lot of people recommend against it. Gonna soldier on for now.

So any tips on how I can do more with less? Any and all constructive criticism are welcome!

Thanks! pk
Patricia Tries: A Better Index For Prefix Searches
http://heyhub.com

Clickable link
Operational Transformation (algorithm behind Wave, Google Docs)