skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm fond of re-telling the following story, which I first heard when I was an undergrad 30+ years ago. (I'd love to be able to cite a reference. Is this familiar to anyone?)

A brand new office tower was unveiled, the architect was on hand, the tenants moved in. Everyone was enthralled with the new digs: spacious offices, sensible layout, all the modern conveniences. But everybody - I mean everybody - complained about the elevators. They were so slowwwwwwww.

The building owner consulted with the architect, who was plainly amazed. He hadn't scrimped on that aspect of the project either, and pointed out that the elevators were as fast as anything you could buy in the marketplace. They'd done modeling studies, and the simulations showed that the
elevators could keep up with peak demand. There couldn't be anything wrong with the elevator system.

Yet people complained loudly and uniformly. The elevators were way... too... slow!

It took a human factors guy to figure it out. The first floor elevators had an indicator over the door that told which floor the elevator was currently servicing, but ONLY the first floor had such indicators. The remaining floors only had 'up' and 'down' buttons, and nothing more. "Put indicators above the elevator doors on EVERY floor", the human factors guy said. "People don't mind waiting, as long as they know where they stand."

The building owner installed indicators and that fixed the problem.
So just going to put this out there...

Initial thought #1 -- How can we rate your startup if all you have is a landing page? It's a good way to generate interest, but I can hardly rate anything that I can't, well, use.

Thought #2 -- Wufoo? As part of the marketing-for-dummies crash course, think "why me, why us, why now" when addressing your customers. Why me: because I need forms, why you? Because you provide forms... which Wufoo also does (your target market is likely aware of them, so you'd prolly need to differentiate directly, think the "iDon't" campaign from VZW) and why now: I can't use your service, so I definitely don't need it now.

Also, you have "watch the video" which might have made me watch, but that's a dead link. Right now, in my mind, you're suffering from over promise and under deliver, even with your slickly designed site, which does show some promise.
The link to the video just goes to the home page (at least for me using Safari on my Mac)
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1451008
Interesting suggestion. What real problem would this solve for people? Sending MMS messages is expensive at the moment, so making it cheaper would proably make it more usable for people. Anything more?
Dagda - who says you can't do anything with Linux 2.0 and an original Pentium?
Just look at reality TV for an idea for how popular the lives of 'civilians' are to other civilians. Reality TV is an extreme example, admittedly, and it's audience not exactly the demographic you would be targeting in this case, but you get my point.
This is a good argument; that everybody can play because you just need a referee and not a lot of extra judging help or technical stuff. This is a good explanation of why soccer is so popular. The other one is that unless other sports you just need some sort of ball to start playing.

Actually we played 5 to a side (smaller field) football/soccer in college without referee and without the offside rule (which would make it hard to call). The only point of friction between teams were the faults (only obvious ones were called) so it could get a little rough but other than that the situations are mostly obvious and you can do without a ref in friendly games.

For critical decisions in a World Cup soccer could use video replay though, especially since the scoring is usually so low (average is about 1.5 goals per game so far I think) that a goal changes everything. Perhaps it could be used after the games just to punish "divers".
Profitable Niches With Guest Brian Kaldenberg [Podcast]
DejaVu Sans Mono (http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page) does a pretty good job.
"It's nice to want things."
Unless you are Pixar.
I think I meant cheaper, or got confused for a minute. But that's interesting, I didn't know your LLC could be taxed as an S-Corp.
> My number 1 reason for quitting is I want to get off the addiction of the constant paychecks.

This is interesting... it reminds me of what I tell people when they ask if I'm going to finish college.

I can count the classes I'm missing on one hand, so I often get asked when I'm going back, and they're shocked when I say I'm not. Basically, at this point, a degree will only stop me from getting boring, corporate jobs. I don't want those. But if my startup were to go under, it'd be real tempting... and then I'd get caught in a tarpit. I'd just rather not risk it, and make it harder on myself to get boring jobs.
I don't think this solves a problem any developer has. It's fairly trivial to process web forms.
Fair enough. How much does the last app in the 10% make?
Your analogy has the benefit of not being specious; it's just completely missing the point. Support from your printer manufacturer is an ongoing relationship, but the only thing tying you to them is your desire to overpay for ink. You could easily get ink from other places.

With WoW, how many other vendors are able to continue providing an Azeroth for you to craft your wars?

The software you buy for WoW is clearly marked that it has no functionality outside of online play. It's client software that connects to the WoW "service" on Blizzard "servers." You are paying for the service, since you can download the same client software for free on Blizzard's website. I'm guessing that, like Eve Online, any retail purchase equals the equivalent game time.
"I have plenty of savings..."

I think this is the key. You have two years of runway to figure out what to do next (according to the blog). That money in the bank is a lot more security than any job can offer, by itself. Staying in your job for another two years might be the greater risk, when opportunity costs are taken into account.
The one at Leicester Uni was cool, kind of felt dangerous, have to be careful when you get on.
If a person cannot understand that a button will not spontaneously form on a physical panel, cannot understand the basic laws of reality and physics, then they shouldn't be let outside or out of the care of others. There is nothing you can design that would work for someone with that kind of mental disability.
>It seems much wiser to wait till you have an idea that you want to pursue and then quit.

Every stripper and/or prostitute, the story goes, plans on quitting once they make enough money to go to school/open that greasy spoon/move somewhere else.

In reality they end up `quitting' when the system is done with them and tosses them out.

9-5ers often live out the same lie.

You talk about rational choices, but what normally happens when someone has a comfortable, non-challenging job is that they start to compensate for missed excitement by filling their life with expensive habits (whether it's drugs, addiction to games and electronics, expensive cars, the cottage, etc). Soon they are completely bound to their job, those golden-handcuffs demolishing any potential they might have had.

Anyways, I've got to go off and look at a new car. My current one is 2 years old and is getting a little embarrassing.
On a more constructive note, you're better off providing a service like this to non-developers. It's a much bigger market and the product has already been validated by startups like wufoo.com
Why? Haven't you ever met anyone that seems borderline sociopath? It's not so much needing money as it is not giving the slightest shit about other people. Other people are simply there to be manipulated and taken advantage of for personal gain, that's why.
Thanks - had a small bug pop up! Fixed that.
He did specifically say that he wanted to hear what people think, though.
What is your time worth? I'd assume that each app took several hours to write?
Unfortunately that's not necessarily true. A normal distribution is just vastly different than an exponential distribution. Using the central limit theorem allows you to expect the mean to be normally distributed around your samples, but that's about all.

The reality is that taking an average over an exponential distribution is largely meaningless. There are an infinite number of distributions that would create that exact mean. Some of them not at all profitable for certain apps, others very profitable.

The problem with using an average over this distribution is that it doesn't give you anything to work from. You can't figure out who is profitable and who isn't, or how high up the curve you need to be to be profitable. Taking an average over all of the apps in the app store is like taking the average revenue of every website that tries to make money on the internet. It's a meaningless number.

At the end he compares the low numbers in averages to a single anecdotal example of something that had a 100 Million downloads. On the one hand he dismisses the few highly successful appstore apps but then uses another singular example of a highly successful app to recommend a different platform. Overall the methodological approach is deeply flawed.

I could go on, but ultimately, I found this analysis not very insightful. As with any new channel, it takes some time to figure out what works and what doesn't. Who is going to buy and who isn't. In almost all software the distribution is exponential where the top 10 to 20% make over 90% of the revenue. The same is true of the app store.

It all comes back to fundamentals. Find an unmet or under-served need in the market, figure out how big that market is, figure out how much it's going to cost to fill that need, make sure your app fills the need, and start trying to sell it. Then once you've built up a sales platform, then you start scaling it.
This is actually how I read everything.
>How can we rate your startup if all you have is a landing page?

Because clearly some kind of deity hates us and tortures us with frivolous requests for reviewing 'startups'. I think it's just part of startup culture to be over-preening.

> Wufoo?

Yeah, I don't know either. They definitely didn't have anything on the landing page that screamed, "BETTER THAN WUFOO", which should be a primary target.

> "watch the video"

Any website that requires I watch a video, I leave. Immediately. I read @ 900 WAM, I am not going to listen to some hamfisted audio dialogue. Period.

Come out with a product for us to test!

Edited for quality.
Randall -
Thanks for your thoughts -

1) Right now I'm looking for impressions on the landing page + idea. Right now that's the MVP that I'm pushing, to gauge interest on.
2) Yes, differentiation is important. I love Wufoo and its great for non-developers to easily create contact forms and such - this is a more powerful service for full web applications.
3) Fixed the video link. Apologies.
Yet gas stations have the right to charge 7-10 cents per gallon less on cash purchases vs. credit card purchases of gasoline?
Agree. Type this in Google:

small business development center <<state name>>
Yeah, it's weird they left that detail out, but I assume they mean the administration will have someone take it out during conference committee. There is also a time after a bill has been passed by both houses (but before the president signs it) where corrections can be made to the bill. These are only supposed to be typographical corrections that don't change the meaning, but...
I thought it was already understood that the model of "create a $1 app and sell 10k of them per month" was long over. The App store is still a relatively new market, so people will continue to learn how to be successful on it.

I just got an iPad and started using the App store for the first time in my life and guess what? Out of the 5 things I wanted to use the pad for, 3 of them didn't exist at all. There is plenty of space in this market I would say. Just not for iFart anymore.
Honestly, it seems like kids are expected to work flat out in school these days, killing themselves to get top grades and doing as much extra curricular stuff as they can schedule.

I don't think it's necessarily the case that they are expected to. But to get into college, they had to spend 4 years doing this in high school, so it may just be force of habit.
That's just plain wrong. There is no federal line item veto and even if there were you couldn't use it to veto one letter.
Moore's Outlaws
I am not a developer so I can't comment on the usefulness of your idea.

I can, however, tell you that the landing page didn't really offer a picture of what the software does and the video is a bit out of the way. I would suggest adding a shot of how the software makes code simpler or an example form or an example API call or something along those lines!
Every American spectator sport spends more time in stoppages than in actual play. The main business reason for this is for television advertising. And this is also the main reason soccer isn't a successful spectator sport in America.

"All American spectator sports are extremely fine tuned affairs."

Christ, I know. Have you seen the NFL rulebook that changes every year on substantive matters (like the definition of a "completed pass" whether or not you're pushed out of bounds)? It's horribly overcomplicated. The NBA's rules change nearly as much. At some point during the 90's, zone defenses were illegal. And even now, fouls under the basket are ruled based upon what side of a line you're standing on.

"Officiating standards are laughable. There is an unacceptably large amount of variation between referees regarding what is and is not legal play."

Oh, you mean like the strike zone in baseball?

"Offsides should always be "tie goes to the offense". There is no compelling reason to blow extremely close plays dead because the offensive player just might have been offsides by 6 inches. FIFA should issue a "point of emphasis" stating that "ties go to the offense"."

"Ties go to the runner" isn't even a rule in baseball. The offsides rule is one of the better governed parts of the game, there being a dedicated linesman and all. It's extremely rare to see an offsides call be wrong.

"There needs to be more than one referee."

I would not be opposed to having a fifth video referee.

"Referees should train as groups and speak a common language. This is even more important for an international world championship event. This is just common sense."

As I recall, World Cup referees are all required to speak English.

"Referees should be required to make distinguishing hand signals for each call. This would greatly aid the players, the fans, and the commentators in determining exactly what the ruling was."

I've seen a lot of soccer, and this generally isn't a problem at all.
Then why are American sports so outrageously boring to watch?
> You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.

Yet it's still testable. There isn't anything you can't test somehow and there isn't any design any designer could come up with that can't benefit from incremental improvement as a result of testing.

> And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps.

That's your own strawman, no one says you have to. Test radically different designs against each other, testing will still declare a winner and that winner can be incrementally improved by further testing.
Thanks for sharing, it sounds like it was a good time. In some parts of the country (like mine~), finding interesting startups just to network with is nearly impossible. The idea that they all came together to court people into their web is turning my hacker worldview upside down.
I think they're concentrated on the mobile environment.

SkypeKit for consumer electronic device makers will be available tomorrow, June 23, based on the Linux OS. For desktop software developers, SkypeKit will be available for Windows and Mac in the next few weeks.

http://blogs.skype.com/devzone/2010/06/skypekit_beta.html
Thanks, I appreciate that feedback!
Frontiers
As someone who's been skimming "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", I note that your schedule is purely Product Development - there's no Customer Development. Since YC is about "building something people want", that second part is equally crucial. Arguably more so.

My take on "4 steps" is: do iterative/agile/RAD/MythicalManMonth development (you present a demo ASAP, so the client can tell if that's what they want or not), but to not wait til you have a demo. You iterate on "the customer problem you're solving" and "specs of the product". This is much faster than building a demo, which is faster again than building the whole thing - and only then finding out that the "people want" part is missing. (You build the product concurrently).

What you're proposing is an engineering project - which is great! Nothing wrong with that, challenging, lots of fun, lots of learning. Just noting it's focussed entirely on that half of an entrepreneurial project - a common developer approach.
I think he's arguing that Ford is an outlier. Remember, when the car was invented, there were hundreds of car companies (remember the Stanley Steamer?)

If you went back to 1920, and compared the car companies from then and now, Ford might be the only one that has still remained. Even classic nameplates like Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick have fallen off.

If you went back to the 1960's, and told someone that Oldsmobile and Pontiac would cease to exist in 50 years, they would have called you crazy.

Is this going to happen to the electric car as well? Will Tesla be the next Ford or the next Stanley?

*The same trend can also be seen with PC manufacturers. How many different PC companies were there in the 1980's. How many exist now?
Summer Trend 2010: Tie-Dye Bags
I've heard of mirrors being installed to accomplish the same thing. People don't pay attention to the speed of the elevators because they're too busy primping.
Ok, here we go. RTP Hackers & Founders / Open Coffee Club Meetup formed. See:

http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/
When reading this, it helps to remember that the author is a former Nokia executive that does consulting and speaking to Big Business. He mentions Hilton Hotels, Rite Aid, and Walgreens.

I don't know how you would split out Brand apps vs hobbyist vs junk apps, but he should have mentioned that. I'd be surprised if there are more than 10K Brand apps like the ones he appears to be most familiar with.
So I checked out your resume. And as a graphic designer, I found it a little jarring. But your not applying for design jobs, so thats not a huge deal. It's an interesting idea, a great idea probably. But if you're going to do something like this you need to establish a flow of information.

Here is my resume: http://www.zevdesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/czh-res...

It's not the avg business person's resume, cause I'm not a business person. Anyone can have a resume like this tho.

a) I feel like a sentence/phrase formatted layout for your resume is interesting and effective if they read it. If they read it, they'll get the info they need.

b)Yes

c)Why not?

d)I have no reason to assume otherwise, imho. Nothing seems out of the ordinary.

I just worry about a TL;DR. sentiment when seeing this.

If you're gonna go with the phrase format, then you need to follow through the pattern throughout the piece. dont capitalize first letters. And add periods at the end.

here's my version of your resume: http://www.zevdesigns.com/dev/images/benglert.pdf

dont look if you dont wanna see it completely reworked.
A lot of those people who are losing their houses are losing them because they treated money they had not yet earned as an asset. Unless your employment contract says you have tenure, you should act as if it does.
Tour the Googleplex in pictures
" In some parts of the country (like mine~), finding interesting startups just to network with is nearly impossible. "

Well, in some countries (like mine) finding interesting startups at all is nearly impossible. ;-)
Pingpongninja.com launches
Can't tell from the landing page. When you have screenshots, demo's, videos, anything but a feature list then I will let you know.
What a brilliant/bullsh!t marketing campaign.

Obviously if OpenPGP could be broken, there are much bigger rewards than a lame $5000 dollars from nasuni.

They picked an encryption scheme that has stood the test of time and hackers. It's "known" to be secure (as meaningless as that word is in the field of security) and the only question is whether or not the NSA has some secret way of getting past it, but the general consensus is that no one does.

They let others do all the hard work for them and are doing nothing more than directly using PGP/OpenGPG............. except, of course, to their average client, that has no meaning. To them, "Nasuni has done something super great with security and they're so confident, they're DARING hackers to break it."

Brilliant idea, I say.
On Android and Custom UIs
Tell me about it! All those regulations over credit default swaps and... oh wait, there are none.
Ugh. I like schemes that use OpenPGP, but cracking contests are Schneier's "Warning Sign #9" of Snake-Oil Security.
It's always been a popular sport in America for amateur players, kids, and women (our women's team is the best in the world). Men's soccer on a professional level is trending upwards, though. In college towns and the like you'll see a handful of people wearing Man U shirts or something. MLS is expanding, and in some cities it catches on rather quickly (Seattle, for instance).

It's still hampered by the fact that we have pretty third-rate players by international standards. The American leagues for gridiron, basketball, and baseball are de facto world championships because the best players in those sports always play here, but in soccer the best club could be English or Spanish or German or Italian, and Americans have a problem with that.

I would say it's a top 4 sport already (displacing hockey) but the top 3 is hard to break into. I suspect it'll displace baseball next.
It is one of my great regrets in life that I did not attend college at UCSB and instead chose to attend a more "prestigious" institution. High schoolers: don't make my mistake, and if you're confused, send me an email. Let me assuage my regret by steering you towards the Good Life.
I also concur on the olark recommendation. We have been using it for about 9 months now and routinely close deals via live chat.
Totally. I myself haven't put in enough time to know more about combinators than "they exist."
As of 1.0.5 there were still some codecs missing, causing the annoying error message which ends in "There is nothing you can do about this" or something similar. It's not clear to me that this is something that can be fixed with code, though, sadly.
I play a lot of golf. It is a really good break for me because it just feels really old school. I don't even bring my cell phone and it is technology free.
That's easy to fix, though, they just press their floor number again. If all the buttons are pressed there is nothing they can do (unless they know the secret reset password).
Would you be happier if the rules said "the player who most convincingly acts will win the call"? Then it wouldn't be cheating, but part of the game...

I don't think it's nearly as bad as the American incarnation of hockey, where fistfights are tolerated with a slap on the wrist. Talk about encouraging unsportsmanlike behavior. If you tried that in soccer, you'd at the very least get a red card, if not more.
Cf. the Fredkin gate, which has three inputs and three outputs, and in which the number of bits going out equals the number coming in.

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