skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Our MVP for an ecommerce site (kembrel.com)
When we first started working on www.kembrel.com, we wanted to put out our MVP as fast as possible to get feedback from real users, iterate quickly and all that good stuff.

Our idea is to apply the successful flash sales model to a large market, US college students and to build a very focused community around it. Like other business applying this model (Gilt, RueLaLa, JackThreads, OneKingsLane, etc), you have to be a member to get access to the sales. Once you are a member, you get regular emails announcing new deals. Consumer brands give us VERY discounted merchandise to get rid of overstock (not defectives, just excess inventory) and to gain exposure/loyalty in a new market.

The challenge in building that MVP is that a flash sales site requires a minimum set of features by definition (e.g., limited access, access to inventory, a minimum member base). The Magento private sales module is only available in the Enterprise Edition ($13k). We couldn't find any SaaS options that satisfied the minimum requirements.

Now we wanted to build a real MVP, not do a dry test (http://yongfook.com/mvp-vs-dry-test). This means that we needed to actually build something that works, not just a landing page with an email collection form. To do this, we needed to work on 3 fronts at the same time:

IT: we built the site using the Magento community edition, bought a couple of cheap plugins and customized the rest inhouse. As you see, we are weak on the design side (working on that now with a pro) and we have a long way to go to make it a . But that's the point of a MVP.

Products to sell: we signed up over 50 brands and are in discussions with many more. This part requires getting on the phone and making calls all day long. There is no easy way around it. We called several hundreds brands to get to the 50 we have. It's hard work but it's worth it. We learned so much about the industry by doing this work (we are not industry insiders).

Customers: we invited all our friends, asked them to invite their friends and experimented with Facebook ads. We have content on the front page that is bringing us decent traffic.

The products and customers portions are a classic chicken-and-egg/marketplace problem. It is difficult to attract lots of customers to your site if you have nothing to sell. At the same time, how do you convince brands to give you significant discounts on the wholesale pricing if you don't have the user base to justify it? It's been a difficult process for us but we are starting to see the results now.

I would love to get feedback from you on our MVP.

If you are a student and are interested in getting deals (up to 80%) on apparel, ipod accessories, etc, please consider joining and telling your friends about us :)
The Mac share of viruses is zero. If youre right & market share is the only consideration, logically that means nobody should be writing any software (eg games) for Mac either.
Great recruiters would know both ends of the equation, and knowing that, make good calls. I'm actually of the opinion that most technical companies are bad at hiring. The only strategy that can be formalized and generalized is to error on the side of caution, but this can be a problem in the current job market where it's hard to find good people and you can't afford false negatives.
This smells of sour grapes to be honest, I'd imagine the guy who wrote this may have had a rejection letter in the post recently?

Or he just has some bizarre vendetta against Google in general.
Version 1.5 just released today. Includes fixes for memory leaks and some other small changes.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about culture, they can’t just hire a bunch of hyper-rational introverts with no friends, who are massively arrogant about their math skills…and cookie cutter follower zombies in the world of technology.

...

Anyways, all this to say, if you want to try to do things differently, if you want actual, real entrepreneurial experience and a real start-up job… we need a killer dev at Peek.

Hmm, that's a tactic I haven't seen before, trolling for new hires.
link: http://kembrel.com
There are two choices:

1.) 100s of millions of people dying of malaria
2.) 100s of millions of people not dying of malaria, but with likely unintended consequences, either negative or positive, or both.

I'd pick number 2. Number 1 is a pretty bad choice. Worth the risk. Inaction is just as much a choice as action.
Creators & Casualties of the Age of the Internet by Kieran Levis - The chapters on Steve Jobs alone will put some fire in your belly.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh - reading this now...inspirational.
I don't know the slightest thing about any other language besides Javascript, PHP, Java (from school), and MySQL.

It sounds like you need to get uncomfortable more often: explore new things outside your realm and expertise. Human beings tend to get stuck in ruts and do the same routines they are comfortable with.

We need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

I suggest diving into a language or framework you've never used and just stumble around for a while. I find that this is when I learn the most, and many times, colliding my existing knowledge base with something totally foreign sparks new and original ideas I may not have had before.

Also, don't compare yourself with everyone else (easier said than done). We are all knowledge workers here. Everyone is on their own quest. It is not a zero sum game with other hacker news members.

Always improve yourself with respect to yourself, not other people.
Books are great, but in all seriousness Mixergy.com is where you should look to park yourself at least twice a week.

There's no better starter of fire in the bellies than that place.
Sometimes I feel all these people are so much more hardworking than me, which is a sad thought, but also a healthy 'kick your own ass' type thought. As regards people having talents and achievements that I may never be able to match, that in itself does't bug me because a) as a consumer I'll probably benefit from their innovations, and b) if you're anything like me you secretly think that you are pretty f*cking smart and if they can do it, just proves you can, broadly speaking. ;)
no, really, thats wrong. There are no analogies. Selling an idea and "democratic" innovation processes are as big company as it gets. Verizon does the same thing for the love of god.
OSCON Summarized: Community, Cash & Clouds
We developed a lot of the protocols and technologies ourselves, and could talk about them for hours :) Let me know if you have a specific area you want me to discuss.
Overpopulation is already a major problem in many places. Does human life in those places have negative value? Should we cull the population like deer? How is that any different from withholding the cure to a deadly disease?
Malaria is a serious economic drain on endemic countries. It's likely that without this disease burden, living conditions would improve, and the birth rate would go down in these places.

Also, I've had dengue fever, a relatively mild case that laid me up for a week and left my digestive system complaining for months. If I get it again, odds are it will be worse. I say that this is an experiment worth trying; it's not like mosquitoes can't be re-introduced into the wild if somehow necessary.
Peek is my backup plan in case I get rejected by the Kin and Sharp Zaurus teams.
Bootstrapping Startup: Raise Debt From Your Employees
openid?
I am working on something exactly similar in my free time as a side project. Nothing to show yet, but I am currently playing with rsync to support incremental diff-based syncs.

Will your program be open source?
Vinyl Banners - Printing in Style 
Concisely, we will just say that vinyl banners printing are a great way to promote your business products or services. They are really smart and eye-catching because of their resistant properties. Moreover, you can utilize them in any weather condition devoid of feeling any sort of fear or danger. Finally, they are highly attractive and target-oriented because of their Full Color CMYK/PMS printing process.
So it's Dropbox but without the requirement for a central cloud component? Is there anything I've missed?
If you have the context to sit a level above the conversation and can see that the issues being talked about are clearly peripheral, you know enough to redirect the conversation to the core issues with a good question.

If you don't, you can ask clarifying questions until you do. Always focus on what would help you decide one way or another.

If you get into a disagreement with someone and you can't resolve it in the scope of the conversation, ask for a reference or data.

If you're in a conversation with an expert, you're the student. And that's ok. We're all students of the world.

At the same time, don't be afraid of speaking too far ahead of your knowledge. When someone calls you on it, you have a chance to learn.

Become a questioner.

The real problem is if you've been fronting and cracks appear in the facade. Then people know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you've been acting small and think less of you. The only cure is not to be a bullshitter. Don't pretend you know what you don't.

There's a difference between pretending like you know it all and being forced to act on imperfect information. The former is a character flaw, the latter is just life happening.
or 3) unknown # (0-all) of people dying from the replacement(s)
Yeah, I've been more of a racketeer than a lisper of late. I like their 'batteries included' philosophy.

I don't much like the macro system, though.

I might check out typed racket. I don't care too much about lazy evaluation one way or the other, long as all my doubles get multiplied, added, and divided, and it happens fast.
I so wanted a Heathkit HERO when I was a kid. I biked regularly to Radio Shack just to stare at it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_%28robot%29

No robot for me, but I did end up getting a Tandy 1000SX. I used that all through high school and college.
I am not sure how to say this, but books aren't exactly what you need. You can read a few, and sure they might help, but you won't get what you want.

If you're the type of person who goes to a lecture to see how a big company became a big company and survived the problems, then you sort-of already have what it takes.

I've read a ton of books until I got the most important message from all of them. Stop reading books and go create, experiment and see how it goes.
I had exactly the same thought about setting an example for my child. I took on employment recently with hindsight on the coming child (nervousness of my spouse about finances somehow getting to me), but I am really not happy with the decision. It is difficult to quit again, but really, I don't want to set this example for my son. On the other hand, maybe my son would prefer me being able to by him all the latest toys (playstations etc). Who knows :-) (And not being on steady employment of course does not imply being poor, but it certainly seems more risky).

I was also floored at a recent garden party meeting other parents when I learned how much it is simply taken for granted that men are away most of the time and don't get to see their kids grow up.
We're doing machine-augmented crowdsourcing, not straight voice recognition. It's different, and allows us to provide consistent high quality at low cost.

Essentially, we've built a crowdsourcing QA system a la Crowdflower, expect better and more suited to the specific task of video-to-text, and augmented it with speech recognition.

It's pretty fucking cool, if you ask me, but also very different from how people have traditionally approached this problem.

Also, the current site and product will be completely replaced in 8 days with something MUCH much better. So keep you eyes peeled.

-Matt
I think the "most intelligent" Google line is also crap-ola. My friends who ended up working at Google were not the best of the bunch at all, especially vs the ones I know at start-ups. I've worked at start-ups that had dev teams that could eat every google developer I know for lunch.
The problem in your thinking is that you say "it can eventually bottom out by returning NULL". But you don't tell the compiler that.

You have to end the recursion somewhere. Fortunately, you can just use an equivalent type.

typedef void^(^func_ptr0)( void^ );
typedef func_ptr0 (^func_ptr)( funcptr0 );

func_ptr foo( func_ptr a )
{
return a;
}

void main()
{
func_ptr ^p = foo;
}

There's really no reason to keep expanding it. If you're suggesting that using a void^ is not allowed, then that's like suggesting that you can't return NULL.
The Softer Side of Dell
This is a great problem to try and solve, but I can't help but think that there are already vehicles out there which more-or-less fit the bill. The humble Toyota pickup, for example, has already been put to many uses on this continent. eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
In a similar vein:

>Vendors like Adobe (with Flash and Adobe Reader) and Oracle (with Java) are similarly responsible for many of the flaws being reported.
A year for learning
Work ethic leads to better performance than IQ in college students:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789312

Example of what can happen when the workload exceeds one's raw intelligence and exposes the limitations of work ethic:
http://lwn.net/Articles/393694/

And another HN post provides evidence that working harder will contribute to your happiness:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/07/were-happier...

The simple fact is you are plugging yourself into where some very bright people are communing (namely, HN) and that shows that you recognize value.
You seem to also be able to assess yourself. That is good. At least you know where you are starting from.
Focus on the positive. What you set your mind on tends to be what you get more of in your life. Don't worry about how smart everyone else is. Results are the only things that matter at the end of the day. So set your mind on what you want (a goal) and work harder than you did the previous day/week/month/year to get there.
Constantly be learning (by coming here, you will.)
Learn how to learn better, faster, easier.
Learn how to work faster, cheaper, more productively.
"Hack" your mind/heart and apply your life to the expression of your mind/heart and you will see more results. (Notice the absence of moral guidance there. I don't want to start a flame war only indicate a system and a pattern.)

Enough self-help guidance. I wish you well.
Hmm, I wouldn't touch it unless I know it will come off w/o much residue, which the site doesn't say.
This week on, "The Customer Isn't Always Correct"...
I'd also suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer (http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer, written by @pragdave) and the The Passionate Programmer (http://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer).

People who are passionate about what they do have a tendency to stand out (pg makes a similar argument on Amateur section of http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html).

If you are passionate enough about software development aspects, most HN articles will not feel overwhelming, as you will be constantly improving on your craft. But then you will know how much more there is to learn. Just don't feel overwhelmed then.
They list $6k as the goal vehicle price point.

http://mobiusmotors.com/prototype/process.html
I am fairly sure that for any non-trivial game that would boil down to a solution to the halting problem, though I lack time to prove it.

(Or possibly what I think of as the "finite halting problem" somewhat colloquially; a system that isn't actually Turing Complete because it's finite and bounded, but shares "enough" aspects of Turing Completeness that it still means that it's completely computationally infeasible to "prove" the property in question in the real world. Technically the halting problem on real computers falls into this class, a program running without IO is technically on a finite state machine but you're still not going to solve even that halting problem in a world where the bidding opens at 4GB of RAM.)
"The Map of Innovation" by Kevin O'Connor is hands-down the best startup book I've ever read.

http://amzn.to/9yN58l

It's very comprehensive; he provides key insights on how to spot the right trends, execute, and the right qualities to look for when recruiting. His track record at DoubleClick speaks for itself.
When Is A Disease Not A Disease?
Does it use P2P transfer or the owner of a file should update as many copies of the file as peers syncing?
Are you suggesting there's some kind of shortage of people who can check an email/database and reply:

"Hello this x, with Apple's Product Security team. We've received your report and have assigned it #123456. We will begin investigating soon. Thanks"
This isn't meant to be a browser plugin. Reading through the docs, it seems this is meant to be a tool to measure actual performance of your site in actual user's browsers.
Going geo-loco - biggest takeaways from SF conference on location
The value of a reliable mass-market zero-day exploit may be in the high tens of thousands of dollars before you start overtly breaking the law, so the notion that any company is going to get actionable intel from a 'hacking contest' is... naive.
Naive suggestion: would it be practical, to experimentally do this on one island? For instance, eradicate all mosquitoes on Madagascar.
I have been using quite a bit of python and beautifulsoup.

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
1. Start with the minimum viable product and expand your idea from there. It is really hard to improve a product if you don't know where to start. Radically slim down your app to do and show only the bare neccessities, the core, the meat of your service. From there, you can always slowly start to expand the feature base as long as you remember that it will never be the extra features that get you your users, it is the core that matters.

I strongly suggest you to(at least temporarily) remove: Display of people online, all the sorting buttons, the red in yellow notification, the need to sign up or login, the amount of views per post. Next to each post, only show amount of viewers, don't discriminate between guests or users.

After you have done this, start working on color-schemes, and read online guides on typography to make the interface less confusing and complex. Make sure a visitor's eye is drawn towards important elements, and that less important elements are in the background more ( smaller, less bright typography/elements).

2. If realtime Digg is not unique, why create one? It doesn't matter if it's unique or not, as long as your users get what you are offering them. "Interact with Others" is a slogan that could apply to
an alcoholics anonymous group or a dating website. What does your website do that is appealing to me, in a maximum of 5 words?

3. Your first and foremost concern right now is to get users,
if the site gets too chaotic- at least it will be used.
In the event that you start to get serious spamming issues,
you are most likely successfull already and you will have plenty of time to fix the problem.
Don't think that far ahead.

Cheers,
-Edo
Microsoft urges its workers to be Windows Phone app hobbyists
This is just until the last /8 is assigned to an RIR, right? There will still be plenty of IPs available in many locations throughout the world... it'll just be North America that will have a hard time of it.
The Impact of Unfunded Entitlements
I think you should find a security bug in any Apple product and report it before you make representations as to how they handle stuff like this. It's not that hard.
I've never heard of anyone, ever, signing a TOS.

The problem with a TOS is that it's unilateral - I get no chance to negotiate it. In my mind that makes it invalid. Just because the website wants it to be valid doesn't mean it actually is.

But the bigger problem is that I did not agree to it. The website tries to impose it on me.
>“Your team hasn’t know each other long enough,” he told us––or something like that. But they’d be happy to talk to us again, later, in the fall, assuming we hadn’t self-destructed already.

Oh man had that been me, I would properly double my efforts to get the startup to be the next facebook, just to mail PG and tell him he missed the boat...
Great point! I've updated the article to call this out a bit more.
There's already plenty of competition in the smartphone space with Nokia, Apple, Android, WebOS, and RIM. Microsoft in this market won't make a difference either way.

You know where there's not enough competition?

Windows 90%, Mac OS 9%, Linux 1%.

Google only has 70% search and people scream monopoly and want government regulation, and I can switch search engines in a matter of seconds. The desktop market will be healthier when Microsoft has 70% market share. Although, at this time, I'm not sure how that's going to happen. :-(
I'm guess thats because Techcrunch is hosted using wordpress.com's VIP service and that's wordpress.org/com's header
A lot of research went into building group communication tool kits like Spread and Ensemble. Today they are being used in server/cluster environments. I was playing with re-purposing one of these (JGroups) for my pet project. The toolkit implements the abstractions I need (A peer communication Channel, peer discovery etc.). It also provides various protocol stacks so I can use a different one for streaming movies vs. syncing files.
Microsoft Announces Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
The inherent power imbalance weakens the TOS's ethical standing. Facebook has lawyers. I'm not a lawyer nor can I hire one for every agreement. Which means, most people interpret the TOS to mean "I agree to no be a dick." Also any agreement which is allowed to change without notice is inherently unethical.
Chris Messina's Flickr stream also has a ton of screenshots of design patterns: http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/collections/72157600...
Here's one drawback: migratory bird populations collapse, leading to an insect they previously ate having a population explosion, leading to swarms of insects that destroy crops, thus marginally raising food prices and leading to 2M deaths from malnourishment. This isn't even a particularly implausible outcome.
If we managed to eliminate mosquitos, malaria would go with it, just as it has in many developed nations. Afterward, we could reintroduce mosquitos without nearly the risk of malaria we have now.

I'm not sure how true that is of other diseases for which mosquitos are a vector.
Ground penetrating radar reveals wooden Stonehenge twin
Best iPhone Antenna Fix
Here are some buzzword searches from Monster.com (standard search, US nationwide):

"Web 2.0": 893 results

"HTML5": 91 results

"CSS3": 28 results

"AJAX": 2,015 results
I love Hacker Monthly in epub format. I have a sony pocket reader and the pdfs are a little difficult to read.
I don't know how to put it really...

I mean, psychologically I identify with programming (which is why I frequent sites like this). I toy around with languages. But I've never written anything substantial because I can't code.
How dare Apple think they can make this problem go away...
yeah rsync is the de-facto standard for delta sync I think :) Open API and/or open source part of AeroFS are in our plans.
Masterpapers sells papers as samples
Students are given assignments for assessing their research and writing skills. They must do their assignments by themselves. Masterpapers.com provides essays, research papers, theses and dissertations as samples to help them improve their academic level.
I disagree. Overpopulation would effectively force humanity to create novel solutions. Perhaps we build up higher, or perhaps we move off of the planet, maybe we'll create giant artificial islands (or continents). We'd be forced to tackle farming in new and interesting ways. All in all, I think being faced with overpopulation would force us to solve a lot of interesting problems.

Either that, or massive amounts of war and extinction. Then again, we run that risk with everything we do.