skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We had no goals–which is great because anything you get is gravy. Let me explain: 6 years ago I built something for a friend. "Hey, this is great. You should try and sell it," he said. "Meh, ok, whatever ... " I replied. Sent some emails. Got some good response. Fast-forward and we've got thousands of customers, 6 employees, and 7 figures in revenue.

Was the revenue easier than we thought? Well, yes ... because we never thought anything. I know that doesn't really help, but what I'm getting at is maybe it's a bad idea to waste energy "setting goals" to any degree beyond covering costs or being ramen profitable.

Just focus on finding a need, saving/making people money, doing customer development, and iterating/adapting. Most everything else is beyond your control.

And don't forget, when you're setting goals, there are a lot of numbers less than 1% (that came from an HN post/comment IIRC)
I wonder if it is. Are you in the US? Maybe you can buy a phone, try to upgrade the software on it, and if it bricks itself, complain to the FTC?
You think that they could use something other than rubber bands to hold the phones!
I can understand Python (I've heard a lot about how easy it is) But why Ruby? :)
Both my 1st and 2nd gen iphone suffered a broken screen. Maybe if you've a preternatural grasp on your phone and never ever drop it, sure. But I've had my phone drop from a variety of heights, skate across the train platform, fly down stairs, and more. No case = new phone every few months.
Ask HN: How would you market a new product launch? 
I know there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who reads this site so I want to pick HN's collective brains on this. What are the steps you take to ensure a successful product launch?

A little background. We are days away from launching www.cardmunch.com, a dead-simple way to transcribe business cards on mobile device with unbelievable accuracy(launch pending AppStore approval). Until recently most of our efforts has gone into building the product over launch marketing. Now I find that being small and new really work against you when trying to get the attention of the big blogs.

Would you mind sharing some of your product launch strategies / experiences? There seem to be so much that you can do to market a new product. In your opinion, which approach is worth the time and effort and how would you prioritize it over other approaches? What are some of the time sink that I should definitely avoid? And any out-of-the-box ideas that ended up working out really well for you?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

P.s. If any HN readers has a pile of business cards that they would like to get the contacts right on their phone, shoot me an email at bowei@cardmunch.com. I'd be happy to give you a sneak peek of what are we doing.
Intuit Small Business Employment Trends [pdf]
>Steve also claims that only 0.55% of people who bought the iPhone 4 have called into AppleCare to complain about the antenna, and the phone has a 1.7% return rate at AT&T, compared to 6% with the 3GS, though he would cop to a slight increase in dropped calls over the iPhone 3GS.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but so far this seems to be some excellent crisis communication.

I’m actually surprised by that. I always thought of Apple as a fairly undynamic one trick pony when it comes to PR. (The secrecy, suspense, big event and hype cycle.) I should have noticed something when they released their “Thoughts on Music” or “Thoughts on Flash” letters.

(— edit: wow. The top story right now on HN is not some article lamenting Apple’s reaction, it’s cool pictures of Apple’s testing facilities. This is fucking brilliant PR ;)
Ask HN: Rate my iPhone app - Promo codes included
My first iPhone app just went up for sale on the App Store and I'd like to give some promo codes to HN readers.

It's a pretty simple utility app (a check splitter), but with a very straightforward interface that can handle quite complex cases.

Say you are in a party of 5, the bill is $120.45, and 2 people ordered wine, while 1 person skipped dessert. You are paying for yourself, your spouse, and your friend, and you had wine while your spouse and friend didn't. How much do you owe?

Without this app, it gets hairy very quickly. With this app you can quickly find out how much your share of the total bill is, including tip.

The app is called "Ultimate Check Split"

It would be great to get some feedback from you guys.

Promo codes:
1) NPPXJFN9943W

2) 7LLYK996WXTY

3) JFX496JXLXPR

4) 3HLK3X9TLW9H

5) Y796TXR6NEKA

6) JKRXTYPY9THA

7) N4MYN7JLE6N3

8) WM7M9XY9M93X

9) JTJYM94FK6HE

10) 7KXNKMKPAPJ4
A European pop band (Beborn Beton) had a track called 'Encounting', which they clearly mixed up with 'And counting', which is what those guys say in the movies.

"75 seconds ENcounting!"
@watmough Thanks! Totally agree with your comments. We're updating the UI as we speak and still have a couple of bugs here and there. We'll be working on a new video when the rest of the UI has been refreshed which should happen very soon.

@davided Indeed. I think the auto-complete experience needs work. Thanks for the comments.
Poyozo - Make Life Make Sense
Fascinating. To my non-radio-engineer eyes the patterns look like acoustic dampers—is it an illusion that they resemble the foam wall inserts in a recording studio, and these are actually composed of a different material to affect megahertz radio waves?

Furthermore, how are they supposed to affect those waves, and to what end?
http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=W8lZDdBoHf
this old debate

memo to the planet: males and females are different

stop thinking, open your eyes and ears and get out in the world. do this for say 20+ years so you get exposed to a lot of reality, enough to overwhelm your theories/thinking, then revisit the issue.

one last point: I think universities and colleges are the main vectors for this "males and females are the same with exact same potential, desires, talents, predilections -- but mean old Society is oppressing/distorting them" idea. can't wait to see it die out.
I've built 2 B2b products now, and I can say that it depends entirely on what type of business is your target market. Case in point:

-RateMyStudentRental sells to colleges and universities. Schools are essentially large corporations, and the sales cycle is excruciatingly long (a year or more). To top it off, my absolute maximum market in the US is around 5500 possible clients if I garnered 100% of the market (probably actually less because some schools are commuter campuses which puts them outside my market). I've been doing it since 2007, and I'd tell you that you may get 3 customers in 3 years if you're incredibly lucky.

-LeadNuke on the other hand is a B2B product that can be useful to almost any type of company, startups to multi-national corporations, franchises, and freelancers. I haven't even really told anyone about it yet (except the occasional HN post), and it already has around 30 companies signed up and using it. In this case, I'd tell you, pshh that's easy.

My point: it depends. The only way to know is to try it. Any speculation before trying it is just that.
Wow, crazy stuff. I hope there will be a new, and possibly better website to replace it.
the place where I'm now (http://cascaad.com) does use the freebase dumps as a primary source for out entity database (though more are in the works). It is pretty usable even if some interesting data is not available. The dev list and irc channel is also a very useful source.

We hope to be able to provide rdf/rdfa links at some point, because, hey, the semantic web is a darn cool thing :)
I'm guessing these batteries are the same thing.

The shake-to-charge flashlights appear to be a long tube with a coil of wire wrapped around it at the middle, with a permanent magnet with soft bumpers able to slide up and down the tube. You can feel the bump when the magnetic field hits the coil; I'm guessing that the rest of the circuitry consists of a bridge rectifier and a capacitor. (And an LED, of course.)

Presumably in the "battery", the LED is replaced with a power supply that can boost 0.8V or whatever up to 1.5V, or reduce 2V down to 1.5V when needed.
Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Craigslist for BA apartment rentals?
Curious if anyone knows of or has used successfully any other sites for apartment rental in the bay area. I know it's an old story how hard it is for competitors to challenge CG in this and related spaces. However, I just want to make sure I am not missing something.

It seems quite hard to find an alternative with better filtering by criteria and location that maintains enough volume. Any brilliant scraper plays?
You can make fun of me if you want, but the fact is that there are many, many differences between men and women. We don't really know what those differences mean in the real world, but we shouldn't pretend they don't exist any more than we should assume that they're 'crippling'.

As for which ones would prevent a woman from being successful as an entrepreneur in her 20s, it's impossible to say because success as an entrepreneur is multiplicative. There are dozens of factors, and only one has to be zero or near zero to make the whole thing fall apart. But the very fact that women are so different from men makes this theory quite plausible, albeit completely speculative.
What would it take to convince you that it isn't a "Big 'oops'"? [Serious question]

I just checked my EVO manual and it specifically says where not to touch the phone (upper left). The difference seems to be that people learned where not to touch the iPhone and then made a huge deal about it as if it was something new.
It looks like they used a low DoF lens (or similar post-processing effect) for most of the shots.
Wavelengths at RF frequencies and sound frequencies aren't very different; sound travels about 1/300000 as fast as EM radiation, but typical frequencies differ by about the same ratio.

In the RF chamber the foam inserts are impregnated with conductive material, sort of like antistatic IC foam.

The surfaces are designed to present maximal absorption area to any wavefronts within the room, and they're made all spiky and angular to disperse the reflections that do occur, not unlike the way a Stealth aircraft works. The goal, again in both the acoustical and RF test chambers, is to eliminate standing waves to the greatest extent possible, across the whole frequency range of interest. If you have standing waves, the measurements you make will have unwanted dependencies on the physical location of the transmitting and receiving antennas.

Play a sinewave through your speakers and you'll probably find large variations in loudness as you move around the room. The whole idea behind these expensive test chambers is to avoid that effect. They are also usually shielded to keep external sounds/EM fields out, but this is actually a secondary consideration for most users.

Edit: another reason for shielding the room, obviously, is so the company can operate things like base-station emulators without running afoul of the law.
Same as in a recording studio--to eliminate signal echos.
Increasing Landing Page Conversions Just Got Easier
"If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed."

no boom, but still no boot
The antenna engineers don't have the ultimate say... There's a reason why Apple's products are so stylish.
Because you also said this:

>> If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision.
No real mystery...

Newspapers = day old news printed on paper.
Why don't you focus on providing value before you start worrying about how much money you'll make.

From your questions it seems you want someone to tell you it's going to be easy - a piece of cake.
It's not.

Why not flip the equation and focus on how you can add enough value to 100,000 people a month. That though you're charging them $30 a month they've benefitting to the tune or $3,000 or even $30,000 a month. Plus do this without focusing on your own need for a side stream of income.
A great presentation.

I found it interesting that they only came upon the virality of the product after the fact, and that their initial thoughts for marketing tended toward AdWords. In hindsight, the double-sided incentive for sharing DropBox with a friend seems obvious-- but that doesn't make it obvious at the beginning...
ok, so what would you do instead?
One wife for 2-3 brothers: Polyandry custom fading in India
most of the time i can see only robots holding the iphone.
A little off topic, but you should know there's a better way than the Yellow Pages to find customers. The ReferenceUSA database will give you all the companies in a given area that fall under the entered NAICS code. Here's a small sample of the information you'll get:

* Business Name

* Address

* Contact Information

* Number of Employees

* Number of PCs

* Location Sales Volume (in dollars)

* Credit Rating Score

* Names of Management and their Titles

* $ spent on accounting

* $ spent on contract labor

* $ spent on advertising

And this information is all free to you thanks to your local public library. It's pretty awesome if you ask me. Here's how to get access to it:

1) Get the NAICS code for the industry you're selling to. This code is used by the government to classify businesses. http://www.census.gov/eos/www/naics/

2) Go to your local library to access the ReferenceUSA online database. You may even be able to do that through the library's website (I can through mine).

3) Click on U.S. Businesses under Available Databases

4) Customer Search

5) Enter the NAICS code in one of the boxes at the bottom of Business Type -> Keyword/SIC/NAICS.
You can mount SSH volumes with MacFUSE
Any content online should be clearly structured and scannable.

For example if you read a reference at the bottom of the page to something in the middle, it helps to have headings to quickly find what was mentioned.

This is important when people have attention spans of 3-year olds, as they do when reading online.
Lucky Apple
Shortage doesn't seem like the right word. That implies that there are more job openings than applicants, which simply isn't true. According to the New York Times, this is one of the weakest job markets for teachers in decades: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/nyregion/20teachers.html

The applicant pool is plenty well stocked, so there is no "shortage" of teachers. What there is, perhaps, is a shortage of qualified teachers in the classroom. In other words, due to budget cuts, layoffs and position cuts (i.e., not hiring a replacement after someone retires or quits), there are not enough employed teachers to adequately teach all the students in the states with a so-called shortage.

But there are plenty of qualified people looking for teaching jobs -- more than enough for current openings and then some. So what this is, is a money problem. There's no teacher shortage, there's a budget shortage. We're not allocating enough funds to adequately fill needs in schools across the country.

Or at least, that's how I see it.
on the app store its listed at 1.99. How do I enter promo code, and is it free if I use the promo code ?
One interesting usage of sizeof() is to calculate the dimension of an array at compile time:

#define dim(x) (sizeof(x) / sizeof(x[0]))

and this is handy for static arrays with dimension defined by its data, likes:

static const struct {
someEnum_t enCommand;
void (*Fxn)(stCommands_t *a_psCommand);
} m_stCmdMap[] = {
{CMD_SD_FREESPACE, _sdFreeSpace},
{CMD_SD_DISK_INFO, _sdDiskInfo},
{CMD_SD_FORMAT, _sdFormat},
}

When you add a new array elements, it just keep the stuffs going calculating it at any recompilation:

for (i=0; i<dim(m_stCmdMap); i++) {
if (m_stCmdMap[i].enCommand == stCmdLocal.enCommand) {
m_stCmdMap[i].Fxn(&stCmdCopy);
break;
}
}

Another useful macro to work with structs is offsetof(), its incredibly usefull when you have to port some code to different compilers/target with different alignments and paddings.
The fact that Apple is giving free cases (http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/apple-to-give-away-free-b...) means that the iPhone antenna has a bad design.

So they spent million of $ to improve the antenna and forgot this little detail? Where are the testers?
What I'd suggest is to find a way to make your story into a story. In other words, come up with a hook, a narrative that helps the story write itself.

Put another way: what's so special about CardMunch, as opposed to the iPhone app I already use (where I take a photo of a business card, and it scans it into my Contacts)?

If there's not a compelling "unique value proposition" for the product, what's so special about you guys? What makes this not just another launch amongst a million?
Startup - 1 or 2% equity is good deal? Please advise.
In a way, those "strings for everything" WTFs have an air of some kind of Turing-machine reductionism about them.

In any case, I don't think I could bring myself to deliberately write bad code. Enough of my code ends up that way already (though I of course always try to clean up after myself).

I find that almost all of my "bad code" comes from not fully understanding the subtleties of the problem and trying to hack warts onto the original imperfect solution.

Occasionally it also happens that a problem is so complex that it's extremely difficult to keep everything in mind at once - this mostly happens to me in C, when I have to think of memory management, concurrency/asynchronous I/O, as well as the actual problem I'm trying to solve.
Why would this get modded down in light of the topic? People are suggesting vitamins, sleeping sickness, and all other manner of diagnoses and potential cures. I don't see why prayer should any less valid as a topic of discussion.

Besides, what's Celiac disease have to do with technology, startups, or Y-Combinator in general? The whole thing seems far off topic to me.

My 2c: I certainly wouldn't avocate relying on prayer to the exclusion of other remedies, but as part of the big picture, down-modding seems a bit extreme.
I guess it would be cool if they recorded it with an iPhone4
Generally I would agree with that. Except that location on the iPhone 4 is rather unfortunately placed. And even more so, when Consumer Reports weighed in. I tend to respect CR quite highly. If they say there is a problem, I tend to believe them.
Does anyone know what material is used in making those cone-like pokey things? My immediate guess would be that its some form of dense foam to damp waves; but what exactly are they?
/pushes button

>modal dialog: "Are you sure you wanted to push that button? No / Yes"

/pushes yes.

/pushes another button

>modal dialog: "You pushed that button you pushed!"

/pushes ok.

Yep, I'm really seeing the Bing/Microsoft side of the application's design. I wonder if it asks if you want to launch the application when you launch the application?

I find it particularly ironic that the yes/no dialog comes up on the button with the greatest amount of error-room, while the one that just says "yaay!" has essentially the least. Apparently they're not a fan of Fitts' Law or its ramifications; they just put the double-check cost on the hardest button to miss, and the "congrats" on the one easiest to miss.
Gluten intolerance /= Celiac disease. They're two separate problems but often confused because the latter incorporates the symptoms of the former. Whatever the final verdict winds up as, avoidance of wheat gluten is a preventative step common to both conditions.
True, it is fairly ancient. However, the beauty is in the implementation - i.e. emulating the WebSocket API and using the same endpoint.
What users want has nothing to do with it. Verizon is probably getting paid X cents for every copy of that app, and since they've already accounted for the revenue GAAP won't allow them to remove it.
I'm not making fun of you. I'm saying that women being more successful entrepreneurs in their 40s may not be tied to them being women, but to them being twice as old and experienced as a 20 year old
Brilliant! Except at the end...

end.should be "Ruby"
Write to bloggers with audiences that are your potential customers. Tell them about your product and politely ask if they would like to feature you in a post. Offer some pre-written copy (not too much) for them to use or cut/paste from to make it easier for them. Offer free downloads of your software for e.g. 5 of their readers (but don't do that for everyone you email).

Keep it brief, be polite, and some might bite. Michael Dorfman's advice about your USP and your story (either/both are good for bloggers) is good advice to keep in mind when thinking of what to write.
I bet you the money in my pocket that this lab was not called "Antenna design and test lab" prior to the press conference; part of the brilliance in this deflection of attention is most certainly found it the naming itself of this awesome place.
Motorola's official response is that the eFuse device exists to disable the phone (aka switch to recovery mode) when unauthorized software is run, and _re-enable_ it when the original Motorola-approved software is installed. They claim that the phone is disabled only temporarily and not bricked.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/motorola-responds-to-droi...

(Sorry, I couldn't find the original Motorola post)
Password crack [affecting OAuth and OpenID] could affect millions
Can you elaborate more on what this was that earned you $100(k) from a weekend of hacking?
would you be able to scan that page? seriously that would be great to see.
The US spends far more on trying to save the lives of premature and sickly newborns than any other country.

[citation needed]

Many these don;t make it after being born and show up in the stats as "high infant mortality".

That's true in every country, regardless of how hard you try to save their lives. More of them make it after being born if you try very hard to save their lives.

I also have personally experienced health care in other countries (Greece, Mexico, China

So have I. I surely don't need to point out to you, with your wide travel experience, that not all other countries are equal. The Argentine health care I've experienced is head and shoulders above anything I've experienced in the US, although that's mostly because I live in the capital where things are good.

The US's infant mortality rate is about .0063. Greece's is about .005 to .007. Mexico's is .017 or .018. China's is about .020 to .023. Your personal experience that care is much worse in those countries, with the exception of Greece, supports the validity of infant mortality as a measure of care quality; it does not undermine it.

There are around 25 countries with better infant mortality than the US, but that doesn't include the three you listed. Several of them have less than half the infant mortality level of the US. Have you personally experienced health care in any of them? What was your experience?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_count...

I recognize that statistics do not always capture the reality of a situation. However, in this case, I don't think it's adequate to simply deny their validity without any evidence. (The evidence you have adduced so far, from your personal experience, supports their validity rather than undermining it.)
I'd be convinced if I actually held one in my hand and could either reproduce or not reproduce the problem.

I find it crazy how many people leap to either attack or defend Apple without having ever used one of the things.
My first reaction when I saw these pictures was "Holy crap! Apple went and built a danger room![1]"

I can't be the only person who had this thought.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Room
I could be completely wrong - I do like the "or" syntax as well - reads much better.
No "wall of PR", my ass.