skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This hit home on my current project, since we're two founders but I'm the solo coder. My partner has some basic coding experience, enough to know what I'm talking about, but he's bringing more of the domain knowledge to the table. He's also producing the help and marketing material, and usability testing as well.

But what we found is that having that different perspective in things like the user interface design has helped tremendously. It's resulted in us thinking through the interface in a way I know neither of us would've done as well on our own, and has definitely helped make this project my best work to date.

Really what I've learned is that knowing your strengths/limitations and finding a partner that complements them is critical, but it's also freeing. I can see why YC says they don't like solo startups. I've tried that before, and got pretty far (10k+ users), but while it is too much work for one person, I'm also seeing now how much better it could have been with the right partner's perspective.
Windows 7 to break previous API compatibility
I've read this article three times over now, trying to find a way to agree with it. I'm sorry, but since this guy thinks learning Dvorak is a better use of his time, I'm afraid I'm going to have to write him, and this terrible article off.
"HN replies favor brevity" is briefer.
Social, economic, and technological changes are bad because they force me have to think and work.
Good point, but if it's big enough to interest VC's, it's big enough to attract interest in an open source or free version (Linux, Wikipedia). I can't think of VC's driving the price to zero in niches, as per his thesis that it's VC's driving the price of things to zero.

I should add that there's also certainly space between a new product's entry into the market, and when it becomes commoditized. If you're doing something that's not easy to replicate, even if people do start trying, you might have a number of years to make some money at it.
Building a brand online doesn't have that much to do with the URL anymore. There are really too many company examples to name.

The fact is that everyone knows how to use google. Even serious tech laggards understand that you search in google and then click a link. The days of people searching in the address bar are very over.

It sounds like these guys have done a great job building an Internet property, but the value is in their content partnerships, SEO, distribution etc.

Maybe the URL gave them motivation to start the company, but they would be doing just as well with choco-latefan.com
There are lots of reasons someone would not want to leave their current desperate circumstances for another location. People have family and social support networks which won't make the transition. Sometimes even finding transportation is a barrier. Fear of the unknown can also be very strong. Hopelessness can make one believe that no amount of effort will fix the situation, and that moving to a new area will do no good. And some people just... give up. It's so easy to get caught up in our struggles that we forget to look for a way out.

Personally I've moved many times - since I was a child my family moved every three or four years. We all have the wanderlust. Some of it was for education, some of it was for new jobs, and honestly sometimes it was because we wanted a change of pace. I have a hard time fully comprehending it but I've met many people over the years who are born, and will live, retire, and die in the same town where their parents did the same.
Reminds me of a Toles cartoon I saw during the early 90s recession, with two labour-types sitting at a bar:

"Remember how we were told that, in the future, machines would do all the work and we'd have tons of leisure time?"

"Yup."

"W-why'd we think we'd still be gettin' paid?"
I keep hearing comments about AWS and latency, but I haven't used it (yet!) so I don't have any first-hand experience. I've seen that S3 can provide direct public links, but are there latency issues that make these too slow for general purpose content serving?
I agree. 99% of Google's top-line revenues last fiscal year came from their adwords/adsense empire... every single other web serivce they offer accounts for 1% combined.

"Business" is about making money. Let's just agree that without revenue, you have no "business". And this suggests that even Google is having problems with monetizing products aside from their golden goose. This probably slightly irritates Google, but it should really scare those of us who don't have a golden goose yet.

We shouldn't be interested in creating products that are "built to flip", as my ex-CEO liked to say. We should be interested in creating products that create tangible, sustainable value... and that means making money.

Some startups can do that by offering products for free, and scaling up. Others will have to charge for their offerings, commensurate with how targeted and value-creating their offering is. It will be a combination of the two. The idea that every internet startup can survive by giving away their service will lead to one thing: disaster.

At some point the Googles and Yahoos of the world will not be able to explain acquisitions to their shareholders, because they have a fiduciary responsibility to create wealth. If the acquisitions do not create wealth, they will stop making them. But that lesson will take years to learn, in my opinion.
Ask YC: Feedback on my site: pageonetimes.com
Can you take a look at my site, pageonetimes.com, and let me know what you think. It is a "reddit", but just for sports. I am a sports fan and interesting stories are hard to find, so I decided to make a site to solve that problem.

As an interesting footnote, the site should seem familiar, because it is written in Arc and is based on news.arc, the same code that powers this site.
RT doesn't dazzle and amaze me, but it gets the job done quite well.
I've heard good things about Cerberus Helpdesk:

http://www.cerberusweb.com/

Very reasonable pricing.

We used RT before and while it met our business need and allowed us to add custom fields etc. the interface was just hideous.

Cheers
Please update us when you have something reasonably stable.
It happened when a b-school grad tried to talk me into joining his startup. I contract sometimes, so if he was funded, I'd have "given him my email." It was the sense of having something someone really wants when what they are offering isn't something you're interested in. The predatory leer also triggers some part of the "flight" instinct.

It was also enlightening in the sense that the rejection wasn't about him (he was a Sloan grad, and a nice enough guy), or his idea--it just wasn't a match. I work on unfunded startups, I'm just busy now and didn't care for his idea.

When I had to politely repeat how busy I am, I could suddenly see how being an attractive woman who had to fend off advances could be exhausting, and how easy it would be to stop being polite if you had to do it all the time.
If you want something really simple and lightweight: Gmail. Put the ticket number in the subject, and it will automatically be grouped together with the replies.
I get the impression that the author didn't think through his argument before he wrote it. He starts off saying one thing and proceeds to contradict himself. Really there are advantages and disadvantages to everything. Spending too much time learning new languages and never master CS basics is clearly a waste. However, never learning a new language, or more importantly, never programming in a fashion or environment that is unfamiliar to you, can lead to an insular way of thinking. "If all you have is a hammer, all problems begin to look like nuts," or something like that. Its a matter of being a little bit selective and aggressive with your choices. If a new language is too easy, its probably not teaching you much.
That's actually very similar to the point this writer makes: that learning different languages does have benefits, but that they should be significantly different. The two just differ on whether you should learn many different languages, or a few.
The potential privacy issues could be a bit sticky here.
Comments should live on the original blog post. We'll continue to see hacks like friendfeed comments and this plug-in until comments are fixed.
So then by this logic, it's the market that's going to tend internet revenus to zero?

You're right. And this will lead to a massive market correction at some point. Companies that had the balls to listen to reason (a la 37signals), will be the ones that weather the storm. They'll end up being the Berkshire-Hathaway of the internet industry because they a)focus on the long-term, b) concentrate on what they know and do best, and c) fiercely execute on value, and not trends.

There's a reason Warren Buffet came through the dot-com crash unscathed. And it's the exact same reason why companies like 37signals will as well.
Don't use whatever Xobni just used :) I heard they're switching.
Garrett Dimon and the crew is building one at http://nextupdate.com/

Unfortunately, it won't be out until later 2008, but looking to be a great product. Can't wait.
its a nice beginning - you may want to add some color to it - at least for news headlines ...
> icky -- don't know if you know it or not, but Paul's writing his own application language, Arc, and testing it out on this board.

"Whoa, you mean this isn't wood shop class?" ;-)

> To my knowledge he is not using an Apache stack.

For static pages, there's no reason he can't stick an Apache in front.

> In addition, he's doing a keyed-continuations deal across loads/posts, so he's effectively keeping the stack around for each user.

That part might be tricky to optimize, but there ought to be a way, even then, to avoid hitting the app server for static page loads.

Edit: Looking at the login cookie across page loads, it's just a session-id. There is absolutely no reason that the app server ever need know about these cached static page loads.

> Really cool stuff, but I can see where memory can become an issue. He's probably running into paging issues and trying this out as a fix.

He's also running into state issues, since he's keeping all session state as in-memory continuations, which is probably forcing him to keep news.yc on one box.

One thing that might work is to come up with a way to serialize those continuations, and store the key-value pairs in a memcached box. Then the app server can become stateless again, and he can add more boxes.
Hey, Hank, the last time you flamebaited us with "Relational Databases are Dead", we played along and had a nice little thread. But that was your only free pass.

On to new business...

First of all, I still chuckle at "whydoeseverythingsuck.com"
That thought is the antithesis of everything we (should) believe here. I guess it's just your little tongue in cheek thing. Cool.

You say, "it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it". I, along with 7 million of my compatriots beg to disagree. If you don't want to play roulette, er I mean pursue VC, there are a lot of other ways: bootstrapping, friends and family, angels, debt, etc., etc., etc.

I guess the thing that bothers me most about that remark is that someone may come here, read that, actually believe it, and then become discouraged.

OTOH, maybe it's just another form of Darwinism. Anyone who pursues an "advertising = only revenue" strategy should be prepared for the worst. More prospects for those of us with sound business models.
> If the symbols are "hard linked", it is not dynamic anymore.

Lies, slander! ;-)

Anything that happens within a function can be treated as a black box, and compiled down to the metal, if you like.

The language can be as dynamic as you like; that doesn't preclude the output format from being tightly optimized machine code.
If ad-subsidized businesses turn out to be infeasible over the long term, then yes, you'll see companies go out of business and/or start charging for their services.

Either way, though, it's not the fault of the VCs.
> the marginal costs of digital products are essentially zero

Assuming you can scale. ;-)
Battlestar Galactica Streams Into Season 4
Don't forget to toss in Delicious Monster in the mix too.
Here's that I posted on his blog:

I agree with a lot of this...

But VCs aren't going to change (and it isn't really in their interest to do so). VCs ONLY win in two cases-- someone buys the company or the company IPOs. Sustained modest growth rarely gets you to that destination.

It's not irrational for VCs to push for growth at the expense of revenue/profit. For their "business model" (the hits in their portfolio paying for all of the duds), it makes perfect sense.

I suspect that if a VC tried a new model (focusing on sustainable growth and revenue/profit), they'd find that they'd have a healthier portfolio that was largely illiquid.
Ah, right, gotcha. I was seeing "TC50:" as a sort of tag then trying to interpret the rest mathematically. Obviously, I shouldn't trying reading HN too early in the morning
Looks good. Personally I really like the clean and simple look. Sadly I'm not a sports fan.
Of course, none of Python, Perl, or Ruby are "interpreted" languages. I'm not sure I see any distinction between a compiler (or interpreter) and any other program. Programs read data, and produce a result. Compilers read data (source files) and produce a result (the program described by the source code). HTML in Safari is conceptually the same as a python compiler.

Anyway, who cares about Apple's proprietary platform? Yeah, the iPhone is cool, but if you value freedom over looks you should try OpenMoko instead. I have one of the Neos and it is pretty nice. (Not a lot of app development going on in dynamic languages, unfortunately; most everything is plain C. Yuck.)
I've actually made this observation myself. Some products will be consumed by a wide audience, making them more like media. Some products will provide a targeted service, making them more like traditional software.

It's crazy to think either that all internet services will tend to free, or that no startups can offer services for free. Like most things in life, the sustainability point is somewhere in between.
RT is very full-featured and customizable, although it has a few rough edges and can take some time to learn. It's open source and is also available in as a hosted service. http://bestpractical.com/services/hosting.html

FogBugz is decent -- not as flexible as RT, but may be a bit easier for non-techies to get started with. It's also available in both hosted and installable versions. http://fogcreek.com/fogbugz/
I've never had a problem with components from Fry's. Just gotta choose the right brands. Patriot and Kingston are decent brands that usually gets sold in good sales (I think I got a couple of nice Kingston 2 GB sticks of for $35 each recently). Sometimes you'll see a great deal on Crucial as well.

I should also add, that your theory doesn't even make sense - the kind of people who buy components from Fry's are exactly the kind of people who will return stuff. What they are doing is just typical retail loss-leading sales in hopes that you'll buy that new DVD-burner* with a higher markup while you're in there.

* or whatever
Carr made the same point recently: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/03/the_mediaizatio.ph...
Neither of these were universities suing their own students.

That's an interesting point, but 1) would the university not have sued if it were a student (or professor) that provided the IP? and 2) then why shouldn't he just use the code outright, especially since he claims to have written it and the university is not likely to care?

(a) That the university might have insanely unrealistic ideas about terms, because they're so inexperienced, and (b) that it could take so long to arrange the deal that it would literally be faster to rewrite it.

Licensing is there for a purpose--someone paid for him to develop this software, so he has an obligation to that employer to at least ask permission before using the software.

Imagine if a startup took seed money from you to develop their software, then turned around to rewrite it for use in another project and thereby sidestepping your 2-10% share. Wouldn't that be unethical? They could even claim both (a) and (b) above.
Converting visitors to buyers with generic named URLs is hard!

Placing well known "brand name" affiliate marketing image code is simply a bad idea.

I dropped out of the Linkshare network when I realized I was displaying their affiliate images hundreds of thousands of times to visitors to my sites.

I took them all out and use Google ad-sense code sparingly. I think we should be about the content we all want on our pages, not the other stuff, because when more queries and feedback forms come in with stuff people care about there is a ton of good will generated and lots of future potential customers.

I think building a site to expect revenue from affiliate code Ad turns is like playing the lottery: the house always wins.
I was referring more to the print publication of The Onion and the New York Times than to the websites. To clarify my point, starting a website with an advertising based revenue model is similar to starting a new newspaper or magazine. I used The Onion as an example because I remember it being freely available in bars back when I was in college.

I don't have any marketing data on whether advertisers prefer paying audiences or not, but I assume a lot of that would depend on the advertiser. I know that the bigger players in web media (facebook, myspace, etc) are definitely "bottom-of-the-barrel" when it comes to advertising rates because they reach such scattered demographics.

With that being said, I don't fully understand your point about advertisers preferring paying audiences. I think the problem is in the math. If I start charging for content (turning my users into a paying audience) then I'm going to most likely going to serve less page views. I don't know if the extra money advertisers are willing to spend for my now paying audience would be enough to offset the loss in page views.

The main example of a media website with a paying audience I can think of is the NYT, and I think the only reason they can get away with charging for content is because they've been established for so long. I think the rest of us are going to have to decide between 1) charging up front 2) trying to build a media property 3) trying to make money from premium subscriptions (which usually just amount to being donations from dedicated users).

Thanks for the reply, I'll definitely be thinking about this.
A lambda calculus for real analysis
What about the things you pass into the function? You can't know their properties in advance, in general, or can you?
I built a gaming PC around Thanksgiving with very similar components, and I haven't read that article either.
That's not what I'd call a server. Not even ECC RAM.
In the Distant Future, the Year Two-Thousand, robotic beings rule the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64&fmt=16
>> I suspect that if a VC tried a new model (focusing on sustainable growth and revenue/profit), they'd find that they'd have a healthier portfolio that was largely illiquid.

Well, if VCs were to concentrate on sustainable growth and profits, maybe we'd see a resurgence of the flacid IPO market. It wasn't too long ago that tech entrepreneurs were motivated to make profits which then allowed them to take their companies public.

Seqouia would not have made a crazy-multiple on their investment if Google had focused on being bought pre-revenue in preference over creating profits and taking themselves public. Google's IPO absolutely dwarfs YouTube's acquisition.

I think a VC model encouraging profits over growth would be a healthy thing for everyone!
Poor Summer; she's so typecast.
I concur with nearly everything he says except one: that Unix could have been written in assembler as much as it could have been written in C. Unix was originally written in assembler but they changed it for a reason. Unlike assembler, C is portable.

C's low levelness not only gives the programmer a needed degree of precision control, but also makes the language easy to implement elsewhere. There is a version of gcc for the x86, and for the ppc, and the sparc and the arm, and to port programs between them, often all you need to do is is set the right compiler flags and use preprocessor commands wherever necessary. C is highlevel enough to keep you from having to write architecture specific code, but low level enough to allow you to do so.
Rails isn't really MVC, though.
I'll elaborate a little. A CDN is supposed to serve content from a server very close to each user, like in the same city. Thus CDNs must have many servers in many cities. AWS does not have many locations, thus because of the speed of light it cannot have latency as low as a good CDN. This is not a problem with AWS; it wasn't designed as a CDN.

Do you need a CDN for "general purpose content serving"? Probably not.
I like the service, but I think the name needs a non-generic angle. Not some crap like swifflr.com, but something that lets me know that it's a sports site without even going to it.

Other than that, it's clean and focused.
I don't think it applies here - the python apps don't download python code and then execute it, they are bundled with it (or the python compiles, I don't know).
> Maybe it's just that many of the languages I've been learning have had little syntax and no operator precedence quirks

This is a good point. It is probably not a good use of your time to learn Java and then C# (or similar), or Perl and then Python and Ruby. Sure, there are differences, but basically the languages in the same groups are the same.

If you go for the more "academic" languages, you'll get more return on your learning investment. Recently, I've learned Lisp (this is what started me down the "wait, learning new languages isn't a waste of time!" path), Smalltalk, and OCaml, and I've picked up a lot of good ideas to port to my primary language. (Otherwise, my background before that was C, Perl, and Haskell. All good languages to know :)
"What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night? The only difference between a date and a job interview is that in not many job interviews is there a chance you'll end up naked at the end of it." -- Jerry Seinfeld
Despite the fact that the Onion is a subscription-based tabloid, they still get the majority of their money from ads.

Nearly all newspapers and magazines are well into the black before you buy them. Consumer research just says we don't value a magazine that's free. (Vice is upsetting this current model)
I am open to interpretation. Where I am coming from right now is project completion time, when our tyrannical overlords force us to record utterly meaningless metrics (SLOC) using tools that make it harder, not easier (our line-counter).

I'm just curious if this is something that startups even have to worry about.
Interesting in the light of the Auctomatic story last week.
You're only saying that b/c you've never been in a situation where you were compelled to do the "wrong" thing. :-)
I think site looks cool!But what the domain does mean? domain does not sound sporty?