skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there are a couple of ways to look at it, but you first need to figure out what you are selling. in the case of myspace, they were creating a place for people without web skills and money to have a social website, it was geocities2.0 and if someone at geocities was paying attention, they should have come up with the idea. the ipod on the other hand was designed to have every sales advantage over every other MP3 player, and at launch, IT DID. the iPod was smaller, easier to use, had a larger hard drive, and it was cheaper; Jobs was able to sell the iPod cheaper than other MP3 players because he knew that he could make the money up in the online store, so if Apple broke even on the device, he would make it up later. So Apple had more in common with selling a Starbucks Coffee, than selling a piece of hardware. Apple became a music experience vendor.

Dyson sells vacuum cleaners as an experience vendor too.

How are new cars sold? Are they a total experience sale, or are they a hardware sale?

How are used cars sold? Are they a total experience sale, or are they a hardware sale?

If your site is an experience sale in a developed marketplace, you may need to think about design "now," however, if your device is a time saver, or is new in its marketplace, you should be able to iterate the design over time.
if morality is a tool to use to live better (i agree), then people who don't use it, or use little of it, are immoral, and ought to change.
I was not expecting to see this line in the article.

The government is subsidizing the development of robots as caregivers for the old.

That's pretty sweet. Hell, I'd buy my own robot butler even before I got old.
I noticed this while looking for cute kitty photos on reddit this morning, surprisingly the discussion remained remarkably on topic. That Arc spurs a mostly rational discussion on reddit is perhaps an indicator of the value of the exercise.
Already debunked on news.yc here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183339
You don’t need job adverts, you don’t need resumes, and you don’t need contract negotiations. What you need is to network...

I think I'll specifically avoid the shmoozers, thanks.
Decades of details flood woman with unmatched memory
...or the roommate may have perfectly good intentions, but his father's intervention is damaging the business relationship, and either the roommate doesn't recognize that's going on or can't tell his father to tone things down a bit.

Any way you interpret it, though, it's a warning sign.
Microsoft courting Facebook?
I try and read before posting but if the title is descriptive enough (I assume) then I don't.
OK, so "great" wasn't the right word. What's a word with similar meaning but conveying subjectivity?
Yahoo has publicly stated that they're going to be launching a service to compete with Google's App Engine using PHP as the programming language. No word was given on the timeframe.
For anyone interested in the operations side of business, Jeffrey Liker's "The Toyota Way" is a fascinating read. ERP/Supply Chain software seems pretty expensive and useless compared to simple mechanical or paper kanban systems, coupled with regular time spent together talking about how to improve the process (kaizen), so the improvements come from the people with the most knowledge of the system: the ones actually doing the work.
And does that not prove the superficiality of non-French people's existential woes? As in, only French people see these issues as deep enough, so that they cannot be forgotten even after getting laid? Or maybe they see deeper in the issues?

I'm just kidding. This argument is getting ridiculous.
How to Break a MySQL Left Join
"The ones that are small are always worried that a huge consulting firm is going to move into their market."
The thing is, huge consulting firms seem incapable of actually producing working software. They have to get the small companies to do the actual 'nitty-gritty' work for them.
What a lovely comment.

Though I haven't met him in real life, I'm quite familiar with jrockway's work and he's hardly an "architecture astronaut" or in academia. He's a good programmer who gets real world work done. And guess what? I find his code well-written and easy to maintain. Go figure ...

Just because you don't need the items on his list, don't going throwing stones at those of us who do. You'd be like the people who rush out competitors to Microsoft Word on the theory that people only use 10% of the features -- only to discover everyone's using a different 10%.
> has somewhat unpredictable behavior on complex queries. Including counts.

By default, MyISAM compresses its primary key: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/05/13/to-pack-or-no...

So you get bad performance when the primary key is accessed in descending order: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=17847

If this corrupted, you get a different row count when you order by ascending or descending key. I've seen this in the wild. Unfortunately, this possibility has been repeatedly missed by developers: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=28542 http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=28658 http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=35605

MySQL is a nice bit bucket but I'll continue using Postgres for anything important.
Supporting DRM-Free Music
Our main product uses MySQL 3. We are unable to upgrade it to version 5 because a key violation problem. Only next versions will use MySQL 5, so we are not able to use UDF nor stored procedures. When developing another strategical product, Ricardo Banffy used PostgreSQL with a very good performance and nice UDF and stored procedures.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184507
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182760
While Postgres seems nice, mySQL is still the choice of the majority of high-traffic sites that absolutely need to scale. I'm not saying Postgres is bad, but their only huge-volume user is Skype. They simply don't have as many of the huge, high-traffic users such as craigslist, eBay, Ticketmaster, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.

Those sites need to scale an order of magnitude (or several) greater than sites like CD Baby or Macworld.

Just look at: http://www.postgresql.org/about/users

Other than Skype, there aren't as high-use sites as the ones I mentioned that go for mySQL. Postgres isn't bad, but it just hasn't been tested at the same level. Could it do better at that level? It IS possible. I prefer to go for a sure thing.
Or as Plato put it, "Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Oh. Please. Post the three words.
I would argue it will only make those issues disappear for a short time. Knowing yourself is a precursor to any successful relationship.
"Better quality. Less money. And no evil, consumer hostile DRM! It's almost unbelievable. Needless to say, I've been buying as much music as I can from Amazon to vote with my wallet and demonstrate to the music labels that yes, giving the customer what they want does pay. And you should too."

Something irks me about being told to go buy things... through an affiliate link.
I would point out that a Django developer that can't show something in 14 minutes is incompetent ;-)

Yes. It's really that easy.
Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details
Giving someone 35% equity at a full salary makes no sense at all. If you can't find a developer who will take a salary cut for 35% equity, you have serious problems.

To elaborate: if a developer is earning a full salary plus equity, there is no opportunity cost to them. Your company will be no different to the developer from any other contract gig, barring the greater upside potential. The hunger to succeed will not match yours.
STOP WORKING!

Legally, you’re not well off here: taking money is an implicit acceptation of the contract.

Technically he needs your help since the project is still in its infancy.

Talk it out with your friend; proceed with a friendly conversation. Offer to give back the money, explain the possibilities of being together in this project and go for at least 50/50 equity with respect to the fact that you made a mistake. Mainly don’t be apologetic, at the same time don’t look down on him and avoid as much as you can the lawyer dad during the discussion. He has as much to lose as you do.
yes and no. www.yahoo.com and yahoo.com still isn't treated as a dupe even though both URLs point to the same page (it's only a consistent 4 character difference), and I don't know how the same URL was able to be re-submitted without it becoming a dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183903

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177270

I'll probably start submitting links twice from now on
Find geographic focus of a topic by locations of people who search for it.
30+ Javascript/Ajax Techniques for Sliders, Scrollers and Scrollbars
Needs better colors; I can barely see existing domains list. Cool stuff!
If you really want a DH6...

guilty of having immoral values. they ought to find better things fun, but instead are wasting their lives.

There are no single accepted set of moral values so the term has no inherent meaning.
Where some groups say your thoughts are a moral choice it's far more common to say it's your actions that are moral in nature.
Of those groups that feel your thoughts are important most feel doing good works is not a moral imperative let alone creating beauty in the world.

So you are basically suggesting a world view without support. And thus you are just defining your terms and not presenting an argument supported by fact. This prevents a DH6 as there is no central point that could be refuted. You are not presenting an argument as much as presenting an unsupported opinion which falls under the same category as gibberish and is not refutable.

PS: "If you really want a DH6..." present an argument supported by facts.
Flickr is worth 4 billion because he guessed at its freemium conversion rate and the introduction of advertising, then ran it through a multiplier chosen by a guy banned for life by the SEC? At the least, this is unpersuasive.
Gamble your life away in ZT Online
Is it April 1st?
Most bizarre Git service and other stupid Rails powered "businesses"
I use Django at the Washington Post to develop interactive databases and respond to breaking news. Most of the codebase was written by Adrian Holovaty, a creator of Django, and it's by far the best codebase I've ever inherited.

The admin interface is truly great and allows the non-technical folks to easily work with data, and it's nice that it's consistent across projects. The templating was easy to train graphic designers on. I'm very happy with Django overall.

I was pretty concerned for a while about the health of Django. It's been over a year since the last feature release, but in the last month development has woken back up. Branches are getting merged to trunk, there's finally a plan for 1.0, and there are regular commits to the repository. I'm pleasantly surprised.

I wrote a blog post when I started that links to a few of the largest apps: http://push.cx/2007/washingtonpostcom
Networking doesn't necessarily mean schmoozing. It means hanging out with the folks who are in the same field as you and going to the same events they do. Most of the time, they'll have the same interests as you, so these'll be the folks you want to hang out with anyway.

Posting on news.YC or programming.reddit counts, for example.
Just testing
just testing
That's pretty much my exact same story. I came from an Oracle shop and wanted the same power that Oracle offered, but without paying $250k/yr in licensing fees. Postgres came the closest, and I've been really happy with it so far.
Completely wrong. In the absence of a contract that explicitly states otherwise, the IP rights belong to the programmer, not the partner.
Integration Guide for the New Facebook Profile
If you're only 20-something and already thinking about how to reach your highest potential in life etc, I'd say you're well on your way to doing just that.

You're sickeningly young (from the point of view of someone who's 31 soon), and you have all the time in the world.

Heck, even I still have a twinkle of hope of making something worthwhile out of my life.

At any given moment in time, just do what you feel like doing - especially in your case, where anything you feel like doing is likely to be productive/useful anyway.

As others have quoted all kinds of important people too, here's mine:

"Don't worry - be happy" (Bobby McFerrin)

:)
At the very least it will distract him for a while. And when the relationship ends he'll have a whole new set of issues to keep him occupied. Eventually, your imaginary existential issues will vanish by your mid-20s anyway.

My advice to the original poster is to print out a copy of that big long rant, and keep it in a drawer somewhere. Look at it once a year or so. When you get to the point that you can't read it without wanting to travel back in time and slap yourself for being so whiny and self-important, you'll know you've outgrown those issues.
Success in a small niche can enable success in a larger niche, which in turn can enable a larger success. One of the properties of a market niche (or segment) is that the members reference each other's buying decisions (in other words one member will be influenced by another member's testimonial). If you get to critical mass in a niche (typically about 1/6) before anyone else, then your marketing costs go down and your customer acquisition becomes easier. There is a lot of benefit for aiming at a small niche to get started, and it doesn't preclude serving a larger market later. By the way, 1% of a large market is a recipe for extinction. You have all of the cost of trying to reach a large market recouped over a tiny customer base.
Yes. Do not work with this guy. Just stop, now.

It's just not worth it. There are other ideas in the world. There are other art students. There are certainly better paying, more deserving consulting gigs. Just bail now, before you kick yourself later for not bailing sooner.

If you need a list of creative excuses I'll offer a few:

-- One of your pet goldfish died and you can't work while you're in mourning.

-- You've converted to a new religion in which the Sabbath runs from Monday to Saturday. You could work on Sunday, but that's when all your homework needs to be done.

-- You need money to finance your expensive drug habit, so you got another gig that pays $150 per hour. Unfortunately, it takes up most of your time.

-- Walk around in public with one arm in a sling. Claim, sorrowfully, that you can't type anymore. Bonus points if you switch the sling from arm to arm every other day.
Reddit is also Postgres, if you consider that high-volume.
Shortest summary of the release of the iPod: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...
@drinko,

I feel sorry for you but here's what my advice would have been (although it would not have helped you in this situation) but typically when I contract out my project to someone else other than myself, I normally would include a deliverable clause in a contract, even if the other party is a cofounder.

The deliverable clause is basically a statement of work, with specific milestones and dates that the "contractor" would agree to. This helps in keeping the project realistic (in terms of scope creeps) and also makes sure that the project progress in good terms.

I would have to agree with most people who commented about the salary paid out. At $6900, you could have hired an outstanding developer without dishing out any equity. Although the equity play more than often would help as a motivational push for the other party.
Still buggy pogo.com showed up as free and it's not.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise in a written contract, the IP rights belong to the creator (programmer in this case), not the employer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
Started with MySQL, switched to PostGres for latest project, but latest project doesn't have any significant traffic yet, so I can't give you a field report yet.

MySQL can have fairly unpredictable performance characteristics if you're not an expert in it. It certainly can scale, but it's very easy to kill your performance if you're indexed wrong or have the wrong table type or wrong cache settings or run into table locking issues. (And these aren't theoretical issues; we've run into some of them at past MySQL-based websites.)

I don't have the time to spend debugging cache settings and EXPLAIN SELECTs and locking issues, so I went with Postgres, which supposedly has many fewer pitfalls "out of the box". Been happy with it so far, for development, but haven't needed to scale it yet.
This kind of a UI looks like a bigger headache to me...

REs are easier to write than to understand. It would be great to have a tool that visualizes existing REs, I think.
This is obvious, but it doesn't really contradict good startup advice...to me, it seems as if many independent observers assume that doing a startup is synonymous with doing nothing except sleeping and working.

There are times in a startup's life when this is necessary, but even then it isn't sufficient: everyone needs to work all the time on the details that matter because there is too much work to be done and not enough time to do it.

I guess 37signals's stories are popular because the apparently pose a counterpoint to the standard Silicon Valley startup culture, but in fact they are only pointing out obvious things that most successful startup founders already live by: you can't work non-stop for two years without a lot of positive feedback on the way (and for five years maybe not at all), breaks with no work are necessary, perfectionists can get derailed if not careful, etc.

An undertone in other 37signals stories is that you can create wealth slower but with more certainty than most startups are trying to do, and that people shouldn't try so hard to create a successful startup..but I can't see that these views are mutually exclusive. To each his own. Both these kinds of companies are important to technological development.
>and a good ER tool

HappyFish (http://www.polderij.nl/happyfish/gallery.html) is elegant, simple, inexpensive and powerful and works with Postgres and MySQL. I have run it under wine on linux.
I can list a whole lot of successful web-based companies that don't fit many of this guy's criteria. I'd suspect this was a DHH sock puppet writing it except that he thinks that small businesses on the web are a lousy market, and DHH's success with Basecamp probably proves otherwise.
I see you have interest in search, I do too. Why don’t we get in touch we may share stuff.

edit: please ping me at okeumeni (at) intelliverb (dot) com
"The person may look like a hero, coming in to solve crisis after crisis, when in fact the crises could have been avoided. Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work."

I've had a few jobs with big organizations where they expected long hours, and it would be a stretch to say that I created the problems.

I think whether or not your organization hits "crisis mode", and how often, is something that company leadership and management needs to control. They can't cry wolf all the time - it is not good for your people's morale (and sanity) to push them that hard all the time.
doesn't sound stupid to me...@ github you are not just paying for git... you can do that yourself... you are paying for backups if your laptop / server gets hosed

at least that is how i look at it
TechCrunch Stories Now Appear On WashingtonPost.com
now the power of getting techcrunched is even higher as people outside our little world will hear about your startup
There are several factual inaccuracies in his post and unreasonable assumptions.

1) I believe that Flickr sold for $17 + a small earn out. The only authentic data on this is a post by Rafat on paidcontent.org.

2) You can't get at potential freemium subscribers by total uniques! Most Flickr viewers are not Flickr members! You need the actual uploader count and then at the very very best 1% might pay.

3) The ecommerce number is probably significantly off (2-3x) because Flickr is all about online sharing.

4) Flickr is huge but unfortunately is losing community aspects to other channels now like Facebook and twitter.

5) For another comparable, Webshots sold late last year for $45M and was probably 3x revenue.

Ultimately, Flickr has a pristine brand, leads the photo sharing category, so I'd guess it deserves a premium above photobucket so if Yahoo decided to sell then maybe $300-350M.

The bottom line is that there will never be big money in photos.
I used to have a boss who always said "This is you #1 priority!" Uh boss, this is the third time today you've said that. Which of these #1 priorities comes first? I think sometimes crisis mode is more of a (dysfunctional) motivational tactic than a scheduling strategy.
37signals advice seems like it comes from a really really narrow set of experiences. Best to take with a large pinch of salt I'd say.
Don't sign the contract. According to U.S. copyright law, YOU own all the code unless you sign something that explicitly states otherwise. The lawyer dad knows this, which is why he sent you a 17 page contract.
As a former workaholic, it can be cured. Workaholism can be fueled by an intense drive to show others how hard you can work (the classic I'll show them attitude). Which is good because you can divert it to other interests (e.g. not your job). For example, I diverted my workaholism to Toastmasters and it simultaneously saved my job (was going to quit, feeling underappreciated) and I stumbled into a great group of people (many, still friends).
My Dad always told me: You’re not entitled to anything in this world, always give your best and hope for the best!
Unfortunately, the most sensible answer has the most downvotes. The programmer owns all the IP in this situation, and has the most bargaining power if he simply continues on without a contract.
One of my favorite open source Google Analytics alternatives is phpTrafficA. You don't need to agree to Google's TOS to use it, and you can integrate it easily via either Javascript or two unobtrusive lines of PHP code.
http://soft.zoneo.net/phpTrafficA/
Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work.

This one rather sounds like a pathology. Many if not all great things were created by workaholics.

Psychologically, every workaholic has reasons for being it that are very personal, oftentimes latent, and from what I can tell unrelated to the actual performance.

So, workaholism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being able of creating great things, but otherwise it means nothing.
Dude: Just... walk... away. Seriously. Say thanks, and sorry, and just walk away. Forget the website, forget the awesome idea. Just do your best to salvage the relationship with your roommate, and walk away, or you are absolutely, positively going to be walking into a burning train wreck.
MySQL. Easy to setup replication and good tool support.
The Chief Cause of Problems? Solutions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
Thanks for the advice~ I would changen it definitely. Gut doesn't sounds good with meet/meat.
All excellent points. You do have all the leverage here, not film student guy.

> Personally, I still wouldn't take the deal because it sounds like your "partner" is adversarial.

This is what stood out most in my mind as I read the OP. I wouldn't go into business with anyone that I didn't trust like my own brother. If he is trying to make you sign some 17 page contract as a college kid, imagine what would happen if there were ever any real money to divvy up.