skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we agree more than we disagree, and I'm sorry for doing a bad job of getting my point across.

I agree that if you set out to "beat Wufoo", then you are not going about it the right way, and you'll probably lose. What I worry about is that if you set out to "make the best product for your customers", and you don't believe Wufoo is it, then in some way, you have an implicit goal of "beating Wufoo", but one which I find acceptable.

I also entirely agree that a market which has a "good" product (both in terms of the product, and in terms of the intentions) might be the wrong market to enter (Google and search is also an example). However, I think we both agree that it is a market that you CAN enter, and you CAN win, even though it might be harder.

Hopefully that makes more sense.
The Japanese Model: Blogs as a Business Tool
More confirmation that having a well-written company blog is a good idea.
While I agree that I hate those apps, the good ones do have a massive userbase. While I do intend to discourage stupid pointless apps, I won't explicitly ban them. Though 3 may be a little high, I may switch it to 2.

Keeping in mind that the course is meant to give a taste of something that wouldn't normally be taught in an average course (forgot to mention that), I think giving a taste of everything is a fair gameplan. Though talking about leveraging the "social graph" is a good idea.
that's sure taking the easy way out. "we can't give reasons because you have a sort of mild mental illness that prevents you from listening to any." you could ask them to give you reasons in text that you'll show a third party for evaluation. anyway, so far, i don't quite see why you'd listen to them about this particular issue.
Like Soothsayer said earlier, I recommend you read a book about Myer-Brigg personality types in order to understand why other people behave as they do, why they expect you to behave in the same way, and why it's not your natural inclination to do that. Then you can accept who you are, and understand that you're always going to be acting to some extend when, e.g., engaging in small talk.

A book would be better than an online test because the point should be to learn about all the other personality types, and how they interact, rather than understand your own.

http://www.amazon.com/Please-Understand-Me-Character-Tempera...
does anyone care? hell yes.

- there are entire classes of problems that require VC funding due to their complexity. Sure, some don't, but many do. Google is a great example. In their case, they required capital to quickly expand their team and for capital equipment.

- when VC confidence plummets, then angel investor confidence also plummets -- perhaps more so because angel investors are investing out of their own pockets. does anyone care if angel investor confidence plummets? hell yes.

I read someplace about the percentage of YC companies that secured funding after graduating. I can't find the reference, but the percentage was fairly high. If nobody cared, then that percentage would have been close to zero.

This is even something PG appears to care about: http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html

BTW, if you're talking $1MM in company revenue per year, better divide that in-half-ish as the amount that ends up in your bank account every year (assuming you live in the USA). There are taxes to pay, after all, and many other fees. So now you're looking at 9 - 10 years. Oddly enough, DHH really didn't make note of that in his presentation, which just goes to show you how he over-simplified everything.

But then again, if $1MM a year is so easy, then how hard could $2MM per year be, right? After all, he didn't mention an upper-limit on the amount of revenue his 3-step plan could generate.

I'm not trying to convince you that you shouldn't move forward with your DHH-slide-presentation-inspired company. You absolutely should! But I've been there myself a couple of times and there's a good chance that one day, before profitability, you'll need money. And you've already borrowed everything you can from your friends and family. And you're broke and the people who work for you aren't getting paid. And if you ever reach that point (and I sincerely hope you don't), you might care too.
Yeah, like all of them AFAIK. And packet-switched voice isn't automatically cheaper than circuit-switched.
Do you manually make recommendations for each request or is there some sort of natural language parsing algorithm that you've built? If the latter, then really cool this has potential..
Geocoding Tutorial - Getting physical address from IP address (using MaxMind)
There have been a few others, one fellow made a search system (using the rss feeds) where you can search across cities (by using checkboxes to select the different areas). Craiglist didn't like that.

I guess the bigger question is, what would Craigslist like? I am not sure, I just have not seen anything survive yet because Craigslist hasn't liked anything anyone has done so far.
Hey Aaron, for that, I'm going to have to take the blame and offer my apologies. (I think I apologized before, but here it is again). Your nitpicks were actually really great feedback and addressed the kind of design details that make all the difference between what's good enough and what's great in an interface. Unfortunately, they were 1) covering stuff that was near the bottom of our priority stack because we were just trying to launch at that point 2) I was still an asshole during that period and hadn't fully learned the value of users yet: http://particletree.com/notebook/reflections-of-an-interface...

I offer no excuses. Thanks again for taking the time to help us then and I'm sorry that I left a bad impression for my reactions.
fantastic. taking the air out of all the inflated bubble egos in the startup world. make a product useful enough that people will pay you for it.
You're forgetting the second point DHH made. Target small businesses. They're a little more likely to spend money to improve performance than your average Joe internet user.
The Mundane Nature Of Programming
A list of deals one VC firm passed on -- Google, eBay, Apple, Intel, Fedex, Paypal, etc.
an oldie but a goodie.

you gotta love this entry:

Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
We break up this work into smaller tasks, and use Mechanical Turk for some of the tasks.
Looks really good.
sql ledger is kind of gross.
Startup School Speakers Rock the House
I've always liked this list. BVP is no different from most VC firms in this respect. What's unusual about them is that they're so candid about it.

I was just talking to some founders about what terribly bad judges VCs are, compared to how confident they seem. They're in the same position as governments. All governments are horribly inefficient, but they don't realize it because their only competitors are other governments.

Come to think of it, this may be changing. Now that startups are so cheap to run, companies rejected by VCs are increasingly likely to survive to embarrass them.
A second round of Google millionaires?
Judgmental people are not successful socially. Get off your geek high horse!
I like the site - at first I was a little put off because I thought I needed to register to see anything but then realized I can still see other people's requests/answers.

The colors seem a little dull to me in this "Web 2.0" world - I think if you make the design look more lively it 'll increase the appeal of the site.

Also, are you you are allowed to use the images you are using? I have no idea what the Amazon TOS are.
Truth before social success? Why would you want social stuff, or anything, that you hadn't judged was a good thing to want?
Hmm...well that should be fixed. Those hover areas are leftover properties we used in the Entry Manager and since we just reused a good number of the XHTML/CSS when we redid the documentation, we forgot that the extra effects and activated areas weren't needed there. Thanks again for the detailed attention!
I dont know about rails, but for django it is not possible to standardise modules/plugins etc until 1.0 comes out and the 'best practises' are defined. This is a design decision as until 1.0 comes out there will be backward incompatible changes. So there is not alternative to 'monkey-patching'
Randy Pausch's book: The Last Lecture
The music industry thinks it is morally wrong to do what muxtape is doing. If you are going to share music on the internet though, I don't think it should be crippled to only work for people that can figure out how to get past the interface.

The music should be free or it shouldn't. There shouldn't be a gray area.

The faster any laws about this get resolved, the better. That's why I want this to be public.
I like the idea. More details about how you make money would make for better feedback.
You are awesome.

Seriously. Users are fucking awesome, but people like you, people who understand users and are completely transparent about their process are even more awesome.

Thank you for the inspiration.
What I said was that if Microsoft cared about users, they'd recommend they switch to OSX. You replied that Apple hardware comes at a premium. I replied that this premium is less than the difference between new and used hardware, and that using OSX only costs about $500. Could you find a laptop capable of running Vista for significantly less than that? If not, how am I mistaken?
Someone has been watching Battlestar Galactica.

The play button doesn't work for me either. Firefox and Ubuntu.
Google App Engine Blog: Google App Engine Hack-a-thons!
Japan's hunger becomes a dire warning for other nations
Dismissing comments because of spelling errors? Not sure where it would lie in PG's categories (ad hominen?)*

hominen makes this hilariously recursive.
The Idea Factory That Spawned the Internet Turns 50
Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island
I prefer hypem.com for discovering music.
How is it scalable? Also: do you not plan on using ad revenue? As a consumer reports-ish site it seems like ad-fare might damage your cred (read: your entire product).
Good news for those of us who'd like to use AWS as an option for our own corporate customers. Would be nice to have a reference list so we can say, "Even XYZ trusts AWS, so should you."
I think it's neat, but it seems like something that would exists as a B2B licensed product, rather than a consumer-facing tool.
You are only making it harder for muxtape, not the RIAA.

There is no question that RIAA is no angel, I'm just saying you're complicating it for muxtape and the direct result might be them not being able to provide an awesome service or them having to make it much less attractive.

If this is public, muxtape potentially shuts down; RIAA does not change its unethical practices. Think about it.
We plan to charge for a premium version of this service (underway).
I disagree with self-made man. She confuses eye flirting with 'rude' eye contact, and other misunderstandings that would be unique to lesbians. Of course when the men don't want to flirt with you because they think your a guy, they don't try to keep eye contact with you! Something like self-made man could be counter productive, giving you negative social ideas that could make you even more awkward.
I saw this in the wufoo FAQ:

Weâ€™ve done everything possible to ensure the safe keeping of your data and the data you collect. Our servers are located at 365 Main and backed up onsite and offsiteâ€“every 12 hours in Toronto and every 24 hours in Virginia.

i'm using opera 9.26 with automatic character encoding on.

(sorry, this may not be the best place to submit such feedback...)
We show ads to users who aren't signed in. We're experimenting with affiliates, but we're careful to put in affiliate tags after recommendations are generated.

If ads and affiliates become a serious concern for our users, we'll ditch them.
Why should muxtape get to do something unethical when everyone else has to follow the rules? You're basically saying this is ok because no one knows about it. Is it ok for me to steal something from a store as long as no one catches me doing it?

Perhaps a better way of going about this would be to contact the muxtape developers directly, however like you said before, they already know about this.

Also, in this situation, the RIAA would not necessarily be doing anything unethical to shut down this site. They are hosting free music on the internet. Can you think of a more straightforward way to break copyright law?
Anatomy of a zero-knowledge web application
A problem with connecting customers and sellers
I am probably not the only person that has had this problem, though I've thought about it at some length while most others just accept it as part of life.

There have been several times that I really want to find a particular product and have had absolutely no luck.

Example 1) I've lived in San Francisco. At least out here, fedoras are an acceptable fashion statement. I love the way they look on certain guys(and girls!). I have been to several stores, and even went to a couple of high-end boutique places. In the 2 instances I've found exactly the style I want, they don't have it in my size. Can you order it, I ask. No, sorry we can't. You can buy them online, but this is a very personal kind of purchase and I need to be very sure of what I'm ordering.

Example 2) I lived in Ft. Lauderdale for several years. A Haitian friend gave me a bottle of a Haitian coffee liqueur called Toussaint. The other night, I was remembering what an excellent drink this was and spent the next 3 hours trying to order it. First stop, eBay and Amazon.com, nada. Called the local stores, no dice. Did various combinations of Google searches and eventually found there were no U.S. retailers selling this. Apparently its becoming quite popular in the U.K. and parts of Europe, and the only distributor is in Britain. Final word came down from the distributor after an email exchange was there are no U.S. distributors. None of the U.K. distributors ship overseas. Sigh.

So the problem I am encountering is that despite the endless amounts of advertising I am pummeled with every day anytime my eyelids open, I cannot find the things I actually am willing to spend good money on.

I would like to think that there are many other people like me. We have money we're willing to spend on the quality products that we really want, but its often very very hard to connect us with the people who might be selling them.

Sellers spend billions of dollars a year trying to connect with customers, relatively successfully at least. However I as a customer have very few options to tell sellers what I'm actually looking for, and its getting damned annoying.

So, what are your thoughts on this? Is there some superb web service that I have completely missed that will solve my problems? Have any other people experienced this?

Why can't there be a service that will let me post an ad for $5 for the stuff I want that sellers will look for. Maybe there needs to be an ad network for customers, where my desires are communicated to lots of businesses that might be able to fulfill my needs.

Thoughts?
This sentence is priceless:

Already the home of the inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham), the initiator of the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds), a boatload of RSS and OpenSource-heads, Portland Oregon is also becoming a hotbed of OpenID work.

OpenID will succeed because the awesome presence of Linus Torvalds is filling the air over Portland with tiny molecules of Smart!

Seriously, has Torvalds ever uttered a word about OpenID in his life? If so, could we have a link? If not, what the heck is he doing in this article?
Yep, the response was good natured and curt. I certainly felt... uh... upset? at first, but that quickly faded when I realised the message was quite practical.
Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today
Amazing.

This is easily one of the best interfaces for a music player that I have ever seen. The music selection is great, load times are nice and there are no ads. Did I mention the interface is both gorgeous and efficient?

I would prefer that it played a song when I clicked on the title rather than having to hit 'Play Song' each time. Other than that stunning job on this application.

Edit: I felt I should have been more constructive/useful.
There are lots of back-office and internal systems that could use something like AWS. For instance, statical analysis of individuals and their chance of defaulting a loan. Or using their past cash flow to determine how likely the person is to buy a specific product, and offer the most likely product at the ATM.
Please help us evaluate CelleCast mobile social media listener community
But that's a correlation relationship, well off families tend to have higher performing kids. A reason for that may be that in order to become successful you need to value an education.

I'm trying to find the underlying causation of why things got that way and I'm sure it's much more complex than I'm making it out to be.
Makes me wonder - is it all luck at some level? After the fact one can look and see - what made all the successes successful? What attributes do they all share? Is it only that they succeeded?
Geocoding tutorial - Accessing Google Static Maps from Java
Some years ago I was trying to deliver a product in the face of rampant perfectionism - the kind that never delivers - when, so the story goes, I said "There is a level of mediocrity people are willing at accept, and I'm all for delivering it."

I cringe every time it's quoted back to me - usually after I've heaped scorn on some prematurely released product. I was trying to make the point, of course, that after six months in the bat cave our product would benefit from some customers more than the customers would benefit from our product. (It's now #1 in its market thanks to those same customers).

Knowing when to pull the trigger is an art. There really is a level of "mediocrity" where no amount of spit and polish trumps getting a product in front of customers.
I'm glad they are humble enough to provide that information.

What do you think of the idea that companies that are cheap to run may face stiffer competition and thus never really gain a large chunk of the market, thereby never making it "astronomically" big.

At one point the network effect will come into play as well as consolidations down the line but it's an interesting thought.
After reading your comment, I went back and read the original article again. I believe you have made some very good points and no one can really argue against them except I believe the main point of the article was much simpler than that, which is what the author calls "dynastic", as in dynastic company, dynastic exit and therefore dynastic funding (from VC).

My own experience with starting and running startups is that time has changed. I am not saying that time has changed completely such that the old model (get VC money to do R&D) does not exist, I am just (humbly) saying that a new model has emerged that allows entrepreneur to "bootstrap" a meaningful company with sustainable and meaningful revenues. And when time comes to scale the company, one can always go out for more money. That path has not gone away just because you bootstrap, except now you are treating VC money as working capital (not R&D grant).

It really comes down to impedance matching which I think is the important point of the original article. Should we match the impedance for the VC which means big exit, big company and big funding? Or should we try to match the impedance for the entrepreneurs which calls for modest exit, modest company and modest funding?

I am a successful example of the latter which is what I call "getting a medium slice of a medium pie". My last company is completely bootstrapped. Six founders worked three years with no salaries. They then took a modest amount of angel money to launch the product and buy inventory. Now the company is very successful. Late-stage VC's are kicking the door down to want to buy a piece of the action. And I took an early retirement to write a book. It can work.

http://www.StartupForLess.org
Currently telecom is all IP based. Telcos have a circuit switched system at the last mile for backward compatibility and profit reasons, but from your local CO to the terminating call CO is IP based. The telcos also own the internet connections as a tier one providers, so most of it is privately routed.

But yeah, the circuit switched system still exists only for backward compat. for the existing system. Cost for call routing has gone down significantly for telcos ever since the 1990s. (Some shithole countries do not apply.)
Stay your bids, fair maidens, as you were. I give you our next chap, a gentlemen of highest rank:

The vast majority of women, at least 99 percent, have some combination of eating disorder [1], television-induced personality necrosis, age beyond or near-beyond the breeding years, "baggage" (children, alcoholism, etc), or straightforward ugliness.

Oh dear.
Roll your own real-time twitter search with thrudb
Brazilian VC: Time to start experimenting and take more risks
to be fair though, when someone says "you should switch from X to Y" there isn't an implicit "you'll have to use second hand / used versions of Y" attached to that message.

e.g the statement "you should switch from [cheap car] to [expensive car] because expensive car is much more comfortable" does NOT carry the "I meant a used [expensive car]" implication.

Most people would understand that the first statement implies you should pony up the price differential because the extra comfort is worth it.

It is bad enough that Windows has a monopoly and uses it to gouge customers. Why would anyone want to replace a software monopoly with a software and hardware monopoly?
Linkbait title. Boo.
"And last but not least Kate Courteau for all her help with “afterparty logistics.” "

There was an afterparty?

And here I was feeling like one of the cool kids.
Hybrids: The Potential Web 3.0
http://www.fitlinxx.com/
http://www.expresso.com/
Finally, someone took time and said it. Moreover, I'd recommend for someone who didn't have exposure to "big iron databases" to look up performance benchmarks for Oracle, Microsoft and DB2, they're very popular not only among these companies but also among big-iron manufacturers like Sun, IBM and HP. It's crazy what they can do if you use them right, good luck building a business that will need such transactional capabilities of your DB.
What does this have to do with Americans? That seems like a total non sequitur.
It struck me that this essay shares many things in common with the last chapter of Guy Kawasaki's book, "The Art of the Start". That chapter is called "The Art of Being a Mensch", and argues that to build a lasting organization, you need to help lots of people, do what's right and pay back society. Sounds about right to me.
I believe a lot of early stage startups were not jumping on board EC2 because up until now, it was only possible to use it to augment existing infrastructure. Big companies can afford to have their main data centre and the AWS stuff. A lot of early stage startups can only afford their main data centre (or in some cases main hosted solutions). Not only that, a lot of early startups don't need to augment their main infrastructure as there is no demand for it.

I spoke to a lot of friends and acquaintances in smaller companies and startups that all said the same thing: "once EC2 supports static-IPs we'll use it". Now that EC2 has Elastic IPs, I'm sure using EC2 for the main set of servers will be an attractive option to startups and smaller companies.
if you did language parsing you'd be in for a big buyout from someone like amazon.
Very good idea. I would touch up the design using better colors and that's about it. Huge potential.