skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the risk of sounding too critical (which isn't the point), allow me to help you hear yourself:

Our strategy is for the hackers to create a demo and
backend to achieve my design objectives while I flesh out
the rest of the medical research.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to warn you against. If the hackers are your partners (as they should be), then "my" design has to become "our" design. Invite your hackers to make suggestions and tweak your design. Have a whiteboard fight (what's better than a whiteboard fight?). Take their suggestions seriously, and if you disagree, don't be dismissive: try to convince them why they're wrong; get buy-in. If you can't get buy-in, then either your design is broken, or these aren't the hackers you're looking for. Then once you're all on the same page, turn them loose on the implementation while you get busy with your medical research. To my mind, that is a better way to divide labor without losing the sense of partnership.

Armed with a demo and medical research, I will be able to
prove to potential partners and angels that there is a
big medical problem, that design can solve it, that much
research, when considered together, provides a picture of
haw to solve the problem, and that I solved it. Then I
will find a partner for business aspects and look for
funding.

This sounds great!...except, make ...that I solved it... into ...that our team solved it... - because once you take on partners, you're partners. Founders really have to be able to swallow some pride and share ownership to keep everyone on board. You may be the leader, but especially at this stage, being the leader shouldn't mean a whole lot other than a job description.

Even in your language you have to be careful about the messages you're sending to your partners to make sure that they are, indeed, partners. When you take on partners, your vision has to become their vision, and you have to be willing to let your vision evolve with new blood and new ideas (obviously, you don't want to loose the essence of the business...)

Consider the result of a subtle change in language:

Armed with a demo and medical research, I will be able to
prove to potential partners and angels that there is a
big medical problem, that design can solve it, that much
research, when considered together, provides a picture of
haw to solve the problem, and that our team solved it.
Then I will find a partner for business aspects and look
for funding.

This is much better, because it's evident that your hackers are your partners, and that the things you're doing for the venture are valuable (performing a demo, persuade partners and angels, find funding, find the additional talent you need, and medical research skills).

Again, I hope you find this helpful. This is all stuff I've been reflecting on a lot lately, so it just comes pouring out of my head through my fingertips.
Little scraps (or: On the importance of image)
http://getsatisfaction.com - support requests + social networking website

beats having to setup and maintain one yourself; or paying for a service...
Silverlight Timetable: 2.0 Coming This Summer
sportspageone.com is available. thesportspage.com is taken, unfortunately.

I really like the tag line though. It certainly makes the address make sense. "Page One Times - Where Sports Belong."
non-tech person came to me with the idea and i accepted based on the idea, market feasibility, business model, and the work load.

for reference, i don't think we're working together. but i really hope we're not competing, its a fairly stagnant, old market and i don't want to have a new tough competitor :(
Well, the reviews were "Fake" because they were not genuinely written by anyone.

Although most of the Slide people I've met are religiously fanatical about their products, so maybe they were genuine, but posted with fake names.
nicely done a few suggestions - the categories (nba nhl mlb) look really crammed together maybe a visual separator | would help.

Agree that the domain name is a bit odd, but not a huge deal.

Would be great to have an RSS /subscribe tool so I can read the headlines in reader, maybe even by sport.

Also if it grabbed an image "ala facebook" share feature that would be cool.

A bit more white space.

Most of these are nice to have and are likely already on your list of possible features. Overall well done!
I've yet to see silverlight implemented as a practical part of an application.
Agreed. I've asked several ad people why I would want to work with them and they all say, "well, we're number 1." This answer is ALWAYS offered and never goes deeper.
Aroxo: How Little Decisions Matter — A Lot
I also agree with the article, but I must take exception with your assertion that C is easy to implement. The ANSI C99 spec came out almost ten years ago, and most major compilers still barely support it. GCC has a depressing number of C99 features flagged as broken (http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html), for example.
You don't need a cowboy programmer! You need to fire the IT boss. Also you should fire the big-boss because he hired and kept the one who was in charge of IT. The mediocrity comes ALWAYS from the top.
Luckily for you the market in which you are is more juicy than your company can suck. So it survives even being inefficient!
I find such comparisons misleading. The differences between natural languages are not at all the same thing as the differences between programming languages. All natural languages have the same expressive power, or at least very close. The existence of the phenomenon of translation proves it. You can take a book in Classical Latin (according to my friend's girlfriend who is a linguist, a very terse language) and its translation into German (typically given as an example of a very verbose language) and the difference in length will be maybe 30% (and frankly, I don't even believe this difference can be accounted for by the greater expressive power of Latin; my guess is it's just that German words are longer on average.)
I even tried CUSP back then, but it was somehow confusing (or refused to work), I don't remember.

Maybe it's because I don't normally use Eclipse.

If someone is interested in other alternatives, here's one: http://phil.nullable.eu/

- Phil's "ABLE" editor. I tried it too, but it didn't work too well on Windows (something about CLISP, iirc).
Obviously I was being facetious. I use XP every day of the week.

It requires a lot of additional software installations and tweaking to be a productive environment, though.
I think that thats a bit premature, given how immature the language specification apparently is, and anyways there are few implementations for languages which have the syntax and runtime error handling capabilities of plt scheme has, and the core language is rich enough that in terms of interpreter / compiler performance you won't get much better without sacrificing some nice bits of lispiness...

on the other hand, knowing all the weaknesses that pop up in the language when used in a standard compilation setup is always good
I agree with you, I was confused at first that this was the same guy we saw bashing PHP b/c ruby code looked so much better.
Assuming that you have other copyright or trademark protections in place, arbitration may be an option. ICANN uses the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ("UDRP") which provides for mandatory arbitration
proceedings for registrants of domain names. http://www.icann.org/udrp/.
Is anyone using 1.0?
Service I want: "Report websites that suck"
Hey,

I was just going to pay my monthly bill on PG&E. For some reason the "Pay" button doesn't work in Firefox 3. Of all the functions on that websites the "Pay-button" is likely to be the most important one. Sad they had to fuck that up.

So, here is my idea in response. Build a service called "Websites that suck". It could be a firefox plugin or just a website. People can sign in and report sites that constantly suck or break. It can be a very simple tools where thousands of users together figure out which sites that REALLY suck.

Once a month a report is created, very similar to Technorati's "State of the blogsphere" that lists the websites that suck the most and how the top 50 has changed month by month.

What do you guys think? Big opportunity for a startup. Say I work for PG&E and 10,000 people report every month that our website suck but I don't know why. I then buy all the comments from the startup for say $1000/month. It's a cheap way of getting rid of bad PR.

Gustaf
"Of course software startups will need hackers. But startups who wish to be “successful” need “validated” ideas- and that’s a huge assumption to make. I’m not trying to claim that only business minded people can bring validated ideas to the table, but business people can at least afford tables."

So as I understand it, the thesis of the article is that:

1) The geeks on Beauty and the Geek lack perspective.

2) You, hacker, are probably like the geeks on Beauty and the Geek.

3) Thus, you need a "business guy" to give you the ability to sell things to the tanorexic blonde girls (and everyone else).

I'm glad that the level of discussion has risen to such a high intellectual plateau. Clearly, the special training that business school students receive must inevitably endow them with the unique ability to validate ideas for market fit. To wit:

"It is also worth pointing out that business minded people have been finding innovative ways to make real money for as long as there has been money to be made, whereas hackers are still trying to find some green in the grey zone of the Internet."

Right. Because, if the dot-com bubble, the real-estate bubble, and the failure of such august business institutions as Bear Stearns and Long Term Capital Management teach us nothing, it is that "business people," left in isolation, will inevitably create tangible, permanent value out of thin air. Truly, they are the alchemical wizards of our time.

(On any other day, I might also point out that the "gray area" of the internet is totally devoid of "business guys" who are trying to make a fast buck. But that would be self-evident. The internet will always and forever be the exclusive domain of poorly dressed men who live in their mother's basement, and that no person of sufficient technical capacity has ever launched a successful business venture based upon anything other than computers, robots or comic books.)
RT is very complicated. I used it at the company I used to work for...lots of complexity and probably more power than you'll need.

I haven't heard anything about FogBugz, but maybe if we buy enough things from Joel Spolsky I won't have to read about him every single day
Clever take on the situation. However, unlike a straight up B2B play, you do still have a huge chunk of your company doing B2C work, and the more good you do in the latter, the easier the former gets.

Ask the engineers at Google and Facebook whether they feel like they're unimportant even though they're not directly bringing in the money for their company.
even better idea. works in both IE and FF right?
Thanks for the load testing tool suggestion, but I am after tools or tips on testing the effectiveness of two different buttns, links, navigation bars, pages, ad placement, etc.

I am also looking for tools that will give me more insight into users click behavior, etc.

Thanks though.
I think it's "undecidable" because we'll never know how many do it but don't get caught.

The only thing I can say is I hope most get caught. But they're just wasting their time trying to fake value while they could be creating more value for themselves and others.
Matt, are you asking for software to handle actual emails or the issues/tickets mentioned in them?

I don't know of any software to handle emails themselves. We use a shared squirrelmail account for everything (though we should probably switch to gmail). We've just developed a system of putting things into folders, leading items that haven't been dealt with as unread, etc. There has to be a better solution, but I haven't heard about it yet.

Hmm...maybe someone should make it and apply to the winter YC session
What do you want in your spam filter?
That is to say, what is the trade off between lost ham and spam are you willing to make? If you could decrease your spam by N messages would you be willing to give up 0.001N ham messages?
"You have to make your product better not through superior technology, but often through superior PR, sales operations, or other non-geek issues"

Better sales/PR does not make what is being sold better. It is business development, not product development.
GCC has been making progress on C99... part of their problem has been, how best to implement C99 features that were already part of GCC prior to C99, but with different syntax?

For Microsoft, I read somewhere several years ago that they had no plans to support C99, because they viewed C as inconsequential compared to C++. I have not kept up with Microsoft C compiler development at all, so I don't know if this is still true or not.
Please don't worry about sounding too critical. Just be honest. This is much more helpful with the true critical parts not obscured by worry about hurt feelings.

That "I solved it" is painful. That is very obvious. Gotta get rid of that mindset.

I used the term "Design objectives" from a medical protocol standpoint. We're working together closely to translate the protocol design (which I have objectives for, in the form of information flowing between components of the system, and providing certain outputs and inputs to patients and doctors) into technical designs (which the tech guys make). We are tracking areas where we disagree as open questions on a wiki, and we revisit them once we've done more research and thinking. I'm not giving them pages of screenshots and saying make it work, I'm saying the medical system must move information like this, and that creates a technical puzzle as part of a medical puzzle. I don't override them and I encourage them to be as critical and creative as possible.

Thanks again for your comments. That "I" thing is something I will watch carefully for and is good to hear.
What do you need to track?

I have seen simple interfaces with basically description field and then a textarea for info, and I have seen ones with 50 different fields so that all kinds of different data can be tracked.
Well, he seemed to be saying the prices are made artificially low (ex: free) because of VC's subsidizing the businesses.
There are certainly plenty of stagnant old markets in the medical industry.
"tanorexic." nice.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that I said this: "The point of all this is that there are people with creative ideas in all walks of life."

and this "It’s simply a case of mental economics- we all have our strengths, and participants come out better by trading."

and didn't YOU quote ME on this part? "I’m not trying to claim that only business minded people can bring validated ideas to the table"

So really, I didn't really touch on anyone "needing" anyone else. The point was really for people just to keep an open mind. I apologize if my word hacks weren't elegant. That's not my primary function.

Thanks for jumping to "any other day" for that last bit as well. Was that through the gmail "custom time" interface? :)
Also, his site is probably going to be aimed at a much different subset of the overall sports fanbase than a sports rag. My guess is by being social news themed, he's going to cater to the younger, hipper section of the overall demographic, which is very, very broad. The Sporting News, on the other hand, is probably going to cater to the older, less tech-loving section.
I made my local IHOP into an ad-hoc startup office space the other day. It may not have a plug for my laptop, but at least I didn't feel an exaggerated sense of importance about it.
The idea that MySpace Music _might_ give my email address to any band that I buy a song from terrifies me to the point that I _won't_ buy anything from MySpace until I know that they won't do that. If I want a band to be able to contact me I will sign up for their mailing list.
here is another related link:

Web 2.0 And Why You Shouldn't Fake Reviews
http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-Should...
Indeed, the difference here isn't the capabilities of the language, but rather the quality of support the tool chain offers for the task. None of the tool chains that I know of offer decent support for building operating systems, but the C portion of the gnu tool chain offers the least sucky support for it.

A sign of the flaws in the author's argument is that C++ clearly offers just as much control over the hardware as C. However, an order of magnitude more OSes are written in C than C++. Anyone who's tried to write one in C++ knows why; trying to bend the tool chain to support bare-hardware is a daunting task.
Advertisers in print media base their pricing on how many paying subscriptions the magazine or newspaper has, not overall distribution.

Printed publications make far more per unit from advertising than they do from the subscription fee. If advertisers didn't care about paid subscriptions, it would be in their interest to give their magazine freely to anyone and everyone who wanted it. But they don't because advertisers only care about paid subscribers. That is why magazines seem to try as hard as possible to give you nearly-free (but still paid) pricing on subscriptions.

I don't know why that is, but I know enough about the publishing industry to know it is true.
doing..? hacking cell phone software in Lua? I'd love to have at some embedded stuff with a non-c language. So much less to worry about screwing up. Although a lot of embedded stuff is hardware level stuff that has to be done in c anyway, so no lua there.
Doesn't every OS? (I know every time I've tried Linux I've had to add stuff, haven't use a Mac since 1990)
How does this make sense? The principle is based on the fact that something is easily recognizable because it looks familiar and follows an expected template. So, how is it that this does not translate across mediums.
But if it sells better, that's better business.

Product * Business = Profit.

Better make sure Business > 0, preferably > 1. You can worry about product perfection once you've solved The Money Problem.
Just a little nitpicking, but I'd say one of the top problems facing startups is letting the "super l33t hackers" do the design portion.

Very few start ups bring any significant skill to that end and have atrocious workflows/UIs. You can have the most elegant code in the world that can scale magically to no end but turn off everyone who looks at it.

And that's ignoring the bigger picture - there's a large difference between what one amazing coder thinks would be awesome and what any market is actually interested in. Don't get me wrong, it's very likely the same that can happen to a business superstar too, but if nothing else it's crucial to have people from different perspectives involved in a project. You work to avoid tunnel vision that can completely lead you down the wrong path and waste those months of 50-60 hour weeks.

Also I would be willing to put forward that if you're not doing 50-60 hours worth of non-coding work for a startup, you're probably doing it wrong.
Exercising anything is hard to do because it's much easier to do nothing.
I like what I've read by Mitra; she seems to be one of the sharper commentators out there. I wonder why she didn't mention YC. The last two paragraphs could easily have been written about it.
Fluid Rails Docs on OSX
Pshaw. We have 35 million illegals doing the work of 35 million people. Much better system. (So I'm told.)
On one hand, I have to agree with webwright. The key question here is "What are you going to do for 10 hours a day while I build a product?". But if the "business guy" is truly good, you won't even have to ask that question.

Quick anecdote from "Founders at Work": Wozniac did ALL of the technical things for Apple in the early days. People have implied that Jobs took advantage of him, but in the book Woz says something to the effect of "Anything technical, I did. Anything business related, Steve did. And anything that either of us didn't know how to do, Steve just found a way to take care of it. He really wanted to have a company".

If the "business guy" can fill that role, or at least work with that much passion, then it doesn't matter if he never contributes a bit of code.

Personally: I would love to have an MBA with 5+ years of corporate experience on our team right now. B2B corporate people have a whole way of doing things and I know enough to know that I don't know anything about it.
After Success, Problems for Microfinancing in Mexico
delicious tag?
The free model can work if it leads to a secondary revenue model, such as B2B services, or secondary products that actually do make money. Launching a business blindly for free hoping to "fake it until you make it" is not a recipe for a successful business model.

I wrote about how to properly use the FREE software model today at http://www.onlineepiphany.com/2008/04/04/how-do-they-give-th...
He is trying to separate two concepts: "works-as-designed" and "esthetically well-designed". There are many things that would not benefit from high esthetics, but do benefit from a surprising amount of sweat.

The case of pizza flyers is a good example of overlooked effort: they have to look both alluring and cheap. Their design is not ill-considered, at least for the larger brands. They have been worked out over decades by talented and observant people using empirical data.
Learn something quick and dirty.

But, as noted, brass knuckles (or a gun) will not cause you to grow up as a person. The martial arts teach patience and poise, which is almost exactly the opposite of a quick fix.

More concretely, Sig Kufferath (who basically carried the Danzan-Ryu torch to mainland USA) apparently beat the hell out of a couple guys who tried to mug him, then got them medical help and sent them flowers in the hospital. (The story may be apocryphal, but I would not have put it past him) Norvig's motives appear similar -- he is an acknowledged Jedi and has little to fear, in general, from helping others to raise their game. Having crossed paths with both guys, I feel reasonably justified in my perception.
How William Morris and other Hollywood agencies are getting into tech startups and investing
Note that I said the syntax is small for all of (list of languages) and most of those have a small standard library. CL has a simple syntax and a large standard library. By extension, so does Qi.
As a society, weather we consciously realize it or not, we use progress not as a way to work less but to think less. Example: the expiry dates on milk and stuff. Instead of letting people decide for themselves when the product goes bad we tell them the exact date that it goes bad. More quick examples? Here: Calculators, Fancy medical instruments, air guitars, spell checkers etc. All of these deaden our sense of observation and awareness and dull our minds.

So we have a choice: Do we make an effort to train our brains our do we let our technology do all the thinking for us? Well, why go through all the effort to train our brains when we don't have to?
Soashable Instant Messenger - Open Source Meebo Clone written in ExtJS
Good luck, but if PG&E et. al ever get caught paying to unransom published comments they'll face a worse PR nightmare than mere reports of bad javascript.
HN ♥ brevity
That's completely off-topic, subjective and it's completely "reversible" too, look:

"I actually like Firefox better than IE. Loads faster, works better."

Beware of such statements, they're often a sign of insipidity.
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia

I don't know how it's coming but wikia search should be able to allow users to modify whether search returns are good and valuable.
I think The Onion said it best:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33648
He didn't say "make your business better". If he had replaced "product" with "business" I wouldn't have replied.