skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do referral programs really work?
Has anyone successfully run a referral program (ie. tell your friend about our product and if he/she purchases and mentions you, you get paid)? We have decent word of mouth for JumpBox at this point and we're interested in accelerating that. My main concerns at this point are:

* Kathy Sierra is adamant about the idea that you never pay your evangelists. I hold her advice in high regard and I can understand her arguments: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/02/inspiring_your_.html

* in any cash-back incentive program you introduce the ability for people to game the system. I suppose it requires willingness to accept some level of that in trade for the boost in visibility.

* energy devoted to implementing the program is potentially be better spent on other evangelism activities (Joel Spolsky in Founders at Work said none of the sales-generating gimmicks he's ever tried has had more ROI than investing time in improving the product - http://www.grid7.com/archives/143_faw-25-joel-spolsky-of-fog-creek-software.html

But at the end of the day, I'm really curious if the referral program could substantially boost our word of mouth. This forum always has insightful startup advice - I'm hoping to get input (good or bad) from folks who have conducted referral programs or other successful activities to get the awareness ball rolling.

sean
It is possible to write buggy, unstable, unreliable, unscalable applications in any framework or language and just because you use a certain technology doesn't mean anything about whether you'll create an app with a good experience.

Handing a sniper rifle to someone does not make them a sniper. Snipers have personal qualities and training that make them what they are; their weapons are just tools that help them realize their inherent abilities as well as possible.

Why are you and other TechCrunch people so eager to assign blame when you don't actually know anything about what you're assigning blame for?
Even if they don't, how difficult will it be for them to bring in a great hacker who can?
I'm embarrassed by a lot of comments here. I thought people on this forum would know better. It's like I'm watching a car, with smoke and flames pouring out from under the hood, pull over to the side of the road and people running up and checking if maybe it needs new tires.

You could probably rewrite the front end in applescript and you'd see little difference, and if you did just throw more servers at it. The problem is probably that theres a DB at the heart of all the message crazyness, you can't do that and expect to scale.
I was 47 years old when I started my most recent startup (I am now 52). I am the 3rd oldest among my co-Founders (the 2nd oldest will be celebrating his 60th birthday this summer). I am also the only one on the team who had any kind of previous startup experience. We struggled for three years and took no salaries (1st year was conceptual, 2nd year to develop product, 3rd year we started shipping). The company is five years old and has been profitable for two years. It was recently selected for the Emerging Company of the Year Award by Frost & Sullivan. I also decided to take an early retirement early this year to write my book and travel with my parents and my kids. We took no VC money and we control our own distiny. We were successful for the same reasons that all startups are successful. We were dedicated, we were tenacious, we were lucky and we focus our energy on making sure that there are as many people as possible who care about our success and not our failure. It also helps that we took no shortcut, in life or in business. We work hard to keep every friends that we have and we didn't try to make new enemies.

Sometimes the good guys do get to win, even if we were just a bunch of old farts. So there is hope for all of us.

Good luck, everyone.
Yeah,. We are going to add some form of job postings. At a minimum, we will let startups add an RSS feed of their job listings. What we don't want is job listings from big companies that are just aimed to pick people out of the startup community.
"I have never seen a polluted stream or a park covered in litter there"

A Japanese beach, though, is a giant ash tray.
It's strange to me that people seem to want the average age of the start-up founder to be low...why is it more fun if the founder is young than if they are in their 40s?

As a side note, there are some insightful comments that point out the differences in the two data sets that the writer is referring to (a study vs. anecdotal evidence from VC Fred Wilson). But it's an interesting read, none the less.
Thanks for grouping me under cool people :-p
Zed certainly did trash the community. Take a look at

"This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college. [...]

After this, I started thinking, since it was the first realization that I picked the absolute last wrong community to make my living in. They were all pricks, morons, assholes, and arrogant fucks who didn’t care about the art or the craft.

They were all a bunch of little ghetto fabulous princesses trying to make it in this tiny little Rails world and not enough brains between them all to make it happen."

and about the framework

"Now, DHH tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother fucking day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches. These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread (like a Ninja, Mentalguy is awesome).

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average."

Although he does add that

" [...] Rails is a pretty nice idea, and it demolished the Java world I hated so much."
This article, and the one from the other day (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176526) inspired a little idea: bite-size exercise.

You subscribe to a (Twitter?) feed of simple, two-minute, quick-break-from-your-desk exercises, like "do 20 pushups", "walk up and down a flight of stairs 3 times", or "jog around the block." These exercises are explicitly designed for busy folks like us who spend too much time sitting in front of a computer.

You get a task like this every few hours. When you complete the task, you reply to the message. You can see who did the exercise, poke friends who haven't yet done it, encourage each other. Office-mates could make it a shared break.

Maybe there's a "step it up" button, which increases the intensity (like on a treadmill) -- you go from 20 pushups to 30, for example. Eventually, use historical data to customize exercises.

Thoughts?
We want to create really useful regional pages. That is one of the things about Canada. People don't just pick up and move to one particular city (ie: the valley for tech) -- we tend to stay in our own towns and cities and make a go of it from there., so we want to support that in some cool ways.
skillset is a really good word

i am really surprised how facebook, so quikly found the skillset to build a 10,000 server site and how come, twitter didnt! just why ...

its the skillset, but again why was facebook successful in aquiring the skillset when twitter wasnt! ... why is twitter considering a rewrite and facebook didnt ... they just grew !!
Don't underestimate the rewrite of high traffic site like twitter. Rewrites are among the top mistakes that kill startups, and are risky.

What they should do instead is to slowly rework their code, instead of doing a massive rewrite.
"X doesn’t scale" is a myth.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160730
No way. I use Amarok at home and love it. At work I have to use Windows, and used to be happy with iTunes - until I started having to update it every week (60MB download, no I don't want Safari, no I don't want to see the Quicktime icon, I'll check the box asking not to be propmted when there's a new version - oh, you're going to tell me anyway).
Anyway, I thought I'd try Winamp again (I used it about seven years ago and liked it) - it doesn't seem capable of playing a CD without crashing.
If anyone can recommend a free and/or open source media player for Windows I'd be grateful.
I am Ruby learner. The way ruby works with DB is problem for novice. If programmer don't do careful coding for caching then it is bound to cause problem. Ruby hype is all around auto code generation and simple coding/scripting. But when you are writing enterprise level apps then there is more to consider.
"Gay Ad Network makes a river from small streams." Now there's a loaded title if I ever saw one.
Just to keep the conversation going: what do you think Twitter's main issues are ? (Or do you think their downtime is not worth mentioning?)
Picking between the wrench and hammer is never a problem.

All tools tend to look like hammers when all problems are seen as a subset of nails.
Lisaac: An Efficient Prototype-based language
Emailing yourself the result of a query
Design patterns are good at what they were meant to solve: give a common name to patterns that appear commonly in software development so that qualified individuals can have intelligent conversations about software design.

There are two extremes to design patterns however. On one end you have idiots that insist on using design patterns everywhere. These people know they can't program and use a design pattern soup in order to hide their incompetence.

On the other end you have people that claim design patterns are evil and they'd rather reinvent the flat tire over and over again instead of trying to learn from the experience of others. These people think they're smarter than everyone else.
Twitter isn't a messaging application in the traditional sense (as in IM or phone networks) because it doesn't involve real-time synchronous communications. All communications in Twitter are asynchronous as in most database-backed webapps and I think it should be possible to scale Twitter with Rails assuming you know how to scale the database tier.

Having said that, it would still be fun to rewrite Twitter in Erlang... :)
CPMs on SFW gay sites are huge... there's nothing less than $3 CPM.
We reverse engineered and shipped facebook chat in two weeks: the desktop isn't dead
Dang - I was going to say Erlang. This is an ideal application for Erlang... scalability and uptime. There's a reason it's heritage is in the teleco industry.
This brings back memories. I wonder if anyone else used to read 2600...
What the parent says is that a proper assessment will require an in-depth knowledge of how it is actually implemented. Taking random shots like this article does is like a blind man trying to grope an elephant.
According to Fortune's best places to work (http://tinyurl.com/3dofj9), Adobe isn't a bad gig.

You can use the same list to see what people are making at different companies and what kinds of perks they're getting. i.e. A software developer at the SAS Institute pulls down $104,566/yr.
Threads Considered Harmful
James Reinders compares native threads with the goto statement so famously denounced 40 years ago by Edsger Dijkstra. Paraphrasing Dijkstra, he says they both "make a mess of a program," and then argues in favor of abstraction. Some commenters question whether or not we should be even be treading into the "swamp of parallelism."
I talked to him, he said that there are a bunch out there already and they'll be using them to aid in the process. But there's still work to be done, there are a lot of legacy systems that need to have optimized/readable code.
So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it
means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a
bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak.

Uh, not quite: x(1.1) + x(0.7) != 0.77(2x). Reminds me of the fuzzy math in DHH's startup revenue calculations...
I agree, it would have been more useful to have seen the data with an industry dimension added as software was only one of 8 major industry groups they included.Maybe the results of that slice didn't fit their expected conclusions?
True journalism, indeed.
What version of Winamp did you use? There is a golden version: 2.91. Everything above is a perversion.

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp
I love Emacs, but I think the lack of 'Intellisense' is one of the few good reasons to use an IDE over Emacs or Vim. Some people think Intellisense rots the brain [1], but I can't see anyone ever saying that about eldoc-mode.

[1] http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...
While that may be a valid point, it isn't what he said.
This is a great example. The media industry is very broken right now, and unless the innovate, these dire predictions will come true. More than anything, they need to fix the content, which is still king.

This is exactly why we started NewsCred. Who knows if it will work or not, but we're going to give it a go.
Yea, these beasts can't even compete with their own 5-year old products.
Spoilers are always a problem in this sort of thing.
How about make it part of the game to vote on other respondents input.
Then its not a matter of being a 'better' response, its a popularity contest.
Scalability problems are usually endemic to a particular setup. There is always another bottleneck. The way you're viewing scalability is different than the reality of it.

My previous company (a web testing company) did a load test for a large tax return company. When testing started, their app could support 3 simultaneous users. When the bottlenecks were removed, one by one, the same app (framework, codebase, language and all) supported north of 10,000 users. As you test, there is usually something like a database lock problem, high cpu from a loop that needs to be optimized, bad query/data layout, memory usage maxing out, or something you are running out of, one way or the other.

The people who point out that twitter is not a standard web app and might be better served by messaging have a point also.
Microsoft Nixes XP Extended-Life Rumors
What abbreviations are acceptable here? I've used btw. I've even seen PG use btw. Anything else?
"Very smart people with no life"? Sounds a lot like working on a startup.

I grew up in the States, and I don't recall any university or school curriculum focusing on interpersonal skills.
The Value of Ideas
No, but I do run a Windows machine just for Winamp.

I have friends that do the same and I've also seen a number of restaurants in Vancouver (Rugby Club), Montreal (Bières et Compagnie), and Haifa (Stella's?) that use it too (among other places).
Do you have any more info on Facebook's chat architecture or were you just speculating?

A quick Google of "erlang facebook chat flat file" returns your initial post, would love to read more about that if have anything.
"want the average age of the start-up founder to be low"

Then they must be brilliant. If a 40 year old was brilliant, then why didn't he do this 20 years ago? (They tend to forget that it wasn't like this 20 years ago.)
"This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age."

Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.

My guess is that people in this glorious new age will continue to be, by turns, noble, venal, kind, warlike, selfish, generous, stupid, wise, thoughtful and ignorant, and that life will go on much as it always has.

I find it hard to believe that this discovery/invention (as opposed to, say, the transistor, fission, the steam engine, the telegraph, quantum mechanics, et-bloody-cetera) is really going to alter the human experience for all time.

We will, however, have smaller iPods. And this is a cool discovery.

From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer. I'd guess not; I think this stuff will be used to make faster/smaller versions of what we already have, in much the same way the last 30 years of advances in processor design were used to make really fast IA instruction set chips. If I'm wrong, though, it'll be interesting learning how to program the things.
plenty of companies got started more than 20 years ago. What would have prevented you from starting a company when MS or Apple started?
You were only semi-cool until the last day. Your discussion of generating python source from other apps while eating a burrito and texting pushed you over the top.

</sarcasm>
Michael never claimed to be a journalist. You're likely mixing up the professions because you think TechCrunch has gotten so big that it has and cares about its reputation. That wouldn't be the case, he just writes whatever he can to continue to generate pageviews.
I reread your comment with fresh eyes and I can see the sarcasm now. I kind of feel like the Mitch Hedberg joke:

My friend said to me, "I think the weather's trippy." I said, "No, man, it's not the weather that's trippy, perhaps it is the way that we perceive it that is indeed trippy." Then I thought, "Man, I should've just said, 'Yeah.'"

Anyway, enjoy the coffee!
The survey doesn't consider serial entrepreneurs. They just ask the age of the founder during the current company's incorporation. (For example, Andreessen would contribute an older data point with Ning even though he was a prototypical young guy success story.)

Also, I think the attention paid to the Ivy-League is unwarranted given other possible groupings in the data. If you look at the data in the paper, it looks like you can create a non-Ivy "Entrepreneurship" league comprised of the following schools:
MIT, Penn St, Stanford, Berkeley, Missouri, USC, Texas, and UVa. By my mental math, this 8 school league graduated just under 14% of the founders compared to the 8% for the 8 school Ivy-League. Regional effects were probably even more interesting, and you wonder what a SF area (Berkeley/Stanford) + Boston area (MIT/Harvard) grouping would look like compared to other regions.
Having a grandfather worth $20 million.

Seriously, don't kid yourself. It was a VERY DIFFERENT world back then. You graduated college and hoped you could find a job. There was no www and you needed 5 to 10 grand just for hardware and proprietary software. It's utterly stunning how easy it is to get started today compared to then.

(Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to the private Lakeside School which had a privately donated PDP-11 in 1968. Imagine being 13 years old and having access to the same computing power as Stanford University. The other 99.99% of us had to wait another 10 years for access to a computer.)
I wouldn't recommend wasting time with it. The only reason for me to recommend something to my friends is that I think the service or product is great and it would be a good fit for them. If the product is great I will recommend it even if I don't get paid. If it's not great I'm not going to trick my friends into using it just because I'm getting paid.

A refferal program could however convince someone to adverise your product to complete strangers on the web. But if that's the kind of exposure you want just go ahead and buy ads.
Software was a lot harder to write when I was in high school.

Also, entrepreneurship wasn't encouraged.
Here's a rule of the thumb I follow: abbreviating well-known phrases is ok, abbreviating words is not. I try not to be picky with other people's comments, but it's hard to take comments seriously when they use abbreviation unnecessarily.
Having 10,000 servers doesn't say 'skillful' to me.
The only real reason why it's harder for older people to make a startup is the high risk involved. Once you have a family you cannot mess around anymore.
ev: FWIW: Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR. Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though. Maybe that's why people are confused.

http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348

(Ironically, Twitter was down when I first tried to get the URL for this.)
But what's the goal? Getting into Harvard, Princeton, etc.? Because once they actually get in and reach their goal, they'll notice it's yet a long, long road to go.
Java would work extremely well.
Java works pretty well for highly scalable network backends actually.
Isn't it the responsibility of the wife to bring in a steady income?
someone tell this to david blaine
Employing people with the skillset to build 10,000 servers and having the money to do so are two separate things.
So what value does RDF give you exactly - especially compared to an easier to use format such as Atom or one of the non-DRF varieties of RSS?
He probably never tried the javascript editor of netbeans.

http://www.netbeans.org/download/flash/js/javascript_demo.ht...
This is sadly true; I really, really wish that the whole 'respect for nature' included things like 'not smoking'.
I disagree quite strongly that it was misleading. That was a direct quote, and it appeared to me he was making fun of the person who got up and stated "I see myself as a Semantic Web evangalist... what is Google doing about it." Norvig went on to say that Google was always watching what was happening in the space.
Facebook's system is also 1000x times more complicated than twitter's simple message passing system!
The point wasn't that 2 million is a huge number, but that 5.3% is just as huge. The millions are the eye-catching part, but this looks like an odd way of saying a risk-adjusted 5% return is insane, and 10% (the target for a '90s-era portfolio) is not twice but ten times as insane, in the long run.
Mindset and almost no open source + internet/Arpanet infrastructure. (Internet changes marketing and distribution to the advantage of young entrepreneurs.) Twenty years ago, kids didn't have a long list of successful role models who made it big while young. Now, that's all you see in the media.
true. I picture the scene at a user group where I myself would recommend a service or product to somebody and that recommendation is always strictly based on if I think it would be valuable for them given their situation. So I'm inclined to agree with you.

re: buying ads- We've experimented with google ads and stumbleupon so far (no print yet) and while we've seen plenty of traffic, there is a high educational component associated with our stuff for ads to be truly effective at this point (ie. visitor has to know the value of open source, be using virtualization, etc).

The good news is people who like JumpBox _love_ it because it removes so much pain. So the word is spreading, just not as fast as we'd like. We're evaluating the best way to "light the strategic fires" to accelerate adoption. Thanks for the advice.

sean
Ask YC: Recommended Podcasts and Video Shows?
To better manage my time, I'm trying to purge the South Parks and Aqua Teens from my life in favor of more "complex carbohydrate" material.

I think everyone could benefit from suggestions.

To start things off, I'm a big fan of WNYC's Radiolab podcast. Every one I've heard has been fascinating, and well-produced.
Back in the 90's, something similar was done at some of the telecom startups (Cascade, etc.).

I've personally made (and lost!) a fair bit of money in the stock market. Here is my "best advice" find a competent wealth manager. This may take some time, and it will likely be a 2-way interview (ie: they will be interviewing YOU as well, if their client select criteria is simply "write me a check", then move on).

Managing a decent sized lump of money, and your estate at large, is a rather complex endeavor. Proper wealth managers (I happen to go through someone at UBS) will have access to data streams and investments that you as an "end user" will simply not be able to reasonably gain access to.

I keep a bit of money on the side to "play with" in the stock market. But trying to manage 100% of my portfolio on my own would be (IMO, obviously) a less than optimal move.

Keep in mind you don't need to be "rich" either, often times you can open an account effectively with as little as $50K or $100K. Not chump change, but you don't need to be an *airre either.
Digg Rolls Out DataPortability Enhancements