skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nicely done. It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up against Blinksale. The price is reasonable when compared with Blinksale and the like, but you'll probably want to make this $59/mo unlimited or a high number of invoices, and create sub-plans that, for example, with $10 a month, you can send out x invoices.

Just some thoughts.

By the way, I've always wondered this. How do you reroute subdomain.corduroysite.com? DNS things? In other words - how do you recognize that subdomain.corduroysite.com is the account name? I haven't been able to figure this out, but it's probably because I've been on shared hosting forever :)
Since you can go to www.embought.com and search for products I would have to say your wrong. If I had only written a crawler I would have a nice collection of webpages on my hard drive and nothing more. Why are you so down on Ferret? what problems have you had with it? Just making an off the cuff statement without facts to back it up doesn't make you look very credible.
what? am I not allowed to hate pdf? I would say something useful on it, if the medium were more accessible. but instead I have to download it piece by piece. then merge it together to make a full book. Then I have the problem that pdfs just don't work the same as web pages, they are more like images.
> MADD is heading the opposition, .. arguing that the 21 law has saved more than 20,000 lives.

I don't think this is a relevant statistic. We could save more lives by completely banning alcohol. We could save even more by not allowing people to leave their house.

We could do these things, but we can't solve all our problems by making living life illegal. People die.
A few thoughts on how I deal with my stress
Wild card DNS entry directs all subdomian.site.com addresses to the same server, then determine the site based on the URL in code. That's how I do it.
What? Yer joking right? C'mon I've been putting my biz plan under my pillow every night waiting for the fairy!

Ok not really, I enjoyed the post, I think all of us start-up junkies have fallen into this trap a few times. My recommendation? Be ruthlessly hard on yourself and your product, if you can find flaws, users and money folks will too.
You need not to talk much. I have read somewhere that if you listen 90% of the time and talk 10% of the time, people will find you very interesting and socially adept. Life as an introvert can be quite hard.
They worked wonders for Michael Scott on "The Office."
That's probably because RTM builds their Paid plan from their Free plan, only offering marginal changes in features. 37signals focuses on the price and builds from there, offering a free version on the side.
thanks. judging from the comments here already, i think a lower-priced restricted plan is needed. i'll work on that tonight...

for subdomains, a simple DNS wildcard is used to route (everything).corduroysite.com to the same ip. a wildcard SSL certificate is also needed, which is quite expensive unfortunately.

the application then checks the hostname that was passed from the web server, finds the matching company record, and does its magic.
pg's median comment score is 4:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166110

More people read pg's comments, so he does get more upvotes than the same words would if coming from someone else. However, to say that you can mention pg in a comment to get more votes is neither true nor particularly funny.
> I feel that if you are old enough to go to war and risk your life, you are old enough to have a few beers.

Who cares about war? At 18 you are entitled to be an adult. I feel that if drinking alcohol in moderation doesn't have a detrimental effect on your health to the point that drinking should be illegal, it should be legal. I know other countries let people drink at 16, and they do fine. So I think we should get over our authoritarian complex and just lower the drinking age to 16. People drink anyway, why bother with all this crazy "show your papers" crap? Laws that people ignore should go away.
Funny. This is how I start a lot of my apps.

Example: I've just been tasked to manage a project at work. While thinking it through, I realize our intranet project tracking software (not MS project) sucks big time. So now I'm working on the new app :)
True, but it is good to see the mainstream media talking about Linux on the desktop. Vista is the best thing that ever happened to Linux :)
But, the best submissions would still exist. People would still vote for the best things. There would just be more rewards for those who submitted them.
That is semantics. By democratically I meant the same sense of the word democratic in the original comment.
The principal effect of karma here is not how it helps you judge your fit, but how it actively shapes the community/content. This effect was clearly visible on reddit as it was realized that the more sensational content was vastly more promoted in the reddit karma system.

So my question:

What is the value of high quality content ordering? Are the present ordering strategies on HN/reddit/[insert karma-based discovery site] good enough? Would the theoretically perfect ordering offer much more value than current systems?
Good design involves both style and substance. To completely understand it, I do think it's helpful to study substance in isolation from style.
I found that "How to Make Friends and Influence People" was really good but more suited to the workplace/building up business contacts.
Worked Over and Overworked
I think you're right. In the UK I would guess that the average teenager these days starts drinking with some regularity from the age of 15. Incidentally you can only begin driving at 17. I think this ordering works better as most of your irresponsible drinking is done without any option of driving.
The Problem With Free
Yes, that is indeed the current hypothesis. I am suggesting an alternate one might improve the quality of the submissions even more. And, to test this new hypothesis we must necessarily discard individual karma.
Easy, you just have to take time since you've joined and # of posts and comments into account:

I can see that you joined a year ago but didn't gain much karma. That means that you're an old timer, but a lurker, who doesn't post or comment often.

nickb and other top 10 karma users define this community and they lead by example.

I joined just recently, because I somebody posted a story about my startup and I had to comment. But since that I've been posting stuff that people care about.

All this is visible by looking at the profile of the user, without knowing exact posting history. This is huge time saver for everybody involved.
No problem. Your response is very limited to this case, while I thought you asked a more general question about why you might pass on a Microsoft offer.

Consider the edge cases, which is always a great idea.

If Microsoft offered them $1 today, clearly it is not appropriate to sell, despite Microsoft taking them time to be interested.

If they turn down the offer, and 6 months later grow to 10M users from 100K, clearly the terms should change.

Now your point seems to be that they won't change because Microsoft won't offer any terms again, ever. However, in my experience, this is not how M&A negotiations usually go. The door hardly ever closes for good. And it is quite common for people to walk away only to resume shortly thereafter (months) with different terms.

Now whether Microsoft decides to pursue it or not is a different story, and I don't know enough about the internal workings of Microsoft to know the likelihood of that.

As for other offers from other buyers, I don't see why not. I don't use Xobni now, but if it is a general solution that is generally applicable to email, that solution is presumably valuable to more than just Microsoft.
Hmmm..A better ordering system might improve things but I am not aware of any simple alternatives.
wouldn't mode or average be more useful?
Take a look at my startup, we're trying to push a different system for ranking stuff. I personally think there's a lot more value in it. But sometimes people prefer simple algorithms that are easier to understand, there's value in it too.
Good Company: Zingerman's
I survived 2001, and even IPO’d! Lessons for weathering a downturn.
tell us more
then we could have karma farming bots :P
A few months ago I went down the same road that you did because of my frustrations with social interactions. I read "How to make friends...", tried to talk to people on the street, tried social lubricants like alcohol and caffeine. To my dismay, nothing seemed to work or stick. Then I read the book "The Game" and started getting into the "pick up" scene. While I felt (and still do) uncomfortable with the sometimes negative views of women and social interactions, I have to say that many of the "whys" and "hows" that they teach have helped me a great deal. The one that has helped me the most is http://www.pickuppodcast.com.
>With Flickr, you have to be careful because there are also network effects because of the community,

That;s the brand right there. At least my definition of it.

> people use because they know it (which is one kind of branding), or because they want to be seen using it, as with your previous examples?

Point is, they're using it and not phoning a travel agent. They're getting something from it, that much is given.
I think motivating others to socializing with you would be more comfortable for you (as in let them do the work, so to speak), and that takes charisma. Didn't pg write that (paraphrasing) charisma is basically about liking people?

Disclaimer: I am quite socially inept, and don't even care . . .
A fridge should: know its foodstuff contents, recommend recipes based on user profiles, order food JIT using Amazon Grocery et al. A car needs wifi, should connect automatically to open channels and service user profiles; if there are n passengers, the car should help triangulate which media to play; if n profiles indicate it's lunchtime, the car should pull from Google (or its cache) suggestions for restaurants and directions. I can navigate Leopard by voice so why not keep a subset of its tools in my car, connected to open wifi and myriad API? People often have questions when they're driving: why not establish a Mechanical Turk presence, to augment onroad decisions? Exciting times ahead.
I apologize if some things were not clear. The situation described is hypothetical; while I appreciate everybody's concern about my giving away too much, the numbers here are made up, no deal has gone through, etc.

I think the 83(b) election is what I was looking for here. And yes, I'm definitely on the hunt for a new financial advisor/CPA, my current one is not up to snuff here. (The simple fact that they didn't mention the 83(b) possibility raises red flags.)

Asking the question here is simply to get some unfiltered, unbiased advice so that I have more to go off of when evaluating advisors, because yes, this is my first time taking on outside investment.

Where people are stating that the company value is essentially zero; if anybody has any links to throw out regarding how to value a company that has only taken a angel round, I would appreciate it.

The "equity is not income" argument; I've been told that my equity has to be given to me in exchange for something—just being the "founder" doesn't cut it. Since they're given to me in exchange for my services, it's considered taxable income.

Thanks for all the great feedback/conversation, I really appreciate it.
I'd agree with that concept, yes. 37s's "free" is just enough to have users say: "Well it doesn't suck, and I could really use that X feature".
Median score is not what's being discussed. It's quality vs score. Those individual comments that are of completely average quality and yet have phenomenal scores are the most telling.

Also very telling: score velocity over time. For example, if `joe` makes a good point with factual grounding and is getting lots of points. Then `bob` replies in disagreement and bob provides almost nothing to back up his position. Then suddenly the points reverse (joe goes negative and bob gets lots of points) just because bob said it it must be true and everyone blindly agreed. There are ways to measure this impulse response that would provide more concrete numerical measurements.

Median score... there are so many effects that would cause this to not relate to comment quality that that is pretty useless. For example, just commenting on more active topics can give you a much better median score.
My assumption is that reddit only really cares about keeping traffic up, while PG only cares about keeping quality up.

Having karma today allows PG to make changes tomorrow if he needed to take care of quality issues.
For most questions I think average would be more useful. For the question of whether people upvote pg thoughtlessly or not, median is useful. If more than half of pg's comments end up with a score of 4 or less, then we can conclude that his comments that end up with 50 or more points are a select subset.
Prediction: One fifth of mid- to high-end phones will run a Linux-based OS in 5 years
yes but it's too easy to get bad karma on slashdot. I have bad karma on there (1-2 bad comments) and now none see my posts... it's too hard to redeem.

plus their karma system seems less easy to use.
Another billing/invoice2.0 site? You picked a crowded market.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/09/online-business/

What is your competitive advantage? And from a customer perspective, what's unique about your app?
Well have you read "How to Make Friends and Influence People"?

If you haven't, the advice in it sums up to: be honest, respect others, respect yourself. That's really all there is to it.

The important thing about how to make more friends is to know how to BE a friend. Think about what you can offer other people, think about how to make the law of comparative advantage work for you.

I also highly recommend Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth" .. which will not directly talk about how to make friends, but will dig into the root causes of why you have issues with making friends.

Also I would say, one thing that helped me a lot, is I have recently been watching the latest season of "Beauty and the Geek." observe closely the character of "Joe," and instead of laughing at him or thinking how much better you are than him, think about how you are, how all of us are, so very much like him and so very much unwilling to admit it.
So you suggest that all people who do not post often enough do not fit into the community. And that posting often is the metric to drive? And because, in our current example, you have a higher karma per day, you belong to this community as opposed to me? But if nickb was to read this comment then you and I might both be trivial?

Finally, as a supposed 'lurker', it might serve me better not to login and just read submissions instead of participating by voting. Clearly, voting and commenting are also measures of 'being in a community'. So as lurkers stop logging in they cannot vote and then voting drops making the submission rankings either volatile or static.

I do not understand your line of reasoning.
I think he would get more if our usernames stood out more. but I can accept that I am being grossly inaccurate and exaggerating.
Every Mac software company works on this model.
Submission scores might be a statistically different distribution then comment scores. Also while median is better than mean, it may or may not be better than mode - difficult to tell without looking at the shape of the distribution.
Any informations if they're profitable?
well... you most likley need to contact an insurance agent for liability and omissions insurance. 1million is around 4-6k depending on where you are.

1099 can be dangerous for them since if you don't pay your taxes, the IRS can come after them, since, well you don't have the money and they, as a company, (likely) do.

See if you can make an LLC/scorp and just do corp-to-corp for them?
Okay, thanks. Much clearer :)
How many other chat/messaging competitors does campfire have?

I can guarantee you huddlechat was not the only one, so now that its gone campfire can go back to enjoying their monopoly of the chat/messaging market.
Campfire is a chat app. I don't think 37Signals sees it as a bulwark against competitors. If HuddleChat integrated with Basecamp and Highrise, maybe they'd take notice.

This issue obviously cuts both ways. 2 people at a tiny consulting shop can probably whip up most of what VC-funded 2.0 companies build too. And those consulting companies don't have boards of directors that will flip out and fire the management team when that happens.
For a long time at Rice University they, in not so certain terms, allowed underage students to drink in private parties on campus. While going there many of us thought this helped prevent drunk driving. Hearing about friends getting DWIs was very unusual, and generally limited to off campus students trying to drive themselves home when they shouldn't.

More recently, they've started to crack down on underage drinking, and now the police blotter fills a column in the campus newspaper with a series of "Driver arrested on suspicion of DWI." Hopefully this is a result of them cracking down on drinking and driving too, but I fear that to some extent it's because they are forcing the parties off campus.
And a possibility of acquisitions by gaming companies...

Interesting.
That's easy. No VC will fund a Mac app. It's just Darwinism.
Oops, you responded pretty quickly... I wasn't satisfied with my answer yet:-) In any case:

Branding definitely is not network effects, though. Branding is what your earlier examples are about, like Apple. Network effects can be present even if you're not really that excited about the company - like eBay or Paypal. Actually, in some cases, where there's some exclusivity in the brand, they may actually work in opposite directions. Network effects push you to 'go with the crowd', whereas, say, Apple says to 'think different' and get a computer that not everyone else has.

I think expedia is a good example in terms of advertising/marketing, where people use it because they get out there and sell it. So perhaps that's part of the answer to keeping a DHH style company out front - sell it lots and sell it well. That's not something 37signals has ever shied away from. However, something like expedia is also probably not likely to ever be completely commoditized/open sourced, so there's always going to be some scarcity there.
We sell to large enterprises almost exclusively. It's "different" than selling to consumers, but not "harder". Longer sales cycle, higher average deal size.
Simple: karma as a measure of your contributions to the community is not perfect, but it is much better than nothing at all. Do you know a better system?
Subdomain routing with Rails
GitHub and Lighthouse are two examples of unproven products. 37signals makes millions of dollars a year, which is what makes them credible.
The goal is not to start startups, the goal is to start companies, operating businesses. That "trend" has been happening for hundreds (if not thousands) of years and will continue after we're all gone, we need to gain some perspective.
I think the beauty of these types of sites is that we've probably haven't heard of many of them.
My company is charging $50 per month for 5-user licenses for Exponent. You can see what it offers at: http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent
What makes you say they're proven or unproven? They've each got hundreds of users and I can say that they each have at least one paying customer (my company).
That is not a response to the original chain of thought. Nonetheless, karma might be an unnecessary tool for the necessary effect.

Do you know a better system?

Yes, I am suggesting an alternate mechanism which uses only voting on submissions and comments while discarding individual karma.
down arrows are the plus.
I wonder if it asserts or refutes this claim, couples with similar attributes will get hitched.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/view/1831130?seq=3
On the plus side, they only have to deliver something as good as XP to be considered a success. :)
It would be easy for the service to reject port 80 but allow the port used by the version-control system.

More difficult would be allowing access to programming documentation on the web while rejecting time-wasting web sites. One idea is to reject any web page that has changed in the last 24 hours on the theory that the time-wasting sites are constantly changing (are topical) whereas the sites you need to do your work are not. (I do not know if it possible programatically to determine when a page last changed.)
I live in Madison, and I did a startup here (with two co-founders) back in '99. I ended up paying ~$20k (my share of the debt, with interest) on an idea that went nowhere (and we developed our own software - it would have been much, much more expensive if we tried to pay someone else to do it).

So don't pay to do it! Your idea is most likely not right anyway. Do you really want to erase $30k to make it obvious?

If you really think you have a great idea, do this as a summer project (learn to program if you need to). Just don't borrow or spend much money on it. If people might eventually pay to use your thing, it won't matter that your implementation is rough at first.
That's hardly the case. Anything less than around $800 per year, which is what the average CPA charges to do a small corporation's 1120 or 1120S tax return, is reasonable. That equates to $66.67 per month. When you start to consider how much time and hassle a good accounting package can save, the price could even be higher while still providing value.

Accounting usually gets ignored in startup environments, but it's really crucial to have a grip on things. Otherwise, who knows...you might end up like Bear Stearns. Or Enron.
http://vortices.appjet.net has a direct vote up/down on users as opposed to cumulative karma.
Maybe, maybe not. As discussed here before, many hacker types don't tend to think outside of a very limited domain of problems very well, leaving lots of potentially useful programs unwritten.
This doesn't deserve to be at -5. Let's leave that kind of trashing of comments to other sites, unless it's something blatantly trollish.
Here's a product that I want to buy, that I don't want to build: I want a small, waterproof (or at least water-resistant) audio device that has a single speaker and three (or so) buttons. Pressing the first button plays a long audio file of hurricane and storm noises. The second button plays a long audio file of pirate battles. The third button plays a long audio file of WWII submarine combat sounds. The audio quality has to be very good. I'll pay up to $20-$25 bucks for this without thinking twice.

Why? Tubby time for the kids! Of course, I could set up something myself, but I'm too lazy.

Future iterations could include other similar devices (e.g., one with space sounds), or a "fourth button" that allowed custom sounds to be downloaded.
Hundreds of users, you say!
Clocking IT
Speaking of 37 signals... this app looked pretty cool to me.
i guess i should start by saying i didn't pick the market. i started writing this application years ago to run my own software development business because i was unhappy with quickbooks, and i've been using corduroy as my sole billing system ever since. i just recently added a few features and launched it as a hosted service because of some outside interest in it.

looking over that list of accounting packages, nearly all of them are just invoicing and/or project management applications. corduroy adds check writing, online banking integration and transaction history, as well as customer login support.
leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short,

Short != imperfect. It's not some flaw. I'm perfect the way God made me, and the author can eat my shorts.
No sound and not really video anyway.