skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if you are doing it the second time around, and are already rich from the first time? Is it still painful, and will people still spend as much time on it? Somehow I can not imagine they would. Seems to me the first time is painful because of the pressure: financial worries, the worry to be a failure in life, stuff like that. Would not be so much the case if you already made it?

Also, isn't it amusing how such links are inevitable called "what they don't tell you about..." rather than simply "It is painful to do a startup"?
Some local tribes think that orangutans are smart, just pretend to be dumb so they can slack off and skip work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_zero
So platform independent it doesn't work on devices such as iPhones. ;-)

I say add an extra link or make it a cookie preference, so I can have different settings depending on where I am.
"How do salt/sugar solve dehydration?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy
one opportunity would be fixing ERAU's website...
Head over to http://shoutcast.com/ and look up "ambient" "downtempo" "breakbeat" or "chillout".
London Broil Recipe
Recipe for london broil
Unless you're already a Python whizz, "Python Essential Reference" is a must.

I found poking around inside Satchmo incredibly helpful for finding quality code examples. (http://www.satchmoproject.com/).

Other than that, just do the tutorial on the djangoproject site, and subscribe to the django-users group on google groups.

have fun!

Rich

edit: Also there's a feed called the django aggregator. A little noisy at times, but worth scanning through couple of days: http://www.djangoproject.com/community/
No programmers toolbox is complete without good knowledge of a simple, fast and dirty scripting language. In the past it would have been perl, nowadays it's more likely to be python or ruby.

That said, I really appreciate the benetfits of knowing at least how to read C, lisp, erlang and haskell. :P
Simple: intersperse ads with results and make it obvious which are the ads.
lol. me and my friends are working on something similar to this. beta should be available before august :P
I like to listen to Terence McKenna lectures when I want to fall asleep.
You need to learn Javascript before you learn AJAX. AJAX is really a simple set of method calls, the harder part is really understanding DOM manipulation, event handling, etc.

I highly recommend the Sitepoint books -- "Simply Javascript" and "The Art and Science of Javascript." Between these two books, you get a very step-by-step, approachable tutorial of the basics of what you need to start out with.

They teach you in framework-agnostic way, which is important because you want to be able to write JS without relying heavily on any one framework. In fact, one of the books goes into detail teaching you HOW some frameworks work their magic. It's fascinating.

Good luck!
How to optimize your E-Commerce website
Ask HN: Web API's That Allow Commercial Usage?
I was wondering if anyone know of any web api's out there that allow for commercial usage. I cannot seem to find a single api, rss feed, data source, or anything for that matter, that allows for commercial usage. I'm also wondering how all of these new websites that utilize rss feeds and other data sources make, or plan to make, money. And of course, looking for free ones.

Thanks..
Let me get this straight: you are about to start as an undergrad, and you are thinking about writing textbooks?

Holy hubris, Batman!
Which do you think is most important: the right market, the right product, or the right team?
This is very old - firebox.com started in 1998 and went on to become the 13th fastest growing privately owned UK company in 2004 when they achieved annual sales of £4.4 million and 150% pa growth (www.fasttrack.co.uk).
Good point; I think he meant "square one" instead of "ground zero"

Oh... and when he's done he'll be on "cloud nine".

English is weird.
I think that the use of tools is interesting to hackers. Startups and hackers invent new tools to make life easier; this article shows another species doing the same thing.

Anyway, I found the "article" (really just a picture with a few words) interesting.
And if you don't like Adobe, for Windows there's Foxit Reader, and for Linux there's Evince.

I can't vouch for Foxit, but viewing PDFs through Evince is also far more efficient in terms of processor usage, especially since flash seems to like to take up all the cycles it can get.
The best way to learn is by example. This is a good way to start. http://www.7days7apps.com/

Get the code here using svn:

svn checkout http://7days7apps.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ 7days7apps-read-only
So, Mint is probably way undervalued and nearly all of the others are way (way way way! holy crap!) overvalued. Billions for Habbo and Linden? Seriously? 400mil for Slide?

But, I got a chuckle out of Ning's valuation, given that they raised roughly the same amount about a week ago...so they literally have as much cash on hand as Alley Insider has valued them at. So, the business is worthless in their eyes. Interesting. (I think the valuation of Ning during that round of financing was wildly out of whack, but it's certainly worth something.)
All languages are weird, but pointing out a fairly substantial error is not a bad thing; unless it's done in a mean spirited way.
Hi all,
I wrote that article because I'm experiencing few things that I wanted to share. I'm working on starting a startup, handling all marriage and day job responsibilities. I find it very challenging, but I still push myself because it's my character flaw - that I want to start a startup. To make this happen, I'm also looking for building a founding team. For that, I'm talking to few people who shared their interest of starting a startup.

Whenever I talk to some young professional, the most common observation I have seen is - almost everyone wants to start a startup, literally almost everyone. But the fact is - they just don't know what it takes to make it work -- the insane hard work at initial stages. They just talk about success stories, but when it comes to put the time and build stuff, they disappear. And that's how I got inspired to share this thought on my blog.

I am not saying we should take that advice seriously and stop working on our dreams. That advice was more for those people who "think" they want to start a startup, but probably don't understand the reality to make it happen.

-Aditya (Adeologue.com)
Foxit is great, it feels much more like a Linux PDF reader than Adobe's reader. The editor is also good, it lets you edit PDFs at a relatively low level.
A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search
forgot to mention..excluding those 'eye-candy' api's like google maps and charts, etc
I like the post and the replies. Hacker News seems to be a really good forum for inquiries of this nature.

But what on earth is "Damaged by Java" supposed to convey? I guess you find Python with Django to suit your particular needs better than Java, no reason to play down the latter though.
improve Scribd so it doesn't mangle pdfs.
I haven't found a UI I liked that wasn't in a text editor.
Also, if you want to keep up with the Django community and changes to Django code, I would recommend the "This Week in Django" podcast.

Read more about it in Michael Triers blog at http://blog.michaeltrier.com/
Are all the good domains taken?
Are there any good desirable domain names left? Or are they all taken?

AFAIK, 3 and 4 letter domains are all gone, but are there any good 5 or 6 letter domains left? Have you found them?
What did you decide not to do in order to focus on your startup?

When did the business model become clear for your business?
I really like Tomboy. It's super simple and has a lot of great features.
Our idea of success is all messed up
"If you want to get smart - get doing." Code, code as much as you can and try and sway off the beaten path. My first project led me into middleware, user profiles and custom fields. I would also suggest that you rather use trunk than the 0.96 release.

Also, because no one has mentioned it before: http://djangobook.com/
How much to pay your startup lawyer
We found Chase in Canada (I can't speak for them in the US) to be quite lacking in responsiveness. I was pretty surprised about it actually.

We're going with Optimal Payments up here (www.optimalpayments.ca), who have been very responsive, amazingly helpful, and have really good rates for Canada too :)
Fred Wilson Effect: inadvertent social dividend of an open conversation
I never found this "correct" way to quit the game, but learned that just pressing Alt-F4 in any of those screens does the trick.
Lessons from the first job I ever quit
Stuffed Peppers Recipe
Recipe for stuffed peppers
Pmarca: If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo
This is a "me too" blog post echoing DHH's sentiments, but it is always useful to see the model work for more people.

Their example re: dropsend and how they're turning a $200k profit with no additional time or effort is impressive.
Ning raised $60 million, at a pre-money of $500 million, so the post-money valuation of $560 million on Alley Insider is accurate.
I use this: http://www.pdf995.com/

Lets me "print" a PDF to a file - and that's how I converted it to something I can save on my HD and read at my leisure when I'm not online, e.g. when I'm on a plane trip.

This "solution" would not be necessary, however, if scribd and ipaper would go away and never cause any more pain on this planet. I despise ipaper. What were they thinking?
www.nameboy.com is useful.

Also, searchyc.com can yield lots of threads re: how to find more domains.
Is this your opinion, or do you have evidence of this (for example, have you asked DK about this?)?
That is so wrong in so ,so many ways...This is one of the misguiding articles I have ever seen and I'm beeing easy on the article now...

sell , design and then make the product? come on...
Bloggers offer glimpse of uncensored Cuba
Instead of 'ajax' which doesn't really exist, I'd recommend learning javascript. Don't start with a framework or library, just learn the nuts and bolts of the language.

The incompatibilities between browsers are really really over-hyped, so I'd say using a library isn't worth it. At least until you have a solid understanding of all things javascript.
What??? That makes absolutely no sense. Javascript works just fine in IE.
It's really not. Compatibility issues are seriously way way over-hyped.
Is Pandora like last.fm? It's US only so I can't access it.
It's choosing the lesser of two Adobe evils. I'll take Flash over Acrobat Reader any second.
Ah, I stand corrected (by nearly an order of magnitude). That makes a lot more sense than the numbers I had running around in my head.
Check out the "Dream Factory" at http://www.hbr1.com/
Hi Ed,

I just emailed you my environment info.

I was referring to bookmarking the page in my browser favorites.

Right. No text data. Personally, I find a text version of a document to be indispensable.

I actually waited for the download to complete, and was still unable to print. First time I have ever had that problem.

What would be wrong with ditching iPaper altogether? Personally, I would convert the document to HTML, and provide links to download or view both the .pdf version as well as a plain vanilla text version.

That is just me though. I do appreciate your post however.

Maurice
http://rajshekhar.net/blog/archives/85-Rasmus-30-second-AJAX...
Not all the good ones are gone, but it's certainly getting increasingly hard to find a sensible domain name. What worked for me recently is although I couldn't find a domain name that wasn't taken, I found a good one that was registered but isn't in use, then used the coarse expedient of offering the owner a few hundred quid for it.

My main concern is that most of the domains are ending up owned by a very few individuals concerned only with slapping cheap advertising on them. I refuse to attempt to buy domains from these bottom feeders, and I would suggest that everyone else do likewise. However, it's an increasing problem that's going to require either the advertising industry or ICANN to crack down on one of these days.
It takes very little time to learn how to do things in Django but it does take a long time to learn how to do them the best way.

Don't worry when you start about doing them the best way. Its often better to make the mistakes (while still exploring) and your next app will just be that much better.

Good luck and great choice :)!
Dessert Recipes
Recipes for dessert
Mr. Yuk Says Project Roadmaps Are Poisonous
I find this one handy: http://www.bustaname.com/
off topic, but how do you create a poll?
If you're in the valley, get an intro to a fee-deferred lawyer...
Wow, that's a lot of Amazon links.
Congratulations and welcome to the world of startups. What kind of thing that people want are you planning on making?
Lisp machines
Atta Go, Twitter!
Another option is that the Scribd guys add the feature to download the PDF file.
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll but you need more than 200 karma points, see http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html 1 Mar.
I think there are a fair amount of 5 letter domains out there yet. (here are the few 5-6 I've registered: kleevr.com, kratr.com, rabyt.com, exphi.com, excyt.com, xcytr.com, zroone.com, onezro.com, grabyt.com)

Whether these qualify as 'good domains' might be in the eye of the beholder, but I like them and have pretty good ideas sketched up for most of them.
This one is good for brainstorming ideas with immediate feedback: http://instantdomainsearch.com/
This seems to reinforce pg's latest essay, "Be Good" http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

3 of the top 5 seem to fall into the category of companies that act like charities: Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Mozilla.
We used SecureTrading for one of our businesses. Their documentation was a bit byzantine at first (heavy on the technical info, but light on the actual business process that one needs to follow). However, I can really warmly recommend them because they offer good prices and excellent tech support when you're in trouble (and when your payment gateway is in trouble, you really want good support!)

Daniel
It's blatantly a standard Flash template from TemplateMonster, fyi.

Those are good to throw something together quickly with a professional appearance to it, but I would never run a proper business on a TemplateMonster template...

Daniel
Sorry to disappoint, I'm actually going to be another employee, but on a small team in an exciting industry, making CGI movies :)
5-letter doesn't necessarily mean good. For instance, the 5-letter domains mentioned by kleevr in another post (kleevr.com, kratr.com, rabyt.com, exphi.com, excyt.com, xcytr.com, zroone.com, onezro.com, grabyt.com) might be nice and geeky, but good luck trying to get someone to remember them.

There's plenty of good stuff in 6/7-letters. I recently registered flails.org for an open-source project, and my latest business runs on Woobius.com. Both are clear and easy to remember (and, we reckon, not lame).

Daniel
+1 for content negotiation. Extension-less URLs are just plain sexy.
If you give advice about anecdotal cases, you should package it with advice about how to make that exception situation arise again.

If you don't know why it went well despite poor odds, don't give advice :-P
There are places like Namejet you can use to know when "good" names are expiring also.

Personally, I think that people give too much merit to the short domain names. There is some value to a 4-6 letter domain name, but it's not the be-all/end-all.
But not in the same proportion as software engineers :-) it's 10% vs 60% (imho). Also, a crap dentist might not be great, but he's not actually going to rip all your teeth out by mistake while taking an x-ray. The dentistry exams and associations do guarantee at least a baseline level of competence, which is what we're trying to establish here.
From the sound of it the NAS was trying to legislate greatness rather than competence. I'd agree that you can't legislate greatness, but you can definitely legislate competence, so long as you set the bar at a reasonable level.
I don't think this is a "fairly substantial" error. I understood what he meant, and I wasn't offended... so it's just a slight problem (like forgetting a comma, or using "affect" instead of "effect").
Yes - until we get an internet wide refactoring option:

"Apply this change to the entire freaking internet?" y/N>
The article would immediately be 30% better if you removed all those inane revelations about how you're a sinner and need to worship God more. If you want to write tech articles, write tech articles, not religious diatribes.

Daniel
It isn't arbitrary at all. I think people should know a compiled language (procedural), a scripting language, a numerical computing language (w/ vectorized notation), and a functional language.

I think its completely excessive for the average programmer to know Haskell AND Erlang AND Prolog AND Smalltalk. Do you think people should know all of those? I see advantages to learning each, but I think my list would take the average person a bit further.
There are probably still 4 letter domain names in .us (and friends). I got jrock.us a few years ago -- nice-n-short :)
Raw Food Diet
What the raw food diet is
Looks like they got overwhelmed:
"Due to extreme popularity we are experiencing unexpectedly high traffic. This special will not be available till tomorrow morning (9 AM PST). If you would like to sign up for accounts starting at 99 Cents please sign up here."
A lot of them are gone, which is what you get when you make the cost of registering a domain pretty much free. IMHO it'd be far better to make the cost of registering a domain a few hundred dollars a year.

As it is you can just register domains, slap advertising on them, and you make a slow profit.
Interview with Donald Knuth (Emacs and Ubuntu user)
A great option is to look at expiring names for domains being dropped because domainers couldn't monetize them.

A good tool is this, look at the tdnam expiring list: http://www.freshdrop.net/expiring_names.php

Just filter out everything except .com, and have a scan through. Hundreds of names drop each day. Minimum cost is $10 + reg fee, which is another $10 per year.

Right now I can see these dropping today, with no takers yet:

waffly.com
zanze.com
upbreak.com
tibbu.com
serific.com
foxtrots.com
frankable.com
measurably.com

It's a gold mine!

Rich
Is it a 'diatribe' simply because it mentions God, or is something about the way I've gone about it? Any tips on how I could make the same points in a less inane way?
How many iterations took it from the initial idea to the current product? How did you get your first customers?
I think domains themselves will be old news before too long anyways. I think OpenDNS is working on some cool ideas in the area.

I bought a domain like CarTrust.com for about $400, wanted to build a site to fix the 'how to find a good mechanic' problem, but recently realized car care wasn't a core passion of mine, so I passed the domain on to someone else. I'd spend at least two weeks playing on registrars before checking out the auctions, because if you work at it long enough I'm positive you'll find something you like that's unregistered.
Extension-less URLs are great, but I'm not a fan of content negotiation. I like to be able to copy and paste a URL to someone and know that they are going to retrieve the same piece of content as I did. I don't like language negotiation for the same reason - if someone finds a typo on my French language site and sends me a link to the page but I see it in English I won't know what they're talking about.
Heaps of domains left.

Your ideal domain
+ an extra short common word at the end of it: tip, now, it, ify, zone, space, net, repeat word
+ .com
Nearly Infinite
The sentence I liked most: "Just knowing what to search for is now as difficult as the search itself."
But for one successful project that he mentions (Dropsend) there are 2 projects of his that have 'failed':
- the webapp Amigo -- https://myaccount.heyamigo.net/serviceDown.html -- that he even marketed starting a blog about its build and there was even a quote of O'Reilly talking about an untaped market.. and it's gone
- a few years back Ryan also built a subscription based online project manager, before 37Signals launched their Basecamp, and it's no longer around.

Bottom line: he says you can do it to, and he's right, but you have to really know your target market at the start (which he did with targeting Dropsend to the designer/agency market, that he knew well due to his work on BD4D) and have contacts in it to spread the word (at the start, eventually your client demographic expands)... but it isn't as easy as he makes it seem on a blog post based on one of his successes, when that formula didn't work out well for his other projects.
<tongueincheek>Yeah, that would be horrible if people spent their time on a creative endeavor with no real expectation of pay. I will immediately remove Linux, Firefox, Emacs, etc in favor of proprietary products so I can feel warm and fuzzy about everyone getting paid for everything they do.</tongueincheek>

People choose to participate in these contests choose to. They're not forced to, and designers with better economic options won't participate. Just like most of the people here look down on rentacoder, elance, etc because we have better options, while there are plenty of programmers who use those sites to get experience, a little cash, etc.

It's a business, and it gets customers, so it can't be all bad.
Citizen Journalists and Responsibility
Thesis Writing
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Best place to start would be to read the free online book written by the authors of Django.

http://djangobook.com

I would also recommend "Python Pocket Reference" (3rd Edition) by O'Reilly. It really helped me get up to speed with Python in a short amount of time.

Good Luck.
Pretty much all of the generic, single/double words and three character domains are gone (and the people who own them are making $$$), but I've still found some good ones by adding two words together and being creative. It's just a little harder today than it was in 1999.
I think the article isn't serious. It's obviously meant as a joke. So lighten up guys :)
Attention Is Migrating to FriendFeed
Speaking as someone who's not especially keen on religions (particularly christianity), I found that as I read the article, I kept stumbling out of reasonably interesting statements about your job and your experience of it, into bible quotes or other declarations of sin. It was fairly hard to parse out the actually interesting bits.

Another way that this jarred was that the software development and the christian points you were making were mostly unrelated. If you really want to write a blog about "christian software development", then you could focus on the relationships between your chosen religion and software development, and draw parallels between the two. This is different from just intermingling the two. If you actually drew out the parallels (e.g. "Why I enjoyed this job more because I'm a Christian"), I might disagree with you but I wouldn't feel like the article keeps jumping from foot to foot.

Also, the "I'm a sinner unworthy of God" theme is practically a cliché, so even from the perspective of an article about christianity, the article didn't really add much new.

Hope this helps.

Daniel
There may be no 4 letter, but there are still lots of 4 digit [a-z0-9-] .com domain names. Maybe not ones that you want, but they're there.

example: i48u.com, o440.com, u0-0.com, etc...
"The files are kept forever as long as they are being downloaded".

Do they say how long after the last download the files are kept? Else they could always free up some disc space by removing the least recently downloaded files.