skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "You don't have to appeal to everyone."

I thought that idea was one of the highlights of the presentation. If you can sell 400 accounts at 40 USD a month, you're going to live very comfortably. If you can't find a market niche where 400 people would be willing to pay 40$ (or 4000 people pay 4$), you might need to reconsider your idea.

This was a big point in the Italian restaurant analogy as well. You don't have to redefine Italian cuisine, you just have to build a restaurant far enough away from the other guys and make good enough food (among other things) to attract a large enough customer base to meet your goals.
don't. people are generally least interesting in casual, social situations. for example, most of the people in this thread have said reasonably interesting, intelligent ideas. but at a bar they'd say worse things.
The Now Defunct Museum
One thing I've realized personally about why good works: when you are evil, you can only fool those people who are less intelligent than you. You can bully only those people who are weaker than you. If you are very smart or very strong, that could be a lot of people, and you can benefit a lot, and you are necessarily setting a hard limit on the number of people who are willing to help you. When you are good, when you give more than you receive, the opposite is true. You gain the aid of those who are smarter and stronger than you, others who "get it" and who have chosen to commit to the "cooperate" branch of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
I wish people in the Rails (and Django) community would release modules instead of blog posts. A plugin is easy to maintain. Code that you cut-n-paste from teh intartubes is a nightmare to maintain. If you want to write literate code and make it a blog post, that's fine, but please make the actual meat available in a machine readable form (so the computer can manage updates, instead of you googling for a fix).

Also, they need some sort of solution to the monkey patching problem. Perhaps emacs-style hooks.

It's hard to call something an "enterprise solution" when it's a bunch of code cut-n-paste from blogs, mixed in with possibly-conflicting modifications to the core.
Why the downmode? Our product is indirectly creating an environment for property managers to list individual units, and because of the design of the system, you have to be using our property management software to list on our listing engine. Reducing possible fraud if not eliminating it all together.

Our listing engine will not provide the same listings you see in forrent.com, rent.com and apartments.com, which is primarily apartment complexes. Our goal is to provide a wide variety of rental listings more similar to craigslist. Listings that normally would not find themselves on the above mentioned sites due to the magnitude of cost that is required to list there.

For this I get downmoded :(

Sincerely,
Christopher Mancini
Don't forget Quickbooks - it is by far the most dominant player.

For most small biz owners, being online is not important, so a locally installed QuickBooks is good enough. Even if web access is required, Intuit can put Quickbooks online easily just like they put TurboTax online.
looks cool, but they are missing step #2. Set a price
Xobni - a waste of money
Gee, and people wonder why UK startups hate the VCs over there.
A better approach is to have excellent public transportation. Then people can get around without driving everywhere. Japan has a business culture predicated on drinking, but they have trains and mini-hotel rooms in case you miss them.
Honestly, I just removed reddit from my bookmarks toolbar, and make a conscious effort to not go there. That has made me much more productive even during "downtime". The side effect is that I post here more, but at least there is the lock out feature if I notice I'm wasting too much time here ;)
Collapse comment trees.
how about lower the age to 10, so people get used to drinking long before they can drive?
not having used them... if the sms involves cell phones it might be because of outrageous sms costs for cell phones.
States did that because of federal pressure, denying them federal dollars if they didn't. It was unilateral.
They're doing it for free/fun/advertising, apparently. Might not be sustainable in the long term, but you can always get the source code for it and run it yourself.
It's time to legalize all drugs, with an age of zero.
Browser history sniffing to determine the user's IDP will be a big step; is anyone from Clickpass or JainRain listening?
okay smartiepants... point taken, but organizing those is lame.
I think the issue is more with the consumers than the producers.

Instead of using the code you find on the blogs as copy and paste modules to add functionality to your software use it as an example of how to use a certain technique then implement that technique in your software.

Lego applications rarely end up being what the consumer actually wants despite having all the required functionality because general solutions are hard to map to specific requirements.
Ask PG: Can we have a top level link to our saved (upvoted) articles
It is often near impossible to find useful links back after a few days.

Reddit has a feature where you can save a link. I just found out we can do the same in HN, but it's buried in a user's settings. Can we add this link to the top level navigation next to the username.

I might be the only one but bookmarking http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=spif in my browser feels like a bad hack.
Hacking with passion towards a great idea will see that idea to fruition, but passion for your field of work will keep you go going indefinitely.
Facebook demeans the value of real relationships.
Did you just say /b/ instead of Hacker News? Those are like as extreme as you can get on the two ends of the spectrum.
In related news, Slysoft (which cracks Blu-ray for profit) got tired of people reverse-engineering their cracks and distributing them for free, so they moved to a SaaS model where apparently all the cracking happens on a server. This should make life a bit more difficult for Macrovision.
This change will come around 10 years too late :)
If your are targeting discontent Quickbooks users, then it will be very difficult battle. The cost of switching is very high, and most of the quickbooks users are not web savvy, they will cling to what they are used unless Intuit really screws them up. I don't think it's likely to happen because Intuit is a very strong company - Microsoft tried very hard to get them but failed.

I do think you might have a chance to target the web startups, like the users of YC news. But these companies are cheap, so you may need to give me at least 1-year free trial so that I can see your app carry me through a tax year. Then I wouldn't mind $59 a month. But then, most web startups die in a few years. Well, it's just tough.
2x50,000 + 2x15,000 btw. Parser ate my stars. How do we escape this? backslash star?
Thanks, this was exactly was I was looking for with my app.
Thats interesting. We (Clickpass) are looking at making it easier to choose alternative IDPs. Will see if BHS fits in, although its name suggests privacy violation which it clearly is not :)
Disruptive? Really?
I am fascinated with everyone's response to DHH.

Maybe it's because I am a bit older. I've been working in industry for 20 years. The subscription model and the idea of going after Fortune 5 million businesses, is from my view, the standard business approach.

It's what you do when you don't have an idea that you are excited about. He's right that most ideas won't work but so what. From my view, it's not about the success, it's about the effort and the process. If you find an idea that you are passionate about, you give it your all and see what happens.

Still, I think that DHH really connected with the audience. When I questioned DHH at the conference, he said that the approach he outlined is actually the approach he's taken. So, it is very interesting that this approach resulted in something as revolutionary as Rails.
I couldn't agree more. During Y Combinator, there were two guys sitting behind me. They said something along the lines of "Not to be sterotypical but I am suspicious of any girls here. They're probably just project managers and not really hackers."

Not a very "social" tactical move to do when there were about two girls around the area who heard his comment and some hackers wonder why girls don't talk to them.
Some great answers on here! Just wanted to give a contrary view though..

I tried becoming more "socially adept" for quite a while, but even though I can put on a pretty lively appearance on the outside, it's just not me. I'm an introvert and I accept that.

One of the best bits of advice I've heard recently is to "focus on strengths, not weaknesses." That is, there's no point hammering away improving at things you're bad at, and ending up mediocre at everything, if you can focus on the things you already kick ass at and become world class!

Most people who are socially inept tend only to be so with the public or people who are not considered close to them. Take Stanley Kubrick. He got a reputation for being an appallingly bad socializer, yet most of his closest contacts talk about what a friendly and amazing person he was.

So.. enough people are socially awkward, or even downright grating, but are or were world class in their field. These people should be an inspiration. Don't hammer away at making yourself a socially popular person if it takes energy away from being kickass.. because if you're kickass, you don't need many social skills.
How SimpleDB Differs from a RDBMS
For anyone who missed it, there was a beautiful exposition written on the quagmire that is mathematics education in the United States:

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
It does. He seems to be implying that small companies (or companies with modest expectations) cannot be considered "startups" when, in fact, that's nearly always what they are.
Here's an example of how the context-freeness of the web can work against you. I've never seen this guy's blog before. The headline was just interesting enough to get above my click threshold. But when I got to the post, all I noticed was how badly written it is:

perhaps it was quickly than trying to replicate

some Microsoft underlying thinks that they will make the old boss happy

If I knew the writer to be a frequent source of good insights, this wouldn't have much effect. But I don't, so it does.
don't cop out by saying you didn't pick the market. when you release a targetted service and charge for it, you're picking a market. embrace it though. your market may not be quickbooks users. so say, "We're building a better online accounting service for small companies that don't need to overhead and learning curve of Quickbooks and need more than just invoicing." that middle ground is your market.
I agree, there is a complete disconnect between what industry wants and what is taught at engineering school. 5 years down the line, most people can't recognize the equations used in school.
I didn't care about social aspect at all, there were two absolutely crucial features in Xobni that I absolutely loved:

1. Ability to instantly see all attachments sent by a given person.

2. Outlook's own search is unusable, I never mastered it, Xobni was a godsend.

Take any product: some people like it and some won't. I liked Xobni and this guy didn't. God knows why, perhaps he didn't have enough attachments or didn't bother to search anything because of his phenomenal memory or something :)))
I agree that he's wrong. So vote him to -1. No need to keep going after that.
Just on the Ferret side of things, it does have a pretty bad reputation in some circles. Google for "ferret "corrupted index"" .. there are 59 results alone just for that limited query.

I don't use Ferret myself (I tried it once; it seemed pretty good) but I'm very well read in the Ruby community (I run Ruby Inside and RubyFlow) and I've seen more than enough people saying bad things about Ferret, how it corrupted their indexes, concurrency issues, and what not, to personally avoid it. Solr and Sphinx seem to get a far better rap.

..

I should add that I had a play with your site after reading your article, and it's pretty good. There's a lot of trash out there in this field and you've pulled together a good site. Kudos.
This won't do your tax returns.
Hundreds of users, you say!

Oh, the sarcasm! Perhaps if you'd actually watched the talk before commenting on it, you'd have gotten the point and wouldn't be so unknowingly ironic. ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168378
You should really check out the Catalyst framework for Perl if you want a system that allows you to create plugins that augment and add functionality in a modular and maintainable way.

Here's a good example of a Catalyst plugin, so you can see how straightforward it is: http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Catalyst-Plugin-Unicode-0.8...
AWS, AppEngine and the future of data
Startup School, DHH, and the Missing Marketing Piece
This isn't actually a 'vc' in the UK who has any standing either
Google's New Social Network: iGoogle
Note, he used it on a home machine using his webmail, not his work email. Xobni seems much more useful for professional email than the email account you use for your amazon account and emailing your parents.
The True Genius (and Danger) of Google App Engine
From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X
Open Source Software Saved Customers $60 Billion
aaronsw. you're one person I'd have expected to be mentioned in this essay. :-P
But just observing isn't enough; it can be tempting to use observing as an excuse not to practice and talk.
I care some, but not as much as I once did.
So true. I spent years reading about entrepreneurship and organizing conferences about entrepreneurship, and that was all just missing the point.

Just create something and put it out in the world -- everything else is secondary.
he mentioned posting an article related to PG, not just comments
Picking Apart Logical Fallacies - PG's "How to Disagree" in video (sortof)
"Good" basically reduces to "do what your users want".

To be fair, PG makes the same connection in the essay, albeit in the opposite direction: "Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money. What you've got is a description of a charity." And charity = good.

Arguably, tobacco companies make something people really, really want, but they do not fit the definition of charity or good, probably because while people really want tobacco, it's not in their long-term interests. In other words, there's a gap between what people want and what they should want, and the tobacco companies exploit this gap. So PG's description fits more things than just charities -- and he really doesn't argue otherwise; he simply chooses not to consider it in the essay.

There have been plenty of successful startups that similarly satisfy "Make something people want" but are of questionable benefit to their users' long-term interests: gambling, adult sites, online games, etc. Whether or not these endeavors constitute "evil" is, of course, a value judgment and depends on what you consider a long-term benefit. (The very idea that "good" and "evil" could be phrased in terms of short- and long-term benefits is interesting...)
Can you share any more?
You do realize that you just linked to a module I maintain, right :)

FWIW, Catalyst plugins have a lot of problems, but they have also proven useful to people trying to extend the framework. 99% of the time, people can get a maintainable chunk of code into their application without having to monkey patch or change the core. That is a Good Thing, but we can do better :)

Catalyst 5.8 will use Moose roles for plugins, so the safety problems of mixins should go away. The next problem to solve is how to reuse cross-sections of applications (models, views, controllers, templates, etc.) in a clean manner. I'm experimenting with Bread::Board (IoC) in a new framework called Kiiteh. If Kiiteh pans out, it will be Catalyst 5.9.
Let me play devil's advocate:
I wish people would turn these blog posts into modules if they also find them useful.

It doesn't seem fair that the person who took the time to a) explore this problem, b) create a solution, c) describe their solution (with code) should also have to d) create a plugin/gem.

Conceivably, the time they saved you could be devoted to creating the plugin and adding some polish.
Looks like they dropped SkypePro, which was the unlimited US+SkypeIn yearly bundle.
This is the third time in a short span that I've found myself interested in your comments. Contact me if you'd be interested in discussing issues relating to context online further (my email address is in my profile).
New England Venture Investment Falls Sharply in Q1
I actually listen to PickUp Podcast (http://www.pickuppodcast.com) and found their advice to be right on point. I plan to enroll in one of their coaching programs in the near future.
Oh, I agree completely. I'm just commenting on the community sentiment that I think they might benefit from rethinking.
Stuff like this I tend to find interesting on kind of a "meta" level -- it's interesting for me to track how once obscure technology percolates into the mainstream. They're ... well, not astounding misguided at this point. :-)
Semantify Your Web Apps with Triplify
Are you sure it's Ann Coulter? It definitely has the thousand-yard stare, but I don't see an adam's apple or muscular, veiny hands.
It's pretty easy to work on stuff when things are going well.

But when something goes wrong (illness, fatigue, family issues, money issues, problem with your product/business, etc.), passion is the thing that keeps you going. You don't know any other way.
Misses the point.

Ultimately, we as internet developers need to start thinking about charging customers. I'm always talking with friends about how applications are moving from the desktop online. And some of those applications best fit some sort of pay for use model. How to get users is one thing, but that wasn't DHH's point.
I meant that we should convince the trolls that /b/ is where they should post, so they don't clog reddit and hacker news with their drivel.
5 years down the line, most people can't recognize the French used in school.
This UI is horrible. But they get the simple things right.
Thanks for sharing your experience.

For doing product search at the few-hundred-thousand-item scale, I would suggest SOLR rather than Nutch from the Lucene family.

You'd need to do your own crawling/scraping, but the indexing is solid, simple, and flexible. (SOLR's pedigree is from CNET's own product search.)
Dismissing comments because of spelling errors? Not sure where it would lie in PG's categories (ad hominen?), but anyway. I remember the other saying, that sometimes you can learn more from your enemies than from your friends, because they are more likely to tell you the truth. How many people here on HN will dare to criticize a YC startup?

Personally I don't need or use Xobni, so I can't comment. And anyway, I probably make a lot of spelling mistakes, too, because English is only my second language. So feel free to ignore my comments.
Wikipedia:Disruptive technology
Examples of true disruptive innovations, ie. innovations that are lower in performance and lower cost, succeeding are rare. Occasionally, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as cheaper, lower capacity but smaller-sized flash memory is doing for personal data storage in the 2000s) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology)
Charlie Rose on Charlie Rose on Technology
Um, those weren't 37Singals' numbers he was putting up on the screen, you can bet on that. The difference between that and what 37 Signals makes is what can be attributed to marketing, yes.

Saying that they are wholly dependent on marketing to be profitable at all is a little much though.
All the eligible bachelors are coding of course! I didn't need to read the article to know that.
I once interviewed the industrial design lead at Fluke, who are well-known for the design of their electronic test equipment. I asked him, "Did you have any particular desire to work on test equipment when you started?"

He laughed and said "I still don't! I don't even know Ohm's law. I just love industrial design."
Skype: unlimited long-distance to more than 1/3 of the world's population
Thanks! I really like ruby inside as well, you have a lot of great info there.
China Sets Sights on Online Gaming
It's a 12-step process. Steps 1-11: play less. Step 12: or else.
Ask YC: How would you teach a Facebook Apps course?
A while back I was given permission to run a course at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Creating Facebook Applications". I have free reign to do what I want with the course, but from conversations with people in the industry, I have narrowed down a few specifics. Here's the info:

* The course will have 20-30 students in each section and will meet once a week for 80 minutes

* Students will work in groups of up to 3, and will develop 3 applications over the course of the semester (one sample "learn the API" application and two legit applications)

* There will be a product fair towards the end of the semester showing off the apps.

Since I'm sure most people here are pretty familiar with the past/present/future of the Facebook API, I figured I'd ask what you would like to see if you were taking such a course. Specifically:

- What topics would you like to see covered besides virality, monetization, and scaling?

- How should I measure success of an app?

- How much should I guide the application concepts, should I restrict one of the 3 apps to "education themed", or should I let the students run wild?

- Any speakers I should get in touch with to see if they'd like to give a talk (I have a few in mind already)?

- Is it worth inviting VCs and other influential people to the product fair? It's much further for most of them to travel than going to, for example, Stanford...

I'll be spending the summer preparing for the course, so any input to help direct my lectures would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the info. I have looked at Solr and it looks great. I'll give it a try and write up my thoughts. [Edited to correct iPhone typing mistakes]
Eh, looks like just the frame header is identical... simply turning on gzip/deflate on the webserver solves that.
The US government does that all the time with a variety of laws using threats of highway money and other things. That is just politics--it doesn't make it unilateral. Sometimes states refuse, sometimes they don't. And sometimes the Federal government backs down. Not all states have a drinking age at 21 so there is sort of a control here and it goes the other way, i.e. I bet they are still getting federal highway money.
This is HALF the disruptive technology. Now pair this service with an easy to use, portable, interface that the mainstream can get behind.

Even with this news: Skype is still mainly for expats and the tech-core.
i have a greasemonkey script that adds in a search box and saved functionality to the orange header bar. i'd be willing to share and make it simple to customize if others think it'd be useful. that way you can add in whatever feature you want to see
There has been a lot of articles/papers written about the lack of the creativity element in modern education although it is used in almost every high level field. I think that the problem is all these standardized tests where student performance is directly related to the teacher's and school's funding.
IGoogle Slowly Turning Into An App Development Platform
Very handy. Just what I'll be needing if my baby naming application migrates off Heroku: http://emilyoremma.heroku.com/
Hmm. Now if the quality were as good as my POTS service. I pay France Telecom about 40 Euro a month for unlimited calls across Europe and North America. That seems like a good deal to me because it always works and the quality is good.
Cropping away the letterbox on each JPEG would help too. Lazy!