skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we need to look a step back. Africa can barely produce a Ford or a General Electric!

That said, there has been speculation lately that Africa might well be able to leapfrog over a lot of industrial development and jump straight to developing a knowledge economy, but with the cultural and political issues (and "issues" is an understatement) African countries have with (and within) each other, this seems overly positive for the short term.
I suspect when you mentioned "Africa" you didn't mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa ?

SA is pretty modern, stable and has some money (middle income) although it is not free from problems (like any country)
I don't think hunger and war are a major problem to hackers actually. I thik war-tone countries are a minority in Africa and only affect rural people who are a majority and obviously non-hackers. I'm a hacker in Malawi and have never experienced war or hunger but that's because I'm a minority living in city.

Internet connection yes. Most hackers in Africa have internet access at work only where they work on custom enterprise software or general IT (non-programming) jobs and have to code hacker-interesting stuff off-line at home (if they have a computer) or evenings and weekends at work.
The word simplest just throws me off. "Most simple" seems more right then "Simplest".
There are studies out there for success rates of VC-funded companies. I read one that had a success rate of 18% for first-time founders, 20% for founders that had previously failed, and 33% for founders that had previously succeeded. Don't have time to dig it up now, unfortunately - it was about the gains from serial entrepreneurship, and I think it was posted on news.YC.

It's much harder - possibly impossible - to measure the success rate of bootstrapped ventures, because the boundaries are much fuzzier. For example, my current venture started with 5 founders (none of whom are still with it) and is now just me. We've launched 3 websites, all failures, and have one still under development. If the new website succeeds, should this count as 5 failures, one per founder that left? 1 failure, treating the original founding team as a failure and me as a success? 0 failures, since none of the other 5 founders quit their day jobs, and so it was just a hobby for them? 1 failure, since one of the other founders committed significantly to this and did a lot of work for it (even while still holding his day job), yet the other 4 didn't really care? 3 failures, one per failed idea? 1 failure, since two of the failures were launched while we were all still at our day jobs? 0 failures, since it all worked out in the end? 2 failures, since the hypothetical success builds upon one of the failures? 5 failures, since there were a couple other hobby projects that weren't intended as startups but might've become so had there been interest?

With VC, there's a clear delineating line between startups. You just go by the corporate entity, which must exist for them to take investment. But bootstrapped startups frequently don't incorporate until it looks like they'll be successful, and often success comes from accidents.

And by many of the definitions of bootstrap failure, the big VC-funded startups are failures too. My first employer (VC-backed) went through 4 business plans in the year I was there. Paypal did too, as did Flickr. Should those be counted as 3 failures and 1 success?

I'm skeptical about any sort of statistical data anyway, because (as with any economic data) the act of publishing that data changes the data itself. If a study comes out showing that you should not take VC money, there will be a flood of entrepreneurs into those markets that can be serviced without VC funds. That'll necessarily drive down success rates, as the market becomes oversaturated, competition drives down margins, and bootstrappers find it unprofitable to continue. Similarly, if a study comes out showing that you should take VC money, there'll be a flood of entrepreneurs into the markets that are considered "hot" by VCs, like what happened in social-networking/bookmarking in 04/05. That'll drive down success rates, companies will fold or be acquired for peanuts, and the next study will say you shouldn't take VC money.
Until such a study is made, I will take the "avoid VC money" advice from those who made it work with a grain of salt.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but you must be eating a lot of salt, because the opposite advice -- "take VC money" -- also suffers from selection bias, despite the eloquent efforts of Philip Greenspun.

This is one of those situations where science lets you down. I guarantee that if you wait around for a real study of any given market, you will forever be ten years behind the curve. (I think people are still just beginning to understand what the dotcom boom of the 90s was really about, for example.)

And when you do finish collecting and collating and interpreting all the data, and you make your Spock-like decision about which path to take... you'll probably be miserable, because it will turn out that the most rational choice is to become an accountant, but you fscking hate tax forms.

Taking VC money is one way to build a company. Angling to be bought by Yahoosoft is another way to build a company. Aiming for independence, small size, and modest profitability is yet another way. All of these strategies fail more often than they succeed. The most important difference between them all is probably which kind of failure will make you happiest. All else being equal, I would probably rather fail to build a modestly profitable Basecamp-like app than fail to win a million-dollar VC dice roll... but all else is never equal, so it depends on the circumstances.
Yea, google-type/like giants can come out of africa. Just try a Y-combinator/africa (centred in Nairobi) and you'll see. HONESTLY.
Not advice for improving your craft, but advice for life:

Move away from Nigeria. I know it's your home but it is a hostile environment for economic success. Heck it's a hostile place to live for a multitude of reasons (of which I am sure you are very familiar with).

When I lived in south america, I went to school with a couple kids who's family worked at the Nigerian embassy. They flat out refused to move back to Nigeria. They spent the vast majority of their effort securing visas to the US. I recommend you do the same (or to South Africa or the EU somewhere).
I know Egyptians in Egypt who have the skills and know how, so I would say yes. I out source tech work their instead of India these days because the value of the work coming out of their group is exceptional and the documentation is extremely accurate.
Ballmer sells windows1.0
We've launched 3 websites, all failures, and have one still under development. If the new website succeeds...

If the new site succeeds the whole thing is a success. Who cares about the failures? Certainly not you.

Once you succeed the narrative will immediately fall into place. Your earlier "failures" will turn out to have just been stumbling blocks, correctable mistakes, and/or learning experiences along the road to success.

Which just makes your main point stronger: You can't rationally measure the "success" or "failure" rate of "ideas" until you define "success", "failure", and "idea" -- all of which are arbitrary and vary from company to company, from founder to founder, and from time to time.
while its true that a lot of consequential companies have been purchased by google or yahoo, a decent number of these companies were just the best of a group of similar apps.

microsoft could swoop in and buy the second choices and get a similar portfolio together quickly, building off of them. their portfolio might be overall crappier, but it will be similar and their weight behind it will be a serious driver.

having said that, i'd think that a big problem they might have is the burning desire to have everything built on .net, and most apps online are not build on .net.
I hate that GIMP is so much different.

I mean, I hate that ctrl-d duplicates the current work, rather than deselect... but this weekend, I used the ctrl-d multiple times with wild success, so maybe my process is broken :)
Last week my brother in law's laptop refused to boot windows.

He brought it over on Saturday and I booted off the HH live cd and copied all his stuff onto my NAS.

There was a LOT of crap on his laptop (spyware and viruses it looked like).

I then installed HH, opera and the flashplayer on his laptop and said "here you go, your password is xxx". I showed him synaptic and made sure that hibernation and the wifi card worked and sent him home.

So far, I've not heard any complaints yet :)
I just tried it, very slow. I was trying to upload a 2 gb file, it stops and stucks at 224kb.
One question i have is how the accounting is done for the $200k profit, bearing in mind the app benefits from the wider business (Carsonified events etc). As a standalone app it might be paying more for marketing, legal/ accounting, management overhead etc
Is it that Gimp is so much worse, or is it simply that they're different?

I used Corel Photo-Paint for years and years, and when I tried Photoshop after that, it seemed like it was designed by space aliens. I don't mean to say that Photo-Paint is easier to use -- I doubt it is. But when you get used to a particular interface for something like photo editing, maybe any given interface is ok, but switching interfaces is hard?
Sharing Salary Figures on Facebook
I didn't mean to suggest that I'll wait for this kind of study to come out before deciding which path to take, just that very few data points aren't enough to make a strong case that "avoid VC money" is the best advice to give entrepreneurs. Both independent and VC funded ventures have had many successes and failures, and you need to look at more than just a few cases to get a sense of the right way to go.

IMO, if you think you have an idea for a Basecamp-like app that you can develop quickly with no outside investment and sell enough subscriptions to make it self sustaining, go for it. It's probably a safer strategy than betting on a 100mil exit in VC funded company. However, it's also possible that 37signals has picked a low-hanging fruit the likes of which aren't always easy to find and that the "avoid VC money" advice doesn't work for companies that need a longer runway to profitability.
Aditya - good luck. It is possible to have a great family (I have same wife for the last thirty years and we have two teenage kids) and do startups at the same time. Pick you teammate carefully. I wrote about my own criteria in the following ("turn off the light and see if you run away from them").

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/03/team-building.html
Not if you would have made more, learned more, and been in better health had you instead done an industry job during this time. Isn't that a good, simple way of defining success here?
If there were only two evils, I might agree with you. But there are better options than either of the two you mention, for example Preview on a Mac or Sumatra PDF in Windows. Converting to Flash makes it harder to use a decent program to view PDFs, picking evil for everyone, not just those who use Adobe Reader.
We bought OFF2.com from snapnames about 1 1/2 years ago, $60 as was expiring, we are a travel website so its a great name for us
My opinion is only academic, but the conclusion I've formed from reading news.YC is exactly opposite of yours markbao.

The VCs claim they fund people. So you have to ask why? The best developers know what features are necessary for 1.0, and know how to prioritize changes.

Why release early?. The advantage a small startup over big companies, is its ability to release early, and then quickly refine the product, based on the feedback of its users.
Redefining success to have a lower threshold seems a huge (though common) mistake for groups that are currently behind.

There are plenty of people in Silicon Valley working on mundane, income-producing businesses. In addition it has Googles.
Not here....
Cool initiative, but the lingo is a bit on the lame 2.0 side of things. "...in the field of 2.0 technologies..."

From the submission page, Web 2.0 elements: Feeds, Blog, Ajax, Wiki, Tags, Mashup, Social Network - if your submission doesn't fall in these categories your are not 2.0 enough?
How to ask smart questions, by Eric Raymond
you shouldn't make the "take VC money?" decision based on a study, but based on rather you need VC/Angel money or not.
are you saying that Y-combinator is now in nairobi, kenya?
i thought that the country recently had some election crisis?
so how stable is it?
Good question; I'm not sure. What I can be sure of is this story:

A couple months ago, I had to create some annotated screen shots to be used as cheat sheets by a number of people I'm working with. I knew that I could do something like this in Photoshop, having used Photoshop a bit 10 years ago.

I first tried GIMP, because it was free and available. After trying for a while to figure out how to get layers happening, I finally gave up and downloaded a copy of Photoshop. Everything was immediately intuitive. Even though the Photoshop UI had changed (a lot) from when I had used it a decade ago, I was able to very quickly create my annotated screen shots.

Now, you could say that I didn't bother to read any of the GIMP documentation, and you'd be right. But with Photoshop I didn't have to.
Is this a real trend, or just another trend made up by the New York Times to fill in space?
How much has bandwith increased? (or amount of highspeed users?) .. Im just happy the amount of "splash pages" hasn't relatively increased.

The best service on that site:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
You make a good point that I haven't considered. I would define "success" or "failure" as the ultimate outcome of the efforts of the group of founders who worked together on one or more products, regardless any part/full time jobs they had. Having one successful product, no matter how many failed ones, equals success. Having no successful products equals failure. That's just my definition -- feel free to pick a different one if you like it better.

One should be skeptical of any statistical study (didn't you know that 60% of statistical studies are flawed? :) ) but I think it would nonetheless be interesting to analyze a larger data set of startup outcomes to answer the VC funding question.
Is there any way to flag spam?
That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not completely convinced that those are real problems.

If you send someone a content-negotiated URL you can be pretty confident that they'll see the text/html (or application/xhtml+xml :-) version).

Similarly, any typo report more specific than "there's a typo somewhere at this URL" will tell you what you need to know.
I recently (Feb 2008?) got a 4 letter domain, but it does include numbers.
The Science Of Thinking More Intelligently.

Go Harvard go.
No hard feelings and thanks for the clarification.

I think Python is a slick language and tool and its Benevolent Dictator for Life is a knowledgeable and nice person. I ran into him while interning at Google (worked on the same team and almost did a project related to one of his).

I guess what I don't like is that devs of all kinds of backgrounds have been downplaying Java ever since its inception and in my view not always rightfully so.

My (admittedly subjective) impression is that this has been happening beyond the usual "religious programming language wars".

Developers writing native code are still complaining about Java's (supposedly) terrible performance, admin-focused scripters for lack of immediacy and web-focused coders for being bloated and not supportive of "agile procedure". I'd just like to point out that this language has become the "working man's language" and with it spans a wide variety of domains and features an incredibly large community.
Perf-wise, I doubt that there is currently another language VM that has been better studied, optimized and supported than the JVM (Azul, anyone?).

Of course, the truth is that Java is a tool like every other language and has its proper uses and domains where I'd also pick a different weapon of choice.
Yup - particularly "search for website and download app" versus "open package manager and search for app".
Have you looked at the source code? web2py is a bad joke with a lot of marketing. Then again, the author isn't really into the Python style - just its userbase. Look at Django if you want a full stack or Werkzeug if you want to roll your own; the latter can easily emulate the style of web.py or Pylons (in fact the trunk comes with these examples).
When I was getting my MBA, one of my professors discussed the idea of a workplace where everyone's compensation was disclosed. The basic conclusion of the discussion was that since there are virtually no workplaces in which compensation is truly tied to value (and value is impossible to measure anyway), knowing what co-workers make will always lead to morale issues.

As far as friends go, I think we will experience feelings of resentment, jealously, inferiority, or superiority to a lesser degree than with coworkers, and are more likely to be happy for a friend who is compensated above what we see as her perceived value, and more willing to try to help someonse who is compensated below what we see as her perceived value. This is at least partly because we are not competing for pieces of the same pie as we are in the workplace.
It seems problematic to charge for the basic functionality of something so simple; there are plenty of Twitter competitors that offer what Twitter does and more, still for free. (coughpownceahem)

They could charge for expanded functionality (again, removing API and SMS limitations, and possibly additional features), but I don't think they can take away what they've already given for free for so long, and I have to wonder how many people need more than what's already free so much as to pay for it.

Just thinking out loud, anyway.
I think when people say they "want to do <x>, but don't have time" it really translates to: "I feel like I should do <x>, but I don't really want to."

Exercise is the classic example.
http://you-need-to-read-borges-labyrinth.com
I liked this article - I was expecting a "yay, see how usable Ubuntu is" fanboy-style writeup. Instead it found some very honest issues with its usability. I wonder if Canonical ever does any of the one-way-mirror style UI tests that (presumably) Microsoft uses? It seems like it would uncover some of these gotchas.
I believe that a document aimed at hackers describing some basic etiquette in dealing with the general public would be a far more useful document. This reeks of arrogance and to me, exemplifies what is wrong with the Open Source crowd today.
Sound's very loosely like fractional banking.
What percent do you have to keep on hand per user in order to prevent maxing out the storage capacity? Or do you just let it max out and then add more storage?
Take a look of this one, a little bit of old but still helpful:
http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/Interesting-Facts-About-Do...

I registered a 5 letter domain (xruby.com) in 2006. I think there are still 5 letter domains available, but good names are extremely hard to find.
I'd like to append one. In a limited time frame q/a, one fast simple question with NO 'quick' follow ups.
It is my opinion that Java is not practical for scripting or web-based development, so I agree that people using it for that purpose will complain about it.

I definitely agree the majority of Java complaints are from people choosing the wrong tool for the job.
Thanks for posting this topic. I'm in the exact same place as you and all these comments have been very helpful.
Spoken like a man who hasn't read ESR's sex tips for geeks. ESR is a weirdo, and has had more or less nothing to do with open source for more than a decade now.
We surely can. It a matter of we sitting and deciding what product we can come out that best fit and solves most of our continent problems. If african hackers can come together, certainly sure we can be giants like Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Take a look at this post, it tells you we're getting somewhere. http://whiteafrican.com/?p=992
Well, learning is too hard for most people, so apparently Linux should be exactly the same as Windows.

If you want to avoid the $300 Vista upgrade, along with the DRM and general suckage of Windows, you might have to learn to use the Free alternative. Why is that such a terrible thing?
Grand Theft Auto 4 expected to sell 9 million copies (reviews have been overwhelmingly positive)
feels like a bait and switch, but for 99 cents... you might get what you pay for :(
Here is the procedure for asking questions on the Internet:

1. Ask your question carefully and appropriately.

2. Watch everyone ignore you.
That experiment is a little biased. It wasn't an example of a person who doesn't know how to use computers trying out ubuntu. It was an example of a person who's very confortable with Windows trying to use a different Operating System.

The test about using youtube is particularly bad. It's good that Ubuntu doesn't come with flash, it would be even better if it didn't even tell you about it. Maybe in the future it might come with gnash already installed (you may want to install it, I'm sure it's on the repositories, even my debian etch has it). For youtube specifically, as I understand the latest totem comes with a plugin that allows you to watch youtube videos directly from totem, another alternative for using youtube without flash.

And yes, I'm a free software extremist, who simply doesn't get it, who will forever be wrong. And I'm too radical, things can't be taken so seriously, I'll never find a girlfriend. I know all that. Still, the purpose of Ubuntu is to spread the use of free software, not to be another system offering propertary software. If the free software already available is not enough for some people, I guess we'll just have to wait (not change our systems so it includes propertary stuff).
Excellent tip, Rich; thanks very much for posting.
Well, a "few years ago" is wayyy past 1994 when there were still usable domains left.
saw a commercial this weekend... looks beautiful. Too bad I'd have to buy a $300 gaming machine that I'd never play after the initial week of marathon gaming to play it.

(as I did with the Wii -- got it, played for a while, then it was played more by other people than me, then I sold it and haven't missed it yet).

Video games are just a huge time sink for me. I just end up tired with cramped hands and nothing to show for it (other than hours and days of my life wasted).
But Ubuntu and Linux want these users. Why is helping casual computers out with a few simple, easy to implement tips such a terrible thing?
Ask News.YC: Hacker News API.
Would there be any interest or use for it? Also would PG or the community (or any website for that matter) be opposed to having a web app that lets you write APIs for websites that do not have one or expand on theirs using the DOM of the target website?
Canadian debut may be set for Apple's iPhone
Wow 300KB is the average. I never would have thought it to be even close.

I was doing a design for a particularly graphic intensive site(the whole page was basically one photograph) and was cringing when it hit 90KB for the page.

I think another factor is the widespread use of javascript frameworks where as in the past most javascript code found on sites was custom for that site.
Thanks. The only reason I asked is because she is syndicated in my home town and people who don't read techcrunch read her column. Like my father.
Zoho Sheet launches pivot tables and visual basic macros