skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: I have a twitter account with 1800+ followers, what do you think it is worth?
I'm just curious what the account may be worth. I've actually had the account less than a week and it has grown quickly. I remember there was some guy who was trying to sell his twitter account on ebay and the bidding was up to $1500+ (for 1500 followers) before he canceled it. I know it kind of depends on what the account name is, etc... But I'd prefer to remain anonymous right now and I am mostly interested in a generic $ value/follower figure. Any best guesses?
Thanks!
see this is part of the problem with social networking.

'once your friends start using twitter enough'

it's proprietary and unstandardized, unlike email or phone numbers where it doesn't matter as much what network you are on, you can still make and receive messages. (I know cells are very proprietary, but you can still get calls right?).
Why you should never skip writing tests
http://hitforge.com
I'm confused. Has everyonewho has commented on this thread read:http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html ?
If not, take a deep breath and deal with it if a fellow HNer chooses not to pensieri stretti.
I don't think I've read the essay about why children need to ask to go to the bathroom, but it seems to me that the answer should be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever had to take care of thirty ten-year-old kids. It's hard enough even when they're all within your line of sight -- if they go wandering off to the "bathroom" at random intervals then surely disaster looms.
In-body wi-fi will call 911 if you have heartattack...
I agree i have yet (I know im the last hold out) to fully comprehend while twitter "is the next google" ... this is a decent use, good luck with your endeavor
I think schools need to be more economically focused. Teach kids about the realistic options in their future and what they can do to give themselves more choices (avoid premature optimization).

also: I hate when people whine about how hard "the poor" have it. I'm technically living below the poverty line and I live the way an emperor might have lived in ages past.

I have my own personal transportation to take me wherever I want whenever I want. I eat delicious food shipped to me from all around the world. I have fantastic opportunities to make riches beyond what 99.9% of the human population has ever been able to.

I'm sorry what's the problem? Oh, right...school is kinda boring. boo hoo. self starters have always taught themselves what they wanted to know anyway, regardless of the institutions of the time. Our forefathers achieved more with less. I don't think blaming poor schooling excuses us from anything.
Couple of interesting Indian Startups
So far, only one: a DemoCampGuelph back in January. I'm planning on going to more similar events in Guelph, Waterloo and maybe Toronto this summer.
$0

I just don't understand the draw of twitter. I guess it's just the old "take some old unix app and make it for the web" thing again. Hello wall 2.0.

ETA: the simple fact that you can get 1800 "followers" in a week devalues the "service" even more to me.
Not surprising. I think we're going to see the engagement gap grow in Myspace's favor too. They realize that social networking isn't a utility, it's entertainment, and they're building from there. Music is going to be very good to them.
A little of both I suspect.
just because you don't understand it does not mean it has zero value.
> The error is that we "as a society" don't make choices. Individuals do. If I thought a conspiracy of government officials and oligarchs were making work choices for "society" as a whole, then I might be as offended as the author.

But that's basically the official policy. When the federal reserve lowers interest rates, it creates a supply of cheap money which is then invested, driving up the demand for labor (and higher wages encouraging individuals to meet the demand). As the federal reserve adjusts interests rates with the goal of sustaining "full employment", a closed loop is created.
The original colonists of the Pacific
I'm sure the biggest source of seed-stage funding is still individual angels.
Dang it...forgot to mention what the app does! It's an ecommerce web app that fundamentally changes how businesses process their web orders.

What's more intriguing, however, is our business model. Happy to elaborate.
but the fact that someone can go from 0 to 1800 "friends" in a week (assuming they are a noone like me) has to imply the lack of value of an account with that many friends (and IMNSHO the "service" itself).
http://www.prnewsnow.com/PR%20News%20Releases/Technology/Tec...
You shouldn't care, but if you want to use it, use it. But, with most things, don't put it down until you try it.
> give J (an APL descendant) a try,

J is not open source. Might be a factor to consider.

From the J site,

"Jsoftware licenses source for all the Jsoftware binaries. There are several factors in determining the cost of source licenses. Primary is the source itself: J Engine (portable C); Windows GUI support (C++); and Unix GUI support (Java). Secondary is the scope of use: internal; distributed products; and competitive (to Jsoftware) products. And finally the platforms: Windows; Unix; PocketPC; etc. The price range is from $10,000 to $400,000. Regular updates to our current source levels are available for separate update fees."
careful, not free: http://www.jsoftware.com/source.htm
Linking to the print version of this article annoyingly brings up the print dialogue every time I load the page.
That is GOLD!
I'd have to agree. I think you might be using the service for the wrong reason.

BTW, i think the auction type stuff happened really earlier when it was hard to get on twitter. the barrier is quite low now.
It's worse otherwise.
"followers" - not "friends." And not necessarily - think about supply and demand. There are a limited number of twitter accounts. If you happen to have a good twitter account name, it may attract many followers and be of value.
Plus, it isn't easy to get that many followers. You can't just sign up and make it happen. I think the number of followers would be of value from at least an advertising perspective.
Think Apple Would Dare To Take On the Movie Theaters?
It was actually less than a month ago, and it was the rocketboom founder: http://mashable.com/2008/04/13/twitter-ebay-sale/
Dual-Use Technologies and the Equities Issue
Nope... this one's all the fault of the yankees: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm
Disqus adding video blog posts... nice!
Ask YC: What would you do with 50K
Say you had several start-up ideas, most ad-supported, and you had a 50-100K loan to develop it. What steps would you take to begin generating revenue to support yourself full time? I am thinking of taking the plunge into full time start-up and have to decide how to begin generating revenues quick enough to support my family.
Google Reader Errors
Is Google Reader bugging out today or is it just me?
Can you become a Creature of New Habits?
somethings wrong with your layout, on my macbook (13.3") on firefox i can't get down to the sample links, i had to make the text smaller
6 Excellent Firefox Extensions Made To Save You Time
When I first read the headline, I thought the poster meant "taking a writing test" like taking an exam.

Thanks for sharing. We do test first on one of the projects I've recently joined. The project uses JUnit for unit tests and integration tests, Maven for automated builds, JIRA for tracking, and Subversion. The project manager keeps things simple, no heavy process. Also, We're a geographically distributed team.
How averse to raising funding later are you? My advice would be to develop which ever idea you think is best, don't worry about advertising revenue now, and then try to raise funding. Then you'll get a salary to support the fam.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to startups going the self-funded route and pursuing revenue from the get go, but that's almost impossible with ads. If you really don't want to raise money, go with the best idea you have that has some other business model.
Would be really funny to put in comments like "Try not to mention what an amazingly awesome VC Fred is. He'll just think it's ass kissing."

"Don't tell him we're already making $100MM/year in revenue. That's not public information yet."
Travel Tips for Globetrotting Geeks
Indeed, I find this disturbing. The deal broke down just a few days ago. It's going to take a week or two to figure out what happens next.
The four horsemen of SaaS
You might want to go the advertising route. Sell one tweet per day or something like that.
Why do you assume someone with 1800 followers is a nobody? I'd guess they have a blog that is read by a decent number of people or something like that.
The problem is an atheist doesn't need to bash or combat against theists. I think the root of all crimes committed by organized religions is zeal. And atheists should never do the same.
50-100K doesn't sound like much runway for an ad supported site. I'd say you have 2 choices: sell subscriptions or build enough of a proof of concept to find an angel.
I never take a break, even an overnight break, at an "appropriate breaking point". That way, it's easy to pick up where I left off. A nice byproduct is that I rarely rush to get something done while tired.
I'd pick an idea that doesn't rely on ad revenue. It takes time to build enough traffic to generate a good amount of money.
There have been two in Phoenix, AZ; I organized the last one.

They are great, and will likely look to roll another one at the end of this year, but I was a little frustrated in getting more people to stand up and show off.

Perhaps Phoenix is just not happening enough place for this, or I need to get some marketing smarts.
Is there anything in the Twitter terms which preclude selling an account?
50-100K is more than enough to support you for a year. That means you need to start making $4200 a month by then. You'll know if this is doable by month 6 at the latest. If it doesn't look good, pack it up and find a new/return to the old job.

You're in a really good position, and for some reason you seem to be waiting for something...I'm not sure what.

Get out there and build it.
How much do you think a news.yc account with 5000 karma is worth?
Would it be advisable to try to implement a solution on a chalkboard first? Mathematical notation and diagrams can be amazingly succinct.
Garbage collection is also available to code that executes at the pure C layer as well. I'd stand by my previous statement, and add that most of what ObjC brings to the table is some framework design patterns that you do have to learn, but that can be learned in far less than a week.
I completely understand. I have a subscription based product as well. I think that may be the product i launch with. Any tips?
That's probably a rather common situation for someone getting ready to take the plunge. I'd quit my job right now if I had 50K to get off the ground. You could probably live off that for a whole year, working full time on your idea(s).

I've also got a few ideas, ranging from simple to grandiose. My plan is to start with the simplest (fastest to create, simplest revenue model, smallest potential) as a moonlighting effort. I hope that it can generate enough to keep me alive to buy time to start pursuing the grandiose ideas. YMMV.
Another Google Executive Joins Facebook
matlab costs boatloads of money for commercial stuff. At least from my perspective.

I wish there were an open alternative to matlab that was fast. Matlab is kinda fast if you do exactly the right thing, but its interpretedness gets in the way. Most of the people I know doing computational stuff write everything in c using some outside libraries to speed things up. Often they just code up all their own algorithms from scratch. Its lame, but they usually halve the computation time. I could imagine that SciPy and NumPy is much much faster than Matlab.

Matlab is crazy easy to code for though. Its really handy for prototyping.
I've noticed a similar conceptual pattern while investigating meta-programming. I think there's something fundamental going on here. Something that conventional programming constantly misses. Something remarkably simple, consistent and powerful. It's where code is data along a continuous path of transformations.
they are copycat companies just focused on the indian market. Id like to see more creativity come out of such a skilled, educated country.
A game theoretic approach to the toilet seat problem
Top grossing films of all time, inflation adjusted
$99 is generally a really good deal for a conference. Only people like Paul Graham can put on stuff like Startup School for free.

This was organized by a group of Seattle Hackers who are just trying to do a good thing. No ulterior motive. No goal of profit. No hustle for sponsors. I know the people putting it on-- they are decent chaps... And I know a couple of the speakers (in fact, I might be on a panel).

WTF is the point of attacking the event?
That is EXACTLY what it is. It just pushes AIM away messages around. Just add song lyrics aimed at your ex-girlfriend and you have AOL circa 2002 in a "social network" of high school kids. The only reason I would want to use it is for mass texting, i.e. Want to meet for lunch? type messages. For that a better feature would be grouping on your cell phone.
Ask YC: Concurrent vs. Registered User Ratio?
Does anyone have any numbers they could share on the number of registered users (or active ones), vs the number concurrently using the system at peak times. I'm trying to estimate the size of the production systems I will need.
Here's a Great Idea that a HN Reader could easily implement
I am /very/ interested, as I just searched for a good online backup system that worked with linux and came up empty handed.

Sadly, 30 cents/gig every month quits being an awesome deal when you got 200ish gigs of stuff you want backed up.
A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto
Tracing your way - ping, traceroute & mtr
Sprint and Google, will announce a $12 billion venture to build a wireless data networks.
Unit testing in the enterprise: Five common myths dispelled
What Makes Software High-Quality?
I don't mind paging through sites nearly as much as everyone else seems to.
You don't have to back up all of your data -- many beta testers have said things like "I have 400 MB of source code and documents which I'm going to back up, and 5 GB of music which I might back up... and 100 GB of ripped DVDs which I'm not going to bother with".
One of my professors (Allen Downey at Olin College) loved to show his idea of system like this for postal addresses. The idea was that you would be issued a fake address that is a key within a database pointing to your current address as a value.

So my address might be:
1532 Elm St. Faketown, PL

Since PL is not a state, the postal service would know to look up the current address in this database, and would forward mail appropriately. They could then slap a label on it with the real address so that the postal carriers don't go crazy.
Gatto is like the 'red pill' for understanding American education.
I realize that and I'm doing that, but I got more data than your example. Mine's more along these lines:

20 GB source and documents I want backed up.
150 GB CDs ripped to mp3 and flac I want backed up.
1000 GB ripped DVDs I'm not going to bother with.

Oh, and a few gigs of pictures. :/

Maybe I'm just a digital pack rat...
Sounds like a great event! I think some News.YC users, many attendees of the most recent Startup School, were reacting to the purposely chosen words "Startup School" in the submission title, which begged for a comparison.
How fast is your internet connection? 150 GB of music would take a month uploading at 0.5 Mbps.
In boston? check out this o'reilly "user-generated" conference
VeriSign gets patent for DNS redirect that can be used for Advertising
That's what rsync is for. ;) A month or so of uploading all day while I'm at work, and then a few mins a day from then on to upload the deltas.

I guess this brings up a good point. Does tarsnap do incremental backups?
Well, there's all the typical stuff you'll find here. Launch early, get a few users who really like your product, iterate rapidly. You have to be a lot better than any free competitor because people will choose a free alternative over a premium one if they're equal.

Beyond that, try to think of creative ways to market the site. Going the subscription route is very hard, but if whatever it is you have up your sleeve is compelling enough you can make a lot that way.
Understanding PerezHilton.com’s Pageviews & Unique Visitors
That's pretty much the reason I don't watch CNN or read the New York Times. Why do I need to read the same editorial that 100 of my friends just read?
that's a long time in the startup world :)

my bad
Programs with short methods are easy to understand.
My program uses short methods.
Therefore my program is easy to understand.

so if follows....

Cats have Eyes.
I have Eyes.
Therefore I am a Cat!
Ask YC: Accepted YC and regret it?
This question is directed to those that applied and have been accepted into YC (both presently and in the past). Was it worth it? Would you do something else with your time knowing what you know about the program now? Any regrets?
The history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury is actually pretty neat.
Or, in Safari 3, just go to the Advanced tab in Preferences and activate the "Show Develop menu in menu bar" checkbox.
Well, delicious.com works these days...
I'd make my own theme park! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the theme park!
The twitter account is worth nothing, your reputation is what you are attempting to sell.

And as with the offer of a virginity on the open market, the very act of offering it as a commodity devalues it.
Interesting that this came up today; I finally finished getting real backups going for my laptop's homedir.

Basically, I ended up using duplicity [1], which can back up to a mounted filesystem, WebDAV, ftp, ssh, or S3. It handles encryption and incremental backups, and compresses everything on the backup medium (in encrypted 5M archives, with a seprate index file). This is why I used it; davfs2 is very slow at creating files, and my homedir is mostly very small files. I intially tried rdiff-backup, but it was just way too slow creating all those files. Duplicity, however, is nice-n-fast; 1G of data compressed down to 85 5M files and the initial backup only took a half an hour (plus an hour or so for davfs2 to sync the data up to the server; damn slow DSL...). The incremental backup is also quick, usually only a few megs of data transfer and it takes about a minute to run.

Anyway, I don't see much reason to pay someone else to do this for you. Get duplicity, get an S3 account, and enjoy.

[1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Now it's time to rsync up my music collection. I have 50G of storage to burn through, and the 200M full backup of my homedir just isn't doing it :)
Snarfbot search
This is an early alpha i have made for demonstration. I am looking for feedback on use ability, and usefulness of the site. Any comments are welcome.

---

Snarfbot is a new way to search. It allows you to easily compare results from multiple search engines at once without altering or reinterpreting the results. Future updates to Snarfbot will include the ability to create custom search tabs and tab groups that you can share with your friends and colleagues.

http://www.snarfbot.com/
Grand Theft Auto IV’s First Week Sales: $500mm and 6mm Units
it cant be said enough: make something people want.

then again, you could also try: make people want something.

however, you said you were a programmer and not a marketer.

alternatively: want something? make people.

nobody ever went broke betting on people's urge to reproduce.

permutations are fun: something people make? want.

desire in the world comes from attachment to expectation, we are the fabricators and stewards of that desire. want-creation is a multibillion dollar industry, ads are just the way to tap into that market with the lowest barrier to entry.

wheeee: want something people make.

aggregate other people's content. for text, scribd, for video, youtube, for audio? (i consider this one still out there for grabs.) increasingly, micro-markets (like etsy) are going to flourish, facilitating trade between craftsmen and consumers. make your mother proud, become a middleman.

---

for real advice: dont pay an accountant or a lawyer until you start giving other people money or taking other people's money. before you do either of those things, get the go-ahead from both. things take twice as long and come out half as good as you think.

also, make sure there is always forward progress on what you are actually intending to provide. you provide someone with resources something (goods or services) that they perceive as valuable. unless you continue to create more/better goods or provide more/better services, you're stagnating.
Yes, suggestions?
nope, totally worth it (dropbox, summer 07)
1) It's not a new way to search, there are literally thousands of these around. They are so successful I can't remember a single one of their domains.

2) Hooray, we learned the iframe tag in class today. Time to change the web!

In all seriousness, if it saves you time - congrats, you've nailed the first step in developing great products: create them for you, what you need. It's always fun to play around with these things and it may prove useful to you personally.

I would have rather spent the $6 on a pack of smokes than a domain for this though.
$50-100k? I'd for sure quit my current job and live off it for a year while I develop my idea(s).

The only problem is, I don't have $50-100k. Or even $5k. (Feel free to help change that! :o)
A New Kind of Social Networking Search/Discovery Tool | FastCompany.TV
Impedance Mismatch
I wouldn't go for full time. There are 100,000+ of people trying to create sites that generate enough ad revenue to be full time. A very small percentage actually succeed. Try to do it part-time and see where it goes.

In my experience this has been the better path. I worked fulltime on an ad supported site for 3 months, plunking 10k into it(and living expenses), and got about $200 in return.

Another site, which I built in a day, has generated over $10K for me in ad revenue. It's a big crapshoot and going full time probably won't increase your odds too much. Wait til the traffic is big enough, not your desire.
Works like normal for me.
There are different copycat versions of facebook, youtube, flickr etc, in each of China, Korea, Japan, Mexico and Brazil.

People don't do what you'd like to see, they do what makes money, regardless of how challenging or cool it is.
1) Definitely go for a market-led not technology-led business idea (ie, one where the demand exists, rather than one where you have to invest time and money educating the market).

2) You then need to Position yourself in the market that's demanding it. This requires you to develop a consistent profile in the marketplace, so when people think of 'Generic Need' they immediately associate it with 'poppysan' before anybody else.

3) Above all, believe in your business. If you're confident, you will invest emotionally and be productive. If you're not, the market will see you as a frantic mess to be left alone for a while...and you don't have a while!
Not just you - about 3 or 4 times today its gone completely unresponsive for me. I wonder if its somehow related to the new stuff they just added (notes or something like that).
Campaign Monitor and their companion product MailBuild http://www.mailbuild.com have worked great for me. MailBuild in particular is a fantastic web app and I have not had any issues with delivery rates. Both products also have an API.
yes apple would dare. and they could double those prices in the article. then most individual viewers won't rent it, but groups of 2+ people would still see it as a reasonable price.
also, never check-in code when you have been drinking. Learnt it the hard way.... twice.