skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of mine had a company that outsourced production of T-shirts to China. The problems he faced was not so much finding suppliers but dealing with the cultural differences of how to do business.
You're probably going to want a design firm, rather than a manufacturing firm, to get you to the point where you have a physical prototype, CAD files of manufacturable parts, and choices of materials and processes. Then they can guide you to a contract manufacturer.

Some resources:

Design firms that work on toys:

http://www.dexigner.com/directory/cat/Toy_Design/Companies.h...

MIT product design course:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-783J...

Berkeley's course covering rapid prototyping and manufacturing, including lecture videos:

http://bmi.berkeley.edu/Me221/me221_resources.htm
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906...

The Berkeley videos totally opened my eyes - I was a computer science guy with no clue about making physical products.
I agree. The problem is that the MBA does not have a user replaceable battery. If you want additional cord-free hacking time, this is the only option for now.
There's also SISC, which purports to be a full implementation of R5RS Scheme for the JVM.

http://sisc-scheme.org/
Just don't eat nothing but rabbit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
I'm with you on the merit of a press release on HN. I thought it was of value for those considering the purchase of the MBA but who were concerned with battery life (and the inability to swap in a fresh one).
Any thoughts on why this is? My first thought is those that are frugal understand the long-term consequences of their decisions, understand the fragility of their position and are otherwise more measured decision makers. All qualities which I think translate well to running a successful business.
YC doesn't keep track of anything, except the people involved (and even that is optional).
Google begins blurring faces in Street View
I don't procrastinate because I'm lazy. I procrastinate only when doing the task makes me feel uncomfortable. Reasons for discomfort are generally I don't know how to do it, or the outcome is unsure and I'd rather not know.

I don't procrastinate to avoid work. I do it to avoid the feeling of discomfort that comes with facing something I'd rather not.
Google Maps API for Flash
What happens when Business Majors enter Web is, they end up reinventing wheel most of the times and most of them are not visionaries. They don't know what is possible and what is not. They come from a place where they think Web as place to make money. But what they don't understand is "no amount of money can buy you audience or position". Some start up from someone's bedroom will change the the whole dynamics of business, look what happened to Music Business. The clash between Business Majors and Hackers is like a Clash between Old Age Media and New Age Open Media. Hackers were pissed with the way Business Majors handled the business with their bureaucracy and high-handedness and hence they started a parallel industry by inventing Internet and a Industry which could thrive upon ideas and openness. This is a Hackers world.
Maybe this is because excessive spending is caused by not thinking carefully and precisely about all the factors relevant to the startup, whereas frugality comes from trying to maximize everything to one's benefit. So even if the actual money savings doesn't make a huge difference, it's a visible indicator of doing the right kinds of things.
I think you've made the critical argument: the law is a blunt instrument, because there are people who will abuse the intricacies of anything less.

This entire comment thread fascinates me, because it seems to consist of repeated jabs at "absurd" laws by cranky libertarians (or anarchists), followed by parries by people who can see reasonable arguments for said laws. Rarely does the debate rise to the level where it is acknowledged that sometimes good laws have unintended absurd consequences, and that just because a law prevents you from doing something you want to do, doesn't mean that the law is invalid (or an inappropriate intrusion of government into daily life).
Race on Campus: Beyond Obama, The Unity Stops
The first three paragraphs sound a lot like Bradley's Ghost: http://paulgraham.com/polls.html
Programming is not an Art, Science, or Engineering Discpline
Charter to Snoop on Broadband Customers' Web Histories for Ad Networks
Hot or Not in a different form. I don't see the point.
Swiss 'Fusion Man' Flies Over the Alps With Jet-Propelled Wings
NY’s “Amazon Tax” Takes First Casualty: Overstock Affiliates
http://www.thecollegeblognetwork.com

not sure if it I'd consider it a failure, but definitely has not seen the organic growth that we initially expected.
An Open Letter from a Male Project Manager to Women in IT
purely coincidental
They've almost never been the cataclysms people have expected. Global cooling, thermonuclear war, never materialized.

The ones that get us are never seen coming.
Frugality is just a basic life skill. It serves you well in anything.

However, I'm beginning to notice now that our customer base has grown and our revenues have doubled a couple of times over since our time in YC that what used to seem extravagant (paying people to do things for us) is now becoming the smartest way to make problems go away. I just paid Google $500 yesterday to handle search on our site, because it is a problem that has effected me on a couple of occasions, and I decided that even one more day of me fighting with full text search in MySQL and PHP (which is not a comfortable language for me to work in, as I use Perl mostly) was one day too many--the opportunity cost was just too high, when that one day spent talking to customers could close a deal worth many times the $500/year that I pay for Google Custom Search.

But, that's frugality of another kind (one that considers the value of both time and money), of course, so it doesn't invalidate the idea that frugality is pretty much always a net win. I just thought it worth mentioning since I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs take frugality too far. Colocating their own box instead of renting a server in order to save $10/month, for example...if you have a single hardware problem during the 18-36 months that the server is in service you end up with a raw deal (because you either have to go to the colo and deal with it, or hire the colo service folks at $100/hour to deal with it). If it's not the focus of your business, try to find someone else who does have that as their focus to do it for you. Work on your differentiating factors, not the day-to-day crap that every business has to have.
Can you be more specific on the "cultural differences of how to do business." Do you just mean language?
I was never able to get over the fear of not having a steady paycheck. Working at a corporate job is so darn easy that I have plenty of brain power to work on my entrepreneurial ideas after dinner through the night.

Of the start-ups that have approached me my biggest issue has always been that I did not believe in their idea. To really leave the corporate job you have to believe that the idea your working for will work. As the only breadwinner of my family I cannot risk their safety for just any project.
The fear factor is certainly one thing holding me back. That any not having an idea that is good enough.

I have plenty of ideas all the time, but I don't think any are good enough to put all that work into. I have also found it is tough to think of ideas outside the field of IT - thats where there are all these potential problems to be solved, but as I have never worked there so I don't know about them!
And it's Verizon, which means we'll get a custom OS that's completely unusable, unhackable, has annoying logos and cross-promotions everywhere that can't be turned off, makes you pay extra monthly for most "features", gets upgraded without your consent, and is ugly and red.

Yay for Verizon!
Reasons Why Video Comments Will Work
I may well be alone in this view and I really don't want to sound rude but personally I just can't get excited about another one of these sites. It seems the successful ones (e.g. hotornot) in this area were the ones which were both original and fun. Unfortunately, I don't think this is either. Looks beautiful and I'm sure a lot of work went into it, but not for me. I feel bad, maybe I shouldn't have posted! Hmm..
Will your iPhone destroy the Internet?
I got hooked on Mark Twain in the third grade, and had worked my way through just about everything he wrote by the 8th grade. I suspect it was the prevailing influence on my early life, and the reason I was an atheist, libertarian, and vegetarian by the time I finished school (Twain was not a vegetarian, but independent thought was the over-arching lesson I took away, not any specific activity or belief).

Anyway, almost every profound and contrary thing anyone says today has been said before, and better, by Mark Twain. (I know the same could be said of others...but as an American, it is my God-given right to ignore everything that happened before 1776 as irrelevant and distasteful.)

Though I'm surprised pg is a fan, given Twain's colorful, though playful, comments about Jane Austen (pg is apparently a bit worshipful of Austen). My girlfriend, also a big Austen fan, scowls whenever I mention Twain in conversation, but maybe that's just because she's already heard all of my blowhard opinions on the subject.
Videos from the Embedded Linux Conference
There we agree totally.
I'm a lone entrepreneur with an idea, don't think I can afford professional design firm. I will check out the MIT and Berkeley courses though.
As a startup, the more you constrain your target audience, how feature-heavy your product is, and how much money you spend building it, the more likely you are to find a market you can succeed in -- or fail quickly. Both are positive outcomes.

But, you have to value your time properly. Otherwise your perception of being frugal is really just an accounting error.

Our competitors outspend us by orders of magnitude. But we've been frugal and focused. So while they're worried about raising their series X and lining up an exit, we're worried about serving our customers better and how to spend our profits. I wouldn't want to switch places.
Hopefully as many online retailers as possible follow suit OR Amazon wins its suit. If that doesn't get NY to change its socialist ways, nothing will.

Edit: I do feel bad for the NY based affiliates who will be hurt in the short-term. Hopefully they RAGE at their respective government representatives.
The dollar has fallen a lot recently. That's a legitimate macroeconomic reason for this kind of shift.

But there are a few confounding factors, too. First, from an employer's perspective, it is hard to deal with Brazilian employees from a legal standpoint (firing, hiring, etc). Second, the difference in costs between skilled Brazilian workers and skilled Floridans might be smaller than the difference between unskilled Brazilians and unskilled Floridans. Third, since Embraer produces for the Brazilian government, this might be an arrangement between the US government and the Brazilian government to improve the trade balance between the two countries (Brazil makes cheap steel, and only a few US producers, like Nucor, can compete with it).
One thing is always funny to me about people living out of the ‘system’: They all forget that they still depend on the ‘system’.

Remember the dad working for short terms? She is working for neighbors for little pay? They even buy fuel! lol how about electricity? They read books and enjoy them.

Without the ‘system’ they will mot live the little revolution of living out of the ‘system’.
You got one thing wrong. Most kids can and do handle the truth about death better than most adults (Says the thirtysomething who tried not to cry at the funeral). The reason that we lie about death is that it is one of the biggest cultural taboos.

You are not supposed to talk about death. Keep silent at the cemetary. etc.
That's a very good example of what frugality is. A lot of people seem to equate "frugal" and "cheap" which is wrong; fragality is only spending money when you need to. Or in your case, you determined that the cost of spending $500 for a Google custom search was worth less money than the time you yourself were putting into doing it yourself.
This is a neat little app. Not really ground-breaking, but hey, that's not a pre-requisite for success. That said, I think this is just a web base comparator, not a startup. I must be missing something, but what pain point are you soothing? How is this new? The fact that you have categories? Are you hoping to take all the results data and try to pull something useful out of it? Or is this just a "hey, let's learn rails and make a facebook app" type thing?
Well done. Simple enough. Fun to use. I'll probably never use it again, but I'm sure there are many millions of people that would spend a dozen minutes or so on this site. With that kind of traffic, I think you have a good shot of success. My prediction is that the celebrity comparison will be the most popular, followed by the user submissions. It's fun to look at pretty faces. It would be interesting to see the patterns and clusters that develop in your data. That would be very cool if you shared the statistics with the community(or if you ever need a data junky to volunteer an analyze your database shoot me a message). Good luck.
Stealth Search Engine Blekko Gets Money From Marc Andreessen, SoftTech
But he coded on his windpowered PC two new UNIX and six Lisp flavors. And he had the time to read all the books recommended here. Do you think that's nothing?!
Where is this school? I want in (for my kids)!
Are you sure? It seems to be as if you just took their source code - you even have their logo in the top right corner.
How does this work come tax time? From my understanding, you can only write off hosting, half of food (sometimes) and maybe a part of rent. How did you guys deal with this?
Hi Noel, there are many companies who work as intermediates between you and chinese manufacturers. These companies are based in china, but run by foreigners. They find the company, produce the product, arrange the shipping. So it's basically the same deal you would get, but perhaps 5% more expensive. For that, you avoid the cross cultural difference, you have reputable sources etc.

I can introduce you to a company I know personally based in Shanghai. They'll source any product you want. Send me a message if you're interested, I don't want to be seen as a shill.
ZocDoc API, dev contest
The contest, which runs from now until August 1, 2008, challenges developers to build the application that will most benefit patients looking for a doctor. A new API allows developers to pull data from ZocDoc such as doctor and dentist information, practice locations, pictures, URLs and available appointment times, which can be integrated into custom mashups and applications. The developer of the application that benefits the most users (as measured by appointments made) wins a brand new MacBook Air!
Java?

Just kidding.
That is definitely a large part of it. When Greg Mcadoo from Sequoia spoke at YC this winter, he said he'd also noticed that frugal startups did better. When I asked him why, he said probably because frugality was an instance of focus, and that focus is the key to success in a startup. Overspending = spending on inessential things, which in turn implies you don't understand what's essential.

For the same reason, it's bad when founders can't explain what they're doing concisely.
Two tools - flickr storm and a thesaurus. There are still lots of great domain ideas out there.
If you just want to print the same output, you can be ever so slightly shorter than his Perl/Python:

(dotimes (i 5) (print (expt (1+ i) 2)))

This doesn't follow his semantic steps, so it's kind of cheating, though in a real program I have a bunch of utility functions to help me out so it's about the same:

(join " " (mapcar #'sq (range 1 5)))

I think the point is not that Lisp is shorter for any given toy problem, but that Lisp allows you to build such abstractions. Even if you had join() and range() and sq() in Java, what's Java for (f x (mapcar #'g (h y z)))?
Nice points. I like using mind mapping to stay focused. I am currently using mindmeister.com to mind map. I will be adding some of the things in this article to my mind map.
I that the more money you have the more you think about how to spend them. If you don't have a lot of money you don't have these options.

It takes a lot of discipline to raise a lot of money but still keep the same amount of speed/focus as you did before you raised the money.
Depending on how accurate and fine-grained the detection is, this could make for some great pixel manipulation or bending-warping in an image editor or 3D modeling program given the finger size vs. the display size.

I don't see this replacing the keyboard and mouse, but making a nice supplement and maybe replacing the Graphire.
220 mph Train from SFO to LA
Web Start-Ups Seek New Ways to Click
That works both ways. I might find its ok to drive drunk and I might not want to keep my meat packing plant up to "code" but I might object to you build a hazardous waste next to my house. When it comes down to it a lot of people taking minor risks is why 10’s of thousands of people are murdered every year in 100% preventable car “accidents”.

The point of regulation is collectively managing risk. Driving with old tires might seem a reasonable thing to do but your risking other people’s lives. And the average farmer knows nothing about the overall risks of animal to human disease mutation, but people still pays the price every time such incompetence creates a new disease strain.

PS: Farming is one of the most polluting industries in the world but the lack of smoke stacks seems to give people the warm fuzziest.
I can see video commenting working in limited domains, but as a general format for comments, they're way too inefficient. The reasons this guy gives are valid points about advantages specific to using video, but they do not make the case for why video comments "will work". The advantages of video won't outweigh the advantages of text, because text is so much faster to absorb: I can skim through multiple comment threads as quickly as I could watch a few video comments in one thread.

I remember seeing these old videos of computer interface researchers demoing audio/voice interfaces, one being a kind of virtual secretary which understood voice commands and told you about your latest emails and voicemails. It all seemed so novel and exciting at first, but eventually it dawns on you that the novelty will wear thin, and how much faster it would be just to use a visual/text-based interface. This is why Apple invented Visual Voicemail for the iPhone: random access for voicemail messages, and it's way faster deleting things visually rather than having to wait for audio prompts.

Video commenting is yet another unfortunate example of people mistaking novelty for utility. This guy is clearly way too invested in his invention to properly assess the disadvantages of using video.
Top 10 Innovation Myths
the padlock logo is recommended by facebook, it's in the wiki
On 6 "No unintended meanings"
I knew someone who had a t-shirt with "hug therapist" on it.
You still might want to get the bids and see what you can afford - even $10k might get you pretty far if you're willing to do a lot of the work yourself, using the design firm as consultants to guide you through the process.
http://www.likebetter.com/

http://addmired.com/
Beating Google?
I didn't elaborate in the parent post since it might have sounded racist. Which it isn't meant to be.

It seems that asians have a different perspective of doing a deal than Europeans and Americans. Americans and Europeans think the negotiations are over when the contract is signed. Asians seem to think that the negotiations have only just started when the contract is signed, and they will try anything to cut corners if they can. So you basically have to watch every step extremely closely, making sure you don't release payments before the priduct is secured, etc.

This, of course, is just my impression - feel free to correct me if it isn't accurate.
"By the way, (American) English is a very flexible and tolerate language..."

Sure, but that sentence immediately marks you as a second-rate English speaker. Many will take that as a reason to doubt your thoroughness in other areas.
If I could upmod you twice I would...
Thanks Maximus, I sent you an email, but it bounced I used the maximus gmail address on your profile.

How would you respond to mixmax's post above? (on the cultural differences)
Did Twitter Really 'Outshine' the Mainstream Press?
Museum Kills Live Exhibit
I don't know that we're representative, but, so far, I mostly just wave my hands around and go, "This sucks." And then leave it for later (meaning we haven't been doing much with write-offs or expenses on our tax filings). Pretty much all of my bookkeeping to date has been of the form "put it in a folder for when we hire a bookkeeper". Luckily, this will be the year in which we hire a bookkeeper, and I won't have to think about it too much any more, and I most likely won't end up in jail for not reporting things correctly or on time (fingers crossed).
On Michael's final point:
"And most importantly, once you’ve picked your name, NEVER FREAKING CHANGE IT"

I have personal experience with this. I joined a startup called TradeAccess. They changed the name and re-branded to Ozro. They closed their doors summer of 2001.

I won't say the name change was the cause of demise, but I can't say it did any good either.
I definitely agree that a frugal attitude is essential for success. But I'm reminded of a great article on "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" called Cheap vs. Frugal.

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/cheap-versus-fruga...

Being cheap means spending as little money as possible often ignoring quality and efficiency. Now frugal, might not necessarily be the cheapest but it is the best value.

From the article above:

"Cheap people think short term. Frugal people think long term."
Are you also familiar with Clojure? How would you compare the two?
I think it represents a more taboo set of thoughts / actions than it's milder alternatives. Fill in the blank: Illicit lovers ____ where married people have ____ and young lovers make ____.

PS: It's not accurate but many people still think the world started with: "Found/ Under Carnal Knowledge" or "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" which comes back to the idea that the word means more than just the act of procreation.
Google releases free, detailed, HTML/CSS/Javascript encyclopedia by Mark Pilgrim
Reason #1 that they won't work:

They take much longer to create than blasting out a bit of text.

Reason #2 that they won't work:

They take too long to watch. I can't think of the last time I watched TV News. I'd much rather scan NYTimes.
Sorry, my email in the profile was wrong. It's maximusklein@gmail.com, and not maximus@gmail.com

Regarding the cultural differences - I'll say this: It's very difficult to do effective work with chinese companies without micro management. The chinese work very hard, but sometimes they work very hard on the wrong things. An obviously flawed product will get created and nobody will bother to inform you till its too late. And the english is terrible. Products are mislabelled, punctuation is usually in the wrong spot.

Outsourcing to china is a very hands on affair. Quality control is not an option, it's a neccessity.

I've been to china often over the past few months, and it's a very different working philosophy from what I'm used to. So yes, be careful. Very careful.