skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldnt agree more. Also I think 'convincing' anyone to do a startup is amazingly dangerous. Even in the situations that it can be done, it should not be. You cannot, or rather should not convince anyone on doing a startup.

This is one aspect where PG has gone really wrong on his essays, which are otherwise brilliant. As you rightly put it it harms startups more than help.

A related point is that I have never seen equal co-founders in a startup which have succeeded. There is almost always an anchor/leadership which takes a last call.
I think you should build an early beta before you decide to dump the idea. You are jumping the gun, you don't have anything real, just a lot of talk that someone disagrees with. From my experience, ideas change to become more useful while they are being built.

Also, IMHO, you should not have spent all that money without having some basic implementation.
Isn't that more a clever technique than a mystery?
'That's one way to fill a website I guess'.

Although I can understand your not enjoying this particular letter or agreeing with its inclusion on a blog named Letters of Note, to hear you then use that as a stick with which to beat my entire website - a website you admittedly know nothing about - does smart a little. I'd suggest maybe having a poke around; you may come to the conclusion that today's letter simply wasn't to your liking and that, actually, the website does have some value.
And the readers here should be very aware how easy it is to access and use free and independent resources and techniques to teach themselves in the areas of software and business

This element can not be understated. When I want to learn something about Ruby on Rails or Java I have a pile of resources: open source code, free online tutorials, books, forums, StackOverflow, HN, etc.

For a lot of other disciplines, this is not the case. You are lucky if there is a book on Amazon that gets close. Forget websites, forget forums, forget open source, there is just no equivalent to all of that. It makes it a lot more difficult to survive without a college degree becuase a lot of times you are rederiving things.
Mike Butcher or Robin Wauters at Techcrunch, or Marshall K at RWW.
Bonus feature: "For the record, I have absolutely no idea what this quote of mine from the Reuters story really means".
I cannot understand what this does by looking at your site and your examples don't work. Why don't you have a video?
The idea was a niche stock photography site floated somewhere between the current microstock business and the traditional rights managed business (quality and great service, fair prices and a fair share of the proceeds going to the contributors).

One of his arguments was that you can't bootstrap this kind of business because the photographers won't sign up unless you can guarantee sales and/or see that you are going to throw a lot of money at marketing.

He thinks the only photographers I'm going to attract initially are the hobbyists and that the quality won't be there to attract the sales, which you need to attract the pros.

Also from his position, he sees a lot of new startups in the industry every month, and most of them fail in no time, because they couldn't get enough photographers contributing to get off the ground and didn't have the budget to take on the big boys (iStock photo etc).
The comments really knocked the wind out of me, but he had a lot of valid points.

I definitely think there needs to be a modification to my business plan, just setting up a stock photography site and "hoping for the best" as it were, clearly isn't going to cut it.
Translation: life sucks, better teach that to kids early.

Life doesn't suck, and we shouldn't deliberately make the lives of children boring and tedious.
Very good points. :) Working on it. EDIT: And yeah, At the moment my marketing efforts are only focused on one faculty in one university. :)
So far, I've only spent about £30 which is what it costs to form a limited company in the UK and the cost of a domain. I'm still in the early planning stages and was planning on launching a "coming soon" type page in the next couple of days.

The problem with the industry (stock photography) is that I need to attract the photographers first - no point putting a beta site live without any pictures, so my focus was to be on building a streamlined sign up and image submission process that does away with all of the bullshit you have to go through with iStock etc.
Even though there's a lot of NYC bashing on this thread, you might like New York. You might try Chicago, Toronto (if you wanna go Canuck), or DC too. You can live car-free in all those places and they're less introverted.

If you moved to Boston you could have the chill but lose the car. :)

Funny... Boston is exactly the same in that the natives don't get the chill thing and deny its existence. It's normal to them. But then again, native midwesterners don't get the cultural isolation of the midwest either. People come to the MW and are like "holy crap you guys are a cultural backwater!" "No we aren't! We have 3G and FIOS!"
That was unusually pretty. Minion Pro, right? This link seems to work better, though:

http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971
Thus, Mongrel (or any other non-mindshare-majority server) is only sought out by those who don't like the one they've got - that is, by people who are not getting the performance they desire.

This is probably true for most non-apache servers now, but I don't think it will necessarily be true for Mongrel2.

Mongrel2 gives us a new development model - http calls -> messages, language doesn't matter. I can easily mix python and c++/Haskell, for instance [1]. It's rather different from what we've had before.

Mongrel isn't just a faster apache; people might use Mongrel2 for features rather than performance.

[1] Last time I tried to do this, I basically put a halfassed version of mongrel2 behind apache/django. I.e., apache/django handled http and sent messages to my c++ daemons. Fugly.
I don't really disagree with him, but he's dampened my enthusiasm quite a bit.

I still think the potential is there, and once the platform is built, it would make it easy for me to launch other niche stock photography sites in the future and "expand".
That shouldn't take to long, why don't you just build it and see what you think after you get 20 users.
Gmail Adds Drag-and-Drop Saving for Attachments
I've never heard of Amazon Marketplace and you're the first person to bring it up. There is however an existing competitor "http://www.textbookexchange.com.au and I just totally avoided bringing them up on my website. (I hated using that website so that's how I got the idea to start my own, better one.)

People in my university doesn't even know they exist even though their market share is 25% across Australia's universities, in terms of number of "active members"... So apparently they're ignoring my university at the moment and I'd like to keep my fellow classmates ignorant of them also...
>‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere.

Low cost of living fallacy. "Ramen money" in new york might be a higher number then "Ramen money" somewhere else, but the pay will (obviously) be higher as well which is what you want.

If you double your pay and double your expenses you're still better off unless you were spending every penny. There are a lot of things you want/need to have that aren't going to be cheaper when you live in a low cost of living area (e.g. computer, luxury car, smart phone), so living in a higher pay/cost area makes these items relatively cheaper (e.g. $1k seems like a lot when you make that in a month, but not when you make $20k a month).
Good point... I wasn't sure it was relevant to the discussion, but I've added a comment with a bit more detail.

One of the main criticisms was that my niche (photos on a white background) wouldn't be niche enough, which is a fair point, so it may be worth me pivoting and just targeting another niche instead.
clickable: http://www.pingbrigade.com/
Never done it? I've had a job of some sort since I was 15. I worked overnights while in HS stocking shelves in addition to landscaping during the days in the summer. I put myself through college waiting tables so when I graduated I had < $10k in school loan debt. I also worked the entire time I was in graduate school.

Come up with all the excuses you want, but at the end of the day you're still mooching off your friends when you're perfectly capable of doing some job while you look for more work. IMHO, that's not acting like an adult.
Well I planned on posting a rate my startup question this weekend since we're just starting a hackathon tomorrow to squash some bugs, but the way we think we're going is a online interactive walkthrough of the site when a user first logs on to give them an idea of what to do next. We tried to use amberjack but it seemed a little limiting so instead we wrote our own utility using jquery and expose. I would post a link to the library but I'm on my stupid iPad right now so just search for jquery and expose and you'll find the library we use.
It's something that almost happened to me too. A git repository for a project that at first, in the prototype-stage, had credentials hard-coded, but inevitably moved on to be config-file-driven.

I concocted the following command to change all mentions of a specific word to another word, in a git repository:

git filter-branch --tree-filter "find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/originalpassword/newpassword/g' {} \;"

Use this to check if there are any mentions of some word, e.g. your password, in the repository:

git filter-branch --tree-filter "grep -r originalpassword * || true"
" What's the best way to warn these folks? What other credentials are lurking out there?"

Sure, posting that on HN is a good way...
That's what I'm thinking at the moment. It won't cost me much to get to that stage and see if the interest is there - if I can get a few contributors in, then I can at least build up the library and basic functionality and launch the main site with minimal cost.

If it works, great - I can go from there, if it doesn't it's a bit of a shit, but I haven't wasted a lot of money and can still try out other ideas.
LAMP is definitely still the way to go.

In my office Perl is the P, and we use the Catalyst framework on top of it.

With these frameworks most of them use the MVC pattern. This allows for you to easily jack in different front ends or "Views". At my job we use e-mail, JSON, XML, and templated HTML(Template Toolkit) Views.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93View%E2%80%93Cont...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalyst_%28software%29
http://perl.org
It means the person listening to Bruce had absolutely no idea what he was saying so when s/he paraphrased it, they just took words out.
My son was born 10 weeks premature. He was right under 3 pounds.

Today 11 months later he is 24 Pounds, strong as an oxe and almost about to walk.

Besides being breast-fed we also practiced the kangaroo method, where my girlfriend would have him on her chest to maintain the symbiosis he would normally have benefitted from inside of her.

He was out of the hospital 5 weeks after he was born, 5 weeks before he was supposed to.

I don't know about the kangaroo method but obviously the breast feeding (which already started 5 days after he was born albeit in small quantity) helped him quite a lot.
Thanks for that... I was really excited when I got the email and it was the first thing I read when I got out of bed.

Reading it was like being kicked in the nuts, it stung like hell but I think, once I've got up off my knees my balls should still be working sufficiently to create something decent from the experience. ;)
Funny you ask, going through the middle of an organization where ProjM is turned into ProdM right now. As far as I can tell very little changes except the titles on business cards ;-)
How about something with github API? I'm pretty sure you can search/email?
I call bollocks. I don't doubt that companies make these silly agreements, I don't doubt that companies actually try to enforce them, and I don't doubt that employees cave in thinking they have no options.

What I doubt is that if a company tried to enforce one of these ridiculous agreements that it would hold up in court. Are you trying to tell me that if I work in networking for a new york company I can't get another job for 2 years? That's just not possible.
Ask HN: Is free-for-commercial-use a viable option for SaaS applications?
If you want to offer groups and organizations that fall into the not-for-profit category a free version of your application, how can you prevent for-profit organizations from claiming to be not-for-profit and there by bypassing any costs?

I know of a few companies that have used Google Apps without paying anything - simply signing up as a non-profit organization.

Is this maybe not a concern at all?
Interesing Artistic Works by LucyandBart
LucyandBart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body.
From that short description, the product sounds a bit like Wikipedia :)
Doctors are sick.

In electrical engineering, we learn models for electric motors. Doctors walk around with simple models of people and because they are probably very predictive, they see everybody as an automata. What a miserable existence.

Once, I was listening to my birds sing. I thought about a simple circuit. Suddenly, my delightful bird was a little circuit.

This falls in a category of unlawful carnal knowledge, perhaps. It seems like the tree in the garden of Eden. Welcome to hell -- everywhere you look you can't get these automata models out of your head. Your wife, perhaps, too.

Even if your models aren't accurate, you still can't unsee them. Life goes on, though and you forget.
Interesting to see the data on this. From a personal perspective, I would just add (as someone who has founded a company with one co-founder but not taken funding) that you should not underestimate the value of the support in taking decisions etc. that come from having someone with you who is equally invested (in an emotional sense rather than just a financial sense).
Awesome! Recovering gold from the contacts with several steps involving electrolysis in 95% sulphuric acid and a reaction 2 Au + 3 Cl2 -> 2 AuCl3!

I wish there would be more chemical hacking articles like this. It's a pity they didn't write more about how did they come up with the process and how does it work.
Using BudgetSimple instead of Mint
Correlation != causation.

http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/piratesarecool.jpg

I think per capita scientific achievement has declined, but I think it's because we did all the easy stuff already. We are starting to hit a wall where new discoveries increasingly require one or more of the following:

1) A lot of expensive tools. (accelerators, genomics cores, supercomputers, etc.)

2) A lot of labor. (The "armies of graduate students and postdocs" phenomenon is a product of this.)

3) Intelligence beyond the capacity of a single individual. (Supercomputers, large numbers of people over time, etc. are required to "grasp" something. Anything ending in "omics" is a perfect example of this.)

You can think of it as being loosely analogous to peak oil, though the underlying causes are different. With peak oil, it's because the resource itself is limited. With scientific discoveries, you might have an infinite ultimate supply but you have a finite horizon of vision. It's like if there actually was infinite oil deep in the earth, but we were strictly incapable of building drills longer than one mile.

Personally I think #3 is the limit we're really hitting. I sometimes doubt that we have the IQ power as a species to truly grasp the genome or to unify QM and gravity. We either don't have the IQ or we don't yet have the language or philosophical framework to think about those things.

We're not infinitely smart. Can your dog read Hacker News? Maybe aliens are watching us now and thinking "well, they're sort of clever but they're really just still animals... they only see two sides to every conflict, they can't think in more than three dimensions, and they can't hold more than seven or eight simultaneous ideas at once..."

I'm not saying academia is perfect. It needs to change. If we really are nearing our IQ limits, we need an environment that removes distractions and allows people to really focus to get that last bit of creativity and intelligence. Academia is too bureaucratic, noisy, interrupt driven, and stressful. All those are IQ-killers.
You said that you have only spent 30 Gbp so far in one of your comments. Spend another 30gbp and buy four steps to the epiphany by Steve Blank. Then I would go out and find some photographers and tell them about the proposition and ask them if they would use a site like that. If they all say, no I use corbis then I would drop it. If they all say that they use corbis but they hate it, then maybe you have something.
I think you become an expert when you go from "unconscious competence" to "passionate competence" i.e. you care so much about it that you live it, dream it and think of it every second.

Examples are:

* Rand Fishkin and his love of SEO

* Jonny Ive and his passion for design

* Tony Hsieh and his love of fostering an awesome place to work.

All of these people live and love their chosen area of expertise.
http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=26
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Haters gonna hate - you're always gonna find resistance from some people. Maybe it'll end up that your idea won't work as originally planned, but how is that different from any idea? No plan survives contact with the enemy.
>Even if it was done at home on your equipment.

Have any examples of this actually being enforced (in court. I'm sure they've scared people with lawyer-ese before)? It's hard to image that the law basically says that the company owns you even if you're not "on the clock".
I don't know if it's this way at every level, but the one quarter of an MSNA (I think that's the acronym) prep course I had to take in tech school was chapter after chapter of lists of steps. If that's the way the other three quarters are, I don't know how a Windows administrator fresh out of school could handle an unexpected situation.

"Go through these menus to achieve x" won't help you when some joker breaks explorer and forces you to work with the command line.

Either way, I'm glad I went the Linux admin route. The instructor for the classes was about as quirky as you'd expect a Linux admin teacher to be, and all four quarters were a load of fun.

If any of my grade school classes had been like that, I wouldn't have hated it so much.
To be able to make an accurate assessment of your website, and proclaim my expertise on it as such, I should look around more than base my conclusion on one post, that much is true. That said when one makes decisions, it's usually based on incomplete information; and the lower the stakes, the faster the decision. When reading this letter I only had the one in front of me to decide if I was going to read any of the others, to see if those were better, and considering the very low value of the one I saw I didn't see it as good use of my time (or more accurate, the most suitable thing to waste my time on...) to browse other letters.

I guess the snide remark didn't contribute anything to the point of my original post, and that that post would've been off just as well without it. Well such is the nature of a forum - I would like it too if I had hours and hours to hoohah over each sentence I write and get to compile them into nice internally consistent and rhetorically perfect masterpieces. Alas I'm just a programmer posting in between compilation and simulation runs, so the style is much more conversational, and conclusions are often more haphazard than any that would stand up to rigorous scientific standards.
because it must be interesting to at least a few people.
Thanks - It doesn't seem to be available on Amazon, but I'll have a hunt around and see if I can find a copy somewhere.
Landing a Job on a Wide Team
This is an "outside" versus "inside" question. From the outside, a team with 2 or 3 is going to be a stronger team than just a person. But this is just a wide generalization, made by folks trying to find patterns. Startups happen in Silicon Valley, by teams of young 20-somethings with more dreams than brains. Most fail, and some change the world.

But there are a lot of guys making money trading collectible buttons on E-bay or some such. And although some folks don't call these a startup, in my mind any business you can scale to a large degree from nothing is a startup. And since we don't have to have the overhead, many former small business ideas are actually startups. In your unique case, being a sole founder might work better.

I tend to think that in the 20-30 age range, you need a cofounder. The team needs breadth of experience and long hours. The coolest startups have the biggest impact, so you have a lot of work to do! Plus 3 people working together are about ten times as effective as one person.

Somewhere between 30 and 40 it probably starts making more sense to go it alone. You know the ropes (hopefully), you're more likely to be playing a safer game, you're going to leverage. Also, oddly enough, under 17 or so is probably single-cofounder territory also.

I can't get past the enormous opportunities colleges offer to get to know closely a group of people over several years. These relationships can be invaluable with startups.

But I think that the conventional wisdom that startups have some certain shape or fit comes a lot more from the social nature of the startup community. VCs and the other hangers-on are always trying to make generalizations, always looking for boxes to put people in. How many single-founder startups are out there, bootstrapping, running under the radar, doing very well? Probably ten for every hotshot team that gets funded.

That's just a guess, and my opinion, and my opinion doesn't matter. If the sole-founder movement is true, it'll happen with or without us encouraging or acknowledging it. And if it's not true, no amount of pontificating and blustering will make it so.

But I'd bet on it.
why don't you just email github? i'll bet they have a way to contact their users
Skyhook Wireless Reacts to Getting Dropped by Apple
From my front door to the WTC station takes 10-15 minutes, assuming I hit the train when it arrives at the Grove street station. When I was working in an office on Chambers, that meant 15-20 minutes -- door to door -- to get to the office. Subways generally run on a predictable schedule.

I've been in the NYC metro area for 10 years now. 5 of those years were spent freelancing/contracting/starting businesses. Nothing beats the 15 foot commute from my bed to my home office, but I'll take the public transportation system in NYC over the commuting traffic nightmares of the rest of the country any day. Compared to my commute in SoCal, 1-1.5 hours every weekday on the 405 for a drive that takes 25 minutes on the weekend, I absolutely love the NYC public transportation system.