skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going free also makes sense if you want total market dominance. In which case, free is really the only way to go.

No it's not. The other way is to make the best damn product in the market. I hate to give cliched examples, but since we are talking market dominance, see Windows, Adsense and iPod.
Might I suggest throwing something up on the subscription page that advertises the fact that the first three issues are available for free in digital form? As a first time visitor, I was obviously reluctant to subscribe without having seen a single issue. With some nominal site scouring, I was able to find the first three issues, but there really should be something on the subscription page I think.
I suffer depression. Mostly it's not that bad but it does mean that I never sustain the passion/effort required for a startup (or even modest personal projects).

hmmmm, I think everything else is either fall out from the depression or an excuse to avoid facing fear. Fear of personal failure, fear that I'm not elite, fear that I don't "have what it takes", etc.

I'm also "old", 40yr, and I hate to say it but I feel less energized, less excited about the world than I remember feeling when I was younger. Change the world? Make "it big"/millions? Be famous? Meh, it's time for my nap.
There are a several similar examples in Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. It provides some explanations, too.
Yes. For the most part it will be affiliate sales (e.g., Amazon Associates). I will also accept non-obnoxious advertisers/sponsors down the road. If the list becomes big, there may be advertisers interested in placing a small ad in the messages.
Absolutely true.

That leads to 'seed AI', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_AI when run in reverse, so you'd have to implement the 'minimally viable self improving brain', and take it from there.

And even there maybe not all the strands in the carpet have to be just so, but it may very well be that there have to be certain amounts of each colour in roughly such and such a pattern with interconnects between these larger groups and so on. Some of that information is known but definitely not all of it.

The damage angle is a tricky one, some damage seems to be absolutely not problem at all, even if it is major, in other cases the smallest bit of damage seems to be enough to cause terminal failure. There are a lot of clues in there about the organization of the brain.
Moral of the story:

Being a kid = ADHD.

Parents need to stop resorting to "parenting in a pill" for their own inadequacies, or pressure by society to "act" on their child being precisely that.

That's not to say that ADHD doesn't exist or some-such nonsense, but I believe this study at least is going somewhat in the right direction to prevent overzealous diagnosis.

As someone already stated (and with whom I definitely agree) - the test set is already biased for a large percentage based on age.

Not to mention the pressure that is allowed by teachers. I myself was suddenly diagnosed after ONE of my teachers decided I was too active and made an enormous fuss about it. Took the meds for a couple of weeks, lost ~10 pounds (I'm already a stick), and told them to bugger off.
An impromptu code jam on the subject from 3 years ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65307
I think with enough determination the current owners could pivot into something that makes money. They would be building on top of the branding, website and traffic that I put time into building.

Maybe it's not a question of if it will fail or not, it's a question of how long and how many pivots until the company becomes profitable?

I just don't want to stick around for the pivots. It would be nice to get something in return if the company eventually becomes successful. Am I being too unreasonable in wanting something if - and only if - the company starts making money if what I helped build enabled the team to get to that point?
Question #1 is far more important than question #2. In fact, I'd argue question #2 shouldn't even be asked. I work with some folks who are very, very good at their jobs, and I get on with them well enough during work hours, but I have zero interest in engaging them outside of work (and it has little to do with political preferences).

Personally, I think it's sorta sad that as a culture, we've allowed political differences to splinter relationships, professional or otherwise. I'm not suggesting that we can't disagree about politics, but it needn't be as divisive as it is.
This is fascinating. Thanks for looking it up. I too have now learned something new!
Sean Lip's algorithms course (Cambridge, with videos)
True - and the exact reason why I'm a paying customer. I got down to my last 200MB and then I became a paying customer. I didn't even think twice about it.
A while ago I wrote this:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/content/adhd-ritalin-and-evolutio...

It's how I feel about the whole ADHD thing and the industry surrounding it.
Does anyone know if you install an app on Chrome on one device, will you have to pay for it on another device?
comments are checked every 20 minutes, it's working pretty fine afaik :) (disclaimer : i did it)
The guys at MailChimp released a nice guide with an overview of what you need to know when running a high capacity email infrastructure: http://resources.mailchimp.com/email-delivery-for-it-profess...
"After it lets you in, eat the evidence."

This is genius.
The quick answer: no, it's not dead.
Wasn't something like that Malcolm Gladwell's theory for the prevalence of top Canadian hockey players born in the early months of the year?
Intrigued about twifficiency madness? 
Check out Neil Kodner's (@neilkod) interesting analysis and visualization of Twifficiency scores
ADHD isn't about age, it is about amygdala sensitivity and compensating behavioral habits, like shying away, avoiding eye contacts and playing alone with/in own imagination.
Great points about the buy-out and non-active founders shares.

I'm not trying to ask for a piece of what they create in the future. If the company makes money, I'd like to get paid back for the platform that I helped build which enabled them to get to the point where they are making money. Do I deserve to ask for that?
Ohlife reminds me of a prettier, and less clever version of 100words. http://www.100words.com/

There's some really interesting creative work coming out of 100words based on folk's every day experiences. I'd recommend that HN folk check it out and that the OhLife founders take a particular look at it to see how they might attract and retain their own customers.
We use a similar approach, though not sending emails at your scale. The issue then becomes that of deliverability. Emails will be sent, but will not reach
Good Luck. I like the concept and waiting for other programming language support.
HTML5 Peeks, Pokes and Pointers
Google hasn't even managed to accept Canadian developers into the Android marketplace, despite having multiple operations there - they either aren't trying very hard, or they are just really, astonishingly bad at this stuff.
Huh, thanks! Now I finally know why the hell that happened.
There has been some interesting research done using transcranial magnetic stimulation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html
you might have found at anyway, and now, at least, you can avoid the subject
his comments, too. manic much?
acquire a lot of customers very efficiently

First of all, people who don't pay are users, not customers. Secondly, how are conversion rates of less than 2% considered efficient?

In the freemium model, even if cost of customer acquisition (COCA) for a free "customer" can be considered to be zero, Life Time Value (LTV) is increasingly negative.
Wow, thanks. This is a fantastic idea! Finding out about good, new books is actually one of the things that I find really hard to do. Usually I just have to wait to hear about it by word of mouth, which means my information is generally out of date.

Are there any plans for any sort of rating and recommendation engine? For example letting users rate books that they've bought and then recommending new areas of interest based on their ratings or something along those lines? (More difficult, I know...)
Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
Every time I've entertained the idea of joining a startup, it's always an "all we need is a developer" situation, or its cousin, the "we had a great developer (who invariably stunk) who'll get you up to speed."

So it seems I'd have to go it alone, and my ideas are too big for my time. If I had some simpler ideas I'd definitely see if they held water, however. I definitely have the application, server, and DB skills to make it happen.
All of those scenarios would be less likely to happen if the "entrepeneur" had an actual office in the home.
A separate room.
With a door.
That can be locked.

During working hours in the office, people can contact you through instant message, phone, email, etc just as though you were not there.
Adhd, ritalin and evolution
Don't let the skin and bones fool you. Those skinny buggers are tough to kill, whether you have a magic ruby or not. You practically have to hack them to pieces, and throw every piece into a fire.
I plan to approach this incrementally, but it's a clever idea. I'd say that once the list is bigger, a lot of fun new features can be implemented. At this stage, I favored the essentials, trying to get the minimum viable product out there.
I believe he's implying that his priorities are close at hand.
Unless you are a politician, it shouldn't make a difference. I don't care to much what they do/think outside of work. As many people have said, having a diversity is a good thing in the work place. Unless the person was very out spoken about his/her beliefs that was disrupting work, it shouldn't matter. But you wouldn't know this before hiring them, but if they had that type of personality, they probably show up in other ways in the interview processes.
I spend a decent amount of money on domains every year. I think I own or take care of maybe 100 domains.

I use EnomCentral because I have a reseller account with them through hostgator (~10$ per domain) but they have grown more and more into an upselling machine. They automatically assume you want a free trial of their Content Writing program. I uncheck it everytime. This is annoying.

I've lately been buying all of my domains through NameCheap. They offer a free SSL cert and free privacy. They don't do much upselling, as I recall. If they do, it didn't bother me as much as Enomcentral.

I don't think upselling is a bad thing. I think it can be a good thing if I see value in the product they are upselling. If not, that's when it's a bad thing. Automatically adding a free trial (w/ a monthly fee after the trial) to my cart when it's something I don't want is horrible.
My imho(i am not such a long time HN reader): HN is all about startups and its pushing you to start your company. Period.
Its not really a core recourse for programmers/hackers and there is a very small %% of tech material here. Why? Just remove news. and /* from this page URL to find out )))

In other words: NH will not help you to become better programmer/hacker. Just look at http://news.ycombinator.com/ at this moment and see that there are only few tech links there - rest is about "why facebook is better than google" bs.

My point is: If you ultimate goal stable financial situation for your family you can less risky archive it by becoming better programmer.

On meaningful projects: is working on google/apple/any company you like meaningful enough for you?

All above is just my imho of course..
I would argue that in order for a free account to work you will have to meet the following criteria:

- The free account is only useful while you're starting to use it - so a real constraint has to be in place for you to want to upgrade.

- Your product has to be useful enough on it's own.

- Your product is not too niche. If the percentage of people on planet earth that can benefit from your product is low, then there will be less chance that a user finds somebody else to recommend the product to.

I haven't looked at Bidsketch, but if people are signing up for free and the free plan has enough constraints in place but people are still not upgrading, that could be a sign that people don't like the product enough or don't get enough value out of it.

Also, the article doesn't state what features the free plan had, but if the free plan used to be what is now "basic plan", maybe the free plan was too good ?

The website looks good btw.

edit: added a bullet point
I've always thought about the idea of turning a barn style building into an office.

The biggest issue for working from home is meetings. You can't have people into your "office" and be taken seriously, and there are just some things you can't do at Starbucks.
World of Warcraft dominates the MMORPG market. Why? they created the best damn product.

Go free to get lots of broke users if you want to help scammers serve ads to those users.
Ask HN: Should I take on a side job?
I'm thinking of doing something minimal (e.g. teaching piano 5-10 hours a week) to supplement my savings before my business becomes ramen profitable. Do you think this is a good idea, or do side jobs generally end up being a distraction?

In "How Not To Die" pg says distraction is fatal to startups, but I'm just starting out and brainstorming ways to support myself for the long haul.
First of all, you shouldn't ever ask a person for his political views during an interview. Opinions that are freely offered on Facebook or a blog are a separate matter. I don't think someone gets "protected" status for political blog posts, based on the "reasonable man" hypothesis; a reasonable man would consider it acceptable not to hire a person with announced and extreme (e.g. KKK) politics.

To answer your question: no, but that doesn't mean political views shouldn't be considered at all. They reflect on a person's ethics and sense of social justice. Not all who identify as "Republican" are stupid and mean-spirited, but the politics that the modern-day conservative movement represents is stupid, short-sighted, and mean-spirited. So if a person is politically aware and yet supports it, that should be a major red flag.

If someone puts "Conservative" for his political views in his Facebook profile, that doesn't mean anything and I wouldn't hold it against him, because "conservative" and "liberal" mean different things to different people. If he rails against the "Ground Zero Mosque", posts in support of the Arizona immigration laws, or is in favor of retaining Bush's tax cuts for the rich, then... yeah, I wouldn't hire him, because he's an asshole and his disregard for social justice reflects a lack of character.

I grew up in "Red America", so I have a lot of friends who identify as "Republican" but are actually centrists or moderate libertarians, and their political views wouldn't put me off. I'd hire them in a second. On the other hand, someone who actually supports this country's lurch toward corporate oligarchy is a person of bad character and I wouldn't want to hire him.
Malcolm just rehashed something than any coach or school teacher can tell you: the smarter, stronger kids are the older.
Ars Technica posted an article on the same study with less trolling: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people-in-t...

I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me.

[1] = http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2
Interesting that the parachutes are deployed 32 seconds before landing, and only fully expand 22 seconds before landing (as far as I can tell from the video).

Anyone know what the margins for a skydiving human are by comparison?
Exactly. IIRC, Twitter went to 140 for space for an ad or something... I've been trying to find other services that aren't affiliated with Twitter who use 140 characters and have come up empty.
I actually did start and was able to quit my job about a month ago.. and a week later I was in a drowning accident and ended up in the hospital with heat stroke, dehydration and acute kidney failure.

Now I'm in limbo trying to recover as quickly as possible. I still have lower back pain near my kidneys which makes it hard to sit in a chair.

It's not that bad actually, I'm just finding it really hard to get the motivation to work consistently.
Isn't this a site dedicated to startups? Don't we often say that you should charge for your product, rather than give it away for free? Charging for it isn't a bad thing. If people don't want it, don't pay for it. The market will send the signal.

Many people waste enough time here (myself included) as is. Sometimes 24/7 access is more detrimental than a curated summary. The 24-hour news networks, for instance.

Any of your bullet points for the magazine could be equally considered to be benefits of the magazine over HN itself.

These comments ragging on the magazine don't make sense, coming from startup founders. I'd consider it an unwise venture if they gave it away for free.
The Genesis SDK for Adam is Almost Here
Notion Ink has been working on their own SDK for Android, because they want apps that can take advantage of the tablet form factor, and they couldn't wait for Google to do something about it. They are announcing their developers that this SDK is coming in the next few weeks.
The presumed need to use Google Checkout was the first thing I thought of when I read about the new store. There have been problems with people having their Google Checkout services shutdown and their funds denied, and that would make me nervous about using a service which forced me to rely on a Google Checkout account.
Identify polymorphism - Don't abuse the If
Biometrics of this sort have been known for years as a soft security system - similar to a text password.
Yes, but would those companies have become popular

You hit the nail on the head there. Web startups have become a popularity contest. Instead of building really good products and selling them for a price, people are trying to get as many users as possible and then tinker with all sorts of metrics to get "conversions". I can see the reason for doing this if you have big investors and want to sell to a big company one day. But, it seems like a really poor strategy if you want to build a profitable business.
You are correct that these traits would apply to any arbitrary group of young children with a one year age spread. Kindergarten is an ideal such group, not only because it encompasses a one year spread of young children, but also because it is a group that is being observed for signs of ADHD.

But yeah, I'm not trying to say that the title isn't misleading - there is a correlation between Kindergarten enrollment dates and ADHD diagnosis and that's it. The article makes this pretty clear but the title does not.
I think it's a reasonable criterion. A person who can't understand the concept of "physically present but working and unavailable" is likely a person who is stuck in their own head and can't appreciate that you have your own life. That can be a real problem.

At least, that's my experience. YMMV.
Well. Yeah, I guess it kinda did. Sorreee muuum. :)

And you guessed right. Someone has to make all those liquid-center scented baby-dolls, right? And it just so happens that doe-eyed deer are particularly capable. Just a bit work-shy, which is where I come in and whip them into shape.

Edit: Hey! Why do I lose karma?! Was it the whipping part...?

Edit: Thanks. :)
Competition is a good thing. It's confirmation there's actually a market there.

You're far better off with a small slice of a big pie than a big slice of a tiny pie.
Looks like a good service. I've signed up. I'm curious, what's the purpose of the Kindle ebook question?
Typically something in the far-upper atmosphere breaks the sound barrier by just falling - not as many molecules to produce drag - but I don't think the sound barrier "breaks" at that altitude for the same reason terminal velocity is greater than the speed of sound up there.

I may be mistaken in this, but I don't think without propulsion or an absurdly stable / aerodynamic falling that you can actually "break" the sound barrier in the traditional sense at the point in the air where density is high enough to produce the shockwave effect.

Edit: That second paragraph was entirely too convoluted on my first go at it.
Re: wanting to pay but not needing the "pro" version -- I feel the same way about Jing. I use it almost every day and I think TechSmith deserves my money, but I really don't need any of the features of Jing Pro.
MediaWiki has a tool that parses LaTeX, sanity checks it, and can spew out LaTeX again or a very limited version of MathML.

If anyone out there knows OCaml enough to improve its emitter that would mean MathML for Wikipedia articles in WebKit browser once this comes out.
I totally agree with that approach. Just signed up, and can't wait to start getting messages.

Another interesting idea to consider might be some sort of integration with librarything.com, delicious-monster.com, or something along those lines.

I hope you're, at minimum, collecting some sort of data on how many people click through from the emails to get more information on the books, seems like that could be very useful and help you justify and build more features in the future.
This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": http://www.withouthotair.com/ As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".
If you want to really understand the language, do what I did, and write a compiler (http://jurassic.codeplex.com/). You'll learn about fun oddities, like why the lexical scope introduced by the catch block is different from any other type of scope and why declaring variables inside an eval is different from declaring variables in the parent scope.
Side jobs are fine if they're not things that you get caught up in such as large scale project work. That's the kind of stuff that will start to compete in a bad way with your company and which will sooner or later eat up all the time you've got leading to the premature death of your other business.

But bite sized projects are a great way to make ends meet during the hard times.
WoW also offers a lot of free months to players. Sign up a friend, both of you get free months.

I almost said "and WoW isn't the best damn product," but that depends on your definition of 'best.' It almost mirrors the Mac/Windows thing. Connoisseurs tend to scoff their noses, yet they just keep on selling...

WoW is a mediocre product executed _perfectly_.
Ok let me say this again. Its 100% fine not to be a founder and work for somebody. It is NOT a shame! You can leave full and happy life without it! Many do that!

It might be that you read way too much HN - This resource pushes towards starting company. Its not the only way to go for hacker! Relax and enjoy your life!

PS I was super surprised to see that so many replied about being stressed about not starting a company today. I am sorry about that, did mean to push anyone when asked this question. I think that you can only start company being in a good and optimistic mood! Stress/scare is a first warning sign!
Dynamic Semantic Publishing prototype
I think its a challenge to collect the information and keep it updated.
good luck with it
I don't know enough. In particular, I don't know where to start, even for a simple project. A lot of what Paul Halmos called pencil sharpening.

I'd love to see an hours-long screencast of how you guys kick off a project.