skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The initial idea rarely becomes the sustaining business for successful startups. The reason for this, is that your idea is a "wild ass guess" until you talk to real potential customers, to see if you're actually solving a problem they need solved.

The idea for a startup is usually just a hypothesis. Once you go out and talk to real customers about what you're offering you'll gain some insight and new information. Most of the time, your original hypothesis is off the mark. Your idea may be slightly off, or completely wrong together, but armed with your new knowledge you can alter your hypothesis.

Repeat the process and eventually your evolving hypothesis will become more refined until you have a scalable and repeatable business model. This is the "search" that he's referring to.
Maintain your resume in latex, only send out a PDF, and give a flat 'no' when recruiters ask if you can give them a copy of your resume in MS Word format. They're specifically asking for Word so they can alter it in ways they think will help them, not you.
Of course, i forgot that leftists are always informed about everything, perfectly objectively, and if you catch them in an error, they will simply lie.

Ok, you are all bigots, and you've been told to hate beck so there is no point in taking to you, you will just continue to tell lies.
> I'm almost concerned that there's NO hazing... a small amount builds bonds with your pledge brothers

After being in one that had a very stringent no hazing policy which they stuck to, I doubt that hazing would make me feel better about anyone in that group or my incoming class.
The Death Of The Deadline As We Know It
The Twitter people continuously surprise me with their incompetence.

And yet, we keep using the service. Hrm.
That article is useless.
Rush is one of the most clearly valuable exercises in sales and getting people to like you that you will ever do. If you join a fraternity, you end up being on the other side of it 3-12 other times (depends on how often your school rushes).

I'll tell you this, smalltalk with strangers while trying to sell something is so easy after the approximately 50 nights of rush I did during college, trying to sell people on an organization while chatting for hours.
Steve Blank is a writer and knows that wrapping his point in a story makes it more enticing to read. And I agree that this post has less to do with job titles, than hiring people who have the right kind of experience.

Having worked in big companies, (Gap, Wells Fargo, Guess) I know that they all have their time tested processes and you walk in and there are step by step instructions on how to do your job (any job, all the way up). Even at IDEO there's a tried and true methodology, design thinking. You dont know what you will come up with, but you know each step to take.

Startups change day to day, which makes them exciting. But hiring a seasoned big company employee is suicidal if they come in trying to execute a time tested routine.

It's not about titles per se, but about hiring someone with the right mentality.
Rejoice! There's no need to talk to your friends anymore.
Oracle certainly has money to throw at the problem. The question whether the problem is one that can be solved by throwing lots of money at it will be answered in 18 months.
HP Buys Security Software Company Arcsight For $1.5B In Cash
Omg, do you know Nazi is short for? Nationalist socialists. It is a socialist party. Fascism differs from socialism only in the businesses being titularly in private hands, but they are completely controlled by the government in both.

I think it is quite sad to see so many people who are clearly ignorant about this history using their ignorance as a justification to call me names.
Time to break out the Ye Olde Fortran or a bottle of Klein's.
In american culture being able to accept gentle and no so gentle teasing, as well as being able to dish it out is a skill required in typical "masculine" professions and endeavors.

It is very useful dealing with people who expect you to take friendly teasing, and it's even more useful to be able to turn it around and tease back (and is a sign of high status individuals in some of those).
Of course you always start with a business model! But then you find out that it doesn't work (customers don't need your product, or are not wiling to pay for it, or you simply can't make money). So you have to switch business models and try something else. You cannot know everything before you start.
Unless they've raised rates (entirely possible), the only $100 ticket you could get was parking in a handicapped zone... tsk tsk tsk!
> Wag tail as OpenJDK slips into obsolescence.

We can simply remove all references to Oracle trademarks from the OpenJDK and continue with it. It may be unable to run software that targets Oracle's evil VM, but it will happily run whatever is built for it.

It's a shame, but it could work.
Steve Blanks view is that "A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model"

from: http://steveblank.com/2010/04/08/no-plan-survives-first-cont...
I try to use them... whether the new Presidential ones or otherwise. People get angry and I say, you'll take your dollar coins and like them!
The software we take for granted has already been written. There is no danger that it will become uneconomical to make more copies of it. It may be uneconomical to write certain new pieces of software, but that's not software we're currently taking for granted.

The majority of software development, something like 90%, is already bespoke project work, which doesn't depend on copyright to fund it. In fact, the more freely we can copy software, the more value we can produce in bespoke project work. Django, Linux, Firefox, and SQLite make it possible for me to toss together a simple CRUD web site in 45 minutes.
World’s Most Cramped Airline Seat to Launch Next Week
The easy answer to this is to just stop developing for their platform.
As a UVA student, all I have to say is that it gets better with time. Losing to an FCS team is never easy, but eventually you will be able to laugh again.

At least it was only once. We're making losing to Duke a yearly tradition.
Dude, you completely, totally, utterly missed the point of my comment. Where did I say that money can't bring happiness? Where did I say that wealth is a bad thing?

Let me restate the point of it for you, since it clearly went over your head: In life, it's best to have a personal (internal) measuring stick that keeps you grounded regardless of how you choose to play the "numbers" game...
Ruby packaging in Debian and Ubuntu: Mythbusting and FAQ
Godwins law doesn't exist. If you bothered to know what You were talking a out you'd know Godwin never made any such law. It is an excuse for holocaust deniers to refuse to admit that the Nazi party was real and did exist and therefore the causes and situations relevant to their existence are worth considering.

Notice also, I did not make any comparison to hitler, i asked how he thought the German people let Nazis come to power and why.

Of course, that was a question that you don't answer, instead you engage in personal attack.

If you actually cared for debate, your only contribution wouldn't be ad hominem and lies.
Throwing money at it probably won't solve it.
The Facebook Effect is about the product and company Facebook, as opposed to Zuckerberg, per se. In tone, it more closely resembles business non-fiction, or long-form journalism, than the celebrity biopic style of The Accidental Billionaires, on which the film is based. So it's less fun as beach reading, but in my opinion more accurate, and probably of more use to somebody in the business.

Kirkpatrick had unprecedented access to much of the early team, including people who were no longer with Facebook. He does come off as slightly star-struck at times, and not just at Mark Zuckerberg, so keep your salt-shaker handy.

Disclaimer: I work at Facebook, and am proud to call Zuck a friend.
I'd honestly say, in my experience, there were certainly a couple oneupsman type people, the vast majority weren't. And the dealing with the ones who were in something that mattered before getting a job with that exact sort of people, was a great bit of job training.
I don't have any personal experience to draw on, but why couldn't you do some combination of free and paid?

Freemium model is an option. There's also the possibility of just giving away full version trials to a lot of people when you're getting started. This approach also has the benefit of generating publicity if you give the free versions to the right people.
New York under attack as bed bugs make unwanted comeback
Whom to hire: The best, the mediocre or the cheapest
You're defending the ridiculous, and really the first two paragraphs of your entry are just unnecessary defensive noise that encourage readers to hit back.

Your title is now vastly better for everyone, from search engines to casual readers.
It is totally legit, an official holiday in Russia since last year. However, we here have such days for a lot of different professions, so of course none of them are days off work, just days of vanity and recognition :)
I'm not an expert on the matter but I think it is fair to assert that the following:

One time fee of 79$ > (79/12)$/month

That depends on lots of factors such as retention rate, conversion rate and customer acquisition cost but as a general rule, you should take for granted that every new customer will equal less than 12 months payout, especially in our ridiculously fast moving industry.

PS: I might be wrong since I got no hard data to back my claim but at least it's something you should consider in your estimates.
The relationship between Debian and Ruby has always been a bit strained, but I wonder how big of an impact the biggest maintainer of the packages will be.

Then again, as one of the comments says, "everyone's already compiling from source anyway", so...
Speaking as an American who left Silicon Valley to go bootstrap a "lifestyle" business somewhere cheaper, I think the US is really over-rated. It's expensive to live and work in the US, especially the Bay Area, and you can still target American / Western customers with whatever software product you want to produce while spending much less in your home country (assuming your home country is cheaper than the US).
Why are Apple iPhone Users Slow to Upgrade?
Thank you for remoinding me: never argue with a leftist, they'll just lie.
You're usually right but not this time.
I was part of the team that put this together at Startup Weekend in NY. We were all about getting this up and out into the world before the end of the weekend. Putting up mostly static images allowed us to not worry about any CSS bullshit and focus all our efforts on the copy, design, and minimum viable functionality for the site.
That's a great point. There is a third branch in the trifecta, which is advertising/PR to tell people about what you have.

Be wary of someone great at advertising/PR but not at market fit. Those are two distinct questions. Often the founder needs to "own" market fit, probably with the help of others, and advertising/PR can be somewhat delegated. However since market fit drives every decision, it can be hard for that person to be anyone else but the founder.
Why people tend virtual sheep when real farmers are virtually scraping by?
Anyone knows how this would affect JRuby?
Lots and LOTS of delicious crepes, everywhere you go!
Ask HN: What are examples of 'open' social networks?
By that I mean somewhere that you connect with people you don't know - as opposed to capturing your existing social group (Facebook, LinkedIn).
The Nomadic Programmer
I think you can outsource much more than accounting as a startup: graphic design to 99designs, html/css to CSS Ninjas javascript to oDesk coders. HOWEVER, you should be able to edit your html/css/javascript in house, so you should know how to write it and make sure you don't get funked inflexible frameworks. However, you should write the backend in house otherwise you have no idea what you're getting.

I worked for a startup that got someone to build their site fast and cheap, and they got stuck with a php QCubed framework. We spent the next 3 months deciding whether to re-write or if we could live with it. I think they are still struggling today. Would have been much easier/cheaper/efficient to get it right from the start.
Twitter is one.
I've had problems with Muni, but uh, nothing ever that bad. The bigger beef for me is that on most bus routes, from A to B less than a mile, you can outwalk the bus.
http://www.HackerNewsers.com
A lot of companies are abandoning the freemium model lately (http://news.buzzgain.com/freemium-is-dead-long-live-freemium...). It's not the de facto choice that it used to be.
If I've got any responsibility for the management of a project (and that includes putting tickets in an issue tracking system and resolving them), I ask the question of "What happens if we miss this deadline?"

I usually ask this question at least once a week, when the subject of the deadline comes up at the meeting.

There really are some things where, if you don't do something by a certain time, you might as well not do it at all (say, a grant application.) On the other hand, I was involved in a project that ran three months late, but somehow we managed to have meetings with the client where we always agreed we were a week behind schedule, but that everything was cool. The customer was very satisfied by that project, however, my continued involvement was expensive for my firm.
Great article. I would be interested in more detail on how you specifically benchmark storage. I benchmark a lot of enterprise SAN storage for Oracle database clusters and I've found a tool called ORION that works surprisingly well. It tests small random I/Os, large sequential I/Os, or any combination thereof, and uses the Oracle asynchronous I/O libraries so you can simulate a real database workload.

The nice thing is that I can plug in my workload mix - 90% read, 10% writes, point it to all of my raw devices, and it will test all combinations of small random, large sequential I/Os, multiple queue depths, and give me CSV file outputs showing my I/O per second, MB per second, and latency for every data point.

You can also tell it the size of your storage array or disk cache, which it will add to Linux kernel cache, and pre-warm the cache with /dev/random. For example, if I'm testing on a server with 64GB of RAM and 8GB of storage cache, it will pre-warm a total of linux kernel cache + 8GB, so it might pre-warm 60-70GB of data before each data point to get accurate, repeatable results without the effects of cached reads/writes.
You can use gemsets and bundler together.

Gemsets simply allow you to have an isolated environment. If you want to install the gems from multiple projects in the same gemset the choice is yours.

Bundler just makes installing each project's dependencies easier.

The pattern I started to use recently was to check in include an .rvm file with the same gemset name as the project.

This way, I simply clone the project, install bundler, and then issue bundle install and my project is ready to go.
Agreed. The author supports going outside of Clojure for larger scale processing, e.g. Hadoop. This is sensible, but it's some leap to call concurrency a fad.

It's likely that Clojure will target some other runtime (in the future). Concurrency primitives in Clojure (var, ref, atom, agent, future, promise etc.) are practical, elegant, and focused tools. Why work around them?
It was (re-)released a few years ago, and some people I saw the movie with were totally convinced that the special effects had all been redone with absolutely cutting-edge CGI like the remastered Star Wars movies. They were quite floored when I told them that the only digital aspect of the re-release had to do with color balance and improving the audio track.
I understand your concern, but I don't think those things will disappear. Not everyone cares about maximizing page views, and quirky, artistic, esoteric websites with narrow appeal will persist even in the face of SEO.
Gene discovery could yield treatments for nearsightedness
I'm working on a semantic web related startup and I've lavishing a lot of attention on web interface for ordinary (non-mobile) web browsers. At some point I think I want a mobile app and I'd ~seriously~ think about outsourcing that.
Thanks for your good post.

I actually think it's reassuring that there will always be a creative and unexpected title that titillates the brain in a way that search engine automation algorithm will never equate. By the way, that why most of the CMS systems allow for an alias used in SEO-type descriptors like search engine friendly URLs or meta titles.

If we leave search engines to choose for us the most creative, interesting, and talented content creators, we are in deep trouble I think. Until then, you can keep surfing randomly once-in-a-while and finding out how far Google is from guessing what's most interesting on any subject. Google and other search engine always tend to return lowest common denominator results on any subject, rather than a new creative and rare perspective on that same subject. It's the nature of automation for the masses.

Search automation such as an autocomplete is useful nevertheless. I also agree it can be vastly improved. Autocompletes are there to help you improve the quality of how you formulate your query, help you find content faster, and help you find related, misspelled, or otherwise relevant content. Here is a paper I wrote on advanced autocomplete features of which most have yet to be implemented by Google for instance: http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremen...
Driver ploughs car through pub wall into the gents' toilet
I did one search and then turned it off.
iOS and Android, in terms of upgrades, are two very distinct beasts. iOS is closely tied to the generation of iPhone it debuts on, where Android is (per the nature of the OS and hardware separation) a living, growing entity. Android upgrades are incremental and often specialized for each device by its' manufacturers (HTC, Moto). iOS is designed to run on that generation's hardware, and the next generation has new hardware and new software. It's an expiring product by design, whereas Android has a longer lifespan.

Compare HARDWARE upgrades to iOS4 devices and software upgrades, and you'll understand the disparity. Apple users are more likley to buy the next generation of phone than upgrade their last-generation device to the newest software.

Not to mention the elephant in the room that is iOS4's initial horrible performance on last-gen devices.

This article is a bit naive.
The last time this issue came up, I recommended the following free e-book on software pricing, and I still stand by the recommendation:
http://www.neildavidson.com/dontjustrollthedice.html.
That should get you thinking about the right issues.

Now, as to your specific questions:

1) I'd start charging right away. If you can't get enough users to get good feedback, then that's feedback of a different kind. I don't see any serious upside to getting lots of free users, if you don't already have a business model built around that.

2) My gut is telling me that $7/month sounds low for this kind of product. If you've got compelling advantages over Balsamiq, and a good way to induce trial (i.e., the "free option" you mention), then I'd be thinking in the $15-20/month ballpark. I say this because as a business user, honestly, when evaluating a product that will help my business earn money more efficiently, the difference between $7/month and $20/month is basically a rounding error. They both fall into the "pocket change" bucket.
Erm... maximize?
Perhaps the South Park and Daily Show comparison is just there because they both are running on Comedy Central.
BoingBoing interviewed Syd Mead, who designed the "look and feel" of the world of Blade Runner. http://tv.boingboing.net/syd-mead/ Note that page has a three-part interview in reverse chronological order. It's all interesting, but the third part is the one that deals with Blade Runner specifically.
Allow me to answer in terms of integrated vs. modular architectures: they were fast enough when Java's virtual machine became viable, when .Net's virtual machine became viable, when interpreted scripting languages (Javascript, Python, Ruby) became viable.

Basically, whenever an extra layer that soaked up performance in return for other benefits (such faster development time, better error checking, more flexibility, easier, more intuitive) was actually adopted by real people, it meant that the computer was fast enough in their opinion to trade some of that fastness for other benefits.

relevant: http://xkcd.com/676/
Leaked: Acer Laptop with Dual Touchscreens
Thanks -- I should have been clearer:

I intend to offer a free plan that limits you on the # of mockups you can create, with paid plans that increase the # of mockups.
Another important think to note when using RVM is to not use 'sudo' when installing gems. It is easy get caught up in a README or tutorial and execute 'sudo gem install...' as listed in the document. Unfortunately, this installs the gem in root's environment, which isn't configured with RVM goodness using the default installation method and you'll quickly end up with all sorts of problems and obscure error messages.
FCC Paving the Way to "Wifi on Steroids"
Learn You Some Erlang: Designing a Concurrent Application
Excellent article. I was really struck by Zuckerberg's reaction to Jose's hesitancy about publishing some of his personal information.
Really? It's two words that aren't commonly found together. The only way I can see it being trivial enough to comment on is if the guy is related to something named Project Metal. But I don't know who he is.
Almost 20 million downloads later, what's next for Bump (YC S09)?
Michael Santoli: The unwisdom of trader crowds
Yes, but one of the JVMs selling points is that it's attractive to both open-source hackers and heavyweight commercial users.

If you fork it, then you're in essence splitting these user bases, to the great detriment of both.
I gave a presentation to in Japan (I don't speak Japanese) to about 200 people through a interpreter. The challenge there is that you must be able to speak slowly, clearly and use non-complicated and less technical words. Since my presentation was technical it was difficult to stay away from technical terms and I later found out that the interpreters did a poor job translating my presentation and many people didn't really get a lot of the detail I discussed. My suggestion is to keep things simple, find interesting ways to explain your technology,product,ideas,etc in a non-technical way (as you were explaining it to your mother). This is obvious, but it becomes that much more important when your presenting to an international audience especially when you are going through an interpreter.

Roy
Heh, by asking "What happens if we miss this deadline?" you're transform it into a liveline, IMHO.

But what happens if you "miss a deadline" in your personal life? Do you have any personal life deadlines?
Good point -- its definitely not that simple.

As a data point, note that Mockingbird, which is transitioning to a paid model, offers a $9/month option as a starting point:

http://gomockingbird.com/launchinfo/

Similar mockup tools are in the $9-$15/mo range on the low end.
Would it ever be possible to do an App Store Instant? And an iBookstore Instant? Wow, are those two needed!

Thanks for designing it so that it works with Opera!
And the guy sitting in jail isn't the killer, but his gun? No, strike that. It's not the gun, but the bullet.
I agree. Just wanted to point out that it is still an option.
3D illusion in street tries to change drivers' attitudes
I suspect there will a healthy market for analysis tools for document oriented databases to allow people to find out what they actually have in their documents.
(take 6 (george-jahad))
Grellas: any guess as to when this mess will finally end?
Why Twitter's t.co is a game changer
It is not difficult to understand. The trouble is, that it is very easy to misuse.