skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Web Startup versus Non-Web Startup
Since I have started visiting HN, I have seen many great reasons/examples for web startups.

However, I have come across some interesting examples of really cheap businesses to start that have very high returns by comparison.

Case in point, a business that I heard about while working an on-site job. One of the technicians cousins had started a business affectionately named, "Scoopy Doo." The cousin paid some workers around $10 an hour to go around the local area and pickup dog excrement from customers yards. He worked approximatively two weeks a year, filling in for when people couldn't work. He has no marketing campaign, very little overhead, and stores the waste on his farm (does not use additional products).

His business nets him $100,000 a year (confirmed), and his market is only a series of small towns in Northern Michigan.

It seems that while there is great value in making a startup on the internet, old fashion entrepreneurship can be more hands on but is still amazing profitable.

Web based companies can grow fast, have huge markets and can be started for very little.

If you truly put your mind to it, you could make a business with very little overhead, very little startup cost and very little micro-management outside of the web.

At the end of the day it is about the percentage return on investment, correct?

So I ask HN, why do we focus on web startups? Why not pay attention on all types of startups?

What about the gray areas in between? For example, creating your own hardware but selling different software for it online.
Note: This article is about consuming APIs, not necessarily creating your own for consumption.
>> "Pretty impressive, but for some reason they decided against using HTML5 canvas."

I'm not quite sure why the 'div' hate and canvas love here...

With the div approach, you can just modify the position of a div, and leave the rest to the browser to update the display. The browser will only redraw what is absolutely necessary. It's pretty well optimized in dealing with that stuff.

With the canvas version, you're redrawing everything each time.

This version redraws the entire set of balls once every 30ms. From scratch. Even if nothing has moved. Expect some CPU usage, and potentially on slower machines, some flicker/lack of smoothness or other issues.

That said, good fun :)
I was shocked to see that effect on Google's homepage; I have had that effect on my website for months! I wrote it in HTML5 as well. You can see my original effect here:

http://jlongster.com/

They did the whole 3d thing which is cool. All I would have to do is increase the ball size as it's moving around.

I'm laughing because I submitted my effect to several websites, but nobody seemed to care... and then google comes along... :)
Several of you seem to be confusing profit with revenue.
A study came out saying that most people on AMT use it because they're bored as an alternative to games or whatever else since if they're going to be bored on the internet they might as well make some money even if an insignificant amount.
Agreed. I think on the continuum from general infrastructure kind of code to end user applications, the place of open source is on the infrastructure end. It's useful to opensource code that many people can and should reuse.
The point of the article is in

Clifford M. Will

"The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment" (2001)

http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2001-4/

"Gravitational wave damping has been detected in an amount that agrees with general relativity to half a percent using the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar,"

I also have something to say to the first question in comments there, to which the article author answered that he can't answer. The question was "Is the speed of gravity reduced by the medium through which it travels in a analogous manner to the slowing of the speed of light through various media?"

I was lucky enough to read Feynman Lectures recently, so as far as I understood him, the photons themselves don't really slow down in various media. That is, what we see as the result is the slowdown, but only because it's a new light (new photons) on the other side of the media. The photons on the other side are photons which were pushed out of the atoms of the media, that's why it appears that they come out slower. Inside, between the atoms of the media, photons still move at the speed of light.
Looks like in cases like that the bug tracker is making the underlying problems more visible. In that case, removing the bug tracker is not the way forward.
This is not entirely dependent on states.

http://www.sfgsa.org/index.aspx?page=411

Plus you're probably not clocking an even 40 hour work week working on your small business. $2k a month is likely minimum wage-ish or below in SF.
Have you read the article at all? Or at least scanned through the section headings? Danah doesn't claim CL is a "victim" or that "men and society in general are being held back by keeping prostitution illegal".

Please take the time and try to extract the author's gist from the article before criticizing it.
Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if you have to stand) and produced a lot of additional confusion. The interesting thing is that previously, with our specs and our so-called waterfall approach were were more agile. It happened naturally as we naturally did incremental development and we naturally talked to each other when we needed to, with no annoying scrum meetings and asinine bs from managers. People say managers have no voice at scrums, but what is a scrum master anyway? Everyone who doesn't write code is a manager and their opinion can interfere with progress. And of course the idiot child product manager would constantly lecture people about talking too much, except she would never shut up herself.

Even if a meeting is 15 minutes, if it is irritating, insulting, distracting and undermining, then it negatively impacts productivity for at least an hour after. I took to. Having breakfast afterwards, where I normally wouldn't eat breakfast, just to get centered so I could get some work done for the rest of the day.

I left that company soon after. If I had stayed i would have gone postal, or had to hire a lawyer to sue them under the ADA for torturing me by making me stand and listen to sanctimonious bullshit from idiots.

People say, when a bad experience is described that it wasn't being done right. Well i see no difference between what i experienced and what is being advocated.

Yes, there is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility.

That said, on my own we've adopted a number of so-called agile methodologies like incremental and iterative development.

But the whole movement I'd oriented around imposing ideology on people. This is wrong.

For instance, whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true, but I would never say there is ONE TRUE WAY. Agile proponents often seem to say there is only ONE TRUE WAY.

Also, don't mod me down just because I work differently to you. This is the ideology of the ONE TRUE WAY that is just wrong.

Programmers come in all shapes and sizes. They actually can be productive and work in a different than I do or you do.
Why is the 'prostitution ads in Craigslist makes policing easier' argument made by everyone but the police themselves?

I think people underestimate how much Craigslist's brand legitimizes prostitution - it's a lot easier to rationalize browsing for hookers when the ads are in the same place you look for apartments and sell your used furniture. Pushing them over to creepy-loser-forums.ws seems like a cheap way to reduce demand.
I don't have reliable data at hand, but what I can say is that VMware is starting to use Redis and will do more in the future :)
Ask HN: Android Mp3/Media Player?
Is there a Android equivalent to a Ipod Touch? As far as I have found, the only comparable option would be to buy a Android based smartphone.
The speed of gravity is either infinity or millions of times faster than the speed of light. If the speed of gravity was the speed of light, then heavy objects passing near the earth would have more gravity than objects passing away. Less of the gravity beans would be arriving to be measured. Like the red shift in light or the doppler effect with sound.

I see gravity as more of a property of the universe, every atom in the universe is attached to each other atom in some way.
To clarify, I was indeed referring to the iPhone 4.

Perhaps I should just have left the reference out altogether. Imho it's a serious problem that needs to be addressed regardless of the state on other platforms.
Pathetic Buyouts: Companies That Sold For $1
I still believe that advertising will be a small source of revenue in comparison to paid accounts. But, within the context of advertising, I am pulled towards local, value added advertisements like you mention. It also helps that we have maps on which we can show markers of nearby bikeshops while someone plots their route!

And, I mentioned donations because he directly referred to donating money to our site! I was just giving him the headsup on what we are thinking in terms of donors and our premium accounts, since we should be at that point within a month.
No-one enters into prostitution willingly or happily for good reasons and there's never a good ending. PIMPS are mostly placing those ads, not your strange vision of freely-enterprising women happily renting out their bodies. They are given quotas to fill and they are kept "under control" by hooking them on hard drugs.

If widespread anecdotal evidence is to be believed, there are at least some and probably many women who enter prostitution willingly and happily. Some of the ads are placed by pimps but it also provides a way for women to work without intermediaries.

You claim that prostitution damages society which might be true but, on the other hand, prostitution has always coexisted with society, sometimes legally, sometimes through organized religion (believe it or not), and currently in most of the United States and various other parts of the world, it's illegal. In Canada, for example, prostitution itself is not illegal but various activities (soliciting on the street, pimping etc) are.

I'm not saying that prostitution is a good thing or that it should be encouraged, but it's certainly nowhere near as black and white as some of the anti-prostitution campaigners like to claim.
I would take the "would you use this service" feedback with a grain of salt.

It costs you nothing to say "yes", but everything changes as soon as you start to charge for it.

Going from Free to $0.01 for any online product or service significantly changes your conversion numbers.

You might get better feedback standing on a corner downtown, asking if people would use your service... and charge them $1 for a voucher that would allow them to use it when it is ready.

PS: Please get out of stealth mode!
Numeronyms. Or, wtf does Mozilla i18n mean?
And all because Chrome OS should be a part of the TV sets! So that's the potential fight: web based OS in the TV sets versus iPhones/iPods that talk to the new Apple TV.

I think it's clear who has better "remotes."
are wordpress.org and en.wordpress.org mutually exclusive? If so, then they'd be #1 if these were combined
Yes, thanks for the feedback. As with all things, good names are in short supply. I've learnt that it's a very common thing for grad students to build citation management software, and I fell into that trap as well.
Ask HN: Would you want a VIM keyboard(cover)?
For the past couple of weeks I have been working on a prototype for a Vim keyboard that would show the default bindings for keyboard shortcuts on Vim. Having finished the (rough) prototype of the board, I was wondering: How many of you would be interested in getting your hands on something like this? If so, would you prefer a keyboard or keyboard cover? And at what price range?

I was thinking that if there is enough interest in my project, I might just work on talking to some suppliers and getting this out to the public.

Here's a link to my blog post that includes images of the prototype on an apple ultra-thin keyboard: http://blog.razerbeans.com/vim-keyboard-hack
I can only speculate. We used seed sites from all American and European countries, including Denmark, so Danish websites should be covered. It might be the geo IP database that we use (maxmind.com), or there are really only 6 sites with more backlinks in Denmark, or Danish webmasters use other countries to host their sites.
What Our $4.5M Raise Means For Our Customers
Agree. When I see my VC friends tweeting about those things, it serves as another reminder of what awaits you when you win :)
I did read it. It's entirely too casual for me.

I completely disagree that making it visible helps victims.

The police know it's there, they just don't want to bother or don't have the manpower to tackle it. Instead of using the CATEGORY LABEL all they have to do is use the SEARCH ENGINE !

I literally see a few drug deals go down from my window every day. I'm pretty sure it's hard drugs. One woman is carrying a baby while she buys. I've told the police about it. All they'd have to do is watch the space for an hour they could get the dealer. But they never do anything. That is a prime example of how if it doesn't fall into their lap, police aren't going to do anything.

So teach the cops to use the damn search engine on CL, you don't need an obvious category!
very cool love it, html5 I assume?
Huh?

So rather than confirm economic theories by using statistical correlations to economic growth or general well-being we should...um...not "hijack economics." Or something.

What's the point of indicting pseudo-science and confirmation bias? Is she saying that economics is a pseudo-science and should not be taken seriously? Or did we decide that the existence of confirmation bias invalidated all scientific inquiry? Should economists give up on back-testing theories and go back to proposing what ought to happen when perfectly rational consumers meet perfectly rational producers?
Running DirectDraw games on Windows 7 using OpenGL
Use Condensed Milk for Baking
A Beer Drinkers View of the VC Industry
Here's a clickable link: http://blog.razerbeans.com/vim-keyboard-hack
Yes, the lists show the numbers for subdomains so wordpress.org and en.wordpress.org are mutually exclusive. I suspect that all Google domains combined would be #1 (google.com, maps.google.com, code, picasaweb, sites, news, video, groups).
A bike with a reverse-spinning wheel
More variation in offline startups while the techniques for web startups probably apply mostly to other web startups as well.

But I agree, there are often good ideas where the web is just ancillary, or even enables the business but isn't the core.
The Every Child Left Behind program suggests that it's not a theory.

Placing an emphasis on standardized testing is symptomatic of exactly that -- train the intellect and imagination out of the populace... they're easier to control then.

Teachers are rewarded not for what they teach their students, but rather how well their students do on the standardized tests. So now not only are we forcing everyone to abide by the lowest common denominator, we're penalizing teachers who try to do their job, and rewarding the ones that game the system by teaching their students how to take the standardized test.
well. On older iPhones with known issues in the bootloader, you could in theory also replace the apple OS with something completely different (remember the Android on iPhone 3G videos earlier this year?).

The fact that HTC and other vendors are sloppier in securing their phones (remember the discussions about Motorola's e-fuse?) doesn't make these phones more "open" in the "freedom" sense.

It just means that it's easier to exploit them to install a different OS.

Now the Android OS of course is open source, but what good is that if there's no device available that actually allows you to officially install your own build? This also means that my earlier comments are about the phones, not the OS itself.
My biggest issue with buying an unsubsidized phone is that I would still be paying the carrier a premium for subsidizing a phone purchase (to my understanding) without actually getting that benefit. (I guess there are other carriers, I have not actually bothered to look) In the end I just seem to be loosing about $400 or so since my phone bill remains the same, but I have to spend more to buy the phone.
In our tests, Yahoo Site Explorer sometimes shows more links, sometimes less links than we do. It depends on the subdomain.
The Future of Ad Agencies and Social Media
Wait, what? Did you read the article? The propagation of the curvature of spacetime happens at the speed of light. If it didn't you could use large amounts of energy to propagate information faster than the speed of light, which screws the hell out of causality (using the light cones). If you have a good math background you can solve for it using the equation.

I see gravity as more of a property of the universe, every atom in the universe is attached to each other atom in some way.

Please don't do science like this. You should use experimentation to differentiate between theories.
But foo is more likely to jump around than env, right?

I'd like someone else to make up my mind on this. Please discredit the env approach in any way possible :-)
I'm curious how "killer" it will be regarding power consumption. The present Hummingbird based Samsung's best single-core S5PC110 is already in 45 nm, so if they put two cores, the CPU will need twice as much power as now when both whenever the second core has to do something.
Nice work guys, like the QuoteLinks.
Makes sense. Craigslist does not beat prostitutes, take their money, dictate what they will do for customers, or force or encourage them to do dangerous drugs. Now prostitutes will resort to people who may do all of those things.
TinySrc - easy and free way to reformat graphics and images for mobile devices
It applies to everyone. Not just mechanical turk folks. When someone says they 'will use' your product they are non-committal. (I have done this so many times for the fear of offending the person who is asking me). When its time to take out their credit cards then they backtrack. They are 2 different decision points. The later is what matters to startups.
not to mention one full of grammatical, style, content, and spelling errors. There was not one fact in this that is not immediately obvious to anyone who has been in NYCity for five minutes. And, also, in addition to that, some of the observations were dead wrong. For instance, Starbucks is universally known in this town to be the public restroom of Manhattan.
Why all the ire, you ask. The reason is that this post contains numerous uses of "lol" as an arbitrary sentence particle, which, for some reason, makes my blood boil. Oh, also, New York is one of the greatest cities in the history of human civilization and to utterly fail to have any insight into it at all is embarrassing. Try again!
This is a great concept, but I would love to see it implemented as a plugin for Visual Studio or Eclipse, not a new IDE.
There are some things that are only a crime when certain people who disapprove are merely aware that they took place.
That is, however, precisely what they did during the .com boom.
"Pretty impressive, but for some reason they decided against using HTML5 canvas."

IIRC, it was because of browser incompatibilities. IE8 removed the VRML necessary for excanvas.js to work and yet doesn't have full canvas support, so they were in the odd situation where it worked on IE6, IE7, and standards-compliant browsers, but not on IE8. Googling, I've found that excanvas.js has since been updated to work on IE8, but maybe it didn't support the specific functionality they needed.

There're also pretty strict latency constraints on the homepage, so including excanvas.js and its canvas emulation is quite a few bytes that just aren't necessary if you use divs.
I (the author) agree with you. I also do not like this whole idea of ONE TRUE WAY. From the closing graphs.

Iterative and incremental development isn't for everybody. Lots of teams do things completely ad-hoc. Lots of teams are happy with waterfall. Lots of folks just don't care to change. These are all good reasons why agile might be a bad idea.

My standard for what agile isn't universal, sure. but I'm very happy teaching best practices for iterative and incremental development. You can call that agile, you can call it Joe. Whatever it is, helping people see things and try things they haven't seen or tried before -- and then letting them decide whether it's working for them or not... Over time there can be an us-versus-them attitude that sets up between any two groups of people. We must always be on guard for this. If you're not a servant to the team, you shouldn't be in the room.
I've always thought what we call 'speed of light' is the indirect observation of a structural property of (this) the universe. A property that has something to do with movement in general and not only the movement of light (the movement of space itself?).

Another interisting property is the 0º Kelvin (absolute zero) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
I feel a Timecube coming on...
Education: Quantity Vs Quality
Your trouble is on focusing on the analogy too much. Instead of, "how can we measure what the effects of gravity would be if matter or energy were created or destroyed?" ask "how can we measure the movement of the curvature of spacetime?"
Oh thanks, I fixed the text.

I do not think Angband is a low quality game, although after reading the text this is what I understood as well, the sentence was poorly written, sorry. I intended to address the situation that some people perceive it is a "low game" and that even the worst game for Atari 2600 is better just because it does not have graphics (I play it without tiles).
Thanks for pointing out my lack of reference to our site. http://ridewithgps.com

mapmyride is the key player in the market, in terms of userbase and, recently, a $5 million A round. I am more wary now they have VC's, who may be more aggressive than mmr ever would have been in other circumstances. At least, that's my assumption.

I can't imagine MMR would sue their own customers over it, that would be downright suicidal as far as public opinion goes. However, that is duly noted.

I wonder if I can convince a particularly feisty/intrepid user to maintain this piece of software, pulling the risk away from us primarily ;) Hmmm. Thanks for the advice, definitely something to think about.
Doesn't instapaper already integrate with Kindle? You can have instapaper email you a .mobi file to your @kindle account with links to text only version of the saved pages.
This is a consideration. I just would need a willing, competent and feisty user to take on the project! I'll have to consider it.
Cockroach Brains Could Hold the Key to Next Generation of Antibiotics
Online Workers Doing Fine, ODesk Passes One Million Hours A Month
Ask HN: Why is this story dead?
She's using the term ISP as it's defined in the Communications Decency Act. In those terms an ISP is anyone who provides a communication service over the internet, which encompasses everyone from the lowliest blogger to globespanning access networks like Verizon.
Here's the wikipedia entry on this poem along with the audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
Your right, but it doesn't matter because Google, et al. "see" subdomains as separate entities just the same as TLD names.