skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It concerns me where you say: We've been struggling with selling our product because many people refuse to change and don't want to learn new technologies.

If you are getting this product in front of true potential clients and they are not saying "wow we need this" then you might be in trouble. Even traditional industries now realise the value of technology and if it is going to save/make them money they wont be against new technologies (and for the few exceptions, stay away from them - they'll soon be dead).

So firstly you need to make sure you are building something that customers "don't know they want/need" as opposed to building something "they don't need or want". Just because you thought it was a great idea and could save money or improve processes doesn't mean they will. So if this is not a spinoff of software you have already done for a company I would suggest you do some serious market research to ensure you are not flogging a dead horse.

The next stage is then marketing. Firstly in doing your market research you should have identified some potential clients that said "yes this would be useful", so target them first. Then target their competitors. If this is a product that costs a lot of money then you can factor in having a sales team that really spends time selling the product to each client.

Then think about how you can market the product. It doesn't sound like your target users are likely to be doing Google searches for this product, they may not read anything online in relation to their industry, but are their industry magazines? Can you get cheap advertising in such magazines. Can you offer to write an article about how "tech is changing the industry" - you don't need to reference your product too much if at all - "Guest article by Yosho, CEO of XYZ Enterprises" will get things started.

And lastly don't forget about face to face with any local businesses that you might be able to work with. I did some work with a small consulting company that was looking for new clients, they decided to go to some conferences to try and get new clients. I found a website in the US that showed approximate turnovers for businesses in the area (can't remember the site but was government related) and we found more than 2,000 business with 10 mill a year turnover (their target clients) within about a 10 mile radius of their office. Here they were all about to get on planes to get clients that would have them on planes and away from family for years, and they had never tapped the 2,000 clients down the road. Anyone close to you involved in the industry you are targetting - cold call them, phone them and ask to meet them and show them what you are doing. If you are young (under 25 say) play the "I need guidance" card - you'll be amazed at how many people might be interested in helping. And never rule out getting these people involved - potential investors etc.

Good luck, but do check that you are building something someone wants before you go too far!
While I've never used Movable Type, I feel confident recommending WordPress hands-down. It works great, is amazingly flexible, and has a marvelous community. Themes, extensions, tutorials, and more all make WordPress one of the best platforms to work with.

Plus, if you've gotten used to the variety of post types in Tumblr, there are quite a few good Tumblr-style microblog themes for WordPress from Woothemes and others. They might ease the transition and keep your blog working more like you're used to. You might even be able to tweak a WordPress microblog theme to look like your existing Tumblr theme...

Finally, with the changes going on at Six Apart right now, it's hard to say what the future will hold for Movable Type. Could get better, could get worse, but right now it's in limbo of sorts. WordPress.org (and Automattic) are doing great, and I can't imagine that changing anytime soon.
Researchers seek to find true level of cyberstalking
The Art of Money Getting, by P.T. Barnum (1880)
from a tech dodo's point of view, i go for wordpress. i find movable type too cluttered.
>>To be clear, the threading example was just something off the top of my head,

That is OK, since I just skimmed the example and saw problems with Apache/PHP std lib.

It was just stupid. Lots of people use those -- and bugs are killed fast.

In absolute worst case, use an external program in another language for this. (Processes or threads doesn't matter.)

That works, since IMAP4 was new and shiny in the mid 90s(!) -- in the non-MS world, we don't replace functioning standards all the time so there are multiple implementations out there for e.g. email libs...

>>I'm pretty confused as to why these comments have been downvoted so much.

Because you only know one side of things -- and believe the propaganda about the other side.
>>Rubinius is an implementation of the Ruby programming language.

One sentence from the homepage.
Prolog. After coding in "normal" (iterative/procedural) languages for a long while, this rule-based languaged just couldn't click. It finally did after about a week. And bam. Changed my thinking.

Also, learn Scheme, or Lisp. You'll rethink recursion after that.
Considering HN's minimalist design (a good thing IMO), and the readership, it should be no surprise that we're seeing these "redesigns".

There are a few mobile apps for reading HN - also not made by Ycombinator.
"Are the site's users patient enough to wait for improvements and bug fixes?"

It is not about bugs or improvements. Diggv4 is a completely different site, that does not have a lot in common with the old Digg.

I am not negative per se about the new design, to me, it looks a lot cleaner, but thats about it. It is not the looks that bother me, it is the fact that the site completely changed its purpose. I have used Digg as a silent reader (non power-user) for a few years. I may have left some comments here and there, dugg a few articles, but most of the time, I just went there to get "what the community decided was the best of the internet right now".

This feature is the one that IMO has been left out in the new version, the site has no interest in providing that service anymore, it seems.

The new version is filled with stories I have no interest in, the amount of diggs a top-story gets is marginal at best compared to diggv3.

The site has completely lost its energy, it has degraded to a pretty looking collection of automatically aggregated stories that a lot of people no longer care about.
That is funny... I am not paying a single cent for college. Sucks to be everyone else.
> I can't believe this is something that doesn't annoy a single Canonical developer enough.

The cool thing about open source is that anyone can fix this bug.

That said, it's pretty annoying and I wish Canonical would devote some developer time to fixing it.

Edit: I don't get the downvote. It really is a beautiful aspect of it: if you need something fixed in a certain way, you can, you are no longer beholden to anyone.
The biggest problem is deployment. It's fine if you are happy with web start, but if not then creating an .exe isn't trivial. One of the biggest issues relates the the JVM. Are you going to assume that your users have a particular JVM installed? If so, which one? What if they don't have it? Or you can package the JVM into the exe - although this will make creating that exe more difficult and make it significantly larger.

I would love a Java tool that could analyse your app and create an exe that contained a cut-down JVM. Cut-down in that any classes that aren't used (directly or indirectly) are omitted. This is not an easy thing to do given runtime control of class loading.
There are two countervailing effects going on: a drop in demand for college by states, and an increase in demand due to more college-age people. If the latter effect is the important one, then Hristov's original point (regarding reduced state subsidies for college) is irrelevant. If the former effect is the important one, then spending should have gone down.

And if Hristov believes the decrease in demand due to reduced state spending caused prices to go up, he should explain why he believes college behaves so strangely relative to other goods and services.
Ask HN: What Happens to Mozilla after 2011?
Mozilla has throughout the years proved skeptics wrong by being innovative in the browser market and preventing Microsoft from becoming a monopoly with regards to browsers. Through its search deal with Google, Mozilla has been able to employ and finance the continued development of the Firefox browser. This deal is however set to end in November, 2011 and with Google's continued development of the Chrome browser, I feel Google would not extend the deal. What are your thoughts on this?
Or the obvious alternative, which is that Facebook's value is simply a product of Metcalfe's Law - the value is in the connections between users, not the content the users create. A stranger's Facebook page is worthless to me, none of the content is relevant. I don't use Facebook, but that's largely irrelevant. What I see as mattering is the fact that when my mum or your mom or whoever joins Facebook, they are barraged with opportunities to connect with people they might not otherwise have kept in touch with. N^2 is a really big number when N is nearly everyone in the western world. Add a decent portion of lock-in and it's fairly obvious that you've got a multi-billion dollar company.
Geo-Location Tracking Data and Your Privacy
F(orget) this s(tuff)! Lets go build great products and businesses. Its taking away 15 mins we don't have.
"lost"? This seems a little over the top. He can always leave if he is unhappy. He obviously has a bright future ahead of him, whether it's at Google or not.
There are plenty of other angels out there ... if you don't trust the one you're dealing with, find another.
Bravo! TextMate really needed a modern and definitive clojure bundle.
Ask HN: Please review my startup- Local news as a game
Hi, would like to hear your feedback on new service "PixyCity- Your City News". Thanks!

www.pixycity.com
Google will absolutely extend the deal. It generates hundreds of millions in direct revenue.
Poor guy? I don't notice the man with a gun standing behind him that forces him in to servitude here.

He's a free agent, he made this little project, got offered a job at a very prestigious company, has his name on the map for the future and a reference that will open doors for a long long time to come (being offered a job directly by the head of the video division of Google, formerly an entrepreneur himself is likely not a daily occurrence).

Poor guy indeed.

Somehow I feel this isn't the last we've heard of him, and I wish him the best of luck with what he'll do there, and I don't doubt that if he ever decides to go solo that he'll find a lot of people willing to back his (ad)ventures.

There are much worse things to happen to you than this.
MyBuilder.com vs MyHammer.co.uk - Dirty Tricks
Super of the Youtube guys to follow through on this and great for him to see he actually got the job.

I'm pretty curious if we'll be able to spot his 'fingerprint' in the features that youtube will roll out over the next period.
that's quite impossible after an upvote and 2 comments
That's the lamest excuse of all to do something like that.
All right, all right, all right.
Installing and data availablity are a huge part of what I meant with 'trouble'.
Imagine what he can do with all the resources of google behind him.
Looks nice overall. But Caslon is a bit blurry and hard to read at less than 18px on Windows with Cleartype enabled. I'd either switch to Georgia or bump up the size.
You could if you put your money in Icelandic banks ;)
Google Checkout can do subscriptions for sure. It's in beta, but works very well:

http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Like I said, I wish him the best. I hope he does exactly that: use Google as a wonderful opportunity (like it is).

Money could make him comfortable where otherwise he would be hacking. I was hoping that didn't happen, and he uses it as another opportunity.

"Poor guy"? Maybe that was over the top. Maybe it wasn't. We will see.
Google Checkout does have recurring: http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
As others said, I don't think I've ever see entrepreneur spelled entrepenuer quite that many times before. If the nuclear bomb was mispelling entrepreneur, it has been dropped.

Though, I appreciate Ron's willingness to speak out against the collusion of these investors to wreak havoc on their competition.
Well, SLIME is far more powerful than what I'm illustrating here - particularly when coupled with Common Lisp. Over time I think this bundle can achieve a good portion of that power - we're just starting out :)
I don't think there's anything suspect about Ron Conway's misspelling of 'entrepreneur'. He probably just banged out the email without doing a spell-check. Let's remember it was a private email. Had he intended to have it published he probably would have taken more care. I can't speak for Ron, of course, but I will say that I frequently write the word "entrepreneur" (i.e. in blog posts, emails, etc). I'm not sure why - maybe it's the way I touch-type - but I often miss the second 'r'. I typically don't even notice until I do a spell-check. All in all, I think it was just an innocent mistake.
This is a great article, it washes away most of the misunderstood hype around HTML5 and the associated technologies.

I can't help but feel the mainstream media are dumb enough to accept any jargon that gets thrown in their general direction and put it as their factual message to their readers.
He also didn't specify which platform he was targeting. A lot of the points pornel mention apply equally to GUI toolkits running on Windows or Linux. You sacrifice some control in order to get cross-platform compatibility (as you have to do with certain CSS / Javascript elements). Java is probably the worst of all worlds in terms of the look and feel of its de-facto standard GUI library.
Minimum Viable Product in Hollywood - Ryan Reynold's "Buried"
Financial Crisis? The Greek Response.
If you have a few options, then you don't rely on a single company, do you?
If you're sympathetic to claims that you should build for the web, you might want to try Pyjamas. It advertises being able to simultaneously target both the browser and the desktop.
Codec2: GNU low-bitrate speech codec (2400 bits/second)
I am amazed he left Facebook.
Has anyone done a shootout recently like this?:
http://programmingzen.com/2007/12/03/the-great-ruby-shootout...

I'd heard that JRuby was fastest these days, so it would be great to see some numbers and side-by-side features comparisons.
"Interestingly enough, the ambitious Aboukhadijeh was a software engineer intern at Facebook when he created Youtube Instant."

Hm, I was under the impression Facebook didn't allow side projects. I suppose this doesn't apply to interns?
I find it hard to tell if this is a heartfelt attempt to "tell it like it is", or masterful damage control to pull his buddy's ass out of the fire.

PG vouches for him (which counts for a lot) so maybe it's completely legit and heartfelt.

If so, it does indicate a certain lapse of judgment on the author's part. Why on Earth would he think something this inflammatory would stay secret? It must be obvious to everyone involved that they have serious operational-security issues. There's no way something like this would be kept private when the members of the group couldn't even keep the existence and location of their meeting a secret from a notoriously trigger-happy (and widely read) blogger.

If it isn't heartfelt, then it walks through the checklist of everything you should do for damage control when you or someone in your circle faces an accusation of collusion / conspiracy:

- Loudly and vehemently disagree with the "bad group"'s philosophy;

- Explain the presence of the buddy in "bad group" in terms of how he didn't want to be involved but was sucked in and unable to escape. (Don't wave this type away as "bad judgment" since it implies guilt);

- Completely disavow the "bad" group;

- Keep focus on how you only care about "good group";

- Repeatedly assert that you always look out for "good group" and you would never allow anything bad to happen to "good group"

(Incidentally, the spelling errors were a particularly nice touch.)
مسلسل لالولا الحلقة 7
Why is that bad though? I find OS X unusable because it doesn't have alt + middleclick to resize.
Virtual machine can give the wrong connotation to a Java developer though. It isn't just running compiled classes like in Java. It has to do ongoing runtime compilation.
Here's where he argument falls apart... and he should understand this, and I'm surprised he doesn't -- yes, money is available from many sources. Perhaps some of you even have rich uncles or aunts who can throw cash at you. But, the reason some angels rise above others is: the value and power of their network. This translates directly into an ability to help a startup a) get follow-on funding, b) get some initial biz-dev deals and alliances, c) get some press. That's what separates a top-tier angel from a second-tier angel.

It's a fact that, as with VCs, some entrepreneurs (the smart ones in my opinion) will take money at a slightly lower evaluation from the top-tier angels than a higher valuation from second tier angels, because anyone can throw money at a startup, but not everyone has a powerful business network and collection of relevant portfolio companies to contribute (the classic "smart money vs. dumb money" argument that you'll hear over-and-over once you start to try raising money).

Let's create a fictional example using Y Combinator... Let's say that PG just announced that he's going to take 1% more of companies that are accepted into his accelerator than the competing accelerators take. If you believe Scoble's argument, then people should just go to another incubator because there are plenty around, but many, if not all, would probably give up 1% more because they get more than 1% of extra value out of being involved with Y Combinator. My guess is that the deal flow into Y Combinator would not change all that much.

That's what's at stake here. It seems like people are assuming that these guys want to cut valuations in half or something like that. What if they just want to drop them by 2%? Seems trivial -- almost laughable -- but that 2% could mean tens of millions of additional profit in the pockets of these top-tier angels. And when an entrepreneur is given two offers -- one from a top tier angel that has a 2% lower valuation than a competing offer from an angel that is just getting their start in the industry -- which will they take?

Scoble is coming at this as a reporter and not as an entrepreneur. It's a lot more slippery when you look at it from the eyes of an entrepreneur.
Yes, it is just a matter of good sales and marketing, in the same way that building your online software was just a matter of programming.

It's often said that it's better to have technical-only founders, because it's easier for them to learn the non-technical aspects of business than it is for non-technical people to learn the technical side. This is true, but it's predicated on technical people actually putting in the effort to learn.

I'm still learning sales and marketing myself, so don't take what I say as gospel, but I think the solution to your problem has two parts. The first part is an intensive, non-sustainable effort to win your first few customers. See edw519 for how to go about it. After you win your first customers, things will get easier, by which I mean possible.

Seeing other people have success with your product is an essential part of the sales process, so once you get your first few customers it won't be like pushing water up a hill anymore. It will be like pushing large rocks up a hill -- difficult, but not impossible.

The second part of your solution itself has two distinct parts: selling the problem, then selling the solution. You have to separate selling the problem out as a separate activity. Blog posts are part of this, but won't be enough by themselves. You'll have to figure out the rest on your own. Once you've sold the problem, you're ready to sell the solution. Pointing to other people having success with it will have much more effect than any of your logical reasoning as to why your solution fits the problem.

When people say a good product sells itself, they don't really mean it. It's like if we programmers say that with a good requirements document, software writes itself. What we really mean is that with a good requirements document, someone who knows what he or she is doing can write the software with minimal struggle and creativity.

Your next challenge is to become somebody who knows what you're doing in the sales/marketing area. Until you do this, it will be as hard to bring in an appropriately skilled sales/marketing person as it is for a non-technical founder to bring in an appropriately skilled programmer.
So, what's your startup?
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I'm involved with fairbooks.com, as well as lisbeautiful.com.

Plus a few ideas on the back-burner.
Choices - I meant to write last night but got tied up. Being on that side of the table, I get their motivation. However, that sounds like a rather large amount of money.

LaunchBox Digital - an incubator around here - gives teams $20k I think, plus connections and other resources. $100k is lot of money to develop a product. It's certainly not unreasonable if the specs call for it. But as someone else said, they're going to get paid regardless, PLUS they want future revenue from the idea.

I think you should shop around some more, and I'd be interested in talking to you more about this. Contact me at mgkimsal@gmail.com - willing to consider a money/equity split, and probably not anywhere near a $100k deal. :)
You're right. I'm normally first in the Facebook-bashing line, but suggesting that Facebook should pay it's users because they provide network effects is like suggesting the phone companies should pay users for hosting terminals. Or the post office should pay you for having a letterbox.
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Java desktop apps almost always feel a little kludgy (in the UI), imo. Might be ok for tiny apps like yours.
As far as the ranges issue, that took some tweaking, but there was a good deal of white space between columns, so I got it tweaked by trial and error. I had no idea it was exclusive though. Is it exclusive on both ends?

I love the template thing. I've got to read up on that!

On close() - I found that if I didn't execute a close, and I opened the output in a text editor and attempted to save it I got an error that it was being accessed by another process.

I love this community, you guys are awesome. Thank you.
Which kinda sucks, since re-reading his post, it seems like he was invited there. To me, it seems probable that he wasn't the ring leader(s), but merely the one that's talking the loudest. Doesn't excuse the guy, but he's getting the spotlight shone on him while the others sneak off into the night unnoticed.
I've been getting these for at least a year. I wrote back the first time too. I bet it's really effective.
Programmers will do 'side projects' in their heads when you tie their hands, it's like painters having to paint and writers having to write.

Not allowing side projects is opposing a force of nature.

Silly move by facebook.