skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good question. And you are right: the first "golden" rule is always held to be "build something people want".

I haven't looked at this quantitatively - I think it would an interesting study - but I wonder how many businesses started out building something that people already wanted, or instead built something that people didn't know they wanted. I reckon that a lot of products, particularly in technology, fall into the latter group. So don't despair.

As Michael Dorfman says: you have to be able to quantify either a) how much your product will increase revenue, or b) how much it will save in costs/overheads. If you can't do this you wont be able to sell your product - even if it's free. The overhead in learning a new technology will not be deemed worth it.

Even if you can quantify the value of your product, you still have to fight inertia. As you are discovering businesses have established ways of doing things. It might cost them a lot both in time and money to switch to a new way of doing things (a factor you'll need to consider in the ROI your product offers). Additionally an even bigger barrier to change is contractual relationships with suppliers, buyers and staff. So even if your widget is half the price and twice as good, if the customer is locked into a three year deal with another supplier they are not going to buy it.

You really need to understand your target markets' motivation for doing things the way they do them now, and the value that they derive from this. The value they see might not be the value you imagine - and if your products value is not aligned with this, it's going to be difficult.

So talk to your market, find out exactly what value they derive at the moment, assess how your product aligns with this, and how much it will cost them to change. Then value your product.
Bacon mania
If I were you, I'd put all thoughts of "ERP Systems" out of your head. The complexity involved in dealing with ERPs is enormous-- as in, you'll need to manage a large staff of programmers to even get started.

So: the question then becomes, should you build your Recruitment and Training app as a web app or as installed software?

The first question: are there any advantages you see to the customers to one approach over the other? Surely, if you are about to build something, you know the market and have some target customers picked out-- what do they think? Would they be more likely to buy a web app or an installed app?

Second question: where is your technical experience? Have you (or your staff) got more experience in building web apps or installed apps? In the absence of a strong sentiment from your customers/prospects, I'd suggest you stick with the platform you already know best.
Why did it matter what it was written in, if it met the spec?
F5 Friday: THE Database Gets Some Love
Security updates and product updates are mixed on Windows (or were I don't know now). They called them "Option Packs" back then which sounds like it just brings another keg to the party not plans to re-arrange the furniture.
Yes, this way of interacting with your pc could be a nice addition to existing ways like touch or voice recognition, particularly if this is part of a system wide framework. Locking your screen when you are not in front of it (and eventually logging you back on as soon as your face is detected) could be a not too invasive first step in this direction.

Instead of me waving my hands to mute the sound I'd prefer the microphone to pick up my ringtone and mute itself. From a technical point of view, this all is possible for a couple of years now, no? So what's the reason why this wasn't implemented earlier? Maybe people find running a webcam all the time too invasive or the concepts too unintuitive?
How many car trips include more cargo than can be carried on a bus or on a bike?
Dell Exploring Beyond The Computer
Resist Cost reduction for high-end markets
I'm not saying it's not fair, I'm just saying that they aren't going to find a job with a salary like that in Italy.
This was also why I started my company, mind you.
R on Windows HPC Server
you can downvote me all you want, comparing Krugman to Hayek and Friedman is just plain idiotic.

While these two (together, or shall I say in opposition with Keynes) helped lay an important parts of foundation of modern economics, their ideas are just about as relevant nowadays as Newton mechanics to building an interstellar spaceship.
Hi Yosho,

The ceteris paribus consequence of building something that your customers don't know they want is simply that you need better marketing.

Retube has made many good points, but without knowing more about your business I think it's difficult to give concrete advice.

You know your market, and somewhat tautologically, if your customers don't know they need you, and they need to know, then you need to tell them.
Wordpress might be the better solution. It is easier to learn and has a larger user community.

Besides that Six Apart (the company behind Movable Type) has been acquired. Although they state that they will be supporting the bloggingplatforms in the future, the new company is aimed at advertising. Is the Movable Type will get the attention it deserves, can be questioned.
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The quote was completely vapid, from some random analyst with an obvious c.o.i., and totally unnecessary for the story. Why include it at all? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I read the disclosure of her position as ad copy as much as minimally responsible journalism.
Fortunately for you, you can use Emacs. Which is where SLIME comes from.
Either that, or one of the super angles are staying inside exactly so that he can leak this and work against the conspiracy.
Yes, because cornflour blue would be, well, white.
Turn the audio off... :)
Lets be honest - Ron Conway would have no problem getting a mailing-list server he could fix with.
Awesome, I didn't know about Alt-middlemouse to resize, and now I love it :-) Thanks.
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YouTube Instant Creator Accepts Job At YouTube
I'm getting the same thing in Chrome. This way anyway it seems harder to read than the original.
Looked through the post but couldn't find any information on the price fixing mechanisms they're using for these deals. Normally it would be secret meetings in restaurants but I assume the trend as we go ahead will lean more towards secret skype conversations or secret emails.
On being a nerd
Please add alternate row colors! I find it difficult to read a list of links on plain white background.
If they don't want the result your software delivers you have a problem. If they do, focus on the outcome much more than how you do it and make sure they want the result.
Thanks for your tip. Well, I'm using Emacs already, however, as I've outlined in another comment of mine, when using Emacs I've always the impression of using a thrown-together environment, and wished it was a more structured one. I'm talking about the environment, not the editor itself.
Throw Away Your Bug Tracking System (apidesign.org)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668780
If that is a purely technical feature that can't be marketed from business viewpoint easily, use prototypes or samples to demonstrate, walk them through the process you intend for them by explaining your vision.

If you're not working with some specific customer (but just throwing the product online and hope someone starts using it) then you better find at least one live, cooperative customer to work with (huge discounts or even for free if necessary) and see your own product through their eyes. That will help you understand most problems with the product or marketing.
Found thanks to http://hckrnews.com/ listing articles in chronological order.
Remember when voice recognition was all the rage? I remember when I was younger and some kid on the block got a copy of some voice recognition software. Plus, he was the only one with a computer with horsepower to run it. Anyways, we all sat down and tried to train it - given the fact that we were in India and our accent isn't very easily understandable by most humans, let alone computers - we did see some results.

That kid would have the time of his life saying "Open solitaire" loudly and clearly into the microphone a gazillion times, and the system would interpret it as "delete my homework" or "email grandma all my private files".

All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

I am very excited about gaze tracking though. I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.
MySQL versus MongoDB - Fetch by secondary index
Absolutely. We should definitely call bullshit on this one. Slavery means that you don't own any of your productive output and more importantly you don't have a choice whether or not to create this output. There are people in the world who are still actual slaves. Stuff like this isn't helping. We should try to keep this word a little more hardcore than this particular frivolous use.

No one is forced to use Facebook. They do it because it makes their lives better. The users are getting the value. That the company that supplies it gets some value out of it too is a brilliant... oh wait, no, that's just good old fashioned business, but on the interwebs.
I found this post from a year ago convincing that arrington jumps the gun sometimes, examples include "google apps free is done" to the last.fm debacle http://www.somebits.com/weblog/culture/blogs/techcrunch-wron...
what is your sales process like, yosho? i would be very interested to hear more details.
For me, http://www.plinko.net/nevermore.asp is still the best
Technical Debt in startup
Qt via Mono on Unix/Mac and WPF on Windows. As long he uses MVP or some other pattern to decouple the presentation layer from the business layer. Sure it will be harder to maintain 3 apps, but having apps that follow the platforms guidelines is worth it.
Prevent White Hair, Causes And Treatment
Ah, I get you now, so it's the reverse, someone is not paternalizing when they treat you as though they are your father ,but you are paternalizing if you treat someone as though they are your father, is that what you're saying?
> All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

Probably major advantages for people with physical disabilities and repetitive strain injuries.
We keep getting this I think every other 2-3 months, I'm not quite sure why such a smart guy fell for the first one :) We keep ignoring those guys.
To be clear, the threading example was just something off the top of my head, not an actual real-life example. Though the PHP IMAP library is not thread-safe, so the problem would be fixing that library (or learning the guts of it to work around it in certain cases), not Apache. The point is that the example itself doesn't matter.

Finally, all of the big companies I've worked for have been MS shops for the reasons I've stated. Of course not every company is going to be the same. But every one I've worked for wants the MS "guarantee" because they'd rather pay their devs to build their product, not to fix bugs in someone else's software.

I'm pretty confused as to why these comments have been downvoted so much. Just because someone else's company uses OSS successfully doesn't invalidate the justifications for using MS that I've experienced.
Just a note: from Mac user perspective cross-platform often means second-rate.

Portable toolkits just copy superficial look of Cocoa controls, but don't mimic "feel" part correctly. Not all mouse interactions and keyboard shortcuts work "right".

And even if your toolkit uses real Cocoa controls, there's still problem of window layout and UI design patterns, which aren't portable to Mac OS X (e.g. non-destructive preferences don't have OK/Apply buttons, drag'n'drop is expected almost everywhere, OK/Cancel are in reverse order than on Windows, etc.)

e.g. do you know OS X has separate clipboard for search fields? Cmd+E/Cmd+G. I like it and use it, but it doesn't work in "fake" Mac apps.

If you want to make good portable app that supports Mac well, then separate UI from the rest of the application and on Mac add Cocoa GUI (you don't need ObjC, you can use PyObjC or MacRuby).
Actually, you could get very good rates, if your savings were in troubled Eastern EU country banks (denominated in Euros, and insured by the FIDC version of said country). Obviously, not as safe as Treasuries, but also much less riskier than say a random 3rd world bank.

Wonder, how are Euro saving account rates in Greece these days..
Maybe, but we all use stereotypes. We imagine/form/accept patterns and they make our lives easier.
The #Twitterjoketrial
The appeal is being heard right now. I just hope obvious, blatant, staring you in the face, common sense prevails.
I think doing more than one UI upfront is an optimistic mistake.

Pick a primary platform and optimise it. Maybe do a less-than-awesome port, if you're eager. If, down the road, your experience with the primary platform leads you to believe there is a large market for the taking, then you can weigh up improved sales versus development effort for a truly excellent implementation on another platform.

Regarding Qt on the Mac: I've done it before. It would be my less-than-awesome port. If you're not using Cocoa on the Mac, making a UI on par with a "native" app is a sisyphean task: you're fighting uphill and you never quite get there.
Poor guy. And I mean it.

Google is a big mess of hierarchy, (yes, they're much better than the average -- that's not saying much). Their "eternal" startup mantra is just that. Looks like the world has lost yet another good hacker to the halls of the Googleplex.

I hope he loves it. Unfortunately, I don't think he will.

Kudos to all the work put in for YouTube Instant.
Good luck to your future at YouTube!
The appeal is being heard right now. I just hope obvious, blatant, staring you in the face, common sense prevails.
Google and Ranking Result Accuracy
Thank you Michael for your useful comment,

I know how it's hard to do ERP System, however, I will start just with one of the Recruitment or Training and I consider Recruitment to be the first then will follow it with others components.

I will develop them to be used as web app in both cases, if they are going to be as internet app or internal network in customer office, why will I start with Recruitment or Training? because I'm working in HR and I have enough experience in those fields and I know exactly what customers/companies need form both systems. Also, I add new features they are not found yet in any other smiler applications and it needs only 3 developers and 6 months of continuance work to build one of them (Recruitment or Training application).

In addition, I'm addicted to programming and I use any platform that makes it easy for me to create my application.

So, returning to my question which one is the better?

Thanks,
Those are very slick little machines that you've built there.

I've been busy converting this one off-and-on for the last two years, it's going so slow because the machine is in a warehouse almost 200 miles from here:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/machines/dscf1225.jpg.html

But it's actually getting there, just a few more wires and it will be completely modernized.
If I remember correctly corner resizing has been a bug for something like years (no time to look it up now). It's especially annoying when using a trackpad, but nobody wants to bother to fix it I guess. I can't believe this is something that doesn't annoy a single Canonical developer enough.

Edit: November 2007: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/1603...
His writing style's certainly drawing attention away from the issue at hand, so I'd say it works for him.
HTML5: The Facts And The Myths
WordPress in a heartbeat. More developer support, it's free and you can self-host.

Mark
Please re-read the part about RHEL4 and kernel patches. Take into account that some people were using Oracle and Informix before any Unbreakable things.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717023
Mozilla Labs shows off Seabird concept mobile phone
Well, I wouldn't mind if Paypal could improve certain organization features on their site, and also improve the search so it is no longer the slowest website in existence.
Were I interested in identifying the leak, I'd send an email with faked headers that looked like it went to everyone, but actually send each person a version that is subtly different--a misspelling of a word, or a variation in white space, or punctuation. Then, I'd wait to see which appeared on TC.
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Apparently there's another one on http://hckrn.ws/ . What's with the HN redesigns?
Ron Conway wasn't at the dinner in question. If you read all the information out there, it all comes down to Mike got snubbed, made wild allegations in anger, the first person to stand up (Dave) got ran over by the collective truck, TechCrunch posts suggestive information and the party goes on. The ball is still in Mike's court to produce something of substance.

At first, I admired Tech Crunch for having the guts to post something like it but looking it over there's no substance to it. It's just yellow journalism for the digital age. Complete rubbish that feeds into the collective psyche.
A killer adversary for quicksort (pdf)
One Million Visitors in 10 Days
That screenshot shows which of the current (more or less I guess) topics need to be blacklisted. Not which words are always blacklisted.
woah... and I always thought Google was THE place to be.
Take an educational approach. And focus on case studies.

Give away your product for free to a couple of your prospects - hopefully well known in the industry. In return, feature a case study on them. How they used your product. And how it helped them save time / money etc.

Try getting these case studies published in industry trade journals.

Otherwise, just create a white paper with these case studies in it. And mail them to your prospects. And then follow up.
Functional Programming, from Java to Scala, D. Wall
There is no "better."

You simply look at your needs and match. E.g.,:

Apache: Does it all. Uses lots of ram doing it.
Nginx: Does some of it. Uses little ram doing it.

I used to use apache, but I didn't need it's bulk. Nginx suits me just fine.

You just need to pick something and move on to coding. In the end a webserver is only a means to an end: your startup. If you need to change later to scale, do it then. You just need to launch right now.
You have to get your prospects to think that what you're offering was their idea all along.

How do you do this?

Get to know them. Spend time with them. Find out what their lives are like, what they have to go through to compete, and what makes them suffer. Jump into their pool at the deep end and learn how to swim. Walk through their warehouses, customer service departments, and general offices. Sit down at their computers and try to do their jobs. Get them talking.

Once they see that you are sincere and have something to offer, they will not be bashful. They will tell you everything you need to know to help them. This will do 2 critical things:

1. It will provide specific feedback about what you're building or have built, whether or not it makes sense for them, and what to change/fine tune/refocus. It they need it like that, chances are that many others do too. Your first prospects have unwittingly been the best focus group you could have assembled.

2. You will be offering exactly what they asked for so they will have few excuses not to buy. Do not underestimate the solid gold of this approach; it works incredibly well.

Call this good sales and marketing if you want but I never have. I just call it doing whatever it takes to help your customers. Becoming successful is a byproduct.
Afaik google can only do one time payments not subs yet.
It was... 10 years ago.
It's the place to be, if you want an 8-5 job (it ends up being much more than 8-5).

I don't blame him for taking the job. I just hope he keeps up his entrepreneur's spirit. He's already shown an entrepreneurial bent, just imagine what he might have done on his own. (Based on what he did, it could have been wonderful.)
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of course, only geeks can stand the clunkiness of it. i'm no hater. i actually find android powerful but it's just too clunky for a mainstream user like me.
This is by no means new, but it's not terribly well known and I think it's both beautiful and hilarious.

Almost all quicksort implementations take quadratic time in the worst case. They generally do a rather good job of avoiding that worst case, by careful choice of pivots[1]. McIlroy has a very simple technique for making that choice produce bad results in almost all quicksort implementations.

Unfortunately, he has to cheat a bit. His code doesn't construct an array full of evil values. Rather, he has an adaptive comparison function that, in effect, constructs the array of evil during the sorting process. (But it always behaves consistently; the elements of the array are, so to speak, undecided until the sorting routine looks at them, but they don't change after they've been looked at.)

[1] For those who don't know, here's the quicksort algorithm: Choose one element of your array (the "pivot"); partition the array into things smaller than the pivot and things larger than the pivot; then, recursively, sort the two parts you just made. This works well, at least when you aren't facing McIlroy's evil adversary, because (1) you can do the partitioning operation very efficiently and (2) if you're not very unlucky with your choice of pivot you usually succeed in dividing the array into two parts of roughly equal size. But if the pivot is, say, always the smallest element of your array, you'll get terrible results.
[video] Voice Recognition Elevator - Awesome comedy with scotish accents
How to bootstrap your public relations
The OP didn't say he wanted to make a cross-platform app or a portable one.
If this keeps up much longer, Hacker News will be banned at Valleywag.
In the "classic" list I would suggest maybe looking at:

- CLOS (not just Lisp, but it's wonderful "standard" object system)

- PostScript - which is actually a nice interactive programming language that just happens to have nice graphics capabilities

I've spent years working in CLOS and PostScript (on the same project!) and of all of the languages I've used these were the ones that I found the most satisfying. I still keep a copy of AMOP on my desk in my study at home to browse occasionally.

[Deleted reference to APL after seeing previous post]
It's a Ruby virtual machine built on LLVM.