skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are mine (between 2006 and 2010):

(Some of these are offline because they are/were hosted on my personal computer which is currently on a moving truck)

Afk247 - http://afk247.com/ - an away message ranking site where people could vote on their favorite away messages submitted by users. This was back when AIM was my main mode of communication at school. Was going to make money with AdSense. Never really took off, but I did get an article in the school newspaper about it!

MadStatter - http://madstatter.com/ - Baseball stats site. I'm a huge baseball fan and love all those weird stats that go along with it. This site had a couple of (imho) cool interfaces to display interesting stats. Tried using AdSense but didn't make much.

SecureShirts - http://secureshirts.com/ - I wanted to learn how to screenprint my own t-shirts, so I bought all the equipment and learned how. I decided to print my own line of nerdy shirts and sell them online. I sold a few, but never got really big.

TweetShirts - http://tweetshirts.com/ - Twitter themed t-shirts. Made a tiny profit, but had a lot of leftover inventory when I decided to kill it.

Sideways Shirts - http://sidewaysshirts.com/ - In addition to my own nerdy shirts, I did custom screenprinting for events/groups/etc. I did it in my spare time, but became profitable and it was a lot of fun. This covered the cost of printing my inventory for SecureShirts and TweetShirts.

I had to deadpool all of the shirt printing businesses when we decided to move to CA after launching Notifo during YC. We left our townhouse in NC and relocated to a tiny apartment in SF which didn't have room for any of the equipment. I'm sad to let that go, but it was very time consuming and labor intensive. I'm glad for the learning experience though.

Flixpulse - http://flixpulse.com/ - This was the first Twitter Movie Review site that I know of. All of these new studies coming out about doing sentiment analysis in tweets all came along after Flixpulse had been out for a while. I did Bayesian analysis on a manually-trained corpus of movie-review tweets, and then it became pretty well self-learning after that. It was fun but eventually the old little computer that hosted it (900MHz gateway that was forever old) finally ran out of RAM to hold the Bayesian filter data. Oh well. Tried doing affiliate movie ticket sales through Fandango and affiliate movie poster sales, but nothing really came of it.

TheRentMap - http://therentmap.com/ - Apartment listings on a Google Map interface which led to affiliate apartment programs. Not quite dead yet, but it would take significant effort to get it to a point where it really makes any money.

There are a couple others on the verge of the deadpool, but some that I think might make fun side-projects for a while longer.

Mainly I do all these projects as learning exercises. Each one has something new to it that I had never done before, so after a while I have an arsenal of knowledge to throw at bigger, more complicated projects.

I think Notifo will be taking up most of my time for the near-future, and one I am desperately going to keep from the deadpool :)
From the article:

The generosity or Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison knows no bounds.

Correction: no lower bounds.
Please, review my site - Bilitee.com [freelance directory]
Ask HN: How To Build a Community?
I do not suppose there is anything else harder to do on the internet. So how do you think a community like hn or reddit or digg or facebook or any other can be built?
Ruby was my main choice + some command line tools to do bits of extra work, like 'sort' to find the largest palindrome and 'wc' to count the results in last exercise, and even Python command line to just manually sum the primes in second exercise.
Do I get bonus marks for solving this without writing any code?
I'm curious to know why calling a phone number was a deal-breaker.

It seemed eminently likely (to me) that it would be an automated system, but, even if it wasn't, talking to someone isn't that big a deal to me. I certainly wasn't concerned about long-distance charges, but I suppose that might be a problem for some.

I thought it was a nice little twist in the problem set.
Skyrocket Love
"Besides, do you want to be the guy who calls them up and tell them and their families that they are losing their jobs? And for what? Saving a buck after 7 years? We have a choke-full backlog to work on anyway."

Not saying what they did was wrong but there's still the option of automating those guys' tedious tasks and finding them something more useful to do.
Do you feel like you truly tested any of these ideas? If so how?

I have built something that I think is good, but has not taken off. I don't think it is a bad idea, I think it is an untested idea. I would hate to drop it without anyone ever seeing it.
Definitely, it was actually pretty simple once I figured out what I was going to do. I started from the link graph put together by Henry Haselgrove (http://users.on.net/~henry/home/wikipedia.htm) that I found when looking through the EC2 public datasets. I then had a few easy steps.

1) flip the link graph from outgoing to incoming, so from any page I can see what links to it.

2) I found all the distances and paths iteratively by exploding out from Adolf_Hitlers page. http://www.johnandcailin.com/blog/cailin/breadth-first-graph... and blogs like it were very helpful.

3) loaded the data into a large binary file that I divided into indexed parts that I compressed and uploaded to appengine to extract and load into bigtable (this took the most amount of time! both to run and to write the code to make it work)

4) ??

5) profit
It seems the real challenge here is coming up with the highest number of hops. I have two 4s so far with "pro plus" and "smallholder" but haven't been able to eek out a 5 or higher..
Yes, we should all slave for our art, and care about it so much we would starve rather than give up.

Never mind asking knowledgable people to critique, and if its good enough, even help you improve it. That would clearly be a waste of time.
Here in Bangkok, you can afford a pretty decent life at $400 a month given you don't live too close to a central part of the town. Internet here is cheap, $19.99 for a decent 6Mbps connection. Electricity is cheap, $65 for 24-hour air conditioning with always-on PC. Not sure about being hacker-friendly, though.
Happy to share... I think I'll write an entire blog post on this.

MailFinch: Cold calls and asking for referrals.
NotaryCRM: lots of SEO (notice the "find a notary" directory and the theme of almost all of the blog posts)

For both, there was a lot of call-to-action testing (in terms of verbal calls to action during my phone/in-person conversations) and rapid iteration (breaking features down into the smallest chunks and deploying often).

More recently (like, a week ago) I built a really basic site to force myself to learn a little more about consumer-focused community building.

As with all of my ideas, making money comes a close second behind the most important thing to me: learning something new.
For the record, I love it.

You should look into character encoding issues though. I put in "Church–Turing thesis"and got:

ChurchU00e2U0080U0093Turing thesis

Kurt GU00c3U00b6del

1906

Adolf Hitler
Here's what sex-positive means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_positive
It's a learning experience, that's for sure!

Here's what I've tried for marketing so far:

Paid for advertising, $120 for a 125x125 image on AndroidGuys.com for 30 days: 200 clicks after running for 27 days

Paid for advertising on AppBrain.com, they use a pay per install system. Free version got 57k exposures and 700 installs in 12 hours, spending $25. But paying users to install your app is not good business model :-/

Puting the paid version on AppBrain.com: After about 30 days, AppBrain seems to have stopped advertising it after 20k exposures with no sales they can attribute to the advertising. It rarely gets exposure time on AppBrain now :(

Biggest marketing successes: Lifehacker article, and recently a Reddit submission.

In summary, no silver bullet that I've been able to find/control, just 'word-of-mouth'

HTH
You should remove the dates & years from the possible matches. Would be more interesting.
Evan Williams on Decentralized Social Networks
Android Licenser looks to give your app sales a boost
My job history...

Background: Lear Developments created the Instrument Division in Grand Rapids, MI. Lear and Siegler merged, creating the LSi conglomerate.

The Instrument Division in GR spun off another division in Zeeland, MI that made the "Mailmobile", an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) that followed a phosphorescent "trail" on the floor. While I was in college I worked there and hired on full time after graduating.

While I was there, that division was sold to Bell & Howell, then Litton. There was a lull in business (layoffs, no interesting projects, y'know), so I quit and went to work at the mother division, which was still part of LSi. They had fun stuff to work on.

A couple of years after hiring on, LSi was bought by an investment company (Forestmann Little) and the Instrument Division was sold to Smiths Industries. It remained SI[1] for about 15 years. About three years ago, the avionics portion of Smiths was sold to GE.

Bill Lear was an entrepreneur, big time. Thinking back, while I signed on several years after Bill Lear was kicked out of LSi, the entrepreneurial spirit was still alive there. We were creating novel interesting products (e.g. the first solid state crash survivable flight data recorders). As time went on, the division became less entrepreneurial and more enterprisal (to coin a word ;-).

The Dilbert Moment[2] was when the VP of engineering called a meeting of all the engineering departments and told all of us that we weren't going to be writing software or designing hardware any more. Instead, we were going to be a Tier 1 Systems House.

[1] Side note, my buddies registered si.com, which Smiths ultimately sold to Sports Illustrated at a pretty nice profit. My buddies didn't even get a "thank you." :-/

[2] One of my favorite Dilbert comic strips:

1. PHB, pointing to PPT slide: "We'll save money by outsourcing our I.T. function."

2. PHB, pointing to PPT slide: "Then we'll save more money by replacing our outsourcing with fulltime employees!"

3. Wally: "When it's time for us to panic, will there be a warning sound, or was that it?"
Fousquare. Still 5x more popular than Facebook Places.
Whether it's Apps Standard, or Voice, or something else. I meant my point more generally; if you aren't paying for it, somebody is, and they may decide to stop.

Apps Standard has been on my mind because it is currently a useful solution for a few small businesses I know, but I caution them about becoming over-reliant.

(I've argued the cost efficiency of Premier, but they are watching every nickle and dime, at present. Hopefully, if the free Standard version does go away, Premier or similar will remain -- I mean, Google's been been engaging in large, long term Apps contracts with outfits quite capable of "lawyering up" -- and at a price that is manageable.

I know: I'd just plunk down the money, for something that is business critical. But, it's not my call. Their initial use is not business critical, but that's a slippery slope.)

P.S. I haven't researched nor thought it through, but my perception of Voice has been as a partial workaround and/or escape hatch for carrier lock in. For the time being, it helps keep the pressure on.

Longer term? Well, rumors are that Google has invested in a LOT of backbone capacity. Voice may be a step in capturing interactive content transfer, and the advertising/marketing niches that exist both within it and from analysis of resulting meta-data. It may also offer some direct revenue; they already charge (U.S. customers) for foreign calls.

Hmm... will Google roll out a SIP telecommunications service, at some point, to go along with their professional Apps offers? (Maybe the regulation would be far too hairy; otherwise, it would seem a likely cross marketing opportunity, at least until such communications become more fully integrated into a more general communications paradigm, if ever.)
I live in Oklahoma and I live the good life for less than $900/month according to Mint. Granted I have 3 roommates, but we have a huge place. I walk to work though, so that may be a factor. I'm also a stingy SOB.

It's cool to know that I could uproot to a place like Bangladesh if I so decided. That $900/month doesn't factor in the non-monetary costs of living in Oklahoma, which can build up :(
Haha. So given the graph of all article links, maybe you should figure out the articles with the longest shortest paths (shortest paths that are the longest) from hitler. Or maybe to make it funnier you can find the longest path between any article and hitler.
Whoooa, TotalFinder looks amazing! How long has this been around, and how have I missed this?
I make more from my iPad app Portfolio (http://ipadportfolioapp.com/) than my other source of income. I could definitely live on just the app sales alone if it keeps up.
Ask HN: Title(s) of Your iPhone App(s)
I blow a lot of $ on iPhone apps. They might as well be yours.
but, even if it wasn't, talking to someone isn't that big a deal to me.

A lot of people struggle with the phone. I certainly have, though I'm getting better at it. I've noticed many people become spookily compliant on the phone, endlessly listening to and being polite to even the most annoying callers instead of just hanging up.
I have no idea what Ev is talking about
I don't really understand how adding a scheduler was that much of an effort. Couldn't something based on cron work, the code from the Start button the indonesians use is probably similar to what is necessary for that job. There are certainly a few gotchas I have not thought of. Anyone has an idea?
playfirstlife.com - started out as facetoflife.com - had a cofounder and a plan and everything, but then the cofounder decided to go do something else and I had some medical issues coincide at the same time. By the time I handled everything, there were at least 6 full-time competitors.
Evolutionary theory predicts that globalization is bad for the World Economy
It does have the advantage of targeting users who are willing to install software for no good reason.
I always understood that as:

1. Make it work

2. Make it right

3. Make it fast

Sometimes only getting to 1. is "good enough"
“Psychedelic” Steve Jobs
> The gist of what I was trying to communicate is that we don't need to use this "15 minutes of fame" (as you put it) to further ourselves or our projects.

Ok, I believe you.

What made you decide to go ahead with the .ly domain after you read about their terms of service?

For me their policy would be a huge red flag, there is no way that I would ever invest any time or effort or funds in to something on such a shaky foundation, that's the part that puzzles me most about all this. After all it should have given you an indication that the NIC of the TLD that you decided on had a dim view of anything adult related.

My view of the .ly other TLDs like that is they are used mainly by several gropus of people, most notably those that try to imitate something that is already successful (for instance, bit.ly), or they feel that there is not enough choice for catchy names in the predominant TLDs.

In your case I can see a technical motivation (URL shorteners should have a short domain name or else their whole purpose goes away), and a bit of the imitation factor. But those two together don't offset the risk for me, so what made you do it?

Why not secure their agreement that they would be ok with this beforehand?

Someone else here in this thread mentioned that I probably don't read the terms of service of the services that I use, and the funny fact is that I do, and that I pick my suppliers very carefully, even if that sometimes means paying a (hefty) premium. Business continuity is nothing to trifle with.
> ... but isn't all that just a sign of bad management?

Using the words of Tom DeMarco, it is first of all a problem with the company's culture and atmosphere.

Of course manager can setup structures that encourage or discourage bad behavior, but it's usually impossible for a single manager to change a whole company's culture. However, a good manager can (and should) try to make the best of the situation, that is, establish good communication with other managers and trying in establish a good atmosphere in her/his own division.

So maybe it's all in the hands of the founders and the first managers to establish a company structure that can both grow and stay healthy. It remains to be proven whether this is possible or not.

Currently, the only method known to be working it to just keep your company at medium size. Except for very few kinds of business, there's absolutely no need to grow beyond a certain size.
Apps for development | Competition by the World Bank
Delicious Monster takes on iOS and Google with Noogle Noggles
Vagina -> Sex Doll -> Hitler

what?
And of course, omnivoredating.com - a dating site for people who specifically want to avoid meeting vegans/vegetarians. That was an awesome brainfart.
Imagine implementing this on the kindle...
I maintain an in-house developed 'enterprise database app'. When someone suggests new additions to this app, I tell him/her to use Excel to test their idea for a few weeks first, and then ask again. This gives a pretty good idea what they really want, because if people have to track stuff themselves they'll do only the barest minimum, and that's eventually what should go into the enterprise application.
Psychology beyond the Brain - the Heart is gaining ground
You need 700$/month to have a decent hacker life in Banagladesh? Wow.

I am originally from a second tier city called Surat in India. I think I can have a very comfortable life in 400$. Here's the breakdown (all costs in Indian Rupees):

Monthly Rent for 1 Bedroom: Approx 4000

Internet: 2,000 (Not the fastest but hey, we are not hosting servers from the bedroom)

Food: 1,500 (50 Rupees per day (eating out) for 30 days)

Others (Gas (Petrol)/Clothes/Entertainment/Electricity etc.): 3,500 (A rough estimate)

Total: 11,000 INR, approx 250 USD, I am still left over with 150$.
Normal Mapped Photos Using HTML5 Canvas
Normal Maps are calculated based on multiple photos taken from a regular camera. Then the photos are redrawn with dynamic lighting.

All of this is down using Javascript and the <canvas> element.

I'll refactor and release the code when I get some free time. As well I will write up an article explaining how it works as well as how to build your own.
How do you solve the problem of sitting in a chair 8-16 hours per day?
Most of are at our computers, and in a chair, 8 to 16 hours a day. Be it at the office, home or coffee shops. It' supposedly not that good for you. How do you deal with it? Here's some of what I do:

- Change chairs every few weeks, just to switch it up. I've used everything from office chairs, to wooden "kitchen" chairs, to stools. Now I have a HM chair.

- Getting up and stretching, although this is hard to do especially once I'm in the "zone" and don't want to be interrupted.

- Pills. Pain killers stop the small aches and pains.

I'd like to have the option of standing when I'm doing something that's trivial, like email/facebooking, but haven't figured out a way to do that in an easy way, either at the office or home.

Please add what you do.
I started http://blogo.it as a side project. It's now the third media property in italy with 11 ml/uniques month. Before Blogo I started another company as a side project, it was a web agency I later sold to a pre ipo company. Starting a project in this way is a really good way to start slowly, think about it a lot and to have no pressure at the beginning.
Forrst (http://forrst.com/) was a side project I built out of frustration in January. It's now a community of around 15k developers and designers and gets a healthy amount of traffic. Not quite profitable yet, but slowly gaining ground every month.
Carriers or OEMs certainly don't have the
users in mind when they're "adding value"
by disabling features or shipping uninstallable apps.

We already know how well that worked out before 2007,
why would it be different this time?

Also, it's really handy to be able to redefine what openness
means depending on who's doing the asking and when
they're asking you.
Isn't brute force just O(n^3)? Loop over each character to start potential palindrome, loop from start character to end, reverse substring and compare. But yeah, the test input should be longer and/or smarter. Ditto on the third problem.
I tend to like Pivotal and have friends contracting them.

Have any other open source efforts other than Diaspora come out from them? I don't understand how they let Diaspora do a big bang code release of such poor quality if they are the Rails experts they are reported to be.
Had several, this is the biggest one:

http://findforme.net

I had a total absolute blast coding it the summer before last (python and django, interfacing with the Amazon affiliate program REST apis). But I never managed to build a user base for it (probably because it's just too complex to use), and eventually moved my focus elsewhere.
I imagine that if it is a place that is recognizable to the average American, the cost of living will be too high. I know of someone in Moldova for whom $400/mo was quite nice. I have also heard that living in parts of Costa Rica can be very low rent ($400 can last you a year if you are careful). You would have to deal with Internet access, but 3G wireless is becoming pervasive. The real factor is the quality of life that you are interested in.
The easiest way for you to achieve PCI compliance is definitely by using a 3rd party gateway. Customers will have to leave your site but you can usually skin the gateway page to look like the original store. If credit card data is entered in a PCI compliant server, even in an iframe on your site, then you aren't responsible for making your server PCI compliant to accept credit cards.
I was thinking about an idea to cover the startup apps, though not on a CPM basis but on CPC basis. And I was thinking to have it as Sponsored Post kind off item, one app at a time similar to AppSumo. Does anybody here still feels the value in that ?
Internet here is cheap, $19.99 for a decent 6Mbps connection.

What's that like for accessing stuff outside of .th? I hear about lots of cheap Internet with high bandwidth deals around the world but I have to wonder whether for accessing the typical US sites, a 1Mbps connection in the US would always be a win over even a 100Mbps connection in, say, Korea.
I'm a little disconcerted that in each case it was other people that had to convince the author of the alternative approaches given that the he has been "doing software architectural work for a long time now".

Kudos for acknowledging the benefits of their approaches, but I feel like it's the architect's responsibility to reconize the most cost effective solution for the context at hand. How many problems aren't we hearing about that could have been solved with a new network switch instead received an application rewrite with an SOA architecture?
First prize being $15,000 US DOLLARS, to me seems very low for creating an "app to help developing countries".

Is this competition more a gimmick than a desire?
Is it an obvious opening for a startup? How would you generate revenue?
I would choose the SSD every time over a method that requires doing a lot of consulting and engineering of the current system like Sharding.

Why spend a lot of time and work when a simple hardware upgrade will work ?

And you are deluding yourself if you think that the sharding model you are going to implement is not "only buying you time" and you will have to do additional engineering over time if you keep growing.