skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not hard to get: atoms are smaller than nano which is smaller than startups.
Ways Your Startup Needs To Be Getting Customers
Wow. That is impressive. Few questions:

1. How long did it take to write the plugin?
2. How did you find your paid customers? From what I heard, most WordPress users don't want to pay for themes or plugins.
3. And why did you decide to sell it for that kind of high price? Were there troubles at the beginning because it was a free download before?

Thanks!
How are the badges generated?
AirBNB?
I kicked in $20 when the link first hit DaringFireball. It was $5k at the time. By the end of the day it hit $30k. Now that it has $70k I'm ecstatic. But at the same time sad.

I think equally cool is this project to start the first avocado farm in Iran: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/943051402/irans-first-av...

It's far, far, far from its $10k goal. Is the problem that people care more about a plastic dongle versus avocados? Or that marketing at the end of the is the difference maker in making differences in the world?
233rd most popular site in the world according to Alexa

Page views doesn't mean the site is any good. That ranking still puts them far behind sites like youporn and tube8, sites which have no redeeming value, but at least have never crashed my browser, much less my entire computer.
Another awesome article... I read your previous one on success too...
It's still better than the flash version
Goog 411 was in Canada for 2 years.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/article692565...
To him, both donations were worth the same amount of money.

The point of caring is not about the worth to him, it's the worth to the cause.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...
Non-exclusive licenses is a term that carries over from the Flash gaming side of things, it means they'll host a version on their websites that's not distributed (I don't know if that actually applies to HTML5 games anyway, for Flash it does) and has their branding.

As an example my game Trickochet has SPIL Games for the main sponsor, but Armor Games, Addicting Games and a few other sites bought nonexclusive licenses for their websites:

The main, distributed version carries SPIL branding. On most websites if you find my game it'll be their version:

http://www.gamesgames.com/game/trickochet.html

The non-exclusive licenses carry whatever website's branding and are only able to be played on that specific website:

http://armorgames.com/play/5725/trickochet

http://www.addictinggames.com/trickochet-game.html
It's always great to see a promotion of service provider when a simple question is asked. You can always tell when a company has too many sales people sitting around on a Friday afternoon and are working on commissions.
Quick Customization for Twitter or Any Web User Interface
Wow. What did it do?
http://j.mp/cruhgd
http://iwantmyname.com/ has a pretty cool bulk search option. Simple and clean UI too.
I think it's good to look at YC as a multiplier. You hedge some equity to lower your risk, as well as gain guidance and advice. I'm self-funding, and I have a "business" guy co-founder who does all the stuff that bores me (such as cold-calling, preparing investor whitepapers, building Powerpoint decks) and possesses qualities I don't have (negotiating, ability to raise money, extensive network of contacts, knows how to sell), so I didn't go the YC route, but I'm sure for technical people who don't have the business advice and consulting, 10% equity is a fair price to pay for PG and crew as well as decent funding.

I wouldn't discount the article as dangerous, though. If you can get around its linkbaitedness, it makes a good point that someone concerned about making great software shouldn't worry about funding: I'm the only programmer on my project, with two business people and a designer, and already we have built a Windows middleware piece using XMPP and a Ruby/Rails project to exchange messages via XMPP. (I'm a Mac user, but our software requires Windows because it brings a particular Windows app to the Web that I can't quite disclose yet because I'm in stealth mode.)

For coders who don't have business experience, you're better off going with YC so you don't get screwed later. For those who have some business acumen, you might not need the funding or management advice that YC gives. If you're a coder, you will have to learn to have tight budgets. I saved money for two years and invested in the stock market to give me the ability to bet it on this project.

But if you can code, you probably don't need a whole lot of money to keep you going. Whether or not you're YC, I'm sure you'll make it work if you're passionate about what you're doing.
if (social widgets):
return true
I don’t see the irony in criticism.
Already discussed today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1770444
What?! Wow, I missed that entirely :(
Kids these days don't need to go through all that trouble anymore...
http://www.corrupted-files.com/Word.html

"We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g. the program saving the file might crash. Files may also become corrupted when being sent via email. The perfect excuse to buy you that extra time!"
I like the game but the difficulty level between level 1 and 2 is too high
I'm not convinced Max wrote this. Something seems odd here.
I have never had any website crash any device I have used. Ever.

This sounds like a serious issue with your MacBook and not Scribd's problem.
I find this story about vb.ly pretty interesting.
First of all, I'm sorry for your loss ! :) The thing is, as many pointed out, don't expect to be able to negociate anything with Libya. I'm not saying it's a bad country or anything, but it's just how this country runs ! They do their stuff, and that's ok with me. (I'm no-one to have any concern about how the libians should run their internet).

The .ly domains are pretty popular these days. Maybe because there is bit.ly which is well known, and because 'ly' is something new, and better than '.fr' for example. But maybe it's time to move on. I know, the domain is important. But vb.ly is not like smart.ly ! it's not a word. You can take any other domain from now, and your name won't change that much.

Jacquesm (who I respect a lot), is saying the key bit is that they won't let anyone register this domain again. What makes me write a comment here is another 'bit', : "We as a Registry would prefer seeing art.ly used for a website about Libyan art for instance, or lda.ly used by the Libyan De-mining Association, rather than adding more URL shorteners under our National TLD."

THIS, is something I really can understand. The net is something done globally, and it's not something that just can be ruled by what _we_ call the western world. The LY domain is the libian top domain. As far as I know, Libya is a country, and they so have the right to rule this domain as they wish. Maybe they want some control over it ? That's their right. They have policies different than the .com NIC registration rules, they also have the right to be different, in their .ly ruling, than what _we_ (the westerns) have done done with the .net/.com/.org domains.

And maybe this call to 'we would prefer art.ly pointing to a libian art website' is maybe only PR stuff. But even in France I remember some trials about national TV's websites (france2.fr, france3.fr) that foreigners owned. These owners lost their domains due to the fact that .FR domains are made FOR FRANCE. That means, France, the country, can do whatever he wants with the .FR if you don't comply to THEIR rules. So, in short, I'm just saying I completely agree with that particular point.

Libya is growing, it's going on the globalization stuff. Maybe they are right to have a control over their domains (as they SHOULD do, in my opinion). Maybe one day they will develop their tourism and will have to host websites on very important domains , related to them (on .ly). And I would not be surprised if they properly stop the renewal of some .ly domains in the idea to acquire them for themselves, in order to host art.ly, hostels.ly, etc... And you know, I would find it very _right_.

edit: I accept any downvote, no worries ! I know what I am saying here is completely against freedom regarding whoever wants to squat the .ly domains ! And I know I'm actually defending what they did, and that they don't have a good reputation. Personally I hate their president/king whatever because of what he did in the past, but that's not a reason to loose it on Libya, with some racist arguments I read here, just because they modified the way we see the domain rulings :)
Why send men to the moon? Because its a challenge a way to test yourself and to test conventional thought.

You cut your image sizes almost in half. If you are a mega busy site or a catalog or similar you save bandwidth and reduce connection time to your site.
Brute works here because of bad test case. Author could have generated a smart test case and then optimal algorithm could be using suffix array which takes O(n), brute would take O(n!). However a bit smart brute gave the answer in approx 3-4 minutes ( computation + coding time). And yes, Python FTW.
Hey, that's very nice!
Easy monetization opportunity: Signup to be a Groupon (etc) affiliate & include a little string of text with that day's deal for the user's locale along with a shortened link.
...pointing out the obvious incompatibility of US based porn capitalist and Libyan Arab Socialist government. And that's not even getting into history of these two countries' relations.

from your original comment:

It's not simply Libya.

This country's full name is Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

I tend to think the more common takeaway from your comment is that you were being picky about my use of Libya's common name as opposed to the full name. That's how I read it.
For photographic style images, a JPEG+mask is about half the size of a PNG, much less for very large images. You could just manage your images and masks as separate images, but that carries the cost of an extra GET and possibly misplacing one part.

In my case I have a large number of masked, photographic images which need to be in the 300ppi range to manage on a single page and the GETs and file size savings are a clear win.

Note: The canvas method works in Firefox, but not for everyone. I'll have to find an afflicted version and see what is wrong. IE should work with FlashCanvas, but I don't have an IE to test with and fear I left something important out of the example at http://blog.jackadam.net/2010/alpha-jpegs/
All your numberz are belong to us.
How Hacker News Changed My Life Goals.
For me, it seems to be fairly accurate, but mostly based on recent tweets (vs. my entire history of tweets). Is there a limit to the number of tweets it will actually use to evaluate?
Yeah, it can get tedious and time consuming. Though, at this stage, I've got a pretty cool process hacked together (think temps, cronjobs and sweat) so I've gotten a lot of my own time back to work on other things.
I wouldn't waste your time on idea #1. Idea #2 could fold out into a bunch of different paths, at least one of which has to be worthwhile.

Idea #1: You need to ask yourself why people buy gift cards in the first place. They buy them as gifts for other people, gifts to be given at a later date. Instant gratification is far less of a factor when it comes to gift-giving, which is inherently non-instant. The only reason anyone would ever need to print off a gift card would be if they totally forgot the need for it, with like 15 minutes to spare. While that may seem like a niche you can fill, it probably isn't. There are formal-ish standards for gift-giving, and the appearance of forgetting till the last minute is always, always, always avoided; the implication being that you didn't care enough about the recipient to remember to get the gift ahead of time.

Go for #2, and play around with the idea some more.
Ask HN: Examples of products designed to be viral, which failed?
When you design some product to be viral, what distinguishes whether it fails versus succeeds? It'd be helpful to learn about failures since the only datapoints I have are successes.
Default is no quick fix either, since it impedes access to new credit and carries a degree of social stigma.

I don't think many people are concerned about the credit ramification now as well with upwards of 25% of homes for sale in foreclosure, permanently removing these individuals from access to credit would be a difficult proposition, many of these individuals where caught up in the fall out and had no choice in the matter. When backed by a steady job, many of them where reliably debtors, excluding this group from future lending would make it difficult for the lending institution to achieve growth.

I would not be surprised to see a strong credit reporting amnesty movement start to form. Given that the banks where partially culpable for this situation and as the dust settles people will become irritated with the debtor walking away with all of the burden of responsibility.

As far as the stigma goes, after the bail out there was a perceivable shift in the attitude of the homeowner. A feeling of being left behind and to fend for themselves took over. After the bail out strategic defaults no longer carry the stigma they once did.

Further, there has become a growing attitude of "good for you" among people who admit that they did so. Many homeowners feel that they are on their own and actively support the ones who make the move to fend for themselves. With the chain of events I cannot fault them for their logic. The banks where rescued with swift and sweeping actions by the government, years latter homeowners are still trying to patch together the pieces of their financial ruin. Now bankruptcy and foreclose are looked at for what they are, the ramifications for breach of contract and even then the deck has been stack against the consumer.

I would like to see more attention and outrage focused on the fact that the bankruptcy legislation was changed and made far more restrictive on the eve before the crisis. They saw it coming and further stacked the deck in favor of the banks and lending institutions at the cost of the general public.

To illude to a stigma on the homeowner after the actions of the government and the institutions is disingenuous at best.
I loooove totalfinder
By buying some technical toys and net access now, he can invest in himself and potentially make much more than interest from secure investments or real estate. Either way he's learning faster.
If you measure it, it will be manipulated.
too easy. about 30mins and 100 lines of C#.
Mary Shafer explained it best many years ago:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.aeronautics/browse_thread...

It's lift demons.
Yeah, I think if your app is listed on top 10 of all paid apps, you can make a lot of income very quickly.

Just some math: $2.99 * 2500 copies/day * 30 days * 70% to LB = That is a whopping $156975 a month!
Honestly, well done for getting out there and making something happen.
Ask HN: I can't host at home reliably, where and how can I get a remote server?
Due to a number of factors it's not quite possible for me to host a server at home reliably. I'm looking for some sort of solution that gives me a decent amount of privacy and security on a small server that I'm not sharing with others for hosting stuff like email and a small web site. Is this possible? How would I go about getting this?
Wow the G. Address was horribly mutilated.

Four score and seven years ago our faathers brought forth on this containent a new nation conceived inz Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal Now we are engaged in a greaht civil war testing whether that naption or any nartion so conceived and so dedicated can long endure We are qmet on a great battlefiemld of tzhat war
Which is why everyone should be allowed to post what they want, and why everyone should be allowed to not visit sites that offend them.

Hell, my company blocks "offensive sites". Buy that software, install it on your desktop, and then you won't have to see anything on the Internet other than LGF.
The FBI does not need a warrant to plant a GPS tracker on your car, for much the same reason as they do not need a warrant to surveil you from a car or helicopter. This bothers people for reasons I can understand, but I think the concern is irrational; the alternative (having agents manually tail people) is error prone, subjective, incredibly expensive, and no less intrusive.
Just curious, how did you find your initial paid customers?
Which he deleted.
Yeah you have to pay for the service. That's how companies normally work.

It's not like these two services are 100% identical. Cloudmade have a bunch of nice tools to style the maps with.
I'm offended that NIC.LY would use the expression "sex positive". It should be shut down.

(Incidentally, paranoia about my domain being killed is why I have my real contact information in my .us registration. NIC.* registrars seem to be super-strict about their registration policies.)
Curious why it wasn't picked up by the submission script.

Mods could you please mark this dead?
I can upvote your comment only once, unfortunately.
In theory they do. In practice, there's no consequence if they don't, and it might gain them more convictions.
There's probably stuff I missed and it's a basic overview too. Share other customer acquisition methods, hopefully unusual ones too that worked here.
Could the person who downvoted me tell me why ? I merely expressed my opinion, to me this quote looks like a flaw on an otherwise great presentation of his project. Or am I not supposed to criticize projects here (I'm new to hacker news) ?
Why are you busting his balls (and being modded up for it)? The fact is, their domain name was granted, used for some time to build a business, and then yanked by the registrar on religious-bullshit grounds. They proceeded to warn other users of the .ly domain who may not have bothered to read the fine print and whose domains must now be considered in jeopardy.

Personally I have a hard time believing that, I think that that is something that only came about after you found your domain taken off-line, in other words, you only started to care about censorship after being censored.

This speculation adds nothing to the conversation.

Sure, censorship is bad. That's why you stay away from dealing with government entities that will allow themselves the right to censor you.

That would be all of them.

See Google vs China and many other examples.

I assume you've carefully read all regulations and EULAs applying to your own personal and business assets? No? Well, there you go, then.
Run your own mail server and delete emails after reading them.
Do Cryptographic Signatures Beat SSL/TLS In OAuth 2.0?
I took him up on it.

This alone is a hugely valuable lesson. When you need help, and someone offers help, accept the help. (Of course, you had already learned the first lesson: When you need help, ask for help.)
Ask HN: Entering a saturated market?
Hi all, I've been thinking of entering a really saturated market and I'm wondering what others would advice when trying to do this?

The market I'm talking about is in the Health and Fitness space. I know there are some startups in the space, some doing better than others. I recently talked to a friend who knows more about marketing/SEO than I do and he mentioned how the space is quite crowded, he advised I reconsider.

In the end, solving this problem is something I'm quite excited and passionate about so I have been concentrating more on trying to figure out a great solution and not really on how saturated the market might be. As far as I can see, there is a lot of stuff out there, but it doesn't mean all of it is good or great.

Thanks
The querystring is different. The matcher here will let any URL through even if it ends in a non-relevant character (like a trailing slash).

Not much you can really do about it to be honest - I submit through the bookmarklet and end up submitting a fair number of dupes as well.
Y Combinator isn't about money. They effectively provide team living expenses for three months; assuming you're already a competent developer or creative type, you can save three months living expenses in no time.

Y Combinator is about people. A whole lot of people who have a whole lot more experience starting companies than you do. And all those people want to help you succeed, like those before helped them. It's a giant fraternity where instead of keg stands you get proven advice from people who've done the hard work of finding the potholes themselves.

If you need to dig a big hole and don't know about a backhoe, you grab a shovel and start working inefficiently. Y Combinator is the construction guy who comes by and tells you about the backhoe. And about digging a hole you can get out of. And about the nearby water line you're probably going to bust open. He saves you a shit load of time and trouble and helps you grow your skill set.

Y Combinator not only connects you with smarter entrepreneurs, it connects you with the best of the startup world. Need funding? Need a CEO? Need an invite to something? YC has you covered. They can't make you drink, but they sure know where all the water is.

* * *

YC helped me grow as a founder and as a developer. It helped me make the best friends of my life. When my co-founder tragically died, Paul and Jessica made sure I could pay the bills—in exchange for nothing (which doesn't scratch the surface of how much my entire class helped). If I had to do it again, I would. Every single time.

If you know everybody; if you have a following; if you have ridiculously talented friends, you probably don't need YC. But everybody isn't you.
Thanks. Once we got the marketing pages/admin features to a place we thought were worth paying for, I posted a link on HN and from that we got covered by Mashable and several others. That got us profitable.

Now we're working on getting to that next level where one of us can stop freelancing and get a check from Mocksup every month.
I like the christian treatment center ads that run on the side.
What a very refreshing story ! Thanks for sharing. I wan't on HN when this happened but I read all the 1171520 thread and spent almost 2 hours on different discussions that your thread is spawning, related to ebook sales, wordpress theming, etc..

I think the majority of HN readers are just like you : interested in what _we_, as 'hackers', can do. Related to 'change the world', or 'make money'. The thing is to combine both. You seem to be pretty well. Bravo and keep up the good work !
This was intentional - we had to tie break the longest palindrome and we didn't want a quick diff to be able to see what we changed.
Great app. I use it as an example of a good use of a touch UI all the time.
Piwik Supercharges Site Analytics with OSS
I am curious as of why this article is loosing this much steam, its rank drop from the middle of the first page in seconds.
In all seriousness, good for you! And even better, you are probably similarly helping those 5 other people in your employ.
jason@socmetrics.com
My MMO Guild Hosting site started as my own personal WoW guild website, which itself was a fork of the code powering my personal LAN Party website. After deciding in late 2005 to try to make a business out of it, I launched in May 2006 and was profitable since day one, enough so that I abandoned consulting by Jan 2007.

It's been my sole income-source since then.

It took 6 years from initial creation: the first version of that original LAN Party site was written in old ASP in 2000, and then rewritten in PHP in 2001 or 2002, and then forked in 2004 for WoW.

Hopefully some of my new side-projects turn into something useful, almost all written in Erlang with the Nitrogen Web Framework (absolutely love it).
What are the most iconic images of the various stages of the Internet era?