skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I take advantage of a competitor closing down?
I'm working on a startup that is based around the idea of uploading and sharing files for the purpose of collaboration (alpha release: http://esploded.com).

Facebook just bought and made plans to shut down one of the big players in this market (drop.io), which makes me think there is an opportunity here to pick up some of their users, send out press releases, or take advantage of this event in some way.

What are some of the ways a startup can capitalize on one of their bigger competitors abruptly closing up shop?
It's not weird at all. If you have the technology to move your physical being between time periods, you can certainly move a few radio waves around.
andrew warner is there! love that guy!
- = dash not slash
Awesome, hopefully other big sites will follow suit. I wonder if the hype around Firesheep was part of the motivation to make this change.
The parent's story is gone now, but your summary makes it sound awesome.
Got one of these a few weeks ago. It's very much a single-purpose device, but it's excellent at what it does. I have about 3000ish books in my small apartment, so I'm a fan of the paper book. But I'm certain that the majority of my future book purchases will be kindle books.
I've heard there are issues with regard to copyright (I seem to recall advice to register a pen name with the U.S. Copyright Office,with respect to the more traditional "ink on bound paper" environment), but I don't know the details.

Would any of our more legal minded folks have a comment on this?
I'll take the contrarian point of view and bank on Facebook's eventually becoming irrelevant long before Google does. Facebook may look like it's poised to win in the short term, but the bigger and more complex the experience gets, the more AOL-circa-1996 it starts to become.

On-demand always tends to beat out kitchen-sink. The question is, who will eat Facebook's lunch eventually? Probably not a "cooler" competitor, as is popularly fantasized, but rather, a meta service of some sort -- not unlike how Google ate the content web's lunch back in the day.

Facebook Connect and the distributed Like platform will become increasingly important for Facebook as it hedges against site fatigue among its userbase. And if, at some point in the future, Facebook's core value is simply as the universal credentialing and friend list populating system for the consumer web and mobile space, that's still a fun place to be. But how monetizable or sexy of a place is that, really? Would Facebook basically be a Paypal competitor (of a sort) at that point? And how loyal will people feel to their Facebook credentials when and if they're sick of Facebook itself? Food for thought.

It's been said many times now, but ultimately, Facebook is Facebook's biggest competitor in the long run. And it's going to be a tough one.
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That is a good start. Although I am not a paying user (which would have TLS if I am one), that makes everyone protected from the benefits. I also hope that they would not suffer from performance issues, as I've see several loading problems since the change.
What are your other startups? What's your ongoing startup? Do you have a resume ? :)
I like this one better actually ; ) - "Failure" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc
No, let me clarify. You DO NOT need to BUY ANYTHING up front. The process is as follows:

1. Apply to be one of the 9-15 startups presenting on Day 1. The number of slots depends on the number of applications we receive.

2. A group of 5 people will be deciding whether you will or will not be invited to present at SuperConf by Jan 1st.

3. If you are selected to present, you are responsible for your travel costs.

4. You present at SuperConf for a winner-takes-all Grand Prize of $17k in cash & prizes (currently working on making this number bigger).

Note: The winner is decided by a combination of the audience & the panelists listed on the site.

I hope I was able to clearly address all of your concerns.
We're too busy working on features to worry about time-consuming things like welcome messages and how-to pages for right now.

.. But there's time for blogging and commenting on HN?
I'm not sure; mailchimp may remove duplicates.
If you dont mind answering. How did you implement the drag and drop uploading? I am trying to do something similar for a side project of mine.
Wow. This is fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to post this response. I'll pass this information along to those close to the Nerdery and the Bucklin family.
Chrome has four different versions at any one time. Stable, beta, development, and canary. Canary is essentially a nightly build, and is buggier than a very buggy thing indeed, as you might reasonably expect.
My solution for the last three or so years has been to maintain a personal site (http://www.steveasleep.com/) that consists of these things:

* Links to and descriptions for relevant projects
* List of recent blog posts (optional)
* Latest 10 commits I have made to Github
* HTML/PDF résumé
* Links to my profiles on SO, HN, etc.

As a college student casting about for internships, that simple combination has helped me a lot. If you're interested, I could help set you up with the super-simple backend that can be hosted for free on App Engine.

I've also thought about adding a "hacker résumé" to supplement the regular one. The college job search format usually requires a conventional (boring) one-sheet résumé, but I would also like to provide a summary of hackerly accomplishments for the people I actually want reading my site.
I'm the designer, and I just spent around 20 hours designing in the past 48. Taking a small break, then sleeping. Then midterms, then working. Sorry!
There is no assurance that any plugins would be available on all browsers on all major platforms. Sometimes it is political not technological (like Flash on iOS)
Thanks for taking the time to read, and respond.
a) Blog post with the core keywords in the title, now.

b) Offer "Facebook refugees" a deal for migrating to your service. You can always extend it to everyone, too.

c) Play up the David v. Goliath angle to the hilt if you want PR.
Why Miami? Why not Vegas?
Check out the Automatic Commands section under help. Here's an example from that page.

Enable passthrough mode on all Google sites:

:autocmd LocationChange .* js modes.passAllKeys = /google\.com/.test(buffer.URL)

Or you can just press Ctrl-Z once your in the page, to temporarily go to pass-through mode.
thanks for replying!
Lift, State, and Scaling
Did the product improve between TechStars and YC? Or did the YC team see something in you that the others didn't 'get'?
Just out if curiosity, are acceptances confidential? Are people allowed to tell us if they've been accepted?
As pointed out in the question link, the git repo would be available at http://github.com/s4 in the near future.
"I was thinking that I could introduce him to things like BASIC not long after he masters the art of counting to ten but I would love to hear from you guys."

I was talking with a neighbor about how my son was growing.

I started to say, "Back when he was little..."

Only to be interrupted with, "He's only four weeks old."

In ten years, your son will still be a little kid, even though he leads the league in scoring, has a black belt, and can explain photosynthesis.

As he grows all he will really want is to spend time with you. Don't waste it. You're building a person not a programmer.
I'm a founder of 1000Memories, and this is precisely what we're trying to do. Please feel free to check out our site, and if we can be of personal assistance, please get in touch with me directly at brett [at] 1000memories [dot] com
Funny that this doesn't work even a little bit with Conkeror (Web browser with emacs keybindings). Pretty sweet otherwise.
Questions

1. Does the startup has to launch at this conference only? Will you consider a startup that has already been launched?

2. What the application deadline?
Wow. I can't believe I've watched all those videos in one time slot. :))
Quick note: If there any suggestions, please let me know! Also, if anyone has a good venue they'd like to suggest or offer that would be awesome too!

I jumped into doing this without planning it out really well haha. =X. BUT, i promise that I will have a venue ready by the meetup even if I had to pay for it. I'm pretty cheap so thats something special coming from me lol.
d) Offer and show prominently clear and simple procedure and instruction to migrate user's data from closing competitor into your service
http://sxsw.com/music/accelerator/faq/

Bootstrapped startups may be able to lower the fee.
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What Are Teachers Learning?
Uhm, I was saying that I've been able to register by entering a random string.
prgmr.com is always looking for new people for short-term gigs (which sometimes turn in to longer term employment)

You need to be able to communicate intelligibly in English, as I'm a monoglot, but long-term I've been considering the Brazilian market, so meeting some more people who know Portuguese would probably be good, though this is not a requirement.

I want to be up front; we don't pay a lot. If you are good and experienced, you can probably do a whole lot better. I'm looking for intelligent and enthusiastic.

On the upside, we are an excellent place for a 'foot in the door' kind of job for someone who is trying to build experience. Work schedules tend to be extremely flexible and I absolutely don't care where you are, as long as you have access to an internet connection.
I just quit yesterday too!! I feel happy and stupid, because in my situation I'm the only bread winner in my family, so they're really dependent on me for money (even though I'm only 21).

But I was getting miserable at work because all I wanted to do was work on my startup. I'm looking for other seed funding now since I can't afford to bootstrap. Let's see how this turns out. And let's hope my family doesn't starve.

I'm available to freelance as a UX/Mobile designer for anyone hiring in nyc! Money to tide us over as I work on my startup would be nice :)
Thanks for your response. Years ago I cut my SEO teeth with Eric Ward and Lance Loveday, two of your peers in the biz. Don't chat with Eric much, but had breakfast with Lance this past summer when he was in Minneapolis.

Seeing your reply reinforces what I've observed in amazement today.....we're all connected in some way, just trying to get by, do good work, and offer a helping hand whenever we can. It's a small world, indeed. Thanks much Rand - I'll pass this along.
Have you thought it through that far? That implies building a PCIDSS certified solution, with tons of additional requirements. I doubt there are (m)any individuals, small businesses or startups that can legally do their own gateway-independent recurring billing. The physical security, documentation, policy and extra hardware requirements in addition to the huge (half a million dollars per violation) liability make it infeasible.

If someone just downloads your code and starts storing the cardholder data on the same server, even encrypted end to end, that's still not nearly PCIDSS compliant, so they're violating their merchant account agreement and hugely liable if it leads to any kind of data theft.

It would be wonderful if there was an easy way to be payment gateway independent for recurring charges without meeting the 3-digit number of PCIDSS requirements, but I don't think that can come from any code project.
Oh, really? I didn't know asking for more feedback was an option earlier this year. (In fact for some reason I thought they specifically said they wouldn't do that--maybe I'm thinking of something else.) Was that a one off or have other people had the same result?
Yup I agree, same here!
The "top" and "bottom" pages list photos that aren't statistically significant. It'd probably be best to put a threshold on those pages just to stop showing photos with only a single rating.
Yes it did: https://github.com/blog/737-sidejack-prevention
Point of fact: chess is learned but only to a point, probably around 2100-2150 ELO. That is the limit of what most people can accomplish with a lot of study and hard work.

Pushing beyond that and into the Super to Elite Grandmaster range (2550-2800) requires extraordinary levels of memory, concentration, calculation and pattern matching. Levels that can't be instilled in someone through any amount of training. A person either possesses them or (s)he doesn't.

I lack the evidence at hand, but I'm certain I've seen it before that aptitude in those areas correlates strongly to high intelligence.
Looks like I left in some debugging stuff. Thanks for the heads up, it shouldn't work anymore.

In the future, you'll have to contact us for an invite code. A lucky 160 of you got in while you could =)
1. I am going to have to get back to you - I want to discuss this with the people helping to plan SuperConf. My gut tells me the answer will be no, though. Either way, I'll come back to this thread & solidify the answer in about 16 hours.

2. Deadline would be Dec 31st.
2 pieces of advice:

1) Do not make me watch a video to see what you're doing. Write some text -- you should be able to explain it in one sentence and then have some supporting text if you want/need to clarify things.

2) If you really only have 2 employees and one of you is the CEO and one of you is the President, You're Doing It Wrong. Ditch those titles and just go for "founder" at most.
As a startup based in South Florida: thanks for choosing Miami.

Typo: SuperConf is in Miami, Beach!

You mean Miami Beach.
In the iPhone HIG, there's a section on bringing a desktop application to iOS[1]. The entire HIG spends a fair amount of time talking about the different needs of mobile and desktop users. Until Apple releases a document tailored for them, any iOS developers who are planning to port their app to the Mac might want to reread the HIG, this time looking out for what's expected from a desktop app.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserEx...
Agree with first sentence, not so with the second!
Thanks for your reply. I will pass this along to the team at The Nerdery.
The reason is because FOWA left South Florida & I live in South Florida.
Thanks for your comment, and your support. I will pass this along to the team at The Nerdery.
Tried this. The concept seems quite nice. Problem I'm having is that my thumb sweats when pressed to the touchscreen and creates friction which makes doing the continuous gestures unpleasant. Rubbing talcum powder into my hands seems to help with this.

Still, I'll see if I can learn to write a bit more fluidly with this.
My cleverness fails me: LMFAO created a song called "I'm in Miami, B@&#H". It was a sad attempt at a play on those words.
Ah good point. I forgot that he had his own method, separate from Takeo's.
Primarily, the people doing innovation for innovation's sake right now are the guys who've already made their fuck-you millions or billions, and can now afford to fund out-there research. Folks like Paul Allen, Elon Musk, (to a certain extent) Peter Thiel, Sir Richard Branson, etc. Sure, there's occasionally a commercial motive behind some of their side projects -- but not always, and often as a pipedream. In a way, it is refreshing to see people's throwing money at pipedreams simply to make them ever so slightly more realistic. Will Branson make space flight affordable to the masses in his lifetime? Almost certainly not. But he realized that if he didn't kickstart the process, it would have taken the world a lot longer to get started.
So you posted this topic 37 minutes ago, yet I searched for this video on YouTube less than 37 minutes ago and couldn't find it. Damn YouTube search lag made me wait..
We have always implemented SSL regardless to your paid or unpaid status. This is an unfortunate inaccuracy in Eric's Firesheep followup post that he refuses to correct.

Previously, SSL was only implemented on private facing pages, such as (everyone's) dashboard, (everyone's) account pages, (everyone's) repository admin pages and all pages under private repositories.

I know it's a small difference (private vs paid), but GitHub would never hold security hostage for money — the thought of that makes my skin crawl.
Thanks for the 'local' comment. There has been a ton of support here in the Twin Cities, as I'm sure you've seen. I'll be passing along the groundswell of support from HN to the team at The Nerdery. Thanks again.
Dan, those are my aspirations. I would not place a PCI compliance stamp on the project because no matter what, people can use it "incorrectly".

I am not against supporting ARB, but it is a big vendor lock in & I think it makes sense to have options.
Even if spammers aren't using old accounts, if something like that was implemented, spammers would just add

sleep( n * 86400 )

to their bots. Once those n days were up, there would be yet another wave of spam.
maruku has been around for a long time. The last gem release was in May 2009.
What's the point of posting this ?
Thanks to everybody that stopped by and chatted. Was great meeting everybody. - Justin
Can't tell the difference on a MacMini2,1 w/ Safari 5.latest – both sides jerk a bit sometimes, but are mostly smooth-looking. Maybe if I blew it up to full-screen it would show a noticeable difference.

Reminded me of a BeOS demo, where windows would send each other messages about own position and the ball's physics.
we learned nothing from our rejections (other than the willpower to withstand rejection), and continued building our product.

I think we didn't get into TechStars because we were still wrapping up school. YC probably would have rejected us too.
Ask HN: Review my app, kornar.co.uk
this is still a very premature app, i coded it in one day, i just want to test out the idea, the idea to write something very short, and get people to vote on it, like a micropoll.

p.s. this is just prototype, so excuse the design, please do suggest feature requests and any bugs ecountered, cheers :))
I wonder if these programs have been watered down because graduate-level educational attainment often results in an automatic increase in teacher compensation.
unnecessarily left a great many users vulnerable on sites

Except that Firesheep didn't expose any new security problem. "Hey everyone, in a few weeks I'm going to make it easier for people to exploit long-known security problems that you may have been happily ignoring" is different to "Hey everyone, I found a brand new vulnerability and I want to let you fix it before I publish it".
Honestly, aside from just having the mind for it, Google & time is all I've needed to figure out any of the programming challenges I've run into.
The first mobile phone network was done by NMT in Japan, but the first commercial mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper of Motorola and the first call made on this phone was to the head of a competing program at Bell Labs.
That link shows me a 404. This worked instead: https://twitter.com/github/status/29534618326
Why didn't you apply to YC in first place ? Or any specific reason to apply to others first ?
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http://www.kornar.co.uk
It was also because you hadn't graduated school yet, if I remember correctly from your interviews (e.g. This Week in Startups).
Really really happy to see a great conf taking over where FOWA usually would be. It will be good for the SoFla startup scene to have this type of energy going on. Congrats on this auston.
Ah, well lucky you! :)
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Anyone doing a funded (or fund-able) startup in Cincinnati?
The overlap between HN users and startup folks in Cincy seems to be vanishingly small. Prove me wrong.
ouch.. Overlaps exactly with Googles Android promo event - http://groups.google.com/group/android-australia
First thing I tired as well using Chrome. A little disappointing but you cant have it all.
Maintain your resume in Markdown and on GitHub Pages
Iplayer is UK only.
Guy, I need between $250K and $300K to get my project going. What am I going to do with 17K and no incubation?
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I'd perhaps try an adwords/facebook ad campaign directly targetting drop.io users.

Perhaps something along the lines of:
"No more Drop.io? Let esploded take care of you."

Clearly i'm not an ad man but you get the idea, it might be worth trying to be cheeky and funny in the ads aswell.
you're correct, I'm wrong about the "no". I misread the calculation that was given.
Acceptances are not confidential; it is up to the startup to determine when they'd like to release the news of their funding.

Most startups choose (wisely) to keep the funding news secret until they can use it for press purposes.
This creates a market is easily attainable degrees, particularly for online schools or other nontraditional institutions which promise the ability to get a degree while juggling career and family. They typically charge exactly what the government will subsidize. This is not intrinsically a bad thing: the idea behind increAsing educational access was certainly not to have everyone do Harvard undergrad. But, as always, you have to keep an eye on incentives. (I would prefer rewarding things we care about rather than rewarding proxies which are known to have negligible impact on what we care about. Education and seniority of teachers, which entirely determine compensation in most of the US, are both known to be ineffective proxies.)
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Bonus meta points for using HTTPS for this item's Twitter link.
Contact their employees and hire them. Many will still believe in the vision and want another crack at it.
The news done broke
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That's a name that might cause some confusion. When I see the word "API console" I think of this: http://www.apiaudio.com/1608.html
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Imperial stairlifts provide information on stairlifts and chair lifts in the fashion of brochures and booklets about stairlift
Now here is a business model - drug alternatives.
you guys can instantly get thousands of applications..LOL
Wouldn't allowing downvotes on submissions (or a spam flag a la craigslist) solve this problem?

Long time lurker so I had to create an account to post this. I wonder if there has been a spike in sign ups today :)
will this supersede hadoop ?
Thank you jasonlbaptiste!
Be careful about this. It sounds like drop.io was dying before facebook bought it out, and the last thing you want to do is replicate their failure.

I'm not saying that this is automatically a bad idea; just be careful.
Ah, thanks for that. It's not the funding stage yet, though, is it? As I understand it, there's still the interview stage until YC decides whom to fund.
The Facebook Burglaries Story is BS
I think the term "dead drops" is better than "glory holes" but i suppose you're just a likely to get a virus no matter what its called.
San Diego; I Got YC Denied Meetup
Well, denial sucks, I admit that I feel like I got donkey kicked in the forhead, but, I must continue to push forward.

At any rate, was awesome meeting everybody in my chat, and saw a lot of San Diego applicants. Let's do a San Diego YC denied meetup this weekend? Talk nerdy, drink some beers, and push forward with our dreams and ambitions. Maybe watch the Chargers win again?

- Justin
Yeah - from the Vancouver chamber of commerce
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Might be a hiccup in #newtwitter. It works fine for me.
Remember: Always use protection.
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