skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another comment mentioned Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I will elaborate a bit on why the ideas in this book may be relevant to your situation.

Steve Blank argues (and many more agree) that a startup is a temporary organization designed to accomplish a small set of goals:

1) Learn and understand exactly who your customers are
2) Learn and understand exactly what your customers will pay for
3) Achieve product/market fit (though Blank does not use this term specifically)

Only after you've met this criteria to you begin marketing. What you have described is reminiscent of the "build it and they will come," where the focus was on building your product instead of understanding your customers. I may be mischaracterizing your situation, but history has taught this method to be fatal for a startup.

To better understand this, it's best to fall back onto Paul Buchheit's notion that a small base of customers who love you is always better than a large base of customers who like you. The reasoning behind this is thus: A small, passionate base of visionary customers can be exuberant about a Minimal Viable Product, whereas the mainstream market cannot. From those visionary customers willing to purchase an MVP as opposed to a whole product, you can learn an incredible amount.

Back to you: Currently, you have a small number of customers who like you. If the base of visionary early customers you've attracted just like you, how can you expect the mainstream market (which you seem to be aiming for) to even like you that much? The important factor here is that the mainstream market has even more needs than the customers you're currently serving.

You're worried about cash, and I'm afraid that marketing may be money down the drain. I recommend analyzing your spending and drastically lowering your burn rate. Turn away from the mainstream market and back to your visionary customers. Ask them questions. Find out how you can build a product that they love. Achieve product/market fit (for more information on that, I recommend searching out Sean Ellis' blog).

It seems that there is much to learn about your customers, and that the best course of action here may be moving backward instead of moving forward.
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SeqCentral is looking to hire remote contractors in any/all of the following areas:

- Web Developer (php/js/codeigniter)

- DBA (MySQL)

- UX/UI Designer

- REST API Developer

I've been developing a new REST API and am in the process of converting the website to use the new API as a sort of "eat your own dogfood" approach. Help in this endeavor is much appreciated.

Contact: info@seqcentral.com
I can't pretend to be well informed on this kind of business strategy, but wouldn't another option be to BUY Kik? Turn the iPhone and Android app into a RIM-branded, cross-platform BBM, and incorporated it into the BlackBerry client. Maybe risky, but it might help their platform more than a lawsuit... If it was a really solid app maybe iPhone or Android users would think of getting a BB for their next phone, and it might keep current BB users where they are.

I dunno, this whole affair definitely seems poorly thought out. BlackBerry app development is horrible enough as it is, and there are more and more things making it unappealing. (one of the CEOs said mobile apps are a fad a few weeks ago)
Only time I've seen that happen was with ColdFusion or Java-powered sites that don't strip the lines used by inline logic, eg where you see 10 empty lines, there might be an if/else snippet running. At runtime, the language runs through those parts, but keeps the space intact.
Seems like the vast majority of "people" posting negative reviews are random redditors who read an e-mail allegedly sent by the owner of this company. Since they've never used the company's services, are those postings any less fraudulent?
I love the Pomodoro Technique. I've been using it for a few months to improve my work and getting amazing results.

I like it so much, I'm building Pomodoro Planner (http://www.pomodoroplanner.com), a task-management tool based on the Pomodoro Technique. It's still in a limited beta phase, but it's become a tool I personally use every day.

If you want to take part in the beta, you can sign up here: http://app.pomodoroplanner.com/accounts/register/.
Feel free to talk to Japanese entrepreneurs about their sorrows sometime, because I don't want to speak for them, but I don't think moving to the US addresses the concerns of the three stakeholders who I generally hear mentioned: girlfriends, parents, and prospective future employers.
You're assuming that the software business is immune to this kind of thing. It really isn't.
Mountain View, CA

Awesomeness Reminders LLC

Our first product is still very profitable and I have some more curveballs in the pipeline. Looking for a technical cofounder. I'm technically competent (I code, fairly well, and can hack my way around pretty much anything) but looking for someone way stronger than me. You should be good with python, pylons, cogen, PHP, JavaScript, Linux, etc. You should be about 20-26 years old, good at math, looking to make a lot of money (I have specific targets), and not lost in delusions about "changing the world" and chasing VC funding. Products must have a clear monetization strategy from day 1. Looking to do some cool stuff combining nerdy genius with internet marketing. For the right person I'll fly you out to Mountain View, etc. Please "keep it real."
Economically, it would be an improvement. But look at laws like the data retention law that forces ISPs to keep access logs on all their users. The EU is also highly undemocratic, or at least very indirectly democratic.

First install a working democratic process, then get more power. Not the other way around "lets give them insane power and then they will surely be nice to us and give us a good democratic process" as many people seem to want.

Also I'm not even sure that if there were a good democracy that I'd want to give e.g. Italians the power to vote on what happens to me, given that they elect and keep electing Berlusconi.
Perhaps I am anachronistic, but I much prefer real books to e-books. While I may download books from Gutenberg from time to time, if I really want to read something, I buy the hard copy.

One of the greatest things about the Internet, for me at least, is the easy availability of books. While Amazon is an obvious source, I prefer abebooks.com, as you can usually get a used book there for a fraction of the Amazon price.

Thus one can acquire more books; and if there is any money left over, one might purchase some food.
Actually, I don't think it'll get much sharper, if at all, largely for the reason you mentioned. I think that what we consider to be "alive" will largely grow more fuzzy, but what isn't alive will be sharper. I don't find it hard to believe that a computer running advanced software (e.g. an advanced AI) is alive, but I find the idea that a piece of inert data (a virus) is alive to be counterintuitive and wrong.
Send me your resume. archuleta (at) seqcentral.com
Does anyone know if you'll be able to run Adobe Flash 10.1 without rooting the machine?
This is just like any other claim to own some particular piece of real estate: it will have abundant "standing", "merit" and "legitimacy" as soon as she is able to back her claim up by force.

It's been that way since the beginning of time; and (if you follow eminent domain disputes, and the handling of most aboriginal land claims carefully enough), after all is said and done, that's pretty much the way things work nowadays, also.
Personally, I'd say that's an advantage.
I think the reason for that is that their products are designed for PHBs not techies.
I'm OK with comment up/downvoting to reflect agreement. What I find immature is to downvote without raising a counterpoint. Look at the first comment for this post, it just labels the post as "shitty" without telling why. Same hasty approach.
I don't know much at all about prions, so take this with a large grain of salt, but it seems to me that most -- if not all -- of the arguments against viruses being living organisms apply to prions. In the case of prions, the data is just in the form of a malformed protein, rather than a snippet of RNA or DNA. There may be something about them that I don't know that negates one or more of those arguments, though.
Yes. They would complement my tech-heavy skills. Send me email 'archuleta (at) seqcentral.com' for more info.
Digital Ninja Humor
i wouldnt generalize it like that. It doesnt really matter to them if you have a startup already or still a job and a prototype. The important part is that you have already built something to show and are passionate about it. They also form regular companies and they dont tell you how to spend your money or anything like that. They have very good financial advisers that develop a budget with you upfront and then its the job of the CEO of that startup to make it work. The companies are real startups, they just help you alot setting everything up, but in a very transparent way.

And in regards to "they fund people who MIGHT produce something that is successfull"...isnt that how any VC or Investing company works ? Even YC works like that, its just that their risk and money involvement is much smaller.
For me, maintaining focus is about planning.

I found that taking one afternoon a week (usually Tuesdays for some reason), removing all distractions and simply thinking about my big picture goals and what I need to do to get there solves a number of issues - including maintaining focus on multiple projects.

This gives me time to step back and think about the big picture. I don't often get caught up in the small stuff anymore and giving myself time to step out of the day-to-day race lets me see things a little more clearly.

Usually, what happens is that I find myself pushing back the "multiple projects" that don't contribute to my larger goals. At the same time, I've noticed that I can see where smaller projects should combine and will eventually work alongside my big lofty plans to take over the world.

It's a simple thing, but stepping back regularly for an afternoon once a week is one of the most productive things I do and one of the best ways I have to maintain focus in my own personal flurry of activity.
Some bacteria and viri use RNA. But I guess that doesn't really count as being different enough from DNA.
AUSTIN, TEXAS

OtherInbox is kicking ass with more than a half million users and our first revenue coming in the door. We need a kick ass Ruby on Rails developer to join our awesome team in Austin.

http://www.otherinbox.com/company/career/
I love that a company as famous as Fog Creek still took the time to tell applicants about themselves and about all the benefits of working there.
>Worst of all, this flying disaster-in-waiting is supposedly the product of the finest engineers the Federation has to offer.

I've thought about this one before. Imagine how bad the other ships must have it. They must be failing all the time (not just when the cameras are on). For Starfleet to operate it all, they must need a fleet of repair ships, spacedocks with warp drive, which come along and rebuild the USS Irreparable every time the captain forgets not to drag the boot disk to the Trash.
This reminds me of the Star Trek TNG episode where the first officer goes in a 'personnel exchange' to a Klingon ship and the female Klingons try to flirt with him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRrNVimz-F4

skip the first 3 minutes. bring your cringe goggles
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If you mean the crazy amount of whitespace, it may be caused by a templating system. For instance, in JSP JSTL:

<c:choose>
<c:when test="${!empty article}">
<c:out value="${article}"/>
</c:when>
<c:when test="${!empty comments}">
<c:out value="${article}"/>
</c:when>
</c:choose>

Each of the choose/when tags has a newline after it, so even though the tag is not output into the resulting HTML source, it causes a literal newline to be emitted. This doesn't normally matter, since HTML collapses multiple runs of whitespace into a single space.

However, for places where you can't have any whitespace (like the middle of a word) you can work around that by concatenating all the tags into one long line, or by strange arrangements of opening/closing angle brackets:

<c:choose
><c:when test="..."
><c:out ... /
></c:when
></c:choose>

Some webservers like Tomcat also provide the ability to strip all excess outgoing whitespace, which preserves the readability of the source files.
Meh. My guess is you'd see someone provide a cloud-based relay solution to enable initial connections. The problem is really no different than that faced by Skype and NAT. Even if provided for-pay, it would be dirt cheap yet have huge margins.
Being Geek: http://www.amazon.com/Being-Geek-Software-Developers-Handboo...

A review I wrote: http://terrordome.ca/reviews/being-geek
So -- blatant age discrimination, huh? That's... awesome, dude.
Needs some kind of feedback when it's talking to the google servers. The way it is now, you don't even know if you just didn't have any new items or if it failed to connect.
Retreive data from google spreadsheet using python and beautiful soup
I think you are missing the point. What's remarkable is that this person is combining basic hacking skills with a completely different career, not the cleverness of the design. Not everyone has to be a poet but amazing societal changes happen when everyone can read and write.
Yes you can: just run it in many single-core VMs. This what I was recommended by vendor making legacy single-threaded software. They were the best in their field, so they never really tried to port it to multicore ;(
Well yes, of course a business is going to use any tricks, dirty or otherwise, to get as much money as possible. The fact that Comcast is charging their subscribers for access to "the internet" means they ought to be obligated to take bits from anyone who will provide them. If level3 is saying "A person on your network wants these bits, here they are!", Comcast has an obligation to their customer to deliver them.
BlueCava says the information it collects about devices can't be traced back to individuals

Well that's just blatantly false.
I exited school to work at a small, (about a year or so in) established startup that has funding from accel and norwest. I'm employee 15. It's honestly one of the funnest things I've ever done, since the work is interesting and my work actually has an impact on the product.

I'm also the youngest person there, so I am learning very quickly from people with 10+ more years in Silicon Valley than I have.
As an aside, I think /dev/fort is one of the coolest ideas, ever: http://devfort.com/ (This site was developed during a /dev/fort)
Codesketch – Holland, MI

We're looking for iOS developers (objective-c) that have strong design skills, and can create custom U.I. We're looking for people for just a project or two. Remote workers are fine. Our site can be found at http://www.codesketch.com .

If you're interested email me at paul@codesketch.com
The TSA and the enhanced patdowns continue to defy satire
It looks good, but I have no idea what it does.
I read http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/11/five-sho... today. GetSatisfaction and other major sites are using 'nofollow' (see the wikipedia article) and therefore should not be contributing to increasing the pagerank of the sites.

However, tweets and certain blogs (the ones with nofollow diabled) may be contributing to pagerank.

So, the lesson is, if you complain, complain on a site dedicated for that purpose.
Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service
My uneducated guess: they see more stats that show most business owners aren't too keen on the service, especially AFTER they give it a chance. Even services with a seemingly big trajectory can fail due to these sorts of a customer retention problems.
...and we don't because we are (too) focused on the sprint, not the marathon.

This is solid advice. But you need to start by training the people who need to train others. If you have a bunch of great individual contributor engineers who don't know how to manage, instruct, and the like - you will spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

But once you crack that and can build a broad knowledge base for instruction and a corporate culture that supports it, you can scale. And that is why startup entrepreneurs should like this concept. Well, that and superior employee morale/retention.
Well this just takes it up another level, doesn't it? Ever have a bad day, get pissed at somebody? Maybe say some things you probably shouldn't?

Of course you have. Everybody has.

But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.

I just hope that one day this becomes a universal revelation, and we as a society become much more forgiving. The combination of harsh judgement, poor decisions being easy to make, and a public permanent record of anything you say on the internet can have potentially life ruining consequences, and it's easy to find plenty of examples today. In the past, only people who were in positions that would be in public scrutiny (politicians, CEOs, PR people, etc) really had to watch what they said all the time. Now that we have the internet, which doesn't really forget, it's easy for past mistakes to come back to haunt you. I just hope society becomes more lenient about foolish mistakes...
Failure does not power Silicon Valley. Failure is only a byproduct of a rich entrepreneurial culture whose overriding goal is success. That culture understands that startups inevitably will have a non-trivial failure rate and factors this into such things as equity structures, company valuations, decisions to fund or not to fund particular ventures, decisions to leave secure employment situations in favor of joining startups and the like. But failure is never the goal. It is only a byproduct. To me, therefore, it is not accurate to say that failure "powers" Silicon Valley.

Apart from some overstatement about the concept of failure (e.g., its being regarded as a "badge of honor" in the Valley), this piece makes some good observations about how the Valley has grown and prospered through continued flexibility and experimentation in contrast to the relative rigidity that has hampered Japan's startups.

Silicon Valley is beautifully set up to encourage risk taking but the goal of all risk takers is success, not failure. The United States, like Japan, once had a mindset by which the goal of every responsible working adult was to have a "steady job" and there have been cultural factors aplenty that have discouraged people from leaving such jobs to take a whirl with a startup. The move from that mindset to that of the risk-taking entrepreneur is driven by the hope of an extraordinary return for one's efforts. In Silicon Valley, it has been proven over and over again that such extraordinary returns are possible for those who are smart and enterprising and that historically has been the main draw for joining a startup. Today, with the low barriers to entry, the reasons for taking the leap into startups can be more complex (personal growth, etc. can now factor in). But the overriding goal is still money. Silicon Valley provides a fertile ground for those who are driven by that desire and provides all that is needed for success with a startup (as do other centers of startup activity).

What drives the Valley, then, is not failure as such but rather the large number of smart, disciplined, talented people who want to do something special in hopes of getting large rewards. Those people are not afraid to fail but their very essence is to try to avoid it at all costs while chasing after the prize of success.
I like it :) the auto mode is a nice touch, but please get rid of the "OMZG! NO laziness detected!" thing, it's distracting and looks like an error message..
I remember some while back (8 or 10 years? I cant remember exactly when) - Intel was trying to give each processor a GUID so that certain transactions could be traced back to the chip. Didn't go over well at all and Intel eventually pulled back.

I wonder if the same uproar will happen this time around?
By Suing Popular Chat App Kik, Is RIM Poisoning Its Own Ecosystem?
Sure - we have no fixed vacation policy (apart from that fact that it's unlimited). It's purely based on mutual respect. If a team-member wants to take vacation, its up to him to be responsible and plan accordingly, make sure projects are finished etc. Of course, respect means that you shouldn't take 6 months off. But to date we've never had an issue and we've been doing this for two years and will be close to 20 people soon!
NoScript is much more than just disabling JavaScript: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808801

When NoScript is ported to Chrome, I will happily switch.
Just in the spirit of introducing you to other options: there exist people who already have profitable affiliate sites in the space who you could pitch on the idea of "bolt this onto your site and get X more inventory which will rank on the strength of your existing brand/trust/etc." I'd be thinking more in the five figure range than the $3 up front range.
A rare subject on with 'tptacek and I agree!

Not long after the original monoculture paper came out, there was a buffer overrun in a software firewall, and the 11,000 infected machines generated enough traffic that it messed up a lot of the internet. To me this really highlighted problems both with the superficiality of model in the paper and the limitations of the biological metaphor.

That said I did think the paper was very valuable at putting the discussion on the table. Some of the risks of monoculture are very real. I was on a National Academy of Sciences panel at the time with Charles Parrow (whose book Marcus Ranum approvingly cites, although Charles actually agreed with Bruce) and we spent a lot of time discussing the arguments for and against.
This is happening already for much of the 3G internet (at least here in the UK).

Perhaps we'll end up with an internet-routable IPv4 address being a chargable extra from ISPs. That could be easier for them than rolling out IPv6, at least in the short term.