skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: What if your partners want you to let it go after 7 years?
I have been working on a website/service concept for over 7 years now. The work was unhurried until competition started emerging. I had to ask two friends to work on the project. But now, after we're almost half the way, they want to change the concept and switch to another startup. I admit that my project is very demanding and time consuming and that legally they own two third of it all,I am not sure I can let it go. What do you think I should do?
Symbian has a lot of capabilities but it has the same problem as Windows. It has to support a lot of legacy code which is a pain to work with. If they want to compete with Android they need to build a developer friendly layer on top of their code. Because let's face it, Android is not original but it's nicely packaged with the developer in mind.
Happiness as your Business Model
I go to Colgate University. The CS Program is good, not the best, but it is a liberal arts college and the people there are really interesting and smart and a lot of fun. The professors are the best part. I've eaten dinner at at least four of my professors homes with their families and see them all the time downtown and walking around the campus. My largest class so far has been 18 kids. Hit me up (my username @ students.colgate.edu) if you have any questions...love to help!
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there are many issues that you're facing now... but it may be simplified if dealt smartly and with all integrity ... first of all you took too long to implement/execute your idea - so now you're in trouble (internal and external).

anyway lets resolve the internal issue first. You need to find out what your partners really want, chances are they want/need something else than what it looks like from outside, find out what will motivate them to stay with your project?, also it is not clear whether they prefer to quit or they prefer to change the concept, may be they want to quit because you're not flexible enough to listen to them and change the concept - you need to really listen to them and think rationally (not emotionally) whether changing the concept will benefit all, try to create a win-win situation for all. last option is to let them go (because if they are not motivated enough then it won't produce the desired result) without burning the relationship, find the replacement at the earliest. If they are united and want to close the company then find out the legal way to hold on to the intellectual property at the minimum cost to you....

if they are your true friends then they should not give you hard-time in exploring either options. If you really love your project then you have to be very firm though in a polite way so that they can figure it out that you're really serious to pursue your ambition and nothing can change your route (with or without their help) - may be they will change their mind after seeing your determination.
That would get them @gmail.com instead of @*.edu email address.
Based on my experience during 1.0, I've been speculating a fall-out relatively soon as I've seen a lot of me-too popups from the critical areas (SF/NY). Roughly 1 year after this influx in 1.0, the bottom fell out.

During 2.0 that pattern was contradicted as social bees tend to migrate and have a lot less loyalty. Friendster > MySpace > Facebook is one example, and there have been a quite a few other. However, is it really a great migration or simply natural segregation at work? I'm beginning to think it's the latter and that being said, maybe there is a play to be made for the me-too sites this time around.
Site should be coded if at all possible to gracefully degrade if javascript can't be found, but this "DEAR GOD NO JAVASCRIPT" attitude I find these days is just weird. If you stick to the good parts, it's a really awesome little language that lets you do some really neat things. If you code well, you get small, useful applications out of it that increase the usefulness of the browser hundreds-fold.

Javascript just gets a bad reputation because - like PHP - it's used by gazillions of noobs and that brings the average code quality down.
The claim: The world's most efficient turbine
Can you guys identify any books in Knuth's room? I just spotted Hackers Delight (on his left) :)
Clojure: Wide Finder 2 - adding agents
Also this is amazing

Then a startup came to me and said 'Don, write compilers for us and we will take care of finding computers to debug them. Name your price.' I said, 'Oh, okay, $100000,' assuming that this was [outrageous]. The guys didn't blink. He agreed. I didn't blink either. I said 'I'm not going to do it I just thought that was an impossible number'. At that time I made the decision in my life that I was not going to optimize my income.
The Agile 800 Pounds Gorilla
Bad code: OSCommerce
If your developing web applications its completely possible to be self-taught and produce high quality applications.

I was always into technology and was doing PHP + MySQL professionally before I left high school. I still decided to go to college for business. So I learn a lot of valuable business insight I would of normally overlooked.

The one thing I regret is that I didn't have the chance to be surrounded by intelligent tech-savvy people; instead its mostly just kids who belong in high-school who will fit well into their boring corporate jobs.
7 years is a long time, especially in the world of the internet.

If it has not been successful by now, you really need to look at doing other things.
Hey CEO, what's on your mind?
Scientist at Work | John Kao: Where the Whole Agenda Is Innovation
Ask YC: Do you test your site?
Have you used A/B testing or multi-variate testing on your site?

Did you find it useful if you did? What products did you use and did you find them easy to use? Was it effective and did you achieve the gains you expected?

If you haven't, why not?
Ask YC: Two quick Firefox 3 Questions
1. Google reader sessions - now, everytime I close the google reader tab, when I reopen it I have to type in my password again. I don't recall this behavior in Firefox 2...anyone else notice?

2. I'm a fan of the new location bar, but I hate having to use the arrow keys to scroll down it. Is there a shortcut?
i mean, unless they're going to be jerks about it, why can't you just keep a hold, or a copy, of the codestream to continue to work on your idea if they're jumping ship to change ideas and startups.
It's natural to lean towards just copying the latest big hit. 1) Market research is done for you, so you don't have to be as convincing to get funding, 2) there's room in any niche for > 1 competitor (first, best, cheapest, at least :)), 3) creativity is hard, new ideas are hard, innovation is hard.

And there's the major reason. We all* want easy money, so we groan and slap our foreheads with poorly disguised jealousy whenever a 14-yr old girl makes a million bucks with crappy myspace layouts. But the thing is, there's positive feedback for taking the low-hanging fruit: You can make a ton of money. And if you don't, at least you didn't have to invest much thought.

The 'problem' (if so you categorize it) is that there's no promise of greater return for greater effort. You can spend your life trying to solve BigProblems until you die, and get further than anyone else, but the guy in the next dorm room retired at 25 after making a social-networking site for parakeets with dyslexia. In two days, in ASP classic.

So if you're motivated by money, success, fame, there's not a lot of reason to go for the hard problems. And those are pretty common (and powerful) motivations.

*All including you, unless you don't, in which case it doesn't.
We are constantly hearing advice like "Scratch your own itch," "Find problems close to you," and "Code what you know," which is all good advice for finding a startup idea.

What then, do you do if you're not exposed to much?

When I spent time talking to people in SV 2 months ago, I noticed something I never expected: lots of people have very little exposure to "real world" problems.

People come up with "me too" startups because that's all they know.

Sure it's easy and cheap to start a business, and if you're smart and can hack, all the more reason. But what about the giant issue hardly anyone mentions: real world experience.

I've been doing programming work in real businesses for years and still get excellent startup ideas from my customers almost every day. In the past week alone, I have been challenged with problems I've never seen before that are really affecting these people. Just a couple of quick recent examples:

- One customer is preparing blanket purchase orders for '09 models, but since the SKUs change every season, their ERP system is of little help.

- Another is setting up a new warehouse, but their app won't allow bulk updates so they have to hire clerks just to enter 10,000 new bin locations.

- Another has a call center whose response time has doubled with an upgrade to their app. Now they want the new release's functionality with the old release's interface.

And this is just one week! People will pay big bucks for technical solutions to these real world business problems.

My advice to a young hacker with lots of skill but not much experience (outside of college apps): you may want to consider getting a job for a year or two. I know, everyone wants to start the next <whatever>, and get rich now and no one wants to sit in Megacorp's cube farm. And a startup, even a failed one, may be a better education.

OTOH, you will acquire dozens of great startup ideas (and contacts) and avoid the "me too" trap. Something to think about.
Well, I can see:
"The C?????? Oxford English Dictionary", bellow the clock.
"Graph Theory", just behind the humidifier thingy.

A pity the resolution is not better.
Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)
Hey,

My latest web application went public today and I'd love to hear some input from everyone. The site is called Streetread. I've been dubbing it 'Google Reader meets Wall Street'. Streetread is a single-page ajax-driven interface that simplifies the process of gathering the large amount of news and data that flood Wall Street every day. The site aggregates the latest headlines from over 20 of the leading financial sites as well as from all of the stocks you choose to follow. The interface makes sifting through the content extremely easy and the articles are even presented within the same page. Basic stock charts/quotes display with the stocks you follow, etc. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Mike
Hey,

My latest web application went public today and I'd love to hear some input from everyone. The site is called Streetread. I've been dubbing it 'Google Reader meets Wall Street'. Streetread is a single-page ajax-driven interface that simplifies the process of gathering the large amount of news and data that flood Wall Street every day. The site aggregates the latest headlines from over 20 of the leading financial sites as well as from all of the stocks you choose to follow. The interface makes sifting through the content extremely easy and the articles are even presented within the same page. Basic stock charts/quotes display with the stocks you follow, etc. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Mike
2005 follow-up at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/04/11/050411fa_fact?cu...
In Your Face MySpace! | Tech Jaws
Ya, also there is Cormen's book & Unicode 1.0 (I guess--not sure) :)
The thing these interviews never really convey is the kindness and "gentlemanliness" of this great man. I didn't know him well (I worked at a start-up (Imagen) in the early 80's that was a spinoff of the TeX project), but saw him around Stanford and work to form a strong impression of a true giant among men, and not just because of his brainpower.
long story short, you need 4 things :

1. Determination: as pg always says that most successful people are those who're determined to bring their dream come true.

2. Code: somehow you have to manage to get the source code in your control. ,

3. Backup plan: make plan-b ready for damage control anticipated by your partners leaving project.

4. Speed: buddy, you need speed to roll-out to deal with competition.
I say it's semi-useful. But very easy to use.

1 thing though... I don't like what happens when I try to scroll up on news stories for a stock.
Are you referring to how the list loops to the end? You're supposed to be scrolling down but I see how that could get confusing. I was worried some users would scroll in the wrong direction.
Interesting idea. Though of course the way to do it is to train a filter...
How To Interpret VC Response To Your Market Testing
I'm quoting Larry Wall because he said something interesting.

The comprehensions from twisted were not written for clarity so they aren't good examples. The programmer wanted a one-liner to define these constants.
Why do I have to be logged in to edit the list of stocks?
Overall a nice, simple interface.

The scrolling, vertical, ticker-like lists tripped me up for a second, though. I thought the left-hand arrow, pointing to the left, would scroll the list in left, that it would kind of pull the list in that direction like a ticker.
There is nothing wrong in being a "me too" clone.

In the early stages of a market (in any business), when someone stumbles upon something new/novel/untapped, there is always a land-grab and (initially) often plenty of users for everyone.

Ultimately success really comes down to the offering provided (e.g. you offer same service but USP being simpler GUI that saves you time) and the ability to iterate quickly and develop features that users want and find value (ideally without adding unnecessary complexity to what you already offer).

Many a successful company started as a "me too" clone (or late entrant), later becoming the dominant player.

It is only when the market is saturated do other issues such as "churn" etc. (e.g. as seen in the established mobile-phone markets) start coming into play. Now entering the market is actually not a good idea, unless you are offering something radically different (ideally a disruptive technology), but then you would not be a "me too" clone.
allow people to vote up some of the news stories, and have the main page display the popular stories.
Arc's [] notation would help in the second case.

filter([_.endswith('.py')], os.listdir(some_dir))

I've found that one of the most important things
to eliminate from a program is unnecessary names.
Introducing a variable is more than
1 token's worth of conceptual load.
Thank you. Yes, I understand. With all of the scrolling buttons I was sort of torn between which direction to go. It seemed that both made sense and I really couldn't know what users would expect.
If you were to change the stocks without being logged in, once you navigate away from the site, the symbols would be lost, and I felt users might be annoyed by that. Registering literally takes seconds too.
Yes, but that is seconds users do not want to take. I'd advice letting them edit it, but have a small notification at the top letting them know that it will be lost without an account. Cookies are unreliable but they may help.
I considered having this as a feature but didn't for two reasons. Since this is geared towards the investment community, I felt most serious investors don't care about community and what others think, and last, what's popular to some may not even be relevant to others in this industry.
Solid idea, but the one problem I noticed right away is that the site does not currently load news. "Error loading news. Please try again or contact support." Here are two other issues I think you should look at:

UI issue: When I click on a stock, I get the stock quote and information on the right side just fine. However, it does not say anywhere the name of the company. I think that putting the company name above the stock quote on the right frame would be useful.

External links: When linking to an external site (such as Google Finance) "Open in a new Window" does not work for me. Also, the bookmarks link is a bit confusing; it shows a few icons (like del.icio.us) and one could think that clicking on a part of that bookmarks icon would be linking to that particular service. Finally, the top bar (the Streetread part) seems to blend into the external page at times; maybe use part of the dark blue header in the design of the external top bar?

Overall, I think that this is a great service so far, good work!
U.S. Consumer Confidence Plunges Again
7 years isn't necessarily too long to bring an idea to fruition. It's out towards the edge of the distribution for an internet startup, but it's perfectly reasonable for something complex.
You can temporarily store the user's list in a cookie if they're not logged in.
That's a very good idea and I'll definitely consider implementing that soon. Thanks.
Incompatible Browser.

I'm at a large Nation-wide law firm and stuck on IE6. I imagine there are Wall-Street corporationss that are also still using old browsers.
What browser/os are you using?
good point. but the main page looks barren, to me. SOMEthing needs to go there, imo.
Intrusion Detection For PHP Applications With PHPIDS
Good concept, but could be implemented better. Definitely make the logo sizes at the top the same size. Don't stretch or anything, but leave grayspace between them. It just looks cluttered right now.

Center the instructions vertically as to not have so much empty space. Although it will still be the same amount, it will look like less.

How about multithreading? As in when you click on one it becomes active, allowing you to have more than one news source active at a time. Weave the news entries by date and color code them (not everything, but maybe a color code a symbol at the start).

If you implement the above, how about having categories? Sports, world and business, etc? The possibility for sports from the New York Times and International Business from Reuters would be a major feature.

Like I said, great idea. Some more work would make it amazing.

*edit:
I like my scrollbar. I have come to expect my scrollbar from websites. Give me my scrollbar back, it acts as a visual clue to where I am and it allows for intuitive navigation. Don't force me to use your system.
Firefox 2 and Windows XP. I am behind a decently strict company firewall as well.
Since when is Apple super loyal to Intel?
10 startups to watch
Firefox 3 on an Intel Macbook running Leopard: the scrolling is completely broken. If I click on a stock, the new loaded data just scrolls wildly. Further scrolling using the scroll wheel seems to just send the page to various locations at random.

Seems like an interesting idea, but there's no way I'd use it in this state.
imitate then innovate?

Many businesses start successfully (first mover advantage) but are unable to maintain it allowing competitors to overtake them.
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On the other hand, if people go into the profession solely because the pay prospects are good then there will be a huge influx of mediocre developers. That's no good for anybody.

What's killing me right now is the geographical bias of the whole thing. I'm in St. Louis currently and the job market seems pretty stagnant. What jobs are available tend to be with the megacorporates like A.G. Edwards, CitiGroup, and MasterCard. There are a minority of consulting gigs available.

SliceHost is the one major exception I know of for St. Louis.
Pretty slick.

What advantages does this have over me hopping over to Yahoo Finance and plugging in a ticker?

Also, I get live news feeds in my trading platform for any security.

I know you've probably done competitive analysis, but here are some other sites that do pretty cool stuff too:

theflyonthewall.com (fastest news out there)
stocktwits.com (twitter + stock mashup)

Good Luck.
Ask YC: Domain Names: Better to be clear or witty?
In your experience, is it better to have a straight forward domain name like "carprices.com" or something witty, original and completely off topic like Google.com?
- Scrolling is too slow,
- Page loads are too slow

If your going to target the investment banking community, you'll find we want our information fast. You'll notice the old stock tickers had symbols whizzing bye, not slowly scrolling.

If I detect even the slightest lag I'll go somewhere else, probably an rss reader.
I personally know several excellent systems engineers who left the education system because the pay is so miserable.
Without specific examples, this article is as useless as the vague me-too startups the author can't be bothered to write about. Thumbs down.
Thats a hard one. Something witty will get you recognized if it sticks. But a lot of startups these days have 'witty' unusual names and it doesn;t stand out as much anymore. I would shoot for a straight forward domain name thats easy to remember and is short.
Join NASA return to the moon
You got it right. My idea isn't a simple twitter-like service. It was also important to make changes that make my service fit with the web 2.0 hype.
What if the concept too good to abandon and I'm seeing something my partners don't?
The Facebook Dilemma
I get "error reading data" from all news sites...

hm
In my experience, there are several kinds of sysadmins.

Many of them are little more than low-skilled button pressers, password resetters, and service restarters (although they may have lots of domain-specific knowledge learned by rote and not understood).

The good ones, however, are more than competent programmers in their own right, can make quick and accurate diagnoses of tough problems and fix them, write their own tools, etc.
I was shocked to see that DoCoMo (Japan's dominant mobile telephony provider) is contributing to this effort. They are infamously proprietary.
My original comment may have been a bit harsh. I'm sure there's a lot of good people both in the faculty and in the student body. I actually don't know much about the CS department at all, so by all means listen to somebody else's opinion over mine.
Buy and Hold is a Myth
Looks nice. The only thing I found is if you scroll up in the news list area it doesn't stop at today's news , it loops back to a couple days ago. Which is rather unintuitive.
The wrap-around scrolling made it unusable for me, but I'm assuming that will be fixed somehow. Looks great, and I'm going to forward it to some of my friends once the wrap-around is working.
depends on your audience. if you're making a trendy, for-the-web-community type of application, go original/witty. if you're looking to hook the grandmas and the soccer moms, an easy, descriptive name is better.