skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Art Of Driving Your Competition Crazy
Seriously, I don't know anyone who has made a video call for any other purpose than 'Hey Cool!'.

Just because we're in the future already and we have LED's and video conferencing, doesn't mean it's actually useful. :P
I want my 28.5 seconds back. That was the least funny 28.5 seconds of my life. It was so unfunny, that I think it stole past funny moments from my memory and used them against me, like some kind of evil psionic attack. My soul hurts.
If you are using the "Free Transform" tool in photoshop to rotate the image, I found that rotating and scaling in the same "Free transform" session causes more jagged edges. Doing the rotate first, then doing the scale looked better. Not sure if you are doind that anyway, but the edges of your image looked like mine when i was :)
Granted, and bear in mind I'm not saying the Surface is a viable product--but the assumption in the article is that Multi-Touch is Apple's, when the tech is anyone's.

That Apple has the trademark is another story, and raises (for me) questions of how trademarks are managed and issued.
Google: Larry Page + Sergey Brin (both technical)
EBay: Pierre Omidyar & Chris Agarpao (both technical)
Microsoft: Bill Gates & Marc McDonald (both technical)
Apple: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak (both technical)
PayPal: Max Levchin & Luke Nosek (both technical) (Yes, I know Peter Thiel is not technical, at least not on paper)
Amazon: Jeff Bezos (technical) and probably hired a technical person at first.

I'm not saying its not possible to grow a company with a non-tech person, there are many examples where this has worked (PayPal could count as one). My point is that two tech-founders can get a product out fast if you work well together.

Although finding a hacker co-founder, is a whole another ball game. You really need to find someone who will take ownership of your idea as their own and move forward. This is soooo hard to find...soo hard...Good Luck!
Get more visitors, and it'll probably solve itself.

We get about 40,000 visitors a month, and have only a couple hundred unique posters during the same period. Participating users are always significantly less common than lurkers.

Of course, you might have more friction preventing participation than you should. Is your signup process crappy? If you ask more than two or three questions (username, password, optional email address), then your signup process is crappy and needs to be fixed. Do you require all posts to parse a CAPTCHA? Once during signup is probably enough--it's certainly enough until you have a spam problem to deal with. Do you make people agree to a long "terms of service"? Unless you really plan to enforce it in court, don't make folks click through...just include it on the site somewhere so you can point to it when you want to revoke someone's post privileges and need a fair reason to do so.

And, maybe you are boring people to death. I don't know, and couldn't help if you were. Just keep working on improving your site, making it sticky so people stick around and tell their friends about it, provide good content so that search engines send people your way, etc.
Being the founder of OpenDNS makes him a smart guy? Most of the 37Signals products were harder to build and more useful than OpenDNS.
Campfire is not 37Signals money application. You're thinking of Basecamp. I'm surprised if 37Signals gives a shit about Huddlechat.
High Hopes for Start-Ups Meet Harsh Realities
how does this projection stand up with their more recent article about a 70% chunk of apps being developed with intention of free release (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/11/wwdc_survey_su...)
Steve Jobs is definitely not technical. He is, however, a marketer-par-excellence.
1) Build the product
2) Sell the product

In that order. Get whoever you need to do that well.
"And for my sixth blog post, following up such gems as 'Rickrolling has been retired. We get it. It was funny. It’s over now. You can stop.', quoted here in its entirety, I am going to perform the amazing feat of baiting Hacker News."

We get it. It was funny. Can you stop now?
Sure, but so does a guy with a lemonade stand. It's being able to grow and replicate that.

From wikipedia:
"Lifestyle Businesses are businesses that are set up and run by their founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more."

And that's great if you want to create a business that sustains your lifestyle.
Honestly, you're wrong.

The point here is not whether "you" know better than the desktop software does whether or not what you are doing is "safe". The point is that no one does: 2-300 people, or more, were involved in writing the software you're about to run as root. It's a huge amount of code, and no one can even pretend to have audited all of it for security issues. And, in point of fact, vulnerabilities are discovered in this stuff all the time.

Running that stuff as root is just dumb. If linux attracted even a tenth as much attention from black hats as does windows, and you did anything non-trivial (e.g. surfing) with that box, you would be more or less guaranteed to see it rooted at some point. So the desktop developers, being responsible about this stuff, are trying to warn you. You are just choosing not to listen.

Like I said: you're wrong.
no one will sue you for patent infringement till you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether they have grounds to or not. So I advise fatalism. Don't waste your time worrying about patent infringement. -- http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents -- http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
Ah, but you forgot Hofstadter's law:

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."
A provisional patent, or a patent altogether, puts a stake in the ground to help identify when you invented something.

The actual invention date can be earlier, but a patent is very good proof of the invention date.

Remember this: A patent application must be filed within 1 year of public disclosure of the invention, or you lose the right to patent the invention.

Public disclosure is a pretty low test to meet. Launching your startup will probably pass the test. Disclosing to an employee does not. Disclosing to a contractor may. Be careful here.

Be mindful of the year limit, and keep good notes to prove when you invented something.
well, that depends on what we're talking about here. blog? application? etc..
So hard to build that google replicated one in a week? :/
Yeah, same here -- learning how to nap would be valuable, but I just can't seem to do it (perhaps because I'm usually wired on caffeine?).

Sometimes I'll pass out from exhaustion when I get home from a long day, but that is more involuntary than deciding "Hmm, a nap would be good right now".
Could this kill reddit?
"we're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout". He went on to say that "we thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for."
From personal experience, I'm going to say no, don't get a non-tech cofounder (exception made for clones of Steve Jobs.)

There is a lot of nontechnical stuff to do in a startup but it doesn't make sense to start most of it until you actually have something working.
It often takes much longer to design something simple than it does to implement it.
Subscribe to Sites that Don’t Offer RSS Feeds
There are some interesting points in this article.

A lot of people (including myself) have a few Django bugs fixed in their private working copies but they don't contribute them back because the process is too complex. This doesn't mean that they are not willing to contribute. Barriers for contribution are way too high.

It's true that you must continually fight people to help those people to fix their project. It shouldn't be so.
37 signals keeps on cranking out new minimal apps though...
Why The New Web Matters
An amazing book. It's at the top of my recommended reading list.
I see what you're saying and I agree that they're more of a "lifestyle business" as defined in this thread. They're not the traditional type of startup, but they do share startup values to an extent.
jasonfried would be welcome to respond here. while they're busy writing marketing blogs, because of the simplicity, 37signals' software is defensible from a startup's point of view, but doesn't hold a candle to Google if they launched something, a la HuddleChat.
From talking with some of the AppEngine developers, my impression is that they are trying to get developers to write a bunch of free/cheap applications on Google AppEngine that they can then use to persuade people to sign up for Google Apps for Your Domain. Whatever others don't write (well enough) they will crank out themselves.

Besides that, they already have products that implement large parts of 37Signals's applications' functionality. It is just a matter of them packaging it all up into something more usable and then marketing it. A large part of 37Signals's success is due to marketing; Without Signal vs. Noise nobody would know about them.
I always enter a higher salary than my actual on sites like this. It is irrational to be honest here.
Thanks for your comments, very interesting. I was under the impression that Google would be all set by end of summer, but I have no idea why I thought that. iPhone it is! It's too bad, cause I really like Verizon.
Orange Julius and Jamba Juice are both basically glorified lemonade stands. Starbucks is just an upscale version of your gas station's coffee dispenser.
... no! Then instead of 10 committees of 20 people, they'll have 1 godawful app designed by 1 ginormous committee of 200 people!
Sometimes you can piggyback of your competitors. See "How Starbucks Actually Helps Mom & Pop Coffee Shops": http://www.slate.com/id/2180301/
I would say this is true in NYC, but not Silicon Valley. Our company is based in NYC and you're right about VCs not talking to you if you don't already have a concrete business model that's already generating revenue. However, it seems from my experience that the west coast is a completely different world. I'm sure there are many good reasons for this, but I wouldn't say that most VC's/investors won't talk to you, I would say that most NYC investors won't talk to you.
If you truly believe the patent would be valuable - e.g. a blocker patent excluding competitors from a valuable opportunity - then it really is worth seeking patent council.

Releasing establishes a prior art date for US patent purposes and starts a 12 month window within which you can file. Releasing your product publicly may mean giving up your rights in certain countries for a global patent filing.

However if your innovation would not be obvious to a user of the product, then releasing may not even constitute disclosure.

Like I said, get some professional patent advice. It probably won't even cost you anything for an initial consultation.
I've been enjoying the quality of news posts on Hacker News, but this link is lame. Generally speaking, I'd like a little context, maybe some informed opinion, or a first-hand account of some session being held somewhere, not someone's twitter post.
Piracy Is Down
How is it too complex? Instead of letting the fix stay in your working copy, why not attach the patch to the bug?
Sure, but on most sites that have a "karma" type of system, it doesn't serve as that great of a measure of how you're contributing to the community - it serves as a measure of how much the community agrees with your opinions.

I mean if everybody only used the (up|down)vote arrows as a measure of how much something was worthy of submission, or how much a comment was contributing to discussion it would be great, but you can't rely on people to do that (and they often don't), so the meaning of karma approaches nil.

HN seems to be a bit better about this than most sites with such a system (reddit and slashdot particularly), but I suspect that's because its user base is (or was, I'm not too sure recently) pretty small.
I wonder if they have considered load testing twitter themselves, instead of letting their users do it.

Disclosure: I'm currently writing a hosted load testing tool.
Thanks google!

PHP is awesome.
I'd imagine that you got downmodded for not suggesting some of these other ideas in combination with not providing a link or two for reading about these other ideas that are better.
If the author really thinks 37s doesn't like competition, he should address why they would open source the framework created from their flagship product. Seriously, why would a company that wants to prevent others from competing with them give away the tools they use for increasing productivity and making it easier to realize innovative ideas?

37signals is trying to spread what they think are good ideas - the techniques and models that have worked for them. If you've ever talked to them you'll find they do this because they're passionate ideas, not because they want to harm an entire industry. Jason Fried has been talking about "embracing constraints" for how long now? And he does it only out of malice? He speaks about these ideas at events and organizations to people who would never compete with 37signals because he's scared of competition? This idea is so stupid it's laughable.

The only point he might have (and I don't think he's even making it) is that 37signals is not what most people think of as a startup. Over the past few months it seems like 37signals has been trying to change part of the definition of "startup" - they're trying to change the class of companies to which the term "startup" applies but keep the connotations of independence, adventure, and creativity.
Unless you're stuck with an early termination fee to switch to AT&T, I'd say at $199 you can't go wrong with an iPhone.

Even if you're not developing software for it, it's a damned good phone (easily the best I've ever used in terms of sound quality, reception, and battery life).

AFAIK the development environment blows away that of any other mobile platform.

But there is that bit about forking out $99 for a signing key to use your own code on your own phone, unless you go the jailbreak route.
What I'm getting at is that 37 Signals, while they might complain about competition, probably isn't all that concerned because they have a healthy revenue stream. Their revenue may be taken away later, but they'll be able to deal with that the same way they dealt with no revenue when they were just starting: making something people want and straight-up selling it to customers. In the meantime they're making bank.
tbh Vault who's the elephant in this game has an ugly website with a terrible interface which charges it's userbase. It's only value is in it's content. Whoever can offer the same content with either a good interface or for free is probably going to do well for themselves. I'm not sure Glassdoor is the one though.
But copying something doesn't mean you can come up with the next thing.
How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?
We've established that they were willing to be snide about it, but not that it was in any way threatening to them. Campfire is, by far, their simplest application.
Don't forget Adrian Holovaty (Django, Everyblock) and Aza Raskin (Humanized, Mozilla Labs). Also from Chicago.
How to Make Profound and Lasting Change
"... Which begs the question “do ‘aussie’ startups really need them?” Could the continual scarcity of capital and local entrepreneurial mentoring, be a breeding ground for a new form of Startup? ... and you said:`I think this is exactly the type of startup YC breeds` ..." ~

I added this comment before I posted here and while I didn't have Omnisio specifically in mind you pretty much confirm what I suspected.
Serial Number Marketing
Ya that doesn't do much about bots or trolls who enjoy being spanked.
We're doing it by offering an Open Source version of our product that is more powerful than our proprietary competitors products (and our commercial version goes several steps farther and is priced competitively). I don't know just how crazy it is driving them, yet, but I do know that we're on the radar for the two major competitors (because I've heard from them via email). Must be at least a little bit worrisome.

I think our next couple of product announcements over the next month or two will also do some damage...we'll be leaping past the competition in dramatic ways, and more importantly, we'll be letting their biggest customers know about it (because we've built up a nice contact list of their biggest customers over the past few years of their customers using our Open Source and earlier products). But, of course, being in the position to do that has taken a very long time...quietly gathering data, writing software, making people like us enough to talk about us, etc.

I don't know any "instant" recipes for this...but I love hearing stories in this vein.
I'm not sure "Getting Real" sums up 37Signals' business anymore. Since they wrote that, they seem to have melded it with Joel's "hire smart people and keep them happy" strategy.

But this looks like an awesome book, and I just bought it. Thanks!
Plurk was NOT acquired by Pheltup
Because there is a 90% chance that your fix will be ignored. I had a small fix that was completely ignored and the other duplicate fix submitted 2 months later was merged into trunk only because it was made during the sprint and mine wasn't.

I contributed few patches to Django in the past and every time I had to fight for them on trac or on forums. I just don't have time to do this right now.
My contract has been up for over a yr with Verizon. So switching wont be a problem. I just didn't want to regret getting the iPhone if Android was coming out soon (which doesn't seem to be the case). But it seems like no one is waiting around for Android. I will def be playing with the SDK if I get the phone.
If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.

While I've never worked directly with Rails, working with Capistrano is making me use Ruby more and more and I'm starting to think the best qualities of Rails come from Ruby. Ruby seems to offer plenty of opportunity for an experienced developer to map their problem domain directly to language primitives.

Once you get good at doing that you'll be surprised how more efficient you become and how much more time you have for things like creating a business.
Also, it says they've started in the Bay Area. There's a definitely bias there, as the top-paid Google, Yahoo, and Cisco employees will be there, but the top-paid MSFT employees are surely in Redmond.
Everyblock took funding and Humanized seems to have folded, but I'm happy to recognize more hometown heroes. =)
this is an incredibly good article. i have had it open in my browser for a couple of days and finally read it today. wow.
IPhone 3G: the details you never wanted to know
Hmm, maybe it's me. Does Skype on Mac OS have special difficulties?
I hope it's not, too many rounding errors
I think Mr. Jobs choose to sell the Iphone cheaper this time, because he knows that Google Android will be a very stronger competition to Iphone, so it was pretty clever in that way.
I will definitely wait for the release of the HTC android mobile system.
This a mandatory read. Click every link! Garfield is the best postmodern thing ever!
That's pretty reasonable. I'll try to make more salient arguments next time. A Memo To The Internet is more of a rant board... but I'll start cleaning it up.
Good ideas but a lot of them seem to be rooted in "Elements of Style" by Strunk.

Reading that short book has significantly improved the way I write.
This should trip pg's statistical abnormality observer, I would think...
SuperPaper
In Japan, Cellphones have become Too Complex to Use
There's a good analysis at Trovus
http://www.trovus.co.uk/blogs/137-community-contributor-acti...

It certainly supports that your experience is common, and more importantly gives you a framework to improve (ie, make 'Groupies' 'Doers', and 'Doers' 'Stars').
I thought of making a knowledge map like this, except two-dimensional. The other dimension would be practical vs. theoretical (this one would be hard vs. soft sciences). I wonder if there is a quantitative measure for the hard vs. soft, such as the number of axioms vs. "rules" based on those axioms?
It's funny - 100,000 ex-pat Aussies in California, and I only ever run into people I went to uni with and are now working for Google.
That would have been a better point to make, you're right.

As noted elsewhere, AMTTI is more of a personal rant board. I'll work on making the content a bit more cogent in the future as I'd like it to mature beyond that...
I'd go with the iPhone. I think Android could be the next Vista. Or it could be a smash hit.

The point is, any prediction of Android's success will have a wide margin of error. I think the chances that Android will be better than the iPhone in the next 2 years to be very slim.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
A predictor in a poorly specified model can perform just fine until you look a bit closer and identify stronger predictors, or address confounding factors explicitly. eg.

IFF women are more risk-averse THEN less women entrepreneurs
IFF time lost to childbirth is a factor THEN less " "

In the former case, risk aversion drives the predictor, and linkage with gender makes it appear as though gender is a strong predictor. After breaking the predictor in two, a much more informative fit is generated. Et cetera. I make no claims as to the correctness of the above. But I am dubious that vagina possession is the kiss of death for starting one's own business. Confounding seems likely.

Ratcheting up or down the sample size does not address confounding. Are women incapable of becoming successful entrepreneurs? Oprah would probably suggest not. Are there numerous factors working against them? Yes. Far more interesting is to probe which characteristics are overwhelmingly female and which are shared among sexes.
Data Deluge and a Startup’s Glassdoor
Ask YC: Thoughts on MSFT Sharepoint?
Curious what everyone thinks of MSFT sharepoint. What do you think it does exactly? It's pretty vague
PG! I want my downvote-story button!
How Not To Run Customer Service: 2 months of downtime on file a storage site
I'd prefer the shorter version ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html
True enough, though it seems a fair amount of software will pop it up in the installation process and make you agree to it as if it were. This could be due to using plug and play installation software, though.

Maybe I should revise my original post to: go with GPL'd or similar software and an EULA isn't even an issue.
At my large sluggish company everyone thinks it is the bee's knees while I shudder to use it. But, I do wonder if it is more than I think.
The "one year to file after public exposure" rule only applies to US patents. Publication creates a bar to foreign patents.

If you're planning to rely on the "one year" rule, make sure that you understand what you have to do to use it. At the very least, you need reasonably complete and date-stamped documentation. (No, the "mail it to yourself" scheme doesn't work.) You want to talk to a patent attorney with relevant expertise to find out what's required. You may find that it's easier to simply file a provisional. (A provisional, by definition, is date-stamped.)
my first impression was that it was awful. But on second thought I think my judgment was a bit clouded, if it was an open source project it would be a religion.
New Zealanders Caught In The Web
The camel has two humps. A test for programming aptitude.