skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post, but I can't help but notice:

My co-founder was able to sell far faster than I could build
Customers became disillusioned
I collapsed

Which comes across in the albeit very brief description as the root of your problem, it sounds like you didn't actually follow that "standard advice".

That reads like you started scaling before the product was actually viable, which is borne out by your first point of what you've learnt.

I also think I disagree with point 3 of your conclusions, if your partner had been raising funds instead of selling you could have employed more people to get the product ready. Easily said with hindsight I guess.
And since you personally advocate for that route have you achieved a financial success already (even in small)?
Actually currency is more a debt than an agreement.

When you have a 20 € bill, the European Central bank "owns you 20 €".

Since people have faith in the bank ability to pay its debt, everybody uses the note as money.
The proposed policy is nominally one of the "Think of the Children!" type things, ostenibly to promote "student safety". But it also reads like one of those policies designed to enforce "traditional" schooling, like the no-school-between-Memorial Day-and-Labor-Day things a lot of states have, or the insistence on teaching english via "The Classics", boring, hard-to-decipher 1800s texts, or the "back to basics" movement that emphasizes rote learning of arithmetic facts and parts of speech.
'Like a Little' website helps Northwestern students find connections
Currency is based on your belief that the mint won't print lots of money. If you do that, the money becomes worthless. Like in Zimbabwe.
TorChat: p2p instant messenger with a completely decentralized design.
What would be really wonderful (and what I'm hoping will get built) is way to generate web-friendly visualizations directly from the amazing ggplot2 package.
Ask HN: How do I pick between trial and arbitration in my freelance agreement?
Recently I've been looking at doing some freelance work, and came across the issue of what to do if I'm sued. While I hope it never comes to that, I have to keep all my bases covered. It seems as though there's two main options: a standard trial or arbitration.

Looking at the options, it seems as though either way I'd be putting quite a lot of money out, and my client would have the upper hand financially. Does one of these options offer the little guy something to use to not go broke if the unfortunate ever happens?
I hate websites that make you click back 50 times instead of once after reading what should be a single page.
If someone says "that's impossible", you can interpret it as: "According to my limited experience and very narrow understanding of reality, it's very unlikely."

An oldie but goodie - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E
'Products' aren't just iOS apps — the category also includes purchased music, movies, television, audiobooks, and iPod games; as well as rentals of movies & television, iTunes U content, and probably more that I'm forgetting.

For the rest of it they'd never be able to publish it without something substantially similar to the "personal, noncommercial use" clause.

Yes, for apps they should probably totally defer to the application authors, instead of just letting them be more restrictive if they so choose.
It could be interesting to see a solution in Pyke of some popular puzzles such as "Einstein's Riddle" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/318888/solving-who-owns-t...
Bayesian stats book banned in China
Neat idea! I love how the map is user generated. You should add a point system to it somehow.

Could you point me in the right direction for beginning to create a full screen javascript webapp like that?
The poor eat the wrong kinds of foods, because the wrong kinds of food are inexpensive.

Convenient dominates inexpensive. Frozen vegetables fried in a wok with butter and assorted spices is easy, fast and cheap, but not as easy as pizza goes in oven.
>"it is right to steal to feed a starving family, if stealing is necessary"

This slips into what I called "semi-deontological" ethics which has the same issues as ontological ethics, i.e. that it is possible to provide a counter example for any generic ethical rule. Until you get down to an actual example one may invoke Nazi's, fatal pandemics, or lawyers tied to railroad tracks.
You get the Timothy Leary you deserve.
Maybe that high school dropout is wasting his life away because he sees no means of being successful.

I think you'll find that most people who prefer to stay at home and mooch off the system do so because to make their life just slightly better would require them to seriously bust their asses. That means their effective compensation would be very low (maybe zero or even negative in some cases).

We have and have had societies in the past where everyone got equal compensation. Do you think those societies allowed loafers to goof off all day and contribute nothing?
This is really nice, but I guess I already knew this stuff.
OpenRiff: an open-source RiffTrax player
I received some funding (20gs)and started a website selling clothing about 3 years ago. We could never get off the ground or get anything done because my co-founder and I couldn't agree on anything and typically he would repeat whatever opinion his girlfriend had about the situation. Which was frustrating to say the least. The site never really got up and running and it really discouraged me from doing a startup because initially this was my idea, so my epic failure.

Time passes and perspective is gained. I am young (still mid 20's), and I think I learned more by not even starting a company than I would have doing whatever I would of fallen into. I found hackernews during that time, and I realized its about the programming, not the clothing. But I also realized that building a company is what I want to do and that realization is an important motivation.

I recently started on my next project and hope to apply for funding this fall. I think the best thing for my recovery is the doubt or crazy look my friends give me just at the words, 'I am going to start another company'. I just feel like I got something to prove and I know I can do it. Plus, I don't want to do anything else, and like I said that is a motivating factor.

How can you stop at one failed company? Thats like not playing the power ball a just because you didn't hit on the mid-day...
And much like the basement, seemingly built and furnished by a drunken contractor who would be leaving the country in two weeks.
Okay. This is mostly my final comment here. Sort of replying to all the various comments here...

Typically, I don't have a tough time. As I talk to people on the Internet, as if I would talk to them in real life. I don't take advantage of the anonymity. You can see all my prev comments as a proof.

I maintain: down-voting, should only be used for spammers, or for clearly defined things (like profanity being used etc.) . As it does feel quite insulting, to be down-voted. The up-votes, itself, can handle everything.

In any case, I am not really upset now, or anything (thanks for trying to make me stay, as a commenter, in good cheer) :)

You can consider, this as my way of protesting, about things I don't agree with it. (And I stand to gain, no advantage, out of this as I have been anonymous, on this from the beginning...).
This is one of the most inspiring comments I've read on HN in a long time.

When I first read the article I had the same sort of "yeah, yeah, make money at the expense of being bored, etc." response as some of the other commenters here but afte reading this a light went on.

We spend so much time banging our heads on the wall looking for ways to out-do each other in the software realm when there are people in other industries starving for the most basic of the innovation we take for granted, if we can only find a way to make it relevant.

Water water everywhere...yes I am revved up about hacking again!
If the pleasure of consuming outweighs the pain of accomplishment, then what makes you think you should change ways?
Cheaper online? Don't be so sure
How Craig Newmark handles customer service
So if you write a CAD package in Lisp, your user language will be JavaScript instead of base='C', user='Lisp'. I suppose this is progress :)
var tldr = "Lots of irritating, spurious text from a Lisp advocate";
Gongradulations fello americans,

your illuminati oligarchs have promoted you, to become ID numbers with unique identity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY
’Dive Into HTML5' Stats
Lusting for a Verizon iPhone? Hold that thought
In case of web startups:

1) no new web framework

2) no new web framework

3) whatever you do, don't decide to develop any new web framework
I'm pretty sure CLOS and the condition system could be replicated in Lua, though I'm not sure anybody has

re: CLOS - There have at least been two projects to replicate Perl's Moose (http://moose.perl.org) in Lua:

* http://lua-coat.luaforge.net/

* http://code.google.com/p/loose/
Congratulations, sirs.
"It's not quite true that no mass market product uses Lisp. Microsoft's "Bob" environment for naive computer users was developed (and delivered) in Lisp."

...
The internet has changed the piracy game completely

Eh, were you actually around then? Copying floppy disks was generally just as easy as anything else, and the skill level of the average computer user was much, much higher. Based on my experience I'd say piracy per capita was nearly 100% in the 80's. These days there are large swaths of computer users who simply don't install anything that isn't pushed at them, let alone browse through TPB. Before the Internet became popular in the mid 90's a large number of BBS's were dedicated to piracy.

Keep in mind ASP on software is a fraction of what it once was. In 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 sold for $495. Duplicating the functionality of the $150 Office Home and Student would have been over $1000.
OK you aren't about to see Balmer and Stallman together in a hot tub. But MSFT haven't banned GPLed software from their platform
I think Paul Grahams essay IS somewhat contradicting Paras's essay. For example look at this paragraph:

"organic startup ideas usually don't seem like startup ideas at first. We know now that Facebook was very successful, but put yourself back in 2004. Putting undergraduates' profiles online wouldn't have seemed like much of a startup idea. And in fact, it wasn't initially a startup idea. When Mark spoke at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn't trying to start a company when he wrote the first version of Facebook. It was just a project. So was the Apple I when Woz first started working on it. He didn't think he was starting a company. If these guys had thought they were starting companies, they might have been tempted to do something more "serious," and that would have been a mistake."

I think Paul is suggestinging (at least emotionally) that you shoud follow your creativity and hope for a later opportunity of a great business.

In my opinion Paul is focusing on the kind of businesses which are mostly B2C, very innovative and very very risky.

My taste is somewhere in-between: my idea is that somewhow the joy of creativity should be combined with some seemingly boring old fashioned B2B market's need.
Of course. Why is that remark relevant here? Mathematica does make its S-expressions available to the user at runtime. They are in fact much more available to the user at runtime than in Lisp because of Mathematica's term rewriting semantics. Furthermore, the transformation from M-expressions into S-expressions isn't a one-way street. By default the notebook interface will render an S-expression as its M-expression equivalent when such exists.
Well the loophole is not really a loophole more like an escape hatch in that NFLT was shown to not be applicable for certain types of coevolutionary algorithms like say pareto coevolution. The way I understand it is that in essence the no free lunch theorem only applies when candidate solutions are not re-evaluated in terms of relative performance. In coevolution we continually pit a population of candidate solutions 'to play' against each other in order to evolve a champion. Since fitness in this case is relative and not absolute - making performance tricky to measure - NFTL can be wiggled out of. as long as you can evaluate/term your problem within game like heuristics.

- http://www.no-free-lunch.org/
- http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/1/15/Wolpert-Coevolutio...
These days, probably not that much, with the advent of virtualisation. But a decade ago there were a lot of shared shell servers in use with only a minimal install and a small per-user quota. So the rationale made sense...
HN: Can anyone else confirm dropbox is down?
I went to check on a site in my portfolio because of an email from a visitor (a tumblr theme), noticed the stylesheet wasn't loading. Checked the source and cannot log into dropbox.
> These never catch on, and never will.

Another possible counterexample is Logo, though perhaps you didn't mean "Lispy languages with fewer parentheses will never catch on," but "Front-ends for Common Lisp that use fewer parentheses will never catch on." I can't speak to the latter.

The folks who make Racket have also implemented a variety of non-Lisp languages (e.g., Scribble, Algol[1]) that I believe are parsed to s-expressions and then compiled by Racket. Not sure how many people use these implementations for "serious" programming, but they're there.

[1] http://docs.racket-lang.org/algol60/index.html
It's actually incredibly rare for a non-hacker co-founder (aka, a biz guy) to sell faster than the technology can keep up. I'd say this is normally a good scenario to be in as it continuously pushes you to build and build and build rather than sit back on your haunches.

Also, it's better than a biz-focused co-founder who doesn't sell anything. Then you're just dead in the water. I think the key is to find a biz person who's moving just as quickly as you are, and you move quickly together.
The pains of having paying all the bills out-weight everything!!! Even the pleasure of consuming! Wah la! You are good. :P
My first startup was a JavaScript wrapper for the Amazon product advertisement. My idea was that bloggers and others might appreciate a way to embed dynamic, location aware product ads. In other words they could just embed a script that looked like this:

<script src='http://affiliate-script.com/adBuilder.php?q=iPod></script>

The script used the IP address of the requesting visitor to determine which Amazon store to show products from. (US visitors saw products from the US Amazon store, Great Britain visitors saw products from the GB Amazon store.)

Additionally the ad builder always showed the most current and popular products, so the iPod query would always return the latest and greatest best selling Apple MP3 player.

The startup worked fairly well. It served more than ten million ad requests, and made about 500 dollars. I eventually abandoned it due to lack of interest. The only active users of the system were my own blogs and websites.

I recycled the code to form http://bookflavor.com, my new and current startup.
Could have been Commodore 64 - Introduction to Basic Part One, or many of the many Usborne books available at the local libraries.

Or perhaps one of the "The Bytes Brothers" books I had: "Compute a Clue" and "Input an Investigation"

Edit: Geez there were a lot of books around encouraging kids to code back then. Do such things still exist?
Advice for Aspiring Middlemen
Could the iPhone be the Microsoft Windows of mobile?
Again, where is the link to your site on your blog? I realize there is a link in the post. This has been a recurring theme here, site blogs that do not link to the site they are blogging about.
I'm not entirely sure it was 'adaptation' that was the issue.

It wasn't that Facebook adapted and MySpace didn't; it was more that Facebook started off in a totally different direction from MySpace, and it turned out that the market preferred Facebook's way. To focus on just a single difference that's probably the most obvious to casual users, Myspace allowed users a great deal of flexibility in designing their own pages (poorly), Facebook didn't and still doesn't, and basically presents a standardized page for each user with their information on it. There's a significant 'philosophical difference' there. Those differences extended beyond design to their user-acquisition strategy, which created the network effects that allowed Facebook to crush Myspace among college users.

Bluntly, the market decided it preferred a nicely manicured, access-controlled walled garden to the free-for-all of Myspace.

Interestingly, though, I think Facebook has now opened itself up to everyone to the point where it risks getting "Myspaced" itself; if influential users were to suddenly jump ship to something else, Facebook could become about as cool as having a Myspace page or Hotmail email address, and an exodus could follow.

Facebook built itself in large part on exclusivity but has attempted to move away from it in order to grow. They're trying to walk a very delicate edge and I suspect that they'll fall off eventually.
SEC inquiry email into the Facebook deal.
Super-rich people interested in space exploration? Ordinary people donating money for space exploration?
Anyone have an idea of whether this holds true for cable connections? Also do most high end wireless routers handle this well?
Pfft, frequentists.
Intestinal Parasites Might Explain Your Energy Slump
Adding Your Application To The Graph
Yep, which is precisely why economic bubbles happen. Algo traders weren't responsible for housing prices in the last decade.
Think it's the lowercase "go" that made it confusing...
You asked HN news this? Really? Really?
Groupon is growing faster than Google was

I don't see how you can compare growth rates from two different time periods when they deal with a medium that has basically just formed. Just think if there was no "Google" until last year...what would the growth rate be today?
Silly Rabbits: Google is for Spam not for Search
> If you aren't an investor or otherwise involved in one of the company's with a "bullshit fantasy" valuation, how does the "bullshit fantasy" valuation hurt you at all?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the government giving away 700 billion dollars to financial companies burned by rampant bullshit fantasy valuations...
How to Drink at the Twitter Firehose and not Drown
I live in Japan and often access FB through my cheap, simple Softbank phone and service.

Unfortuantely, I can't take screenshots but FB has done a great job of making it easy to use. It even leverages various common emoticons as icons for everything ranging from "Home" to "Search" to "Messages".

And btw, it wasn't always this way; they made the change earlier this year.
Jason's Newest Launch Newsletter (w/discount code for Launch)
Ask HN: Have a place for rent in SV? Or want to move there with us?
My cofounder and I are looking to move within the next week or so to Mountain View (or nearby) to build/launch our startup. We may be open to other areas as well. I was just curious to see if anyone either had some extra rooms that they were looking to rent or if anyone was interested in moving with us and looking into getting a larger space. Both of us are fairly neat, relaxed, and value quiet, and we're mainly just looking for a place to stay on a month to month (or 6 month lease) basis. If you'd like to know more or have a place already please send me an email (in profile). Thanks!
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Or they will crash and burn taking jobs, people and national economies with them. That's also another way they work.
Google profits more from spammy search results than from quality search results? I don't think so. Definitely not in the long run.
RIM Agrees to Indonesia's Demands to Filter BlackBerry Users' Internet Access
I should have phrased my question as limited to valuations of tech/software companies only, since that seems to be what we are discussing here.
For solving specific use cases, or giving you the tools to do it yourself?
"You were arguing from an absolute, government should stay out, free markets."

What?!? Where the heck does the "consistent set of rules" come from other than government? I have no real clue where your response comes from. As to you second 'point', look at the government changes and how long it took for business to recover.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 147
Offer HN: Web/Interface Design
I am a freelance web designer (madebyargon.com) and I have some free time on my hands so I am offering a free web/UI design to HN members.

I am doing this completely free of charge. Just email me your project, and I'll create a design that is (hopefully) more usable and appealing to the users.

Please email me at inlith@gmail.com and put "Offer HN" in the subject.

Note: While I would try my best to help whoever needs it the most, I am interested in working on a project that has already been launched and is being used by a decent no. of users.

Also, I am more interested in designing interfaces than websites.
With collaborators like yours, it should be great!
I have my doubts. One main criticism of Groupon and other daily deal companies is that their business is much less defensible. Aside from the size of their email lists, there's no reason a small business shouldn't go run their daily deal on another competing site. In that case, it comes down to how many users Groupon can get the deal in front of. With their daily email, they can get one page view per day per user. Google gets 10-1000 page views per day per user because of their search and display business, and has one of the largest reaches of any Internet company.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Groupon is going to fail. I think they're going to be worth a bunch of money in a year or two. I just think they're going to get a much lesser share of the daily deal market than Google has of search/search-advertising. Right now they have a huge percentage, but I think that's going to fall and stunt their growth.
Blandness is in the eye of the beholder. The writer of this piece places a high value on his site's design. Others have a different view of good design. Still others value content over design. The beauty of the internet is that we can all consume this content in whatever form makes sense for us. This amazing multiplicity seems anything but bland to me.
Huh?

Telling us how he could have satisfied you wrt a different argument is interesting but he question was "How much support should he have given for each of his arguments to satisfy you?"

Note that he suggested skepticism wrt multiple things, suggesting that general skepticism is a good idea, yet you're only discussing one of them.

Suppose we conclude that skepticism wrt global warming is unwarranted. What, if anything, does that say about his general conclusion?
Seems like it's back up, it's been off and on all morning.
مشاهدة مباراة البحرين وكوريا الجنوبية
Best of Show CES 2011: The Motorola Atrix
If you are fat, you eat too much food. You have more than enough to eat. The situation described by monos, "the lowest x% don't have enough to eat", does not apply. His advice to "share the cake" will only make the real problem (the bottom x% already eats too much cake) worse.

Also, price is not the controlling factor here. 3500 cals of crap might be the same price as 2250 cals of nutritious food, but so what? If you were optimizing for cost, you would eat 2250 cals of crap, not 3500. If you have the money to be fat while eating crap, you also have the money to maintain a healthy weight on nutritious food.

If you can can buy a Big Mac, you can also buy a Premium Southwest Salad ( http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/full_menu/salads/premium... ).
> I should have phrased my question as limited to valuations of tech/software companies only, since that seems to be what we are discussing here.

OK, then. When the web 1.0 bubble burst in 1999, a whole lot of people lost their money. Bullshit valuations make the stock exchange a snake-oil market.
SEO for 2011 Google Success EBook Launched