skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference."

That's nobody's fault but their own. That's one of my primary points about them not really learning a valuable lesson. If they were booked solid by prime conferences at those prices, and people were calling them from all over the country, I'd suggest they were undervaluing their service by at least an order of magnitude.

I believe they should have begun charging sooner and much more than they were, especially if they didn't particularly love the project. When I started hating my previous company and the work I was doing, I doubled my prices. It didn't hurt sales, and I put more money in the bank for my next venture.

I think my intent is being misunderstood quite a bit. I tried to clarify in another response, but it seems like people think this is an either/or thing; that they had to keep working on the label business to be living according to the Gospel of SwellJoe. And, that's not what I mean, at all. I mean that if you're going to build/run a business to bootstrap another business, you should charge enough to make it worth the effort you put into it. They built something that people really wanted, and then grudgingly started charging a tiny bit of money for it (when I'm doing stuff I don't love, I won't even leave the house for less than $500; seriously, when I was doing contract IT work, I billed $125/hour with a four hour minimum), and flipped it for probably much less than they could have.

I'm not suggesting they should have stuck with the label printing business forever, just that they did not capitalize on the label printing business on anywhere near the scale they could have, and probably in the same time period.
There's also a twitter account for more up to the minute things: twitter.com/linkedlistnyc
When do we get closures?
According to whose definition of value?
Their view of "adding value" may be my (and my customer's) view of "imposing".
Here are four startup ideas:

a better search algorithm for the semantic web
a voice conferencing system that allows multiple concurrent discussions
a community for software developers to share revenue
a home device that offers multi-room MP3 streaming
Now, be honest. How many of these ideas did you think were so insanely great that you want to drop your own plans and jump on it?

None.

Believe it or not, each of these ideas has someone today, obsessing full-time to make it a reality.

(source http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/03/11/the-great-startup-id... )
Great article, I just friended & messaged you on FB
Apple’s Digital Newsstand Just Disrupted The Publishing Industry
For whatever reason, Tolkien had a huge following in Russia.
At least one fantasy writer [1] made a career writing LOTR sequels. Eskov himself is actively blogging on Livejournal [2].

[1] http://www.perumov.com/books/
[2] http://afranius.livejournal.com/132382.html
> in a virtuous circle

That's an interesting definition of virtuous you've got there.
You actually missed a step, which to me is what really makes this situation amazing: the TechCrunch page is a teaser for an article on CrunchGear that was actually syndicated from "gamrfeed" (note the via link! ;P) which itself is a snippet of a full article on Forbes.
Damn, you know my strategy. However the difference between your idea and mine is that they are drinking buddies that I gave golf lessons to in exchange for money.
I'm a daily user of CalTrain (Mt. View → SF), I'm not at all sorry to it go.

The system is very broken, and is due for a reboot.

1. Payments. Using conductors to check tickets on a mass-transit system is asking to loose on fares. My commute is long enough (3 zones) that I get my ticket checked nearly every time. But many commuters who only travel one zone could easily avoid paying altogether. Conductors simply don't have the time to canvas the whole train between each stop. CalTrain ought to realize that it's in the business of mass transit, not leisurely travel and implement a tag on/off system (i.e. Muni).

That aside, tickets are far too expensive. I pay for monthly parking and a monthly pass. That monthly fee is not much cheaper, if at all, than driving – and I don't have a hybrid or anything. Oh, and driving saves me at least 2 hours of commute time/day.

Mass transit is a failure if it's neither faster nor cheaper.

2. Costs. I know nothing about trains, but I can't imagine that the full diesel engines they use for these 6~ish car commuter trains are necessary. There's got to be a lot of wasted fuel there. Further, do they really need to attach all those cars to every train? I have to think that less cars = less fuel use & less staff needed = cost savings.

3. Logistics. Again, I don't know much about mass-transit systems, but some simple logic and personal experience states that a two-track system means that if one things goes wrong the entire system gets badly backed up. CalTrain has been a lot more reliable lately, but I can testify that when it gets backed up, it gets really backed up.

Tangentially, Caltrain relies on other systems to be useful – you have to either drive, bus, or BART to one of their stations. It's an incomplete system from inception.

============

My point: CalTrain is broken, I'd gladly suffer the hassle of not having it for a few years if it could be shut-down and reborn as an extension of BART or somesuch.
Check out my first Chrome Extension - Thesauraptor
I have a list of features I want to add, but wanted to start and see how much traction it gets.
You're only providing your new browser to a small fraction of the OS market

I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.
Meetup having financial trouble?
I got this email from Seattle Backpackers Meetup. Either this is a serious PR problem they need to address, or Google, Yahoo, or another has a nice acquisition ahead of them.

[backpackers-114] Meetup is going out of business

#1....IF....meetup closes the doors we will divert our URL http://www.seattlebackpackers.com and http://www.seattlebackpackers.org to our new social event management web site.

It has not happened yet but this is our plan:

We already have new "meetup-ish-style social event account set up and ready to go. If something happens you will not loose access to our organizers or events they will just be on a new platform. We do not want to move and will only do so if meetup disintegrates.

If you want to be on my direct notification list please send your name and direct email address to info@seattlebackpackers.com and you will be on my "Special meetup issues" email list. If meetup closes I will have no way to get ahold of you so this might be a good idea if you want to stay in the loop on this issue. I will not send you anything that is not directly related to this meetup issue or migration to a new service.

Why I am concerned:

When owner of Meetup Scott Heiferman met with some of us organizers a couple of months ago here in Seattle he very specifically stated that meetup is funded by a large 3rd party internet company and has not turned a profit for them yet. They have upped the efforts to become profitable with "Sponsored" links where in Meetup Corporate receives $5.00 a month from the sponsors. It does not seem to be going very well as most meetups are not seeing the benefit and not accepting the sponsorship.....
Outright removing and/or rejecting non-exclusive apps is a recipe for a huge backlash, but I could see maybe giving better terms for exclusive apps - maybe only taking 20% instead of 30% of the sale. I'm sure there are a fair number of app developers that would jump at the chance to sign an exclusivity agreement if it led to higher profits.
Item 1. Agreed.
Item 2. Starting to step up.
You can however use http live streaming with AES tokens to get the same kind of result with html5 (audio and video). It just remains to be seen if that is acceptable to nflix and the content providers they're beholden to.
The difference is that Tolkein's words flow naturally, while the ones here are more forced - the translation appears to mangle the English to fit exactly what is said in the source text, leaving it feeling rather awkward.

Tolkein's sentences, regardless of how complex, just "work" in English - A similar "transliteration" of Tolkein into Russian or whatever would likely feel as obtuse as this does.
No, you are quite right. The decline in construction jobs doesn't support the "jobs obsolete due to technology" hypothesis. It supports the recalculation hypothesis, but that's a separate issue.

It's the increase in production combined with the lack of increase in employment that is evidence in favor of technology making jobs obsolete.
My slightly different spin:

Microsoft is very good at understanding the median user. Their sweet spot is good enough to justify paying rather than reassuringly expensive, and they impress users with feature lists and [sometimes illusory] choice over usability and extensibility.
As a result their products can be pretty horrible for beginners and power users alike, and their blindness towards early adopters leaves them paying catchup in markets like smartphones

Facebook's strength is addictiveness; they understand how to get eyeballs in. Their weakness is a failure to add much value to users' lives beyond voyeurism and distraction.
> You gave me some really great ideas here about reaching out to other engineers that I have worked with and some siblings of friends with CS degrees and startup mentalities.

Reach out to engineers you've worked with, the ones who already know what you can offer and the ones where you know what they can offer. As I said, make them a founder along with you. Even better, ask them who the best engineers they know are and then in turn ask their friends.

I'd avoid hiring younger siblings of non-technical friends. They need mentoring to reach their full potential (they have to learn how to use version control, how to write clean code, how to test code, how to deploy code to production -- even if they know the fundamentals; you can't teach them that); presence of this potential is something which you (or your non-technical friends) can't tell. College grades do not correlate with programming ability. They are the ones to hire once you already have somebody who can identify those with strong potential (and not those who want a higher salary and a nicer desk than what IBM or Microsoft will give them as a "college hire") and mentor them.

As a side note, when you talk to people, ask for advice on a specific technical problem, not "I am seeking technical co-founder".
I can see a lot of publishers offering special deals for purchasing through their website instead of through the app store to offset the 30%. For example "Subscribe via the web and receive 3 months free subscription."

At least until Apple further restricts their terms...
I suppose I submitted this link really because it opens up some interesting business ethics questions. I noted recent news talking about Apple using their control of the iOS platform in order to obtain more revenue from people selling non-software products.

As a consumer do you think this is less acceptable to you than you knowingly dealing with supplier who fail to meet your safety audit standards, and who have employees dying?

As a business owner would you do this? I know its easy to say 'no never', but would you undertake the additional costs of auditing your suppliers? Would you sever relations with people who aren't treating their workers well? If you'd check your suppliers, is responsibility transitive - in other words are your supplier's supplier's also your responsibility?
And how did those apps get on your phone? That's the infrastructure part. Those apps can be sold in 100+ countries around the world with payments processed and on a platform that Apple is selling with catchy commercials and by ensuring a certain level of quality. That's the infrastructure and value Apple is adding with the app store. Do you seriously think there would be 350,000 apps for the iPhone if each developer had to set up distribution and payment handling for 100+ countries around the world, and be able to do it for small payment amounts ($0.99)?
And I do agree. Firefox 3.x I'd consider relatively modern.
I would recommend using someone from that network who you trust, and can validate as a great engineer, to hire your first engineer. No offense, but although you can probably assess for business...(ality?), you need someone who knows what they're talking about to figure out if your potentials, well, have any.
Ask HN: How do you build your own ad server for web or mobile platform?
I am looking for pointers and technology on how to build your own private ad server. Google search on this topic sucks and points only to OpenX links. Our application has specific requirements and we cant use OpenX. We want to use this server to serve both on mobile, web platforms and any know how would help. Hackers help?
Because customers can buy apps in one click, so they do.

If webapps had the same payment/installation procedure, they'd take off like a rocket too. (Given HTML5's local caching and the like.)
There's always the option of "retiring" and requesting to be bought out. If you're desperate to leave ASAP, that's a viable option.

If you are having so many issues with your co-founder, the feeling is likely mutual. It seems as though he may be a control freak, so give him what he wants- total and absolute control.

Be honest. If you want to leave, bring it up with him privately; if he wants you to stay, he'll try to convince you to do so, but if he wants you out, he'll likely try to help you exit, either through LBO or through an outside investor. But, try to take the high road if possible. A current employee, client, or general peer may be your next business partner, so don't sneak off.

Don't go the legal loophole route if at all possible -- no one wins in the long term through method of exit, except the lawyer.
Alan Greenspan was at the wheel,... Why on earth is he still lionised?
I'd go even further and suggest that the current plaintiffs have proven they could not have made FB. Their focus on "getting credit" signals that they wouldn't have been as focused as Zuck on "making something cool".

From the posts on their engineering blog, it sounds like (esp in the early days) that was clearly the focus -- make something cool, get people to play with it.
IMHO, you don't say "got funding" until you can clear a check.
I think his...oh, wait...I think my argument isn't really any of that (though they're interesting thought exercises).

I haven't suggested they should have stuck with label printing or that they should have sold it and started something new; my advice applies no matter what path they chose. I suggested that I don't think they learned the lessons that the market was willing to teach them.

In my wizened old age, I think back on similar situations in my own life, where I missed the signs and missed opportunities that would have had very low costs and very high pay outs. This is one of them for this team.

Since everyone wants me to have actually made recommendations for what they should have done (rather than what lessons they should have learned, which is all I covered to start with):

1. When you have a business that takes off on a run like this, and you know you're going to cash out and run; raise your prices. Raise them a lot. Double them. If volume doesn't drop, double them again. Rinse and repeat until you have found the point at which customers stop coming to you. Conferences are huge cash cows. They have money; if you solve one of their problems in a cool, social, way, they will pay for it. So, OP should have started charging earlier and more (a lot more).

2. Learn from failure. It sounds to me like they're back on the same sort of project as the one they couldn't convince people to like to start with. If they're passionate about social mobile apps, that's fine. But, you have to be willing to listen when the market says "We do not want this."

And, let's add a bonus third point:

3. Leverage past successes to enable future successes. As you note, it sounds like View could have been launched as a cool feature of the label business, getting it into the hands of all of those CEOs and investors that passed through their system. It started as a marketing ploy, and it would have been an effective one for the new product...I don't know that it makes the new product any more awesome or wanted by people, but it is still a valid avenue for marketing the product to thought leaders.
I hate using my real name online.

The most recent wikipedia fiasco involving programming languages being deleted just goes to show how dangerous it is. The poor editor who marked the articles for a delete discussion was stalked to the point of people on HN discussing the idea of contacting the guy's boss with the intent of disrupting his career in academia.

And all because the guy thought an article didn't have enough notability to belong on wikipedia.
TCS iON - Cloud based ITaaS for SMB Market Segment
This is like buying an expensive car for the lifetime warranty. I could buy a 300k supercar, or I could buy 20 economy cars and rent out all but 1.

Like with the cables, neither makes sense. I could just buy one cheap cable from a reputable brand and probably not need another for 30 years.

And if I do? I'll just buy another. Because they're cheap and work perfectly.
At least the kids can't buy anything involving naked girls on the app store. Not sure if daddy is still a fan of this 'feature' late at night though.
When I think a company is limiting invites to generate buzz, it totally turns me off.

OTOH, when I can tell it's because they don't want to overload their systems, or are still clearly building something, I don't mind. It's really just that a "beta" is now a marketing ploy; my paragraph above is really discussing what used to be an "alpha".

So to me, beta = marketing, I hate it. Alpha = testing, I love it. I'm not very good at telling them apart, tho, b/c they both call themselves beta (damn you gmail!)
The reason why IndexTank is probably so palatable to people is that it's somewhat of an arcane art to setup and scale Solr. There are other reasons to outsource search (and the Wordpress plugin looks pretty sweet for non-techies), but if dread towards configuring a search engine is the only thing that's holding your company back from keeping search in-house, you'd do well to take a look at ElasticSearch. Lucene-based like Solr, but set-and-forget for most purposes.

Just sayin'.
I totally agree with his point that stealth mode is a pointless waste of time.

But some of his reasons only apply if what you're after is to be "The [Well Known Digital Property] Guy", ala Mark "The Facebook Guy!" Zuckerberg. For instance, if all you want is to get an independant company going selling enough units to building companies to help them manage their inventory of nails, so you don't have to work for someone else, having a small market is fine.

Secrecy is just as unimportant, but for different reasons.
The Chrome, Safari, and Firefox teams seem to be able to deliver a very good experience on XP. It's kind of lame that the Microsoft team can't deliver the same thing for an OS that they took part in building. If anyone knows XP inside out it should be the IE team. They even have access to the 'secret' APIs. And if the IE team doesn't know XP inside out they have excellent resources at Microsoft to speak to the people who do know, like Mark Russinovich, or the NT Kernel Team. IE9 not running on XP has everything to do with Microsoft internal politics and nothing to do with technical limitations of a 10 year old OS. The fact that people are still running a 10 year old OS is a testament to what the XP team has built.
Apple doesn't need to do this to keep competitors at bay. I don't think they will do it, but that's a different story. Right now Apple's biggest strength is their ecosystem. Developers creating high quality applications and users willing to put up actual cash to get them in large enough numbers to create a vibrant platform. The systems map with reinforcing and dampening actions is much larger than this, but those are the essential interactions.

In the early days it was about features, but once you have an ecosystem in place, they are very hard to displace. Examples: Microsoft and the windows platform. US Dollar as the world's reserve currency. Amazon Kindle.

With IOS, people have purchased all these applications. If they move to Android they will have to find a way to get those again. When you have a substantial investment into an ecosystem, you don't rush out and jump on the next one because it's a little better. Or even if it's close. The larger your investment, the larger the switching cost, the more compelling the alternative has to be. From a strategy point of view, those are the most important factors governing the market right now imo.
This makes me think, is there a way to play music on the iPhone's browser? I suppose not - but ultimately this move could strengthen the mobile web apps approach to things.
Rhapsody passes on Apple's "economically untenable" sub plans
For me, a modern browser is one that runs on all the three major operating systems: Linux, MacOS and Windows. And not just on one of them.
that you expose server-side implementation details on the client?

This particular impl does it with javascript conditionals, but there's no reason the client must see code that it never executes anyways. The equivalent of an #ifdef (ideally buried under a framework rug) goes a long way here.

Moreover a function does not even need to resolve to the same code on the client and the server. For example a model-validation function could evaluate to the actual validation logic on the server (incl. DB lookups etc.) and to a mere ajax RPC (calling that function on the server) on the client.

I could very well see a smart node serverside-library that let's you write one js file and then transparently mangles it as necessary before sending it to the client. The trick is to keep the magic down to a sane amount (slippery slope!) so that the end-result remains always predictable.

Luna

Yes, it seems luna is basically taking this approach.

What I don't like about luna is that it's not javascript and that it's, for my taste, taking the abstraction too far. It claims:

the client-side JavaScript, the server-side SQL, and everything in between

That's too much. Sure, for the developers it's comfortable to sidestep a whole cascade of hard problems simply by assuming control over everything ("My way or highway"). But this approach has not proven very successful in the javascript-world. We love small and pluggable components like jQuery or Backbone. The monoliths like Dojo or ExtJS tend to be too limiting on the My part of the way.
I don't mean to imply a moral judgement; I rather simply mean mutually reinforcing.

It's a common idiom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_cir... - and it would be virtuous from Apple's perspective.
an English speaker has to unravel and reconstruct each sentence. It makes for heavy going.

Although according to Guardian, the translator spent "a few dozen lunch hours" on this, I strongly disagree with your point. I've only looked at the first couple of paragraphs so far, but, especially taking into consideration the miniscule amount of time spent, he did quite an admirable job. The reason you find it 'barely readable' and have 'to unravel and reconstruct each sentence' is that this translation strives to emulate the literary style of a 19th century novel. Whether it does it successfully is another question, however, I'm sure you'd be of different opinion, had you spent more time reading Dickens, Hardy and the like.
AFAIK disclaimers about personal opinions being separate from official statements has been used on Usenet for years. I know because I read Google Groups often.