skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2 and 3 are not really advantages for PHP, as the same can be said for most any language.

I think #1 is the big reason that PHP is as popular as it is, but that "feature" has a funny smell among programmers who don't like to mix languages.
Chrome extensions for iOS Developers
"Considered harmful" considered harmful?
As I said yesterday on another similar comment, you do want to keep the concept of "coding" in there somewhere. After all, executives, marketers, sales of all kind including the kids taking your order at McDonalds, and the secretary taking the phone calls all communicate so therefore they are programmers. That dilutes the term into uselessness.

(And let's skip the hypothetical where maybe they've got some package that allows automation; then, yes, when using it they are acting as programmers. Labels are always fuzzy. Nevertheless, they convey real information despite that fuzziness. Deliberately fuzzing up a definition to try to win a point on the internet is a terrible thing to do to a word.)
They didn't write it, their VA did!
Curses. How do I get URLs to work? I've tried `[markdown](http:\\example.com)` and <a href="http:\\example.com">HTML</a>. Those URLs are ugly; I don't want to use the URL->link facility recommended in the formatting help: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
It can all be traced back to a remark by Robert Bringhurst in his influential book "The Elements of Typographic Style" in which he suggests that in titles it is worth using the most decorative & sign we have (some fonts have different variants available) or even use the italic ampersand in roman context, because the italic & is often more decorative (ultimately they all come from a stylized "et").

I think many have taken it too far and the results sometimes look pretentious. An example still on the safe side (IMHO) is in pg's book:

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR2J5Pw_xUwVNxV_z504...

And the typograhy book (highly recommended):

Non-affiliate:
http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

Affiliate:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0881792063/mybookbox-...
Yes, being rich can make you confident which can do well for your career. But there are plenty of other unfair advantages that also bring confidence, like height or good looks. And then there are really horribly unfair things like intelligence.
Yep, after everything is said and done...hosting, tools, developers, etc.
Business Insider: The Full Monty
I've taken to doing basically this with PHP for static websites. A lot of websites I work on are really just a handful of static pages--- needing logins and a database and a "theme" and to fret about security patches just for that is like swatting a fly with a bazooka.

Here's an example: http://8cities.org/newyork

It's a supporting site for a marriage seminar being put on by a local church---the content on that page is being sourced from http://8cities.org/content/newyork-left.txt and http://8cities.org/content/newyork-right.txt , so it's easy for the staff to make changes to the files without needing a ton of technical know-how, but there's less overhead than with a whole CMS.

Another way to do it that I've found works well is to have a php file with a little <?php ?> block at the top where you set template parameters, etc, and then have the markdown content following in chunks separated by a marker (like #######). Then you include the file in your processing code, use PHP's output buffering to capture the content, split it into chunks, and run markdown and smartypants on it. Then you have HTML blocks in $content[0], $content[1], etc, which can be included into the template PHP file.

An approach like this would work really well with a Dropbox backend.
That's a little better. Granted, it's difficult to quantify things like socially outgoing and confident. Also, that's still not quite what the author is arguing here.
nothing of earth shattering here. I agree with most of the comments. Kreci- I don't mind marketing the ebook at the end. The problem is if you write something so little people will doubt about the content of the ebook too.

anyone can google "how to write android app" or "how to become an android developer". There would be tons of useful links relative links. What you can/should do is make your article unique. Some of the ideas are a) what are the steps involved in developing, submitting and marketing an android app, b) steps in developing android apps for novice developers (google dev site can be overwhelming for newbies). Just some thoughts :-)
Why do you need to be specific about how many founders you have? In your story, focus on the problem and the customers. Having a professional website, business cards, grasshopper phone lines, etc will help project the professional image you think you need. However, if people were to ask, I'd be honest. Be proud of what you've accomplished alone. You might loose a few sales but you'll earn those in the future. Authenticity counts.
New York State.
Federal Gov't wants new ways to wiretap the web
I think it's unfortunate that they mention rich, yet don't mention the advantage of coming from an entrepreneurial family. Whether rich or not, if your parent is self-employed or an entrepreneur it will have a huge impact on how you take on corporate jobs versus someone who's parents didn't start their own company.
How were you able to bootstrap for 3 years? Were you consulting on the side?
Kik Interactive Blog: Pictures. Groups. Funding.
Steve Jobs explains ban on Flash
I'm legitimately curious, which fucking books do you think the author of the blog should read?

For what it's worth, I initially dismissed your comment as a troll, but was motivated enough by your replies to click through to your profile and read some of your own blog, and was surprised to find that you are actually an intelligent and interesting person.

See how just one carelessly worded rant can tarnish a first impression? Give the blogger the benefit of the doubt -- he sounds young, but not stupid.
It depends on what you define as startup and what you define as profitable. Visual Website Optimizer beta was launched in December 2009, I quit my full time job in March 2010 (yay, it will be one full year soon!) and then launched paid plans in May 2010. Within first week, sales of VWO >> my previous salary. And that's how I define the startup as profitable.
Motorcycle instincts and start-ups
This was our "night time and weekends" project. I still have a full time job.

FYI, I do not write code. We have three very part time developers building it.
DentalXP.com an online international dental teaching web site
I don't know... sure the kids may have missed some of the subtler points, like decomposition and atomicity. I bet though, that they now have a pretty good memory "hook" for robots being silly creatures that are a little dumb and need lots of very careful instruction. This is a good fundamental bit of understanding for later dealings with computers.
My dad did that exercise with me one evening. When I told him to open the bread he tore the packaging apart with pieces flying out. It took me a long while to settle down after that but it was an excellent lesson.
>Microsoft sales reps promise you the world and whisper sweet nothings in your ear until you give them your virtue, but once they have ravished you they roll over and go straight to sleep.

Isn't that true of any reps? Why single out Microsoft? And this deal was with Accenture IIRC.

Haven't you dealt with IBM or Oracle reps?
"Wrong. There IS something centralized: it's called the Multiple Listing Service, and ONLY Brokers and Realtors have "access" to it. They are salespeople, and salespeople compete only with each other. That 6 percent commission is the unwavering aspect of their model -- they built it to ensure that it always gets dropped into their shark tank. Consumers do not benefit from this system, ever, and every single entity in the real estate industry wants to keep it that way."

As much as the industry would like to thwart progress, they can't. There is too much money in this industry for their not to be "rebels" looking to take market-share by keeping prices low.

Companies like Redfin are offering flat-fee listings, with typical realtor services, including MLS listing.

There are quite a few "flat fee MLS" services as well that offer bare-bones services to buyers, mostly getting their house into MLS. While access is still restricted, a couple hundred dollars isn't a huge barrier.

I am currently selling my house and am using a flat-fee MLS service. I pay, I believe, $400 to have my house in MLS. I can then determine what commission a seller agent gets.

In a "traditional" MLS transaction, the seller agent gets 3% and the buyer agent (if there is one) gets 3%. Most realtors will negotiate that down, and I've personally offered 2.5% to seller agents on my house.

As to how worth-it the agent system is, a lot depends on your market. If you're in a large market, I'd expect the value of agents to go down because alternative systems are likely to be in place. I live in a small market and have used MLS, a sign in my front yard, Craigslist, and a few newspaper ads to market my house. I can say that 90% of inquiries have come from buyer agents through MLS. I'm going to have to give up a few thousand due to the 2.5%.
Thanks, we're on GAE, and they claim they'll only route to subdomains. Any ideas?
Lunch with Napster co-founder Sean Parker
I've had a bunch of things in about:flags on for the last few versions (pretty much as soon as I found out about it, which I think was in 7.x), including both of the hardware acceleration options. It hasn't led to any crashes, as far as I can tell, by which I mean chrome hasn't crashed since at least two versions back. YMMV, but it seems to be a fairly safe thing to do.
Kik
i think its a great idea... any ideas on monetizing?
The word is "Melamine", which is the name of the resin used to bind the wood powders in that family of engineered wood products.

You actually want tile board, which is a coated, thin hardboard used in bathroom walls. The particles in hardboard are finer than medium-density fiberboard (MDF), which is finer than particle board), all of which are varieties of melamine board.
Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business
Interesting article about the decline of outsourcing
They've been doing this very thing (bricking modded consoles via firmware update) with the Wii for quite some time now. People will always find a way around these things, but I think the whole region-lock nonsense that Nintendo insists on is equally ridiculous.
Your suspicion has been echoed in other threads since the poster has yet to confirm you who he is in real life, 'just found reddit' and knew enough to create an AMA and 'lost his password'. In all likely-hood this could be a Munchausen by Internet[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_by_Internet
I'm currently working on two web apps:

Preceden [1], a tool for making timelines, was profitable almost immediately. Heroku costs about $50/month and a premium account costs folks $29, so with 2+ upgrades/month it is profitable. Currently making ~$700/mo.

jMockups [2], an HTML5-based web-design tool, was publicly launched about 4 months ago and is still not profitable. Costs total $200/month and with one paying customer, I've got a ways to go before profitability (but it's progressing very well).

Recent blog post has more details:

http://www.mattmazur.com/2011/03/february-in-review-life-tra...

[1] http://www.preceden.com

[2] http://www.jmockups.com
Show HW: PlaceSheen
These seem to indicate systemic problems with the LSE. That makes me wonder if it was really justified to blame Windows Server and SQL Server the last time around.
You forgot:

Secretly plot the torture and murder of the web guy who redesigned the login page and got piles of credit while your widget gets a perfunctory "ok" from management. Despite the login page having no effect and your widget saving the company thousands of dollars.
Just found out "Tab overview" in about:flags, it's Expose for Chrome tabs... Awesome!
You read my mind. I am growing tired of this "considered harmful" hype.

This title would have been warranted if there was actually a fundamental problem with JavaScript getter/setters. The idea is fine, the only problem is that presently, browsers are slow to process native getters/setters. That does not mean it will stay like that in the future (in fact, the Firefox caching feature that is mentioned in the article sounds perfect for this use case and should not be that hard to adapt).

Even if ECMAScript getters/setters were to remain slow forever, it is still a gross overstatement to say they should never be used (which is what "harmful" implies). Only in cases where performance is an issue should readability and robustness of code be sacrificed for performance gain.
Strategy and Tactics (and SEO)
Seconded. I live in rental apartment and painting walls is not an option for me. I have their biggest size surface stuck to my wall and I love it. The only downside that I found so far is that if dry erase marker writing stay there for a longer time, they do not come off as easily as from traditional whiteboard. But paper towels (and sometimes a little bit of cleaning solution) easily solve that.
"His point was that rich kids have better attitudes, skills and perceived work ethic which is simply not true."

I mean I can point you to any number of academic studies confirming this, e.g. Hart & Risley's Meaningful Differences book.

Or just go to any elite private university and compare the kids who are there during summer session with the kids who are there during the rest of the year. The only real difference is SES, as you can't apply financial aid to summer session classes, and you also can't be there if you need a job over the summer. And yet the kids are completely different than the ones who are there during the regular school year.
Show HN: Bootstrapped, Not Profitable *Yet*, & Proud: Pagify
I've been working on an app in my spare time for about the past 6 months in between my day job and taking care of my 10 month old daughter. I'm launching a beta today and would love to get the communities feedback. It's called Pagify and it's an app that allows you to build custom Facebook tabs using their new iframe method.

I'm quite proud of the fact that I actually got this out the door. This past year my life has been quite hectic. Let me know your thoughts and give me a "Like" if so inclined :). Thanks

View the app at http://pagifyapp.com
Skip the Marketing stuff and go straight to the app at http://app.pagifyapp.com
Clickable http://pagifyapp.com
Would they have been any less worried if you had answered "2" though?
Does nobody care that this makes the world-wide-web completely pointless from any perspective that isn't a web browser with JavaScript? I'm going to be royally pissed if I have to write from scratch an http library in C with JavaScript support just to make a friggin' scraper script or debug a website/webserver.

If you want to be annoyingly fancy with the way you deliver content, just do it to user agents that support JavaScript. For any other user agent just provide the actual content we wanted! To do this, all you have to do is not use hash tags. The URI can remain the same and the application will work just fine (JS can still check the friggin query uri and do any Ajax trickery it wants). Sometimes I think webapp designers are just trying to piss hackers off.

We'll ignore the fact that having to escape the bang is really annoying, considering the page is useless from the console anyway due to the aforementioned requirement of JavaScript.
Interesting analogy. The gist seems to be that for both startups and motorcycles, momentum is more important than it is for cars and large companies.

Any idea if there's a correlation between motorcycle ownership and startups? I happen to be a member of both groups (Suzuki SV650 and ParkWhiz).
If this handheld works offline the battle is already lost. Same goes for the PS3 and the wii, if you disable the system from calling home you can easily open it and do whatever you want with it.

These companies should instead focus on creating enough value and reason for gamers to be online. Like Steam, introduce social incentives to create a game collection and interact with your friends and half the battle against piracy is won.

There will always be piracy, these companies don't seem to understand that most pirates wouldn't even buy your console if they wouldn't be able to hack it.
This is more scary than funny. What is even worse, is that the 'fact-less science' folk are winning a war we didn't even know we were in. This suggests that whatever joke the author felt he was committing, was regrettably on him (and the rest of us)!
Work Less
Wow does this ring true to me. I'm working at wal-mart for gas money while going to college. I had a customer call and complain and I had to go talk to management. Such a scary ordeal since I need this job. I have nothing to fall back on, with no gas money, no degree. My fate is in their hands and that is the most sickening feeling I've ever had. But this is temporary. When I'm done with college, wal-mart customers are going to get a piece of my mind since I won't be worrying about getting fired.

The guy is right, when you have everything to lose at the slightest mistake, you don't take chances.
4 years in as a bootstrapped one-person product before sufficient profitability to reinvest and take a salary/dividend (my definition of profitability).

Bootstrapping and being just one person made it feel so much longer than I had hoped when starting out.
pick up MM's CommonWare book instead its somewhat better and usually more up-to-date..biases: MM is a peer and somewhat friend..
I think this is a great step in the right direction, publishing is getting simplified and with the advent of cheap storage that can be easily placed behind a webserver the options for static websites are quite interesting.

I foresee more services of this type and more power to you guys for building this, I highly recommend exploring and iterating around more simple ways for people to 'create webpages' by simply dropping 'something' 'somewhere.
I haven't posted a comment on TechCrunch with the new system, but I do see there is a checkbox for "Post to Facebook." Seems that would solve the problem of your 700 "friends" being exposed to your comments. Unless the comment still really does end up on Facebook in some way which I wouldn't be surprised by.
Last week I received several emails from a woman who was having trouble creating timelines on my web app, Preceden. She repeatedly asked for our customer service representatives to call her to work through her issue. When I finally did call her, she was upset because I was not calling her from an 800 number and was surprised (disappointed?) that it was just me.

I'd be up for A/B testing some landing page copy on Preceden to test the results of saying "We" vs "I". Any recommendations on how to set up a test so that the results are good?
I have never been placed through a recruiter, but I just had a fun experience with one that bears sharing. A while back, a woman named Gina Storey from EdgeLink called me about a job that involved an AJAX library I have fairly strong experience with (Ext-JS). It was a short-term contract without health insurance, and as I have a child on the way, I wasn't particularly interested in giving up the insurance from my current job. I told her that I'd be much more interested in it as a side-gig in addition to my day job, but she said that none of her clients have ever been interested in such an arrangement and asked how much money it would take for me to give up my insurance. I gave her an "f off" figure and we left it at that.

Soon after, I got an invitation to complete a survey regarding my experience and what they could do better. I haven't had that much fun filling out a survey in years. I told them that, in the 3 months since that conversation, I had started checking craigslist ads once a week for additional side work and had found 4 clients who paid me for exactly the sort of after-hours work that Gina said "nobody was intersted in." With an average of 30 minutes searching a week, I found a paying client every 3 weeks and they were getting 0% of the money I was making just because she was unwilling to pursue the work arrangement I was interested in. I cc'ed her manager (he had contacted me previously) on the e-mail and made it clear I couldn't recommend them to anyone I knew largely because of her unwillingness to compromise on what she thought her customers wanted.

In general, I don't mind recruiters in the same way that I don't mind garbagemen, stevedores and pharmaceutical reps - they're easily ignored and have little impact on my professional life. However, this was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up on. I still smile to think about it.
Given the number of one-line comments on this post, people must be responding emotionally rather than logically.
I have no experience, but https://flippa.com/ comes up every time someone asks something like this, and it looks quite active. What are you looking for? What are you looking for that flippa doesn't offer?
I'm in the exact same boat. I'm looking into both eBay and flippa, but I think it depends mainly on the profit and users the projects have. I'm curious to see if the HN crowd has any detailed expertise, or if this is a common question.
On another note, wouldn't it make sense for Nintendo to pull a Sony at this point and create a Nintendo store for Android? In a year or so a good amount of Android phones will have glasses free 3D.
Custom printing site that offers customization not currently available online
been using this for one of the sites i run on aws.

http://www.wwwizer.com/
What bothers me is that the only solution to bridge the "income inequality" is to take money from the rich and just give it to the poor.

Beyond the mentally and physically unable (which is a very low percentage), poverty is a result of poor life choices. This is what freedom gives us: the ability to succeed or fall flat on our ass due to our own choices, which is why we will always have poverty in our current system.
thanks for sharing. out of curiosity, since you mention you are at HBS, are you a programmer as well? if not, what strategies did you use for building out the site?
Nintendo needs to be careful. I'm not sure they realize just how dire their situation is, especially in the handheld market.

Apple is already in danger of making the 3DS (and other handhelds like the PSP) extinct. The iPod Touch is a serious threat to every other handheld "console". Yet Nintendo and Sony both (in separate ways) continue alienating their fans.

The A5 processor has (allegedly) 9 times the graphics power of the A4, which is already capable of playing some pretty decent games, even 3D games (eg Infinity Blade, Dungeon Defender, Rage).

Just how long do you think it'll before Apple makes the Apple TV a gaming console?

Now this is a fundamentally different model than the touch model their current devices have. The importance of this can't be overstated but Apple has an huge user base and all the distribution infrastructure it needs for this.

Nintendo has proven that you don't need bleeding edge graphics to sell consoles (like Microsoft and Sony provide). There is (IMHO) absolutely a market for Apple to extend the iTunes ecosystem into console gaming.
The blatant idiocy and hatred of this comment more than justifies the downvotes from HNers (and lack of reasons for them) that this comment has received.

No, really, why did you guys downvote that?