skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I Sell My Company or Wait?
I hate almost every "top 10 xyz companies" top listing websites. All of them are just affiliate links, self promotions, dozens of banner ads.

You know which one is more corrupt now? Web Hosting Comparison. Go to google/bing you will get 99% of self promotion listing or affiliate listing websites.

Then, I decided to write an algorithm that compares prices & hosting specifications (cpu,space, memory, bandwidth, location). I even wrote a datacenter feature comparison too (IRC allowed hosting, adult allowed hosting, ipv6 available hosting & etc)

It is a 85% accurate algorithm (I know the indexer needs a little cleanup).

Everything went great, more than 600 web hosting companies registered an account with me (Including Site5 & many recognized companies). My algorithm/engine compares more than 6500 web hosting plans (dedicated, vps, shared, datacenters & a simple cloud list.

The problem is.,

I am on 5th page (Bing)
I am in Google's sandbox for 6-8 months.

I am getting 80-100 visitors per day thats too low to be low.

I do have very clear plans to monetize from this service. But., My traffic generation plans are organic and that takes time to reflect my google analytics.

Should I keep doing organic way to increase the 100 to 200 visitors and go on or should I simply sell it?

Some hosting company would surly buy it and spend few thousands in adwords to get traffic and self promote themselves.

But., I want this to be really a decision making engine for web hosting buyers.

Suggest me something.

My Web Hosting Comparison Engine URL: http://ServerGrabber.com
That depends totally on the job. If it's a well paid megacorp job - very safe, but far from something that might spring ideas in your head, you're locked in a little corner doing your thing. Only in small companies the business side of things is transparent enough for the technical people.
Find a place where you can talk to someone in power (i.e., not just HR) and demonstrate your passion for what the organization does (it helps if you actually have some).

I wiggled my way into my first programming job because I really liked what they did, and made it clear to them. My boss later told me that the code samples I submitted weren't very good, but anyone can learn to write code--He hired me because I really demonstrated a desire to do the work.
Since when is paying yourself and your employees not an expense that factors into whether or not you are profitable?
Open source 911 viewer with heat maps
I am actually already offering a very similar service, although it is optimized for a somewhat different use case.

The service is here: http://pagekite.net/

It's useful for all kinds of things. :-)
Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
I don't remember Chrome giving a choice. But I guess it's possible that it is one of the configuration options, and I just do what almost everyone does: click next without looking at it. The article's point still stands.
Yes. I quit my job last year to start up (and OP is my cofounder).
Tim is an absolute straight-shooter. He's not pandering and he's not playing games. That's the way they think. (An old co-worker of mine is his right-hand man, running the book publishing business.)
Right. But they does not claim HoneyComb is open source.

(They does not deny it outright though. That's little devilish (evilish not a word!), but I can sympathy with them)
There are no excuses. If the it is important and matters, you will always find a way.

If you have the know how, start by spending 30 minutes a day on it. Get up 30 minutes earlier. Pack your lunch and work on it then. Small steps are important. Try to make time daily.

You're in the process of discovering a product. When you close your eyes, can you see yourself using this product? Do have this feeling that you're using it as if it already exists? Do you find yourself constantly thinking about it?

Hiring developers can be toxic - they'll certainly be able bill hours for building features, but would they be able to help you discover your product?
I remember it giving me a choice. So the article's point does not stand, since it is not true that the default SE of Chrome is Google.
Google has been pushing the 'open' line heavily since Android launched. They've benefitted from endlessly positive PR; they deserve to be called on it when they choose profits over principle. That seems to be a lot these days.

> I can do whatever I want with my hardware

All handset manufacturers lock down the firmware. You can download the source, but you can't do anything without hacking the phone. If that's 'open', then by unlocking my iPhone I can render it just as 'open'. Now you can't even download the source. As for side-loading, the second-largest mobile provider in the US doesn't let you do it at all. How is Android open if Google never calls out the gatekeepers as they strip away the openness?

The only substantial way Android can even claim to be 'open' is the lack of editorial control over the software installed on Android phones. Of course, Skyhook probably has something to say about that too.

As for Apple, they do plenty of things I don't like. But fundamentally they're just a consumer electronics company turning out gadgets with few political implications.

Apple isn't the world's largest advertising company, running the world's largest private information gathering system. Apple isn't the go-to company when Obama wants advice on tech issues. Apple hasn't enabled censorship in China. Apple hasn't supported net neutrality when it suited their needs, then yanked the rug away when it didn't.

Google is all of those things - and their reputation as the universal love child, reflexively defended by legions of fans based on their commitment to principles like 'not being evil' and 'openness', enables them to act without regard to those principles.
Obligatory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
Gowalla leads in openness, to offer place data
Excellent work on the Russian text input. I was easily able to sound out some russian phrases that I know and input them correctly.
I remember that assertion from the "bitter truth" videos. But I don't exactly understand why he says so.
nice work guys =) ps it would be cool if I could browse by gender.
Google search now supports Cherokee
What do you think are the examples of software freedom that are understood by everyday Indians?
My Optimus V's android 2.2 browser opened it successfully
To be fair, the vast majority of people who live in a First World country and who have an interest in getting an O’Reilly ebook also have the means to easily pay for one—or to put it on their employer’s expense account.
I have to say I agree with "good ideas only come through trial and error". Perhaps "only" is too strong of a word, but if you ask any successful entrepreneur about how many ideas they've been through before figuring out the one that led to their success, I'm sure the average will be quite high.
If you want to hack away at Honeycomb for tablets, you just have to contact them and they'll provide you the full source code

Are they going to provide the source to the ROM modding community? They're supporting the Nook and several other pre-Honeycomb tablets. If Google isn't going to release the code anytime soon those projects are dead. I'm sure Google has good reasons but they really should have figured this stuff out and set some clear guidelines ahead of time. Being secretive about development and tightly controlling access to source, while talking up the virtues of open source, is going to upset the people who are most loyal to the platform.
The moat and scorched-earth metaphor also describes Microsoft's development of Internet Explorer. IE was given away to protect the economic castle of desktop development. Incompatibilities delayed and added expense to web development for decades, all to defend Windows and Office sales.
Seems like whenever there is a no-drm success and they are interviewed it is EXACTLY the same argument/story:

1) If 10,000 people will buy my X I will have sold 10,000. I will not have sold more since nobody else was willing to pay.

2) If 100,000 people also pirated my X then potentially a few of them would like it and either buy it, or buy a future product from me, which translates into more sales.

3) Once my X is hacked it is hacked for good (or something to that extent) and people pirating have no problems with DRM while people who legitimately bought X have to deal with DRM.

4) DRM can cost me sales just as piracy could.
it improves around minute 10, that's where he stops the humorous intro & starts talking about being a developer.
No, now you're equivocating the rather trivial matter (in the big picture of real life) of protection from sketchy apps with stifling freedom of speech in real life. You can always access the sketchy stuff on your Android or general web browser. There's no real lack of freedom.

And, personally, beyond whatever moral objections I might have to porn on the app store, it's always associated with bottom-feeder and generally sketchy behaviors (they obviously don't have any qualms about making money any way they can), and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that.

(Let the downvoting begin! ;-)
If it's a well paid megacorp job - very safe, but far from something that might spring ideas in your head, you're locked in a little corner doing your thing. Only in small companies the business side of things is transparent enough for the technical people.

This is exactly the opposite of my experience. The bigger the company, the bigger the problems, in both number and size. It may seem counter-intuitive, but I have worked in many "megacorps" and you'd probably be stunned by the extent of their needs and their difficulty getting them fulfilled. I have hundreds of ideas accumulated over years of enterprise programming that I'll probably never have time to get to.

Sometimes I think it would be a great idea to put a tiger team of hungry programmers together with the right enterprise users. But since that rarely happens from within, attacking their problems from the outside is still probably the best approach.
No, don't sell. Wait.
Kelly criterion has nothing to do with bubbles (it says nothing about timings, and the main challenge of bubbles is timing). Also, Kelly criterion uses odds received and probability of winning, and you don't have anything like that in the stock market, bubble or no bubble.
Thanks schultzi. That's kind of a great idea!
"This is why I don’t have an acting career, or am a musician — because as much as I’d like those, I somehow stubbornly don’t actually do the things I need to do in order to achieve them."

Being an entrepreneur isn't about sitting on a beach enjoying your millions, it's about solving lots of intensely hard (and often frustrating) problems.
Before arguing that "CAPTCHA's are a necessary evil", it pays to know the life time value of a user/customer for your site. It's likely that the cost of dealing with the spam would be lower than the amount of revenue lost from your CAPTCHA-impaired conversion rate.
The value of a stock is whatever people are willing to pay for it
Honeycomb is a production branch of the code, shipping on hardware already available on store shelves. So the idea of it being withheld as 'not ready' doesn't pass the smell test.

Surely withholding Honeycomb is within Google's rights and likely its best interests. But I don't think you can argue that it fits within any reasonable definition of Open. If "Open" has but one inviolable property, what could it be if not "source code availability"?

Honeycomb may become an Open Source project in the future. Google may have every intention of making that happen. But until the source is released "Open" isn't a property of their project, it's an unrealized goal.

And when evaluating how likely they are to deliver on that, I note the trajectory of the Android project has been away from Open and toward Closed for some time now. This non-release is an acceleration of that trend, not a simple continuation or an aberrant change in direction.

The best-case scenario is that Google does release Honeycomb, merely putting us back to where we were already arguing about whether Android's "Open" was translating into real, practical benefits over the approaches of Microsoft, Apple, RIM and HP.

Whereas the likeliest scenario is that this "eventually-Open" lag between product release and code release becomes a regular fixture. So not only will the practical advantage of Android's Openness be debatable, but the applicability of those contributions will vary within the release cycle.
Google Patents the Google Doodle
As the number of startups increases, is there a risk that most or all of the investors end up chasing the 10-20 best pitches? While perhaps any single company could hold their own in isolation, it seems like they're fighting the others for attention. It must be fascinating to see the distribution of interest between the investors and companies.
I don't believe that “officials had underestimated the time and effort required to develop and integrate the F-35's software, which is an order of magnitude more complicated than code found on board the Air Force's F-22 Raptor.” supports the hypothesis that there is a backdoor. By that logic, the A380 is full of French-German backdoors.
North Korean Special Forces
Excellent, meaty article with a lot of practical examples and hard-won knowledge.
Are your mom and your wife blind?
Stop the Presses Windows Phone 7 Update
Fuzzy Search: find what I meant, not what I said
Sometimes I think we have it wrong. Instead of trying to determine if someone IS a spammer, why not try figure out if they're definitely NOT a spammer.

So start with a pessistic view they they are, and that they need to be shown a CAPTCHA. Then do some analysis to try figure out if they're legit, e.g. time spent on page, mouse/keyboard interaction, geo-location, referrer etc.

If they're all good, don't show them the CAPTCHA (perhaps just rely on honeypot inputs), otherwise show them a CAPCTHA as a next step after posting content (and apologise in case it's a false positive).
Complete 3d replica of fabricat'11 exhibition in 48 hours
Try mollom (http://mollom.com/). It uses text analysis for the most part and only uses CAPTCHA if its not sure. Even though I don't have a huge site it blocks a lot for me.
one racket talks to another.
If you are an at-will employee, the power is yours and don't let your employer convince you otherwise.

If you do quality work with integrity and know that your pay rate is below market, then ask for the raise. If they don't give it to you or try to convince you to the contrary, seek new employment for a closer to market rate.

You have to have the confidence in your work and skills, regardless of having a completed degree.

I was in a very similar position where I was providing tremendous value to an organization, but never was given enough respect to be given the official title, pay rate or benefits that went along with my responsibilities. I eventually left and found a position where they valued my contributions and was paid market rate while I was still finishing my degree.
Embedly Releases Parrotfish for Firefox 4.0
newsworthy.
There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about a guy who was selling something I don't remember. But he used to sell books. And when talking about piracy he asked the audience who did not agree with him "how many of you are fanboys/fangirls of an author and will buy everything that person makes" which was followed by "how many of you bought the anything made by that author as your very first introduction to him/her as opposed to borrowing it from someone, reading it in a library, pirating it and reading it, etc...?"

People understand the value of things. If you give people something they value and want more of, they will gladly pay for it (the value that they see it's worth) because they want you to keep producing. They know if they stop there will be nothing new. So the end-goal is to make people see the value you produce (even if its giving them that thing for free) because instead of instant-value you will get long-term customers.
Glass displays everywhere (video)
WearaBraille, a virtual wireless Braille keyboard, with an iPhone and VoiceOver
xxx retaliates by blocking .in domain.
The more I read about YC, the more I want to get in SO BAD!
I'll huff, I'll puff, and I'll blow the door down if I don't get in!
Sure, they could be, and also to trivially solve captchas on mechanical turk, what's your point?
Here's what I've "learned" with regard to tags. The UI needs to be effortless. I've encountered exactly one program that accomplished this. It was written over 10 years ago and has since been abandoned.

It automatically generated a fairly sensible set of tags from context. Then the user could adjust. They were presented as a comma-separated list -- just edit the list, free-form.

I had thousands of bookmarks, spanning many months, in the thing. And by typing a list of words/tags, I could invariably find what I was looking for in about 3 seconds. I believe it also did partial matching against all tags beginning with a search value; one didn't need to remember the exact tag to generate a match.

I still miss it.

UI's like Gmail's labels are better than a hierarchical, single-location structure. But they are still miles away from the above.

OT: I also want tagging in my file system. My understanding, purely from reading, is that BeOS was one of the few/only to really do this. Anyone have pointers to a current, maintained file system that does this?

--

EDIT: I think I mis-remembered, and that the program presented and used a whitespace separated list. Whitespace separation was, in my opinion, easier to use than e.g. comma separation.
It is 100 different tests, not same test run 100 times.
how does this work ? I'm using chrome on mac, and I right click on the links provided in post and don't see a way to click ?
ya, it applies to a team of founders living off their savings who need to push their product out and get quick feedback from initial users to set their product/service in the right direction.

A team of 20+ people with $41 million in the bank has the luxury of not having to worry about missing a rent check and they have the resources to do thorough QA testing and run a beta program to get initial feedback (maybe color ran a beta program I'm not sure).

Color definitely has the resources to run a 6 month beta program to get feedback and test their app....a founding team of two living off their savings may not have the time or money to do this.
IPad 2’s thinner glass makes it much stronger than iPad 1 (video)
Should I focus on getting a good UX or getting something quick out of the door?
If you've been using chrome since a long time you haven't seen it. I think they introduced it right before their marketing push in Europe...
>Is it actually true that unions find it easier to extract rents from monopolies or oligopolies than from competitive markets?

just look at the public employees unions. The GP beautifully explained about "the cut".
Ask HN: How to price data?
I've been googling for hours now and haven't found much in the way of pricing strategies for data companies. My company has a proprietary database of competitive intelligence information that we currently sell through a subscription-access-website. Recently, I have connected with multiple companies interested in receiving a data feed to be white-labeled inside their product.

This scares me in that our data is all we have regardless of the legal mumbo we make them agree to, the fact is they have our data once we send it to them. One of these potential clients is in a completely different market then our our client-base so I feel better about working with them.

Any resources or best-practices on pricing data? And doing data-oriented deals?
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine_Caridi#Piracy_incident
Not until well after their IPO and the bubble bursts on the absurd 40, 50, 75 billion-dollar valuations we're seeing now, IMO. Entering search actually brings on some risk, because if they screw it up, or if it doesn't take, a lot of Facebook's future equity goes up in smoke.
The cynicism about the iPad is still valid. There's some revisionist history amongst "i told you so"ers that paint pre-launch iPad cynicism as being about it's success.

The actual pre-launch cynicism was "this is just a big ipod". The reason for the the cynicism is because there was a geniune belief that the ipad was going to be something breathtakingly different, something akin to the original iphone (or the courier). I remember the coverage in the months leading up to it, and people were predicting off the wall things that didn't turn out. I remember one prediction that the ipad was going to be just screen that is powered (wirelessly) by your iphone, for example.

The cynicism was "this is all?". It's still valid today. There are many people who have written about how their ipads are collecting dust. There's a novelty to it that wears off, to some degree (to some people, certainly not every one, I still use mine fairly often).

But what I don't remember is "this thing isn't going to sell".
Simplicity and common sense should characterize planning and strategic direction.

- Ingvar Kamprad

http://startupquote.com/post/4086979508
That's called "fraud" and there are pretty severe repercussions for that.
It already did. In fact, it has from the beginning. You can search Facebook. If you want a paradigm, Facebook = AOL in the sense that it's a walled garden.
Bubble Trouble? I don't think so - Ben Horowitz
First off, there is a whole debate about launching hundreds of new TLDs going at ICANN. It's pretty much the hottest issue there is. They are trying to do exactly what you're suggesting, a registry free for all.

Second, yes, food.review is harder to remember than foodreview.com. Trillions of dollars have been spent branding .com into consumer's minds worldwide (also local ccTLDs in some country trump .com because of use/adoption). Wait, did I want food.review or food.guide? or was it...? People do get confused by URLs, having the same TLD (.com/or whatever your country uses) makes it easier to remember for average consumers. The biggest thing I think a lot of people here forget is, YOU'RE NOT NORMAL. Average consumers aren't hanging around at HackerNews, a site for the tech elite, and their behavior doesn't match this audience (you).
There are more than a billion people living in India. I don't think you can say much about them collectively, aside from obvious banalities.
Is MySpace's death spiral due to bets on Los Angeles and Microsoft?
> "This ignores the difference in technical competence of consumers versus Apache users."

No, it doesn't.
It insists that "Open" retain some reasonable meaning.

The difference in technical competence is what makes this move understandable and in Google's best interests. But that doesn't mean it makes any sense to continue calling the project "Open".

Honeycomb is closed. The reasons are irrelevant to whether "Open" is an acceptable descriptor. Google may one day make Honeycomb "Open". But that too is irrelevant to whether "Open" is an acceptable descriptor today.
When did you lose your virginity?
So when was it?
Is the biggest takeaway from why Myspace cratered really that they migrated their technology to a .NET stack?

That seems ridiculous to me.

The being in L.A. thing might be less ridiculous, but I also find it hard to believe that there aren't boatloads of developers in L.A. who couldn't add value to a social networking site.

The reasons that come to mind for why Facebook initially started to attract users away from Myspace are that its profile pages didn't look like the Trapper-Keeper of a 14 year old, and the fact that it had exclusivity from being associated with Universities.

edit(I forgot this one as well): Also the shift from having to seek out your friend's pages to having their updates show up on your main page seemed like a big differentiator.

You can chalk the enhancements made to Facebook after that point to their underlying technology, but I really don't think ASP.NET was responsible for why Myspace sucked.