skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
38 willing to pay customers isn't quite the same as 38 paying customers. Instead of spending a week getting ~$400 worth* of obligation-free commitments it would have been better putting the time towards a working prototype. Then find a small beta group -> iterate -> release & sell -> iterate & update.

Soliciting opinion on a problem you want to solve can be extremely valuable, but it sounds like the author already knew more than enough to put together a 1.0 version.

This is a problem I've had for a number of years. While working on personal projects, commercial or otherwise, I always had a tendency to allow all the peripheral matters (names, websites, logos, mailing lists, teasers) to take time away from the only one that was really important - building the thing and getting it into the hands of testers and users.

Nowadays I make it my number one priority to build a minimally working prototype of whatever I'm trying to solve. By the time I have that then it's usually clear whether the idea will go anywhere, and if it does I have a prototype to iterate on and give to small number of people for further feedback. If your idea and implementation are good this can generate far more interest and potential sales than showing around a mockup with a vague release date.

(*I'm sure that blog post is an attempt to garner interest, much like posting it on HN, so of course it may have more extrinsic value than just 38 potential purchases.)
Thank you. I found sharing my own experience can help consolidate what I've learned.
Slick plugin, I could see this being used to help non-technical marketing people better contribute to a website.

Hope you're able to make it compatible with http://wpml.org as we use this plugin extensively.
I wonder about that, too, but think it'd be worth experimenting. The cost should probably be small.

I find myself wondering, "if I submit this now, will enough people be awake/etc. to notice it before it spills off the page?" That has deterred me from submitting more interesting content than costing 2 or 3 points ever would.

Also, a lot of those upvotes come from duplicate submissions. I don't have detailed info, but probably a significant percent, likely enough to lift them out of the new feed and onto the front page.

Or, maybe duplicate submissions shouldn't give the original an automatic upvote? I don't know.
Eric Meyer's Lukewarm CSS
Admittedly, I don't know much about running Adwords campaigns, but you might want to check out AdGrok (http://www.adgrok.com)
Bogon-announce mailing list shutting down
Very true. Tons of change in a startup always and as a startup grows, it often requires different approaches to working as well as different types of work and, therefore, different people.
Back in the day, anonymous FTP were a sizable part of the web (especially for good quality source code and scientific data/papers/comment). Some of them stored full backups of the lion's share of USEnet (and still do to this day).

FTPsearch filled a large void, and was blazingly fast compared to other search engines. In these days you waited for 15-20 seconds before the likes of Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista started showing results. Without tabbed browsing, to boot.
Ad-supported Kindle to ship May 3rd
I find that there's a very big difference between people saying that they'd be willing to pay something and getting these people to actually pay for that thing.

The rate of false-positives in people indicating they'd buy something before being pressed to buy it is very high. This is speaking from first-hand experience. Sometimes having 0 customers and seeing whether people will actually buy it is worth more than asking people if they'll buy something without putting it to a real test. In fact, you might come to different conclusions about what is important and not if you go based on what people say they will pay for vs. what they actually pay for.
Disagree. FDT is in fact a much better solution than Flash CS and Flex Builder.
Happy thank-goodness-I-removed-flash day. One of the best holidays, since I get to celebrate it so many times a year..
What is the point of ML now that we have Haskell? This is not meant to be a troll; I'm seriously asking. Haskell proponents mention ML and Miranda only in passing and as lesser (in terms of purity and ease of use) antecedents of Haskell. What reasons are there to still use it?
Neat idea. I'd recommend trying to ignore Foursquare checkins in the users' tweetstreams.
Mediastay Group secures a series B round of financing with $21.5 Million
So very first sentence of Myth #1:

'Employees in a startup have a chance to make money when the company exits, i.e., gets acquired or goes public'

This attitude that a purchase or IPO is the only possible way for a startup to earn money for its employees would be laughable anywhere outside computerland.
Hi, Stephen here. I wrote the post.

Yes, I'm currently working on it and I'll keep everyone on HN with my progress.

Meanwhile, you can also join the mailing list: http://artsyeditor.com
> Artsy Editor was a little idea I had 2 weeks ago. 9 days after that, I showed 1000+ people my mockup, validated with 109 people personally, and 38 of them were already ready to pay for it.

So why didn't you take their money?
Hmm.

We might take this concept further and make it a "wager" of karma with a minimum bet, and you get gains at some rate proportionate to the size of the bet. But extending it in this way, it would probably also have to have some effect on the front page algorithm for a large bet to ever make sense. Which in turn could lead to a stagnation where elite posters are constantly sinking thousands of karma points into "sure things" and nobody else can compete.

Something to think about, in any case.
I'm coming late to this conversation, as I was mostly internet free last week, but

a) Thanks for doing all this work
b) I imagine you generally feel this way, but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality.

I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality and esprit-de-corp rise and fall:

Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit

Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites face.

To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is significantly below the 1:1 line.

Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big improvement.

All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is cheap, take mine!
We'll definitely let users with <$10 "cash out" their earnings eventually, but we're still working out the details. After all, we just built this over the weekend =P

But your right--we could make this more clear on the site. We'll also be sure to keep HN Posted as we add more features to the product!
Even though it might not be the perfect way to estimate topicality for a comment/submission, karma is the best thing we have. As things are at the moment, groupthink is a huge problem no matter what rules you place on the system. You can't really stop it.

Everyone thinks about karma to some extent as it is, given that you can only do certain things with a certain amount of the stuff (downvoting, flagging, etc).
In the end a University degree is just a piece of paper. What matters is the quality of the knowledge and mentoring you receive from your lecturers and from the university as a whole.

I think this situation is a result of the financial crash; Thiel is right, people have fled to something they see as a safe investment to increase their personal worth. People are going (back) to university so they have the qualitifications they need to get a job that would have previously required very little in the way of formal education. The market is flooded with educated job-seekers, so people must now set themselves apart with something else.
IIRC, one of the few exemptions to DMCA is interoperability. That, and this circumvention does literally nothing to aid piracy.
They're the most important element to a movie, especially this one.
Design heroism is over. Collaboration is the future.
I think that's a misrepresentation. HN has enjoyed a long run as a forum with a professional vibe. Its owner, and the core constituency, do not intend to let it become the next Slashdot/Fark/Digg/Reddit. You can find more background here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
Yeah, I do that too, sometimes, especially when I feel like someone has been downmodded by mistake.
Good point. Cash flow is king. I was trying to keep it simple. The fact that nowadays it's easier than ever to build a profitable small company in high-tech is another reason to go to startups.
Even though it might not be the perfect way to estimate topicality for a comment/submission, karma is the best thing we have.

I don't think so. "Topicality" matches "lack of flagging", not "many upvotes". Or at least, it should -- there should be some standardized way, used by most HN members, of marking that they don't think a submission is good HN content.

This actually brings us to a very common problem on HN caused by the fact that you can't downvote links. It works like this:

Suppose you have two links, Link A and Link B. Link A is stupid TechCrunch linkbait, and Link B is an interesting scientific article. Link A is something everyone on the site understands, and 100 people upvote it. But in reality, suppose 2/3 of the people on HN actually would have downvoted it for being a terrible article -- but couldn't -- because there's no downvote.

Link B doesn't have as wide an appeal and gets only 20 upvotes, but nobody thinks it's a bad link. Yet despite 2/3 of the people on HN thinking that the TechCrunch article is terrible, Link A rates way higher than Link B.

While downvotes have their downsides, the fact that HN has no link downvotes basically guarantees that stupid linkbait industry buzz fills the top stories constantly. This is basically the HN equivalent of the Bikeshed problem.

It also gives people an incentive to submit the most linkbaity, overdramatized links possible, because the goal is not to submit good links: it's to submit links that get lots of upvotes. And when there's no downvotes, the best way to get upvotes is to get as much attention as humanly possible.
u vee double u ex wye zed
now we know the alphabet
I don't know. If I can't see the little score increment or decrement in response to my up/down vote, I find I have very little urge to actually click either button. With no visual feedback to tell me "Yes, that click actually changed something", where's the satisfaction in voting?
I'd be interested in hearing your approach to it. Sounds something like Aloha Editor, and it's a PITA problem to solve w/ all the cross-browser inconstancies.
That's why i feel its best not to give any karma for submissions at all. karma only for comments.
No, I think at most it should add just the right amount of friction.

Rewarding first submits is the real problem, IMHO. It's like, "first post!", except it also drowns out good submissions.
Did they stop doing that already, or are we being A/B tested?
Open Source at Google: Introducing CityHash
One of the most comprehensive and informative idea development posts I have read. The hard work that you put into gathering customer feedback as well as in assembling this post, clearly shows. I look forward to some follow up posts where we find out how many willing-to-pay customers actually convert. Best of luck.
One additional thought I had here; based on this graph idea, it seems to me a useful thing to do would be to create some sort of way to get a handle on community on quality using metrics.

They would probably be terribly inaccurate metrics at first, but they would also provide a means for people to decide how to assess.

As a start, you could use people, for instance paying people on Mechanical Turk to evaluate a post and its comments for specified HN guidelines; these could be used as a first attempt to get a feel for how well a given day / week goes.
It doesn't sound like that to me. He sounds like he's against the plaintiff on that issue, for sure, but that doesn't mean he lacked objectivity. Being objective or unbiased means that you aren't influenced by external factors, so your decision is based only on the relevant facts. It doesn't mean you don't ultimately take one side or the other.
If you don't think a story will get 2-5 up votes, then you probably shouldn't submit it.

And I assure you that people who don't think about karma (I couldn't care less) will continue to not think about it.
Please fix downvoting. Even right now, there's a thread that I can my post be downvoted, and then my reply later that sets the record straight be upvoted. Apparently people here vote before informing themselves or reading the rest of the thread. Regardless, not being able to change a vote, especially if a simple misclick is made, is very, very frustrating.
what are the terms? (you talk as if you know them; i can't find any info anywhere)
I was always under the impression that voting is not to be used for agreeing or disagreeing, but rather to reward a good contribution to the discussion (and punish a bad one). I have on numerous occasions upvoted a comment even though I disagreed with it just because I think it has been valuable to the overall discussion.
You want them to think "is this interesting and on-topic for HN?"

My earlier proposal (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242453 ): deduct karma from submitter and _anyone who upvoted_ on submissions that were successfully flagged. That should get people to think the way you mention not only when submitting, but when upvoting as well.

Improve the submissions and comments will naturally improve -- submissions that are one-sided/gossipy/demagogic tend to attract similar comments. Whereas submissions full of technical content are often rich with links to further reading, contrasting viewpoints with cited evidence, etc. (Disclaimer: observations in this paragraph may be subject to fundamental attribution error).
Yes, but how core is "don't ever write more than one test at a time"?
I think this ability to vote in two different ways would be extremely interesting.

The agree/disagree voting stated above would give people insight into what others personally think about their comment and possibly push people to ask themselves, "Is this a useful, interesting comment, but I don't like it because I fundamentally disagree with it? Or is this a bad (meaning - does not contribute or against rules) comment?"

If this system worked, some of the most interesting comments could be ones that are voted up a lot, but very disagreed with.

Although looking at it from the other side, I could say it would make it harder for new users to participate/get up to speed, voting types could be confused, and it would add another step to a somewhat complicated process. (Plus people just might not like it)

edit: Fixed grammar and clarified some of my ideas
VHX.tv lauches beta (video sharing site from ex-vimeo/know your meme)
$3 million is actually probably not high. For instance, here are the revenue/employee of some tech firms:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2283-ranking-tech-companies-b...

Note that these figures include admins, HR, finance, warehouse staff, etc. and not just hackers. Taking that into account, $3m annually per programmer isn't outlandish according to these figures. Remember that each programmer is offset by n support staff, who will often not contribute directly to revenue.

You can calculate the analogous numbers for any company that is publicly traded in the US and some other exchanges that require employee counts to be published. There are also other aggregates posted on the web.

So if you're aiming to create $60k of value for yourself, you're aiming at a far lower number than anyone who would hire you.
Einstein's Pedometer app provides a relatively good incentive to get you moving
Should I start flagging stories that I just don't like rather than only ones that strictly violate the rules?
I pointed out for profit colleges because that's who I see advertising the most heavily (ever watch day time TV). Ads during Maury Povich show, multiple judge shows, etc... Those ads aren't for state schools. How many non-profit schools do you see advertising?

I'm a capitalist, but some of the practices of these schools are not defensible. High cost, high dropout rate, low placement.
I'm not seeing any benchmarks: since they tout speed as a major selling point, that surprises me.

Edit: For instance, the blog post mentions being inspirsed by MurmurHash, which touts its performance on its site along with benchmarks (http://sites.google.com/site/murmurhash/):

OneAtATime - 354.163715 mb/sec
FNV - 443.668038 mb/sec
SuperFastHash - 985.335173 mb/sec
lookup3 - 988.080652 mb/sec
MurmurHash 1.0 - 1363.293480 mb/sec
MurmurHash 2.0 - 2056.885653 mb/sec

In fact, it looks like the author of MurmurHash also developed a test suite for hash functions which includes performance testing: http://code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/SMHasher
Happy 20th Birthday, Linux (video)
Yes, the one who did what he did prior to being worth what he is.

Its pretty easy for anyone to say if they were worth X Billions of dollars to donate some fractional percentage.

We are talking about how he got these gains -- not what he is doing with them.

There is a difference.
This video would be a lot cooler with some good background music.
What do you call the opposite of impostor syndrome? When someone thinks they made it to their awesome position by being awesome, whereas in fact they were just lucky?

Alternatively, how about the syndrome where someone blames bad luck for their failures, but in fact their failures are really just due to the fact that they personally suck?
I just got an invite. And, I am reading through the docs. It seems like background job is not available currently, right?
Fukushima accident assessment raised to level 7
Leeroy for Jenkins - Send a meme from Jenkins CI server to Campfire
Unfortunately, it's also BS from start to finish (heh heh). People still care about their own lives, even if they realize that it's useful to appear unreservedly dedicated to the customer's needs.

And the niche you choose does make quite a difference in what the resulting business will look like, what demands it makes on your time, what kinds of customers and partners you will be interacting with, etc..

Unfortunately, if you're looking for "a niche, any niche" that happens to meet criteria completely unrelated to what the need actually is, who the people actually are, etc., it seems unlikely to work out well.

I suppose this depends on personality, but... it's hard to build a business. If you find the perfect niche but you actually have no past domain experience, don't have any personal connection to the "pain" you're fixing, etc., what will carry you through? I imagine you'd be much more likely to throw in the towel when things got tough (and I suspect investors would worry about that as well).
Echo Streams Near Real-time Social Features to Brands
I think it's good that the usernames don't show. Other HN members have expressed a similar opinion over the years... it prevents voting for/against the person keeping your impression of the comment (at least the first impression) based on the content and not the author.
While I disagree with the tone of this comment, I have to admit my first thought was "TDD has jumped the shark". The last thing I want is some random critter getting happier or angrier based on the results of my testing. I don't want "Agile Clippy", thanks.
Still happening as far as I can see. Try /newest - there's more green showing there.
A lot of people on HN, myself included, consider votes to signal contribution to the discussion and not agreement/disagreement. Your comment is right in that they are often used as such, but I don't think it's desirable.
Suggestion: the Rerun button allows veteran users to signal that an article has reached the front page before. Far from flagging the links for removal, the rerun button signifies that the content has a timeless quality.. it definitely isn’t news, but it is still worthwhile. A link that is getting both sufficient upvotes and rerun clicks is moved to the Reruns page, which would feature all manner of old chestnuts and stop them clogging up the front page.
according to wikipedia, this is called the "dunning-kruger effect": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
That's a good idea, actually! Seeing a bunch of people discussing an article that you submitted should be sufficient reward in itself.
I like the app-it's pretty cool seeing extensive lists of words that get returned for even a small set of letters. The Hangman and Unscramble options are good ideas, too... Nicely done!
I haven't seen this blog before, but I'd love to get other startup sales blogs that are worthing checking out.

Anyone have any good leads?
TEPCO, Nuclear Power, and what is really going on
Things the Media Either Gets Wrong or Doesn’t Know About the Winklevoss Twins
by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss
> Photoshop is around $600-700 for the full product

Or something like $1500 if you happen to be European. This is roughly as fair and balanced as FOX News.
Can you please consider reversing the "xx comments" and "flag" links? I think everyone here is used to clicking the last link under a submission to go to the comments!
Thanks for the comments (and encouragement) everyone. I will start investigating my options to see how this could be done in the SF area. The thinking behind this design is to use ressources that are excessively locally available (not a specific type of wood that needs to be shipped half around the country) and local production facilities in order to minimize environmental impact and help small businesses.
It'll be interesting to see whether this can be achieved while meeting an acceptable price point.

I'll follow up on this if I make any progress.
M
From http://code.google.com/p/cityhash/source/browse/trunk/src/ci...

// WARNING: This code has not been tested on big-endian platforms!

// It is known to work well on little-endian platforms that have a small penalty

// for unaligned reads, such as current Intel and AMD moderate-to-high-end CPUs.

//

// By the way, for some hash functions, given strings a and b, the hash

// of a+b is easily derived from the hashes of a and b. This property

// doesn't hold for any hash functions in this file.
23andme goes free for today: DNA testing, disease risk analysis
Great article.

Wanted to comment on this "The first project I did on my own was jeansbargains ... I built it and then realized that I did not want to spend the time looking for deals to put on it"

This seems to run as a common theme in many engineer friends (including myself, several times.) When approached with a sales-like problem, such as a opening a store or a SaaS product, or even starting a social network, we dig into the code first and build, but then get stymied by the "business stuff" necessary to get things off the ground. This might mean not e-mailing potential customers, sales leads, blogging, etc. In the meantime, we'd spend time polishing back-end code that no one will end up using.

I have several unfinished projects due to this syndrome (does it have a name?) And while I am not better at this yet, reading HN has definitely inspired me to do more than just code in that regard.