skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
5. Have some really unique features (they will get duplicated though)

Someone told me "You have limited time to make money". Does that time give you enough money? Or can you add another unique feature in that time? I'd like a business that lasts for all time - like coke/wrigley - but technology revolutions make it impossible. However, it is possible win one revolution...

Unmet demand is the incentive for copying - without oxygen, no competitor can beat you. Do you neglect, alienate or reject any market segment who wants/needs your product (including being too expensive)? Do any aspects of your product (including links in the chain of purchase) turn off customers?

For online software, lots of clever people can reverse engineer it; and customers can learn about it, trial it, adopt it and integrate with their lives/businesses. These are buffers, not "barriers to entry". It takes some time, but doesn't stop competitors - if there is unmet demand.

The best way to stop your competitors from serving your customers... is to serve your customers.
I'm on record as saying that it won't - I could very well be wrong (just look at my track record ;-), but that's my prediction.
The Web's Dirty Little Secret
What a bizarre, convoluted way to justify buying Perforce.
He actually was pretty honest-- he put pairwise up there because he (at the time) believed in the team but isn't even sure if they are still working on it. And, FWIW, RescueTime is still a helluva gamble with a hard road.
I applied the day that the iPhone SDK came out and was invited last week. (Woot!)

I have no connections to Apple or any Apple development companies. So it looks like they are finally allowing normal devs in.
Most of them are simple in concept, but big in opportunity. For example, an iPhone review website. The opportunity there is huge. You have tons of people who need to get more/better info about apps before they buy than the app store currently offers. The business idea is very simple. Build a good review site, promote it, most likely rely on an advertising model. Based on how quickly the iPhone market is growing, I think the users are there to make it a profitable business. But it requires time an energy. On the one hand, a good website is essential, and easy of use and security (making sure reviews aren't skewed) is also very important. In fact, a strong web framework makes for less work in the future, so developer skills are critical. On the other hand, building a business, working with advertisers, long term strategy, promotion and customer service will also be important. Its too much work for one person, its just a lot of work in general. But I think it would be a great business.

Don't even get me started on my iPhone app ideas...
While I do feel that the anonymity provided on the internet has great value, I also feel that positive things can be exploited in a negative and counter productive manner.

Just as trolls exploit this aspect of privacy to attack people that they likely would not have the courage to in the real world, so too do pedophiles exploit children that they otherwise would not in the real world. Using this same anonymity, con artists, thieves and all varieties of low lives are able to orchestrate their attacks and subvert the societal protections that would obstruct or prevent their attacks in the real world.

I guess it is all about the person and their moral compass, or in some case, the lack there of. I certainly do not believe that this privacy should be removed from the net - actually I strongly support its preservation. This said, I make a habit of only doing or saying things online that I would also do or say in the real world.

I do however feel that when these facets of anonymity are exploited to the degree that a criminal offense is occurring, the douche bags who are crossing the line should be tracked down and handled - i.e. the story in this article of the parents receiving multiple calls from little pricks after their son's suicide - I am pretty sure that can at the least be construed as harassment and should be criminally perused as such.

In this example, you have misguided youths tormenting individuals who are already suffering greatly - these same youths a) would not like this being done to them had their parents or siblings also died (golden rule) and b) likely would not do this without the separation of the web or the phone system our of fear of having their asses kicked, which is sad in itself...
So now they know how to efficiently store Hydrogen as gas ?
I was that guy, except I had loads of ideas. I even created them, includidng the first content management system ever, which I designed and was in use by our web development clients in 1994, for a company I owned.

Sadly, I had no freaking idea how to market, run a business, get funding, get mass customers, or anything else of use. Eventually I figured enough of it out to launch a profitable startup, but it took 15 years. lol.

I think the most important thing to success you need is a successful mentor, who is doing something similar to what you want to achieve. The more the better. That was the major turning point for me.
Executive summary: When designing a page focus on the semantics first, and the rest will come together. Don't prematurely optimize the interface, instead figure out what pieces of info and user actions the page should contain and figure out what pieces relate to eachother and which are independent. Then group the interdependent pieces together into "chunks", then prioritize those chunks on the page. You'll get a modular design that is easier to tweak.
actually I tweeted about tipping a tweet about tipping a tweet
Social Thing (Techstars) Acquired By AOL
Conspiracy theories are another huge trap for smart people...I know a bunch of brilliant people, often highly educated, who never accomplish anything because they believe the government is watching their every move and there's about to be a complete societal breakdown as people realize how much the power elite is fucking them over.
The earlier versions were better, before esr fucked up the sections on politics and personality. Here's the first version in which that appendix appeared; search for "this profile".

http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.3.1.dos.txt
thank you. this is an awesome post, and makes me recall how many times i've fallen into these traps. I've always wanted to be in politics and finance, and thought that's the best way to maximize my potential. Then i find out politics/finance is more about rent-seeking than doing good. I spent most of my college life just to figure it out. And then I find the start up life, which is really the thing - I got out of the traps. =)
I don't think its a myth. Apple really has done a lot of the marketing on behalf of developers. Everyone iPhone user knows where to get their iPhone apps. Just that right there is huge. Yeah, you still have to work hard outside the store, but setting up the location, the trust (no need to worry about Apple) and the ease of use is a marketing marvel that webapps just don't have. I think its hard to ignore the advantages. Going above and beyond that will help you immensely, but at least you don't have to replicate Apple work.
Yeah I didn't mean to direct my note at you - it was more of a general comment than anything.
Water found on Mars by Phoenix lander; mission extended
couldn't agree more. people typically don't realize how important transitions are to getting you into the right frame of mind for the different parts of your day.
YC means that you aren't doing it yourself?
And when you start creating your own thing, you realize how hard it is to build and you criticize less
>> people realize how much the power elite is fucking them over.

isn't that true though?
Exactly.

I guess it can be argued that you cannot partially support freedom, as it is only sold as the whole, but I also feel that there are laws that can mediate this middle ground.

Although I am not always the biggest fan of 'Johny Law', I do feel that at least the law can step in when harassment or threatening behavior is occurring to reduce its presence. Most of these participating in trolling behaviors would not continue their actions after a couple of rounds in the courts and after paying the associated fines...
Passion and tolerance for risk (both emotional and financial). Ideas, too, I guess. Lots of people truly don't have any ideas and just don't think that way.
How To Take Criticism Like Donald Trump
do it part-time or something. delicious started that way.
"Ever heard of Paul Graham?" I asked. "Nope"

There's your answer.

Although it's easy to forget it after hanging around here for a while, doing a startup is not intuitively obvious. If you don't have a role model you're not going to get far.

Hand the guy a copy of Founders at Work and see if something clicks. If not, perhaps it was never meant to be.

The other factor, of course, is that technical skill is only a part of what you need as a startup founder. You need some Jobs to go with your Woz. If this guy doesn't have the marketing spark, and he realizes that ("No ideas, I guess"), he's acting quite rationally. Maybe he'll choose a different path if and when he meets the right business person.
RIM has some solid products, no doubt. It's hard to imagine the iPhone will be able to cut into their core market without a physical keyboard and a BES equivalent.

The trouble for RIM is that their current stock price is predicated on continuing growth into the consumer market, something the iPhone (and potentially Android) may make more problematic.
Proving your concept by rolling out slowly
No! Please get started! I'd love some good ideas! I wish I had more.
Sshhh don't say it out loud! They could be listening right now. :)
5 Things You Must Know About Sleep
Of course it's true. Whenever there's a power imbalance, one party is being fucked over, and whenever there's more than one person, there's a power imbalance. It's almost a tautology.

But acting like it's true gives you an excuse for not doing anything. And then instead of just having the power elite fuck you over, you're fucking yourself over too.
I agree with the disagreement. Google was late to search, the iPod was late to mp3 players, the iPhone was late to smart phones, YC was late to investing, etc, etc, etc.
Not everyone's built to be an entrepreneur... Nothing wrong with that, all of us that are, we need employees ;-)

Just cuz you are capable of doing it does not mean you should.
The problem is that The Professions are a grind

Sounds like someone's never worked much in the non-professions.

and higher education (in the US at least) teaches only critical thinking

Right. If by "teaches only" you mean, "doesn't teach the least amount of"
I spend part of nearly every day at a local coffeeshop. Change of locale away from my office helps my creative energy enormously.

I rarely get distracted by all the noise and movement, though. Once I'm in the zone, I don't hear the music playing or the people coming in-and-out of the joint.
Do you think it's really enough money to do 3 month full time commitment? (I have family, not enough saving)
I don't think it counts as hype if you have to subscribe to it. Hype is that which passes before your eyes whether you subscribe or not.
Blackberry for life.

I know I say this a lot, but I mean it. You can poo poo this and that about the iphone, but the utility of the blackberry can't be rivaled.

So looking forward to the bold..
2. Be first in some area

- there's always a "blue ocean" where you can innovate - read up on The Intersection (The Medici Effect)
lets remember you have to do quite well to match the pay, benefits, and lifestyle of joe corp coder

i won't toot my horn but i leave at 5pm SHARP, go to the gym everyday, great benefits and 401k, and i get about $150k, lots of vacation time too

you think about how hard you would have to work on a startup to get that.
It's the only browser allowed at my day job :-/
No, it's definitely not. So where's the YC clone that does $80k per founder? I'd bet they will achieve a significantly higher success rate than YC does. More experienced, hungrier, stable founders who are highly motivated not to return to their cubes because they already know how much it sucks.
Business idea, could someone in the program who's not doing so hot (flashlight developers ;-) possibly auction off their memberships?

I wonder if someone could make an auction site for that? Or is that explicitly forbidden?
Although I'd love to agree, I think there are two major reasons why I cannot program in a coffee shop.

1. No ergonomic keyboard (or my 22 in. monitor) to help prevent carpel tunnel.

2. No Aeron Chair.
Only some people are wired for it.

My wife is smart, hard-working, and has skills that would translate into much higher paychecks if she worked for herself. Even her hobbies could make her lots of money. I've tried numerous times to get her to start her own business, because I find entrepreneurship so fulfilling and I love the freedom and the challenges. I want to share the feeling with her and, frankly, I also want her to better understand me. Her complete lack of interest in starting her own business is so alien to me that we have really struggled to even communicate about it. I've bought her books and cut out articles of people that have started successful businesses in her field of interest in an attempt to entice her to the startup fold. She is completely not interested, and she gets tense and testy when I even suggest she start her own business.

One of her best explanations was that her very traditional, 'ladder-oriented' upbringing (father was a military officer, then a corporate man, and her mother was in academia) has made her most comfortable with a traditional job. She wants the safety and structure of working for someone else. Even if a startup would be more lucrative, fun, and flexible than her current job, her fear of the unknown outweighs those benefits. She doesn't want to have to always "figure out what to do next", and she doesn't want her income to be inconsistent.* She also needs quite a bit of external positive reinforcement for her emotional well-being (that is, she needs people telling her "Thatta girl!" when she does a great job in order to feel good and keep going.) She thinks a startup would be lonely and she thinks her self-confidence and motivation would falter without frequent external reinforcement from co-workers and supervisors. All of which is probably true.

Both of her parents are very educated (PhDs) and have always worked for someone else. They are also relatively wealthy. My parents didn't attend college, and are "rural middle-class," but they have both owned their own businesses. My parents also have some very wealthy entrepreneurial friends that I was around quite a bit as a child.

* I went from making $40K/yr working for someone else, to making more than that A MONTH working for myself. Even though I was making EXPONENTIALLY more money by working for myself, the income was sporadic, so my wife asked that I get a 'second job' making about $10 an hour as a 'backup'! She is completely emotional and irrational about money, and it drives me crazy.
Those people "with a firewall" hurt people in real life with their "virtual" selves, crossing the real-world/virtual border, but I have a feeling they'd be the first to whine if someone retaliated in real life (in a more or less civil way) for what their "virtual" selves did.

What hypocrisy.
It's quiet. Too quiet. You can't hold whiteboard meetings and wave your arms a lot in a library, or they ask you to leave.

The conference rooms do exist, sometimes, but it's probably hard to consistently get one several times a week. When you find you really need a conference, the rooms may all be full.
There's a temptation to resist talking about failure. It's easy to think that you'll retain your self-image (or tribal status), but that's not usually the case.

Openness actually helps when you fail publicly. You gain status, so to speak.

But how do you strike a balance?

It's probably better to err towards openness. But I do find that revealing too much feels draining.
Unless you go to a campus library. Then you also get access to lots of fun research journals
AT&T's U.S. iPhone Exclusive Extended To 2010? Or Shortened From 2012?
Park nomad, laptop in tow, calls bushes home
Good. Slowly, but surely...
Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution
Hey New Haven, are you listening??
“Do not focus on results,” he said. “When you focus on results, it builds anxiety. And anxiety is the kiss of death.”

That sounds a bit like the Kyudo (the Japanese art of archery) philosophy. They say not to worry about where the arrow goes, only how you shoot it. To hit your target, you focus on it until there's nothing else in your universe, and then it's not possible to miss.

Watching these folks shoot is quite amazing. They ride past past a series of targets around 8 inches in diameter, on horseback -- at full gallop -- and pick them off one after another almost casually.
There wasn't a company as controlling as Apple with an active/growing marketplace before.
He might be thinking about the funding + network that YC provides.
Whoa, I never noticed that the real answers were at the bottom of the page!

But anyway, I assumed a site that looks "commercial" and secretive like that would probably have crappy answers. I'm wary of the "What's in my hand?" tactic.
IPhone Tethering Returns To Apple’s App Store
I think this is a pretty clear picture of the power of the iPhone platform. There are a couple of things going for the iPhone platform that make it inherently better to develop for than any previously designed platform:

1. Streamlined distribution. The app store makes it super easy for anyone to download applications from anywhere in the world. With 8 million sold worldwide X the amount of bored people trying to kill time by finding a new toy = a lot of users and downloads. In fact, the iPhone store had over 25 million downloads in the first month.

2. MONEY! Since iTunes has already a well established user base that has grown accustom to micro transactions for things like songs and videos, they're more conducive to impulse buying.

3. A REAL operating system. While the mobile platform has inherent disadvantages like screen real estate and control, it makes up for it by providing a sandboxed platform that has real power over the whole system.
I don't agree that whenever there is a power imbalance, one side will get "fucked over". Indeed, the whole idea of having a market is that people are mostly equal in terms of power (read Hobbes' Leviathan). It's only when power imbalances are so gross that they're obvious that one side is guaranteed to get "fucked over".
I have a bold on my hands right now, and while it is relatively nice device, it's web browser leaves a lot to be desired. The rendering performance is not up to par, zooming in and out, and overrall navigation are not in the same league as the iPhone.

Of course, email/messaging, typing, are excellent. The screen is really nice too.

So, it all depends on what do you use your main device for, email, or web surfing.

Coorporate people, probably care more for email, while normal users, about surfying, apps, and shiny things.

Since the growth in future of smartphones is more in normal users, and not coorporate, the iPhone will soon eclipse BB, and it will start eating it's turf.

I honestly think that RIM just don't get customer stuff. I remember a little over two years a go, argueing with one of their engineers, and they were making clear that mp3/video playing is not a big deal (and they didn't care for), and that cameras and external memory are security risks.

Well, these are the same things that normal customers want. Eventually, reluctanty they are coming to their senses, that even the Coorporate devices are used by PEOPLE, that actually kinda care for fun things too. If iPhone gets their email up to par with BB, then they will soon starting eating Rims lunch.
There are photo sharing sites other than flickr?
i have a BB, and it just lying on my floor, unused. Even the Samsung Instinct (iPhone wanna be), is more pleasurable to use.

I just can't stand the outadet UI, and washed out screen anymore.

(P.s. I work in mobile, so I use all kinds of devices all the time, so not an average user).
Well, I can't deny all of this because it's true. However, it is not very useful ultimately since everything is relative. Everybody on the App Store gets these advantages. Yes, there is a central location to look for but when you have thousands of apps and you are not in the top few, you are essentially back to the user already knowing about your app.
Bruce Schneier on the recent DNS vulnerability
There are really two types of trolls and they're completely different things. One type is the person who does rickrolls, feigns ignorance in technical forums, and generally is more of a prankster than anything else.

And then there are people who would be best described as terrorists. These are the people who drive teens to suicide. These are the people who send death threats to Kathy Sierra. These are the ones who need to be arrested for harassment.
I love this app. I wonder if AT&T will strike it down though? I think that since it's a little bit hard to setup, perhaps it can fly under the radar for a while.

Do you guys think this app will last till the end of the year?
And given that you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a smart person

Presumptuous, condescending, self-aggrandizing and manipulative all at the same time.
Mixing Computing and Time Travel
By accident? Sorry!
But I'd also like to be able to save articles without upvoting them.
Job Losses Likely to Accelerate
Interactive Journey Through NASA's First Fifty Years of Exploration
Zed's Reply To HN Concerning Feed Readers
This article brought up an interesting point on the cost of hosting servers through cloud computing. I don't think this writer was especially tech savvy, but she/he has the right idea. For example, scaling one of the top Facebook applications can cost upwards of $30,000 a month if you use single dedicated servers, but that cost can jump all the way down to <$5,000 if you're using multiple EC2 servers of various sizes to maximize the throughput on each instance.
Lack of good examples. Most people here probably read techcrunch, so day in and day out they get to read nothing but success stories. So they think success is the norm. So they have no problem developing something extremely simple, because they know that simplicity has paid off for some people.

An older guy who is in a corporate job, has no clue about techcrunch, and knows that whatever idea he comes up with has been done by Google etc. And if it hasn't they'll just steal his idea before he can make money.

So in the end he doesn't want to give up his corporate job, his income, and 2 years of his life, to develop an application has little probability of success.

I mean look at your average startup founder, its a younger guy who has no other commitments. And they can survive with a burn rate of $500 a month(live with parents + cost of dedicated server + other minor bills), while an older guy has a $2500 mortgage, $500 food bill, college tuition payments etc. And he thinks he needs $100,000 in servers, since that's what he is used with working at his corporate gig.
Phoenix Spacecraft Confirms Water on Mars
I thought this was going to be about Steve Jobs. Thank god its only about 51,000 people getting fired.
woo. Yay us. :)
I'm sorry, but this guy is a idiot for hiring the idiot. Putting faith in titles is ridiculous and not recognizing someone's incompetence upon meeting them has more to do with yourself that with the other person. My two cents anyways.
WTF? This article has nothing to do with Apple at all!

Linkbait!