skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I find a "mission critical" company/consumer problem?
Steven Blank describes in The Four Steps to the Epiphany that successful startups supply a "must-have" consumer product or solve a mission critical company problem. My problem has been with idea creation. I've been developing 'cool' ideas, but nothing that people absolutely need.

I really like Blank's book and I agree with his theory about developing a product hypothesis then talking to potential customers to test if the product is needed. This is basically a way to find customers first, see what they want then begin to build. But my question is, what if you don’t have a product hypothesis? How can you generate product/service ideas that are "must-have?" I've been told to "scratch my own itch," but many great startups are B2B. And finding problems that specific businesses face without being apart of that business is difficult. The same can be said for specific consumer markets.
I think the key with both was that there was a "plausible" explanation for why the bubble valuations made sense.

In the 2000s, you had the "New Economy" bullshit: The internet was changing everything and the most important thing was to start a company that carved out your niche of the New Everything. Profits or even cashflow fundamentals could wait until after the land-grab.

There was a kernel of truth of course, the Internet has changed a great deal. That's what made the argument sound plausible.

With the housing bubble, the argument was "real-estate never goes down," "the population keeps getting larger so demand always goes up." "houses are real things with real value."

Again there's a kernel of truth to the argument --- just enough to hide the reality of the bubble from people who don't take a hard look at the numbers with a critical eye.

And moreover, during 2000 as well as the housing bubble, very many people who participated believed there was a bubble. Goldman Sachs were long on housing derivatives for years before they went short in the final few months.

There's a lot of money to be made running with the herd in a bubble so long as you veer off before the herd goes off the cliff.
Steve Jobs. Counter example.

Build what you wanted but couldn't buy because it didn't exist and win.
Look for the cameras to mysteriously malfunction whenever the bar is dead.
Just 5 days ago...

"Kiwi developer Glenn Martin, who has been working on his flying machine for 30 years, intends to make it available on the market in 2012 at a cost of about US$100,000. Last month, the jetpack made its first high-altitude test flight, taking a dummy pilot to 1,500 meters under remote control while Mr Martin watched from a helicopter."

For more, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8566096/Martin-Jetpack...

Humans will make it to the asteroids, to the rest of the Milky Way, and fill the Universe.
Think of words you want, check every combination you think of, grab any that aren't registered, select from that list.

It took me months to come up with Playtomic after I decided to ditch the old name "SWFStats" because it was such a married-to-Flash name.

The other thing to keep in mind, it really doesn't matter what you do decide to call it, people are going to like or not what you're doing and in either case the name isn't going to be the reason.
I had the same incident on my ~2007 Macbook. The wires became exposed at the connector body slowly and finally failed on me. I wasn't aware I could return it (this was last year) and bought a new one. I had religiously pulled it from the body and it was practically a desktop with a 2nd monitor.
lets take b2b companies, i know nothing about b2c[1]. not only do you have to find a problem, and understand the problem, and have a real answer why your team is better equipped to solve the problem than any others[2], you still need to be able to convince the customers of all this.

many of my role models became immensely successful by accident. they strove to be great, and worked hard, but didn't actively set out until a solution arose naturally from their career history, and they said "oh hey, i can do this!"

[1] i actually know nothing about b2b other than working at
a small pharma-industry shop
[2] you know, more than just a few crack twenty-something
coders -- you've got credible industry experts on your
team
Very true. Usually people that risk the most have the most to gain (or lose).
Claiming that the urchin URL parameters are "one of the malicious effects of URL shortening" is confusing cause and effect. Urchin's software dates from at least 2003, and was already massively distributed by Google in 2005, while URL shortening did not catch on in any meaningful way until the advent of Twitter, which was not founded until 2006.

The very long URLs created by Urchin and other web analytics was one of the problems that URL shorteners were created to solve.

Whether short URLs have a "malicious" effect is a topic for a different discussion, but whatever the effects of URL shortening, Urchin parameters are not among them.

Urchin parameters certainly do make it harder to detect duplicate URLs, which would be pinboard's primary problem with them. However, so lots of other URL parameters like sessions, landing page refs, etc.. Urchin's are just the most common ones.

[Disclosure: I work for awe.sm, which provides social media analytics using, amongst other methods, short URLs]
Ask HN: turntable.fm clone - node.js & grooveshark api
as we have seen multiple node.js chatroom apps, wondering if one can throw together a basic chatroom app with moderators that can select songs from the grooveshark api http://bit.ly/liLVuQ
For refernce -- Anna Creek Station is slightly larger than Vermont or Isreal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_station
Recap of the last 24 hours: NHS assisted, Jihad site taken down, Pron.com owned
What grains of sand look like when magnified tremendously
hn get's reddited
Pretty sure SEO is the real reason long urls are such a problem, it's why URLs are long and it's why they're all tagged to hell.

There was a time where your site would be

site.com/product.php?id=x or

site.com/product.asp?id=x,

now it's:

site.com/keyword-keyword/keyword/keyword/product-name?urchin or google analytics crud
Anyone who presents technology to non-expert audiences can benefit from studying these presentations. They're masterful.
this is ok- and even shows you how to do async loads. an article targeting more comprehensive bookmarklets might recommend your bookmarklet should only load an external script. additionally, some discussion of postmessage would be cool. you can actually create insanely robust bookmarklets posting messages (and using views) through an iframe(s).
Show HN: Review my site: Moviemail, get emailed the day a movie is released
Link: http://moviemail.info

Type a movie title > enter your email address > click Submit = You'll get an email on the movie's release date.

There is no registration. No sign-up. No beta. It's just a simple tool.

I built this because I was tired of adding movie release dates to my Google Calendar (or forgetting to do so after seeing a cool trailer). Do any of you have this pain point too? If not, I'm fine with just chalking this up as a tool for my own personal purposes.

If so, then I know a lot more can still be added, but I'm not sure what I want to add because none of the yet-to-be-added features are heavy pain points of mine. For example, I was thinking of building a "Remind me" button -- similar to Twitter's "Share" button -- which could be embedded on movie blogs like FirstShowing and ScreenRant, and possibly sites like Rotten Tomatoes. At scale this could be a valuable complement to pre-release ticket purchases in gauging movie demand.

Any and all thoughts are welcome, I only ask you keep them constructive. Fire away.

Thanks

PS - Moviemail is built using Rotten Tomatoes' API.
Linus Torvalds Sits Down, Talks 20th Anniversary of Linux [video]
I'm using Clickatell and they charge about 8c/msg. Does the beta include delivery to Norway? If so, how can you charge 1c? Is Clickatell (and others) overcharging that much, or are you using alternative less stable methods of delivery?
There's an interview in which PG say that if YC had stayed in Boston, then some other firm would have become the YC of Silicon Valley, but PG wanted YC to be the YC of Silicon Valley.
Not necessarily if you can parallelize computing the digits. Your average Pentium processor can compute a floating-point number with a mantissa of 16 decimal or 52 binary digits in one clock cycle, not 16 or 52. It does so by using enough silicon to compute them all in parallel.
Everyone knows of the XBox, but almost no one thinks of it as the 'Microsoft XBox'. The only brand they're helping there is the XBox brand, not the Microsoft brand.

Average families that don't want Office? Any of them with a Mac. iWork is cheaper, integrates better, and is generally easy to use, plus the templates are much nicer. For the 99% of people who use 1% of Office's features, iWork is more than 'good enough', it's 'much better'.

Windows 7 was a success because Vista was junk and XP is ten years old and showing its age. It's a good OS, but people are buying it because XP just isn't good enough anymore and it's Windows 7 or Mac OS X.

Microsoft's brand is hurting because they don't have a cohesive strategy for the things they do. They've launched two separate mobile phone platforms in the last few years; one of which was cancelled almost immediately after launch, and the other, while extremely promising, is floundering in the market so far.

Microsoft needs serious top-down leadership, not middle-outwards leadership, and until they get that, their brand is going to continue to suffer.
I sense some confusion here. Those parameters are also used by Google Analytics which the author is using on that very page.

The utm parameters allow a site to track campaign information and replace much more annoying techniques like setting up unique landing pages or redirects. There's no relationship between these parameters, which have been around for nearly 10 years, and URL shorteners.
Do you have an example of something cool done with postmessage? I've never seen that term before.
i threw some example code [1] on gist to supplement my comment. i modified it a bit and didn't test it- but it used to work- so probably still good for reference. it's also not very pretty. questions, comments, concerns welcome.

essentially, it gives you two-way communication to your server on any arbitrary domain- that's pretty powerful!

[1] https://gist.github.com/1020251
But the blingy solution breaks anyway, and is also ugly, beyond being dangerous.

Parent's point was that if we assume Apple is optimizing for showroom appearance, better to put the bling over the function bits and let the going break after a few months, instead of having only bling and letting the bling break and kill the device and user with it.
There was, at launch - they were terrible, didn't work properly, had a ton of downtime, etc. It got a reputation for being a slow, useless, unreliable service, and while the service got much better (I've been using it almost since its inception), its reputation never truly recovered.
I think the argument is that url shorteners hide this types of URLS which has led to them being used more often since they fly under peoples radars.

Sounds reasonable to me.
I'll be that clojure is faster and it isn't statically typed. I have far more confidence in the JVM handling heavy load that V8 which wasn't designed as a server side technology.
Whats the fuss about exits? Why not focus on revenues? Do Redbus, Cleartrip and Flipkart need to be sold before they're worth doing?
It seems to me that, if Apple so desired, they could make a fair bit of money selling a 'private iCloud' service to companies looking to incorporate iPhones and iPads into their infrastructure in a big way. In the same way companies can set up their own BES server to provide in-house management of their data, the ability to set up an in-house iCloud server, to back up their employees' documents, data, settings, etc., as well as 'find my iPhone', distribute out custom books (e.g. corporate training documents, procedures, forms, manuals, etc.), and in-house apps, could be very appealing to a lot of companies.

I'm sure Apple's considered it, but I doubt they see enough of a market in the product to bother packaging it up and selling it. It's obvious that they're not incredibly interested in the server or high-end enterprise market, and they're perfectly content to let their Activesync integration carry them for now.
Indeed it is not dependent on tornado, but it does use the tornado event loop in this example.
The fact that somebody can make a living going around and giving talks like that is interesting. It is so incredibly obvious that this is the way that things are, but it seldom gets said (with a few exceptions).

And, along that line, this is a red flag when put to PGs "What You Can't Say" essay. It's somehow impolite to say something like this Hanson fellow is saying, despite the fact that it is both obvious AND true. Ought we not stare at this straight in the face to better understand how we can best remedy the situation?
It's a cool idea but I expect it will have a serious dead man zone between about 40 - 200ft altitude. In that range you're too low to use a parachute but too high to survive a crash.
For any given algorithm, the worst-case runtime behavior of an algorithm and the average-case runtime behavior are described by totally different functions, each of which has its own big-O.
The idea upon which this is based is called hormesis. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloric_restriction

The basic idea is that our ancestors were under stress so often that we evolved beneficial processes that kick in during times of stress, and only times of stress. Without the right environmental cues our bodies won't do the right thing. Imagine having to red-line your car for a few seconds in order to start the automatic oil-change.
I bought my MBP in 2008, I'm on my third Magsafe cable now. The last 2 caught fire. Seems I need a new cable every year.
El7aneen Forum
Believe it or not, sometimes mongodb is the perfect tool for the job. It actually does support safe wrriting features, so some of the hype in that video is false. MySQL is always a great piece of the stack but it's not always good.
The main problem is that the Indian market for digital goods and services is tiny. In a non-existent market, neither product finesse nor pricing can make much of a difference.

Yeah, and you know what? McDonalds doesn't try to sell Big Macs to Indians either. They sell them Chicken Majaraca Macs.

So there's not a market for software for rich lazy people like there is in the U.S. It's not like there's not money in India. The marketing channels are different. The payment channels are different. Peoples' needs are different.

Maybe Y Combinator (incubator for rich people problems) won't specifically work. But Y Combinator (funding model for lean, adaptive startups) surely would. I think the problem is that the OP isn't thinking adaptively enough.
Did you read the article? Who will you trust to build your "trusted execution environment"? What tools will they use to build it?
I have a Strida and I love it. I've used it as my commuting vehicle for years - a mile to the subway, half mile from the subway to office. It's not any more work to pedal than a larger bike, other than having only the one fairly low gear.

Yes it rides fast enough for the street. The belt drive is so smooth that it's pretty easy to hit 120-150 RPM on pedaling. (Most riders on a full-size regular geared bike use a cadence somewhere between 70 and 90.) And the excellent brakes, short stopping distance, and short wheelbase for maneuverability make it an amazing vehicle for navigating city traffic.

I do even ride the Strida on sidewalks sometimes for a handful of blocks when the road is too crowded. Its agility is almost more like a scooter than a full size bicycle. An alert rider poses virtually no danger to pedestrians, and they're usually caught by the novelty more so than mad at a cyclist on the sidewalk.
That's actually true, the Economist has always been very critical of Italy. I have a couple Italian friends who cut their subscriptions a while back because of one article or another. I wouldn't go so far as to say they have no credibility, but they do have a sizable history of negative articles about Italy. Their criticisms may have been justified, but I think that's still a useful piece of knowledge.
It doesn't sound reasonable to me, and for obvious reasons I spend quite a lot of time thinking about URLs and how people interact with them.

The truth is that outside of nerd circles most people don't even understand URLs, far less care whether they have extra parameters in them. Major browsers are considering getting rid of the URL bar entirely. The tidiness of URLs is therefore of almost zero concern to major online publishers, but accurate analytics is, which is why UTM tracking is so popular.
I'm not arguing that URL shorteners came first, but rather that their widespread use is what has enabled this kind of URL crapification to become so pervasive.

[Disclosure: I hope your entire product category dies]
"It's what separates kings from bums lying around on the side of the road."

Since kingship is, by definition, hereditary, I'm pretty sure that what separates kings from bums is largely a mere accident of birth.

Just as we have evolved with an unrealistic perceptual bias to see lions in forest shadows - thinking you see one where there isn't one is low cost, failing to see one when there is one is a potentially lineage-ending move - we've also evolved to think that we have much more influence on the course of our lives than we do.

We have limited self control; our conscious minds can really only inhibit unconscious impulses, and that only to a limited extent. Nevertheless, we've evolved to believe that we have much greater control than we do so that we continue to try to exercise the limited control that we do have, rather than not trying at all because we see our distinctly limited self control for what it is.
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Interesting, reminds me of a practical exam we had in intro to programming class that was taught in Java. We were asked to implement a FIFO data structure class with methods push and pop (something along these lines).

We'd just learned about OO principles and extending classes the week before. After reading the task for the practical I nervously raised my hand, "Would it be acceptable to just extend array list and create methods just named as described but using the existing methods?" The teacher kind of looked at me blankly and said yes.

I was the first person finished, no one else apparently thought of that approach. I'm not a programmer, but given that we'd just discussed this days before it seemed like an obvious solution...
[Infographic] Startup Bubble 2.0 - the new startup ecosystem
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10.3 should work. Go to the Preferences, then Store, and select Automatic Downloads for Music/Apps/Books. Also, you can go to the Apple Store and under Quick Links, you'll find a Purchased link. That'll let you re-download any Music/Apps/Books. It's not really cloud-y yet, but it's a start.
Wow. That's a little rude.

I'm arguing that URL shorteners have had nothing to do with the popularity of Google Analytics, which is the source of urchin parameters. The dominance of Google and the massive profit incentive around accurately tracking adwords and adsense is what's driving that. Consumers don't care what their URLs look like, so it doesn't matter whether URL shorteners obfuscate them.

I recognize that shortened URLs are troublesome for a bookmarking service, but they are hardly insurmountable. I'm not sure I understand why you'd have so much hate for us.

(And for the record, URL shortening is not our primary product)
Ehh, last time I messed with canvas (sometime around February this year) any approach to clearing the entire canvas was too slow. In order to get any decent performance I had to layer multiple canvases on top of each other and keep the dimensions of the last draw operation saved so I'd only have to clear that bit of the canvas. The layering was so that I wouldn't have to bother redrawing things like the background after clearing something on top of it.
Also, if stripping the utm parameters are supposedly going to make it easier to dedup urls, why not just make the deduping logic strip them before running? So that argument is not fully thought out either. Of course, that doesn't make the conclusion invalid, it just means that this point cannot rationally be used to support it.
I understand that Google isn't really targeting technically oriented users, but Engadget is (or should be, haven't really followed them for a while now) and the review video was a joke. The reviewer spent 2:20 talking about the plastic and the look of the laptop. This was all I needed to know what a horrible review this was going to be. Followed by the "revelation" to the reviewer that were the "F5" key usually lied was now replaced by a refresh key. If you don't know why this is ludicrous, then perhaps this chromebook is for you. Anyways, if anyone finds an actual review, let us know.
The proper technique is ridiculously subtle.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1630
That support article is a spiritual ancestor of the Antennagate defense press event.
they do need to be sold before they are worth investing in as an institutional investor
Show HN: SoWink - Revolutionizing the Future of Online Dating
SoWink brings you the next generation of social online dating for young people, exclusively for ages 18-35. Unlike existing dating services, SoWink does not use complicated matching algorithms to decide who your matches are for you, instead, we allow you to meet people and decide for yourself through organic chemistry.

Consider us the future Facebook of dating, except you definitely won't find your mom on it!

We've just recently launched private Alpha. Let me know what you guys think.
tl;dr: "A Detroit entrepreneur surprised university engineers in Ohio recently, when he invented a heat-treatment that makes steel 7 percent stronger than any steel on record -- in less than 10 seconds."
For a short time there, it was:

site.com/dashboard/alerts

We should get back to that. There need to be better ways to do SEO than polluting URLs. Slapping this information on a URL is a misuse of the purpose of URLs (permanent locators for a resource on the web. E.g. even if the resource has moved, there is a response code and a way of reaching the new location).
SoWink brings you the next generation of social online dating for young people, exclusively for ages 18-35. Unlike existing dating services, SoWink does not use complicated matching algorithms to decide who your matches are for you, instead, we enable you to meet many people and decide for yourself via organic chemistry.

Consider us the future Facebook of social dating, except you definitely won't find your mom on it!

We've just recently launched private Alpha. Let me know what you guys think.
I love this. Somebody decided to invent and plant a meme and see just how gullible people are.

I'd image than several months later the authors will be laughing their posteriors off reading all the retweets, blog posts, and journals about people following the "procedure".