skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My startup is failing, I need advice.
It’s been 10 months that we are working on our startup and it never gained traction that we would like to see. It’s a social web application. Me and my co-founder are really good friends, we started working on this idea, just after college. We had couple of good offers to join, but we decided to do our own startup. We’ve read all the essay's of PG, we have the hacker’s attitude. We’ve worked our asses off, we got one funding offer as well, but that was too low to do anything, we are based out of India. We’ve all the latest technology stack, djang/jquery/orbited/apachemq and all. We’ve learned a lot of things during these 10 months, I’ve became a different person altogether, from a college kid to an entrepreneur, have came a long way.

Coding, testing, deploying, releasing, going to the crowd, iterating, we have learned this all. I’ve worked upon everything, from django to UI/UX, making banners to videos, PR to marketing, support to sales, everything. It’s been a wonderful life so far. I wouldn’t have learned all these things, had it been a regular job after college. I am so grateful for myself and my co-founder for letting me work on all these, all these months.

It’s been an emotional roller coaster ride too, many many strange, weird, unimaginable things happened too. We started with very small amount in hand, it was the worst decision among all others. Money started to become a problem of us. But we managed somehow.

The story has many twists as well, 3 months back, both of us lost our laptops, yes both of us. It was a painful time. It took us well two weeks to recover from that. We met with so called startup mentors of India, listened all the bad things one could listen, we iterated our product, pivoted again, but it’s a social app, it takes time to take off. Especially, if you are in India ( nothing that I am complaining). We have all the patience an entrepreneur can have. We got covered in national newspapers as well, but nothing big has happened so far.

It’s been 10 months. We have simplified our product, removed almost all features, we’ve worked on the design, very hard, it’s come out good now.

Lessons that we have learned is, social web app is a saturated market, you are compared with facebook, even if you don’t want, everything can be done by making a facebook app or whatever and you need a lot of good people/networking into the tech world to really get them off the ground. We lack it.

Final words, we are not doing good. We are in good state of mind, have taken all the positive things from it, me and my co-founder has a great co-ordination, it’s just that we didn’t pick the right idea or we were too young then. Now, we are at the point that we want to take some decision, whether to move on, do something else or to stick on it for some more time.

Personally, I am thinking of working at a startup in SV. The biggest thing I lack is exposure, contacts and the experience of working in a real startup environment. I am not really sure, if that is even possible. But I really want to make things move fast from here on.

I need advice from fellow hackers.
This is a great idea. We'd love to help. MySocialVenture.com
You can find some good lectures on the ArsDigital University Archive http://www.aduni.org/courses/
I liked the Theory of Computation lecture.
I wish the proponents of this theory would carry it to it's logical conclusion: we should tax the poor more heavily than the middle class. Sure, we might be imposing one extra screaming guy on them. But so what? The harm to them is minimal, only $0.01 of diminished utility.

This is the logical conclusion to Karelis' bee sting theory of poverty. Yet neither he nor any of his proponents are willing to follow their theory to it's logical conclusions. I wonder why?
HN is a way to find interesting stuff. This includes older material. If people don't find it interesting, they won't vote it up.
How would using a Mac prevent that?
It is possible, all you need is to find the controller which will control the flame, bigger==faster.
Your link is actually to the 1992 data, here is the 2003 data:

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
Judged by reality, by what really is, the truth. It's been called lots of things and names but it is just what is. People can't judge intentions accuratly, thus the incredible confusion over whether it matters. It's a matter of faith I suppose.
I feel that within the next year groupon's bubble will burst. I constantly read about how companies are unhappy with their groupon deals and how they will not use groupon again.

This article: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/09/even-businesses-that... talks about a study done on companies that used groupon and it found that 42% wouldn't do a deal again. That simply isn't sustainable as a form of business.

I have also read on numerous occasions that many of the companies that have used groupon found that the people using the groupon deals were previous customers. This defeats the main purpose of using groupon as a company and will likely contribute to the (predicted and in now way absolute) downfall of the company.

I also feel like companies like groupon will be helping to create a massive tech bubble, similar to the one in the late 90's and I am worried that it will burst from rampant over-investment in companies.
You guys really need to think about the chance that it actually works. Loopt isn't some shady company trying to steal people's credit card information for something malicious. Their goal, in the end, is something benevolent for all parties.

If they fail (which is likely for any startup) then it's because the idea wasn't a good. It stands to reason that they can make this clear to both parties: consumers and businesses. If they didn't at this point then I am sure they'll fix it because ultimately everyone actually will be angry. The market will answer so you need not worry. I am sure Loopt has done a sufficient amount of customer development before exhausting all their engineering bandwidth, marketing resources, and product focus--meaning you should consider giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Let businesses decide. It's not something you're capable of proving. Loopt likely is gaining more feedback about it then you realize.
> on a unix server, you have to be root to read everyone's data.

> on an os x laptop, you can be the logged-in user and read everyone's data

Shenanigans. Unless you have the password of the logged in user, you can't read stuff belonging to other users. Further, if the user in question does not have an Admin account, you're shit out of luck even if you do know their password.
Do you have a link or a keyword to look for? thanks.
> He forgot to mention the whole part about objectifying women

(Rolls eyes) Yes, these poor, naive women aren't intelligent enough to determine that they are being "objectified". Do you feel the same pity for the I'm on a horse, Old Spice guy?
Is cdnjs.com ready for use?
There was a post about www.cdnjs.com 5 months ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132553.

There were some DNS problems at that time and thus most people were concerned about reliability. Now that it is powered by cloudflare.com, do you think that the timing is right to let global javascript hosting to cdnjs.com?
Thanks!

I agree, there are a few issues with SGP I would fix: It fails badly on Change Password forms, it uses ~10-iteration MD5 hashes which are easily-reversible today, and the default character set for the generated passwords is not great.

I feel I'm still in the "research" stage where I want to see if I can survive with using something like SGP. I'll definitely switch over to the extension from now, though.

Side note: It's probably not a terrible idea to still maintain multiple master passwords for really-important vs throw-away accounts.
Pensions, Welfare, Medicare... The more I read about these things (and the coming crisis ahead) the more I feel like it is a classic example of a (mild) Ponzi scheme.
Reread the exchange. ("The guy above" is not Bob.)

I'm responding to someone who thinks that it's irrational to fix up one's own house when others get significant benefit.

The person who is doing the fixup is doing it because he gets significant benefit, regardless of what other people get. The person criticizing thinks that Bob, who won't do work that benefits others without being compensated, is rational.

That's envy-talk.

Envy is worrying about what other people have/get. Greed is worrying about what you get. A greedy person will do things that benefit himself even if other people benefit without paying. An envious person won't.
I'm a huge fan of Khan Academy, so I hope that your site will do the name justice. Now I can't imagine that Khan would have a problem, but you should be careful when relating your site with others like this. Some people might think that you're actually aligned with Khan Academy.
Maybe implementing functional programming logic in FPGAs? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2645423
I have the 13", and I would strongly recommend this if you plan to be taking it around a lot. It's the perfect size / weight for me, and I don't think twice about bringing it around. In regards to the window management, I have to agree. It took a while to get used to, but now that I'm used to it, it's no problem. It's really just what you're accustomed to. Another note is that Mac devs love TextMate, but I've always just used VIM, so Mac is no better to me in this category!
You are of course 100% correct (although it seems to me that most stuff on HN is "new" stuff). My gripe is that I use the RSS feed so I see EVERYTHING that gets posted to HN, and this is one of those posts where I feel like the target audience is quite small, and those who need it will have no issue finding it themselves. But I guess I'm just biased because I have actually used this book before, and therefore don't find it interesting at all when it is brought to my attention at a time where I have no further use for it.
It is a commonly used argument that the lives of poor people are very hard and unpleasant and that dealing with the hardships sucks out all their energy and brings down their spirits so they can't take advantage of all the opportunities that middle-class people have to improve their situation.

The problem I see with this reasoning is that if you consider the entire range of standards of living which people had throughout history and geography, with maybe middle-age European peasants on one end and say Larry Ellison on the other, then on this scale, the standard of living of contemporary American poor is very close to the standard of living of the reasonably well off. From the point of view say anyone in communist Poland, as well as at least a billion people living today, what you call poverty would seem like mind-blowing opulence. On the other hand, I rather suspect that for anyone featured in The Real Housewives of New York, the lot of doctors and software engineers and struggling janitors alike must seem like horrifying wage slavery.

So, to claim that there exists a standard of living threshold, and that below this threshold life is objectively hard, whereas above this threshold it's easy, and that it so happens that the line lies between the poor and the middle class in contemporary America, you have to believe that we're looking at a very unique time and place. Of all the possible values that the threshold could potentially have, what are the odds that it would actually fall within this narrow range you're looking at? A hundred or maybe even fifty years ago in the US (and much more recently in many countries around the world), almost everyone's standard of living was way below that of contemporary poor. Do you think all these people were equally as incapacitated by the harshness of their lives, unable to make rational decisions and work to improve their lives? If the civilization does not collapse for one reason or another, chances are in fifty years time even the poor will have the standard of living as good as wealthy people have now. Do you think the poor of the future will not suffer from this ten-people-in-a-room-screaming effect?
Odds that one of the crew is commenting on this thread?
Well at least they're dogfooding.
Ask HN: Let me help you build your product for free
I'm looking to gain some experience and I'd like to know if there is anyone out there who would like help on their product. I wouldn't charge anything since I love programming and the experience would be more than enough for me.

I've been using mainly Python lately, with small bits of HTML, CSS, JS, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Flask. I'm very open to learning new technologies and I would actually like to see what the hype is about Ruby and Rails.

If you think we could get along and you need some help, feel free to drop me an email at jjb127@mun.ca.
>When you most want to quit is usually when you are closest to success - that's a remarkably accurate statement.

Accurate in the sense that a broken clock is right twice a day. As you accumulate failures, your motivation flags and your desire to quit increases. Now, this might meant that you're about to make a breakthrough that will turn your business into the next Google. It also might mean that you're bashing your head into a brick wall and you need to pivot in order to become successful. Your desire to quit gives you no information as to what your strategy should be, and, therefore, is totally useless as a decision-making strategy.

tl;dr; Your desire to quit is also greatest right before you go totally bankrupt and wreck your life.
Another good resource: http://www.reddit.com/r/carlhprogramming/comments/9nz5s/welc...
> Every single deal requires an opt-in from the business before it goes live.

So no more reverse groupon? Will you be working with business owners now before offering a deal to users?

If that's the case, that seems like the right thing to do. But now, you would be playing in the same space as groupon. Any differentiators planned or it would be down to plain old competition in the same space?
Dreaming Of A Progressive Tea Party
Riot Games just send us an email again, selling this product to someone who might spam around with this site,

is out of question now; especially after they contacted me directly and know me personally now.

Anyway thanks for putting my mind together.
It seems that there are better people out there that got angrier

http://www.gamemarshal.com/features/20110622113313/lulzsec-h...
Head of Russian Payment Processor ChronoPay Arrested
A lot has changed. If you're looking at other strongly-typed functional language, particularly if you don't have to handle laziness, Compiling with Continuations is a fantastic book (http://www.amazon.com/Compiling-Continuations-Andrew-W-Appel... ).

There is still a lot that has changed since then. In particular:

1) Control-flow analysis has become much more well-understood, and there's a lot more you can do in your optimization phases to dramatically speed up code and reduce allocations (allocations and heap accesses are the bane of functional language implementation, btw. Unless you're Haskell, and then you also have to deal with mutation for shared lazy computation results).

2) Certain tricks such as monomorphisation (http://mlton.org/Monomorphise ) dramatically improve the ability of the compiler to generate optimized code from originally polymorphic inputs without paying huge representation overheads.

Unfortunately, #1 and #2 are mainly written up "in the source" of modern functional language compilers or at best in JFP (Journal of Functional Programming) articles :-( But the Appel book provides most of the fundamentals you'll need to get bootstrapped with anything more modern, so I'd recommend it anyway!
If everyone says it and the group is quite skeptical, and you know it has basis, then it seems the steps to becoming successful are actually useful. I'll call that common knowledge for lack of a better word.

Why would common knowledge be depressing?
Asteroid To Buzz Earth Monday, June 27th
How to Manage your Ads Effectively 
For most business owners, there are two main reasons why they spend big money on advertising. The first reason is because they want to inform the general public about their brand, what it offers, and how it can benefit potential customers. The second reason is that businesses use advertising to communicate with people in order to call for a favorable action. But advertising, like any other forms of communication, needs to be measured in order to test how effective it is and if there is a ROI.
Jeeva in Gautham Menon film
Watch the D conference videos. He deals with some none too pleasant subjects in them.
Dow has changed a lot since then, and I am unsure if they have continued the program. This was at their Michigan plant in the 80s.

Now it looks like they have moved more to diversity, cultural, disability, and gender issues:
http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm
more eyes and dollars need to be on near earth objects, such short notice is kind of scary
Ruby has a penchant for giving you more than enough rope to hang yourself on, and "Ruby keyword arguments" are no different. I've seen them used in the wild. It's horrendous.

The code I had to update was poorly written, but the functions with "keyword arguments" were practically incomprehensible _because I didn't even know what their parameters were_. Furthermore, the interactions between these "keyword arguments" wasn't documented anywhere. Sometimes supplying one keyword demanded that another keyword also be supplied, less the function quietly fails.

Finally, there's no way to make a "keyword argument" a required argument. Every function I saw with keyword arguments was littered with "bar = foo.key?(:bar) ? foo[:bar] : default_value" or "throw Exception if not foo.key?(:bar)"

Don't use hashes as a replacement for argument lists in Ruby. Hack the Ruby source and add real keyword arguments.

edit: added another example
No big surprise with that. When you have a dominating monopoly on most of the major venues in America, you probably don't lose any sleep at night worry about user experience. The only way that is ever going to change is if people vote with their wallets and stop going to Ticketmaster events...
I talked to the old CEO of TicketMaster years ago about the fees and when I found out that most of the service fees are kicked back to the venues, I found them far less evil. They take all the blame that should be directed at venue owners.
What's the targeted difficulty level here? My experience with other Khan Academy videos is that they may be fine for a sophomore or junior year high schooler but their advanced topics are very lacking or generalized. How much CS will actually be taught here? How will it compete with things like Google Code University? http://code.google.com/edu/algorithms/index.html
Is there any businesses targeting this demographic online? I don't have much idea how to create markets for a very sophisticated demographic that's averse to new things yet it's probably the richest demographic in many countries if not all.

I've seen the elderly happily depositing hundreds of dollars per day on pokies to the point that venues are very dependant on them. To give an example, there was an ad in the local paper how the RSL club would be unable to support local charities, jobs would go, veterans would suffer, etc if gamblers were discouraged by setting limits before gambling by law.
You are right. I've come to realize that the reason the site has garnered the attention it has thus far is mainly due to the comparison to Khan Academy. Otherwise, such services already exist (although one could argue that their execution leaves something to be desired).

The only reason I used Khan Academy in the slogan was to get the idea closer to mind (and to do it with as few words as possible). But the effect has been far more powerful than anticipated.

I'm really wondering now if I should remove any allusion to Khan Academy from the page. What do you think?
How come you never see cool things in North America? I guess we'll just have to make do and carry on with our software-infested careers.
Specifically, Palm Graffiti.
I think a lot of the growth is/will be in offices where people are working at computers. A group of people with headphones at workstations DJing to each other is very compelling, and turns a part of the environment that can be isolating into something social. Likewise, friends working at different companies can be plugged in to each other in an ambient way while working. That's the coolest part so far.

Beyond that, there seems to be a lot of ad-less Pandora going on: join a genre-focused room and get a stream of stuff you may or may not know without the labor of building a playlist in Grooveshark. As stated elsewhere, this can be annoying though, because people suck at sticking to the stated genre (ie. frantic Drum and Bass in a "chillout" room).

If it really gets traction, it will also become a target for bands to market themselves. I've already seen some DJs spinning their own songs.

Big hurdle: it's ugly. They should fix that, especially since it's basically a "place" to hang out.
It's perplexing that they charge such a large premium when the industry must be saving many millions of dollars a year in printing costs, box office attendants, and sales.
Here are some thoughts.

1. A journey line can be anything which weakens the focus of the site. Could you pick one particular use of the journey line and focus the site and the business on that use? For example, if this is useful in MBA courses you can focus on that. This focus will give you immediate actions. You could talk to MBA professors in the area and see if they want to use this for their classes. Would they be willing to pay for use? Plus you can use the name of the university as a user and increase the credibility of the business and maybe make it easier to charge on the next deal.

2. Could you give a more clear example on your site or in a blog about how to use this?

3. Try to sell the subscription. Based on feedback from potential customers see if there is a particular angle and focus that will make this resonate with a gap in the market place.

4. Do you use the site? What do you use it for? Could you live without it? Would you pay money use it? If not then what would make you pay money to use it?
I maybe downvoted to hell for speaking against a yc company. But I am going to say it anyway because it's downright wrong.

Now that their dirty practice is out in the open. What do they do?

Oh, It's actually a bug in our software, and we'll fix it.

This is just way too dishonest.

In 2008, when users signed up for loopt, they sms/spam everyone from the address book of users. When people complained about the spam, what do they do?

Oh, there's a bug in our user interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt#SMS_invitation_issues

If companies like Loopt succeed, it might give people the wrong idea that in order to succeed, you need to adopt sketchy practices like what airbnb and loopt have used. It doesn't matter if it's unethical or even illegal as long as you benefit from it and get away with it.

This is just sad.

Now it might give people the wrong signal that in order to be accepted by pg/YC, you need to be as sketchy/evil as Loopt or Airbnb founders
FFS, don't work for others for free!

Work on an open source project.

Build your own site. If you don't have ideas, then look through flippa.com for ideas. Build a site, and then sell it on Flippa.

Find out what people want, then build it for yourself. For example, you could build Wordpress add-ons and sell them. People will give you ideas for this all day long.

If you must work for someone else for cheap (not free!) then look for your closest web development shops and offer to work as an intern for cheap. If you don't get work, then learn more and come back later.
That seems disingenuous. It is my understanding that the fees are kicked back to the venue owners only if they make TicketMaster their sole agent. If you sell tickets anywhere other than your box office or TicketMaster, you're not going to see a dime of those TicketMaster fees.