skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely agree with this. I left on a round the world trip in April with my wife. We've been through Australia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, and now Austria. I spend half of my time traveling / meeting people and the other half building my mobile app business. The trip is costing us about $5000/mo (using airbnb and being fairly liberal with spending on food and attractions, we have 0 expenses in the states since we packed everything into storage), but I've managed to triple revenues this year to ~ 25K/mo, so if we wanted to we could do this indefinitely.

I know many people who are working 80 hrs/week on their startup while letting life pass them by (including a few in YC), but I wouldn't trade places with them. These days it is entirely possible to build a company and live your dreams at the same time.
I found it neither confusing nor hypocritical. My take-away is that with an educated work-force and working market, a city can improve its productivity by allowing density to increase. Cities that don't do this - typically cities with well-heeled citizens who don't want their backyards ruined - will see their competitive advantages eroded.
For those that haven't seen it, this is exactly how the Better Business Bureau (BBB) operates as well, here is a 20/20 investigation look at it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw
For a time I thought topic based folders was the best approach, but over time I figured out that sorting folders in an 1 - 10 fashion, 1 being all the sites I really care about to 10 sites I would read if I have the time. By triaging my feeds like this I know then I can read the most important pieces in a very short amount of time. I don feel bad at all about emptying out the otter folders.
I'd be inclined to trust YC that they make their money by picking AirbnBoxen rather than chiseling twenty somethings out of a few thousand bucks. Even if I were cynical regarding their motivations, I would personally take a YC investment as a Good Housekeepng Seal of "will probably not pull sociopathic moves.". My theory: founders only need to exit once and might be tempted to get screwtastic. VCs face no market penalty for screwing employees because a) employees have severe information asymmetry when it comes to deciding who to work for based on investors, b) the Valley practices institutional omertà about speaking ill of fellow investors except over backchannel, and c) a reputation for chiseling out employees doesn't hurt VCs at their main opportunity for market feedback: seeking LP.

By comparison, YC is an early employee-comprehensible brand, and I'd expect anyone contemplating screwage would hear "You are about to chill hiring at several hundred companies in the mafia. Are you sane?! Don't do this. If you insist on doing this, we'll be forced to very publicly disassociate ourselves from your decision. You do not want to be the one ex-mafia guy in the Valley. It is a lonely place."
If you choose a product with a rating of more than 4 stars averaged over a lot of customer reviews, it's pretty decent data to go by. For routers, there are a handful of good brand names you can safely pick from. Even so, you admit you don't actually read the reviews, just go by the total number.

It's harder when choosing a product like a washing machine which has a lot of options between 3-4 stars in any given price range and no clear winner.
why has your code improved?
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I'm a subscriber to your javascript and html5 newsletters and I must admit you're doing a great job. every week i get the best of the news, carefully picked with short descriptions so I don't have to look any further if something doesn't interest me. i wished there was newsletters like yours for more of the topics that interest me!

thanks!
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As a consumer i'd prefer not getting any likes to getting tons of notlikes on my boring fb status updates...

Besides, an issue with such systems being used to determine merit is this... Which is worse, having a bunch of people who consume the content you created and not give a ditt or people connecting with it and disagreeing and marking a downvote
PhiloGL - WebGL data visualization, coding and game development
How does sam get what he needs from his twitter stream?
Is it ok to run an illegal library from my locker at school?
AccumuloProposal
Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth
It seems there's a problem that needs to be solved, doesn't it? How's this for a startup idea: "Pandora for RSS"

Users subscribe to a few feeds and provide feedback as to which articles they liked and disliked; the system correlates each individual with other similar users and starts providing suggestions, ratings, and sorts the articles in terms of "quality" that you defined by your votes. Then, as a user, you don't have to read everything - just the best recent posts.

It can be treated more like a tailored/customized version of Reddit or Hacker News. You don't have to "catch up", you just go browse it when you feel like it.
http://www.interviewstreet.com
So I spent 6 months or so sitting in a room with 3 really good salespeople selling solar power systems to homeowners (anywhere from $20k up). The things I noticed, listening to their phone patter, etc.

- Building trust is the most important thing in getting to a close. The buyer has to feel like you're working for them, and that your knowledge is valuable. In the end they should feel that you've done such a great job helping them figure out all the options and pitfalls, that they're very happy to pay you a commission.

- Feeding and monitoring the pipeline and allocating your time matters. You get many people with just casual interest. You have to serve them well, but also not misallocate time, as you have to devote the majority of time to people who are closer to the actual sale. So you have to be able to judge how serious people are. CRMs (i.e. Sales Force) are your best friends.

- Despite the last point, sometimes big sales appear out of the blue, from customers you thought you lost, or someone you met at a party, or whatever. Network a lot and never burn your bridges.

- "Hard" selling doesn't work.

- There's no one "salesman" personality. There's traits you need (especially that you enjoy talking to people), but the 3 guys were all over the map.
Thanks. I see it both ways, and agree with both you and rumpelstiltskin.

My current job pays abysmally low, but it offered great experience when I didn't have any. And I'm getting more interesting opportunities now because of it.

So now I can afford to be a little less desperate.
Was just logging into the e-service portal DigiD which previously had a Government cert verified by DigiNotar. Now it's verified by Getronics PinkRoccade, a big dutch IT-services company belonging to former state-owned telco KPN.
"they are convinced it filtered at least some of the positive reviews after the Braders refused to buy advertising."

If I was Yelp, I'd try to address this accusation somewhere.
I wouldn't recommend competing primarily on price. Start fresh with solving the problem in a way you think would address the needs of the market better. MP3 players existed well before the iPod and cost a lot less.

Find and talk to target customers and try to discern what would meet their needs best. I've been trying to take Jason Cohen's number of 30 to heart...find 30 customers who would buy your product, or tweak your offering until you do. Don't ignore the competition entirely, but don't base what you do just on what is out there.
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I actually want to see an educational process/technique that produces content, even half as good as Khan Academy, repeatably.

My question has always been - will Khan Academy lose relevance after Sal Khan ? Or is there a recipe that allows the creation of more Khan Academys.
Yea, I don't think I did mis-understand the comment, but I glad you found a place to plug your site.
How to Launch a Cool Looking Viral Launching Coming Soon Page
Broken is a point of view. Backwards compatibility is important to Microsoft.
I've gotten into the habit of just having git installed on my web server, and pulling directly from there. Is there some reason why whiskey_disk is better?
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Exactly. I use to sit back on launch Reeder on my iPad AFTER my working day is done. It may take some time to go through all those items and skipping duplicate stories can be anoying but it's always nice to end the day with good content that keeps you updated. There's really no need to consider rss as interfering notifications.
Michael, thank you for the well thought out feedback.
oh no another launchrock. I hate these pages, with generic image and incredibly vague product description.
That's an awful lot of negative press. Seems quite possible there's something to it (unless there's some sort of conspiracy against Yelp).
This too -- I can identify precisely with this second paragraph. I can't be content with filling some kind of mould. But that's because I can see the mould, and it certainly isn't me.

Seeing possibilities is not something one necessarily chose to do - it was maybe the result of a great need at a time, but now that you're out of the mould, and you see you're a pot maker - not just the clay - the bets are off, because your dreams are different.

I think that's when meaning becomes important, in order to not be consumed by ambition. That's probably also when it becomes really important to make sure that you have both supportive and different people around you.
Counterpoint: sometimes regular employees do great. An older (~now 35-ish) acquaintance of mine made near-FU money from Amazon.com. He was an English major fresh out of college, started at Amazon when it was still a startup; his jobs were _reviewing books and doing secretary stuff + odd jobs_.

Lots of talk here about the myriad ways employees can get screwed, but sometimes they do great.

Another awesome company? Linear Tech. Not quite a startup anymore, but they do a lot of hardcore analog+digital EE design. Their engineers get design ownership over specific projects/chip designs, and are paid _a percentage of profits_ on that chip. So there are a substantial number of regular employees there who are millionaires because they designed something cool.
The Spanish speakers might be only a niche in the case of this one website, but they don't face being a niche practically everywhere they turn. I'm not going to weigh in on how that difference should affect how you deal with accessibility, but it's a real one.
Properties of self-avoiding walks (Part 1)
Pitching effectively to big groups
I had things locked down great, as I had gone to work with them to implement my IP that they required fundamentally as part of their business. They signed a licensing agreement and a document outlining the various inventions I had coming in to it. After their product was ready to ship, there was a buy out offer, but required exclusive ownership of my IP. The license was non-transferable and required renegotiation. They didn't like this and asked me to transfer ownership outright to them for free or they would fire me and I would lose all my equity. They had absolutely no case whatsoever, but this didn't stop them from launching legal proceedings against me. These went no where since it was only for the purpose of strongarming and intimidating me. At one point, a vice president of the company was telephoning relatives of mine and threatening them if I didn't cave. I didn't cave, held to my position (which was very reasonable), and they didn't bother to proceed since they knew they had no case, but only after tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to top notch lawyers to represent me against them. Several months after this they sold to another company (Fortune 500 sort) and lied to them that they owned my IP, not mentioning me at all. That company then patented it, with the VP claiming to have invented it. At the same time I have his signature on a licensing agreement, the exact text describing the invention which appears on their new patent, granted some 10 years after I first implemented it. (It was previously a trade secret that I was selectively licensing.) Of course the next question is why don't I sue them. That's easy. At the end of all this I was broke and in debt and there's no lawyer taking IP cases pro bono. They are tremendously expensive and in the end the company with the deeper pockets nearly always wins. Good IP lawyers run $400+ per hour.
I suggest you do more research. If you are having a local database use, sqlite, possibly csv, or flatfiles. Otherwise use whatever solution thats right for your application. It doesn't matter if its mobile or not.
Agreed. If there was one terrible review written a year or two ago by someone with a reviewing history, and then suddenly twenty gushing all caps reviews filled with superlatives and exclamations of personal affection by reviewers with no other review history, all posted within the same week, I'd be upset if yelp didn't filter them out.

If some business tells all of their best customers to post a review on Yelp, a site they had never used before, then they actually are straw reviews and worth nothing - and this business owner admits that. Case closed. Filter working perfectly.

This is not to say that the one bad review characterizes this man's business in any way. He probably just doesn't have a tech-savvy, hip clientele, and the first yelper he ran into may have been a spoiled curmudgeon. What offsets the damage is that since he isn't drawing from that hip clientele, the review is likely not driving away any significant business.

The best response would probably be to put a Yelp sign in some prominent space, which might trigger someone who is familiar with their business to add a few more reviews. If he gives good service, the preponderance will be good. Much better idea than calling for a favor from your affectionate regulars.

There is no right to a good reputation.
I'd love to know your story and background. Do you have a lot of experience in the mobile space? iOS or Android? Do you have employees? Contractors?

What sort of apps do you build?
She found that the subjects who believed that exercising one's willpower strengthens it rather than depletes it actually increased their willpower.

That to me doesn't discredit the notion that willpower is an exhaustible, finite resource. It merely illuminates a neat psychological trick for increasing your willpower.
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the reporter egocentric Liz, the mother leaves her son were harassed just one cupcake a week and Natalie
That's a false equivalence, though. China's "rules" are much worse than most of the "everywhere else"s. Thus, they will continue to have trouble attracting foreign investment.

Which is, perhaps, exactly how they want it.
I'm always open to suggestions! :-) There are a couple more on the way but it's reached a bit of a "crunch" time where I decide if there's a business in it or not. Interesting times.
You're being ridiculous. I don't have access to Unilever's internal marketing materials, and I doubt that you do either.
the monolith comment was more spot on than you think. see fullerenes: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/08/fulle...
I'm wondering. Considering how important these things are, would it make sense that governments set up their own CA?
New experiences probably have some effect on your ability to think abstractly. I've heard similar anecdotes of people improving various skills due to traveling.
Scrum is a decent place to start, but it really isn't the be-all of agile and in many cases, one could argue, it becomes the anti-thesis of "lean". On the bright side Scrum has done much to get agile into places that probably wouldn't have considered anything without a certification and consultant-based training attached to it. The bad thing about Scrum is that has also done more to facilitate cargo-cult agile than anything else.

Iterations? We don't sell iterations around here we sell software, software features specifically. Planning releases around iterations often results in more pain than pleasure I'm afraid, but it is still usually a step up from most traditional waterfall processes (on that note, most traditional waterfall shops really have no idea how to do waterfall either).

Stand-ups? Great when there is no more than 5-8 people, more than 10 and they quickly become a way to bore the entire team for 15 minutes.

Velocity? A useful planning tool, but often seen by managers who have "drunk the Scrum kool-aid" as a way to measure team performance. It's not, and in the end planning poker is simply another euphemism for task estimation, which in turn is a euphemism for performing magic tricks.

Scrum certainly has it's place, but it's important for teams learning it to treat it as just a few steps along a much longer path.
To be honest, I do have RSS feeds of the newsletters that I don't promote (unless people specifically ask). I haven't put much effort into them for two reasons: 1) I'm trying to get the e-mail side of things 100% right rather than spread myself too thin, and 2) e-mail is a lot easier to monetize nowadays (think mid/high double digit CPMs rather than the $5 or so I make on my Web properties).
From personal experience Yelp is a company I do not respect or trust in anything.

Yelp absolutely don't care about small business and how their filtering system works. My wife is running a small business and she has been facing exactly the problems described in the article. Real customers posting real reviews but quickly disappearing in the filtered reviews for unknown reasons, some of her customers have been on Yelp for a while but still their reviews are filtered, while some competitors (we guess) post a negative review with what is most likely a fake account stayed, and are never filtered out.

Like in the article, my wife was contacted by Yelp to advertise, and she declined... Soon after some of the positive reviews vanished!

Yelp until a year or so ago didn't even let business owner reply to a negative review, so the power was in the hand of the reviewer. What is worst is that even with that in place, even if a fake review is posted and advertising for a competitive business which is against their TOS, Yelp simply do not care of removing such review.
Another area wher Yelp is doing a really poor job: it is still possible to review a closed business or a business that change name BUT the business owner can't reply to any such post. So the communication is borked and Yelp does't care to fix that. They do mention "freedom of speech" which my wife and I do get, but then how come someone can post a review on a close business, but the previous business owner can't reply to it?? If people are able to review but owner can't reply, it means that their back end system has some logic to handle that, but the code for the owner to reply has most likely been disabled ! Why? That's not really how freedom of speech work!

Yelp is NOT at all for promoting small business, they are in the business of selling ads and having the most page views. Trying to be a fair and honest business is not at all on their business plan.

From what I heard from other small business owner here in the Bay Area, they have experienced mostly the same.

Yelp is what I consider a SCAM and as a software engineer I will never consider a job in this unprofessional company. Sooner or later I think the truth will be shown on how Yelp manipulate their system for their own benefits.

Finally to conclude this rant, my wife business is still going on even with some negative reviews because we made sure that she was not dependent on Yelp for getting customers. She had many happy returning customers for the past 3 years, even if their positive reviews disappeared.
> I think what the author of the article really wanted is to suggest a free/open commenting platform similar to disqus.

From TFA:

> So I guess what I’m saying is that we need an open source (preferably AGPL) Disqus.
I'm currently experiencing some scalability issues as you might have noticed. The machine I deployed on is limited to 128mb. But Joyent is actively resolving it.

You can try going to http://observer.no.de/sign-in to sign in again and see if that resolves your issues.

If not just create a new account :p
That's a mighty fine business you have there. Shame if anything were to happen to all your positive reviews. Maybe... advertising with us could help with that?
I don't know if you use Twitter but there are some great (unofficial) HN related accounts on there. @newsyc100 has all items that get at least 100 votes, for example. I also like @hnfirehose for the real time experience.
> However, assuming that I'm using Disqus just because I'm running a blog on Jekyll isn't a fair claim.

Assuming every jekyll user also uses Disqus? Not fair. Assuming a significant correlation? Very fair.
A peek at the home of Dieter Rams (industrial design, Braun)
Incidentally, the robotic wheelchair that can climb stairs (the iBot) is now discontinued [1]. Based on the bevy of comments, users are sad to see it go. Also, I believe Deka (and now J&J) have extensive patents in this space. They should release into the public domain so that others can build on the technology.

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/02/11/ibot-discontinued-unfo...
Thank you, very interesting read! Also the customer's perspective in the comments...
They have. Take a look at the default root CA list in your browser. The big governments are represented and therefore can MITM anyone they want.
It would be nice if this could be combined with something that extracts the content of HN's links in to the RSS feed itself, like:

http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://...
"the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything."

I completely agree. The other huge problem with social search is I don't have 100% overlap with all of my friends. If I like Alice's taste in music, and Bob's taste in food, searching among Alice's taste in food and Bob's taste in music is a complete loss for me. Instead, I want "Netflix search": "people similar to you that rated Foo 4 stars also rated Bar 4 stars.
tangential: it amazes me more attractive women don't pull a natalie dylan.
I think that the problem is that we are looking at "willpower" as a general skill when we should see it as more specific to the task. I have built up quite a bit of resistance to certain desires like food and television, but I still flounder when it comes to other areas of my life.

I would be very interested in long-term studies that attempt to build willpower in just one area and then examine the individual's ability to apply that self-control to another, separate task.
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Torrents don't work like that. Once someone has downloaded the old version and leave it to seed, it is accessible and can still be downloaded with the right link.
My browser pointed at Hacker News and sub-reddits is my "dip in to the info stream" tool. My RSS reader is for low-volume feeds where I'm fairly likely to care about each item.

That's both bases covered without compromise.
Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web
Absolutely the first thing to do id you want to pursue this is to get rights to the software from the bank. In the US they own it because you were an employee using their resources. Use a lawyer because employment and IP law are a mine field. (Oh, you are a lawyer. IANAL, but my advice is still good. :-)

PG mentions a web based service which I think is the way to go, but some kind of Excel add on might be easier to sell. If it is web based, look at the fog creek model because adoption is cheap and painless.

As far as University vs startup, some great companies have been founded in grad school.

I say go for it. Scratching your own itch is a good motivation for producing a goo product, particularly since it is in a domain little served by HNers.