skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At first, this seems to be the bog-standard "I built something that people said they want, but then they didn't buy it" post-mortem. However, dig deeper and you will be delighted by gems like these:

"This is a farce. Talking about tech and being on the Twitter make teachers look good to administrators and to the public. They can add “Technology Committee Member” to their resumes and congratulate themselves for being innovative. But using tech to do work requires a small minimum of effort and change, and any amount of these is too much for teachers."

"I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement."

I applaud this subtle rhetorical device. The author understands that this readers may well be distracted by feelings of sympathy. So, he has carefully filled his post with nuggets like these so that we can focus on the substance of his post, rather than mawkish sentiments like: "How sad that a nice person can work hard for a year on a startup and not succeed".
Disagree. Eric Schmidt is being very careful and respectful, knowing that his quotes will be taken apart later, and it's hard when you have congressmen some of which with their own agendas who want to show their constituents that they are asking Google the tough questions and are not afraid to take action.

Whenever I see a person and think, "man, that would be really hard for me to do, and I am a CEO!" I think they are doing an excellent job.

I would say that a programmer's carefulness is serving him well here. Even though he's not one, as far as I know. :)
My point is that, even in that case (current silicon scaling stopping at 5nm), there are a lot of potential technologies that could allow Moore's law to continue (nanowires, III-V materials, etc.).
Why We Built a Chat Room that is Closed 99% of the Time
The difference is that the iOS stuff only runs on $500 devices. The web stuff runs on just about everything. No one ever said standards were easy.
Aw, yet another thing I wanted to build several years ago but never got around to it. I even got a cool domain name for it, just never started coding. It was meant to be just a link you can share with friends, and have it pipe your local audio to them.

My (and my friends') workaround ended up being just sending a link to the song on YouTube to whoever I want to listen to it. Not nearly as seamless as a "proper" solution, of course, but simple enough.
Ask HN: What do people do with the code from failed startups?
I see a good amount of failed startup stories come across HN and I always wonder what they do with the code after they have called it quits. I haven't really seen a case of someone open-sourcing their code and uploading on github or something. I know that this is easier said than done, there are probably some legal issues around it. Nonetheless, I am just curious in what people actually do. Do they destroy it? Archive it? Print it out and burn it?
My point wasn't that Linux or Python or jQuery own their sectors. I responding to your claim that a single owner promotes stagnation.

It's important to distinguish the Internet from the collection of web technologies. The Internet is the thing that needs to remain open and uncontrolled.
I don't understand the argument. Joe is saying that the web stack (that is, HTTP/HTML/JS/CSS) deserves to be saved. And that the only way to save it is to have somebody own it.

But what makes the web stack special if someone owns it? Why is it worth saving? Let's face it, if you actually bought The Web(tm) from a vendor, you'd ask for your money back.
Yup, you're right: the data is automated by CrunchBase. It should also be noted that fundings, exits, etc are under-reported, as CrunchBase is generally a little bit behind for two reasons: 1) Not everyone keeps their companies up to date 2) Some people don't want to make much noise with their financial events
Is there an example of a storm cluster in Clojure somewhere? I could only find examples for Java, Python and Ruby on github.
GitHub is a great Strange Loop. Probably why it's so good.
Same with Ixquick. Looks like it's still around, and going for the "privacy" angle, like DDG.

http://ixquick.com/
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Would give new meaning to the term "voted off the island"
Have a look at http://xp-dev.com which does not have any limits on number of projects

(disclaimer: I run it)
"You’ll be working from your home. You’ll report to Dave Thomas, but you’ll also be working with other senior staff both to help resolve issues and to work on enhancements to our systems."

I think this is a great section. Too many employers lack the confidence and business awareness to encourage the idea of working from home. You don't need someone sitting at a desk next to you so that you can bother them every few minutes. If your requirements are communicated efficiently and documented properly the developer's physical location is completely irrelevant.
Ask HN: Reading materials for someone looking to get into the startup world
I've been an entrepreneur for many years, with both successes and failures. I love it. Some of my friends who have been 9-5ers for years have asked me for recommendations on articles/blogs/books to read about taking the plunge into the startup world. Embarrassingly, I've come up blank off the top of my head, and I don't have enough time to fully vet all the stuff that pops up in Google to make sure I'm not doing them a disservice.

So, HN, I turn to you. Off the top of your head, what reading materials would you suggest for a typically non-tech person that is looking to jump into our world?
I recommend setting up a Google spreadsheet form to collect emails during this preliminary stage. Mark me down, please.
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The information dilemma - Roger Ehrenberg IA Ventures
Interesting post by Roger on Big Data and finance industry. Can anyone recommend some resources for how big data is being used in Finance industry specifically in the area of automated analysis of unstru
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That was my first thought. Create an Airbnb opportunity for people willing to leave the area as they found it (remove own rubbish, etc).

I've always wanted to be stranded with basic supplies to see how I'd go but someone in survival mode might end up needing to hack away at trees to build a shelter and trap rabbits and I don't know how that would gel with their principles.
I'm sure I'm going to feel really dumb after getting the answer to this, but what prevents someone from sending a picture of the same check to deposit in multiple banks through their respective phone apps?
Checkout http://fivedetails.com/seamless/.
I typically tar it up and store it somewhere safe. On occasion, I'll work on a new project that could use a piece of code I know I've got stored away. Other times, it's something I stumble upon years later and laugh at myself for my coding style & quality, which continues to improve. "Omg I can't believe I tried to solve X that way... wow..."

I've seen a few people open source their code for failed projects. Hadn't really thought about that, but it's something I'll keep in mind should I have an interesting, failed project.
I guess I can't submit my query with the story

Interesting post by Roger on Big Data and finance industry. Can anyone recommend some resources for how big data is being used in Finance industry specifically in the area of automated analysis of unstructured 'relevant' financial information?
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Yeah, I am not sure what the real value in open-sourcing the code would be because you can imagine how hard it would be trying to dig through a project that isn't designed like a library for re-use.
Having rubbish/refuse management under control would help a lot.
Also, CMake uses CMake to create its project files. Any others?
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Indeed. By the time the pill reaches the top, it's coated by a foot thick layer of sugar.
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How does Android only have a reach of 24 million people in that article when they were activating 550,000 devices a day with 130 million devices already sold by July of this year?
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I'm looking to put an interactive line chart on my blog for people to compare performance between a few things. Anyone know of a good one thats free? Thanks!
Nah...I want to know what it will look like when I'm wearing it and this is definitely how my shirts typically look when I put them on.
Wow, can't wait for this.

4-5 years ago, for my first startup idea, I actually spent a few months and built a client that will scan your complete MP3 library, extract and normalize ID3 tags, and sync with a web frontend.

The frontend lets you control and listen to your library in real time, and also multiplex your stream to as many listeners as you want. You could also browse and control your full music library through this.

Relevant news.yc thread from 1631 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753
My point is that a central owner _without competition_ stifles innovation. There's only one web, so a central owner would be a bad thing - for the web. To quote your article "To thrive, HTML and company need what those other platforms have: a single source repository and a good owner to drive it"

The only other way to read that is that you're advocating splintering web technology into HTML-Moz, HTML-IE, HTML-Cr and so on. While that might make for a better developer experience for somebody who develops apps for _one_ of those platforms, it's a disaster in terms of interoperability. Which is kind of one of the key points of "The Web".

We were heading down that path for a while with browser-specific extensions, and it lead to large problems. For users, because they needed to have "just the right browser". And for many backend services, because actually extracting data from web pages required understanding all competing standards.

I care mostly about the users. The web of yore, with "best viewed with" stickers was a debacle in terms of UX.
I'd especially second #3, which is a popularity contest. In my experience (raised money twice before, doing it again now), it's basically impossible to raise from VCs/Angels who are not actively looking to invest in your industry already, no matter how good your business is.
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I'm not sure why you'd say 'unquestionably,' short of a very loose definition of what makes an application.

People spend 8 hours a day using desktop apps -- word, excel, outlook, GIS software, development tools, whatever.

They read their email and twitter and consume content throughout the day on their mobile devices.

At home they play video games, read books, comics, videos -- all using 'apps' on their TVs, mobile devices, and playstations.

Color me unconvinced -- I just took a break from 3 hours reading in iBooks to write this.
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Smart boy.
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An announcement of an announcement. This has added nothing to HN or my day.
Eric Schmidt is no longer a programmer, but he was one of the authors of lex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)
"I have seen what Facebook is launching on Thursday, and it’s going to change the world of social media."

"On Thursday, developers will be elated, users will be shellshocked and the competition will look ancient. On Thursday, Facebook will be reborn. Prepare yourselves for the evolution of social networking."

These are some pretty bold quotes. It certainly caught my attention. I am pretty anxious to see what they will be launching. The music tweet from earlier I think is a neat idea.
I appreciate your detailed and involved response, and I appreciate your experienced perspective. That said, I'd like to make a few points.

First, I suspect you're assuming I'm new to the industry or that I am working on my first startup. In fact, I have done several, had a number of good exits, and am currently building another profitable, growing business in a large market. I am no stranger to building successful businesses, and I've put in my time on the web developer's equivalent to the 80186 project.

Second, my experience is that success in building businesses in no way translates to the kind of popularity or network that venture capitalists look for. Your claim that simply working in a startup gives one visibility to other entrepreneurs and those who funded them is not something I have seen. I have seen tons of contact with vendors, customers, strategic partners, etc, but never venture capitalists. They simply don't move in the same circles that bootstrapped companies move in.

Mind you, none of this is sour grapes. We're doing quite well growing on the basis of our own cash flow. We are happy to have never diluted ourselves and we are happy to have full control over the board and decision-making. But if we ever got to a point where we would like to accelerate our growth with outside capital, there is a no door open to us in the VC community, because we lack access to that network. Bank loans or traditional boutique private equity firms would be the likely targets of our financing efforts.

Anyway, I enjoyed your story of your time at Intel - it's great to see one of the "fathers" of early microprocessors here on HN. Thanks.
How about for textbooks or schoolbooks? This is at a size that I could actually see myself using it, if it were something I could lay flat on a desk. It would even be practical for taking notes, I think.
> Even though he's not one, as far as I know. :)

He is one of the authors of Lex if that helps :)
The web has already crushed a bunch of 'owned' platforms that had strong-willed, deep-pocketed stewards. A good run for iOS, and a few features where the web lags, doesn't change the immense power of the web commons platform. The things proven-out by adjacent proprietary platforms will be assimilated, in a few years' time — plenty of time for multivendor adoption and mass-market usership.

(It won't be standards bodies that lead the way — they never do. At best they can codify consensus after the fact, and lightly shame laggards. Instead a rotating selection of innovators, in different categories, will drive change.)
Your argument pretty much hinges on the assertion that Microsoft innovates more than others on the web, which is not something everyone agrees with.
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Just curious. I read Running Lean and always had problems with its advice. I just recently got my hands on Lean Startup and think the advice is a lot better.

Running Lean is part of the problem. People can't tell you what they want, you can only observe what they actually do.

You should have pivoted Knack so that its customers were parents who wanted to track the progress of their child against other children. That's what parents just love to do. Parents should have been begging their teachers to use the tool, then it would have been adopted and you probably could have charged a lot more for it.
joke journalism. out.
I guess it's horses for courses - but I do agree with you that it seems rather bland. I much prefer something like last.fm where I can listen to tracks that others with similar tastes to me are listening to.
or in this case, you live and i learn. :)

Thanks for that awesome bit of info. I've always assumed stock options are better because it raises the purchase price of a company in comparison to an all cash sale. I guess even if the purchase price is lower, money in your bank is always > paper money.
Well, Apple, Google, Mozilla and MS control the browser scene, and that's what I think Joe meant by platform. Things are a little more complicated in the backend.

You could add Facebook to the pack but, though it has changed how people use the Web, it didn't contribute much to improving the platform.

And in a sense, although it may sound idealistically foolish, all of us. A long time ago, I helped fixing a bug that prevented Webkit and Gecko from connecting to my bank's crappy site, making me launch VirtualPC just about everyday. A few years later, I wrapped a perl script in a GUI that spared the users of a broadband provider from having to manually login in on the carrier's “portal” just to use the Web. A lot of people used it and they eventually changed that annoying behavior. There's nothing stopping you from trying to have an influence.
I take it you're going for irony here, but, well, your hyperbole is right: as a shipping product, or anything other than a very cool hardware proof of concept, this absolutely does not exist.

When Apple invents some new UI conventions suitable for such a form factor, spends years testing and tweaking them, engineers all the hardware to fit neatly into a single unit with optimal battery life, builds a cost-effective manufacturing process and ships it along with an SDK full of frameworks custom-suited for such a large touch surface, then it will exist.

And yes, it will only run software from the App Store.
this can really be a killer app if done right. this increases the average time spent on fb further. currently fb and twitter are not doing anything about the users past activities like, likes/tweets/status updates etc., except for images in Facebook. if i wanted to look up an interesting thing i tweeted or shared in the past it is really not that intuitive and most of the time i give up. this music thing can be really huge similar to the images app, not just the live listing feature, currently there is no way to have all my liked music from various apps to be in one place.they may introduce a music tab, they also have my favourite artists, so they may fill my music tab with their songs if available. if done right this can be really huge, the most used app next to images. i hope they can deliver.
They still haven't open sourced Android 3.0, in which they said they would never release that part of Apache licensed code to the public.

So there could then be a possibility, again be hidden APIs so that their tablet app offerings could be better than others.

I personally think that, if you claim open source, some should be able to obtain the code if they are using the software itself. I clearly don't think a normal android tablet user would reasonably grab a copy of that source code.
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I think a bank aimed at providing a good service to consumers, with a great user interface and features that are beneficial to low income customers, has the potential to be truly useful to that demographic.

The two things that could get in the way are marketing and access. I agree that, so far at least, it does appear to be marketing to... well, a hacker news croud. This may change as they open to the general public. Certainly, HNers probably make better beta customers for just about any business. Let's hope they start making themselves known outside the tech field, for their sake and ours.

As far as access, obviously the poorest of the poor probably don't have access to an online bank, and if you make the bank unusable to people without a smart phone, you're limiting it even further. On top of that, it's not clear yet whether they will have stringent credit rating requirements that could shut a lot of people out who need a service like this.

My hope is that BankSimple will keep in mind how important they could be to people who really do need a less malevolent bank. They certainly could end up appealing only to an affluent crowd, but I get the feeling that they have a certain amount of zealous righteousness that could translate good user experience into a truly new type of bank. I do think they are that ambitious, and I think they have the opportunity to fulfill that ambition. But it's still up to them to prove that their heart is in the right place.
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I just want to pick one illustrative example, because the other replies cover most of the ground:

What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon.

In native-land, we've had SQLite for over a decade. If I want "WebSQL DB" today, I simply link sqlite into my project and move on.

Before SQLite, we had bdb. When the next new thing I want to use comes along, I'll simply use it, and I won't have to wait around for standardization, and the for browser makers to wrap it up in a JavaScript API.
Everything the web runs on now is much more advanced than the computers of 10 years ago.

Joe's point he made a year ago is still true today, but it hasn't happened. "Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later"
Bring a stick man to life.
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A) not everyone does yet B) with a check you don't have to get any information from who you're paying other than the name.
Listening to the same thing as your friends right now makes a great demo, increases time on Facebook.com, and is a first step in gathering new data that can be associated with facebook uid's.

Once Facebook has the data for what every person in the world (already close to 1 billion active users) listens to at all times (via FB Connect) then an entire ecosystem will emerge from this data set and the graph API alone.

It might even save last.fm, if they can build something compelling on top of that data.
Online IDE? Check out http://c9.io/
lol, i just realized myspace used to do this? anyway i hope the music experience wont effect fb negatively. i can also see fb coming on top of all the current cloud based music services if done right
If the startup isn't costing you a lot it may be best it leave it running. It'll give you more credibility as if someone says "I Made X and failed" yet there's just an expired domain at X you've basically scrubbed out the past and your work.

There's other sides to this as you won't want an ugly broken site up connected to your name. Case by case basis really.

There isn't a whole lot you could do with the code, i'd just say for most open source it and leave it quietly running, if feasible.
Also take note that the CEO of Turntable.fm is scheduled to speak tomorrow at Facebook's f8 conference.
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Some value is better than no value I guess.
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