skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sales is important

But it's not everything. There are other aspects of marketing that hackers are usually pretty good at (for instance, giving the impression that your company is honest and hires smart, competent people.)

Many companies skip the "buy a suit, meet the client, buy them expensive dinners" kind of sales. Selling to consumers is much easier (well, for me) you still have to market your company (like I said, can be as simple as giving the impression you are smart, competent and honest, depending on your target market.) but the actual sales consists of posting the prices and setting up an automated system to take money. No fast-talking is required.

Some people say you need sales skills to attract investors and partners. Personally, I wouldn't take an investment from someone I wouldn't want as a partner, because they will act as a partner. And I don't want a partner who is willing to give more money to a smooth talking salesguy than to a smart, honest hacker.

Granted, I do want a good salesperson on my team, but I don't want to put anyone who is vulnerable to sales anywhere they can make decisions that effect my company. It is critical that small companies buy products and solutions that provide the best value, not products or solutions that are sold by the best salesperson.

My current plan is to get the technical side of my house in order (and I have no trouble selling to technical consumers, so far I haven't had any trouble selling faster than I can put up new capacity) and get a customer base under me. After that, it should not be difficult to get a sales person to do corporate sales or the like, if I choose to go that direction.
Likewise, I read monthlies like Portfolio for even deeper investigation and higher profile features. And funny enough, this month there was a light interview with Marc Andreessen (http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/10/15/Marc...):

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business--shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.
Maybe it's just that pg's comments are more relevant to this community? If a nickname didn't lend credibility to a comment, we could all post anonymously.

Also, users of this community likely want to read pg's comments, and upvoting is the surest way to get them noticed.
We need to get this code threaded...
Ask HN: Is personal bankruptcy a problem for founders?
I'm considering filing for bankruptcy. I plan to start companies in the future. This would of course need to be disclosed to investors in any future startups of mine. Do investors care much about previous bankruptcies? Or at all?
Researcher Warns of "Digital Dark Age"
Check this out - hope this helps -

http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/iphone-application-and-webs...

http://icodeblog.com/category/iphone-programming-tutorials/
That's an interesting find but he's not necessarily being hypocritical or deceitful. Ballmer could just think that the web apps Microsoft is announcing today are super awesome compared to Google Docs.
Why are today’s market charts inverted? Oh, you mean they *gained* that much?
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

and

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer...

Doesn't work to track Ajax? I've never used but was thinking to apply for some of my projects.
Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony
How Not to Use a Lawyer - A Personal Case Study
I thought the hold-ups were patent/licensing related? Wikipedia concurs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code

ECC's are so interesting.
FTA:

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

Here comes the difference: I still have all of the data that was important from my first commodore 64. I literally have papers I wrote when I was a 5th grader. I can't read the c64 disks now of course but I copied them. From tape to 5 1/4, from low density to high, from c64 to amiga from high desnsity to 3.5, from amiga to pc, from 3.5 to zip, from zip to cd, and now to dvd. My parents lost nearly all of their records and photos in a fire in the mid 80s.

There is no "digital dark ages" because you can copy it. Easily. With no degradation. Yes, NASA lost some data from the viking landing. They learned the same hard lesson as the rest of us. Have backups.

Digital media has its faults but then so do Libraries at Alexandria. Digital's faults are just easier to work around.
finding good people is hard, very hard. Finding good people for below market wages is even harder. It's possible, though. It is much easier if you have the skill set you are looking for. I bet that if you just hire blind and fire the people who don't work out, you will end up paying for a lot of unproductive hours.

It also adds a sense of urgency. The thing is, once these good people working for below market wages get some good experience (working for you) they will get jobs that pay market rates. This has happened to me many times. Expect and understand this. Don't feel betrayed because someone with little or no equity abandons you for several times as much money. Be honest, you would do the same. Give good references. The best resource I've found for finding people who are both skilled and poor is other people who are skilled and poor.

I'd actually like some advice on how to handle equity in this case. I've always done handshake kind of deals, which is asking for trouble if you become successful. If the company does succeed, it seems fair to me to give some equity to the people who were working for below market wages. (now, personally, I still think I should have more equity, because I was both the investor and one of the workers.)
Help Zed find Matt
Seriously. If you're not doing the fulll-on TDD thing. at least get selenium in there early and bang on the site as you go to avoid some headaches later on.

It's easy to "finish" one part then never look at it again until you demo a site, and then realize you've changed DB schema or munged some template or model and shit falls apart.
Just for the record, the map is showing directions to the Greenlake Zoka, not University.
I'm sorry but that was hilarious. Invasive like a strip search and root canal, but funny as shit.
I'm not asking for me, I'm asking about the post above mine...well, whatever.
One of the largest ever percentage gains in the DJIA was in 1933, near the bottom of the Great Depression. What does it all mean? Nothing.
All the biggest market gains were in economic recessions and depressions. Don't be fooled until the numbers come out positive for at least 2 quarters.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Legalissues/lm28.cfm
Looks a lot like Kubuntu. I like it.
I've learned more trackable economic indicators over the last two months than I have during the rest of my life. Case-Schiller? CDX? Neat! Thanks market crash! Thanks, ctkrohn!

Can someone put together an aggregator for this stuff?
Uhm, no, third party developers are not welcome yet. They will open the platform to them, later.
Get Erica Sudan's ebook. It's worth it and you'll learn a lot. Then just dive in and go for it.
but that's the thing. worse is better. The Internet doesn't need to be re-designed for every new type of technology that comes around. Sure, you can do a 'content centric' setup on top of IP, on the most hackish level, just set a squid cache with big disks at the head of your network. (at a more expensive level, you can put your content on akamai or the like) But you don't have to be content-centric, and this is good. How would you do VoIP over a content-centric network?

The decentralized and hackish nature of the internet is precisely why it has become so successful. Personally, I would argue that 'worse is better' is the only way to go if you need the cooperation of many people, as it requires the least agreement. more complex, more "perfect" systems can sometimes be better, but they usually need to be created and operated by a single entity. This would be completely incompatible with what makes the internet great.
A simple post from Flickr that I found here yesterday:

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/27/lessons-learned-while...
The Hotkey King
Zed Shaw, is that you?
The Google-ization of Bechtel
How many of the fast-money momentum investors do you think are still in the market? I would think that the large-scale losses have just begun (well, not just, but we still have more of them), because retail customers are starting to get scared and pull their money out of funds. Even though the fund managers themselves are value investors, they're only as strong as their weakest backers, so they may be forced to sell shares (even when they'd rather be buying) to meet redemptions. But then, you're closer to the market than I am, so you'd have a better idea whether this is actually going on...
Actually it looks like they imitated some features and solutions from OS X, not just simplicity per se. For instance the dock, how the user can control the menubar (taskbar in Windows) and how you select a wireless network. By Redmond running their photocopiers ;) Windows inherits some simplicity.
I'm drawing those conclusions just from looking at the pictures. I wonder if they are starting to "get it" now.

I think it's great. When I am going to run Windows once in a while in the future, it will feel more like OS X.
I clicked it and when I found out others have already clicked it I felt cheap and used.
Immediate caveats: Alex is a smart guy, and Van Jacobson (Peace be upon him) is the Interpope. I can only have an imperfect understanding of what VJ is saying with Content-Centric Networking, and I am extrapolating some of what I knew him to have been saying in the late '90s.

From the promotional material, Content-Centric Networking appears to be the combination of three major ideas in networking:

* Multicast, a failed experiment from the network layer but still a possibility outside it: simply the idea that each network hop can be 1-N instead of 1-1.

* Overlay, an idea that started with IRC and TIBCO (which I think invented content-addressed networking): the idea that we can build networks with ambitious service models on networks with simple ones.

* Peer to Peer, the idea that if we write software that's smart enough, we can repurpose all the existing services to build networks instead of deploying new ones.

On their own, these are all good ideas. Clearly, some combinations of them are effective too. But I don't think there's a new Internet you can synthesize out of them. There are some really hard problems in here that I haven't seen compelling solutions to:

* Overlayed or not, multicast gets unwieldy as more addressable content is added. The web scales because Pitchfork Media doesn't need to know anything about Ars Technica. The services that need to know everything are all contemplating building floating offshore data centers to hold it. This is the problem that will keep IP multicast from ever happening: NSPs filter prefixes below (what is it now?) /19, and multicast wants a globally routed address for every web page.

* The only proven group reliability strategies are lossiness and forward error correction (a la BitTorrent), but FEC is drastically less effective for short, near-transactional content than it is for large streams of data, and lossiness doesn't work for CNN.

* The failure modes of Internet-scale, telco-reliable P2P (err, "self-organizing networks") are totally unknown.

* Group security is harder than unicast security; for example, the group equivalent to SSL/TLS involves protocols and algorithms like key sharing that are currently exotica in industry.

* Unless all you're trying to do is stream video --- in which case, why not just invest in Akamai? --- there are too many application service models to design a single network architecture to. Who knew 150 character limits were going to be a feature in 2008? Who knew AOL IM was going to crush IRC?

VJ has been talking about these ideas for over a decade, and other absurdly smart people have been working there too --- Paul Francis and Frans Kaashoek come to mind --- and I'm sure we're going to get lots of cool stuff out of this line of thought. I doubt we'll get a new Internet.

And if we do, it'll be running directly on top of the old Internet, so we better hope it's not too shaky, Alex.
The Widening Gyre
If Larry and Sergey Asked for a Loan ...
Not sure about the colors, maybe invest in a designer and a copywriter, and did you know the button was SQL Injectable? You're off to a great start, but I worry about Facebook and Google turning this into a feature instead of a product. Consider the enterprise.
How do you manage to run Leopard in VMware?
The Behavioral Revolution: Or, the problem of perceiving the problem
Please don't use the google maps link.

2901 NE Blakeley Street, Seattle, WA 98105 is the right address.

mwerty and I are here. See you soon.
Yes, U Zoka is the right one.
World Bank data API
Facebook/FQL should also have something similar to this. A console to try out queries. This is a nice idea.
economy.fucked--;

( sleep(30); economy.fucked++ )?
LinkedIn Means Business With New Application Platform
That one may or may not have bit me, as well. :)
Who is Not Afraid of the SaaS Wolf?
That's pretty impressive, though I was thinking from the beginning, and "recent years" being the last 10 years, and also of the kernel size (not its RAM usage). I agree that kernel size matters less than RAM usage.

But to share my perspective: My first computer was a ZX81, with 1K RAM total (i.e. 1024 bytes). 32*24=768 bytes were used for video in the worst case (it was compressed, newline style). To be fair, it didn't have a filesystem (no disks) or multitasking. In truth, I found 1K just too limiting, and went for the 16K rampack addon.

Regarding my main point: I doubt the massive software base can be given up at this point (even the disruptive technology of cell phones switch to linux when they get powerful enough) - it's just my yearning for those days of daring frugality, when a byte was worth fighting for.
50+ Rubyists to Follow on Twitter
You both saw the note on the front page this weekend, yes?
You needn’t do more than attempt to watch a streaming video on a busy office LAN or oversubscribed DSL circuit to understand that even the best-served markets for Internet connectivity are struggling to keep up with demand for networked content.

I don't know, I think the worst aspect of my video browsing experience at home is my ISP's second guessing of Youtube's bandwidth and streaming parameters, which end up in their DPI shapers and cause Youtube to underrun.

If the point is "see, if the internet was awesome you wouldn't need those shapers" I guess I couldn't disagree, but experience tells me to trust one smart guy on the far end of the network to figure it out and not rely on the people in between who generally seem to mess it up.
I swear, one reason I read today was that there was good news for "commercial paper production." People will rally on anything, but there are fundamental problems here that stock markets won't solve.
That's called "The end-to-end argument in system design", and if you Google that you'll get one of the most important CS papers ever written. I agree with you, of course.
Community college courses are definitely hit-and-miss but I'm a strong believer in their utility. You just have to make sure you pick wisely.

Arts education is a steal. You can find classes with reasonably successful faculty. I'm currently taking screenwriting at De Anza and enjoyed short fiction classes with Bob Bausch (http://www.robertbausch.org/) back in Virginia. With workshop-style classes, there can be wider variation in talent-levels and enthusiasm yet not be a show-stopper in helping you move forward with your skills. These faculty can also be very accessible for personal review of your work.

Comp sci/programming is another story. It'd be too frustrating to take courses at the CC level because of the pace, although even here, I can see a problem-based course accommodating different levels of skill and interest.

The availability of all these internet courses will make a dramatic impact to education. I would have killed to have access to this stuff back in high school. Makes me wonder what impact it might have on the community colleges, especially if states force reuse of exemplary open material.
Definitely agree. This will probably not be a "slap on a band aid" type of thing that fixes quickly.
What data sets does this open for developers and start-uppers to use? Is there a list?
TnyMail: Free, Fast, Anonymous Email Alias
Not sure what to think of this... I guess this point out one of the missing features of twitter: groups.

I don't feel comfortable adding 50+ people that I don't know just so once in a while I can get a neat ruby trick.
It's a service when Dell comes to you and says, "How's about we give you a pile of cash and you make Ubuntu work with our new netbook?"
I am very excited about this platform, can't wait to see what the development process is like!
Peter Fenton: Prominent VC, successful triathlete
The original comprehensive list is found here:

http://www.bschool.com/blog/2008/brain-trust-100-ivy-league-...

This is great.
I work at a newspaper. It was just announced that our presses are shutting down and our daily print edition will be printed on the presses of our mortal enemy that is no longer our mortal enemy (expect that to be a trend).

Newspapers are feeling inadequate compared to the Internet at large so they're starting to churn out more and more "this just happened" news. Unfortunately, "this just happened" news is an easy-to-find commodity, so the strategy is doomed, IMHO.

I think newspapers should cancel their AP subscriptions and change their print editions almost entirely to what they call 'enterprise journalism' (answering the why's), and their online editions to local in-depth analysis. I'm not sure I would bother with breaking news at all, to be frank. There are too many other channels for that.

In short, I would leave the "this just happened" alone and focus on being the local Economist (which I've been saying before I ever read timtrueman's comment, which I completely agree with).
You might subscribe to the one person who reads all 50 of those Twitter feeds to pick out the one neat Ruby trick.
probably depends on your position.

I'd think twice before investing in a business person who declared bankruptcy. I mean, it would matter why, and it wouldn't be an immediate no any more than having a failed business would be an immediate no, but it's a black mark. The technical partner having that black mark? especially if the technical partner had a business partner who was responsible (and who would presumably be responsible for the money) well, that wouldn't bother me so much.
Official blog post: http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/10/announcing-appl.html
This is a related post I put together earlier this month: http://www.trending.us/2008/10/08/11-places-to-get-started-w...
Maybe it would help if you thought of it as an art project instead. In any case - and I hope this doesn't come off as trolling - isn't creativity exactly the sort of thing us hackers should be striving for? If you measure success in terms of "mak[ing] something people want" then I'd call this a success, if only a small one. For whatever reason, people sure do seem to enjoy clicking that button!
Internet killed the print newspaper star?

Not really. It's a little more complex, as I've learned.

* Early 2000's: Newspaper uses soon to be outdated technologies and eyeballs strategy.
* Mid 2000's: Housing boom allows newspaper to rake in cash and hire lots of help.
* 2007: Housing crash kills your advertising revenue, exposes bloat and deteriorating revenue in classifieds.
* 2007-2008: Unless you're the NYTimes, your 10-year-old CMS/publishing platform offers you almost no way to innovate.
* 2008: You throw yourself into the online world as much as possible, but you aren't sure if you can afford to invest in your long-term future (MUST. MAKE. MONEY. NOW.).
* 2008-2009: Massive uncertainty and an identity crisis of great proportions.
This is a great idea - thanks for the list!
Hopefully LinkedIn keeps the quality of the apps at a high point. Not doubting that they will.
Thanks. I have played both the CEO role and the CTO role. In the future I would likely be playing the CEO role.
Flickrfolio - Instant portfolios
Flickrfolio, create an instant portfolio from your flickr account
Android Speed Reviews: Notable Apps
Test my startup Urbanmelt based in Chicago
Haha, that's pretty funny: I use Windows all day, and "Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically" will be the absolute first thing I disable. How is that useful on 24/30" screens?
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sign human rights deal
physical access is root access... I don't think renting virtual servers (what you are doing with ec2, at least) is inherently any less secure than renting a physical server. Either way, if I am the provider, and I am willing to do unethical things to your server, I can.

Virtualization makes this slightly easier, but it's certainly possible on physical servers. If you are co-locating your own hardware, I only need to fake one crash to give myself root. If you are renting a server, well, it's easy enough to trojan the image I give you.

Like most of the 'cloud computing' hype, these problems have been around for a while. 'cloud computing' seems an awful lot like 'what we have been doing all along, only faster and in a standard manner' Not that it's not awesome, but I'm just saying that the problems are not new.

(unless you mean application-level cloud computing like google app engine. that's something different, with different concerns. I was speaking of 'quick provisioning' clouds, or 'utility computing' like amazon ec2)
Wow. Just three months with my iPhone tied to an Exchange Server and I forget how to use a manual calendar. I've started missing every event that I don't RSVP to in the form of a calender invite...
Logitech Buys SightSpeed For Video Conferencing
The one suggestion I would add is to segment your users in the model: flighty, regular, loyal (or something similar)
Focus your analysis on clearly modeling usage by segment in the first few months to get a good feel for who is dropping, when, and why (good exercise). There is nothing wrong with modeling a 'loyal' segment that simply loves your service and never or rarely cancels, so long as you also model 'regular' and 'flighty' users.
Does a "VW short squeeze" have anything to do with clowns?
I wish I had seen the post earlier. I'll definitely come to the next one.
Start To Finish: Publishing a commercial iPhone game