skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a "Jolly good going", a pint at the pub and a pat on the back is in order here. Those are great numbers - it really seems like you made something people want.

It's really hard for us to judge what kind of buy-in, etc. you'll have without knowing what you're offering. For porn it's 0,1% or less - for Rolls Royce engines it's 50%.

I would use the momentum you have and compose a mail telling your beta applicants, and potential customers, that everything is going much better than you could ever hope to excpect, and that you're happy that you can solve so many problems for so many people yada yada, and that you don't have space for more betatesters but will soon be offfering the real deal, and will send them an e-mail when this happens. And don't wait too long, they'll have forgotten about it in a month.
can you invite them in waves? send 500 invites, see how many join on day 1, maybe assume 50% more will join over the next week. Repeat to get to the number you want in the beta.

also, many will sign in once or twice and never come back. not all beta members will be active members.

Be open & honest with those you turn down. until you can invite them, keep them in the loop with a periodic newsletter. maybe even poll them if you need customer input.
That sounds like a nice little feature.
I have not, but reading it now (thanks for the link) I maintain what I wrote (even though I got a lot of downmods): this is far too complicated to ever actually work.

Did you read the section on tolerances, and the temperatures? Do you really think such a thing would be reliable for day to day running on an airplane?

It's not impossible of course, but it's not practical, and it's a waste of money. Use the nuclear power on earth, and save the liquid fuels for the air.
How'd you get that many applications?!
YouTube Shows Off API With ActionScript 3 Demo
The cheap credit bonanza of the last 20 years has ruined margins in all kinds of businesses. A long time ago I read a post by an old guy who had made millions off a local chain of dry cleaners. He talked about how in the early days he spent some time living in his first shop. He had to struggle hard to scrape up the capital to get going. He eventually got rich, but he completely sold out years ago because the business had been ruined. Most of these Korean outfits you see all over the country are credit financed franchises. The families running them put close to nothing down and then pay themselves slave wages. Of course this drove margins to zero.

Cheap credit and easy funding is an enemy to anyone trying to get a profitable concern going. The hurdle of raising capital is an important barrier to competition.
Am I wrong in wondering if cloud computing might do for computing what hedge funds and CDSs did for finances? By this I mean that in both cases we're talking about attaining the last iota of efficiency by consolidating a resource in the hands of a few. What happens when the MS cloud goes down? (I know. Impossible.) We've seen the stories about people who have lost access to their gmail accounts. What if a large portion of the economy has their applications tied up in the cloud and there's an interruption in service. Or a natural disaster.

Analogously, should these cloud providers be required by law to maintain a (geographically distributed) computing reserve? A second (or third, even) clone of the current cloud?

I understand that the communication between the cloud and the world is distributed, but the actual cloud seems to be as distributed as a rock.
Ok point taken. But Fred Trump was similar to her father, i don't think he went to college.

Perhaps i am inspired by people that are successful, but much more by people like Mark Cuban, who came from nothing. Much harder and merits much, much more respect.
Symbaloo - Life in Boxes (poetically so)
Hypothesis Testing: The Basics
Heating air as reaction mass is far far more complicated then you are making out.

And that's NOT a ram-jet. Part of the thrust in a ram jet comes from the liquid fuel suddenly growing much larger as it's vaporized.

Using air directly would mean heating it to thousands of degrees. Then you need a material that can handle such temperatures (which don't exist), and still contain the nuclear fuel. And at those temperatures your fuel is molten.

When you burn liquid fuel - it burns at a thousand degrees or so, but then expands rapidly (and cools), so you don't actually have to contain anything at that temperature.

But if you heat air you do - and that's not easy.

Oh, and the entire point of ram and scram jets, is to provide oxygen without blowing out the flame (which is why it's so hard to do). That doesn't apply here.

Edit: Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket and you'll see how hard it is. And they had control of the working fluid, you are proposing plain air.
Tom,

I hope you continue writing posts like this. For an aspiring entrepreneur, it's inspiring to hear the stories from people who have taken the risks.

By the way, we worked in the same company before in San Diego. I was miserable so I just quit and moved to the Bay area.
The problems did not arise from demand for debt, rather the dealers' reaction to demand for higher yields on debt. The instruments which have been problematic were specifically designed to provide a higher yield with the appearance of risk commensurate with lower-yield instruments. These were backed by credit that was pimped out to people who could never possibly pay it back and then obfuscated in a package that the buyer was very unlikely to critically examine.

You are right, debt-backed securities have a future; but fraudulent securities do not. This is not a new economic phenomenon -- lies and fraud are as old as mankind.
I think he was joking? At least, I sincerely hope he was joking... I'd suggest doing it for a few more months, and if nothing improves after that, maybe start looking for a new job. Living for a long period of time with a job you hate might not be good for you. :D
Windows Live is now an OpenID Provider
Agreed, it's troubling that Microsoft isn't giving us any indication of what pricing may be.
I've heard this come up many times today. I'm curious if everyone questioned the financial motives of Google App Engine when it first came out.

Then again the target market for Azure seems to be enterprise IT depts, who tend to be involved with proprietary technology, and not start-up developers looking for a cheap and efficient host.
I suppose it depends on the industry you're targeting. If it's one that isn't too distressed by the current situation–or if it's a way for them to obviously save money–then, sure.

Like davidw said, it can be a good source of income, but good growth is hard. Service companies just don't scale well because you're so limited by man-hours.
And, in turn, the demand for securities is coming from countries such as China that are becoming richer, and people there want a place to invest their money where they will get a good return.
Android Garage Door Opener, part 2
While I whole-heartedly agree, I do feel the need to point out that quality massage chairs aren't even remotely "cheap" by any standard.... if they were, I'd be sitting on one right now! :D
What a shortsighted, lame argument. It's like taking anything you disagree with and then comparing it to a bunch of arbitrary truths in life.

Look at this article and replace "SEO" with any other word that you disagree with.

For entertainment, just replace "SEO" with "McCain."
Integrating TextMate and Pygments
Completely forgot about that - thank you!
"The best articles are voted to the top by the community, but in a way that makes it difficult to game the system. Instead of being able to vote up your own articles or those written by your friends, readers are given a random sample of articles and asked to compare them in pairs. This A-B approach filters the best articles to the homepage."

This is cool; variations are used by recaptcha, etc. I wonder if this could be used by digg? Increasing the quality/reducing gaming of community-based ranking seems like a very good idea.
Under a different user name? I checked out your three posts and none of them seemed to mention your site.
Thanks a bundle; for some reason I didn't come across that on my own search.
I was featured in a few industry blogs and it has caught on like wildfire.
I think that's more a function of their academic training than their natural aptitude.

I had a year of similar schooling when I was growing up, and it was pretty stifling.
I'm really glad you enjoyed it! Were you at Active? I'll write a post later on about how I ended up moving to SF. Good call on the move, this area is amazing.
One more point: Found out today that, you can redirect using some service (bit.ly for one) and get your traffic tracked! And one of them (decenturl.com) make a meaningful url instead of tinyurl.com/sUw7_gKj. I think these are nice value additions.
I would imagine this success made walking away from that other success (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338286) easier. And, of course, GitHub is proving an even greater success.

Your story, once written, will be one of a man fighting tooth and nail with success coming from all directions.
I was in a similar situation with my last employer - I absolutely loved my first project there, felt really productive, did a bang up job with it, and delivered something pretty slick. And then I got put on another project with a different toolset and absolutely hated it. I felt terribly unproductive, like I was wasting my time, and didn't believe I was learning anything professionally useful.

If I were you, I'd look around for other jobs and see what else is out there. If there's another job that you really want to do, or you see a viable startup opportunity, jump ship. If not, buckle down and finish up the project. In my case, a friend from college IM'd me a couple months after I'd started feeling discontent, and said "We're starting a startup, and need a technical person. Wanna join?" I stayed long enough to get my current project into a sellable state, and then quit.

Some reflections in hindsight:

1.) My feeling of lower productivity was mostly a mirage. In LOC/day, I was almost as productive as I was in the previous project, it's just that more of those lines were boilerplate, and so I guess my productivity in function points/day was lower. Boss was relatively happy with my productivity, he just didn't like my complaining.

2.) In terms of it being a dead-end professionally, I was absolutely right. Actually, both technology stacks (Swing/Netbeans for first project and JSF/Facelets/A4J/Hibernate for the second) were dead-ends; overall job markets for both seem to be declining, and anything new that I'd start now would need a modern web framework (Django or Rails) and/or C++ WinAPI experience.

3.) 90% of products fail, whether they're done by a startup, a small company, or a big company. The only variable seems to be in how fast they fail, and how much resources they consume. So you should expect that your project is doomed and do it anyway; that's the only way to find out if it's one of the failures.

4.) There was just as much grunt-work for my startup as for my job, but it didn't feel nearly as onerous. I think this was because I knew that even if the product didn't pan out, I was building skills that I'd want to use in the future. For me, it's okay to work on a project that'll fail as long as it leads to one that'll eventually be a success. At the last project at my employer, I felt that not only was the product doomed, all future projects using that skillset would also be doomed. (This feeling was not helped when we e-mailed some mailing lists on how to do simple things like integrate other AJAX libraries, and the response was "It's not possible. In fact, the engineers here have recommended to management that use of JSF be banned for all future projects.")
This is an interesting conversation to have, let's explore!

1.

So "no competition" is bad becasue products and processes lack diversity neccesary for "natural" selection. There is also no pressure to innovate. Left unchecked this situation does not rectify itself as monopolies tend to self-perpetuate until there is a diruptive technological innovation.

2.

"A lot of competition" is bad: it drives margins to zero thus no one can invest into more innovation. Further yet, the collective of buyers ends up paying for a 100 small development teams instead of, say, 5 moderately large ones. At this point wastefulness of effort duplication overweights the diversity value that it brings to the table.

This situation is not stable - nearest credit crunch will purge out the weak players and lead to consolidation. Consolidated players will have less fixed overhead to spread over the same user base, thus margins will improve and some more research can be done to further improve the product.

It figures then that there are differetn types of markets: some which require more diversity and some which require less or none at all. Barring government intervention the former will be able to sustain more smaller businesses and the latter only a handful of big players. At the extreme it turns into natural monopoly (e.g. utility) where value of diversity is diminishingly small compared to fixed overhead of one more business (e.g. second water pipeline).

Now let's discuss which markets need diversity and which ones do not!
Get enough sleep and exercise. Starting to do these things have made a noticeable (to me) difference in my productivity level and outlook.
Ask HN: When do you scrap a startup due to a well-entrenched player/competitor?
So, here's the deal. I'm juggling a couple different startup ideas at the moment (Our main biz is running well, so they are all side projects right now).

One of the projects has a fairly well-entrenched (and well-funded) player. They have a big user-base and good growth. On the other hand, they're not perfect and there are some things I think we could do better. But, at what point does their size make that irrelevant?

A good analogy would be eBay. There are ways you could have an auction site that does things better/cheaper than eBay. But they are big and they've already overcome the chicken/egg issue. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see a general online auction site as a good startup idea because of this.

So, my question is ... at what point does this occur (if ever)? When do say "don't enter this space because X already owns it"?

TIA
I've found that it's best to find some sort of sweet spot. Not so simple that later scaling requires a huge rewrite, but not so complex that you're spending valuable time up front to scale something that may never need it. I now try to code the first version as a simple version of the later version. Think ahead, but build for the present.
GitHub Rebase #1
Cool. I guess it's a 'make something people want' story: it's one of those things that I look at and say "boring", but people wanted it, so it was successful.
They aren't mutually exclusive. A good, simple design will allow you to move faster and scale better.
Article title: "...300X faster than naïve Ruby"

OCaml comes in at 300x faster than Ruby. Python comes in at 45x times faster than Ruby. However, there's more going on here than language:

* The ruby version is single threaded and the test is on a 32 core workstation (counting CPU time Python is only 4x faster and OCaml is only 17x faster)

* The author admits that there were multiple stabs at the OCaml version. What savings could come from optimizing the code in other languages?

* The test is IO heavy. Is OCaml (or other language) taking some shortcut (e.g. Unicode vs non-Unicode, Strings vs bare char[] arrays)?
Fun! Agile development applied to rocket science.
The key to a successful seppuku is to have your trusted friend practice beforehand to make sure he really can behead you in one swing.

This is one situation where being a hacker is not recommended.
I like the google gears approach, where you can go offline with the data if necessary. Still not ideal, though.
I think it's a balance. You have to design with scaling in mind, and pick tools that allow you to potentially scale later on. If possible you don't want to have to rewrite you app several times from scratch as you scale.

But I agree. The hardest bit is making something people will use, and come back and use again, and again.
Microsoft releases "limited distribution" Surface SDK to PDC developers
Once Automattic took over and scaled Gravatar out with their amazing CDN, adoption really ramped up. I use them without pause on my own projects, and I'm really happy to not have to configure my avatar every place I go!
Based on the WSJ article a couple days ago, this is a marketable asset in our generation.
Yup Active. We were in the same team. Crazy Rob and I know each other. The Active home page was "cameronized" last week.

Moving here is probably the best decision I've made in terms of my career. It's easier to meet like-minded people. I got to know startup founders and employees with no effort at all.
Millenials, eh? ;-)
Also be sure to watch the movie "Office space".
1. Yes, I did question it back then too. Google has since rectified their stance and published their pricing scheme. The paid service is not operational yet but it's a neccesary piece of inforation to plan the projects ahead. I have started learning pyhon based on that information (python is required for google's services) but did not commit the project itself yet because the ship date is still up in the air.

2. This is not true, they target several markets and among them both corporate develoers and web developers: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/corpdev.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/webdev.mspx
Then I believe you are saying "we gotcha", right? Or in other words we have a disagreement. My thesis is that the uber rich will generally find a way to avoid (not evade) taxes and I believe your position is that it is impossible/unlikely because we will catch/punish them.

I would refer you to prohibition. It seems to me that at some point people will not willingly agree to ten times the taxes for the same amount of representation. Tax evasion is illegal, as we all know. But tax avoidance -- finding loopholes in the law -- is an American tradition. Think I could find as many loopholes with my 10K as somebody else could with their 10 mil? I kind of doubt it.

I note that the income tax was passed in 1913 in the U.S. I think it was really low -- something like 6% on income over 200K. The very next year, the tax was raised to 85% on the wealthy as a way to finance WWI.

Now practically speaking, do you think that all wealthy people actually paid 85% taxes? Just from a intuitive standpoint, doesn't it seem like this would sack the people at the low end of the wealth scale -- those without tax attorneys and multiple streams of revenue and corporate aliases -- not the truly rich, who saw the law coming and already found ways to protect their investments?

I'm not a tax law specialist so I can't comment on specifics. But intuitively it seems like most people would act in their own self-interest. And it seems that the truly rich have many more options than most folks do. So as a general rule of thumb, I would think that at some point you are going to lose money by raising taxes.

Just intuition, mind you. Lots of room for disagreement here.
If one were to build a nuclear powered airplane, a jet would be quite a bad choice. Propellers would be a much better propulsion system.

Honestly, though, a hydrogen powered plane is a more likely and more physically reasonable system. Hydrogen has a very high specific energy, and energy density isn't nearly as important as weight in a plane.
I think the reason we see these guys getting caught for $100 tabs is because they get sloppy. There were probably millions in kickbacks which they were able to hide properly because they took the effort to do it right. But a $100 kickback by comparison gets overlooked as an insignificant amount
I would love to see a Haskell-implementation.

Also the Ruby-benchmark seems weird. It can't be that much slower right? Just how naive is the implementation?
Cool Cell Phone [PIC] It is called "ring-cellphone" and designed by Tao Ma
While I agree that it shouldn't be reprinted per the instructions on the email, it's sort of inevitable when he sends it to 10kish people.
The term professional is so overloaded anymore as to seem almost meaningless; I'd look at it more as the difference between someone who cares about what they do, and someone who doesn't. Depending on who you ask, being "professional" can actually imply the complete lack of passion and caring to avoid the appearance of vulnerability. Your advice is good, but wrapping it in the veil of professionalism vs. amateurish makes it seem a little too "self-help" for me to stay quiet.
> When do you scrap a startup due to a well-entrenched player/competitor?

When you decide that you can't win.

Or, better: when your opportunity cost is such that you should really be doing THAT project and not this one.

> When do say "don't enter this space because X already owns it"?

That's a slightly different question. In the first scenario, you've already accomplished some things. In the second scenario, you're just starting. I'd saying NEVER in the second scenario. Not if you're truly going head-to-head. If you've got a niche that the big player can't go after (as, for example, my <a href="http://SmartFlix.com">SmartFlix</a> not really competing per-se with Netflix.).
We had a similar situation with one of our apps–although not with the numbers you quoted.

If it's a monthly service, I'd say offer a 30 day free trial (if you don't already) and possibly a small ongoing discount.
If you identify a structural weakness that can be exploited without huge gobs of cash, go for it. The only thing big guys can consistently do is outspend you.

Good weaknesses include new technology you can use faster than they, or a country/culture you understand better. If your competitor has good growth and features consider a fast-follow: matching them feature-for-feature but cheaper. Worst case you distract them and start a price war. Then you shift gears and start offering better features. If you don't think you can out-feature them, you are in the wrong business.
Direct electrical stimulation of the brain might just work.
A couple of things that might be relevant:

* How many people who want to do X but haven't yet would choose your site over established-X-player?

* Would you expect people using established-X-player to switch to using your site? Why or why not?

* Does X involve substantial lock-in or network effects that established-X-player can take advantage of?

I've been seeing lots of articles (recent calacanis death spiral email, for one) saying that this economic climate will not be friendly to smaller clones (don't mean to imply that your idea is a clone).
West Virginia vote flipping caught on tape
Why Talent is Overrated   
Brilliant piece if you believe in "busy being born"!
This is just a design, right?
I wouldn't say we're just starting–mainly because we already have a platform built and we'd just be tweaking the code-base to launch it for this new purpose/industry.

So I guess we're in the middle somewhere.