skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first time I charged for a web service the hard part was getting over the guilty feeling that I was charging for something that cost me almost nothing. That's definitely not the case of course. I had to develop it, support it, pay for hosting, etc. Still, it takes a bit of strength initially to begin charging money for little more than adding a few rows to your database.

From the inside it's really easy to undervalue what you're doing. It's a big mistake too, because if you're solving a hard problem for someone they really don't mind trading money for it.

I think 37 signals emphasis on creating products you can charge for is their very best advice. Paul Graham didn't go for eyeballs with Viaweb -- he charged something like $300/mo for an online store application.

Working on a product that makes money is entirely different from working on a free one. In a thousand little ways. As a business I definitely prefer charging users directly and probably won't ever try to create another free (to users) business again.
I trade options, and I know that people cuold put on synthetics in lieu of shorting outright. But the market makers on the other side of the trade have to short the stock in order for them to properly hedge. Since it's much harder to do, the spreads on options became pretty retarded after the short-selling ban. This reduced liquidity, put the VIX, VXO, VXN, to all time highs, and exacerbated the moves downward.

The past 30 days have essentially become one very long one.
Numerous psychology studies have found that .97 is the new .99 - you're already used to rounding .99 up to $1 but not $.97
Oops, I'm modded down. I presume that this is a stupid idea that has been suggested and rejected n000 times before. Anyone?
even without the downturn, a reality check was coming. literally hundreds of little websites have been surviving due to only one factor: costs have dropped so low for producing a website that you can run it on poverty wages for years. in the 90s this wasn't the case...higher burn rates put more companies under quickly.

and the web economy is maturing in ways that just aren't friendly to small sites. google has become an accretion disc for all ad revenue that even other big websites can't compete with. the major sites are paying good wages to good talent...increasingly engineers will take $120k for 9-5 from yahoo over a lottery ticket and slave labor from a startup

the recession will just wake most "founder" types up to the reality that their payday will never emerge
From the article "However, if the case expressions are noncontiguous values, most compilers translate the switch statement as a comparison chain."

The recommendationi in that case seems to be to write the comparison chain yourself. How is my comparison chain better than the compiler's?
But does anyone know if the reason companies have not been IPOing?

because IPOs are risky, and people are avoiding risk
Good point, I should have added that its smart people with good intuition and a passion for what they do.
well if all you want is hosting fees and money for ramen, you don't need funding at all. just use your VISA.
Interesting. So keeping a reference to a list with the value works, but the value directly doesn't? Thanks for the note.

Good to know it's possible, though I'd rather it handle closures / lexical scoping directly.
yeah like starting a website is real "out of the box" thinking in the bay area
I just sent these notes to many of my founder friends. Please do the same. I don't think I'd ever bet against Sequoia.

Even if they're wrong, most of what they said is a good practice regardless of economic state.
7 isn't a bad number - and it seems to have worked with getting the bailout passed. 700 Billion feels closer/is easy to report as "Half a billion". 800 Billion would have been rounded to "One Trillion" - a (slightly) scarier number. It's very much the same problem, though at a different scale & with different decision makers - in the case of the bailout, the target audience was Congress with a nod to the media. In any case - to bring this back around to the original post - the lesson here is to know (or be) your audience and to understand the sacrifices they'll make for the value you offer.
I agree that it shouldn't be a "life goal" or something equally ridiculous. But honestly, I applied on a whim. If I hadn't, I most likely would have been laid off from my job last week.
"Hands on" with Microsoft's Touchless SDK
"strangle a banker"?

Do you mean to strangle: a speculative investment banker, old time JP Morgan and pals who created the CDS and all that to buy companies cheap later (they've been doing that for over a century, ask Graham Bell), the irresponsible borrowers in US and UK (going bankrupt has a social cost, now a worldwide cost), the war profiteers (you know who), consumerism (non-durable goods are now only pollution), all the excess size strategy (from hummers to expensive corporate software), and finally, with honorable mention, the Sarbanes-Oxley dodging Hedge Funds.

How is it that a country with close to a third of the world GDP could get so bad? How did you let that happen?
Haha likewise and I indirectly sell discretionary goods.

It's already becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. I think that's why Cuban is buying.
The very best kind. :)
Yes, because it will mean a whole generation will struggle.

But these are the cards life is throwing at us. We are not the first generation to go through this, nor we are the last. One day we will look back and be proud we endured. It will be a great opportunity to refocus our priorities, to work on preventing this to happen again.
Hey there..

>>Real time? - Great for Yahoo if it works.

It actually works very well, and we had a 7 second latency only - in the days of IndexTools. And the reason for only using the ‘up to the minute’ in Yahoo! marketing material, was to make sure we under promised and over delivered :-)

Cheers
d.

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!
Blog: http://visualrevenue.com/blog
Book: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-analytics-book
> the hard part was getting over the guilty feeling that I was charging for something that cost me almost nothing.

Yes! Coming from the world of open source software... that's something that doesn't fit into my mentality. Other people in this thread are talking about how the 37s people were probably able to envision paying X $ for something themselves. I would have trouble with that - there are few things I pay for online besides domain names and hosting.

So how did it work out for you?
A severe case of overgeneralization from a couple of suboptimal questions to an overly broad conclusion. When I give interviews, I try to tailor questions I ask to our environment and to the interviewer's skill set. I've also been in a number of interviews where I was asked interesting and relevant questions. If I were to generalize from my case, I'd say that tech interviews were worthwhile, but that'd be just as dubious conclusion as the author's. We can only conclude so much from anecdotal evidence and personal experience.
It makes me want to start a bank.
Sequoia Capital Partners Reiterate Value of Cash : Fort Worth Startup Blog
hi,

We do in fact have a YWA API - and a bunch of clients using it. It is not open for the public as of today, but stay tuned! :-)

it has recently been enhanced alot, because of the integration to the Y!OS developer community that we are doing..

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!

Blog: http://visualrevenue.com/blog

Book: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-analytics-book
Thanks a bunch, the tutorial is really interesting.
This is exactly what I thought as I read the article. We're talking about an entire generation of young workers who might not be able to reach their full financial potential (as measured against the past six years, at least).

But you're right. Thems the breaks. Make money for people, and you will make money. Who knows, in 15 years you might find yourself in the perfect position to make a lot of bank.

Or maybe Sequoia is overestimating the damage and we'll be fine in 36 months. Keep hope alive?
the difference is that a small team startup has to make a lot less revenue to survive. A big new startup on the other hand would have a few million a year just in salary expenses.
My favorite part from the .nfo:

"Internet Explorer? Hahahahahaha."

I was curious how they did the sound, since I wasn't aware you can do sound strictly with JavaScript ("WebKit-based browsers (Safari or Google Chrome) should hopefully use native HTML / Javascript audio"). Looks like they're using this:

http://schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

Which looks like a JavaScript wrapper around a Flash-based player. Pretty interesting.
I think it depends how you define "real world considerations".

The spirit of the rule seems to be about bribes, not about anything that can have an impact on the outside world; keeping the AI in the box or letting it out both will have "real world considerations", in a way. Pointing out whatthe impact of that choice might be is hardly equivalent to bribing someone -- it's just convincing him that one outcome is more desirable than the other, and convincing the gatekeeper is what the experiment is all about.
Or forward-compatible, since encode/decode in py3k is between bytes and unicode only.
Test Center review: Acquia Drupal 1.0
Netbooks will boost adoption of Linux, says Novell CTO
The whole "forget growth and get to positive cash flow" push sounds a lot like the 37signals business plan.
While it certainly is an interesting idea, shouldn't running arbitrary JS code be considered problematic?

Seems like this is an XSS attack waiting to happen...
Most of the survivors of the last crash are the huge players today -- Amazon, Yahoo, IAC, etc. The problem is, you don't remember the thousands of other companies that died, and how the survivors were mostly pretty big before the downturn hit. The little guys died, right along with the wasteful big guys.

Point is, you shouldn't kid yourself: a down economy is a terrible, awful, tremendously bad time to start a new company. (On the plus side, it's only a very bad time to be a small company, and a bad time to be a big company.)
Do it yourself first
Argh. I don't know why e-commerce sites insist on doing that.

Here's the postal code for one of their own stores: M1H1A9.

I've tried finding a non-annoying link, but Google results for that chair's name show a slightly different picture (maybe a newer model).
The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw
>Why do I need to subscribe to all these blogs when the best content for me ends up on the front page of HN?

So you can submit interesting stuff for the rest of us to read :)
In short, the industry is going to be forced to mature from its bed wetting phase and you know what?

That’s not really such a bad thing, is it?

.COM buble 1.0 Déjà vu!
Good luck to all the new YC applicants. As it mentions on the YC site, you should definitely bounce your applications off YC alums. Email us-- it can only help.
What amazes me about HN is the number of famous hackers who post comments and read. It's also like a democracy in that I can vote (comments up/down). I've also worked out what kinds of posts get karma points, and I've adjusted (eg, by sincerity, sarcasm, pun/wit) to what helps the community most, and thus gets me the most karma.
reddit.com has more bitter and sensationalist political headlines, digg.com has more linkbait from cracked.com and collegebreak.com.

Oh, and digg.com loads more slowly.

I think that about covers it.
Cuban was talking about a market correction to oversold conditions, not at all about an impending economic rebound.
I am. The other website looks ok, if not very polished.
Web 2.0 Marketing Lessons from the Craigslist Bandit
The Craigslist Bandit who hired 12 guys on Craigslist to dress just like him and to confuse the cops, he then went on to flee via inner tube.
Obrolan Santai
No, but if you send me a mail I can send it to you as soon as it was graded.
Wakoopa Begins Tracking Web Apps Alongside Their Desktop Counterparts
I can engage in rational conversation whilst still letting my emotional decision stand by. In fact, it can even be seen as a rational choice - go into the conversation with the rational decision that you will not let the AI out of the box...
Google Chrome, cara baru menjelajahi internet
Launching Groundbreaking New Writing Opportunity at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
I think there's value in documenting and discussing this sort of thing.

If it won't always happen (or will always happen but is one of those things that earns a degree of passive (or active, depending on the example) condemnation when it does) and people don't like it, the discussion might bring about change. If it will always happen, or even if Tech NY doesn't change, it might still help the reader better understand the context, be it the NYC startup scene, their own tendencies and "tribes", or something else.
Mailman http://list.org/

Things you should be looking at are queues and error handling in an asynchronous message passing architecture.

Also you'll learn that not every web application needs an SQL database for persistence.
New Contestants On the Turing Test
Successful Social Network Marketing in Two Easy Steps - Video
New Apple Laptops Due Next Week: A Rumor Recap and a Poll
Starting Up in a Down Economy
Yeah, totally. I hate to be cynical, but #6 seems bogus.
I use an Aeron at home... While I do think they're overpriced in comparative terms, they are better than a standard $100 chair.

That being said, I don't use an Aeron at the office, and I don't find myself pining for my chair at home all day long.
Yes. The baked in use of units is incredibly helpful (best use of any static typing I've seen, I tell you), but the biggest thing is that the LaTeX formatting and larger character set allows code to look like what it does. The code and the formulas look like the very same thing because they are the same thing.
Sorry for posting page 3. This is a repost, but I think it's appropriate at the moment.
That's not true ... if you define 'good' as what will lead to maximum growth then you would not want to follow these survival tactics in 'good times'
Maybe it's just me, but I like doing it this way in Ruby:

100.times { puts "Ruby" }

Not that there's anything wrong with your approach, but I just like the way that my code reads almost like English.
Nope. Winter 09, which is January.

Applying for the summer I'd guess gets sent in around April, if it's exactly 6 months apart. Meaning people like you and me still have time to polish up the plans.
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 - Talking Points Summary
And people have done this, and they have won. If I am reading referenced article correctly, Eliezer had three wins, two losses before calling off the experiments.

He's not claiming he can convince anybody with his arguments, just that he has successfully convinced a few people. Make of that what you will.
I can sustain about 12 mph, so it's about 2/3 as fast as biking. Some harder-core unicyclists can get over 20 mph with extra-short pedal cranks or gearing.

Almost all pedals are 1-1, which is why you want a big wheel. You brake by resisting rotation while you tilt back.
Indeed, it's a decent line.
Understood. But the doom & gloom message isn't just affecting stock markets.
You Can Do Your Own P.R. for FREE
Brian Eno's iPhone App
8 ways to grow your software company in a bad economy
Probably comparable to a bike when I'm going 2/3 the speed. But it can be hard to react suddenly without losing control. Though you usually just land on your feet, running behind the uni in that case.
FastCGI - The Forgotten Treasure
That's why I said "most".

Focusing on profitability, becoming cash flow positive, trimming fat & reducing overhead are good practices always. Some of the other ones, especially if you're trying to attract and retain talent, are not.

You'd think this would be common sense, but based on how many companies are run, it's not.
How to use a Virtual Assistant to maximum effect
Well, yes, you could define "real world considerations" as "only tangible items", and then Eliezer could be making this argument, and people could be accepting it.

But I still think they would be doing so in error. Just as we can't be sure how Eliezer is interpreting the rules, future AI researchers can't be sure how valid the results of the experiment are. Since the meta-argument depends on the results of this experiment convincing these researchers, the meta-argument shouldn't be accepted.

Heck, if the gatekeeper player is shown that the meta-argument exists, he should realize that the researchers will also come up with the meta-argument as a likely explanation for the AI getting out of the box, leading the researchers to further disregard the results of the experiment. Eliezer would do just as well to argue that a loss would discourage him from further safe AI research, or that the $10 forfeiture would deprive him of valuable research-related pizza.
I learned quite a bit from web.py (http://github.com/webpy/webpy/tree/master). It's small enough to be fun to poke through, but has more than enough "advanced" Python tricks to be worth your while.
I've actually added a couple dozen blogs to my RSS reader which I first encountered on HN.
Does anyone here think that the tech/software industry is in the bed-wetting stage? I don't.
Uncov's Back
QikCom - Everyone's Messages
GitHub Founder (and former Powersetter) Tom Preston-Werner's InfoQ Video Interview
QikCom Adds Its Own Twist To Enterprise Twitter: The TabStore (Invites)
shrug

I don't think I'm extraordinarily clever (not compared to some of my friends from university, or to many of the posters here).

I do try to challenge and improve myself. Just like with the marathon, training does make a difference.
Operations review:
Engineering: Since you already have a product, strongly consider reducing the number of engineers that you have.

:(
IControl Apps - System PVA Statistics  DevCentral  F5 DevCentral  Documentation and Tips
Well, you're right that companies should always focus on profitability. The part left open for debate is their time frame for profitability - that should grow and contract with their ability to find capital. Maybe I'm reading your posts wrong, but it sounds like you're saying to always strive for short term profitability, even if it costs you growth in the long term.
I thought the article was entertaining.
It doesn't matter if they understand what's actually cool about it, of course. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327085)
> "I was charging for something that cost me almost nothing"

Don't charge based on your (marginal) cost; charge based on the value you are delivering to your customer.
Depends on where you're looking. Enterprise/consumer level software, no. The business models for web applications, well, bed wetting might be generous.
This bit of "advice" soured the whole thing for me -- a shining example of MBA wisdom.

To be fair, maybe the advice was mis-communicated, or maybe the speaker was talking about VC-funded monoliths who had grown too quickly (and hired poorly), but it seems kind of foolish to fire engineers at a tech company, just because you think you "already have a product".
It makes sense. The credit markets are imploding so it's going to be harder to borrow. Basically you need to survive by not borrowing, so get cash flow positive.

I think this crash is analogous to the long depression:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

But I doubt it will take as long to recover as it did in 1873.
Isn't the erlang pitch it makes multiprocessing transparent?
This whole line of thinking is great for companies as a whole. If it forces more companies to be more responsible and efficient with capital, I don't see a problem.
No, sounds a lot like 'fundamental business logic'. Nothing 37signals does is new to the traditional business world (just VC funded 'exit strategy' startup minded folks)
Eleven characters! Beats Fortran by four. We have a winner!

(Counting only the loop-related characters, leaving out whitespace.)

Unless anyone has a shorter way of doing something one hundred times?
Yep, finding a business model that generates revenue quickly seems to be the emphasis across the board. The get users, find cash later, models of the past are certainly out for the most part as long as this economic cycle is with us. Back in are real business models that actually make money.
Fred Wilson: Capital Efficiency Finds Its Moment
Interview: Miguel de Icaza
twisted is very clean and readable.
Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Have A Business Plan In Three Years
My first thought was, if you agree to say 4 hours of chat time you could try being mildly annoying to the point where losing 10$ does not seem like a big deal. When it's bob's job to keep the AI in a cage if he does not like his job he might as well let the AI go free. Depending on the gate keeper's response you could build empathy for the desire to go fee etc.

Anyway, I suspect that the ideal strategy is to probe the gatekeeper and then based on their type convince them to let you go.
SBCL dominates usage at LispForum
I think if you want to talk about advantages though, with Fortran you're going to want to talk about the speed, not the brevity. Ruby is quite poky by comparison.
Not all of it. Heating and gasoline prices are expensive. Energy in general is expensive. If it's possible to create a system cheaper than burning stuff we're in good shape.
EXtreme Switch sets performance standards for automotive lighting
How do I get in shape? Excercise Hack for Entrepreneurs
Maybe it was, I just forwarded it on so can not say. Tech companies always need smart productive engineers. Product development never stops.
IMHO it's about finances. In these dire straits you either load up on talent, make your product the absolute best, and take over your entire market segment while everyone else is hurting... or you lay low and weather the storm. For companies where they simply don't have the cash reserve to keep that many people on board for that long, the second option is the only one.
Evaluating icons using spatial frequency analysis
Facebook has funding from the venture capital arm of the CIA. I'm not aware of any (public) connection to the NSA.
Peter Trifonov (bugman) wins Intel Threading Challenge
Intel Adaptive Spike-Based Matrix Solver
'Big Bang' Neutron Beam Line Starts Work
I don't think that focusing on profitability is always a good idea. If you extend the argument to what you work on personally, then there's no way to ever start a product company, or a new line. And in the last bust, Google didn't focus on profitability until much of the storm had already passed. They're doing fine now.

The difference was that they had time. Lots of runway. We might very well not, and the goal is to extend that runway.
First Brender says "we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground."
then "Google's partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite's photos."

So which is it?
There are bigger things in the global economy than the opinions of Sequoia. This may not be very popular to say here. It is likely companies like Sequoia got burned worse than many other businesses. Money that funds them comes from investments like the stock market which has lost ~ 2 trillion dollars in value in the last few months. On top of that the last thing most big companies are thinking about are acquisitions - let alone IPOs. I understand their pessimism but I don't think it necessarily applies to the whole economy over the next 15 years.