skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying that it's not true a lot of the time as I do believe a lot of good ideas do meet initial resistance, by all means I think that people should be as creative as they can.

I just think that the one thing that we are all looking for is validation (especially in an idea rich environment such as this) and that such a blanket statement as "all good ideas are initially resisted" can be misleading, especially if someone misinterprets it as "my idea is being resisted, therefore it must be a good idea"...

As Iggy Pop once sang (please excuse the language, but it is probably appropriate)

if it looks like shit, sounds like shit, it must be shit

But in all seriousness, I wasn't meant to overanalyze the point, I was just trying to provide commentary on why I don't think it is as black and white as was laid out in the post and it only applied to that single point.

Thanks for motivating me to explain it a little better, +1 for you!
Electrolysis cheaper than steam reformation? -Old
There's a lot of hate being thrown Yammer's way because it's a twitter-clone, but I thought Yammer was brilliantly executed with additional layers of their own innovation. They have what Twitter does not: a very viable subscription model. Could be a nice acquisition for LinkedIn if you ask me.

I do agree though with the general consensus that it should not have been the winner. I thought OtherInbox was leaps and bounds more innovative.
When is their IPO?
Another Hydrogen Forming Catalyst
Sure, IT budgets are growing more slowly than they used to, but they are still bigger than they have ever been.

The idea that 1$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable. Stop making things up.
The best part of that document is the line "the founders who join the company full time and are committed to making it a success are much more valuable than founders who are going to sit on the sideline and be cheerleaders."

That said, if the three of you are equally committed, you should probably be equal owners, based on the information you've shared.

If I was the guy turning your idea into gold and you held significantly more equity than me just because you built a prototype, that fact would bubble up and bother me exactly when you don't want it to - when things get tough.
Paul Graham's "The Equity Equation" (http://paulgraham.com/equity.html) clarified my thinking on this. In brief, if average outcome of the company is $X right now, and would be $Y with the new cofounders, you should be happy giving away X/Y of the company.
Solution: 1 bed, two comforters.
I'm wondering if you have the same issue I do, the day job is pulling more of your programming bandwidth than you think it is.

In my case I'm dealing with a virtual river of shit, and when I get home, I don't want to touch the computer at all. And when I do make time for programming, it's very hard to get into flow because it's usually 'sandwich time' stuck between other responsibilities.
Excellent article exposing what most people who do business with Google already know. Search arbitrage or not, Google is in a position to force out anyone they are not 'partners' with.

This case isn't nearly as bad as many arbitrage cases out there, and I would argue that even true arbitrage is healthy for the market, identifying and exploiting inefficiencies in the ad market and correcting them (and who's to say you can't make some money doing that?)

Example of 'helpful/legit' arbitrage: you buy from AdWords the keyword "mortgage" and then geo target your ads to only customers in California, sending them to a page with AdSense ads for the keyword "California mortgage" which pays higher than the national/non geo-specific term.

The problem with this is Google wants both the 'mortgage' term AND the "California mortgage' term and objects to you profiting from their advertisers over paying.
good luck with corporate adoption considering yammer is indian slang for penis
I like Yammer, mainly because we'll also be using some of their techniques ourselves. It's also pretty well executed, just from some casual use.

If TC50 picked a winner solely on whether the TC50 grand prize itself could make the company successful, then Yammer was the right choice. It might not have been successful without this, but because they picked it, it may give TC50 a quick success to parade next year to raise credibility of their conference.
No. If they were doing something "no-one wants", they'd be making no money - a bit like if I tried selling ice to the eskimos.

People were clicking on his Adwords ads (which would have to be properly descriptive - due to Google's policies) out of choice and were then browsing the guy's site before some of them were clicking on Adsense ads (again, properly described and out of choice).

If someone didn't like the sound of an ad, why would they click on it? They were clicking on the ads, and short of being forced at gunpoint, they obviously "wanted" to click on them.
Xavier Leroy's FP course: operational semantics, abstract machines /compilation,
He wasn't polluting the Internet any more than Google are. He was running a directory of companies. Having a directory organized for a specific industry can be extremely useful, compared to the myriad of results you'd get on Google.

If his site had no "value" then how was it creating $155k/mo of profit? Out of thin air? By browsers forced at gunpoint to click on ads? It had value.
http://weblog.markbao.com/2008/how-i-built-a-webapp-in-18-ho...
Do the two people coming in know each other, have they worked together in the past? I'd be concerned that they would act as a single unit, so if you gave them equal shares, you'd be giving up all control. And that might not necessarily be bad, as long as you realize it, and have appropriate safeguards for your new minority shareholder position.
That's a very weak analysis. The point you're replying to is that this site had no content, not that its users didn't "want to" use it in some metaphysical sense.

This site was exploiting a difference between google's advertising cost and its advertising payout. They would buy ads to drive traffic to more ads, and make money on the difference. That's all. The site itself didn't matter, it was all about ads. Google, to their credit, discovered that they weren't making a profit from this customer, so they adjusted their prices accordingly.
The two paths are not equivalent at all. When two people bring you in, they might bring someone else instead. So the outcome should be reduced by how easily you can be swapped with someone else.

If you have one of a kind domain knowledge or ability, then they might have to pay you much more than 1/3 of the company. After all, without you they would have a much reduced chance of success. If you are a cleaning lady, they can just pay you the usual cleaning lady rates, since there are a billion more cleaning ladies ready to take your job with equal ability.

Plus, you further assume that holding ownership of the existing company is worthless?
@davidw - I bet you get value - enjoyment/quality of life, not money - by building "cool stuff" that's useful. Why not use this along with your frustration to offer something so much better than sourcetool.com? Take their general approach and make it sooooo much better.... identify who users are and what they want or just build it b/c it helps you. Things like ...
- better interface for their search (take their search tips and put an intuitive interface on it)
- revenue model of ads for specific listings. For example, listing Z pays $x to display a banner add everytime someone searches for "ball bearings" on the site. We'll call it the "<your domain name> words" programs (ala AdWords).
- drive revenue to the site through multiple means like using Google Adwords, ads in industry magazines/websites, word of mouth, blogging
- offer other features like customers join to have emails sent to them whenever new listings appear based on certain search terms. Then you start building a customer base of which you can analyze what are they want (e.g. ball bearings) and who they are (work at a manufacturer with $T in sales). And then you tell all the ball bearing listing that "hey we have X people interested in ball bearing, don't you want to pay $$$ for a banner ad?

oh my gravy, i have to stop.... i'm so excited and typing so fast I can barely breath
Stuart Langridge slides: javascript closures
Make something people want. Either people want it or they don't, but I say judge a startup by that and not just technical innovation.
I wonder if its just the case that most of ideas are created by the "nerds" and the "geeks" who had lonenly childhoods because of their smarts and got picked on in school.

I really don't think you can create anything decent if you don't surround yourself by other smart people that'll make you think.
I agree. Also, you can't patent or trademark just an idea. So just wait out the year or whatever on your NDA and make the company yourself. Unless the people who want you to build the prototype have millions of dollars in funding, they need you much more than you need them. It is nearly impossible for a nontechnical person to manage to get a web application out the door without huge piles of money. Someone with the ability to build the site can do it for whatever time it takes them to do the actual work.

Really, any nontechnical 'partner' had better be bringing in leads, selling ads, or otherwise causing cash to come in, or they are basically dead weight (and they'll have lots of little changes they want made to the site, aka the what color to paint the shed principle). Having spent hours and hours programming, while the 'partner' does basically nothing, thinking long and hard about usability and how things should flow, and then having a 'partner' look at the site for 30 seconds and start listing off changes that need to be made is not tolerable.
Hilarious! I know I'd like to do that to some of my Dells!
Okay - this is tough to do in person but even more difficult to do from just a few sentences on the web. I've just gone through this actually (well, technically still going through it as papers aren't signed [being reviewed]). It took us nearly ten weeks of back and forth but I had revenues and sizeable growth.

Let's call your potential partners "Dave" and "Joe"

Question #1: How much would you sell the company - lock, stock, and barrel - for right now?

Question #2: What do you think the valuation of the company is if you were to raise money?

Question #3: What will the company be worth in each of the following situations:
-- If Dave joins but Joe doesn't
-- If Joe joins but Dave doesn't
-- The assumption is that, if both join, the valuation bump will be equal to the two above

=================

#2 is likely different from #1 by a wide margin but not necessarily.

Let's say that you felt that #1 was $250,000 yet your potential partners felt it was $100,000. You agree to compromise at $175,000.

I would explain these to the potential partners in terms of, "I'm bringing $175,000 to the table. Dave - we agreed that the company would be worth $225,000 if you joined. Joe, we agreed that, without Dave, the company would also be worth $225,000 if you joined."

Now, if all else is equal, then you could use the formula: $175,000 + $50,000 + $50,000 = $275,000
You: 63.5%
Dave: 18.25%
Joe: 18.25%

But it generally isn't equal. Dave may agree to a $3,000/mth salary while Joe needs $7,000/mth.
Then how about educating us about the specifics of how multiprocessing differs from distributed computation (honest question)?
Does anyone but me find Erlang's syntax to be its main negative?
Luarc : Arc's web server in Lua
Mystery of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal
Call me crazy but I think Microsoft should be allowed to do just that, and as a result I'm fine with Apple's decision on this (and I rarely defend Apple on anything).
That's actually a pretty cool document... Thanks for sharing.
I wasn't the one who claimed C's worse case was better than Python's best. Perhaps you should reread the thread and see what I was objecting to. You can write bad code in any language, but some don't let you blow your foot off as easily. It's well known and well accepted that higher level languages are more maintainable that C, that's just a fact. If you don't agree, then you're the one making radical claims, not I. Regardless, I'm bored now, this is a dead horse.
It seems that network security is not near the top of many people agendas over there (it might be now) - even though not having it done properly leaves them open to attacks which could stop them achieving their primary goal.
It's still better than "Click Vista Orb to Shutdown" imho.
Why give up equity?

Will these people be offering genuine marketing (tailoring and designing your product to address specifically identified markets) or will they just be 'sales guys'?

If these folks will just be bringing in contacts and shilling the work you create, I'd recommend offering them a very lucrative commission on sales instead. Say, a ridiculously high percentage for the first n-years, with that amount declining over time to a regular commission as scale and sales revenue increases. Then, these people will only be rewarded (and rewarded handsomely) if they deliver on what they say they can produce while you retain full ownership of the intellectual property you will have 100% role and responsibility in creating.
USASpending.gov | API documentation
Will the sequel explain why, on Macs, you drag disk icons to the trash can to eject them? That always made me think twice about what I was doing.
NASA Extensions to the Google Maps API
It's not pretty, but I think there are other things that are more serious problems.

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/09/22/erlang

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/09/languages-wor...
0 - Nada

The secret to being rich is 100% ownership.
"Extension Method" in JavaScript
Type Scum
Love it, but the real way to test this is to present the monetary choice itself. For example, they could pick to get payed 1 cent with 100% certainty or 25 cents with 4% certainty. (although I don't think mturk supports this natively)
EDIT: right, exactly as been suggested by other commenters!
The 1st Law of Software Development
Microsoft Announces H.264 Support for Silverlight
Adobe: 25 Million AIR App Installs, Actual Number Likely Higher
Simple Easy Parallel Processing in PHP
Why Yammer Matters
How is this not just a more verbose equivalent of a shell script watchdog? The idea is sound (if hardly mind-bending), but the implementation here seems overly complicated.
People used to say tonic, and some oldtimers surely still do.
If it really bothers you, there is LFE (Lisp-Flavored Erlang). Like Python's whitespace, Perl's line-noise, etc. this is one of the first things people find strange along with single-assignment and then fades pretty fast.
App Store: I'm out
For starters, it is baked into the language and can handle things like dynamically adding or removing items from the supervisory tree; it works are a more fine-grained level than shell scripts. It can also provide both all-or-nothing (e.g. if one item dies then restart everything in my supervisory tree) or one-for-one (just restart the bit that died).
So if $X (suppose) is $1000 and $Y would be $5000, I should be happy to part with a fifth of the company. You're SO right. Yet wrong.
Well, I get all of these, except for the preparing food part( which I anyways can't). And I work for a really big company :)
People who start businesses want to run them in places where there is political stability and the social contract is relatively intact...

4 more years of (failed|insane|irresponsible) policies will not only bankrupt the nation, but will alienate us from the rest of the world; this is not good for business.
I'd be interested to know if his problems went away on a similar Linux setup.
It will soon, though. See http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/Releases and "Parallel garbage collection".

A release candidate of ghc 6.10 should be out in a few weeks.

None of this would help Joel, I suppose, since he decided to move away from Haskell to Erlang for other reasons.
mod_php apps are cached sets of CGI scripts.
So who wants Yammer? (apart from the VCs)

Do you know anyone who is actually using Yammer?
Not only does your brain get drained, your yammer does too.

Zing!
If a cofounder is good enough that the company is 5x as valuable with him, it speaks very poorly of you.
I really like PowerPoint because you can simulate interactivity, it's easy, and it's flexible. A few links:

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/interactive
http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/07/10-minute-mock-prototyp...
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071018/powerpoint-prototy...

There are tools specific to GUI-prototyping that have other upsides/downsides, a great list is here:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiPrototypingTools
The same day people where I work started sharing invites to the service it was escalated up the ladder as a risk.

That's not to say Yammer's a bad idea. Just a poorly executed one. A better business model would have been to whitelabel a script or produce an appliance that companies could run on their own. Both would sell.
> This site was exploiting a difference between google's advertising cost and its advertising payout.

And? If you go to work and get paid $50,000, your employer is "exploiting" the difference between the value of your work and what they pay you. That's not a bad thing. An employer adds a lot of value (a team, equipment, various capital expenses) a typically employee could not use on their own.

So it goes with this guy's site. He might have been exploiting a difference, but he was also adding value. If he were not, then the advertisers of the ads he was making money on would have been advertising where /he/ was advertising.

Arbitrage is not in itself bad or deplorable. People seem to have a personal vendetta against it on the Internet, however, due to their undeserved phobia of advertising - an industry that has pretty much fueled our economy (and the Internet generally) for a good 50 years now.
Be very careful, because people can claim to have contacts and be worth nothing in the end. So, don't sign away your company without actually being sure that they bring the value in.

Think of it this way - these people are getting a technological product that would take years to build for free basically.

Make sure you are also getting a good deadl for yourself.
The problem with being open with their mostly algorithm driven systems is that it'd allow people to find loopholes and game the system.

People currently do this, but it's very unpredictable due to lack of information. With information, some advertisers would be more informed than others and have an advantage - this is not what Google wants because informed advertisers spend less and I suspect Google would rather have uninformed "stupid" advertisers wasting $1000s per month propping up their business.
> Loudly and conspicuously hire an App Store Evangelist

I agree, but I'd be surprised if we see it happen. Evangelists are needed all over the place and yet so few companies bother to hire any or attempt any serious relationships on social media and the like. Apple are also not known for their openness in situations like this. A lack of information gives them some sort of advantage, I guess.
(1) Don't do a startup that requires raising funds.
(2) You probably can't raise funds in SV either.

While there are many things that are easier to build in SV, there are things that are easier to build elsewhere.

More to the point, people who build things in SV could almost certainly build things other places, they'd just build different things. If you can't build anything where you are, is it really reasonable to think that you could build something in SV?
It's intriguing that Adobe appears to have fudged the numbers and estimated the number of AIR App installs when, in fact, the more interesting number (for developers) is how many people actually have the runtime..!
But everyone understands that TechCrunch is a joke, right?
Air Sharing: iPhone Killer App?
This is totally the new LOLcat :)
As much as I think it's bad form to poke fun at someone's expense (especially when they are unable defend against it) I just had to link this video of Steve Ballmer doing an ad for Windows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvbWLfr-Z4s

I was waiting for him to try and give me a free set of steak knives to go with it.
I mean, you could, but do you really want to saw a horse's head off? Anything bigger than a cricket is too much for me.
I too refuse to write for the App Store until an evangelist is hired!
Care to share some details of these techniques? Enquiring minds want to know.
> "The idea that 1$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable."

So is the idea that Fortune 500 companies would let data like this be in the cloud.
I'm not making things up; I work in an 'enterprise'. (And I still dislike that term.)

$1/user/month in a 40,000-person enterprise (smaller than, say, Oracle) would be $480,000/year, not a trivial sum to get in the current climate.
Make something people need. That beats "make something people want" any day of the week. Apologies to PG, but it should be "need". Want is transient; need isn't.
How is that guerilla marketing?
Ah, Stuart showed us his typing abilities
That's a great idea - dunno why I didn't think of that.
Thanks :)
Take a look at the site yourself and ask if this is the sort of page you want to end up on.

http://timepieces.sourcetool.com/index.php?s=0&l=2&c...

Looks like a spam directory to me.
Yammer hasn't been blacklisted where i work yet and i only think it's b/c it hasn't caught on yet. We'll see though.
We looked at Starling but it wasn't as fast as Beanstalk. We ended up using Beanstalk and the Ruby client for our queues. I recommend it, but it doesn't persist to disk it is memory only, so if you have to guarantee jobs complete it not work for your situation. In our case if beanstalk goes down all the jobs are useless anyways so we can just restart.

Starling was a close contender, but it looks like twitter won't be working on it anymore as they are going to be moving to a different system. The beanstalk group is pretty active and has been very helpful.

Stomp also looks interesting, but we didn't try it out...
I wouldn't, but I'm not the target market for this sort of thing. I'm defending the business model, not the individual site.
Anytime your work needs approval to be live, you are in big trouble.

The problem is not Apple. The issue is the mobile industry. Everyone screams the Iphone is an open platform, but if you truly look at it, it is not significantly different.

You still have to go to an approval process and your application cannot compete with any Apple applications or future applications.
The day twitter rolls out group privacy settings, yammer is dead.
Ask HN : What are the most annoying issues you run into when writing code?
I'm looking to identify problems that our startup KrashKart can solve.. any ideas..

here are some we've come up with...

- errors in tools

- libraries (& web browsers) that don't comply with standards

- have to deal with complexity in order to do a simple task

- significant portion of code may be parameter marshalling

- large number of files required for typical project

- text is subject to typos & encoding problems

- can't find example/testbed code for a library/standard

- poor/nonexistent documentation
REST Channels: HTTP Channels with JSON support
Want may be transient, but need is subjective.
I agree with you on principle, but in today's society (which could be arguably described as hedonistic) people often seem to choose something they want over something they need.