skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey,

Well my personal circumstances are by the by: they were an example :D
My point was really more that you should try to talk to people with experience (face to face, not just here). A half hr to an hr conversation will probably get quite a lot of stuff straight.

Considering your situation it's a bit hard to give advice. Do you actually have a product to bring to market? Are you at a stage where you a) need funding or b) can begin to sell. With my startup I worked with a team of friends for about 2 years before we formed the actual company. We all had day jobs or university and so we worked in our downtime bringing our idea into fruition. Now we have an almost marketable product and are at the stage where funding is essential: so recently we took the step of forming the company and searching for funding.Until now it was an unecessary need.

If your not selling or bringing in cash for funds then I would advise avoiding forming any legal entity. The only thing I would say is that it might be worth signing some kind of partnership agreement between you and your friend. I'm sure things will be fine but if you fall out (it's so easy) it is best to know exactly where you stand in terms of what individually you can take away (ideas, code, etc.).

As to the final part of that post - regarding getting out if the startup fails. That is incredibly country specific. You will need to get some advice: either from a lawyer or from a public body (if they exist) as to your exact options.

In the UK you could, for example form a Limited Liability Partnership (where if things folded you only have a small personal liability) or an full on LTD company (where there is no personal liability). I assume similar entities can be formed in China (though I DONT KNOW).

I think the best advice is to hunt for someone locally who can tell you your options in that case.

If your entering into contracts with other companies at this stage (note not just selling - actual contracted agreements) then you DEFINITELY need to consult professionally. It shouldn't be too expensive and is worth it. If your obtaining funding and are presented a contract ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS take it to a lawyer before signing. :)

Good luck!
This is totally nuts. Talk about a flying dirty-bomb! Plus, jettisoning the reactors and bringing them down with parachutes only works if you know you're going to crash at a high enough altitude, which does not include takeoffs and landings.
Have you looked at Project Pluto? They built a working nuclear jet engine
What this should say, is that SEO as an INDUSTRY is bullshit, proper search engine optimization should just be taken into account as you build whatever you're putting on the web. SEO is a feature not an app in startup terms
Politics and a dated beer ad mixed together? How is this hacker related?
Sometimes it's more about execution than product inventory.

If you go to http://pixlr.com/app, you immediately get a Photoshop interface.

If you go to http://www.picnik.com/app, you get to wait for a minute while the app 'fluffs clouds' and then you get a screen full of buttons and text ... when do I get to edit my photo again?

I had never heard of splashup.com. Their app execution seems good compared to picnik, comparable to pixlr. Perhaps marketing failed?
This post is bullshit.

SEO, just like anything by itself, is not an answer. Simple logical way to look at this:

1) You need more customers, visitors, users,etc.
2) Google often drives them to you. The higher you are, the more of them you see.
3) You apply SEO tactics to increase ranking
4) More people come, you've achieved your goals.

Now, doing this alone doesnt mean anything:

a) if your product sucks, you can be number one on google. odds are, you still wont go anywhere.
b) if your support sucks, the people you convery will leave.
c) if you cant sell, these people will leave after talking to you.

Hope this makes sense, just giving a balanced opinion.
One other point is how you plan to account as well. If you want to do it yourself you'll either have to put together your own system (that is EASY to use - trust me that is essential) or invest in a commercial package. That can be expensive - so it might be cheaper to seek professional services.

If iti s only a small company you might be ok just keeping a general book (income, outlay, expenditure etc etc.) and keep all receipts. Then at the end of the financial year take all that to an accountant and pay him to get it all written up and submitted. That is how it works in the UK (and probably costs around £400-500 depending on the amount of work involved) - I dont know if that is the case in China but it is worth investigating. Usually there is no formal requirement for a small startup to keep regulated books - just to have some form of accounts the tax man can request at any time (it;s more complex than that but, meh, essentially all that ya need to know :P)
Are you referring to source code control? I've never really heard of Configuration Control outside of the realms of 3rd party software implementations (e.g. "Implement SAP at company X"), where it refers to, basically, source control for the app configuration.
I couldn't agree with you more.

A lot of SEO can be done as you're building a site, but there are certain aspects to be made aware of. Unfortunately, too many companies sell these BS packages and belittle true SEO, instead of delivering actual results.

He'd also have more of a leg to stand on if he had given some _reasons_ to back his statements.
yes, you can imagine worldwide frustration over poor monetization of these "internet eyeballs" is reaching a boiling point. i am VERY surprised the solution isn't here yet
The add is indeed brilliant, I loved it. And yet I absolutely agree with you, it should not be here.
I highly doubt it but I can recommend X-Plane. It runs fantastically on the phone and you can even do ILS approaches.
For the likely fate of this submission see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=344359
Everything you mention is common-sense and easy to tech-savvy people like us. Not so much for "Joe the Plumber" (bad joke, I know) who just wants good search engine placement for his local business. He doesn't know what a "good user experience" means and he's not going to get it he builds his site using an off-the-shelf CMS or have his newphew build it.

Do you just not like the term "SEO"? Would you prefer "user experience consultant"?

My point is, there's a gap that skilled SEO people fill, regardless of semantics or the notion that optimization is inherent in a properly built site.

BTW, there's plenty to optimizing Flash sites that don't involve frowned upon methods. Yes, much of it is also about user experience.
Establish a customer / supplier relationship between teams that build libraries and those that consume those libraries to build applications. Treat the libraries as separate internal products with a defined release schedule and version numbers. Require any library API changes which could break backward compatibility be delivered in a release with a new major version number, along with documentation.

It also helps to organize your source code repository so that every developer can check out all the code across your entire organization. Then when a library developer refactors something she can immediately see if any dependent code will no longer build or fails unit tests. Google does this, at least for the majority of their Java code. I saw a presentation from the Google Collections developers and they explained that working that way made it fairly easy to revise their API.
Actually there is zero effort required to use git in an environment that already uses svn, git integrates incredibly well with svn.

"I want to know /why/ I should try it. I want to see my work flows called out and the minutes/hours I will save by switching from svn to git explained clearly."

Sounds like you're waiting for a salesperson. Good luck with that.
i see where that is the case. i just hope it's not idle paranoia at this point letting people's judgements be clouded. if they have a solid reason, that's fine. but if they're just being sheeple they need to be educated properly. advertising is practically the ONLY way to gain traction in a recession.

what needs to be cut is NON revenue generating expenses in companies. not the ones that actually drive your business
this IS bullshit - those 5 things you can do without paying so-called SEO Consultants
Long healthy families life in your live
Lessons from the last crash
Very nice indeed, excellent speed, unique presentation; I don’t accept the comparison to Google maps.

Zoomii deals with a total of less than 200k items in its inventory compare that with how many geocodes and frames are necessary to represent a street chunk.
"User experience > SEO" -Dustin Curtis

Many of the SEO best practices can be implemented without taking away from the user experience. However, once the SEO crap starts taking away from the user experience...Stop.
there is no reason not to explore this line of thinking, however, there would be an even greater likelihood that someone would want to steal a planes reactor to make some sort of bomb.

i think it would be safer to have the nuclear reactors and fuel on the ground and to somehow transmit that energy to the plane.

another option would be lightweight, high density batteries that can be charged in minutes. planes could then at first fly several hundred miles, touchdown, refuel and then take off without much time loss. CNT (carbon nanotubes) might produce batteries/capacitors that are upto the 'charge'.
Yes, I dislike the term SEO because it is misleading.

I agree with you here, but I don't think I said anything related to people who perform 'SEO'. I am talking about the general notion that is perpetuated that you should modify your site to 'improve SEO'. No, you should create a better user experience by conforming to standards and as a side effect search engines use these as markers.
My last boss wasn't technical, and he had all the "SEO" down that he needed - to the point that he had a string of SEO "experts" come in to see if they could do anything, and he figured out that he knew as much or more than them.

I have to come down on the side of "SEO is bullshit", even though the article in question was mostly content free. It's not that there's nothing to "SEO", just that there's not enough to justify it being a "career". The whole thing smells fishy to me, and I think that the market for it will eventually implode due to all the snake oil being sold. That or the structure will change radically as people who are honest and know their stuff start charging in a different way - perhaps something like getting money for training rather than working directly on a site.

Genuine designers/UI/user experience people are a different breed entirely, who know about making a site nice for people. That's not what "SEO Professionals" sell, though, generally.

Another few disjointed thoughts from my flu-ridden head:

* In terms of comparative advantage, if the thing you are relatively best at is attempting to fiddle with search engine results, as compared to, say, programming, or user interface work, or design work... what's that say?

* ... I had another one a few minutes ago, but my headache got the better of me. Oh, here it is: can't most of this stuff be automated somehow? That would be a legitimate business, creating tools that help people get things right.
I guess that's true, but I don't think you've rebutted the article; companies will certainly disqualify you for things you do when you're 18.

The article also isn't making the value judgement you're arguing with. It's just saying, "acquiring a criminal record is a bad move for a kid". Of course they're right.
"Professor Poll said an alternative to carrying nuclear reactors on aircraft would be to develop aircraft fuelled by hydrogen extracted from sea water by nuclear power stations." Somehow, I'd feel a bit better flying across the US knowing there wasn't a nuke reactor underneath me.
One question that comes to mind: How does this effect the market for private, dedicated (managed) servers? Or rather the platform providers for today's online apps?
The problem isn't that it's an extreme example, it's that it's an irrelevant example.
Try out the new features and see for your self if they get you anything. They might just be "wow" features, or they might save you significant amounts of time in ways you couldn't have imagined before. Unless of course your imagination is far above average and you have the rare skill of knowing in advance exactly what you want and how you want it to work.
Why is advertising the only way to gain traction in a recession? Do you not understand that the startups on the Internet have many options for revenue? Do you need a stern talking to?

(above is tounge-in-cheek if that wasn't clear)
This reply probably deserves the same fate as the post, but it's worth noting that the Bud commercial was based on a 1999 short film by the name "True." So, technically, it's a remake of that short film and not the commercial.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222458/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

The ramjet lives on, but it's not nuclear powered, and don't they call it the 'scramjet' now?
Pixlr seems significantly faster than Phoenix.
advertising is practically the ONLY way to gain traction in a recession.

That's simply un-true. Advertising is a growth strategy, but you can only grow when you're sure you've got all your ducks in order. What often happens during a recession is that the people in charge cut back on growth areas to ensure they are still focused on the right things. If they find that they are not, they persue new directions, if they confirm that they are going in the right directions, they reinvest.

You can rant about it all you want, but that is the reality of the marketplace. Not reacting to reality is not a smart thing to do, and most smart investors would rather keep their cash then give it to a (now riskier) venture.
Open Solaris + MySQL + ZFS Success Story in Production at SmugMug
I don't think this trend of criticizing the ad-supported business model is fair. Whether you like it or not, having eyeballs is "valuable" and brands will always pay to be seen. It doesn't matter how old you are or how much "value" your app is bringing to the table, if the economy is up and you have eyeballs, you can sell ads and make money. If the economy is down, ad spending is cut and the ad-supported model struggles. The ad-supported model isn't dead merely because the economy is down lately. It will be back.
'Wrong business model' is the right answer here, it encapsulates: Market not ready for idea, focus on technology (trying to make something useful), selling nothingX3.
This is dumb, and essentially the same conversation that was had a week ago. I'll repeat what I said then:

A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.

From the [original] article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"

True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."

I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.
Will_paginate and Merb
This is a more effective exploration of the issues behind the WSJ entitlement article for hackers and founders. Related threads

The Trophy Kids Go To Work (WSJ) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455219391652725.html

Don't Mistake Ambition for Entitlement by Matt Maroon http://mattmaroon.com/?p=573

Hacker News Discussion of both http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=342358
Google Scrambles to Patch Buffer Overrun Exploit in Android G1
Nah, it is always about execution :)
Layoffs Hit Revision3
Perhaps not in 1987?
The cache in the processor - whichever one is the final cache before going to memory, which is the L2 or the L3, depending on the processor.

There almost certainly is not enough memory to cache all of the information. But hardware cache friendly algorithms have good locality. This means that once they pull data into the cache, they do everything to it that they need to before it gets kicked out. Cache unfriendly algorithms continually kick out and pull in the same data.

The simplest example of this is iterating over a two-dimensional array in C. Since C stores arrays in row-major format (the rows are contiguous in memory), you want to iterate over the rows first, then the columns:

for (i = 0; i < ROW; ++i)
for (j = 0; j < COL; ++j)
matrix[i][j] = 0;

The opposite will result in many more cache misses:

for (i = 0; i < COL; ++i)
for (j = 0; j < ROW; ++j)
matrix[j][i] = 0;

In the second case, in the inner loop the column is fixed, and it's the row that is changing. Since a two-dimensional matrix in C has contiguous rows, this means that each load in the inner most loop will probably result in a cache miss. In the first case, since the inner loop has a fixed row, and is iterating over the columns, the memory being accesses is contiguous, so it will consume all of the data on a cache line before kicking it out.
the NSZombie and malloc tracing stuff shown in this article helped me out a number of times

http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?DebuggingAutorelease
i think that it's not necessarily that we have outer-role people performing the roles they're not accustomed to, it's more that one person cannot be everything necessary to create a successful software application. the problem is communication, because since we don't have this miracle "jack of all" person, we're functioning as separate body parts of the business frankenstein monster, each part having misconceptions of what the other is doing and is supposed to do.

it's because of this that you can have the best design, best bizdev, best engineer and still fail because you lack the cohesion to create one solid being. the glue you need is great management.
One word: Distribution.
Sure, if you already know all of those things, and can do keyword research, etc... Many small business owners don't and can't. Hence the need for a service.
Maybe salesperson shouldn't be a dirty word then. I think the burden is on the creator (and or proponents) of software to explain to others why they should use it. Would you argue otherwise?
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crash
You should tell your friend that it does not seem to work in Opera 9.61.
3 lame stories and 1269 words to get to the rather obvious and well beaten to death Internet cliche of ...

1. Have Idea, launch Site
2. Get Lots of Traffic.
3. ??
4. Profit.

I got it Paul, save your wrists.
Dean Kamen: part man, part machine
The motorcycle screw reminds me of a similar problem solving lesson I have learned from experience, which may resonate more with those less mechanically inclined.

When moving a large object (especially a couch), remove everything you can (that is intented to be removable) from the object (legs, pillows) and the path (doors come off hinges easily). The set up and tear down (in testing terms; in practical terms, it is reverse order) steps seem like potential wasted effort, but taken as a mandatory step are constant time. Iterating through the things that need to be removed to achieve the goal is linear, with potentially exponential cost (you get tired). Like what everyone is saying about burn rates in a recession: in hindsight, few regret trimming too early and plenty regret trimming too late. Few complain about a move made too easy.

In theory, this is a straightforward argument that any sufficiently intelligent person could read and practice. In practice, it is not until at least your third move that you pause during the move to question why the plan is "let's just try it first" and "it is not too heavy". But you never see a professional piano mover iterate. This is not a comment trying to propose a solution. I just liked the article for its clean way of expressing how experience matters in your approach.
There's good money in telling people how to make ... good money.
That's nothing. Now joining many large corporations involves an incredible amount of snooping in your life. From drug tests to reading your social network posts. What's considered normal is insane. This includes some young high profile "do-no-evil" corporations.
BAD SEO is bullshit.

Well thought out SEO as part of a larger scale site impact consideration is AWESOME :D
[disclaimer - I work for the Windows Azure team].

The root website is www.azure.com - that should link to all the relevant docs, bits, sites. We're turning on all the switches as I write this so you may see a few 404s before noon PST.
I think you mean function object:method(arg) ... end, if you're assuming that object will be passed (as "self") implicitly. The colon is the difference from normal map indexing.

I much prefer Lua's solution for this over Python's (and I'm also coming to strongly prefer prototype-style OO, in general).
Well, fully anecdotal here, but every guy I know (at least 10) that got knee surgery to "correct" a problem continued to have the same problems.

It seems to me that most of them regarded this as simply a stop gap or "treatment" and not a cure. Those that thought they would not have any more issues with their knees were not happy. Many who got it earlier on suggested that they would have chosen to go as long as possible without the post surgery rehab if they could.

I've been fortunate enough not to have any knee or foot issues myself, so I'm certainly not claiming to be an authority here.
fair point :D
FYI, does not look good in camino.

http://browsershots.org/screenshots/77c69ab2a918ce3b1628a45d...
This is the sort of thing you'd see on early reddit, and I wish there was more of it. I'd guess that half of you think this is "not hacker news", or not appropriate, or whatever--so I wonder where this would be appropriate. Anyone know?
I have another boring story. I was moving a treadmill with my Dad yesterday and we had to disassemble parts to fit it into a particular room. As we were working I told him about a treadmill I had owned, that folded up and had good wheels.

Lesson? Make and buy treadmills that fold.

The end.
I can agree with this ... but I think there are still search engine ranking factors which have nothing to do with user experience.

Inbound links, for example, play a huge role in ranking–but are completely external to the site's user experience.
Very cool write up. I always find it interesting with small changes to code can result in significant improvements. Even when it might lead to a little be less natural code (loosing the compare_faces(face1,face2) function)
"He said that, in the worst-case scenario, if the armour plating around the reactor was pierced there would be a risk of radioactive contamination over a few square miles. "

So, even if these planes were to exist, we would need to build a new network of remote nuclear airports (nukeports) miles away from any urban development ---plus a transportation infrastructure to shuttle between the nukeport and urban centers.

The cost wouldn't be the flight itself, but the adhoc transportation network of several dozen miles from the nukeport to urban centers. It could take several hours to get from the nukeport to the city in poor traffic. That's why this is impractical for civilian use, though maybe it could work for mass military transport or freight.
Revision3 cuts shows including 'Pop Siren' and distribution deals including 'Wine Library'
A bunch of Terms of Service (TOSes)
Good point, I think the real question is whether your ads can support your business and it's costs and growth goals.

For some it may not (see YouTube).
Homework for the Perfect Startup