skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you are starting any form of business the wall you always hit is how to find your customers.

Their are numerous methods of doing this. Even if your an internet start-up as big as the web maybe, You still need to get your first base of users, customers.

To do this your first step should be word of mouth with your direct family and then outward to friends, friends of friends and so on.

This is the old fashioned word of mouth.

Of course some products just won't sell that way: if you sell expensive watches and your family are all broke your going to struggle with this method.

But in some cases this method is a good kick start.
If your product is good, desires repeat orders this can fast grow a nice base of income.

Either way a good business needs many nets (marketing revenues) to keep going. this is the first.

Secondly is cold calling: used the wrong way it can be painful. Used the right way it can be fun and work well.
For example knoking on doors asking if the owner wants to hold a perfume party will be tough.

Taking a stool outside a local supermarket/centre and offering free samples / feedback on what perfumes people prefer can be fun, and lead to: oh i like that where can i get this from...your in.

Another good revenue is getting post cards printed - brand them well state your message and leave them on pin boards, at checkouts, take-aways anywhere people go, stand and wait, the dentist, the vet.

If your message is good and your product market worthy your be amazed at how much response this will get.

Link this all with a website, Facebook the social web and with a good customer attitude towards business and hard work
and i promise you your be amazed at how well it will all turn out.

Work hard, work smart be different, stand out.

don't be afraid to fail or tumble.
We all do it.
Best of luck

Martin Webb
founder
Tillify.com
@tillify
Point-of-sale is about to get an ass whipping
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My mobile client is consuming your API over a lossy and high latency network. Some of my requests will time out. Sometimes I will drop offline after sending a request and not be able to receive the response. Which requests can I retry safely?
Urbanisation has huge economic benefits - making everyone work as closely together as possible seems to have a magical effect on productivity. Organisations need to compete in the same market, the job market is pooled and made more efficient, and there are weird productivity gains - people moving to work in cities seem to add more to the economy, and it's not perfectly understood why.

I went to a presentation in Melbourne by a who worked on the CrossRail business case, and he said that the benefits of agglomeration alone made the case for the link. In his eyes urbanisation wasn't a necessary evil, it's was goal, at least as far as London was concerned. He did make a point to say that it wasn't for everyone, and that it'd be a good thing to keep some jobs in the satellite towns to cut people's hair and sell and entertain tourists, but...
No. I'm with you man. The way he said it was seriously bugging me. At the same time I couldn't justify my annoyance with an alternative pronunciation that made sense.

Perhaps some memes should never be vocalized.
I guess this is where we all complain about HN finally jumping the shark and turning into Reddit.
I would love to write Roy in a language with static typing (I'm definitely up for writing Roy in Roy).

But I think CoffeeScript has shown that in-browser compilation and execution is very useful. For example, if I wrote Roy in Haskell, I wouldn't have been able to easily write this demo site:

http://roy.brianmckenna.org/

It means you can play with Roy just by hitting a URL - low barrier to entry.

Another benefit is that you can include the Roy compiler in a page and use that to compile your Roy code - no pre-compilation necessary.
Really good explanation in that infographic, but is that accurate? I think it's missing the part where carbs transform to fat, or is that correct? I've always assumed that.

Also, extra fat usually goes straight through your body. It's weird how it's always assumed that every calorie stays in your body. So it's not necessarily just used for fuel or stored, some of it comes out of the other end.
The thing that has gotten me the most excited since then has been an initial version of type-safe node.js modules:

http://brianmckenna.org/blog/roy_node_modules
Good work man I think it's awesome that you've found something that works for you.
Welcome any ideas on how to make the README better. Better yet, I'll very happily accept pull requests ;)
Check out the Duct Tape Marketing book. It gives some good ideas on how to get more sales (for example, by looking at partnerships).
Twitter reports this information to http://www.chillingeffects.org/. I think this is what you're describing.
Great post good for you for hustling to take care of your family. Lots can be said from various moral points of view however simply put he's taking care of his family and not drawing on struggling Federal and State governments (while actually paying his share).

A couple great points having grown up in the antique business the skill he's developed is the ability to know the local market (buy and sell-side) for a variety of local items.

Roseburg - a suggestion that may help you're right about a clean listing good pictures etc... However one interesting twist I've experimented successfully with is using Copywriting techniques to drive attention to your ads. Mainly I did it for practice but its seems to work well having helped sell the items far more quickly than previous CL sales I've done. I'm happy to share/email a few examples of ads I've written with you if they would help.

Not sure the best way to connect off the comments here (since I've just registered to leave this comment)
I can think of a lot of obstacles:

1. Competitive intelligence - do I want my competitors to know exactly how busy I am, and when? No, I don't.

2. Pricing - do I want to give someone else a cut of all of my sales? No, I don't. I don't mind doing that a little bit if that's what it takes to do business - but if some outsider wants a significant piece of all of my business, my answer is "no".

3. Local/loyal customers - do I want to be so booked-up with online (especially if it's discount-focused) business that I can't take care of regular customers? No.

If your goal is perfect information available at all times, you're headed for disappointment. You can probably get pretty good information a fair amount of the time, but you'll have to work at it or pay for it.
It's not an automatic censoring. The country sends a request to Twitter.
Because the US Attorney who would start this lawsuit and the Attorney General who would support her would lose any hope of being hired by one of the plaintiff when they want to get their share of the loot.
Not an Aussie, but living in Australia... I think the GP overstated things a little. Melbourne is reasonably dense compared to some other cities I've lived in. Quite a few of my co-workers don't own cars, and none of them drive to work in the city - every one of them walks, cycles, takes a tram or catches a train. Melbourne buses are terrible, but the trains aren't nearly as bad as everyone says. Our trams and cycle lanes are ubiquitous and they're incredible. Most of the hills in Melbourne exist in bike riders' imaginations, though - compared to my native NZ it's dead flat.

Having commuted on Brisbane's buses I know they're top notch, and the ferries aren't bad if you're near the river and have some extra time in the mornings. The trains are getting a lot of money thrown at them, too, upping service frequencies and extending them further north.

There's definitely cultural lean towards living in the suburbs and having a back yard big enough to play cricket on, but you only really know what you see. What used to be called outer suburbs are now called inner suburbs, and they're getting dense and very transport-accessible.
Congrats to all of you who laughed. You are all great hackers. I don't find this remotely funny.
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I visited quite a few startups this past week. What surprised me were how small in number each one was, and I think that worked to their advantage.
Keep up the good work. Wow - i just read all the comments here - there's a lot of 'can't be done' negativity. All that means is that you'll have few competitors. To be honest, i'm thinking of not bothering reading HN comments any more.

Keep making a difference - if you guys succeed in improving the efficiency of US hospitals, that's something MAJOR to be proud of :)
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Lectures are a terrible way to teach. Why would putting them online be better?
Can assistants really do something good at only $3 per hour?
Yes, but censorship is a slippery slope to silence and government abuse. Eventually Twitter and/or the People will need to make a stand against tyranny if they feel human rights and free speech are being overly obstructed.
This is more of a PR stunt than a winning legal strategy.

1. The US government has sovereign immunity (except where specifically waived by law) for virtually all its official acts, unless those acts violate the law or constitutional rights.

2. The supreme court has affirmed in a somewhat similar case, Kosak v. US, 465 U.S. 848 (1984), in which a set of paintings were detained (and possibly slightly damaged) by Customs officials. More recently, the core holding in Kosak was affirmed in Dolan v. US, a case regarding a specific waiver of immunity for the US Postal Service (though the lower court was reversed).

3. In a recent series of cases on criminal law (Medellin v. Texas, among others), a majority of the Court made it clear that they do not view decisions of the International Criminal Court as self-executing, meaning that they are to be followed without the ability for the Supreme Court to review them.

In other words, this is a real longshot. At some point, if no criminal case can be proved, the accused may get the servers back (and the users their files). But if convicted (or if the assets are subject to foreiture as the fruit of illegal activity), there's a good chance those servers are gone for good.

Besides, how would the FBI establish that the files were non-infringing and should be returned? In theory, the DMCA helps guard against this--had MegaUpload actually followed the takedown procedures, the government could have more faith that returning the servers to a surviving entity wouldn't put the same infringing content back online.

Imagine a scenario where your financial advisor has control of some of your money and also happens to be a drug dealer or insider trader. The police bust him and seize his assets, but because money is fungible they can't tell exactly where all the cash came from. Your money is frozen pending the outcome of the case and a determination which assets should be released. You can sue the accountant (he had a duty to you), but suing the government isn't going to get you very far. Not exactly the same, but analogous, to my mind.
I actually got great feedback on the Second Edition on Hacker News earlier; George Grellas, who commented extensively on the thread, worked closely with me to help turn out this Third Edition, which, while only 20 pages long, was nearly nine months in the making and incorporated feedback from three attorneys and dozens of HN folks.

Second Edition Threads:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573970
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623182
What a load of crap.

"If they would have come into the city and said, 'Here's what were proposing to do,' we would say, 'Here's the kinds of things you need to do to comply with the building code,'" Berns said.

F%@# that, when somebody wakes up in the morning and decides to do something cool, they should not be required to have "Will the government allow this?" as their second thought. As noble a cause as fire safety is (and I was a volunteer firefighter for a decade plus, to I'm close to these issues), the building code should not be rammed down their throats at gunpoint by the heavy hand of government.
However, lots of teenagers will be glad to be on google+, I've felt extremely frustrated at not being on it not because it's a "hip" social site, but because of google's constant integration of google+ into everything. It was like going to disney-land without seeing Mickey Mouse, so I hardly think the complaints would be justified.

Also, not to forget lots of teenagers are tech-oriented, let's not forget how apple and Microsoft started!
> This is so impossible!

This is exactly why I feel we need more such start-ups in this space - Naive but Bold that have a "Stay hungry Stay foolish" mentality.

Having said that, I pretty much agree with all what you said. The core problem is that few years working in health IT, most people (myself included) start thinking this way. And thats why I feel we need such bold visions, which may sound stupid or "impossible" at this point but can potentially change the status quo. Its very hard to predict when, how and who will bring the change but I know it ll happen, sooner or later.

PS: I disagree about the UMLS part - I don't think any company in their right mind would use Metathesaurus as their base vocabulary, may be synonyms, mappings etc but not as a coding vocabulary.
H1B is tied to a single company and if your potential co-founder switches to your newly formed company he has to get his H1B transfered. There are also many implications with regards to the green card process as it is tied to the sponsoring company. In short, talk to a lawyer before getting started!
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Good job! The goal is here is to keep pushing yourself. What will happen is that the next app will build on the skills you learn in the current app and so on.

Once you finish your first app, I'd look into some open source projects and see how they are built and learn from them. It accelerates your learning, but you need the basics first.

TBNR and the iOS Docs are a great place to start, but there's nothing like just jumping right in. :)

Also a word of advice: Making the app is only 50% of the work if you are expecting to make significant income from the app.
Actually, current zoning laws in NYC require [most] new developments to have some minimum number of parking spaces available (usually underground) based on the size of the building. Just look at any of the new condos that have gone up in the last 10 years. Found this recent article while looking for a reference:

http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/01/06/times-architecture-cri...
More importantly, this finally means that Google+'s Big Push into Japan - their collaboration with J-pop megagroup AKB48 - can be completed, as before most of the members were too young for their own accounts (man, giving over 100 girls Nexus Ss can't be that cheap...)

https://plus.google.com/117147321771860727748
>You can sue the accountant (he had a duty to you)

That's how I see it. They're probably under better legal standing suing MU over gross fiduciary misconduct, etc.
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Move the wiki somewhere where they don't even have to leave their normal flow of work. We moved ours to github. Just make a private & empty repo, add a wiki to it, and now you have a wiki you can edit in your favorite editor, search with grep, and save / revert with git. Back of the napkin estimate, I would say we have 4 to 5 time the activity on the wiki that we did before. We found that developers really don't want to leave what they are doing, open a browser, possibly log in somewhere to edit in some embedded editor that doesn't have emacs/vim/whatever bindings. If your team still doesn't use it, well then it might be time to polish off that CV.
"... Australia is very much like California. Population density is low. Almost all of Australia is car dependent. Land sizes are large. This makes public transport largely uneconomic and unworkable, with certain exceptions (eg parts of Perth, inner Sydney, Melbourne). Even then, that transport is largely limited to going into and out of the city. If you want to go somewhere else it's a huge problem. ..."

Cletus, Melbournite here. Isn't the majority of the population urban and concentrated on the eastern sea board? The density is high. The picture you paint of car dependence is not quite as bad as you portray it in Melbourne at least. Public transport is actually pretty good compared to the roads cost wise & safety. It's not at European standards, but Europe is far denser and politically different. It's also hard to lump the cities together. Melbourne has had good public transport, Perth better. Sydney is pathetic. Having said that, if you live outside the 50km zone (less in some capitals) of Melbourne you will either get a car or depend on day and irregular public transport, if at all.

The key point to remember here is, traditionally the major capital cities of Australia moved from serviceable public transport to car based travel, only when the sprawl of the 70's occurred where land use, surpassed infrastructure and the will to supply it. Transport moved from communal and "tax based" to private and "user pays".
Yes, I think that really depends on the kid. Mainly I wanted to point out that there are plenty of learning vehicles that teach the programming concepts without necessarily being 100% text-based coding. For some kids that will excite them more. (That's also why I like WeDo Robotics and Mindstorm.)

Nothing wrong with going directly to programming languages if that's what the kid's into.
The MU terms of service specifically said there were no guarantees about upload lifetime (or something to that effect).
It's not weird at all, at least to me. I still love my solution for a crazy puzzle in Riven (Myst II). You had to select certain stones with animals carved on them. You figured out which ones to select by finding certain objects on the island, and the current screen supposedly contained a shape similar to the object. However it was nearly impossible to figure out which shapes corresponded to which stones partly because the puzzle was spread all over the game, and partly because it was hard to figure out which creature a shape represented. My solution was to use my computer and programming knowledge.

Stage 1 was taking screenshots of the stones and shapes. Stage 2 was outlining the shape screenshots with Paint, and using a simple script to look for the outline color, and other colors would change a background color, so I was left with a simple outline. Stage 3 was using an image display program I created and will be selling soon to create a grid with the shape outlines in the top row and the stones with animals in the other rows. Thus I had all the information needed to figure out the code on a single screen. This was so much more fun than doing it the normal way :)

Oh, and then there was the time I solved the last puzzle in Professor Layton, a sliding block puzzle, by programming it in. I used brute force, which of course didn't work (too slow), but then used memoization techniques and such to speed it up. I not only found a solution, but I found interesting stats, such as the minimum number of moves required. It was even more interesting because it was my first program in Python, so I used it to learn the language. Programming to solve video game puzzles is one of the most fun kinds of programming out there.
ASK HN: Vetting a Share holding agreement with an incubator
An incubator has shown interest in my startup after we met them at a startup event.
When they shared their SHA (share holding agreement) with us, there were several points that alarmed me and my team.
I am not sure if we're overreacting or if these are really alarming issues.

Specifically, Preferred Stocks, voting rights, tag along rights etc. How important are these and how much should an entrepreneur be willing to let go of?
When done correctly, there's a separate up button and back doesn't double as up. There is confusion because when you are drilling down into an app "back" and "up" are the same place. Even worse, I suspect that confusion is why developers often get back/up handling wrong.
I don't necessarily think it is a copout. They are bootstrapped, are making a ton of money, and hit the market with a good product right off the bat. Not many companies can afford to do the things they do and still pull a profit. How many startups can afford and justify having an artist (not graphic artist mind you) permanently on staff? Don't get me wrong, I love github and they have a great team, but not every company can do the things they do and still be in business.
Ask HN: Why does the YouTube commenting system suck?
Forget nesting comments and Reddit style ranking algorithms, YouTube doesn't even link you to the original comment when you reply to one. You are left to hunt for the original until you realize that you don't care that much.

It's been like this for years, and besides top comment, nothing has really changed. Is this uncomfortable by design? Technically speaking, it's of course hard to build a more advanced commenting system for the volume that they get, but I have a hard time believing the guys at YouTube can't figure it out.

Any thoughts?
No it doesn't. NP-Hard just states that it's NP-Complete + Polynomial Turing Time reducible to H.

NP-Complete just means that a correct solution can be evaluated in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine. It says nothing of the number of solutions that exist.
My first thought looking at this was "Ooooh, it would be so nice if my GPU could parse Q.."

In fact, Q thoroughly sold me on tightly coupling a small expressive language with a parallel-friendly datastore. So many data problems require just this combination, and most general computing languages are surprisingly bad at it in comparison.
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I think that a hacker would also realize that the title makes no claim whatsoever about the hacker status of those who don't laugh.
Hm, but then even Google’s stock apps get it wrong. I was using a factory fresh Galaxy Nexus.

Maybe we are talking about something different? What I mean is that sometimes, the back button does something different than taking you back to the last screen you were on.
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