skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: My Startup didn't go viral- what now?
So I launched my startup (moodstir.com) after working on it since November or so and have made a few attempts over the past couple of weeks to try and get a following. It's actually one of the main reasons I decided to take a leave of absence from the University of San Francisco.

I understand that virality is not going to happen overnight, but I approached the project under the assumption that it's either going to be adopted and spread throughout some niche quickly, or never catch on.

So I'm asking for advice from some of the more experienced founders on HN- am I being impatient? Should I pivot the concept in some way? Perhaps allowing other login options aside from Facebook is the first step to reduce barrier to entry.

If you have any suggestions about either where I should go from here, or specifically regarding the concept, I would be happy to hear them.
Seeing 44% Chrome / 27% Firefox / 17% Internet Explorer on a large gaming website, sharing the Chrome popularity but Safari is at 8% -- behind Internet Explorer! I guess tech people love macs!
Assistly.com becomes Desk.com!
Indeed, it looks like Assistly is completely rebranding: http://www.assistly.com/blog/assistly-deskcom/
Wufoo gets a New Wardrobe and a Form Builder Demo
Apple is not responsible for large chunks of Internet infrastructure, such as search, advertisements, email, maps, analytics, and many other services that are automatic "go-to" solutions for hundreds of millions of users of Google services. They just want to sell you an overpriced phone/table/laptop (God I can't believe I just defended Apple!).

They do increasingly dominate the online music business with iTunes, much in the same way that Amazon does with digital books, but that is nothing compared to the global Internet reach of Google and hence a higher level of responsibility and scrutiny.
Location chambres & suites Essaouira: un riad de charme de la médina
Chacune des quatre chambres & ds quatre suites du Riad Perle d'Eau est unique.
Ambiance médina ou vue sur mer, à vous de choisir...
Yeah, I always thought it was odd that I had to get a special insurance for dental work. This is supposed to be a socialist land of milk & honey, not cold-hearted America :p

Sweden used to be all about reaping the benefits of both capitalism and socialism, but now our gov't seems to take a perverse joy in making it a "worst of both worlds" type of country.

I would be curious to know what countries today offer what Sweden used to offer. New Zeeland? Canada? Denmark?
Tyvek Pants & Disposable Pants 
Disposable-garments.com provide tyvek pants and disposable pants with full of durability and comforts protective clothing you don't have to compromise. That's because we delivers the best balance of protection, durability and comforts. We delivers tyvek pant and disposable pants which are 100% high density polyethylene and while other protective clothing either have a film or coating that can be scratched or worn away easily.
I still think it won't succeed. Electric cars have been build since 1904. But range have always been a problem. Ofcourse charging your car becomes quicker. But I still think a lot of people won't buy an electric car because they are afraid of not getting home.
Sadly, I have to agree with you. It's not ready yet at all.
Red Hat developer explains open source color calibration hardware
This is what a car manufacturer's website should look like in 2012. I'm tired of looking at flash "loading" screens and 12px type. This looks like a startup's site, in a good way.
Badly needs a demo.
Sensory Processing Disorder | Children Autism | ADHD | Children Games | Autism
Find out what Sensory Processing Disorder means and. With Lifeskills4kids’s Sensory Processing Measure (SPM) kit, you can now get a complete picture of children’s sensory functioning at home, at school, and in the community.
Sensory Processing Disorder | Children Autism | ADHD | Children Games | Autism
ADHD being misdiagnosed is a hot topic among parents and teachers these days. Statistics say that any given elementary classroom will have one to three ADHD students. At lifeskills4kids get the perfect assessment and diagnosis of ADHD.
I suppose so. Also Mac only has a tiny gaming library so you're going to inherently receive a smaller audience (I know you can game on console also, but I find that PC gaming on the internet is overrepresented in much the same way Macs are on HN).
What's the value-add you're offering users?
MegaUpload's data safe for two more weeks
One reason for which I don't like Google anymore is that they broke their primary promise, which they were emphasizing more and more around 2004-2005 (if I remember correctly): to make most of the world's information easily accessible and shareable, and, why not?, trying to make a difference in this world.

In my ideal world the Wikileaks info would have lived in a Google sub-domain, climate change discussions would have been based on open charts and data which would have been also hosted by Google (with available info going back since the first meteorological observations were made), mashups about Iraq and Afghanistan wars with geo-located user-uploaded photos could have lived at maps.google.com/war and so on and so on.

I know that what I was dreaming about doesn't add any stock-market value or anything (and in the worst case scenario it gets you straight into jail), but that's at least what I call "changing the world, trying to make it a better place", like guys such as Diderot or d'Alembert did three centuries ago.
Google has been very successful for years. They've only been losing their high esteem in the last year or less. At least in my social circle.
But I'm not using git so I have to understand how a RCS works, I'm using git so I can keep track of my files!

Similarly, you don't program C just so you have to learn assembler and how a CPU works. Yes, if you do you can do awesome things, but that's not the point, that's a bonus.
This could be handy for something like starting a template from scratch for a CMS.

However it needs more work. Multiple classes are broken.

.post-5 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-products post {

}

Also, it misses a trick by not using heierarchy for definitions the way anybody who writes css as part of their job would.

I'd like to see it as a tool that gives you every definition you need, and then you can strip out what you don't want afterwards.

I can't see myself using it on a bespoke project, as I tend to write html and css simultaneously.
Oddly I've just move (back) to Firefox because I'm increasingly concerned by Google's activity and I'm curious whether anyone else is thinking along similar lines.

I like Chrome more than any other browser (I've got a Chrome theme for Firefox so it looks similar...) but I'm simply not willing to put all my eggs in the Google basket and it was one of the Google products that got dropped in the cull (Gmail and Reader surviving, Chrome and search going).

Ideally I'd like Apple to sort out Safari but I'm still not wild about it on Windows and I want to use the same browser on all my machines so Firefox it is (Xmarks and Feedly not supported on Opera).
Same thing here, I launched http://whodidiforget.com a few days ago, and after getting a little traffic from HN it fell flat.

Sorry for hijacking your post but my question is similar to yours: what to do when you're not on a first name basis with big blogs editor (and those blogs do not respond to email tips) and you don't yet have a large network ?
Sh*t… Twitter is exciting… again
My feedback:

1. It wasn't obvious to me why I would use this when I went to the site. This is just for telling people my mood? I can do that on Twitter. You need to make clear what the difference is. Perhaps even some sort of demo.

2. When I did try to enter a mood I was asked to sign in using Facebook. That's a dead-end for me; I won't give a random company access to my Facebook account.
Regarding your last line: reading some of the anti-Google stories going around (e.g. anything John Gruber or MG Siegler produce) actually made me stop and think whether I needed to go back and re-evaluate Microsoft as I may have just been swept along by the Apple cult attacking its strongest perceived competitors.
Chennai guest house
Theprinceparkchennai provides,deluxe rooms,rooms,hotel,serviced apartments,guest house,ac rooms,lodge,guest room,mansion in Chennai.
Google is removing search results?
The best thing you could of done but didn't do would have been to validate the idea before even building it. And by validating, I meant finding a core group of users who absolutely had a need or want for what you were looking to build, not friends or people who thought the idea was cool. This core group would then go on to be your beta (or alpha) users.

I assume you didn't do the above. Virality, press, etc... are often not reliable sources of traffic to build a sustainable group of users in the early stages. At this point, you should go back and find that core group to improve the MVP with and worry about growth once you've worked out all the initial bugs and features users actually want.

Obviously take my advice with a grain of salt as I have no idea what your idea is and just how far you got and this is very general advice (on iPhone and didn't go to your link). You need to make sure people even wants your product
I just ran across this, wanted to say that it looks like an interesting project - not sure however what advice to give you. I can however say, that I m a student studying NLP and I like the way users self annotate their moods based on their statements. Good luck.
Congrats on your early traction! I think it would be interesting to A/B test your current registration call to action and button with something like:

Drop Your First Rhyme or Beat!

Button: Free Signup [or] Get Started
My feedback:

1. It's not obvious what you do that's special. There's probably some secret sauce in figuring out who I might have forgotten, but you don't tell me what it is.

2. It would be useful to have a walk through or screencast or something showing how it works. For example, does this thing just make lists, does it manage invites, send emails? No idea from the site.

3. I won't use sites that insist on a Facebook login.
I don't like the index variables and splitting in half part. I like to write my binary searches with bit patterns:

1) figure out the number of bits required to cover the largest index (= a little bit of cheap bit-twiddling)

3) initialize your index to 0

2) flip a bit on in index, starting from the highest bit available from step 1)

3) if data[index] is smaller than what you're looking for, leave the bit on

4) try with the next-lowest bit and loop to 2) until at bit #0

It's pretty easy to write it out in a way that's just obvious, instead of requiring the reader to wrap his mind about which variable is the lowest and highest bound and whether the indexes are inclusive/exclusive in which ends, etc.
The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why. Since people love posting their thoughts on twitter, we imagined there would be a market for those who want to let everyone know what's causing their emotions.

From the about page:

Moodstir is where you give the world a snapshot of your emotions.
Tell the world you're [frustrated] because of [traffic], or search [Jersey Shore] to see the variety of moods the popular TV show causes people to share.
If you don't mind: which are those more exclusive advertising networks, and what are the hurdles you have to take to get in? What's an average ecpm there?
I guess you need to provide some reasons for your users to use your site? And maybe you should try some more marketing strategies? Your UI looks fine, but rather simple - maybe too simple. Looks more like an experimental side project to me. It simply doesn't have the "official" look to it. That's just my humble opinion. I'm not an expert or any sort, I'm a user.
Clickable: http://moodstir.com
The man who said 'no' to co-founding Facebook with Zuckerberg
If you want it to go more viral you can always go the usual route: integrate aggressively with facebook, twitter, and other social networks. Use "rewards" in terms of points or medals or achievements to encourage users to spend time on your site.

Also think really carefully about what your target audience is, what value you want to give to people, and how you plan to (eventually?) make money. I agree that a startup product like yours has to grow big fast. So the important thing is the viral part, the rest is pretty much irrelevant (once you have a bazillion users it's easy to build something they want).

Where should you go from here? Figure out a clever way to make something viral, then go do that.

Feedback regarding the product? I don't see how it can ever generate passionate users. I can't imagine anybody saying "Moodstir is the GREATEST PRODUCT EVER, because...". Twitter was the first social network to do one-to-many broadcasting right. Facebook gets people laid. Linkedin is a social network for business purposes. People really love those products, and it's very clear in what way they bring value to the user. This too is something that you should probably think about.
Also, at least at the moment, Apple's profit model is easy to understand - you pay money, receive something in return and they pocket the profit. Google's model is based upon understanding who you are so they can place the best adverts in front of you. When you're an upstart, that "who you are" bit doesn't seem to matter too much, when you're a behemoth, it becomes pretty scary.
"I approached the project under the assumption that it's either going to be adopted and spread throughout some niche quickly, or never catch on."

This is a silly and immature approach, in my opinion. Such an approach is only suitable if you either have loads of time and money to throw at projects just for fun or you have a pet project that requires extremely minimal resources and effort to get off the ground.

The de facto approach to just about any web business should be to imagine it like a mom and pop store or restaurant. You'll spend a lot of hard work on it, it'll take years to get into the swing of things properly, and if you're really lucky you'll just barely do a bit better than keeping yourself employed at a reasonable level of pay.
So how many mA⋅h in your laptop's battery?
Agreed! Treating submodules as their own git repositories is a neat and powerful idea, but the UI really does breakdown. Especially when adding a trailing "/" to the submodule name like: 'git add submodule_name/' will assume you are deleting it and adding the files recursively in the parent project.
Thanks for the advice- we should probably have this on the home page. The idea is that there's something specific that caused that emotion. When a number of people start posting an emotion about a certain thing, "Tim Tebow" for example, others could search that term and find the collective emotional consensus everyone has towards him.
An interview exam for C coders (actually coding)
Mathematics, looking for a good home
4 Connotations For Designing State Of The Art Clothing Line Logos 
Clothes identifies your personality, it helps you look smart, unique and good looking. Therefore, there must be

something that identifies clothes as well.
It told me I should eat a cup of avocado and 2 cups of skim milk for dinner. I'm confused and rather appalled by the thought of having that for any meal.

Additionally, I've heard stories of it telling people to eat 8 eggs for breakfast, so I'm a bit wary.

(No, the 8 eggs for breakfast was not a diet for Gaston, either)
And also got hit with a giant stick of corporate-inspired fugly.
I am also thinking along similar lines. It's just a matter of time before Chrome starts getting all plusie on us.

Besides, Google products in general have begun loosing their appeal after Google deviated from being technology-focused to social-focused. Soon enough those products will start lagging behind others in innovation and early adopation of lead-technology and usability features.

Hopefully the alternatives will come in a variety of ways and tastes and not united under a single banner/brand.
Well, others seems to have been kicked out, we were simply not let in.

We applied for an account couple of years back and were declined. We went back and forth 3-4 times and they wouldn't tell us why we can't get in or what we need to fix. I have never used AdSense in my life, so it can't be the past history. We rank in top 1-5 results for all relevant keywords for our business. Was it the 302 redirect? Was it the old history of the domain name? Was it the IP address we were hosted at? Who knows!

Thank God, our business model was not based on advertising.
This is a cool and useful idea. My thoughts about rearranging your homepage:

-Shrink the login box and move it to the upper right corner

-Even though it looks nice, remove the middle column

-Condense the First Name and Last Name signup fields into a single Name field

*Take the content that comes up when someone clicks the "click here to learn more" link and put it on your homepage. That page does a great job of showing what makes commentto special, so it should be front and center!
It told me that I need to be on the skim milk diet.... Too bad it can't be used in conjunction with the cookie diet...
ASSASSIN Ultralight Blue Burst Electric Guitar
Price: $199.99.Save $20 off 2012 Sale. Free Shipping Worldwide. Wholesale Guitars From China. No minimum!
Needs a little refinement. It's suggesting I eat 6 eggs a day and while I am no expert, that sounds excessive.
I've never made a startup, so I'm talking as a consumer, but here's my honest opinion.

I don't want to use your service, I have no need for it. I have four other services I can use to vent, and I only use 2 of them.

Are you addressing a need that isn't provided elsewhere?
What research did you do?

If I was you, I think I'd be researching until I identified something people actually need or want, and I'd re-use some of the code from this project for connectivity.

Also, I'd allow people to use more than just Facebook. Maybe I'd rather have a unique account on your service that's associated with my email, but not discoverable by absolutely everybody.
>The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why.

Why, exactly, can't we just use Twitter, or G+ or FB to post our mood? There's no value-add here; your service is just trying to further divide your target users' attention and splinter their social network.

Quite aside from the value-add problem is the value proposition itself: what on earth do I provide by sharing my mood with friends and what do I gain by moodstalking them?
It was mostly "friends or people who thought the idea was cool". The handful people who were most adamant about the idea were somewhat savvy Twitter users, so I envisioned others having the same passion for the idea.
It is too sad to notice that Google only serves famous people. All those people who raised their voice on blogs and HN are given priority. What about the people who post on the Google Adsense forums and GAN Forums? Nobody from Google even replies to those legitimate queries.
Firefox 12 now starts to download when you paste url to the download window
Two optional children's seats in the trunk.
Thanks for your feedback !

1. I didn't want to add too much complexity to the app by going into details of advanced Social Network Analysis, but I'll think about adding details.

2. Good idea, I'll work on a screencast/walkthrough

3. I understand that, but I have no other solution: having access to the user's facebook friends is an absolute requirement for the app to run.

Nevertheless, thanks for your feedback.
Probably because I posted it at like 4 am on a Sunday... and it's obviously not a rigorous comparasion - more like a walk through a swamp...
My app has a Wordpress install in a subfolder /blog/. Any suggestions on how to break that out of the app? Apache proxy? 301 redirect to a new subdomain?
I don't want to conflate the whole Canadian pharmacy thing with criminal activities related to buying drugs online. The fact is there are Canadian pharmacies that are licensed by the gov., and only sell legit products, and they do it online. As a Canadian, if I buy them it's basically the same as popping down to the Pharmaprix and shopping there.

If an American buys from one of them they are making a safe purchase IMO, but breaking drug importation laws put in place more to protect the bottom lines of drug companies then to protect the consumer.

Now if a canadian or an american buys drugs online without reasonable assurances they're dealing with a reputable company... well that is stupid/sad/dangerous as you said.
What would be a good way to have crowdsourced content that pays its creators a fair share?

Honest question; I am looking for insight in this area.
I expected much more from this, off the title.

Look, Git is a major pain in the ass because it's designed to support every possibly imaginable workflow. The only way to do this is to just expose Git's internals, i.e. make users think like Git, instead of making Git think like its users. This fits the minds of kernel hackers perfectly (they think like computers do all the time), so there's your history-of-Git in a one-liner as a free bonus.

The only way to make Git more usable is to make a frontend that carefully and in a well thought out way enforces a certain workflow. It'll be more usable for people who use that workflow, then (and, obviously, less usable once you want to step outside that workflow)

git-flow [1] is a nice example of this. I'd love to see more examples for additional workflows. I'm also very curious whether it's possible to do this without leaky abstractions, i.e. to really have a team up and running that doesn't understand anything about Git, and only understands the workflow. Did anyone using git flow manage that? (i.e. have devs never touch 'bare' git)

[1][http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/]
I am trying to learn HTML5. What are your favorite resources for this?

Thanks for this beginners guide. It is very helpful!
I appreciate the candid response. The age-old "ideas vs execution" argument is something that interests me, and I've always wanted to start projects that have a neat core concept, where they can potentially get off the ground quickly from word of mouth. However, it's inspiring to see sites like Reddit struggle for long periods before eventually having explosive growth.
The whole cholesterol in eggs thing is actually not really that big a deal: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466 (basically says that dietary cholesterol intake levels are unlinked from blood cholesterol in 75% of the population, and that it has been shown to inhibit atherogenesis/artery plaque formation)

Besides that, since they're made to carry something from a bundle of cells to full organism, they're chock full of a full set of micro and macronutrients.

This started as a site for body builders, though, and it's only now broadening to normal foods.
Aren't they doing this for a long time now?
Although the website looks good but you cannot call it a startup right now. It is just another website or app that lets me do something. You should understand the difference between a startup and a simple web app.

Just building a web app will not make your idea into a business / company. You need to chalk out marketing strategies, revenue streams etc. Most importantly you need to get users to use your site without much force!

My 2 cents :-)
Lambo (well, or Audi R8) is even worse; until I think 2012 MY, you got the same crappy RNS-E of a 2001 Audi A3, not even the Audi MMI from the A6.