skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. I've got a bright friend who's similarly looking to do something outside of college, who has abilities that I don't. We complement each other.

I'm maintaining straight A's, partly because I'm in a set of programming-intensive classes. I do both at once.

My site won't be pointless. It appeals to a niche that hasn't been appealed to yet, and we've got a non-community driven revenue plan. The goal is that even if our community doesn't start off strong, the technology driving the community will.
Acquired & Closed != Failed

Twitter just had too much momentum. Pownce got press, but nothing that came close to competing with Twitter. Whether good or bad, people cannot and could not stop talking about Twitter.
Party's Over, As Recession Woes Kill Monthly 'Media Meshing' Events
This is why I'll actually complain about off-topic postings and such, despite the utterly inevitable complaints about the complaint. (At least nobody's babbled about how it's their free-speech right to post whatever crud they want to a social site in a while, and you just have to suck it up...) Community standards don't maintain themselves.
the comment is combative and in poor tone, but i'm upmoding it. there's more to your education than knowing how to make a dynamic web-site.

take something away from undergrad: if you want practical experience work on business-wise pointless but technically interesting projects (just for yourself) or open source projects. take the time to learn mathematics (calculus, calculus-based statistics), electrical engineering and physics: web fads come and go, but solid scientific knowledge stays with you.
Rarely have I seen such bad news in such a small font.
What's interesting about online comments is that the comments themselves become a part of the "landscape" of a site. So a site could be aesthetically pleasing and designed well (i.e. no apparent "broken windows" as Kottke would define them), but if the comments are full of expletives and "roflmao" type messages, then they effectively become the broken windows.

If I were to apply the broken windows theory online, I'd consider "bad" comments as graffiti and "good" comments as public art. The broken windows would be more an analogy of a community misusing what's been made available to them as opposed to a designer purposely or accidentally creating something ugly.
that's actually not even the case:

this is like a fast-food franchise owner who consistently serves poor quality food saying an expert chef (who, however, only works in a gourmet restaurant but has never run a restaurant himself) has no right to criticize their food quality because he isn't running a business.
Just wanted to point out that I've seen the karma point of this post bounce up and down from 3points to negative 2 and, as of this writing, is sitting at 1 point. Obviously, this post is a lot more interesting than other 1pointers who haven't received any votes in either direction. It would be interesting to show a total number of votes for the comment.
This semester I've been really focusing on web development. We want to apply to YCombinator over the summer, and I want to make sure that I'm more than capable of handling the aspects of the site I'm running.

My co-founder (apparently that term's inappropriate now) is very much a math-and-science person. I'm not averse to them - I took calculus in my junior year of high school - but at the same time, that's not what interests me. I'm much more an arts person: writing, music, theatre. It's a good combination, because we look at what we're developing in different ways.

At the same time, I'm learning how to program, I'm in a digital arts course, and next semester I'm taking an upperclassmen programming course. I'm not planning to throw my life away on a project. But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.
that's a very good point (about domain knowledge), but it doesn't seem to be that IBM will give him the sort of domain knowledge he's looking for either. and perhaps the original poster doesn't know what domain knowledge to look for - as he hasn't been exposed to it yet.
Can Google Flu Trends Be Manipulated?
There is a related concern I have about costs piling up due to corporate or managerial mandates. I have the impression that people above us only think about what will make their jobs easier -- what else do they need for us to supply them with so that they will be able to achieve predictability, manage or reduce costs, and generally manage the company better. When they come at it from this angle, it always seems reasonable that they ask us to do more -- provide more reports, track time against projects, report metrics -- when in fact most of what they ask actually interferes with us being able to get real work done. Since they/we do not have adequate productivity measurements in place already, the resulting reduction in productivity is never noticed, hence an invisible cost has been added without a conscious decision or cost/benefit analysis. Since I think most individual contributors recognize that this is taking place, it acts as a disincentive.

In the end I think the solution to both the article's and my concerns are the same: It is always better to ask the members of the team that experienced the problem firsthand what they think the solution would be or what they would do differently next time to avoid the problem. Especially if you phrase it as "what could you or your team have done differently to improve the outcome" and urge them to avoid proposing major process initiatives if at all possible, the improvement will be more practical and lower cost in all senses.
this. was going to edit my comment to include this, but you beat me to it :)
The generation raised on the Internet
When Pownce launched, the reasoning for it was that Facebook didn't have the features Kevin Rose and friends wanted. But, as luck would have it, Facebook grew up a bunch and said, "We have lots of people, and lots of money, lets build in all of these features." Then, Pownce was (excuse the pun) pownced.

How do you get users to use Facebook, and Pownce, if they already use Facebook and there's no longer a compelling reason to use Pownce?
When hiring, example projects are more important than grades.
I 2nd that. Understand that this is like a good troll, you just have to enjoy it.

"There's a whole world out there of byzantine financial products just waiting to be invented, Dagny. Let the leeches run my factories into the ground! I hope they do! I've taken out more insurance on a single Rearden Steel bond than the entire company is even worth! When my old company finally tanks, I'll make a cool $877 million."

Their eyes locked with an intensity she was only beginning to understand. Yes, Hank ... claim me ... If we're to win the battle against the leeches, we must get it on ... right now ... Don't let them torture us for our happiness ... or our billions.

He tore his eyes away.

"I can't. Sex is base and vile!"

"No, it's an expression of our highest values and our admiration for each other's minds."

"Your mind gives me the biggest boner, Dagny Taggart."
> But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.

Sure but don't risk your undergrad. Graduate school is a much better time for this. And to quote DHH, don't treat your life like a planned waterfall project: "I want to do web development, so I will do X, then I will do Y."
This one reads like it was written by someone who got through the first 50 pages of Atlas Shrugged, read the cliffs notes, got a D on a paper, and has resented the style and the ideas ever since.
Seriously. Its a 5 liner in a tc script on any linux box to make udp streams behave nice and share the bandwidth without driving up each others latency.

I think ISP's can figure it out. The fact that many isp's are also telcos presents a far greater threat to voip than bittorrent, tcp, upd or otherwise.
Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser.

I don't think that web development is my big thing. I'm interested in the web, but I'd hate to have to work on ideas I don't love. My current project is something for writers, so it has practical uses for myself as well. And YCombinator summer happens in Boston, which happens to be the place I want to go, so I told my cofounder and we agreed we'd give it a good try.
BitTorrent: Register report on protocol change is "utter nonsense"
Maybe I just don't find it funny. I don't find Stephen Colbert the least bit funny either (though I think Jon Stewart is extremely funny).
Heh. so the article basically says 'open source is really good for software users, therefore it is bad for software vendors' - perhaps they are right, but that seems more like a positive than a negative to me.

Personally, I wouldn't want to buy software from someone who wanted to lock me into something broken.
If you depend on online poker for a living, yes, it is.
Um, These 2 blog posts really aren't bad.

So she isn't the next guido van rossum, but if any of us ( maybe even guido ) posted our thoughts, code examples, and solutions on a blog there would be many examples of less than ideal or poor code.
Revenge of the Nerds: Hackers Give Victoria's Secret Campaign a Virtual Wedgie
FBI enters the widget market
totally agree. there's power in a singular purpose. sometimes with singular purpose, one runs the risk of being branded a feature and not a company. but, other times, a twitter emerges.
bush is the most famous hbs mba lol

i hope putting pic of bush won't scare the applicants
i was in on the beta, and even then it wasn't really far ahead of the featureset curve.
Is your question "how exactly would the site usage monitoring hacker steal your bank account?" or "how would a bank use two-factor authentication over the internet?"

For the former, if we assume a malicious website administrator collecting usage details, he'll use the email address and other information revealed during the sign-up to spear-phish the unwary user with malware targeted at their particular bank. Such malware is available at any wretched hive of scum and villainy at reasonable prices.

If your question's the latter, solutions include a battery-powered token that produces different numbers at 60 second intervals, a temporary PIN sent by SMS to a registered phone, and others.
Link or more info to that work, please!
I was glad it was not. As much fun as a "lolcomputerz" would have been, I found a nice comparison of the speeds that things happen in my computer, all normalized to MB/s to be quite informative. It was helpful to see all of the proportions all at once.

I particularly like the analogy that if getting something from memory is like a minute long trip down the hall to get a candy bar, getting from the disk takes more than a year. Nicely done.
I think even if you tried, your PokerTracker stats would be abnormal, even if you only used your advantage sparingly. For example, the river strategy you proposed was what resulting in the monstrous river aggression factors that identified many of the accounts in question.

It'd be tough -- agreed that its an interesting thought experiment.
simple really...they lacked the first mover advantage.

If you are going to do the whole twitter thing, you'll go guess where? thats right twitter. Everyone who is anyone(if you want to call that) was using twitter, so people just signed up for that.

And they couldn't pull a facebook/google...because twitter was doing a good enough job for most people.
This is the one I found really funny. It's still not brilliant, but it's good: http://www.emba.uvm.edu/~wilson/aynrand.pdf

The man nodded. His nod seemed to reject the possibility of objective thought.

I also like this one, even though it's not nearly as good. http://www.spudworks.com/article/66/2/
I wonder if the security features are going to prevent extensions from talking to each other. I'd love it if my GMail tab could run an extension which provided services to an extension in my HN tab...
He is appropriately askew to convention, he is not radically unconventional. The difference is paramount.
I disagree. Facebook didn't have the first-mover advantage, Friendster did. Google didn't either, Yahoo or Altavista did. Pownce could have been "the Twitter that actually works"...
Europeana website overwhelmed on its first day by interest of millions of users
Great link. I like the analogies he uses.
PayPal Brings Allowances Into the 21st Century
Here's what really bugs me: 2 months ago, Leah was on the cover of Inc Magazine and part of their "cool, determined, under 30" feature. They quoted the NY Times assessment that Pownce is "one of the hottest start-ups in the valley".

Why is it so hard for the media (print and web) to cover technology start-ups and founders that are actually changing the world and/or making a profit?

Are you telling me that 3 months ago the Inc editors saw Pounce as some huge, valley juggernaut–and now it's shut down? Or did they just have that much trouble finding good under-30 entrepreneurs?

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/
But since all DVCSes can basically implement the same workflows, the git vs. hg/bzr argument still doesn't matter.
I'd be interested in a general sale price.
http://www.linkrap.com/teddyquote
I'm not entirely surprised by that.

But think of it this way, your "hacks" will keep getting better and better and cleverer and cleverer.

I heard a (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso being asked to sketch something at a restaurant once. He obliged, and doodled some lines on a napkin. Then he asked for a lot of money for it. The lady balked and said "but it only took you a few seconds." His response? "It took me 40 years."

Decent blog post on the topic. http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/04/01/inherent-value-in-design/
Judging from their traffic, any revenues must have been negligible.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pownce.com
Six Apart: Welcome Pownce team
Gaming and VoIP both tend to be very low bandwidth. Seems like it'd be very easy to throttle all UDP traffic down without hurting either of them. Latency is way more important for them than bandwidth.
Thanks. I'll pass.
Almost certainly not. 200k uniques per month (from Compete.com). Call it 3 page views per person (average). 600k page views. They charge $3/CPM for ads (that's $3/1000 views). Say they average showing 2 ads on every page view (I doubt they have that much paid inventory, but pretend they do). That's $6 earned for every 1000 page views, or $3600 per month. Double or triple any of the numbers in the formula and I still think you aren't in the ballpark.

These are pure wag #s, of course.

On the cost side, say that 1 fully loaded dev on starvation wages in the Valley costs $10k/mo (taxes, benefits, costs on top of an $80k/yr salary). Hard to tell with their about page, but it looks like they have 3ish FTEs. Add in office (dunno), servers (?), contract folks (legal, accounting, etc), and I bet you have a burn rate of $30k-70k/mo. If they are getting paid market rate, on the high side of that.
Because conspiracy theories are grounded in rational thought...

"They're just saying it, it will never show up"
"They'll have secret hooks to get around AdBlock"
"They'll have in-browser ads"

&c
Are allowances even a good idea in the first place? My parents never gave me an allowance. I did chores, and I was compensated for my work. It gave me a deep understanding of work, and it was simple to go from "working" for my parents to working for other people. What does an allowance teach children?
Benefits Are Seen in Battlefield Robots, but Moral Questions Remain
U.S. agency sees robots replacing humans in service jobs by 2025
I think if Twitter hadn't resolved the downtime issues there could have been a mass exodus to Pownce, but Twitter took care of what they needed to and Pownce lost its opportunity. Even though Pownce had a lot of features that Twitter doesn't (filesharing, etc) I never really thought of Pownce when I needed to send a file, link, or image to friends. I always went straight to twitter and used TinyURL or mediafire.
shuts up

=]
I did something similar to what unalone is trying to do - worked on a fast-growing volunteer website in undergrad - and have no regrets. The time I spent working on FictionAlley was much more educational than anything else I did in college, and if I had to pick one, I'd say ditch college and build your project.

It's not just "knowing how to make a dynamic website", too; in fact, after I finished, I vowed never to use PHP again. The most valuable skills I got from FictionAlley were all soft skills. How to balance a dozen different feature requests and pick out a design that isn't what anyone suggested but satisfies them all. How to diffuse a massive PR disaster. How to deal with a completely unreasonable customer. How to make your life a living hell by promising features to users before they've been developed. How to (roughly) estimate the time a project will take (if you're just starting out, expect it to take roughly 10x as long as you expect). How to build things incrementally so you get to the finish line eventually.

I picked up a couple useful technical skills too; I learned all my UNIX, SQL and vi skills from that project, along with softer technical skills like how profiling, logging, optimizing, diagnosing performance problems, etc.

Most of this, you simply can't get in college. The projects are not of sufficient scope. You'll never have an unreasonable customer for a homework assignment, no matter how much you hate your professor. ;-) You probably won't have to maintain code that you wrote 3 years ago and can't stand now.

Heck, most people don't get to deal with that at work until they're in their late twenties, or even well into their thirties. I have older alum friends that graduated before I matriculated, and they're just now getting into positions where they have to balance competing tradeoffs between different groups.

I actually risked my degree a whole lot more than unalone is doing - I was a physics major, and it's a lot harder to do dynamic web programming + upper-level physics than it is to do dynamic web programming + CS. It ended up working out for me (after a really nerve-wracking last semester) and I got the degree, the fundamental math/physics/CS knowledge, and the experience of working on a fast-growing website. But if I had to drop one, I'd say drop the degree, get the fundamental knowledge from textbooks, and do the project.
That's the other side of the coin, for sure. And yet, I think worthwhile minorities (such as geniuses) will always find a way to bypass the majority rule to make their mark.
Was Pounce really "stuff people want"? Without knowing the terms of the Pounce acquisition, it's hard to say whether this is closer to success or failure. SixApart certainly aren't buying Pounce because of the quality/popularity of their product.
On Board the Navy's Lifeless Shoreline Ship
According to my Dad, the acorn crop has been so good in central Texas this year that corn feeders have been (relatively) ineffective at luring in deer.
"Of all the Firefox plug-ins, this is the one essential one," said Firefox user Ole Eichhorn. "Chrome is faster until you factor in all the cruft that gets downloaded as ads, then it isn't faster anymore. When Chrome supports AdBlock, it will be the winner, but until it does, Firefox is the only choice."

http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/
slightly off topic but still on broken windows theory

do you normally clean up your code 'aesthetic' ?

like the commented:

old code (to make it unactive) -> ;(define bla)

return value -> ;returns '(1 2 3)

debugging print statements -> ;(print bla)

hacks -> ;quick hack for x, buggy but good enough for now

what's the better practices? thx
‘Mr Martin you have early onset Parkinson's Disease’
Paul Martin was just 33 years old when he was diagnosed with Early Onset Parkinson's Disease. He had just started a new job, was living with his partner, Melissa, and they had been blessed with a beautiful little baby boy, Lucas. Paul was relishing his role as a new - if slightly naïve - Father, and had never been happier.
I thought github does allow private repositories on the free plan? Maybe something changed, but it used to allow a private repository, but you couldn't share it with anyone.
Sixearch: Social Web search via adaptive peers
Wow! I didn't know anybody from FictionAlley was on Hacker News. That's incredibly cool.

Your interface was one of my favorite FF ones. I liked how you sorted by author name rather than genre: it put the emphasis on the writers, which was really neat.
You would think that they maybe should have held off releasing chrome until extensions were put into chrome possibly?
The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry. [video]
Apple Offers Free Licensing for Mini DisplayPort Technology
Who Needs VCs? Seattle Entrepreneurs Say Bootstrapping Is the Way To Go.
first mover advantage doesn't matter if the first mover product sucks, this is why Google and Facebook were able to get ahead.

But Twitter didn't suck enough for Pownce to be able to get that core segment of new users who are annoyed and frustrated with the competitor.
Why Do Universities Love RealPlayer?
"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Twentieth Century Fox." :(
I agree. My friends didn't use it, nuff said.

In fact, this is the same reason I persist in not using Twitter. Just because my friends tend to start and end with Facebook.
That was an allowance the term is still used when it's connected to chores. The value of an allowance is it teaches children how to balance spending ex: between cheep short term wants and more expensive long term ones. Without an income children tend to just keep asking for stuff independent of how much it costs and the last time they got something.

PS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allowance_%28money%29 Often parents demand that certain tasks (such as cleaning or sharing) be done as a condition of receiving the allowance...

Edit: Any idea when the special character URL bug is going to be fixed?
Followup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382152
this is actually pretty brilliant on eBay's part, since it'll get the kids to only buy on eBay, since thats pretty much the only place where buyers accept paypal(yes others accept paypal too, but on eBay pretty much everyone does).

So it'll generate them fees from sales, and they'll condition the kids to buy their stuff on eBay instead of other sites.
Implement first, design later
Honestly, it's a pretty standard role for the CEO at a startup to be the "supporting cast" for her tech and sales guys.
You are right, but I don't see how that answers the GP posters' point. If Pownce was purchased just to be shut down, then I doubt very many people wanted it to make it economically viable.
Yeah, I was the tech lead for FictionAlley from 2002-2005. I wrote about 90% of the code in the current system, and did most of the design and project management (though of course it was a consensus effort, and lots of people contributed). I've been mostly-retired for almost 3 years now, but I still get called on for occasional bugfixes.

It's funny, in the "When will you consider yourself a success?" thread, I was thinking that my answer would be "When random people I meet say, 'Wow, you built X! I use that all the time' where X is some project I've done." It's really gratifying to hear someone using it.
Very few games reviewers can develop games. Very few people who review music are successful musicians.

Reviewers - except when on industry-formed panels - are rarely any good at producing what they're reviewing.. that's why they're reviewers.
Professional PR gets you into Inc. But it also increases your burn rate.
The patch set for extensions is out for review here: http://codereview.chromium.org/12809/show
Tyba Startup Diary - Day 6 - Long emails and why you should write them
Insecure Magazine #19 Released
It sounds like the acquisition was really about acquiring the employees not the application.

If Pownce was losing money, it probably doesn't make too much sense for Six Apart to keep operating it.