skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN - Compiling the Best stories on what you did to get initial traction.
...and what techniques did your startup use to grow its user/customer base after launch?

We all hear about amazing success in the Tech Press, but a successful launch and ongoing growth requires great execution, in product, planning, etc… with a grain of luck. Between PR, social media, true word of mouth, online marketing, App Store rankings, viral loops, guerilla marketing, etc… what tactics did the successful and less successful tech Companies use? This is what I am trying to figure out and assemble in a series of blog posts that are going to be as detailed and quantitative as possible.<p>

YC Companies often have amazing early traction - that some can sustain while others don't. What did they do initially? If you are willing to share with me and the Community YOUR story or your Company's story, please do so below or contact me through this link: http://j.mp/HNLaunchGrow
Thanks!
A Guide to Career Hacking
I had no clue that Postgres supported LISTEN and NOTIFY. Granted, it's a new addition, but this is really slick:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/sql-listen.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/sql-notify.html
A few things I like, though not all of them are strictly needed:

long long foo; /* bigger ints on 32-bit platforms */
uint32_t bar; /* stdint.h, integers of specific bit width */
int array[n]; /* length-n array, where n is a variable */
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) /* loop-local variable */

Also, the safer stdio functions like snprintf.
Good to see the entrepreneurial spirit alive and well with a man in his 60s.
Actual article http://www.technologyreview.com/article/40245/
Yes your are right. I will fix the script to look for the default python.
>> In essence, the report suggest that VCs get paid “to build funds, not build companies.”

Sometimes it seems like the whole financial sector is just one long series of perverse incentives strung together. But I guess it doesn't make the news when it works the way it is supposed to.
Totally different model, as a side note Flattr (died/failed/didn't succeed) due to absolutely terrible product marketing and doing ludicrous things like an invite-only beta. They had a huge chance and screwed it up, from what Sahil has done so far I don't think he'll make the same mistakes, he doesn't seem so short sighted.
What kind of work would you sacrifice a weekend for?

Edit: I mean specifically.
Multi Factor authentication is basically using multiple factors to authenticate a user, like texting a number to the person's cellphone to authenticate them if they are visiting from a IP that is not familiar with the system. Its basically using a second piece of information besides a password to ensure that a user is who they say they are. The sending a text message with a number is a real popular way of doing this. Think as well as a pin and a credit card at an ATM. Sure you have to use your ATM card at the ATM to prove your identity but you also have to use a PIN to add an extra layer of security. This significantly reduces the risk of a breach on someones account.
He's probably talking about session hijacking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_hijacking
The US Military Wants To ‘Microchip’ Troops
Remember Color? It's Taking Another Shot With A Big Verizon Partnership
Nop they are stored encrypted with a key randomly generated
I'd love to have a delightful product, and I'd love for it to be given positive press to over a hundred thousand people! But like Android back in 2008, I don't think I'd get there without scrappily alleviating a pain point, getting my foot in proverbial door, and just shipping. Had Google waited and waited, they might be where Microsoft is now with WP7—an awesome product with really nice details that no one uses.

Granted, it's easier to switch cat feeders than phone OSes, but I think the point still stands—if you alleviate a pain point[1], you can tweak your product to make it delightful later.

Thanks for keeping up with your blog, and congrats on your three little humans! Do they make automatic feeders for those yet? Perhaps if you clean out your old cat feeders really well...

[1]: If you enter an existing market with nothing to differentiate your product (including price), then yes—you're probably going to fail.
Roundup of HTML-Based Slide Deck Toolkits
Respect to him for realizing his dreams. We should all strive for our dreams and take steps every day.
Mashable Goes 'Behind the Launch' With New Documentary-Style Video Series
Did I say it wasn't? You know what else is a feature? Being awesome!
Writing the story of an API - The Hashrocket Blog
Quite nice.

But you should seriously improve your registration field, I could register with an one character long password.
The report that they link is well-worth reading in order to understand the VC ecosystem.

tl;dr of the linked report:

* Somebody who relies on VCs to invest their money has finally noticed that VCs fail to beat the market over 10 years.

* They think the fault lies at the investor-VC interface: The way VCs are compensated is broken, and the way VCs report the performance of the portfolio is opaque.

* They make recommendations, which will never be adopted because it would expose and publicize the true VC returns.
Umm, I don't recall. Just some talk about how Warren Buffett isn't investing. And Soledad liked my choice of Jay-Z for the 'intro' music guest can select.
Readable also got a lot of improvements when it turned into Evernote Clearly.
Socks, birthdays and hash collisions
Previous: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3893182

Many, many comments.
If they're untreatable, locking them up in the cage doesn't do them any good - it does society good.
This had already been done, see 'Misunderstood Pigs' in the App Store http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/misunderstood-pigs/id43145100...
Thoroughly depressed by the responses here - especially on a site that prides itself (or used to) on being more nuanced and intelligent than average. If you don't like the message then fine, it's a little saccharine for my taste, but it doesn't make Apple a 'soulless' company, it doesn't make Apple customers empty-headed morons suffering from "stockholm syndrome", and snarking at it does not elevate you above those people who do believe in the message. Quite the opposite.
Microsoft May Charge For App Names
Both C99 and C11 add many useful features to the language. I don't love all of the additions, but I use enough of them everyday to consider them a net benefit. It's still a vastly simpler and cleaner language than C++.

`noalias` was fundamentally broken, which is why it was never adopted by the committee. Instead, `restrict` was standardized, but `restrict` does not suffer from the problem that Ritchie highlights in the post you linked to.

It's also worth noting that C99 fixed some significant oversights in the C90 standard; C99 fully specified integer division for example (C90 left the behavior implementation-defined for negative arguments).
Slightly off-topic question - is there a way to A/B test App Store descriptions / pictures / etc?
AT&T Argues That More Competition Leads To Higher Prices
New addition?

listen and notify go back to at least 6.4 which came out 1998 ish http://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.4/static/sql-listen.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.4/static/sql-notify.html

What might have changed is the implementation though. I seem to remember that some point in the past I was investigating listen/notify and the driver (libpq) was forcing you to handle LISTEN by polling (calling PQnotifies periodically) which doesn't really help compared to polling on your own.

This has not changed so far:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/sql-listen.htm

states

> With the libpq library, the application issues LISTEN as an ordinary SQL command, and then must periodically call the function PQnotifies to find out whether any notification events have been received.

It might be possible for drivers working without libpq by talking the postgres protocol directly on the wire to get real asynchronous behavior, though I don't know anything about how this is being handled on the server right now (it might still be polling internally on the server end).
Interesting! ::findjsobjects is all open source[1], so if someone wanted to implement GDB support in a similar fashion, it should be more of a port and less a from-scratch re-implementation...

[1] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/tree/master/usr/src...
Technically, it does not produce very bad code when run on AMD systems, it produces very bad code for running on AMD systems.
Oh, sure. I'm talented at solving certain kinds of "personal" and social problems. Doing so tends to leave no evidence, thus I get called a teller of tall tales. Some issues I have addressed:

Recovery from child sexual abuse. I talk about that sort of/some on a blog called November West.

Raising and effectively educating very challenging children. I talk about that on a site called Kids Like Mine.

Getting well when doctors say it cannot be done. I talk about that on a site called Health Gazelle.

I don't know how to get traffic or effectively monetize any of them, in spite of the big reaction it often gets out of the handful of people that read them.
The difference between small business and a startup is that small businesses scale linearly while startups scale exponentially. And organic growth is usually more linear-ish. The investment makes in exponential.
It's crazy that there was so much investment for such a simple idea. I mean the entire product is just a thin wrapper around Stripe. He must have some really serious plans to move in a new direction in order to attract that much interest and funding... I wonder what the plans are?
If Gimp had a UI more similar to Photoshop, I would have switched over a decade ago.
Capital One acquires financial startup Bankons
> an improved C with more features

This mostly means it's incompatible with C even in the parts of the language both of them share. Completely valid and idiomatic C code will therefore not always compile if you use a C++ compiler.
It's not exactly new, 7.4 was the oldest version I cared to check, but I think it goes back more :) http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/sql-notify.html

A recent addition to NOTIFY is the ability for notifies to carry payloads (which makes them even more useful)
In the US, the regulations often do little to protect construction clients, particularly individual homeowners. When contractors fail to observe the code, what recourse does the client have? Most often, the only thing available would be a lawsuit. Lawsuits are always expensive. This is especially true when they hinge on a technical question such as: "Did the defendant observe [insert building code citation] while installing the pipes that are now buried under a slab of concrete?" The costs make suing rather unattractive, particularly because here in the US, the loser does not pay the winner's litigation expenses.
Connect the Dots
Really dig the design on Kandan but I wish it could be used as a front for XMPP/Jabber also.
Our take being acquired, http://www.bankons.com. #500strong
A difference, to me, is that they don't have as great a pool of people to choose from who are knowledgable about Japan, are connected (and speak English). I think is his case, they do have a good quality pool but feel comfortable with his subject matter knowledge and demeanor.
Thanks for the clarification, it seems that I misunderstood your comment. A local IMAP server would fit right into my suggestion of mail client integration, without the headache of writing a plugin.

But now you've got a background process running on a privileged port, yikes! (It's got to be a daemon that starts automatically, because "non-geeks" will not understand why they have to start another program before accessing their mail in Thunderbird.)
Does this mean real-time Dirac video encoding might be possible?
> The Doppler effect, if you remember high school physics, is where the frequency of a sound alters depending on your distance from it [...]

Wat!? Is there no hope for science reporting?
> Why?

Because shareholders do not employ executives to make acquisitions of terrible companies simply for their personal profit.

> The value of the deduction for making the donation is significantly less than that gain.

In CA, it is about 50% of the gain.

> Taking the deduction leaves him at 0.

No, it leaves him with profit of 50% of the gain.
Here are a couple of great books about web/software security:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Web-Application-Hackers-Handbook/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Sins-Software-Security-One-off/...
On the other hand, with Zynga's penchant for liberal "borrowing," this seems a bit hypocritical of them.
Wrong Moore.
>"They could do some interesting work in B2B products, vertically targeted/non-discounted/package offering, and generally use their existing resource base to get people offline together in new and creative ways."

That's still a very labour/sales intensive process. Can this business model work without droves of underpaid call centre workers?
Totally. There are so many people out there ripping off things from Zynga. Hell, even municipalities like Jacksonville and TV shows like Smallville are trying to take advantage of the Zynga brand.

It's simply disgusting when a company tries to rip off another like this.
Yes. But apparently extremely badly...or something.
Unfortunately not. You can only upload 5 images per device type (iPad / iPhone) and one description.

In theory, you can play the language game and change your descriptions radically based on language, however that's not exactly a valid experiment.
Please don't require credit card information when you advertise a link on that page as "Launch and use Kandan now". And especially not when that credit card information is required as the second step in an initially single-step seeming sign-up process -- and also, please don't hide all of this behind a big "Launch" button.
GUID guide (part three)
So it's a $1.14bn pivot.

Awesome.
I'm not sure about long ago, but the recent version of libpq has NOTIFY working asynchronously (you can stick the connection file descriptor in a select(2) and you'll get woken up when a notify is available).
I think there is not an answer to this question...yet. I built Gumshow.com a few months ago half-way expecting to update and re-brand the site for whatever niche really takes off on Gumroad. However, I don't think that this has happened yet. While our team here is going to give Gumshow a face lift and $7mil makes me feel good that Gumroad is sure to stay in the game, I'm just not sure where the explosive growth is going to come from. I think, as one commenter here said, paying some higher profile artists (musicians, etc.) to use the site could be a very effective marketing move. It's also possible that a niche market product (that uses the Gumroad API, like Gumshow) could get things really rolling.
Agreed. My experience is that there is way too much emphasis on languages, libraries, and frameworks. Nobody really talks about the methodologies of building software. For any given day on HN, how many articles are about how such-and-such extension for this-and-that language is the best thing since the great pyramids and how many are about how code review can help reduce bugs? Or how to more effectively gather requirements? Or anything about comprehensive testing practices (unit tests are just a small part of effective testing.)
Wow, really surprised this was downvoted. Perhaps it came off as too judgmental and arrogant - if that's the case I very much apologize - didn't intend it to be like that. Just a little tough love : )

I thought people here valued polish and attention to detail... while this may or may not be a fine product, nobody can deny that there was absolutely no effort put into the design. This is really significant - all the downvotes here indicate to me "fuck design, we don't care how your product looks" which is really backwards for hacker news...
Are there any usage stats out? Are people actually using Gumroad?
Big science funding
Ask Dr. Solder
Based on the description "social payments" I think it's targeting a wider base than the original "paid link shortener"
This.

Startups are an acute instance of "too much to do, too little time". Good task prioritization might be the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT skill that a startup founder needs to develop.

Not all failures are time wasters though -- some of the items in that list seem reasonable enough (techcrunch amazon affiliate links).

DHH said something like "If you're not working on your single best idea, you're doing it wrong". He was talking about startups, but I think that could be applied to your to do list as well.
Not to mention trying to partner with dating sites and the like to offer offline inventory to their users - new revenue stream for both parties, and solves the problem of awkwardly have to choose where you're going and figure out who's paying...
> Occam's razor says that we should give more credence to the simpler theory, not the more commonsensical one

Yes, and I find Occam's razor itself to be common sense, which is what my point was. If a theory seems to reflect more closely observable reality, I would bias my investigations toward that theory over one the projects something non-sensical.

> I hope you don't also go around telling biologists that its absurd that we're descended from Apes, or astronomers that its absurd that the Earth goes around the sun...

Evolution and Earth's orbit are explanations for observable reality. They do not lead us to conclude outlandish things that are conveniently not observable.

I am not saying Boltzmann was necessarily wrong, only that common sense should direct us to look for what we are missing, and for theories that direct us toward more sensible scenarios. Sure Boltzmann, could be right. I find the Bible more compelling, and Bolzmann's theory doesn't seem to preclude them both being correct.
Jury rules Google violated copyright law, Google moves for mistrial
Alabama’s Law Should Make Democrat or Republican Choice Crystal Clear
Android Holds 61% Of U.S Smartphone Sales,iOS Down To 29%
> "Isn't the more likely scenario that China overtakes us economically, not militarily?"

This seems almost certain at this point, all the more likely that there will be a military showdown at some point.
Regarding your third point, if I was a VC that was beating the market - and there actually are many - I'd be happy to share my info and put pressure on the weaker VC's to expose themselves.
Looks really nice. Couple questions though.

1. What happens if you shut down your service? Will the apps function properly?

2. Any idea how much this will cost? I wonder because it would be possible to implement A/B testing without a problem using Flurry, and that would be completely free.
I probably wouldn't recommend training team members on Backtrack. Backtrack is a go-to tool for network penetration testers, but if your concern is the security of your code, you're better served with a license for Burp Suite. Much of what's in Backtrack, including Metasploit, is probably not going to be useful in the "we'll need it every time through the dev cycle" sense.
23 Startup Tips
I wish [I] had it 5+ years ago when it mattered [to me].

Most people don't drop 75+ dollars on Starbucks a month, and rent, food and healthcare expenses are a tad more important than buying faster, more expensive hard drives. Free software optimizations would actually be very much appreciated by a great deal of people with scarce disposable income.

This reminds me of that article in a New York publication a while back written by a woman marveling at how much money she saved by not eating out every meal. Like the advice given wasn't an obvious necessity already for 95+% of people.
One of the bug fixes for Postgres95 Release 0.03 (Released 1995-07-21) is:

* the LISTEN/NOTIFY asynchronous notification mechanism now work

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/release-0-03.html
Just to be clear, "TCP Sucks", despite successfully running the majority of the global Internet traffic. "TCP Sucks" so bad we're basically going to copy a lot of it: window based congestion control, SACK, timestamps, ability to add new options, etc. "TCP Sucks" because it is not perfect and has an issue, an issue that requires router / switch upgrades. We're going to fix that by breaking backward compatibility with _tons_ of applications and requiring an OS update on _every_ client and/or application. All this assuming our relatively new and unproven thing is as good as TCP in all other ways and fixes this issue of TCP perfectly.

Hmmm. Me thinks that TCP does not suck so much.
MSVC has been essentially a C++ development environment for almost 2 decades now. Asking for C99 support is a bit like asking for objective C support. MS has made it abundantly clear that it would be unprofitable for them to add C99 support on many occasions before this.
Off the top of my head, C99 features that I've used in the past couple months:

- declarations mixed with statements
- declarations in `for` constructs
- hexadecimal floating-point literals and conversion specifiers
- the strtoxx( ) conversion routines
- the restrict qualifier
- the expanded math library
- designated initializers
- extended integer types
- compound literals
- // comments
- VLAs
- complex support

Note that some of these features are still not present in C++11.

C11 features that I have used in the past few months:

- CMPLX macros
- anonymous structures and unions
- <stdalign.h>
It's a good question, but I'm not sure it has to. They're almost breaking even right now with that cost, and their only consumer product is a crappy deals e-mail site. With better consumer offerings, they could be getting 2-3x the value off of that cost.
What's the C++ alternative to designated initializers?
I love WAHH.

I can't stand "Deadly Sins".

I'd replace it with _The Tangled Web_, Zalewski's new web security book; WAHH and _Tangled_ is a formidable amount of knowledge to keep on tap.
if you do enough research, the "unlimited" hosting isn't unlimited at all. There are certain restrictions in the fine print. which is exactly what American should have done.
Credit card info is only required for the second app launch, or when you invite more than two people. We have to do that to manage our resources, but we definitely didn't want it to be the first thing you see. If you send me your account email , I'll bump you to a verified account manually so you don't hit that :)

Edit: You can send it at sean@cloudfuji.com or just click on the support link in-app, and you'll get a modal form to contact us.
Is anyone really surprised that Microsoft continues this behavior? For the fan-boys (not that I expect there are
many): the purpose of standards, whether you like them or not, is to ease development and promote products with
actual value - not merely technology lock-in. Having maintained a C compiler for Rabbit Semiconductor and read the C99 standard, I can say it is an improvement on C90. Contrary to certain comments by Microsoft employees in the
article claiming irrelevance of C, it remains very relevant to the embedded systems community. If we, as developers,
want standards to prevail, we must eschew nonconforming implementations. You've heard of "vote with your dollars",
now "vote with your code".
This is an exciting integration that we've considered and will be exploring more in the future.
even an empty password is possible!
Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use
I miss C99 named initializers even in C++.

struct { struct y y; bool flag; } = { .flag = true };
That's not quite true. The http-parser library has some bits lifted from nginx. Node itself, however, does not, and the bug is not quite the same as the nginx bug (though they do have a lot of words in common: attacker, request, carefully-crafted, etc. ;P
Yep, just take a look at the logo comparison in the scribd document - definitely no questions on if Zynga should be doing this or not (they should). It's one questionable-ethics company suing another questionable-ethics company, nothing to see here!