skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Startup life, balancing schmoozing with work?
(Apology for the repost, I forgot "Ask HN" in the original!)

As someone who's doing the whole full-time startup thing in SV now, I have to try to balance between putting work into the project (all three of the co-founders are devs), and building relationships with folks in the startup community. I'm still in very early customer discovery phase, definitely not in the "running a business" phase, and so I can often kill two birds with one stone, see if there's interest in what I'm building.

I was wondering if you folks in a similar situation have found a good balance between meeting people and putting work into your startups. With meetups, mixers, hackathons, gatherings around SF and SV happening 24/7, it's really easy to get lost and never put any hours into your project. At the same time, it's hard to tell how far you can take a product if you don't know the right people (be it VCs, mentors, potential colleagues etc.), who you might be connecting with at these events.

How much time do you dedicate to "socializing"? Do you consider it "work"? If so, do you value it more or less than say, development?

Thanks!
That wasn't by B&N. It was by a cheapass public domain parasite who did a search to replace "Kindle" (probably as in "Kindle Edition") and wound up FUBARing the book before submitting it to B&N.
Also, if you send someone a text and they have an iPhone, it will use your email. Some of my friends have iPhones, but not my email, and are confused.
What app does it need ground up inovation?
Mail?
Social Networks?
IM?
Sharing?
Storage?
Etc? (you name it)?
Do I have to do a startup in my area of experience?
I work in financial technology in my day job but lot of startup ideas that I get are not necessarily related to financial tech. I have heard/read that you should usually try something in an area where you know what you are doing. Now I know there are exceptions or outliers. But in general, what do you guys suggest? For example, lets say hypothetically I might have an idea around CRM but no experience whatsoever. Would you ever jump into a startup like that ? Of course, I would commit more than 100% if I do but the question is: should I?
Sign up for www.unblock-us.com or www.unotelly.com and watch the amazing BBC coverage on iPlayer. Super super simple setup.

Personally, I prefer www.unblock-us.com
I'm not defending Apple but your point is completely irrelevant. They don't want products in their store to mention a competitor. That has nothing to do with them using a service which they don't have a competitor for.
Rent a VM in a UK colo (I recommend http://www.bytemark.co.uk/), and use get-iplayer (http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html) to download programs from the BBC.

Edit: Even though I live in the UK, this is how I watch TV because with a bit of scripting it's a lot more convenient than having a TV.
>>>And you don't have to buy your iBooks books from Apple.

Um, wut? OK, you probably meant ebooks, but iBooks -- created by iBooks Author -- can be bought only from Apple.
Out of curiosity, is there just an advertisement for 20 seconds at the beginning of a live stream? Or do they have commercial breaks?
Probably reject it as they rejected a magazine that was for Android users.
Post-hoc Analysis of InstaWifi’s Launch
ProgrammableWeb is my go-to resource too.

There's also:
- http://www.mashape.com/
- http://apis.io/
- http://data.gov/
What, are you kidding or just not paying attention? This has been going on since before the iBookstore, when books had to be wrapped in apps.
We have the relevant package; but Insight won't even acknowledge our login to use the app. They can keep their streams and ad-views if they don't want to make it even half-usable.
does this work in the us? http://www.eurovisionsports.tv/london2012/index.html

this is the official european broadcast stream. simply the best, every event in live and you can also replay them. plus there is no commentator here, just the raw broadcast (i hate when commentators talk too much...)
When we have a robot that can use this method for sight, it will be able to dodge and move around anything that attacks it.

There are already systems of computer sight for robots that allow for ridiculous dexterity.

This will make the T10000 invincible.
Gamers may not make up the majority of their userbase, but it is certainly not a profitable segment that can be simply ignored. Games have undoubtedly held onto millions of users who otherwise would have switched to OS X - the only reason I kept a Windows desktop around during the Vista years was for gaming, and there are tons of others like me.
I understand the frustration, but NBC is just trying to optimize for primetime viewers so they can extract maximum advertising dollars. They paid over $1 billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Olympics and now they must recoup that investment.
http://www.mappyhealth.com - tracking disease trends on Twitter (more data sources including CDC reports coming eventually) and trying to make sense of it all.
That sucks about not being able to get it OTA. I'm in Toronto and with a $20 antenna I can get a solid NBC broadcast from Buffalo. The local CTV channel also has an Olympics program so at any point in time I usually have 2 sporting events to choose from.
Well, to be fair, some new things are pretty cool. I'd love to have both the latest cool stuff and be able to run every add-on I've ever liked since Mozilla 1.0.

I know that's just not going to happen, so I made a choice. I'll do without certain things in order to keep other things.

I'm just occasionally concerned that I'm overlooking some serious downside (e.g. FF 3.x can be made to set my Linux machine on fire or whatever).

Mostly the only thing I notice is that WebGL demos don't work. Not really a big deal for me. I can run those on Chrome or something.
Looks like some sort of proxy. Routing through the UK is an option so BBC iPlayer will allow you to stream the Olympics.
I want to say that they just found a local optimum, and that they're sacrificing long-term viewership for a short-term profit.

But who am I kidding? Nobody's going to stop watching NBC permanently because they won't air the olympics in a timely manner.
Are you saying technically under the hood, or just how does a person use the service?

Using the service is trivial for anybody on HN. Just a matter of setting your DNS settings to specific servers. That's it.

Technically... I'm still trying to figure that one out. I think what they do is handle the IP check from the service, and then pass off the stream to your computer. This would make sense since the stream server would be different than the IP check server. This is great because then only a very limited subset of traffic is flowing through their servers so you get "native" speeds.
1) Not "instant rejection".
2) Not "just saying the word Amazon".
That's a really helpful link. I had not idea there even was such a thing. Thanks.
The NOS website has a nice design. The sports and events are very well categorised. They even place a thumbnail of the video stream in the floating menu when you are looking at items further down the page (so you don't miss out on anything while reading the articles). The only thing that's missing are other languages than Dutch, is it possible that it's done deliberately to keep people from abroad out?
But "clinical" has no meaning. It is not mentioned in DSM or in ICD.
>>>preventing users from reading specific content on their devices

What? What? What?

Where have you been? Apple has a record of this, and it started here:

Apple Forfeits eBooks By Banning A Comic Book!
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/apple-forfeits-...

That's before there was any iBookstore. And it's gone on since. Every now and then this issue gets publicity, people are outraged and new people wake up to it -- yet it continues.

Never has any Big Six publisher or print bookstore rejected a work or refused to carry a work because it mentioned a competitor. There would have never been a Books in Print or a Writer's Marketplace, to mention just two reference books.

It's only recently that crap like this has cropped up, with Barnes & Noble and some indie print bookstores refusing to carry print titles published by Amazon. And I think B&N was emboldened by the lack of protest over Apple's moves in this direction.
Not sure why others downvoted you. I just tried unblock-us.com and it works... basically by changing your DNS servers. I added it to the article as another option.

I'm confused because I thought that geo-restrictions were handled by IP address, so I'm not sure how this gets around that.
What area are you in with no terrestrial NBC affiliate?
I'm Not an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
I'm outside the US and I want to watch the olympics, what can i do?.
I am irked by the fact that Firefox added a doodle to its Home tab which is using my local resource to host the GIF image. I am fine with doodles but there shouldn't be a doodle on my browser without my consent, let alone the image is running from my hard drive.
Could you explain why PHP is not the right tool?

I've written plenty of sockets based PHP programs that run reliably and were easy and efficient to create. I didn't come across any problems that weren't easily surmountable.

If you're going to propose an negative argument, it would be helpful to at least outline the basis on which you are making it.
Show HN: MoodTrack, a simple iPhone app to track your moods and thoughts
I've often wondered whether there are any patterns or cycles to my moods so I built a simple iPhone app that occasionally pings me to ask how I'm feeling on a scale of 1 - 10. I also note down what I'm thinking or doing at that moment and automatically grab my location. I use the data to show some basic statistics on how I've been feeling on average over the past three days, past week and since I started tracking. There's also a graph of my moods over time.

I'd love to get feedback on whether people would find something like this useful. I'm curious about what other things people would want to track about themselves and interesting things to do with the data.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moodtrack/id541505268?mt=8
Negative, "you cannot watch this outside of the European Broadcasting Union".
Use your email and get a temporary pass on NBColympics.com.
Although it only lasts 4hrs but I assume you can use a different email after that and it might still work.
Standards vacuum. Maybe reach out to the GitHub API dev’s. Having a powerful but open minded adopter would help a lot.

Maybe contact the developer behind flask-oauthprovider [1] (oauth 1). I see you have some flask-sqlalchemy type snippets in there.

[1]: https://github.com/ib-lundgren/flask-oauthprovider
It's not necessarily related. It is, however, pretty closely linked to getting into Harvard. It's debatable whether Ivy League-type schools have more successful alumni on average, and if they do, whether that's because they only take people who were largely going to be successful anyways.
In most cases CBT & exercise and better food is attacking the depression itself, directly.

> The key thing, however, is for people to lose that attitude of 'go get a life doing things I think are healthy/fun and you'll be happy' because, basically, that's b.s. projection,

Yes, I agree.
>> the costing model is too high

I know, there is a feature that I thought was worth quite a bit, and I didn't include it but based the pricing model off of

I'll attempt to fix this soon, it's currently late here and I'm very tired :(
Gmail's + syntax doesn't work. So -- email+1@gmail.com, email+2@gmail.com as a strategy doesn't work. I tried that.
> What made the difference, I think, was that I stopped caring so much about living up to my potential and started caring more about being a part of important things. Basically all of those world-changing projects that you see in the news are team efforts, which many people contribute to.

Any advice on how to overcome the lone wolf attitude? I read your prior comments on this thread and found them very insightful, but I also figure a more pointed question could get me a more pointed answer. It feels like I'm almost there, but not quite...
FYI, it's a link to an article, not a question.
Very well said. Thank you.

The only part I didn't get was the end of the second text:
> It would be a life without purpose.

I understand, that this might not seem to be a fulfilling life to you. Though, these people can still have a purpose. It doesn't have to be happiness.
As an example, take the nurse or doctor who works unbearable hours in an emergency room, or the soldier who sacrifices his life for others. Some of these people might never be happy, but I would suggest, that their life has a purpose.
Apparently html is not one of their strengths.

Website seems mostly broken and has no information.
Tomcat, Jetty, or GlassFish?

Heroku Java deployment is "unusual" and there are many Java developers out there that prefer WAR/EAR that complies with JEE5 (legacy purpose) or JEE6. If you can achieve that, get ready for massive users, I know there are people who don't like GAE model for various reasons.

Basically: make it like Jelastic and don't limit it like CloudFoundry (no EJB 3.1, etc etc).

JavaEE deployment model is preferable over some "weird" setups.
You build an olympic village.
I still use it too.

It's the only RSS reader I can find for OS X that lets me set it up in my preferred "River of News" display format (what NNW calls 'combined view'). All feeds in one big stream, no 3-panel Mail-style separation of titles and content. Just scroll and read.

If anyone knows a cleaner, less ugly, less buggy RSS reader for OS X that can display feeds in this way, I'd love to hear about it.
Funnily enough, I know a lot of British people who use the exact same technique the other way around to watch Hulu and Comedy Central in the US.
OK, Thank you for the feedback, I'll rework the pricing structure soon
> Sure! In fact, if you’re in the UK, you can legally stream every event of the Olympics live, and commercial free.

Note that I believe you need to pay the licence fee to legally watch iPlayer (IIRC it pops up a dialog the first time you run it to confirm you've paid). So even in the UK you have to "pay for TV" to get this service. It costs approx £12/month.
"This is where the line is drawn."

Really?

I mean, yes this is clearly terrible, but if you're surprised by Apple doing this then you haven't been paying much attention the past few years.

I don't begrudge people who choose to use Apple products, they certainly have their charms, but I do get slightly annoyed when they are suddenly offended when Apple does something like this because post-App Store Apple pulls crap like this all the time.
hey thanks a lot for your feedback. really appreciate that!

i always thought that open links in new window is kind of aggressive. but a friend of mine also instinctively suggested that, the first time he saw the site, so maybe that's what people want/expect...

did they give you a reason why they'd prefer larger images? isn't it harder to compare themes then?
There are no physical or direct monetary damages to the MPAA, either. Intellectual property is just as based on belief as the Iranian desire to maintain a pure culture.
Just a note, that's only for live-streamed things (such as the Olympics). Repeats of shows don't require a license fee.

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/...
No. That's coming for the iPad, not for the desktop. There is no iOS6 for the desktop (and it's not in Mountain Lion :)
You can also move dots around. For example the following all go to the same inbox:

myemailaddress@gmail.com
my.emailaddress@gmail.com
myemail.address@gmail.com

etc.
http://mailinator.com/
That's what I'm saying, it's just not possible. Pageviews would explain Facebook being so much larger than Wikipedia, but think about it - how many links from outside Facebook point to Facebook vs how many links from outside Wikipedia point to Wikipedia?
Wait, I don't quite get it - the first thing the author says is that he got "crystal clear" high-def Olympics coverage from someone called Telemundo over the air. He goes on to conclude that "There is no good way to watch the Olympics in the United States without a cable subscription".

What did I miss?

Edit: Thanks for the quick answers.
Between NBC's behavior (and I'm recalling the unwatchability of the winter [CENSORED] two years ago, as well), the branding bullshit (including special, specific protective legislation), the outsourcing and outsourcing fiascos, and several other things I've already managed to consciously forget, I've already made my decision. I will not seek out one second of coverage.

Sportsmanship left the venue, if not always the specific athletes, a long time ago.
In general I think that working in an area you have experience in makes things smoother especially in the beginning. You know the pain points without having to do any research and have some initial "instinct" that points you toward potential solutions.

However, I strongly believe the most important thing for an early-stage start up is passion around the space/solving the pain points. The main reason is that working in a start-up is really hard and, at times, soul-draining. If you hit that depression phase and you aren't 100% committed to solving the problem you'll never pull out of the death spiral.

That being said, if you're passionate, you don't have to be an expert as long as you commit to becoming an expert quickly. Tons of breakthroughs happen when intelligent novices enter a space without the preconceptions of the existing leaders.
Ah, i remember reading about xpizza. The manpage included

BUGS:

Some of the staff at the pizza place
don't know how to operate the fax machine.
> [...] the onus is on us as web developers to encourage [him/her] (in positive ways) to upgrade - through better web applications that require new features, better communicating the reasons for upgrading, etc.

I disagree. The onus is on those peddling the product (i.e. marketers) to sell its worth to users.

> Believe me when I say that I understand the frustrations that come from having to support outdated browsers

I read about “frustration” when referring to older browsers a lot. That has led me to question just how much people learn about supporting those browsers. Shouldn't supporting browser X become trivial once a certain amount of experience is accrued? Or do we just hunt and peck until a page ostensibly works?

> There isn't enough information in the original post to determine if the last one (auto-update occurring despite being turned off) is what happened here - I'd like to learn more. It would be worrying (and I'd argue an insecure design) if the software were even capable of self-updating with that setting turned off.

As someone who tests every whole number version of Firefox (1-14), I have experience with the force-fed updates. Imagine my frustration when viewing the version information (via Help > About) led to the browser paving over my existing installation. I really don't want to have to tinker with the settings for fourteen separate programs.

Conversely, Opera 8+ will ask before updating. Though this happens every time I open the program, I can easily decline and continue with my business. This is how to respect users.

Chrome is far worse, as it forbids the existence of an older build, even after the newer build is uninstalled.
Sure! I hope your site goes well, it has a lot of potential.

It feels a little aggressive on some sites, but for an "aggregating" site I actually prefer them to open in new tabs. As I see it, I'm using your site to find something...but I probably will look at several different options on your list. I don't like navigating back and forward a lot...I'd rather just close tabs and go back to the aggregator.

Now, that could just be me. I do compulsively open tabs (I have like 40 tabs open right now).

As to larger images: reduces clutter, makes it easier to scan, easier to see details.

If you want to read the initial feedback I got, you can see it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502418
Telemundo is the spanish channel in the US.
Telemundo is in Spanish
Presumably Telemundo have spanish commentators talking over everything?
Dropping a feature is one thing. Silently making a user's data disappear is something else altogether.
That Telemundo is a Spanish-language channel and, presumably, the author only speaks english.
It's not clear that he has no terrestrial NBC affiliate. He might well have one that he can't receive with "spare coax cable used as my antenna" instead of, say, an actual antenna.

I can't imagine coax works well as an antenna, considering it's shielded to prevent RF interference.
Good call. My bad.
good pointers. Thanks
Show HN: reKiosk, a viable model that can up-end iTunes?
There is no computing project that is worth your life.
Hearing from Yahoo employees - what should Marissa Mayer do next?
This rocks. Thanks for sharing all the details.

I was a little mislead by the title being "the average person donated 7.66$" rather than "of people who donated, the average donation was $7.66," i.e. the average user did not actually donate money. Nevertheless, this was a high price to pay in a day and age when people avoid paying $0.99 for the most entertaining and useful apps.

I have not yet downloaded the app (I am about to), but I am very appreciative of the decision to not put ads in the app. I am a strong believer that the ad-supported model must be broken, and I believe the way this will happen will be via true usefulness and content depth (with which money can come from in-app purchases, etc.).
you should do what you have a passion for doing.

do you have a 100% passion for CRM?
Sorry - I updated the article, but as the other reply mentioned, Telemundo is a channel in Spanish.
Fun with Framingham – Open Source Heart Attack Risk Calculator
CRM was just a hypothetical example I was using. So no. not really CRM. But I am passionate about learning and teaching. Got a few ideas bouncing and even working on a side project related to learning.
It is illegal if you live in the UK and consume TV to not pay for your TV license.

Legally, I’m unclear of if an American connecting on a VPN to a live stream in the UK is breaking the law. I would guess that it hasn’t really come up with the TV license people yet.

I don't know about the UK law, but nearby Ireland has a similar "TV Licence". The law there is not "you need a licence to watch TV", but "if you're in Ireland and you have something that's capable of recieving TV signals, then you need a TV licence".

If the UK is similar, then it's not "watch BBC" that requires a licence, but "owning a TV in the UK". The OP almost certainly does not own a TV in the UK, so almost certainly not need a TV licence.

(NB: There may or may not be terms & conditions on the iPlayer website which say you may only access it if you are in UK / have a TV licence / etc., which might make the above the illegal (but not for TV licence reasons). I'm suprised the Olympics works for them, usually BBC iPlayer stuff uses GeoIP to block it from non-UK IP addresses.)
It's not that hard to retry a transaction until some deadline is reached. Many programming languages have standard library facilities to make this extremely easy.

If the database is fast enough and transaction failure is at least moderately unlikely, it's not really an issue.
The /.well-known/ stuff always throws me for a loop. Why not use DNS for service discovery? Has worked well for SMTP for a very long time.
I can't get any major networks over OTA, except for channels I wouldn't watch, ie Telemundo, Univision, HomeShopping,etc. I live about 50 miles from SF. It's really frustrating, not being able to watch the Olympics. But I'd hate to go through VPN. Just like my previous viewing of World Cup,I'd have to resort to non-English channels and learn a little bit of Spanish, although their coverage is focused more toward Spanish-speaking countries.
Yes, I have been paying attention. Trading is all about timing.