skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a retail store, they'd have to significantly mark stuff down to compete with online stores. I'm surprised they're still so high though; I would have expected more of a fire sale.
Will Silicon Valley turn into Detroit?
It's not an advisory article. It's just my approach. Somebody with a different background probably has a completely different approach.
As a side question, what is the current roaming situation in Europe? The last time I had a European phone (a number of years ago), it was very frustrating to have to pay very high roaming fees as I was traveling in different countries. I think I had gone with Vodafone, which at the time seemed to have the best prices and the largest network. Coming from the US, where almost any plan allows you to call coast to coast with no extra fees, it was frustrating taking a train for a couple hours and then having to pay 1.50 euro/min or similar.
We are working on something in that area in Germany, Kijiji doesn't compete because it's ebay. That's my personal opinion. They chose the worst name ever and they don't have their priorities clear, it's not a "used goods" market with enforced standards it's just a market.

The basic problem in this area is reach, but that's not a problem or ebay so asking why kijiji fails is not going to answer your questions for a startup.Different situation different problems.
I would have expected more of a fire sale.

It's one of the oldest retailing tricks in the book: advertise a fire sale, and then don't have one. There are people who will convince themselves they are getting great deals, regardless.
That is extremely stupid, to me anyways. The argument posed when other carriers tried to do it here is that the company was double charging for the service - which stopped a lot of carriers from even attempting to implement the incoming charge.

Another thing that's crazy is the cost of your txting plans/packages. My mom and sister are on $25 plans here and get unlimited txting included for free.
I think you're thinking in terms of end-user products, like a website. In this case, technical excellence may be less relevant as long as it works. However, if you're selling technology, like in the example given at the end of article, technical excellence may carry a higher payoff. Another example: id software selling their engines to other game developers.
But hasn't Apple's revenue shifted away from desktops and notebooks towards phones and consumer electronics as well?

The article makes a point that there could be disruptive change on its way that leaves the world with much less relative, general purpose computing power in homes and small businesses. I don't think that is disproved by Apple's success.
Our stats indicate a 0.3% click rate
I completely agree about the compounding effect of the credit card problem and I'm really far from being optimistic about the financial crisis. I think this has a long way to go.

If banks get deeper into trouble and smaller countries have to rescue them, eventually people will ask whether those countries are going to default and who gets hit by that and so on.
Network effects. Brand/mindshare.

One pattern that you could apply to break craigslist would be focus: http://ycombinator.com/munger.html [Search for 'travel magazine'].

You'd want to pick a suitable niche within craigslist and service that like crazy. Then move on to others.
I'm not sure that "because X was first" is that much different than "because X has users" or "because X has 90% of the market", so that isn't really that shallow of an answer. The challenge is to get people to switch services from one that they are already comfortable and successful using, and sites like craigslist, ebay, and google already have a significant headstart by being both first (long ago) and good.

It's not just enough to say "we have a better search engine than google" if you want to dethrone google, you actually have to be better (although the former may get you funding). Witness Cuil. Or Live -- who tried to pay people to use their search engine: even the lure of easy money isn't enough to get people to switch. With places like craigslist and ebay, the first mover advantage is significant. These sites bring two parties together. Those who have something to sell and those who have something to buy. The sellers want to be where the buyers are and the buyers will go where the sellers are.

It is possible to have a successful business as a small time competitor to an established, entrenched player, but if your goal is to be competitive, you've got a long uphill battle ahead of you. It may be wiser to redefine the industry or look at it from another angle, then tackle that. What does craigslist do really bad that could be better? Is the lack of a competitor that eases that pain the reason why people still use the incumbent?

I'm not sure what craigslist's weak points are. The site is extremely minimal, search works reasonably well, people automatically sort most things into the right places (because otherwise they'd be wasting their time), the majority of posters don't need to pay, fraud is managed well enough that people are not looking for something else. I can't think of any weak points -- which may be why I'm not working on craigslist competitor.
Like a lot of people here said, I think it's important for you to learn html/css. At least enough to be able to do simple websites (or modify designs that you outsourced to integrate them in your website.)

For css try to use and understand a framework like blueprint or better even compass which is a meta-framework ported on sass (sass is to css what haml is to html). It will save you a lot of time by not having to deal so much with browser inconsistencies).

On the javascript side, read the book "Javascript the good parts" from Douglas Crockford, watch his videos and then play with jquery (it's very sweet and simple to use).

One last recommendation on the front end is to read Steve Souders "High performance websites". It's a quick easy read and highlights a lot of important considerations for the front end performance (like this you'll know for example that it's a good idea to ask designer to slice images that they use as background in the css file)...

It doesn't mean that you need to do everything by yourself (I hate doing css for example) but having a thorough understanding will help you chose the right web designer to work with and make sure that you both speak the same language.
Most big web companies started out either by design or fortitude by applying crossing the chasm techniques.

1. Define the large market.

2. Focus entirely on one small niche within that large market that will give you enough credibility to win over the late majority in the latter. See facebook [harvard college social], myspace [music], bebo [birthday reminders], craigslist [local events in san fran] etc.

3. Own > 90% of your niche

4. Cross the chasm into the large market. The market adoption curve demographics of the large market should ideally match the niche you chose.

BTW it is unlikely that a "tech" audience are a good niche to pick, as they do not contain many peers for the larger market to identify with. It will be interesting to look at twitter in a few years to see if it crosses the chasm into the mainstream user.

I'd say read the book. It's a classic.
How does this compare to twilio.com?
You should read up on the economics of our industry. This book is a good place to start:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a...

Basically, there are what are called "positive network externalities" or "network effects" for a site like craigslist: if you you want to sell something, you want to go where lots of buyers are. If you want to buy stuff, you'll get a better selection where there are lots of sellers.
Zune revenue falls 54%. Zune to be forgotten.
Unless you tell them that they're testing a new hockey-stick design. It's made from a nano-aluminium InnoStrength 2000 alloy, boys! If anyone asks about the odd-looking pad, tell them it's fitted with sensors.
Well, if I was to apply to such a job and saw this kind of mistake, I would point it out in the best way I could.

E.g. "I've been developing in XX language since it was released", "The technology has been available for X years and I started using it shortly after it was made public".

Well, im not a native English speaker so I'm probably a bit short on vocabulary to express it here. But stuff like that, shows that you know what you're talking about without telling them in their faces that they don't.
First of all, that name. What were they thinking?
Second of all, read the other comments. They summed it up quite nicely :)
Just what we need: an online community of the elite upper class to get organized to better manage us worker bees.
“Assembly Language Step by Step” by Jeff Duntemann
I actually quite like SMS. It's cheap enough for anybody to afford yet expensive enough to prevent idiots and spammers which give it a great signal-to-noise ratio. It's ubiquitous, push and fast.

There are already alternatives, from e-mail to instant messaging to social networks, but none of them have the ubiquity, standardisation or simplicity of SMS.
no.

Not that we couldn't use better government priorities. Also, per guidelines, better link would have been to TFA:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/181392
I think people are wising up. We are beginning to demand truth in advertising. When we are lied to, we are walking away. When we had lots of money, we would tolerate it, but not anymore. In times of surplus, we can act without reason, but in times of scarcity, rationality wins.

It was funny walking around the store -- like a bad garage sale. People would pick things up, look at them with this confused look on their face like they were thinking, "Are these people serious?" and then put it down and walk away.

People don't have any money. Where is the mystery? People want bargains and Circuit City has 1.3 BILLION dollars worth of inventory they have to move.

Marking up 20% then down 10% isn't going to move product. That kind of arrogance is why they are going out of business. I hope the other big boxes don't learn this lesson the easy way and they go out of business too.

It's sounds very cynical to say it, but I think the world will be better off without brick and mortar stores like Circuit City.

Actually, it makes me very excited to see them going out of business. I know it is painful for a lot of the employees and I don't mean to relish in their pain, but it's proof that rationality wins in the end.

The Circuit City bankruptcy is a metaphor for the U.S. It's a signal that the old world is dying and a new world is being born -- online. Consumers are being smarter about their money. They don't have anymore credit cards to max out, the housing ATMs are broken and people are wising up.

We're all going to be smarter and better and more rational after the fire. Slash and burn. Plant a new crop.
interesting topic!

my project will be launching soon, and it'll be interesting to see which implementation we should take:

a) share this buttons
b) "email this" button
c) no buttons
You don't spot ninja listings, they spot you.
Steve Jobs introducing WebObjects in 1995
Black-list reprieve:
This morning there seems to be "about 129,000" search results.
I don't suppose this is the power of HN's disclosure?
Surrogate Scripts vs Google Analytics
Detecting Googlebombs
no one is going to spend $200 for an OS on a $200 computer

They would if they had to. Lots of people spend $200 on games for a $200 game console, don't they? I just spent $380 on a computer to run on a $20 power supply, because without the computer, the power supply is pretty useless.

The difference is that Linux is now good enough that they don't have to spend $200 on an OS.
Ask yourself: why would kijiji be competitive with craigslist? What advantage do they have?

I suspect:

* Buying pets is not a killer app for craigslist-like sites

* The fancier design is a net negative

craigslist has a pretty good lock on what craigslist does -- they don't charge users for much, have the userbase, have a simple UI.
Here in India, where no classifieds site has emerged a clear winner, Kijiji is among the leading sites. just my 2 cents
You have far more faith in people than I do. Something tells me within the next 5 years Americans will have forgotten about the whole "maybe spending way more money than I make is a bad idea" and things will go back to the way they were. Whenever I have to choose between lasting rationality and history repeating itself, I almost always choose the latter.
because its just a clone. Haveing a "fancier" design and bending some rules != innovation

Did you talk to craigslist users and see what they wanted changed? Is allowing sales of pets a deal breaker?
It is very successful actually. It's one of the top classified sites in most countries - if you are so narrow minded that you only look at one country, then that is your main problem as an entrepreneur.
Twitterfall does actually use multiple keywords when they are specified by Twitter. If you check search.twitter.com and check the queries it performs when you click on a trend - those same queries are being performed by Twitterfall.
Last I remember, this patch was purported to make a big difference precisely because it improves branch prediction, by giving the CPU a bunch of different possible sites to jump from.
If you post something and it gets flagged and removed, there's no way to tell what you did wrong.
Neural Networks - A Systematic Introduction (Free pdf)
Craigslist started with a lot of word of mouth marketing. It was the de facto classifieds site in the Bay Area before it opened for other cities. It started as and still is essentially a not-for-profit.

On a side note, Craigslist is hardly successful outside of the US. Even in London it's got no traction.
I'd tell you if we could log into addthis.com with the credentials their site provided as our current username and password. Or if they replied to customer emails. AKA if they weren't a shit pile.
Most dot-com sites are kind of scummy. E-commerce dot-com sites are especially scummy. eBay is one of the scummiest of all the sites that aren't out-and-out scams. Craigslist kicks their ass primarily by being trustworthy, IMHO.
Haha, top down approach that will fail as surely as I wipe my ass after going to the toilet. You think you have discovered something new and hidden and sweet - well, hundreds of people have found it before you, and they have silently failed. That's why you cannot study them.

There is only one way to get rich if you are not one of the elite - get off your high horse and get dirty. Start quick, test quickly, poll users and don't charge at first. Evolve, evolve, and evolve. Then get slimy. Studiously ignore techcrunch and focus on the smaller people. All these people who speak about 'buzz', they are part of a social network you are not a part of. They don't tell you this, so you do the same things and you wonder why yours does not work. Observe this eco-system, but do not ever believe you are a part of it, otherwise you will be blocked by their constraints but have none of their advantages.

There is no design for making money that works. There is no grand plan, because if there were, someone who have tried it and executed it successfully. There is just having a product, then modeling it in ways that sell it. Then reaching a huge amount of people. Use tricks like network effect, auto spreading, etc. Don't just drop it and expect anything to happen.

Most important rule: Don't let the constraints that tie the minds here tie you down.
This is a great time to set up a business that helps small to medium businesses shave some of the IT costs; that's exactly what I am trying to do as a side-project. So not all is black and gloomy in this depression.
I was a backend guy and was faced with the same dilemma. I thankfully listened to the engineer in me (at that time we had our UI work contracted out and was not shaping up well).
It took a while to get a good grip of HTML, CSS and JS. They are the tripod on which today's web UI is balanced. In the end I think it was the right decision to learn it all!

Moreover if no core team member knows UI - then either get one or you become one, becoz sooner than later you will repent outsourcing it fully.
I recently got a Lenovo s10 and I'm considering using it as my main development workstation (hooked up to decent monitor & keyboard, doing mostly Python stuff) after spending some time traveling with it: I absolutely love this tiny laptop and I could easily imagine people using it as their sole machine.
94k hits, seems to be about what any 3 random words will bring up, for example: http://www.google.com/search?q=kangaroo+fries+blue
Additional article and more discusion at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449747
What I love is living in a very comfortable house in front of the sea, with nobody else around me for miles. What I love is sitting in a hot bath and reading a book. What I love is travelling and being entertained.
So far, nobody has offered to pay me to do what I love. It's a shame.

So I have to work for money like the greedy bastard I am, to make the world a better place for me.

Let me quote one of Ireland's most successful businessman, Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, on "doing what you love":

"I am not a cloud bunny. I am not an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other goons who populate the air industry"
Pizza Boxes San Francisco | DMS Innovation - Promoting Reuse.
DMS Innovation has a pizza pallet designed to promote the reuse of our specialty pizza boxes in San Francisco and the world.
Wow. ChaCha Is Raising Another $30 Million
What is startup.tv worth?
Hi All,

I own startup.tv and would like to sell it to help fund the startup I'm currently bootstrapping. (The startup itself doesn't need a strong web-presence as we're delivering our service via network augmentation.)

I'm not much into the whole "domaining" thing, so I figured I'd ask the folks here three things:

1) Where's the best place to post the availability of the domain for sale?

2) What is it worth? (Even a ballpark would be useful.)

3) I also own mac.tv and flex.tv -- is it even worth it to try and sell these names? (Considering, I could be spending time on building out our demo/prototype instead.)

Thanks for all your thought and feedback!
I can't agree with this comment enough-- on every other site you feel like they just want as much of your money as possible. Craigslist feels like your favorite uncle made you a website, and it may be a bit simple, but you can feel the TLC invested in it.

Craig clearly and explicitly treats Craigslist like a nonprofit, so he's leaving a lot of value "on the table" that he isn't extracting. I'd say this value goes to Craigslist users. If you use both eBay and Craigslist a lot, and I do, you can feel the difference pretty strongly...
In the right hands, startup.tv could make a bunch of cash.

mac.tv only has one obvious use: 24/7 live streaming MacGyver.
Here's a better idea: Give the music to the artists.
Why Has Knol Survived Google's Project Killing Spree?
are you asking to sell the domain or is it a project you want to sell?
no one is going to spend $200 for an OS on a $200 computer

You can easily pay $20,000 for software to run on a $200 computer. Whether that represents value for money or not depends on what you're trying to do.
The important factors on buying/selling domains (IMHO) are:

* Is it .com?

* How much traffic does it get?

I think that unless you get one (ideally both) you really struggle to sell domains for more than their original cost. Unless you're really lucky, buy a quirky domain and someone _needs that domain_
Building Open Source is a community effort - it is about writing your own abstractions upon the work of others. At the beginning when there were not that many libraries to base your work on, this maybe looked a bit different, but now it is all social - and that means that social skills matter.
surely the whole point of Knol is that it isn't wikipedia?
It's not that bottom up is good - it's that top down is simply impossible. Try to design a duck this way. It sounds very sensible, and you'll get a sketch in about two minutes. Not detail it: a couple of hours and 5 pages. Now continue to do this until you no longer have to backtrack: i.e. until what you discover about the duck in the current level of detail does not change at all what you have designed so far.

This will have two effects: first, the complexity of the design is equal to the complexity of the duck. That's A LOT of paper. And second, most mistakes in the design will cause the duck to fail spectacularly.

On the other hand, with bottom-up design you start with something which eats and reproduces, and improve it constantly until it has a beak and feathers and quacks. It will certainly not look anything like a duck at fist, but it is very likely that from the second or third iteration it will solve 80% of the client's problems. Sometimes even from the first, but that's just luck. It's messy, but it's at least doable.
Having shopped around for businesses like coffee shops and having considered opening a (hacker friendly) coffee shop in Los Angeles, I can't decide if even $20/person is enough for bottomless coffee, a sofa/desk, free wifi and power for a coffee shop given size, employees, rent, bills, cost of goods, limited space..even parking spaces.

There is no denying good wifi access (fast and preferably "free") and comfortable surroundings brings more customers. But I've seen one business for sale that was always packed full of customers but never really turned a profit..everyone bought like $2-3 worth of coffee and snacks and then sat down at one of the roughly thirty desks with their laptops for a couple hours at the minimum, never again getting up to buy something else. Customers that just wanted to have a seat to wait or sit for a few minutes never got a chance anywhere: all the desks/chairs, sofas, bar stools and all the patio seats outside were always occupied. It was truly bizarre...a haven for anyone wanting to use their laptop outside, but completely awful for all other customers.

There must also be something said about how a busy cafe can bring in more customers, but those customers will typically be turned off by the inability to find any seating that isn't the floor if they wanted to eat(rather, drink)-in.

That being said, I've visited theOffice once down in Santa Monica near me, which is a nice little place for working. I think a day pass there was $40, which at that point I think is overpriced (see below)..but they have memberships that make it as cheap as a few bucks a day to get free beverages and wifi and power and a place to chill quietly. No noises of grinding and banging and customers walking in and out and names being yelled out. I also know of blankspaces which provides more amenities (i.e. conference rooms), but they are just as expensive.

I must mention my reasoning for the $20-not-enough/$40-too-much: coffee shops are usually located where space is at a premium. Workspaces like theOffice and others can be located, frankly, anywhere where there is commercial real estate. They don't need to be located at a prime area of a mall or at a busy intersection, they can be hidden in a little side street office building where rent is typically cheaper. That alone is probably enough to make a huge difference in cost and services that can be provided.
With GCJ, the same should be possible for languages based on the Java VM too (including Java). Consequently you would be able to get Clojure, Scala, Groovy or Jython on the iPhone too.

I think most of the fame for actually pulling this off for Mono/.NET needs to go to the Unity engineers and not so much to the Mono gang. Although this is speculation on my part.
Awesome, considering its 1995 - its great! Jobs is the real visionary.
You could have saved time by clicking on the first link from the previous query, realizing that, literally speaking, it is not a joke.
How To Get Your Startup On TV
Also, a Periodic Table of Visualisation: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table...