skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since day one. Someone has to manage, because there are resources and efficiency involved.

The hacker founder might not think of himself as a manager, because of the PHB stigma. But there's always management to be done.

I understand you didn't ask exactly this. You want to know when a "pure" manager should be brought on board. But if you realize that there're always things to be managed, the question becomes: Would this company run better if the engineers didn't have to manage? If they were free of worries about how much soda is left at the refrigerator, if the revenue/income ratio is sustainable, if John's productivity is better with one monitor or two, if there's money to buy these monitors, and if there isn't, when the budget will allow it, how to explain to John why the extra monitor will only come next month, actually research the monitors, price, negotiations with suppliers, the wall socket where it'll fit, etc...

IMHO, "pure" managers should join the ship when more work can be outputted with him onboard. BTW there's nothing wrong with "promoting" an engineer to management. S/he doesn't have to be a manager all day, and this person knowledge about the products will actually help with the management part.

But really, just mutate your question. It's not when, it's how.
You might want to visit, the weather has been unseasonably warm. Tell immigration that you are a tourist on vacation. Don't mention working or trying to find work.

There are hostels in SF where you can stay for cheap. Most are in the Tenderloin/Financial area. I've never seen the inside of those. I have actually stayed at one hostel, to check it out for a traveler friend. Element Hostel. It is in the same building as Medjool, quite possibly the stupidest nightclub in the city. It's a good hostel, though, and I think the only one located outside of downtown. http://www.yelp.com/biz/elements-hotel-san-francisco
The mission is a bit grimy but at least its where the young do their thing.

Also I'd actually just do a vacation, the Bay Area is a nice vacation spot. Tons of stuff to do and see.
The ability to add notes to explain traffic spikes etc.
This is quite simple, so I wouldn't be shocked if it's been done before, but providing an RSS feed for stats/new referrers, etc.
Yeah, I guess I agreed with the guy below me.
Don't go to SF, traffic is horrible. </sarcasm>

Go for it, I have never regretted a large drastic change to my life yet. But I do usually regret passing up good opportunities.
It hasn't been my experience that MBA-types, with training in "strategy", finances, marketing, and management, do a better job of running companies than engineers.

The history of business is replete with examples of engineers, lawyers, authors, and designers running successful businesses. Take Apple, for instance.

There's also plenty of examples of "business"-types coming in and fucking everything up. Start with Ars Digita.

Someone in your company needs to keep their eye on the ball. It's easy to take your eye off the ball when you're chest-deep in commit logs. But there's no reason at all that person needs to have an MBA.
Isn't that feedburner (which Google acquired?). Guess you mean they should integrate feedburner with GA.
You can analyze an existing progression. You cannot predict the possible future progression.

You could analyze Please Please Me and determine how to generate similar Beatlesy sounds. You couldn't predict Help. If you had Help, you could make Help sounds but you couldn't figure out that Rubber Soul was on its way. The sonic style changed constantly and evolved incredibly.

Or imagine trying to copy Frank Zappa. You might replicate a single song, but it wouldn't be possible to predict the next songs in a given album. He evolved and shifted too rapidly to follow.
Just don't let the "pro" have the final word in hiring the m-team. Hiring a VP is just as dangerous as hiring a CEO.
Thanks, that place looks pretty cool. The second review down made me chuckle.

Nice one, cheers.
We can all admit that Google Analytics has a few failings. Maybe there -are- lots of companies who find it doesn't meet their needs. Personally, I feel like the issue isn't one of features, it's one of communication.

There are a large number of companies out there with websites, but very few of them have the time or talent to effectively configure a statistics package. These people have a problem - they want more sales/conversions/phone calls - and they have a tool - google analytics - but they can't be bothered to map their business objectives on to analytics.

In my opinion, if you can solve that problem, you're in business.

------------------------------

Completely off topic - why hasn't anyone built a hosted version of Mint? (http://haveamint.com)
Ready Lisp version 20090130 now available
That's definitely a good idea.
You are right, I could have phrased my original reply more politely. I understand why you you would find it a useful feature because of the situations you describe, I would probably use other means and tools to detect your later case. I clearly see the usefulness of near real-time data in the first case.

To clarify, I worked a lot on Web Analytics at a Swiss Web Agency when I did an Internship there and I mostly focused on established sites there. They most definitely wouldn't be covered on digg or slashdot.
We used Web Analytics to understand the inner workings of the Websites, to understand the longterm development of traffic sources etc. and we tried to identify trends which helped to make fact based decisions when it came to developing the Sites. Therefore I couldn't directly see a use for real-time data. I would much more prefer a finer granularity in the data those tools provide and to segment in more defined pieces but that both is an area where Google Analytics is catching up fast. If there is one request I could make for a feature in Google Analytics it would be to not have to provide Google with the data but to get a Version that I could run on my computer (Urchin is hopelessly outdated, or at least was when I last checked).
"Do people speak English well?" you mean. I normally wouldn't point it out, but given the context...
Add an 'exclude weekends' option for reports on a given date range.
I'd like the ability to share part or all of my data to anyone, privately or publicly. And in the case of data I share publicly, I want it to be available on a page that is indexed by Google and doesn't require someone to login with a Google account.

Also, I'd like to see Google rank sites in a similar manner to Alexa, but with real data. I know that Quantcast does this, but having both GA and Quantcast JS beacons on my site is a waste of my users' load times and privacy.
I'm not super-familiar with Feedburner, but sure :)

To make sure we're talking about the same thing, I mean that I want to be able to subscribe to a feed that gives me stat information so I don't have to go into my analytics tool.
Any samples from a guy who actually is able to sing? That guy was nearly rapping.
piwik is an opensource one (which you can host), no?
"Berlin is the Startup Capital"

http://www.deutsche-startups.de/2007/11/29/berlin-ist-die-st...
Exactly my point. That's what I tried to express with: and I'm not saying it needs to be someone who has an MBA or something similar

I just think that someone needs to keep an eye on the business perspective and take responsibility for those things related to it.
Nice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5nTFKSTAxo
We seem to be both infantilizing children and simultaneously expecting them to work and behave like adults.

Though I don't know the effects (no one does), it can't be anything good for them or for society.
Very easy to forget IMHO, and hard to remember if it's duckduckgo, duckgoduck, gogoduck, duckgo, goduck, etc etc
In most major European cities, you can "get by" with English. The problem is that "getting by" is not that satisfying, and after a while you start wanting to be able to communicate in more meaningful ways, and the only way to do that is to either limit yourself to the people that speak English really well (which are fewer in number, and who, in any case, also have friends themselves who don't speak English so well), or learn the local language.
Email me when unusual traffic spikes happen. Send me a daily email with my largest referrers and how much traffic they sent in.
Only listened to the first part, but I think he might have a hit on his hands. Brilliant lyrics!

The last hit I witnessed in Germany (I rarely check) was something along the line "I count to three and take you home, come along we'll make a threesome" - people love that kind of lyrics...
Why shouldn't an AI be able to listen to ALL songs that are uploaded to YouTube at any given time and from that synthesize something new? Real musician presumably don't do anything different - at least they don't start from scratch, they build on existing music and styles.
Feedburner "only" delivers stats about your Feed and not a Feed about your stats, so I think you weren't talking about the same thing :-)
Cost of living in London is number 3 in the world. San Francisco is number 78.

http://www.citymayors.com/features/cost_survey.html
Don't underestimate the -fun- factor in realtime stats. When people are personally invested in a website, they feel attached to the success & failure of it. That "hits/pageviews/visits" meter is direct reflection of that success. Seeing that number go up and down is an exciting time for people just starting out. It's the equivalent of seeing your first customers walk in at a brick and mortar store.
Facebook founder finds a way to profit from its members' private data
The company I work for was, until recently, completely WFH, with ~20 or so people. (In the US. In Europe, its HQ, there was always an office, and in other satellite offices.) One of our WFH US locations is, in fact, Atlanta.

It works fine, IF you can find the right people. Not everyone can work from home. Not everyone wants to.

Our biggest hurdle was training. We had nowhere really to meet to get the new guys up to speed after they were hired. In Atlanta there are plenty of "remote working" locations like ROAM, Jelly organizations, etc.

We have since leased a small office, mainly for this purpose. But it provides a place to "land" when we need to, and for those of us with families, a place to get OUT of the house once in awhile to get work done.
For many cases of hard to find things, Google should have the advanced search option of excluding certain words more prominently highlighted.
I thought all schools stopped doing recess after about 5th grade? You just move on to hour classes and get the 5/10 minute break between each one.

Now, in college, 2 hour classes means that the prof. better give us a break at the half-way point or we'll be dozing off.
(Almost) 40-Year-Old Product Review Virgin
What you're feeling is the reason even people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs needed cofounders. I'd recommend finding one. It will also greatly improve your chances of succeeding.
What if we don't assume every vote is equal. What about weighting a user's vote by some factor of their karma? And/or capping the threshold that a user can vote. i.e A user with 0 karma can vote on comments with 0-3 points. A person with 100 karma can vote on comments -3-6 points. A person with 500 karma can vote on comments -9-9 points, etc... This implies that a comment with ridiculous votes (either positive or negative) has been decided by members of the community that the community has already shown approval for.
Adult Fast-Food Diets Tied to Too Much TV as Teen
An API or some way to feed it other statistics and visitor information.

For example, you could hook it up to sliding door sensors or something like that and track flow of people entering and exiting a store.
Anybody know how large the overall market research industry is at the moment? Is this a big deal, or a drop in the bucket?
Which is exactly what happened on Reddit, where you have to wade through all the up-modded pun threads to get to the real comments.
"Manager" is such a vague term that it's hard to give any useful advice here.

I'm going to make an assumption that what you mean is not "product manager" or "project manager" or any other kind of specialised manager, but a "general manager", aka a managing director or CEO of some kind.

I read somewhere that start-ups go through 3 phases to become established companies:

1) Develop the product (build something that can be sold)

2) Sell the product (create a process of selling it that makes money)

3) Optimise the money-making process (i.e. squeeze every last drop out of that process).

You don't need a non-tech CEO before phase 2, but at that point, if your team is mostly technical, and don't want to learn a whole new field (sales), or feel that they won't get good at it quickly enough, then it might be worth bringing in a CEO with sales experience to help build your ability to sell the product. Selling is a difficult problem, as difficult as building a product, and putting an expert in the lead can make a difference.
"economics are chaotic, not Newtonian..." This is hugely important. First, there never will be a set of equations, that given a gazillion variables will pump out a usable long term economic forecast, but the reliance on faulty models will exacerbate the risk. Case in point: nearly all the players in the derivatives markets used the Value-at-risk model to price the riskd of their derivatives. Guess what, it was wrong, and it was so wrong that last year all the companies tanked, not just one. It was wrong because it couldn't handle the psychology of panic.

Second, the Newtonian fallacy that every effect has a direct cause, leads politicians and economists to rely on flawed models like VAR and misguided social programs where the belief is that, if you tweak the cause, the desired effect will follow.
It's a replacement from the standpoint of humans who want meat and/or labor. From an ecological standpoint, our attempts to create replacements often fail miserably.
"The connection? Too much time spent watching ads for fast food"

Occam's razor suggests a simpler explanation: the kind of people who watch a lot of TV also like fast food.
At the end of Feb, I will have gone one year without a job. By choice. I spent that time finishing grad school and working to get some things off the ground.

I used to have cold feet and sometimes I really hated my own guts for throwing my savings away for what felt like "spinning my wheels". I was also afraid of losing my bargaining power/credibility in my old community the longer I spent time away from it (unfounded fear FYI). Oh and I had months where I felt like I wasn't making progress fast enough and I had many days full of questioning myself. I should note I launched two projects during this time that saw very little interest--finding this out early is a great argument for release early, release often.

Anyways, there is a happy stop gap in here somewhere. I launched a project in November and it gained interest and started making money. The profits are nothing huge but making that first $1 is huge to developing that entrepreneurial confidence. Its a small milestone but celebrate it anyways.

Now I'm getting close to ready with my big startup effort. Its based on one of the aforementioned failures but I'm using the lessons I learned and I'm really excited about it.

It took awhile but after a few breakthroughs I'm glad I took the jump. If I don't succeed now, I feel its certain I will later. Each effort I'm learning different things and starting to develop a mental model of what works and what doesn't.

Its one thing to read "write to bloggers to help market your product". Its another to write to them get zero response, refine your pitch, add a mediakit, and then try again and succeed.

My point is--you may have some growth to experience before you're ready to run a successful company. However, no matter how much growth you've got to go through, you may as well start now. It doesn't happen on its own.

Oh last point--to quit your job is a decision only you can make. I find when my personal needs are met its hard to force myself to do things that are painful but necessary for growth (i.e. get started). Even when I had significant savings left, I still felt too comfortable. Seeing my savings dwindle offered a great kick in the ass to move :)

I'm consulting now to meet my financial obligations but am nowhere near comfortable. This makes the whole thing feel like a "mission" and I love it. YMMV.

Good luck!
I currently use two providers for my analytics and stats - GA and SiteMeter.

As many have mentioned here the ability to have real time information is key to addressing possible traffic spikes and commentary that are happening about your site elsewhere. 24 hours seems like a short period of time, until you realize that someone has linked to your site that needs a response.

Also GA has some advanced features similar to Omniture that are actually hard to flush out. It is truly a powerful product and a simple howto to get this data out of the system would benefit many analytics folks I have talked to.

Distinctions between search and organic incoming traffic could be better categorized.
We just started using sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com). So far, we are very happy with the results we are seeing. For a typical LAMP architecture, Sphinx is a very neat fit.

Craig's List just went to Sphinx.
Artists, Bands and Musicians on Twitter
I'd add a slight caveat to that. This is why it's a good idea to either have a cofounder or have a guru like pg tell you that you won't succeed with a cofounder.

For me, the desire to prove pg wrong supplied all the motivation which is normally supplied by a cofounder. :-)
Visitor paths; i.e. "user A went from this page to this page to this page"

Visitor paths really help you see what pages are confusing your users. For example, using SiteCounter, we found that a lot of people would click the "login" link, and then would click the exact same link again, indicating they weren't sure if they got to the right page. As a result, we modified the page to look more like what someone would expect a login page would look like.
This is important, because it helps defend the site against trolls.

But perhaps it would be better not to be confronted with your score every time you log in.
A number of our hosts are also involved in startups, so it may also be a great way to meet people in the bay area. http://airbnb.com/travel/san-francisco/ca
You can click through on referring domains to see the exact URL, but the URL parameters, which are often relevant/useful, aren't shown.
For example:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461131
would show up as:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item
I just moved to SF from Canada for 8 months. I'm also 19. The process took about two months and cost over $1,000, including health insurance but not the flight. I was lucky because I'm a Canadian citizen, I'm currently attending University (took a term off to be here), I'm returning to finish my degree at the end of it, and I had a job lined up, all of which helped to make things a lot easier.

I admire your sense of adventure, and I don't want to discourage you from moving here. Just be aware that it will involve a fair bit of patience and frustration. Good luck!
I didn't fail my first time. And you're not guaranteed to fail by any means so please don't let anyone convince you of that.

I have never recommended a Paul Graham essay on this site (something that I'll never be able to claim again), but I highly recommend you read this one:

"How Not to Die" (August 2007)
http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
It isn't possible for anyone who hasn't heard a particular Beatles or Zappa (rock, not classical) song before, to recognize it as a Beatles or Zappa song?
Look what you started.
Bolidea, a self-described startup incubator in Montreal, Canada
That would make the developer of dashalytics life a lot easier.
Umm, isn't this pretty much what Facebook Polls did before they pulled the plug on it?
heh, "failing" is subjective and is dependent on certain variables (e.g. connections, capital, experience, etc)

If he plans on becoming a multi-million dollar company and this is his first time, then I would say, yes he will fail and that's not a bad thing. You have to work at it a few times before it works out. Sure you can get lucky but I am trying to be a bit more pragmatic.
For those interested in game theory (like me) and have yet to actually understand it (like me), the Teaching Company has a lecture series on it. I've heard it's good.
Also see his post on auto-completion: http://www.enigmacurry.com/2009/01/21/autocompleteel-python-...
Try using something like http://userstyles.org/

They have a Firefox extension, Stylish, which lets you apply custom user styles to sites, to override the native CSS if it's not to your liking. Just like Greasemonkey for Firefox.

I found it after becoming immensely frustrated with a site that had inexplicably decided to invert the colors for a:link and a:visited.
You can pay $2 a month for this -> getclicky.com
Interesting demonstration using what appears to be brand new bills (although the paper looks thicker than there is something printed on them that looks like it says "FOR GAME"), but what would be more interesting is if the method of holding and counting is based on the size, shape, paper quality, age, and condition of the bills.
It's a huge market but how much they will be able to tap into it remains to be seen.
Why wouldn't they get any comments or upvotes? You just posted a thread about a big spike in new users. There's no guarantee that they have read and taken to heart the guidelines.
I ran into this company while browsing a portfolio of a designer who made a logo for them. So the link is more of an FYI rather than a recommendation of any kind.

If anyone knows people on a founding team, it'd be interesting to hear some first-hand details.
Please, yes, for the love of all that is holy, get a co-founder. If you can convince someone else to go in with you, then you've done a good enough sales job that you'll be able to get customers.
From an ecological standpoint, our attempts to create replacements often fail miserably.

Source? What is an ecological standpoint?
I wouldn't let the lack of a cofounder stop you from trying. If you start on something you can handle on your own, you'll:

1. better understand your strengths (i.e. what you have to offer)

2. better understand your weaknesses (i.e. what you'd like in a cofounder)

3. know how to get started. (huge!)

All of these things will make you a more valuable partner in the future. While a cofounder could bring value, I wouldn't consider the lack of cofounder a deal breaker for moving forward.
Ability to exclude registered users and zoom in on non-registered users.
Why would Shanghai be so high on the list? It did not seem that expensive to me.
iSteam is definitely a cool app. I'm an http://www.dreamworldsol.com myself, but I must say I'm impressed.

Sam Shaw
http://www.dreamworldsol.com
I got relocated by an American corporate on an L1 Blanket which was relatively easy and now I'm applying for a Green Card through said corporation.

That said it'll have been 3 years to be home free assuming I get my green card in the next 2 (I've been told that's likely).

Being married to an American I have a get out of jail free card but I wouldn't recommend that for visa purposes only. ;)
Official Microsoft blog on public policy issues
Heading to SF for a short period seems like a good idea.
Since you don't seem to have a network there, it is probably a good idea to do a recon trip. This also works well with the visa situation.
It is probably considerably easier to meet people willing to sponsor you if you meet them in person, so just take a "vacation" to SF and plant your seeds.
This also gives you the chance to see if you really like SF, although i would be surprised if you didn't like it.
Good luck!