skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* You can't compare the startup activity here to the valley, but well, you can't compare the Valley's music and arts culture to Berlin's.*

The Valley maybe, but not San Francisco and the Bay Area generally. San Francisco has an extremely mature (though not in a classic sense) arts and music scene.
It got really popular real fast I see. When I last saw it you only had ads in one city, now they are everywhere. This is the first such site for Nigeria, right?

I got a bit frightened when I read this one though: http://www.nairalist.com/overseas/dating/46 :)
Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. Anchoring, framing, and sex are very powerful.
Thanks a million for that suggestion.

Most other countries seem to have very strong classified ads websites: a local craigslist, or a local gumtree, or a local kijiji. But they won't touch Nigeria for obvious reasons.
"respectable pornography"

There's a misnomer if ever I saw one. The only way those 2 words go side by side is the day a porno wins "Best Picture" at the Academy Awards.

I don't disrespect people who work in the porn industry. However, naivety aside, unless you are lucky enough not to have to deal with Protestant America, your'e better off not going down that road.
Besides the obvious jokes about Nigerians and internet solicitation... it looks pretty good. Very fast response for me -- the servers are in Dallas (?). Not sure how that will work for actual Nigerians. They will route through Europe or Brasil. No direct US-Africa links AFAIK.

Once you start scaling up you'll need a search and better drill-down into cities and neighborhoods.

You should also consider services that assist Nigerian expats. I don't know what that might be, but you can probably think of some.
This bug is ancient.
No. You can not "work." That means doing anything for any sort of compensation. That includes working for your own business. People do it - but people have broken the law since day one, so you have to make your own decisions and take any possible consequences.

Disclaimer: IANAL, but I spent time with one trying to get on top of this very issue.
I like and use this calculator, but it has one glaring fault: no modulus operation. I doubt I could even write a program for a calculator without doing one modulus, so I'm mystified why it wasn't included as a basic operation.

The author knows it's a desired feature, but it hasn't been rolled in yet - that I know of.
> Would you do business or be associated with someone in the porn industry?

If it made business sense, of course. I certainly wouldn't turn it down on "moralistic" grounds.
I am going to to start using that footnote technique of yours...

Hooray, I'm an innovator! ;)

[1]

----

[1] Though technically I think I stole the amusing footnote idea from Terry Pratchett, and from the Steve Meretzky/Douglas Adams team that wrote the HHGTG game.
It's a good anecdote, but the data seems to overwhelmingly favor his argument.
The only difference between porn and art is the lighting :)
Here's a porn idea that would differentiate you.

At different times, I have thought of all sorts of business ideas, and one of them was for pornographic shower curtains. Search the internet and I think you'll find there are few, if any, competitors in this space.

I think your market is people looking for gag gifts, frat boys, gay men, and swinger types.

To create this business, you should develop a website and translate it to a few European languages (particularly German), keep it very small and focused on various types of sexy shower curtains, and you could market it a few ways.

Do like Playboy and the other skin mags and send freebies to frat houses. Attend a sex convention or two. And advertise on various porn sites.

For production, you can get these made in China for a few dollars each, and I think you can probably charge 19.99-29.99, depending on the version. I've done research on producing things in China, and I'm thinking you can get them for under $5 each if you buy a thousand of them, and significantly less as you scale.

At the beginning, for shipping, I think you'll want to just have a big stack and do it yourself, but you'll eventually hire someone as you scale up.

I agree that it will be tough to make a good porn site, competing in a saturated market against well-funded players, but I think you could get into the shower curtain business, use the internet for distribution, and carve out a very nice niche for yourself.

If you are worried about it being to risque, keep the curtains erotic and soft core.
One bomb [...] does a pretty good job of destroying just about everything at ground zero

Did you read my links? The Hiroshima bomb destroyed old buildings, not modern buildings. Nearly 800 people survived near ground zero in modern concrete buildings, despite blast overpressures of 15-20 psi. http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2008/05/philip-j-dolans-former...

in two reinforced concrete office buildings, at [distances between 0.3 and 0.4 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima], almost 90 percent of the nearly 800 occupants survived more than 20 days, although some died later of radiation injury.

[...] of nearly 5,000 students [within a mile of ground zero at Hiroshima] who were shielded in one way or another, only 26 percent were fatalities. ... survival in Hiroshima was possible in buildings at such distances that the overpressure in the open was 15 to 20 pounds per square inch.
During my teens I did build an erotic forum with another partner. It was never intended to be big money but money was good for us teenagers. However, I quit after a month simply because the mind becomes numbed out by sex, you don't enjoy it anymore.
If you do decide to go ahead with this, I would suggest you try to work out a schedule or structure where there is some break time, at least visually.
Ah. Is this an American game perhaps? Never heard of it. Thanks for explaining. May hamper global adoption :)
Guys, my whole plan was getting you into your homes for three of your five day work week. You are utterly bombarded with "artifacts", "personal effects", etc. at home.

This is a compromise between the insanity of commuting, from a business standpoint, and the necessity of commuting , from a tribal and social standpoint. As is the case with compromises, it's not going to be up to your idea of perfect, but what it allows, is, with the sacrifice of your personal items for two days a week, you still get your tribal/social time with your team, bosses, and subordinates while at the same time, freeing our society of much of the inefficiency of the current system.

@fish, if you're uncomfortable with your explanation of why we insist on driving to office buildings in an age when it's not necessary, than fine. But it doesn't matter. The fact is, we are, and it's probably for reasons just as mysterious and ingrained into our genes as your idea. So, that's all we need to know. We apparently can't beat it, so we must adapt to it, rather than bemoaning the state of things, which you were not doing, which is why I liked your piece. Instead, we can implement a hack like this to allow us to have some of our cake, and eat some of it too.
JamLegend was a participant in LB08. We've been in the News.YC community for a while (have quite a large number of YC friends in the bay area).

I'm going to personally blog about the experience, but if anyone has any questions, post here and I'd be happy to answer.

Now that YC will be located in the Bay Area for the near future, LaunchBox is a pretty good East Coast alternative.
Yup, this is what I had in mind.
Wow, after reading a few ads, I like Nigerians better than Americans.
You can always get a different domain and host your application. Someday there will be a new craigslist and it could turn out to be your software.
When hiring a manager a lot of companies go wrong in thinking that that person needs to be _senior_ (hence bosses and TPS reports).

You can hire someone junior to add 'professional management' - by which I mean reporting, analysis, forecasting, planning and investment appraisal. They then feed these things into the senior decision makers in the same way as technical or design staff do.

These people are normally called 'management accountants' or 'project managers' or something similar.

For a startup hiring someone with an accounting degree and two or three years experience offers you the chance to:

- Get hold of someone bright who is disaffected with working for a big firm and driven to do something new, and do it well.

- Won't believe they have a god given right to tell you how to run your business, but _will_ have a solid understanding of the basic business techniques that offer a big return on investment.

- Can be given the opportunity to grow into a senior member of staff that really understands the business you are in.

That way you can treat it like hiring a designer. Hiring a (senior) manager is more like hiring a CTO - something to do only when you _want_ a more radical direction change.
My co-founder is very useful to me, and our business. He has a completely different but complementary skill set and viewpoint. Furthermore, we push each other when things don't look so hot, business-wise. I wouldn't know what to do _without_ a co-founder.
I'd suggest providing anonymous email (or phone #s) for your users. This "Craigslist-like feature" makes buying and selling to/from strangers safer and more discreet, and it shouldn't be too hard to set up.
I can't find the point of this one.

Was the whole point at the end that we should just code everything in Mathematica, because it's a great language "in which you can write just about anything that can be written"?

And that interactive elements are bad? Cuz they're down the slippery slope?

I think he's using those nifty tree animations to distract people so much they're rendered incapable of reading. (Worked for me.)

And it's total linkbait.
And the plot.

And the quality of the plastic surgery.

And the quality of the set.

And the hirsuteness of the male "models" (ugh).
This atlas ain't gunna shrug.
Any explanation must answer the "why". Their explanation says that they like fast food because they are exposed to more advertising, and we know advertising tends to work pretty well.

You propose a mere correlation, but don't say why that correlation exists or what causes it.
Sure. It's there and it's good in San Francisco. And Berlin still blows it out of the water.

Right now Berlin's one of, if not the, place to be for arts and culture in the west. Which was kind of the point of the analogy -- the Valley / San Francisco is the epicenter for the startup world. Berlin is the epicenter for new music, art, etc. (And this isn't just coming from a biased Berliner; I'm an American that ended found his way here. :-) )
I see that you order the states by number of posts. Won't this inconvenience users of less-popular states since they currently must scroll down?
Nice straw man. I advocate better software, not more software.

find, locate, dir /s and the horrendous file search in Windows XP (I haven't used Vista) are not solutions for most users. Under what circumstances are Spotlight, Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search context aware? If I'm in MS Word will any of these tools show Word documents before other types of documents? If I'm using a browser will they perform a web search?
Rails 2.2 onwards http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/11/21/rails-2-2-i18n-http...
Yes, it's the first Nigerian site dedicated to classified ads. Some other websites have sections for this.

About the ad: You initially thought someone's rib was physically stolen, right? :-)
Yes, at the risk of identifying one or two of them:

I think that the biggest part of it was the presence of temptations in the home environment not present in the office environment that they found hard to resist, as well as a 'home front' that was pushing in the wrong direction.

All this in an office of about 10 people, for 6 of them it worked very well, 2 were so-so in the working from home environment and 2 didn't work out at all. We had some good conversations about that and parted friends (still in contact) so it was quite clear that nobody really was at fault, it's just a situational thing.

I can see why you would be concentrating on the 'bad apples', but the best bit in my opinion is that for a larger than the majority section it actually worked out very well, better than I ever expected.

Right now I'm working together with people across 6 time zones, we don't even have a formal office and it feels pretty good. Regular meetings are a little harder for us though :)
I don't think that this is a problem for now, and letting the people show their real phone numbers and email lends to the trust of the site. Even newspapers in Nigeria print phone numbers of people featured. If the users complain about it, you should do something, but till then I think that the current setup works fine. It seems more personal, compared to a totally anonymous setup.
Google Feedback Loop
There's just no way to spell this word correctly!
There's just no way to spell this word correctly! http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&...
Thanks for posting that link, Visitors was precisely what I happened to be looking for...
* teach english in Japan *

You will find that this almost universally requires a degree from a 4 year university. They don't care if it is a 4 year degree in Dog Care, but it has to be a 4 year degree.
"Ask HN" threads are much more appropriate for book recommendations. Imagine if every book in the threads below were submitted- we'd have a bunch of noise and no real discussion.

Submissions like this are only useful for people too unmotivated to Google for "SICP".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240628

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85840

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193308

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80845

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127711

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56618

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156137

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41532

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136875
By "no safety net" do you mean no savings? That's how I read it at first. In which case, run, don't walk, away from the startup until you have some in the bank.

BTW, our "startup" is earning money after the first month we shipped. We made $1500 on the first round of 30 day trials. (Now we're up to about $2000, as we're rolling towards 60 days - and thus another wave of charges - but not there yet.)

That's not enough to live on, but you can make money right out of the gate if you:

1. Solve a real business problem.

2. Solve a REAL business PROBLEM. That doesn't mean inventing some new tech thing and then looking for a problem it can theoretically be applied to, & expecting people to eat it up like pigs eat slop.

3. Solve a real BUSINESS problem. If it adds actual bottom-line value, people will pay for it.

And if you're not doing a service people will pay for, you're going to be freaked out until those savings are gone, because your only option will be a buy-out.

EDIT: I have grander plans too beyond this first money-making service, but I do care about it itself, as well. I don't recommend doing something you're going to come to despise to pay the bills. Might as well have a job, at that point.
Can't you just run another site with exactly the same setup, but globally, and seed it with the foreign users of your forum? I.e, for Nigerians abroad, you setup a craiglist, such that they can get in contact with each other for whatever reason. If you keep it generic enough, it could spill over to the general population and also do well. Of course, it's a lot more admin work for you for a concept that may not take off, but you never know till you try.
The Rage of a Freelancer on Craigslist
My best guess would be that teens get pretty used to a very low level of activity... Using TV to fill 5+ hrs a day every day is going to alter how you feel about expending energy. Hence, requiring a very large convenience level for other things you do in equal routine.

Just a guess.

Either way, does this mean that those same years spent in front of a compiler mean that a kid's likely to have caffeine and cheeto problems later in life?

Jittery, bright-orange fingers?
Well done. I also love how spontaneous the ads are. This one for example made me laugh out loud: http://www.nairalist.com/lagos/services/136.
You Get What You Pay For
I think the point is that the "frat boy" ideas come most often to people who have a romantic idea of business, but lack the will to actually make it happen.

So if they don't really have the will to do it, then yes, one should discourage them from doing it. For their own good.

People with will will ignore the advice anyway. (Will will will!)

That said, the desire to build a book exchange is like a nerd disease.
Thanks. That's true.

I'm considering some possible solutions, such as a feature that remembers the states viewed by each visitor and moves them to the top of the list during subsequent views.
what about those of us who are both, heh
What's up with the cars? I read 15 of them, and nobody showed a price. I know that's not you, it's them. Must be a cultural thing.
Nice interview. I'm a big fan of BC. BC, TextPad, and SecondCopy are probably the three most-used small-time-company installed-software-that-isn't-open-source products we use.

It's-true-yes-sir/
Counter-anecdote: "My Coffeehouse Nightmare". http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/
Loved the article. Going to school during the internet bubble, I heard most of these a lot. People want the independent business lifestyle, but don't spend more than 90 seconds thinking of the business idea. Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is.

Hence the lack of analysis on if the business has been tried before, has current competitors, or what your costs per product would be comparatively.
It's good to see more Haskell-related stuff being posted here.

Since you presumably frequent #haskell, how does it compare to other programming language channels? What sort of level is the discussion generally at? Are the people joining the channel relatively new to Haskell, or have they been using it for some time and want to involve themselves a bit more deeply in the community?
SICM was discussed a few weeks ago here on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428345
I did. First I thought it was a joke, then I got confused before figuring out what she meant.

If you're the first, you can certainly take control of the market now.

When studivz was getting popular in germany, what they did was 'seed' universities with a few people handing out flyers for a couple of days, after which the viral effect kicked in. You may want to also add a viral effect - for example, a room-for-rent site in germany I know of allows people to print out the ad in a way that can easily be hung up on hallways or in schools. This template points back to the site, which furthers growth.

Another easy way to grow quickly is to allow people send the ad they just posted to a few email addresses, but this will lead you to a spam problem, as spammers will use you as a relayer.
Agree it's linkbait. And yes there's a bit of self-congratulatory informercial about it.

But there's an interesting underlying point at the end about the tradeoff between high-level application-specific languages and powerful general purpose languages:

"I would have done that years ago, but there was no tool in existence that made it possible. 'Possible?' you say. 'Surely it’s possible in C code, or Java, or Visual Basic, or Squeak, or something.' Well, no, it’s not possible for me in C or any other such serious environment, because I’m busy and these are just fun little things. If it’s going to take hours or days to do, it’s not possible for me to do."

Also, Mathematica is damned cool, if I remember correctly from grad school days. So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the back.
You lost me. What differentiates good and bad ideas other than the difficulty of pulling them off?

Speaking in the abstract, of course. In reality difficulty is relative, because we all have different resources to draw on.
I absolutely agree, I just thought a success story would be nice in a world where most startups fail :-)
While you are looking for more permanent housing, try http://www.couchsurfing.com/ . People offer up spare sleeping space for free. Should let you see where in the bay area you want to stay.
The OP was not talking about murdering a race or stealing from a bank.

It's porn, people. Porn is pictures of people having sex. Consensually. Over minority age.

You can say "BUT NOT ALWAYS!" but if the dude's worried about his rep enough to hide himself on HN, do you really think he's gonna do that?
Hello,
Thanks for all the great response.. I truly appreciate it.
I dont have a "moral" problem with Porn or even prostitution if all parties involved are over 18.

that said, most people I know and deal with on daily basis are against porn in general... the society for the most part is againt porn or hide the fact that they watch it.

I have a very good idea for a simple porn site that I can start for 5k (including legal fees) that can get me 2-3K paid users.. its frankly brilliant and the loss if it doesnt work out is not that great.
I need an income badly, disparate times... they really are :(

My other site gets 15k traffic a day, we have been blogged 1000s of times in different languages, there are 100s of reviews about us, however, traffic is not getting any better and I have had enough!
My new start up is launching this month, If i do start the porn site it wont be till april/may (if the new startup doesnt pick up)
So its pretty much my last 2 months.. then I will have ran out of money and I will have no choice but get a real job which I havent done in 10 years.

thanks again guys
I agree. Scammers really love anonymous environments.
I would love it if the analytics script was much less bloated. Seems that the extra time it takes to download what is basically a rather large javascript file could be seriously cut down by minimizing the script in some way.
I stopped reading at t-shirts because that's (kinda) my business. While it's not just about the t-shirts, I run a video game community and we sell legally unofficial merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies to support the website. If you have something you cannot advertise to (because there's no money in ads), and you cannot provide a 37signals style of direct service, never underestimate the power of merchandising.
NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED.

I did a variation of this my freshman year, by actually buying about $10k of books from students on campus and then selling them on Amazon. We made about $3k all told... I guess the author is right that it didn't "really succeed" and become a huge business, but I definitely learned a ton. (And notably, Chegg is in this space and seems to be doing well enough to get Kleiner Perkins to join their $25m series B.)

THERE IS NO MONEY IN T-SHIRTS.

Nonsense. There's a lot of competition, but plenty of people are making tons of money.

Anything where you plan to make your money exclusively from ads

Bashing ad-supported business seems to be popular these days, but somehow those people are overlooking the fact that Google made $21B last year doing just this. Making significant money from ads requires getting to scale, but if you have the drive and the right mindset, getting there isn't as hard as you might think.
Imho it's not really qualitative but merely a quantitive difference: Jealousity.
"Why does he have a big office when I'm in this sucky cubicle?", "Why can he work from home while I have to drive to work?".

I had a simple response to anybody who asked why I'm so rarely seen and why they don't get that privilege: As soon as you put in 50+ hours a week like I do and get up at 4am at least once every week to clean up the mess that you deployed...

That was my story, others may be different.