skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My attention span ran out after a few paragraphs, but I think he's advocating DSL for GUIs. If so, I'm 100% in favor of that, as I've been saying for a while.
This is exactly the problem I designed http://utilitymill.com to solve .. at least for me. An easy way to slap a web GUI on a cool python script and share it with your friends.
This is more a screed against a "frat-boy" -- i.e. naive, un-thought-through -- approach to business ideas than a useful list of ideas to avoid.
Hard advice you're not going to like:

If you can't convert your traffic, maybe you should spend time investigating how to get people to convert, how to make products that they want, how to market & sell & reach people effectively, etc.

Don't just give up on it and flip to the next project, which you won't fully invest in either, like a schizophrenic hummingbird.

If you've got the traffic, you can make money with it. If you're willing to study, test, and learn.
What browser? I only tested on Safari. Try this:

javascript:(function(){if(typeof cornify_add==="undefined"){
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).src=
'http://www.cornify.com/js/cornify.js';}
else{cornify_add()}})();

(remove the newlines)
Having a cofounder != an increased chance of success for your startup. Having the right cofounder that is as excited about your product and is as determined as you are to make something thats awesome will be the difference between failure and success.
The universe is probably not a quantum computer
> So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the back.

I wouldn't care if it there was a feeling of "meta" awareness of the back-patting.

Eating your own bullshit like it's tasty tasty chocolate, now that's a slippery slope you have to watch out for.

Getting high on your own supply -> believing your own hype -> eating your own bullshit == quick track to irrelevency.

Even if it gets you more fanboys.
So Zuckerberg, under the auspices of world peace and progress, opens up it's users' private data to multinational corporate businesspersons, who are also there under the guise of world peace and progress. That's genius. Evil genius.
Reddit just added a feature that puts a dotted-line box around the headline you just clicked on, to make it quicker to find the headline to either up or downmod or comment on when you return to Reddit after reading the piece.

A nice feature which would encourage interaction after reading pieces.
1981 video about online newspapers
Actually, I threw together a book exchange in a weekend and sold most of my books on it. Quite a few people are still using it. Granted, it doesn't make any money, and it's operated through the Engineering Student Society, so I guess it doesn't count.
On word: typefaces. (translation: vector fonts).
Hehe. Well, I guess that's one thing they won't appreciate about me, then.

Hopefully I'll find other ways to make up for the loss. :)
adobe has opened up a little bit. enough to convince a casual observer that swf is an open format. but it's not.

for example, the open source flex sdk can't be used to create flash apps with gui controls. for that, you need adobe flash cs4. they haven't opened up the fla format, which means that nobody can create a product that competes with adobe flash cs4. so it's not very open at all.
Track individuals... tell me all dimensions on someone who looked at a piece of content... more intensive stats like WebTrends used to have.
"We’re also changing our sponsorship model for our events. Instead of just creating value for sponsors at the physical events, we’re starting to work with them throughout the year to help them reach new customers and generate excitement. "

Translation: spamming, of the white collar kind.
That makes sense.

But I guess those two days you'd spend in the office would have to be largely in meetings and other things that capitalise on the "social" opportunity, with the idea that you'd be focusing purely on actual implementation (or whatever the work you do is) the rest of the time. Is that realistic from a scheduling perspective? Seems like corporate life always brings a steady composition of both.
There was an article linked to from there on Slate where this quote ended the piece "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

That quote is both very true and very wrong. It's true that you can get into entrepreneurship with very idealistic values that drive you to ignore some of the more important financial aspects of running a business, and wrong in that if you don't do it for at least some type of love then you are probably going to fail for lack of passion.
It's partly a cultural thing, but a push in the right direction may be what they need.
Keep that feeling, it's your biggest asset. The moment you lose it is when you should be looking out real hard for trouble because it is bound to happen.

Insecurity at some level is one of the biggest drives to succeed, even if most successful entrepreneurs would never admit to it.

There is no such thing as a 'failed' startup, there are no such things as 'bad questions'. Even the worst startup experience will teach you more than years of business theory will ever do and even the most silly question deserves to be heard and answered in a serious way.

Don't let anything or anybody stand in your way of trying and give it your best, you'll probably be amazed how far that will get you on momentum alone.

For me the turning point came when I was out of a job and my gf was pregnant, it was all or nothing and it worked out pretty good, 15 years and counting. I'd never go back to a day job no matter what the compensation and 'perks', there is no better perk than to know that you are moving under your own power.
The marketing message is pervasive about everything Wolfram.

It gets on my nerves a bit, too. However it doesn't detract much from the information. Once I sat down and started actually using Mathematica 7, my mind was totally blown.
Was thinking of something like this, also.

I could see it working, but mainly for queries that have one clearly-best result, or where the 'snippet' itself answers the query. So perhaps for 'answers' search more than general web search.

The implicit user feedback created would be great... but uses might be frustrated by not being able to scan many results quickly. (I always set Google to return 100 results...)
Competition in the p0rn industry is stiff.
Van Halen's Runnin' with the Devil:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kxqMpGAL3I

1:45 in and 2:45 in are some highlights... Money back guaranteed if you're not crying after watching it.
Can you give an example of a company that isn't constantly spinning its own PR story? It's annoying, sure, but I'm not sure it's actually, from a business perspective, detrimental.
That's because you haven't seen this one: http://www.nairalist.com/rivers/dating/54 :-P
The problem he's describing is certainly real. There are characteristic traps young founders fall into when thinking of startup ideas.

I don't think he's gotten to the root of the problem, though. The root of the problem is not certain categories of ideas. It's a half-baked way of looking at the world.

As long as you avoid that, there are good ideas to be had in several of the categories he describes. For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever? And if “Flickr + ___” is a recipe for failure, it wasn't always. YouTube's goal was to be the Flickr of video, and that worked out well for them.
I think there is some truth hidden in that first statement.

I think the financial model of porn is easy enough to grok, if you can get a lot of traffic to a legit site, then I don't imagine that you can't make a porn site work. It's really just a matter of figuring out what folks are buying and start selling it and if you're seedy enough you can find the right models, etc... It's probably easier in a lot of respects. What might be harder is "going legit" after that.

Without passing judgment, porn seems to be one of those addictive sorts of things, once you're in it or into it, getting out isn't always that easy. Especially if you've known "success" with it and not really in other ways. It's sort of a stereotype.

I've known a couple entrepreneurs that had experience with porn, running ISPs and providing various technical services, in the post-porn world they seemed to have a swarthyness to them that get in the way of a lot of things. I can't say if they were that way before or if it was something they picked up along the way but they just have different attitudes about the worker bees and people working for them as well as those providing services they purchase. The easiest way to describe it is a lack of respect on some human level; it's hard to say, they have employees come and go and it's just different, the people are almost all pissed when the leave and a lot more leave than do some of the other companies around here.
I think it's surprisingly good. The layout seems clean, and very easy to use. I would suggest adding some more subcategories when it grows. For example separate dating into m4w, w4m, m4m, w4w sections.

I also like the fact that one city, Lagos, has the majority of the posts. That should help you get some traction. Right now, if I lived in some of the other cities, I really would not consider using this until it got more traction. But if I was in Lagos, it would be worthwhile for me to use it, and the market penetration for Lagos should bring in ads for other cities.

Since you run a successful Nigerian forum that has a problem with ads, I can really see this website get some decent traction. Traction seems to be the biggest problem with Craigslist clones, so I think this will be successful
"What exactly is your secret sauce..?"

Porn is often the first (commercial) industry to take advantage of many new technologies (DVD, the internets, etc), but even then there's probably tons of room to innovate.

For example, I recently saw a porn recommendation engine posted on Reddit that used collaborative filtering and all that fun stuff. AFAIK there aren't many sites out there that do recommendation, even though it seems pretty obvious.
I read this article about 3 years ago. I found it again today while googling around or something of the sorts. Hacker News wasn't around the first time I found the article, so I was curious to see the HN comments around the article, hence the submission. Some of my notes:

* These ideas aren't destined to fail. Look at chegg.
* Just because it's been done before, doesn't mean you can't. ie- busted tees. This goes back to our is there room for another photo sharing site discussion from last week.

Here's why I don't particularly agee with the article, despite Ramit being a badass:

*It focuses on the business types MORE than it focuses on why they won't work. It doesn't focus on things like: uniqueness, execution, design, segmenting growth at first to niches,etc.
> Once I sat down and started actually using Mathematica 7, my mind was totally blown.

Unfortunately, 99.999...% of us can't ever reach this point, due to the cost of mathematica.
You don't have a safety net? You'll find you don't need much of one. If you have money saved up, reduce your expenses and figure out a time-frame for it to work. By the end of that time frame you can decide what you want to do. You would be surprised how well you can scrape by if you really want to.

What if the company fails? Who cares! You'll learn so much about what you are doing, yourself, and much more that you will benefit either way.
Yes yes, there are real religions, and the rest are imaginary, as theology is a complex field...

What, nobody else saw that one coming?
The student version costs $45, which is as much as a textbook, and less than one hundredth the cost of most semesters at American colleges.
On the software side, I'd say that you'd probably want the ability to specialize the sub-apps (e.g. the columns in that table) over time.

For example, you may want to tweak the dating & jobs applications differently.

Also, on the spirit of psyklic, maybe it'd be better to specify which regions you want to see? A small bitmap is easy to store in a cookie. On the same note, letting people set their sort order (popularity vs alphabetic vs reverse alphabetic) may be useful.
Now there's a business model- $10/month subscription to opt-out.
Remembering and reclaiming the beauty of life leading up to a tragic event, even partially, is one of the most generous things anyone can do.
They cancel each other out :-P

j/k. As an Indian who grew up in the US, the posts remind me a bit of my own family.
Yeah, it's an american thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Duck_Goose

I think pretty much all Americans know it instantly. I'm sure some will pipe up here not knowing it now...it's their queue :)
The question isn't whether they're spinning, but whether they drink their own Kool-Aid, or realize that it's Kool-Aid to begin with.

Me, I hype myself, but I also make self-denigrating jokes and meta-references when I'm hyping. I apply my bullshit detector to myself. Example: http://tr.im/5bucks

You may say "Uhh, but you're just a person," but I'm a person with a readership of about 7500, and another thousand or two on a mailing list, and I'm working on a tongue-in-cheek "What sucks about freckle time tracking?" post for my company blog. Because there are parts of our product that really suck. And we know it.

Here's a reverse case study: 37Signals was a lot more reasonable 5 years ago. Their blog posts were more actionable, less hype, and more importantly, the products fit a need and evolved. They kept doing consulting to pay the bills, so they couldn't escape reality. Reality is good.

Cut forward 4 years, they launch Highrise, a product that was so "less" that it was practically "nothing" and not usable for anyone. It didn't have any features people required to actually manage their customer relationships. It was just an online addressbook with comments.

You couldn't even sort by people with the most recent comments. How could that help you manage anything?

And they had been talking it up for months, meaning that it wasn't an addressbook with comments that was developed in a weekend.

There's nothing wrong with their marketing and PR. The only issue is that they believed their own hype, and really embarrassed themselves with a totally useless product.

Now, a year later, it's a little bit better, but it's no Basecamp and no Backpack.
We had to basically create our own table in the DB and pages in our admin to track that. Not much time - ~2 hours - but it would've been 0 hours if it was built in :)

FYI: After having this in place for about 9 mths, I heartily recommend spending the 1-2 hours to do it.
Dude, JamLegend is so awesome. Thanks for the great work on it.

Though it could use some more popular music. Are you guys looking to partner with any labels or artists?
I'm surprised that this is the first post I've read that listed heatmaps.
GoDaddy CoFounder: Never give up (but be very quick to change).
Please post to HN if a video is released.
Thanks for the help, Hacker News. Enjoy the TwitterBowl
seunosewa - Great job! The site is fast, very responsive, with a lot of content.

I see you are trying to keep it minimalistic, is this to change? I don't mean to sound superficial, but personally I never liked the craigslist look and feel. A little color, and a little aesthetics (IMO) go a long way.

Going off topic, I did want to say that this brings back fond memories for me. I spent the first 16 years of my life in Lagos, and browsing around, esp. in the Housing section, I see a few posting from Ilupeju (where I lived). Nigeria is a good country, and Nigerians will always have a special place in my heart. Good times, good times indeed.

I wish you the very best (Also, you might want to extend this to other countries and cities)

Edit - I see sarvesh had the same suggestion. Sorry, wasn't attempting to hijack that thread
"You can actually rewrite history with this command".

Seriously now, I am using "git pull --rebase" when there are only a few commits that were pushed while I was working. It keeps a linear commit thread and no merges.
I should just mention Amy, that I love your work. Twistori is so cool.

But my point is mostly that, despite the bullshit, Mathematica is radically more powerful for building user interfaces (up to a certain complexity) than anything I've seen. The self-hype hasn't exactly toned down over time either, so I'm less certain it's really the bad omen you make of it.
And I'll point out again that the 1900s comparison isn't particularly meaningful since the US had roughly the same murder rate in the 1950s that it had in the 1900s.

And, as long as we're making comparisons, tn some cities, the 1960/70s murder rates weren't unprecedented either - it was a return to the Prohibition era murder rates.

FWIW, it's generally believed that accurate crime stats weren't collected much before 1850 and it took a while before they became uniformly reliable. (They weren't in much of the US until the early part of the 20th century.)
Ask HN: What do you think of side projects or other "frat boy" business projects?
What do you guys think about the value of ideas like selling t-shirts, or selling other items as business projects?

From reading HN the idea of entrepreneurship has started to grow on me. But of course I have no idea how interested I would be in business because I have no experience at all with startups.

So basically I have had this idea in the back of my mind to start a small side business, something comparable to the ideas on this website: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-business-ideas (I actually have briefly thought about t-shirts). If I would do a startup or business project, I would want it to be something I could treat as a side project, and have a low initial investment.

Reading about entrepreneurs it seems like most of them have a significant number of failures before they have a successful startup.I am also right now very risk-averse since I would have no knowledge of what I'm doing. So while I would have the goal of making money, it would probably be more of a secondary benefit. My primary goal would be getting experience dealing with suppliers, customers, marketing, and those sorts of things. It would also give me some idea of how comfortable I am with failure, since that would probably be the outcome for my first business project/startup.

So would this type of thing be a good way for me to get some experience and business knowledge? Or would it be better to choose something that required a co-founder, more time, and money?
If I understand the student licensing correctly, you can only use it for educational purposes, and only as long as you're a student.

edit: also, the price is $140 for the student version: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents/
Cloud Computing Confusing SMEs?
Your command never generates lower-case letters. :-)
i had recess through high school. it was called lunch, but we weren't confined to the lunch room. instead, we'd hang out by the picnic tables outside near some woody trees and then go down to the soccer field to play ultimate frisbee. i knew i was lucky and i loved it.
Religion is always referring to something that we can not reach with our own intelligence.

It's in the nature of this concept that it can be faked in infinite ways...
much better UI.
That's an interesting division. But, how does elevating ourselves, even if the better part, not reduce to ego gratification too?
As much as I like the fact that facebook provides a bunch of free services this is simply bait and switch. Turn a social networking site into a marketing panel.

Besides that, using facebook as a 'panel' seriously degrades the value of the company as a whole, panels are commodities and are definitely not valued in the 10's of billions, even the very large ones.

There are lots of players in that segment and most of them were put together with the express purpose of being used as panels, it's quite easy to get access to panels with large numbers of respondents in a given target demographic.

That's especially hard when your demographic is working single moms from Nebraska or something equally arcane, if your database isn't set up to record such information right from day 1 then you're not going to add it afterwards in an easy way.

And those respondents are usually paid for their work, fb will do the opposite, nag you and charge you to opt-out.

Of course facebook will have to turn a buck but I highly doubt this is the way to make it happen.
Twitter comes clean
The Computerized Coach
Yes, it looks like it. Only, re-launched with a few more bells and whistles and with a good marketing spin. Funny how the name of the product and how it's presented makes such a big difference in how valuable it becomes.
My Dell laptop has identical components to most MacBooks, so I'd say 90% of the drivers OS X already supports would be involved in my Laptop.

It doesn't necessarily have to support every variant. I just mean it would be amazing if Apple struck a deal with Dell so that OS X could run on their laptops. However, I think Apples decision to support outside hardware will likely be an image thing over a cash thing. If Apple compromises its image then it could potentially compromise their entire business.
I use TaskTrack:

http://www.bushsoftware.com/TaskTrack/TaskTrack.html

no setup required, and it tracks exactly how long you spend on each document during the day; so all you have to do is group the documents into tasks and you have the total time spent.

its actually made this stuff a heap easier than it was for me, I never used to bother until the end of the week, now I still dont, but the numbers are right :)
That's fair. I would still consider start ups as a form of financial freedom where instead of having no financial concerns to interfere with my real interests I use my real interests to offset my financial concerns. But, clearly the concepts are not as distinct as I've been making out.
"I am a young man of 23 years of age, male. I am a Christian, am so nice to people around the world. I am 35ft tall and also very much handsome. And I'm every woman's dream in life."
Ok, I'll give him a bit more rope. Personally, I'm just really turned off by this article, though. It's like someone constantly telling someone they'll fail until they get discouraged and do fail, and then congratulating themselves on their insight. But, I know you have a different perspective on such caustic communication, which perhaps I should adopt.
I had a 20 minute break and a 40 minute break every day throughout my entire 13 years of school. This was in Australia.

I can't believe that in other countries you don't get to run around regularly at school.
hows your ruby fu?
Ego gratification is not bad: it's good and even necessary to grow.

But we can't always (by ourselves) distinguish between gratification (read: elevating growth) and egoism (destructive growth).

So we need some 'illumination', which is, in another term: Religion.
Tried implementing DKIM+DomainKeys and SPF? Haven't had problems since I did that. (Though I don't run a big list via qmail -- only outgoing user notifies, signup, etc.) I'm using a qmail-remote wrapper for dk computation.
Maybe you could also sell prominent placement for ads, like eBay does with "featured auctions".
can you code? what are your skills?
The structure and design of that article reminded me why I strongly dislike GoDaddy.
That's an amazing example of candid communication with your userbase, it really impresses me very much.

I can think of (quite) a few other companies that I would very much appreciate such candor from (but I guess that once you've IPO'd there are too many rules and regulations at work to make such candor a working solution).

Kudos to Alex Payne.
well atleast you didnt get rick-rolled this time. Clicked on the comments first just to be safe!
Haskell circa 1994: reviving  the Gofer standard prelude
I'm in a similar situation and looking for one too. Contact me (email in my profile).