skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to point you to my comment (and its resulting thread) on the other article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483780

"This article is useless. Magenta is a combination of colors, and is not represented by any single wavelength of light. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Saying magenta doesn't exist is like saying green paint doesn't exist, because it's a combination of blue and yellow (within subtractive primaries). [...]"
Indeed :P The design is directly inspired by StackOverflow's (so bad that we mentioned it in the about page).
"The site pulled in estimated revenues of just $280 million last year, and sources close to the company say it didn't break even."

Lots of good facts in this article. "Early board member Jim Breyer, who put in $1 million of his own money and $12.7 million from an Accel Partners fund, says that profits are 'a secondary consideration in this stage of the growth.' He wants to get a return on his investment, but he's not pushing anything now."
> I basically agree, but there's a certain amount of sense in the statement you're debating — if I design either the database or the UI and then make the other one just a thin layer over it, I get a terrible database design or a terrible UI design.

Then don't do that.

> I haven't found a good rapid-feedback way

Is rapid more important than correct?

> Do you have any suggestions about what kind of software you use that avoids that?

They're both scriptable.
Black is the only non-color when working with additive primaries (RGB, light).

Black is the presence of all colors when working with subtractive primaries (RYB/CMYK, pigment).
Amazon was founded in 1994 and posted its first profit in 2001. This doesn't quite meet your criteria of zero revenue (Amazon always had some) and going to explosive profitability (Amazon's first quarterly profit was 1 cent per share).

Maybe a pharmaceutical startup would fit your criteria. One that's small enough to be focusing on just a few products, sucking up investor resources in R&D and approval, and then boom. I don't know enough about that world to nominate a candidate company, though. And the drastic contrast is due to regulation more than the business or product.

Is your real question something like "are companies which end up mega-profitable also profitable in the small, early on?"
> I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same (as Stanford) because the CS departments are comparable.

Comparable != same. They're both good, but they're different.
50% off first month of 37signals products
This should be helpful for a few startups.
this should be helpful for startups
I agree with this article 100%. My latest installs have been on windows and it's the same story. In order to download a product you need to do the following:

1.)Register for Trial

2.)Download installer Software

3.)Download Product (Freeaking HUGE Arse Files 1GB)

4.)Run installer (starts to uncompress the download - takes forever)

5.)Run real installer (again, takes forever)

6.)Jump through tons on splash screen startup nags

7.)Finally get software to start - my computer with dual core processor now crawls to a hault.

8.)Trial expires, but Adobe "auto updater" still thinks I want updates for my expired trial????

9.)Unistall (get coffee and wait 30 minutes - no joke)

FAIL
Yes. The book review was written by someone less familiar with the research than I would have desired. The opening line I objected to was probably inserted by a Wall Street Journal editor, but the book under review is less impressive than, say,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Nature-of-Intelligence/dp/B000PY4U...

or

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

or other books I've read on closely related subjects. This is a subject that deserves a lot of books, but one might as well read the better books.
This sounds more like, "How to become Jeff Atwood."
"You honestly believe Google would ever blacklist a prominent startup like Mahalo?"

Sure. Google's trust and search quality are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Mahalo is not.
Direct Experience.
You wouldn't have interpreted the sentence that way had I written, "a young hacker might proactively seek the company of more people," which was responsive to the main point of the article however I chose my vocabulary.
Measuring Single and Multi Server Performance
The Mathematical Opinions of Dr. Doron Zeilberger
37s was a very well known usability consulting group for years before hiring DHH and building Basecamp. Not only is SvN good marketing, but 37s had the kind of powerhouse targeted niche brand that is nearly impossible to obtain.
I've been using Photoshop since version 3 (first version with layers) but I don't think it's had a "must have" feature since version 7. However, I think that's just a trait of very mature software. Been using Flash since it was called FutureSplash. I develop on Flash CS3 almost daily

Is Adobe software frustrating? Yes, at times. Is it incompetent? No, I wouldn't say so.

And this line:

>> Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.

Well, that's just silly.
I really like the idea, so much so that I jumped through all of the hoops and added my own project: http://clusterify.com/projects/list/TimothyFitz/9/

Unfortunately, there were a lot of hoops! I had to register. Once registered I wasn't logged in?! I confirmed my e-mail then logged in, then clicked new project. Most of this went well except for the tags, where the auto-complete broke (would show the tag I had just typed, over the textbox I'm trying to type into). That might just be a Google Chrome issue?

My $0.02:
You should optimize the hell out of the new user -> adding a project loop and the new user -> joining a project loop. User accounts are stupid and antiquated. Have the add project field use the same fields that wordpress comments use (name, e-mail, optionally website). Defer dealing with misuse (hopefully defer it until you're popular!)
And conveniently gender-neutral as well?
And yet I'm not flocking to the Gimp download site, why not?
I think that's a slightly cynical view. While I can certainly appreciate and relate to the distaste for SEM/SEO gaming, their article for how to play the guitar is a very newb-friendly summary and a lot better than 90% of the sites out there. Look at the top results, it speaks for itself.

A successful startup does not always rely on unique and innovative technology, the execution of a consumer "brand experience" can be as equally important. In this case, their IP is human-driven. Google's algorithm is nice but it's not AI yet.

To me, Mahalo completes the yin-yang of search. The concept is not new, human-filtering was around in the 90-00's. Popular algorithms and directories have come and gone. Mahalo is doing the best job of it today.
日本語を知っていますか？

Not to be nosy, but could you go into some detail about how you ended up in Japan of all places? :)

I find intrigue with any "developer turned entrepreneur moving to Japan" story.

がんばっていょ!

:)
>> and you are legally prohibited from fixing it

Ah, ok. Dear Programmers, pleeeazee write me a Photoshop 5.0, a Quark XPress 3 and a Freehand 4 Clone in your spare-time without financial compensation. Thanks.
Most users don't care for fixing it - they just want something that works. Most users are not programmers either, and those that are probably have other issues making them busy.

So the ability to fix broken is not really a benefit for most users. It's an enabler for those that can.

As for not working well, that can be said equally well for both Open Source and proprietary software. Equally, I can pick examples of software that works well from both types.

The biggest benefit for most users is that Open Source is free (as in beer). Firefox only hit the mainstream because it's free and was rock solid. Opera was for a long time rock solid but not free and that didn't help it, did it?
> If you are in a position where you don’t need money, that’s great. If you aren’t, you better figure out a way to make money off of your blog.

I don't know what to say about this. There are very few professional bloggers. There are many bloggers who use their blog to indirectly generate revenue (business leads, networking).
Nil, really. It's just related to my "day" job really and using that + the web as a surrogate. It's much too big a place and too decentralize to really work for me like I think it would for me on the east coast (Where I'm from)

But it's just stuff that I discovered here that if someone had told me YEARS ago in Wyoming, would've helped us be a lot more successful a lot sooner. But it's stuff that no one knew to tell me, because there's no one on the ground who has the experience to be able to say anything.

And yeah that place is an anomaly but still. Sometimes just being connected to a larger place can raise your profile and make what you do 'seem' more legit.

It's strange.
An illustrated version of this rant:

http://www.betalogue.com/2008/11/13/adobe-cs4-installer/

...and a response from Adobe:

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/notes_from_installer_mg...
Google wins Street View privacy suit
Thanks TimothyFitz, we hear you. Sounds like we need to make the process a bit smoother for new users.
The design of this and whitehouse.gov drive me crazy. The gratuitous use of italics randomly in headings always seems to emphasize the wrong part of the sentence. Right on the front page of this site we have "Your money AT work". Now why on earth would you emphasize the least important word in the phrase? It makes it sound like someone who can't quite make out some handwriting is narrating the page. Maybe a minor nitpick that not everyone notices, but in my case I find it really detracts from the readability and professional veneer these sites are trying to achieve.
Very nice, subscribed to the RSS feed but the RSS links point to invalid locations.
T-Shirt Hell pulls a fast one; closing message a troll for more business
This looks great. I want to open hndir.com with other hackers, I'm fairly busy on another project right now but really like the idea. It's down right now, moving the host to linode.
He mentions wanting an open source solution for developing on Chumby. I have used Sprouts [http://www.projectsprouts.org/] for some Chumby projects and I have been very happy with it. It doesn't have a drag and drop UI like Flash (it's more for hackers than for average users) but it is easy to work with and to setup.
Maybe take a lead in ability, but in an install base? I'm not sure. Even .NET has trouble with having a large enough install base (on Windows machines of course).
Read the fine print(!):

* Tax Relief - includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy.

So the largest bubble, tax relief, actually includes the other bubbles? Wouldn't the normal expectation that if there is one large bubble marked tax relief that it actually represent tax relief and not science spending? Or is that just an almost transparent attempt to pander to people who want tax cuts? Help me understand this!
I'm half-way into "Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart", and it's very revelatory on the subject. Turns out with the "recognition heuristic" alone you can go about halfway. The rest goes again halfway with another just a bit more complex heuristic. Also interesting is that very simple heuristics tend to be about as good or more as very complicated algorithms, and sensibly more robust.

I found an abstract (http://www-abc.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/users/ptodd/SimpleHeuristi...) but it's a bit dry. The actual book is a lot more readable.
It's not 97 gems. It's 97 screaming headlines. #7: Stand Up! I did that this morning to go to work. My software doesn't seem any better.
Some thoughts on retroactive deletion of shared content on Facebook
Making It Big
Homeless Man Takes Up Internet Panhandling
OK thanks for pointing this out! URLs should be fixed in RSS feed now.
Branding: Slogan Wars Between Coke and Pepsi
Open, Loving, Just Workingness: The Smart Platform and Javascript
Literal Thinking in Autism
Tell HN: Pecha Kucha Night - SF tonight (gibsonf1 presenting)
Take an evening off and enjoy hearing and talking about ideas from all areas while enjoying a good beverage. If you come by, let me know - I always like meeting fellow HN readers.

Details for the location in SOMA: http://pechakucha-sf.com/
it doesn't load for me, just a blank screen, what do I need to do?
maybe, but it is still an ad.
Foundations might fund online networks that help people contribute more to society. One example is Cogito.org,

http://www.cogito.org/default.aspx

which has full membership for young people who pass a screening process, but good resources for lurkers too.
Shock of all shocks. NO ONE saw this coming. eye roll
Interesting reading!

The response from Adobe can be summed up pretty concisely: their products have reached such complexity and bloat that they can't do much about it. (Given the management's hunger for regular releases and spending as little as possible on development.) I used to work for a company which was in the exact same state, and among other things I was in charge of creating the installers, so I've seen this exact phenomenon up close and personal. Smart engineers were leaving the company left and right.
That's how I started following Penn Jillette. On the other hand, I have my profile pic uploaded.
#98 Use Appropriate line spacing if presenting content over 96 lines long
Want to use just the datastore from Google AppEngine ?
Open source does not thrive on the fuel of non-profit alone. Red Hat and Sun are for-profit, but they're major contributors to open-source projects.

Open source is successful with not-for-profit models because people like hacking on open source. I don't think that's necessarily impossible for a social network, because people like to waste a lot of their lives on social networks, but are open-source hackers going to be interested in working on a project they aren't interested in using? I'm assuming that the primary appeal of social networks has long moved past the techie demographic.
Teaching, Symbology, and Intellectual Materialism- The Chasm is a Vacuum
The value of telephone user surveys
I have yet to use a programming language that throws CodeWasWrittenInTheWrongCityException. Its a good thing, too, because I am certainly in the wrong city.
http://seenonslash.com/node/2411

That's all I have to say on this subject.
Great ^ Job.

Some suggestions:

Add 'in progress'/'started' as a project status. This would affect some other features as well, for example filtering the project list. But it would allow people to find new projects more efficiently.

Also add a field for 'time to finish' once the project is done.

Allow sorting or filtering projects by est. time. If I don't have more than 4 hours, I don't want to see any projects that take longer. Additionally, in the 'New Here' section: Clusterify: work on fun, small (~2hr) projects and meet other coders. '2hr projects' is not very relevant - a lot of projects listed are est. time >2 hours, and it really depends on the quality/quantity of people who join.

Do you want to explicitly specify a limit on the number of people who join? Once the limit is reached the project can move to 'In Progress' status. The project submitter can approve join requests.
The thing that pisses me off about Mahalo is that Calacanis goes around claiming it's some type of innovative idea/technology and that everything thing they do is for the benefit of the users. It's a straight SEO play, along the lines of About.com. Everything they do is to increase Mahalo's search traffic! Just look at the widget mentioned in that article. Does anyone really want that set of links on their blog? Does it really help anyone? And all of Jason's friends on the blog circuit still give Mahalo good press...
For a much more insightful breakdown, http://stimuluswatch.org/ has a pretty interesting listing that allows people to vote, comment, and offer arguments for and against individual items.
How Git stores your data
Funny you should mention that. I've been working with a friend on something along this line for the last two weeks. We are looking to announce a beta launch here sometime next week. The site is going to be called Democritique. Stay tuned.
Stimulus Watch.org
Vote up and down on individual projects, make arguments for or against, or just least leave a rant or a rave comment... Well organized and informative.
Quality hockey equipment at affordable prices from morrant
Hockey Equipment Morrant Sports, the DISCOUNT Team Sports Equipment mailorder specialists. One Stop Shop for all your CRICKET, RUGBY, HOCKEY, FOOTBALL, NETBALL, lEISUREWEAR AND TRAINING EQUIPMENT needs...
The State of Massachusetts SSAA Grouping
Yeah no joke. Every comment on every submission of the original story to every social news site on the internet expressed suspicion that this was marketing.
You honestly believe Google would ever blacklist a prominent startup like Mahalo?

I must honestly admit I have no idea who Mahalo is, and by reading this headline I automatically assumed it was a spam network.

They might be well known and influential to you, but that doesn't automatically translate to the rest of the internet.
F1 engines have overhead cams for specifically this reason.

F1 has displacement limits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_regulations#Engine

F1 is not relevant to the world outside racing, where there are no displacement limits. Important engine metrics in the consumer world are size, weight, reliability, repairability, fuel economy, and capex economy.
Google Latitude Attracts A Million Users In A Week
Recess PHP Framework v0.11.1 Released
Exporting the past into the future
Gordon Ramsay could teach software engineers a thing or two?
I guess they learned something from furniture stores
Handbook for employees | Staff handbook
4staffhandbooks ensures that statutory regulation and company policies are understood and accepted by your employees.
Google's policy never to settle with patent trolls to discourage frivolous claims.
Google Still winning search wars, Microsoft big loser
Thanks for all the suggestions; I've just (17:18 GMT) updated the list.
wow, what a lot of whining. Just because you have a slow old mac you can't really complain too much about this. And doing the math on 2/3 1000 at a typical flash programmer hourly of say $100, that means it took you over six hours of time... Something I find very hard to believe. I would suggest upgrading to an Intel Mac.

In general Adobe products are some of the most functional, feature rich and reliable on the market. Photoshop is an amazing piece of software. Saying it has 'ugliest, least intuitive, inconsistent UI’ is just plain wrong. Adapting to the differences in UI's between products and operating systems has never been much of a challenge; it is a complex piece of software, but then so is gcc, but I also don't complain about that. Complex problems require sophisticated and complex solutions. Not everything can be Mickey Mouse.

Welcome to the world of programming...
It would be nice if it could look through .bash_history when it's first run, or something.
I think he would include that indirect revenue as "a way to make money off of your blog."
So the ability to fix broken is not really a benefit for most users.

These users can pay someone else to fix the software. With proprietary software, that's not an option either.
Six ways to make Web 2.0 work - The McKinsey Quarterly
Because you've convinced yourself that you need some feature it doesn't have.

So instead you pay $900 for something that doesn't work right either, and then you "make fun of me" on a social news site.

Clearly you win!
+1 for that.
There is a difference between things that an architect needs to worry about and the things a developer needs to worry about.

That difference is due to scale - the architect has to think about the application holistically where a developer needs to think atomically.
If you haven't written it, you don't really need whatever feature you are complaining about not having.

Let the downmods begin!
I agree. People will read good content on a poorly designed blog. And if they like your content but hate your design, they--in my sad experience--make it very clear that they'd like you to improve your design. A great design for a blog is kind of like great office space for a startup, it's nice to have but is a misuse of resources if done prematurely.
Help wanted: US teens need science and engineering mentors
OK so the registering process should now be much easier (for better or for worse -- we'll deal with misuse as it shows up, as you said). It's not as good your comment and shimon's propose, but it should at least be much faster: no activation, direct to profile.
One aspect of "selling" that is often under-reported is the importance of making good presentations. I am constantly astounded at how bad some people are at conveying their ideas. Even a brilliant mind can seem stupid if they do not master the way in which they convey that information.

Here are a couple tips:

- Stick with pictures. If you put up a paragraph on a slide, then I have to choose between listening to you or reading what you wrote. Sometimes I get confused and end up thinking about my next lunch break.

- Tell a story. Don't jump into specifics and don't generalize. Make sure your content is a happy medium between the two and it flows in a way that makes sense to the average person.

- PRACTICE!!!! Oh god how I can't stress this enough. There must be a linear relationship between how many "Um's" and "oh's" and "ah's" in a presentation and how long you spend practicing.

- Improvise to social queues. This is difficult to master, but when you give a presentation you have to be observant about what is happening in the room. Do people look bored? Try to relate the content to them. Do people look tired? Keep them informed how much longer you will be presenting. Are people squinting? Emphasize the concept and not the detail.

Bottom line: If you can master the presentation, your chances of making a deal go up dramatically.

Who are good presenters? Watch a few talks on TED.com, look at Duarte Design (used by Al Gore), and read up on Edward Tufte.
Hey you're right, I can't notice a difference in speed/responsiveness between Safari on OS X and Chrome on XP inside Parallels, whereas it's painfully slow on Firefox both on OS X and XP+Parallels.

Does this mean Firefox is slow because of its Canvas implementation, and not the Javascript?
NYC was originally going to open up their own spaces and possibly put the co-working companies out of business. I'm happy to see that they decided to work with them instead. Congrats to @tonybgoode from New Work City and others.

(If you're in the New York area and interested in co-working with fellow entrepreneurs, etc., you should really check out these spaces. For instance, I'm hosting an After Hours tonight at New Work City: http://www.meetup.com/coworking-nyc/calendar/9607959/). I don't get paid for this or anything, so please don't consider this self promotion!)
Juan Enriquez: Beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis
Social Networking Personality Enhancement Service
100K shirts sold in 3 weeks. Brilliant. Props to the marketing concept.
Because Adobe has money to market their products, the Gimp does not.
"What I'm going to try and do in the next 17 and a half minutes is talk first about the flames. Then where we are in the economy. I'm going to take three trends that have taken place at Ted in the next 25 years and try and bring them together and give you a sense of what the ultimate reboot looks like. Those three trends are the ability to engineer cells, the ability to engineer tissues, and robots."