skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's missing the idea of bootstrapping. I think it makes a much rougher environment for fledgling startups, but I think it should be considered more like a hot forge. The more the odds are stacked against you, the better you get. I guess people sometimes miss that when they are aiming for Twitter/Facebook level revenue accountability.
Not a fan of praise for the sake of it either, but having said that, this is one of the most succinct and focused essays I've read on startups, in a long time, and hard to fault it's fundamental message.

As founders it's easy to do things other than push every day to get customers and/or active users. Some founders are so focused on other less stressful activities, that they outsource the entire function to a 'growth hacker'. Let someone else deal with it... Yikes!

Grow is core to the startup's success, and happy to be reminded of it.
Because if TC isn't clarifying, then the reporter is acting only as a stenographer.
Predictably DSLR's image has much narrower depth of field, essentially producing non-interchangeable photos. For comparison to be interesting he had to set diaphragm to the same value as iPhone.

But iPhone's camera is impressive nonetheless. I haven't seen 5, but even 4S has very impressive (i.e. "smart") metering system, it just guesses correctly on so many occasions, and sometimes I wish that 5D Mark 3 would have something similar.

And this new panorama feature in iOS 6 works on 4S as well, and, while simplistic, is very nice.
Are you saying that unpaid Twitter users are worth more than $5-10/mo to advertisers? That's a pretty high spend.
If this essay had an abstract, this would be it:

"If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. Growth is why it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups: not just because the returns are high but also because generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than generating returns from dividends. Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers. To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too."
Very nice. I'd been meaning to get back into reading novels, and I've already bought a few described here.
In Praise of Unit Test Driven Interviews
2 major reasons:

The content industry

Segmenting markets geopraphically
It's argumentative because poorly constructed appeals to emotion usually have the opposite effect on me.

Anyways, by the comment about civil disobedience, I meant that, if you willfully break a law you feel to be unjust, what comes with that is a reasonable expectation of the punishment for breaking that law to be meted out.

I see it kind of like a button that says "By clicking okay, you will be punched in the face". The people that click okay don't have any reason to complain, they were warned.

Replace "punched in the face" with any possibly negative thing. If you are told that X will happen if you do Y, and you do Y, and X happens, don't complain.
I going to guess that referring to inmates by numbers would be widely criticized as inhumane by many human rights groups. It would be an uphill battle to keep something like that going.
That's the most useful comment of this whole discussion, and I'm sorry it's buried so deep.
Buy it, Sell it, Ship it. Unlocked iphones selling at a premium on ebay.
This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle

Uploaded willfully by the people concerned. What is hard to understand about "don't put something online you don't want others to have access to"? (Values of "others" change with the service involved.. but you'd have to be frankly, moronic to put something on a social network site and not expect it to be accessible to others, as well as authorities if they come knocking)
I don't understand this part: "For founders who are younger or more ambitious the utility function is flatter." Does flat mean O(1) or O($)? I'd guess the former, but the latter seems to fit more with the conclusion.
What about in my case, where I run a free service that currently has served over 9.3 million requests in the last month? (That service is http://jsonip.com)

Its a utility service that a lot of people are finding useful and has a lot of traction, but no way that I can see to monetize it. Not even sure I have a desire to try and monetize it, since it costs me almost nothing to run.

I would love to be able to build that resource into something more, but I'm not even sure where to start. It has a lot of usage and growth, but its not something I would remotely call a startup.

I made a short post a few hours ago about the current state: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=4556711
One of my favorite pg essays of all time.

Same here. I figured out that one can turn into an optimization problem her user satisfaction and that it was key to get a successful product and then key for the company, but it's even funnier: can be turned into an optimization problem the whole process of founding a company.

Definitely awesome.
"It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist. I've long since gotten used to it. But it seems to bother a lot of people, particularly those who've started ordinary businesses. Many are annoyed that these so-called startups get all the attention, when hardly any of them will amount to anything."

I see so many comments on HN poking fun at VC backed startups with underdeveloped business models. Sure, a lot of the criticisms are well deserved, but I wonder if a part of it is because people are bothered by the power law phenomenon.
Are you called "fleitz" in real life? No? That is not your real name then. It is a pseudonym.

This isn't rocket science.
This is a tough sell to young entrepreneurs. Its hard for them to understand that buy giving away some portion now will make their equity more valuable when they are able to scale to mass market.
But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the innovation is unconscious.

-- This is an interesting bit. The notion of what is intelligence.

At any given time, there are 1001 questions that may be [intelligent]. But ask right question, and the answer is often [easy] to see. So Framing. Observation. Caring. Passion. Perserverence. Non-ovious. Yet invaluable. Forms of intelligence.
Still trying to figure out why Avengers got such a high rating while it was one of the worst Marvel flicks I have seen so far. Even the action scenes are dead boring.
Thanks! This is a very good selection for me. (I particularly like f.lux)

I only recently jailbroke my iPhone because I wanted to change some APN settings after switching to an MVNO (StraightTalk), but hadn't really installed anything besides Zeppelin, to remove the carrier name. I had the same "tackiness" sticker in my mind about Cydia. A lot of stuff seems to be tacky though, and the store itself feels very cheap as well.
The point is that's a content-free statement, used in that direction. Every genius started as a single cell. So what? Doesn't really tell us anything about anything.
Thanks for all your help! I've been speaking with a friend of mine who's a real estate agent. He's mentioned about IDX listings - would you happen to know how it works and whether or not, I can just fetch API data? It seems like some companies provide it as a full embeddable solution which looks horrible for my purposes.

Would you also be able to elaborate more on using akismet for lead generator? Did you mean that spammers would hit the contact form fairly often?

Thanks for your help. And I understand about not stepping on your previous employers' toes. If there are any questions I'm asking that you do not feel comfortable with, please let me know.
Unless you had some agreement in place that the original tos was perpetual, I don't think you can do much about updated terms.
Chrome Canary got a added flag to enable CSS custom shaders
Serving 9.3M requests is impressive and if you are looking to build it into something more, have you tried getting some feedback from users? What is the reason they are using your service? I think in general, one of many ways the growth can be actualized is via feedback from those who is actually using the product/service.
"the same thing that makes" -> "the same thing makes"
spellcheck: abolute

My favorites were the last paragraph and the last footnote.

How did those Russians get on anyway?

The only other thing I would add is that these high growth companies, so-called startups, are all utilizing the web. They are relying on what it provides. I guess that's implicit, maybe it need not be stated, but historically could older forms of media have supported the type of growth rates discussed? How popular was the term "startup" before the web? And did it mean the same thing?

The startup: 1. Trying to solve a harder problem than existing businesses are willing to take on. 2. Being equipped for rapid growth. 3. Utilizing the web.
> It just seems they are being more explicit about it now. It is quite an odd decision to make though.

Given a choice between hidden limitations and explicit limitations, I'd much rather have the explicit ones. At least then it's clear what you're getting. I'd prefer they eliminate the artificial restrictions entirely, of course.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee
One can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don't get in the way of conversations.

Based on the level of discourse here on hacker news and even on reddit, I don't think one can reasonably say that.
I think he knows as much about this subject as he does about managing Dennis Rodman.
Except Apple hired Comex, a well known iPhone hacker, to improve security
It may not scale, but the chances of it making (any/more) money are much higher ("riches are in the niches") than a "fast startup" as it's very rare for a startup to grow fast and monetize quickly at the same time, because most people just won't buy immediately, sometimes even if it solves a problem for them.

That is the exact point of the essay. An average niche business makes more money than an average startup, but a successful startup makes many orders of magnitude more money than a successful niche business.
The tool has no point if the data source is flawed. It is like saying you made a weather forecast website but none of the predictions are accurate: It becomes worthless. If you make a tool that tool has to be able to extract quality data before anything else.
A 'startup' is simply a new business. That's what the word means. You can't just take a word that has an existing meaning and say it means something else.
http://stickyjs.com/
I'm not upgrading my i4S to the i5 until the jailbreak is available. Hope to see it soon.
Bad for the country, good for me - I don't want the competition for jobs and salaries.
Do you think most people listing ads on CL read the terms and understand them as you did? (Or were the terms confusing?) Are CL's terms different from what one would normally expect from a newspaper? That is, would you expect that the newspaper would require an exclusive license and prohibit you from running your ad anywhere else?
Ultra-awesome Geometric shapes with CSS3
Not the smartest but a safe way: Rolling 3 month T-bills at your friendly banker (in book entry form, i.e., in your name). You can get more clever (and more return on your capital) if you are willing to take some risk. Just remember that risk works both ways.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation for acute treatment of migraine with aura
I'm curious if PG encourages a "discovery" stage where they don't have growth targets but rather are learning about the market/customer and building a product? And if so, how long of a "discovery" stage is encouraged?
You Can Buy An Island, But Can You Really Own It?
Marketing via nerdsniping. http://xkcd.com/356/

It has to be a challenge to make it interesting.
Some time back, I tried to take JSON as the AST and see if I can build a Scheme-like programming language with it. I did it just for kicks, but if it interests anyone .. [1].

It's lacking in docs, but this might be of interest - you get a Scheme-like language (without tail recursion), keyword arguments, lambda, macro, quote & quasi-quote, let expression, where clauses, generators, and some degree of code isolation. The compiler is a very simple one and is written in "stream of thought" style [2] and so might be quite easy to follow.

[1] http://github.com/srikumarks/jexpr
[2] http://srikumarks.github.com/jexpr/
The problem is that when you "hack" or work on side projects you dont associate it with money or as a real job. You have to make sure that you realize that your time is valuable, opportunity cost. Every project that you work on you must make sure to work as efficiently as possible.

Before every app I build. I do a few things:

1. Quick wire frame - so i dont go off on a tangent
2. Amount of time I think it will take me to finish (be strict)
3. What happens if I fail.

Stick to these rules and you'll get things done faster and a more organized manner.
I do not even think it rates as fine! The script was awful, and Loki being beaten up by Hulk was just so wrong. Loki is joking about it but he ia supposed to be a God and way above the Hulk and so on. I could go on and on and nitpick forever on this movie, there were so many thins wrong with it, but the worst is that there was no tension, no sense of urgency, and no reason for the super heroes to team up together. The super heroes should have been going one by one after Loki and their ass kicked so that they realize they need to work together.

Anyway, Marvel really messed up what could have been awesome in the first place.
Exactly, no matter how decentralized is the infrastructure, there always has a centralized node, such as BitTorrent tracker.
self-funding growth from profitability pretty much guarantees you are locked into a relatively slow growth rate

That's an unwarranted assumption. Part of designing a startup business model is organizing growth so that you are unconstrained, so that more input produces greater output, earlier -- whether it's capital, users, employees, or support. All it takes is for one component of your business to not scale and you won't hit your growth numbers despite the brilliance of every other part.

Capital is just one of the areas you have to look at. Amazon is a decent example. Bezos chose books because it was (a) accessible (catalogs existed), and (b) he got 6 months to pay back booksellers, which meant he could afford to grow the more he sold, by using the money owed to the booksellers as float.

Startups would do well to evaluate all possible constraints on growth, capital and otherwise. Many times small tweaks to how you sell your product (or what product you sell) can produce large variations in the amount and timing of capital needed.

Here's an example: do you have customers pay for the first 30 days up front, with an option to cancel within that time? Or do you charge your customers after the first 30 days are up?

Now, you'd think the latter would always be better for "growth", because it involves a weaker commitment -- no money changes hands early.

But it also has a huge capital cost differential, if the service costs a substantial amount of money to deliver. In order to grow the latter model, you'll have to obtain more and more capital over time as you grow.

But if you do the former, you can "fund" your company's growth off of its earlier growth. Although this might impact growth negatively, by turning away customers that "won't pay" for the first 30 days up front, but who would have become customers the other way.

So which is better? It really depends. If your growth rate is already 7% with the pay-up-front model, that's better IMO than getting, say, an 8% growth rate with the pay-after model. The latter will require raising increasingly greater amounts of capital, despite the fact that it's growing "faster" initially, ultimately hurting your growth or wiping out your equity, or both.

Both approaches will still have their "S" curves end up at the same place (the market size doesn't change), but let's be blunt here: no company can catches up to 7% growth, so wasting your equity on 8% growth just makes you poorer, and the VCs richer.

Sustainable growth is just as important, and treating capital as something you "have to" raise is exactly what VCs want you to think, since, hey, that's what they sell. Venture capital is a financial tool, not the only (real) way to capitalize a startup during and after growth.
I think judges have more to fear than prison guards.
The password hash has always been computed on the first n < 16 characters of the plain text password. What I suspect is going on now though, is that Hotmail is transitioning to accepting arbitrarily sized, plain text passwords. Before Hotmail can change the code though, they need to get the current users used to entering the <= 16 characters of their 'actual' plain text password. If they just change the code, everyone who has a > 16 character password will find they cant log in. and chaos will ensue.
Your opinion doesn't change "My Library" behaviour I'm worried this will help drive.
"The law really only intimidates the people playing by the rules, or trying to."

A seemingly simple yet profound statement. Thanks for this.
Inmates are commonly referred to by their number in prison -- as far as the prison system is concerned, they're not 'Leland Highsmith,' they're A319445 -- it's tied to their phone calls, commissary purchases, meal records, medicine records, and health records.
The sixth footnote appears to address this a bit. You of course need to have something that could possibly grow before you can hope to achieve growth.

During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because there is so little time before Demo Day, and partly because startups early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what they're doing. [6]

...

[6] This is, obviously, only for startups that have already launched or can launch during YC. A startup building a new database will probably not do that. On the other hand, launching something small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that could start this way probably should.

In other words, if a startup hasn't launched yet they quite sensibly don't measure growth rate--but it's a good idea to launch early so you can measure growth and optimize for it.
There is no enough time in life to check all the crap that made it to the top of that list. This seriously a problem with this tool, the data is so flawed that you cant expect anything good from it.
Hi Yuri, not yet. We are looking at different possibilities for expanding the dataset, and the most popular right now is futures. Equity options do come up often, and are a close second for market data.

However, we are actually more excited about adding non-market data, because we want to bring more talent to 'algorithmic investment'. We hope our community can create algorithms that make buy/sell decisions based on more than just liquidity - fundamentals, reported data, qualitative news and research content. In other words, automating more of fundamental analysis and investment.
I'm guessing it's because a culture and expectation of using real names had already been established on Facebook by the time the masses arrived, while privacy-conscious techies were the first G+ users.
Congratulations, Chris! I'm sure Mr. T and Mr. S are very proud, too. The work looks fantastic; Jeremy and Ashu have done a great job getting art assets into place for you guys.

-- A friendly HS alum
pg makes his point clearly at the cost of oversimplifying his definition. Scalability is a continuum. There is a continuum between barbershop and search engine.

VCs have every incentive to hit the far high end of the continuum. But a young, hungry entrepreneur probably gets higher expected value by not straying quite so far out.
"to get to know one person to the point of being able to form an intimate and (semi-)permanent emotional bond"

One would expect that this service is a springboard that would lead to such "traditional" dating.
That's interesting, and I'm very grateful you didn't just LMGTFY (I was on my phone!). It sounds like it's only really employed in criminal proceedings, and even then only a small number, because the expense of employing an investigating judge is very high. As far as I know, patent litigation is moving to a 'loser pays' model in the US, which seems much more economically sound.
I actually support the idea that Terry Brooks should be able to reskin The Lord of the Rings if he feels like it. I bridle a bit at the label "supposed imitation", though. Read them both -- they're exact copies. Even those parts of LotR that are utterly irrelevant to anything are faithfully duplicated in Sword of Shannara.
I don't think it is alarming. Check out most lists that rank graduate schools around the world. The US is quite disproportionately represented among the top. We've got Harvard, Berkekey, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, CMU, Chicago, Princeton, and UCLA for instance. No one else comes close to having that many schools of that quality.

The UK has two to four, and nearly everyone else has none or one.

Given this, it is not at all surprising that a lot of foreign students come to the US for graduate school even if they do not intend to stay in the US after getting their degree.
Healthcare in the US is expensive because it doesn't follow a normal market economy. The people using healthcare generally aren't paying for the services out of pocket, so they have no incentive to try to keep costs low.

I'm just curious -- can you point to a country in which healthcare does follow a "normal market economy", and which therefore has a more efficient healthcare system?
Thanks Matt! I'd like to think that I'm putting what they taught me to good use.
> Because this code was designed well over a decade ago, and someone decided 16 characters was an acceptable limit. From a guy that worked on the Live team, he said in many years of reviewing the security issues, password length never came up as a high enough priority issue to justify the changes required.

But the limit just does not make sense because the presence of the limit implies that in the authentication database there is a CHAR(16) column in some table, presumably specked that way to limit DB size consumption resulting from storing password values.

But if they were doing the correct, secure, thing, they would not be storing the user entered password, but a hash (assume "hash" to mean proper secure password hash) of the password. The result of the hash function will be to convert an arbitrary length user entered password into a fixed length quantity. And it is that fixed length quantity that is stored for use in future authentications. Meaning that the DB column that stores the hash is "length limited" by the operation of the hash function, such that there is no reason at all to length limit the user entered password string.

Therefore, presence of a user facing length limit on the password implies, but does not prove, the possibility that somewhere they are not performing proper password storage procedures.
it's called multiple hypothesis testing.