skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perceived addressable market or size of opportunity.

VCs tend to care principally about how big it could get, to the exclusion of other potentially important principles.

A good counter-example to Color is actually Bingo Card Creator.

It's a great product, very well managed and fine-tuned by patio11, but it has a pretty rigid ceiling on its opportunity.

VCs avoid businesses that seem limited or overly niche so as to create a limited maximal market opportunity.

Another contrast would be anything in the ad business. It's such a huge business that a lot of startups that go into the ad industry end up making a sizeable amount of money fairly early on.

VCs tend to be keen on advertising startups that want to build a large platform or catch-all service that all the buyers/content providers will want to use. Nevertheless, they'll still invest in smaller scope ad startups that have an opportunity to expand.
I am sure there are companies that already have this kind of equipment that will make you a batch or two.
Hacker News' Official Lists
> Unfortunately that dream has failed to pan out. Instead of proprietary plugins, the web ended up with proprietary video codecs, which has created a split in browser support for HTML5 video. Firefox and Opera support the open Ogg and WebM codecs, while Safari and Internet Explorer supported H.264.

Funny, it looks like a major browser was left out there (in fact the #1 browser in usage according to some metrics).

The article is pretty good overall, but is missing a key piece that is important to understand the background.
That is why they left.

However given an investing role, you hear about things that you could not otherwise, and get to break stories.
Thanks for the detailed list. I have many follow ups but I don't wanna bother you much so I narrowed it down to two:
1- What percentage is Twitter Bootstrap driving your UI? In other words was it just a plug and play or did you have to overwrite a lot of js/css to get what you want?
2- How is Redis performing? (I am debating if I should use for my own side project)

P.S. I hope that you have your own closed office for that clicky keyboard :)
Exactly, this news is hardly any good, it's just convenient.
There is a kind of startup that comes pre-packaged with a solution for some perceived barrier to entry. For instance, your team could include a world expert on some heretofore intractable problem in your startup's problem space. Or, you could be the first mover in a market with significant network effects, and you could be raising when you already have significant traction. In these cases, barriers to entry are a good thing.

In other words: the barriers to entry behind you are defenses for your success. The barriers to entry ahead of you are obstacles to your success.

No part of this has changed since the 1990s.
Regarding your comment about inventory costs, it seems that if this trend for creating hardware items takes off, there might be an opportunity for a company that does volume manufacturing on-demand. Recently, most volume manufacturing of physical goods has happened in China because the labor costs there are much lower. But I'm thinking that a company which does mass production on demand, cheaply and _well_ would be very successful. It would be like an infrastructure company for physical goods.

No reason why this company couldn't be located in Asia as well, but having very close and accessible communication with the people who use its services might also turn out to be an idea that was stupid until it wasn't.
Counter point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fine_Adventure
A Whale with a Distinctly Human-Like Voice
Well if you ask the publishing a few people they cost more to make, and most say the costs are almost the same. seriously I kid you not. This of course is why they need new accounting departments and financial analysts and are highly prone to being broken apart like crab legs at a vegas buffet.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Twitter.

They are one of the most successful internet things and yet they still don't seem to have any really solid way to monetize that. They are now part of culture but are they revenue positive?

The things they are doing lately don't make sense until you take that into account:

Restricting 3rd party apps and APIs? Seems to be driving users away... Except that if all your users are costing you money, then less users is in fact good.

And the only money making thing they seem to have is "paid tweets" that you are forced to see (aka ads) and so yeah, obviously they don't want 3rd party apps and APIs that could filter that one weak still mostly crappy source of money. So if they loose some freeloading users, why would they care.

So yeah. Why has no one else mentioned Twitter in this discussion as the grand-daddy-king of unsustainable companies?
I'm still struggling to understand the logistics of starting a hardware company.

Let's say I have an idea for a portable mini-fridge. What kind of engineers do I need to contract to design it? Where do I find them? Do I need approval, testing? What kind of regulations do I need to follow? And finally how do I get it manufactured? Do I actually need to go to China and meet with factories?

I wish someone would put together a step by step guide for these kinds of questions.
I would actually exclude Foursquare from that list- they're building up a really interesting collection of business partnerships- the one with American Express was particularly significant.

Doesn't mean all their money making problems are solved of course, but they're further down the line than turntable.fm are, who continue to confuse me in terms of their lack of business model.
I was already splitting my ebook purchasing between the Apple bookstore and Amazon.

From this point, ebook purchases will be through Apple or a purchase of the real book. I kinda miss the feel of a real book too so that's a nice change. If I need a digital copy, and it's Amazon exclusive, then I'll be using "other sources".
> Every other manufacturer is now going to follow suit. The end result is a win for the consumer.

Perhaps, for now. But there is nothing preventing them from changing their policies later, or even doing so capriciously. Consumers will not be safe from similar events until the law is changed to prevent companies from doing this.
We only use Java for Android development at Hey Jimmy. For the web we stick to PHP as it's what we know best.
Citadel v1.3.4.5 Leaked in a Spanish BB
Twitter testing ‘like’ and ‘star’ instead of ‘favorite’
FB emails are probably a bit "fresher" than ones found by randomly crawling the web.
Apple announces 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with 2560x1600 display - $1699
Citadel is a ZeuS fork (bot network management tool), it is being sold in the private hacker forums as a SAAS. Citadel has a CRM store, it allows its users to get support, share ideas, report bugs, poll for new features, comment on software modules, get jabber notifications and other functions.

The base package of Citadel is being sold for $2399 plus $125 each month. Plus there are modules, e.g. a $395 priced module allows self update the bot just when the antivrus software starts detecting the previous version, so it will be updated before the owner of the infected computer updates her own virus definitions database.

If you are a securtity expert or are just curious, you can download the leaked archive from http://www.sendspace.com/file/4ug8rg for studying and analysis, the password is Citadel. The Builder is not working.
10 awesome new additions in Office 2013
Do more with Chrome Developer Tools
"Mobile social" is a new idiom, right?

Maybe it's particularly good to be a hardware company when the solution to the problem you're tackling requires new hardware. For instance, if 50 years from now we're all going to be getting around on motorized skateboards. But if you watch Kickstarter, there are hardware proposals that are "hardware for its own sake"; those offerings might be structurally disadvantaged compared to iOS or Android software, and you might not want to start that kind of company as your first startup.
Jon Huntsman on China's Currency Manipulation
Of course it can. Google can obfuscate it if they like (presumably quite well, being Google), but ultimately it's just data on the machine. Malware has just as ready access to that as everything else.
It would still be too slow simulate a HDD system.

You generally have two bottlenecks in tape seek performance. The first is the fetch from the robot, which can take seconds. The other is spindle rate on the tape drive itself which is limited by the durability of the tape. Also, in order to make this work, you'd need many tape drives, with many robots accessing the same racks of tapes. There's a physical limit to the number of drives and robots that can generally fit in a cage and have access to the same tapes so you'll have a lot of trouble pulling this off.

All this and you still haven't addressed the difficulties involved in overwriting tape. Nor does it address the normal redundancy you already need to deal with corrupted and broken tapes, or the fact that you'll need to expand your setup even further if you want multiple users of the filesystem at once.

Current systems already do caching and concurrent reads off multiple tapes. Tape is still not a drop in replacement for disk. Any application you write for it has to have it's limitations in mind.
It is difficult to follow lean startup principles with hardware products. The feedback loop to design, build and test hardware is long and expensive. Then once you've got a workable design you'll need a lot of capital to do a production run.

Before we can have a true renaissance of hardware startups there needs to a be a platform for cheap rapid prototyping with push button production scaling.

Akin to what Heroku did for web apps.
RealtimeConf 2012 Live Video Stream
I am surprised there was no mention of the Rapsberry Pi. Open sourcing hardware and allowing one to build their own "widget" is a game changer. You don't have to know about board layouts anymore, you now have a product/package ready for production that is $25/$35 that has HDMI, 2 usb (easy wifi enabled), ethernet, and audio. Just build software and put on SD card.

There are a TON of software products you can build off of this and sell.
Schools are Not Businesses
Spot on PG. I think we are qualified to add value to this discussion here. We have bootstrapped our plug device (TonidoPlug) couple of years back. Lot of people ridiculed and cautioned us when we have started. Now it is one of the top rated NAS product in amazon without any recognizable brand name. We have built the entire software stack around it. Now, We OEM our software stack to other Consumer Electronic companies. We have done all without any external investments. Also there are fundamental changes happening in the industry that will aid provide impetus to the growth story. 41% of CE sales are done via online now. So we don't need to pay hefty margins required by Best Buy OR other brick and mortar companies. We can sell directly to end customers and pay the amazon sales tax :)

Also many CE companies (Exception of Apple) stopped innovating or don't have access to the exceptional software skills. Typically they buy units from Taiwan ODMs, buy software stack from companies like us, put their brand and sell to their existing channels(Staple, Best Buy).
There is no value addition provided by these companies in the entire supply chain except their distribution. Now even the distribution is coming under attack because of the direct sales model. For instance we ship units to more than 75 countries.This situation is so true when you take a look at home networking products (Consumer Routers, NAS, DVRs). You can do a heck a lot of innovation there and people use it daily.

Now we are sitting with exceptional know-how, ODM relationships, a software stack that can run on all the embedded device (Routers, DVRs to NAS products) and mobile apps on all the popular mobile OS'es. In couple of years we can challenge the incumbents and build a company that can generate 50-100 million in sales and challenge the incumbents. Even if the margins are tight, we can still make at least 20% net margin. We are ready to accept investment from YC if PG is interested.
Yeah but these are easier and fully featured/integrated(think for example notifications). Also given my heavy use of Firefox and Chrome, think 100+ tabs spread out in multiple windows & never ending sessions, it's many times easier with casual things to use a Metro app then open additional windows or tabs.
US Patent Office issues initial invalidation of Apple’s rubber-banding patent
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but "did an about-face" is a good translation; it's a common English idiom: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/do+an+about-face
Has AMD's Clock Run Out?
Is restricting 3rd party apps and APIs really driving users away though? Do you have any data to back this up? I suspect it's having a negligible impact on their user count, but I'll believe you if you show me some data.

I think their road map to financial success is mainstream media related (second screen etc.).
Apple Introduces 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display
Are IP issues a bigger deal when considering hardware startups?
Show HN: a flowchart to help non-technical founders choose their tech stack
What's wrong with selling ads? You could argue that Twitter is doing it poorly, but I don't think it's fundamentally different from what, say, Facebook or LinkedIn are doing.
How far can MUNI take you in 30 minutes, right now?
...But not Bill Nguyen (at least with Color).

I probably gave more than $200 to Groupon during the time that I found it useful. I checked into Color over a period of weeks and never stayed on for more than a minute.

So while both are money-losing ventures, I think Groupon should still be ranked higher than Color.
I think native apps will continue to have significant advantages over the time frame you mentioned. The biggest reason is the following:

Steps to open the Facebook web app-
1) Click on browser
2) Type in Facebook.com
3) Sign in

Steps to open the Facebook native app-
1) Click on Facebook

HTML5 (and other web languages, but mostly HTML5) apps may be more prevalent in the future than they are now due to cross-compatibility advantages, but it is still difficult to use phone functionality in comparison to native code.
Live from Apple's iPad mini announcement
Noir Detective Treatment Planned for Patent Giant
Working on WinXP for me:

http://www.ustream.tv/ipadmini

Seems to be about ~1 min behind the live blogs...
It should be legal per fair use. But this is gray area. Logic wise - it should be 100% legal. But laws are often broken and stuff like DMCA is really messy.
I have a passing familiarity with some well-regarded MBA curricula and disagree that these problems are things that b-school grads leave school equipped to handle.

Here's a Slate story about a Kickstarter hardware project that failed spectacularly. The income Kickstarter generated was counterfeit, because the guy running the business was swamped by expenses he hadn't predicted out the outset and would only learn when he needed to ship in volume. Spoiler: all he was trying to sell was lockpicks, little shims of metal.

http://hive.slate.com/hive/made-america-how-reinvent-america...

Want another example? How about Wakemate?
Check this comment: http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&#...
Because it is the universal standard, from when the internet protocols involved mail carriers and the packets involved sheets of paper. It is the universal standard because it interrupts the flow of thought as little as possible. If I decide I want read their articles, I will.
Well, that's certainly true. You shouldn't undertake schleps unless they're necessary, in your first company or successive ones for that matter.
EULAs can't override laws. Even if you break the EULA for legitimate purpose - you aren't necessarily breaking any laws.
I wonder what the market effect will be if AMD exits the picture entirely. Once Intel has near-total market share for PC chips, wouldn't they become a prime antitrust target?
Apple unveils next-generation iMac with slimmer design and Ivy Bridge
Friction Stir Welding - Used on the new iMac
Welcome back Mike and MG. I’m sure this move will go smoothly and will never come back to bite me.

No, not you, Jay Kirsch. Just the rest of us.
This is much more sophisticated than just jumping back to your previous directory. It keeps a weighted history of dir's you cd into most and uses those first for autocompletion etc.
And you can resell their DRM free ebooks. Just let that sink in for a minute.
I think that ARM-based chips will probably have significant market share by the time AMD exits completely.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4156764

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586047

There is a monthly Freelancing thread on HN, on the 1st of the month
I'm just forming the actual startup now.

I'm not yet interested in audio/video, but that's eventually where the puck will be (so that's where we should be skating to - if you're familiar with that metaphor).

But in fact I think what's externally visible about a person's day to day life isn't that interesting. Especially if he's staring at a computer all day. A lot of quantified self stuff I actually find quite dull and useless. I'd be more interested in seeing my blood sugar levels

Humans have an intense world of internal description and that's what I'm interested in working with. Describing your life is a way to actually frame your own feelings and sense of purpose.

My own life has been dramatically improved by the software I've written that really just tells me what the f•¶§∞ I've been doing and let's me visually compare that to what I want to be doing.

As I get rolling here turning into an actual product then I'll be more public about it. Definitely interested in talking with people though. I'm especially looking for datavisualization people.
How can you abuse "lifetime, unlimited"? I want a plane ride, I book a ticket. I cannot book multiple simultaneous tickets. So abuse can only be defined as "They used it more than we'd anticipated."

That school of thought is very much like the oversubscribed phone lines of yore, which made the phone companies highly intolerant of long modem sessions.
Show HN WikiSapien: social networks are annoying, a wiki profile for each user
There were plenty of web app startups long before Heroku and EC2 were available, these just lowered the bar even further.

Things like arduino can lower the friction between hardware and software design quite substantially for hackers.

I wouldn't necessarily expect startups to be rushing out to compete with the dishwasher any time soon but the point is that it now becomes much simpler to think about "hooks" in your software into the physical world.
Perhaps you are right but it is much better to have the reexamination process than not to have it. There were too many computer programming patents too easily granted in the nineties and the 00s. That is a fact it already happened so saying "it would be better if this hadnt happened" is completely pointless now.

It is a good thing that a reexamination process exists to address bad patents when they are the focus of an expensive lawsuit.
15 years ago I did a hardware startup, development was extremely hard and I woved never to do a hardware startup again.

Now I'm not so sure.

Our problem was twofold: First hardware development was not generally something you just did in your sparetime, it was for the big boys. This meant a lot of convoluted processes for dealing with suppliers, expensive and unreliable dev kits and tools, long lead times and all sorts of other hassles.

Second the turnaround time for a prototype was at least two weeks. If you made a small mistake you'd find out two weeks later when your prototype arrived. This adds up quickly and slows you down tremendously. Not because we made a lot of mistakes, but we had to be absolutely sure that something worked before sending it off to be prototyped. No testing a new idea in an afternoon or two.

These things have totally changed with the commodisation of hardware and the looming 3D revolution.

With a makerbot, a raspberry Pi, an arduino and a shelf full of components you're prety much ready to go and can hammer together a working prototype in no time. If you feel cheap you can buy a nice box for your arduino and call it a finished product.
Unveiling Intellectual Ventures' Hidden Web of Patents
Doesn't matter to me. The fact that Amazon can break and enter into my devices with impunity is completely unacceptable. The fact that I can't back up my own purchases without hacking is completely unacceptable.

I'll continue using Kindle for free content but I'll be buying only real books unless there is very clear legislation, or a change in Amazon's technology, supporting my right to keep and control my own purchases. Amazon (and not just Amazon) has too much power here and has repeatedly demonstrated that they will abuse it.
I'm not following how being a member of a union would make me any better than a non-union worker; thus I am not seeing the clear advantage of membership being a positive endorsement to me.

"Having a union that endorses members" doesn't lead directly to the creation of "a professional body that is superior to non-unioned workers". IT/IS workers are usually considered "superior" (and thus more marketable) based on the degree of their knowledge and the effectiveness of their problem solving skills, to which membership in a collective bargaining society adds neither.

Perhaps rather than forcing people to join, you want to force employers to exclude non-members? So that rather than being "under management's thumb" I can be under the "union's protection"?
Microsoft employee here.

I'm using various versions of Windows 8 on various machines: Release Preview at home and RTM at work. While most of my work is on the desktop, I have gradually reformed my start menu into groups of different concepts.

The different groups I'm using, in order, from left-to-right:

* The store, desktop and various super-commonly used tools such as remote desktop and web browsers.

* A few "neat to look at 'real quick" live tiles, including Finance and Weather.

* Development tools and communication programs, so Lync and Visual Studio and Fiddler.

* Misc SDET specific tools

* Another group with all of the repositories I work with

* Windows 8 apps that I've bought/downloaded from the store for various reasons

In all, I can see 41 app tiles without scrolling, both large and small, all of them are easily identifiable and relatively easy to reach. Since they are all large buttons (compared to your normal start menu shortcuts), I can swing my mouse over toward them, rather than dexterously follow a series of menus. It's different, but relatively easy. For my work, I would liken it to pressing [windows] + D to see the desktop, clicking on an icon and then having that different application load.

Honestly, I've grown to like it.
>I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting.

This has been my experience as well. My time was considered more valuable, people respected my input and expertise more, I was treated with more courtesy. The works.
Yeah, from the "related" links at the bottom you can see this article from January 2011 entitled "Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser" ( http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/01/google-dropping-h-264-codec... ), which has still yet to come to pass.
It's been around for two years, but on a platform that nobody uses: Windows Phone.

It's only been around for nine months or so on a platform with an actually significant number of users: XBox 360.

It's coming soon to a platform with something like ten times the number of users the 360 has: Windows. So there's going to be a lot of people encountering it for the first time over the next few months.
This is just true!