skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have noticed that startup ideas advanced by the type of folks that might read HN are already pretty minimalist compared to the pre-Lean Startup era. That's not to say that there aren't glaring exceptions and abuses of perfectly good investment capital, just that our dials are set to "what are the blocking features required, and that's it". For me that started with reading the 37signals blog; HN/MVP/4 Steps came later.

On the other hand, I assure you that non-technical founders that approach us for development help are not on the MVP train yet in 2012. They want it all, on desktop and every mobile platform. Helping them scale down is one of the most valuable things we can do for them.

The takeaway for me is that I find myself largely agreeing with this article. I've been involved with projects that released too soon and it wasn't that the early adopters were forgiving or not. No, they just came once and were silently let down by what we couldn't yet quite do and never returned. Those early members were not ransoms but carefully chosen for their background and interest in our domain.

It turns out that when you blow your first impression with the folks you need for your Tipping Point... it's hard to move the needle after that.

The answer is obvious: an Eric Ries vs Malcolm Gladwell cage match.
Good thoughts on the limitations of the Lean Startup methodology. I actually like the concept of the MVP, but I tend to think that a lot of companies' MVPs who are trying to follow the LS method aren't really viable.

The whole "put up a landing page and count signups" idea just turns me off completely. However, if you can actually build a usable product that only does one thing really well and avoids excess in every other way, then you really have something to test. But wait! Why spend all that time and money if you don't know it's going to work? Exactly. Welcome to the world of being an entrepreneur. There aren't any magic bullets here.

I spent 13 months on a bootstrapped, sideproject startup and clocked over 500+ hours. I'm now testing how to market the product and start growing revenue. What, am I crazy? No, I simply refused to release a product before it was a product. Am I shafted if it doesn't take off? No, because what I learned in building it (not to mention I'm using it myself and I love it) was worth the entire exercise.
I feel the need to chip in here, as I've been a lurker for a year or so.
I'm a recruitment consultant. I recruit for front end web developers. In my spare time I've been teaching myself Javascript and (with the help of my flatmate, who is a software developer) C#. I do this because I enjoy it, and consider it a valuable skill to have as technology becomes more and more integral to my life. But I also do it because it makes me better at my job. If I can understand a company's requirements better than 90% of other recruiters ringing them up, then that benefits them, the candidate whose CV I'm representing, and me.

Now, I know that a lot of developers have had bad experiences with recruiters. I've had bad experiences with recruiters, when I was looking for a job out of university. You see, in the UK at least, a lot of recruitment consultants are graduates like me who couldn't find a relevant job in their field of interest, or one that bore any relationship to their degree. So instead we got caught up in the recruitment industry, which offers a salary, office experience, and the potential to (allegedly)earn some money. The majority of us are as confused as you are as to why we're here, but those of us who are still doing it after 3 months are probably doing it because there's something in it they enjoy, or they've been lucky enough to keep it.

I get that there's bastards in the industry. There's bastards in every industry. And the tech industry isn't the only one beset by recruiters. I used to work in social housing recruitment, where we were actually liked by those people we were trying to find jobs for. To go from that, to an industry where we are seen as 'the scum of the earth' (which I saw on this site), 'evil bottom feeders' and 'fucking idiots' came as a shock to me.

I'm not asking you to all suddenly start getting lovey dovey with us. This won't change many peoples mind. But be aware that on the other end of the phone is probably a young graduate, terrified out of his mind, who has been thrust into an industry he doesn't know anything about, and expected to hit some ridiculous targets in order to keep his job. A lot of the time, his only mistake has been accepting a job when he didn't have one. Recruitment preys on the desperate, lost demographic of graduates.

So yes, every industry has its shits. But for the most part a lot of recruiters have nothing but respect for developers and designers in the tech industry. Hell, we're scared of you most of the time. You guys possess talent that we can only dream of having, and pretty much make the world go round. All we're doing is helping you find a job.

tl;dr Recruiters are people too. Not all of us are the 'scum of the earth'. Some of us are just trying to get by until we either get better at this job or find another one. We're not all out to screw you over.
Any links to bug reports or mailing list discussions where Charm reported their problems?

Googling for "rails charmhq" doesn't reveal much, just that one of the Rails contractors was a company called Queve: http://www.qurve.com/clients/charm/
Building a Design-Driven Culture
>but you may pretty much view REST as the SQL of the Web, and RPC as stored procedures.

Indeed, but that just raises the question: what would possess you to write an app out of SQL calls rather than general functions? So then why do the Web equivalent thereof?
I can _personally_ attest that it runs on SuSE (SLES), Debian, Arch, Fedora, [and Ubuntu].

I have no idea what this team was trying to do, but I imagine there _had_ to be more than what they wrote in this gist. That, or they simply ran out of money to troubleshoot the issue further.

There are also many different ways you can run Rails apps. They could've tried to run them on varoius Rack compatible application servers (Passenger on Apache or Nginx, Thin or Unicorn, et al.) -- If they migrated backwards to Rails 2, they could've used an [obsolete] version of Passenger with Ruby 1.8.7-Enterprise, which had many speed and stability improvements. (Assuming their app wasn't 1.9.x compatible.)

tl;dr: There has to be more to the story than this, they had so many options. For a $100,000 investment in administration, I'd have trouble believing they _didn't_ explore other options.
I was just about to ask that. Thank you.
Just wanted to say that this isn't just any F1 technical blog, Scarbs is -the- best technical blogger and has uncovered and written about several innovations before any other source. He's a technical sleuth, who delivers great articles.
The message makes it sound like it's all over, but this alludes to a reboot in 2013:

https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/271279292741201920
That's nice and all, and I definitely don't mean to sound like the tough New Yorker I am not, but if that's a "micro-apartment" then I have seen several "nano-apartments" in NYC that wouldn't fit a queen-size bed comfortably, let alone a nice kitchenette like the one in the article.

They're still livable, mind you, for some value of 'livable'.

In other words, if that is considered "micro" nowadays then my standards must be awfully skewed (which they probably are) and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised when I move out of here.
I have figured out a solution to the heat problem, but it looks rather different.

I'll do a blog post later today with it. But now I have to get my daughter to school.
Or BSD, or OS X or if your business depended on it, maybe even Windows!
Great post. Lean Method likes to portray that it is merely looking for some essential truth. However, I have seen multiple times now where two teams will try to follow lean to validate an idea and one will have it validated while another will fail.

In addition, Lean puts emphasis on isolating variables but I don't see enough about the use of judgement. Instead I read how we should pursue it like a scientific experiment. But what does that mean? In a scientific experiment you are anal about every little variable and constant. Last time I tried to do that while practicing Lean it ended up being the opposite of Lean.

This is more a criticism of how Lean is positioned to new people than the method itself. Most studies I see are not people who are following the specific Lean philosophy but kind of naturally developed their own. Most failures I see are guys finding it difficult to employ judgement after reading Eric's book. I think he can do a better job of explaining nuances and exercising judgement when doing Lean.
Content marketing memes for your viewing pleasure
> On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good
> attribute

If nothing changes, then yes. If situation changes and your stance does not, it may indicate less desirable things.

I'd understand Stallman's position in the world few decades ago, when almost all software was by developers for developers. In todays world it is bordering on absurd (imho).
I'm having trouble getting http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/clinton-white-h... to work.

You should have a few links listed on that page that you know will work well as examples for people to try the service out with.

Btw, how do you feel about my other comments in this thread about algorithms not working well? My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.
Did they try other kernel versions? Other Ruby VMs? This is a terribly weak excuse. It's like quitting your job because you can't get the printer driver working.
This is hosted on Blogspot, so I don't think the author has the authority to permit or deny people access to that computer.

Surely it's entirely within Google's gift.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

That said, I can't actually see where they authorise access, only that they tell us not to misuse. Though they do give an example: "don’t interfere with our Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide." which might imply that accessing them through the provided interface, and not interfering is OK.
I remember that research and also wonder what happened to it - can anyone give us an update?
I think they've used their patents to go on the offensive at least once (post Motorola acquisition), and indirectly by transferring patents to HTC. So, that kind of makes me puzzled by the whole 'they find them abhorrent' aspect. If they did, they wouldn't be using any of their patents like that.
San Francisco has got to have the most frustrating and puzzling housing policy I've ever seen in this country.

No, let's not build any more housing, let's completely stonewall any attempt to redevelop any land whatsoever (except Mission Bay, because it's the San Francisco Yuppie Quarantine Zone). Instead, let's subdivide existing housing into increasingly tiny units.

Because gosh-durnit the cute colorful Victorians are sacred and override all other concerns, including economic stagnancy, transportation nightmares, unprecedented rent increases, destroying traditional neighborhood demographics, and very fundamental quality of life.

Nope, none of that matters, because we're basing a housing policy on whether or not this neighborhood can pass for one from the early 20th century!
We're offering forever free for our beta users. Sometime in the future, we will charge a very reasonable fee for the use of the system.
Would You Like Another Byte?
Actually they spent like $20k in what I assume was the salary of their sysadmin:

https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/271128780058267649

The rest was infrastructure costs ($40k) and porting from Rails 3 to 2.
What's HTC paying Apple for patents? Not an "outrageous" $8 per phone
You do notice that all of the countries listed as "Very High Proficiency" are Scandinavian or Dutch, just like he said, right? And many of the continental European countries, like France, Italy, and Spain are listed at only "Moderate Proficiency."

While you don't need perfect language skills to understand technical concepts, not being at full proficiency can be a barrier. I know that when I help people out on StackOverflow, one of the main barriers to answering some people's questions is that they can't formulate it in English in a way that I can understand. Proficiency is a two-way thing; besides being able to read English, you need to be able to speak and write it well to fully interact with the technical community.
What??? How is this even remotely possible?

I call BS. It's either a smoke screen for some other issue, or their app was built back asswards. Either way, this post and the circumstances are indicative that Amy and/or the Charm leadership has no idea what they are doing.

And they were not even launched? Beta or something? The comment about opening to the general public implies that they weren't getting that much usage. These days it's hard to build something with a modern framework and decent hardware that does not at least work for a closed-beta period. Add 100k to the mix and honestly what the hell.

Amy/Tom run Freckle and do some other cool shit so why are they dropping the ball on this? It's like getting a paper cut on your finger and going home for the day because it's just too much to bear. Cry me a fucking river.

Why does this keep happening?! People are throwing cash into the dumbest shit these days.
.. FreeBSD, Solaris, NetBSD, Windows ..
I think we Indians will spend a lifetime correcting "Ghandi" as "Gandhi". :-)

EDIT: To add to the discussion - not many people are aware but MK Gandhi was indeed very thorough in his use of Non-Violence and other means of protest. On few occasions when a protest became violent he was the first to call off the protest. When most of India & Pakistan were celebrating their independence he was busy caring to people affected by Hindi/Muslim riots. Having unwavering attitude is not just stuff of movies.
>Probably won't get funded ever.
that's a product from Amy Hoy[1]. I doubt they'll ever would want to get funded.

http://unicornfree.com/about/
Flatiron, A framework for Node.js
An entrepreneur's retrospective on financial planning for startups
The article discusses exactly this, so I'm not sure what your issue is.
Wow, this is unprofessional.

Lots and lots of people run Rails apps on Ubuntu. Many more run them on non-Ubuntu distros. There is not an epidemic of "welp, Rails magically crashes the kernel, time to pack up and go home", and citing that as the reason to close down after spending over $100k on infrastructure smells really, really funny.

"A poor workman blames his tools."
Preface: my primary modes of transportation (in my city) are walking, biking, and subway.

God, I cannot wait for either hyper loop or self driving cars (I'm sure we'll see the latter first). I live in Northern California and have family in Southern California. We're starting to flip the holidays this year (wife's family for thanksgiving, mine for Xmas). Just went down to LA for a friends wedding and the drive was horrendous.

A lot of factors come into play:

1, as much as I've hated them in the past, a big suv (especially with a kid) is the way to go. We have a VW Passat (wife's) and it was so crammed it was ridiculous. Very uncomfortable and it's not even a compact.
2, I'm over 40 now and it just physically hurts to drive for 7 hours. I was totally sore the next day. Frickin sucked.
3, Directions. I totally need navigation now. Even with the turn by turn on my phone, I still made wrong turns.
4, I hate driving. Hate it. I see it as such a waste of time. I can't imagine needing to drive to make a living. In my late teens and early 20's when I lived in Southern California, I hade to do just that. After I moved to the city I vowed I never would again.
5, Other drivers. I was pretty appalled by some of the drivers on the road. I kept thinking, I can't wait for computers to handle this so that guy driving down the emergency lane wouldn't be able to.

If I could just hop in a driverless car for that drive, it would be great. I could nap, read, compute, converse, etc. Things I can't do now. I'm sure there's going to be some resistance at first by those with a 'god given right' to drive. But after a while, I see common sense prevailing.

I listened to a great talk at The Long Now Foundation by Tim O'Reilly. He was talking about driverless cars and how the DARPA car challenge when it started could only do around 7 miles. It wasn't the algorithms that got that much better (although I'm sure they did) for the Google cars, it was the data set. Google Maps was a huge advantage and the 'killer app' for the latest generation of their cars.

So a lot to look forward to in this arena. I think my kid will grow up with the internal combustion car for him being like the 8-track for me.
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/stp/niac/2012_phaseII_fellow...
True. I almost didn't include Lincoln because of this. But even if Lincoln hated black people outright (highly unlikely), history remembers him (somewhat incorrectly) as a believer in human rights. In reality he was probably just trying to hold the U.S. together and prevent the South's succession.

But if this is the case, then it was his belief in his country that motivated him and that qualifies Lincoln as a believer. In my mind that was enough to not delete his name after typing it. :)
I don't think they tested other browsers. Distros might be pushing it a bit.
Your right, I heard that sending coins through a several eWallet services, back and fourth then to a brand new address would require a massive operation to track you down. Could this easily be circumvented?
Exactly. I'd sooner attribute kernel panics to faulty hardware or a corrupt install than a problem with Rails. (Sure, running a web-server might _exacerbate_ the problem, simply by exercising the hardware -- but it's unfair to attribute that to a problem with Rails/Ubuntu/"mystery.")

The fact that they could not achieve break-even/speed-gains on Rails 3 tells me the application was likely a less-than-stellar codebase to begin with.

I'd agree, if you can't get a Rails application running after investing $100,000 [minimum] in it, it's probably wise not to advertise that fact.
>Probably won't get funded ever.

Amy Hoy is in the same bootstrapper camp that DHH and Jason Fried are in. Regardless of the situation, I imagine "won't get funded ever" is ranks pretty close to the top of her "don't give a shit list".
I think being unwavering in ideology is bad, but being unwavering for a policy is good - i.e., 13th amendment, civil rights act, etc.
A lot of "3D" films are basically parallax because they add in the 3D after the fact, painting it on in a special compositing tool. Only a few live action films are genuinely shot in 3D from the start, like Avatar.

I've found that computer animated films often translate better to 3D since, obviously, it doesn't require any fancy cameras.
Stallman was the only speaker that day who wasn't streamed.

>"Streaming online would require use of [the] Microsoft Silverlight plug-in, which would pressure people to use proprietary software. Dr. Stallman considers it wrong to pressure people to do that."

Why is Silverlight necessary? http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/live-streaming-webm-with...
FWIW, according to San Francisco magazine, the median ago for a mission Bay condo owner is 56 and already owns a home somewhere else: not exactly yuppieville.
Sched - A nifty utility to help quickly add reminders and events to iCal - FREE
Would you feel the same about lens flares, vignetting, chromatic aberration, distortion used as an effect in music etc...
Me too, because it sounds an awful lot like someone doesn't know how to use ruby-prof.
20 Spectacularly Nerdy Science Jokes
In every "job advice" article I've ever read, the employee is warned NEVER to accept an offer to stay at the same job, for ANY reason at all, because the employer will no longer see the employee as "loyal".

Seems funny to me that companies expect loyalty out of us, but provide nowhere to develop. I'd have been glad staying at my past two jobs if they'd continued challenging me. Instead, they started making poor use of my time (getting me to be a data entry monkey despite years of sysadmin and software engineering experience because I was the fastest typist they knew and was "around"). They paid too much for their use of that skill, and we both knew it, and I left, and I hear mumblings and incantations to the effect that they never wanted me to leave. Well, show it.
Totally. I know people who use Ubuntu Server only to be able to use paid commercial support in case of urging/unsolvable issues.
(instead of Debian I mean)
Sounds like he means credit limit
Who gave these guys & gals $100k?

Reading this must make founders striving to get investments furious..
A related factor is that it's very common for even the first iteration of a product to be in English, which means it can start to get international appeal. This is possible partly because even the domestic market is fairly open to English-language products/services, so you don't need to make something in Swedish in order to sell it to Swedish people.
The ICCID is not a password, it's an ID. It's not secret. In fact it's printed on the outside of the SIM card.
Haha, I knew it as soon as I hit reply. My apologies, corrected. :)
NFC on your RaspberryPi
Eric Schmidt Tells Parents To 'Have Online Talk Before Sex Talk' With Kids
Interesting in light of the questions asked by the EU about the control of payment providers. Those questions were specifically about WikiLeaks, but the same applies to usenet providers as well as private torrent sites.
Like jabiko said above, you can simply spoof the ip with a get parameter.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403746,00.asp?ip=this-...
Steve, I read all over the place that employees who take counter-offers are usually gone within the year anyway.

More often than not this is usually the case. It's all contextual but if you take one of the more common reasons for leaving (being offered a better salary/opportunity elsewhere) the employers reaction tends to be an instant promotion and a reasonable salary increase to match.

Money is rarely the sole factor in peoples decision to move on and over time the underlying issues become more and more prominent.

As mentioned below, I'm going to put together a blog on the issue tomorrow as it's a bit too lengthy to get into it here so keep an eye out.
Thank You HN: From 30 people whose lives you saved
Three months ago we launched Watsi.org (first global crowdfunding platform for healthcare) here on HN, and the response was amazing.

I hope this doesn't sound too corny with Thanksgiving tomorrow and all, but I wanted to thank the HN community for giving us our start. Not only did HN directly fund every medical treatment we had on the site at the time, but the buzz that resulted gave me the confidence to quit my day job, take the plunge, and dedicate myself to Watsi full time.

Most important, thank you for the feedback you provided. It's funny, but whenever I feel like we're losing focus, I come back to the comments on our Show HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081) to remind myself of what's really important.

In our first three months our volunteer team has processed nearly $30,000 in donations, 100% of which have gone directly to patients in need. And while this is just the start, we wanted to take the time to say thank you HN. Not just from us, but from the 30 people who've received life-changing medical care because of you, and the 3 million more to come.
Sounds a bit strange.

I'd love to see an Ask HN with _proper_ technical details. Who knows, maybe they'll get better ways to solve this rather than close shop.