skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I've never seen YC fund a direct clone before. I'm not saying that's the case, it just really looks like it to a layperson. Foodoro looks very similar to Foodzie, just better executed (widgets, more shipping options, less cluttered design, easy to use navigation, etc).

But it's so similar that I just can't get over it. And it's not just similar in terms of business model and timing of the startup's launch, but even the home page layout! A big full-width "featured foodmaker" box with a grid of "featured products" right below.

Considering fooddude is aware of other startups from the "several other competitors in this space" comment, I have to ask if this isn't just a blatant rip of Foodzie?
I met these guys at TC50. The product, along with them is the real deal. They also gave away free liquor at their demo table, which made watching Yammer win the best company award a little bit more bearable. They sold their last startup to Akamai, so they're not a bunch of noobs running around with your expense information. Glad to hear it's free now. If you do expense reports (my condolences), check them out for sure.
what are you talking about? income inequality doesn't mean anything if everyone's standard of living is increasing. Would you prefer YOUR standard of living to go DOWN just so you can have the satisfaction of watching the rich get poorer? I would much rather have everyone get richer even if that means the rich get richer. You're comparing percentages but you're neglecting that on a per capita basis the 78% of 2006 is much much larger than the 92% of 1980. It's not even close.

whose debt are you talking about? household debt or government debt? if the former it is up to people not to live beyond their means, if the latter the government is simply stealing from us. Where we are at now has nothing to do with the middle class and everything to do with government intervention in 1995 and again 2000 and 2001.

what the hell has modern macroeconomics done to our country? all over the place I see specious analysis such as this comparing numbers that either don't mean anything, are inaccurately measured, or can't be shown to be an indicator of other things.

edit: I pulled up some numbers

GDP in 1980: $2.7 trillion

GDP in 2006: $13.2 trillion

Population in 1980: 226.5 Million

Population 2006: 298.4 million

GDP per capita 1980: $11,920

GDP per capita 2006: $44,000

$11,920 in 2006 dollars according to the CPI: $28,824

we're not quite twice as wealthy, but we're far FAR richer now than in 1980. Income inequality means nothing.
It really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.
Thoughts on how I can move towards becoming a program manager? I have the communication skills, I'm learning to program (ruby) and I'm learning to design webpages.

I'm not very interested in becoming a full on hacker but I want to help build programs and webapps because I feel I'm good at getting 'the big picture' and advocating for users/customers.
Advice for SW entrepreneurs: The Great Startup Idea that I Can't Reveal (Yet)
Smarter Cities - Planning for 27+ Megacities by 2050
...until it turns out two of the three founders tend to agree on most issues, and the third is constantly overruled, feels left out and angrily quits.
I don't think it really makes that much of a difference: there are pros and cons to both 2 and 3 founders.
You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for bringing those articles up. I checked the last link you mentioned, and I wasn't really satisfied with the criticism. Maybe I just didn't understand the article, but it seemed to me that all the author said was "A lot of other tax rates balanced out the highest marginal tax rate shown in the curve." I would have liked to see an alternate conclusion instead of a simple refutation. But again, thank you very much for the links.
2 seconds of song title information in a 200 second song. Irrelevant!
True. But I don't think he would have been satisfied with some fee -- he would have been prudent enough to realize the possibility of success so the contract was inevitable.

The woman who designed the Nike Swoosh was simply paid. Several years later the founder of Nike gave her stock to show his gratitude for helping define the brand.
The reality is that CD's used to be mastered to produce a "sound stage" - because the target was the hifi in people's homes.

Now the target is iPods, Cars and maybe Radios. So they mix to make it sound good in those scenarios (well, in lots of cases).

Also, whilst this sounds interesting, knowing more about the experiment might help. AAC compression can do more than just compress the music (might be doing some other form of levelling, and/or adding punchiness in some other form).
Nancy Lynch
Why would you be interested in living in a Waterworld city? No seriously, what's the draw? I'd feel pretty damn cooped up and imagine that it'd be like living on a houseboat in the middle of nowhere.
I don't buy it because I don't think that these iTunes gift cards are activated until you purchase them.
What? This is the formula for building a marriage in which you resent your wife 10 years down the line, not any way to build a successful company.
You're right that the reporting stuff is hard to do and difficult to abstract. Google Analytics and Mint both seem like pretty good systems that work for wide userbases, though. I guess because payments are so intertwined with authentication/access levels is why just a custom reporting and easy to use credit card processor may still not be the entire answer.
This post is also partly based on my experience and discussions at AngelConf. You should always be able to reveal at least vaguely in what space your startup is. So I can help you. If you refuse to give me any information at all, then there is nothing I can do.

The strength of Silicon Valley is in its network and its 3 degrees of separation (if the rest of the world lives by 6 degrees of separation, then Silicon Valley is at 3 or less). Which means that I probably know someone who knows someone who will be greatly helpful to you. Allow me to help by telling me something.
Geek Travel Guide
Cool. It normalizes to lowercase, but it's otherwise functional, even if the URL bar's case differs from the posted version.
I totally agree. His article starts out feeling like a "get rich quick" scheme, but what he does is to create a reasonable quality site in a short time. All along he promotes it using low cost methods.

The linking strategies he employs could be used by any website. I think one could use these strategies to start any number of websites.

Edit: last sentence didn't make sense so I fixed it.
Open-source Python development at Less Wrong
It is about using the right tool for the right job.
What you appear to be doing is using the right tool for
your job, then concluding that everyone should use
your tool for their job.

Here is a great IDE hacker:

John Carmack, ID Software, uses Visual Studio

I work at a game startup making their first PS3 title.
The C++ engine team does development in Visual Studio
and the tools guys do python outside of an IDE.

Do you really think that is evidence that all
the tools guys are superior to the engine guys?

It doesn't, both can be great and both can be mediocre.
Payment for web apps is a consistently difficult problem. Subscriptions are on an order of magnitude more difficult. Anniversary dates? Pro-rating? Compliance issues? Charging back only a portion of the order? Upgrading your pricing structure and tiers without modifying the code? Rebate codes? Yeah, to build a subscription billing system that can eventually scale with the business, it would be like building another product. With Publictivity, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out a solution. We settled on Zuora over Aria Systems. They're a great team that knows SaaS like the back of their hand (first salesforce employees+early webex). They're not self service yet though.

I've said it to most of my entrepreneur friends: there is tremendous opportunity for a YC type startup that makes subscription billing painless + developer friendly. I'm talking API calls, plug in the merchant processor, and you're done. Get started instantly, with no need for "enterprise sales calls"+"integration strategy calls". If you're making a web app in a weekend for fun, and want to charge on a subscription basis, you're pretty much SOL. You talk about gaping hole problems? This is a hole so big it's a rip in the space time continuum.

Update: I JUST found this: http://spreedly.com via @ryancarson. Looks to be a start in regards to what I'm talking about.
Twitter Cracking Down on Refollowers
2600 magazine had a nice article 10 years ago about default codes for many different keypad locks (including FedEx drop-boxes). I worked in hotel security at the time, and discovered that many of these defaults were in use at assorted locations where I worked.

That changed.

See also:

http://www.cirt.net/passwords

http://www.routerpasswords.com/
IANAL but I don't see how this is any different than any other sort of international transaction. I can buy items from eBay sellers in the US so why can't I buy work in the US?

Having said that I'm certainly willing to attribute it to some weird legal restriction.
incredibly popular shuffle feature

I agree that the shuffle iPod itself is very popular but do many people actually use the shuffle feature?

I like the shuffle because it's small and light-weight - even my first generation one. Which has 512MB - my factor-of-ten improvement rule means it's approximately time to upgrade.
The article only briefly touches on the benefits Amazon gets from utilizing its own system. I'm willing to bet that the increased revenue from having richer, more properly tagged (and hence more easily-findable) product listings more than makes up for it. It'd also be nice to see the conversion rate on the'Amazon Remembers' feature for the iPhone app, which could be a good example of the upside of putting a little money into Turk.
In decent writing every word is said precisely because it needs to be said. It's not a contest on who can say stuff with most obfuscated and "proper" words in it. It's a contest on who has the best ideas and who can be a good telephate. We're just trying to pass stuff from our neural networks to other people's neural networks through written language.

There's no prize for saying the same thing with less swear words but as each word, including swear words, carries its own emotional aura and meaning, you _must_ use them where necessary to convey your thought.

In this case the thought was about humorous, uncompromising denial of blocks set by the perceived reality. Something a teenager would say when denying authority or looking to think out of the box, created by the religious past.

If you need word "fuck" to be in the text, then please god-fucking-damnit put it there!
Whenever I come across articles discussing development estimation, I am reminded of the study discussed in Peopleware, the one in which the team that had no estimations finished first.

Book summary with a table of some data from Michael Lawrence and Ross Jeffery's 1985 study:
http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_5

The only way to estimate (and I don't mean guess) that I have found to be reliable is the one mentioned in this article: to use previous data, and this only applies to the extent that what you're doing this time is very similar to what you did that time. Once you throw in any research, new technologies, new methodologies, that method is no longer applicable.

For this reason, I find value in separating Research (testing new methods, new technologies, integration methods) from Development (applying what you already know). Research is inestimable; as far as I am aware.
Again, I tend to agree with you, although associating the illiquidity opinion with TF is just an unnecessary swipe. Much smarter people than he support the illiquidity theory, which was what I intended to point out.
Ha, I'd been doing work like that for a year and I did it for 2 years after that. The only reason I stopped is because I moved out of the country, and I've got a guaranteed job offer to go straight into a construction job as soon as my papers go through.

That's purely work, that's not including the things I've done as favors to people. Helping to build a dock was the most fun, but a weekend of drink and power tools is hard to beat.

I think I need a DNA test, I think I've got some hillbilly in me.
Double it is basically the engineering mantra -- The problem is when is occurs in big organisations and/or projects. The doubling can be compounded as the estimates trickle up.

I've seen reasonable estimates of 10d suddenly explode into 40+d once it makes it into upstream project plans.

Best thing to do is invest in metrics, and to revisit your estimates after the fact (nobody ever does this).
Just to plug my own Rails SaaS framework:

http://github.com/maccman/saasy

== Features

* No local credit card storage
* Automated billing script that should be run nightly
* Configurable subscription plans (price/duration)
* SSL protection for account creation (and when updating CC info)
* Account can have multiple users, interface for adding more
* Trial ending mailer
* Invoice mailer
* Automated notification and retry of failed renewals
* Plan upgrade/downgrades
* PDF invoices
* OpenID support
* Shared secret SSO
* Credit card verification
* REST API for users and subscriptions
I can't see that article (you can use searchyc.com to search) but there are lots of articles around if you search for loudness war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I did one of these with a potential client several years ago. Its absolutely non-binding and served nothing except to make her nervous. My business partner pushed for us to do it so we could have something for a press release. http://mannea.com/2007/05/21/church-crawford-signs-letter-of...
This looks very useful. We actually need something like this for our startup. Any plans for an API (or would you be interested in working to develop one)? Email me please if you could.
Go without != no access to
Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.
Food Sells and when they make it nice looking, it prolly sells a ton more.
I understand your point about the diminishing marginal utility of extra dollars for the rich, but it seems dangerous to make that judgment for them. Who is to say how much the extra $5,000 is worth to me? What if I make $500k/yr, but I've budgeted most of it to regular expenses, some savings, and the rest in investments, and my daughter is now engaged and will have a wedding in 3 months? Now I receive a $20k bonus from my company to help pay for my daughter's wedding. Unfortunately for me I can only spend about $12k of it for wedding expenses, because someone else (society, taxpayers, politicians) has decided that those extra dollars aren't as useful to me than someone else (the government decides who). My point is not that it's possible for someone who makes a lot of money to not have it readily available, but rather that the road we head down when we say "The socially responsible thing to do is tax people who earn more because they can deal with it" is a scary one.

Also, tax + redistribute until everyone is equal will never happen, even if there are no second-order effects, simply because people are different. Some are content to work x amount for $y, while others want to innovate, work harder, and do more.

The government should make the game equal, not the players.
You right! I've started the page to do it http://www.signumframework.com/FAQ.ashx I'll finish this tonight.
There's some overhead in each packet -- maybe a 4x increase in the number of bytes -- and bouncing between DNS servers will give you an increase in latency -- maybe an extra 500kbps -- but it won't be so bad as to make this unusable. I imagine IP-over-DNS-over-neighbour's-wireless would be much faster than IP-over-phone-line in most cases.
The thing with planning and estimation is that it's really the actual work in microcosm - you're building a model of what you want to do.

The tradeoff is - how much time do you want to spend on the model, instead of building it? You can get an absolute 100% accurate estimate if necessary - i.e. by doing the project and seeing how long it takes.

For tasks that are reasonably repetitive or normalised, this can be straightforward, and you can reuse old models. the problem is larger software projects (like a unique building) usually involves either (1) high levels of complexity, such as legacy data or large levels of integration or (2) a lot of otherwise novel aspects, such as a new bit of R&D.
You're in a chair flying in the sky and you're bitching about not getting Internet Access!

Sorry, that was a poor attempt at a witty put-down. Let's start again.

There is a fixed amount of space. true, 4GB seems like plenty, but so did 640K once upon a time. But the question here is whether 4GB of music and voice cues in a very small form factor is more valuable than 4GB of music only in the small form factor or 4GB of music in a larger form factor with a screen to display visual cues.

It's all a question of turning the design knobs to produce the overall highest value/best experience.
Generating speech from text is not very difficult (parsing speech to text is the hard one). You string phonemes together with some sequence rules. e.g. ET's "phone home" on Speak & Spell did it with 80's consumer technology.

The branding of PC vs. Mac voice could be done independently of whether generation is done on the iPod or in iTunes.
Ask HN: Interesting code to read
Hi,

Do you know some really interesting code to read (the kind of code that shows best practices in action), in C, python, yacc and lisp ?
Show HN: JStartup - Hacker News for news people/journalists
It would be nice to see documentation of unique days. IE a national holiday when the zoos open early, or when they open late or something. I mean does the chimp still collect stones when the zoo is going to be closed, or is it caught off guard when people arrive in the zoo earlier than he expects.

The mere fact he collects stones before the zoo opens does suggest they anticipate things. However, it would be nice to see that he's anticipating something based on experience. If the Zoo's closed on Monday because it's a national holiday, does he still collect stones? Or is something the trainers doing tipping him off to people arriving?
The third idea is pretty cool. You said they are already making it? Would love to know who?

a community for software developers to share revenue
I've always gone with 4 times. That way even if it takes twice as long as I expected I still have plenty of time to either double check my work or goof off.
Excellent Resource for Entrepreneurs
Over 300 articles on entrepreneurship, business, how to market a website and more!
Great article! From my experiences with starting ventures with friends, I would also add:

1. Make sure they have A+ work ethic. I partnered with an A+ friend with a B- work ethic, and things definitely did not go well. I've also partnered with B- friends with A+ work ethic, and now they're still business partners and some of my best friends.

2. Operate as a meritocracy. This was touched upon, but most of the time your partners will have other obligations. Every week, we set goals that each person must meet before the week's end. We have a policy where if anyone misses his or her weekly goals over a certain threshold, that person is relieved from his or her position. This happened once in my case, but the person accepted it and totally understood because he had other obligations to deal with.
I'm a bit biassed here, but several people have told me that they think the tarsnap source code (all in C) is "beautiful", "well designed", "very UNIXy", "incredibly clean", etc.
The OA won't load so I'm basically just commenting on the headline. The purpose of a web framework is to abstract all the numerous nuts and bolts issues of building an application on the web which was never designed with applications in mind.

The reason Rails is so successful is because it identified the right interface to abstract for the maximum range of utility.

As a counter-example I often cite Drupal. Drupal is not just a CMS, but also a framework. It's incredibly well thought out and strikes an awesome balance of out-of-the-box functionality and customisability. The problem is that it comes with a lot of baggage, so you always end up with a lot of complexity that you don't need.

Adding high-level application features inevitably leads you down this road which—though appealing for projects without a proper budget (ie. most client work)—ends up forcing all kinds of small sacrifices in design, usability, performance, data modeling, and simplicity. Some projects could never get done without these sacrifices, so projects like Drupal are invaluable in terms of absolute value (especially to small businesses), but to add these features to something like Rails is to utterly destroy an incredibly useful general-purpose tool.
The first part is interesting. The second part is lame (link sharing/spamming, albeit manual spamming, but still spamming) but necessary to pull it off.
Not really. The linking strategies he talks about will likely get your site removed from Google's index. That's part of the cost of doing business for guys like this, and it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites. He knows that he'll lose a certain percentage of them every month.

This sort of thing would be suicide for a site you actually care about. As a startup, having your website de-listed by Google is pretty much guaranteed to kill you.
The article establishes that people can, in fact, tell the difference between MP3 and uncompressed, no?
Nothing really new in this post -- but the message bears occasional repeating: ideas are a dime a dozen, it's executing on one that few people can do well.