skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's successful because when it got created, it offered a music service that nobody else did.

This is the safe-for-the-media version of why MySpace was successful. It's wrong. Pardon my crassness, but Myspace was successful because it had more sluts.

At the time, Friendster made it hard to sign up, impossible to view profiles unless you were a member, and it actively deleted semi-risque photos. Myspace did none of these things. Anyone could sign up, anyone could view profiles, and teenage women were encouraged to post tawdry photos of themselves. There were even loads of bogus profiles of babes in bikinis.

The music stuff was an interesting side note, but in the beginning it rarely even worked right and certainly wasn't why people joined the site. They joined because it was essentially a dating site without the social stigma of being a dating site.
Deny deny deny...
Joel, in case you are lurking around here, link for the book Don’t Make Me Think is broken.
How to Choose a CMS that doesn't suck
We have noticed more and more that people are having a hard time deciding how to choose the right CMS for the job.

It’s not an easy task for some people, and for that reason we’ve created this article with the hope that it can free some of you from feeling overwhelmed.
The Program Manager also understands the timeline/schedule and improves the code without actually coding.
It's not about subsidizing the netbook alone. It's about subsidizing the mobile broadband connection as well. The problem is there doesn't exist a national eat all you can mobile broadband offer. Imagine if Google could wrangle one of the big 3g providers to give you a netbook plus all you can eat mobile broadband for $50/month. And they didn't restrict you from using the device as a WiFi access point so you could share the connection with your other devices. I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.
... and this explains, in detail, why Microsoft products are so much more difficult to use compared to Apple (designed by industrial designers) and less functional than FOSS (designed by programmers and domain experts). They are designed by committee and program managers who are smart, but fresh out of school with no real world experience.
Huh! I didn't know what about Friendster. (I was pretty late onto the MySpace bandwagon: only joined in 2005.)

I would suspect that the people who remain on MySpace, however, do so for the bands. The sluttiness has moved its way towards Facebook, at least in my social circle.
I thought maybe being relentelessly resourceful was kind of a nerd trait, at least in the sense PG uses it.
He talks about building alliances as something apart from being resourceful in the essay.

Does someone who can't do a thing, but knows people that are relentlessly resourceful become an relentelessly resourceful person too?
recursivity :)
Major Newspapers That Will Either Fold or Go Digital Next
Then I'm with menloparkbum and not understanding what you mean, since your business doesn't even cover the cost of keeping its sole staff member from going into insulin shock.

Didn't really mean to wade in here. Congrats on getting some liftoff with tarsnap.
There is just not enough hours in the day. I do need to focus more on marketing but I am not an expert. Can you recommend anyone that will work for equity? :)

I googled Yonly and everything looks. What exactly are you referring to that needs to be fixed?
Where's that money coming from? A grant? Then you're not profitable; you have a runway, and you're still waiting to get liftoff.
It seems that this is confusing a lot of people. Let me spell things out for you.

1. Tarsnap is profitable. Its revenue exceeds the cost of keeping it running.

2. I am not profitable. My revenue does not exceed the cost of keeping me running. (Well, living. I've never been very good at running.)

3. I could get a job, move to the middle of Africa, and get hit by a bus, and tarsnap would keep on running. Tarsnap doesn't need me on a day-to-day basis; while it is true that I'm still writing code for tarsnap, that is appropriately accounted for as a capital cost, not as an operating cost.
What if you only pay yourself for the time spent actually pressing the keys on your keyboard? Clearly you should only count the time that you're pressing them in, because they bounce back by themselves, so the time the key is going out should not count as billable time.
With 128bit addresses, it makes it the same size as the GUID address space, and betterexplained.com has this to say:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/the-quick-guide-to-guids...

"Think about how big the Internet is: Google has billions of web pages in its index. Let’s call it a trillion (10^12) for kicks. Think about every wikipedia article, every news item on CNN, every product in Amazon, every blog post from any author. We can assign a GUID for each of these documents.

Now let’s say everyone on Earth gets their own copy of the internet, to keep track of their stuff. Even crazier, let’s say each person gets their own copy of the internet every second. How long can we go on?

Over a billion years.

Let me say that again. Each person gets a personal copy of the internet, every second, for a billion years."
I am hosting in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. I am ready to scale :)
mmm, AFAIK , there are no metal detectors in AVE (Alta Velocidad - High Speed) trains in any of the 5 or so routes we have in Spain (just took a couple of them a week ago). They do we have a small x ray machine for carry on baggage, but the process is ridiculously fast (about 5 - 10 seconds total).

This is really important if you think that we do have an in active terrorist (or political liberation, according to some) group in Spain, which targeted those trains in the past.
some texts are better when you can flip around randomly quickly. the recent mark bitterman book which is half recipes comes to mind. otherwise, I use it in situations where I've forgotten my kindle at home. luckily, it syncs what page you've read through to all devices. it's not a replacement, but a good auxiliary device. it might serve as a useful intro to the product.
For me -- Seems to also fit the (albeit rarely found) definition of a "good architect" also.
http://dabuttonfactory.com/edit?t=This%20is%20a%20startup%3F...
Ramen profitable is not the most interesting milestone. Getting any kind of revenue is a major step: it shows there are people willing to pay for your product.

After that, it's all a question of scale. PG's definition of ramen profitable is useful because it gets rid of all the accidental revenue. Sure, if my aunt bought my software once, it shows somehone is willing to buy my product. But not really. By setting a bar just a tad higher than just "1 sale is good enough", it becomes a useful metric.
Instant Ruby Deployment
I read your blog.
Maybe you should take a look at: http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

Also consider taking a look at: http://www.startuply.com/ which contains jobs at startups, and some of it at the bay area. Startuply is a YCombinator's startup. :)

Good luck for you.
That is probably the awesomest thing I've ever seen.
I'll give you that. I've never seen a "good architect" that wasn't also a "good programmer" via my definition.
I quit my job to work on NewsCred in July 08 (8 months ago). Hope to be Ramen profitable with 6 people in the next six months (we have a B2B side that is not apparent from our consumer website). Will definately post with details when that happens. It's tough, but no question one of the best decisions of my life.
This is a great idea for a poll, but I think it is self selecting away from reality. As of 4:19 EST there are 12 votes for items where someone reached "ramen profitability", 3 for "Never", and 11 for "Hopefully soon(also never)". So that means 12/26, or 46% of respondents have reached some level of profitability. This seems high to me.

I'm not sure whether to be annoyed or inspired as I'm still in the Never category, but will back in "Hopefully soon" before long.
alias_method_chain in models
Interesting how women (or men if you're female..) seems to drive more business than you're initially aware of.

We can't escape our darwinian roots I guess...
I will disagree.

We can't 'take a joke' because the purpose of this site does not include humor. We have plenty of other places to go to look for something funny.

As for being boring, then this means to me that the content is not your cup of tea. Plenty of us spend a great deal of time on here reading and contributing.

And lastly, we're far from the same person. We have a niche we reach to so people come from similar places in terms of goals and projects, we're fairly heavy on the programming entrepreneur, but it's still not the 'same person.' We're much closer to the same person than the much broader Reddit, sure.

But the amount of discourse and discussion on this site is quite evident as proof that we have varying opinions.
Duplicate (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508918)
Yep. Rtm and Tlb get called by their usernames too.
Sure, if my aunt bought my software once, it shows somehone is willing to buy my product.

Right, but there isn't enough information to determine if this is not what he means by profitable. I am also a hacker, I know how much money it costs to run something like this. It could mean that 1 person paid $50 and the AWS bill and web hosting was only $49.

Anyway, I don't find this conversation interesting anymore so congrats on the profitability.
Yes, every one-off comment on a social news site should be proofread and edited at least 15 times before actually posting it.

Anyway, this sort of comment seems to be the bulk of most replies to comments that do a lot of criticizing here. It is pretty annoying. Perhaps it would be better for everyone if we just kept this sort of thing to ourselves, realizing that nobody is going to use perfect English for a quick post to HN.
On top of that, MySpace was founded by a bunch of people with background in direct email marketing. So they knew all the greyhat techniques for getting users in the door.

The girls just kept them there.
Don't stop trying. Remember the world is full of girls who are a bit more awkward than their peers, not to mention girls who had socially awkward fathers. As long as you're making a sincere effort to interact pleasantly with people, without pretending that you don't have a problem, you will find girls who are willing to overlook your awkwardness. It's just another unattractive characteristic that some people mind and other people don't, like being chubby, short, boring, badly dressed, poor, always late, glib, irresponsible, whatever. People can even find it endearing.

Good intentions + sincere effort + honesty about who you are = nothing to be ashamed of.
Unless you've hired someone you haven't told us about, you getting hit by a bus kills tarsnap. Nothing really runs itself on a day-to-day basis without any oversight:

* You still have to invoice/bill customers and do the books.

* You still have to keep up to date with Amazon web services, which could change out from under you.

* You still have to be responsive to bugs in your software, which will inevitably occur.

I take your point though; you've architected the business so that it depends very minimally on your own infrastructure and labor, and so its operational costs are very low.
I reported this problem to pg, and I hope he will take an action!

The problem is that the submission script does not consider that www.domain.com/some-article/ is the same as domain.com/some-article/, and looks at them as 2 different links... so it does not consider them duplicated, while it is!
Facebook People
It would make more sense having high speed rail going from SF->PDX->SEA->VAN... at least once you get to those cities you can get around without a car.

Yes, very good point. Even only connecting Portland / Seattle / Vancouver would be fine. That is a short enough distance for rail to be competitive, and there is definitely demand on that route. (Last time I needed to go from Seattle to Portland, flying was actually cheaper than Amtrak. And the flight was out of Boeing Field, so there was no security to deal with.)
No, that's not correct. An LLC is qualified to invest only if it has $5MM in assets, or if all the principals of the LLC are themselves accredited.
That's exactly what the latter part of my portfolio graph looks like.
See above, and then consider that if people could invest $500 in your startup, someone else could build a business creating a liquid market in startup equity, which you could then tap for funds in an arbitrary amount.
Out of interest and on the topic of your personal profitability, do you get any meaningful income from the AdSense on your daemonology.net pages?
I'm not the greatest looking guy around, but I've dated some very hot women by breaking most of these "rules".

When you can sit down at a table of 4 gorgeous women without being invited you've hit gold. I'm ballsy, bordering on arrogant and women always know where I stand. Women respect that.

If you see a woman and you want to ask her out, do what it takes to make that happen. Women respect that.

You won't learn that in an 18 page PDF.

Guys focus way too much on the mechanics of flirting when they should really be developing their inner confidence, self-worth, and certainty.
The reason political issues often result in uncivil discussion, me thinks, is we have not spent enough time in a forum (online or off) that demands civility in such discussions. If HN can provide both (1) topics members want to discuss along with (2) its approach of keeping the discussion civil, this seems a very good thing.

I am a big fan of hacking social and economic problems. If a topic is not of interest I ignore it. A thread rarely stays on the front page more than a day or two.

I originally came to HN for Web 2.0 news. But things have evolved.
Navel gazing much. No wonder that how to flirt article is so popular. Jeez people, go out smell the flowers.
"When the Bush administration's Commission on the Future of Higher Education aimed to bring more accountability to colleges and universities, the only member of the panel who refused to sign the document was David Ward, who represented the nation's biggest higher-education group.

"It was a clear act of defensiveness.

"College lobbyists eventually succeeded in killing the commission's proposal to develop a national system to track the progress of each student in the country. They also resisted efforts to make the accreditation process more open and to establish a consumer-friendly database that would allow parents, students, and policy makers to compare institutions."

It's still remarkably difficult to get relevant data from colleges about how well the colleges are doing by their enrolled students. Perhaps current economic conditions will prompt more of the people paying for college educations (often parents now afraid of losing their jobs) to seek more information about whether or not colleges are a good investment.
The article argues that one thing is having a successful technology, and another is having a successful business. This is, of course, true - but there's a significant correlation between the two. Correlational databases, Google's search algorithm and the light bulb were all influential technologies that founded hugely successful companies.

There's a rule of thumb saying that your solution to a problem has to be 2 - 300% better than the existing state of the art for it to be adapted successfully without artificial help (marketing $, monopolies, etc.) and Google certainly lived up to that when it went live. It remains to be seen whether Wolfram Alpha will.
I'm pretty sure mass murder an order of magnitude above the Holocaust is not the answer here.
Sorry, but that's just not what profitability means. That's like saying that ice cream is health food if you don't count all the sugar and fat.

Most business folk wouldn't even consider "ramen profitable" really profitable. Until the business is operating at a sustainable level, it's not profitable. Just because nobody switches the server off doesn't mean that a business is alive.
Android sales to outstrip iPhone by '12?
Sounds like you haven't smoked much marijuana, I'd say you're wrong on both counts. I'd go so far as to say marijuana's primary use is as an anti depressant. It's a freaking make me happy/content drug for Christ sake, that's why people smoke it.
I don't think there's any way to improve snipd.com. The fundamental problem is that it's hard to understand what exactly snipd does. I'm a computer expert and I still don't understand it.
Stellar cartography of Battlestar Galactica
I don't say it's a substitute, but wicked handy. I read a lot faster on the Kindle, but reading on the iPhone gets a lot of stars given I always have it on me no matter what.
How about just using hanging gets?
Samsung U550 Verizon CDMA
Samsung U550 Verizon CDMA is upgraded handset presentation of the company and you can have the deal of the phone from cellhut.com at an affordable price. The phone has integrated many features as it supports CDMA2000 1X 1900/800 band of network and make you always with in touch with your colleagues and friends.
I was always looking for a good tool that does this! This one is great!
Using dual currency systems is the best way to sell virtual goods
I agree folks should not waste space with comments that are purely for amusement. However, I have noticed that if a comment is on-topic and still adds humor, it can be taken very poorly. I agree: "we're far from the same person". Humor is often the best way to open minds in a diverse group. Alcohol works as well for breaking the ice, but its hard to induce that online ;).
I understand the urge to make software perfect; but really a usable system need NOT be fair, democratic, open and with set rules that may be debated upon (e.g. www.xkcd.com: We don't ask for democratic control over what comics are "on-topic". Yes, I know it's a personal site; but consider: would you ask 37Signals to change their blog to your liking?)

What we really need is a system that works most of the time. The cost of a false negative with down-voting (losing a genuinely insightful article as off-topic etc) is simply too high, IMO.

As regards the comparison with Stack Overflow: I find it rather pointless; the sites exist to serve different purposes altogether.

Perhaps you could rethink your initial thoughts given all the comments above and provide an even more interesting analysis of how user behavior is modified by the presence of certain features... :)
YouTube to block music videos for UK users
Indeed - For whatever reason, I've had the title architect for most of my career, so I hope that's true (as for the "good" part...).
Man, I know you were joking, but suddenly I feel that a psychological/humor-driven analysis of popular memes might be a fascinating article to read/write.
Maven inside: say hello to Groovy Grape
Grape is a very cool feature of Groovy 1.6 ... but it has the potential to be overestimated.
Getting to "cash-flow positive" is a great milestone! Congrats! Let us know when it liberates you from other work.
Wow I never thought of harvard as cutting edge computer science, this class looks awesome ;) Need to get my college to host something like it.
Dawdle [my startup] and Goozex: two ways to game on a budget
I think it's pretty amazing that you'd have to have a 52ft x 52ft monitor to display all of the addresses in IPv4... and that 88% of the pixels on the screen would represent a device hooked up to the internet, right now.
Chronological Index of Paul Erdos's papers
Fortunately, the mob of angry teenagers seems to find the group of slightly older people having a quiet conversation in the library rather dull.
regarding the first part, you're absolutely right, but understanding the worst case computational complexity of a problem does lend a certain appreciation to the average case complexity that happens when people implicitly approximately solve those problems.

Admission: My current research project involves studying the computational complexity of socially inspired optimization problems. Turns out that even the simplest nontrivial ones are PPAD Hard or #P hard. (so special cases or approximations become key very quickly)

This is why its useful to put social problems into at least semi-mathematical language to make it easier to spell things out to the socially oblivious (but still logically endowed, which sadly isn't always the case) or to make it easier to discuss a complex social issue with a friend
That is an interesting observation!
If you realize we come from non- or low-interactional media like newspapers and tv channels, you could say society has been low in discussion because of media limits. And the internet resolves this, giving people the freedom to focus more on what really matters to them: opinions and analysis.
My new rule of thumb for entrepreneurs: Divide by 3
I'm a really big fan of Dawdle (and Fake Sachin). Here's hoping they do to Ebay for video games what Stubhub did to them for sports tickets.
Will History Repeat Itself?
do you (or anyone) have recommendations regarding health insurance for "private contractors"/small (2-3 employee) businesses?
I don't understand why Joel calls out Fried on functional specs and describes the exact same 2 step process:

-----------

Joel Step 1:

You start at the highest level: a vision statement, no more than one page explaining the gist of the new feature.

Fried Step 1:

So what do we do in place of a functional spec? We write a one page story about what the app should do. If it takes more than a page to explain it, then it’s too complex.

-----------

Joel Step 2:

Once that’s nailed down, you can develop storyboards… mockups of the screens showing the user’s progression through the application, with detailed notes showing how they work.

Fried Step 2:

Then we begin building the interface — the interface is the functional spec. First with some quick and simple paper sketches, then directly into HTML. Unlike paragraphs of text that are open to alternate interpretations, interface designs are common ground.

-----------
This entire argument is flawed. If your marginals costs are so low, and you can charge $49+ (whatever) for what is essentially air, that means more money in your pocket. In fact, I'd argue that its much better if your marginal costs continue to get lower as you add more users! Why do you think Microsoft is such a cash cow?

I've seen way to many web entrepreneurs think of their products' price in relation to costs and and I just don't get it. Try to keep fixed costs low, focus on how much revenue you can extract from your customers, and drive marginal costs as close to zero as you can.
Bumbling around by semi-randomly trying behaviors learned from pop culture and from other kinds of interactions, discovering empirically what works in what contexts, is actually the normal way to do it. Most people start a lot younger, though. If you make the same mistakes at 18 that other kids did at 13, people aren't going to be very impressed, just like you wouldn't be impressed by a college student taking remedial algebra classes.

The good news is that flirting is a lot like math: most people don't learn any new concepts after the first two years of college. Once you've caught up to that point, it's just a matter of getting from the point where you understand the concepts, but have to think very hard while applying them, to the point where you apply them automatically without thinking about them. It's the difference between understanding the principles required to solve x^2 + x - 6 = 0 but having to think your way through each step of the solution, vs. just looking at the problem and letting your mind produce the solution out of habit.
Ask HN: "Deals fall through"
I'm curious which startup had this mantra (as discussed in http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html) and how they're doing?

great mantra.
I used www.ehealthinsurance.com to get a CareFirst health insurance for about 170/month