skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand where you're coming from, but a lot of what I'm seeing in this discussion is analyzing this lady's situation out of the context of this ad.

This was a 'her situation is similar to me' type of ad mixed with an 'incentive to find exactly what you need'. Arguably, two very potent advertising concepts executed in a short and effective commercial.

The targeting of these 'i'm a pc' ads and this particular one is 'I'm a person, with dynamic requirements as to what I need in a computer, one of those happens to be a 17" screen on an affordable laptop'. Contrast this with the Apple ads. There are people (read: average consumers) that see those ads and then walk into the Apple store (without knowledge of all the particulars that comprise the Mac experience) and think "wow, these are really nice, but a bit out of my budget". They then go into Best Buy, see something in their price range, and settle on that. I'd be willing to bet this happens everyday. More often than not, these are satisfied customers who could really care less about owning a Mac because they didn't just pay $1799 extra for a similar (in their mind) machine.
Actually, I'm pretty sure year comparisons are more standard than month comparisons, for a lot of financial and economics stats. The press sometimes reports ambiguously, but since year-to-year comparisons tend to be more useful, they also tend to be more often used.
I have always thought you would be awesome at taking someones product and taking it's web sales to the next level. Is that what you are interested in?
Music collaboration via git?
Wouldn't XP be at least 25% of the cost of that netbook? Firefox runs great on Ubuntu. :)
The week isn't over yet.
You've never had any Microsoft-related developer gripes?
I think it's not about the affordability of the OS, it's about the affordability of the whole machine. In choosing a business strategy that allowed any OEM to load their OS on any HW, MS has ended up being on much cheaper machines (because of the competition in the HW market), and on machines that are less reliable and easy to use, partly due to that very openness (sure, not all Windows' faults are the consequence of this choice). So far all the things that Windows isn't, and all the faults it has, it is still the cheapest way to buy a personal computer, so I think it makes sense to MS to talk about that.

The thing I find strange about this ad is that they are trying to associate with people who can't afford a Mac (quote: my budget can't stretch..). Surely those people will buy a Windows machine anyway? If you wanted to make a point about price, wouldn't you try to associate with the people who do have the cash for a Mac, but point out to them that if they get a Windows machine their other $x000 can be spent on something else, e.g. a DSLR, holiday, etc. So maybe the real point of this ad is simply feel good factor, ala 'Windows is your friend'.
When you see fun list posts and decide not to upvote them.

Oh wait, then Hacker news wouldn't have a problem. My bad.
"Ideall Microfinance is a start-up aimed at making it simple for small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs to raise capital."

And yet we can't classify ourselves as an entrepreneur? I mean, I develop software, but that's not how I primarily think of myself these days. I ticked the 'Other' box out of confusion.
Setting up UNIX file systems for improved performance and safety
We assume that you are already an entrepreneur (or at least a prospective entrepreneur) if you're answering questions about borrowing money for your startup.
This doesn't address my criticism in the slightest, and I'm extremely well aware of all of this. My comment did not concern what statistics the press should report in presenting financial data, only the lie of the original headline which suggested that the press incorrectly thought homes sales went up when they actually went down. For the scope that the press intended, the stats they reported were accurate.

To reiterate (and not to clarify, because my original comment is clear): When the press reports rises and declines, if they do not explicitly say year over year, they are talking month over month. Indeed, this VERY article contains an example of it, with the press reporting that home sales were up 4.7%. The original title of this submission, before it was edited to include "year over year", specifically played upon this implied and incorrect comparison to provoke a response.

Indeed, I'm not the only one who found the headline misleading; my comment had been voted up to at least 5 shortly after I posted, and before the headline was altered and your tangential comment sent people on a wild goose chase.
I found it quite interesting to click through to the previous post referenced in that article, as well:
http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2008/12/gender-gap-in-st...

He talks about the proportions of women in tech startups there. Funnily, the 12.7% women-in-IT percentage is more or less equivalent to the proportion of women on my undergrad and graduate computer science courses, and also nowhere near the percentage of female tech entrepreneurs I meet. (I've met two others, I think.)

However, I'm just doing what I want to do because it's cool and fun. Not because I want to fly a flag or be a statistic. I almost get annoyed when people draw attention to the gender gap, as it makes me even more of a three-headed monkey, and heaven knows I get enough strange looks as it is.
The ad markets to the current economy and highlights their strength (up front cost) with a friendly actress. Not much to it, far from innovative if you ask me.

On the other hand, I find Apple's aproach much more notable:

Apple is advertising by featuring products, err, rather apps, that Apple does not make. It's a commercial for the iPhone and not iPhone apps only because the ad states at the end that you can do all of it only on an iPhone.

The incredibly "cool" iphone gadget is featured 2nd to the developers' creations and the everyday user experience.
Admirable, certainly. It's nice to see a CEO who is keen to experience his business from every angle.

From observing the workplace of my girlfriend, who has recently worked in retail for a large, national corporation, I can tell that the particular company she works for definitely doesn't. Very often they get instructions about how to rearrange the sales floor that anyone actually working there with the customers would never in a million years think was a good idea -- usually, a few weeks later, they're told to change back to what they were doing. My guess is that's how it goes in most big companies. Eventually, the suits don't touch the nitty gritty parts of the business, and they end up getting way out of touch.

That said, I doubt if Bezos, by virtue of the fact that everyone will know who he is, will run into the rumored "sweatshop" conditions at some Amazon distro centers (if those rumors are at all true, which is impossible for anyone who hasn't worked in one to say): http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10123835-93.html

EDIT: Also, does Jeff Bezos have a blog? His is one I would really love to read.
I'm not sure I buy the 'Rich don't use what they pay for' argument when it comes to taxes. Just because you're not living in government housing or collecting any welfare doesn't necessarily mean you're using fewer tax dollars.

The US military industrial complex, the largest socialist institution in the world, exists in part to protect the wealth of this nation. If the US was a much poorer nation, we would have significantly less need for a large military (nor could we afford it). If you're wealthy, you're probably just as reliant on roads and airports, perhaps even more so than a poor person who probably walks/bikes more often. The wealthy are also completely dependent on affordable, readily available education (K-12 and higher education) to train the workforce. Then there's all the wealth created in the private sector that have been reaped from research originally conducted by NASA, the NIH, and for the military. And lets not get started on corporate welfare which props up everyone's investments in the domestic equities markets.

Most of what I've listed is an indirect benefit, but lets not pretend that the wealthy have decoupled themselves from the spendings of the US Government. Spending is rarely cut for just this reason: the big money backing the politicians doesn't want its share of the government cheese to disappear. It's no accident true small government proponents are marginalized and replaced with phony doppelgangers spewing platitudes about "small government" only to turn around and feed the very beast they've been elected to destroy.
I agree. While I like that YouTube EDU has lots of classes, it just doesn't match Academic Earth for the organization. YouTube EDU seems to rely more on search, but Academic Earth has a well-structured taxonomy that makes more sense to me in an academic setting. With more sites out there like this, this should only increase the bar so that we end up with better resources.
Yes! This is what more CEOs of large companies need to do. If you are a CEO, you need to understand what is going on in the company first hand, not by playing whisper down the lane with the chain of command. (This is my philosophy, hopefully reality one day.)
Obsession Times Voice: How to do online writing right.
From the stories I've read over the years on Jeff Bezos, this is perfectly in line with his management style and persona. If it was anyone else I would probably questions motives a bit more, but this seems to simply be wanting to experience the work and environment on the ground level. Its gaining valuable perspective that helps effective CEOs run their companies better.
Thank you. Glad to see that this is helpful
Please don't use all uppercase.
You should check out Steve Blank's talks on customer development.

In his latest talk at Stanford (http://cli.gs/JUh0Ne) a class member asked whether or not they should do surveys to understand the market...he said no. You should be testing whether or not your customer would buy your product following your current spec/idea not just general features they'd like.

You seem to be looking for people to formulate the product itself without clearly stating the core offering. That should be something you do inhouse then go out and see whether or not the market agrees that your idea has any ground to it - then reiterate.
I think the purpose is pretty clear, but it would be nice to have an actual demo instead of just screen shots. One thing that seemed a bit off to me was inconsistent capitalization: "missionary" is sometimes capitalized and sometimes not (I would suggest that it not be capitalized) and the sentence at the top (Share your Missionary's Photos, Experiences and More with your Friends and Family!) seems like it it's too long to have most of the words capitalized. I think it'd be easier to read in all lowercase.

I agree with patio11 on the lightbox effect, but I still think it needs some sort of tour or demo instead of just screenshots. I visited a similar site recently (not for missionaries, but for high school graduating classes), and I'm leery of creating an account here just because that site had poor usability and about ten pages for registration.
The biggest mistake you can make in visual design is to be guided by taste rather than understanding how different styles work psychologically and what is suitable to your target market. Some hackers deride "design" because they've either never worked with a talented designer, or they don't understand what design does. However there's quite a bit of science to design as well, it's just not as quantifiable as code.
Personally, I don't agree with that. Why waste time developing features your intended customerbase wouldn't find beneficial?
Except they forgot to include any numbers. What good is a budget without numbers?
Clojure Agents
Ok, I should have been more specific. When you close your first deals, you care about bookings. You cash the check. When you approach the $100M range, you care about revenue, with its complex rules about revenue recognition, whether the deal has to be recognized over multiple years, etc.

You can end up in a situation where the CFO tells you that the check in your hand is not profitable... Weird.
Bush did it to himself. That whole, "I'm a moron" thing was just an act. Look at his speeches from when he was a governor, night and day compared to the Bush of 2008.

No this isn't a substantial critique. Why? Because it just repeats the same stuff we heard before. Just a repetition of the same old mantra...low taxes! low taxes will fix everything!

36% tax rate = free market working at its best.

39% tax rate = marxist pigs, set out to destroy this nation.

There are plenty of Republicans to admire, unfortunately for the GOP, the only people at the front are the hypocrites who noone takes seriously any more.
YouTube Adds A Twitter Button
I believe we do accept before YC (last year it was the case). Our schedule revolves around the 'summer' for CU Boulder. We end before the school year starts.

Best of luck in both programs, let me know if I can ever help out.
He's going to get a very sanitized version of the experience. What would be really amazing is if he disguised himself and went to work in the warehouse unannounced. Although I'm sure there would be plenty of self righteous outrage if he actually did.
It would be their systems that are misconfigured.

Well I'm asking for a couple of reasons.

1. To get advice like yours, which I followed in addition to sending emails to their main site.

2. This is a somewhat interesting issue in that more and more sites simply pass every request to their script engine and then process the URI to determine what to do with it. This seems to be true on HN also as you get a response to every request.

If you go to http://news.ycombinator.com/test.gif this is being processed by the back end most likely. Now multiply this by 10 or 20 such requests for every 1 real page load from one of these misconfigured systems.
This of course wastes a bunch of resources. In the least it may start sessions that don't need to be started, at the most, even db connections are made before module information is determined and the request can be rejected.

This is not just some single person on the net with a misconfigured cache/proxy but an ISP. This potentially means that all users using their ISP are causing much more load on sites than they need to be.

Is this trivial? It may seem so. In the old days this was a non issue. The server did not have that file and minimum resources were used to send a 404 response. Today, it's probably less likely, as your web app may be launching bootstrapping code, starting sessions, db connection, just to determine that this is a bad request.

3. It's a warning for all us developers, that misconfigured systems like this do exist out there and you can take measures in designing your site to handle these with minimum resources.
Electrons per Song on an iPod
That's pretty close to what I do as well.
Outsourcing ASP.NET Development Australia
cyberThink Infotech Pvt.Ltd. is best source to Outsourcing ASP.Net Development to Australia.
Thats the point hes trying to make - you shouldn't wait until your product is developed to test out the market. You should talk to customers as early as possible. But you need a solid concept for a product to present to the customer in order to get quality feedback.

At the stage your at, I would be testing whether or not the problem exists... not what features they wanted on a product that has not yet been formulated.

The one key question your missing is "Do you find it difficult to raise seed capital for your startup?". That question deserves an open-ended textbox.
The important thing is that he is going to be at the same level as those employees. He can ask them questions such as, "What needs improvement?" He's a bright guy so I would imagine he can figure out a way to make the employees feel comfortable enough to be dead honest with him. While you are right that there will be some cleansing, in general the employees can show him what they are talking about in a way that some feedback form just couldn't accomplish. (I must note that even dishing out a feedback form to employees once or twice a year is a giant step for many companies.)
Twitter's bid for revenue: paid pro accounts
Yes, this is in the U.S.

"Top private" as in #1 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. It's academically selective (slightly under 20% acceptance rate), and yes, very pricey for those not on financial aid. The demographics did skew toward children of upper-middle-class parents who wanted degrees in useless subjects. Liberal arts, after all.

BTW, this is not saying that 50% of graduates could not find jobs. There were a couple in that situation (mostly English, history, and language majors), but most people living back with their parents had jobs - in some cases, very good ones. I worked at a financial software startup. I had a classmate at the State Dept. Another friend was doing strategic analysis at MITRE (MIT Research and Engineering). All of us chose to live with our parents, even though we were making more than the median household incomes for our respective areas. Then there are more conventional live-with-parents stories, like the schoolteachers and librarians and baristas and unemployed.

It's more that if a large enough critical mass (say, all the English majors) chooses to live with their parents, it then becomes socially acceptable. And then their friends do it (while banking the rest of their salary), partially so as not to feel "different" from their less-successful classmates and partially just because they can.
No asian women. Count me out.

Design is nice.

Overall, the whole thing is corny. I'm sure there is a market for it, but as someone who is a prolific member of other dating sites, nothing about it is interesting.

Why would I, as an established man, want to be harangued by a bunch of gold diggers? I can't figure that out.
Fair enough. Good point.
Adults Spend 8 Hours a Day in Front of a Screen, Study Finds
Weinberg's "Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design" is a thought provoking book on defining and managing requirements. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0932633137
$200 million per mile for heavy rail.

Crikey, numbers like that bring perspective to the old "Why doesn't the US have Japan's mass transit system, yet?" Because just building Japan's total of tracks would cost $3.4 trillion... and we'd have built barely enough track to cover California or New England to service levels comparable with Japan.
Terrific survey of free business models online
the vast majority are drivers, there are thousands upon thousands of drivers in there which means hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
The only commercial maglev running right now is in China, not Japan.
Has Tesla even considered outsourcing the manufacturing? I'm sure lots of people in Detroit would be more than grateful to be paid to make cars that are already sold. I wonder if capacity is not the problem, but that the Roadsters just take that long to actually make.
> "Print This Page". Cute. I am so not clicking through half a dozen pages on this slow-loading iPhone.

Clicking six times on an iPhone is way easier than typing that long-winded sentence with full punctuation and capitalization on an iPhone, wouldn't you say?
People initially flocked to Google because their search returned the best results, now here come the marketers calling it a "brand".

You know what a brand is?

A brand is just the business counterpart of a person's name. My name is a proxy in other people's minds for my professional reputation, but this doesn't give me loony ideas about "investing" in my name, making it more "catchy" or somesuch crap.

Sorry for being confrontational: I'd like to hear a marketer's honest response to unfiltered thoughts of this kind.
The article doesn't link to the company's website, which is here: http://american-maglev.com/index.php. Sadly, neither the article or the company website indicate how fast the train will go, or any details about where they get the $20 million/mile figure. Those were my questions anyway.
A week of selling software under a "Name Your Price" model
I use EMacs heavily to mantain my GTD "buckets" and flow. If you use an editor a lot I'd suggest you try using it over notecards and see if it helps you implement GTD.

Plus you can do several nifty things with an editor that just isn't possible with pen and paper. For instance, I link each action item with a "project" or a "goal" and each day I get "points" for all items completed (based on these links). It's a great reward system!
Google check-out completes their advertising chain management, enabling assessable advertising. Instead of pay-per-click, you can pay-per-pay. It really is a fantastic concept for trying to optimize marketing automatically.

Problem: they suck at it.

So... this function really helps their mission, but they can't do it. Therefore, they should outsource this function, or spin off a startup so that it can operate on the values needed for success in it.
This couldn't have come at a better time. I've been trying to work out a business model for the idea I'm starting to work on and while this information doesn't make the decision for me, it helps remind me of the variety of options out there.
Its a big mistake, given the enormous cost of Windows compared to linux running on Everyman's netbook.
How to Find a Business Model for Your Startup
Hollywood Free Movie Download: Knowing (2009)TS.XVID.STG
Moreover, its a ridiculous comparison even if you leave aside the "More Profits Are Evil" hidden agenda.

Gamestop is retail. They need higher margins to pay for retail rents. Dawdle is online. It should be cheaper. This is called positioning. It doesnt make one side better or worse ethically, and to shine Gamestop in that light is absurd.

I could find the same item in Boutique stores, on Amazon, or at target for many things -- but I would expect different prices at these stores based on my level of convenience, their operating model, etc.

Moreover, to say that any second-hand market is 'bad' for the new-item market is a big who cares to me. Its not my problem as a consumer that the economics of the retail game trade make more sense for me than they do for game publishers -- its their problem to adapt around it.

I'm not trying to sound rude, but this whole article is written like a kid having a tantrum. The fact that Dawdle is more economical should be enough of a point, they dont need to get into how 'bad' gamestop is for the world. Not only does it confuse the issue about addressing superior model (according to them), it also leads the reader to discount the whole article becuase of inane bias.
Name me a traditional payment processor (e.g. a bank) that can just walk away with your money and you have no means of recourse.
Continuous Integration Does Not Cause Low Quality
Well, we'll certainly be applying. I've always wanted to live in Austin.

Nice to see these places proliferating. It looks like Paul's vision is catching on.

I hope these places end up making money. But if they don't, they will have lost less money than a PE firm loses on a single bad investment.
Regardless of whether or not this is true ... it simply isn't worth the risk

I never understood this mentality... can you explain how you reached this conclusion?
Ok, now we have two self-selected samples of experiences with Google checkout.

While I appreciate your post, I'd like to point out that statistically speaking, we still have learned nothing about the risk/benefits associated with using Google checkout. sigh
'''Flockr is slow. I would profile it, but profiling in Java is a pain''' - weird ... that is not my experience. I've had nothing but excellent results with profilers on Java code. On the microsecond level.
Wouldn't the current used change depending on the volume? It seems quite unscientific to just take an average. Real measurement would have been more interesting.
Tucker max was chief consultant.