skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree, when you are a startup you are also creating a culture, and you need to manage it.

Firefox is by far the easiest browser to develop for. Firebug, makes it so damn painless. Ec2, and S3 now have plug-ins for Firefox.

I always develop for Firefox first. I tend to figure that if someone is using IE6 or IE7, and the browser is buggy, its microsoft's problem and not mine. I do not have time to hack javascript and css that is out of spec.

Safari and Opera often times work when Firefox does, but usually have different defaults for padding, boarders, forms, fonts, and margins just a bit differently which can all be handled withing the bounds of normal css and javascript.

IE on the other hand, is a mess, and breaks rules all of the time. Not only that but the culture of the IE team is to not fix the problem, but to create new HTML features so that you can branch between browser versions. The culture behind the IE team is all wrong. I hate developing Google Gadgets for IE because Google will not let you publish your gadget iFrame in xhtml strict for which most browsers come close to rendering the same.

As far as the OpenID thing goes, it was also easier to support than a registration system for users, and it encourages a certain culture for the site. I myself do not like OpenID, as it is based on HTML redirect protocols, and not something that works well for applications. OpenSocial is better for authenticating application permission for a given user, but it still seems lacking on API consistency, OpenSocial is going to be an API arms race, like IE and Mozilla are in the browser market.

Also for our app, we would much rather support enviroments like the Mac, iPhone, and treo 700p than IE, based on the audience we are trying to reach.
Users can choose pay or free:

http://ourdoings.com/hostingplans.html
"...keep most routines short enough to fit on a single screen..."

Absolutely.

What invariably seems to happen is that 30 lines of code turns into 300 in a few years. Seems like most enhancements are inserted "black box style" so as to not "mess around with that which we don't understand and don't have enough time to learn".
Guys, I wrote a similar tool few months ago: http://www.instantwordsearch.com

It does more than definr (e.g. pattern search). But it was met with indifference (except on StumbleUpon). Can you tell me where I screwed up?

May be I shouldn't have mentioned that I wrote it as a toy app? (but it IS a toy app) Picture needed? Looks ugly/too simple? Name too long? All I am able to come up with are some conspiracy theories: 'Definr creator lists Kevin Rose as friend in his Digg profile'; 'Ruby-On-Rails was mentioned' etc. But the real issue must be something else.

I think the fault is invisible to me as I created the tool. Hopefully I can learn a marketing lesson or two from this... Please help.
I'm not a radical animal supporter but the choice of picture attached to this article is disturbing.

What's next... Soylent Green is people?!
Prescription UI
This is a great list. I think an alternative to #1 is that ad driven sites tend to promote more page views and page refreshes, which tend to lower productivity compared to a well designed subscription driven site (so they value their employees time, and the work that they deliver, more than they want to get a "free app"). Also, some amount of screen real estate has to be lost to ads that could instead be applied to improving the information content on the page directly relevant to the task the employee is performing.

2 & 3 are very under-appreciated by the advertising driven sites. I think that startups stay in "free beta" too long in particular. Any application that involves helping my business I only want to use if I know the developers will respond, and the default terms of service typically say that they can disappear without warning (along with my data). Even a 15-30 day grace period with a warning for shutdown would be a huge improvement. Also, I think there is a misunderstanding behind the actions of the "TechCrunch 50K" who chase cool new applications and small business who has to bear a lot of cost in workflow and process changeover. They do want you to stick around because their true cost of adoption is much higher than what they are paying you.
My service (not yet launched to public) is a pay model, right now the idea is a pay-for-what-you-use model, but having four general brackets to encourage people to pick what suits them best and save a little money.

People want to know that you're dedicated, and a subscription type service has a contract on both ends.
That was delicious. I've always avoided studying physics because it seems like very hard work to just satisfy my curiosity... so far my copy of the Feynman Lectures has only served an ornamental purpose.
That's nice and all, but what do you offer at 52 bucks a month that is more than what picasa and picasaweb offers for free? it's not space, if it's the "sort-by-date" feature, I would reconsider your model.
RescueTime is awesome
Does anyone else think so? I run it at work so if my boss bothers me, i can just show him my rescue time and be left alone
Controversy in regard to my idea for generating promising Facebook app ideas
Try looking into agile methods, might be exactly what you need.
id like to see peoples answers to this as well, cause i dont follow any form or convention, i just start defining classes in the system
95% of laptop thieves are not computer saavy. Rest assured they are not examining your hard drive for sensistive data or reading your email, data theft is too sophisticated for laptop thiefs and takes valuable time that could be spent smoking crack, but needless to say changing your online passwords is first order of business. If your laptop was a windows PC then the thief traded it for pot to a cousin who is currently installing pirated games on it. If the laptop was running anything other than windows then the hard drive has been reformatted. If it was a Mac laptop then it was traded to a fence for cash who reformatted it then put it on ebay.

Fortunately laptops are getting cheaper. The best policy is buy a cheap laptop and assume it will be lost, stolen, or broken. Treat it as disposable.
Cancelling Facebook
That's going to be unpleasant to fuel up. How many miles per pig now?
You design top-down, you code bottom-up, and you manage high-risk/first -- and if you do it right, you code circles around anybody else, whether it's a big or little project.

There's a longer answer, but it can run into several books worth of material. That was about as terse as I could make it. I could provide an example if you're interested.
this isn't the greatest answer, but it's what we do: we do what makes sense based on the information available at the time. and then we adjust what we're doing based on the information gained as the project goes on. sometimes core mods have to be built first. sometimes we can grab low-hanging fruit first.

so, i'd have to say "it depends."

no one can answer this question for you, in my opinion. not without a full understanding of the history and objectives. and even then, it'll be wrong and have to be adjusted as the project unfolds.

so i suppose i agree with robmnl, but methodology alone isn't the cure.
Why are there so many toy applications being created? Because there is demand for them. They are the most likely apps to make it big.

So if you don't like these toy apps, blame the users, not the developers.
Google-Microsoft Data Center War Expands to Siberia
"Also for our app, we would much rather support enviroments like the Mac, iPhone, and treo 700p than IE, based on the audience we are trying to reach."

Sure hope you have a fertile niche and you master it well. You better, since you're discounting 70% of the population.
Types of Risks VCs Take
Different VCs take different types of risks. When you are selecting which VC funds to target you should be sure to avoid funds that do not take risks that are still associated with your venture.

The risk categories essentially can be categorized according to the investment criteria that VCs consider. While there are many risks associated with any investment, I have included a short list of risks that typically distinguish one VC investor from another...
I believe the standard metric is miles per american. (or some other witty comment about Americans, fatness, and big cars)
I dumped all of the non-important stuff (videos, music etc) into /Users/Shared and use Filevault only for dev and the size of it is fairly small. I haven't noticed any of the things you mentioned...
That's actually 52/year. I'll take this as a lesson that the word "year" should be in bold.

The "sort-by-date" feature is the starting point for what distinguishes ourdoings.com. But I don't want to go into detail here. If you have a few hundred photos that lend themselves to chronological organization, make yourself a free site and give it a try. If you don't like it, use the "Tear down this site..." option on your site info page, and the "Forget I exist..." option on your personal info page.

More relevant to the business model question, it's important to look at the ad vs pay question from your customer's point of view. From my own point of view, pay is better because I don't want ads on the pages where I share my photos. However, I'm catering toward people who have very little time to spare. Freeing them from filling out a form with credit card info is a time saver. They will put up with ads for other convenience.

Initially it was pay-only, but I changed it.
you should have just turned up, they don't have big scary bouncers to throw you out - just pose as a student :)

they wouldn't let non-mba's attend the original events but we used to go anyway.
Money means accountability, legally speaking. When they give you money, that's definitely "consideration" in terms of contract law. Looking at an ad is probably not consideration.
Are Web Forums an OK Way to Sell?
Sorry, I'm poor, so I consider $1000 to be a horrific loss. :(
Treating the old application as the spec for the new one is usually not a good idea. Define the problem(s) the new application is trying to solve instead of trying to copy the behavior of the old application. This is important for both developers and users. (http://www.chadfowler.com/2006/12/28/software-as-spec)

I like tackling the tougher parts first as assumptions usually conflict with the real world and the design will change once you start building and testing.
I try to design my problems first, then my questions, (what data will I be looking for, how is it related) [i.e. define the schema, it doesn't matter if it's a single object or a database]; then my interfaces, and then I build all my code as if every interface worked as planned.

Then I fix my interfaces, because things change in production;
Then I fix my other code.

I usually start coding in the middle, not all the detail things, and not the giant core things, with some general drivers for the giant core things until they are built.
I too scoffed at the pretentious Apple store until I tried editing video on a PC. Soon I too was walking out of an Apple store with happy with my purchase. I scoff no more.
"Rewrite the whole system" is generally a BAD idea. You might want to have one or two senior guys go and prototype the core parts of the new .NET version. You can then add resources to the new one as it progresses. In a lot of cases the development of the new one can overtake the developed-in-parallel old one if it's done well, since they don't have to work with all the overhead of the old legacy junk.

And if the new development project fails, oh well, you only sunk a few man-months into the failed project. The sunk cost is smaller, so it's easier to abandon.
In my comment I assumed it's a line in a file and that the termination condition is eof, but you can generalize to any aggregate of items. I'm just combining the test with the increment step so we can use a simple while loop without having to peel the 'first increment' step out of the loop. If that makes any sense :)
Yeah, actually picasa doesn't have ads at second glance either, I've been using it for quite a while now, and as with most ads, I don't even notice that they're there (a note to people who think that ad-based models get user's attention).

I certainly don't want to argue with you, or tell you that your business won't work (I can't say that I know TOO much about that), but picasa auto-arranges albums by date too. It doesn't have the blog feel of your albums, which I sort of like.

I like that you've added a free service, but I guess I just didn't see what made somebody choose your pay service (even per year) over google's, who gives 10Gb for $20 per year.

My bigger question, is how can us little guys compete with Google and Yahoo and Microsoft on anything?
If you don't pedal too hard, bicycles will go for very long distances on fat and simple sugars.
This is actually a very wise strategy...after all its the early adopters who generate buzz and better guide product development.
Opera is not one of the three main browsers. The three main browsers are, in order, IE, Firefox and Safari.

Personally, I don't use Opera or one of the three main browsers most of the time, so I periodically run into a site that tells me they don't support my browser, in which case I switch browsers.

I don't expect everyone to cater to my whim all the time.
So engineering students had to sneak into an MBA-only event to hear Paul Graham speak? Wow, I'm... surprised. I'm still searching for the right metaphor, but it involves a lunatic, a head stand, a finger, someone's mother, and a string of explicatives that will exhaust the thread pool (oh there you go - it's a Java metaphor!).
I too am of the 'exploratory hacking' persuasion. You just have to be ready to throw bad stuff away with no mercy, and/or simply start over if it's not working out.
Charging tells you a very important thing: if you're adding value. Probably this would prune a lot of fruitless branches from your development tree.

There is a much larger universe of "wouldn't it be neat..." ideas than there are "this would really ad value and people will be begging to pay us..." ideas. Even things that people will pay for because they add value but that are so small a morsel of functionality don't work either- eg: little tiny utilities where people would gladly pay you $1/month to use, and where you could make big money at $1/month given the size of the audience, but are simply not worth the effort to renew on an annual basis for people because $1 a month isn't significant enough in the customers mind to get them to sign up. (EG: a spam filtering service is borderline here, anything less featurful or significant is not going to get many customers, I expect.)
Here's a quick answer to your bigger question: Google has attracted a large number of users who like the way picasaweb feels now, and they need to keep those users happy. How can they ever compete with lots of little guys who make things that appeal to others?

A longer answer will appear in a blog post in the not-too-distant future.
Any feedback appreciated for Ajax IRC/Telnet/games project
I lol'd at the poll options, esp. "Take them back to Dallas!"
This is something I've been working on for a little while now.

Screenshots:
IRC plugin: http://www.mibbit.com/mibbit.png
Telnet plugin: http://www.mibbit.com/telnet.png
Jigsaw game: http://www.mibbit.com/jigsaw.png

It's just running on my home ADSL at the moment, so if you can't get into some of the IRC servers that may be why (I don't have an i-line yet).

The site should work ok on FF/IE, and mostly ok on Opera bar a few cosmetic issues. Probably doesn't work too well on anything else at the moment.

I have lots of big ideas for it, but would be interested to hear any early feedback for it so far.
Or at the very least citations should include a specific revision. When citing from a journal or a book, you always include the revision image (publisher, edition, year-published). The idea is to allow the reader to check up on your sources rather than fulfilling some arbitrary administrative requirement (homework). As I mentioned above, that points out the teachers' rather than the students' competence.

We could compile together the list of suggestions generated here in this discussion, open up a new Wikipedia page on how to actually cite and use Wikipedia. Then get the word out.
Anything that can be free, will be free.
This is an excellent point.

The market needs pay-for-software because without it, there's no way to have the software industry make things the users want. Sure you can count eyeballs, but simply because I'm willing to surf over somewhere doesn't mean that I assign the place value -- I surf all kinds of places. In fact, the places I surf are kind of a herd mentality thing. The software I buy is based on my careful analysis of what I need and what it's worth to me. Free software is worth nothing -- even if it has a lot of users. This is the difference between just looking at a pretty girl from afar and actually getting a date -- both experiences may feel good, but one has a lot more significance than the other.

It's also interesting to note that there is a gap between free, nada, el zilco -- and paying money. Ten bucks a year is probably too close to zero. Something like 20 bucks or more sounds like more of a commitment. That's just a guess, though.
They do that with the ability to change the defaults, and add new features, like a hosted blog management (blogger) or similar. The same could be done for picasa.
I just typed in 'quotidian' to both apps. (It came up this weekend.)

Definr is very fast. It looks up words faster than I type so that the list of words at the bottom updates with each new letter. With IWS, I had to pause mid-word for a half-second in order to get an updated list. By the time I got a choice of words with IWS, I had finished typing and already made a typo.

Also, the interface for Definr is much more friendly looking and simple. Definr gives you the complete definition on the main page, instead of links to other definitions. And Definr is an easy name.

Sorry, but I liked Definr much better.
And I will continue to not have a facebook account.

So there.
A Beginner's Guide: How to Rent Your Ideas to Fortune 500 Companies (Plus: Video)
I don't leave my laptop in my car...
I wish. Can you send an email to my manager telling him this?
Every option/feature has a cost. If they try to be all things to all people they will fail.
Thank you for the feedbacks. I shall show it to my teammates. Do everyone here hate meetings as much as I do?
Types Of Risks VCs Take
Blame the crack user and not the crack dealer.
I'm just waiting for my laptop to break / get stolen, it would give me a great excuse to buy a new one...

(it's a 1.33GHz PowerBook...)
Except that's a silly distinction, when you don't yet have any information about what the upper bound is, or any evidence that growth is slowing from its exponential stage. The growth of real-world things clearly has some upper bound, and in saying that it's "exponential" this is understood by all listeners.

Since calling a real-world trend "exponential growth" is always an approximation, pointing out that it's actually "approximately sigmoidal growth, i.e. only approximately exponential until it flattens out sometime in the eventual future" is (you guessed it) a redundant waste of breath.

And to say that pointless pedantry is the same as "mathematical literacy" is even sillier.
What is it?

I might be slow but I have no idea what the site does :)

Definitely looks like you put a lot of work into it, so let me know what it is.
Designing a computer system (and that means everything but the coding) is constructing an intermediate vocabulary and language such that, when things change, your intermediate language can already express the new conditions. Now you can do that with functional code and a DSL, or you can do that with OOP and a class model. Since you're going to .NET, let's assume OOP.

You've got two things to do before coding: analysis and design. Analysis is understanding and creating that language I spoke about. Design is implementing a solution with that new language inside a certain environment. Coding is actually detailed design -- it's the same thing. In OOP you (generally) move smoothly from talking to the users about their world to coding the computer. In greenfield programming there are no major jumps like you would have with waterfall. The goal of all of this A&D is to get classes, code units, tables -- big hunks of stuff that will organize your code. Small systems you should be able to burn through A&D in days or hours. Big systems can take much longer.

Now there's all kinds of tricks to making good languages, er, object graphs. Too much to go into here. Just remember that the purpose of OOP is that when the customer says "But I'd like that green if the bank account balance is over $200" that you should be looking to tweak something regarding the class BankAccount and the member "Balance" -- the customer's language is your language. This is what makes OOP rule large development work.

Now that's the 5-cent version of OOP. As for "What to do, when" it's real simple -- do the stuff the team worries about. Having said that, it's perfectly fine to use a "recipe book" like RUP, MSF, Agile, etc to help you remember stuff you should be worrying about. In general, just like in coding where you move from talking to the folks to making the code happen, you should be thinking of "stuff to worry about" starting with business concepts "Do we know what they want? Are they going to pay for it? Do we have access to the key players?" Then you move towards technical concepts like "Are we sure a relational database is going to handle this load?" or "There's no way the user is going to wait more than 5 seconds at his browser" But there's no rule -- you can have killer business risks later in the project and you can have killer technical risks earlier. The trick is to be constantly moving from big, fuzzy, general, business-type worries to little, clear, specific, technical-type worries. If you get your "conceptual cone" working in a project -- designing and managing from big concepts down to little concepts -- it's like riding downhill on a greased rail.

I've probably proven myself a complete idiot for trying to take on such a huge topic in a blog post, but there's a lot of "noise" on this subject: the core principles are not supposed to be rocket science.
It updates the word list underneath the search bar with every letter typed...at full speed typing. Since typing speed pretty much defines the maximum data input speed, I think that qualifies as 'incredibly fast'.
Ok, so it's a chat site, with collaborative apps, and games. Actually quite fun, I just played a puzzle with you :)

For sure nice work.
Well, I think it's OK to sell on a forum as long as you are upfront with your users and explain your intentions to them.
It's a kinda ajaxy framework. Currently the plugins are

- IRC client
- Telnet client
- Multi player jigsaw game