skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would I want to have other advertisers - exclusively - look at my ad? Do they buy the stuff I sell?
yes, and can I please have an invite. I've been waiting for months
It would be a free service. It would provide an incentive for people to look at ads.
It's a difficult road in some ways, but I would suggest finding one or more large customers for version 1.0 and springboarding off of the contract you get to develop for them.

For more details, I would further suggest reading the article at the end of the comment linked to below. If you're interested, I would also recommend listening to the talk mentioned in the reply here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715
If you let it coast, it will never go anywhere great. Only you can determine if it is a big enough opportunity to be worth pursuing (I draw the line, and VC level investors tend to draw the line, at $100m/year potential...your line may be much lower or higher). I suspect time management can be a pretty big business--particularly if you take your strength in that one niche and then mix it up with related products six months or a year from now (what those related products are is up to you to determine...email-related time management products seems a good place to start groping around, since there is a large and growing population that uses email as their todo list, among other things).

If money will enable you to compete more effectively, then you should raise money. If you're this uncertain about the market size, and how big you think you can be in it, start with a small investment. $50k, $100k, along those lines can be raised pretty painlessly with a good demo and presentation. Your site looks awesome, so if enough of it works to pull together a great demo, then you can raise money. But, if development is what you want, you might want to bring in a co-founder...a great coder costs more than a small investment will buy, but equity in a great idea can buy great developers. You seem quite capable of holding up your end of the bargain, so you should have hackers knocking on your door...just pick the smartest of them, and run this idea up the flagpole. (You might still want to raise money, but not so much for development.)
No please. I am a slowly reforming chemical engineering student.
VoIP + Asterisk is the way forward. With a cheap linux server and cheap SIP phones or adapters you can easily do nearly everything an expensive phone system can do if you really need it.

Asterisk does need a bit of setup but it's not that hard for someone technically minded.

BTW, If you do any kind of conference calls get a proper conferencing phone, they are kinda expensive but so much better quality than speakerphone on a normal phone.
"worse in the later parts?" The message arc is "the capitalists are right, so let's try communism instead." Do yourself a favor - grab a copy of "The Road to Serfdom" and spend less time on the internets.
If I was in your place I would finish building a functional and presentable product without funding. I would then go public and see what sort of growth rate I had. Maybe you can attract more bloggers to write about you.

Then, go looking around for angels who have experience selling a product like yours. Use them to fund your marketing. I imagine most of that money would go to a PR firm.
Are you saying that you'd do this just as a hobby? If that's the case, sounds like an interesting idea.

If I play the devil's advocate as advertiser a bit more though, I'm still not understanding why I would value this service. My time is a lot more precious than the pay-per-click rates I would spend on google. I'm not really that interested in looking at ads all day.
People generally ignore Google ads. Here the ads would take your complete attention. In fact, we can take this idea further by asking the user to decide whether the ad he/she is looking at should be linked with his submitted ad (to provide a "related" ads feature).
MIT's Intro to Algorithms class lectures are a available in video:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
Chrysler is currently worth less than nothing, but Chrysler Financial has real value. Basically, they acquired the unfunded liability of Chrysler as the price of Chrysler Financial. Chrysler Financial may be work 18B of pension obligations to Cerberus, especially if they get synergy with GMAC.
I also felt the same way after building a basic app reading along with "Rails Solutions" in two hours. Seems too easy...until you start getting into some meatier applications and use cases. Take a look at some of the tutorials over at peepcode.com. You won't feel like you are cheating any more if you can get through some of those.
Context-Aware Image Rescaling
Ask news.yc: Raising money using bank loans?
I'm interested in hearing any thoughts that some of the other Hacker News readers on starting a company using loans, and who might be the best places to approach?

We're a small team, about 70% of the way through a fairly hefty project. We've done most of the back-end code, but we need to contract some artwork, and want to move one of our co-founders to working FT on the project, in order to speed up development.

SBC style loans are offered by Citizen's bank and others-
These loans, as I understand, typically require that you invest 30% of the loan amount into the company at the time of the loan.
While we've invested quite a sum over the last few months as we've been building (legal fees, etc), I don't have a huge amount of up-front capital.

There's private sources of capital such as America One (amone.com), but they seem very shady, and want a high percentage as a finder's fee.

I know we could end up going to Angel Investors asking for a loan, but we don't know any personally, and building lengthy presentations for investor meetings takes time away from actually building things, as well as dilluting capital.

We're very dedicated to the idea, and the company, and I'd appreciate any advice, thoughts, or experience as other people have gone through this part of the process.
New Vista Activation Bug Not Reported Yet
My brand-new laptop woke up with Vista updates and a screen that my key was no longer genuine. The individual key on the bottom of the laptop didn't work any better than the Dell OEM key it came with. After trying System Restore from the Repair prompt during reboot, I'm told I can't restore because a file already exists. My system diagnostics and hard drive are 100%. It seems the WGA saga continues.
I defended Vista in response to Matt's post. Well, my brand-new laptop decided to wake up from sleep and install multiple Vista updates overnight. Now, a message shows my key is no longer genuine. The individual key on the bottom of the laptop didn't work any better than the Dell OEM key it came with. After trying System Restore from the Repair prompt during reboot (via a Dell Tech's prompt), I'm told I can't restore because a file already exists. My system diagnostics and hard drive are 100%. It seems the Windows Genuine Activation saga continues--it says the status of my operating system is unknown. It suggests I... revisit the same page again and find out the same thing.
Membership: 3 and counting. 'Grats on being the founding member.
Google is now worth over $182,410,000,000
Probably a bad idea unless you already have cash flow. Getting into debt could ruin you for life.

It doesn't sound like you need that much money.

Work on reducing your expenses/taking 2nd jobs instead.
Use Ubuntu.
I agree with your point, for the most part. On the other hand, virtually every investor loves to see some validation of the idea (traction)... It makes it a safer bet.

But the question wasn't about what it takes to get funding... It was-- with the market that we've chosen, with the traction that we have, and with the challenges I wrote about (largely team commitment), is funding something that I should consider pursuing?
That's actually a good answer. I can install Ubuntu and try to run Vista inside VMWare inside it, and only when I need it.
Thats exactly what I do, but with Windows XP
Marc Andreesen on Steve Ballmer on Facebook: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/on-steve-ballme.html:

"I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people," Mr. Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

Ballmer subsequently added:

"I think these things [television shows] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [talking motion pictures] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [rock and roll music] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [hip hop music] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [fast food restaurants] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [video games] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [digital music players] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [search engines] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [the Internet] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

And finally:

"I think these things [personal computers] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."
As another poster pointed out, the coder in question isn't owned by anyone.

I don't see how it's more or less moral to make the offer before or after the application. The coder's relationship with his existing team, and that teams product, should be compelling enough for the coder to stick with them.

If it isn't, then it's within his rights to move towards a better opportunity, and within someone else's rights to provide that opportunity.

That said, I think this post should have consisted of a simple, polite statement of caveman82's case. Comments about 'The Accuser' running to his mother are immature and only hurt Caveman82's reputation.
I do the opposite - run Ubuntu inside VMWare on a WinXP host.

At the time I bought my computer, Linux didn't work well on it - no drivers for the wireless. So by running XP as the host, I could let Microsoft handle the drivers and then have VMWare mooch off them via bridged networking.

It's probably better now, but I've gotten used to this setup, so I see no real reason to change until I get my next computer.
I dunno. Something tells me that a real estate site has little in common with what the rest of us are doing. When the market tanks (and it will), this looks like what George Plossl used to call, "A precise estimate of a wild ass guess."
I remember having this conversation at Startup School last year with some very smart hackers over dinner. The overwhelming majority felt that Facebook was exactly that, a fad like MySpace or Friend or whatever, that it won't be around in 5 years, that they don't have any real technology, etc. I was the only person who disagreed.

I argued that they have an amazing team, that they control the most accurate and real social graph on the planet, they are cooking up something big with it, and they will without a doubt not only be around, but be much bigger in 5 years.

6 months, 1 platform, 5000 apps, and 50 million users later, I'm feeling pretty comfortable about my stance, I don't know about the other guys.
Previously employer used Cisco VoIP phones over SpeakEasy service. Phones themselves were ok; the service sucked. We had several outages and recurring problems with sound quality.
Amon Tobin, William Orbit, Miles Davis, Moby, Fatboy Slim, DJ Food, Speaker Pimps, Telepopmusik, Rara Avis, Robbyn Rhodes, Trilok Gurtu...

Those are just some of the artists I've been listening to recently. Usually chill/ambient electronica with good repetitive beats-- the best example is Angel by Massive Attack. I turn that way up and hack the night away, sometimes.
There's also some awesome stuff at http://opensourcefood.com
From the first time I heard about Truemors, I thought it was stupid. And it's still stupid. The only reason it gets any press/traffic at all is because of Kawasaki. You always hear of it as "Kawasaki's Truemors."

At least the man knows how to leverage slight success on his name's reputation alone.
iRobot introduces gutter-cleaning robot
Motoman introduces impressive two-armed industrial robot
I've been told explicitly by several people not to finance an early stage startup with debt. I second utnick's suggestion to try to find other ways to make ends meet, until you can land some angel investment (in the form of equity financing). Not only can debt ruin your life if the startup fails, but a lot of debt can look bad on your books if you reach the point of looking for outside investment.

I recently learned about Certified Capital Companies (CAPCOS), which are government backed organizations that look like banks, but their investment turns into equity like an Angel or VC investment. Apparently they are still very conservative in their investments though, and may not have very desirable terms. But at least this is better than taking on a lot of debt. I dont know much about them, but they might be worth looking into if they are available in your state.
>People generally ignore Google ads.

Well, google's billions suggest they don't, but people would ignore a site that only contains ads even more.

I think there's a YC company doing the ad rating thing though, can't remember their name at this point though...
VC 2.0: what does it mean to your startup?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9965
I think I see where you are coming from. But this is not my way of finding out an easy way to become a programmer, rather a better one. In my defense, I am trying to work around the fact that I don't have a CS background, and am trying to learn as much as I can. I certainly know that there is no shortcut to the "promised land".
del.icio.us rewritten in PHP - bye Perl!
To this day, my favorite hacking tool is a brick.
Beautiful Programming Quote
"If you're doing top-down design, you produce a specification that stops at some level of granularity. And you always risk discovering, come implementation time, that the module or class that was the lowest level of your specification hides untold worlds of complexity that will take as much development effort as you'd budgeted for the rest of the project combined. The only way to avoid that is to have your design go all the way down to specifying individual lines of code, in which case you aren't designing at all, you're just programming."

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:ysongopFAqIJ:gamearchite...
I don't think you can get an ordinary bank loan without some real cash flow.
> "The only thing you can conclude is that it's a crap shoot," Kawasaki said in a recent interview at his home office in Atherton. "You have no idea what is going to succeed."

(Guy passed up on Yahoo and Google.) I think to someone without the requisite skill necessary to evaluate the technology and people it's like a crapshoot, sure.

However, I think a more accurate analogy would be that it's poker. Luck is a factor but it's dominated by skill (execution). If you're not an expert player then it seems like it's all luck; but expert players finish at or near the top over and over again.

Start-ups are like players that don't have a track record, so you have to watch their play carefully to decide if they're good or not. But in order to do that accurately you have to be an expert yourself.
A bank would value a startup at zero, and thus expect you to put up your personal assets as collateral. That would be a big mistake.

It's because banks can't evaluate startups that venture investors exist.
> Source?

Straight from PG:

"Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
threads that kept making the system crash."

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/574d19d5e7...

From Reddit:
http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
I happen to know a bit about this bot. Ask any questions you like.

The more exciting new robot is the ConnectR. Wifi streaming of video from a mobile platform you can control through the internet.

There are many possibilities that opens up. There is simple no other platform with a history of openness that allows for remote mobile video/2-way-audio at this price.

That said, an "er"->"R" for the name ConnectR is a tired idea.
Never heard of the site and never been to their page... but by looking at their logo, maybe MS bought it because it looks similar to MSN butterfly ;).
Wish I had read this before I decided my college major in the first grade.
I'd also recommend against getting a loan. Finding an investor might be more effort, but you really don't want the added pressure of possibly losing your personal assets as well as everything else if your business tanks.
Question 1: how do you like working with Rodney? :)
What is an ad anyway? Isn't every page on the web essentially an ad?
If we disqualified all developers with personal issues from investment, there would be no-one left. Emotional intensity and productivity seem to be positively correlated.
He's obviously a very smart guy, though involved mainly at a high level as a technology advisor for future developments.

But his students often get jobs at iRobot afterwards, like this guy:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/bpadams/

As both the founder of a number of companies and a big guy at CSAIL, he has plenty of good stories to tell.
"The only way to avoid that..."

Uh, no. Another way:

top-down design + bottom-up programming

Roll it up to your target, allowing either to change as you go. Kinda like squeezing an orange to get the juice without breaking it.

Apologies to Einstein...

"Top-down design without bottom-up development is lame. Bottom-up development without top-down design is blind."
Google To $2000/Share? Somebody Muzzle Blodget
Scribes - TextMate-like Python editor for Ubuntu/Gnome
Hey Ivan!

Quick question about the design process... how the heck did you guys come to an idea for making a gutter (among all other applications) robot?! Is gutter cleaning that big of a market?

Also, how long does it take to test this bot? How many real gutters did you try?

Thanks.
I have been looking for something like this for quite some time. Talk about something people want! I've already found a few to add to my binder.
There's nothing wrong with his moral compass, and there's nothing wrong with offering a talented hacker work, no matter how you know him. The other guy was pissed because he doesn't seem to have any talent of his own and considers the hacker his, an obviously absurd position.

This isn't high school, it's business, and if you're going to cry every time someone approaches your talent, you don't belong in business. If your hacker leaves you for another position, it's your fault, not the guy who hired him.

Though responding publicly was a bad move.
SesameVault - like YouTube meets S3
my favorite song of his
If the acquirers don't suspect your intentions and you don't have any moral or ethical qualms about it you can try and pull an Aaron Swartz or at least a Justin Frankel.
Taleb's books seem to make a good case, though, for market success featuring considerable luck.

Also, a variation on this rule of thumb: When other people demonstrate a remarkable skill (dancing, drawing, playing an instrument) it's talent. When you can do it, it's hard work and practice.
Banks are for houses and sometimes cars. They might be for restaurants and brick-and-mortar businesses, but I don't think it's a wise idea, since those also fail. They are not for technology startup companies, and not just because they don't want to loan you money.

There are angels who will give you convertible debt at reasonable terms, if they like what you're doing. But, it's probably wise to give up a little equity to get someone with some money savvy working towards your success, and that's one of the benefits of raising money from investors that work with tech startups.

In short: Banks don't want you, and you don't want them. Debt is bad for you.
If we get to 10 I'll print membership cards.
Sheesh, what could you have possibly said on TechCrunch?
MediaTemple down for 30+ hours
symfony is the good stuff.
I leave finding that post as an exercise for the reader. Brett or someone else found and linked to it the first time this came up. It's on a blog post comment, not the forums.
MediaTemple is incredibly mediocre but no one else gives you a TB of bandwidth for $17/month.
If I don't get accepted to YC, can I work at iRobot? Any advice?
Pmarca: On Steve Ballmer on social networks
Personally I kind of do it like an artist, not meaning to be pretentious, but like an artist 'dabs' the spatially-defining features of a painting first, I'll code or pseudo-code, first, parts that are the most 'interesting' or that I'm most uncertain about. Thus I hit the bottom places that change the design the most, early. At least that's the intent. I will still hit some unforeseen detail that knocks some larger organization out, but, I do find that defining the 'interesting' parts makes it that much easier to fill in the rest.
Hmm. I don't want to step on any toes, so I'm just going to answer somewhat generally.

There are many smart people at iRobot, and most of em have many crazy ideas. Because the Home Robots side doesn't get government funding, iRobot needs to invest a fair amount into a product before it sees a customer. That means that the market potential needs to be vetted before proceeding. All of this is pretty intuitive.

They've turned around this product really fast. That's what iRobot is good at: making something that actually works, really quickly.

Like many companies, employees are early testers of the products.

One VERY smart guy at the company once quipped: "robotics is the study of the failure modes of connectors".

It's sad because it's so true.
send me email.
if you can, get traction first -- your valuation will be much higher; investors pay a lot for momentum.

and start building the team early -- it's unlikely you'll get funded as an individual.
I've heard good things about Chase small business loans. This looks like a good resource for info on lots of banks:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,5837,00.asp

Interest free credit cards are an easy way to go as well. 1 year interest free and then you can switch it to another card or take out a loan from your bank directly with a fixed rate and pay off the card.
Internet friends do not count as friends.
Sometimes they do. Not in this case.
Have you actually tried to use the whole TB? :) I think this deal is along the lines of "unlimited" internet that cable companies offer and "unlimited" hosting that many shared hosts "provide."
What does this have to do with Ubuntu? As far as I can tell, this runs on anything that can run Python and Gnome.