skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The authors numbers are a little rich. If you have that much money to blow maybe you just go to Amazon and buy everything. Here are some numbers that are more realistic.

> 1 Server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 for Email, SharePoint, Domain Controller, etc.

Use a workgroup instead of a domain. Host your email on GoDaddy for $5 or $10 a month instead of running your own mail server.

> 1 Server running W2K3 Server as the front-end for the web-based app.

$149 on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/MICROSOFT-WINDOWS-SERVER-2003-USER/dp/...

> 1 Server running W2K3 + SQL 2005 as the backend

$795 Get rid of the extras on the cd you just need Windows and SQL Server

http://cgi.ebay.com/Windows-Small-Business-Server-2003-Premi...

> 2 Desktop machines for Development, with VS 2005 Pro, Office 2007, Windows XP

Buy $400 computers and use Open Office. Dell sent me an email today for a $400 computer with LCD Monitor, I deleted it but it might have come with office not sure use Open Office instead.

Visual Studio 2 x 137.95
http://cgi.ebay.com/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-2005-Professiona...

> 1 Laptop for the business guy, with Office 2007 + XP

$598. Use Open Office or look for a laptop that is a little more expensive that comes with office
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7757623

------------
Totals

$400 Developer Computer

$400 Developer Computer

$598 Laptop

$795 Windows + SQL Server

$149 Windows 2003 Server

$275 VS Studio x 2 (137.95 each)

--------------

$2,614.00 excluding shipping

Personally I use Windows Server 2000, SQL Server 2000, and a free tag editor so I have not paid even close to this in software. But if you want to be legitimate then I would estimate less then $3,000 for everything you need.
Digg Tools Directory
For the Digg connoisseur... these are tools you need to keep your addiction fresh. Enjoy!
>But if you want to be legitimate

I presume a post-launch startup would have to be crazy to not license their Microsoft servers. Or does Microsoft never enforce its licenses against startups?
The Results Are In: Google's 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist
Don't get too many people to seed sites like Digg for you -- we got buried yesterday when we launched http://www.commandshift3.com because we got a lot of our friends Digg us and they blocked it. It got on the front page of Reddit and del.icio.us completely organically, without any action on our part..
Instant JavaScript Apps (John Resig)
Thanks guys, these look like good options, but is there anything more like Second Life that doesn't tie you into it's own system, like Linden Labs does?
I wish I could mod up more than once.
Everyone seems to be counting the initial cost in monetary terms.

What's the overall cost of pinning your company's technology to a single supplier?

With a FOSS-based solution (like LAMP/Ruby/etc..) you know you'll always have access to the tools required. The same really can't be said for an MS-stack (especially with products constantly being added and removed, and support expiring for old ones).
This is a fantastic resource when dealing with the traditional media. Something I would highly recommend you do, when you launch, in earnest.

The Care and Feeding of The Press:
http://www.netpress.org/careandfeeding.html
That sounds a lot like http://www.idrive.com/ or www.evault.com/ and or several other systems out there.

As I said, lots of people are doing online backups. Nobody else is doing secure online backups.

Building a secure system is a hard problem

Exactly -- that's why it's something which I can do but nobody else has done yet.

and [...] few people can judge how well your (sic) doing

Fortunately, with a doctorate in Computer Science, as the FreeBSD Security Officer, and as "that guy who found a security flaw in Intel processors a few years ago", I'm ideally positioned to show people what I'm doing right -- and what everyone else is doing wrong.

Is secure online backups a smaller market? Absolutely -- most people don't care about security. That's the price you pay for entering an arena where there are many established companies: The best strategy is to carve off a smaller part of the arena rather than trying to fight for the complete arena.
Check Your Laptop's Linux Friendliness at TuxMobil
Great question, we're running into the same issues with our startup http://freemyfriends.com. Not sure how to get the word out without paying for a PR campaign. At the very least, we're just looking for feedback on our API.
thanks myyoung, that's very good advice. I'll get those fixed.
This article on Guy Kawasaki's blog talks about how word of mouth from normal everyday folks is worth more than trying to get high-profile people to talk about you.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/12/word-of-mouth-v.html

Thinking that way would also push you in the right long-term direction. "How can I make a product worthy of being talked about?" vs "How am I going to get this in front of celebrities"
thanks. Probably a good idea, removed it.
IdeaBlob Funding $10,000 each month for the most popular start up idea
How to Not Choke
very true, customers matter more than high profile bloggers. thanks.
Facebook doesn't even have a majority share yet. Unlike eBay with auctions, there is no winner yet in the social network space unless you count MySpace. Also, most people have trouble duplicating eBay's services successfully. In contrast, for any given feature of Facebook there are probably already plenty of existing alternatives; before you even consider the primary competition like MySpace and Bebo.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/theres-no-such-thin...

Message boards, Reddits, YouTubes, Blogspots, Flickrs, MMORPG's, eHarmonies, Wikis, and of course just plain old email and the ancient concept of a home page still solve the problems that Facebook solves.

Facebook helps you find people and stay in touch. Personally, I have not had much success with it, and if you're not finding people there's really nothing to use it for.
I think that if you already have a destination and some technology of your own building a Facebook app could be an investment. You'll probably have to create something resembling an API to your own site/technology just to create an app inside Facebook. That same effort and the knowledge you gain will help you take advantage of any new hot "platforms" in the future.
I realize I'm howling in the wind by replying 13 days after the fact, but I just noticed this.

I would view the sale of "sex.com", at whatever price, to be a good and natural example of free markets tending to reallocate resources for near-optimum utility. I believe I read your parent post correctly as claiming that domain squatters serve a beneficial function by auctioning off domains to high bidders rather than letting fast-moving hobbyists set up disappointing web sites at those domains, and pointed out that the hobbyist could sell the domain just as well as a squatter could -- thus the squatter doesn't provide any added value for society as a whole.

So no, I would not "rather both sides walk away sad", and likewise I would not agree with most of your characterization of my comment. I'm sorry I was not more clear.
An array can be variably-sized in C (C99, that is). And thank you, I know the difference between an array and a pointer. You just seem to have arbitrarily interpreted the question to limit it to C89 and a fixed-size array in order to make your solution work.
ok, adding works properly now. Thanks for bug report.
The biggest problem with Microsoft software is imo not the price, but the complicated licensing structure of their software. When reading pages on microsoft.com about licensing you will get a headache if you're not an accountant. With Linux you can simply deploy another server if you need one, without thinking about all those licensing programs and restrictions.

A related question that i have is: would a startup be less attractive for potential buyers like Google and Yahoo if it uses Microsoft technologies?
This is a point that I wish the article had chosen to make: if someone figures out how to bend the rules to gain an immense advantage and unbalance the game, all that happens is that the rules get changed. It's not as if the size of a hockey goal is determined by the laws of physics.

And, indeed, unwritten rules are handy because they can be changed on the fly as necessary.
Imagine if every one of your VPSes or servers used Windows... you'd have to pay MS for every virtual machine that you add to your setup and if you used SQL Server, you'd have to pay for replication servers as well.

To run a site that gets 100K uniques a month, you'd need $4K+ worth of software just to keep growing.
Ow. That's harsh. They also did http://www.songza.com/ , which I think is pretty elegant.

Here's the response to the Quicksilver Clone accusations:
http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-...

At the end of the day, these guys are pretty sharp about UI, IMO-- whether they cloned something or not.
Thanks for that reference. 2 things about it enlightened me:

1. Hacker news is not the only place to read stuff like this. (although, for me, it sure seems that way now)

2. The children haven't made it here yet. (and hopefully they'll stay where they are)
dhouston- good call on having a big story. The VC's could literally care less about the features of your product, they want to know how it's going to be thing that will be a common-place word in 4 yrs and you have to paint that picture vividly for them.

I would disagree on the pitching in front of a mirror thing. And actually i should add this as #14- I recommend that you _don't_ have a scripted pitch. Have a deck of slides that serves as a framework for the conversation but just talk about it naturally. If you truly believe in it, this should become second nature and they'll smell the candidness whereas a scripted pitch comes off as brittle and less engaging. You want it to be anything but mechanical IMHO.

sean
Its cheaper to become a microsoft partner which is free and then get the software action pack for about 400 dollars. This will give a small startup team all the ms software they will need to get the product made. They also send you a disc 4 times a year with the latest software and updates. It even includes office, vs, all the new silverlight tools etc.
No. I'm sure plenty of the old users are still there. The problem is that there are too many new users polluting the community with less than worthless comments and submissions that are completely off topic from what was once the norm and driving force behind the community.

Reddit was once a great place, but its time came and went. Now there's n.yc, and whenever this site starts to drift off on a tangent, something else will crop up to keep us entertained. I think it's just the cycle of life for social bookmarking sites.

I have been working on an algorithm to solve the problem, but I'm not yet ready to release it out in the open. :-)
sure, in generic terms. Our lawyer was instrumental in getting 3 - we splurged a bit and hired a very reputable firm in Palo Alto that is well-connected. We paid more than we would have liked for the legal work a year ago but it's paying dividends now in terms of introductions. The other intros came from just random networking. We live in AZ but I drove my truck up to SF and couch surfed the past month just going to events, shaking hands and meeting people. I had a list of people I know through various user group involvement and presence on listserv's so i contacted them and tried to have a different lunch lined up everyday. I used Meetup, Upcoming and googled "Bay Area User Groups" and tried to lineup a different event every night. I actively used Facebook and my blog to solicit intros and tell people what I was doing, switching my network to Silicon Valley temporarily and finding events via that. I met great contacts at the Startup Weekend that was held in SF. And the whole time I was writing a series of posts on my trip essentially live-blogging it to meet more contacts. You can read those here if you're interested-> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/tags/sfroadtrip

There is no "typical intro" to describe - they happened in the most unpredictable/serendipitous ways, but having the conversation-starter of "so I drove here from Phoenix and have been sleeping on friends couches so i can be in the mix for our startup" was a powerful lead-in to be able to talk with people and get them to listen.

I know PG is a big fan of the idea you should really be in the Bay Area to give your startup the best chance of success. We have our company in AZ right now and moving wasn't an option so this was the next best thing we figured we could do. Definitely very happy with the choice.

sean
You brought up the "vast majority of students".
guys, lemme clarify this- when i said "deferring calls from his wife," he was politely saying "honey, gimme 15 more min" because he was so into it. It really wasn't rude at all and perhaps I should have better explained it or left that out altogether.

sean
Why Arent DBAs Obsolete?
The main difference is that, except learning to fly planes (although I've looked up nearby flight schools, know how much time+money it requires, read up on the basics, and learned what is required to get a private pilot certification) and working with OLPC, I have done these things in my free time already, even concurrently. And when I had more free time (just a couple of years ago), I did them more often.

There is just very little doubt in my mind that the choice afforded by a nice passive income would help me do more things that make me happy.

Also, I hate Doritos. :-)

Know thyself, I guess.
True, but I don't think you can use the action pack software in a production environment. It's more like MSDN software; for internal use in development/testing scenarios. Even still, it's a great deal and is highly recommended if you run any MS software in your shop.
Mootools head apologizes, fires developer over JQuery Misinformation
Thanks, I was desperatly trying to remmember that name! Heres an article about them: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2006/sb20060...
I think that MySpace proves that going the MS route can be viable. PlentyOfFish.com seems to be doing pretty well also. I agree with 'idea' that the price isn't the issue, the complicated licensing structure is the administrative nightmare.

I used to do all MS at the company I did IT for, but now that I'm on my own I concentrate on LAMP. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
Before you worry about the when and how, you should take a step back and be clear on your launch time goal.

With your initial launch, you don't necessarily want a big PR hit that draws 1000s of users to checkout your site. What you do want is a small group that joins your site and gives you feedback. Go for the big PR hit when you are more sure from your small user-base that you have a great product.

That was our plan. Fortunately(or unfortunately) we posted on the techcrunch forums and some people loved it and passed it to digg and soon it made the TC homepage without even submitting to them--making to TC was our 3 month goal.
I just wish someone made all the transparent PNGs available in GIF so they'd work easily with IE6. Anyone know if it's possible to automate the process of putting the little white pixel dust around the images for transparent GIFs that work with colored backgrounds?
Polar Mesospheric Clouds "exquisite thermometer" for CO2 effects
Chris is a good guy. I imagine that must be a little scary, leaving a high paying job to go it alone, but I am sure he will do well.
Some Western Digital networked drives prevent users from sharing files
This has nothing to do with it being statically sized or variably sized. You have to know what size it is when you are going to reverse it. The solution presented works as long as the programmer knows what the size is.

If you want to posit any kind of sane question, then you can have a sane solution.
He argued that the mental cost constitute a barrier. A barrier of non-zero costs.
orkut.
As long as Wikipedia is still working. ;)
24-bit PNG is vastly superior to GIF. Rather than give up PNG's benefits I'd suggest hacking IE6 into compliance.

Check out http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
yep your right, you can't use it for hosting your app but you can use it to develop it. The example they use is you can use it to run your own interanet but not a clients. Cheaper than an MSDN sup as well.
You are never going to lose the tools to develop stuff. MS still supports asp classic on the lastest build of iis etc

The thing with the MS stack is it improves every single release and gets stronger at a better pace.

I am a developer that makes my living using MS tech to build sites and they make my life easier with each update to their platform.

You are never tied to a platform in these days, if you decide that you want to change platform then you hire the talent and change.
You should launch on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Mondays still feel like weekends, and Friday everyone wants weekend to happen. Thursday is also not as good because people wait for fridays.
Well, suppose I have an array `A' of size `len'. How would you write an algorithm that reverses that array in place, without using any temporary variables, and that works for arbitrary values of A and len? I think the answer is "you can't". You can't claim to have a solution for the problem if it only works for a fixed input, and if the solution itself would be different for different inputs.
Hey, I have been following your site for a while now. One of my submissions (unsuccessful) to YC WFP was a concept highly similar to flascarddb/quizlet. This project has not launched. And don't worry, it looks nothing like FlashcardDB :)

Quizlet is obviously more powerful, but has a lot of superfluous functions. The drag and drop thing is a cool addition but probably has little impact on actual learning. I also don't think the page layout is optimal. But hey, he's a high school student and they have >80k users.

I wouldn't do text-entry verification unless you can make it fuzzy -- which is extremely difficult for typed input. Last time I tried in Quizlet, you are marked incorrect unless your answer agrees 100%. At most, I'd make it a suggestion function that tells you if you are on the right track or not. This is something I'm intending to implement later on.

Feel free to send me an email. I've been thinking about this, on an off, for no less than two years, and only recently started building a related product.
Notes on startup culture as a hedge against the arrival of "The Hard Times"
Wouldn't people just downvote all others and get all their friends to vote on his own? I didn't read it carefully; maybe they have something to prevent that.
But the 2015 projection was based on FB having 52 million active users.

It now has 58 million....and this is likely to be 100 million sometime in '08.

Hence the conclusion.
in fact the projection was based on 48 million active users (92% of registered)...
Enso seemed to just show a lot of idiosyncratic ideas about how UI design "should" be. The idea that the user should type some extra command, or hold down some extra key -- that's all crap. I'm a loyal Quicksilver user who bought into their arguments and tried using Enso at work on WinXP for a few weeks, and Quicksilver beats Enso hands down. Quicksilver just works and is friendly, whereas Enso tries to convert you to their quirky UI cult.

I like the idea behind Enso's "commands", but why the hell make it mandatory? Make the default action what the user expects by default, and allow the user to override it in exceptional cases -- a la Quicksilver!
LD48 - 48 Hour Game Programming Competition
If you need a kick start to your creative process, or need a reboot give this a shot. It's one weekend of intense programming and nerdery. Doing these competitions has shown me just how much amazing work can be done in a short time by passionate dedicated people.
I think it's nitpicking to say that the current version of FF doesn't support Acid2. It's clear that MS doesn't care to implement CSS correctly - and they only reason they can do that is because of their extraordinary market share. That's wrong.
I disagree with this whole line of thinking.

The most important reason to continue submitting xkcd and Coding Horror links to news.yc is the comments. When I see an interesting article come in over RSS, I often click over to news.yc to see what the folks here have to say about it. Smart people read this site.

By contrast, I almost never read the comments on Coding Horror itself. I don't know that crowd.

Secondly, it's easy to just skim past the Coding Horror and xkcd links. It's not like they take up more than two lines on the news.yc page. It's not like news.yc has a thirty-second load time when you click the "next page" button.

Thirdly, these sites have limited traffic. It's not as if xkcd will suddenly explode and generate 50 posts per day, all of which will be submitted to news.yc.

Finally, everyone is a newbie once. There are several sites that I've been introduced to by seeing them cited repeatedly on news.yc. I think it's foolish to assume that people "can just read Site X on RSS": how do I know that site X exists and is worthy of a spot in my RSS feeds unless I see it getting recommended over and over by smart people?
What do you mean by "everything is turning into software"?

Also, while I agree that there's effectively infinite demand for new software (I can't imagine a day where all software companies and open source projects stop writing code), it doesn't mean that there's infinite room for new software businessnes -- especially the ones that start with a few hackers in an apartment cranking out a webapp in 2-4 months.
First of all, MySpace is not a startup and they have plenty of money to burn. They chose MS for many reasons, including the fact that they can hire a ton of people who know the platform. MS also did a lot of custom engineering on SQL Server to help them scale. If you read that giant article from CIO mag you'll see that this was one of the biggest plusses. If you're rich & have plenty of cash on hand, you don't have to worry about the cost. But if you're a startup, cashflow is everything.
Of course they do and yes, you'd have to be crazy not to use licensed software since you couldn't upgrade your software very easily and you'd be exposed to every security hole that someone discovers.
What about the lack of WPA-Enterprise? At least for me this is a huge problem.
this would be my +10 of the day
It's an urban legend. Einstein was not a polyphasic sleeper; he was a heavy sleepy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep#Urban_legends
For comparison-based sorts, no. There are some good links if you google "lower bound of comparison-based sorting algorithms".

Knuth's question was a joking reference to http://xkcd.com/342/
Mozy, Carbonite, and all the other big ones I have heard of seem to be Win/Mac only. Linux might not be a huge market, and there are DIY solutions, but personally I would pay for an easy to use linux backup system. Tarsnap isn't exactly what I need, but it's the closest I've seen yet.
Right brained, or left?
Surprisingly, I was almost equal on both, 52% right, 48% left...
Way beyond cool: autotest + growl + Doomguy + Rails
Vonage founder Jeff Pulver: Tel Aviv is the Hi-Tech Startup Capital of the World
When your product is mature, it could be very different from what you started out with upon launching. It's hubris to think you'll get it right the first time. I'd say, therefore, don't worry about stuff like this at all. Launch but don't make a big stink about it on the blagoweb.

In other words, you don't want the Marimba Phenomenon to bite you in the ass.

Disclaimer: I'm a wage slave and I have never worked in a startup environment.
They're onto my ass. Go to get moving.
The more stories that are submitted here, the more often this kind of thing starts happening, unfortunately.
Rucola, a RubyCocoa application builder
Thanks. The comic doesn't mention what the algorithm does. I thought I heard "search" in the lecture not sort.