skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that any percent is a fallacy. Most business plans and pitch decks include the requisite section on market size, but who cares? The only thing that matters is how many customers are you going to have. That cannot reliably be determined from a top-down assessment. You don’t look at a pie and just say, “I’ll take 1% of that”.

Instead you spell out through which methods you will gain and keep customers and how many you will gain via those methods. For SaaS, that could look like “We have x visitors to our website. We have shown with previous products and experiments a y percent conversion rate. From this, we estimate x * y customers at $d/month. With your funding, we should be able to increase the number of visitors to the product site by z% while maintaining or improving our conversion rate."

These numbers are not a factor of market size.

p.s. The only thing market size can tell you is what the upper bounds are for a product niche. But unless it's a very, very small niche; why does it matter what the upper bound is. If you hit that, you've got a good problem on your hands.
"because you realise that the point he is making is at this point, not that SQL IS relational after all, but that the Relational model is so absurd and stupid to begin with so as to be useless."

No, I was saying that your (and Fabian Pascal's) definition of a relational database is absurd and stupid and useless.

Your definition seems to be a server that enforces the relational model whereas EF Codd's definition seems to be something that enables the relational model.

EF Codd's definition seems quite good. It also seems to include IBM's original SQL system and Ingres and everything similar.

And your (and Pascal's and Date's) response seems to be a rather dishonest attempt to rewrite history and to change what relational means in order to make your stupid, stupid ideas work, so you can continue to whinge about SQL and NULLs.

It would be a lot easier just to learn to live with the fact that people need NULLs.
This is really interesting to me. How do you compare societies in terms of their materialism? Which are the most/least materialistic?
Appreciate the feedback. We've heard this from others. Then again, we have customers happily paying these prices. If you look at competitors in the space (RightScale, Scalr) we're on the lower end.

Keep in mind we include orchestration, monitoring, collaboration, real-time log feedback, command-line interface, REST API, not to mention EC2 templates for 1-click deployment of any open-source stack you can think of.

Besides making the introductory plan include 3 environments, any other suggestions on pricing?
Chrome is Google's best way to influence and improve that platform

You mean by pushing Google Mail, search, docs and other Google properties.
Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter
If you're in the trust industry then validation goes a long way.

I'd put that in the minimal column.
Announcing the Ember.js discussion forum, hosted by Discourse
It'll be a lot cheaper if you do it before having to hire lawyers (not to mention Amazon can probably yank your affiliate earnings for terms violations). Buy a new domain, change a couple bits of text, and you're done. An hour, tops.
The effective engineer’s handbook
We did it with Clerky during their beta. So glad to have them!
I'm curious. If you have a dozen or so Heroku apps and a few peers you collaborate with, what's your management strategy?
I guess my point is that, talking generally now rather than about any one specific site, we just don't need to put as much weight as perhaps we used to on what Google think of our pages this week. More and more of our traffic comes from personal mentions, passed on by people who are actually interested in what we have to their friends with similar interests, and people who find us that way are far more likely to be genuinely interested themselves and to enjoy our material, increase our income, or otherwise match whatever we created the site for.

People use buzzwords like "going viral", but really this is just the same old exponential growth of word-of-mouth recommendations for good products, speeded up thanks to modern communication technologies and the social networks they support.

Obviously we still make our sites accessible to search engines. It's not like it's difficult to do that if you've got real content and a sensible information architecture, and after all, a bit of extra traffic never hurt anyone. Maybe, if an enthusiastic person finds us that way, it could even seed a new network of people finding us.

But I see this becoming less and less of a priority and dedicated search engines becoming less and less relevant for a lot of sites as people learn to use social networks to spread the word. In particular, I don't see cbeach's original idea of a "search engine that ranks mainly on social-graph recommendation" adding much value in that scenario, simply because the social networks will probably offer similar functionality without needing a third party anyway.
Welcome to OpenNews Learning on Source
I said I acknowledge that woodsmoke is harmful and that I don't care. I don't hold a cherished belief that woodsmoke is harmless.

I do feel that my personal liberty is under attack when people like Sam Harris are out there, advocating that my life be regulated into a sterile, one size fits all dystopian nightmare of his own design.
I'm not sure the "corporate veil" stuff has much to do with company formation --- except to the extent that you incorporate and operate in crazy jurisdictions like Minnesota, where salary obligations attach to company directors. Most of the "piercing the veil" stuff I've read comes from directors intermingling their own finances with those of the company.

(This has come up on HN before.)
We are building hosted Continuous Integration platform for .NET developers
I managed to get one page in, no luck after that.

EDIT: link to list of buyables http://comicstore.marvel.com/Marvel-Free-First-Issues/comics...
I have a help button in my iOs apps, so that people can send me emails if they have a problem or a question. This email account gets a couple of linked in invites a day.
This isn't news. Chat and messaging are one and the same. You can message anyone, and you can migrate conversations arbitrarily between the chat and message UI, or even both at the same time. If you message someone who you don't have good reason to message, facebook will classify it as spam and send it to their "other" box.
Any remote jobs or must you live near Los Gatos?
Interesting, I may be wrong but I don't think its a 'fallacy' (after all if you got 1% you would be successful) so much as a 'unsupported argument' which is where you don't say "how" you get that 1%. The Derek Sivers link is also good in this regard.

The mistake is believing that people will randomly try your product. That is true if the threshold for their trying it is below their "don't care" point, but if it's going to cost them more than their "don't Care" point cost they won't try it unless sold on it.

Its perfectly reasonable (in my opinion) to go in with "The market leader here has an $X billion market, with Y customers. All of those customers have pain foo which our product version solves. We're going to reach those customers through the following channels with the goal of converting 1% of them to our product which is functionally identical and less painful."

That is a 'go to market' strategy that, if you are right about the pain, can turn your product into a going concern. But again, it solves a problem you know exists.

However having an identical product, especially one where you don't differentiate, means you have to get out ahead of the market leader in acquiring new customers and that is expensive and difficult. Not a good strategy over all.
how is that not a valid response? sure, it's not semantically accurate.

but, if someone says that, you know exactly what they mean. seems like a valid response to me any way you slice it.

p.s. this kind of attitude is part of the problem.
That could still be gamed by committing a lot if you are a malicious user. I'm sure they could figure out a way that would work but it seems the naive way is Not ideal.
Then why does my mouse turn into a cursor when I hover over them?
Public corruption in Africa? Shocking.

Sarcasm aside, this is a press release put out by a political party (The Democratic Alliance) that opposes the current premier (edit: of Free State). I'm not saying it's untrue, but the source definitely has an agenda.
I'll connect with someone in my field and location, because those are the connections I hope to foster with LinkedIn.

One of the weirder things I've experience is people "endorsing" my skills. Many of which are skills they've certainly never seen me use. I assume they were doing it for some sort of reciprocal endorsement, but I don't want my name attached to someone's skills that I know nothing about.
That's pretty sexist! There's no reason to think that women are worse than men at evaluating market opportunities.
I have read that it was a conscious decision for Windows 8 not to have modes, e.g. touch versus desktop. But, I think that was a bad decision. After almost a year of using it (since the developer preview), it still does not feel natural. I think Metro works well for touch and the desktop works well for traditional input. But, the mixture still feels forced. I think this app is a step in the right direction, but it really needs to be baked into the OS.
Thanks for changing the perspective on this story.

Look, I know linkedin's reputation so when I finally signed up, to keep in touch for jobs btw, I made sure not to click things without reading first. It's as simple as that. :)
The fact that it is its own process is a very small contributor to per-tab memory usage.
Are there plans to expand to other types of corp....or, more importantly to my own heart, nonprofits? (especially with YC starting some work w/nonprofit startups)

I tend to find most nonprofit information (especially on Legalzoom and maybe nolo) to be shaky at best, most everything appears to be written by for-profit corp lawyers that quickly read nonprofit statutes and modified a few for-profit corp templates/forms.

One example—unemployment & worker's comp regulations seem to be very, very different (YMMV, depending on state) for nonprofits, which led me (on a lawyer's advice) on a weeklong snipe hunt trying to procure insurance and trying to pay taxes that I didn't need.
Uh yeah ... Windows 8 has taken us all the way back to the Windows 3.1 days where everyone had a different cool app/utility just to make their machine barely usable. The last thing MS would/should/could want is dependence on third party apps for basic functionality.

The twenty, thirty, however many years have shown just how important and how defining the default settings are. "It's easy to change!" doesn't solve the problems with X default settings for just about anything.

It's like that Saturday Live sketch - "Warning: this is a bag of glass" still makes the, uh, "Bag Of Glass" toy a little problematic. And it's got me thinking about the 80's (or was that the 70's, those ole' memories...)
Or ggp is talking about Neosporin (and other triple antibiotic ointments).

But peroxide and iodine and rubbing alcohol are all also available, and plain petroleum jelly is available. And then most small cuts should probably just be washed with soapy water and left open to the air.

(also, the Wikipedia roundup on triclosan suggests it isn't a problem yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan#Resistance_concerns

Not that it is particularly useful to put it in soap)
Speaking as a dev, but from a user's POV, the thing that made jump to Chrome on release day was the immediate recognition that a single bogged down tab did not impact the responsiveness of the chrome (heh) and other tabs noticeably.

I remember, vividly, in Firefox: I would middle-click on a Slashdot link to load it in the background while reading the current one. My focused tab would begin to hesitate and sometimes altogether freeze for several seconds. In Chrome, only the spinning tab would be affected by their bloated DOM.
I would have hoped that this policy would also have been exempt from this pervasive mania for secrecy. The Harvard community in general is well-served to know: 1) that there is a different policy for athletes than for other students 2) that at least some of the "guilty" students were convinced by trusted Harvard faculty (possibly including coaches?) to take a "plea bargain" rather than inconvenience the Ad Board with making a proper determination of guilt 3) that the resident deans, who are privy to many of the secret actions of the administration, don't trust the administration, and they have good reason not to trust it.

Maybe we should have known these things already? Then what harm has resulted from letting the public in general in on it?
One advantage I've noticed: our angel investors seem to like the standardization and quickness of Clerky. They know exactly what they're signing and there's less back and forth.

I could see clerky going far beyond corporate formation; this seems like just the first step. We used it at first to raise our first seed round, but we continue to add new investors and follow-ons through clerky, since the documents are the same. There are plenty of other flows they can help standardize.
I kind of hope not, the biggest draw for me of playing PC/Steam games vs just playing console games is the deep strategy games available on Steam. Trying to play those with a controller? No thanks!

You could support both control schemes in one game, but then how do you make it so that the gamepad players don't get frustrated when playing against those with a keyboard and mouse?
A great resource for building a custom PC on a fixed budget is http://www.logicalincrements.com/.
I don't disagree with the OP's basic point about not making "get 1% of huge market" your strategy. As SoftwareMaven points out above, getting 1% of a market is not a strategy at all, it's a result, and it's not going to happen just because the number sounds small. But I do want to oppose the more general notion that you shouldn't enter crowded markets.

A market like CRM is not one big homogenous thing; it's got tons of nooks and crannies in it. Maybe you want to be CRM for bakeries, who, let's just say, are largely not using CRMs yet. You'll end up with a different product, but more importantly, you'll have different sales channels and marketing strategies. You go after an untapped niche with special requirements, maybe even one that's too small for giant CRM firms to target. You compete with all of those giant CRM companies by not competing with them.

Will that add up to 1% of the market? Seems doubtful, but ask yourself what percent of $18 billion you can run a company on. It's a lot less than 1%.
$1000 seems a little pricey, however, a grapefruit sized, sleek computer has a lot higher Wife Approval Factor than the "On Sale" computer case with red flashing LEDs I used for my server. Even at $900, I'm not getting one pre-sale, but something like this that sits comfortably on top of/beside my stereo might happen at some point.

The video card is a 7660, so probably the highest end graphics you can get in something that isn't pulling more wattage.

Something like this might make it into my living room at some point, but I'll have to see how it performs as an HTPC type of thing before committing. The SSD doesn't bother me so much, most content is streaming or going to be stored on a main server for me.

Does it support airplay out of the box?

I don't mind having to ssh in to get things to work right, but there's a lot to be said for something that "Just seems to work most of the time" for other household members.

Edit: Looking around, it seems the amd R series is too new to have many reviews, but the 464 is the top 'APU' in the lineup and seems to be targeted at some of the i7 line from intel. There aren't many for sale retail, but just the cpu and a motherboard would run about $450 if my maths are right ($229 retail for the APU, ~175 pounds for a jetway motherboard). So, the form factor seems to be adding a really large premium. Adding in memory, disk, etc. I can see it getting to $1000. This is also a 35W system, while I still think $1000 is above my pain threshold, a 35W system doing full-on PC gaming is a little mind-blowing to those of us who remember when Pentium-based computer was a synonym for 400W 'space heater'.
There must be some shifting in the geekforce. I just switched back to Firefox a couple of weeks ago on OSX 10.7. Flawless, which is more than I can say for Chrome or Safari.
We're going to be forced off of the planet by evolved pests and predators.

Doubtful. They may impact our growth or even trim back our numbers, but we're numerous and have lots of mutations too. If technology doesn't save us, it's likely that we'll experience some sort of evolution that allows us to adapt. Even back before modern medicine, the Plague only managed to wipe out 2/3 of the population.

one of our evolutionary advantages is that we can survive in space

I doubt we'll be getting many humans out into space any time before some sort of Singularity beyond which we're all just guessing anyway.
As mentioned in other comments, piercing the corporate veil is on thing, but another thing is that if you're doing business in NY and you're not incorporated here, you're going to have to register as a 'foreign agent', which can be costly, esp. for a LLC.

But if you don't reg. as a 'foreign agent' or are incorporated in the state you can't legally do business in NY state.

Hopefully your business lawyer knows their stuff and complained about the NY state LLC publishing law (posting ads in newspapers announcing your LLC). If they didn't, I would be skeptical of them.

NOTE: IANAL and take all of this with a grain of salt, I may be completely wrong.
Boston, MA - Programmers hacking Biology

Ginkgo BioWorks is a well-funded MIT spinout that genetically engineers organisms that make the world better. Stop building apps and work on something that matters: http://ginkgobioworks.com/careers.html
apply here: https://ginkgo.resumetracker.com/public/job_detail/83
The GPU is fine, but that build needs more RAM and possibly a better CPU. Would benefit significantly from an SSD; spend ~$100 on a 128GB SSD and watch your loading times drop.
RubyGem developers: sign your gem with PGP
Remember the recent Rubygems.org vulnerability? We don't want all that to happen again do we? But the responsibility lies partly on us, the gem developers.

The folks at Phusion have already signed most of our repositories and gems with our PGP key, which in turned is signed by the rubygems-openpgp CA. Will you be the next to sign? Go to http://www.rubygems-openpgp-ca.org/
A bit of a shameless plug here, but I launched a similar site a few weeks ago: http://applist.io

applist.io is mainly focused on B2B SaaS apps for freelancers and small businesses.
Chrome is far safer than IE:
1. built in flash (sandboxed and up-to-date)
2. built in PDF reader
3. security updates are not delayed
4. the filtering is very good
5. friends & family on XP or Vista get the latest version

There are other good reasons why the security is better, with the only downside being the invasion of privacy, where Google are no worse than others, so pick your poison.
Image support is planned actually (just noticed that is not in the wish list, will add it) but has some big prerequisites. With photos you have to be a little more careful regarding permissions, which means that users and roles should be supported first.

But it will be implemented at some point.
Please don't do this; it's annoying and unnecessary. The context for untog's comment was quite clear. A lot of folks wasted time trying to clarify something for you.
That's awesome...and I fully appreciate the complexity of all of this.

Maybe you could even just integrate that with Stripe, so you are a 1-stop shop. We go to Clerky to incorporate, setup bank account, and Stripe.

Signed, sealed and delivered.
WORLD WAR 3, ITS 4 DAYS SINCE THREAT, NORTH KOREA BATTLE READY
ICANN Coordinated Disclosure Guidelines
An Interview with Eric Meyer
I don't believe in SEO. I've always felt that they're just one tiny step above spammers. When one contacts me, I just tell them to go f* themselves.
Good designers and good developers have a lot in common.
A high-level talk I gave at Waza this year on how designers and developers consider similar things and build skills in similar ways.
The flip side of that argument is that two of the five biggest CRM vendors had single digit market share (2008; Gartner via Wikipedia) and ~40% of the market uses vendors outside the big five. It has high margins, few economies of scale and sales that are more relationship than reputation-based - in other words one of the markets you genuinely could get very rich off being a smaller player with a good sales strategy and a generic solution, power laws be damned.

You won't get anywhere near that mythical 1% without a well-costed and planned strategy, but the same applies to trying to capture a huge chunk of a tiny niche market like bingo card creation. Once you've stopped worrying about phoney percentages, you can afford a lot more false starts in the huge addressable market than with a misjudged niche product.
The article is not about woodsmoke.

The article is about how people react when you attack something. The article uses woodsmoke as an example, presenting many scientific reasons why woodsmoke is bad, and allowing some of the audience to experience the feelings that people have when something they like is attacked.

The comments in this thread show that it's a poorly written article and that most people didn't get that point. (Or were not interested in addressing that point.)
Obscure mistakes in law are like mistakes in memory management - easy to make, easy to miss, can turn out very costly later on, or may not turn up at all.

For example, if you do not set up any vesting schedule and things turn sour with your cofounder, you will be in for a rude surprise when it's time t divvy up the business. But if you do set up vesting schedule and yet miss out on 83(b) rule you will be in for an even more rude surprise when the IRS demands the tax on money you don't have.
Honestly, that would explain a lot. I think whenever you let technical limitations drive the experience you end up with a bad experience.
Money might buy "freedom from depression," but I suspect it does so by buying antidepressants and therapy.

I think Robert Sapolsky is on to the best explanation of depression: it's a disease rooted in biology and genetics, similar to (and exacerbated by) chronic stress. (Here's a lecture that I'm sure has been posted here before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc). Reducing stress can alleviate the symptoms, but really effective treatments treat depression as a disease.
To the point, trusting Coinbase for a successful bitcoin purchase can be touch and go.
Individual Developer - 90/10 (code/meetings)

I think 90/10 is a bit high. I have yet to meet a Manager who writes code (quick and dirty SQL queries or get latest => view changeset don't count as coding if you ask me). 90/10 might also mean you are not attending others' code reviews. Sitting in code reviews and watching the style and asking questions while they pass through their changes has helped me learn in the past.

Sorry I can't help much beyond that. I'd say I am closest to 90/10 as I can possibly get but even now I am chasing people trying to figure out the requirements.
I do - when are you coming and when are you leaving? This week is a bit busy for me but from Monday on I am okay. :)
Maybe I'm naive but I have to wonder how you can raise a decent clip of angel money and none of the angels told you any of this. Seems like you should add "get angles that are interested in the business and can provide more than just money"

Either way, nice read. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned :)
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