skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going from zero to $5000/mo is definitely great as that means you've created some value somewhere. But $5k is not really sustainable as a business for three people. It's a great side-job for one person, or good total income for one person who lives in a low-rent / low-cost area.

But for a team of 3 people, you can do much better than $5k just selling your time in consulting.

It's not clear how you'll get from $5k/mo (nice side-job income) to $50k/mo (Good bootstrapping income for team of 3) to $500k/mo (ok, now you have a business that scales).

I'm not being critical here -- It's just that SaaS math has me scratching my head wondering if all that work for all those customers with such small amounts to show for it is worth it.

Would you rather service 200 people for a total of $5k a month with 3 bodies to support or one solid consulting customer @ $5k+/month with just yourself to support?

I'd imagine that you'd want more revenue so you can have a business and not just lifestyle income to support one person. Going from 0 to $5k is one thing -- the advice here is good for that. But getting from $5k to $50k, where you need to be to have sustainable business for 3 people, will require much more substantial effort that's not clear you can achieve with these methods. Indeed, it is not even clear what your margins are at the $5k/mo revenue point and whether that will even be sustainable given the amount you'll need to spend on Customer Acquisition, Customer Support, and slaying the Customer Churn demons to retain your necessary high monthly subscription rates. This is where most SaaS companies die -- trying to achieve this necessary transition.
Doesn't someone already own the trademark for Soylent? Here is Rob's trademark application dated February 21, 2013: http://www.markhound.com/trademark/search/sBxK5WeM7 It seems (to me) incredibly unlikely that someone hasn't already at least tried to trademark it for use in protein shakes or other foodstuffs. And whoever owns the rights to the movie Soylent Green might want to have a word with him if his food supplement ever becomes popular.
Depends what you mean by "mobile".

The non-Atom chips usually have real Open GPU drivers that work the same as the desktop ones; the Atom chips [AFAIK] are the ones that primarily suffer from being PowerVR-licensed things with badly half-working "open" drivers.
> Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce.

It's definitely part of the secret sauce, but I wouldn't call the moderation aggressive - it'd call it targeted to preserve culture. If MetaFilter has a first defence then it is the 5$ account wall, the second is the (almost legendary) snark, the third is the moderation. Moderation is almost always employed as a last resort, and it's rationale is normally documented.

The "secret sauce" of MetaFilter is really the community and everything else works to preserve that. The moderators of MetaFilter are the last resort in that process, but their are neither "aggressive" nor numerous, they are just very well chosen - not by algorithms, but by other existing moderators who actually understand the organisation/community they work in.
Read the entire article. In it he praises hackernews then says it needs to filter to top 10 items, as slashdot did. He says twitter is fundamentally broken. He says reddit is too big.
Licencing of components is done before you, well, put those components inside a million phones.

Someone who "tries to make their devices as open as possible" chooses components that can be made open. Someone who intentionally chooses a component and does not ask/licence it's driver to be open - hasn't even tried.
Nobody noticed this but Soylent actually made its debut in the matrix.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY

Truly the food of the future. (controlled by machines.)
Perhaps it will give an incentive for banks to write shorter contracts. Also, it could probably be automated with OCR software.
Your example is so naive that it just might become the one period you were embarrassed about.
Which was still the government's choice. I chose a turkey flatbread sub at Subway yesterday. I might still choose meatball should I go next week.
More Powerball players seeking big jackpots only
Koding: Cloud development, private VMs (with root) and much more is now public
IOS versus Android: We're looking at it all wrong.
As someone who has never touched C/C++ or managed their own memory, can you explain how other allocators work and how the performance differs from malloc?
The same story has been submitted multiple times, from several sources. Here are just a few:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165708 (much discussion)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6167331

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171813 (moderate discussion)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171979
This line of reasoning drives me crazy. Who cares if it's maybe healthier than just about the shittiest food available for consumption? Honestly, can you think of anything that wouldn't pass the test of "healthier than McDonalds"?

Beyond that, the distracted 16 year old is not suggesting that you consume McDonalds as your sole source of nutrition (in fact, he doesn't care at all what you eat); pretty much everyone agrees that eating only McDonalds is a terrible idea, how that gets twisted into a defense of Soylent is just baffling.
To clarify: My point is about the marginal cost of providing a customer with service. It's not useful to talk about a certain amount of recurring revenue if you have terrible margins. I could start a business that gives you two dollars for every dollar you pay me and reach $5,000 in monthly revenue in no time at all!
The mistake that Marx, like you, made was in thinking that inequality was a product of capitalism, when in fact inequality is the inherent state of mankind, and moreover of all living things.
go to https://koding.com to register.
One of the simpler fraud checks is velocity (rapid orders) and flag them. In this scenario, he should do a charge back (through his bank) to recover the funds.
> if Bitcoin is a currency because it can be exchanged for dollars

From the decision:
"It is clear that Bitcoin can be used as money. It
can be used to purchase goods or services, and as Shavers stated, used to pay for individual
living expenses. The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as
currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S.
dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors
wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money."

Exchangeability for other currencies isn't the only factor, the real factor is "it can be used as money", and further, that the defendant in the case agreed that it can be used as money.

> I guess the SEC will crack down on fraudulent dealers on ebay now.

If they were selling securities contracts (which is the issue here) on ebay , the SEC would already be cracking down on them.

Shaver tried to argue that the contracts he was selling were not securities contracts because they were being sold for bitcoins rather than dollars, among other arguments.
Show HN: I designed an optical disc solution for the new Mac Pro
Technology tends to get miniaturized over time.
You're welcome :) Glad to share it.

I'd love to take more classes in music history! I already took one (called "Roots of Rock & Roll", covered the mid-1800s minstrel show through the 1960s) that I absolutely adored, but unfortunately there aren't any other jazz, world or American music history courses offered (I wouldn't be that interested in classical history, I'm not quite ready for it yet, but we'll see where my growing musicianship leads me over the rest of my years).

If you have recommendations for good books that deal with music history, especially American musical history from the past 200 years or so, I'd be interested. I also would be interested in discussing this stuff in general; it seems like a lot of people, especially within the tech community, don't delve that deeply into the history and context of music (or really of art in general), so it's great to meet individuals that do.
I wrote something similar today, only I called it "When the Sh-t Hits the Fan with Your Startup": http://www.erica.biz/2013/startup/

In the post, I wrote: I firmly believe no outside problem (running out of money; struggling to pay bills) can’t be fixed by looking inside yourself and becoming a better, stronger person.

That may sound sort of cheesy and "self-help-y", but for me it was transformative. I had to have internal confidence before I could project confidence externally. In order to have that internal confidence, for me, it involved rethinking absolutely everything about our startup, from our name to our customer demographic to our value proposition. (I go into detail on what happened and how we re-thought our startup in my blog post.)

Once I rethought everything, I found a deep well of internal confidence, and we went from "teetering on the brink" to raising another $175,000 from outside seed investors quickly (some of whom had been sitting on the fence for months), and then applying to and getting into Techstars' first Austin class as well.

External problems like lack of money or investors saying "no" are often reflections of your own internal doubts or lack of confidence. As PG said, it's not fixed by bravado, but by going deep inside yourself and rethinking your assumptions. Why are you doing this? Of all the things you could be doing, is this the #1 thing that drives you every single day of your life?

Once you fix your internal issues, the external issues resolve themselves. However, this lesson may be something you have to experience to believe (as I did.)
jstz is a great JS library that we use at my startup for automatic timezone detection http://pellepim.bitbucket.org/jstz/
Nightcode: Awesome new Clojure editor / IDE
Thanks. Just trying to learn.
> She places a high value on social order, trusts the government, and assumes that the government wouldn't use any information they get from her e-mails to hurt her. And you know what? She's right. They won't. The government pretty much exists to protect middle-aged, upper middle class women like my mom. The status quo in this regard is consistent with her interests. She doesn't need a "corporate-owned media" to make her think that way.

This is very important and a strong reason why (some) people are OK with that kind of government. They have trust in the system because the system generally does protect their interests over the interests of other people.

But not everyone fits into that class and status. There are whole classes of people whose daily experience is that of gov't at various levels seeking to cause them harm, physically, emotionally, and economically. Political discourse and media representation does not include those people (arguably on purpose) and those people are not the focus of efforts to change how are society is broken and fails to provide prosperity for all its citizens. So long as there are people willing to have comfort and success off of the backs and lives of others, representative democracy has a huge failing point.
How would that work? I don't remember ever getting back a copy of a credit card agreement after I sent one back. I'm not even sure I've sent something back. Isn't that all on line now?
That's what I've done to date in First Law and it works well - as I continue to need more traditional configuration/UI stuff I am finding it a bit of a struggle though. Like right now I'm trying to create a controller/flight stick configuration screen and the number of choices continue to expand. Lots of work to figure out what works well for complicated UI structures.
The full press release https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yVP8Y7OJIGSKvNAdYv1AMLqk...
Yeah, and to be sure, a benefit in reinventing SMS is that they can restrict it to a limited taxonomy.
The bank is going to argue that he forged documents. They'll probably win not because he is in the wrong but because of the (quite proper) turmoil that would result. It's a rare judge that'll uphold the rule of law when it might be inconvenient for big institutions.
This comment, though polite, is quite dismissive of their accomplishment. I think you read the post and wrote your comment as if the $5/mo was the goal. Going from 0-$5k/mo is a huge step towards their very clear goal of building a larger business.
Imitations sneak into above-the-table supply streams all the time. The bootlegger need only imitate the package shape and markings, and even knowledgeable people may not notice.
The way that it creates closures for enclosing variables for packages is idiomatic and best practice. The way that it handles looping is idiomatic for avoiding certain kinds of common pitfalls. The way that it creates "that" variables for temporarily holding on to "this" for a while is idiomatic. There are a bunch of things like that that it does automatically.
Android open source maintainer quits over proprietary code issues
They can enforce it within their powers. Confiscating bitcoins like they confiscate wages is not within their powers. They can jail you for evading taxes apparently. C'est la vie.
I don't know why fhd2 was downvoted. Hippies created BSD and TCP/IP; suits created Compuserve and X.whatever.
The complexity of malloc comes from the fact that the objects can be of variable size and have unknown lifespans. Faster allocators usually work on "pools" of objects that have the SAME size and/or lifespan. Using "pools" lets you avoid the extra overhead.

If you can be sure that your allocator is only called in one thread, you can also avoid expensive memory fences.
No; did you read the article? AmazonFresh does not offer benefits at a yearly fee similar to Prime. The closest thing it has to that is extra benefits for those who purchase $300 in a certain time frame (Big Radish).
I would say Masters of Doom is one of the best startup related books anywhere. A team of incredibly passionate people that just wanted to make awesome shit and focused on that. Very inspiring.
I expect the most common age span around 21-35ish, tech savvy, not limited by any profession at all, and the website focuses around lifestyle/hobby, so there is no specific business activity to tie it to. Govt agency - must be bored at work during mid-day I guess :) I've just started gathering subscribes, so I got some time to research the habits. I'm trying to analyze activity on discussion groups, maybe that will give me some hints.
Technically, the man did nothing wrong. His bank agreed to the altered terms.

I've seen some credit card and bank card forms that include language which make the agreement void if its terms are altered in any way, but if it doesn't have that, there's nothing really stopping you from doing the same.

That said, legal teams for credit card companies and banks are notorious for finding ways to beat you with technicalities and/or drag their feet through the court system so your own bills rack up. They can claim bad faith, and/or fraud (which is a hot button) and add to the mix a DA willing to create a name for him/herself by putting away a scumbag white-collar "criminal" (I.E. Joe, the Photoshop user) and you've got a lot of risk behind it.
I mention the reasons for using SunSpider. They're effectively micro-benchmarks that exercise various implementation features on their respective platforms, they're easy to port, and simple to understand.

If we treat them appropriately and carefully (i.e. we don't look at two scores and use it to make an absolute judgement, but simply as a starting point for investigation and thinking about what it implies about the platform), they are of some use.

Even with the transcendental-heavy benches, it might still have been the case that there was some other implementation issue that slowed down asm.js on those benches. It's good to confirm that there aren't.

NBodies suggests asm.js costs associated with double-indirection. NSieve suggest that asm.js ARM codegen could be improved relative to x86. Binary-trees suggests that Dalvik may have an issue with highly recursive code. Binary-trees also suggests that there may be a perf issue with the default NDK libc's malloc (or free, or both) implementation.

All of these things are useful to think about, as long as we avoid the pitfall of using the benchmark as a judgement tool, and remember to use it as a starting point for analysis.

Lastly, I felt the exercise was useful in confirming that across a set of commonly accepted microbenches, asm.js was generally able to hold its own. It's good to confirm these things empirically, instead of assuming them.
I agree, and I don't mean to be dismissive. The point of my comment is that the post here is useful to get to $5k/mo, which is certainly laudable and better than many can do, but unfortunately it won't help much to get to the larger business goal. Indeed, many SaaS companies die precisely at this stage - they have decent single-digit thousands per month revenues that can't really support the business and have trouble making the transition to the larger, and necessary, double-or-more digit thousands per month revenue. Which in many cases is not even possible given the constraints of the market, churn rate, acquisition, and support costs.
I happened to work with one of your co-authors a handful of years ago. Did you happen to use a ThingMagic reader? I worked on the software side of the fixed readers (arm-linux based), not the small embedded reader modules. I also added a lot of improvements to the python API for rapid prototyping using the embedded module.
I'd rather see stats on projects that have delivered, not just ones that have achieved their funding goal.

I think Kickstarter also is more constrained on what kinds of things you can raise money for, which may help its percentage of projects that reach their goal metric.
I'm 24yrs old, this is my first business. I conceptualized the design myself. Did the web design myself, the packaging design myself, and now I'm trying to do the marketing myself. Any feedback is greatly appreciated :)
This is why many professionally drafted contracts will have somewhere in the integration clause[1] language that says that the agreement can only be modified in writing, and only by a person with a specific title at the company.

[1] http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/contract-integ...
It's just like Amazon Prime, except all the prices on Amazon aren't inflated by a ludicrous markup when compared to other online stores. (On top of a delivery fee or annual subscription.)
UTC, not GMT.
Tesla Q2 shareholder's letter
If you assume a specific target, there is always a way to get to them.

If you're talking about making a browser secure against internet-based attacks, there is not always a way. This type of security is merely extremely, overwhelmingly difficult.
Yeah, but what smartphone vendor is willing to take a 20x hit on performance in exchange for open blob licensing? Performance sells phones much more than blob licensing ever will.
He won the first one, which left him only having to pay off the amount he owed (no cancellation fees). I hope he doesn't win the second one, as I'd expect ridiculous fees to be unenforceable on either side.

If a massive credit card agreement had a cancellation fee of $10, I'd expect to have to pay it. If the fee was $200,000 then I'd expect a court to say "Don't take the piss".

Just like we keep arguing that ridiculous terms in EULAs shouldn't be enforceable even if someone clicked ok, the bank shouldn't be held to this.

The contract was deemed valid though, which I think is awesome.
IIRC there was some documentation or firmware source that OLPC only asked for after they committed to use the Marvell chip and thus had no leverage.
Thank you very much. If you have any questions I'm here to answer it. We really work hard on it and seeing it public is a great moment for us.
I think customers that signed up a long time ago get unlimited bandwidth forever so long as they don't do certain things (Tor, Bittorents, run a CDN)
I don't get the appeal to those of us w/ easy access to a wide variety of inexpensive, high-quality foods stuffs. Eating a varied diet is one of life's great joys, not a problem that needs to be solved.

Even if you want to avoid the joy of eating, isn't Ensure Complete Vanilla already a sufficient meal-replacement-that-looks-like-seminal-fluid drink?
AspectJ with Akka, Scala
A Still Profitable Tesla Motors Owes Its Success to Government Subsidies
Absolutely not green. Green is people.
Really? How do you realise it is carma whoring on such a high niveau portal? I see many comments stating the obvious getting their upvotes, not contributing anything useful to a topic. It is still carma whoring, just on a high niveau. This is what such a system creates and it forces you to scroll more to find the really useful comment. I know it works, I did it too ;)

Removing the system completly while integrating a clever report-system would have been more useful here imho.
Cloud email is cloud email. There is no open source solution to a subpoena.
One of the biggest changes in my style as an entrepreneur from when I started WePay (4 years ago) to now is that I used to focus so much on "the sell" - but now I focus on the substance. It makes the selling far easier, and it makes it easier for your team to sell it as well.
There appears to be a (badly titled) menu item that takes you to the company site, but it's hidden beneath the "hamburger" icon, which inexplicably appears even when the web page is full-screen on my laptop but is replaced by real menus at small screen sizes.

Puzzling.
Caching with ActiveResource
I would love to believe in this product, but there are just so many sketchy statements on the homepage alone that I doubt the ability of the team. People are literally going to entrust their lives to this product and the best third-party assurances they have are completely un-cited quotes such as:

"The taste is awesome."

"As a Biologist/Chemist I approve of Soylent and really want to start using it."

"My mood experience! It has improved a lot lately. And by a lot, I mean A LOT."
Here's a test, with this markup:

http://jsfiddle.net/GEynT

<h1>IFrame, normal</h1>
<iframe src="http://www.example.com/"></iframe>
<h1>IFrame, view-source</h1>
<iframe src="view-source:http://www.example.com/"></iframe>

Chrome does not allow it and instead shows a blank frame. Firefox will show the view-source window inside the iframe (which probably /shouldn't/ be allowed). IE10, interestingly, loads that page, and then redirects you to view-source:http://www.example.com immediately.
There's no need to be pointlessly snarky. Nobody has any idea how many units of the Ubuntu edge will "sell", because it's not for sale yet. It's ridiculous to consider an $800 commitment to back a product which will exist a year from now at best a "sale".
Capitalism might be the motive, but what's preventing AOSP from really taking off is the patents and copyrights on the proprietary device firmware.

Capitalism would get along just fine without patents and copyrights. No one likes to admit that though.
Hoping Oculus and EMOTIV Insight (http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_br...) consider a joint project connecting their 2 ground breakers.

That space puppy would make the technology of written language the equivalent of banging rocks together. The possibilities of creation & control without the limitations of writing, typing, and even learning means we could create, build, view, and modify ideas with just thoughts... so rad it's scary.
The point of recurring revenue is that you don't have to work to earn the $5k each month. Depending on how long they have been working on this, it's definitely a good investment of their time. If they wanted, they could now go and consult (at a higher rate) AND get a small pocket money each month.
So if you set both, will it auto-magically do multipart/mime/alt? That is pretty nice.