skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maplewood, NJ, Short Hills, NJ & Montclair, NJ Air Conditioning
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Pocket Programming: Learning New Skills Anywhere
The US is a dual system-- people are free to use whatever system they want, but business is encouraged to use metric, especially for trade.

There was a big push in the 1970s to teach and adopt the metric system on a broad basis-- I remember there were even km speed limit signs-- but it failed. Americans think in feet, inches, miles, gallons, and pounds....imperial still has the first-mover advantage 400 years later!
(I had written a long reply but then wrote this last paragraph and found it summed it up better than an essay could).

It sounds like a challenge; run up and meet it head on. Im sure your project has pitched numerous technical challenges at you previously. Now this is a business one. Throw yourself at it the same way as you would with a coding problem and you might find it surprising what you can achieve :)

(also if business copy and "spin" is your problem I am happy to read over any material to critique it; I've found a modicum of skill in that area in the past, so if it's useful to you then drop me a mail [check my profile])
Also you can do some freelance jobs in your field. You can make some money and learn more about B2B.
You used to be able to buy real Mate de Coca on Amazon. I have no idea how they never got caught for that until recently. They are working on bringing back a version without the cocaine now, last I checked.
Newspaper Model for Success: Ditch the Press, Dismiss the Staff
I really wish I could convince someone to summarize that book for Squeezed Books. Without having actually picked up a copy, it looks like a book with some good points and lots of fluff.

I guess the fact that I can't, easily, is indicative of why that site isn't going anywhere, though:-/
With those figures, I think cocaine is a healthier option
I work in B2B. Do you have something of value for us at the right price point? Sell me.
Could simplification be helpful? I'm thinking that in a conservative B2B industry, offering too much too quickly from an unknown probably gets your target's risk radar bleeping.

I spent a lot of time consulting for, managing projects in and selling into the wholesale banking industry - pretty conservative, slow to change and hard to break into. I found that simplifying both my offering and my message to focus on one or two major points of functionality and pain helped pique interest enough that I could get a decent conversation going, during which I could gently introduce other features and benefits.

In terms of long lead times I would suggest, if it's at all possible for your product or service, offering risk-free trials for a month or two. Manage the install, the maintenance, the training yourself, so the prospect has little or no reason to say no. Once they become users, and assuming your product or service is good, it will be easier to upgrade them to paying status.

A major feature of selling into the B2B space is to know who your buyer is. It is rarely an IT manager. It is rarely an HR manager. It is not always the Operations manager. It is very often, however, the Finance guy. This is not always true, of course, and many people have more or less influence over a given purchasing decision, but you need to know who those people are, what they care about and how to communicate with them in terms they each understand and care about.

To answer your question about how you decide whether to give up, I would advise you to do the above until you are 3-months from zero net worth. At that point, find a paying gig (consultancy, full-time job, whatever you need to do to keep your head above water), then use those three months to go all in on your startup - phone clients and push them hard, phone/email/meet with as many prospects as possible, and push, push, push. If it's going to fail, there is little harm in being harder-nosed / cheekier about the sales process. I would also, in that last 3-month period, look for a buyer for your technology, to at least get some return back on your investment. If, however, you land a contract or two during those three months, you can cancel the paying gig and continue with the startup.

Really good luck, whatever happens! Please do post an update - I think your story will be of interest to pretty much the whole of HN!

If it helps, I spend a reasonable amount of time helping people formulate business and marketing strategy. Happy to offer a specific opinion and ideas (gratis, of course) if you want to email me.
Help Us Test Google’s Hearing
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe he was also known for perfecting the move, wasn't he?
Hi nopassrecover, I have no intention of building in export funcionality into Mockups as of right now. There are too many possible languages and framework for a small company like mine to try and keep track of, so I'd much rather have other companies focus on a subset of them each.
We're always saying to each other, HTML + CSS is wrong.
We like PDF & PS & troff and plumbing on http://example.com/cod.pdf will open it in the pdf viewer.

fmthtml turns web pages into plain text.

But ignoring the majority of web content is really not an option. HTML can be pretty lightweight, we do have some renderers that do HTML3 and a subset of CSS really well and there's also Abaco that does a good job with HTML4, we've even got a canvas widget!

We could probably port WebKit if only we had a native C++ compiler but the incentive to do that is pretty low, we've got other cool beans to play with and you can pick up a dedicated Web browsing machine is less than the price of a round of drinks.
Introduction to Interfaces in Objective C, the iPhone Programming Language
This sounds like a hilarious opportunity. Seems like Google has a little bit of work to do before their voice-mail transcription will be ready for practical use.
Being down to 0 money left is quite different to bankruptcy, do you have large debts that are going to cause someone to file bankruptcy proceedings against you? Otherwise I would have thought worst case scenario was really just looking for a new job and you might know that you need to do that slightly before you fully run out of money.Lets imagine the lead time for getting any old job, starting and getting your first pay cheque is 6 weeks. So 6 weeks from running out of money I would start job hunting.

From your comments in reply to others I assume you are young(ish) with no dependents. That has to be the best situation to start a business in. You talk about perhaps doing this again in the future with another idea, but imagine in that future you are married, you have kids, you have a mortgage. I'm in that position and I can tell you it is a lot lot harder than it is when you have no body depending on you - I can go without for a while, but kids grow, they need new clothes etc. You also get more accustomed to a lifestyle as you get older - which is hard to give up (Thank God I built up a cellar over the last few years because I cannot afford to buy wine now!).

If you've lost faith in your idea or don't see it being a success then cut your losses now, but if you still think you can make it work my advice would be to go for it.

Good luck.

PS. Also you mention that you are doing everything from dev to sales and marketing. If you actually have contacts in the industry I would focus 100% on dev, then get them to look at the product properly. People you know don't need to see your sales and marketing to tell you if the product will be a success.
What about finding outside investors? Or partnering with a client? Your business idea may be impaired by your funding model...you didn't give yourself much of a runway. No matter what, don't cash out your savings just to stay alive through the holidays. It is too much personal risk-- it is better to dilute your equity with outside investment.

Also, pay close attention to your mental health. Working alone, under deadline pressure and financial stress can lead to poor decision-making.

You can always get another job but even that takes some time, especially in this market, so keep that in mind.

Good luck and keep us updated!!!
I have been meaning to finish writing some blog entries that detail the whole thing. If you're interested here they are in their not-ready-to-be-published form:

Short version:
http://www.nileshk.com/node/73
Long version:
http://www.nileshk.com/node/71

I've been meaning to finish editing these entries for a while, so I will try to do that sometime soon. If you'd like me to notify you when I've finished them, you can e-mail me at hackernews /AT/ nileshk.com.

The "long version" doesn't talk much about how I actually cured myself yet, but really details everything that lead up to it. But really, there wasn't much to the actually cure. I read the outline that I linked to, and it just made sense to me. I immediately read The Mindbody Prescription and it was like it explained everything that I had been experiencing and why it happened the way it did. After I finished reading it, I immediately just started trying to go back to normal and doing the things I do without restrictions. I started repeatedly telling myself "there's nothing physically wrong with me." After a week my pain was almost gone, and I told my employers that I'm ready to start working full time again (I was working part-time at that time). A month later I was completely back to normal, typing without pain and without fear of the pain returning, playing my musical instruments without pain, and using my hands and arms without any restrictions.

I did also take a look at the things in my life that could have caused repressed emotions. Things that had emotionally effected me, but I just wasn't dealing with. I tried to force myself to face these things by just thinking about them and trying to "feel" the emotions that they caused. This was a gradual process over the course of the next months, and is an ongoing thing I continue to do.

Now the reason this worked for me was because I immediately completely believed the ideas it presented. In my case things were lining up for me to come to this realization, I just needed it explained to me the right way (in a scientific, concrete sort of way that I can make sense of and believe). So there is this "leap of faith" you have to take with this approach, which makes it difficult for a lot of people. For me it was easy to take, because it made sense of everything I had experienced (even some things before the wrist pain), whereas before I was confused as to why such a thing could happen and only had useless diagnoses such as "fibromyalgia" or "thoracic outlet syndrome" from my doctors. For me, there had been lots of hints as to what was really going on, but no clear explanation until I came across this.

What I'd suggest (assuming you've already seen a neurologist and eliminated diseases like MS as possibilities) is read this book, and if it doesn't immediately make sense to you, just keep it in mind and start observing the patterns of how your pain occurs. Give it another read after a while and see if it makes sense.
I wonder what big scale incident will be so important and newsworthy that it would bring the web completely to a halt.

If the likes of twitter and Google were prominent when 9/11 happened, that would have caused big enough congestion in all the networks worldwide.
Grab a copy of "The little Schemer" (Daniel P Friedman and Matthias Felleisen) and a pencil and you can skip the phone and the notebook - oh and learn scheme of course.

Travel light but make sure you travel.
An FF team loses many times and wins also, the king of pop dies once only. This has effected me, I am not sure about profoundly, but to some extent. Mostly because I, like many others of whatever age, grew up with his music and I personally felt a sort of anger that he was covered into all sorts of personal controversy rather than allowed to give this world more of his talent through other great albums that he would have made.

There is a sort of sadness to his later life which I believe will be used as the example of the culture of the 21st century media. Media can kill!
This is a man who like Tesla offered the world so much and yet died so low. It speaks a lot about the society we live in. You do not need to like his music, or the guy, or his dance moves, but it would be hard to deny that Michael has entertained the world like no one else I've experienced and his record proves that.

When the queen will die, here in the UK at least, I am sure that everyone will drop whatever they are doing to share the moment because she is a person loved greatly. If the US and perhaps the world entertainment had a King, that is Michael and I believe that he is greatly loved.

I wish him peace and I wish that the world learns from this sad tragedy. He will be remembered as the King of Pop for sure, but he also tests our prejudices - our judging of him as a freak because he wanted to change his nose - our ignorance of the effect that his skin colour might have had on him personally - our refusal to understand the profound effect that his childhood had on him, instead to insist that he judged according to conventions, a grown man does not have a playing ground park, as a freak - but above all our irrational mania with Michael as the person rather than the artist. This is like being more interested in what Einstein ate for dinner, rather than his relative theory, or being more interested that some great author does drugs than some magnificent novel he has written. The world now grieves, not only because this man had so much talent, but because this talent killed him!
I have never come anywhere close to my limit. I think the highest I've ever gotten was a bit over 100 GB a month from the sites, with another 50 GB through my (private) web proxy (I have a bad Amazon tv episodes habit). My limit is 500 GB at the moment, so I'm not too worried.
Mainstream Media Still Has Eyes Wide Shut
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Best thing I've read all week.

(And from the title, I thought it was going to be about the speedy decline in the fortunes of Time Magazine....)
What does battery life have to do with tablet inputs? Tablets (at least, the typical kind and not the kind with built-in screens like the Wacom Cintiq) use relatively little power (much less than, say, charging your phone via USB).

Different tablets use different technology. The Wacom tablets use an inductive charge (from the tablet itself) to charge a capacitor on the pen. This means that yes, you need a special stylus. However, because of it, you can get much more precise location and pressure readings. You also don't need to change any batteries in the stylus, as it's powered "over the air."
FireQuery: Firebug enhancements for jQuery
Your PC/Mac doesn't keep passwords secure. Rec: buy software to fill gap
yes i'm ok to pay this service
What's your monthly burn? If you downshift to building something that will bring in $2k/month you have an infinite burnrate.

With our startup we had a six month financial abyss timeframe, which was doable but risky. So, we spent the last two months pushing out a series of products- we shipped four different things in those two months, with the criteria being 'novel, simple, and potentially profitable in the short term'. Fortunately enough, one of them has taken off on the App Store enough that we're on track to make 2-3k/month with it

Now, 2-3k isn't a lot... except for the little detail that my co-founder and I are living in Budapest! I'm American and he's Hungarian so it was a no-brainer for us, but if you are working on your own, pick a place!

From my perspective, living in America is a waste of money if you have an internet based income- by moving to somewhere somewhere in South America or Eastern Europe your money will go three times as far, and you'll have a great time in the process.
Yahoo CEO talks of revitalizing company
Chinese government blocks access to medical research papers on sexual subjects
Windows 7 upgrade campaign savings are limited for enterprises
Thanks johns for the mention !!
I'm honored to see that Napkee has been posted on HN!
Yahoo CEO: Web just need efficiency, not better strategy.
While I respect your desire not to use YCombinator to shill your company, you've got something that apparently is facing some growth problems. Why not at least include a URL, or description of your product to help us gague whether it's got legs? It feels like you're still keeping your product in the stealth mode, but at the same time complaining that it's not getting any traction. It's not clear to me how you expect something to take off if the company's only employee refuses to also serve as your PR person.
Two different takes:

1. If you absolutely love the idea you've built (like you were born to build this idea) take it to the very end. If you believe this is what your are meant to do then quitting will be a regret you'll never get over. And bankruptcy is bad but it is short lived (relatively).

2. If you are in the business because you saw an opportunity and are taking advantage of it... If you saw this as an opportunity, but don't love it for what it is, then get out before it causes too much debt, but not a minute earlier. In the meantime try like hell to get it to work but there will be other businesses to build.
Nap at Work
I agree in some ways with what you say, and it ring some of my own bells, but i would like to dig on one point i disagree with :

> In a free model there isnt any point in marketing the band

Why do you think this is the way, i would have said, quite on the opposite side , that promotion is the beginning and end of the free model, to make the only substantial income you have (gigs) worthwile.

Also, the reason i see this in a positive way is because, i personnally have very little esteem for the actual beholders of the music market, wich in my opinion, has a very conservative way of gauging the quality of music.

In fact, as releasing Cds is very expensive, and as we're talking about often multi-billion dollars companies, you see a phenomenon wich reminds me of the videogames industry, in wich you'll settle on very well known recipes that are proven to work. The amount of innovative stuff that reaches the mainstream is very very low. You could say that it is, by definition, but i would argue, and that's very subjective, that even some of the hits of the 80s wouldn't have been released by todays Record Companies standards , wich has never been so conservative.

Especially in artistic matters, quality can't only be gauged by the amount of stuff you're gonna sell, and even if it's a criteria, it shouldn't be the only one IMO. The generalization of music sharing on computers allows the growth of a much more liberal ecosystem here, and i think it's really for the better !

The question of wether people should be 'allowed' to think about music as a free thing, (in short , morally abbrogate copyright) isn't clear to me. Intellectual Property is one of the biggest foundation of today's economy. Questionning it is scary. I don't know if it should disappear in artistic matters, but i surely think it's a question we have to debate today.

We have a very important position in this, as the Open Source 'movement' is maybe the precursor of such conceptual trends. I think we owe to ourselves and to our peers, as hackers, to ask ourselves, and to question the facts deeply about these matters.
Personal income jumped (paychecks 1.4%) in May 2006
People here generally do not take offense at linking to companies/sites/products/stuff we've built. Why should we? It's only 'shilling' if it's pushing it where it's not appropriate. Otherwise, we like to link to the stuff we've done - we're proud of it, by and large. In any case I strongly agree that having something to look at would be useful.
As does Tony Hoare, apparently.
Interesting.

The chart says "$ per gram" so I had assumed the prices were already represented in US dollars.

Anyone else got info on local prices? Esp Canada, NZ.
Can we throw "insanely great" into the scrap heap with ninja, rock star, and the like?

To my mind, something that was "insanely great" would mean that it's great beyond being rational, which most likely would mean that you got a wonderful product at really cheap prices. It's not irrational to make really high quality stuff if you're charging appropriately for it, so the crazy part would probably come from pricing.
Google was pretty prominent when 9/11 happened. Most major news sites went down. Google actually mirrored a copy of cnn.com and linked it on the front page of Google.com under the search box. As far as I remember, Google itself never went down.
Who uses cloud computing? Startups do, VCs don’t
In general when most people speak of free speech they are concerned with political speech, not libel/slander/ordering an execution/shouting fire in a theatre.

And I do agree that all campaign finance law is an act against free speech.
President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo, Egypt
I have the feeling that Apple's approval team consists of three factions: (a) Those who approve nearly anything; (b) those who search for a way to access some kind of inappropriate material with the app; (c) perfectionists who want an app to function exactly like the HIG specifies. (a) makes up 20-30%, (b) 60% and (c) 10-20%.
Do what you can until September, if you can't improve the business then cash in 50% of the stocks ($5k) to live on until you find another stable 9 - 5 job. Keep working on the start-up while looking for a stable job, things could improve. If you find a job before things get better then wind up the business and try something else after re-couping the money from the stocks.

That's the beuty of a small start-up, you've got room to experiment and if it doesn't go well you can cut and run without too much loss. Just don't pour everything into it unless you are in love with the idea and know your potential market loves it too.
Here in Canada (west coast) it's usually around $80/g (cdn). This number obviously fluctuates based on quality, dealer, etc.
Social Gaming - Developer creativity to be replaced by Analytics?
In summary, you have a product you've been working on for two years. You have no sales and will run out of money to live in about six months.

You need a source of income! Unless just 1-3 sales will keep you paying your bills for months, you need to start making money outside the business. In the best assumption, your business will not be cashflow positive within six months: few product busineses are.

If you're committed to the idea, they by all means keep growing the business, but you simply can't rely on it as a source of income right now. Get a job, even a part time one, or do consulting.

I was in a similar situation in the late 90's except I was making sales -- just not enough to pay rent, etc. With about 3 months of runway left I got a job and it was the right decision. In hindsight, there's no way I could have built up the market in the limited time I had left and the "niche" was being commoditized.