skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In his personal, excellent talk (as the 1st commenter on Damien Katz's blog post wisely notes), Damien Katz shares and talks about quitting to do a startup when you are not young and single but older and responsible but still have that startup urge on simmer/low.

Laura (his wife) and Damien's share their differing responses/perspectives on what the personal/family risks were in the comments on his blog post below:

http://damienkatz.net/2009/02/couchdb_and_me.html#comments

In the beginning...

"Sell our house, live off the savings and build cool stuff... There were a lot of reasons not just money...

The first was just educational - I had interests in a lot of areas. The first was, distributed systems. I wanted to know more about them. I wanted to know how to build them... It seems crazy but if you're going to go off and pursue a Master's degree - you're going to quit your job, you're going to have to pay your tuition - and there's no income - and the end of it you have a degree. An Education...

It was about more family time. I had a beautiful one-year old and I didn't want to spend all my time at the office, working on somebody else's crap...

I wanted to see what I could do...

And this is the reason why my wife was interested. It would be an interesting story...

No wants to be wrapped up in this consumerist lifestyle, where if you have money you spend it...It was a good thing it forced us to downsize...

I wish I had sort of a vision... It wasn't like that - it was just day after day and letting it bubble into my consciousness...

The development process...It was really stressful once I decided I wanted to build it because I didn't know how to build it...I couldn't see past all the complexity...It just took a long time grinding at the problem, thinking about it...

I really just went into a panic mode. I was thinking I was a total fraud, I don't know what I'm building, I've got my family wrapped up into this - I don't know how to build it - so I got on Amazon and ordered Code Complete"
Leasing is a replacement for the buy new, sell after 2-4 years model. That's not an uncomment way to own a care, some places more common then others.

That job, it does reasonably well.
> Truly amazing - giving away the source code!

They had to as part of the terms for the Knight Foundation Grant. Not that it's any less amazing, or anything. Just saying.
I tend to avoid demo apps that require me to enter my payment info right off the bat.

I don't know of any studies, but I would guess that many people feel the same.
He appears to be purposefully trolling in this post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001257.html

However, he never admits it. I suspect that although many of his posts might not start out as trolls, he is quite happy to engender a loud reaction without any real concern as to the accuracy or utility of what he writes.
I have no data to back this up, but I know that I would think twice about signing up for a "free trial" that asked for payment information.

Really, the only way to know for sure is to do an A/B test on it and compare the conversion rates.
I'm operating under the assumption that you're using the magazine billing model -- sign up today and you will be billed in 30 days unless you cancel in the interim. This is opposed to the shareware billing model -- sign up today and you will not be billed until you make an affirmative decision to purchase.

The magazine model has a lot of funnel dropout at the first stage (sign up) and fairly little dropout at the second stage (cancellation). The shareware model has less drop out at the first stage (sign up) and hideous dropout at the second stage (decision to pay).

For a service, I'd go for the magazine model. (A lot of non-technical customers assume you're going with the magazine model even if you're not. I get an email on a weekly basis asking to cancel a downloadable free trial.)

One possible exception is if you think your free trial is likely to be in-freaking-sanely sticky for users that start with it. In that case, you might want to make up the difference in conversion rates in sheer volume. Another possible exception is if you get business value from free trial users. For example, if your software has strong network effects, or if you are running an online game and free players are essentially bonus content for playing players, then you might want to encourage as many signups as possible even if you knew a-priori that you would fail to monetize most of them.

Note that if you collect information prior to collecting authorization you've got some headaches to think about beyond the scopes of conversion rates -- information security, whether your payment processor will let you do it, etc.
I like _Working Effectively with Legacy Code_ by Michael Feathers. It's a collection of techniques for bootstrapping tests into an existing code base - carefully, incrementally restructuring the code to add enough tests to safely perform deeper structural changes. At the same time, it's ultimately a book about improving legacy codebases (testing is just a major technique), so it focuses on using testing when it's most useful.

(Also, maybe it's just me, but a book that starts from, "Help! I just inherited a C++ project with ten years of rot and half the comments are in Norwegian! How do I even start adding tests to this without breaking it further?" seems a bit more practical than one that starts by applying unit tests to example code designed for convenient testing. It's seldom that easy.)
Sputnik Observatory
Fat Free CRM - Ruby On Rails-based open source CRM
And you think that uncle Larry will make them rich?
Sorry I missed it. You need to do this again Hua!
The title that I originally posted with this link seems to have changed. How does that happen? Thx in advance for answers
This article gives a wonderful overview of the challenges:

"Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard"
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988407

(site is down currently.) google cache:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:13tlOSQwtjAJ:queue.acm.o...
Howard Rheingold: Crap Detection 101
Drop the free trial. You've got a free version - if you need to 'convince' people, point them at the free version.

If you would like to do a 'first month free' kind of deal, collect payment/payment information up front, but drop off the cost of one month from the total. Or, allow people to cancel within 30 days for a full refund.

Essentially, I agree with avoiding 'free trials' that want credit card information - I am always afraid that it's going to be a nightmare. But if I know I am signing up to pay, that's a different story. The "being able to cancel within 30 days for a full refund" rings much better to my ears than "30 day free trial with payment details collected up front".

In fact, I hate "trial versions" altogether. I much prefer that either it's free, or it's not.
thanks, good to know (both about types) and to get over to type 2.
Your spouse is still a human being, so you can really only trust them to the extent that you can trust the most trustworthy human beings. Of course, there should be unparalleled trust between spouses, but there are still times when a password should be secret. Passwords to resources regarding one spouse's employment shouldn't be shared with the other: if not for the trust issue than simply for preventing liability. Also, while I might trust my spouse not to deliberately abuse any password-protected resources of mine, I might not trust the security-awareness of my spouse, e.g. carelessly saving passwords in browsers on public or shared machines or simply underestimating the importance of password secrecy.
Perhaps just add another commandment about giving attribution and credit (and not representing others work as your own) to the existing TED commandments:

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/05/the-ted-commandments.html
Enterprise-ready Twitter Management: TweetDeck for iPhone Delivers
Odd. His shortlist consists of you-will-never-be-rich's... except for:

> If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich.
Yeah - if I'm asked for payment info during a demo period, I'll probably just move on and find something else. For one, my wallet generally isn't near my computer - but even if it is, I don't like giving out my CC number for something I may use once and then uninstall (because I might forget to cancel the payment plan).

As a startup, one of the things you're selling is great service. So get some contact info and contact them with a few days left and ask if they'd like to re-up.
As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board, and then all the features are missing too. It's a lose-lose.

I haven't found a single task where GIMP is less obnoxious. Most of the time I give up -- sometimes I'll try to use ImageMajick or PIL, other times I'll get a Mac or Windows box with Photoshop or Paint.NET
I don't use Google because it's cool, I use it because I'm familiar with it and it's always been fast. Other browsers probably rival it in speed now, and in fact I switched my browsers to Bing a week or so ago just to force myself to try it, and I've rarely been disappointed or even aware of differences with its results. As for niche browsers, I really don't think there's a market for them (especially for geeks or hackers) when a nominally clever google search can yield as good or better results.
For an artist, aren't life's ordeals the very grist for the mill?
The GIMP's development process has strong central control around a unifying cognitive model.

Unfortunately the people in charge are idiots with terrible taste, and they've been under siege so long that they're deaf.
I once tried to break a thick frozen pizza into two parts with a hammer. So, cooking stills aren't a priority.
The vaccum the article is referencing is the DC31 - http://www.dyson.co.uk/store/product.asp?product=DC31-IRSBL - with the Dyson Digital Motor, which I assume is branding-speak for what we're talking about.

As others have mentioned, the AirBlade - the hand dryer that uses this motor - is awesome, and generates some serious breeze. Sadly, it's almost too smart: you use it somewhat differently than you use a normal hand dryer, and if you don't (and use it normally) you loose most of the genius of the design.
Why would you have that many bookmarks? Trying to make search engines obsolete?
I guess this is reflected in the popularity of the "app store" for iphone - and now others trying to replicate that (not just for phones either). Its the proprietary equivalent of the open source repository approach.
Here's a short python script to optimize your firefox databases: http://pastebin.com/m155f9e6e

Close firefox, run it, be amazed. People have been claiming phenomenal speed boosts (mostly if your profile has aged a bit).
This guy has a huge mouth. Why would he do an interview with the Times again if his previous interviewer there claimed to disclose information told in confidence, alleging murder no less?

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/cele...
There are similar services but the author questions the integrity and security of those services.
Passwords to resources regarding one spouse's employment shouldn't be shared with the other

I totally agree with this: however passwords/passphrases related to my employment are not something I worry about in case of my untimely death - they are known (or can be reset) by my employer.
what a great news!
Wait a second, there's still one thing missing ... you would then have to kill the doctor who inscribed the password.
... must have talked to
I've been looking at this software for a week or so. It has great potential but it's not ready to deploy just yet. I've already found about a half dozen bugs and crashes with the demo data that ships with the source.

However, once the bugs are ironed out this is going to be great.
The scientific approach works for figuring out how nature works because nature doesn't try to game your system. TRying to measure performance of people in any area will inevitably lead to people gaming the system to optimize the score and not the actual goal.
"The Professional Chef's Knife Kit" by Culinary Institute of America teaches almost every knife skill. I learned from the step-by-step photos.

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chefs-Knife-Kit/dp/047134...
> Why would you have that many bookmarks?

Why shouldn't I? Firefox 2 handled it fine.
The rotor however has no magnets or coils attached.

What is the rotor then? The wikipedia "reluctance motor" article mentions the rotor having flux barriers. Is it something like an iron daisy?
Watercoolr - Gossip for web applications
I hope you're being intentionally daft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
True, that example drifted off topic, but I was responding to the notion that there should be NO secrets between spouses. I suppose there's a difference between a secret and simple nondisclosure. Your spouse should probably know that there's something you simply can't or don't need to tell them because of security reasons.
FogBugz does it the right way. 45 day free trial with no payment info up front. After those days are up, they ask you for payment info.
Perhaps because when we finally do conquer aging, it's going to cause societal disruption unseen since humanity's beginnings. Chances are good that you won't want to live through such a time.

Think about it. It takes time and money to commoditize any new technology; wealthy early adopters are often required to help the technology evolve to the point where it's ready for the masses. Remember when only the "rich" had phones in their cars? And the way ordinary people would often snicker at the very idea of such an indulgence?

Now imagine a time in which only the "rich" can live forever. Suddenly there's not so much snickering, as there is the sound of axes being sharpened.
IPhone Push Notifications for any IMAP account
Fantastic feedback. I can't believe how much this makes sense. I'm going to take your advice.
I think the Internet has and will continue to have profound effect on how we interact with the information, and most likely, on our cognitive processes as well. It is unclear, however, whether the overall change is progress-positive, progress-negative, or progress-neutral. Also it is unclear what can be done to prevent the change: the genie is out of the bottle at this point.
There's an article about pubsub here:

http://www.igvita.com/2009/06/29/http-pubsub-webhooks-pubsub...
He's Cory Doctorow -- the Mary Sue characters in his fiction have massively over-inflated egos, are mostly worthless to others, are extremely paranoid and delusional, and tend to dick over everyone close to them.

In one of his short stories he has his wife and child die (who were somewhat fleshed out), and doesn't seem to care a bit.
Disagree that college bound students have higher IQs than average. There are many factors that determine one's interest in college, and means and motive aren't tied to IQ.
I would offer a cancellation policy within 30 days. The way I see it, there are only two reasons why anyone would get payment information up front.

A: To 'trick' people into paying for something they might have decided against buying. (Bad reason)

B: To limit people who try to take advantage of unlimited free trials - buy using credit card info as an identifier, you could tell who's already had a free trial and who hasn't (to some extent).

If it's for reason A, don't do it. If it's for reason B, do it, but don't charge them until they confirm at the end of 30 days. Send them an email with something like, "We hope you enjoyed your free trial. If you are happy with the service and would like to continue using it, click here and get a promotional 10% off your next 3 months." Anything to ease your customers over the second hurdle of committing to using the service will be good.
Let them signup without payment information. It promotes easy signup and you are much more likely to get people to try it out. I know from experience.

Loose the free trial because you are giving a free version away which is enough to try it out.
How about the burden on an already overwhelmed medical system because doctors are focusing on nonhealth related distractions.
I disagree with dropping the free trial just because you have a free version.

It's always a nice gesture to let users see paid plans before any money is exchanged.

There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is letting the user test drive your software with no limitations so they can evaluate if their needs will be fulfilled.
it's cheaper. just like off-shoring IT. Lots of patients needing complicated or expensive medical procedures go to India, China, Thailand, etc...
Which is kinda what he's saying. He explicitly says that if he could do it over again, he'd have stopped at the point where he could live comfortably but not extravagantly.

I used to wonder how people like Bill Gates could resist walking away once they'd made their first ten billion, and doing something fun or personally fulfilling. If I were Gates, I'd be living on the Moon and looking through a telescope at Mars. But upon thinking the question through a little farther, I realized that if Gates were the type to do something like that, he'd never have made that first ten billion in the first place. He would've quit after his first ten million, without the resources to do anything but live well on Earth with the usual expensive toys.

A depressing paradox, when you think about it.
I came up with the same conclusion a while back for my projects, BUT it only makes sense if there isn't a feature differentiation between the Free and Paid products. If the Paid products do come with compelling features then it will make a lot of sense to have a Trail period as it will give potential paying customers an opportunity to "test before buying".

Having said that, asking for payment info upfront is generally not a good idea when you have a trail period. But then again, if you do not pick it up, you might get some abusers who won't cough up the dough after the trail period is over.
Live Web, Real Time: It’s Gonna Take A While To Get It
my favorite is determine if an int is a power of 2: if(!(a & (a-1))){ // a is a power of 2 }
This is really pretty great. Spent a few minutes adding contacts and tasks, and it went pretty well. Readmore is right about some of the demo data bugs, but I haven't ran into anything when i started from scratch.
The 10 Worst Partners For Your Start-Up
I wonder if they are going to release their iPhone app code as well.
Keeping Billy Mays Alive With Twitter
A few notes: I spent the last few minutes reading the updates from Billy Mays's son. Very emotional, brings me down to earth. Real and genuine and something traditional media can never convey. The account of recent days is incredibly sad but his account on twitter and his father's account on twitter serve as a very interesting tale on our times.
Using Deceptive Design Elements to Emphasize Product Features
The anecdotes come from bank tellers. They 'talk' to a lot of people.
FDA advisers vote to take Vicodin, Percocet off market
Collect the email addresses. You will be able to monetize a certain percentage of your users in unexpected ways. Maybe because they use your free version for years and finally decide to pay.

Don't scare people into denying you the ability to sell to them out of fear or mistrust..
Unpaid intern at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and at the same time worked Drive-Thru at a McDonald's (High School)

Application Developer at Cingular Wireless (College)
So how many of these do we see this in ourselves?
Anyone have any thoughts on how this compares to SugarCRM and vTiger? SalesForce.com? Comparing screenshots, it looks a lot like SalesForce.com, but I haven't used either, so I dunno.
Huh? He asked if the list was by submissions or by votes, and I was pointing out that his answer was right at the top (by submissions).
what would you ask for?

I'd ask for the other side to name a number, and then counter with a higher number, because in addition to specialized software engineering skills I have also learned the first rule of salary negotiation: it is never in your interest to give a number first.
Data.gov - Raw Data Catalog
The privacy concerns here are obvious... Neat service otherwise, but I don't trust too many people with my e-mail.
The web provides more "thinking food" although it is distraction sometimes.
RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case
Test it yourself. Any studies or advice is likely to tell you 'it depends.' Any advice you get gere will be 'we do this' or 'I like that.'

Can't beat real data that applies.
The motherboard on my XP machine died and I dug out my old w2k machine and (amongst other things) I installed OpenOffice. I only use OO for word documents and spreadsheets but it has served my needs without problems. So why can't I convince anyone else to try it? My guess is that they know Microsoft Office, and they feel safer being in the same boat as everyone else. Any problem won't be their fault. The old FUD.
Agreed, here's a previous submission for past comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465653
Interesting that they are doing these commercials for browsers when only 10% of the population or less could even tell you what is and or name one.

Hopefully they are teaching this in grade, middle & high schools! Though that is doubtful!
I think it depends a lot on context. There are some kinds of code where unit testing is just about the only way to test it at all and makes a huge amount of sense. There are other situations where unit testing verges on being a complete waste of time. One of those is that which the author describes, where you are writing what is essentially glue code between several large, complex components. Your code is simple while the components are complex. Mocking the complex components in order to test the simple code usually ends up having very low value to effort ratio. Instead, a functional or integration test that verifies that all the components work together correctly is simpler to make and more useful in terms of the results it produces.
#11 The one that writes lists like these.
People seem to be very loose with their account info these days when it comes to convenience.

You'd never give your password to someone if they asked you in person, but if it's a website, that's a whole different scenario.
Pretty sure that's Rajiv from Dropbox. I can confirm all 10 fingers made it through the onion cutting. Fwiw, he wasn't actually cutting through the onion there, just a centimeter or so into it. Probably not the best technique, but minimal chance of blood.
Today is July 1, not April 1...
http://jottit.com/pk9my/ - a two page version (I hate clicking on thumbnails) courtesy of python ( http://pastebin.com/f4e261330 )
After watching his video on YouTube where he says he wrote it "20 twenty years when I was in college", I think he wrote it when he was a student but now, he is a professor. I agree that the writing style seems odd.
BSNL Wireless Broadband Service for Goa
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is taking great initiatives to keep its existing subscribers happy and to attract new subscribers to its state owned telecom service. Recently, the profit level of BSNL reduced drastically due to the high level of competition through out the country. We have been seeing great improvement since then in the quality of the services offered by BSNL.
The "already-overwhelmed" medical system in Russia? Paid for out of pocket (I assume, the article doesn't say but I have never heard of an insurance that would pay for that)?

(Besides, the laws of economics tend to ensure that supply will match demand when the market is left alone. If we weren't working so hard to disconnect all the market forces that go into causing that Econ 101 result, maybe our system would be less "overwhelmed". The food I purchased today did not take food out of your mouth; the medical services this woman purchased don't have to take medical services from you.)