skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hopefully helpful critique regarding the business itself:

1. I'm not sure about Americans, but "lodging" translates very poorly for this Canadian. It's not that I don't understand it, it's just that people don't really use the word here. "Rooms" or "Beds" would be a better bet.

2. I'm questioning why I as a traveller would bother to "bid" on a room that I may know nothing about. Seems like a win for the hotelier, but a lose for me. I can stay at a hostel or hotel chain and have a reasonable expectation of what to expect. I can't do that at a B&B, but I can compare prices to get an idea of what would be up scale and what would be bargain basement. This site disables that, and brags about it. I really don't need to save $5 that badly.

About the process:

I think - humbly - that sometimes us geeks can get so caught up in the process of how we're building something that we lose sight of what it is we're actually building. This doesn't matter when you're making lego structures as a hobby, but it's completely relevant when you're trying to design a business.

How you do it is - in the end - largely irrelevant. Yes you can argue about productivity or the best way to get the most hours out of a day, but extremes aside it is not going to be what matters to your customer. I don't care if you used agile and got your product up in 10 hours or if it was a disastrous waterfall plan that needed to be redrawn 6 times and took 6 years to complete. I care about the product, and what it can do for me.

In this case (and I mean this respectfully) I get the impression that the process was the focus and the product was the afterthought. There's nothing wrong with that specifically, but it certainly shows through.
When you "go bankrupt" with code, there's often a huge penalty to your user experience. Presumably that code existed so you could do something and make things better for your users. If you take it away, or even stop maintaining it, you're doing less for your users.

Did you read the article? Eric Ries gave a good example of a piece of code that they had built, with technical debt, and which they threw away because it had little or no customer value.

In practice, I see it happen all the time. There's functionality in most applications that could probably be removed with little impact to user experience. Even on Woobius there are some chunks of functionality that are not much used at the moment and that we could remove without much impact on the users.
Some reasons:

1. I have very little clue what gets people to spend money. I keep wanting at least a plausible theory of how this could make money before I dive in. I am particularly discouraged by the idea of making a web site that requires high traffic in order to be ramen-profitable.

2. I am easily distracted. I find myself getting sidetracked at all time-scales: by administrative and sysadmin junk, by other project ideas, etc.

3. I find it particularly hard to implement a software idea that I've come up with myself. It's weird, but I find myself in a mode of "just wanting it done" instead of enjoying the coding. No joy, no work.

4. I don't tolerate mediocrity in my life. Just posted about this in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730261

These all seem fixable.
You react when you think he is going to blink, then.
Sometimes it makes sense to take that hour of savings today at the cost of 5 hours later, though. I've been on projects where we knew a competitor was coming to market soon, and sacrificed a bit on code quality to beat them. We ended up launching 2 weeks before they did, which meant that when they finally did launch, the press was all like "But can they compete with Company X, who launched a similar feature two weeks ago?" Doing things the right way would've added about another month and a half - if we'd paid that cost up-front, the press reaction may've been "But their relevance may be fading, because Company Y launched similar features a month ago."
I don't think its OK to screw up, but in the event that you do screw up, step up and take accountability for it. This all boils down to being honest with your customers.
The Moving Pavement

They're not widespread due to energy consumption, but most large airports have moving conveyers between terminals; and escalators (vertical moving sidewalks) are ubiquitous in malls.

House-Moving by Train

It's normally done by flatbed truck, but it is done.

Televised Outside Broadcasting

Justin.tv.

Personal Flying Machines

Um, hang gliders?

Weather Control Machine

[feverish paranoid conspiracy fantasy involving HAARP, Hurricane Katrina and global warming removed at the request of the commenter]

Combined Ship and Railway Locomotive

Containerization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization

Undersea Tourist Boats

Disneyworld's "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" ride.

Roofed Cities

Toronto's PATH. http://www.toronto.ca/path/

Personal Airships

Luxury private jets.

Summer Holidays at the North Pole

Check back in 20 years.

Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine

Ubiquitous urban CCTV cameras, TSA heavies.
Thanks for the cite (and for the underlying post). Agreed that it is a complex issue - depends on the intent of the parties, equitable factors, etc. As you note in your post, it is a bad contract that leaves you in this position of having to litigate over this in the first place.
Funny how they think a "Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine" is a good thing...
Safety concerns raised over popular wakefulness drug (modafinil)
"Its like asking for microsoft to support their new bluetooth mice on windows 95"

Actually, it's like Microsoft checking whether the mouse is made by Microsoft and then refusing to work with it despite the fact it would work perfectly.
Arm-swinging riddle is answered
This article is a few months old, but I ran across it and didn't remember it being discussed here, so thought I'd post.
This is extremely important to note. I would absolutely not buy a notched carabiner any time soon, and as far as I am aware, nobody makes them for climbing purposes.

However, as a counterpoint, it's rare that people take big dynamic falls on rappel anchors, as you don't usually climb above them nor have the kind of slack when finished with a climb that would cause this. Even so - I still prefer the idea of a simple, crazy strong, anchor.
I agree-looks mutually beneficial. Yahoo's strength hasn't been search for a long time and MS is trying to break into that market. Sounds like MS gets more traffic to search and Yahoo gets more traffic to sites where they actually have strength (e.g. yahoo finance, yahoo sports, etc).

If I've learned anything about MS over the years it's that they don't break new ground very well but they do a helluva job coming in after the fact and muscling their way up (eg Windows, Xbox, now search...)
which they threw away because it had little or no customer value

It's easier to type that sentence though than it is to actually come to that conclusion. Assessing customer value, or even better, which customer between two competing customers matters more is the hard part.

You don't solve technical debt with technical decisions, as it's a symptom of business process scope creep.

Unnecessary code is not technical debt. Code supporting unnecessary process is technical debt.
I'm still boggled by the length of the deal. Ten years is so long in internet times. Ten years ago, I was browsing with Netscape navigator, there was no Google and my hard drive 256mb. How the hell can either of these companies know what's going to be happening with search and PPC in ten years?
I was under the impression that "Organic" in Canada is mostly a meaningless title. It isn't enforced and can be applied to a wide swath of products that most people would not consider Organic.

I checked Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification#North_Ame...) and it says that the Government has published a set of Guidelines but applying organic labels is up to "Private Sector"...

However, doing some more google-fu I found (http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/orgbio/orgbioe.shtm...) which seems to imply that on June 30, 2009 the Canadian Government finally got it's Organic ducks-in-a-row.

So, that seems to imply that only within the last month did Canada actually gain an Organic label that is regulated and trustworthy: http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/orgbio/stainte.shtm...
It’s Finally Official, Microsoft & Yahoo Make A Deal, Yahoo Gives Up On Search
I like Fugue a lot as well. It's also CC-By Attribution which is a very easy license to work with.
Debian only "does too much" if what you want from an OS is a simple platform on which to build your own bespoke solution. The BSD operating systems, and OpenBSD in particular, abdicate a lot more responsibility for actual system management and application deployment to the sysadmin, while Debian provides opinionated defaults (in the form of package install layouts and configuration styles) that work for most environments.

Both have their place, but for general-purpose servers, I find Debian to be a much more productive system on top of which to build solutions. For firewalls, embedded storage devices, or load balancers, on the other hand, I still reach for a recent OpenBSD install disk, because the smaller footprint and security hardening have real advantages for systems running such a limited set of services.
if you'd like someone other than the author to say it's good as your qualification of what can get posted here, here it is: it's good.

i came across this blog outside of hn, i ended up bookmarking like 10 pages (pretty extensive compared to other sites).

it's not like every post on hn is going to interest you. for me, when reddit was the only place i knew of, quality articles were 1 in a thousand, you learn to scan...here it's 10 out of a 100, pretty damn good -- but i don't expect to find an aggregation site where every link is meaningful to me.

take a look at the hn headlines, there's plenty of industry gossiping, and just waste of time speculations about the future.

sure it's not fart joke equivs thaty you find on many aggregation sites, but just because they were spell checked and the grammar is nice, and the person talks intelligently, or has a job remaking the same jquery code everyone else is remaking....doesn't make it quality -- quality is tough to find.

this dragon guy puts thought into what he writes, that's for sure. i don't expect him to be right, i expect to find another person truly exploring. he's not some 'wanna be a blogger so i don't have to work' delusional mess-up spamming the world with the latest hunches he came up with while reading cereal this morning...you can tell this is another person who takes life very seriously, wants a rich experience, has spent lots of time thinking about these things, and is sharing, and he's pretty good at that..sharing his perspective.

browse around the site, and compare it to the other headline articles from this last week on hn...if this doesn't make the cut, then there's a whole bunch more that doesn't make the cut which should could use your criticism more than this post.
I don't eat organic vegetables due to a lack of preservatives.

I cook only for myself, and I often find my irradiated, preservative laced, genetically engineered food going bad. If I bought organic, I'd never get to eat anything. :/
I really think more people need to worry about eating nonprocessed food before they start discriminating between organic or not.
And that's the one they got right.
That totally depends, though. If you're designing general computing or consumer goods, fine. If you're designing a custom point of sale program for a particular industry, that statement clearly doesn't apply.
So, the book Omnivore's Dilemma asks a question which I'm not sure is sufficiently answered by this study, but may be answered elsewhere (and I just don't know): Is it correct to treat food as a commodity. For example (ripping straight from the book here) is a carrot grown in Michigan the same as a carrot grown in Florida? There is a base assumption that we can treat the foodstuffs as commodities, but if this is not true, we cannot believe this study.

If the organic is grown in already marginal land, while the "standard" food is grown somewhere fertile, is it possible to get these results, or possibly results indicating organic food is less healthful?
see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721929
The Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) has 70 acres of enclosed floor space. I think people in 1900 would count that as a roofed city.

Personal airships == private helicopters.

Personal flying machines == ultralights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huntair.pathfinder.arp.jpg
Agreed. I didn't say adding developers proportionally affects output, and this is true with engines as well.

A particular engine architecture scales proportionally up to a point, but then gets harder to get a little bit bigger. Same is true with dev teams...
Why Twitter Beat Second Life
Good point. Mods, feel free to edit the title.
The best way to avoid traffic jams is to adjust your speed according to the person in front of you by accelerating smoothly and decelerating without braking. Sudden stops cause traffic waves.

http://trafficwaves.org/

It's best just to leave a big gap between yourself and the car in front of you and drive at a slower speed. Your average speed will probably end up being the same anyway as if you had continually accelerated and braked abruptly, but it would be less frustrating.
"we design for ourselves"

Be very, very careful here. You can just as easily lose your shirt as you can come up with a hit. What your users will buy and use may be very different from what you think.

What sometimes works in the consumer market often doesn't work in the business to business space. There are cemetaries full of companies that designed for themselves, especially in software.

When I hear someone like Steve Jobs say he doesn't do market research, it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway.

Sometimes I think posts like this are just part of the big PR machine to maintain the "Apple mystique". Would you bet a billion dollars of someone else's money without talking to anyone first?
That's absolutely true, that was not what I had in mind.

Websites, gadgets, consumer goods, the stuff that you interact with on a daily basis, the kind of stuff that apple produces.

Effectively that is the crux of the 'we don't do market research', if you are your own consumer then you can get away with that. As soon as you are selling to people that will use the stuff you build and you yourself will never use it you are going to have to do very much your best in order to make sure that your customer is happy because you can no longer look in to their head.
That is why Apple decided to design high tech products, as everyone with this vision should do.
Right. Who actually thought organic foods had more vitamins?
I guess I'm a control freak. Having other people invest in my idea means I have certain obligations to them, I would feel less free to go about things the way I want to. Most of all it would create a sense of urgency which I don't have now.

I also happen to have a decent job where I am the lead developer on a product -- which in itself means I get to make the choices I want to make and I don't have to worry about all the stuff I don't care about (sales/marketing, finances, etc...).
I think these articles are possibly quite damaging to startups.

Not everyone can design the product they want - its quite a rare skill. You get wrapped up in irrelevant features.
Which is why I said: "This would obviously depend a lot on the orientation of the spring when it impacted the helmet".
Preservatives are found in processed foods, not vegetables. Organic vegetables generally don't last any less long than normal ones.

They make lots of organic frozen prepared foods. You can get organic macaroni and cheese in a box that's just like the regular (but tastes better). There are organic canned soups, pasta sauce, frozen burritos, etc.

You name it you can buy it.
You make a good point about controlling the delivery of a tangible good. That may get around some of the regulation that applies to money transmitters, but either way I think this type of business is going to require some rather expensive lawyers to review.
It sounds like you don't want to run a start-up. Weighing expected return against current income means you're only interested in results, not in playing the game.
"it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway."

Fwiw, I don't want watch tv. (And I know a few people who choose not to watch TV) Too much of a time sink. I don't even own one. The one practical difficulty I found is that most game consoles seem to work with TV sets (and not with monitors, of which I have a few lying around the house) so I don't have a game console either.
WSO2 Releases Web Service Framework For C++
What, no flip-flops or tatoos?

I find it interesting that so many of these "predictions" consider technology while completely ignoring popluar culture. Notice that no matter what the prediction, people are still wearing Victorian garb. The easiest prediction of all would have been that people would wear more functional clothing.
At least until they wreck and hold up traffic for hours.
I always think of Google when I think of this.

A new webapp gets used by Google employees internally first, and you tweak it based on their feedback. But even with 10,000 potential employees QA'ng an app, you still get stinkers like Page Creator and Notebook.

Why? I think it's because no one can stop something from being released at that point. I'm guessing at Apple they either involve employees at an earlier point (judging by their secrecy w/ the iPhone I don't think this is true) or cancel more late-stage products, regardless of the lost time and money.
Colorado here, or I'd offer to lead. ;)

(One weakness of being self-employed is that when someone wants to take the day off and go climbing with me, I have very few reasons to say 'no.')
How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World'
Somehwhat more accurate predictions from mid-century

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE
There are lots of reasons to eat organic foods- besides health benefit. I quote

"Organic farmers build soil.

Soil is the foundation of the food chain and the primary focus of organic farming. We’re facing the worst topsoil erosion in history due to our current agricultural practice of chemical intensive, mono-crop farming."

http://nutiva.com/nutrition/organic.php

That site gives a lot of -interesting?- reasons to eat organic. But that reason in particular stands out to me. Anyone seen pictures of the dust bowl? Here you go~

http://www.paranormalknowledge.com/articles/wp-content/uploa...
"orangegreen"
I often feel the same way because I shoot holes in 9 out of 10 of my own ideas. I also think that you should have some competitors as it demonstrates that what you are doing actually has a market. Keep working on ideas, and work on executing better than the other guys.
Oops, I forgot the biggest reason: grad school.

I want to become a professor so I'm paid to indulge my curiosity, teach, and write interesting books into my old age. I imagine that as a professor, as I age into my 50s and 60s and 70s, I would be an appreciated contributor in a loving community, and I imagine that as a start-up founder, I would be cast aside in my old age the way they do in Ik society.

I am now at the age when there's not much time left to go down the professor track and be successful.

If I wasn't trying to become a professor, I would do a start-up without hesitation. The above four reasons wouldn't stop me.

My first year as a grad student was so miserable, I am now reassessing.
Of course, but I was responding to the comment, which was about calling it "technical debt" vs. "technical drag".

We could just call it "technical venture capital". You make a large number of investments, the majority of which have absolutely no value to consumers. You abandon the losers, sometimes after much handwringing. It is usually impossible to tell a priori which features will be winners and which will be losers, though experience and good technical judgment can improve your odds. You can invest more in promising features to bring them to market quickly. Doing so usually introduces lots of warts into the codebase which will have to be fixed later - but then, you'll have lots of money later to fix them. But you have to be careful to avoid investing too much too early, before you've seen how the feature will actually play out, because then you build a giant monstrosity that collapses under its own weight before it can ever get to market.

Or we could accept that all metaphors are imperfect. I'm going to continue calling it "technical debt", because most people - even if they haven't heard of the term - have some idea what I'm talking about when I mention it.
Or I could just use Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel-popup/lulu-tv
Is Apple hiding problems with fiery iPods?
I sympathize with the position of an unpaid developer and, if the case is extreme enough, rescission laws do enable one to break such a contract. I don't think this will normally help a developer who is denied the last payment - in that case, fair or not, the law will normally limit the remedy to one of suing for payment.

Of course, the problems can all be avoided if the terms of the contract explicitly state that no IP rights will transfer unless payment has been made in full. In that case, I would agree with your assessment 100% (I don't disagree with your other points either - they are good clarifications).
It always saddens me when people wait for official scientific studies to prove things which are obvious. Arbitrarily screwing with things tends to arbitrarily screw them up. Imagine what your code would look like if you let anyone in the world put anything they wanted in it at any time.
Avoiding pesticides is half of why I go organic the other is just plain taste.

I don't know if that's because the plant varieties are different, or the method or whatever, but I've blind tested myself (no, it's not scientific, more like Mythbusters's level science) and I can easily tell the produce apart.

That it tastes better may just be in my head, but I can definitely tell them apart just by taste.
[review] my job site jobkicks.com
I live in Lexington, Ky and am in the RRG very frequently. My girlfriends father owns the land behind Miguels. I would definitely like to meet up if/when you guys come down.
The Bad Apple: Against the Iphone
The challenge of working on a project part-time is not a limit on time; it is follow through. For example if you can give 15 hours a week to a project at 100% you will be able to build something significant within a few months. If you don't have strong drive the 100% and 15 hours will both drop, and in the end you'll just have an idea that never happened.
Further proof that patent decisions are made by people who have not had meaningful contact with the world for several hundred years.
Cool. Let me know if anything gets organized. My friends and I frequent ET, but I mainly goto the Rockville one. I also work part-time at a very small climbing in Rockville (2 out of the 4 hrs its open a week).
I don't mind eating food containing tiny amounts of carcinogens, but I do object to poor farmers, without safety equipment, handling drums of the stuff.
There's a big difference between speaking out against the government and yelling at a cop (or anyone for that matter).
To Our Friends at Novell: Welcome to the Party
Ugh. The blurb is suggesting sequestering carbon by using plankton blooms... but they already tried that. It just caused an increase in the number of plankton predators... that's all. They weren't able to overwhelm them with so much plankton that 'some' would end up dead at the bottom of the sea.
this isn't quite relevant because the tasks performed in the study aren't on the intellectually nontrivial side, I would think