skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) I know print on demand will absolutely murder your margins but offering it is worthwhile just for business development. You will find it much, much easier to get attention from the media that way. Your product is good enough to get into major newspapers if you pitch it right.

2) You really, seriously need to improve your web design. It looks like a ransom note. It should look bright, clean, safe, and inviting. You'll be selling to an overwhelmingly female audience. Many of them will have never bought anything online before.

3) Put one page of a sample book on the front page. Even a thumbnail will do. I'd suggest one with a smiling young boy. Put a handwritten note next to the thumbnail, circling him, and saying "This book was made special for Dylan. Why don't you make a book special for your child?"

4) Drop the email confirmation. Drop the password confirmation. These serve no purpose but to drastically decrease the number of users who sign up to your web site. Deck that page out with reasons why they should give you their info (what does this get you?) and reasons they should trust you (this phrasing works absurdly well: "We will not spam you.") I would consider dropping the name field -- are you going to address them by it prior to them purchasing? No? Nix.

5) The table at http://www.cookupbooks.com/my_books is confusing and meaningless to me -- and I live for selling teaching aids. Your users are going to be totally lost.

6) Find some satisfied customers and get a brief testimonial out of them. You want something that essentially sounds like "My son never liked reading, but he lit up when he was the star of the story!" -- Kyle's Mom. Feature that prominently next to decision points.

7) You are selling books at $1 / book / student. Parents are willing to pay much more than that. I have doubts about it being profit-maximizing for teachers, either. (For a point of reference, my typical customer pays $30 for a product they use roughly twice a year... and I undercharge terribly.)
Isn't a startup's founder obligated to act in the best interest of the inventors whose money and risk made the venture possible?
This list is so predictable.

Machievelli is better understood in the context of the history of political philosophy. Using him as some "self help" entrepreneurship guru won't get most people very far. But these are people who think Ayn Rand is brilliant so as cwan mentioned you can't expect much from them.
Fix Missing Cmd + Reft CMD + Right bug in Textmate on Snow Leopard
This bug has been plaguing me for months! So happy to have a simple fix in a bundle.
News.YC No points display script.
I wanted to disable the display of points on news.yc. So here is a Greasemonkey script to do so, http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/56164 (Partly as a response to post I saw enabling dsiplay of Points of users on comments page as well )
Clickable

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/56164
If that's the only thing stopping you, just tweak your editor's keymappings.
Thanks Daniel this is great feedback! We'll definitely incorporate them (I'm the programmer).

The basics:

1) An account includes 5 free books (it should say "you have 5 book credits" on the left navigation) and unlimited students.

2) All accounts have at least ONE student. If you are a parent with 3 children, or a teacher with 30 you'll want to sort your books (and their customizations) by "student".

3) All books are complete with text and pictures.

4) Books are purchased in blocks ("credits"), i.e., if you purchase 10 books you'll have 10 book credits. It's THEN that you can click the dollar sign and "acquire" the book.

5) Books can be customized after they are "acquired".

6) Stock and custom books can be downloaded (in PDF) after they are "acquired" (the icons are terrible right now, sorry!).

7) ALL books are customizable. There are "suggested customizations" as part of the reading program, but you can customize everything (which could result in an entirely different book) if you so desired. You can customize a book only ONCE.

We will work on making this more clear...
This completely doesn't tell the whole story, and those of you commenting should realize that.
The big problem I see in the implementation of this idea:
How does one forum handle the mass of users? I'm not talking about technical issues, more of the user experience. How can all users engage in the discussion without being overwhelmed?
Presumably they don't get the brand, domain name, existing code base, and access to registered users.

There's probably a lot more to this story than we know--there's no need to jump to conclusions.
Also to show the power of Jquery. Total lines of YC specific code required = 6. (I included JQuery with the script as I was too lazy to do this in raw JS)

http://dpaste.de/ZsFF/
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
Wow, this is proof that this place is turning into Digg more and more every day.
It's the most difficult kind of article to rebut: the kind that "raises questions" without drawing any conclusions. But they sure made the situation look pretty shady.
Comes across as "there's more to it", but it did tell a side of the story that your earlier announcement didn't mention at all, which is why I guess people are interested in it.

Hope you both come through it all ok in any case, and good luck at your new job, and at some point in the future, your next stab at a company.
I would like to hear PG's (or other investors) views on this.
The number of people seriously studying Chinese outside China is tiny. Unless you can sell the product within the educational system, there's no market for it.

There are other issues with the demo (drawing characters on a laptop mousepad is very painful and slow compared to practicing on paper). But even the perfect app would struggle given the tiny market, and the fact that drilling characters with flash cards is a pretty good substitute.

I'm in my second year of studying Chinese and endlessly drilling hanzi, so I think I am somewhere in the target market for this thing.
Well thats the problem with people who tell lots of stories isn't it? You can never tell if a story is actually true or not.. At least it does seem to me to be a remarkably depressing section in an otherwise fun and quirky book.
Basically it appears like Facebook made the rational calculation that hiring the developer at retail is a lot cheaper than buying the company wholesale.

That is consistent with what I have argued in HN comments: with the glut of start-ups (50 from YC alone this year?) prices will drop towards replacement value. The replacement value of a start-up amounts to a hiring bonus for its developers. This is likely true even with substantial user traction.

We saw much the same thing in the implied valuation of iLike - after liquidation preference, developers basically get a hiring bonus, if they stick around. And iLike had 10 million monthly users on Facebook.

So unless a start-up has a plausible path to independent profitability, it is going to be subject to the brutal laws of a buyer's market. In other sectors this effect has been well observed: take enterprise software for example. There are public companies with $100+ million revenue that trade for basically not much more than cash on hand.
Debatably, they got less than half the talent, thank you very much!
FB Hires TipJoy Co-Founder Ivan Kirigin After Backing Away From Acquisition
But mostly hilarious.
My biggest problem with 4chan is that despite knowing they're doing awful things and inflicting pain on people who don't deserve it, they still manage to be really funny and so I lose the will to strongly condemn them.
Another solid reason why you should never use the same password for multiple sites. To do so, you are effectively trusting every single site in the chain.

I read enough HN and Codinghorror to know that many sites have no clue how to handle passwords in a secure fashion.
FYI, When I click on the link `Books` on the landing page, the URL it redirects to http://www.cookupbooks.com/my_books
does not show up in Safari (version 4.0.2) , it appears ok in firefox.
I don't ever look at the username unless the comment is exceptionally nutty.
Pixel Qi color screen for kindle-like ebook readers
I don't understand how it is hilarious, though I've been told my sense of humor is a bit odd.

Inflicting pain and embarrassment on complete strangers by stealing their log in information and violating their privacy - is that your idea of a good time?

Empathy pro-tip: ignore who the target was, and pretend the attack happened to someone close to you. How does that make you feel?
Say what you will about TechCrunch, but this article has a less inflammatory tone than the AllThingsDigital article by far.
Just learn some markup and CSS stuff, there's always plenty of that to do and most programmers I know would rather be writing code. The nice part about this is that it's pretty easy to pick up, a month or so and you'll be able to at least look-up anything you need to do.
4Chan, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

(to borrow from Obi-Wan)
Yeah, if the startup's sole value is that it looks good on a résumé, that's true. But many startups have added brand value -- if Microsoft wanted to get into micropayments, for example, I think Microsoft TipJoy would have more initial traction than Microsoft Micropayment using the same developer. FB already has a great brand name.
Thanks for the info. I really like this RentHop.
Thank you so much for your well thought out responses. I am forwarding your excellent suggesstions to the programmer.

I, however, am wondering what you meant by "pitch it right" to the newspapers? Would you please elaborate a bit?

I wanted to make the site affordable for ALL children, hence the low price. But I will definetely give that some more thought.
that's Howard Aiken, for the record.
THIS is very helpful. Thanks a lot for providing insight into how you spend your time. Scott currently does a lot of our accounting and Nick has been handling feedback, but that's all sort of shifting as each task is taking more and more time. I really should re-write the our user's and quickstart guide, which have been languishing. They're not used that much, but it could be because they are so poorly designed and updated.
I'd second ASP.NET - whether you use the MVC framework or just plain old ASP.NET is up to you.
Good distinction. Thanks for that.
I Used to Believe
For those of you into IR he discusses the use of set oriented faceted search to refine the meaning of a users query, particularly with the goal of involving the user in the refinement. He finds a set oriented approach to be better than clustering, which tends to be opaque. The discossion of faceted search begins around minute 29.
How does that make you feel?

If my friend had a fake message posted under his or her account, I would probably not feel all that bad. The issue of password reuse aside, it is really not a big deal. "Haha, my account got hacked, I didn't actually have sex with him!" and that's the end of it.

Some people try to add wayyy too much meaning to their lives...
We can't always align our sense of empathy with our sense of humor. Ever seen comedy movies or sitcoms where all kinds of embarrassing things happen to the characters as a result of malicious outside forces?
The page displays Unicode characters, which are organised in blocks of 256 character, in pages of 100 characters each, thereby completly hiding the logical structure of Unicode. This is an, let's say, interesting choice...

[edit: typo]
In this particular case, Ivan's already mentioned that the brand was a net drawback, in the previous thread about TipJoy this week.
Yes, this is news. It presents specific, new evidence of the practice. The general idea that ancient humans had negative impact on the land was recognized as not being novel in the lead: "The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America."

I see this tendency with scientific articles a lot. An article presents a new finding within an existing framework, and someone feels compelled to point out that the existing framework is old hat. This ignores that the news in the article is the new finding, not the existing framework.
I kept my idea secret for years because I thought that as soon as someone else knew it, they would steal it, execute it, and become a billionaire while I'd be stuck in a cubicle forever.

I thought I was so smart, but looking back, I can't believe I was so stupid.

Once I started sharing my idea (only parts of it at first), I got instant feedback, what was good, what was stupid, how to improve it, who else to talk to, etc. You get the idea.

My dream took wings and became my project only after I shared it with others.
"I don't know what a full-time business person is supposed to do at a webapp which teaches Chinese. What were you anticipating?"

Nicely put, to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure. I guess I had these visions of high-powered business meetings, a lot of funding pitches/presentations, demo days, conferences, print advertising, and employees. All that stuff still could happen, but it's going to be a while, and we're intentionally keeping things as small as possible for as long as possible to minimize overhead and managerial headaches.

Good idea on the front page too. We're actually A/B testing it right now. The current design is about 8 months old and we realized about 2 months ago that it was probably sucking hard.

I've never heard of CrazyEgg, but I actually just signed up for a $9/mo demo account.
Well, imagine going to your fathers profile page and seeing a photo of him with shit on his dick. After YOU persuaded him that being on Facebook would be fun. Maybe not so funny after all...
Inspired Interview: Derek Herman – The Man Who Built Envato
So he'll get salary instead of equity, for now (I suppose). Good for him. I read his thread the other day and was really impressed. No doubt he'll achieve success, just down a different road that he imagined.
12chan?
Would you please elaborate a bit?

Here's the lede:

Dwayne Goes To Camp is a children's book. It tells the story of how Dwayne Williams, aged 6, went away to camp and ate s'mores. You can't buy Dwayne Goes To Camp at Borders, though: there is only one copy, and the owner isn't selling.

"It is awesome, especially the part about camp", said Dwayne Williams, aged 6.

Dwayne Goes To Camp is the brainchild of Susan YourLastNameHere, who at 5,307 books written in August alone may well be the world's most prolific children's writer. She was inspired to write the books, each individually personalized to the child who owns it, after noticing that struggling readers in her classes read best when reading stories which engaged their own lives and concerns.

"Every child wants to be the hero of their own story", said LastNameHere.

---

Seriously, you've got a quirky human interest piece with a doogooder angle on a silver platter for your friendly neighborhood education, style, or metro reporter.
There's no evidence that they didn't.

FaceBook held all the cards here - all they had to do was wait until TipJoy ran out of money, then snatch up one of the founders when he goes looking for a job. Which is what they did. What else would you have the founders do?

Just highlights the importance of bargaining position. Make deals when you don't need them, because you won't be able to when you do.
Little, but not nothing.
This is a really valid concern. Right now it's really tempting to use my time inefficiently essentially building up unsustainable expectations from our user base. To be fair, I've given in many times, and I write personalized thank you cards to people who pay (we don't advertise that anywhere, so I can stop whenever it becomes unmanageable), but a lot of the things that I could be doing don't make a lot of sense when I run the numbers, which is frustrating. I see all these other businesses running huge adwords campaigns (we tried it, didn't get good ROI, we'll try again later, but not yet), hiring employees, moving into offices, managing payrolls, schmoozing with clients (something that's hard to do in rural Ohio) and generally doing things which the numbers say aren't a good use of my time.
... except when we fail to act on our supposed ideals, which seems to be most of the time!

I suppose that if we assumed that humans were like some species of giant ant, then our spread accross the globe, destroying species, altering coast lines and spewing out poison, would be a marvel of nature!

If each complex species that enters and alters an area is "degrading" it, what is the most desirable ecosystem? A giant mound of plankton?
It's like the Zeno's Arrow of stories: we get half the remaining story every time.
Ha! Perfect.
Ask HN: Mashable getting worse? 
I used to browse through techcrunch and mashable a lot before I discovered HN. I have slowly since then started to hate mashable. Look at these 2 articles mashable posted in the last 2 days:

http://mashable.com/2009/08/21/palm-pre-iphone-ad/

a complete misrepresentation of facts with an eye catching headline to gain traction

and than this is just plain simple ridiculous for a tech blog to post

http://mashable.com/2009/08/22/embarrassing-facebook/

a poor woman account probably got hacked or she was drunk enough to post it as her status, but bringing it to everyone's attention is just unethical.. IMHO.

Now, I dont read any article on mashable or techcrunch before I read user comments on that article on HN. What do you guys do?
By this logic, the Darwin Awards aren't funny either.

Yes, these people aren't culpable in the same way, yes it's a bad analogy, but it doesn't stop it from being funny.
Point taken. Our pricing is actually really cheap, between $6-11/mo for an account, and it's a lot less for institutions. We were torn about this, because we wanted the front page to be clean and clear (right now it's like a landfill of accumulated patches and additions, but take a look at http://www.skritter.com/frontB for a look at what we'd like to move to). Do you think that on a more simple homepage the pricing information distracts from a conversion goal, or encourages it?
In my mind, brand value equates to user traction. User traction alone isn't enough for valuation (particularly in sober times), particularly when the acquirers have massive user-bases themselves.

Microsoft's historical acquisitions were of that kind (starting with DOS!): technology/development teams, with little or no premium paid.

As an acquirer this is perfectly rational behavior.

Why make a VC rich? That is the logic that is increasingly being applied and the proliferation of start-ups makes that logic very compelling. Let's say FB next needs a real time video service. Do they really need someone else's brand or audience? They would likely scout for a hot development team with good technology, and there are many to choose from.
As far as I am aware, 12chan just trades dodgy photos. 4chan seems more "hands-on".
Yeah, I doubt it would cause too much trouble in my peer group either. But I know people outside my peer group, my friends' parents for example, who don't take everything as lightly as our nihilistic generation.
God bless those little /b/tards.
It represents specific new evidence. Got me there.

My point, somewhat rhetorically put, was that the framework itself is what is new for most readers here, not the specific piece of information. And that's sad.
Thanks for the input. It's actually really frustrating to hear about the airplane use, because everyone and their mom wants an iPhone version, but Nick and Scott are seriously tapped out right now making features we've all agreed need to come before we can fork the code and get Nick learning objective C. Man, waiting for that really really bugs me. Everyone on the site right now wants the features we're developing, and our first mission at present is to please our current customers, but we could convert a lot better if only we had those kinds of nifty gadgets.

We'll be going back to Oberlin College this semester and doing in person testing with first year students and positioning is something we're struggling with.
At less than a tenth of the price?
Good idea here, I actually just talked to Scott, and I think I'm going to start taking over all the web implementation stuff. Up till now I produced a mockup and handed it off to him, but it would ease his workload substantially if I could carry a design from mockup to implementation.
OMG you're incredible! I'm going to get going on Dwayne's story ASP! LOL! Seriouly, though, your feedback has been outstanding. Thanks again.
One of those jokes that's really funny -- as long as you're not the one getting trashed in public.
Personally I don't think Mashable is getting worse, it's just concentrating on a different demographic : people who are tech savvy but not hackers/founders. It has helped them find an audience and by some estimates it's bigger than TC.
I don't think Mashable is for people who know what they're doing. It's very good at getting pageviews -- the "Number Adjective Noun You Can Buzzword Buzzword Buzzword" formula kicks ass. My only problem with them is how oversaturated they are -- whenever there's an inane trending topic on Twitter, I know it's either related to sports, reality TV, or Mashable.
Video is something we hadn't thought of, thanks for suggesting it. I'll do a proper ROI calculation and figure out how many uniques we'd have to get to make that worth our while. I also majored in Cinema Studies, and have a lot experience making videos, so it would be fun and easy for me to produce quality material, its just a question of recouping our costs.

We've been trying to ramp up the blogging recently, and it's good to know that it takes a while for it to affect pagerank. We were getting down because it hasn't given us a big quick boost. We're dedicated to continuing a lot of blogging though (most of which I'm doing now).

There are a few internet forums for this, and I'm a member, but I don't participate regularly, maybe I should change that.

Usability has been (pardon my French) a bitch. I thought I had a great UI eye when we first started. After 3 sitewide redesigns, 4 iterations of the vocabulary interface, and numerous leaky conversion steps later, I'm pretty humbled. Do you have any specific recommendations for UI reading? I pay attention to Nielson, I've read Landing Page Optimization, and Call to Action, but I'm only starting to put their lessons to use.
It's great to know that someone else has experienced this, and hopefully I'll have the same problem you're business partner did! Sometimes its really frustrating and downcasting to feel less valuable than my partners because I can't be constantly programming. Thanks for sharing this.
That is by far one of the worst solutions I've heard to the problem. I really feel bad for anyone who is hired to work on your code and told that it was written in PHP, only to look at a compiler generated mess.

Please tell me you're joking.
Ask HN: Should I get a Master's in CS?
I've seen some relevant threads:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180780
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754426
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180743

But I have a slightly different perspective.

I am a rising senior at UPenn studying CS and business, and I have the opportunity to "submatriculate" to get a Master's in CS. It would be one extra year.

I have worked on some interesting projects, but nothing huge. I want to work at or create tech startups for my career.

If some entrepreneurial opportunity opens up, I'll take that hands down, but I think it's likely I'll have to choose between a job at Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc and a Master's. Would the extra year at a big tech company or the degree be better for my long-term goals?

Many thanks for your thoughts.
Thanks losvedir, we (of course) always like ot hear that we're creating value for people!