skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sorta happens with certain shows already, just on Twitter.

For example, in the UK there's a business show called Dragons' Den where people pitch for money for their crazy business ideas. Quite a large number of people tweet about the show while it's on and almost everything that happens. Not quite "chat" though.
You mean, CC a trusted third party?
http://tabblo.com
Criminals Prefer Firefox, Opera Web Browsers
http://piecesofrakesh.blogspot.com/2009/08/songs-in-code.htm... popped into my newsreader this morning, had a few more good ones. :)
"businesser" people can do marketing and user support. use google and twitter search to find people looking for what your product does, but don't know about your particular product. reply to them personally and try not to sound too spammy.

same for user support. reach out to your current users and find out what they like and don't like. gather feedback to deliver to your more techy partners who can do the actual implementation.
Check it out graphically. Click anywhere on the chart and see how it started, peaked and came back down.

http://trendistic.com/songsincode/_7-days
That still seems incredibly low (and yes I did read and I still think it's low).

Picking the most recent example from my projects..

This project has lasted 2 weeks so far (12 days). About 15 hours according to my commit logs - so that is roughly 24 hours work including debugging. It's almost feature complete (I reckon another 5 hours total to release it).

After I scrap all the js libraries and all my drop-in code the lines I have written in that time comes out as 4940.

That's 205(ish) LOC per hour.

So, yes, his is a low figure (though my figure is easily the maximum I can manage - this was a productive project; I would say 100 is my average)

EDIT: I will agree with his stuff about honey moon period. I would say the bulk of that code came out in the first 10 hours. Half of the code was written on wednesday in a 5 hour coding session (and 3 hrs of debugging).

Perhaps it is to do with how I work and the fact I am well practiced in this language & framework. I sit and write code solidly for 3 or 4 hours. Then spend and hour debugging all that code - that is a good workflow for me but I know others hate that approach! (we regularly argue over it in the office :P)

If you read he learnt a lot of things as he went along - and include them in the metric. So that lowers the value somewhat. If your working with code your well practiced in and using a framework to build on then it's definitely a lot faster.

The main point I was making is his metric seems bad - and the value he comes out with very low. As he bases his whole point on it I think it weakens his fairly good argument.

That said I know a couple of programmers who could slam out and debug a 6000 line web app in a long weekend; and it would mostly work.
If Google agrred to provide archive.org all its scanned book data, would that remove the contention?
Good journalism? It's sourced entirely anonymously and interleaves editorial commentary and prediction (!) with (supposed) factual reporting.
<?php

1 GOTO 10

2 GOTO 11

3 GOTO 10

4 GOTO 11

5 GOTO 10

6 GOTO 12

7 GOTO 10

8 GOTO 12

9 GOTO 13

10 print "Jump"

11 print "around"

12 print "up"

13 print "and get down"

?>
After 40 years, one can expect to have lived through 3-5 slumps/recessions.
Why?

Like cars and booze, there are illegal drugs at pretty much every price point. (Crack created a lower price point option for cocaine.)
Autonomous machines prompt debate
Lousy Smarch weather.
The last one: isn't that google?
I don't know what a full-time business person is supposed to do at a webapp which teaches Chinese. What were you anticipating?

Here's my suggestion: forget "traditional" marketing. You're now Head of SEO. Don't worry if you're totally incompetent at it, most professional SEOs are, too. Set yourself a goal for the end of this year: I am going to learn SEO, and I am going to quintuple the traffic Skritter receives from Google, and I am going to lift our front page to trial conversion by 25%.

Then, that is your full time job. Trust me, you will be able to continually generate value for the business.

(I originally typed "fill the time", then I smacked myself. Filling the time is a self-destructive, useless way to look at working. Don't feel productive, be productive, and then go home. And tell your coders that, too.)

P.S. Let me get you started on lifting the front page conversion -- that huge, ginormous, eye-catching animated thing on your front page? That is getting clicked, I can guarantee it. It is probably being clicked more than every other element on that page put together.

Install CrazyEgg if you don't believe me.

That should be linked to whichever of sign up and try now generates more business value.
There are a million non-programming things to do in a startup.

* Talk to schools/teachers to get them to try your software - especially study abroad programs.

* Reach out to Chinese community centers

* Write. Write for your blog, guest blog. Do everything you can to find people in your target audience.

* Learn SEO. Hunt down and win your keywords. This only takes time.

You don't have money for traditional marketing. And you are worried about having too much time. Fortunately non-traditional marketing takes much more time than money.
How Tim O'Reilly Aims to Change Government
Two words: Push Email

Yes, there's a preset icon for both Yahoo and Gmail but iPhone supported push email for Yahoo mail accounts, still does, and still does not have push email from Google.

To get Yahoo push email working before the 3.0 with "push" for everyone, Apple allowed Yahoo's mail a feature only shared on the iPhone by the MobileMe subscription service.
Here are some ideas:

1) Make phone calls to the competition, pretend to be a customer, listen to their sales pitch, and see if there is anything your company can gain from the experience.

2) Have the geeks setup a CMS and designate yourself the webmaster. You get a job title with master in the name which is kind of cool. Use some of your time to maintain your companies presence and give it a voice.

3) Become the social media guy for your company, someone needs to be manning the Twitter, Facebook, Frappr, Blfousajf, and whatever else folks use now. This is very time consuming but if you have time, do it. (at least I perceive it as time consuming)

4) Read the Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing and start doing that stuff.

5) Network--become the networking guy. Search for events in your area on meetup.com and other places. Get involved. Find out about different opportunities to get more free cash, chase these opportunities.

This is my wishlist of stuff I'd have someone do if I had them.

It's all about finding your niche based on what's missing. I wouldn't expect the cofounders to always be the one throwing tasks at you. They're stuck in the weeds doing the product.

Maybe take some time, read books, and try to become the big picture guy related to what you're doing and look for small ways to move that forward.
"Jump around up and get down"?
I assume you know this already, but you can apply for a session even if you've already started a project. If you're nervous about starting a project because of needing money you should either do what agotterer suggested in fund raising, or just start your project on the side and keep day jobs until you can apply.

I can't speak for PG either but I would assume the chances that he'd fund you outside of a session aren't going to be any higher than during the lead up to a session, if anything the chances may go down.

Anyway, good luck!
I know about the paths available, and all of them are all very viable options for us in the future. I was mostly just wondering if it ever happens outside of the normal funding rounds.

We will probably be looking for some sort of funding in the future, and it will probably be through angels or VCs. At this point however, we haven't even really started on much outside of brainstorming and early design, so we won't be worrying about anything like funding yet.
You can find swipe files with Google, though there's nothing really dedicated to the task, and it'd be useful to have it switch nouns and verbs for you to get a better immediate view when scanning ;-)
An Easy Way to Lose Weight Fast
i dont see any mention of flash involved with this at all. from what i can tell, its a 60k javascript library.
I'm interested in one other thing - does anyone know if any VC (YC or not) 'fund' startups that don't need money at all - but only connections and advice in exchange for a percentage?
Right - I've found that 5 minutes I compensate for. 1-2 minutes on the other hand is little enough extra margin that I don't, but just enough to save my arse reasonably often.

My business partner moves the time on his bedside clock around by 15 or 20 minutes semi-randomly every couple weeks to keep himself off balance - that didn't work for me at all but it's been doing fine for him for years now.
Machinarium Is Coming In October 2009
Hi!

I created the promo page of Machinarium and shared it with my friends. So I encourage you to do the same.

Machinarium is wonderful game and your friends will be happy with it.
And your support will inspire Amanita Design to do their best!

How can you help?
Please spread http://bit.ly/machinarium

P.S. This is not paid advertisement or affiliate program. I spread this product because I like it. I'm sure you will like it too! :)
Please spread http://bit.ly/machinarium
Follow Amanita Design

http://twitter.com/amanitadesign

http://friendfeed.com/amanitadesign
I have been in a situation where this was the case: myself and another guy were the devs, and the non-programmer was the public face of the company: he did customer service, marketing, PR, specs, QA, research -- pretty much anything that we didn't have time to do. Once we got up to a significant amount of users he became overwhelmed so we hired more business people. OR you could use that time to learn how to program.
To be clear, they've cracked the "measuring network latency" nut, not the "network latency" nut.
What purpose do seasons have if they're a very rough and completely inaccurate approximation of weather trends?

Take Canada - or at least Toronto - jokes aside about "winter season" and "construction season", or "cold weather" and "patio weather", the reality is there isn't much of a "spring" to talk about, it rarely lasts more than 2-3 weeks (and it's not uncommon having to switch from heating to AC within the same week, sometimes more than once). What purpose does the European model of four 3-month seasons have in other climates?

You ask why. I think a better question is "why not"?
I would also be interested in knowing something like this. Speaking with a seasoned VC or even entrepreneur could be just as valuable to someone who is thinking about launching a startup.
This story looks like another attempt by Arrington to cast himself as an important person in tech.
Well, now we know that financiers think we should read Rand. Any operators got different lists?
I'm not sure how common it is, but I know it happens. That's how Microsoft's original VC round went down.
Once dropped in you get partial support for SVG 1.1, SVG Animation (SMIL), Fonts, Video and Audio, DOM and style scripting through JavaScript, and more in about a 60K library. Your SVG content can be embedded directly into normal HTML 5 or through the OBJECT tag. If native SVG support is already present in the browser than that is used, though you can override this and have the SVG Web toolkit handle things instead. No downloads or plugins are necessary other than _Flash_ which is used for the actual rendering, so its very easy to use and incorporate into an existing web site. [emphasis mine]
I haven't looked at their code (though I will definitely try this project out soon!), but I'd guess that their javascript library is parsing the SVG then dynamically replacing it with a flash object. I've seen some type-layout libraries that do the same thing using Flash, so that you can use non-standard fonts on your website.
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/cpg/1330457677.html
Yup. I thought about this about a year back as well. Some networks have experimented with micro-sites and social media plugins with this type of functionality, but I'm not aware of anything that has really caught on yet.
I would agree that its important to get feedback from everyone around you. But, there's something scary about throwing out an idea on Hacker News. The author mentions that only a handful of people will drop what they're doing and copy your idea. I would imagine that your odds are a LOT greater around here! :)

Of course, I'm half kidding here... but I cant be the only one who ever worried about this.
1) Doesn't use a ton of leverage, even considering the float.

2) Makes an excess return with or without float.

3) Made his initial money without using float.

4) Is a fairly unusual guy, which is why we've all heard of him.
I strongly agree with this post. Summary: you have more to gain in idea refinements and reality checks than you have to "loose" from competition. Also NDAs are almost worthless.
These are good points, thanks a lot for spending the time to generate them.

Nick was actually monitoring this thread, and read me aloud your comment about "Facebook, Frappr, Blfousajf" and I thought he was kidding around, nice one.

I actually just got done reading "Made to Stick," "Landing Page Optimization," "Supercrunchers," "Word of Mouth Advertising," and "Call to Action." Generally my favorite was Made to Stick, but I'll pick up a copy of that Guide to Guerrilla Marketing you mentioned and read through it. All the books I've picked up so far have been YC recommendations, so it can't be that bad!

Regarding the networking, there are some things in the area I can look into, mostly tech entrepreneurs that get together and talk shop.

Again, thanks for the comments, I really appreciate them.
There is a huge gulf between "can copy" and "will copy". Execution wins every time.
On a side note, I couldn't find how much your service costs, so I'm going to assume that I can't afford it.
He simply said that had Scala already existed...

Actually, Scala did already exist when Groovy was created. What Strachan really said is this:

"I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy."

- http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-repl...

That said, I still think Groovy and Grails are a potent combination for increasing productivity in traditional Java shops.
Outreach and business development. I'm actually learning Chinese, so hearing about your site here was very useful for me and I just checked on chinese-forums.com (my other recent discovery) to see if the folks there have heard of you and what they think and I see that you've posted there and received good feedback. So I think you're on the right track. Have you looked at partnerships with other operations like italki, livemocha and chinesepod?
Oh it's the business logic that drives me crazy. Lets face it, most web code is ABC simple, rarely is there innovation in web code.

Show this, hide that. Click this, open with ... a fade. ABC

It's the business rules that each line of code is trying to accommodate that takes the longest to work out. Thinking out the ripple effects on the future is the time killer.
something to reduce the waiting time while making customer service calls. may be an iphone app. I specify the service (PSEG), time I would be available (4 pm to 9pm), expiry date (3 days). It would call the damn service on my behalf, and connect me once a human is on the other side, without disrupting any of the other phone tasks. no clue how it is technically possible, or if something like this already exists.
Congratulations; you have successfully introduced a whole new way to have off-by-one errors.

People are used, due to forty years or more of tradition in the great majority of major languages, to zero-based indexing. Tossing that away Because It's Inelegant won't do much good to anyone, especially when you take into consideration the fact that an awful lot of math is more convenient with 0-based indexing.
It's still out there:
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/
Yeah, this is such a bummer to find something interesting but not have the site be upfront about costs. Bad mistake in my book. I will NEVER sign up for a free trial if I don't know what the paid version costs. Why waste my time?
It's interesting how using a different language gives a slightly different flavour, e.g. Python:

len(problems) == 99 and "bitch" not in problems
Wow! Damn that's a cool website.

Sorry I don't have anything useful to add, just saying I wish I had that site around back when I was learning Chinese.
Market your product using videos. Decent video production is hard to do, and takes a lot of time, but Google places relevant videos at the top of certain searches. It's easier to get on the first page of a video search than it is on the first page of a regular Google search.

Blog, blog, blog, blog. Google primarily indexes text for it's search. The more fresh, well written, original content the better. That being said, it will take months before you start to see that have a solid effect on your bottom line.

Find each and every single forum devoted to learning Chinese. Become a member on those forums and interact heavily. Build credibility on those sites by providing valuable interaction, and then feel free to post appropriate links to your software. A lot of forums let you have a link to your site in your sig. That can only help you in the long run. * disclaimer * I'm not suggesting spaming, I'm suggesting good, solid interaction. Geeks don't really use them that often, but normal people use forums quite a bit, and Google loves to index forums.

Connections. Email anyone and everyone that might be interested in your product. Develop relationships with people interested in learning Chinese. Find cross marketing opportunities. Read some business and marketing books, take those ideas and run with them.

Become a sales expert. Start reading books like crazy on sales and marketing. Your technical co founders are going to be working like crazy to get the software side of things up and running. Every idea that you can bring to the table is going to help them out, and make your product better.

Study usability like crazy. A lot of times, technical people can get really wrapped up in making something work. They can often get too close to the product to be able to see it objectively and relate to how a customer uses their product. They need to know what problems the customers are having with their products, and what is confusing to them. Help them do that.

Do usability studies. Find friends and neighbors that have never used your product, and get screen captures of them using your product, and video their facial interactions with them using your product. Meetup.com does this for every new iteration of their product.

Find new uses for Mechanical Turk with your product. You can do some amazing things with Mechanical Turk and a little HTML knowledge. Have Turkers test one or two specific aspects of your software, and get their feedback. Pass that on to your engineers. Manage A/B testing through Mechanical Turk.
Heh... yeah. I meant well, but my tea pot was screaming, and was more important than integrating php goto mockery into this topic :)
Regarding the networking, there are some things in the area I can look into, mostly tech entrepreneurs that get together and talk shop.

Tech entrepreneurs are one thing, but find people interested in learning Chinese. Find people who teach Chinese, and give them a free membership. Ask them to "beta test" your product. Learn every thing that you can about your customers and potential customers.
This article was written 3 years ago. I'm guessing Django has improved quite a bit since then. Maybe this would have been a bit easier if done today?
Or memoize the fetch function. Greasemonkey has support [1] for persistent data, it should't be hard to cache the info to only fetch the counts every n comments or x days.

[1] http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/advanced/gm_getvalue.html
I hate to say it, but the new CEO of AIG is right. It IS congresses' fault.

I’m not in favor of the bailout/oversight plan that the Obama administration is pursuing (and which, in all fairness, the Bush administration started). I think they should just let businesses that make stupid decisions fail and let the market take its course. But if you are going to be prepared to bail out companies like AIG when they catastrophically screw up then you have to regulate them in a way that keeps them from taking advantage of that safety net.

Because otherwise you’re just giving them license to make any crazy deal that want with no fear of negative consequences. Which is what happened here. Congress created a system in which AIG would be almost irresponsible not to make crazy loans because those loans were possibly a big financial win and they (thanks to congress) had no risk of potential loss.
I can never be quite sure that I'm remembering the proper closed form expression, so I always rederive it in a way that's basically what you have here, but a little less dense:

Call the sum of the terms Sn, though we don't know what it is.

Sn = 1 + r +r^2 + . . . + r^n

Multiply each side by r

(Sn)(r) = r + r^2 + . . . + r^(n+1)

Subtract the former from the latter

Sn - (Sn)(r) = 1 - r^(n+1)

Sn(1 - r) = 1 - r^(n+1)

Sn = (1 - r^(n+1)) / (1 - r)

And there we have the closed form expression for Sn. As n goes to infinity, it approaches 1 / (1-r)
Thanks for sharing, it's nice to be able to name things you enjoy. That's a good one.
http://www.daytum.com sorta does this
You appear to have deeper problems than just finding work for a single non-technical person. Your app seems to be an example of an unworkable product idea that was a ton of fun for someone to code.
I have your role. Here's what keeps me busy:

1. Writing the copy for the website. Mainly keeping the support documents up-to-date.

2. Doing all the business related tasks.

3. Doing all the customer service.

4. Handling all incoming e-mail.

5. Doing all of the social networking stuff (facebook, twitter).

6. Doing all of our marketing. Handling Google AdWords, banner advertising, text advertising, etc.

7. Dealing exclusively with our accountant.

8. Tracking all of our expenses, etc., into Excel and getting everything ready for accountant (see 7).

9. Handling all legal work with our lawyer.

10. Doing all of our networking. I'm the guy that goes to all of our relevant events.

11. We all come up with ideas for product development.

12. Blogging. I do all the blogging.

13. Handling payroll. I do that.

14. Dealing with the bank accounts. I deal directly with the small business rep at our bank.

15. Market research. I find out as much as I can about our competitors, what they do, etc. I also learn about our market as a whole.

16. Handling all incoming advertising requests, setting up their campaigns, etc.

17. Dealing directly with all our merchants (credit cards + PayPal). Dealing with the very few chargebacks we receive.

18. Paying all of our bills (server expenses, software licenses, domains, advertising, etc.) and monitoring our cash flow.

19. Pitching. I handle all of that.

20. Anything that requires a phone call. Incoming or outgoing.

...and many other tasks as they crop up. For example, I'm the point person on setting up our new office.

My job is a lot more "flexible" so I can deal with things as they arise and take the lead. Whereas my partners (one is a designer and one is a coder) usually have to stay on task so they're not distracted. For example, we're setting up a new office as I mentioned above and it's just not feasible for either to spend time dealing with that in the middle of production. I, however, can do that.
I think they should actually play songs... I'm not very good at it, but I tried: http://twitter.com/beenewilliamr/status/3436763908