skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't buy into this whole pure non-contextual ideal, as though the only possible result of attaching a name and a reputation to a comment is an ad hominem argument or fan-worshiping.

When you're making an argument or counterpoint, you would do well to divorce your argument from the external characteristics of whoever you're responding to. However, when you are just reading through conversations for your own benefit there is a lot you can gain from the added context of the user's reputation.

For example, whenever there is an article about security and I stumble upon a comment written by tptacek, I can safely assume that he knows what he's talking about and I can therefore place more trust in his comment than I would in a comment from someone I don't know. This context is particularly useful to me when I have a hard time judging the value of the comments alone simply because I know jack squat about security.

Similarly, if I stumble across a comment that makes a radically strange conclusion (like "women and men should be lumped into one sports category") and I look at who wrote it, I can remember that the commenter has made some very good points in the past and is not prone to making dumb arguments. From there I can cut a little more slack in my own mind for the argument and I can try to reach into it and see what the main point he's trying to get across is.

None of these approaches is fan-worshiping, nor do they involve me making an ad hominem argument. Context is absolutely useful for humans. We are inherently biased creatures for a reason. We have to make quick judgments and take shortcuts every day to deal with all of the information, and the context of others' reputation works great for this.

You wouldn't do a risky business deal with someone whose reputation you didn't know, would you? Well think of reading others' opinions as a kind of transaction. You take on a little risk by buying into someone's opinion. You may change your worldview just a tiny bit based on the value you place on another's comment. That is what conversations are all about. The risk comes from the possibility of adding inconsistencies, falsehoods, or improbabilities to your worldview without realizing it. We don't know all there is to know and so we cannot make perfectly objective and absolute judgments on whatever we come across.
Here's something that seems to be left out of this discussion: there was an existing Google Voice application on the App Store called GV Mobile. At the time that Google's own app was either "rejected" or "held for further review", Apple also pulled GV Mobile from it's App Store. That at least, is rejection.
There has to be a difference between "talking to everyone who will listen" and "broadcasting your idea to the world". You might want to talk about your idea to 99% of the people you meet, but specifically avoid 1% for one reason or another - putting it in front of an anonymous audience makes that control impossible.
Tough audience, I guess HN really hates buggy code :p
Networking is the number one task as far as I'm concerned. You need to be reading every site in the world about your field, looking for competitors, partners, and customers. Find language learning blogs, forums, training companies, and let them know about you. This is a full-time job in itself, and geeks hate doing that stuff.
I remember the first time I went searching for the Io and Processing languages, expecting that the generality of the names would make it hard. I got good results right away.

On the other hand, some names make it hard to talk about things. For example, much as I like the Sequel ORM for Ruby, having a aural discussion about it is more trouble than it should be because you have to be clear when you are talking about the RUby library or SQL. (Pedant alert: SQL should be pronounced ess que el anyway, but few people do.)
I've been following PG and YC for years, and I've never heard of a single instance of them taking equity in a company that they didn't fund. I've also never heard of them doing a funding round (or what you're describing) outside of YC. I've also never heard of them getting involved with a startup that wasn't close to Boston, or now, Silicon Valley.
You should send this idea to USPS. ;)
1) Find Deals - Find people who can resell what you have, promote what you have, etc. That's bizdev and sales.

2) Track any keyword possibly relating to you on Twitter, Google Blog Search, etc, and join in the conversation wherever you can without looking smarmy.

3) Design A/B tests. You sound geeky enough to change headlines, swap out images, etc. Figure out Google Analytics and Google Site Optimizer and start squeezing percentage points out of your funnel.

4) Blog and Tweet. Be a social media god.

5) Grok SEO. 95% of the work around SEO is linkbuilding. with low margins, SEO is your friend. Be amazing at it.

6) Go to conferences that might be appropriate (see #1).

7) SEM. Find google keywords you can buy and convert enough to justify the expense. Adwords is hard, but if you can optimize your way to a good ROI, it's gold. If necessary, find long tail keywords (I know companies that bid the minimum on 750,000 keywords and make a killing). Adwords is all about a conversion funnel-- plenty to learn there.

Your job is revenue enhancement. That means you have to live and breath your sales funnel. Acquisition, conversion, retention, virality. Make 5 cold phone calls a day to potential partners/resellers and then get busy testing/optimizing your funnel. (I actually did a presentation on this for a local startup group: Post and slides here: http://www.tonywright.com/2009/software-and-making-money-pre... )

If you can't make a full-time job out of building revenue for your company, go part time and negotiate a fair slice (15%?) for your P/T participation. But the above is enough non-menial work for 2-3 people.
Absolutely true. I don't think a college degree has any correlation to programming skill at all. I completed an MIT-based CS curriculum with all graduate-level classes my senior year. Had I not also been working full time as a web developer, and dabbling in the web since 1993, my degree would have made me virtually unhirable as a web developer.

On the other hand, the CS theory gives a very solid theoretical base that makes me a better programmer in all aspects of what I do. None of this stuff is exclusively available in a CS degree, all this information is available for free online if you know where to look. Most decent practitioners will pick up a lot of this stuff intuitively without formal training, but not with the same breadth or formality.

The stuff I did in my CS degree, such as optimizing binary code, writing a (subset of) Java compiler from scratch, and writing radiosity and monte carlo 3d renderers is demonstrative of a certain practical ability to deal with complex subjects that I consider valuable to all types of programmers. Therefore I think a CS degree can continue to stay very relevant, as long as they stick with theoretical CS and don't turn programs into Java and C# farms.

That said, the skills to succeed in a theoretical CS program do not necessarily translate into the ability to get things done in a real world environment, and it would also be a mistake to use it as some sort of litmus test since a college environment is not for everyone.
I looked at your homepage and said out loud, "that is cool!"... great idea.

I think there's two main things you should focus on:
1. Working on business relationships (networking, finding potential partners or customers, customer support, etc.)

2. Miscellaneous busy work related to programming. A lot of the work involved in programming can be done by someone who can't program, if you're decently technical. Examples: Testing/QA (help maintain a bug list), research and compilation (finding or creating relevant databases or lists), seeking relevant forums online and posting to them, etc.

Also, you say that traditional marketing isn't going to have a positive ROI. You need to figure out what IS going to have a good ROI, and work on that!

Two suggestions about your website:

1. You need a pricing page on your website... I can't figure out how much your service costs after the free trial.

2. I'm glad you mention that any input device, such as a pen tablet, can be used. I think you should offer a page of suggested devices (and links to buy them -- get commission if you can) because it seems like that kind of investment is a no-brainer for someone who is serious about learning Chinese. Skype does/did that because Skype works much better for people with a good headset microphone. Similarly, someone is going to learn to write Chinese better if they can actually use a pen-like device while practicing.
Ancient Man Didn't Exactly Live in Harmony With the Land
I loved this series as a kid, and for some reason, also really liked the theme music -- it's "Take 5" by Dave Brubeck.
That sounds like a better solution. The way it is now it is very heavy.

The very best way would be to ask for stuff like this to be configurable for those that want it but HN 'feature' requests are not usually honoured.
I disagree. I think it's responsible to not make crazy loans, even if you might be turning down profits.
I love this thread.

While considering what I could add - all I could think of was an old Neighborhood comic that pictured a guy in a suit and tie slumped against a building holding a tin cup in his hand. Around his neck is a sign that reads "My mind is a hodge-podge of half-baked ideas."

My biorhythm must be off today. Yeah, that must be it.
I'm curious as to why they did not translated it to VML like excanvas does. I guess there may be parts of SVG that's a poor fit to VML, and Flash also will make it possible to have it work with any browser with a flash plugin, not just IE.
Uh oh. These got popular before, & the Exploratorium site got overwhelmed. So, check out the torrents.
I think this is a phase all startups go through. Initially there are several roles, tech, business development and planning (project management).

During the execution phase the focus will shift, temporarily to tech and project management. But once you really start to take off business development comes back to the top, and if you play your cards right as a company it will stay that way, pretty much forever.

How long that phase starts is up to you, I'd use my 'idle hands' to get busy making as many contacts as you can with potential gateways to large number of users as well as the press. Eventually that will morph into a business development department, but right now that should be your role.

An important side effect of performing this function is to keep the tech department up to date with a steady stream of customer - and would be customer - feedback.
You want to build an advisory board. A lot of startups build a board of advisors even if they take money or not.
Don't be silly. You're asking Congress to be prophetic in their creation of laws. Omniscient perhaps.

When did our society decide that if it's not illegal, it's okay. It's not okay what they did. They knew their actions would jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands and create an economic catastrophe -- that's why they did it. They had to in order to be bailed out.

It was theft. What you are saying is analogous to blaming a bank for being robbed. Or a pedestrian for getting mugged. The american public was mugged by AIG and it's AIG's fault. Not the american people's fault.
Ask HN: Rate my startup - customizable, downloadable books for children.
http://www.cookupbooks.com

The gist of the site is that parents or teachers can change the pictures and/or text of the stock books I've written as part of their reading instruction.

This site is a dream come true for me. I've been using these custom books to teach reading for quite some time now with great success, and facing retirement, I wanted to take what I've learned and put it online in order to reach a more global audience. It's AMAZING to see children's reactions when they flip a page and see a picture of themselves, or their dog, a parent, etc...

Please let me know what ideas you have for improvement! Thank you so much!
Cheating the App Store: PR firm has interns post positive reviews for clients
In a way, you're in a great position in which you can make a real difference to your business. While your partners have to go on every day with the same programming tasks, not always able to see how they make a difference in the immediate term, you get to wake up every day, consider what's the best thing to do right now to advance the business ... and do it. Sometimes it will mean working on funding, other times it will mean filling different roles for which you're not yet ready to hire an extra person (marketing, sales, user support). Sometimes it might even mean just getting out of the way and making life easier for the developers (someone needs to cook those ramen - make sure they're delicious).

I think the main problem you have (I can only imagine, I was never in that position myself) is that you need to remain very confident that you're pulling your weight. Do that by deciding to not worry about the division of labour and simply doing the absolute best you can all the time.
Does seem to be a pricing page, http://www.skritter.com/pricing , maybe its new
What a fantastic idea. I'll send it to everybody that I know that has small children.

Minor nitpick, I'm viewing this on a fairly wide screen and I still have to scroll horizontally.
"In terms of the risk of someone stealing your idea, there are at best a handful of people in the world who might actually drop everything and copy your idea."

Sure. But what if there are others who are already working on something similar and, on hearing about your idea, glom some interesting features, or get motivated to push something out before you do.

I guess I'm skeptical that that there is zero downside to having your competitors know what you are doing.
thanks, my reading skills are a little lacking today it would seem.
I've yet to see that come true, ever. I've seen lots of people try to do that, but invariably types like that will go for the low hanging fruit. Their heart won't be in it and as soon as the next thing comes by that looks like less work they'll start chasing that.

Building a business takes dedication and tons of effort, the idea is a minor part of it all. Sure, you need an idea to get started but if your execution is excellent it will take a very determined party to try to compete with you.
I do not work for this company, though I use their services.
Single sender email addresses -- The idea is that a subscriber to the service gives out a separate email address to each friend or associate that he's willing to hear from (maybe from serialized business cards or whatever). The mail server accepts and records the first sender to any previously unused address, and subsequently performs a policy dependent action (e.g., blocking) when mail to that address is received from any other sender. Return addresses on outoging mail also have to be handled consistently. Not sure if there's a market but I know I'd use it myself.

Any non-obvious flaws?
> Also NDAs are almost worthless.

That's so true. It's gotten to be such a formality now that plenty of parties don't even bother with them any more. In the US maybe less so that in Europe, but the last NDA I signed is already 2 years ago and it's not like I haven't done anything in that period.

By the time you need that NDA you probably have other problems to attend to.
reply to them personally

Unless you are automating this (i.e. spamming), it isn't worth your time for their product. Do the math: how many people would you find per hour? How many would you contact, per hour? How many trial signups? How many convert to a paying plan? What is their ARPU? Of that, what is the margin?

I'm looking at their pricing table, and it suggests that a customer is likely to be worth less than $10 a month in profit to them, unless they are an institutional account.

Concentrate on stuff which scales out of proportion to time invested, or you're just buying yourself a low-skill low-value job.
http://twitter.com/cathodion/status/3461646455

s="bottles of beer on the wall\n";
99.downto(1){|b|
puts "#{b} #{s}#{b} #{s[0,16]}\nif a bottle happens to fall\n#{b-1} #{s}\n"}
#songsincode
True scientists celebrate their failures.
Almost everyone is doing this on the appstore including the big names. Moreover, I am just astonished by the fact that apple is still letting developers game the system by allowing the developers to change the availability date with new updates so that the apps show up as new releases. If they stop this, it will probably reduce the number of submissions from 8500/week to probably 1000/week and thereby being more consistent.
Well if you want to try it out for a few minutes, as I guess most people on here will, it beats rebooting your PC (or figuring out how to even make it boot on a MacBook). It's not like it's full featured enough for daily use anyway.

I can't really see your point to be honest.
Online radio service wins ruling over license fees
Yes, but I'm not Warren Buffet. :-)

A more useful comparison would be to Jeff Bezos: Even disregarding unearned income, tarsnap produces roughly 1.5 months of float due to AWS billing a credit card at the end of each month (0.5 months after usage, on average) which has a billing period ending 3 weeks later (0.75 months) and which has a long enough grace period that I can wait another week (0.25 months) before paying off the credit card bill.

This "negative working capital" model is one of the reasons Amazon could grow so quickly in the early years -- and makes it very unlikely that I will ever need to raise capital to fund tarsnap's growth.
I really like that website! I've had two pushed to learn Chinese which both failed. I think I will try Skritter for #3.

I coded in the very early days of my website and moved to the business side as we grew. Other HN users have posted big lists of good stuff. I want to say that you really have two big goals based on those lists:

1. Keep ONLY user feedback flowing to the coders and handle anything else that would otherwise fall to them. They are the engine of your company; respect that by keeping them healthy, focused and productive.

2. Find the next big source of growth for your company. As the business guy, although coders often contribute, this is really on you.

I've played around with the bulk of lists others have written in answer to your post. Here are the time intensive, low cash things that have worked for us:

a. SEO. The cheap place to start is long tail keywords that are highly targeted to your service. Make sure your H tags and falling paragraph content align with the terms you want. After that, you'll need inbound links from non-spammy website. $100 a month can from textlinkads can help. If you are too poor for that, you'll need to convince bloggers to write about you - and to use those long tail keywords. Hard but possible.

b. Newsletters. These are surprisingly effective, but they are also time consuming and require a "I am going to work this hard for 3 months" approach to gauge true results. There are a wide range of email service providers, from ConstantContact on up. Many will let you send a few freebies out, others will let you send always free under a certain limit. This is great if you have a small list. Shop around, call the owner of one, explain your situation and negotiate for a little more head room. Remember, they make money on volume, so if they can show you ROI free early, they'll win too.

My parting advice is, dig in. Give whatever you decide to try your full effort. At the start it will feel frustrating and ineffective. Let it snow ball. Come in with the mindset that "this will work" and "I will not let my company down by failing to make this work". Then it will.
Since the iphone is not advanced enough to support background processes, the only way it would be possible would be through a server side process. Interesting idea, and definitely worth a try I guess.
I think there are a lot of design issues that need worked out.

I had to expand my browser to 1139px wide in order to avoid horizontal scrolling. This is bigger than a lot of people's max monitor resolution. It is certainly bigger than I prefer to keep my browser. I tend to keep mine around 950px.

The text on the homepage is very jarring. Preferably, use only one font size and color for any given paragraph. At most, use two.

The table for displaying info on books give a huge amount of space to information which seems to be relatively unimportant. Is the number of words (especially when it varies by only about +- 75) really that important? If you trimmed it down, you could display information on a lot more books on a single page. I hate paging through information, and most users won't even go past the first page (think about how you use Google or Amazon... how many pages are you typically willing to look through?). Some sort of categorization/tagging may also be in order.

The "get started" link on the homepage really needs to contain more information. If you want your users to start there, you should give them something more. I never start with signing up. I start with learning about the service.

The about page mentions that you can unlimited students in your account, but it's not at all clear what it means to have an account and what it means to have students in it. You are giving details, but I'm not clear on the basics, even after browsing around for 10 minutes. I've visited every page on your site and I still couldn't tell you what the day-to-day use of your site will be like.

I don't mean to criticize. I think you have a great idea, but I think right now, it comes off as very under-developed.
So once an application is submitted to the App Store, it can safely be considered and discussed as having been rejected until the author has been notified of it's approval?
I think they hate GOTO's more
If Apple locked down desktop OS X in the same way it has locked down the iPhone, I would switch to desktop linux in a heartbeat.

I did not say Apple should distribute 3rd party software. I said they were restricting downloads. They have become the gatekeeper to software installs on the iPhone. You have to illegally hack your device to get around this.
If it becomes that popular it can always be added as a built-in option in hn.
The theme music was actually Val Bennett's "The Russians are Coming", a version of Brubeck's Take Five. It's been permanently stuck in my head since I first saw this series years ago.
Mind if I asked a similar question, but in a quite different context?

So I'm working for an outsourcing startup which provides development services for startups. We're doing Agile development on RoR.

My eventual role would be a scrum master but my college major was international business. No SC background whatsoever.

At the moment I'm still in training and playing a role of a "front-end developer" in which I do all the HTML markup and CSS design in HAML and SASS.

My pair is a coder who handles all the back-end coding and so there's really inequality in our time spent.

What should I do to keep up with stuffs? A lack of CS foundation really prevents me from doing all the back-end stuffs but after a while I'm now able to comprehend most of the code.

Should I spend more time on stuffs like SEO, analytics, design, or invest more in RoR and tougher things? I'm still pondering over this everyday and I really hope you guys can share your opinion about this. :-)
Nothing new here. It's SOP for about all PR firms. Social media was the best thing that could happen to PR firms: they can broadcast their message(or framing) without interference by the press.

But with all the layoffs in the old press, journalists are overworked so it's not unusual to have PR releases slightly reworded parading as real articles in major newspapers and even more so in local ones.