skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Localization. We recently set-up a bug tracking tool for someone who was sending bug reports to an external developer as Word documents, and we picked Mantis because it supported Hebrew (as well as being free and relatively straightforward to install).
1. Sponsorships

2. Direct advertising

3. Adsense

1 + 2 are sometimes blurred

2 + 3 are sometimes reversed

...as the other guy said your own numbers don't add up. And furthermore they are out of order.

...and we try not to just break even
Python 3 new features
rapidly innovating physical products. fixing our own physical devices. 3d printers are to the physical world what 3gl languages are to software, or maybe assembly, or maybe machine language over punch cards.
Interesting. So, the winner will probably have a bunch of slightly inefficient flywheels that technically provide a tiny amount of lift and/or thrust, charge those up, and use them to power the main rotor.
Income breakdown:

100% projectwonderful. Advertising space.

However, my site is not a web application or anything. It is just an encyclopedia on purely all things open source gaming, and the only one in the universe. As a result, I doubt there are many ways to monentize the traffic.

It gave me nice money to booststrap my game development site, although I still need to make it "real serious as in not-just-for-fun" startup firm.
Exactly what I had in mind -- thanks.
Ok, so, since you're asking us, what are your numbers ?
I've currently sorted out integration with Github. I'll look into integrating with Subversion and others if there's enough call for it.
Please do steal features that trac or redmine are great of.

And if you plan to make it open source, please make it easier to install than trac.
100%: Selling things to people for money.
As a developer I've sorted most of these :)
From Canada's profit 100 list:

Avg founder age: 43

62 have started multiple firms

3 firms on avg.

Avg workweek 58 hours

Graduate degrees 27

Sole founders 37

Co-founders 48

Female 6

Avg 5-yr growth rate: 2506%
That's funny, I've learned something more like:

1. If you see something you can put in your pocket, do so.

2. Whenever you're in a new place, look at everything and try to use it. Even better, put it in your pocket.

3. When you're done with that, use everything you've put in your pockets with everything else in the room.

I admit my lessons are less practical for real life, but they have helped me finish a lot of adventure games.
Sales don't magically equate to better technology or a superior product.
We're the platform provider in a two-sided genealogy market (genealogy document clients on one side, genealogy lookup providers on the other.) We take a commission from providers (15% of their selling price) and a processing charge from clients (10% of the provider's selling price.)

So our income breaks down as:

client processing charge: 40%

provider commission: 60%
Looks like this would work well for lot's mobile devices. Thanks.
It starts up about as fast as IE6 does. I'm guessing two or three seconds.

Because of Arora, that computer is actually usable now. Thanks for the great browser!
take a look at the hosting cost on something like slicehost.com for a server. add in bandwidth costs to your server costs. does it still seem better to be developing on windows?

also, what are you charging your customers if 20 minutes or your time is worth $100, that's impressive. I wish I worked for a microsoft platform company so that customers would be willing to pay that much for a simple service.
The time you waste instructing the 3d printer to recreate your broken widget is better spent carving it out with the methods at hand.

That little steel thingy that wore out I can drill, file and bend by hand faster than you can CAD/CAM it up. You'll beat me if you're making many of something. But your home shop 3d printer still won't print steel.
Warning: my last corporate job was very heavyweight on the bug tracking

Things that are required at places I've worked:

Configurable workflows. An admin should be able to specify the allowed states in a bug, and the allowed transitions between states. If you do this, allow the set of required fields to change based on bug state.

Proper subtasks. It's really damned annoying to "support subtasks", but then not allow subtasks to have their own subtasks.

Things I want to see, that I haven't seen anywhere:

Merge tracking. At my last corporate job, we did a lot of branching and merging of source, and then the managers want to keep track of which branches/releases contain which bugs, so they can choose to port a fix over, or not. This process involves making a new bug for each port, saying "port bug #X to branch foo", which gets closed after the bug has been ported and tested on the new branch. The whole process is much more laborious than necessary. When the bug is filed, have the user report the first version that contains the bug. Then you can say all branches created after the first bug version (FBV) have the bug, and all branches that contain the fix don't have the bug.

Auto classification of component and severity. Many defect trackers have a field to track what part of the system has the bug UI, backend, etc. Many users don't fill out the fields. Use spamfilter techniques to guess at the component and severity based on the bug description.
And how does your reckoning change when the big day comes that you have to buy another server? And another? And then another 20? And you've locked yourself into the MS stack?

That $2k/box starts adding up real quick.
I haven't noticed it at first but that's right, it's really outdated. But still interesting as it depicts the inner workings of OS OS'es in a lively manner.
1: inertia

It took a long time to displace COBOL. Microsoft's technology is not superior. Their main advantage is the shady deals they have with computer manufacturers that push their software to people who don't know they do have options.

Oh... and BTW, where are the sales figures for all the people who download, say, Debian or CentOS or *BSD or OpenSolaris and just go about doing their business without showing in any sales chart?

That said, I find both Debian and OpenSolaris have strengths Microsoft doesn't. Do they have software management comparable to APT? Do they have file storage comparable to ZFS? Instead, people learn to live around their limitations and fail to notice there are better choices to whatever came bundled with their computers.
A few different sites w/ diff models:

Consumer facing listings site
90% advertising (prem ad partners + adsense)
10% affiliate

Consumer facing subscription
98% subscriptions
1% advertising
1% affiliate

Consumer facing pay per use
100% customer payments
I use this every day. I find it very useful, but it sometimes crashes randomly and seems to have problems loading additional stories lately. Love the Instapaper feature for reading on iPod touch on the go.
Slightly related, but hopefully worth mentioning...

If anyone's in the UK and is looking for a mentor to help them with their IT-related entrepreneurial activities, then here's a really good scheme:

http://www.itcmentoring.com/

It's where my startup found our absolutely wonderful mentor.
This is meta-physical drivel, and the guy thinks that 10^x + 10^y = 10^(x+y)

This should not be on HN.
Where are all the articles about when it's a bad time to start a startup?
My collaborator Ted Nelson (of Xanadu fame) has been carrying a camcorder to record (on hundreds of tapes) just about every conversation with people he's met, for about 30 years. Pretty ahead of his time, I guess. I'm on some of his tapes too, which is nice.
> The site has to balance looking like a historic newspaper with the constraints of the web.

See, that's certainly what they're trying to do, but I have absolutely no idea why they think "look like a newspaper" is one of their key constraints. You're a website: look like a website. The reason people don't read newspapers anymore is because they're inconvenient, why on earth would try to emulate a dying format?
iCombinator is great. However, there has a been a lot of downtime lately and you cannot comment or log-in.

An actual iPhone application would be great if pg would agree to let someone do it.
I know, seriously! I don't know about you, but I've been sitting on all of my ideas, patiently avoiding making any forward progress all in hopes that someday soon the economy would tank so I'd be able to bust out of the starting gates with my amazing ideas right when the time is right and my would-be competitors have trouble getting second round funding.

All those people who've been executing their ideas without the patience and fortitude to wait for this downturn are such suckers!
I was hoping so.
Databases such as Oracle, and DB2 are either equal or better in certain respects. Furthermore, I personally find PostgreSQL to be on par if not better than MSSQL. Aside from PostgreSQL's inability to return multiple recordsets, IMHO it's easier to write stored procedures, functions, views, and triggers in PostgreSQL. In addition PostgreSQL is significantly more consistent syntacticly. Every so often my brother who works for an MS shop will ask me how to do something relatively complex in MSSQL, I'll show him how, but in addition I'll also show him how much easier it would've been in PostgreSQL.

One can argue that when working with SQL Server Studio you don't have to worry about how to do things since the IDE will create most of what you need. However, the same can be said of decent IDEs for PostgreSQL, such as EMS.

Personally, I like the ability to read my functions, views, and triggers, and be able to easily understand what's happening; which is not something I usually experience when working with MSSQL.
Any kind of clout measuring will lead to massive gaming.

Technorati attempted to measure the clout of blogs. Was gamed. (Lot of probloggers asking their readers to add them to their technorati account.)

Twitter shows how many people you follow and how many follow you back. It is gamed.

Digg gives out clout measurement - how many % of your submissions reach the front page. It is gamed.

Clout measurement leads to gaming.
Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldspan
I don't know the exact numbers, but I have seen these low priced DVDs sell like hot cakes, even though the selection was quite limited (around 1.5 years ago, when I was in India, not sure now).

What the studios don't realize is this - they wont lose anything by reducing the prices because a) piracy will come down b) the sheer volume of sales, will make up for the price reduction.

Indian market is supremely price sensitive, so Indian companies aim for volume. The same can and will work in US too, if only the studios have the common sense to try it.
Thanks, very informative! I had no idea. All the articles I have read recently have simply made it a 'Windows uses this - OSX has always used this' debate.
he never said that. He's simply stating that this year is a better time to startup than, say, five years ago.
I actually agree with the above quote to a certain extent, if you remove the "real" its 100% correct.

I know a lot of people who have recently quit their jobs and are doing a startup - simply because of the down turn means companies are:

cutting back on R&D, giving you a tech advantage

laying off staff, meaning you can recruit easier

there is never a bad time to start up, but I do think some times are stronger than others.
If Kindergarten were like Social Media Marketing
apparently 280 North are working on one...
Sanitising JSON callback identifiers for security — a must for web developers
Seems to hang my browser. Is it video?
I don't have a copy of the software in question, I was basing my understanding of Time Machine's operation on the blog entry. When the author says things like "There are apparently people out there who have lost all of their backups because...", it seems reasonable to assume all means all.
I use an ExpressCard. It didn't even occur to me that a drive connected this way might appear to the OS to be an internal drive, but that actually makes a certain amount of sense.
I'm not worried about losing the old backups. But I would be worried about losing all of my backups, which is what would have happened if I had not noticed what was happening and stopped it manually.
You raise a good point - but consider:

* It is very possible that 3D printers may be able to craft some sort of metal in the future.

* You will have massive CAD sharing websites if 3D Printers were to ever become a home standard. You would be able to simply grab and print anything you need - quickly.

Your comment overlooks the fact that most people cannot drill, file or bend by hand.

The unfortunate reality is that most of us are not machinists. Much like how most of us cannot compute large mathematical equations. For this, we created a tool to make it so everyone could do. The result has grown far from that simple goal.
How To: Navigate the Developer/Businessperson Language-Barrier
I believe that has been in the works for.. quite awhile. A status update would be nice.
I was in your exact same boat, though I stopped just shy of multivariate calculus in High School, and after the first 2 calc classes, took statistics and whatnot.

Anyway, I would suggest staying in high school and enjoying it. I ended up only going to school for half the day my senior year along with a buddy who was in a similar situation. Then a few days a week, we'd attend a college class in town. The other days, we'd go to the beach, or really anywhere and just relax. Those are days we'll never get back, but it's ok, because I think we spent them properly the first time around :-)

College will still be there in a year.
You failed to account for:

- mandatory downtime for updates: every couple months your Windows server has a bunch of security updates that require a reboot. It's no problem for a development server, but just measure the wait SQL Server takes to start on a high-load environment. Compare that to Linux where the only reason to reboot is a kernel update and even that will be soon be history.

- The added cost per server. As someone pointed out, if you have to scale to 10 or 100 servers (just imagine one of your apps got successful) you will soon have to deal with their account managers. And they will know exactly how bad your position is. And you are pretty much stuck with x86 hardware too. You just can't employ a a Sun Niagara server for front-end business (instead of 5 x86s) because it doesn't run Windows.

- You are stuck with their licensing/core/memory limitations. You can't just pop a couple more gigabytes of RAM or a couple more processors in your servers without paying because neither Windows nor SQL Server will use them without - gasp - a reinstall.

Windows is cheap. It's not always inexpensive.
We're sorry, the article you are looking for is not yet available on mobile, please go back to the main site or choose one of the following links

I hate that shit. More so the redirect to the mobile site and not the actual article. Sincerely pisses me off
Happily, the logs record exactly what happened. The request was for 877.54 GB. The TM volume is 731.95 GB. It deleted 14 old monthly backups (so just over a year's worth) before I stopped it. But given that it had requested more space than was actually available there is no reason to believe it would have stopped before wiping them all, and in particular, before wiping all my Leopard backups, which would have made it impossible for me to revert.
There are other factors at play also. Redbox is actually $1 per day. Keep it longer, pay more, all the way up-to the price of the DVD, in which case you just keep it. And probably more significantly, they can only hold a very limited supply: someone takes out that new release, it's out, and your options are then go online or another box hoping to find it, guess when the person that got it out will return it, opt for another movie, or, pay a higher price with another vendor to avoid these pitfalls.
balancing shouldn't be an issue - this thing is not affected by waves as hydroplane is under water. steering might be problematic though.
You're seriously telling us that when the hardware changes, instead of updating the license, you have to reinstall the entire stack?

Got a link for that?
there is never a bad time to start up, but I do think some times are stronger than others

Agreed. I actually upmodded your parent comment as well as the story, but I couldn't help but poke fun at the idea of people timing the market, waiting for an economic downturn before starting their startup. The idea that you can time the market and consciously start a business at The Perfect Time is preposterous. :)
Yes, I think that might be right. That hadn't occurred to me before.
As a web developer, I agree wholeheartedly. The Mac gamma correction was more frustrating than any IE6 bug. I'm thrilled to leave it in the past. Thank you Apple!
Painting of Tica by Dru Blair
If most have started multiple firms, then they didn't start being entrepreneur at 43. So is it age, or simply repeated experiences that really matter?
Ask HN: Is is correct to judge a developer's performance this way?
Is is fair to judge a developer's performance based on the number of bugs filed against his name?

Or based on the peer code reviews that are done?

If not can you guys tell me whats the best way?
I like one or two designs, but I can't say that any of them is "better". It's easy for designers to pop Photoshop open and start moving things around to provide a final "web 2.0" layout or a "more beautiful" look and feel, without looking at analytics and studying user behavior.
CraigsList is useful, but not very usable. And sometimes a useful product with low usability score is better than a usable product, that 50M existing users need to re-learn. Muscle memory plays an important role for existing customers, especially frequent visitors.

Craigslist is a profitable business. And they need to evolve incrementally the same way Amazon does.

The fact that it's simple and basic doesn't mean that it's broken. It works. At least 95% of the time :)
Comparison of online backup services for Mac
Natural compounds, chemotherapeutic drugs may become partners in cancer therapy
august:

adsense - 37%

tribal fusion - 26%

direct ad sales - 17%

CJ affiliate ads - 16%

donations - 4%
On some of my servers, I made a couple scripts that does it in several levels. It first deletes incremental backups beyond a give horizon but keeps the full ones. Beyond the next horizon, it deletes every other full backup and does so until it reaches the size constraints I set.

If it cannot delete anything else and the storage is beyond its limits, it e-mails me telling me to please do something about it.
“These machines are to the video industry what the Internet was to the music business — disaster”

Hate to break it to you bud, but the Internet is not choosy about media types. I promise you that when movie streaming becomes more practical, it will destroy these bulky/expensive kiosks as well as other traditional store chains. The time of DVD is slowly approaching its end.
Well, first of all octopi are invertebrates, so their nervous systems are quite dramatically different from ours. If I remember right, an octopus' axons are unmyelinated (I don't know much about invertebrates; I know some invertebrates have myelination, but I don't think octopi do). This means that it's quite a bit slower to transmit signals around in their bodies, so in order to react quickly they need bundles of neurons near the sources of the signals.

Perhaps as a throw-back to our invertebrate ancestors, we still have unmyelinated fibres that transmit some kinds of information, such as some forms of pain. That's why if you stub your toe, you feel two waves of pain: one sharp and quick, and the other much duller. The second one travels over unmyelinated fibres, and so takes much longer to arrive in your brain.

If all you had were unmyelinated fibres, and if control were centralized in your brain, you'd have a round-trip time of a few seconds to your feet. How could you control your legs for walking like this?

Obviously, we do have myelinated axons, so things are quicker, but it's still impractical to involve the brain in most reactions, because it's large and complex and takes a while to reach a steady-state after unexpected stimuli.
Thank you!

Interesting the 'donations' column. And tribal fusion looks like a pretty serious contender for adsense wrt to income.

That's a nice datapoint to have.

If you want to trade 'absolutes' drop me a line.
wow, thats retarded.
why did someone rename this post from "There is no better time to start up a startup" -- Mike Butcher to the current title? weird.
Quantitative metrics typically fail. For example, the number of bugs would be expected to increase as the developer writes more code, so while one developer might have more bugs assigned to him, that doesn't mean he writes worse code than another developer.

The best answer is: you judge the performance of a developer the same way you would judge the performance of any employee. You gather feedback and apply your own personal assessment of that individual's performance given the tasks and objectives you've assigned. There is no magic bullet.
I agree 110%

Patents should not be a marketing defense strategy.

Patenting things you have no intent of implementing/selling simply to block competition should be outlawed.
my first thought: no shit?

why do you think serial entrepreneurs find it so much easier to raise money?

PG wrote an essay on it, and the startup learning paradox. You're likely to fail when you're young because you're inexperienced, but the only way to get experience is to start up.
There's an "about me" panel in the side-bar of the blog.
The fairest way to judge a developer - any developer - is long term stable contribution to your project, in other words if they bring you value for the money you spend.

If someone is a perfectionist takes a year to complete a small item then it may be perfect, but by the time it is done (0 bugs to fix) the company may be bust.

The opposite, someone that is extremely productive but so sloppy that you are basically thrown in to 'crisis mode' by default is also untenable and not value for money.

The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, good enough to go to production in an acceptable time.

Things like 'bugs fixed', lines of code or anything like that are not going to cut it because they can be inflated or spoofed with great ease.

When you hire a developer you hire time from somebody else for your dollars, as long as it is worth to you what you pay for it you have a good developer.

You can start 'qualitative' comparisons by employing several developers in parallel, seeing which ones work best and then slowly over time try to improve your 'mix'.

There are no absolutes in this.
Just curious: on the second one, serving ads doesn't bring in much income, and it might even drive people away. Have you considered removing them? If so, what was the result?
A command line interface.

Now this is not to sound stupid, nor because I have an unhealthy relationship with Bash. What I mean is something like google: most people just enter their queries directly into the bar, and it just works - your software should too.

Then there are a few power users, who take the time to learn that you can improve you results with a few extra additions.

One example would be the use case, where I have discovered set of bugs that are properly in Freds code, so I want to assign them to him; it would be very useful if I could write something like this: "Components not aligned in about box;;as fred; pri high". Basically steal the google interface and allow people the maximal freedom to work with the software.
Wingify: Predicting Conversions on a Website using Visitor Behavior