skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Straighten out the situation with the rights, first. Establish who owns what, so that if your buddies decide it's not right for whatever reason, you still own the right to do things with it. If it's a joint contribution (eg you did the coding, but you all3 came up with the idea and your buddies each suggested things like site names and design elements), then work something out now.

Even if they are cool and 'nah, it's all your buddy' get it in writing. Don't ask them to put it in writing, say 'cool, I'll just write that up then'. (The only part you want them to actually write themselves is their signature agreeing to the terms specified by...you. This is something I wish I had realized earlier in life!).

Then launch. Or conduct a limited alpha with HN readers or whatever you need to do. Also, I do get the feeling you're letting these people (and others) hold you back a little bit. I feel where you're coming from, and I trust you have reasons for your disappointment, but you come across as a bit passive. If you're like me, you may have difficulty sounding out people's feelings, so you can't tell when someone is seriously interested or when they're just being polite to blow you off or get something for nothing. The only solution I've found for this is to be polite but assertive about asking follow-up questions. If someone vacillates and says 'well of course I do like it...maybe I could help you later' just let them know you'll keep exploring other options, eg 'Sure, I get that - I guess you won't mind if I take it across the street then, I need to move forward with this'. It's a terrible drag but that's how a lot of people are, if you hand them something on a plate they don't appreciate it and if you take it away they'll complain you didn't let them have a bite.
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Actual Nutjobery.
Seriously - this is rather interesting. Looks like proof of the whole "there are no new ideas, only execution" maxim.
World's Most Expensive Single Objects
I agree with much of this, but "time management" still seems like a half-baked metaphor for FP immutability and not a clarifying model, at least not yet. It's easy to explain the X to which "memory management" refers: allocating and freeing memory. Surely that was easy to understand even before the advent of GC. It's also easy to explain what memory is and point to where and how it is manipulated in code. I don't see how time is a programming construct in the way that memory or state is.
The set of all men plus all women is greater than the set of all men. If you find that concept appalling, more power to you.
Hanı mənim Dilim
There's a joke about Duff's (Doomsday) Device somewhere in there.
Honestly, I don't get the whole "Yahoo has neglected products" meme at all. The new homepage is an improvement; the new SERPs are a huge improvement; the new Yahoo Mail is pretty good (although I still prefer Gmail); Yahoo Sports is awesome; OMG gets more traffic than TMZ; Flickr still rocks; and so on.

Could it be even better? Sure. I'd love to be the overall product czar at Yahoo (hire me, Carol; forget that Brad Garlinghouse fellow who cut and run), flitting about from team to team demanding polish on various bits and pieces.

But Yahoo does better at selling premium ad space than anyone else on Earth - and they're creating more premium ad space than anyone else on Earth with their content investments in Sports, News, Finance, OMG, and so on.
Sure, influencers and celebrities benefit from the broadcast without a doubt but is it possible that the back and forth conversation is limited (post, possibly a reply, and that is usually the end of it) to make the rest of the user base just feel like they have been heard. Of course there are consumers and contributors in the mix but I would like to think that more value could exist via real conversations.
The organisms currently composed of organic nanobots (cells) are a beautiful, complicated mess. It'll be some feat to augment that mess in the ways he predicts and as quickly as he predicts.

A human is like a giant software package that's been patched for billions of years. It's had a long time to get pretty complicated and to take advantage of every physical phenomena we've yet to understand.
"Permissive Action Links. ... So in 1962, Robert McNamara ordered every nuclear weapon locked with numerical codes.
Effect: None. Irritated by the restriction, Strategic Air Command set all the codes to strings of zeros. The Defense Department didn't learn of the subterfuge until 1977."

The most egregious default password in history.
We're working on adding institutional accounts. There are some complexities involved, mainly involving legal issues and various whitepapers that need to be written, but I wholeheartedly agree with your idea: early adopters are a great way to get institutions to adopt a product.

As for your second suggestion, do you think a way for current users to send potential users an invitation to try a demo account (a sandbox) would do the job?
I agree, silly rants like this is absurd and really doesn't do any good and is not productive. Execution is key. I'm little passionate about my startup and that is why I replied. I never said he stole our idea. I said "almost" exact replica. Facebook borrows from twitter, eduset borrows from pownce, we borrow from twitter, facebook, friendfeed.
I agree; its not the idea that makes the product (or service) but rather the execution. Jeff should simply concentrate his time on bettering his own venture. Consider a similar venture nothing short of flattery.

I wish both Eduset.com and Edmodo.com the best of luck with their ventures - let the execution begin.
For a post titled "How Ravelry Scales to 10 Million Requests Using Rails" the only scaling advice they mention are the technical specs of the site like:

Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant is used instead of memcached in some places for caching larger objects. Specifically markdown text that has been converted to HTML.

and this one tip:

The database is the problem. Nearly all of the scaling/tuning/performance related work is database related. For example, MySQL schema changes on large tables are painful if you don’t want any downtime. One of the arguments for schemaless databases.

Not much "how" in that.
Why Asian girls for Dating and Romance?
Asian women are feminine, naturally beautiful, patient, submissive and tend to be caring to their family members. These traits make them popular among western men - especially American men. More and more American men are opting for dating and even marriage with Asian girls because they find them more appealing than American girls.
While an interesting examination, the problem with articles like this is they have lots of graphs and math to maximize dollars without any consideration of value that can't be stored in the bank; like pride of ownership, owner enjoyment, confidence in reliability, and predictable monthly expenditures (as a function of warranty).

There is more to value and cost than money.
My sister is getting her PhD in learning and memory research, and specializes in how kids learn (and she has her teaching cert), and her experience matches mine: teachers hate being told there's something new, young, and better. If they discover it for themselves, great. But positioning yourself as the new young buck on the scene is shooting yourself in the foot. Frankly, I'd try to get an advisory board chock-full of NEA and AFT reps.
"Does anyone have any experiences with overcoming this hurdle?"

Ask them if they can hold some of the money in escrow ... or go with a different underwriter that will allow yearly subscription (but at a higher rate).

You could also just do one-time payment for the year and require them to re-purchase.

Might even look into accepting POs from schools. If you're into cashing checks :)
So in your case....dealing with a hard technical problem the current establishment of forums for richer discussions and interaction could leverage the power of community, no? Would a microblog version of what is now specific forums be enough of an experience to handle the majority of what needs to be covered? Would you be willing to participate in this manner if there was an extra step to finding the specific conversation home (within the platform) for the request, question, or dialogue?
Skype’s new revenue plan, Enterprise Telephony
I'm somewhat surprised to see that San Francisco's New Bay Bridge is going to cost more than the LHC.
Your core customers will happily pay $35 for a bingo activity which they'll use once. You're offering an application which revolutionizes the way they work, and charging $5 a month.

Thus, the usual pricing advice: charge more.
Charlestown slots | charlestown casino | video slot machine
Seeing it in action without having to register is important (and not on video), perhaps sandbox to play.

On price IMHO it would be a plus to also offer a 'school option'. It maybe easier and can capture a wider audience.
Jeff, I understand that you're passionate about Edmodo, just as I'm passionate about Eduset. And it's very true that all startups are derivative to a certain extent. However, I have to correct you: you did say I stole your idea. Here's your tweet from September 2nd:

"Is being copied (i mean blatantly ripped off) the sincerest form of flattery?"
http://twitter.com/zemote/status/3715106709

If you're willing now to take this back, then I think that we can happily coexist as healthy competitors.
Wow, this sounds remarkably similar to my situation except there is me and just one other friend and we've been doing it a couple months less than you.

I'm going to talk with my friend this weekend and get things sorted out. The worst case is that I will just launch the site as a minimalistic version and then work on a separate business idea by myself.

I think the main problem is that my friend is completely non-technical. I was relying on him to do the marketing.

As a follow up question, how do you separate duties between a technical founder and a non-technical founder in the first few months of a startup so that all people have equal amounts of work?

With my idea, I was prepared to invest more up-front time as I was solely developing the website with the expectation that my partner would get things going at the appropriate time.

I guess that is a mistake in hindsight.

This comment probably doesn't help you in any way but hopefully we can learn something for the next time.
I'm confused.

Carol Bartz is not stupid nor a bad leader. In the early 1990's, Autodesk was failing. It was unfocused, undefined, and it was easy to see the atrophy of quality in its products. There was no leadership, and the young company was losing the faith of its own customers. It was basically a miniature version of where Yahoo was last year when Arrington was calling for Yang's head.

Bartz came into Autodesk and turned the company around. She cut products that weren't working, she focused the company's energy on AutoCad and other cash cow products, and she developed a pretty awesome culture that still exists today. She took risks at Autodesk, and pushed the company to explore products that seemed impossible to build. But some of those experiments turned into extremely successful features of AutoCad (many of them failed, too, but she developed a culture that encouraged failure with quick abandonment).

When Bartz went to Yahoo, I was expecting a repeat of her early days at Autodesk. But it hasn't happened. She just started cursing at the news media and firing people. She has not created a focused product strategy. She has taken a failing Yahoo culture and somehow made it even worse.

Given her track record, I don't understand why she has accomplished so little in time she has had. Something does not add up.
"However, Mr. Kalashnikov's design was never patented and the production agreements were largely handshake deals."

Well, what can I say? Bad luck?

From another article from 2007 - http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL06893771200707...

"People say: 'If you lived in the West you would have been a multi-millionaire by now.'"

"They get hung up on the green stuff, on dollars. But are there not other valuable things in life? Which of the Western weapons makers can say that a bronze statue of them has been built in their home village?"
Thanks!

They definitely did put in a lot of work, which is why I'm surprised they're giving up now. Eg., they made a whole bunch of fabulously slick presentations for investors that must have taken dozens of hours each (none of them invested, but hey, that's startup life).
So why doesn't Microsoft just announce that they will no longer be supporting IE6?

What are the companies who have IE6-only applications going to do? They'll have to upgrade or consciously continue to use an obsolete browser. Did they sign contracts with businesses that state they'll support IE6 forever or something?

Microsoft employees may hate supporting IE6, but someone in charge there doesn't mind it so much.
Sure. I suppose what motivated me to write the original post in this thread is that I'm beginning to see a lot of people jump into startups with a great amount of wishful thinking and a complete misconception of what they are getting into. It's really the computer geek equivalent of a jock joining the military after high school because the ads are cool and he enjoys fighting.

I'm not a huge fan of the strategy to keep on trying until you succeed. There are some things in life that I will simply not be good at. No matter how much I try, there is no way I will be an Olympic swimmer. That ship sailed well over half a lifetime ago. Some people just aren't cut out for running a business. Hell, even some successful business people are tormented by the idea that they were simply lucky, and spend the remainder of their time failing at future business endeavours.

All I'm suggesting is that you need to go into a startup with a reasonable sense of commitment. For most businesses, I think a reasonable time frame to dedicate to it is 3 years. There isn't a fixed gestation period for a successful business the way there is for creating a baby. But 3 years is long enough for you to have seen some highs and lows, to have performed several iterative improvements to the product/service, and (again, hopefully) witnessed the market's initial reaction and longer term assessment of the product/service. It's enough to have executed a few strategical paths and many more tactical manoeuvres. In effect, it's long enough to provide an adequate number of data points (for you) to make the decision to continue or not if the market hasn't made that decision for you already.

For those of you wanting to go into a startup, think of being able to put in a 3 year commitment and now let your mind explore that idea vs the idea of simply putting in a year's worth of effort. You'll come up with a vastly different sense of obstacles that you will face (e.g., cash flow is a problem for a 3 year commitment for most people but not so for a 1 year commitment). The problem is, most people discount these obstacles and then face them anyway because they aren't successful within that first year. Their strategies don't take them into account and are rendered ineffective as a result. Basically, treat a startup as if you're emigrating to a foreign country for a few years as opposed to just visiting one for vacation. All the same sort of obstacles still apply.
Yup true. Will add that option.
Fuck, this morning we got up to a massive dust storm. The sky was red, then turned yellow, then the weather changed and it became freezing cold.
When you want data from threads starting from "Ask HN:" you can use this.
The article linked in this thread had pretty good details:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802889
(http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry)
Does anyone have any experiences with overcoming this hurdle?

Switch you subscription term from "per month" to "per academic year". Alternatively, characterize the payment as a one-time license or use fee, get a year of positive history with Braintree, then switch to a subscription model and give your existing customers free-for-life accounts on it. (This is equivalent to a lifetime subscription option, but offered by stealth and limited to early adopters.)
I'll talk to them further about the possibility of escrow - that sounds like a potentially reasonable solution. I asked previously about one-time payments, and they said that doing so does not negate the issue, which is interesting.

Also, if a school wants to pay the good ol' fashioned way, I'm more than happy to oblige.
You may want to setup a system just for cloning if you create a lot of slices for yourself or customers. You can then just restore it to a new slice, run updates, make firewall changes, etc, but at least you get some of the core work out of the way each time - and it's as easy as a few clicks.
Goole Map, Facebook Connect, iPod Library and Camera with iPhone
Much more succinctly put than I could have put it, but spot on! The problem I'm seeing is a greater number of pilots that think they're flying Harrier jump jets when they're really piloting Cessnas :)
That's fascinating to hear. It seems I've occasionally failed to consider both early adopters and regular teachers in my marketing materials. Thanks.
Yes, we can co-exist as healthy competitors. I'm usually not one for silly rants, my passion has gotten the better of me tonight. Edmodo, Eduset, and The Education Community as a whole is better served by us putting our energies into execution of our startups.
Hi

When naming/labelling physically the servers two main things to be taken for consideration.

SECURITY and CONVENIENCE

SECURITY : When other persons have physical view/access to our servers they should not be able to locate the role of servers by our namings like WEB , DB , PROD , TESTING etc. By this weakness they know which machine to attack.

CONVENIENCE : Our sysadmin should be able to identify server with ease.

We name by Rack , Location and Position. Example R1CA12 i.e Machine is in Rack1 California and 12th Server. This will ease our Remote Network Operations Center engineer to know the position and coordinate with local sysadmin .
I've found that teachers are a stingy group when it comes to paying for classroom services.

What data do you have which supports this contention? Is it more of a "gut feeling"? I had that gut feeling once myself, and you know what? It is a lie. A myth. Totally contrary to empirically observable fact.

The average teacher in the United States spends $200 to $400 of her own money per year (varies with level and geography, and I've seen a few numbers quoted from different studies) on instructional supplies.

The average customer for Bingo Card Creator spends $32.50 on a program which most use once or twice per year. (Which is still cheaper than the laminated set of bingo cards they were about to buy at the teaching store. Those cards are on the shelves because they sell.) I have a trial-to-purchase conversion of about 2.3% for my online version, which is considered fairly good.

Some teachers do complain about the price. That is a good sign -- if no one is complaining that it is too expensive, you've priced it too low.
Dude, you've been taken advantage of. You did all the hard work; while your friends may have brought the idea to the table, they're not invested the way you are. Your friends are the assholes who give "business guys" (like me) a bad name.

I can do a fabulously slick presentation in half an hour (I've charged people to make slick presentations for them (if you can't make your own docs, contact me - it's only $150 an hour :) ). You've done vastly more work than they have, trust me. You should let it go and let them fend for themselves. Hopefully, you've learned some sysadmin stuff you can apply at your next gig, but this has been a harsh learning experience.
There are plenty of what you're saying for sure. I've had the same experience in other places - and also the experience that actually there's far less content than meets the eye. A LOT gets recycled and regurgitated endlessly. If you're not selling anything or trying to get anything then take the time to just sit back and listen. It starts getting surreal. Especially if you have 10 or 15 years of solid tech background and you realize there are far fewer "rock stars" than people think. Particularly the rock stars themselves.

That said - I'm really happy for you that you are finding it an exciting experience. Good luck with it! As I said before, I'm sure we'll have many more successful companies coming from here. Hopefully some of them will create lasting value.
The traffic is a hassle only in the rush hour. Most tech companies here operate on flexitime specifically so their employees can avoid it, which works pretty well.

Having said that, I haven't worked anywhere else. The perspective of someone who had would be useful.
Relevance as Deception? Searching for Snake Oil
I am so submitting this proposal. In cartoon form.
Buying new cars is financially crippling.

http://www.daveramsey.com/etc/lms/drive_free/player.cfm
I know all of those cities. I'm hoping to make it to austin city limits next month if my schedule cooperates. I've lived in NYC and visited Boston and and Seattle many times.

NYC is fun for a while. I could live there again. Seattle felt a bit small and depressed last time I was there. Austin just has hot and drunken live music memories. I need to visit in a more serious mood some time.
1) That's good to hear, I'll try to make the video more prominent.

2) What's your reasoning for the $30 price point, as opposed to something lower? Also, having more than one class in a slot would cause some confusing overlaps in homework due dates and such, but you're right, there will always be some people trying to do it.

3) That's a good point, I'll look into a database of schools that I can put behind an AJAX picker.

4) I worried about that when I made the tour. I'll work on tacking on short segments from a student's viewpoint at various points in the video.
I agree that babies act differently from the start. It is also true that a very small number of babies are truly inconsolable, and most babies go through periods of being extremely hard to console. Often with good reason. For instance both of mine developed a painful problem with gas at about 2 months of age.

That said, the combination of strategies that I described works amazingly well. The fact that they won't _always_ work doesn't diminish how much they help.
Maybe it's the repeated failures to get investors that did it. They might need to be reminded that the lack of investors is not necessarily a bad sign - audiences, unlike VCs, have nothing to lose by giving you guys a chance.
That's great to hear. I'm glad we've put this behind us.
By charging for your service, you're actually rather protecting your users — a free service is much more likely to suddenly disappear from the face of the web when it's too far into the red. And certainly, that wouldn't be appreciated by those users who have come to rely on the service. Maybe you should even put that into your marketing copy: it not being free is a feature.
Equinox (Magnolia's Back)
It sounds like you constantly depend on other people too much. Have you thought of bootstrapping and just doing everything yourself?

My favorite quote of all time is "Only victims make excuses." I think you need to stop being a victim.
Moore's Law still rules OK at Intel
There is actually a reason for doing that, as opposed to commenting it out - at least in compiled languages, the compiler will complain if code changes elsewhere conflict with it, so it doesn't bitrot as fast.
Interesting that the Big Dig cost twice as much as the Channel Tunnel.