skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a simple explanation that reconciles those two statements.

Bartz < Yang < Someone else.

Is it any wonder a whole essay was written about knee-jerk responses to Arrington?

edit: The tragically deceased parent comment was a complaint about the incongruity of "Can we please have Jerry back" and "Do I really want Yahoo to bring Jerry Yang back? No, not really." The author then asked if it was any wonder that so many people dislike TechCrunch.

Don't delete comments with replies. Losing a maximum of five karma points isn't the end of the world, though I think downvoting is generally a silly thing to do.
Yup, those are just the names that are well known. I'm sure for everyone of them there were/still might be 5 more. Things like Yahoo Dev Network, Hadoop, etc. are awesome initiatives and I always keep my fingers crossed that they keep them going.
It is faster because you use it less so the cache is smaller ? Think about that.

I have no reason to doubt it is true; I know poeple who claim to have made Firefox run much quicker by disabling the cache or making the cache direstory read only.

One of those people uses a 56k dialup connection that rarely connects as fast as 56k.

How badly do you have to screw up a cache implementation to get it where it is faster to fetch the data over a 56k dialup than look it up on the local harddisk ?
I would vote for an institutional subscription model. It might be a hard sell for individual teachers (often likely out of their own pockets), but I bet you could sell the value to institutions which employ teachers.
With each semester a teacher would have a new class right? Would it be possible to perhaps charge a one time fee for each class that is created instead of a monthly fee?
I currently have a video walkthrough posted on the left side of the page (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-WCIKVbRc). Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of, or something more in-depth?

I'll look into the technical aspect of setting up demo accounts, I am beginning to come around to the idea.
I do like how professional the site looks, however, it took me a while to find out what it would look like to use eduset. What I did find to be very helpful was the video showing linked from "click here to take a tour of eduset". The content of that video was informative, but not at all what I expected. I would place it more prominently on the page, not right above a screenshot (I was surprised those two elements were unrelated) and maybe give it a new name ("See eduset in action"?).

Props on the highly visible "Try it for free" buttons.

No props for the opening line of your faq "Eduset is an online classroom communication tool designed to make teachers' lives easier." Try something that says a little about what eduset actually DOES. While the product certainly does look easier than maintaining a personal webpage, it would be better to state how it makes a teacher's life easier, rather than just saying it will.

Similarly, in your about page, I would suggest moving your first sentence to the end of the paragraph (or at least to right before you talk about contact information.
I guess it depends what you consider important. I moved here recently. I don't disagree with much of what you say - but for me nightlife, social circles, name-dropping, and sycophants are only background elements.

What I do think are important are: 1) the very talented people I meet that come to the valley from all over the world both to live and to attend the endless flow of conferences, 2) the entrepreneurs and researchers I meet who are trying to change the world (in those words), and 3) the wide availability of resources (people, funding, advice, etc) for my startup.

These things I consider most important have actually exceeded my expectations about the valley.
This is almost an exact replica of my startup http://edmodo.com which is completely free for multiple groups (eduset charges for more than 1 group), and already has decent traction with 87,000 registered users.
If we want to nit-pick about semantics, I don't think it's a true dichotomy, because discovery persuades rationalist readers. In fact, in psychology this is called the Central Route of Persuasion.

Also, your essay reminded me of the caterpillar from alice in wonderland. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbntWU7pG8 - 47 seconds in). What's the isness in yo bizness!
The demo appears to use Google Maps, not Bing/Live Maps.

I disbelieve this is a Microsoft production.
Instructure looks like a very good product. Slightly more college-focused and LMS-like than Eduset, but certainly similar.

I'm definitely working on more features to differentiate from generic platforms that could be used (Facebook, Wordpress, etc). As for the price, do you think that it would become justifiable to someone like your sister once more features are added, or do you think that she and other teachers like her are unwilling to pay for any sort of classroom web tool?
It's not just about good vs bad. It is also the fact that i can see what people didn't like it. Often there are downsides that are a big deal to some, those that rate low which may or may not apply to me.
At least they didn't use switch/case. Can you imagine forgetting to include a break between case statements?
OK let me tell you something.

You have no idea why your startup failed. It has relatively little to do with the things you listed.

Your startup failed because you named it "trogger".

The name of a product, technology, website, whatever is critical for success. The name "trogger" makes me think of "troglodyte" or "troll blogger". Seriously, this is one of the worst names for anything internet or technology-related that anyone could possibly come up with.

Please please please make sure that someone else chooses the name of the next startup you work on.
Bhangra.
William Gurstelle: Take Smart Risks
Wait... they have Nginx out front passing requests to HAProxy and THEN to Apache + mod_rails? That just seems like a bit much given that mod_rails can be installed with Nginx straight up. Why would you want a set up like this?
Need's to learn about apostrophe's.
Ask HN: I think my startup is going to fail, what should I do?
Dear Hacker News:

About six months ago, me and two of my friends (we work at the same company) decided to go and start a startup. Since we didn't have funding, we figured we'd keep our day jobs, build the website, get a few users, and then quit and work on the company full time. The initial plan was for me to do the programming/technical stuff, one of my friends to handle getting funding and the other to handle marketing/getting users.

I've built a pretty decent site (in my humble opinion), but I think my friends want to abandon the project. They've floated the idea (several times) of just scrapping all my current code and starting over, they don't propose new features anymore, they haven't gotten around to getting the paperwork to form the company since they said they would (in June) and they say now they might never do it, etc., etc.

I only put a few months of full-time equivalent work into the company, so it's not the end of the world if it fails, but this sort of thing seems to keep happening to me. When I was in college, I did some research with a professor and he never got around to helping me with the write-up and publishing. I wrote a long article for a magazine last year, sent it in to the editor, they said it was very nice and then ignored it. I did part an earlier web application four years ago, but my co-workers never launched it. How can I avoid this sort of failure?
Jeff, I have to say, I'm kind of disappointed you chose to say that it is an "exact replica" publicly. As I said in my email to you some time ago, I had the idea for Eduset having never even heard of Edmodo, and only discovered Edmodo about halfway through the process of building Eduset. While I was certainly stunned at how similar the ideas were, I decided that the classroom microblogging space was big enough for more than one player, so I continued work.

Further, for the record, the inspiration for Eduset came from Pownce. When I first tried the Pownce closed beta, I realized that its model would apply perfectly to the classroom setting.

Edit: Also, note that Edmodo is planning to add paid features this year (http://www.edmodo.com/blog/2009/06/07/thank-you-for-a-succes...)

Edit 2: I'd like to emphasize again that I sent Jeff a long and detailed email about this exactly 3 weeks ago, containing everything I've said here and more. He confirmed to me that he received the email, but has yet to reply. For him to then take the debate public here, without bothering to talk to me personally, is unnecessary and absurd.
"Things like ... Hadoop ... are awesome initiatives"

Doug Cutting left too IIRC.
That's a very helpful observation, thanks.

The problem I actually ran into there is a liability one. My payments provider, Braintree, informed me that allowing yearly payments for a web-based service presents liability concerns, as if Eduset was to close, Braintree could be on the line for any refunds demanded by customers. Thus, they say they advise against new companies charging yearly. Does anyone have any experiences with overcoming this hurdle?

Also, given the feedback I've gotten from some other commenters, I'm going to add a demo account feature.
I like the design and the core concept. My suggestions:

1) The video was helpful and I would out it right under the "Try it for free" tab

2) In terms or pricing strategy, I like the idea of giving away one class for free and then adopt a per class pricing at around $30. I am sure there would be some teachers out there who would just use their one class slot for all classes but then you will always find 10% of your customers getting more than what they paid for. Lets worry about the remaining 90%

3) Make sure you keep track of what school are these teachers from. As soon as you see >5 teachers from a school registering, you might want to solicit an institutional model

4) I, as a teacher-customer, am not sure how will it work for students. What would they see and how? A video will help.
Can you tell us what the startup is called? Or at least what kind of work you guys do?
<< When people dislike something intensely, the reason is not always what they claim, or even believe themselves. >>

This is stunningly arrogant

No it's not. It's an obvious fact of human nature. One way to know this is by self-observation. That may seem oxymoronic (how can I observe something I am denying?) but with a bit of honesty it works well.

One tell-tale sign is when the emotional charge around something is incommensurate with the reason someone is giving. I think this may be going on here. The most common stated criticism of Arrington is that his journalistic standards are poor. But is everyone who says that really so passionate about journalistic standards in general? I kind of doubt it.
better question: after a few months of full-time equivalent work, why don't you have something you can launch? or is it not that type of company?
I agree with the above - in its current form, I think you'd attract early adopters who, even if they love your product, might have trouble convincing others to sign up and fork out for it. With an institutional model, said early adopters (presumably those in charge of educational technology spending) can try and push it out to teachers in their school.

Along these lines, perhaps consider some way to allow those who use and love your product to bring others in with minimal friction - let them try out the product in an administrative and student role, without having to sign up and learn on their own. Most teachers I know won't try something out until they really see the value in it (i.e. students engaged, fulfills some kind of need).
I'll give some more thought to revealing my age on the about page (I'm now a college freshman, by the way). Any specific reasons you say teachers would be uncomfortable with it?

I'm hesitant to add more plans at the risk of creating too many options for users, but I am looking into the possibility of institutional accounts.

Also, I hadn't fully realized the disconnect between that screenshot and subtitle, thanks.
I don't want to do anything that might provoke a fight, and they might be reading this.
We could have launched it last month, but I don't think I could handle the workload myself in my spare time, and they want to keep delaying our launch until they think the site is perfect.
I actually have proof you signed up for Edmodo in October or November of last year, so you new about Edmodo almost a year ago. The classroom micro-blogging space may be big enough for two but we are more motivated than ever to own the educational micro-blogging space which we are already doing a very good job at it. I'm just letting the Hacker News users the similarities between your service and ours and ours is free unlike yours and we have a business model too :) We put our money where our mouth is and making the Education community a better place by offering the best free micro-blogging we can for individual teachers.
Jeff, Will has already explained to you multiple times in both in public and private that Eduset is not a copy of Edmodo and both products were developed independently of each other. Kindly lay the fuck off and quit advertising your startup at every mention of Eduset.

Will and I both developed a teacher classroom web interface independently of each other. The difference is that I didn't lay claim to the idea and become a dick about it.

BTW, your comparison of Eduset and Edmodo is like a comparison between the Zune and the iPod. You might as well accuse Classleaf of similar 'exact replica'-tion.
That is disheartening to hear sorrow (wow the name matches). Honestly this just made my eyes glitter with hope that we can finally drop all IE support. Its an internal web-app and some terminals our users use must have IE6 because of compatibility issues with other crummy web apps (upgraded to 7 recently) which means we just need to test in google chrome and Firefox and were almost guaranteed to work in safari and guaranteed to work in actually all major browsers :). Its perfect! God I love google sometimes.
If your job has your system locked down that much, most likely they don't want you to be surfing the web, wave, or whatever.
Game theory says give, not receive the limited stock of flu vaccine
screw that, launch. launch it and control your workload by controlling your marketing plan, trying to keep the number of users in check with what you can handle. then polish it.
Nope... Google might pay companies like dell and hp to sneak this baby into pre-installations. Woo. And I am sure there will be a google javascript thingy which detects IE and gives you a message about download this and supporting pages will magically run soooo much faster and look sooo much more awesome.
Ken Hinckley's Blog

Handwriting recognition with Inkseine
http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/ar...

Codex, a DIY project...or is it?
http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/ar...
"Yahoo is to tech what General Motors is to autos." - McRib

Quite possibly the most epic burn I've seen all month.
LOL.

I was just thinking about this today. In the end I dont think it matters which path you take as long as you were happy to take it at the time and you dont have any regrets. Everyone is different and everyone will have different wants. I'm 31 and single and I can feel this disconnect between my married friends (with kids) and I.
This works across the niche spectrum from "Internet forum trolling simulation game" to "bingo card creation software". Customers validate ideas -- the opinion of non-customers is irrelevant.
Looks like an interesting concept. I'm not too surprised to see it coming from MS R&D. They are well funded and have some great ideas. The problem with a company like Microsoft is actually getting those ideas into a real shipping product unmolested. I hope Apple's rumored tablet is more or less the same form factor and functionality.
I sent her the link just now and we talked a bit. Turns out the school district currently offers a very basic website for teachers to interact with students online.

This is the site they gave her - http://barnes.myteacher.dvusd.com which was created using http://manila.userland.com.

As you can tell, its nothing fancy really. She mentioned that students can create accounts and interact on her page but that its too confusing and so she just uses the basic features.

To quote her:
"I can have the students create accounts on there so they can post stuff too but I haven't played around with any of that stuff.
Its really confusing so if he could market it to school districts instead of making us use this stuff then that'd be great.
Its really dumb, a lot of teachers just use google sites instead cause its easier. To make my site look like that I had to go through and edit the html code"

It seems like she is definitely looking for something different but expects the school district to purchase it. Otherwise she'd rather use Google or Ning. I hope the feedback helps :)
If you want to get into proof, here is proof that I got the inspiration for Eduset exactly a year earlier than I signed up for Edmodo: http://grab.by/5A5

Also, it is painful for me to see you painting me as a villain here. Why are you implying that I'm not "putting my money where my mouth is", that I'm not also trying to make the education community a better place? As I said above, you are planning to launch paid features, so please don't try to make it seem like I am doing teachers a disservice by charging a small amount.
I would. The approach to testing is fantastic, the style is extremely consistent, the comments and commentary are well thought out, and I find it a good compromise between clarity and efficiency. Why wouldn't you recommend it?
Net Neutrality? Not so fast, says GOP
I believe you should keep this thread going. It might get you covered on Techcrunch :)
Another way is keeping it theoretical and perfect.
> Microsoft is just again using vaporware

I've used NATAL. It's not vaporware.
To be honest I think this is step 1, perhaps the best first step EVER MADE to move towards progress in HTML. With this plugin basically we can finally make messages on websites in the same way flash is installed to download google chrome and we have HTML5 compliance (once the spec is done and fully implemented). It will be great. Till now were stuck with HTML 4.1 until the entire world moves to IE8 AT LEAST. This is really a technological leap.
Kalashnikov (maker of the iconic AK-47) faces bankruptcy
Because I'd rather offend people needlessly than use needless words, and you have to choose one or the other.

Reminds me of a quote from Robert Heinlein

"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best."
Things we can learn from Twitter's registration experience
Starbucks gets an official iPhone App (or two)
>>How can I avoid this sort of failure?

It seems like all of these "failures" were related to your dependence on some other people. Once they gave up on you, you seemed to accept the effort as a "failure".

I have two suggestions
1. Perhaps pick your partners a little more carefully
2. Work on a venture that doesn't depend on other people ...or at least don't give up immediately after your partners give up.
imo suggestion-2 is the way to go, but perhaps you should also consider why you have always been dependent on other people for your success plans.
> including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident

Men are interchangeable? Women are capable of thoughts men aren't? Every rationale for such a statement I've come up with is appalling.
As if we need another reason to distrust the GOP...

Seriously - one of the major arguments for net neutrality is that the lack thereof serves as a serious /threat/ to commercial interests dependent on internet accessibility. Given the GOP's business-friendly public image, you'd think they'd be a bit more careful about picking this particular fight.
I just ran a check on a publicly traded company that has about 300 employees and several millions in annual sales. The company information Cortera showed was plain wrong - under 5 employees, under 500k sales. It did however want $3 for further information.

If they can't get the basic information right, how reliable is their crowd-sourced data ?
Having Nginx in front is a lot more flexible that just having HAProxy listen on port 80. For example, it can serve static files and do redirects both of which don't need to pass through the whole load balanced stack.

They could use Nginx -> HAProxy -> Nginx(w/ passenger), but the Apache version feels slightly more mature (e.g. it has some config options that the Nginx version lacks) and it's likely they were already using it before the Nginx version came out.
How can I avoid this sort of failure?

The only way to avoid failure is to stop trying. Unfortunately that is the same way to avoid succeeding. I think you need to find less flaky people to work with.
It's used, but it's not the enormous wave that Gmail was. There's no way Google Wave is ignored, but there's every chance it becomes useful only to power users and niche groups, just like how Google Docs isn't viewed as a competitor to Microsoft Word.
I've tried pair programming a few times at several companies, and while it's occasionally been great to work through a specific problem, in general I wasn't a fan, it was awkward and boring. But recently, at my startup, I've been sitting on the couch coding on the TV (because I switched over to iPhone development and the only spare mac was the TV mac mini, and it can't drive my 30 inch monitor.) Pair programming has actually been happening fluidly with this set up, and it's been great. It's comfortable to sit side by side and both have a head-on view of the large monitor.
Keep the day job and build it on the side...
Ask them to sign over all rights for the company to you. Prepare to be busier then you've ever been. Launch. The worst case scenario could be that you get no users... if that happens, search out a new partner, it should be easier to find one with a prototype already built.

If the other worst case scenario happens and you get a lot of users, good problem to have! Find some more help at that time.

You are on the cusp of succeeding or failing. Nothing has been determined yet, and don't let your partners decision to do nothing stop you. Oh, and it sounds like they haven't done anything yet.

Next time make sure your partners are putting in as much effort as you are along the way so that you aren't the only one with flesh in the game and they along for the free-ride.
You're an airplane pilot trying to get your bird off the ground. You have to attain a certain velocity to succeed. If your runway is short, you'd better open the throttle wide -- and if it isn't working, you have to decide pretty quickly to give up and try again.

But if the runway is longer, you have more time: continue building speed until you have enough force to lift off.

You just want to avoid giving up when you had plenty of runway.
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After having tried it, edmodo sucks balls. Huge, bloody, salty, donkey balls.

I guess being first mover/original isn't the best thing.

Stop spamming your lame little startup every time a superior competitor pops up.
Seconding this. You're not going to have a perfect site specifically because you haven't launched. Without audience feedback, all you're doing is endlessly second-guessing yourselves - that sort of feedback exacerbates any existing groupthink behind the design, potentially causing it to be far less usable than it originally was.