skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some profitable companies operated at a loss for extended period of time at first. Sure, nobody disagrees with that. The point of the post was that it isn't the operating at a loss that makes a business a success, no matter how large the revenue stream. Operating at a loss may turn out to have been worth it, in retrospect, once the profits start rolling in.

It may even be the case that great business success is always preceded by years of operating at a loss. Let's assume that for the sake of discussion. It still doesn't show that any company that operates at a loss, no matter how large the revenue stream, is going to be a great business success. And it certainly doesn't show that the business, while operating at a loss, is currently a success. Operating at a loss, with a large revenue stream, may be a necessary condition of success, but it surely isn't a sufficient condition.
Thanks! Both the Rubygems Bundler and Rip (as Josh explains) are great examples of why "require 'rubygems'" might not always be the best idea.

Bundler: http://github.com/wycats/bundler

Rip: http://hellorip.com/
I just wish Wikipedia would find a self-sustaining model that didn't rely on perpetual annual donations. I'm not proposing a for-profit company, but I am proposing finding a non-compromising way to make just enough revenue to keep it going sustainably while remaining neutral.

PS I donated to Wikimedia last year, so I'm willing to contribute until the project finds a more sustainable model.
The Secret To Delivering On Time
For decades, delivering on time has been the holy grail of software development...
Actually your system should work just fine with ksh as /bin/sh. KornShell is a superset of the Bourne shell.

http://www.kornshell.com/doc/faq.html
Hell, if botnetted PCs started racking up huge erm, phone bills, maybe people would actually maintain them in the first place!
We had our first story break 50 votes yesterday!

http://www.windycitizen.com/ourmaninchicago/press/2009/09/01...
Doh, I really don't want to re-enable my Facebook account, but I'm tempted for this. :) Can I RSVP some other way?
I guess the pilot of the aircraft probably has better information than whoever wrote whatever I read on the net somewhere years ago.
A much better approach is to use a spigot algorithm

http://home.att.net/~srschmitt/script_pi_spigot.html
<sigh>

37Signals' products weren't profitable for a year or more, if memory serves. They took "investment" from the other side of their business (consulting). Every month, when their product revenue grew, I'm sure they were thinking, "Wow, we're going to be profitable in X months"... and eventually, they were.

Product profitability takes resources. You need:

1) Time (you can accelerate this with cash if you're disciplined)
2) Money (you can use savings, investment, or you can "buy" money/time with consulting)

That's immutable.

EverNote and their ilk ("our ilk", I should say, as RescueTime falls squarely in that world) is trying to build a business formula that works... And it looks like they're succeeding. Presumably they could cut dev staff, stop all experiments, and get to profitability MUCH sooner-- maybe even today.

But that's how business works, right? It's all about intelligent debt to ultimately maximize the metrics you care about (presumably some combo of growth, revenue, profit, and lifestyle). You hire an employee, and you are spending time and money on them for a while before they are really contributing. You take funding so that you can run the experiments that require capital. You take your consulting profits and pump them (and your spare time) into product efforts. And some businesses scale differently than others (Amazon is a great example).

That's ALL DEBT. And it can all be smart debt (like a mortgage used to be!).

Just because companies are choosing a different flavor of debt or choosing markets that scale differently doesn't make them bad. I personally am THRILLED to give up a relatively small stake in our company so I don't have to consult and can run experiments about as fast as I want to.

Scarcity FORCES you to be smart-- but the lack of scarcity doesn't mean that you CAN'T be.
Just show up. Won't be a problem.
Ivan, maybe try different text in your ad and see how that affects conversion. Also, I know it's old-school, but I wonder if email newsletters are worth testing.
If the government is willing to bail out companies that fail then it reduces risks, so you should be more willing to invest in those companies.
Ask HN: How to check if your website works for all ISPs and locations? 
I found a few times that there are some places where internauts could not access our website. Some people suggested that it may be a DNS issue and others said it may be an issue with a particular internet service provider.

Is there a way to check if your website works in different locations (cities) or for all ISPs?

Thank you.
The results of the poll seem to be bearing that out.

It would have been very surprising to see another outcome.
As much as I hate to rely on a drug to boost myself daily (even if it is natural), I simply work better with a bit of caffeine in me. Without it, I can do well but who cares? Entire cultures celebrate tea and coffee as a ritual at various parts of the day and it's been around forever. It didn't hurt anyone back in the 1800's and it definitely won't hurt me (in moderation!)

(I voted for 0-3 cups a day. Usually I do 1-2 coffees in the morning, and tea for lunch.)
and knowing is half the battle
We're not talking about humanitarians or artists. We're talking about entrepreneurs, and their goals. I agree money doesn't have to matter to an artist. But it has to matter to an entrepreneur, even if your goal is fame. It matters the same way that being able to kick a ball matters to a punter, even if they're playing football just for the fame.
The great thing about phones though, is that they work both ways. You get one line going in, and one going out, and that's all you can work with. If that was regularly being tied up, you'd notice fairly quickly and expect someone to fix it.

Your computer, on the other hand, can take at least several dozen concurrent connections. If a few of those are tied up sending spam, or being part of a DDoS, you are barely going to notice, especially if you're the type of user who is only on the computer to browse "websites".
You want to somehow make it more compelling for the sites whose badges you are using. I think you should brainstorm a bit more on that sales pitch.
Having a blog about programming languages and formal methods I understand the basis of your disgust with PHP. In a perfect world all programming languages would use robust type systems and be capable of formal verification. PHP makes no attempt at either.

Out in user land there are all sorts of scenarios where dynamic invocation makes sense. Higher-order functions are the most obvious. Is mapping strtolower on an array of strings really spaghetti code?

Most uses for dynamic invocation are at the utility/framework level, not in application land. You're right, it's dangerous when used improperly, but you should consider coming down from the theory clouds if you believe dynamic invocation and goto are in the same boat on the river styx.
This is a great way for financiers to think about entrepreneurship, but maybe a really bad way for operators to think about it.
my favorite feature in the new version of Fogbugz. the only issue I've ever had with it is that if you enter in your parent case and subcases but then find that they are accidentally under the wrong project, the only way (AFAIK) to move the entire case tree is to click on each individual case and move them all one by one. Other than that, I must say it's pretty sweet.
People like my grandmother who were adopted, and thus didn't know their family history, can now get a genetic analysis done to see if they are more likely to get breast cancer, or any of a host of other ailments. Can't get much more practical and day to day than "am I going to get cancer."
Linux powers world's fastest stock exchange
cranks with axes to grind

Every wikipedia critic I know used to be a huge wikipedia fan until something they deeply cared about was either screwed up, vandalized, or deleted.

I bet one internet cookie that if/when this happens to you, you will be as passionately anti-wikipedia as you are now pro-wikipedia.
Nice. It's not nearly as awesome, but here's my Sudoku solver in Clojure:

http://github.com/vishsingh/lisp-toronto/blob/80ea008e80976d...
Not a Ruby guy but I saw a small presentation on this at a dev meetup a few days ago. Having worked with Objective-C for a bit this looks like a beautiful way to pass over some of the very um, verbose hurdles that Objective-C tosses at you.
Ask HN: Anyone shortlisted for Seedcamp?
We've just had word that we've been shortlisted for this year's Seedcamp. We're attending the interview here in London on 9 September.

Any other HN readers going? It would be great to meet up with others who will be there.
It still blows me away that David’s talk at Startup School 2008 was met with such enthusiasm (I know David was surprised too).

The content of his talk was not the main reason that it was met with such enthusiasm. (What he talked about was obvious and no one would disagree.)

It was his delivery that made it such a bit hit. His passion and conviction was easy to see. We could have easily read the talk on-line, but we go to these things to get the "whole story", the things that words alone do not convey. What a pleasure it was to see someone in his position so enthusiastic about his work. It's hard not to get caught up in the moment.

(The fact the he's the author of Rails and his liberal use of the f word to make his point also helped.)
And given his audience is probably 80% American, he'd be right.
Maybe I will!
You're missing the premise of the article. Fried isn't ragging on open source projects which will never make money. He's ragging on the business press for pumping up companies as success stories when they haven't turned a dime in profit.

There are a million ways to score a software project, but not nearly as many to rate a business.
The copyright law[1] applies to everything that is created which has a original form and is in itself original (ergo not a copy).

Hence the music you buy is protected by this law.

Hence you can not ask the author to get a spare cd. Since he's not obliged to give you one. Also everything you want to do with the music is determined by the law.

[1] i am talking about the law that protects original creations, not the one where you have to pay for a patent.
presumably there was a significant cost in time and/or money required to gain that experience.
Youre statements are propaganda (if any). I'm a citizen of one of countries of former republic of Yugoslavia. I know people from all involved countries. I've been to most of these countries and I know what are the facts of Serb agenda and what were the results.

They were no more victims than Germans in WW2.

Edit: About half of referenced article is truth and makes sense.

However article is taken out of context of 90' on balkans. IMHO NATO intervention had a lot to do with feeling of guilt of NATO members for allowing the Bosnia debacle. Most westerners don't understand that Kosovo is Serbian hallow ground and that they would exterminate Albanians without thinking twice (once they were already on rampage). Short term this was probably the only solution. Long term there will be more bloodbath in Kosovo.
This is really cool.

I thought one of the design decisions of SQL was that it would NOT be Turing complete, so hacks like this could not exist. It's funny that the nature of a database makes things like this possible. Can a turing machine be made only using SQL queries? Could a higher-level language compile to it?
OK ksh a bad example.
Cool idea but my first attempt at using it on a heavy AJAX page locked up Firefox for 10+ minutes (100% of one CPU core).
I don't know about the USAF, but that particular combat tactic gets you a royal ass-chewing in Wing Commander.
Windows has plenty of programmatic text editors that offer most of the features of vim , with better discoverability.

except reliably being installed, which vim isn't on Windows anyway.
Ask HN: Your most successful side project?
I know I -- and I assume many others -- would be interested to hear about HNers' most successful side projects.

Wherein side project is defined as something started by you -- with or without others' help -- on the side of a full-time dayjob that turns/turned a decent profit, was sold for a decent amount or has considerable uptake and a bright future.

I'll go first. In 2005 I started a designer community event called CSS Reboot that, in its 1 1/2 years under my ownership, made $5,000 in ad sales. Fall 2006 I then sold it for $10,000.
Cellphones are making a MAJOR impact on the lives of billions of people in the third world right now, and no-one's mentioned them so far. They were invented recently, and disruptive technologies and cultural artifacts based on cheap mobiles are coming thick and fast.

In some ways, poverty-stricken folks in Bangladesh are leaving us fat Westerners behind.
howsyourcode huh....

you should get the domain: knowyourcode.com, i think its better!
I didn't say the Apple monitors weren't sexy! But $1800 is a big chunk of change for a startup. I have 2 22" samsung LCDs that cost $200 each back in 2007. Those are a much better investment in my opinion. My chair is an Office Depot task chair - $24 with $10 rebate in 2001. The chair comes with a warning: "not for multi-shift use"
Really?

I guess if you exclusively work on legacy codebases whicih already smell a certain way introducing stuff like this may cause some headache but if you have the opportunity to design something from the ground-up why would you NOT go for elegance?
Does less evening Internet mean Europeans lead better lives?
This seems odd: I don't know any person who is a directly anti-wikipedia, but I do know several people who are against wikipedia. They don't active talk bad about it, but they're the type of people who say "You can believe anything written on there, it was just written by people". Due to the ease of editing, they feel that it means nothing is fact-checked.

On the other hand, I know one of the administrators there, and he has shown me several pages of the hate-mongering he gets, mostly for just being an admin. Some of it has merit (for example, a good chunk of it was because of one particular article he moderated, and the side that lost did not lose gracefully), but most of it is just people jumping on him because they feel they are being denied their right to, well, write.

I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring wikipedia. Most of what I see is little more than "I hate that admin, he said I wasn't notable enough for a page. Lets go egg his house!"
Yep, that was arc.
Interesting, thanks. One of the things I liked about my G1 (sadly, stolen) was a terminal app that used all of the space on the screen; that picture makes the xterm look a little cramped.
I've lived in six different countries and traveled to dozens. I agree that some travel expands people's horizons. Some people gain more from the experience than others, depending on their willingness to really see new perspectives. But my experience with "endless travelers" on the whole does not incline me to think they have access to any kind of special enlightenment that isn't accessible to everyday people who travel far less.

In fact, the I've-been-on-the-road-for-a-year types you run into in hostels are often narcissistic overindulged wankers for whom the travel is more about dick size and proving how "different" they are than some mechanism for truly expanding their horizons. Their travel is about their personal insecurity, not the "deep" journey they want you to believe it is.

I'm not knocking travel in general, but nor do I in any way believe that someone who HAS traveled a great deal is more world-wise, intelligent or self-assured than someone who has not.
This was the thing that sold me:

$ macirb
>> ''.class
=> NSMutableString

MacRuby is Obj-C! Of course, this works both ways: some stdlib stuff is currently less reliable than using the Cocoa framework equivalent.

Either way they're making really awesome progress and it's an exciting project to watch.
Awesome. This is a great addition to the plaintext arsenal (which includes Markdown and Textile).

I'd like to see a superfluous extension/hack of this to be able to produce art and cool-looking things in general, a la pixmaps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap
Coldest, Driest, Calmest Place on Earth Found
Don't forget that there are other industries having such remarkable properties as well: another example is pharmaceuticals and generally biotechnology. Or the motion picture and music recording industries.
Sony Ericsson Jalou D&G edition 
The Sony Ericsson Dolce & Gabbana Jalou Mobile Phone features a 3.2 megapixel camera, and the ability to record video as well as take photos.On top of that it has a built in FM radio, MP3 player, Bluetooth, a pedometer, and even a Mirror key so you can check out how you look.
Right. You don't need a license to protect your legal rights. You haven't asked all your friends to sign licenses promising not to rob you because theft is illegal. Record companies shouldn't ask people to sign agreements that they won't break the law. The law is already written. Why do you need a license on top of it? Licenses are for covering situations not covered by law or, more notably, for giving away permissions which would otherwise be covered by law. If you were going to allow one of your friends unrestricted access to your car, it would be a really good idea to give him a signed license agreement so he didn't get arrested for stealing it. If you don't want to allow your friends unrestricted access to your car, you don't have to do anything.
It's not that tricky. You just click the ^
Programming Interviews at Fog Creek
MacHeist: Participating developers' perspectives
You think his apartment doesn't have a roof?
Ask HN: Legal resources for startups?
The answer to so many questions is "speak with a lawyer", but how does one find a good lawyer for a particular field in the first place? For example, to write a proprietary software license agreement to find some particular need, one needs a copyright lawyer--but what's the best way for a startup to find such a lawyer? There seems to be very limited resources on this topic (or perhaps I'm blind).

Particularly, the kind of services I'm looking for:

1) Writing a bulletproof contributory license agreement (CLA) for dual-licensing an open source project.

2) Writing a proprietary license agreement (the "dual" part of the dual license).

Enough of this is custom enough that I imagine it would be a very bad idea to try to simply rip the legalese from an existing license, but I'm not sure where to start with regards to finding and contacting an experienced lawyer.

Additionally, I'm not familiar enough with IP lawyers to know how much such services might cost--$2,000? $10,000? $50,000? I'd like to know what to expect before jumping into this, but I have no experience in the field.
They should get UNESCO to fund it.
I have an outsourcing business that brings in about $3000/mo profit. Clients include web design/development companies, and small businesses who need "intern" work done. All work is done in Cebu, Philippines.

I had a comparison shopping site with affiliate links back in college (1999-2000) that I started with 3 friends. We pocketed about $1000/mo each until mysimon.com came along.
Well, he was killed by the government he helped save from Nazi conquest.

Not quite killed by his invention, though.
I would argue that the point you make is irrelevant. Col. Zoltan did enough to both prevent the aircraft form flying its mission and score a big -1 on the depth chart for the US.

Double win.
I've been wondering lately, based on the success of MacHeist, if anything similar could be started for web apps.

Obviously, recurring monthly payments is the hurdle you have to get over. Asking for developers to work in some way to provide upfront discounts to a large set of new users would be difficult, to say the least.
This is the first time I've run across trees/nodes in the organization of relational data. Makes a lot of sense and certainly sounds like someone was "thinking outside the box".
Snow Leopard's Four Best Improvements (for Civilians)
Yes, I find that having no caffeine at all improves my average overall alertness, almost completely cutting out the highs and lows, both. However, I really like the hyperalert state that caffeine brings, and I don't know any way to get it without, so I put up with the lows that accompany it, going off caffeine every year or so for a few weeks to reset the effect (which gradually wears down so that the hyperalert state approaches mere alertness).
Yeah. that's my thought. I'm at a couple racks now, but I want a solution that will scale beyond that. Thing is, to be honest, the coraid crap will probably be more reliable (and cheaper if you include my time) than stuff I build myself for the first few units, until I learn what I'm doing, but long-term, I could be significantly better off if my idea works as planned, as my units are potentially much cheaper and have a whole lot more cache (and cache redundancy) than the coraid.

On the other hand, if I handle the 'beta' poorly, like taking it out of beta early, there won't be a long term to worry about.
Happy birthday Internet in five videos
Correction, bands which have become popular through radio and CD sales make most of their money from touring. Most bands with no record sales have no ticket sales either. And most bands with no record label have no record sales. You're creating a distinction where none exists. The entirety of an artist's effort goes toward their income. Whether it's direct or indirect is really not the point.

Google makes most of their money from ad sales, but if everyone blocked all ads and only used Google through web scrapers, no one would buy ads from Google. If you rob traffic from Google's page, you are robbing from Google, even if they make no money from their page.
There is not much chance of being a millionaire plumber any time soon especially not after a couple of years work.
I've had some friends who have had success using DocStoc's DocStore: http://www.docstoc.com/store/

They seem to have some number of legal documents such as "Trademark License Agreement" and "Letter of Intent for Business Transactions." I cannot attest to their quality though.
Before you go reading hidden motivations into the design of Django's template language, I think you should read Jacob's explanation of his approach to templating:

http://jacobian.org/writing/salt/

Personally, I'm inclined to agree with him, and I take a stance similar to what's expressed in one of the comments there: it's better to leave a potentially-good feature out, but provide the means for people to implement it when they need it, than to burden the language with a potentially-bad feature that's hard to disable.
But you explicitly have a commercial activity you can do with that CD: you can resell it. You can resell it so much that there's even a special term for it: "first sale doctrine". No one has a problem with me re-selling my car or a treadmill or even a television. You should (and do) have that same right with a CD.

That's why the software people are so insistent that they're selling you a "license" and not the disc itself. My understanding is that the prevailing caselaw says that the industry's argument is bullshit in the most recent case to be decided, Autodesk v. Vernor: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks...

(Again, there might be more recent caselaw than this, but I personally am not aware of anything more recent than Autodesk. Please note that Autodesk technically is only binding in the Western District of Washington state, including Seattle, but other federal courts may look to Autodesk for cases that involve similar fact patterns that may appear before their courts.)