skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I developed a search engine optimization (SEO) tool targeted for non-programmers/small businesses, to help them easily analyze and improve their site for search engines. I haven't found many tools that do this (they generally seem a bit confusing), so I built an app that tries to do this in a more user-friendly fashion:

http://www.seositecheckup.com

I'd love to hear your feedback as to whether this is going in the right direction, missing some key features, or if the balance between SEO-speak/web terminology/simplicity should be tweaked. I've included explanations and links in the analysis where I thought it would be helpful, but I'm unsure of the right balance. Thanks for your thoughts!
What utility?
Notable that while the article shows a real working prototype of a shippable product, the title is still about Microsoft's vaporware product.

And, as usual, the real product is nowhere near as amazing as the fantasy one ;-)
I was hoping this would be about startup costs for something like Somalian pirates...

As a note, slides are sometimes good without the accompanying speech. I did not feel this was one of those situations. From my experience, the more you get out of just slides, the less overall quality the talk was (as a note, this implies that this talk was relatively good).
Hacking Two-Factor Authentication
If you used taxis and rental cars like you'd use a car you owned, it would be far more expensive, even in the cases where it would be possible (want to run out to the store when you discover you don't have any X while Y is cooking? You're out of luck in most places, unless you have a car).

I just spent a year and a half without a car, and it was a nightmare some weeks. It basically means no spontaneous trips unless you happen to have an extra half an hour to get there, on average. Oh, and the choice between spending several hours a week grocery shopping (mostly in walking to and from the store) or paying 15% extra to have most stuff delivered isn't fun. I think if you put an hourly price on all the inconvenience, a car comes off as the less expensive option.
Any thread that you either upvote or comment on becomes a saved thread on your profile page.
Anti Aging Drug that Works Wonders
There are several anti aging drugs on the market that work wonders but they work differently for everyone. Find your cure to aging today.
Are Chicken and Fish as Unhealthy as Red Meat?
really? I haven't seen a more packed slide set of stuff it isn't saying "acquire customers" it's saying "acquire customers, and here are a ton of methods"

handy.
I remember something from my being exposed to network marketing days that is relevant here.

"If you treat it like a hobby, it will be a hobby. If you treat it like a business, it can be a business."
Get used to it?

You have the most free time you'll ever have in college. It just gets worse the older you get.
So a possibility just occurred to me. Build the whole device, but disable the key. You can't launch!

It would serve all sorts of deterrent purposes, but in the end, no revenge.

Of course, you'd need a few people to keep secret, but you could probably keep this to 2 or 3 people.
And as usual, PHP is at the top of the game: http://fr2.php.net/.svn/entries (note: interestingly, not all subdomains are open, the us* ones aren't, the uk* ones aren't either, and fr.php.net is also closed)
Case in point to complement my previous post:

http://fr.php.net/.svn/entries secure

http://fr2.php.net/.svn/entries open
Thats not what abefortas is saying. Its different in the case of larger and larger build ups. Here, each side is causing

1) The possiblity of doing more damage.

2) Which leads the other side to do the same. Going back to 1.

The problem is that building up your arsenal is always better from a strict game theory sense (assuming, of course, the other side is rational).
Entrepreneurship at Duke: Aaron Patzer (Mint Founder)
Interview with Heyzap co-founder Jude Gomila
Right, my problem with this particular set of slides wasn't being too vague, it was that it was a little too busy/crammed with information to really make sense of it. While it looked valuable, it seems more difficult to extract it from the slides than it is worth (at least to me). I'm sure seeing a presentation on it would be well worth the time, however.
Really? Makes sense I guess, but it would be great if you do run across any papers.

So I guess the real art comes down to

1) Picking your learning algo

2) Some details with each method. For nn's - do you use sigmoid squashing, etc... For knn - what is your distance metric.
Drug Raid Turns Into 9 Hour Wii Bowl-A-Thon
Start Simple HTTP Server with Python
I don't think spending your evenings on a startup is necessarily bad for your employer.

Someone spending considerable amounts coding on his/her startup in the evening still brings the knowledge and experience of doing that back to the full-time job. At home you're working on projects you care about, you invest time in learning about new technologies, you research best practices, etc..

That actually adds value for your employer compared to those employees who go home to the wife and kids and don't spend any of their free time thinking about code.

Ofcourse, you shouldn't overdo it and arrive at work a zombie, but that would also have a negative effect on your startup work, so I don't expect people to actually do that.
Behaviour like that isn't going to help either startup.
Maybe we agree... but I guess my point is that if you are doing things correctly/intelligently, it should never make things worse (in aggregate)...

In other words, if combining algorithms is making things worse than you are probably combining them wrong.

I'm sorta pulling this out of my ass (in the sense that I haven't done this before), but thats what I would thing...
How is working with BrainTree?
While this is interesting from a data visualisation perspective it just shows further that the things people twitter about are completely worthless.
Plus he doesn't take inflation into account
How the Skype deal got so messy: Skype Founders Pull Out the Stops
Another option is 'lazy signup', as demonstrated with some YC startups like posterous. Get the user starting to use the site and only then ask for an email address, username, password etc.

My hunch is that in the real world if it's "signup or die" most people choose the latter.
VCs: Enablers? Value Adders? Or Other?
How to Throw a Windows 7 Party: Step 1 - Shoot Self in Face
Plus I imagine there is a limit in many jobs to the number of times you can call up and say "I'm sorry I can't make it today, my car broke down" before you don't actually have a job.
I couldn't watch it all the way through. It made me feel sick.
It's actually surprisingly coherent. Is Russian easier to translate than other languages or has Google's automated translation just gotten that good?
Your "monitoring" of a competitor, is made a lot easier today in the "internet world". More so, now that any budding startup reads they need a blog, they need to twitter and they need feedback. They then jump on all the other little startups who are offering these services.

Then you or I or anybody comes along and picks over their history.

Scan over their twitter feeds, pick up bits and pieces.
Dig thru their "open to the public" feedback with responses.

All of a sudden, we are in possession of a lot of valuable data.
eg.
Unhappy customers.
People wanting things which they arent able to get.
Features you overlooked.
Features you thought were good and without building are not so.
Potential users to aim your product at. Woe them away ( might not be very ethical )

All this data will aid in the creation and moulding of your own startup. Its a little ironic. Yet at the same time. Its a completely new approach to competition

I note that you havent mentioned your competition or "the idea".

Do you think the competition would take you seriously?
Serious enough to start making private ( Closed walled ) around the feedback from their users? Should they?

Its all food for thought.

Bottom line as already mentioned, dont give up! Im sure the internet has space for a few of the "same sort of web application". As I read earlier today, it is all about execution. ( I at least hope it is )

Post the url :)
Agreed. I feel way behind in some respect when I compare myself to women around my age. Almost all my college friends are have two kids or are expecting their second. Almost all my real female friends are single.

However, I'm fairly certain my drive is to create something that melds technology and art that people enjoy using.

If you have not yet seen this - this is very inspirational:

Ira Glass:

"Don't quit even when you know your stuff sucks".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE
VC industry on pace to race 3B in Q3, lowest level since 1996
Yes, it is customary in Russian writing to write century numbers in Roman numerals. The Russian language is going through a significant anglicization phase right now, though, so this will probably change.
Why does the SEC prosecute companies instead of people?
Russian speaker here, I'll translate some selected comments for your convenience.

harm: We need more people who, upon finding a hole, go on to scan the whole Runet, for no nefarious reasons but just to warn unwitting site owners.

SilenceAndy: In olden times such people were called hackers, until journalists perverted that word to mean cyber criminals.

grayhex: This comment is impervious to Google Translate.

cancel: Google inurl:.svn/entries, lots of interesting stuff.

Nirvanko: This ain't new, see http://www.adamgotterer.com/2009/01/26/hacking-the-svn-direc...

SynteZ: IIS doesn't have this vulnerability :-) By default it doesn't send files without extensions, because it doesn't know the mime type.

varyen: Funny, Wii disks from SEGA also have .svn folders, though they're empty.

crazywebdev: Now I know how http://vkontakte.ru came about.
Whalesalad, totally agree, Education startups are lacking. I'm very impressed with the new Schoolrack release. Hey we are getting close to you guys :) http://www.quantcast.com/edmodo.com
Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. - Jason Kolb
what do you mean by "extreme prejudice"?
That probably was a knock-off. I went through 6 months army training camp with one of those (the original), used it almost daily, and it did not jam once.
It looks to me that you have some kind of mental block over judging people or your too quick to trust. I used to have the same problem.

In American society its frowned upon to judge people but the truth is if you want to trust someone then you have to judge them by their actions.

Its usually the hardest to judge your friends because you've subconciously glossed over their flaws. If you look carefully at the way someone does things (and this can be anything) and how they behave then you'll get an idea of what he/she's capable off. You have to be careful so you dont mis-judge people but you do have to do it.

So dont be afraid of judging people. And always judge before you form a relationship with them.
This is good tool. How different it is from other tools such as websitegader.com or mysitegrader.com?
Disposable? I don't see anything that suggests that you bury it in a landfill after 10 years. All I see is a sweet-spot calculation for when to liquidate the asset. I think the assumption is that someone would buy it and use it.

I'm in the process of selling a condo and buying a house. Does that make my condo "disposable"?
Take these slides with a grain of salt. Dave's slides are decent for low-touch symmetric high-volume consumer web sites (B2C). Not so great for B2B or asymmetric businesses.
Definitely not taken the wrong way. As a female compSci student, this really did come up as an issue. I had a friend who was doing great in our program, but after her first internship, she realized compSci was not at all what she was interested in. She didn't want "to sit behind a desk all day dealing with a computer" in the sense of just coming to work writing code. She did not find that interesting after having done it in the context of a workplace, so @icey really does have a good point.

As a woman, I can say a lot of us have a little bit more interest in the people-based aspects of life and for some of us, working with computers all day is off-putting. A lot of women I know who don't understand what I do all day (writing code), oversimplify and only see the computer and tend to think of me as having a job where I don't interface with people much. Just that perception (as false as it often is) is enough to be a turn-off and doesn't garner the field much interest.

Plus, it's often an issue of exposure why a lot of women aren't as interested in software in the first place. Before I got to college, I didn't know any other women who wrote code. My foray into compSci was helped along by an uncle who bought me a programming book for my 15th birthday. (hehe.)

This isn't always the case, but it's difficult to take up something you've never been exposed to. Even brief exposure is enough for some people and I'd argue tons of girls aren't getting that exposure.
Starting a company is all about creating value. First you must be able to identify a void. Second you must solve the problem of how to fill that void.
The utility is http://propeller.in/HackerNews
Acquisition, Retention, Referral and Revenue apply to almost every business...
The none kind.
Meaning like every other Google account termination, probably...
Looks like someone works at Google :-) (for others, google office is to the left of those photos).

What a weird morning.
Russian language is indo-european, therefore the result is much better than if you're translating from chinese or turkish.

Google translate is good at lexical translation but still can't bind words together properly (and probably never will unless they'd change their paradigm).

I have to add that original text is surprisingly incoherent. They surely didn't re-read it after they wrote it.
Title is misleading and plain wrong.

The issue is not in "using SVN". It's in using any revision control system that has .svn .git etc directories, and accidentally making those directories world readable from a webserver.

User error.
Why Oracle bought Sun: to control the systems business
> IMO, having more than one job is just going to split your thoughts and wouldnt help much in either of them.

It is true that it is going to split your thoughts and it gets really, really tiring.

But it can help if in your job-related projects you start seeing patterns of what people want, how to please them, how to talk to them to get details about their business that they forgot to mention, etc ...

The implementation of your side-projects suffers for sure, but you can gain a lot of knowledge from your social interactions with clients. I used to hate consultancy work for many reasons, but the bottom line is that I learned a lot too.

I guess the answer to this question (quitting your day-job or not) is the same useless and moronic answer given to all things complicated ... it depends.
Tool of the Day: CTwittLike: See Twitter From a New Perspective
The sentence mentioning money, when converted into US$ reads

"it took us a year to get started with an initial investment of 3000 $ and a government grant."
Dell-Perot marriage: The fear factor
FTA:

> [Larry Ellison's] goal is to leverage Sun to create systems - billing systems, airline reservations systems....where engineers optimize the integration not customers and service providers. He envisions building the successor to Tom Watson Jr's IBM, which he views as the most successful enterprise company of all time.

In other words, it's all about vertical control. Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s ... the IBM that was eventually sued for anti-competitive practices, incidentally, because customers were locked into their closed, top-down computer systems.
Making cloth from spider silk
My tool looks for a number of other factors which those sites don't, and specifically ignores other factors which they do (it's a matter of personal expertise/opinion as to which factors are really impactful/helpful for beginner/intermediate SEO analysis). It's also supposed to more clearly convey why certain factors are important to analyze, and just how important they are among the entire list. If that's not immediately coming across, that's good to know. Any other suggestions for better making that point/differentiation would be great.
I disagree. Quitting a job you've had for several years and supports your current lifestyle is not easy. It is risky and takes a lot of courage. That is why others show support. That support encouraging and valuable to the receiver. Furthermore, applauding someone's decision is pretty easy, too. Certainly easier than quitting your job. So what's the problem?

If I say I am building a business in the evenings, do you feel like there will be much value in a one-time round of applause? Positive effects of your support will be minor, and will wear off long before they affect the outcome of my venture. Unless you're willing to get interested in my project and show support on a regular basis, or at some critical juncture (eg launch) it's just not that big of a deal. I certainly wouldn't find applause useful (in fact if you applaud work that isn't deserving I'll find it harmful). I need criticism, attention, resources, and frequent but pragmatic optimism.

On the other hand, if I say I am quitting my job, that means I am going through a rather dramatic change. Many of the decisions I make and actions I take in the next few days to weeks will make a big difference. A one-time bit of motivation-- other people letting me know I'm not alone and that my decision can really work out for the best-- can be very significant.
[Golden orb spider silk is] five to six times stronger than steel by weight...

Insanely cool.
Is The End of the Cubicle Finally Nigh?
I wrote a new version that addresses the problem embodied in the comments here: http://paulgraham.com/pxdremix.html
this is a super little tutorial. Lots of nice best practice tips here.
> Just by applauding someone for quitting their job doesn't mean they're ignoring those that moonlight

True. I also think that applauding can also serve (such as in this case) as an encouragement, and not necessarily as a recognition of success.

There's nothing wrong with applauding both at the start and at the finish line.

I think that the author of the post had something to express, like "starting a side-project is also courageous" and "it's nothing wrong about starting a side project", and he felt that it should be in strong opposition with the current appearances (people encouraged to quit their job). It's a little shallow, but not necessarily negative.
Why Java (and almost every other programming language) sucks
Navteq
Eliminating externalities in financial transactions
What is the difference in (time/velocity/etc) of the body with and without a parachute?
Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray, With iRex
as he mentionned, this happened 17 years ago. While I never programmed the original Mac OS, I know that Win16 GUI programming wasn't the simplest thing ever at all - it was considerably more complicated that parsing a command line; you had to deal with message queues, pass pointers around with no nice OO interfaces.
Purely anecdotal, but does anyone else notice while browsing around even the (largely static) unauthenticated pages that the generation times are a bit lousy?
We deploy like this, and it looks like I cannot get to the source files in the way described.

It appears that IIS is naively not serving up these file types. If I drop a plain html file in the .svn folder I can get to it, but any .svn-base file or files lacking an extension are unreachable.
Yes, I was surprised as well but if you think about it, it does makes sense.

I'll dig around and see if I can find the paper.
Total Commander 7.5 Final  Free Download
Ok, I tweaked that bit to avoid confusing people.
I can't believe perl 6 isn't even close to being out. I'm an old perl hacker from way back. It is nice to see new features in perl. Perl isn't as sexy as Python & Ruby these days but it still powers much of the web. The CPAN library is still far above than what any other language offers. If any of you have never hacked up some perl code, i can't recommend it enough.
In my experience, that kind of thing tends to be non-negotiable at large companies. They figure that if you are really so amazing, you're likely to have some great ideas worth keeping.
Hahaa...that's definitely happening to me now. I find myself sneaking out to my car making calls to potential clients to schedule demos, etc. You do lose motivation and the mind wanders... :(
The "small team" is his wife and some community managers -- no other engineers or admins. He builds & runs the whole stack himself, and he has duties outside of the admin/development pieces of the business. So he's still essentially a part time developer/part time admin.
I remember getting one of those email postings from elance a year or two ago, where it was explicitly mentioned about Digg being started through elance. What is the real story then?
Exactly. The example actually supports 37Signals' stance rather than counter it. I'm pretty sure even they would agree that it's foolish to continue working at your job when you've got a lower risk way to move on to your start-up.

The point they're making though is that until you reach that stage, don't though caution to the wind if you don't have to.
Sure, someone would probably buy it and use it, but ultimately at a disadvantage; they would end up paying more in maintenance costs than the vehicle was worth. They would be doing that out of necessity; if they had the credit or initial funds, this pretty clearly indicates that they'd be better off, financially, buying a 5-year-old car instead.

If the car's maintenance costs exceed its value after 15 years, then it should be considered "disposed" at that point, even if it hasn't been thrown away. Just because you can sharpen the blades on a disposable razor doesn't make the razor less disposable.

After looking more closely at the graphs though, I realized that I misinterpreted the headline here. The headline suggests that the car becomes disposable at 15 years of age, and the graph actually has it closer to 20 I think. That's not quite so bad.
Gizmodo Gadget
Worlds top rated gadget community on the web. Find Gadget information, technology, electronic, mobile reviews, spy gadget, computer and internet stuff. Feel free to join and share your experience.
Applause is easy to give. Quitting your job, despite the claim in the article, is not easy. Quitting your job is frightening and peer encouragement is very useful. That's what the applause is for.
Very loosely. You have to understand the nature of a business before you start prescribing metrics to watch. A manufacturer wouldn't use these as success metrics. If we just focus on web-tech we're still left with a buch of questions: Is the business B2C, B2B, Symmetric (User pays) or Asymmetric (3rd party pays - e.g. Google users vs. Google advertisers)?

For asymmetric businesses or high-dollar ($10k+/sale) enterprise/B2B most of these metrics are good-intentioned but likely to send the business astray.

For example: in low-volume/high-dollar B2B and most enterprise, 98% of the time needs to be spent focused on Average Sales Price (ASP) and Average Time to Close (ATC). To minimize ATC and maximize ASP you're trying to listen closely to pain points, determine champions, help win cross department fiefdom battles, get the purchasing department to pay before your company runs out of cash, etc.

Dave's suggested metrics start coming into play for symmetric low-dollar subscriptions to thousands and 10s of thousands. These are the types of markets he understands well, and that's aok, but that's not everyone's business and the advise should be taken with a grain of salt.