skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a difference between a media launch and a product launch. Fraser wrote a short comment about this directly on the blog post: "I'm also a fan of the notion of decoupling the product launch from the marketing launch. Although, I guess the idea of 'never launch, just iterate' takes it one step further."
Give me your URL and I'll get you some links.

As for 1,000 people per day costing you a thousand bucks, you're doing something wrong there. 30K per month gets you at least half a million uniques per month in a competitive market, but you'll have to do your own 'buys', not go through a middle man.

A big media launch will get you most likely about 10 to 15,000 users and you'll drop to about 100 or so after one week. You don't have to believe me of course, but I've been there and done that several times now, the pattern for me so far has been fairly consistent.

People that come from a newsfeed are usually not actively looking for what you are offering just moderately curious.

The time you get them to 'stick' is when they are really in need of what you have to offer.
Lots of PHP hosting providers have free account options. Here's a random one I just googled up:

http://www.000space.com/
Might be worth checking out these guys - http://diybio.org/

See if theres a local group and go along and talk to a few people. I'm sure they'll have some stuff you can get your hands dirty on that will at least get you some experience in the field
last.fm launched their Xbox Live integration service today. I'm sitting here listening to it right now, and am very impressed. A landmark 2 million Xbox Live subscribers were logged in simultaneously last week with the launch of Modern Warfare 2 driving online presence. I imagine that last.fm will get a lot of new users with this expanded service.
I'm not out to knock thesixtyone.com -- my point was just that I don't see a big change in consumer preferences occurring when it comes to music. thesixtyone.com and others might be able to be successful as a niche product, but most consumers are looking to access major label content. Even if every new song from here on out was released in a threesixtyone.com model there is still a lot of demand for older content.

That puts music startups in a tricky situation. Either you don't provide access to that mainstream content, provide it legally w/ label deals that hopefully don't cripple your business, or you offer it illegally. According to the wired article the ad supported streams model seems to be dying, which means music subs must be coming back for companies that choose the legal model.

I'm personally not excited about this and hope they so do badly labels give ad supported another try.
do a search of recently awarded government grants on bioinformatics, particularly small business grants (SBIR). awards are all public, so you should have no problem finding them. contact those folks and just tell them honestly what you are interested in doing (be sure to read their awards first so you have some idea what work they're doing). everyone respects people who are trying to learn new skills, and i think you'll get a lot of warm receptions.
We are part of a pretty risk averse large corporation, and this really isn't all that much of a consideration for us (for reference, we use another small recurring billing startup). We generally think the startup can do a better job of handling these things than we can. We also get ridiculously good service that we wouldn't be getting from a large, established company trying to shunt us through a useless enterprise sales process.

So in summary, you're kinda right, but I think it's worth the relatively minimal risk.
They mean 'users are dumb on both platforms' ?
MacRuby 0.5 beta 2 is out.
Ok, here is the major difference I think:

You'd be sharing the same kind of box as with this hosting provider, but instead of sharing it with several thousand others you'd be sharing it with maybe 5 to 10 others.

You wouldn't be limited to PHP.

You'd have a lot more storage space and bandwidth.
When someone is already drugging their self , it's going to be hard to prove that someone else tried to drug them even more. Especially outside of lab settings. People respond in different ways to varying amounts of different drugs.

If someone wakes up they may have just had too much to drink the night before and are jumping to conclusions about being 'drugged,' but it's just as likely that someone did drug someone that then assumes they just drank too much.

To try and claim any sort of evidence from the number of incidences that were reported or proven proves nothing. Rape -- in general -- is a notoriously under-reported crime. Trying to generate some sort of scientific conclusion based on such numbers is tenuous at best. Yes, those are the only bits of hard data available to us, but we also know that those bits of information are not the complete picture (and trying to complete the picture is an impossible task).
There are a lot of bioinformatics positions out there that don't require much biology out of the box. Many universities have bioinformatics departments with lots of programming positions. I worked for the past year as a student programmer helping develop and maintain the data entry website for a set of international clinical trials. My superior was a seasoned Unix/Perl hacker who found a niche coordinating the development of clinical studies websites.
awesome, thanks! it's http://styleguidance.com :) I've had very good response from the alpha for it, and everyone seems to love it.

I'm going by the rate of return on ads I've seen in the past. Sure you get a ton of clicks, but only a tiny portion actually registers. Way below that 10% you've talked about.

No I trust you, I had a launch similar like that with another site. Had 60K the first two days. 20K on day 3. Then it slowly dwindled down to 1000 users a day. Those seem pretty loyal, but the problem was that it was a content site, that was generated entirely by me, and it wasn't worth focusing all my energy on something that brought in 2-3 bucks a day.
That's a very very clever move of them. Last.fm is one very savvy group of people. They've been 'on the ball' right from the get-go and I hope that they continue in the way they've been going.
The Last 10% or: How to Keep Your Software Development On Time and Under Budget
Why Economists Love to Study Cellphone Pricing
I've found hacker news to be really great for european stuff.
Cheering against the Yankees would be a waste of time if the Yankees literally won all the time. It would increase people's interest in the game the same way that a trick coin increases people's interest in betting on coin flips.
The author is the same person who wrote the much-commented scienceblogs post about why he won't go to his high school reunion. The post and the comments are well worth reading, if you haven't seen them before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709733
Adobe Air 2 enters public beta: broader client-side support, smaller footprint
I think it is going to be a similar pattern as open source vs closed source, it will take time to get momentum, but I think that in the long term it's going to be unstoppable.

As soon as people figure out a way to do a 'redhat' with music it will accelerate a lot. So far most of those efforts have fizzled, but with so many people trying to start fires it is only a matter of time before someone will succeed.
You don't need courses solely in bioinformatics. You need a solid foundation in molecular biology and genetics. These will give you the requisite background to speak intelligently about the issues. You can take additional courses in (or read independently) about bioinformatics concurrently.
A few years ago, I was talking with the director for bioinformatics and such at a reasonably large medical research university. He told me they really don't hire "pure" computer science people any more, because there are increasingly academic programs combining CS with biology, and they much prefer to hire people who are skilled in both arenas.

That said, I agree with you; it ought to be possible for a good programmer to get into the field and be useful. But gaining more experience/knowledge about the biology side of things may be an important ingredient.
This has been on Hulu for a while now, it's a great film to educate yourself on copyright law, particularly if you're a Girl Talk fan.
Clearly not all businesses lend themselves to iterating over time. For example, if you started a restaurant and you opened it before you were able to make good food, then your initial reviews would be bad so you'd crash and burn.

Rather than starting with the statement "never launch, just iterate" it would be better to start with the following question:

"Should I start a business that lends itself to iteration?"

That's an interesting question that's worth discussing. But as it stands this post is the wrong answer to the wrong question. (Which also shows how you can often catch sloppy thinking by making explicit the question that a statement is answering, and diffing that with the question you should be asking.)

edit: I think the actual answer is that you should choose to start a business that lends itself to iteration, but that's different than the advice given. It's another case where the given advice is close enough to the truth that it tends to work, but the underlying rule is still wrong.
I've noticed this as well in an area with extremely bad reception (inside a skyscraper) - my iPhone seems to frequently default to showing 5 bars when it can't actually make or receive calls, but then when I go next to a window and it actually establishes a workable connection, the signal strength meter shows 1-2 bars.

I haven't seen a citeable source, though.

Edit: clarified a bit. Also, I wanted to add that I get one or more dropped calls basically every day, even outside (in Manhattan).
Will have to look at the data again after this year, roughly 70% are funded or profitable by the end of the session.
I don't see why arbitrary pointer operations are necessary anymore for memory management and the other things. I think this is something left over from the days when we had to squeeze every iota of performance out of machines.

Squeezing out performance is pretty much the job description of system programmers. Can you give a compelling reason to change that?

Pretty soon, we'll be trying to figure out how to keep 8 cores busy on a typical desktop.

No, we won't. Software becomes twice as slow every two years. Things will stay pretty much the same as they've always been.
The performance argument falls down when you consider the embedded domain where there is a long way to catch up before all embedded devices are multi-core with lots of RAM and huge caches.
This is similar to the idea of Yext (http://www.yext.com/) from TC50.
Access the Mac OS X multitouch framework from Java.
The post starts with "This comment deserved some expansion." What comment? I spent 5 minutes looking around his site and still have no idea.
Transparency: Benefits and Best Practices | UX Booth
oh yeah, I forgot there's more discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564063
This is great to see. MacRuby is accomplishing important work very quickly.

Here are the highlights from the latest Status Report from 0.5, posted by Laurent on Monday at http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-Nov...

----------------------------------------

Enjoy! The final 0.5 release is not far at this point :-)

Highlights:

- rdoc, ri, rack, sinatra are now working.

- DTrace probes are available. Same as in MacRuby 0.4.

- BigDecimal, OpenSSL and JSON support (experimental).

- macrubyc: support for building fat binaries (using the --arch
argument).

- New tool: macruby_deploy, to help you deploying a MacRuby application, by ahead-of-time compiling its source code and relocating the MacRuby framework inside the application bundle. One-click Xcode targets provided.

- Lots of bugs fixed, especially related to compatibility, thread-safeness and memory/resource leaks.
Lisp on bare metal
First Look: The New Retweet
That sounds like a good idea. I'll give that a try.
Google Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. Launch Plans To Be Revealed
"Remix culture" is really nothing new. A lot of traditional music worked this way: Someone would hear several melodies, then they'd use fragments of them to make a new one. Someone would take a melody from one song and write their own set of lyrics.

"Remix culture" is just how things have always worked. It's just that now, we have all this digital technology to leverage for it.
We need a language for programmers
Joyent Secures Funding From Intel Capital
Ok, one link is up, let's see if you can 'catch' some of these visitors, will do another one on a different site.

The text I gave the link is: "If you (or your significant other) want to look your best"

If you want a different text let me know.

Ads are imho a waste of money unless you have a direct track between click and sale and you can measure very accurately which dollars spent give you how much worth of income.
Using JRuby to prototype VST audio plugins
I guess I am assuming "get" means GET. On the surface, a 10-year old could understand Dawkins' letter, but to really appreciate the weight of the issue and to be able to make an informed decision on their own (and not just believe Dawkins because someone said they should) is past their ability.
Is there any notable innovation here over tumblr?
Why would that be vetoed?

Last Answer :http://destructionoverdrive.blogspot.com/2005/06/last-answer... is also a good one.
Ask HN: Facebook app-ing?
has anyone done a very small focused facebook app successfully?

- late and definitely not on the bandwagon but <sigh> have one of those worthless things we term an idea...
Being funded is not a measure of success, not for a start-up and not for the incubator that is associated with the start-up.

Any significant exit of any of those start-ups would be.
Crowdsourcing Comedy on Amazon Reviews
might be too long of a read, it might be overly complex for some 4th graders, and it brings up religious subtexts at the end.
I see. I don't suppose the free CPU cycles would be too critical for someone doing a prototype, but the language freedom is definitely compelling.

With that being said, I think the getting a sys admin part might be tough. FWIW, I hear that many private mmorpg servers die because they overlook the amount of time and money needed to keep a server running.
I’d really like to see a better explanation of that, or some evidence. It’s possible to order things from “best” to “worst”, with the bottom one percent being the best, but there’s really no way to interpret “below the 85th percentile” as anything other than “among the bottom 85%” without some special, personal, opposites-day definition of “percentile”.

To show that at least some at the NIH have a perfectly reasonable understanding of percentiles, here’s a chart of boy’s blood pressure by height percentile: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/hypertension/child_tbl.p...

The NIH’s percentile scoring system for grant applications certainly knows the proper meaning of “percentile”: http://www.med.nyu.edu/spa/education/PaylinesDescription.htm...

My guess is that the commenter was mistaken.
Chargify changres nothing for the first 50 clients and then I think it is a flat fee if I am not mistaken. That can be cheaper than Spreedly. Recurly seems to be doing something similar.

What does make a difference is that Spreedly is not PCI compliant. Both Chargify and Recurly are PCI compliant.
Actually, I found the version in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" which does not have quite the same lascivious language and tone as the version I found online. This should work...
> I think the getting a sys admin part might be tough.

Someone has already volunteered for that post.

I'm a bit upset at all the negativity though.
There are plenty of approaches that are helpful for programmers in both Web and Bioinformatics domains. Seriously.

Check out Programming Collective Intelligence, and I bet it will give you some ideas.
Unlike the usual "script kiddie" Linux rootkits, it is largely focused in exploration and control of a single machine, but the building blocks Metasploit provides could easily be used to construct botnets, especially in dense networks like college campuses or medium-sized businesses without a strong IT security focus.

Metasploit is a coder's tool. More often than not you will have to use the framework to write the exploit yourself. If you already know how to write the exploit and can write it then all metasploit does is simplify things -- there's nothing you couldn't do yourself, it would just take more time.

I use it to develop 0day exploits for various services. Great for testing.
What were the encoding parameters? Resolution, bit-rate etc. I tried to put couple of demos on YouTube and they don't look nearly as good, even though the source video is very crisp.
awesome thanks! yeah that text should work.

Agree fully on the ads, the only reason I spent any money, was because I had some facebook and adwords credits. And since I'm not even running any ads now(don't want to scare off users), there is no X in ads = X new subscriptions.

Oh btw, I have the url fixer plugin for firefox, and it "fixed" your site to www.com, happened like 3 times before I realized what was going on, you should email that developer and tell him to whitelist your exact url. If that works, you'll get a ton of extra traffic.

The guy behind that plugin is http://www.chrisfinke.com/
Ask HN: Most development bang for our buck w/o another full time hire?
So, we have a number of projects/tasks in the pipeline and we'd like to increase the pace at which we can knock them out. At the moment, however, we only have 50-75% of what a full-time, salaried developer would cost per month.

So, what's the best way to put that money to work? Try and find someone who will work part-time and salaried? Try to find a contract person? Try to find a small development shop to assist us?

My main fear is that I'll work with someone and then they'll be gone in 3 months.

Has anyone else faced this scenario?
Four ways that Lexis/West will survive for now. None are permanent, but this is not a perfect solution yet:

1 - Lexis/West both allow lawyers to search based on jurisidiction. If I am a lawyer in Florida, then I want to see results from Florida front and center. A decision from a state court in Arkansas is not directly relevant. It might be interesting, but I don't have time to sort through 50 state courts just to find the one Florida case that affects my client.

2 - Lexis/West both have access to the "official" versions of opinions. Many courts release opinions subject to a lot of technical revisions (fixing typos, changing citations, etc). The opinion is considered final only after all the technical revisions are complete. Many online sources do not reflect the technical revisions. I don't know where Google is getting its data, but lawyers (who value certainty and hate risk) would be willing to pay $5 to Lexis/West to make sure they have the absolute most final version of a case.

3 - Lexis/West have PDF versions that show the proper pagination/column-ation of the cases as they appear in print. This seems silly, but when you are in court talking about a case to a judge, you need to make sure that you can say "I win because of what the case says about halfway down the right column on page 451" and have the judge open his copy of the book and find the statement in the right column of page 451. Eventually, judges will move to line-numbered books and this will be irrelevant. But in the meantime, lawyers want to have the identical version as the judge.

4 - Both Lexis and Westlaw employ people who summarize and categorize the cases. Keyword search doesn't work if the court does not use your keyword. If a case is about landlord/tenant law, the Lexis/West will categorize it and tag it as "landlord/tenant" (as well as a LOT of other things) even if the words "landord" and "tenant" never appear (maybe the opinion calls them "renter" and "rentee").
What happens when you bring a 22 year old Mac to the Genius bar?
YouTube Direct empowers citizen journalism
What Everybody Ought to Know About Digital Photo Retouching
The copied app (unlike on the free internet) couldn't be called "Colloquy" (or reference Colloquy in its tags) because Apple would forbid its distribution, and so discoverability is significantly reduced.

Sadly, not completely true. It couldn't be called colloquy, but the I last time I looked (admittedly, a month or two ago,) two of the competing IRC clients in the app store mention Colloquy by name in their description and one of them also has "Colloquy" as one of their search terms.

Is it really a different issue? It seems like the only thing protecting you from unrestricted copying is Apple's DRM and control over the AppStore.

I don't see the difference between Apple creating some semblance of DRM in the app and developers having to do so on their own. A cracked app is a cracked app, regardless of the protection that was cracked.

One of the things that I love about the App Store is that I don't have to deal with keeping track serials. I buy the app, and it just works. If (when?) Apple were to allow people to put apps on their device without going through the App Store, serials may then become an issue.
Fair warning: get your own merchant account, never ever use a service that does not use segregated merchant accounts.

All you are doing is to allow other people to reduce their chargeback rates by diluting their volume with your charges and sooner or later they'll go down and leave you swimming.

It will take you a bit longer to get approval and you will have to pay a fee but at least you will be building a business that will last.

All you need to do recurring is an IPSP.
In the end you have to manually manage memory and compile to assembly code. C is one of the best languages we have for this and it has a lot of history behind it. This is why it is useful.
Chargify, CheddarGetter, Spreedly, Zuora, Aria Systems and now Recurly. Seems the space will get crowded quickly.
I, for one, welcome a django-like templates for .net -- Especially since it's open source.

I looked for exactly this half a year ago, and couldn't find anything. I ended up writing my own template language, which i never would have done if there was a good option out there already. I'll probably open source my template language also, just in case anybody finds it usefull.

It's actually one of the bad things about .net: the open source community is much smaller than for other languages. Usually when you need something (like a nice template language), you have some commercial options and very few open source projects -- if any -- that hopefully are still maintained and up to date.
Thanks for that heads up, I never realized that, I sent him an email.

edit: ok, second link is also up, together that should get you about 3.5M exposures per month, I'm really curious what it will do for you.
First, you need to define a few things:
- very small (10's, hundreds, etc)
- focused (girls who wear pink?)
- successfully

I've always assumed folks wrote facebook apps to grab the eyeballs of the 16 million users and ride the network effect.

I'm curious about what you are looking for specifically.
(Right now, I'm writing a controversial app just to study the platform and the social network aspect. I'd be glad to share what I know if/when I know it)
Bike Sharing Comes to Silicon Valley
I'm just curious how this is a startup? This seems like a neat way to aggregate some content, but a "startup" should equate to a business, presumably a potentially profitable one.
Bistro, a web framework for .net
A little bird told me that Matt Maroon is making between $1000 and $10.000 a day (fluctuating) from adverts on his facebook games. So I guess he knows.