skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN: Call for Hackers
Call for hackers

I really enjoyed reading that piece by Philip Greenspun on HN the other day, "Online Community Integration"

Article: http://philip.greenspun.com/business/online-community-integration
HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896013

Anybody else excited about this idea? I think it has a lot of merit.

How about all the HN readers that are interested get together and see if Greenspun will chat with us for a bit on how he would implement something like this. Then we could decide whether or not it might make a good business venture.

Anybody else interested?
Damn, I was wondering why my viagra order was never placed.
Thanks for the preview. I think it will turn out to be time well spent.
I'll respond to this from both sides, both as "the girl" and as "the person who gets no respect working for a startup."

I am the opposite of your last sentence. A guy I like _has_ to have a dream/extreme passion. In fact, I prefer a-dream-and-broke, to no-dream-and-sweet-day-job. Either way I just like people who are focused and excited about stuff. That comes way before their job. (you hear that dudes in bands who sling coffee coz it lets you tour? i keed, i keed...)

On the other side of the equation, when i talk about my own entrepreneurial stuff, reaction is all over the place.

I think the main thing is that most people, guys and girls, have "a type" (i don't just mean looks, i mean style, subculture, humor, etc) And when when you approach people "cold," without knowing them through some other context (where you volunteer/go to school/hang out and drink coffee/see shows at), talking about your job is kind of this thing you're hoping will get them to change their type, or recontextualize you or something. But the thing is, before we utter the first words about our jobs, the chances that we'd click with that person are mostly determined by other stuff. So while it's very true that talking about our startups doesn't impress most people, it's really the low success rate of the "cold call" to blame :D
tl;dr version:

Write code to solve the core problem. Don't write code for the rest unless it's really needed.
Ask HN: Review Our Product
We've just built a Time Tracking app that integrates with Xero (online small biz accounting) called MinuteDock.

http://minutedock.com

It was built nights+weekends, around "pay-the-bills" work and a never-ending stream of other projects ;)

Basically, we decided to build MinuteDock as an exclusive add-on for Xero (using their API - http://blog.xero.com/developer). They've been really good to us - offered a possible blog post and a spot in their newsletter.

Before we get sent out to ~12,000 Xero customers though, we'd really like to make sure we've got the product somewhat right. I usually enjoy the Review my Startup posts on HN, and this seemed like the perfect time to give it a go for myself.

US-based HNers: Do many people use Xero for their startup's accounts? Have you guys even heard of it?
From many parts of Oakland you can be in downtown SF in less than 15min by car (without traffic) BART is ~10min into the city, and if you're nautically inclined there's a ferry from Jack London Square.

Essentially: commuting from Oakland to SF can be quicker than commuting from one end of SF to another. It's much cheaper, and I've found it to be more accepting of the self-employeed.

Great (safe + cool) Oakland neighborhoods: Temescal, Rockridge, Piedmont Ave, Lakeshore, Lake Merritt, Uptown, Old Town, and Jack London//produce & waterfront.
Clickable link: http://minutedock.com
I wish the patent office had taken that to heart and stopped issuing patents.
I would agree that decisions with 2 people are difficult, but I don't think they're impossible. A marriage could be considered a startup with only 2 founders, and in that case, making a decision where the equity is 50/50 is essential to making it work. And while many of these 'startups' fail, countless others succeed.

In marriage, as in business, honesty and the ability to take another's perspective go a long way. Ideally, you've chosen a partner whose abilities and insights compliment your own and decisions can be made by the one most qualified to make them.

I would think twice about starting something with anyone who was immovable in their opinions. (and you'd know if they were or not pretty quickly) It may not be the first instinct of entrepreneurs, but there is a possibility that both parties are wrong! ;)

-jc

*edited for word choice
Anything but what you did. That's about the worst thing you could've possibly done, so anything else at all would be a step up.

What the reviews indicate is that your product description is misleading. They aren't upset because you only have one channel. They're upset because they were deceived. If deception and derision are your idea of marketing, the sooner your product dies the better.
No, sparc.org is the right domain, most likely someone thought it funny to report sparc.org (although google's malware interception page states that it's been reported several times over the last couple of months, so maybe Sparc Intl. really are hosting malware?)
clang gives 7 9 9 7 2 2 as well.
gcc gives 7 10 9 7 3 2 when targeting arm.

2,3,7 are all valid possibilities for the 4th and 6th numbers, but apparently gcc interprets the 5th as 2 + 1 somehow, which I can't see as being valid whatsoever.
> 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP.

Not really, when global GDP only grows a few percent each year... '2% of GDP' might seem small, but if we rephrase it as 'half of annual growth' or something more realistic?

> It entirely depends on how that money is diverted...OTOH it is hard to overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause.

"My proposal assumes that men are angels and wishes are fishes; assuming that, everything will work out great! We'll have our cake of carbon reduction & not eat the cost of spending 2% of global GDP. And if it doesn't work, I blame anything but my proposal."
Not being able to write your own code to deploy into a production environment won't get you very far as a software developer.

Merely my $0.02.
Two thoughts:

1. The site looks like a domain parking page.

2. Why can I not view books sorted by gender distribution? That seems like the entire point of the site, yet I can't do it.
The way we got our first users for Woobius was that some of the initial team were architects, and we had strong links with a number of architecture firms. So when the product was barely useable, we deployed it and got them to start trying it out. There followed a frantic search for a decent host when we realised that those people were using Woobius for real live projects and they'd get rather annoyed if it suddenly vanished in a hard drive crash or the like.

Anyway, to cut a long story, since Woobius is a naturally viral tool (see http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-applicat... ), it spread from that initial kernel, with effectively no marketing.

If you don't have strong connections to potential users of your product, I would advise building a different product.
I'd be interested to know if any of these "experts" on this panel have ever worked for or hold any financial interest in companies that are likely to get the contacts.
Very neat.

movl $7, -4(%rbp)
movl -4(%rbp), %ecx
addl $1, -4(%rbp)
movl $2, -4(%rbp)
movl -4(%rbp), %esi
addl $1, -4(%rbp)
movl -4(%rbp), %edx
movl $.LC0, %edi
movl $0, %eax
call printf
iTunesU has some courses for stats, but they may not be suitable for learning in a hurry.

-jc
Pre launch:
Blogging about a subject related to your startup and twittering, funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page, along with personal networking should give you 1000 prime users ready for when you launch.

Post launch: more personal networking (esp with influentials - either in person or virtual) and getting good write ups

However, before you sign up even your first user you need to make sure you have a strong viral loop going (assuming your product is suitable for it) so that every user you obtain is likely to send you even more.

IMHO it's not actually hard to get 1000 users, it's actually harder to obtain the first 50,000 users. After that you probably are reaching the inflection point and it gets easier (assuming good viral loop).
Agreed. This survey is terrible.
Surely it is until you prove it succeeds it's quite likely it will fail - if you have not launched or have launced but have no users or are not profitable it's seems likely you will fail without a lot more work.

I suspect from your description that your business is already successful and is a low risk of failure.
Oh man. Never make fun of users.

Instead, thank them for taking the time to write feedback, explain the situation, and (here is the most important bit) tell them what they can do about.

For example, set up a petition online asking a TV channel to open up on your platform, and ask them to sign it. Or give them address to a decision maker (could be a politician for example) and ask them to write to this person.

You can take this a step further: if a user says he/she works for a TV channel and is sad it's not there, ask them who you should talk to and ask for a referral. Likewise if they have a friend who works there.

You'll need a public page to manage these efforts that is the first port of call and one reference for everything. Say domain.com/more-channels . Anyting descriptive and memorable will do. On this page, write that this page is for helping users get more channels on the platform, and give them references along the tips I mentioned. ANY TIME you engage a user about this topic, provide a link to this page.

And don't forget to give your contact details on this page.

Good luck.
What's the word for bribing people with their own money?

I think people in the enterprise world generally refer to that as "getting your salespeople to make a convincing business case".
In one of the graphs there is a mention that the last slammer was seen in August 2009!
Course catalogs tell you nothing. They're stuffed with appealing descriptions of courses which may or may not end up on the schedule, and when they do, may or may not resemble the description in the catalog. Not to mention the teachers' knowledge level; I once attended a cryptography lecture by a professor who didn't know the difference between public and private keys...
Videos of tech talks at software, math, graphics, and other conferences
Forgive my language, but even playing field my ass. This kind of stuff really makes me angry.

Do you think when millions of starving Irish refugees turned up in the 1840s it didn't depress wages for existing American workers at the time? Or the Poles, or the Germans, or the dozens of other nationalities?

Immigration is an economic force which moves labour from areas of high supply to areas of high demand. The result, considered globally, is greater prosperity for everybody.

The American economy is and always has been fuelled by cheap labour in the form of unskilled immigration -- forget $30k, the people who really get the economy moving are doing shit work for $8/hour.

Lower wages means goods are cheaper, which means you can buy stuff that's cheaper, and when we export it we make more money. Lower wages are GREAT for the economy -- even, in the long run, for those in the industries affected, because their savings are bigger (cheaper stuff) and worth more (lower inflation), and their standard of living is higher (more stuff).

And it's as true in high tech as it is in blue-collar industries.

Saying you don't think there should be programmers working for $30k is exactly like those idiot auto workers who formed unions which demanded that they all be paid $60k/year to do the same assembly work people in Asia are doing for $30k. As a result, they're now either out of work or YOU are paying their ridiculous $60k wage out of your tax money after the bailouts. Not exactly the American Way.

Even if you shipped over every single able and willing programmer in India and China to California tomorrow wages wouldn't drop to $10/hour. There are just not that many programmers in the world.

But because some Americans are terrified that rampant immigration will mean they earn $95k instead of $100k/year, every time they get they opportunity they vote to make it harder for hard-working, skilled immigrants to enter and stay in this country. In so doing, they save that $5k but never earn the $50k they would have earned as the stock market rose on the strength of all that immigration-fuelled growth. But because you can't see money you never earn, few people complain.

Do you know how many H-1B visas (the most common skilled tech worker visa) are granted every year? 65,000. That's 0.02% of the population. You could let in 10 times as many people every year and nobody would even notice.

America's anti-immigration policies are stupid and self-defeating on a purely economic analysis, before you even get into the issue of a nation of white immigrants suddenly deciding that immigration is bad because the new guys are all brown.
This is of course based on the assumption you've built something people need/want.
Project Hail Cloud Computing
Zynga’s Mark Pincus: I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America
I don't know if you're avoiding a longer drive, but every time I visit San Francisco I have to get a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city from Battery Park. I did last night, after the Dropbox party and before my plane took off.
Internet Text Archive
funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page

How did you make this work for you? How long did you open it up before launching?

Edit: formatting.
Why not? It's doing the x=2 first (before anything else in there), then the ++ of the last expression (and returning 2 for it), then giving you the result of the middle one (which is now three since it ran after the last one). The 7 is because it ran that one before doing anything to the other values.

It should be noted that this is illegal C, and compilers are allowed to do absolutely anything they want when they see it. Even things that are totally not logical.
I haven't figured out why, but far too many people will (often anonymously) publicly eviscerate a product when they find a problem, without actually bothering to contact the maintainer for help.

It's sad, because there is often a perfectly valid reason for the issue; and the fix is often trivial, or at least, explainable.

There are a few defenses against unjustifiably-bad reviews. (I have had to deal with this personally.)

First, if you can become a member/poster on the forum with a rant against you, do it. Post a reply that identifies you as associated with the product, and clarify whatever the customer has apparently misunderstood; or, if it is a bug, instruct the person on how to provide more information to have the problem fixed. There is little chance that the fuming anonymous poster will ever see this, but they might; and either way, it shows others that you are doing your best to deal with the problem.

Second, forums sometimes have moderators who will accept complaints and remove remarks. Rants are often obvious; for instance, if everyone except one fuming moron is giving you 5 stars, a moderator shouldn't have any problem removing the offending post.

And third, be vigilant. It can be disheartening to have people publicly destroy your product, and sometimes all you can do is just keep working and make it better. At some point, the bad press will fade. It may well have caused some damage to your product's appeal in the short term, but in the long run your name will be considered one of the good brands.
Content creation and organic SEO. If you're the guy writing things that solve problems for your users, it a) brings them into your site and b) pre-disposes them to trust you when you say that using your software/service will help them with the problem they are having. (Content ranks for long-tail terms, content draws links, links help you rank for more competitive terms, repeat ad nauseum.)

Organic SEO scales stupidly well, incidentally, and if you're a bootstrappy type of person you can turn the revenue it brings into AdWords or other paid acquisition strategies, then use the revenue that brings to improve your organic SEO, then...

It really helps if you either write very well, have a unique positioning for your blog/articles/whatever, or have some sort of unfair advantage that everybody else on the Internet can't match. In my case, the unfair advantage for the last two years has been my CMS, which lets me outpublish organizations with budgets next to which mine would be rounding error. (An old buddy of mine, ex-military, on the subject of unfair advantages: "A fair fight is the result of poor planning".)
The trick for me is to learn a good foundation in statistics but to know that you don't need to learn everything.

A friend who founded a startup that makes heavy uses of statistics likes to trawl academic papers for algorithms that help his business.

Think of research papers a bit like a well documented private object/library -- you know what data it accepts, you know what it returns, but you don't need to know how it works.

Just make sure your code reflects exactly the formulae/model documented in the paper and you're good.
I suppose saying "directories" doesn't really do my suggestion justice. Although in some cases simply listing yourself can be really effective.

What I really suggest is marketing your thing by integrating it into something popular. If you create a plugin or addon that connects something huge (like Firefox, phpBB, MySpace, Facebook, iPhone) with your thing, you get to get to drink the water from the elephant's eyes.

Convincing 1,000 to give your thing a shot is not particularly hard. Once you have access to those people it's not hard to sell some of them on something else (if necessary).
A peek at Categories: an object system for Scheme
Vim is actually next my list of productivity tools to learn -- I just got done learning the Colemak keyboard layout.

How painful can I expect this experience to be? Vim doesn't seem fun at all.
Wow, you came across as an enormous dick. If I saw that on a product I was considering I would high-tail it away and purchase a competing product.

When someone tells me that my company's book app sucks because it doesn't have Twilight or Harry Potter, the answer isn't that they need to read the description. The answer is to apologize, explain the reasons we can't offer those titles, and offer a refund, no questions asked. I get at least three emails like that a day, too- we've only had one person to date ask for the refund. If you're nice to your customers, they're nice to you.
Tales of a Semantic Web Skeptic
The Future Is Big Data in the Cloud
I've sold shareware for 3 years, similar to what you and many other lone developers I know personally and online are doing (seems like mac, iPhone, and casual games.). The thing is, when a group of developers decide to band together to try to develop something bigger, they all have to hurry to keep the momentum going, as there are more people who might quit due to running out of money, going to grad school, getting married, etc. At the same time, the vision of the company should be bigger than that of a lone shareware author, such that it more than compensates for going-for-it-alone.

Many are happy to have a lifestyle business in addition to their full-time job, and feeling respected by posting on Joel on Software and these discussions. Others have opportunities, either because they are young and have college friends, or are older with money saved up and a list of industry contacts, to jump in on a new idea together. This dilutes ownership but allows one to iterate faster, and avoid being the only one outside of their customers who actually know and care about their product.
Indeed. I'm kinda ... ashamed of seeing this in the homepage.
I did read it, it seemed an odd thing to do, but there isn't anything there that jumped out as being a joke... How do you know it's satire? It was on Google news so I assumed it to be true. Then again, the Onion is on Google news as well...
Lessons for Software Developers from Robert Heinlein
I can't speak highly enough of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran. It's not everything, you'd need other books, but it covers "fantastic applications" of techniques. It has really clear explanations from real-world scenarios, followed by extremely clear python code and with a second explanation with code and maths of each technique used in the appendix. Check out the contents on Amazon.
There are a lot. the built-in TK library has worked well for me in the past. It supports some drag and drop.
Over lunch last week, a group of peers were talking about how the "link economy" has essentially collapsed as people seem to now just forward links without any commentary/explanation and often without even examining them.

Thinking about the 7 people that up-voted this link, this is a great example of that. It's satire, and not even all that funny (and I'm a Brit living in America reading a British newspaper's take on my president) -- so I can only assume the 7 votes were made without examining the content of the link carefully/at all.
I wish he had another 20 or 30 minutes to talk. When the "5 minute warning" was flashed, I think everyone was genuinely surprised that that much time had already gone. He had some fascination stories & information to share.
But unless you're a web host or something, you are not being paid to write web servers. In the limited amount of time you have to solve your business's actual problem, do you want to learn the ins and outs of HTTP, or do you want to learn the ins and outs of the actual problem you are trying to solve?
Running a startup is not like having a job or being a student, because it never stops.

I was fraternity president for a while. I distinctly remember being surprised by this "feature" of my job. Especially when I am awoken at 3AM with news that a (fully sober) member had driven his truck into the lake across the street.

This job was the best experience I had prior to running a startup, and I'd never do it again.
Presumably <blockquote>?
What you describe is a pointer, but not a surrogate key.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_key

"For example, table Staff may contain two rows for "John Smith", one row when he was employed between 1990 and 1999, another row when he was employed between 2001 and 2006. The surrogate key is identical (non-unique) in both rows however the primary key will be unique."
I re-read C99, and the reason this is allowed is not because of §6.5.2.2 p10, but rather §6.5.16 p4 as far as I can tell. Though it's weird to me that the expression (x = 2) can ever be evaluated as anything but 2.

Also, it's not illegal C, it's undefined C and compilers are only allowed to do whatever they want within the undefined area (which is larger than I expected.)
As an addendum to this post I just got an email from Greenspun and he's agreed to a telephone chat tomorrow morning.
I'm going to get blasted for this, but here goes anyway.

I'm willing to bet that the majority of founders are single males who do not understand what marriage is all about. I have not had the experience of being part of a start-up, but I do have 6 years of marriage under my belt. I cannot imagine any circumstance where being someone's co-fonder is in any way like being married to them.
However, the wannabe founders reading it are also probably single males who don't understand marriage. We do, however, probably all share a very similar caricature of marriage - and thus the analogy is useful in communicating the bizarre mix of love, hate, co-dependence, shared depression and elation, occasional jealousy and careful maintenance that characterizes the relationship between two guys in a foxhole with laptops.
Do you mean that the only way to earn a reasonable amount (at least enough for hosting) is to target a dumber audience?
any videos of the presentations?