Datasets:

OpenPipe

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hacker-news

like 10

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python_kiss

How Important is the .com TLD?

http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/02/19/how-important-is-the-dot-com/

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python_kiss

Wireless: India's Hot, China's Not

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=21355

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python_kiss

The Battle for Mobile Search

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2007/tc20070220_828216.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

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phil

8.3% of what they did in 2005: wow.

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dngrmouse

1. Have it so you can be automatically logged in. I have to manually log in every time I visit the site (using Safari here).<p>2. Just like Reddit does, show the domain each link belongs to. Reddit has this in brackets after the headline, which works fine. Since I don't have much free time, there are some sites that have sub-par content which I avoid reading, and it helps to know where I would end up without having to hover over the link.

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rms

CRV Quickstart: $250,000 in seed stage financing. How does an 18 year old entrepreneur find references to list on the application?

http://www.crv.com/AboutCRV/QuickStart.html

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rms

It's bad if you come out of the Techstars program without any funding and a non-sustainable company, but then you're probably screwed anyways. VCs are infamously inscrutable; we hear that they are always out to take advantage of naive or underfunded companies.<p>If you're good enough to get further investment after Techstars, you get it from a VC that you already know instead of having to deal with the typical painful negotiations. And if Brad Feld's Foundry Group will give you money, maybe you could get Bay Area VC money. Even better, the best companies will get to reinvest their own profits.

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rms

What algorithm does news.YC use to filter spam?

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msgbeepa

Great Way To Find New Job And Career

http://www.wikio.com/webinfo?id=13628228

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volida

Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars, which afterwards collapsed because after moving the servers outside China the service's data were going through word filtering (e.g. during login) and there were failures...

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volida

Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars

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volida

Probably they dislike the content and not the posting itself.

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Alex3917

You know your country doesn't have many role models when Alex Tew is considered the poster child for a successful Internet entrepreneur.

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volida

Bug: I think there is a bug when you edit one of your comments. Instead updating seems there is a new entry?

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Alex3917

That is actually what a guy I know from Wilson Sonsini says: Sell the product, design the product, build the product.<p>I think it is the best strategy provided that A) you are targeting businesses B) your software fills a need of a very specific niche.<p>Regardless of whether you literally sell the product first though, I think it's good to at least think about the process in that order.

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Nick_Smith

Inside Myspace.com - (great info on how they scaled)

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1397,2082921,00.asp

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amichail

Any thoughts on collaborative invention (e.g., using human-based genetic algorithms)?

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amichail

Just to take one example, one might build a service where users invent board games. This could be done using human-based genetic algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_genetic_algorithm. Users of the service would be able to modify rules to try to make a game more fun. A fitness function would take into account how popular various game variants are among players. Note that users of such a service need not be programmers: the domain is sufficiently restricted so as to make visual point-and-click rule creation/modification possible.

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Chingy

why is this here

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Chingy

You should be able to vote down bad stories. I thought this wouldn't be needed but we're starting to get off-topic submissions, so we need to be able to bury them.

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wioota

This was a great read and the patterns of growth and strategies they used hold true even for much less extreme scaling.

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volida

Y Combinator funded companies

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volida

xobni.com, reddit.com, pollground.com, loopt.com, weebly.com<p>which else?

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Alex3917

Use your customers as references. If you don't have customers, use the people who said they'd probably buy your product if it existed.<p>Also, you aren't going to get 250k without at the very least a bunch of informal advisors, so list those people too.

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pg

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

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pg

Trusted human editors.

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dpapathanasiou

Just another reminder that acquisition cannot be your only exit strategy.

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amichail

Is it acceptable for software to lie (like in the ESP Game say)?

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amichail

One might imagine having a service lie to, for example, make it look more busy (so as to attract more users) and/or to detect cheating. Is this a reasonable thing to do? See for example how the ESP game lies: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf. In particular, take a look at the sections on Pre-Recorded Game Play and Cheating.

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amichail

If you think that it would be morally wrong to lie in this way, would it be better if the service told you that it may lie at times to enhance the user experience?

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pg

Myspace preparing to block all widgets?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/25/imeem-blocked-from-myspace/

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awt

&#34;Remember Me&#34; Feature Would Be Nice

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amichail

As another example, consider using human-based genetic algorithms to create daily news shows, perhaps in the style of this site (but using people rather than computers): http://www.newsatseven.com

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Nick_Smith

This seems like a great time-waster idea. It would probably be very addictive if it ever got critical mass. Naturally I think it will be impossible to monetize on its own, but it will be awesome when a profitable company buys them out.

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bradn

Yahoo! Announces Hosting of YUI libraries on their edge network

http://ajaxian.com/archives/yahoo-announces-hosting-of-yui-libraries-on-their-edge-network

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Nick_Smith

50 percent of their traffic is for their mail service at this point, according to Alexa. If they ever get beaten on that, it'll be lights out for them.

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pg

Am debugging it now.

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pg

More that you can't count on any given acquirer.

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dpapathanasiou

True, but does that imply that companies should be formed with the sole purpose/goal of getting acquired?

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dangrsmind

&#34;Attachment creates delusion.&#34;<p>-- Buddhist saying

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msgbeepa

Make Money From Making Comments!

http://www.wikio.com/webinfo?id=13633186

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ratlaw

A quick place to list your startup and see others

http://webstartup.info/

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joao

Freedom of choice, and how entrepreneurs relate to it

http://www.caterina.net/archive/001037.html

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onebeerdave

Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/business/yourmoney/25slip.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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farmer

Tim Bray: &#34;The buzz around OpenID is becoming impossible to ignore.&#34;

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/02/24/OpenID

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Alex3917

Can you change the CSS so that the links that have already been visited turn a different color?

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joshwa

a YC company

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joshwa

option to open articles/comments in a new tab by default?<p>bookmarklet set (I often use my &#34;reddit this&#34; bookmarklet to get back to the comments page for an article I&#39;ve clicked)

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Nick_Smith

Since the NYT demands your info:<p>THE World Wide Web is awash in digital video, but too often we can’t find the videos we want or browse for what we might like.<p>That’s a loss, because if we could search for Internet videos, they might become the content of a global television station, just as the Web’s hypertext, once it was organized and tamed by search, became the stuff of a universal library.<p>What we need, says Suranga Chandratillake, a co-founder of Blinkx, a start-up in San Francisco, is a remote control for the Web’s videos, a kind of electronic TV Guide. He’s got just the thing.<p>Videos have multiplied on social networks like YouTube and MySpace as well as on news and entertainment sites because of the emergence of video-sharing, user-generated video, free digital storage and broadband and Wi-Fi networks.<p>Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England, that sells “media delivery systems” to Internet service providers. “I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent,” says Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.<p>But search engines — like Google — that were developed during the first, text-based era of the Web do a poor job of searching through this rising sea of video. That’s because they don’t search the videos themselves, but rather things associated with them, including the text of a Web page, the “metadata” that computers use to display or understand pages (like keywords or the semantic tags that describe different content), video-file suffixes (like .mpeg or .avi), or captions or subtitles.<p>None of these methods are very satisfactory. Many Internet videos have little or obscure text, and clips often have no or misleading metadata. Modern video players do not reveal video-file suffixes, and captions and subtitles imperfectly capture the spoken words in a video.<p>The difficulties of knowing which videos are where challenge the growth of Internet video. “If there are going to be hundreds of millions of hours of video content online,” Mr. Chandratillake said, “we need to have an efficient, scalable way to search through it.”<p>Mr. Chandratillake’s history is unusual for Silicon Valley. He was born in Sri Lanka in 1977 and divided his childhood among England and various countries in South Asia where his father, a professor of nuclear chemistry, worked. Then he studied distributed processing at Kings College, Cambridge, before becoming the chief technology officer of Autonomy, a company that specializes in something called “meaning-based computing.” This background possibly suggested an original approach to search when he founded Blinkx in 2004.<p>Mr. Chandratillake’s solution does not reject any existing video search methods, but supplements them by transcribing the words uttered in a video, and searching them. This is an achievement: effective speech recognition is a “nontrivial problem,” in the language of computer scientists.<p>Blinkx’s speech-recognition technology employs neural networks and machine learning using “hidden Markov models,” a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing are guessed from what is known.<p>Mr. Chandratillake calls this method “contextual search,” and he says it works so well because the meanings of the sounds of speech are unclear when considered by themselves. “Consider the phrase ‘recognize speech,’ ” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Its phonemes (‘rek-un-nise-peach’) are incredibly similar to those contained in the phrase ‘wreck a nice beach.’ Our systems use our knowledge of which words typically appear in which contexts and everything we know about a given clip to improve our ability to guess what each phoneme actually means.”<p>While neural networks and machine learning are not new, their application to video search is unique to Blinkx, and very clever.<p>How good is blinkx search? When you visit blinkx.com, the first thing you see is the “video wall,” 25 small, shimmering tiles, each displaying a popular video clip, indexed that hour. (The wall provides a powerful sense of the collective mind of our popular culture.)<p>To experiment, I typed in the phrase “Chronic — WHAT — cles of Narnia,” the shout-out in the “Saturday Night Live” digital short called “Lazy Sunday,” a rap parody of two New York slackers. I wanted a phrase that a Web surfer would know more readily than the real title of a video. I also knew that “Lazy Sunday,” for all its cultish fame, would be hard to find: NBC Universal had freely released the rap parody on the Internet after broadcasting it in December 2005, but last month the company insisted that YouTube pull it.<p>Nonetheless, Blinkx found eight instances of “Lazy Sunday” when I tried it last week. By contrast, Google Video found none. Typing “Lazy Sunday” into the keyword search box on Google’s home page produced hundreds of results — but many were commentaries about the video, and many had nothing to do with “Saturday Night Live.”<p>Blinkx, which has raised more than $12.5 million from angel investors, earns money by licensing its technology to other sites. Although Blinkx has more than 80 such partners, including Microsoft, Playboy, Reuters and MTV, it rarely discloses the terms of its deals. Mr. Chandratillake said some licensees pay Blilnkx directly while others share revenue and some do both. Blinkx has revealed the details of one deal: ITN, a British news broadcaster, will share the revenue generated by advertising inserted in its videos.<p>For all of Blinkx’s level coolness, there are at least three obvious obstacles to the company’s success.<p>First, because Google Video is not much good now doesn’t mean it won’t get better: after all, when Blinkx was founded, it first applied machine learning to searching the desktops of personal computers, a project that was abandoned when Google and Microsoft released their own desktop search bars.<p>Second, even if Google improbably fails to develop effective video search, the field will still be crowded: TruVeo, Flurl, ClipBlast and other start-ups are all at work on different subsets of the market.<p>Finally, Blinkx might not go far enough in searching the content of videos: the company searches their sounds, but not their images.<p>THIS last objection is the most serious.<p>“Because Blinkx emphasizes speech recognition, there is a great amount of multimedia content that they cannot address, like photographs,” said John R. Smith, a senior manager in the intelligent information management department of I.B.M.’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. “But what’s worse, speech is not a very good indicator of what’s being shown in a video.”<p>Mr. Smith says he has been working on an experimental video search engine called Marvel, which also uses machine learning but organizes visual information as well as speech.<p>Still, at least for now, Blinkx leads video search: it searches more than seven million hours of video and is the largest repository of digital video on the Web.<p>“Search is our navigation, our interface to the Internet,” said John Battelle, chief of Federated Media Publishing and author of “The Search,” an account of the rise of Google. With Blinkx, we may have such an interface for digital video, and be a little closer to Mr. Chandratillake’s vision of a universal remote control.<p>Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: pontin@nytimes.com.

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Nick_Smith

I'm not much of an expert on this stuff... what do you all think about their chances?

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danielha

I've been trying out their beta for the last couple weeks, and while some may find it nice, it doesn't hook me at all.<p>

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danielha

It shouldn't be a problem as long as they have a business model this time around. :)<p>Good article, thanks.

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lupin_sansei

Couldn't they just put Adsense on the sidebar to monetise it?

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danielha

Of course it&#39;d be ideal to create a company with a sustaining business model; there&#39;s no question about that. <p>Is that the only time a company should be formed? That may be akin to only purchasing shares in long-term growth companies. Sometimes it&#39;s in your best interest to just ride the short-term explosion and move on.<p>It&#39;s completely viable to get into something with only a foreseeable immediate market. After a certain point, perhaps the company would be better off taking advantage of the economies of scale. It isn&#39;t a problem to be true to yourself and realize early on that an acquisition is the best end-target for your new company.

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danielha

I can see this resulting in mass abuse very soon.

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danielha

Humans have too much compassion. We need cold, hard algorithms! Indiscriminating, zero-tolerant machines! ;)

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danielha

A lot of you would-be entrepreneurs should give this a read. There are many things to consider in the crucial first steps.

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danielha

Thanks, I&#39;ll be watching this soon.

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ottawastart

Interesting that two of these companies had NO co-founder. Hmmm... There seems to be a lot of emphasis in the YC companies on finding a co-founder, a partner, etc.

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danielha

All I know is that it works. I tried out a few terms and got what I had in mind every time.<p>They heavily emphasize speech recognition, I think. For what this is, it&#39;s very cool. The technology is there and the product works. I think this is going places.

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danielha

I did a search and didn&#39;t see this mentioned. <p>In any case, a very useful feature would be a way to track your comments in the different submissions and the stories that you voted up.<p>There are a lot of really great stories on here and sometimes I don&#39;t have the time to finish reading some. I&#39;d like to be able to find the stories again quickly in my recent history.

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python_kiss

I pointed out in an earlier article (http://m4th.com/Articles/Article.php?Article-Title=Anatomy-of-a-Successful-Social-Network) that MySpace owes much of its success to the countless choices it offers to its users. Over the past couple of months, however, MySpace has turned greedy. Rupert Murdoch feels that online widgets are a zero-sum game; in other words, widget companies make profit at the expense of MySpace. This couldn&#39;t be further from the truth; the fact is that widgets complement MySpace by giving its users the choice to decorate their pages anyway they want. By restricting access to these widgets, MySpace will not only frustrate the users but also generate unprecedented negative publicity. - Jawad Shuaib

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omarish

People trying to delete their posts. Erasing the text == deleting the post.

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Harj

Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2007/02/silicon_valley_20.php

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gaz

myspace arn&#39;t given enough credit, supporting a site with that many users is no easy task.

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omarish

People trying to delete their posts. Erasing the text == deleting the post.

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python_kiss

Patience pays for VCs too. It was my understanding that many quick sell outs were a result of VC pressure. MySpace former ceo, for example, filed a lawsuit against its investors (VantagePoint) for pressuring them into sell out for a quick $580 million. VCs are much like shareholders in corporations; they often vote for a buyout or merger if a corporate raider, like Carl Icahn, promises quick short term dividents. The way I see it, a founder is more likely to stick to their company than an investor whose only interest is cash.

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omarish

So i&#39;m not the only young one pursuing a startup. Good to know.<p>Good luck.

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vikram

It was bound to happen. All the known ones will probably have to pay some sort of a toll. I wonder if the community will care enough to fight back?

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jwecker

Nice. A network of hierarchical bayes inference machines without a line of code.

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joshwa

I&#39;ve been thinking about this in relation to my startup-- it would be great to have a really low-friction way for my users to create accounts, and to say, &#34;well, if you already have an AIM account or a LiveJournal account, just use those credentials&#34;.<p>But I think the average user might need some education on this, as they might suspect that my site is just a phishing scheme? I.e. why would I be asking for their password to another site?<p>I wonder if I could autodiscover existing openID credentials/other accounts as part of my signup process? Kind of how 30boxes can autodiscover myspace accounts based on an email address... I&#39;m trying to envision what that user experience could be like.<p>Ideas, anyone?

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joshwa

downvotes on articles might help... There are a bunch of posts from an adsense farm that I&#39;d like to flag/downvote.

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ashu

How to handle security bugs in your code

http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=459

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bluemoo

This problem is firefox specific. For whatever reason, IE does The Right Thing. Actually, the whole site just looks better in IE, so maybe this should be a request for better Firefox support :)

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danw

Theres a list at:<p>http://yrumors.infogami.com/OldHomePage

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joshwa

Would love to see the &#34;inbox&#34; feature of reddit, so I can see when one of my comments has been replied to. <p>Or simply an email or RSS notification... you wanted to spark the discussion, right? So give me a way of knowing if I&#39;ve sparked anything!<p>Also, it&#39;d be nice to see on the list pages something along the lines of &#34;N comments (most recent M |minutes|hours|days ago)&#34;

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danw

Startup School Wiki - Wiki inc videos of startup school 2006 and 2005

http://startupschool.infogami.com/

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Harj

Facebook is Stickier than Peanut Butter

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/02/22/facebook-is-stickier-than-peanut-butter

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pg

Ok, from now on, restarting the server shouldn&#39;t log anyone out. Form submissions will still be lost if a restart happens in the middle, though.

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dmon

sure

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jwecker

Make sure and post this comment in the &#34;Features you want&#34; section if you haven&#39;t already. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363

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dangrsmind

In my experience the acquiring company will require an NDA since as a public company they would not want early acquisition discussions disclosed. I&#39;ve only done one such transaction but I understand this requirement is typical.<p>The company to be acquired also wants to have an NDA in this case since in the event that the acquisition does not proceed you don&#39;t want your negotiating position revealed to other potential acquirers before you have chance to even negotiate with them.

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pg

Slife: displays graphically what you do with your computer

http://www.slifelabs.com/

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pg

really? which ones?

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jcwentz

How to Waste a Lot of Money in Software Development

http://blogs.slcdug.org/jjacobson/archive/2007/02/23/6628.aspx

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eli

It doesn&#39;t even really have to be AJAX. You could solve the problem just by setting up an #anchor so that when the screen reloads after voting, it just the user back to where they left off.

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eli

Maybe the rules could even be tweaked to keep good stories with a minority viewpoint from being buried. At the very least, maybe have down votes count as only 1/2 a vote. (So there would have to be greater than 2:1 of people against a story to bring it down below 0 points)

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rms

Thanks for the solid advice.

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jwecker

can&#39;t speak for joshwa, but I thought this one was spammy. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1040

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mmcgrana

From an engineering perspective, I enjoyed the inside look at how Myspace scaled their infrastructure. Scaling is certainly a critical issue for these big sites; one of the reasons that Friendster waned in popularity was that they used algorithms and a back-end infrastructure that were painfully slow for their once-massive user base. <p>On the other hand, a site should be able to handle several hundred thousand users with a single beefy database server, remote static file hosting, and a few load-balance webservers. When you start &#39;scaling out&#39; to a bigger array of cheap hardware, you introduce complications that make your site harder to maintain and improve. That change will need to happen at some point along the growth curve, but it seems to me that seed stage entrepreneurs need to be most concerned about making a product that people want to use.

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jwecker

I can&#39;t get it to pull up. google cache http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Kzhj8Oi5868J:www.slifelabs.com/&#38;strip=1<p>Good heavens, there&#39;s not a news.YC effect, is there? I guess it&#39;s on digg...

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jwecker

How to Waste a Lot of Money in Software Development: _Neglect to fire_ people who need to be fired and/or neglect to have a little bit of new blood flowing into the program- especially if it&#39;s a long-lived program. If there is a programmer not pulling their weight or not passionate about the project or programming in general- move them or help them find another job. Otherwise they&#39;ll be a drag on everyone. Don&#39;t let the accountant decide whom to fire. The team knows.<p>Anyone who has seen a government IT department (except for NASA) knows what I&#39;m talking about.

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sharpshoot

boso.com (now auctomatic), socialmoth, justin.tv?

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immad

Facebook Launches Facebook Query Language

http://mashable.com/2007/02/25/facebook-query-language/

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dangrsmind

Many NDAs require the disclosing party to describe, list, or specify the confidential items disclosed. But often I find when very early stage inventors ask people to sign NDAs they often fail to specify what is disclosed even though their agreements require it. If you ever have to enforce an NDA, trying to argue that the entire conversation was confidential is much harder than simply producing the list of disclosures. Also, I&#39;ve never asked an investor to sign an NDA. Asking someone to sign an NDA indicates a lack of trust. IMO if you don&#39;t trust the people you are talking to you probably shouldn&#39;t be talking to them at all.<p>Recently I&#39;ve been asked to sign NDAs as part of employment interviews. This seems to have almost become standard practice now. I don&#39;t really think this is a great idea, and I often won&#39;t take an interview that requires an NDA. But sometimes if I am certain that I won&#39;t be developing my own ideas in the field I&#39;ll sign one. Inevitably I find that these employment related NDAs are the most frivolous, silly, and irrelevant ones I sign. YMMV.

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immad

http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&#38;doc=fql &#60;- thats the facebook docs on it.<p>Maybe a bit bland but I was thinking of using the facebook api so i found it interesting. Also I was thinking how the facebook api is a genius move by facebook. The friends network is a barrier to entry for any new vertically integrated social network, so if you can effectively use the friends network established in facebook it gives you a lot of power. Wider adoption of the api would strengthen facebooks position as well. They probably need to make the api more powerful, which they might not be willing to do.

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immad

$8 billion for 18 million users values each user at $440. Assuming that the technology can be reasonably coppied in less than $100k, apart from users what else does facebook have? They also have a very powerful brand. Given that myspace went for $440m (correct?) then the facebook valuation probably is reasonably fair.<p>Anyone suggested just paying 20 million users $100 each to join and use your social network for 1 month, hehehe, seems like you could 4 times as much money :-)

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immad

A Fatal Paper Cut - Too many shareholders and bad shareholders agreement

http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2007/02/a_fatal_paper_c.html

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immad

Story is not that interesting but the advice is.

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eli

Hmm, the second Top 10 list about running a forum from seorefugee.com. Something tells me their real strength lies in Google rankings, not forums.