skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its not really a wufoo competitor - wufoo is in a whole class of its own.

This is a convenient feature for google to tack onto spreadsheets to increase its utility. The primary product is still the web based spreadsheet.
Shit i accidentally downvoted you...

but... Agreed!
oops, I was confused - I was thinking of PeopleSoft rather than WebCT. As bad as WebCT is, PeopleSoft is far worse.
There are a lot of possible uses for forms. This may not overlap all that much with Wufoo. But insofar as it does, I'm not too worried. I know this may sound unlikely, but the Wufoos are such animals that, on their territory, no one could compete with them, not even Google. They're up there with Sam Altman for people I'd never want to have as competitors.
Ask YC: Discussing your secret weapon?
In his essays, pg intentionally draws our attention to Lisp as a primary advantage for Viaweb. It was their "secret weapon".

Would you reveal your company's secret weapon? Or only after you exit?
Thanks for a great essay. I'm in exactly the position you describe at the beginning. I have a degree in Math, but always felt like what I was learning was just ahead of what I was understanding. I work in computers, so I get to use the reasoning skills I developed on a daily basis, but I have been wanting to start a rediscovery of Math. Thanks for the great pointers.
Interestingly, the female genius stay fairly consistent across their life spans. It does not exhibit the sharp peak in the of their male counterparts. Unfortunately, the paper does not address the impact of marriage on women's productivity, only on mens.
I'm not married yet. Engaged though.

I wonder if this study controlled for children. From what I've seen, having kids affects people's lives a lot more than getting married.
Congratulations. This page is now the top Google result for "lazy co-founder." I have a theory: everyone who has lazy cofounders (considering how small the number of founders is overall) is too busy to blog about it.
A secret weapon is only a secret weapon if its secret.
depends who you marry
I am working on bundling a webapp using xul/xulrunner. I will make it opensource and available soon.
50 Ways to Waste Time When You're Broke and Bored
Huge hunter killer robots. With lasers for eyes.
Google Docs Gets Forms, More Access-Like Little By Little
Funny thing about startup secret weapons... No one is particularly impressed until they get chewed to pieces by them.

If PG and co sent a letter on Viaweb letterhead to their competitors describing the various and sundry advantages of Lisp, what percentage of them would've done anything but laugh?

99.999% of the time, stealth mode is a huge waste of energy.

(please assume a standard "IMO" ahead of all of the above statements)
Personally, I think that you should be worried if you think that secrecy is your best chance at a successful business, at least on the technical side of things. Unless you really, truly employ the best programmers in the world, chances are that you haven't come with anything truly novel, so thinking that you have some "secret sauce" that no one else could replicate is just going to make you complacent and slow.

The things that turn a technically-competent team into a bunch of ass-kicking code-ninjas are good tools, a nimble process (not necessarily XP or "agile programming"), and deep knowledge of the problem domain. None of those are particularly dependent on secrecy, and in this day and age, there's a strong argument to be made for the marketing, recruitment, and simple bogofilter potential of transparency and peer-review.
Q&A on reddit, YC, and the future of news
<sound of the crack of an assault rifle from behind is heard>
I tried the phrase "lazy business partner" on Ask.Com and AltaVista. Ask.Com returned 20 results, of which 19 were junk. AltaVista returned 79 results, most of which are useful. As previously noted ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106235 ), these search engines will also return more results for "Google is evil".
This guy implemented a continuation-based syntax highlighter in JavaScript:

http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/story.html

I'm not sure how relevant it is to implementing Arc, but never say never. JavaScript is Turing complete, after all...
This seems overcomplicated. Here's a simpler interface: all the numbers in your PIN are between 1 and 8. You view the screen by looking into a binocular scope. On each side of scope is a row of four buttons where you can place your fingers. The screen displays random permutations of the numbers 1-8, and you select one digit of your PIN from each permutation.
Is the majority recent college grads? Any 30ish entrepreneurs?
I don't read any other tech news. This source is generally the stuff that matters.

It also lets me see what are the new trends to spot in the web industry.

Lastly, it teaches me how to think like a hacker, which gets me closer and closer to being useful at our early stage.
Happy Chinese New Year!
The new year's day for lunar 4705 is February 7th, 2008 on the Gregorian calendar.

Have a good one!
How about, "A secret weapon is only a secret weapon if everyone knows about it but nobody knows how you plan to use it."
The article doesn't say that marriage turns genius off, it says that marriage and _children_ turn it off. BFD

My bet is that children alone absolutely destroy productivity and further, that marriage without children would (at least initially) enhance productivity.
When I read the "lvalues and references" part, I thought about functional programming and equivalence. That is, an interpreter where you can state:

f(g(h(x))) = n

and any time the first was mentioned, it would be substituted with the second, and vice versa, whichever allows the evaluator to simplify to a greater extent.

Then, thinking further, are there any programming languages that rely on the sorts of math where f(f^-1(x)) is simplified to x without being evaluated?
I got an expired link when I clicked submit, and when I backtracked, the form no longer contained my data. I successfully submitted a new instance of a blank application a few times (it accepted blank input.) Then I submitted my real application. Will that confuse the system?
Marriage turns other things off like a tap ;)

Maybe that contributes? 0.o
Indeed, a single program that ran through all of these in sequence could be a proper (or better) substitute for a reference card.
Making an installer project for your program (inside of visual studio) should detect the dependency on the C++ runtime and bundle it with your program. It's not so bad really.
obviously...not! ;)
Why did you pick them as a partner and what would you do differently if you could pick again? Or did they pick you?
"Q&A on reddit, YC, and the future of news"

Reddit: Cool. Nice site. Ok.

YC: the future of news.
Gong xi fa tsai, hong bao na lai! (Happy new year, give me money!)

We actually go around to our extended families and all the funds go toward that shiny new gadget...or if you've got a big family, you might be lucky and save up for that macbook air?
As far as I can tell, they assassinate bugs before users even realize they're there.
It's already possible. I just forgot to do it there. Will fix. Edit: fixed.
GUI kids like me like gedit, but on the terminal I don't see how anyone uses anything except vi!

Yeah the alt text is sort of important too... I never realized there was any until I went on IE at someone else's computer though. Stupid firefox!
You know what we need? Ubuntu live CD, a solid 10 character password with numbers and upper/lowercase, and fast typing.

The first eliminates the threat of keyloggers. The second prevents shoulder hacking.

Don't need to be a rocket scientist.
nope, learning Python is much better. It is a really good book that teaches you even what's going behind the scenes in python. Diveintopyhon is good if you have no patience, but you probably will miss a lot things that "learning python" explains, especially if you are new into scripting languages (I came from Java, and some php experience).

Take a week and a half of time, two hours a day, and read it. Meanwhile make sure you practice some in your own, and then start a small real project, so you can actually start imprinting what you learnt.
Pumping Startup Iron: Be an Arnold, Not a Lou
Note to self. Never start a startup in Ivan's industry.
Sorry, I must have changed my question while you were editing. But I do see using the back-button on the form has been fixed.
Miserably enough I had to use REXX occasionally in my previous job. I no longer have it to verify, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if something akin to that were indeed allowed.
Another suggestion: try to get a seat as soon as you can so you don't have to stand for hours at a time. Also, I think parking on campus is free over the weekend.
This is the greatest headline I've read in weeks. Kudos, e1ven!
Why Lisp works for me
FWIW I'm one that doesn't care either way.
Especially During the Bad Times...Satisfaction Pays Off
the feature-set of Google's forms sounds like it was something they are using within Google and they just realised it to the public.
I can tell you that last year there was a good amount of 30ish entrepreneurs although the majority of folks did seem to be college students/recent grads (myself included).
This currently seems limited to sending forms via e-mail or providing a link to a form at Google. It's quite easy to embed a Wufoo form in any webpage.

Also, I just tested the system. After submitting an e-mail form, I got this nice error message on a pop-up web page:

"Something bad happened. Don't worry, though. The Spreadsheets Team has been notified and we'll get right on it. Sorry about that."
No, Google launches Access competitor. Wufoo is in a whole different league.
34 here.
Scale Facebook Apps With Amazon Services
yo soy 28
done....thanks for looking out for the yc newsers
It is bad. Why do I need to "install" a simple application? Installing usually requires Admin privileges and for a simple game that I just downloaded of some random website that's a lot to ask for.
US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul
The salsa dancing parallel reminds me of learning to snowboard - I signed up for a week long trip through a group at my school and took lessons the first day on the mountain. Before embarking, I had read a bunch of articles on how to snowboard and tried to commit all the information to memory. So I got out there and tried to apply my knowledge to little avail. At the end of 5 days, my knees made the nurse in our group cringe. I was absolutely battered head to toe. Then I went home and read as much as I could find over the next year and went back. Much to my amazement, things came together; I was suddenly and surprisingly decent.

I think this same kind of learning process applies to anything that you really have to understand to get good at. Many things have two levels of understanding: most people can drive, but who really understands how the transmission works? Those are the people that are able to truly control a vehicle, and they probably drive manuals.
That's really not that surprising. If I feel that nagging 'it would be unhealthy to stay up any later' feeling, staying up and putting in those extra hours just seems less appealing if the alternative is a bed with the warm body of someone who loves you. Guess it's a matter of motivations/priorities.

Alternatively, maybe it just means that, once you have a family, you're less likely to take the risks that are sometimes necessary to produce those genius contributions.
> Personally, I think that you should be worried if you think that secrecy is your best chance at a successful business, at least on the technical side of things.

Sure, but that's an obviously untenable extreme.

Assuming you do not expect secrecy to save your ass, what's the business advantage to choosing to reveal information?

And is all information equal?

For example, if I tell people I'm using Haskell for my startup, I don't expect it will alter my prospects much. However, if I believe I've located a niche market that is under-served, I hope I won't be so naive as to think no one else is thinking the same thing, but announcing that fact seems unlikely to reduce possible competition.

Why would I volunteer that information or not try to keep it secret?
nostrademons you are the man.
Ask YC: I just quit Microsoft to work on this product full-time. What's your brutal feedback?
I'm the only founder... so far ;P. I'd love your honestly brutal feedback about the website, the product, the idea, or anything else you have to say. I have come to respect this forum and and I'd really like to hear your thoughts.

Also for all you hackers on freenode that would like to have a discussion, but can't be bothered with HTML forms, I've set up an IRC channel to discuss: #emptyspaceads (my nick is arooni).
Interesting idea - I like the fact that you don't mess with a sites design in order to serve ads. That said I think that your success will largely depend on the clickthrough rate - which is what customers pay for at the end of the day. And in this respect you might have a disadvantage, since visitors don't see your ads before they hover over an empty area.

Also you should watch out for your brand - there have been many examples of obnoxious ad models that tend to turn people off. A good way to nurture the brand is to serve relevant ads, and in this regard of course you have a formidable competitor in Google.

The reason Google is doing so well is exactly because they are non-obtrusive and relevent.

I would work hard with the non-obtrusivenss, and think about how you can serve up relevant ads. The last one is of course extremely difficult for a startup because you need a lot of data, a lot of customers and somebody with a good knack of algorithms.

But all the best of luck :-)

Just thoughts off the top of my head....
These are great points mixmax, thanks for your feedback. A couple notes:

* We've been seeing click through of 5-20X times higher comparing existing ad units on http://www.phonemyphone.com with the same ad unit delivered in an emptyspacead. So far so good :P.

* About the relevancy of ads we serve: First off, we're not an ad network. We do work with ad networks to serve their ad units in website's empty space. Secondly the publisher is free to create their own text and image ads as well as ShoppingAds which can be keyword targeted to the site's content.

* The core of the product is the patent pending ad format we've developed. I think finding a bunch of advertisers and serving relevant ads is a hard problem I'd rather let others solve. Hats off to the folks at AdPinion (http://www.adpinion.com) for being the YC company to step up and do this.
> (eql (not open-source) nil)

T

>
Personally, my productivity went up after me and my wife separated. No kids involved.
It was a focus issue with me. I simply could not manage to fully focus on what I was doing when having to deal with another person's constant issues, whether it be this or that. Constantly having to pay attention to someone, having to go along with weekend activities I was not in the least interested in. Now, I love the woman, and we are still husband and wife, but I personally can't handle living with someone and therefore having my life intertwined with another person's life.
I love the site design. Although I think the idea of any ad that just pops up like those do are very annoying. From your demo though they don't seem so. If you can get some ads for various games, let me know and I will sign up. I am launching a game review site soon and the only way I can put ads on the site without ruining the design is in the margins.
Thanks very much for your feedback dawnerd!

We can definitely hook you up with ads for various games. Check out http://www.shoppingads.com one of the first ad networks we support. They're an eBay super affiliate and operate as an ad network. The bottom line is you can copy and paste their ad code into one of our forms and serve ads for video games for sale on eBay within your site's empty space. We offer a 50/50 split with publishers for this type of ad (we call it a NetworkAd). Please find my contact information in my YC profile, I'd be more than happy to assist you, feature you on our blog, and our home page when you launch.
remember that most of the scientists surveyed lived before effective birth control, when marriage usually led to children.
I don't have Flash, so I can't use your demo, but I think I get the gist of it anyway. I'm wary of the placement options other than "fixed". I have no tolerance for ads that do anything to cause my eyes to jump away from text -- this generally includes moving around the page or changing color balance from one animation frame to the next. Whenever I see one, I'll hit the back button and never come back. Most people have more patience with this sort of thing than I do, but I'd still urge caution.
Thanks for the feedback dfranke.

You actually don't need flash to run our demo, the ads are already appearing on that page (provided you have javascript enabled). The flash demo is only to help walk you through what triggers the ad appearing and disappearing. We tried to make the ads as pleasing as possible and ridiculously easy to get rid of (hit the X, shake your mouse, or hit the escape key on your keyboard). I'd be interested in seeing what you think of them. Example: http://www.phonemyphone.com.
( Public service announcement: some of us hang out on freenode's #startups )
Sorry, I wasn't trying to mean.

I don't hit on the things you listed either. At the time of your application, you won't be able to do much about any of those. You can change your attitude though. By attitude, I didn't and don't mean you're a jerk. I meant more in terms of optimism.
How is this different from other ad systems? My first impression is something along the lines of "I have adsense, what's different about this?".

It was a little bit slow loading this:

http://www.emptyspaceads.com/websites/preview_url?website%5B...

But 'try it with my web page' is definitely a compelling feature!
> "We've been seeing click through of 5-20X times higher..." hey that's great :-) I think that monitoring, A/B split tests and continually pondering on the data to find out how you get better click throughs is paramount to your business, after all that's where the money is. And without money there is no business...

> "About the relevancy of ads we serve" - I missed that one ;-) But I think that it is definitely the right decision to focus on what you do well, and do only that. Especially if you are only one founder and thus have limited resources.

A word about patents. I have done two startups, both based on patents I have. One of the things I would have done differently is to not focus so much on the technology that we happened to have a patent on, but go where the market leads. It is easy to become thrilled by a patent, but in my experience the only ones that care about it are investors. It's a great thing to have, but don't base your business on it. Just saying this because I noticed you mentioned it a few times in the comments.
Great question davidw.

The basic idea is your site along with every other website has some amount of empty space which you're likely not making any money from.

So basically our value proposition is: "don't give up any existing ad units you're using, let us help you make revenue from the real estate you didn't know you even had." Eventually we'd like to have close integration with AdSense so we can serve your AdSense units in your site's empty space. Finally today, you can create TextAds and ImageAds that drive users to pages you monetize well or that you'd like to promote. For you perhaps its: http://www.dedasys.com/about.html. For others its a RSS subscription link or the "buy a t-shirt page".
Google launches Google Apps "Team"
Great feedback mixmax. A patent is only one ingredient of the intoxicating elixir that is a startup.
wow I cant wait. It looks like way to many people are going to register for this, they prob wont accept most of them.
21 here.
I really like the idea. Seems to make adding adds very simple. The demo is really cool.

Your largest benefit is that you make it easier to put up adds. Your UI should reflect that. There are too many words on your site. I didn't read any of them and I won't until there are ridiculously few to read.

Also, put that awesome demo as the front page. The front page needs to draw them in. Just say "Put in your blog to see what it'd look like with emptyspace adds" and then a submit box.
The Arc challenge in Seaside
Yes, there are several things that set me off here:

1. Whatever network you're serving the image ads from is already in my blacklist, so I just get the loading indicator. The indicator animation is irritating.

2. Get rid of the fade-out animations. Just have it disappear.

3. Any event that fires on mouse movement is evil. Re-position the ad on page-up/page-down instead.
Wow really good feedback thingsilearned. What did you like about the demo? The customization of the ad format that you could do? The flash portion?
Thanks for the feedback dfranke. Sounds like you've got AdBlocker extension installed on Firefox. Our NetworkAds don't currently work with AdBlocker but our ImageAds and TextAds should.

These are great feature ideas I will add to Trac for new releases.
Just hope it helps :-)

I do business models and such stuff for a living and think that I would be an ass not to spend two minutes helping out if I can...
Best startup I've seen on here in a while. The ads didn't show up for me in Firefox 3 on Linux but they worked in Opera.

Also, do you have any publishers yet?
I guess I didn't find those parts of the demo. I just went to the "Learn More" page and put my url in. It showed my old blog.

http://www.emptyspaceads.com/websites/preview_url?website%5B...

I thought that was really awesome, where do I sign up? It would be great if somewhere in those adds you had a "Sign up" or "embed the adds". It would then bring me to a page, where I give you my email, you give me the js to embed, and the whole transaction is done. (Other than a month later when you email me telling me you need my account info because you have $20 for me).
Ping me once you've implemented these and I'll take another look. But anyway, like I said, I'm as curmudgeonly as they come about this sort of thing. If you succeed in not annoying me and still get clickthroughs from other people, then you've definitely got a viable product.
Ah gotcha! So you went to the publisher learn more page as opposed to our demo page. That's a good call on the call to action to sign-up being embedded in the ads themselves. Our signup URL is: http://www.emptyspaceads.com/user/new

Sidenote: It's so interesting to tail the log files and find out where users go. My friend Kalid (http://www.instacalc.com) recommended to me the free service StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com) which is like Google Analytics... but updated live. I'm using it to watch all of you :P.
There's no conventional name in English for the WHAT and WHAT of a pair? :)
Thanks very much for your feedback rms. I need to check out FF3 issues as I've heard that issue come up before.

We do have a few publishers already on board including: http://digitalpayag.blogsome.com/, http://fslayouts.us.to/, and http://www.phonemyphone.com (if you count me :P). In addition, we've had an article written about us: http://www.howtotuts.com/2008/02/01/how-to-place-ads-in-the-...

We haven't really started marketing the product yet (that's tomorrow). I wanted to post to Hacker News before and get all of your feedback before the big marketing push (to work out any kinks in advance).
yea i have a feeling the applicant pool is going to be huge this time around.
Bluetooth Jabber Doorbell