skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paul,

Good essay. I apologize for seeming nitpicky, but worry you may be encouraging misunderstanding about the type of person who succeeds at sales inside a large company:

<blockquote>The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. </blockquote>

Sales people actually do build things. The things they build are called client relationships. Each one is new and different in some way. Once the relationship is created, upselling is pretty easy to do, as are yearly renewals. Often, these renewals are sent over to the account management team and taken out of the hands of sales.

There's actually quite a bit of strategy involved in creating these relationships, especially for a complex sale -- complex in terms of the organizational structure of the customer and the technology of the product. There's an awful lot of time spent thinking about what questions to ask different people in the organization and when in order to find their specific problems and elicit the specific needs. Only after you know what you need to know about the organization and the people in it do you pitch. A lot of these problems and needs are similar, but the pitch has to be tailored to what they have told you. This is how you show the customer respect, and build trust. A lot of it is subconscious but a lot of it is learned behavior.

Furthermore, sales at a large company can be quite entrepreneurial. You either make your numbers or you don't. If you don't, you get fired. If you exceed them by a large enough margin, you get to skip sales meetings and show up whenever you feel like it.

This is the first time I've commented on one of your essays, but I've bought about 5 copies of your collection for friends.
I think it is important to remember that the immortality mentioned here is a protection from biological causes of death, but there are plenty of other obstacles to prolonged existence (especially prolonged self-consciousness and memory, which is harder to wrap one's head around).

Take the popular theories of the universe's lifespan (or life cycle).

1) The universe is expanding exponentially: eventually every star will die and there will be nothing to birth new stars. The universe will stop moving and hit a zero Kelvin freeze.

2) The universe cycles between big bangs and big crunches: information cannot survive through a crunch. Well maybe one binary bit? hehe.

3) Some sort of multi-universe collisions or string theory madness: who knows but there could be some event that wipes out what we know as reality.

Basically, I am trying to point out that immortality is probably a fundamentally flawed concept. A simpler approach might be to consider memory. Memory storage cannot grow forever (let alone be accessed efficiently enough) and while we could cap memory and still exist indefinitely, I think we would have to hit a ceiling of knowledge attainment and we would just be spinning a wheels like a more exciting version of a rock (not that humanity is any less of a _process_ right now).

Smarter people than I have already dwelled upon these issues and probably have better answers than mine (esp. since I have no answer). Asimov's "The Last Question" is an interesting short story that covers this area a bit.
What Ed Thorpe did was just plain genius!!!
And what 'rainman' (movie ref) did was beyond genius!

But IMO what these folks did was cheat.
You can count cards as long as you do not use an external device to aid you in the counting. These folks collaborated with others to share each one's counts so as to take advantage of the system. Not that I am a big fan of the casino (or their making tons of money).
There's a difference between being stagnant and being a guinea pig though.
As you say their determination was due to the fact that they believed in their idea - not that their idea was particularly great.
As there is between a serious concern and a straw man.
PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future
Every time I've gone to startup school, I've been able to find a student willing to share his couch for the weekend. It's always been a great experience - I recommend you try it. It's a great networking opportunity as well - I'm still friends with the guys I stayed with. If you can find a student going to startupschool, even better.

Try looking on these: http://craigslist.org / http://www.couchsurfing.com / http://supost.com / http://wiki.startupschool.org / #startups on IRC
[meta] - this is one of the most awesome linkbaiting headlines I've seen here.
You should offer a few static screens for people who browse with flash and javascript disabled.
What about in the situation where you're actually contacting other users on behalf of the registered user (think event planning)? In those cases, shouldn't you at least try to verify that the user is who they say they are? What are the alternatives?
YouTube - Design Coding
Didn't the DMCA already exempt ISPs from liability?

The music tax could be a double whammy for ISPs, because not only would they have to pay the tax but their bandwidth costs would likely increase due to increased usage of P2P.
Revealing the thought process as he did does allow me to draw conclusions about his general predictive success.

My definition for a futurist is someone who is a standard deviation better or reasoned in his/her predictions than the median. Let us say that I am no good at presaging, so of course you shouldn't give much credence to any predictions I might make. However, predictions aren't what I am offering here. It is a critique of his ideas and the generative process behind them.
First off, this affects us. This proposed tax is voluntary for ISPs, not consumers. The ISPs are paying this money as protection to the RIAA, so they won't sue. This fee is then handed down to the ever growing list of fees to subscribers. This additional charge for bandwidth and the implications for music-based start-ups is very real and relevant.

That being said, I too am tired of the RIAA. So, apparently, are their artists: http://consumerist.com/368663/riaa-pockets-filesharing-settl...
It would be really ironic if none of us printed said shirt.
Ask YC: What should I be doing at age 19?
I'm just about finished with my first year here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and I'm coming to the realization that this is not the place for a software entrepreneur who grew up on the west coast. I've got a few summers of experience working for startups under my belt, and I'm trying my best to live vicariously through YC News and other sites as I slog through high school and college. It gets old.

My question is this: Where should I go from here? I've been unable to find cofounders I can mesh with here, but I've got the experience and competency to be a productive member of a startup. Should I transfer? If so, where? Should I even be in college? What's the cost/benefit being in college in the first place? I'm fairly committed to leaving RPI, but I don't know what direction to take from here.
I think that the idea of a soft confirmation is a very good one, and we'll be switching over to that for Chron X.

The biggest reason we want an email address at all is for password resets. We have a decently large list of customers, some paying, others playing for free.. But if you've invested months, weeks or years into the game, and you lose your password, we want to have a way to help.

Currently, if this happens, we go into the database and manually verify your billing address, time you signed up, recent activity and the like, but it's a very manual and potentially error-prone process. Giving them a way to reset it automatically would help quite a bit.

The second thing we use it for is notifications. Since Chron X is an interactive game, some users request to have us send them a note when it's their turn. We wouldn't want to start sending out turn notifications without a confirmation, to avoid having users inconvenience others. ("Yeah! Send all my turns to billg@microsoft.com, and my second email, sjobs@corp.apple.com")..

We've been debating this internally for a while, arguing between easier signup (no conf), and better security, and lower customer service time (conf).

Soft-conf is a good tradeoff for us.
Yeah, for example uniquely identifying users.
You can do that with a username....
Exactly. The business metric of email lists will keep them from going extinct.
Most of the problems he mentions have reasons behind them...there's method behind the madness, for those experienced in Java.

Yup - and the reasons all have to do with fundamental paradigm flaws in Java itself (IMO). As someone who has been permanently scarred by designing and implementing a large J2EE application, his post made me nearly blow a gasket I was laughing so hard.
>wrote his own programming language when he was 16...

Do you mean he executed "man yacc"? ;)

Thats quite a stream of serendipitous events (referring the the above blog). How does one just have "intense sessions" with people like Max Levchin, Evan Williams and Naval Ravikant??
While in most cases you probably don't want to prevent users from signing up, there are cases where a few hurdles can be a good thing. If you have a site that depends heavily on user-generated content and registration is pretty much exclusively for posting privileges, the registration process can be one means by which you filter for higher quality, more committed users (assuming your site is in any danger of having lots of users who will submit low-quality content).
The Real Value of Widgets
Some comments, written as I think them as I navigate your site:

1. No explanation: A first-time visitor will have NO idea what the site is about. You have a bunch of "Register now" links, but without some idea of what the site is, there's no reason for anyone to register. This is a fairly serious deal breaker that will significantly limit your rate of adoption.

2. Email confirmation sign up: Once again, this will limit the number of people who sign up. Requiring users to first give you their email, and only then register once they've received it, is slow and outdated. I'd remove the confirmation step entirely, but if you really feel you need it you should allow the user to first sign up and only then confirm.

3+ The concept vaguely intrigued me (what little of it I could glean from your confusing videos on the main page), but for this to be successful you need to seriously revamp your site. To be frank, it looks like something made in a previous era of web development.

Interfaces should be easy to use and clearly laid out. Yours does not provide enough information at the start, and presents too many irrelevant pieces upon login.

As in all startups, the ideas behind them could be great, unique, groundbreaking, etc. but if the implementation isn't up to snuff you'll go nowhere.

I realize this criticism may be harsh, but you did ask how to gain a more widespread user base. The best way to gain users is to make the concept easy to understand, and dead simple to begin using.
I think I'm not alone in witnessing Microsoft and the BSA treat my corporate customers very badly over the years. The biggest deal at my biggest corporate customer's IT dept. is the "renegotiation" that happens every couple of years with MS in which they send their people in and see how much more they can grab this time around...

When you treat your customers like crap, they don't line you. Now there's a surprise.

I think after all I've seen, when the decision finally falls to me, I'm gonna be Ernie Ball'n it, even if it costs more up front.
There are a large number of ways to utilize data from your web app to make money. It doesn't mean that you are selling user's account names, passwords, emails, or any identifying information. Trend data is very valuable in certain markets and there is no impact on the actual user in selling it.
Oh yes, I did not take your statement in any negative light. I was just responding to the claim about how much of a role YC would have played in establishing a lot of these relationships. My guess is it was Sam's hard-work and business acumen (at least early on) that created all these opportunities.

(Ntw, I don't know a lot about Sam personally, and I am not basing this on PG's judgement of Sam either.)
True however then users have to think followed by get frustrated dreaming up a name. They already know their email address. And unless they already signed up its probably not taken.
You predict that his predictions are bad.
No, he wrote a fairly decent language called Croma while he was in HS and it is what is still powering auctomatic today.
I have first hand experience of this at my last company (as an employee). Several big name companies were sniffing around and the CEO took the initiative to actually explain in detail what we were doing and how we did it.

Not one of the companies actually became a competitor even though they had the financial resources to crush us. In fact, one ended up purchasing us!

The idea truly is nothing.
want a job at a cool startup?
Ask YC: do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend?
I just want to know that ^_^
SSRN-Black Swans and Market Timing: How Not to Generate Alpha by Javier Estrada
Yup! Flying down Friday night.
We appreciate all the feedback; thanks!
No. I'm married.
If you are offering the chance to work at a startup, I would have to answer yes. If you could bear with someone who learns quickly, but is not quite up to full coding power yet, I would be a great candidate.
So its the same thing that happened last year? If anything, this gives more points to Firefox fans, rather then Windows fans.
why not use authentication APIs from yahoo/gmail/hotmail etc for the login/account creation process. It will accomplish not only validating email address, but also creating an account in one step.
I well remember reading Peter Gutmann's "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" [1], in which he said:

"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history."

I'd say Peter's prediction is holding up pretty well so far. I mean, Microsoft is not dead, and they're not even near death, but they do look more like an invalid than an industry leader.

[1] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Is robot evolution mirroring human evolution?
I like him. He must be a good teacher, whether his "act" is contrived or not.

When you do something the first time, its science.

When you do it the second time, its engineering.

When you do it the third time, its technology.

Brilliant.
I got a call for Startup school Apr19th programme, how?
Hi All,
This is AnkammaRao, from INDIA. I got a mail inviting for attending this Stanford StartUp School programme. I dont have VISA. How do i get it? All people staying outside USA will get VISA's from this programme.

I am very happy and dont want to miss this opportunity. But how can any body answer me??
Two huge reasons that activation emails are worthwhile:

- validation (to a reasonable extent) that a user is who they say they are

- enhanced security for users

The whole war on sign up forms and the like is far overblown imo. If your users are going to have even a moderate level of ongoing interaction with your site (especially if your site has social aspects to it) it is necessary to include some form of identity verification.

I, for one, would think quite poorly of a company that allowed someone else to sign up for an account using my email address.
I think the frustration of entering your email, checking you inbox and following a confirmation link is a lot more than the frustration of dreaming up a name - which you have to do anyway unless you use your email as a login.

I think that the metrics support this view as well.
SF is probably 45 mins (driving) from Palo Alto. You should look for hotels in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale.

I booked a -nice- 3 star hotel on Hotwire (Mountain View). $66 a night (for 15 nights). You might be able to get the same deal for just a few nights.
I think it's a combination of Vista and XBox 360. When Windows 95 came out it used both game support and office applications to become the defacto standard in businesses and homes. XP brought solid compatibility and durability. Vista became Windows ME part deux. There's no need to buy a new computer when the 360 has shifted the hardcore gamers away from the PC. And although Office 2007 is the first significant improvement in 10 years, the fact that you don't need Vista to use it detracts from any tie in possibilities. Now throw on top of this the estimated 33% failure rate of XBox 360s and there isn't much to brag and toot their horn about.
> Thats quite a stream of serendipitous events (referring the the above blog). How does one just have "intense sessions" with people like Max Levchin, Evan Williams and Naval Ravikant??

I think I read in that blog that they first met at some Oxford business event. I'm thinking that YC brought in some remarkable people from across the 'pond (going global)
Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser
From 1968, What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?
yes.

even those holed up in a closet working full-steam on a startup need to socialize, whether with friends or a SO. otherwise, you'll go crazy and burn out.
I mean, it's one thing if your site has very little interaction with its users. If you want to have any sort of meaningful long-term relationship, though, go ahead and verify them.
I think Auctomatic uses Seaside (http://www.seaside.st).
Mark Cuban on How To Cash Out At The Top
I quit my job to start a startup; in India.
Bulletin Board Material!
somehow this has splintered into an "business model vs. traction" agreement - in fact you need both. It will not kill a programmer to spend some time running a few models on how they can actually monetize the service, just as it is not beyond the scope of any biz/marketing person to understand that building something users want is job #1.

where many people stumble is thinking in one dimension terms, like assuming Adsense is a business model (see recent posts by Josh Koppelman and Jeremy Lui) on just how big you need to be for this to be truly viable.

What I liked in the original article is that it offered a few, less obvious options for monetization.
The other legitimate use of email is for actual features that use email-- internal messaging, invitations, notifications, reminders, etc.

All your users have it-- have you thought about when your users might like to be notified about new activity relating to them? (opt-in, of course)
An interactive shell for php written mostly in python
Having a user's email can be extremely useful and many times necessary. When you make changes to your TOS/privacy policy, you can send them notifications. When they receive an internal private message, you can send them a notification. You can also send them updates about your service. Also, email is probably still the most powerful marketing vehicle. If you ignore it, you've just lost a very powerful ally in your path to success.

Now, how you collect this email is also extremely important. The best way to collect emails is through double-opt-in. User first requests to receive messages from you (a checkmark during the signup is sufficient) and then they confirm the subscription when they receive the email. Why is this important? It prevents people from claiming that you're a spammer. If you follow this procedure and if you keep these records (i.e. dates, IPs etc), you can defend your email when you get spam complaints from other postmasters. It is CRITICAL that you followup on these spam reports since you can easily get blacklisted on all of the email services and your emails will never be delivered. If you use email list services (like Aweber etc),they require you use double opt-in and won't allow you to add an email without it. I like these various email contact services since they deliver emails to inboxes of pretty much all of the email service providers and they fight every spam report on your behalf.

So yeah, I understand the need to have an easy signup but you should also think ahead. My suggestion is to start with no double opt-in and add it later on as your site grows and you start receiving spam complaints.
congratulations and good luck - keep us all in loop - by the way what r u working on ...?
Science project sparks subway scare
..Or half realized that a fake one wouldn't cut it and signed back up with their real email.

A while ago I put more rigorous user tracking on a site of mine and found that a very large percentage of the dead accounts where just duplicates from active users.
It's important to distinguish between HSA's (good for some) and FSA's (use it or lose it), which are what most employers offer.

Also, FSAs (and maybe some HSAs?) have no benefit if you're itemizing your deductions on your tax returns.
I think India is a fantastic place to do a startup right now. Good luck. Sure, it lacks in infrastructure, but I think it makes up for it in untapped markets. There's a lot of room for disruptive technologies to grow within India before needing to compete against the international giants.
Yes, I felt those too. Thought it was only me. His idea of future scares me.
Thank you. I'll be posting the progress on my blog.
Currently i'm dabbling with a couple of ideas. Nothing grand; small ideas that might just work. I will take some time to refine them before i pick one and proceed.
Nope. Life as a computer science major in college and an overall geek leaves very little time.
I disagree with the notion that those are examples of idea theft.
what font does twitter use? its not listed
Solved? I think this qualifies within his predictions. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22037/
One site to rule them all: bugmenot.com

Fuck compulsory registration.
Pass this to your IT guys: 10 things IT needs to know about Ajax
General Advice Needed: This will be my first startupschool and I am quite excited. I'm flying in the night before, but how long after the 5:30 event end do people hang out? I'm trying to figure out when I should book my return flight (what time that night or the next day). I don't want to miss out on any networking and meet-up opportunities.

From previous year's blog coverage, everyone brings their laptop, but is there anything else I should definitely bring/have/not have/etc...?

Any tips or info for first timers? Thanks!
Request'd!
Would that be your own architectural firm?
I believe HSAs give you similar tax benefits as IRAs once you hit retirement age, although I don't know anything about what happens before that.
I laid out my objections to your objections here:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/mindx/frame.html?main=show_thread....

I wouldn't be surprised if he's spot-on about the technology of speech recognition getting to that practical level exactly on his predicted schedule -- it's one of those kinds of things he has been obsessed with on a very technical level for many years, and it really has been improving rapidly.

The chief reason I doubt most people would choose it is that it just doesn't work in an environment with other people around. However, since developing tendonitis in my right hand, I've often thought I'd try it just to give my hands time to heal.

It could get good enough within three or four years that people will do it anyway, just because it will be faster and more comfortable than typing for all but a handful of people.

I agree that some of his other predictions are a little nutty, but only by degrees.
Apart from infrastructure, a community like this is also non-existent. As they say, this business is based as much on who you know as what you know. But nevertheless, i'll try to make up for that by following YC-news (and putting things in Indian context). The opportunities for growth in India is HUGE, especially now with overall improvement in infrastructure and growing number of internet users.
An Approach to Internal Domain-Specific Languages in Java